Diapers To Donuts

25 Ways To Be An Amazing Parent To Your Children

2009-01-31T20:51:59-05:00

Teach them how to have a relationship with God.
Share your life's greatest moments with your children: the first time you met your spouse, the day you got married, the first time you held your newborn child in your arms and all of the stories that are as much their history as your's.
Every once in awhile, pack them into the car and take them somewhere totally unexpected - those are the days they will remember when they look back upon their childhood.
Read "Goodnight, Moon" like it was meant to be read: in a soft whisper, full of love and meaning, especially when the quiet old lady whispers "hush."
Start reading bedtime stories when they're too young to remember and don't stop until they're too old to forget.
Teach them that some things are worth believing, even if they're not true. When they're old enough, watch the movie Second Hand Lions to remind them of this powerful truth.
Stop watching TV. Instead, watch them.
Realize that your children are your most important job; raise them as if the future of the planet depends on it because, ultimately... it does.
End each day by saying "I love you" and telling them why they're so terrific.
When you have to make a choice between work and your kids, make the right choice: they need you.
Take responsibility for raising your children before your television, computer or video game console does.
Be a part of their lives before it's too late: watch what they're watching, listen to what they're hearing, know what they're thinking.
Read The Bridge To Terabithia with them. When Jess dies, cry together. They need to know that in life there is joy and pain.
Don't be afraid tell them you love them too often. You can't.
Love your children even more when they're at their worst, and make sure to enjoy them when they're at their best.
Let them see you cry, get angry or make a mistake. The more human you are to them, the more they'll listen.
Teach them to laugh so hard that tears roll down their face. Do this often, for tears of joy are a gift from God.
BE the parent you want them to be. They're watching.
Try to see the world through their eyes but always remember that they need your help making sense of it all.
Dance on Sundays and laugh every day in-between.
Savor every "first moment" as important milestones along their journey: first time sledding, first friend, first day at school. They all matter.
Don't try to be perfect. Just be human.
Tell them about the time you read THAT amazing book in a single day so that they too will love reading.
When they tell you, "But everone else does it!" make sure they know that's the best reason of all NOT to do it.
Make each birthday a grand celebration and resist the temptation to go through the motions. Your time with them on this planet is short: make it count.

Listening To God's Children

2009-01-31T11:43:33-05:00

Some days going to church is like a blessing. Other days, your knees hurt when you kneel and you spend the entire time thinking about Battlestar Galactica when you should be thinking about God.

On this particular Sunday, the experience was somewhere in-between. I came to church wanting to be inspired but our priest had decided to compare Jesus to Civil War general George B. McClelland and I had a hard time coming along for the ride.

With my son Sean on my left and Declan on my right, we did our best to follow along. Mass ran a bit long (comparing the World's Savior to a Civil War General is no easy task), ending just after noon. My stomach growling, I closed my Hymnal with visions of last night's Chicken Soup and Irish breakfast tea dancing in my head. I had paid my dues and was ready for an earthly reward of gastric proportions!

But then something entirely unexpected happened.

Well, two things.

Out of nowhere, a little boy walked up and informed us that he had an amazing talent for drawing Star Wars figures. He then started to take us through his notebook full of drawings, taking great pains to go through each page in detail.

At first, all I could think about was the Chicken soup. I gave several furtive glances towards the door, plotting some sort of escape. I wondered to myself where his parents were and tried to pick them out from the throng of people surrounding us, many of whom were heading towards the exit.

Then something struck me about this little boy.

The drawings themselves were exactly what you would expect from a seven year old. Sometimes recognizable, and other times not so much. What was different, however, was the excitement with which he went through each of his drawings. As far as this boy was concerned, there was nothing in all the world more interesting than these drawings. They clearly meant a great deal to him.

All this little boy wanted was an audience, someone to listen. It didn't really matter what we said just so long as we were there to nod and to smile, to serve as witnesses to his creations.

After about ten minutes of "Star Wars Figures On Parade", a man suddenly came up to me, introduced himself by name, and proceeded to talk for another ten minutes straight while Sean and Declan patiently listened to the young boy's Star Wars narrative.

The man's voice patterns reminded me so clearly of my Autistic sister Christina that I felt like I was talking to her. I guessed, but could not tell for sure, that he might be handicapped. He had so much he wanted to tell me - where he was from, why he chose this Church, what his parents did for a living, how he coped with his condition and his anxiety about life in general.

After ten minutes, he paused suddenly and just looked at me. In his eyes I could see a question: he wanted to know if I was willing to listen more.

Instead of offering some sort of excuse ("You know, we really need to get going..."), I told him how much I liked his stories. His eyes grew wide, clearly surprised that I was willing to listen more.

And so, emboldened, he launched into another series of stories.

There we were, surrounded on all sides by people who wanted nothing more from us than our attention.

