Double Digits

I had to update the 'about me' section off to the side of my posts because my daughter had a birthday a little while ago. She made it to double digits, 10 is a pretty big deal. You're in the single digits for 10 years, but doubles for the next 89. That means that I also made it to double digits on this job. I've never done that before. Aside from my marriage, I've never done anything for 10 years in a row. Not school, not work, nothing. Just parenting.
I'm trying really hard to enjoy these few brief years where I'm done with babies but I don't have teenagers yet. No diapers, no boyfriends, just raising kids. Always trying to enjoy and appreciate the day that I've woken up to. Maybe every day won't be like that, but today is, and I'm happy. 

ETC: Harold and the Purple Crayon

Harold and the Purple Crayon was written in 1955 by Crockett Johnson, so if you're reading this then you've likely read it as a kid, or to your kids, or even to your grandkids. The fact that the book has continuously been in print for almost 60 years lets you know that it has staying power. The story follows Harold as he decides to go for a walk at night. It's dark and he draws everything he sees with his purple crayon. In fact, everything in the stories, except for Harold himself comes from his crayon. It's a whimsical story that sees Harold get scared, save himself, get hungry, be kind, explore, and make it home in time to tuck himself in for bed. The kids love it and I love reading it to them.
Crockett Johnson wrote and illustrated a total of seven books about Harold and his adventures. In the edition we have, The Adventures of Harold and the Purple Crayon, Four Magical Stories, we have the origional Harold and The Purple Crayon as well as Harold's Fairy Tale, Harold's Trip to the Sky, and Harold's Circus. They're all great stories. The books have all been made into animated shorts and they're quite good. The also spawned a follow up cartoon series on TV that wasn't as good. That series spun off some books and they're ok, but not as good as those Mr. Johnson wrote himself. Stick to the originals here.
The Harold books tell simple well told stories about a little boy who is imaginative, self reliant, and very creative. They're truly childhood classics and well worth adding to your bookshelf.

Dummy Bird - Part 3

In Dummy Bird - Part 1 my dad I and killed a bunch of crows and inherited their babies. In Dummy Bird - Part 2 I raised the little guys on the dresser in my bedroom. I learned a lot about baby birds and gave three of the four birds away to good homes, leaving me the obnoxious and adorable Dummy Bird. It's time to wrap things up.
Other than waking me up at the crack of dawn every damn day, Dummy Bird was a really cool pet. He was very social and always wanted to be out playing with me. Having him out it the house was always a danger because evolution has not given birds the ability to control when they poop. I always had to try and guess how long you had before something stinky happened, sometimes I was right, sometimes I had to clean up. I'd put a towel down on the back of the couch and he'd hop along and mess with my hair and squawk at the cats and have a jolly good time. His real joy was going outside. He loved hopping around on the grass and messing with stuff. Grass, sticks, bugs, flowers, it was all fascinating to him. He was sort of trying to learn how to fly but he mostly hopped and he got around pretty good. When I wanted to go somewhere faster than he hopped, I'd try to get him to sit on my shoulder. In case you're wondering, yes, he pooped on me, I considered it just part of having a crow. He liked my shoulder, but he LOVED to ride on my head. He could see better and it really was his favorite spot. Yes, he pooped on my head too. I washed my hair a lot for a teenage boy. You had to be careful with him during the middle of the day. Being black he absorbed a lot of heat from the sun and could overheat quite quickly, panting crows look weird and he never did figure out how to find shade by himself. He was intelligent, but maybe not smart. I really wanted to take him out and use him to try and pick up girls. If girls liked puppies, they would certainly fall for a crow, right? That idea never came to pass due to the fact that I could never be sure that he'd stay safe. He was always jumping off my head whenever he felt like it and I was sure he'd get hurt. It's probably best that it never happened, even though I thought I'd be the super cool guy with the crow, really I would have been the weird kid covered in bird poop. I didn't think things all the way through.
Click thorough the jump for the ending.

Watch Your Dough Man!

Release me........

In my unending quest to promote home bread baking, I want to show you what happens if you forget that you have dough rising for a couple of extra hours. It's not ruined, it just gets big and climbs out of the bowl. Ooops. I punched this batch of dough down and put it in the pan for it's final rise and it turned out great. If you're running a bakery, consistency is really important, people want to buy a consistent product. If you're making bread at home, you can ignore a lot of what you read about baking bread. Too much water? It'll be fine. Too stiff? Probably be okay too. Too little yeast? Things will just take longer. Too much yeast? Things happen faster. First rise too short? Second rise will take care of it. First rise too long? Punch that sucker down and forget about it. It turns out that baking bread at home isn't as precise and demanding as all of those bread books will have to believe. All you need is some flour, water, salt and yeast (either tame or wild) and you're good. Everything else about bread can vary quite a lot and it'll still turn out fine. There's some sort of allegory for life and parenting here, but I'll be darned if I know what it is. There are lots of different routes to great bread, and great kids, and a great marriage, sometimes you've just got to give it a go and be happy with great results, even if they're not quite what you expected when you started.

Winning!

Winning! But not really. Damn.

I went autocrossing again this weekend. I had a really good time and I felt that I drove much better than the last event. I was a super smiley guy when I walked in the door. Later that evening I checked the results online and found out that I didn't actually do as well against my competition as I had thought. I was still slow, and probably just about as slow as I was the last time. The great feelings of driving well slowly evaporated as I started at the charts of lap times.
When my kids play sports, on teams, or against each other, or even against me, I'm supposed to tell them that having fun is more important than winning. Their soccer league doesn't even keep score, instead focusing on playing the game and having fun. The kids keep score though, they always do. No matter how much we try to de-emphasize winning, the kids are always keeping track of it. It's human nature, we like to compete, and when we do, we like to win. It's more than that though. We don't like sucking at things. It's more fun to shoot an arrow and have it hit the center of the target than miss by a foot, even if you're the only one there. It's more fun to play a musical instrument well than poorly, even if you never perform. It's better to place third in your age group than fourth at the local 5K race. It's clearly better to cook a good dinner than a bad one, even if your wife will love you either way. Everything is a joy when it's done well.

So how do we reconcile this as a parent? How do you make sure that winning isn't the only measure of success while at the same time acknowledging that that winning really is very important to the person involved in the activity? I'm not sure that I know the answer to that. I think that paying attention to your kids feelings is pretty important. Having empathy when they lose badly is more important than trying to make they feel good even though they were crushed by a superior opponent. At the same time, you need to share their joy at winning while reminding them of the joy in just doing something well, and that their opponents might be feeling pretty bad. Competition, winning and losing, doing something successfully, is as much about emotion as anything else.
I'm 36 and a dad to four. and even I get bent when the competitions I participate in don't go as well as I'd like. I'm going to work hard to remember that as I'm parenting my kids through their wins and losses this year. Hopefully I can at least win at that.

Ready....Fight!

Combing through old pictures and I came across a sequence of two photos that make me glad that I'm a parent during the age of digital photograpy. I know that the abilitly to take picture after picture without fear of the cost can cause picture overload, but the ability to snap off a few in a row can give you a sense of motion that is lacking when you're only snapping one at a time and conserving film for later. The computer has become the old shoe box of photos in the back of the closet. It's still just as fun.

Ready.........

Fight!

Fire!

This is the week of me writing about my kids doing dangerous inappropriate things. First the bow and arrow, not fire. Every summer my son has a cookout on his birthday for his birthday dinner. Like all boys, he's much more interested in the fire than in the hot dogs. This past summer he learned how to burn things with a magnifying glass and a couple of times during the summer I let him light up piles of paper and cardboard that needed to be burned, as well as letting him start his cookout fire. Give a boy a taste of freedom and  you can't take it back. He's been itching to start some sort of fire down here in Texas and I had told him that if he could figure out how to start one with a bow drill then it was ok by me. He's been working on a bow drill for months on and off. Finally he was figuring that it wasn't going to happen and he had been begging me to let him use a lighter to start a fire. Starting a fire is one thing, playing with a lighter is quite another and I told him no. A week ago I met him half way and let him use my Swedish Fire Steel to make sparks and see what he could do. I showed him how it works and told him to go research how to make fire with it. Well, he's spent some time on youtube looking up videos and he's pretty much got it mastered. The boy is a fire starter.
Like with the bow and arrow, I have conflicting thoughts. He's a regular boy and he wants to mess with dangerous stuff like fire. On one hand, I really don't want him burned. On the other hand, if he's going to end up doing it anyway I might as well show him how to do is safely and let him do it when conditions are right so that he doesn't burn down the neighborhood. We live in a place where pretty much everyone burns their leaves and other yard debris, so having a small fire is fine. Hopefully by teaching him how to do it right, how to be safe and how to judge weather conditions he'll learn when things are safe. For now, I still have control of when the fires are started and I'd rather know that things are burning than be surprised by it. I'm aware that this whole thing might backfire, and his ability to start fires at the drop of a hat could get him badly hurt or in serious trouble. It sucks, but there's no real right answers in parenting a lot of the time. So much depends on the individual children, who they are, and how life is when you have to decide on these sorts of things. Not everyone is ready to go out back and start fires when they're 8, but then again, sometimes they are.

