Tech and Travel

I'm not an old man, not really, but sometimes I feel like I can't quite keep up with change in the world. Our recent vacation was an anomaly for us. Usually we're headed to a known place on a known schedule. The most challenging decisions we make are where to stop for gas. We're a predictable bunch. This time we decided to fly a bit looser with our schedule and see what we could see. We knew when we had to be in Orlando, but we had three days to get there. We drove a bit, stopped a bit, ate a bit, and our first day ran out. In the past this would be the part of the day where we'd start pulling off the freeway at every stop and searching out hotels that would accomodate six people. This is not a fun thing, and in the past has ranged from hitting it on the first hotel, to discovering that we're in a state where the fire marshal has declared that under no circumstances can more than five people be in one room ever. While I was dreading this and looking for a good exit, my wife calmly pulled out her phone, and let her maps program show her exactly where we were. She then did a search on the town in front of us for hotels. She popped on over to a web site or two and found a hotel with a suite that would sleep six. While still online, she made the reservation and told her maps program to alert us when the exit came up.
My wife the magician.

The healthy ones. 

It gets better.
The next day I'm driving along thinking that the world is an amazing place. We're driving, stopping, eating, stopping more, having a good time. Most of us are having a good time. My daughter is getting slower and slower and redder and redder. She's sick. Her throat hurts. Crap. There's a high likelihood that she's managed to contract the same strep throat that my wife had the week before.
This is bad.
Like, really bad.
My wife calmly puts on her wizard hat and pulls out her phone again. Within 10 minutes she's located the closest town with a walk in clinic that's open first thing the next morning. She's also located a hotel three blocks from there with a room that will sleep six right on the beach. Everything is plotted on the map. We can wake up and she'll take one sick child to the doctor while I take three healthy ones out for a shell collecting walk on the beach.
Despite a growing concern that my wife may be able to turn me into a toad with her phone, I'm ecstatic.
This magic phone has completely changed travel. I won't even go into the Disney maps that showed us right where we were and where the rides were and how long the wait times were for each and where the restaurants were and what they served. I won't discuss that, but it was equally amazing.
I only bought a cell phone about 6 or 7 years ago after an incident with a broken Volvo. The phone I have is not smart, though it may still be smarter than me. I haven't really figured out how to text on it yet or program in numbers or retrieve voice mail. I thought I wasn't ready for a smart phone, but after watching what one can do, I'm not sure I'm ready to not have one.

Shark Teeth

One million shells here on this beach
Push them aside and flip over each
They sure are pretty and shiny as well
But I don't care about any old shell
What I am looking for might be underneath
I want to find some fossil shark teeth









At the end of our trip we took a two and a half hour detour to visit a beach that is known for it's fossil shark's teeth. I've got to say, the beach was beautiful and the shells were perfect and beautiful as well. We hardly noticed. We were intensely searching for the teeth, and we found them. We still need to lay them all out and figure out which ones came from which species, but we have somewhere around 50 teeth of various quality. For a family like ours, this sort of detour was totally worth it.

Walt's World

Happiness and memories and stuff. 

In 1955 a guy named Walt opened a little amusement park in California. It was a modest success. It did well enough that Walt decided that nobody should be limited by their proximity to one coast when making vacation plans. What better place to build another one than swampland in Florida? After convincing the state to grant them a special government district that essentially gave the company the powers and autonomy of an incorporated city, they started the ball rolling. Unfortunately Walt passed away before things got built, but fortunately for my children it was built none the less. Since then a bunch of people have made a trek to central Florida at one time or another to ride rides, hang out with movie characters, and generally have a good time. You can now add my family to that list.
This is not something that I planned on doing. If you could sit down and design a place where I would not want to go, destroying beautiful swamp and replacing it with crowds of people would be right up there at the top of my list. I would much much rather hang out in a swamp. My wife is more attuned to the likes of our children and was the one who planned this trip with a series of reluctant grunts from me. I'm glad she did. (don't tell her I said that)
We had some other adventures aside from the happiest place on earth. We held baby alligators, visited a walk in clinic, walked on a variety of beaches, found fossil shark teeth, and got to swim in hotel swimming pools. All of these things have individual stories behind them that deserve to be told, and tell them I will. However we are currently in the middle of sorting out the wide variety of illness contracted from touching every available surface at the amusement park. Their slogan might be "The Happiest Place On Earth" but it really should be "The Origination Center Of The Epidemic That Wiped Out The Human Race." I started the day surrounded by coughs and one child with an unspecified full body rash who had to stay home. Another call later in the day brought home the second one with a fever of 103. We're continuing to have a good time.
Stay tuned this week and I'll go over the vacation more. I'm going to try and make it less of a slide show of what my family did, and more of a discussion of the pros and cons and ins and outs of travelling with a herd of children. For now, I need to slip on my level 4 biohazard suit and tend to my sick flock.

