Fun Kid Story, Football

So I've been playing catch with my middle son in the backyard every day as part of an exercise regimen. The rules of the game, set up by him, are that when a player catches the ball, he has to run to the fence for a touchdown. Two hand touch is a tackle. I basically let him run so I can run after him, hence the exercise.

Earlier this week, when running close to him to try to tackle, my son put out his arm to me with his palm facing me: classic stiff arm position.

I asked him, while keeping pace, "are you trying to stiff arm me?" And he said "No, I'm using the Force!" It worked, too, because I started laughing so hard I couldn't catch him.

Upside Down House

What follows is a long, personal, shaggy dog story:

We've been having a few days of craziness in the house. It started two weeks ago when I smelled an acrid burning smell around midnight; I left my office and found that the smell was through the house; when I came upstairs I saw that there was smoke in the house. After evacuating my wife and three kids, all under 7, we entertained the fire department for an hour (my family went to stay in our minivan and watch DVDs until 1am when the all-clear was established). The FD was stumped as to the cause except that they found (using a cool heat/temp gun) that some ceiling lights were running very hot - nearly double the temp they were supposed to.

We were told to shut off the circuit-breaker for that part of the house, which in turn shut of my wife's office, our basement lights, downstairs bathroom, and electric stove. Since this was Thurs night, I couldn't get an electrician to come to the house until Monday. He arrived and said that he could see nothing amiss with our electricals. Which meant that we would need to follow the advice of the FD and tear the ceiling down to see why there was "heat buildup in the strapping."

Meanwhile, we noticed the smell persisted even with the electricity out. Moreover, we were told by our condo association that our drier's exhaust had been declared unsafe. So we simultaneously needed to get a contractor to demolish part of our ceiling, and get a dude to fix the drier hose. We were also due for a furnace checkup - and I suspected that the smell was from there anyway - so we needed all three done at once.

The furnace people claimed they couldn't come to see us for over a week. We did get the drier hose fixed but it didn't chance the problem of the smell that triggered this whole episode. We did tear the ceiling down - which rendered most of the first floor of the house inaccessible - and the electrician didn't find any reason for the smell-smoke-heat. I asked him to change all the wires and fixtures anyway - once we have the ceiling open - and he recommended we keep those new lights burning for a few days to see if there's any recurrence of the problem.

Meanwhile the furnace guy came and said - guess what - the furnace was busted. That's why we smelled the burning plastic and wires and - this is the best - why we saw the smoke! Because these punks didn't come to our house for 10 days after our calling them, we needed to pursue the electrician/contractor/ceiling route because until it was fixed we couldn't use our oven or basement.

Naturally the furnace guy said it would take most of the week to fix the furnace - he came Tuesday and the furnace is still not fixed... which is bad because Boston is freakin' cold in May.

In the midst of all this our drier - remember it, the one with the new hoses - broke. Just busted. And we managed to convince the contractor that he needed to put our ceiling up before the weekened (which I managed to do, and he did too, except it needs to be painted, so we still have no use of half of the first floor). But we do have electricity... and the drier and heat are to be fixed today...

All this happened at once. I do thank Hashem that we didn't lose all of the electricity, nor the hot-water heater (which, by dint of the pattern, should have gone belly-up).

And my daughter's second birthday is on Lag B'Omer and I'm leaving that day for a conference. Shabbas!

Kosher Tooth Fairy

My oldest child lost his first tooth yesterday. This was eagerly awaited; all his friends had lost a tooth already and this is a prepubescent milestone. Considering that I lost a tooth a few weeks ago, his event was much more celebratory.

In any case, he had heard about the tooth fairy but I had planned for this eventuality: how to eliminate the Anglo-Saxon superstitions that our culture is saddled with. It's bad enough that Xmas and other Notzrei Chazarai is in the air for one quarter of the year, but there's Disney and others talking about fairies and wishing upon stars.

