Tag: children

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100 bottles of beer on the, er…street

Beer PumpkinIt’s over, done, fini, complete…and any other foreign-sounding words that are meant to provide a sense of accomplishment regarding Halloween and trick or treat. Not that the whole event was bad, but it’s just such a build-up to something—like Christmas—that afterward leaves you feeling a bit like, “Was that it?”  And I think it’s doubly bad when said build-up happens in the middle of the week and you have to turn around go back to work the next day. Blah!

But in any event, last night was fun. We went to my oldest son’s best friend’s house for a party and then they TorTed for a while before making it over to the grandparent’s house who were overly and unusually chatty until finally my son gave us an “out” by exclaiming, “I want to go to my home.” Good boy!

And once again, we had absolutely zero Trick-or-Treators at our house last night. An examination as to why this is yields a couple of possibilities:

  1. Parents are too scared to let their little ones wander down our hilly driveway for fear of them getting tangled up in their sheet-costumes and tumbling down the pavement and crashing into my garage door.
  2. We are near the end of the neighborhood in a side-street where the housing density is not terribly great. From a parental standpoint, I can understand the desire to maximize one’s TorTing time by hitting the thoroughfare and avoiding the mildly populated side streets.

However, one thing struck me last night that I have been noticing with greater frequency of late, and that is that the life I lead is vastly different from the lives other families (and men in particular) lead. Here are a couple of “for instances.”

At this week’s golf tournament, several men were discussing the “over and under” and “the spread” regarding this weekend’s upcoming NFL games. It occurred to me that I had absolutely NO idea what they were talking about (well, I vaguely know) and that I was in the distinct minority here.

Secondly, last night as we TorTed around my son’s friend’s neighborhood, I noticed that every dad on the street, and some mothers, were carrying around a beer in their hand. And in one case of “oh man, where’s my camera?” we spotted a mother pushing a stroller with one hand and dragging a cooler full of beer behind her with the other. And these aren’t “white trash” people either. These are white-bread, successful white-collar professionals. Even the father of the boy my son was visiting put his son and my son in a wagon to pull them around the neighborhood, and then all around them in the empty wagon space he placed approximately 8 or 9 beers. WTH? I mean, we only planned on being out for 45 minutes. How many beers does a guy need?

And like I said, these activities aren’t limited to the men…nossir, the women were doing it too and both my wife and I realized how far from our peers our lives deviate. When things like this happen it always makes one wonder who is exhibiting the strange behavior? Them, or us?

Sometimes wish I could be “that guy.” I wish I could give up this zeal for fitness and this responsibility I feel to always be clean and sober around my kids and just live life for me as if having children didn’t change anything. But I don’t think I can, and truthfully, I don’t think I could live with myself very long if I did. But they’re still my friends…especially when they have free beer!

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Dad Blogs Family

Take ye this bread and…try not to crunch too loudly

After nearly two months of church-skipping, I made a command decision this weekend and announced that we would be going to church. Now, I’m not thrilled with our current church, but it does have its “up” side. For one, it has an early service, which lets us get in and get out quickly. It also has a good childcare department and it’s the right size (not too small, not too big). And lastly, it’s uncomplicated. From the parking, to the quick-exit, I know where everything is; I know where I’m going; it’s just…comfortable, for lack of a better word.

My wife (hereafter to be known as “Career-mom”) doesn’t really like our church that much and holds onto the irrational belief that the perfect church is out there somewhere and all we have to do is visit enough of them to find it. She’s playing with statistics here. I, hating little more than being the new guy in a new church, try and avoid this as much as possible and I got lucky this week because the two churches she was interested in, didn’t appear to have much for the kids. So new scary church out…old comfortable church in. Yah me…I win!

Now, our oldest son doesn’t like going to the kids’ church, so after dropping off the baby, my wife brought him into the big church with us. To his credit, he did very well, only whispering overly-loud one or two times and certainly not reaching the volume that two children did about five pews ahead of us, which prompted one of the bouncers (AKA: elders of the church) to get up and politely ask them to take their child elsewhere.

But wouldn’t you know it…this Sunday was Communion Sunday. Unlike Catholics, we Pentecostals take communion at our pews. Consisting of little unleavened wafers (think tiny oyster crackers w/out salt) and an itty-bitty cup of juice, Communion for us is a complicated affair of holding onto your micro-wafer while simultaneously trying to pass the juice-laden tray to the next person without causing a complete disaster. My son was sitting next to Career-mom and I noted, quite amusedly, that she got sacraments for him too.

The whole sacrament distribution process takes about five minutes (we’re very efficient), and after everything was passed around and the Pastor had reverently recited the proper passage from the Bible about how the bread represented Jesus’ body and the juice his blood, we all partook…it was all very holy and quiet.

But just as I was putting my now-empty plastic cup of juice in the holder, my son looks over at Career-mom and me and says, “But I’m still hungry.”

You know you can’t get mad at that!