Tag Archives: parenting

Three solid hours of non-refundable simulated deafness

We were ready to watch our first Monster Trucks show. My son and his friend had their Monster Truck flags, which indicates that they had not succeeded in poking out any eyes with the flag sticks during the pit party. They had their industrial-grade earmuffs, and my wife and I had our ear plugs ready.

On the arena floor were two rows of junk cars just waiting to be crushed to bits. The Monster Trucks were scattered around the outside of the floor area. We anticipated a fun-packed circus of mechanization and noise.

kids looking at monster truck

This truck can totally crush a whole row of cars. It can do it all . . . night . . . long.

The announcer introduced the drivers. The names floated past us into oblivion. The drivers put on their helmets and got into the their trucks, assuming their true identities (e.g. the guy driving the black truck).

The boys put their ear protection into place, which instantly turned them talkative. You’ve never heard a more confused conversation than one between two preschoolers wearing earmuffs:

FRIEND: “The red truck is starting up.”

SON: “Huh?”

FRIEND: “The red truck is starting.”

SON: “Huh? Oh look, the red truck is going.”

FRIEND: “Huh?”

Seeing me put in my ear plugs inspired my son to attempt a conversation with me, an activity fraught with miscommunication under ideal acoustic conditions. Realizing that I couldn’t hear him, he helpfully lifted a muff from one of his ears every time he spoke.

I tried to preserve my son’s hearing by discouraging him from talking. I turned my attention to the spectacle below. This was when I realized that I’m not really a Monster Truck kind of guy. Yes, it was cool, the first time the trucks ran over the cars, but they just kept running over them again and again. I believe this is where the phrase beating a dead horse originated, back during the old Monster Stage Coach exhibitions.

two moster trucks crushing cars

Looks pretty cool, right? It was pretty cool, until about the 20th time over the cars. I didn’t take a picture of the 20th time, or any of the times thereafter.

Finally, after the cars were crushed flat, the announcer declared, “Well, the time has come . . .” I reached for my coat. “. . . for intermission.” Intermission? You mean we’ve got to wait half an hour until they decide to start driving over a road of flattened metal again? “That’s right, it’s intermission time!” the announcer replied to my thoughts.

The second half of the show was amazing, for those who can’t get enough repetitive truck driving. The boys were fidgety. They were losing interest, but they didn’t want to go, because at that age it’s easy to get trapped in that gray area between boredom and not wanting to miss anything. One of the trucks shot sparks, leaving the boys hoping for a full-blown fireball. It seems almost cruel that none of the trucks exploded.

The show finally ended when the grand champion’s truck started leaking some crucial fluid. It wasn’t exactly a heart-stopping finale, but all the smoke rising from the engine made it almost like the fire the boys had been awaiting.

My wife had the boys’ coats on, earmuffs put away, and was leading them out of the arena in about 15 seconds. Apparently, she’s not a Monster Truck kind of gal.

Monster Trucks: Every bit as good as a sharp stick in the eye

We took our four-year-old and his friend to see a Monster Trucks show at the local sports arena. I had never been to such an event and did not know what to expect. All I could reasonably be sure of was that the boys would enjoy themselves at a show featuring big trucks with big tires crushing stuff.

Before the show there was a pit party. Everyone got to get a close-up look at the trucks and meet the drivers. The first thing the boys noticed when we got there was that some other children had Monster Truck flags for the drivers to autograph. Well, if people we’d never heard of before, and would never see again, were signing other kids’ flags, then we needed flags for signing too.

boys visit big chicken

I’m not sure what a giant chicken is doing at a Monster Trucks show, but those huge eyes of his must present a tempting target for a couple of kids with sticks.

The flags hadn’t looked like such a liability for other parents, but as soon we handed over the money for them, we realized what a bad idea they were. Give a kid a flag at the end of a stick and he is overcome by the need to wave it recklessly. Correction: Give a kid anything at the end of a stick and he is overcome by the need to wave it recklessly. Correction: Give a kid a stick and he is overcome by the need to wave it recklessly.

It was a crowded arena, and many times I had to deflect one of our jubilant flag sticks from the vulnerable parts of strangers. But the kids needed the flags to collect autographs and that is exactly what they did, until they had each collected one autograph. You had to wait in line to get an autograph, and waiting in line is not nearly as fun as running off and waving your flags in each other’s faces.

waving flag into camera

It’s always fun until some camera loses a lens.

For the one autograph they did get, my wife held our places in line while I refereed their flag fight. I’d hoped this might get it out of their systems, but they were still in a waving frenzy as we rejoined the line. We needed to have a man to man to man talk about flag safety before somebody got hurt, and somebody got sued.

I knelt down and made them pay attention. “Listen, if you put out somebody’s eye, I don’t know you,” I told them. “When they ask you who brought you here, you go point out somebody at the other end of the arena so I have time to get back to the car. Got it?”

A minute later, they got their first and only autograph from a very nice man whom I could not now pick out of a police lineup to save my life. He has a very snazzy signature though. It looks great on the flag, but it’s illegible, so we are unlikely to ever know who he was. He’ll always just be that guy who drove the red truck, or was it orange? Oh well, the important thing is that nobody lost an eye needed an attorney.

writing on monster truck

Taking a break from flags and chickens to visit a Monster Truck. Writing our names on Chalkboard Chuck.