My solution is that in every case where there's some intercessory minor divinity required, I bring out Eliyahu Ha-Navi (Elijah). Normally, I'm loath to adduce miracle making whoozits into my religious pantheon - so I eschew sephirot, malachim, Rebbe Meir Baal Ha-Nes, and the sundry Kabbalah Masters who sadly have found locale in contemporary Orthodoxy. Fie on all this avoda zara.

Yet, I am stuck with Eliyahu Ha-Navi as an immortal, ever-present visitor: it's in Tanakh, and all over liturgy. So I might as well use it. If Eliyahu comes to every Havdalah, Bris, and Seder, he can give my kids money for their teeth.

Pic is Gustav Dore's depiction of Eliyahu going up to Heaven.

The Holocaust and Guns

I just finished a stint as a teaching assistant for a Holocaust history class this semester. It was a fascinating class with a brilliant professor but, naturally, it was horrible. I've purposefully kept away from the topic all my life, not because I'm trying to ignore or hide the facts, but because a little bit of emotional dread goes a long way with me (and my family). I lost many relatives; I'm named after two brothers of my grandfather who were murdered; but I have tried to avoid the soul-crushing intensity that a dive into the holocaust waters would bring.

Well, there went that plan out the window. The class met for an hour three times a week, which meant I was depressed for most of the time. True story: I got the last word in class - the last day we have a class-wide discussion and I explained to the mass of undergraduates, many of whom were born the year when I was a college freshman, that studying the Holocaust is different when you're a able-bodied single adult than when you're a married parent. As a 20 year old, you can imagine being in the resistance, escaping a ghetto, hiding out in the woods etc. As a parent, all you imagine is your children being murdered. Again, it was horrible.

One natural response of a study of the Holocaust is Zionism, but it's a bit more complicated than that. One disturbing realization of the history is that while the mass murder started in Western Europe, aided by a culture of anti-semitism that reacted to the gains of liberal Jews in Weimar Germany, for the most part the assimilated Jews of the Western countries managed to escape. E.g. 50% of German Jews escaped, and many more would have survived if they had decided to identify as Jews (and thus flee) and not as loyal Germans (and thus stay, wearing their WWI uniforms).

Who were the overwhelming victims? Orthodox Jews who were estranged from their home countrymen (Poland, Lithuania, Belarus) - and the estrangement led to a mutual hatred. One way to see it is that the assimilated Jews of Germany angered the Western European murderers who took over the backward Slavic nations and slaughtered the unassimilated Jews. One lesson I take from this is another support for Modern Orthodoxy, but the whole subject is too dreary for clean lessons.

A question I do ask is why Jews in the diaspora don't own more guns. Zionism is a natural response to the Holocaust, but Zionism isn't limited to the land of Israel. This is a large topic - the debate between political vs. cultural Zionism - but you don't need to go as crazy as the JDL to wonder why Jews don't have a gun in the tool-shed for protection against our crazy neighbors.

My quick answer is that (a) Jews in the US are primarily urban and the anti-gun laws are severe in cities, and the response time of police is quick (especially since Jews, as prima-facie middle-class Caucasians, are preferred clients of law enforcement); (b) Jews are pro-natalist (i.e. we have many kids) and guns and kids don't mix; (c) Jewish law forbids hunting, and eating food shot to death, so it's not in the culture that way; (d) it's tough to be a Jew in the military and that's where gun familiarization occurs.

Those are at least most of the reasons why I haven't already purchased a load of weapons after a semester of being scared out of my mind with Holocaust horror.

Video: Oy Lei!

Tonight I saw the below song from Phineas and Ferb - the only really good kids show I've seen in decades. I actually look forward to watching it with my kids. They have at least one song every show and the following is an expansion of the character Vivian Garcia-Shapiro, a Jewish Mexican. My mom will love this.

The lyrics are from the dude who put the clip up:

Lyrics:
It's a Mexican-Jewish cultural festival!
Mexican-Jewish cultural festival!
Oy-lei!
There is kreplach on tostada,
'Cept for picking a piñata.
We kibitz when we lambada.
How are things in Ensenada?
We put bottles on cabezas
We do mitzvahs up on mesas
And we're coming to your places
With big smiles upon our faces.

