Sunday Haiku: Design for the Masses

Is there anything
more fun to buy at Target
than wrapping paper?

11 Reasons I Love and Like my 11-year-old

A happy boy and his birthday tacos.

1. He still thinks I'm funny.  Not all the time, but sometimes, he can't help but laugh at my jokes.
2. He works hard.  He does his homework and practices his trumpet and takes baseball coaching by actually changing his stance/swing/throwing.  He can start a task and stick with it until it's done.
3. He's so sweet with smaller kids.  He showers most of that sweetness on his brother, but he loves all babies, and he loves leading younger kids in games and adventures.
4. He has few secrets (I think).  I'll just choose to believe this one for as long as I can.
5. He's affectionate with everyone in his family.  He may be more shy than he used to about showing affection to his parents in public, but he loves our nuclear family and his extended family, and he's quick with a hug, a back scratch, a pat or a tug.
6. You know where you stand with him.  He's a straight shooter.  I think his honesty comes from how confident and sure of himself he is - more qualities that will stand him in good stead.
7. He's so game and enthusiastic.  He jumps in with two feet and likes going new places and learning new things.
8. He's a big sports fan.  I'd love him regardless, but it makes it easier that we share that.  One particular thing about his sports fandom is how quickly he forms a loyalty to a team he's rooting for.  We went to one baseball game in Korea, and he's a huge Doosan Bears fan.  He's always loved Robert Morris basketball, and he likes the major league teams for which his little league teams are named.  He never watches a game without choosing a team to root for by some criteria and then sticking to that.  He loves wins and takes losses hard and knows his stuff.  We found out at the end of fifth grade that he'd been giving Monday morning Pirates updates at his school's morning assembly for two months.
9. His new friend receptors are always open.  He only has friends and friends he hasn't met yet.  We worried not at all about leaving him at a summer camp where he knew zero campers and zero counselors.  He jumped right in, and we figured he'd be mayor by the end of the week.  (Turns out, that camp doesn't have a mayor.  But if it did...)
10. He takes serious things seriously: schoolwork, injustice, his faith.
11. He's so cute.  Awkward phase shmawkward phase.  Unless it's still coming, which it probably is.  But even then, this kid will still be cute.

With love for my Charlie Barley.

Story flashback via the Moth

I love The Moth.  It's a nonprofit that features people telling true stories, live, on stage, without notes.  There's a podcast, the Moth radio hour on some public radio stations and both main stage events and "story slams".  A story slam is open mic format with a theme.  Any number of people sign up, and they pull ten names at random to tell stories.  Volunteer judges then score the stories.  The winner participates in a "grand slam" competition of all the story slam winners for the past year.  In Pittsburgh, about 300 people attend the story slam; I don't know how many people put their names in, but I'd estimate it at 20-30.  It can be a torturous setup.  Knowing that you might get to tell a story (that's supposed to hold the audience's interest and that will be judged) means that you have to prepare.  For me, that means writing the story out and trying to memorize it well enough to be able to tell it under the bright lights.  But it's like if you had a to cram for a final knowing that you then stand a 60% chance of not having to take it.  I've prepared before and not had my name called.  It can be an unpleasant emotional roller coaster.

My name got called last night, though.  It was my second time in 4 or 5 tries.  The theme was "wanderlust".  The story I told was a repackaged version of this post from August 2009.  Read on for a trip down CP memory lane.  


I don’t call myself a stay-at-home dad. It’s more accurate, but more complicated, to say that I work part time and have primary parenting responsibility. Almost as complicated as it is to work part time and have primary parenting responsibility. I cut down from full-time at my job when my son Charlie was 6 and my son Teddy was 2. The following summer I figured out that with my Monday, Tuesday, Thursday schedule, I could leave on Tuesday for a 5-day trip while using only one vacation day. My parents have a summer place in Maine. When I grew up, we’d go there for 2 or 3 weeks every summer. Making a run for the coast seemed like the perfect use of my new schedule flexibility. The fact that my wife would have to stay in Pittsburgh to work and that this would be a solo parenting adventure in the month that my boys turned 7 and 3? I was up for that; it seemed like a neat reversal of the '60s era "mom takes the kids to the Hamptons while Dad stays in Manhattan" family arrangement. It would be a downmarket version, taking a 12-year-old Honda Accord to a 6-room bungalow in a honky tonk Maine beach town, but I liked the parallels.

