Like Father, Like…

It has to be said that my children are a special… well, they are just special (if you get my drift).

They have both gone through a lot in their lives. To start, well, I’m their dad, so.. BOOM! But as of recently, they have had some personal hardships that have caused them to see me in a different light. Either that, or they finally hit that age that Mark Twain once spoke about…

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

― Mark Twain

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The Science of the High Five

Apparently, there is a science to the high-five. Color me shocked, but I had no idea that there was this class of study until my daughter decided to drop a knowledge bomb on me and inform me about it. Here I was, in all my years of living on God’s green earth (which she informed me was blue, because it is mostly ocean), giving high-fives and doing it in a non-scientific manner.

See, when I give a high-five, I put my hand up and stop, allowing the person who is on the other end to aim and complete the arc, connecting the hands at the top. I do this because when I use to continue the effort I would leave the person with whose hand I connected, stinging and in pain. I tend to be forceful, exuberant even, when giving high-fives, and because I have big hands and know how to cup them just right to create the greatest amount of impact, the resulting connection is quite magnificent. Having worked with kids for such a long time, I recognized that this could be a bad thing, so I adopted the much more passive version that I use now. Unless of course it’s a teenager who annoys me, then… well, full impact mode is a go.

Songing

I’ve been writing poetry for a very long time. Mind you, none of it is really all that good, at least not in my opinion. Add to that fact that I have this really weird way of creating songs out of nothing (a trait my wife calls ‘songing’ (yeah, I don’t get it either)), and you end up with this weird mish-mash of strange songs that get sung (way out of tune) to the melodies I hear on the radio or tv.

Except for this one time.

I’m not sure when it happened, but it was sometime around my daughter being about 3 years old. She was a ball of fire, always on the go, always quietly planning to do something. That was one of her scary traits. With our son, we always knew he was doing something wrong because he would make a ton of noise doing it. Our daughter however, when she got quiet… you could almost guarantee she had some nefarious plot she had cooked up and was in the midst of trying to take over the world.