Time Jump

Even though I haven't posted here in who knows how long, this blog never quite totally disappears from my thoughts... I can't tell you how many entries I've written during my morning shower. Only in my head, of course; I probably use up enough hot water without trying to rip out 800 words or so at the same time.

Despite the aged-in-the-cask nature of the 200+ posts here, it's not uncommon for me to send a link to one of them to some unsuspecting passerby -- I can find a periodic excuse to pass on this one and this one in particular -- but that always reminds me that I kinda miss doing this thing.

It takes intentionality to create a blog entry, however, and since my blog has never been big on the 'feedback' end of things, it's difficult to muster the concentration, effort, and time it takes to post. Next thing I know it's seemingly a whole lifetime later -- it would probably take a lifetime to recap all the water that's gone under the bridge in the meantime.

I decided to resurrect it at least temporarily (who knows, maybe I can get a little something going here at least sporadically) for the purpose of posting our family's holiday letter here. This way I can easily link to it in Facebook or an email and anyone who would venture a click can read it (while at the same time, it's fairly unlikely that anyone who doesn't care would wander in).

Anyway, I find that I haven't lost the knack for writing half a page without even remembering my original objective... but the following is what I ended up writing about the year 2017:

Merry Christmas to you and a Happy 2018! Writing this is literally the first thing I’m doing in the New Year. We’re off to a strong start already; my son’s first words to me on Jan.1 were not “Happy New Year” or even good morning, but rather “Where are the donuts?”

Having located them, he’s (munching, &) watching YouTube videos on his laptop; his mom is curled up with a cup of coffee and a podcast on her new iPad; the young woman among us is still sleeping; and I am determined to capture an entire year, or at least the State of the Family as the calendar changes, in a few paragraphs.

We’ve been a little lax in our longstanding holiday letter discipline, but this year’s was inspired by a few pieces of news we wanted to make sure our whole circle of connections were aware of.

Kelly has the biggest news this year. As she observed her third anniversary as pastor of Hartford UMC, and the fifth anniversary of her traumatic brain injury, she began to feel a readiness for a fuller ministry.   After much prayer, she told the Bishop she was ready for ¾ time status as a pastor.   That seems like the ideal “balance” right now; allowing her to pastor and still spend meaningful time with our two teens and her husband.   As of today Kelly is appointed to serve the Ballston Spa UMC on a ¾-time basis.

Because that church has been without a pastor for 2 months, she had been getting started with some things there, but yesterday marked her final worship service with the gracious folks at Hartford.   How well they thanked her and honored her ministry among them.  They also did a great job blessing our family with support and kindnesses.   The parting is sorrowful, but the small country church sends Kelly onward with their blessing.

Mark, Katie, and Jonathan have been involved at Hudson Falls UMC since we left Colonie, but Mark & Katie have made the decision to join Kelly at BSUMC, even as we all remain in our Moreau home.  Jonathan will continue at HFUMC, both because he has such a “home” there and as part of his continuing transition toward independence. At this point we anticipate a likely move to the Ballston Spa parsonage in the summer of 2019.

Meanwhile, Mark reached the 20^th anniversary of beginning at IDX Systems Corporation, which eventually became part of GE Healthcare. He’s blessed to have maintained this position through a change of role, corporation, and five physical moves, having worked 100% from home for more than 14 of those years. He’s saddened to transition away from being Staff-Parish Relations chair and praise team leader at his hometown church, but excited for the opportunity to share in ministry with Kelly once again. We’ve missed each other.

After spending a year in the high school program at the Wildwood School, Jonathan transitioned this summer to the school’s Young Adult Program, just before his 18^th birthday. YAP seeks to give young adults on the autism spectrum the living and working skills they need to achieve maximum independence. His teachers consistently remark on how he’s become a leader and the example they often use with the other students. Visitors to his bedroom consistently remark on the many Lego creations he has assembled and is displaying on every horizontal surface.

Katie celebrated her 15^th birthday at midyear and is now a sophomore at South Glens Falls HS. One of the highlights of her freshman year was her first participation in the school’s legendary Marathon Dance, which really has to be seen to be believed. This year she and the rest of the student body raised over $800,000 to help people in our local community, most of whom are facing a life-threatening health crisis.

This fall Katie took up tennis and had a winning season as part of the varsity team’s first doubles pairing. As the year came to a close, she suffered what was somehow her first broken bone in a gym class mishap, a right pinky-finger fracture that required the insertion of 2 pins. At this writing she is anxiously awaiting the removal in a few days of the cast and the pins, so she can resume writing and drawing (and full household chores, of course).

This summer we also celebrated our 30^th wedding anniversary with a trip to Rhode Island, including some fascinating time in Newport, and had a couple of quick getaways to Lake Placid which resulted in Mark becoming obsessed with waterfalls.  And as with all of you, this year did hold its share of heartaches, but we won’t chronicle these.  What we do want to convey is this:  we’re here on the other side - by the grace of God.  We cannot help but remind you whom we care about that God is our source of strength and peace; He heals us and restores our hope.  It is well with our souls.

As we close out this year and anticipate a fresh new one, we pray that each of you is well.   We’d love to hear your latest news, for you are important to us.  One of our New Year’s resolutions is to see as many people as we can in person.  So reach out soon so we can plan a simple meal or host you for an afternoon or evening.    We’ll set out some “sweet treats” and savor them and your good company.   Do let us show and share our love, and God’s love with you in 2018! 

Call Me Cautious

I realize that a high percentage of my posts end up to be about music. I guess that's kind of like the way Eskimos are supposed to have so many words for snow, or fish tweet all the time about how the water is today. Not that I claim that level of expertise, but I seem to be surrounded by music so it seems to be on my mind more often than not.

It's not the same as it once was, I have to say. Actually in a way it is, because I seem to be immersed in the same music now that I was then... but what I meant was, in my younger days when there was something cool and hip and happening, I was aware of it (even though I was constitutionally unable to be hip) more or less right away.

Now when I am... less conclusively young... I am reminded of that fact over and over, because the new hot song comes to me through my children. Ouch, by the way. Quite often they say, "We heard this song and it's really cool and can we have it on our iPods?"

It is my intent as a parent, of course, to exercise a certain amount of quality control over what's going into their heads, so my answer is always "Let me look at it." I then head directly to Google (pretty often right that very moment, with some encouragement).

I know I have no grounds to be all that superior -- "She loves you yeah yeah yeah" is not precisely Shakespeare, and no one will proudly hail the ascension of "My Ding-a-Ling" to #1 in October 1972 as a cultural touchstone. But I also can't say that I've been overwhelmed with the literary quality coming out of top-40 radio these days either...

Maybe "literary" is the wrong angle. Now that I'm coming at it from the parental standpoint, I'm actually more interested in the message than the turns of phrase. Sometimes I can sort of get around "adult language" by making them get the Kidz Bop version, since it's sanitized for your protection (shades of Pat Boone), but other times it's more of a conceptual struggle, particularly in the way current music deals with male-female relationships.

With that in mind, I'd like to submit the following proposed lyric:

Hey, I just met you,

But I'm not crazy,

Can't have my number,

So let's meet for coffee sometime in a neutral and non-threatening public place where I can be completely sober AND see you in the light of day AND be able to hear what you're saying so I can figure out whether you're a normal guy or some kind of stalker,

Maybe

Apple: Not Falling Far Enough

I guess everybody wants to see a little of themselves in their kids. I don't have the biological thing going for me, of course, so I do tend to study them closely to find those small reflections.

