MRS. 42

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how being a dad, instead of scaring all of the weirdness out of my life, had actually added all kinds of absurdity to it. Another example of this came to mind driving the kids to school this week.

Since I often work late, I make it a point to try to drive the kids to school, and have been successful in being able to do that about 90% of the time over the past 5 years (early morning conference calls, business travel and hangovers account for the other 10%). On the days when I know I’m going to be working particularly late, I realize that the 5 minute car ride to school will be my last chance to hang out with the kids on that day, so the pressure is on to have a worthwhile conversation with them. Unfortunately, I am decidedly not a morning person, and my children seem to be taking after me in this regard, so my attempt to get things started with “What are you going to do at school today?” is often answered with silence, or the shout of “HOW SHOULD I KNOW!!!” If they knew how to swear, this is when they would use that skill.

Our route to school includes a two mile trek down Fairmount Boulevard, one of the swankier streets in the Cleveland area. Trying to maintain the illusion that public transportation is for everyone, however, Cleveland’s regional transit authority mandates that a bus travel up and down the length of Fairmount six times a day: three in the morning and three at night. This bus - Bus Number 42 - is almost always empty or virtually so, since anyone with the means to live on or near Fairmount Boulevard almost certainly has a car (some probably have chauffeurs, even). I happen to personally know how full the bus is because the 3rd and final pass of the morning down Fairmount each day occurs right at the 8:15-8:20 a.m. time that I take the kids to school. So we end up actually seeing (and passing) the bus about once a week.

If we’re a tad early (or the bus a tad late), about halfway along our trip down Fairmount, we see an odd site: someone actually waiting for the bus. Other than a few nuns who appear to be from outside of the United States, I've never seen another soul waiting for the bus.

She's a woman, probably in her mid to late 50’s, standing at the bus stop. Slightly on the smaller side and apparently of some kind of some indeterminate Asian descent. Thick, coke-bottle glasses.

She rides Bus Number 42.

She is Mrs. 42.

When I’m struggling for conversation with the kids, whether or not we are going to see Mrs. 42 is something the kids will talk about. The kids may not want to talk about their day, but they’ll speculate as to whether she’ll be there (they’d probably gamble on it if they knew how ... actually, hmmm...). If I see us approaching Mrs. 42, I have to inform my younger child so he has sufficient time to actually turn his head and look out the window (as all parents of young children know, this action surprisingly takes at least 6 seconds, so you have to tell them to look out the window pretty damn early).

If we don’t see her, my older daughter will sing a song (to the tune of Scooby-Doo):

Mrs. Forty-Two.
Where are You?
Did the Bus Pick you Up Already?

And if we’re lucky that day, and actually get to see Mrs. 42, well, that topic of conversation will carry us all the way until drop-off. “Is that a new coat?” “She looks tired today” “I think she got a new pair of glasses!” “I like that red umbrella that she has.”

I can only imagine what this woman would think if she knew that there existed a 4 year old and an 8 year old (and a 35 year old) who were experts on her wardrobe, where she likes to stand, her stance, her schedule.

Not only does Mrs. 42 give me a conversation topic, she provides other benefits. We use Mrs. 42 as a geographic marker now. If the question is “Are we almost to school daddy?” then I can answer, with complete understanding, “No, we’re not even to the Mrs. 42 spot yet.” We use Mrs. 42 as a racial marker. “Y’know the guy that looks kind of like Mrs. 42?”

So thank you Mrs. 42. Whoever you are. And thank you for whatever odd reason exists to make you ride the bus every day, whether it’s that you never learned to drive, a DUI, an involuntary manslaughter or maybe that your car is being repaired by the slowest auto mechanic on the planet. Thank you from the bottom of the morning-hating hearts of me and my kids. You make our morning drive a happy time.

