Just a Smidge

Leap Year

2012-02-29T13:19:00.000-08:00

It is February 29th today. There is not supposed to be a February 29th. Not normally, anyway. It’s a leap year. The whole concept of leap year, and our calendar in general, is very strange. I have never agreed with how our calendar works, and I have decided that it is time to stop the madness. I hereby propose that the world adopt the Smidge Calendar.

Our current calendar is complicated. This stems from the fact that the earth takes 365.2422 days to go around the sun. If we didn’t do the leap years, we would lose six hours off the calendar every year. That’s 24 days off in a hundred years. Not good. I mean, what if your birthday was in that lost month? No party for you. What if the lost month turned out to be October, and we lost Oktoberfest? Totally unacceptable.

A long time ago, Julius Caesar, a huge fan of Oktoberfest and birthdays, introduced leap years to correct for the 0.2422 day problem. Julius decided they would do a leap day every four years no matter what. That is actually too many, since the day fraction is 0.24 and not 0.25, so things started getting out of whack. Fifteen hundred years later, after people got tired of spring starting in the middle of summer, someone developed a formula. To be a leap year, the year must be evenly divisible by four. If the year is also evenly divisible by 100, then it is not a leap year, unless it is also evenly divisible by 400. Simple, right?

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, and I don’t really have a problem with the leap year math. It’s necessary. What is not necessary is having our months all different. Why have some months with 30 days, others with 31, and one with variable days? It’s too complicated. When I was a kid, my dad taught me a way to tell how many days a month has in it. You count on your knuckles. Start on the knuckle of your index finger as January. Count the months down your fist, landing alternately on your knuckles, and the valleys between your knuckles. When you get to your pinkie knuckle (July), start over on your index knuckle (August). If you are on a knuckle, the month has 31 days. If you are in a valley, it has 30, unless it’s February, then you have to refer to the complicated formula.

The knuckle trick is handy (get it?), but it shouldn’t be necessary. With the Smidge Calendar, you will never need to count on your knuckles again. My months will all have 28 days. Gone will be the days of not knowing what day of the week the 12th of March is. The days will always be the same number. The month will always start on Monday the 1st. Sundays will always be the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th. Simple and easy.

Holidays will always be on the same day. You will always know when Thanksgiving is going to fall, and with the new calendar, we can move some of the more flexible holidays to always fall on a Monday or a Friday. Three-day weekends made easy.

Now, with 28-day months, we'll need to have 13 of them, to make a year. We’ll have to come up with a name for the new month. We'll make it fun and have a national contest, and pick the most popular submission. This will be a worldwide calendar, of course, but we'll retain naming rights. This is our idea, and everyone else can just get on board. It won't be a hard sell, due to the New Year’s factor.

Thirteen months at 28 days each only gets you 364 days. The all-important 365th day will occur on what is currently known as January 1st. However, it will be known only as New Year’s Day. It will not have a number. It will not be a Monday. It will simply be "New Year’s Day," and it will be a freebie. No work will occur. Nothing will be accomplished. It's a phantom day that doesn't exist on the calendar. Relax and enjoy!

Since we can't do anything about the 0.2422 day problem, we will continue with the current leap year formula, and any leap year will have an extra bonus day, known as New Year’s Weekend. Two totally free days every four years. Winning!

While you will be encouraged to do nothing on New Year’s Day and Weekend, inevitably, a certain amount of children will be born on these phantom days. This is where the Smidge Calendar also has a bonus financial planning aspect. Any parent having a child on New Year’s Day will get to choose whether their new child's official birthday will be December 28th or January 1st. This will allow them to decide which tax year they would like their new deduction and tax credit to fall in. Just a happy bonus feature of a new and improved system.

In fact, I don't mean to brag, but the Smidge Calendar has no discernible flaws. It's way better that the current random 12- month system. The only potential downside I can see is a slight long-term hit to the calendar industry, since calendars will now be reusable.

Now, before all you accountants out there have a conniption fit, screaming about financial quarters, please try to relax. We'll still have quarters, they're just 13 weeks long now. You're supposed to be good at math, so deal with it. Like I said, no flaws.

I anticipate immediate adoption of the Smidge Calendar as soon as the word gets out. The only thing left to do is figure out where to put the new month. I'm thinking between September and October. They always seemed like they needed to be separated a little more. We could call it Smidgetober. It would be a fun month. We could introduce Smidgetoberfest, the Oktoberfest pre-party.

Just food for thought.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Edible Stroller Recall

2012-02-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

After we had our second child, Son Number Two, as we lovingly refer to him, my wife caught me at an extreme moment of weakness and convinced me to buy a stroller. Not just any run-of-the-mill stroller, mind you, but the Cadillac of strollers. Dare I say, the Ferrari of strollers. The B.O.B.

Those of you without young kids are probably saying to yourselves, “What the heck is a B.O.B.?” That’s what I asked when my wife said she wanted one. (It turns out, the original name for the stroller was Beast of Burden, but it was shortened to B.O.B.) When my wife told me how much they cost, I politely told her that it would be a cold day in Hades before I ever spent that much on a stroller. She then started spouting statistics about the B.O.B. resale values. I laughed and said I would rather spend the extra $20 and buy a mid-sized car for the boys. She then began telling me how unbelievably agile they were. I told her that gazelles were agile, too, and it would cost less to have a live one trapped and shipped to our house from Africa on a chartered plane. We could put a leash and a saddle on it, and the boys could just ride it instead.

Then, apparently she drugged me, or hypnotized me, or something, because the next thing I knew I was at REI test-rolling a B.O.B. Revolution Duallie, and saying, “Man, this thing is easy to push and can turn on a dime! And I love the shocks. Plus, the front wheel locks, so I could take the kids jogging. Wow, this is a nice stroller! It’s like the baby-buggy equivalent of a Jeep or a Hummer! This thing could fit three kids in it. Tell me more about the resale values again, honey.” Ten minutes later we owned a B.O.B.

What can I say? They really are pretty awesome, as far as strollers go.

Anyway, I told you that story so I could tell you this one. We used the bejeezus out of that stroller over the next five years or so. I would have almost gone as far as to say we got our money’s worth out of it, but that’s hard to do with a stroller that costs as much as a home mortgage payment. However, when Son Number Three was no longer in need of too much parental mobility assistance, my wife sold our B.O.B. to a nice couple in town for a surprising amount of money. Turns out she was telling the truth about the whole resale value aspect of the B.O.B. phenomenon, and after I wrestled the stack of cash away from her, and bandaged the bite marks on my hand, I felt a lot better about the purchase five years earlier. We really did get our money’s worth!

Anyway, I told you that story so I could tell you this one. Somewhere along the way, the B.O.B. stroller people got our name and address, because I received a safety recall notice in the mail recently. Since we no longer own the stroller, normally I would have passed that information on to the new owners, but since the entire sale was brokered on Craig’s List and transacted in the parking lot at the mall with cash, I have absolutely no record of who we sold it to. Normally, I would be concerned that the new owners should really be alerted to a potential safety issue with something like this, but after reading the Safety Recall Notice, I am not very worried.

“Our records indicate that you may have purchased a BOB Stroller that may present a potential safety hazard. The stroller canopy’s embroidered logo’s backing patch can detach, posing a choking hazard to babies and young children and must be removed to safely use the stroller. BOB is recalling this product in cooperation with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC) and Health Canada.”

I looked at the recall repair instruction sheet included with the letter, and the logo’s backing patch is a soft piece of fabric about the size of man’s thumb. Holy cow, that is dangerous! Since sitting in a stroller is the only place on earth where small children would ever encounter a rogue piece of fabric, I can obviously see the CSPC’s concern on the matter. If a small child ever took enough time off from trying to eat their own shirt, or their stuffed animal’s arm, they might be tempted to swallow an embroidery backing patch. Oh, the horror!

