I caught Lydia mumbling to herself while bent over her dinner bowl at the far end of the table. I turned to Andrea and smiled, “There you go Andrea, the best compliment you could think to receive.” I motioned towards the little girl, “I just heard Lydia whispering out loud about how much she likes the dinner you made.” My daughter, hearing her name, looked up from her bowl of cauliflower casserole and frowned, “What?” she glanced down at her bowl and then back up at me, “Oh… Yeah. No, I didn’t say I liked dinner.” “Oh, I thought I heard you say you liked it.” “No. I still haven’t tried it yet actually. I was just praying and asking God to HELP me…
A father's struggle to capture his children's brief moment of youth in words and pictures
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“This is so gross…” I turned to look at Clara and found that her face was screwed up into a tight knot and she was holding both hands in front of her face like a fence with her eyes just barely peaking over. “Is it really gross?” I asked quite seriously. I looked back at the screen where we were watching a chef explain how to properly clean and gut a puffer fish. ‘The skin is poisonous,’ he explained as he tore it off and tossed it aside. ‘and the entrails are also very poisonous,’ he said, reaching up inside and tearing them out in the same casual manner that you would expect from an expert Japanese Fugu chef. It was amazing really. I…
I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. I woke up exhausted and stared at my alarm for a full 30 seconds before reluctantly pulling my arm out of the warm cocoon of bed sheets to turn it off. I had woken up in the night, soaked in a cold sweat. I had been having troubling dreams. At least, I thought I had been. I couldn’t exactly remember what dreams I was having, but I felt anxious and uncomfortable and was certain that the dreams must have been terrible. I felt like something evil was sneaking up behind me in the dark and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Something was hiding in our room and it was quietly…
It’s interesting to see children as they grow to understand the world and begin to get jokes. But it’s even more interesting when they start to make up jokes of their own. Most of the time my children’s jokes are complete nonsense. For example, yesterday Lydia asked me, “What did the asteroid that hit the moon say to the asteroid that didn’t hit the moon?” “I don’t know.” I said, “What did-” “He said, it looks like I’m an asterROID, and you’re an asterWRONG!” See? Nonsense. Never mind the fact that it’s also terribly inaccurate, scientifically speaking. I explained this to my daughter, but this apparently makes the joke “not funny”. Jokes like this grow on trees at my house. Joke trees growing out…
“I’m bleeding! I’m bleeding!” Clara rocked back and forth on the floor. “You’re not bleeding,” I told her, peering down from the bed. “Yes, I am! Here!” She contorted her leg and showed me a faint red line on her ankle. “Clara…” I sighed. “How did you possibly cut yourself just by climbing off your bed to pick up your floor?” “I cut myself on this!” She held up a small piece of petrified orange peel. “Okay, you see, this is why I told you guys to clean your room this morning. You had all day to work on this. I shouldn’t have to sit here and dictate every single step of cleaning your room so that this place doesn’t look like a garbage…
Clara offered to help me fix the car yesterday. I was reluctantly pulling on gloves and searching our closet for a stocking cap, and she started pulling some out for herself as well. I agreed to let her come with me, although I knew there was probably not much she could do other than provide some companionship in my misery. Our old minivan had been sitting dead in the driveway for over a week, and I’d been putting off working on it in the hopes that it might get a little warmer outside, or I could work on it when it was lighter out, or maybe the van would magically start working again on its own and I could take credit for it. But…
“Do you like this song, Clara?” She shrugged,” It’s okay. It’s like, you know…” she trailed off in thought. I could tell, she was trying to tactfully choose her words so she didn’t disappoint anyone. Finally she said, “It’s like, a candle that has already been blown out.” “Clara, this is ‘Take On Me’, this song is classic.” She smiled apologetically, “I know. I’m sorry. But you know, the candle thing. Like I can tell that there used to be a fire and it was probably worth something at one time, but now it’s kind of just… there and sort of lifeless. Just a stick of wax and some smoke.” Kids can be pretty brutal critics sometimes. I hope the guys from A-Ha aren’t…
I was carrying Gideon to his bed the other night when I stumbled over a large pile of toy trains in the dark. I nearly dropped the half asleep little man and grit my teeth as his eyes popped open and stared at me for a second as I lowered him into bed. “It’s okay, Gideon. Daddy, just stepped on some trains. You can go to sleep now.” I nearly tripped again trying to get out of the room and I left a painful crashing of blocks in my wake. Andrea was waiting in the hallway as I staggered out into the light, “Sorry,” she said. “Gideon dumped his toy box next to the bed. I’ll make him pick it up in the morning.”…
Clara found some chocolate eggs with prizes inside of them at an after Christmas sale. She was so excited about how cheap they were that she bought an entire stack of 8 or 9 of them with the intention of giving them out to her friends at church the next Sunday. She piled them up in the living room and fought to protect them from her brother and sister (and herself), but by the time Sunday morning came around there were only four left. She very diligently wrapped each of these in black wrapping paper with white polka-dots and stuck a bow on top of each one. She finished just as we were rushing out the door to get into the car. When we…
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