We struggle with reading sometimes. It’s okay, really – even though I am an English teacher and an Anglophile of the highest order – I get it. My children are fully immersed in French-speaking classrooms, they are doing well and working very hard. I still want them to be kids, something that wasn’t necessarily happening with any success where they were last year.
It has fallen to me, the stay-at-home writerdadguy who can barely cook, to get a lot of the dailies done while the kids are in school and my wife is at work. I am not complaining. I get to write again, and explore creative options that have sat stifled under piles of guilt and regret for decades. I can follow a recipe, so we’re not starving. I am beginning to enjoy cooking, though I am not sure that I want my wife to know that just yet. She is amazing where I am passable.
There is some reluctance with our youngest to read Chapter Books, which she is certainly ready for. I am not sure what the deal is, although she has said that she wants to stay little. I think she fears growing up because she thinks the way that she is treated will change.
We try to treat our children equally. They all aid in cleaning up, doing laundry, things like that. They can make themselves eggs and routinely pack their own lunches. Things are pretty great. Two ten year olds and a seven year old…
About that seven year old:
She loves Dr. Seuss books, and has read every one we own aloud to me. So I decided to write in the Seussian mode to encourage her. She read it, and now I am trying to get her to write her own. Mine is below. If I have any success having her create her own, I will post it here.
One day we were home and the doorbell did ring.
One day we were home, at the cold end of Spring.
“Who is it?”
“What’s there?”
“Let me see, let me see!”
And when we cried out, our father agreed.
It seemed that he was of terrible mood,
he wasn’t his usual super cool dude…
but we kept on crying our super loud shouts,
we kept on crying, ‘til he let us out.
And what do you know, would you just look at that!
Underneath a giant blue horseradish hat,
there stood a thing so sweet and so cuddly:
Upon the doorstep, so small and so fuzzly,
a poodle, a pink one, and strangest of all,
this little pink poodle was three inches tall!
“Oh my gosh, dad, please look!” we called back through the door,
our hearts growing bigger than they’d grown before.
“Oh my gosh, dad, please look!
“Look!”
“Look!”
“Look, look, look!”
We carried her in, right there, through the door
and we each saw something we’d not seen before:
her eyes were of different colors you see
and atop of her sweet little head grew a tree!
Not a big tree, not gnarly… but tiny, petite:
her tree like a daisy made the whole look complete.
Our father just stood in the room once again
while we danced around, singing and circling our friend.
“I think I have seen one of those things before,”
our father said quietly from the floor.
“A long time ago, yes, I’m suddenly sure.”
C. Brannon Watts 