Aunt and Uncle Birthday Wars

It’s hard enough to figure out what your own kids want for their birthdays. I struggle with
whether to buy them exactly what they say that they want (but where’s the surprise in that?), or to buy them something that they would want if they knew existed, or to buy them something that they might not even think they wanted, but will eventually like once they start playing with (that’s the ideal, but failure is common) or to buy them something that’s good for them, whether they want it or not. It can be tough.

Lucky for my oldest daughter, as the first grandchild on my side of the family, she has gotten presents each birthday from all of my three siblings, her aunts and uncles. But she is doubly impossible to buy presents for, for reasons I won’t bore you with.

Her 8th birthday just happened earlier this week. My wife and I struggled to figure out what to get her (thank you Amazon for the just-in-time sale on Flip video cameras, by the way), so we weren’t expecting much success when the presents rolled in from others. If it went like last year’s birthday, she would act appreciative, but never actually play with many of the toys.

And the presents did roll in this year from my siblings. But it appears that all three of my siblings have thrown up their hands and completely given up on trying to figure out what a good present might be for her, because all three of them gave her money.

The danger inherent in this choice is that, since they all gave money, it was easy for my daughter (and, OK, me) to compare and contrast gifts to figure out who is generous and who is cheap. And while that might seem like an easy comparison, we had to grade these on a curve:

My young sister gave $8. Four bonus dollars are awarded to her for actually knowing how old my daughter she is. So we’ll count this as worth $12.

My brother gave $10. Now arguably, this would beat the $8 gift, but he also sent the gift via overnight mail, apparently paying an extra $16.50 in the process. It’s tough to know how to count this one. We’ll award him three bonus dollars for spending the extra cash. But he loses two bonus dollars for forgetting her birthday until the last minute. So this gift is worth $11.

My old (but still younger than me) sister gave $20. This looks like the winning gift. This sister, however, lives in Chicago. $20 in Chicago is only worth $15 here due to cost of living issues, so this gift only counts as $15. Plus, she gave really good gifts in the past, so expectations were high. Deduct an extra $2. Still, at $13, old sister takes the prize.

Accordingly, my old sister and her husband will now be called, to my children, “your generous aunt and uncle” whereas the others will be “your cheapskate aunts and uncles.”

(Note to my siblings: next year, a small separate check made out to me will influence who I deem the “winner” in future comparisons of this sort, and may well be worth your while).

Another good thing about this cash-based-present development is the precedent that it sets. My young sister gave birth to a son in February. So utilizing her logic, next February, he gets a shiny Sacajawea $1 coin for his first birthday. Cheap for me! My brother’s wife gave birth to a daughter last December. Since his philosophy is to spend more on postage than on the gift, and stamps are now 42 cents, his daughter will get 40 cents. As for my old sister? She’s pregnant, with a baby due in a few months. When that baby is born, we’ll give him/her (I know which gender it is, but I’m not telling you) $5 and tell my sister that for poor folk here in Cleveland, that’s a full day’s wages.

$6.40 on three presents next year. What a deal!

Why We Don't Party

“Just because we get married and have kids, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop going out.”

That’s what people say to themselves before they have kids. They pledge to themselves that they are going to get babysitters and still go out and have some drinks with their friends once a week, or every other week. They pledge that they are going to keep some semblance of their pre-child social life going. What they don’t realize is that married couples don’t stop going out because they’ve become lame. OK, that’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the only reason people like me stop going out so much.

These are the reasons married couples don’t go out:

(1) $9 beers. If you knew that going to bars would cost you $9 a beer, would you keep going out? Trust me on this one: you don’t want to know what babysitters get paid these days (and most of it is your wife overpaying them to make sure they come back).

Here’s how the math works. The babysitter comes over and you enter the 30 minute transition period where, because your wife needs to show the babysitter where every single thing is in the house is. (just to clarify, don’t get to leave, but you’re still overpaying the babysitter for this time). So the babysitter gets there at 8 p.m. You leave at 8:30 p.m., meet your friends at 8:45 p.m. You’re out for 3 hours and home at midnight. That’s 4 hours of time for the babysitter at, maybe, $9 an hour, for $36. If you and the wife each have 4 drinks during those 3 hours, that’s 8 drinks. Assuming $4 a drink, that’s $32 at the bar, lets round up to $35. But you didn’t really pay $35. You paid double, because you also gave the babysitter $35. So you paid a total of $70 for 8 drinks, or about $9 a drink.

