Entries Tagged 'being a kid' ↓

Last night, Allison and I finally sat down to wrap the presents we got for Lauren, Jesse and Max. I’m thinking she was a little bit punchy from a combination of being up late, a few extra Christmas cookies, plus the fact that I finally gave her carte blanche to work the tape dispenser. Either way, at one point she broke into a spontaneous rendition of Wham’s “Last Christmas.”

“How do you even know that song?” I asked, fairly positive that it didn’t exist in our iTunes Christmas shuffle.

“They play it on the bus,” she said before launching into another chorus.

Last Christmas… I gave you my heart.
The very next day… you gave it away.
Next year… I’m gonna give it to somebody special.

At which point she stopped singing, looked at me and said, “I know who that is.”

Assuming she meant she knew who sang the song I asked, “Oh yeah, who?”

“God and Jesus.”

That stopped me for a second. George Michael has been called a lot of things, but I imagine Lord and Creator of the universe is not one of them.

“God and Jesus sing this?” I asked.

“No, that’s who she’s going to give her heart to,” Allison clarified. (Apparently they play the Taylor Swift version on the bus) “Because God and Jesus are really special.”

That stopped me a second longer.

Applying what she understood about life, love and the world to this cheesy Christmas song, Allison knew that no matter how fickle other people could be with their affections, God and Jesus would never take her love for granted.

You all know the place I’ve recently come to regarding religion, but how can you argue with a faith like that? In churches all over America, Christians talk about having a childlike faith in God. But very few of them ever come to the place where Allison already is, where the only thing that matters is that God loves you and you love Him… no questions, no qualifying conditions, and no eternity of torture if you mess something up.

I was rendered speechless for the barest of instants before saying through a slightly tighter throat, “You’re right Allison. They are special. I think that is who she gave her heart to.”

No matter what your faith this Christmas, whether your reason for the season is Jesus, family or tradition, I hope you all experience this simple joy of loving and being loved. Whether it’s a spouse, a child, a close friend or an invisible man in the sky, I hope you all have somebody special to give your heart to, somebody who will keep it close to their own and never give it away.

Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth.

Allison and I have been reading “The Tale of Despereaux” before bed for the last few nights. First off, it’s an amazing book so far. I find I’M getting to the ends of chapters and saying to Allison, “You wanna read just one more?”

But the name of the human Princess in this book’s name is Pea. Which, when you’re reading visually, is a very cute name. Princess Pea. You can almost picture her, a tiny little girl, dressed in green, maybe sitting on a royal chair that looks like a pod. But when you’re reading it out loud to a kid who can’t really follow along with the words, she’s just hearing it phonetically, so she can’t keep a straight face every time an exchange happens like this:

“Her name,” said Despereaux, “is Pee.”
“What?”
“The person who loves me. Her name is Pee.”
“Nevermind her name. Did you allow her to touch you?”
“Yes sir,” said Despereaux, “I let Pee touch me. It felt good.”

Allison has been going to Vacation Bible School this summer where she’s been learning all about Jesus.  In these two clips she explains to dear old dad the story of The Passion and the story of Jesus healing the paralytic.  I know I’m biased, but I think it’s freakin’ adorable.  Take a listen and I think you will too:

The Passion… according to Allison

Healing the Sick… according to Allison

Ask anyone with a four- to ten-year-old and they’ll tell you: Knock-Knock jokes are the bane of a parent’s existence.  I’ll take the three-year-old “why why why” phase any day over the Knock-Knock phase.

It’s not just that Knock-Knock jokes are inherently unfunny.  But because the setup is so dang simple, kids feel like it gives them free license to write their own material.  Which is basically the equivalent of somebody reading Harry Potter and thinking, “Hey, I like to read.  I could be a novelist.”  Or my personal favorite, a woman who told my wife that she could be a midwife because she watches A Baby Story every day.  So Allison will frequently come out with such gems as:

Knock-Knock.
Who’s there?
DVD.
DVD who?
DVD like the movies!

Knock-Knock
Who’s there?
The couch.
The couch who?
The couch that you sit on to watch TV!  Ha ha ha ha!

As a parent this really is a no win situation.  By laughing I encourage her to keep making lame attempts at humor.  By not laughing, I of course destroy every shred of her self-esteem and scar her for life, right?

On the other hand, the fact that they find such disproportionate levels of humor in something so insanely stupid can, in fact, make a parent’s job easier.  For the last two years I have been able to make both my kids laugh without fail using this very simple formula:

Q: What did (x) say to (y)?
A: You’re so silly because you’re a (y) and I’m an (x)!

