It's Monday, and things are looking good in the land of the flogged blog. I and my lovely bride attended a birthday party for my second grandson, Jericho, who turned two this past Saturday. He's just now beginning to break the code, speaking wise, and you can sense he's also figuring some stuff out as far as how to holler a certain way if he needs something or his brother (my young car dude) is up in his grille. He had an old school party with his chums from the daycare he attends two days a week. All the young grunters were in attendance, slinging orders to their moms who knew instinctively what they wanted. My middle daughter Jessie made it easy on all if them by serving corn dogs, chips and juice boxes. She ingeniously made a "push-pop" cake, which wasn't a cake at all, it was the ice-cream in a tube you push up from the bottom till its all gone. No cake mess, lots of happy grunters and grown ups all in one place. By the way, she also had a tub of brewskis and high brow hand held ice creams too. The cone kind with the chocolate coating rolled in nuts...they were called drum sticks back in my day and were on the 25 cent column when the "hunky-man truck" rolled around, selling ice cream out of spotless white vans that played strange but familiar caralon music. These days slasher movies have started with less.
The party itself was a smash hit with the 2-5 year old crowd. Of course, you always have a kid or two who is an only child and should be preparing to gets their little asses kicked in by their peers in the not to distant future. You know the ones, they whine and cry about every little thing, like trying to open the presents of the person who is actually having the birthday, not understanding that not everything is for their benefit and destruction. I witnessed these moms actually pull a wrapped toy out in addition to the gift they brought for the birthday boy, just so their kid wouldn't make too big a scene at gift opening time. I'll give you a minute to process that before I proceed. The moms in question excused it away by saying they'd read it on some child rearing Internet blog, surely one sponsored by Toys-R-Us. It was quite possibly the dumbest thing I have ever witnessed. I mean, if I would have been invited to a party and raised any manner of hell, Ida been taken out back and shown the second side (I called it the business side) of the two-sided belt my dad invented. One side was for wearing to work and holding his suit pants up, and the other side was a bull-whip, made for busting asses of those dumb enough to holler about not getting to open another kids present. My dad was not abusive at all, but he did have a very distinct sense of right and wrong. He was my dad and he was right, and most times I was wrong. At least when it came to challenging his authority in matters that involved potential ass-whippins. At the birthday party in question, I heard more moms start counting to three than I have ever heard in my life. It was rediculous. In 15 short years they'll be wondering where they went wrong. I hope not, but a dumbed down and undisciplined society only produces lazy dumbasses.
To finish up with the party, my daughter and her husband had an old school Slip-and-Slide, the giant rubber slide you hook your garden hose to, but only after spreading it out in your front yard. The dude who invented that has got to be a billionaire, they've been going strong since they were invented in the sixties of my youth. There were no video games or gameboys as gifts for my two year old grandson this year. Jericho ripped open the toys with glee and let the whiner kids play with them all they liked, and he still enjoyed playing with the box they came in. He's a neat little kid but I can tell already he's the sneaky one of the two. Jonah, the older grandson, knocked Jericho over in the fray, when five or six boys were attempting to make an approach on the Slip-and-Slide. I watched the events unfold as little Jericho got bumped into the bushes where sticker bushes and chiggers live. He didn't whine much, probably less that I would have, as scratched up as he was. It was a few minutes later, in a wet dog pile on the aforementioned slide, they he got his revenge. I watched him reach over a few kids and grab himself a double fistful of his brothers hair and give it a yank. He pulled till Jonah hollered then let go, going about the business of being a kid again. In his small world, I guess only his bigger brother commits crimes. He wasn't guilty as I saw the whole event unfold, but he dispensed justice the only way he knew how. I guess it was his way of standing his ground, kid style.
I'll finish here by say that some things are better the old school way. The Slip-and-Slide way, the Push-pop way, the Drumbeat stick and Corn-dog way. The computer games and peer pressure will inevitably come for my two grandsons, but not yet. It was good to see the kiddos have fun the way I remember it. The complicated stuff is out there waiting for them. I pondered the whole thing over the weekend. I heard that the Cremlin had decided to go back to typewriters and paper documents because technology has betrayed the country via hackers and computer viruses killing their networks. Think about that for a second. An entire country reverting back to Slip-and-Slides!
Its like the cave man giving up the wheel, and fire! Oh, what will we do...
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