The big problem with this is this: what if some uninteresting topic of conversation comes up while you’re out? In your pre-child life, who would care? At $9 a drink, you care. Every moment has to be interesting and exciting, because it’s costing you! And so having to sit and listen to your wife discuss the wallpaper designs she’s considering for the downstairs bathroom will make you cry.

(2) Getting a Ride Home. What if you really need to blow off steam and you drink a bit too much? You hopefully aren’t gonna drive home. In the old days, you might walk home or hitch a ride with someone less inebriated and then come back to get your car the next morning. But how does that work now? Now, when you wake up the next morning, your spouse can’t just drive you back to your car, because you’d be leaving the kids home alone. You have to go back to get the car as a family. And there’s nothing more edifying than getting to show your kids where daddy got his drink on the night before. That will certainly fill you with pride.

And what if you took the primary family car out that night? The one with all of the car seats? Then, when you drive from home to bar the next morning, you’ll be forced to let the kids ride 70’s-style sans carseats, kids all piled up in the backseat while you go get your car from the bar (now you’re really a good father).

The alternative is even sadder: you have to remember, when leaving the bar, to go back to your car only to get the carseats out, and then hitch a ride home with a friend, while carrying all of the car seats with you in their car. It’s tough to maintain the illusion that you’re a cool couple out for a hip night on the town if you’ve got an armload of empty carseats with you. It doesn’t exactly scream “party.”

(3) OK, You’re Home, Now What. You wanted to avoid the $9 beers, so you figured the best way to do that was to hire a younger babysitter so you could pay her less. This was an ingenious strategy until you got home and realized younger babysitters can’t drive, and now you have to drive her home. So if you get hammered, you and your armload of empty car seats will be sitting up front in the passenger seat in your buddy's car, with the babysitter in back, while your soon-to-be-ex-buddy drives your babysitter home with you.

And even if you were OK to drive yourself home, there’s a moral difference between being willing to drive yourself home after 2-4 drinks (but still within the legal limit) and feeling OK about driving a young babysitter home after those same 2-4 drinks. So now you’re drinking about two beers when you go out to make sure you don’t push it. I don’t think this is what the pre-child version of you had in mind.

A similar potential problem arises with younger babysitters in that they’ll ask you when you’re going to be home. One time my wife and I hadn’t been out for months and got an 8th grade babysitter that lived a few houses down from us. The wife and I planned to hit a bar and grill a mile from our house for dinner and drinks with friends. We were excited because we knew we didn’t have to drive her home and told her we’d be home “around midnight.” She informed us that she “had to be home by 10:15.” Wow, a night out that ends at 10 p.m. The pre-child version of you would not consider this “going out.”

(4) Wake Up Call. They say that one effect of alcohol on the central nervous system is that your body essentially doesn’t get much benefit from sleep until much of the alcohol is out of your system. This means that if you’ve been out drinking and get home at 1 a.m., the sleep you get for the first few hours – say, from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. -- is pretty much worthless. So even if you manage to get a cheap babysitter that drives herself, and even if you go out to a bar within walking distance and can get yourself home, you still are gonna be screwed when your kids wake you up at 7 a.m. or so. And God forbid one of them has a nightmare.

I’ve considered trying various things to try to figure this out.

I've tried having the babysitter to keep the kids up extra-late (until 11 p.m. or so) in an effort to get them to sleep in! Although this seems like it should work, it invariably fails for at least one kid. And the kids are whiney and cranky the next morning, which is excellent for keeping your hangover going.

I’ve considering buying happy meals in the McDonalds drive thru at 1 a.m. and “getting breakfast ready early” by leaving it on the table at 1:30 a.m. so that it’s there for them when they get up 6 hours later and hopefully will just eat and leave me alone.

