Thursday, March 15, 2007

Raising them Right

Sometimes as a parent you feel like you're just blundering your way through, and then there are those moments when you realize you've done something right. (Kind of like the night when the boys pretended to run away from Blockbuster Video.)

This afternoon I had one of those moments. We were driving up Ashland Avenue (as we do oh-so-often now) and Baxter pointed out two small shops across the street from each other: "Mufflers 4 Les$" and "Brakes 4 Les$". After an amusing comment or two about the use of "4" in place of "for" and the dollar sign in the word "Les$", Baxter struggled to explain something that was troubling him about this advertisement-within-a-name. "It's hard to explain," he started, "but let's say, for instance, that you needed new brakes." This was not hard for me to imagine, since we just replaced our brakes, say, for instance, two weeks ago. "You would walk in there and they'd give you the price - say it's 50 cents [snort!]. And you think that sounds good but how do you know that's the best price... really?? You would have to go to some other brake stores and find out their prices to know if this one really is less than the others, right?" I can't believe it! My first grader is already appropriately cynical about advertising!

1 comment:

Christopher Tassava said...

That's awesome! But now he'll probably be a lifelong Nader voter. Just what we need... (Honestly, though, this jibes with other stuff you've blogged about his admirable ignorance of the bad side of American mass culture - not knowing about McDonalds, for instance. Someday some kid will sing, "We've got the MI-das touch," and Baxter will say, "What about a king in Greece?"