Classic quotes, Vol. 38

Here are a few recent notable quotes from my 8-year-old son D- and my 5-year-old daughter M-:

M- (amused by my response to her claim that she and D- will become spies when they grow up): No, we wouldn't have to work hard in school for it, it's all very easy!

D- (with slack-jawed awe, quietly to himself while watching The Avengers at a drive-in, after a giant flying robot-bug ship crashed into a building): Now thaaaaaat's... somethin'...

M- (as if I could have no idea what she's talking about, after she cleared her lunch plate): I'm going to go ask Mom something... (mysteriously) because it's something that can only happen after lunch...

A conversation with M-: The little things matter most

The following is a conversation I had with my 3-year-old daughter M- recently, while passing the time before preschool by reading her feather on the class turkey of things for which the kids are thankful.

Me: You're thankful for lollipops?? That's what you're most thankful for?

M-: Yes!

Me: Not your family, or something?

M-: I'm thankful for lollipops AND my family!

Me: In that order?

M-: Yes!

(Note that all of her lines purposefully end in exclamation points... that's just the way she talks.)*

In case I don't see you all before next week, happy Thanksgiving!

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* Except for when she's bossing people around in a quiet, threatening way, instead of her usual loud, outraged way.

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You may enjoy my previous M- conversations, (6YO son) D- conversations, and (wife) J- conversations.

Things that amuse me, Vol. 5

Here are some more of the things that have been amusing or intriguing me lately:

1. You can never fully understand how unbelievably irritating a person you are until you get the chance to closely observe your clonelike child at the peak of his/her powers.

2. I think Siemens should really rethink the tagline they used in a radio commercial: The men work for Siemens. (Note: This is actually general advice for any company whose name sounds like "semen".) Maybe this adjustment in compensation substance is how they're weathering the ongoing economic crisis?

3. Either my son's really going to get extra credit for bringing to school a bag of candy for the class reward jar, or the world's greatest 6-year-old criminal mastermind just pulled off another flawless heist.

(No matter what, he's going to enjoy his bus ride home.)

4. Yahoo has an ad encouraging me to store my contacts' birthdays along with their e-mail addresses, so I can get a reminder when the date approaches. The ad features a woman with her face hidden (in shame?) behind a balloon, along with the headline, "You remembered!"

That's right, kids! Now you, too, can deceive your friends into believing they matter more to you than they really do, just like celebrities with personal assistants have been doing for years!

5. While talking up my productivity (both in my work from home and my work around the house) to my wife one day, I noted that I'd already showered before 3pm. My 3-year-old daughter's immediate response --delivered in much the same way she would ask if she could go SEE Santa now that he landed in the yard and had been pleading for her to take a ride in his sleigh-- was to ask, "Can I SMELL you??!?"

Mayhaps I need to get on a more professional schedule even while working from home.

A conversation with M-: What good's education if you can't show it off?

The following exchange with my 3-year-old daughter M- came in the midst of a completely unrelated conversation between my wife J- and me in the car the other day:

(J- and I discussing something boring like taxes, or kitchen remodeling)

M (loudly interrupting): BABY gorillas are nice. (ominously) But NOT silverbacks.....

Me: ... Huh? ...M-, did you learn about gorillas in preschool today??

M- (satisfiedly): YESsirrr.

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You may enjoy my previous M- conversations, (6YO son) D- conversations, and (wife) J- conversations.

Future careers of my daughter's preschool class

At the preschool graduation for my daughter's school yesterday (as an underclasswoman, she was just there for moral support, I guess), the teachers announced to the gym each graduate's answer to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Here are some of their actual answers:

1. Race car driver

2. Doctor

3. Batman

4. Teacher

5. Police officer/Firefighter

6. Army guy

7. Dentist

8. Spider-Man

9. A doctor AND a teacher*

10. A Mommy

I'm pretty sure that last one was planted, to squeeze a few extra tears out of the audience. Nevertheless, I noted a distinct lack of willing candidates for Equally Necessary Jobs like the following:

1. Systems analyst

2. Septic tank cleaner

3. Telemarketer

4. Import/export facilitator

5. Cat burglar

6. Lounge singer/DJ

7. Local politician

8. Hustler

9. Tabloid photographer

10. Racehorse euthanizer

I hope most of these kids are headed for a junior high epiphany resulting in a slight change of career path, because otherwise we may be facing a hell of a lot of very bitter, disillusioned telemarketers/gravediggers.

