Auto Confusion

The actual hand that feeds her. Not a smart dog.

As I mentioned in this post I bought a new car last week. It's working out great for everyone but the dog. She's having some trouble with it. When I brought it home the first time she barked at it, which is to be expected and maybe even applauded. Strange car, protect the house, good dog. I got out of the car and talked to her until she figured out who I was which made her very very happy. She was bouncing around and squealing she was so happy. Then I got back into the car to pull it through the gate at the end of the driveway and she forgot who was in the car. She barked and tried to look all mean, which isn't very mean looking, but at least she tried. She was genuinely shocked to see me get back out of the car that I had gotten into moments before and was all excited that I was home. Again. Throughout the afternoon she would periodically look out the front window to see if my wife had come home (she loves my wife) and would be shocked and alarmed by the new car and bark. She seems to have a horrifyingly short memory.
Over the past few days she has gotten a little better. She no longer barks at the car in the driveway. She clearly doesn't like it, but she doesn't bark. She also only barks at me until I get out of the car now. She seems to have figured out that even though it's a strange car, if I get out of it, then it's an ok strange car. She's not excited about it yet. When she seems my wife turn onto our road she starts jumping and turning somersaults and squealing and turning into a noisy tornado of happiness. That lets me know that it's possible for her to retain a memory for a couple of days at a time, so there's hope, but I'm not sure what it takes to implant that memory. Maybe my wife has to take the car for a drive. That might work.
Writing about my mentally damaged dog reminds me of the best pet writing I've ever read. It's from a blogger named Allie Brosh who is sadly no longer writing. Her writing is part of what encouraged me to start blogging. I realized when I read her work that pretty normal events in life can be knock down funny when told right. I'm not actually funny like her, but I promise you, my stories are funnier than my real life. Here's her three dog stories. If you can read them without wetting yourself, they you're a better man than I.
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/07/dog.html
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-understand-basic-concepts.html
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/04/wild-animal-simple-dog-goes-for-joy.html

Fried Zucchini

There are very few foods that feel as weird as battered deep fried vegetables. You take something that has an aura of purity and healthfulness and then you do about the worst thing you can possibly do to it, make it starchy and greasy. Why? Delicious, that's why. I'm not suggesting that your daily intake of veggies should be fried, but every now and again it's a good way to break up the monotony. This recipe is for fried zucchini, but you can fry about any vegetable. In fact, the county fair scene the last decade or two has show us that "you can fry anything" isn't limited to vegetables, not by a long shot. To at least pretend that we have an understanding of basic nutrition, we'll just stick to zucchini.

Battered Deep Fried Zucchini - assembled from far and wide on the internet.
3-5 medium zucchini, cut fairly thick.
1 cup flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup water
2 tbs water
1 egg, mixed
2 tbs oil
2 cups peanut oil or enough to fill your frying pot to cover the zucchini when it's frying

Put the peanut oil in the pot, wait, first a word about oil. The reason we use peanut oil is that it has a high smoke point. This means that we can get it hot enough to cook without burning it, about 375 degrees. Butter has a smoke point of about 350, extra virgin olive oil about 400, corn oil (what is usually labeled vegetable oil in the store) at 450, and peanut oil at 450 or so. Since we want to cook at 375, butter would burn and olive oil would actually be starting to smoke (I've tried it). Of the oils that are left I think that peanut oil works the best and since I'm in the south, that's what I use. Ok, back to the cooking. Fill your pot with the oil. You can use a deep fryer that sets the temperature automatically, or you can do it on the stove. If you do it on the stove you should really have a thermometer that is capable of reading to 400 or so to check your oil temperature. Also keep in mind that you're cooking a big pot of oil on a stove, and if you have a gas stove, a big pot of oil over an open flame. Pay attention and know where your fire extinguisher is before you start. Really, not even trying to be funny, burning down your house is serious business so make sure you have a fire extinguisher before you start heating oil on the stove. Lots of people fry things all the time without burning down their houses, I don't want to freak anyone out here, but according to the National Fire Preventaion Agency 42% of all home fires were caused by cooking. This is probably the most dangerous thing you can do in your kitchen. It's like extreme cooking. Hard core. Back to the cooking again. While the oil heats, mix the 2 tbs water, the egg and the oil together. Mix all of the dry ingredients together. Mix your wets with your drys. Let them sit for about 5 minutes. Now your oil is hot and it's just a matter of dipping your zucchini slices in the batter and gently sliding them into the oil. If you drop them you splash oil on yourself. That's bad. Wear pants. Even so, be careful. Don't crowd the zucchini in there, only do 5-7 slices at a time for somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, whatever it takes to get them brown and beautiful. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon and let them drain on a paper towel on a plate. You might notice that there's not a whole hell of a lot of seasoning in these and they don't have a very strong taste at all. You might like to salt and pepper them when they come out of the oil. You might like to try and add the salt and pepper to the batter. You might like to try and marinate your zucchini in something before hand to impart some flavor. You might want to use all of these experiments to make this a lot, because even though it's not as healthy as making zucchini basically any other way, it is delicious.

Shooting Hoops

We're a few weeks into youth basketball season around here so I thought I'd post up some of my thoughts on it. My son in third grade is playing for his third year. In the past two years the league was structured so the boys were divided into teams at the beginning, and parents were asked to coach. Nobody wanted to coach (including me) so I ended up coaching rather than have the whole thing fall apart. It was supposed to be a competitive league and winning was supposed to be important. This sucked. If you were lucky enough to draw one or two kids who were good at basketball then they stayed in the whole game and just ran over the other teams. If you either had a lack of talent or thought it was a good thing to rotate all of your players so they got to play, you got creamed. Every game. Couple that with parents who thought that yelling like drunk college students during a final four game was the appropriate way to cheer on their six years olds, and it wasn't a whole hell of a lot of fun.
When my son brought the flyer home for this season I was relieved to see that things had changed. A new high school coach had arrived and he had some different ideas. He wanted his boys to coach the little kids to get experience coaching as well as feeling the pressure to live up to being a role model. He also focuses much more on fundamental exercises than we had time for, and teams are newly formed each week. It's working out great. The kids seem to be having more fun, they're learning more basketball, they listen to the high school players better than they ever listened the parents, and the parents in the stands are even quieter. It's amazing how the structure of a program can dramatically change how things work out.
I'm not sure that everyone, or anyone for that matter, needs to play organized basketball at such a young age, but having tried to do just that I've learned a few things I want to pass along. Hoop height is really really important. There's probably nothing more important in fact. When your kids are little, they need a shorter hoop. Lowering the hoop to 8 feet allows kids as young as kindergarten to be able to shoot properly. If it's too high you don't learn how to shoot so much as throw the ball and hope it makes it. The league keeps them on 8 foot hoops until they are in 4th grade and it's a great idea. Use a smaller ball too, a girls sized ball works great. It fits their hands better and it's lighter. It's a lot easier for them to get used to shooting a heavier ball at a higher hoop later than to have to completely rebuild their mechanics when they get the strength. Dribbling while looking at anything other than the ball is hard. Practice is the only way you get better but dribbling is the least fun part of practicing. The more you integrate dribbling into other drills that allow shooting, the more practice they'll get.
That's about all I have to say about basketball. I only played for one year in 7th grade and only made one basket. I was bad. You don't have to be good at basketball to help your kids learn how to play, you just have to be a little patient and make it fun. They tend to like doing anything with dad as long as it's fun enough that you're both still smiling. It also helps that I can dunk on an 8 foot hoop. Someday they'll figure out how unimpressive that is, but for now, I'm awesome.

