Category Archives: Random Toy Box

Posts on the general topic of family.

A true Superstar delivers the pasta

We have a house full of fleeting superstars. For one week every year, one or more of the boys is the superstar student at his school. Apparently, third graders have outgrown the notion of revolving notoriety, so only Buster basked in the limelight of stardom in his preschool this year.

Being a superstar is not all fun and games. There are responsibilities associated with the honor, and this is what a superstar’s parents are for. Any superstar worth his salt requires a poster board with pictures of himself in all his glory. Parents are usually good for making these, and even when they are not, they can be counted upon to recycle the one from last year into a presentable placard.

As a parent of an annual superstar, the most daunting responsibility is supplying a healthy snack to the class. The key, and vexing, word here is healthy. As the child of a simpler time, healthy snack is the epitome of oxymoron to me. Healthy is an adjective that belongs paired with the noun leftovers. The noun snacks deserves a more appropriate adjective, like sugary. The following sentence illustrates how these combinations were intended to be used in conversation: There are plenty of healthy leftovers remaining in the corner, where we shoved them to prevent their impeding our access to the sugary snacks.

To me, a snack is an item 90% of kids will readily eat. I don’t know how to make anything healthy that meets this criterion. I’ve heard some parents know how to make healthy both fun and delicious by constructing adorable designs with various fruit bits and toothpicks. I’m not young and hip like those parents. I am just old enough to know that both fun and delicious take a back seat to pain when the toothpick shard hits the soft gum tissue.

Besides, my kids like their fruits segregated, so they can be analyzed, and probably rejected, separately.

This year, Buster chose spaghetti as his healthy snack, proving he is a genius in addition to being a superstar. I was taken aback by the logistics of providing spaghetti to a classroom, but Mommy went with it (after approval from Buster’s teacher), proving where Buster inherited his superstar genes.

spaghetti

Making spaghetti the Superstar way.

Making spaghetti the Superstar way.

She bought disposable bowls, forks, and wet wipes. We cooked spaghetti and cut it up into short strands. This, with a bowl of warm sauce, filled up the insulated bag, covering the two secret packs of Oreos tucked underneath. Every superstar keeps a an ace in the hole.

Buster’s teacher reported the spaghetti a success, but wondered why Buster didn’t want any for himself. Here’s the thing about Buster: he’s a forward-looking superstar and spaghetti was yesterday’s idea.

He confirmed he didn’t eat any spaghetti. “But,” he said, “I ate an Oreo.”

Judging by the empty containers, his classmates feasted on spaghetti and Oreos. They and their teachers are all superstars, allowing us to get by with a more-or-less healthy snack, unsullied by the mockery of me trying to stab blueberries with toothpicks.

Daddy may not be very bright, but he still makes an awesome stick figure

Yesterday Buster went to work with me for a couple hours because I had to be at work and he had to be off the streets until Mommy could collect him.

He brought the Kindle Fire with him so (in theory) he could play games while I worked. We’ve had some trouble with this theory in the past: he would try to play games he didn’t understand. This led to frustration, loud whining, and tears. This is not a good result for a usually quiet office setting, even when the loud whining was coming from him and not me.

Yesterday, the theory played out well. He’s getting better at figuring out games. More importantly, he’s getting better at figuring out which games he shouldn’t attempt to play until his skills are more accomplished: learning to read instructions, for example.

Everything went as well as could be expected, except he wouldn’t eat his muffin because he was too busy understanding how to play games.  The important point is that he was not disruptive for big chunks of minutes at a time.

He played, quiet and happy, until he attempted a game requiring internet access. We have Wi-Fi at work, so I took his Fire from him to set up the connection. That’s when it hit me that I don’t know much about how to work a Kindle. I’m used to the iPad; the boys are the only ones who use the Kindle. I swiped and swiped but could not figure out how to find the Settings menu.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I can’t find Settings to connect you to the Internet.”

Instead of being disappointed and whining, my little boy who doesn’t know how to read said, “Maybe you should type in Settings.

Well, I’ll be damned if there weren’t a search field beckoning from across the top of the screen. Before I made it past the second t in Settings, the little gear icon popped right up. A few seconds later, Buster was playing his Wi-Fi enabled game.

No doubt, he was thinking how dim the old people are. That he wasn’t saying it out loud only shows what good manners his parents have instilled in him.

I, too, was thinking how dim old people are, specifically, me. I was also thinking about how disappointing it must be for him to discover how old and dim his dad can be.

Mommy came to get Buster and I went on with my work. I took consolation that I do my work with, and for, other old people; consequently they wouldn’t be bright enough to judge from it how dim I am.

Later, my wife sent me an email with the following attachment.

The hair alone is awesome.

The hair alone is awesome. It reminds me of the hair I had when I was young and could program the VCR.