"Notice Me. Hear Me!" they each said in their own unique way. "I Matter."

The Church lights suddenly flickered off, and I realized that almost 40 minutes had passed. The Priest beckoned to us from the Church entrance. It really was time to go.

Sean, Declan and I said farewell to the young boy, agreeing that most certainly no one in all the world could draw Star Wars pictures like THAT.

We said a hearty "Goodbye!" to the handicapped man. "Can't wait till next time," I said. "I'll bet you'll have even more stories!"

When we got home, I struggled to explain to my wife what had happened. I started to tell her about the boy who could draw the world's best Star Wars pictures and the man who I barely knew but yet whose life story I could now repeat verbatim.

It all came out sounding so strange. What the heck were we doing, exactly?

"Listening, that's all," I said in exasperation. Why couldn't I explain it, after all? "Just listening."

Listening because while sometimes God speaks in loud, booming pronouncements, other times his voice is as soft as it is mysterious.

Listening because if we don't, we may never hear what the quiet or the small or the challenged ones have to say.

But more than anything, listening because in so doing, we give meaning and significance to the life of another.

By listening we tell them: "Yes, you do matter."

So, the next time one of God's children has something to tell you, I suggest that you resist the temptation to focus on your own small world and that you open your heart to their's. For it is by bearing witness to another's humanity that we find our own.

The Sled

2009-01-18T12:00:04-05:00

It is the last day of your vacation but you are tired. It was supposed to be a long, restful vacation but instead it was filled with sickness and chest colds and waking up at 2 AM with your mind racing because in these tumultuous times there is much to worry about.

Your usually adorable 4 kids have decided to re-enact the entire first and second seasons of the Tom and Jerry TV show, inventing entirely new and spectacular ways to injure each other. And they are loud. Oh so loud. When one isn’t screaming another one is perfecting a new form of singing that involves chortling “You Are So Beautiful” at the top of their lungs.

It isn’t pretty. But then, inspiration strikes.

You tell the 4 kids that they are going for a walk but to bundle up first. You don’t tell them where you are really going because you want to leave that for a surprise, because you remember the day when your parents loaded you up into the car for a Sunday drive to nowhere and an hour later rolled up in front of an amusement park (Rye Playland, but it might as well have been Disney Land). You remember THAT moment of realization as you peaked out the window and saw whirling, spinning, flying machines stretching across the horizon. Yes, miracles do happen… and even the smallest of things pass for miracles in the eyes of a child.

In a fury of sound and motion (“Luke is eating my glove” and “Can I wear my storm trooper helmet instead of a hat?”), you spend almost 30 minutes trying to jam all manner of gloves and hats and snow pants on their various appendages in some semblance of correctness. You decide to forego the usual rules in favor of expediency. This isn’t a time for rules. This is a time to fly! And while it would be nice to have matching gloves and snow pants that fit, life is too short for that.

With four children in tow, you charge out into the cold winter air like some kind of prehistoric gang of cavemen in search of their next feeding. The cool, winter air fills your lungs and raises your spirits. This is what it means to be alive: to leave the hot, stale air of a stuffy house and stride forth into Winter's icy expanse.

You search frantically for the answer to your prayers, the one thing that can turn an interminably long day into wonder and magic. You find it sitting there in the shed, which is in and of itself a minor miracle, since the shed isn’t so much a place for storing things as a holding tank for items that the children plan to eviscerate in some sort of bizarre weekly ritual. You remember the pitching net that you placed there just last summer and the horrible mess that it became – all horribly twisted and mangled and nothing like its former self. You are glad that this item did not suffer the same fate.

The kids suddenly realize what it is you’ve been looking for and their squeals of excitement are a welcome contrast against the cold winter afternoon.

“The sled.” they cry. “The sled!”

You realize suddenly that this is the very first time you have ever taken your children sledding, that you have been too busy worrying about upcoming business meetings and paying the bills and this or that thing to focus on the simple pleasures of whirring down a hill on a piece of plastic. You feel that sense of parental guilt that wells up from time to time. You wonder quietly to yourself what other “firsts” have you neglected or missed when you were stuck at the office tending to some business emergency, when the real emergency was that your children were growing up and you were too busy to notice? Sometimes it hurts to think this way.

You are quickly snapped out of your parental funk by the realization that your 3 year old (Luke) has decided to ride his tricycle in the snow. Ordinarily this would seem like a crazy idea but somehow, much to your amazement, he is actually able to make it work. You are about to tell him that riding your tricycle in the snow is a crazy idea but then something stops you. Maybe it's the smile on his face. Or maybe it's the realization that the world needs more, and not less, 3 year olds riding their tricycles in the snow while adults like me think of all the reasons not to. After all, the best thing about 3 year olds is that they have the conviction of their ideas and absolutely no way to tell a good one from a bad one. Who am I to take that away from him?

