A Chip Off the Old Block

From my lovely spouse:

As we were doing our writing exercise this morning Jessica asked how to spell the word pretty. This was about her fifteenth spelling inquiry, and it was really slowing us down. (Also, she's an excellent speller and was doing this for dramatic effect. But I digress.)

I told her we'd make all corrections after we read what we'd written and she said, "But I can't. I'd just die if I don't spell it right." I retorted, "Well, we'll give you a lovely funeral and on your headstone we'll inscribe, 'If only she knew how to spell pretty.'"

At this point Nathaniel popped up and said, "Yeah and we'll spell the word wrong just as a joke."

Consequences of the Fall

Jessica, at the end of a long hike, was tired, thirsty, and impatient: "I wish everything was perfect," she complained.

I was about to remind her that nothing apart from God is when she added: "I wish when Eve saw that apple she just clapped her hands together and left it alone."

Taking Candy from a Baby

One-year old Jessica sat on my arm, her fingers prying into my lips, while I cleared dishes. She often used to touch me in the special way of someone who doesn't know what it means to poke out your eyes.

But soon her nails started scratching painfully at my teeth and gums while she peered into my mouth.

"What are you doing?" I laughed, holding her out at arm's length, knowing she would not answer.

"She smells the chocolate," Camille chimed in.

Ah, yes. I have a sweet tooth, and chocolate is my chief vice. Too often there's some in my mouth, and sure enough, Jessica was making for it.

• 
  

At nine years old, Nathaniel's taste is finally broadening. In fact yesterday he made himself a ham sandwich that incorporated strawberry jam, cheese, pickles, peanuts, and barbecue sauce.

But as a toddler, he had mysteriously transformed from an omnivore to a fussy eater. Camille and I were exasperated with trying to feed him a balanced diet.

"Just try the asparagus," I said. "You don't have to eat them all, but you have to eat two."

"I don't like them," he said, tears coming into his eyes. We had been through this before.

"You don't know you don't like them," I insisted. "You've never, ever eaten asparagus in your entire life." I was pretty sure he hadn't eaten it uncooked, anyway.

"I know what I like," he said. "I don't have to try it."

"How can you know what you like if you haven't even tried it? Maybe you'll love it."

"I always know what I like. I like Mac and Cheese. I like Cheerios. I like chocolate."

Something dark crept into my mind. "You don't always like chocolate," I said.

Scornful disbelief. "I always like chocolate."

"No," I said back at him slowly. "You don't know until you try." I pulled a box of baking chocolate from the cabinet. Unsweetened.

I set a square ceremoniously onto a clean plate. Without hesitation he took the bait. He was so sure of himself that for a fraction of a second he actually gloated at me in triumph. Then he ran to the bathroom.

As he frantically scooped water into his lips, I sermonized at him, "You don't know if you like something until you try it."

He never did eat the asparagus.

• 
  

We still control our children's diets, so treats are really treats for them. They greet a slice of birthday cake or a bowl of ice cream excitedly: Jessica has been known to quiver with heady anticipation.

Long ago I introduced the idea of testing for poison. How uncertainly she looked at me the first few times I carefully tasted a corner of a brownie while assuring her I was protecting her from possible harm. Now, even before a cookie hits her plate, she proclaims, "There's no poison in it, Dad! You don't have to test it."

Lately she's varying her routine. As I entered the kitchen yesterday morning, she leaned over her plate, spread her arms protectively, and called, "The Pop Tart shop is now closed!"

Among the many lovely things Camille does for me is to have the children copy and illustrate poems. Nathaniel recently chose Shel Silverstein's poem, "Poison-Tester." It includes lines like these:

. . . Mmm--it's OK, but these boysenberries--I'll make sure they're not poisonberries.
Mmm--no, they're safe, but that burger might be deadly.
Mmm-no, it's all right. And now I'll test your hot fudge sundae . . .

It's good to know I'm not the only dad who tests for poison.

• 
  

Both children love to help us cook. Lately the path to pancakes is strewn with bits of eggshells, and I've become expert at extracting them from our mixing bowls.

The children now also occasionally cook for us. I mean "cook" in the sense of adding milk to cereal or microwaving leftovers, but it pleases me to no end.

