Tag: kids are awesome

Toddler Life, ch. 419 — Cite Your Source

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“Dad, I’m drinking ink.”

It’s 6 AM, and when your five-year-old says he’s drinking ink at 6 AM, you forget for the moment about overactive imaginations and the fact that five-year-olds will say just about anything for the pure joy of trying it out. I whirl and look, and he’s grinning at me with a made-you-look smile, his tiny hands wrapped around his Pokemon tumbler and a smear of pink foam glazing his lip.

The sleepy haze recedes a bit. Of course he’s not drinking ink; he’s drinking my smoothie. But where’d he get that idea? Ink? It’s …

I haven’t said anything to him yet, and this kid requires a response to everything he says, no matter how off-handed or to-himself it seems to be, so he starts repeating himself.

“DAD. I’m drinking ink.”

“Ink?”

“Yeah. Pink ink.”

Pink ink. Pink ink? That sounds Seussian. More fog recedes. It is Seussian. He goes in cycles — about two weeks at a time, wherein he loves a certain book like air itself while totally forgetting whatever book he was over the moon about just a few days prior. Currently, the Book he Loves is One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. The nonsensical novelletta about a menagerie of monsters.

I hate this book.

I grow to hate all the books he loves; as an adult, you can only read the same series of simple sentences so many times before you begin to memorize it, and once you’re muttering the phrases to yourself as you walk the halls at your job, well, you start to suffer from social problems more than you already do.

This one has a little star. This one has a little car. Say, what a lot of fish there are!

(And then the murders began.)

I hate this book more than most, though, because it’s not a narrative, not a story. Every page just presents a new, weird little critter, spurts off a few rhymes, and then sends you on your merry way to the next critter. No throughline, just “look at this weird little thing. Isn’t it weird? Hey, here’s another one!”

But at the same time, I hear a tiny voice from the depths of distant memory telling me that I once loved this book — our copy of it was quite well-worn — when I was my son’s age, for much the same reason as I hate it now. The sing-songy little rhymes. The cute little creatures. I dug it.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. The morning haze recedes enough for me to realize — he’s quoting the book. Which is awesome. I mean, sure, thinking about the Yink kinda makes me want to put an elbow through a wall (really? It drinks pink ink, and that’s it? There’s nothing else worth mentioning about it? How about those bizarro weird tufts of fur all up its neck? Can you explain for me the evolutionary processes that spawned those, perhaps? WHO CARES WHAT IT EATS?). But the kid is quoting literature. Identifying with a character from a book. I approve of this development in general, if not in the particulars of the moment.

But I’m a dad. And the dad circuits are waking up. I can’t just say, “oh, that’s nice.” I have to tease. I have to troll.

So I say, “oh, that’s right. You’re drinking ink like the Gox.”

He laughs at me. “No, dad. The Gox doesn’t drink pink ink. That’s not the one.”

I nod and smile. “That’s right. I remember. It’s not the Gox. It’s the Zeds. They drink pink ink with one hair upon their heads.”

His smile disappears, replaced with a scowl. “Dad, no. You’re not getting it right. It’s not the Zeds.”

I smack my forehead. “I forgot. It’s the wump. That one –”

“Dad! Stop! You’re not paying attention.” He’s mad now. He hops down from the bench and goes running upstairs, only to reappear a moment later with the book clutched in his tiny paws. He plops it on the table, starts flipping pages, finds what he’s after. Turns to me, with every ounce of I-told-you-so that a five-year-old can muster dripping from his voice.

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“See, dad? It’s the Yink.”

And I pause. Blink. Things start to rattle around in my brain. This little midget just cited his source on me.

As a teacher who has been trying for seven years to convince students of the importance of doing exactly this thing — to point to your source material and use it to prove the point you’re making, so you’re not just pissing opinions into the wind — I’m gobsmacked. My five-year-old just did this thing automatically, for a thing that had literally zero stakes.

He can craft an argument. Make a literary allusion. Cite his source.

If he could just write his own name, he’d be ready to graduate high school.

Five Years a Dad

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My son is five years old today.

Nothing quite drops a boulder in the stream of what you thought your life was like the birth of a child, to say nothing of adding a 26-day stint in the NICU into the mix. Having kids has forced me to grow up in ways that I never thought I would have to, has cast shadows of doubt and rays of hope across my world in ways I didn’t think possible.

I used to think I had a pretty good idea of who I was and where I fit in this world. But kids will divest you of that notion like a raccoon divesting a garbage can of its contents.