ETC: Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep

I've got another set of shows to watch that I heartily approve of. We'll start with the DVD that's in the title, Wallace & Gromit, Three Amazing Adventures. These movies follow our hapless hero, Wallace, and his more intelligent and resourceful dog, Gromit. They are stop motion animation done by the same group that did Chicken Run and the newer movie The Pirates: Band of Misfits and they are brilliant. They involve inventions that are improbable and wacky that always misfunction. Wallace gets himself into trouble and Gromit saves him, every time. It's not a new formula but it's done so well that the kids and I are always entertained. There is a third 30 minute show on DVD, A Matter of Loaf and Death, and a feature length film, The Curse of the Were Rabbit. All are worth it.
In the third show on this disk, A Close Shave,  you're introduced to Shaun the Sheep. He's a minor character in the episode and you might think it ends there. However, if you have Netflix and can stream shows, it gets better. Shaun the Sheep went on to live with a farmer and his dog Blitzer and he became the head of the flock. They had 26 adventures over two seasons of production and have quite a few other specials out there. The comedy is all physical, there is no speaking outside of baas from the sheep and barks from the dog. The farmer only grumbles, and he does that a lot. These shows are at the absolute top of what anyone should watch on Netflix if they have children. We should be crashing their servers with our demand on movie nights. I'm serious, it's that good.
If your kids are going to sit down and watch TV, you should sit down next to them. If you're going to sit down next to them, you might as well be watching something awesome. At the top of that list should be Wallace and Gromit, and Shaun the Sheep.

Dummy Bird - Part 2

Last week when I left all of you in suspense at the end of Dummy Bird - Part 1,  I had four naked baby crows living in my bedroom. I learned a lot of respect for crow parents in those first days. Baby crows are hungry all the time. At 17 I didn't realize that really all babies are hungry all the time so this new responsibility took me by surprise. You can't go to the store and buy baby crow food, so we improvised. Under the direct supervision of a veternarian (my parents) we decided that wet cat food would probably contain all of the nutrition that a growing baby crow would need and would be easy for them to swallow. Think about it, adult crows regurgitate food for their chicks, and wet cat food already looks like it's been thrown up by something, why not an adult crow? I'd mix the food with a bit of water to soften it and form it into little balls. With the whole batch of crows pointing their open mouths to the sky I'd place ball after ball in and watch them disappear. After a while they'd start to get bigger and bigger and when they were so full they looked sure to pop they'd settle down and do what all well fed babies do, fall asleep. In a wild crow nest food can be at a premium so the most aggressive chick gets the most food. In my nest, everyone ate all they wanted, and they grew. Oh how they grew.
The baby crows needed to eat every four hours or so during the day. My parents worked, and school was close to home, and they were my crows, so I was voted the man for the job. The only hitch was that back when I was in school, we had a closed campus, which meant I couldn't leave. A quick call from my mom led me to one of the greatest rule breaking triumphs of my high school career. The principal at the time was a guy who took the word 'pal' out of principal. Couple that with my propensity to be at the site, though never the cause, of every major violation during the school year and I was not on friendly terms with him. It brought me no end of joy to drive past him as he guarded the parking lot to bust people trying to sneak out at lunch, and just smile and wave as I drove past. He hated that my mom had given me permission to break his rules for something so incredibly weird as feeding baby crows. How do you even argue against something like that? It's not like you're all of a sudden going to have a bunch of other students leaving to feed their baby crows, and even he didn't want to be the guy responsible for the death of a bunch of baby birds. It was awesome.
Click past the jump to read more about the crows.

Strawberries and Whipped Cream

Strawberries and whipped cream is such a simple delicious dessert. It give your kids a serving of fruit and a kick of healthy dairy based fat with very little sugar. In order for it to really be good, you need to make whipped cream from scratch though. It's quick, easy and it's always better than anything you buy in a plastic bowl or a spray can.

