My Son
Dean
My son Jacob recently had a birthday. He's in the third grade.
We told him that he could have anything he wanted for dinner for his birthday. Yet on his birthday this last weekend, we had his party, but we we didn't do McDonald's. We had a nice cake and cooked something on the backdoor grill.
The next day, we decided to go out for dinner. We asked him if he had any input on our choice for that night. He said what he wanted, and we (his parents) said we weren't sure that we were in the mood for McDonald's.
He looked at his mom and said--I swear to God--"You guys didn't give me what I asked for last night. Shouldn't this be my de facto birthday dinner?"
As God is my witness, the kid asked, "shouldn't this be my de facto birthday dinner?"
I suppose more conservative parents would be angry at his arrogance. Rose and I? We said, "Our son just asked for his de facto birthday dinner." So we gave him what he asked for: Happy Meals all around.
My son asked for his de facto birthday dinner. Envy me, lesser mortals.
That's impressive to be sure, but how many words per minute does he type?
My 12 year old son saw me set up my blog, and the next day when I got home from work, he had installed PHP, mySQL and WordPress on his own hosted site and had his own blog up and running.
Of course he soon lost interest in it and went back to creating tag boards and message boards. I think he did it just to show me up. It took me two days to get it all up on my site (my admin person gave me the wrong userID and password originally).
Sean: Hey, at least he already gets the value of open source!
Turned out to come from "Calvin &Hobbes," of which he was an avid reader.
Generation Gap can be a scary thing at times. I doubt there will be any semblance between my world and that of my children's children.
When my brother and I were very little (3 and 5), someone gave my brother a complete volume of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. It had not occurred to my mother (who's very spacey on all pop culture issues) that those A.A. Milne volumes were for children, with all the polysyllabic language in 'em. She had read them in college, and thought they were "college" books.
So she started reading the Pooh stories aloud to my brother. I was in the room. She assumed I didn't understand them until one day when she saw me in the backyard, attempting to "ride" an oatmeal box as if it were the Hunny Jar Pooh tried to use as a boat when the Hundred Akers Wood flooded.
Kids pick up a lot more than we give 'em credit for.
[Which is not to suggest, Dean, that your sons are not the smartest children the world has ever seen. They are. Mine will be, too, of course. ;) ]
If the parents have a good vocabulary the kids will too. Comics are another good influence - I learned a lot from Peanuts, although I pronounced Beethoven beet-oven for a long time.
I am so proud of him!
...now that was meant to be a real compliment to Jacob.
Dean's World already?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI