Because you’ll need more than one for every head.
Drew steadies his boob while setting out the milk.
Porter models the Birthday Hat Mohawk
Ladies wear mohawks, too.
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Three years ago in My Tiny Kingdom: Tackled By Football
Now that Finn has three weeks of Junior high under his belt and is no longer quite so mesmerized by the bountiful offerings of the lunchroom, he’s had time to make new friends and gauge how the adventure is affecting his old friends. The stress and thrill of it all has already caused some friction.
The Tiny Kingdom has four elementary schools which run from kindergarten through grade six, and the junior high brings the students from all four schools together for grades seven through nine. Our elementary school is the smallest of the four, and Finn says he has several classes in which he’s the only kid from his school. He knows plenty of guys from playing sports, though, and seems to have made new friends quickly.
I sat Finn down for a frank talk before school started. I felt like he’s mature enough to recognize the social maneuverings that inevitably go at this age, and he’d be better equipped to deal with them if he was given a heads up about their existence. He’s never lacked self-confidence, and I wanted him to be prepared to stand up for his friends if they were ostracized, and to defend himself if his self-worth was attacked.
I told him that when I was in junior high, I saw people change. Some people decided that sports were the only thing that mattered. Others sought popularity at all costs. People who had been friends for years split up because one decided the other wasn’t athletic enough, pretty enough, or cool enough. Others drifted apart because they matured at different rates, their interests changed, or they found they had different values.
I even got down to the nitty-gritty and talked about girls and the way they can act at this age. I felt qualified to give this talk because I have a vagina and survived junior high. ( You know, there’s a reason we all loved The Breakfast Club
I told him that he might see girls dropping friends in order to join a “more popular” group. He might see a couple of girls accorded special power, just because of their perceived status. What was important for him to remember was to be there for his friends, especially the girls, because they’re in for a rough few years.
We talked about first impressions being important. Teachers and peers form opinions of you quickly, and once formed, they’re hard to change. On the other hand, you should try not to make the same mistake. Don’t judge someone as a loser because he or she looks different.
It’s a difficult assignment - we make snap judgments about people all the time. As an example, I reminded him of my irrational prejudice against double first names, which are extremely common in the South. My first reaction is to conclude that the parents are either indecisive or snooty. I have absolutely no evidence to back up either of these determinations, and I must often remind myself that in fact I have many close friends whose kids have two first names. They are just as entitled to believe that mothers who name their children after Scandinavian countries are ditzy, to say the least. See? We’re all different. Our quirks plus a Coke make the world go round.
Bill overheard part of our conversation and thought it was unnecessary. Neither his parents nor mine ever had such a discussion with us. But when I look at Finn, I see a whole lot of me, and I would have appreciated a warning about what lay ahead.
We had our talk about a month ago. I’ve already heard through the grapevine that there are girls jostling for position, turning their backs on friends they’ve had since first grade, in order to be accepted by the “in” group. Social climbing never stops, and I surely can’t prevent it. I can only hope that Finn can see the bigger picture and be there for his friends, no matter how many first names they have.
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I have a post up at Deep South Moms. Check it out!
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Three years ago in My Tiny Kingdom: Not A Normal Day
Michael Phelps At A Young Age
I don’t know who to credit for this and would love to know. Perhaps I can incorporate it into the sex talk!
I’m all about encouraging the boys’ love of science. Sadly, they’re not satisfied with the science they learn at school, because television has taught them that real scientists use test tubes and Bunsen burners, both of which are tops on Porter’s Christmas list. A Bunsen burner = fire and last time the boys played with fire, (that I’m aware of) a parakeet died. Here’s hoping he adds more to the list in the coming months.
Porter has spent the last year concocting potions in his bathroom out of non-approved materials such as Pert, dirt, mouthwash, shampoo, rocks, toilet paper, and other household objects stolen from my kitchen.
This may look like a damn fine mess to you, as it did to me. Scissors, aluminum foil, the plastic case from an iPod, murky water– where’s the science in this?
“It’s a model of the Bermuda triangle, and the blue water is the ocean around it,” Porter said. “Can we go to the Bermuda triangle? But lots of people don’t come back, so we should take guns and parachutes and food and cell phones.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “But we’re not going anywhere until you clean up this bathroom.”
His scientific method was cutting into my grocery budget. He especially enjoys producing bubbles and relies on bathroom items intended for hygienic purposes to generate them. Once I came home just hours after a trip to the Dollar Store and found that he’d confiscated an entire cabinet full of shampoo, which he was about to pour into the bathtub to create a tidal wave.
I put an immediate stop to that. Porter needs as many cleaning products on his body as he can apply in one shower.
In a rare instance of exceptional parenting, I bought Porter a book full of science experiments and the supplies needed to perform them, in hopes that I could cut down on our toiletry consumption and steer his investigations in a more scholarly direction. Sandwich Bag Science
Drew became equally obsessed with the book, and Porter and Drew ran through the first ten exercises in no time. I restricted their activities to the driveway. All was well until yesterday. Finn was home sick, I cleaned up a bit, and made a horrifying discovery in Drew’s bathroom cabinet.
I swirled the mixture around a bit but was unable to identify any ingredients, except the minty smell of mouthwash.
