Adventures With Tentacles

The other night, my day job sponsored an "end of fiscal year" celebration at Dave and Buster's.

I was one of the few who invited my wife. I'm pretty sure I was the only one who dragged along a small child.

It was fun. And Laura got lucky enough a couple of times that we were able to pick up enough points to walk away with some good swag (including a couple of spiffy novelty glasses).

We also got a little glow-in-the-dark rubber tentacle finger puppet thing. Every time Mal breaks it out, I act completely grossed out and terrified of it. He assures me that it's nice, and it's okay again until the next time.

This evening, I woke up from my knee-heating nap to hear her on the phone, engaged in some sort of serious conversation, and Mal demanding that she count for him.

So I shouted out that I'd do the counting and dived in to try to give her a breather.

We spent a while playing "scare and seek." Which is basically hide and seek, except that suppose the hider is supposed to leap out and scare whoever's "it." Something along those lines.

I'm not very good at it. I just hid until Mal tracked down Laura to ask for help finding me. The first time, she might have helped a little. Or maybe just encouraged him enough to convince him to put some effort into looking). The second...he wound up sitting outside with her for long enough that I just gave up on it and move to the recliner in the living room and broke out my phone to check the news.

He decided he was ready to move on to running races. Which basically amounts to lining up in a single file (we take turns in the poll position) and chasing each other in circles around the house. Eventually, we wind up in his room, with Mal proclaiming the he won.

I spent about 45 minutes doing this Friday or Saturday night, while Laura got some alone time. It was long enough that my ankles are still sore, but it was great exercise that the rest of my body desperately needs.

Tonight, I'm sore enough that I couldn't.

So Mal decided to just join me in the recliner.

He played a "game" that starts with cleaning Pepa Pig's teeth using a variety of dentist implements. He's already fixed hers, so he's unlocked Rebecca Rabbit's, which are much nastier. He always gives up as he's getting close to the end of hers, so he hasn't unlocked Emily Elephant yet.

Today, I messed with his ear with that tentacle thing from D&B while he told me that he couldn't and needed help.

I finally told him that he totally could, but didn't have to. It's a game, so he should stop playing if it isn't fun. He jumped right over to "What's a tentacle?"

I tried to explain it, then came up with the brilliant idea of showing him videos. So I googled for "tentacle."

For the sake of your sanity and whatever innocence you may have left, never make that mistake. Luckily for the sake of my illiterate child, the results didn't come back with pictures.


Searching for "octopus tentacle" returned results that were safe enough that I felt comfortable switching over to focus on videos.

We watched a couple of those. I don't think he was impressed enough by the ability to squeeze your entire body through a hole the size of your beak.

Fun fact: the real plural for octopus is "octopuses." A bunch of academic snobs managed to foist "octopi" on us a couple of hundred (or so) years ago. But that's Latin. Since the roots are Greek, the "proper" plural would be octopodes.

I don't think Mal appreciated the subtleties of these distinctions.

He got bored with the octopus video (it was too long, and the predation didn't have enough cheesy dialog), so we moved on to one about the skin of squids. I thought it looked fascinating, but he wasn't interested.

So we watched one about jellyfish for a bit. He proclaimed that they're "bad." I tried to explain that we should stay far away, but they aren't really "bad." That's another distinction that's lost on him. I probably should have just agreed, but I don't want to be one of those parents who tells their kids something's bad just because it can hurt you a bit.

Somehow, that led to a video about "the glass couldn't contain it."

It was a long video, but it was Mal's speed. Because it was basically a sequence of 3 second clips of predators in zoos trying to what they do. Except for the glass.

I think the scariest one was a polar bear in a swimming pool. There was a kid about Mal's age crouched down just below the water line. The kid stood up, popping his head above water, and the bear struck. You could see its jaws clamping down.

Mal thought the entire thing was hysterically funny.

He got bored when the pace slowed down and they switched to discussions about this time a bear (grizzly? it looks to big to be anything else) managed to splinter the glass, but it looks like it didn't actually break through. One of the witnesses commented about how the bear was a clown that had been playing with the rock for a long time.

He made me go back to the beginning so we could watch the first 12 minutes (or so) again.

The second time through, he allowed us to keep going. They showed a segment of a gorilla charging the glass and managing to make it spider web. They showed that segment over and over.

I'm not sure where they were going (the volume was way down). We moved on to playing Mal's "I don't know" game.

Laura wrapped up her conversation by describing that, then rejoined us before I could show him what that gorilla had really done to that plate glass. I think her conversation up to that point revolved around dysfunctional relationships and the difficulty of finding a good man.

I'm pretty sure it didn't have anything to do with the tentacle videos.

Honest, sweetheart. That's why that's why such an awful thing is in my search history.

In a Hurry?

Parents: "Kids want to grow up so fast! Why don't they just enjoy their childhoods?"

Parents, also:

In so many ways, we give our kids the impression that they're not fully people; they're people in training. But do you remember being a kid? Did you feel like an actually-fledged human being? 

I think we do this with really good intentions. We know our time with our kids is limited, and we want to "prepare" them to release them out into the world as responsible, equipped adults.

However, I'm afraid this often leads to our making long-sighted parenting choices when short-sighted ones would actually be better. For instance: If my kid's room is a mess, maybe it's just that they don't have the energy to clean it this moment, or even today... and it doesn't have to mean that OMG, they're going to grow up without any self-discipline and their house will be overtaken by roaches, and they'll get evicted and therefore I'm turning off the wifi until the room is clean, dang it.

Kids see this. So much that they know, as they get older, that even their education isn't important in this moment. Otherwise, why would they ask, infamously about algebra, "When am I ever going to use this in the future?"

How often has a kid, discouraged with an extra-curricular lesson or activity, been encouraged to keep going because, "Someday you'll wish you'd mastered *this* so you can do *this other thing.*" 

Do you know when I've learned the things I've needed to know as an adult, for the most part? Exactly when I needed to know them.

This might surprise you, but I never learned a darn thing about real estate until I had to "learn" it to take a test. And even then, I didn't *actually* learn it until I was working in the field. Same with insurance. And video production. And script-writing. And parenting. Yeah, pretty much all of it.

And I have a theory about why family vacations are so much fun for our kids (other than the splurging in terms of fun and money throwing-around and whatnot): When we're on vacation, we are in the moment with them. We're not planning for the next thing. We're enjoying the thing we're doing right then and right there.

What if we lived like that all of the time? Or most of the time? Or at least some of the time?

Maybe our kids would be more content being children if we let them know they're important *now.* They can do things in this day that have value. We don't always have to be projecting them into the future.

Nichole Nordeman tells a story of how she had volunteered to play a song at one of her kids' school events, and as the day approached, she hadn't prepared anything. Then this following song came to her. And although the song is directed toward the children, she said that, of course, the encouragement to "slow down" is actually for the parents. I'm trying.