Dolls for Boys

Nathaniel wholly embraces gender stereotypes. He won't drink out of a pink plastic cup or use the yellow token when he plays Sorry. He loves Concentration, but not the Disney Princess edition. He still plays with trucks, but never dress-up or “house.”

Fortunately he hasn't yet learned all the intricacies of machismo. He still holds my hand in public, and he still sings in the car. . . . well, pirate songs and Christmas songs anyway. Specifically Christmas songs that don't contain any girlish words like “love.”

You can imagine my surprise last night when I heard Jessica propose that they play dolls.

“Yeah,” said Nathaniel eagerly. “Let's play dolls.”

They sat down in front of the doll house, and Jessica began narrating with authority. “I'll be the Mommy and the Daddy and the Sister, and you be the Baby. It's time for lunch. What should we make for lunch today? Let's look in the refrigerator and see . . .”

Meanwhile, Nathaniel had picked up the baby doll and stuck it head first into the doll house's toilet. He quietly waited for Jessica to notice.

“ . . . we have chocolate cake and ice cream and pasta and – Hey, Baby! You're not supposed to play in the toilet!” In pretended indignation, she plucked the baby out of the toilet and hurled him violently back into his crib.

Then she fell on her back laughing, reliving her brother's wit: “Silly Baby! You don't play in the toilet!”

By the time she sat up, she had to pluck the baby from the refrigerator. Then he was on the bookshelf . . . driving the car . . . hanging upside down from a window. Each time Jessica fell over in belly laughs until Nathaniel would start to giggle too.

I suppose that's how real men play dolls.

Roof-Repair and Child-Rearing

Our new house sports a simple roof-line with only one tricky spot where the flow of rainwater could have been misdirected. Someone dutifully installed aluminum flashing where the porch roof meets the house, guiding any water down a twelve-foot channel. Then someone else, in a rash moment perhaps, sided over the bottom of the channel, dumping all that water into the wall. The water rots the wood, of course, and the rot attracts bugs to speed its decay.

In spite of all that careful flashing, we share our new house with carpenter ants.

• 
  

I was happy to fix the flaw, because I enjoy roofing. I like imagining how water runs down a slope, nudging and guiding its flow. To the astonishment of my tech-savvy colleagues, I had spent one of my rare weeks of vacation roofing our house in Chicago.

I repaired our new roof with silicone caulk and a sheet of aluminum. My flashing was adequate, but not neat. A masonry bit allowed me to pin it in place with a three-inch screw, but still it bent away from the shingles.

Could a slanting rain form ice beneath it? How do you shape those stubborn bits of aluminum once they're in place?

In my impatience my first idea seemed like inspiration.

• 
  

“Help me out here,” I called to Jessica. “Please take my drill, carefully, and put it back in the box.”

I was giving her another chance. Perhaps a little traumatized by our recent move, she had been misbehaving terribly. She had broken a toy intentionally and hid the evidence. She had rolled her eyes and sighed at each of the few duties of a six-year-old, then dealt her a brother a shove on the stairs when he ignored her teasing.

Just an hour earlier, while I was precariously caulking a fan vent from the top rung, Jessica had been talking to my aunt in Chicago on the cordless phone. Out of nowhere, I heard her say, “No, please Daddy, don't make me stop talking to Aunt Agnes. I miss her!” I looked down to see her, twenty-four feet below, holding the phone at arm's length and pretending to plead with me.

“I have to go,” she lamented into the phone. “Daddy won't let me talk to you.” Then she hung up on my aunt.

What strange, six-year-old subterfuge was this? I saw red but contained myself. Within two minutes I had climbed down, called Aunt Agnes, explained and apologized, and stood by while Jessica reluctantly came clean.

• 
  

I had been searching for a way to shape her behavior, and I figured that entrusting my drill to her was a peace offering of sorts: I was giving her a chance to make amends.

“Help me out here. Please take my drill, carefully, and put it back in the box.”

A little too slowly, she approached.

I removed the bit so it wouldn't break. “Put this in the box, too.”

A little too nonchalantly, she reached for my new drill.

