Daylight Savings Mess

It's like this: people look at something like Daylight Savings Time, and they think, "My gosh, it's so inconvenient to run around the house and change all those clocks!" They don't know the half of it.

First, no one even owns a VCR anymore, so there's no need to figure out how to set the time on one of those things. (Hint: It's not possible--when they were manufactured in Japan they were all programmed to perpetually blink 12:00. Payback, you know.)

Second, the time change is a completely different experience when young children are involved. Early in my married life, when I had disposable income and tools scattered about my house, Spring Forward meant losing an hour of sleep on Sunday morning. Or it meant waking up at the normal time and then realizing it was really practically lunch time and I was a lazy slob.

These days, it means that my children's biological clocks, which adjust to change about as well as the rudder of the Titanic did, are thrown off for at least a week afterward. It all starts off great on Sunday morning, when they don't come bounding into the bedroom (without knocking) until almost 8:00. But everything goes downhill from there. To make this easier to understand, I've documented it in timeline form below:

10:30 am Day 1 of daylight savings:
What do you mean you're not hungry? We eat snack every day at this time.
Oh, wait, we don't.

1:00 pm Day 1 of daylight savings:
Why aren't you in your bed? It's rest time, just like very other day.
Oh, wait, it's not.

7:30 pm Day 1 of daylight savings:
Why are you jumping rope in the basement? It's your bed time.
Never mind, it's really not.

7:02 am Day 2 of daylight savings:
Seriously? Doesn't your body think it's 6:00 am? How are you awake already?

The days that follow are a mass of confusion: late bed times, early waking times, altered meal times. Eventually an equilibrium is reached wherein the kids go to bed later and wake up earlier, all in the name of keeping the lights off a few minutes longer in the evening.

I'm sure everything will made right in the fall though.

And the Oscar Goes To...

With the Academy Awards coming up, I thought I'd have my own award ceremony for my family. "Well that's rather pompous and self-serving," you might say. And you'd be right, but no more pompous and self-serving than an industry that gives itself awards several times a year just so it can get together and wear ridiculously expensive clothes and make incoherent speeches. 

 In typical Hollywood style, I'll be starting with the awards no one has heard of.

Visual Effects

 The winner for best visual effects is "Planet Cookies" by Brennen, Caleb, and Emily. Think they don't look like planets? You try making Venus out of sugar cookie dough and blue food coloring. Want to point out that Saturn's rings aren't big enough? Tell it to Uranus. And that last one? Yep, that's Pluto—once a planet, always a planet in my book.

Short Film—Live Action

Something has survived…again. Yes, 2013 marks the 20^th anniversary of Jurassic Park, and Universal Studios has decided to further sully the great reputation of this film by producing Jurassic Park 4—also known as "Another desperate attempt to recapture the awesomeness of the first movie."  This short film "I Like Dinosaurs" is expected to have more plot development than anything Universal comes up with.  

Music

Imagine you’re a tourist in a coastal Michigan town, and you approach this pirate ship parked on the sidewalk. It's filled with children, and they are singing pirate songs. Call the police? Search for the parents? No, give it the Oscar for best music.

Makeup and Hairstyling

It takes special skill and a tremendous amount of patience to fix a two-year-old's hair. My wife got my daughter to stand still for upwards of ten minutes to create this hairstyle, which I'm sure has a name. Centuries ago, someone who could keep a toddler quiet and still this long would have been burned as a witch. This year, I'm giving the Oscar for makeup and hairstyling to my wife, Debbie.

Costume Design

Weta Workshop has nothing on this family. It's one thing to put a bunch of beards and wrinkles on grown men, but it's quite another to turn three children into a transformer, a spider, and a princess, with enough time left over to scour the neighborhood for candy.

Actor

The Oscar for best actor is traditionally given to someone who performed in a movie that no one really liked, while movies that are actually good, like Blues Brothers and The 300, get completely passed over. Not this year. The Oscar for best actor goes to Brennen and Caleb, who reprised the roles of Tom and Huck in one of the greatest scenes in all literature. Except they used chalk instead of whitewash.

Actress

And finally, the Oscar for best actress goes to Emily. She's never had a wardrobe malfunction, and there's no silicone or botox in sight, but her performance in Girl with the Kitty Tattoo is Oscar-worthy.

