A Female Deer

My daughter has fallen in love. I thought I'd have more time to prepare for this day. More time to string barbwire around the house and set out Beware of the Dragon signs. But this romance might be worth encouraging. The object of her affection is a fellow named Georg. Nope, I didn't spell that wrong. But, you might know him as Captain von Trapp. 

We watched Sound of Music for the first time a few weeks ago, and it's taken hold of my children. My boys burst out into "Do-re-mi" with no provocation, and I was asked just the other day if we could ever hike to Switzerland. But my daughter is the most enthralled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgawkL3zhfE

My little girl has transformed into Frauline Maria. Some days she pretends she's a nun and asks me to be the Wevwund Mother. Other times she serenades her brothers, her parents, or her dolls with "My Favorite Things."

And then there's the dancing. Multiple times a day she tugs on my pant leg, steps back and curtsies, then asks me to bow, so we can dance. The dance is more like a spinny carnival ride than any Austrian folk dance, with me having to switch directions multiple times so I don't get dizzy.

She is Maria, and she's in love with a story—with songs that I never tire of, and with the idea that a few notes can make her feel better when she's feeling sad.

And like the real Maria, she doesn't even mind that I can't sing Edelweiss. 

Girls in Space?

I've never been a strong advocate for my favorite causes. I've never written my member of Congress, I don't complain at stores and restaurants, and I've never held a sign and marched anywhere. Mine is more of a live-and-let-live mentality—seeking my own happiness while letting others seek theirs. (An exception would be if Coca-Cola reintroduced New Coke. I'd likely end up in prison over that.)

But today that may have changed. I was reading a book titled Mousetronaut, about a tiny mouse that traveled on a space shuttle. (It's a true story, and the mouse had its own uniform and special training…budget deficit anyone?) Partway through the story, my daughter pointed to one of the human astronauts and asked, "Is that a girl?"

"Yep," I replied.

Then she turned around in my lap and asked wide-eyed, "Can girls be astronauts?" 

Wow. I've never done anything to suggest my daughter cannot be anything at all she wants to be, yet somehow this three-year-old had determined that going to space was only for boys.

I still won't be writing any letters—I'm too busy helping my kids build a LEGO castle for that—but I guess more needs to be done to show children that they can do and be anything their imaginations desire.

So, yes, my little girl needs to see that astronauts, mayors, and dump truck drivers can be girls as well as boys. Just like my sons need to see that teachers and veterinarians are not all girls.

It's my job to make sure my kids know that they can be whatever they want, and that they should choose something that excites and challenges them. Unless one wants to be a chemist modifying the recipe for Coca-Cola. I'd draw the line there.

Looth Tooth

My six-year-old got his first loose tooth the other day. Like many parents of boys, I was initially skeptical about whether he had come about this naturally, rather than as a result of jumping from the top bunk onto his brother. Six seemed early to already be losing one’s teeth.

But my musings about how the tooth had been jarred from its moorings were interrupted by my wife. “Are we going to do, you know, the Tooth Fairy thing?” I was speechless. I thought we wouldn’t have to make any potentially life-altering child rearing decisions again until girlfriends started calling. But there I was, pondering the existence of a midnight wanderer in a tutu.

I have to be honest; we’ve been pretty inconsistent in recognizing the figments of our culture’s imagination. We’ve introduced Santa Claus, but only as a character in a story, not as a prowler who slinks into our living room once a year and leaves presents behind. The Easter Bunny has been completely ignored, as I never could determine its connection to Jesus Christ.

But I haven’t thought about the Tooth Fairy since I was, like, nine. My image of her was something between Tinker Bell and that Bippity boopity boo chick from Cinderella. And I have no need for some mini-skirt clad hussy flittering around my kid’s bed offering him money. 

There’s the question of cleanliness too. Isn’t it sending mixed messages to teach my son to wash his hands and sort his laundry and then turn around and ask him to put a decaying tooth under his pillow?

Finally I have to think about his impressions of money. I guess it depends on your political persuasion, but most folks don’t think money is something that just shows up after you’ve done nothing but put in a good night’s sleep. 

Whatever I choose, I have to do it quickly. This thing is hanging by a thread, and I know it’s only a matter of time before some wrestling match or acrobatic routine shakes it out.

A Whole New World

I had hoped that by being raised with two older brothers and their respective dinosaurs, knights, and mud puddles, my daughter would turn out to be a tomboy. You know—the kind that isn’t afraid of spiders and would just as soon knock a boy down as hold his hand.

