Halloween In Review

Now that Halloween is over, let's take a look at what we learned this year about the holiday:

1. My wife still hates the holiday. Maybe it's because she has to deal with lots of kids dressed up at school, then has to come home and deal with three more. Or maybe she hates candy.

2. We contributed one Elsa and two ninja turtles to the official final count, so we have kids who fail to think outside the box...just like their dad. Maybe next year they'll just go as a box. Or I'll dress as a box and they can Trick or Treat outside me.

3. The little one has a chance to be the kid who comes up with some good costumes...at 2 years old he has an imagination unlike his older siblings. He has been riding around the house as a witch on a broom, as if he has just discovered witches on Oct 30 and wishes he could extend the holiday out a little. He also still dumps water on his head in the bathtub and shouts Ice Bucket Challenge!

4. My wife stayed home to "give out candy" even though we were the only people in the neighborhood participating. I'm a sucker.

5. Because we were the only ones participating, it seemed awkward going to people's houses and taking their candy. One family shut all their lights off and pretended to not be home but their dogs barked incessantly when we walked past. I wanted to stand there until 1:30 AM just to see what would happen.

6. As awkward as it was, going to eight houses (six people answered the door) and getting home for pizza after an hour is my idea of Halloween...minimally intrusive. The kids reported they got "a whole bunch" of candy, so we'll probably continue to do this and not travel to someone else's development, with people we know even less, spend three hours instead of one, all in the name of enhancing Halloween. We do Halloween just fine.

7. Seriously, no Ana? All Elsa? No Duke of Weaseltown?

Raising Sienna

Do yourself a favor and go take a look at Raising Sienna, a site by Lorne Jaffe. Read as much as you can in whatever free time you're afforded, then bookmark the site, and go back and read more when you're able. Read everything on this site. Such honest, direct discussion about anxiety, depression, and parenting. Plus, Lorne will be on the radio! Tuesday at 11:20 am.

All Wheel Drive - Part 2

There was plenty of guesswork involved Saturday as we tried to get a tire changed…how many tires? What model of car? All Wheel Drive or Front Wheel Drive? We decided on 2, Equinox LT, and Front Wheel Drive as our final answers and then handed in our exams and felt like we earned a solid C.

The key to the All Wheel Drive thing is that the tire required for AWD was not in stock, (even though I could look around and see enough tires to fill a sports stadium) and would have to be ordered in 1-2 business days. Which is highly inconvenient for someone driving on a donut, whose 50-mile life was mostly used up. This is probably the reason I guessed “not AWD,” since the “not AWD” tires were, in fact, in stock, and could be replaced in 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Wait, what? 2 hours and 45 minutes in the middle of the day? This is something that I, as a parent of three, would pay $10,000 for. I didn’t realize all I had to do was get some tires changed …maybe I should have gotten four.

Except the only place I had to go was a mall. Me in a mall for 3 hours is like sending a kid into a workplace. Lots of crewing around, nothing getting accomplished. The better scenario would be for my wife to have three hours in the mall, and me at home so I can play Mario Kart get some work done around the house.

My wife, if given 3 hours in a mall this time of year, would have all the Christmas shopping done, including the gifts Santa will get all the credit for, plus presents for family, friends, teachers, Day Care staff, random recipient at office White Elephant, random recipient at family White Elephant, mailman, garbage man, and 12 other people I’m not thinking of and won’t until December 24.

Instead I spent 45 minutes in a book store watching a 2-year-old and an overmatched grandparent try to negotiate a down elevator, which looked like this (at the 35:00 mark.) This came after the kid grabbed a CD or book and refused to let the clerk check it out without causing a massive scene.

This means I added three items to my unofficial developmental milestones for kids:

1.    Can your child handle a down escalator without backing up traffic?

2.    Can your child handle himself when he has to give a store clerk his newest favorite thing for 15 seconds?

      2a.    Can your child handle himself when you try to microwave his food for 15 seconds?

I spent the rest of the time in the mall people-watching and trying to eat whipped cream with a straw--because no fancy drink topped with whipped cream ever comes with a spoon—before walking around aimlessly looking for Santa Claus.