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* This one's the kid who couldn't decide if he should go for impressing the chicks or kissing up to the teacher, so he went for both. Sounds like the winner to me!

Classic quotes, Vol. 24

Here are some recent quotes from my suddenly-very-quotable 3-year-old daughter M- and my 6-year-old son D-:

M- (very pointedly adding an important qualification, so I don't get too cocky): I love you! And I'll love you forever! (suddenly serious)...Because you let me use your special spoon.

M- (after my wife, who's a highly functional Fruity Pebbles addict, pointed out Mother's Day was coming up): Oh yay!! That day we get to have the colored cereal for breakfast!!

M- (when asked if she's learning a lot in her new preschool): Yeah... Mostly playing, though, not learning. Playing outside... and inside...

D- (very dramatically, after I casually referred to my sister's "friend"): You mean... boyfriend?

M- (touching the edge of her skirt): This is not as short as I want it to be.

M- (answering my exasperated "Why do you think I gave you a fork??"): Ummm... for me to fork things.

M- (rambling in her high chair): Switch, witch, bitch, mitch, rich, itch... heh, heh... "switch" and "itch" rhyme.

Reports of my death are only mildly exaggerated

Editor's Note: Please humor me by imagining this post being grunted over my shoulder as I slaughter mice by the thousands, sword and shield in hand.

Editor's Note: And a gun... a really big, cool gun.

Now that I've gotten my Internet service up and running, I felt honor-bound to offer you all some kind of post as a reward for waiting patiently this whole week. By the computer, quietly whimpering all along, no doubt.

As a bonus for me, your standards are probably set really low by now, much like a food critic on the brink of starvation. I've always excelled at soaring over low standards as easily as I take the high-standard bar right in the teeth.

But speaking of teeth, as I listen to our new house settle and make all those noises houses do, I recline with bated breath, like the world's laziest hunter, waiting to see if we can all (theoretically) feast on roast mouseflesh tomorrow at breakfast. Otherwise, it's back to good old ladybugs and houseflies. By the handful.

The story of my short time in this (wonderful, amazing, joyous, I swear) house has been undeniably written in blood, though thankfully not much of it has been human.

If I were to make a size-relative hash mark for every life I've taken in the past six days, I could have re-created Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte twice, or, more likely, covered several walls with thousands of tiny scratches forming no discernible pattern. Either way, I'm pretty sure I'd be in trouble once my wife saw it.

But what my wife would like less would be the sight of me getting ready for breakfast by dabbing at blood stains on the old carpet someone saw fit to put in the kitchen while yelling at our 2-year-old that I meant it when I said to stay upstairs for just one more lousy minute.*

For you see, since my wife already had quite a long commute from our old apartment, and our "new" 120-year-old house is 2 hours farther away, she'll continue staying at my parents' house most of the time during the week, probably through the rest of the school year.

Our 5-year-old son D- is there with her as he continues at his old kindergarten until Christmas break, and thankfully after getting to play in his new bedroom for awhile on move-in day, he's eager for the school transition instead of dreading it.

And he's making the most of the opportunity to start over fresh, it seems, by not only torching every bridge a 5-year-old could possibly have built, but first desecrating them and then laughing while they burn.

So you can see why I've been even scarcer than recent months around here. I do appreciate the Amazon click-throughs some of you seem to have made after my previous post, and also the comments on my handful of recent status updates on Facebook. It's nice to not be totally abandoned even when I've abandoned everyone else for the time being!

I'll try to cobble together some list posts and other fragments that don't require as much consecutive minutes of focus, to get back in the swing of posting on here.

In the meantime, keep an eye on my Facebook status to make sure I haven't joined the fried mouse corpses in a fuse box somewhere in our dank old basement. ...Which I love, somewhere deep down. Deeper than the source of water that bubbles up through the floor now and then.

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* In case you somehow missed her repeated announcements to the world at large, she will SAVE the mice. All the mice!**

** That was before I explained to her in greater detail this evening about the bathroom habits, or lack thereof, of housebound rodents. Now she "hates all the mice", and presumably thirsts for their life force.

Not to belabor a theme, but...

I was informed by my son's school calendar that apparently today is something called "Labor Day".

Not having been a part of the traditional work force for almost two years now, I'm not quite clear what this means beyond my having to entertain a five-year-old for one extra day this week.