The tricycle slows you down a bit, but it only takes 5 minutes trudging down the road until you reach the hill. The very same hill you’ve driven by countless times on your way to the office, or to catch a plane or to attend to some faraway crisis and always too busy to stop. A couple of times times you even thought to yourself, “Hey, this would be a perfect place to go sledding” but then the thought was quickly submerged behind a million other cares and worries never to see the light of day… until now.

You watch each of them take turns sledding down the hill and you are both happy and sad at the same time. Happy because you found this time and place before it was too late, before they were too grownup or too cranky or too much like teenagers to enjoy this moment with you. Sad because it shouldn't have taken this long. And you have to admit that it is all a little overwhelming, for it is right here that the unforgettable things happen, that the memories are made.

You watch Declan, in his own world, choosing to lie head first on the sled and to look up at the afternoon sky as he slides down the hill. He is talking to himself, totally oblivious to where he is going and to what is brothers and sister are up to. You wonder to yourself if Declan will always be like that, off by himself, always choosing to do things a little differently just because that's his way. As he slides down the hill, you can see the world reflected in his crystal blue eyes.

You watch your son Sean stand on the sled and ride it like a surfboard down the hill and just as you are about to tell him all of the reasons why he should know better, you realize that you used to do the exact same thing when you were his age. Only, in Sean's case, he is actually able to pull it off without falling flat on his face like you did so many times. You watch as the sled comes to a gentle stop at the bottom of the hill and you don't know why but you are suddenly proud of him for every part of the boy he is and the man he wants to become. When he comes back up the hill, you hug him for no other reason that he is your boy and you love him.

Then there is MaryKate, the oldest. You are glad that for her it isn't too late, that she is still able to enjoy this time with the eyes of a child. You know that at ten years old she is on the verge of trying too hard to grow up, urged on by this crazy society where the innocence of a child is a marketing opportunity. But you are glad that somehow, miraculously, she is still your little MaryKate, if only for a time. You hope she will always be this way - so happy, so filled with a passion for life and so ready to charge to the bottom of the hill on a little piece of plastic. As you watch her flying down the hill, her long hair a tangled mess of snow and ice, you silently wish to yourself that life could just slow down, so you could take the time to say Goodbye to the child you knew before she grows up.

While the other three are off on their own, little Luke, on the other hand, still needs you. He it too scared to go down the hill on his own, and it is nice to be needed. You climb on the sled and pull him on to your lap. As the sled picks up speed and he begins to laugh in only that way that a three year old can do, you hug him tightly against your chest. You hug him tighter than you need to because he will only be three for so long, because one day his little body will no longer fit so perfectly against your chest and because a time will come when he won't want to sit on your lap anymore. But for at least a little while longer, he is still your's. And so, you hold on to him for dear life.

You tell yourself to remember this moment. You try to take a mental picture in your mind and hold it there. You try to notice everything. The way the sun slices across the afternoon sky with its golden hues, the sound of the sled cutting through the snow, the way their laughter rings out across the valley and most of all for how much you love each one of them at this very moment.

And then, you all decide to pile on the sled together, a jumble of arms and legs and scarves, of memories past and adventures future, and off you go down the hill in one last grand ride before heading home. There it is, really: the reason why we go through all of the pain and the sadness and the tears, the payoff that makes it all worth it, the inspiration that gets us up in the morning and that carries us through whatever life may throw our way.

For it is in these moments that we find our Joy. Surrounded by those we love, wanting nothing more than just to be with them. Feeling the warmth of their bodies and the nearness of their souls. Experiencing the world through their eyes. And realizing that there is nothing more important in all the world than taking the time to truly love them before it's too late.

Wow, What A Ride!

2008-09-30T22:15:30-04:00

Here I am, verging on my 38th birthday, and what exactly have I done with my life?

Can I honestly say that I am living a truly noble and holy life, a life that is worthy of the God that created it?

Have I used all of my talents to make this world a better place?

As darkness falls across this world, with all of its hatred and injustices, can I say that I have railed against that darkness like a beacon in the night?

Have I filled each and every moment with the joy that comes from exercising my abilities for the betterment of mankind?

The answer to all of these questions is no.

I have done none of these things.

At this point in my life, I must say that I am just plain old tired.

Tired of trying to be something I’m not.

Tired of feeling like this world won’t let me be me.

Tired of believing other people instead of believing in myself.

With each passing day, I grow weary of this world and my inability to be the person God intended me to be.

And so, I make a pledge.

This pledge is to my creator, my wife, my children, my parents, my sisters, my friends and to myself:

I pledge to live every day with overwhelming passion.

To stop worrying about things that in the grand scheme of things just don’t matter.