“Use two hands,” I added sternly.

She stepped indifferently onto the porch, held the drill at arm's length, and dropped it onto its case from a height of eight inches with practiced aloofness. I choked back a reprimand and looked away.

• 
  

Now for my brilliant idea. I pulled out the 12-pound head of a sledgehammer that Nathaniel had found in the woods, hauled it onto the roof, squirted some silicone under my flashing, and positioned the heavy hammer on top with duct tape. The weight held the metal flush against the shingles while the silicone dried. Tomorrow I would remove the tape. How clever I was, thinking to force it into shape this way.

Cleaning up, I couldn't locate the masonry bit. Not in the drill, not under it, not in the lid of the case, not on the nearby windowsill, not on the porch.

I eyed the cracks in the porch. They were narrow. You could push a bit through there, but you would probably have to work at it.

“Jessica!” I hollered.

Eventually she sauntered onto the porch.

I questioned her, but she looked unconcerned. I accused her of losing the bit intentionally, and still she looked at me dumbly.

Suddenly she wasn't an uncomprehending child any more. Her silence was mockery.

I gave in to my anger and ticked off every offense she had lately committed, gaining volume as I went.

She started to cry. After her stubborn refusal to bend, I was gratified to see my effect on her. I was vaguely aware that my shouting might be carrying clear to the next house on the chill autumn air, and it even crossed my mind that a good bit runs only a few dollars. But I was also mad as hell, and if it was attention she wanted . . .

Camille came out. “Are you looking for this? I thought you might lose it, so I took it inside.”

Oh, no.

• 
  

My conscience repaid me with fitful sleep, even after many apologies to my daughter. Then I awoke to a loud crash. At once a series of events took shape in my mind: the cold dew had loosened the tape, the hammer had slid down the shingles, but the length of tape hung on, and instead of dropping harmlessly to the ground, the hammer had careened into the side of the house. Me and my stupid ideas. What was I thinking, using a sledgehammer for a delicate job? Well, there would be no sleeping now.

The sun rises late this time of year, so at 4:00 am it was still richly dark, except for a radiant half-moon that silhouetted the pointed pine-tops on the ground. I discovered clumps of tiny stars that I had never seen in the city, and they surprised me next to the familiar constellations.

The night echoed with the bang of my ladder against the eave. Tape and flashing shone in the moonlight. The hammer was in place. The house was intact. I still don't know what caused the crash. Maybe something fell in the cellar. Maybe something fell in my imagination. I took down the hammer and went inside for some tea.

While the pot boiled, Jessica's door squeaked open. Curious as always, she questioned me. In bare feet and flannel pajamas she seemed more sleepy toddler than schoolgirl. I urged her back to bed, caressing her cheek and rediscovering the softness there.

In the morning it rained. My new flashing, still imperfectly shaped, carried the water in spite of me. May my children do the same.

Chewbacca Was a Fuzzy Little Bear

The children recently watched Star Wars again, and it brought me back to the first time they saw the DVD. Jessica was just five at the time. She couldn't begin to follow the plot, but the music entranced her.

Some recollections:

• Whenever another character mentioned Leia, Jessica would cry out “Where's the princess?” “There!” Nathaniel would say, exasperated, when Princess Leia was on screen. But to Jessica, whose idea of a princess involved glittering ball gowns, long gloves, and flowing hair, Princess Leia was unrecognizable. “Where?” she would persist.


• Remember Chewbacca, the towering, ape-like sidekick who cast aside pairs of stormtroopers effortlessly with the back of his huge arm? He talked in a strange, unearthly sound that must have seemed to Jessica like a cry of pain. Twice when he grunted, Jessica asked, “They didn't hurt the little fuzzy bear, did they?”


• Jessica also had trouble following the cuts and scene changes. After having seen Darth Vader in one scene on the rebel spaceship and in another on his own bridge, she saw him in a third location. She threw up her hands and sighed dramatically. “Another Dark Vader? There are Dark Vaders everywhere!”

