The next step toward getting the roof shingled on Amy’s club house is finishing the gingerbreading and drip rails. Gingerbreading has begun!
Category: Of Being Dad
Fatherly posts.
Snot, Wet Wipes and Frost
When you are pulling into the carpool line as your child is supposed to be entering the building to avoid a tardy, it is not a good time to look over your shoulder and discover that last night he invoked his super powers and is still wearing his secret identity of Booger Boy! It is a worse time to realize that leaving a package of wet wipes
How children make us stronger adults
It’s a beautiful day. Snow has blanketed the landscape. The roads are solid white but schools are not canceled. I’ve been fighting insomnia for the past two nights and I am weary. If I can only get the children to school, I can rest my head a bit and still put in enough hours for my clients today. I drag myself upstairs to find my adorable little girl in the hallway, "good morning!" "Dad, I threw up."
She was good to me and made it to the bathroom so clean up consisted of a flush and a mouth washing. I settle her into our bed where mom can protect her and I take the five year old boy to school all the while covering up my thoughts of lazily sleeping in with the deception of being a good dad offering comfort to the sick child, "Mom and I will lay here and keep you safe." Integrity traded for another half hour of hiding under the covers! But alas…
Upon my return, my groggy wife is upstairs. "Your daughter threw up in our bed." My first thought, "oh poor child!" My second thought, "Wife is upstairs. Maybe her side of the bed is still clean." But no, by my daughter’s special encouragement, I remain a responsible, awake adult and head off to my client’s office [to sleep under the desk].
Let the really kinky sex begin!
After a full decade and several nearly awkward moments with the children, our bedroom door finally has a lock!
Oy vey! My daughter is Jewish!
Despite her grandparents regularly taking her to a Baptist church on Sundays and her boyfriend introducing her to the Methodist church which they regularly attended on Wednesdays, I’ve just realized that my eldest daughter is Jewish. See, she drives a car that burns oil, feh!, and I’m quite certain that it ran out weeks ago…yet it still runs!
Happy Hanukkah! Shalom.
Of Being Dad
No one said it would be easy. Being a father is a fantastic thing. One of my best friends once told me, "you’re not a real man until you have children" and I, childless at the time, thought he was being a little to narrow in his definition. I get what he was saying now. I could write a dissertation off his simple statement. However, for the moment, suffice it to say that children grow you as a person. Unfortunately, it seems this growth takes about 20 years which is probably part of why grandparents are so much better with children than parents; aside from the fact that "the kids go home."
Sometimes, your word choices don’t match your actions. You feel stupid as you lose your temper with a child and shout, "quit being so angry!" or something akin to that. But it happens. And you paint yourself into a corner. You start down a path and almost as the words roll off your tongue your argument with/discipline of the child becomes about "how do I back out of this?!" Words can be like knives. Word choices can inflict as much pain and damage as physical abuse. As parents, it is important that we truly think before we speak or act. And perhaps, before giving that child a timeout, we should give ourselves one first. This morning, overtired and with a head cold but without an excuse, I should have given myself a timeout and didn’t.
From the mouths of babes
Sarah, entering college in January: "Dad, can I have $1000 tomorrow? Oh, and I’ll need $17,000 in six weeks."
How did the snack tray go over?
Not terribly. Broccoli and tomatoes didn’t go over great. My children enjoyed the tray while the neighborhood kids raided their Halloween candy.
Future trays to include melons (thanks R. Neal see his comment), apples and cheeses.
Encouraging healthy snacking
This is my latest attempt to encourage the children to snack well. Everyday they arrive home from school, the neighborhood kids come over, and the whole gang immediately starts raiding the pantries and fridge scouring like starving mice for sweets. My hopes are that having this tray readily available on the kitchen table will make nibbling easier and discouraging staring into the cabinets. It has already been met with skepticism.
Rally 4 Sanity – Thursday
aka National Lampoon’s The Doug’s Take Washington
Side note: Please Don’t Rob Me
n.b. Before I get started, allow me to counter the paranoid reaction of those who have bought into the media hype of sites like Please Rob Me.