To be honest, I wanted to prove to myself, to my wife and to the world – which couldn’t care less – that I could take two boys 1400 miles round trip by myself. To not burden my wife, I packed everything we’d need by myself on Monday night. Clothes, beach gear, stuff to keep them entertained in the car, diapers and pullups for Teddy who was not quite potty trained. He was on that cusp between being a toddler and a pre-schooler, but he really leaned more toddler.

After work on Tuesday afternoon, I grabbed Charlie from the summer nanny, got Teddy from day care, and we set off east. About 75 miles down the turnpike, I realized I’d packed the brand new portable DVD player. and NO DVDs. [Forehead slap]. It would be a harder evening drive than I thought to my sister’s place in Queens.

We hummed across PA as you do and then confronted New York with printed google map directions, no smart phone, no GPS. These facts became important when I missed the Van Wyck expressway in Queens at 11 pm, 375 miles into the trip. My dad of the year nomination probably went out the window when I woke my three-year-old by yelling FUCK as I saw the exit ramp go by. I bungled my way around 1-3 New York boroughs acknowledging how nice it is to have a navigator - like, say, my wife - in the passenger seat in New York City. I eventually got to my sister's 1-bedroom, non-air-conditioned apartment in the throes of a heat wave. The air was thick and motionless. She slept on the floor in the living room while the boys and I sweated a lot and slept a little in her bed. Charlie concluded from overhearing me tell his mom on the phone that I'd "f-bombed my way across Queens" that "to f-bomb" means "to drive really fast".

On Wednesday, we met up with my brother and his kids in Boston and caravanned up to my parents’ place. I have some great pictures of Charlie and Teddy dead asleep on the beach. After the road trip and the stifling night in Queens, they were not raring to splash in the icy ocean. But we did have fun the next couple of days on the windy Maine beach that I grew up visiting as a kid. I savored sharing that place with my boys, my brother, my nieces and my parents. We got to have a joint birthday party for the boys with the extended family at the cottage. It was nice.

On Saturday, we drove down to my brother’s place outside Boston and spent the night there to get us that much closer to home for Sunday’s drive. We got up and out early Sunday aiming to being home in time for dinner. We made great time from Boston down through Rhode Island and Connecticut and across the Tappan Zee Bridge. Then we crossed into New Jersey, over three and a half hours without a stop. With kids that age, this was an amazing feat. I’d put Teddy in a pullup for the ride home to cut down on urgent bathroom stops, and he slept all the way from Boston to New Jersey. It was golden. I was pretty proud of myself. He woke up in the Garden State and soon after, I heard baffling splattering sounds from the back seat. Teddy was reminding me in the most graphic way that sometimes, he gets carsick. He threw up all over himself and his carseat. And some luggage. And his brother's video game. I pulled over on the side of I-287 and field-stripped him in the breakdown lane as traffic whipped by. I changed his pullup and his entire outfit. I scraped vomit off the upholstery with a plastic knife and sopped up what I could with leftover rest area napkins.Nonetheless, it smelled horrible in the car, and we had 300 miles to go.

Once we were finally back underway, Charlie said "now we're really going to have to f-bomb across Pennsylvania to make it home in time for dinner."

Update: Dad's Summer Reading Program

No doubt careful CP readers have been wondering how Dad's Summer Reading Program has been going.  So far, so good.    Because the impulse behind the program was getting Teddy to read more, I'm pleased to report that he was the first to redeem a coupon.  He got to ten books by June 30, and he chose a pack of Pokemon cards as his reward.  Amazingly, the library only calls for reading five books to "complete" their Summer Reading program for the whole summer!

He's rated his books quite highly so far: five books at five stars, one at 4 1/2, two at 3 1/2 and one at two stars.  The stinker was Rise of the Serpentine, a Lego Ninjago book.  He called Darkwing Duck and the Calvin and Hobbes collection Something Under the Bed is Drooling "very funny" and gave them five stars.  He's also delved into some more honest-to-goodness chapter books.

