Normally.......

My oldest daughter is a bit of an odd duck. She learned her letters at 20 months, not just saying them, but typing them on a keyboard. She didn't speak to her preschool teacher at all until the last week of school, she just sat quietly and did as she was told. She has also shown an unusual amount of empathy from a very young age. She is very in tune to the emotions of others, and always wants to comfort them or make them happy. Of course, being our first, we thought this was normal. It wasn't until we thought our second one might be a psychopath that we did a little reading and found out that early empathy was unusual, and that he was actually the normal kid.
Like most parents we tend to just roll with the eccentricities of our kids, and after a while it all seems normal. When she had a school field trip last week she was pretty excited, which seemed normal. It was to a Texas heritage festival, which, living in Texas, is also normal. There were going to be booths there, and the kids would have an opportunity to buy things if they wanted, so the school reminded them to bring money if that's what they wanted to do. She was excited because that meant that she could buy things for all her siblings, which is getting a bit odd but is very normal for her, she wants to make others happy. It wasn't until I picked her up from school that I realized that she had gone a bit farther than normal. Click through the jump to find out why.

Hand Foot and Mouth

The foot part.

I swear, every time I think I've got a handle on this whole fathering thing, something new comes up and lets me know that I'll never know everything. Drives me nuts.
Earlier in the week my two little kids had high fevers. I got a call from the preschool 45 minutes after I dropped my son off saying that he was laying in a heap on the floor weeping. Damn. He was mostly fine when I dropped him off, a little grumpy, but he's four, he's grumpy sometimes. By the time I got there he was clearly sick and by the time we got home his temperature was 102.5. That's just some bad parenting right there. Then my kindergartener fell asleep in the truck on the eight minute drive home from school and had a temperature of 103.5.
The fevers broke with medicine and everyone slept well. The next morning they were fine. Cool. One day fevers with no other symptoms. We've had those before. Nothing to worry about. That day went find and I thought the case was closed. The next day was preschool again. I got right to the end of that before another call, rash on his forearms. Now, I know that wasn't there in the morning, but still, having to get called twice in the same week because your kid is symptomatic? That's not good. Of course you can guess that my daughter had the same rash when I picked her up at the end of the day too.
Off to the internet. High fever, breaks, then rash on the forearms. The first thing that comes up is Hand Foot and Mouth disease. It says that the rash will be on the feet too and maybe in the mouth depending. Pull off the socks and yup, rash. Nothing in the mouth, but this is almost certainly it. After a few days a bit of the rash has turned into the mild sores just as predicted. They're uncomfortable, but we're all dealing with them. It's viral so there's no treatment, just sit and wait it out. The good news (I guess) is that by the time you can figure out what the kids have, they're probably not contagious any more. Probably. Still not feeling like a particularly good father with all of this. Sending my kids to school sick at least twice and helping to spread a virus to at lest two different schools. There's some shameful head hanging going on around my house.
I talked to my mom and she just brushed it off saying that we all had in when we were kids and it was no problem. What? How many weird childhood diseases did I have? Considering every time my kids get anything, my mom says that I had it too, a lot I guess. I'm starting to feel like I should start a running list of illnesses that my children have had, and what treatment (or lack of treatment) we've pursued. I'll just make a copy of it and wrap it up to give to my kids as a baby shower gift. Congratulations, this is how your children will get ill. Have fun.

Normal Childhood

The first computer in my house as a kid was an IBM PC Jr. My dad got it second hand from his boss and he never learned how to use it. He had a vague sense that his kids should learn how to use computers and just by having one in the house we'd figure it out. We did. I never got too far beyond loading games and playing flight simulator, but my older brother became quite proficient. In the early years of high school my brother got into computers in a big way and I tagged along. A friend ran a BBS site and we were on the cutting edge in these days before the internet. This was back when you had to dial up to individual computers to talk to them. 2400 baud modems and setting them to re-dial over and over until you could get through. I learned basic programming in high school and how to use word processors and spread sheets, valuable skills. I wasn't exposed to the internet, the real internet, with it's web pages and e-mail until college. E-mail was still typed out using arcane text editors that required wizard levels of skill to navigate. This just wasn't that long ago.
The idea of dialing an individual computer seems silly now. The idea of dialing up anything with your computer seems silly. The internet is always on and you're connected through the air with WiFi. My six year old can pull the laptop off the shelf and sit down to use it. She opens it up and fires up a web browser and navigates to one of the game sites that she plays on. She enters her user ID and password and it's all quite normal. This is a normal childhood, and I watch in amazement.

