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.