Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Tuesday, March 31, 2009 The Quarter in Movies (Part 1) One of the nice things about having Chao living up here now is that I have someone to go to movies more often with. In fact, despite my hectic recapping schedule, I've seen more movies in the theater past three months than I did during a few entire calendar years. So it only makes sense to convert the previously annual movie review into a quarterly feature. That way I'm less likely to forget stuff. Although I can't really make any promises. Yes Man As always, the first film of the year is from the previous year, but since I saw this on New Year's Day, there wasn't a way around that even if I'd tried. This is not something I would have gone to see on my own, and I didn't. I went with my sisters-in-law, and actually enjoyed it. I thought it was going to be another Jim Carrey supernatural comedy, like Liar, Liar or Bruce Almighty, but it was just about a guy in a rut of negativity who made a conscious decision to go in the other direction. It actually kind of spoke to me. Sometimes Trash thinks I'm too negative and closed off to new ideas, and she's right; I have to make an effort not to be. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that this little movie kind of inspired me to say "yes" more, at least for a while. I'm also really glad that I saw it after the trailer that asked me to see He's Just Not That Into You. Doubt The effects of Yes Man were still lingering into the very next night, when Chao and Gerd invited me to see this with them. I wasn't too excited to see it, since I actually thought the title was Dobut and thus was expecting a totally different kind of movie. Okay, not really, but I was wary of seeing another film by writer/director John Patrick Shanley. He and I have had kind of a tense relationship since Joe Versus the Volcano. Jvs.tV is a somewhat controversial film, generally regarded as a debacle but with a few passionate defenders. I'm not one of them. I saw a few parallels with this more recent effort. One was that Shanley's ability to evoke a dreary environment remains undiminished, and indeed has been refined in both subtlety and endurance. The other is you can't go to a Shanley movie expecting it to get anywhere in a hurry. And finally, the redhead is going to disappear sometime in the second act. Quantum of Solace Febrifuge and I have seen every James Bond movie in the theater together since A View to a Kill. We almost missed this one, but then he was back in town for a six-week rotation, and I sneaked out of work early one Wednesday afternoon, and the streak remains unbroken. I've been hearing that in recent years, James Bond has been more and more influenced by Jack Bauer, which I can totally see. You know who I'd rather see him getting influenced by? Michael Westen. I'd love James Bond to start explaining everything he's doing in a dry, sarcastic voice-over. If nothing else, maybe it would have helped this movie make more sense. It certainly would have made it more fun. The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy Shit, man, I don't even know where to start with this. Should I say this was the first midnight movie at the Uptown theater that I'd seen in years? That it was the first movie I ever saw in a theater in 3-D? That it was the first pr0n feature I ever sat through? And quite possible the worst movie I've ever seen in my life? Because all of these things are true. When I told Trash about it the next morning, she thought I was making it up. Yes, she believed me when I told her about the random sexual encounters that opened the film and punctuated it at random intervals, but then when I got to the part where the three ancient Greek soldiers wander into the film and spend the rest of it looking for Troy and each other in lengthy, talky, Vaudeville-inflected scenes, while wearing animal costumes, she thought I was making it up. And then the movie gets weird. In between the Vaudeville routines are random shots of people waving things at the camera, a long and talky plot about a candy company that accidentally invents aphrodisiac lollipops, until it ends with the film's director and screenwriter appearing on screen, the former suicidal. I didn't blame him. The weirdest thing was taking off the 3-D glasses after two hours. Staring through red and blue lenses had created powerful blue and red afterimages on our eyes. I think that freaked everyone out more than the part where the dude rolled an egg downhill into our faces. Anyway, Chao wrote a more cohesive review at the time. You're probably better off checking that out. More big film events coming later this week, including two that begin with W! No, make that three. posted by M. Giant 6:00 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:I look forward to many more movies together. Besides, Star Trek and Land of the Lost are coming soon - which one am I going to like more? I think writers are losing their imaginations and just rehashing movies they liked as kids. Maybe you should write a new script for Goonies 2 or Neverending Story 2015.
By Saturday, March 28, 2009 More Than Meets the Eye I got my first Transformer in 1985. It was also my last. It was a semi-gag gift from my ever-waggish friends for my fifteenth birthday. Even then, parents were complaining about how modern toys were cheap plastic gewgaws compared to the indestructible heirlooms of oak and cast iron that the pre-Coca Cola Santa Claus used to deliver with their annual Christmas orange. Fine, then where are those toys now? Yeah, I thought so. Because here's the thing: I've still got that Transformer. Or, more accurately, M. Edium does. To be fair, my large "Jetfire" figure was above contemporary durability standards. I could tell that even at the time. There's a surprisingly high proportion of metal in there, and all the joints and hinges still operate and lock as smoothly as they did 25 Januarys ago. And, also to be fair, it languished in my parents' basement from the time I moved out until they moved into their new house several years ago and decided my kid might have more use for my old Legos and toys than they did. I didn't expect Transformers to come back the way they have, and I certainly wouldn't have predicted that when my son was four and a half, he'd be going through a Transformers stage. It's nowhere near the passion of his WALL-E stage at its peak, but he's been pretty excited about wearing his TF PJs to bed at night. I think he's half-hoping that he'll wake up in the morning in the form of a Big Wheel. Over the last year, he's accumulated a few miniature Transformer toys of his own. Of course, they're cheap plastic gewgaws compared to my oak-and-cast iron Jetfire heirloom, but he enjoys them. One of them is like a Mitsubishi version of Optimus Prime that stands maybe five inches tall in robot form. He's been playing with that for a few days (by which I mean bringing it to me and saying, "Dad, can you transform this please?"). Then yesterday, he suddenly asked, "Where's my Decepticon?" "You own a Decepticon?" we asked him. We didn't remember him owning a Decepticon, but he's usually right about these kind of things. So we let him empty one of his toy bins all the way to the bottom until, sure enough, he located an angry-looking steel-gray robot with pointy bits sticking out all over it. He handed it to me and said, "See what this transforms into." Ten minutes later, I had managed to transform it into the same robot doing yoga. Transformers are trickier than you think. They don't just crouch down into a fetal position to become whatever vehicle they're supposed to be. Shit twists and rotates and folds in ways that, if a human were to try it, would transform that human into an organ harvest. It's more difficult when you don't have the instructions, or even any memory of what the robot is supposed to transform into. It's all very counterintuitive, especially if you've seen them transform instantly by themselves like in the movie trailer. Why are there wheels on the elbows? Shouldn't the head be tucked away somewhere? Does it count if I just snap it off? But my persistence was rewarded, and after a half hour or so, I presented my son with some kind of Decepticon airplane with the arms, head, and torso of a robot sticking out the back. No wonder the robot looked so angry. After Trash stopped laughing, approximately five minutes later, she gave it a try herself, also using her mad librarian skillz to try to find instructions for this model online, which was tricky with only the number 82121 printed on its pelvis/central fuselage. But she didn't have any better luck than I did. "You're the boy!" she protested. "You're supposed to be able to do this!" Well, we've got a new boy now. And if he ever wants his third transformer, a red SUV, to turn into anything more than a stunted dwarf-bot with scoliosis, he's going to have to figure it out on his own. posted by M. Giant 10:55 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:
Have you tried the Transformers wiki? http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Main_Page
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You know, I read this and somewhere my transformers-hoarding husband just broke out into a cold sweat and doesn't know why. He does that every time somebody admits to letting their child play with the generation 1 toys.
