Thanks TSA

Generally, the TSA rules about liquids on flights have been a huge inconvenience to parents. Of the 119 items required for any movement with children, a huge percentage are liquids (yoghurt, lotion, nips of vodka - for me) that are now banned on flights. So be it. But during a trip to LA, these rules were just a tiny bit helpful.





As usual, the kids spent more time at the museum gift shop then we did at the La Brea Tar Pits.

This may have partially been my fault. The educational film about animals getting caught forever made a big impression and my own jokes tossing them in made the little Goofs a little nervous. Also, at the site, the major tar pits are fenced off, but there are little tar pits bubbling up all over the park so the chance that they would stumble into one and be trapped seemed all too real. (Truthfully, the only real danger is that Mama Goof would yell at them for getting tar all over their shoes - but that wouldn't have been a sufficient deterrent on its own).



At the gift shop, Goofboy selected this little flimsy plastic bag filled with colored liquid - an item almost certain to (like a bomb) burrow its way into our luggage and explode. But, thanks to the TSA, I could tell him we couldn't take the thing home. Rulings emanating from me may be arbitrary - but he respects the airport men in uniform and put the thing away and instead bought a bag of multi-colored rocks.

Trouble with Travel - Sleep Wars

So one thing about our regular trips to visit the in-laws that I do not look forward to is the sleep deprivation. The four Goofs share a hotel room, one parent and one child to each bed. In a previous life I had a cat that always slept in the exact center of the bed - perfect to disrupt the sleep of any human being foolish enough to intrude on his space.

My children, as sentient reasoning creatures, do the cat one better and apply advanced calculus to determine how best to use their small bodies to occupy as much bed space as possible.

My son is particularly ingenious, twisting himself into ever more complex angles. Already crammed into a small portion of bed, I spend nights with him being kicked and prodded as he seeks to become a human tesseract.

Fortunately I have developed a solution. If Goofboy wants to play territory all night - bring it on. My counter-strategy can be summarized in two words: pillow fort.

I sleep in peace, protected by high soft walls. It does, however, provide ready ammunition for the morning assault.

Asymmetric Information & Parenthood

I've discussed the economics of babysitting in the past. Basically, we parents are so desperate for baby-sitters that the teenagers have us over a barrel - hence the steady rise in price for baby-sitting services.

The one advantage that adults have is that the teenage babysitters don't recognize their own market power. But a wise commenter pointed out:

Better watch whose hands this information might get into. As the father of a babysitter, I'm just saying...

Also, you might want to warn people that sitters with older siblings have a very good idea of the market. So watch out.

The only advantage we old people have is based on asymmetric information - that is they don't know what we will pay and act as price-takers. If they truly formed a cartel, then they could be price-makers and we would be at their mercy. There are limited substitutes (duct-taping kids to the wall while we go out is cheaper but could result in fines or imprisonment - which carry high opportunity costs). My commenter points out that this process has already exists between sisters. This is an old story - King Lear, to be specific, in which a pair of sisters depose their aged father... I'm just saying...

Broader Implications
But this discussion got me to thinking that asymmetric information is really central to parenthood itself. This is what we've got on them. They can't read so we can tell them what is and isn't on a restaurant menu (for example.) They don't know that I won't really let them run away or that there are no dental police that will haul them off if they don't brush their teeth. (Those old Crest commercials have come in handy!)

They don't know that they toy store isn't really closed or that I can in fact afford whatever thing they want - I just don't want them to have it.

It isn't that they aren't smart - within their limited range of experience children quickly develop models of how the world works. Once, when I told my then three year old son that I didn't have enough money for something he wanted he said, "Yes you do, you have money."

"Not for that."

"No, I saw, the money from the pizza man."

He didn't understand change (he doesn't always handle the other sort well either) and just assumed grown-ups transferred cash to each other under some arcane rules.

But there are huge realms of information that they are simply unaware of and I can always draw on these vast unknown realms to re-direct their demands.

As they get older and understand more, my abilities to rule through information dominance will decline. They will know that I can get money from the ATM anytime and that computers do not actually bite if they don't get enough sleep. They will learn to operate telephones on their own (although other, more useful, appliances like dishwashers and vacuum cleaners will undoubtedly remain mysterious.)

