Category: Geeklet Stories

My Mini Macbeth

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Haven’t told a kid story in awhile. Turns out my 4yr old boy may be the biggest geeklet of them all.

Over the weekend, he was trying to figure out when he had school again. “Do I have school today?”

“No,” I said, this being Saturday, “not today.”

Him: “Tomorrow?”

Me: “Nope, not tomorrow either.”

Him: “Tomorrow and tomorrow?” That’s his way of saying “two days from now.”

Me: “Not quite. One more day.” He actually has Monday off as well as Sunday.

Him: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?”

Me:”Creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.”

Him: “….What?”

Me: “Macbeth. That’s a line from Macbeth you just recited.”

Him: “….ELIZABETH!” His sister is seated next to him at the breakfast table. “When I said Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow THAT WAS FROM MACBETH!”

He’s also gotten into the habit of making his elders feel stupid. The other day he runs up to his grandmother (my wife’s mother) and says, “To be or not to be, Gammie! Do you know who said that?”

“Was it Macbeth?” she asks.

“No, Gammie, it wasn’t *Macbeth*,” he says, “It was Hamlet!” And then runs off. He does this to his preschool teachers as well.

Drive-by 4yr old Shakespeare. I couldn’t be more proud.

Beware the Geeklet Uprising

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Note, this post has no Shakespeare in it, just my geeklets. But it’s really the only forum I have to tell stories about how smart my geeklet kids are, and are becoming.

Story #1 : We’re watching a Christmas movie, I’m building a fire in the fireplace. During a commercial my 6yr old – the *6* year old, normally the quiet one – asks me, “How do you make fire?”

Now, I’ve always had a policy of answering their questions as honestly as I can, and I can predict where this is going. I can answer it one of two ways. I pick the easy way. “Well,” I tell her, “You start with a very small fire, like by lighting a match. Then you put things on that fire that burn really easily, like paper. Then you go to small wood, and then bigger wood, and each time you add stuff you get more fire until finally you have a big fire in the fire place.”

“Yes,” she says, “But how do you *make* fire? Where does that first fire come from?”

Visions of E=mc2, mass and energy flash through my brain, trying to figure out how to answer that far more interesting question (which, really, I knew was what she was asking). Luckily, though, the Christmas movie comes back on and she’s no longer all that interested. She is 6, after all. Bullet dodged!

Story #2 : We are watching Miracle on 34th Street, which is an interesting experiment in a house where the children range from 4 to 8 and my wife’s never seen it. So the burden is on me to determine whether this movie, which if you’ve not seen it is basically about a whole bunch of adults trying to convince a child that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, is appropriate for my kids. Are they going to come away believing (which all of them do, by the way), or not?

The movie is a pleasant surprise and basically takes a stand on the message that “No matter what anybody tells you, you can choose to believe things for yourself.” We’ve not yet finished it, so when the kids go to bed each night there’s a million questions. Last night I tried to explain to my 8yr old the difference between “know” and “believe”.

I pick up one of her stuffed animals and hide one hand behind it. “Do you know how many fingers I’m holding up?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

“I’m holding up 1 finger,” I tell her. “Now do you know that I’m holding up one finger, or do you believe that I’m holding up one finger?”

“I know you’re holding up one finger.”

I move the doll to reveal that I am, in fact, holding up 2 fingers. I put the doll back in front of my hand.

“Now,” I said, “Do you believe I’m holding up 2 fingers, or do you know that I’m holding up 2 fingers?”

“I believe you’re holding up 2 fingers,” she says.

“No,” I tell her, “You know I’m holding up 2 fingers because you just saw it.”

“I know,” she says, “But now that your hand is behind the doll again you could have changed how many you put up.”

…. That was actually going to be my next point, and she beat me to it.
You know that scene in all the good science fiction movies where the creation begins to learn faster than the creator can control it, and eventually takes over the world? Yeah, I have moments like that all the time. Wouldn’t have it any other way!  Rise of the Geeklet.

