Tag Archives: humor

This peace offering is for the birds

Last fall, while I was doing some yard work, my three-year-old son and his friend were playing nearby. They came over to show me something they had found in the dirt. “Look,” the friend explained to me, “we found a worm.”

“That’s a mighty fine-looking worm you’ve got there,” I said, or some such words intended to placate them, so that I could get back to my work.

“We have to protect him, so the birds don’t get him,” the friend said. He seemed righteously concerned for the fate of his worm.

“That’s a good idea,” I said, making movements with my yard tools to indicate that the time for talk had been superseded by the time for me to get back to my work without further interruption.

The boys took their worm carefully back to the place where they had been playing. I returned my attention to the work I’d been doing, giving no more thought to worms.

A few minutes later, I saw my son running around the yard, his cupped hands held high, calling out, “Birds! Here, birds! We have a worm for you!”

His friend was chasing him around, trying to convince my boy to quiet down and give the worm back to the protection of his own hands.

Maybe because he buys into all of our “sharing” propaganda, or maybe because the birds didn’t seem very enticed by a loud, young human offering them a treat, my son eventually gave the worm back. To my knowledge, nobody ate the worm, although you can never be sure with three-year-olds.

My first, society-tainted thought about this spectacle was that I had been blessed with a sociopath for a son. Where the other boy’s instinct was to nurture and protect, my son jumped right in to the hard facts of survival of the fittest and the rites of worm sacrifice.

I might have been slightly dismayed by this, except that I quickly figured out that this was not what I had witnessed at all. My boy is not a sociopath; he is a forward-thinking diplomat. He was presented with an opportunity to offer a gesture of friendship to either the worms or the birds. He measured the pros and cons of each carefully and made the informed decision that an alliance with the birds would likely be of more use to him if ever came the day when the animal kingdom were divided by strife.

On balance, I have to say I think he made a wise choice. Birds hold the potential to become dangerous adversaries. They can fly; they have sharp talons; they can peck your eyes out. Birds are loud and jumpy. They are not likely to have the patience to sit quietly through long peace negotiations.

Nobody really knows what worms can do. They appear to be no match for birds in single combat. They don’t have much of a record of pecking eyes out, and it is probably easier to mend fences with them than it is with birds, if it comes to that.

I have to agree with my son’s logic on this one. The world may see the other boy as a caring nurturer, but let’s see how far that gets him and his little worm friends when the skies are filled with angry birds.

Stand up and lie like a man!

We all want to make sure that our children don’t grow up to be liars. We go to great lengths to instill within them a sense of the value of the truth. We even agree to mitigate punishments for their transgressions if only they will come clean and confess the truth. “The truth will set you free [from time out],” we tell them in so many words. We lead them to resist the temptation of the lie in every way, except by example.

If our children knew how often we lie to them, and how easily we do it, they would never tell the truth again. In fact, we manage our children largely through deception. We do it without batting an eye, and without the tiniest pang to our consciences. I wonder how often we even know we are doing it.

Raise your hand if you’ve never told your child that the store with his favorite toy department is closed at 1 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon. Good. Now, who hasn’t tried to pass off some kind of vegetable on your child’s plate as just a different variety of some food that he loves? We brag up and down about how bright our child is; then, in the privacy of our own home, we secretly hope he is dim enough to buy a Brussels sprout as a green Chicken McNugget. It’s time to load up on some Vitamin Gullible, son.

You’re kid wants you to stay in his room with him until he falls asleep, but your favorite TV show is about to come on. “Lay down, Junior. I’m just going to put on my pajamas; then I’ll be right back.” Sound familiar? Do you always keep your pajamas in the TV room? It’s okay; if he doesn’t fall asleep before he comes looking for you, you can just throw out a couple more lies to cover your tracks. It’s easy. You don’t even have to break a sweat coming up with lies good enough to thwart your children.

I lie to my son a lot, and I will continue to lie to him at this pace until he becomes more reasonable. Those are my conditions: when he becomes a person who can be reasoned with, I will curtail the lying I do in order that I don’t have to go insane trying to negotiate with a three-year-old rogue state. Until he understands that we are not entitled to a treat every time we want one, I will continue to devise fictitious barriers, all beyond my power to overcome, that stand between us and the world’s treats.

Whether he believes me or not is another story. He often does not believe me when I am telling the truth. For example, the library really is closed at 10 p.m. What is my child doing up at 10 p.m., you ask. Simple, he’s bugging me about taking him to the library. And he cannot go to sleep because he is convinced that I am lying to him when I tell him it is closed. It’s very frustrating for an honest man to be disbelieved.

I’ve decided that it’s probably hypocritical for me to expect my son to always be truthful. If he’s going to grow up to lie, which of course he is, the least I can do for him is to help him develop into a competent liar. Right now, his lies are ridiculously childish. Anybody could see right through them. He needs to learn how make them plausible and then really sell them. His weak, baby lies won’t cut it in this cruel world. He needs to step up and lie like a man.

