children
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2007My kids see a fair share of lukewarm religiosity with their grandma and teachers. At home, they're taught that there are basically two types of characters:
Real people who merit empathy and solidarity, such as themselves,
Fictional ones that you can make up stories about, such as Spiderman, the Little Mermaid and Jehovah, Lord of Hosts.
Being Swedish, I've never come across a religious parenting manual. But I gather they are really common in the U.S., and that some are exceptionally nasty (as discussed by Jim Benton). Enter Dale McGowan, editor of the anthology Parenting Beyond Belief: On…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2007
My 8-year old son is, like myself at that age, a big Star Wars fan. But his road to the stories has been more complicated than mine. Much of what he knows about them comes from a computer game version where everything is for some reason visualised as built out of legos. So he asks me a lot of confused questions that I can't always answer.
Just now we had such a conversation where I learned that he had gotten all three main female characters mixed up: Luke Skywalker's grandma, mother and sister were the same person to him. When I teased him about this he just replied, philosophically, "It's…
aardvarchaeology | February 4, 2007I love my kids and a lot of that affection spills over on their friends as well. But I'm not the kind of dad who finds children's games very entertaining. I rarely even pretend to enjoy them. In my opinion, the best baby sitter is another child of about the same age.
So I'm not the kids' play mate, I'm their support staff. Since my son reached the age when he no longer saw other kids as a kind of unusually loud and mucuous furniture, he has had a lot of visitors in the weekends. At about half past nine on a weekend morning, I reckon other families with kids will be awake, and I tell him to…
aardvarchaeology | January 9, 2007
The kids' teachers had a training day yesterday, so we picked up a visiting cousin in town and went to the science centre in Södertälje. I hesitate to tell you its name: the place's mascot is for some reason named Tom Tit, and there's no genitive apostrophe in Swedish, so our much-beloved science centre for kids is named... err... Tom Tits. Sounds like a buddy of Seymour Butts's to me, but I guess the people who named it weren't thinking in English.
A science centre is an interactive science exhibition where kids can perform prepared experiments. The little ones of course don't understand…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2006
As a Christmas present for my eight-year-old son, I bought a miniature hammerworks and had the rubber gaskets (Sw. packningar) on my old steam engine replaced. The gaskets dried out years ago, so it's never been possible to get the vapour pressure up in it. To my knowledge, Samuel had never seen a steam engine run before Christmas Eve.
That morning, we gave the kids their presents, and Samuel didn't really understand what the hammerworks was for. "Errr... Thanks Dad, this looks really... fun..." So I told him we actually had a functioning steam engine too, and then the present got a lot…