Whipped Cream - From Betty Crocker's New Cookbook
For 1 cup of whipped cream:
1/2 cup heavy/whipping cream
1 tsp powdered sugar (granulated will work, but powdered mixes in better)
1 tsp vanilla (optional, but not really because it's soooo much better with vanilla)
Put it all in a chilled bowl and whisk until you get whipped cream. That's it. Really. Whip longer for stiffer whipped cream, less for softer, we all have our preference. Too much and you end up with butter, so be careful. If you have a mixer with a whisk you might need to make a double batch with one cup of cream to really let the mixer make enough contact with the cream to whip it. Experiment. Also, you can vary the sweetness of the whipped cream. Less sugar when you're putting it on something sweet like angel food cake with chocolate syrup, more sugar with something like tart berries. You can add all sorts of other extracts like lemon or mint instead of vanilla if you want to get all crazy. Whipped cream is extremely simple and yet has the option to go wherever your imagination can take it.
I'm a little shocked that people buy whipped cream to be honest. We almost always have a quart of cream in the fridge and whip up a batch whenever we have something to put it on, at least once a week. Pull out a whisk and a bowl and make some whipped cream this weekend to put on something. Strawberries are easy and healthy. Your world will be better for making your own whipped cream, I promise.

Well Armed

My son saved up his money from allowance and other sources and bought himself a bow. This was a pretty big step because he's now moving from toys to weapons. It's serious. It's a purchase he's wanted to make for a while, but until now we didn't give him permission. We set up a cardboard target and I taught him the basic safety rules and let him at it. He spent several afternoons shooting arrows before losing one. It actually took longer than I thought it would. Then he decided that he was ready to hunt squirrels in the yard. We went over the rule about knowing what you're shooting at, and what's behind it, and no shooting in the air. It didn't take him long to lose his second arrow. Now he's sitting around without any arrows thinking about what he could have done differently. We'll be out and about soon and will be able to pick him up more, but this thinking time is good.
Weapons and kids are a funny thing. My kids have Nerf swords and a Nerf guns and have a ball with them. Even with those toy weapons around, my son still wanted to make a bow out of a branch and some string, and arrows out of smaller sticks. He desperately wants to shoot the bb gun that I have locked away. It's not enough that he gets to shoot something, he wants to go farther, bigger, more dangerous. The safety of the Nerf products doesn't fuel his needs. I'm sure he'd be out back launching a bazooka if he could. Even though kids aren't allowed to play guns at school these days, that hasn't taken away their desire to. They have knowledge of these things that are dangerous and exciting and want to try them. I could probably clamp down and prevent them from touching any weapons at home, but that wouldn't really change the nature of the problem from a parenting standpoint. The problem is that weapons are inherently dangerous, and we don't want our kids to get hurt. The path my wife and I have chosen is to introduce them when appropriate for each child, and teach them how to use them as safely as possible. Shooting a bow isn't any more exciting if you're ignorant and dangerous than it is if you're knowledgeable and safe.
If you choose to let your kids cross the line between toys and weapons, take a few minutes and teach them how to do it properly. If they're not mature enough to take the rules seriously, then they're not ready at all. When they're ready though, you can help give them the proper information to make good choices and be as safe as possible with something that is by its very nature, dangerous.

Supervised Scrubbing

I like to keep my cars clean, even though I don't always keep up as well as I should, and the kids always want to help me. I'm weird about washing cars though, and it always makes me nervous when they start attacking the cars with anything. I'm always worried that they'll drop the sponge in the dirt and pick it back up and just start scrubbing. With dirt from our dirt driveway stuck to the sponge, that would be pretty close to rubbing the car with sandpaper. It freaks me out and I spend more time watching them and worrying about what they're up to than I do washing myself. It's pretty stressful.
I've finally figured out a compromise that lets them scrub to their hearts content, and lets me not worry about them. They get to wash the wheels and the tires, and I get to wash the rest of the car. They have to start with the shiny parts, the wheels, and then move to the black parts, the tires. They can understand that and they do a good job. They have their own sponge and brush for their jobs and by the time they're done with all four they're pretty bored with the work and are ready to move on to some other adventure. This has made car washing so much more relaxing for me. I can focus on doing a good job and I don't have to worry that they're abrasively scrubbing hundreds of dollars of paint off the other side of the car.
Teaching my kids how to do jobs around the house is one of those really trying parts of being a dad. There are very few things that I can't do quicker and better by myself. I keep having to remind myself that much of what I have them do is really a benefit for them, not for me.

