Inappropriate Restaurant Games That I May or May Not Play With My Kids At Skyline Chili

I may have previously mentioned the affinity that me and my kids have for Skyline Chili. I know why I like it: Mixing spicy Habenero cheese with chocolate-enfused chili and putting it on a plate of 10-cent-quality spaghetti noodles that were cooked 5 hours before you got to the restaurant: it’s just magic. But what isn’t entirely clear is why the kids like it.

(if you don’t know about Skyline Chili; well, the simple description above does not do it justice; just go here and come back in a minute).

And they like it very much. My daughter insisted on making us go there for her birthday two years ago: including my wife’s parents and my parents, who came in from out of town to be subjected to the Skyline experience.

The reason it makes little sense that my kids like this place is that none of the kids actually eat the chili. My daughter eats the hot dogs (which are mini-hot dogs), my son eats oyster crackers and multiple bowls of shredded cheese and my other daughter east the overly sticky noodles and maybe some cheese. Yet they claim to love it.

I’m sure part of it is them just feeding off me and my enthusiasm, but I suspect a large chunk of it is the familiarity – really, the ritual of the experience.

And there is a ritual for us. In fact, for my family, Skyline Chili is the land where jokes never get old, where things have to go perfectly. And if we skip a step, there is hell to pay from the kids.

For each Skyline experience must proceed as follows:

I’m Lost: First, I am required to pretend like I don’t know where I’m going as we drive there. Normally I’m supposed to say things like “So we’re going to the fish restaurant, right?”

Race: Once the kids direct me in the mini-mall complex, and once we are safety under the mini-mall overhang, we are required to race to the restaurant. Not just running, either. I am required to mark-off appropriate head starts for each of the kids and participate as well. Once in the place, we always sit in a booth.

Worm: Once the drinks come, when you take the straw wrapper (straw sleeve?) off the straw, you crinkle it all up before you take it off the straw. Then you use the straw to get a few drops of coke/sprite/water into your straw and you drop it on the crinkled-up straw wrapper and it starts to expand and wriggle like a worm.

Here’s a video.

Cracker Soccer: Cracker soccer is the bastard cousin of the study hall paper football game When you sit down at skyline chili they give you a bowl of oyster crackers with – I’m not making this up – a fork. I’m not sure I get that one.

Anyway, we sit at a booth and the kids take their straws and I take mine and we put an oyster cracker in the middle and try to blow it off the table on the other person’s side.

This is more fun than it sounds like.

Pass Daddy the Ketchup: This is probably the kids’ favorite and the most ritualized Skyline Chili practice. We get in the both and I tell the kids that I LOVE to eat oyster crackers and ketchup and I ask them to pass me the ketchup. They pass me the hot sauce, watch me put some on an oyster cracker and eat it and then watch me over-act like a Wil E Coyote cartoon, complaining about how hot it is. Then they race to give me water and ask me, as if I might be permanently injured, whether I’m OK.

Nothing in this world is better to them than this. I’m not sure I totally get it, but I absolutely go along.

Competitive Eating: Once the food gets here, the kids start talking about how it is not enough like they are Joey Chestnut or Kobayashi or something. My son gets two bowls of cheese and demands two more. My daughter’s mini-hot dog eating record is, I think, five, but often a far greater record is alleged. Most of the time in life, when it comes to food, they are nibblers. This is the only time in the world that they think eating tons of stuff is cool.

Superballs and Such: A kids’ meal at Skyline Chili ends with a choice of a sucker or oreos (they used to provide both -- when my kids were forced to choose starting about 18 months ago, there was a minor revolt and I was required to let them choose suckers and give them cookies at home). After that, they demand quarters for the superball machine. For some reason, any ball with a design is considered good. A pool ball superball is considered bad, unless it is your current age. Luckily, pool ball superballs can normally be traded to the two year old for her ball, so as long as we only get one pool ball out of three, we’re good). At this point we must have nearly 100 superballs bouncing around our house.

And that’s about it. That’s the Skyline Chili experience every single freakin’ time we go there.

(and I kind of love it all too, so maybe it’s not just the kids that like the ritual)

DadBlog Pimps and Crayon Physics

I do no pimping on this site for the most part, other than for people that I’m pretty much required to be nice to as a legal matter.

In fact, I think I’m in a tiny minority when it comes to parent bloggers. Surprisingly, I’ve learned over the past year that many parent bloggers view this whole thing as a networking exercise; that blogging is somehow a career-like activity, where the blogger apparently holds out dreams of becoming a kind of oddball semi-interesting internet sensation and possibly cashing in, likely for something stupid like getting fired for blogging, instead of becoming famous for blogging well (aside: I would question the idea that anyone is good enough to actually get paid for parentblogging; it just seems silly). But the network-bloggers think that the appropriate “ends” that they need to achieve is to get as many hits as possible, and they’ll exercise whatever means are necessary to achieve their goal. Others are lonely and want friends. A few others use it like a personal diary, never expecting anyone to really read it. That’s about the universe.

And a few people like me blog mostly for friends, partially to see if anyone out there might also enjoy what we have to say but don't think of it as a second source of income. But we're the minority.

If you start a daddy or mommy blog, the following things will happen to you: (a) you’ll get people who email you and ask you to link to their site; (b) you’ll get people who visit your site and leave comments with the express goal of getting you to visit their site (or maybe they're just really friendly, I can't tell); (c) you’ll get “best of the web” start-ups that get 20 hits a day telling you that you have the “best post of March 16, 2008” (they figure if they do this 365 times, they’ll get at least that many hits in a year); (d) you’ll get some people that will offer to pay you to review their site; (e) you’ll get some commercial enterprises that will try to convince you to link to their site (see below). All this seems incredibly bizarre to me, kind of like when I learned that the nerds in my high school had a social hierarchy not all that dissimilar to the one that the jocks had. The main difference was that the nerd one was so so much more pathetic, because who wanted to climb to the top to be crowned King of the Nerds?

Maybe I’m naïve. I once got a nice email from an outfit called Kobold Toys . It was friendly, they claimed to like my site (not sure if they actually read any of it, but lets give them the benefit of the doubt) and they asked me to link to them and say something nice and, in exchange, they were going to have a portion of their site that linked to blogs. I promptly ignored the email. Looking at other dad blogs a few days later, I stumbled across a dad blogger with a “for sale” sign on his own forehead that, well, decided to play along and actually pretended to have stumbled across this great toy store website and pimped it for them. And then the toy store linked back to his review from their website as if it was all spontaneous instead of orchestrated via email behind the scenes. And then the kobold toys blog stuck his blog on the “blogroll.” It all just struck me as dishonest and sad. People actually taking the time to sell themselves for links. I felt like Jeff Smith learning that Senator Joe Paine is in the party machine’s pocket.

Just looking at the number of google ads out there on blogs that get tiny numbers of hits just kills me; it’s hilarious. It’s the equivalent of someone in your neighborhood putting up a billboard in his front yard, and selling space on his car and on his children’s shirts. I mean, what are you people fucking doing with all this advertising? Why does this seem like a good idea to you, commercializing yourself so you can get $7 checks in the mail each quarter?

This is totally not rock n roll guys.

In any event, I don’t pimp things as a matter of course, but…

… you gotta check out the new game Crayon Physics. WOW this is cool shit.

Although it’s not out yet, I’m quaking with anticipation. My kids and I have spent hours playing the very limited free demo. My son was 4 and had little trouble mastering the concept or the controls (he couldn’t solve it all, but loved creating crap and dropping it on the balls anyway). My 8 year old ran with it.

I'm pre-ordering this thing now. You and your kids gotta try this game. Trust me.

And for the record:

****THIS IS NOT A SLIMY TIT-FOR-TAT OR PAID ADVERTISEMENT****

p.s. Thanksgiving was actually still fun. Although my siblings had to tend to their own children, they were now more into children in general, so they still played with mine and let me be a lazy ass. All in all it was a win-win.

Thanksgiving May Very Well Suck This Year

Yes, yes, I know; it’s really two days after Thanksgiving, but my family’s get together is today, Saturday.