ETC: Feeding the Fish

Don't....fall.....in.....

I love this guy.

Outside my wife's office is a scenic waterway. Like most waterways in Texas, it's artificial, but that's ok, it's pretty and you can take a nice walk along it and you can feed the fish. The fish are mostly bluegills and they are hungry. Very hungry. Watching them eat reminds you of every piranha movie you've ever seen and it's slightly terrifying. I really don't want to fall in. We feed them any leftover bread butts or pancakes or waffles that I've thrown into a bag in the freezer just for this. Sometimes a rather big catfish comes up from the deep to suck in a piece of bread which is pretty exciting. More rarely, all of the action attracts a giant spiny soft shell turtle. That guy is a sight to behold, and he seems to like eating bread as much as anyone else there.

We usually feed the fish when we visit my wife at work for a picnic lunch. We sit by the water and eat our lunches and hang out and feed the fish. When they have the time off school it's a nice break in our day. We get an extra hour with mommy on a work day, and we get to feed the fish. It's good fun.

Laundry Cat

Really?

Why do cats do this? If I have a basket of dirty laundry, the cat has no interest in at at all. It's like can kryptonite. The moment that I pack the basket with clean clothes, the cat is there. You might think it's because the fresh laundry is warm, and cats like warm things. This ignores the fact that I'm particularly lazy when it comes to folding laundry and it seldom, if ever, makes it out of the dryer while it's still warm. The clothes in the picture had been dry for a full 24 hours before I put them there. 24 hours of dry and it took Schmat 5 minutes to seek them out and lay in them. No easy task with them up on the washing machine and her being 12 years old and not having the same spring in her step that she used to. It's worth it to her though, for some reason it's worth it. Drives me nuts.

The Briney Deep

This makes meat better.

Note: This is another requested post. My wife got all bent out of shape when I said that she should brine some chicken breasts before she baked them the other weekend. She insisted that I hadn't revealed the secrets to how I brine things and suggested that I was hoarding knowledge so that I could remain valuable around the house. She might be right, but here it is anyway.

Brining meat is simply the act of soaking meat in water that has had salt added to it. Most people know it from ham, hams are brined and that's part of why they are delicious. In addition to salt, adding sugar and liquid smoke will dramatically improve the flavor of almost everything. I brine beef and chicken and shrimp. The only thing I don't brine is pork because pork is awesome just the way it is. For a better explination of brining than I'm capable of giving you, read this.

Brining meats, a primer.
First some rules:
1. Thawed meat only.
2. You need enough water to cover the meat.
3. The thicker the meat, the longer the brine. Shrimp for 30 minutes or so, chicken breasts for an hour, beef roast for three. Interpolate everything else from this.

Take your meat and cover it with water in some container that holds everything. Keep track of how much water you add. For every quart of water, add equal parts table salt and sugar, 1/4 cup to the quart. Add 2-3 shakes of liquid smoke per quart as well if you want too. It makes it taste better, so you probably want to. Cover the meat, put it in the fridge for the allotted time, pull it out, dry it off and cook it. It's just that simple. There's some osmotic pressure differential thing driving moisture and sugar and salt and liquid smoke into the meat. It will be moister and taste better compared to an unbrined piece of meat. If your recipe calls for salting the meat when you cook it, back off a bit so things don't get too salty. For a slightly different flavor, substitute honey or maple syrup for the sugar (about half of the amount of sugar you would have added.
When you have the time, brining meats before you cook them will make them better. I think it's the single biggest reason that restaurant meats taste different than things cooked at home. Use what I have here as a guideline, but not as a final answer. Brines can be as simple as just salt in water or can involve a list of spices and buttermilk and god knows what else. Look around on the internet and in cookbooks. Apply techniques from one recipe to another, from one meat to another. This is good stuff.

