Firsts, Ever-Full Diaper Genies, and Coming Full Circle. Again.

As a parent there are a lot of Firsts. Actually, when you're a new parent, life is really all about your child’s Firsts and not much else. There are first words babbled, first steps wobbled and first teeth toothed. First trips on the big yellow bus to school only happen once, as does the first trip to the emergency room for stitches. (Which was really not my fault, despite what Nurse Ratched obviously thought when she checked us in.)*

There is another side of early parenthood as well though: the Mostly Unacknowledged World of Mind-Numbing Monotony. Which is world that includes all the drudgier bits of parental obligation that includes, but is not limited to, the seemingly infinite number of diapers changed. Or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made. Or runny noses wiped. Or loads of laundry washed. Or, or, or.


Jeez, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I’m having a mild PTSD-like reaction to this little flood of memories. Suddenly I can't stop think about our Magically-Ever-Full Diaper Genie. The Diaper Genie that I was always quite sure I emptied mere moments before. Or was it the Tuesday before? Either way, it was somehow always full. Ugh. There was just never any way to be sure. Sleep deprivation will do that to you.


But luckily enough, the magical Haze of Times Past smooths over most of these of indignities that parenthood requires of us. And before you know it the tots have grown like proverbial weeds and they’re ready for launch. Which brings me full circle to the Full Circle portion of the Dad’s Off the Couch blog. The boys are indeed mostly grown and the end-game is in sight. So, here we go.

* Fun fact! The ER at one of our local hospitals has a big spiral-bound notebook crammed with what looks like year’s worth of informal, handwritten notes on kids admitted with questionable looking injuries. This is a book that Nurse Ratched will pull out from waaaay under the counter and consult surreptitiously while glancing back at the possible offender and victim. So, if nothing seems to match up: its’ your lucky day! If there is a match, well, I suppose there may be Questions. I’m just thrilled that I never found out for sure.

PS- And first teeth! I knew I missed a big one!
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Robin Williams. As real as it's going to be.

Look, over the next week or two there will be hundreds of thousands of words written about Robin Williams. There will be remembrances of all kinds. There will be mindless segments on every TV show that has an intern willing to write some copy. There will be countless think-pieces published about him. Robin Williams will be on magazine covers that will subtly evoke a sad clown.

And, most of the pieces written about him will focus on the deep and all too common connection between creativity and an inner life out of balance. There will also be some hand wringing and rhetorical questions about drugs, whiskey, heart attacks and the friends Williams kept in the early days.

Which is all well and good, but there’s so much more to him than all that. Really. Go to the source: the man speaking about himself. No, not clips of him putting on a dog and pony show for civilians like Barbara Walters… instead listen to the man having a real conversation. A conversation with the prickly, brilliant, and sometimes maddening Marc Maron.

Maron is a skilled interviewer and he’s no civilian. The hour he spends with Robin Williams is raw, contradictory and heart-breaking. If you’re actually curious about what was going on in there, this episode of WTF is a good place to start.

#riprobinwilliams

Coming Full Circle, part II, in which a Stay-at-Home-Dad grows up with his kids

It was a busy Saturday in May. First there was a trip to the community center where the younger boy had SAT prep. There was some question about how he was going to get back afterwards, but as always the specter of a long walk home ensured that he would work it out somehow.

Once this was done though, the main event was on: a road trip to the North Country of New York and the bustling metropolis that is Potsdam. A trip to retrieve our older boy from college. Our boy who, while he still holds the title of First Born, now also holds the title of College Student. Yow.

And how did this happen? How is it possible that our boy is in college when it seems like only five minutes ago that he was dragging a wet diaper around the house while in pursuit of Scrunchy the Shih Tzu, a dog that was not only faster than the boy, but quite a bit more clever?  How is it possible that our boy is in college when both his mother and I feel no older or wiser than the day we got married?

Or, more to the point, how is it possible that his mother and I have been taken by surprise by events we saw speeding down the track as quickly and inevitably as trainload of tired metaphors about life? Well I’ll tell you. Because I’m coming full circle.

Full circle means a lot of things. For the younger boy it means car trips to SAT prep instead of playdates. For the older boy it means trips to college instead of SAT prep. It means watching the boys climb into a tuxedo for prom instead of for ring-bearing duties at a wedding. It means talking about  why Stravinsky was a badass KGB-baiting composer instead of why the Under the Sea song is the best song ever.

Mostly though, coming full circle means that not only are both the boys living the lives of near-independence, but that those lives mirror what my own life used to be like. Thier lives are full of girls and parties and road trips and all the things that make being an adult great.