Going back to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving and Christmas used to be a great joy for me. I’m the oldest of four children and none of my siblings had kids, so the day would be spent (a) with other people watching and playing with my kids, often in cool ways, with me sitting my butt on a couch (sometimes with glass of wine in hand), (b) talking with people that have semblances of real lives (those people being my siblings and their spouses) and actually know some things about the world and stuff, so it was good to get all caught up.

Now a terrible thing has happened. The last 12 months have made me an uncle three times over. All three of my siblings have had their firstborn children.

Now my wife and I will get to (1) hold a lot of babies, (2) watch my siblings worry waaaay too much about their kids (likely chopping turkey into unrecognizably small bites) (3) listen to them discuss the merits of different brands of baby clothes and videos and toys and car seats, things upon which we have all kinds of opinions, but we will have no way of expressing them without seeming like obnoxious know-it-alls, so we’ll have to just shut up, (4) watch the confused look on my children’s face as grammy and grampy aren’t devoting 100% of their time to them, (5) worst of all, I will have to entertain my own children while the tryptophan forces my limbs deeper and deeper into the couch.

To be clear: this isn’t to say that my siblings and their spouses are going about this the wrong way. I love my siblings and spouses quite a bit (and even like them too!). They’re good parents. If anything, we very well may have been more unrealistically anal about our firstborn when she was young than any of them are. But, as my wife says when she hangs out with college friends that just had their first baby: “I’m happy for them, but it’s just hard to get excited about their baby stories after a while. I’m kind of over it all.”

We’re leaving in 45 minutes and I’m not sure I’m looking forward to it this year.

Really Being a Father

It may seem from a lot of what I’ve written that a large part of fatherhood involves getting away from your children. And it seems that way because it is true. You have to maintain your individuality. Way too many people, once they have kids, think that their kids are their life. And they sweat and toil and think “I am making my kids’ life better.” And then their kids have the grandkids, and the kids sweat and toil for the grandkids and, down a generation, the grandkids sweat and toil for the great-grandkids. And at some point you realize that people are sacrificing themselves on down the line from generation to generation with no payoff. If every generation is selfless until it isn’t, then you have 6 generations of saints busting their ass down the line until you get unlucky and you reach a generation of jerks and assholes who say “ok; now we’ll just spend the money. Thanks suckers.” (kind of like this generation of the Kennedys, Hiltons, etc.). In any event, that whole generational live-your-life-to-pass-it-all-ondown kind of enterprise never struck me as something that gives purpose to a life.

The trick of fatherhood to me has always been trying to balance my life and my fun with my obligations to the kids and to society (to raise the kids right). I will sacrifice for my kids, but I won’t ruin myself in the process if I can help it.

One way I try to do this is trying to get them into the stuff that I’m into, so we can have fun time for Dad at the same time we’re having fun time for the kids. Getting them into chess, sneaking math lessons in now and again, taking them to Tribe games, etc. But that’s not always possible. Sometimes I have to do my own thing, or something with just my wife, and without them.

But if you’re going to take “alone time” every once in a while, you better be ready to commit yourself to “kid time” every once in a while too.

I think the mistake that many fathers make is that they are afraid to truly and fully commit to children’s play. They won’t give themselves over to it. When your kid wants to play princess and make you a prince, you gotta attack the role like you’re fucking’ De Niro. You are the prince. Do you like your crown? Should you try to get one in a different metal, such as platinum? Do you recall your childhood or do you suspect that you might once have been a frog? Why am I not wearing the royal purple? I should go get a purple shirt on. Why is this princess smaller than me? Lets come up with a logical explanation for that, like you got zapped by a “giant-maker” ray. You gotta feel it, man! Be the ball! And it can’t be a self-conscious wink-wink act where you’re playing cute for your spouse (or the blogging community; I define "not playing cute" as limiting ironic comments to once every five minutes). Leave your shame on the treelawn and keep it out of the house today, my friend, as it has no place in here. It's all about the kiddies.

Here's another experiment, particularly for the young (which I've only successfully been able to pull off twice). If you are walking down the street with a 2 or 3 or 4 year old, forbid yourself from saying “hurry up” or “let’s go” or “this way” or from even touching their hand to guide them. Walk at their pace wherever they take you, even if it takes you 45 minutes to get four houses down the block. When they stop and bend over to look at something, you stop and bend over, or sit on the sidewalk patiently. (once again, leave the shame before you being your trip, as the people in the house whose sidewalk you are in front of will be peering out the windows wondering why you’ve camped out on their sidewalk for 10 minutes).

For 60 minutes you gotta live in their world and ignore the phone and other adults and listen to every word they speak and treat it like it was the most important and serious thing in the world. Two or three of those sessions a week –120-180 minutes -- and you’ll be not telling them but showing them that you respect them and take them seriously, and that’s gonna go a long way in about 20 different ways.

And you won’t feel nearly as guilty when on Tuesday night you decide to read that new book you’re obsessed with instead of playing with them.

Christmas Cards

Holiday season is coming. One thing I like about late December / early January is by that time our family accumulated a giant pile of Christmas cards, most of which I haven’t seen because my wife gets the mail in our house. So each year I settle in and go through them before they get thrown out.

Christmas cards are one aspect of life that is totally obscured from the view of single bachelor men. Single men don’t buy Christmas Cards. Single men don’t normally receive more than three or four Christmas Cards, maybe from their sisters and mothers. They really have no idea that after being married five years, they’ll have 75 Christmas cards flowing into their mailbox during the month of Christmas. A cultural surprise it is.

And Christmas Cards are a very good thing. Once you have kids, you have no choice. You gotta do your part and contribute. And the primary reason that you have to contribute is because your Christmas Card is your message to the world about Who You Are. A Christmas Card is to a married couple with kids is what a Halloween costume is to a 22-year old. It is a public form of quasi-art that you know people will see. It is planned and considered in advance. The idea is yours and expresses what you think is funny or interesting, but it’s not just mental; your physical pluses and minuses are part of the package. And your choice will convey a message, whether that message is “I don’t care,” or “We are straight-laced” or whatever. You have an opportunity each year to do the equivalent of blast faxing your friends with something you’ve created (or paid to have someone create). You gotta do it right. [ed note: of course, the primary reason that I now believe in the fundamental importance of Christmas cards is because my wife put together a smashingly funny one last year; two years ago I thought they were crap and a waste of money, but lets just ignore that for now]

The father’s primary purpose, as in countless other aspects of family life, is simply to keep your wife from going horribly wrong. In the picture (and if you have kids and you’re sending a Christmas Card without a picture, you may be beyond help), your pet can be an accessory but can’t be given equal billing with the kids. Matching outfits are only permissible if both adults wear the outfit as well, making it plainly over the top. Boys’ hair must have been cut at least four days prior to the picture and should not be glued to their heads. Parents must be in the pictures at least every 3-4 years so your out of town friends aren’t horribly shocked at how friggin’ old and fat you look after not having seen you for ten years (or to prep them for the plastic surgery and/or Hair Club surprises).

In addition to the Christmas Card being a form of semi-art you circulate around, the other key purpose Christmas Cards serve is to allow those friends that don’t see you very often to see if your kids are uglier or better looking than you. Sometimes you see a Christmas Card with two attractive parents, and you look at the kid and you know with certainty that the parents are thinking to themselves “what the fuck happened here?” as they’ve done the genetic equivalent of mixing Dr. Pepper and Vanilla Almond Special K, managing to create a gross and disgusting thing out of two great ones. Other times the kid is so cute it makes you wonder…

One old tradition that I’m sad that apparently has died is the Christmas letter. The Christmas letter was roundly mocked and derided as shameless self-promotion and prattling on about things that aren’t interesting [ed note: like a blog? Dddyfsto: Shut up]. As a result, at least for my generation and social circuit, the Christmas letter is now extinct (my parents’ friends still occasionally send them, but baby boomers have never been shy when it comes to shameless self-promotion). This is an awful shame. These things were great. At the absolute worst, you got to mock and deride the letter and, at best, they were actually kinda funny and informative. I mean, if your friends are going off the deep end and getting all weird on you, don’t you want to know that before you travel and visit them and find their house postered wall-to-wall with I Can Has Cheezburger kitties? Wouldn’t it have been nice to know that they were going down that path before you agreed to spend the weekend? You can see, we need the Christmas letter!