I've written before about my son and how I started out looking in all the wrong places for connections with him. It turned out he was not much for elaborate wordplay, and didn't care much about baseball -- but when we're riding in the car he always wants the oldies station playing, and pretty often he says, "Dad, do you have that one?" So we have a fair amount of overlap in our iPods. And I was happy to get him hooked on the finest in visual entertainment as well.

My daughter and I are pretty close in general, but the thing that we talk about the most (well, the thing I talk about with her; she talks about anything and everything with anyone and everyone) is baseball. Now that I'm helping coach her team, I like to try to teach her about the game... yeah, she's not really any more inclined to listen to dad when I'm wearing a maroon baseball cap than any other time. But even though it's somewhat frustrating, we can always connect on some level around the game.

Naturally I can't really expect them to share my preoccupation with the past... or least that's what I was counting on recently when I was able to recapture 8.5 oz. of my childhood.

I've seen a lot of those photos that look like posters on Facebook recently talking about how our lives were simpler when we were kids -- we didn't have seat belts or sunscreen and we stayed outdoors from dawn to dusk without posting armed guards -- but I can certainly testify that one thing was in fact way simpler, and that was breakfast. In my day it seemed as if nutrition was optional; the proper response to "Sugar content?" was "Yes, please!"

So it came to pass that in the fullness of time, and bowl, I started nearly every day with a heaping bowl of Quisp cereal. Like his cousin, Captain Crunch, Quisp was a jolt of sugary, sticky, corny goodness and I loved it. And I believe it was no coincidence that as I got a bit older and was slowly induced to eat a higher proportion of breakfast foods found in nature, Quisp was actually taken off the market.

In the 90s Quaker brought it back as an Internet-only product, and from there it gradually crept into scattered stores. You won't find it in your average Price Chopper or Hannaford, but it is perhaps ironic that I found it when browsing the more upscale Fresh Market (perhaps the only time "fresh" and "Quisp" have shared a thought).

Since it's such a "boutique" cereal now, and since the Fresh Market is so... well, I kinda want to say "snooty", but I'll try "esoteric"... an 8.5 oz. box of Quisp actually set me back more than a normal-size box of a normal cereal (for a real eye-opener, check this out). I was OK with that, though, because I figured one box would get it out of my system.

I bought it on a Friday night and basically wedged it into the back of the pantry shelf, then I went to bed. Saturday dawned bright and sunny and, as basically the only prerogative of the parent, I slept in a tiny bit. As I came down the stairs yawning and stretching, my daughter greeted me cheerfully, "Dad, this new cereal is really good!"

I had already planned bagels for the weekend and the Breakfast Blast from the Past for Monday; I decided to stick with that despite my feelings of foreboding...

... and so it was that on Monday morning I poured the last of the Quisp into my morning bowl. It was pretty good, but not as good as an entire box of Quisp.

Parental Advisory?

When I was in my 20s and 30s I knew everything about parenting, which made it even more unfortunate that we didn't have kids at that juncture. Apparently that brand of expertise comes with an expiration date, sadly, because by the time the kids actually arrived I seemed to know a lot less about being a parent.

As it turns out, it's like everything else in the world: you can't really be taught, you have to learn it for yourself. Of course, over my 12+ years of experience, I've developed a few theories... but I'm reminded of a baseball quote. Charlie Lau, on catching the knuckleball: "There are two theories on catching a knuckleball; unfortunately, neither of them work."

Each of my children has in their own way provided a well-equipped laboratory for research and development in the field of study, but I thought it might be interesting to submit a case study for possible peer review.

Our daughter is prone to report a new ailment every day -- I'm always prepared for a litany when she gets off the bus, and she rarely disappoints. And despite her apparent athleticism, she seems to get bumped & bruised on virtually any trip across a room that's not completely empty. I've heard it before, is what I'm saying.

So this morning I was not completely astonished to find her with a long gauze bandage wrapped around her hand and halfway to the elbow. When I inquired, she told me that her arm hurt and she needed to protect it. I don't have a lot of patience with her... well, I don't want to say "hypochondria"... let's say "hypersensitivity", so I told her she would be taking it off before school. She said no, she needed it because her arm hurt, and she was to say the least not impressed by my contention that since it was neither cut nor broken, it wasn't doing her any good.

I am aware that you can't really win a war of wills with someone who's determined to be unreasonable -- I have often said that parenting is the ultimate proof that you can't ever really make another person do anything -- so I decided to retreat to the shower to consider my next move.

I knew that gym and recess are highlights in her schedule, so I decided to tell her that if she was that hurt, she would have to sit out of both gym & recess for the day. Maybe I was just waterlogged, but I really believe in natural consequences: if you mess up, the result of that should be related to the offense. So I thought it was a logical way to squeeze her... but she just shrugged and said, "okay."

I certainly didn't want this to devolve into me chasing her around the house with a pair of scissors, and I couldn't very well threaten not to take her to school, so I decided to up the stakes: I told her that since she had been argumentative and defiant in not removing the bandage, her consequence would be to lose her privileges for the day -- no evening TV, no bedtime snack, no video games or any "special" recreation after school. Surely this would tip the balance...

... except of course if it had, I wouldn't be writing this. She said, once again, "okay."

And of course she had an awesome day at school because everyone was all curious/interested in her Serious Injury, so it appears she, well, beat me at my own game.

I did tell her that if the bandage continued, she would be too injured to play in her Little League game tomorrow, so she did conclude this evening that it was feeling better after all. But I hate to lose to an 8-year-old.

I suspect that if by some miracle I get multiple readers for this entry, the snickers will be inversely proportional to the number of kids per reader -- some of you have Been There, I'll wager -- but I'm certainly curious to know whether any of you would've handled it differently (I can ask that because I'm reasonably cure my wife won't read this; I know she would, ah, have an opinion). Warning: if you get all know-it-all on me, don't be surprised if your doorbell rings and you find her standing there with me peeling rubber halfway down the block....

Diamond Mind

I never had any shortage of toys as a kid -- don't get me wrong, I wasn't pampered either, but I don't recall ever feeling like I was missing out on certain "stuff". I did my fair share of Sears-catalog surfing at Christmastime, and my parents will tell you that I always created an itemized list on lined paper with the columns carefully drawn in with a ruler: page number, item, description, cost. But I don't think I ever seriously expected to get three-quarters of the stuff, nor did I feel like I came up short when I didn't.

It was always kind of a moot point anyway; there were only a few possessions I really cared about. The vast majority of the time, I had a book in my hand (and it wasn't unusual for the other hand to be buried up to the elbow in a bag of chips, but that's another story), although I can tell you that may not be the best policy at times such as when riding a bicycle, for example. When it was dark, or there was snow on the ground, I was racing Matchbox & Hot Wheels cars. When I needed something portable that I could mess with for hours, I brought my baseball cards.

The rest of the time, anytime I could get outside, it was my baseball glove.

On my frequent trips to the drugstore down the street to buy baseball cards, I would also carefully evaluate the available rubber balls to find the ones that would give me the perfect bounce off the brick wall of the church next door, then off the driveway into my waiting glove. If only there had been a Little Brick Wall League.