What's Next #4

In part one, part two, and part three of this series I discussed my future after this whole staying at home thing, where I thought I would be, and where I could be headed. This post is more about what's now, what I'm doing as I transition.

It's a race car! Really!

Everyone, no matter what they do, has options before them. Sometimes we feel trapped by the life we're in, and babies can certainly do that to you. Even then, and maybe especially then, we dream about what if. It's part of being human. It starts when we're little and talk about what we're going to be when we grow up, and doesn't end until....well, it's not over in your mid 30's anyway. Even if I was working, I'd still have options and I'd still be thinking about them. Because I'm a stay at home dad, I feel like I might have even more options. Maybe. My one limitation is that I need to be here for my kids and my wife first. Everything else I'm doing must be in the background to that. Within that limitation, I also need to be present. The Buddhists have a saying, they actually have a lot of sayings, but I'll focus on this one. "When you are eating, eat." It's pretty important for parenting. When you are with your kids, be with them. Don't spend the time you have with them dreaming about doing something else, and your time away dreaming about being with them. I'm working hard at doing that in this last year with a little one around nearly full time. We do our shopping together, and we play, and we read books, and we get stuff done. We talk a lot, a whole lot, when we're together, and he asks some wonderful insightful questions for a four year old. My time with him is different because it's only him, and he's the only one that I get to do this with. All of my other children had to share me when they were four, but not him. My relationship with each of my children is different because of who they are and when they were born and a host of other factors that I can't change. What I can do is enjoy each for what they are.

This is turning into a wall of text, so click through if you want to read the rest. 

Messy Kids

No clothes, no bib.

Accuracy issues.

Shockingly messy.

When I wrote my Pet Hair on the Stair post the other day I was thrilled to get a comment from my friend Jill over at The Jill Dobson Show. Jill is also writing about her experiences raising her son, but she does it in a way that is much more well-written and way funnier. You should probably read her blog instead of this one to be honest. It's not surprising that she's good at this sort of thing with her journalism degree and all of her TV experience and that one time she was a Miss USA contestant. Seriously, she's sort of famous. She's probably the most famous person I know and certainly the most famous person that I've beaten in Trivial Pursuit. In case any of my guy readers are wondering, the key to all of this is to marry someone hot, like my wife. Lots of times hot chicks come with hot friends, it's pretty awesome. If the world works perfectly, then you can end up married to someone hot, be unemployed, and get to know her famous friends. This, my friends, is Valhalla.

I eat with my eyebrows too.

Back to the subject at hand. Jill is a real grown up and when she writes posts her son is beautiful, and her house is beautiful, and basically all of the pictures of her life look like she has clipped them out of magazines. She suggested that her husband, on the other hand, would probably think that is was hilarious to post pictures of their son all covered head to toe in mushed carrots. I'm here to tell him that he's right. Posting pictures like that is hilarious. Even if living those moments was slightly less than fun, the pictures are great. It was always hard to really get  into the mess that my kids were making when they were learning how to eat. Sure, it was cute, but every time the put a handful of food in their ear instead of their mouth you just knew that you had more work coming. I've always been curious about how incredibly uncoordinated kids are when they start to eat. They seem to be able to hit every part of their head but their mouth. If you leave a marble or a penny or something parentally irresponsible on the floor though they hit the jackpot the first time. It's the buttered toast paradox of the baby world.
Everybody who comes here should really head over to The Jill Dobson Show and read about her baby and all of the other grown up stuff that she does. When you get sick of well written stories and pictures of a beautiful baby in a beautiful house, you can always come back here.

ETC: Avatar - The Last Airbender

We don't watch a whole lot of TV. Mostly that's because we've gotten ourselves into a situation where it's very difficult to watch it. We used to have cable, but we didn't watch much TV, even then. So I built an antenna which enabled us to get local TV and we canceled our cable. Now we have fewer channels and there's less on so we watch even less TV. Now that we watch even less TV, it seems like it would be silly to get cable again. We'd just be paying more for more TV to watch more TV and it's hard to feel like a good parent making that decision, so we're stuck.
We do watch movies though. Every Friday and Saturday night we sit down and watch a movie for somewhere between half and hour and an hour. This usually lets us split a normal movie between both nights. It's a family thing, it's fun. It is sometimes hard to find movies that are good for an age range of four to ten. You don't want to freak out the little ones, but you don't want to bore the big ones. That's why when my brother gave the kids Avatar - The Last Airbender for Christmas a few years ago, we were skeptical. I mean really, how could my childless younger brother possibly have the inside scoop on something that would be appropriate for my kids? And something I'd never heard of? Impossible! But he was right. His youth and complete refusal to grow up when I was off pretending to be an adult in college had kept him clued in to this incredible TV show that blew right by me.
The series follows Aang, the last of a tribe of people who can manipulate air at their will to fight. On top of that, he's also the reincarnated Avatar, a sort of supreme being who can control all of the elements, air, water, fire and earth, and is supposed to keep balance and peace between the tribes that have the ability to control each. It sounds a little weird, and in some ways it is, but it's brilliant. It's engaging to everyone from my youngest all the way up to me. It has action and comedy that everyone can cheer and laugh with. It has a few scenes that are so well written, so emotional, that I was literally crying. In short, it's always appropriate and simply brilliant.
There are 61 episodes between the three sets, Air, Water and Fire. Each episode is just over 20 minutes long and we generally watched two a night, four a weekend. Even with quite a few other movies to choose, we've watched it all the way through twice in the last few years. Often when there's a movie on for the kids I'm sitting off to the side reading a book either because I've seen the movie already or because I'm just not interested in it. When Avatar is on, I'm right there in the middle of the couch with kids piled all around me, as engaged in the show as they are. A big thanks to my brother, I owe you one.