If I can’t find your kindergarten, you’ll have to be homeschooled

We intend to send our son to kindergarten in the fall. Many parents are delaying kindergarten an extra year for their kids. That’s their choice and I respect it, but the way I figure it, the sooner he goes to school, the sooner he graduates, and the sooner he can begin working and saving money for that posh retirement home his parents will so richly deserve in their golden years. Even one year of lost wages could tarnish the first-class accommodations I’m owed.

I feel like, out of all the people holding clipboards who knock on our door at dinner time, one of them should be the person who signs up your kid for kindergarten and tells you where to leave him on that fateful morning in September. So far, none of them have been that person, and I begin to fear that such a helpful solicitor does not exist. We may have to leave the house to get the boy enrolled in school, and to find out where that school is.

In my youth, there was only one elementary school in town, if you happened to live in one of the towns that was on the whole education bandwagon. As long as your parents got you to the door of that school during daylight hours, with some kind of identification tag pinned to you, you were officially enrolled. There weren’t so many forms with nosey questions about residency and immunizations. The teachers were experienced at picking out the potentially rabid, and these were set outside the classroom door to become the school nurse’s problem. Life went on without a fuss, except for the minor difficultly of having to often find a new school nurse.

show and tell

Checking the pack of new pupils for signs of hydrophobia and ticks. (Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston)

There are several elementary schools in our district. I’m pretty sure our boy will go to the nearest one, rather than the one whose data entry person picks our packet out of the stack. I found a map and our house is in the area outlined in blue marker, so I think that means our son will attend the blue area school.

I went to our district’s web site and opened up the enrollment form. I scrolled all the way down through the many pages of forms until I hit the Acceptable Use Policy. Somehow, I doubt that my son will be running an online dating site from the PC in his kindergarten classroom. He’ll bring his own laptop for that.

I finally had to navigate over to espn.com and take some deep breaths to stop the hyperventilating. Why do they need to know more about my kid than I do? Now I’ve got research to do. Maybe I’ll Google him. I wonder if he’s got a Wikipedia page.

It all seems kind of daunting and confusing right now, but I expect we (my wife) will figure it out by autumn. If not, the boy will be another kid whose advent into kindergarten will be pushed back a year. That wouldn’t be so bad except for the dent it will put into my retirement plans.

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

Our four-year-old had a friend over. I was watching a basketball game while they played nearby. They began discussing their respective lineages. How four-year-olds get into such a discussion, I don’t know. There must be something about toy trains that leads naturally into ancestry.

I let the ballgame fade away as I focused myself upon a little parental eavesdropping. I wanted to know what my son had retained from the things I’d told him about his family.

“My grandfather was a soldier,” he told his friend.

That was very nearly correct. It was his great-grandfather, but that’s all the same to a preschooler.

“He died when he got old,” my son continued.

Correct. He was about 70, which seems ancient when you’re four.

“My grandsister died too. She was sick.”

Grandsister? I don’t know what closet he pulled her out of; I’m sure I’ve never mentioned a sickly grandsister.

“And,” he said, with no more emotion than he’d displayed when recounting the demise of his faceless grandsister, “my father died because somebody shot him.”

What? I’m sitting right here!

Number 1: You’re clearly lying.

Number 2: It’s rude to speak of someone’s grisly death right in front of him.

Number 3: If you’re going to tell people I’m dead, at least act a little cut up over it!

His friend pointed out that I was quite nearby, and although I displayed all the vigor of a declining couch potato, it was clear that I still clung to my low-grade existence. My son dropped the subject and picked up a locomotive engine.

A lot of thoughts go through your head at that moment when your son first begins to tell people that you are dead. Once you eliminate malice as a motive, you are assailed by a Twilight Zone of possible interpretations:

Is he a psychic, unwittingly foretelling my violent demise? Well, he didn’t see a Time Out coming when he threw a tennis ball at the TV screen, so his psychic powers can’t be too polished.

Am I seeing him in the future, when I really am shot and killed? It still wouldn’t hurt him to show a little grief over the event.

Does he see dead people (i.e. me)? Well, if I’m already dead, his friend, his brother, his mother, all my co-workers, and the guy who flipped me off in traffic this morning can see me too, which gives death no advantages over life.

After the shock of my untimely end wore off, I realized the truth. It had nothing more to do with the Twilight Zone than that my boy might have written for the show if he’d been around at the time. The kid is a storyteller. He likes storytelling so much that he blurts out the plot before taking time to review its plausibility. He said I died because he wanted to keep the story going and the word father came to him before he could conjure up a grandbrother.

The boy likes to spin a yarn, and since I have never been one to embellish any story or make any tale taller by a few inches, I can only blame his mother.

drawing of army man

A storyteller and an artist too: This is the boy’s illustration of his great-grandfather. I can only assume that the stain on his uniform is mud and/or coffee. War is dirty business, and, if this soldier was anything like his great-grandchildren, most of his drinks ended up on his clothes.