Mind you, the punchline is always delivered in a frantic almost stuttering manner and punctuated with a heartfelt “Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!”  But the effect is always the same: both my kids laughing hysterically at what essentially amounts to restating a question with the question itself.  Hopefully I’m not raising them to be TV pundits.

Q: What did Barack Obama say to the deficit?
A: Y-y-y-you’re so silly because because because you’re the deficit and and and and and and and I’m Barack Obama! Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Roll your eyes all you want, but this little technique has come in quite handy on many a JC Penney portrait days after said children have been cooped up inside a car for an hour and then forced to sit in a chair and smile during what should be their nap time.

But as much as I pretend-complain here, the fact is I really do bring it on myself.  I recently introduced the Chicken Joke and its one truly funny manifestation to Allison:

Q: Why did the frog cross the road?
A: Because it was stapled to the chicken.

Now she simply substitutes any animal or inanimate object for “frog” and tells it like it’s a brand new and utterly freakin hi-larious joke.  And okay, the way she cracks up every single time is kind of adorable as hell.

We’re T-minus any day now for kid number three (boy number two), so I figure it’s about time to get this dormant blog fired up again with all those random musings about childhood, parenthood and randomhood that all three of you faithful readers have come to expect.  So without further ado:

RANDOM PARENTAL MUSINGS AS OF LATE:

Bibbity bobbity BOOM

I was watching Star Wars with Allison the other day.  Upon watching the Death Star obliterate Alderaan, she turns to me and says: “Where is the Princess going to live now?  I guess she’ll just have to marry someone with a house.”  I, of course, blame Disney.

Jesse is two and a half and has taken to playing with his penis pretty much non-stop.  I don’t want to necessarily scold him and lay the foundation for weird sexual hang-ups later in life (that’s what walking in on mommy and daddy mid-coitus is for).  On the other hand, with the way he yanks on that thing, and the fact that I can’t personally attest to the tactile strength and elasticity of foreskin, I don’t want him to, ya know, break anything… which, I imagine would affect his future sex life even more.  That’s why the phrase, “Only in your crib,” is uttered an estimated three hundred times per day in our house.  Because the fact is, he’s probably fine.  I just don’t want to see it.  This is why this standup bit is the funniest damn thing I’ve seen in months.  And as a side-but-related-note… even though I don’t doubt our decision not to circumcise, I just have to say: foreskins are freakin’ WEIRD.

Allison and I have been reading chapter books before bed.  We recently started “Ramona the Pest” which I thought would be great since Ramona, like Allison, is starting kindergarten.  Yeah, then on her first day she gets into trouble like five times and has at least three kids making fun of her.  Allison was psyched about kindergarten, but then you have jerks like Beverly Cleary making her ask, “Why was Ramona sad on her first day of school?”

I have not pooped by myself in about four months, which is coincidentally about how long it’s been since Jesse learned how to open doors.  I don’t know why he insists on joining me while I drop a load, but I’ve lost the will to fight him anymore.  Now I simply have fun with it. Like sticking my foot out so that Jesse, running at full speed and expecting the door to open all the way, plows into it head first.

Whereas we had all our girl names picked out a good three months before we were even engaged, Lauren and I have really had to struggle to eke out a boy’s name, preferably at least a couple days before they’re born.  We’ve been settled on Max for several months now.  At least I thought we were until the other night when Lauren announces that she’s freaked out about what we’ll name him if he comes out with red hair.  “Max just always struck me as a dark haired name,” she says.  In case you didn’t already know, both our kids have red hair, I have red hair, Lauren’s sister and grandmother have red hair, my entire paternal side of the family has red hair.  Recessive genes be damned, if we don’t have a redhead, I’ll be pretty freakin surprised… after which I’ll apparently be one of those parents who, in fact, did not pick out their kid’s name ahead of time.

I’ve discovered that no matter how cranky Jesse gets, or how hopped up on adrenaline he becomes, I can pretty much diffuse the situation and make him laugh by hurling a pillow full speed at his head.

I find having Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the door actually provides a good opportunity for discussing world cultures with a five-year-old and explaining how “some people don’t believe the same things we do.”

In the last couple months Jesse has mustered up the strength to open the refrigerator door.  In the last week he has mustered up the strength to lift and move his step-stool in order to reach the microwave.  Absolutely nothing in our house is safe anymore.

I had my first “there’s no such thing as monsters” talk with Allison before bed the other night.  Hearing her say, “Thanks, Dad,” at the end and then throwing her arms around my neck was, perhaps, the highlight of my entire summer.

