This has probably been covered before in many ways on this here website, but Nikki and I have noticed the completely inconsistent things we do to our poor children. Let me explain.
First off, to our own delight, we don’t have even the slightest hint of music taste concerns at our house. Not sure if this is even a thing anymore, but our kids like the same music we do, and boy is it rather an eclectic mix. At any minute, they could be singing along to Ray Charles on their iPods, or maybe rocking out to the new Daft Punk album. Quinn finally got over his unrelenting Bron Yr Aur Stomp addiction recently, while Cael couldn’t stop dancing to Thrift Shop, you get the idea.
In this very same vein, this week I realized that we are giving them the STRANGEST childhood as far as culture is concerned. For starters, we introduced them to Smokey and the Bandit on Monday, which was an enormous hit as you might imagine. That movie is remarkably kid friendly for something made so long ago. The only real problem is Jackie Gleason’s rather foul mouth, and thinly veiled racism, but most of the worst ones went right by the boys since he uses a particularly incomprehensible southern accent. Anyway, we saw that movie, and then on Tuesday for some reason or another I got talking to them about my Grade 5 teacher at Naismith Memorial PS, Mr. Lake and how he loved poetry. Which led me to find and read some favourites to the boys:
William Wordsworth – I wandered lonely as a cloud
Robert Frost – The Road not Taken
Alfred Noyes – The Highwayman
We even discussed what they might mean, and enjoyed the descriptive language together.
Now, separately these two things are just lovely anecdotes of family time. But when you realize that these two things happened within 24 hours of each other, you begin to realize that perhaps I’m not really qualified to have children. I mean really. What. The. Hell? I’m not really giving them a solid literary background, as Paula will probably mention in a comment here, these poems are like popcorn, not really all that nutritious or filling. And the movie clearly isn’t really worth all that much in terms of their development, with the possible exception that I was able to demonstrate where the Dukes of Hazzard CAME from. It also probably explains why Cael wants a CB radio installed into the Sienna.
So anyway, there you go. The kids will be weird in that ever so unique way that makes them Vallentyne weird, and not Jones weird or Smith weird or, well you get the idea. That’s your job as a parent; not only to give your DNA to your kids, but to provide your very own special mix of strange so they can go off and mix it with some poor unsuspecting person and raise their own special kind of weirdos. The circle of life turns onward.