(Both parts repeat at the same time.)

Don't Pay the Ferryman, Part 2

As I posted earlier today, I enjoy the song "Don't Pay the Ferryman" and as part of the celebration for this song, I played it for my middle child. He likes the song and was boogying around to it in our living room. When we put him in for a nap, he was still grooving to it and was singing the lyrics (which he made up) at the top of his lungs. Below is a small clip, recorded off the child-monitor audio, of his 20+ minute rendition of "Don't Pay the Ferryman" (lyrics by Chris de Burgh and Jota Minuscula Styx)

Purim Pic of the Littest Styx

My daughter in her cow costume Purim eve:

Cockney Rhyming Parenting

I declared back in 2003 that it should be heretofore known that Cockney Rhyming Slang is not cool. It's actually less cool for Britons to use it than Americans because we Yanks just assume everything in a British accent is fancy. Hence, Americans will consider high-class London, Manchester, Cockney, Irish, Scottish, and Australian all 'British accents' and high class. So if an American uses Cockney Rhyming Slang its usually in the same sentence with the word "gov'ner" and a few lines from Austin Powers.

When the British use it, though, it's the UK version of "jive talkin'" and it sounds ridiculous. White boys from Chicago suburbs aren't ghetto and pasty-faced Britons still sound irredeemably wussy even if they attempt to redeem some toughness with the Rhyming Slang.

Moreover, the entire concept is anti-meaning - the phrases are arbitrary and irrelevant. What thief needs to make a code for his wife ("trouble and strife," har har Andy Capp).

Parenting Use

Yet after that devastating rant of mockage, my wife and I actually found a use for Cockney Rhyming Slang that is both legitimate and practical. And thus my derision for the verbal form is now modified: if a person is actually employed as a thief/spy/parent and uses CRS in it's intended manner, then you are spared the otherwise heavy criticism automatically triggered in all right-thinking people.

I'll explain. Every parent, as you know, needs a special language so they can discuss things in front of the kids. My parents (and many of ya'lls, I assume) used Yiddish. However, while my wife knows many languages, I'm stuck with Hebrew and Spanish. The kids are learning Hebrew in school, so that's out, and Spanish is all over PBS (besides being intuitive for most English speakers, as this sound file attests).

So the other day, my wife, to her immense credit, realized that we should just use Cockney Rhyming Slang (we just had a Guy Richie movie marathon so it was in our heads). And it works! So here's some of our terms, for use for the public weal.

[Key: Original Term = CRS (Annotation)]

1. Nap = Ginger Snap (This is by far the best one, and most redolent of the original art form. Say the word 'nap' - even spell it out - and the kid dissolves in tears, hence we now say "ginger")
   
   
2. Lollipop = Boughs of Holly (We use sugar-free lollipop as a reward/bribe but if the boys hear the word, they go nutso in demanding them - so now we say Hollies. It may not work for long so our rejected backups are: "Seward's Folly" or "Lassie, Assuming She Was a Collie")
   
   
3. Television = Long Division (other options: "nuclear fission" or "gone fishin'" or even "double vision" which may be too close to the original; my wife thinks that this weak entry may need to go to "Telly" and then it could be "Jam & Jelly" which sounds satisfyingly like the original form.)
   
   
4. Blankie = Yankee Doodle (If a blankie is missing, it leads to more wailing, so we now use "Yankee" - doodle actually has other uses in our home; another option: "fish tankie")

Pic from here. Oh, see also this google book, cool eh?

Monkey Man

So my mother-in-law took my wife and kids to a live action Curious George show in Worcester. The eldest, Big B, likes the TV Show quite a lot and Jota goes along for the ride. As for me, I'm ambivalent: on one side, I have the adult male's appreciation for monkeys, on the other hand, the show is destructive and even terrible.

This is a PBS kids show and, you may not know, but PBS now has top level animated educational shows that I would have killed for as a kid (instead we had puppet shows and Reading Rainbow). So while there's some superlative stuff, e.g. Zula Patrol & Super Why, there's also Curious George.

