Sunday Haiku: Wishful Thinking

If I put those pants
near the sewing box, the seam
might one day get sewn.

Baseball! Yay! Boo!

Sitting down to complain about how little league ruins our family life, I remembered and looked up this post.  I've covered that ground in this space before.  Little leauge, is, however, my excuse for scarce posting lately.  We added Teddy and his five hours of little league to Charlie's six.  If you recall or reread last year's post, life got ragged for us with one boy playing.  Two boys playing wreaked havoc.  Very few family dinners, no sleeping in ever (thanks to a new 9:00 church service on Sundays) and a lot of time logged at the fields.  Hence, no time for this little pursuit.

Yes, I'm grateful that my kids are healthy and like baseball(TM).

One news update: Oxi-clean is out for cleaning baseball pants.  Shout is in.  Paige heard about it from another baseball parent and taught me her technique.  Wet an area of the pants (we like to start at the waistband on one leg on the front or back and work our way around the garment panel by panel), spray Shout on a stain, scrub the pants against themselves vigorously on the stain.  Repeat with each spot on the pants - dirt, grass stains, blood, juice box.  Then throw some Oxi-clean in the washer and run them through, either by themselves or with another cold gentle load.  They come out good as new every time.  It's a little bit of work, but the success feels sweet. 

Oh yeah: the 14th Ward Rangers are in the World Series again this year.  Yay!  Two more weeks of baseball!  Boo!

Brace yourself

My pediatrician father-in-law snarkily says that there are two indications for braces: a mouth with teeth and middle-class parents.  Well, Charlie has those two factors.  After getting a palate expander at the beginning of May, he got braces yesterday.


I never had braces, so it's all new to me.  His mother, who did go through this experience and has the nice teeth to prove it, keeps bracing for the steps to be really hard for Charlie.  He very impressively just keeps rolling with it.  I gave him one ibuprofen after they got put on yesterday - which he tried to refuse - and he has not asked for more.  He reacted just as sanguinely to the intrusion of the palate expander; it all is just no big deal.

If you came of age in the 80s as I did, you might be surprised that he's getting them before he turns ten.  Braces seemed like more of an early teens thing when I was a kid.  Apparently, the science has discovered that if a child gets braces when he's nine, the potential exists to repeat the exercise before he reaches maturity.  This produces good outcomes for marinas that cater to orthodontists.

Actually, though, from a social perspective, nine is a better age to get braces than 12.  Charlie's teammates and classmates seem more interested in the wonder of this course of treatment than they are ready to make fun of him.  So much better to get braces when they seem like a cyborg enhancement than a social crippling device.

A little piece of business advice for orthodontists from a paying customer: make up something for the child to do so that the visits last more than 90 seconds.  It will take some of the sting out of the expense of the whole thing.  I know that it takes space-age chemical compounds and specialized equipment to install and adjust braces, but the speed of the appointments is galling.  They don't even need magazines in the waiting area; no one's there long enough to get through an article.  I'd feel better if it seemed like I was paying for a large amount of time my child spends with an expert tinkering around in his mouth.

Monday Chart: Awakening Differential

Battleship Mad Lib

B4 you start D9 it, let me just say that Battleship is a F1 game.
G2 many people don't realize it.  
C4 yourself: lining up your ships and finding your opponents is a good challenge.
I4 one really enjoy it.
I played with my friend Eddie, whom I call "E".  Let me tell you: E8 it up.  
E2 found it to be a terrific game.
I do H8 it when my opponent sinks my carrier.
I just have to accept my F8.
You get to say the most satisfying sentence in Battleship at the end: I1.

Love, Logic & Debt

A while back in this space, I reviewed the well-known book Parenting with Love and Logic.  That book's parenting techniques focus on allowing your children to make their own choices (where possible) and let them live with the consequences.  While most parents I know who've read it like the principles in the book, the examples can feel unrealistic.  For example, my friend who lives in an "up and coming" neighborhood with busy thoroughfares chuckled at the notion of letting his squabbling kids out of the car to walk the last half mile home as a "natural consequence" of bad behavior.  When I find practical ways to implement Love and Logic, I get excited.


Here's an experience I'd like to share; it takes some explanation to set up.   Sometime last year, Paige discovered the Moonjar, a three-part bank that helps teach kids that money has different uses.  We got one for each boy as a place to put his allowance.  The three parts are Spend, Save and Share, and it even comes with a little passbook if you want to track the amounts in each over time.  Currently, Charlie splits his $1.50 allowance evenly between the three - his idea - setting aside 50 cents to spend, 50 cents to save for gift buying and bigger occasions and giving 50 cents in the church offering each week.  Teddy splits his $.60 allowance 30 for spend, 20 for save and 10 for share.

A few weeks back, the boys had both built up a little pile of money in the Spend chamber of their Moonjars.  They decided to go together and buy a larger pack of Pokemon cards than either could afford on his own and split the cards proportionally to the amount each invested.  It's their money; it's for them to spend.  This transaction passed muster.  After the purchase, however, Teddy was left with around $.43 in his Spend. That Friday was dress-down day at school, a fundraiser for the yearbook.  If you give a dollar, you can dress down; otherwise, you're to wear your school uniform.  Since the boys get an allowance and have money of their own, we've had them pay their own way on dress-down day.  Teddy went to his Moonjar and found that he only had the 43 cents, and he was really bummed.  He wanted to dress down and asked if he could borrow the money.  I told him that he could borrow it under these terms: I would take 40 cents from him that day and then cut the 30 cents he would usually put in Spend out of his allowance for the next 2 weeks in order to pay me back.  He took the offer.

I wish I could say that he learned clearly about paying off debts and the restrictions it places on other spending you'd like to do.  Instead, he kept thinking of other things he wanted to buy, and I kept having to remind him that he now had 3 cents in his Spend chamber.  He engaged in some magical thinking about how he could probably buy some things for 3 cents.  The best learning moment probably came at the next dress-down day (the yearbook needs a lot of money) when I decided not to lend him a dollar again.  He had to wear his uniform when his brother and other friends dressed down.  


It will take more learning opportunities than this one, but I appreciated the Love and Logic framework and a chance to execute it.

Chart: 2012 Pirates Win Predictions

Readers have been asking (OK, one reader asked) when the family's win predictions for the Pirates would come out.  We're an optimistic bunch in 2012, all predicting more wins than the Pirates got last year.

How, you ask, did the family's predictions from 2011 work out?  Well, see below.  After 57 wins in 2010, Teddy predicted a stark dropoff to 20 wins.  This may have had more to do with his grasp of numbers at age four than any actual feeling about the Pirates season.  Mommy and Daddy predicted modest improvements.  Charlie predicted a pretty big leap.  As it turns out, as long as we're not using Price is Right guessing rules, Charlie was closest to the Pirates actual win total of 72.