Holween Safte Rules No comments yet
Phil’s daughter wants us all to be a little safer this Halloween:
This little gem is quickly making the rounds. Visit A Family Runs Through It for the translation.
Of Starving Children No comments yet
A few years ago, my mother gave me a LEGO version of the Hogwarts Express for my birthday. What? It’s LEGOs and Harry Potter! It also has small pieces that are easy to lose, which is always a problem with LEGO playsets.
Sometime ago, Ian spied the box in the closet, wedged between Simpsons Clue and Cranium. Since then, it’s become the ‘train game’. Frankly, it’s a pain to let Ian play with it. He always wants me to fix the pieces he breaks, but loses interest the moment I start. So I stop. He complains, I start, he wanders, I stop. Complain, start, wander, stop. Comstanderop.
Last night he wanted the train game. Not his castle, pirate ship, truck, truck, skee-ball, truck, Lincoln Logs, Hot Wheels, grocery store, kitchen, doctor bag, or truck. Just the train game. I said ‘no’. I explained—as I’ve done before—that the train game isn’t a game, but a toy. I told him I’d be happy to play Candyland or Chutes & Ladders.
In response, he pulled Chutes & Ladders from the shelf, and threw it on the floor. ‘It’s a stinky game!’ Well, yes it is. But that’s hardly the point.
‘Ian, I’ve said that you may not play with the train. There are a lot of boys who don’t have your toys. If you don’t want them, maybe we should give your toys to them.’
Yesterday Ian visited my office again, and I forgot to bring his cup home with us. This morning he wanted tea, but didn’t have his tea cup. I grabbed another, and he wailed. ‘That’s not a tea cup! That’s a juice cup!’ He is not a morning person.
‘Ian would you rather have tea in the Clifford cup, or no tea?’
He took the cup and threw it to the linoleum. I asked him to pick it up. He held it out to me, his other hand on his hip. ‘Some people don’t have cups,’ he said. ‘We should give it to them!’
Special Advertising Section 1 comment
Everyone else is doing it. Why can’t I?
I don’t write Total Depravity to make money. Which is a good thing, ’cause I don’t. I’ll never see the $11 I’ve earned through my brief experiment with Google AdSense, because it’s not worth their time to print the check. The purpose of this site is, and will remain, as a way for me to chronicle my fatherhood and Ian’s most embarrassing moments. And to streamline his therapy.
All About Fatherhood, however, is a horse of a different kettle of fish.
Blogging ‘networks’ are a fairly recent development (kinda), and 451 Press is one of them. A blog network is a collection of blogs on a range of topics, organized and maintained by a centralized group. Strength in numbers, and all that.
I started writing for 451 Press earlier this month. All About Fatherhood is my-their blog, and basically I’m doing what I do here…only there. Its content is less personal, and more about fatherhood in general.
What does this mean for Total Depravity? Absolutely nothing. You probably never would’ve noticed anything if I hadn’t mentioned it. I’m hoping that All About Fatherhood will help me focus Total Depravity more on Ian, less on everything else. We’ll see how it goes.
This is the first and only time I’ll mention All About Fatherhood, though I may place a link in Total Depravity’s advertising section. I also won’t post anything here that’s posted there*, and vice versa.
So, please stop by, and say hello! It’s a little lonely out there.
* Okay, so I cross-posted Prayers for Canon. But since when is more prayer a bad thing?
Hold That Thought 1 comment
Last night, Ian and I put the last of the shooting stars and moons on his bedroom ceiling. He’s only been waiting for a year for me to do this. He doesn’t have much patience, but his memory is short.
As Ian stood on his bed, handing me fistfuls of jade-green stars, he asked, ‘Can we go to space when you’re done?’ Well, duh.
But first we had to have dinner, because you can’t fly to space on an empty stomach. Then a bath, because a smelly human doesn’t make as good an impression as a freshly-scrubbed one. Then a trip to the bathroom, because there are no rest areas between Earth and the Moon. Preparing for spaceflight is a lot like getting ready for bed.
Cssshhhht! ‘Ah…Commander Ian…’ Csssssht! ‘You are clear to tinkle…Over.’ Cssshhhht!
Ian climbed the ladder into his spaceship, and crawled under the blankets. Safety first. The countdown started, and at zero the be…spaceship shook and shuddered. The lights flickered and went off. When they came back on, we had landed.
Ian descended, and we walked on the moon. It’s a nice place, with wood floors and cats everywhere. We went downstairs to collect moon rocks. Along the way, we stopped to see if Moon Mommy liked hugs and kisses as much as Earth Mommy.
Our mission to the moon was really just a layover on our way to Mars. That trip is much longer, and you have to sleep through it.
Ian boarded the ship, but I decided to stay behind. Just before the countdown, Ian held up his hand. ‘Wait, Daddy! Can I just be Ian? Can I go to bed?’