That's all for this year's Academy Awards. Yes, I left out such popular categories as best cinematography and best documentary. Such is the benefit of having one's own award ceremony.

How to Screw up a Kid for Life

I’ve named three babies in my life. You may question whether that makes me a doddering amateur or a seasoned professional. I suppose if I said I’d hammered three nails in my life you’d likely not be inclined to ask my help on your next construction project. But if I said I’d defused three bombs in my life, you’d think I was MacGyver (Or James Bond if you’re too young to know who MacGyver was.) Given the relative scarcity of baby naming opportunities a person has in his life, I consider myself highly proficient at baby naming.

I named my first child, Brennen after bickering through a list of names with my wife. My second son, Caleb, was taken from the same list, being the only other name that we both agreed on for a boy. My daughter, Emily, is named after the greatest poet in the history of the universe: Emily Dickinson. 

Those are three pretty straightforward names. Chances are, if I asked you to spell all of them, you’d go two-for-three without breaking a sweat, and you might even luck into spelling Brennen’s name with an “e” instead of an “a.”

So if a noted weirdo like me can name three children without incident, setting them up for a life of normalcy (at least on the as far as their names go), why are so many people having trouble naming their babies lately without resorting to odd creations and perplexing spellings?  Celebrities, for example, apparently can’t even be bothered to think about their children’s names. They just shout out the first concrete noun in sight and go with it: Apple! Blanket! Coco! Done.

Possibly just as bad (at least for their future teachers) are those kids whose parents decide to test the limits of phonetics with their creative spellings. Ashleigh, anyone?

I fear we are raising a whole generation of kids who think spelling is like some sort of X-games event: make it up as you go, and as long as it looks pretty, you’ll get some points.  

Sick Day

Have you ever seen one of those movies where explorers find a journal written by some poor schmuck who was chronicling his civilization’s downfall right up until invading hordes swept the pen from his ink-speckled hand and offed him with a broadsword?

I bring it up because this blog might someday be a museum piece for this very reason. My family is in the throes of some unidentified sickness, and I’m slouched at the keyboard, with pieces of toilet paper scattered around the desk (because the Kleenex are long gone, and no one has had the energy to get dressed in days, let alone make a trip to the store). Cough drops are my constant companions, except when I’m actually coughing, which the aforesaid cough drops are powerless to prevent. I’m typing simply because my fingers landed on the keyboard when they dropped in exhaustion.

The coughing and sore throats came first, which led to the run on cough drops, then on honey, and finally on the leftover Halloween candy that would have never been eaten otherwise. Then came the fevers. At one point the mean temperature among the inhabitants of my home was 102. We probably should have all gone to the hospital, but who would have driven?

Nobody’s really eaten anything in a few days (except the Halloween candy). Nobody’s felt like cooking anything either though, so it’s hard to tell if our collective fast is out of necessity or lack of options. 

They are coming…I can hear the coughing in the distance. They are stumbling over empty Kleenex boxes and discarded cough drop wrappers, but nothing stops their relentless march. We have bleached the door handles and propped up our pillows. We do not hope to see the sunlight again…

See what happens when I get sick? I eat gross Halloween candy and have delusions that I’m Tolkien. Maybe somebody should drive me to the hospital. 

Looth Tooth

My six-year-old got his first loose tooth the other day. Like many parents of boys, I was initially skeptical about whether he had come about this naturally, rather than as a result of jumping from the top bunk onto his brother. Six seemed early to already be losing one’s teeth.

But my musings about how the tooth had been jarred from its moorings were interrupted by my wife. “Are we going to do, you know, the Tooth Fairy thing?” I was speechless. I thought we wouldn’t have to make any potentially life-altering child rearing decisions again until girlfriends started calling. But there I was, pondering the existence of a midnight wanderer in a tutu.

I have to be honest; we’ve been pretty inconsistent in recognizing the figments of our culture’s imagination. We’ve introduced Santa Claus, but only as a character in a story, not as a prowler who slinks into our living room once a year and leaves presents behind. The Easter Bunny has been completely ignored, as I never could determine its connection to Jesus Christ.

But I haven’t thought about the Tooth Fairy since I was, like, nine. My image of her was something between Tinker Bell and that Bippity boopity boo chick from Cinderella. And I have no need for some mini-skirt clad hussy flittering around my kid’s bed offering him money. 

There’s the question of cleanliness too. Isn’t it sending mixed messages to teach my son to wash his hands and sort his laundry and then turn around and ask him to put a decaying tooth under his pillow?

Finally I have to think about his impressions of money. I guess it depends on your political persuasion, but most folks don’t think money is something that just shows up after you’ve done nothing but put in a good night’s sleep. 

Whatever I choose, I have to do it quickly. This thing is hanging by a thread, and I know it’s only a matter of time before some wrestling match or acrobatic routine shakes it out.

Around the World in 80 Minutes

“Daddy, what’s inside the Parthenon?” Questions like these have replaced “Why is grass green” at my house thanks to the Around the World Toob® from Safari Ltd®.  The educational possibilities of this collection are almost unlimited, and my kids are drawn to the beautiful replicas.

Around the World

 We started by using the Around the World figures to make matching cards, which are popular in many elementary classrooms.  In this case, we have colorful replicas in place of pictures. I wrote cards with the name of each wonder and its country. Then my six-year-old worked on matching them up.

Brennen tries to remember where Big Ben is located

 

He was thrilled when he was able to match each of the ten figures to its name and country. Then we practiced saying the name of each wonder. Fortunately Machu Picchu wasn't included in this group, or I'd have been in trouble.

Then we brought out our world map. My four-year-old joined us for this, and both boys enjoyed trying to locate the country where each figure belongs and place it on the map. Although we have a large world map, this would work with any sized map, as the figures are just a few inches wide at most. 

Caleb sets the Empire State Building in New York

 

This turned out to be a wonderful group activity, as my oldest gave the name and country for each replica and his little brother tried to find it on the map. I was no help at all, as I spent the whole time trying to figure out why my camera batteries kept dying. A few minutes later, they had each model in the right place, and were they ever proud of their work!

Emily joins in for a group shot

 

So in one morning, my kids learned some history and some geography while playing and having fun. I learned what's inside my camera, which was far less fun. Now if I can only figure out what's inside the Parthenon.

Call of Duty or Honor or Whatever

You know that scene from epic guy movies where a muscular hero wipes out an invading horde of bad guys with like a butter knife, and then he’s standing there surveying the carnage, and says in a deep, gravelly voice, “My father taught me that duty and honor are more important than anything”? 

Well, as a father of two impressionable young boys that I would love to raise to be epic heroes someday, what I want to know is how do I get that deep, gravelly voice? I mean, how cool would it be to teach a kid to tie his shoes, and then tell him in a deep, gravelly voice, “Son, always remember that the rabbit goes around the bush and then into its hole.” He’d never forget that lesson. At the same time, I’d also like to know when those lessons about duty and honor are supposed to be worked into the conversation. 

I thought I’d discovered the perfect opportunity a few days ago when my kids were playing outside, and my youngest son began to cry because he’d fallen off his bike. (It’s about three inches from his seat to the ground, so why this is cause for tears is beyond me, but we must be sensitive, mustn’t we?) Anyway, the exchange that followed went like this:

Me (After clearing my throat repeatedly in search of my best James Earl Jones voice): “Son, going to aid your brother in his time of need would be honorable.”

Six-year-old: “Daddy, you sound funny.”

That went well. At some point I should probably consider the wisdom of trying to model my parenting techniques after the fictional fathers of half-naked male characters from guy movies who spend their time eviscerating their foes and sharpening their butter knives. That deep, gravelly voice on the other hand…maybe I’ll find something for that in my spam folder.

Art Attack

Scientists would have us believe that there is a vast ring of debris, an asteroid belt they call it, somewhere a few miles beyond Mars. Well, there is a vast ring of debris floating around out there, but it’s not chucks of rock and ice. It’s made of countless pictures created by children to be hung their parents’ refrigerators.

You see, toddlers create pictures at an astounding rate. (Paradoxically, artists who wish to be paid for a living struggle to produce a decent drawing once a month.) It doesn’t matter if you have a dorm room mini-fridge or a walk-in freezer; a single toddler can fill every square inch of surface with a vast array of shapes, lines, and colors that only he can interpret.

