“My five-year-old is struggling with writing. Well, he’s not so much struggling as he just hates it and thinks it’s a waste of time because it is in no way related to video games.”
Read more about how I’ve convinced him that writing can be fun on the Mom Congress blog at Parenting.com
“If your kids fully know that you’re completely unwilling to follow through on your threats, there’s no way they’ll trust you or do what you ask. I know this with my head but my heart and my laziness sometimes have a hard time laying down the smack. I give too many “chances” and then get frustrated when they whine and beg for ‘one more chance, just one more chance.’”
If you observe my children, you’ll start to think we have a series of very interesting rules in place in our home.
#8. Refuse to eat food that is more than five minutes old because it is “leftovers” unless it’s more than two days old and you find it on the floor.
I saw a woman in the line at the grocery store today who was a dead ringer for Dame Judy Dench. It made sense to me because Dame Judy seems to pop up in all kinds of places. But then I thought, “Why would an older woman with a British accent be required to play ‘woman buying avocadoes at Safeway’?” No, they could have gotten anybody for that role. Heck, I’ve played it before.
Judy Dench should be kept available for playing roles like: persnickety housekeeper, or snobby aristocrat, or hard-bitten head of British intelligence, or The Queen.
In his Easter basket, or rather under it, Magoo got a gigantic illustrated Lego Star Wars encyclopedia. In a plastic sleeve on the bottom corner of the book was a tiny Lego Luke Skywalker. So Sunday night he’s talking to some friends of ours about his Easter and he says, “You wanna see the awesome thing the Easter Bunny brought me?”
“Sure,” they say. What else can they say? The entire evening’s been a frantic show and tell, the likes of which only a second child with a captive audience can pull off. I am a second child. I would know. They know that he’s gonna show them the present whether they say, “Sure,” or, “Why don’t you take your pathetic Easter present and shove it where the sun don’t shine?” so they might as well be gracious.
At this point they’ve already seen his gaping tooth orifice and the way his tongue can slide through it, heard all of his jokes, learned how you can amputate the legs from multiple Lego guys to make stilts for one lucky Lego guy, and been subjected to detailed descriptions of multiple video games. What’s one more exhibit? Besides, we’re holding them hostage and if they want pie, they need to play along. Also. He is adorable.
So he brings out the tiny Lego guy and goes off about all of its many amazing properties (hair, moving limbs, painted-on medallion, relation to Star Wars) and its deficiencies (lack of light saber or weapon of any kind, representation of a part of the movie that involves kissing). He loves this Lego guy and is so glad that he got him for Easter.
“Oh, yeah,” he adds as an afterthought, “And he comes with a book.”
I’ve spent the last 4 days in D.C. at the Mom Congress conference and I’m inspired and exhausted.
Click here to read how I stayed close to Dan and the kids while hanging out on the opposite coast.
