Sand Holes

Some people build sand castles. We mostly dig sand holes. Big sand holes. Huge sand holes. Then we fill them back in. It's not very artistic, but it's fun. Burns energy. Tires people out. Mission accomplished.

June 25th

I well and truly love my wife and today is a good day to tell her that. We've been at this marriage thing a while, and I'm still as happy today as I was at the beginning. Maybe happier.
Love you lots.

Swimming

Put them in the water. Put them in the water every day. Give them a little instruction. A little egging on from siblings. Some gentle coaxing from parents. They'll figure it out. They always do.

Walkway

You can't touch the water until Daddy gets there. It's a rule.

Baby Ditch Bird #6

Well, our baby Yellow Crested Night Heron isn't a baby any more. It spends it's days and nights outside. It hunts and it flies, though neither of them well. It's been chatting with the other herons in the yard. Most importantly, it finally convinced my wife to like it.

Hunting in a small pond. Very small.

I've been doing pretty much all of the feeding up until the last week or so. Because it's summer and because I get to sleep in a bit, my wife has been feeding the bird in the morning. She takes the food out and calls to it and it flies down from wherever it is in the yard. The swingset, the roof, on top of my truck, it comes gliding in for breakfast. Finally my wife can enjoy a caring relationship with the bird without having to worry about touching it. That makes her happy.
We'll keep feeding the bird twice a day as long as it wants to eat. I acknowledge that by raising the bird and taking it out of it's natural environment I may have altered it's ability to hunt a bit. I have watched it eat bugs out of puddles and off of the lawn, so I know it's learning by itself, but there's not a whole lot of motivation to go hunt frogs when you can just wait for dinner.
We've pretty much done it. We rescue a helpless chick, fed it, raised it, and released it. It's functioning as a wild bird in the same way that a song bird that eats birdseed from a feeder is wild. It gets supplements from humans, but other than that it has to make it's own way in the world. The other day I counted six adolescent herons on my lawn and another four adults in the trees. Keeping Baby Burr alive isn't going to matter much to the bird population in my area, but to the bird, it's the difference between life and death. If there's any lesson to take from the effort that we put into raising this bird it's probably related to that. I don't think that being a stay at home dad is going to have any real impact on the world. Wars will still happen. Taxes will still be paid. College will still be expensive. All of those things would happen if I stayed at home or if I put my kids in daycare. To my kids however, I think the decision to hold them every day for naps when they were babies is significant. I think that making a healthy dinner for them every night is significant. I think being there at 3:00 to pick them up from school and help them understand their homework is significant. I'm not affecting the world, but I am affecting four lives. That's good enough for me.

Sill Work

Somewhere around nine years ago I replaced the old broken windows in the first story of our house. The first floor of our house is constructed of reinforced concrete. Not, just the foundation, but the walls. Six inches of concrete with a webbing of re-bar. The house is basically a bunker, which has it's good points and it's bad points. One of those good/bad things is the thickness of the walls. You have 6 inches of concrete, then a stud wall, and then the wallboard. Even after you shove a window in the hole, you end up with window sills that are almost 10 inches deep. Every widow on the first floor feels at bit like a porthole and sometimes I feel a bit like a medieval archer looking for enemies, but every window is also a shelf, a big shelf. Shelving everywhere, it's handy.
In the bathroom, the window is right next to the sink, which is convenient. We use that space to hold toothbrushes, hairbrushes, razors, mouthwash, and whatever else seems too troubling to put in the medicine cabinet that is right in front of our faces. We've always set things there, it just seems so natural. We've only had problems with this system two times. The first was when we first replaced the window. The old sill came out and was not immediately put back. The wide span was covered by a 2x4 right next to the window, and a 2x4 right next to the wall, and about 4 inches of space in between that dropped off into the black hole of the interior of the wall. After the second toothbrush went on a journey never to return, I was instructed to put a temporary board in place of the sill so we would stop losing things until I had the time to put a proper sill in place. I did that, and it temporarily stayed there for nine years and worked splendidly. The second problem related to the same gap around the window, but the gap on the sides. Like all houses in east Texas, we have the occasional roach. Not too many, but a few. We've put out roach motels but they've proven ineffective due to the lack of imagination on the part of their designers. Nobody seems capable of designing an opening big enough to allow for our roaches to get in. The tasty poison is there, and the roaches want to eat it, but they're shut out by their sheer bulk. It's a sad state of affairs. Because they can't be trapped by conventional means, they sometimes decide to crawl out of the walls and sit on the temporary sill, surrounded by toothbrushes and razors and what not, and look longingly out the window at the night sky. My wife wakes up early, flips on the light, and everyone has a terrible morning. It's an unfortunate clash of cultures, one that I was recently instructed to stop.
I've finally done it. I bought the wood and got out the saw and the nail gun and spent the few hours getting it all into place. It's been a bit of a pain not having that shelf to put things on for a couple of days, but I suppose it will be worth it. I'm priming the wood today, and then we can go back to using that space for proper storage. Shockingly, my wife is happy. She has the rare ability to wait out my procrastination with out wanting to smother me in my sleep. She doesn't seem to see the nine years of a temporary sill and the countless star gazing roaches in their wonder of the infinite distances of space. No, she sees a well made finished product and she's happy. To many, this is inexplicable, but I don't see a nagging wife, I only see patience. She doesn't see the maddening procrastination, only the beauty of freshly painted roach proof boards. We have found joy in each other where others would see anger.
I'm not sure that I believe in the idea that there is only one true love out there for any given person. That seems like a stretch. I do know that every now and again, through luck or fate or whatever it is, two people can come come together in a way that makes the fairy tale feel pretty damn real. It's nice.

Summer Schedule

Well, I've given it a lot of thought and I'm going to change my posting schedule. For the past nine months or so I've been trying very hard to post six days a week. For the most part I've been successful. When starting a blog that you hope that somebody will read, content is a big deal. You don't want someone to read half a dozen posts, love them, and then run out of things to read. You also don't want your posts to suck so that they read only one and go away, but that's another issue. Now I have content, I have stuff for you to read if you want to. There are 44 posts about food and cooking. There are 26 posts about my adventures with pets. There are more posts than I can count about the general day to day life of a stay at home dad.
That's what I really need to do right now, just hang out and be a dad. When school is going I have some built in down time to sit and write. With school done the schedule become sort of soggy and I find myself at the end of the day never having had enough of a block of time to write. It's stressful. Because of this I'm going to pull back for the summer. There will still be posts, but only two or three a week. Most will be short and archival in nature. I'll still be writing, but instead of writing on the computer, I'll be taking notes on paper. I'll get some ideas down and organized, so when my life returns to structure in the fall, I'll be able to not only improve the quantity of content on this site, but also the quality.
Have a wonderful summer and please check back once or twice a week if you can. Enjoy the summer days, and if you're a stay at home dad, enjoy the extra time with your kids.