The lesser-known skills that a Boy Scout needs

On Monday night M achieved 2nd Class rank in Boy Scouts. The way his troop handles the awards ceremony, not only does the Scout receive a cloth badge for his uniform, but he is also handed a small metal pin with a miniature symbol of the rank badge, and he is told “In recognition of your parents’ love and support, place the miniature pin on your mother.”

It’s a pin with a single prong on the back and the kind of clasp you pinch to remove. It was clear M had no idea how to remove the clasp, so I took that off for him. And then M, with an impressively confident flourish of “I have no clue what I’m doing, but I’m going to pretend that I do,” stabbed the pin directly into my shoulder.

Fortunately for me, I was wearing a very heavy wool sweater, so the prong didn’t reach my skin and the pin actually stayed in place without a clasp long enough for M and I to get off the stage. But I definitely heard a number of muffled giggles from the audience at M’s approach to the problem: “In recognition of your parents’ love and support, please stab your mother in the shoulder.”

Strange night for wildlife sightings

4:40 a.m. — Pack of several coyotes howling and yipping somewhere on the other side of the shrubs from our yard.  We reminded the cat, who was busy peering out the window looking for them, “This is why we don’t let you out at night.”

6:40 a.m. — 4 turkeys ambling along the main road on their commute to work.

6:45 a.m. — 1 cat walking along the same road, also on its commute to work. 

7:10 a.m. — 1 raccoon trotting briskly down the sidewalk on the same road, who was clearly going to be late for work if he was scheduled to be working the same shift as the turkeys and the cat.

8:00 a.m. — 1 very skinny woman in leather pants and thigh-high boots, who probably worked the same hours as the coyotes, but at least not behind our shrubs.

For future queens or wannabes…

Come on, you know you want one.  E

Barbie Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken Doll

Snow and rain

No, these aren’t photos from two days ago, when we got the freakishly early first snow of the year. These are photos from today, as we get an even more freakishly early second snow.

Fortunately for M and his camping trip, it was actually dry on Friday night and Saturday. The rain didn’t start until Saturday night, and it didn’t change to snow until after he got home this morning. So he brought home plenty of wet clothes and a sodden tent, but his sleeping bag stayed dry, and he was not uncomfortably cold and wet on the trip.

In other news, the cat spent quite a while today trying to convince E to let him outside. She explained that it was wet out. She showed him that it was raining outside the front door. She showed him it was raining outside the back door. Each time, he poked his head out, agreed with her assessment, and went back inside, only to start squawking again 20 minutes later. The third time she showed him that it was still raining outside the back door, he decided rain wasn’t so bad after all and made a run for it. Three minutes later, he turned up at the front door, wet and shivering and begging to come in — which would have been fine except that he had a chipmunk in his mouth and he did not want to leave his prey outside.

Sorry, dude; what happens in the yard has to stay in the yard.

Bigfoot

S here, and we got the first snow of the season this morning. I can’t remember snow ever coming this early, but it’s been unseasonably cold. And the whole weekend is supposed to be rainy, cold, raw, and windy — so of course M is on a Boy Scout camping trip.

We discovered last night, as we packed the last of his things, that he has outgrown all of his boots. Size 3 boots fit him last winter, but somehow over the last few months he’s even vaulted past the pair in size 4 that I had expected he’d use this weekend. Fortunately for Bigfoot, my boots fit him just fine. Even more fortunately for Bigfoot, my boots are not girly boots. They are Herman Survivors workboots from the men’s department, nicely broken in and complete with well-scuffed toes from activities like roofing and snowblowing.

At 4′11″ and 80 pounds, M is not exactly the most macho dude on the planet. But from the ankles down, he’s now a vision of rugged manliness, thanks to his mom’s boots.

Teens versus preteens

S here, and last night was my first session of leading Boy Scouts through the Family Life merit badge. It was a markedly different experience from when I led the financial management merit badge last year.

1. Last year the boys in my group were mostly teens in high school. This year they were mostly preteens or young teens in middle school.

2. Teens do not talk voluntarily. They are perfectly willing to sit and stare silently at an adult asking them questions, while their thumbs nervously twitch as they go through texting withdrawal.

3. Preteens do not stop talking voluntarily. An adult doesn’t even have to ask a question for them to be hollering out ideas, suggestions, opinions, and random observations.

