Close

Sometimes I forget how close our first two kids are together. It all seemed normal at the time, but I distinctly remember people looking at us like we were insane when both of them were very little. Looking back at pictures, it does indeed look like we were insane. It was great though.
I'm not sure how much I'll be posting over the holidays. I'm going to try and get some things up, but time has a way of slipping away when you're busy. To everyone who reads the blog, have a wonderful time with your families and enjoy the mystery and magic while it's there. Merry Christmas.

No place to go......

We need some of this. 

The Beetle

There's a beetle in my coffee
Not swimming
No he's dead
He stopped on top to take a sip
He slipped and
Drowned instead

There's a beetle in my coffee
He fell in
With a plop
He's black and big and I can't see
Him floating
At the top

I'm frozen with a sleepy look
In horror I
Wonder, why?
If I don't get my sweet caffeine
I fear that
I might die

I had so little coffee left
I could only
Make one cup
If this one's bad there is no more
I don't want
To give it up

I probably should just throw it out
But it is
My belief
That I should just be careful
And strain it
With my teeth

He's on the bottom lying there
He kind of
Freaks me out
I had to save my coffee
But him
I will throw out


This poem is inspired by true events. Ewwwwwww.......

You Can Be.......

Not too many years ago a boy didn't have many options. If his dad was a carpenter, he could be a carpenter. If his dad was a farmer, he could be a farmer. Stepping outside the role you were born into was hard. Your best bet to step outside that was to be sold into an apprenticeship where you worked long hours for not much more than food for years and years with the promise that someday you'd be good enough to join the guild and actually get paid. If you were a girl, you looked longingly at the wide array of options that boys had. You could be a wife, or not, and the choice wasn't even always yours to make.
Sometime between then and now we've decided that you can be whatever you want. At least that's what I heard growing up. You want to be a fireman? Go be a fireman. Astronaut? Go climb up the rocket. President? Sure kid, all you've got to do is get half of everyone to vote for you. How hard can it be? Lots of dreams came from this simple idea.
Then life happens. Maybe you realize that as the smallest boy in jr. high your probably not going to make the NFL no matter how much you like football. You could be soldier dashing off to battle, but that only works if there's actually a war, otherwise you dig latrines and wash your tank and wait. Doctor sounds like fun until you learn about the 20 years of school and residency and all of that. One by one the doors shut. You can be whatever you want, except for the things that you can't be.
As I was driving home the other night I had an epiphany (or I started my mid life crisis). I was a race car driver. I was returning from a race with race numbers on the side and race tires in the back. A trophy sticker was on the seat next to me. I had driven my car in a race, and won. I was a race car driver. Holy cow. That got me to thinking. There was a time where I was a rock climber. I was also a big game hunter. I'd lived on a ship at sea. I'd traveled to foreign lands. I crewed on a racing sailboat. I built the second story on my own house with my own two hands. I did all of these things while living quite an ordinary life. Middle class. College. Work. Babies.
Yes, there are things that are probably still out of reach. I'm probably not going to space. I could learn to fly if I wanted to though. Flying lessons are expensive, but it's not impossible. I'm not going to be president, but I could certainly run for elected office, even if I didn't win. I am a race car driver. Suddenly the world has grown. It's all in my head, but I realized that it's always been in my head. Most of those options that I thought shut down as I grew up were shut down by me. The only person who ever told me I couldn't be a fire fighter was me. I drive by the volunteer fire department every single day. They need volunteers. If the thought of walking into a burning building didn't nearly make me pee myself, I could run down there and sign up today.
The really exciting part about all of this isn't me at all, it's my kids. Like all parents I've been telling my kids that they can be whatever they want to be, all the while knowing that it's not quite true. Except now I realized that it actually is true. It's true as long as you realize that you can be whatever you want to be, but you might need to be other things at the same time to make that happen. The president is the president, but even he had another job before hand. The volunteer fire fighters have day jobs and put out fires in their off time. Every race car driver I drove with this weekend has a job that put them in that car. My kids really can be whatever they want to be, they just have to work to make it happen within the life that they are living. Doors and dreams don't have to close. They might need to be smaller doors and dreams, but they can always be there if you want them to be. Always.
You really can be whatever you want to be.

Jump Rope

I'm awesome at this.

New PJ's

It's cold now and that means it's time for new cold weather PJ's. The boy and I picked him up a new pair at the store the other day. My wife instantly claimed that they were too big, even before he put them on. I insisted that the next size down was too small and these were just fine. Last night he put them on, and it looks like I was right. They do indeed fit just fine. One point for daddy.

Guest Poet

Twas the Night Before My Birthday

Twas the night before my birthday, and all through the house

Only I was stirring, jumpier than a mouse.

Streamers were hung by my doorway with care,

In hopes that some presents soon would be there.

I jumped off the walls, and I'm happy to say

I'd be turning ten the upcoming day

I'd asked for some awfully big presents this year,

Certainly bigger than toys around here.

And in the kitchen, there arose such a clatter

I snuck down the stairs to see what was the matter.

I saw it was Mother making the din

Surrounded by pans, what a sight she was in!

She sat in a chair with an excited look,

Flipping madly through the recipe-book.

And what to my wondering nose should I smell

But batter in the hands of eight singing elves!

They held some batter so shiny and red,

I knew in a moment they were making shortbread!

The need for ingredients began to appear,

So she clapped, and shouted, as you will soon hear:

“Get sugar, get flour, get water too!

Get cocoa, get nuts, and frosting, only blue.

Grab sprinkles and milk, we're wasting daylight!

We must make a cake for my daughter tonight!”

As dry leaves before a hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.

So up to the pantry her helpers they flew

With a mixing bowl, and ingredients too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard in the next room,

My dad's tired feet stomping-BOOM, BOOM!

As I covered my mouth and was turning around,

Into the kitchen my dad came with a bound.

He was dressed all in P.J.s from his toe to his head

And with an expression like he'd just come out of bed.