Brain Quest Trivia

Camille's mom recently sent Brain Quest quiz cards for the kids. Believing our kids are ahead of their peers, she bought the second and third grade editions.

I didn't think I'd like these, but I do. They're just booklets of questions—sort of a Trivial Pursuit for the grammar school set. The questions vary widely in difficulty and style, so a question like “What's the math term for 6 in this problem: 6+4=10?” (the “addend”) might be followed by “What kind of number is 67: odd or even?”

Camille pulls these out for oral quizzes while the kids eat lunch, and the uneven difficulty actually serves as a motivator. They know that if they're stumped by two hard ones in a row, there's still a chance that the next question will be easy. The topics include grammar and math, light history and geography, logic, and science.

We make no effort to have the children memorize the answers. Instead the Brain Quest cards:

1. Reinforce and give the kids a chance to show off what they already know. Nathaniel proudly recalled how to add dimes by counting by ten, for example, and Jessica beamed when she remembered that it was Abraham Lincoln who ended slavery.


2. Serve as springboards for discussion. After Jessica correctly answered that the wind causes waves in the ocean, I reminded the children that we had heard on the news about a tidal wave caused by an underwater earthquake. Soon we were onto plate tectonics.

Tomboy Princess

I have only brothers, so girls were, and probably still are, a mystery to me, but I always preferred the tomboys. I admired their pluck and their deft, athletic manner of carrying themselves. They spoke confidently and behaved alike in the company of other girls, boys, or even adults.

Early in my adolescence I lost interest in the the more feminine girls. I never knew what to make of them, made-up and giggling, whispering to one another behind turned backs. When I finally dated some tomboys, they put me in my place often enough for me to appreciate their verbal directness.

My wife, Camille, is a knockout, but a plain-spoken, tomboy knockout. Her unequivocal dealing ranks high on her list of attractions.

Now my daughter, like many six-year olds of unroyal lineage, wants to be a princess. A couple of her aunts share this ambition, but I'm resisting it.

And I'm losing.

• 
  

Jessica's femininity will not be subdued.

Our landlady outfits her hair with exotic braids. High heels, boas, and rhinestone tiaras keep making forays into the toy box. I once worked for Mattel and learned firsthand not to tolerate Barbie, but the Disney Princesses (TM) have effected a deep incursion into our home.

Jessica's clothes, mostly presents from female relations, tend toward the pink and are equipped with flower patterns and lace. (Camille succeeded in repelling both halters and hip-huggers before they secured a beachhead.)

When a stranger once called her "cute," Jessica smiled benevolently, flipped her hair, and tried to sashay off like a runway model—until Camille spun her around and prompted her to say "Thank you."

• 
  

Her daintiness does not extend into the kitchen. She loves her food and burns it fast. I remember how proud she used to be when her one-year old belly would balloon after a meal, protruding over her diaper. I miss that belly. I once overheard a mom tell her cookie-eating toddler to “watch your figure.” We don't believe that six-year old Jessica has a figure, let alone that she should watch it.

We try to encourage sports, but fail—probably because we're not sports fans or athletes ourselves. Jessica enjoys running races, but not football or baseball.

Jessica's first inclination when she skins her knee at the playground is to scream for attention. Her dignity more injured than her leg, she demands to be coddled, then works herself into a pique. At the risk of being callous, I've learned to make light of these scrapes and bruises. Usually a hug and a “Can you bend it?” are enough to restore her composure and set her on her way.

We try to encourage her interest in making things: Legos and crafts and such, but Jessica's engineering aptitude doesn't currently extend beyond coloring.

Her big brother inadvertently does more to steer her towards being a tomboy than I do. Outside, she aims to keep up with him physically. Inside, she'll find herself playing dinosaurs or knights more often than “Dress Up” because older Nathaniel steers their play.

That's another struggle. We try to encourage her to stand up for herself—not to let Nathaniel dictate what she does all the time, not to stand by helplessly while some bully on the playground mistreats her or another child.

Our results are mixed. At times Jessica makes us proud, at times she plays the victim, and at times she even becomes the bully. She has been guilty of decidedly un-princess-like shoving.