So, going forward I’m obviously going to have to start preparing to be a different kind of father. The kind of father who’s not constantly surprised to find that my boys are nearly grown. The kind of stay-at-home-dad who’s coming full circle.

Coming Full Circle, part I, in which I mull over the birth of a Stay at Home Dad Blog

It was, say, the summer of 2003 when I got wind of a little thing called Blogger. Billed as a free, simple platform for publishing anything and everything, it almost seemed too good to be true. My fingers started twitching. It would be my own little slice of the interwebs. There were even “blog rings” that would let me follow the few other people writing about similar topics. So without even a second thought, I signed up, hit send and just like that I was a “blogger.”

But I should probably back up for a moment.

At the risk of revealing that I’m an old guy, I am proud to note that I was an early refugee from the static tyranny of yellow legal pads and ballpoint pens the moment I got my hands on WordStar. It was the early 80s and it was magical. It was on a machine that displayed whatever you typed on a screen. You could go back and fix mistakes. No more clickity-clack of steel keys, no more smell of 3in1 oil, no more inked ribbons that reliably went dry each and every time you had a final paper due. With a computer I was a WiteOut-stained-wretch no more.

And it’s been an electronic free-for-all ever since: papers for school, letters to editors, opinion pieces for any paper that would have me and bits of ephemera for myself. Bits of ephemera that were, parenthetically speaking, really little more than poor imitations of S. J. Perelman. (The real irony is, of course, that it’s a stylistic thing that I can’t seem to avoid. Just consider this piece as a whole. Although there is eventually a point, it’s all discursive prose that noodles here and there and is chockablock with so many extra words that I can hear my copy of Strunk and White weeping softly. And see? I’m doing it right now.)

Anyway, mention of discursive prose brings us back to the summer of 2003 and Blogger. Until then I had been sending off pieces about this Local Issue and that Personal Observation to our local Gannett rag, the Journal News. (Pieces I sent on paper, in stamped envelopes via the fine folks at the USPS. I know, right?! ) The Gannett editor at the time seemed happy enough to publish much of what I sent, but now I had the ability to focus and publish my own column of sorts; and so Dad’s On The Couch was born.

Dad’s On the Couch? Yeah, I was younger, my kids were wee and I realized that this was the perfect outlet for sharing my experiences as a dad who was home raising his kids…

Anyway, tomorrow in Part Two, I connect virtually with some other dads via Web Rings and I discover that there was an official name for me: I was a Stay at Home Dad, with capitals.

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The epic college odyssey, part I. Gaaa.

It would be hard to argue, I think, that one of life’s greatest pleasures is serendipity. The serendipitous discovery of, well,  pretty much anything. Food, music, people, authors, even words; it really doesn’t matter. Well that’s not true, I’ll try any kind of food. And lots of it. I’m just easy that way. I’m much pickier about my authors.

In any case, a bit of serendipity dropped on me today when I came across the word Decidophobia. I suppose you could make the case that as a word it’s a little bit obvious or literal minded, but I still think it’s perfectly descriptive in a lean, efficient way.  Mostly because I have the perfect use for it: Decidophobia – “a condition that may afflict parents with a teen looking at colleges.”

 Yes, we’re in the midst of the labyrinthine and baffling rite of passage that is looking at and sorting schools.

And I’ll be damned if these parental rites of passage aren’t getting harder each time.  The early ones are easy: Hand-wringing over whether or not he’s walking and talking on “schedule.” Potty training. Dealing with the first school bully. First trip to the ER for stitches. Braces. Learning to drive and watching the first broken heart.

Piffle, I say. All those rites of passage were mere child’s play (ha ha!) when compared to staring at a list generated by Naviance that includes 15 colleges. Which is a list that started with 160. Sure, we’ve already been in consultation with an awesome counselor and teacher which is why we’re pretty sure which schools have strong programs… but that was the easy part. We’re told that admissions departments DO care if your kid has requested information, visited with a rep and taken a tour, so how do we schedule visits to schools that are more distant than Kate Gosselin’s 1000-yard stare?

And then we need to schedule SAT prep, sitting for the SAT, and trips for NYSSMA since we’re looking at music programs. Which also means there will be an audition process for each school which is a whole separate thing.  Breathe slowly.

And none of this has even addressed what is, unfortunately, perhaps the biggest issue. Yeah, you know the one. Tuition + room + board = Gaaaaaaaaa.

As we continue to make progress though, my Lovely Bride remains the voice of reason on our team and keeps reminding me that we’ll figure it out one step at a time. Of course I think that a crippling case of decidophobia is still a real threat to be guarded against, but I’ll keep you posted. Gaaaa.
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Ticker tape, the Giants and dad's shoulders.

The  sky was grey, it was crowded, and the weather was colder than  Kate Gosselin’s smile. And yet none of that mattered because Underdog was floating past me, up in the sky, larger than life. Perhaps most surprising though, he was also in Living Color, complete with bright red standard-issue superhero tights and a blue cape. Who knew? Mostly this was remarkable to me because  I had only seen him on our black and white Zenith TV, which also meant that it was not just Underdog, but Mr. Rogers, Big Bird and Easy Reader who were rendered in a surprisingly small number of grey, grainy hues.

That being said, it was exactly the sort of day that a six year old never forgets because it was not just my first Thanksgiving Day parade, but an adventure in the city with my dad.

My father is an interesting guy for a lot of reasons, but perhaps most important to me is that he’s a guy who straddled a transitional period in our culture when notions of what success, family and fatherhood meant were shifting. He was in some ways entirely traditional: each morning he left before everyone else was  up to catch a train to the city where he worked at a mysterious job in a mysterious skyscraper. He then came home around dinnertime and read a paper while listening to the news. (He did, however, wisely avoid the pipe and martini thing which thankfully remains in the dustbin of dad-history. There are some clichés that no one can pull off, short of an Adolphe Menjou or Claude Raines.)

Traditional as he may have been, though, my dad made a conscious decision to (mostly) not work late, not bring work home and to not work on the weekends. He had made a calculation about what was important to him and then made it his business to be present in our lives even though it must have cost him professionally. Sure, we could probably have lived in a bigger house and had cooler cars, but I was luckier than that.

And so that’s why I’m assuming that even more memories are being made today at the Giant’s victory ticker tape parade. The streets are lined with families dressed in blue and there are little kids on shoulders watching bigger than life figures make their way down the canyon of heroes. But here’s the thing, even if you didn’t make it to New York today there are still plenty of opportunities to get outside with the kids and see the weird and wonderful things that only happen in a parade.

An obvious one is the St. Patrick’s to-do in either Pearl River or New York, but there are more parades than you would suppose. Try the Columbus Day parade, or the weird and creative Halloween parade in Nyack. And in case you didn’t know, there’s an annual Volunteer Firefighters parade to be watched.

Or, have you ever had the urge to see a 30 foot Dora the Explorer? Of course you haven’t, but your kids want to, so make sure to hit the easy-to-navigate Thanksgiving Day Parade in Stamford. It’s actually extra cool because it features a whole herd of full sized balloons.  And of course there’s the far more hilarious and entertaining Halloween parade in the Village, but, well, you know. Take the teens.

So anyway,  even though Eli Manning probably won’t be at any of those wearing red tights and blue cape, your kids won’t care. Just make sure they get a turn on your shoulders. Do it.

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The Nine Minute Winter, Golf and Kids.

For those of us able to remember 1979, if only because age-wise we’re  in that sweet spot somewhere between untenable youth and impending infirmity, the year was  sort of a mixed bag. There were a few bummers: the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor threatened to melt down, about a dozen fans were trampled to death at a Who show in Cincinnati, and perhaps the most shocking of all, Britain’s first nude beach was established in Brighton. On the up-side though, Three Mile Island’s coincidental timing guaranteed boffo box office for Michael Douglas in The China Syndrome and the Who disaster guaranteed boffo ratings for a subsequent “very special” episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.

I can’t imagine, however, any up-side to a nude beach populated by a cluster of pasty, doughy Britons shivering on a rocky, overcast shoreline. Yeah, I know.

Anyway, 1979 was also the year that Steve Martin published Cruel Shoes, a collection of whimsy which included a shockingly prescient piece called The Year Winter Lasted Nine Minutes.  Which sounds rather a lot like this very year, I’d say. As a kid that story struck me as worst case scenario, but as an ostensibly grownup dad, the notion of a winter-that-never-was sure is appealing. And now with the roughly nine minute snowfall of last week well behind us, it continues to be a season with plenty of opportunity to get out with the kids and pretend it’s spring.

If, for instance, you’ve never gotten around to teaching the kids how to hit anything longer than a nine iron, now’s the perfect time. There are ranges still open and waiting, some of which even have heated stalls. Moreover, it’s a big bonus that there’s never a wait for a bucket this time of year. (Presumably  most of the old retired guys are busy dodging gators in Florida.)

