Shotgun Daddy

5:58

Like most of us, my time is not my own during the week. Even though I'm lucky enough to get home from work fairly early, dinner time, bath time, homework time, and reading time still sucks the entire evening away. By the time the kids are tucked snug in their beds, visions of tomorrow dancing in their heads, there usually isn't enough energy left to do much more than collapse and get ready to do it all over again the next day.

As a result, I've developed a bad habit. On Saturday nights I have date-night with the TiVo. It doesn't really matter what I'm watching -- a Stanford basketball game, Grey's Anatomy, the Office, or even a Seinfeld episode I've already seen a thousand times -- it only matters that I'm not watching Caillou, Dora the Explorer, or Hannah Montana.

The problem with this is that I usually end up falling asleep on the couch...

And so it was last Saturday night. One minute I was watching a sweet History Channel documentary called "Life After People," the next Alison was kissing me on the forehead.

Usually it's a pretty nice thing to be awoken by your daughter with a kiss on the forehead on Sunday morning, but something was different on this particular Sunday morning. It was still dark outside. No problem, I thought. I'd just send Alison back to bed, I could get back to sleep, and we'd reenact this scene in a few hours.

But just as I turned over to fill Alison in on the new plan, I noticed something that made my heart sink. Kate was sitting on the couch next to me.

Daddy: Is Kate awake, too?
Kate: Yes.
Daddy: Alison, did you wake up your sister?
Alison: Yes.
Daddy (absolutely incredulous): Are you fucking serious? (Relax -- I only wanted to say that.)
Alison: Yes.
Daddy: What time is it? (fumbling for phone in pocket)
Daddy: Are you kidding me? 5:58?!? -- this is absolutely ridiculous! You two need to go back to bed!
Kate: No want go bed. Watch Caillou!
Daddy: Sweet mother of god.

The Elbow and the Pirate Ship

Somehow it’s been weeks since I’ve posted anything here, and months since I’ve had any consistency. I’d like to say that I’m back to stay, that you can count on something witty and insightful on a daily basis, but you’d probably see through my optimism. So instead I’ll promise nothing and hope for the best...

Let’s start with last weekend. It was one of those weekends. You know, the kind where you realize that you really won’t mind paying tens of thousands of dollars of college tuition some day because it will mean that you’ll finally be able to take naps during the day, take your wife to dinner in the evening, and sleep in the next morning.

Also, you probably won’t have to make regular trips to the emergency room. On Friday night I was holding Baby Kate’s hand as we walked through a parking lot. Kate didn’t want to walk, so she let her body go completely limp in protest of the forced march. As her feet lifted up from the pavement I felt something pop in her arm, and her whining turned into screams of pain. Lovely.

We drove straight to a late-night clinic near our house where she was diagnosed with a case of "nursemaid’s elbow." It’s apparently fairly common. After the doctor pops the elbow back into place, the child typically recovers completely within about twenty-four hours. Kate, however, has a rather over-developed sense of drama, so she took forty-eight.

So even though that was probably the worst part of the weekend, there was a close second. Henry’s basketball team had its holiday party on Saturday afternoon, and there was a gift exchange -- each boy had arrived with a fifteen dollar gift. Easy, right? Well, when it came time to trade gifts, Henry ended up with the smallest one. As all the other boys were gleefully ripping open their presents to find dinosaurs and Lego sets and Hot Wheels contraptions, Henry opened his to find a wallet-sized package of fruit chews.

Fruit.
Chews.

I was about ready to tip over the buffet table, but then he turned the package over to reveal a Toys’R’Us gift card taped to the back. Now, in theory this might be a good idea. You give the kid a gift card and he can pick any gift he wants, right? Sounds nice, but what five-year-old boy knows what a gift card is? What five-year-old boy has the patience to eat fruit chews in the middle of ten other five-year-old boys who are showing off closet-door basketball hoops and remote control cars? And here’s the biggest question of all -- what parent wouldn’t anticipate that scene? What parent wouldn’t know that a gift card would be only a small step above a stockingful of coal?

Thankfully, Henry took the whole thing pretty well. He was certainly disappointed, but he cheered up when we told him we’d take him to Toys’R’Us directly after the party. (By the way, Toys’R’Us on December 15th is not a good place to be.)

So Henry used his fifteen dollar gift card (and if you had been inconsiderate enough to give a child a gift card, don’t you think you would’ve at least pushed past the fifteen dollar limit?) to buy a knock-off brand Lego pirate ship. You should’ve seen how excited he was as he stared at the box, imagining hours and hours of fun. You should’ve seen how excited I was, as I stared at the label on the box (OVER 450 PIECES!) imagining hours and hours of assembly time...

As it often turns out, I was right and Henry was wrong. I finished putting the ship together at 1:30 AM Sunday night/Monday morning, and even as I clicked the last few bricks into place, snapped the plastic swords into the tiny hands of the plastic pirates, and ran the string through the sails and around the mast, I knew one thing for sure: this ship would not last more than an hour. With that in mind, I was sure to take pictures. Here are a couple taken in the wee hours:





And here’s Henry on Monday morning. His first words to me when he opened his eyes were not “Good Morning,” but “Did you finish my pirate ship?” Doesn’t he look excited to play for hours and hours?

