Tag Archives: parenting

This is how they do it in the UK

Our kindergartener is into flags and geography. Whenever I’m looking at something on my WordPress dashboard, he always wants me to click on the stats page. “Can we see what flags are there?” he asks. (For those unfamiliar with WordPress, the stats page shows the flags of the countries from which visits to your blog originated.) We go down the list and he names the country that goes with the flag. I make him read the names of the ones he doesn’t know. He seems to enjoy this game, though it gets a little boring on days when all my blog hits come from the US and Canada.

I love that he has an interest in these things because I like flags and geography too. More than that, I think that knowing where different places are makes you more interested in learning what happened (and is happening) there. In my book, a grasp of geography is vital to educating oneself about the world.

It also leads to interesting mealtime conversations and creative fibs.

One day, my son was drinking out of a mug with a handle on it. After quenching his thirst, he said to me, “Daddy, I know how they drink out of cups in the United Kingdom.”

I was not expecting this statement, as I did not know there was a particularly British way to take a drink. Naturally, I was intrigued. “How do they do it in the UK?” I asked.

“Like this.” He lifted up his mug and conspicuously uncurled his pinky finger, extending it out straight, exactly as Queen Elizabeth might do if she ever sipped from a plastic mug with her name printed on it at high tea.

“Oh. That’s how they do it?”

“Yup. Just like that.”

He couldn’t tell me how he came to know such an interesting and amazing fact. He knew it in the way that kindergarteners know such things: he just did.

Spot of tea, Gov'ner?

Even with his low-brow family holding him back, he is determined to blossom into a society gentleman.

A few days later, at breakfast, I was spreading raspberry preserves on a saltine.

“Can I have a cracker?” the boy asked.

I offered him the one I had just spread.

“No. I just want a plain one,” he insisted. “I don’t like that berry stuff. It tastes terrible.”

“How would you know?” I scoffed. “You’ve never even tried it.”

“Yes I did.”

“When?”

“In Germany, in the 1950s.”

Raspberry preserves

As part of the Marshall Plan, post-war Germans were forced to consume ersatz fruit spreads from America.

Well, I guess that explains why I didn’t know about it. I’ve never been to Germany and I wasn’t even born when he went on his European fruit spread sampling tour. Maybe that’s when he popped over to have a drink with Queen Elizabeth and learned her people’s cup handling techniques.

He shut me up. I handed him a plain saltine and for the rest of the meal I sat quietly, trying not to draw attention to the fact that I needed all of my clumsy, provincial fingers to lift my cocoa.

Should I immunize my child against the scourge of adverbs?

One Saturday morning, our kindergartener was watching cartoons when one of the toy commercials that saturate children’s programming came on. I don’t remember what the toy was, but it doesn’t matter; just as he does in response to every other toy commercial, my son told me that he wanted it. He’s like fish in a barrel to toy advertisers. They never miss him.

This commercial must have made the toy look exceptionally fun, because the boy added emphasis to his desire. “Daddy, I want that really badly,” he said.

His statement left me with mixed feelings – not the part about him wanting the next random toy that was advertised. I know how I feel about that; I don’t like it.

My mixed feelings were about his word usage. At first, I was pleased at his understanding of the adverb form. I was happy that he didn’t say, “I want that real bad.”

I could only afford to be impressed for a moment, though, before the word really began raining on my parade. Really is most often a wasted word. We all, including me, use it too much. Nine times out of ten, it adds nothing to the sentiment. “I want that badly,” would have conveyed the depth of his desire just as well. Omitting really doesn’t make me think he wants it the opposite of really badly; I’m not left wondering if he wants it fictitiously badly.

Then, I thought about his choice of the word badly, and the clouds burst above my proud Papa parade. Adverbs take up a lot of space in our sentences without doing much to earn their place. Of the total, questionable population of adverbs, badly is a bad one. I guess it has its place in statements like: “The child expressed his desire badly.” But when you want to use an adverb to add emphasis to a desire, isn’t it better to use one like dearly?

What does it even mean to say you want something badly?

 

barrier parenting

“You’ve erected a barrier between us with your constant desire for toys and your inefficient use of language.” (Image: Gottscho-Schleisner)

 

This is what too much writing gets you. Sometimes it brings rain to parades that should be clear skies and sunshine, as this one should have been. “I want that really badly,” is a fantastic use of language for a five-year-old. Moreover, what five-year-old is ever going to say, “I want that dearly.”? What 50-year-old says that? The only person I know who would say something goofy like that is neither five nor 50, but he reads too much Victorian era literature.

In the end, I am proud of the boy’s grammar, although I wish he would go back to his simple, “I want that,” at the end of every toy commercial. It’s concise and it will disappoint him no worse than “I want that really badly,” will when he doesn’t get the toy.

Meanwhile, I am happy that I didn’t vocalize my mixed feelings. They were misguided, and I wouldn’t like to embarrass myself speaking such unnecessary words in front of my son.