And even better, some ranges have mini golf on site in case you have little ones to amuse while the older siblings are busy shanking the afternoon away. And if the kids don’t hit balls yet, now’s the time to get a lesson, because there are plenty of pros sitting around busy hoping they won’t have to spend the winter running from gators. Do it.

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Kids, Snow and Gravity = Perfect Family Time

It was a crisp morning above the frost line on Whiteface Mountain during, lets say, 1988. The air was still and a few inches of fresh powder were a nice change from the usual late January ice that makes skiing in the northeast a more of a chore than it really needs to be. It was, all in all, a fine morning, right up until my buddy Dave and I found ourselves facing a drop so sheer that we weren’t really sure that we were supposed to be there. Clearly we had missed a trail marker while we were chattering and trading stories about the previous night that had started at Lums and ended up, well, never mind.

Anyway, retreating back up the lengthy trail wasn’t an option, so we decided to face this nasty bit of black diamond the way only real men would: we took off our skis and started sliding down on our butts. Genius? Absolutely, and we were feeling pretty good about the whole business until we heard the telltale swish of a skier flying down the hill behind us. Needless to say it turned out to be a kid, all of six or seven years old, and not only was he flying down the hill in perfect form, he even spared a second to glance back at us with an expression of pity I’ll never forget.

It had never occurred to me until that moment that kids and skiing not only mix well, but are a perfect match. And it was just that combination of fearlessness and ability to pick up new things that I was counting on years later when we took our boys to Ski Big Bear when they were about six or seven. Since then, the three of us have had a lot of great days not just skiing, but enjoying some of the other benefits of a day on the slopes: getting a chance to shoot the breeze while standing on line, talking music and whatnot on the lifts, and just generally having a good time away from the pressures of school and the distractions of home.

So even if you’ve never been skiing or are looking for an excuse to get back out after some time away, now’s the perfect time to pack up the kids and take advantage some of the resources out there. There are, for instance, late season packages, discount ski passes offered by retailers such as Costco, and the very tidy Liftopia.com. And… now’s the time to start thinking about your fourth or fifth grader for next year because there are skipass and passport programs available for free lift tickets wherever you may be. Do it.

New York’s 4th grade program

Pennsylvania

New Hampshire

Michigan

Ski Utah's 5th grade Passport and 6th grade Snowpass programs

Frank Wiley’s behind the curve. (And I ramble about some self evident things.)

Picture, if you will, it’s a warm summer evening, the sun is starting to drop and we’re playing Wiffleball in the street. Moreover, the radio in the front yard is blaring “Billy Don’t Be a Hero.”  Yes, yes it is.  Because it’s 1976, that’s why.

Which also means that most of the cars that pass by as we play are driven by dads coming home after having spent a long day somewhere mysterious doing things even more mysterious. “At work” is pretty much all we’ve been told, because at that age we don’t even really care much anyway. All that matters is that dad is back and it’s time to head indoors for dinner.

That, however, was a long time ago and the world in which I find myself is very different indeed. I’m a dad now, but instead of a Buick the size of a nuclear submarine in the driveway there is a small Japanese SUV. There are no bell-bottom pants in sight, and, god help us, we have more than one TV in the house. Alright, more than two.

Inexplicably though, all this may be lost on Frank Wiley as he notes with a slight tone of surprise that more dads than ever are staying at home with their kids. Yeah, I know. In my neck of the woods this is no surprise, as the neighborhood is filled with cops, firemen, and restaurant/food service guys. There are also families in which the wives have the most earning potential, guys in the trades, and guys who are simply “between jobs.” Simply put, this is an average neighborhood and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a dude pushing a stroller around while waiting for Starbucks to open. 

Yes, Wiley is simply pointing out that more dads are staying home with kids, but reporting on this trend as if it’s surprising (which it likely is to Frank, since he will admit only that this delightfully vague information has appeared in “a U.S. report” with no further elaboration) seems very… 90’s.

And yet, I must admit a certain nostalgia for the nineties, if only because back then politics seemed harmless, the interwebs were shiny as a new penny, and it had been a full decade since that movie with Michael Keaton had added that phrase to the lexicon. Just saying.

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Fearless, Hitchens style.

It was about four or five years ago that the boys and I happened to be stuck indoors on a grey, rainy afternoon of the sort that makes you question whether or not the sun will ever actually reappear. You know them: those winter days when the notion that Persephone has been spirited away makes perfect sense. Or, the sort of day during which it seems impossible to not launch yourself headlong from the end of the couch and into your brother’s midsection for no particular reason other than he responded “Did SO!”