A cold cup of coffee he held in his hand,

And it looked like he'd fallen from a separate land

His eyes were so tired, his smile not there,

And it looked like a rat had crawled into his hair

His pajamas were wrinkled from a fitful sleep,

He'd stayed up too long just counting sheep.

He went straight to my mom, who'd finished my cake,

Her elves had set it in the oven to bake.

He called to her, “Hey, I've got Lela's present!”

(The mailman had winked and said it was pleasant!)

He went to quickly help my mom wrap the gift,

Then he went and told her it was the end of her shift.

He'd guard the cake while she was away,

She had to rest up for work the following day.

My dad gave her a good-night hug

Before putting hot coffee into his mug.

Taking a sip, he sat down to wait,

Knowing he'd prob'ly be staying up late.

I wanted to scream(I didn't), instead,

I crept up the stairs and snuck into bed,

Whispering to myself as I walked out of sight,

“Happy birthday to you, and to you a good night!”

Note: My daughter had an assignment for school that she wanted me to read. Quite frankly, it's better than the drivel I write on here and I thought it deserved wider recognition. I hope you enjoyed it. 

Dog Jail

I've written about our special dog before. How we found her in the woods and she's getting a little more normal and all of that. Well, she's getting less normal again. It seems that leaving a dog with abandonment issues alone for a week is one way to blow a few circuits in her head.

High security, but only here.

See, you just can't take a dog to Disney. I guess you could if it was a service dog, but Patty is more of an anti-service dog. It's not like we totally abandoned her though, we had a really nice responsible neighborhood girl come over every day and make sure she had food and water and was doing well. They know each other and they're happy to see each other and Patty had a nice warm bed in the garage and everything. We came home and she was fat and happy. Or so we thought.
She didn't even try to get out of the yard the whole time we were gone. I assume she just laid in the garage and contemplated her bleak future alone. After we got back though, she was so happy that she was determined to never let us go away again. Ever. If we left the yard, she was leaving the yard. First it was by mashing the gate open with her body. Then it was through a weak patch between our fence and the neighbors fence. Then it was by tearing off an attachment of the fence to the gate and prying the fence out of the way. Then it was back to the patch again. Over it. Around it. Under it. Every time I fixed some part of it she poked and prodded and dug until she could get out.
She didn't stay out. She just worked and worked and worked to get out, did whatever looking around she could do, and came back in to wait for us. Oh, she occasionally went and found something dead to roll in, but she wasn't running away (unfortunately) she was just getting out. I finally had to cut the old patch out of the corner and doggy proof it. I bought four, two foot long pieces of rebar and pounded them halfway into the ground about three inches apart. Then I cut up some old leftover wire from making the guinea coop and wired a patch in. I also used wire to tie it to the rebar. I also purposely left all of the pokey ends of the wire sticking out to deter her from digging at it. After two days I had to get out more wire and wire the neighbors fence to our pole to stop up gap about two inches wide that she was still managing to squeeze her body though.
She's been working at the corner for a few days now and I think I've stopped her. The weird thing about all of this is that there are about 50 other places she could get out if she tried. Failing that, she could simply climb or jump over the fence, it's lower that the kennel that she broke out of this summer. This isn't about escaping as much as it's about dealing with her mental illness. She's obsessed with getting out and looking for us, but her brain is so broken that she's unable to use any problem solving skills to do it. She can only see the gate or the corner as possible escape routes, she seems to be blind to the whole rest of the yard.
I'm hoping that if we can keep her in the yard for a few weeks the episodes she's having will wane. She'll somehow forget that we left that one time and start to believe that when we leave we'll come back. Perhaps some of those broken circuits will heal and she'll move back toward normal. Maybe.

Oh....tree....

What we started with.

The tree I was posing next to in my last post wasn't actually the tree we picked for our Christmas tree this year, though it was in the running. Instead we picked the fine tree you see in the upper picture. Normally I pick trees based on their overall shape and density of branches and quality of top. It's a hard process to describe. A good tree just looks good. A bad tree can look bad in a wide variety of ways. 
The six summers I spent pruning Christmas trees as a kid exposed me to tens of thousands of trees. I saw every way that I tree could go wrong in growing. I was also tasked with attempting to fix some of those faults and I know that a lot of the things I see wrong with trees in the field aren't so much the fault of the tree as the lack of skill of the pruner. Poor trees never had a chance.

Sturdy branches.

With the tree farm so close, and the family that runs it so nice, we were destined to find a tree that we found acceptable. Which we sort of did. The main selling point for our tree this year was sturdy branches. The poor thing had been pruned way too hard on it's last go. Instead of having soft fine branches full of needles, it was festooned with stumps. It's more a collection of small pine logs than a tree in many ways. It was also completely lacking a top in the conventional sense. Yes, it had a highest point, but instead of that point coming to an actual point, it was shaped more like a basket, or more optimistically, a mesa. I wasn't initially sure what we'd do about it but I figured we'd sort it out.

Not too shabby.

We brought the tree home and bolted on the stand. A quick shove through the door and we were in business. Lights and tinsel and ornament after ornament. This is where the hefty stumpy branches proved their worth. Adults tend to put ornaments all over a tree. Little kids tend to pick a spot and cram as many ornaments as they can on one branch. In the past we've had trouble with formerly tall proud branches reduced to hanging on the floor under the weight of the ornaments. Not this year. This year the branches didn't budge. 
As the decorating continued I was still scratching my head about the top. I could have just set a beach ball up there and called it good, it wouldn't have rolled away. Then I noticed that in the back of the tree a branch was hanging down to the floor. There weren't any ornaments on it because it was in back, and all it was being used for was a chew toy by our toothless cat. A quick snip and a zip tie and we had a top. My wife complimented me on my crafty solution for an artificial top. My dear, it's not an artificial top, it's a prosthetic limb.