And who are the people that are complaining? These are people that think Christmas letters are boring, but when they get yours, instead of just not reading it, they read it anyway so they can complain about how boring it is. I can respect people that like X-mas letters; I can respect people that don’t like them and don’t read them. But people who enter into an unpleasant experience so they can mock it later. Who needs those people as friends?

So c’mon, join with me. Let’s bring back the Christmas letter! Who is with me here? [as this is a blog, I am supposed to say something like “let’s see a show of hands in the comments section”]. Time is short, but how long does it really take to write a page of your family’s accomplishments and to figure out a way to portray them in a reasonable/interesting/or funny way?

C'mon people. I’m expecting some letters this year. Let's do it!

Science Proves That Your Mother is Better At Watching Your Kids Than You or Is Maybe Just Scared of You

I read an interesting study this week that just came out in Pediatrics magazine . The researchers looked at kids that were 30 to 33 months old and tried to figure out what attributes in the kids’ parents or lifestyles made it more or less likely that the little tots would be injured.

Most shit didn’t matter, even stuff you might think would matter. Income didn’t matter. Child’s birth weight didn’t matter. The mom describing herself as depressed didn’t matter. The mom thinking she was competent didn’t matter. Race didn’t matter. Ethnicity didn’t matter. Of the things they tested, 5 things mattered. Three decreased the chance of injury and two increased it.

The two things that increased the chance of injury are kind of boring. First, if the parents split up, the kid got hurt more. This one’s simple math: one person potentially watching out for you vs. two. The second is whether the kid’s father was identified as the primary caregiver. Then the kid was more than twice as likely to get hurt, which basically proves that when toddlers start trying to climb bookshelves, fathers have an impulse to sit back in their chairs “just to see what happens” that they have to overcome before springing to action. Apaprently this is not an easily overcome impulse. Or dads are pulling a Cosby and trying to prove their incompetence so as to be relieved from their child-watching duties.

The decreases are more interesting, at least to me:

(1) How old your mother was when you were born.

This one is easy. Old moms aren’t gonna play a lot of running around games themselves. And old moms have earned enough money in their lives to have bought actual nice stuff, so they don’t let their kids tear shit up in the house. Kids have to play calmly, thus they don’t get hurt.

(2) Whether you’ve moved recently.

This is the one that shocked the researchers. If you moved recently, kids got hurt a lot less. But this one’s obvious too if you think about it. Anyone that’s ever moved knows that your parents don’t let you do shit, don’t let you even cross the street they’re so overprotective.

(3) Whether your grandparents take care of you during the day

This one is the best, and is news that will surely be greeted smugly by all grandmothers around the globe, who I’m sure suspected this, never doubted it for a second. The conclusion was that if the grandparents take care of the kids during the day, their chances of being hurt are cut in half compared to if someone else or the mother herself watches them. The best part about this one is that it apparently isn’t wisdom or experience that makes grandmothers better at this, because if the mom is out of the picture and the child is watched by the grandmother full-time, the injury rate goes back to normal. So grandmothers aren’t better at parenting. They are only better at watching their grandchildren if the parents are still around.

Best I can tell, this suggests that there are one of two things are going on (or maybe both). First, the grandmothers are keeping the children from being injured simply as a way to look better compared to the mothers. It’s a simple “watch me do this better than you” dynamic, which is really pretty awesome that science has demonstrated this (even though it was obvious, it’s nice to have scientific proof that moms are secretly competing with their mothers and mothers in law despite their denials to the contrary). The other thing that might be going on are grandparents that are deathly afraid of the kid getting hurt and the mother starting to withhold the presence of the grandchildren.

So either your parents think they are better than you at raising kids, or they’re afraid of you. You can decide which one applies to you, but you can’t deny both.

Halloween for Dads

I’ve never been all that big on Halloween. We weren’t a big Halloween family when I was growing up. I’m not a big chocolate fan. The insides of pumpkins gross me out. Costumes seem like a pain in the ass.

Sure, I attended a few Halloween parties later in life, in college and thereafter, and made half-assed efforts to wear costumes to some of them. But I can’t say I was ever a big fan.

And so after I got married, the one (bizarre, hilarious and sometimes more) advantage of Halloween – watching women skank it up – didn’t really matter anymore. To the extent we were still going to parties, watching thirty-somethings skank it up had the potential to be less than appealing or disastrous.

So I was content to let Halloween fade away. I figured I’d let my wife run with this holiday with the kids, I’d put in an hour or two of work every year and that would be that.

But taking the kids out trick or treating the past few years, I’ve begun to recognize a glorious thing. A surprising number of dads wandering around carrying red plastic Solo cups filled with unknown liquids. Stopping to sip from their unmarked water bottles an inordinate number of times. People seemed happier and friendlier than usual. One street near our old house essentially created a mini-block party, with most of the adults out on lawn chairs on front porches or in the lawn.

This is great! I mixed myself a special beverage last year and, figuring the cops would have their hands full with pumpkin tossers, I became brazen this year and just carried my Coors Light around with me with another in my jacket pocket. I dropped the empty cans at the houses of neighbor we know. It worked out great.

This Halloween thing might actually have some potential.

Halloween Racists

How do you spot a racist?

No one wants to be friends or even friendly with racists. But how do you really know who in your neighborhood is racist? In most cities, you’re left to wonder, but in Cleveland Heights, there’s a way to find out.

Cleveland Heights is a city that’s as racially integrated as any (the trick being that not many cities in the world are very integrated). In any event, Cleveland Heights has about 27,000 white people and about 21,000 black people. Cleveland Heights also borders East Cleveland, one of the most maligned cities in Ohio (and for good reason) and some of the sketchier parts of Cleveland. And while it is numerically racially integrated, in practice the whites and blacks tend to live in different parts of the city. We have about 16-20 houses on our street, only three of which are occupied by black families.

If you want to know who is racist in Cleveland Heights, you wait for Halloween. You wait for what I affectionately call the “visiting trick-or-treaters.” A number of presumably-poor black families that you’ve never seen before in your lives descend upon the mostly white streets of the moderate to upscale streets of Cleveland Heights. Every one of the kids using a pillow case for a candy bag. Not every one in costume; many in poor or barely recognizable costumes.

In Cleveland Heights, if you want to find the racists, look for the residents of the nice neighborhoods that are just put off by this. And they do exist, and it sneaks out of them all night long. The dad who you are chatting with you mentions that “those people that aren’t from this neighborhood are just all over tonight.” Or the woman at the door of her house who, passing out candy, shrieks “my goodness I’ve never seen so many trick or treaters. Where did you all come from? You just take one a piece now!!” My father-in-law speculates that a quarter to a third of the neighborhood turns off their lights because they just “don’t like it.”

(I have to say that I am sometimes myself irked by the annual visit of the 35 or 40 year old woman, who appears to be escorting her kids, who steps up herself to stick her pillowcase in my face. Some version of this woman appears every year. One of them a few years ago was kind enough to lie that the bag was for “her sick son,” which made it easier not to hate her, but screw the rest; I fantasize about not giving them candy, but my sorry, pathetic self gives up the peanut butter cup every time).

It's tough to know what to make of this at first, but the more you think about it, the harder it is to complain about this. The visting trick or treater parents don’t want to expose their kids to the nastiness of their neighborhood after dark. Instead of sitting at home, they want their kids to experience trick-or-treating. They're willing to live with the embarrassment of it all. So they cross the border for goodies, like seniors in the United States used to take the bus to Canada for medicine to pick up their prescriptions on the cheap.

There's no way to really complain about that when you think about it. And that doesn't even take into account the racial gay-dar they bring that lets us know which neighborhood folks need to be skipped over when it comes time to invite people over for a cookout.

The way I see it, they’re really doing me a favor.

Break-I-Festo

After getting killed by work for 6 weeks, things are slowing up, so I plan to post this weekend and resume posting through the end of the year.

It's always heartening to look at your hit counter and realize that people read your blog more when you aren't posting.

The Mantra That I Need

I am not a big brother.

