kids

Summer Vacation, Day 56: Go Yankees!

/ J. Thorp / 4 Comments

I know that the above subject line will make some people’s blood boil. To them, I say, “Tough!”

I purchased four tickets to a Yankees-White Sox game in mid-September – part of a week-long final home-stand in The House That Ruth Built. Brendan, Gabe and I (and one other person TBD) are going to the Bronx to see the old stadium before it closes and falls. Plus NYC, the Statue of Liberty via the Staten Island Ferry, maybe. Everything we can do cheaply. Suggestions? Woohoo!

A couple days later, the Yale football plays its opener at the Yale Bowl against Georgetown. Might hit that, too – and the Peabody Museum of Natural History and Yorkside. Oh, this is gonna be fun!

It’s also gonna be a lot of driving. Even figuring diesel at $5 a gallon and only 40 mpg (I average 46 or so), it’s still way cheaper to take the Golf than fly or Amtrak it. Could check the bus, I guess …

Summer Vacation, Day 55: Gabe at Work

/ J. Thorp / 6 Comments

Brought Gabe to work with me today, and thought I’d share a few of the highlights and authentic Gabeisms:

1. This being the U’s off-season, lots of rental properties around campus have “For Rent” signs posted – in windows, on the doors, on the lawn. We passed one such property and Gabe said, “That’s the second tree for rent I’ve seen today!” He laughed and laughed, then explained that the “For Rent” sign was stuck to the tree, but it was for the house …

2. In a colleague’s office, given full freedom of a white board, he drew three bowling pins and a bowling ball dropping from the sky – black outlines, red stripes on the pins. In order to use every color white board marker available, he signed the picture by: Gabe!

3. In a meeting immediately following the drawing, he sat quietly and recreated the drawing in his notebook. Then he drew another, with the ball actually striking the pins. Each of these he labeled “ARIGNL” — then made smaller version of each on a single sheet of paper, labeling those “COPY” and inviting me to hang them in my office.

4. In the same meeting, as people were filing in, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “How many boys will be in this meeting?” I replied, “Just us, I think.” (Most of my coworkers are women, and he seemed to be getting nervous – they all kept talking to him and trying to give him stuff …)

5. I was sitting at my desk watching the boy at the computer I set up for him, and got the warm, fuzzy, proud-papa feeling. “Gabe,” I said, “I think I’ll keep ya.”

“Fine by me,” he said.

Summer Vacation, Day 54: Call Me Trevvy

/ J. Thorp / 3 Comments

Trevor turned four a little more than a month ago. As recently as two weeks ago, I was still sailing along through Moby Dick, and the kids were asking all sorts of questions about the book I always seemed to have with me.

Trevor, in particular, was interested in the white whale himself, and asked me to find a picture of a sperm whale on the computer (i.e., google it). I forgot a time or two, and then the little man came back from Target with a new Imaginext toy purchased with his own birthday money. “That,” I told him, “is what a sperm whale looks like!”

His whale is not white, but (based on countless pages of description) it’s clearly the same species. I told him I wanted a photo of his whale – he put the harpooneer in its mouth. The package called the whale Hefty, but over supper, our son proclaimed him Moby Dick …

Today I returned to Jacqui’s Room to watch her critically acclaimed video review of the Melville classic, and thought perhaps she’d enjoy Trevvy’s staging.

Summer Vacation, Day 53: Good Housekeeping?

/ J. Thorp / 3 Comments

Is it a bad sign when the living rooms are just picked up enough that they don’t look like bedrooms, when the bedrooms are just picked up enough that you can make out a trail from bed to the closet to the door, when kitchen is just clean enough that you’d consider crossing the floor barefoot, and when the bathrooms have no standing water – and the children are gushing about how great the house looks?

We’ve worked all weekend, and it still feels like an uphill battle to Jodi and me. Meanwhile, Brendan is declaring victory: “Now all we gotta do is keep it this way!”

Summer Vacation, Day 51: Better World

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

Brendan, our oldest, came to work with me today. On the way in, we talked about all sorts of stuff – not typical 10-year-old stuff, but grown-up things, like whether people who don’t believe the same as you should still respect your beliefs. Super cool!

Then The Current spun “War!” – “Ughn! Good God, y’all! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’! Say it again!” – and the boy began to philosophize:

“I wish we could find a better way to deal with problems that wars or the death penalty and stuff. … I wish that there wasn’t all the really bad stuff in the world – but not perfect, because nothing would be funny. If everything were perfect, there would be no laughter. … I wouldn’t want it to be perfect, and I would change the things I’ve done wrong that have gotten me in trouble because how would I learn about right and wrong? … And if we were all perfect, what would we laugh about?”

O wise child! Thy father loves thee!