4. Teens do not raise their hands and wait to be called on. For one thing, they don’t want to answer anyway. For another, it interferes with their ability to surreptitiously text under the table.

5. Preteens raise their hands. They wave their hands. They wave the entire body that is attached to the hands. About half the time, they even wait to be called on before they start talking. They occasionally raise their hands for other reasons, such as to blot out their view of the kid in another group who is making weird faces at them, but even if you mistakenly interpret that view-blocking hand as a call-on-me hand, they’re still happy to chime in with an idea, suggestion, opinion or random observation.

6. Teens were intrigued to learn how to decipher the newspaper stock pages that I brought, they asked relevant questions, and they thought it was really cool to see the names of companies they recognized listed in the stock tables. (OK, they found it mildly cool, not really cool; these are teens, after all.)

7. Preteens were very excited by the Lowes and Home Depot fliers that I had brought, to give them inspiration as they each had to figure out a project they could do that might benefit their family. They thought it was totally cool that the fliers included pictures of toilets, because hey, they’re toilets! And any idea is funnier if it can involve a toilet! Especially if it means you and your buddies can say the word toilet multiple times! And the chainsaws were cool too. But not as cool as the toilets!

8. Teens were not impressed by my explanations of what happens when interest is compounded. But they did think that the laptop I used to demonstrate it on a spreadsheet was a really sweet laptop. (Thank you, E, for working in IT and lending me your laptop.)

9. Preteens got pretty excited when I announced that we would start the discussion on “What makes an effective father” by talking about a father we all knew and what ways he was or wasn’t effective — and the father was Homer Simpson. They nearly jumped out of their skins with joy when I passed around a few Simpsons comic books to get the discussion going. The discussion went astonishingly well, and I think I won enough general coolness points with that one to get us through the rest of this badge later this month. If I’m really lucky.

I don’t suppose anyone knows how to tie a discussion of stocks, bonds, and CDs to either Homer Simpson or toilets, do they? Because I’ll be teaching the financial management badge again soon, probably to the preteens. Maybe I could rig up some game involving Monopoly money and a toilet picture for when risky investments go bad…

The bottomless pit

M grew again. He also now considers a TV dinner to be an afterschool snack. I can only imagine how hard it will be to keep him fed when he’s an actual teenager.

Political analysis by M

“I think one of the leading Republican contenders for the 2016 presidential race is John Thune. He’s the Senate minority whip from South Dakota. I’m not so sure about Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota. I think he’s more likely than Thune in 2012, but Thune would be ahead for 2016, because he’s more up-and-coming. He’s also better-looking and more charismatic than Romney or Huckabee.”

Anybody want to hire a political analyst? Do you care that he’s only in 7th grade?

Poetry by M

M had to write an “I Am From” poem for a school assignment. His use of imagery just amazes me.

————————————————–

I am from dirty glasses and lost teeth.
I am from being enveloped in goodnight hugs.
I am from steamy mouthfuls
of Ramen noodles and rice pilaf.
I am from the yeasty aroma
of big soft pretzels.
I am from conjured up worlds and monsters
in the confines of my back yard.
I am from cardboard wings and time machines,
from bikes and swings.
I am from Legos and Bionicles,
from Indiana Jones and dinosaurs.
I am from the words of Harry Potter,
and Harry Turtledove,
stretching across the page.
I am from a kind and close-knit family.

The father’s role in the family

S here; each year, M’s Boy Scout troop gets various parents to be merit badge counselors, who then spend several troop meetings helping a small group of boys work through earning the badge. At an all-parents meeting last year, we were given a very brief overview of the dozen or so badges that the troop hoped to find counselors for, and then we were told to sign up for whichever ones we felt comfortable teaching. I signed up for (and eventually led) Personal Management, which was mostly about personal finances and investment basics. I also signed up for Family Life, based on the explanation they gave that “it involves discussions of household chores and stuff like that, and moms generally find it a really easy one to lead.” I’m willing to live with mild sexist assumptions, especially when the alternative is signing up for badges like Rifle Shooting or Machetes and Flamethrowers.

Well, this year I got a call that they’d like me to teach Family Life. So I finally looked up the requirements, and most of them really are about helping the boys make household chore charts and stuff like that. But oh, the irony, when this lesbian mom gets to lead the boys in requirement 7, a discussion of “Your understanding of what makes an effective father and why, and your thoughts on the father’s role in the family.”