Double Digits

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

ETC: Harold and the Purple Crayon

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

Dummy Bird - Part 3

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

Watch Your Dough Man!

Release me........

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

Winning!

Winning! But not really. Damn.

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

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

Ready....Fight!

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

Ready.........

Fight!

Fire!

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