Or then again, maybe the cabin fever induced brawl that ensued wasn’t really triggered by a Seasonal Affective Disorder-y event, but rather the maddeningly low level of discourse in which the two little knuckleheads were engaged. It was, after all, an argument that was unwinnable: who deserved time with the Xbox more. In this intellectual battle of less than titanic proportions there were assertions made about the character of the opposing sibling, refutations, counter arguments about the inherent lameness of said sibling, and then retaliatory ad hominem attacks.

It was, in short, rather like watching pundits on cable news in their never ending  race to the bottom of the intellectual pile. Which, it must be said, is why today’s loss of Christopher Hitchens was so unfortunate.

He was an iconoclast who was by turns contrarian, baffling and often maddening, but always intellectually fearless. Early on he was a member of the International Socialists, and yet by the last couple of decades of his life Hitchens spent much of his time decrying what he saw as a soft Western response to the rise of Islamofascism and supporting America's military adventures. All the while, mind you, he remained a staunch “antitheist” and saw himself as a standard bearer of traditional Enlightenment values. Go figure.

As my boys have grown I’ve always done my best to make sure that they not only think critically about the world around them, but how to. By asking questions, and by forging relationships with those who are willing to listen to questions. By talking to kids with whom they disagree. By taking positions contrary to what they’re saying over dinner just to see what they’ve got.

In short, I’d be proud to have my boys grow up to be as fearless as Hitchens. Maybe just with a little less of the drinking, smoking and self inflicted cancer. You get the idea.

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Crummy weather? Bounce bounce bounce...

There was much to be said for growing up in New York in the late sixties and early seventies. There were the as-yet unregulated plumes of black smoke that periodically belched from the tops of apartment buildings that gave the city a distinctly Dickensian feel; there were the monochromatic,  brick box apartment buildings themselves that lent the neighborhood a slightly Soviet-style dystopian flavor; and of course there were the parks. Parks composed almost entirely of bare dirt, broken glass, dog poop and concrete playgrounds.

Well, yes, now that I think about it there really wasn’t much to be said for growing up in the city. As a kid there were few options that didn’t involve concrete in one way or another, so a lot of my early childhood was spent nursing skinned knees, elbows, hands, and pretty much every other bit of me that I had little choice but to leave unprotected.

But luckily enough it’s not the seventies any more, and here in  the sylvan climes of suburbia we have many more options to keep our kids active, most of which involve the kids getting to keep their skin. To wit: the little ones will likely enjoy bouncing an afternoon away someplace like Bounce City with its 16,000 climate-controlled-square-feet of bouncy castles, slides and obstacle courses.

Bounce! Trampoline Sports is another choice for keeping the kids busy on grey winter days, and it’s one of the growing number of indoor trampoline parks that give the slightly more adventurous set the chance to play dogeball and basketball on court-sized trampolines. Which, if nothing else, ensures a chaos/fun filled day.

There are a growing number of these facilities around the country as well, so odds are that you’ll be able to find a place where ever you may be. And best of all, you can leave the Bactine and Band Aids at home.
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Nanuet Teacher says there’s no Santa? We’ve got a Nanugrinch!

Holy cats! Right here in Nanuet, a teacher of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed second graders decided yesterday that it would be wisest to let the little munchkins know what’s what; namely that this teacher believes that there is no fat man at the North Pole. No Saint Nick riding the Beach Boys’ Little Saint Nick. No right jolly old elf making his list and checking it twice. In short, that there is no Santa Claus.

That’s right, we got trouble right here in Nanuet city. There has of course been a predictably high level of dudgeon directed at Teacher X in the wake of these revelations; the only real question is just how long it will go on. (And yes, I do know who Teacher X is, but we can’t really have angry mobs with pitchforks and torches running in the streets, now can we? That is, after all, Fox News’ job.)

Speaking of which, I really can’t wait until Murdoch’s guardians of all that’s good and right in ‘Merica pick this story up and run with it like a fumbled ball at a Rose Bowl game. This incident was, after all, just another skirmish in the War on Christmas perpetrated by Teacher X in the service of the secular-atheist-pagan-whatever agenda. Right?

Or then again, out here in not-crazy-land this incident may be seen for what it is: a rigid teacher with a reputation for being particularly strident was having a worse day than usual and decided to take it out on a little kid who had the temerity to point out during a geography lesson that Santa lives at the North Pole. And for good measure, Teacher X decided to note that it’s actually the parents who leave presents under the tree. Yeah, I know.

