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Note: In case you think this sounds familiar, this is a variation of a post I did a while back on communication between husbands and wives.

A mom’s questions can have very different meanings to her son than they do to her. Here are some examples:

Mom’s Words: “Would you like to set the table?“

Mom’s Words: “Where are you?“

Mom’s Words: “Are you wearing that?“

Those were, of course, random examples from anonymous people.

Here’s my tip for moms: Don’t ask your son a question if you want him to do (or stop doing) something. Direct commands are best.

Here’s my tip for kids: Chances are good that your mom will ask a question that requires an action, not an answer. But you still need to answer her so that she knows you got the message. But don’t answer the question as it was phrased, answer by saying what you’re going to do.

Now that school has started, here are a couple questions. One math question and one grammar question.

1. What is the value of twelveteen?
A : 120
B : 112
C : 22

2. What is the past tense of snowblow?
A : snowblew
B : snowblowed
C : snewblow

Time’s up. Pencils down.

Hand your paper to your left and we’ll being grading.

Ready?

1. Your guess is as good as mine.
2. Trick question. “Ran the snowblower” is the right answer.

One of the recurring events in a child’s life is the family photo. Sometimes it’s immediate family, sometimes it’s extended family, and sometimes it’s just the child by himself.

I had opportunities to be involved in various family photos this year, and I observed something:

Family photos are like a race.

No, not to see who can get done first. It’s like a race in that the finish line must be set – a fixed destination.

You know the drill –

“Okay, we’ll do this group.”
“Now put the grandparents in.”
“Okay, now everybody together.”

By this point, some nerves are getting frazzled.

Invariably, someone now says “You kids are doing such a good job, let’s get pictures with you and [insert family grouping here]”

But the longer the photo shoot goes on, the worse the kids get. Why?

Because you’ve moved the finish line.

The kids thought they were going to be done after the everybody-together shot. But then they weren’t done, they had a couple more poses to do.

Think about a race. You enter a race knowing the finish line is a certain distance away. You pace yourself accordingly and have just enough energy to kick it into high gear near the finish line.

How would you feel if someone saw you running at that point and said, “You are doing so well, and you look so fast right now, we are going to move the finish line another mile down the road!”? And they said it in a cheery voice to encourage you.

You would feel annoyed, betrayed, dismayed, or something along those lines. And you would not do very well for that last mile, since your racing energy was used up for the expected course.

That’s how kids feel when you just keep adding groupings to the family photo and extending the whole session.

My two recommendations for family photos:

1. Get the most important photos first. The more photos you take, the worse the kids behave. Unless you like pictures of crying and frowny kids, plan your photo priorities.

There are some cultures that believe photographs steal your soul. I don’t believe that, but I would be open to the theory that each photograph steals part of your smile. After a long photo shoot, you might not be able to smile for a time until your smile can recover.

2. Tell the kids the plan, and establish the finish line. They can pace themselves if they know where the finish line is. “We’ll take just you kids, then you kids with your cousins, then everybody together, and then we’ll be done.”

And then don’t move the finish line.

P.S. If you are worried that it was you who inspired this post – it wasn’t you, it was the other side of the family.

I have dozens of topics and ideas noted as possible blog posts, but today I am just going to phone it in, as they say, and wish everyone a happy labor day.

Happy Labor Day!

I realize that you won’t be reading this until after Labor Day, unless you wait almost a year, or unless you are in a different country and happen to not read this until that day. But whatever. I spent the day doing various house projects and spending time with the family, rather than research and write blog posts.

And we spent some time getting ready for the kids to go back to school.
And getting ready for the start of AWANA.
And getting ready for the start of BSF.
And getting ready for piano lessons to resume.
And so on.

The summer was fairly relaxed as far as schedules go. Now we switch gears and become a little more regimented.

In case you’re wondering, my next house project is finding out where the TV antenna is connected. We haven’t hooked up the TV since we moved and football season is about to start.

Summer is here, which means it is time for me to review the books I have read and let you know what I thought of them.

Here they are, approximately in the order that I read them.

• Darkmouth by Shane Hegarty
  I read this only because Alpha checked it out of the library. I previewed it at the library. I think Alpha actually handed it to me and asked if it was okay, probably because the cover art was a monster chasing an armor-clad boy. The way it was drawn was more campy than scary, but you never know these days.

  I previewed it in the library, and previewed it some more. It was good enough that I probably read about a quarter of it in the library. So we got it and I finished it at home and then let Alpha read it.

  It does have monsters – mostly the standard mythological creatures. And it has some violence in that the people are fighting the monsters. And there are some bad guys who do unkind things. Someone does die. There’s slight descriptions of gore, but mostly the fighting is done with – simplified here so as not to give away the plot – a sort of shrink ray that puts the monsters into small glass jars.

  My main problem with the book was that it is written as book one of a series, so the ending is a segue instead of an actual ending. But if you’re going to read the whole series together, that should not be a problem

  Maybe 4th or 5th grade on up.

• Masterminds by Gordon Korman
  The main problem with this book was that it is only part of a book. It is only about one-third of a book, not a whole book.

  This is the first book of the planned Masterminds Trilogy. The other books aren’t out yet, so I don’t know how the story ends. It might be one complete physical book, but it has only part of the story. The book ends as if it were a commercial break in a television program – a bit of the story has been finished, but you are left wanting the rest of it, to come to a conclusion.

  I’m not a fan of books that don’t have a solid ending.

  The other problem is that a major premise of the book is that all the kids are being lied to by all the adults. In other words, it is the kids’ job to work around the adults in order to figure out the truth. Adults are not to be trusted.

