Globalization

T+ 1 hour since bedtime. Four-year-old comes tramping down the stairs. Wife asks him why he keeps getting out of bed.

“Because I have things to tell you.”

She says, “Please save these things for morning.”

Pause. Thinking. He rejoins, “But it’s morning in China.”

And this is, yet again, why I am not the best at discipline. I crumble in the face of genius or creativity. I’m also ashamed to admit that he probably derived that bit of logic from my morning declarations of “it’s happy hour somewhere, glug-glug.” (Kidding. I don’t drink in the morning. Usually.)

Guilt-free flatulence

My oldest son has manners, damnit. The kid is just polite. Bless you, thank you, may I? And when he farts, well, he’s quick with a “scoo-me” which is the “excuse me” apology for those with little time for extra syllables. Problem is, he’s too polite about it. For some reason he thinks that every part of the fart — every discrete fart quanta, if you will — must be separately excused. Imagine if you will (and please pardon the excursion into the vulgar if you don’t have kids) a child gatlin-gunning flatulence which bystanders cannot hear while saying “scoo-me scoo-me …. scoo-me” for each occurence. (At least he no longer calls the act “passing gassing”. That was just unbearably cute.)

Worse, he thinks he must do it no matter when it happens. He’ll be mid-sentence: “I was swinging at — scoo-me — the park — scoo-me scoo-me — and this kid walked in front — scoo-me — of me …” It is out of control. How out of control? Well, when he’s pooping behind a closed bathroom door you will hear the poor Emily Post mutant crooning scoo-me as he actually defecates. That’s just wrong. The crapper is sacrosanct. Do what you will in there with no repercussions, son. It is your temporary kingdom.

We have told him this. But he’s just so damn polite. Scoo-me.

Stork

Confronted with the double-whammy of having to explain to our sons that there was a new baby coming and that the nanny wouldn’t be around as much, we chose the easier of the two. Sat ’em on the couch, pulled up mommy’s shirt (my job) and said, “Boys, mommy has a baby in her tummy.” Blank stares. “Guys, you are going to have a new brother or sister soon.”

“When?” As in, like later today or tomorrow morning? “In May.”

“Oh, that’s great. Can we see?” Now both are off the couch, poking, prodding the belly. The youngest thinks the belly button is the baby.

Then … the question. “So, how did it get in there?”

Mommy lunges for her stack of baby books. Index, index — “Babies, questions on where they come from” — damnit, where is the index?!

I rock back and start in my best 1950’s public service ad narrator’s voice, “well, son, when a man and a woman love each other very much –”

OH NO OH NO! I HAVE TO GO POOPY RIGHT NOW! He darts off for the toilet and completely forgets his question.

Saved by a crap attack. Isn’t it wonderful?

$$$

“Daddy, why do you work?”

“Um, so we can have money.” Thinking, crap, I should have said something more meaningful like “well, son, I work to make the world a better place.” Ah well, better roll with it.

“But money comes from the machine.”

“Yes, but work puts it in the machine.”

My son thinks about this for a very long time, then walks off without saying anything. I’m pretty sure he thinks my job is to actually load money into ATM’s.

Eh. As long as he’s proud of me.

The always-ending story

My two-year-old refers to books as “the end”. Sing-songy, up-down. “The end.” If he wants a book he will point to it and say “the end”. Walking down the aisles of a bookstore a few weekends ago was an endless parade of “the end, the end, the end.”

In addition to being cute, this is also useful since ending a story — and being able to say “the end” — is the best part for him. So you never have to worry if you’re not up for reading a longish story. Just quickly proceed to “the end.”

However, I’m not sure he’ll be as interested in the looping, sometimes endless hypertext fiction as I am.

The end.

Osiris, meet Jesus. Jesus, Osiris.

Yesterday I was a guest speaker at my son’s school. Each week a new student becomes The Chosen One, he/she whose ego shall be inflated by week’s end. This was my son’s special week, so I volunteered to come talk to the class about my job, specifically about my work in Egypt. I figured that’d be more interesting to four-year-olds than, say, XML or Gantt charts.

Now, I’ve given presentations to CEO’s and government officials, to audiences skeptical and outright hostile, but I gotta say prepping for the preschoolers ranks right up there in terms of pre-show jitters. I mean, blowing a pitch to a client is one thing. Embarrassing your child the very first time you get a chance in front of his peers, that scars for life.