But here’s the thing, either way you choose to interpret this little contretemps, Teacher X is wrong. There is, as all sensible people know, a Santa Claus. Yes, as a parent I do assist in the process by gathering wish lists from my kids, but that’s where it ends. Sure, I’m in my forties and the kids are well into their teens, but that changes nothing. I collect a list and the rest is Magic.

And, I might add, my folks who are in their seventies now are more than happy to point out the same thing to anyone who asks.

So, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, have a great Ramadan, and enjoy the Winter Solstice while you’re at it.

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(Oh yeah, and Nanugrinch? Who doesn’t love a new and completely unnecessary portmanteau word?)

There a number of rites of passage we all remember for our childhoods, some fondly and others not so much. Some are religious: Confirmations, baptisms, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, or even the appropriately vague Coming of Age ceremony for commitment-phobic Unitarians. (My peeps!) Some rites even seem designed to invite the chaos that we spend much of our time trying to avoid as parents: Walkabout and Rumspringa come to mind.

Among the suburban and rural set, however, there is the nearly universal cultural rite of the Acquisition Of The Driver’s License. It’s a milestone that represents freedom and responsibility for teens and sleepless nights for parents. Not to mention the financial burden of insurance premiums higher than the net worth of the teens themselves.

There’s a cost benefit ratio for you to mull over on some dark night.

Anyway, if your progeny haven’t reached that stage yet and are still stuck catching the school bus with a Pokémon backpack and a lunchbox full of Uncrustables, they’re still in luck. There are plenty of opportunities for them to get behind the wheel of a fun, fast go-kart that will be just quick enough to alarm the old folks and frighten the horses.

The boys and I are fans of our local indoor go kart park, Grand Prix New York. The track is reasonably challenging and there’s a restaurant, a space for parties, and a bar for Mom and Dad when they’re ready to hang up the helmet.

The best part about racing karts is that by the time the weather turns warmer and everyone is comfortable behind the wheel, there are countless places to race outdoors on larger tracks with faster karts. New York, for instance, has dozens of tracks, as does nearly every other part of the U.S. So go make Art Ingels proud. The kids will thank you.

Grand Prix New York (GPNY, to the cool kids)

August already? Believe it.

August... what I had neglected in my earlier musings about the beginning of the end of summer is the old fashioned family-car-vacation. (Not that I'll miss this particular year in the least anyway. First it wouldn't stop snowing, and then it wouldn't stop raining. Then it was hot enough that 24 hour news “reporters” felt compelled to cook things on the sidewalks, and then just this week the NWS took to issuing tornado warnings for Bergen and Rockland counties. And yes, that's just half an hour from midtown Manhattan. Yeah, I know.)

But anyway, August is here and before you can say “back to school sale” my lovely bride and I will be tossing the kids and what I'm betting what will be a surprising amount of our belongings in the back of the van and setting off north. Yeee haw. We're gonna see us some boats and some aquariums and we're gonna play us some mini golf. You know the drill, just like when you were a kid and you and your siblings had to sit in the back seat on the way to visit a house where George Washington's secretary's half-brother may or may have not slept. Or signed something. Or whatever.

Either way, August, here we come.

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Sick day redux. Or, an Active Dad concedes the day.

It seems like just days ago that one of the boys was home sick, which had triggered a minor episode of Proustian remembrance on my part. Except that for me, sick days past were mostly about getting to eat as many bologna sandwiches and goldfish crackers as I wanted. Yeah, I know.

Anyway, the reason it seemed just like mere days ago that I was tied to the house with my very own little Typhoid Mary is because it really was, as it turns out, just days ago. And now the other boy is home sick. But that’s ok, because part of being an Active, Awesome Dad bla bla bla… is that I’m ready for any contingency. When the boy finally dragged himself out of bed we stuffed a pancake or two in his face and then the fun, such as it was, began.

We started off slowly with some streaming Netflix and an episode of American Pickers. And anyone who’s seen Mike and Frank poking through a box of oil cans will tell you that any given episode is stultifying enough to make the folks down at Auction Kings seem positively bacchanalian by comparison. (What? Is that a Charles Lindberg scrapbook? Stop it!) Anyway, once we had our fill of rural barns overflowing with moldering crap we moved on to the Xbox.