Santa gave Jesse a Matchbox car ramp for Christmas.  Few things let me bond with my rambunctious son more than staying up until eleven o’clock on a Friday night, racing these things down the ramp over and over again, and busting a gut every time they crash into each other.

It’s amazing how your kids will just randomly give you new and completely amazing reasons to love them.  And new and amazing examples what unique individuals they are.  The girl received the movie Dumbo for Christmas and has watched it several times since.  But when she asks to watch it, she doesn’t ask to watch Dumbo.  She says, “Can I watch Jumbo Junior.”  Because if you remember the movie, “Jumbo Junior” is what the elephant’s mom originally names him.  It’s only after everyone sees his giant ears that they start calling him “Dumbo.”  It’s meant as a derogatory nickname.  And yet even his best friend, Timothy Mouse calls him that.   That’s like making friends with that fat pie eating kid from Stand By Me and still referring to him as “Lard Ass.”   Okay so you made friends with him, but you’re still killing him a little every time you don’t call him by his real name.  Apparently this never struck anyone in the Dumbo audience as weird.

Well it struck the girl that way.  She understands that even an elephant has feelings and recognizes how blatantly wrong it was to keep referring to Dumbo as Dumbo.  So she has decided to do the right thing and call him by his real name.  And not only that, if one of us forgets and says, “the D word” she will actually correct us.  “Jumbo Junior, dad.”

I seriously love that kid.  She’s only four, but she gets it.  Sometimes I forget how much.

Indy, why does the red background move?

Continuing with the theme of video games from yesterday, the very first eBay purchase I ever made was a used Atari 2600. The year was 1999 and I was twenty-one. And yes, I realize in my previous blog I made it pretty clear just how much of a colossal loser you had to be to play video games post-drivers age. But you don’t understand. I had to buy that Atari. I had to. For one very important reason. I had never beaten Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Before I continue you should realize, if you don’t already know, that video games in the mid-80’s weren’t like the video games of today… or even the video games of the early 90’s for that matter. Most of those games couldn’t actually be beaten. You just kept moving up levels of increasing difficulty until you returned to the first board and began the process all over again. In the world of Atari and Coleco, you pretty much just played until you died… or until the console got sick of you and overheated. It was a lot like life in that respect. So the idea that you could finish Raiders of the Lost Ark in a somewhat positive way inspired you to keep at it. But between me, several of my friends and every one of their older brothers, we were never EVER successful.

That haunted me.

The Nazis' vertical line is too long... they're digging in the wrong dots.

Over the next thirteen years my mind often drifted back to that two-dimensional world of pixilated snakes and dot matrix whips. I had clearly missed something. Something to do with the Map Room screen. I knew that you had to bring a key and a medallion into that screen, just like in the movie, to reveal where the ark lay in a vast mesa field. Selecting the medallion supposedly revealed the ark’s location, but selecting the key was the only way to reveal the map itself. How could you possibly select both items at the same time? Especially when one false step without the proper item could and would make you fall off a cliff and die… and by “die” I mean your “body” would disappear pixel by giant pixel, starting with your rectangular “feet” and ending with your upside-down-T “fedora”. But the more and more I went back, the closer I came to five or six plausible strategies. Unfortunately, I’d gotten rid of my Atari in fifth grade, so I had no way of testing those theories.

God bless the age of the internet. I went onto eBay for the first time in the fall of 1999 and placed a bid on an Atari 2600 with a largish handful of games—including, of course, the much anticipated, and much antagonistic, Raiders of the Lost Ark. I checked back frequently, almost schizophrenically, in the auction’s final moments, then waited two long weeks for my check to clear and my destiny to arrive. The day it did, I could barely focus on work. I ate cereal for dinner, hooked up the Atari, jammed the Raiders cartridge into its slot and said a mini prayer of thanks when it fired up on the first try.

Cue the John Williams in 4-bit sound.

I’m here to tell you right now, folks; the American Dream is a reality. I beat the game in less than thirty minutes. The “victory screen” was minimal—a five-second animation of Indy rising on a spring toward the ark—but few moments, before or since, have ever been so satisfying. I sighed contentedly as I thought, “Okay, now what?”

That was nine years ago and I’ve yet to come up with an adequate answer.

See how it’s done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uKI7J0pdr4

At what point did video games suddenly become cool? When I was a kid you played video games until (and ONLY until) you or one of your friends got a drivers license, at which point you said, “Screw Mario Brothers, I’ve got better things to do.” Personally I always looked forward to the day when I would be deemed officially too old for video games. I never knew which turtle shell to stomp on to get to the secret level, or which bricks you could smash to get ten bazillion lives. I don’t even know how anyone managed to figure that stuff out in those days before the internet. Actually yes I do know how they figured it out. They were geeks! And they had no life! So I was very much looking forward to sixteen, and turning in my paddles for the chance at maybe touching a girl’s boob. Of course that particular dream wouldn’t become a reality until the age of 25 or so, but at least nobody was calling me a “Gamorian” every time I got killed.

