Category: Paternal Thoughts
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Happy Halloween Pootle!
(For the uninitiated, this is Q Pootle 5, the Little Monkey’s alien de jour.)
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Little Monkey vs. Watermelon
Music: Hidden Agenda by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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Dance, my little puppet, dance!
As a child I never moved house, and, in fact, the Monkeyshines grandma still lives in that same house. So, the lack of purges required when moving, allied with hoarding tendencies, means that many of my treasured childhood toys and books remain stashed away in cupboards and under beds. It has been fun, now that…
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An Aldeburgh Holiday
Castles made of sand Holidays on the English coast were a staple of my childhood summers, and Mrs. Monkeyshines’ too; she went to the beaches of the south-west, and I to those of the south-east (and we both went to the Isle of Wight). So we were both looking forward to our week with the…
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A Two-Year Old Little Monkey
Last year we had fish and chips at the seaside, and fruit for tea, to celebrate the Little Monkey’s first birthday. This year it was a party in the garden with a Thomas the Tank Engine cake…
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It’s a Little Monkey’s world
The Little Monkey is a talkative young simian, and I thought it’d be interesting to use his vocabulary to reflect on his interests, on the eve of his second birthday. I only consider words that he says, rather than those I judge him to understand; and I include words where his pronunciation might only be…
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Little Monkey Memories
The Little Monkey oftens catches Mrs. Monkey-shines and I by surprise with the things that he remembers. I don’t really have a frame of reference, so I don’t know if he’s unusually good, or if all children are like him. I guess it might seem surprising because you think of people not remembering things from…
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The Gravitational Pull of Thomas the Tank Engine
When the Little Monkey was littler, I was a bit reticent to get him Thomas the Tank Engine books and paraphernalia. I had the impression it was annoyingly twee, and I didn’t relish the idea of being beholden to a marketing juggernaut. But gradually the books crept in, some of them a bit rubbs, others…
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A Glimpse of the Rarely Sighted “Boxheaded Little Monkey”
Everyone tells you that children love nothing more than a good cardboard box. They’re completely right. Music written by Tom Cusack.