Weekend Part II: Parental Rewards.

Today was pretty good. We forgot about Mass but it was because of cool stuff. . As usual, we watched Peter Pan, and discussed some fo the basics of neverland; why the pirates are grown-up if they're in Neverland (they were already grown when they came to Neverland); why the Indians are grown-up (presumably they do age, or by now they'd mostly be children; my guess is that the antiaging properties of the island do not affect Neverland natives -- the Lost Boys all fell out of their carriages before making it there).

Art and science were the topics of the day. The big one did some pictures, one of Cinderella, the other of a sleeping Easter Rabbit (she doesn't do "bunny") in his bed. She then spent about two hours on the computer doing a rather intricate picture of eggs in a basket, and learned a few new CorelDRAW tricks. Then we two movies came from Netflix; For me, the original Dawn the the Dead; for all of us, Before the Dinosaurs: Walking with Monsters.

The kids were enthralled by the trailer for the latter movie, watching it over and over, so I pushed it to the top of my queue. I recommend it most highly. It's from the same BBC bunch as Walking with Dinosaurs, and follows the same format; a standard nature documentary, but one set hundreds of millions of years ago, through CGI, animatronics and very realistic puppets. Of course, a lot of the stuff like behavior and coloration is conjecture, but it does a great job of making the things real. (One goof; the "giant spider" later turned out to be a type of sea scorpion, but it was too late to change the movie).

In the middle, we had to pause for a discussion of evolution, which we've discussed several times, but she doesn't quite get -- I think she finds it hard to get past the idea that specific animals change into something, rather than intergenerational change, but I think we made progress today. She made me very pleased by coming up herself with the problem of infinite regression: that you can't just say that people came from their mothers, who came from their mothers, who came from their mothers... ad infinitum.

I reached into my bag of analogies and a very brief description of genetic reproduction, and came up with a hypothetical example of some small, short-antennaed, short-tailed violet shrimp with uniform leg size, who gradually, one trait at a time, gave rise to a population of long-antennaed, long-tailed brown shrimp twice their size, with elongated front legs with hooks.

It was a simple matter to translate this principle to hominid evolution, which led to a brief talk of tool-use and its effects on human physiology. It rocked.

And it all made dinner late again tonight. They did not seem hungry, however (probably due to hominy-bean stew eaten during the Monsters video), and I got them off to sleep with some egg sandwiches and milk. Toddler was reluctant, but at some point a noise or something scared her, and she needed "hugs!" and fell asleep withing about three minutes on my shoulder.

I get lot of rewarding moments being Daddy, but some stand out. Some days, I say the big reward for good parenting is having your kids become productive, independent citizens who get emancipated early and move out at 15.

Actually, I say that most days.

Today, though, it was different. Today's reward came from the toddler, after some bit of mutual silliness. She stoppped laughing, looked at me sideways and said with a big smile:

"Yo' fun, Da-dee!"

I do my best.