It’s great having three kids, and whenever possible, Wife and I try to pull them all together and do things as a screeching, protesting, questioning Forcedly Functional Fivesome.
Which makes the one-on-one kid times somewhat rare and very entertaining.
So it was, on Saturday morning, that even though we had to get up at 6:15 a.m. on a Saturday, and drive about an hour away, I was actually looking forward to some solo time with Rosebud, who will turn 8 next month.
I was not disappointed. I was so not disappointed that as soon as she joined her teammates, I opened up the note function on my phone and tried to capture the unfiltered wisdom I was just imparted. If you could keep this curiosity sharp – while learning all that we learn in college and in life – you’d have a pretty unbeatable corporate leader.
On the way there, Rosebud immediately wondered if we would get more red lights or green lights, so we counted.
“Do you know how to play SKY TIC TAC TOE?”
Of course I didn’t, so she explained that it is done with contrails, and that you can either dot your Xs or Os above the contrail lines or you can verbally do the Xs an Os, and that really the main problem is that there are rarely enough vertical lines that cross the horizontal.
“Hey, when you fly to Florida tomorrow, you could ask your pilot to make some lines?”
It was agreed that I would.
We then discussed a few other items:
● How “Miss Blodgett” her second grade teacher is a lot like a student, in that her husband packs her a lunch and a snack every day and she wears a backpack to school to carry it in.
● Whether I could hear the sound that Rosebud was presently making with her cheeks and whether it was loud in the front of the car.
● That the Big Otter River must have otters in it and that they must be large, or that the Big Otter River must be shaped like an otter – and if so, which part of the otter we had just driven over.
● That “Miss Blodgett” had already missed five days or school, three one week and then two when she went to someone’s wedding, and how if she misses about five more, she’ll probably get a nasty letter from the school district.
● That Rosebud likes sheep, but they have no brain because they always just follow each other, which is why they could easily get eaten by an Anaconda.
● (Upon passing Thomas Jefferson’s Country House, Poplar Forest): Whether Thomas Jefferson really needed two houses, but anyway, that the location of this one – surrounded by a mulch company, a fake Jefferson neighborhood and a four-lane highway – didn’t look much like a location he’d enjoy.
● If I had ever put a Band-Aid on my finger so tight that it turned purple.
● Whether I was aware that the term “gay” had two meanings, one for people who are happy all the time and the other to denote the kind of person once featured in “Poppy’s hitchhiking story.”
● If I had ever noticed that bald men’s heads are really shiny and how they get that shiny.
● And that the indentation in the back of the car head rest would be an excellent place for a fairy to live – not all the time, but when the fairy went on a vacation for a couple of weeks.
I had never noticed the indentation, then again, I figured fairies were permanently on vacation.
For the record: 16 green, 7 red, 1 yellow.
I wonder who ever decided green was for go and red was for stop and yellow meant slow down and which part of the otter we crossed and what fairies really do on vacation?
MyThreeDaughters 