Captain Jack Makes Port

Naming Your Child (for Dummies)

2012-01-27T09:03:00.000-06:00

Because you’re out there, you know you are. I write this simply to tick off every last one of you. Let’s rumble.

1. Pretend to be a slack-jawed telemarketer that subsists on Red Bull, Skittles and weed. You have a brother named Darryl. I mean, really method-act, here. You’ve been up since 4am for no apparent reason. You drive a yellow Toyota Celica with one of those Calvin (urinating on something) stickers. It’s now 8:15pm. Can you pronounce the proposed name on the first (okay, second) try? No?

2. Read variations of the full name aloud, very clearly, like you’re speaking into a large PA system. It doesn't matter that they'll go by “Pinky.” The teacher/ drill instructor/prison guard/college president will call out “Cletus Alfonzo Smithfield.”

3. Is the name connected, in any way, with a book/film/anime/toy franchise? Kashyyyk Obi-Wan Jones-Miller is OUT. Don’t be that parent. You should be dragged into the street and shot if you have children named Bella, Frodo or Hermione. (Shot after you sign paperwork legally changing their names.) Honest coincidences, though rare, are excusable. Unfortunate, but excusable.

4. Superfluous letters are OUT, as are arbitrary letter substitutes, especially subbing “Y” for just about any vowel sound. This “MycKynzyey" nonsense is what we’re talking about. Use letters sparingly and with economy.

Listen to me. When you (brilliantly!) spell a "traditional" name in a freaky way, you’re not being clever. No, what you're being is a total chicken. Like, um, we want to be, like traditional… but like we’re scared of being like the SAME! Like, sameness is totally the WORST.

When you – let’s face it – pull a name from thin air to “differentiate” your child (read, "mark for life"), you thumb your nose at the parade of civilization before you. ‘Cause YOU’RE smartererer and more originalistical than the 100 billion people that have gone before. Right, buster. Riiiiiight.

5. Generally, your child should have no grounds for a civil suit (and importantly, monetary damages) relating to their given name. Bonus points if you can pass off liability to a namesake (“Sue Uncle Festus, but leave us out of it. He threatened to take us out of the will.”)

6. The Google/Wikipedia Rule: Be especially cautious when you’re using a famous name. Cover of People or Us Weekly? Out. Cover of Time? Maybe. Cover of Scientific American? Heck, why not? Go for it. Google every conceivable variation of the name. Joe Stalin Cook or Sirhan Sirhan Thibodeaux might dust up a few hits.

If you’re using a historical name, make sure you know exactly what that historical figure is chiefly remembered for doing. “Honey, says here this Benedict Arnold guy fought in the American Revolution for our side!”

7. When naming a child, simply deferring to the father is… unwise. By age 7, girls have their first thirteen children fully named. Gentlemen, rolling in and issuing a name fiat after some unbelievably serious and contemplative thought during your morning jog is playing with fire. Hot, raging, unquenchable, phosphorous-based fire. And divorce proceedings. Fellas, know your limitations and let “Pat Brady Belichick Clarke” go.

Unless your frau’s choice is going to get your little boy killed in 2nd grade. There’s that.

8. Before picking an ethnic name, check your driver’s license (and a nearby mirror, if necessary) to ensure you actually belong to that ethnic group. Thinking of a German name? Great! But if you can’t come up with your nearest German ancestor in 3 guesses, “Horst” is verboten.

9. Last-names-as-first-names: I can speak to this personally. Mom’s maiden name for a first name? Yep, that can work. Absolutely. But don't get cute. Using U.S. presidential last names for girls’ first names is OUT. Because, I mean, nobody in the world has thought of that before. No, really. You’re the first! Don't give the world a Madison Nixon Brown.

And using Irish last names for girls’ first names is OUT. The Irish don’t even do this (see #8).

10. A tricky one that I’ll call the “Boy Named Sue” Rule: Be extremely careful with gender neutral names. Like handling nitroglycerin in an Old West movie careful. As someone who sports a name now popular in the preteen girl set, I'll say that it can work. But you (meaning your child) accept certain risks.

No, you can’t use Ashley for a boy's name. Yes, I know it’s in Gone with the Wind.

And now, an important word from Jack:

Sports and Hector's Ideal

2012-01-23T15:27:00.001-06:00

Many parents struggle with sports, especially contact sports and their children's participation in them. In that vein, I wanted to share this. It's fairly lengthy, and 96.2% of you will find it overkill, but I highly recommend taking a look.

Rarely have I heard the case for sports made so well. His premise, at least one of them, is pretty interesting:

A major objective of [Plato's] great work, The Republic, is to show how for a civilization truly to thrive, it must find a way to make the drive for glory subordinate to reason.

He goes on basically to argue that it's healthy to engage the glory-seeking/ultra-competitive among us with sports, in lieu of war, etc. Hector in The Iliad is presented as the ideal, as someone that can embody both the shockingly violent warrior, and the lovingly gentle husband and father.

This guy also presents a really novel critique that sports creates an absolute, well-known hierarchy based on ability. This rings true with me - I knew precisely my rank on every team I've ever played on (it wasn't high). Check this out:

A world that is so intensely hierarchical is a clear and energizing world, where meaning is available all the time. Who are you? I'm the best center in the league, or the second-best, or whatever. And I'm working to rise, or to stay on top, or whatever. One of the joys of sports lies in knowing who you are and where you are and what you have to do to ascend. Such knowledge is not available to most people in the world, and often they envy it, or they tap into it vicariously by becoming fans.

Things get sticky when you think of this ranking being the antithesis of Christianity. We're to see all people as equals, or as Paul says in Philippians, as better than ourselves. But ranking and outdoing bleeds into everyday life, to the detriment of our faith and of others themselves.

Oh, fair warning, the author makes a stupid (and inexplicable) left turn into homosexuality and how all male athletes are (of course!) secretly drawn to it. Riiight.

Exit quotation, emphasis mine:

The more ambitious you are, the more competitive you are, the less often you will experience serenity, a state in which, as Wordsworth says, "with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things." The man who lives in that spirit, Schopenhauer tells us, is the one who, when he passes another on the street, says to himself, "That too is me." Those who whisper, however subliminally, "That is another" live in the purgatory of individual pride and desire.

The Chronicle of Higher Education - Do Sports Build Character or Damage It?

The Big Questions

2012-01-19T15:09:00.001-06:00

GOING LONG SBUX. WAY LONG.

I have less and less to say about more and more.

I guess the real problem is the daunting nature of boiling 400 million disparate things down into 500 or 1000 words. Weekly. And making it ~~half~~ ~~sorta~~ ~~partially~~ mostly readable.

I hinted at this last week, but the big thing that's come down the pike lately is The Asking of the Questions. Jack's turned into sort of this cagey trial lawyer, where he'll ask and re-ask questions trying to trip you up. He usually asks things to which he already knows the answer. But sometimes, he asks some real doozies.

He woke Majestad out of a dead sleep during (the ironically named) Quiet Time the other day.

"I NEED A SURPRISE."

"Do we love Satan? He's a bad guy."

Easy one. That's a big "no." Yes, he is a bad guy. The baddest guy. Man, this parenting thing is easy.

As H.M. was trying to pull herself together, he adds, "What about Darth Vader?"

Hmm. Tricky. I'm pretty sure we can completely ignore those joke prequels Lucas cranked out. Jack's only seen the Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, and he seems unredeemable. But then, we know that Vader pulled his bacon back out of the fire in Jedi... Gonna go with "no" because Jack not seen Jedi yet. Whew, these are getting harder.

"Where is heaven?"

Well, lessee. We're not really to where we can discuss the metaphysical or the concept of a spiritual realm yet. I'm going to go with the medieval thought that it was literally "up." Like in the sky. It's easy to show him plenty of art that depicts heaven in this way and it just makes things altogether easier. (Make note to clarify nonliteral meaning of "up" in 2018.)

Obviously working from data gathered from previous answers, at dinner Jack asks, for family discussion:

"Does God love Satan?"

Aw, c'mon. You gotta be kidding me.

I mean, let that one percolate for a minute. I opened my mouth to answer, and then promptly shut it again. I'm no theologian, but I've got passable answers about most issues in protestant Christian theology (and even some outside of that). But I had to go dark on this one.

"Uh, I dunno, Jack. Eat some more catfish."

The 2 minutes that followed were filled with me mouthing all sorts of things across the table to Majesty (Like originally? But he's been/will be defeated, right? Is he even technically redeemable now? I know, no way, right?!).

Pictures. Take note of Jack's first Starbucks (relax, it's cocoa) and his very first trip to the movie theater. We did sort of a ~~last hurrah~~ Big Brother Day for him. We went out for pancakes, and then saw Beauty and the Beast. He was a little fidgety, made worst by the interminable previews. I'm serious, they had to be pushing 40 minutes. Anyway, the general idea of a teevee as big as your house really went over well.


I HAVE NO WORDS FOR THIS.

I'M ABOUT TO WATCH 73 MOVIE TRAILERS. YOU?

The Christmas Download & Thoughts on Sumo

2012-01-10T15:51:00.002-06:00

Lots of ground to cover here in the new year, so we'll see how much we get to and where this thing goes.

Christmas played out pretty much as expected with gifts aplenty and glitter all over our clothes and all that jazz. Majesty labeled it an "extravaganza" for what that's worth. This sounds like I didn't think much of the whole thing, which is false - but I'm sufficiently removed from the event to now be dispassionate. If you get me.

Jack cleaned up. You're shocked. He got a work bench. Like with a neato drill (it reverses?!) and all sorts of kid-friendly wrenches and hammers and tools and stuff. It's branded by the ad wizards at Home Depot.

And thus passes the toy kitchen, or at least this particular chapter in its existence. It had fallen into disuse and so we stuffed it out into storage until the Next One can busy herself with imaginary confections and pots of unimaginably strong pretend coffee.

This is a good place to note another parenting maxim: The Principal of Substitution. You can't just take stuff away. That leads to the Dark Side, bro. Nah, you sub in something (of equal or greater value, restrictions may apply, see store for details) and voila! you've got yourself an equilibrium. Which is all any honest parent really wants. We don't want butterflies and unicorns. Okay, maybe we did way back there in the ether somewhere, but the idealism's almost completely washed out now. No, what we want is for the Iranians not to go nuclear and snuff anybody out. We want (controlled) chaos. Like so:

H.M.: Where is he?
E.C.: Who? Oh. Up in his room, I think. I mean, I heard stomping. Crashes.
H.M.: Fine. I don't care what he tears up in there.

And that's the way it goes. You just foolishly pray for nonaggression. Because most parents are Chamberlain at Munich, dude. Anyway, so make sure you've got a replacement ready before you start yanking stuff pell-mell. You'll thank me for it. I digress.

Christmas. We were talking about Christmas.

He got a castle. About time, you say. I know, every man needs his kingdom and all that. The thing's complete with a drawbridge, trap door, knights, horses, crossbows, saddles, quivers, you name it. There's a royal family (really just a figurehead now that the place is a constitutional monarchy). There's even a court jester. The really silly part of this is that we haven't even opened a few of the castle-y type gifts. Don't tell Jack that. Enough became enough. Gonna save those for ~~bribes~~ rewards.

He snagged a Lightning McQueen RC car, which I've become rather adept at driving through my living room at alarming speeds. You should see the air I we can get when I we send it hurtling over the steps. Jack chases Lightning around and cackles. This is 100%, completely, only, strictly for Jack's entertainment. I just drive because I have to, okay. Back off.

He also got a big Buzz Lightyear (Space WANE-JURH!). Buzz sometimes goes by the alias Buzz Aldrin, if you can believe that. Semantics. Lessee, the rest of the list was 2 (!) globes, several new games, books and CDs (current favorite: Mr. Sonny and the chorale singing church songs, $0.00) and lots of books. Skippyjon Jones is the current favorite. It's also Jack's new nickname. This week.

Majesty fished Jack's favorite thing about Christmas this year from him: "Probably singing and playing the guitar with Daddy and Uncle Blake." For the record, Uncle Blake sang and played (Jack's) guitar. Jack and Daddy wailed off key. It was more fun than it was pretty.

WEEKLY INCIDENT REPORT:

Jack has started asking some big questions. Where is heaven? What is the gospel? I just hope we have some big answers. If we run dry, we've got several of you on speed dial.

Jack is playing with a random girl at the park. They run into each other. Both experience a gravitational emergency, and this follows:

Tasha: Are you okay?
Jack: I'm okay; I'm a boy... and an astronaut.
Tasha: I'm in a rocketship.

Majesty's take: "They may be made for each other." Hmmm.

Darth Jack cometh. Imagine the least scary, most comically deep threeyearold voice ever, and you'll have the voice down cold.

Jack pours out of his room one day during The Time of the Quietness. He wakes Majestad up, of course. The child is wearing seventeen shirts. That's the number 17. H.M. counted. There were multiple pants/shorts in play, too. I took one look at the pictures Majesty sent me and started reevaluating our full-fat dairy decision. Oh, note the direction of said shirts. Frontswards, backswards... he don't care. Roll Tide.

We're now at 34 weeks with the Girliest Girly Girl. Had a really nice dinner with all our buds this weekend to celebrate... I dunno. Uncomfortableness.

Lastly. Jack has apparently decided we've gotten too soft and aren't ready for the responsibility of a new baby. He's probably 100% correct, too. So he's begun waking us up in the dead middle of the night - I guess for practice - and cajoling whoever will have him to snuggle. The odds aren't great with either of his options, let's face that. I then have to escort him up to his place and stay with him for a minute. Where I pass out yet again. Anyway, when Majesty already wakes up 10 times per night to take care of her bidness in the john... she's not impressed.

One can only hope he'll whip us into shape in time.

Hot Versus Pretty

2012-01-03T17:08:00.000-06:00

I'll try to do an all-encompassing post that gets to the new year shortly. Today is not that day.

In lieu of me rattling off something (arguably) entertaining, one article really struck me yesterday. Keep in mind I'm grappling with how to approach parenting one of those crazy old girl feemale type folks. But boy, er... girl this brief little story was enlightening.

Do parents enthusiastically encouraging their daughters to look "hot" ever think about the commoditization behind it? I didn't think so, either.

I really like the premise, here: pretty is the result of a balancing act between beauty and innocence (at all ages). Let that one soak for a minute.

Original story link is first, with very good analysis second. Enjoy.

NC Register: The Death of Pretty

Hot Air: New Year’s Eve Night Out - Why What Women Wear Actually Matters

There's even a bit more analysis building on the original article here.

My Coworker? Tom Petty.

2011-12-22T10:39:00.001-06:00

I think this qualifies as "live blogging" an event. We are SO cutting edge.

So Jack enjoys hard work. Especially when it includes YouTube of a Tom Petty concert.

There Is Another... Skywalker

2011-12-20T11:56:00.000-06:00

I flipped on the color teevee set this weekend. If you keep up with CJMP ~~on an annual basis~~, this is sort of rare. Jack was/is pretty sick, and so I was pulling guard duty for the afternoon while Majesty tried to rest, or something.

There was some golf on, and probably some football games I have zero interest in. But hey, what's this, The Empire Strikes Back is on. I flipped it over there for a second. Because, y'know, why not. One of my favorites.

After maybe a quarter hour (this "parenting" thing is really hard), I look over to my left. Jack has been standing there, stock still, eyes locked in on the screen. "They're in outer space!" he declares as Star Destroyers drift across the screen. "Daddy, what are those called?" (Those are AT-ATs, Jack.) He's a pilot! (Yes Jack, Luke's a pilot.) "Awwtoo! Where's Awwtoo?" he asks as R2 disappears into the swamp.

It floored me. We acclimated long ago to Jack's ignoring of whatever we're doing. He fixates on microphones and guitars and destroying Christmas ornaments and doggedly pulling umpteen pairs of shoes out of our closets. Darn near killed himself on the stairs while flopping around in my captoe bankers the other day.

But this time, he watched. And he watched. And he got in his little squashy chair and watched. And he didn't move a finger when I put the infamous plaid blanket over him.

He erupted in laughter when kooky old Yoda showed up. He cackled and belly laughed. He kept on laughing. The next overloud advert came on, and I heard him muttering Luke's "Hey! Get out of there!" cracking himself up all over again.

Then there was a swordfight. A. SWORD. FIGHT. With SWORDS. SWORDS THAT GLOW IN THE DARK. The DARK. He's kind of a connoisseur of sword fighting. Considers himself a real expert. Again, he was transfixed. I actually caught the moment when those big liquid eyes ~~and brain comprised of mushy bananas~~ took it all in. There was this slight smile, the kind with a bit of wonder in it, when the blue and red lightsabers started humming and zapping and popping. He was hooked. He was hooked just like I was - like almost every little boy of a certain age was - in 1980.

An interesting side note, and one that Majestad pointed out, was that the Dude was completely unfazed by Darth freaking Vader. When Vader stepped out of that white smoke in the original, a very, very young El Commodoro got right outta town. I mean, it was abandon ship, every man for himself. There was no way I was sticking around for whatever the 6-foot-6 guy in total black with a toaster oven on his chest had planned. That was sixty-five kinds of scary.

Jack isn't the big chicken his dad is, apparently.

All this does cause me to reevaluate this year's decision to keep the (talking!) Vader ornament off the fauxenbaum. I'm breaking that sucker out, stat.

Mr. Photogenic Strikes Again

2011-12-14T14:19:00.000-06:00

My favorite random conversation of the week (compliments of my Cajunette dentista):

E.C.: "So how're things?"

Cajunette Dentista: "Ah, y'know, good. The fight against decay never ends."

Boy, isn't that the truth. I guess one of my presents this year is a nice new shiny white back tooth. The Cajunette yanked the 25 year old filling, which had enough mercury in it to, well, actually be Mercury. Looked like the bumper off a '59 Chrysler Imperial.

The most enjoyable development from past few weeks has been Jack's willingness to sing. I know, I know, he always does that. But now he's singing with us. And with the radio. And with CDs. Like, loud. In public. We hear him pipe up in church and I usually crack up laughing. It's so awesome. And I mean that not making fun, but in a celebratory sense. It just flips my pancake when he joins in. Gets most of the words right, too. Fake it 'til you make it, dude.

I'm staying busy ordering a frightening assortment of trum-tookers, sloo-slunkers, blum-blookers and hoo-whunkers and all sorts of other Christmas paraphernalia that arrives at our doorstep in a steady stream. I keep saying this every year, but the very super bestest part of Christmas is experiencing it alongside a child. Inexplicably, Christmas fell off my radar for several years. Yeah it was fun, but I enjoyed it primarily for the time off from my sweatshop of a former job. And that's not quite the point.

