On adventure and the great views from down low.
Our littlest girl has been falling a lot – usually while running with her siblings, sometimes while squirming in a chair that’s too big for her, and far too often while just standing there doing nothing. (This is the same girl that has choked herself up with every sip of every drink she’s ever had. She’s all windpipe.)
“I’m okay,” she says each time she falls, peeling herself off the floor.
On the words we want our kids to say
Our youngest girl said her first bad word. She didn’t realize it. Her twin brother didn’t realize it. Her older sister didn’t even realize it. No one but my wife and I realized it. No one cared.
We were watching Home Alone 2, in which a kid who’s been separated from his family for the second Christmas in a row, lures two escaped convicts away from the scene of their crime and into an abandoned house filled with traps explicitly designed to murder them. Our kids love this movie, despite the fact that the kid could have easily called 911 (a lesson he should have learned last year, but he clearly has a taste for torture) and the fact that the bandits somehow survive electrocutions, explosions, three-story falls, and several bricks to the face. The kids cackle uncontrollably as Harry and Marv endure cartoon deaths in real life. “I can’t even breathe!” our boy said, gasping for air between laughs, as Marv was literally being electrocuted to the bone.
So we’re sitting there as a family, laughing at two guys dying over and over again on screen, and yet it’s the simple word “ass” where we’re supposed to fast forward. It made me think about what we show our kids and who decided what was acceptable for them.
On mindfulness…and thoughtlessness
The other day we were walking around the neighborhood with the kids. Our little boy, who is as wild a spirit as I have known, walked up to a parked car and without the slightest hesitation gave it a good lick. “What the hell are you doing?!” I yelled, “You cannot do that! Do you understand me, sir?” He glanced back at me, then gazed off into the distance and, while flicking his tongue in the air, asked, “What’s licking for?” My response should have been, “Well, it ain’t for cars, my man,” but instead I was dumbfounded by his 100% unfiltered mindfulness.
This 4 year-old bundle of flesh and bone was having a foundational thought about why we do the things we do. It’s a level of introspection that has become foreign to us adults. All kids start out exploring why their bodies do the things they do, but often once we get past the very basic physical functions, we stop learning, stop exploring, and stop asking ourselves very basic questions…about ourselves.