Beadniks

Tony and I spent all weekend in parenting class.

No no no. It's not a court-mandated thing or anything like that. We're applying to become adoptive parents, so you have to go to parenting class.

The class is taught by social workers, so they had us doing all that touchy feely stuff. We broke up into small groups. We did a meditation exercise. We role-played.

Normally, I don't do any of these things. If there's going to be a team-building exercise at work, I schedule myself to give a presentation in Chico or something.

But I didn't mind the parenting class. It was fun. They even brought in this adoptive family with the cutest little bilingual pre-schooler. And we did this bead exercise, where you put beads in a cup to represent different people in your life. Like Jeffrey is Chinese, so he was a yellow bead. I had one black bead in my cup, because my favorite musician is Della Reese. Well, technically I guess she should have been orange, but…

Well, I don't want to get into the rules, but let's just say the social workers had an issue with Tony and me coming up with completely different bead assortments in our respective cups. Tony's cup was like half orange. Well, that's because he wasn't following the instructions! See orange is multi-cultural. He kept defaulting to multi-cultural. Like at our dentist's office, one dentist is Chinese and one dentist is Italian, so he used the multi-cultural bead to represent our dentist.

Well, that's not how it works! You're supposed to pick one dentist!

But anyway, it was a fun exercise, and I made Tony a multi-colored bead bracelet for Valentine's Day, and then when I told Jeffrey about the bead bracelet, Jeffrey said "I can't believe you did that! You hate that stuff! What's happening to you?!"

So I got out my colored pencils and puffy paint and made Jeffrey a multi-cultural valentine.

He'll come around.

Kurt "big daddy" True
14 february 2007