Month: October 2008

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Family

Things you didn’t know, you didn’t know (about)

As much as I love cooler weather in the fall and spring, it plays havoc on my sinuses. I suffered excruciatingly when I was a kid from sore throats on a regular basis and I’m pretty sure had my tonsils just been removed (and me given lots of ice cream during recoup), that I’d have led a much less painful childhood.

Anyway, about five years ago, I had my sinus Roto-Rootered out by my ENT, and what I would classify as “the most uncomfortable 6 months of my life” followed after that. The surgery itself is simple and pretty painless, but it’s the routine visits afterwards that kill you. They go in with a long-hosed shop-vac and suck all the junk out of your sinuses; it’s a real pleasure. But the coup-de-gras is when they numb you up, and then reach in with the tool used by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall

Total Recallto remove the tracking device in his head, and the doc pulls out these clips they left in your head during the surgery. You hear crunching sounds; the doctor literally holds your head and “POP!” out come these huge-mongus things you didn’t even know existed.

These days I keep my sinuses clean and clear with the help of a daily steroid spray and an occasional saline bath courtesy of a re-purposed bulb snot-sucker that I absconded from my kids (I know, the mental imagery is astounding).

low tech neti pot

The funny thing is, many people I know, do the same thing, only with a device called a “Neti Pot.” It’s basically a gravy boat with a nasal-sized spout on the end that you stick up your nose and pour the gravy saline rinse through.

I was IM’ing a friend about it this morning and while looking around online, I came up with this little jewel of an instructional video, courtesy of my mom’s local Himalayan Institute (their HQ is about a mile from my mom’s house in PA).

Feel free to laugh along with me:

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

I wanna make, a memory…

Every now and then, you do something that’s not only good for familial relationships, but which is also cathartic. It’s cathartic like the way watching Augustus Gloop glutton his way up the chocolate tube makes you feel better about the time you spend in the gym. It’s cathartic in how watching a nose picker in the car beside you come up with a nugget only to find that he/she is out of hankies, makes you feel better about yourself.

That’s what the yearly familial trek to the punkin patch is for me.

We didn’t really have family traditions around the holidays growing up. Oh we had a “fairly close to Christmas eve” family get-together, but to my knowledge, we didn’t go get pumpkins; we didn’t go cut a Christmas tree; and we certainly didn’t decorate for Halloween.

I like traditions. To me, they are the best kinds of memories (not that I really have much of a basis for this belief). So, I try to decorate a bit for the holidays, and I take the family out to a local tree farm and I hack down a tree with an old fashioned handsaw, and each year we go to “Berry Patch Farms” here in the burbs and we pick out pumpkins–overpriced pumpkins to be exact.

Sunday morning (yes, we skipped church…get over it!) MLE woke up at 6 a.m. I heard him because I was sleeping on the couch after having woken up at 1 a.m. with back and leg spasms and having gone downstairs so as to not wake up CareerMom. After the usual Saturday morning routine, we all piled into the car and arrived onsite at the punkin patch when it opened at 10 a.m.

They have a nice setup there. There are a few choice farm animals for the kids to fawn over. They have face painting and a little swing play area. Then, you take a hayride over to the punkin patch where you trek across 50 yards of leftover punkins–still on the vine in many cases– to a main area where the majority of the big ones are gathered.

And then, the pictures commence!

Pumpkin patch 4 pumpkins patch 1 Pumpkin patch 3 Pumpkin patch 2

Along with a dozen or so other parents, for nigh on 30 minutes we cajoled, we bribed, we even occasionally threatened our children to do something cute (or else!) just so we could get that one picture…that one memory to stick away in a book somewhere, or maybe to e-mail to all our friends.

But we got a few and then we let the boys pick out a couple of pumpkins to take home. We all loaded back onto the hayride and it was then that I noticed we were the only ones actually buying pumpkins. It seems everyone else just came for the pics, and that made me kinda sad.

