Archive for the ‘Career’ Category

Littlest Scientist

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Reid made a fridge magnet at Cosmic Adventures camp on Wednesday. As we drove away, she asked for a piece of paper and a pen. A couple of minutes later, she asked if I had a metal water bottle in the car. I handed it back to her and she stuck her magnet to it. That little light that floats above my head went on. Reid was testing different things to see if they were “magnetic”. She had developed a chart with an “M” at one side and an “N” at the other and was tracking the results of her experiment. She tried a couple of other things and declared that non-magnetic “won”. I bet adult scientists don’t have contests in the midst of their experiments.

* For some reason, the Littlest Hobo came into my head as I wrote this title.

Reid the scientist

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Reid brought a leaf and a rock in from the driveway last night. She said that we needed them because we were scientists. I was cooking supper – I’m the principle human nutrition scientist in the family – and Reid was playing in the hall. All of a sudden, she started crying and Ken went to see what had happened.

Between sobs, Reid explained that the rock had hit in her in the chin. Ken, naturally, asked how the rock had gotten to her chin. Haltingly, the story came out:
Reid: I had the rock on my feet and I moved them and it hit my chin.
Ken: Hunh?
Reid: I had the rock on my feet and I moved them and it hit my chin. (Clearly not seeing anything unusual in her statement)
Me: She was lying on her back.
Reid: I was lying down and my legs were up and the rock was on my feet. Then, I forgot about the rock and moved my feet and the rock hit my chin.
Me: (Laughing in the kitchen, but quietly. How glad I was that Ken was the one dealing directly with Reid!)
Ken: So, you’re saying that you were holding a rock above your head and it hit your face when you moved your feet. (Ken likes to try to teach Reid logic whenever he can to counterbalance the unpredictableness of life with me.)

I’d thought that Reid would be learning about the natural sciences of botany or geology with her leaf and rock but it turned out to be physics on the course schedule.

Three body parts indeed

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Reid hasn’t brought much home from school since the first few days when she came home with a craft each day. I’m not sure if they are doing work sheets instead of crafts or if Reid is just choosing other activity centres. She has been drawing, though, and last week brought home a picture or herself – or maybe it was me, Reid’s story about who it was changed. The person in question had a large head from which arms and legs protruded. There were two eyes, a mouth and a nose that had two nostrils right were nostrils should be. Okay, maybe more where nostrils are on a pig but, since I don’t think I’ve ever drawn nostrils on a person, I was more than a little impressed.

Reid was in charge of making a birthday card for Sarah and decided to draw stick figures of Sarah, me and herself. These figures had heads and bodies – potato-shaped like me but not so much like Reid and Sarah – as well as the requisite limbs and facial features but no nostrils. The scale was wrong for nostrils. Maybe Reid has an eye for scale already. Maybe I don’t need to continue with my RRSP savings, maybe Reid will be a famous artist before I retire and I’ll live in luxury. Sigh.

Maybe not. Either way, Reid has more artist talent than I do. I’m not even a smidge jealous. I’ll know what to say when the doctor asks me if she draws people with at least 3 body parts next time. I might even bring an example.

What I’m training Reid to be

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

I read Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes last Thursday morning. Lily thinks her teacher, Mr Slinger, is fabulous and decides she wants to be a teacher instead of an ambulance driver, surgeon or diva, as she had considered earlier. Reid must have had this in mind when she told Uncle Dave and me that she is going to train her child to be a teacher. Uncle Dave asked, “What is your mom training you to be?” Reid answered, “A French kid.”

I was aiming for bilingual, actually, but it seemed a minor distinction not worth pointing out

Commuter stress

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

I blogged this “live” but didn’t get it posted before the update at the end:

I’m on a bus that was 30 minutes late – that’s the length of time when 3 buses of the same route are supposed to pass my bus stop – and I’m about 25 minutes from Reid’s school. There is a good chance that I’m going to end up paying the penalty for being late. In Reid’s 3+ years of care, I’ve never had to pay that fee. I can see needing to plan for extra time in my commute but twice the required time seemed reasonable to me. For now, I’m at the mercy of OC Transpo and I’m wondering how the late-fee compares to the $15 parking fee (plus gas money) that I was bragging about saving earlier today.

Update:

For all my stress (and whining) I got to the school at 5:22. On the up side, I wasn’t even the last parent to arrive. On the down side, it was stressful! Reid said that she had waited and waited for me and, while she was waiting, she had hurt her hand and washed it in the little sink to make it feel better. No guilt there, eh?

More thoughts on Reid’s future career

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Ken and I often talk about the sorts of careers that Reid may seek out based on her behaviour as a young girl. When she was quite small and most interested in knocking over the towers of wooden blocks that we wood build for her, we talked about her being a military engineer. There was the time I thought she might want to be Rowdy Reidie the Wrestler, a cowboy phase, and our on-going conviction that Reid would find great success as an actress or, at the very least, a teenage drama queen.