Enough. Let's look at more pictures. These are hot off the press, so enjoy.

Better Watch Out, Better Not Cry

2011-12-08T12:28:00.001-06:00

They tell you whenever you can't write to just start typing. So here we go. I had a complete post done, entitled Naming Your Child For Dummies. Scrapped it. Wasn't worth outraging the relatively few ~~strangers that read CJMP, people that will still talk to me or,~~ friends and family I have. Discretion is indeed the better part of valor. Or something. And now I'm stuck.

So how 'bout that weather?! Right.

I'm reading a tremendous amount lately, at least for me. I'm trying to deliver on the oft-broken read-the-Bible-through-in-a-year pledge. I should finally make it this time. Taking January, February, August, September, and most of October off didn't help. Normally I wouldn't recommend the sort of procrastination/cramming routine I perfected in college. But with the Bible, there's been a surprising side effect: Greater perspective.

I can't overstate how helpful reading the Gospels through in a few days has been. It's changed my view of them. And more broadly, there's a huge benefit to arriving at Matthew right after slogging neck deep through the Prophets, wondering what it all means. The folks in every Gospel account were wondering the same thing. What are these amazing signs and new teachings all about? Is this the one we're waiting for? After John, my favorite, you blow right into Acts, swept up in the logistics and immense danger faced by those who helped build the church. Romans comes, and it gives you an intense look at the doctrine and theology that was being laid out. I have more to say on all of that, but no room here. Anyway, the point being, try reading more than a verse here and there. It'll change things.

Jack. You remember Jack. He's pretty pumped up for this Christmas thing. He runs around, periodically yelling "MEWWY CWISTMAS, DADDY!" and "MEWWY CWISTMAS, MOMMY!" and "MEWWY CWISTMAS, MR. JACK!" I think I've bought every legitimate* Christmas song on iTunes. There's a slight problem with that, too: The King (no, the other one) plainly sings, "Santa Claus is comin' tonight." Jack tends to take that literally. It's become kind of a nightly disappointment for him.

The Girliest Girly Girl is kicking and somersaulting, making herself heard however she can from the Occupy Majesty movement. Darn little deadbeat hippie. Majesty gets bigger by the quarter hour. It's almost imperceptible, like watching the shadows move across your patio. Wow. I will probably never live that sentence down. There it went, right there, hundreds of thousands of marital capital points. Ah well, easy come, easy go.

I've been Christmas Decoration and Elf Management Czar this year, and did fearsome battle with the lights on the bottom part of our venerable old fauxenbaum one afternoon. I ravaged that thing with a box cutter and strangled it into submission with strands of fresh lights. Live porcupines must be easier to wrestle. The tree looks (mostly) normal now, but stands there stark nekkid, still undecorated. To this day I'm convinced it was a single, evil, tiny little bulb causing the dang problem. I then put up Christmas lights on the front porch only to discover that my Lite-Brite of a fuse box that doles out the juice decided my GFCI outlets should die. All of them.

So things are normal. Like, pretty much.

One quick story. My boss gave Jack this way cool interactive globe. So you tap a country with a pen and it calls out "MONGOLIA" in a know-it-all voice. You can play games and all sorts of things that geo-nerds do. It's really, really neat, and Jack has been playing with it a ton. So at 7am this morning, we hear The Dude screaming and crying. He's kind of past the screaming/crying for no obvious reason stage, so I run up there expecting to see the place slathered in blood and carnage. Jack is standing there, big old bottom lip poked out about 14 inches, with the (kinda heavy) globe suspended from his waist. He had tied the pen's plastic tether cord around himself like a belt and had coiled it around about 10 times. The thing was just mercilessly cutting into him, and he's got nowhere to go. Can't walk, can't sit, can't untie it, and has to just wait for reinforcements. (And no, I will not be sharing this story with El Jefe.) Okay, so that really didn't go anywhere. The Waist of the World? Wide World of Shorts? Atlas Whimpered? No? Alrighty.

Oh, we got Jack's picture made here at the house a few weeks back. I'll upload a few of those in an upcoming post. Probably. But in the meantime, you know you love Lite Brite Elvis. You KNOW you do.

Worst post ever. I'm out.

*Any Mariah/Miley sort of ridiculousness is OUT. Bing, Frank, and Springsteen are IN.

Thanksgiving Knickknacks

2011-11-30T12:09:00.000-06:00

I should do a proper Thanksgiving post, but here I am, a week out, and I find myself with precious little Thanksgivingy type stuff in my head. My tummy? Yeah, there's plenty of Thanksgiving stuff(ing) down there, sure. But I've kind of moved on from the holiday. Just imagine I did a mind-altering, comprehensive, tell-all Thanksgiving post. There. It's almost like I REALLY DID. But I think you're going to get Quick Hits today. Sorry.

Issue No. 1: How does the Ittybitty Girl know precisely when Jack gets up in the mornings? At 6:19 AM she is rolling around and muay thai kicking H.M. Jack's already bumping around upstairs. They're not (uh like, as far as we know) twins or anything... But have they forged some sort of weird, unexplainable telepathic bond that they'll eventually use to defeat and control us? Anyway, that's worrisome. The very last thing children need is a secret weapon to triumph over the old folks.

Issue No. 2: Jack had a cold last week. "My neck hurts" is how he described his "throat" hurting. Semantics.

Issue No. 3: Majesty co-hosted a friend's baby shower one Saturday back. Jack and I bolted out of there before the estradiol reached lethal levels. We sauntered over to the Children's Museum and built the largest Lego structure I've ever been personally responsible for (I was structural engineer/design consultant on the project). Jack could easily become a Lego real estate magnate. The mom and her son next to us kept glancing over worriedly.

Issue No. 3 1/4: We sat in a stripped-down Chevy S-10 on display, which was way cooler than it sounds. We looked like two cops on a stakeout. Jack also learned the names for all the buttons. I worry now that I've given him the information he needs to break into and hotwire my car. Anyway, we finished up our day with a trip to Coldstone for ice-cream, something that I'm not sure he's ever done, at least with me around. The little turkey obliterated his cup of strawberry and then demanded some of mine. Of course. Sure, I'll do anything for my kid(s). But giving up a whole quarter ounce of Sweet Cream and Snickers did give me some pause.

Issue No. 3 1/2: The folks at the house (for the baby shower) included 2 extraordinarily well trained music teachers. Jack had the time of his life siphoning off all the superdupersecret music knowledge they would share with him.

Issue No. 4: Majesty's been teaching the sprog all about outer space this month. (I'm trying to get Pigs In Space into the curriculum. No dice yet.) He's already naming the planets on his fingers, which was sort of cool to watch. Hilarious, too: JUPITUW... SATUWN... MOOKUWY... UWHF.... He pretends to be an astronaut and we blast off, from in front of the fridge, sitting in his little white chairs (the ones that nail my spine right on the T12 - it's like flying coach on Continental Express). I provide blastoff sound effects, and was pretty pleased with my ability to rumble. Just to bring it all home to him, I was taking the trash out one night, and noticed what I'm about 67% sure was Jupiter in the eastern sky. He really dug looking at the bright spot in the black sky and declaring, "JUPITUW! It's BIIIIDH [big]!!" Sure is, big guy. Sure is.

Issue No. 4: Just finished up a semi-big deal remodeling project at the house. After a brief explanation that Mr. Tylor is not an electrician but rather a contractor, Jack logically wanted to know:

"Does he drive a tractor?!"

Issue No. 5: Jack's obsession with soap is bordering on mental illness. He decides that dumping an entire bottle of hand soap in and around the toilet and on the wall an hour before friends arrive for the weekend would be a swell idea. Another time, he dumped an entire bottle of vaporizing baby shampoo into a clay cup Majestad made in grade school. Jack then set the cup on his book case. Gravity ensued. I could NOT for the life of me figure out where the unmistakable, elementary school janitor's cat litter vomit soaker-upper smell was coming from. Soap oozed from the cup all morning before we discovered the mess. Thanks to another of my very favorite physical forces - capillary action - the soap crept halfway up pages of just about every one of his books, ruining some for good. Curious George Rides a Bike, we hardly knew ye! ~~Good riddance, you daft monkey!~~ ~~You can't stay out of mischief for like, 7 seconds?~~

Issue No. 5 1/2: Some questions, here: Why exactly do we have so many bottles of soap? Why are we so afraid of dirt? It seems to me that cleanliness is overrated. And who is responsible for buying baby soap in Old Lady Menthol-Cigarette flavor? This person should be reprimanded.

Issue No. 6: One weekend we went to the annual Children's Festival they have here. Pure genius, that was. Jack ran down a steep hill with a small parachute strapped to him. Think NFL training camp. He saw Thomas the Tank Engine. He had his face painted. He tried to brush a bald spot onto the side of a live pony. He looked for "gold" (really just U.S. coinage) in a monstrously large sandbox. He made bracelets - and this was the real focal point - with high school girls' help. He had newspaper and masking tape hats made directly on his head. And bestest of all, he got to make a kaht. I mean kite. Flew it pretty deftly, too. I'll leave it up to you as to who had more fun doing that.

Issue No. 7: Thanksgiving.... we stayed put at home, had excellent food, and my parents came down to visit for a day or so. Was really great to see them, as always. I ate so much that I almost fell asleep right in my gravy.

Quote of the Week

A Sleepy Jack One Morning: "I want to watch Sesame Street... scratch that... I want to watch Bob the Builder."

Where does he get this stuff?

Short Conversation of the Week
(Upon seeing some old friends from our former church this weekend)

Gal That Naively Offered to Babysit Jack: I'd love to!
E.C.: Great. Better bring a Clif Bar.
Gal That Naively Offered to Babysit Jack: You're kidding. He eats those things?!
E.C.: No, no. It's for you.

The Grocery Store Frequent Flyer Program

2011-11-23T12:07:00.004-06:00

I propose a complete reordering of society. A revolution, if you will. Nah, not a political one, but for grocery shopping. I'll get to all that in a minute.

As some of you know, I was drafted as the family grocery shopper dude during that dark period when the thought of food made Majesty turn pale and retch her cute little guts out. And I've learned a few things.

The grocery store can be an intimidating place for men. I've no idea what a good comparative metaphor would be, here. Maybe a gym? Let's use the gym. Many women would walk into the freeweight/dumbbell section of a gym with at least a little unease. It's (mainly) the Other Side's turf. Same goes for grocery stores. The people that really know what they're doing in there, the consummate professionals, are those fee-mail type people. Guys are generally just sent on bumbling, one-off sorties to retrieve cold cuts and tubs of Cool Whip.

Of course, we men know roughly where our subsistence foods are (there are about five, and I'll leave those to your imagination) but that's it. We have no clue where dried porcini mushrooms, applesauce and pita bread are. None. And we're not going to ask. Because, y'know, we're men.

But I stand before you, the exception. I now know (most) grocery shopping secrets. I know where canned beans live. I know how to acquire fresh catbah filets. I know where they park the Desitin. I have gathered this hard-won knowledge in the sub-zero corridors of the frozen food section. I learned it by braving the 125 degree parking lot with single-bagged half-gallons of ice cream in August. I've cheated certain death with moms in Audi Q7s trying to run me down out there.

And I bring a certain ruthlessness to grocery shopping. I will cut off old ladies in the produce section. I will look the other way, pretending not to see you as we both speed toward the same free cashier (I'll 'accidentally' get there first). I will shamelessly step in front of any obliviot chatting aimlessly on a cellphone. I will bump you (not too hard) if you're texting in the dead middle of the grocery aisle. I will take the last one, without apology.

Because I'm on a mission, dang it.

And that brings me to my revolution. We have to streamline the grocery shopping experience for the benefit of all humanity. We must separate the professionals from the hoi palloi. We need... a frequent flyer program. For grocery stores. You heard me.

When you shop, you get points. Those points accrue. But here's the kicker: During peak shopping times like Saturdays and holidays, we only admit folks with a certain level of points. So at 5pm the Tuesday before Thanksgiving? No amateurs allowed. Only the grown folks are in there, bro. If you're like the two men I actually observed looking for cloves of fresh garlic on the spice aisle, you're gone. We'll let you in at midnight. Wanna shop at 3am? Great. Knock yourself out.

Who's with me?!

Say What? Accentuating the Negative

2011-11-16T15:10:00.008-06:00

When I'm relaxed, tired, or not paying particular attention, you'll hear it. It's worse in my own home. Much worse. The accent. It's beyond drawl, that's not entirely it. It's the quirky vowel swap that gets people. If you're from roughly where I am, your long "I" sound turns into sort of a short "A" sound, more "AH" than "EYE." Oh, that's not too bad, you say. Barely noticeable, I'm sure. Uh, no. Huge problem.

An excerpt of an actual conversation I had Saturday:

E.C.: That Children's Festival thing was great! We took Jack over there and made kahts. They were so cool!
Nice Neighbor Lady: I'm sorry, cots? They let you make cots?
E.C.: Uh, no no, the ones you flah. Kahts.
Nice Neighbor Lady: *Glances at H.M. with puzzled look*
E.C.: String. Paper. Yah flah 'em.
H.M.: *Interjecting, annoyed* KITES. He means KITES.
Nice Neighbor Lady: Ohhhhh, kites. Um, neat.

And lahk - sorry, like - everyone, I've got the typical southern habit of incessantly dropping 'G's, which at one point in my life was an issue so pronounced that I couldn't correctly say the name of my university.

Circa 1995 Neighbor: Whereya goin'ta college, boy?
18 Year Old E.C.: Hardin'.
Circa 1995 Neighbor: Ah! Hardin Simmons. Great. Daddy went there. Baptist.
18 Year Old E.C.: Nosir, Hardin'. HarDING.
Circa 1995 Neighbor: Neverheardovit.

Generally you try to clean this mess up when you're talking on the telephone with foreigners (i.e. native New Yorkers) or when you're reading Scripture aloud in church. You concentrate hard then, trying to knock off the edges. Or maybe Scotch-tape them back on.

At HarDING, it helped immeasurably that (1) I'm somewhat of a mimic and (2) had a Midwesterner roommate that spoke cleaner English than Tom Brokaw. By the end of sophomore year, after bunking with a fantastic dude from Worcester, Massachusetts (!), folks back home believed I had suffered a stroke, having only partially regained the ability to speak.

Accents are funny things. They conjure up preconceptions that may or may not be true. They tip people off about your upbringing, social status, education... and can even comment on your level of real intelligence. It's a common belief in the U.S (especially in politics) that a southern accent magically lops off 30 I.Q. points as soon as your mouth opens.

We know a few other things about accents. One is that strong regional dialects (ones lahk mahn) are disappearing. Our speech is becoming more and more homogenous all the time. (So THAT'S why our grandparents sound like Flannery O'Connor characters!) Another interesting thing is that as income increases, dialects generally flatten out. So as we grow wealthier, and watch the same TV shows, speech distinctions begin to vanish.

So how much of a big deal is it for ~~Jack to screw up his vowel sounds~~ me to screw up Jack's vowel sounds? Does it (materially) limit him in an increasingly competitive world, where small advantages - heck, any advantages - are ruthlessly exploited?

In other words, should ah watch mah mouth?

Majesty is having a small, controlled fit over this. (KAHTS, huh?! Really?! She couldn't even understand you!) And ah finally found out whah:

Others monophthongize /aɪ/ in all contexts, as in the stereotyped pronunciation "nahs whaht rahs" for nice white rice; these speakers are mostly found in an Appalachian area that includes eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina and Northern Alabama (the "Inland South"), as well as in Central Texas. Elsewhere in the South, this pronunciation is stigmatized as a working class feature.

Oh dear. Of all the things that could've done us in, who could have predicted accent bigotry?!

Firefighters, Dogs, and Madrugadores

2011-11-08T13:33:00.005-06:00

Yes Virginia, There Are Talking Cars

As you can figure out from the picture, Jack went as a firefighter this year. Majestad found him this rock solid outfit, complete with huge metal clasps on the jacket and coverall bibs with knee patches. The lid looked pretty good, too, albeit more 1970s fire dude than present day. No oxygen tanks, though. Bummer.

We did Trunk or Treat at church this year, which is kind of the logistical next step in Halloween laziness. (I'm a huge fan.) Jack's favorite attraction wasn't the candy; it was the car our friends fixed up to look just like Lightning McQueen from Cars. Jack just stared, in complete shock, like he was thinking, "I KNEW HE WAS REAL! I KNEW IT!" He spent the rest of the night demanding to see Lightning's motor.

Speaking of Pixar, each car/family in the lot kind of did their own thing, and my absolute personal favorite was the guy dressed up like Steve Jobs. The dude is a dead ringer (sorry, couldn't help that) for Jobs. It's freaky. I go to shake his hand, and I get the Namaste greeting, his palms together, the whole thing. Said he was unveiling his newest product: iApples. They were, of course, real apples lined up on the shelf behind him. You have to respect the guy that goes all-in on the sight-gag.

The next night, we slowly toured our neighborhood, trying to lure folks to their doors to give me Jack candy. Turns out that Halloween is an official dog holiday as well, because all the pooches hit the doors running, barking and swarming all over Jack as he nervously declared, "I'm okay. I'M OKAY!" The pups probably were hopped up on candy. Hey, who wasn't? Anyway, the rest of the night, he forgot his lines and began asking people about their current pet situation.

Conversation of the Week (Tie)

Think classifying people as either adults or chillrun is easy? Think again.

Jack: "Daddy's a child."
H.M.: "No, Daddy's an adult."
Jack: "I'm an adult."
H.M.: "No, you are a child." (To me as I leave to go back to work) "Bye, babe. See you tonight."
Jack: "Daddy's a babe."

Er, um, thanks.

Jack: (Walking into the grocery store) "That signs says H-E-B. That spells H-E-B, Mommy."

He just said that because he can't say "redundancy."

The Very Latest In Unexpected Parenting Dilemmas

Each morning, Jack used to (mercifully) stay in his room until somebody went and collected him. But after our vacation (in eastern time) and then with the time change itself, he busts into our room at painfully early hours. So you'll hear a door slam, and 4.7 seconds of thundering footfalls later, he arrives yelling "Mommy!" or "Daddy!" at the top of his lungs, talking incessantly. It's my pet theory that the body wakes in sections. In his case, his legs and mouth are working several minutes before the brain strolls in.