• 
  

Pretend boyfriends pose the worst challenge to my tomboy designs. Any older boy whom Jessica meets is a potential sweetheart. I can't recall when the word “boyfriend” invaded her vocabulary, but it was a dark day. For months we were likely to overhear this sort of monologue from the next room:

Oh, Luke. You can't be my boyfriend anymore because now Scott is my boyfriend. [A pause.] Okay, you don't have to cry. Scott is very handsome, but you can be my boyfriend, too.

We tried ignoring this behavior, disallowing it, framing it as babyish in order to make it unappealing, and even asking her blankly why she wanted a boyfriend (or two).

At last boyfriend-play seems to be on the decline . . . but has she abandoned her imaginary beaus or just learned to make-believe more quietly?

• 
  

I used to worry about those feminizing aunts. I recall the party when they shuffled baby Jessica into a back room and she emerged vaunting lipstick and rouge. I remember how they lobbied to have her ears pierced. Visits from the aunts always left a trail of clinquant costume jewelry behind.

Now I'm starting to worry about peers. Her aunts, confident adults themselves, want what's best for Jessica and respect us, her parents. I'm afraid her peers won't be so benign. At six, Jessica and her friends don't scrutinize each other's appearances, judge each other's fashions, or compare real boyfriends. At sixteen, I suppose they will.

Ultimately I know I can't make my daughter a tomboy--but can't I at least nudge her in that direction?

I had one early victory, and the memory of it gives me hope. Jessica was about three, a huge Christmas party was in full swing, and both children were trying hard to consume a month's worth of desserts amidst the chaos. When Camille realized how much they had eaten, she insisted the kids have no more sweets. Pretending not to have heard, a guest sneaked Jessica another chocolate. I saw.

“Did Mommy say 'No more desserts'?” I interrupted.

Jessica nodded, putting the chocolate back onto the tray.

“Oh, all right,” said the guest. Then she turned to Jessica. “You want to keep that nice figure anyway.”

Jessica, only vaguely sure of what was being said, lifted her shirt and threw back her shoulders, beaming.

“I have a BIG belly!” she exclaimed.

You won't hear that from a Disney princess.

Oedipus and Electra

While we were walking into town for ice cream the other day, Nathaniel asked his mother to hold his hand. Camille did. He said, “No, like Daddy holds it,” and carefully put her arm through his.

Then he added “Now we're married.”

These moments are precious. At six and seven, the kids seem so often to push us away, to assert their independence, to establish their distance, that we really cherish the moments when they want to be close.

Pretending to be married to Mom is a paradox of independence.

On the one hand, Nathaniel is envisioning his adulthood. He's recognizing that someday he will be a man, possibly a husband. On the other hand, he's craving intimacy with his mother, a little jealous of her bond with Dad.

Jessica has recently learned how to wink. She hasn't mastered the subtleties yet. Her winks involve turning her head sideways and painstakingly scrunching the right side of her face while she stretches her eye open on the left, maintaining a furrow of concentration on her forehead all the while. But she's proud of the skill, and in her weaker moments even teases her big brother. “When are you going to learn to wink, Nathaniel? It's not hard. All you have to do is this. See? Mom, I wonder why Nathaniel can't wink. . . .”

At the table last week, Jessica winked at me. I winked back.

“Don't you wink at my husband,” Camille teased.

“Why not?”

“Because girls shouldn't wink at married men.”

Forbidden fruit is succulent, indeed. At every meal since, whenever there's been a moment of quiet, Jessica has remembered to wink at me.

“Look, Mom,” she says impishly, through a carefully contorted face. “Look! I'm winking at a married husband.”

(When I want to read about other children's antics, I check out the 25th Carnival of Homeschooling.)

Learn Geography by Taking Over the World

I learned my world geography from Risk. Military conquest over his father motivates a boy to learn a map, and I can picture the Risk game board to this day.

This learning strategy has a couple of problems, however.

