Banana Phone and the Generation Gap

Have any of you had an experience that really made you feel the generation gap between your kids and yourself?

I had that experience through, of all things, a game of Banana Phone with Big Bro.

1. As I handed him the banana and pretended to talk to him with mine, I realized that a banana looks nothing like the phones he's seen. He might've felt more at home using, I don't know, a slice of bread.

Luckily, I have a stone-age (read: 6-year-old) flip phone that kind of looks like a banana, so I guess he could see what I was getting at.


2. To start the conversation, I asked him who he was gonna call on his banana phone. Quick! Fellow kids of the 80s! We all know there's only one way to answer that:



I then realized that his generation will not automatically go to 'Ghostbusters' in response to that question. How am I going to relate to this kid??

So we enjoyed a good chat, mostly about what he had for breakfast. But then when we wrapped up the call, I notice how we each hung up our Banana Phones.


I'm just used to always theatrically placing my banana down to hang it up. Big Bro's banana has an End Call button. Of course it does.

I have to catch up here! I'm not even old, either!

(Speaking of 'catching up', I also have to really start saying 'recording' instead of 'taping' when talking about TV shows before I'm dismissed entirely as a big lame-o).

What have been your experiences that make you feel the generation gap?

Things That Go Bump (and Beep, and Roar... ) in the Night

It's always unnerving to hear those mystery 'bump in the night' noises. They make you wonder if it's just the dryer running, or if you forgot to close the garage door and your house is being ransacked.

When you have small kids, however, and have any of those motion-activated toys that make sounds, the noises that wake you up are a whole new experience.

For example, we have an interactive toy house facade that is always at the ready for fun and singing and learning at any time of day. It's about two feet high, and it's not easy to see when you go downstairs in the dark for a drink of water, as we found on more than one occasion.

We also have kicking around a few musical trucks, Play 'n Learn singing puppy and a sassy wise-cracking ankylosaurus. Add those to our myriad "How-the-heck-do-I-open-this-thing" baby gates, and an intruder wouldn't stand a chance.

Who needs a security system?

Everything is a Vehicle

When I was three years old, I would set myself up in a laundry basket with every stuffed toy I owned and badger my dad to fly me around the house in it.

We called it "Pigs in Space" --you know, like the Muppets. Don't know about Dad, but I sure never tired of it.

Like mother, like son; Big Bro sees a potential vehicle for rides around the house (flying or dragged along the floor) in pretty much anything he can fit on or into-- boxes, bumbo chairs, blankets, buckets, serving trays, and so on. My poor back. That boy loves to be given rides.

I should clarify: he loves to be given rides, except for in his stroller and other things he's actually supposed to ride in.

Click to Enlarge

(P.S.: I've tried to word it as 'going for a ride' in the shopping cart or stroller to make it sound more appealing, but he's not buying it.)

Pintimidating

So I go on Pinterest and type in "Toddler Activities" to see if I can find some good ideas for things to do with Big Bro now that he's reached the exciting, curious age of two. Some extra little things I could set up for him to keep things interesting during those days at home together-- especially those times when I'm busy tending to Little Bro.

I found ideas, alright. Pinterest could be otherwise named "1001 Awesome Things You Aren't Doing".

Pages and pages.

Kids' rooms are supposed to be chic, I see... are ours chic? Not canopy-pirate ship-treehouse-reading loft chic, they aren't. My kids are also totally getting ripped off having to read in chairs instead of in a 'nook', let alone a super awesome reading loft. LOFT!

I also don't know how whimsical I could consider our play area. It's organized, but decidedly lacking in whimsy. Our suburban backyard doesn't even have a tree, let alone a vegetable garden and chickens for my kids to tend. I didn't lovingly restore any furniture, unless by "restore" you mean "put the cushions back on".

Then there are all the photos of excited, engaged children learning and developing skills through open-ended play thanks to busy bags and homemade sensory bins.

For a moment, I have an image of my kids picking their nose and staring at the ceiling fan all day because I'm not on top of my parenting game here. We didn't even do anything for St. Patrick's Day!

But it's not about stressing to do it all anyway, right? It'd be like going to Paris and spending the whole time stressed out because you're trying to fit in all your must-sees, not enjoying the experience.


But then, you wouldn't want to spend the whole visit in the hotel room watching TV either, if you get my analogy.
 
In reality, it's not that I don't want to do this cool stuff; in theory, the teacher in me and the artist in me would like to try it all ... it's just that I think I'd need to put the kids on 'pause' for a good month to do it. Unlike in teaching, you can't gather ideas gradually over the years for subsequent batches of kids. They're here, and they're growing up just once. It's now or never.

So I came across several quick and easy activity ideas using items in the house and small dollar store items. Yes, this I can do, at least! Cheaply, too! Such activities include:

• Pipe cleaners and a strainer-- he can put them in the holes!
• Pompoms and plastic bottle or yogurt container with a hole in the top-- fill and dump!
• Buttons and a muffin tin or egg carton--  sorting! Throw in plastic eggs and you've got an Easter theme!
• Tearing paper!

The kids in the pictures look so into it. And so does mine, at least for a while.

Well. That was a lot of effort to create more clutter.

(On a related note, I would also caution anyone trying to make a bean bucket not to buy yellow peas, even if they're on sale. You would not believe how far they roll.)

I guess we're getting there with the homemade toddler activities. I'm just not ready for my Pinterest debut yet. 
 

Thanks, Captain Obvious

It's so handy to have a toddler who will inform you when the bellowing baby is being disruptive and hard on the ears... especially when you've been two inches from said bellowing baby for the past 20 minutes trying to calm him down.

Having small children is full of delightful, precious moments.

This was not one of them.

Shoveling Metaphors

You know it's been a rough afternoon with the kids when you volunteer to shovel the driveway in a snowstorm just to get a break.

This was me during the last big snowstorm we had in Ottawa.

Speaking of shoveling, many parents of young kids like to quote this famous Phyllis Diller line:

“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.” 

I beg to differ, however. If you shovel while it's still snowing, you've still made headway. You still have less to do later. In fact, we often do shovel mid-storm for that reason.

I tend to see cleaning with a toddler in the house as shoveling before the snowplow comes by and pushes all the #@&$ snow back in your driveway. In this case, your 35"-tall plow circles the block alllll day long.

Broken Nights

Ayoye, I'm not used to these broken nights anymore.

I've been spoiled by full nights of sleep since Big Bro was very young. I think we encouraged this by 'giving him a minute' when he'd wake up fussing... as in, "Let's give him a minute to see if he can learn to connect sleep cycles." Develop good sleep habits and whatnot.

Yes. That was it. It had nothing to do with our not wanting to get out of bed.

Unfortunately, this time when Little Bro wakes up fussing at 2 a.m., there's the problem of possibly waking up Big Bro if we 'give him a minute', so I scoop him up a lot faster. Because of this, he's not quite 'doing his nights' as well as I'd like yet. Hmm, I never thought of this.

What to do, then? Do they sell noise-cancelling headphones for toddler siblings... maybe with bulldozers or trains or something on them?

In the meantime, I guess there are a few more broken nights to be had. Urgh. Oh well, I guess I can look at it as a sort of mom-baby quality time...