Tag Archives: parenting

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.

Cranky old men aren’t what they used to be

Big Man is in 4th grade, which is weird because, in my memory, he started Kindergarten yesterday.

After school, I strain to contain my impatience with the car line so I can drive him the five minutes to home.

On rare afternoons, we find ourselves driving behind a bus from his school that passes within 30 yards of our house. Whenever this happens, I threaten to put Big Man on that bus the next day.

This is an idle threat, as the amount of paperwork it takes to get a kid onto a school bus these days is another thing beyond my patience.

I don’t know if Big Man takes the threat seriously, but he feels he must provide resistance to it, just in case I do harbor such a crazy idea as putting him on a school bus.

The idea is revolting to him. “No, I will not ride the bus!” he insists.

“You’ll love it!” I tell him. “Bus friends are the best friends!”

“No, they’re not,” he responds. “Bus friends are the worst friends!”

The last time we had this exchange, I asked him what was the big deal? It’s only a five-minute ride. “When is was in school, I had to ride a bus for an hour to school and an hour home again,” I told him. “And I had to do it from Kindergarten until I graduated high school.”

  In my day, we were grateful to have a school bus to ride.

He didn’t care about childhood troubles from the olden days, and he likely thought I was exaggerating anyway. In truth, I was exaggerating; the bus ride was probably only 55 minutes each way.

As I considered this, I realized I had given him the classic, old-man, life-was-much-harder-in-my-day gripe. Making myself a cliché was bad enough, but this was as wimpy an example of the old man gripe as has ever been griped.

I didn’t walk 10 miles, through three feet of snow, uphill both ways. I walked 20 feet from the bus door to the school entrance – on level pavement. Yes, the bus ride was a good 10 miles and more, and there was sometimes snow, and no doubt a few hills, but I was riding the bus for cripes sake!

One time the bus got stuck in a snowbank, but no one died. No one even got chilly. We were inside a heated bus. It was exciting, in a completely non-life-threatening way, to hear the bus driver softly swear as he spun the tires backward and forward until the equally comfortable replacement bus showed up.

And that was it. That was the pinnacle of my hard-luck childhood. I had to sit still for nearly two, non-consecutive hours per day. The horror!

I fear the future of a nation whose old men’s exaggerated stories of childhood hardship are so soft and squishy.

For this reason, and to avoid the administrative headaches involved, I don’t think I’ll try to put Big Man on the bus.

When in Greece, climb something

I’m not much of a traveler. Taking our family to Greece for 2.5 weeks was a big step for us, though my wife was the driving force behind the adventure.

I learned some things in Greece, most of them not very useful in my everyday life at home, but a few of them mildly interesting. Following are some observations made in Greece (your experience may differ.)

Greece is hot. Greece is exceedingly hot in summer. They told me this was an unusually hot summer, but seeing all the habits Greeks have developed over the centuries to avoid the summer heat, I’m thinking Greek summers are always going to be hotter than I can stand. Also, air conditioning is marginally effective when all the doors and windows are thrown wide open.

There are lots of hills in Greece. You can’t fail to notice this when you are walking in 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. Just about everything you want to see is on top of a big hill.

There are lots of neat things to see in Greece, amazing, ingenious, beautiful things. If you survive the walk up the hill, you can see them.

The fruits of surviving the walk.

Ounce for ounce, bottled water is the best beverage investment you can make in Greece. It is inexpensive, which is good, because you will need gallons of it. Beer can be purchased anywhere, from a vending machine in the laundry mat to a kiosk on the beach. I found this form of liberty refreshing. What I found less refreshing was the beer. There are many varieties, from Greece and elsewhere in Europe. Almost universally, I found them to be the continental cousins of Bud Light. If you love Bud Light, you’ll find many beers to like in Greece. Otherwise, bottled water.

The kids could not find any lemonade that wasn’t carbonated (as the locals said, “with gas.”)

Athens is noisy. Traffic is a never-ending game of chicken: the one traffic cop I saw was smoking a cigarette; it would have seemed more humane if they had also offered him a blindfold. There are lots of stray cats. The pigeons don’t give the cats a second thought. Greek bus drivers have nerves of steel.

Island villages are more peaceful, but drivers will still park in the middle of the street to run to the ATM.

Beach can mean a place with sand, or a concrete deck with ladders down into the water.

Greek landscape is beautiful. Greek people are friendly.

I can’t tell if Greeks are whispering sweet nothings or screaming bloody murder at each other. The hand gestures and voice volumes look and sound exactly the same to me. Maybe that’s how they keep Americans from knowing their business.

Travel tip: You can avoid the hill climb by visiting the LEGO version in the museum.

We’re empty netters now

It’s amazing how a little dose of parenthood can change your perspective. I suppose this is true in regard to human children too, but I’m thinking about the parenting of adopted insects.

For Big Man’s birthday, we got him a butterfly kit. This is a plastic cup of caterpillars and some mysterious earthy substance that we assumed was their food.

The caterpillars looked dead when we took their plastic habitat out of its box. At that point, our emotional attachment to them went no deeper than figuring out how to return a box of dead insects for a full refund.

The caterpillars were not dead; they were sleepy from their long, dark journey from the caterpillar factory. With a little light added to their world, they came to life, eating the mass of brown stuff and growing at an impressive rate. At the moment we discerned the change in their sizes, our emotional attachment to a cup full of bugs began.

They were supposed to climb to the lid of the container and there attach themselves for cocoon construction. We all gasped with awe at baby’s first steps as one, then another, began the climb. They must have been still a little hungry, because one after another they came back down for a snack, putting us all on an emotional roller coaster as they went up and down without attaching themselves to anything.

At last one of them hung from the lid and began the transformation. There was rejoicing throughout the land. One by one, they all followed suit, with the exception of one confused late bloomer. We wrung our hands over him, speculating upon whether he was ill or just daft. Finally, he joined his comrades and we all breathed easier.

We transferred them to their netted nursery. How long was it supposed to take them to be (re)born? No one knew. Days of doubt followed. One morning, there was a real, live butterfly clinging to the netting, his cocoon an empty shell. More rejoicing ensued.

It’s so hard to get children to smile for the camera.

Another butterfly appeared, then another and another. All but one had emerged victorious. While we waited and worried about the last, we cut up tangerines and carefully set the fruit inside the cage for food. I busied myself making our babies happy and comfortable, careful not to let anyone escape.

This made me realize that if a cousin of these precious creatures had flown into the house from outside, my wife would be chasing it with a bottle of Windex and a fly swatter. She’s not fond of insects, except the ones that are family.

We prepared ourselves for the worst regarding the remaining cocoon. Just when we had given up hope, there was movement. The butterfly struggled, but could not free himself. It was heartbreaking to watch him entangle himself deeper in silk and cocoon wreckage.

My wife prodded me to help him. With a toothpick I tore away his sticky fetters. I freed him, but alas, his wings were malformed. At my wife’s bidding, I set our poor Tiny Tim down next to the fruit, so the doomed child might live out his days in comfort.

The day came to send the kids out on their own. All but one found their way out into the open air. The last stayed by the fruit. My wife was convinced he was refusing to leave his wounded buddy. He might have just been hungry. The next day, the injured one expired. We gave the last healthy butterfly another chance to go. Having a clear conscience, he did not stay for the eulogy.

I wonder where the kids are now. Have they stayed nearby or are they off to see the world. I hope they don’t come home to visit. We don’t like insects in our house.