The Big Blowout Labor Day Fall Preview Extravaganza Bonanza

In this Fall Preview issue:

1. In-laws and by extension, sex.
2. Football
3. Christmas
4. Mario Kart Wii
5. Apples
6. Football
7. Pumpkins
8. Halloween
9. Leaves
10. Thanksgiving - Football
11. Christmas
12. Football

Hi, this is the kids. Our dad was supposed to have written the Big Blowout Labor Day Fall Preview Extravaganza Bonanza by now, but he has spent the past week working, poring over his fake football teams, and playing too much Mario Kart, so he had us write it instead. Unfortunately, by now some retail stores have started putting their Christmas trees out on display, so fall is over. We missed our chance. We'll do it anyway, as practice for next year. We've never written a Big Blowout Labor Day Fall Preview Extravaganza Bonanza before, so we hope it meets all of your expectations. 

But first, we had a question for all of you parents, one that our parents won't answer. Please help answer it for us!

We were wondering if we had in-laws. We're fascinated by the concept of in-laws, so we asked our mother last week who ours were. She said you had to be married to have in-laws, but since we're not married, we are adopting Daddy's family as our in-laws. We decided that since we came out of Mommy's belly, that we would share her in-laws. Then we asked, since we came out of Mommy's belly, what role exactly does Daddy have in the whole process? They wouldn't answer that question, either, except to say that it's too soon to talk about birds and bees, and that there's no time to be visiting aviaries and apiaries. We're SO confused. Can you help?

BIRDS

BEES

On that note, on with the Fall Preview...fall around here means football season, and we helped our dad pick his Fantasy Football teams by insisting he take our favorite player-- Minnesota Vikings tight end Kyle Rudolph-- every chance he gets. Rudolph is the only active player in the NFL named after one of Santa's reindeer, so he's our favorite this year, just like he was last year, and the year before that. We tried to get into Nathan Vasher, the "Kansas Comet" Gale Sayers, and even Ed Donder, but none of them really grabbed our attention. In fact, we just made Ed Donder up because he sounds like an offensive lineman from the 1950s Chicago Cardinals. At some point, there will be a player with the first name of Blitzen, then he will be our favorite, and we'll kick Kyle Rudolph to the curb.

And speaking of Christmas, all the oldest among us will want is her two front teeth, since she lost them both within two days of each other, which is a relief, because she was beginning to look like these people. The tooth fairy, however, apparently lost all her gold coins, so she gave her a dollar and a pack of gum. Seeing his sister turn such a handsome profit, the oldest boy is now tying his teeth to oncoming trains.

By the way, the reason our dad is playing so much Mario Kart is that we are making him. Because little did we know that Elsa's twin sister Rosalina is hiding in that game somewhere. All Daddy has to do to unlock her is earn a Star rating on each of the eight Mirror Cups (something he has been unable to do since he bought the game in 2008) or the more direct route, race 250,000 more times. Then he'll unlock Rosalina and immediately enroll in carpal tunnel therapy. And what will we do with Rosalina once she is unlocked? Probably absolutely nothing. 

Congratulations? On what? Six years and still many, many races from unlocking Elsa...er...Rosalina.

Let's turn our attention to some outdoor pursuits coming our way this fall. We see a trip to the apple orchard in our future. We just had one in our very recent past...last weekend, in fact. The first weekend all summer where it actually felt like summer, down to the sweat seeping through our butt cracks. We rode on the John Deere tractor (our little brother's favorite part) and sniffed the gas fumes out to the field where we picked 86 pounds of apples that we'll never eat -- unless our parents painstakingly remove every inch of skin off of them-- and even then we'll neglect them the minute we spot a stray Go-gurt in the back of the refrigerator and pitch a fit when we're told it's been there since 2009 and is probably no good. Mom has a busy autumn ahead of her on Pinterest, making edible football helmets out of apples with two bites of them, and Dad has a busy season of dolloping whipped cream all over everything. We'll eat countless bags of Welch's fruit snacks between meals and our parents will ask, in vain, "How about a crisp, fresh, hand-picked apple instead?" "Naaaah." We're doing this again in a month, by the way, because there will be "different" apples available. We won't eat those, either.