By Correction, a quick google search reveals that it would only be about half a month's rent, and then only if new in box. Those TF collectors are nutbars...
By Wednesday, March 25, 2009 Trash has been after me to re-post this old entry for a few days now. It's from back when I still had enough old funny stories to carry me through days when nothing happened. If you've ever considered starting a blog for stories like that, I can tell you that they won't last as long as you think. I have this rule about not being rude to people who have access to my food while it's being prepared. It's just common sense. You piss someone off, and who knows how many of their bodily secretions you could be ingesting moments later? Sometimes it's hard, though. Like the time my wife Trash and I hit the drive-thru on the way to work one morning. I won't tell you the name of the restaurant, because I'm discreet like that. Anyway, I order us two Egg McMuffins. That's it. But from the reaction of the person at the other end of the speaker, I might as well have been in an airport control tower trying to convey DC-10 landing instrctions to a quadriplegic platypus with severe brain damage. She "repeated" the order back to me. "Bacon Egg & Cheese Biscuit?" "No," I said patiently. "Two Egg McMuffins." "Hash browns and orange juice?" "Actually," I clarified, "that's two Egg McMuffins." "Hotcakes?" This exchange went back and forth, with me consistently repeating the phrase "Two Egg McMuffins," while she tirelessly came back at me with every other permutation of breakfast food she could think of. Finally, I managed to get across the concept of an Egg McMuffin. "One Egg McMuffin?" she asked. Dear God, we're still not there. "No," I kindly explained, "two Egg McMuffins." "Egg McMuffin and what?" she asked. I understood I would have to tread carefully here, or I would end up with a pair of Loogie McMuffins. "Egg McMuffin," I said slowly, "and...another Egg McMuffin." Silence. It was all or nothing. I screwed my courage to the sticking place and added: "For a grand total of...two Egg McMuffins." The speaker crackled softly. I listened to it. Time passed. Cars lined up behind us. The sun climbed higher into the sky. "Sausage?" she asked. I took a deep breath and tried again. I sent Trash to get a can of gas so I could keep idling. The sun set. Public officials served out their terms. The coasts flooded. Glaciers covered the parking lot, then receded. The sun became a dark red cinder. Finally, I heard the words that had become the apotheosis of my very existence: "$3.19, please pull forward." Trash retrieved my eyeballs after they rolled all the way into the back seat, and I did so. There was some drool on our sandwiches, but I don't think it was put there maliciously. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless. posted by M. Giant 10:23 AM 3 comments 3 Comments:
That reminds me of this classic Dr. Demento bit:
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A friend of mine and I were in a late-night drive-in. At the end of our order, the cashier asked over the intercom, "Habbada babbada beebees tonight?"
By ha! pretty funny
By Sunday, March 22, 2009 I started this blog seven years ago this week, so in honor of the occasion, I decided to post the entry that's the reason I get to put "award-winning" on my resume. Enjoy. Last winter, Strat was getting a little, shall we say, less than discriminating about where he was shooting his whiz (I’m talking about my cat, in case you’re just joining us today). After a few weeks of having to smell our clothes before we put them on, we appealed to the veterinarian for help. The vet subscribes to my number one rule of problem-solving, to wit: when narrowing down possible causes, the first thing you check for should be the easiest thing to fix. That approach has served me well in the past, although it does have limits; for example, filling a dying car with high-octane gas is only going to do so much when the clutch has worn down to a featureless disk. But in this case, the vet suggested we try to rule out a bladder or kidney or UTI infection before we tried to address psychological causes. All we needed was a urine sample. No problem, I’ll just wander around the house wiping up noisome damp spots on the carpet, or I’ll wring out something from the laundry hamper, or I’ll scrape those golden crystals off my dress shoes—what’s that you say? It has to be in liquid form? Oh, fine. At this point we had two options. One was to park the cat overnight in a cage at the vet’s office, and they monitor him and collect the sample when…you know. When it’s time. The other option was to send him home with a collection kit. This consists of a bag of plastic beads and a plastic catbox liner. What you do is take the regular litter out of the litterbox, put the liner down in it, and scatter the beads onto the liner. The beads don’t react with cat juice, so it allows for a clean sample. Then you lock the cat in the bathroom overnight with the plastic litter. It has to be a small room because a cat would rather pee anywhere than into a catbox filled with components for cheap jewelry. Then, in the morning, you gather up the warm yellow slushie, double-bag it, and drop it off at the vet’s office for analysis. The urine goes to the lab and the beads go to the factories that supply Claire’s Boutique. Pretty ingenious, really. Vastly preferable to following the cat around the house all day holding a vial under where his little kitty winky used to be. Naturally, we went with the option that was less expensive and less traumatizing to the cat, even though it involved a little more work on our part and lacked the reliability of the other option. Yes, we had spent weeks trying to get rid of cat pee, and now we were trying to get some. We’re all about the irony. The first night we did this, Orca was thrilled. She was so happy to not have to share us and the bed with Strat for the night that she woke us up at four a.m. to express her joy. Yeah, I’m happy too, cat. Now stop headbutting me. In the morning, I discovered that Strat had peed in the litterbox, but he had pushed the liner aside to urinate directly into the plastic bin, shredding the liner in the process. The sample was useless. We’d have to get another kit and try it again. It was another couple of nights before we got around to it. One of these nights, I had a dream that Strat had actually died from a kidney infection, and it was all my fault for not getting it diagnosed and taken care of in time. I had no idea how close to prophetic that dream of my cat’s death would prove to be. Although not in the way you’re thinking. That next day, I was using our bathroom in its non-cat-confining capacity. I was just sitting there, minding my own business. Strat came in, looked at me, turned around, and peed on me. Let me say that again, just in case you were skimming: MY CAT PEED ON ME. Once again, for the Google searchers: MY+CAT+PEED+ON+ME+!!!!! I know I should come up with a funnier way to say that, but it’s still too upsetting, even months later. One second I was sitting on my throne, receiving a respectful visitor, and in the next second my leg, pants, underwear, and sock had