Category: Family

Seeing that I would not keep up an FTT for every day of the year, I decided I should at least reach 100.  This penultimate post is one that I meant to put up quite a while ago:

Tina emerged from the downstairs, shouting about a spider in the downstairs bathroom that was “as big as the bathroom!  It came in through a crack in the wall!”

When asked how a spider as big as the bathroom itself could fit through a crack in one of the bathroom walls, she grew thoughtful.  “It squished,” she decided.

Last Sunday was the Parish “Rendezvous,” an annual event welcoming the new WCC freshmen.  They have square dancing and axe throwing and food and so on.  College students offered guided horse rides to little kids.

At one point a college student was giving a horse ride to a little girl when he saw David huffing along behind.  “Um,” said the student, “do you want a ride?”

“No,” David panted back.  “But I was told to stay with my sister.”

In my last post, I may have made the life of a parent seem too easy.  At first glance, my account of the Rule of Seven makes it seem as though the battle-weary papa or mama has only to make a list of everything the rowdies should remember, bring them in one by one, and repeat each item on the list seven times.

Would it were so simple.

What complicates the situation is that, in kiddiedom, commands are self-expiring.  Every order papa issues contains within itself an expiration date, so the moment it enters a childish ear the count-down begins.  My seven-fold “Shut the door” injunction went bad, so to speak, exactly one hour later:  it ceased to have any authority, as though it had never been spoken.  It arrived in the juvenile mind with a label, “Best if used before 7:00 p.m.,” and by 7:01 it wilted and turned to ash.  Grandpa began yelling at children as they breezed in and out, “Number eight:  Shut the door when you go through!”—but with just as little effect as when the evening began.

By contrast, all permissions last forever.  They are like forever stamps, redeemable no matter how many years have passed.  If a child be once allowed to take a paper cup from the downstairs shelf, then three years later that child will freely help herself to paper cups without asking.  If commands are like unpasteurized milk, permissions are like beef jerky.

So if a tired mama begins with 683,812,076 problems, she can apply the Rule of Seven to bring it down by one almost instantly.  But one hour later—perhaps twenty-four hours, if she is particularly impressive about it—the problem will be back.  And in the meantime, every permission she grants will become a problem at some point within the next five years.

683,812,077 and counting….

On a mild but sultry day we stepped down the hill to visit Grandpa and Grandma for dinner.  The air conditioner was running, but we could hardly tell because all six kids ran in and out the door and never, ever—not even once—shut the door behind them.  One or another adult always shouted after them, “SHUT THE DOOR!” but it didn’t seem to make any impression.

Then I remembered what our new college president, Kevin Roberts, explained at a meeting yesterday.  In the advertising business, an old rule of thumb dictates that people need to hear something seven times before they remember it.

So the next time a child blew inside and left the door swinging behind, I stood her in front of me, solemnly explained the Rule of Seven, and then said:

“Close the door when you come through.

“Close the door when you come through.

“Close the door when you come through.

“Close the door when you come through.

“Close the door when you come through.

“Close the door when you come through.

“Close the door when you come through.”

And by golly, that child shut the door from then on.  So I gave “the treatment” to the next child and to the one after that.  Since the youngest can’t open the door by herself, only two children remained who still left the door open.  But by that point, one of the three “treated” kids always came behind to fix the situation.

That was easy.  One problem solved, 683,812,075 to go.

Tina just emerged from the hallway.  “Tina, go to bed!” Jacinta greeted her.

“Mama,” Tina explained, “I’m sick!”–this quite cheerfully.

“Then you need to go to bed,” Jacinta countered.  “When you are sick you need to lay down and rest.  You will feel better in the morning.

“No, I want to go to bed at the hospital!” Tina insisted.

Um, no.  The hospital has been on her mind ever since her recent stay due to some kind of RSV-imitating virus.  When Jacinta explained that you can’t eat the green leaves on a rhubarb plant, Tina questioned:  “If you eat it, you get sick and have to go back to the hospital?”  And that has been our threat when she does anything dangerous:  “If you fall down and break your arm, you’ll have to go back to the hospital!”

But when it’s 9:30 at night and the world is boring, I guess anything is better than laying in bed.

Well, I really, really fell off the blogwagon this time.  For reasons known only to Providence, the cosmic law of academic life dictates that the end of the semester shall be turbulent, somehow, some way.  This year I just grew more and more tired as the end approached, and when it ended I was simply exhausted.  And I didn’t blog.

But when it comes to resolutions, one must beware the “OH WELL” fallacy.  When somehow, by some stupifying improbability, not everything goes as planned this year, even though everything has gone exactly as planned for the past ten years running, one is tempted to say:  “OH WELL.  I can’t keep this resolution perfectly, so I’ll just drop it.”

Not so.  Even a hundred FTTs will be better than 93!  So on to #94!

Tonight there unfolded in my kitchen a complex event which I can only summarize as follows:

Bernadette threw a drinking glass at her mother.  When asked to explain this extraordinary behavior, she excused herself on the grounds that she was trying to imitate an excited tissue box.

I leave you to reconstruct the context.

The kids keep going getting more [fill in the blank] because a month ago I said they could have one.  When the kids come back every ten minutes to ask again if they can [fill in the blank], it dawns on me:

Prohibitions are self-expiring, but permissions last forever.

My local parish has a decent Church building, not spectacular but not appalling.  But one feature struck me right away.  When you approach the sanctuary for communion and then turn, either to the left or to the right, you see ahead of you a door with this sign over it:

If you turn left, in fact, below the sign is an open door into a very short hallway, at the end of which is a bathroom with the door open.  It’s an odd subject for meditation in the first five seconds after reception of the body of our Lord.

But eventually, I learned to interpret this sign as an icon of Adam and Eve.  Having repurposed the sign this way, I now see icons at every airport and Wal-Mart I visit!

Our kids use Teaching Textbooks, a computer program that teaches mathematics.  The only stupid part of the whole program is that you have to insert a CD to make it go, and getting a replacement CD costs $15.

David lost his math CD for a couple of weeks.  He got further and further behind, and when urged he would go look through his room again, but couldn’t find it.  Finally, Jacinta explained the deal to him:

In just a little bit, I’m going to come look through your room.  If I find that CD, I’m going to charge you $15, which is the cost of replacing the CD.  But if you can find it now, before I get there, then I won’t charge you anything.

And by golly, he was back in fifteen minutes with that CD!

I’ve started this custom at dinner whereby I ask each kid in turn what was the best thing that happened today and what was the worst.  Yesterday, Isaiah responded that the worst part of the day was:

“The lego volcanoes I made didn’t work.”