The Five-Year-Old discovered Lisa Loeb’s summer music album, Camp Lisa, this week. She loves it so much that she asked me to sit down and listen to the whole thing with her “so that you can talk about it on Caterpickles, Mommyo.”
Exposure times for photography in those days were extremely long, which had the perverse effect of making the dead daughter in this example the only reliably in-focus part of the image, while her (then) living parents appear blurred and more ghost-like. (Image via cogitz.com)
Earlier this week while doing some of the never-ending research for my novel-in-progress, Asylum, I came across memento mori, the Victorian practice of posing their dead for photographs. At first, I labeled this as just one more in a long line of somewhat creepy things Victorians did. But then The Five-Year-Old did something that completely changed my perspective on it.
The Five-Year-Old, pointing to clouds streaking across the sky on a recent trip to downtown Boston: “Daddyo, how is that even possible?”
I hate brushing my daughter’s hair. I’m not alone in this. My daughter hates it when I brush her hair too. Sadly, The Five-Year-Old’s hair is super-fine and extra tangle-ly, which means that every morning we have to deal with a major case of bed head before packing her off to preschool.
One day while I was folding clothes, The Five-Year-Old came up and offered to help. Never one to turn that down, I pointed to a stack of towels and asked her to put them away.
The Five-Year-Old, under her breathe: “[mild expletive, mild expletive], our phone is broken. [mild expletive, mild expletive].” I knew the day when The Five-Year-Old started using…
With travel season hard upon us, I decided it was probably time I talked travel gear. In November 2009 we bought our daughter a Trunki, Terrance the Cow to be precise (it was the only one available through Amazon at the time that would make it to our house before that year’s Thanksgiving trek).
The Four-Year-Old, from the backseat of the car: “Mommyo, are elves real?” Mother, distracted by all the crazy drivers on the Thanksgiving weekend roads: “No.” The…
The Four-Year-Old is an expert practitioner of the art of delaying bedtime. So much so, that I’m convinced that putting off bedtime is the way children develop the vital life skill of procrastination.
Still, bedtime is bedtime and not, as The Four-Year-Old claims, the best time for hunting polar region allosaurs, so something had to be done.
Mother, after mashing up a banana to use as the middle layer in a traditional Icelandic devil’s cake, thinks, “Mashed bananas were the first food I…
CATERPICKLES 