This needs to be solved well before February. We'll now be taking your suggestions. The phone lines are now open.

Theological Trick or Treat

2011-10-31T14:22:00.012-05:00

A little palate cleanser for you. I'll try to post on family Halloween antics and shenanigans and all that stuff later on, but I came across this little video and was compelled to share.

I would guess that the majority of people that bother with our blog are Christian, as we ourselves are. I'd also guess that most if not every one of you, have at least heard of Lewis's Trilemma. It was popularized by theologian and writer C. S. Lewis and goes something like this: Lunatic, Liar, or Lord. It means simply that Jesus of Nazareth made claims about himself so unheard of, so profound, so magnificent, that he was either (a) completely crazy (b) perpetrating an incredible hoax, or that (c) he is precisely who he says he is.

Now, you can believe that or not. The trilemma's Wikipedia entry falls all over itself to present reasons why the idea's absurd.

And what about a fourth option added by some modern scholars? Legend. How do we know that followers of Jesus didn't simply make everything up? Did Christians add dubious stories over the centuries since Jesus lived? How can we know the Gospels are reliable at all?

Majestad and I have been trying to finalize the girly-girl's name. You dig through books, you look at lists of popular names by decade, by country or language of origin. The names are usually ranked by popularity. You even wander through your family trees looking for particularly slick family names. (I've quit pointing out to H.M. that the new name would by definition become a family name, but whatever. I just work here.)

Choosing names is the prerogative of every parent. Some do it carefully and well. Some give out painfully boring handles. Others saddle their kids with ridiculous, acid-trippy ones with superfluous "Y"s or unintentionally hilarious initials. Similarly, fiction writers get to pick their character names. And that's where this video comes in.

If you yourself were to cook up characters for a new novel about a certain place and time and culture, would you get the names just right? I mean, would they be used in correct proportion? Would your geography be accurate? The food? The law of the land and its subtle politics? Dr. Peter Williams would like to let you in on some powerful new evidence, especially about the proper names in the New Testament.

The clip is just under an hour long. Okay, DO NOT sissy out because of the length. It's extremely engaging and understandable, and you've likely never heard anything on the reliability of the Gospels quite like this. So that's the 'treat' I have for you... and if you're a believer, it's required viewing. (Yes, I went there.) Enjoy.

Not convinced, are you? Most of you won't be. The overwhelming majority of folks won't bother. Because most of you have things that you rate as more important, as more urgent. Places to go. Appointments. Kids filling bathrooms 3 inches deep with water. I completely understand. And I'm certainly not here to nag, or to be the village scold. I'm just some fool dad blogger, after all.

But not bothering... not taking the time to know, truly, for yourself alone, as a layperson (i.e. non-'clergy'), is why we're losing the knowledge war in churches today, and losing it badly.

And that's the 'trick,' isn't it?

(UPDATE: I've added the Q&A, which comments on another important question or two.)

The Mountain Yak, Part II

2011-10-27T13:34:00.007-05:00

Continued from Part I:

(Special thanks to my wifey wife for letting me cheat off her notes. Straight up, I didn't remember doing half this stuff.)

ME HATE MANY CAMERAS! WHERE LOOK? ME NO KNOW!

Okay, to review: We started out nice and bumpy, with chilrun covered in dried yakkity-yak and nauseous pregnant girls picking assorted er, stuff out of hair in the bathtub at 5:45 am. We burned the two hours before the rescheduled flights by watching The Little Mermaid.

Majesty was good enough to point out that Jack pretended to be a puppy dog for the entire two hours of wait time (his "Jack the DAHWG" alter ego). It was like we'd released a psyched shih tzu loose in a movie theater. The kid did great on the flights and passed clean out in mid-takeoff during our second leg flight. H.M. says The New Kid apparently loved flying, and that she was dancing and doing flips the whole trip. Maybe we've got another good traveler on our hands.

On the first official family hike since circa 2009, Jack did very well. We hiked methodically about 4 1/2 miles and he was a real pro. Keep in mind, 4 1/2 miles in 3 year old mileage is like hiking from L.A. to New York. Roughly. Uncle Jesse, NaFANiel and Elijah saw a BEAWH! He was booking it through the forest and across our trail so fast that none of the rest of us oblivious tourists saw it. Good thing, too; would've been my 3rd sighting in about 2 years. I don't want to fool around with math that will eventually go against me, bigtime. Oh, and Jack really bonded with his big boy cousins. Had a blast hanging out with them on the trail and otherwise.

We hit a little snag on the the 2nd family hike. Jack yanked his own card and said he was done virtually the moment we stepped onto the trail. Snacks didn't work. The allure of chocolate didn't faze him. He cried and fussed and issued typewritten threats via his attorney (he couldn't get cell service to CPS). As a last resort, I let him ride the elephant until the elephant's neck and shoulders were screaming. Then, in a stroke of pure, Wile E. Coyote genius, I emptied the venerable blue backpack and we strapped him in there like a 36.5 lb iron dumbbell (the luggage scale at the check-in desk isn't just for looks).

Super.

Lessons: You'll ~~allow your wife to convince you~~ convince yourself that child carrier backpack thingy from years past needs to stay down in storage after your sprog hits 3. Because y'know, they're too big to ride in there. They'll get bored. They won't like it. You. Are. Mistaken. GRAVELY mistaken. Take that sucker. Pay the airline the extra 827 clams to check it. Do whatever you have to do, but get it on the silly plane. Personally, I'm taking that pack along until the chilrun are about 19. Because let's face it dads, you never really know who'll need to be carried up the mountain. And down it. And back to the car. And over to the potty. And back to the cabin.

I'm expecting to strap Majestad into that thing someday. Heck, if things go my way, a hulking, 6'6" Jack will carry me up trails in it. That's where this whole thing is headed.

Anyway, even if I wasn't, H.M. was pleased Jack was up in the makeshift carrier. There were ahem, allegedly some pretty steep drop offs that perked up her motherly Spidey-sense. The hike itself was worth it, and ended with a really neat waterfall. Poppa egged Jack on to get in the water... accompanied by guess who. I'm usually not a squish about cold water, but let me just say, about 2.9 seconds in that water and it felt like several ice picks were being driven through my feet. Jack made absolutely no indication of pain. Showoff.

He clambered up the big boulders at the falls while we gave him as much supervision as was possible. And H.M., at 5 1/2 months pregnant, didn't hike fast, but kept up really well. The hike back, and the interminable hill I carted Jack up on the way back just about ended me. You wanna ~~induce a heart attack~~ get in instant shape? Strap your kid to your back and hit the stair climber. Sheeshkabob.

We stayed in and played in the cabin the next few days as it rained and some cooler weather pushed through the area. Jack collected neon colored leaves, and threw rocks in the pond.

I'm told he thoroughly enjoyed playing in the hot tub with Poppa, reading with Bebe and spinning quarters (?) with Aunt Gena. I think I was out one of these days trying to kill myself on a hike.

We went to Cade's Cove one day, which is very touristy, but still a must-see. Most of the original white settlers to the region lived in the Cove. Jack loved this and didn't mind temps in the low 40s in the slightest. We had a picnic out in one of the deserted meadows down the hill and behind the old white Primitive Baptist church building. Afterward, Jack got in there and lead our group (and some passing strangers) in singing, prayer and he even preached a brief sermon. Majesty says she used to go there in the summers with Bebe and Poppa so its sort of fun to see Jack there now. Continuity is an amazing thing.

We visited quite a few old home-places with (very old) original log cabins and barns. Jack had a supreme blast going in them and climbing the old handmade ladders. He especially liked the corn cribs, probably because we couldn't easily get him out of those. Wildlife was everywhere, with lots of deer and turkeys and even a couple of bear cubs. Some idiots were about 30 feet from the cubs getting pictures. They seemed not to worry about where mama bear might be lurking. It's one thing to ignore danger, but these folks acted as if they were at the zoo. We skipped the Darwin Award(s) waiting to happen and got outta there.

The morning we left for home, it was 35 degrees near the GSM. The moment I got out of the car in Houston, three mosquitoes swarmed me and bit the fire out of my forearms. It was 82 and sunny.

It's a weird way to say welcome back.

The Mountain Yak, Part I

2011-10-25T15:58:00.003-05:00

Yeah, yeah, so I missed a week. I was busy. I was actually busy in an entirely different state, one with legitimate, discernible seasons. And (live) trees that were red, orange, shocking yellow and this deep purple, winey color. And mountains. Real deal mountainous mountains.

I let some of the more adventurous (and sadistic) in-laws talk me into hiking to the top of a few of them, too. My knee wasn't too happy about that, but peer pressure says you gotta go up, and up I went. In so doing, I burned up most of the marital capital I had accrued over the summer to hike up to the AT and nap on a Thermarest in (melting) snow with my bare feet in the sun. But dude, there was a mighty steep toll to get there.

Like say, a yakstravaganza:

We packed up and prepared to skip town bright and early one Saturday. Everything was ready. I mean everything. We were going to walk out the door in 5 minutes, and had planned on eating a proper breakfast during our layover in Dallas. The bags were in the truck, and I was waiting downstairs with a tremendous caffeine buzz. Great Smoky Mountains, here we come.

Then I hear Majesty yell, "Jack is sick!" from his room and I rush up there. In the darkness, all I can see are spatters of red all over the bed (and uh, Jack). It looks just like blood. I mean, just like it. Great. An axe murderer has chopped up my son into carpaccio. Really great. Or he's been juggling with my carving knives. But no, thankfully (?!) we've got yak everywhere. It has to be what, 1,000 to 1 odds that he'd get sick the morning of the big family vacation, right?

Lessons: Grape tomatoes look all innocent and cute sitting there in the produce section, twittering at you in little voices that they may not be as big as a regular tomato, but their flavor sure is, buster. Know this: those shiny red little suckers have a sinister side. And apparently that side is unmasked when you eat about 6 pounds of them along with your breakfast-for-dinner.

Thanks to my double super secret weapon flight app, I'm on the phone to American in minutes. They gleefully extract an easy $150 for rearranging our flights and I was glad to pay it. So we sit there watching The Little Mermaid with a (now generally clean) Jack sitting on a beachtowel on the sofa. Y'know, just in case this ain't "over" over. The disgusting load of bedclothes in the laundry room spins and hums.

But hey, watching TLM with a caffeine high is delightful. Sebastian? Pretty darn talented. It does bug me that King Triton is that ripped at his age. Does he pump weights with the bullion that falls to the sea floor? And the Sea Witch reminds me of my fourth grade math teacher, no kidding.

I've lost all notion of what I was talking about.

Oh yeah, we did make it to the mountains, with no more er, projections from Jack. He was in great spirits on the flights up there. To celebrate, we stopped for some authentic, local, mountain-type food. The kind the Indians and first settlers to the area would have enjoyed...

Homemade fudge.

(Going native is delicious. Don't let any fool tell you otherwise.)

The Tinkerjack Strikes Back

2011-10-13T17:36:00.000-05:00

Only have time for a short note this week.

Jack keeps on developing new nicknames for himself. Naturally, he wants to remain anonymous to protect himself from reprisals from the folks that run this joint. Like, well, us. This week's noms de guerre were inspired by Peter Pan: "Jack Pan," "Captain Jack" (knew that one might show itself someday) and my personal favorite... Tinkerjack.

The swordfighting schtick from Pan is pretty funny these days - Jack er, Jack Pan shrieks out "Dis time you've gone too fahwh!" as we duel furiously with red and blue plastic golf clubs (note club pic below). Luke and Vader, eat your hearts out. If it means anything to you, The Sprog insists on wielding the red ~~lightsaber~~ ~~golf club~~ sword. Coincidence? Methinks not.

This one demands a little explanation. The babyproofing in the house is now almost totally compromised. Even the single cylinder deadbolt I put in a week or two back probably won't withstand the Named Storm and his drill. And yes, that is my three year old using fake powertools to gain access to dangerous chemicals.

Beatles. Seatbelts.

FORE!

Coming soon to an alphabet near you.

Oh yeah. Majesty heard Jack calling "Julio" on the phone this week. The "phone" these days is usually the hose sprayer on the kitchen faucet that looks surprisingly like a early 20th century phone earpiece. Thank you for that, Mary Poppins. Anyway, H.M. wasn't able to hear much of the conversation. "It sounded big," she said.

Unfolding

2011-10-05T15:23:00.004-05:00

I promised Majesty a more serious post this week. I said my thoughts were still very scattered and unorganized about this whole new baby DURL thing. They still are, to the point of being unintelligible. But I have this week's post to er, post and you people evidently have some spare time to burn. So we're stuck in this thing together, aren't we?

The events of the past few months have made me realize a few things. For instance, that I enjoy the slow surprise of it all. You never know all at one time how your life will turn out. You get glimpses, clues, and sometimes, like last week, definitive information that colors and changes your understanding of what your future can be. I very much like how life unfolds one square at a time, like a great big topographical map. We see a bit more of what's ahead of us on each sunlit square. Some places you've been to already, but most you can only imagine.

And that's the really jarring part of finding out you're going to be a parent again. And of being told what flavor the kid is, or any really big news you hear. I'm suddenly (G0d willing) not going to be the parent of an only child. We're going to have a few, now (again, G0d willing). And that's a very different future image to project in one's mind.

Is any of this making sense?

Let's have another try. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have toted the Mona Lisa around with him for years. He reportedly tinkered with the portrait off and on, and lamented in later life that he never finished it (or really any of his other works, for that matter).

We all have an image of ourselves. And the 'big' events of life (and sometimes even the small ones) shape that image. It's being updated and adjusted continually. Maybe it's just a brushstroke here or there. But there's really no way to predict exactly what will change over time, or how the portrait might look afterwards. Furthermore, I believe that different artists can be at work on that image concurrently: we ourselves, our friends and family, our circumstances, our enemies, and even - hopefully - God, Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit. As you might imagine, some artists do a better job than others.

Anyway, I'm delighted by the reshaping of that image of ourselves.

Another obvious point this brings up is that it's a very good thing that life reveals itself slowly because we generally have time to cope with the changes, good or bad.

So I turn now to coping with a tiny little girl that doesn't kick too much, seems to sleep all the time, and loves classical music to an inordinate degree. Really. Isn't fazed by sugary stuff, very cold things her mother might drink, or my voice. She kicks for classical.

The chiquitita is refined. Dude, that bodes ill for all us yokels.

Bahs, Catbah and The Big Reveal

2011-09-30T09:30:00.010-05:00

"Pardon Me, But Would You Have Any Catbah?"
My child has forever ruined the English language for us. Pop quiz: Identify the following objects from actual household conversations:

E.C. "Babe, have you seen my bah? I heard it just a minute ago.
H.M. "No, but I've got mine. Let's go."

H.M. "What do you want for dinner this week?"
E.C. "Ahdunno. Catbah?
H.M. "Yeah, catbah sounds good. Get about a pound and a half."
E.C. "Done."

"But of course!"
For some reason, Jack substituted BAH in for any sort of "F" sound, so "phone" became BAH (and later BONE). Same for "fish," hence "CATBAH." Linguistics be some wacky stuff, yo.

And we litter our daily language with all sorts of other weird words and nonsensical phrases, cooked up by somebody that (1) doesn't read, (2) can't write or spell, and (3) is supposed to be learning our particular brand of the Queen's English from his elders (that'd be us). We flap our arms and yell, "YANNIT" when we really like something. We can't bear to correct him on "peenano" yet because it's charming. And hilarious. And charming. But rest assured, 20 years from now, we'll be attending that peenano concerto and charging up our bahs.

Oh, and forgive me, but the best of all was him calling pomegranate juice...

POMMADAMMIT. I kid you not.

I'm tired of toying with you. Julio is a....

DURL.

That's right, friends and neighbors, it looks like we'll be completing our set with one of those crazy and wildly irrational fee-mails. Jack was pretty pumped, and is now referring to himself as BWUVAH BEAWH [Brother Bear (a'la Berenstain)] and the new kid in town as SISTUW BEAWH [Sister Bear]. Daddy Bear thinks that's awesome.

The anatomy scan showed little hearts and livers and brains and stuff. So that's good. I'm told the 'fluid levels' looked good, as well. I've no idea what that means. I chose to interpret that as transmission, washer, brake, and power steering. Sue me.

The Melvin Udall School of Blogging
This is a big one - I'm gearing up for writing blog posts in pink, frilly font (on an unreadable, headache-inducing hot pink background), ruthlessly sprinkling sentences with the words "precious" and "sweet" and "adorable." This should be really insane to watch. And precious. Dare I say sweet? Adorable, even. Sounds precious, doesn't it? See, I'm already getting the adorable hang of this sweet and precious preciousness.

Precious. Wow. It really is unsettling in this pink, isn't it? Holy moly. I'm getting queasy just writing this.

Bullet Points

Jack strips down at the drop of a hat, now. You'll turn your back on him, and he's instantaneously nude. Happens all the time. I'm trying to explain to him that there's a point in his life where this becomes, uh... legally actionable. And awkward in social situations. Anyway, H.M. tells me that quiet time inevitably ends with someone getting nekkid. I hope The New Kid skips all this. You girl-people generally show more restraint on that point, I think.
We rode the Water Taxi the other day. So there's this meaningless public transportation that kind of putters around the artificial canal that runs nearby. My boss presciently told me "Yeah, you'll do that once." I now know why: Hot. Boring. Jack did okay, but was somewhat less than enthused. No fooling, it got stimulus money from the gubbmint. Natch.
Majestad took The Dude (and I guess by extension, Julio) to the Natural Science Museum this week. There were 1,000 butterflies and Jack... just wanted to jump in puddles. Missing the point is what childhood is all about. I'm told The Mommy enjoyed it, and that's all that counts sometimes.

(Extremely Brief) Conversation of the Week:

H.M.: Jack, what's in your shorts? (Obviously asking if there were any, er, accidents lurking in there.)
J.M.W.: Legs!

You know what that is? Precious.

This will get ugly.

A Man About Town

2011-09-22T10:32:00.001-05:00

This looks like the movie poster from The Big Chill

Let's discuss The Dude's new ride. I get this text at work from Majesty that says, "I don't think I'm getting out of Wal-Mart without this." Attached to the text was a picture of a cheeseball smile (attached to my son), atop a Radio Flyer scooter looking thing. "Just do it," was my ~~canned Nike slogan~~ reply.

