Dad’s Home!

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The kids go out to school while us stay-at-home parents stay home

They’re going to say, “She’s Home!”

When I was a kid, I knew when Dad was home. I could hear his VW Squareback a block away.

“Dad’s home!” I’d shout before running out to meet him.

My three kids don’t do that because I’m always at home. We’re not a typical family, I guess. Mom and Dad don’t go out to work. I do retreat to my sort-of office to work as a reporter on the news out of Argentina and Latin America and to edit and write. I wander into the kitchen to fill up on coffee, water or tea and to get told off for picking at the lunch or a fresh-out-of-the-oven cake. I do go out for interviews and the occasional editorial meeting for an online publication I edit. The rest of the time I’m in the office or helping out around the house – time permitting – to fix toilets, unblock toilets and get the kids dressed and off to school, helping out with homework and breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It’s the kids who go out, the two eldest for now. They go to school. I can hear my seven-year-old daughter’s school bus a block away. They go and then they’re back and us parents are here.

My office is out the kitchen door and across the courtyard garden or down the main hall and through our bedroom and into the garage and hang a left. It’s the first room you run into. My office.

We don’t put the car in the garage. It’s a playroom. The kids love it. There’s room to stretch and invent. A blanket over a couple of chairs becomes a fort and that table over there the enemies’ lair, and in between lies a battle field. Soon the floor resembles the aftermath of a battle with toys everywhere. And when there’s need for more space, it’s to the office. Charge!

They’ll switch the channels on my TV – I watch the news to monitor events – and swift as anything we’re watching Discovery Kids or Disney Channel. Turn it up, turn it up! I could get mad. They watch my TV and use my desk for building a Lego castle and press the button on that noisy toy time and time again, and my keyboard – what a temptation to pound on the keys, just like Daddy! Yes, I could get mad and yell a bit and put them in their place, send them back to the playroom as I interview a politician or a high-flying executive. But I don’t think they’re thinking they need to be quiet just because Dad’s home and busy because, well, Dad’s always home.

The Mystery of Room 19

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“It may not sound true but it is. I swear. Cross my heart and hope to die. You can’t go in, really. You can’t go in or else you may never get out!”

That’s what my seven-year-old daughter told me when she came home from school.

I listened intently.

“It’s classroom 19. It’s spooked. There are ghosts in there, and bad things happen. It’s true. Some of the kids don’t believe it. But I do. It’s true.”

“My!” I said.

She told me of how her and a friend went to the bathroom. It’s across the quad from room 19. The bathroom windows all of a sudden shook, the toilets flushed on their own, the lights flickered. And they ran. Out the door, down the hall and into their classroom with a gust and the door slamming behind them. They flew into a room full of looks and a query from the teacher – “Something the matter?” – followed by a reprimand – “Please sit down and be quiet, girls.”

The kids knew and waited impatiently until recess to hear every last detail as my daughter and her friend spoke in fast forward.

“My!”

I had heard tales of buried bodies but not of a ghost, not of room 19. My daughter elaborated on the mystery of the room, telling me of a bodiless hand that wielded a large knife, and about the bodies of three students who dared venture into the room only to come out headless. They’re buried on the roof – somewhere. “Nobody knows where. And we’re not going up to find out. Not now!” my daughter tells me.

I decide to investigate and my effort starts with an inquiry at the door of the school before the kids are let out. I approach a mother of my daughter’s friend. “So what’s all this about room 19?”

“I know,” she says. “Frightening, isn’t it!”

She tells me what she’s heard, but then the scream of the traffic on the avenue in front of the school drowns her out and then other parents join our circle and the conversation turns and the kids get out and my investigation comes to little.

“So?” I ask my daughter as we start walking home.

“What?”

“Room 19.”

She starts telling me the latest but the traffic swells on the avenue and I make out little of what she says until the buses and cars pass and then she becomes audible.

“So?” she says to me.

“What?”

“Can you buy me a piece of gum at the kiosk?”

“Oh, yeah… Okay.”

And she skips in front to find a friend and I think I will have to take a fresh tact to get to the bottom of this mystery. That is if the spirits let me.

The T-Rex

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Watch out for dinosaurs!

My son doesn’t like to walk sometimes. Well, often. Who would when you have two capable parents to pick you up and carry you? That was fine at two and at three and even for a time at four. But now that he’s five years old and stretching out and putting on mass it’s not so easy. I can do a block, maybe two. And then he’s got to walk no matter his protests of tiredness and that his legs have stopped working and that he just can’t go any further.

This is a pivotal moment. Play it wrong and he may cry up a storm and you’ll wind up lugging him.

So this calls for tactics. My favorite of late is the tactic of distraction.

It can work. The other day we were walking home from school when the protests began. “Pick me up!” he said. My response came with rapid-fire determination: “Quick! We’ve got to run. A dinosaur is about to eat us.” So we ran and a tyrannosaurs rex stormed after us with his jaws snapping in our tracks, hungry for a morsel of human flesh. For blocks it gave chase and we ran faster and faster, sweating now and then huffing and then slowing with tiredness. “We have to keep going,” I told my son. “A few blocks more and we’ll be safe at home. Quick! Run!” [continue reading…]