It’s winter and there’s still cold seeping around most doors, causing us to dress in sweaters and bundle up under blankets. But that doesn’t stop time from marching on. Believe it or not, it’s time to start looking for summer camps.

I know. It’s hard to believe, but it is true.

Over the last couple of [...]]]> by Richard

It’s winter and there’s still cold seeping around most doors, causing us to dress in sweaters and bundle up under blankets. But that doesn’t stop time from marching on. Believe it or not, it’s time to start looking for summer camps.

I know. It’s hard to believe, but it is true.

Over the last couple of days, we’ve begun to receive many, many thick catalogs with ideas for different camps and summer programs in which we could enroll our little dude and our teen dudes. We’re lucky. We already know what they’re going to go away to do. Unlike some camps where the little dudes and dudettes go for months, we send ours to shorter, normally two-week, camps. They get a trip out of town on their own and we get to keep a few pennies in the bank account. A few, mind you.

There are many, many fine summer camps all over the country. A lot of the ones I’ve dealt with, either by attending or by sending a little dude there, are associated with the YMCA. For the most part, they run a great camp.

All three of our little dudes have attended Camp Cheerio (no relation to or association with the cereal) up in the mountains of North Carolina. Each of our dudes have really loved their time there. Two years ago, George of the Jungle aged out. Last year was Zippy the Monkey Boy’s last time at that camp. This year, Speed Racer will be attending without benefit of brothers. He can’t decide if he’s going to be sad or going to explode with joy because he doesn’t have to watch out for surprise noogies.

The two older little dudes are going a bit farther afield. Last year, George of the Jungle went to Costa Rica to help rehabilitate habitats for endangered animals on a wildlife preserve. He got 25 community service hours and had the time of his life traveling with Rustic Pathways, a teen travel and service organization. This year, he’s going with Rustic Pathways to New Orleans to help rehabilitate homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He’ll be there working and playing for about two weeks. He actually said he didn’t want to go out of the country this time because it would be “too much hassle.” He stuck to it, even after we had the doctor check him over for hidden head trauma.

Zippy the Monkey Boy has signed up to travel to the United Kingdom and tour Scotland, Ireland and England with a number of his classmates and other high-school dudes from around Charlotte with Educational Tours. Not so many opportunities for service with this one, but he will be exposed to a different culture or two.

We know these are all expensive, but they’re worth every penny in the joy and horizon-broadening they bring to the little dudes. So start researching now if you want your little dude or dudette to experience the joys of sleep-away camp or even find a service opportunity.

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When dads sit down around the campfire after a long day of herding little dudes and cleaning up after them, there’s a cautionary tale that gets told to the shivers of the listeners. It goes something like this.

There was a family with three little dudes and or dudettes. It doesn’t matter. The family was [...]]]> by Richard

When dads sit down around the campfire after a long day of herding little dudes and cleaning up after them, there’s a cautionary tale that gets told to the shivers of the listeners. It goes something like this.

There was a family with three little dudes and or dudettes. It doesn’t matter. The family was planning a vacation to somewhere warm, sandy and delightful. As they were doing the final pack up, they heard the news. At the resort, a bird who’s species is on the verge of extinction had flown into the engine of a fully loaded jet as it was coming in for a landing. The jet went down in a ball of flame, killing all on board as well as wiping out the resort and causing a fire that devastated the tiny island.

“Oh, how horrible,” said the mom.

“That’s just terrible,” said the dad as he began to unpack their suitcases.

The middle little dude looked on, aghast. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“Wait,” he said. “Why are you unpacking? That doesn’t affect me, does it? Well, find something else.”

And the group around the campfire shivers, knowing the little dude just didn’t get it. All he worried about was whether or not he was going to get something. The dads hoped they were raising their little dudes to be better than that. They picked up their plates of beans and started a fart contest. Whatddya want? They’re dudes.