Well, actually I am a big brother;, I am the oldest of four children. But what I need to remember is that I am not my children’s big brother (I am also not my wife’s big brother, which is something that she tends to remind me about when I try to push her off the bed at night because she said something annoying). This is probably my biggest failing as a parent (when it comes to my failings as a husband, this is but one to choose from out of a veritable cornucopia of choices).

[it's really kind of easy for me to get confused, however, because when I was younger, I had 2 younger sisters and a younger brother; and now I have 2 girls and a boy; are you buying this excuse? me neither I guess]

For example, the kids and I were leaving to drive somewhere this morning, and after I shuffled them out the door onto the driveway, I realized that we had a full bag of trash in the kitchen trash, so I went back and de-leveraged and de-suctioned the bag from the kitchen can and carried it in my left arm outside toward the trash can. In the 30 seconds it took me to do this, my 2 year-old managed to find the puddles in the driveway and begin stomping in them, soaking her shoes and pantlegs.

So I said “Argh… what are you doing!” which is fine, but then I said “I am going to throw you in the trash can,” which is really not completely fine. My 2-year old laughed a bit at the fact that she made me “Argh” (which annoyed me a bit more) and I hurried over and scooped her up with my right arm. I then walked over to the trash can, to deposit the bag of trash.

As I walked over the trash can, my two-year old (utilizing the normal observational skills of a two-year old, and thus having no freakin’ clue that I had a trash bag in my other hand) began to think I was serious. She whimpered. She squealed. The problem is that, at this point, full-on big brother mode kicked for me in here (which I was able to recognize by my inadvertent smile). An actual, responsible adult would have stopped himself immediately and put the child down or something. I, apparently being a naturally evil person, however, went ahead and took the lid off the trash can, causing the two year old to shout “NO Daddy!” At this point, the big-brother-in-me said “now you should laugh in a really evil way” and I actually started to do that until the father-in-me finally, about 20 seconds too late, beat the shit out of the big-brother-in-me and I stopped being such a jerk and put the kid down.

This is not the only time I have done this. When my oldest (named Emma) was 6-years old, our old dilapidated garage was on its last legs and needed to be replaced (we had nicknamed it “deathtrap” and considered inviting the really annoying neighbor kid over to play in it). But trying our best to be fun, creative parents, my wife and I decided that the garage’s imminent demise meant that we could spray paint the fuck out of the old thing the day before it was scheduled to be demolished. My wife bought a can or two of red spray paint while I was at work at we were ready to go that night. While the kids played inside, we snuck out after dinner to get a chance to loose our inner graffiti artist before handing over the cans and allowing the kids to take over (knowing with a certainty that there would be no turns left for us once the kids started).

My wife drew a few shapes on the door and I watched until I burst needing my out chance. I sprayed a line or two and got an idea. I sprayed “Emma wrote this” on the garage door in large, red letters. I put the garage door up, so there was no evidence of any painting.

I called my daughter out of the house.

I told her she was punished for the bad thing she had done. She looked at me quizzically, having no idea what I was talking about.

I pulled down the garage door.

My daughter read it and became hysterical, screaming “I didn’t do it I didn’t do it I didn’t do it.” She then began to run. Fast and far. My daughter, the girl that had been going out and running 2 miles with me back then (and who now, at age 8, kicks my butt), was off to the races. Down the driveway, turning at the sidewalk and just going.

It began to dawn on me that overteasing your 6-year old isn’t cool. Not at all, not at all, not at all, not at all not cool not one bit. Luckily my wife eventually tracked my daughter down and, after about 20 minutes, she actually stopped crying.

Parents are supposed to be a comfort to a child. Parents are the two people that will always love their children and accept them for who they are, unconditionally. Yet here I am, screwing with a six-year old. Sigh.

I’d like to say that I’m cured; that I’ve stopped teasing my kids. The fact that I’m blogging about it (and posting a pic), however, suggests that part of me still, and inappropriately, thinks that it was kinda funny.

But I really am trying to remember that I'm not their big brother.

Teaching The Hatred: A Father's Duty

LeBron James has done it again. On Sunday I was in my living room, watching the Browns vs. Cowboys game, and there is LeBron on the sidelines at Cleveland Browns Stadium … unfortunately, he’s on the Dallas sidelines. LeBron famously showed up at an Indians vs. Yankees playoff game last fall sporting a Yankees cap, rousing the ire of Tribe fans, but later explaining that he’s always liked the Yankees. Maybe having your professional sports stars like other teams is OK when they are from somewhere else, but people most in Cleveland felt that, as someone actually from Cleveland, LeBron should “get it” and should be an Indians and Browns fan. So this new move should come as little surprise, at least.

Lots of people had takes on this. Some good. Some not so good. I personally always thought that LeBron had a legitimate built-in excuse: he grew up without a dad around. I mean, most kids learn about sports by seeing their dad watching the NFL on the tube Sunday afternoon, or by riding around in the back seat listening to the baseball game on the radio. Some even get taken to some games by their dads. Who took LeBron to a game? Did anyone ever tell him to like the hometown team?

We learn from history that racism was (is?) largely taught to children by their parents, probably more often than not by fathers. Hatred of something can, in this way, be passed on from generation to generation.

I am inspired by the example of our Southern brothers. If they could teach their kids from generation to generation something that is as freakin’ stupid as “black people are inferior,” then I should have no trouble teaching my children the plain truth that “maize and blue people are inferior” and the “Pinstripes suck.”

This is one of the best things about sports: it is the main place in modern society where you can pass an irrational hatred of something on to your children, where can put your mark on your children -- and, if you are a Cleveland fan, psychologically mar them -- in a way that, if you do it properly, will so impact them that they’ll similarly deform their own childrens’ psyches.

It’s great.

For example, I’ll be sitting around, watching let’s say a baseball game on ESPN Sunday night baseball or something. One of the kids walks in, and it goes like this:

“Daddy, who is playing basketball?”

“It’s baseball. And it’s the New York Yankees against the Boston Red Sox.” (I mean, why in the world would anyone show any other game on TV if you can show the Yankees Red Sox? Ack.)

“Who do we want to win”

“I guess the Red Sox.”

Pausing, “So we don’t like New York.”

“Nope. Nope. Nope. We don’t like New York.”

“Do we hate them?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do we hate them double?”

“Yes, we double hate them. Triple even.”

“So we like the Red Sox, right?”

“No, we hate them too, but just a little bit less than the Yankees.”

“Oh. That little guy Ped-Roy-A is annoying to me. I think maybe I hate the Red Sox a little bit more.”

“So long as you hate both of them, which one to hate more is up to you to choose. It’s a personal philosophical choice that each person has to decide for himself. Post-2004, there’s no correct answer when it comes to Red Sox and Yankee hating; both are valid personal choices.”

“Do you hate the Yankees more than Michigan and the Steelers?”

“Ummm…. Errrr.”

(This is where I normally pass out simply from the thought of the question.)

You see, LeBron didn’t get any of this crucial training at a young age. So he ends up a Yankees fan and a Cowboys fan. I mean, I almost feel sorry for the guy.

Not Quite There Yet

It happens to all parents. You are trying to teach your child something (or hoping that they’ll learn it without you having to go through the exercise of actually teaching it, via osmosis or TV or other really effective methods like those) and you get the impression that they’ve got it! You can see, with your powers of super-perception, that they’ve gotten it – even if it doesn’t seem like it -- and you tell your spouse or mom about it and … actually you’re just full of crap. I always thought that the kids were smiling at us well before they were. My wife once thought our 20 month old was reading (and even made me get out the video camera so her mistake is preserved for posterity). Every time we leave the kids with my mother alone overnight, she mysteriously claims that they’ve learned some new skill that we see no evidence of once we take them home. (It’s possible that she’s just fucking with me to get back at me for years of harassing her, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on).

My nieces, who live in the Middle East (not as in “Maryland” but as in “near Syria”), came to visit us and their grandparents again this summer. They are 13 and 10 years old, and my now-8 year old daughter (the oldest) absolutely loves their visits as she can have the older-sibling-type relationship with them that she’s deprived of otherwise in her life. The nieces go off to camps sometimes in the summer and come back with all kinds of interesting stuff to teach my 8-year old (none of it is the bad kind of interesting yet, at least as far as I know).

