Tag Archives: fathers

My promotion to 5th grade in 1977 must have been a clerical error

“Dad, how do I do this?”

I get this question every time there is a big 4th grade or 6th grade project due.

I thought I had completed both of these grades back in the 1970s. I never suspected I would be made to repeat them, and certainly not after this many years.

Big Brother, now a 10th grader, doesn’t ask my help on schoolwork anymore. Once he got to high school and settled into being a teenager, the notion struck him that he was smarter than me. This notion does not only pertain to scholarly pursuits, but also, and more importantly, to the scope of freedoms and privileges a young man should be allowed while making the most of his parents’ hospitality.

If Buster and Big Man believe they are smarter than I am, they keep dark about it. They realize the unseemliness of asking the big dumb guy to do your homework for you. For now, they let me believe I’m smarter than a 4th or 6th grader. I suppose they’ll let me know how things really stand after they don’t need me anymore.

I don’t mind helping them here and there with a difficult math problem or vocabulary word. It’s the big projects that are trouble. They are both daunted, nearly to the point of paralysis, by big school projects. They hide from the project for five and half weeks, hoping it will fade out of existence in the last three days.

At some point within the last three days, they realize it is still there. This is when the problem gets referred to Dad.

Most of their projects require the reading of a book. They may, or may not, have read the first 20 pages in the previous 39 days.

Dad’s first task is to hound them to read the book, or at least enough of it to know the main character’s name and to be able to make a wild guess as to what the major conflict could be.

That’s the easy part.

Today’s teachers aren’t satisfied with students reading a book and showing their comprehension of its themes. They want pupils to be able to do arts and crafts about it.

“A Book in a Box” Finished with the timely assistance of a crafty neighbor.
We are capable of printing pictures and coloring them.
A dragon head of clay? Nope. Not in our wheelhouse. Thanks neighbor lady!

Buster, Big Man, and I are all creative in our own ways, but rarely does that creativity spill into the realm of arts and crafts. I read a lot of books, yet I can’t recall a time when I’d finished a novel and been inspired to fashion a paper doll in homage to the protagonist.

Perhaps I am out of touch with modern times, because it seems that every book must inspire some diorama or figurine. After stumbling through the book, this is where my boys fall flat. They fall flat on top of me, the man who waits, with his bag of popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue, to memorialize in sculpture every book his reluctant children are forced to read.

I would be a more active blogger, but with Buster so close to junior high, I must devote my time to perfecting Play-Doh replicas of Romeo and Juliet.

What’s your superpower

Our two elementary school boys are going through a Superhero phase. Big Man often asks me, usually when I am working, what superpower I wish I had. He wonders about the ability to fly or to turn invisible, but tops on my superpower wish list is the ability to make children turn silent when I am working. I will never attain this power fully, but there are times when I have come close, through my secret weapon of the computer tablet, loaded with video games.

Even the good guys need to use their powers for a touch of evil when they need to catch a break.

Big Man, being a normal Superhero of six, sometimes falls asleep watching TV. These occasions make me wish I had the superpower to be 20 years younger, when I could carry a heavy sack of potatoes up the stairs without wheezing.

One morning, after he had been carried, unconscious, from the couch to his bed, Big Man announced that he had teleported from living room to bedroom during the night. This was concrete evidence he was a genuine Superhero. Teleportation is a bona fide superpower, and people possessing superpowers must be Superheroes. This is especially true of children. It’s all in the Superhero employee handbook.

Way back when Superheroes knew how to play outside, some of them even teleported into their beds from the baseball diamond.

This is his superpower now: he can teleport, with certain caveats. The first caveat is that he can only do it when asleep. Caveat 2 is that he has no control over the destination of his teleportations, except that they most often end in his bed.

Caveat 3, which he has not yet encountered, is the weight limit on teleported matter, and the age limit on the fathers of those who may use this superpower. When he gains a few more pounds, or his father gains a few more years, whichever comes first, his teleporting days are over. Until then, he is free to teleport in ignorant bliss whenever he falls asleep in an inconvenient spot. In the coming years, he will have to wake up and climb the stairs himself, unless he chooses to meet the new day in the same awkward position he left the old one.

Perhaps his true superpower is being a sound sleeper. Even when I have to tussle his body into a totable position, he is not roused from his teleportation. The more I think about it, the more I think being a sound sleeper would be an excellent superpower. With all the miniature Superheroes fighting crime, peace, and quiet in my home, I think I’ll choose this as the new superpower I wish I had.