To stop and take it all in, to be completely present in the moment as if it were my very last.

To be the spark that ignites the bonds of change in this world, an immovable force that will not rest until my work here is done.

To live my life according to HIS rules, and not anyone else’s.

To turn this life into a story worth writing, a movie worth watching and something that my grandchildren’s children will tell their grandchildren about … not because of how much money I made but because of who I helped and the example I left behind.

To stop listening to everyone else and to start listening to the voice in my head that says, “Speak up! Do Something! Be Better! BE YOU.”

To stop being afraid and to start being alive.

To be the miracle we are each supposed to be, to do things no one ever thought I could do and only He knew I could do.

To guide my actions not by what others tell me but what my soul says is the truth.

And finally, I pledge to live according to the following quote by Tom Peters. I will repeat it every day when I awake and before I go to bed. I will hold it in my heart and I will make it my reality for THIS is what God intended:

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body—but rather a skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow, what a ride!’ ” – Tom Peters

An Open Letter To Washington

2008-09-28T02:25:26-04:00

Dear Elected Officials of the United States Government,

I want you to know that the American people and I are tired.

Tired of spending 60+ hours a week doing our jobs followed by countless hours spent raising our children, only to discover that you haven't been doing YOUR jobs.

Tired of trying to stretch every little penny so we can pay for our kids' food, clothing and education, only to discover that you have squandered every single penny we've ever given you.

Tired of trying to figure out exactly what happened here, of hanging on to every last word dripping from the lips of so-called news experts, only to find that they're only repeating the lies you told them.

Tired of wishing for leaders who can speak the plain truth, only to find an endless cast of fork tongued snake oil salesmen whose vacuous words sound nice but offer no answers for the mess we're in.

Tired. Just tired. Tired of running on a tread mill to nowhere while you run on a treadmill made of gold.

Do you really expect us to believe that you never saw this coming, that this was some kind of surprise?

And do you really think that after you pass this miraculous bailout package that all will be forgiven, that Americans will go back to their lives happy to live off the bread crumbs from your table?

I don't think so.

While we were busy feeding and raising the children of America, you were busy pillaging our prosperity to satisfy your endless greed.

While we toiled under the yoke of increasing costs, trying to figure out how the heck to afford driving to work on gas that costs twice as much while somehow still managing to feed our kids, you continued to dine on an endless menagerie of earmarks.

But the game is over. The clock has struck the mythical hour and all of the greed, the incompetence and the lies have been revealed for exactly what they are, not to mention your condescending belief that "only you know best."

So let history record that you have failed us all, that each of you have brought us to this horrible place with no way out, with no easy solution or quick fix, where people's retirement funds and house values have evaporated in a matter of days, where the recovery will be measured in decades and not years.

So it is, in the harsh light of day, all fools are revealed. And while it is true that we are certainly fools for believing you, it is you who are even bigger fools for believing you could deceive us.

The Secret

2008-02-24T22:03:26-05:00

About two months ago, I stumbled upon a movie called “The Secret” while perusing through the “On Demand” movies offered by my cable provider.

What really got me was the preview, which pretty much promised that if I watched the movie by the end I would be rich enough to hire Donald Trump to wash my car while George Bush rotated the tires.

This sounded perfectly legitimate to me, except for that part about Donald Trump because I doubt he even knows how to wash cars, and so I eagerly hit “buy” on my remote and was bombarded for almost two hours with all sorts of “positive thinking” imagery that boiled down to this single premise:

“Whatever you can visualize will come true.”

“Wow!” I thought. Who knew it could be THAT simple? Now, there have been many not-so-proud moments in my life whereby I suspended all disbelief and tried one hair-brained scheme or another. Usually this occurs when I am particularly desperate for money, like the time I tried to convince my friends and family that they should join a network marketing company where the main product was an e-book that appeared to have been written by a fifth grader under some type of duress, in which the over-arching theme of the book was the notion that you could “retire quickly” if you got a job that paid you more money. Pure genius!

And so, I gave it a shot. For the past two months, I have been visualizing myself as a fabulously wealthy author with a penchant for fish and chips loaded with extra salt and vinegar. I don’t know exactly why, but the extra salt and vinegar has played a key role in my visualization exercises, to the point that I have spent more time thinking about the salt and vinegar than all of the money I’m supposed to have as a fabulously wealthy author. And oddly enough, in my imagined life as a famous author I apparently have an overwhelming affection for Cool Range Doritos which I tend to dip in bowls of Cherry Diet Coke when no one is looking.