But then the language changed. Suddenly anyone who spent twenty bleary-eyed hours a day pushing buttons in their parents’ basement weren’t complete video game nerds. They were… “gamers.” I’m sorry, gamers? Slap an enigmatic title on it and suddenly it’s cool to be lame? Why couldn’t they have done that for the geeky things I was into? Rather than assembling plastic X-wing models in the secrecy of my own room, I could have been… a cementer. Nah, too easy to draw out the “C” and make it sound gay. A gluer? A builder? Exactoist! Crap, some geekery just doesn’t lend itself to badass verbage.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like playing the occasional bout of Mario Kart on my sister-in-law’s Wii as much as the next guy (and I’m sorry, but the fact that the end of this sentence doesn’t make anyone’s eyebrows go up is just plain wrong). But you used to be able to get that kind of fix with five dollars worth of quarters at the local video arcade. And since it was kind of a social situation, indulging that latent geekery provided at least some small probability that you might meet a girl who might let you touch her boob. But unless something goes horribly wrong, there’s no way that is going to happen on my sister-in-law’s Wii (seriously how does that not bug the crap out of everybody???).

Am I wrong? I can’t imagine I’m the only thirty-year-old in America who thinks the ubiquitousness of video games is a bad thing… the only thirty-year-old who looked forward to buying a car for no other reason than he could finally stop memorizing some stupid UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT combination.

I was watching the Dane Cook “Rough Around the Edges” special on Comedy Central the other night (I assure you, there was absolutely nothing else on) and the first thing I want to say is: Dane, buddy, I know you’ve been at this standup thing for a few years, so you should know better by now—when your comedy special airs on basic cable, it might be a good idea to make sure they don’t have to bleep every other word out of your mouth. Kinda makes it hard to appreciate the gentle comedy.

But here’s the good thing about the show: Dane’s opening bit was about a place in New Hampshire called “Benson’s Animal Farm.” Now, for any of you who didn’t grow up in New England, I’m sure that reference is lost completely on you. In fact it might even be lost on some of you who did grow up in the area. Benson’s was my very first amusement park experience. Well, I think “amusement park” is a tad too grandiose a description for the place, which was really little more than a glorified fairgrounds with cheesy midway rides and a sad little zoo thrown in for good measure. But what did I know about quality entertainment when I was all of three years old?

I don’t remember much about that day at Benson’s Animal Farm save for two things. First, I remember thinking (seriously, no joke) that it must have been Robert Guillaume’s day off. But the more important memory—Benson’s was also my very first experience on a roller coaster.

Though again, “roller coaster” is perhaps a wee bit too generous. I mean sure, it was an open-air train on a track that went up an incline and coasted down at an increased rate of speed, except the total distance traveled was little more than three hundred feet at best. The fact that they let me ride it at three-years-old gives you some idea of the G-forces it was pulling. It was intended to be just a bit of low level amusement for kids and their parents, much like the rest of the park. But that didn’t stop me from screaming my head off the entire time.

It wasn’t the speed that got me. I knew perfectly well what I was getting myself into in that arena. And I remember being really excited when I got onto the roller coaster with my mom. We sat right up front so I could see and experience everything. The ride started and we climbed the ramp, crested over the top and started down. And so I started screaming. A happy little scream at first, simply because I knew that’s what you were supposed to do on a roller coaster. But that all changed as we approached the bottom at maximum speed. You see, the builders must have realized just how lame their ride was, and so as an added gag they stuck a mini section of track onto the bottom of the hill which shot out a few feet and abruptly ended. Ha ha funny, it looks like we’re going to fly off the track!

Yeah, I didn’t get the joke. As our car rushed toward the “end” of the line, and the potential end of my life, my innocent little scream turned into pure, unadulterated terror. Holy god, we’re going to die! The train, of course, veered to the side at the last second and we hurtled in a small circle over a couple bumps and around a few curves before coming to rest at the bottom of the incline. I managed to calm down almost immediately, even as the train started back up the hill (the circuit was so stinking short they had to send us around several times just to make it worth the effort of a line). The train crested the hill again and started down. Once again I saw that small chunk of track terminating into thin air and I howled, tears streaming from my eyes, certain I was about to plummet to my death. But at the last second the train swerved and we were safe. By the third, fourth and fifth time around, you’d think I would have picked up on the pattern, if not the humor in it. But at the age of three, I was not what one might call a “logical positivist.” Just because the sun had risen every day since the beginning of time did not mean that I would not die a horrible painful death as hard jagged metal sheered through the soft tissue of my body. So I screamed and cried and screamed some more until the thoroughly evil man finally stopped the ride and let us off. I’m pretty sure I got ice cream out of the ordeal so it wasn’t all bad.