Tree Hunting

My kids woke up this winter day

Fields of Beauty

Put on shorts and a Tee
It's how you dress
When you're in Texas
To cut down your Christmas Tree

The day was pretty, the Trees were green
The search was long and hot
We looked here and
We looked there
To find beauty, we did not

An ugly tree, a lonely tree
Finally caught our eye`
No one else will
Pick this tree
If we go and walk on by

We chopped it down, a mighty fall
This ugly weird shaped tree
We brought it home
And dressed it up
Now it's pretty as can be

Road Laundry

I only have five pairs of underwear. My wife shakes her head at me about this, but really, it's generally not a problem. I've got an underwear drawer that's spacious and clean, and when it's all clean I've got what I'm wearing plus enough for four more days. Since my first baby was born I've never ever gone four days without doing laundry. Ever. There are a lot of things in life, like my small supply of underwear, that aren't an issue right up to the point where they become an issue. For me, that point came when we were packing for our recent trip.
We took our trip in my wife's truck. Fantastic vehicle her truck. Comfortable, gets ok mileage for something as big as a house, cruises at 70 with no drama. It's a good truck. However, it does not have a lot of extra space for luggage once you put people in the seats. Since we wanted to bring all of the people in the family, that meant we had to figure out how to not bring a lot of stuff. The trip was going to be nine days long, but a quick calculation let us to the conclusion that we couldn't fit 9 days of clothes. We could pack for 6 and just double up on some days. Or we could pack for three and buy new clothes if we need them. Or, and this was actually a new thought, we could check and see if the hotel we were staying in had laundry. It turns out that it did.
We decided, based on my four day reserve of underwear, that we would pack for four days and do laundry at least once on the trip. It turns out that we did laundry twice, and it was fantastic. Our luggage was half of what it was had we decided to pack enough to wear for the whole time. The whole family was packed in two smallish duffel bags and one small backpack. When we unloaded at the hotel we looked like we were just overnighting. It was awesome.
It turns out that every hotel we stayed at on the trip had coin operated laundry available. This may be old news to some but it was new news to me and I was delighted with it. So if you're laying out your family's clothes for your next vacation, remember, there will almost certainly be a washer and dryer where you're going. Pack light and every third night or so tell your wife that you have to go do laundry. It might be the most peaceful hour you get on your whole trip. Enjoy it.

Baby 'Gators

Big Boys.

If you drive I-10 through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, you're bound to see billboards for a variety of alligator based experiences. Whether they're fan boat rides through the swamps or 'gator farms or 'gator ranches, alligator culture abounds. As many times as I've driven that stretch of road I've never stopped. I always looked at the swamps and imagined what lived in them instead of actually stopping and seeing. On this past trip that changed. We took a break at stopped at The Gator Ranch in Moss Point Mississippi. Word on the street is that the upcoming season of the show Gator Boys will be filmed on location there. The burly looking guys with cameras and shirts that said "Gator Boys Crew" on them were also a clue. We don't have cable, so we'll probably never see an episode, but if you do, be sure to tune in.

A girl, a gator, and I really nice guy.

So what did we see? Gators. Big ones and little ones. Really big ones. Alligators in excess of 13 feet in fact. Intellectually I knew that a 13 foot alligator is big, but that didn't really prepare me for actually seeing one. They're really big. Like really big. The kids were also able to hold a small one which was really cool. The alligator they're holding is somewhere between one and a half and two years old. Again, pretty cool, not the kind of thing you get to do when you grow up above the Mason Dixon line.
All in all the stop was well worth our time. We didn't take the fan boat ride though I have no doubt it would have been worth it as well. I don't know how many of you are likely to find yourself rolling through southern Mississippi any time soon, but if you do, keep your eyes peeled. In fact, I'm starting to think that I should be keeping my eyes peeled more when I drive. I've been passing a lot of cool things in my hurry to get from one place to another over the years. Maybe it's time to slow down.

Tech and Travel

I'm not an old man, not really, but sometimes I feel like I can't quite keep up with change in the world. Our recent vacation was an anomaly for us. Usually we're headed to a known place on a known schedule. The most challenging decisions we make are where to stop for gas. We're a predictable bunch. This time we decided to fly a bit looser with our schedule and see what we could see. We knew when we had to be in Orlando, but we had three days to get there. We drove a bit, stopped a bit, ate a bit, and our first day ran out. In the past this would be the part of the day where we'd start pulling off the freeway at every stop and searching out hotels that would accomodate six people. This is not a fun thing, and in the past has ranged from hitting it on the first hotel, to discovering that we're in a state where the fire marshal has declared that under no circumstances can more than five people be in one room ever. While I was dreading this and looking for a good exit, my wife calmly pulled out her phone, and let her maps program show her exactly where we were. She then did a search on the town in front of us for hotels. She popped on over to a web site or two and found a hotel with a suite that would sleep six. While still online, she made the reservation and told her maps program to alert us when the exit came up.
My wife the magician.

The healthy ones. 

It gets better.
The next day I'm driving along thinking that the world is an amazing place. We're driving, stopping, eating, stopping more, having a good time. Most of us are having a good time. My daughter is getting slower and slower and redder and redder. She's sick. Her throat hurts. Crap. There's a high likelihood that she's managed to contract the same strep throat that my wife had the week before.
This is bad.
Like, really bad.
My wife calmly puts on her wizard hat and pulls out her phone again. Within 10 minutes she's located the closest town with a walk in clinic that's open first thing the next morning. She's also located a hotel three blocks from there with a room that will sleep six right on the beach. Everything is plotted on the map. We can wake up and she'll take one sick child to the doctor while I take three healthy ones out for a shell collecting walk on the beach.
Despite a growing concern that my wife may be able to turn me into a toad with her phone, I'm ecstatic.
This magic phone has completely changed travel. I won't even go into the Disney maps that showed us right where we were and where the rides were and how long the wait times were for each and where the restaurants were and what they served. I won't discuss that, but it was equally amazing.
I only bought a cell phone about 6 or 7 years ago after an incident with a broken Volvo. The phone I have is not smart, though it may still be smarter than me. I haven't really figured out how to text on it yet or program in numbers or retrieve voice mail. I thought I wasn't ready for a smart phone, but after watching what one can do, I'm not sure I'm ready to not have one.

