Note To Future Self

(with apologies to DFW)

For extreme thrills, I highly recommend getting your children’s social security numbers wrong on your federal tax return.

It’s a laugh riot.

Despite my total ignorance when it comes to world folklore, I’ll go out on a limb and make the assertion that there’s a long tradition of stories concerning the Grim Reaper — a humanesque figure who appears in our last moment to spirit us away. Or maybe he looks like a hyena, or raven, or carbiou. Whatever, don’t confuse me with details.

Most stories, I’m sure, have to do with tricks, deals, and narrow escapes from death, ultimately with tragic consequences for everyone involved. Or there’s always that old saw about the boy who traps death in a nut, saving his beloved granny. Wait, let me guess. Everyone goes hungry because they can’t eat their chickens…. Yawn.

As an antidote, I present (drumroll)….

Teresa Bateman’s The Keeper of Soles. I won’t ruin the plot for you. Nay, I can’t ruin it for you, because it’s completely transparent. And yes, entirely predicated on one terrible pun. But there is such joy and levity in the story and the illustrations, you (as the parent reading the story night after night) easily forget that it’s fundamentally about a man groveling for his life.

Given a quiet evening around the house, I thought I’d try throwing a post or two about books up, for old time’s sake.

I’ve noticed I have a parenting attraction to kid’s books about death. Which is strange, because I reserve a few special entries in my swear-word cheatsheet for pedantic, preachy, and god-forbid “lesson” kids books. So, no `Toby is Playing with our Forty-Five Previous Hamsters in Heaven’ or ‘Uncle Jed is with Grandma.’ Not to belittle the genre, much, as I see the point of bludgeoning kids with a fat two-by-four of emotional talking down to.

Instead, I’ve greatly enjoyed books which manage to quietly incorporate death as just another aspect of living. Who says kids should be afraid of death? Is shielding them from it entirely the ultimate form of this “cotton-wool” culture that’s supposed to exist out there somewhere? If nothing else, perhaps a passing acquaintance with death reminds us of childhoods not so long ago when fairy tales were a bit more resonant (wolves in the woods? snacking on children?) and most families were marked by the loss of children to starvation, disease and accident. Of course modern books are a bit less red of tooth and claw than Mssrs Grimm.

But enough armchair philosophizing. I’m going to save the big guns for later and start with a softball, Sylvia van Ommen’s Sweets.

(as an aside. $55 for a used copy! I’m going to steal the library’s copy right away!).

(image courtesy the big book company named after a river in Seattle. Uh, no, not a river in Seattle. Name after a river, which is in Seattle. Never mind.)

The pull quote on the back says it all:

Is there a heaven?
Do they have sweets there?

To whit, Oscar (the cat) texts (!) Joris (the rabbit) about a meet-up in the park. They enjoy some allsorts and coffee, and wonder about the existence of heaven, their place in, and whether they’ll be able to get together to eat sweets once there. The end.

What more do you need? No two by four, just coffee and sweets.

(Disclaimer: despite her use of the ‘h’-word, not a religious book. You’ve been disclaimed.)

I’ve been working a new photo aesthetic I like to call “late-night-college-party-photo-lets-post-it-on-Facebook-so-we-can-regret-it-in-a-couple-of-years/weeks/minutes”

Pretty good, huh?

Also, we’ve achieved “hairstyles” (aka pigtails).

It’s winter. We might be a little bored. What’s next? Tattoos?

By request, this weekend we got daddy-n-me tattoos.

Snakes, yo. (or maybe ugly worms) Cuz that’s how we roll.

Yeah.

Hm, ignore the previous parental gloating. There seems to be a glitch in the latest version of the cheesy smile firmware.

Please, no more pictures.