Isn’t part of the fun, taking a pumpkin home with you? Does the kid care that you brought them to the punkin patch and just took pictures of them and let them feed the goat some leaves you stripped from a nearby tree? Is that a good memory? I dunno.

The carthartic part, for me, was watching all of the other parents with their kids. And so many of them seem to be going through the same things we are with ours–the defiance, the pulling away when you want them to do something, the annoying whines–it was all there on display. It made me realize that we’re not the only ones sighing on a regular basis, or praying for just one quiet meal at the dinner table. It was a good moment. Kind of like when you blog about something and a bunch of other people respond in kind.

So we did it and I have the pictures to prove it, good or otherwise. Now, if the weather would just cooperate and drop about 15 degrees, it’d be pretty darn perfect!

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your kids’ friends

gender bath Tonight, MLI has his first non-familial sleep-over at someone else’s house. It’s with a girl–the same one whose mom keeps asking us to do things. After saying “No” to Disney and numerous other requests, the child’s mom cornered CareerMom at daycare and asked that he come over tonight for a sleep-over.

What’s a CareerMom to do?

Well, one thing she did was tell the girl’s mom that she didn’t want them bathing together.

*crickets*

*more crickets*

When she told me this, it struck me as a bit of a silly thing to say when asked if your child can have a sleep-over. Of all the things to be worried about the first time your four year old stays at a relative stranger’s house (who is a divorcee with an ex-husband of questionable character), worrying about the kids seeing each other’s thingies seems a tad bizarre.

I don’t know, but are four year olds that “aware”? Granted, I started digging girls at a pretty young age, but not THAT young.

What do you think? At what age did you stop bathing your opposite-gendered children together?

Categories
Dad Blogs DIY Family Life in these United States

Adventures in pipe replacement – part deux!

georgia My plumber arrived on time yesterday morning, apparently from Georgia (formerly part of the Soviet Union, not the state in which I live), and commenced working. However, based on a previous conversation I had with his office, I was under the impression that he would be using a pipe replacement technique in which they slide the new pipe inside the old pipe and then pull it all the way through, splitting the old pipe in the process. The idea here is that you can run a new line without ever having to fire up a trencher.

That was not to be the case.

By noon, I had a very circuitously trenched path from my water shut-off valve, down the hill, around my grass, through where some of my prized bushes were placed, under my sidewalk, and then through yet more bushes (flame creeper azaleas).

When I saw the path of death and destruction, I nearly cried. Me, a grown man.

The fellow doing the work, in broken English, explained why the “split and replace method” didn’t work and why he had to trench, and then I explained how he’d just destroyed about $300 worth of plants, not including the $600 Seiryu Japanese Maple that he laid his boring pipe against and rubbed off a 1.5″ strip of bark, right before WINTER!!!!

I was pretty upset.

By 4:30 p.m., he had the pipe in the ground and was just letting the PVC set before turning the water on and I began the arduous task of getting my plants back in the ground. Unfortunately, he put the pipe right under three of them, which meant, despite his having buried the pipe 13″, I still had to raise the mounds up where I put the plants just so I could cover the existing roots.

I fumed. I “huffed.” I made very annoyed screeching sounds when I talked. It was not my finest moment, but this was like having someone come into your house and write all over your walls with pink magic marker and then having the paint store tell you that they don’t sell your particular color anymore!

In the end, he helped me put everything back and I watered it in as best I could. I surveyed the damage again this morning and it looks like most of my big stuff will make it, though I lost an entire section of Creeping Jenny and probably two Flame Creeper Azaleas.

Here’s a before and after:

IMG_2347 IMG_2353

It’s hard to tell the difference here, but there is one. If nothing else, the difference is in my psyche!

But we have water now. I washed dishes, I cleaned, I wiped things down, I FLUSHED! (repeatedly). It’s a great feeling. Honestly, I don’t know what people did before modern plumbing. I really don’t!