children – Dan Q

God’s Adviser

Duration 7:28

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Of all the discussions I’ve ever been involved with on the subject of religion, the one I’m proudest of was perhaps also one of the earliest.

Let me tell you about a time that, as an infant, I got sent out of my classroom because I wouldn’t stop questioning the theological ramifications of our school nativity play.

I’m aware that I’ve got readers from around the world, and Christmas traditions vary, so let’s start with a primer. Here in the UK, it’s common¹ at the end of the school term before Christmas for primary schools to put on a “nativity play”. A group of infant pupils act out an interpretation of the biblical story of the birth of Jesus: a handful of 5/6-year-olds playing the key parts of, for example, Mary, Joseph, an innkeeper, some angels, maybe a donkey, some wise men, some shepherds, and what-have-you.

A group of children dressed as Mary, Joseph, shepherds, kings, angels, and a variety of barn animals crowd a stage. — Maybe they’re just higher-budget nowadays, or maybe I grew up in a more-deprived area, but I’m pretty sure than when I was a child a costume consisted mostly of a bedsheet if you were an angel, a tea-towel secured with an elastic band if you were a shepherd, a cardboard crown if you were a king, and so on. Photo courtesy Ian Turk.

As with all theatre performed by young children, a nativity play straddles the line between adorable and unbearable. Somehow, the innkeeper – who only has one line – forgets to say “there is no room at the inn” and so it looks like Mary and Joseph just elect to stay in the barn, one of the angels wets herself in the middle of a chorus, and Mary, bored of sitting in the background having run out of things to do, idly swings the saviour of mankind round and around, holding him by his toe. It’s beautiful².

I was definitely in a couple of different nativity plays as a young child, but one in particular stands out in my memory.

Dan, as a young child, superimposed against a background with a star, with a speech bubble reading 'Hark! A star! In the East!' — “Let us go now to Bethlehem. The son of God is born today.”

In order to put a different spin on the story of the first Christmas³, one year my school decided to tell a different, adjacent story. Here’s a summary of the key beats of the plot, as I remember it:

God is going to send His only son to Earth and wants to advertise His coming.
“What kind of marker can he put in the sky to lead people to the holy infant’s birthplace?”, He wonders.
So He auditions a series of different natural phenomena:
- The first candidate is a cloud, but its pitch is rejected because… I don’t remember: it’ll blow away or something.
- Another candidate was a rainbow, but it was clearly derivative of an earlier story, perhaps.
- After a few options, eventually God settles on a star. Hurrah!
Some angels go put the star in the right place, shepherds and wise men go visit Mary and her family, and all that jazz.

So far, totally on-brand for a primary school nativity play but with 50% more imagination than the average. Nice.

Edited watercolour of magi crossing a desert on camels, with a large meteor inserted into the sky. — What the Meteor Strike of Bethlehem lacked in longevity, it made up for in earth-shattering destruction.

I was cast as Adviser #1, and that’s where things started to go wrong.

The part of God was played by my friend Daniel, but clearly our teacher figured that he wouldn’t be able to remember all of his lines⁴ and expanded his role into three: God, Adviser #1, and Adviser #2. After each natural phenomenon explained why it would be the best, Adviser #1 and Adviser #2 would each say a few words about the candidate’s pros and cons, providing God with the information He needed to make a decision.

To my young brain, this seemed theologically absurd. Why would God need an adviser?⁵

“If He’s supposed to be omniscient, why does God need an adviser, let alone two?” I asked my teacher⁶.

The answer was, of course, that while God might be capable of anything… if the kid playing Him managed to remember all of his lines then that’d really be a miracle. But I’d interrupted rehearsals for my question and my teacher Mrs. Doyle clearly didn’t want to explain that in front of the class.

But I wouldn’t let it go:

“But Miss, are we saying that God could make mistakes?”
“Couldn’t God try out the cloud and the rainbow and just go back in time when He knows which one works?”
“Why does God send an angel to tell the shepherds where to go but won’t do that for the kings?”
“Miss, don’t the stars move across the sky each night? Wouldn’t everybody be asking questions about the bright one that doesn’t?”
“Hang on, what’s supposed to have happened to the Star of Bethlehem after God was done with it? Did it have planets? Did those planets… have life?”

In the end I had to be thrown out of class. I spent the rest of that rehearsal standing in the corridor.