Ever since I became a dad, I feel like every day I have to reinvent myself a little, adjust the way I think a little, consider my effect upon the world just a little bit more. I have to grow up a little more every day, just to stay a few steps ahead.

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Well, maybe not that far ahead.

Happy birthday, Sprout. To quote Johnathan Coulton, you ruined everything … in the nicest way.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Look Around

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A short entry today:

Holy carp, it’s Saturday. The Thanksgiving holiday is basically over (teachers get a few perks). If you asked me — or, I’d imagine, any other teacher, even the ones that only got a few days off — I’d be just as likely to believe that we only got an extra day or two as opposed to the full week.

Not because I got a lot done over the break (I didn’t). Not because a lot was happening over the break (decidedly not). But just because when we’re sitting around with our families and spending time with the people we love, the time seems to pass a little faster. A watched clock at work can take an age to tick over, but the same clock when you’re enjoying time with the kids — watching them explore and paint and build with blocks and chase the cats and “read” books and “help” around the house — well, that clock runs at ludicrous speed.

It’s easy to lose track of that stuff. The tribulations of parenting a two- and a four-year-old seem to outweigh the joys on your average day-to-day. The good stuff is still there, of course, but it has to fight for its time, and when you’re working full-time, the stuff you have to do sort of ends up claiming its time first.

But holidays give us a chance to slow down and take a look at the whole picture, and you know what? This parenting thing? It’s not so bad. I gripe about it a ton, but all things considered, my kids are both pretty awesome. I mean, who cares if the house is a wreck, if my wife and I both have permanent raccoon-eyes, if the best moment of our day most days is the moment we’ve gotten them down to bed, the screaming has stopped, and we can sit on the couch and exhale. They amaze me every day, even if they do drive me nuts more often than not.

This week has reminded me of that. So even though I’m not going to give a pages-long things I’m thankful for account, I’ll just point out that I am, indeed, thankful for my kids, who, as I pointed out above, amaze me every day. And for my wife, who, truth be told, does most of the work with the kids and allows me to work a creatively fulfilling job and practice my creatively fulfilling hobbies. And for the rest of our family, who continually shower the kids and us with love. And … no, stop that. Keep it brief.

I started this post out planning to keep it short, and I’m creeping towards going long, so I’ll get to the point: the quote that inspired this post. Not a particularly poetic one, but a classic all the same, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

So. Here’s to the holidays that allow us to stop and look around once in a while.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Toddler Life, Chapter 419: We Have Lost Normality

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Kids make you insane.

Not necessarily in that gibbering, banging-your-head-against-the-walls, strait-jacket kind of insane (well, maybe in small doses), but in the way that it warps the way you look at the world. The world a parent lives in is not the same world that a normal human lives in. We see things that are invisible to most people. We do things that make normal people scratch their heads in wonder. Our heads are constantly filled with bizarre fuzzy maths that would make the physics department at MIT weep. We tie ourselves in knots to make the world livable for ourselves and the future humans we are tasked with raising to adulthood.

Here are just a few of the strange behaviors that have become totally commonplace for my wife and myself since having kids (we have two, and that’s probably significant as well):

