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just threw p.'s laundry in the dryer ... he puts his laundry in a little cart which he designated as his laundry cart some time ago (it's a little toy supermarket buggy) and puts it out by the door to the laundry whenever it gets full. i never taught him this, he just figured it to be a good idea and rather enjoys doing it.

i always thought you had to teach kids that stuff. nah, i thought you had to pound it into their heads, threaten them with the removal of desserts and what-not. apparently not. you just need to give them some half-decent guidance in their (thankfully relatively simple) lives and enough creative space to explore things.

he's also started reading more on his own now, recently having put it together in his head that letters go together to make sounds and strings of those sounds make words ... and, for anyone who has met him can attest, he knows how words work so the rest is pretty easy from there. this was another aspect (education) that i thought might be challenging. but he's picking up some reading skills at kindergarten and his mom and i have been doing is reading to him, helping him along with his adventures in sounding things out and encouraging his writing/reading with praise and interest (which, i'll admit at the end of some particularly hard days, is a huge effort (and one i probably sometimes fail at))

when i first discovered i was about to become a father some 6+ years ago i was pretty concerned about the effort it would require to properly raise a child who had any sort of chance in hell of having a good life: lots and lots of hours, lots of Doing Things Just Right(tm), etc ... turns out it's pretty simple, though the lots of hours (hardly noticed, though) is generally true.

but even on days where i feel particularly drained, like today, i can certainly attest that it's all worth it. but please don't take that as a call to go out and populate the world like some modern day adam or eve. there are enough people here already; we need to learn to take care of what we have first. were i to aquire another little life to complicate my own up some more, i'd probably adopt.

(p.s. i had something of a backlog of drafts in my blog. just noticed that today. so some of these postings are a few days old. but unlike good bread, they don't stale quite that quickly. or maybe they're like bad bread: stale when they leave the oven. ;)