Category Archives: Kids

About Snow, Sort Of

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(Tim, Sam, Gil and Simon – the stars of today’s story – 22-plus years ago.)

[For your reading pleasure today, another Throwback. Or…should I say SNOWback? Oh, my sides. Enjoy, in spite of bad puns.]

They say that in the Inuit language, there are about fifty different words that can be translated into one English word: snow. Those conversing about snow in that language are able to understand perfectly what kind of white stuff is being referred to since the description is inherent in the word.

We are not so fortunate in the English economy of words. Snow, other than the original meaning, can also refer to the fuzzy reception on your television (talk about a throwback) or in alternate verb form, to trick someone. All this can be very confusing to a small person. Hanging out with my small children, I can hear a lot of funny interpretations as they attempt to translate the adult language around them.

Kids are literalists. On the morning of the first frost, Gil was calling his little brothers’ attention to the crystallized scene out our window. When he referred to it as frost (there’s probably a really appropriate word for it in Inuit), Tim’s eyes got very big and said, “That’s a pretty big cake out there!” Although he’s old enough to know that the frosting outside isn’t sweet – not that Timmy wouldn’t test the theory – he got the connection immediately. In another “chilly” scenario, while picking some sticky burrs off Simon’s sweatpants the other day, I asked a little friend of his if he ever had burrs. To which he replied, “I only get “brrrs” when I eat ice cream.”

My two older boys have sibling rivalry down pat. They are constantly scrapping about…well, everything. So when Tim went off to spend the day with Dad last week, I had a relatively peaceful day with the other two. Later that evening, when I called Gil’s attention to the fact that there were no fights that day, I inadvertently told him that he and Tim were “the problem”. He took it upon himself to explain this to Tim as they lay in bed that night. Using the best analogy he could come up with, we overheard him say to Tim, “It’s like the world is a big math book and we’re the problem!”

As if single words weren’t enough, kids have to decipher phrases as well. My nephew Sam is the star of a favorite family story. One day, as his mom was bent over cutting his fingernails, he decided to investigate something that his mom had repeatedly told him. Reaching into her hair, he prodded her head, then said, “Oops, sorry, Mom. I poked you in the eye.” Puzzled, she denied that his fingers had gone anywhere near her eyes. To which he replied, “I meant the ones in the back of your head.”

Be careful what you say to your children. They might take you literally and poke you in the eye – oops – I mean the head.

About The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

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Christmas pageants and plays, populated with preschoolers and preteens, have perennially caused problems for pastors and play-directors. Well, maybe we can be a little more generous and just call them “memorable experiences”.

Unfortunately, this year, a.k.a. The Year That Covid Killed Christmas, there won’t be any opportunities to watch your kids have a live meltdown on stage at school or at church or at a recital or ANYWHERE. Thankfully, we still have plenty of ways to recreate moments like your preschool daughter flashing her underpants (repeatedly) at the entire church congregation (because fancy skirts can be so much fun to flip up and down). Or like when your usually sunny son stands front and center on stage with his arms crossed, scowling at the crowd and refusing to sing in spite of every other rehearsal going as smoothly as possible.

Remember Kevin McAllister’s rotten brother Buzz? He expertly (and blatantly) antagonizes his little brother during an angelic solo and then absolves himself of all of the blame after the entire show’s scenery comes crashing down around Kevin’s lit-up ears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7-T-pqCCs

And there was story I reviewed last Christmas on this blog, The Shepherd, The Angel and Walter the Christmas Dog, where (spoiler alert) the entire choir loft ceiling came crashing down. There’s just too many variables in a live performance with unpaid and underage amateurs amid poorly anchored scenery for Christmas plays to go exactly as planned.

[Side note: When I was a youngster, I went with my mom to a Christmas concert at Derwent School and watched while my big brother was “operated on” with a carpenter’s saw behind a backlit curtain after a scene where he ate too much pie. I bawled my eyes out thinking that something had gone horribly amiss. But no, the play went exactly as planned and it did look like they killed him. And that’s why you shouldn’t eat too much pie at Christmas, especially if someone wants to try out some new tools.]

The title of Barbara Robinson’s classic book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever appears, at first blush, to be ironic. The Herdman kids, notorious for wrecking everything in their path, bully their way into all the lead parts for the church’s nativity play which were (in this story) traditionally held by the milder and meek of the Sunday School crowd. The initial attraction for the un-herded Herdmans, whose mother works double-shifts and has essentially given-up, is a rumored abundance of food at the church. Much to the chagrin of the kids who previously enjoyed a Herdman-Free-Zone at their Sunday School classes, the hungry Herdmans decide their omnipresence is called for, even here in the church where the oldest Herdman, Imogene, mutters unhappily that apparently “everything” is about Jesus. You can imagine how it all plays out: near disaster, followed by unforgettable redemption. That’s my kind of Christmas story. You can download it to your Kindle or listen to it on Audible or even watch the movie on YouTube featuring Loretta “Hotlips Houlihan” Swit of M.A.S.H. fame. You’re welcome.

