Category: Fatherhood

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Charity, begins at home

Contribution Chart In the grand scheme of charity, I’m a fan of the “Teach a man to fish” mantra rather than being on the “Give a man a fish” side of things. This is not surprising considering my political views, but it goes deeper than that.

I’m just not a handout kinda guy. My folks didn’t pay for my college. My folks have never given me any money since I left home outside of small sums for birthday and Christmas gifts and when I was out of work for several months after a layoff, I didn’t file for unemployment (though if I had to do it all over again, I definitely would!)

Asking for stuff just isn’t in my genes. Now, if you want to just voluntarily GIVE me things, well now, that’s a completely different story. Please make your checks payable to…

This carries over to my charitable contributions as well. I have absolutely NO problem donating things to charity, and I also give money to church (ahem..*cough* *cough*…when we go).

CareerMom is just the opposite of me. She donates at work through United Way, and she was also once suckered into giving by some group that “gave” her some nifty return address labels. Now she gets no fewer than 8 or 9 charity requests by mail each week, most of which I toss in the recycle bin in the garage on my way in the door in the afternoon (I know, I know…I’m baaaad!)

I’m also not a huge fan of just giving money to a big organization, only to have half of it eaten up in administration costs, or having it go to some faraway place helping God knows whom, with God knows what.

That said, if everyone in the world were like me, it would probably be a pretty miserable place. So, I recognize my own shortcomings.

But regardless of your beliefs on the subject, the very idea of Charity, is that it should come from the heart. It shouldn’t be forced upon you because then, it’s not really Charity–it’s taxes.

With it getting near the holidays, charities are cranking up their efforts to get their piece of the pie this year and my company, like many across the country, have joined them in their efforts. I have no doubt that this is mostly just so Public Relations groups can tout how much money they’ve raised so that when next quarter’s earnings report comes out, perhaps folks will cut them a little slack.

Regardless, I’ve been ignoring the Employee Charitable Contribution Campaign e-mail for about a week now. I have not in the past, nor do I now, have a desire to have some charity automatically deduct money from my paycheck each month. So when I got another one this morning, I ignored it too.

Then, as I was sitting at my desk, my chat program popped up:

ECCC Chat

So, whether you donate or not, you’re supposed to “confidentially” respond whether or not you’re going to donate.
Fine, whatever.

I followed the link she enclosed and here’s what I had to fill out:

CCC registration

It’s not enough to say that you don’t want to donate, but they have to go about it in a way that makes you feel guilty about not doing so.

THIS, is what drives me away from it every year. It’s the tactics, as much as anything.

I truly do hate to sound all “bah Humbug’ish,” but this isn’t exactly the best time to be hitting people up for cash. But I do have an idea for my company and others who REALLY want to gen up Charity contributions:

You give me a guaranteed employment contract for the next calendar year, at my current or better salary and benefits, and I’ll donate.

How ’bout that?

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My what smooth hands you have

At least three people in our house show the signs of having a shoe fetish (I’ll let you Postulate on which three). As such, we have a LOT of shoes. Many of these shoes tend to congregate in the garage since that’s where we generally come in and out of the house.

I dropped by my friendly neighborhood Target and picked up one of those cheapy metal cage things with dividers to store your shoes in. In addition to it being quite cheap, it is also constructed using those little plastic clips like they use in IQ tests to see if you can figure out what shape something will be in once you put it together (well, OK, in IQ tests they use origami, but it’s still just as difficult).

I finally got the thing together,IMG_2433 but it remained tenuously intact. The slightest bump, such as the one from MLE’s big plastic car flying down the driveway at 10MPH, just destroyed the thing and I’d have to spend 15 minutes looking at it like Curious George looks when he’s trying to figure out a thorny problem concerning Hundley and one of the building’s residents.

Now, a couple of years ago, I discovered the BEST glue on the planet–Gorilla Glue. If you’ve never used it, it’s this thick brown stuff that expands for about an hour after you squirt it out of the bottle. It foams up to about three times its normal size and is about as strong as…well, I don’t know, but the stuff is STRONG.

So, I whipped it out yesterday and started gluing all the shoe rack’s joints. It was getting close to the time for me to leave to pick up the boys from Daycare, so I got a tad careless with the stuff and by the time I was finished, I had it all over the garage floor, and all over my hands (later that night, I found huge clumps in my hair).
“No worries,” I thought. “I’ll just rub some turpintine on it.”
But…turpintine didn’t work.

Soap didn’t work.

Even some very caustic paint remover didn’t work, but my hands did enjoy a nice chemical peel.

The glue is so tough that it stuck to the green scrubby thing I used when trying to scratch it off my fingers:

IMG_2435

But, what all my efforts did do, was remove the big chunks of glue on my hands and spread it around my the entirety of both of my hands. It’s so thinly spread, that you can’t see it, but I can feel it. It filled in my pores so it’s like I’m wearing silk gloves. Everything I touch just sort of glides away from my grasp thanks to a lack of fingerprint texture.

When I touch my own skin (here, here and…nevermind), I can feel the pressure and I can sense the warmth, but I can’t actually feel the texture. It’s very odd.

You know…you’ll never get back the 2 minutes you spent reading this, but at the very least, I’ve informed you about the wonders and dangers of Gorilla Glue.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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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!

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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?