My nine-year-old daughter was typing up her first book report for school.  She’d already written a draft on paper, and was transcribing the report to the computer.

I decided to have her do it in Microsoft Word.  She’d written the title, and had gotten the first paragraph down when I decided she should learn how to save the document.

I pointed to the image of floppy disk and said, “Now click on the… the little blue square thing here.”

That’s when it hit me.  She’s nine years old, and already Microsoft Word’s graphic for save is so out-of-date as to be meaningless for her.  What was the point of explaining what the picture was of?  We don’t have any floppy disks.  She’ll never see one.

Aaron, our six-year-old, was browsing instructional art videos on YouTube.  The art subject of choice was Mario, of course.

He knows how to do this sort of thing himself.  After logging in to his account, he launches his web browse, and types “youtube mario” in the Google Search field to get to YouTube.  After that, he’ll type “draw mario” into the YouTube search box, and he’s off and running with his instructional videos.

His mother and I were in another room when we heard him get frustrated a few minutes later.

“It’s not there! I can’t find it. It’s not anywhere! I can’t find MS Paint.”

I knew right away what had happened.  He’d navigated from a YouTube clip of somebody drawing Mario with a pencil to one doing it in Microsoft Paint, and he wanted to try it out himself.

I ran to him.  He was on a Windows PC, so he obviously had Paint, but there was no telling where he was looking for it.

When I got to him, I saw that he’d typed variations of “ms paint” into the Web Browser’s search box and into YouTube’s search box about a dozen times.

Poor kid. He was searching for Microsoft Paint in the only places on the computer he knew. Wasn’t everything on the web?

Aaron’s a great Super Mario Galaxy player. He’s gotten all 121 stars over and over again. Now he’ll start playing the game just to pass the time. He’s even found a glitch in the game.

It’s pretty much all he wants to do. Bringing him outside to play catch or go for a bicycle ride is like asking him to do homework.

A few days ago, when he asked to play the game again I told him, “No, you really should do something else. Put one of the puzzles together or play with your toys instead.”

He walked off and called back to me from another room, “I’m going to play Jenga, Daddy!” I answered ”OK, Aaron.”

Everything seemed fine.  Maybe he really could entertain himself without obsessing about Super Mario Galaxy.

A little while later, I went to the kitchen and discovered what he called “playing Jenga.”

He drew a Grand Star in Jenga pieces.

Yesterday, my wife and I were chatting with Maddie’s piano teacher, Ms. Kim. She just sent her youngest kid off to college and her house feels really empty now. This morning, my wife dropped our kids off at school and I went directly in to work. A little later I got the following email message from my wife…

I walk the kids into the school and stand there with Aaron waiting for the first bell to ring…

I ask him if it’s okay for me to leave after the first bell rings and he says it’s okay…

I give him a kiss, and he gives me a kiss…

The bell rings, and Aaron and I say goodbye to each other…

He begins to walk away with the other kids to their respective lines…

One kid amongst thousands it seems…but I watch our son leave…

After a few moments, he turns his head towards me, and our eyes meet…

I feel the same thing you’re feeling, son…

I wave at him… he waves back at me, and he continues to walk forward…

I feel a certain something in my chest, and I knew I could start blubbering if I didn’t walk away too…

I feel Ms. Kim’s pain…

I know what empty nest syndrome feels like…

And I don’t look forward to that part of my future…

Boys’ Adventure
Originally uploaded by dblume

This weekend, the whole family went to San Mateo County Memorial Park to celebrate the birthday of one of Madison’s friends.

Aaron and I took the opportunity to go on an adventure in the park, on our own, away from the girls.

We went straight to the creek, and wound our way along the trails following signs to the Tunnel Tree and the Largest Tree. There were plenty of fascinating trees with burnt-out trunks in which to explore and lots of paths leading off towards unimagined adventures.

The photo here captures Aaron sitting at the end of a concrete wall a few feet above the water just before a spill-over. He had to walk carefully along the edge of the wall to make it to the pylon. This is what he and I deemed “the most dangerous part of our adventure”.

My son called out from across the house, “How do you spell dare?”

Seeing as how this was on Valentine’s Day, I thought that that was an unusual word for a valentine.  But I spell it out for him anyway: D, A, R, E.