And finally, for who those of you who agree with me that this is the best Christmas play ending ever (even if it is animated, Charlie Brown and Snoopy will always be real people to me), heeeeeeeeere’s Linus!

About Career Choices

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[It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Throwback Thursday. It’s fun to read about what my under-10-years-old children were wanting to be when they grew up. It’s safe to say that they were not expecting a worldwide pandemic and a shaky job market for the year 2020.)

            One of the great advantages about being five years old is that you can make a career choice without considering the logistics of the situation whatsoever. Never mind that we live no where near Cape Canaveral, my youngest son Simon, for the longest time has wanted to be an astronaut, or in five-year-old language, a spaceman.

            Tim, the middle child, made a point of getting clearance from us that he DOES NOT have to do the same thing as his Dad. When we said that he could be anything he wanted, he decided that he was going to be a millionaire. (Get the connection? Dad: not a millionaire.) Rick and I capitalized on the moment and began considering early retirement since we figured Tim the Millionaire could take us in. But when we asked him if he would take care of us when we were old, he flatly refused.

            We then turned the question on Gil, the oldest, a.k.a. most guilt-ridden, son. Gil’s preferred occupation, like most kids, usually reflects what he’s interested in at the time. So at the moment, he’s torn between becoming a professional soccer player or a professional Lego builder. Bolstered by his younger brother’s answer to our plea, Gil smiled at us and said, “No way!” And so the ball was in Simon’s court. Four pairs of eyes were on him as the youngest child had the question posed at him. And with the carefree attitude of the baby of the family, he absolved himself of all responsibility by announcing, “I’ll be in space!”

            Simon has been so resolved upon the astronaut route that it came as a huge surprise the other day when all that suddenly changed. At a car dealership, he saw a car that he particularly liked and said, “I want that one!” To which I replied (with all the coldness of a parent who has been shut out of their child’s home when social security becomes obsolete), “I guess you’ll have to go out and get a job.” This presented no problem for him. “ Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna be a wrestler!”

            A wrestler? The change of course was easily detected. The night before we sat in a pizza joint, subjected to big screen WWF, which the two younger boys were especially enthralled with. “What about space?” I demanded. “Don’t you want to be an astronaut anymore?” Sure the moon made for expensive round trip visitation, but a WWF wrestler? Astronauts rarely go slamming other guys around in zero gravity.

            But Simon had it figured that since there were no towns in space, and he liked to go to town, his life’s occupation would have to change. If television has such an effect on such important decisions, however, I think we’re going to have to buy a copy of Apollo 13 and start playing it over and over again. And even though the pizza was good, we’ll have to stay away from that pizza joint.

[Apparently, I wasn’t too thrilled about Simon’s WWF aspirations eighteen years ago. I’m happy to report that while he’s neither an astronaut or a wrestler, he’s pursuing a career that he loves and he spends most of his time on Earth.]

About Jerkury, The Undiscovered Planet

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(With kids back to school this week, here’s a throwback to our homeschooling days with our three little spacemen.)

            This week in our house, we’re discovering the final frontier. No, I’m not talking about the dust-bunny village under my bed or the dark recesses of the furnace room, although both are rather scary places. The kids have been learning all about outer space and not just because we are threatening to send them there.

            This expedition was kicked off by a simple bedroom renovation. Maybe we were being doting parents or maybe we didn’t know what we were really getting into (most assuredly the latter), but a couple of months ago we decided to create a spaceship themed room for the three boys. With a little manipulation, we were able to steer the brothers in this direction and even make them think it was their idea, since their suggestion of a castle bedroom with full-sized knight in shining armor daunted me just a little more than stenciling a few portholes and planets on the freshly painted walls.

            And so, after a few days of studying the sun, stars and so on, I find I’m learning a lot more than I bargained for. After all, can there be a larger subject than the cosmos? Most of the speculation of how stars are “born” and black holes could be used to travel through time is where science fiction found its origin. No wonder George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry made so much money plumbing the subject that has no limit.

