Ian Admits Defeat

My five year old son Ian has some cute verbal peccadilloes: he says "usually" instead of "actually" as a transition (e.g. usually, I have to pee right now . . . usually, I'll have a cookie instead of licorice) and when we play chess and he inevitably starts to lose badly-- he's great at setting up the pieces and moving them correctly, but he gives away a lot of material in suicidal attacks-- then his eyes fill with tears and he says-- repeatedly-- "I'm done for, I'm done for," which makes me wonder if this is good for him mentally . . . but there's no way I'm going to let him win . . . I handicap him three or four strong pieces, but he still has no end game, so I tell him all the suffering and defeat will be worth it in the end, because, maybe, someday (like my friend Rob) he'll be President of the Chess Club (see the image above for the kind of babes you can pull as a high-ranking chess club official).

Ghetto Kite

Sometimes you need to step back and think about what things look like from the outside; last week my son Alex woke up with a mission: to build a kite from scratch using a "Harry Potter" plastic bag as the body; he used a toilet paper roll and some cardboard discs he cut from a pizza box as the spool, wound it with twine, built a frame with sticks from the backyard and, as luck would have it, the next afternoon was a blustery one, so we went to the park-- my son Ian with his store bought fish kite and my son Alex with his home-made plastic bag kite-- but Alex's sticks immediately blew off the "body" of his kite and he was left pulling a black plastic bag on a string (he could get it five feet off the ground if he ran fast enough) while Ian was having a blast swerving and diving his fish kite in the wind . . . and when I took a moment to assess the scene, I realized we looked like a family that could only afford one kite, so that the pariah of the family had to fly a ghetto kite with a toilet paper spool, but the funny thing was, Alex was quite content dragging around his ghetto kite because he made it himself.