It appears I’ve failed. She’s only two, but she insists (depending on the day) that her favorite colors are pink and purple. She has tea parties for the dinosaurs and knights, and she’s totally gone for princesses. 

 The princesses are a problem. I know I should encourage her interests, but according to the Happily Ever After Princess Storybook we got at the library, princesses don’t win their men with dizzying intellect or feats of bravery. They just have to make sure their feet fit into the proper shoe. Or they have to be willing to put up with a man being a complete beast for a while. Or they can lie around laconically waiting for a kiss. Or they can wear a ridiculously low-cut top and allow themselves to be whisked about on a magic carpet.

I have no problem with my little girl dancing around in a dress and picking flowers all day. But if she encounters a troupe of short old men with long beards, I want her to be able to handle herself. She can still act like a princess, but I’m thinking more like Xena, Warrior Princess. 

With a turtleneck, of course.

Call of Duty or Honor or Whatever

You know that scene from epic guy movies where a muscular hero wipes out an invading horde of bad guys with like a butter knife, and then he’s standing there surveying the carnage, and says in a deep, gravelly voice, “My father taught me that duty and honor are more important than anything”? 

Well, as a father of two impressionable young boys that I would love to raise to be epic heroes someday, what I want to know is how do I get that deep, gravelly voice? I mean, how cool would it be to teach a kid to tie his shoes, and then tell him in a deep, gravelly voice, “Son, always remember that the rabbit goes around the bush and then into its hole.” He’d never forget that lesson. At the same time, I’d also like to know when those lessons about duty and honor are supposed to be worked into the conversation. 

I thought I’d discovered the perfect opportunity a few days ago when my kids were playing outside, and my youngest son began to cry because he’d fallen off his bike. (It’s about three inches from his seat to the ground, so why this is cause for tears is beyond me, but we must be sensitive, mustn’t we?) Anyway, the exchange that followed went like this:

Me (After clearing my throat repeatedly in search of my best James Earl Jones voice): “Son, going to aid your brother in his time of need would be honorable.”

Six-year-old: “Daddy, you sound funny.”

That went well. At some point I should probably consider the wisdom of trying to model my parenting techniques after the fictional fathers of half-naked male characters from guy movies who spend their time eviscerating their foes and sharpening their butter knives. That deep, gravelly voice on the other hand…maybe I’ll find something for that in my spam folder.

Tangled and Tied

You know those people who can take a piece of kite string and fashion a knot capable of suspending a grand piano in midair? Then they further insult you by saying, “Yeah, that’s a mid-shipman’s half hitch slip noose with a breaking point of seven tons.”

Having never been in Boy Scouts, Eagle Scouts, Little League, or wherever people learn these critical life skills, I can barely keep my own shoes tied. So I was thrilled when my five-year-old son recently learned to tie knots.

This has opened up some exciting new possibilities for him. Just the other day, for example, I pulled a pair of boots from my closet, only to find that it was tied to five other pairs of boots. Why do I have six pairs of boots, you ask? Shut up. That’s not the point.

Being able to tie knots, my son can now be expected to perform simple tasks like tying his own shoes and changing the oil. So far, though, he has yet to use his new power for good. Yesterday, while I thought he was playing quietly in his room, (No child, by the way, is ever just playing quietly in his room; it has taken me five years and three children to learn this) he removed all the laces from his shoes and roped every one of his dinosaur toys together into some kind of prehistoric chain gang.

This led to a daddy rendition of that “With great power comes great responsibility” speech from Spiderman, which I completely botched, because I could only think of the beer ad: “With great beer comes great responsibility.” My Father of the Year application will have to be postponed again. In the meantime, my son apparently needs a more constructive hobby. Maybe I’ll have him join Boy Scouts.

On the Road. Again.

A little over a year ago, my family moved from Minnesota to Michigan. We traded bitterly cold Minnesota winters plagued by Canadian winds for the heavy lake effect snows of Michigan winters. At least we gained a beach in the deal. Although my boys were only four and two, the trip through five states in a moving truck remains the highlight of their lives. This is probably because I was in charge of the eating arrangements in the truck, which meant we mostly ate powdered donuts and jelly beans. Never in their lives have they been able to ask for another donut so many times and have the answer be yes. Although it’s been 18 months now, my sons will still sidle up to me from time to time and whisper, “Daddy, remember the ride in the moving truck?”

