Random Familial Oddities

Assembling bedroom furniture

Things have been monstrously busy in our household of late. I've been working tons of hours to keep caught up at work and when I'm home our days and nights have been pretty much exclusively dedicated to the bedroom swap and office gutting and all the associated paraphernalia displacement that that brought about. There has been nearly no downtime. I've not posted much as a result, though, certainly, the world has continued to swirl and gyrate around us. As I'm not expecting things to improve in the immediate near term, I figured I'd better take a moment or two to share a couple of quick mini-stories and mildly interesting encounters, lest I forget them in the endless flow through of time. Most of them feature N who has been prolific in his musings and ponderings of late. Enjoy.

N: Did you know that when you go potty, your brains come out? That's the first thing that comes out!

I never realized how prone our house was to volcanic eruptions. They have been ubiquitous of late. Luckily the kids have a top bunk to flee to, which they do quite often. (Evidently Mommies and Daddies are immune to hot lava.) The lava flows, I am told, usually reach 100 feet, but that is not a concern, because N assures me that the top bunk is a "googelin" feet high.

N: Mommy, are hippopotamuses octurtles?

Mommy: Yes, they stay up at night.

I walked down the hall one morning to notice L in the bathroom doing her business tinkling with the door wide open. She was yelling out brusk instructions to N who was in the living room setting up things on a little TV table. "You have to make sure everything is done by the time I get back," she yelled.

"What are you doing?" I asked from my hallway vantage point.

"Playing school. I'm the teacher and N's the principal," she responded.

"I hope the teachers are a little more discrete than this at your school," I observed. "And generally speaking, the principal is the teacher's boss, so he should be giving you instructions."

She thought about this a moment, perched upon her seat of contemplation, and then promptly demoted N. "Then he's a teacher's aide."

N: Daddy, do you make satellites at work?

Daddy: Yes, I do indeed.

N: Is making satellites very hard?

Daddy: Yes, it is very hard.

N: Daddy, you should get used to it, because you've been doing it a very long time. Or you should do something easier.

I recall a similar conversation a month or two ago with my functional manager.

I had my traditional Saturday morning tea yesterday with the kids. Nate decided he wanted his hot tea made into ice tea, so I put it in the fridge and set the timer for an hour. N camped out in front of the timer and plaintively called the play-by-play.  "Daddy, it says 5-8! Is it ready? ... It's 5-7! Is it ready? ... " Ten minutes in and he showed no signs of waning enthusiasm.

Everyone I've told this story to asks me why I didn't must put ice in it. Don't really know myself, but for the sake of looking like a rational and engaged father, I'll claim it was to provide an object lesson to teach him the difference between a hour and minutes and seconds. Yeah, that's why I did it that way.

At any rate, I don't know if he has any improved sense of scale regarding our standard units of time, but he has developed an engineering nerd's fascination with timing everything and anything. He made us explain how to set the timer on the stove so that it's "counting down" instead of "counting up" and now he engages himself regularly in timing the minutia of our daily lives. I've realized now that I can't hold him off any longer with the standard "wait a minute" deferral, because he will do exactly that, and let you know just how much you've exceeded your promise.