Category: Kids

It was a cold Sunday morning in February.  I was still in bed but my wife had already gotten up and was in the shower getting ready for church. I was drifting in and out of a state of sleep when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was my son. I rolled over and looked at him. He was standing there wearing one of the tee shirts that he wore at night. He lifted it up to show me that he had changed out of the diaper that he wore through the night and he had put on his underwear. We were in that transition time with a child that wasn’t that excited about moving away from diapers.  It was a major accomplishment that he was willing to do this on his own. I wanted to reinforce this positive behavior and I bragged on him. I told him it was great and he needed to go show his mom what she had done. I saw him run off into the bathroom where she was still in the shower and heard her talking to him. I rolled over and drifted back off into a state of semi-unconsciousness.

When my girls were little, they shared a bedroom.  They are four and a half years apart in age.  And the younger of the two was a hypochondriac.  Whenever her big sister was sick, Mary would want the same attention that was given to her sister.  If we took May’s temperature, Mary needed to be checked too.  If May wanted a damp towel on her head, Mary also needed one.  And if May needed medicine, Mary wanted the same medicine.  May would get sick and have a terrible cough.  While I was tending to her, Mary would begin to cough too.  But Mary’s cough was obviously not real.  She wasn’t mocking her big sister either.  This was clearly an attempt to get the same attention that her sister was getting.  I would go downstairs to get medicine for May.  Most of the time, this medicine was either a red or purple liquid.  I would bring it in one of those measuring cups that came attached to the bottles.  I would also bring a small cup of water to help wash down the medicine.  Regardless of what fruit flavor they made the medicine, my children always hated it and wanted water.  While I was giving May her medicine, Mary continued with her fake cough and asked for medicine.  I didn’t want to give her something she didn’t need.  But I did want to give her the attention she wanted.  I went downstairs and filled the medicine cup with grape Kool-Aid and got a cup of water for her.  She had no idea that she was not getting medicine.  And when she drank the Kool-Aid, she winced like she had downed the more horrible medicine ever and drank the water as quickly as possible.  This was the same Kool-Aid she drank at most meals with no problem at all.  Her cough magically disappeared.

Several years ago when my youngest daughter was still little, she was playing one day in our kitchen.  As she walked around the kitchen table, she would assign a gender to each chair.  She would say, “This is a boy chair, this is a girl chair, this is a girl chair, this is a boy chair” and so on.  The gender of the chairs seemed to be totally random because it didn’t alternate for every chair and there wasn’t a boy chair for every girl chair. Nor did it seem to have anything to do with the gender of the person that usually in that position around the table.  I took an interest in her game and then I asked her this question: Do you know how to tell the difference between the boy chairs and the girl chairs?  She didn’t have an answer for me.  I had an answer for her.  If you want to know the answer that I gave her, send me an email at art@artwheelermusic.net.

Several years ago, we used a satellite service for television. When we first subscribed to this service, we were unable to get our local channels.  I wasn’t interested in dealing with all of the processes that were necessary to get network feeds from New York and Los Angeles.  We had no antenna and lived far enough away from any city where we might be able to pick up any networks so we went without for about 3 years.   The only network we could get was ABC but we were far enough out of town that it didn’t come in very clear.  At the time, our children were very young and their interests dictated a lot of what we watched.  We didn’t feel that we were missing that much on network TV.  This was at the same time that Survivor was starting out and was a big hit.  It didn’t sound like anything that would appeal to me.  It was a rare occasion when I really missed having the networks.   Finally, the satellite TV provider started offering local channels and we were eligible to receive the ones from Memphis.  We immediately added them to our package.  It was at the first of the year when the NFL playoffs are on every weekend.  I didn’t realize how much I had missed professional football.  The first Sunday after we added the networks to our satellite package, I came home after church, turned on a game on TV and went to sleep on the couch.  I hadn’t napped that good in 3 years. 

When I was growing up and had an opportunity to go any place where you played games to win tickets that could be redeemed for prizes, I always dreamed of having enough tickets at the end of the day to get one of the prizes on the top shelf.  These included basketballs, lava lamps and the largest stuffed animals ever made.  I don’t think Chucky Cheese was around when I was little and I never went to one until my children were born and old enough to be interested.