Nine Days of Summer - Day 3 - Kids in the Attic?

This is the third in a nine-part series, one part for each consecutive day I'll be home on a vacation from work. "Vacation" in a corporate American-ish sense means I'll still be checking in, checking e-mails, and doing all sorts of work-related things, except without having to put pants on, but with small people draped on me. The following is on our list of things to do for the week plus before school starts back up again, my wife goes back to teaching kindergarten, and all Hell breaks loose:

Day 1 is here.
Day 2 can be found here.
And the entire 1979 Major League Baseball All Star game can be found here.

One day when I was 26 years old, I overheard a conversation at work between two thirty-somethings who between them had about 6-7 kids. The man told the woman that he and his wife were finishing some major home project and that they would be dropping the kids off at Day Care to complete the task.

How cold and heartless, I thought, to ship the kids off to Day Care so you could finish some menial house errand. Don't you want to spend every last minute you can with your little cherubs? The moments are fleeting, the memories are fond, and Harry Chapin is out back warming up his pipes, preparing to serenade you outside your window tonight as you throw away a chance to spend another day at home with your precious little ones...I will never send my kids to some strange place when they have all the comforts I can provide. We'll laugh, we'll bond, we'll share lemonade.

Well how quaint.

Forget Day Care, today we would have hired gypsies to babysit.

It's our fault, really, but we had quite a bit of inside work to do on what turned out to be a beautiful day when the kids by all rights should have been playing outside. Someday soon they will reach the ages where we'll force them out of the house and command them not to return before dark unless they are missing a limb or multiple fingers. But at ages 6, 4 and 1, today was not the day.

The dangers are still too great. We live in a decent enough neighborhood, so we don't think anyone would come after them. Plus, our kids have been so programmed to detect Stranger Danger that they initially shy away from many of their older relatives. But you never know. And lately there is an idiot 10-year-old out riding his bike flipping people off as he goes past. I don't want him showing my kids that gesture; I want them to learn that from me someday -- when the time is right. Besides, even if no stranger accosts our kids, I can't trust any of them to run once up the driveway and back without tripping and splitting their lip open. So no.

We held them inside against their will and then asked, and then demanded, that they not play anything that would create a mess as we tried to quite literally get our house in order. We even asked, and then demanded, that they help us. We tried in vain to use the Golden Child technique. We offered blatant favoritism not to the child who helped our cause, but to any that didn't hurt it.

Nothing worked. As soon as one room got clean, a school of Pepperidge Farm goldfish swam out of the bag onto the floor. When those got picked up, an entire easel full of art supplies cam crashing down. All 108 Uno cards made an appearance on the floor today. Welch's Fruit Snacks were tramped into carpeting.

Per usual, the only help offered was when we had to load two 750-pound tubs full of old kids' clothes into the attic.

Ah, the unfinished attic. Known for its two distinct climates, sub-Arctic or super-Saharan, the never-started attic acts an unglorified dumpster. Everything that we should throw or give away goes up there, in the hopes that it will just melt away into the Owens Corning. (Everything except the Christmas ornaments. There's an angel made from a dollar bill as well as a Mario Lemieux Starting Lineup-ish looking ornament that I'd like to rescue.) Because the temperature is never conducive to anything but swearing, there is no time or desire to organize. As a result, the entire back 85% has gone unused, because who wants to bend over to avoid the roof's eaves while carrying a bowling ball and an Apple IIc monitor in 172-degree heat.

According to bpghome.com, this is an example of a poorly planned attic. Compared to ours it still looks like Valhalla.

But the attic is the New World to the kids. They seek approval and funding from the King and Queen of their respective countries to explore it. (If they don't get their acts together and help us, we may make them colonize it, too.) Maybe because the rungs of the ladder are exactly the width of the one-year-old's foot do they feel empowered to climb all 8 steps to see a bunch of unmarked boxes. My mom always told me the boogie man lives in our attic, and I'm convinced he still lives in mine today.

I turned down the offered help, then, on the two tubs of clothes and within five minutes needed a shower. My kids thought we had a sprinkler system installed when I came down. I told them nobody ever should have to go up there again as long as we live here. Then they knocked a cup full of milk to the floor.