And it was totally worth it for this anecdote.

Footnotes

¹ I looked around to see if the primary school nativity play was still common, or if the continuing practice at my kids’ school shows that I’m living in a bubble, but the only source I could find was a 2007 news story that claims that nativity plays are “under threat”… by The Telegraph, who I’d expect to write such a story after, I don’t know, the editor’s kids decided to put on a slightly-more-secular play one year. Let’s just continue to say that the school nativity play is common in the UK, because I can’t find any reliable evidence to the contrary.

² I’ve worked onstage and backstage on a variety of productions, and I have nothing but respect for any teacher who, on top of their regular workload and despite being unjustifiably underpaid, volunteers to put on a nativity play. I genuinely believe that the kids get a huge amount out of it, but man it looks like a monumental amount of work.

³ And, presumably, spare the poor parents who by now had potentially seen children’s amateur dramatics interpretations of the same story several times already.

⁴ Our teacher was probably correct.

⁵ In hindsight, my objection to this scripting decision might actually have been masking an objection to the casting decision. I wanted to play God!

⁶ I might not have used the word “omniscient”, because I probably didn’t know the word yet. But I knew the concept, and I certainly knew that my teacher was on spiritually-shaky ground to claim both that God knew everything and God needed an advisor.

Invertobang

My 8-year-old asked me “In Spanish, I need to use an upside-down interrobang at the start of the sentence‽” (I assume the answer is yes!)

A little while later, I thought to check whether Unicode defines a codepoint for an inverted interrobang. Yup: ‽ = U+203D, ⸘ = U+2E18. Nice.

(And yet we don’t have codepoints to differentiate between single-bar and double-bar “cifrão” dollar signs…)

Note #25446

I’m staying in a lodge in the Yorkshire Dales National Park to celebrate the eldest kid’s birthday and we’ve just received a huge dump of snow, overnight. What was grass is now a thick white carpet of fresh powder. Sounds like a great birthday present for an excited kid I can just hear beginning to wake up…

My Ball

Our beloved-but-slightly-thick dog will sometimes consent to playing fetch, but one of her favourite games to play is My Ball. Which is a bit like fetch, except that she won’t let go of the ball.

It’s not quite the same as tug-of-war, though. She doesn’t want you to pull the toy in a back-and-forth before, most-likely, giving up and letting her win¹. Nor is My Ball a solo game: she’s not interested in sitting and simply chewing the ball, like some dogs do.

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog on a black-and-white rug, indoors, stands while chewing a lime green tennis ball. — I’d like to imagine the grunts and snorts she makes at about this moment actually translate to “My ball. Myyyy… ballll. Myyyyy ball! MY BALL! My… BALL!”

No, this is absolutely a participatory game. She’ll sit and whine for your attention to get you to come to another room. Or she’ll bring the toy in question (it doesn’t have to be a ball) and place it gently on your foot to get your attention.

Your role in this game is to want the ball. So long as you’re showing that you want the ball – occasionally reaching down to take it only for her to snatch it away at the last second, verbally asking if you can have it, or just looking enviously in its general direction – you’re playing your part in the game. Your presence and participation is essential, even as your role is entirely ceremonial.

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog in a doorway, on a tiled floor, holds a braided rope; a human hand barely holds the other end. — This might look like a game of tug-of-war, but you’ll note that my grip is just barely two-fingered. She’s not pulling, because she doesn’t need to unless I try to take the toy. This is *My Rope*, she knows.

Playing it, I find myself reminded of playing with the kids when they were toddlers. The eldest in particular enjoyed spending countless hours playing make-believe games in which the roles were tightly-scripted². She’d tell me that, say, I was a talking badger or a grumpy dragon or an injured patient but immediately shoot down any effort to role-play my assigned character, telling me that I was “doing it wrong” if I didn’t act in exactly the unspoken way that she imagined my character ought to behave.

But the important thing to her was that I embodied the motivation that she assigned me. That I wanted the rabbits to stop digging too near to my burrow³ or the princess to stay in her cage⁴ or to lie down in my hospital bed and await the doctor’s eventual arrival⁵. Sometimes I didn’t need to do much, so long as I showed how I felt in the role I’d been assigned.

A toddler with long blonde hair, wearing a pink cardigan, sits on a tall stool in front of a kitchen sink, holding a long-handled scrubbing brush. — In this game, the chef was “making soup” (in the sink, apparently) and my job was to “want the soup”.