What would look to the average adult like a series of crooked purple lines inside a blue oval is, to its creator, Noah’s ark. And even more amazingly, a child who can’t remember where he put his brother’s left sock five minutes ago can remember each and every picture he has drawn, and will notice if one is missing.

I discovered this when I made room for a fresh batch of drawings by removing some old pictures and placing them in the garbage. I may as well have thrown away my son’s favorite blanket, stuffed animal, and shirt for the look he gave me when he saw his artwork in the garbage.

Of course, the spaghetti-sauce-stained picture had to be prominently displayed once again. This led me to my grand aforementioned conspiracy theory. What have parents done with all these pictures since crayons became widely available?

That’s when it dawned on me: The space program. Does anyone really care if Jupiter’s seventh moon has ice on its poles? Of course not. All those missions succeeded in one thing: dumping reams of children’s drawings beyond the prying eyes of curious toddlers. Soon, these orbiting illustrations will fill the outer reaches of our solar system. And we wonder why Pluto took off.  

With Great Speed Comes Great Bodily Injury

Most people think that after the age of say, twelve, you can’t go sledding anymore. This is far from the truth; a great number of teenagers can be found hanging out on sledding hills; they just don’t actually sled. I, however, have been a big fan of sledding my whole life. The rush of wind and the thrill of speed more than make up for the long, arduous climb back up the hill that it took 13 seconds to get down or the jarring in the lower spine caused by bouncing over frozen ground with only a thin piece of plastic for padding.

 Just when I thought my sledding days were over, I realized I could take my son sledding as a weak excuse to fly through the snow once again. “No,” my wife said. “You’re not taking our six-month-old sledding.” Eventually he grew to be two years old, though, a perfect age to sit in a sled in front of me and shield me from the snow flying up in my face. 

I soon discovered that sledding had changed from when I was young. At the age of ten, I would have sought out the mound of snow built up at the bottom of the hill with no other thought than “This will be cool.” Now it’s, “This will hurt. I wonder if my co-pay applies to emergency room visits. Can I use my HSA to purchase ice packs? Maybe I’ll be able to deduct my medical expenses this year.” 

And then there’s the duration of the sledding event. I have nostalgic memories of spending the better part of a day sledding, and most of that time in mid-air wondering “now what?” But now that I’m dragging myself and a thirty-pound toddler up the hill every time, I’m more interested in quality than quantity. As in quality time sitting at the top of the hill resting. But a two year old has no interest in my stalling tactic of explaining why some trees lose their leaves in winter and some do not.  “Really, you want to go again…already?” 

 I can’t help but wonder when my son will be able to pull me up the hill. 

It's What's For Dinner

Every father fears for his child’s future. It’s easy to lose sleep at night worrying if your little boy will do well in school, make friends, or ask if he can join ballet.

But for me, one of my worst fears was almost realized before my son turned two.  He quit eating meat.  Not that there’s anything wrong with being a vegetarian.  There are plenty of actors, university professors, and even real people who don’t eat meat.  I am just not one of them.

For me a balanced meal is one that includes beef, pork, and chicken.  So I was understandably dismayed when my son turned up his nose at his meat one afternoon. I grew concerned when he did it again the next day. I was severely alarmed the day after that. On day four of his self-imposed meat strike I considered calling the nurse hotline.

Surely a child whose father grills ribs in the garage in December just because he misses the charcoal taste should be more inclined to be a meat eater, shouldn’t he? It didn’t matter what kind of meat it was. Hamburgers, chicken strips, fish sticks, even hot dogs, barely identifiable as meat, were rejected.

With a two-year-old, one’s options are limited when it comes to convincing him to eat. You can pretend the spoon is an airplane, a rocket ship, maybe even a helicopter, but if the toddler isn’t into winged modes of transportation, you’ll get nowhere.

I don’t know why parents think that forks resemble airplanes. And I don’t know why we expect children to respond to this. Maybe it is a holdover from prehistoric days, when food was brought to hungry cave babies by pterodactyls. Maybe it's supposed to appeal to the inner risk-taker in a child. Certainly any kid who thinks diving headfirst off a toddler bed into a pile of freshly folded clothes can see the inherent risk in eating food delivered by a flying fork, and he should respond in excitement.