Lesson learned: Parents, if you want anything done efficiently, ship the kids to day Care. Secondary lesson that probably nobody learned: Things go quicker when we all work together as a team.

There is a trip to Sesame Place in our near future, though. All will be well then, when we slap hands with Elmo and forget that some days were never meant to go the way you planned them.

Nine Days of Summer - Day 2 - Hit it to Me!

"These guys aren't very good hitters. They aren't hitting it to me."

This is the second in a nine-part series, one part for each consecutive day I'll be home on a vacation from work. "Vacation" in a corporate American-ish sense means I'll still be checking in, checking e-mails, and doing all sorts of work-related things, except without having to put pants on, but with small people draped on me. The following is on our list of things to do for the week plus before school starts back up again, my wife goes back to teaching kindergarten, and all Hell breaks loose:

Clean laundry room
Clean garage
Clean bedroom
Supervise kids cleaning their bedrooms (so just do it for them)
Ensure no other rooms in house get messed up
Re-finance house
Take kids to Ball Game (Wilmington Blue Rocks - Class A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals!)
Get cars looked at
Clean behind refrigerator
Schedule meeting with financial planner so he can remind us how rich he is
Power-wash house
Go grocery shopping
Complete and analyze 42 Fantasy Football mock drafts
Re-seal driveway
Get back-to-school haircuts
Take kids back-to-school shoe shopping COMPLETED
Go to Sesame Place - with kids

Day 1 is here.

Day 2:
Determined to make something out of this morning rather than let it rot away in bed like the previous morning, I tried to wake up before at least one of my kids, and succeeded in beating two of them up (not literally) by mere minutes.

Then we picked up where we left off yesterday and took turns cramming kids, one at a time, into a 12" by 18" wagon and pushing them down the hall into a box pile. In the year 3535, when people no longer have feet but their brains will download pleasure-nourishment pills that will last up to 53 weeks at a time, kids will still need to push a makeshift form of transportation rapidly down the hall into sharp-cornered walls. Some things you just won't be able to program unto a pill. Later, in the shower, I heard a noticeable thud that was probably followed by screams of terror, the wagon sacked by either a band of miniature bandits or some uneven carpet. I'll never know because I was off duty. Incidentally, the average shower in our house lasts 48 minutes.

The list above contains some difficult items, but the sneaky-tough one on that list is "Ensure no other rooms in house get messed up." If we get out of the next 8 days with only that having been accomplished, the whole week will have been a success, even if one or more kids falls down a well in the interim. Pillows, cups, shoes, more cups, straws, everywhere. All the time.

To counteract some of this rampant careless behavior, my wife has enacted the Golden Child award. The award is given instantaneously to any child who actually does what we say the first time without backtalk or grief. Used in a sentence: "Looks like <so-and-so> is the Golden Child." Because there is no tangible benefit such as a ridiculously expensive doll, or ridiculously expensive doll clothes, or even a quarter we found under the train table, our six-year-old has abdicated her Golden Child throne and is living the care-free lifestyle of someone who can turn any declarative statement into an argument as well as someone who notices and questions every facial expression you make. ("Why did you just laugh?" "What's funny?" "Why did you laugh that time last week?" "Did you just roll your eyes?")

On the other hand, the four-year-old has taken the Golden Child title to heart. He still needs to hear an official Golden Child Alert before he'll do anything helpful, but at least then he'll spring into action, ready to do whatever you ask of him and absolutely nothing you don't. With the little one too little to understand any of it, right now the middle child is the Golden Child, and literally so on the nights he goes to bed without having peed since 1:30 in the afternoon.

Due to some real-life job obligations and the difficulty we had ensuring the rest of the house wasn't being torn apart, we once again were reduced to crossing just one item off our list. The baseball game. My kids are blessed with attention spans that quite frankly outlast mine, so we can confidently go to any baseball game knowing we will watch all nine innings without having to worry about what the kids will do when they get bored. As long as we bring $4,000 for food. But there is an inflatable bounce house (an inflatable bounce house, I say) down the third-base line and none of my kids cared. I give them full marks for that.

A Wilmington Blue Rocks game is quintessential Minor League Baseball. A jumbotron that you need binoculars to see, vendors outnumbering fans hawking crap or chances to win crap, and multiple mascots that include a celery stalk that dances behind home plate every time the home team scores a run, even if that run scores on a rally-killing double play with the home team down five.

