Unclench, Mike!

Mike has sum more 2 share abt his life as a parent:

April,

Formerly little sis. I remember when my sister and I would get into arguments and we rarely had the opportunity to just talk it out. Mom would intervene with some screaming, and whatever method we could have developed through the pure joy of conversation didn’t have a chance to work. I figured I could just stand there or sit there, giving disapproving looks and my children would eventually come to a logical conclusion about whatever it is that they were arguing.

My fatal mistake as it turned out was the assumption that there was a logical conclusion. You may recollect from my writing yesterday, my son had stated that “Merediff was SEEING at me!!!”

My daughter’s counter argument was, “Daddy, Robin’s being a baby!” This argument may work well on the 5-year-old set, but for me I really needed to hear how she wasn’t “seeing” at my son. My son, however, caught on to the illogic of her argument and restated his point. He said, “AM NOT! She was seeing at me!!!” he pointed a finger toward my daughter, and she very cleverly chose that moment to have no eyes. Well, that did confuse the matter. After all, how can she be “seeing” at my son, if she has no eyes? I gave them both my Alice the Goon , slow burn.

Well, my daughter’s eyes suddenly sprang back into her head and they were open very wide, not unlike your speed freak eyes you occasionally get. My son pointed out, “Look! She’s doing it AGAIN! She was SEEING at me!!!” This was a clever move on the part of my son, because now he had definite proof of his claim in addition to a visual definition of what “seeing at me” means. His case was very strong, despite the fact, to illustrate his point, he was pointing at his chin.

My daughter countered with “Duhh!! Can’t I LOOK at anybody? All I did was LOOK at him!” and the patented Patterson splayed hand to the chest. This is a good counterargument. Instead of denying my son’s definition of the phrase, “seeing at me”, my daughter indicated that she had another, more common, definition for what she was doing, i.e. “Look”. She was using one of her advantages of age, which is to know the words for things.

I decided to sit on the chesterfield to reason this one out. While I was sitting there, I decided to try my own version of “seeing at” my son, to see if he noticed. He didn’t. He was concentrating on his sister and imitating her eye movement. He said, “I was playin’ an’ she was doin’ THIS wif her EYES!-- She was SEEING at me!!!!” Well, I had already gotten the subtle difference, since I had actually seen her do it a few seconds before. And I was a little distracted that my son could say the “th” of “this”, but couldn’t say the “th” of Meredith. Despite this demonstration, my son felt the need to emphasize the point and said, “SEE?!! as if he wanted corroboration that I had seen him do the eye motion.

But then I realized he had actually used a double-entendre, because his final “See?!!” could be taken as a question as to whether I witnessed his demonstration or a question as to whether I understood what he was trying to say. Wordplay from my son brought tears to my eyes, which I couldn’t let my children see, so I slapped my hand up to my eyes to hide my tears, and also to get in another good grimace. You can’t grimace enough when it comes to kids.

Love,
Michael Patterson

You can’t grimace enough when it comes to kids. Yeah, you totally can. And you totally do, Mike. Unclench! BTW, the "th" sound in "this" and the one in "Meredith" are different sounds phonetically. They're represented by different symbols if you do phonetic transcription. My English teacher demonstr8ed this 2 my class this yr.

Apes