Even as much as I loved baseball, as a small, skinny kid who (at least when away from the brick wall) did not demonstrate prodigy-level baseball skills, I was actually too scared to play Little League the first year I was eligible. Once I got started, however, I couldn't be stopped. I played 4 years of Little League, and when I graduated from that -- despite ample evidence that I had already, ah, peaked as a ballplayer -- I played 3 years of Senior League. Well, "played" is perhaps a little strong in the latter case, but I had a uniform, and I showed up for every game, and every once in awhile they'd let me out on the field until the good players showed up. There comes a point, unfortunately, when no matter how fiercely you love the game, it stops pretending it loves you back. Regardless, however, when I look back at my "career", what I mostly think about is the fact that I missed playing that first year.

As a parent, I have tried not to make my kids merely xeroxes of myself -- I want them to have their own interests and their own opinions. So my son is big on Legos, which I never cared about as a kid, and they both like Pokemon cards, which I find kind of weird. Still, I was certainly hoping that the boy & I could share baseball; when he turned out not to dislike it, but not be enthusiastic either, I won't deny I was a little bit disappointed.

I'll also concede I was a bit surprised when it was the daughter who started at a pretty young age to ask me to play ball in the yard, and before long to beg to play Little League. Life around here (especially in the evenings) can get a bit complex, so we held her back from playing for a couple years... but as she continued to ask, and I continued to remember that year I didn't play, it just felt like we had to let her play.

She's having a great time playing -- she shapes her whole week around games and practices -- and I'm having a good (although often nervous!) time watching. I try to be there all the time for her; I remember that in my later seasons, my dad would walk to the field... see that I wasn't playing, again, and turn & walk home. I want her to remember me there. And I resist as much as possible the urge to coach, although I do... ah... encourage her in very specific terms. Most importantly, I try really hard not to call her "honey", "sweetie", or "baby".

The Best Kind of Sticker Shock

I was a genius when I was a kid.

I was reading before most kids my age even knew their letters. School came easy to me; I was always ahead of everyone else, always got the best grades. Gradually my pervasive awesomeness overcame most of my native humility and I got a little arrogant about how brilliant I was – rarely (although I can't honestly say never) as an excuse to act superior to others, but sometimes as license to goof off.

Then came the day I had to go home & tell my mother I was failing reading. “How can you be failing reading?” she retorted. “All you ever DO is read.” That was a Scared Straight moment for me and after that I resumed my previous trajectory, continuing at the top of my class all the way through.

It was really when I got to graduate school that I grasped the essential truth: that I wasn’t that special intelligence-wise after all. I was blessed with the ability to pick up new ideas pretty quickly; I was always very successful in testing situations; and I was motivated to succeed and/or scared to fail. Bright “enough”, quick-witted maybe, definitely faster with a punchline than was probably healthy (in multiple senses)… but no genius. I met people in grad school who had the sheer brainpower, as well as the will, to tackle complex problems and just chip away at them until they got to the other end. That was not me; I made it through my Master’s just fine, but no one was throwing incentives at me to get me to shoot for a doctorate.

Still, as kind of a geeky kid, and then adult, who loves to use big words, has a fairly (um…) complex sense of humor, and knows a fair amount of trivia about a variety of subjects, I’m probably most comfortable around bright, educated people – not because I’m a snob, but because they tend to “get” me better. Literally, they speak my language. And I always hoped that when my kids got old enough, I could introduce them to Twain and Thurber and O’Rourke, we could discuss the intricacies of baseball analysis, then sit around exchanging all sorts of obscure wordplay.

Then our son was born, and we gradually learned that he had some intellectual and emotional challenges. Not the kind that get you a telethon or label you “handicapped”… just the kind that ensure you’re always going to start the race from the back of the pack. And while nothing we learned diminished my love for him even an iota, it did kind of make my heart sink.

Not because I was disappointed in him. Not because I couldn’t point to what an awesome success my kid was. Because I thought it meant we’d never “get” each other. The things that make me who I am, in a sense, are things that will never be a part of him at all; the things I love are largely out of reach for him.

Or so I feared. He’s 11 now, and as a semi-part-time stay-at-home dad, I spend more time with him than anyone else and I know him better than anyone else. What I’ve learned is that he loves music, just like I do. He loves a good joke – granted he doesn’t always know why it’s funny, but he often seems to be able to feel the funny even when he can’t quite spot it. He has a particular facility for a very odd trivia subspecialty: if he hears a voice on a cartoon, he’ll often point out that it’s the same actor who did a different voiceover. In fact he’s almost infallible at that and at, “Hey dad, we heard this song last year when we were going…”

I wrote before about some of his school struggles and the way he was overcoming them or at least persevering. At this point he’s classified as Special Ed, so while he spends part of his day in the general classroom, he also gets extra accommodations and small-group instruction with individual help.

I was standing at the bus stop waiting for him one day several weeks back when a car went by with one of those “my kid is an honor student” bumper stickers and I thought, you know, if my boy ever came home with one of those, I think my head would explode. A few minutes after that, he got off the bus and we walked up the street to the house, where he pulled out his backpack and said, “Hey dad, look what I got at school today…”

Turns out it wasn’t that essential after all – but it’s sure cool having one more thing in common.

Yet Another Christmas Review

I guess I need to figure out (once again) whether it’s my life that’s out of whack, or my expectations.

Every year I have this vision in my head about how Christmas is going to look, and every year my actual mileage varies. By quite a bit, really. I’ve written about this before, enough times in fact that it’s probably time to wake up and smell the eggnog. I seem to be perpetually in danger of missing Christmas because our Christmas doesn’t look like the one I see in my mind’s eye.

After all, our Christmas is pretty entertaining in its own somewhat skewed way. But with three services on Christmas Eve, for example, and creating PowerPoints for 2 of them and providing all the music for the third, I may not ever get a profoundly spiritual experience out of it – at least not from sitting in church. Maybe, however, from incessantly cycling through over 300 Christmas songs on my iPod, or from sitting quietly in front of the tree, or from trying to help my own kids keep the meaning of the season front & center, or even from a paragraph in a Christmas letter – even if it’s my own.

Even though we may have fallen short, once again, in observing the rituals I’d like to see become our family-traditional Christmas, there are always events of the season that guarantee we won’t forget it. Such as:

· My son playing a Wise Man in a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story – in this case a Wise Man who was too busy at a conference to discuss “Celestial Signs of the Coming Messiah” to actually notice the birth when it happened.

· The kids deciding that the best way to give Santa a list is to wait till the last possible moment, and in fact revising the list as their last act before going to bed Christmas Eve.
· Dad hauling out presents to put under the tree, eating the cookies left for Santa (and a few more, just for the sake of realism), pouring the milk back into the jug, and then settling down – AFTER midnight – to compose the traditional Santa Reply Letter. Don’t ask me where Jolly Old St. Nick keeps the laptop and printer on the sleigh.
· In response to each child’s inquiries, the letter addressing subjects including (a) how the reindeer are doing, (b) what Santa’s favorite baseball team is, and (c) how exactly he can tell from all the way up there who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Also, why you’re not getting any of the presents no one even knew you wanted because you just added them to your list on Christmas Eve.
· Watching on Christmas morning as the boy disappears in a blizzard of wrapping paper scraps, surfacing only to ask repeatedly, “Are there any more presents for me?”
· My daughter walking around the house all Christmas day in a ninja costume, playing a trumpet which someone with apparently a rather evil sense of humor has given her, while…
· Her brother spends most of his day trying to sneak up on people with a remote-controlled Rude Bodily Noisemaking Device that someone else with a rather evil sense of humor has sent us.
· The girl pausing in the midst of a soliloquy about all the cool stuff Santa brought her to look sharply at dad and say, “Wait a minute, did you…?” before stopping herself. “What were you going to ask me?” “Never mind…”

And of course there’s one other tradition that never misses – the hurried sprint out of town for vacation, since as long as she’s in the same town where the church is located, she can hear it calling her (this is the spot where I really wanted to include a sound clip of the slot machine in this Twilight Zone episode, but I couldn't find it as a standalone).

