My dear eldest son, how intellegent you are! Someday SOON we shall have to apprentice you to our friend in New York, who will (maybe) help you to be more useful with your talent:o)

When you were 2 and a half, I caught you on a chair, screwdriver in hand, taking off a switchplate. A year later, you took apart the beautiful workbench your father laboured so hard to make for you. At four, you fixed an old, junky tape recorder, and used it profitably for some weeks. You took apart so many things to find out how they worked, and collected all sorts of wires, capacitors, and diodes (not to mention dead batteries) for use in your own creations. Your favourite presents were old, broken electronic gadgets and gizmos.

You have put together your own lights, fans, and even computers. Oh, you seemed so promising! But this latest gadget--are you MY son? Surely those genes came only from your father! But I see that you are, in fact, ALL BOY and must, for some unexplained reason, go through a CRUDE stage. But must I go down in history as the mother of the boy who invented the electronic whoopie cushion?

Love, Mom

-- Cathy N. (keeper@attcanada.ca), January 19, 2002

Answers

Patience works.

-- mitch hearn (moopups@citlink.net), January 19, 2002.

Just hope it doesn't short circuit!

-- Christine in OK (cljford@mmcable.com), January 19, 2002.

How dare you tell my secrets, mom.

-- Nathanael Newton (keeper8@attcanada.ca), January 19, 2002.

Today an electronic whoopie cushion, tomorrow, the man responsible for patching the ozone layer...be proud Mom, he's using that wonderful brain! God bless.....

-- lesley (martchas@bellsouth.net), January 19, 2002.

I should come back and say that I am quite pleased with my son. My open letter to him was not a reprimand; we all got a good laugh out of it, and he enjoyed my letter. We REALLY got to laughing about the effects of a short circuit!

-- Cathy N. (keeper8@attcanada.ca), January 19, 2002.

Hi Nathanel! You have a great talent. A propensity for fixing things can be very valuable when you get older! As well as useful for rigging up some fun jokes!!!!

-- Melissa (me@home.net), January 19, 2002.

During an interview for a job, I was asked "Tell me about one of your failures and what you did about it." I was stumped. Failure ? Some readers might say "Well, yes, bozo, everyone fails some time. What ? Your ego to great to admit failure." Well, failure is a frame of mind. If I either made a big mistake or committed some absolutely foolish act which resulted in negative consequences, that's not failure. Failure is when you make a big blunder or commit some absolutely foolish act and then don't learn from it but rather ignore it as though it were something to be forgotten.

Success, however, is the art of TRYING, like Nathaneal has often done and then LEARNING from what doesn't work and then keeping on trying, even though it might risk shocking your mother once in a while.

I commend Nathaneal for TRYING and then again TRYING. Failure is when we stop trying. Failure is QUITTING. Failure is REFUSING to learn from our mistakes and our blunders.

To all those parents of inquisitive, experimenting, dare devil children, I challenge you to place boundaries only where boundaries must be for propriety and for safety ( perhaps there are a few others but these are general enough to cover most ) and the REST of the time, allow your children to tinker.

Let then get their bumps, bruises and "bo-bo's" while they can. They'll learn well from their mistakes and blunders faster than they'll ever learn from our lectures. Your job is to simply keep them alive while they're learning :)

And, Cathy, next time we hear a vulgar sound, you and I will break out laughing and point to Nathaneal and say "He dunnit!" ... we'll see which one of us is the most ... um ... shocked ?

-- Allan Robert Smith ( the first ) (larsmith@tds.net), January 20, 2002.