Somebody with much more acting experience and/or a deeper academic comprehension of the performing arts is going to appear in the comments and tell me why this is, probably.

But I guess what I mean to say is that playing with my dog sometimes reminds me of playing with a toddler. Which, just sometimes, I miss.

Footnotes

¹ Alternatively, tug-of-war can see the human “win” and then throw the toy, leading to a game of fetch after all.

² These games were, admittedly, much more-fun than the time she had me re-enact my father’s death with her.

³ “Grr, those pesky rabbits are stopping me sleeping.”

⁴ “I’ll just contentedly sit on my pile of treasure, I guess?”

⁵ Playing at being an injured patient was perhaps one of my favourite roles, especially after a night in which the little tyke had woken me a dozen times and yet still had some kind of tiny-human morning-zoomies. On at least one such occasion I’m pretty sure I actually fell asleep while the “doctor” finished her rounds of all the soft toys whose triage apparently put them ahead of me in the pecking order. Similarly, I always loved it when the kids’ games included a “naptime” component.

Note #25428

Our family tradition on New Year’s Day is to go to the Rollright Stones. Legend has it that you can’t count the standing stones and get the same answer twice.

This year the younger child counted 37, the elder 67… so wide a difference that you can see how one might ascribe a mystical reason!

Note #25413

Christmas Jumper Day at school, and I’m continuing my never-ending effort never to rest on my laurels, proving myself time and again worthy of my title of Most Embarrassing Parent.

Building another secret cabinet

Earlier this year, after our loft conversion work, I built a secret cabinet into the bookshelves I constructed for my new bedroom. My 10-year-old was particularly taken with it¹, and so I promised her that when she moved bedroom I’d build one for her.

A bookcase in a child's bedroom, with Christmas decorations visible in the background. Several very old looking books stand conspicuously on the shelf. — Some of these titles perhaps don’t look like they belong, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

My initial order of fake book fronts was damaged in transit but the excellent eBay seller I’d been dealing with immediately sent a comparable replacement. This had left me with a spare-but-damaged set of fake book fronts, but with a little gluing, sawing and filing I was able to turn them into a second usable fake cabinet front.

My 10-year-old’s fake cabinet isn’t quite as sophisticated as mine (no Raspberry Pi Zero, solenoids, or electronic locks) – you just have to know where it is and pull on the correct corner of it to release it – but she still thinks it’s pretty magical².

The same bookshelf, but now with the older books - actually fake fronts - swung open to reveal an empty cabinet behind. — I’ve no idea what she’ll store in here, and given that she’s on the cusp of becoming a teenager it’s possible I don’t *want* to know. But at least I know the secret to opening it, should I *have* to.

A cut-down plank of plyboard stained the right colour, some offcuts of skirting board, a couple of butt hinges, some L-brackets, some bathroom mirror mounting tape, the fake book fronts, and an hour and a half’s work seems totally worth it to give a child the magical experience of a secret compartment in their bedroom. My carpentry’s improved since my one, too: this time I measured twice before cutting³ and it paid-off with a cleaner, straighter finish.

Footnotes

¹ She was pretty impressed already at the secret cabinet, but perhaps more-so when she discovered that the fake book fronts I’d used were part of the set of The School for Good and Evil, the apparently-disappointing film version of one of her favourite series’ of books.

² Which, frankly, it is. I wish I’d had a secret compartment in my bedroom bookshelves when I was her age!

³ Somebody should make a saying about that.

Note #25375

Today, while I cooked dinner, I introduced my two children (aged 10 and 8) to Goat Simulator.

Within half an hour, they’d added an imaginative twist and a role-playing element. My eldest had decreed themselves Angel of Goats and the younger Goat Devil and the two were locked in an endless battle to control the holy land at the top of a rollercoaster.

The shrieks of joy and surprise from the living room could be heard throughout the entire house. Perhaps our whole village.

Babies and Baubles

For a long time now, every year we’ve encouraged our two children (now 10 and 8 years old) to each select one new bauble for our Christmas tree¹. They get to do this at the shop adjoining the place from which we buy the tree, and it’s become a part of our annual Christmas traditions.

This approach to decoration: ad-hoc, at the whims of growing children, and spread across many years without any common theme or pattern, means that our tree is decorated in a way that might be generously described as eclectic. Or might less-generously be described as malcoordinated!