Shark Teeth

One million shells here on this beach
Push them aside and flip over each
They sure are pretty and shiny as well
But I don't care about any old shell
What I am looking for might be underneath
I want to find some fossil shark teeth









At the end of our trip we took a two and a half hour detour to visit a beach that is known for it's fossil shark's teeth. I've got to say, the beach was beautiful and the shells were perfect and beautiful as well. We hardly noticed. We were intensely searching for the teeth, and we found them. We still need to lay them all out and figure out which ones came from which species, but we have somewhere around 50 teeth of various quality. For a family like ours, this sort of detour was totally worth it.

Walt's World

Happiness and memories and stuff. 

In 1955 a guy named Walt opened a little amusement park in California. It was a modest success. It did well enough that Walt decided that nobody should be limited by their proximity to one coast when making vacation plans. What better place to build another one than swampland in Florida? After convincing the state to grant them a special government district that essentially gave the company the powers and autonomy of an incorporated city, they started the ball rolling. Unfortunately Walt passed away before things got built, but fortunately for my children it was built none the less. Since then a bunch of people have made a trek to central Florida at one time or another to ride rides, hang out with movie characters, and generally have a good time. You can now add my family to that list.
This is not something that I planned on doing. If you could sit down and design a place where I would not want to go, destroying beautiful swamp and replacing it with crowds of people would be right up there at the top of my list. I would much much rather hang out in a swamp. My wife is more attuned to the likes of our children and was the one who planned this trip with a series of reluctant grunts from me. I'm glad she did. (don't tell her I said that)
We had some other adventures aside from the happiest place on earth. We held baby alligators, visited a walk in clinic, walked on a variety of beaches, found fossil shark teeth, and got to swim in hotel swimming pools. All of these things have individual stories behind them that deserve to be told, and tell them I will. However we are currently in the middle of sorting out the wide variety of illness contracted from touching every available surface at the amusement park. Their slogan might be "The Happiest Place On Earth" but it really should be "The Origination Center Of The Epidemic That Wiped Out The Human Race." I started the day surrounded by coughs and one child with an unspecified full body rash who had to stay home. Another call later in the day brought home the second one with a fever of 103. We're continuing to have a good time.
Stay tuned this week and I'll go over the vacation more. I'm going to try and make it less of a slide show of what my family did, and more of a discussion of the pros and cons and ins and outs of travelling with a herd of children. For now, I need to slip on my level 4 biohazard suit and tend to my sick flock.

Happy Turkey

Mmmmmmm......turkey.........

I'll be away from the computer for a few days. Have a wonderful time out stalking and killing a turkey for your holiday meal. That's what you're doing, right? Only seems sporting.
Lots to talk about when I get back.

Vectors #2

So my last post established that life has a vector possessing both magnitude and direction. A lot of people like to think of life like a path, but I like vectors better. A path suggests a destination, traveling toward a place where we'd like to end up. That's all well and good, but there is always more than one way to get to a destination. There are some horrible horrible people that are also wildly successful. While I want my kids to succeed, I don't want that. I'd like to watch their lives unfold and see not only success, but steady positive movement toward that success. I'd also like to be able to to what I can to direct things in a positive way. I want my parenting to help my kids be better in school. To be better as people. To be better in life.

I'm a parent, you're a parent, we're all parents. We all want our kids to be valedictorian and marry the love of their life and grow old in comfort and happiness, right? If we all have a common dream, why don't we have a common solution? Why can you walk into any book store and find 100 different books on child rearing? When your child brings home their homework tonight ask them how many different answers there are for each question. Does each question have one answer, or 100? There's the twist, each child doesn't really have the same question, not really, let alone the same answer. The simple explanation is that every child is unique, they have their own vector, they are their own question seeking a unique solution. That's both true and false, and it's why I generally hate parenting advice.
I was born a white male to educated parents during a time when being an educated white male made life a whole lot easier than the alternatives. Being born like I was when I was virtually guaranteed some level of success. I was hard to screw up no matter who's parenting advice you took. Two of my kids also fit that demographic, but two of them don't. Two of them are going to have to make choices in their lives that I never have than may profoundly affect their lives. When I talk about having babies I often say that "we" had kids. "We" didn't have kids, my wife did. Deciding to grow a baby for nine months and deliver it and recover from that delivery and then breastfeed for the better part of a year is something I never had to do. Neither will my sons, but my daughters will. Fifty years ago the choice to have kids profoundly affected the life of any woman. It still does, but having kids no longer forces you to give up work and stay home. Now it's a choice. I can't quite predict how the world will be for my sons and daughters when they're ready to make that decision. Then there's the fact that I'm kind of a meek quiet guy who's good at sitting still and learning by listening. You want to design someone who's good academically, it's a good place to start. Had I grown up in a different place or a different time it would have been a good way to get the crap kicked out of me. The attributes that make one successful aren't constant. They aren't constant through time, or place, or across cultures.
Where does that leave us as parents?
I'm not sure.
I think it leaves us evaluating our kids one by one. Parenting isn't something you know how to do, it's something you learn how to do. Ask any parent who has more than one child and they can explain it to you. No matter how much they thought they knew after one baby, there were a whole bunch of things they had to learn differently when the second one came along. Every child takes their first steps in their own time and in their own way. They need different levels of support and freedom when they get to school. The attention that one child needs to feel safe in the world might smother another.
This is not simple.
I think I have more to say about this. I might add on, and I might just start over. We'll see.

Tasty Ears

This summer I introduced my kids to the culinary joy that is elephant ears. Now whenever they go to a place that might have fair food they're craning their necks to see if they can score another. There might have to be an intervention someday, but for now we're coping. I have to say though, it's kind of weird when you first go for an elephant ride, and then you eat an elephant ear. Weird I tell you.

First we ride them.....

Then we eat them! But just the ears. We're not cruel after all. 

I took a few days
And went a long ways
To spend a few days alone

I'm glad that I did
But I miss my kids
It's time for me to come home








Just about done with my annual trip to the woods. Ready to come home now.

