Mommy, what did you do at work today?
One of my friends on and off the Internet recently posted a question in her journal: What do our kids think we do all day? Until she asked, I hadn’t given it a great deal of thought, really. I’d ask my kids what they did at school or daycare most days, and they would answer in an age-appropriate fashion. As they got older, I’d be asked what I did at work in return.
I tend to keep my answers simple and parallel to their experiences: “I spoke on the phone with my co-workers, I went to meetings to talk about work, I wrote my work using the computer, had lunch, and missed you kids.” I have a book about “what authors do” on my Amazon to-buy list, but it doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill. “See, son, this is what I do, but instead of rhyming silly words, I format and validate command line parameters for a small audience of high-level administrators of medium- to large-scale server farms.” Not exactly driving up in a large fire truck, sirens blazing, when someone dials 911. My emergencies are more along the lines of a document not formatting correctly when saved in ASCII instead of UTF-8 … and it needs to be uploaded before 5pm.
But while home sick for a week with my oldest child, a little television show by the name of Wow, Wow, Wubsy provided a fantastically age-appropriate explanation for what it is I do actually do all day for months on end. Continue Reading »