Melt.

~ duane ~ Leave a comment
My adorable 5yr old daughter follows me into the kitchen this evening, holding a small piece of paper.  “Daddy, I found this card,” she says, “Under the couch. I don’t know what it is.”

I know what it is.  “What does it say?” I ask.

She begins to read.  She’s just learning how. “Not…of…an…of an … a g e…”

“Age,” I say.

“Age,” she says, “Not of an age…but…for….all time.”

“Thanks Sweetie,” I tell her, “That’s one of Daddy’s Shakespeare cards.  You can just leave it on the counter.”

🙂 I can’t tell you people how it melts my heart to hear words like that coming out of my kids’ mouths.

Breakfast With Geeklet

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

The story you’re about to hear is 100% true.

We’re on vacation, up in a hotel in the mountains.  We’re having the breakfast buffet, and as is typical, the kids have placemats and crayons to occupy them.  My oldest, at 6, shows her picture and says, “What do you think, Daddy?”

“Looks like a shoe with windows,” I say.  “Is it the old woman who lives in the shoe?”

“No,” she says, with the head tilt and eye roll that all 6yr olds master on their 6th birthday.  “It’s Miranda on the island.  See, that’s her Daddy next to her, and this is the boat that’s going to crash on the rocks.  She’s calling to them, saying that they’ll be safe on the island.  See the people?”

“….”

She flips the paper back over, colors some more, and flips it back so I can see it. “What’s the name of the monster, again?”

“Caliban?”

“Right, Caliban.  That’s him, there.”  Caliban has been drawn in red, and looks rather devilish. Again the flip, the coloring, the flip again.  Now Ariel is up in the sky, like an angel of some sort.  “What else can I draw?” she asked.

“Books,” I told her.  “You need the magic books.” “Right!” she says, and returns to drawing.  “Finished!” I look at the final picture (which I have, and plan to scan when I get home).  The books are in a tree.  “Prospero keeps his books in a tree?” I ask.

“That is the entrance to his secret hiding place,” she says, again with the head tilt and eye roll.

It may never actually happen, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that art class: “What did you draw, Hailey?”
“I drew a flower!”
“And how about you, Aidan?”
“I drew a dinosaur!”
“Katherine?  What did you draw?”
“I drew the opening of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Act I, Scene 2.”

Daddy, Can I Read Your Book?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

That’s what my 3yr old asked me this morning while I was getting ready to go to work.

“Sure,” I told her.

The thing is, the book was King Lear. More specifically, it was one of the comic versions of Shakespeare that I have.  I also have The Tempest as I’ve mentioned, Taming of the Shrew, and Romeo and Juliet. In general I have refused to actually read them the story of King Lear, as we don’t do that degree of violence in my house (hence my emphasis on the non-violent Tempest).

But she does like to look at the pictures.  So there she sat, doing her morning business, flipping through the pages.  Like any 3yr old she was also carrying around what if she were a boy I would call “action figures” – small statues of her favorite Disney princesses, including Belle and Ariel.

“Her name is Cordelia,” my daughter tells me, pointing at the Belle figure.    Then she points to the cover of the book and asks, “Is that Cordelia with the red hair?”

I look at the cover and sure enough, Cordelia is in fact the one with the red hair.  “That is Cordelia,” I tell her.  “And those are her sisters, Regan and Goneril.”

I think I reached her limit, though, as I never heard the names of the evil sisters mentioned.  She did go off playing, speaking of Cordelia’s friends Jossa, Brak and Ryda, which I thought was rather unusual.  At first I thought she was getting in to the imaginary friends stage (her older sister’s imaginary friends were named Cartlyn, Neejin and Lonoze).  But then I wondered if maybe hearing all the weird names in Shakespeare that she hears nowhere else, she’s tuned to thinking that names can in fact be any stream of sound, and not just repetition of the same names she’s heard over and over again.