As I've observed before, success in parenting sometimes hinges on picking your battles. And there was absolutely nothing to be gained by Majestad dying on this particular hill. Who wants to be buried on "Scooter Hill," anyway? That sounds lame. You wait for a "Fire Breathing Dragon Hill" or "Extremely Unwise But Principled Stand Hill." That's where you dig your foxhole and go down in a blaze of glory. But Scooter Hill? Not so much.

H.M. is still pretty green around the gills, but out of the nausea and the haze of pregnesia came a whopper of a great idea. We drove over to that Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion Thingy for a free concert one night. The Houston Symphony folks were performing a Brahms violin concerto paired with a selection from Dvořák. We scored some Chipotle and took it up to the huge ribbon of lawn above the 'spensive seats and had a nice picnic. It was great. The heat had broken a bit, and a breeze made it just abominably enjoyable. It occurred to me that there's no more beautiful music than classical. You can certainly prefer other music, but it's just not as beautiful in the er, classical sense, if you read me.

I don't know what Jack liked best: the quesadilla, the phenom soloist just sawing away mercilessly on his violin, or running at the edge of control down the steep grade of the lawn. I think it was the running. He finished up the night by crashing spectacularly, smashing his mouth into his sippycup as he hit the ground like a meteorite. He was unhurt. At least, he was laughing before, during and afterward, so we didn't ask questions.

Norah's birthday party was this week. She got a pink Flintstone car. Guess who rode in it? Everyone but Norah (sorry about that, Norah - owe you one). She took on a massive cupcake to the delight of the adults present, but she didn't really want much of it herself. But my son was there close by to vulture what she fed him. Yeah, so Jack co-opted that intensely personal family moment... again, sorry 'bout that, Norah.

And once again, I am "that guy." The irresponsible parent guy. Thanks a bunch, Jack.

I guess the most consequential thing about this week was telling Jack about Julio. Have I mentioned that our codename for this baby is Julio? Even though Majesty is sure it's a girl? I don't even ask anymore. And yes, it's in honor of Julio Jones. Hey, it was better than using his real name: "Quintorris Lopez Jones" just didn't have the right ring to it. I've been further confusing things by calling her(?) HOOL-ee-ya.

Whatever. We'll know what flavor we're getting next week, the Lord willing. If I'm sweating and pale, you'll know I'm trying to work out the financing behind a ridiculously huge wedding. If I'm looking awfully relaxed, then I'm just springing for barbeque in our back yard or something.

Oh, back to telling Jack. We do have this on video (which I don't have with me, natch). Jack kept asking, "Where is it?" as he looked down H.M.'s shirt for the baby.

Logistics.

He is now busy with listing off stuff the baby would need: toys, a bed, a blanket. He also thinks the baby is a girl, but I'm not entirely sure Majestad didn't coach him into supporting her position.

What does the baby need? Right now I'd say a heap of good luck. Can you imagine crash landing into this family? The kid has zero chance at a normal life. Zero.

Cravings and The Craven

2011-09-15T14:58:00.011-05:00

The summer's been tough for those of us in what's apparently become the lobby of Dante's Inferno. You may know it as "Texas." But there are coping mechanisms. Iced tea. Lemonade. Tiger blood snow cones. And... hot chocolate?

I made mention of this ~~insanity~~ last week but that's right, there's nothing that cools you down in 106 degree weather (in the middle of the worst drought on record) like a steaming cup of hot cocoa. And not that fakity-fake Nesquik junk nuked in a microwave, either. We're talking old school stovetop, babies. Mini marshmallows. Full throttle.

There I am, with a look on my face like I'm trying to figure out how to model String Theory in Play-Doh, just whisking away like a fool. Because if there's one darn thing I hate, it's lumpy hot chocolate. Okay, I'm whisking away furiously because, let's face it, this isn't my first rodeo, and to paraphrase Alfie Tennyson, "Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to ask 'how high?'"

But it's getting super weird.

Majestad is frequenting fast food joints that she hasn't been to in a decade. Arby's is the current favorite. By the way, how did I not remember their sauce being so clovey? Seriously, it's gotta be like 60% cloves. She went to Arby's twice in a single day. Swears that she's limiting it to once per week, now. Uh huh. Suuuure. Taco Bell was running strong there for a while, too. Note: Taco Bell has not changed one single bit ~~since I was too poor to eat elsewhere~~. It's like a (lethal) culinary time capsule.

The woman ventures out in one of the only rainstorms in recent memory to get... a whole watermelon. With a sprained ankle. Drags the kid with her. Eats one slice and tells me it wasn't really what she wanted after all.

She wants iced tea. She boiled up a huge pitcher of it and siphoned it off for a week. I finally poured the remainder into my glass just to ensure she wouldn't drink sweetened botulism or something. See how much I love you, babe?! SEE?! And no, I couldn't pour it out. You don't pour out sweet tea, people. Like, ever.

She wants sushi (currently unfulfilled). Raisin bran. Fried eggs with grape tomatoes (I'll giveya three guesses who was frying eggs at 10pm). Pecan pie. She insists we have French toast and pork sausage every Saturday. I deliver crushed ice and apple juice to her nightstand at 7ish every morning. (She spills it at least once per week.) I put the glass of juice next to the Pop Tarts that get her going. Eats her "real" breakfast out on the patio with Jack. 2nd breakfast... it's like they're hobbits.

She avoids the "smell" of the dishwasher like it's the Black Death. Wasn't really aware there was much smell there but hey, I'm not currently incubating another human being. H.M. can't stand being in the vicinity of raw meat, especially chicken. And beef. Sausage. Lunchmeat. Pork. She shies away from the fridge altogether. Thinks it's revolting.

The cravings and aversions are really just part of the odd behavior generally (mostly in trying to reduce the nausea). She walks around with kid's (blue camo) Sea Bands on. The adult ones don't fit her. (I think the urban camo is quite flattering.) The nausea still kills her anyway. So enter Preggie Pops: the world's most rare, expensive, and sour candy. I don't even want to do the math, because they're probably like a few grand a pound. But she's got to have candy or something to snack on at all times. Empty Tic Tac boxes and Jolly Rancher wrappers litter the house. And her car. Peppermints are everywhere.

Speaking of nausea, the dry heaving is the absolute best. These vulgar, disgusting sounds echo through the house at all hours.

I declare. All of you people are CRAZY.

I have no idea if this is a craving or not, but she made me crank up 1944's Arsenic and Old Lace the other night. I second what Cary Grant's character observed:

"Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops!"

Veni, Vidi, Weewee

2011-09-06T13:46:00.005-05:00

THE CONQUERING HERO

That's right, he came, he saw, he potty-trained. I say again, we have housebroken the child. And the indoor plumbing fixtures of the earth did tremble mightily.

In unrelated news, Kimberly-Clark stock dropped sharply on a reduction in forecast U.S. diaper demand. Weird.

Jack took to the ah, first order of business immediately, since a primary characteristic of being male is the ability to urinate on demand anywhere, anytime. "Phase II" as Majesty calls it, took a bit longer. But two weeks of perseverance (and a ton of guitar time whilst sitting on the throne) did the trick. There. Civilization returns to the house once again. We're not perfect yet - he's still working with a net during the night and at "Quiet Time" (f.k.a. "naptime") but it's a good start.

So this is an object lesson for all who would take little things for granted: Don't.

Oh, and this Quiet Time thing is sheer genius. We've been fighting over naptime since he was 18 months old (I'm told), and things are much, much better now that we skip over all that babystuff foolishness. So Jack heads to his room, grabs an 18" stack of books (really), and reads quietly or sings songs by himself. H.M. heads off to DVRed Friends episodes, and I hit the old leather couch in the living room and konk out for a half hour of oblivion.

This is a GOLDEN AGE!

Is there anything JR Cash can't do?

A week back, we did the last of many third birthday parties for Jack with a few friends. As usual, I won't bore you with sticky, buttercream icing covered details, but I do want to mention the awesomest kid's CD I've ever seen, given by Jack's bud, Hudson: THE JOHNNY CASH CHILDREN'S ALBUM. You heard me. This is like the Death Star of children's music: This [CD] is now the ultimate power in the universe!

We had an excellent Labor Day weekend. It started off poorly for me with a trademark headache on Friday evening. After I had (partly) recovered, I sat out on the porch - zonked out of my gourd on meds, mind you - and I saw a large hawk alight in a tree near me. Real or imagined, I had no idea. He had something in his grasp, but I couldn't see straight if you paid me. I then see his cargo just flapping for dear life. The hawk takes off from his branch, and drops what turns out to be a DOVE in my swimming pool like he's a B-29 on a bomb run.

The fam is out there by this time, and I am now pretty sure this is real. Yeah, I go fish the injured dove out of my ce-ment pond without falling in (I grabbed the one in the middle). Anyway, Jack and I had Wild Kingdom time with the calmest almost-was-a-tasty-meal on the planet. Later, when Majestad then heard bats flitting around above us, she looked at me and said, "I'm outta here."

City folk.

Somehow we became Southern California over the weekend, and we dipped into the low 90s, with strong winds, rock-bottom humidity, and... wildfires. The whole place smells like a weenie roast gone horribly, horribly wrong. But Jack and I got to swim a long while, and to work in the front yard (insert obligatory wheelbarrow ride here). I mean, after we took care of H.M.'s Arby's craving, that is. By the way, I haven't eaten this much Arby's since they did 5 for 5 my freshman year of college. It's absolutely insane. And tangy. But insane, too. I'll do an official cravings post soon. A preview: We made stove-top hot chocolate this weekend. You know, to ward off the Texas summer chill. Brrrrrrr!

A question for all you wise folks out there. Any advice on how/when to tell Jack about ~~his competition~~ numero dos? We wanted to wait until we at least have brother or sister specifics to give him... Got any words of wisdom for us?

"Gelato, I hardly knew ye."

Yes, that is TP. In necktie form.

"Dad, don't get me wrong, I love the horsepower, but I mean, the turning radius just isn't there."

The Novennial

2011-08-31T14:30:00.002-05:00

Nine years, or about one quarter of my life ago today, I was married to the ever wonderful and beautiful Majesty. And so for the years since we made it legal, we've been trying to make it good. And that ain't always easy, folks.

The good part comes slowly in little things, in fits and starts. You make glacial progress toward it. Oddly, growth happens when you decide to grow up. When you realize that things don't revolve around you and your ease. Am I there yet? Nah, not by a longshot. But maybe on the day of our 18th Anniversary, G0d willing, I'll be closer than I am now.

Anyway, as I keep pointing out, never has a more painfully average man snagged himself a better woman. I'm glad you're here to share this little slice of the universe, babe.

Now to figure out the logistics behind getting a pregnant girl an illicit shipment of sushi...

Fahvuh’s Day or In Which I Make A Very Big Announcement

2011-08-23T11:05:00.009-05:00

If you can slog through this mess, I promise there’s a payoff. I think. This is a story about when an ordinary day suddenly turns interesting.

On a Sunday a while back, I had to stand up and say a few words during communion in our early service. It happened to be FAHVUH’S DAY, as Jack puts it. I’d been up too late trying to organize my thoughts. I usually do my rehearsing/rehashing out loud while floating in the pool, but it was already past 10. I had run a good bit Saturday morning, so I ended up stretching out some tired muscles on the bedroom floor. And by this time, some tired neurons, too.

Next day, I dragged myself out of bed and made my way through my warmup and finally over to the gym. My head wasn’t exactly clear, but it was plenty clear enough to dread proving myself a complete fool to 400 people. The workout ground itself out, ticktocking from monotony to enjoyment and back again. They do that.

My pre-workout shot of chocolate milk had used up Jack’s 2 percent. So I careened over to HEB in my rickshaw of a car, and headed back to the milk case. There was one other person in the aisle, obviously an athlete of some stripe, his cart already about a third full even that early in the morning.

Back to the house to nuke the leftover half-caf homemade espresso in a mason jar and down the last of the Peanut Butter Captain Crunch. I know, I know - truly the Breakfast of Champions everywhere.

I threw on my standard not-trying-too-hard Suit-No-Tie… but I really was trying a little harder than normal, so I actually shaved. We were late. I flew over to the church building and just made the little informal meeting of those who would serve during the morning’s worship. The song before communion was Alas and Did My Savior Bleed. Alas. Bleed. Got it.

Apparently my bit went over okay; people were very kind in their reactions. I’m not well known at the church, and am rusty at that sort of thing, anyway. My voice gets this odd quaver in it now.

We finished up with Bible class, me in the phenomenal Romans class taught by my all-time favorite preacher, a man truly gifted in simplifying (and then relating) complex theology. Majesty had rolled her aaaaaalmost healed sprained ankle again while teaching the little tribe of three year olds (+Jack “I Play A Three Year Old On TV”). Back to the big black orthopedic walking boot for her. We slowly edged out to the truck, The Dude in tow.

Majesty had the keys, and hopped in the driver’s side. But I almost always drive. Y’know, because I’m pretty much insufferable as a passenger. Hey, it’s no secret. I look at her, and before I get a chance to protest, she says, “My foot hurts, and I’m going to let you out at the store to get some milk.”

AHA! THIS IS MY CHANCE TO FINALLY PROVE I’M A GOOD HUSBAND DON’T BLOW IT MORGAN DON’T BLOW IT DON’T BLOW IT…

“I already got milk. I already got it.” HA! TAKE THAT. TAKE THAT, WOMAN!

She sputtered (obviously shocked that I could’ve been so responsibly thoughtful, like, ever) and then said words I will not forget:

“Then you can get some orange juice. And a pregnancy test.”

I just grinned like an idiot, stunned, halfway in the passenger seat, halfway out. I don’t even remember what I said – I think I just managed a big, dumb, “Okay!”

She said later that she hadn’t told me beforehand because she didn’t want to spook me for my communion talk, which I really appreciate. I don’t want to imagine the sweaty, blathering, giggling result otherwise.

H.M. also said that she didn’t plan to tell me in a parking lot. It just happened. But I couldn’t - and still can’t - imagine a better way to be told: “Hey, get some Tropicana. No pulp. And I’m pretty sure you’re going to be a father. So remember, the big picture here is NO PULP.”

I have learned at least two things from all this. First, sometimes Father’s Day is meant to be taken literally. Second, I think there’s something fishy going on with those big black orthopedic boots. Seriously. We found out about Jack when I was waddling around in one of those things after a leg break. Anybody know how we can get immediate government funding for a study? We’ll all be RICH. Rich, I tell you.

Anyway, watch yourselves out there. One minute you’re limping to your physical therapy appointment, the next you’re digging the Pack ‘N Play out of the attic, down 250 grand plus college.

In truth, I had learned this part already, but the OJ/Fatherhood announcement was a pointed reminder that my timetables, plans, and absolutely surefire knowledge of the future are all pretty much a bunch of smoke and guesses and worthless nonsense. But anybody with any sense knows that.

I have so many things swirling around in my head now. And as you’d imagine, I’ve got plenty to write about, too. I have too many questions. But most importantly, I have thanks, praise and adoration for God in my heart for answering prayers. We would covet your prayers as well. (And your large cash donations. There's that.)

So it's Round 2, then. Ding, ding.

A Birthday Post

2011-08-16T15:52:00.001-05:00

"I'm horseback riding like Daddy!"

We've been super busy. As you may remember, the crew basically split up the continental U.S. between us, with Majestad and Jack taking the East, leaving me with the West. It's like Risk. Worldwide domination, here we come.

I jumped on a plane the morning of Jack's third birthday, and sang Happy Birthday to him in the middle of coach. The older couple sitting next to me said they thought about joining in. Told them the entertainment was free with the price of admission.

So Jack-san is TWEE YEAWS OWLD. He told me so when I picked them up at the airport. Which just bakes my noodle all the way through. Time, whatever else you think about it, is difficult to take in. I mean, to comprehend. To have a fundamental grasp of. It drags on, then arbitrarily speeds past with only the memory of it as fading proof. As I (uh, rapidly) age, the moments pile up; I can't hope to reliably record the library of stuff and thoughts and images and laughter. Such is being a parent. Heck, such is being.

You do what you can. So happy birthday, my boy. Many happy returns. I'm more amazed at you with each passing day.

This could be Mars for all I know.

It's really a cruel thing to take a Houston area resident and stick them in the Pac Northwest during August. And it's not because of the pristine summer weather up there. The cruel part is when you take away the pristine weather. I've got to tell you, after stepping off my return flight and walking up the jetway in Houston, it took me a half hour to come up with compelling reasons why I live in this brutal climate (answers were "Mexican Food," followed closely by "Driving Fast" and "Because My Wife Is Always Cold").

I went running up there one morning. It was 52 degrees. High temp at home that day? 102 degrees. The ~~misery~~ heat index in Texas hovered right around the melting point of aluminum. Running in Washington was like running on another planet. The only drawback is that they have quadriceps burning, soul crushing hills. Big ones. And lots of 'em. Anyway, it was the second time I had been up there for this particular conference, and we were right on the Columbia River Gorge. I cheated death on this year's horseback ride (saw a BWACK BEAW!) and also survived the whitewater rafting trip (someone's gotta do it). Oh yeah, there was a conference thingy in the middle somewhere. Right. Good grief, I love my job.

During the week, H.M. sent me a steady stream of texts and pictures to give me my occasional absentee dad fix. Examples:

Okay, I have to tell you about the monkey. Uncle Blake has this old toy monkey that is pretty ferocious looking. It's about a foot high and walks around menacingly on battery power. Jack was TERRIFIED of it. Absolutely terrified. Coincidentally, The Dude also has a bad habit of running up to Uncle Blake's room when nobody's watching to jam on Blake's guitar.

So before I left Mobile a few weeks ago, I had a chance to do what all loving, caring, patient fathers dream of doing: getting even with the chilrun. I wandered into Blake's room one day and stood the toy monkey up slightly behind a corner as you enter the room. I put it precisely where a little boy would come face to face with it. In a dark room, no less. I congratulated myself on my (evil) ingenuity and went my merry way.

The next day, we're upstairs getting dressed for something or other, and I see Jack venture quietly toward the room. He goes in. I then hear "AHH AHH AHHHHH AHH AHHHHHHH!!!!!" and see Jack shoot out of there like he's on fire, arms flapping, the works. I was crumpled on the floor, about to asphyxiate. H.M. didn't exactly, ah, approve.

But total victory is sweet, indeed. Sweet but brief. I got a text after I left town from Majesty that said "He's overcome his fear." She had attached a picture of Jack reaching out and barely touching the monkey's nose. Reminded me of E.T. But with a monkey. And without the glowing finger. Okay, it's nothing like E.T. at all, so just drop it.

