Tag Archives: parenting

Hay still smells good, but Daddy’s done with cows

For some strange reason, it smelled like a haymow on the second floor of my building yesterday. It’s not the kind of space that should smell like hay. Maybe somebody was just wearing an extra dose of Barnyard by Calvin Klein. Whatever the reason, it sent my mind reeling back to the 1970s.

The images in my memory were not ones of attempting to lug hay bales as big as myself, or of scratching up my arms on the rough edges of cut hay. They weren’t of getting blisters in the joints of my destined-for-office-work fingers from the friction of baler twine. They weren’t of trying to balance on a moving wagon while keeping out of the way of bigger kids who could actually heft the bales up onto the stack.

My memories were of building forts with bales in the mow; of playing hide and seek and tunneling between the stacks; of the hay smelling fun, not being the odor of sweat and hard work.

haymow diplomacy

Ah, those good old days! Making forts, hiding out, and negotiating international treaties in the wonderland of the haymow. It was good to be a kid. (Image: Ridson Tillery – US Farm Security Administration)

My wife once asked me if I regretted my children not having that kind of upbringing. I said no.

They’ll have much more opportunity in their suburban childhoods than I had in my rural one. They will have schools with more resources, and a wider variety of people with which to interact. They will miss out on some particular brands of fun, but they’ll miss much of that fun merely because it’s not the ‘70s anymore. Even in the country, it’s 2015, with 2015 rules and regulations.

A farm life would be good to teach them the value of hard work. It might teach them that you can smell bad and still walk tall, as long as you smell bad for a good reason, and only when necessary. It could teach them humility, as it did me when my job was to hold cows’ tails. Cows’ tails can get to be very – let’s call it grimy – and having to hold them tight can make a young dandy have to swallow a good portion of his pride.

All the cows are doin it

Even with a friend along to help talk to the cow into it, I still don’t want to do any more milking. (Image: John Vachon – US Farm Security Administration)

There can be many character benefits to a farm life, but I don’t want it for my boys. The selfish truth of the matter is I don’t want it for me, because if they lived on a farm, I’d have to live there too, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to start work at 4 a.m. and knock off after dark. I don’t want to carry blisters on my still perfect-office-worker fingers all through haying season. I don’t want to coerce milk from an animal who doesn’t feel like giving it up, or even one who does. I don’t want my livelihood held hostage by the weather or a far-away commodities market. And I never want to have to grab hold of another cow’s stinky, sticky, wet tail again.

I’ve decided the second floor of my building smelled more like a silo. Silos were always dark and damp inside. I never had any fun in a silo.

Doctor say it bleeding

The boys were a  dream over the weekend. Unusually well-behaved and full of imagination, they provided several snippets worth remembering.

It began Thursday night, at the book release party my wife threw for A Housefly in Autumn. There were other events at the venue, with lots of people in fancy clothes attending them. As he helped push our wagonload of books into the elevator, Big Brother looked up and asked. “Daddy, do all these people know you’re famous?”

“No, I’m pretty sure they don’t,” I replied.

“Why not?”

I changed the subject. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. I should have said, “Someday, they’ll know,” but I didn’t think fast enough. Anyway, it makes me proud and humble enough to know I’m famous to him.

On Saturday, Mommy went away on an overnight visit, bravely leaving her house in the hands of us four men. We didn’t break the house, as far as Mommy knows, and we had lots of fun. Big Brother invented two new jokes.

Q. What does corn call its father?

A. Pop Corn.

Q. What does an apple call his grandmother?

A. Granny Smith.

You can see the pattern he was working on for his comedy that day.

After jokes came wrestling.

blanket lump

When Mommy’s away, two boys and a blanket lump will play.

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Did that blanket just give birth to a Big Man?

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You boys go about your play. Big Man’s on the march.

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Why is he climbing up the stereo?

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Of course! An extension cord will make the perfect addition to the stash of useful objects he keeps in his hole behind the stereo.

 

On Sunday, Big Brother said he was worried. “Mommy hasn’t called or texted or anything!”

I reassured him that she had texted me. He looked disgusted. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Now that I know he’s a worrier, I’ll be sure to keep him in the loop. He’s right to worry about Mommy’s safety, considering that I’m the only parent he has in reserve.

We were low on food, so I got to do one of my favorite things in the world: go grocery shopping with three boys. Before we left, Buster insisted I help him tear off a piece of Scotch tape. He attempted to wrap the tape around a “Boo-boo” on his baby brother’s finger.

“That’s not a Band-Aid,” I said.

He nodded to reassure me. “It is. It is Band-Aid,” he insisted.

I finally convinced him to leave Big Man alone. He contented himself with wrapping the tape around his own finger. In the car, he tried to convince Big Brother his finger was bleeding.

“It’s not bleeding,” Big Brother insisted, because he’s a pathological corrector, even of  three-year-olds with big imaginations.

“It is bleeding!” Buster shouted back. “Doctor say it bleeding.”

For the rest of the ride, Big Brother attempted to pin Buster down as to exactly when he had been to the doctor.

Buster gave up the argument, secure in his own knowledge that he possessed both a bleeding finger and a Band-Aid. Sometimes, you just have to ignore the skeptics.

