parenting – Page 20

Diary of a 5-year-old

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

We have talked the 5-year-old into keeping a casual diary of sorts, and, while it’s so fun to see his days summarized in his little hyphenated paragraphs, it’s also really surprising, too. For instance, we’d thought that he had a terrible time on the day mentioned above! He moped around and complained about the heat and all the walking. It’s a reminder that if you have a kid who keeps things close to the chest, giving them tools to express themselves (in O’s case it’s Garageband on the iPad to write songs, or a pen and a nice notebook for a diary) gives you this whole different glimpse into who they are and what they’re feeling and thinking.

Shell games

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Shed Your Skin Like the Golden Cicada
When you are in danger of being defeated, and your only chance is to escape and regroup, then create an illusion.
—The 36 Strategies

Summer afternoons in Texas with a 5 and 3-year-old have me at my wits’ end. Yesterday, their mom was off on errands, so I suggested the grossest activity I could think of: Let’s go around and collect the cicada shells stuck all over our porch, fence, and trees. We wound up collecting over 50 of them, and then we were trying to decide what on earth to do with them.

Twitter alerted me to a Japanese high school student who made a cicada monster:

A few summers ago, we put them on the kids’ chalkboard and tried to make comics with them:

Then we put them in one of the boys’ cars and made a timelapse video out of them (which I lost, sadly):

After all this, I was reminded of Ladislav Starevich, who made stop-motion animations using dead bugs, like The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912):

Boredom has its creative benefits.

The season of lies

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Back home after two weeks on the road with the kids. No new epiphanies, only fortified beliefs:

1. Traveling with young children is not a “vacation” it is a “trip.”

The sooner you understand and accept this the sooner you can lower your expectations accordingly. My kids are, I think, wonderful travelers, and even so, traveling with them is beyond exhausting.

2. Photos can say whatever we want them to say.

Instagram lies. If you follow me on Instagram, it probably looked like I was having the time of my life. Nope! There was a lot of eye candy to be had, but a large majority of the trip was pretty miserable.

I found myself thinking a lot about Errol Morris’s book, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, and how he summarized it in these handy 8 points:

All photographs are posed.
The intentions of the photographer are not recorded in a photographic image. (You can imagine what they are, but it’s pure speculation.)
Photographs are neither true nor false. (They have no truth-value.)
False beliefs adhere to photographs like flies to flypaper.
There is a causal connection between a photograph and what it is a photograph of. (Even photoshopped images.)
Uncovering the relationship between a photograph and reality is no easy matter.
Most people don’t care about this and prefer to speculate about what they beleive about a photograph.
The more famous a photograph is, the more likely it is that people will claim it has been posed or faked.

If you’re sitting around this summer scrolling Instagram seething with jealousy over vacation photos, remember what Mary Karr says: “Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to people’s blow-dried outsides.” You have no idea what kind of time anybody’s having. Images are nothing without context.

If you love summer and summer vacation, I’m happy for you. For me, it’s the season of lies. Best to pour some iced tea, crack a book, and wait for it to pass.

(Happy to be back, BTW. Will write a more upbeat post tomorrow!)

The distance I can be from my son

Monday, July 9, 2018

We took the 5-year-old docent and his brother back to the Blanton Museum this afternoon. My favorite piece was Lenka Clayton’s The Distance I Can Be From My Son (2013). In three short videos, Clayton films her son walking away from her until she can’t stand it anymore and runs after him. The videos were part of Clayton’s “Artist Residency in Motherhood:” an attempt to “allow [motherhood] to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work ‘despite it’.”

In Hannah Gadsby’s devastating Netflix special, Nanette, she deconstructs how jokes work on a system of tension and release — the setup is “artificially inseminated with tension” and the punchline releases it. Each of these videos is structured like a joke: You see the son toddling away, and at the very end of the video, the mother bolts after him. Tension and release. Setup and punchline.

There are interesting layers here: Clayton is setting herself up to see how far she can let her son go, and she’s setting us up, too. (Gadsby points out that her job as a comedian is to build tension and release it and do that over and over again. “This is an abusive relationship!”) We watched the videos with our kids after spending an exhausting 30 minutes in the museum trying to keep them close, my wife restraining the 3-year-old from leaping onto the paintings. (Unfortunately, art museums do require “helicopter parenting.”) The joke, I think, is not on the kid, or the kid viewers: my sons laughed out loud during the videos — I think they were rooting for him to get away!

Then, you remember the news and the fact that our government has split thousands of families apart at the border. Suddenly, The Distance I Can Be From My Son takes on a completely different meaning. You laughed and now you want to scream.

Drawing side by side

Sunday, July 8, 2018

My 3-year-old loves Super Simple Draw (how great would it be to have an animated Ed Emberley!) but my 5-year-old never really showed much interest until the other day when they were both in the studio. It was really fun to watch them draw side-by-side and compare their drawings: