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.

Sandra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic

This article, part book review, part essay, is perhaps the best thing I've ever read about working moms and the like ("so many roads lead to a wet wipe" is a classic.)

In fact, looking over Loh's last half-dozen articles, she's on a tremendous roll.

The Pattern of Life

I think I may have figured out how life goes.

Once you become a preteen up until you’re age 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or even 35, you spend a decent chunk of your life developing principles and thinking that there is a particular way that you like to live your life and molding your personality into the kind of person that you want to be.

At various ages, you decide whether religion matters to you; whether staying in shape via exercise or diet matters to you; whether you’re going to try recreational drugs or not (and whether you are going to continue to “try” them each and every morning after you wake up); whether you want to go to college and ultimately do with your life from a career standpoint; the types of things you save up for and spend your money on; what your political beliefs are; what clothes you wear and how that expresses who you are; what sports you’ll play; what clubs to join or hobbies to have; whether you’ll play video games or not; how to wear your hair; what car to drive; what music to listen to; what books to read; what TV to watch; what bars or clubs to hang out in.

But you don’t just choose religions and philosophies and art and material goods. You choose the people that you will live your life with. You choose your friends. You choose a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Lots of these decisions are big and lots are small, but in the 21st Century, your identity is no longer determined by who your family is, or what “class” you’re from. Who you are is based, in large part, by the choices that you make. Lots of people take this seriously, spending thousands of hours deciding who they are; making choices that they can respect the rest of their lives.

What no one tells you when you’re 20 is that you shouldn’t spend so much time figuring this out, because you ultimately just give it all away.

For men, I think it starts with the girlfriend. Specifically, I think it starts with the first chick flick that a guy goes to see with his girlfriend. It continues when she buys him his first shirt with a designer label (yuck!) and gets him to stay home instead of going out with the boys. When I got married I was a little horrified to find my wife going to Jazzercise classes.

But the spouse or girlfriend is nothing compared to the children.

Earlier this week, I was flipping ahead on Turner Movie Classics and AMC, to see if there were any movies I wanted to TIVO this week. And I saw “Look Who’s Talking” come up and I thought “oh, the kids might like that” and I hit the Record button.

And it didn’t even hit me (that's probably the worst part). I didn’t even notice that I had, completely without irony, chosen to record “Look Who’s Talking.” I couldn’t help but flashback to the teenaged version of myself, when I believed Look Who’s Talking to be so odious and held it with such disdain as to not be worth mocking (since everything is worth mocking to a teenager, this means I held it in such low regard as hair metal bands, the song “I Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode, my sister's Jelly shoes and people who didn’t like Catcher in the Rye). The teenaged me wouldn’t recognize the man who just chose to record Look Who’s Freakin Talking without irony.

I think most people in their early twenties realize that on some level they’ll get more tolerant when they get older, or they start to realize this as they actually start to get more tolerant.

What I’ve just come to realize is that it’s your own damn kids that largely do this to you. You may have always thought playing with dolls and barrettes are silly, but you don’t think your daughter is silly, so if she cares about that stuff, ultimately you do too on some level. So I’m a 35 year old man that has opinions about the merits of different kinds of barrettes now. You might have thought, pre-children, that “People that have kids are just making excuses about not working out and I am going to work out six days a week after having kids” and then, when you have kids, that goes out the window (at least when they’re real young, it has to).

You start watching absolutely ridiculous TV hows, like that new show Wipeout or American Idol or (the worst) America’s Funniest Videos with the kids, simply because the kids love it. And after watching them crack up at 10 ridiculous videos of people falling off three-wheelers, it will be tough to maintain your dislike for that damn Tom Bergeron (or Bob Saget, if watching reruns). I mean, I’ve used flash cards with my kids. I’ve said “because I said so.” I’ve worked at a job I’m pretty damn ambivalent about for 9 years.

Hell, half the crap I write about in this blog is exactly this: me surrendering principles at the altar of my children.

You might hate McDonalds and fast food. But your kids won’t and they’ll mellow you out about it. You may have chosen certain sports to play in high school or at least favored those sports (I played tennis and would’ve loved to play football had I weighed over 140 lbs). And you probably thought some sports were silly (for me volleyball and, later, lacrosse). But when your kid is out there playing, your prior opinions will go out the window. So if my kids like it, it’s LAX for me baby!

The increasing-tolerance principles-out-the-window affect even applies to serious stuff. While there are certainly horror stories from the gay community about parents rejecting gay children, the more common outcome these days is for the gay child to convince the parents that there isn’t really anything wrong with being gay. And you hear a lot about parents and children fighting over politics only to come to terms with the other’s political beliefs a few years later.

It is a cliché how parents complain about how their grandparents coddle their grandchildren and how “things weren’t like that when they were raising me.” It is similarly cliché how “the first child has it the worst” when it comes to discipline. And while simple fatigue is part of the reason for this, half of this is simply because, at age 60, you don’t have the principles that you had at age 30. Maybe at age 60 you don’t think hitting someone because they took your toy isn’t really so bad; you don’t think kids making a little too much noise in a restaurant is such a big deal; and you realize that giving a kid extra candy now isn’t going to spoil them and ruin their life 20 years hence, making them so lazy as to be unemployable or something.

So that’s it. You gather up principles for the first quarter or third of your life and you spend the rest giving them away.

Finally, you whittle it down to just one principle.

And that last principle you give up is the principle that you like life more than death.