Pet Hair On The Stair

One of the best things I've ever built is the staircase in our house. It's super strong and the stairs are basically perfect in their rise/run. I'm so proud of them that I'm going to write a whole post about them eventually. In this post I'm going to focus on their one downfall, pet hair.
When I built the stairs I used standard dimensional lumber and ended up with a small gap at the back of each stair. It's only about 1/4 inch, maybe closer to 1/2 at the widest spots. It doesn't affect any quality of the stairs and when I built them I figured that once they were covered with carpet or something it wouldn't matter. Except they haven't been carpeted yet and it sort of matters because all of the stuff that comes off of your feet onto the stairs ends up falling through the cracks. If I swept more then there would be less to fall in the cracks, but I don't. The problem is that the cracks lead to the closet that is under the stairs. This is one of only two closets in the entire house so it's pretty important, everything that goes anywhere has to go here. Anything that has to go anywhere is then subjected to a constant rain of pet hair. It's remarkably unpleasant to get things out of the closet.
I did devise a temporary solution of putting duct tape on the bottom of the cracks to catch all of the hair and not let it fall on things in the closet. This worked quite well and became more of a long term solution. I figured I could just keep this system going by replacing any piece of tape that fell off through time but my wife had other ideas. This is mostly because I was very very slow in replacing the pieces of tape that fell off making it more like not a solution at all most of the time. Today I took the years of subtle (and increasingly not so subtle) hints that I had to so something proper to stop up the cracks and stop the constant rain of pet hair into the closet. $6.00 in wood and two hours of work and I had it all done. I could have probably done it in half the time but I like to be slow an inefficient when I can. By the time I was done I had dealt with so much hair and dust from pulling the remaining duct tape off the cracks that I was in the middle of a fairly substantial allergic attack. A quick shower and some benedryl seem to have taken care of that.
I was going to take a picture of one of the pieces of duct tape that I pulled out of the closet. It's pretty amazing how much hair you can get stuck to a piece of tape if it's in the right spot. My intuition is telling me that my wife would be less than thrilled with me sharing such a fascinating photo on the internet. She's not all that cool with a picture that says "look how disgusting our house is" even if I make it perfectly clear that it's not the whole house that's that hairy, just that one thing. You'll have to use your imagination.
This isn't much of a pet related post now that I read it, but it's what is going on in the life of this stay at home dad.

Softening Dwarf Bread

In the Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett there are dwarfs, amongst other things, and the dwarfs have dwarf bread. Dwarf bread is a staple of the dwarf civilization and it has some interesting properties, such as it's ability to enable the eater to survive off a single loaf for several days (by making you realize that you're surrounded by other things that look more edible), never going stale (possibly because it's always stale), though it's primary use for the dwarfs is that of a weapon. When experimenting with bread, I've made a few loaves that could be considered dwarf bread. They taste fine, but actually eating them is hard work. Inevitably what's missing from my baking is some sort of fat. Adding fat to any bread recipe will yield a more tender loaf. The reverse is also true, if you take out some fat, your bread will build some body. The toughest, weapons grade, loaves of bread consist of nothing but water, flour, salt and some sort of yeasty stuff. If you happen upon a recipe that is fantastically tasty but takes heavy machinery to cut and chew, add one tablespoon of olive oil (or butter) and try it again. The bread will be softer and more edible, especially for kids. Don't ever be afraid to change a recipe to suit your taste. Learn what each ingredient does and how varying it will change the outcome of your baking. Add some variety, it's the spice of life after all.
Having said all of that, it's Shrove Tuesday today and you should all be making pancakes for dinner tonight.  This is the one day of the year where it's not only ok to make pancakes for dinner, it's actually encouraged. If you're only going to be Catholic one day a year, forget Christmas or Easter, be a catholic on Shrove Tuesday.

Holey Socks

A couple more good wearings left in these puppies.

Short post today, it's Presidents Day and all of the kids are home. Lots of action today.
When I put on my socks this morning I was pretty thankful that I do the laundry around here. These particular socks are getting a little old, but they're not dead yet. If my wife did the laundry she'd pitch them. Really, she would, even though none of my toes are even sticking out. She just doesn't understand where to draw the line at things being well and truly worn out. Or maybe I don't. Either way, I do the laundry, so I get to decide the fate of my socks. It's a small perk of the job, but I'll take it.

What's Next #3

In the first part of this series I established the fact that I'm probably not hopping back into a job when my last son starts school full time. In the second part I explained that this wasn't always the case. I did in fact have every intention of continuing to be a proper contributing part of the economy with a little re-training. As my life changed and my wife's job changed and we kept having more and more children, so did my plans.
I do have some things around here that I really need to do. The garage needs a new roof for starters. I don't just mean new shingles either, it has holes in it you can climb through. Since I have to dive that deep into the project I'm seriously thinking of making the roof somewhere around 8 feet taller. This will give me enough room inside the garage to install a lift for working on cars. It's always been a dream of mine to have my own lift. It's sort of the ultimate automotive tool. At about $3000 I can't imagine how I'm going to justify it. I'm thinking that maybe I can explain that since I'm doing all the work on the garage myself then the money I save can be used on a lift. Maybe? It's going to take me as much time to come up with something to tell my wife as it's going to take me to do the work. I also have a lot of work on the house to finish. I have moldings that I started putting up 9 years ago that I'm not quite done with yet. I should probably get on it. While I'm at it I need to finish up the rest of the drywall that I hung 8 years ago when I put the addition on the house. Then I need to do some tile work in the bathroom. The kitchen also needs to be gutted. That's going to suck. Now that I think about it, I've been putting off doing a lot of work.
That's what I need to do, but what do I want to do? I want to build a race car, just because. I also want to build a go-kart for the kids, and they really want me to do that too. I want to have the time to properly train for a marathon. I could do that now, but I don't want to take the time necessary for the long runs. A 20 mile run takes me 3.5 hours and then time to eat and then take a nap. I'd rather not demand that big of a chunk of the weekend right now. I also want to try out some volunteering. The Houston Food Bank, Habitat for Humanity, and Meals on Wheels are three organizations that I'd like to spend some time with. They all do great things. Those are volunteer jobs that I know I can do by just calling and showing up. There are also some things that I might need a little training to do. I'm very interested in literacy. I'm convinced that one of the primary reasons that school was easy for me, and probably the reason that people thought I was smart, was because I could read well at an early age. Everything is easier when you can read well and harder when you can't. If you fall far enough behind, you get lost, and with a lot of kids it's just the time, the practice and the patience of a dedicated reading teacher that they need. I can read. I taught my kids to read. I think I can help teach other kids to read and help them succeed if I can get the proper training in it. This is something that can make a real difference on an individual level. I am also interested in volunteering at the Shriners Burn Hospital in Galveston. I burned myself a few years ago. Not so bad that my life is changed long term, but bad enough that I had to rely on a lot of physical and emotional help while I healed. When you're burned badly enough that you can't do much other than sit and heal, life sucks. I'd like to go help life suck a little less for the kids that end up there. Again, I'm not exactly sure what I can do, or how I can help, or what training I need, but I'd like to help.
There's a lot I can do in the world, both at home and away, when I've got the time. Things that help me, things that help my family, and things that help people I haven't met yet. I think I've got a lot of options.

