Bad Influence

/ Shane / 4 Comments

So, there is a flip side to the social butterfly coin.

We had a situation the other day. We were at the garden, and there was a little girl from the neighborhood who didn’t have a plot in the garden there. This little girl…hoo boy. Words escape me. She was the worst kid I have ever seen. She wouldn’t listen to anything. No matter how many times Sara said not to touch people’s gardens, or touch our things, or leave this or that alone, she just kept doing it. And the worst part was, she was convincing Evie to do it. She pulled out every trick in the book, telling Evie that her parents said it was okay to do things, telling us that Evie wanted her bike helmet, even though it was just a ploy to get the bike helmet we said she shouldn’t touch, etc. It was even worse than that, she had such sass on her. For example, she was trying to convince Evie to take off her shoes:

Sara: “Evie, don’t take off your shoes”
Girl, in her sassiest tone: “They’re not shoes, they’re boots.”

If we stopped watching them for even a second, the girl talked Evie into some compromising position; taking off her boots, practically strangling her trying to take off her helmet, getting her to take off her clothes so they could “shave” with sharp sticks. At one point I looked up and she had Evie by the hair and was getting ready to smash her face into the ground. She was, “washing [Evie’s] hair”. She never once called Evie by the right name, and even got into an argument with me about what Evie’s name was. Talk about oppositional defiant.

Did I mention this girl was 3 years old?

Poor, sweet Evie was completely unprepared for this. All of her interactions with other kids has been more or less adorable. Sometimes kids are bossy, but Evie’s okay with that. But we’ve never prepared her to resist being really taken advantage of or manipulated. It was actually quite startling.

It wasn’t all bad though. I was particularly proud to hear Evie say, “Remember what my mommy said…” a couple of times to the girl. It was like Evie was trying to do what was right, but she was totally overwhelmed by this other girl.

So here was the horrifying part. Evie wants to make friends so badly, that she was putting up with all of this. In fact, when the girl finally got called home (Thank god!) Evie said she was sad and she missed her. That really made my heart shrivel up inside.

Of course, when we did get back from the garden, Evie was not listening to us anymore, and being naughty. I was thunderstruck. We were around this girl for less than an hour, and, until her spell wore off, she had more influence with Evie than we had in years.

Thus the true horror of bad influences on your children was revealed to me. And to see Evie desperate for this girl’s attention, and to see how bad and corrupting this girl was, if only for a short time. It made me think of abused wives going back to their husbands. Now I am scared to send Evie to school, lest she fall in with a bad crowd! And furthermore, imagine being in that girl’s class in school. The teacher would not be able to give attention to anyone else, she would have to focus completely on dealing with her.

Really, the victim here is not Evie, it’s that poor little girl. If she acted like that with us, imagine what she is like at home. Imagine what her home is like in general. I feel really bad for her. However, at the end of the day, she’s not my responsibility, Evie is. And that’s why I am always going to be nervous whenever we go to the garden, that she might be waiting for us.

I kind of hoped I wouldn’t have to deal with things like this for a few years!

Garden 2.0

/ Shane / Leave a comment

It’s that time of year again…garden time!

The fate of the old garden has been discussed before, so I will not belabor the point. The excellent people of the new garden have been working nonstop to get things ready to go. Evie and I put in a little work, but not nearly as much as some of the folks. And the result looks mighty fine, I might add:

Over the weekend we planted 6 tomato plants, peppers, an eggplant, carrots, chives, basil, and, new this year, some strawberries. I’m already anticipating some delicious produce.

Of course, this being a story involving me, it couldn’t go off without a hitch.

In order to plant our strawberries, we needed to build a box to put them in. Strawberries, left unchecked, will keep coming back every year and expanding, until they take over your garden. So you want to put them in something, so they are contained.

Me, being the handy man around town, went over to Home Depot to get some supplies. This turned out to be beyond me in several ways. It was immediately clear to everyone that I was way out of my element. Let me give you some examples:

Me: “I want to buy some wood to make a strawberry box. Do you guys cut the wood to specification?”
Guy: “You don’t want this wood!”
Me: “I don’t? Why not?”
Guy: “Are you going to eat these strawberries?”
Me, catching on very fast: “This is treated lumber, isn’t it.”

Me: “Is this untreated wood?”
Guy: “Yes. What size are you looking for.”
Me: “…”
Me: “About this big?”
(Note that this conversation was repeated many, many times.”)

Finally I got a piece that looked good. We wanted each side of the box to be 3 feet, so I picked out a board that looked like it was about 12 feet.

Me: “Is this 12 feet?”
Guy: “That’s 10 feet.”
Me: “Let me go get another one.”

Guy: “How do you want this cut?”
Me: “We want 4 pieces.”
Guy: “So, how long?”
Me: “Well, if the board is 12 feet, so if we want 4 pieces, we’d need them to be 4 feet long.”

Now I would like to point out here, that this was really the critical error of the day. However, that guy had every opportunity to see that I was an idiot right there, and stop me. But he didn’t. He cut me 3 pieces 4 feet long. After some very tense conversation with Sara in which I explained what I had just done, we had to go get another board and cut it. We debated having them cut a foot off of each piece, but we were really pushing the limits on what the Home Depot guy was going to put up with from us. Plus we would have had to pay for all the extra cuts (to say nothing of the extra wood we were going to have to buy). Finally, in my mortal embarrassment, I managed to convince Sara to buy the wood as-is, without having the extra cuts, so I could just get out of there as fast as possible. And the Home Depot guy, seeing that I was as clueless as they come and in need of major help, decided not to charge me for the extra piece of wood. (Thank you!)