Porter disavowed all knowledge of the stuff, and proclaimed that he had moved on to sprouting lima beans. Drew squirmed under interrogation and finally confessed that he might have put some powder from Porter’s rock tumbling kit, toothpaste, blue Powerade and a squirt of Neutrogena face cleanser into the plastic cup.
“Mom said you can’t put anything you put on your body into your science experiments,” Porter said with the authority of a ten-year-old who knew that practice was so last week.
“Shut up,” Drew said, with the attitude of a kid with a couple of bullies in his class.
I was going to impose discipline, but I decided that being scientists was so much better than the alternative.
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One year ago in My Tiny Kingdom: They Didn’t Analyze The Men So I Will
I watched Bionicle zombies terrify humans on TV the other day. Hell, the sight shocked me near to death, and I was sitting in the safety of my house in Birmingham, Alabama. Maybe you all knew there were metal skeletors on television, but I didn’t. The TV was off limits for the boys for ages. Now that they can watch Nick, Discovery and the History channel they know plenty about pyramids and smelting, but I haven’t heard anyone mention the other-worldly scenes I witnessed while I was watching an entire show, which is a rarity for me.
Sure, I could have turned off the show, but I wasn’t just channel surfing. I sat down to watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on purpose after I learned that my idol, Shirley Manson, was going to be appearing on the second season of the show.
Because I am both a devoted fan and anal-retentive, I Tivoed the first season so I’d be ready for Shirley’s debut.
Wow. It didn’t take two seconds for me to realize that I’m not Terminator’s target audience. It’s fortunate that I’m not the newspaper’s television critic because I would be at a loss as to how to describe it, except maybe I’d be close if I said it’s a sci-fi action adventure show with a mother-son relationship thrown in. And the main characters have fabulous hair.
This is the son, and his hair looks even better on the show.
Apparently some Bionicle looking machines have been sent from the future to attack Sarah Connor’s son, John, because if he lives he will be the leader of the humans and fight the machines. In the future. So there’s some time travel involved, but it’s not the dainty kind like in The Time Traveler’s Wife
Instead this is jarring time-travel, without refreshments. The future has Star Wars type scenery, but updated. Unlike me, the producers have seen a few science fiction films since 1977 and they understand that there are many things scarier than Darth Vader, and they tossed them all into Terminator and I am still having nightmares. The boys will not be watching Terminator.
I must admit that one episode was particularly enthralling, and a bit humorous. A multitude of skeletors had been destroyed by the humans, but a small piece of metal remained. That piece of metal regenerated himself into a whole Bionicle looking figure. Doing so required him to go retrieve his head from some old dude in a shack, but I don’t think that was important to the plot line.
What caught my attention was that Mr. Bionicle had a number of errands to run, and he found a pair of sweat pants, a sweat shirt and a diving mask to wear while he walked around downtown in a midsized city in America, as if a skeletor dressed like the Unabomber wearing a scuba mask was somehow less noticeable than a naked Bionicle hanging out. I guess he just didn’t want people to know he was a pile of metal walking to obscure places without ever asking for directions.
Mr. Bionicle wore his sweats to the hospital where he stole a bunch of blood, and then he went to visit a scientist. He commanded the scientist to mix up a bathtub full of blood and growth hormone and God knows what else, and then he took off his sweats and submerged himself into the liquid. When he came out, he looked like the inside of a jellybean, but pinker, and I gathered that he had successfully gotten some flesh on his bones in a manner that did not involve eating.
Then he put his Unabomber outfit back on, and that was a wise fashion choice. Plain metal can be sleek, but looking like a naked newborn bunny is not so sexy. He walked to a plastic surgeon’s office and demanded that the doctor make him look like a certain human man, and the doctor did so in a five hour operation. The doctor did it late at night without anesthetizing the patient, and without nursing assistance. I feel sure he was acting outside the parameters of his malpractice insurance in performing this particular surgery. It didn’t matter in the long run, as the Bionicle killed him after he was finished.
So now there’s a Bionicle who looks like real man, hanging out in sweats, (unless he buys some new clothes) and I suppose he’ll be coming after the mother and son soon.
Actually, apart from the whole saving the world/monster part of the show, I found myself responding to the mother-son relationship, and so maybe I could be Terminator’s target audience. The son is around 14 or 15, not so much older than Finn, and his mom has to struggle with letting him do what he wants (”Let me drive the armored truck into this concrete wall– I must fulfill my destiny!”) while still protecting him, not only because that’s her job as a mother, but also because if he dies the whole human race will be taken over by Skylab or something. I can relate to the push and pull of allowing your children the freedom to make mistakes, yet wanting to protect them from the real world. Where there are no Bionicles in Unabomber clothes, so help me, God.
Sarah Connor’s job makes my mothering duties look like a cinch. If Finn screws up he’ll get an F, or learn a lesson, but it won’t affect the entire human race. But Sarah - talk about some parenting pressure. I wouldn’t trade places in a second– not even for the fabulous hair.
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Three years ago in My Tiny Kingdom: Getting Back Up
(This was the post I wrote after Hurricane Katrina, and ironically, it’s equally timely now)
