stories

Daddy I Want

stublandford — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:15:43 -0700

Again our cast of characters -

Me (The Daddy)
The Bean: Age 7
The Butterfly: Age 5
The Loving Understanding Wife

About an hour after I'd finished Daddy I Want to go to the Beach, I was supposed to take the Bean and the Butterfly to eat at our favorite (read closest) Mexican restaurant, La Parilla. This usually involves the girls eating cheese dip for dinner; however, recently The Bean has started eating refried beans. Go figure.

In the book, the main character (Lily) won't go to the beach until her sandals, her Mermaid Barbi, her swim goggles, etc are found. By the Daddy. Lily waits and paints her toes while the Daddy looks high and low for Lily's belongings (she doesn't feel the need to help).

Lily is based loosely on The Bean. However, in this instance, it is The Butterfly's turn at bat.

Get this: I announce that it's time to get in the minivan (the convertible is in the shop, I swear.) The Bean is all excited. She dashes to the garage and proceeds to strap herself into her car seat (yeah, they grow up so fast, but it can be very convenient).

But The Butterfly throws a fit. She doesn't like the dress she's wearing. She wants the one that Grammy got her. She shrugs when I ask what it looks like.

So we go through her closet and the laundry room. I don't have a clue what I'm looking for, but somehow we find it.

Get your Crocs, I say. Let's go, I say.

No!

Crocs are stupid. I want my sandals. SANDALS!!!

Stop me if this sounds familiar.

The Butterfly proceeds to sit on the floor and not help. So The Bean (she's come back inside wondering WTF) and I do a room-by-room search for sandals.

We finally find them and go off for a wonderful meal of beans, cheese dip and Margaritas.

Savvy Daddies Worldwide

The "Toddler Effect"

Philmundo — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:47:06 -0700

by Phil Stott

Just last weekend I noticed-not for the first time-one of the major benefits to having a child of toddling age: getting away with stuff. For some reason, having a bundle of cuteness with me wherever I go seems to make people more amenable on those occasions that I get caught acting like a complete jerk-something that never quite seems to be as rare as I think it is, as my wife will surely attest.

The most recent example of the toddler effect happened, of all places, in my local library. Having finally returned a book that had been in my possession for almost two months, I was appalled to get a phone call a couple of weeks ago from said library alleging that the condition of the book had deteriorated so much in my care that I would have to pay them for it.

Being busy with work plus the fact that I really wasn't looking forward to the encounter, it took me a couple of weeks to get down there to sort the problem out. Being the kind of guy who likes to run through a million different scenarios of how a scene is likely to play out, the two weeks between the call and me presenting myself at the lending desk were filled with all manner of variations on the theme. Ideal scenario: I'd get some teenager who couldn't care less, and would just take the money. Worst case scenario: I'd get a stern lecture from some withered spinster (in my imagination only bored teenagers and sharp-eyed spinsters work in libraries) while other library-goers paused from browsing the stacks to look up and tut their disapproval. Even worse was the prospect that I'd hand over the money and have to argue over the fate of the book; in my estimation, paying for it meant that I should get to keep it, especially if its condition was such that they would rather call me in than lend it to someone else.

Having spent most of Saturday manfully trying to find ways to put off the encounter yet again (grocery shopping, getting a new tire, feigning an interest in college lacrosse on TV), I was eventually propelled towards my fate by my wife's insistence that she needed some peace and quiet to get on with her grad school work. Running through a mental checklist of Maeve-friendly errands that needed running (as opposed to Maeve-unfriendly ones like, uh, going to the driving range), I realized that there was no way I could put off the library encounter any longer. Packing her into the car, then, I headed off towards my fate, mentally rerunning both the best and worst case scenarios as I drove.

As it turned out, the encounter fell somewhere between the two extremes. In fact, thanks to Maeve, it ended up a lot closer to "best" on the scale than I had any right to expect. When I went in and announced myself, I was met with a frosty "Ah. Yes" by a distinctly matronly character, before she flounced off to grab the book as if I'd done her a personal injury. Returning with it, it wasn't difficult to see why-or how I'd thought the book was okay to return. It was a nightmare. A giant coffee stain, with grounds in it, adorned a significant cross section of the pages, and the cover was bent in half, the unbound edge pointing skywards at around the same angle as the screen currently sticking up from my laptop.

Fortunately, just at the point she brought it out, Maeve started fidgeting on the floor beside me, and I picked her up. The change in the woman when I set Maeve on the counter next to the offending book was a sight to behold. From stern and matronly, she morphed into a kindly grandmother right before my eyes. Not only did she forget what she was doing, when I reminded her she seemed distinctly sorry to have to be taking the money, and I left the place carrying not only the book (which was surrendered without question), but a much lighter load of guilt and shame than I'd expected.