And conquering fear naturally leads into... dental work. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, that's my kid flossing the monkey's teeth.

I didn't even bother trying to tell Jack the monkey needed to floss because it had been eating little boys whole. That monkey's lost his touch. Totally.

No News Is Boring News

2011-08-09T10:02:00.001-05:00

I've been over here in Texas batching it and watching the plants on the patio bake. It's riveting. I left Majesty and The Dude in Alabama. Or put another way, I was expelled from the state without my family. To earn that daily bread stuff.

So I'm running the usual playbook: watching more TV than I've seen in probably the last 12 months combined, reading and rereading books, staying up too late, playing that rock and roll music too loud, and eating an arterially dangerous sequence of identical meals (chorizo, potato and egg tacos). The whole place smells strongly of coffee, cumin and fresh tortillas.

I hate when the family is out of town. When I've got some huge fixerupper project going, it's tolerable. Being both busy - and then incredibly tired - is a great antidote for the quiet of an empty house. But with no projects to speak of, and 110+ degree heat indices, I'm starting to feel like a dog locked up in the hall bathroom. At least there's Skype. Thank goodness for that.

I think Majestad is going to come home to some scratched up baseboards and chewed chairlegs.

Tick tock.

Of Babies, Rainbows and Low Country Boil

2011-08-05T13:32:00.003-05:00

This past weekend we hauled everything over to Mobile to catch Baby Nolan's birfday.

I'm officially a real-deal, legit UNCLE now. (I'll be signing autographs in the lobby afterward.) Baby and mommy and daddy are all okay, and everybody has the requisite number of toes and fingers and ears and nostrils and whatever, last I checked. Was a very good time. Some observations:

Traditions are good. And odd traditions are even better. Bebe and Poppa have this great custom of trolling for blueberry pancakes (or is it waffles?) every time they have a grandbaby. I'm told I actually witnessed the first installment of this back in 2008, but I have absolutely no memory of it. None. I mean, zero. How messed up was I?! Anyway, seeing Bebe crush a full on, buttered up slab of blueberry deliciousness is like watching a star go supernova: it's just not something you see everyday.

Celebratory dinners are relative. Before we left the hospital on Tuesday night, the staff brought in the "celebratory meal" for the new padres. The choices were either a piece of fried fish or a sandwich, and let's just face it, nobody celebrates with cold cuts. Doesn't happen. Anyway, the fried fishyfish and hushpuppies actually looked pretty darn good. (Okay, I was still too distracted by the electric blue frosting on the Celebratory Cupcakes to notice much else.) After a long while, everybody started talking about how good it sounded to go get fried fish or heck, just fried something-er-other, period. Enter Wintzell's Oyster House down on Dauphin Street.

Somehow I've been patrolling Mobile for almost 13 years without shoehorning myself into Wintzell's. This is the place where certain (anonymous) members of the family tauntingly email me pictures of huge fresh oyster platters. Total cheap shot. Anyway, we proceeded to annihilate one of the all-time best family dinners, well, ever. Crab claws. Buttered bread. Fresh oysters. Low country boil. Gumbo. Shrimp and grits. Bread pudding. (Lotsa) bourbon sauce. It was stupid good. Stupid, I tell you. Jack notched firsts in several categories.

Explaining how to eat crab claws to a two year old can be complex.

No, these aren't all about eating. Okay, okay, here you go.

Baby experiences are dependent on a huge array of variables. (See? Not about food.) The difference in cities/cultures/doctors/hospitals is insane. Not to trash on Mobile at all - I'm sure it's fairly typical of places its size - but I was very glad we had Jack in a larger city. It just fit us conservahippies better. Mobile makes Houston look like - and I can't believe I'm making this comparison - San Francisco. Hilarious example: A (Mobile) doctor actually told Jay and Emily, "Don't bring a doula [with you to the hospital]." Er, yeah. Right, doc. Then you'll know what a digitus tertius is.

The State of Louisiana shuts down Interstate highways arbitrarily, and too often. Maybe it's the Cajun/English language barrier. "ONE LANE?! No, you idiots! I said TRES BIEN!"

Almost forgot: Jack saw his first rainbow just after starting the drive to Alabama. And no, it hasn't rained a lot here. Check it out!

We're approaching Jack's third birthday. Stay tuned for all sorts of frosting-slathered details. Majesty asked him what he wanted for his birthday this year. With a big smile he said simply, "A big red birfday cake!" Simple (and permanently staining) pleasures, I guess.

And on an administrative note, we've officially hit our third year of CJMP. You poor, poor people. Well, heck, you've hung in there this long...

What's a few more wasted years?

Baby It Like Beckham

2011-07-27T10:35:00.005-05:00

This might be rocky. I promise I'm going somewhere - just stay with me.

There are few topics that get my goat like overpopulation alarmism. You'll hear it called Malthusian catastrophe, sometimes. You've seen it, because it's everywhere. The idea itself has made the rounds for a few hundred years, but it really wedged itself into mainstream thinking with the publication of Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968. Heck, I can remember well-meaning science teachers frightening us about this stuff when I was a teenager.

To summarize a few of the gory details, folks like Ehrlich, Thomas Malthus and many more basically theorized that since the earth and its resources are finite, an upward, exponential trend in human population will eventually destroy us all because we'll simply exhaust the food/clean water/living space we have. It's a fairly logical idea.

The problem is, it's not true. Population growth has absolutely skyrocketed since the alarm was raised about two centuries ago, with living standards throughout the world generally improving, not the other way round.

True or not, there are some really very nasty public policy ideas that naturally follow from this type of thinking: legalizing (and encouraging) abortion, allowing certain death rates to rise, eugenics, Chinese-style limits on family size, you name it.

So this brings me to David Beckham. Really. Mr. Beckham, of soccer/footballing fame, welcomed his fourth child into the world last week. You might have heard that a few Brit papers sniffed that having this *ahem* outrageous number of children was "environmentally irresponsible" and that the Beckhams were "very bad role models."

Wow. I mean, where do you even start?

I wonder if the overpopulation myth is where general hatred for parents and kids comes from. Everyone knows that "good" people:

Have few kids, if any (moral restraint)
Meticulously recycle and drive hybrid cars (religious worship/good deeds)
Eat only organic/free range/etc. food (a new "kosher," as others have noted)
Publicly defend the environment/earth/nature/etc. (proselytizing)
Donate to activist organizations (alms giving)

These are the basic tenets of the new religion. Of course, "bad" people don't live within these wonderful conventions. *Gulp* Hey, and there's nothing inherently wrong with some of the stuff above. But, as in everything, motives do matter. Tremendously.

Look at the comments section for (non-Chuck E. Cheese) restaurant reviews where kids are welcome. The anti-family vitriol from the usually younger, single, and/or childless folks is at times downright evil. Normally this would just be classified as rude behavior.

But when the environmental movement gives its blessing, and coos that you're actually doing the responsible thing by calling out these filthy "breeders" (a term that will instantly land you in a fistfight with this dad, by the way), you're not a jerk - you're virtuous.

So making snide comments to pregnant women surrounded by little ones in the supermarket is totally fine. Ridiculing families (of any size) and those who would like to be parents is commendable. It's your civic and moral duty. Like voting or driving the speed limit.

When I get really fired up about the war on families, I take comfort in one thought. The militantly anti-family/anti-child have a little demographic problem, themselves:

They might just breed their ideology into extinction.

Here are The Boston Globe and Washington Examiner articles, if you're interested:

Jeff Jacoby: Population Boon

Washington Examiner: The expected value of each human being is positive

Growing Up (And Down)

2011-07-18T14:56:00.022-05:00

One thing that throws me about seeing Peter Pan on the stage is that girls are always cast to play Pan. The other convention y'all have no doubt seen is that Tinkerbell is always "played" by a (usually annoying) flickering spotlight, accompanied by (irritating) jingling music or some equivalent noise. Yes, I know Barrie's classic was originally in play form.

Jack is obsessed with Peter Pan. And he went about it the right way, too. We've been reading slices of a fat Disney storybook and he immediately loved Peter Pan. I was changing him at one point over the weekend, and he was driving me almost completely insane. Kept serially chattering WendyJohnandMichael enough to make me start twitching uncontrollably. I fixed him up, sent him on his way, and he was finally quiet. Until I heard, very plainly:

"I'm not going to grow up. And I'm not going to grow down."

I almost shot milk out my nose. I was not drinking any milk.

But since we were unsure he'd like the actual Peter Pan movie, we Netflixed it (I'm quite sure that's a verb) and let him see it on Saturday. It was a rainy day, and just perfect for movie watching.

It was really nice to sit down and see Disney's interpretation. I hadn't seen it in decades. I didn't get to watch much, but it was really interesting to note that particular era in animation (1953), when some scenes bled back into the soft-edged Snow White or Fantasia days, and others reached forward to The Jungle Book and beyond.

We had his BIDH BOY BEHD mattress delivered that day, and he sat in front of the flatscreen, transfixed as I wrangled and fixed and strategerized about furniture. I finally got the mattress tentatively anchored to my odd-sized, ancient, heavy iron bed. It's been in storage for years. It's unpainted and is varnished only in Briwax. I bought it for 150 bucks to furnish my first apartment and it weighs as much as a Buick.

It is Jack's new bed.

So the crib and the renowned Zip-A-Kid Foolproof Incarceration Tent are no more. It took some time to break it all apart and put everything down in storage. So we busted our little inmate out of stir, and he's now free to roam and destroy his room at will. At night. Oh, and pretty much the rest of the house, too. Climbed right over the baby gate at the foot of the stairs to come say "Hi" to me at one point. Uh oh.

We've kinda gone from Birdman of Alcatraz to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, if you follow.

Majesty tries to put him down for the first official nap in his huge expanse of bed. Doesn't go well. His head is about to explode, and she just gives up and leaves. After a good while, she turns on the monitor and hears him quietly whimpering. He's managed to solidly wedge himself between the iron headboard and the wall.

I didn't fare much better at nighttime. We read, and prayed, and sang, but he was still uncontrollably fidgety. I took off. After finishing up an installment in our weekend Potterthon, we hear him at about 10:30, still fidgeting away. I stroll up there and quietly ask him my usual, "Jack? Anything you need to tell Daddy?" In this comically loud whisper, I get:

JMW: "That man sells apples in The Babe and I." (Talking about a recent library book.)
EC: "Yep, he does sell apples in that book. Anything else you want to tell me?"
JMW: "Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1st Samuel, 2nd Samuel, 1st Kings."

We sang a song or two as I tried to stifle my laughter.

Photographic Evidence of Our Existence

2011-07-14T12:41:00.000-05:00

Incredibly, some (dated) photos finally showed up on one of my memory sticks. Look well upon them, ye dogs!

Pennies

2011-07-06T10:24:00.006-05:00

Switching gears today. And once again, no pictures. Sorry, I'm working on it.

I wanted to share a communion thought I gave a few weeks back, for reasons that will become apparent later.

If you're not familiar, it's customary in the Churches of Christ, as it is in other evangelical Christian groups, for someone to stand up and give a few brief thoughts before the taking of the communion, or Lord's Supper, which we participate in weekly (for background, see the events of Matthew 26, especially verses 26-27 and also Acts 20:7). Some guys bail on the devotional and give quick prayers of blessing, and some wordy ones forget that they're not the preacher and drone on forever.

For me, it can be the most revelatory and interesting part of the service, since you hear what the average Joe thinks about his salvation. About Christ. About God. At times it's hilariously strange. Sometimes it's profoundly moving.

People approach the communion service in many ways. In the quiet spaces, some read their Bibles to maintain focus. They go to the messianic Psalms, or to Isaiah, or they read the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion. They close their eyes and pray. They meditate on Jesus Christ himself, or on the very idea of his mission. Still others just sit there and try to make sense of what exactly happened, and why.

I'm probably in the latter group. And I get into ruts with my thinking, turning the same idea over in my head week after week. My most recent rut, running through even last Sunday, has been to simply thank G0d for my family's salvation. For my own salvation. For Majesty's salvation in Christ. For the opportunity to teach Jacques about Jesus as he grows.

Sometimes, when I've had my coffee, and I'm really feeling high-minded, I'll actually thank God for saving those in my church family, or even those across the world, that are acting out roughly the same thing we're doing right here in The New Town.

But I think I've missed the larger point. Christ didn't give his life for just my family. He didn't give his life just for those in the same church building I'm in. And he didn't die for only those seeking to do his will right now, in this moment. His mission was to provide salvation for all those that have ever lived. For all those living now. And for all those that will ever live. Everyone. Everywhere. Ever. Will all those take hold of it? Sadly, no. But his mission stands, nonetheless.

It was widely reported a while back that world population will pass 7 billion this year. That's a whole lot of people. And, by extension, that's a whole lot of sin. It got me wondering, do we have an idea of how many people that have ever lived, total? One demographer I found had calculated the number at just over 100 billion people, all-time. That's 100,000,000,000. Now, straight up, I have no idea whether that figure is even in the ballpark. But assume for a moment that it is.

When people start throwing around billions and hundreds of billions and trillions, my eyes glaze over pretty quickly. The reason is simple: numbers that large are almost impossible to imagine. They don't even seem real. And I like concrete, real visualizations. Like pennies. You know what a penny looks like, right? You've got them in your pockets, your desk drawers, and in the ashtray - sorry - coin tray of your car. They're about 1/16th of an inch thick.

So back to our 100 billion people. If you took 100 billion pennies, and stacked them up right in front of you, the stack would be just shy of 100 thousand miles high. That's not quite halfway to the moon. Each penny a person. Each person a soul. Each soul in desperate need of salvation.

This speaks not only to the breadth of Christ's sacrifice but to its absolute, extreme power. Think about how much sin and unrighteousness and lawlessness 100 billion people could crank out. Heck, I can hold my own just by myself. Unfortunately, you can, too.

It's wonderful to boil salvation right down to what it does for you and yours. Salvation can be, and indeed is, near to us all. That's kind of the point. But when we fail to think in larger terms, much larger terms, we're underestimating exactly what we are, and what we're a part of: An eyedropper full in a vast ocean.

I Hear the Train A Comin'

2011-06-30T15:18:00.001-05:00

I'm way, way behind in getting some pictures and videos posted. Sorry. I really hope we can capture some of the sprog's latest antics in digital glory. He's been pretty hysterical of late.

What's up with us, you ask? Not a whole heckuva lot. Summer in Houston has arrived, and the weirdish, hippy SoCal Spring we were having is long gone (As are the sit ins, peace demonstrations and tye dye). Now it's just dead hot and nasty. I try to do what I'm going to do outside either before the sun is up, or well after it's down. Like vampires. Vampires with lawn care businesses.

Bebe and Poppa decided to pop over for a visit since Majesty re-sprained her ankle at church a week back. The redux was incredibly convenient, let me tell you. Anyway, they (Bebe, Poppa and Jack) all had a blast over at The Children's Museum - a pretty slick place to hang out if you're in the business of being entertained. Or in the biz of having your kid major-league diverted for a coupla hours.

Let's see... what else? Oh, Jack is investigating his, uh, carry-on luggage capabilities. So we let him string beads on pipe cleaners and shoelaces to improve those motor skill things. The beads are, as it happens, about one nostril wide. He started fussing a bit during the bead stringing exercise one night last week. No one saw anything. We asked him straight out if he had shoved one, y'know, up north somewhere. He denied everything. We looked (trust, but verify) but could see nothing.

Next morning, a hanky finally exposed his fib: Kleenex, meet orange bead. Right.

Musically, The Dude's on a pretty resilient Johnny Cash kick but alternates with Soldiers of Christ Arise and Send the Light. Hey, Johnny was steeped in gospel, too.

And I kid you not, one day last weekend I hear "I HEAW THE TWAIN A TUMMIN', IT'S WOLLIN' WOUND THE BEND..." and he proceeds to belt out, strumming his guitar, a medley of Folsom Prison Blues, Long Black Veil, and Oasis/Ryan Adam's Wonderwall.

I believe they call that "musical versatility."

The Post-Father's Day Reader

2011-06-20T10:09:00.005-05:00

Once the line was cast, we popped open our Dr Peppers, listened to the rhythms of the wind and the water lapping against the boat, and the hours that passed opened up their marrow. --Tim Dalrymple

The events of FAHVUH's Day weekend have still got me beat. I. Am. Exhausted.

But hey, I got a book* and (no fooling) a BASEBALL GLOVE from Majesty and Jack! So awesome. Oh, and a card that screams out Sammy Hagar's I Can't Drive 55. I just want to say that having a day for presents in late June just blows my mind. (My BUHFDAY is in the fall.) This dad thing has got an upside after all.

So I give you a Post-Father's Day Reader. Neither article is overly long, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

You might have heard already about Mr. Thomas S. Vander Woude. His horrific choice becomes the ultimate illustration of fatherhood itself:

Jeffrey Goldberg: A Father's Day Lesson About Children and Life

Next, I give you Tim Dalrymple's piece about his father, being a father, and some not-so-obvious gift ideas. By the way, if you don't read everything Tim Dalrymple writes, you're the poorer for it. The story is posted on his personal blog:

Philosophical Fragments: Gift Ideas for Father's Day

A quick Jack story for you:

Last night H.M. tells me about putting Jack down for the night. They had made it through storytime. Jack always hates when storytime's over, and pleads for more books to be read. The Mommy puts the lamp out as he fusses, and says, "No, Jack, it's dark - and what do we do when it's dark?" She was fishing for the painfully obvious answer of, "We go to sleep."

What she got, however, was Jack saying flatly in the darkness, "We turn on the WIGHT!"

Like, duh, old people.

*Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell. Looks to be just wicked crazy awesome so far. Couldn't put the thing down last night.

Toddler, Monkey, Con-Man, Mountaineer

2011-06-14T15:38:00.003-05:00

Do you have plantation shutters? I didn't even know what those were a few years back. Anyway, we've got plantation shutters. Lots of them. 'Cause, you know, I like to sit behind them in a rocking chair wearing a white linen suit and horn-rimmed glasses watching my sugar cane being harvested. Or something.

They're pretty cool little inventions, plantation shutters. They can make a room as dark as Egypt, which is excellent for sleeping. We like to say that la casa nueva is a great "sleeping house" because of that very thing. They're pretty much maintenance free. Dust on the shutters? Sure. It happens. But what shouldn't have to be removed from them, like ever, is my 2.5 year old. You see where this is headed.

Majesty walks in the used-to-be-a-study-now-it's-a-playroom the other day, and Mr. Guess Who is 8 or 9 feet up above the parquet, scaling the shutters like an ice climber on a frozen waterfall.