Just when I was seriously considering thinking about calling the doctor, even though my son's next checkup wasn't scheduled for six months, he returned from the dark side. After I put on a veritable air show with meat on a fork one day, my son ended his meat refusal policy.  Maybe he finally saw the error of his ways. Maybe it was the pterodactyl noises. Or maybe he just pitied me making a fool of myself.

Road Trip

People who keep track of such things tell us that the most accident-prone drivers are teenagers. But I’m not so sure. I get that it is difficult to concentrate on driving when one is simultaneously texting, changing songs on an MP3 player, fixing make-up, and checking a Facebook feed. I don’t see, however, that this level of distraction is any different than what the average parent of a toddler faces on any car trip longer than the driveway.

I try to prepare for long car tips by making my toddler as comfortable as possible. I give him a small bag of cheesy goldfish, and I present him with a pile of his favorite books. Alert and experienced parents are already shaking their heads, knowing that such efforts are in vain.

I learned this the hard way once on a trip across the Midwest with my toddler. Before leaving, I made sure he was properly nestled among Bernstein Bear books, with a full sippy cup and a bowl of raisins at his side. He even had his favorite blanket. My plan was virtually flawless. We were leaving just before nightfall, giving him a short amount of time to brush up on the virtues of familial love taught by the Bernstein Bears before drifting to sleep with a full belly and a comfortable blanket while I drove four hours through the peaceful darkness.

It was three minutes before the first raisin ricocheted off the windshield. Not wanting to disrupt the calm that was surely forthcoming, I turned briefly and gave him a mild frown. Turning my attention back to driving, I had just enough time to nudge the car back across the center line before The Bernstein Bears Love Their Neighbors plopped beside me, knocking over my Mountain Dew and spilling my bag of skittles.

Unfazed, I turned again, this time to deliver a threat. I stopped short of promising to take his books and food away, thinking this would only guarantee that he would not drop into a dreamy slumber quite as quickly.

As I refocused on the road, planting my feet firmly on the brakes to avoid developing a short-term relationship with the driver ahead, I realized almost immediately that I should have considered disarmament. A brief barrage of paperback children’s books was followed by an invasion of Croc-wielding feet slamming into the back of my seat.

With one hand replacing the lid on my soda and the other hand plucking a grape skittle off the floor, I carefully navigated a lane change with my knees while admonishing my son in the rear view mirror.

I eased into my new lane, only to be cut off by a teenage girl lost in conversation on her cell phone. Watch the road, kid, I muttered under my breath. 

Dinner Is Served; Part 2

Eating dinner with a toddler is just like eating dinner with any normal, happy adult.  Assuming, of course, the adult is a species other than human.  Toddlers are at a stage in life where they learn new things every day.  Unfortunately, the one lesson they haven’t learned (and won’t until age 13, at least) is that not all new skills learned during the day are applicable at the dinner table.   Take throwing a ball, for example.  Now, like any good father, I began teaching my son to properly throw a ball when he was a fetus.  We fathers have several reasons for doing this, not the least of which is no man wants his son to throw “like a girl.”  (The trouble with this statement is that most girls throw just fine; it’s the guys who make a toss with their elbow tucked firmly into their ribs who bother us.)  The other reason, of course, is that we all think our sons are going to grow up to be professional baseball players.  This isn’t quite true- the average boy has a better chance of getting a college diploma and joining the circus than becoming a pro ball player.  Nevertheless, teaching my son to throw quickly and accurately receives a great deal of emphasis.  Is it any surprise then, that meatballs, chicken nuggets, chunks of hot dog, peas, sippy cups, and basically anything that has mass becomes a device for long toss at the dinner table?  It’s hard to know what to do in these situations.  When my son picked up a carrot the other night, briefly contemplated eating it, (or just took a moment to get a feel for its balance) and hurled it across the kitchen, should I have cheered his good throw or chastised his lack of manners?  Would it change your answer to discover that the carrot caught my wife right in the temple?  And why couldn’t someone have prepared me for this dilemma earlier?  As it is, I will have plenty of time to cheer my son’s throwing skills from my new bed on the couch.