The Katie Chronicles: Daily Questions, Episode #1328.

On the way home, Katie and I chat about the day and she sings, giggles, and asks me a very wide variety of questions. Today, we were discussing how all the trees have leaf buds or flowers on them and how pretty they were. She got thoughtful for a minute and then asked, "Mommy, what if, when each leaf burst out of its bud, it shot glitter?" So listen, God: Disco Trees. Get your tree team on that, stat. 

The Katie Chronicles: Potty Mouth Edition

So we’re eating dinner tonight and conversing as we normally do. Katie says, “Mommy, I’ve been…um…f-word…” Wherever you were at about 6.20 Eastern time, you may have felt the distortion in the time-space continuum that occurred at this moment. The Earth stopped turning for a minute and the planets in the galaxy wobbled on their axes. Time actually seemed to slow down as Jerome and I heard that utterance from our sweet, innocent youngest child…”f-f-f-f-w-o-o-r-d.” I was the first off the dime: “WHAT DID YOU SAY??” She looked at us pretty placidly and said, “It’s an F-word…I can’t say it at the dinner table but I’ve been doing it more lately.” As my brain tried to compute this and Jerome’s eyes continued a slow exit from their sockets, it dawned on me. “Katie, is the f-word you’re talking about another word for ‘toot’ [meaning flatulence]? Fart?” She looked at me like I’d stated the obvious. And said, with a sheepish grin, “Yes, toot” and then she looked at us as if to say, “What did you think I meant?” Time sped up, the world began rotating normally, and I realized she had no idea what just happened. The adult version of the “f-word” is, I’m happy to report, not apparently anywhere in her consciousness. In her 8 year-old world, the “f-word” stands for something gross that her brother had been chided for talking about last night while we ate. Relief flooded me and I told her (again) we don’t talk about those things at the dinner table. I’m sure the adult version of the f-word will make its appearance sooner or later, but I’m happy to report it didn’t appear tonight. Unless you count “fart.”

The Katie Chronicles: Boy Lessons Edition

The background: Katie has a friend at school named Max.  Max, Leo, Kaelyn, Cameron, and Katie have formed a Spy Club, which apparently involves critical meetings that must take place over the weekend. The setting: My car, driving home after work.  

Katie, who has never independently made or received a phone call in her life:  Mommy, I HAVE to call Max tonight on the phone!  He wants to get together this weekend to talk about the Spy Club and I have to call him. 

Me: Katie, I’ve told you before...if he wants to get together with you, he needs to have one of his parents call or text me.  

Katie:  Mommy, PLEASE.  He keeps asking me and asking me and asking me and he’s going to ask me tomorrow why I didn’t call him.

Me:  Did you give him my phone number?

Katie: Yes.

Me: Well, if he wants to talk to you, he needs to call you.  [smiling now] Sweetie, you’re going to have boys pestering you to do stuff all your life so it’s better to learn now.  If he wants to talk to you, he has my phone number and he can call you.  

Katie, thoughtfully: Oh, OK.

The Katie Chronicles: Sleepytime Nomenclature Edition

 This morning, on the way to school, we were talking about an upcoming slumber party and the sleeping, or lack thereof, that will ensue.

Katie: Mommy, girls get beauty sleep but what do they call it when boys sleep?

Me: I think it's still beauty sleep. Boys can be beautiful, too, like Daddy.

Katie, thoughtfully: I think it should be called handsome sleep whenever boys do it.

The Katie Chronicles: Neighborhood Explorers Edition, Guest Starring Ethan

Well, it was a rough evening in Kidville. After we got home for the evening, Ethan and Katie were playing outside and joined up with some neighborhood kids that they hang out with a lot. It began to get dark and time for dinner when one of the neighborhood parents came to ask if her kids were in our house. I knew Jerome was outside calling the kids in but apparently he and the parents of the two other kids were all roaming the neighborhood, searching for missing offspring. We figured out quickly that they must all be together but they weren’t answering parents’ calls, which is a no no. (Our kids have free range of a two or three block area, including a playground and some woods, but they can’t go outside the range of our voices, including inside someone’s house, without letting us know.) When I heard Rome’s car start up, I knew we’d gone to Def Con 2. A few minutes later, I heard Rome’s car pull back in the garage, the door open, and sniffling everywhere as the kids came in. Rome’s spidey sense had told him that they had gone to their favorite babysitter, Alex’s, house. She lives about 300 yards away as the crow flies but several blocks away by normal navigation, and a couple of blocks outside their allowed range. He had found all the kids there, happily playing with rocks. (What did Alex’s parents think when a pack of neighborhood kids showed up and asked for their daughter?) Rome apparently gave them The Talk to End All Talks in the car on the way home, perhaps at a volume a teeny bit above normal, because they came in, sat on the couch, and cried. Rome started in with part two of The Talk to End All Talks, also known as “And Another Thing…” but Ethan saved him the trouble by tearfully providing a rundown of all the things they’d done wrong and what he’d done wrong as the oldest in the group of kids. Dinner was a sober affair, with lots of “yes m’ams” and “no, sirs.” Ethan said the grace and he even threw in a note of thanks to God “for our kind parents” and asked for help following the rules. We always discuss our favorite parts of everyone’s day at dinner and Ethan’s favorite part was “learning his lesson.” (Perhaps a career in the ministry is in his future? He’s got the conscience for it.) Don’t tell anyone that I’m secretly glad I have kids with enough chutzpah to push the boundaries on occasion – I’m a fan of the “free range kids” philosophy...one of their evening’s adventures had included Katie falling out of a tree she’d climbed – but I’m also a fan of kids not disappearing in the dark, too. So lessons have been learned and good times have returned to Kidville, minus a privilege or two. And how was your evening?

The Katie Chronicles: The List Maker Edition

I come from a line of list-loving women, and Katie is carrying on the family tradition.  A month or two ago, she made a list of all the things she wanted to get done on a particular weekend.  The items were:
Call Chandler [her friend] to see if she can play, yes or no
Play in my cichin
Shop
Mack my dish [a Food Network-inspired item]
Shoos and unbrella [?]
Pool
Play withe AJ
Play on my mom computer [I don’t know if this is missing the ‘s or if she has invented a computer just for mothers]
Read a book
Do mathe [is this my child?]
Eat ice cream [yep, she’s mine]
Do 2 ABC orders [homework]
TV
Ask to go to SKZ [Sky Zone, a trampoline jumpy place]
Cook with mom or dad
Rit a note
Eat penuts or nutse
Snugol [snuggle]

So there you have it, a 7 year-old’s priorities.  Lots of food, lots of playing, lots of food-related playing, all topped off with some snuggle time.  Sounds like a great weekend to me.

The Ethan Update: Throwback Edition

At Ethan's school, kids sign up for feedback sessions where teachers and students can give them feedback about things that they can improve on. Then they implement the feedback and they can sign up for promotion. If they get promoted, they get additional privileges and "pay" in their token economy. Ethan recently went up for his first feedback session and one of the main suggestions he got was that he needs to let others answer in class. Since I was a child in the 70s, my first thought was, "Dear lord, my sweet Ethan is Horshack."