Silflay Hraka

In addition to our other bedtime books, I’ve been reading to Ngnat each night from my old Children’s Bible, as part of a cunning strategy to inoculate her against the siren song of religious lunacy later in life. We’ve almost finished up Deuteronomy, but last night, given the season, I thought we’d read the Christmas story.

The problem with reading the Christmas story directly from the Bible is that what we have come to think of as the essential components of the story; no room at the inn, Wise Men, shepherds, spring from two separate books; Matthew and Luke. Our Children’s Bible makes a desultory attempt at bringing them together, first telling Luke’s story of the manger and shepherds, then of Jesus? bris and his presentation at the Temple in Jerusalem. Some time elapses between the two events, as you might have surmised. Only after the mohel makes his appearance do The Wise Men make theirs–in Bethlehem–implying that Joseph and Mary must have rushed back to the manger from Jerusalem.

As you might imagine, I found this narrative thread to be something less than compelling, though it is characteristic of Christian stories that draw from more than one of the Gospels. Jesus films in particular suffer from this problem, taking a bit of Mark and a snippet of John, then attempting to fit them into a framework taken from Luke, with narration by Matthew. It’s a kind of mash-up, which is fine as long as the reader or viewer realizes that, theologically speaking, what they are experiencing is a modern day version of an unapproved gospel. Basically, The Passion of the Christ is about as useful when it comes to theology as is The Gospel of Mary Magdalene–possibly less so. It’s also not nearly as entertaining, though that’s probably just my take on things.

I finessed my manger/magi problem last night by skipping the trip to Jerusalem, but the inelegance of the solution remained in the back of my mind for the rest of the night, a vague itch that surfaced every now and then to importune a scratch.

Eventually I decided to write my own mash-up, something that I could read to the kids each Christmas without having to resort to page skipping and abrupt personnel changes in the middle of a scene. About halfway through it I remembered my previous attempt at a Christmas project, undertaken for Ngnat’s second Christmas, just after we moved into the new house.

It was going to be a family book of carols, the impetus for the creation of which was my discovery that my favorite carol, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” had been left out of the new Methodist hymnal.

United Methodists have strong commitments to the theological concern over the use of gender specific language about God and God’s people, and this is reflected in this hymnal. Hymn texts have been modified so that masculine nouns no longer speak for both genders. “Good Christian Men Rejoice” is much improved by the new “Good Christian Friends, Rejoice,” while “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and “O Brother Man” are, as in The Presbyterian Hymnal, missing altogether.

Eventually I decided that a bundle of loose carol printouts weren’t all that appealing when it came to a family heirloom and abandoned the project, but I’m still pissed about God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. Frankly, any church that emasculates itself to such a degree that GRYMG is seen as objectionable deserves the subsequent decline in attendance. At least most of the individual churches within the denomination have yet to be infected with that PC virus.

I figured as long as I was going to rewrite the most memorable portions of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, I might as well make up an entire Christmas program, taking the family’s favorite carols and inserting them wherever they would fit into the story. This way I will have not only a clean narrative of the Christmas story, but Scotty and the Ngnat will know the words to God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen when they grow up.

Assuming I can get them to sit still long enough for us to get through it. *

Continue reading ‘A Hraka Family Christmas’ »

There comes a point in a family’s life when the parents must draw the line on the children bathing together.

I’ve reached that point. I arrived there last night, when we put Scotty M. into his pre-bedtime bath with the Ngnat. As always, my son’s Pavlovian–and immediate–response to the warm water embrace of his lower extremities was to release the yellow hounds of bladder control and pee all over the tub, a look of beatific calm on his face. Ngnat loved it. She always does. It’s the bath time equivalent of a floor show for her. Occasionally she asks for Scotty to join her in her ablutions specifically to watch him irrigate the tiles.

Her fascination with watching her little brother pee is somewhat off-putting, but at least understandable. Children are curious beasts. Worse is her tendency to absentmindedly drink the bathwater afterwards. Scotty does the same, except it isn’t absentminded on his part and there’s nothing I can do to stop him short of taking away the toys–a move that would end in misery, howling and a surrender on my part almost Gallic in its swiftness.

Ngnat I can at least remonstrate with, for all the good it does.

