Tough Questions

It's finally happened.

I knew this phase would come eventually and I thought I would be ready for it.

Amelie has been asking the tough questions. See, I always thought I had a creative idea for handling this. Take my plan for the classic "where do babies come from" question:

Amelie: Daddy, where do babies come from?

Daddy: Well sweetie, it all started back in the primordial soup, somewhere around 4 billion years ago. No one's quite sure, but some theorize that lightning struck a strategic combination of chemicals and life began. It didn't always work at first, see, and eventually over thousands and millions and billions of years, these little creatures developed what's called mitosis. That's when cells....

Amelie: (Sigh) Nevermind...

See, crisis averted. That was my plan at least.

But it just didn't work out that way. Here's a sampling of a few of the tougher ones of late:

Amelie: Daddy, if you're bad, the police officers will shoot you, right?

Daddy: What!? Uh, no. I mean, well, uh, it depends. I mean, no they shouldn't shoot you. They're not supposed to shoot you unless, like, you shoot them... or you're black or a G8 protestor or something... You're not going to shoot a police officer, right kiddo?

But, police are nice sweetie, very nice. They, like, are here to help and stuff.

Or here's a fun one from when we were on a family walk and we happened across a cemetery with flowers by the headstones.

Amelie: I want to smell the flowers!

Dominique: No.... I don't think you should smell those flowers.

Amelie: Why? I want to smell the flowers.

Dominique: It's, uh, because, you know, those people are dead and those flowers aren't for smelling, they're for the dead people. See, it's like they're not here anymore. They just have those stones there so people will remember them.

Amelie: (Looks at Dominique intently, actually listening for once).

Dominique: Uh.... See, people just, you know, go away and, uh, we don't want to forget them (rambling incoherently, panicked, hoping Amie will just come to the end of her attention span, but she doesn't).

Or here's one that arose because Amie put on a jacket she was wearing the last time we took a plane. The jacket had the Delta "wings" pinned to it.

Daddy: Oh, look! Your wings. You know, when I was a little boy, I got wings too! Back in those days, they let the kids go in the cockpit with the pilots and look around at all the buttons and knobs and gauges and stuff. It was really cool! But they don't do that anymore (to myself) because of 9/11 and everything.

Amelie: What's that?

Daddy: What?

Amelie: 9/11.

Daddy: Oh, it's a long story (forgetting that Amelie loves stories).

Amelie: Tell it!

Daddy: Aww man....

The moral of the story: You're never really prepared. The questions just blindside you and you'll be totally caught off guard.  Please, help me. What random questions did your kid ask you that you had no answer for? The more I'm prepared, maybe I can avoid a potential disaster.

Thanks!

-Tom

I'm Baaaack!

My lovely wife-to-be, Dominique, has informed me of a latent demand for my particular brand of daddy blogging.

If you didn't know, I was previously signed to a 5 month contract to write 5 blogs about being a daddy every month. Well, the contract ran out, the company went under, and I had no more financial motivation to continue.

Since then, I've been mostly focusing my efforts on the TOP Project and it's blog and social media sites and writing articles about the religious and political views of celebrities--and watching my beautiful and charming daughter grow up right before my eyes. Oh, and going to school. Yay.

But school's out for the summer, the weather's warm, we're going back to Europe for a couple of months, and if Dominique's right, there are some eager readers out there. So why not start up again, right?

Where to begin. It looks like in the last blog I wrote (and maybe I'll post the old ones periodically), Amie was struggling to assert her independence. That was a year and a half ago. She's still struggling to assert her independence. So... not much has changed, I guess.

Of course that's not true, she's growing and changing and evolving. She's a little person with her own opinions and ideas. She says the most random things, such as walking up to a lady who's daughter she was playing with and saying: "Your kid is telling me I'm little, and I'm not."

She's finally kicked her aversion to languages and seems open to learning words in German and French. She colors, OMG, this girl (and I kind of hate to say this because I had always hoped she would inherit her daddy's musical knack over her mommy's visual artistry) has got an eye. She drew mountains and I'm talking mountains with one side green and one side brown--like a rainshadow and stuff. She drew an electric kool-aid acid test caterpillar Santa Claus, which, I'll be honest, really got me thinking. She drew a building from BSU, having seen it once while we went on a walk, complete with windows and and doors and a roof. I was impressed. You would be too. Maybe I'll post photos of these masterpieces later.

Anyway, she's 3 now, going on 30. We love her to death. She's the glue in the craft project that is our lives.

In terms of a general idea of what to look forward to from this blog, it's hard to say. I just kind of write them as the inspiration hits. However, we are gearing up (as mentioned before) for a couple of months in Europe. We'll be leaving in about 3 weeks. Amie is now old enough to realize that she's in a different world where people talk funny and places look different. So that should be interesting. I'll keep you posted. And, just like the last round of daddy blogs, feel free to leave comments or suggestions about what you'd like to see me write about. I don't pretend to be some sort of daddy guru, but I've got a few tricks up my sleeve...

-Tom