One of this year’s camp hand-me-downs was “five-minute mysteries,” which are basically short riddles. For example: “There is a man in a yard with a fence that no one can climb over that is locked from the inside and he is lying on the ground, dead, with a stab wound in his chest, and a giant puddle underneath him. How did he die?” You can ask questions in a 20-questions kind of way, ultimately trying to come up with the answer: “it was winter and an icicle fell onto his heart and killed him and then melted.” She had a half-dozen things of that genre. My eight-year old loved it and it seemed to me that my nearly five year old was kinda getting it too. I was kind of proud of him for being able to follow what was going on.

I often overestimate the walking that my son will be able to do. I figure “he’s almost 5, he should be able to walk a mile or two” and it never really works out that way. The other day we were going to an Indians game and hitched a ride downtown, thinking we would take the Rapid train home (something my son loves). Post-game (OK, really, post-7^th inning) he was able to walk the half-mile from the game to the train, but once off the train, it was shoulder-back time for the mile or so walk home.

So we were trudging up a hill on our way, and I spotted a dead bird on the sidewalk ahead of us. I hesitated, not really ever having to address death with the boy. Unfortunately, he asked.

“Daddy, look at that bird.”

“Yeah … it looks like it’s dead. That makes me sad.”

He paused. “Maybe it’s just sleeping.”

“I guess that’s possible, but I don’t think so, buddy.”

When a serious topic springs up out of nowhere, having a kid on your shoulders is rough. You can’t see their faces, their eyes. You have no idea if they are shaken up or have moved on. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I wanted to see his face so bad that I spent 3 or 4 seconds trying to roll my eyes up so far as to see the face of the boy sitting on my shoulders.

We walked past the bird and about 20 paces beyond.

My son drew a deep breath and said: “I guess it will always be a five-minute mystery.”

(maybe sometimes they don't get it when you think they do)

Family Friends

While you and your wife may have brought your own sets of friends to your marriage to begin with, if you’ve been married long enough, you’ve probably been around when your wife (or you) actually met someone and became their friend. And that new friend probably had a significant other. And somewhere early in the relationship, you probably went out as a foursome. And if it was her making the friend, if you hated the guy, couldn’t stand him, then her relationship with the female maybe never got off the ground, or was probably restricted to shopping or girls nights out or something like that. And vice versa. The basic standard that most people seem to have is this: you get to maintain the friendships you came to the relationship with (you don’t have to get rid of the high school friend no matter how annoying to your spouse), but all new friendships have to be cleared with the spouse before commencement. That’s just the way it goes.

Having kids takes this in a whole other direction, since now you have to find a family that is not just acceptable to mom and dad: you have to find a couple with kids to be friends with since you’ll bore regular non-childed people to death discussing diaper brands (or your top ten worst diaper “blow-outs”). And the kids generally have to be the same age as yours (your actual age no longer matters; in parenting terms, if your kids are older than someone else’s, then you’re the “older” parents). You may resist this restricting yourself to childed couples at first, but soon you’ll recognize the advantages of having another set of parents with kids to hang out with.

But first, you have to realize that in choosing these friends, how much you like them and they like you counts, but other stuff counts at least as much if not more. Perhaps most importantly, you need to make sure that they have a reasonable level of attachment to their kids and a reasonable discipline level. Some people believe that once the adults are talking with a cocktail in their hands, all adults are to pretend like the children don’t exist. These are the people whose kids are probably down in the basement, pulling your kids’ fingernails out with pliers when you aren’t there. That’s too far. Other parents, however, will actually follow their kids around your house from room to room and show them how to use toys and will pay more attention to the kids than to you. You might mention to these folks that if you wanted to follow kids around, you have your own. You didn’t need to invite their’s over. So you need to find balance here. Someone who when the kids play in the backyard proposes that the parents sit on the deck, or at least in the family room with the window. But not in the yard.

Another big test once the kids are older is how do the other parents react when you say to their kid “Frankie… stop standing on Julie’s head” in a stern voice. When you discipline their kid. If they’re OK with it, you’ve got family friends for life, even if their favorite band is ABBA and they watch CBS constantly.

This is one of the key reasons why, as you get older, adult brothers and sisters start to hang out with one another. Not because they’ve grown closer or actually like each other. It’s because they’re WAY more comfortable yelling at their own flesh and blood in the form of nieces and nephews when they do something ridiculous like tear up the garden. If it’s not family, you force yourself to think “I didn’t like those flowers anyway.” When it’s your nephew, you grab them by the scruff of the neck and deal with it.

So you’ve got these new couple friends. What are they for? It’s important to do the right stuff. For example, do not ever ever take your family of 3 or 4 out to dinner with another family of 3 or 4. That’s just a disaster. You’re now a table of 8, and you’ll sit in the lobby for 45 minutes waiting for the 2 tables in the restaurant that seat 8 to open up while your kids scream “I’m hungry.” No, what another family is ideal for is for breaking the monotony of weekends stuck at home or weekday summer nights. You go over to the other person’s house, you turn the kids loose and you drink a beer or a glass of wine and spend 2-3 hours together. That’s what these new friends are for.

I wondered why my dad never did anything solo with our “family friends’” dads. It’s because he didn’t actually like many of them as actual friends. And, look, you’re gonna have to lower the bar here. Sometimes you get lucky and you find some guys that you’d normally actually be friends with. When this happens, they normally have a kid who keeps trying to kiss your daughter’s belly or a kid that kills small animals or a wife who your wife hates because she’s really really hot, I mean smoking hot (despite the superficial attraction to that situation, don’t become friends with that guy: it ain’t worth it). There’s never an ideal situation. If you accept that, you can have a blast with the new friends.

The problem really arises when you get older. You not only need a guy that you’re ok with, you need a wife that your wife is ok with, and ideally they will have approximately the same number and ages of kids as you, and hopefully similar gender distributions. There probably are 17 families like that in the world, but only 3 of them speak English. So someone’s gonna get screwed, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. Just make sure that kid gets an extra Christmas present: preferably a Nintendo DS so they have something to play with when you go over to that family’s house and the rest of you have fun.

More Parenting Definitions

Last time around, a commenter observed that I seem to be coming up with sniglets here, which I'm sure he meant as an insult, but which I have decided to treat as a compliment.

Baguette Skins – the crusty shell of a baguette that your kids leave for you to eat after pulling out and eating the soft fluffy bread center.

Drive-Thru Swap – After driving-thru at Wendy’s or McDonalds on one day to grab a meal for your kids, when you intentionally drive your spouse’s car through the drive-thru the following day so that the fast food employees do not recognize that you’re feeding your kids fast food every day.

Handshake Drugs – A style of paying a babysitter employed by most parents, where the money is palmed and handed over to the babysitter in the most discreet way possible (Why? Are we worried that our kids secretly think that the babysitter has a platonic crush on them, and that’s why she comes over?)

Sandwich Birth Order – When you have three or more children, with only the youngest and oldest of the same gender, like Girl Boy Boy Boy Girl.

Living Close to Home

There’s an odd thing in other major America cities: Other City bars. Washington or Chicago have “Boston bars” or “Ohio State bars” or “New York bars.” Cleveland doesn’t have any Other City bars, I’m pretty sure because no one from other cities ever actually moves here, or at least not enough of them to support a bar. Practically everyone that’s here in Cleveland is from here or from around here.

But several other cities have Cleveland bars. And therein lies the problem.

When they grow up, my kids are going to grow up and they are going to move away. I’m trying to come to grips with that, the fact that it is highly likely that they aren’t going to live anywhere near Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland is the 15^th largest metropolitan area in the nation, yet young kids clear out of this place like they clear out of Podunk Population 102 towns throughout the Midwest (and like they clear out of Lincoln Park in Chicago on December 23).

I said a few weeks ago that I was going to explain reasons that I wanted to have 3 children. This is one of the reasons: I live in Cleveland, Ohio, and if you live in a Cleveland and want to have at least one kid stay in the area once they grow up, you better have a whole bunch of kids to improve the odds. In fact, 3 probably isn’t enough.

