More Halloween

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

Costume parade. They said wave.
He never stopped. 

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

Pumpkin Guts

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

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

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

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

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

Rallycross

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

Prouder than I probably should be. 

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

Big Belly

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

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

Smile?

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

Driving Dad

Where he grew up. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fall Soccer. Yay!

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

Reading Outside with a Baby

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

Being watchful. I swear. 

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

Run

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

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

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


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

Fall Colors

Just wait, someday she'll dye this black.

Sewing Halloween Costumes #2

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

Tech for the Sick

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

Musings on Vomit

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

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

Dancing Goalie

In every single soccer game
Goalie's something that we play
It can be exciting
When the ball is kicked your way

You have to stop the speeding ball
Then throw it right back out
The fans all get excited
They clap and also shout

But when the ball is finally kicked
Down to the other end
You stand there sad and lonley
No one is close at hand

Some times your mind will wander
And you'll look down at the ants
Sometimes you stick your arms out wide
And do a twirling dance

It's good to be Queen

Every now and again I find myself in a parenting/spouse situation where I stop and think. Instead of wondering how I should approach the world as a stay at home dad, I wonder how I would solve a problem if I were a stay at home mom instead. 

This morning my wife was all excited because Monday night football was actually going to be on network TV. She's quite a football fan, but we don't have cable, so she usually just spends monday nights sulking. It was good to see her excited about a Monday. As I was eating breakfast I was wondering how I could make the day even better. It occurred to me that although this was going to be a bit of a nutty week with two nights of soccer practice and one night where I have to give a school presentation, Monday night was free. Free to hang out, free to cook. If I was the best wife in the world (instead of the best husband) what would would I cook to make the evening even better? Steak. I'd cook steak. Then I'd sauté up some mushrooms and onions and pile them on top of the steak. 

At houses all over America tonight there are men with wonderful wives thinking about how it's great to be king. A solid day of work, a hearty meal, football. At my house, it's good to be queen. 

In case anyone is wondering, I side with Hemingway - "There are only three sports, bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."

Before Airplanes

What was this game called before airplanes? People must have been holding babies up like this as far back as language goes. Did they call it bird? Cloud? Did they start playing hot air balloon in the mid 1780's in Europe (much earlier in China probably). Was there is great cultural transition in about 1903 when your floating blob of a baby suddenly got wings? I often wonder about these things.

Debatable

My oldest daughter is pretty excited about this election cycle. She's been reading as much as she can in the magazines that come to the house and has been asking me about it. We talk. I try to present both sides of the picture but I feel that one side is right. We talk about that too.

I cannot tell a lie. I love political debates. 

She heard me mention that the first of the presidential debates was on last night and wanted to stay up and watch. Fundamentally it's not an issue, but from a practical standpoint, it started at bed time. She insisted that she had only this election and the next before she would be entrusted to vote. Getting her feet wet now would prepare her to really get into it in four years and then really know what she's doing in eight. She takes the long view.
We compromised and let her stay up and watch the first half hour. She paid attention. She asked good questions. She wanted to know which of of them was telling the truth as it was pretty obvious that they both couldn't be. She was bummed when she had to go to bed and asked me to pay attention and fill her in on things in the morning, which I dutifully did.
I'm not sure how normal it is for someone who still thinks boys are pretty icky to be excited about politics. It's ok with me though, it gives me someone to talk to about it. She and I are the only ones in the house that really wants to discuss these things. It's nice.

Hurl

My little girl has just hurled
While running down the stairs
There's hurl on her shirt
And hurl on her shorts
And hurl all through her hair

It turns out she wasn't faking
When she said her tummy ached
I told her to finish
Up all her veggies
That was a huge mistake

Dart Board

My  wife sometimes accuses me of being cheap. The reason for this, I believe, is that at the very core of my being, I am cheap. Why pay $.94 for a jar of pizza sauce when the generic brand is $.88 and they hardly taste different? That's saving us $.06 every two weeks. These sorts of things add up. Really.
We were out buying soccer cleats this weekend for the impending soccer season and happened to walk down the aisle passed the dart boards. It just so happens that my wife has recently been invited out to play darts with the guys at work a few times and she sort of sucks at it (her words, not mine, I thinks she's fantastic). She hates being bad at things, and mentioned that if she had a dart board at home then she could practice and then not just be randomly hurling the darts at the board and hoping that the points work out. I love my wife and want to see her happy and here was my chance to brighten her day.
Proper dart boards use sharp pointy darts that stick into the board. And the wall if you miss the board. And the ceiling. And the cat. And siblings. Luckily there's an alternative for those of us that that wish our walls and ourselves to remain unperforated; plastic tipped darts and a dartboard with a ton of tiny holes in it. They sort of work pretty good some of the time. Kind of. Really though, the only good thing about them is that the object you're hurling less likely to result in a trip to the doctor. In our case, that's reason enough. Plastic tipped darts it is.
Dart boards aren't very expensive. You can get a pretty fancy one that holds your darts and automatically keeps score for several different games and lights up for not much money. However, for even less money, you can get a dart board that does none of those things. In fact, all it does it catch darts. How novel! This is where my razor sharp wit and my nose for saving a buck comes into play. You see, as nice as it is to have a dart board keep score for you, when you do that you're not doing math. No adding. Nothing. You're just pitching plastic at the bullseye. However, if you have a simple dart board, it also becomes an educational tool. Columns of numbers and adding and learning the rules of the game. Flawless logic if I do say so myself. And it's cheaper. Perfect.
So now we have a dart board which is also an educational tool and was fantastically cheap and I've managed to my wife just happy enough to not smother me in my sleep. Sometimes life really is wonderful.