The Dentist: Don't Judge Me!

Today we had our bi-annual dentist appointment for all four kids. The appointments are for the kids, but I feel like the judging is for me. Any cavity is acknowledgment that I'm not doing my job. Any low brushing score shows what an inattentive father I am. Any vomit means that I ignored the standing order to not feed my children before an appointment. (Just to clarify, my children have thrown up on the hygienists so many times that they have a big red reminder in their records to call me before the appointment to remind me not to feed them. Hair trigger gag reflexes, no sword swallowers in the family.) Because my kids aren't big enough to be responsible for their own dental care, I am, an if they fail at any part of the checkup, it's my failure. The whole thing is unbelievably stressful.
Today was a great day though. Nobody threw up. Nobody had any cavities. Everyone had a good brush score. The only little thing was my youngest son screaming at the top of his lungs when he was getting his x-rays. You would have thought that they were holding his foot down into a tank of piranhas for all of the noise he was making. It freaked the other parents in the waiting room out and I felt the need to reassure them that the noise they were hearing was my child not theirs. They visibly relaxed. One said "thank god". It was really a minor thing though because I knew who it was, I knew why he was upset, and I knew he'd be just fine, and he was.
He even got a little parachute man for his prize and we celebrated the good appointment by pitching him off of the second story staircase on the way out of the building. Usually I don't do things like that in public, we have to wait until we're home. I was in a good mood though. It's hard not to be when you've been judged, and the verdict is awesomeness.

Hello, I'm Your Husband

Elusive.

I often joke with people and say that I'll get to talk to my wife after the kids grow up. I'm starting to believe it. I woke up with the kids this morning so she could sleep in, and because I had things to do that I needed to be up for anyway. The kids and I got breakfast and then agreed on cartoon rules so everyone could be happy and quiet. I loaded up the soccer field striping equipment and headed off to make everything pretty for today. By the time I got back from that, we were packing things to head back for the days games. My wife is coaching, so she was off doing her job on one field with the oldest, while I was on another field watching the younger two play. Once the games finished there was a quick kiss and then she was off to a birthday party with one of the kids while I watched the last soccer game of the day. Now I'm home and lunch is done but my wife is still at the party and will likely be until a lot closer to dinner time. I might get to talk to her when the kids go to bed, which is good, because tomorrow I'll be gone almost all day autocrossing. Then we're back into the week when we communicate more by e-mail than in person. Life can get busy, and before you know it you're not spending much of it with the person that you promised to share it with. I'm not sure there's a fix for it, but by being aware of it we can work to snatch a few moments here and there for a kiss and a hello and an I love you. I will get to talk to my wife again when the kids are gone, but at least I won't be talking to a stranger.

Balance

My four year old is deep into building with blocks. Lots of towers going up and coming down lately. He's getting creative and is building things that he won't be able to explain until he has a few physics courses under his belt. It's pretty amazing that we can get a 'feel' for things quite easily but being able to properly explain them is quite hard. Building block towers, riding a bike, holding and comforting a baby so it falls asleep on your shoulder. It takes time, practice, and a feel for when things are just right that you can't fully explain in words. Sometimes you need to make a plan, learn something, and then make it happen. Sometimes you just need to know what you're trying to accomplish and then dive in and feel it out.
Click through the jump to see what my son did when he asked me to take a picture of the tower.
I think it was a trap.

ETC: Apple TV

There is no good way to photograph a TV.