been baptized with pure liquid ammonia stink. Trash heard my cry of shock and disgust and more shock, and came to see what happened. “Your cat just pissed on me!” I accused as I chased him down. Any of you with a household of three or more beings knows what the phrase “your cat” or “your dog” or “your kid” or “your roommate” or “your Attorney General” means, so I’ll just assume I can move on without clarifying. “I think this proves that he’s sick,” Trash managed between poorly suppressed guffaws. “He fucking better be!” I bellowed, holding the cat by his tail and using mighty overhand strokes to crack his head repeatedly on the top of the doorframe. What the hell kind of cat will come up (more accurately, back up) to the person who has for over a decade provided him with food, water, shelter, and unconditional love, and VOID THE FOUL CONTENTS OF HIS BLADDER on that person? On CHRISTMAS EVE?!? I’ll tell you what kind. The kind that spends Christmas Day stuffed into the Brita™ pitcher in the fridge. We got a usable urine sample the next business day (since I lacked the presence of mind to squeegee piss off of myself into a bottle when I had the chance) and the vet confirmed that Strat did indeed have a fire in his loins that could only be quenched by antibiotics. That’s why he’s still alive. Not because the antibiotics saved his life but because the excuse did. The antibiotics were contained in a colloidal suspension that we had to squirt into his mouth twice a day using an eyedropper. God, he hated that. God, I didn’t care. After ten days, the infection was cleared up. Since he didn’t feel like his litterbox was sticking live electrodes up his peehole any more, he struck up his relationship with it anew. He’s been much better behaved, urine-wise, ever since. Maybe the reasons for that are purely medical. Or maybe he knows that even though the medicine is gone, I still have the eyedropper. And payback’s a bitch. posted by M. Giant 6:01 PM 8 comments 8 Comments:My all-time favorite blog. Thank you for posting it again.
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Seconding the thanks - I had actually forgotten this one, but when I was midway through I realized what was about to happen and started laughing before I even got to the Big Moment!
By Ahhh Strat! We miss your furry funny stories.
By I can't believe it. I would never have thought that anyone else had been minding their own business when the cat did his business on their leg. It is good to know that I am not alone. But I still have no idea why Arthur did it.
By God, you are funny. Ah, memories. I can practically hear the poorly suppressed guffaws now. Good times!! Kisses, Anna
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LOL!
By I know that this is an older post, but as you put it, Google Users: cat+peed+on+me. I was just laying on the couch, just now actually (well, before the bath) and my "elderly" cat jumped up on my lap and just peed! I was half awake and he continued to lay there, for a second I wondered if I had peed myself, lol. Not funny, being that he continued to lay there, prettu sure he didnt even know and it may be his time.
By I was scanning the net and found this. I can relate. I got my cat declawed 2 weeks ago. I was home with the stomach flu yesterday and he slept on me and peed on me. My vet thinks it's because he got really comfortable and just released his bladder (a lot). I need to throw out my down duvet and pillow. My mattress was cleaned. I'm still sick and he's sleeping downstairs from now on.
By Thursday, March 19, 2009 Do the Collapse Every once in a while, M. Edium just needs to chill. We love that he gets excited about stuff, and how happy stuff makes him. But as much as we'll miss these days years from now when he's cultivating the studied contempt of a teenager (or, let's face it, a ten-year-old), sometimes it can be a bit much. And he just needs to chill. Like last Friday, when Dave and Tara were here. As I believe I've mentioned, both Trash and M. Edium have Fridays off. Between the thawing weather and the "Mommy and M. Edium" day in progress and the friends from out of town that he hasn't seen without the aid of Flickr for the better part of a year, he was wound up tighter than a B-string tuned to E-sharp. He though he needed to be everywhere at once, doing all things at all times, and spouting every word in his vocabulary at top volume. In fact, he just needed to chill. But since chilling was not happening on its own, we invited him to have some quiet time in his room. This was not a punishment or a time-out, mind you, because he wasn't actually doing anything wrong. He just needed a little quiet time, and he went along with our suggestion, possibly in part because he was probably getting a little tired of being told to chill every thirty seconds. Another reason he was happy to be up there -- and, quite honestly, another factor adding to the level of his excitement -- was that some guys were trimming tree branches in our backyard, and the neighbors' backyard on both sides of us. When I delivered him into his room, I suggested he watch the guys to keep himself entertained. I wasn't actually expecting it to work, but to my surprise it did, and I went back down to rejoin the adult conversation. About ten minutes later, we heard a crash that we wouldn't have needed the baby monitor to perceive, followed by that distinctive sound that's so like an old-time siren getting cranked up to speed. I dashed upstairs and found him sitting on the floor. Also on the floor was his tipped-over wastebasket, his wooden stepstool, and -- here's the weird part -- a rather large pile of old board books. "I fell," he told me. "No shit," I didn't say. While scooping him up to comfort him, it took me a moment to reconstruct the accident in my head. Clearly he had put the stepstool on top of the wastebasket and climbed up on it to get a better view of the doings outside. But where had the books come from? The stepstool has a little drawer that had fallen out, but it's not big enough to hold more than a couple of those books. Besides, there was an empty space on one of his shelves. "Did you stand on a stack of books?" I asked after he had calmed down and told me where it hurt. "Yeah," he said. Trash and I both told him that he should a) never stand on his wastebasket, b) never stand on anything else on his wastebasket, and c) especially never stand on a stack of books on top of his wastebasket. He quickly set us straight. "I put the wastebasket on the books," he explained. Sometimes, when we're watching him play with his blocks, we wonder if he's going to grow up to be a structural engineer. Maybe he will and maybe he won't, but either way he's got a bit more growing up to do before anyone entrusts life and/or limb to his creations. I know. I should just chill. posted by M. Giant 9:11 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:Aftermath: http://www.flickr.com/photos/glark/3354738806/
By Best guitar string analogy EVER.
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I actually AM a structural engineer, and I still do stupid stuff like that at home.
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"No shit," I didn't say.
