Category: Marriage

Discussions about marriage in America.

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Dad Blogs Family Marriage

Crap…it’s almost the weekend

payday Start rationing bread! Wait, only one glass of milk! Save money…CONSERVE, CONSERVE, CONSERVE!

What? No, I don’t live in Texas and I’m not hoarding supplies for the pending hurricane! Nope, I’m conserving because we have THREE WEEKENDS IN THIS PAYDAY!

(insert Sam Kennison-like scream here!)

If you’re like me, you’ve already spent the bulk of your paycheck by 8 p.m. of the day you get it and each weekend, when you have kids, is like opening the drain in the bathtub and waving your money goodbye as it leaks away, mostly by dragging the kids around trying to keep them happy.

So when there are three weekends in a pay period, I start getting worried. Worried because, as the temperatures continue to soar, along with the humidity, there’s only so much sitting in the house, or walking around the mall (without actually buying anything) that I can take.

There should be a law against three-weekend pay periods, or at least a moratorium on gas prices on the weekend so that those with kids can drive outside their usual sphere of influence in search of activity diversity.

Oh, but there IS college football and that should be good a few hours at least!

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Dad Blogs Family Marriage

I’ve already forgotten my title

I’m pretty sure that before I had kids, I was much less forgetful and absentminded. When I went into a room to do something, I actually remembered what I’d gone in there for. When I came home and put my keys and wallet down in the same place I always put them, they would still be there when I needed them later rather than having up and walked off on their own and placed themselves in some obscure place like the soapdish in the bathroom.

I can’t remember how many things I’ve lost since my kids were born. Tools, papers, little flashlights and odds ‘n ends like that; all gone…to God knows where.

And my absentmindedness isn’t much better. Rather than losing things, I lose my train of thought, or my bearing on the here and now.

For instance:

Our bathroom is great. It’s big; it has two sinks and ample counter space for all the many things a woman and her slightly “neat freaky” husband needs. Our shower is also pretty great, being one of those large tiled, stand up deals. But, like so many contractors, whoever tiled our bathroom was in such a great hurry, that they forgot to add a soapdish or any other kind of shelf for storing things one might need while showering.

CareerMom has many such things. Shampoo, face wash, sugar scrubs, conditioner, shave gel and more. And, I’m slightly embarassed to say, I have a similar number of items in the shower.

So far, we’ve made do with this dinky little vinyl covered wire rack thing that sits on the floor and reaches all of about two feet high. At least twice a week, the darn thing falls over and all of our…stuff, falls in disarray on the shower floor. I once purchased a spring loaded vertical rod with several shelves on it at various heights, but for some reason we couldn’t get the tension just right. It was either too loose so that it fell over, or it was so tight that it was pushing the sheetrock of the ceiling up.

So this little rack thingy is jam packed with various items and the other day as I showered, I used a few of them. Extra points if you can pick out which one I accidentally used instead of my shower soap:

shower

Here’s a hint, top shelf, dog on the label…

For the record, it wasn’t nearly as sudsy as my SoftSoap.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Marriage

When exactly can I tap the college fund?

karate Sometimes I feel we’ve gotten a handle on this whole “being a parent” thing, and other times, I feel completely inadequate. For instance, who knew that in order to get your child enrolled in a fall Soccer program, that you had to register in May? Who knew?

With t-ball over for the summer, and with MLI having completed his swimming lessons, CareerMom and I have been looking for something for him to do with the cooler months coming on, both for him to get some exercise, and to get us outta the house to enjoy the cool air. But, it seems we’ve missed the boat on most team sports.

But one of MLI’s good friends takes Karate–or some form of martial arts, I’m not sure which–and MLI has mentioned wanting to take it on several occasions. I took American style Karate when I was younger, so I’m all for it, but CareerMom has been hesitant.

I’ve always tried to be careful and not steer my kids in a particular direction. The last thing I want to be is that dad who is trying to re-live his glory days through his kids, so I generally will only mention something to him and then try to explain the pros and cons about it without actually endorsing it.

We have a Taekwondo studio for kids very near to the house, so we took him over there last night for a little intro session and he seemed to really like it. They took him in a little room and had him do some punches and some kicks and come on…what little boy wouldn’t think that’s cool! And while they’ve got him doing that, they’ve got you filling out a form that basically enrolls you. Now, I’m not stupid…I know what’s going on, so I don’t fully fill out everything until after the class and only after CareerMom and I had conferred and decided to enroll him for a month to see if his enthusiasm remains even after having to endure 30-minute sessions of doing what the Sensei tells him to do, which probably is not a bunch of fun kicks and punches to start.

The price is significantly higher than I expected, but then, we didn’t shop around either. With our schedules, convenience is highly prized and local businesses know it and therefore charge accordingly. But the whole time MLI was doing his thing, MLE was watching and soaking it all up. And I know what’s gonna happen; in a few years MLE is going to want to be doing whatever sport his brother is doing and if that does still happen to be martial arts…well, let’s just say it’s a good thing daddy has decided not to play golf for a while.

Current Scorecard tally:

Parenting duties: 5

Selfish desires: 0

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Dad Blogs DIY Family Marriage

The Things We Do for Blogs – New Paint Colors for the House

The funny thing about blogging is that once you start, everything that happens to you on a daily basis becomes fodder for a blog. Even stuff that you wouldn’t normally bore your friends with, suddenly becomes this…story that you can’t wait to share with people.

For instance:

I took off work on Friday to get some painting done around the house. CareerMom and I have been slowly covering the bare off-white walls in our house with some color, but we hadn’t come up with an overall color for the majority of the walls, until last week.

clair de luneWe picked a Behr paint color called “Clair de Lune,” which here looks really brown, but is actually in the yellow family. I’m sure it looks different on different monitors.

So everything was going well as I painted till I got to the stairwell. Thanks to high ceilings, I wasn’t able to reach about a 5 square foot section of wall that was above the stairs. I needed to get up close to the crown molding, so I couldn’t just use a roller with handle extensions, or else I’d have big swatches of yellow on the molding that I’d somehow have to figure out how to paint over. After considering my options, I concluded that there was no way around it; I was just going to have to “get up there” somehow.

I broke out my trusty ladder and put one leg on one step and then tried stacking a number of items on the next lower step so as to raise it up enough to support the other leg of the ladder. But, I could never come up with a tall enough combination of phone books and other items that offered the right mix of stabilization and height that would satisfy my fear of falling to my death, or at the very least, falling and breaking something I might need at a later date.

So, I finally gave up on the ladder idea and instead, low-teched a solution:

painting

Note that I have two paint roller extension handles screwed together and the pièce de résistance—a paint brush duct-taped to the handles.

VOILA!

Once I felt confident in leaning my full weight against the railing and settled my nerves enough to paint in a straight line, it all went like clockwork.

Now, what you may be asking yourself, and what I DID ask myself is, “Who does this? Who stops in the middle of something like painting a house, and sets up their tripod and their camera on a timer, and poses for a picture?”

Only a blogger my friends…only a blogger!