Happy Turkey

Mmmmmmm......turkey.........

I'll be away from the computer for a few days. Have a wonderful time out stalking and killing a turkey for your holiday meal. That's what you're doing, right? Only seems sporting.
Lots to talk about when I get back.

Vectors #2

So my last post established that life has a vector possessing both magnitude and direction. A lot of people like to think of life like a path, but I like vectors better. A path suggests a destination, traveling toward a place where we'd like to end up. That's all well and good, but there is always more than one way to get to a destination. There are some horrible horrible people that are also wildly successful. While I want my kids to succeed, I don't want that. I'd like to watch their lives unfold and see not only success, but steady positive movement toward that success. I'd also like to be able to to what I can to direct things in a positive way. I want my parenting to help my kids be better in school. To be better as people. To be better in life.

I'm a parent, you're a parent, we're all parents. We all want our kids to be valedictorian and marry the love of their life and grow old in comfort and happiness, right? If we all have a common dream, why don't we have a common solution? Why can you walk into any book store and find 100 different books on child rearing? When your child brings home their homework tonight ask them how many different answers there are for each question. Does each question have one answer, or 100? There's the twist, each child doesn't really have the same question, not really, let alone the same answer. The simple explanation is that every child is unique, they have their own vector, they are their own question seeking a unique solution. That's both true and false, and it's why I generally hate parenting advice.
I was born a white male to educated parents during a time when being an educated white male made life a whole lot easier than the alternatives. Being born like I was when I was virtually guaranteed some level of success. I was hard to screw up no matter who's parenting advice you took. Two of my kids also fit that demographic, but two of them don't. Two of them are going to have to make choices in their lives that I never have than may profoundly affect their lives. When I talk about having babies I often say that "we" had kids. "We" didn't have kids, my wife did. Deciding to grow a baby for nine months and deliver it and recover from that delivery and then breastfeed for the better part of a year is something I never had to do. Neither will my sons, but my daughters will. Fifty years ago the choice to have kids profoundly affected the life of any woman. It still does, but having kids no longer forces you to give up work and stay home. Now it's a choice. I can't quite predict how the world will be for my sons and daughters when they're ready to make that decision. Then there's the fact that I'm kind of a meek quiet guy who's good at sitting still and learning by listening. You want to design someone who's good academically, it's a good place to start. Had I grown up in a different place or a different time it would have been a good way to get the crap kicked out of me. The attributes that make one successful aren't constant. They aren't constant through time, or place, or across cultures.
Where does that leave us as parents?
I'm not sure.
I think it leaves us evaluating our kids one by one. Parenting isn't something you know how to do, it's something you learn how to do. Ask any parent who has more than one child and they can explain it to you. No matter how much they thought they knew after one baby, there were a whole bunch of things they had to learn differently when the second one came along. Every child takes their first steps in their own time and in their own way. They need different levels of support and freedom when they get to school. The attention that one child needs to feel safe in the world might smother another.
This is not simple.
I think I have more to say about this. I might add on, and I might just start over. We'll see.

Tasty Ears

This summer I introduced my kids to the culinary joy that is elephant ears. Now whenever they go to a place that might have fair food they're craning their necks to see if they can score another. There might have to be an intervention someday, but for now we're coping. I have to say though, it's kind of weird when you first go for an elephant ride, and then you eat an elephant ear. Weird I tell you.

First we ride them.....

Then we eat them! But just the ears. We're not cruel after all. 

I took a few days
And went a long ways
To spend a few days alone

I'm glad that I did
But I miss my kids
It's time for me to come home








Just about done with my annual trip to the woods. Ready to come home now.

Sleepy Zombie

If this isn't the sleepiest girl that ever lived, I don't know who is.
Conversely, she might just be a zombie.
Could go either way.