I read the recall notice and was immediately disgusted with lawyers, yet again. Not insomuch for the ridiculousness of the recall itself, but for their sheer lack of initiative. A group of lawyers decided to spend their time and energy to target the B.O.B. stroller company on a ridiculous waste of everyone’s time and money, yet they were so pathetic and small-minded, the best they could come up with was an embroidery backing patch? Have they ever even seen a B.O.B. stroller? I mean, come on! This is one serious piece of hardware, folks.

It has over-center cam-locking latches to hold all three wheels on. A kid could crush his or her finger in those latches, if an adult were present to help them close them tight enough. It has sprocket-toothed gears on both rear wheel hubs that mesh with a spring-tensioned emergency brake bar that you flip down with your foot. If your child was lying under the stroller when you flipped the brake bar down, the spring tension alone would be enough to knock them out cold. And don’t even get me started on what might happen if the kid was riding in the underside cargo compartment while the stroller was moving and they reached out and grabbed one of the wheel hub gears or got their hand or arm between two of the five-point molded plastic wheel spokes. Emergency room, here we come. Then there’s the ever-present danger of over-inflated pneumatic tire explosions and their resulting debris cloud and associated hearing loss issues. Also, there is a pull cord on the back of the stroller, and when pulled hard enough, two latches let go, and the entire stroller folds in half for storage or travel. Did anyone think what might happen if a parent folded their child up in the stroller on accident? Hello internal injuries and claustrophobia! Plus, the entire stroller is just plain heavy. I’ll bet our Duallie model weighed a good 35 or 40 pounds. Talk about dangerous. Add a kid or two, and you’ve got a 120-pound rolling menace on your hands. What if you hit another kid with it, or your kid jumps out and gets run over?

All I’m saying here, lawyers, is apply yourselves a little more. I mean, if you’re really going to try and keep us all safe, let’s concentrate on the steak and not the peas!

I have a feeling if the Consumer Product Safety Commission really had their way, the embroidery backing patch on the shade canopy would probably be the only thing on the entire stroller that the good folks at B.O.B. would actually be allowed to sell.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Valentine's Day

2012-02-14T13:17:00.001-08:00

I am coming up on ten years of marriage, so I thought, this Valentine’s Day, I would help all you guys out by imparting to you all of my knowledge about women. This should be pretty quick.

All you guys out there who have been married longer than ten years can refute this entire article, since marriage is an ever-changing, dynamic situation. All those of you out there who have been married less than ten years, treat this advice like the gospel itself. I know what I’m talking about!

All my vastly limited knowledge about women boils down to what I have learned about “quality time.”

In the beginnings of marriage, usually, unless you did things in the reverse order from the standard procedure, you don’t have any kids. You both work, and other than that, you have no responsibilities whatsoever. It’s awesome. You come home from work, and spend the entire evening together. You go out to dinner all the time, and you have more money than you know what to do with, even though, at the time, you think you’re poor. Boy, were you wrong.

Then the kids come and you find out the true definition of poor. When the kids are newborns, you foolishly think that you have no free time, but again, you are wrong. It is only when they grow up and start going to school and playing sports, and karate, and piano that you truly have no free time.

As your married life progresses and the kids get older and stop staying where you put them, your couple’s together time gets less and less. After almost ten years of marriage and three children, hypothetically 7, 5, and 3 years old, you and your wife see each other for about 20 minutes a day.

As with anything in life, when you start running out of time, you invariably are forced to concentrate only on what is critical. For example, if you were only given five minutes per day to eat, you would not spend any of that five minutes chatting or doing the dishes. You would be stuffing your face with anything that was even remotely edible within arm’s reach for the entire five minute period.

I think, as a general rule, guys tend to be much more pragmatic in those squeeze-play situations than women do. For instance, if a guy is on a boat and the captain suddenly starts shouting orders at him in an excited voice, most guys will tend to just grab the winch handle and start cranking it clockwise like they were told to do. It is more of a female trait to pause for a moment and wonder if the captain doesn’t think they can follow orders without being yelled at, or if they did something earlier in the day to make him angry with them.

When the couple’s together time gets squeezed down to 20 minutes per day, both parties naturally agree that they’d better make that time count, and make sure it’s all “quality time.” This is where the differences between men and women come into play. Both parties yearn for “quality time” with each other, but unfortunately, both parties have different definitions of “quality time.”

Now, like it or not, us men are pretty simple animals. Our “quality time” standard is universal, and does not involve clothing. Enough said.

Women, on the other hand, are very complex and complicated creatures. Their definition of “quality time” is a fast-moving target, based on a multitude of different factors that may or may not include the weather, the rude clerk at the department store, the temperature inside the house, their awesome boss, the cable company, their idiot boss, the smokin’ deal on spaghetti sauce in the paper, the kids’ reaction to dinner, the tone of your voice, the cost of living, the note from the teacher, the situation in the Middle-East, your cute text this afternoon, your son’s snotty attitude, the neighbor’s stupid dog, and any number of other things that you cannot possibly know about, but have a heavyweight bearing on the situation.

Nine times out of ten, your wife’s definition of quality time that day involves you doing a lot of listening, and cuddling on the couch, usually fully clothed. When that is the case, guess what you’ll be doing?

If you thought that you would be receiving some incredible nugget of wisdom or some sage-like advice at this point, you were dead wrong. I’ve got nothing. I don’t know any more about women than I did ten years ago. In fact, all told, I know a lot less.

All I really do know is that you’d better get on board with her definition of quality time if you ever hope to have her get on board with yours.

Happy Valentine’s Day, and good luck out there, men!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Low Tech, Low Fat Kids

2012-02-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

My wife and I recently won two tickets to go see the Sacramento Kings play the visiting Portland Trail Blazers at Power Balance Pavilion. Since real babysitters cost money, and both sets of grandparents were out of town, we decided that I would take our seven-year-old, Son Number One, to the game and she would stay home with the other two. Win for me!

They were really good seats, down close to the court, so I was almost as excited as the seven-year-old, but he beat me out on the excite-o-meter since it was his first professional basketball game, and he got to stay up way past his bed time, on a school night, no less.

Almost immediately after we sat down in our seats, I became skeptical about the appropriateness of our surroundings for my son. The rap music that was blaring during the pre-game show contained some language that was less than desirable, and I had to answer some pretty interesting questions about the Kings' cheerleaders’ dance moves. Then there was all the swearing from the stands once the game started. (Actually, that was me. The Kings couldn't get a rebound to save their lives.)

It ended up being an enjoyable evening all around, but it served to reinforce my belief that I need to keep my children insulated from the hip-hop/sultry dancer/foul-mouthed sports fan side of life for as long as possible. There is a lot of trash out there, and it is just waiting to be a major influence on my kids if I let it.

The way I see it, the main way that the trash is attempting to enter my home is through the television and the internet. Technology, in general, seems to be my enemy in the battle to raise mentally and physically healthy children. Technology and fast food seem to be my top two foes. Anyone who has witnessed the crack addiction-like effects of television and French fries on a five-year-old cannot argue that point.

My kids sometimes think I'm being mean when I tell them they can't have a Wii, or can't eat every meal at McDonald’s and Taco Bell, so in an attempt to explain my position, I offer them this:

An open letter to my children

I love you very much, and I want you to grow up to be strong and smart. That is precisely why I have these rules:

You will be the last kid you know to have a cell phone. You don't need one. There will never be any hypothetical emergency situation that you can dream up that will change my mind. For the rest of your life, you will always be within three feet of eight other people's phones. You may get your own phone when you can afford to buy one and the airtime plan to go with it. It will be a flip-phone with no Internet access of any kind. If those are no longer available ten years from now, you will be out of luck.

You will never have an iPhone, an iPad, and iPod, an iTouch, or an iAnything. Apple products are expensive -- arguably overpriced -- and you don't have any money. My money is not for buying you iPads. My money is for buying you heat and shelter and food.