More recently I’ve been thinking that Reid might find her calling as a lactation consultant. In addition to her nearly four years of first-hand experience, Reid has been practicing helping others to nurse. At various points over the years, Reid has brought her stuffed animals and dollies with her to nurse. Reid makes sure that their heads are in an appropriate position to receive the milkies that she loves so much. She was sharing with Thomas, the Care Bear, one night last week when she experienced an “aha moment”. She stopped nursing and went to find Baby-with-a-round-mouth (not all of the stuffies and dollies are lucky enough to get a people name). The doll in question came with a soother and so has a mouth that is formed into an “o”, rather than the traditional wide-mouth of a nursing baby but it was certainly closer to the right thing than the smile sewn onto Thomas’ face.

Then again, Reid has always been interested in buses. She was tiny when she first fell in love with school buses and has since generalized this love to all buses. She had been able to twist her tongue, more or less, around “articulated” to describe the extra-long city buses we see on the streets of Ottawa. On Sunday, we saw the Lady Dive Tours‘ amphibus. I explained that it was a sort of bus-boat. Reid liked the idea and wondered if it was a double-decker bus. I explained that it wasn’t and Reid told me that when she is bigger, she will have a double-decker boat-bus. She and I would drive the lower floor and Daddy would drive the top floor, she said. Upon further reflection, Reid decided that she wanted a really long bus so that the whole world could ride if they wanted. I proposed an articulated bus and Reid agreed that would be good. (I write this so that I can prove to the teenage Reid that she didn’t always think that I was clueless.)

On the way to Reid’s optometrist appointment on Wednesday, Ken had explained that she would be seeing another kind of doctor, drawing a parallel between our family doctor, dentist and the optometrist. He told her that he, himself, was a different kind of doctor – a doctor of history. Once home they told me of the discussion and she said that Ken was a big doctor of history and she wanted to be a little doctor of history. Ken and I thought that was a good thing. But then Reid suggested that I could be a middle-sized doctor of history. Ken and I both said “no” (though he was perhaps a bit more forceful than me). We explained that Daddy had worked long and hard to be a doctor of history and that I hadn’t done that work. Reid likes the exclusive club of being the little doctor of history to Ken’s big doctor of history.

In the end, though, I’m left wondering if the career Reid will have even exists yet. She speaks about being an astronaut sometimes. Maybe that will be more of a reality than most of the jobs that come to our minds at present.

Reid’s latest career – cowboy

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Reid chose to wear her Dora the Explorer socks this morning, specifically the ones with Dora wearing a cowboy hat on them. After that first, important choice, she could only choose a shirt and pants that were suitable to a cowboy. Unfortunately, Reid’s assessment of what a cowboy might wear doesn’t match with Ken’s. He proposed a blouse with a flower print, which seemed more cowboy-like than the purple and pink long-sleeved t-shirts that otherwise dominate her shirt drawer, but Reid didn’t think it suitable for a cowboy. She did agree to a striped blouse and so we were able to go downstairs. When I asked what she wanted for breakfast, Reid asked what cowboys ate. It was at this point that I noticed the socks. I’d had no idea where the cowboy shirt request came from since I was getting ready for work in a separate room. We decided that cowboys eat raisin oatmeal and breakfast proceeded as usual. By the time Ken and Reid left, I had that 80s song in my head, I Wanna be a Cowboy, or really just the refrain:

I wanna be a cowboy
And you can be my cowgirl
I wanna be a cowboy
And you can be my cowgirl
I wanna be a cowboy

It stuck with me throughout the day. Thanks, Reid. I guess if the fire fighter and police officer plans fall through, Reid can always be a cowboy.

Reid’s next career

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

I may have discovered Reid’s next career – if the whole daycare attendee -thing falls through.

Last night after supper, Reid was looking in a bag of tights that I bought.  (Last year I was late shopping and had to have some special ordered and I wasn’t about to go through that again). She pulled out a pair of bright rainbow striped tights – think socks with toes in the the late 70s – and stripped off her shorts to have the tights put on RIGHT NOW. Well, once the tights were on, her shirt had to come off and she wandered about as “Rowdy Reidie”. If you haven’t watched pro wrestling, you might not have the image exactly but think of a small, round-bellied girl with tights that go nearly to her chest and have a teddy bear’s head on the bum. Soon we’ll teach her to do body slams and choke holds.

Oh, I should say that Reid would probably argue that she is not “small” and it’s true she seems to have gotten taller all of a sudden.

Edited to correct a particularly problematic spelling error and the category.