Any thinking person will be driven batty by this show - it takes the conceit of the books that a monkey can act as a surrogate/metaphor for a child's sense of curious wonder, play down the freaky pre-War imperialism angle, yet play up the imperiling destructive power of the lead primate.

In nearly every episode, a different set of adults give George access to sensitive and/or expensive venues and he spends most of the episode enacting thousands or millions of dollars of property damage - often to irreplaceable or significant objects. And, after the adults realize that they've allowed such damage to occur, George bears absolutely no consequences! What a wonderful metaphor and lesson for our youth.

My favorite example is when George manages to flood the first few floors of his New York City high-rise domicile. Ha ha! As a former tenant of a flooded NYC building, this episode was both humorous and a PTSD trigger. Another example is when George is introduced to the train engineer booth which had a control set-up similar to an airport's tower. The trains needed the engineer to switch tracks, as they move at top speed, so they will arrive on time. The engineer, after telling our hero about the controls, decides to leave George alone in the booth while he departs for a long lunch. As he leaves, George hears radio calls for help from the trains and he uses his monkey ingenuity to switch the trains - potentially ramming each locomotive into others, resulting in death and carnage. Hoo hah.

Ironically, my boys haven't learned to emulate the destruction (yet) but they do like speaking like monkeys. Which sounded cute, at first, but is actually annoying.

Anyhoo, the live show. The tickets were expensive, and I asked if there was a trained monkey on stage - which would kinda justify the cost, right? I mean, add up your monkey chow, monkey cage interior design, and the rest and that means high overhead. But no, George was played by a dude in a monkey suit (see pic above). So I concluded that the cost must be going to pay for therapy for the kids of the guy in the suit.

High Two

When we describe our kids as geniuses, we often mean that they're precocious - i.e. that they exhibit thought processes of an age older than they are. Yet this presumption of precociousness is based on a parent's knowledge of what children are generally capable of and unless the parent is an expert in (developmental) psychology, medicine, or a child-care professional (e.g. teacher, PT, nurse, what-have-you) then the presumption could be wrong.

The 'genius/precocious' label is more reliable if the child exhibits actual adult behavior/cognition. Especially if the observed behavior/cognition is rare even within adults.

My middle child, Jota Minuscula, constantly amazes us with this genius behavior. He truly thinks outside the box and is also truly funny.

Story from last night: He and his older brother, Big B, were leaving home with their grandmother for a big-boy sleepover. I was holding their baby sister in my arms and Big B, who was dressed in his full winter ensemble, asked if I could hold the baby so he could give her a "high five" - which he did. Then Jota piped up: "No, not a high-five, a high-two because you're wearing mittens!"

Now, this whole observation would be moot if someone told Jota that joke - but we didn't know who did (I didn't). His mom admitted that she wouldn't have thought of that kind of joke, at least as an instant retort. As such, I need to assume that he just thought it up - especially because he's done stuff like that before. It's just the way his mind works.

"I Am A Robot, I'm Going to Clean You"

Cute Kid Alert.

If you say the word "robot" to my son, he will then say - in a robot voice - "I Am A Robot, I'm Going to Clean You" while moving his arms, elbows locked, up and down, making a "vvvt vvvt" voice.

/Cute Kid Alert.

Croup in the 21st Century

Monday night, my son's cold turned into a more serious 'barking' (and barfing) cough. The nurse, over the phone, said that it was probably Croup - which was confirmed by his doctor the next day. Evidently, it's not as bad as I remembered, especially after reading Mark Twain's Experience Of The McWilliamses With Membranous Croup which permanently placed the disease as a nightmare. Turns out "membranous croup" is what we now call Diphtheria. Oopsie.

Happy Birthday Jota Minuscula

I'm still acting as if my identity is a secret, so I will only offer my son's 3rd birthday wishes using one of his codenames (one of mine when I was a kid). Happy birthday Jota Minuscula! He said this morning, in response to being declared 3 years old, that when he grows up he'll be an engineer (a goal he learned from his older brother, Big B) and he'll be "one hundred and fifteen years old." I suggested 120 but he insisted on 115.

