Tag: Dad Blog

Categories
A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Society

My good deed for the day?

top secret Ever since I was forced out of Children’s Church into the “Big Church” with mom, dad and all the other big kids, church has been an exercise in extreme boredom for me. I remember when I was younger, sitting in the second from the front row where all the teens sat (we figured sitting up close with our friends at least got us away from our parents, even if we were then under the watchful eye of the preacher) with my eyes fixated on the pastor as he stomped to and fro on the stage. Sometimes, I remember that I’d stare at him so long and hard that I’d actually get tunnel vision. It became a game in fact–seeing how long and hard I could stare at him without blinking.

Having been in church since I was very young, I’ve heard just about every take on every story in every chapter of the Bible. I’ve heard metaphors made out of Psalms that would make Pythagoras scratch his head. I’ve heard God’s vengeance on Sodom and Gomorrah soliloquized to the point where one could almost hear the screams of the city’s denizens as the fire rained down, and I’ve heard Jesus the Fisherman preached so much that I could almost tell you what his bait of choice was when fishing the Sea of Galilee with his buds.

You preach it, I’ve heard it, and that’s why to this day, church bores the mess outta me. But there are other reasons I go; such as for my kids.

Because we can’t seem to settle down in a church, and because I never see myself  “joining” another church, MLI doesn’t have a bunch of friends at church that he likes to go play with. Previously, any attempts to make him go to children’s church so that mom and dad could watch the service without having to constantly admonish him to be quiet while also fishing crayons off the floor, were met with extreme crying and fit-pitching. But this past Sunday, I was determined to make him go to children’s church if it was the last thing I did.

We actually got there early, thanks to having started getting ready at 7 a.m. We checked the boys in and a nice lady escorted MLI and me upstairs to a “holding area” where they put a lot of kids until all the various teachers show up. As soon as we arrived at his room, he started his act:

  • Hands in his mouth
  • Pulling away from me
  • A slowly rising whine that threatened to embarrass me in public

So, I squatted down and said, “Come here, let’s talk.”

Not quite sure what to make of this odd development that didn’t involve daddy yelling and threatening to spank him, he stopped whining and with his hand still in his mouth, came over to me.

I said, “I’m gonna tell you a little secret, but you have to PROMISE not to tell mommy ok?”
(In my head, George Strait was singing, “…a secret that my daddy said, was just between us…)
He nodded.

In a hushed voice, I told him, “I don’t like church either. It’s kinda boring, and it’s long and stuff. But, mommy likes for us to go and we want you to learn about Jesus and stuff, so that’s why we all go. So do me a favor, and just go in there and try and have fun and before you know it, it will be all over.”

He looked at me with those red eyes and with a bit of a sniff, he turned to face the head lady who was coming towards him, hunched over and with a cow sock-puppet on her hand. As she got near, a spooky voice emanated from the sock puppet, “I’m scared too!”

I wanted to say, “Lady, you’re not helping,” but rather, I took off running down the hall before he could change his mind and come running back to me.

Turned out, he had a great time. They ate lots of junk food, and made rice crispy treats for me and CareerMom. In fact, he was talking about how next time he didn’t want to come in big church with us.

So, mission accomplished.

If so though, why I do I feel kinda crappy about it? At the time, I thought maybe he would appreciate a little “man to man” truth–a secret that was just his and daddy’s. But now I’m not so sure. What if I just colored his religious experience for the rest of his life? What if, rather than being open to what God wants to do in his life, he’s instead just going to go through the motions to make other people happy?

I’m struggling with this, even in the face of apparent success.

What do you think? Did I help, or hurt?

Categories
Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

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.

Categories
Dad Blogs DIY Family

Maybe I can invest the money I saved…

It seems that I’m forever fighting the natural flow of water around my house. Since we’ve moved in, I’ve ripped out all kinds of old drain lines and replaced them with new ones, but problems still keep popping up.

Most recently, the gutter on the highest part of my house (where I can’t reach) started just gushing over the side, gouging a hole in the ground where it splashed during a really rainy day. My first thought was that I had a clogged gutter, but I couldn’t be sure because I couldn’t see in it.

My local gutter guys wanted $110 to come clean it out, a price I didn’t want to pay until all the trees had dropped their leaves at least. But I’m a tad (just a tad) anal about knowingly having things wrong with my house and my not fixing them, so I started relooking at the problem and decided that perhaps the problem wasn’t in the gutter, but in the drain lines.

The original builders had used that cheapo corrugated plastic piping and I’ve ripped enough defective pieces of it outta the ground to know it was probably suspect. So I found the start of the pipe at the bottom of the downspout, and using some exploratory shoveling, found where it plunged deep into the slope of my backyard hill. I stuck the hose in it and turned the water on to see if I could find out where the water was coming out, if in fact it was, but I couldn’t find it.

To make a long story short, I ended up ripping the whole thing out and here’s what I found:
IMG_2432

I replaced this plasty-crap with about 25 feet of 4″ PVC piping. Miraculously, I dug under two sprinkler lines and didn’t break either of them.

IMG_2431

It was a banner day…but I have a feeling my back is going to be screaming tomorrow.
Now I just have to get that retaining wall done, but then I’m sure it’ll be something else…

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!