- We computer geeks all recognized the potential for sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp and similar sites to reveal too much information and present opportunities for people to rob you long before Please Rob Me was ever created
- Using these sites is too much work for a professional thief. A friend’s brother is a professional thief and he says he never robs on weekends (that’s when people are home) and that he simply calls the house and if no one answer he busts the door down.
- Most people leave for work by 7:30 in the morning. Professional thieves don’t need to Twitter and Facebook to know this. Yards without toys are more likely to have no one home during the day plus they tend to have nicer things.
- A drive through a neighborhood on trash day reveals who has purchased an HDTV, game system, or computer with less work than social media sites. Remember, to get the information, the thief would have to sift through tons of data.
- The people in the news using Facebook to rob others are almost always related to the victim in someway or another. Even prior to social media, vacation theft is often done by teen friends of the children.
All that said, many people also don’t realize that a simple call to the non-emergency number of the sheriff can initiate a property watch while on vacation. The sheriff asks for the types of cars that will be at the house and if any cars not on the list are there during one of the drive-bys they get questioned. I had to list the cars, make and model, of the house sitters that are staying at our house and watching over our dogs. That’s another one of those things that Please Rob Me fails to mention; social media announcements that someone is out of town does not mean that someone is not at their house.
I’m also fortunate to have good neighbors watching over the house and very lucky to have a right-wing conspiracy theory, Drudge Report reading, Obama is ruining the nation, revolution is just around the corner, gun nut neighbor who has 24/7 video cameras all around his house which capture everything entering or leaving the street. Last time some teenagers took a neighbors car joy riding, he just showed the police the video.
Enough said.
Pre-Launch
We are heading to the Rally for Sanity! Thursday started at midnight with me still on the computer trying to meet client expectations. Coffee is brewed and I’m ready to program through the night and sleep on the plane. Instead, Comcast turns off the Internet and the television for "scheduled maintenance" for fiber maintenance. Funny, I never had an announcement or warning about that. I call reveals that it will go on through the night but should be up at 6am. 9 hours later, almost to the second, the Internet returns and I’m at wits end. My attention turns to packing for me while Cathy finishes packing for 4 people and cleaning and making notes for the house sitters and for the grandparents and generally we are both frantic.
The Airport
Eventually, our crew is gathered and we head to the airport with Cathy twitching because we are half an hour behind schedule and still need to get gas. I try to check in electronically and am confused when Delta wants to charge us $23 a bag because I thought I read that 1 bag was included. I decide to check in at the airport and they clear up that 1 bag is not included and it is now $25 a bag. Lesson learned-ship your luggage with UPS. At the airport, I use the self-checkin kiosk to get checked in because it looks like self-checkin is now the only option. The printer prints our passes and we drop our luggage at the x-ray machine and head to the gate. As we approach security, I can only find boarding passes for Cathy and I. Maybe children are someone barcoded into ours but I have two and Cathy has one. A quick jaunt down to the Delta counter and a discussion with an employee reveals that I walked away from the kiosk without grabbing all the boarding passes. Apparently it paused in printing and I thought it was done.
Security
This will be Amy and Evan’s first airplane flight and they are beyond themselves with glee. We explain security to the children then proceed through. Of the five of us, the only one who gets hassled is the 5 year old. They did run my Scottevest twice which contacted an Energizer portable battery, a monocular, power cord for an iPhone, the iPhone itself, SkullCandy earbuds coiled in a bag, car keys, a bluetooth headset, a wallet and a change purse with coins but I think it was less about the items and more of a double-take. The TSA agent had this look on his face like "how many pockets?!"
The Launch
After a short wait at the gate, we board. The plane taxis and Amy and Evan watch out the windows with anticipation. As the plane accelerates, smiles widen and when it leaves the grown, the grins are ear to ear with eyes bugged out. The littlest are thrilled. The teen seemed anxious. And the mother was putting dents into the armrest with her fingers.