My son found his baseball glove (he actually calls it a mitt for some reason) and then found one for his sister because "we're going to catch something today. Either a ball or a hot dog." Love the enthusiasm, but alas, the Blue Rocks don't shoot processed meat out of an air gun into the upper deck, or any deck, you have to go to the big leagues for that. They did shoot three lousy t-shirts and missed us by a mile every time.

After going the entire game without a ball or a hot dog or a t-shirt, the kids got to run the bases after the game. The girl, free-spirited, like at recess. The boy, determined, like the seventh game of the World Series. "I was the fastest runner out there...did I make smoke [dust] when I ran?"

Yes you did. But we're going to have to make smoke to make a dent in our to-do list. we're going to need the help of several Golden Children.

Nine Days of Summer - Day 1

This is the first in a nine-part series, one part for each consecutive day I'll be home on a vacation from work. "Vacation" in a corporate American-ish sense means I'll still be checking in, checking e-mails, and doing all sorts of work-related things, except without having to put pants on, but with small people draped on me. The following is on our list of things to do for the week plus before school starts back up again, my wife goes back to teaching kindergarten, and all Hell breaks loose:

Clean laundry room
Clean garage
Clean bedroom
Supervise kids cleaning their bedrooms (so just do it for them)
Ensure no other rooms in house get messed up
Re-finance house
Take kids to Ball Game (Wilmington Blue Rocks - Class A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals!)
Get cars looked at
Clean behind refrigerator
Schedule meeting with financial planner so he can remind us how rich he is
Power-wash house
Go grocery shopping
Complete and analyze 42 Fantasy Football mock drafts
Re-seal driveway
Get back-to-school haircuts
Take kids back-to-school shoe shopping
Go to Sesame Place - with kids

In two good weeks, with focus and determination, I could get 30% of that list done, without kids. So with the extra challenges, we'll be happy with just cutting the grass and getting some of the dishes done.

Day 1:
With that daunting task list in front of me, I slept until 10 AM. That hasn't happened since college, in the days when I could still sleep on my stomach without it taking the Coast Guard and 100 civilian volunteers 3 hours and 45 minutes to move me a quarter inch. I've witnessed the miracle of birth three times but have never once witnessed a Saturday morning when any of them let me sleep that late, much less witnessed the miracle of having no telemarketers from Nebraska, Florida, or Utah call before 9AM. But I did wake up to giggles with a couch cushion on my head. (Honest to God.) So I was knocked out cold.

Refreshed from the best night of sleep I've had since the day after an all-nighter, I contracted some sort of allergy. They say that people are more susceptible to allergies as they get older, and for some reason I have in my late thirties become allergic to the month of August. Something grows in August that doesn't agree with my lungs...maybe it's the No Holiday Tree, the Humidity Weed, or the Pre-Season Football Death Vine, but if there's an allergist in the house, please see me.

I responded to the allergy not by taking medicine to deal with the symptoms but by sneezing so forcefully and consecutively that I thought I crushed a rib. This is why nothing ever gets done in the house...I'm called on for a few simple tasks--and a few complex ones-- and I sneeze my way onto the DL on the first day. So we decided to try things that don't require me to stand all the way upright...we ordered the tickets for Sesame Place, threatened our kids that we'd go by ourselves if they didn't clean their rooms (which is total bullshit because two adults going there by themselves is creepy) and decided to go do the shoe shopping.

(The ball game will wait until Sunday, and this is the first sign that I might have the best kids in the world...we originally told them we'd go Friday when there are fireworks, then backed out because of a 60% chance of rain - it didn't rain - then promised them Saturday, then in the interest of time and health, pushed it back to Sunday, when we now promise them they can go on the field before the game and run the bases after it. If we renege on this promise, we'll have to get tickets to the game where all fans 14 and under get to play an inning of right field. But other than a few mild protests, they've been ok with it. So far. Love these kids.)