Charlie hasn't gotten to his first 15-book milestone, but I'll keep you posted.

As a family, we're reading Little House on the Prairie at bed time and on road trips.  That will count toward their rewards when we finish it.  They don't know that the reward is reading it.

Dad's Summer Reading Program

We have one avid reader (the 10-year-old) and one who reads in discouragingly short bursts (the 6-year-old).  Immediately following a trip to the library, he reads with a high degree of absorption.  His usual habit is then to declare himself finished with at least one of the books he just got before it seems possible that he could have finished it.  He also gets really excited about a series of books (e.g. Magic Treehouse) for about 2 1/2 books.  I tend to find out that he "doesn't like those anymore" upon bringing home a stack of four of whatever series it was from the library.

All this is to say that I did not think that our library's summer reading program would be enough

to get him interested in reading this summer.  I have decided, therefore, to supplement it with Dad's Summer Reading Program.  The boys found at their places this morning four coupons, two of which are picture at the right.  They can choose whatever order in which they redeem these coupons for rewards valued at under five dollars.  They just have to show me their reading logs when they've reached a milestone (10 books per reward for the younger and 15 books per reward for He Who Would Read No Matter What).

We'll see how it works.  The younger complained that 10 books was too many at the same time that he planned the order in which he would redeem all four of his coupons.  The older chose one that he would redeem first then said "Maybe I'll read 75 books [15 more than the sum of all his incentive milestones] and get a five-pack of cars."  While I appreciate both his ambition and his confidence that he could negotiate terms completely different from those offered in writing, I think I'll stick to my original plan.

Watch this space for updates.

Sunday Haiku: Summer Pests

The kitchen smells like
Raid.  Ants in the cupcakes won't
be tolerated.

Media Review Doubleheader: If This is 40, Bring on 50

Armed with a free RedBox rental coupon from the grocery store courtesy of Kellogg's (wha huh?), we sought out a movie the other weekend.  Having read the quite enjoyable 2012 comedy issue of Vanity Fair - edited by Judd Apatow and heavy on his sensibility - and having enjoyed Paul Rudd just about every time we've seen him, we chose Apatow's This is 40.

It may be that they shortened the title from This is a Version of 40 That is so Bleak and Depressing we Can't Remember Why we Made a Movie About It or Where we Left our Souls.  Or they should have.  The trailer features the laugh-y parts, but in reality, this sort-of-sequel to Knocked Up portrays depressing people completely incapable of being honest with themselves or others.  The first twenty five minutes were so bleak that we paused it and asked each other if we should go on.  There would indeed be something to laugh at every five minutes or so.  We told each other that if the characters could make real changes deep inside themselves that the movie would be a good redemption story.  Spoiler alert: it doesn't happen.  They blame everything and everyone else for their problems.  They're horrendous parents.  At the end, my competent wife asked "Do you think Judd Apatow really hates his life?"  Casting his wife as a horrible person married to a horrible person makes this a very viable question.

On the other hand, we've bored everyone we could raving about an obscure drama/comedy that lived a too-short two seasons and is now on DVD.  Men of a Certain Age, an original hour-long show from TNT (yup, that TNT) stars Ray Romano, Scott Bakula and my long-term man crush Andre Braugher.  I know!  Ray Romano!  Whodathunkit?  They portray three guys nearing 50 who went to college together and are still friends.  One's going through a separation, one's married, one is single and, um, busy romantically.  One has little kids, one has teenagers and one has no kids.  One has big daddy issues, one battles an addiction and one has to confront the knife edge of following creative dreams versus having enough to live on.  The show portrays real male friendship featuring real give-and-take and accountability.  They call each other on their sugar honey iced tea.  It's dramatic but also deeply funny.  We got attached to the characters and plot very quickly.

If you think you know Romano from Everybody Loves Raymond, Andre Braugher from Homicide or Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap, think again.  Spend 26 hours with these episodes and you'll see whole different sides of all three actors.  Despite all of the good TV out there, there's still not enough real, moving drama on television.  Do yourself a solid and check out these two seasons.