That ain't good.

Majesty hears Jack in the upstairs office closet and can't locate him. He's not in there, but she hears him... above her. He had climbed a series of boxes, and ended up on the extreme top shelf - a pretty darn wobbly deathtrap of a top shelf - of the closet.

That ain't good, either, folks.

And he's not getting the message of the frequently frequent spankins and talkin' tos either. I stroll through the playroom the other day (still in my linen suit, right), and just casually look over at Jack, perched atop his toy kitchen, about 5 feet up. You remember the toy kitchen.

We're trying the taking away toys thing. Pretty marginal results. He's had more stuff confiscated than a con doing twenty to life at San Quentin. His guitar. His ukulele. His microphone. Thomas the Tank Engine. Friends and associates of Thomas the Tank Engine (Yes, he has a ukulele; stay on target, here.) Buzz and Woody. Everybody - and I mean everybody - is in protective custody.

About an hour after the kitchen incident, I'm watering the withered lumps of greenish brown that pass for my mint plants. Jack's off playing in the jundle. I glance over there to make sure he's still alive, like they teach you to do every few hours or so in Dad School. He's suspended by both arms, hanging from a really unfortunate Youpon Holly tree. Smiling.

We've no idea what to do. He's far too young to fathom the whole grounding thing. Not to mention the whole acceleration of gravity thing, which is the real problem, I guess. Grounding probably wouldn't work anyway, gauging how headstrong (from mommy) and resistant to authority (from daddy) he is. He's got the pain threshold of a bull elephant, so all the whuppins are of little effect.

Nets? Maybe nets. Nets like those ex-Soviet trapeze dudes at Cirque du Soleil have. We can just cover the floors with safety netting. I might be on to something here. After all, netting worked like a charm in preventing BASE jumping from his crib.

We took a long weekend and went with our good friends Mike, Meredith, Aaron, Jason, Valerie and Baby NOWAH down to Galveston. We all split a house down at the western end of the island. You should have seen The Dude drown-proofing himself in the surf on the first day. Much more brave than in Florida, he crashed out into the deeper water and got just swamped with waves over and over again. Wouldn't stay with me for any reason. And he loved it.

At one point, he gets down parallel with the surf, letting it roll him, and roll over him, as he cackled and sputtered and choked and laughed and coughed out seawater. Not just a few times did I see the top of his hat under the big clear wave that just swamped him. Completely fearless. The second day he was a little more reserved, and got his kicks by letting me pitch him up in the air. I stopped counting at around 70 or so. Probably got a hundred out of me. Sheesh. I guess toddlers are sort of nature's medicine ball.

As you might suspect, swim lessons started yesterday.

Oh, I forgot to mention this the other week.

We took a walk on a trail by the house, and Jack insisted on riding his tricycle. We traipse up on a group of four high school girls, and they're still maybe 50 feet from us. Jack stops, stands up, and tumps his tricycle over. He flops on the ground and lies there, faking a wreck for the girls' benefit.

I've never seen someone stoop so low, or do something so, so... utterly brilliant.

Reversion to the Mean

2011-06-06T17:55:00.001-05:00

Not much time for writing these days, folks. Our annual meeting is this week, and they're ~~continuing to haze me by~~ letting me give a brief presentation. You know the secret of giving a really fantastic, engaging talk on an esoteric subject nobody could give two beans about?

Yeah, me neither.

So the family's back! Jack is about 18 inches taller than when I last saw him in person. Dunked a basketball right over me. It was sick.

Right after they get back, and after several tries, I finally get the water wings/swimmy thingamajigs on him. We swam yesterday until I was waaaaay past pruney. I was almost raisiny. I threw The Lead Baby up in the air a zillion times, him splashing everything withing a 10 mile radius and laughing uncontrollably. He was churning water with those little legs pumping like crazy. He would screech with joy and then plow toward our pool fountains like a semi truck driving through the water.

Majesty is still ~~really playing up her "injury"~~ limping around on her crutches and all. Yesterday she was sitting there propped up on two kitchen chairs, icing the bum ankle. She made some comment about how she was just taking it easy, not being demanding about anything. This is the familiar "I'm a good patient" speech that absolutely everyone gives at some time or other. Y'know, whether it happens to be true or not.

I had just filled Jack up on another sippy cup of pomegranate juice cut with water. H.M. says, "I'd like some, too." No problem. After almost reaching for another sippy cup... I start filling her (non-sippy) cup up with juice. "That enough?" I ask. "No, I usually do a little bit more." "How much more?" "Oh, I don't know, just a little bit."

More juice goes in. "No, no, that's way too much!" Naturally, I drink down an inch of juice (as she crinkles her eyes at me). What? No, really, what? I'm not throwing it down the drain - pom juice is like $10,000 an ounce. It's got gold leaf in it, I think.

And I top the cup off with water, just like she likes it.

And everything is normal again. Mostly.

UPDATE:

Majesty reminded me last night that the best part of this was Jack sneaking over while nobody noticed, drinking all of her juice, anyway. Resistance is futile.

Vidateleconfraparenting

2011-05-31T21:41:00.094-05:00

Vidateleconfraparenting
Just got done Skyping with the wifey and the Sprog of Sprogs. And the peanut gallery of relatives in the background, to boot.

That's about all the contact I've had in some time with the family. They've gone and left me. Hopefully not for good, but left me they have.

There was a baby shower for my 'bout-to-be-nephew. Or is it for his mom and dad? Dunno. It's to benefit every and all, I guess. So Majesty blew town with my kid for that. And that means...

I finish dangerous and highly laborious projects here at the house. The ones that involve machetes and live wires and acid and stuff. I cleared out about 30 acres of dense jungle behind the house, to be used as the fort/swingset location. That is, if I can get one in there before the jungle reclaims the land I cleared. Cannot tell you how much this project took out of me. I'm still tired, 3 days after. I'm so old and decrepit.

Are You Sure Your Wife Knows About This?
I went to Le Home Depot and dropped about fifty thousand dollars on every single electrical switch in the store. And one of those Electrocuting Yourself the Easy Way 1-2-3 books. I have this weird GFCI code conversion thing I'm doing in Jack's erstwhile pink bathroom, and I haven't attempted to wire something like this in about 7 or 8 years. And I'm not intelligent. So I needed a primer, and my other books weren't cutting it. I figured I could do worse for handing over 11 bucks. And you know, some pride.

The guy checking me out... no... ah... er, the dude scanning my items for purchase got about three quarters of the way through the mountain of white plastic switches, and pulls out the book. He looks at it, scans it, and then moves on... and then mumbles, "Reading up on wiring, huh?"

I thought, "I know how it looks, Home Improvement Guru. My annual salary worth of electrical equipment and a how-to book. There should be a copy of my last will and testament in the basket, too." But all I managed to drawl back was, "Well, I can do the easy stuff, but I've got this weird setup in my kid's bathroom that I need some help on."

The guy kind of nodded knowingly, like, "I'm one of the last people on earth to see this joker alive. Hope this fool's life insurance is paid up so his kid can go to trade school!"

Cross Off Another One on the Bucket List

Oh! And I got... I got...

A TOOLBELT. Yes. I did it. I can feel the testosterone course through me just mentioning it. I've never had one in my entire life, because, y'know, I'm not a professional or anything. What's the point, right? But boys and girls, let me tell you, all machismo and Tim Allen clichés aside, this is the greatest step forward I've ever made in my homefixingupping prowess. Ever. It's revolutionary. All your thingamajigs are right there at your hip, ready to help you demolish a perfectly good house. Quick.

My belt has a HOLSTER. Not going to lie to you, did a few quick draws with my cordless drill just for giggles. For a rapidly aging man, I'm still pretty fast, kids.

So I've been swimming every day like a darn manatee. I did a good long Bataan death march type run Monday. Jumped in the pool right afterward. I've been wiring outlets and frying every single meal with the sole and notable exception of decaf espresso with Cheerios. I've been watching subtitled French gangster movies that Majesty probably wouldn't dig (the 2 readers of Interestive might know which ones). I am quickly freeing myself of my domesticky shackles, bound once again for the violent freedom of being, like a dumb and happy wild animal, male. I'm lucky I still remember how to use indoor plumbing, but even that's fading fast.

The Experiment
Speaking of food, I should horrify you with my culinary experiment while the family is away: I've been exploring exactly how many Mexican dishes one can make from a relatively finite stock of ingredients (onion, garlic, jalapenos, serranos, queso fresco, colby cheddar, masa, 6 month old (!) tortillas - I'm absolutely serious, they're 6 months old yet miraculously pristine - cilantro, Valentina sauce, eggs, tomatoes, potatoes, tomatillos, and flank steak).

It's been a complete blur of carne asada tacos, homemade corn tortillas, salsa verde, the dangerously ancient storebought tortillas (when the homemades ran out), huevos rancheros, carne asada tacos, chilaquiles, huevos con papas, salsa fresca and huevos con papas. It's incredible.

And I miss my babies. Terribly. I know it doesn't sound like it from the above, but it's completely true. Hearing The Dude's little babyish voice on the phone takes about 2 weeks off my lifespan. Kills me. Kills me. And like taking the needle out of the compass, I am without direction and purpose when my one twoo wuv isn't around.

Yeah, and H.M. decided to trip down a set of stairs and sprain her ankle. (Word on the street is that she was pushed by family members. I don't doubt that.) Anyway, they're sort of stuck over in Alabama for the moment. But Jack is having a blast hanging out with his (very married and very pregnant) main squeeze, Aunt Emily. Shameful. And he's getting tossed in the air during pooltime by his Poppa. And picking blueberries. He doesn't even need me anymore, he's got fresh fruit.

But rest assured, back in Texas, this thing is only going to get stranger.

Children and Affluence

2011-05-24T17:18:00.013-05:00

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. --Philippians 4:8, KJV

I read very slowly. If it's really good stuff, I roll the language around in my head and ponder and reread and get caught up in some tangential thought and return eventually to read and reread again. It's a messy, frustrating way to do it, but it's mine. I can (consciously) speed up but I eventually drift down to "normal" again.

And I take in books almost literally, as the books I read become part of me forever. I think about some books almost daily, though I read them years ago. That's one reason book selection is very, very important to me. And maybe it should be to you. You can't read them all. So which ones make the list?

Not saying you have to read Kierkegaard every day; I certainly don't. I er, actually just finished a certain aging guitarist's autobiography, come to think of it... But by reading, are you taking the elemental stuff in, or are you giving pieces of yourself (and time) away cheaply?

Waitaminute. I've just convinced you not to fritter away your life on schlocky dad blogs. Forget everything I said!

Anyway, back to my point. One book I read a good while ago made roughly this observation:

In the West, we have fewer children, and later, because we've discovered that by doing so, we increase our affluence.

If that's true, it scares the pants clean off me. Is it? Has our materialism and self-centeredness really gone that far? Do people think, explicitly or otherwise, in those terms?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

And no, I'm not going to tell you which book. Makes no difference.

The One About the Ritz-Carlton

2011-05-20T17:16:00.008-05:00

This is proving to be the longest post of my life. I was about 70% done with this super-gigante when Blogger decided it was terrible and long and overwrought and deleted it all. I'm not sure whether to be irritated or relieved. Here's hoping the few scraps left in my head are workable.

First, a brief disclaimer. This post is not an attempt to bigtime you. There's just no other way to convey the ridiculousness of the past week without sharing some detail. There's a place for a vicious rant on serial namedroppers and $30,000 millionaires, but it ain't here.

Do you know the origin of the term "ritzy?" Me neither. But I think I'm beginning to get the idea.

They let people like me out of their shoebox punched full of holes about twice a year. For conferences and stuff. It's necessarily a rare thing, because everyone you meet suddenly realizes that with you here, there's absolutely zero getting done back at the office. For all they know, at that very moment there's an Ecstasy-fueled rave going on in the big conference room.

So a week ago I emerged, wild-eyed and pasty, for a work boondoggle. I know, big deal. Work wonks talking in 25 cent acronyms about scary "proposed legislation" and the "current regulatory environment." Boooooriiiing. I get that.

But this one was in Florida. In south Florida. On the beach. At the Ritz-Carlton. White sand, coconut palms, carved travertine fountains, Bentleys, people calling you Mister, you name it. And deep sea fishing. DEEP SEA FISHING. DEEPSEAFISHING. My hair almost fell out.

And I miiiiiight have been trying to keep this quiet. But then Majesty found out about it. The beach? The BEACH? There was no way she was missing the beach, she said.

Okay, so that's one extra person. No sweat. We'll just keep it our little secr...

Then The Named Storm found out about it.

Suddenly, I'm taking my 2.5 year old to the Ritz. Not that I'm afraid of traveling with Jack, he's unnaturally well behaved and tolerant of stuffy planes and turbulence ~~and creepy TSA agents~~ and bad airport food.

Anyway, let's just say that you should be glad the hotel is still there for you to enjoy. You should, in fact, be glad the entire state is still there.

Ladies and gentlemen, the other half lives very, very well.

First full day, I'm ~~trying desperately to stay awake~~ hard at work at the morning conference. The rest of the family is at the little terrace café thing to grab some quick breakfast before they hit the beach. While she's fixing up their plates, Majesty looks behind her to check on Jack. Somehow, he had gotten the spoon from the brown sugar bowl and was just chowing sugar like he was at the Super 8. She told me her instinct was to scream, "Jack! You can't do that at the Ritz-Carlton!" She instead grabs the spoon from him... and pretends nothing ever happened. That chick is the consummate professional.

And I can't believe the hotel snipers didn't get them first. I was under the impression that proper manners were enforced by lethal means. Hmmm.

Mr. "Yes, I Just Rocked Your Brown Sugar, What of It?" then shows up on the magnificently pristine beach. He - no kidding here - looks around, immediately bear hugs Majesty's leg, all the while making these squealing, happy sounds.

Those two end up eating dinner at the restaurant right on the beach. I heard afterward that they had a perfect view of the sunset... and the rainstorm that washed out my beachside dinner. Pretty funny, though - about 50 well dressed fundies, i-bankers and yours truly crammed under three beach umbrellas in the rain. LOTS of personal space was violated, let me just say. I had enough Britons cuddled around me to elect a member of Parliament.

But no complaints - I stayed dry. One half-soaked English girl next to me found out I had my wife and Baby Monster with me (she had left her husband and kiddo back home). We talked about the concept of marital capital. "Oh," she said, "you're doing quite well." She didn't know the half of it. Heh.

Anyway, nature was taking a long while to dry itself out, and one of the umbrellas mysteriously started to move, with 15 or so people still crammed under it. Their umbrella ended up right beside H.M. and Jack's table. Dinner for us moved indoors, and they trucked in more lobsters than I have ever seen in my entire life into our packed dining room. Think in 55 gallon drum terms. I plopped down by the Afghan-born New Yorker and the San Franciscan. The slightly damp North-easterners were puzzled. Evidently it's customary to serve Florida stone crab here, not Maine lobster. I guess it was like the time I showed up in Boston and was served... quesadillas. In Southie. I guess they had a point. The uncouth Texan had more lobster.

So in spite of the acronyms, the conference was pretty great on my end. I mean, when do you get to have dinner and hear a Medal of Honor recipient speak, or get to meet a U.S. Senator you saw on TV all the time when you were growing up, or haul up a reef shark?

Oh, one story. Senators, as you'd imagine, can tell some stories. Now, Bill Clinton anecdotes are probably my second favorite genre, right behind Reagan stories. This (very Republican) senator met with Clinton after he'd just been elected, but before he took office.

Clinton meets him with a huge smile, wraps his arm around him, and says, "Senator, you know, no two people in Washington more alike than we are." The lawmaker's ah, skeptical. "Our mothers were both practical nurses, we each came from poor backgrounds, we've both done a lot with ourselves, and we both care deeply about policy." Just laying it on as thick as you please.

The Senator eventually staggers out of the meeting, and is slapping himself on the face a few times to snap himself out of all the charm. He goes directly to a large Republican congressional meeting and loudly exclaims, "[Insert name of Christian deity here]!!!!! Fellas, we've never seen anything like this guy before! I mean, it's unbelievable!"

I did play just a leeeeetle bit of hooky when the conference topics got too nerdy even for me. I hit the beach with the family, but not before we got gelato at the little shop in the lobby. You're catching a theme. We didn't even want to leave the grounds. Miss Julie, about the nicest person in the universe, hooked Jack up with JEH-WATO, specifically some DOO-CHAY DUH WEH-CHAY. She even put sprinkles on it for The Dude. I had the dulce de leche too, but restrained myself from asking for sprinkles. Barely.

On Friday morning, Jack and H.M. spent probably an hour and a half just sitting in the water and jumping the waves. Jack was obsessed with the clear jellyfish that he found all along the beach and couldn't resist touching and patting them. Majesty said she buried about 2 dozen but finally gave up since they didn't seem to hurt him. His Super-skin is probably immune.

After I got back from disturbing the delicate marine ecosystem myself, we went down to the little aquarium at the hotel. This was genius. Sheer genius. Wasn't huge, wasn't the most spectacular thing ever, but a perfect diversion for kids. Jack's favorite part was the little turtles, which were in a big open tank so that you could touch their shells and pet them. Or in The Named Storm's case, frighten them with your enormous, waving, oar-length toddler arms.

That night, I was absolutely destroyed from sitting on a boat in the sun all afternoon (somebody's gotta do it), so we end up crushing room service burgers while watching the Toy Story DVD we brought. Jack sat on the little couch at the end of the bed, covered with a beach towel. And ketchup. I think it's one of my favorite family meal memories. I was as locked-in on the movie as Jack was. My oozy, medium rare, bleu cheese burger didn't last 45 seconds, people.

Oh, you want a hotel review? Well, alright, here you go.

The Pros:
If it's free
Excellent brown sugar
Room service
The beach
Gelato

Room service

The beach

Room service

The beach
The aquarium

Room service
Gelato

The beach

The Cons:

If it's not free
Skunky towels. I kid you not.
Noisy - do rich folks pay someone to sleep for them?
Travel time - takes nearly an entire day to get there
Are there any people actually left back in New Jersey? No, seriously, are there?

Even though we took what essentially became separate trips, everyone still had a blast in what has to be the best vacation in memory. I had forgotten how much fun it is to wander around, mouth hanging open, pointing, finally blurting out, "Gah-LEE! Lookuh THAT!" Majesty says she can't wait for next year. Ditto. When we got back home to Texas, we listed all our favorite things about the trip.