 This may be why my sons so desperately want to move again. The boxes had barely been unpacked (who am I kidding; they’re still not all unpacked) when they began asking if we could move a second time. This time they wanted to go to Indiana. I’m guessing they chose the Hoosier state because it’s one of the few states they can name.

I have nothing against Indiana, but I don’t want to move there. I see Indiana as more of a place that you drive through to get somewhere else than as a destination. So not knowing how my sons’ little hearts were set on making an interstate move, I turned them down, suggesting we enjoy our new house in Michigan before moving again.

Not to be deterred, my boys moved anyway. One morning while I was still in bed wondering why no young boys had jumped on top of me yet, they packed up their things and left. Every toy, puzzle, game, and article of clothing in their shared bedroom was taken one by one to Indiana, which was conveniently located in the basement.

I eventually made my way to their now empty room, where I beheld nothing but furniture (which I presume they would have also moved if they were a little stronger). My subdued early morning surprise gave way to resignation as I realized how we would be spending the next few hours of the morning.

The basement looked a lot like Indiana. After a massive tornado. Apparently the movers had not been careful in the unpacking process, so all of my boys’ earthly possessions were scattered throughout the room. This isn’t really something a father should get angry about, so I helped them move again, this time back to their bedroom in Michigan.

When we were all finished, we went out for donuts, just for old time’s sake. 

Pass the Kleenex

Have you ever noticed that young children perpetually have runny noses? Of course not. That’s gross to even think about. So you’ll have to take my word for it that kids get sick a lot. Like if colds were cheeseburgers, they’d all be on America’s Biggest Loser.

The primary reason for this, of course, is that young children routinely taste dirt, other children’s toys, and shoes. You know how some large stores have antiseptic wipes next to their shopping carts? That’s not so you can protect your child from the germs of the previous cart user, it’s so you can wipe off the bacteria colony left behind after your child licks the entire cart handle.

Parents with multiple kids are left with no choice once one child becomes sick. The rest are sure to fall; it’s only a matter of time. It’s sorta like a really bad sci-fi movie where some mysterious plague strikes a city’s birds, and before you know it the government is nuking an entire state to wipe out the disease.

But with kids, some parents make a conscious decision to spread colds as quickly as possible among them, knowing that having them all sick for two days is far better than having one sick kid every two days until the next leap year, as the virus slowly mutates and recycles its victims.

So don’t be surprised next time you see a family at the grocery store with three sick kids. They’re actually doing you a favor. But don’t follow them into the shoe aisle either.

Art Attack

Scientists would have us believe that there is a vast ring of debris, an asteroid belt they call it, somewhere a few miles beyond Mars. Well, there is a vast ring of debris floating around out there, but it’s not chucks of rock and ice. It’s made of countless pictures created by children to be hung their parents’ refrigerators.

You see, toddlers create pictures at an astounding rate. (Paradoxically, artists who wish to be paid for a living struggle to produce a decent drawing once a month.) It doesn’t matter if you have a dorm room mini-fridge or a walk-in freezer; a single toddler can fill every square inch of surface with a vast array of shapes, lines, and colors that only he can interpret.

What would look to the average adult like a series of crooked purple lines inside a blue oval is, to its creator, Noah’s ark. And even more amazingly, a child who can’t remember where he put his brother’s left sock five minutes ago can remember each and every picture he has drawn, and will notice if one is missing.

I discovered this when I made room for a fresh batch of drawings by removing some old pictures and placing them in the garbage. I may as well have thrown away my son’s favorite blanket, stuffed animal, and shirt for the look he gave me when he saw his artwork in the garbage.

Of course, the spaghetti-sauce-stained picture had to be prominently displayed once again. This led me to my grand aforementioned conspiracy theory. What have parents done with all these pictures since crayons became widely available?

That’s when it dawned on me: The space program. Does anyone really care if Jupiter’s seventh moon has ice on its poles? Of course not. All those missions succeeded in one thing: dumping reams of children’s drawings beyond the prying eyes of curious toddlers. Soon, these orbiting illustrations will fill the outer reaches of our solar system. And we wonder why Pluto took off.  

Learning to Speak

A Bible story from thousands of years ago tells of a mighty tower that was built to touch the heavens. Seeing that man was growing brash, God decided to slow down man’s progress a bit by forcing everyone working on the Tower of Babel to speak a different language. Unable to communicate with each other, the workers went their separate ways, and the tower was left unfinished. (This curse has repercussions still today. Just try finding someone to work on your house who speaks the same language as you.) 