The problem with shoe shopping is that it requires all kids present. This runs counter to my attempts to divide and conquer our errands by splitting up the kids and getting double the work done in the same amount of time. But today there was a buy-one-get-one-half-off sale (a BOGOHOS, as I understand it), so we trudged into the shoe store and by some grace of God, all the kids found shoes they liked. Of course, one pair was not available in the correct size, so my wife immediately stepped in and said we'll order those online. If only she had been there for me two weeks earlier when I picked out a pair of dress shoes and, at the tender age of 38, still managed to get taken by the "Well, we don't have THAT exact shoe that's on sale in your size, but we have this one just like it," that happens to be marked up 300% and is not on sale. I'm THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD and still fall for that crap. I hate business, I hate people, and I hate businesspeople.

The middle child was the one whose shoes didn't fit, so we got him a smoothie to take his mind off the fact that everyone got shoes except him. Then we got the other kids smoothies because we got one kid a smoothie. We will run completely out of money before the youngest turns 3. The benefit to this, though, is that he now gets a package in the mail, and he has been known recently to openly weep when he gets nothing in the mail, even though all the rest of us get is a Coupon Clipper, some credit card applications, and a Victoria's Secret catalog addressed to the former residents. (It's been eight years, Vicky, time to update your database.)

So by my early count, we got one thing done today. This puts on a pace to have the list wiped out by late September, when a new list will have blossomed out of the cracks in the plumbing. I did chug a little Robitussin and downed some Allegra tonight, however, so maybe we can hit the ground running Sunday, and maybe even a little before 10 AM.

A One and a Two

One of the better strokes of luck I've had as a parent came on a night a couple years ago when things were looking a little desperate. The kids started using the couch as a stage. And as a pulpit. And somehow as a tightrope. And as a napkin. And as a diving board into the coffee table.

At wit's end, I was determined to punish them for disobeying my repeated commands to not abuse the furniture while also trying to smoothly transition them to a calming activity that wouldn't result in blood and the emergency room. (Ain't got no time for that.) But mostly I wanted to punish them. They were acting like jackasses, and I had no patience left to try to get them to sit and play Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders or to watch another episode of any of their idiotic cartoons. I needed something new, something fresh, something they had never seen before, so I could blow their minds and channel all that energy into something other than swordfighting with empty paper towel rolls on a cushionless loveseat.

So I made them watch the Lawrence Welk Show. PUNISHMENT.

It was sheer desperation, but it worked. They had seen entertainment shows before, all of them involving singing and dancing, and x's and buzzers, and judges and infighting and black stages and Cielo. Blah. This was a brand new world...an orange-ish stage mandated from the 1970s, the large band playing all sorts of musical instruments in the background, and of course the Geritol sign. (Question #1)

It was mostly the instruments that got their attention. The brass section, the woodwinds, the strings...it was probably the first time the now 4-year-old had seen some of these instruments, so he asked "What's that?" for all of them (Questions #2-6). Our daughter got into the singing duets and the dancing, and both of them were duly amazed by Arthur Duncan's feet.

For me it was a little bit of heaven. Not so much the entertainment but the quiet, although I always enjoyed when they played the song from the United Airlines commercial that was a part of most football telecasts in the 1980s. But all the noise and clatter from before had dissipated. There were no commercials that I'd be called on to fast forward through. And if there was a rating softer than "G", this show was that, save for everyone referring to Anacani as "our little Mexican girl." But that lack of subtlety proved too subtle for our young ears to pick up.

In a perfect story, my kids, after watching the Lawrence Welk Show and wondering out loud why everyone in the crowd looks like somebody's great-grandmother (Question #7), turned from unruly hellions into docile creatures that picked flowers, danced with unicorns and developed an appreciation for the fine arts. But in reality we have only watched "the singing and dancing show" a few times in the years since, even though I have two episodes still saved to the DVR, the last 2% that isn't taken up by Chuggington, Let's Play Sesame, Super Why, Tom and Jerry, Caillou, and of course classic NFL games from the 1980s.

Still, between that show and my wife taking my daughter to an education fair where she fell in love with a violin, and me mixing in one Mirror in the Bathroom Youtube video among the 12,000 straight views of the Muppets' Manamana that turned my son on to the saxophone, maybe we have accidentally created at least a respect for music in our kids. And who knows, maybe there's a talent there we can uncover that will best my musical peak, which is lip-synching to old U2 songs on the drive home. My daughter wound up playing the violin, and my son keeps pestering us to allow him to play instruments that are taller than he is. So there's hope.

