“Bampf!” I was filling a glass of water in the kitchen and slowly turned off the faucet and looked down at the boy standing beneath me. “Bampf, Daddy!” He repeated, holding something up in the air in front of his face. He beamed proudly and spun the item between his fingers like a jewel in the sunlight. “Excuse me?” I looked more closely at what he was holding between his thumb and forefinger. “Oh! I see. Gideon, you found a feather!” This was not unexpected. His sisters had just recently been involved in something of a pillow fight in the living room. If we worked hard, we could probably reconstruct two or three whole geese from the feathers strewn about house. The little boy…
A father's struggle to capture his children's brief moment of youth in words and pictures
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My family came by my office this afternoon. My kids came charging down the hallway and exploding through the door like a team of commandos. The oldest kicking the door off its hinges while the younger rolled between her legs and across the room. Sprinting, somersaulting, cartwheeling their way into what had just moments ago been a peaceful place of solitude and thoughtfulness. Like a college lecture on the history of modern medicine interrupted suddenly by a Kool-Aid commercial. My coworker tried his best to politely ignore the fact that we had been invaded. Before the girls had made it to my side of the office, their mother walked through the smoldering hole in the wall with a little boy held tightly in her…
“Sharks are more scared of us than we are of them.” “What?” I stuck my head out of the bathroom where I was busy getting ready for the day. I saw all three of my children lounging on the bed as if it were a tropical island. Lydia in sunglasses. Gideon sipping from an invisible coconut. “What are you talking about? Put your clothes on so we can go.” Clara hopped off the island and started looking for her dress somewhere among the waves of bed sheets. “It’s true!” she said, “I learned that on Wild Kratts!” “Yes, yes. I’m sure it’s true. But that doesn’t mean that sharks are not dangerous.” I had no idea why we were even having this conversation. We…
Andrea and I started saving coins when we were still newlyweds. We had a large clear glass jug in the corner of the room and every evening we would fill it with the change from our pockets. We called it our Vacation Fund. And we were only half joking. Because someday we hoped to take a trip and cash in all of our coins and spend it while we were far away in some exotic location. I was going to spend my share on tiny Swiss chocolates made by hand at a monastery in the Alps. Andrea would buy cute toe nail polish made from the nectar of rare African plants. This jar was our ticket to royalty. But dreams die. My dreams of…
It had been a chilly hike, but we were finally all bundled back into our mini van and headed on our way to find food for the evening. One child sneezed in the backseat and was quickly handed a napkin. Another hugged themselves and shivered. “I’m sorry it was so cold and muddy!” I yelled into the back of the car, “But that was fun though, wasn’t it?” Their mother smiled and turned in her seat. “And just wait. Someday we are going to go on a vacation to some place warm. We will go on a hike in short sleeves and we will never get cold. The sun with shine down and we will hold hands and smile. We can walk along the…
Sometimes we forget just how much children are forced to accept as normal. For instance, the breadth of their limited experience on Earth isn’t enough to tell them whether it is normal to find a spider crawling in the bath tub in the morning. Is that normal? Really? What else is normal to find crawling in the bathtub? If we walk in and find that a crocodile has moved into the downstairs bathroom, is that one of those things Mom and Dad are going to laugh at and say, “Just open the door and leave it alone.” or will they run screaming from the house and never come back? Who knows really. Because they have predicted our reaction to things a million times before…
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