Since then, a colleague told me she'd read something about how people with kids have been less likely to lose their jobs in the recession than childless people. I don't know how true that is, having seen couple of parents canned at my own office of late, but if it is, it's another example of the toddler effect in action. Regardless, it's something I'll be trying to harness in future-I could use all the help I can get at the office, whether it's in asking for a raise or (more likely) avoiding yet another round of layoffs.

Savvy Soldier Daddys

Toby — Sun, 24 May 2009 15:08:36 -0700

Thank you to all the savvy soldier daddys out there. For those protecting us, stay safe!

Welcome home to those who have returned. Enjoy the clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kerMm0HG1mk&feature=related Cheers, Toby

Tiger Woods' new motivation: his son

tony — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:44:39 -0800

Have you ever watched Tiger Woods play golf? I don't like golf at all, and I despise playing it, but watching Tiger play is something else. He seems to win even on his really bad days. On his good days, forget about it. This writer thinks he's going to get even better... because of motivation that comes from his son.

Man make fire, man feel manly

silly_sad_machine — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:08:02 -0800

By silly_sad_machine

My father kept a fire burning in an old iron woodstove during the winter to heat our house. We lived in very, very rural Oklahoma, and while we had electricity and (eventually) satellite TV, central heat and air was a novelty to which we had never been introduced.

My father woke early - always. He was up long before we were, and when he finally woke us to get ready for school the fire was already burning hot. My sister and I would rush down from our bitterly cold second-floor rooms and scramble to be the first in front of the woodstove's single blower.

When I was old enough my father put me to building fires. He showed me exactly how to do it, as well. You laid out two sticks of wood about a foot apart, and you stacked about four more sticks of wood across the first two. The effect was to make a little cubby to shove in paper, cardboard and other household tinder.

I built a lot of fires in that woodstove during my teenage years, and I always used my father's method. As far as I knew, it was the only way to build fires. But it was amazingly difficult to do. Paper burns hot, but it also burns fast. You could cram that little cubby so full that paper wads were bursting back out onto the floor, and you'd still only get about 20 seconds of good, hot flame. With sticks of wood that were easily as big around as a softball, 20 seconds wasn't good enough.

My father never had a problem with it, though. His hands were like magic in the stove. He'd carry in a load of wood, toss in some paper and there was your roaring fire, no questions asked. But I can remember countless times when I admitted defeat, unable to get the fire to start after several tries. These were no "Leave it to Beaver" moments, though, and my father didn't toss an arm over my shoulder and give me a heart-to-heart. Not being able to start a fire was a black mark against my manhood, and he let me know it. Although he didn't put it so seriously (way too sarcastic to be serious), these were the things a man did, and by God I needed to learn how to do them.

Today I'm building fires in my own fireplace (our woodstove has a stone hearth built around it ... much better than my father's). It was built by my grandfather when he built the house, and its giant presence forms the base of the house's support structure.

The presence of an iron grate on the floor of the stove, however, prevents me from using my father's method of starting fires. It had been some years since I'd really built one, and I suddenly had to adjust and find my own method. In doing so, I learned something very interesting.

My father's method for building fires sucked.

How could the man honestly believe that he was teaching me to build fires if he never taught me anything about kindling? Watch any survival show and you'll learn there are three keys to building a fire: tinder, kindling and fuel. The tinder catches the flame, the kindling stokes the flame and the fuel burns and puts out heat. My father's method involved wads of newspaper (tinder, I guess?) and gigantic sticks of just-seasoned wood. That's it. And yet, somehow, he pulled it off.

As it turns out I can build a pretty good fire too, and it doesn't take me 10 tries, either. Although my father didn't teach me a good method for actually stoking a fire, I think now that maybe that's not what he was trying to do. Maybe he wasn't really trying to do anything, but what he did do was give me a deep and abiding fondness for a roaring fire in a black iron fireplace. It makes me feel like a real father and a real man like nothing else I've done in my life, and burning a fire in our home is like rekindling the heart of our family's legacy.

No, there was no way he was aiming for that. I think he just wanted an excuse to call me a puss.

Take your advice and …

Philmundo — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:39:01 -0800

By Phil Stott

My wife took my daughter to the grocery store, and got reprimanded for her parenting by a complete stranger, which infuriated me, and led me to consider: what's the best way to deal with an interfering busybody (however well-meaning)? And just where the hell do they get off anyway?