I've hemmed and hawed about writing about Apple TV. I hate to suggest anything that provides, literally, unlimited time in front of the TV for anyone, let alone children. It's just been awesome though, even though we're not using most of the features. In fact, about all we do with it is use it as a Netflix streaming box. For that alone, it's worth it. 
We have had a Nexflix subscription for a few years. We get one movie a week in the mail and have used the streaming service off and on since it became available. The only hitch was that we could only stream to our computer, and as nice as it is, it's not as nice as the TV. We debated the pros and cons of getting a cable that would basically let us use the TV as an extra monitor so we could play movies on that, but in the end $100 for the Apple TV seemed like a good deal. It really has been. You can't stream everything on Netflix, but you can watch more than I ever would, including all of the seasons of Top Gear UK. For the kids, they have a separate area that allows them to pick from kids shows and movies. On Weekend mornings they each get to pick a show to watch and it's easy enough that they do it all themselves. They've been watching He-Man, She-Ra, Shaun the Sheep and Inspector Gadget lately. With the exception of Shaun, those are all shows that I watched as a kid which is pretty awesome. 
The best part of watching these old shows on Apple TV is that there's no commercialism. Sure, when I was a kid watching He-Man made you want to run out and buy He-Man action figures, but that's not possible now. They don't see commercials for things they can buy at the store, they don't see characters that are on the shelves. They don't have the constant barrage of commercialism that's designed to suck them into the toy aisle at the store. They still love the toy aisle, but they're able to judge the toys on what they see themselves, not on what they've been shown and told and sold on TV. I like that. 
Maybe I'm just trying to justify a box that makes it easy to entertain my children without much work on my part. I might be actually, but if you have an internet connection, and if you have Netflix, and if your kids watch even a smidge of TV, then Apple TV might make your world a bit easier.

Caging the Beast

Dramatic reenactment.

Life with our dog Patty is continuing on it's wobbly course. The latest issue has been at night. She's taken to peeing on the floor every week to 10 days. There's no rhyme or reason to it. She goes outside before bed and whether or not my wife can convince her to actually 'go' has no statistical relationship with what she does at night when she's alone. After the last time we made the decision to get a cage, or a crate as it's become fashionable to call them, to put her in at night. The crate sits in the exact same spot where she sleeps in her bed outside our bedroom door. She sleeps in exactly the same spot, it's just that now she's stuck in that spot instead of being able to roam around and pee in the darkness. For a dog that seems to have some significant learning disabilities she caught on pretty quick to the whole cage thing. The first night she ran upstairs happily. The second night she got half way up before she stopped and wouldn't move. By the third night she wouldn't budge off the chair. You could have baited her with a whole ham and it wouldn't have made a difference. My wife had to carry her to bed that night and every night since. Speaking of whole hams, she won't eat a treat if you put it in the cage with her. She seems to think that any food you give her is tainted with the stench of betrayal and won't touch it. Even ham.
So the cage thing is going ok I suppose and there's only really one part of the whole deal that has been interesting enough to talk about. On the fourth of fifth night everything went fairly normally. We could hear her panting and being weird in the cage but it was storming and she's a pretty weird dog so we didn't think much about it. In the morning she was let out and we went on with our day. In the afternoon I was walking by the cage and I noticed something inside. I quick peek was enough to let me know that I needed paper towels to pick it up. It had clearly been alive, but now it was not. I brought it into the light to take a closer look and figured out that I was holding the partially digested head of a young rabbit. I tried to show it to my wife but she ran away screaming. She said she was glad I was home, otherwise she would have had to just throw away the cage and buy a new one.
That's where we're at with the dog. It's still too early to tell if the long term psychological impact of crating Patty at night will outweigh the benefit of not having pee on the floor. Maybe we'll all get used to it and come to believe that this sort of thing is normal. Maybe.

Bread Crumbs

Leftover bunny bits.

Last week I wrote about making bunny sandwiches. You might have noticed that the finished bunny sandwich was much smaller than the piece of bread that I started with. After noticing that, you might have wondered what I did with the leftovers of four loaves of bread missing only bunny shaped centers from them. Bread crumbs.
Bread crumbs aren't rocket science. They're literally just the crumbs of bread. I usually save the butts of my loaves of bread and put them in a bag in the freezer until it's full and then make bread crumbs. That's what I recommend everyone do as bread crumbs are useful for meatloaf and chicken nuggets and all sorts of stuff. Making the butts into bread crumbs is easiest with a food processor, and that's the method I use.

Bread Crumbs
One bag of bread butts, or bunny cutouts, thawed.
Oven at 200 degrees.
Food processor.

