English for nonmajors

There's a lot of grading going on around the house today. (Well, not at the moment.) That required a definition of what essays are: "A bunch of paragraphs to tell someone else about what you read."

The jump rope queen responded, "Then I don't want to go to college because I don't like doing that."

Later, after listening to "The Chocolate Sundae Mystery" on the computer, my little jumper said she thinks one of the minor characters had a crush on one of the major characters. I asked her to refer to the text to support her claim.

We started the mystery again (fifth time since Friday evening?), and the story arrived at the moment when the minor character blushes and is nervous when first interacting with the major character, jumper piped in, "That's why I think he has a crush on her."

She might like college after all.

Skinnerian shopping

When the kids and I get groceries, we usually go to Wild Foods, where they have tiny carts for children to push. There's a fair amount of faux racing, but last week's carting had extra oomph, and there were many intra-familial collisions.

I was prepared to pull the plug on the whole expedition -- yuppies and hippies alike were appalled by my apparently inadequate daddying. Then I pulled out a move from Grand Master D's preschool, adapted for the materials at hand like a behavioral psychologist MacGyver. We adopted the three twist-tie rule. If three twist ties were secured to the cart -- awarded for inappropriate behavior -- we would leave on the spot, notifying a worker of the location of our carts and groceries on our way out. GMD earned two.

He would have earned a third for punching the cardboard cutout of a Peruvian peasant woman, but she was by the exit.

Rapper's delight

I came home from work Tuesday night, and the kids were done with their homework. So what do you do when that happens?

Break dance, of course. Oh yeah, Papa can still do the centipede.

That was more impressive to me, apparently, than it was to the kids, who promptly A) made up the wolf and the bear, and B) told me that I had just been served in a very earnest manner.

Lessons in hubris (Vol. I)

What's the blog equivalent of knocking on wood?

I jinxed the hell out of my daddying work by pointing out the sleep taking place on the couch. I lay down again, and not 10 minutes later: Cough, cough, cough.

We got a decent plan B together where she was comfortable and I could go back to sleep until 6:45, when her brother woke up. That's right. On a Saturday.

Coughing, coughing, coughing

My daughter has a cold. The big kind. The late-night kind. She's been coughing in the night since Wednesday.

Tonight, though, I'm on duty. After about an hour of realizing that there wasn't much I could do about the cough (philosophers have to think things through), I decided at least to check to see whether she needed anything. She did.

To pee. Water in a cup. A yogurt container in case she vomited. Tissue.

After 20 minutes or so of the drama associated with getting out of bed in the night when you don't feel well and you're 7, we settled into a few quiet moments together. And that's when the great moment came: I got her back to sleep -- on the couch -- and she's not coughing.