Men Feeding Babies

I think that almost all of my job as a stay at home dad is pretty normal from a biological standpoint. Men have always been involved in raising their children to a more or lesser extent depending on the culture of the time. What's clear, even today, is that when men are more involved in raising their children they tend to do better. That has almost certainly been true from back in the days when an attentive dad could fend off a saber tooth tiger right up until today. The only thing that is weird about a stay at home dad in the modern sense is taking care of infants.

Utterly wonderful, yet odd.

In the past, the mother/infant was more of a single unit than something that could be separated for a day of work. There would be people around to help hold the baby while mom did something and I'm sure that dads have always helped, but you just couldn't go too far from the boobs. If you had an infant, you had to have a lactating woman around. There was no way around that. Prior to the 1920's you either needed a wet nurse or the ability to make up some sort of food with animal milk, and that didn't always work. If you had a baby and the mother died, if there wasn't another mother nursing right there, the baby often died too no matter how good a dad you had. In the 1920's the first commercial infant formulas were developed and they've been working on them ever since. It's pretty widely accepted that breast milk is always better, but at least as a dad, formula made is possible to do a job that had previously only been available to women. Breast pumps have actually been around since the 1850's, but without refrigeration widely available, you still only had a very limited time away from the boob.
Historically, it's almost certainly been more common to have women in combat, right out on the field getting shot and stabbed, then to have men at home feeding an infant. I don't think we're ever going to have a world where it's a 50/50 shot whether the mom or the dad is the primary care giver from day one. The fixed location of boobs gives some pretty dramatic advantages to a mother in the first few months at least, and always will. Anatomically modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago. In all that time, men have only really been able to be primary caregivers to infants for the last 70 or so. Culturally, it's only been happening for maybe the last 30, and it's still certainly not widespread by any measure. It's much more common to hire out the care of a 6 week old infant then to leave them in the care of their father. No wonder seeing men with little babies still seems odd.

ETC: Goodnight Gorilla

Depending on what type of reader you are, Goodnight Gorilla is either awesome, or it sucks. If you just want to sit down and read the words out loud then you're screwed, because there are very very few words in the book. Just the zoo keeper saying goodnight to everyone and heading off to bed. The storytelling in the book is what's happening outside the words. The animals escaping and following the zoo keeper home and crawling into bed with him and his wife without them noticing. You get to point out the action in the pictures and ask your kids if they see what's happening and if they can guess what's going to happen next. Once they catch on, it never fails to entertain them that they know what's coming and what that zany gorilla is going to pull off at the end. The book is always the same, but because you and your kids provide nearly all of the narration to the story, it's also always just a bit different. It's fun and engaging in ways that lots of other books aren't.
This is one of my top 10 board books for little kids. I'm going to try and work through my favorites over the next few months and then I'll move on to books for older kids. When I get to them I'll be in less of a hurry, but we're in the closing days of board books in our house. I'm trying to get the good ones sorted before they all go away.

Raccoons

Let me start off my saying that raccoons are never really pets. Like baby deer, they are wild animals that may decide to live with your for a while. They all grow up, they all get wild, and they all head off to make their own way in the world. With that disclaimer, it's story time.
My parents are veterinarians. One of the odd things about being a vet (and there are a lot of odd things about being a vet) is that any time someone finds a sick/hurt/abandoned animal of any sort, they bring it to the vet. You might think that doesn't sound odd, after all that's what vets do, they fix animals. The odd thing is that people bring these animals there to leave them. If you find a pile of kittens without a mother, bring them to the vet. A flock of ducklings? Bring them to the vet. Baby raccoons? To the vet! People confuse 'veterinarian' with 'home for wayward animals'. Of course most vets are suckers for raising baby things which is why they got into this job in the first place, so as a kid we ended up raising a lot kittens and ducklings and even raccoons. Because of this, I had a fun childhood and I have a lot of stories.
This raccoon story isn't about a raccoon that somebody brought to my parents, though I have a lot of those too, it's about one that I got myself. When I was eighteen I worked for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for the summer. One day a car showed up at the office with a raccoon. On the roof. The lady was freaked out. It seems that she had parked in the woods to go hiking and when she got back this little guy was waiting for her and wouldn't leave her alone. She didn't want to touch it and it didn't want to leave so she did the most logical thing in her situation. She slowly drove to the DNR to ask them what to do with it. We were part of the Wildlife Division after all.
Nobody there had any idea what to do. except me, of course. By that time I was an old pro at raccoons. we had raised several that had been brought into my parents. This was a young raccoon, a bit over two months old probably, that had clearly been hand raised by a person. When it got to be too much to handle they dropped in in the woods figuring that everything would sort itself out which it sort of did. Being heavily imprinted on people the abandoned raccoon went looking for more people to take care of it. He found a car and just waited for the nice person to show up, which she did. When I got him, he was pretty happy to have found a person would hold and feed him. Probably the DNR should have done something more official with him, but I assured them that I'd taken care of raccoons before and I could do it again. At the end of the day he came home with me.
This story is getting long. So I don't completely fill my front page with a wall of text, I'm putting a jump in here. Click through to read about living with a raccoon.