“Don’t drink your bath water!” I told her last night. “There’s pee-pee in that water. Do you like drinking pee water?”

She looked at me, considering.

“Yes.”

She is one with the Ollie. Not much I can do then, save declaring a provisional and largely unenforceble end to co-ed bathing in the Hraka household for those below a certain age.

In answer to the obvious question, no, there is no ban on co-ed bathing for the older members of House Hraka, but given the presence of the younger members of House Hraka, there might as well be.

It’s always daddy’s fault.

If it seems that the world has been spinning just a little bit faster lately, there’s only one I can say.

My bad.

Scotty M, Papa and I were playing in the backyard today, kicking a giant pink plastic ball around. Actually, I was playing. Scotty was randomly toddling wherever the sprit took him, and Papa was spotting him, as we never know when a vagrant impulse might send the boy careening down the 6-foot embankment at the back of the yard.

The game consisted of kicking the ball to the top of the roof on our two-story Modern American Cookie-Cutter, figuring out where it’s coming down, meeting it there, then kicking it back up to the top of the house before it bounced twice. It was a light ball for its size, so a good kick would send it forty feet or more into the air. For traction’s sake I was playing barefoot, as it had just finished raining. Besides, last time I checked Nike hadn’t yet come out with a shoe for….Soccer Roofball.

So, anyway, I had a good chance for an extremely rare triple volley. The ball was coming off the eaves in a fairly straight line, the wind had died down, and the two-foot moving hazard was at the opposite end of the yard, spouting gibberish and pointing out god knows what to his grandfather. But, at the last minute I misjudged the landing spot, over-corrected for my mistake while trying to come up underneath the ball and drove my toes into the ground at full speed, excavating a divot the size of–call it a five-wood–into the lawn in front of me. I immediately fell to my ass howling, then got up and speed-limped around the backyard–the faster one limps, the faster the pain goes away, you see–cursing in front of my impressionable toddler and his minister grandfather until the air turned blue.

Scotty enjoyed my performance a great deal. “Fuh!” He shouted, getting into the spirit of the moment. “FUH!”

Papa’s ears were red, but it was from amusement rather than the righteous wrath of the God of Isaiah, Methodist ministers being more likely to overlook the occasional “Fuh!” than are the spiritual leaders of some other denominations.

Needless to say, though I state it anyway,me being the sort of fellow that peppers his conversations with inanities like “Needless to say,” Soccer Roofball was over for the day, and possibly the season. Once the speed limp had drained away the initial pus of pain I hobbled inside, to a bag of frozen corn wrapped in a dishtowel for my foot and a healthy dose of wifely ridicule and derision for the rest of me.

I don’t think my foot is broken, purple and swollen though it is. The spiky lines of pain emanating from it feel more akin to the numerous jammed thumbs that decorated my Little League career than they do to the fat kid falling on my arm in the Moon Walk greenstick fracture I suffered in fourth grade.

On the other hand, my body really, really doesn’t want to put any pressure on it. I’m shuffling round the house like a marionette with one string cut and the rest hopelessly entangled by a puppeteer who drank too much before the performance.* I hunch over like an Igor at open bell tryouts, and my arms swing about with wild abandon with every step as they try to keep my (not inconsiderable) weight on the one good foot. It’s hopflailshuffleflail, hopflailshuffleflail everywhere I go. A grand-mal seizure epileptic with three limbs asleep makes better forward progress than I do.

So I’m pretty much sticking to the couch at the moment. I’ve asked the Sainted Wife twice now for a little bell to ring when I discover a need that requires attending, but she’s not been very forthcoming with one.

She’s not very empathetic for a man in my condition, if you ask me.

*Stage fright, of course.

In an effort to save…let’s see here…carry the one….less than $100 per annum, I no longer patronize the upscale and luxurious haircutteries of the world. Instead, when time comes for the shearing, we visit the in-laws, where my flowing locks are removed courtesy of the father-in-law’s home barber kit. He doesn’t use it, mind you, but it’s good enough for the likes of me.

The first time I submitted to the ministrations of G-daddy’s electric clippers it was an event. SW sat me up in a chair outside on the deck, running her fingers lovingly through my hair. The kids were gathered round to watch, and a towel was gently wrapped round my neck prior to the wielding of the scissors.

