Appeal to the nobler motives.

(The in-joke here being -- I just found the image on The Filtered Mind website and it was SO COOL I couldn't resist using it. And I hope this is sufficient credit to them where I found it http://www.filteredmind.com/doctor-doom-vs-darth-vader especially since one of Jeffrey's favorite books is Darth Vader and Son whose main character has some father/son issues himself ... and as I'm Jeffrey's dad, and with the passing reference I make in the next paragraph -- heck, let's get going!)




I don't think we're in danger of Jeffrey becoming so enamored of his scar left after the stitches came out from above his right eye yesterday becoming the new Doctor Doom (Marvel's Fantastic Four arch enemy who got mildly scarred in a lab accident and then majorly scarred putting on his armor's mask before it cooled) for he doesn't – at six years old – have the ego sufficiently developed for it. I asked him last night whether the other kids said anything at school about his scar, and he said some kids made fun of him for it.

Then I asked my son what he did and, while curled up on the end of the couch watching an episode of Sam and Cat on the iPad, Jeffrey said he didn't do anything. I told him I was very proud of him. Especially because I had a friend tell me yesterday about his boy starting a fight during recess (I assume he meant “threw the first punch”, I didn't press for details) and being banned from recess for two weeks, with the next time resulting in suspension from school. Quite naturally, my friend was not in a good mood about that. Nor would I be.

But really, now in school the kids are doing awesome jobs! Jeffrey came home Monday with a Great Speller award signed off by both his first grade teacher Mrs. Johnson and his principal Mrs. Larson and with Junior Achievement that's visited him I've seen some great things. Got a picture he drew of something he does to help out at home, the four of us sorting clothes out of the dryer; and for now he says when he grows up he wants to be a “bank worker”. I say for now because you know he'll change that another ten times or so, if he's anyone like I was.

Sarah, who when I got home last night was helping her mom in the kitchen making spaghetti with homemade garlic bread (YUMMY!), is one of two kid in her class whose artwork was selected to be posted in next month's Spring Fair at Longfellow! And though she didn't want to go over her spelling words this morning, Jeffrey's the one who came to ask me why he and I weren't going over his. AND yesterday he gave Sarah the last of one brand of cereal they both like if she wanted it. Both excel at what they do, I just wish they did not choose to badger each other quite so much!

 

Hm. (Or as Watchmen's Rorschach would say, “Hurm.”) I'm at the closing paragraph of today's mighty missive and it's a toss up whether I want to relate finishing William Coles' 2009 novel Prelude (ISBN 9781569475744) about a 1982 romance between a seventeen year old Eton boy and his six-year-senior piano instructor – really, it's more touching than it sounds – or the journal I got for Christmas that I finished Sunday which has its own number (ISBN 9780641644719) so the punctuate essential journal is technically a book I read, or the fresh snowfall from overnight that's already melted?

This … is North Dakota, David