Frenzied Daddy

The DQ is learning to trust her instincts when it comes to presentation, context and audience. She’s being taught this song in her music class at school, and she complains that they’re being taught to sing it all light and fluffy. However, she believes it’s more of a funereal song and it should be slower and more sad.

I’m really proud of her ability to understand that. Her empathy. I agree with her, it belongs slower and lower, not happy and light.

This song was recorded with my cellphone and then converted to MP3. So it sounds pretty disgusting. You’d think someone with all the tech-love at my fingers I’d use better tools. You’d be wrong

comeon.mp3

Gever Tulley has a list of five dangerous things that you should allow your kids to do.

He persuasively argues that allowing your child the freedom to explore will help them learn bigger life lessons than ones “you can learn from Dora the Explorer.” One of his examples is fire; teach your kid to play with fire and actually let them poke around with it. Learning how to control and work with a mysterious and primal force is one of the great things that people learn. It teaches them about intake, combustion, and exhaust, the three crucial pieces of “fire” that you’ll need for a fire.

( this quote is somewhat paraphrased because I suck at typing).
when we remove every sharp object, every pokey bit from the world, then the next time the child comes into contact with something not made out of round plastic, they’ll hurt themselves with it. We rob our children of valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. And despite our best efforts and intentions, kids will always figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can in whatever environment they’re in.”

The video linked above is somewhat less than 10 minutes and is worth the time spent watching it. He’s very persuasive.

There’s a huge brilliance in the sky today. I was startled when I came out of the basement office by its light shining through TT’s room and down the stairwell into the basement. Being a quick thinker, I stumbled into the living room where my phone was and caught a photo of it.

Too bad the Weekly World News isn’t printing any more- I’m sure they’d be up for this awesome photo!

Wow. The French President must be laughing his fanny off. He’s marrying Carla Bruni, a supermodel, next month ( according to cnn ). This woman has also dated Donald Trump and Mick Jagger.

It’s interesting because generally the French, like me, tend to value the privacy of their public figures, but on the other hand, news of his engagement to Carla Bruni seems to be affecting his … whatever approval ratings are called in France.

Mark Dominus has some interesting posts on his site, about bringing up his daughter. I really liked his post about Santa Claus. And if you read his post on Santa Claus, you’ll see a relationship of parents and children to fiction and lies (he doesn’t mean that in a pejorative way, and I’m leaving that connotation open, but there’s a crucial difference between the story of the Little Red Hen and the story of Santa Claus that just the broad brush of “fiction” doesn’t cover.)

I found it interesting because on the two peas forums, they discuss how some parents will tell their kids that Santa Claus won’t come if the kids are bad; thus making SC into an authority figure. And there’s an interesting connection of all thoe concepts that I don’t feel comfortable pursuing right now because I know that the DQ reads these posts :).

Anyway, his daughter ( Iris ) is “not a vegetarian”. He’s explained that meat comes from animals to her, and she’s pretty comfortable with relevation. It was apparently prompted by her inadvertent exposure to the movie Charlotte’s Web ( on a plane flight ) and how Wilbur is in danger of becoming a ham.

I liked his story of taking her to the chinese food place and feeding her fish that was caught specifically for her. She’s a fun kid.f

I think I’ve mentioned before that I had recently come to the conclusion that dad wasn’t blind to my shenanigans but chose to overlook them rather than dream up some strange punishment.

I’ve been suspecting the DQ of sneaking downstairs after I go to bed for a while.

I caught the DQ downstairs after bedtime last night. I was working on going to bed, sent her and the TT to bed around 9:30, and she told me not to stay up too late. She asked when I was headed to bed and i told her 10. Well, it’s true, but I was trying to finish a project that kept me up to 10:30. At about 10:10, she called downstairs to see if I was up. I responded. She came down, gave me a hug, and scolded me.

I finally finished about 10:30. When I came upstairs, I noticed that her light in her room was on. I headed to bed. About fifteen minutes later, I heard her come out of her room; they turned off the lights and the TT claimed she was scared. The DQ made some other light, brought the TT some water, and then called downstairs. Then they crawled into our bedroom. I don’t know why. Kids these days. Shortly afterwards, the DQ led the TT downstairs.

I let her / them get into whatever they were doing and then strode over, opened the door and sent them to bed. The DQ came up acting sheepish.

My first inclination is to ground the DQ from computers and televisions today. Just today. I’m not angry, but I want to impress on her that when I send them to bed, I’m expecting them to go to bed, not stay up and sneak down to play video games until the weary hours of the night.

On the other hand, it’s not a school night. The only fallout from them staying up so late ( two nights in a row; they were up late for new years as well ) is their unmitigated grouchiness today.

I’m mildly annoyed that she led the toddler around and encouraged the toddler to be sneaky, but I guess that’s what big sisters do. ( big brothers don’t teach their siblings to be sneaky, noooo ).

Anyhow. What would you folks do about this? Both Ms B and I work early in the morning, so we’d rather not stay up and enforce bedtime by keeping the kids away from the computers and playstation. I don’t want the kids on the computers when we’re not there, but I want to keep my workstation on all night ( I have some scripts that run every night) which precludes my turning off the router all night. She did lie to me about going to bed, and told me that the TT couldn’t sleep ( duh, your light was on ! ).

… Last night was terrific fun. A friend we play evercrack 2 with has flown into town (and leaves tomorrow, sadly ), and we got together at E and A’s house. You can see E here in this video playing the Guitar (in the middle). Our friend P is on the drums ( left side ), K is playing the bass ( on the right, in the chair ), and A is in the back singing. The song is a cute little song called “Maps.” No, I don’t know why; I don’t even recognize the song!

I took another video of one of my favorite Bon Jovi songs; in this song, S is playing the Bass and J is singing in the back. Unfortunately, the battery on my phone gave out during this one and I have only about half of the song. You can see the video over at youtube.

What have I learned?

First, my rhythm hasn’t gotten any better. I did ok singing ( doesn’t really grade on pitch, just voice moving up and down and trying to hit the words ) but my drums sucked. My rhythm is so bad that one girlfriend in my youth was moved to exclaim “Damn, you’re white!” The drums were awful. But awfully fun, too.

If you’ve played guitar hero, the layout is similar; you have a … moving road of what colors you’re supposed to hit and when, so you can estimate the times for smacking the keys. With the drums, you have a cute little drum set, and you smack, smack, smack, pause, smack, smack, … you get the idea.

It really is a fun game, and it was a great way to have fun last night. I still liked the apples to apples game more than trivial pursuit, but it was fun to play a trivial pursuit with questions from the nineties!

Oh, what else have I learned? Use the damn video recorder instead of the phone!