“This isn’t so bad,” I remember thinking. The more fool me. The shepherd may be gentle the first time, but once a particular sheep is used to the shearing, what’s the point?

As you may have gathered, there was no such production this past weekend. No chair, no wife, no running of fingers through the hair. There was just myself, the barber kit, and a vaguely bored Ngnat on the back deck of the in-law’s house, with no mirror save the poor one provided by the windowpane in front of me.

To be fair, it’s not like my haircuts are complicated things. All one really needs is an electric clipper with a quarter or half inch guide attached, depending on how much hair I wanted left on my head at the end of the process, and ten minutes of time. The end result is perfectly acceptable to me–I’d consider any more effort on the part of my head to be the exercise of needless vanity*, and even when I patronized the discount barberies of the world my main concern was to get in and out in a minimum of time, with a minimum of chat. Getting my haircut was a chore, akin to taking out the trash or emptying the cat box.

All of that floated through my head as I pawed through the contents of the home barber kit, looking for the clipper attachments, eventually leading to two logical, at least to me, conclusions;

“The less I have to mess with this crap the quicker this will be over with.” and

“The shorter my hair isat the end of this, the longer it will be until I have to do it again.”

Now it turns out that used normally, the non-guide enhanced electric clippers will cut hair down to about an eighth of an inch, but even that setting can be adjusted downwards, to something that I estimate leaves less than a sixteenth of an inch of stubble behind–and it was quick. Save for some minimal retouching in the back, I was done in about three minutes.

It was a very positive experience, made more so by the reaction of the wife, who declared that I couldn’t be left alone for more than five minutes at time without doing something stupid, dammit. She then intimated that perhaps I should have had a pass at the eyebrows as well, they being a little too MarkTwainian in appearance for her tastes. Scotty blinked in confusion for a few seconds when he first beheld the new me, but was otherwise pretty phlegmatic about the whole thing.

Ngnat liked rubbing my head, but told me I didn’t look like Daddy anymore.

“Who do I look like?” I asked.

“That man from Annie,” she replied, to the general amusement of all round.

I’m thinking about getting one of these for next time, though the extra time I would have to spend shaving would argue against it. On the other hand, use of it apparently drives the women crazy with desire.

*Oddly enough, I developed this attitude only after marriage. The thing I feared most as a teenager was that Mom was going to make an attempt to cut my hair with her home haircutting kit–a process that not only felt like it took forever, but left me looking like the class retard.**

**In my opinion. I may well have looked worse.

Courtesy of Scotty and Ngnat.

Ngnat
Olympics - Valympics “Can I watch the Valympics with you, Daddy?”
Fart - Grass - “I went to the potty, but it was just grass.”
Burp - Mouth Grass “Daddy had loud mouth grass.”
Hopscotch - Hotscots - “Isiahus messed up my hotscots!”
Popsicle - Siclepops - “Can I have siclepops for dessert?”
Father - Dada - an occasional infantalized pronunciation that we consider direct evidence of Scotty M’s bad influence on her, usually uttered when she wants to be carried.

Thanks to his tender age, Scotty has a larger number of entries, but no contextual examples
Ball - Ba
Balloon - Bough
Frog - Fra
Toad - Fra
Pacifier - Puh
Bug - Buh
Butterfly - Fwy
May I have some of what you are eating? - Ahhhhhh!
I’m starving, you heartless bastard! - AHHHHHHH!
Cat - Tzishi
Flower - Fla
Train - gung-gung!
Sister - tita
Mama - Mamamama
Daddy - dadadada
Hello- Heh-ya
Byebye - Byebyebyebye

Second Child Syndrome: SW and I were sweeping up after dinner (cornbread, rice, and beans) when Scotty trundled into the kitchen. He was evidently still hungry, for he bent down, pulled a cold and dusty pinto bean out of the pile of sweepings, and evinced every sign of gastronomic satisfaction upon devouring it in front of his parents.

Neither of us blinked an eye. Nor did we do anything when he returned to the pile a second time for a chunk of Ngnat’s discarded cornbread.