By Tuesday, March 17, 2009 How Deep Is Your Love? Trash is taking over for me for another entry. Dude, this is sweet. You know how you will be watching a TV show, enjoying it a regular amount, and then something - or someone - will suddenly stand out in a way that makes it the BEST SHOW EVER? That's how I feel about Law and Order: Sex Police, because of my great affection for Mr. Ice-T (or as I keep wanting to type it, Ice-Tea.). I know he spends most of his time on the show barking his lines like a drill sergeant, ignoring all nuance within the sentences and avoiding the use of pauses or inflection. I realize that the directors have given up on trying to help him improve, and have resorted to directing him to either enter or leave a room while speaking his lines, just to give him some sort of motivation. I understand that the other actors - many of whom are quite talented in their own right - sometimes add an extra pause at the end of a line, as though attempting to convince themselves that yes, he is actually supposed to be on the show. I don't care. I love him. LOVE him. In my mind, he is brilliant. The way he chooses to look blank as an emotive choice, the times he is still talking after he has left the screen, the fact that you can see him looking for the invisible *X* that should tell him when to stop walking - and talking - when he crosses the room. I love it all. I used to watch the show with our friends Linda and Bitter and I would make them hush whenever he was on the screen. Of course, most episodes he isn't on the screen for longer than a couple of minutes, but sometimes I was lucky and he would have several lines in a row. In fact, my favorite episode of any show EVER was called "Haunted", or as I like to call it "39 Stories About Ice-T." The episode is clearly his Emmy reel, as all of the lead characters on the show are given at least one episode to show their stuff to the judges. In "39 Stories", the directors haven't bothered to write an entire episode, with a linear plotline. They obviously understand it would be asking too much of their muse. Rather, they have the start of 39 different stories, and they let him go in each one until he is spent, usually 2-3 minutes into the plot. Ice-T stops a bodega shooting? Check! Ice-T is assumed to have shot an unarmed boy? Check! Ice-T has a reunion with his estranged, gay son? Is accused of allowing a girl to die when he was working undercover narcotics? Breaks up a meth lab? Saves a baby? Check! Check! Check! Check! It's as though they emptied out the drawer of starter plots and used all of them in this one episode. The other cast members make cursory appearances, but to provide Ice with a partner they had to go outside, and bring in someone unaffiliated with the show. Well, do you blame the others? How could their own Emmy reels possibly stand up against this one? Luckily the new partner is hot, and often shirtless, so everyone wins. Last year, Tara took pity on me and my laments about the infrequent airings of "39 Stories" and recapped the episode for me. She found all of the elements that I love best about the episode, and more. I had forgotten some of the finest elements of Ice's acting, the poignant pauses as he struggled to remember his lines and the way he squints to look menacing, because really? The recaps remains one of my most cherished possessions, and no, you may not borrow it. This past week Tara sent me a link to a recent commercial The T filmed for the new Conan O'Brian show, and it's a little upsetting, because in the ad he appears to be acting. Not yelling, or muttering, but acting. Check it out: It is a little worrisome, because it raises the possibility that his acting on the show is intentional, which might ruin my enjoyment…. No, that's a lie. It would add yet another layer to this amazing two-dimensional man. Moreover, this weekend Tara and Dave informed me that, while they were out of town, SVU has filmed close to their home in Manhattan, and they MISSED it. After expressing my disappointment in them for having lives outside of Ice-T, Dave offered to enhance a photo that should have already existed.  I think my life is now complete. Labels: trash talkin' posted by M. Giant 8:59 PM 8 comments8 Comments:This is not complete without your reenactment of him walking across a room, pausing to read his line, and continuing.
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I think this is the one place where I can make this, my deepest, darkest confession:
By You really sell it in that photo.
By Reading this post, one would never know that someone very special had recapped that episode of "SVU" for you.
By I don't even know you, yet, that's STILL the best picture ever!
By Tara! I included your BRILLIANT recap of the episode in my first draft, but I hesitated to include it because now everyone will want to read it, and I didn't know if you wanted to share it with the world. But I shall rectify the situation post-haste.
By I am picturing Miss Alli, Tara, and Trash on the counch, quietly watching L&O Sex Police (I love the new name!) I bet the comments are brilliant. It would be a live recap.
By Trash needs her tongue pierced.
By Saturday, March 14, 2009 M. Edium's at his grandparents' house for the evening, so I'm looking forward to a night uninterrupted by needing to help a small human go to the bathroom, or waking up with him next to me in bed. I shouldn't complain, I know. It used to be much worse, four years ago. As this week's rerun demonstrates. Humpblog (1/05/05) Overheard while putting away clean laundry the other day: “Why are the legs of these pants all knotted up like this?” “Well, they’re yoga pants, aren’t they?” * * * I’m nobody’s brain trust at the best of times, but when I first wake up, look out. Especially now that I’m waking up every night to help take care of the baby. So particularly look out if you are the baby. Not long ago, I got up, mixed the proper pre-measured amount of water with the proper pre-measured amount of formula, stirred it up well, picked up the baby, settled him in my lap in his favorite feeding position (reclined), picked up the bottle, and inverted it over M. Tiny’s mouth preparatory to slipping in the nipple. Whereupon I realized—too late—that I had forgotten to screw the nipple back on. Yes, I literally threw my son’s drink in his face. He took it really well. In fact, he had no reaction at all. He just gazed up at me, silently, calmly, with formula dripping from his nose, mouth, jowls, neck, and pajama top. I was so grateful that he’s not old enough to realize that he’d just been dissed as badly as he’s ever likely to be dissed by an adult in his life. He minded the wiping more than anything else. Trash took the kid from me before I accidentally set him on fire or something. While she took care of him, I went downstairs, knocked a bunch of shit over in the kitchen, tripped over my own feet, and nearly fell out the bathroom window while peeing. These are the moments we’ll look back on fondly one day. Perhaps on a day when he's old enough to laugh at me for knocking my glasses into the toilet or something. * * * Overheard while putting away Christmas stuff the other day: “Aw, look at Turtle, sitting in that empty storage bin.” “Yeah. She’s a box Turtle.” * * * Heard on the local 80s radio station during the past holiday season: “That was ‘The Little Drummer Boy,’ from Bing Crosby and David Bowie. Those two can sing together thanks to modern technology.” Actually, I was under the impression that they were able to sing together on account of being in the same room at the same time once, back in the 70s. Modern technology was a lot less modern and a lot more literal back then. * * * Today's best search phrase: "krispy creme guitar pedal brian may -donut." I thought DragonAttack knew the search phrase contest was long over. I'll have to remind her, I guess. posted by M. Giant 9:14 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
That's the one! Still cracks me up. Poor tiny M.Edium.
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Excellent rerun!
