WHAT!

I'm not sure if I've posted this picture before, but every time I come across it when I'm scrolling through pictures I think I should. My son received a tool kit for Christmas one year and he loved the drill. His little sister loved it too, but instead of pretend building, she loved to poke the drill in her ear and let it run. Don't worry, it was way to big to go in and cause any harm. I laughed every single time I saw her off in a corner, concentrating hard, drilling away at her head. Kids are fun.

Not My First Rodeo

We have a phrase in Texas, "It's not my first rodeo".  It's meant to explain that you've been here before, done this before, and you know how the game works. My assumption is that is originated in actual Rodeo competition as a way to let others know that you didn't need instruction about how to hang on to a bull or what not. Having never ridden a bull, that's pure conjecture.
Today at my son's preschool was rodeo lunch. They do this every spring during the time when the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is going on. They have hot dogs for lunch and then play rodeo games like lasso the rocking horse and stick horse races. It's fun. Today, as the parents gathered and wondered what to do, a number of faces turned toward me and asked where they should do. They knew that this was not my first rodeo. I pointed here, here, and here and put people in their places and things worked our great. One thing I've learned through the years is that it's not so important who is in charge, just that somebody is. Things go much smoother if there is one face to look to when a question comes up, even if that face is making up the answers.

The day went great. Everyone had fun. Only one stick horse racing injury that I'm aware of. The kids went home tired and the parents took a lot of pictures. It was a little bittersweet for me though. This isn't my first rodeo, but it was my last.

Boxes

Little kids like boxes
They like to climb inside
Pretend that they are on a boat
And take them for a ride

Half Pipe

Last week I took my wife to the dentist. I didn't need to, she's perfectly capable of finding the dentist on her own, but by doing that I was able to hang out with her for an extra hour or so on the drive to and from. It was nice. While she was getting her teeth cleaned my youngest and I went grocery shopping and explored a small public skate park near the dentist. I scoped out the ramps, read the rules, and wondered if the kids would like to come back.

Asking a nine year old boy if he wants to go to a skate park is like asking if a fish pees in the water. The answer is so obvious that you feel silly asking the question. So we went. My older daughter had some work to do so the three youngsters piled into the car along with a couple of boards and helmets and pads. We had a good time. Nobody is quite ready to drop in on the halfpipe but they had a lot of fun going back and forth and sliding down on their feet. Ramps that any one of them would jump off without blinking are quite intimidating when you're riding on wheels. It's going to take a few trips to really get the hang of things. We had fun and nobody got hurt. We'll certainly be back for more.

Slow Day

I'm calm! Who says I'm not calm!

I was pretty excited about today. The only thing on the calendar was my wife's dentist appointment. Looks like some time off for daddy. Just had to drop the little kids off at the elementary and then drop my oldest off at school across the street. I headed back to the elementary because I had to prepare a couple of deposits for the PTO and then take them to the bank. Not the close bank, but the far away bank because they're the one with the automatic change counter and it's more time efficient to do it that way than to count it all by hand. I was lucky enough to make it home in time to load my wife and youngest up and head off the the dentist. I didn't really have to do this, but if I didn't then I wouldn't really see my wife at all today. While she was at the dentist my son and I went grocery shopping and checked out a neighborhood skate park. Then we picked my wife up and had an actual legitimate treat, a lunch out. That was my morning. In a few minutes I've got to head out to pick up the little ones from school and then we'll go to the library for our weekly book retrieval. We'll make it home in time to head back out and pick up my oldest and her friend from after school science club practice. That should leave us all sitting down to dinner after which I'll be awaiting a phone call from the friend's older brother who I have to pick up whenever his track practice ends.
I'm glad I get an easy day like this every now and again because the busy ones wear me right out.

Special Boy

I feel the need to make this picture public. He's a special boy.

Crew

Recently hired a work crew to help me spread some gravel. With their help it took only slightly longer to finish the job than it would have taken if I had worked alone. It was a lot more fun though.