My Wife's Lawnmower

We have two lawnmowers. One is a beat up old push mower with a deck that is rusting through that is almost impossible to start. It's a very manly mower. The other mower is my wife's. Hers is self propelled and electric start and quite nice really. I bought it for her last year after I killed her old self propelled lawnmower, which was also quite nice. I hit a stump and bent the crank an it died. I felt bad, but not so bad that I ran out and got a new one. I still had my old one and it still mostly ran and I did 90% of the lawn mowing anyway. Even though I'm a stay at home dad and I cook dinner and do the laundry and have raised four babies, I still sort of feel that mowing the lawn is man stuff. It makes no sense, I know that, but knocking down a field of wild grass into a smooth sheet of green feels manly.
My wife likes to help though, and if I only have the one impossible old mower then she can't. So I went out and bought her the really nice mower. I set it up. I showed her how to use the new fangled electric start. She was really happy and mowed the lawn once. Then it stopped raining. For about 8 months. Only recently has it started again and the grass is finally starting to wake up. The other day I couldn't find the guineas because they were walking through the grass, which let me know that it was probably time to start mowing again. I got out my wife's mower just to make sure that it still worked, just in case she wanted to mow later. It's a nice mower. Don't tell her this, but I liked mowing with it, my old mower kind of sucks.

ETC: The Elephant Alphabet Book

Reading is important. It's really important. It's really really important. Reading well above grade level is probably the biggest advantage that you can give your kids in school. It makes every single thing in school easier. I'm never going to promote those teach your baby to read type programs that you see on TV. Those are just silly. What I will always promote is good old fashioned sit down with your kids and learn phonics based reading. Read to them a lot. Teach them their letters. Teach them the letter sounds. Point to the words when you read them and all of that jazz. It's not hard and it's worked for a lot of kids for a very long time. Repetition is important to learning and since you end up reading certain books over and over and over to your kids anyway, you should try and make sure that one of them is an alphabet book. Big letters, not abstract, pretty pictures with them, bright colors. Flip the page and ask them what the letter is. Make the sound. Make sure that the text of the book uses the sounds over and over with a particular letter. The word move becomes MMMMMMMMove when you read it. The word balloon becomes BBBBBBalloon.
We've taught all of our kids their letters and sounds with The Elephant Alphabet Book by Gene Yates. It has worked well, but there is no reason to choose this one over any other. As you can see from the picture, we even got it on super sale at a half priced book store. When the kids are in that two to three and a half range they seem ripe to really learn the alphabet and the sounds. At least 3 or 4 times a week I'd have them pick a book to read and I'd grab the Elephant Alphabet Book and we'd sit down and read them both. It's not structured learning and it doesn't feel like it. It's just reading books. It's interacting with your kid as you point at the letters and say them and them have them repeat them.
I can't stress how important I think it is to teach your kids to read. Imagine a world where all kindergartners could read at a basic level the first day. Imagine a world where all of the six graders could read at a high school level. Think of the savings in teaching time and frustration. Think of the resources that would free up for those kids that truly have learning disabilities and really need extra outside help learning to read. This is a big deal, and all it takes is a book and time on the couch reading it with your child.

Dummy Bird - Part 1

Pour yourself a drink and pull up a chair. I've got a pet story that has all of the great elements. The follies of youth, joy, pain, tragedy, and most importantly, a pet that nobody should have as a pet.
Growing up, I hunted a lot. I seldom ventured afield without my dad. We hunted deer and pheasants in the fall. We hunted rabbits all winter. We hunted turkeys in the spring. The only time we didn't hunt was summer, and then we fished. My dad had grown up hunting just about everything and is quite the woodsman. We spent a lot of time together and he taught me a lot. Even though he knew a lot before I ever showed up, he was still learning every time he went into the woods and that's one of the best things he passed on to me. When he was young there weren't any turkeys in Michigan to hunt, in fact, turkeys were extinct in Michigan by the early 1900's. They were re-introduced in 1954 and the population reached huntable levels by the early 1980's. It's quite a success story. The first year we turkey hunted was in 1988 when I was 12. My dad got some great instruction from some experienced turkey hunters and became quite a great turkey caller and hunter. What does this any of this have to do with pets you might be asking yourself. Well, let me explain in a very round about way. Turkey hunting is a little odd in that you have specific hours that you can hunt them. I'm not sure what they are now, but at the time of this story you had to be done hunting by about 2:00 in the afternoon, which left you with the whole rest of the day to kill time. Part of every turkey callers arsenal is a crow call. By blowing a crow call, you can sometimes 'shock' a tom turkey into gobbling and giving away his location. You can also call crows with it.

Click through to learn how a crow call can lead you down a path that you might never expect.