By Thursday, March 12, 2009 Rock, His World M. Edium doesn't like to leave the house without something to take with him. He claims that it's because he needs something to play with in the car, but I suspect it's a security thing. Something to remind him of home. It's been going on since he was two and spending weekdays at the daycare lady's house. When he started Montessori last year, he used to bring something to school every day too, but we've managed to convince him that his lunch bag counts. Well, us and the shouts of "It's not show-and-tell day!" from his classmates almost every non-Wednesday. When he and I went for our Sunday errands this week, it was a little red lava rock from our yard. He was thinking about moons and meteors that day, and while I did the shopping, he happily held the little rock up in front of his face as he walked along beside the cart, making whooshing noises and imagining it was zooming through space on a collision course with some celestial body or other. It kept him happy, and it wasn't like a cashier was going to try to ring it up when we checked out. In the meat aisle, I began to think about how this looked. Here was an unkempt dad with an adorable little four-year-old child, who was happily playing with a rock. Completely fascinated by it, in fact. Any observer would have assumed it was his only toy in the world. A rock. A. Rock. I wouldn't have felt so bad if I hadn't just threatened to take it away from him for kicking it across the floor in the previous aisle. What the fuck kind of father only gives his child a rock to play with, and then might not even let him keep it? Fortunately, he had earned a reward that morning, by spelling and reading a slew of short words using little cards I'd made for him with letters written on them. So later, when he asked for one of those rubber bouncy-balls that sit in a big bin and sell for $1.59, I was happy to oblige. "Look, son, it's your first real toy! From a store!" How exciting to have a ball to go with his rock. Must have been like Christmas morning. He picked the green one. The color of money, just to show off his affluence. It's somewhere in the house right now, but I'm net sure exactly where. Too many toys cluttering the place up, you know. posted by M. Giant 9:10 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:
I think any other parent get that Kids Are Weird, really. It's like that thing that makes them walk right by the big giant mega-toy and spend countless hours playing in the box for said mega-toy.
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A couple of years ago, I teasingly threatened to get my then 6-year-old daughter a box of rocks for Christmas. Her reply? "That's what I like."
By A friend of mine was complaining recently that since she's had her baby 5 months ago, her house is always so cluttered with baby things. I laughed at her and told her to wait until the kid gets old enough to bring home rocks, leaves, shells.... not to mention the endless stream of crafts made out of popsicle sticks and dried pasta stuck on paper so it can't even be easily sneaked into recycling. My 6 year old's jacket weighs about 10 lbs from all the rocks she keeps in her pockets since the shelf in her room is full.
By I'm 26 and I still love rocks. I stole some from the Grand Canyon a few years ago and they're sitting on top of the fireplace in the living room. Coincidentally, they're the only things my nephews (ages 3 & 2) want to play with when they come over.
By My 4 year old is always collecting rocks, too. Unfortunately, she prefers that they take up residence in my truck... by the end of the not-snowy season (heh, MN), they're falling out of the truck every time I open her door.
By Tuesday, March 10, 2009 Trash Talking Three Here's part three of the story Trash has been sharing with us. Part two is here and part one is here. After M. Edium had been in back with the school testing folk for about an hour, the assistant instructor returned him to the main room. She explained that the lead instructor was in back, completing her report, and would soon be out to fetch us. The assistant looked more tired than when she came to get him, so I asked if it had gone OK. She said it had, he had performed wonderfully, he was so friendly and cute and smart…and stubborn. Which he is, oh yes, but he is also quite well-behaved for the most part. We asked if he had acted up and she assured us that he was great. We tried to ask M. Edium how he thought it had gone, but really, what was he going to say? “I excelled at the verbal reasoning but came up short in analytic thought?” No, all he wanted to talk about was the book on volcanoes we were reading earlier. The lead instructor appeared roughly 10 minutes later and escorted us to the back room. She sat us down at another kid-sized table and started going through her report, doing that annoying thing where you read every line on the paper, as though we were illiterate and needed assistance. We had been there for over two hours at this point, and M. Edium was getting pretty restless, so M. Giant spent most of his time playing while I dealt with the teacher. This division of labor usually works best, because I am somewhat willing to (mostly) pleasantly argue with a bureaucrat for a while, while M. Giant prefers to not talk to them ever, but on this occasion it might have been better for M. Edium to do all of the talking, as the system was pissing off both adult Giants. In any case, she explained that kids were evaluated on a scale (I never received the actual scale) and at age 4 they hope to see children passing with at least a 25 (out of 30? 100? 1 million? No idea) and to enter kindergarten they should pass above 50. M Edium was above both of those numbers, and tall, so they were all ready to start the next phase of testing. I explained – again – that we were uncertain if that was a path we interested in following, but that we would certainly consider it. She then went through the test itself, explaining that up until the last two sections he had only missed one question, that his reading and spelling skills were advanced and that he could perform basic addition and subtraction. (Heh – see what you can find out about your kid? We had no idea he could do any math at all. Good job, Montessori program.) Again, having seen the requirements earlier I wasn’t convinced it was actual math so much as perhaps a test to see if he could count to one, but she assured me it was indeed math. She then explained that the last two sections were on rhyming and alliteration. Now, I didn’t care that he had missed some – or all – of any of the questions, but those two categories surprised me. M. Edium frequently uses alliteration as a joke (I guess he has his dad’s sense of humor) and will recite long lists of rhymes from the back seat when we are in the car. Makes for some fun traffic jams, believe me. So it surprised me that he had any trouble in those areas, and I said as much. “Oh no,” the instructor was quick to assure me. “He didn’t get the questions wrong. He told us he was tired of taking the test, and crawled under the table and hid behind the file cabinet.” And I couldn’t help myself – I knew not to be a smart-ass, I knew to just shut up, but I said, “Ahh. Sounds exactly like the behavior of someone ready for kindergarten.” Sigh. Needless to say, we were back to square one. The teacher pointed out that he was a very well-behaved child, had played wonderfully with two other older kids during the adaptability portion of the test, and would certainly grow out of it by fall. I didn’t want to argue any more – and M. Giant was shooting daggers at me after my last comment – so I agreed to tour the school and at least speak with the principal. We also agreed that we would remember that kids who get bored in school can have a lot of problems as well, and we didn’t want that to happen. I could have mentioned that boredom sounded like a problem for the kindergarten teacher, but I refrained. Whatever, we got to leave. I would have agreed to almost anything just to get out of there. We did indeed go on a tour of the local elementary school, which we liked, and I spoke not only to the principal but to two of the teachers. I expressed my concerns (and those raised by my friend Chao in the comments on my previous post) and they both totally sided with me. The principal told me that they have a gifted and talented program starting at kindergarten in which he would most likely qualify, and that the program allows the students to focus extra energy on the areas where they excel (hello, science!) and lets them work far ahead of the regular class work. One kindergarten teacher said that she would rather have a kid start at age five and then be so prepared that she advances him to first grade, bypassing kindergarten, rather than start too early. Both of these women had been with the school for several years, and they indicated their intent to still be at the school in two years, so we didn’t have a sudden bait-and-switch. We also spoke with a few friends and family members who had started school early, and with only the one exception they all said they would rather have waited. Most of them did say that they thought we needed to make sure M. Edium felt mentally stimulated (apparently being around M. Giant and me isn’t enough) so we are starting piano lessons this spring and classes at the Minnesota Science Museum – and I spoke to one of the women in the education department and she is letting M. Edium start in the 5 year old and up classes. See? We can be reasonable. You’re welcome, Minneapolis Schools. Labels: trash talkin' posted by M. Giant 4:10 PM 4 comments4 Comments:I love the idea that he needs to be more mentally stimulated when I personally think he's an incredibly adorable and awesome...geek. You know, as it is. And as he should be.