One is that Risk's “countries” are archaic and imprecisely defined. The game's Siam is our Thailand. The game treats Yakutsk, Irkutsk, and Siberia like three countries, but—if I understand rightly—Yakutsk and Irkutsk are actually a city and a territory within Siberia, which is a region within Russia.

Another problem is that Risk merges countries into convenient regions. On that embarrassing day in high school when I was unable to locate France on a world map, I really did know the location of Western Europe, a Risk "country."

Nathaniel's at the age where he would love Risk, and I wish the game were available with a map closer to the real world. Laying out all the countries of the Middle East as potential sites of conquest in an American board game might smack of imperialism, but it would be the most educational sort of imperialism.

Anyway, I don't believe all those hours of Risk ever infected me with a subconscious desire to colonize Irkutsk.

Recently I had a chance to try an even better game, Ticket to Ride, at Geeks and Gamers. It's devilishly easy to pick up, but the longer I played, the more new strategies I discovered. I can't recommend it highly enough.

The object is to build railroads linking cities across North America. The board is a map of the United States and a bit of Canada, with several city names on it.

Nathaniel would love it, but I wish it worked with all 50 states instead of a handful of cities.

Instead I bought 10 Days in the USA.

It didn't hook me at once like Ticket to Ride, but it's growing on me. It features a clearly labeled, brightly colored map of the United States. The object is to acquire 10 state cards that represent a 10-day "journey." That means adjacent cards have to be adjacent states. Some car and airplane cards are also included to let you work with states that aren't adjacent.

Playing the game with Camille has had a funny psychological effect on me. Now I feel a new affinity for states like Tennessee and Missouri, which border eight states each, but I'm uneasy about Maine—a state I used to like—which borders only New Hampshire.

10 Days in the USA seemed like an ideal teaching tool. Like Risk and Ticket to Ride, it teaches not only the names of places, but also their locations.

Unfortunately it's too hard for our kids. The box recommends it for children over ten. For children who are still struggling to locate the states and read their names, the rules and strategies are just too abstract.

The game board and the cards do provide a great tool set for creating our own educational games, however. What homeschooler wouldn't want a clear map of the United States with a corresponding set of color-coded state cards?

This morning the kids and I tried it with my own set of rules. Jessica won. They liked it. These are the rules we used.

10 Days in the USA—Little Kids' Rules

Objective
To acquire five state cards depicting adjacent states.

Setup
The Alaska and Hawaii cards are removed from the deck: these are not used. All the other cards are shuffled and left face down in a pile.

Play
Players take turns, beginning with the youngest.

A player begins his turn by picking 1 card and turning it face up in a common pile.

If the card is a car, the player discards it and picks 2 more cards instead.

If the player chooses, he can return any number of cards from his hand to the common, face-up pile.

If the player sees 2 or more face-up cards depicting adjacent states, he can choose to take those cards into his hand.

Play proceeds to the next player.

Rules
Airplanes are wild cards. An airplane can represent any state that is the same color as the airplane. For example, a yellow airplane could be used in place of Illinois or Utah.

The cards in the player's hand must always be contiguous so that you could draw a line through them without passing through any other states. For example, a player could have Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas in his hand, but could never have Illinois, Missouri, and California in his hand.

The first player to acquire five adjacent cards (including any airplane wild cards) wins.

Amusing Moments in Fatherhood

Chalk scribbles covered the driveway. Within this asphalt spaghetti I recognized many instances of Jessica's name, several flowers, and that four-armed robot guy from the recent Star Wars movies. Closer to the house were a skull and crossbones with a curse: "Do not inter or you will be destroyd." It was signed "KKK" in giant, careful letters. I made a mental note to investigate, but inside I discovered mud tracked all over the floor and immediately forgot.

•  

At bedtime, Jessica and I were reading to each other, side by side on our backs. I read my pages (on the left) and she read hers (on the right). The tale was yet another Junie B. Jones adventure. Since she's read each book in this series five or six times by now, I occasionally tease her by changing the words. I ad-libbed a T-Rex into a scene in Junie B's kindergarten.

Jessica didn't pretend to complain like she usually does. Instead she quietly closed the book, set it on her nightstand and pointed at the door. "If you're not big enough to read with me," she asserted quietly, "you have to go."