Thus far in our parenting careers, my wife and I have received exactly four pieces of unwanted information from random strangers, and every single time it's been in the supermarket. That's once every three months on average, provided no one else assails us between now and Maeve's birthday at the end of the month. What it is about our parenting skills that compel someone to interrupt their shopping to pronounce judgment on us is beyond me - our "offences" to date have included:

- Not having her in a sweater (granted, the store was over-air-conditioned, but it was 95 outside, not an unreasonable temperature for not having a sweater in the diaper bag).

- Having her sockless (again in summer). Because having an infant in socks for more than 45 seconds is completely do-able.

- Giving her our keys to play with to stop her from screaming the store down - not something we do on a regular basis (there's a lot of monitoring to make sure she doesn't try to eat them), but sometimes it's the only thing that works.

Looking at the list of offences, there's one common thread - not having enough junk in the diaper bag - that probably could have prevented all three instances. Having said that, the reality of parenting, at least for me, is that we spend our lives running around doing all the things we forgot to do yesterday while forgetting what we were supposed to do today. Assuming that anyone with the gall to offer unsolicited advice on a subject is presumably an expert (i.e. a parent or childcare specialist), wouldn't you think they'd recognize that and just cut you some slack?

Anyway, it seems like the person sticking their nose in where it isn't even remotely wanted is likely to be more or less a constant for the foreseeable future, so the question then becomes: how do we deal with it?

It seems to me that there's a sliding scale of appropriateness in terms of reaction, with my initial instinct tending towards the less polite end of it. Thankfully, I haven't been in the immediate vicinity on most of the occasions, so my two favorite words haven't been aired in public quite yet - and for the sake of an easy life, I have no desire for that ever to happen. With that in mind, I had a long think (and canvassed some friends) regarding what might be termed "more appropriate verbiage" in business-speak. Here are some of the best suggestions I garnered:

1) It occurs to me that just accepting the advice (or pretending to) might be a viable option, ruling out any potential conflict. Saying something like "You're absolutely right. Normally we'd have a sweater handy, but we only popped in for milk." Not my favorite suggestion, as I'm not in the habit of justifying my actions to a complete stranger, but definitely likely to diffuse an awkward situation.
2) A friend, meanwhile, agrees with me on the psychological satisfaction that comes with a decent brush-off, but has developed a more appropriate manner of delivering it. Basically, she pays the person scant attention and says something like "Thank you. She's fine." Short, to the point, and with the added benefit of pointing out that, yes, you do know what your kid's up to, and are aware of how to take care of them.
3) Further along the scale, another friend admitted that he once opted for the slightly more aggressive "If I'd wanted your advice, I'd have asked for it." The result? Stunned silence, and fleeting satisfaction, but a guilt trip at a later date. Probably best to reserve this one for the dealing with the rudest of the rude.
4) At the very end of the scale, the best lines are the ones you know you'll never use. In my head, I have a retort that goes something like "Thanks for your concern, I guess we just got so caught up in teaching her how rude it is to offer advice to complete strangers that we totally forgot to put her hat on."

Still, I'm pretty sure that there are some other ideas out there about how best to deal with the busybody (both tried and tested, and lurking in the recesses of the imagination). Feel free to share your best suggestions and war stories below.

Discussions of life and death with a 5 year old

CharliePATpk — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:51:57 -0800

One of the benefits to cyber schooling is having the opportunity to be directly involved in a child's education. Indeed, in the younger grades, it is essential to be the teacher (small 't') whereas the Teacher is a person whom the student converses with online, by phone, and at sees at the monthly field trips.

Our kindergartner has taken very well to the cyber classes, and my much-better-half has the dominant role as teacher, with me filling in as needed. Last week the 5 year old asked me to help him with his science class (note: to the best of my memory, I didn't have Science in kindergarten. In fact, short of snack time and frying pumpkin seeds in oil, I have no recollection of kindergarten). We read the book Things that are alive, things that are not (the title may be incorrect; will update if I am wrong), which was helping kids understand that inanimate objects aren't alive, and so forth.

One page of the book described if you walk in the park and see a bird lying on the ground, not moving, and not doing anything a bird usually does, it's dead. Obviously, the author needed a good example of a dead animal, but never considered the amount of road-kill seen on rural roads. That said, the drawing of a bird lying on its back on a field of green elicited a case of the giggles from my son. But, remember, he is 5.

A few days later, however, this topic apparently began to ferment in his head. Daddy, why is it that dogs and cats can get old and die, but people can't? Ohhhhh-kay. He's beginning to piece things together, albeit with a few holes. I explained to him simply that people can die just like dogs and cats, and in fact anything alive can die. He seemed satisfied with this, and then changed the subject to what was on TV. I later learned that he asked my much-better-half if birds could die could our cat die, too? So the progression was logical.