But then they will make their way into the great wide world, where they are pummeled by information asymmetry. Hopefully, my parenting strategy of lies and deception will have properly equipped them for this cold harsh reality.

Downtown, Things Will Great...

In an effort to repair my failings as a parent (in not adequately exposing my children to the wonders of our nation’s capital) and to give the long suffering Mother Goof a break I took the little Goofs downtown for an adventure.

My daughter had somehow fixated on visiting the National Aquarium. She has visited the much larger National Aquarium in Baltimore many times. But she seemed to think there was a hammerhead shark at the DC aquarium, so that became our quest.

My son did a great job on the way downtown, by reading his sister the funny pages. (On a previous junket with my son to see the Lincoln Memorial I read the funny pages to him and attracted a crowd of listeners who laughed uproariously at my interpretations of Brewster Rockit: Space Guy. They might have been high… but my son thought I was very cool. I should hold onto this while it lasts.)

Road to the White House

Downtown, we added some elements to our journey. We decided to go see where the President lives. My daughter asked, “Does Barak Obama ever stand in the window and look at people?”

“No, he’s pretty busy.”

Along the way I told her about how the President lives and works at the White House and that inside there is a swimming pool, a bowling alley, and a movie theater. When we got there, we looked around for a bit and then my daughter got upset. When I asked her what was wrong, she replied, “Why can’t we go swimming here?”

“This is where the President lives, and he didn’t invite us.”

My son tried to distract her by singing the llama song – he can be surprisingly useful – while I tried to re-orient her towards our original goal. This is a key lesson of travel with children – what you tell them and what they hear can be vastly different.

We headed towards the Commerce Department – the National Aquarium lives in its basement. We passed the Treasury Department and I told the kids about what the Treasury Department does (isn’t it great having a dad studying Public Policy?)

My son and I discussed the major departments. I tried to convince him that State, Defense, and Justice are more important that Treasury. He wasn’t buying it, observing that without money you can’t have an army, you can’t fly to other countries to talk to them, and you can’t pay for police. These were good points and I have high hopes for him.

My daughter pointed out interesting features on the facades of the buildings as we walked around. On the one hand, they are just office buildings. However, they do have some striking features and it is refreshing to be reminded of these small decorative touches throughout the city.

When we got to Commerce, we followed a line of people and found ourselves in the new White House Visitors Center. It was neat, but not on the agenda – so the little Goofs got antsy. We did find a picture of Taft’s bathtub, with four regular-sized men sitting inside it (clothed.) Anything referencing Taft is always a crowd pleaser. Then, we turned a corner and went to the Aquarium.

The Nation's Oldest Aquarium

The National Aquarium is the oldest public aquarium in the country and it may be one of the smallest. This is not a bad thing. While its scale and holdings are modest, little children have low thresholds and can wear down quickly. The shark tank was modest – one can imagine a James Bond villain (or even a sitcom star) having something bigger in their living room. The exhibit emphasizes that sharks are an important part of the ecosystem that, in the face of human activity has become more prey then predator. The exhibit sharks were small - horned sharks and leopard sharks. But they still had that cruel shark mouth and even though they probably weigh less one of my legs – I wouldn’t want to encounter one while swimming.

There was also a modest alligator exhibit which affords nice close-up views – and if you are there at the right time, you can watch them eat..

Most of the exhibits are smaller tanks that feature the marine life of one of the various American marine sanctuaries – ranging form Guam and Hawaii, to the Caribbean, but also off the coast of New England, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi River, and Appalachian Creeks. It provided a lot of nice digestible things to look at. Some tanks featured colorful fish and frogs. Others featured some wonderfully creepy sea creatures. In other tanks the challenge was finding something too see at all as these marine denizens were skilled at hiding. There were several activities, including one where kids could trawl around in a sandbox for shark teeth – a nice win (although my daughter kept putting them around her mouth and trying to bite me.

Again, after a lengthy visit to the gift shop it was lunchtime. I could have just brought the kids home, but I didn’t want our adventures to end just yet. On the way to a food court, the kids encountered a fountain and ran around it, putting their arms in it, and trying to grab the coins people had thrown in. They would have stayed for hours.

I dragged them into the food court where they got very excited about Sbarros (I got indigestion) and the immediate consensus was pizza.