The first time I tried this visualization exercise, the results were less than stunning. Within minutes of imagining myself eating fish and chips while being interviewed for the New York Times Book Review, I suddenly felt a couple of drops of rain on my head. Now ordinarily this would not be a big deal but for the fact that at the time I was sitting in my kitchen and what was a couple of drops quickly escalated into what felt like a Peruvian waterfall. Granted, I have never been to Peru or Peruvia for that matter but it was a lot of water. Long story short, my visualization exercise had managed to clog the upstairs toilet and flood my kitchen with what my children referred to as “poo-poo and pee-pee” water.

Strike one.

The second time I tried it was on a plane to Atlanta while on a business trip. This time, I imagined that I had become famous by writing a cookbook about the many different ways to cook fish and chips and that my big breakthrough was a recipe in which the batter was made of Cool Ranch Doritos and Diet Cherry Coke. In this visualization, Martha Stewart decided to buy my cookbook franchise and we were in the middle of arguing about her desire to sell my cookbook at K-Mart which I strenuously objected to. I was right in the middle of explaining to Martha my rationale – basically that I didn’t understand what a “K-Mart” was but it sounded too much like “Special K” which is a cereal I despise – when the plane hit some kind of supersonic speed bump that catapulted my Diet Cherry Coke through the air, causing it to ricochet (love that word) off the seat in front of me and dump its content right on top of my Thinkpad T60 thus rendering it completely inoperable unless its sole purpose was to act as some kind of square alien Frisbee with an amazing ability to stick to things (thanks to the Cherry-ness of the Coke it was, shall we say, super sticky).

Strike two.

The last straw happened this weekend. I was sitting in my living room attempting to once again visualize myself eating fish and chips while sitting on a stack of dollar bills. In this particular visualization, they had just brought Jack Lemon back to life in an amazing scientific breakthrough so that he could star in the movie version of my tenth novel. My visualization this time was rudely interrupted by my wife Clare, who informed me that there was a suspicious puddle of water underneath our hot water heater. This led to a series of events whereby some guy named Butch showed up at my house, took one look at my hot water heater, announced to the entire family that it was deader than Jack Lemon (ah, the universe can be so cruel), and proceeded to write up a bizarre invoice that didn’t mention anything about fish and chips or my world famous book but that did inform me that I had just joined some sort of “Gold Club” that would entitle me to a $60 discount off the $2,300 he was about to charge me to replace my water heater.

Strike three.

And so, the next time someone tells you that simply by imagining something you can make it happen, my advice to you would be to go eat some fish and chips and leave it at that. You may not be rich but at least you’ll be happy. And don’t forget the extra salt and vinegar.

Love Is A Girl Named Clare

2008-02-14T23:21:27-05:00

Here I am, sitting on the plane back to my hometown of Boston returning from yet another business trip. I gaze out the window and study the blanket of clouds beneath us, my eyes continuously drawn to the sun’s glow as it slowly drops below the horizon and on to faraway lands unknown.

Surrounded by total strangers who don’t even know my name, I feel a strong desire to be home NOW instead of in 3 hours. Perhaps the very fact of knowing that soon I will be home makes me want it even more. I long for the sound of the garage door closing behind me, the dog’s inevitable barking as I climb the steps from the garage into the house in that last act of a man coming home to his family.

This aching for home makes me sad, but in a good way. I can practically hear my daughter calling “Daddy’s home!” while she rushes to hug me. If I close my eyes I can feel my wife’s embrace and all of the emotion that comes with it, that feeling of having reached a point of completeness, where all of the world’s indignities seem to melt away, where all of the anger and frustration that comes with being a human being suddenly seem so very small against the backdrop of a love that knows no end.

But that embrace is far away, and so as I sit here on this lonely plane flying above this even lonelier planet my mind begins to wander.

It was only ten years ago, in the summer of 1997, that I walked into the English Education department at Columbia University Teachers College and a woman who I had never met before looked at me and said my name without even hesitating, as if she had known me my entire life.

“Hello Sean,” she said all those many year’s ago, looking at me with those dark brown eyes that I have come to adore and love, her life-giving laugh filling the air. To this day I don’t know how she could possibly have known my name. But somehow, she did.

If Hollywood and Popular Culture is to be believed, love is a fleeting, temporary emotion. It is something that comes and goes. It is disposable, an emotion of convenience that is only worthwhile as long a it feels good. And once it no longer suits our personal satisfaction, it should be thrown out the window like a used paper cup.

If a man cannot recognize his true love when he comes upon it, if he is so self-focused that he is unable to see with eyes unencumbered when loves stares back, then he is ultimately a hopeless cause and will be doomed to see love the way that (sadly) most people do.

But not so for me. Ever since that fateful day, I have experienced what it means to love and to be loved in a million different ways, big and small, each moment and each gesture serving as a constant reminder that I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Truth is, my wife and 4 kids have taught me everything I ever needed to know about love.

Love is the happy chaos of a house filled with children playing, some of whom are your’s and others who are children drawn to your house from down the street simply because they smell happiness and want to be near it.