Living close to home is underrated in our society. A lot of people, particularly in the upper middle class and above, act like if their career calls for it, they’ll move anywhere. Especially in academia. People assume that if you’re offered a slightly better professorship across the country, you’ll pick up and move for that slightly better job. But it’s everywhere. Good students often go to the best college or doctoral program they can get into. Doctors go to work for the best hospital they can get a residency at.

Sometimes I hear someone about to move for a “better career opportunity” and I think that they must be joking. In my life, I would have moved for friends, for better weather, for love, to get laid more or to be near family. Moving for a career … yuck. That kind of requires you to admit that you want to have a career in the first place, requires you to admit that you’re into your career, that you care deeply about your career. I’m just too immature for that.

Technically I grew up 60 miles away from where I live now, but my wife grew up a mile away, and I think living where you generally grew up is a great thing. Your friends are your lifelong friends, and you know their parents and their families firsthand, not just from stories. Your relationship with your parents turns into one of equals as see each other enough to learn to live with one another, instead of continuing into your 30’s the somewhat stunted relationship so many have when they live away from their folks and only see their parents for a week a year (and, during that week, 24 hours a day is spent with them, inevitably bringing back all the old frictions). If your brothers and sisters stick around, you not only maintain a relationship with them, but develop one with your nieces and nephews.

This summer, my wife and a friend, both drawing on their decades of experience with the Cleveland area, put together a set of Cleveland-centric kids’ activities that was really impressive, a list they never could have figured out if they weren’t from here. I’m trying not to turn this into a love letter to Cleveland. The ability to do that could be true about any city someone is from. But having my wife from here, we know where the closest drive-in and putt-putt courses are, which playgrounds have the new equipment, the best place to see a sunset out on the lake, a good route for a family bike ride, the street that are full of college kid rentals, which Chinese places are crappy and which are worth bothering with. We know that all of the Rib Cook-offs in town are a rip off. We know where to sit so we can see the Air Show for free and which fireworks are the best and where to sit for them too. We get to actually go see the sports teams that we love, and listen to the hometown team on the radio and on the local news. And, on the love letter to Cleveland side of things, here’s a list: Cedar Point, Towpath, Voinovich Park, MOCA, Parade the Circle, the West Side Market, Beachland Ballroom/Cleveland Agora/Grog Shop, the Saffron Patch, The Colony and all the Lee Road bars; Coventry Road; The 4^th of July at Public Square; the Feast of the Assumption; Slyman’s; Put-in-Bay; University Circle generally; all the amazing bridges over the Cuyahoga. And that just scrapes the surface.

I know very much how sexy the lure of other cities was for me, and will be for my kids. New York is an amazing beast of a city. Chicago, at its best, feels like a Cleveland or a St. Louis or a Milwaukee, but just hipper and bigger and smarter and faster and better looking. Columbus and Indianapolis are just so damn friendly. I understand the impressive pluses of a Denver or a San Diego or a Seattle or a Sante Fe or a Boston (Dallas and Atlanta, on the other hand … those I don’t get at all).

But you don’t pick from scratch. You're from somewhere.

And I am going to tell my kids exactly that some day. You are not an asylum seeker coming in from a foreign country and freshly choosing where to live from a menu of choices. You have a history here. You don’t pick from scratch.

I won’t unduly pressure them (OK, I probably will unduly pressure them, but I hope I won’t), but I really do hope that my kids live around here when they’re grown. Living elsewhere doesn’t mean that they don’t “get it,” but if they live here, I’ll have one more data point of proof that they do “get it.” And really, I think that they’ll have a more satisfying life if they live here.

But I also think that I’ll have a more satisfying life if they live here. I mean, I’m (hopefully) not moving, and I like my kids, quite a bit, and expect to like them for a long time. And I’ll tell them that too.

Allowance? What's In It For Me

Probably belatedly, the wife and I began giving our 8 and 4 year old kids' allowances this past Winter/Spring. After doling out the allowance for a good 6 months or so, I've realized several things that make me wonder why I didn't start handing out the dough several months' earlier.

First, holding the allowance over their heads is an excuse to make your kids do chores around the house, something my wife is semi-successfully using. My children are fighting back, of course, utilizing their world-class whining skills, largely bringing the standoff to a draw, but at least my wife is armed now in this battle to try to get them to do chores and clean their rooms.

Second, as part of my attempt to emulate life from 1950's TV shows, I have a change bowl near the back door of my house into which I deposit the contents of my pockets at the end of each day. The allowances are normally drawn, in part, from that change bowl. In the past, change sometimes mysteriously went missing. I don't know that the kids had any real intent to steal; it was just that the ownership of the change was never firmly established and it seemed like just another toy to them. Now that they know that they are getting paid from the bowl, if anyone touches the bowl they come running to me to tell. No one is cutting off their source of funds!

But really, the most important reason to give an allowance is that is serves as a magic cloak that you can wear when hanging out in the checkout aisle of a store with your kids. They want tic tacs, a crappy yo-yo, a cigarette lighter? There's no need for you to buy them anything. All you need to do is say "maybe you can spend your allowance on this." (note: when kids get older, you can change the response to the more brusque "what the hell do I give you an allowance for?"). Of course, they never have the money with them.

(note: don't fall prey to the "I'll pay you back" line. They are your kids. They owe you, if you think about it, tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in room and board, educational expenses, etc., none of which you're ever going to see. What makes you think they're going to pay you back for the $1.50 they just borrowed from you? Also, payday lending is getting outlawed in many states, so you can't charge them high interest rates anymore, so it's just not profitable).

With these benefits, there's no doubt in my mind that providing an allowance is a good idea. The problem I'm having now is determining the proper amount. One of the divorced kids from my kids' school is was alleged to be getting over $10 by the second grade by compensating parents. The children of the hippies at our kids' school are getting nothing still ("Teach kids about money! No way! Down with capitalism!"). Right now I'm giving my 3rd grade $3-4 a week and the kindergartener $1.50 a week, but I have no idea if that's the right amount or not. I didn't think I'd be able to get away with giving them different amounts, but the younger one hasn't thought to complain yet. Actually, since he normally leaves the money lying around the house on the floor anyway, if he complains I'll just up his allowance to $100 a week, since I'll be able to get it back at the end of the day anyway just by walking around and picking it up.

On Vacation With the Kids

Off to see the Atlantic Ocean and visit our nation's capital.

I'll be back August 9th or 10th.

Why Three?: Parenting Marginal Cost / Economies of Scale

Some people have asked me why we had three children, so I figured I’d answer it in my next few posts (actually, these are the reasons that I claim now: the real reason is that my wife controls the birth control and she wanted three ... but anyway...)

People seem to understand why people with two kids of the same gender would try for another. But we “already have one of each” with a girl and a boy, and thus had no reason to have a third.

There are a number of reasons for this, but a big one is the “economies of scale of parenting,” by which I mean the fact that, once you have one child, each additional one is marginally more attractive to you (for the economists in the crowd, it’s all about marginal cost: and the first child has the huge marginal cost; the rest are nothing compared to the first one). Another, less kind, way of putting it is the “My life is already ruined anyway” way of thinking.

Financially, the economies of scale are clear. You already have the crib, the diaper table, the pacifiers, the bottles, the breastpump the 3 strollers, the car seats, the ultrasaucer and the baby books. Not to mention enough onesies (mostly stained, but still) to choke a cow. If you have another kid, you don’t have to re-buy all that crap. If you can double or triple up on gender, you don’t have to redecorate or buy much in the way of new clothes AND you can double up on rooms. Other than food, a second or third child of the same gender is practically free.

From my perspective, as a father whose wife stays home with the kids, I always noted that I wanted to “get my money’s worth.” Since we were sacrificing an entire second income and my wife was going to stay home with the kid(s) no matter how many of them were running around, I figured that I might as well give her as much work as possible to do. I was mostly adding to her workload; not mine (at least when I was at work).

Outside of the monetary reasons, there are practical economies of scale as well. If you’re going to sit around singing ridiculous Raffi songs, there might as well be two small pairs of ears listening to you instead of one. Getting multiple uses out of the Robin Hood animated DVD (i.e., now 2 or 3 different children can watch it 8 times each).