Unfortunately hours and hours turned to minutes and minutes. Henry and his sisters destroyed the ship before breakfast.

No worries, though. Santa has already arranged to give Henry a sturdier ship to replace this one.
If I get around to it I’ll put the ship back together and put it up somewhere out of reach. Until then, it’s just a pile of plastic. So what’s the moral of the story? It’s quite simple really. Little girls’ elbows and generic Lego pirate ships should be handled with care. And never, under any circumstances, give gift cards to five-year-olds.

Boo Humbug

When I was a kid it was always the same. A few hours after the smoke cleared from the Fourth of July fireworks, we'd immediately start brainstorming Halloween costumes.

My costume choices as a boy weren't too different from most kids my age. You can see me in the picture in my cowboy outfit in preschool (note the empty holsters -- my peace-loving mother wouldn't hear of it), and later I was the Six Million Dolar Man, Darth Vader, Ron Guidry (seriously), and a bum at least two or three times. And like every teenage boy ever, I went in drag one year.

One of the best Halloween traditions, though, has gone the way of the rotary phone. Remember when you used to wear your costume to school on Halloween and the whole class would parade around the neighborhood for no apparent reason? My kids will never get that, because their school does not acknowledge Halloween.

Why not? Simple, really. The Constitution of the United States might declare the need for a separation of church and state, but far too often the religious right controls what happens in pbulic schools. In this case, of course, it's the erasing of Halloween, a holiday that some small minds have connected with devil worship.

And so Alison couldn't wear her snow princess costume to school, and Henry had to leave his pirate outfit at home. Such a shame.

Homework is Where the Heart Is

I'm fairly certain that I went to school everyday when I was in the second grade, it's just that I have no idea what I did when I was there. I remember some addition and subtraction; I remember that the class was divided into high, middle, and low reading groups; and I remember feeling bad that my best friend was in the low group. Our big math project was counting the seeds in a cherry tomato (tomatoes still make me a little nauseous thirty years later) and I wrote a report on my favorite dinosaur (triceratops) off the top of my head. Homework? Never.

Things have changed.

Alison's in the second grade, Henry's in kindergarten, and both of them have a significant amount of homework every night. Alison usually spends about sixty to ninety minutes, and Henry clocks in at about an hour. (I don't think I was doing that much until at least the fifth or sixth grade.)

Homework usually starts after dinner and bath time, somewhere around seven o'clock, which is probably our first mistake. The thing you have to realize, though, is that Hurricane Kate is swirling in the late afternoon, making conditions less than ideal for concentrating on math facts and identifying patterns. And so we wait.

Once Baby Kate is put to bed and homework gets started, the division of labor is clear. Alison and Henry attend a Spanish language dual immersion school, which is amazing. The problem, though, is that Alison's second grade Spanish has already outdistanced my high school Spanish. Since Leslie is fluent, she's in charge of Alison while I take care of Henry.

Henry's kindergarten homework is really just about learning how to learn, but the secret bonus is that it's also helped us learn how to learn together. Like most five-year-old boys, Henry can be frustrating sometimes. If he's not in the right mood he might scribble all over his paper and start to cry or roll around on the floor and dissolve into laughter, making me sure in either case that he'll one day make an excellent President of the United States.

Recently, though, things have been different. We both still get frustrated, and there are still evenings when the session ends in tears, but those aren't the norm. I'd love to take credit for the transformation, but the truth is that Henry has taught me more than I've taught him.

1. There will always be more homework
If he has trouble repeating a pattern of shapes on Monday night, I can be fairly sure that he'll do fine on Tuesday.
2. Tomorrow is another day
If we get a late start and it just make sense to spend another thirty minutes cutting out capital letters from the newspaper, we can always put it off until the next day. The world won't come to an end.
3. Stay within the lines
Okay, maybe he didn't teach me this one. Everyone knows that even if you're thinking outside the box, you still need to color within the lines. What he has taught me, though, is that there's a reason why kindergarten teachers ask for everything to be colored. Little boys have trouble with small activities like this, and Henry's no exception. Coloring is good practice.
4. Be patient
There's no need to worry if he can't recite the letters of his name in Spanish. He'll do it when he can do it. (And by the way, he can do it!)

The biggest thing that all this homework has done is given me an hour of uninterrupted time with my son every night, no small feat in a family of five. So whether we're deciding if an airplane should be colored purple or red, sorting words by their opening syllables, or discussing the trials and tribulations of Curious George, we're doing it together. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Big Time

Hey look -- we're famous! Last week Lisa Takeuchi Cullen wrote a nice piece on daddy blogs over at Time.com (apparently the article was originally slated for the actual mag) and included a nice word about this site. Go check it out...