We will never own a Wii, an X-box, a DS, a PS3, or any other random string of letters and numbers denoting a video game console. The reason for this is two-fold. For starters, you get enough screen time as it is, since your mom and I taught you how to turn on the Disney channel in the morning so we could sleep in every once in a while. We're not proud of that, but when you have kids of your own someday, you will understand. I do not want you becoming pasty-white, fat little drooling slobs. At our house, your Wii is the back yard. Secondly, I do not want to spend my money on video games. I know you will get all the video game time you will ever need at your friends' houses, and that is a much more financially prudent solution for me.

You will be allowed to have a Facebook account when you are 18 years old, and not a minute sooner. You will be allowed to use the Internet under strict parental supervision to research school papers and look up cool videos of lions attacking zebras and such, but other than that, it is off-limits. If you need to talk to your friends, you may ride your bike to their house, or talk to them at school. If you are the only kid at your whole school that doesn't have a Facebook or Twitter account, I will take that as a sign that I am doing my job. If you don't like that answer, you may get your own job, your own house, and your own computer, and go crazy.

You have already eaten at more fast food restaurants in your few short years of life than I did in my first eighteen. As much as your mom and I try to avoid them, they are somewhat a fact of life these days, but the food at almost all of them is bad for you. I know it’s delicious, but it will kill you early. That is an important life lesson in and of itself. This is the reason that you have to eat all of your broccoli at home, and you never get soda. You will notice that whenever you complain about eating your vegetables, I smile. That’s because doing my job makes me happy.

In short, in an effort to make sure you grow up healthy and fit, your mom and I will feed you right, and strive to make sure that the only technology you ever own as a child is the GPS tracking device that we will have surgically implanted under your skin to keep track of you in your early teen years. You’re welcome in advance.

With love,

Dad

P.S. – No, you may not go get a second opinion from your mother.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Sippy Cups

2012-02-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

We did a happy dance at my house a few days ago. We are finally finished with sippy cups. Son Number Three is finally old enough to use a regular plastic cup and keep it at the table or the counter when he drinks. No longer is he allowed to roam free around the house holding a sippy cup of milk. This is a BIG deal for us, and I’m guessing that only parents who have experienced the modern-day sip cup can really relate, but I will try to explain.

The sippy cup full of water is no big deal, but water isn’t why you bought sippy cups in the first place. You bought them so that your kid would stop splashing milk on the furniture and the carpets. A sippy cup of milk is no big deal either, until it goes missing.

Now, nobody has just one sippy cup. You have to wash them on a fairly regular schedule, and you might even have more than one sippy cup-using rug rat, so chances are you have at least two and probably more. This seemed like a good idea at the time. “We’ll just buy this convenient five-pack of sippy cups, that way we’ll always have them available for our precious offspring, plus they’re cheaper this way. Aren’t we smart!” No. As it turns out, you’re stupid, because now, since you have multiples, when one goes missing you don’t notice right away.

The problem is compounded by the multiple colors that the sippy cups come in. The ever so misleadingly non-convenient five-pack has five different color sippy cups. That makes sense at first glance, because you’re thinking you’ll be able to keep track of them better. That might actually be the case if the right color lid ever stayed with the right color cup. And they might if it was just the parents handling them. Insert kids into the mix, and suddenly it’s chaos. Blue cup with yellow lid. Purple cup with green lid. Anarchy. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a sippy cup in my house with the correct color lid.

What’s the big deal, you might ask. Well, I’ll tell you what the big deal is. The big deal is that when your wife asks you if you’ve seen the purple sippy cup in a while, you have no idea. You’re pretty sure you saw the purple one this morning, but it may have just been the purple lid you’re remembering. Or was it the red lid on the blue cup? Now this conversation is going to take a lot more of your time than it really should. Whatever you were doing is put on hold until you can verify the whereabouts of the purple cup and/or the purple lid. No luck? Well, sir, that’s not good. Now we’ve got a broken arrow. A sippy cup is officially missing somewhere in the house.

The modern day sippy cup is the result of years and years of post-moon landing-era engineering and material science. They are incredible. They only let the milk out when you suck on them, and they don’t let air in or out. They have plastic air-tight screw tops and removable silicone rubber one-way valves in the lids. This makes them expensive, hard to clean, and indispensable for parents who enjoy owning furniture that does not smell like sour milk.

It is their air-tight, spill-proof nature that is both their greatest feature and their fatal flaw. Since it is in a perpetual state of hermetical seal, a sippy cup full of milk can remain hidden under a couch or behind a desk for weeks without anyone noticing. It will only be searched for when its absence is noticed, not because it smells. Once you finally realize that you haven’t seen the purple one in a while, you have absolutely no idea how long it’s been gone.

Anyone who has ever owned a gallon of milk and a refrigerator has surely experienced what happens when the milk gets too far past its sell-by date. It develops a little film on top and starts to smell a little sweet. Let it sit in the fridge a few more days and you may start to see some curdling taking place, and the smell gets a little stronger. You then take it out of the nice, cold fridge and pour it down the sink while holding your nose and lamenting the fact that you didn’t get your money’s worth out of that gallon-gone-sour. Oh, well.

That is nothing like what happens to milk in a sippy cup under a couch.

Milk in a sippy cup underneath a couch at room temperature goes a whole different kind of bad. It undergoes a special kind of chemical transformation that is usually reserved for things at the dump or things in hell, and turns to a cross between tapioca pudding and beige house paint. The smell is almost indescribable. Crack the lid on a rogue sippy cup and you will be wishing for the carefree days of the sour fridge-milk smell. And, unlike the jug from the bad gallon of milk, you are obliged to try and salvage the sippy cup itself, since they are expensive. So, you are left at your kitchen sink, fighting back your gag reflex, and scraping chunky house paint that smells like death itself out of all the little cracks and crevices in the cute purple sippy cup.

Every time you do that, you think to yourself, "Man, I can't wait for the day I get to throw these things away. I don't ever want to smell this smell, ever again, ever."

It occurs to me, as my boys grow up, that much of the early parenting experience is marked by milestones that involve getting rid of smelly or annoying and inconvenient stuff. All told, I can't remember very much about the last seven years, since much of the early parenting experience involves sleep deprivation. I remember very clearly, however, the day that each one of them was done with powdered baby formula, and baby food, and diapers. I clearly remember the days that Number One and Two graduated out of their car seats, and I will always remember the day, just a few short days ago, when I threw away the last sippy cup we will ever own.

I mean, I think it was the last one. I hope it was the last one! It better have been. Although, come to think of it, I'm not sure I actually saw the purple one... Dammit! I'd better go check under the couches.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

My Wonderful Husband

2012-01-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

Hello to all the loyal Just a Smidge readers out there. Marc’s wife Sandy here. You can call me Mrs. Smidge. We are having a first here at Smidge World Headquarters. Our faithful writer is down and out with the stomach flu, so I am sitting in. This is a momentous occasion, since aside from a couple of “best ofs,” Marc has not missed a week since beginning this column in 2008. Such a remarkable man!

All I can tell you is that this must be one powerful flu bug, because Marc never gets sick. I can count on one hand the amount of times he’s even had so much as a cold in the almost ten blissful years we’ve been married. He’s almost bullet-proof! I’m so lucky.

Since the Tyrannosaurus Rex of flu bugs has reduced my amazing husband to a pale, quivering, sweaty, huddled mass on the floor, I was not able to get a good answer from him on what my topic should be. The fever must be making him slightly crazy, because all he could say was, “Please, no.”

So, since humor writing is not my forte, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a little about what an amazing man Marc really is, and how incredibly lucky I am to have him. Literally every morning when I wake up, I thank God for letting me spend one more day with Marc. His captivating optimism, his intrepid courage in the face of danger, his super-incredible manliness, what can I say? He’s just awesome.