Anyone being honest would admit that having a kid takes its toll, emotionally, financially and freetimily. I mean, really, if you have a kid, you’ve just ruined 18 years of your life. If you give that kid a sibling when he’s two, you haven’t doubled the ruination. You haven’t now ruined 36 years of your life, because the years overlap. You’ve only ruined an additional 2 years, for a total of 20 years, which isn’t that bad, come to think of it. A whole extra kid for just 2 extra ruined years seems like a bargain after the first one.

I don’t mean to say that there aren’t emotional and other benefits from having children. There definitely are, and I think it’s a good trade on balance. But the benefits are paid out over time; the change in lifestyle for you is abrupt and definitive. And crap. Your life goes from 40% fun to 20% fun. If the fun percentage went down equally for each subsequent child, at two kids you would be down to 0% fun and you’d be absolutely miserable. If this were the case, no one would be stupid enough to have a second child. The planet would be China, but with the one child policy being self-imposed instead of imposed by the government.

But in actuality, once you’re at 20% fun, you’re pretty much at the bottom anyway; it can’t get much worse. So you might as well have another. Then life is still 16% fun. Three only takes you down to 14%, so why not?

Refreshment

Refreshed.

That’s what people say. They go on vacation from work, and they get back and you see them in the hall, or talk to them on the phone, and you say “how was the vacation” and they say “I’m refreshed. I’m ready to get back at it.” Or you read a study saying how vacation is important for the mental health of workers because it refreshes them.

Me, personally, after a weeklong vacation, I get back to the office and start to work (normally digging out from under god knows how many emails, voicemails and interoffice memos) and, at some point, I look up and check the clock for the first time of the day, and it will say “9:36” or “10:09” and I think to myself “In no way, shape or form do I feel refreshed.” For me, vacation just reminds me that working kinda sucks when compared to life at home or on vacation.

In any event, my parents, who live about an hour away, took the kids and had them sleepover for the last three nights. My folks are good like that, taking the kids 2-3 times a year to give us a break, sometimes so we can get away for a quick vacation, other times so we can stay at home and “do projects.” We have high hopes at the start of these visits. “We’re going to paint the bathroom” we’ll claim and then we end up acting like lazy bums all weekend, gloriously sleeping in until 10 a.m. each weekend day and then still lying down for a nap in the afternoon or playing tennis together or actually having a beer with friends after work and marveling at how wonderful it is to do all that. So we get nothing done, really, and we didn’t get anything done this time either, but it was nice.

Just a few minutes ago I got home from picking the kids up this fine Sunday morning. At the end of these visits, I do start to miss the kids; I get a kick out of seeing how excited they are when I pick them up. You forget how they were a pain in the ass and whiny just 3 days ago and how you couldn’t wait to get rid of them. So the drive home was great, with us laughing and talking and singing and joking them telling me about the weekend. These weekends away do “refresh” me as a parent. And it “refreshes” your kids in some ways: they actually seem to appreciate hanging out with you.

For a while.

At some point, it wears off and the feeling of refreshment ends on both sides.

In fact, I’ve figured out a formula to figure out how long the refreshment lasts. Get out a pencil and paper! Take the number of days your kids were away and convert it into hours. Add 15 and then take the square root and add 12 to that. Then double it. Then take that piece of paper, crumple it up, get out a new piece of paper and write “90” on it.

That’s how long you’re refreshed. 90 minutes. Enjoy those 90 minutes, but don’t expect to get more than that.

The Only Rule of Coaching

This year, my 4-year old son is playing T-ball for the first time. My 8-year old daughter is in her 4th or 5^th year of tee-ball and softball. As the years have gone by, I’ve become more and more involved in helping out at games and practices. In the 100+ hours I’ve spent on this stuff, however, I’ve only learned/noticed one non-obvious thing And that is this:

When your kids are young, don’t coach your own child

My daughter's coach is a woman we know pretty well. She’s a short-haired athletic woman of about 40-years who plays softball herself. She’s known for her somewhat boisterous personality and yells at the girls in a lovingly joking way. She’s a good coach. Another coach in the league is a very nice, super-positive guy; he wears baseball pants, so people are afraid of him and are skeptical at first, but he’s great once you get to know him. He’s a darn good coach.

The female coach’s daughter has refused to wear helmets, refused to play the field, refused to “take a walk” after missing 8 pitches in a row and sat out entire practices and games a couple times. The male coach’s daughter, instead of throwing the ball to the pitcher of the opposing team, kicks it … very slowly … back to the pitcher. She loves to play first base, largely so she can chat with the opposing team. You can see how it troubles these coaches – two people that love baseball – that their kids clearly just aren’t that into it. It doesn’t kill them, but you can see that it does bum them out somewhat.

So me and another mom, to avoid having our being the coach make our kids act like little shits and/or make them dislike the game hatched a plan last Saturday. We decided that next year, when my daughter is in 3^rd grade and hers is in 4^th grade, I would coach her daughter’s team in the 4^th-6^th grade division, and she would coach my daughter’s team in the 1^st -3^rd grade division. Thus, no coaching our own kids: no problems!

Of course, I agreed to this before realizing that a man volunteering to coach 4^th-6th grade aged girls, when that man has no familial relationship whatsoever with anyone on the team isn’t the type of volunteering normally accepted by a standard park and recreation department (I can just see myself writing “I just really enjoy working with girls of that age” on the form: that would go ever well, I’m sure). So I doubt I’ll follow through, but it seemed like a reasonable idea earlier this week.

How the 1970s Hold Up

I was a fan of Star Wars. I was about 5 years old when the first movie came out back in 1977 and I remember it as the first movie I ever saw in the theatre that wasn’t animated. I got the toys, did a Halloween at age 7 or 8 or so as Luke Skywalker (with my sister as Leia). I remember taping Star Wars on VHS off TV in the early 1980s and watching it 13 times, partially so I could brag to my friends that I watched Star Wars 13 times. I was a fan, but I never became one of those teenaged Star Wars geeks that just wouldn’t let it go (like these guys).

And so when I considered watching Star Wars with my daughter around the time that she turned five, I figured that it would be something that just she and I shared (and that the bigtime Star Wars geeks shared with their kids). It was, after all, a 25 year old movie. And the new series didn’t seem particularly popular. But soon after we watched the original Star Wars movie, my wife informed me that lots of kids were “into” Star Wars these days. A trip down the toy aisle at Target confirmed that kids these days were very much into Star Wars.

Certainly the new Star Wars movies had something to do with it, but it’s not like Spiderman had most of an aisle to himself, and he had popular new movies out too. So it was clear that Star Wars was something more. Kids were drawn to the whole universe like moths. This was something from the late 1970’s that kids took and claimed as their own. It had stood the test of time.

This led me to wonder exactly what else from the late 1970s (and in some cases the early 1980s) stands the test of time in the eyes of kids today. Here’s a short list of things I came up with and my thoughts regarding whether they hold up 30 years later or not:

Buck Rogers (1979-1981) Twiki-twiki-twiki. My wife rented this DVD the other day and tried to watch it with the kids. They were mildly interested for about 10 minutes. Also, my wife was right: Twiki’s head does look like male genitalia. Verdict: Doesn’t Hold Up.

(side note: Erin Grey, however, definitely holds up.)

Being Terrified of Teenagers. (Late 1970s/Early 1980s). Kids today don’t understand this, but in the 1970’s, us younger kids were absolutely terrified of teenagers. Teenagers were scary as hell. They were hairy. They had lots and lots of acne, since they had no Clearasil or Pro-activ to get rid of it. They were smoking and swearing all the time too. They would kick the crap out of you as soon as look at you.

These days, teenagers have clean faces and just sit there silently typing at their phones, well-dressed and not scary at all. Verdict: Doesn’t Hold Up.

Benji (1974) This is a close one. I watched this with the kids in the Spring. It has that 1970’s made-for-TV-movie touch with 3-minute songs accompanied by a montage of slo-mo shots of Benji running, as if he was Bo Derek coming out of the pool or something. It’s just weird. I blame the Graduate for stuff like that. But the dog-actor (who was apparently 14 at the time of the movie) was incredible. And animals doing their own stunts: that’s cool. And without all of the quick cutting, in your face, MTV-ish directorial style that movies have today, so the kids don’t feel overwhelmed (plus that makes the dog's acting all the more impressive). They can follow what’s going on (and they’ll be terrified by the scary teenage bad guys). Verdict: Holds Up.