Pic from here.

First Day of Kindergarten

My oldest child, codename "Big B," started kindergarten today! A milestone in his life, and my life, simultaneously.

He has many friends there already, and, I'm told that BigB did something his father was unable to do on *first* day of kindergarten. He was brave enough to ask the teacher to go to the bathroom. Many 5 year olds are too anxious to do that (ahem ahem) but BigB did. Yay him.

[Pic from here.]

Personal Update

I've been away a long time, but for real reasons. We had to take my wife to the hospital, back at the end of April, for pregnancy complications and she was basically in there for almost a month until the birth of our daughter on May 22. After that, it's been non-stop catch-up for all the things in my life. I hope to get back on track soon.

Mervin Verbit

Mervin Verbit is a distinguished professor of Sociology at CUNY - which was my second choice for grad school (they offered me a prestigious scholarship) after Brandeis - and I've seen his name referenced a bunch of times. But, I must admit a chronic weakness of mine, one that's shared by some of my heroes (notably, Dave Barry) which is that I cannot resist a funny name.

This man is a senior colleague in my field yet his name is a caraway seed in the dentures of my mind because his name is beautifully, tragically funny.

We were brainstorming what his middle name is: Bert? Gertrude? Murgatroyd?

Story illustrating the use of the name from this morning: I gave a gift to my eldest son: a small paper map of the 553 bus route. He loves it. It's got roads, railroad tracks, the letter T, etc. And there's the picture of the guy I call "Mr. Bus Man" - his smiling face is on a number of bus maps and the MBTA does not identify him. Is he a driver? Does he own a bus? Did he invent Boston? No idea. Anyway, my eldest asked me, naturally, who this guy was. My answer, also naturally: Mervin Verbit.

Mervin Murgatroyd Verbit, to be honest.

A la Grover, I am so ashamed.

The Doodle-Flu

My youngest son a stomach-flu two weeks ago, which spread quickly to my whole nuclear family. It started on Tuesday, the week before Purim, and my last day with it was Purim itself. The symptoms were all gastric (pretty similar to the ones of the food poisoning in Airplane!; I'll see if I can find a clip).

I call it the "doodle-flu" because I call my kids 'doodles' (yeah it's cutsie-poo; there's a long story behind it, but my kids are cute so it works for them).

We knew he wasn't feeling well because he had a lack of appetite even when we were in our favorite restaurant (as you can see in this pre-dated story): the Brandeis cafeteria. Then, near the end of the meal, my youngest let loose with a truly heroic Yorq.

We were mortified (this happened a few months ago to our oldest and we think that there's an unwritten 'three-yorqs-you're-out' clause somewhere). But they were very nice about it. We thought it could have been caused by any number of factors (kids don't need excuses to boot; for the first 12 months of their lives they boot frequently), but as the night progressed we saw that it was part of a constellation of symptoms that developed into the Doodle-Flu.

Now my youngest probably got it from some of his miscreant toddler friends at day-care, and when we called our doctor's office they told us that it was running rampant through Boston.

And that's what I was willing to believe, until this morning.

In preparation for telling the Campus newspapers about my Madoff chair, I went to the website of one of the two papers, The Hoot, where I saw this headline:

Kosher food not responsible for G.I. bug
by Ariel Wittenberg
March 13, 2009

The Health Center confirmed that there was no food poisoning in Sherman Dining Hall after 29 students came to the center complaining of vomiting and diarrhea.

The complaints came from students falling ill after eating at the dining hall, specifically, in the Kosher section; however, Nursing Director Kathleen Maloney said that these students were suffering from a norovirus, or “tummy bug,” and not food poisoning.

[snip]

... [Nursing Director] Maloney said that only three of the 29 students who went to the health center with the virus reported on their health records that they followed a Kosher diet, despite the fact that rumors had speculated that Kosher food was to blame.

Jenna Rubin ’11, who chairs the Student Union’s Dining Services Committee, said that she heard the rumors of food poisoning from multiple students who, after becoming sick, refused to eat food that came from the Kosher Dining hall.