I now realize that talking about Ancient Egypt to a group of kids who don’t understand the concept of death is extremely difficult. How to explain the mummy? (“The wrappings keep the Egyptians cool when they take forever-naps.”) I did get a bit of a kick out of introducing the class to some of the Egyptian pantheon of gods, especially as this is a Catholic school. I had visions of the tots explaining to their parents that they learned about Osiris, Lord of the Dead, at school. Multiculturalism, kids. Teach the controversy.

At one point I introduced a finger puppet of a pharaoh. I explained that he was the leader of Egypt, that he wore a headdress that made him feel powerful like a lion, and that he ruled everything he could see with absolute power. At this point one of my son’s friends exclaimed “Just like President Bush!” No, I’m not kidding. I only wondered if he meant the puppet part or the absolute power part.

“More than you know, kid, more than you.”

Proud of my little pantheist

“Mommy, what is god’s job?”

“Um.” A silence pregnant with panic.

“What does he do?”

“Well, he created the world and now he watches over it.”

“Oh, that’s good. So we could all be god then couldn’t we?”

“Eat your lunch, son.”

Nature’s vs. nurture’s call

Currently my four-year-old son’s most requested song is “Mongoloid” by Devo, specifically this a capella version. His constant requesting of it can’t be good in the long term, especially since his uncle has Down’s Syndrome. The upside is that I guarantee he is the only preschooler who knows that the condition is chromosomal.

Recently he announced “You know, Dad, everybody poops … except Mommy.” This is curious because neither I nor my wife has ever told him that she is a non-pooper. (Oh, and also it is untrue.) I’ve never seen a reference to immaculately crapless mothers on any kids’ TV show and I can’t imagine this is a point of discussion at school. Are little boys born incapable of believing their mothers could be dirty in the way that their fathers clearly are?

Speaking of ingrained behaviors, the older boy actually leaps for joy — there is no other way to describe the ecstatic dance he does — when he hears the 20th Century Fox fanfare that precedes their movies. You know, the martial drums and horns? This is because this is how Star Wars movies begin and forever the two shall be linked in his mind. This of course is a terrible setup for disappointment before the several hundred Fox flicks that aren’t followed by a yellow text crawl into the distance.

Sausage fest

We’re all about penises today.

Wife: “Son, why are you holding your penis?”
Me: “Why not?”
Wife: [disapproving glare flashed my way]
Son: “Because it likes me.”
Me: [laughing into pillow]

Then, later, the same son spotted mommy in the bathroom.

Son: “Hey, you don’t have a penis.”
Wife: “That’s right. Boys have penises. Girls don’t. Mommy’s a girl.”
Son: “Well then you can’t live here. This is a boy penis house. But you can live next door so I can come outside and see you.”

Brilliant.

Window to my world

Some choice morsels from the last twenty-four hours in my household.

My newly four-year-old son is hell-bent on being able to wipe his own butt these days. So I’m showering, he’s pooping, same bathroom. He wipes with enough paper to cover a house in a John Hughes movie. Proceeds to bend over to the ground, ass aloft, and smashes his rump against the shower door glass. He asks me to check to see that he is clean. Let me tell you, this kind of scatological evaluation is not easy from the other side of a steamy shower door. I tell him I think he should wipe again. So he loads up with toilet paper again and proceeds to run out of the bathroom. He comes back about five minutes later and explains that he had to go to his room so that he could wipe in the mirror. I still don’t know exactly how he accomplished this. Best guess is that he was bent over looking through his legs backwards at the mirror. OK can we stop talking about this?

Today same son looked outside as dusk approached and said, “Mommy, its nighttime. When does the babysitter come?” Nice Pavlovian reaction to the end of the day, son. We don’t go out that much.

The youngest son was napless and ornery at the restaurant tonight. We had to scoot his high chair away from the table so he had nothing within banging distance. Mama offered him some crunchy chip thing. He took it, stared her right in the face with a completely emotionless expression, and crushed it into dust with his hand still outstretched, like a Hollywood villian pulverizing the hero’s antivenom as he sits in a snake pit. This is when you ask for the bill before your food arrives.