This site has no agenda, and its author has no chip on his shoulder. He promises not to whine about "fatherhood equality," and he'll do his best not to sound superior. He is, afterall, just a dad. Instead, he promises to tell good stories about his three kids. That's about it.
I know what you're thinking, believe me, I do. At this stage in the game, when we've got about seventeen thousand different varieties of flavored water, filtered water, vitamin-enhanced water, and brought-down-to-Earth-by-aliens water, why in the world would we ever need yet another version of that which already flows freely from our faucets?
Well, without commenting on the water industry in general, let me tell you this: my kids absolutely love Wat-Aah! Wat-Aah! is the creation of Rose Cameron, a mother who was tired of watching her children pour colorized sugar water down their throats all day long. She knew water would be better for them, but she also knew they thought it was boring. (For the full story, check out the Wat-Aah! website, DrinkWataah.com.)
Anyway, the good people at Wat-Aah! were nice enough to send me a few samples so I could run a simple test. The idea was that I would put a couple bottles in the refrigerator next to some soda or Gatorade and see what my kids would pick. It was a nice idea in theory, except for one problem. They never made it to the fridge. My kids descended as soon as I opened the package, and the bottles were gone. As pictured above, my daughter grabbed one to take to her basketball game, and she definitely preferred it to Gatorade.
The only bad news I can see in this whole thing is that even though Wat-Aah! is currently available in twenty-eight states, you still can't buy it in California, which is a drag. (If you're lucky enough to live in NYC, you can get it almost anywhere, but if you live anywhere west of the Mississippi, you'll have to order it from Amazon.com.)
But please try it -- I know you and your kids will love it.
Almost two years ago, I wrote about how my love for honey combined with my poor grocery list memory to result in a considerable stockpile of the sweet stuff. (For deeper context, here's the full story.) Anyway, I thought I'd let everyone know that earlier this week we finished the last bottle of honey. I can't wait for the next Costco trip. We need honey.
I love Tiger Woods for a lot of reasons. He and I both attended the same university, we are both biracial, and we have both felt the sting of racism. Aside from that, I am a huge sports fan. But unlike most fans, I have no interest in the underdog. I root for excellence, and there has been no athlete in my lifetime -- not even Michael Jordan -- who has exemplified excellence as Eldrick "Tiger" Woods has for the past dozen years.
I will not waste space here listing his accomplishments, but if you're reading this and all you know is that Tiger seems to win all the time and pitch a lot of products, you need to know that he is not just a great golfer, he is an historically great athlete, the Babe Ruth of his generation. This weekend, playing in The Masters, one of golf's most important tournaments, Tiger will have an opportunity to create more history, but I won't be watching.
Even though my kids are in school, my wife is out shopping, and I'm home alone, I won't be watching. The Masters is played at Augusta National, a private golf club in Augusta, Georgia. Until 1990, there were no black members at the club, and there are still no female members, despite numerous protests and much negative publicity over the past few years. If a private organization wants to limit its membership to a certain race, religion, or gender, the United States Constitution guarantees it that right, and I'm fine with that. My problem is that the PGA does not need to play a tournament at such a club.
For me, it is an equality issue. I have two daughters, and I simply can't sit them on the couch next to me while I watch a tournament played at a club where they might never be welcome. (Technically, women are allowed to play the course as guests of members on certain days.)
Should Tiger Woods stand up and make a statement about this? Probably. Should he consider skipping the tournament one year, just to make a point? It would be more than admirable. To be fair, Phil Mickelson, the second-best golfer in the world, could also say something. He has daughters at home who would learn a valuable lesson if their father said something about Augusta National, but neither he nor any other golfer (to my knowledge) has ever said anything about Augusta's membership policies.
Not everyone has the strength of character shown by people like Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, or Billie Jean King, so perhaps we should give Tiger a pass. He's an athlete, no more, no less.
Except that he IS something more. Here's one of Tiger's first Nike ads, a spot which can be read in two different ways. Either Tiger was making a statement about his background as it related to the state of the world, or the people at Nike were exploiting his background for financial gain. More and more, it looks like the latter.
I hope Tiger wins this weekend, really I do. I just wish I could watch.
One of Alison's teeth fell out two nights ago, and it was kind of a big deal. First of all, it was the first molar that she's lost, which is cool, and second of all, it was the first time in a while that one of her teeth had come out on its own. As soon as one of her teeth is even slightly loose she typically comes to me to see if I can pull it out. When I was a kid I remember freaking people out as my loose teeth twisted in the wind for weeks, but Alison doesn't roll like that. If it can come out, it must come out.
Anyway, all of that is only marginally interesting. What really got me thinking was that she was eager to see what the Tooth Fairy would bring her the next day. Alison is nine years old, and I know for certain that by the time I was nine I had solved all the mysteries; Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy had long since joined Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty in the land of fairy tales.
