Our Tooth Fairy Tale

 

When my son was six years old, he lost his very first tooth. He was so excited that his tooth finally came off after so long. He carefully put the tooth in a Ziploc bag and placed it under his pillow when he went to bed that night.

I waited for a few hours to make sure that the boy was deep in sleep. Then my wife and I sneaked in. Then I searched for the Ziploc bag under his pillow. Then I placed a dollar bill there. My son was still sound asleep. Mission accomplished. We could not breathe.

The next morning, my son excitedly showed us his one dollar bill from the tooth fairy. “The tooth fairy must be very tiny!”, he said. “She left me one dollar and I could not tell!”

My son also bragged about it at school. Then his classmate Boden said:

- That’s nothing! My sister got TEN dollars for her tooth!

Indians are Now Turkeys

 

When I was a baby in Vietnam, my father would hold me and sing me a song he found in the English book. The song went like this:

One little, two little, three little Indians
Four little, five little, six little Indians
Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians
Ten little Indian boys!

A few decades later, now I lived in the U.S. My son came home from kindergarten and taught me a song he had learned in his class for the upcoming Thanksgiving. It went like this:

One little, two little, three little turkeys
Four little, five little, six little turkeys
Seven little, eight little, nine little turkeys
Ten little baby turkeys!

No, I am aware that singing about “little Indians” has become somehow offensive and therefore unacceptable. So now we sing about turkeys. 

But what if the people from Turkey also get offended?

"How to" Celebrate Father's Day in a Meaningful Way, Pt. 2

 Continued from Part 1.

Another way is to punch some bricks for coins, obviously!

A Father's Dismay

 

In the movie A Christmas Story, a little boy named Ralphie was helping his father fixing a car tire when he dropped the nuts he was holding. In a panic, he blurted out: “Oh, sh*t!”, much to his already-grumpy father’s dismay.

Unlike Ralphie’s father who used swearwords often, I rarely applied foul language in my daily speech. Nonetheless, I feared of one day when my son, Spidey, would muster something like Ralphie did. I wouldn’t know what to do.

Then something happened. I was at my desk working at home and Spidey was playing with his Transformers toys on the floor nearby. Spidey liked to talk to himself while playing, pretending that his robots were interacting verbally. Suddenly, I noticed that Spidey was shouting “Dammit! Dammit!”

“Oh great”, I thought to myself, “so the day has come.” Did he learn that from me? Did he learn that from his friends at school? At church? From TV? More importantly, what am I supposed to explain to him now? Parenting is hard. I had a quick prayer to God that I would say the right thing.

“Spidey,” I turned to him and asked, “What did you just say?”

My son looked at me quite innocently and said: “Dimetrodon. This guy is transforming. He’s turning into a dimetrodon. DIMEtrodon!”

He was shouting dimetrodon.

"How to" Celebrate Father's Day in a Meaningful Way

The best way is to shoot down space invaders, obviously!