Bacon Week

It's spring break this week and due to an overlap of my wife's work commitments and my exceptionally poor planning we're not taking any trips. It's not that we're not doing anything, there's a lot of sword fighting and robot programming and that sort of thing going on, so we're still having fun. We're also having bacon week.
We get up and make bacon for breakfast on most weekends. It's such a lovely meat. This weekend we were sitting down to eat it, and my wife commented that since we were home this week we could have bacon every day. She meant it as sort of a joke. I took it as a challenge. Saturday and Sunday we had bacon at breakfast. Monday we had grilled bacon and cheese sandwiches. Tonight we're having bacon and spinach stuffed pork roast. Tomorrow will probably just be bacon for breakfast again though I may head off and find a recipe for bacon muffins or something depending on my motivation level. Thursday is bacon pizza. Friday I'd like to do something with bacon and seafood. Maybe bacon wrapped shrimp, maybe some sort of bacon and salmon dish. People don't mix bacon and aquatic foods as much as they should. That would be a whole week of bacon right there, but I'll probably extend it into next weekend just because I can. Nine days of bacon.
There are no recipes in this food post because I haven't cooked anything bacon related yet that is deserving of one. I will pass on a bacon related tip though. All of that bacon grease that's left in the pan when you're done cooking, save that. Put it in a jar and put it in the fridge. It's the best oil ever for making popcorn the old fashioned way in a pan. The smoke point is high and it makes the popcorn fantastic. Do this, your life will be better for it.

Shopping With One

Counting boards. Waiting for a changing room is fun....with one.

My wife had the day off on Friday and she needed some new shirts for work. The three big kids were in school, so we went to the mall with just the youngest one. It was awesome. I spent the whole time in a giddy haze of relaxation. I kept wondering if people who decided to stop at one child had this much fun when they went out. After mentioning this wonderment to my equally joyful wife, she pointed out that people that only have one don't have the proper reference point to properly enjoy it. They have two sets of eyes for one child. They have four hands between them for holding only one small hand at a time leaving them three hands for other tasks. If everyone uses the bathroom at the same time then one of you is using the bathroom alone. What a novelty! When stopping at the mall play area you only have to watch one child. When trying on clothes my wife could just leave my son with me, no mobs of wrestling children, nobody wandering off in the clothes racks, no one trying to go into or out of changing rooms at the very wrong time. The world is so much different with only one child. Yes, I needed italics to properly show how much different it is, it's that different.
I love having a big family and I wouldn't trade it for anything. Every time I'm peacefully getting dinner ready and there is a mass sword fight in the living room, I'm thankful. When they're all out back building a fort and I'm reading a book, I know how lucky I am. When we're all crammed on the couch together watching a movie I love the fact that we couldn't sit apart even if we wanted to, we have to snuggle. I love my big crazy family, but by god, I know enough to appreciate the simple joy of a day out with one.

Blog Updates

Thanks for reading. Have a cheesy poof.

I've been pretty successful in my goal to post here six days a week. I want to build up content on the blog as well as give myself practice writing and meeting deadlines. It's all going to plan so far. What I didn't anticipate was the sheer volume of stuff I would accumulate in a short time. There's a lot of stuff here, somewhere over 150 posts as I write this. I always intended this blog to not only be entertaining, but also to be a resource for stay at home dads.  I've realized that I needed some organization for that to happen.
To make things easier I've added two things to the blog. The first is a search bar off to the right. Put in any term and you'll find out if I've written about it. The second is post labels. At the bottom of many posts now you'll find a little section where the post is labeled. If you click that little blue word, it will take you to all of the posts with the same label. There is also a group of possible labels on the right side if you scroll down. Now if you're looking for something to cook, you can just click the food label and all of the food posts will come up. I'm hoping that some stay at home dads out there will find this useful. I know I would have.
I'm also experimenting with the ability to write posts ahead of time and schedule them for a later post date. This way, I can get motivated and write several posts in one day and set them to post automatically in the future. To you, the reader, it will continue to look like I'm busy and productive day to day. I'm hoping it will allow me to slack off and not have you notice.
I want to thank everyone who continues to read what I write. I hope that I'm as entertaining to you as you are motivating to me.

Little Girls Love....

Little girls love dogs, right? And little girls love boxes too. So what could possibly be better for a little girl than a tiny dog in a great big cardboard box?
I'm always amazed that people take their kids in to get pictures professionally taken. I know, the picture quality is better than what I've taken, but it's not the same. This is what I like to remember from their childhood. Not a giant plastic block in a studio. But a semi freaked out Boston Terrier in a cardboard box in Grandma's living room. That's a memory worth preserving.

ETC: Day at the Races

Real race car, real fun.