After that I felt somewhat guilty, so I poked at Scotty with the broom when he returned yet a third time to the linoleum buffet. Eventually the prickly feel of the broomstraw on the tops of his feet was sufficient to drive him out of the room. I swept the pile up and tossed it outside.

“You see what your son did?” I asked the wife when I came back in.

“He’s not my son when he does that,” she replied. “He’s your’s.”

Question: When making a mix cd for one’s four-year-old daughter, is Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues an acceptable song?

It feels like the politically correct influence of the times having its way, but based solely on the “But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” line one would think not. Do I really want to introduce Ngnat to the concept of murder for the hell of it before she can even read?

On the other hand, Folsom Prison Blues is arguably an American classic, along the lines of Tom Dooley, which certainly is about as far from the typical saccharine children’s song as it is possible to get.

I met her on the mountain, there I took her life
Met her on the mountain, stabbed her with my knife

It’s not like Ngnat is at the point where she pays a lot of attention to the lyrics–though she almost certainly pays more attention to them than I suspect–children on the whole being like that. Aside from that, FPB is the type of song she likes (or that I like to think she likes)–not that there’s a lot, if anything, that she disapproves of when it comes to music.

But it could also be argued that Tom Dooley, despite its age and status, isn’t an appropriate song either, that on the whole children shouldn’t be exposed to any mentions of murder and death whatsoever–or that at the very least the introduction to such ideas should be delayed as long as possible. Where then does that leave Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which was scheduled to join the bedtime reading pool over the next month or so?

Early in the morning, Gretel had to go out and hang up the cauldron with the water, and light the fire. “We will bake first,” said the old woman, “I have already heated the oven, and kneaded the dough.” She pushed poor Gretel out to the oven, from which flames of fire were already darting. “Creep in,” said the witch, “and see if it is properly heated, so that we can put the bread in.” And once Gretel was inside, she intended to shut the oven and let her bake in it, and then she would eat her, too. But Gretel saw what she had in mind, and said: “I do not know how I am to do it; how do I get in?” “Silly goose,” said the old woman. “The door is big enough; just look, I can get in myself!” and she crept up and thrust her head into the oven. Then Gretel gave her a push that drove her far into it, and shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt. Oh, then she began to howl quite horribly, but Gretel ran away, and the godless witch was miserably burnt to death.

If Gretel’s burning of the witch is acceptable, I don’t see what’s so wrong with Folsom Prison Blues, though admittedly her actions are more defensible than those of the Folsom Prison Blues narrator. I think I’ll go ahead and make both available. Then I can show her the joys of combining the two.

Oven Cooking Blues

I smell myself a burnin’; I’m cooking like a hen,
And I ain’t seen that Gretel since, she pushed me in.
I’m stuck inside this oven. I’m charring to the bone.
Yes now my eyes are boiling ‘ I’m reaping what I’ve sown.

Well, if they freed me from this oven, if my life again was mine,
I bet I’d change my ways, I’d be a little more benign.
Far from this here oven, that’s where I want to stay,
But now my skin is turning black. It’s time to pass away.

We’re back. Actually, we came back yesterday, but if one counts the time spent decompressing from the vacation as part of the vacation, we weren’t really back until this morning, when I got up, groggily stumbled to Scotty’s room at 6 this morning, lifted the wailing child from his bed, stumbled back into our, tossed him at a comatose SW and fumbled my way into the shower.

It wasn’t a planned vacation in the sense of something we had been anticipating all year–we can’t afford those kinds of vacations at present, or so I am informed. But with school starting back up, hotel prices start to fall at the coast, so we grabbed a cheap room at the Atlantic Beach Ramada Inn on the spur of the moment. It was only ten miles from the house we stayed in at Christmas–convenient, since the Ngnat had inadvertently left her favorite stuffed rabbit behind when we left.

She’d been asking about it ever since. I drove her down on Monday, and asked the bemused current renters if they had happened to notice an aqua bunny lying about. Lo and behold they had, so rabbit and Ngnat are together again.