About this time, Oliver started wailing, which was not helping my stress level. So Sara took the kids out to the car, which should have signaled to me immediately that I had more humiliation in store.

Me: “I can’t find a bar code on the wood.”
Checkout guy, looking at all the boards and not finding a bar code: “What size is it?”
Me: “…”
Me: “I think 1×8”
Checkout guy, sighing: “Can you [hold up the entire line and] run back and get a bar code from some other piece of wood?”
Guy behind us in line: “There is a bar code right there.”
Me: “He’s right!”
Checkout guy: “Oh, I was just taking your word for it that it wasn’t there.”

Okay jerk face, you looked at the wood too and didn’t see it! Man. We finally made our escape and the next morning I cut a foot off each board with a handsaw. Since we didn’t have to pay for the extra wood, and since it only took me about 30 minutes to saw up the wood and assemble the box, we weren’t really out anything. I would say the most embarrassment really could be traced back to this conversation:

Me: “Should I write a blog post about this?”
Sara: “Why not? You embarrass everybody else on there.”

Well, I’m nothing if not fair.

Social Butterfly

/ Shane / 4 Comments

When kids are little, even when they are “playing” with other kids, they’re not really playing with other kids. They’re mostly just playing at the same time as the other kids, who happen to be in close proximity. However, some switch recently flipped over in Evie’s head, where she suddenly noticed other kids. She really just loves to make friends.

Whenever we go to the park now, she’s so excited to talk to the other kids. She runs up to them and says, “My name is Evie, what’s your name?” She also tries to entice them to play whatever game she is playing, such as driving in the little plastic car and announcing casually, in her loudest voice, “The back is open, if anybody wants to sit in it!”

At soccer practice, we’ve been going with the same kids for like 8 weeks now. Suddenly, last weekend, it’s like they noticed each other. Soon Evie and another girl were holding hands and stopping periodically to hug each other. It was the most adorable thing ever. It was hilarious too, as each of them would kick a soccer ball in opposite directions, and then almost pull their arms out of their sockets as they both tried to run after. Eventually another boy joined in with the hand holding, and they almost threatened to destroy the entire practice with their peace, love, and happiness.

The other aspect of this is that she is now learning adult social skills, such as making conversation segues and small talk in order to keep conversation flowing. For example, seeing Nathan’s pop bottle: “I got a water bottle for Christmas from Santa. Have you seen the big girl bed that Santa got me?” which of course leads to her showing him around her room.

The other day she met a random girl at the library and Sara was watching her make small talk with the girl:

Evie: “So, where’s your mommy?”
Random Little Girl: “She’s at work.”
Evie: “My mommy never leaves me. Sometimes my daddy goes to Detroit.”

::General arguing about the moon for quite some time::
Random Little Girl: “The moon doesn’t look like this picture.”
Evie, finally getting fed up: “Sometimes the moon is a circle, and sometimes it is a crescent!”

I love watching her interact with other kids!

Baldness

/ Shane / 4 Comments

My brother visited me this weekend, and while he was here I noticed a disturbing lack of hair on the top of his head. In fact, he kind of has like a blond spot on top combined with thicker, darker patches on the side, giving him a semi-unique look.

One of these guys is my brother

Now, obviously I’m not one to talk when it comes to baldness. But really, I see myself every day, so I don’t think much about my own baldness. This, of course, led to this picture:

Who's the baldest?

So I ask you, who has the most to worry about here?

The case against Nathan:

  • He is 5 years younger, and thus *should* have more hair.
  • His hair is longer, and thus doesn’t look as bald in the picture as it really is.
  • His hair is generally lighter, and his skin is generally darker, so the bald patches don’t show up as much.
  • His baldness is more diffuse, like a general thinning, instead of discreet and more drastic patches of baldness.

The case against Shane:

  • Look at that picture, my goodness.
  • There is an actual reflection on the top of his head from the flash.
  • His forehead (five-head) starts way over the dome of his head, half-way to his ears.

So, there you have it. Speak now or forever hold your peace:

So really, it was their own fault

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Rachael and Nathan were cleaning the gutters at my dad’s house. It is always dangerous to set foot in my dad’s house, because he’s always looking for people to put to work. Now, Rachael is afraid of heights, so she’s army crawling around on the roof, trying to be as careful as she can. Before long, my dad disappears for a little while. When he comes back, he is carrying bottle rockets, which he proceeds to shoot at them. Of course, being on the roof, it is hard for them to escape.

Eventually the bottle rockets ran out, and my siblings were able to descend from the roof. Later, Rachael was talking to my step-mom:

Rachael: “Do you think regular families ask their children to clean the gutters and then shoot bottle rockets at them?”
Sharon: “Well, maybe except that last part. I told you to get rid of those bottle rockets…”

So really, they have no one to blame except their selves. Besides, come on. This was my dad we’re talking about here. They grew up with the guy and they didn’t see that coming?