Tag: #experience

  • Showing My Kid “Cool Hand Luke”

    I’m not the best father. I have very good intentions, and I show up, and I am dependable, but outside of that, I’m floundering around here.

    One of my flounder moments of late is trying to show my kid good movies. Like really good movies, the best movies, movies that had a huge impact on storytelling, movie making; you get the deal. I am way too eager to do this, and I have to remind myself that most of the beast movies ever made aren’t appropriate for a nine-year-old.

    So, of late, I have just been showing her the start of movies or very famous scenes. Amazingly, this has worked out very well. After watching Barbie together, I thought showing her the opening “Dawn of Man” section of 2001: A Space Odyssey would be a good idea, as that part is parodied in Barbie. And I was delightfully rewarded showing it to her, because she was able to visually follow the story, understood the importance of the bone/tool, and how tools good be used for good and bad. And she especially understood what Barbie was parodying.

    After having such a rewarding experience with 2001, I decided that I would press my luck and show her one of my favorite movies, Cool Hand Luke, a film I consider a great movie and if nothing else, it’s Paul Newman’s best performance. Unfortunately, the only streaming service I could find that had the movie came with commercials. What this availed to us was two minutes for me to answer questions, which is to be expected, as I do have a very curious and inquisitive child. Mind you, we only got 1/3 of the way through the movie.

    The questions she provided me were; Where are the girls? Why does everyone smoke? Don’t they know that’s bad for them? Is there a prison for women and do they do the same thing? Do they have air conditioning? Are the guards allowed to shoot people? If the guards shoot people, do they get in trouble? Why isn’t “The Box” illegal? Are there bugs and rats in “The Box?” And my favorite – How do you play poker?

    I don’t mind her questions, that’s how you learn; you ask questions, right. What I forgot was how much of a huge jump in her experience it is to see a movie made in 1967 about people living in the South during the early 1950’s. It’s just on the very edge of her understanding. Such as, she sees the cars and the trucks, those are things she can relate to and understand. But no air conditioning? She doesn’t know a world without A/C. And then I had to explain to her what parking meters were – how you had to put change in a machine, and turn a handle, and it counted down until you had to put more change in it. That kind’a blew her mind…

    And we haven’t even got to the egg eating scene yet.

  • Summer Grocery Shopping

    The school year is coming to a close here in NYC. As of this moment we only have 6 days left of remote school, and we all can’t wait for it to be over. Come September, the kid will be back in class, like a normal elementary schooler, and there will be so much joy and excitement for that occasion, it already feels like it’s going to be Christmas Morning on that first day of school.

    In the meantime, it’s still the Dad/Daughter Experience for the Summer.

    Yesterday, as we got out of class early, I had to go shopping at Trader Joe’s. I didn’t see any reason why the kid couldn’t come with me, as the store is allowing people to shop together again. If nothing else, it would kill an hour of the day, which was better than her watching TV.

    Getting there did mean a subway ride, which is slowly beginning to feel normal to me again. For the kid, mass transit is still an adventure, and now it’s more exciting as she can read, and loves checking out all the ads on the train. Stepping down into one station, and then appearing out of another, is like magic as you get transported to a whole new world; Like the Upper West Side. Once in the store, she was a good kid, and is now big enough to push the cart for me, unassisted, so she was really helping out, and not fake praise helping out.

    As we walked to the subway station to go back to Harlem, the kid was excited about the ice cream we had bought, and I wondered how much of this she would remember later in life. I have foggy relocations of going grocery shopping with my mother during summer vacation when I was my kids age, and at the time it was just a thing we did, but now it has taken on more of a melancholy reminiscence. A very important mundane experience that I value more today.

  • First Time at the Dentist

    Yesterday was the kid’s first experience with going to see a dentist. I know for some people going to the dentist is not an enjoyable experience, and looking at the websites for pediatric dentists, almost all of them have a page dedicated to calming your child’s fears of going to the dentist for the first time.

    My kid saw Little Shop of Horrors, so she didn’t have the healthiest appreciation of the dental profession.

    But I was committed to making sure that the kid would have no issues with going to see the dentist for the first time. I found lots of videos online about kids going to the dentist where they explained the tools, and the procedures. We watched them together, and she very quickly associated that dentists are just like any other doctor, as they are there to help and make you feel better.

    And the pediatric dental office we went to was great! This is what they do, but they were really great at making the kid feel special, and explaining everything to her, so she wasn’t afraid. I could even feel my anxiety rise as the cleaning started, and the kid let the assistant start touching her teeth, but she was fine. It was all fine, and the kid even said that she found the dentist fun!

    I told her how proud I was of her. Then we got home to tell mom all about the dentist, and I added how proud I was of the kid. After dinner, I reminded the kid of how brave she was at the dentist, and that made me proud. As we brushed our teeth before bed, I reminded her how proud I was how she handled the dentist. And then when I tucked her in, she told me to stop telling her how proud I was of her.

    I was laying it on rather thick.

    And I had committed the sin of trying to over parent my child to compensate for my perceived failings in my life. I was a nervous, anxiety riddled child. I worried so much about things, that I often made myself sick to my stomach to where I couldn’t get out of bed. I wish I wasn’t the worry-wart little kid, as it created self-doubt and fear in me, and I have had to work hard as an adult to overcome it. I just wanted to make sure the kid isn’t afraid of things like I was.

    This might be one of those life lessons where as I parent I need to set the example, rather than over praise.

  • Blackout: Learning Experience

    Yesterday, very powerful and disruptive storms hit us on the west coast. The rain wasn’t any worse than a bad thunderstorm in Texas around late May, but whereas a Texas storm is done and over in about thirty minutes, the rain yesterday lasted for over twenty-four hours.

    As the storms were tapering off in the middle of the evening, just as we were about to start making dinner, we lost power, and got plunged into darkness. Luckily, we have a large collection of Yankee candles thanks to our many trips to outlet malls, and we quickly had light in our apartment.

    As we sat and waited for the power to return, the wife and I thought about the last time we were in a power outage. For me, it had to be at least 20 years, back when I was in Texas. My wife was in New York for the blackout of 2003. For our daughter, this was the first time she had experienced no electricity.

    We explained to her what was going on, and that nothing would work in the home. I know she heard us, and understood, but it was cute to watch her go from room to room, trying light switches, and then ask if we had extra electricity in the apartment to use. Like a battery, you know. We even opened the front door, so she could see the complex and the whole neighborhood cloaked in darkness.

    It was interesting to watch her learn. She had been given information, but she still needed to experience it for herself; to touch and see. She questioned why this happened, and how does rain make electricity go away. She wanted to know what we could do to fix it, and when I told her there was nothing to do but wait, she didn’t like that.

    If there is a problem, then we have to solve it.

    Waiting is still a lesson to be learned.