Sleepy Zombie

If this isn't the sleepiest girl that ever lived, I don't know who is.
Conversely, she might just be a zombie.
Could go either way.

Vectors

Vector - noun - A quantity possessing both magnitude and direction.
I just finished a book called Again to Carthage by John L. Parker, Jr. It's the very awaited sequel to his book Once a Runner. Both books are about running. Both are fantastic. Both are worth reading even if you've never run a step in your life. It's the second book, Again to Carthage, that has set me thinking.
In the book our hero has followed a semi successful olympic bid with a semi successful, though mundane, life. He seeks some sort of redemption through attempting to make the olympic team one last time. The author beautifully lays out the torturous thought processes that lead our runner on this path, but it all boils down to direction. In his post olympic life he doesn't have anything in his life that is moving definitively forward. He's wallowing. He craves the simplicity of working to run better. Of training for a certain goal and being able to measure whether you are coming closer to that goal. A life where everything can be boiled down to one simple thing. Are you getting faster?
The author uses an arrow for reference. Life as an arrow pointing toward something. When you know where it's pointing and that you are headed that way satisfaction is easy. He never uses the term vector, but I suspect that's really what he meant. A life where you are moving a given direction with a magnitude that you can measure. When thinking about this I initially thought it had profound implications for life. The more I thought about it though, the more I thought that it has even greater implications for parenting.
It's easy to get lost when you're an adult. It's easy to find yourself just wallowing around in life for a few decades after college, or even longer. You just do things and grow old. Pretty much everyone once thought they'd be rich and famous somehow and it's a little disheartening to realize that at best your life is pretty average. Like I said, wallowing.
Not when you're a kid though. When you're a kid it's all possibility and movement. From the very beginning, the first day, your'e getting better. You see better. You move better. You grow. Soon crawling and talking and eating and all of that wonderful baby stuff. This is progress. Real measurable progress. Any parenting book will tell you where your baby should be at a certain age. When should they walk? When should they have 10 words? When should they recognize letters? Progress that is measured by parents and pediatricians to make sure that the vector of life has both the magnitude and direction that it should. All healthy children have this vector, and it's fantastic.
It's not so simple for our whole lives though, and I'm not just talking about middle aged wallowing. Take a look inside any county jail and think about the life vectors involved. Even more startling perhaps, look inside a juvenile detention facility. These are still kids. Young adults maybe, but arguably children. Once they were laying down on a floor and rolled over for the first time. They spoke their first words. They were measured and plotted on a growth chart and it was decided that they were doing fine. Somewhere something happened, and I think this is one of the things that parents fear most. That vector that was always pointing forward somehow turned, or reversed. A life that was supposed to be getting better and better for some reason didn't.
I'll pick this post up next week.

Glass Doors

Glass doors are fun.
They just are.

Issues

My oldest daughter isn't quite to the age where boys are icky. She's still living in the wonderful part of youth where, for the most part, people are just people. Yet, she seems to have an intense curiosity about how the world works. I posted before about her interest in the presidential debates, so it came as no real surprise that she was also quite interested in the election itself, both the process and the outcome. We had talks about the electoral college, the popular vote, how people in different parts of the country tend to vote, the usual stuff. Then yesterday I was truly taken by surprise.
At her school they held a mock election. They talked about the process and the importance of voting, but more importantly they discussed why they voted the way they did. From what she reported, most kids spouted information that was plucked directly from their parents news source of choice. Kids at this age are still very much under the sway of their parents, which is both cool and terrifying, so I sort of expected it. We got to discussing how you can have very good friends that hold very different political views from you, and she was cool with that. She stopped me cold in my tracks though, when she mentioned a friend who's parents "weren't supposed to be here". To him, to his family, to everyone they knew, there was only one issue. Deportation. There was no talk of taxes or being tough on terrorism or unemployment numbers. Just that one candidate had stood up in front of the world and said that he wanted to have this kid's parents rounded up and shipped back to the country they came from. He was born here. He's a top student. He's a good kid. He's an American. He loves his parents and when he went to bed last night, before the election was decided, he had a much different set of worries than my daughter did.
So we talked. For the last two months I had been stressing that one should listen to everything that a candidate has to say. Look at their stance on this and that and don't hang too much importance on any one phrase or promise. Choosing who you want to represent you as president for the next four years is a complex and thought involving process. Except when it's not. I had to concede that the world has a lot of people in it that aren't like me. Like her. Like our family. For us there are issues, for some of them there is only the issue.
I try to answer all of my kids questions as fully as I can. Math, science, politics, issues with kids or problems with teachers, I try to help them make sense of the world. They still surprise me when they bring me a question where my answer not only helps them make sense of things, but when I'm done, it has helped me make sense of things too. Parenting has many unexpected joys.

Realization

We have a brand new baby
She just came home today

That's a happy baby. I'm clearly good at this. 

She spends her time
With my wife
Sleeping and nursing away

There's not much for me to do
When she is very small
Because I lack
two full boobs
I'm not much use at all

But I can still change diapers
And hold her which is neat
My wife can stretch
Her weary legs
And get a bite to eat

Soon my wife is back to work
Warm bottles are the food
New girl and me
On our own
Now I am truly screwed

Editorial note: This is about our first baby and it's a little dramatic. My daughter and I did very well when my wife went back to work. It was a little overwhelming (if something can be just a little overwhelming) when the house first emptied of well wishers, then in-laws  then my wife, and I found myself alone with a baby, truly getting down to the business of stay at home dadding. Turned out just fine.

Sewing Halloween Costumes #3

Halloween is over so naturally it's time to finish up writing about sewing costumes. A fat lot of help that will do anybody. Oh well. Such is life.
Zippers. It's amazing how people are afraid of zippers. It's only been in the last year or two that my wife has been willing to sew them on herself, and she's pretty darn good with a machine. They're not really hard though, as long as you have a zipper foot. A normal sewing machine foot is symmetric about the needle. It has area on both sides of the needle. This wouldn't work with a zipper because when you sew on one side of the zipper you'd have part of your foot running over the zipper itself. To solve this dilemma you might think that it would be good to just hack off the half of your foot that's running into the zipper and this is exactly what a zipper foot does. They's also usually set up so that you can swap the foot to either the left or the right side of the needle which give you the freedom to sew in whatever direction you want.
Click through the jump to watch me sew in a zipper and do the final hemming of the tunic.