The gift of an hour

I was in the living room with our one-year-old when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard my wife’s voice on the other end of the line. That’s when it hit to me:

The call was coming from inside the house!

But this is more of a Christmas than Halloween story, so nothing terrifying happened.

“A Disney Christmas Carol is on channel 48,” she said. She was upstairs, getting ready to go to bed early. She didn’t want to yell down the stairs and let Buster know where he could find her. He might decide he’d rather be with her, which would ruin her sleep plans.

I like watching A Christmas Carol. I love reading it. I try to read it every December because I think it is one of the most perfect stories in the English language. No one else in my family is old enough to remember when words were used, instead of CGI, to paint a story. So, with them, I watch it.

Big brother was already in bed, visions of making it to kindergarten on time dancing in his head. It was just Buster, me, and special guest Jim Carrey as Scrooge. We rocked in the recliner. It lacked an hour until Buster’s normal nodding off time. I wondered how long he would watch before he climbed down and looked for a toy or a mother.

Ghost of Christmas Past

Jim Carrey seems most human when he is computer animated. The Ghost of Christmas Past is a delight to little boys. (Image: Disney)

He looked for neither. He watched with me. He didn’t fidget or look around the room or punch me in the ear or anything. He watched, like he was interested. He seemed especially mesmerized by the Ghost of Christmas Past with his flaming head and superluminal flying skills. He made it through an entire hour, until the visit to Scrooge’s nephew’s Christmas party with the Ghost of Christmas Present. Then, he rested his head on my chest and nestled in to sleep.

It wasn’t much, only everything. That one hour was the kind of time a dad cherishes. Sharing something you love with your son, and having him be interested in it, doesn’t happen every day. Yes, he was interested on a completely different level, but still, it was a moment we shared.

Maybe he won’t care for it at all, next year, but that hour gives me hope that he will. It gives me hope that someday, we’ll read the story together. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but maybe someday, he’ll read it with his son. Of course its title will be changed to A Holiday Carol by then, but I expect Dickens will still be dead, and a little rolling over in the grave never killed anyone.

Illustrated Christmas Carol

My illustrated edition: beautiful words and pictures, but no computer animation, so we’ll have to wait and see how well it catches on.

I’m not a very religious person, but I do believe Christmas, taken in the right perspective, can add light to one’s soul. Maybe I’m just a backward traditionalist, but if we don’t give our kids something enduring at times like Christmas, we leave them nothing but toys. And we all know how long toys last.

We hope you had fun at our Christmas potty

I spent an hour in the mall over Thanksgiving weekend. That alone would be worthy of pity, but hold the sympathetic tears for a minute; it gets worse. I spent half of that time in the men’s room.

Okay, let the wailing begin.

While on our mall visit, my wife, who is uncannily in tune with such things, noticed something in the way our five-year-old was walking. “Do you have to go potty?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, which meant, “I do, but I’m really into these Christmas ornaments in the Hallmark store right now, so I’m gonna pretend I don’t.”

I led him down the corridor of despair that leads to the mall restrooms. Inside the men’s room, he took off his coat and handed it to me. I thought this unnecessary, but little boys have peculiar peeing habits.

He walked past the urinals toward the stalls. “Oh, it’s one of those?” I moaned.

“Yup. One of those.”

An inspection of the three choices led us to the least disturbing toilet. In my head, I heard my wife’s frantic voice demanding a buffer between her child’s precious behind and the germ-ridden seat. I wiped the seat with toilet paper and laid down one of those paper seat rings with the punch-out center. Having prepared his nest, I left the boy alone with his duty in the stall.

God rest ye merry gentlemen.

Waiting for the patent on my holiday themed seat cover.

I placed myself in the sink area. That seemed like the most innocuous place for a figure lurking in the men’s room, with no legitimate business there, to stand. As people passed me to get to the urinals, I held my son’s coat prominently, testament that I wasn’t camping in the restroom without reason. It would have been more clever to hand out paper towels, but I’d left my tip jar at home.

One gentlemen said hello to me as he passed. I decided to relocate.

I retreated to the stall area. The other stalls were empty, leaving me free to converse through the door without raising a response from the wrong squatter. “Almost done?” I asked.

“Nope. When I do this, I do it slow,” he replied. “I’m not good at doing things fast.”

“Just keep plugging away then.”

I had to warn my wife. I went and stuck my head out the men’s room door.

“What’s taking so long?” she asked.

I held up two fingers.

Her eyes grew wide, like from some sharp, internal pain. “Oh my God! Did you put down toilet paper?”

corner stall

“Oh my God! Did you put down toilet paper?”

I patted myself on the back as I nodded to her.

I returned to the stall door. “Almost done?”

“Not yet.”

I leaned against the wall, holding up my child’s coat of a flag for all to see. People came and went.

And then.

From behind that stainless steel door, came the sound of gentle humming – the melody of his favorite Christmas song: Carol of The Bells.

“Dum de de dum.

Dum de de dum.

Dum de de dum. . .”

It goes to show that even the horrors of a public men’s room can’t rob a child of his Christmas spirit.