Benson’s closed it’s gates in the mid-80’s and has become something of a mini-ghost town. After watching Dane Cook’s oft-bleeped routine, I’m suddenly rather curious to take a stop back at the old ‘Farm and see if the memories of my first palpable fear of death come shrieking back to me. Jeez, do any of you really wonder that I’m such a neurotic mess?

A couple years ago, armed with three juice boxes and a Ziploc bag full of Cheerios, Lauren and I took our niece to see Piglet’s Big Movie.  It was cute and fun and all.  The only thing that bothered me was that about five minutes from the end, there’s a point where you think Pooh and Piglet are dead!  Seriously, the entire cast cries for like thirty seconds because they assume Pooh and Piglet have just plummeted over a waterfall to their deaths.

I couldn’t believe they would put something that intense and traumatic into a kids movie.  But then I had a conversation with my sister about the movies we loved growing up, and it occurred to me that if kids were traumatized by Pooh and Piglet’s temporary demise, they would get royally screwed up by the things we used to watch.

Take for example Charlottes Web.  What a depressing ninety minutes that was.  A pig who fights to not be slaughtered only to have his best friend die in the end.  Now I know the movie was based on a book so I can’t really blame the filmmakers.  But then again, in E.B. White’s version you didn’t actually see Charlotte die.  It was just kind of understood.  But in the cartoon she sings the saddest most nostalgic song ever, and then on the last note, exhales her terminal breath and wilts.  Cut to a close up of Wilbur crying.  “Charlotte?  Charlotte?  CHARLOTTE!”  Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, all of Charlotte’s children run away!

Dot and the Kangaroo was about a little girl lost in the Australian Outback who is befriended by, you guessed it, a talking Kangaroo.  Kangaroo protects Dot from dingoes, the weather and even a freaky monster called the Bunyip.  When Dot finally finds her way home, she’s eager to introduce Kangaroo to her family.  But by the time she runs back to the forest, Kangaroo has run away.  The entire ending credit sequence shows Kangaroo hopping through the forest while over the soundtrack you hear little Dot crying, “Kangawoo… Kangawoo…  Oh Kangawoo…”  Luckily for my sister and me, our parents didn’t keep a gun or straight razors in the house.

E.T. abandons Elliot.  Willy Wonka yells at Charlie.  Amalthea becomes the only unicorn to know regret.  Atreyu’s horse dies and Fantasia is destroyed.  The rats of N.I.M.H. were just plain dark and depressing.  And Luke realizes that the love of his life is actually his sister.  Seriously, was it some kind of massive, collective cocaine withdrawal that inspired Hollywood to depress the crap out of us kids in the seventies and early eighties?

Or were they trying to do us a favor?  Maybe we needed that sense of reality.  Maybe Hollywood knew there were lessons we needed to learn.  People die, endings aren’t always happy, and friends will screw you over the second something better comes along.  It’s probably easier to learn about death by watching a cartoon spider wilt in a barn than by watching Grandma wilt in her bed.  Are we doing our kids a disservice by making every movie unrealistically happy with singing bears, dancing vegetables and big red dogs?  Maybe Pooh and Piglet should have gone over that waterfall.  Maybe Nemo should have stayed lost.  Maybe rather than singing cheerfully alongside Pocahontas’s people, the white men should have stayed true to history and slaughtered them.

Hey, maybe this is the answer to ending school shootings.  Not less violence in movies—more violence.  More depressing, horrifying, make-you-afraid-to-cry-in-front-of-your-friends violence.  Let’s have less vegetables dancing and more spiders wilting.  That’s what me and my friends grew up on, and you know what—none of us ever shot one of our buddies.  We knew what death was.  It wasn’t a glorified spectacle to us.  It was a loyal spider wilting!

Will I let my daughter watch the movies I grew up with?  I may have never killed anybody, but I sure had a lot of nightmares that I apparently never got over.  I don’t know if she should have to deal something as heavy as watching Charlotte wilt or listening to Dot cry for three straight minutes.  Maybe I’ll just edit the last four and a half minutes out of Piglet’s Big Movie then take her out for ice cream to mourn.