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.

My Son Alex Explains His Consciousness

My six year old son Alex called me "Mave" the other day-- Mave is a girl in his class that also played on our soccer team-- and then explained his error in a Joycean monologue: "I have all these names smooshed together up there . . . kids in my class and kids at school and kids from soccer all up front, and you and mom in the back, and whichever one is next just spills out."

It's Hard To Get Angry When I Would Do The Same Thing

My six-year-old son Alex recently lost his two front teeth and while this has caused him no problems at meal-time (he can still eat an apple) we have run into an unexpected distraction; unlike Count Dracula, our fanged child can see his reflection, and it amuses him so much that if he catches a glimpse of himself in anything reflective-- tinted glass on the Metro, the window across from him at the dinner table, a store mirror, the side of a polished car-- then he starts laughing demonically and making various vampirical faces until we drag him away.

Toddler Magic

My son Alex did his first magic trick the other day-- he took a penny, showed it to me, and then placed it behind his back and asked me to guess which hand it was in; I guessed his right hand, but he opened his palm and it wasn't there, and then I said, "Okay it's in your left hand"-- and then I heard the sound of a coin falling onto the wood floor-- and then he opened his left hand . . . and it was empty: magic!