A few weekends ago I took my son to the SCCA regional races at MSR Houston. It was a long drive and a long day but it was worth it for the both of us. I'd read about SCCA club racing for years and I think I would really like to try it. It seemed to make sense to at least go and visit and see if it was everything I thought it could be. It was. These are real amateur racers racing real race cars. It's not quite what you see on TV, but there are some real advantages to that. The big one is that we could walk around the paddock and just ogle the cars. I pointed out some interesting production based cars to my son as well as some normal road cars that were pretty incredible. We also got to see a few real purpose built race cars. At one point we came around the edge of a trailer and saw a gentleman working on a Formula Vee. I wanted to point out to him that it was the same kind of car that he had seen watching Mighty Machines on TV. Well, the nice guy working on the car saw us and waved us over to talk. It turns out he was the father of the driver, Charlie Hearn, and was getting the car ready for the race. He talked about the car and insisted that we stay while he buttoned things up so my son could sit in the car. It was a real treat. We cheered him on in the race and he was doing very well until transmission troubles put him out of the race.
We had a great father son day and truthfully it was probably as much entertain the daddy as it was entertain the children.

Spider Migration

Disturbingly, not a big one.

It's spring again, and that means that the spiders are moving. My theory is that they're on some sort of massive migration and they're simply moving through the house rather than living in it. Whatever it is, we see a LOT more spiders this time of year. For a very long time, as the man of the house, I was the sole spider catcher. Yes, that's spider catcher, not spider killer. My migration theory makes is seem kind of mean to kill them, as they're just passing through. I catch them under a cup or a jar and slide a magazine under the whole contraption and move them out. After years of doing this alone, I have finally convinced the kids that it's ok to give it a try. They've gotten quite good at it and I'm usually only called out for the big ones. I'm a proud daddy.
The other day they captured one that was carrying around her egg sack. Somehow my son got it in his head that the right thing to do with it was to keep it and build it a habitat in a jar and take it to school for a class pet. I convinced him that punching air holes in the lid was a bad idea with how tiny baby spiders are. Oddly, his teacher thinks that stuff like this is great, and the spider is living somewhat happily in class now. I can't tell if she's a brilliant educator or just slightly confused about what the word 'spider' actually means. I am interested to hear if the babies hatch though.
Even though it's pet Wednesday on the blog, I certainly don't consider the spiders in our house pets. They're more along the lines of the resident fauna. We coexist with them as peacefully as we can and we've made a slightly uneasy peace with them. In another month or so the spider traffic will calm down considerably as their theorized migration comes to an end, and we'll see very little of them until next spring. That's a really good thing.

Dumplings

There are a few different foods that are referred to as dumplings. I haven't made Asian style dumplings yet and apple dumplings are for another post. What I'm writing about today I call traditional savory dumplings. They're very similar to biscuits, but they're cooked right on top of a lightly boiling stew or soup. They add a bit of thickening to the stew and they're simply fantastic. Other than their taste, their main advantage is that they don't require any extra pans making cleanup just as simple as before. These are the simplest easiest way to add a home made starch to your meal from both a prep, a cooking, and a cleanup standpoint. What's not to like?

Basic Savory Dumplings - from King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion
Note: This is is double batch which is perfect for my family of 6 in a 10 inch pot. Adjust as needed.

Ingredients:
One pot of lightly boiling stew or soup
2 cups flour
1 1/5 tsp salt
1 tbs baking powder
4 tbs butter
1 cup milk

Mix the flour, salt, and baking powder in a bowl. Cut the butter into small pieces and cut into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or pastry fork or whatever technique you would normally use to make biscuits. I prefer a pastry cutter. Add the milk and mix gently until it's all stuck together. Let it stand for 10 minutes. Using a spoon or your fingers, drop balls of dough about the size of a golf ball into the stew. I get between 8 and 15 balls depending on the mood I'm in. Doesn't seem to matter, it always turns out great. Let the dumplings cook uncovered in the simmering stew for 10 minutes uncovered. Cover and cook for 10 more minutes. Remove from heat and serve.
If you want to spice things up you can add a bit of garlic powder or rosemary or a pinch of cayenne pepper or whatever sounds good. Different soups are complimented by different flavors so experiment and see what you can come up with. Dumplings are fantastic.

