Overheard by Mr. Spy recently in Harriet�s family room:

The Girl Next Door: And you have to faint when I say to.

AJ: What does that mean?

TGND: Faint means you fall down for a long time, like a year.

AJ: okay.

* * * * *

I�m learning some things about girls from The Girl Next Door. First, they are bossy in a way that boys aren�t. Don�t get me wrong, AJ likes to bark out orders as much as the next guy, but girls do it differently. They get these elaborate plans and only reveal part of them, holding out on the rest until the unsuspecting victim does what she wants. The victim is usually willing, if only due to his curiosity about the rest of the plan. AJ doesn�t care about plans. He just wants to be in charge. Both, though, have a tendency to change the rules in their own favor as they go along. �Oh, I forgot to tell you. This is a base I�m touching now, so it doesn�t count that you tagged me.�

Small wonder that a favored phrase in both their vocabularies is �No fair.�

TGND is also the spreader of much false information. If AJ doesn�t know something, he�ll generally admit to it. If TGND doesn�t know something, she makes it up. And because AJ is, himself, unflaggingly truthful, he believes her.

�Mommy, do you know what staring is?�
�What is it?�
�It�s when you stop everything and stand very still like a statue and don�t move for a long time like a year.�
�Who told you that?�
�The Girl Next Door. We were having a staring contest.�
�Who won?�
�I don�t know. She went home.�

Figures. And incidentally, in TGND�s world, a year is approximately 7 minutes in duration. AJ�s too, if he�s left without a clock. Although the other day, he wanted to know how many seconds there were in a year, so he got his calculator and I helped him figure it out. He knew seconds in a minute, minutes in and hour, hours in a day and days in a year. He punched the buttons carefully and hit the equals sign. �Whoa! 31,536,000!� And then he asked? �How come we didn�t do weeks? Or months?�

Yesterday, I attended a book group meeting with four other women from my neighborhood. The book was lightweight and annoying � The Memory Keeper�s Daughter is a great idea for a book, but it�s poorly written and poorly edited and dissolves its literary potential within minutes for tedious romance with poorly fleshed out characters. Because there wasn�t too much to say, the discussion devolved into other kinds of misinformation. Two of the parents have children in fifth grade and this week the fifth graders are watching The Film. The Film every parent dreads dealing with. I think most of us saw The Film. It was talked about for weeks prior and then squirmed through. Afterwards we tried to forget it � it had raised more questions than it answered.

One of the parents shook her head over the school bus conversations her twelve-year-old daughter was overhearing. �She said, �Mom, what�s so great about 69?� And I froze. �Uh, it�s a nice number!� And then she told me that the football players had been fighting over who got to be number 69 and she figured there had to be more to it.�

�What did you tell her?� Someone else asked.

�It�s a very nice number! It�s not prime!� chimed in someone with a sense of humor.

�And it�s evenly divisible by three!� said another.

�Well, I started to tell her � because I didn�t want her to be hearing it from somewhere else. But after I started she covered her ears and said, �That�s enough mom! That�s all I need to know!��

As horrified as you are to get questions like that as a parent, you�re also incredibly happy that your kid asked you. Because kids � little ones like AJ, big ones like my college students � are full of questions, but tend as a whole not to be as discriminating as they ought to be about the sources of their answers. I know I wasn�t. While getting questions about vocabulary or sexual terminology may seem different from students citing Wikipedia as an academic source, in some ways the impetus isn�t so different. And when I was writing �do not rely on Wikipedia� on the 23rd research paper, I thought about how similar the situations are. You do the best with what you can do on your own without addressing the hard question: how do you ask mom/the professor for help without looking like you need help?

Or a spouse, for that matter. Working at home with a spouse who works at home has some definite challenges. The greatest of these for us is the issue of scheduling of work time. And although we�ve been doing this for five years, we still have trouble. When Mr. Spy says, �I�m thinking about taking AJ to the library tomorrow so you can work for an extra hour,� I hear it as a tentative idea and expect him to bring up the issue again in the morning so we can plan our day. Mr. Spy thinks it�s a done deal. Rather than clarifying � it seems too formal, somehow � we tend to putter around wasting time until someone makes a move. This arrangement annoys both of us, but we can�t seem to figure out a way around it that doesn�t seem presumptuous, like one person is telling the other what to do when. And so we continue being annoyed, continue avoiding the questions that could make all of our days run more smoothly. Like children, we�d rather figure it out for ourselves, even if it means working with misinformation. Even if it means falling down. Like for a year.

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