I gave him a travel voucher.
Metrical Friday: The Writer 1 comment
The Writer
By Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
Thanks, Dad! 1 comment
In August, I wrote about New South Wales’ Fatherhood Festival. Apart from tree-planting and kite-building, the festival also hosted the annual ‘Thanks Dad‘ photo competition.
The results are in! Here are some of my favorite entries:
Take a moment to browse the 2006 galleries; they’ll brighten your day. Even if you live in Detroit.
Not My Thing No comments yet
I took Ian to school this morning, and stayed for about an hour and a half to play. It was his Star Day, which means he was the teacher’s helper, and got to bring something for Show N’ Tell. As me, Ian, and a classmate finished making a monster out of blocks, Ian’s teacher told me a story she said I had to share with everyone.
On Tuesday, the kids painted with their feet. Ian’s pretty fastidious, so I was sure I knew where the story was going. He wouldn’t paint. ‘No, thank you.’ After several attempts at coaxing Ian into joining the fun, he finally looked at his teacher, wrinkled his nose, and shrugged.
‘I’m just not a feet painting kinda man.’
Dlogearchine No comments yet
I heart Google. I really do. The goal of everything they create seems to be making the internet personal and useful. And neat.
Their latest fare is a feature called Google Co-Op. The service allows you to create a specialized search engine with results limited to the sites you select.
It is with great…something…that I present the ‘Dlogearchine‘. Want to know what dad bloggers are saying about boogers? Football? Elmo? Search the growing number of dad blogs in one place!
Co-Op is (of course) in beta, and the results are sketchy, but I’m having a blast finding little-known posts from fellow blogfathers. So far, Dlogearchine* is searching 45 dad blogs, and I’m adding more as I find them. If you’d like me to add yours, or would like to contribute, please let me know! Also, let me know if you’d like to add this search to your site.
*Think ’sea urchin’, only with a dog. And an ‘l’. Hey, it sounds better than ‘Dad Blog Search Engine’.
When Kids Collide 1 comment
Weather permitting, a group of kids plays freeze tag outside the church after dinner on Wednesday nights. Ian and I have time to kill before our respective catechism class and choir rehearsal, so we usually join them on the playground.
It’s not old equipment, but it’s aging. There are plenty of gaps to fall through, and raised planks to stumble across. The grass is slick, and there are filthy, splintery railroad ties bordering the playground.
In a logical world, you’d think the itless would scatter and hide; instead, we cluster around the playground equipment, taunting the It and daring ourselves to get closer and closer. It’s chaos compressed into a few hundred square feet of wood and plastic and steel. A dozen atoms spinning through the air, limitless in energy and disastrously drawn to each other. One atom is so full of energy and exuberance that it spins by itself in an excited orbit, around and around and around.
Sometimes the atoms collide in a tangle of pony tails and sneakers. They stagger and try to stand, rubbing their foreheads. And then they run in the opposite direction, because the It is merciless, and unmoved by excuses or bruises.
This happens in Sunday School, too, and in nursery, where the goal isn’t survival but simply to get from this toy to that. They run, they hit, they fall. Sometimes they cry, but more often they laugh. More often than that, they ignore the crash completely and move on with their lives.
An elementary school in Attleboro, Massachusetts has banned tag. And touch football. And ‘any…unsupervised chase game during recess’. Students may get hurt.
Who decided that children shouldn’t hurt? What idealistic parenting book is telling new mothers and fathers that it’s their children’s right to live without scraped knees, bloody noses, or even broken bones? If that were the case, our bodies wouldn’t heal.
Through pain we learn about cause and effect, about consequences, about boundaries. We learn about physics. We learn caution, and how to help others who’ve fallen. We learn that that was a really dumb thing to do. We learn that we can be hurt.
We learn forgiveness.
Celeste D’Elia says ‘her son feels safer because of the rule’. He may feel that way, but, if so, it’s an illusion. No one is safe, not really, not completely. Protecting children from what may happen doesn’t prepare them for what does happen. What will happen.
This weekend, four-year-old Canon passed away after a month-long struggle with complications which arose from a heart transplant. It’s a situation far-removed from tag or flag football, and extreme, but the lesson for parents is the same. We can try fooling ourselves, with rules and padded corners, into believing that we can protect our children. But if Christ died for something as great as our salvation, why should I worry about something as little as a bruised forehead?
(Thanks, Child’s Play!)
Blackwater Giles No comments yet
Kelly is directing the middle school play, and has rehearsal this afternoon. Ian is sitting behind me, sending mail to my coworkers and pretending to be a ‘boxer man’.
My iPod is playing in the background, and Centerfold by J. Giles came on a few minutes ago.
Inappropriate content aside, can someone please explain to me why this might be the ‘pirate song’?