The Odyssey Home

From there, I took them to the Botanic Garden on Capitol Hill. We have been listening to the various adventures of Judy Moody and her little brother Stink. In one, Stink decides to be a professional sniffer and discusses the worst smelling thing in the world – the corpse flower. We heard there was one at the Botanic Gardens so we went to check it out.

It was overreach. The corpse flower, which thankfully only blooms about once a decade, was not on display. The kids wandered listlessly through the gorgeous displays of exotic plants – although they were fascinated by change thrown into the fountains in the greenhouses. Walking back to the Metro, my daughter sat down and refused to walk farther, sobbing. She perked up when I propped her on my shoulders and carried her for a block while she enjoyed spectacular views of the city.

On the way home I told the kids how, while I am lazy in day-to-day life when I am being a tourist I get pretty intense. I told them how, when I took their mom to Belgium, she started complaining, “Not another castle, not another church… it’s Belgium, can’t we eat some chocolate and take a nap?”

When we got home they hugged mom, who asked them about what they saw and what their favorite thing was. They answered in chorus, “We had pizza for lunch!”

Lesson: The things kids will take away from adventures and what you want them to remember are two very different things.

Summer Adventures: Afternoon at the Museum

At the beginning of summer, before camp started, I took the little Goofs downtown to go to the Museum of Natural History.  The subway stop nearest the museum spills you out into the massive courtyard of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.  There was a summer concert series, so we bought some lunch and sat there for a while.  My children looked around in wonder, my son announced, "I never knew Washington DC was so interesting."

That they were wowed by the (admittedly impressive) courtyard of a federal office building means that I have been negligent in introducing my children to the wonders of our nation's capital.

The rest of that day went well.  My daughter wanted to see skeletons of animals and so we did.  The manatee skeleton was particularly important to us. 
One of the not-so-secrets of travelling with children is that they can get tired of interesting stuff extremely quickly – whereas, in the presence of such interesting stuff, seemingly boring things fascinate them.  So after some skeletons and trying to find the queen bee in the insect room, they were ready to get out.  Since we passed by, I dragged us in to see the Hope Diamond.

I told the kids that it was the largest diamond in the world.  My daughter was unimpressed (let that be a warning to any lad who seeks to court her).  I told her to compare it to mommy's diamond ring and quickly added, "But don't say anything about this to mommy."

We topped off our 80 minutes at the museum with about the same amount of time in the gift shop, kids find gift shops at least as interesting as museums – if not more so (see note above).  Then we headed home.  I told my daughter that I used to take the subway downtown everyday for work.  She looked at me incredulously, "You worked?"

"I work now, you were at my office yesterday," I said wearily, "Remember we watched a movie in the conference room?  But I used to come downtown everyday on the subway.  Wouldn't it be neat to do that?"

"People take this train everyday to go to work?  That's ridiculous," my daughter said, incredulous.  Commuters sitting close to us chuckled sadly.

We arrived home at about the same time as Momma Goof came home from work.  My daughter immediately took her hand and examined it.  My wife happened to wear her engagement ring that day.  Goof Girl looked at if for a moment and yelled, "You're right daddy!  It is teeny-weeny!"

Veggie Extracts

The Goofs belong to a co-op, which means that over the summer we get fresh vegetables in bountiful quantities.  Although the co-op folks get very excited about how delicious and invigorating these fresh veggies are - the kids don't buy it.  It ain't cookies.

Fortunately, there are other aspects to vegetables for kids to love.

My son discovered that he rather liked roasted beets.  But he liked them even more later that evening, as he ran around the house yelling, "Pink pee!  Pink pee!"

Yes, beets have a certain impact on the digestive system.  My son now wants to eat beets at every meal so he can show his friends.

Now we just make up effects, "Cabbage, orange pee - but you have to eat a lot of it!"

When the vegetable fails to have the expected effect, we can always fall back on, "I guess you didn't eat enough."

Keep some food coloring hidden around the bathroom so you can provide encouraging examples...

"Daddy ate all of his rhubarb and and it made a rainbow." The downside of course is that for this to be credible, I actually have to eat rhubarb - the mutant celery.

My daughter found she liked fennel.  I mean, really liked fennel.  When I say she ate a fennel salad, it was literally that - just a big pile of fennel.


She was pooping good'n plenty for the next three days.