Breadcrumbs. Ingredients for good food.

The drier the bread is the better it will break up. Heat your oven to 200 degrees. Lay the bread out on a few cookie sheets not overlapping too much. Place the sheets in the oven and wedge the door open a crack with a wooden spoon. Bake them for 20 minutes and check. When they're dry, they break. Take them out and break them into smaller pieces and cram them into the food processor. Grind them into oblivion. Bag them back up and put them back in the freezer until you need them. You could get creative and add spices to them and make them Italian bread crumbs, or herbed bread crumbs or something. I don't do this to a whole batch. I prefer have a big bag of plain ones and then spice them as each recipe calls for it. If you know that you're making them soley for meatloaf or something like that, you could combine the meatloaf spices right into the bag. That way you simply need to mix the meat, the egg and the milk and presto!, you're done. Just an idea.

Save your butts, use them for cooking. Make bread crumbs.

The Tower of Death

Note: this is a requested post by my parents. I think they requested it for two reasons. 1. They like my story telling. 2. They like to remind me that no matter how awesome I think I am as a parent, they were at least as awesome. They were. 

Just before I turned four, my parents bought the old farmhouse that was my home until I moved out to go to college, and continues to be their home today.  It was on ten acres of land and had a big barn, a pig house, a huge chicken coop (it could handle 250 chickens), several fields for gardening, and the pond. Most people assume they fell in love with the old farmhouse. Some suspect that it was the barn and the outbuildings. The way my mom tells it, my dad wasn't convinced until he saw the pond and the fish that lived there, that sealed the deal. There are a lot of stories I could tell about the cows and the goats and the chickens and the geese and the pigs we had, and I might get into them some day, but today is about the pond.
My mom made it a priority to work from home when we were kids. She was a veterinarian and her office was in one end of the house. She kept pretty normal hours for a vet, with one notable exception. In the summer, she always took two hour lunches so that she could take us swimming in the pond before she fed us lunch. The pond was quite big for a farm pond and had a good supply of fish. It also had the crayfish, turtles, and dragonflies that populate any pond and gave us things to chase. Like most ponds in that part of the world it was a muck bottom pond. This problem was mostly solved with a dump truck load of good clean sand every 4 or 5 years on one corner of the pond. This gave us a "beach" to dig in and to build castles on. It also alleviated the muck problem in that one corner and made sure it was shallow enough for us to learn to swim, and we swam every day we could. We had a raft that floated on four 55 gallon drums that we would swim to and jump off of. We put in a dock and picked up a second hand diving board when the neighbors filled in their pool. We had a collection of old boats and learned to row and paddle and sail to the extent that the pond would let us. The most interesting thing we had on the pond though, had to be the Tower of Death.
Click through the jump to read the rest.

Last minute!

Holy cow. Three soccer games and a birthday party and the day got away from me. Here's a soccer picture and a promise that I'm working on a nice long story of my youth for Monday.
Have a great weekend.

Not Work

Fun fountain Friday.

When your last one is at home it's tempting to wrap things up quickly, find a daycare or a full day school, and get back to work. There's a lot of reasons to do that, financial, sanity, you're just not doing much compared to having two or three or four at home. Some days it's hard to just sit around and feel like you're just killing time. Some days though, some days make you glad that you're not at work. They make you glad that it's sunny, that you're home, and that you're ready for an adventure. Days like today are fun. 

ETC: Ten Little Ladybugs

In my earlier post about The Elephant Alphabet Book, I talked about the importance of having an ABC book to read to your kids. Reading is a fundamental skill and the ABC's, the letters and their sounds, are the foundation of that. Another fundamental skill is counting. Counting is different though, because at it's most basic level, it's real in a way that reading isn't. Letters and the sounds they make are abstract, they differ across languages, they're almost arbitrary. Numbers on the other hand, are real. Sure, we use different names for them in different languages, but two of something is two of something whether you're speaking English or French or Mandarin. Because counting and numbers are more real, more a part of our physical world, learning to count is different. Like I said before, two is two. There are two of them, you can see them, you can touch them, there are physically two. Now add one, and you have three, and they're physically different than two. Counting is tactility different than reading. For that reason I recommend counting books that are tactile, books where you can physically touch the objects you're counting. I don't have a specific recommendation as I don't think the particular book matters. We have had Ten Little Ladybugs by Melanie Gerth for all of our kids and it has worked well. Every page has a different number of little plastic ladybugs glued to it. The story starts with 10, and you lose one with each page flip. On each page you can touch the little bumpy ladybugs and count them, one, two, three....
There are lots of different ways to teach counting and all of them are important. A number book with physical tactile things to count might be something to add to the arsenal.