I think there is a lot he could learn from me. I see a lot of great father-son bonding moments ahead.

When done playing, switch baby to OFF position

We’ve made it to a new year. Good riddance to all those garbage years we had to slog through to get to this shiny, fabulous year. I can’t believe we even put up with those old years, when there was such year as this new one waiting around the corner.

This is my son’s fourth new year. It blows my mind to think that we’ve kept him safe and healthy for this long. It just didn’t seem like it was something we were capable of, way back when some irresponsible hospital worker handed him over to us as if we had the first clue what to do with him.

Sure, we went to classes before he was born, but those classes were all about other people’s babies. They were pictures on a screen, films of strange people who had a stage director and a sound man to tell them what to do with a helpless child. At their most real, those classes were about how to care for a lifelike doll. Granted, I didn’t have a lot of experience playing with dolls, but I learned quickly enough that when you were done playing with the doll, you handed it back to the lady and she put it away in a closet. Fun, yes, but hardly translatable to that first day of actual parenthood.

Our other great accomplishment in class was to collect a fat folder full of hand-outs. We had pages and pages of flow charts, checklists, helpful hints, and other documentation crucial to the success of maintaining the fiction of our preparedness. It was a veritable owner’s manual for the care and maintenance of the human infant, and it went right into the same black hole that hides the owner’s manuals for every other appliance we own.

In spite of the fact that we showed up for delivery lacking all of our props and diagrams, the hospital person handed this screaming, live, human baby to a us. Needless to say, we were a couple of confused folks, having been thoroughly trained on how to care for a relatively sedate, plastic child. Thus began the madness.

I can still remember the cruelty of the hospital staff as they, who knew secrets about handling infants, watched in amusement while we made fools of ourselves. I recall gritting my teeth and thinking, “I’d show you which end of this baby is which, if only I had my blueprints with me.” Alas, my set of instructions was at home, jammed into a drawer with the toaster warrantee.

As soon as they determined we were bright enough not to put the child away in the closet when we were done playing with him, they made us take the baby home. Since our home was a frightening place, devoid of outside supervision, I questioned that decision as potentially negligent. We never did retrieve our manual, but we figured out that if we used the same techniques as we used to preserve our stereo—keep him in a cool, dry place, and not stack too much crap on top of him—he’d last a while.

That was 2008. As we welcome 2012, I’m still amazed at how well everything worked out, in spite of our ignorance. Now, we’re getting ready to do it all again. The only thing I know for sure is that at the crucial moment, I will draw a blank and remember nothing. I’m not even going to try to locate my tip sheet this time. It’s frolicking in the ether with a long-expired warrantee somewhere far away. Let it have its fun and I’ll have mine, learning the ropes all over again.

May 2012 be a fun one for you too.

Basking on borrowed time

My wife is due to give birth to our second boy in March. People ask her how she is feeling, which is a perfectly sensible question. Some people ask me how I am feeling too, which makes no sense to me at all.

How am I feeling? Of course, I’m feeling great. I am basking in the limelight of an impending miracle. I am receiving congratulations, getting patted on the back, and being tolerated far above what I deserve by people who have no solid reason to tolerate me. And what is it costing me? Nothing. I have no aches or pains and I sleep like a rock. I am enjoying the loan of good will that I will not have to begin to pay back for months yet.

The pregnancy time is an expectant father’s grace period. Everything difficult about the new baby is still theoretical. The diapers, the lost sleep, the marital stress are all miles away yet. There’s nothing to do but sit back and soak up the congratulations. Life is good before the interest on the borrowed time is called in.

I imagine that this is kind of how it was for dashing young men at the outbreak of the Civil War. The horrors of war were still a ways into the future, and not necessary to be thought about yet. Meanwhile, all a young gallant had to do was announce his enlistment to afford himself the glow of the young ladies’ attentions. “Oh, you’re going off to war? How courageous of you. I will reward your bravery with a brief glimpse of my stocking below the ankle.” Cha-ching!

Those guys had no idea what they were getting themselves into. They thought it would be a few months of roughing it in the woods, just the way a first time father innocently believes that his new baby will be a nearly-self-sufficient toddler after about 90 days. Fools — all of them. It was only the men who re-enlisted after having seen the face of war that deserved to score some ankle for themselves.

Like me, those 19th century rakes were living high off the news. They hadn’t been brought down to earth by the reality yet. But I have an advantage. I’ve been through this war before and I know its horrors. I know what happens in diapers, and I know it doesn’t always happen in a diaper. I’ve seen a baby boy lie in wait for some unsuspecting parent to carelessly peel back his diaper and unleash a merciless ambush of pee. Here’s mud in your eye! Only, it’s not nearly as pleasant as mud would be. I am a veteran, hardened by the destruction wreaked by little babies. I know that I will not make it through the coming conflict unscathed, untainted, un-puked-upon. I know it and I accept it as my fate.

In the meantime, I intend to sit back, relax, make the most of my grace period, and maybe see if my wife will condescend to showing me a glimpse of her ankle.