Vectors

Vector - noun - A quantity possessing both magnitude and direction.
I just finished a book called Again to Carthage by John L. Parker, Jr. It's the very awaited sequel to his book Once a Runner. Both books are about running. Both are fantastic. Both are worth reading even if you've never run a step in your life. It's the second book, Again to Carthage, that has set me thinking.
In the book our hero has followed a semi successful olympic bid with a semi successful, though mundane, life. He seeks some sort of redemption through attempting to make the olympic team one last time. The author beautifully lays out the torturous thought processes that lead our runner on this path, but it all boils down to direction. In his post olympic life he doesn't have anything in his life that is moving definitively forward. He's wallowing. He craves the simplicity of working to run better. Of training for a certain goal and being able to measure whether you are coming closer to that goal. A life where everything can be boiled down to one simple thing. Are you getting faster?
The author uses an arrow for reference. Life as an arrow pointing toward something. When you know where it's pointing and that you are headed that way satisfaction is easy. He never uses the term vector, but I suspect that's really what he meant. A life where you are moving a given direction with a magnitude that you can measure. When thinking about this I initially thought it had profound implications for life. The more I thought about it though, the more I thought that it has even greater implications for parenting.
It's easy to get lost when you're an adult. It's easy to find yourself just wallowing around in life for a few decades after college, or even longer. You just do things and grow old. Pretty much everyone once thought they'd be rich and famous somehow and it's a little disheartening to realize that at best your life is pretty average. Like I said, wallowing.
Not when you're a kid though. When you're a kid it's all possibility and movement. From the very beginning, the first day, your'e getting better. You see better. You move better. You grow. Soon crawling and talking and eating and all of that wonderful baby stuff. This is progress. Real measurable progress. Any parenting book will tell you where your baby should be at a certain age. When should they walk? When should they have 10 words? When should they recognize letters? Progress that is measured by parents and pediatricians to make sure that the vector of life has both the magnitude and direction that it should. All healthy children have this vector, and it's fantastic.
It's not so simple for our whole lives though, and I'm not just talking about middle aged wallowing. Take a look inside any county jail and think about the life vectors involved. Even more startling perhaps, look inside a juvenile detention facility. These are still kids. Young adults maybe, but arguably children. Once they were laying down on a floor and rolled over for the first time. They spoke their first words. They were measured and plotted on a growth chart and it was decided that they were doing fine. Somewhere something happened, and I think this is one of the things that parents fear most. That vector that was always pointing forward somehow turned, or reversed. A life that was supposed to be getting better and better for some reason didn't.
I'll pick this post up next week.

Glass Doors

Glass doors are fun.
They just are.

Issues

My oldest daughter isn't quite to the age where boys are icky. She's still living in the wonderful part of youth where, for the most part, people are just people. Yet, she seems to have an intense curiosity about how the world works. I posted before about her interest in the presidential debates, so it came as no real surprise that she was also quite interested in the election itself, both the process and the outcome. We had talks about the electoral college, the popular vote, how people in different parts of the country tend to vote, the usual stuff. Then yesterday I was truly taken by surprise.
At her school they held a mock election. They talked about the process and the importance of voting, but more importantly they discussed why they voted the way they did. From what she reported, most kids spouted information that was plucked directly from their parents news source of choice. Kids at this age are still very much under the sway of their parents, which is both cool and terrifying, so I sort of expected it. We got to discussing how you can have very good friends that hold very different political views from you, and she was cool with that. She stopped me cold in my tracks though, when she mentioned a friend who's parents "weren't supposed to be here". To him, to his family, to everyone they knew, there was only one issue. Deportation. There was no talk of taxes or being tough on terrorism or unemployment numbers. Just that one candidate had stood up in front of the world and said that he wanted to have this kid's parents rounded up and shipped back to the country they came from. He was born here. He's a top student. He's a good kid. He's an American. He loves his parents and when he went to bed last night, before the election was decided, he had a much different set of worries than my daughter did.
So we talked. For the last two months I had been stressing that one should listen to everything that a candidate has to say. Look at their stance on this and that and don't hang too much importance on any one phrase or promise. Choosing who you want to represent you as president for the next four years is a complex and thought involving process. Except when it's not. I had to concede that the world has a lot of people in it that aren't like me. Like her. Like our family. For us there are issues, for some of them there is only the issue.
I try to answer all of my kids questions as fully as I can. Math, science, politics, issues with kids or problems with teachers, I try to help them make sense of the world. They still surprise me when they bring me a question where my answer not only helps them make sense of things, but when I'm done, it has helped me make sense of things too. Parenting has many unexpected joys.

Realization

We have a brand new baby
She just came home today

That's a happy baby. I'm clearly good at this. 