Love is having a vacuum cleaner that only works when it wants to, and having a wife who not only doesn’t mind this fact but who is happy to drop everything she is doing when it finally decides to turn on every 10-15 minutes.

Love is giving far more than you take but still getting more than you ever wished for.

Love is wanting to scream at the top of your lungs with every fiber in your body but resisting the temptation to do so because little hearts bruise easily.

Love is a lazy Sunday afternoon spent chasing your kids around the front yard, with no other objective other than to watch them grow before your very eyes.

Love is never forgetting the promises you made on the day you were married and on each day your children were born: to honor, to love and to cherish.

Love is finding that one person in the world who knows your name even before you can speak it.

Which is why, for me, love is a girl named Clare.

“Hello, Sean,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation.

It was almost as if God had whispered my name to her on the day she was born and said, “Show this man the meaning of love.”

And somehow, she did.

The Secret To Life

2008-01-31T23:54:46-05:00

There I was at 7 AM in the morning, rolling along on the train to work, completely engrossed in (of all things) an Excel spreadsheet. Oh what joy! Is there anything more fun than editing tiny little worksheet cells while your laptop bounces up and down rhythmically on your lap? Needless to say, I was annoyed and felt tired even before the day had begun.

But then a tiny, quiet voice inside my head told me to look up. You know, THAT voice. The one we are usually too busy or too tired or too wrapped up in something else to notice. The voice that is as wise as it is quiet, that contains more wisdom in a single sentence than most of us can muster in an entire lifetime. After all, God doesn't yell. He whispers. And you have to listen hard if you want to hear him.

So, I reluctantly pulled myself away from the laptop not knowing exactly what I was looking for, and lifted my gaze to the wintry scene outside. My breath caught in my chest as my eyes struggled to take in the beauty of the scene before me. It had snowed the day previous and thanks to a thin layer of ice the snow still clung to each tree. The whiteness of the snow mixed with the blueness of the morning sky in a way that when illuminated by the golden rays of the sun created a tableau of astonishing beauty.

It spoke to me of being a child again, of winter afternoons spent flying down a hill on my trusty metal sled, of feeling like you could literally launch into the sky and never come down, powered by nothing more than the conviction that little boys were meant to fly.

It was an astonishingly beautiful scene, especially in contrast to the painfully ordinary interior of the train with its mute colors and grimy floors. And the saddest part of all was that everyone in that train car was too tired or too busy or too preoccupied to even notice.

Suddenly I wanted to stand up and implore everyone to look out the window, to beg them to put down their books and their newspapers and their laptops and to really appreciate the world around them instead of always being so focused within.

Here it was, right there for those who cared to look, a scene of such overwhelming and utter beauty that the troubles of mere mortals would simply pale in comparison.

And so, I started to think about all of the things I had missed because I was too engrossed in my silly little world to notice the spectacle of life all around me. All the times I had rushed right through my time with Clare and the kids, too worried about some looming deadline or presentation to be fully there.

Are we not at one point or another weary commuters on a train, so beaten up by the concerns and cares of the world that we are unable to see the beauty that surrounds us?

And how many times are we so focused on getting THERE that we don't enjoy BEING HERE?

How many times are we so wrapped up in our own concerns and cares that we miss some glorious scene right outside our window, right there in front of our very noses?

And how often do we fail to listen to that voice, the one that tells us to look up, to open our eyes, to really see the beauty all around us instead of being trapped in our own little world?

Sometimes the secret to life is as simple as looking up. Looking up and seeing the beauty that is right in front of us if we would only take the time to notice.

Not Just A Train Table

2008-01-23T00:09:51-05:00

This is a story about a train table.

Well, not really.

This is really a story about a man and his daughter and how sometimes the passage of time hurts more than we'd like it to, especially when we are too busy to notice its passing.

So there I was, sitting all alone, staring at the three foot high train table that is often the center of attention in our living room, the train table where we have created countless combinations of wooden railroad tracks over the years. My two year old son Luke had just abandoned me to see what his two brothers were up to downstairs, and I was sitting there wondering what to do next.

Suddenly, my nine year old daughter MaryKate fluttered into the room. I say "fluttered" because MaryKate doesn't so much walk as bob and weave through the air like a butterfly on a Spring afternoon. That is just her way.

"Hi Dad!" she said.

Then, something amazing happened. As she began to play with the train table, pushing Thomas The Really Useful Engine around the track just like she did when she was two, a switch went off in my head and it was as if for every moment that had passed between now and the day she was born a memory played in my head.

I remembered what it was like to be a Dad for the very first time, excited and terrified all at the same time, always wishing someone would tell me exactly what to do but always having to somehow figure it out.