Jack's favorite? "Going back to the room with Mommy and Daddy!" Majesty's reaction: "What an awesome kid!"

Ditto.

Like, Catching Up and Stuff

2011-05-09T16:49:00.005-05:00

Catch up week. I was too busy spouting off about car washes that I neglected to update anyone and everyone about much else. Other, like, important stuff and stuff. Okay, you got me. I have virtually nothing in my Brown Paper Sack of Blogging today. Sue me, dude (or dudine, as applicable). Oh, yeah, there was the zoo last week. But I heard about that secondhand.

Mr. Leopard, This Is Your Wake Up Call

At the zoo, H.M. tells me that Aaron's trike was a big hit because of the little bell on it. Majesty was explaining to the sprogs that the leopard was sleeping, but you could see him if you searched for his spots. Jack (a.k.a. "tricycle hog"), was sitting on Aaron's ride and says, "It's okay, I wake him up! DING!!!! *rings the trike bell*.

Today's Vocabulary Word: Condescension
In other domestic news, Jack's started talking to Elmo like we talk to him (Jack). Did I mention that we have an Elmo that has buttons, zippers, shoelaces, and whatnot, ostensibly to teach young'uns how to get dressed? I think it's an elaborate plot for him to look sloppy and panhandle for change on the corner of Sesame Street and Alphabet. But that's my problem. Anyway, Jack talks to him in that unmistakable, benevolently condescending check-this-out-I'm-exploiting-a-teachable-moment-here parental tone, and asks him, "Elmo, do you hear that music?" or "Do you like that music, Elmo?" or "Elmo, can you clap your hands?"

I guess it really is true. Pretty much anyone on earth is qualified to do this parenting gig. That stings a little bit.

"Happy Mommy Days, Mommy."

"Mommy Days" (Mother's Day 2011, in Jack parlance) went fairly well, and was a success all around. Or else The MommyTM is too polite to tell us what she really thought. But she usually speaks her mind - I just heard a collective gasp of disbelief out there - so we probably did okay. That is, until next time, when we have another golden opportunity to ~~blow it.~~ ~~fritter away marital capital.~~ show our undying appreciation. And stuff.

Backyard Terrorism

2011-05-06T10:39:00.008-05:00

The new face of extremism.

The fact pattern was this:

A vivid memory I have from childhood is washing and waxing the car with Dad. My poor little CAWH hadn't had a bath since the summer of 2009. Really. Majestad had a some girls' movie night to head over to on Friday. (I get weepy just thinking about how much estrogen was in play, there.)

I took out the slide rule and Scotch-tape and squished all that together into an idea. I declared that Jack and I would wash the car. Wile E. Coyote, super genius, move over, dude. See, babysitting minutes burn like a raging grassfire, ending with the benefit of a glossy car. "Sheer geeeenius, that's what it is!"

I thought about jumping in the old faded-by-dangerous-chlorine-levels swim trunks. Nah, I mean, there's no way I'm getting wet. First, it's not that hot outside. And besides, we're only going to be spraying off the car for what, 2 minutes? Not necessary. Jack is giggling and grinning at my abject stupidity as we walk out the door. His brain is about to spontaneously combust when he sees the galvanized bucket stuffed with all sorts of leaky bottles and unsafe chemicals. And then there's the ultimate prize: the spray nozzle capping the end of the hose.

Have I mentioned that he is absolutely obsessed with water? And waterhoses? And sprinklers? Guess that's par for the course if you're 2.5ish.

I let him use the SPWAY GUN on the end of the hose to get the car wet. About 1,200 pounds of crud and dirt fall off the car, along with a body panel or two, a llama and an old paisley loveseat cushion. Jack's a steaming mess of giggling incoherence by this time. Having a BLAST. I get the thing soaped, and just at the moment when I discover that my car is, in fact, black not gray, I immediately feel a cold jet of water, right square on my butt.

The little water jihadi got me with pinpoint accuracy, and is just dying with laughter over his marksmanship. Furious, I grab the gun and soak a stripe right across him. He squeals, roars, and then convulses with more laughter. I pop him again (on the rump) again for good measure. Little turkey.

Needless to say, when the hard work started, dude bolted and let me finish it myself. He comes by that honest. That's probably what I get for using 35 year-old Turtle Wax. He knew better. Anyway, the two of us came in late (took a long time to figure out legal status of the Guatemalan family I found living in my trunk), and fried up potatoes, sausage and eggs for a dinner that would appall every woman on the planet. Jack inhaled it.

Holy war makes you hungry, I guess.

A Moveable Feast

2011-04-26T13:35:00.001-05:00

The Week in Haiku

2011-04-20T16:28:00.005-05:00

Thomas, Tank Engine
Came to Rusk for Jack to see
Short ride up? Snowcones

We went up to the Texas State Railroad in Rusk two weekends back. If you're within striking distance, you can't miss this, whatever your age. It's basically a very limited railroad complete with period steam engines and coaches. I actually did this trip when I was very young, taking the longer available trip between Palestine, TX and Rusk. No, no. PALLUH steen. There you go, that was good. I vividly remember the ring pop mom & dad bought me. My first.

We drove up there ~~to come full circle and repeat history~~ to see Thomas. You know the one. The obsession of bahzillions of little boys. Random Thomas the Tank Engine factoid: Ringo Starr used to narrate the TV show. Former Beatles reading to your child is awesome. Where was I?

Thomas in Rusk, yeah. So somehow dude found a way to get from the island of Sodor down to Tejas, and there he was, in all of his full sized, blue-painted glory, smoking smokestack and all. Hooked up to a real train. That you ride on. Jack's head almost exploded. Grammy and Grandpa met us over there, and we all tried to stall the exasperated Yakubu while we waited for 10:45. He got his picture (which we forgot... parenting FAIL) made with Sir Topham Hatt (for you uninitiated, just picture Mr. Peanut, but as a doughy Englishman, and you're pretty much there. He's the mayor/jefe of Sodor, if memory serves).

The train ride through the rough piney woods was beautiful, and ended far too soon. We'll do the longer trip to Palestine (no, no, STEEN. Right.) a few years from now, I think. But the weather was absolutely pristine, and uncharacteristically breezy. So the drive up was way more pleasant than I would have ever predicted. But hey, put me behind the wheel in the Texas hinterland on a picturesque day, and I'm beyond happy.

After we got done with Thomas, we all had a picnic under a pavilion and ate tutti frutti and tiger's blood snowcones. We looked like the local vampire family.

Jack was so beat - he was still recovering from the World's Longest Running Illness AND a huge growthicus spurticus - that he ended up lying in Majesty's lap, the rest of him spread out down the picnic table bench like warm peanut butter. That's what they call COMPLETELY UNHEARD OF, people.

"C'mon Aaron, let's
Go play" was heard... Hermann Park
Norah watches them

Jack, Aaron and Norah and their respective parental folk went down to Hermann Park for even more picnic action. I'm told it was picnickeriffic.

Visit entertains
Bebe and Poppa bring ~~floss~~ fun
Chuy’s is delish

They came. They saw. They Chuyed.

Jack played with Poppa in the CAWH Saturday morning. When Majestad went to check on them, she told me she saw her dad sitting in the back seat. Jack was in the driver's seat wearing Uncle Blake's golf hat... and was busy flossing his teeth with real dental floss. Her reaction to all this? "Whatever."

Oh, and we went down to a local hangout one night, and ran into some of our neighbors that we'd met before. This deserves a complete post to itself, but we're basically living parallel lives with them. The dude works in my industry, is from my (relative) part of East Texas, they lived one street up from Home Port 2.0, their son was in Jack's gymnastics class, and they were there in Rusk to see Thomas the day we were.

Jungle Book they act
A play Jack sleeps almost through
Sore adult bottoms

You're detecting a theme. In a novel interpretation of "intermission," no-nap Jack decides after 30 minutes that the actors dressed up like Baloo, Shere-Khan and Kaa could manage by themselves for a bit. He passed out, laying across three of us in a (the?) high school theater in quaint Tomball, Texas.

Train to hunt eggs well

Eggs found in bright BATYAWD sun

Other kids? No chance.

You train for victory ahead of time. And there's no chance that Jack will be allowed to eat much of anything he gathers on Easter, candy-wise. So I'm basically trying to introduce a guided, deadly, Easter egg-snatching Predator drone into this year's fray. To. Get. Me. Candy. So we drilled and practiced egg hunting on the patio last weekend. A lot. Those other kids are GOING DOWN. Believe it.

A Remembrance

2011-04-13T11:06:00.009-05:00

re·mem·brance, noun. \ri-'mem-brən(t)s also -bə-ran(t)s\
1. the state of bearing in mind
2a. the ability to remember: MEMORY
b. the period over which one's memory extends
3. an act of recalling to mind
4. a memory of a person, thing, or event
5a. something that serves to keep in or bring to mind: REMINDER
b. COMMEMORATION, MEMORIAL
c. a greeting or gift recalling or expressing friendship or affection

Considering the date, it's storytime. Turn back now if you don’t want to hear about dearly departed puppy dogs and such. We’ll call it even and just part ways here. See you next week.

I had just started my first hedge fund job, and was hip deep in a world I only partially understood. I had been scraping along in a lion’s den of a Big Six firm. Really. I’m surprised they didn’t have to-the-death gladiatorial contests and child sacrifice up in the training rooms on 15. I loathed every picosecond there. Majesty and I had been married only a short time, and, incurable nerd that I am, I had made a dire-looking spreadsheet illustrating the exact moment when we would run out of cash. Not we’d be a little short. I mean, run flat out. The we can’t make rent kind of run out.

But, the LORD in his beneficence freed me from that hellish place, a story of its own that I won’t tell today (think plagues and parting seas). And so I was off to a new gig, where you could make money if the market went up or went down, if companies did well or if they limped disastrously close to the edge of ruin. All was new, polished and shined.

One day our admin lady told me to clear my calendar on a certain night, because the fund had bought a table at some charity event. I didn’t care one whit about going. I didn’t have much to wear, so I picked the better of my two (what I'll charitably refer to as) suits. It was the tatty black one I picked up in college for literally $150. I had been wearing the slacks to work and church about every other day since then.

The “table” my fund bought went for something like ten or twenty grand. Which is by most folks’ standard, a potful of money to swap for dinner near an ice sculpture. The soiree was held at the newly minted American Airlines Center in Dallas. You walked in and a bunch of fake paparazzi took your picture if you looked wealthy and/or famous. (We didn’t.) Quite a few pro hockey players showed up, and I was just floored to see Mike Modano and Guy Carbonneau strolling around amongst the finance stiffs. They looked as out of place as Majesty and I must have.

I actually knew a good number of people in the crowd, just by way of tooling around Dallas for a few years. My very good friend at the time, Katherine (not her real name) was strawbossing the event, which included a live auction, with who knows how much dough going to the charity du jour. Katherine was walking around with this sleepy (and, we’d discover, spectacularly doped up) white Llewellin Setter puppy with faint brown spots on its ears. The puppy was to be one of the auction lots, and had been flown into DFW from an out of state breeder.

The puppy was cute, sure, but not my type. I was a Labrador man. Was going to have two enormous thug chocolabs, I was. But Her Majesty and I got to stroll around carrying her, babysitting while Katherine barked orders and schmoozed effortlessly. Hey, it passed the time. Katherine had worked at the same accounting firm that I had and ended up marrying a client. In gun-shy, risk averse CPAville, that's what we'll call... complicated. She ended up with her pink slip, but it didn’t faze her much. She had married a zillionaire.

Our local NHL broadcasters (Ralph & Razor), handled the auctioneering that night. Without the faintest chance of buying anything (remember my spreadsheet), I didn’t pay much attention. And I didn’t notice who ended up with the cute pup.

What actually happened was this. James (not his real name, either), the head of an i-bank in town, whom I didn’t know (although I know him fairly well now!) got blasted with a friend of his, and ended up directly in front of Ralph and Razor during the auction. Right. You see where this is going. Naturally, they tried to outbid each other for the dog. I heard the money got up to $1,500, but I don't know for sure.

Katherine came up to us shortly after the auction. “I can get you that dog.” “What?” I said. “The puppy. I can get it for you if you want. I’ll go talk to James.” H.M. and I just looked at each other, partly stunned, partly amused. “We can’t have a dog,” Majestad said, looking at me for confirmation. “Can we?” I looked back at Katherine and said something like, “Sure we can! I think?"

Not three minutes later, Katherine comes back, (comatose) puppy in her arms. “He’s going to give her to you, but he has some conditions.” “Conditions?” I asked. A very nice, but uh, saturated gentlemen followed, declaring that he was to be the “dohg’s gahdfathr. I wahnt visitatshun rights, pichtures, everything.” I agreed and we swapped info.

I couldn’t believe this dude’s generosity, but I was grateful. Yet, maybe it wasn’t 100% altruism. He told me afterward that he had called his wife right after the auction to tell her he had won the dog. She told him flatly that she was pregnant, they had two kids, and two dogs, and that he’d better not bring anything else home. Period.

Katherine explained that the pup, a female, came with pet insurance. She came with papers and a substantial pedigree. Breeding rights. Serial numbers for an (implanted) ID chip. Phone numbers to national associations. Instructions on how to get her ears tattooed (with even more ID numbers). There were free vet visits. A big carrier. Treats. Squeaky toys. Bags of dogfood. (You should have seen the look on the valet guy’s face as we dumped all this into my car. It looked like I had held up the SPCA at gunpoint.) Oh, the little pup was even a close relation to “Hank” from a show called “Hunting With Hank” on OLN. Hank's son Dash had his own show, too. Bigtime, high caliber bird dogs, these were.

Majesty walked around regally for the rest of the night, the puppy in her arms. Every single rich lady in that room fawned over our sleeping pup. We talked to fifty, sixty people, minimum. They all wanted to know everything. How we got her. What we were going to name her. I heard Majestad respond, “I’m going to call her Belle, because she’s the belle of the ball.” It was decided.

It was February 13, 2003. I looked over the papers. Belle had been born the previous December, on the 10th. My mom’s birthday. We took her back to our little upstairs apartment very late that night. By that time, Belle was climbing out of her druggy haze, and decided she was sober enough to poop on our floor the second we took her out of the carrier. I think she was getting even for us stealing her away from the pampered life she would have no doubt enjoyed.

And so it began. The sweet, speckled, gentle, mischievous, panty-eating, neurotic, serial butt-sniffing, ever-shedding ball of atomic energy was ours.

First Quarter Photo Blast (Part B)

2011-04-11T08:07:00.000-05:00

98... 99... 100!

Gravitational challenges.

Go west, young man. No, the other west. Your other west.

Jack's Great Granny actually lived in one of these. No fooling.


But wait, if we throw him in, which one of us gets the wish?

Dude, you're totally missing those kids. You have to lead them.

And you should see someone for these warts. Yikes.

Soothing the savage beast.

The savage beast needed even more soothing after the soothing.

Cousins = hilarity.

Le Peep? Le delicious.

Too... many... captions... Can't... write them... all...

But what's it FOR?!

First Quarter Photo Blast (Part A)

2011-04-07T15:38:00.003-05:00

Like everyone, I need a little help with landscaping. Exhibit A? The Help.

But help is, I suppose, relative.

We actually keep him in there with a bottle of Spray 'n Wash.

The first time.

But not the last.

I actually ate some of these, and I'm still upright.

Probably our best trick photo, well, ever.

I can't wait for my mother to unsuspectingly stumble across Jack's new pet.

The very embodiment of Mardi Gras.

Maximum cheese level? Check.

We love you, Texas Burger Madisonville...

For the memories. For the ketchup.

Zero. Zip. Nada.

2011-04-05T12:54:00.001-05:00

We're all going stir crazy. Well, me to a lesser extent since they let me out of the house regularly to go earn that daily bread stuff. Jack did his time with a virus (see last week for gory introduction) and the World's Longest Fever (that's 5 days, if you're scoring along at home). The franco-medical word pretty much describes it: malaise. The kid was laid up on the sofa all week watching whatever talkie Majesty was charitable enough to pop in.

So a steady diet of ice cream, The Jungle Book, Popsicles, Tom & Jerry, Children's Motrin, and Sesame Street eventually got him through. Hey now, don't sweat the ice cream and Popsicles. That was, no kidding, the doctor's prescription from The Tigress. Calories, people. That's all we were concerned with. I would have fed him rendered hog fat if he would've eaten it. Mmmm. Hog fat. Uh, where was I?

Oh yeah. Nowhere.

The F5 Tornado of Thought is angrily whirling with lots of diverse topics lately: Sir Thomas More, the federal budget, classical education, and how to get the blasted ants out of my tomato vines. But I for darn sure know you don't want to hear about any of those. Really, it's okay, I understand. And even if you did, I can barely muster enough coherence to chat about them.

That's what pushing four months without coffee will get you, folks. I'm your cautionary tale. Quitting is for quitters! Swirl that in with a very pleasant spring, a very peaceful life (at least currently), and you get nada in terms of blogging ideas.

I've got a couple of Storytimes bubbling. Maybe they can entertain you people.

Apart from those, we're pretty much at the point where we go to the phones. Topic requests, anyone?

Let It BLAAAAAH!

2011-03-30T13:38:00.009-05:00

I love my backyard. I told Majestad the other evening that the more time I spend back there, deep in the JUNDLE, the more I love it. Could just sit out there reading for hours. We really haven't had a peaceful place outside to relax since our house in Dallas. And even that was soured by The Old Yellers, Fat Elvis and The Martini Boys. Remind me to tell you about all that sometime. Home Port 2.0 had lots of fine qualities, but going outdoors to watch (and hear) the abominable little Satan-worshiping thugs-in-training ooze past on the sidewalk wasn't one of them.

But la casa nueva's BATYAWD is different. Very different. I mean, it's nothing fancy, and we had to dismiss all the servants waving palm fronds and swatting mosquitoes, but we get by. We're out there all the time, almost year round. Jack climbs (small) trees, plays in the sandbox, kicks soccer balls, rides his TRAI-CEEDLE and sprays people in unflattering places with the water bottle that I use for ~~fire control while~~ grilling. Sorry to everybody at the party Saturday night. My bad. Looked like we were running an incontinence awareness rally.

If we happen to have left the garage door up, Jack usually finds his way in there and jimmys my car door open. I've mentioned before that Jack loves to play in the car. Any car. He loves to wreck all the switches and levers and buttons so that when I crank up the next morning, the thing acts like the jalopy in Christine.