Parents of toddlers face a similar curse. We spend the first eighteen or so months of a child’s life being unable to understand him. Hunger, dirty diapers, thirst, exhaustion, and injury are all communicated with the same sound: crying.

Then the magical day comes: a child speaks his first word. For parents, this is an unbelievably joyful day.

He said his first word. Tomorrow he’ll add a few more. Next week he’ll be speaking in sentences. Soon after that, he can begin learning Mandarin. Medical school will surely follow. We’ll retire to that beach house yet!

Our expectations may not be entirely realistic.

My son’s first word was shoes. Once he realized that by repeating the same sound a few times he could get his parents to hold up the item in question and make complete fools of themselves, he began to seek other applications of this new skill. More words followed, and our house soon became a menagerie of concrete nouns. Then came the day he learned the word every parent hopes their child will never say…

No. It was inevitable, I guess. After more than a year of hearing things like no touching the stove, no throwing food, and no pulling the neighbor’s cat’s tale, the word was bound to surface in context. It is a harrowing day when you realize that your child can express a will contrary to yours.

Soon the word began infiltrating all manner of conversation:

Let’s go get in the car.

No!

Let’s put our coat on.

No!

Let’s eat some of our peas.

No!

Let’s skip dinner and have a dessert of ice cream covered brownies slathered in caramel.

No!

It is important to remember at times like these that language acquisition is a gift, not a curse. It’s only when your child asks to borrow the car for a cross country road trip that you’ll find yourself wishing you spoke a different language.

Trick-or-Treating with a Toddler

One of the saddest moments in a person’s life is the year they realize they can no longer go trick-or-treating. This occurs at different times for different people. Many children realize around age twelve that since their superman costume no longer fits, it’s probably time to give up tramping through the neighborhood with a pillow case begging for candy.

Other children take a bit longer. It is not uncommon to see groups of high school students roaming about on Halloween, some of them at least pretending to honor the traditions of this venerated holiday by claiming to be wearing a costume, even if it is their baseball uniform or a set of mismatched socks.

Eventually though, the dream of knocking on people’s doors and having them freely dispense candy ends for all of us. That is, until you have a toddler. I took my son trick-or-treating when he was 17 months old, deciding he was ready based on several acute observations:

1) He could walk

2) He could mumble three syllables that sounded like trick-or-treat

3) He was cute

Walking is important; if your trick-or-treater can’t walk, it might look like you are just carrying a baby around the neighborhood stumping for candy.

Coherent speech is important as well. In fact, I assert that baby-making should be planned so that the ability to walk and talk converge at the earliest possible Halloween. (Others would argue that procreation should be planned around the tax calendar, a theory that does have its own merits.)

Cuteness can not be overrated either. Let’s face it. Who’s getting more candy: the acne-speckled teenager with his hat on backward, or the toddler dressed as a skeleton saying, “Twick-uh-Tweet”?

So for now at least, I can skip staying home to pass out candy and take my own child out for a Halloween adventure. But what to do with all this candy that his pediatrician probably would not want him eating?

It's What's For Dinner

Every father fears for his child’s future. It’s easy to lose sleep at night worrying if your little boy will do well in school, make friends, or ask if he can join ballet.

But for me, one of my worst fears was almost realized before my son turned two.  He quit eating meat.  Not that there’s anything wrong with being a vegetarian.  There are plenty of actors, university professors, and even real people who don’t eat meat.  I am just not one of them.

For me a balanced meal is one that includes beef, pork, and chicken.  So I was understandably dismayed when my son turned up his nose at his meat one afternoon. I grew concerned when he did it again the next day. I was severely alarmed the day after that. On day four of his self-imposed meat strike I considered calling the nurse hotline.

Surely a child whose father grills ribs in the garage in December just because he misses the charcoal taste should be more inclined to be a meat eater, shouldn’t he? It didn’t matter what kind of meat it was. Hamburgers, chicken strips, fish sticks, even hot dogs, barely identifiable as meat, were rejected.

With a two-year-old, one’s options are limited when it comes to convincing him to eat. You can pretend the spoon is an airplane, a rocket ship, maybe even a helicopter, but if the toddler isn’t into winged modes of transportation, you’ll get nowhere.

I don’t know why parents think that forks resemble airplanes. And I don’t know why we expect children to respond to this. Maybe it is a holdover from prehistoric days, when food was brought to hungry cave babies by pterodactyls. Maybe it's supposed to appeal to the inner risk-taker in a child. Certainly any kid who thinks diving headfirst off a toddler bed into a pile of freshly folded clothes can see the inherent risk in eating food delivered by a flying fork, and he should respond in excitement.