I have to say, this time it kind of worked for me too... once we got out of town, I forgot all about what was "supposed" to happen, and I just enjoyed my vacation. Maybe next year I can start that frame of mind before Christmas!

Practically My AARP Application

Someone who knows me very well once said that I was middle-aged when I was 9 years old. That's probably not the most flattering thing anyone ever said about me... but nonetheless pretty hard to argue against. I mean, it's not like I was born wearing a 3-piece suit or anything -- but if you look hard at the sonogram you might see the outline of a tiny bow tie.

Given that, you can see what I'm fighting against as the years advance and the hair retreats, or at least redistributes itself to some unpredictable locations. I don't want to be the proverbial get-off-my-lawn guy, but I can't much help myself; even when I was a teen I was trying to keep the neighbor out of my yard, and she was gorgeous, so I clearly can't help myself.

Adding another layer to the issue, I have to confess that Halloween has never held much appeal for me. The costume takes something of a creativity factor (and/or a thick wallet), not exactly up my alley; the whole atmosphere of the holiday is built around a certain enjoyment of the macabre and creepy, which is completely incomprehensible to me; and what's up with walking up to a stranger's door and asking them for candy? I've been known to visit friends and be unable to ask where the bathroom is, so again this holiday is not designed for me. And, to complete the woebegone picture of the little kid as sort of accountant-in-waiting, as a kid I (somehow) didn't have that much interest in candy (now? Yes, please).

This doesn't really fit anywhere, but let's pause a moment to consider the genius of wearing one of those thin nylon bodysuit costumes in an area where the average low temperature on Oct. 31 is 35 degrees. Nothing says 'superpowers' like a parka and mittens.

Why do I go through this elaborate setup? Because I'm incapable of doing otherwise. Well, that, but also I know how this is going to sound. Complaining about Halloween Nowadays is going to come off like the usual Why in my day everything was fun and innocent and these kids today just don't know how good they've got it and whatever happened to simpler values and and and....

My real point, however, if I haven't already run out the clock on having one, is that while I've never really 'gotten' or especially enjoyed Halloween, it's way worse now than it was. It wasn't much fun then, and it's considerably less fun now.

I know I'm hopelessly square and old -- I got an excellent head start on coming to terms with that, as a child -- but what I see around me is mostly just disgusting. I get that the white sheet with the eyeholes is Charlie Brown-passe, but so many of the costumes I see now have to look like the wearer is actually bleeding, or decaying, or at least getting ready to kill a bunch of people. Several of the kids at the Cub Scout Halloween party -- Cub Scouts, now, say ages 6-12 -- had some sort of zombie-looking garb AND semi-automatic weapons. I suppose with as slowly as the traditional zombie moves, it pays to have something to even up the odds a little.

In that case, I guess I should congratulate the costumes that don't require a parental advisory sticker, except a lot of those aren't costumes at all. I saw a couple of young-teen girls just wearing what appeared to be kitty ears. Get your mind out of the gutter; I don't mean just kitty ears in the sense of 'kitty ears and nothing else at all', I mean it in the sense of, "Let's put on our coats and go out to scam some candy -- hey, look, put these on your head so we can say it's a costume."

But they make up for it with their charm and personality. A big clump of them comes up & rings the doorbell; when you open the door, they shove a pillowcase in your face and stand there till you come across. I have to say it does not exactly bring out the gracious host in me.

Sigh. I know. I KNOW. They're just kids, and scary can be fun, and they're just trying on roles as kids have done forever, and I shouldn't expect everyone to have perfect please and thank you manners, and I'm probably the last person in the world who should be criticizing others for leveraging opportunities for free food. And I should stop being such a study hall monitor already. I guess I was just hoping that we could get all excited, and drop money on costumes and giveaway treats, and tromp around in the cold and rain, for something a little more... life-affirming?

OK, I have to admit, it wasn't a total loss. We were still making the rounds when my daughter dug around in her pumpkin-shaped bucket and pulled out and handed to me... a tiny, tiny (TINY! I believe it was the 1.74 oz. size, or maybe 6 pieces) bag of Peanut M&Ms.

Vacationpalooza Tour 2010

The Family Summer Vacation is our annual phenomenon, and every year I attempt to make some sense of it in this space. But an experience so sprawling always proves elusive to summarize -- especially for someone like me who likes to be concise and brief and a man of few words and generally is not given to going on and on about something almost indefinitely until you finally are about to forget what the beginning of the sentence was.

Wait, what was I saying?

Oh yes... I was making the point that two weeks packed with adventures can even pose a writing challenge for someone such as myself, who is, you know, gifted with, like, words and stuff.

The basic structure of the trip does not change: the meat of the sandwich is several days at a beach house in North Carolina with "my side of the family" -- enjoyable despite the minor tensions inherent in putting 9 (related) people under the same roof. Every day we go to the beach, we read a lot, we eat, we talk and play cards, and at almost any given time someone is asleep. It's almost as close as any of us usually gets to turning off the main engines and simply idling for a prolonged period of time.

So it's doubtful that that portion holds any interest for anyone not related to me, or at least someone without an inordinate interest in sand castles (not that that's stopped me from the attempt in the past). But I thought it might be worthwhile to mention a few highlights from the "bread" of the trip sandwich -- the seemingly endless miles of interstate highway travel which we attempt to punctuate with Fun and/or Educational Experiences (and suite hotels with pools). The driving part of the trip was extremely grim, more than 1800 miles of travel split into not nearly bite-size chunks... but the Experiences seemed to be home runs across the board.

The first of these was the National Aquarium in Baltimore. As far as I can tell, they became the "National" aquarium essentially because they decided they would call themselves that... but they filled the bill and more. There were of course all manner of tanks full of beautiful or odd or scary marine life -- my wife was particularly mesmerized by the jellyfish -- but also a delightful and exciting dolphin show, and a couple of odd things: a rainforest habitat and a live show with native Australian animals. Come to think of it, I'm not sure they have any better grip on the concept of "aquarium" than they do of "national"... still, it was certifiably both Fun and Educational, and you don't see that every day. Frankly I have a hard time envisioning any visitor that wouldn't be captivated by a visit, and that's a pretty strong endorsement coming from me.

Since we were in such a rush to get to the beach, the second Big Adventure didn't arrive till the trip back: a visit to Sight and Sound Theater in Lancaster, PA. This was the trip my wife in particular had been yearning to make for several years. You might describe Sight & Sound as an attempt to bring the feel of the Broadway musical, mixed with a little bit of circus, to Biblical storytelling. The show we saw was Joseph, depicting his life from his conflicts with his brothers to slavery in Egypt to a respected position to prison back to a respected position to reconciliation with his family. It's a gripping story on the page... but presented on stage (multiple stages, actually) with scenery and costumes and music, and live animals, helps you understand and feel the story in a so much more visceral way. The show was thrilling and touching, one I think every Christian would certainly enjoy... and something I would urge on anyone who wasn't actively hostile to a story that revolves around faith.