If Nathaniel is awake with me early in the morning, he'll sometimes offer to prepare a bowl of oatmeal for me while I shave. He tops it off with yogurt and nuts, just like a fancy restaurant. Somehow his tastes better.

• 
  

Situated between a Home Depot parking lot and the town dump, we have a wonderful local ice cream stand. Unlike the nearby Ben and Jerry's--understaffed, over-priced, and occasionally out of milk--it's a great spot. It means everything to Jessica that she can order her own ice cream.

Always I ask "Do you want to share one with me? We can get something really special." And always she answers "No, Dad. I want my own." And we buy her a "baby" sized cone, and she picks her flavor, and she's perfectly content.

Secretly I want her to share with me. There's some kind of a super-mega-ultra-lightning sundae on the menu, and I swear I'll buy it if she ever offers to share with me, just to make the point that good things come to those who share.

But I think I'll see her married first.

Tongue-Rolling Your Way to Your Identity

After finding a storybook character who could roll her tongue, Jessica decided she needed this skill.

The list of tasks Jessica can do better than her big brother is short, and it was a long winter for her sibling rivalry. Nathaniel, former seven-year-old-who-can't-read-as-well-as-his-five-year-old-sister, leapfrogged from being a competent reader to an avid one. Lately he pretends to be still asleep in order to steal half an hour with The Secrets of Droon before breakfast.

In ski lessons Nathaniel promptly earned the nickname "Dash." If Jessica had earned a nickname, it would have been along the lines of "Snow Bottom" or "Tearful."

Nathaniel can't whistle, but neither can Jessica.

She's the natural musician, but it's hard to gloat as she's on piano and he's on violin.

Only in winking and finger-snapping is she truly dominant.

The promise of beating Nathaniel to tongue-rolling meant a lot to her. She began to practice without telling him.

For days she alternated between the mirror and her mother, sticking her narrow finger of a tongue out and asking, "Ith thith it? Amth I lollin' it?" Even navigating our icy road home from Girl Scouts, I heard a plaintive cry behind me and saw Jessica craning in her seatbelt to make eye contact in the mirror, pointing at her out-thrust tongue, and shrugging her shoulders inquisitively.

"I don't think you'll ever be able to do it," Camille warned her. "It's genetic. For you to roll your tongue, maybe your biological parents would need to roll their tongues." (We've since learned that the genetic aspect of tongue-rolling is still a hotly contested debate.)

Jessica's contorted face relaxed and became thoughtful. "So . . ." she said carefully, "there's a woman in Romania who has brown skin and can't roll her tongue."

"Ah, the puzzle pieces are filling in," I quipped.

I spoke lightly, but that's exactly what was happening. Both children are becoming curious about their roots.

Recently they sat captivated in front of an old audio tape of a two-year old Nathaniel. At the start of the tape, I was singing to him: "Chim Chim Cher-ee" from Mary Poppins. After "Good luck will rub off when I shake hands with you," I had left the room. For the next twenty minutes Nathaniel repeated hundreds of times in a sing-song, "Good luck will rub oss!" among deliberate, guttural truck noises.

The children love this window into Nathaniel's toddler days. They sit rapt when Camille and I recall their strollers and one-sies. Jessica has become a regular reader of Camille's scrapbooks, poring over her own baby pictures.

Their earliest windows are the VHS tapes we received from the adoption agency when the children still lived in Romania. In the videos their foster parents coo over the infants while measuring their heights and head sizes.

On Jessica's tape, a family dog makes a cameo. Currently Nathaniel wants very much to have a dog, and Jessica knows it.

Sensing a new weapon, she began to fill unusually peaceful moments at dinner by intoning wistfully, "Oh, I wonder what my foster dog is doing now. He must be missing me. He loves me very much."

Then she would look pointedly at Nathaniel.

At first the speech upset him, but he found his comeback.

"That was seven years ago. . . . Dogs don't live very long." He looked pointedly back at her. "Your dog's probably dead."

Nathaniel's science curriculum has introduced genetics recently. That got both kids speculating about the traits they share with their biological parents. In third grade the details of heritability are still fuzzy, however, and the kids sometimes credit biology where they shouldn't.

