Quality time
May 13th, 2008
Good weekend. Saturday the wife had to work, so I took the kids to soccer. This is theoretically for Alex’s sake, but since it’s not really a team, and it’s not really a practice — and hardly anyone shows up anyway — nobody minds if Lea participates as well. This week she wanted to be a goalie. That was fun for a while until I scored a goal against her.
Mean daddy!, you cry. Scoring against your own kid! Sure, like I can control what happens to the ball after it launches away from my foot. I’m not exactly a precision player on the soccer field. The best I can do is hope that the ball travels in the same direction I am facing, and not sideways or backwards. Once, as a child, in the middle of a real soccer game, I went to kick the ball into the goal and missed entirely, my foot getting nothing but air, as if Lucy had pulled the ball away. When I brought my foot back down, then it connected, sending the ball backwards to one of my teammates, who kicked it into the goal for the score. I received an assist.
No one was more surprised than me when the ball snuck into the narrow gap between Lea’s body and the rest of the kid-sized goal. Well, maybe one person was more surprised, and that was Lea herself, and she had a fine, old-fashioned temper tantrum. Alex, meanwhile, didn’t want to be there in the first place — the ground was soggy from the overnight rain, and he didn’t want to practice kicking, and he didn’t want to have a catch. Why did we come here? Why were we staying? I had no answer to either of those questions, so we left.
Went home, changed clothes, and headed over to the Ansonia Nature Center with its big, beautiful wooden playground. (That picture doesn’t even capture the entirety of it — there’s more to the left.) The kids could run around, and I could solve a Hex cryptic. Win win!
We wound up staying for close to two hours. Lea made friends with two little girls in identical tie-dyed shirts. That was par for the course. More unusual is, Alex made a friend, too. He and a little boy named Zachary sat at the top of the big, curvy slide for something like half an hour, dropping handfuls of pebbles to hear them rattle their way down. No way was I going to break that up. Lea at one point said to her friends, “That’s my brother. He doesn’t make sense.” I really need to talk to her about saying things like that. Her heart’s in the right place, and I know she’s simply preparing her new friends for the Alex Experience, which can be, shall we say, non-linear. But there’s got to be a better way to phrase it than that.
Sunday. Mother’s Day. There’s an art fair on the town green, and we go, even though the past DOZEN art fairs have ended with Lea saying, “I don’t like this. I’m tired. Pick me up. I want to go home,” and Alex falling apart at the pure, overwhelming boredom of it all. Luckily, just as they are at the verge of calling social services on their abusive parents who make them go look at art, we pass a stand selling homemade fudge. All is forgiven.
As we walk the green, my wife says, “Do you think that guy will be here?”, and I know exactly who she means: The worst artist in the world. We love this guy, because his paintings are hypnotically awful — unfunny cartoons with sledgehammer punchlines, drawn with the talent of a sixth-grader. Imagine walking around an art show… not everything is great, but there are some appealing abstracts that make you pause a moment, and some interesting watercolors and a lot of good photography… and then, smack in the middle of the show, your eye is helplessly drawn to this.
Okay, I admit the idea behind this one sort of made me smile for a moment, even if it’s rendered in the same crayon-in-fist style. But, jeezlouise, $350?! I think you left out the decimal point, friend.
After the art show, I go to the supermarket to get the fixings for salmon risotto. The Stop and Shop has opened its garden center in the middle of the parking lot, so I pick up a couple of trays of cheerful yellow flowers. Janinne spends the afternoon planting them with Lea’s assistance, while I’m in the kitchen chopping onions and shredding spinach.
Dinner. The kids actually eat the salmon. Someone fetch me the smelling salts, I may pass out from the shock.
After dinner, the kids watch part of a movie while I kick myself for not working more with Alex. Bathtime, pajama time, book time, bed. J and I top off a very nice weekend with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It’s bleak and hopeless, but at least it’s over two hours long! We resolve never to rob a jewelry store.
This weekend: The Washington Post Hunt. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there!