The very next day saw Adventure #3, our third trip to Hersheypark (I should mention that we always start our Hershey day with a fun, and free, trip here). Hersheypark will remind you of basically every other amusement park: you've got rides, souvenir shops, shows, food... and you have to really keep busy all day long, not only to do everything but to keep yourself from thinking about the hurting they put on your wallet at the front gate (exacerbated this year by our 10-year-old being full-fare for the first time). Oddly, it was the one day of the trip that was not hot & humid, so some of the charm of the Intercoastal Waterway was diminished, but we still had a relaxing drift and also still hit the bumper cars and the Reese's Xtreme Cup Challenge and a bunch of entertaining shows. Our thrill-seeking 8-year-old daughter even ditched us long enough to get 2 roller-coaster rides and a trip on the Scrambler. It was a lot of fun even though we would have had to stay for another 3 weeks or so to get our money's worth out of it.

On the next & final day of the trip, dear old dad begged for a bit of Driver's Privilege. I've tried for the last couple of years to bend the trip to include the Martin Guitar factory tour but could never quite shoehorn it in with all the space Hersheypark takes up... but we were so close, and on our way home anyway.... I am a guitar player, and while Martin's a bit out of my price range, I appreciate them as wonderful instruments and works of art in their own right. The tour was an hour of walking through the factory with a guide who was once the plant manager (and should have invested a bit more of the salary in a better toupee). One of the neat features of the tour was that each person had their own headphones and the tour guide "broadcast" to us, which made it so much easier to know what was going on over the noise. Guitar-making these days is of course highly automated, but on the high end there is also a lot of hands-on craftsmanship -- to the point where it takes easily 3 months for one of their non-customized guitars to make it from pile of wood to finished instrument -- and we got to see both.

I now know much more about the guitar as an instrument than I did before, which was principally this: it makes no sense for me to buy an expensive one, because in my hands it sounds just the same as my (presumably non-craftsman-created) Yamaha that was $200 25 years ago. In fact, I think they disowned it because I can't find it on their website, although I did find it here and here.

We had other, smaller adventures along the way -- including coming home & then leaving the next morning for a camp weekend (including s'mores!) -- but these are the ones we'll remember when we look back...

... in a few weeks when the credit card bill arrives.

Catching the Bug

I'm living proof of the limits of heredity. My dad was in his day pretty good with cars. That was in an era when an actual person could look at an engine with just eyeballs and fix it -- and I don't think that's in any way diminished by the fact that in those days, "winterizing" meant "closing the rumble seat". As a teen, he worked in a garage; even when I was a kid, he could always ID anything on the road at a glance (often by year).

It may be just more pointless nostalgia but it seems to me that cars were more distinctive awhile back, and none moreso than the Volkswagen. The VW Beetle was responsible for the "punchbug" game (spot a Beetle and smack a companion). I hadn't even heard the term in years... but now despite the fact that most VWs are no longer in the insect kingdom, the company is trying to revive the tradition. Of course, since Bugs are now few and far between, they call it "punch-dub".

They can say what they want, but they can't control the people... so my son came home from school last week telling me about the Punchbug Game, and ever since then we've been playing each time we leave the house (One significant problem there is that, as I referred to earlier, all cars look alike these days unless you can zero in quickly on the hood/trunk ornament. Am I wrong about that? If so, feel free to correct me in the comments....).

It was only a matter of time until my daughter the competitor caught on to what was going on. Now she wants to play every second of car time. I'm finding that I'm up against a certain array of disadvantages:

• > My sunglasses, which I have to use for driving, are at least 3 prescriptions behind my new glasses
• > As the driver, I have a few other things to do
• > My reflexes, shockingly, are not quite as fast-twitch as once they were

Maybe the biggest disadvantage in playing against my daughter is that she has always been from the school of "shoot first, ask questions later." Basically if it has wheels and it has a roundish insignia, whap. That doesn't take away from the fact that she seems to be able to spot one from the next block... so taken all around I'm flying with one flap down these days. But I'm determined to get back in the game.

In a completely unrelated development, I rear-ended the car in front of me four times on the way home....

The Now and the Not Yet

I am on record in this space that I have long since decided that I'm not doing the Funny Kid Blog here. Sure, it would be easy enough to do when surrounded by kids (OK, not exactly surrounded by 2 of them... and anyone with more than two would certainly scoff at me... but a lot of the time it feels like it). I could tell the tale of my daughter -- who's been talking since she was about 4 hours old, and who carries around a pad and pen for amusement -- taking an hour to write 3 sentences for a school assignment. Or here's a son story: we've been inflicting Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons on the kids lately as part of the ongoing quest to instill Old-Fashioned Values. In one such episode, John-Boy had a crush on a girl and sneaked in for a kiss... whereupon Our-Boy remarked in a low tone, "Well, that was a good one."

And so it goes. I don't know that there's a big market appeal for that kind of blog, and in some ways it's way too obvious anyway. In the same way, since we got the news to which I alluded in my previous post, it would be easy to write the "We're Moving" blog; after all, we think of little else. We've got piles of boxes around (with the result that the van is now permanently out in the driveway to make room) and it's certainly a recurring topic of conversation. Of course, everyone in the church kind of wants to work through it with their pastor, so by the time I get to her she's often kind of "moved out"... so sometimes I'm left to stew in it. And so I do.

Consider the children of Israel, when Moses led them out of their Egyptian captivity (all right, stay with me here a bit)... they got out into the desert, and before long they realized they weren't really getting anywhere. Even though they were told they were going to the (original!) Promised Land -- which by definition ought to be pretty cool -- they weren't there yet, and all they could think about was what they used to have.

In case it's not immediately obvious, what they used to have was slavery. Beatings if they didn't work fast enough. The Old Testament even points out that they were making bricks for the pyramids, and the overseers not only raised the brick quota but also made them find their own raw materials. Think of it as No Brick Left Behind.

Still, I'm keenly aware that if you stretch a simile even a little too far, it can snap back and put your eye out... so let me be clear that I'm not escaping from slavery here (nor is it entirely clear that the Promised Land is the destination). But that's also kind of the point: if it can be a challenge to get from torture to paradise, I can perhaps be forgiven for being a little hung up on the in-between when I'm starting from a very comfortable spot.

It may also be quite clear already that I most certainly don't seek out new frontiers just for the sheer exhilaration anyway. I probably established that for good and all about 30 years ago, when I worked at the same place for 6 consecutive summers. Or perhaps when I spent 11 years in my first career despite having a full-time position for exactly one out of the 11. Could it have been when I bought my fourth Toyota?

For all that, however, what we do know is that it's coming up (and closer every day) no matter what we do about it. I wrote about this very sensation four years ago when I compared myself to Wile E. Coyote. My timeline was off by just a bit, but my conclusion was basically sound. So here's what we're doing:

(1) Last Sunday, we went to visit the new church -- just to say hello and let them start to think of us as something besides an announcement in the bulletin. We met a lot of people (though it is to be hoped that they don't expect us to remember all the names!) and everyone was very welcoming. That was in some ways a very important step in transitioning to a new reality.

(2) Then we took the kids to tour their future home. They got to see where their bedrooms would probably be, and check out the back yard, and generally begin to put a face on this thing we've been telling them is coming.

(3) Then I went around the place like a complete maniac with a tape measure in my hand, and for the last week have been translating the measurements into floor plans, complete with tiny scale-model paper furniture. There's so much about this that seems to undetermined & undeterminable that it seems to both of us like having a real concrete sense (pun not intended) of our new home will begin to smooth the way.