Nathaniel and I were struggling to finish a wooden birdhouse in time for a fund-raising auction. I was starting the nails for him, and I bent one.

As I pulled it out, Nathaniel suggested that he could start his own nails.

"You might as well try," I said encouragingly. "You swing a hammer better than I do." He beamed.

I held a new brad. After hitting my thumb a couple of times, he drove it straight and true, finishing with the nail's head recessed just under the surface.

I was proud of him, and suddenly a little nostalgic for his discarded Fisher-Price hammer and workbench, and my thumb still smarted.

He looked up, and I was sure he was going to thank me.

"I guess my biological father was a better hammerer than you," he said.

The next day Camille sent Nathaniel to read his science lesson while she worked with Jessica. A short time later the door sprang open, and Nathaniel returned.

"Look what I can do." Effortlessly, he rolled his tongue. "I read about it in science."

Jessica's mouth opened, and she began to stammer and stamp her feet, but for once, her tongue failed her.

[This blog got a nice mention on Matt Langdon's The Hero Workshop a while back. Matt does a great job promoting heroism in everyday life. I'm grateful.]

Kids and Heroes, in My House and in Pakistan

I had no childhood hero. Athlete and astronaut left me equally unimpressed. When Time Magazine pronounced “Generation X Doesn't Believe in Heroes,” they were pronouncing about me.

But I have one now. Since I first learned about his building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I have increasingly admired Greg Mortenson.

They say the problem with heroes is the falling. You can adore Mel Gibson or Marion Jones, but where does that leave you when they go on a drunken tirade or admit to steroids?

Still, falling is a problem only in cases of hero worship. The risk of glorifying people is that they're people after all. They have faults.

I like to think that if some side of Greg Mortenson disappoints me, I will feel only crestfallen, not crushed.

Heroes also remind us of our failures.

You don't admire the chess-playing of someone who loses to you. To admire someone is to admit to your weakness. Maybe it was just stubborn pride that kept me from having heroes when I was a kid.

Greg Mortenson sold everything he owned and begged in order to build his first school. To this day, he lives in impoverished places and negotiates with dangerous people in order to teach reading to girls half a world away.

I can't think of any reason I shouldn't do the same. Instead I maintain a comfortable job in lovely New England and pride myself on Camille's success at homeschooling.

When I heard my hero was speaking nearby in Vermont, I immediately called my wife and told her I wanted to meet him. What I said next surprised me: “And I want the kids to come, too.” Camille, may God bless her always, bundled them up in spite of her flu and drove them out to meet me.

So I hurried them through bitter cold, at just about their bedtime, to meet my first hero.

Greg Mortenson really knows what it is to cherish education, and I admire him. And I'm in awe of him, and intimidated by him, and inspired by him, and indebted to him. I spoke with him that night in Bellows Falls, but I couldn't look him in the eye. I was too ashamed.

This is why it was so important to me that the children see and hear him.

The event was for adults. In a crowd of hundreds, Nathaniel and Jessica were the only kids. They fidgeted through parts of his slide show and looked to me for explanation when he fielded questions about American foreign policy.

I think I did right to bring them. My hope for Nathaniel and Jessica is that they will turn out better than I have. I want them to have the courage and the yearning to do tangible good in the world. I want their actions to emulate Christ's. I want them to love strangers. I don't want them to be afraid.

Maybe the evening with Greg Mortenson will influence them. Already they are collecting pennies for his schools. We keep some of his promotional photos in the kitchen, and I like to think they are starting to feel a kinship with these utterly foreign children half a world away.

As a child I had no hero; as a parent I do. My hero's achievements point to my failures, and my failures point to my hopes for my children. I want them to be a little more like him—and a little less like me.

All Games Lead to Chase

Our children always loved to be chased.

Running exhilarates toddlers, and I suspect the mental challenge of navigating at speed excites them too.

Children never hide their need for attention, but in a game of Chase they feel wanted. They are actively, physically pursued.

Chase even lets toddlers delight in their independence. Running away from Mom is, ultimately, what kids are built to do. Darting away from outstretched arms might deliver an extra frisson because it's practice for the real escape.

And Chase is about love. Ultimately Mom catches the child, and hugs and tickles ensue. (Even if a stubbed toe ends the game prematurely, hugs ensue.) Maybe the promise of affection is the game's biggest appeal.