And this text:

Mom: That’s a great picture. Who is it?

Buster: It’s Daddy, awesome Daddy. 

Old, dim, and awesome. I guess I’ll take it.

Day 17,940

Today I outlived my father.

Before anyone sends condolences, I should clarify. My father died in 1976. Today I am one day older than my father lived to be. I am 17,940 days old, which translates into 49 years, 1 month, and a dozen days.

How do I know this? Microsoft Excel.

Why do I know this? That’s harder to say.

Probably, it is for three reasons: Big Brother, Buster, and Big Man. If not for them, and all they’ve added to my life through fatherhood, I likely would have never thought about this milestone.

The eight years I had with my father boil down to about five years of faded memories. Beyond that, he’s mostly hearsay from others and conjecture on my part.

For most of my life, I recalled my father through the eyes of a child – the last eyes that saw him in real life. My own children have allowed me to relate to him as a father.

Children are remarkable adapters. When my father died, I adapted to the way life must be without him. I lived as children live, thinking about today, leaving yesterday behind. My mother pulled double duty to provide her children good childhoods.

Like lots of kids who lost a parent, I considered my life to be normal. I never felt sorry for myself. That hasn’t changed, but something else has. Once in a while I feel sorry for my father. This empathy is a gift to me from my own children.

As a child, I coped with, and moved past, my own loss, and that was the end of it. I didn’t consider things from a parent’s point of view. I couldn’t conceive of the tragedy of being pulled away forever from a house full of young lives embodying all your hopes and dreams. I didn’t appreciate the sadness in not being there to share the joys and sorrows.

I don’t know what comes after life, or if there is a time or place for a departed soul to feel the sting of this separation, but now I feel it for him. I feel it when I realize how precious my boys’ smiles, and even sometimes their tears, are to me. I feel it when I think about how much they have to learn and how much I need to teach them. I feel it when I realize that most times I am called by name, that name is “Daddy.”

On my father’s 17,939th day, he had eight children, aged 5 to 19. The next day, we all were forced to rebuild our lives without him. Faded, with my memories of him, is the sadness of losing him. More vivid to me now, is a sadness for his losing us.

I visit this sadness now and then. It reminds me to enjoy the great gifts of fatherhood while I can.

I dont want to miss a thing.

I don’t want to miss a thing.

The blog days of August

The blogging world slows down in the summer. Some bloggers take a vacation. Some try to rediscover the real world. I, on the other hand, have just been slacking. It’s not my fault though. I blame society, because society is convenient to blame for everything, with its constant breakdowns. But mostly I blame this intellectually stifling season called summer.

It’s harder to get motivated to write in summer.

First of all, it tends to get hot and it’s harder to think when you’re hot. My best ideas leak out through my sweat glands in summer. Then, all I’m left with are horrible images of an old man perspiring. When the humidity hits, I start thinking again. I start thinking about the mechanics of breathing. I start thinking about how sweating like a pig is supposed to cool a body down. Lying science!

I can't do my work.

I can’t do my work.

The boys want to be outside, running around like maniacs who laugh in the face of the heat index, instead of staying cooped up in the house where I can easily hear and see the funny things they say and do. They become totally selfish and don’t care at all about their responsibility to give me good blog material.

Since between one and two of the children are too young to be outside, running around like unsupervised maniacs, I find myself always outside running around like a supervising maniac, preventing kids from changing neighborhoods like the wind. I can’t type while jogging, let alone at a full sprint. We might be outside until dark, which is practically tomorrow in summer.

As Captain Oates famously said, "I am just going outside and may be some time." It should be noted that Capt. Oates was never seen again, and it wasn't even hot weather.

As Captain Oates famously said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” It should be noted that Capt. Oates was never seen again, and it wasn’t even hot weather.

Then they want to stay up late, because, hey, there’s no school in the morning and it’s still kind of light outside. This leaves me hardly any time at all for a muse-provoking scotch on the rocks, because, hey, there is work in the morning and it’s going to take me two hours to fall asleep in this heat. Kids tend to supply zero writing prompts when they are standing between you and a quiet nightcap.

This makes me grumpy. When you are hot, sticky, and grumpy, it is the perfect time to write – if you are due to fire off another angry letter to the electric company. When you are grumpy, you tend to lash out at people, which is just what the utilities need and expect. Unfortunately, utilities probably make up a minority of your blog audience. So you should probably just go to bed and stew in your own juices until you fall asleep, as figuratively as you can manage.

All of this not thinking and not writing leads to large gaps between blog posts. This is not the end of the world because your audience is outside playing and getting heat stroke too.  The real problem comes when you get frustrated and give up on the thinking altogether because you figure you can still do the  writing without it. That only ever leads to a third-rate blog post.

And I hope you enjoyed it.