Baby My Baby

Baby my baby
Could you maybe
Not poop on me today

Your clothes look fine
And so do mine
Could they stay that way?

Baby my baby
Could you maybe
Not poop on me today

Each day this week
You diaper has leaked
In a most disgusting way

Baby my baby
Could you maybe
Not poop on me today

You wrinkle your face
Poop all over the place
Both stinky again today

None Too Small

At this house, there is no holiday so small that it doesn't deserve celebration. Take Valentine's Day for instance. Though this holiday has been around in some form since the days of Chaucer, it has in recent years evolved into a minor holiday in which those in love give each other stuff. It's not even important enough for a postal holiday. Derided by many, we grab onto Valentine's Day in an attempt to add joy to the dreary early days of spring. Heart table cloth, heart napkins, heart plates, and pink heart shaped pancakes to start the day. We're always ready for a celebration.

Bath Goggles

I had an interesting chat with my sister the other day. It seems that there's a bit of a lice issue rolling through my niece's preschool. Not a huge deal, humans have had lice since before we were humans. It's really probably a rare thing that we don't have lice. I've had lice, you've had lice, we've all had lice, not a problem. You just wash everything you own in water with a temperature as close to lava as you can get, and you wash yourself and your loved ones with anti-louse shampoo. Sounds easy, but here's where the story gets interesting.
You see, not everyone likes getting their hair washed. Some dislike it more than others. Some dislike it so much that they throw a huge fit and fall all over themselves as if washing hair is a violation of their rights as a human being. With normal kids shampoo it's not a huge problem, but with louse shampoo, it can be. It turns out that louse shampoo isn't tear free. It stings a little. Ok, it stings a lot. That stinging might actually turn out to be a chemical burn on your child's eye. She might freak out enough with all of the thrashing and wailing to make herself throw up. Now you've got lice, a head partly rinsed of shampoo, an eye that's literally burning, and vomit. These stories are better to hear than to live through.
After I stopped laughing and my sister told me that she had to do another round of shampoo in a week, I recommended that she run out and buy a pair of children's swim goggles. We've used them with a couple of our kids who hated getting their hair washed with normal shampoo. Works great. It would have been better advice before all of this happened, but, better late than never I always say.

$17,881

If you've been reading along, you know that a couple of weekends ago my son stepped on a nail and ended up spending three days in the hospital on IV antibiotics. The bill came today. We have insurance so the part that we have to pay is comparably small. The overall number, $17,881, is quite large.
I try very hard not to be political when I write this blog, but I'm going to make a bit of an exception about this one issue. I think we should have some sort of health insurance for every person in this country. Whether or not it's the system that is due to come into effect in the next few years doesn't really matter to me, I just think that something needs to be in place. Right now we cover the elderly because their care costs more than they can possibly pay. We also cover the poor for the same reason. According to a quick search, somewhere around 105 million Americans are covered under those programs. 48 million people are uninsured, about 8 million of them children.
What happens when you're five and step on a nail? If you have insurance, you go to the doctor when your foot gets puffy. They decide how bad it's likely to be, and you get treatment. Life goes on. What if you're one of the 8 million kids that don't have insurance? Well, hopefully it's not bad and the body will heal itself. If it's like my son though, you can either take him in and be lucky with only $18,000 in hospital bills, or you can wait. If you wait it turns into a larger infection and that infection gets into the bone. Now you're looking at a month or six weeks in the hospital and surgery and perhaps a lifelong limp. Suddenly $18K sounds cheap. You waited one day because you knew you couldn't pay. You still can't pay, but now you can't pay over $100,000 instead of $18,000. How is this better for anyone?
People in this country should be able to seek medical treatment without the fear of financial ruin. They should certainly be able to seek it for their children. We already, as a population, pay for the sum total of all of the medical services that happen every year in this country. If you can pay, you pay. If you can't pay, and you're old enough or poor enough, maybe the government pays. If you can't pay, and you don't pay, those bills don't just go away. The medicine has been used, the tests run, the care given. Those unrecouped costs are passed along to those that can pay. Let me repeat something. We already pay for all of the medicine that is practiced in the United States as a population. I simply think we should re-arrange things so that we don't have to financially destroy part of the population to do so.