Valentines: Chocolate Covered Strawberries.

Today is Valentines Day. I hate buying stuff for Valentines day. "Look, the store sells chocolate!" I'd rather make something. That's not to say that I always do, but it's what I'd like to do, and today I'd doing it. I'm taking the wonderful chocolaty shell from buckeyes and instead of applying it to the outside of delicious peanut butter and sugar balls, I'm going to do it to strawberries.

Finished product. A tray full of love.

If you're a dad, and you're at home, you still have time to do this. I'm posting this up early Valentines morning and even I haven't made them yet. I can't make them ahead because of the surprise factor. Well, I probably could, but the small children who can't keep their yaps shut couldn't handle it. So I'm making them this afternoon during nap time, just hours before my wife gets home so that I can reduce the opportunities for anyone to squeal. Of course, my kids will be all excited that I made them  chocolate covered strawberries and my wife will be lucky to get a few before they're all gone. I might still need to hide a few. A surprise within a surprise. I'll post a picture after it all happens, but I thought I'd get this published early in the morning to give all of you an opportunity to run to the store and grab some strawberries and chocolate and get it done before your wife gets home.

Chocolate Covered Strawberries
1 pound strawberries
6 ounces chocolate chips (semi-sweet, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, whatever you like)
2 tbs shortening
Wash the strawberries and gently dry them. You might want to set them on a cookie sheet in the fridge to dry for a while before you drip them. Water in melted chocolate is bad. Heat the shortening and chips in a double boiler or a glass bowl floating in a pan of hot water. Stir until smooth. Grab the strawberries by their leaves and dip them. Roll them around a bit to get them covered. This isn't exactly brain surgery. Place them on a sheet of wax paper on a cookie sheet and then put all of them back in the fridge to cool and harden. Serve and enjoy.

I'll edit this post later to post a picture and let you know if my wife liked them. Really though, except for the people who are allergic to strawberries, who doesn't like chocolate covered strawberries? This is a slam dunk. Good luck!

Edit: These were so easy to make. I used dark chocolate because that's what my wife likes. They look so cool. If you make these and have any chocolate left over, animal crackers are a pretty fantastic way to clean out the bowl. It's good to be the daddy. Happy Valentines Day!

The Last Diaper

I'll actually miss these guys.

I cleaned my truck yesterday. I don't want anyone (especially my father in law) to think that I never clean my truck, I do. I pick up the toys that haven't made their way in and I vacuum a bit and shake off the floor mats and wipe all the plastic down with armor all. I clean it, but I don't often clean it. For about the first four years that I had the truck I always had a car seat strapped in back. Not unusual for someone with small children, but in my truck that means that I couldn't fold up my rear seats. Well, I could, but I'd have to strap and unstrap a seat just to do it. Unless I had a flat tire and I needed to get the jack out, that was a lot of work. Too much work for just cleaning, especially with all the small people that want to help me. Because of that, there was an area of my truck that didn't really get cleaned, under the back seat. Well, I'm down to only having three booster seats in the back so it's not so much of a big deal to strip everything out of the inside and really give it a good scrubbing. I found two pairs of sunglasses, a pair of gloves, seven tennis balls, four lego guys, 3 pencils, one pen, numberless goldfish crackers and one diaper, among other things. It's the diaper that made me pause. My youngest has been potty trained for over a year. I kept a few around those first few months just in case, and this is the last of them. I pitched all of the ones in the house when I cleaned up the bathroom to paint and I thought I got them all. Nope, just this one. One last diaper.
It's no secret that I really loved having babies. I never minded diapers. Even though there were so many of them, so very many, it always seemed like a minor thing. It's like someone offering you a Corvette, no, a Ferrari, with the stipulation that you have to wash it when it's dirty. The washing is minor, you might not even notice. I didn't. If it wasn't completely idiotic to have more children I would be all over it. Everyone has to look around them and set a limit sometime. With some it's only one, some make it into the teens, for us it was four. The house is full, the truck is full, the kitchen table is full. If you combine that with the fact that I have to talk another person into gestating for nine months, and then the whole birthing thing, and then breast feeding think, it's not like I can make the choice on my own. It's a team decision. Emotionally it sounds like a good idea, but intellectually, both individually and as a team, it would be idiotic.
The last diaper, the end of an era.

What's Next? #2

I didn't always wonder what I was going to do after the whole stay at home dad thing runs down. I had plans. I was taking action. I was even working on what's next before the whole thing really started.
I began taking classes in mechanical engineering at the University of Houston a few months before my oldest daughter was born. I started by taking an intro to mechanical engineer course. Just one course. The next semester, after my daughter was born, I took a mechanical drawing/drafting course. These were very simple classes, just the beginning courses that a beginning student would take in their first semester. I already had an engineering degree so they weren't hard, I just had to show up, do the work and collect my grade. The big positive with them was that I was actively taking charge of where I was going to end up in the world. I was retiring from work, but I was going to return stronger, better, and even more prepared. Everything was going well until I hit a bit of a glitch with class scheduling. It's theoretically possible to get a mechanical engineering degree taking a few classes at a time, but it's really hard to do it if you can't take any of them during the day. It would take somewhere around 12 years to get them all done if everything went right, and you'd still end up having to take a few during the day. If you have an engineering degree already and you don't need to re-take many of the core classes, you end up with big spaces of time where there is simply nothing that you can take. You need to wait between one and three semesters for another class to come up. There was no way I could sit around that long and just wait, like I said, I had a plan.
I decided to check out the local community college and see what they had that I could use to either work toward a mechanical engineering degree, or at least help me to become a better one. What I came up with was welding. They had quite a good program that taught welding and non destructive testing. I jumped in with both feet figuring that it was a good use of my time. Knowing how to weld could only make me better at whatever I was going to do in the future and I'd end up knowing how to weld stuff. Nothing is more manly than welding.
My wife was a saint. There were many times where she would leave work half an hour early two days a week to meet me at the college where we would swap cars. She'd take the kids back home and I'd spend two hours welding. I'd come home and everyone would already be in bed and she would be exhausted. She really loved me and wanted me to be happy. She still does, but man, she really put forth a ton of energy to keep me sane. I need to go give her a kiss. There are only so many welding classes offered, and eventually I ran out of them. Then took all of the non destructive testing classes they had. In fact, I'm just one class away from an associates degree in welding and non destructive testing. I just need to have a college sanctioned on the job experience to get it all done. That's the trick, I took all of those classes, but by the time I finished, I never really intended to work in the field. I'm not going to go out in the field and inspect and x-ray welds. I learned a lot though, I met some really good people and I stayed sane.
When it was all said and done, that was the most important part of the whole thing. It would have been, and was, hard for me to transition from a life where I had been working for 8 years through school and work to build myself a good career, to a job where I did.....nothing. Not that parenting is nothing, it's not and I don't think I ever really felt like it was. I did know that I was pitching my career out the window when I agreed to stay at home. I think a lot of people, whether they're men or women, do this when they leave the work force to raise kids, and it's hard. You take all of the momentum you had in life and you just stop. I don't know that this is harder on men, but I suspect that it is. We still have a societal message that it's noble for women to put taking care of their babies ahead of their career. For men, the idea is still that providing is where it's at, and it's hard to not have that affect you.
Having a plan was important for my transition into being a stay at home dad. I needed to know what I was doing and where I was going in order to not go crazy. I needed to know that if I had to, I could step back into the role of provider. I needed to know that I was working toward being an even better provider than I was when I left work. Even though it didn't work out at all, it was important.