Ditch Birds

Which itch does the ditch bird itch?

Like crayfish in a blender man, like crayfish in a blender.

We live in a place that is cursed with poor drainage. Along with poor drainage comes crayfish that live in our lawn. Along with the crayfish come the ditch birds. The ditch birds have always been around, but until the last few years, they've mostly spent time in, or near, the ditch. Pretty clever name we came up with for them, isn't it? Two springs ago, a funny thing happened, they moved in. We think it was because of the guineas, they kind of look like slower much less graceful ditch birds. Kind of. We think the guineas are some sort of signal to the ditch birds that they're on safe territory, that this is a good place to nest, so they have. Last year we had 9 nests on our one and a half acres. This year we're down to 7, still a lot. When they became residents we broke out the bird book and properly identified them, it only seemed neighborly. Ditch birds are actually Yellow-crowned Night Herons. They're about as big as a guinea, but skinnier, and amazingly, louder. As their name suggests they're most active at night, wandering around catching crustaceans in the yard. They have a call that is sort of a cross between a monkey strangling a raccoon, or perhaps a raccoon strangling a monkey. It could go either way, but when you're falling asleep it sounds like whatever terrible thing is killing or dying, it's coming for you next. It makes wonderful nightmare material. The birds are mostly harmless aside from their screaming. They have caused a bit of a parking difficulty. Most of my yard is trees. The Yellow-crowned Night Heron nests, rests, and roosts in trees. My truck is parked under trees. To compound the issue, the herons seem mostly incapable of digesting their chosen diet of crayfish. This means that any unlucky hits look more like someone put a crayfish in a blender and poured it on your car than conventional bird poop. It's weird enough that it kind of freaked out the ladies in the car rider line at school yesterday necessitating a wash for my truck today.
 Yellow-crested Night Herons aren't pets, not even stretching the definition to it's limits, they're truly just residents of our yard. In fact, my Wednesday posts are veering dangerously away from 'pets' to 'creatures that live in my yard'. I think it's ok though, even on our small suburban lot, there's a lot of nature to see if you open your eyes and look. I'm continually fascinated by all of the stuff that lives on our little plot of land and love sharing it with the kids.

Bunnies

So many bunnies....so many....

I was asked to cater a snack for the preschool party for my four year old last Thursday . Ok, that's not exactly true, what really happened is that I signed up to be the head of the party at the beginning of the year, then I forgot, then I was reminded by the teacher on Tuesday. Ooops. So I had to do some quick figuring and get something together that wouldn't suck. This is pressure time, I feel like I'm representing all stay at home dads, and any deficiency that I might have in putting this together could reflect badly on stay at home dads everywhere! All of them! In the whole world! Maybe that's too dramatic, anyway, I settled on grapes, orange slices, cheese cubes, and turkey sandwiches. I also made sugar cookies to frost for desert. Not exactly ground breaking stuff but a fairly well balanced meal and most kids can find something they like to eat. It sounds simple, but for some reason I can never do things the easy way.
First I buy all the stuff, then I have to get it ready. The cheese is easy, just chop big blocks into little blocks, then bag them. All I have to do is not cut myself. Nearly pulled that off. Quick bandaid and it's on to grapes. Those are the easy too, pluck them, check for stems, rinse and bag. No problemo. On to oranges. All I have to do is peel about 60 oranges. Crap. Not technically difficult but holy cow does that take a while. On to sandwiches, and where I get derailed. Sandwiches are fine, but wouldn't bunny sandwiches be better? Yes, yes they would. Using a cookie cutter I cut out the turkey. Easy. Now I need to cut out the cheese, but I don't want to make the sandwiches until right before the party, because I don't want them to get soggy. So I unwrap each piece of cheese, cut out the bunny, and then wrap it back up. Next I cut out the bread, and while I only had to cut out 48 pieces of turkey and cheese, I have to cut out 96 pieces of bread. Bread doesn't cut as well with a cookie cutter as you might imagine, not even fluffy white completely nutritionally deficient bread, just so you know.
I did get it all done (I even made sugar cookies in the shapes of bunnies and flowers during all of this) and brought it all into school. I spent the 20 minutes before the party assembling all of the sandwiches so they looked perfect. Then I passed out the food, and quite frankly, it was perfect. It was healthy and cute and everything that you could possibly want in a preschool party snack. I'm very happy with how it all turned out, but I'm glad I'm not signed up for the next party. At least I don't think I am.