The point is, although I have no definitive data to back me up, I think kids still like music. And if the kids are driving you nuts and you can't find any music around that they like, and you can't find any around that you like, introduce them to something you don't like. (You're a big boy/girl, you can handle it for an hour.) It may at least calm everyone down a little, and somebody may actually like it!

Questions Index:
1. What does that sign say? GERITOL. What's that? Don't worry about it.
2. What's that? A trumpet.
3. What's that? A saxophone.
4. What's that? A violin.
5. What's that? An accordion. Do you want to play the accordion some day? No.
6. What's that? A bubble machine. I want one. No.
7. Why does everyone look like great-grandma? Because everyone looked 25 years older than people the same age do today. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's their glasses. Why?

The Mac and Cheese Debate

Sounds like a no-brainer really, when you have a choice between a pan of hot, fresh, homemade macaroni and cheese and any number of oddly shaped store-bought mac and cheese brands cooked in boiling water. But in this episode of Point/Counterpoint, our six-year-old daughter makes a very compelling case for "the leading brand" over the homemade variety.

Actually that's false. I totally destroy her, then pile on by offering a bonus recipe for a stuffed pepper casserole that is out of this world.

Her: Kids have different taste buds than adults. They may not be quite as advanced as an adult's taste buds, and our palates may not be as discriminating, but the fact remains that Mom's macaroni and cheese, with the thick, sharp cheddar cheese, is the worst thing I've ever tasted, after her stuffed pepper casserole. In fact, I'm not allowing her to look at Pinterest again until she makes me a year's worth of hot dogs and ketchup and potato chip sandwiches.

Me: It's macaroni. And it's cheese. It's macaroni and cheese. Mom may put a little flour in it and change around some of the cheeses, but it's still just macaroni and cheese. Look, I was like you at one point in  my life-- picky eater, afraid of anything that had a vegetable in it until I was 25 years old. To this day I still don't eat asparagus, artichokes, cauliflower, cabbage, beets, eggplants, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes unless they're diced, endive, kale, escarole, cucumbers, chick peas, snow peas, regular peas, and anything with the word "bean" in it. My great-aunt used to make jello salad stuffed with parsnips, turnips, fruit, nuts, bolts, and car parts that nobody ever ate except her fellow old people. I'd pick out every last piece of pepper and onion from my Manwich as a kid. So I know where you're coming from. Food is full of gross stuff. But not macaroni and cheese for goodness sake! There's nothing else in it! Look not even any onions "for texture."

Her: It's yucky.

Me: Can you please elaborate?

Her: The "good kind" of macaroni is the kind mom makes in the pot. They're shaped like shells or wheels or crescent moons, and the cheese either comes in a squeeze pouch that splerches all over the side of the pot, or as a powder that collects on the side of the bowl when you don't mix it thoroughly. That's the good stuff. Mom's is the "yucky" kind. Plus she just gets the recipe off of a box of pasta anyway...

Me: Shhh!!!! Look, I don't disagree with you. Any time you can ingest cheese-dust, you take the opportunity. And in my day, I ate entire boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese. It was, and always will be, the Cheesiest. But, I'm telling you, once you give Mom's kind another chance, you'll never go back.

Her: Disgusting. Gwoss.

Me: We've warned you about your baby talk before. Did you know some of your favorite aunts also make their own macaroni and cheese?

Her: Yeah, and it's still yucky.

Me: Fine. Eat what you want. That's more for me, even though this pan could feed our entire family for a week or more. Do I need to get you a peanut butter sandwich?

Her: With brown sugar?

Me: Sure. Next week, we're having that stuffed pepper casserole, your other favorite.

Her: That's not my favorite...make sure you put enough brown sugar on my sandwich, but not too much. That's too much! Scrape some off. Oh, you scraped too much off! Start over...

You don't have to be George Stephanopoulos to see how clearly and decisively I win this debate. Even if it's true my wife just stole the mac and cheese recipe from a box. You can, however, find the recipe for the stuffed pepper casserole here. (Be sure to have plenty of peanut butter and brown sugar on hand because it's disgusting.) God Bless you Pinterest...I may not totally get you, but you've provided some wonderful meals this summer.