Regular Life

My wife went through a large stack of papers and projects our son brought home at the end of first grade and found these poems he wrote.

Heart
Pump Pump Pump
Mimry (memory?) in my heart
Love love love
I love my heart

Mrs. Kenely (his 1st grade teacher)
I like her
I like her a lot
Oe (oh) yes I do
Mrs. Kenely
I rember (remember) her evry (every) day
Now I am at home
I miss you
bye Mrs. Kenely bye

Noah (his best buddy)
nice, playful
Laughing, bouncing, sleeping
He is my buddy
Friend

Butterflise (Butterflies)
Btterflise here Butterflise there
Butterflise on my bushis (bushes)
Sucing (sucking) necter (nectar) in the flowers

“I don’t like going to the beach,” my son said.

Start the sound clip below and then click the thumbnail image to get an idea just how much he ended up hating it (earbuds will immerse you, but speakers will work):

I didn’t specify when he said it, because he told me that more than once during the first several days of our Sanibel Island vacation.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, son,” I said. “I would like for you to go with me in the morning. It’s my last day here, and on Saturday mornings you and I always have our father-son time.”

“Okay,” he said.

On top of that, he had another incentive.

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Four metal fence posts — the kind farmers and ranchers use to put up barbed wire fences — formed four corners of a square around a low mound of loose sand. A woman wrapped bright yellow tape around the posts to cordon off the area. She wore khaki shorts and a dark green shirt, topped off with a blue denim ball cap. Another woman, dressed similarly, walked to a small white pickup truck and climbed in through the open driver’s door.

(click any pic to enlarge)

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He stands on the balls of his feet between the poolside ladder’s safety rails, heels hanging over the water, facing me. The artificially turquoise waves dance below, waiting eagerly to envelop him.

He covers his mouth and nose with one hand and falls backward without bending. His back smacks the water loudly, muffled slightly by his swim shirt, and as he sinks the water quickly sloshes back in to complete his temporary translucent burial.

I review my results on my camera’s LCD.

His head breaks the surface and he rubs his fingertips over his eyes to clear them. “Did you get that one, Dad?” he asks through a wide smile.

“It was pretty good, but can you go again?” I say.

“Yep!”

Rarely when you miss capturing a moment do you get to try again. That moment at a wedding when the groom kisses the bride — sure, you can do a set-up shot, but it just isn’t the same. Same goes for that hug between a diploma-wielding graduate and a teary-eyed, seldom seen relative.

You miss those moments and, well, they’re just gone.

When taking action shots of a seven-year-old jumping into a swimming pool? Opportunities abound. My wife certainly took advantage while I threw the boy up in the air.

My son loves the water and all the wet fun it brings. He wears a swimming shirt that I’m certain must deaden the impact, because he has virtually painlessly performed several huge belly flops and more than one Nestea plunge. If it hurts, then he hides it very well.

Ah, those lazy, crazy days of summer.

“In the morning, take a piece of Scotch tape and place it directly over the anus. Then peel it up and stick another piece of tape over that one. Take that to your pediatrician’s office when you take your son in.”

Those were the words of the after-hours nurse we called when our son could not sleep due to severe itching. I allayed my son’s fears by demonstrating on my own arm that yanking Scotch tape off doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as pulling off a Band-Aid. Then I dutifully did what the nurse directed and sealed the sample in a zippered sandwich bag.

I felt a bit like MacGuyver. Or maybe George Clooney’s character on “ER.” He was in Peds, after all, and was known to improvise with what he had on hand.

We told the doctor that we had collected and brought in a sample, per the nurse’s orders, and he said, “Yeah, that doesn’t really do anything. There are lots of things like that going around the Internet.”

After we left, bewildered at our boy’s second positive test for strep at the opposite end from where most people get it, I thought maybe the doctor hadn’t understood. We had gleaned that advice from the after-hours nurse we reached through his clinic’s main number. We didn’t subject our son to the first cockamamie medical advice we found on an online forum. In fact, we didn’t research it at all until after talking to the nurse, because she had been our source of terms to search.

Surely their paid professional nurses don’t dispense advice based on their own half-baked Web research. If so, then someone needs to know it and put a stop to it. Here I go, dialing the clinic’s number.

What’s the weirdest medical advice you’ve received from someone who ostensibly could be trusted to dispense it?

Happy Birthday, Benjamin!

Readers, if you add a comment, conceal that you otherwise would have had no idea it was this person’s birthday, just like on Facebook.

Benjamin,

Remember that night I recorded you while you read one of your bedtime books? You read Slip, Slide, Skate, and then you asked me to record myself reading the next one.

In my hotel room on Tuesday night I listened to you reading the one about the little girl who goes ice skating. I listened to the whole thing, and you did a great job. I smiled when I heard your voice and the pages turning.

I thought that on your last day of being six you might like to hear the recording of me. If you are at home, then pull out Duck and a Book and follow along; if not, then just imagine the pictures. It’s only a little more than a minute long.

I am sorry my work trip got extended by a day and I can’t be there to read it to you in person. I will see you on your birthday.

Love,
Daddy

“Benjamin, please go throw away your wrappers,” I said. He had eaten granola bars for breakfast.

He reached into the sink and placed an empty drinking glass inside an empty 4-cup/1-liter Pyrex measuring cup. Then he placed a wooden spoon inside the drinking glass. “You know what that means, Daddy?”

I thought for a moment. All those things nestled inside one another could only indicate a convergence, which implies agreement. “It means, ‘yes,’” I guessed.

“That’s right,” he said.

He reached in and removed the spoon from the glass, then the glass from the measuring cup, and set them down separately in the sink. “Know what that means?”

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(Note: Those reading “Shootings” may continue to Part Twelve)

Photo by my lovely wife (click either pic to enlarge).

There are several things going on in this picture.

1. Benjamin is in the hallway, and the light is shining from the bathroom where I lie quite uncomfortably under the sink installing the new faucet (previous post covers that),
2. he is dressed as a cowboy in Christmas pajama pants and my hiking boots (the latter of which I had used just about an hour before on Benjamin’s first time sledding in the spring snow),
3. he’s holding his way cool six-shooter Nerf dart gun that we threw away weeks later, after he threw it in anger, and
4. the flash didn’t fire when my wife took the picture.

 
That last point was the one I came out here to make. I like the motion effect it caused, but it was a bit too dark and the white balance was way off. I don’t know that I improved it any, but it was fun to play with it.

(Click to enlarge)

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t like bubbles. So much science in one soapy object. Oh, and they’re purty.