            Children don’t have the same difficulty with entertaining such notions as do skeptical adults. Their minds as wide as the universe itself, they dispute nothing and marvel at everything: that Venus is hotter than Mercury which is closer to the Sun; that Jupiter is 1400 times larger than the Earth (more impressive if demonstrated with appropriately sized paper circles) and that dogs and people have rocketed into oblivion on their own volition. (Well, maybe the dogs had to be convinced.)

            While reading about the characteristics of the Milky Way’s family, the boys entertained themselves by yelling “stupider than Jupiter” and then collapsing into mad giggles. I was thinking that the phrase was very apt for anyone who would volunteer to leave the nice safe atmosphere of Earth to live in a spaceship where you had to sleep seat-belted to your bed. (If there’s a time I appreciate gravity, it’s when I sleep.) But all giggles aside, the gray matter in the boys’ heads soaks all this stuff up, if maybe not the correct names for everything. At one point, Tim tried to tell to me that the largest planet was named Jerkury. I suspected that although this planet was yet undiscovered by Earthlings, it probably had sent more than a few “ambassadors” here and presented a good explanation as to where grouchy people really come from.

            Much to my surprise, I found myself one evening when my husband was away curled up in bed with the oversized Dorling Kindersley Guide to Space and smaller but just as interesting Everything You Wanted to Know about Johannes Kepler But Were Afraid to Ask. I was riveted to the bed (without a seatbelt) and the subject matter. Earlier that day while the boys were testing the theory of gravity by dropping dangerously heavy objects from the tops of chairs and spinning pails of water over their head to imitate centrifugal force, I was my most captive audience as I read aloud the story of Galileo and wept as he succumbed to the Inquisition by refuting his theories about the Earth revolving around the Sun instead of the then popular vice versa.

            While I wonder to myself how I could forget (or never have learned) such interesting stuff, my sudden fascination with the subject at hand is very comforting. After all, the idea of trying to teach your children everything is overwhelming. At any rate, what they don’t learn when they’re young, they can still look up when they’re 35.

About a Change in the Weather

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(True to summer in Alberta, there certainly has been A LOT of weather lately. Here’s another throwback to the what the weather was like in my yard twenty years ago…)

Some days it seems like my children go through more emotional ups and downs than a Richard Simmons infomercial. Often the grouchy quotient is elevated by a bad cold and/or not enough sleep. But sometimes, in young families, I find we’re still all just trying to get used to each other.

Throw another kid into the mix and things can really get messy. My children love to have friends over. The best thing is when a family with about the same number of kids comes over and mine pair off with theirs. But the other day, just one friend came over and this particular day, it emphasized the battle lines. 

It all started out innocently enough. Gil, my oldest son, had the great idea of playing baseball. Of course, Mom had to dampen that idea by nixing the use of the real baseball bats since I wasn’t able to supervise at the time. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about three and five-year-olds swinging a Louisville Slugger with reckless abandon that I have a problem with.

So, they settled on just playing catch. Gil doled out the ball gloves and, true to form of the oldest child, began to give everyone orders of where to stand, how to hold their glove, who throws to who, and so on. As I looked up from vacuuming out the van, I first noticed Simon, the three-year-old standing about one hundred feet away from Tim, to whom he was supposed to throw the ball. So, I did what no mother is supposed to do. I interfered. All I did was make the suggestion to Gil that maybe there was no possible way that Simon ever in a million years could throw that far. Simon apparently had more faith in his big brother’s direction and proceeded to run the first ninety feet towards Tim before he hurled the ball at him with all his might. He still came short three feet.

Everything went downhill from there as the three younger players suddenly lost all interest in “organized” sports. Gil declared mutiny and informed the younger tribe that he was running away from home. At first, they weren’t too concerned since kids are used to each other’s dramatics.

But then Gil crossed the fence and Tim got mighty upset with this turn of events. Perhaps it was genuine concern for his big brother’s welfare or maybe he was worried about losing a good Nintendo partner, but he felt the acute need to report Gil’s departure to me at the top of his lungs. I yelled out to Gil to remember that he couldn’t cross the fence that bordered the back of our property and he replied that he merely intended to stay out in the bush forever. Much to Timmy’s dismay, I returned to removing an entire sandbox from my van.

After ten minutes of Tim keeping a not-so-silent vigil at the barbwire fence, Gil suddenly decided that forever was a long time if he had to listen to his brother whine for him to please, please, please come back. He stepped out of no-man’s land and to Timmy’s relief, agreed not to play baseball but to ride bikes instead.

With the incentive of the younger friend’s ability to ride his brand-new two-wheeler, Gil that day learned how to ride a training-wheel-free bike, after a few good pushes from his mom. The boy who convinced himself he could never learn to ride a bike was all sunshine and laughter, a sharp contrast to the gloomy boy he left behind in the bush. And I just marveled at how quickly the weather could change in my yard.

About Hard Lessons

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Welcome once more to Throwback Thursday.

Recently I’ve been re-reading the newspaper columns I wrote about twenty years (!) ago, seeing if there are any new/old story ideas I can use. I’m so happy I recorded so many things my boys said and did when they were little. Sometimes they make me a little sad and nostalgic, but most of the time they make me LOL.

This story turns out a little dark, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself laughing with a hand over your mouth because it shouldn’t be funny. But it is. Enjoy.

            There’s a huge advantage of living out of town that few people mention: the frequency with which one is able to study dead animals.  Most wild animals just don’t sit still long enough for you to take a good look at one. Porcupine or badger sightings occur so few and far between that if it wasn’t for the occasional lump of dead animal on the side of the road, my kids would never know how big one of those suckers really is.

            Sometimes, however, it isn’t the wild animals that bite the dust, but a more domestic critter right from our own yard. If someone ever calls our place a farm, I usually correct them, saying we don’t really have any animals besides the occasional borrowed horse and of course, our herd of wild cats. When we moved out here, the previous owners left four cats behind and these cats have made it their mission to propagate their species in an exponential fashion. Unfortunately, we almost never find the kittens when they are born. Once they were old enough however, these wild kitties had no trouble clamoring for their share around the supper dish.

            The latest addition to our feline family was a pair of peaches-and-cream kittens, one of which was smooth and silky, the other very fuzzy, looking like he was badly in need of a hairbrush. The kids appropriately named the fuzzy one Messy and his sibling, Jessie. These kitties didn’t start making themselves known until they were old enough to run off from the kitty dish with a whole chicken leg in their mouth, but we were persistent and eventually could catch them and pet them if we really felt like getting all scratched up. Then the snow came and the temperature dropped and the kitties suddenly disappeared. We suspected the worst.

            A couple of days ago, at least part of the mystery was solved. The boys were outside when suddenly I was summoned at top of someone’s lungs to come to the door. Simon and Gil were by the garage, crouched down, examining something on the ground. An agitated Tim was at the door, saying (and I quote), “Mom, there’s something wrong with one of the kitties! I think its head fell off!” As happens only too often, the kitten had met its maker when it sought some heat from a warm engine. I expressed my sympathies and something possessed me to ask, “Can you tell which one it was?” To which Gil replied, “Yeah. It was Messy.” No kidding.

            There were no nightmares that night about decapitated cats or even tears over a lost kitten. Instead the boys were just wistful that the kitties wouldn’t be around anymore. I don’t want my kids to be hardened to the whole experience of life and death, but I don’t want to shelter them from it either. Maybe these are some of the best lessons our little acreage will ever teach us. 

About What I Learned While Homeschooling

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Along with all the other inherent stresses imbued in a global pandemic, parents right now are finding themselves thrust into a scenario they never wished upon themselves or their children – schooling their kids at home. It’s not for the feint of heart, taking responsibility for the education of your kids, but then neither is parenting. Having kids is probably not what you ever thought it was gonna be: it’s way harder and way better.

About twenty years ago, Rick and I made the decision that we would willingly take on schooling our kids at home. There was no virus threatening our safety, just three little boys testing our sanity. It’s actually a little amusing to me right now that the government is telling parents they need to do this, because it wasn’t always a sanctioned choice. I never was a vigilante-homeschooling mom, insisting that everyone should do it. But I did always maintain that it was an option, like public school or private school were other schooling choices out there. And for us, at the time, it was the right one.

That’s the way you have to look at parenting in retrospect, whether giving grace to yourself or your parents: you do your best with what you know at the time.

I admit that I’m relieved that my kids are graduated and responsible for whatever the heck they want to learn now. And COVID-19, with all it’s social distancing challenges, has really put parents schooling their children at home to the test: no playgrounds at “recess”, no fraternizing in the hallways except with your enemies (oops, I mean siblings), no sports, no clubs, not a lot of anything to let off steam except screens and backyards.

It was a different time and a different place, but for what it’s worth, here’s what I learned while homeschooling my boys – with the perspective of being past it all.

One of the best things I heard at a homeschooling conference once was that educating your kids was like creating a hammock for them. You need to make sure they have the basics to support them – through the next level, through regular life – but there’s always gonna be a lot of holes. If kids only get the basics – like the original trifecta of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, that’s a pretty good hammock. It will hold up. And there’s no way you can ever fill all the holes anyways.