Choir

My oldest son tried out for, and was accepted to, his elementary honor choir. It was all a bit surprising as he wasn't much of a singer. Our assumption is that he wanted to participate in any activity that let him stay after school and hang out with other kids. Choir, team handball, slug taxonomy, if he could stay and hang out it all sounds good to him.

In the end it really did sound good. Given a few weeks of practice, an optimistic young choir teacher can take 100 singers of moderate ability and blend them all together to produce something that's enjoyable to listen to. The whole was truly more than the sum of it's parts. I hope you enjoy it.

Open Apology

Nurturing, caring, and up to code.

This is an open apology to my in-laws. When was writing yesterdays post about the saga with the refrigerators, I looked through old pictures to see if we had any of the really bad fridge. While I didn't find any, I did find pictures of our house immediately before, and right after we had our first baby. Holy cow I'm sorry. I'm not sure how you ever walked into, and then out of our house and didn't openly question whether we were out of our minds deciding to have kids. The place was, and still is to be honest, an active construction zone. Bare concrete floor. Plastic sheeting hanging from the ceiling to keep the dust out of the 'clean' part of the room while I worked on the other part. Tools and stuff piled everywhere.
You came and visited. You must have slept somewhere. You kicked the cement block in front of the fridge to keep the door closed. For several weeks we had to walk outside to go from the kitchen to the living room. Our bedroom was as orange as the setting sun. Somehow you just smiled and said good luck and hid what must have been rising panic at the thought of us raising your grandchildren. Maybe, somehow, you knew it would turn out ok. I don't know how you did it, but I'm truly sorry and forever grateful that you were nothing but positive as we bumbled our way through learning how to be parents and adults all in one go.

