Let’s boogie!
Parenting gets frantic. It’s a big responsibility to provide the education, health and mental wellbeing that children need. Plus clothes, food and, well, all the stuff of life.
I think my wife and I are dong a pretty good job with our three children, not just with the routine. We try to take time to stop and just be with them and do things out of the routine, out of the ordinary. It’s not always easy but we try.
My wife took out the two eldest before dinner the other day, leaving me and the youngest on cooking duties. The youngest, who is four years old, was miffed at being left at home. But after a while she said to me, “Let’s play.”
I said, “Just wait a minute until I get the dinner on.”
She sighed in disappointment. [continue reading…]
What’s analog?
“How do you turn this off?” my nine-year-old daughter asked me holding up a hulking push-button telephone from the 1980s or 90s we’d found deep in the back of a closet. “There’s no off button.”
“You just hang up the receiver,” I said.
“You mean like this,” she said, putting the receiver back in its place on the phone. “Wow, that’s pretty cool.”
Yeah, you’ll never guess what I want.
I’m pretty much fluent in Spanish.
Of course, some might differ, but they can abrir las orejas or go jump in a lago. The rest get it and don’t mind a few mistakes or my accent, which is kind of good but not native for Argentina, especially with the use of slang, the double r, the number three and the placement of che and boludo. I’ll leave the latter to the porteños.
Then there are those that marvel at my skills to convey a message, and hands down that recognition goes to the guy at the hardware store. He watches my arm and hand movements and pieces together my indications to produce just what I wanted: a galvanized fence staple or a plastic tie thingy or something to hang up a swing from the ceiling without it falling down kid and all. Come to think of it, I don’t know half of what hardware supplies are called in English.
Then I had an idea. [continue reading…]
