Home & Family

I love our kids. I love them even when they’re being jerks, of course, but I real­ly appre­ci­ate them on days like today when they’re being so sweet.

One of the things I love about them most, though, is their very unique­ness. Two of our kids are unabashed­ly geeky. The third is sor­ta goth, and very artis­tic. They all love RPGs. real_pochacco is an NPR junkie. shad­owkatt’s favorite time to lis­ten to 99X is dur­ing the Retro­plex (80s stuff). real_pochacco had to come get a real­i­ty check dur­ing the broad­cast today—he was absolute­ly sure that he could­n’t be hear­ing the words “take the skin­heads bowl­ing.” (He was, of course.) lit­tle­fire­fae some­how man­ages to be a lit­tle goth chick even while wear­ing periwinkle.

We watched Wag the Dog with all three kids the oth­er night. We’d request­ed it from Net­Flix a while back, but it seemed to be very pop­u­lar lately—probably for the same rea­son we want­ed to see it. real_pochacco did­n’t want to see it. Part of his indi­vid­u­a­tion late­ly is that he does­n’t want to read or see or lis­ten to any­thing we’ve rec­om­mend­ed. But he did appre­ci­ate it, and we had a good dis­cus­sion about how pub­lic opin­ion can be manipulated.

We’d watched a 70ish British pro­duc­tion of The Tem­pest with the girls the night before (the boy was­n’t inter­est­ed). I can­not rec­om­mend that par­tic­u­lar versiona7mdash;it was rather annoy­ing. But they were enthralled by the sto­ry itself, which was the point. I had to do a lit­tle trans­lat­ing for lit­tle­fire­fae so that she under­stood any of it, as she has a lot of trou­ble with British accents for some rea­son (and with Shake­speare­an dialogue). 

lit­tle­fire­fae’s friend here in the neigh­bor­hood spent last night with us (today is a no-school day). Our nor­mal conversations—about pol­i­tics, reli­gion, art, books, etc.—seem to leave her com­plete­ly with­out a frame of ref­er­ence. She ends up look­ing total­ly lost, and we’ve learned not to ask her any direct ques­tions or try to involve her in them too much because she gets a slight­ly fran­tic look as if she’s being test­ed in some way.

This is what I want­ed when I was a child. I’m proud of our fam­i­ly and home.