Category: A Boy’s Life

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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States

I Don’t Care for Today’s Reimagined Superfriends!

SuperFriends

I have discovered something (else) too late in life that I wish I had figured out sooner: Never, and I mean NEVER, tell your kids about something you really liked as a child and that you still sort of hold near and dear to your heart because they will latch onto it like it is their own and you will hear of it to no end until you are just so sick of it, that you wish you’d never even heard of it.

What am I talking about? Spider-Man…that’s what I’m talking about.

It all started innocuously enough. Some kid in my oldest son’s class was already into Spider-Man and my son was only mildly interested until one day I was briefly watching (I only get to watch things briefly at my house because the instant I sit down to watch anything, my attention is diverted by one of the boys) Spider-Man the movie—the one with the Green Goblin–came on television and my son came downstairs and quietly sat down beside me to watch. Well, I wasn’t sure I wanted him watching it, so as he sat there with me, I didn’t really respond to his questions of, “Who’s that?” and “Why is that man hitting Spider-Man?” with any gusto.

So now, since I didn’t respond correctly, the Green Goblin has become “The Green Guy.” And then sometime later, my son saw Spider-Man 3 with the black suited, mean Spider-Man who has big teeth and a long tongue and now he has become “The Tongue Guy.” So now we have “Red Spider-Man” to differentiate between the black one, “The Green Guy” and “The Tongue Guy.”

Oh and did I tell you that he wanted to be Spider-Man for Halloween, which earned him one silky feeling Spider-Man suit which he cannot stand to be without. From the moment he gets up in the morning to the moment he gets home from Daycare in the evening he wants to wear it. And I can’t blame him. If I’d had a silky outfit when I was a kid, I might have worn it too…but I digress.

So now, all I ever hear is, “Daddy, I’m going to be Red Spider-Man and you be The Tongue Guy” and we’re gonna get the bad guys.”

Now honestly, I’m all about playing with my kids and all, but there’s something about having my favorite superheroes reduced to blasé naming conventions that grates me and quite frankly, I’m tired of Spider-Man and his ilk.

But stupid me, in an effort to move his interests along, I introduced him to another of my childhood favorites, “The SuperFriends.”  So far, it’s been tolerable, but that’s only because we’ve not yet exhausted all of the television episodes that still exist on Nickelodeon. But it’s coming. I know it is!

And not even Superman and his boundless powers, combined with Green Lantern’s power ring will be able to stop my son’s childhood enthusiasm from ruining that for me too! And I thought I HAD grown up!

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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States Society

Body Dysmorphia and Young Men

No fat swimmers allowed!Let me preface this blog by stating the following: I am woefully ignorant about the sport of swimming. I don’t know if there are weight classes and I don’t know what the age divisions are. All I know is that skinny, though usually muscular in the upper-body, people, do things in the water that my frame was not designed for.

Yesterday as I was changing clothes in the locker room at my local L.A. Fitness  (folks, have you ever heard of cleaning the carpets and deodorizers?), there was a group of boys from a local high school in there. As I listened to them talk, it became apparent they were on some local swimming team and one of them was even wearing spandex shorts, which I didn’t know was standard swimming attire, but hey…different strokes for different folks. The boys appeared to range in age from 13 to perhaps 16. The youngest was a tiny little fellow who couldn’t have been more than 4’ 7”. There was another boy in there who was probably 14 or 15 and he was pretty thin and close to my own height of 5′ 8″. Like I said, he was skinny; there were no telltale love handles…nothing to indicate that he was overweight in the slightest.

As I was changing, each of these boys hopped up on the scales (one of the worst indicators of true health if I ever saw one) and when this one skinny kid got up there, he yelled out, “125 lbs!?”  Then, all his friends started jabbing him about his weight. One even went so far as to run back in the shower area blurting it out.

Now as I mentioned, I’m no expert on anything related to swimming, but I am pretty smart when it comes to boys’ and mens’ health. I know for instance, that at 14 or 15 years of age, the male body is starting to put on weight in the form of increased bone density as it prepares for the onslaught of male hormones that will significantly increase the boy’s muscle mass. And I know that in order for any of this to happen as it should, the body needs energy. And unless there’s a new form of energy out there that I don’t know about, food is the only way for that energy to be made available to said young boy’s body. I also happen to know that swimming, especially when not combined with an adequate weight training program, can actually have an adverse effect on the body. Water is the closest simulation that normally people have to being in space, and when in space, the body loses both muscle mass and bone density due to the lack of demands on it. This combination of lack of adequate caloric intake, coupled with an activity that burns whatever energy is available to it, and which does not stimulate lower-body musculature, is a recipe for disaster in teenagers.

Now, I know that girls have been told for years to stay thin and the media haven’t helped that, but truthfully, a young girl’s body doesn’t require the same caloric intake that a boy’s does (if you wanna argue this with me, just look up the caloric requirements of boys and girls of the same age).

So I say all of this only to point out to parents that we need to make sure that we keep an eye on our sons as much as we do our daughters. Fathers especially tend to dote on their daughters while allowing their sons to just “be”, assuming they’ll take care of themselves. But I would say that the pressure to win and to look good (at any cost) is especially prevalent in teens and it’s important that we set the right attitude about nutrition and health when they are young.