“They wouldn’t eat kosher food, so they couldn’t eat any food on campus,” she said. “They were eating chips and fruit for two days because they were so afraid of it.” [more]

Circumstantial evidence falls to blaming my young son - who is too cute for serious punishment; I still feel guilty.

Pic of a doodling bug, a doodle-bug, from here.

Simple Pleasures: Pom-Poms

We (my that I mean my wife) had as a project, to while away the time on a Sunday afternoon (easily the toughest parenting day at my kids' age - they need to be occupied and we still haven't built the hamster style energy-saving flywheel for them to scamper around in) to put together their Purim costumes. Since both my boys are addicted to Thomas the Tank Engine and associated products (an addiction I encouraged back in the day, more on that another time), the idea was to make train costumes. And to do so, we (again, my wife alone, mea culpa) had to go out and buy art supplies.

Now, I love art supplies. Always have. And my sons are chips off the old block. But the best part was how my youngest developed a sudden, and intense, lust for the fuzzy art supply pom-poms.

When my wife and two kids returned home, my youngest was clutching the bag of pom-poms as if it were a teddy-bear (did he know?). He wanted to have the bag opened immediately and I can imagine he was hoping to dive into the poms like Scrooge McDuck.

When I came back, after an hour or so, to the art-room (the basement playroom), it turned out that my youngest had opened both bags and had systematically strewn the poms all over the floor. It looked like, and I said so at the time, a muppet had exploded.

Parenting & Road Runner

As a parent of boys, I try to plan ahead for what I can use to provide positive and negative reinforcement. We let them watch TV during the day - exclusively PBS Kids (the shows are truly educational, there are no commercials, and other networks - I'm looking at you Nick Jr. - have frenetic and often stupid shows) but when they get ready for bed, we let them watch a little more TV. This allows us to get them in PJs and brush their teeth while using the TV as inducement/punishment. Inducement because they're tired and glazed when ogling the tube, and punishment in that we pause/stop the DVD when they don't cooperate.

So what to let them watch? I decided to start with Road Runner. This was a risky move, because early cartoons are pretty violent. But (a) there are no words, good for their age, (b) the violence is actually not as bad as I remember (we have only the 'toons from the 50s-60s), and (c) since the violence is focused on the coyote, and he's clearly the antagonist, there's a morality to what happens. This is in contrast to Sylvester and Tweetie, which I never liked as a kid: these have words (often bad ones for kids, with insults and mean language), and much more gruesome violence. I was right to not like them as a child, who knew?

Pic from here of an actual Road Runner. Backpost finished 2009-12-06.

Childrearing in the Old Days

I've heard from old timers, thank God not my parents, who denigrate the new rules and restrictions for child safety. These "old wives" say that in their day they would put a child to sleep on his/her stomach, or not use a child seat, or feed a child grapes/peanuts/broken glass - and it would be fine! They would emphasize that "I raised my child this way" somehow assuming that their lives, and those of their immediate circle, create the entire cohort for the law of averages.

I think it's important to remember that infant mortality rates in America have fallen precipitously in the past few decades. To quote the CDC:

At the beginning of the 20th century, for every 1000 live births, six to nine women in the United States died of pregnancy-related complications, and approximately 100 infants died before age 1 year (1,2). From 1915 through 1997, the infant mortality rate declined greater than 90% to 7.2 per 1000 live births, and from 1900 through 1997, the maternal mortality rate declined almost 99% to less than 0.1 reported death per 1000 live births (7.7 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1997)

As such, even though we must respect our elders when they have opinions that reflect their years of accumulated wisdom, the 'elders' often know diddly about medicine. And when an elder is clearly confusing nostalgia with knowledge, then smile politely and whistle a tune in your brain until they stop talking and then say "Thank you" and walk away...

{2009 Update: Child labor picture from here, which captions the photo thus: "[Two girls wearing banners with slogan "ABOLISH CH[ILD] SLAVERY!!” in English and Yiddish, one carrying American flag; spectators stand nearby. Probably taken during May 1, 1909 labor parade in New York City. George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).]"}