Not Wearing Seatbelts. (1978) I was shorthanded on car seats the other day and had to hit the grocery store, which is about 2/3 of a mile from my house, so I told the kids, for the first time in their lives, to just hop into the back seat and they didn’t have to wear seat belts. You would’ve thought they were at a freakin’ amusement park they were so excited. The problem is that they were so used to their every movement being restrained, the younger two fell to the floor twice: once when I stopped; once when I went around a corner. Verdict: Mixed. Kids like it but don’t know how to do it anymore.

Cordouroys: (1976-1981) Still kicking around. I’ve noticed that the cords are tighter. Kids these days aren’t dealing with the quarter-inch sized cords that we had to deal with. But you still hear the familiar nostalgic zwhishing when a kid walks past you every now and again Verdict: Holds Up.

Adults Smoking. (1492-2004) Sadly, too many kids today have never actually seen an adult smoking in real life, so it is impossible to gauge how they would react. Verdict: Unknown.

Atari. (1977-1983) I got one of those fake Ataris – the Atari Flashback - a few years ago that comes with about 40 games built in and I play it with the kids now and again. Verdict: The games Pac-Man and Adventure hold up. Kids these days find it mind boggling (and thrilling) that in Adventure, “you are just a dot but you can still fight dragons.” Other games don’t hold up.

Shaggy Bowlcuts. (peaked with Adam from Eight is Enough in 1977). Hipster parent websites are trying to bring back plaid, but not even they dare to try to bring back bowlcuts. Verdict: Doesn’t hold up.

The All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. (1977-79). While it aired, this was perhaps the greatest television show on. It’s possibly the greatest show of all time (if you’re curious, the other competitors re It’s Your Move, Sledge Hammer, the Simpsons, Seinfeld, Homicide and the Sopranos; The Office is close). Only 24 episodes were made. After that, why mess with perfection?

Every kid in the universe has, at one time or another, sought to mix and match different fantasy character genres (i.e, who would win if Chewbacca fought Harry Potter?) Outside the world of comic books, rarely do the characters actually mix. Best I can figure, it’s happened 3 times. There’s Alien vs. Predator (twice). There’s Freddy vs. Jason. And then there’s the All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. And the All-Stars were doing it decades before the others.

You remember, don’t you? The three teams: the Yogi Yahooeys with Yogi, Huckleberry Hound and the whole A-team Yogi crew plus Grape Ape. These guys were so rich and famous already, they had nothing to prove, and competed accordingly. The Scooby Doobies (I can’t believe they got away with that name with Shaggy on the team) with Scooby and the gang, Dyno-Mutt and Captain Caveman, among others. And, finally, the Really Rottens, with all the bad guys, including Muttley, with his smoker’s laugh. The three teams would compete in simply bizarre events seemingly conjured up by a group of suspended-adolescent stoners.

It was the 1970s, where realism was king, so even in a cartoon show, the bad guys were allowed to win dozens of individual events and actually won 3 of the 24 episodes outright.

(side note: Why is “A-Lympics” spelled this way? It’s part of the beautiful mystery)

Of course, there is no DVD set and no plans for one. There is practically nothing on Youtube. There are apparently some 1996 VHS tapes of 8 of the 24 shows, but you can't even get those on ebay. And that’s it. So I couldn’t show it to my kids to gauge how it held up and had to simply explain the gist of what it was like.

I said it’s like Dora the Explorer, Diego, Franklin, Clifford and the Backyardigans against a team comprised of Pokemon, the Teletubbies, Boobah and the Wiggles against a team of Wall-E, Nemo, Ariel, Mowgli, Balloo, Tigger, Woody and Buzz Lightyear. This description certainly piqued their interest.

But they never saw the actual show, so it’s unclear what the verdict should be, so I have to guess at this one. On the one hand, this is the greatest concept of all time, so that’s a positive. But kids today have only a vague notion of who even Yogi and Scooby are, and the minor characters (Snagglepuss anyone?) are complete enigmas to them. Thus, sadly … Verdict: does not hold up. But only because the classics have been lost. If kids are prepped with 25 episodes of Scooby Doo and other 1978 Saturday morning cartoons prior to viewing, it would definitely hold up.

Understanding Child Abuse a Bit Better

A major impact of having children is that it grants you special kinds of understanding. Having children makes you understand many many things with a fullness that you never appreciated. You understand exactly the havoc that pregnancy wreaks on a woman’s body. You understand how it is possible to sleep next to a woman for over a month and not have sex with her even once, something the 18-year old version of you simply could not have comprehended. You gain an understanding of why it was that your father cracked open a beer Sunday afternoons a little earlier than seemed necessary and why there was a small smile on his face Monday mornings when he left for work. And one thing that you unfortunately gain an understanding of is the genesis of child abuse.

After we moved into our house a year ago, we noticed a strange thing. In the second floor hallway there was a hook-and-eye lock on the outside of one of the bedroom doors. Obviously it was there to lock a child in. Even worse, the lock was 7 feet from the floor, suggesting that the prior occupants of our house wanted to make sure that none of the other children would be able to rescue their brother/sister.

If I had noticed this 7 years earlier, before I had children, I would’ve been aghast. Actually, I’m still a little bit aghast now, but in many ways, now I understand how people could get to the point where locking your kid in their own room seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

Actually, these days, I’m pretty much ready to give the parents there the benefit of the doubt on just about anything. Even when I see one of those leash kids, I figure the kid probably deserves it and that it just might be necessary (well … almost … the leash kids probably cross the line, but the fact I’m even thinking about it shows how much less judgmental I am about stuff like that than I once was). You start to realize that even some of the stuff that would make you aghast might be necessary, like when this guy installed a lock on his the door of his autistic son's bedroom because he was sneaking out of his room in the night and had started a minor fire one night. You gotta do what you gotta do.

But that kind of thinking can also lead to problems. Most anyone who has had a particularly testy baby has had a moment that scared the bejeesus out of them: the moment of recognition where they said to themselves “I really want to do something unspeakable to this baby/child right now.” It happened to me once when I walked past an open second story window with my daughter after she had been screaming for an hour plus. I had the urge to throw her out similar to the urge many people (including me) feel to jump off a cliff if they get too close to the edge. I of course didn’t, but for a moment it seemed like a possibility there, and it was creepy scary.

These feelings thankfully pass, but after breaking down because of my kids’ behavior, I always feel a particular kind of shame, a blend of two wholly different kinds of pathetic. On the one hand, you feel pathetic because a child that’s been on this planet just a few months or a few years has, in some ways, beaten you by getting you so mad that you have to walk away. It’s like you are the one backing down (from a masculine perspective, it is very pathetic to be beaten by such a small creature). On the other hand, you feel pathetic because this is your child, and for some reason you haven’t raised them properly, because they are crying too much, or acting like such a complete jerk. And you’re pathetic for that reason as well.

An odd thing will happen to you when you’ve had a baby for a few months. You’ll be watching the local news and see a story where a father (or boyfriend) kills a five month old baby who just wouldn’t stop crying. And maybe for the first time ever, you’ll actually pay close attention to this kind of story. You’ll be interested in it. If you’re honest with yourself, maybe you’ll … in some bizarre way … realize that you can in some way relate to the guy.

In the criminal law, if you kill a guy in the heat of the moment after catching him in bed with your wife, that’s supposed to get you a lesser prison sentence than if you plot and kill some guy in cold blood. And there have been times that I would have strongly considered letting my wife cavort in bed with someone else if it meant that the baby in my arms would just stop crying. So if catching your wife doing it with the neighbor is a mitigating circumstances when it comes to murder, it makes you wonder why a baby crying for two hours can’t be mitigating as well.

Don’t get me wrong. You’ll still think the guy should be locked up for life for what he did; but that doesn’t mean that you don’t understand how it could’ve happened. And that’s an understanding that you previously never would’ve thought possible.