Category: Parenting

Who’s your daddy?

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Dates With A Ten Year Old

I haven’t been as good with this as in the distant past, but have been wanting to do it more recently. The idea is to treat each of my daughters to a “date” to show them what to expect from guys who date them in the future and to spend some one-on-one time with them to get to know them better. It’s a bit intimidating because my expectations are a bit high and after a long work-week I’m pretty worn out.

How do you date a ten-year-old? I have a few plans based on her interests. For example, take her on a photography walk at dawn after stopping to get some donuts. What about my other two daughters? There’s glow-n-putt … bowling. Hmmm the bowling alleys strike up memories of thick smoke and cursing old men, but they should have a family night that would omit both of these nasties.

A friend on facebook asked what constitutes a date to a guy. In her case a boyfriend asked her over to his place to watch some TV. This means one of two things to a guy: either he’s really wanting to hang out with her or he’s trying to put her in a compromising situation. She’s right to be offended if he implies this invitation is a date. It means he offers low standards to her.

How to plan a date:
1. Know her interests.
2. Plan a place and a time.
3. Give her anticipation.

Don’t get mad or irritated on a date – ever! Even if the waitress throws a plate at you and you see cockroaches crawling on the kitchen floor. Just politely excuse yourself. If the lady looks embarrassed then explain to her that she doesn’t deserve to eat at a restaurant where the business doesn’t give her respect.. that she deserves better. Apologize to her, and take her someplace else. It’s best to scout out the place first, then you won’t be in an embarrassing situation of paying a bill for food you won’t eat… but don’t even sweat it. She’ll associate your frustration with her, not the restaurant.

As my girls get more sophisticated, I’ll deliberately go into these situations to show them how a man should behave.

At a dinner talk my wife introduced the question “What shows more character: the way a person acts while being watched by others or the way a person acts when not seen by anyone?” My answer was “Neither. A person’s character is best seen when put in a nasty situation. The uglier situations are the most revealing.”

When my wife and I dated, I would take her up to the restaurant, glance around, check out the menu, check out the bathroom (people who cook your food spend time there and if it lacks soap, they didn’t wash) then on occasion, leave. She would get very upset. It was in her head that if you parked in the lot of a restaurant, a hidden obligation was set that you had to eat there. To alleviate her embarrassment, I would ask her to stay in the car and relax while I checked the restaurant out. After explaining to her that I wanted to show her a good time, and wrenching for days after going to a bad restaurant does not equate to a good time, she agreed to this solution.

It’s things like having the man think about and look out for them, showing responsibility and initiative, that my girls are being taught to look for…

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A Little Light Reading

I love reading to my children. We just got through reading the unabridged Alice in Wonderland. Before that it was book 6 of the Lemony Snickets series. We intermingle The Boxcar Children, Little House on the Prairie segments and other books throughout the year. I think we’ve read through the Narnia series twice, or at least some of them keep getting reread.

I find the imagination in books to be better than most movies – particularly in older books before there was TV. My guess is that watching mainstream media saps the creativity out of your brain and back before TV just writing out some crazy dream you had was surreal enough to have people question your sanity, if not your intentions.

A great quote for this photo is from Gallagher the humerist – “Don’t you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked ‘Brightness,’ but it doesn’t work.”

[Book pictured: The Annotated Alice, compiled by Martin Gardner – without dust jacket.]

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Runaway

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have. – Thomas Jefferson

Lately my life has been an emotional roller coaster. Is this what people refer to as mid life crisis? Maybe I’m just finally getting back in touch with my feelings. I could get seriously mature at this point and talk about politics and religion because that’s what adults are supposed to do… but I’m going to take a chance and run with my emotions here for a moment.

I’d have to thank my wife for helping me along that road. Sixteen years ago we met over a poetry group that I founded and moderated at the U. Emotions were fierce and wonderfully inescapable.

These emotions are what drove my creativity … I think by the time we’re adults we’ve learned to suppress our emotions so much that we forget we have them … the life that used to be so brilliant and colorful when we were kids has become a sea of lackluster and that dreary adultness points a finger at “responsibility” when being more responsible has nothing to do with losing that edge.

It was that emotion that drove the creativity into writing music, poetry, art and photography. A good friend of mine, Jorge, who had more creative genius in his left foot than I had in both my hands found a girlfriend and was spending most of his time with her. That left me with only geeky buddies to hang out with and visit. Then I found a girlfriend and she was the hottest girl in the CS lab to be sure! Now she’s the hottest girl in my house!

So when it comes to emotions, adults are conditioned to forget about them, and that’s easy to do with television and computer games. Since I’ve cut those out I started to see life normal again.

Last night I read a book to my son. It has a picture of a playground and a boy at the top of the slide, looking out. I remember that moment – the first big slide I climbed. I was so high! It was amazing. Then I thought to myself … all those moments in life that followed where I got used to being taller off the ground made being as high as that slide not so exciting anymore: The first tall tower, the first flight, the first time falling in love… but each of those highs were different. They had different mindsets and observations. And each one is so wonderful they shouldn’t be forgotten or compared with the rest.

So why did I suppress my creativity? I was trained into it for one thing. It’s the politics, the corporate, the expectation to be proper and civilized. Go ask James Thurber about being civilized! … but more than that it’s childhood fears in an adult form that I haven’t faced and shook off.

I can’t run away from who God made me, but I’m so paranoid! I’m afraid of people watching me and calling me a failure face just like they did for years in school! Ugh! It still feels like they’re watching me and waiting for that chance to laugh at me all over again.

Like the daft Captain Hook – always looking for a chance to choke the life out of Peter Pan just to sneer at Pan’s failure. The adult psyche is always trying to kill the child psyche. In more modern terms, it’s like the dreaded Count Olaf – always watching … always near and just waiting to snatch up the little orphans’ souls (after all, that’s the most enormous fortune anyone’s got).