By My parents didn't know I could read until I took the entrance exam for private school when I was 4. I read along with books when they read aloud to me (which was like three times a day) but they thought I'd just memorized the books and was reciting them. Testing DOES come in handy.
By You did well, Trash. As long as the OPTION to advance is there, I'll be appeased. Plus you and M. are great parents, so I wasn't worried. And I'm proud of you for not listening to me. I'm VERY convincing... (Yikes, I think I just creeped myself out)
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In re: low standards for starting kindergarten:
By Saturday, March 07, 2009 By request, another rerun. Yes, one of my three shows is now over, but I'm still tired. Plus I got a request! What else could I do? Swiperphobia The trouble with being a blogger with a kid is the almost unavoidable pitfall of becoming a daddyblogger. Let's face it, though: I don't want to write about my day job (not only becaue I don't want to get Dooced, but also because it would bore you to tears), most of my paltry interactions with modern pop culture are already documented in exhaustive detail elsewhere, the house is finished, and the cats don't do much but lie around. Pretty much the bulk of my bloggable experiences are interactions with the child. But sometimes you have to stop and think and remember that one day, that child is going to be old enough to read some of this. He won't, but he'll be able to. And maybe someone will send him a link to a years-old entry that, when he's fourteen or fifteen, will utterly mortify him. And I'm not sure I want that responsibility. That said, there's this kid I know. He's about two. His first real nightmare was several months ago. He woke up late at night and cried, "Swiper took my cake." He didn't have any cake, and hadn't for a while, so the only explanation was that he'd had a bad dream. Those of you with toddlers and TVs already know who Swiper is. For the rest of you, Swiper is a character on the animated series Dora the Explorer. While Dora and her sidekick, a semi-retarded monkey named Boots, go about their adventures, they're regularly plagued by a fox named Swiper. Can you guess what Swiper does? Good guess, unless you guessed that Swiper is a compulsive credit card shopper, in which case guess again. But the truth is that Swiper is the worst thief in the world, and quite frequently fails to live up to his name. A couple of factors are responsible for this. One is that Swiper's approach in the vicinity is always heralded by "sneaky" theme music, which notifies Dora to announce, "Uh-oh! That sounds like Swiper the fox!" (Dora always yells everything). Plus Swiper pops into view a couple of times, giving us glimpses of his mischievous grin, gloves, and Dread-Pirate-Roberts mask, so Dora and Boots are sure to see him coming. Swiper's complete ignorance of the element of surprise gives Dora and Boots plenty of time to utter the phrase "Swiper, no swiping!" three times, which always succeeds in thwarting Swiper, leaving him to snap his fingers and groan, "Oh, maaaan" before scampering off. In other words, Danny Ocean he ain't. But even the worst thief in the world occasionally manages to pull off a job. On rare occasions, Swiper is actually able to get close enough to make his move before Dora and Boots can get out more than a "Swiper, nooooo--". Wherupon he snatches an item from Dora and Boots -- her backpack, a fallen star, whatever. And then the worst part is, he doesn't even bother making off with it. He just throws it or hides it somewhere and smirks at them, "You'll never find your [backpack/little star/blowgun] now!" Then he cackles and runs away, no richer except for the satisfaction of having briefly inconvenienced someone else. Because even in those rare instances where Swiper succeeds, Dora ad Boots quickly recover the item in question. Which is why a certain toddler's phobia is so puzzling to me. Recently, in the bath, he was reaching around behind himself and discovered a part of his anatomy that he had not been previously familiar with. Or, if he was, he didn't have a word for it. He commented briefly on this new discovery, and in a short time had settled on some kind of fixation with relation to it and a certain cartoon fox. Now hardly a bath goes by without at least one utterance of the phrase: "Swiper gonna take my hole." As a parent, you naturally want to protect your child from everything. You even want to protect him from the fear of everything. That's not always possible, of course; on a practical level, you do want him to be afraid to do things that may result in an injury, such as climbing a precarious stack of power tools to retrieve a sharp knife from on top of the fridge so he can use it to fish his firecracker out of the toaster. But aside from that, you want to be able to promise him that nothing bad will ever happen to him. Unfortunately, you can't promise that he'll never be hurt, or that nothing will ever happen to someone he loves, or that a favorite toy won't ever get lost. However, there are certain things that you can promise him will never happen. And one of those is that Swiper will never, ever ever take his hole. Being able to say that with confidence gives me a warm feeling inside. Let's just count the levels at which the success of such a heist is unlikely in the extreme. To start with, Swiper is: 1) The worst thief in the world. 2) Fictional. 3) Animated. 4) Based in a tropical jungle, and not the upper Midwest. 5) Confined to a fairly narrow M.O., targeting only things he can easily grab. 6) Not typically armed with anything he could use to steal a hole, whether it be a sharp knife or some kind of plug. And even if Swiper were somehow able to overcome these formidable obstacles in the course of attempting to perpetrate an act of anal larceny, getting past the kid's pants and diaper would afford his victim plenty of time to repeat "Swiper, no swiping!" the required three times. Any such attempt would certainly end in a disappointed "Oh, maaaan" instead of a smug, "You'll never find your poop-chute now!" Yet this child continues to fear becoming a victim of rectal theft. My certainty that this will never happen is something I just can't seem to communicate to him. All I can do is help him be more prepared. No, I'm not talking about getting him an Ass-Club or something. Whenever he mentions his fear of getting butt-jacked, I just say "Swiper, no swiping!" with him a few times. Then he goes, "Oh, maaaan" and everything's all better. I just hope his problems remain that easy to solve for a little longer. But I know that someday, he's going to be living in fear that somebody will find an embarrassing blog post written about him when he was two. But then that won't be just his problem. It'll be his dad's, too. Whoever his dad might be. posted by M. Giant 12:52 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:Thank you for re-posting this, you certainly made my Saturday a bit more entertaining!
