Piano Lessons Have Been Canceled Until Further Notice
(Kids • )
…due to an outbreak of insurgency.
→ B.Dunn, Feb 17, 2010, 08 28 am
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Does Innocence Just End Or Erode Away Gradually?
(Kids • )
Up until last night my 8-year-old boy’s biggest inner conflict probably had to do with his unconfirmed but strong suspicions over the state of Santa Clause’s existence.
Those of you who think parenting is easy if you just apply the basic tenets of canine training might have – like me – been proud to note your young son voluntarily sitting down next to you to actually listen and observe as the president gave a portion of his State of the Union address.
Then, Obama says, “This year I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.” And your boy, who up until now only thought of “gay” as meaning “fairly happy,” specifically wants to know why not one member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff clapped or even smiled when the president made that statement.
Which, do you think, is the most appropriate dog command for that particular situation?
→ B.Dunn, Jan 28, 2010, 07 08 am
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Pecan Zen
(Kids • Garden)
You wouldn’t think a sick child is a silver lining, especially when she’s uncomfortable and cross about blowing her anticipated perfect-attendance merit sticker and you’re somewhat anxious about laying the foundation for a new web venture as a hedge against having to compete, seemingly, with every laid-off newspaper writer in America for even the smallest assignment.
But then you set aside your plans for the day and reacquaint yourself with this wise, ancient 5-year-old over a large bowl of uncracked pecans. The clouds part as you divide the labor – you re-remembering how much pressure to apply to the half-cylinders holding nut in cracker so as not to simply crush the insides – she quickly grasping the finger mechanics of pulling apart the cracked shell pieces so as to preserve the largest unbroken portions of nut meat.
After both of you tire of your given tasks, you trade. She makes refrigerator poetry with word magnets while you try your bigger and clumsier hand at the shelling.
“Summer see once,
one red happy baby boy went cool pink
so, cocoon day, yes,” she says. “How about that?”
“Nice,” you reply, working your way through the pile of cracked pecans until none remain but the toughest nuts to crack. “The rest of these won’t open in one piece anymore.”
She comes over to inspect, then gets close and becomes very serious. “You have to think that they’re going to come out good,” she says. “Then they will.”
→ B.Dunn, Oct 21, 2009, 11 24 am
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Substitute Writer
(Writing • Kids)
I was going to write a clever post about cranky old men trying to figure out the subtleties of Twitter and Facebook, all tied together under the headline “An Anti-socialist’s Guide To Social Media.” But I got distracted because there is so much crap piling up on top of, underneath, inside and surrounding my desk that I can’t get the smallest task completed and so I am going to write about that instead.
It all started with a really swell new D-Link router that should’ve been a snap to set up but was not. As I fiddled with approximately 150 possible variables that could’ve been causing my problem, I became increasingly agitated and impatient, and was searching through stacks of software CDs and looking for a longer piece of cable and knocked over a drink just exactly like I warn the kids not to do, set up too near a scanner and phone and USB hub. Soda was about to pour all over everything, so I just shoved stacks of Unidentified Crap Species toward the back of the desk.
Got that all sopped up, cured the router/networking issues, went to bed.
The next morning, the impact of what I’d done hit me: There’d been a tectonic shift in my desk landscape. Yesterday I’d recognized every peak and nook of every pile. Today it was an entirely unfamiliar crap mountain range.
Lots of things are missing, but the most crucial is the tiny 2-inch-square lithium battery charger for my camera. Gone with the coke. Which makes every. Picture. Exceedingly. Precious.
Either I find that charger, or I have to go to Worst Buy, a geek store run by teenagers (with no idea what I need, but plenty of incorrect assumptions) and buy another. That would mess up a perfectly good day, if I were having one. On the other hand, the only way to avoid that retail fate is to clear out every last piece of crap from my office. That will take approximately nine days, if I devote three hours a day to the task (or 27 hours if I work straight through, but that’s not happening). And that assumes I didn’t already throw the battery charger in the wastebasket along with the soda-soaked phone book and secret password list.
My daughter spent the weekend with her grandparents so that I could swear at my desk properly. About three hours after she got back, she decided to show me the great picture she had drawn over at Nana’s house. Only after turning her world upside down, she discovered she had left it behind with her Nana. She spent the next 45 minutes stomping around and declaring “I want my drawing back,” in a very whiny voice. I tried to coax her toward Reason, but she said she could not get her head to focus on any other thing. Finally, I had to revert to something more resembling a threat.
Did she not know that when her head only thought of sad and futile things, no happiness or productivity could leak through her brain-pan? Did she not know that when her mother and I heard her declaring only sad and futile thoughts, that it made us feel sad and futile? Did she not know that she had a responsibility to the whole family to keep them on the upside of futility?
Granted she’s only 5, but could she not discern that I required extreme quietness in order to achieve the proper state of being pissed off about that AWOL lithium battery charger?
Kids.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 12, 2009, 11 02 am