I apologized, but she stuck to her guns. I had lost my bedtime story.

•  

In one volume, Junie B. is upset because she received one valentine fewer than her classmates did. She's trying to figure out who stiffed her. Then her teacher approaches.

"Junie B.? I have some good news for you!" she said. "Guess what I just found in the bottom of the valentines box?"

I sat up real quick.

'Cause guessing games are my favorites, of course.

"A meatball," I said.

We lived that moment recently. Camille was reading something to the kids at the dinner table and the word occupation came up.

"What's occupation?" asked Jessica.

"An occupation's a job," said Camille. "Daddy's occupation is software engineer. What's grandpa's occupation?"

Grandpa's been a high school teacher for—let's see—over 65 years now. Jessica knows this. He talks about school all the time. She's been to his school.

"Dentist," she said, immediately and confidently, although the only dentist she's ever met is her own, a young woman.

•  

The entire roll of toilet paper had been carelessly unrolled, then very carefully rerolled in an attempted cover-up. At once I suspected Nathaniel, who holds zealously that rolls of toilet paper, like Q-Tips, exist primarily for play and secondarily for hygiene.

I met him in the hall. He had cardboard wings affixed to his arms and long pieces of masking tape attached to his hair.

"You're frozen!" he said.

"What did you do the toilet paper?" I seethed.

"I'm a gorgon. You're frozen!" he said.

"You better tell me what you did to that toilet paper right now, or . . . "

"I didn't do anything. Talk to Jessica." With a flap of his wings, he was off.

After locating Jessica, I repeated my inane question.

She burst into tears: "By accident I played with it?"

•  

The kids were chalking up the driveway again. Nathaniel was dutifully inscribing another threat in front of the door: "Beware! Go bak or meet thy doom!"

"This is a pirate warning," he said proudly. Then he added "KKK" with a flourish.

"What are the Ks for?" I asked.

"They're your DOOM!"

I threw up my hands helplessly and waited.

"It means cutting your throat." Impatiently he drew his finger across his throat and made a guttural sound: "Kkkkk . . . ."

Food Poisoning

Camille's mother came into town for a four-day visit this week. That would normally be great news, but this time the visit went sour. Camille, her mother, and I contracted food poisoning after ordering from Kalliope. Camille's mom was briefly hospitalized: food poisoning can be particularly tough at 88.

We're all recovering slowly: two days later I've had four Saltines and am drinking a cup of tea. We're just sorry that Mom's trip was spoiled by the incident.

This story has a silver lining, however. While Camille and I were at the height of our sickness, sometimes retching simultaneously into our two toilets, the kids (who had eaten pizza) did an amazing job taking care of us. They were attentive and brought us glasses of water or the telephone or books. They were respectful and stayed away while we napped. They prayed for our recovery. Jessica even tried to do all the kitchen dishes herself and read a story to Camille.

Most amazing, they did not fight. I can't remember another day when they played so peaceably. They never raised their voices all day.

They were a bit scared at seeing both of us sick, and I think they were even scared by the weird sort of carnival day they had. They enjoyed unlimited access to TV and video games—a first for our household. Their diet tended towards M&Ms, fruit snacks, and other sugary treats.

Still, it was wonderful to know that they can pitch in when they need to.

Pangea and the Colonies

This is the risk of homeschooling your kids, in a microcosm:

This afternoon Nathaniel and I were hiking up Bear Mountain. We had been singing It's Christmas at Ground Zero in the car (one of my favorites), and he was still humming it. He was leading (as always), and he missed a turn in the trail.

I set him straight, but he blamed the painted marker on the tree. Whoever paints the trails had missed this tree for at least a season, so there were just a few faded bits of paint on the bark where there should have been a neat yellow rectangle.

"Look at this paint!" he said shaking his head. "They should redo this. It's all broken apart. It's pangea!" He started chortling. "It's like the United States went backwards and became thirteen colonies again."

Then he laughed so hard at his own joke I had to stop until he collected himself.