{"id":845,"date":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"-0001-11-30T05:17:32","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/?p=845","title":{"rendered":"On being 4"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Four is a special number for me. My beloved\u2019s birthday has several 4s in it, my FD badge has a few and, of course, my daughter is 4. When I was way younger, being four years old meant being innocent, pure and, well\u2026naive.\u00a0 In most places on earth, you can\u2019t even testify in court until you\u2019re mature\u2026like, uh, 5. So 4 is pretty young. I\u2019ve never talked down to children\u2026baby talk is best saved for the bedroom (that\u2019s another story)\u2026I believe children can understand plain English (or Spanish, or French, or Swahili) without needing a vocabulary of their own. But still\u2026children are, well, not yet fully formed. Right?<\/p>\n

So my spousal unit, at the dinner table, is asking one of her trademarked probing questions\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you think the world was like before you were born?\u201d<\/p>\n

Dear Daugther ponders (briefly, as any four year old may be prone to ponder) and says \u201cWell\u2026\u201d, then rolls her eyes, shows the palm of her hands and says \u201cwhat do you think? Like, I wasn\u2019t born, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ok\u2026Miss Practical\u2026it was a baited question designed to illicit a cute response. Just play the game, I\u2019m thinking. So I add \u201cOK\u2026when I was young, I thought the world was just boring, waiting for me to be born\u2026\u201d Somehow, in my man-mind, I thought this would get her gears grinding in the right direction and she would say Something Precious<\/em>. She laughs, rolls her eyes again, looks at her mother in a conspiratorial woman-to-woman way and says \u201cthat\u2019s just silly.Nobody was just waiting for you to be born!\u201d<\/p>\n

Just for the record, at least one person was waiting for me to be born\u2026and probably even anxious about it.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four is a special number for me. My beloved\u2019s birthday has several 4s in it, my FD badge has a<\/p>\n

Continue readingOn being 4<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/instipator.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}