So how is it that Alison still believes with all her heart? If anything, you'd expect that children in this day and age would be growing up faster and would be less likely to hang on to childhood fantasies, but in our house ignorance is bliss. I know for a fact that her best friend cast the veil away from her eyes quite some time ago, but still pretends for her younger sister's sake. While Alison has occasionally asked the expected questions (How does Santa go to every house in the whole world? Why does the Santa in this store look different from the one in the other store?), she always accepts whatever answer I come up with, probably just because it's easier to believe.
And isn't that what we all want, to believe in something? One of my most vivid childhood memories centers on this type of belief. When I was four years old my parents and I were on a camping trip in the Grand Tetons over the Easter holiday. I was allowed to sleep in on Easter morning, until my dad poked his head into the tent with amazing news -- the Easter Bunny was outside busily hiding Easter eggs, and if I hurried I might be able to see him... I shot out of the tent, but unfortunately I wasn't fast enough. My dad pointed to the top of a gentle hill that rose in the distance, and told me that he had seen him hopping in that direction. Again, if I hurried...
I sprinted up that hill, my four-year-old legs pumping faster than they ever had, my heart beating with pure excitement. As long as I live I'll never forget what I felt as I ran up that hill. I had missed him once, and nothing could stop me from seeing him this time. I was absolutely certain that once I reached the top I would see him hopping leisurely in the meadow below.
But you know how the story ends. When my last strides brought me to the top, instead of the Easter Bunny I saw only a field of wildflowers blanketing the valley on the far side of the hill. I stood alone for a moment, disappointed that he had escaped me again, but I soon retraced my steps back down the hill to our camp where my parents erased any lingering sadness by reminding me that there were eggs waiting to be found.
In the end, it didn't matter at all that I hadn't seen the Easter Bunny. The thrill of coming so close was good enough; in fact, the emotions attached to that day in the mountains stayed with me long after my belief in the Easter Bunny had faded away.
And this is all I can hope for for my children. Years from now I doubt that Alison will remember the moment when her Santa Claus innocence was lost, but I hope she holds on to what she felt yesterday morning when she woke up and instantly checked beneath her pillow to see what had been left behind. She found two presidential gold coins (our Tooth Fairy pays double for molars) and jingled them against each other in her hand as she looked up at me and smiled. The Tooth Fairy had come and gone while she slept, just like she knew she would.
When Alison and Henry were small and just beginning to talk, we kept waiting for the "verbal explosion." All the books we read -- and we read a lot of books -- told us that one day the words would start coming as if they were never going to stop. But it wasn't to be. Neither Alison nor Henry were particularly big talkers; in fact, we were so concerned about Alison that we took her to a speech pathologist when she was just a bit past her second birthday. We had been promised a verbal explosion, a tidal wave of words, and we couldn't understand why we weren't getting it.
As the years went by, both Henry and Alison started talking the way they were supposed to, but for both of them their growth was slow and steady. They weren't riding the tidal wave the books had predicted, but were instead floating languidly down a relaxing river slowly winding its way to the sea. At least they were getting there.
And then came Kate, a different child altogether. When she was an infant, she cooed and gurgled and bubbled as her siblings never had. Her first words came months earlier than either Alison or Henry, and when she started stringing words together into sentences and paragraphs and novellas, we finally understood what the books had been talking about.
This wasn't an explosion as much as it was a nuclear reaction. Part of it, I suppose, is that with two older siblings she gets much more input and many more opportunities for conversation than either Alison or Henry had, but that's not all that's going on here. Kate is a talker, plain and simple, and to be honest, it can sometimes make you wish there were an off button somewhere.
Here's where I may lose some of you. I'd love to tell you that I'd happily spend every second of my day soaking up every syllable Kate has to offer. I'd like to say that her words fall upon me like cool rain on a hot, summer day. I'd like to say that her angelic voice is the only soundtrack I need as I go about my day.
But I would be lying, and you would probably know it.
Driving in the car is probably the worst. The world outside her window is constantly changing as we speed about town, and everything must be commented on, asked about, sung about, described, and discussed. It's fun and cute for a while, but then a cool song comes on the radio and all you really want to do is turn into a rockstar for a few minutes and sing along at the top of your lungs. Instead, you find yourself engaged in a game of twenty questions, a game that you will never, ever win. Not in a million years. One thought rings in your mind: if only you had passed on the DVD player and instead had installed a limo-style privacy partition just behind the driver's seat. How cool would that be?
But as quickly as the thought arrives, it is washed away behind the force of Kate's Syntax Tsunami. You drive on, nodding in the right places, responding when she stops to take a breath, and wondering how someone so small can have so many words.
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