Mark's Musings

Last night we were watching the Nova episode “The Pluto Files“. It was all about the hullabaloo surrounding the demotion of Pluto to Dwarf Planet status. One sequence in the episode started when Dr Tyson brought out an eight-foot weather balloon to use as a scale model of the Sun. He then proceeded through each planet, starting with Mercury, using a scale representation to show the relative size of each planet. Jupiter ended up being a kick-ball, for example, and Neptune was a croquet ball.

After each planet was introduced, I heard Samantha making small noises. Grunts of appreciation, maybe? I took them to be the verbal expression of learning new facts about our universe. But after each planet was introduced, she was a bit more vocal about it. I kept quiet. Finally, Dr Tyson takes out a small ball-bearing from a roller skate and places it in the dish for Pluto.

At this point, Samantha can no longer contain herself. She interrupts the show and says “Daddy?” I pause the DVR. “Yes?” I ask. And then the source of her agitation is revealed. “Daddy, do they really make eight-foot balloons!?”

By Samantha Musante. Still age 6 1/2.

Feathers is perfect
Feathers is nice
Would you like to have
Feathers on Thanksgiving night?

During the Veterans’ Day Parade:

Samantha: “Why are those men wearing skirts?”

Me: “Those actually aren’t skirts. They’re called kilts.”

Samantha: “Oh.” Pause. “Is that what Jamie wears on Doctor Who?”

Me: “Yes.”

Samantha: “Ohhhh.”

In the newen days of 2008, I translate “RIF” as Reduction In Force — a euphemism for firing people en masse. Back in the ’70′s, though, I understood RIF to mean “Reading is Fundamental“. I used to see RIF ads on TV all the time. Reading is a very important skill to both Julie and me, and we were very pleased when Alec was reading way above his grade level even before he started kindergarten.

Samantha hasn’t been so quick to pick it up. She’s a smart little girl, but she doesn’t like to work, and reading is a lot of work if you’re just starting to learn how. I try to stress to her how important it is, and I work with her almost every evening on at least some reading. She fights and she fidgets and she squirms and she uses all the possible delay tactics she can think of, but eventually she (with reluctance) and I (with patience) get through it.

A few weeks ago I was once again stressing the importance of reading. “I know it’s a lot of work, and I know it’s hard now, but it will become easier the more you do it.” And then, for some reason, RIF popped into my head, so I said, “Besides, reading is fundamental.”

She shook her head and made her curls bounce. “Well, it’s not fun ta me!”

Samantha has odd notions about how to get out of doing things that she is told to do. The actions she takes are mostly about defiance, but these acts of defiance actually make her punishment worse than it would have been.

Two examples spring to mind, but there are many, many more. The first takes place at the supper table, when she is told she needs to eat something that doesn’t meet her standards of looks and/or smells. She will first declare it to be gross and wait to be told to eat it. Then she’ll put it in her mouth, and chew. And chew, and chew. And then for good measure, she’ll chew some more. She won’t actually swallow it until she is told to do so. This strikes me as fundamentally backwards: if something tastes gross, wouldn’t you want to swallow it as soon as you possibly could? We say “the more you chew it, the longer you’re tasting it”, but that doesn’t seem to convince her. It’s about the defiance, really: “how long can I avoid swallowing this?”

The second example just happened recently. She did something wrong and I told her to go wait in her room for five minutes. She recently discovered that counting is equivalent to time, so she asked how high she needed to count up to for five minutes. I told her to count to 300, not because she would actually count one number per second – she counts much faster than that – but because I believe that if I’m consistent about 1 minute = count to 60, she’ll grasp the concept of seconds and minutes sooner. Five minutes is kind of arbitrary anyway; the point of the punishment is to have some sort of physical consequence for incorrect actions, and being alone in her room meets that requirement: the exact length of time is irrelevant. I told her she could come downstairs once she reached 300.

Around 20 minutes or so later it was supper time. We called her downstairs. I had thought she was still up there because she found a book to read or a toy to play with and lost track of time. I was mistaken. She comes down the stairs very slowly, and very dramatically, and says with an exhausted, quiet voice that she couldn’t count to 300 because she was so thirsty. In other words, she sat in her room and did nothing for four times as long as her original sentence. She was pretending to be too thirsty to count, and was actually waiting for us to notice.

I’d swear I never did anything like this as a kid, but I should check with my parents just to be sure.

We’re in the car. The kids are bored. Samantha decides to entertain herself. Samantha is five and just started learning her numbers and basic addition.

“Daddy, what’s one plus one?”

“Two,” I answer.

Alec jumps in. “What’s 41 plus 41?” he asks.

“82,” I respond.

“Nope! Its four thousand one hundred and forty-one!”

“Um, Alec, that joke doesn’t work with ‘plus’, only with ‘and’.”

“No, really, its…”

Samantha interrupts. “What’s one hundred times one thousand?”

“One hundred thousand,” I say, thankful to avoid an argument about 4,141.

Not to be outdone, Alec jumps in. “What’s a billion times a million times a thousand times a googol?”

“Um,” I say, calculating the exponents in my head.

“It’s eighty hundred!” shouts Samantha, and laughs.

“It’s one times ten to…”

“No!” Alec stops me. “It’s 300 googol!”

“Um,” I say.

Samantha says, “That was going to be my second guess.”

Julie and I bust out laughing, but we quickly realize that that was a line from her favorite film “Ice Age 2″. Still, a moment worth remembering.

Last night it snowed.

In fact, the snow started yesterday afternoon, just in time to turn the evening commute into a nightmare of slush and traffic. It had become rain by the evening, but got cold enough overnight to turn back into snow and put down about two inches of fluff. Everything was covered – power lines, trees, houses – and as it was nighttime, it stayed. The morning was overcast, so the sun didn’t melt any of it. The entire world seemed a wondrous winterland.

These are the mornings I like, and one of the (very) few things that make this season tolerable.

As we were driving to daycare, I pointed out the snow to the kids. I didn’t want them to miss something that happens maybe once or twice a year. Alec couldn’t care less. Zoe pointed outside and said “so! so!” (s + n is not easy for her yet). Samantha said, “It looks like we’re driving through a wedding!”

Last week, Samantha’s class was coming up with rhyming words. The teacher would give a child the opportunity to name a type of animal that you’d have for a pet, and then come up with a word that rhymes with it. For instance, horse/course, ferret/merit, and so on. All the kids came up with rhyming words.

Only Samantha would invent a new word:

We were getting ready for daycare this morning. Samantha was putting on her shoes when she noticed Alec’s sandels in the corner. Julie had take the two older kids to see Cars last weekend, so Samantha was familiar with the image on the side of the sandel.

“That’s Lightning,” she said excitedly.

“Yes, you’re right,” I answered, because if you don’t acknowledge a four-year-old, they repeat the statement until you do.

“Sometimes,” she said thoughtfully, “sometimes they call him the king.”

Elvis? I thought to myself. And then it clicked.

“They call him Lighting McQueen,” I corrected her.

“No! He’s a boy. He’s got to be the king.”

“Yes, you’re right,” I responded.

That’s the phrase that Samantha uses to get our attention. “Um Kewmi”, with half-a-beat between the two words. It’s a contraction of “Um, excuse me.”