  Maybe that will get better (i.e. some non-villain adults will figure into the story) in the other books. But if you are concerned that your child is tending towards problems with authority figures, you might want to steer clear of this book.

  Apart from that, the book is well written in that it was hard to put down. I put it on the Captivating side of the scale.

• Savvy by Ingrid Law
  This was an engaging book. Borders on the feel of the old-time tall-tales genre, which adds to its charm.

  This would be fine for 2nd or 3rd grade on up, but I would suggest 5th grade on up because of the themes that are presented. Nothing objectionable, quite the opposite in fact, but why bother a 2nd grader’s mind with the first crushes and the appropriateness of tattoos and other such topics?

  The best part of the book was its small-town feel and values. Church is part of people’s lives. Bibles are common. The girl says she doesn’t want to be kissed and the boy says that he can wait. A variety of little things that aren’t the main plot but are part of the story. They all add up to make a positive book.

• As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley
  If you like all the other Flavia de Luce books, you’ll like this one. It’s a Flavia de Luce book, but it’s not really part of the series. It stands on its own fairly well in introduction, setting, characters, and ending. As far as murder mysteries go, it’s tame. High school on up.
• The Supernaturalist: The Graphic Novel by Eoin Colfer
  We were at the library and the boys were gathering books. I glanced through the titles, as I usually try to, and this one stood out as one I should investigate.

  I ended up reading the whole thing before we checked out. Not because it was that engaging or interesting, but because it was quick.

  It was a little darker and more violent than I liked, so I took it out of the pile, told the child the reasons I didn’t like it for him, and put the book back.

  I think he found this only because he had read some other things by this author, and because he probably figured that a comic-like book couldn’t be bad.

  I’m not outright condemning this book, but there are so many better options for your child to put into his mind – don’t waste it on this.

• The Real Boy by Anne Ursu
  Has references to magic and potions and wizards. Most of it is just which herbs to use for what – there’s probably more about traditional herbal medicine than magic. I don’t know that the herbs they mentioned are effective for the treatments described, or even if the herbs are real.

  Anyway, on to my conclusion. It’s a good book. Some bullying and mild violence, plus some worse violence that happens offscreen. Or, uh, off-page since this is a book. But there’s not a lot of that.

  Overall, I found the book to be interesting. 3rd grade on up.

  P.S. – if this book is ever made into a movie, I wouldn’t trust it. It would probably end up very creepy due to the plot of spoiler prevention activated that some directors might emphasize.

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with grief, for this would be unprofitable for you.

Hebrews 13:17

Having young children, we have a few of the waterproof mattress pads or covers. Mostly, they are made waterproof by having one side of it made of vinyl. Or some other type of softer plastic, but we’ll just call it vinyl.

In our previous house, we never had any problems with the laundry. The washer and dryer handled the mattress pads with no problem.

Then we moved.

Our first week in the new house, we ran a load of laundry. It wasn’t the first day in the new house only because there was no washer or dryer. So we had to buy them – a brand new washer and dryer, all shiny and sparkly and undimmed by human tears.

The first load of laundry in the new appliances, and we ruin the dryer.

Almost.

More like temporarily ruined the dryer.

We ran plenty of vinyl through our old dryer and it never melted. But the new dryer melted the vinyl off the mattress pad and it stuck to the metal vent in the dryer.

I even had the heat set at medium, not high. I wonder what high would have done.

I had to pry, then cut, the mattress pad out of the dryer. Then I had to peel the vinyl off the metal vent. But it wasn’t cooperating, and it was an uncomfortable working position, so I had to unscrew that vent from the dryer in order to get at it better.

After spending a couple hours on it, I finally gave up. I left it with the plan suggested by my wife of finding a product to dissolve the vinyl off it. I came home that evening to a metal vent that was free of any vinyl.

A friend had soaked it in hot water, and the vinyl softened up and peeled right off. So I was able to put the vent back in the dryer and we could resume cleaning our clothes. Or at least wearing dry clothes.

Moral of the story: if you get vinyl melted onto a metal surface, use hot water. It should work for other surfaces too.

As I was listening to a pre-game interview on the radio recently, I was interested to hear all the questions coming from the reporter guy.

• So-and-so had a good game last time against this opponent. Talk about him.
• The team is 3 games behind the leader in this division. Talk about the importance of this game.

I’ve written about the issue of sports reporters and the use of “talk about” before.

Since I can’t beat them, however, I will join them. Rather than trying to get reporters to ask real questions, I now suggest replacing them with a robot. Simple natural-language AI that starts each statement with “Talk about” and then adds some keywords relevant to the team and the schedule and the players – that should be indistinguishable from the current situation.

Think of it as a reverse Turing test. If the audio clips are so meaningless/predictable/boring that they could be replaced by a computer and no one would notice, then why hire reporters to ask the questions?

Also, the answers the coaches/managers/players give can be just as bland:

• I thought everyone played well individually today, we just didn’t play as a team
• We had a good game plan, we just didn’t execute well
• I was glad to be able to do my part to help the team get the win today
• We had some trouble early, but everyone pulled together and it showed in the second half

If the AI is good enough, it could replace both sides of the interview and neither reporters nor sports figures would need to be bothered.

The only problem would be the audio itself – getting the computer to sound like the actual person. Maybe have the computer generate the scripts, hire a couple of voice actors and they can read the scripts and produce the interviews for the whole league in one batch.

I’ve also come to view pre-game and post-game interviews as the equivalent of comments sections of news sites: they’re going to have them, but I know they’re a waste of time so I avoid/ignore them.