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.)