Financial Warfare

I drove my new car at an autocross yesterday. How I did (badly) is much less interesting than the fact that I got to spend the day hanging out with a bunch of people that are normally outside my social circle. Car events are fun like that. You get people of all ages from all walks of life that happen to all like cars. They range from people that like terrible cheap little cars like mine, to people that are willing and able to spend many many multiples of that for something that isn't anything more than a toy to play with on weekends. Variety. It's fun.
I had conversations with two people from the weekend that made me think a quite a lot about money and relationships and raising kids. Both of them were guys, and both of them had wives that didn't work, so it was fun to contrast and compare with my own situation. The first talk was with a young man with an adorable 7 week old baby that was there at the races. I spent about two hours working the course with him and he liked to talk. He's young, still in college, has a wife and a baby. He went out of his way to make it clear that spending money on his car was what was important to him even though his wife disagreed. Now, it might have been nothing more than a show of testosterone, I don't really know, but he was bragging about spending money he wouldn't even have for a few weeks on his car, which was pissing off his new postpartum wife. The second conversation I had occured because I wasn't willing to give up my seat in the shade. I found a great covered picnic table where I could rest between working and driving. About 5 minutes later a whole car club of quite well off older folks showed up to have a pizza party at that spot. I stayed and got sucked into their conversation, they were really very nice. Among all of the things discussed, the one that struck me was a gentleman talking about how his wife demanded something for the house every time he bought a new car. New furniture, a room redone, something. This last time she decided that he had spent enough money that she wanted a whole new house and she was shopping for floor plans. Again, this is mostly guys, sitting around in a very many environment telling stories, so it's hard to pull the truth out of it completely, but it was interesting to listen to and think about.
Click through the jump if you want to read more.

Miss Me?

I missed my first scheduled post yesterday and I apologize. I wanted to comb through old pictures until I found something cute and write about some aspect of parenting. Instead I took my son to basketball in the morning, then came home to pick up my other son and take him to a birthday party, then came home again and made 10 pizzas for my daughters birthday party which was here at the house. I started out at 8:30 and wasn't done for 13 hours. Today I went to an autocross and was gone all day again. Instead of catching up entertaining you, I entertained myself instead. I did have a jolly good time. I'll get back on track tomorrow. I promise. To tide you over, here is a picture of a very little girl with a very big llama.

Quick Release Toilet Seat

This is just so cool.

After I finished painting the bathroom recently I decided to celebrate with a new toilet seat. I never knew you could wear out a toilet seat until I potty trained four kids. The wear and tear of putting a training seat on the regular seat 1000 times a day just wore the surface out. When I started shopping I was amazed to discover that a great leap forward had been made in toilet seats. If you looked, you could now find them with quick release tabs on the back. This was huge. Seriously.
If you've ever spent time cleaning a toilet in a house with several small boys you'll know the joys of cleaning up after poor aim. My mom will surely chime in here and say that it doesn't get better with age, but I disagree. It wasn't until I had two little boys trying to hit the target that there were so many missed shots around here. The big thing is that they overshoot and pee on the back of the bowl. This makes a mess of the back of the toilet seat where it attaches to the toilet bowl. This is hard to clean. Pieces overlap and there are areas you can't get a sponge into and it becomes clear that aren't meant to be cleaned. At least not in place. About once a year, before my mother in law visits, I would unscrew the seat and take it outside and hose out all of the parts that just couldn't be scrubbed. This worked, but it did not make for a quick job cleaning the bathroom, and it just sort of made me angry that there wasn't a better way. We sent a man to the moon before I was born and I still had to unscrew two bolts to get my toilet seat clean? Really? The world has finally caught up. My new toilet seat makes the world a much happier place, because it just pops off. Now every time I clean the toilet I can just take off the seat, rinse it off in the bathtub, clean the toilet rim, and snap it back on. It's actually faster than cleaning it by just wiping it down. I'm so happy I can't hardly stand it.
I'm not sure that this leap of toilet seat technology is enough to make you abandon your current seat, but if you're in the market for a new throne, look for this feature. It'll change your life.

ETC: The Big Hungry Strawberry

The book I'm writing about today isn't actually titled The Big Hungry Strawberry. That would be silly, who ever heard of a big hungry strawberry. The title is actually The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and The Big Hungry Bear by Don and Audrey Wood. One day, one of the kids brought me the book and I was feeling silly. I said "YAY! The Big Hungry Strawberry, I love that book" and they laughed and laughed and how silly I was. So from then on it became known as The Big Hungry Strawberry, and it's still funny. This book follows Little Mouse and his adventures picking a big red ripe strawberry. He's immediately informed that big hungry bears love red ripe strawberries and he spends the rest of the book trying to protect it. Eventually he agrees to split it with the reader as a way of making it inaccessible to the bear. The book is fun, you're talking directly to the character and they are reacting to what you as a reader are saying. We never meet the bear but he tromps through the forest on his big hungry feet, BOOM BOOM BOOM and with some feeling as a reader, you can really get your kids into it. Like most of the other board books I love, you and your kids become more than just passive listeners to the narrative, you become part of the story. That's the kind of thing that makes kids love books and eventually love reading. Be prepared though, when books are good like this one, you'll end up reading them thousands of times. It's worth it.