I remembered searching furiously for things like juicy cups, teddy bears and pacifiers. How she used to carry her teddy bear with her everywhere, the very same teddy bear that now spends half of its time under her bed or stashed away in a corner, the teddy bear who recently gave up his nighttime spot on her pillow to a dog named Princess.

I remembered how sometimes she would fall asleep on my chest, how she used to burrow her head under my chin and how I would lie awake listening to all of eternity in the inhale and exhale of a baby's breath.

I remembered how she used to scream "SALSA!" at the top of her lungs because she knew it would make us all laugh, and inevitably it did.

I remembered the Christmas when she was given that train table, how excited she was as she ran to it for the first time, her curly blond hair bobbing up and down like Shirley Temple, how she used to laugh as we played for hours.

Strangely, too, I remembered those times when I myself didn't want to play with that train table anymore, when after what seemed like hours of pushing a locomotive around a wooden track I could imagine a million other things to do. What I wouldn't give now to be there then.

I remembered all of these things and it made me wish that I could stop time from its inevitable march forward, that I could hold THIS version of MaryKate in my heart for just a little while longer, and stave off the day when the train table will be nothing more than a silly piece of furniture and playing with Daddy will just be an annoyance.

"Oh why don't you play with your father one more time?" my wife will say one day in the not too distant future.

"But MOM, it's just a train table!" MaryKate will respond.

Just a train table?

JUST a train table?

True, maybe to some, this is just a lousy old train table.

But once upon a time, I met a two year old girl named MaryKate at this very same train table. She was the first child I ever held in my arms as a father. She was the one who taught me what it really meant to be a Dad, those hard learned lessons at 2 AM when all I wanted to do was go to sleep and all she wanted to do was scream at the top of her lungs because of a cold or acid reflux or because sometimes that is just what babies do.

And so, I hope she will forgive me for wanting to play with her just a little while longer, for wanting to sit at that train table and hold on to every last vestige of the child she was and the girl she is now. Forgive me for wishing that, at least for a little while longer, I can still be Daddy and she can still be my little MaryKate.

How To Get To Heaven Via Prime Rib

2008-01-13T23:53:25-05:00

Recently, my wife decided to send our Priest a Christmas card in Latin. Now, since my wife does not in fact speak Latin, she used Latin.com to create the text for the card. This can be dangerous, because as it turns out we sent our Priest a card that said, "Father, we hope your bush doesn't burn too brightly this Christmas!"

Naturally, this piqued our Priest's interest. I'm guessing the train of thought in his mind went something like this, "Burning bush? What are they doing over there at that crazy Flavin house?" and so he promptly called to investigate. Somehow, this simple investigatory phone call lead to a full fledged invitation to Saturday night dinner.

As you might imagine, the week of preparation was pretty intense. Our biggest challenge, if I may call it that, was to secure a new toilet seat. That's right. Toilet seat. Let's face it, my boys are as adorable as can be but they lack a certain amount of accuracy when it comes to their bathroom rituals. And without going into too much detail, they have clearly decided that NOT using your hands as a way of ensuring accuracy is a particular badge of honor. This is all a nice way of saying that our original toilet seat was so disgusting that even our dog had taken to avoiding the downstairs bathroom. This is the very same dog who enjoys eating out of our trash can.

So my wife decided to get a new toilet seat in preparation for the arrival of his most Priestliness. Over the week leading up to the Good Father's arrival, we launched a massive search for just the right toilet seat which required a great deal of trial and error. We must have tried at least 5 different toilet seats. Now, I have to be honest, I didn't even KNOW how many different toilet seat sizes and shapes were in existence until this whole travesty began. It got pretty exciting as I found myself rushing home each night to test out that day's model. In the end, we settled on a seat that most would consider too large for the toilet with the thinking that we wanted to offer his excellency a truly spacious experience. Some people like to "trick out their ride" but we Flavins prefer to "trick out" our toilet seat. That's how we roll!

The preparation was pretty grueling. The trick was to try and make it seem like we were a totally normal family with children who don't spend half their day screaming for the butter or a juicy cup or another toaster strudel. An almost impossible task! Why ask politely when screaming at the top of your lungs gets the job done much faster and even might make your fellow siblings laugh if you're really obnoxious about it? It was also important to clarify things for the younger ones about our dinner guest. No, God was not coming to dinner. No, our guest doesn't know Manny Ramirez or David Ortiz or any of the Boston Red Sox but he is STILL important.

After an extended culinary debate ranging up and down the Northeast involving multiple levels of familial relations, my wife decided to cook prime rib instead of meatballs and spaghetti. After all, this man of God deserved a "meal fit for a king" which of course made me wonder why I'm always eating the aforementioned toaster strudels... but I digress.

Problem was, my wife has never made prime rib before. So now it is time to record rule #122 to the Book of Common Sense: when you have a Priest coming to dinner, don't cook a meal you've never cooked before unless it involves 3 easy steps and a Microwave.

