I know you know I am a Noticer but did you know I can Chew and Notice at the same time? Well now you know and here is what I noticed while chewing my breakfast last Friday. I bet you are all excited with anticipation...Or are you?
There were several families with small children within my Range of Notice. They were all doing the same thing to their adorable small children. They were frequently kissing their adorable small children. (I could have said “constantly” but that would be exaggerating and I never exaggerate...Or was I?...Or do I?)
I know you just said out loud, “You are right, Fella, the modern American family does that all the time! I surely don’t notice as much as you notice but even I have taken notice of this!”
Yes, this is what we do to our children in the Good Ole USofA today. We kiss our children all over their adorable little heads.
Many times the child is not aware that it has been kissed because we kiss them on the top of their heads. This seems like a wasted kiss to me. If we are going to kiss them we ought to make sure that they know we have kissed them.
We need to build up credit in their small minds so that we can delay the time in their teen-age years when they decide that we don’t know what we are talking about about anything we talk about.
We need to delay that awful day when our once adorable small children decide that they need to follow what their peers do in everything that their peers do.
This is when we are shocked into stunned disbelief by the realization that our child has decided that his schoolyard buddy, who had 3 D’s & 2 F’s on his last report card, is smarter than we are.
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Fast forward 18 years and your once adorable child has moved through his smarter-than-you-teen-age years and has graduated collage. Today you are waiting for his return from his first job interview.
He arrives and the look on his adorable face and the body language exhibited from his adorable body makes your heart sink.
You are afraid to ask but you do, “You did not get the job did you?”
He responds, “No, I got the job”.
You say, “Please, tell me what happened. Tell me the whole story. Why do you look so unhappy?”
Your son talks in Bullets Points. It is one of the things that make him so special and quite easy to understand...
Ø The whole interview went quite well.
Ø I was greeted warmly.
Ø I was offered coffee and my choice if a gluten-free croissant or a gluten-free bagel.
Ø It became obvious that the interviewer (who asked me to call him to call him by his first name, Angelina Jolie) was actually intimidated by me because he came right out and told me that he was not going to ask me any tough questions because he knew I was smart because I graduated from a northeastern university that can’t play football very well.
Ø In short order, I was offered a position.
Ø I know what you are thinking, dad, you think they offered me a very low salary and, as you predicted, I am going to have to live in a small start-up apartment, but that’s not the case. The salary I was offered will allow me to live in a house that is larger than this house in which you raised me and my 7 brothers and sisters.
At this point I had to interrupt his bullet points and I blurted out, “Why then are you so unhappy?”
His answer broke my heart as he said to me with his tear-filled eyes and quivering voice, “My interviewer did not kiss me, dad, he did not even kiss me where I could not see him kissing me! It was awful!”
Would I kid u?
Smartfella