Candy Conundrum

Halloween is awesome. Dressing up is awesome. Trick or treating is awesome. Candy is awesome. It's all awesome.
When you're a kid.
When you're a parent it's all awesome except for the candy part. The candy part is a problem. This year we collected just north of eight pounds of candy. There is no way we could consider ourselves good parents if we let our kids down that much candy. How do we deal with this?
When they were very little it was easy. We went trick or treating and by the next morning when they looked in their plastic pumpkins they had 2 or 3 pieces of candy and a variety of packages of crackers and goldfish and such. When you're three you don't pay so much attention to what you get, just that you get. All the better if you find out the next morning that all of those nice houses gave you treats that you can eat! Yay!
Eventually that fell apart. My younger daughter runs back from every house announcing exactly what it is that she has scored. I'm not sure that she keeps a running tally, but she has a pretty good idea what she's carting around. We do still occasionally actually receive a package of crackers or goldfish, which ends up ok, because those can be taken to school as part of lunch. The candy though has a different fate. Every night after dinner, and weekends after lunch too, each child may pick out one piece of candy. Restrictions apply if you're very little or you have braces or you fall into some other special category. This goes on for one week, usually eight days actually, until Halloween candy season is declared officially over. A week of candy for desert is all we can do.
What to do with the extras? Well, that's always been pretty easy to deal with. For most of the time that we have had kids, my sister didn't. We simply got together all of the candy, explained that Aunt Biggie didn't get to go trick or treating because she didn't have kids, and sent it off to her. Postage paid and problem solved. Then she went and ruined our excellent plan by having a daughter. If I thought I was a bad dad for allowing my four kids to eat eight pounds of candy, then I'd be an even worse uncle for sending something like six remaining pounds to my niece. Also, my sister has threatened to retaliate by sending her leftover candy to me and I'm not sure I want to engage in that kind of arms race. The only one who wins that kind of battle is the post office.
Like everything else with raising kids, we've adapted. At my wife's office is a wonderful woman who works the front desk. There's a lot of things that make her wonderful, but as far as my kids are concerned, her perpetual bowl of candy is tops. Whenever they come to the office to visit, they never leave empty handed. So now that's what we do with our leftovers, we provide fodder for the feed bowl. Again, problem solved.
All parents deal with the candy issue in their own way. Some people we know refuse to trick or treat or only attend scheduled events where the quality of booty is known in advance. Some allow their children a sugar fueled free for all until everything consumed in a mad pre-diabetic rush. We all find a place where we're comfortable dealing with the candy conundrum.

Trick or Treat!

Trick or treat!
Thank you.
Over and over and over.
We had a very fun night.
We live in a neighborhood where there's no real trick or treating. You could try, but if you did you'd be more likely to be bit by a stray dog than find any actual candy. Luckily we have always had friends with a very strong desire to see our kids all dressed up who invite us to more hospitable surroundings, and we always appreciate it. We had a wonderful time. The kids were polite, mostly didn't fight with each other, didn't get hit by any cars and brought home more candy than they could possibly eat. The little kids were really into it, though my oldest is already showing signs of growing out of it. Not completely, but I can tell it's peeking in around the edges.

If you see any sewing on those costumes that beautiful, it was my wife. The crooked stitches on exceptionally easy costumes, I did those. She's amazing, as always.

More Halloween

This is a straight up, legitimate prize
winning pumpkin. I'm a proud husband.

Costume parade. They said wave.
He never stopped. 

This week is going to be all Halloween, all week. Yesterday you got poetry. Today, you get some pictures. Tomorrow you'll get the real pictures because trick or treating isn't until tonight so I can't possibly have any pictures of it yet. Later in the week I'll finally finish showing you putting a zipper on a tunic and hemming it, and if there's any week left I'll talk about candy and pumpkin seeds and what not. One whole week of Halloween!

Pumpkin Guts

Pumpkin guts, pumpkin guts, there on the floor
Pumpkin guts, pumpkin guts, scoop out some more
You first took a knife and opened his head
Now should he look happy or scary instead?

What kind of eyes, round triangle square?
How 'bout his nose? Should he have hair?
Do you put teeth in his mouth open wide?
Will you carve ears over there on each side?

You're almost done and he's looking grand
Be careful my boy and don't stab your hand!
Those pumpkin guts make it easy to slip
The last thing we need is a hospital trip

Looks like you're done, his smile is so wide
Grab him, be careful! Let's take him outside
Light up the candle, now watch him glow
I could stand for hours just watching this show

Pumpkin guts, pumpkin guts, clean up the floor
Pumpkin guts, pumpkin guts, look there's some more
The house smells of pumpkin, it will for a while
I close my eyes, I sniff, and I smile

Rallycross

Yesterday I took a day off. I left home at 3:30 in the morning and didn't get back until 11:00 at night. I drove 409 miles all told. Why? All to drive ten laps, slightly over 5 miles, around a 14 acre field with a bunch of other people that all thought it sounded like fun. At it was fun. A lot of fun.
A while ago I wrote a post about autocrossing. The best explanation for this type of silliness is this: It's like drag racing, but instead of going in a straight line, it's all curvy, and instead of being on a purpose built track, the track in laid out with traffic cones in a big parking lot. There are classes for different cars, but basically the guy who drives fastest wins. Wins what? Nothing, it's all for fun. Spending a whole day driving fast (or slow in my case) cars around a parking lot for fun. This is an odd subset of the population to be sure.
However, there is a subset of this subset that is even a little bit odder. Those are rallycrossers. Rallycrossers somehow have decided that pavement is simply too boring and predictable. They prefer to run events that are basically just like autocross, but instead of parking lots, they use big dirt fields. People say that autocross is about the most fun you can have with your car. They're right. It is about the most fun. The most fun is rallycross.
So yesterday I did my first rallycross in a decade. There was one event held in Houston way back in the day, and then nothing until this year. This year there are monthly events held either west of town a couple of hours, or north of town about the same distance. It's a bit of driving, but driving to go driving seems to make sense. My street tires are incredibly inappropriate to drive in anger in the dirt, so I bought a set of agressive snow tires and had them mounted on an extra set of wheels. I loaded them up, drove to the event and switched wheels in the parking lot. My gentle daily driver was instantly transformed into a rallycross beast. Kind of.

