Sign Here Please

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

One of the things I have learned at a father is never do something funny unless you are willing to do it a) 100 times in a row or b) every day for the foreseeable future.  I won't go into details but there are things that (for some reason) my kids find wildly entertaining.  Things that I wouldn't mind NOT doing for the rest of my life.  New fathers, this is my best advice to you: Don't do something for a simple laugh unless you want to do it many, many, many times in a row.

Anyway, my son has a reading goal for school.  He is supposed to read 200 minutes in the first 6 weeks.  This only averages out to about 5 minutes per day.  For the first week or so he was doing his best to stay at the minimum.  And then he picked up the pace since there were other kids at school that were up to 100 minutes ahead of him.  The wife has tried to get him to read over the last year or two and it was like pulling teeth.  But now all of a sudden it is a competition at school and reading has taken on a whole new purpose.  I don't know if this trick is going to work long term but I guess we will wait and see.

When he is done reading for the day, one of the parents has to sign a form that states what book was read, what day it was read on, how many minutes it was read, and what the total minutes to date for the six weeks is.  The wife signed the first week's worth and then one day she was gone and I was asked to sign.  Now the wife has excellent penmanship.  She really puts forth the effort for her signature to be pretty.  On the other hand, you are lucky to make out 2 letters of my last name.  My son watched me sign my name and he thought it was a joke.  He thought that no one would sign their name so poorly.  And my signature looks especially poor compared to the wife's a few lines up on the same sheet of paper.  So every night for the last week or so, he has requested that I be the one to sign this form.  He cracks up every time I scrawl out my "name."

There is another form that has to be initialed daily.  He requested (with a smirk on his face) that I also take care of this.  He was real disappointed when the J and D were actually legible.

I am predicting that form has only the wife's initials on it from now on.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon