Girly voices flow above the running water, amplified on the tiled floor and porcelain. The smells of soap and vapor seep into the bedroom and hall, and if it weren’t for the closed windows and pulled drapes, the house feels as fresh as spring time.
The trees are bare behind the houses. All day the wind has pulled at the frail tree branches that shed leaves in late October and have been burned in leaf piles. With the sun freshly lowered, the moonlight casts cool shadows on the street-parked cars and house fronts. (more…)
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Tags: Family Life, Kids
The Mall
Monday, October 20th, 2008
Some argue that the best opening line in literature is Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But for me, it’s Peter Pan’s beginning, “All chidren, except one, grow up.”
Maybe it resonates to me because I so often stand in the children’s section of the wholesale bookstore at the mall, rediscovering memories of possibility and the fascination of experiencing things anew.
For children, the selection of picture books at the discount store is always quality. The shelves are filled with overstocks and titles with all the popular characters that just didn’t sell enough. And, there are more worthy titles. Tonight, I found an EB White collection of three stories for $5.99.
For adults, the picking is more sporadic. You might make several trips and turn up nothing, then the next visit unexpectedly find the book that’s been on your list for months but the price or your mood for that piece had never been timed right.
I got lucky and for less that six bucks found a hardback copy of On the Road. So with a bag full of books and deep thoughts still fresh from standing among the bookstacks and reading famous works, we head out to the play area in the mall’s middle.
No one could blame us for feeling intellectually elite (for a time) simply because of the way we spent the last hour broadening our horizons. Everyone else around us was pursuing a better pair of pants or maybe a new Hollister shirt.
The mall is not located in a working class area not far from where we live. Late October into early November is the drop in temperature that leads to cold and flu season. We are driven inside every autumn to pursue warmer interests.
The trips are a good way to rediscover childhood, but a better one is reading to the children as they lie in bed after bath time. They fall asleep with fresh imaginations and images in their minds of flying fairies and pirates. They do grow up, though, and they go to work and maybe watch their own children so they can be young again.
All that happens so fast, as quickly as pages turning.
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Tags: Books, Kids
Naughty Words
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
The word “poop” is as dirty as they come in the conversation circles of the children we’re raising. For them, it is the age equivalent to the F-bomb, somehow more profane than “bottom” and “butt,” and not yet crossing the imaginary line I’ve drawn at “hell.”
If I remember right, I was swearing full on by third grade, so somewhere in the next two years, my daughter who started kindergarten this year will be exposed to words much more offensive than I’ve spoken in her presence. The culprit that teaches her the new words no doubt lives in a mile radius (the same radius statistics show that I am likely to be involved in a deadly car accident) from where I sit contemplating my kids’ eventual potty mouths. (more…)
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Tags: Family Life, Kids
Fish
Monday, September 15th, 2008
Seldom does any section in a department store hold childrens’ attention as well as the toy aisles. But for our kids, the fish tanks are a major attraction.
The back-lit boxes stuffed with psuedo-seaweed and mock treasure fascinates them not necessarily because of the beautiful whipping tails and booping mouths that bubble with life, but also the lifeless bodies that swirl around randomly and at odd angles, running face first into glass, lodging in fake plants and aerators.
Our youngest child, who will turn three next week, has learned much about death in the pet aisle. She took me by the hand tonight to show me a tank at her eye level. As I stooped, I heard her whisper, “See, it’s dead.”
And, it was.
There was use in shielding her from the sadness on obvious display with an innocent mistruth. The truth has a way of presenting itself sometimes, and it rose to my lips instantly, as if I’d already been caught in an unspoken fib and needed to come forward to clarify something long misunderstood. “Yes, it’s dead.”
No bigger than my pinky and aswirl in orange and white, the fish spun against the bottom of the tank on its eye. I wondered, then, how well they are taken care of here, but then remembered I’d never seen an employee tending to them unless a customer had purchased one and stood waiting for the net to scoop up the right fish. But it’s not the care that kills most of these fish, it’s the poor breeding that leads to sickly, short lives as miserable as the final deaths they die.
This little fish, I suppose, didn’t die in vain. My daughter noticed it and it was enough for me to think of the value our society puts on life (or the lack thereof.) That fishes life, because it is tiny amd quiet and can be recreated, is nearly worthless and is treated so, not as the tiny package of life it truly is. My little girl, as tiny as she was when was born, was no less precious then because of her size than she is now. Maybe at her age, she’ll learn to grow up to care for all types of life and actually do something about the smaller ones that can’t protect themselves and the best they can hope for is to be noticed, in death, to pass on a hard lesson to be learned.
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Tags: Kids
Both girls are at the table for breakfast, observing the temporary but appreciated comity that comes each Sunday morning. The peace lasts between them but not in the house as the younger one, whose bowl has run empty of cereal, begins hammering the table with her toddler-sized spoon.
The racket it creates in the all-wood dining room is tremendous, and it sounds as though a half-dozen full-size workmen are in the room with hammers in hand and nails in teeth pummeling sheet rock across bare walls. That is merely the sound of it. The real culprit has tangly golden hair and wears a pink nightgown with a single stretch of ballerinas across the chest. She’s backlit by the windows on the front of the house and the thin, baby tree that’s the same age as her, but taller and more reserved.
One holler from her father and she drops the spoon. She goes back to eating, which, with cereal, is an activity that involves streaking milk across the table top. Her sister, the oldest, cleans up her bowl without any real notice of the younger, not so much as even a laugh to encourage more outlandish behavior.
Surprisingly, the peacefulness breaks in a confrontation with the house’s only boy and his younger sister. The fight involves a card game that involes arranging cards in a particular order on the floor and when the little girl screams, the boy tells him the fight occured because he doesn’t want to share. Fair enough, the house’s proprietor thinks, as the house temporarily still again. It is quiet enough that the dog can sleep and a car door far up the street can heard closing. The weather looks beautiful today and the light comes strewaming in on the chairs at the dinner freshly pushed out from a brief breakfast. These children are just now gaining their energy for the day, so the volumes will rise and the pace for confrontations much faster, and that is the most threatening fact to parents who are responsible for discipline.
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Tags: Kids, Sunday