Here we rely heavily on Gamefly. Although not nearly as cheap as the low-end Netflix membership, belonging to Gamefly is still a far less expensive way for your kids to amuse themselves than getting tangled up with a seemingly never-ending stream of positively smelly game titles at full price. For $20 a month (which the boy pays for himself by doing extra chores around the house) the nice people at Gamefly send us two video game titles to keep around as long as we’d like before sending them back in their little pre-paid envelopes. Then, as if by magic, new titles arrive, and before you can say Master Chief we’re shooting aliens. Or jacking cars. Whichever.

So, are these responsible ways to spend a sick day? Would the day be better spent doing extra credit for homework? Or maybe getting a head start on that copy of Great Expectations that’s looming this Spring? Well sure, but sometimes being an Active, Awesome Dad means conceding that it can be good for the soul to do absolutely nothing productive. Which is also better than eating faceload of bologna sandwiches.

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Batting cages or little league? Cages every time.

Having been around a little, I can tell you that kids are unique and as different from one another as can be. That said, they do all share some common traits, one of which is an almost supernatural ability to produce common emotional responses in parents and caregivers alike. These responses are of course enormously complex and fall on a wide spectrum… but that’s still not going to stop me from indulging in my fondness for oversimplifying everything.

To wit, at one end of the emotional spectrum is baffled disappointment: “Why did my boy just lick the kitchen floor from the back door all the way to the fridge?” At the other end is justifiable pride when he scores against that big goon of a goalie who’s either a 20 year old ringer or a fifth-grader with a glandular problem. “Run boy, run!”

Somewhere in the middle, however, is that sweet spot of maudlin sentimentality evoked by kids when they do nothing more than grow up. A maudlin sentimentality for which I’ve found that I have no patience. The sort of maudlin sentimentality that I don’t feel for my boy’s little league days. I’m probably just a bad father.

It’s been a couple of years since the older boy has played, and since April 1^st is right around the corner I was just thinking that I miss almost nothing about little league. I don’t miss the early start of the little league season. I like baseball well enough, but when Coach called up every December, that’s DECEMBER, to let us know that he was starting indoor practice in January it was all I could do to be polite. Mostly.

Nor do I miss all that time spent freezing my butt on the aluminum bleachers in April, or all that time spent baking in the sun on those same aluminum bleachers in June. I don’t miss all the shrieking little league parents who are blissfully unaware that they are walking, talking clichés. I don’t miss watching other people’s kids whiff the ball repeatedly. My kid does that plenty, thank you very much.

But here’s the thing; I do miss getting out to the batting cages with the boy. (Just enter your zip code and the website will find one for you.) In late winter and early spring it was always a great way to get out of the house and do something fun, active and productive. He loved the challenge, and I loved the opportunity to show off just a little. Right now it’s still too early in the season to be outside much, so it’s the perfect time to take the kids for a little no-pressure batting practice. Just make sure you don’t run into Coach.

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Steve, deathcore, and Weird Al. Go.

Be courteous, kind and forgiving,

Be gentle and peaceful each day,

Be warm and human and grateful,

And have a good thing to say.

Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike,

Be witty and happy and wise,

Be honest and love all your neighbors,

Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant.

Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus,

Be dull, and boring, and omnipresent,

Criticize things you don't know about,

Be oblong and have your knees removed.

Be tasteless, rude, and offensive,

Live in a swamp and be three dimensional,

Put a live chicken in your underwear,

Get all excited and go to a yawning festival.

O.K… everybody!

Steve Martin, Grandmother’s Song.

The first time I heard that song I nearly embarrassed myself in a way that would have been hard to recover from. (Not unlike ending a sentence with a preposition, I suppose.) Put simply, I was the first bright-eyed kid on our block to get Let’s Get Small when it came out in ’77. When I brought it home, my pals and I crowded around the tired old turntable in the living room and started listening to the tracks, one by one, until we were nearly breathless from laughing harder than we ever had. That is, until the Grandmother’s Song came on and I nearly peed myself right there in the living room, which meant I was just a heartbeat away from a defining adolescent experience that would have embarrassed even Charlie Sheen.

Anyway, all of this is to say that it wasn't long before I convinced my dad to take me and a buddy to see Martin do his thing live at the Westchester Premier Theatre. It was a fun night, not just because Martin was as great as we had hoped, but because it was a chance for my dad and me to get out and do something new together. And since then, I’ve found that taking my own kids to shows has been just as fun.

It was just about two years ago now that I took the oldest boy to see Job For A Cowboy at the Starland Ballroom. It was a hoot, not because of the thoughtful, melodic quality of Cowboy’s music, but because it was something I never would have done if it wasn’t for the boy expanding my horizons a bit.

