Friday, March 24, 2006

carseats

The straps on A's carseat are difficult to tighten. We determined that the cheapest way to solve the problem would be to get C a booster seat and give her the one he's currently using. This had the additional benefit of making it more exciting for C, because he got to pick out a new one for himself.

And what did he choose, you may ask? The purple one with flowers, of course! Not having the heart to dissuade him, we bought it. In a year or two, he'll either embarrassedly swap it for the one currently in Nana's car or (we hope) stand up for himself and declare that yes, flowers are pretty and he's comfortable enough with his masculinity to admit it.

This left us with an extra carseat, which I immediately freecycled. In fact, we had ANOTHER extra hand-me-down we didn't want, and I set it on the porch for a friend who wanted an extra. But the freecycler inexplicably took both carseats- well, we assume that's what happened anyway, since they were both gone when I came home from the dentist on Wednesday. As long as they're not in my house, I'm not going to fret-

A continues to hate riding in our car. She's happier in SUVs, presumably because they allow her to see out the window better, but we told her in no uncertain terms that we are NOT upgrading. Of course this means that every car trip involves Much Singing to keep her from screaming, which annoys C to no end because the only song he wants to hear is "This Land is Your Land," and given how long this request has been standing, we just can't tolerate doing it more than twice a ride (with several verses, mind you). A particular favorite of A's is "Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat," and she's also partial to "Edelweiss." She is decidedly unimpressed by our interpretations of Janis Joplin.

This past week, we let C pick the TOPIC for each song, so he'd be less offended by our efforts. The first topic he picked was "staying up waaaay past my bedtime." So we launched into an improvised version of a Rosenschontz song that I remembered from grade school. Since the only lyrics I remembered other than the chorus were "with Olivia Newton-John, I've got a roller skate date," we had to come up with all sorts of our own reasons for staying up late, such as eating candy, making messes, getting into trouble, etc. Many of our more creative thoughts, unfortunately, were not appropriate to voice in front of the children.

(Why do I remember anything about that song, despite having never owned any Rosenschontz music? It's because they apparently sent my 6th grade music teacher a promotional copy of their album and my music teacher played it to us for two weeks worth of music classes. Odd? Yes, but no odder than the fact that my music teacher also spent three weeks of EVERY year having us lip sinc to tapes that we brought in from home, and that he told the same stories EVERY year in the exact same way so that by third grade I could recite them word for word, and that he had three different explanations for why he had a prosthetic leg. At the time, however, none of this seemed odd, and I rather liked the teacher and the class. Memories like this make me think of how nonsensical so many of the life events of children must be-)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I linked to the song and really liked it...Rosenchantz for Easter!

Kids need to go through these somewhat weird experiences in order to turn out as cool as you!

hmmm...you WERE singing the song, weren't you? And I know you lip sync ALL the time... :)

Anonymous said...

He's the same music teacher I had. Imagine how many years he did the same thing...

Dan said...

Not just every year, but every year for probably 5 classes a day! (I just attempted to look up his name, to no avail-)

Anonymous said...

Mr. Bowler

Dan said...

I remembered his name (even his first name- Ken), but can't find him on google or the Times Union.