A day later he asked me if people can die when they get old, how come Pop is still alive? Wow, now he's shoving my father into the ground!! Won't Pop be pleased??

I know this type of discussion hadn't come up when our 13 year old was a similar age, but then he had the mixed blessing of experiencing the passing of my much-better-half's parents over a few short years (and he didn't start cyber school until the 2nd grade, if that matters). I reassured our youngest that while Pop was old, there's no reason to think that he's going to die tomorrow, which again satisfied him (at least for then and there). My father is 78, and in overall good health, so there's no reason to think he's going anytime soon, but statistically speaking, he's entering the home stretch (the SSA predicts he's got another 9 years or so).

Since my youngest has accepted that people can (and do) die, I am going to wait for another question before I approach the topic further. He's exhibited a healthy level of inquisitiveness for this topic, I think, and isn't apparently bothered by the topic. My father has 2 older brothers still living (and 2 younger sisters, the husband of one sadly is struggling with cancer), so it a stretch to imagine that a funeral may be in the cards over the next few years (believe me: I have no wish to hurry such an event). So sooner or later, this will be discussed again.

In the meantime, I await the next question to come to mind of my youngest. It is more than a little interesting to witness the thought process taking shape in his young mind.

Originally posted at Nobody asked me, but....

Potty Training Adventures

tony — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:31:07 -0800

by Tony Chen

I was getting ready to leave work this past Monday when I got a 5-word text message from my wife:

"poo poo in the potty"

After months of trying, then dropping it (no pun intended), and then bringing it up again with our little one, little Meme finally poo poo-ed in the potty this week at day care! I can't tell you how much my heart was filled with pride. It almost rivaled the day he started walking. My co-workers must of thought I had lost it (again) as I just had to run out of my office and tell someone. "POO POO IN THE POTTY!"

The logical next thought, obviously: did the day care teacher take a picture of it?

It's been an interesting journey to get to this point. Potty training seems to be the topic that keeps going and going and going. On our facebook page, folks talk about it incessantly. Some Children's hospitals now offer "potty training school" for parents at their wits end. Guess how many times "potty training" was googled last month? 368,000. 368,000! I mean, that's almost as many searches that Brooke Burke gets.

My wife and I read all the tips - getting the right equipment, using rewards, scheduling potty breaks, etc. My parents told me stories about how I was potty-trained in one day by my grandmother -- she was floored to see your truly at 18 months, still in diapers. Come on, the kids in China are trained by 6-12 months of age, right? Apparently, all she did was strip my diaper off all day and lay some newspaper on the ground. I went. I saw it. And I was potty trained.

When all is said and done, potty training is basically this: when they're ready, they're ready. Yes, we could have done a lot of things (maybe even earlier than we thought) to get them ready. And yes, it's hard to maintain consistency in our 2-days-per-week-in-day-care, 2-days-per-week-with-grandparents life, but potty training is not something to force, either. We had seen more and more interest from him especially these last few weeks. He'd pretend to go. He'd look forward to the scheduled potty time. He really wanted that reward lollipop. The last straw was probably him seeing the kids at day care do it.

Anyway, what a relief. Now, let's see if we can get him to do it 2 days in a row. Then 3. Then a whole hectic week. Then, it's onto bedwetting.

Literary tykes

Philmundo — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:36:22 -0700

By Phil Stott

At a little under a year old, it would appear that reading is already one of my daughter's favorite things to do. Well, not reading exactly, but she loves to turn the pages of her board books, and I'm finding that there's no surer way to settle her down after a crying jag, or for bedtime, than sitting down with her and paging through something like Goodnight Moon or The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

As a literature and history major in college, seeing her enthusiasm for flipping pages - and the attention she gives her favorite ones - is something that's deeply satisfying for me. I'm under no illusions: I know she's not comprehending much of what's in the books beyond learning some vocabulary to store up for when she starts talking, but it does make me wonder if there's any link between exposure to "reading" material at a young age and a love of books as an adult.

The difference between a journalist and someone who writes blogs is that that question would be a jumping-off point for a journalist - they'd be on the phone finding sources and investigating it for an answer to be published in an article with a headline like "10 things you MUST do to make your child a success". For this blogger, though, it's enough to wonder about a link and then to say, well, it doesn't matter - she enjoys "reading," I enjoy it, and we're going to continue to do it, regardless of whether it may be good for her at some unspecified point in the future or not. (That by the way, kind of sums up my approach to parenting - being informed enough to know what's harmful, feeding a balanced diet, and refusing to sweat the rest.)

To that end, then, I'd like to offer a handful of tips to bear in mind when reading with your child.