What I got back was an awkward silence.  Then he asked it again, “How do you spell dare?!”  So, somehow he knew that that wasn’t the spelling he wanted, or he just didn’t hear me.  I asked him to pronounce it clearly.  He yelled back,

“Duh!  Air!  Ruh!”

“Dair!”

Yeah, well, that didn’t help at all.  So I asked him to use it in a sentence.

“Dere’s a giraffe over dere.”

Lillian and I had to explain to the kids that their grandmother passed away.  Lillian waited for me to return home from work to break the bad news.

When I got home, my daughter greeted me with, “Mom said you have bad news.  Did Oma die?”  I answered with, “Where’s your brother?”

When we got the kids together, I told Maddie that she was right, Oma died.  The kids said things like, “Did her heart just get tired” and “I want to see her big stone thing at the cemetary.”

I explained that Oma’s not going to get a headstone.  She wanted to be cremated.  Of course, I knew it was coming: Now I’d have to explain what cremation is.  They asked, and I just dove into it.  “They’re going to burn Oma’s body, and we’ll be left with her ashes.”  I watched the faces of the kids and of Lillian to see how this explanation was registering.

They processed it for a bit, and then asked, “You mean like Obi-Wan?”

Lillian lit up at the comparison too.  Obi-Wan was a great Jedi, after all.  That would be a fitting comparison, right?  I had to explain, “No.  Not like Obi-Wan.  His body just disappeared when Darth Vader struck at him with a light saber.”  I went on, “Cremation is more like what they did with Darth Vader.”

I got slightly confused and horrified looks for a second.  But then as everybody remembered that third original Star Wars movie, they all nodded sagely.

Mom, I love you, and I’ll always remember you.

The rain abated this afternoon, so the kids and I gathered in the driveway for a little fresh air.

Maddie rode her bike up and down the street, while Aaron grabbed the chalk and started drawing on the nearly dry concrete.  He draw a rhino-nosed shark, and began to fish through the bucket of chalk pieces.

“Where’s the red?  I need red chalk.”

He got up and went back inside the garage to sort through another container of chalk pieces.  I’d already figured out that he needed red to draw some blood.  Awesome.  My son was going to draw the shark in a feeding frenzy or something.  I was so proud.

He came out disappointed.  “We only have pink.”

With that, he began to draw a line from the shark’s eye to a little stick-figure man, and then drew zapping lines all around the man.

His drawing was far more awesome than I anticipated.  He didn’t need red chalk for blood.  He needed it for the rhino-nosed shark’s laser beam eyes.

Way to beat your old man’s expectations, Little Guy.

Now that my kids are old enough to read, I’ve been thinking seriously about when I should retire this blog.

The charter of this blog is “anecdotal stories about fatherhood,” and I’ve been able to keep to it for the past six years or so. But as the kids get older, I have to respect their privacy, and I have to do so before they even become aware of this blog. Eventually, they’re going to get online. I just have to accept that.

So, today, the kids start arguing about something silly. I start laughing, and yell, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” I want them to be quiet so that I can point out to them exactly how silly they’re being.

They both quiet down, and they can tell I’m not mad.

Maddie offers, “Daddy, this would be good for you to blog.”

I had no idea she knew. But what does she know? I have to re-think everything.

Aaron got a butterfly treehouse this summer. The treehouse comes with a postcard that you have to send away to get five live caterpillars sent back to you in the mail.

Lillian and I weren’t so sure about the caterpillars’ prospects going through the mail, but we gave it a try anyway. The caterpillars eventually arrived in a little cup with some caterpillar food paste on the bottom. The care instructions were so easy to follow! You don’t have to do anything.

The caterpillars would eat their food, grow and grow, and turn into chrysalises right there in the same cup. And sure enough, they did. Once they turned into chrysalises, we removed them from the cup and attached them to the inside of their treehouse.

After a couple of weeks, the chrysalises opened and revealed the new butterflies. The netting of the treehouse was splattered red all over from the butterflies shaking off the dye that colors their wings.

We kept the butterflies in their treehouse for a few more days, feeding them sugarwater on a papertowel. Then it became time to let them go. We broke out the camera and video camera to record the momentous occasion.

We opened the door, and took turns gently reaching in to bring the butterflies out. I don’t know who started it, but one of us began singing,

Mosura ya Mosura…

Pretty much instantly, the rest of us joined in. We all knew the tune. We were letting the butterflies out to the tune of the Mothra Song.