When Nathaniel and Jessica were first walking, I could start a game of Chase at any time. A fierce look, a sudden movement towards them, stomping my feet so they could hear me coming—any of these could cause them to look up suddenly—is he really chasing me?—and totter away in peals of laughter, abandoning whatever play was at hand.

A little later, whether we were playing Concentration or Construction Trucks, the kids began to initiate the games of Chase. That crazy foreman who always ordered his crew to dump the dirt in the wrong spot would run off in Nathaniel's hand, leaving it up to his dump truck, in my hand, to bring him to justice. Even Construction devolved into Chase.

Tag is Chase with rules. By the time our children played Tag with other kids, they were expert evaders.

Even so, Jessica, fearing capture, would sometimes give up and fall down laughing when no pursuers were near. The anxiety was just too much for her.

Nathaniel was always confused about “It.” No matter how often we told him otherwise, he believed that It was the quarry, not the predator. His goal was escape, not pursuit, and when another child tagged him and called, “You're It!” Nathaniel would zig-zag away. Sometimes the other kids didn't notice, and the playground would be full of frantic children, all running from no one.

I recently played Running Bases with Nathaniel and Jessica. Jessica can throw and Nathaniel can catch. I can't do either, so perhaps the game was doomed from the start. We kept at it for about fifteen minutes, until Nathaniel, about to be tagged, veered off the baseline.

“You can't do that,” I called. “You have to stay between the bases.”

He hesitated. Jessica rallied and took off after him. She heaved the ball at his back, still running wildly, and missed.

“You can't do that,” I called. “You can't throw at him. You have to tag him.”

He snickered over his shoulder. This fresh insult accelerated her.

“You can't do that,” I called. “You can't tag him now—you don't even have the ball.”

Nathaniel put his toe on a rock, and yelled frantically, “I'm safe. No tagging me here.”

“You can't . . .” Oh, what was the use.

Jessica surged towards him, but he darted again.

He led her around the clearing of clover and daffodils that serves as our lawn. Both deftly avoided the wide holes where I had pried out stones and the deep ones where I had spent a morning locating the septic tank. When they came close, I could see the muscles in their calves, and I marvelled at how untoddlerlike their running had become.

Finally they exhausted themselves. Jessica trudged back to me and panted “I'm going in. There's too many bugs out here.” Nathaniel jogged toward the house. “I need water,” he called.

Running Bases was over. No one tallied a final score. Chase had won again.

Marvelling at Butterflies

As a college student I was reading in the park one day when a butterfly landed on the back of my hand. I remember the incident because of how I reacted. I didn't cherish the moment or murmur a prayer of thanks. Instead, my very first thought was, “Oh, no! This butterfly is about to leave me.” And it promptly did.

I'm a forward-looking, planning type of person, and even now I have to try consciously to live in the moment, to appreciate life's wonders, to just be.

The other night I was driving home from Cub Scouts with Nathaniel. We marveled aloud at the thousands of trees knocked down by a recent storm. Then he went quiet, and I turned on something called the John Tesh radio show, a mish-mash of soft-pop tunes and little monologues advertised as “intelligence for your life.” (The samples of intelligence are really just factoids gleaned from bullet points in USA Today.)

That Don't Impress Me Much was playing, and I'm a sucker for gimmicky pop songs.

As it ended, Nathaniel asked, “What was that song about?”

I explained that the girl was singing each verse to a different boy: a smart boy, a handsome boy, a boy with a fancy car. After describing each one's qualities, she concluded, “That don't impress me much.”

“She wants a man who is kind and loving,” I added, perhaps being a little hopeful in my interpretation of the line, “I think you're all right, but that won't keep me warm in the middle of the night.”

“So the smart guy was the one where she said, 'So you're a rocket scientist,' right?”

This was the first time Nathaniel had shown a real interest, indirectly, in how to win a girl's heart, and suddenly I saw his childhood flitting away. I've known him almost eight years now, and I've spent many of them trying to arrange my own life so I can steal more time with him. I feel like I'm just starting to prepare for fatherhood. But in another eight he'll be dating and driving.