1) Any time's a good time for a book. They don't have to be stored up for bedtime, story time, or any other time. Having an appointed time or ritual for reading can make it seem like a special occasion (or a valued part of routine), but quite often putting a book in front of a child's face can be the something that works to please them when nothing else will.

2) Use your voice. Bedtime story? Try making your voice lower and softer as you near the end of it. Lots of characters? Don't be afraid to use different accents, pitches etc. to make them stand out. Kids get a big kick out of anything that helps a story come alive.

3) Improvise. Legend has it in my family that my dad's versions of certain stories were so good that my brother and I wouldn't go to bed as kids if anyone else tried reading them. The karate-chopping pigs that beat up on a suspiciously German-sounding wolf before he could blow their houses down sticks in my mind even to this day. And it keeps the books from boring both the parent and the child.

4) Don't just read the story. In fact, sometimes, don't read it at all. In books for younger kids, the written words are only half the point. Use the pictures as learning aids. Repeat vocabulary to your child, and ask them to point to things as well. It won't work every time, but the first time they put their finger on the sun, a flower, or a ba-ba (as Maeve likes to say) is an incredibly rewarding feeling.

5) Don't do everything for them. Even in my lap, Maeve likes to turn the pages. Sometimes she just likes to flip through a book really fast without stopping to look at anything. That's fine by me, too: while books may be about learning, learning should be about having fun wherever possible. And if she's having fun, I usually am too, which is kind of the point of the whole thing.

A Daily Dose from a Working Mother

tkempster — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:33:01 -0700

Guest post by Ted Kempster

I'm not your typical, divorced, working mother.

My day starts at 5:30 a.m., when I get up and go online to tackle my overnight email and follow-up phone calls. My customers and field teams are global, so there's always something going on at that hour. On the 3.5 days a week that my children are in my care, at 6:00 a.m. I make sure my 14-year-old son is getting up. He needs to be out the door and headed to the bus-stop by 6:50 a.m. He has the typical "distractibility" of a teenager. Sometimes I realize around 6:30 that he's still in the shower and have to pound on the door to "encourage" him to hurry it up. At 6:30 a.m. I wake up my 9-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son. They need to be out the door by 7:30 (if the weather's fine) or I have to drop them off at school by 7:50.

At this point I'm in full "mother" mode ... reminding them about washing, brushing, deodorizing, combing and homework. I make lunches (cheaper than buying), organize snacks for the day (no nuts allowed for my 9-year-old, her classmate is allergic!), make breakfast (okay, usually cereal and juice, but sometimes eggs and biscuits, too) and make sure they're dressed appropriately, both for the weather and for school. It takes teamwork to make this happen successfully, and often I'm more the ringmaster while the children are doing the work.

After getting them on their bicycles or dropping them off, I'm racing to work for a full day of customer service account management. I listen to, empathize with, coordinate for, and advocate for my customers, acting as their liaison with corporate support and management. At 3 p.m. I'm out the door (thanks to flexible scheduling by my management) and on my way home to take care of my children after school. There are activities--scouts, sports, friends and homework. Sometimes these are interrupted for conference-calls. The children have been well-trained to know when I need silence, and to ask whether or not the phone is muted before they speak.

In the evenings I listen to, empathize with, coordinate for, and advocate for my children. One major difference between how I handle my customers and how I handle my children is that I also love them very, very much. I hold them, I read to them, I make sure they are clean and educated and sung-to and played with and tucked into bed ... and most of all, loved.

Bedtime is 8:30 p.m., okay, maybe 9:00 ... alright, sometimes 9:30. Then I'm back online and catching up with email from the afternoon (west coast, Asia-Pac) until 11 p.m. or midnight, sometimes later. At 5:30 a.m., it all starts again.

Thinking of this in terms of my company's Ten Core Values, the transferable lessons of parenting and work are self-evident:

Focus on their needs, deliver on promises.
Seize opportunities quickly; get it done now.
Complete what you say you are going to do; no excuses.
Treat each other with respect and do the right thing always.
Think creatively to provide the solution.
Develop best-of-breed products and services.
Know how we provide real value to our customers.
Collaborate smoothly with others, leveraging our diversity.
Maintain open, honest interaction, build relationships on trust.
Stay flexible, adapt as circumstances change

The above reads like a summary of any good parenting guide. They are goals and values I try to model for and teach to my children, and they see this in my approach to work as well.

Do I sound like a typical, divorced, working mother? Pretty much so, except that I'm their dad.

Working mothers and working, single, fathers are each presented with their own unique set of challenges and opportunities, but more and more I recognize our common experiences and see that we have a lot to learn from each other.