Tag Archives: humor

My kid is really sharp . . . and I’m running low on bandages

My son can’t stand to see me lying down comfortably. He seems to have some sort of instinctive need to keep me on the lookout for invasions of my personal space when I really just want to relax for a minute. Perhaps this is some holdover from evolution. Maybe lions and cavemen would all have been wiped out by sneaky foes with pointy sticks if the young of the group had allowed the older males to close their eyes and let down their guards for a minute.

Whatever his ancient justification, my son views the sight of me in any kind of reclined position as an invitation to climb all over me. I should say, when I am fortunate he climbs all over me. This is the gentle treatment. When I really need a good bruising, he climbs to the top of some piece of furniture, from where he leaps at me. So far, his strategy has been successful, as we have not yet been driven from our home by a sneak attack of creatures bearing pointy sticks.

Like millions of old lions, I suppose I could grow to live with this helpful effort to keep me ever vigilant, except that the lions must have had softer offspring. My son is the sharpest object we have in our house, and that includes the steak knives. His elbows, knees, and heels never touch me without making me wonder if we have a whetstone for such joints hidden somewhere in his room.

Some of these are almost as sharp as my son's elbows.

And, of course, a boy is going to use his sharpest parts when he needs to dig into the cliff face of his father’s mid-section. I swear I still have dents in my ribs that perfectly match that boy’s elbows. I’ve got two good knee prints in my back, in case the doctor ever needs a map to where my kidneys used to be.

I could probably even write off the dings in my ribs and my back as the occupational hazards of housing a three-year-old. But these are not my most vulnerable parts. I suppose my kidneys can shift over and shack up with some of my better-protected organs for a while, but I’ve got some extremely vulnerable parts that have no place to go. For better or worse, they are planted where God put them. They can’t run and they can’t hide. Together, we all live in fear of that ice pick my son uses for an elbow.

They always take the blood out of the cartoon versions.

I’ve learned to sleep with my hands cupped into a strategic dome of defense. Someday soon, I may start awake to a dislocated finger, but considering the alternative, I will chalk this up as a great victory for both fatherhood and the adaptive genius of evolution.

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.