Secondly, what you “routinize” is what your kids will get used to and what they will also do, for better or for worse. Whether it’s schooling at home or working remotely, you get more done if you stick to a routine. Plus, more beds get made, teeth get brushed, fish get fed and books get read. It takes a lot of muscle to build a habit but then after awhile, it just becomes the new normal.

Thirdly, you can’t predict what your kids will remember. While I went off the deep end teaching my boys lots of history and reading them great stories, they don’t remember a lot of the specifics. Frankly, neither do I. It’s pretty scattershot, really. But we did give them learning “hooks”, meaning that if they encounter an idea or some history or a person that we learned about in school, they have a place to hang that knowledge and build upon it. You can’t always remember stuff from first encounters. And now that they are in their twenties with their own Google machines in their hands all the time, they can look it up. (So can I.)

Fourthly, they will remember what was fun and unusual, and mostly, that’s the stuff that families are made of, not school. There were lots of things my boys do remember because we enjoyed them: nature hikes, reading all the Harry Potter books as a family, theatre performances, road trips, music lessons (well, maybe not the lessons, but the knowing how to play afterwards), holiday traditions, sleepovers at Gramma’s house, backyard hockey rinks and road hockey in the summer, crazy youth group events, house renovations. (Oh, wait, maybe that last one was just fun for Rick and me.) And if you think about it, what you remember about school when you were a kid was probably less about what you learned and more about what you did and who you did it with and especially if you had fun.

I’m willing to bet that the COVID-19 classes of 2020 won’t remember a heck a lot of what they learned “in school” this year. Which is not to say that it’s a futile exercise: schoolwork teaches your kids how to learn and it builds their repertoire and frankly, it just keeps them a little busy. But it’s pretty much a guarantee that they will remember all the weirdness, and hopefully a little bit of the wonderfulness, that a quarantine can offer. I mean, you’re in it now: might as well make lemonade out of them lemons. And while you’re at it, your kids can learn math and experiment with taste buds and have (lemonade) drinking contests and then they can wash the damn dishes. Which is also a good skill they probably won’t learn in regular school.

Home, after all, is where they first learned to walk and talk and cut their own hair somehow with child-safe scissors. Maybe they can cut yours now until we get our hair salons back. It could be fun. Just sayin.

About Retrospective Parenting

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(When my adult children sometimes take days to answer my texts, it’s helpful to remember what it was like before they had cell phones – heck, before I had a cell phone – and I couldn’t stop them talking to me. Here: another trip in the time machine back to 2002.)

            Parenting can be such a negative experience. The words “no”, “don’t”, “stop it”, “quit that” and “never” become indispensable to a parents’ repertoire as soon as a child discovers that they are independent beings with the capacity to jump on couches, bite hands and other appendages that don’t belong to them, spill their food all over the new carpet, careen through the house at the speed of light, slam doors with explosive force and test the sound barrier with that weapon of weapons, their voice. It’s usually the voice that gets them in the most trouble. All the other acts can be attributed to normal childhood behavior, no matter how nerve wracking it is. But the power of speech can singularly drive a parent up the proverbial wall.

            Take for instance the average trip to the grocery store. Thirty minutes, fourteen aisles and the whole experience should be a piece of cake for the seasoned parent of a child old enough to talk. However, each shopping trip provides at least 1543 opportunities for your child to ask for something. (This statistic must be multiplied accordingly by the number of children you are blessed to have along on grocery day.) Correspondingly, there are an equal number of times that a parent can practice the most repeated word in their vocabulary. As the child moves from item to item, the parent is subjected to a well-known interrogation technique: ask enough times and you will break down all defenses. Even with strategic moves on the part of the parent to avoid high-density candy and toy areas, children have an innate tendency to ask if they can have everything from dog food to Tylenol to oranges. The unsuspecting parent will automatically respond “no!” to every request even if it is healthy, on sale and on the shopping list. But after resolving to yourself not to give in to any of the child’s queries along with the ultimatum that you will not buy anything they ask for, you find yourself between the rock and hard place of giving in or leaving the store without half the items you came for. 

            Current parenting lore will encourage you to: a) ponder the question before the “no” reflex occurs, and b) think of ways to respond to your children in a positive manner. Considering the question first may result with a happier dog, a migraine-free mom and a chance for the family to ward off scurvy. Positive responses can be worded like, “Of course you can pierce your belly button over my dead body,” or “My, your leaping-off-the-couch-distance has improved since last week.”

            Such strategies can be a real help to all parents. At any rate, you’ll have plenty of Tylenol in case you do break down. And at least the dog will be happy.