We come back to football because the middle one of us is playing flag football this fall. In an ironic twist, these games are mostly scheduled for Sunday afternoons at 1PM. Daddy frowns every time he thinks about this and has said on multiple occasions the only things purposely scheduled for Sundays at 1PM were open houses. Daddy is trying really hard to not be "that Dad" who pays more attention to the scoring updates on his phone than he does to his child. Don't be surprised, though, if he thinks he's posting a cute picture on this site of his son running to glory with his flags waving behind him in the fall breeze, when it's actually a screenshot of the Jaguars/Titans scoring summary. :-(

Around early to mid-October, we will pick out our pumpkins for Halloween. Dad has discussed Halloween in the past so we're just making sure we're on our best behavior so we don't have to go as grapes this year. The pumpkin picking remains the same...the two boys go and pick out the biggest, most misshapen, unwieldy pumpkins they can find and make Dad carry them back to the wagon, while big sister finds a petite thing that she could almost wear as jewelry if she wanted. Then sis finds two gourds, both shaped like ladles, one smooth and the other bumpy, for the front porch. She always picks a bumpy gourd. She's a great friend to bumpy gourds everywhere.

Then comes November, which, if it weren't for Thanksgiving, wouldn't have a whole lot going for it other than sleet. At least the elections are over early in the month. Dad spends most of the month blowing leaves into piles and raking them onto the tarp then dumping them in our backyard bog, which gets boggier when he adds 22 tarploads of wet leaves to it. He says it's better than helping us clean our toy kitchen set three times per weekend. 

We get Veterans Day, November 11, off from school, which we feel is important. Thankfully the United States retains some of its senses and puts Veterans Day ahead of frivolous, meathead holiday ideas like First Day of Baseball Season and Day After Super Bowl. Daddy already gives out candy canes on the first Sunday of football season; that's enough sporting celebration.

Sometime in November, although you're never quite sure when-- because anticipation, because page clicks, because trendiness, because money-- the local terrestrial radio station reminds us it still exists by shifting to the all Christmas-music format, and Daddy goes batshit crazy. Daddy loves Christmas music so much that we'll give him an aneurysm if we tell him we don't want to hear it any more. We play along, memorizing the words to "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and "Dominic the Donkey" but we think one of these years, Dad is going to crank the Christmas Pandora station in August and sit, trance-like, staring at the TV, watching pre-season football and reminding us how much all the gifts in the "12 Days of Christmas" would actually cost today, adjusted for inflation. We just hope he waits until he's retired. 

And oh yeah, Thanksgiving! Really, Dad says, if you're going to declare a new National Holiday, it should just be December. You stuff your faces during Christmas Lite (the erstwhile Thanksgiving), then 3-4 weeks later, all the Christmas preparation comes to a head, you stuff your faces again, and then "whoosh" it's New Year's a week later. America, just take the whole month off and go be good capitalists, spend your money and tell work to shove off. You've got Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby playing in your head the whole day anyway, so you're useless at work. 

(Meanwhile, June and August just sit there, wondering what they needed to do to get a decent holiday..."We coulda put on a helluva New Year's Eve Fireworks display, Junie Baby..." August might say. Might. Instead they get stifling humidity and mosquitoes.)

Other names for Thanksgiving:
1. Christmas with crappier music
2. Christmas with less presents
3. Christmas with more mincemeat pie (gag)
4. Practice Christmas
5. Christmas Lite
6. 10-12 Straight Hours of Football on a Thursday
7. Christmas without all the hype
8. Christmas without the expense
9. Pressure-free Christmas
10. The sane alternative to Christmas

And thus wraps up our Fall Preview. Today Dad will watch football and hand out candy, and we'll sit and make our Christmas lists. No! No we won't! We'll enjoy the season that leads into Christmas, but we're not becoming so infatuated with Christmas that it runs our lives...football, on the other hand... Go Steelers! Enjoy fall, everyone!

Dads at Dance Recitals: What's the Score?