The tricky part, of course, is that we're not dead yet...

We've still got about 7 weeks to go; we can't just pack all the boxes today and wait for this part to be over, we still have life to live and ministry to do and a lot of people here we're connected to -- while at the same time recognizing that an important part of that connection is going to be amputated before too much longer. We are definitely trapped with one foot in the now and one foot in the not yet.

I've talked before about the fact that time-traveling to the past can be surprisingly painful... nevertheless, it may still be easier than traveling to the future and back, no matter how much it costs these days to fuel up your DeLorean.

Giving, and Taking

Even I would have to admit that I don't always project the sunniest of dispositions. I'm not necessarily 100% John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, but I do tend towards the theory that not only is the glass half-empty, but the milk is probably spoiled anyway.

Regardless, I don't think I'm being unjustifiably negative when I say that one of the parts of the year that really puts me through the wringer is vacation. I'm not talking about the physical toll of travel, or the financial drain, or the difficulties of enforced togetherness/small spaces; it's probably more self-inflicted than that. And this has been very much on my mind -- pressing down hard on my mind -- since we just did our 3-day Winter Vacation Trip last week.

I don't know whether it's genetic (a Guy Thing?) or learned, emotional or strictly mental, or even pathological, but I take a huge burden on myself whenever we travel. I spend loads of time before the fact, planning and researching, scheduling Fun Activities for the Whole Family, looking for that hotel room that's 10% nicer for $5 less -- then, of course, getting everything mapped out to the last possible turn (this time, I had 3 pages of printed directions... which I basically ignored in favor of the more, you know, electronic guidance of the GPS).

The day arrives and I am, ah... not bubbly... as I'm trying to get the last details nailed down and get us out the door On Schedule. I do virtually all the driving -- not because my wife won't, or because I don't trust her to, but because it just feels right to me to carry the load. I am in general a pretty confident, and I believe competent, driver; but always in the back of my mind is that we could get lost or break down or have an accident.

If one of the stops doesn't come off, if the targeted Children's Museum turns out to be a ball pit and a card table with a box of broken crayons on it, if somebody gets a lousy meal... all of that feels like a personal failure to me.

I'm sure a lot of that sounds like egomania -- making it all about me -- or some kind of messiah and/or martyr complex. Rationally I do know that plenty of stuff can go wrong that I have absolutely no control over, and I recognize that nobody's waiting to point the finger at me just because the thermostat doesn't work in the hotel room.

But in the midst of all that burden I felt myself carrying the past couple of weeks, I also realized that there's a healthy lesson to be learned as well, and it's this: there are times that it's more blessed to take than to give. That is, I realized that what I was doing, at least in part, was living out the role of Head of the Household (now there's a term you don't hear much these days, at least in a non-census sense) in the way it's really intended: not giving orders, but taking responsibility.

The New Testament talks about the man being the head of the woman, which is a concept that got twisted so far in a particular (and particularly uncomfortable) direction that I think it eventually went SPROINNGGG! and flew off behind the couch or something. Or at least we'd like to hide it there. But I think the real point of being the "head" is that I can serve my family by being the buffer zone, getting out front, taking the blow if necessary.

As it turned out, the vacation came off fine -- a couple complaints from the GPS, but nothing that couldn't be resolved by circling the block. So I can look at it as a lot of worrying for nothing, or I can see careful planning and concern for my family's well-being paying off.

And isn't it interesting that God can take "character flaws" and use them for positive purposes?

Upholding More Than One Tradition

For some reason when I think of doing a travel piece, my mind always goes straight to Kerouac. This despite the fact that I've never read On The Road (but if you're a Frequent Reader you know that my titles, in particular, trend toward the pretentiously literary). It's also true that there is a long and honorable tradition of the Comic Travel Piece; I myself have read such essays ranging from Twain, to Benchley, Perelman, and all the way up to P. J. O'Rourke (but perhaps my favorite example of Travel Literature is Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty"). I have it on good authority, however, that none of those worthy creations mention children's museums, zoos, or amusement parks. Of course, they're most likely more entertaining too.

I decided to forgo the obscure road-related puns in this title; I refer rather to the fact that each summer we go on a family vacation, and each summer I write about it. I'm not offering any warranty that this will be in the same league as any of the guys mentioned above.

Vacation doesn't inspire coherence, so instead of a linear narrative, consider this a series of snapshots. Maybe I should have titled it "Postcards from the Edge".

• $ For any trip, I marshal the full resources of the 21st century: Internet research, including directions from destination websites; full turn-by-turn directions, calibrated to 0.1 mile, from Google maps; and, starting this year, GPS as well. Despite all that, I still had several moments of (if not outright lostness) at least uncertainty. North Carolina in particular has a disturbing habit of combining & then re-dividing their numbered routes. So I asked my dad; he told me that in the late 40s he made three round trips from New York to California. They did have basic roadmaps, but no "interstate highways", and no way to really know what was up ahead; they drove until they found a "tourist cabin" where they could stay the night.


• $ We passed some of those developments bulit practically in the interstate breakdown lane. It's too bad nobody still bakes pies & leaves them on the windowsill to cool, because if they did, you could snag yourself a good snack from the right-hand lane. They had that sign that says, "If you lived here, you'd be home now"... but I couldn't help thinking it should really read, "If you lived here, you'd be wondering what on earth possesed you to spend all that dough on a place where cars are always going through your front yard at 70 mph."


• $ With regard to E-Z-Pass: what took me so long? Some of these highways now have Express E-Z-Pass -- you don't slow down or even drive through the cattle chute; just keep on rolling, they'll get your money. What's more, you can even pick up an e-z-pass transmitter at the grocery store!


• $ Parents traveling with relatively young children do well to deploy several weapons, including extra snacks, electronic games, and a portable DVD player... however, the two most important words to keep in mind: suite hotel. For me, it would be difficult to survive a vacation where lights-out was at 8 every night -- so the separate bedroom is indispensable. Caution: for some chains, "suite" means "has an armchair and a mini-fridge", so don't be fooled by cheap imitations.


• $ Best thing about crossing old Mr. Mason & Mr. Dixon's stripe: Chick-Fil-A. It turns out that there are some in the northeast; the nearest one to us is only 150 miles away. But they're easier to find in the South -- in fact, when I finally got a chance to enjoy my visit, it was here. I don't understand why I can't get a chicken sandwich that good without paying my way into an amusement park.


• $ Twice in a row while visiting Baltimore, my wife pulled off one of those deals only she can, to get things people don't want to give us. We went for the stadium tour at Camden Yards: first she got the parking guy to let us park (in the "wrong" lot) for free, even; then when the tour was sold out after only the other three of us got in, she met the tour guide and talked him into letting her come along after all. I don't know whether it's "feminine wiles", or "selling ice to Eskimos", or The Power to Cloud Men's Minds... but I'm sure glad she's on our side.


