The 9yo Imagination (for posterity)

My son said to me at bedtime

"Imagine making a car that runs on cute."

A car that runs on cute?

"You put a cute thing in the tank and it works. It doesn't matter if it is a picture of an adorable kitten or a dog that fits in a purse or a plushie thing. If it's cute, then it will work."

He also helped me with my crossword at bedtime (I was very impressed) before asking me, isn't your phone supposed to be in a box?*

*during a work trip to Canberra last week, I had dinner with an old friend and the topic of screen overuse came up. He told me his sister has a system where they put their phones in a box when they get home and then they are only used as telephones. If it rings, you answer it. Beyond that, if you want to check an email, you use the computer. Today I decided to give it a go in solidarity with my 9yo and boy can I feel the withdrawal he is going through. Oof.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Feeding Children

Feeding children is the pits. Some children apparently enjoy food. When my eldest was a baby, I was smug in the knowledge that I was following Ellyn Satter and was doing everything right and therefore I would raise Good Eaters.  A Good Eater eats the food you feed them. They try a new food 60 times until they like it, and you cook what you like and just make sure there’s some bread they like on the table and not worry about what and how much they eat. This worked well for about 4 years. And then my eldest became Picky. Picky is a horror film of parenthood. I don’t think I understood what it truly meant.  It means slaving away at meal planning and spending a small fortune on ingredients and then slaving away on actually cooking and even baking your own bread and then your children saying you’re the worst cook ever and refusing to eat the food and just wanting to eat store-bought disgusting gluten free bread with butter. And you die a little inside every day. I remember having a...
Read more

It is night and I am mother

What a depressing scene is the platform formerly known as Twitter. I went on there to try to become involved in politics again, maybe get a sense for where things are and where they are going and I wished I had that t-shirt of Homer Simpson backing into the bushes. There was a video of Elon Musk talking about immigration. He is cringe. Things here are going. On the weekend we went to see The Minecraft Movie and that was a delight. I love Jack Black. There was a strange phenomenon where prepubescent boys sitting behind us in the audience cheered and shouted whenever certain things happened - a portal opened, the crafting table appeared. I think maybe it is a Tiktok trend. The next day I enjoyed two French films at the final weekend of the French Film Festival, Le Fil and N'avoue Jamais. Le Fil was phenomenal. I was on the edge of my seat, until I just read a scathing review of it and now I feel like it was lacklustre and predictable and a bit exploitative. I am but a humble mum and ...
Read more

it was effing PANDAS

 For several years, we have been struggling at our house. I haven't really let on because I just couldn't explain it. Something wasn't right, but no explanation fit.  My beautiful boy was not thriving. Physically he was not putting on weight or growing, and his mental health was deteriorating. We ended up with an ASD3 diagnosis at the age of 8 despite no early childhood concerns. His psychologist at the time suggested it might help the school have more compassion for the inexplicable and unpredictable behavioural challenges he started to have in his second year of school.  And I had my own reasons for pursuing this, too - NDIS funding, to pay for the sessions I wanted to have with the only clinic I could find that would look at DNA, microbiome, and other things to try to address root causes. I was on a mission for that root cause.  But we worked with these practitioners for literally years, and despite following the indications based on his microbiome and his DNA and...
Read more