Dad at School

Short post today because I spent the whole morning hanging out at school. Our school has a program called WatchDOGS which is a national organization that works to get more dads in schools. When my wife has a day off I can go spend the day in school reading stories to kids and playing in gym class and eating lunch with the kids and generally just being around. I thought I'd share a few of my observations on the day.
- Kindergartners think I'm awesome. They all want to be right by me and tell me everything that is cool in their lives. Correction, everything cool that has ever happened to them. Ever. They have an endless supply of things they could tell me. I'm a god among kindergartners. I know how movie stars feel now.
- Third graders still think I'm cool. Most of them still want to play with me. They're clearly more self conscious and would like me to like them. By this point it's pretty easy to tell who the cool kids are and who the shy kids are. I relate more with the shy kids because I was that kid. Some of them really really appreciate a simple gesture like passing a basketball back and forth with them for a few minutes. I sometimes forget that a lot of kids have very very little one on one adult interaction.
- Fourth graders are split on me. They either still want to talk to me or are starting to figure out that they might be too cool to talk to a grown up that they don't know. In the one year between third and fourth grade things are even more stratified between the cool kids and the not cool kids. The world hasn't changed much since I was there almost 30 years ago. Again, this makes me a little sad. All kids have trouble with adolescence, but I can see some kids that are having a hard time now and it's probably not going to get better in the next 8 years. I can see my awkward life repeated over and over. I guess nothing ever does change. I've got two, maybe three, years before I'm going to be lame. Well, I'm already lame, but soon these kids will know.
I had fun. I'm an introvert so having that much interaction with people, even little ones, tires me the hell out. I'll be back the next time I have a free day. 800 kids and so many of them know me and like to see me and say hi to me. High fives and smiles and something about today at school that was better than yesterday. Some days you wonder what good you're doing for the world, some days you know.

ETC: Monster Trucks

A monster truck jumping a flipped monster truck. Awesome.

Monster trucks are completely idiotic, and that's what makes them awesome. The world doesn't need monster trucks, they exist purely for entertainment. Every boy (and probably girls too) at one point or another figures out that if you just put bigger tires on your car, you could drive it over everything. You could drive it over cars and your house and even the whole world! It would be awesome! Then you get bigger and realize that you couldn't really do that. Cars are the way they are for a reason and aside from the technical details, you can't just drive over other people's cars, they'd get mad. Even though you know that, there's always just a bit of that little kid in you that still wants to do it.
The monster trucks come to town every year and we've been going to see them for the past five years. It never gets old. They weigh 10,000 pounds and have 1500 horsepower and and they smash cars for goodness sake! The show we go to starts out with head to head racing and ends with a one at a time show off exhibition of jumping and smashing things for style points. All of my kids pick their favorite truck at the beginning of the night and cheer for them. Inevitably there are trucks that roll over and get smashed up. Tires pop and fall right off the wheel. There's carnage, there has to be, it's what a sold out stadium demands. Thousands of fans cheering while the driver climbs on his (or her) upturned, broken, truck with arms raised in victory.

Earphones are needed. It's loud. Very loud.

Monster trucks are one of those things that you have to experience to really feel. It's like the ballet in that respect. You can't believe you'd pay to watch people dance out a story on stage. Sure, it's cute when my kids do it, but miming out a story in dance? Really? Except it's beautiful and moving. And in a way, so are monster trucks. The technology and the work that is required to get 10,000 pounds moving that fast and flying that far and doing it safely for the driver and the fans is pretty amazing. The fact that they don't do it for any purpose other than entertainment is wonderful in it's own way too. If you live someplace where the monster trucks do a show, and if you've ever had, or been, a kid who thought that smashing cars with a big huge truck sounded like a good idea, I highly recommend going. The kids love it, and so do I.

Broken Sleep

It's a Wednesday again, and on Wednesdays I've been writing about pets. I just can't do it today. My ability to transform memories of animals into witty, pithy, coherent stories just isn't happening. For the last three nights my sleep has been broken and my brain is functioning at a fairly low level.

So......very......tired.

My wife is occasionally asked to travel for work. It's usually only overnight, sometimes two nights, very rarely more. Notice that I'm talking about nights of travel, not days, it's nights that really matter. She's such a good mom and wife that when she gets home from work in the evening, she's right in the thick of things. The load of parenting immediately is reduced by half. It's like carrying a really heavy long piece of wood, even if you can pick it up in the middle and handle it by yourself, it's always easier if you have a buddy to grab one end while you get the other. It's lighter and easier to maneuver and you're less likely to accidentally smash it into something. My wife is my buddy, she helps with the load at the end of the day which lets me mentally relax a bit for the three hours between when she gets home and when the kids go to bed. By the time they're in bed I'm pretty chill and if you give me another hour to chat and unwind I'm ready to head off to dreamland. When she's gone though, the load is that much heavier, but more importantly, I have to be fully 'on' until I get the kids tucked in. Even if I'm tired, my brain is still churning. Calming it down and turning it off so I can go to sleep is that much harder and takes that much longer. My bedtime is later and my ability to go to sleep sucks. I go from getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night to getting 3-5. On Monday night I slept for a little over one. My brain was convinced that it had to figure out the optimal third car to buy that I could work on and autocross and still be able to keep the kids safe. Never mind the fact that by Tuesday I'd decided the whole idea was dumb, I needed to figure it out (second generation Subaru Forester if you're wondering). Once I figured it out, at about 3:00 AM, I was able to sleep only until my son woke me up at 4:00 to tell me he had a bad dream. No more sleep for me. I'm rambling here, but you get the point, no sleep. So tired. So so tired.

