“Yeah, man. The music was so wizard back in my time. Dig it!”
I traveled to the U.S. for a couple weeks last month and on the airplane home my iPod went dead. It happened on the first leg of the trip, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, leaving me with the Atlanta-Buenos Aires leg with only airplane entertainment. Mind you, it has vastly improved – you can choose what you want instead of watching the evening’s movie on a collective screen the stewards have to pull down. I watched “Juno” on the first leg and faced fewer options on the longer flight. I chose “Eat Pray Love,” which was pretty lame.
I’d drunk a too-big cup of coffee in Atlanta so even “Eat Pray Love” couldn’t put me to sleep. I was jittery and insomniac. I read while most slept. I played around with the plane’s entertainment, and skipped HBO on the principal that you’ve got to pay. The TV shows didn’t gel with my want to read. So I went for the music and faced a long list of categories:
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- Hot Hits
- Cool Jazz
- Global Grooves
- Deep Dance
- Spa Sounds (what?)
- Chill
- Classical
- Big Country
- Americana
- Rock
- Chill
- Urban Soul
- On Stage
- Sky Kids
- Retro Rewind [continue reading…]
“Yipee!”
My son is surprising me.
A lot.
My five-year-old has autism and that means most other children are different. He’s socially out-of-tune much of the time. He’s less coordinated. Things don’t come natural to him. His fingers move slower and with less dexterity, so too does much of his body. He has verbal dyspraxia so it can be hard to understand him. His words come out in the jumble and we have to key in on one or two to get his drift. The words are up there and he knows what’s going on. He even corrects us when we make a mistake or simplify things too much or take a different route home, or if we try to con him and his two sisters into doing something but don’t come through on our end of the deal. “But you said, ‘We’ll go to the beach in the morning if we went to bed.’” We had. Last night. In a bid to get the kids to bed quickly so Mum and Dad could have some alone time. A chorus of “Me, me, and me” met our suggestion of going to the beach. Well, then, we told the three children, all under eight years of age. “The quicker to bed, the quicker the morning comes and the quicker we can go to the beach.” With my son we’ve got to keep our word – with all of them, really – or we’ll get called up on it. We try. But sometimes things don’t work out as planned, and we scorn ourselves for making – and breaking – promises. And my son frets. [continue reading…]
Discipline me? Yeah, right!
I’m not good at excuses or getting told off. It might be because my parents were lax. I remember my mother telling me off once, no doubt for being a right pain in the ass. The rest of the time? Zilch. Our requests to get grounded were met by, “Why?” Well, because everybody else is getting grounded, Mum! She didn’t buy it. I once told my dad he’d best put me in the corner. I hadn’t done anything too bad. I just wanted to show solidarity with my friends down the street where we lived in Los Angeles who went from one grounding to the next. My dad played along laughingly. I stayed in the corner for a couple of minutes and then went and sat down on the sofa with a book and without a reprimand whatsoever. Indeed, my two older brothers and I coasted through our preteen and teen rebellion doing most of what we wanted. But we knew right from wrong. We self regulated our actions without the fear of getting grounded or an earful. We called home. “Mum, I’ll be home tomorrow.” And we hung out at friends’ houses closer to the beach so we could go surfing at dawn.
Is this the right way to parent?
Maybe. [continue reading…]
