A Probable Turning Point

The Bear found a lady bug in the back yard.

He brought it inside and showed mom and dad.

He received a bug jar with a magnifying top from his grandmother and having failed previously to catch anything worthy of study (or anything at all for that matter), I suggested he put the lady bug in the jar and get a good look at it.

All was well in the world.

When it was time to come inside, we reminded him that he needed to let the lady bug go.

Why? he asked.

Because if you don't the lady bug will die.

I don't want to.  He's my pet.

Said with the beginnings of a quiver in the voice and impending tears on the lids.

You have to Bear.  If you keep him in the jar, he'll starve to death and die.

More than able to empathize and vaguely able to summon the vestiges of my own memories in similar situations, I attempted to make the release into something more than dumping a bug back into the garden.

The effort had minimal effect

And then seven words I never saw coming and never knew I would dread so much to hear

I want a pet of my own.

The quiver now fully evidenced and the tears now flowing.

This is not going to end well.

Rainy Day Puddle Stomping and Tree Shaking

Rainy Day Puddle Stomping and Tree Shaking: Spent the last couple of days upon a mountain top in Tennessee*.  It literally rained all day on Thursday.  There were five of us in a relatively small house and by 6:00 PM I was ready to go do something.  So when the Bear** wandered by I said, "C'mon let's go outside and play."  


He stopped and looked at me and I could see his little three year old mind working on it.  


"What?" he asked.  
"Let's go outside and play." I repeated.
"But it's raining." Is what he almost said.  He got half of the sentence out and then he stopped himself.  You could honestly see him thinking it out in that instant of time.  "It's raining, but Dad is saying let's go outside?!"  Instead, it went like this: 

Me: C'Mon let's go outside and play.
Bear: What?
Me: Let's go outside and play.
Bear: But it's . . . I need to get my shoes on.

So once we were both properly shod***, we went out.  I informed him that we were going to go for a walk and stomp in some puddles.   Normally whenever we go anywhere and he sees a puddle he immediately asks if he can splash it and we promptly say, 'no'.  But now we were on a walk with the specific intention of locating and stomping in puddles.  He really couldn't believe it.

Every time we'd come to a puddle he would look up and ask me, "Can I step in this one?"  "Absolutely." I replied.  The bigger the puddle the better.  We found one big one that was fifteen feet long or so.  It required a dozen trips back and forth before we could move on.

We also stopped under a lot of trees and gave them a good shaking.  Which I assumed he would shriek about and try to avoid.  Instead he commented that it was like it was raining hard and then we would immediately begin looking for the next puddle or tree.

A wet tennis court provide a good bit of fun too.  Though there were no trees and the puddles were so thin you couldn't get any good splashes out of them.  We did play some game that I honestly couldn't comprehend the rules to.  However it did involve a lot of running.

When we got home it was bath time.  The Pook said we looked like a couple of drowned rats, but we didn't care because we'd "stomped puddles and shaked a lot of trees."

Rainy Day Puddle Stomping and Tree Shaking: A+

* - If that made you think of a song, it just means you're old.
** - No I did not kill it.  Please see here: http://misterbgrades.blogspot.com/2012/06/principal-players.html
*** - Me in flip flops.  Him in Crocs.

First Game of Catch (almost)

First Game of Catch (almost): Just before Easter, Aldi had little kid baseball gloves on sale for cheap.  So we bought one to put in the boy's basket.  Being three and an American, it seemed past time he had one.  On Easter morning, after we described the point of the large black and brown thing taking up valuable candy space he replied, "I don't want it" and refused to even try it on.  Several weeks and a new baby brother later, I decided it was time to retry introduction of America's past-time.  Earlier in the day, while we were wasting time channel flipping I turned over to a sports channel that was showing a college baseball game.  The Bear was interested enough to watch most of an inning and I was careful to point out how everyone except the batter was wearing baseball gloves.  That evening when he started getting restless, I suggested that we go outside and play with his ball and glove.  I had retrieved my glove from it's storage place* a few days earlier and the ball and his glove were sitting nestled in mine near the back door.  He suggested we include his over sized plastic baseball bat and the batting tee he'd gotten for his birthday.  Having added those items we were off into the back yard.  Once outside, I set up the tee, but having seen real athletes on TV playing without a tee, he was no longer interested in using one either.  He suggested I set it on the patio and he told me I could leave his glove over there too as he didn't want it.  Hoping that watching me using mine would inspire him to don his, I agreed and we got ready to play.  I showed him how to stand and swing the bat and I backed away a few steps to attempt to toss the ball in such a way that contact of some sort could be made.  "You swing the bat and hit the ball and I'll catch the ball in my glove" I told him.  "But Daddy," he replied, "who's going to fall down?"  Befuddled I asked for clarification.  "Somebody always falls down" he told me.  I eventually realized that what he'd taken away most from watching baseball on TV, was that it involved a lot of falling down** and getting really dirty.  So for the next several minutes, I tossed the ball near him.  He swung the bat and never once made contact, but after each swing he would drop the bat, run a few steps in a random direction and gleefully fall onto the ground.  His glove spent the entire time lying on the ground.

First Game of Catch (almost): A+

* - The trunk of my car, naturally.
** - a.k.a. - sliding

Mowing the Lawn

Mowing the Lawn: When I was a kid, I hated mowing the lawn.  Partly because I had bad allergies when I was younger and mowing the lawn meant spending several hours (if not a day) sneezing and wheezing.  But also because it was a big giant waste of time.  The grass was only going to grow back and you would be back there the next weekend mowing again.  Fortunately, my brothers and father picked up my slack (thanks for that).  When you are young, older folks tell you things like, "when you get your own place you'll like mowing and taking care of the yard."  When they say things like this, they are clearly deranged because this is clearly impossible.  I hate yard work.  Why should purchasing a house suddenly cause me to become stupid and like mowing?  When I first moved out on my own, I rented a house with two friends of mine.  And while renting a house had many perks, it had some negatives.  One of which was we had to mow.  I can't say that I really ever enjoyed it, but I tolerated it.  Then after I got engaged and then got married my wife and I started thinking about buying a house.  We talked about what we would want in a house and we talked about how we both hated yard work and because of this we both wanted a house with a tiny yard.  Well, time passed as it always does and we eventually got a house and somewhere in there my wife betrayed me and joined the other side.  We found the area we wanted to live in and there were lots of houses with tiny yards, but my wife picked out a house that has one of the largest yards in the subdivision.  Instead of a tiny yard, we got a medium large yard.  If that betrayal wasn't enough, then came the ultimate betrayal.  I betrayed myself!  Turns out I like mowing the yard.  It's time I get to spend by myself (with my iPod).  Sometimes I sing along to the tunes, other times I just contemplate whatever's on my mind.  But also it gives you a sense of satisfaction that just doesn't make sense.  I mean this is the same job I was doing before (at my parents house, at the two houses I rented with friends and the house we first rented after getting married), but for some reason it's significantly different.  Go figure.

Mowing the Yard (then): D+
Mowing the Yard (now): B+