With an hour left and me playing with things in the Lego store, I got a call from the shop. Excited that I might get out early, the guy on the other end instead informed me that my car was in face All Wheel Drive (I told them it wasn’t) but they had the proper tires in stock (they told me they didn’t.) Two wrongs just made a right, I think. At this point, with my head spinning during my second trip through the book store, I just shook my head and read 10 pages or so of each football book plus Mindy Kaling’s book.

While there, I made a vow: Enough of this…I’m going to teach my kids everything I know about cars. Which should take 52 seconds, but still. Of course, by the time they’re old enough to operate their own fingertip-operated flying transporters (they’re not growing up until the year 2158), they won’t want to hear about any “cars.” But I’ll at least have them pay attention to the year, make, and model, and have them ask the dealer if it has All-Wing Drive.

All Wheel Drive vs. Front Wheel Drive

Driving north to work on Interstate 95 last Friday, I felt my car trying to tell me something. I usually don't listen because I hate cars, and they never tell me something good like, "I love watching you drive." They're usually trying to tell me something bad news and jargon-y like, "The governor on your rear differential is about to wear out your fan belt and cause viscosity buildup under the pistons of your catalytic converter. Check Engine." I wouldn't own a car if I didn't have to. I miss the days when I could walk everywhere I needed to go. So does my waistline.

Maybe the car wasn't literally trying to tell me something because I don't have anything fancy equipped with the sultry woman's voice, but there appeared a message on the panel in front of me...the right wheel tire pressure was 3.

3? Seemed kinda low. Usually that number is in the 30s or so, I think. So this is a big problem. Then by the time I process all the information, it's at 1, then 0, and suddenly I'm doing 6 mph on one of the busiest, truck-infested highways in the country. Time to move over to the shoulder, shout some choice words into the steering wheel, call AAA, then pray all of those semis racing by me at 75 mph are operated by competent, awake, alert, happy individuals.

I was glad not to have any kids with me, because they would have gone bananas. But once you get over the initial shock of your Chevy Equinox shaking every time a Dodge Neon drives by, much less a tractor trailer, you're free to check the late NBA and NHL scores and catch up on some emails until the guy comes to put the spare on. (I'm sure as hell not changing a tire on I-95 in my business casual attire. not without a film crew and Mike Rowe on hand.)

Ah, the spare tire. I know there are good reasons (trunk space, weight) why the spare tire is ridiculously small, forcing you to drive like Laurel and Hardy up the Interstate, turning you into that old lady you want to cuss at but you can't because you can't see her when you get by her, making you late for your important business meeting. When I'm named Secretary of the Interior, I'm requiring all roads to have a Spare Tire lane just so those unfortunate souls have a place to drive guilt-free. I'm also inventing a tire that allows you to go faster than 50 mph on it and longer than 50 miles.

All of this brings us to Saturday, when I need to buy a new, real tire so I don't ruin the trusty spare and find myself in another predicament. There are far, far too many questions that need to be answered when buying a tire(s).

1. How many tires? It might as well be a game show with its own wheel to spin. The obvious answer is, "However many went flat yesterday," but you have to account for tread wear, balance, mileage, and at least three other things, none of which I know anything about, so I mentally spin the game show wheel and come up with a number. Today I said two. Who knows.

2. Are there any superfluous letters at the end of the model of your car? For example, please don't say just "Chevy Equinox." Is it an LT, LZ, LZT, LXZT, or B-Sharp? Apparently all of these take different tires.

3. Is the car All Wheel Drive or Front Wheel Drive? For the love of God, who cares. It was explained to me why this is important, but I didn't listen. I simply do not care. Like a "classic" movie that's been oversold to me and I'll never watch, I never want to find out what the differences are between AWD, FWD, or even RWD. Don't tell me. I'm not listening...la la la la la...

I always assumed it had something to do with being able to go really fast through a 15-foot-high pile of snow or driving on steep, rocky terrain like we see in a commercial, but since the only "off-roading" I'll be doing is driving on the striped, weirdly shaped "Land of Indecision" between the highway and the off ramp, I never bothered to figure out the difference and never will.

Still, even though the difference between AWD, FWD, and RWD means nothing to me, I still need to know which one my car is, because of course different tires for each. (Of course.) The owner's manual didn't specifically say it was AWD (apparently AWD is better?) but it didn't say it wasn't, either. So I took to the internets and for $30 I could find out. Not that interested, so I guessed. 50-50 chance, right?