Luckily, my wife's sister sent us a prime rib recipe tiled, "How To Get To Heaven Via Prime Rib" which included the classic initial instruction: "Before you start anything bless yourself and ask for the spirit of Julia Child to guide you on this cooking journey."

Everything seemed to be going smoothly with just minutes before the Priest's arrival. Luke had managed to touch only about 50% of the appetizers vs. his usual 95% rate, which I thought was rather remarkable... But then, disaster struck.

It turns out that there are these things called "meat thermometers" which are used to ensure that your guests don't keel over from some crazy meat borne disease. This all seemed well and good until we discovered that if you leave certain meat thermometers in the oven, at some point they will actually start to melt. And it turns out that if you actually read the directions, there is something in there about this whole bizarre meat thermometer melting phenomenon! It would have been nice if Julia Child had mentioned THAT.

At this point, my wife was pretty much at the breaking point. It didn't help that Luke had decided that this was the perfect time to start sticking carrots up his nose and exhale as hard as he could, thus propelling the carrots through the air and into the ranch dip as his intended (but often missed) target. With snot laden carrots flying haphazardly about my hair, I was instructed to find the nearest meat thermometer PRONTO.

That's when I knew I needed THE MAN: Tom Da Bomb, my next door neighbor who has every single gadget known to mankind including some crazy device that will even tell you when and where you should be fishing. I called over, and of course the man had the most technologically advanced meat thermometer ever devised: the Meat Thermometer 3000 ("The Meat Thermometer for The Next Century and Beyond"). This thing had all the bells and whistles. It was digital and made all sorts of noises in concert with the status of the item being cooked, none of which I understood. The thing reminded me of R2D2 insofar as its ability to beep in some secret code that probably only Tom Da Bomb could decipher.

Then something very odd happened. As soon as we inserted the Meat Thermometer 3000 into the prime rib, this modern miracle of science informed us that the prime rib was technically hotter than the earth's core and in danger of transforming into plasma anti-matter at any given moment which seemed to run counter to my wife's desire to honor the Priest's request of a medium rare meal.

Suddenly, the kitchen was transformed into an episode of ER as we tried to save the prime rib from total disaster.

"Crash cart!" I screamed. "Give it 10 CCs of saline STAT! Where the heck is Dr. Greene? I'm gonna need the defibrillators!"

That didn't get any laughs, but boy was I amused. Suddenly, I looked at my wife and she appeared to me to be transformed into the ghost of Julia Child, floating at least three feet off the ground, surrounded by the steam and fury of a woman whose prime rib was on the verge of an unfortunate metamorphosis.

With bits of carrots and cheese flying every which way (Luke had added cheese to his repertoire) we had to focus on saving this poor prime rib from total disaster. We immediately throttled the oven temperature down. Like a bunch of first year med students, we discussed all sorts of revival techniques.

Ice water injected directly into the prime rib via turkey baster? Not practical.

Maybe I could run around the front yard while blowing on it? Might work, but it was risky: the Priest could show up at any minute and such a maneuver would only confirm his suspicions that we were in fact completely crazy.

Maybe a trip to an ice cold tub? This idea was nixed for health reasons. God help a prime rib revived in such a fashion, with soap scum and little alphabet letters floating about. It might be saved, but it would certainly have an interesting TASTE and might actually verge on inedible.

Maybe it wasn't too late to make a last minute call to Domino's? Maybe THEY could make a Prime Rib pizza!?

That is when a miracle of epic proportions happened. Suddenly, the Meat Thermometer 3000 made a series of unintelligible hiccups and blurps and its temperature readout began to drop. With each successive drop in the temperature, my wife looked a lot less like Julia Childs and a lot more like herself.

Even the little bits of carrots and cheese and now pretzels bouncing off our heads (again, thanks to Luke) started to feel like warm raindrops on a beautiful summer day as our troubled prime rib began to achieve temperatures more becoming of a top notch piece of meat.

Within minutes, the patient had stabilized. The Meat Thermometer 3000 stopped beeping and whirring. Little Luke had grown tired of ejecting food from his nose and had moved on to chasing his brother Declan around the house with a whiffle ball bat, which was far preferable behavior from our parochial standpoint although I suspect that Declan might not have agreed.

We both hugged each other for joy. It was a truly special embrace. It was as if, in facing the challenges of the prime rib, we had become even stronger as a couple. We had after all faced the abyss and returned to tell about it. This was the kind of story that belonged on Oprah.

And so it was, at this very moment, with the prime rib snuggled comfortably in its perfectly temperate spot at EXACTLY 135 degrees that the door bell rang. Thanks to the wondrous and all powerful Meat Thermometer 3000, dinner was saved! Now the real fun could begin.