A New World Opening

"Look Daddy!"

He'd brought home a stack of artwork, all done that day at school. It'd been a rainy one, so I'm guessing the teachers were hustling to keep the kids busy. He was beaming over it, and wanted to show it to me, so we plopped down on the couch to go through it. The caterpillar made out of circles, the green diamond he had painted, the sheet of construction paper with various torn bits of paper glued all overit. And on each one, he directed my attention to the letters affixed to the top.

"Look Daddy, it's my name." Pointing to each letter, he sounded them out. "Aitch, eee, enn, are, why!"

I had forgotten this, the joy that comes when these straight and squiggly lines first start to make sense and coalesce into words, words that go along with the pictures on the page and fill in the story. And the happiness of being able to recognize your own name and put it down on paper.

"And Simie's name is ess, eye, uh, emm, oh, enn!"

His excitement was contagious. He's hungry for it, to have this power for his own, to be able to decipher the symbols and get at the stories that they're telling. As cornball as it sounds, I almost feel like I'm re-experiencing this happiness for myself.

While we're on the subject of our children's firsts, I'll have a post up tomorrow at DadCentric about another first, this one not quite so exciting, but entertaining nonetheless. Be sure to check it out. And in case you missed last week's post about my violent children, allow me to enlinken you.

Be a lot cooler if you did

School started up for me again this past weekend. Tricky bastard totally snuck up on me. I had known all summer that there was this magical mythical day called September 8th upon which my studies would resume, but every time I sent up the periscope to see how far off it was, it seemed ages away. And then all of a sudden it was right on top of me. Lousy periscope.

Anyway, I'm officially taking twice as many classes as I did last semester (1 x 2 = 2). After we went over the reading list in my first class, I knew exactly what my first order of business was: finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as quickly as possible. There was no way I could just leave myself hanging in the middle of it. Books 5, 6, and 7 will just have to wait until the holiday break because I've got a nice hefty load this go round. Blogging may also be somewhat sporadic. Of course, baby # 2 is due right around that time, so he may have something to say about how much reading I do. Ah well, so be it.

I did successfully complete the first order of business mentioned above, and have now moved on to my school reading. I won't bore you with any of the stuff I've now crammed into my head, but I would just like to say, if I ever have my picture included in a textbook, I hope it is as amusing as this one:

Yes, you're reading that right, her name is Karen Horney. I don't recall exactly what her contribution was, but I would like to point out that the text was careful to state that her last name is pronounced "Horn-eye." Funny that they didn't provide the pronunciation for any other names. I think I had that same look on my face the first time I watched "Friday."

And then from the quiet

So Slapdash went pretty well:

Yep, that there's pretty much what it looks like. Speaks for itself, I'd say. And yes, that came from the scene I wrote. Ya never know what you're going to find in a theater's prop storage, eh?

So I think this is the longest I've gone without posting in quite some time. Even though it's only been a week and some change, it feels a bit odd to be back at it. After Slapdash was over, I felt sort of depleted, and not just in a creative sense, but just all around. I felt hungry for input, with no pressing desire to output. Or better yet, I felt less like giving and more like receiving. Like some kind of involuntary greed that I didn't like the feel of and couldn't manage to shake off. I wasn't the most patient person on the planet last week, but I managed to do some things for myself that seem to have helped me snap out of it. For one, Ash and I spent the week mostly avoiding the television, choosing instead to spend our free evenings with our noses stuck in books. We'd become much too comfortable plopping ourselves down in front of the TV after we got the GooGoo to sleep, and I was kind of starting to hate it. Not to mention the fact that my usual reading habit had gone totally to shit following the close of last semester. You'd think with no more assigned school reading to do, I'd have jumped back onto the pleasure-reading boat, but it just didn't happen that way. But thanks to our friends Jeff and Tara, we've now started down the Harry Potter path, which I've found is a nice place to be. I also started reading Lonesome Dove, a book that I've been meaning to get going on for some time even though I've never read a western that I can remember. See, it was apparently my father's favorite book, and I guess having a second child of my own on the way (another boy, no less), my curiosity about this person who was my father is once again rekindled, and I'm back to looking for clues about him.

I'm gonna go read now.

Illiterate little baby

It's true, my son is illiterate. He can't read a lick. Oh the shame.

Oh right, he's 18 months. Chill out, me.

Honestly though, I had started to think the little biscuit never would sit still long enough to let us read to him. Before he was born, I had this vision of a docile little cherub that would sit still and pay me his undivided attention while together we flipped through the pages of colorful and zany children's books, telling tales both sensical and non. I would act out the stories using different voices for every character, be they dog, cat, zebra, friendly elf, or unicorn. The air would be filled with our shared joy of reading. It would be fucking heartwarming.

The reality was that he was having none of it. From day one, he didn't want to sit still, he didn't want to pay attention, and he didn't give a damn if I could make the zebra sound just like Meatwad or if the cat sounded like Cartman with a French accent. If the book caught his interest, it was because it looked like something fun to destroy. We quickly put away all the paper books for later, leaving out only board books which he was only interested in as items that could be used to bang against furniture. Or throw.

In the past few months though, we've had quite the reversal. Not only will he sit still and pay attention while storytime is in progress, he'll actually pick up the book of his choice and bring it over to me, asking, nay, demanding that I sit him in my lap and read it to him.

There's a catch, however. You're not just gonna read him the book. You're gonna read it again. And then when you're done, you're gonna read it again. And when you're done with that, you might offer up another book, one that perhaps he liked just fine yesterday, but this book will be rejected in favor of the one you just read, which you will then proceed to read. In short, you will read the same book no less than five times straight through. I think our record may be ten, though I never keep count. When you're done with that, then you may move on to another book.

It's cool though, particularly since with school, this is about the only pleasure reading I do these days. And as interesting as my readings for class may be, a text book is still a text book. Gotta have a good dose of farting dogs here and there.