• $ Later on in Baltimore, I was going to put my credit card in the parking meter when a guy slipped in ahead of me, stuck in a card, and pulled out a $2 ticket. He said, "I'll give you this $2 ticket for $1 cash." I had about 4 seconds to think about it, so I said, "OK, sure." As I walked away, I decided it must have been some kind of scam -- stolen credit card? -- but I'm still not sure exactly what happened there. In any case, I was able to park all day long in a major American city for $4!
• $ It's good that my literary ambitions are basically drained away by this blog (and, of course, all my Facebook masterpieces), or I would be tempted to write the definitive guide to Children's Museums of the Northeast. This trip brings me to 5, lifetime, I believe -- plus at least 5 other museums with varying degrees of family-friendliness. There is a Children's Museums association, but I'm starting to suspect that the certification process is mostly a formality...
• $ The sequel would be a compendium of hotel pools -- as soon as my fingers un-prune enough that I can hold a pen.
• $ One of the charms of the road trip (or indeed, of getting out of bed each day) is the chance to see something you've never seen before. Quite often it turns out to be something you never imagined wanting to see, but that's another story. For this trip, my nominee for Eighth Wonder of the World was: a restroom hand dryer that actually dries your hands. It's called the Xlerator and after seeing it in action, I can only conclude that it's powered by the same engine as the Boeing 737. The only downside is that every time I use it, it sets my watch back about an hour.

Ten days, 1800 miles, 6 states, 4 hotels, 4 visits to the beach, about a dozen visits to souvenir/gift shops, and all the fast-food cheeseburgers you can eat. Actually a few more than you can eat. In any case, it sure is good to be home. I think I'm going to stick to the roads that are too small to have numbers for awhile.

Papa Song

I suppose it's possible my sense of humor has changed over the years -- although this is never not funny:
but I recall a song that, when I was in college, always had me & my roommate in stitches. It was called "Papa Song", by Phil Keaggy, and what made it funny was the voiceover at the beginning of one of his small children saying "Papa!"

Yeah, I know, I just read that over & it didn't make much sense to me either. The kid did kind of sound like he was weaned on helium, and we always giggled -- in fact, many nights we'd just play that few seconds of the song before we went to bed. I suppose "you had to be there, and also then, and maybe even me" doesn't quite cut it in print.

In any case, as a companion piece to my Mother's Day post (there's still time to send the link to your mom as a special post-Mother's-Day remembrance, if you haven't already!), I'm thinking about dads as the big day arrives. You know, the day where everyone makes a big deal out of dads and there are gifts and dinner out and... well, maybe not. I'm not sure Father's Day is quite as much of a big deal; sometimes it seems a bit like an afterthought to me. I already wrote about this a few years back in my trademark snarky/whimsical style, but since it's summertime I'm in reruns.

I was out shopping for the card for dad this week (observing my own card rules & regulations as laid out in the Mother's Day post), and I noticed a curious theme. Mother's Day cards, of course, are all about "Mom, we love you so much and you're so wonderful and you bring joy to our lives".... all very valid & commendable sentiments.

Many of the Father's Day cards, on the other hand, seemed to cluster around this idea: "Dad, even though you find it hard to say how you feel, we know you really love us." In fact, the ones from sons read more like this -- "Dad, even though we never talk about our feelings, I hope you know I love you."

I've always led the charge against this kind of male stereotype -- and I'm well aware that "Hallmark" comes from the Latin, meaning "cliche" ... but I'm a little hesitant to start painting the picket signs just yet. I'm also aware that cliches get to be cliches from a basis in fact, and maybe I've just seen this scenario actually happen too often in real life to automatically dismiss it as slander.

All I can do is work against it in my own house. I make no claims to parental excellence; I just try to control what I can control (which, believe me, does not always include any of the other residents here): I try to make sure I know my kids better than anyone else in the world, and I let them know every day, a bunch of times a day, exactly how I feel about them.

And, you know, probably 73% of the time or more, that's a good thing.

Public Enemy (Grade) 1

I have probably mentioned that my daughter has possibly more than the standard allotment of personality. As my son is fond of saying (when he’s not shrieking her name at jet-takeoff decibels), “Dad, she’s a rascal, dad.” He has in some ways keen powers of observation, but you don’t have to watch her for long to figure out – if not how her mind works, exactly, definitely toward what end.

The first weekend after she started kindergarten, we received a phone call from her teacher. When she identified herself, my heart sank and I immediately imagined all sorts of issues my girl had gotten into in her three-day educational career. But the teacher immediately put my mind at ease: “She’s already become quite a leader. Some of the other kids are timid about trying new things, but when they see that she’s willing to try anything, it puts them at ease.” So I was relieved and only a bit surprised to find she was using her superpowers for good, rather than for evil.

Since then, the teacher reports have been generally quite glowing… although there have been the occasional incidents of Interpersonal Clash (I may have mentioned as well that she is a junior member of the International Society of Frequently Wrong, But Never In Doubt). In any case, we always experience that delightful jolt of uncertainty when it’s the teacher on the phone – as was the case last week.

This time it was not a plaudit, but instead the news that she had been overheard using… colorful language. It would be impolite of me to specify the color, but suffice it to say it was not a word from her spelling list, not to mention one she hadn’t encountered at home.

And yes, I know that’s what they all say, but although all of us in the house are capable of expressing ourselves with force and clarity, I can say with some assurance that she didn’t hear it here, or at the church.

The teacher hastened to add that she had had a visit with the principal and that she seemed visibly and almost violently remorseful. This is as good a time as any to mention that, especially as former teachers, my wife & I make a practice of backing the teacher to the hilt; we told her that we appreciated her dealing with this swiftly and firmly (this is not a girl, if I have not already made this clear, who does well with a long leash).

When she got home, I waited to see if she’d betray any hint of her ordeal, but when her lips (for once) seemed sealed, I confronted her directly with the Stern, Solemn Talk. I told her that these were not words that she learned or heard or would be permitted to use at home, and that we expected her to behave in a respectful and correct way at all times. I impressed on her the embarrassment attached to going to the principal and having the teacher call home; I know she’s sensitive to being embarrassed. She told me that she was just “repeating” the words – which apparently doesn’t count as “saying” the words – and that she wouldn’t do it again.

When mom arrived, we went through the drill once more – this time with a trifle more, um… emphasis. And this time she revealed something I didn’t know: not only had she employed the word I’d already heard (a relatively junior officer in the Colorful Language Army), but had in fact let loose with the Head Honcho, the dreaded F-bomb. In fact, to prove it, she set one off right then & there in the living room.

My wife was looking at my face when our 6-year-old girl launched it, and she said the color completely drained from me. I have to admit, that was a milestone experience for me, and not in the best possible sense.

Well, washing her mouth out with Clorox seemed inadvisable, so we had to settle for a just-short-of-unhinged lecture and withdrawal of Electronic Privileges (Game Boy, videos, CD player) for one week. And as we all know, there are few more stringent sentences in the modern world than to be unplugged.

I’d like to think that for a normal kid, that would’ve been the end of the story. But in the midst of this, she also slipped in, “By the way, dad, you need to send in money for my cafeteria account.” I knew I’d just sent in money recently, and she’d brought her lunch every day since, so I couldn’t imagine what had happened. I quizzed her: “You’re just getting milk every day – right?” “Yeah, dad, just milk!” When I looked at the check register, I realized I’d sent in $10 one week prior. All I could figure is that maybe the check didn’t make it all the way to be deposited somehow, so I grabbed the phone book to look up the bank’s 800-number so I could find out whether it had cleared.

That’s when she said, “Um, dad, I think I need to tell you the truth about something.” She had been buying a lunch every day, in addition to bringing a lunch with her. I asked her why; was it to be cool or like the other kids? “No, I just like it.”

So in addition to her Electronic Grounding, she also was lunch-grounded the same day: her account was closed, and she was told all she could buy for the rest of the school year was white milk.