Then, when they are older and decide to ruin their joints with weight training (like I have), it’ll be their own decision and they’ll at least have a solid foundation to start from.

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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

I’m handy…I swear!

Thanks to my own father making me sit and watch (and in a few rare occasions pitch in and help) him do things around the house when I was growing up, there are very few things I won’t tackle around my house. I can refinish furniture, build simple bookcases, perform general remodeling, install appliances, etc. In fact, I do so many things around here on my own because I’m too cheap to pay someone else to do it, that my in-laws are rarely surprised when I said I did such an such project and are in fact more surprised when I tell them I had to pay someone to do something (such as walk around on my roof blowing out the gutters!).

However, this weekend, I found something that I can’t do…carve pumpkins! I absolutely stink at carving pumpkins. Once would think that with the thousands of dollars in tools that I have in my arsenal, that I’d have the two or three things necessary to successfully carve out some eyes and teeth without breaking the darn pumpkin nearly in half, but I don’t.  We got two pumpkins the other day at the Dairy-cum-punkin-patch and my oldest son wanted to carve a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine in it. So, I downloaded the template. I also thought I’d just carve the boys’ names in the other pumpkin, so I picked out a nice creepy font and typed their name in MSWord in a size that would fit on a pumpkin and I was ready to go.

At first, everything went great. I got out my jigsaw and cut the tops off the pumpkins…perfection! This was going to be so easy…and cool! However, when I started trying to cut the design that I had traced out on the pumpkin, I quickly realized that the brute-force power-tool approach was not going to work. Unfortunately, that was AFTER I’d botched the first two letters in my son’s name. Leaving that one in disgust, I turned to the Thomas template and while it did turn out much better, it still leaves a lot to be desired. It looks OK at night with a candle in it, but I’m afraid that for the other pumpkin, I’m just going to print up the boys’ names on paper, let them color it and stick-pin it to the pumpkin and call it a day.

My Punkins

Hey, I’m no artist. I’ve always known this, and why I thought my handy-ness would translate into a useful artistic endeavor such as pumpkin carving is beyond me. But one thing about botching something is that it teaches you a valuable lesson. With luck, this year’s punkin debacle will fade from both boys’ memories as quickly as it takes my youngest to go through a box of diapers and by the time they are both old enough to appreciate punkin carving, and aren’t icked out by scooping out the punkin guts (my oldest wouldn’t touch them), I’ll hopefully have found a nice set of carving tools and perfected my craft.

Maybe next year I’ll get a third punkin and practice on it before operating on the real ones. All’s I can say though, is thank the good Lord that I didn’t become a veterinarian.

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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States

The Family (You Don’t Remember) Resemblance

 Weekend in PAI returned Sunday from a trip to Pennsylvania—Honesdale, PA to be exact—where I was visiting my maternal mother and my sister (oh ok, half-sister). Honesdale, in case it sounds familiar, is the sight of the parade at the beginning of the Gina Davis, Samuel L. Jackson flick titled “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” where Gina Davis plays a lowly-housewife jolted out of her hum-drum life only to find that she’s really a top-notch assassin with repressed memories. I give it two thumbs up.

At any rate, I made the distinction that this is my maternal mom because as many of you know (as if there were many of you) I’m adopted and have a caravan of family pieces scattered around the U.S. like goldfish crackers are scattered around the backseat of my truck. My maternal mom, lovingly self-referred to as “Bio-mom,” is a 50-ish aged woman enjoying a rebirth now that she and her husband (also father of my two half-sisters) have gone separate ways. She has a new boyfriend, a new hair-do, and has lost a number of pounds and has apparently sent them packing down here to Atlanta where they were delighted to find a DNA match for a new home around my waistline.

I did a lot of face studying while I was there this time, which is what one does when one looks nothing like anyone in their immediate family. And as one restauranteur my Bio-mom knew remarked upon meeting my sister and me, “Her…I see the resemblance, him, not so much. Must take after his father.” After which I simply sat and enjoyed the momentary noise of the crickets chirping outside until my Bio-mom filled the silence with, “He does.” Said restauranteur felt suitably embarrassed and beat a hasty retreat.

But it’s true, I don’t really look like my mother. I mean, perhaps there is some resemblance, but nothing like there is between my full brother or my two half-sisters so I really have no one to compare myself to.  Which I suppose is kind of good, unless I ever want to know what my hair will do by the time I’m 50 (I’m already going silver so I have a pretty good idea).

The weather turned nice and fallish just as I arrived and my mother and I suited up and took the bikes out on about a 15-mile jaunt. We kept up a pretty good clip actually, stopping a couple of times for a scenic break (the picture at the top is one break we took). I also got a couple of good workouts in at my sister’s house where her husband has set up a gym fancy enough to rival most hotels I’ve stayed at. So all in all, I felt good about all the wine and cheese I ate while I was there.

Monday morning I dropped by an old bosses’ office to say hi and I mentioned my weekend to him. Knowing that he is a recreational biker, I also mentioned that I rode about 15 miles this weekend. Then, as a courtesy, I asked how his weekend went and then I listened with increasing agitation as he explained how he did a 100-mile cross-mountain bike race up in the North Georgia mountains. Ah well, I guess I did ask.

I wonder what time the gym opens in the morning…