While we were doing exegesis on Shania Twain's lyrics, the sun was setting behind scattered trees in what used to be a thick wood. They cast long shadows over the many already dead upon the ground.

I enjoy talking to him at eight. I'll miss his freely asked questions just as I miss the way I used to pull his stroller up to a stop sign and put on a little show.

“Stop sign,” I would say, pointing.

“Dah!” he would confirm, enthusiastic.

“The cars are coming”—I point to a driver who sees me and looks quizzically at the gesture—”and they see that sign: 'Stop!' So they stop their cars,” I conclude, abruptly halting my hand in front of him.

“Dah?” he would say, his questioning tone indicating that he wanted me to repeat the performance.

And I would . . . many times.

That stop sign feels so close. I can't quite believe it's irretrievably gone.

Another song ended and the radio proceeded to offer some of its intelligence, the results of a recent study on finding a mate.

“ . . . so if you want to attract a spouse,” John Tesh reported cheerfully, “don't decorate your room with those Legos or Star Wars action-figures that you hope will be worth a fortune some day. Over 65% of women said they would stop dating a man who had toys in his room.”

Nathaniel was alarmed.

“What!? That's like my room. What's he talking about? . . . no Legos, no Star Wars figures.”

“He means that if you want a woman to marry you, maybe you shouldn't have your room all full of toys, because the woman might think, 'Hmm, if I marry this guy, I'll have to have a bedroom full of toys.' And most girls don't really like Legos or Star Wars figures so much, do they?”

“Just because you get married doesn't mean you have to have the same bedroom,” he argued. “Your wife could have her own bedroom.”

“Usually when you get married you do have the same bedroom. But I'm sure that if a woman really loves you, she'll love you even if you have some Legos in your room. Remember Mommy bought me some Legos once?”

I drove onto our dirt road, slowing to see any deer emerging from the dark forest. I'll miss this eight-year old when he's gone, and I'm sorry to see him taking flight. But I'm cherishing him now, and I'm so grateful he landed here.

Wanted: Not-So-Easy Readers

Did Henry James Write Anything along the Lines of Junie B Jones?

A few years ago when the Captain Underpants series was becoming popular, I recall that some parents were complaining about the increasingly sarcastic, scatological content of children's books. In a bookstore I bumped into “junior chick lit”: Barbie-pink paperbacks in nearly monosyllabic prose that belies their cynically fashionable, prurient content.

I recall an article in which a librarian defended this trend toward simplistic books with a worldly, jaded attitude. She pointed out that many adolescents don't read at advanced levels, so we need I-Can-Read books that are also PG-13.

Our family has an opposite problem. Jessica started reading alone at five and hasn't looked back. She works out syntax and pronunciation effortlessly and reads a newspaper without stammering—even if she doesn't comprehend the story.

When Nathaniel was six, choosing books at the library was like a math exercise. He carefully counted pages and estimated the words-to-picture ratios of books with numbers on their spines. Jessica, however, just peruses thick paperbacks from the spinning racks.

So we need to locate Captain Underpants' nemesis: writing with fifth-grade syntax that appeals to a wide-eyed first-grader.

Restroom Tourism

When Nathaniel was first learning to use a toilet, he quickly came to understand that stores and restaurants, churches and schools, all had restrooms. Exploring them evolved into a hobby for him, and suddenly we couldn't go anywhere without visiting the bathroom.

The parent of a potty-training child who says “I have to go” is in a precarious position. I often suspected he was just curious or bored, but I was never sure. I could ask, “Do you really?” But could I actually refuse?

Sometimes I wished I had. The first time I went into a bathroom with Nathaniel, he promptly withdrew the deodorant cake from a urinal and inquired, “Keep this?”

On later occasions he would finish drying his hands by running them along the walls. That sort of thing makes me squeamish, no matter how many studies insist that my computer keyboard has more germs than a dirty toilet seat. Other men would eye me strangely as I stood at the urinal and called out blindly, “ . . . and don't touch anything! Are you touching anything? Don't touch anything!”

Vengeance came when Nathaniel pretended to have to go to the bathroom in order to get away from a restaurant table.

I watched as he dropped his pants, clambered onto the over-sized toilet, and perched, legs splayed, feet in the air, clinging to the rim with his hands.