Just when I was seriously considering thinking about calling the doctor, even though my son's next checkup wasn't scheduled for six months, he returned from the dark side. After I put on a veritable air show with meat on a fork one day, my son ended his meat refusal policy.  Maybe he finally saw the error of his ways. Maybe it was the pterodactyl noises. Or maybe he just pitied me making a fool of myself.

Road Trip

People who keep track of such things tell us that the most accident-prone drivers are teenagers. But I’m not so sure. I get that it is difficult to concentrate on driving when one is simultaneously texting, changing songs on an MP3 player, fixing make-up, and checking a Facebook feed. I don’t see, however, that this level of distraction is any different than what the average parent of a toddler faces on any car trip longer than the driveway.

I try to prepare for long car tips by making my toddler as comfortable as possible. I give him a small bag of cheesy goldfish, and I present him with a pile of his favorite books. Alert and experienced parents are already shaking their heads, knowing that such efforts are in vain.

I learned this the hard way once on a trip across the Midwest with my toddler. Before leaving, I made sure he was properly nestled among Bernstein Bear books, with a full sippy cup and a bowl of raisins at his side. He even had his favorite blanket. My plan was virtually flawless. We were leaving just before nightfall, giving him a short amount of time to brush up on the virtues of familial love taught by the Bernstein Bears before drifting to sleep with a full belly and a comfortable blanket while I drove four hours through the peaceful darkness.

It was three minutes before the first raisin ricocheted off the windshield. Not wanting to disrupt the calm that was surely forthcoming, I turned briefly and gave him a mild frown. Turning my attention back to driving, I had just enough time to nudge the car back across the center line before The Bernstein Bears Love Their Neighbors plopped beside me, knocking over my Mountain Dew and spilling my bag of skittles.

Unfazed, I turned again, this time to deliver a threat. I stopped short of promising to take his books and food away, thinking this would only guarantee that he would not drop into a dreamy slumber quite as quickly.

As I refocused on the road, planting my feet firmly on the brakes to avoid developing a short-term relationship with the driver ahead, I realized almost immediately that I should have considered disarmament. A brief barrage of paperback children’s books was followed by an invasion of Croc-wielding feet slamming into the back of my seat.

With one hand replacing the lid on my soda and the other hand plucking a grape skittle off the floor, I carefully navigated a lane change with my knees while admonishing my son in the rear view mirror.

I eased into my new lane, only to be cut off by a teenage girl lost in conversation on her cell phone. Watch the road, kid, I muttered under my breath. 

A Good Little Monkey

Every father wants his child to grow up and be a genius. We want our kids to be able to understand the world, solve problems, win Nobel Prizes, and furnish our vacation homes during retirement. To this end, we begin reading to them before they can even focus their eyes to see the pages. As my son progressed from “board books” [Books that contain upwards of seven words but are printed on heavy-duty cardboard to prevent children from destroying them and so the publisher can charge $19.99 for them] to more toddler-friendly material, I found myself suddenly remembering the books I was reading from my own childhood. And was I ever surprised. Take Curious George for example. In my childhood, the Curious Little Monkey was always in great danger. In one book alone he was thrown in jail, escaped by balancing on a power line, floated hundreds of feet in the air held up only by balloons, and landed on a street amidst rush hour traffic. The more recent renditions of George’s adventures, however, are not quite so fraught with peril.  These days George goes to the beach, and gasp, loses his picnic basket. This is hardly the material of a compelling plot. [Although this particular title does feature the Man in the Yellow Hat wearing a bathing suit, flip-flops, and sunglasses.]  In another recent Curious George story he takes a trip to the aquarium where he faces the imminent threat of entering the penguin paddock. Yes, penguins, those bloodthirsty, flightless killers.  George miraculously escapes and is made an honorary staff member at the aquarium.  Really? Is that the lesson I’m to teach my young son? Here, son, hop over this fence and play with the giraffes. When zoo security arrives I’m sure they’ll make you an honorary staff member rather than haul my butt to prison and refer me to child endangerment. Yes, gone are the days when Curious George smoked a pipe after breakfast, joined the circus, and flew rockets into outer space. H.A. Rey’s memory is not being honored here. So instead of my son learning to face adventures and hardships armed only with his curiosity, he gets gentle reminders to keep better watch over his picnic basket. This is not how Rhodes Scholars are made; I may need to rethink my retirement strategy.