Prouder than I probably should be. 

I had a great time. There were two of this year's rallycross national champions at the event. Everyone was friendly and helpful. It was very common for everyone to cheer when someone had a good run and beat their previous best time. The course and the facility were fantastic. I spent the day looking at cars, talking about cars, and driving cars. Also, quite surprisingly, I won. After ten runs, the times were checked, and I was the fastest two wheel drive car that drove. I don't win a whole lot when I compete at anything, but when I do, it feels really good.
It's hard to justify taking a whole day to myself. There is a house that perpetually needs things done. Things fixed, laundry washed, cleaning in general. There are four kids that need tending to lest we end up with a Lord of the Flies situation. Parenting is a team sport, and walking away from that just to have fun is a hard thing do to sometimes. It's also hard not to do it. It's hard to keep your nose to the grindstone day after day and not occasionally engage in a pastime that you love and blow off steam. Recharge if you will. My wife is awesome and understands this. I try very hard to be awesome and not abuse the privilege. It's a balance. It's working. If you ever see me in person and wonder why I'm so damn happy, this is a big part of it.

Big Belly

I'm not sure that kids really understand when someone is pregnant. They sort of do, but when they're little, not really. Whenever my wife was pregnant there was a whole lot of shoving things in shirts. Blocks, stuffed animals, whatever. The kids (both my daughters and my older son) were trying to make sense of the fact that mommy had clearly gotten huge and that people kept telling them that there was a baby in there. They could see it. They could feel the baby kicking. It was there, but it was still part of mommy. It's all pretty weird and they all dealt with it by imitating. It was always fun.

Edit: My wife wanted me to add a disclaimer. All posts that reference my wife being pregnant have absolutely no bearing on whether she is, or will become pregnant in the future. She's not, and won't be. She just was a lot in the past and I have some very fond memories.

Smile?

Click on the picture over there and look at the weird look on that little boy's face. Go ahead, I'll wait. That's a smile. Really. He thinks he's smiling. How does that happen? Just weeks out of the womb babies will smile. It's perfect and sweet and incredible. There's nothing like your baby smiling at you. Then at some point they get it in their heads that they really have to work on that smile. Especially when there's a camera involved, they need to give it some gusto, and it always turns out so weird. It's scrunched up and their jaw is crooked and their eyes are closed and they're certain they look good. All of my kids have gone through this. Thankfully they've come out the other side too, and learned to tone it down and bring it back from a look of comical pain to one of general cheerfulness.
Kids are weird.

Driving Dad

Where he grew up. 

Today I drove one hundred miles
Hauling around my kids
Sit right back and listen to
All the things we did

I drove and dropped the first two off
At school and drove away
Then I dropped the third one off
To enjoy her short school day

I drove the fourth one to his school
And for a little fun
While he was learning ABC's
I did a five mile run

Then I picked the fourth one up
It had been a little while
"It's time to go to the dentist now"
I told his teacher with a smile

We drove and picked up two and three
It was time to head back south
Then we picked up number one
To check the teeth in their mouth

We got done, no cavities
I dropped off two and three
Then I dropped off number one
And she said "Bye!" to me

Then I went home for lunch and nap
Four was a sleepy son
You might think that I'll rest too
But my day is not yet done

I need to wake up number four
Drag him back to the car
We need to pick up two and three
The drive isn't very far

Then to pick up number one
What a wonderful day I've had
They should not call me "stay at home"
I'm more of a driving dad

Fall Soccer. Yay!

Hurray for fall soccer! Spring soccer is fun and all, but it's not as good as fall soccer from a parenting standpoint. To start, it's cooler. In fact, sometimes it's almost pleasantly cool while watching games. Almost. To add to that, it's getting dark early. This means that practice during the week can only go so late. We actually get home before bedtime. How novel. To finish, there aren't as many players. This means not as many teams. This means that all of the weekends games are played during two time slots instead of three. Now we're only at the soccer fields for four hours every Saturday instead of five and half or six. I get to do things like eat lunch at home. It's pretty sweet.
So let us all raise our glasses of Gatorade to the wonderful joys of fall soccer. Three cheers!

Reading Outside with a Baby

Most people think hot when they think Texas. Makes sense. What they don't generally think is hot and humid and buggy. That's because most people think of west Texas with all of its dust and cactuses and cowboys and such. If you live in east Texas, like us, you can't really stop thinking about hot and humid and buggy. It's just the way it is.

Being watchful. I swear. 

Every now and then, though, the right blend of weather and season comes around and you end up with a truly nice day. A day that is warm, but not hot. A day that is low humidity. Most importantly, a day in which all of the biting flying insects are dead. There aren't many of these days and we try to grab onto them and enjoy them. That's what happened way back when I only had two little kids. One was mobile, a toddler if you will. The other was fairly stationary. The day was beautiful and I had some reading to do. I decided that a blanket in the yard was the ideal place.
Now, some of you might have tried this whole baby on a blanket thing before and come to the same conclusion that I did. Babies are drawn to the edge of a blanket like a moth to a flame. Babies that will lay in the middle of the floor in a house and cry so that you will bring them the toy that they dropped six inches away will suddenly develop an overwhelming sense of wanderlust and go wiggling off toward the unknown. They cannot be stopped. They will reach the edge, and they will shove whatever they find in their mouth. Dirt? Down the hatch. Rocks? Give them a chew. Bugs? Fast bugs run away in a panic, but slow bugs have a bad day. Leaves? This is where the story gets interesting.  
You see. I was reading my book, studying for a class in fact, and I was pulling my son back from the edge much more frequently than I was turning pages. He got his had to terra firma once or twice but all in all I was doing a pretty good job if I do say so myself. Then my wife came home and ruined it all. We didn't have one single problem until she walked up to us to say hi. My son rolled over, looked up, and smiled. From between his grinning lips there was a tiny piece of green. My wife grabbed it and gently pulled expecting flick a small piece of grass off his lip. Have you ever seen a sword swallower? Not the part where they swallow, but the part where they pull it back out? Yea, that's what it looked like as my wife pulled the very very long skinny leaf out of the baby. Dammit. I was doing so well too.