Going on an Egg Hunt

I started this blog as a way to talk about my experiences in being a stay at home dad. The idea was that other stay at home dads, or guys who were considering it, could have a look and see what this job is about. For the most part, I think I've been successful. What I didn't count on was the blog helping me to actually do my job as a stay at home dad, as well as talk about it.
Though I didn't know it when I signed up for this job, the stay at home parent is expected to be a conduit of information about the children for any interested parties. Doctors want to know what the kids have been eating, teachers want to know if kids have been doing homework, and grandparents, well, they want to know everything. I'm expected to know the answers and pass on all of the information. Easter was yesterday and everyone lives too far away to participate with our family. On top of that, my mother in law is grinding through the last days of tax season so she can come visit, and the long hours, lack of sleep, and watching for the light at the end of the tunnel has her longing for extra doses of cute grandchild. Because I have the time, because I have all of the pictures right here, that's my job, to pass on the Easter morning egg hunt, to bring a smile to the day. Click through the link to see the fun we had.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter to everyone. I hope that the Easter Bunny made it to your house and dropped off lots of stuff for you. At our house the bunny comes right at dawn so you have to make sure you stay in bed until it's light out. If you get up too early, you might scare him away and he won't get a chance to put out all of the candy filled plastic eggs for you to find. Bunny's are very skittish, you can't be too careful. We also colored real eggs, and had a very good time. We're looking forward to a week of egg salad sandwiches. We're also looking forward to ham dinner and the split pea soup that must always follow the cooking of a ham. Have a fun day with your family and enjoy the traditions.

Note: I wrote this post Saturday night, so I technically didn't miss my post today. It was a busy day, soccer, several parties with the kids' friends, and the fact that for most of the day I thought it was Sunday because the kids had the day off school yesterday. I made it though. Barely.

Sleeping In

My wife is a hard worker. Long days at the office, balancing work and home, all of that. She wakes early to get her day all organized before the kids get up for school so that she can do things in peace. I take the opposite tack, and I sleep in until they're awake and eating breakfast so that I can wake up slowly with fewer demands for my immediate attention. That's during the week, it's even better on the weekends. Because my wife wakes up early during the week, her internal clock wakes her up early on the weekends too. Awesome. By the time I get up, breakfast is sometimes not only started, but finished as well. In my early morning haze of pre-caffeine confusion, the world that I walk into can be weird. Last weekend I walked downstairs to find this guy waiting for me. He assured me that our house was free of bad guys, and that I was safe. What a wonderful world.

ETC: Houston Livestock Show

Moo.

I grew up going to the county fair in Michigan. The fair ran for a week, everyone went when it was open, and you had fun. Coming from that background, nothing could prepare me for the spectacle that is the Houston Livestock show and Rodeo. This event runs for 20 days, and has over two million visitors during that time. There is a rodeo every night followed by a headline concert. The junior livestock shows are much like at any county fair, but the stakes are much higher. The grand champion junior steer sold for $460,000 this year. It's like every county fair in a medium state all happening at the same time. It's a spectacle worth attending.
We've attended the rodeo and the concerts a few times in the past, and they're a really good time. We usually just go to the livestock show though, we cruise the animals, go to the petting zoo, go on a few rides, and generally have a fun day out and about.
The story of a trip like this is really best told through pictures, so click through the jump to see how the day went.

