Sunday Haiku: Fall Fashion

September is like
a slow, welcome reunion
with my long sleeve shirts.

A Poem for Age 40

40 is the new 38

I pause today at 40 to look forward and look back.
I’m not upset with 40. It’s a mathematic fact.
I’ve shed some pale illusions, and I’m trying to slow down.
I’ve put down roots for me and mine in a stout, three-rivered town.
I’m married to the woman I have loved since eighteen years of age.
Forty minus eighteen equals twenty two years with Paige.
My skin has spots like some big cat’s, but I lack a leopard’s fierceness.
Said skin’s unmarred by tattoo ink, intact with zero piercings.
My back acts up, and my knees are sore, especially after hoops night.
By now I know
my second toe
nail will never look right.
I take three pills each morning and another few at night.
I’ve come to fear that my next beard will grow in gray and white.
There’s less hair on my head than there used to be and more on my ears than I care for.
I find I’m too often in some room with no idea what I went there for.
We’re closer today to my younger son’s college commencement than mine.
It’s hard not to take a certain offense at the lightning passage of time.
My twin brother’s better looking, but at this point, I’m stronger.
That makes sense; he’s been forty six whole minutes longer.
I’m raising two young patriots of whom I’m duly proud.
I wonder in the mornings if all patriots are so loud.
Despite eating better and working out lately
I can't seem to get and stay below one eighty.
I sweat from the scalp when I eat something spicy
I stay in at night when the roads are too icy.
High school students look really young;
that’s something that age forty has done.
I’ve lived through eight presidents.
I own my own residence.
No man is a failure who has friends.
I hope making new ones never ends. 

(Gasp. Panting. Out of breath.)

I wouldn't trade my life today for any day that came before.
I'm poised and ready to take on what my forties have in store.

11 reasons I love and like my 7-year-old

I file this post under the good-gravy-the-start-of-the-school-year-is-busy-and-hard-to-

bedtime birthday cupcakes

adjust-to exception to the timely birthday post rules.  Also, for the math majors, I'm offering 11 reasons I love my 7-year-old because I offered that many when his brother turned 11, and my younger-sister wife felt that posting only 7 for Teddy would be unjust.

1. He hangs on me.  I confess that I only came to see this as a positive only after complaining about it.  Having a 50 pound human drape his weight on me while seated or standing doesn't always feel like an asset.  When I complained to Paige about it, however, after snapping at Teddy to get off me while typing, she said "but he's so bonded to you".  We had a lot of one-on-one time from late 2008 until he went to Kindergarten more than two years later, and it still shows.

2. He's a helper.  From an early age, Teddy's relished opportunities to help - mixing up ingredients, shopping, fetching stuff, carrying things.

3. He has an eagle eye.  It's probably most accurate to say that I admire this quality.  Teddy sees things other people just don't - mostly of the insect variety, but also coins on the ground and punchbuggies.

4. He has a strong, accurate arm.  From the time he could stand up (way before he could catch a ball), Teddy's been able to throw a ball a surprisingly long distance right to a spot.  It's wicked fun. 

5. He feels things so strongly.  Poor kid, he got this one from his dad.  Our main priority as his parents is helping him work with strong feelings - good and bad - and behave decently no matter what they are.  Happy Teddy, though, is incredible company.

6. He draws detailed pictures.  When Teddy undertakes to doodle, he draws complicated scenes with tons of things going on.  When asked, he can narrate the whole deal - e.g. "This guy dropped from the helicopter on his skateboard and went down the ramp and then did a flip off of here and grabbed the club and hit the dragon on the head."

7. Possibly related to his eagle eye, Teddy is very observant.  He's a professional noticer of things, people and patterns and he makes connections between the things that he observes.

8. He is so cute.  He's shed his baby fat, but he still has those big moony eyes and kissable cheeks.

9. He has a younger brother's bulldog spirit.  One of our big challenges as parents of two physical boys is keeping them from fighting, but when I'm not worried about safety or hurt feelings, I admire Teddy's tenacity in taking on his younger brother at every possible competition.  I first saw it when he was about 4 and tackling his 8-year-old brother with surprising ferocity.

10. His tastes are very predictable.  The palate has expanded since this chart, but Teddy's still very easy to menu-plan for: pretzels, provolone, bananas and apple juice satisfy most of his appetites.  It will be satisfying when he gets more adventurous in his tastes, but it's logistically easy to stock a Teddy-friendly pantry.

11.  He believes deeply.  Teddy prays with a sincerity and familiarity with which we should all approach God.

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.