I’ve even considered sneaking into the baby’s room and moving her from crib to floor in the middle of the night so she won’t wake me to get out in the morning.

And I’ve actually tried sleeping in an undisclosed location so I couldn’t be found, which unfortunately only causes your kids, with a handful of cold fries, to wander outside in their pajamas looking for you, which never improves your standing in the neighborhood.

(5) Breastfeeding. Drinking is a doubly-dirty business if your wife is still breastfeeding. She has to pump in advance, save up the milk, and then has to undertake the dirty business of the pump and dump the next morning, where the alcohol-tainted breast milk is expressed and tossed. There’s just something much more tawdry and depressing about drinking alcohol when it causes you to dump breastmilk down the drain. The health effects seem much more real to you.

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So there’s five big reasons why we – those that are married with younger children – don’t “party” any more. And those that are child-free with schemes for how they are going to go out once they have kids, well, maybe you guys ought to go out extra for the next few months and get it out of your system.

Numbers of Relationships

I was watching my two youngest children interacting the other day. We were on a short walk, and my 4-year old son walked over and grabbed the hand of my one-year old daughter. It was a cute moment, and made me pay attention the rest of the day to how they interacted, what they said to each other, what they played. It was really interesting to me to really just focus on the two of them and how they related.

I mean, before I had kids, my family had a single relationship. Me and my wife. ONE. That's it. One thing to focus on (or obsess about, at times).

Once you have a kid, however, you increase the number of relationships in your family. Now there’s you and your kid, you and your wife and. of course, your wife and your kid. That’s three relationships right there. And the dynamic is always different if all three of you hang out, so if you count that, then when you have just one kid, there are four completely different ways your family could interact together instead of just one.

This is what makes “the family” so much more interesting than “the relationship” (which is what marriage is before kids). There’s just so much more going on in a family once there are kids around.

Adding more kids makes these numbers explode. If you have a second kid, you go from three two-party relationships to six two-party relationships (you&wife; wife&kid1; wife&kid2; you&kid1; you&kid2; kid1&kid2). Also, there are now eleven ways your family can interact if you add in three and four party relationships.

Three kids means ten two-party relationship and a mind-boggling 26 ways that you can hang out in groups of two or more. Four kids means 15 two-party relationship and 56 total ways in which you can hang out in groups of two or more. 56!!! (I’ll spare you by not listing them).

If you’re the type of person who liked people-watching or stuff like that back in college or high school, you can kill some serious time watching and analyzing the myriad ways in which your family members can and do interact with one another.

This may seem like a funny math point or something obscure, and it is, but it really does open up whole new worlds. You’ll realize that you and your oldest and youngest are perfect for going shopping together or something like that, and you wife and you son can hang out and work in the garden or something. The combinations matter.

It’s fascinating stuff.

Roughhousing: A Guide

One humongous benefit of having children is that you now are allowed to wrestle with people! Pre-children, you likely have far too little wrestling in your life (not counting special wrestling). Children give you wrestling partners for at least a decade. And, unlike in middle school, this is satisfying wrestling, as you’re wrestling with people whose asses you can kick at your leisure.

Honestly, apart from the benefits for you from burning off a little end-of-the-day stress, it’s a lot of fun for the kids to have their father throw them around. In fact, if you’re a little on the rough side so that it’s actually a bit dangerous, like tossing them 5 feet or so through the air onto a couch (or a pillow), they can sense the danger and they really like it. It psyches them up and gets their adrenalin pumping even more. In fact, in my house, if a roughhousing activity ends with a kid crying and injured, that’s what they want to play the next time.