The cab
We had a brief layover in Cincinnati and another flight to DC. Once in DC, we hailed a cab and gave the directions that AAA had printed on the trip tik. As we approach the Lincoln Memorial, the driver accepts a call and has a conversation in Arabic. For some reason, this convinces Cathy that he is asking for directions but I am certain that he is taking us to the right place because it matches the directions on the trip tik. Turns out, AAA misprinted the address 3325 instead of 3525 and we get dropped off 3 blocks too early cementing in Cathy’s mind that my directions to the cabbie were bad which I suppose they were. Eventually our host was able to find us and later we walked from his house back to where the cabbie left us to accentuate how close we were.
DC
Our drive from the airport to the house shows Washington DC in beauty and diversity. We pass Watergate, the Washington Monument, The Lincoln Memorial, Georgetown, Chinatown, and a place we are warned has racial conflict and lots of police. The architecture is varied from old to new but all of it beautiful. The shops look intriguing and I could spend months trying them all. I expect this will be a fantastic and sane trip!
Movibf Targets
One of those things that pushes me toward the brink of insanity is “shit that magically moves.” For instance, the two youngest have forms due on November 1. I prefer to do my accounting on Thursdays and was too busy the day I received the forms so I set them in an out of the way place where I’d be able to finish them this morning while the kids readied themselves for school. Of course, the forms are gone so I’m now faced with squeezing a trip into the elementary school today to go to the office with two checks ($9 and $18) and saying, “I have no idea who to endorse these to nor what they are for but they are due Monday.”
This is not an OCD thing. This is a “constantly off balance” thing. It’s one of the benefits that cone with marriage and children. Never again will you be able to find anything, particularly your tools. Supposedly this teaches you to take things in stride. The way my heart feels right now, I think it’s going to teach me how to self-administer an AED.
Weekend PRoject – Day 19
Corner molding done. Step 14 of 27 complete on The Little Miss.
Weekend Project – Day 18
The corner trim work has begun!
Weekend Project – Day 17
Table saws. Very dangerous. Very fun!
Natural doesn’t mean waist high
In the Spring of my freshman and sophomore years in high school, I sold flowers at an Amish market in New Jersey. Had nothing to do with the Amish market itself, that’s just where I was stationed by the teacher who made ends meet by shipping flowers to New Jersey from South America and paying teenagers minimum wage to stand in front of stores pushing the flowers and plants. I enjoyed it because the flowers came wrapped in newspapers printed in Spanish so I’d practice my Spanish by reading the comics and news. I felt I was pretty knowledgeable about plants at the time. This proved to be wrong when I became a homeowner.
I bought my house in the Fall of 1997. The previous owner kept the yard immaculate. With each season surprises of color and fragrances would pop from the ground and vines on the trees. But I was running a business…rather my business was running me. And in an effort to keep the business alive, I neglected everything. By the time, the business died, so had the yard and its landscaping. Nature reclaimed it. Wild honeysuckle and privet sprung up everywhere and grew 8 feet or higher with thick, viney trunks. I had lots of animals. Birds. Raccoon. Possum. Snakes. Chipmunks. Hawks. And so much more. Keeping part of the yard "wild" for habitat was an attractive proposition. But wild does not mean unkempt and, unfortunately, that’s exactly what became of my yard.
In any other neighborhood, inspectors would have been called upon me for codes violations. Neighborhood associations would have fined me. Neighbors would have posted nasty notes on my door. Mine were forgiving to an extreme and I was a lousy neighbor.
This week Cathy had enough and demanded I pay someone to knock down our waist high weeds. Every lawn mower I bring on the property dies so doing it myself was not an option. I called a friend with a landscaping business. He must have worked his tail off! The yard looks better than it has since 1997! I feel I can use the yard, something I haven’t experienced in a decade. I am flabbergasted! My wife is thrilled! And my neighbors are ecstatic!