And he is such a hard worker! Up and at ‘em every morning, raring to go. He’s an incredible provider for our family. And speaking of our family, how blessed am I that Marc has given me three beautiful, healthy boys! The icing on the cake is that they all look just like him. Not only will that help them out later in life, when they grow up to be big, strong, devilishly handsome men like their father, but having them around the house as constant cherub-like reminders of my loving husband’s face keeps me sane during the hard times when I’m away from him in the middle of the day.

And I can’t forget to mention how smart he is. I don’t know if he’s ever had an IQ test, but I’m just positive he would be up around genius level. He seems to know everything about everything. And he sure is handy to have around the house when something breaks. It doesn’t matter whether it’s our toaster or our car, he always knows exactly what’s wrong with it. It never ceases to amaze me how many different things have a McGruder valve in them. It’s just a shame that McGruder valves can only be fixed with the one tool that is too cost prohibitive to own ourselves. I’m so lucky I am married to a genius that knows those kinds of things!

And did I mention how good looking he is? I guess I already did, but he’s so good looking it really bears repeating. I just can’t believe how lucky I am to have him. I even think it’s great that he went bald. Not too many people realize this, but men go bald because of high testosterone levels, and let me tell you ladies, I’m not complaining about that, if you know what I mean!

I think I should stop here, because at this point it feels like I’m just bragging. Hopefully he’ll be up and around to take care of next week’s column, because I know that this kind of thing embarrasses him. Did I mention how humble he is? I can’t believe I almost forgot that! Humility is one of his finest characteristics.

I just really can’t believe how lucky I am.

See you soon,

- Mrs. Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

A Laughable Affair

2012-01-18T17:40:00.000-08:00

Last week we received a postcard from a local mega-church advertising their upcoming workshop for married couples. The headline above the incredibly happy looking, above-averagely attractive couple was, "Hot Topic: Affair-Proofing Your Marriage." I read that and laughed out loud. My wife asked what was so funny, and when I handed her the postcard, she laughed even louder.

Now, please don't misunderstand, we don't think that extra-marital affairs or attempting to affair-proof your marriage is funny. Nor did we think that this church's attempt to help affair-proof the marriages of their congregation and the surrounding community was humorous. What we found laugh-out-loud funny was the thought of me trying to have an affair.

"Yeah, right! Like you could keep it a secret!" she laughed.

Hey! Wait a minute, that’s not why I thought it was funny.

She’s totally right, though. I can take no offense to her comment. I can’t keep a secret to save my life. Anyone who knows me well will never tell me anything covert in confidence. It’s not that I’m not trustworthy, per se, it’s just that I’m not hardwired for certain secrets. Let me try to explain. You can easily trust me with your bank account numbers, or your password. I won’t accidentally tell someone those things, because, in my brain, they are supposed to be a secret. Just don’t tell me that Julie Fitzgerald is secretly in love with her pool guy, because my simple brain doesn’t register that in the same “supposed to be a secret” information storage area as a password. I will inevitably end up… Oh crap… Sorry Julie! Maybe Dave won’t read this… See what I mean. My wife is going to be maaaad…

Anyway, obviously my wife had a good point about my inability to keep secrets, but what struck me so funny about the idea of me having an affair was time, or more specifically, lack of time. Between being a husband, a father, a coach, a full-time writer and having a full-time job on the side, I have a total of seven minutes of free time each week. I usually use it to cry. If I had enough free time to sleep with another woman, that is exactly what I would do: Sleep.

Putting aside all the obvious moral reasons why I would never have an affair, and thinking about the pure logistics of it, the idea boggles my mind. Seeing another woman would obviously involve a significant amount of time. What activity do the affair-having scoundrels of the world take that time from? It has to come from somewhere. In my experience, most guys who have an excessive amount of free time in their lives arrive at that point not by being hyper-productive go-getters. And they usually use that free time to wear an imprint of their butts permanently into the couch that faces the TV. Those guys don’t seem like the types to go out and make their lives more complicated with covert trysts and lots of deception, and besides that, their wives would probably notice if they suddenly weren’t in their ass-igned spot watching football, bass fishing, or those Mexican game shows on Univision with the really hot women.

So the affair-having class must be the guys with jobs. Again, having an affair has got to take up at least a few hours a week, at a minimum, right? But that is only after the affair is in progress. You’d have to meet her first, right? Wouldn’t that be a lot like dating again? How on earth does a guy with a wife and a job find time to date!?! More importantly, why would you want to? I got married so I could stop dating. Why would I want to start again? And, what kind of job do you have that allows that kind of free time? I can’t even imagine it.

(Seriously though, if you do have a job with that kind of free time, please get ahold of me and let me know what I need to do to get into your industry, because it sounds like a sweet gig.)

Truth be told, I really don’t even understand the concept of an affair. Even if I had the time, the money, and the lack of scruples, it just really seems like it would be a hassle. I can barely keep my to-do list straight as it is.

For me, the idea of having an affair always brings to mind polygamy, which is a concept I never understood. A polygamist is a guy who said to himself, “Affair? No way man! I want to get married to her, too!” Having a regular affair would be a lot like having another wife, but the polygamists take it all the way and actually get married to more than one woman. I can’t for the life of me figure out why any guy would want more than one wife.

Now, please don’t misunderstand, getting married was the best thing that ever happened to me. I now eat consistently good food, I have a wonderful partner to share my life with, and I can always find my socks. But marriage presents a few challenges that the single guy does not face.

For instance, having a wife seems to lead to fairly regular and excessively long discussions about the past, the present, and the future. Those can be not only time-consuming, but mentally taxing, and downright painful.

Also, getting yourself a wife historically leads to having kids. Having kids historically leads to a lot of shopping. It starts with baby food and diapers, but rapidly escalates to furniture, cars, and houses. It’s really expensive.

To sum up, marriage is good, but it is time-consuming and very expensive. I need a full-time job just to cover the expenses with my one set of wife and kids, and I'm not getting nearly enough sleep as it is. There is no way I could afford to have more than one family on the payroll.

What do these polygamist guys do for a living that they can afford more than one family? And why don't they just keep it simple, go with the one set of wife and kids, and put the extra money in the bank. They would undoubtedly have plenty of extra time to nap, as well. Why don't they want that? I don't get it!?!

(Seriously though, if you’re a polygamist, please get ahold of me and let me know what you do for a living, and what I need to do to get into your industry, because it sounds like a sweet gig.)

Anyway, I am happy to report that to my wife and me, the idea of an extra-marital affair is downright laughable. Suffice it to say, we threw the postcard in the trash. Our marriage isn't affair-proof, it's affair-bulletproof. I need a nap.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

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Resolutions, Part II

2012-01-11T17:28:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, I have never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, but since my 2011 resolutions went so well, I was happy to start 2012 with some goals. I gave it a lot of thought over the holidays and finally decided on one main resolution: To get better educated.

There are a lot of areas in my life where I would like to become smarter and more well-rounded, so I plan to pick an area to focus on, give it laser-like attention until I know everything there is to know about it, then move on to another topic. Now, please don’t misunderstand. I am not looking to become the world’s foremost scholar on the Peloponnesian War, or to become a fountain of knowledge about fruit bats. I want to focus on useful things in my everyday life, where I already know enough to get by, but really should know more.

It was at a holiday party this year that the first subject in need of mastery became perfectly clear. Beer.

I have been drinking and enjoying beer for a long time now, and I considered myself to be very knowledgeable on the subject. That is, until someone at the party mentioned that they had just seen a TV show that had tackled the question of the differences between Porter and Stout. It turns out there is no major difference between the two. It’s really just a naming preference. I didn’t know that! Then we started wondering about Amber Ale versus Brown Ale, and if they might be the same thing also, and again, I had no idea.

Well, that was just unacceptable, so I am now going to become an expert on beer. I have always believed that the best way to learn about something is to go out and do it, not sit for hours reading about it. Why on earth would anyone want to read about beer, anyway? I think learning about beer should be done the old-fashioned way; by the pint. Off I went to the local specialty beverage shop and bought one bottle of each different style of beer they had to offer. Two-hundred and forty dollars later, I came home with a trunk full of beer. It turns out there are a LOT of different styles of beer! I haven't even started drinking yet, and I am already learning. To keep it all cool I had to completely remove almost everything my wife had foolishly stored in the top half of our refrigerator, like the milk and chicken breasts and cottage cheese, but I’m sure she won’t mind. I’m about to be much, much smarter.

I figure I should go from lightest to darkest, much like wine tasting, so I'm starting with a plain old American lager. Mmmm. It was good.

Now on to a pilsner. Did you know that it's called pilsner because the style originated in the city of Pilzen, in the Czech Republic? I just read that on the back of the bottle. It's amazing the things you can learn if you take the time to read the labels. It's good too, and has a sharper, cleaner finish than the lager.

On to the ales, I'm starting with the lightest of the category, known as a blonde ale. It has a much different taste than the pilsner, leaving sweet and fruity hints lingering on my taste buds after each delicious sip. It's a medley of different complex favors, offsetting and contradicting the lager and pilsner with far less sharp carbonation. This beer has a slightly heavier feel than the lager, but a much smoother finish than either of the previous two delightfully different styles. This first ale went down really nicely. Yum-o!

Next up is a hefeweisen. The label says that hefeweisen is an unfiltered wheat beer, commonly served with a slice of lemon, and apparently, it is known as "Germany's breakfast beer." Those Germans are so lucky, man! They get to drink beer for breakfast! Maybe they drink it in the morning because it looks like milk. Man, this stuff is cloudy! It's pretty good, though. Sure doesn't taste like milk. Dang, I forgot the lemon slice. Oh, well.

On to the pale ale. Wooo-doggy! this is bitterer than that cloudy breakfast beer! I would not drink this for breakfast. This is much more of a steak and potatos beer. Potatoes? Why does potato have an e on the end when there's more than one? It should be potatoe. Good beer!

This one is an India pale ale. Was it brewed in India? IPA is all it says on the back and some long sentence about a river. I hope it's not river water. This sucker is even bitterer than the pale ale! Apparently it has to do with hops, from what I can read hear on the label's bottle. They must have had something go wrong with the bottle printer, because the words are pretty bluury. Who cares about the printing, though, because that beer was GREAT!

Oh, all right! We're at amber ale. This one was one of the reasons for me wanting to no more about beers. I should get the brown ale out two and drink them together alternatively. That way, I can figure out what the two is between the difference. Hang on.

jhdbfvjhdbh ..m Whoops. I just knocked the keysboard off the desk. Sorry about that. Saved the beer thow. I couldn’t find the brown ale, so I braut back a Irish stout instead. I’ll just compair the amber stout with the Irishale. The Irish is pretty dark, but yummmy. The amber is dark and yummy to, but not as stout as the dark was. when I mix them together they make a superdark superyummy superbeer.

Märzen is the next beer I’m drinkin. It has those funny dots over the a. You wood not believe how hard is it to find those dots on my keysboard. I think their called umlats. thats a funny word. Märzen is delicioso!

Doppelbock in the house!!! This badboy has an alcohol comtent of 8 percent. Boccledop is strong! Thatz way more then the other ones was. Whoooohooo, this is some goooooooooood Dobblepock.

Oatmeal stout is up next up… Is this another breakfas beer? Oatmeal wood be good right now. I’m gonna save this keep it for in the morning tomorow… I’m a lot beerer about smarts four shure now… fhsd;jkvnas’oi

(ZZZZZzzzzz)

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

2011 Year in Review

2012-01-04T16:25:00.000-08:00

When I sat down to reflect on the year that was 2011, more than a few notable events came to mind. Osama bin Laden assuming room temperature. The European debt crisis and riots. Kim Jong Il, the little North Korean pajama-wearing nutbag, kicking the bucket. Britain’s royal wedding, and their major news agency’s royal cell phone tapping scandal. The equal parts hopeful and scary “Arab Spring” protests and civil unrest happening in almost every country in the Middle East. Iran test-firing missiles and the resulting tension in Israel and the US. And, the tragic Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and resulting nuclear plant disaster.

Closer to home we had gold setting record price highs, Steve Jobs passing away, occupy Wall Street, and then occupy everything else, the “Fast and Furious” gun running sting gone completely awry, the U.S. losing our AAA credit rating, and then, most depressingly of all, the 2012 presidential campaigns got underway.

As if all the things I could think of weren’t depressing enough, or maybe out of a sense of longing for some good memories, I did an internet search to find out what I was forgetting.

What I found on that search was more depressing than all the bad news listed above, combined. I had decided to look up the top ten internet searches for 2011, and I found two lists, one from Yahoo and one from Google. After reading the lists, one thing has become perfectly clear to me:

We are doomed. Plain and simple.

Here they are:

The Yahoo 2011 Top Ten Searches

1. iPhone

2. Casey Anthony

3. Kim Kardashian

4. Katy Perry

5. Jennifer Lopez

6. Lindsay Lohan

7. “American Idol”

8. Jennifer Aniston

9. Japan earthquake

10. Osama bin Laden

The iPhone is a camera and video game that can also be used to make telephone calls.

Casey Anthony probably killed her own daughter, but was found not guilty, and has been set loose. Also, she was apparently fairly loose in the first place.

Kim Kardashian is famous for no reason. She was married this year for about an hour and a half. As near as I can tell, the only thing she has ever actually done in her whole life was this year, when she “lost the weight, but kept the curves!” She is the picture in the dictionary under “loose.”

Katy Perry is a pop singer who is also apparently fairly loose.

Jennifer Lopez is a pop singer who wears tight body suits, and may or may not be loose.

Lindsay Lohan is an extremely loose Hollywood train wreck.

American Idol is one of the conduits by which teenagers can become Hollywood train wrecks.

Jennifer Aniston is a Hollywood actress who excited the world by getting married again this year. Since she has repeatedly ignored my offers to leave my wife and elope with her, and since she evidently eloped with some other guy instead, I must assume she is also loose.

You already know about Japan and Osama bin Laden.

Yahoo users went 2 for 10.

The Google 2011 Top Ten Searches

1. Rebecca Black

2. Google+

3. Ryan Dunn

4. Casey Anthony

5. Battlefield 3

6. iPhone5

7. Adele

8. Fukushima Nuclear Plant (searched for in Japanese)

9. Steve Jobs

10. iPad2

Rebecca Black is a 14-year-old singer who self-produced a really annoying song that so many people hated, she became famous.

Google+ is apparently Google’s answer to Facebook. Since no one has actually ever heard of it, my guess is that Google just put it as number 2 on their list to get it more attention.

Ryan Dunn was a member of the Jackass squad, a band of stoners who became famous for performing homemade stunts that no one who was not stoned 24 hours-a-day would ever attempt. He died while driving drunk.

As far as I know, Battlefield 3 is a video game, presumably about battle. It is most likely the third of its kind.

The iPhone5 is the 5^th version of the iPhone. It does not exist yet. There are entire websites devoted to rumors about what it will be like.

Adele is a singer. I am obviously very, very hip, but I had not heard of her until I read this list. I Facebooked her instead of Googling her, for no other reason than to spite this list, and listened to a few of her songs. She is very good.

You already know about Japan and Steve Jobs.

The iPad2 is a giant iPhone4 that can’t make telephone calls. It comes in original white and new black, and replaces the original iPad. Besides now coming in black, the number 2 is the only change from the old model.

Google users went 2 for 10 as well, but were less varied than their Yahoo counterparts, concentrating more heavily on Apple, a tech company that, ironically, isn’t too compatible with Google.

There you have it. That’s what the world searched for in 2011. If that depresses you as much as it does me, just remember this: The Mayan calendar says the world is coming to an end in 2012 anyway, so we shouldn’t have to put up with this too much longer.

There you go. Feel better?

I did notice one glaring omission from our two inadvertent doomsday lists. I have to assume that Charlie Sheen was not on either list for the single reason that he was so over-covered and over-publicized during his cocaine and ego fueled rants earlier this year that no one ever had to actually search his name to hear about him. Winning!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

An Explosive Christmas

2011-12-28T17:34:00.000-08:00

I love Christmas. I always have. I love it even more now that I have children of my own. Earlier this month, as I eagerly anticipated Christmas Day and envisioned all the wonderful activities and experiences I would share with my kids, one thing, above all else, never entered my mind. Bomb disposal. But, that’s exactly what I ended up doing on Christmas morning this year. Go figure.

My boys love flashlights. They love to pretend to be deep-sea divers and cave explores and police officers, and anything else you might do with a flashlight. Thank goodness they don’t know what a proctologist is! Anyway, as with any other toy or object found in our house, when they decide to stop playing with a flashlight, they simply abandon it wherever they happen to be. There is never a thought of returning it to its designated storage spot and certainly never a thought about turning it off. That’s why they never get to play with my flashlights. I like to know where mine are, and I like them to work when I pick them up.

Since I am the cold-hearted father figure, I am content with simply telling them, “No, you may not play with my flashlight.” Their grandma, however, is a softy, and wants them to be cave explorers or deep-sea divers or doctors with a strange specialty someday, so she buys them flashlights. As a result, we have approximately twenty to thirty small, cheap, plastic or aluminum flashlights hidden throughout the house, all with dead batteries. She buys them on sale at clothing stores, or at the dollar stores, so they are never a brand that can be found at any reputable hardware store or home improvement warehouse. What I’m trying to say is that they’re cheap. Inexpensive, and also cheaply made. That used to seem like a good idea, given the boys’ propensity for mistreating them. Not anymore.

This Christmas morning, lo and behold amidst the ripping and shredding of wrapping paper and boxes, all three boys received new cheap plastic flashlights from Grandma. We like to keep approximately half of our family’s total net worth in the form of batteries stored in our laundry room, so we had those babies powered up in no time. Son Number One, being the oldest of the three, got the biggest flashlight. His was the jumbo model that took two D-size batteries. (Insert your own proctology joke here). All three flashlights were the new blindingly bright LED models, and our house was suddenly lit up like an auto mall on Memorial Day weekend. Three minutes later, we were knee-deep in Legos, and all three flashlights were abandoned under couches or behind desks, all still turned on, draining the batteries. I miss having spending money.

After all the gifts had been unwrapped, the boys set about to playing with all their newfound treasures. Son Number One retrieved his new flashlight from under the couch and ended up playing with it for quite some time. He brought it to me after a while, complaining that it was coming apart. It was a twist on/off model, and he had been twisting the lens end enough that he had accidentally screwed it all the way off. I gathered up all the parts and screwed it all back together. Since it took me longer than two and a half seconds to fix, he had lost interest during the repair process and had moved on to something else by the time I had it back in one piece. Not bothering to call him back into the room, I just set the flashlight on the kitchen counter and got back to my duties as official Christmas cookie tester.

I was still in the kitchen five minutes later when Number One came back in to get his flashlight. He reached up to grab it, and immediately dropped it back onto the counter. “Ouch!” he said, “my flashlight is really hot!”

I set my plate of cookies down and picked up the flashlight. I, too, had to drop it back onto the counter. He wasn’t kidding. The plastic case was too hot to hold onto. Hmmm. That can’t be good.

I very calmly screamed for everyone to hit the floor and roll or crawl out of the kitchen, or as I am told I referred to it at the time, “the blast radius.” I dove across the counter and retrieved the barbeque tongs from one of the drawers, and gingerly picking up the incendiary device, made my way as smoothly and quickly as possible to the “bomb containment bunker,” or as we normally refer to it, the garage.

So there I am: Christmas morning, in my pajama pants and slippers, wearing my brand new Cal Poly sweatshirt I just received from Santa, stylishly accessorizing it with wrap-around safety glasses and boar hide gauntlet-style welding gloves, standing at my garage workbench diffusing a bomb made out of cheap foreign circuit boards and two large Duracell® batteries going supernova. You just never know what life’s going to throw at you.

I was able to get the impromptu pipe bomb apart and shake the D-cells out in time, but it was close. They were so hot they had started to expand, and they almost didn’t slide out of the plastic tube. Thankfully, getting the batteries out diffused the short-circuited flashlight and avoided a really ugly, smelly, and strange Christmas Day incident.

With a regular flashlight that has a standard bulb, there isn’t too much that can go wrong. Apparently, however, with the new LED flashlights, since they require internal circuit boards to work, if those circuit boards and assembly techniques get cheap enough, and just the right circuit board parts fail, they can create a situation where the flashlight becomes a space heater instead. A really inconvenient, unpredictable, flaming space heater.

This time of year, many people tend to get wrapped up in looking for the true meaning of Christmas, getting mired down with the inequities of life around the country or around the world, feeling guilty for their own good fortune or envious of others.

I say, don’t overthink it. Keep it simple, and always be thankful for what you have. Sometimes, the Christmas miracle is simply that the cheap LED flashlight didn’t burn your house to the ground.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

A Tale of Two Santas

2011-12-21T12:17:00.000-08:00

Every parent has the propensity to exaggerate their own kid’s intelligence. Ask any parent and they’ll tell you, their kid is the smartest one in the class. He’s reading at a 5^th grade level at six years old… She’s on the pre-school’s honor roll… He potty trained himself at 8 months, etc.

Believe me, I have been guilty of that myself in the past, but only because my kids really are smart. Or so I thought. I was fully convinced my kids had above average IQs until a few days ago. Now I’m not even sure they have IQs above room temperature. What made me change my mind so drastically? Not a what. A who. Santa.

Two Santas, actually. The two Santas upon whose laps they have sat this year. Now, I will give my three-year-old a pass, but the fact that Son Number One and Two came down off of Santa Number Two’s lap without a thousand and one questions leads me to believe that they may not even be smart enough to come in out of the rain. Come to think of it, they usually try to go out and play in the rain. I should have seen this coming, I guess… Anyway, back to the two Santas.

The first Santa we visited this year was the Santa at Son Number Three’s preschool Christmas party. He is the Santa by which all others shall be judged. He is in his early sixties, and has a real purplish-red crushed velvet suit and hat, with white fur trim that looks like it might have actually come from an arctic hare or an albino mink. He has a real white beard and real flowing white hair. He has real black boots that probably have actual fireplace soot on them. He has a deep, booming voice, a cold, red nose, and an honest-to-goodness twinkle in his eye. He is so realistic, I want to sit on his lap and tell him what I want for Christmas, just in case.

They all jumped down off of Santa Number One’s lap wide-eyed and filled with joy, utterly convinced that they had just put in a sure-fire lock of an order for some new Legos.

Then came Santa Number Two, the Santa at my wife's yearly family reunion Christmas party. Every year, one of the cousins gets to be Santa for the little kids. This year it was Greg's turn. Greg is about a foot taller than the unfortunate cousin who had to be Santa last year, but the family Santa suit remains the same. You know the suit I'm talking about. The suit and fur is the same thin, fire engine red felt and feathery, unnaturally bright white fluff that the cheap Walmart Christmas stockings are made of. The front of the suit Velcros closed over the fake belly, and the “boots” are really shiny black vinyl shin covers with elastic on the calf, meant to keep them in place over your regular street shoes. The white, curly wig and beard are made out of the same itchy acrylic that you find inside of stuffed animals and couch throw pillows.

Greg, the man who was barely inside the suit, is a 6’-3” tall, mid-twenties firefighter made entirely out of twisted steel and good breeding. He has no belly. He has no actual body fat of any kind. When he sat down in the Santa chair, the fake belly strapped to his midsection bobbed all the way up to just under his chin, and the cuffs of the bright red Santa pants came up over his knees. He kept having to hike up his faux vinyl boots to try and hide the tops of his shins. He could not have looked any more different than Santa Number One if he had been dressed as the Easter Bunny instead.