Calling on all my powers of deduction and forensic etymology training, I can only assume that this day must have something to do with honoring the struggle and sacrifice of our nation's childbearers.

Care to share any entertaining stories about your (or your significant other's) own labor experience?*

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* Before you answer, keep in mind that my wife J-, rightfully portrayed here most times as an overworked saint and generally sympathetic figure, had such fast labors that she has since declared a handful of other things as more painful than childbirth. Begin hating her... now!

Post-graduate education for preschoolers

Today, instead of writing some wandering rant or sarcastic childish commentary, or just transcribing my kids' strange conversations, I need to sort through a little something here.

Please indulge me while I wrap my head around the fact that I just packed some kid's lunch. For school. Where he'll be all day today, like a real person.

He'll even get there on a bus, by himself, and though he may look as ridiculous with his color-coded nametag, backpack sticker, and strange visor as I did with the grotesque cowboy totebag my mom made my brothers and I carry (but not my sister, years later...), he will have reached the point at which the bounty of day-to-day memories in my own life began, 23 years ago.*

I'm starting to think that, despite all the evidence my spotty memory and helpful cloud of denial can provide, my girlfriend and I just might be parents. Of actual children. And I'm pretty sure I'm getting some flashes that there was a wedding in there somewhere, too.**

This means we may not in fact be college dorm roommates who got matched up with a couple of unbelievably needy, dependent midgets by the university housing authority. Someone will soon be coming into our apartment, holding us accountable for our shamefully disorganized, impromptu lifestyle, emboldened by third-party education outside the cult walls.

As well he should. It's about time someone did.

Good luck, kid.

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* What this means for me, I'm not sure, but it doesn't really matter. I just don't want to screw this up for him.

** Coming up on six years ago, I'm told.

I am the hero I've been waiting for

Though he may be a whole 5 years old now, my son D- is more importantly a man in training, and following that storied tradition, he constantly asserts his superiority in every way over almost everything he looks at, hears of, or thinks of, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So I walk a fine line every time I'm challenged on strength, speed, intelligence, agility, or proficiency in many of the world's most inane activities.

I don't think it's healthy to completely disillusion and demoralize him, but I think it's equally unhealthy for me to set him up for any harder of a fall than he's already due when released into the wilds of full-time school next year.

I mean, a kid needs all the confidence, whether completely off base or not, that he can get in this world. So if he starts out thinking HE'S the strongest man in the world, instead of me, then that just gives him a leg up over all the other boys, right?

Here's a conversation snippet, issued out of the blue while walking through the library, from the kid who's told me (verbatim) more than once, "I know Everything. Not everything-everything, but I know Everything," just minutes before and after asking me entries in that day's long list of questions about how the world works at the most fundamental of levels:

D-: I'm even stronger than you.

Me: Yeah?

D-: I'm so strong, that if there was a robot, up in space, and I was up in space? One punch, and he'd be dead. If I punched a big robot one time, he'd be dead.

...I'm thinking that "leg up" just may land him upside down in a cafeteria garbage can one day. Maybe I should grab his ankles and wrists with one hand and hoist him helplessly into the air like a safari prize more often while I still can.

We all know this world is nothing if not humbling, and I've always found a steady diet much easier to take than the sudden compulsory feast days that are one's only alternative. So I suppose I'll have to take it upon myself to begin a campaign of careful destruction and reconstruction of his ego, via the most fun, ridiculously lopsided competitions I can think of.

And once he turns 10? Then, my friend, we move on to a crash course in Trash Talk 101 delivered by the one true master greater than Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Jordan, and your mom combined.*

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* I mean me.

A conversation with D-: Does not compute

Here is yet another example to illustrate that my 4-year-old son D- has been cursed with the same obsession with semantics that has thus far defined my time on this earth. This conversation took place at the park after I picked him up from his second day of preschool:

Me: So, did you learn any of the other kids' names today?

D-: No.

Me: Really?

D-: Yeah... I think I knew some but now I forget.

Me (only slightly incredulous): So you don't know any of the kids' names in your class yet?

D- (immediately, and eagerly): Yes I do! D----... that's me.

I had to thank him for sticking that clarification in there at the end, because as awkward as it was, I had completely forgotten his name just that afternoon, so his point had gone right over my head.*

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* Now that he's mastered semantics, the next lesson is Sarcasm.**

** And then Footnotes.