What is the difference between a coyote and a louse?

One howls on the prairie.

Douwe's school requests* that we buy a thing called a luizenzak. This translates directly as a louse bag, and I figured I was mistranslating as nobody would buy a bag to put lice in. Turns out I was translating correctly; it is a sort of drape you hang over the jackets on their little hook to prevent the lice from jumping from one jacket to another while they are hanging on the little row of hooks. Hats are however hung on a different hook entirely and not under the louse bag.**

Huh?

This sort of smacks of wild tales of Victorians putting skirts on piano legs. I think little boys spend most of their day licking one another, at least that is the conclusion I have reached by virtue of the sheer number of runny noses which appear around here abut 4 to 7 days after the start of a new school year. So I cannot really see the utility of a louse bag.

However, Douwe has, as of yesterday, given up Pluk and the hat. He declared yesterday that he is a Super Hero and insists upon wearing his t shirt with the Superman logo on it. Since he went hunting mushrooms with Oma this afternoon after school, he is not wearing the thing tomorrow as it has to be washed.

Well, I cannot really complain can I? If they can convince him that he is super as opposed to homeless, then I guess I can cough up the couple euros for a completely useless (it seems to me) louse bag.

Maybe he can use it for a cape.

They also read the Dutch version of "The Rainbow Fish", a book of which I heartily disapprove. Though it is enormously popular.

For those of you who have missed this phenomenon, it is about a lovely fish with a lot of shiny scales. The other fish in the neighborhood envy and covet his scales. They then conduct a panhandling campaign to get Rainbow Fish to give up his scales -- to them, of course. Eventually, the other fish form up into a gang to force him to give up his scales. Thus follows a little public shunning culminating in the social ostracization of Rainbow Fish. Ultimately, under pressure from the octopus who strings together a couple of cliches about how you have to give up what you have to be truly happy+, Rainbow Fish succumbs and gives up all of his wealth, er, individual uniqueness, er, scales, one to each of the others. So now they all look like crap, but they do have a bit of formerly shiny dead scale to carry around, and at least the competition has been decimated. So everyone is now truly happy.

Let's see, there's a lesson for you: you have to give people things for them to like you. Here's another: You have to change yourself to be just like everybody else for other people to like you.

Okay, this is probably not the way it is described in the official review from the publisher.

Anyway, that these things are mostly true in real life does not mean I think it's a really good way to start with kindergarteners. I'll stick with "The Grumpy Ladybug", thanks, at least in that one the other bugs threaten to kick the offending society member's butt.

However, I suppose I shall refrain from explaining the moral bankruptcy of a children's classic to my kid's teacher in the first week. They already think I am a little touched. I cannot imagine why.

Besides, he made a little collage of a fish with one shiny scale and it is hanging on the wall with all the other collages made by all the other kids. So I guess I will refrain from explaining its moral bankruptcy to him, too.

*please read, would require you to buy if it were legal but it is not so instead relies upon the time-tested methods of social control and peer pressure.

** I know this becasue the child has been going to school as Pluk -- remember Pluk? Pluk is the fictional little boy Douwe has, er, had taken into his heart as his new avatar. Pluk wears a red baseball cap which I am sure everyone in Atlanta remembers, um, fondly as he refused to take it off for the pictures. He takes it off for school, though, and hangs it on the un-louse bagged peg.

+ I am aware that Jesus said something like this, too. But I think he said you were supposed to give up your possessions, not your physical attributes. It doesn't say "If thine eye offend the other fish, pluck it out," after all.