All Santa suit differences aside, the real kicker was his voice. When Greg dug down deep for what he later described as his, “best old man voice,” it came out as not so much old, but foreign. I finally settled on “vaguely British” as the best overall description, but it varied at times anywhere from “Scottish golf commentator” to “German foreign exchange student.”

We, as Greg’s loving and caring family members, were almost hysterical with laughter as we tried to pin down his dialect and watched as he fought with his uncooperative foam-rubber belly and desperately tried to hide his knees. My kids, however, were sitting patiently, staring at him with the same wide-eyed reverence and awe afforded to Santa Number One, just a few days earlier.

They jumped up and sat on his lap. They asked him politely for Ninja and Star Wars Legos. They thanked him, and promised they’d be good.

Come on, fellas. You have got to be kidding me! No questions? No comments? How short is your memory? It’s not like we’re showing you mug shots, here. You’re sitting on his lap, for crying out loud. Not only are you not asking me why you had to tell him what you wanted for Christmas again, but you’re not asking me any questions about why he looks and sounds so different than he did three days ago! Are you deaf? Did you even look at his beard?

Since my wife and I still love the fact that our kids believe in Santa, we are not willing to break the spell, so we can’t question them about the obvious inconsistencies they are being exposed to. As a result, we have no idea if they really don’t see any differences at all, or if they simply have such an unquestioning loyalty to the big guy, since he is in complete control over gift distribution, that they are not willing to step out of line and voice any concerns about noticeable variations, for fear of a demotion to the naughty list.

This is kind of an uncomfortable position for me as a dad. While my heart is mostly filled with joy by their apparent belief in Saint Nick, I also don’t want to be raising a bunch of suckers or suck-ups. The way I see it, we’ve got three possibilities here:

1) They are still young enough that the Santa experience is so overwhelmingly exciting that it blinds them to casual observations.

2) They are a bunch of toy-greedy sycophants, sucking up to anyone in a reddish suit in the hopes of scoring some free gear.

Or,

3) I’ve got a bunch of dim-bulb, mouth-breathers on my hands.

Man, I hope it’s scenario number one! I’m going to let it slide this year, but if Son Number One, at least, doesn’t have some serious questions next year when he’s eight years old, I’m going to start getting really worried!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The 2011 Do-it-Yourself Christmas Letter

2011-12-14T17:22:00.001-08:00

Once again this year, you have procrastinated in writing the dreaded Christmas letter, and once again this year, ol’ Smidgey Claus is stepping in to save your bacon. I have created another handy do-it-yourself template to create your 2011 Christmas letter in no time flat. As with last year’s template, just fill in your last name(s) in the blank and circle the appropriate choices, and you're in business.

Christmas 2011

Merry Christmas from the ______________ house. We have had another (fruitful/wildly disappointing) year.

The (highlight/major disappointment) this year was dad's (hole-in-one/arrest). He had been shooting (par/rifles) all year at (the country club/out of season deer) and had been dangerously close to (the pin/being caught) quite a few times. In early October he hit a (nine iron/nine point buck) on a (par three/county road) from the (blue tees/cab of his truck) and down it went. (Luckily/Unfortunately) the (Marshall/Warden) was nearby and the event was officially verified. Dad was (celebrating/incarcerated) for nearly a month. He's finally (sober/been released) and is home recuperating.

Mom was (blessed/cursed) again this year with (good health/rotten luck). She spent most of her time at the (library/casino) volunteering her (time/money) to the (children/Kaweehaw Band of Indians). She was a fixture at the (learning time reading corner/Wheel of Fortune dollar slots) and could never quite (get enough/catch a break) when it came to those (smiling little faces/damned uncooperative machines).

Sister had another (blessed/trying) year. Her work as a (marriage counselor/drug mule) continues to provide her with boundless (satisfaction/stress and frequent flyer miles). She recently took up the hobby of (cross stitch/pickpocketing) and has made several (throw pillows/hundred dollars) so far. She still keeps in close contact with her (college friends/old cellmates), not letting the obstacle of (long distance/obvious parole violations) stand in the way of planning the next (reunion getaway/bank heist and getaway).

Little Brother continues to work hard at (XYZ Global/collecting unemployment checks) while maintaining his position as an (elder/off-the-books bartender) at the (Presbyterian church/off-track betting lounge). He loves his (family/horses) more than anything, and pours all of his (extra time and energy/available funds) into (his home/trifectas). He always says, "Life is a great (gift/big pain in the neck), so make the (most of it/easy money) whenever you can.

As for me, I am staying (busy/home) with my (hamburger franchises/court-mandated ankle bracelet). I am absolutely (swamped/bored out of my mind), and there never seems to be enough (hours/liquor) in the (day/cabinet). I am planning to hire a team of (managers/illegals) to help me with my (day-to-day duties/new credit card scam), so that I will have some more (free time/spending money). If all goes well, I plan to completely (retire/re-stock the liquor cabinet) by the end of next year. Fingers crossed for lots of (success/suckers)!

That’s all we can (fit in this letter/stand to tell you). We hope this finds you (as happy and blessed as/in better shape than) we are.

Merry Christmas!

You’re welcome! Now just sign, copy and send. You’re all set.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Spica Cast, Part IV

2011-12-07T17:59:00.001-08:00

Son Number Three was freed from his personal fiberglass prison on the day before Thanksgiving. It was a very liberating day for all of us. He was cut loose from his huge Spica body cast, and after an entire box of baby wipes and two baths, we were finally free of his tremendously powerful ammonia smell.

While we are thrilled to finally be free of the stench, we have been left with another rather unpleasant side effect: Diapers. It’s our own fault really. We all got lazy.

At the time he broke his leg, our three-year-old was potty trained, but semi-unreliable. He was wearing big boy underwear during the days, and he always alerted us to when he needed to visit the potty, but his bodily function recognition system was still being debugged. He would announce that he needed to go pee, and then proceed to poop. He would say that he needed to poop, then get to the toilet, pee, and tell us “there is no poop in my butt.” To complicate things, he also got it right half the time, so you couldn’t just go with the opposite and be confident. Needless to say, after a few mix-ups while standing in front of the potty, he was a permanent sitter.

When he came home from the hospital in the crazy immobilizing uni-cast, he was no longer able to sit on the potty. To compensate for that, the hospital sent him home with a plastic wide-mouth bottle for peeing, and a plastic bed pan for pooping. Neither one was universal, and it was very difficult to get him positioned to try and use both the bottle and the bed pan at once. Given his lack of reliability on identifying what might be leaving his body at any given moment, you can see our dilemma. It was like a very high stakes game of whack-a-mole. You’d best be quick.

Once the cast went on, he was in diapers anyway, because the last thing you want with a Spica cast is an accident that you can’t get rid of for 6-1/2 weeks. We tried our best to use the bed pan and pee bottle for the first few days, but then we got lazy and tired of trying our best. And tired of cleaning pee out of the carpet. And out of our shirts.

By the end of Son Number Three’s first week in the cast, we were having this conversation:

“I have to pee.”

“OK. Go for it.”

“Are you coming?”

“No, buddy. Just pee in your diaper. I’ll change you right after you’re done so you won’t have a wet diaper.”

“OK.”

By the end of the second week, he was getting lazy and no longer giving us advanced notice, and we were all getting more comfortable with wet diapers:

“I peed in my diaper.”

“OK, buddy.”

“Are you coming?”

“Not right now. I’ll change you after your show is over.”

“OK.”

By the end of the third week, a total family laziness had set in and we were getting no notices at all:

“Hey, buddy, it’s dinner time. Do you have a wet diaper?”

“No.”

“Let’s check anyway… Holy cow, dude. This diaper is full.”

