Articles in The Ascent of Boy
For Christmas, Santa brought our six-year-old boy the classic tales of another six-year-old boy (plus a tiger): “Calvin and Hobbes.” And oddly, he was not enchanted, like, immediately.
Calvin and his tiger Hobbes moved around the …
We have a happy little nuclear family, all things being equal. My husband and I had our son when we were past our rather exciting young adulthoods, and were married seven years before we heeded …
The obligatory social functions one is committed to once you have a child are difficult for shut-in’s like myself. If I was childless, younger and spoke completely off the cuff, no problem: my outbursts might …
The whole house is laid out this week. My nagging virus has turned into a she-beast of laryngitis; my husband keeps getting more and more work as the rest of the house falls apart around …
Our son was an early reader. This skill has raised some interesting issues as we were not given the luxury of either faking him out (he could read the newsletters the preschool sent home, where …
There was a post in the NY Times (Good Night and Tough Luck) the other day which just about summed up the household. Lars sent it to me because it seemed that the author/artist had …
There is a certain level of injustice in everyday life. Not to complain or anything–we’ve got it pretty good–but the sheer unpredictability of life makes it more like a game of craps in Vegas.
For example: …
“I don’t know how to build a Toyota Tundra. Can you help me?”
“I’ll help you when I’m done building my silly car,” I said. I had cannibalized a bunch of odds-and-sods from our son’s Legos …
“I want to watch this,” said our five-year-old. I had turned on the television to find some sort of ridiculous afternoon movie, some pablum from the Eighties finding an audience only in re-run ignominy. What …
“Joe has to be fixed,” my son said about his friend.
I thought, “Already? He’s only five–shouldn’t that wait until he’s a teenager?”
And then I realized that he was saying Joe was broken, not ready to …
One doesn’t want to leave it to a five-year-old to convince the border agent that you’re his mother, but sometimes that’s the only way to roll.