But there’s something beautiful about a deliberately-constructed collection of disparate and disconnected parts.

I’m friends with a couple, for example, who’ve made a collection of the corks from the wine bottles from each of their anniversary celebrations, housed together into a strange showcase. There might be little to connect one bottle to the next, and to an outsider a collection of used stoppers might pass as junk, but for them – as for us – the meaning comes as a consequence of the very act of collecting.

Each ornament is an untold story. A story of a child wandering around the shelves of a Christmas-themed store, poking fingerprints onto every piece of glass they can find as they weigh up which of the many options available to them is the most special to them this year.

And every year, at about this time, they get to relive their past tastes and fascinations as we pull out the old cardboard box and once again decorate our family’s strangely beautiful but mismatched tree.

It’s pretty great.

Footnotes

¹ Sometimes each has made a bauble or similar decoration at their school or nursery, too. “One a year” isn’t a hard rule. But the key thing is, we’ve never since their births bought a set of baubles.

Balance bikes are just better

…

if [the option of a balance bike] isn’t available, you can convert a normal bike into a balance bike by removing the pedals and lowering the seat. Once the kids has learned how to balance as they roll, add the pedals, raise the seat, and watch them go.

…

Sean McPherson

An excellent suggestion from fellow RSS Club member Sean McP (he’s been full of those lately; I’ve been enjoying encouraging drivers through our village to slow down by smiling and waving, too).

Like Sean, I learned to ride a bike using training wheels (“stabilisers” on this side of the pond). Unlike him, I didn’t have any trouble with them, and so when I came to hear about balance bikes as an alternative learning approach I figured they were just two different approaches to the same thing.

But when our eldest learned using stabilisers, she really struggled, and only eventually “got it” with an un-stabilised bike and lots and lots of practice. It’s true what Sean says: for most children, learning to balance atop a bicycle is harder than learning to pedal and/or steer, so that’s the bit we should be focussing on.

Our youngest is (finally) ready and keen to learn to cycle, and so I’m thinking that when I get him his first bike (maybe for Christmas!) I’ll get him one that, were I to put the seat into its lowest position and remove the pedals, he could use as a balance bike for a day or two to get the feel of the thing before re-attaching them and letting him try the full experience.

The Dog and The Snowman

On the way to school this morning, the 10-year-old lagged behind to build a small snowman.

On the way back, the dog saw the snowman, which wasn’t there when she’d passed earlier. She wanted to make it clear that she Did. Not. Trust. it. She stood back and growled at it for a while, and then, eventually, was persuaded to come closer.

Leaning as far as her little legs could manage, she stretched to carefully sniff it while keeping her distance. She still wasn’t entirely happy and ran most of the way to the end of the path to get away from the mysterious cold heap.

(This same dog earlier this year spent quarter of an hour barking at our wheelbarrow when, unusually, it was left in the middle of the lawn, rather than beside the shed. She doesn’t like change!)

Dominated

Kids’ ability to pick up new words from context is amazing.

Kids’ confidence even when they’ve misunderstood how a word is used is hilarious. 😊

This evening, our 7-year-old was boasting about how well-behaved his class was while their regular teacher had to attend an all-day meeting, vs how much it impressed the temporary teacher they had.

His words: “Today we had a supply teacher and we totally DOMINATED her!”

Note #24972

Future Arimaa grand masters at practice, this Sunday morning boardgaming session.

Go back to bed!

Things my children have gotten out of bed to say to me tonight:

I don’t want to go to school tomorrow
I can’t find [name of toy]
I want [name of toy I lent to my sibling] back
if I’m ill, I don’t have to go to school tomorrow, right?
I can’t sleep
I might be ill: I don’t think I should go to school tomorrow
I want a hot water bottle
I’m too hot
I’ve lost my hot water bottle
I spilt my water¹
I went to the toilet because I thought I was going to throw up but I didn’t but I think I’m too ill to go to school tomorrow
my book is wet
I forgot to brush my teeth
I don’t like these pyjamas
I still can’t sleep

Footnotes

¹ it later turned out to have been spilled on an electrical extension socket! 😱

Note #24906

As the kids grow older… someday our final soft play session – something we used to do all the time, and now do only rarely – will be in the past.

But for now, at least, it remains a chaotic way to tire them out on a morning!