Seeing how much she’s testing our parental ingenuity at age 6, it seems to me like I ought to go on amazon.com or eBay or some such place and find out what it takes to pick up an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. Ought to come in handy right about 2nd grade.

Nothing But the Tooth

One of the many stark and sobering realities of parenthood is that you never know when you're going to be ambushed by a question you can't, or don't want to, answer. Even when you dodge a bullet, you can be pretty sure the next chamber's loaded.

There must have been a logical trigger, but it sure seemed random to me when my daughter asked me the other day, "When you're the president, can you smoke?" I should probably note that, in our zeal to inoculate the young'ns against sundry vices, we seem to have created a state of affairs where they recoil in horror when they see a smoker -- or someone with a "needle tattoo" (not to be confused with the rub-on kind).

I told her that the president, or any adult, is free to do more or less what he wishes... which brought the unexpected follow-up, "Well, it's a good thing at least Barack Obama doesn't smoke."

Of course, 21st-century campaigns in the 21st-century media leave few vestiges of privacy, so I was aware that although he's been trying to quit, the Most Powerful Man in the Free World has been known to sneak an occasional butt. So I said, "Well, actually he does smoke a little, sometimes..."

OK, in hindsight I probably should've let that one "lie", so to speak; I know it had some kind of consequence because within hours my wife was asking me, "Why did you tell her the president smokes?"

Fundamentally, I believe in telling kids the truth. Age-appropriate truth, yes, but truth. But it sure is hard when you consider how many built-in lies we're already stuck with. We briefly considered trying to get around Santa, since it's a really high priority for us to emphasize Jesus as the Reason for the Season... but it turned out that sealing them in Tupperware for the last 2 months of each year was impractical and interfered with homework. Then there's the Easter Bunny -- a fondly-remembered staple of my wife's childhood -- and of course the Tooth Fairy.

On top of the strain of maintaining a series of fictions year-round, it can get pretty darned expensive. I am sure that we buy more presents when accounting for Santa than we would otherwise. And they both have a mouthful of teeth.

My son made the tooth fairy thing relatively easy on us. After a couple of rounds of a dollar under the pillow, he said, "Dad, can the tooth fairy bring me stickers instead of money?" In fact, he didn't even figure out that he wasn't getting new stickers. Since he caught me off-guard without an opportunity to contact the tooth fairy, I slipped him some stickers out of the existing stock in the Sticker Box... OK, I'm not proud of that one. My daughter, however, is (as always) a different story, a tougher nut to crack.

She is gleeful each time a tooth starts to wobble, and she will worry it continually till it's out. This last tooth was only a little bit loose when she came home from school with a tale of having been knocked down and getting the tooth knocked out; there's a chance that some or all of that is actually true. And that -- don't hate me for saying this -- is where the story really begins.

But it really gets sticky about 4:30 the following morning, when I am awakened by my daughter's piteous wailing in the hallway: we have forgotten to put the tooth under her pillow, and All Is Lost tooth-fairy-wise. Apparently she completes her rounds in the Northeast US before 4:30am EST.

No, no, baby, of course we'll take care of it... I'll go get the tooth right now and I'm sure we can still catch her. So I stumble downstairs in the dark, leaving the lights off so as not to overpower myself with the glare -- and while I'm there, I snatch a bill out of my wallet. Then I return upstairs to put the tooth under the pillow (did you know that the school now supplies a tiny plastic 'treasure chest' to store the tooth in? wonder what the annual budget for that looks like), and I slip the bill to my even less-conscious wife to plant under the pillow, so I can rejoin my regularly-scheduled coma, already in progress.

In the morning -- or as I like to call it, about 39 winks later -- I notice that she is surprisingly closed-mouthed about the tooth fairy's visit. For one thing, finding a penny on the ground is for her a major occasion for gloating to her brother, and for another, "closed-mouthed" is not her natural state by any stretch of the imagination. Something is nagging at the corners of my brain (and yes, my brain is a perfect equilateral cube), so I check my wallet.

I am a math major by training and a computer programmer by profession, so while I'm not exactly a 'neat' person I am in many respects orderly. The bills in my wallet are always faced identically and arranged from smallest to largest... and the smallest remaining bill is a $20.

I share my growing sense of dread with The Mom, so a little later she asks, "Hey, did the tooth fairy come? What did she bring you?" At first reluctant, as well as practiced in the arts of dissembling, she eventually comes clean: "Yeah, um, I got $20." My wife was able to convince her she owed us $10 from an earlier toy purchase -- but since she did owe us $10, I don't feel like I got anything "back", exactly.

So I'm thinking that from now on, the tooth fairy may be bringing an itemized invoice that shows her account status against an advance for the next 19 teeth (although she doesn't even have 19 to go, so I guess the rate's going up in any case). Knowing my daughter, it won't be long, since she will probably contrive to be "knocked down" weekly now that it's proven to be such a lucrative scam.

Going for the Gold

There was a TV show in the '60s called The Outer Limits -- or so I'm told; clearly I'm far too youthful to have first-hand knowledge -- a kind of knock-off of The Twilight Zone, with less imagination and 50% less William Shatner (not that that's necessarily a bad thing). The opening narration said, "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission," then at the end of the episode they "returned control" to you (a power coveted by today's advertisers).

You may recognize that sensation from the just-concluded Olympics. Thanks to the far-flung tentacles of the NBC-Universal octopus (in turn, part of one of the solar system's largest conglomerates... yet one near and dear to my heart, and bank account), you could turn on your TV pretty much any time day or night and find a channel with an event being contested -- or at least a feature on Michael Phelps, Michael Phelps' diet, Michael Phelps' mom, Michael Phelps' mom's dentist....

I was pretty well invested; by my rough count I watched at least 15 different sports, though I still felt like I was missing out a bit on the Constant Variety of Sport that Jim McKay was always spanning the globe in search of. There were actually many hours of preliminary rounds for swimming, diving, gymnastics, track, and beach volleyball... rumor has it there were even some events happening in other sports where the athletes were fully dressed!

And I know for a fact that they missed out on a number of events that may not involve world-class athletes -- and a bunch of people from tiny islands you never heard of who get to go to the Olympics by virtue of being better at a sport than the other 2 people in the country who play it -- but which are contested every day right here in this venue (a certified Olympic Word). For example:

• Weightlifting. Every other night my son says to me, "Dad, will you carry me to bed, dad?" and I get to heft his angular yet nearly 60-lb. frame up the stairs to his room. During times of misbehavior, on the other hand, if he will not willingly repair to his room for "quiet contemplation", I get to perform the Clean and Jerk.
• High hurdles. It takes a finely-tuned athlete to make your way from one end of the playroom to the other.
• Figure peeling. One of my latest obsessions: see if you can peel an entire apple in one continuous piece.
• Individual medley. A solo competition to determine whether dinner can be assembled from the previous week's leftovers.
• 2-meter dash. It's time to go; let's see who can get to the door first. Although this is a land-based event over a relatively short distance, it's actually a cousin in spirit to the open-water swimming competition, which as I understand it is in turn akin to floating roller derby.

I could, as I have proved many times, go on and on. I am concerned that if I keep at it for too long, I'll give in to the obvious "wrestling" joke, although around here that event's usually held in conjunction with the Synchronized Shrieking competition. This is just a taste of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat as it's experienced here daily... you may scoff, but some of this stuff is way closer to being a sport than rhythmic gymnastics.