Run

Someday will finally be the day
I'll wake up with the sun
I'll pull on my shorts, and lace up my shoes
But won't be able to run

So few times can I stand in line
And hear the starting gun
All of us there in our shorts and shoes
Heading out on the run

So even though I'm tired today
And sitting sounds more fun
I'll pull on my shorts and lace up my shoes
And enjoy that I can run


So I've been running again and feeling all the better for it. I want to race again and my daughter wants to race with me. She's been working up to a 5K and I''m trying to get faster at that distance. I've only got a few more years before she'll be faster than me.

Fall Colors

Just wait, someday she'll dye this black.

Sewing Halloween Costumes #2

Can't a man just procrastinate in peace? Can't he? No, no around here he can't. As usual I had my grand plans for Halloween costumes. I had patterns, I had fabric, I was ready to go. All I needed was some time pressure to really get me going. That required me waiting until Halloween was so close that there was a chance that I might not finish. It's how I work best, and my wife totally ruined it.
I went away for one day to autocross and she got basically the whole fair lady costume done. Cut out the patterns, cut out the fabric and pieces and pretty much sewed everything but the sleeves. How am I supposed to write a blog post about putting together an awesome dress when it's already put together? Gah! I can't, I just can't. So what I'm giving you is a picture of said gown. It's perfect. It's beautiful, and it's done. No thanks to me.
Moving on, I have a few tunics to make. One is for your basic Viking, and the other is for a middle ages warrior peasant girl. These have been assigned to me, and these I shall make. They are both extremely simple, but both require a bit of extra work. The pattern I'm using is the same one as the knight tunic that we're making for my youngest. That tunic has sleeves that are made of shiny stretchy material that is supposed to approximate the look of chain mail. They're pretty narrow. The two tunics I need to make need wider sleeves. The also need to be bigger for the bigger kids and they need to be longer. Because my wife didn't want to live in a world dominated by my procrastination, she asked me to copy the patterns in the size that I need so she could cut them down and use them for the smaller costume. This is a pretty good time to mention that the package of patterns you bought has a bunch of sizes in it. You need to measure you child and figure out which one you need and cut out all of the pieces that are that size. This pattern has one front, one back, two sleeves, and a narrow band of fabric for the neck.
Click through the jump and I'll give a walkthrough of my day of sewing.

Tech for the Sick

Talking to my sick son this morning and he mentioned that Apple TV was great for when you were sick. I agreed, thinking that the wide selection of shows is enough to keep any kid from being bored as the spend a day on the couch. He replied with "Yea, if you have to puke you can pause it, and then puke, so that way you don't miss any of your show."
There's a reasonable chance the boy has a future in advertising.

Musings on Vomit

The second child within a week has been throwing up in the house and I've become a bit philosophical about vomit. It's a strange thing vomit. Mysterious. A quick internet search says that it takes about 24 hours for food to go from one end to the other. It should pass through your stomach and small intestine in 6-8 hours. This is all medical fact. Yet, when my son throws up all over his bed at 9:00 at night, I can still quite positively identify parts of his breakfast from 15 hours ago. He doesn't seem to chew as much as I thought he did either, seeming to prefer to swallow things quite whole. He's growing fine, so it doesn't appear to be a great problem and if I only saw the food once, it would never have crossed my mind.
It's when you're cleaning up that you think of these things. In the moment, when they're actively spewing, you focus on your child. Getting them through it. Trying to convince them to aim things in the least damaging direction. Comforting them. Afterwords, after you've gotten them stripped down and washed off, after you've stripped the bed and tried to wad everything up so you don't leak as you haul things across the house, that's when you think: How did my child eat that much? I made them the food, or at least presented it to them, and I don't remember as much going down the hatch as came up. Did we have peas? We must have. There they are. So many of them.
Cleaning has it's own charm. You really need to pre-clean anything that you want to throw in the laundry. If you pitch a set of sheets in the washer covered in masticated chicken and corn, you're going to get out a set of sheets still covered in chicken and corn. It will be quite clean chicken and corn, but it's hard to convince yourself that you could be a good parent making the bed with those sheets. So there's the scraping. The handfulls of former stomach contents that need to be removed and thrown in the toilet. They were always destined for the toilet, those little chunks of semi-digested food. If my son had been more aware of the hair trigger nature of his stomach he might have made it to the toilet on his own and thrown up there. If he'd never gotten sick at all, and given another 18 hours or so, the toilet would have been the final resting place as well. It's a funny thing the fate of chewed food. Anyway, you scrape, you pitch, you rinse things off in the bathtub. You get them as clean as you can before putting them in the wash. Turning back to the bathtub you need to clean once more. My son, his bed, the floor, his sheets, his comforter, the bathtub. It's a sequence that needs to be gone through before the night is through. People say they hate diapers. Diapers are gumdrops and lollipops compared to an evening of cleaning up puke.
Things are better now. Mostly. We made it through the rest of the night managing to hit the bowl about 98% of the time. We made it through almost the whole day with a little eating and drinking, boosting my confidence that it was over. We almost made it to the library. Almost. Car cleanup is different than house cleanup in many ways, but that's really another story altogether.

EDIT: After reading this my wife asked why the post never mentioned that she was up five times during the night emptying the puke bowl while I stayed in bed. It's not that I didn't wake up, it's just that I'm slower than her at jumping out of bed. For puke anyway. I assured her that I'll be the one in the lead if we every have a bear emergency. I promise.