A favorite activity of mine has been climbing in there with him, dropping the windows, and listening to the radio together while H.M. fixes dinner. On Monday, in a quarter hour or so we listened to Tom Petty, The Cars, The Stones, and (his first ever, to my knowledge) Conway Twitty. That's right, Harold Jenkins is alive and well on my watch! But pretty soon, all the stations went and hit their (seemingly?) synchronized commercial breaks, and I switched it over to the ancient tape player. Yes, the tape player. Still works. I had 1970's Let It Be by The Beatles on tap, one of my favorites.

Jack had been kind of less active than usual, but had still dug out my old yellow flashlight from the glovebox for his mic. When we hit Paul singing the title track, Jack came over and flopped back in my lap, listening to the entire song without moving. I did wonder if something was up. So I asked him, "Do you feel okay?" "YEH." "Do you feel sick?" "UMM... EH." "Does anything hurt? "EH. NAH." So I let it go. The music played.

We sat, and I thought, this is absolutely perfect. Playing records with my son. You know, only a few moments are the really special ones, the unscripted ones that stick with you. There's no second take on those. Their personal significance is difficult to explain to others.

Jack's cough brings me back from my thoughts. I look diagonally just in time to see projectile yak explode in a torrent onto my steering wheel. And he starts... laughing. Dirty baby.

We clean him (and me and the car) up, and put him on the sofa under the now infamous Masai blanket. I later see him climb up to the top of the sofa, flip the lights off, head back down to his nest and look at me. "DOH TO SWEEP," he said. And he did, until about 7:30 next morning.

So if you ever have the pleasure to ~~fear for your very life and~~ ride in my car, this story will explain the existence of two things there: (1) the airline yak sacks and (2) the faint, yet unmistakable smell of peaches.

P.S.

The next morning H.M. asks him what he did yesterday. He starts cackling, and says, "I FROW UP ON DADDY!"

Dirty. Rotten. Baby.

People Dressed As Bugs

2011-03-25T15:32:00.003-05:00

I don't know why I'm procrastinating this week. Usually when I get this off of writing, I post a huge photo montage and everybody's happy. But that's problematic, since I couldn't tell you where the digital camera is.

Are You Not Entertained?!

We took Jack along with us to see Cirque du Soleil last weekend. This was our second Cirque experience, and we saw Ovo. And the missus LOVES her some upside down contortionist trapeze artists a zillion feet up spinning 27 plates on both ears. I think my impression from the first show (Corteo) still holds for the second: I can't remember being more entertained. In the fullest sense. Like maybe in an older sense, if you get me. It's truly a spectacle. And spectacles are fun. That time, we got 2nd row, jewel-encrusted seats from the Cinnabar Mines, but this time we sat up with all the unwashed (on our own dime) in what turned out to be good seats. So I've bought back a small amount of self respect by swinging my own boletos. Go figure.

So Ovo is all about bugs. And Jack likes bugs. The Dude was pretty fidgety after the entr'acte, but ended up sitting through the whole 2.5+ hour deal. We asked him afterwards what his favorite kind of bug-performers in the show were: "Ants... I an ant."

An ant? If you mean unstoppable, dedicated, hard working and clever in achieving your (unknowable) ambitions, then yes, son, you are an ant.

Hi, I Have A Factoid

The kid is getting a bit more bold around strangers lately, and is now regularly talking to them (I hesitate to use the loaded term strangers, but when the shoe fits). Majesty told me he cruised up to a little boy at the local lye-berry the other day and said, "Hi, I have a rock!"

His descriptions of the world around him are getting more involved, too. Which is weird. Most times, I just slog through my day, doing whatever I'm doing without really giving it a second thought. You might, too. But now, I've got my own Howard Kosel doing the rundown on my every activity. "Daddy is driving, and Jack is riding, and Mommy is in the passenger seat!" No one really calls shotgun "the passenger seat" around our house, but he soaked that up from somewhere. No telling.

A Sweatshop of One

As the sentences lengthen, the attention span does, too. H.M. got him to move four boxes of diapers, a box of wipes, and a box of Kleenex from the kitchen to our stairs with no reminding. If you know Jack, you know that's as ridiculously impressive as riding a unicycle on some fishing line above people's heads. If you guys haven't looked into using your progeny as ~~illegal and scandalously cheap child labor~~ household help, it's just brilliant. Next up is home repair. Is it wrong of me to slip the Home Depot "1-2-3" book in with his Curious George yawners? Is it? I can't wait until he hits Basic Home Wiring.

Okay, So the Wood Part Is Inedible?
Oh yeah, one last thing. So everybody at his little school got Popsicles as a treat one day. Uh, yeah, no nap that day... Anyway, some of the kids had no clue how to eat the things. His teach said everybody looked to their ~~MacGyver~~ expert, Jack, to show them all how. Cannot BELIEVE my kid knows more about junk food than, well, anybody on the planet. There are some tough, tough parents out there. C'mon, guys, Popsicles = America. Believe it.

I leave you with a pastoral pic of The Playgroup Posse chowing in the peaceful park.

Ciao, ragazzi.

Fairy Castles, Mr. Jones, and KI Tablets

2011-03-18T15:35:00.001-05:00

Fun With Site Meter

I have many questions today. Not that all of them are important. I'm also wordy. Be ye warned. There's no telling where this one will go. Deep breath.

That Site Meter thingy, for anyone that has a blog, is a pretty darn interesting little ~~timewaste~~ tool. Who religiously reads CJMP in Boise, ID? Or Pine Lake, GA? Panama City, FL? Denver? I know exactly zero people in all those places. Don't get me wrong, I love (the lack of humidity in) Denver. It's like being ON ANOTHER PLANET, humidity-wise. Had a great time in Boise, years back. We spent as much company dough as we realistically could at Milford's Fish House. Anyway, welcome, all you endearingly lovable complete strangers, you. I guess you ran dry of unhinged dad bloggers locally? Well, heck, come right on in.

Site Meter's also handy for picking up search terms that people use to find your slice of The Internets. I happened to post back on November 1st, 2009. Well, Blogger's labeling convention is year first, then month, followed by day. So the 1st of November would yield "2009-11-01." And Blogger sometimes sticks "archive" on the end of post htmls. You would not BELIEVE how many folks from the... er, Dar al-Islam arrive here, on this very ~~infidel's~~ kid's blog, via the search term "9-11-01 ARCHIVE". Boy, that's fun to think about, isn't it?

"Hello... ~~Newman.~~ Dallas."

We took a quick weekend trip up to visit our ex-city to meet my parents at the Dallas Arboretum. I think their harsh winter took a bit more of a toll on the plants this year, but all in all a good visit and a nice day for all of us to sit and talk and eat sandwiches under the budding trees. And the fairly tale castles. There were those. We knew nothing of this beforehand, but the chipper vol that welcomed us pointed out to me where the fairy castles were located. I could only reply with, "Oh excellent. Those are for me."

After we got a demon-possessed, absolutely stark-raving-green-bananas-insane Jack to sleep for his nap, two hours late... Okay, gotta tell you about that: Biting himself, cackling hysterically, screaming, making animal noises, running in place, waving his arms wildly... I was about 2 minutes from calling in an airstrike on my own position. Majesty was ready to lovingly strangle him. I tried to recall the 'sleeper' hold that the old-school 'rasslers did. Anyway, after that fiasco, we went off to have dinner with an assortment of my long lost cousins. Actually I'm probably the long lost cousin, here. Semantics. By dinner's end, the whole table was helping Jack endlessly circle an embarrassingly long, magnetically-connected train around the table. One (anonymous) cousin-in-law had more fun with the trains than Jack did. I'll try to post pics of that - I got some really incriminating ones.

Next morning we got up and had the best waitress ever at Le Peep. High fived Jack because of his eyes, she said. The eyes he was mercilessly using to put the moves just all over her. She didn't stand a chance. This gal even put in his order early... Parents: How many times have you had waitstaff do that? It's genius. Sure, H.M. and I are hungry. But if Dude's happy, then the grown folks are way happy. Genius, I say.

Here's Money for Pizza and Potassium Iodide Tablets

Jack's very best babysitter has gone and got herself in Japan. Right. The earthquaked, volcanoed, sunamied, partially radioactive Japan. Everybody remember to include not only our extremely important, selfish vested interest, but the region and people as a whole on your prayer list.

Sláinte!

On St. Patrick's day three years ago, we found out our boy was exactly that: a boy. Dead serious, here - he presented himself in all of his nekkid glory on the sonogram, fully reclined, legs extended and crossed, one hand behind his head. I asked the tech if she could see a martini in the other hand. Sláinte, me boyo, Sláinte.

Quick Hits

Jack told Majesty the other day, "I have Belle's ball!" He did, but nobody's talked about the ball being The Fuzz's, the LORD rest her, in many, many months. Best memory ever.
A Long December by Counting Crows came on the truck radio the other day. Jack immediately pipes up: "It's like Mr. Jones!" It's amazing us how he can pick up, even now, songs by the same artists heard in different contexts.
Jack tee teed in the potty the other day for the first time. It' was more of a dribble, but hey, victories are victories. We're not potty training, this is more of just an effort to derail him peeing everywhere as soon as he hits his bathwater.

So THAT's What the Kids Call It Nowadays

2011-03-11T11:00:00.003-06:00

Quick one this week, sorry. Busy. Really busy.

The backstory is that el Capitan is very fond lately of this book that talks about Tanzania, and the Masai, and the animals there, all of that. Just file that one away for later.

For the uninitiated out there, there comes a time where you can ask direct questions of your sprog and get fairly direct answers. It's almost like they're human! What book do you want to read? What do you want to eat? What doorstep do you want me to leave you on? You can ask just about anything you can dream up.

Anyhow, Majesty was running a bath for Jack earlier in the week, and she had the dude pretty much peeled down all the way. So she asks him, "Do you have anything in your diaper?" Because, I mean, first of all, that's pretty important pre-bath information. And as I said, you can usually get a straight answer. She asks again. No reply. She asks a third time, "Jack, what do you have in your diaper?"

"A wildebeest."

Don't we all, brother. Don't we all.

Mission Accomplished.

2011-03-01T15:46:00.001-06:00

Here.

I had one, and only one, objective while Majesty and el Capitan were out of town:

Don't burn the place down.

That's reasonable. I mean, you remember what happened last time.

Well, mission accomplished! Ah, that's easy, you say, the whole not-burning-down-a-structure thing. No sweat. Well, normally, sure, I'd agree with you. But when you put (1) a completely unsupervised white collar guy (Read: someone that could mortally injure himself with everyday household items), (2) all the electrical switches, fan controls, and outlets Lowe's would sell me together with (3) a somewhat creatively electrified Reagan-era house, there's a very real risk of fire. Explosions. Fatalities.

But I did it. Or rather, I didn't. Burn it down, that is. I replaced probably a third to a half of our crumbling, arcing (!) outlets and switches, and removed a ton of dimmers. Riddle me this, Batman: Why in tarnation would you want a dimmer over your breakfast nook? That's kinky, bro.

And most of the (unlabeled) breakers in the breaker box now have been mapped. Thanks to literally 60+ trips up and down my stairs. Is that it? Nope. That one? Nope. My buddy Mike pointed out to me that it could have been a 15 minute job had I had an assistant and a few cell phones. Yep. But I wouldn't have gotten the unexpected residual effect. My legs? JACKED!

After I got sick of ~~risking electrocution~~ playing electrician, I ended up in the front yard taking down a tree stump with an axe. Got more than a few horrified looks from passersby. I am still dead tired.

There!

H.M. took Jack over to Alabama for the week, pretty much just to raid their kiddie clothes stores, this time for larger sizes.

The fam took him to his first Mardi Gras parade (with Cousin Eli). I'm told he had a blast, and had his first experience with cotton candy and moon pies. It probably won't be his last. "BIG fan!" is what his mom wrote me. He loved the bands, too. Tubas and drums are always popular in his world. The day he gets his hands on a tuba is the day it all goes south.

Other points of interest from Alabama:

Heard that Jack got to ride in Poppa's boat on a gorgeous sunny morning, and even got a wheelbarrow ride from his great grandmother. Yep, you read that right.
He slept like a baby the whole trip. Go figure.
Jack can now spell: JESUS, JACK, and BEBE. Oh, and BIBLE. Not bad. Line up now to coach my son to spell your name! Only $25.00.
Jack has an imaginary dog named Button. (We're told) Button is black with white ears. Jack will take him for a walk as often as he can using a long, thin stick as a leash. Pretty funny. And economical.

Only YOU Can Prevent Playgroup Destruction

2011-02-24T15:15:00.003-06:00

That fuzzy picture, my friends, taken by lone survivor H.M., is what's left of our house after yesterday's playgroup. I headed over there at lunch to nab my share of the BLTs. It was incredible to watch. But fearing I'd eventually step on somebody, and there was a pretty good chance of that, I polished off my sandwich, some banana bread, a muffin, half a cookie and what ginger ale Jack left in my can and blew out of there.

This, ladies and gentlemen, was strictly for the professionals. And I ain't no profeshunul.

I can't think of much to write about. The days are beginning to lengthen, and the sun feels hotter. I even got my first sunburn of the year (probably of many) on the old pasty English-derived hide. There's lots of work going on in the new sandbox, and we're walking around the neighborhood with Jack almost daily. Mostly we pull him in the wagon, but sometimes he likes to jump out and stretch his legs for a bit.

You know when you were very young, and all you could think about was, "Wow! This is great. I wonder what's next!" I think I'm there.

I love this kid. I love the way his little voice sounds out our big, grownup words. I love the insane way he seems to hurtle through space as he runs. I love his prayers. Majesty and I figure the LORD must get a chuckle out of at least a few of them, because we sure do. We're both snorting and wheezing by the time he hits the amen. I love his trademark Squeezer Hugs. I love, as has been documented here ad nauseum, his rocking out on his guitar. He's not fooling around; three strings on it are just almost gone. I love the way he demands some form of berry after every single meal. I even love the way he gets tickled when we're just aaaaalmost asleep and we read that one line in the book that he finds - suddenly - absolutely hilarious. And he dies laughing. And I die laughing. And H.M.'s downstairs wondering what in the wide world of sports is going on up there. And I love the way that I am almost positively sure that I've had a small hand in creating something... someone far better than I.

What else can I say? His Mommy is doing a great job raising him, and I'm hanging on by my fingernails, watching it all in amazement.

And I wonder what's next.

Blue Skies, Rainbows and Lumberjacks

2011-02-16T10:14:00.001-06:00

In a little boy's mind, how in the world does a dilapidated old Honda trump two trees being sawn down in your front yard? How? It makes less than zero sense.

First, I have a new least-favorite animal. Before now, the mosquito has been enshrined at #1. But, at least for now, the little vampires have been bumped to the #2 spot. I mean, sure, mosquitoes swarm me like determined ER nurses (syringes at the ready), and one time they literally ran me out of a restaurant in Mexico, but they've never, to my knowledge, really cost me serious dough.

But oh, Dendroctonus frontalis has. Probably zillions of southern pine beetles ate up ~~every treasury note in my wallet~~ two of the 962 pine trees around the house. So I headed over to the casita yesterday for lunch again, and the tree guys were in full swing, with Jack and Majesty looking on. And I mean that swinging part, because one of the dudes was hanging about 60 feet up, roped in with a climbing belt and tree spikes.

I looked over at H.M. and just said, "I'm glad I sit at a desk."

Like I said, Jack, who got himself all sick and croupy again, was out there watching all the climbing, chainsawing, trees falling, and pretty much all the supreme raging coolness that lumberjacking has to offer. 'Cause it does. Guys can watch huge trees crashing to the ground all day long. It's magnetic.

Which doesn't explain Jack running over to my [BWACK CAHW!] and demanding to be let in. I try to redirect, but he's having none of that. We climb inside, roped-in, fearless bro still sawing in midair. The Buttonpusher pushes all the buttons he can push and turns all the knobs he can turn, and then raids the ~~glovebox~~ glove compartment. Whatever. He fishes out my [BIDH. YEWWOAH. FWASHWITE] and starts belting out Blue Skies and Rainbows. Saws are whining, trees are falling, and Jack is bigtime praising his Lord in a parked car with a flashlight/microphone.

I just don't know anymore.

A Bathroom Attendant? or This Joint's Classy

2011-02-11T14:43:00.001-06:00

"Jack, I Am Your Father!"

I don't typically watch a lot of that darn color teevee set. That's all fine and good if you want ~~to burn some IQ points on decidedly unreal "reality" TV and projectile vomit inducing tripe that features a guy winnowing a harem of enthusiastic strumpets~~ to do that. It's America, after all. Anyway, when you laugh at something and say, "That's just like that commercial!" I have pretty much no idea what you're talking about.

I even skipped most of the Superduperbowl this year. I had it on tape delay (Ha. Tape delay. That's what we dinosaurs call Tivo. And Tivo's what we call DVR, because DVR sounds too much like VCR, which would make us sound, you know, like, old. Where was I?) So I stopped myself about midway through the first quarter and wondered exactly what dog I had in this fight. So I switched it off and went to bed. Because, to me, sleep is a pretty valuable commodity.

But, because of the awesomeness that is YouTube, I didn't even have to watch. Monday morning, I see the Volkswagen: The Force ad posted online everywhere. You've already seen it, I'm lame for reposting it, but I care not, ye dogs. Behold!

Mark ye well also the "Making of" video, which was almost better:

If this isn't direct video footage from Jack's future, I don't know what is.

Even More Awkward Than That Attendant Guy

One of my favorite parts of parenting is the completely ridiculous, bizarre situations kids introduce. Today, when I went home to have lunch with the family (one of the innumerable benefits of working at Greener Pastures Cap), I had finished up with eating and decided to hit the loo before I left. Jack just strolls in there with his [GEETAUWR] and declares, "I CAN'T SING SOME SONGS!"

Did I mention that he waltzes in when I'm kinda in flagrante dilecto? Yeah. The conversation goes from there. "You can't? Well, what's a song that you can sing?" He says he can sing Jesus Loves Me. "Great," I say. I'll bet Anna Bartlett Warner and William Bradbury never planned on that.

I'm being serenaded by a twopointfive year old, busking with a guitar, singing a hymn, while peeing. Right. Should I tip him like that dude in the swanky restaurant's john?

He proceeds in belting out Jesus Loves Me, and gets to nearly the end when he abruptly stops, giggles, and says in a quiet little voice:

"Tee tee."

At least the attendant dude keeps the commentary to himself.