Good weekend. Saturday the wife had to work, so I took the kids to soccer. This is theoretically for Alex’s sake, but since it’s not really a team, and it’s not really a practice — and hardly anyone shows up anyway — nobody minds if Lea participates as well. This week she wanted to be a goalie. That was fun for a while until I scored a goal against her.
Mean daddy!, you cry. Scoring against your own kid! Sure, like I can control what happens to the ball after it launches away from my foot. I’m not exactly a precision player on the soccer field. The best I can do is hope that the ball travels in the same direction I am facing, and not sideways or backwards. Once, as a child, in the middle of a real soccer game, I went to kick the ball into the goal and missed entirely, my foot getting nothing but air, as if Lucy had pulled the ball away. When I brought my foot back down, then it connected, sending the ball backwards to one of my teammates, who kicked it into the goal for the score. I received an assist.
No one was more surprised than me when the ball snuck into the narrow gap between Lea’s body and the rest of the kid-sized goal. Well, maybe one person was more surprised, and that was Lea herself, and she had a fine, old-fashioned temper tantrum. Alex, meanwhile, didn’t want to be there in the first place — the ground was soggy from the overnight rain, and he didn’t want to practice kicking, and he didn’t want to have a catch. Why did we come here? Why were we staying? I had no answer to either of those questions, so we left.
Went home, changed clothes, and headed over to the Ansonia Nature Center with its big, beautiful wooden playground. (That picture doesn’t even capture the entirety of it — there’s more to the left.) The kids could run around, and I could solve a Hex cryptic. Win win!
We wound up staying for close to two hours. Lea made friends with two little girls in identical tie-dyed shirts. That was par for the course. More unusual is, Alex made a friend, too. He and a little boy named Zachary sat at the top of the big, curvy slide for something like half an hour, dropping handfuls of pebbles to hear them rattle their way down. No way was I going to break that up. Lea at one point said to her friends, “That’s my brother. He doesn’t make sense.” I really need to talk to her about saying things like that. Her heart’s in the right place, and I know she’s simply preparing her new friends for the Alex Experience, which can be, shall we say, non-linear. But there’s got to be a better way to phrase it than that.
Sunday. Mother’s Day. There’s an art fair on the town green, and we go, even though the past DOZEN art fairs have ended with Lea saying, “I don’t like this. I’m tired. Pick me up. I want to go home,” and Alex falling apart at the pure, overwhelming boredom of it all. Luckily, just as they are at the verge of calling social services on their abusive parents who make them go look at art, we pass a stand selling homemade fudge. All is forgiven.
As we walk the green, my wife says, “Do you think that guy will be here?”, and I know exactly who she means: The worst artist in the world. We love this guy, because his paintings are hypnotically awful — unfunny cartoons with sledgehammer punchlines, drawn with the talent of a sixth-grader. Imagine walking around an art show… not everything is great, but there are some appealing abstracts that make you pause a moment, and some interesting watercolors and a lot of good photography… and then, smack in the middle of the show, your eye is helplessly drawn to this.
Okay, I admit the idea behind this one sort of made me smile for a moment, even if it’s rendered in the same crayon-in-fist style. But, jeezlouise, $350?! I think you left out the decimal point, friend.
After the art show, I go to the supermarket to get the fixings for salmon risotto. The Stop and Shop has opened its garden center in the middle of the parking lot, so I pick up a couple of trays of cheerful yellow flowers. Janinne spends the afternoon planting them with Lea’s assistance, while I’m in the kitchen chopping onions and shredding spinach.
Dinner. The kids actually eat the salmon. Someone fetch me the smelling salts, I may pass out from the shock.
After dinner, the kids watch part of a movie while I kick myself for not working more with Alex. Bathtime, pajama time, book time, bed. J and I top off a very nice weekend with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It’s bleak and hopeless, but at least it’s over two hours long! We resolve never to rob a jewelry store.
This weekend: The Washington Post Hunt. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there!