Neither Ngnat nor Scotty knew what to make of the ocean at first, though Ngnat at least had a vague memory of seeing something like it before. However, both were enchanted with the hotel. Scotty loved nothing more than trundling down the halls at top speed, shouting imperiously at the passers-by and banging on the elevator doors. I was constantly pulling him back from them, haunted by the image of them opening up onto nothing but shaft. Ngnat, following in the footsteps of a tradition so ingrained among children that it must be written in our DNA, leapt from bed to bed in the hotel room whenever she got a chance.

Both were much more comfortable with the ocean the next day, though it took a while. In Ngnat’s case, as is often true with her, she wasn’t going to have anything to do with the waves until she saw a slightly older girl, Charlotte–her name turned out to be, who was five–rushing back and forth like a sandpiper as the water came in, then receded. Eventually she and the Ngnat decided the waves were monsters, and punctuated each rush towards the mighty blue with screams of derision. From there it was just a short step to lying in the surf and giggling hysterically while the waves knocked them about.

As for Scotty M, the only impetus he needed was the sight of his big sister cavorting in the tide to spur him on, though after a wave knocked him ass over teakettle he spent most of the rest of his time perched in my lap. When that grew old, he smacked at the beach with a plastic shovel and slid down the tide-created sand cliff on his belly–an activity that will generate pound upon pound of diaper sand and make changing a dirty diaper virtually impossible.

We stayed two nights, which was plenty. The only way to get Scotty to sleep at night was for SW and I to abandon him to the travel crib, an enclosure that he despises with all the fiber of his being, and sit on the tiny balcony outside the room while Ngnat lay in the bed beside him, talking and singing him to sleep. We didn’t tell her to–our plan was to put them both to bed and retreat until things were quiet, but since she couldn’t sleep with him screaming, she sang lullabies to him. We’ve no idea what she sang–we could just barely hear her behind the closed door to the balcony, and any movement/sound from the balcony started Scotty up again, so it remained closed, and Ngnat didn’t recall any specifics the next morning, or so she claimed.

Probably won’t fully recover until the weekend, though. SW is still making up a sleep deficit run up by the hotel bed, I’m sore from a too-ambitious sand castle and moat attempt and we’re still running across the odd pocket of sand on the children no matter how many times we bathe them.

Still, it was better than work.

There are special blessings that come with having two kids instead of one.

Take impromptu screaming contests in the back of the minivan, for instance. One hardly ever gets those with only one kid. But with two it’s just a matter of time.

If a parent is extra lucky, lucky like me, for instance, their two will start said contest when the parent isn’t actually in the minivan with them, causing the parent to stub the ever-loving flibbertyshit out of his toe when he rushes back from his one final check of the door locks to pull the dingoes off his children.

But that’s only the lucky parents, of course, the parents who are fortunate to have not only that fillip of extra spice added to the whole experience but a whole ‘nother–the joy of pulling off half a toenail later on, say, or the warm glow of appreciation engendered by a spouse’s observation that some people are perhaps a little obsessive-compulsive when it comes to checking and rechecking the damn door locks.

As for the screaming contest itself…it’s kind of hard to step on that kind of thing when the baby is bubbling over with mirth at the sight of his sister doing her best Janet Leigh impression.

Aside to the Grandparents: Of course we let her watch Psycho–as much as she wants, day after day after day. It’s one of her favorite movies. She’s so cute in her little chair, rocking back and forth, talking about how she wouldn’t hurt a fly. We’re thinking of getting her The Exorcist DVD for Christmas.

I’m not sure how it started. Possibly the boy gave an impatient yell when I went back in the house. He’s gotten like that lately. When going bye-bye is mentioned, by gum bye-bye needs to happen PDQ. He will not stand for delays in the process. He has places to be.

What is it with you and my damn pants every time we go somewhere? It’s all clear down there, dammit! We gotta hit the road! Time’s a-wasting, you ponderous old coot!

Ngnat apparently volleyed the scream back to him, and they were off. He was entranced because he had happened upon a way to make his sister repeatedly do interesting and wonderful things, much as pressing a certain button on the computer again and again makes Daddy do interesting and wonderful things. She was entranced because he erupted into a truly astonishing series of hiccuping belly laughs every time she screamed back.

I was pretty sure they couldn’t keep it up for the entire 10 minute drive to the grocery store, but as it turned out, I was wrong.