“Yeah, I’m definitely waiting up for Santa.”
At dinner, my six-year-old daughter ran into the kitchen and told us that she was late to the table because she was writing her letter to Santa Claus.
She sat down and explained.
“I wrote that I want chocolate, lots of it,” she told us.
“And I want a Monster High doll, a DS, a DS game, a cuddly teddy bear, a pair of flip flops, and a…” she said, rattling off what she’d put on her list.
She paused to take a breath.
Then she went on to explain that at the bottom of the letter she wrote: “And Santa, please don’t listen to anything my Mum says about me.”
I laughed.
Luckily my wife did too, at least I think she did.
“You hear that? That’s the big city!”
After a week in a pine forest on the coast of Argentina, my youngest daughter came back beaming to the big city.
Why?
We’d gone to the beach, walked down sandy lanes in the forest, and she and her brother and sister had raced bikes, climbed trees, and played in the garden as cowboys and Indians, as knights and robbers, and as campers who had to keep warm in the cold out in the wild like something out of a Jack London
novel. [continue reading…]
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
I took the bus with my nine-year-old son, who is mildly autistic, and we sat in the back.
I thought, hey, we’re back-of-the-bus kids, the cool lot.
He smiled, bounced a couple of times in his seat, and said, “Hey, Dad, we should always sit in the back.”
I said, “Yep,” remembering my days from high school and the quest to gain that “cool” status by sitting in the back, and then later on becoming cool enough (or so I thought) that I didn’t need to fuss about sitting in the back anymore.
My son continued: “Because we are a family of five, and there are five seats on the back row, so we fit.” [continue reading…]