I’ve learned, however, that many fathers, maybe if they were the only boy child or maybe if their father was older, sadly do not understand the many forms of roughhouse available to them. And many wives, particularly women with only sisters, will look at you like you’re crazy when you tell them that you are going to wrestle the children (oops… wrestle with the children … note that adding the “with” makes it sound friendlier and thus more likely that your wife will permit this). My wife has was very much a skeptic but has, over the years, eventually warmed up enough that mommyfesto occasionally will charge in from the kitchen and side with the kids to kick my ass if she feels I’m being a bit hard on them.

So, for the uninitiated, here are some forms of roughhouse experienced in the daddyfesto household (note: although this may appear to be a parody, this is actually serious). Please note that this is only the tip of the iceberg. I tallied at least 20 different things we’ve had going in this house at one time or another (in fact, I tallied so many that it made me realize just how much you’re cooped up inside in the winter in Cleveland and just how much that stinks). Without further ado:

Standard Roughhousing. This is just wrestling, except that instead of trying to pin your children, you are trying to incapacitate them and tickle them. The primary rule that you, the father, must abide by is that if the kids land a solid blow, you have to act stunned (whether or not you are actually stunned). If you are roughhousing with two children, such a blow would permit a trapped child escape (hopefully this will teach your son chivalry). Think Olympic Boxing. It doesn’t matter if the punch hurts, it still scores a point; so if it’s a clean blow, you have to act stunned for a second.

“Super” Roughhousing. The difference between roughhousing and super-roughhousing is that super-roughhousing is nasty. Mainly, I the super version allows punching anywhere except the face and private area. I even allow scratching (if nails have been clipped recently). We’ve had to create additional rules as my son tests out various ways to injure a human being (e.g., no poking daddy in the eye, even if it isn’t a punch), but generally, they get to whale on you.

What do you get? Super-roughhousing was invented after I first realized that if you hit a child square with an open hand in the middle of their back you will (a) make a cool sound, akin to hitting a watermelon with a baseball bat on a check swing and (b) more importantly, not hurt the child. I’m not sure why it doesn’t hurt the child. All I know is that while I’ve never completely “let go,” I’ve probably smacked them on the back harder than I should have, and no crying or game stoppage has resulted (but make sure you hit them square!) Of course, I’m sure there internal bleeding or something, but really, it’s the visible injuries that are gonna get you in trouble, so don’t concern yourself with that.

Super-roughhousing needs to be used sparingly. It needs to be reserved as a reward for the kids getting through tough periods, like having to spent 4 hours cooped up at a wedding and reception. It is for a time when they have too much energy and no good outlet, as you’re essentially volunteering to be a punching bag.

Harry Hungry Bed: When you’re changing the sheets on your bed, take the kids up there. Stand at the foot of the bed and lift the mattress (but not the box spring) into the air, so that the bed, from the side, forms a “greater than” sign. Have your children dart across the box spring while you count down “5…4…3….2….1.” At one, let go of the mattress, then check and see what you’ve caught. If you’ve caught both, pretend to leave the room and go to work. If you’ve caught only one of multiple children, you get to climb onto your bed and pretend to sleep while the remaining child has to pull your fat ass off the bed. If all children are caught, you get to roll around on the bed for a bit while your wife yells things at you involving the word “suffocate.”

When we play this these days, my kids tend to scream louder. This suggests that either I’m gaining weight or it’s time to get a new bed or both.

Fairground Ducks: Pillow-Style. This one is best done in a hall or place with hardwood floors. (Even better if you have a hall that ends with a carpeted room!) Gather up some smaller pillows. Have your children stand at one end of the hall with you sitting at the other. Whip the pillows down the hall in a Frisbee-like motion and have your children leap over them as the pillows fly by. Once all pillows are gone, they have to gather them up and run them back to you for another round. If you get a solid shot they can’t dodge, their legs will whip out behind them and they’ll hit the ground hard (which is why it’s best if you can put them on carpet). Score! Stone skipping techniques work better than you think with the pillows.

Note: Warning! If your child, like my son, has a 2 inch vertical leap, he’s not going to clear any of the pillows and you’re going to fucking annihilate him, a fact I luckily discovered while my wife was not in the house (insert white boy can’t jump joke here).