Bialy Recipe - From The Naked Elm

A bialy is a weird little roll that is sort of a cross between an english muffin and a bagel. They have a depression in the middle that is filled with chopped onions and they are chewy and soft and delicious and perfect. They originated in Bialystok Poland in the mid 1800's with Jewish bakers and were thinly spread around the world with the Jews that were driven out of Poland. I had my first one last summer at The Naked Elm in Blue Mounds Wisconsin before they were open. The Naked Elm is my sister's bakery, and she was testing out all sorts of bread in her new wood fired oven. I fell in love with bialys at first bite and finally demanded that she give me her recipe. The recipe she gave me was the small version of the one she uses in the bakery and made about 24 bialys. That's still way to many for me to make to eat at home so I cut it to a 1/3 recipe. I also converted it from grams to normal measurements because that's the kind of baker I am. So what you've got here is a recipe that has been divided and converted and baked in a different kind of oven than it is intended for with inferior ingredients.  They're still incredible.
The recipe is after the jump, a little advanced maybe, totally worth it.

Quarter Turn Valves

It always surprises me how often it's the small details that avert disaster. In order to really appreciate this, you need to understand how a toilet fills after you flush. In a normal flush, the water from the tank is released into the bowl by the flapper carrying the contents of the bowl and the tank out the bottom and away. When the water in the tank goes down the fill valve opens. The fill valve sends water two places, and this has great consequences. The first, and most obvious place, is into the tank to fill it back up for the next flush. The second is into the bowl to fill it back up to catch the next load. This is all nothing more than a simple curiosity about how the objects in your daily life work, unless of course they stop working. When you push down that handle and release a torrent of water into the bowl, things need to go somewhere. If nothing is moving on down the pipe, you have a whole lot of water trying to occupy the bowl at the same time. This is where your 1/4 turn valve comes into play.

1/4 turn valve, averter of tragedy.

A curious fact about toilets is that they can pretty much all take the regular volume of the bowl and the volume of a flush without overflowing. Barely. Where you get into trouble is with the toilet trying to put that little bit of extra water in the bowl as it fills the tank. This is why, when you're standing watching very bad things float ever higher, the water level continues to rise for a minute no matter how much you beg it to stop. I just did a check on my toilet, I pulled the line that fills the bowl and directed it into a water jug and flushed. My toilet sends just shy of one gallon to the bowl during a fill (almost comically, I was using a one gallon jug to measure and was kind of freaking out as it almost overflowed during the test) One gallon isn't a lot of water, unless it's flowing over the top edge of a toilet bowl that is clogged with things that you really don't want to have to think about cleaning up off the floor. Then all of a sudden, it's a LOT.
That's why when my kids yell from the bathroom "Daddy! There's a problem!" I don't even take the time to figure out whether things are going to come over the top or not. I just dive for the valve and shut off the water. With a standard valve you have to turn turn turn turn turn, oh my god! turn turn turn it's off. Maybe you were quick enough. Maybe not. With a 1/4 turn valve, you just grab and give a quick twist and it's over. Sure, you've still got a clog of god knows what do deal with, but at least you don't have to stand around in socks wet with god knows what while you deal with it. If a 1/4 turn valve saves you just once, it's worth it. It you're like me and live in a house with six people and one toilet that gets hard use, it's worth it's weight in gold.

What's Next? #1

What will you do when they're in school? Are you going back to work? What are you going to do next? Sometimes I wonder how often stay at home moms get these questions, because I get them a LOT. It seems like everybody wants to know what I'm going to do when I'm done. Done? I don't even know what that is. It's true that I don't have babies any more and there aren't any more coming. No more diapers, no more bottles, no more potty training. That's gone. My youngest is still at home all day with the exception of 3 hours twice a week for preschool. For the time being, I'm still needed around here, just not like I was a few years ago. For the first time I'm seriously thinking about what to do when I'm technically done with this whole stay at home dad thing. I think the official end will be the first day of all day school for my last child. From that point on I'll have just shy of 8 hours a day five days a week that I'll be all alone. At that point I won't be a stay at home dad any longer, I'll just be a guy without a job.

I used to be busy with babies. What do I do now?

My wife doesn't like the idea of me getting a job. She's quick to point out that there's an hour between when she's leaves for work and when the kids leave for school. Then there's things like doctors appointments and orthodontist appointments that she never has to worry about. If a kid forgets their lunch, I've got it covered. They're sick? Daddy is here. School holidays are actually a treat for her because so many people have to stay at home with their kids that traffic on the commute is lighter. Quite frankly, she likes being able to focus on work while at work. She likes being on equal footing with the men she works with, they don't have to make special accommodations for her because she has to make sure that her kids are taken care of when she has to go out of town. She can always go, the kids are always taken care of. How much time she wants to spend away is another matter, but she always can. Part of the reason that women get paid less in this country (and many others) for equal work is because they have more family obligations than men. They have to take more time off to take care of sick kids, they have to juggle their schedules more, and they're less able and willing to travel. That's not how it should be, but it's how it is, unless you have some sort of support structure like lots of close family nearby or a stay at home dad backing you up. As long as you have kids, you have an obligation to make sure that if you're not directly taking care of them, somebody is. After school care, sick days, school holidays, and summer vacations all need to be dealt with. I'm well aware that most couples raising kids in America today deal with all of it while both of them work. It's not a matter of whether we could do it in a technical sense, it's a matter of do we want to? My wife has made it quite clear that if it was up to her, she'd rather I did not find a job when all of the kids are in school. Awesome.
Well, sort of awesome. It feels good to be valued that much, I really does, but if I've got almost 8 hours a day by myself, what the hell am I going to do?
To be continued.........