He began chatting, commenting on the wall tiles and the hook on the stall door.

After a few minutes, I suspected a false alarm. He craned his neck to critique a picture on the wall behind him.

The toilet flushed automatically.

It didn't flush like our toilet at home, with a gentle swirl and gurgle. It flushed like a rocket ignites, with a great industrial whoosh. I can still see the terror on his face as he balanced precipitously over the roar.

That ended his restroom habit . . . for a few weeks anyway.

Years later now, I thought these issues were behind us. Recently we found ourselves in a public bathroom again. Either a leaky fixture or some bad mopping had left occasional puddles on the floor, so we stepped in cautiously. Nathaniel went into the stall while I washed my hands. He did his business promptly while delivering a brief soliloquy on his afternoon plans. As I dried my hands, he materialized at my shoulder, clearly proud of himself.

“I rolled out,” he announced.

“You . . . ?”

“I didn't go out the door. I sneaked under.”

Seeing the wet marks on his belly and shoulder, I gritted my teeth and took a breath.

“The door is still locked,” I pointed out. “Nobody else will be able to go in.”

“Okay.”

And before I could stop him, he lunged toward the stall, crumpled lithely onto one shoulder, twirled on the grimy floor, and sprang to his feet on the other side.

Art Appreciation and the Mechanics of Halos

The Hood Museum is one of the blessings of living near Dartmouth College.

It's a gem of an art collection: small enough to peruse everything in an hour, quiet enough to linger, and rich in quality and variety from ancient Assyrian bas reliefs to a Picasso.

And it's free to the public.

We had the kids there on Sunday, and they made us proud. Both are comfortable categorizing portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes. They even know something about how to start looking at a picture. When prompted, they speak comfortably about how it makes them feel, its colors, and whether it's realistic or abstract.

In the art museum, homeschooling shines. When I recall the somniferous sessions with the well-meaning “picture lady” at my own affluent grammar school, I'm gratified to see how easily my children converse with art.

Upstairs, the Hood is featuring a temporary exhibit by El Anatsui, an African artist. Much of his work is a comment on consumption and waste in the modern world. As we ascended the staircase, we stepped into a miniature mountain range built entirely of tin can tops.

“Mom,” Nathaniel eagerly suggested, “we should stop recycling so I can build this at home.”

A few minutes later we were looking at a giant wall made of rusty scrap metal and punctured with thousands of holes so it shimmered with light.

Nathaniel, ever concerned with the engineering of things, asked, “Was the wall already put together when they brought it here from Africa, or did they have to put it together here?”

“I don't know,” said Camille. “Why don't you ask the guard?”

Nathaniel confidently approached the man and inquired . . . “Do you have any free souvenirs?”

The guard promised him a bookmark about the exhibit, but—on discovering they had run out of bookmarks—heaped brochures and informational literature on him instead.

At an exhibit about consumerism and waste, Nathaniel swore off recycling and acquired an armload of printed brochures.

Our children's first visit to an art museum was unplanned. Shortly before moving out of Chicago, on the spur of a free day, we decided to introduce the kids to the Art Institute.

After fighting our way through hundreds of people lined up for a traveling Toulouse-Lautrec show, we made it inside. In the first gallery, a handful of well-dressed urbanites whispered quietly while some college students sat sketching from the floor.

As the door closed behind us and plunged the gallery into silence, Nathaniel looked about the large white room, unfurnished except for a central bench and the oils on the walls. Shouting as if we were still in the crowd, he exclaimed: “What the heck is this place!?”

Camille and I blushed, and most people politely pretended not to notice. The guard let out a peal of giggles.

The children were most comfortable with the Christian art. They knew the Bible stories so many of the paintings became a game of “name that Bible character.”

Camille and I tried to guide the children to particular pictures, but we were too late to steer them away from a grisly depiction of the beheading of John the Baptist.

As I recall the painting, St. John's corpse still kneels on the floor, spouting a fantastic arc of blood from his severed neck, while his head, eyes gazing upward, rests on a platter.

Our children pored over the painting in silence. Realizing that it was probably the most violent image they had ever seen, I scrambled for something comforting to say.

Finally Jessica spoke.

“So . . . when the head comes off . . . does the halo always go with it?”