Walk on Daddy’s Back. Self-explanatory. A definite two-birds-one-stone-situation. Having kids may be worth it for this reason alone. With multiple children, choose the child based upon the severity of the back pain. Some days you need a light 4-year old walk; other days a 7-year old it called for. If you do it on your bed and shake every once in a while so they’ll fall off, you can call it a new kind of roughhousing and trick them until they get bored after about 5 minutes.

Blind Monster. Sit and position yourself in the center of a room with as little furniture as possible. Close your eyes and spin to disorientate yourself. You’re allowed to move but must stay in the room. Using your sense of hearing, your goal is to snatch up the children as they rush in and out of the room. The kids’ goal is to jump onto your back, and if they are successful, they win. There you go.

Explaining to hospital workers that you broke your child’s cheekbone playing a game will be a tough sell, so be sure to swing your arms low to the ground. This is also a good time to break out the standard Obi Wan style father joke: “you are going to smile and start laughing now” which nails the young kids within 5-10 seconds almost every time if used judiciously. Also, make sure the toddlers (and any cats) are out of the room with mom so you don’t clock them.

Have you tried to close your eyes for 15-30 minutes straight without being asleep? It’s not natural. So you ultimately open them inadvertently and the kids cry foul. So essentially this game teaches them that daddy is a cheater. And so it also serves to prove to children that daddy is just a mere mortal man after all. So I guess this is another two-birds-one-stone situation.

Wake Up Daddy. This one was invented by my 20 month old. If daddy is sleeping, or even just resting his eyes and not even asleep, come up and whack him on the head as hard as you can and shout “wake up daddy.” Then run away. Then laugh. Like everything else with 20 month olds, repeat ad nauseum. I normally wake up after about 15 whacks.

Throw Children In Air. Is it never shake a baby or always shake a baby? I sometimes forget. No, seriously, once the kids are old enough so you aren't violating maxims so basic they are printed on the sides of city buses, this one is fun (and is exactly what it sounds like).

One important tip is to throw the youngest child first. If you throw the oldest child first, you might get used to putting some umph behind your throws and you’ll end up with dent marks of your youngest kid’s head on the ceiling.

If you’ve got a room with a vaulted ceiling, it’s extra fun and has the added benefit of actually giving your arms a workout (make sure to do multiple reps of tosses). If you don’t have a vaulted ceiling, do it BowFlex style and tell your kid to put their arms up in the air to keep them from smacking their head on the ceiling. Since they are pushing off the ceiling, it becomes a kind of resistance workout.

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There you go. Those are some of the basics we use around here, and should get you going. Since your wife likely has sough to retire from the “wrestling” circuit, and since men don’t hug enough, roughhousing will give you the physical contact you need for a healthy emotional state.

Happy roughing.

I Think I Accidentally Wrote a Book

It's surprisingly hard to figure out how many words there are in an average book. Googling the question gives unsatisfying answers.

In any event, by mucking around online and counting words on pages in 3 books, I determined that, roughly, you have maybe 250 words on a page (but I got as many as 400 for books with smaller typefaces and larger pages, and we're still talking trade paperbacks, so I'm sure some books have more). If you figure 200 pages is a book, that's 50,000 words or so. Figure blank pages, chapters, etc., and maybe 45,000 words or so. A book length piece of writing is between 45,000 and about 125,000 words.

And I just checked WORD COUNT in WORD to see how many words I've posted here, and it's roughly 43,000.

(no wonder I feel like I don't have anything interesting to say anymore)

CSI: Cleveland Heights Edition

I really just don’t care.

That’s what you think when you’re peacefully settling in, doing something you enjoy like reading a book, and one of your children runs up from the basement and tells you the awful and terrible thing that their sibling just did to them.

But you can’t just not care, because you’ve probably told them that this is what they’re supposed to do. You said: “If your sister tries to start a fight with you, don’t hit her. Come tell me or your mother. We’ll deal with it.” That’s what you unfortunately said. And now you’re living with the consequences.