  1. Normal people can drink out of cups, but we can’t. If we have a glass of some beverage, and we leave that beverage unattended for even fifteen seconds, then that beverage will end up spilled on the couch, the carpet, the dog, or possibly the ceiling. The fact that we have cats plays in here, too, because our cats cannot abide an upright glass. So instead we drink out of bottles with lids, all the time, until the kids are asleep.
  2. Normal people lock the bathroom door to poop, but we don’t. I don’t even close the door all the way; I just rest it lightly against the frame. For some reason, the kids never want my attention so much as when I’m trying to drop a deuce; something about the fact that I’m bent over, pants around the ankles, making my offering to the porcelain god brings them scrambling. And here comes that mental math I mentioned: I can lock the door (which will keep them both out) or simply close it (which might keep out the 2-year-old), but then I have to suffer the slings and arrows of a tireless banging on the door to the chorus of “DADDY? DADDY? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Or, I can give them easy access, and put up with the lesser indignity of relieving myself in front of two future humans while listening to them prattle on about the bug they just saw or the piece of candy they want or why does it smell funny in here? (Generally, the prattle wins out over the banging on the door.)
  3. Normal people can buy just one of something, but we can’t. When we buy treats — and let’s go ahead and establish that a “treat” is anything special that one of them gets that isn’t basic sustenance — we have to buy two. Two bags of popcorn at Target. Two kiddie sundaes at the restaurant (not that we take them out to eat with us, but on that rare occasion…). Two silly little paper hats. Case in point: just this past weekend, we were at the grocery store and saw on the endcap (by the way, the people who design end caps for grocery stores and for Target seriously need to be shot, or at least saddled with a 2-year-old and forced to walk through their own stores) a cute little pair of Minion goggles. You know, the annoying little blobs from that Steve Carrell movie, Despicable Me? Well, my son loves those things, and the goggles were only a couple of bucks, so of course I picked them up. My wife immediately went to pick up a second pair for my daughter. She doesn’t even like the minions, as far as I can tell, but the point is, my son had a thing, so it was gonna be a problem if she didn’t have that thing, too. So we double up, and fill our house with twice as much crap.
  4. Normal people check the thermostat maybe once or twice a day, but I have to check it somewhat more often. This makes me crazy, because the thermostat is not a thing that changes on its own, and I feel like an insane person looking at it as often as I do. But little kids love pushing buttons, both the metaphorical and the literal. Seriously, they had somehow managed to turn on the heat while it was 95 degrees out the other day. Luckily, I caught it before the house or any of us combusted from the heat. Because I check the thermostat more often than your dad does. Every time I walk past the thing, I check it. Very OCD, and I am not even a little OCD.
  5. Normal people know what “no” means, but we don’t. The word “no” means nothing in our house. For two reasons. First of all, it obviously means nothing to the children. My wife and I say it and say it and say it, but they keep asking or doing the thing that had us saying “no” in the first place, so we clearly haven’t taught the meaning of this simplest of words properly. Then, there’s that thing that happens, you know, where you say a word over and over and over in rapid succession and, like a soggy Cheerio, it just kind of disintegrates in your mind? Like the syllables and the letters come apart and the meaning just evaporates? Where do words come from, anyway? What’s a language, for that matter? How are we even able to communicate at all?

There are more, but I have to go check the thermostat.

How about you, dear readers? In what ways have your kids fragmented your reality?

The Seeker of Approval

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“Are you proud of me today?”

My son was sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles, hands bracing the sides — the classic pooping toddler pose. I was leaning against the sink, thinking about whatever it is parents think about when they are trying not to think about the fact that they have to be present while their kids are pooping. Probably penguins. (It’s usually penguins.) You can’t look straight at the kid, that makes him nervous. You can’t wander out of the room, he gets upset. You just have to be present and sort of stare into the bathtub for a few minutes.

“What’s that, buddy?”

“Daddy, are you proud of me today?”

I’ll confess that I don’t put a whole lot of planning into the words I use around my kids, outside of course of trying to stay away from the Sharknados and Mother Truckers that inadvertently bubble to the surface when they, for example, dump entire boxes of cereal on the floor, or throw freshly laundered running shoes into toilets. I mentally replay the conversations I’ve had with the boy in recent months. Surely I’ve told him I was proud of him a few times, but never made a big deal out of it. Oh, you counted to ten. I’m so proud of you!

But here he is, mid-deuce, asking me if I’m proud of him.

“I’m proud of you every day, sprout.”

“Well, are you proud of me TODAY?”

He has this funny way of asking a question where he sort of smiles but forgets to turn his mouth up at the corners. Just bares his teeth at me. It’s adorable but unsettling. He leans his head to the side a little when he does it, sort of like a Cheshire Cat that fails to vanish.

“Sprout, I’m always proud of you.”

“Today, daddy?”

“Yes, of course, I’m proud of you today.”

“Okay.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He focused on the task at hand for a moment, a tiny vein popping out in his tiny forehead as he strained.

“I can’t go poop, daddy.”

“That’s okay, sprout. Sometimes you just can’t. We’ll try again later.”

“Okay. Daddy?”

He thinks, I think, that if he doesn’t address me every time he speaks to me, I’ll forget he’s speaking to me. I’d be willing to wager that he says “daddy” over five hundred times a day. Easily 50% or better of his daily lexicon.

“Yeah?”

“Are you still proud of me?”

“Buddy, I will always be proud of you, all the time. No matter what.”

I held up my hand for a high-five and he gleefully obliged, and we went downstairs. He wanted to complete a puzzle for the fifth time of the evening. Sure, kid. No problem.

If only we could all ask so guilelessly for approval for such small accomplishments.