Since then I’ve taken the boys to a number of other things, most of which have been, quite frankly, rather more tame. There have been Rifftrax shows, Cinematic Titanic shows… and I just got us tickets to see Weird Al in May. (squee!) So embrace the live show. Assuming your progeny are older than the Blue’s Clues set, there are lots of choices that you’ll both connect with. Do it.

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International Women's Day.

So it’s International Women’s Day, which got me thinking about moms. What should you do for your mom? Give her a call, or maybe go visit and fold some laundry for her?

Then you point out that it might be sort of condescending and feel contrived to do such a thing… which might be true. But go give her a call anyway, just because she misses you and would like to hear from you. Go on.

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PS- Pretty random? Yeah well, it is random Tuesday:

"Spring thaw!" Or: "So that's where the Christmas tree went."

So, say it’s the mid seventies and I’m eight or nine years old. Where is the one place I’m likely to be? Sitting at a desk doing my homework? Helping little old ladies across the street? Cleaning up a park with the Cub Scouts? Fat chance. No, I would have been safely ensconced at the foot of my parent’s bed watching TV, that’s where. It was, after all, TV that showed me the most amazing things in the world. Wile E. Coyote, for instance, taught me rather a lot about physics, M*A*S*H taught me the difference between being a smartass and a smart smartass, and the Marx Brothers taught me just about everything else I needed to know.**

Still, though, my favorite shows were documentaries about science in general and archeology in particular. There was nothing better in the world than an episode about mummies, lost cities in the Amazon, or best of all: long lost flights that reappear only after having been ejected from the glaciers that had been their final resting place.

So you can imagine my excitement when I surveyed the back yard this morning and found it completely free of ice and snow for the first time since December. Whooo! The Spring thaw is here, and this afternoon was the first chance of the season to press the boys into service. We were out and about and found all kinds detritus that had been locked away in the rare deep freeze that this winter had brought: turns out our Christmas tree was just a few feet from the driveway, there were shovels and rakes past the deck that I have no recollection of owning, and there were a couple of bats and waffle balls still out near the swing since a nice spell of weather in early December had lulled us into a false sense of security.

Unsurprisingly the boys didn’t find the whole enterprise nearly as entertaining as I did, and in fairness to them our little expedition wasn’t nearly as cool as the one that found Mallory, but hey, spring is here and I got them outside and moving around on a nice afternoon.

**Which, upon reflection, probably explains my skill at charming middle-aged dowagers.

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(Mallory turns up here too, just in case you're not the link clicking sort.)

Chunky Monkey vs. the Contagion.

It was a cold afternoon outdoors, although that didn’t matter much since we lived in an apartment with radiators that spent much of the day banging, wheezing and spitting out enough heat to make sure that we had to keep the windows open anyway. That particular afternoon, as did so many others, found me laid up in bed with a fever and sore throat, waiting impatiently for my mother to get back from the store with the two prizes that would go a long way to making me feel less put upon by the cosmos: Goldfish crackers and bologna. They were, when I was a little kid, the official Sick Treats.

Since then, of course, Goldfish and bologna have been forever ruined for me as an adult because I can’t help but associate them with a high fever and the urge to pull out my own tonsils with a spoon. Still, those afternoons of Dickensian wretchedness have inspired me to make my own boys’ sick days as much fun as possible. So, when our younger boy turned up with a fever and a guttural cough that sounded for all the world as if Carol Channing had swallowed Phyllis Diller whole, I knew just what to do.

First, a trip to Shoprite produced a tub of Chunky Monkey ice cream and a bag of mini Butterfingers that went right in the freezer (Winning!). Then a pair of Motrin and a long hot shower got him feeling perky enough to sit up at the computer where we had a few frozen Butterfingers and played some Butterfinger-themed flash games. (Just for thematic coherence, if nothing else.) When that got old we moved on to Pogo.com where we competed against each other in a few spirited rounds of Word Whomp, Mini Golf Madness and Poppit. After that we were off to Nick.com for some Tartar Treachery with Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.

By then the boy was starting to wilt a little, so we moved back to the couch where we turned on Netflix and finished off the afternoon by streaming Cave Dwellers courtesy of Joel, Crow and Tom Servo.

So no, not everyday can be an off-the-couch active day, but we do what we can. Jeez, I just hope that when the boy grows up he doesn’t associate Chunky Monkey, frozen Butterfingers and Mst3k with his own bouts of medieval-style contagion. Nah, it’ll probably be fine.

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Oh, and help yourself some Cave Dwellers. Mmmm.