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I missed this the first time around thank you!
By a request, which is maybe just a question- how did Trash get her name?
By I was just thinking of this post yesterday and wondering if I could find it again!
By "and her sidekick, a semi-retarded monkey named Boots" gets me every time. It makes me think a TWOP recap of Dora would be hilarious.
By Another blogger I read has a 3 year old daughter who likes to run around naked and claim that Swiper stole her underwear, so maybe the kids know something we don't.
By This post makes me laugh so hard I cry. Thanks, dude.
By Wednesday, March 04, 2009 Boned Here's a photo of M. Edium with his new best friend.  It's a kit that he received for Christmas from his grandma. We started building it in early January. This photo was taken immediately after we got it together. Last week. It's not as hard to piece together as it looks. It's actually much harder. First of all, it's designed not by a toymaker, but a paleontologist. So it doesn't really meet child usability standards. I suspect his goal in creating the kit was to discourage young children from growing up and becoming paleontologists. There are a number of reasons why this was a little too challenging for your average kid, and also for your average adult. Each piece roughly approximates one or more individual T. Rex bones, and is numbered from 1 to 48 in tiny raised characters that you can't read without carbon-dating. The "instructions," such as they are, barely deserve the name, consisting of a photograph of the assembled skeleton with a number and a line pointing to each little bit. And the first step in the construction process requires you to make the intuitive leap of attaching pieces 23-28 to pieces 33 and 35. And that's just the conceptual challenges. Further difficulties are evident in the execution. To begin with, the pieces don't snap together like you'd think. Instead, they're molded out of some kind of semi-flexible rubber that you sort of squish together. You can imagine that not all of the pieces squish together all that well. For each of the vertebrae, there are two little holes in front and two little rubber posts in back. At least one of them fits together on all of them, but not always both of them, so several vertebrae have wide gaps between them. If a real T. Rex had to try to walk around with a spine like that, he'd be paralyzed from the giant hips down. In fact, he'd be lucky to have the admittedly limited use of his tiny little arms. Plus the little metal support rods don't go very far into the base, the giant three pound skull is held onto the neck with a poorly fitted ball-and-socket joint, the pelvis is slashed in half horizontally for some reason, and the "guide photo" turns out to have been flipped over into a mirror image by some genius at the print shop. It took several sessions with several grown-up visitors just to get separate sections assembled, but if M. Edium hadn't kept dragging the box out at every opportunity, it never would have gotten done at all. But we did, and obviously I wanted to get a picture of it in its completed state, which obviously wouldn't last. I was expecting this to happen at any moment, because it had happened any number of times during all of the previous assembly attempts. In fact, I found a couple of extra ribs lying on the floor after the photo was taken. I hid them. I know what you're thinking: real paleontologists have a much more difficult challenge trying to assemble real dinosaur skeletons from incomplete fossil fragments they've dug out of the ground. But unless I'm mistaken, their doctorates don't say "Six or older" on them.* Here's the guy, by the way. They put his picture on the box.  I don't see how he expects people to be able to put this thing together when he can't even button his shirt. * M. Edium sees that big yellow "6+" on the box as a personal affront to him as a four-year-old, and keeps trying to "punch it out" of the cardboard. posted by M. Giant 7:03 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:I *love* the photo of the man out standing in his field (as my punning geology teacher would have said). ALso, I cannot believe you managed to finish putting it together - a true act of love. I'm glad you took a picture of it, so in the future, when M.Edium gets to be an older surly teenager, you can just pull this entry out.
By Wow, that is quite a project. I like the little kitty ears in the foreground. Looks like Dino is stomping on Kitty!
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We had a similar experience the Christmas before last, when we helped Santa acquire a triceratops skeleton model for our daughter (then age 4.5). This one was National Geographic brand and not quite as large as yours, nor were the bits very soft. Quite the opposite, actually - they were really brittle and hard (to simulate actual fossil bits, perhaps) and thus, the force required to jam the posts into the holes came with an extra level of fear that something would just shatter right off while assembling.
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That is a labor of love! And from the get-go visibly more educational than the begged-for model my dad ended up assembling for my sister when she was roughly M. Edium's age: the Budweiser beer wagon, pulled by eight plastic Clydesdales.
