Frenzied Daddy

My birthday is fast approaching, and my mother wanted some ideas. Usually, I’m terrible about giving them out. This year I’m taking pity on anyone who happens to want to shop for me.

As some of you know, we planned a trip to Disneyland® last summer. This summer is looking more promising, with Mrs B having vacation time set up and with our buds E and A planning to come along. While we have an offer from a very generous friend to stay in his palatial mansion, we want to subject our kids to the entire experience…

But now I’ve stumbled across this blog, written by Pixar employees on how to “fix” Disney. And what I’m reading is that the Disneyland® of today is more corporate, more commercial even than it was seven years ago when we took Miss B.

Do these stories match up to reality?

As a general rule, before, say, mid-February, I didn’t involve myself directly into my kid’s school projects. She’d have, for instance, a diorama due, and she’d make little stuff out of fimo clay and then fluff balls (cotton balls) or whatnot, and it’d be ok. But I absolutely didn’t (and don’t) want to be the kind of Daddy who does his kids’ projects for them, creates the science fair volcano complete with flashing lights and railroad cars rolling up in the lava. And I was so afraid of doing that kind of injustice to my kid’s projects (Yes, I know that I switched plurals back there. I have two daughters, but only one has to do school projects so far.

Last Month, Mrs B and I involved ourselves into Miss B’s Lincoln project, because, frankly, she was following a little too closely in my footsteps with regards to how thoroughly she was doing her projects. And her Lincoln mobile came out terrific. She did almost all the work, we guided a little bit on the planning and we printed out some pictures for her, but all the rest was her.

Her diorama this month was a little different. She’s been doing a bird section in school, and they’ve spent three or four weeks on it. Her idea of a end-project for it was spending twenty minutes drawing a poster of the bird she had picked out (Which happened to be the Sandhill Crane). Which leads me to the question … “How do you tell your child that the work they’ve done is below your expectations?”

First, I had to evaluate my expectations; what was I expecting from a third grader? Was I expecting too much? Valid question. But I found the list of approved projects (no poster, huh) and what I was envisioning wasn’t too far out of line.

So then, I had to communicate to her what I wanted. This was a little more trouble; I started with “I want you to spend more time on this, and I want these facts on your poster.” I still wasn’t happy with the results.

After meeting with Mrs B, and yes, this is going somewhere, stop checking your watch, we told Miss B that she was doing a diorama. And then on Tuesday, I took Miss B to the hobby store, where we purchased fake ground, fake water, some overpriced twigs. And begged a shoebox from the mountain climbing store. And then we came home, and I walked her through what she needed to do; cut up the fake ground, scrape off some fake grass for the fake marshlands, et cetera.

I made her do most of the work. I poured the fake water (and got a lot too much of it. It’s like a caro syrup. I photoshopped some flying cranes onto a picture I had taken down at the Smith and Bybee lakes. and I gave her pretty clear step by step instructions, and I was very hands-on with her about what I expected.

So, the question I have is — did I fall on the side of the line of “doing the project for the kid” or the side of the line of “helping the kid do the project” ? She didn’t do every little thing for it, and I helped her flesh out her ideas for what she wanted; it was my idea to make cattails out of fimo and toothpicks, it was my idea to use the picture from the lakes for her background, the fake water was my idea. Actually, her diorama was pretty much my idea, but the implementation of the details was hers.

Mrs B thinks I’m not being completely objective. If I’m asking if I “went over the line here” then I should also tell you that all the knowledge about the bird came from Miss B’s brain (she did the research), and that we discussed most of the components of her diorama. I “helped” with most of it.