She spends her time
With my wife
Sleeping and nursing away

There's not much for me to do
When she is very small
Because I lack
two full boobs
I'm not much use at all

But I can still change diapers
And hold her which is neat
My wife can stretch
Her weary legs
And get a bite to eat

Soon my wife is back to work
Warm bottles are the food
New girl and me
On our own
Now I am truly screwed

Editorial note: This is about our first baby and it's a little dramatic. My daughter and I did very well when my wife went back to work. It was a little overwhelming (if something can be just a little overwhelming) when the house first emptied of well wishers, then in-laws  then my wife, and I found myself alone with a baby, truly getting down to the business of stay at home dadding. Turned out just fine.

Sewing Halloween Costumes #3

Halloween is over so naturally it's time to finish up writing about sewing costumes. A fat lot of help that will do anybody. Oh well. Such is life.
Zippers. It's amazing how people are afraid of zippers. It's only been in the last year or two that my wife has been willing to sew them on herself, and she's pretty darn good with a machine. They're not really hard though, as long as you have a zipper foot. A normal sewing machine foot is symmetric about the needle. It has area on both sides of the needle. This wouldn't work with a zipper because when you sew on one side of the zipper you'd have part of your foot running over the zipper itself. To solve this dilemma you might think that it would be good to just hack off the half of your foot that's running into the zipper and this is exactly what a zipper foot does. They's also usually set up so that you can swap the foot to either the left or the right side of the needle which give you the freedom to sew in whatever direction you want.
Click through the jump to watch me sew in a zipper and do the final hemming of the tunic.

Candy Conundrum

Halloween is awesome. Dressing up is awesome. Trick or treating is awesome. Candy is awesome. It's all awesome.
When you're a kid.
When you're a parent it's all awesome except for the candy part. The candy part is a problem. This year we collected just north of eight pounds of candy. There is no way we could consider ourselves good parents if we let our kids down that much candy. How do we deal with this?
When they were very little it was easy. We went trick or treating and by the next morning when they looked in their plastic pumpkins they had 2 or 3 pieces of candy and a variety of packages of crackers and goldfish and such. When you're three you don't pay so much attention to what you get, just that you get. All the better if you find out the next morning that all of those nice houses gave you treats that you can eat! Yay!
Eventually that fell apart. My younger daughter runs back from every house announcing exactly what it is that she has scored. I'm not sure that she keeps a running tally, but she has a pretty good idea what she's carting around. We do still occasionally actually receive a package of crackers or goldfish, which ends up ok, because those can be taken to school as part of lunch. The candy though has a different fate. Every night after dinner, and weekends after lunch too, each child may pick out one piece of candy. Restrictions apply if you're very little or you have braces or you fall into some other special category. This goes on for one week, usually eight days actually, until Halloween candy season is declared officially over. A week of candy for desert is all we can do.
What to do with the extras? Well, that's always been pretty easy to deal with. For most of the time that we have had kids, my sister didn't. We simply got together all of the candy, explained that Aunt Biggie didn't get to go trick or treating because she didn't have kids, and sent it off to her. Postage paid and problem solved. Then she went and ruined our excellent plan by having a daughter. If I thought I was a bad dad for allowing my four kids to eat eight pounds of candy, then I'd be an even worse uncle for sending something like six remaining pounds to my niece. Also, my sister has threatened to retaliate by sending her leftover candy to me and I'm not sure I want to engage in that kind of arms race. The only one who wins that kind of battle is the post office.
Like everything else with raising kids, we've adapted. At my wife's office is a wonderful woman who works the front desk. There's a lot of things that make her wonderful, but as far as my kids are concerned, her perpetual bowl of candy is tops. Whenever they come to the office to visit, they never leave empty handed. So now that's what we do with our leftovers, we provide fodder for the feed bowl. Again, problem solved.
All parents deal with the candy issue in their own way. Some people we know refuse to trick or treat or only attend scheduled events where the quality of booty is known in advance. Some allow their children a sugar fueled free for all until everything consumed in a mad pre-diabetic rush. We all find a place where we're comfortable dealing with the candy conundrum.

Trick or Treat!

Trick or treat!
Thank you.
Over and over and over.
We had a very fun night.
We live in a neighborhood where there's no real trick or treating. You could try, but if you did you'd be more likely to be bit by a stray dog than find any actual candy. Luckily we have always had friends with a very strong desire to see our kids all dressed up who invite us to more hospitable surroundings, and we always appreciate it. We had a wonderful time. The kids were polite, mostly didn't fight with each other, didn't get hit by any cars and brought home more candy than they could possibly eat. The little kids were really into it, though my oldest is already showing signs of growing out of it. Not completely, but I can tell it's peeking in around the edges.

If you see any sewing on those costumes that beautiful, it was my wife. The crooked stitches on exceptionally easy costumes, I did those. She's amazing, as always.