Fridge

I'll cut right to the chase, my wife sort of demanded a new refrigerator this morning. I say sort of, because although it came out as a demand, I managed to head it off for a while. I'll explain.
We have a fairly long and colorful history with appliances dedicated to keeping food cool. Our first refrigerator came with the house. It was not good at it's job. It was old and tired and on a good day, it would keep the food in the bottom cool, and the food in the top slightly below freezing. This was all dependent on not opening the doors too many times, it couldn't handle too many cool cycles. It was also dependent on the doors actually closing, something which it did with reluctance. At some point in the history of the fridge something had happened to make the doors swell a bit. Whether this was due to water in the insulation, or corrosion, or some other factor, we never really knew. The result of the fault was that the doors became increasingly hard to shut over time. At first they wouldn't stick unless you pressed them closed. They then progressed into a fairly elaborate ritual of slamming to get them to stay. Eventually even this failed and I was forced into ever more elaborate systems of improvising.
The first system, one that worked quite well I might add, was a piece of wood that was wedged between the handles and the doors. Imagine the board that keeps the castle gates closed against attack and you're on the right track. This wasn't just any piece of wood though, it was engineered to fit perfectly in the handles and wedge the doors shut. I was quite proud of it until it stopped working. For some reason, the handles stretched out, the door swelled even more, I don't really know, we had to move to heavier artillery, and by heavier, I really mean heavier, a cement block. Yes, part of opening our fridge for a time involved moving a cement block out of the way, getting what you needed, and moving the block back. This really did prove to be quite effective, however, it wasn't enough.
We had a baby. The baby had to eat. The boobs went to work and left the milk at home, and proper refrigeration became a serious priority. The fridge would keep leftovers for a week, but it wasn't the 40 or so degrees that was recommended for storage. On top of that, the freezer was supposed to be as close to zero as you can get it for longer term storage. Our freezer was closer to the suggested refrigerator temperature than it was to zero. Aside from the cement block issue, the fridge had to go.
We bought a new fridge. A glorious white beauty that produced ample cold and would close every time. Life was good. Sort of. It did produce cold. It did close. That was good. The problem came when it decided that it was time to activate it's self defrost mode. It stopped it's cooling, heated up the coils, melted the frost on them, and deposited all of the melt water right into the freezer. For some reason the tube that leads from the defrost tray in the freezer down to the catch tray on the bottom freezes. Not every time, but often enough that I (or my wife when I'm gone) has to chip out the skating rink on the bottom of the freezer and use hot water and a turkey baster to create a free passage for additional water. I could have probably called some sort of refrigerator repair man, but someday I'll tell you the story of our chest freezer and my still smoldering hatred for repair men. As long as it makes cold, I decided that I'll chip out the ice.
So that's what I've been doing. Every two to 6 weeks, the freezer will freeze over and I'll get out my implements and I'll fix it. For ten years I've been doing this and it really doesn't bother me. The garage has a hole in the roof the size of a Volkswagen and the dog poops on the floor at night. I have bigger problems than a little ice once a month. This morning when my wife mentioned that the freezer was frozen again, she also mentioned that, dammit, she works a good job and makes enough money that if she wants a fridge that doesn't require constant maintenance then by god she should get one! I like being married, so I agreed. In principle anyway.
In reality, it's just not a good time to get a new fridge. Next fall all of the kids will be in school and I'm going to address that hole in the garage roof. In fact, I'm going to address the whole garage. Top to bottom, a garage makeover. We've been talking about this a lot. I'm even planing to build an office for my wife out there. Someplace nice and quiet with a lock on the door where she can go and do work if she needs to. An oasis of calm. A sanctuary if you will. It would be fantastic to have a refrigerator out in the garage for extra food storage with our growing kids. If we're going to have a fridge in the house and one in the garage, then we should buy a new one for the house and put the old one that needs to be defrosted manually in the garage. The hitch with this whole thing is that if we buy a new fridge now then we don't have any place to put the old fridge until the garage is ready. Right now the garage is filled with car parts and race tires. Really important stuff.
So, as I explained to my wife this morning, I love the idea of buying a new fridge. I really do. I just think we should wait until I have a place in the garage for the old one. Somewhat surprisingly, she agreed with my logic. If I can keep her from smothering me in my sleep, we're totally getting a new fridge. Later.

My Boy

I look at you my last born child
You are my youngest son
I just can't help but ask myself
If I've done all I should have done

Did we sit and read enough
Learning letters side by side
Or was I to busy running around
Taking kids for ride after ride

Did I hold you close to share our thoughts
Things quiet as a mouse
Or were those times swallowed up
By the chaos in the house

I know that your life is different
When you are the youngest one
There's more people to help you out
Dad's not the only one

I'm always trying to do everything
It's so hard to know what to do
I just hope the choices made
Were right for me and you

Rollin'

It's how we roll. Or at least how we used to.

Forgettable

See, his brain never forgets.

Yesterday I did something that I've never done before. I forgot about an orthodontist appointment. It was on the calendar. I had talked to the receptionist at the orthodontist's office the day before to confirm it. I had even sent my son's teacher an email telling her that I'd be coming to get him. It still blew right by me. Of all the doctor, dentist, and orthodontist appointments we've had over the last 11 years, I never missed one until yesterday. I feel terrible.
In the grand scheme of things it's not a huge deal. I rescheduled the appointment and my son won't end up in braces any longer because of my lapse. Life will go on. I just don't want to become that guy. The guy who makes appointments and doesn't show up. The guy who shows up late. The guy you can't count on. I'm like your old spinster aunt who never had any fun because she thought close dancing was a slippery slope to drunkenness and debauchery.