Lots of parents renege on this commitment. They listen to one child’s story and then try to redirect them into another activity. After hearing how their sister hit them, instead of looking into it, they say “do you want to sit up here in the kitchen and color?” Other parents intentionally try to not get involved, under the theory that it’s better if you let kids work out problems themselves instead of always mediating for them (of course, if kids figuring it out without parents is always better, why not let them do everything without parents: fix their own meals, take themselves to school and … hell, why not get them their own place at age 8?)
Unfortunately for me, the 10-year old version of myself made me promise to myself that I would not do this. That I would not be overly hands off when it came to family fights.

For when I was younger, I “clashed” quite a bit with my sister that was 2 years younger than me (note: as used in this paragraph, the word “clash” includes everything up to and including attempted strangulation). We fought a fair amount but, at times, when things were escalating, one of us would have the good sense to back off and run and tell our mother that a fight was brewing. But inevitably our mother’s response was unsatisfying. If you were just sitting there and got hit and told mom, she’d try to redirect you. You’d be offered a carrot and told to play in a different room. But you didn’t come get your mom because you wanted a carrot. You wanted justice.

It quickly became clear to me that appealing to the authorities would get me nowhere. I was going to have to take matters into my own hands. And luckily, in the early 1980s, I had plenty of role models for this endeavor.
And so my sister and I waged some epic battles. Weaponry and shrieking like a female Asian mercenary was involved on her end. Biting was once involved on my end (which wouldn’t be that embarrassing if I hadn’t been in middle school at the time), amongst other sordidness. Ultimately we learned to stay the hell away from one another. And although my sister and I became friends again when older, I can’t help but wonder how much we damaged our relationship during the several-year period we were at each other’s throats.

Looking back, it seems clear that my mom’s approach wasn’t all that bad, but was less than ideal. I mean, for 90% of the kids I hung out with, we really did work it out ourselves. But for 10% of the kids I was around (for my sister and two other younger kids I knew while growing up), it only made us stop involving the parents and take things into our own hands. But all too often, that involved getting so angry that even I knew things were getting out of hand, and I knew deep down that something was very wrong with how mad I got. And so all that led me to promise myself that I would not employ a similar hands off attitude toward my children’s fights.

So now, in my house, when a child comes to me with a complaint about how they are being treated, CSI: Cleveland Heights springs into action. I put on my David Caruso sunglasses and get down to work with a five-step investigative program.

Step one is to segregate the offenders. Place the combatants in separate rooms where they can’t see one another or anyone else. Isolation will weaken the criminal mind.

Step two is to search for eyewitnesses. Unfortunately, in our house, if the older kids are fighting, the eyewitness is 22 months old. And if normal eyewitness testimony is unreliable, I can only imagine what baby eyewitness testimony must be like.

Step three is to review the physical evidence. My wife normally cordons off the area of the fight with police tape and then declares that she will be unable to clean that area of the house for the next month “because it is a crime scene.”

Step four is a thorough interview of each side. It’s best to employ re-enactment techniques here. Use of toddler children as stand-ins is encouraged. Since toddlers love being allowed to be a part of anything, this can double as “quality time” with them.

The fifth and final step is to bring both sides together and subject them to rapid fire questioning (while holding their wrists to utilize pulse-rate lie detection techniques). If you’re lucky, after repeated incidents, one of them will eventually develop a stutter.

Employing these techniques has led to some Perry Mason moments:

“Your baby sister couldn’t have thrown a block and hit you from way over there, as she can only throw things directly into the floor, approximately 12 inches away.”

“But he couldn’t have called you that name, because he doesn’t even know that word!”

“Your sister couldn’t have used her penis to make the floor wet”

Even if none of the kids crack and confess and there is no Perry Mason moment, normally, with enough perseverance, you’ll catch the culprit.

And your kids will dislike your bizarre behavior so much that they will do anything to avoid fighting with one another.