By Monday, March 02, 2009 Trash Talking Two Trash continues the story she began last week. We weren't there to discuss early admission, nor were we interested in it, so we were a little surprised. I this I suggested she had the wrong file, but she confirmed that she meant M. Edium. She explained that she was observing him, and while he still had to go through parts two and three of the screening, she could say with confidence that he is ready and able to start in the fall. I then pointed to our child, ensuring we were discussing the same child who was attempting to figure out how to steal a toy car from another child without getting in trouble, shooting furtive glances our way to see if we were watching. The evaluator confirmed she meant our child, and pulled out a pamphlet asking "Is your child ready for kindergarten?" It had several lists of skills your child should be able to master, and instead of convincing me that M. Edium is ready for school it convinced me that they don't ask for much from the average child entering the city's kindergarten program. Can identify at least three numbers? Really? Not write them or spell them or even count them, but identify them? I explained again that M. Edium misses the birthday cut-off for the coming fall and besides, he is a boy. Doesn't the district usually recommend that boys might need to wait another year even if their birthday is in the summer? She agreed, but said it wasn't the case with M. Edium. He was articulate (well, sure, if you want to discuss NASA or WALL-E or which dinosaurs ate which other dinosaurs) and played well with other kids (ummm….) and was emotionally ready. I think I snorted. At this point M. Edium had lost interest in the car and had moved to another table, insinuated himself between a young girl and her mother, and was Eddie Haskell-ing his way into getting to take the girl's blocks. M. Giant jumped in and stressed that M. Edium's birthday was supposed to be the end of November/start of December, so he didn't really qualify for early enrollment. She was unimpressed with this logic and stated she would have given him an exception anyway. Note, she has thus far spent a grand total of 15 MINUTES observing the boy, talked to him for maybe five minutes, but she can just tell. I think this was when I asked if she said this to all the parents to make them feel better, but she immediately pulled out pamphlet after pamphlet discussing why the district wouldn't take your child early, and said that they almost always discourage people from even trying since most kids fail so miserably when they start kindergarten too early. Reassuring. I should take a moment to explain something about our parenting philosophy, which is that every child – yes, EVERY child - will decide which areas of life interest them, and given encouragement and support will excel in those areas. They might be an amazing artist who at five can draw a beautiful picture that is identifiable to anyone as a dog or a tree, not just their parents. Or perhaps they have a way with spatial reasoning, and can build massive towers out of blocks and paper and cats. Maybe they are mechanically inclined or love to read or can tell jokes (and actually understand timing and punchlines) or maybe they can get along with everyone and can HAPPILY share their toys. Or maybe they have an unreal fascination with all things science and can tell you the first five astronauts in space and every character in WALL-E and ask for a microscope for Christmas and will TALK FOR HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS about the space program until their parents are ready to strap them into a real space shuttle and send them off for a week. Ahem. So while M. Edium is very articulate and outgoing, he can't start the DVD player, hates using the computer mouse, and refuses to dress himself. We don't want to appear as though we don't believe he is the BEST. CHILD. EVER. because, obviously. We are so very proud of all he can do. We also know his limitations and acknowledge that he is FOUR years old. In any case, we explained that we really weren't all that interested in starting school in the fall, because we wanted to make sure he was fully ready when he started, because even if he can play well with others (M. Edium was now sitting in the little girl's chair, next to her mom, and her mom was reading to him. I would say reading to them, but the girl had wandered off to play with someone else. Right – plays well with others.) and can count above 2 and thus is prepared academically, we wanted to make sure he was fully ready. And that's when she explained that it would be fine, because HE IS TALL. Yes, apparently the road to early admissions is paved with the bodies of those who are brilliant and socially confident, but sadly too short. We have a friend who once applied for a job working with a private eye. He had all of the qualifications, it seemed like a great job, but the last line in the ad stated "Must have own van. No exceptions." I understand that maybe the PI wanted to make sure the associate could drop everything for a stake-out, but the requirement made the job seem less shiny somehow. The height comment did much the same for us. Our discussion continued for some time, with the Giant family arguing against the early placement (well, two of the Giant family. The third member had abandoned the book and the mom and was trying to figure out how to scale the back bookshelf) and an increasingly surprised and somewhat irritated case worker arguing for it. I think she recommends early placement so rarely that she expected us to be ecstatic and flattered, rather than obstinate and a bit put-out. At this point she authorized M. Edium to go into the back room to be tested. She signed us up for a school choice fair happening in January and said that if he tested as highly as she thought he would, they would send the results to our local school, which has an incredible school ranking and would probably be one of the two choices we will consider when he does start school. She then left us alone to stew with the booklets and the paperwork and the list of acceptable schools for early admission for high potential kids. Except I didn't believe her. I mean, I didn't believe that she didn't say it to every parent, so I sort-of stalked her around the room as she met with the other parents. After all, we were supposed to just sit there for the next 45 minutes while they tested M. Edium, and I hadn't brought a book. What else was I supposed to do. I was a little surprised to see that not only did she not encourage the other parents to try early admission, but she argued against it and flat-out refused one parent. I had to admit that I might have been hasty in my assumption that she was trying to boost numbers for the school district. I still didn't agree with her, though. In fairness to her, she was a very nice person who probably thought she was giving us a great compliment. She had worked as an early education teacher for years, and before that as a teacher throughout the elementary system. None of that mattered, of course, because now we were irritated. We didn't want to attend any school choice fairs or additional testing or meet with principals of schools. We want to leave him in his current school for another year and THEN worry. We comforted ourselves in the thought that he might fail the pre-screening and it wouldn't matter anyway. We could shrug our shoulders and say "Oh well, thanks anyway" and they would leave us alone. Of course, that didn't happen. Labels: trash talkin' posted by M. Giant 7:07 AM 12 comments12 Comments:
That's funny about the height thing...
By Trash is funny! I thought M. Giant might be the only one in the family who could write, yet I am enjoying Trash's description of your school decision. You guys are both so talented.
By
Many parents would jump on the "early admission" thing - I'm glad you two are giving it more thought. Being ready socially is just as important as being ready intellectually. My parents had to fight to get me into kindergarten at 5 because although the school agreed I was more than ready socially and intellectually, they thought since I was not yet 3 feet tall I should stay back a year. Yeah. That makes total sense (I started at 5 and remained short throughout school. It made very little difference.)
By He is a delightful, chatty, friendly little boy. I'm sure he will be fine, but good for you, as always, for being in his corner.
By My boyfriend's son was tested recently for gifted kindergarten, and based on the practice tests...I have to agree that the bar is set kind of shockingly low (at least, out here). MBS cruised through the material, and he's certainly bright, but I don't quite know how they would even get that from those tests, which seemed designed primarily to weed out children with vision problems.
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Just to play devil's advocate, is there any evidence showing that NOT starting a child early (when they're obviously ready), might hold him back and make him as daft as most of the students today? I'm just saying if he gets bored next year because his mind isn't being challenged enough, then that's a bad way to begin his elementary school career. (I sound like that scene from Uncle Buck now.)
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My son is also a Fall baby ( hes 5) & the best advice I got was from parents of older kids. The thirteen year old boy who said " I wish you'd held me back" is what did it for me. It's not so much the academics, it's the social stuff that hits much younger than it used to.
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My parents had the chance to skip me from 3yr pre-K into kindergarten midyear (I found this out much, much later). The teacher in pre-K said there was nothing left I could learn in pre-K - 3 or 4 yr. old.
By @Bunny: I have training in, among other things, identifying Aspberger's; I've met M.Edium in person many times; and rest assured, he ain't got it. He's just very much wonderfully weird.
By @Feb: Thanks. I thought that was probably the case, but just wanted to throw that out. I'm so glad he's just a wonderful, if weird, incredibly curious and intellectual kid. Go M.Edium!
By If you guys haven't read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers (the guy who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink), there's a section in there about how kids born just a few months earlier in a hockey league will have a much higher chance to excel because they will be slightly better than kids a tad smaller/younger and then because of that, get additional coaching, get on a better team/section of the league next year, get even better coaching yet, etc. The same thing works in schools- the kids who can sit still longer learn more, so kids that are the older ones in class learn more at the beginning and get ahead more and more each year. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, but it was interesting to read about and makes me think that holding a kid back might be a better choice. Then again, I was always bored as heck in school and I was even one of the younger ones in my class.
By Identify 3 numbers? Wow, that bar is low. By that standard, by 2 1/2-year-old should go to kindergarten.
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