What does any of this have to do with kids or parenting? Here's Part 2!

This silliness has a Facebook Page!

Punkin Guts

My wife and I this week wondered aloud how bored the first guy who carved a face into a squash must have been. And how this bizarro act could have possibly caught on with the masses without Pinterest. Then we each offered the Gods of Spare Time a burnt offering of a month's salary in exchange for that much time to come up with our own weird phenomenon...or to get laundry caught up...before realizing that there aren't any holidays left.

So next summer we'll petition the month of August to create a holiday that celebrates dry brown grass or oppressive humidity, and we'll carve Tic Tac Toe boards into cow patties and eat pale, tasteless watermelon cut into the shape of William Howard Taft, proclaim that this should become a "tradition" and BOOM! an August holiday is born. Stay glued to Pinterest to find out to see how that works out.

In the meantime, a different Halloween issue has crept into our consciousness...whose job is it to clean the orange stringy crap out of pumpkins? More than one correspondent reported that boys have pawned that duty off on their moms, insisting that the inside of a pumpkin is a place they'd rather not go. BOYS, mind you. The same kids who will eat heads off of worms, pack dirt into their open wounds, and poop in their brother's pillowcase. But cleaning out a pumpkin goes too far for today's BOYS. Boys will no longer be boys.

Seems like a lot of work...

And I agree with them. The inside of a pumpkin is a hellish place that is better off left to nature. If pumpkins were truly meant to be gutted, all anyone would do is cut the lid off, flip it over, and let the seeds and strings slide into the trash can. Or, for the truly sadistic, onto a newspaper (daddy, what's a newspaper?) so we can separate the seeds from the strings, then cook the seeds and...do what with them, exactly?

But instead, the crap inside a pumpkin maybe trickles out but mostly just sticks fast to the side, grasping for dear life, forcing us to use perfectly fine eating utensils to hollow out a space for these faces, maps of the Baltic, or whatever we're carving in them for "fun." And it's always good to have a special utensil on hand that specializes in pumpkin-gutting. But if you live in this house, it will be lost before November. Or it will break in half at first contact.

This is where kids don't understand the impact of their actions. Several weeks ago, as we visited the pumpkin patch, picking our own pumpkins, contributing to the ever-burgeoning "let other people pay for the privilege of doing your job" industry (seriously, apple and pumpkin farmers have to be just laughing at us each fall), we go get the biggest, heaviest, fullest pumpkins we can find because Dad has never thrown out his back. When we announced the conception of our third child, the phrase we heard most often (ahead of "Congratulations!") was "zone defense." We survive most of the time, but this is one instance when we could have used a third, surrogate parent... either to carry the third pumpkin or the third kid or help us negotiate a twisted network of vines before our biceps ripped apart or our hernias arrived.

Unfortunately, at home one pumpkin never made jack-o'lantern status. An unseasonably warm October meant the garage was not the usual cool, dry place where we could house three pumpkins -- not to mention over 10,000 apples -- without some deterioration. One way to ensure a smooth exit of a pumpkin's insides to the outside is to wholly rot the thing out, then pick it up like an injured baby bird, only to have the guts predictably spill all over your dress pants, shoes, and, somehow, your car as you take the Lord's name in vain. And the whole garage smells like pumpkin stomach acid...which isn't latest flavor at Starbucks, though it could be. Luckily, we somehow managed to accumulate several "back up" pumpkins from who knows where, so our 2-year-old never noticed his prized squash died a very real, palpable death. Very palpable.

Now, faced with the daunting task of cleaning out these rotunda-sized plants, kids were regretting their decisions to pick huge pumpkins and were also regretting their choice in dads, since theirs ran to the sink 16 times during the process to clean this menacing, orange, flesh-eating gunk off his wrists. Luckily, their mother isn't as selectively OCD, and she helped finish the job, mostly because she wanted the process to end before midnight.

So, who in the family should go in there and get the guts out? The dad? The kids? The mom? What do we do with those seeds? Is pumpkin-carving still necessary to a successful Halloween? There are still many unanswered questions to this odd-but-still-not-as-odd-as-a-fictional-rabbit-hiding-decorative-eggs-that-house-candy holiday tradition. Does anyone have any answers? Or are we still going to do this because that's what we did last year? Cause next year we can just pick watermelons or something. Less mess, right?