There's always been this image of an attention-short dad attending his daughter's dance recital, devising clever ways to surreptitiously get "the score of the game," which was almost always football, while his wife looked on in equal parts horror, shock, and extreme annoyance. (Like she just met her husband yesterday.) In the old days, you'd see a dad try to sneak in a walkman and listen to the game on headphones or try to sneak in an entire 13" TV in his back pocket then pretend to go to the bathroom every 5 minutes and sneak a look at the game.  Whether it was in commercials or funny TV shows --back when TV was funny or, stated another way, when I was 10-- the man was portrayed as a buffoon who couldn't sit still long enough to get through the recital without needing a football fix (and in a few circumstances, leapt up and cheered for the football team in the middle of the auditorium at precisely the appropriate point in the recital. God Bless the sense of timing those funny TV shows had.)  And the recital itself was portrayed as some slow-footed, backward, tedious affair, where all the participants are 4 years old and holding themselves and crying.

Being somewhat of a football junkie from a young age, I often wondered how I would act when confronted with the same situation. I was pretty certain I'd marry someone who would act horrified and scold me for trying anything. But I also thought at that time I could just tape the game if I had to...until remembering how our VCR never, ever worked, and anything viewed on it was accompanied by two broad, distinct bands of static on the screen at any point in time.

Luckily, my daughter's dance school has taken all the worry out of it by scheduling their recital for June, one of the worst sports months on the calendar. This means I'd miss part of an NBA playoff game (meh), part of an NHL playoff game (which I could TiVo if I wanted and deal with the related inconveniences), or miss a baseball game. Missing baseball games is like forgetting to brush your teeth at night, you can get away with it for a night or two, and if you keep forgetting and it becomes problematic, someone will be there to fill in the holes later.

Which isn't to say I haven't been presented with challenges. My daughter's first violin recital occurred during Week 9 of the 2012 football season. That doesn't sound like much, but when you get addicted to Fantasy Football like I have been, you really want to know what's happening to every single player every single week. So I had scoring updates sent directly to my phone, which I stuck between my legs and leaned forward slightly to view when I felt, uhhh... something. My wife wasn't thrilled, but it was discreet. So discreet that my own mother, seated immediately to my left, either didn't notice or wasn't bothered by it.

Eventually, after my girl perfromed her 52-second rendition of Hot Cross Buns, and the recital stretched into its third hour, and some parents and kids had already left, I felt I had earned a little more slack by sticking it out this far. I started checking the individual games for some additional stats by leaning a little further forward and pretending to drop items that only our forefathers actually carried on them, like handkerchiefs and pocket knives.

All in all, it worked. It was still buffoonery, but it was tasteful buffoonery.

Which brings us to our daughter's third career dance recital today. Free from needing to check on sports updates, I felt I could just sit back and enjoy the show -- until I learned that my daughter would be dancing to "Fly" by Sugar Ray. Last year, when the theme was the Wizard of Oz, and my daughter was one of several dancing (perhaps a murder of?) scarecrows, I could easily fake my way into her heart by gushing, "Oh, the scarecrow was ALWAYS my FAV-OR-ITE character! And you were the best scarecrow up there! Even better than Ray Bolger!" and she'd be happy, then confused, and then we'd go get ice cream.

I'm having a rougher time drumming up phony enthusiasm this year. Every time I think I'm ready, I find myself facing her, putting my hands on her shoulders, blinking for an entire second, swallowing hard, looking off to my right, shaking my head, and muttering in a low voice, "Look, I f___ing hated Sugar Ray. They had one good, honest, kick-ass song, whose name I can't remember and which I only heard once on the radio, and then, when it became more profitable in the late '90s, they turned their back on making good music and joined the Hootie-led "laid-back" revolution and made a bunch of songs suitable only for listening drunk in a canoe and floating in circles for 14 hours straight. Every time I saw Mark McGrath on TV, I wanted to flip him off. One of the 10 greatest days in my life was when, as if all at once, evey chick on the planet suddenly decided they'd had enough of those no-talent jerkwads and stopped listening to them. Break a leg!"

That probably wouldn't go over well with anyone here, so I've just pretended to have never heard of Sugar Ray (which is for the better anyway) by claiming to have been too old to be familiar with them in the first place. That's always a safe play.

The theme this year, by the way, is something to the effect of Popular Music Throught the Years, which starts with whatever came before Bill Haley and the Comets (Glenn Miller? Big Band music? I don't know, I'm asking...) up through goodness-knows-who representing today, with dollar signs replacing all the S's in their names.

And to think they've sullied the time devoted to the 1990s with Sugar Ray, when they easily could have played Sabotage by the Beastie Boys. Surely my girl could have danced to that?