Big Man slept through most of the supermarket, and the other boys were surprisingly good. We hit almost every aisle and I didn’t have to break into a run once.

We went home and had sloppy joes, corn on the cob, and watermelon. Then Mommy came home and they ran to her as if she were all that could save them from the collapse of society.

I’m still not as famous as Mommy, but all the blood was imaginary, so I guess we did all right.

Where have you hidden my manhood this time?

These days I have a devil of a time laying hold of that six-inch long piece of equipment that constitutes my manhood. I suspect I’m not the only husband and father with this trouble. I bet lots of men roam their houses, in desperate frustration, searching for the TV remote.

Just as he needs a comfortable chair, set squarely before the TV, a man need his scepter of entertainment power, preferably programmed to skip anything educational and the various Lifetime channels.

With three boys and a grown-up woman in the house, I don’t get charge of the remote very much. This is a hard knock, but I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve learned to be satisfied with a few minutes of executing my will over the TV after everyone has gone to bed, on the nights when they go to bed before my time is up.

Who needs the remote?

“The remote? Why would you need that? The TV’s already tuned to cartoons.”

What drives me up the wall is when I finally get the TV to myself and there’s no remote to be found. Since it’s technically the cable remote, I can’t even change the channel manually. I’m stuck watching Ninja Turtles as my reward for outlasting them all.

They all have their different methods of losing the remote. One routinely takes it to a different room, where it no doubt also controls the toaster. One loses it underneath couch cushions. One throws it into a toy box.

I caught on to all these tricks and was renewing my acquaintance with televised sports when Big Man began his own love affair with the device. Big Man doesn’t care what channel the TV is on, but that remote is just full of fat, juicy buttons to push, and some of them do things to the TV that make his family react in the most hilarious ways.

keeping watch

Guarding your stash is a 24/7 job. Handcuffs for trespassers are optional.

My wife is a self-proclaimed, part-time hoarder. On the other hand, she hates clutter. She reconciles these positions by stuffing her hoard into cupboards and baskets. This issue would not be related to my difficulty locating the remote except Big Man seems to have inherited these contradictory conditions from her.

He has a little cache behind the stereo  where he keeps his prized possessions. His prized possessions are objects that caught his attention for a minute, until he decided it would be fun to drop them into a hole. He has a second cache behind the kids’ chair in the living room. In these caches can be found Leap Frog toys, plastic soldiers, the tail section of a Mega Bloks helicopter, a good portion of my once-pristine CD collection (with or without cases), and something I spent most of a Saturday afternoon looking for so I could watch something besides Peppa Pig for a damned minute.

Oh well, TV is overrated anyway. Maybe we should investigate some more intellectually fulfilling pursuits, like reading to each other or going to family hoarders’ therapy. Maybe we could just relax and listen to some nice music. Oh wait, where are my CDs?

Let’s just move to Alaska so we don’t have to go to bed at all

It’s hard not to want to welcome the arrival of spring. This is especially true since my winters hold a lot less skiing than they used to and a lot more shoveling. Now that winter is more about searching for lost mittens than a quiet trail through a beautiful woods, there’s not much left to recommend it.

If there is one thing that has begun to lean in winter’s favor, it is winter’s lack of Daylight Saving Time.

DST used to be a good thing. It used to let carefree, childless me play outside after work. It used to lend itself to pleasant evenings in open-air seating with friends, food, and spirits.

Now, all DST does is convince children it can’t possibly be time to go to bed. We spent all their lives training them to sleep at night, and now demand they go to bed in the middle of the afternoon.

Lets screw parents everywhere!

Can you believe people actually wrote to Congress asking them to prevent me from having a quiet moment to myself at night?

This time of year is enough trouble without DST, but why settle for a little trouble when we can have a lot?

Nobody told the sun school is still in session. He stays up late, mocking children who have to go to bed before him.

Big Brother understands DST and the growing days of spring, but it still makes him angry. It’s darker when we wake him up than when he goes to bed. That must be why he prefers morning sleep.

A few short months ago, Buster and Big Man (formerly New Baby) were checked out by 8. Now, 10 o’clock is a good night. They can’t tell time, but they know when they can still see the colors of things outside. Day means play.

Congress must be eager to add more playtime to their days after work, the way they’ve kept spreading DST out over the calendar, but don’t those guys pretty much come and go as they please anyway?

They say it helps farmers, which is something I might buy if there were more than three family farms left. Aren’t all the farms owned by G.E. or some similar giant corporation? Can’t they just manufacture bigger light bulbs to use in the corn field factory?

Defeat!

. . . because you won’t have a minute alone with your wife until November. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

Of all parental responsibilities, putting kids to bed is one of my top 1,000 least favorite. You know what, kids? I have work in the morning, which means I have to go to bed at a reasonable hour, which means every second you resist sleep is a second taken from the only precious little chunk of down time I’m getting today. So don’t look at the sun, or any of the natural time cues you recognize; look at the clock, that man-made fabrication dictating our lives and begging, nay commanding, you to go to sleep so I can have a quiet cup of tea, or during these rough nights of Daylight Saving Time, scotch.

On the other hand, I don’t relish the idea of them getting up at 4:30 a.m., so can I get three cheers for that wonderful sunrise delayer known as Daylight Saving Time?