The problem is that little dude’s reaction wasn’t all that unusual. There’s little dudes all over the world that only care about something if it affects them, or how they want to do stuff. I may, just may, know this from personal experience. Maybe.

I’m not sure why this happens. I’m not sure how a little dude becomes so focused on himself that he sees the entire world through the lens of how it will affect him. I think, though, there are some ways to work with the non-functional-brained little dudes.

One way is the bait and switch. Offer the little dude something he or she really wants, or says he or she does, and then make it contingent on doing something nice for someone more than once. Or tell them they can’t have it. And then give it to them only after they’ve made an unprompted gesture of niceness toward another member of the family.

I think we need to make sure kids like these widen their perspective more than a little bit. Let themselves see the outside world has more to offer and needs more from the people living in it than what happens to them.

*not the band, although they’re awesome.

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In the elementary school all three of my little dudes attended, part of each fifth-grade year is taken up by studying WWII and the Holocaust. So, for three fifth-grades we’ve had little dudes reading stories like The Diary of Anne Frank and Number the Stars. This year, however, was a little different. Speed Racer [...]]]> by Richard

In the elementary school all three of my little dudes attended, part of each fifth-grade year is taken up by studying WWII and the Holocaust. So, for three fifth-grades we’ve had little dudes reading stories like The Diary of Anne Frank and Number the Stars. This year, however, was a little different. Speed Racer came home and said his teacher said the class should watch a movie called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

This was a movie I’d never heard of. Turns out there was a reason for this. The movie was only released last year to, apparently, very little fanfare and with very little in the way of promotion only a year after the book on which it was based. Which is a shame, because this was a supremely depressing movie that was so well-acted and well-written that you don’t notice the depression until a few minutes after the horror wears off.

Yeah. Not a good combination for the most part, but pretty appropriate for a story dealing with children and the Holocaust. I watched the movie with Speed Racer, and my wife, known to me as She Who (Sometimes) Knows A Good Movie When She Sees One, and we could not take our eyes off the TV screen even for a little while.

The movie deals with Bruno, played by Asa Butterfield, his mother, sister and father, who is a high-ranking and fast-rising officer in the Nazi German army and has recently received a promotion. Because of the promotion, the family will be moving away from Berlin and to a house in the country. Once there, Bruno gets bored with hanging around the house and goes for a wander in the woods nearby.

What he discovers is a farm that is surrounded by electrified barbed wire and inhabited by people who all wear striped pajamas. Sitting on the other side of the fence is another young boy, Shmuel, played by Jack Scanion. Bruno and Shmuel quickly become friends despite their background and current circumstances. Bruno comes to visit Shmuel every day at around the same time and they talk and share stories.

Despite being able to see a little of what is going on in “the farm,” Bruno doesn’t grasp what it actually is. He doesn’t figure out that his father is the commander of the notorious death camp called Auschwitz and that Shmuel and all the other Jews in the camp will eventually be herded into showers, gassed to death and then cremated in giant ovens. What Bruno does know is that sometimes the farmers burn things in the huge smokestacks and that the resulting smoke smells terrible.

The movie makers do a great job of allowing the watchers to discover, piece by piece, just what it is that Bruno is missing. Throughout the movie, Bruno never loses his childhood innocence, even when he convinces Shmuel to find an extra pair of pajamas, digs under the barbed wire fence and joins Shmuel inside the camp to look for Shmuel’s father, who has disappeared. Although he is a little concerned when the guards tell everyone in Shmuel’s bunkhouse to strip and head to the shower, Bruno still has no idea something is very, very wrong.

The ending is, as you might imagine, quite depressing. It did, however, enable Speed Racer, his mother and I to all have a very long talk about the Holocaust, what really happened back then and why. We also talked a lot about how people could even think about doing something like this. So, yeah, the movie was depressing, but I thought we did get a very nice set of conversations out of it, letting the next generation know that hatred and prejudice is not something good to have.

If you can stand a little darkness in your life, go rent this movie. I give this five dudes out of five.

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