Roly Poly

A roly poly. Not a great picture, but a really cool creature.

My kids have no fear of bugs. When they were little and a bug would wander through the house, they used to freak out. I was all calm and a super-dad and I showed them there was nothing to be afraid of. I'd pick them up and put them outside to go live their little buggy lives in peace. I'm not sure I thought things all the way through (common theme with my parenting) because now my kids pick up everything and want to talk to them and carry them around. I don't mind bugs, but I don't like them enough for it to be cool to carry them inside and sit down on the couch with them and have a conversation.
Lately the kids have been picking up roly polies, or pill bugs, or whatever other name they have in your part of the world. They're pretty neat. They're easy to catch, and they curl up in a protective ball, and they're harmless, and they're everywhere. I'm expected to be the resident storehouse of information about all things, so when I was asked more about them I had to choose between looking it up, or making it up. The older my kids get, the harder it is to make things up and have them believe me, so I chose to look it up. As it turns out, roly polies are actually woodlice, and woodlice aren't bugs at all. No, woodlice are actually terrestrial crustaceans. That's right, they're land crabs. They breathe through lungs located in their back legs, and they need to be moist to keep breathing through those legs. How weird is that? They primarily eat dead plant matter and are responsible for a huge percentage of the plant recycling that's done on earth. One source estimated that as much as 80% of all plant material makes it's way through a woodlouse at some point. Roly polies are cool.
I'm probably stretching things by including roly polies as a pet post. They're just so neat though, and I had made it through 36 years without really learning about them, I thought I should share. Anyway, my kids pick them up, and talk to them, and bring them in the house, they're practically like kittens. Go flip over a rock in your yard and find a roly poly, a land crab, and pick them up. They're pretty neat.

Bacon Corn Bread Muffins

This is one of the recipes that my wife thought up during our spring break bacon week. We were eating bacon almost every meal, and it was getting hard to come up with new things. For a starchy side I decided to make corn bread muffins, my wife suggested I add bacon to them. Bacon corn bread muffins, that's a good idea! Nothing revolutionary, you're just adding bacon to corn bread and cooking it in a muffin tin, but they were delicious. They really are much better than regular corn bread muffins, and that's saying a lot, because corn bread muffins are delicious to start with. I use Jiffy brand corn bread mix to make my muffins. I know, you're all sitting there slack jawed at the thought of me baking from a box, but let me explain. They're good. I've tried a half dozen other corn bread recipes from scratch, and none of them are as good as Jiffy. It's cheap, it's made in Chelsea Michigan, and I'm a fan. I make no appologies.

Bacon Corn Bread Muffins - makes about 9 muffins
1 box Jiffy Corn Muffin mix.
1 egg
1/3 cup milk
3 slices of cooked bacon, chopped finely
Mix the box mix, the egg and the milk, add the bacon and mix. 
Let it sit for five minutes. Really, it's important, it makes the muffins better.
Restir gently and fill muffin cups 1/2 full. Using paper cupcake liners keeps them from sticking, highly recommended.
Bake 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

Corn bread muffins are good.
Bacon corn bread muffins are better.

Forensics

Take a look at that picture. It's pretty cool. Looks like a fossil, but it's not. It's a recent death. A justifiable homicide if you ask me, and there are many many more like it. I'll give you a chance to search your brain and figure it out, then click through the jump and find out what it is.

Because Race Car

Why no Saturday post?
Because Race Car.

Why buy hatchback?
Because Race Cone.

Why am I talking like this?
http://becauseracecar.org/
I had a spectacular day autocrossing with the Houston SCCA. It was a practice day so instead of 4 runs through the course and real competition, I got 34 runs through the course and just wrote down my times to see how much better I got. I got a lot better. I stayed after and helped them clean up cones and set up for today's event which I'm missing because my wife had to go away for business. Someone has to watch the kids I suppose. A few years before my kids can come drive with me at an autocross, but I'm looking forward to sharing the fun with them.