Hair Cuts

I once heard a comedian refer to someone as "the kind of guy who cuts his own hair". I laughed. I'm that guy. Part of it is that I'm socially awkward enough that it's difficult for me to try and tell someone what sort of haircut I want. I have no idea, just shorter, and good looking. I don't know, they're the ones that cut hair for a living, why won't they ever tell me what sort of hair cut I should get? It's too much.
The other part is that I'm fantastically cheap about some things. I generally don't mind paying for things, objects, but I hate paying for services. I don't mind paying $10 a pound for good steak, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay extra for it at a restaurant just because someone else cooks it and washes the dishes. I change my own oil, mow my own lawn, do my own drywall work, and I cut my own hair.

I took my oldest son for one haircut before I decided that I could do it myself. I could save $15 and not have to deal with trying to describe how I wanted my son's hair to look to someone who seemed to be judging my haircut and trying to figure out how such a beautiful kid came from such a weird looking guy. I started by giving hair cuts with scissors. This was greatly facilitated by the fact that my oldest son has curly hair. It's a lot harder to screw up a haircut when the hair is curly and wild anyway. I finally spent the $30 and bought a set of electric clippers with the different guards for height. The haircuts got a bit more consistent, but most importantly they got a lot faster. You can only get kids to sit still for so long and you don't want to have to send them to preschool with a half cut head of hair.
I know this won't last forever. Eventually my sons will discover that having your dad give you a haircut in the kitchen isn't cool. For the time being though, I'm going with it. I'm saving money, saving time, and making stories that my sons and I can tell for years to come. Not only am I the kind of guy who cuts his own hair, I'm the kind of guy who cuts his sons' hair too.

Book I finished this week:
The Bialy Eaters - Mimi Sheraton
Bialys are awesome. They're this small chewy onion topped roll that's sort of a cross between an english muffin and a bagel. They're even better than that though. On Tuesday I'll share a bialy recipe and admit that I can't make them as well as they should be made. One of the fascinating things about bialys is that their place of origin is well known. They come from Bialystok Poland. They were a bread baked and eaten by the local Jewish population. Bialystok is still there, but the Jews that baked them, and the bialys themselves aren't. The Germans and the Poles wiped out the Jews in Bialystok and with them went the bread that they baked and ate. Those that left, either before, during, or after that horrible time, took the knowledge of that bread with them. Mostly it's their memories of it, but in some places, it's bialys themselves. This book tells the story of the roll and the people connected with it. The author explores the current world of bialys and the connections it has with Bialystok. It's a fascinating and quick read. If you enjoy reading about food, it has to be on your list.

ETC: Polar Bear Polar Bear

I've been posting about food on Tuesdays and Thursdays but I'm going to mix things up. It's not that I'm running out of recipes, in fact I have a backlog of food to write about, it's just that I want to try something different for a bit. I'll still be writing about food on Tuesdays, but on Thursday I'm starting a new piece that I call Entertain The Children.
Everyone who has children does stuff with them. Whether it's reading books or watching movies or going out to do things, we do stuff with our kids. Anybody who has had their two year old bring them a terrible book over and over knows that not all entertainment is created equal. Some books are fun for your kids but simply terrible for you. There are some kids books that I love that my kids want to hide from me so I won't read it to them again. The same applies to movies and outings and everything else. I'm going to try and write about things that have had appeal for both me and the kids. These are things that we have done together that have made us all happy. When everyone is happy, well, everyone is happy.
I'm going to start with the favorite book of our kids when they were very little. This is the first book that they sat through willingly and wanted read to them over and over. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I've read it thousands of times. Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do You Hear by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle is one of the greats. Some people like Brown Bear Brown What Do You See, and it's good, but with that you're just looking at stuff. When you read Polar Bear, you're listening. Not just to the words, but to the animal sounds. In order to read the book right, you, as a dad, need to make the sounds. You need to growl like a polar bear, roar like a lion, snort like a hippopotamus, flute like a flamingo, bray like a zebra, hiss like a boa constrictor, trumpet like an elephant, snarl like a leopard, yelp like a peacock bellow like a walrus and whistle like a zoo keeper. Make the noises, make them real. Ask your kids to make them back. We first learn speech by mimicking and all of my kids could mimic the animal noises that I made even before they could mimic my words. There's probably something fundamentally educational going on here.

By the time they're about 3 they move on to bigger and better things, but for a few years, I never got tired of growling and snarling and fluting and whistling. It's a good time, a great book to share.

Snails

When my kids look outside there are a lot of animals they think they want as pets. Squirrels, birds, foxes, bears, snakes, lizards, there's no end to what they think is a good idea to keep in the house. Growing up we had raccoons and crows and hatched turtles and snakes, and recently we had Baby Deer live with us for a while, but I still think that trying to keep wild creatures as pets is a bad idea. I have one exception to that though, snails. Wild snails make great short term pets. In the right season, they're easy to find, they're easy to care for, they're interesting, and they're durable. In the spring you can check under boards that your kids leave laying in the yard or under rocks or any other place that snails might hide during the day. Every now and then you find them in the morning stuck to the side of the house or a car tire if they haven't made it back into hiding before sunrise. Be gentle when you pick them up, you don't want to hurt their foot making them let go of whatever it is they're hanging onto. Snails have to be the easiest wild animal to catch.
Once you've caught your snail, pretty much any container with a lid will work to keep them. We use old peanut butter jars that have been washed well. Put a little dirt in the bottom, a few sticks, and a leaf or two to crawl around on. Add just a bit of water to make it moist and your habitat is done. Feeding is as simple as putting a small piece of cabbage leaf inside the habitat. The leaf stays good for anywhere from 4 days to a week. When it looks bad, change it. A $2 head of cabbage could feed an army of snails for a year. You'd better find a way to eat the rest of it.
That's really all there is to it. The snails crawl around and eat the cabbage and explore the jar and it's really cool to watch. I like to keep the jar in the middle of the kitchen table as a living centerpiece. It's fun to sit down to dinner and watch the snails crawl along. Like all pets, your kids will get sick of the snails. When you have a dog, this sort of thing is a problem. You're sort of stuck with the dog until it gets old and dies or your kids move out and you can pass it on with them. With a snail, you just go out the the back yard and let it go where you found it. It has spent anywhere from a few days to a few months living in the lap of luxury eating as much cabbage as it could stuff down it's little snail throat. Now it can head off back into the wild and tell it's snail friends about the awesome time it had. You're happy, the kids are happy, the snail is happy, and when you want another one, just head out back and flip over a board. Snails rule.