“Oh, yeah. I peed.”

“When did you pee?”

“At lunch.”

So now, here we are, two weeks after he was liberated from Spica cast confinement, and he is still in diapers and still not giving us any notice. We seem to be back at square one, potty training-wise, and it looks like we’re going to have to go through the whole ordeal again. We haven’t started yet, though.

Why, you ask? Well, there’s another problem. He hasn’t started to walk yet, either.

I contend it has to do with an overall laziness that has taken over every aspect of his life, but my wife keeps telling me it’s all part of the healing process. She also keeps pointing out how readily and vigorously he scoots himself around the house on his butt. She has a point. He does scoot an awful lot in situations where walking would be easier. I still think he’s milking it a little, but in any case, the point is, he hasn’t started back to walking yet.

What does that have to do with re-potty training, you ask? Let me give you a visual to help answer that question.

Imagine a three-year-old boy, who can’t walk because of a bad leg, who wants to sit in a chair. How does he do it? Well, first, he scoots on his butt over to the chair, straddling the chair with his legs. Then he hugs the leg of the chair, putting his face on the top part of the chair leg to gain some amount of leverage. He then proceeds to use his arms and face to grapple and shimmy his way up the leg of the chair, using his good leg to push and slide head-first onto the seat, until his belly is square in the middle of the chair. He then performs a complicated flip-scoot-twist-and-sit maneuver to get into an upright sitting position on the chair.

Now imagine that with a toilet.

We’re going to go ahead and just roll with the diapers a little longer until he starts to walk again.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Christmas Lights Revisited

2011-11-30T19:17:00.001-08:00

I put up my Christmas lights this past Saturday, and in doing so, had a few quiet moments up high on my ladder to reflect on my love-hate relationship with the ever-popular tiny white icicle lights. I used to dread the moment of truth, when I would plug them in and see, with indescribable angst, that not all of them were working. I fear that moment no more, thanks to a wonderful little tool I found last year. The tool that might possible have saved my very life. I chronicled this heart-wrenching journey of pain and discovery over the previous two Christmas seasons, and putting up my lights again this year has made me want to share it with you again. Enjoy!

The Problem:

“The Five Feet of Christmas I Despise,” originally posted on justasmidge.com December 02, 2009

Since I’m a Christian, I really enjoy Christmas. We get to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ with our family and friends, joyfully thanking God for His greatest gift to us. And besides, I really love sugar cookies! There is, however, one aspect of Christmas that I don’t like. Actually, “don’t like” isn’t strong enough. Loath. Hate. Despise… yes, there is one aspect of Christmas that I despise. It has to do with Christmas lights.

It’s not the lights themselves. I love those. I really like the way they make the house look. My wife likes icicle lights; the kind with the individual light strands of differing lengths that hang down from the eaves to simulate a sparkling frozen wonderland. They give the house a warm glow while at the same time making us feel like we have a winter paradise in our otherwise non-frozen California front yard. It’s really quite magical, and brings joy to my heart every time I pull into the driveway from work.

It’s not putting up the lights, either. I don’t mind that chore. I might even go so far as to say that I enjoy it. It’s usually a nice, crisp fall day. I’m bundled up against the early December breeze, high on a ladder, as the boys frolic in the red and yellow autumn leaves on the lawn below. They “help” by holding the ladder, and climbing up to my feet when I’m down low. It seems like the essence of being a father and a family man is all wrapped up in that one chore, and it makes me feel content with my life.

The problem comes when I plug them in. Night falls, and I make the extension cord connection and then stand back to proudly admire my work. And there it is. The five feet of Christmas I despise: The five-foot section of icicle lights that is out, right in the middle of the string.

Dark. Nada.

We’ve got plug end, five feet of lit string, five feet of dark string, five more feet of lit string, and the prong end. Awesome! Right in the middle of the front of the house. My house could be a magical, sparkling, winter wonderland, but instead, that five-foot section of lights, out of the ninety-five total feet of lights, makes the entire house look stupid. The five-foot outage actually takes the whole effort and turns it upside down. Instead of improving the look of the house for the holidays, I have detracted from it, and made it look like the Christmas equivalent of the neighborhood delinquent’s house where the lawn is never mowed, there’s a car with a 2-inch layer of dirt and four flat tires in the driveway, and the screen door is hanging on one hinge. What a wonderful night!

My wife comes out and asks, “Didn’t you check them before you put them up?”

I grit my teeth.

My smart-ass neighbor yells from across the street, “You missed a spot!”

Yeah, thanks, Ted. Why don’t you go back inside now?

My son asks, “How come you didn’t put any lights right there?”

Time for you to go inside now, too, junior.

I would fix it, but I don’t know how. I don’t understand how it’s possible. Is the electricity jumping from one spot to another in the cord, bypassing some of the lights? How on Earth can both ends of a continuous string of lights be lit, but the middle is dark? It’s like turning the hose on at the house, cutting it in half in the middle, and still getting water out the other end.

I’m almost positive I used that string last year and it worked, otherwise I wouldn’t have kept it for this year, right? So please tell me what happened to it while it was tucked away in a plastic tub in my garage for the past eleven months. Did the copper wires melt during the summer? Did the electrons go on vacation? Does it just hate me?

To make troubleshooting even harder, I can’t recreate the problem on a string that works. I’m fairly sure it isn’t a bad bulb, because I can pull the tiny individual bulbs out of their tiny two-copper-wire-prong sockets in the lit strings, and the rest of the string stays lit. Why? Can someone please tell me why? Please! Why???

Oh, well. At least the Christmas tree lights work. Wait a minute…. The whole left side just went out. Great! Someone find the lawnmower while I fix this screen door hinge.

I need a sugar cookie.

And the solution:

Excerpted from “The Cool Yule Tool,” originally posted on justasmidge.com December 08, 2010

This past Saturday, I performed one of my most cherished and anticipated holiday chores. I put up the Christmas lights on the front of my house. (Those two sentences truly highlight for me the overwhelming worldwide need for a sarcasm font.)

I should back up a bit and start at the beginning. If you are a long-time reader, then you already know how I feel about the icicle lights we put up – and by “we” I mean “I” – on the house each year. I hate them.

Now, for you new readers, please don’t misunderstand. I love the look and feel of the lights on the house, and I love all things Christmas, but I hate my lights. It’s not the lights that are lit that I hate. I love those. It’s the five-foot section of lights in the middle of the string that don’t light that I despise from the very depths of my soul. We’re talking real, honest, loathing here.

Now let’s get back to this past Saturday morning…

Have there ever been times in your life when you have stopped and wondered why the you of the past was working against the you of the present? A perfect example of what I’m talking about occurred on Saturday.

I pulled out the two big plastic tubs labeled “XMAS LIGHTS” and popped the lids off. I stood in the garage in disbelief, staring down at a spaghetti-style mess of tangled light strings stuffed into plastic shopping bags. “Why would 2009 Marc have done this to me?” I asked myself. I extracted the first wadded up ball of icicle lights from the tub and slowly untied them into a straight line on the garage floor. I held my breath and plugged one end into the wall socket. There it was. The stomach acid-forming five-foot section of unlit bulbs, right there in the middle of the first string I pulled out of the tub.

I cursed under my breath, and a little over my breath, and retrieved another wadded-up string. This one was different when it was plugged in. The five feet in the middle worked fine, but both ends were out.

I tried to regulate my breathing as my temples began to throb and my right eye began to twitch. Why on Earth would 2009 Marc have done this to me? Why didn’t 2009 Marc throw these out? He had to know that 2010 Marc might have a stroke if he saw more bad light strings come out of the tubs. Did 2009 Marc wish 2010 Marc ill? He knows we’re the same guy, right? Why do I hate myself? Why????

I pondered what to do next. My 2009 alter ego had endured a humiliating Christmas season spent with a house that was 7/8 lit and 1/8 lame, resulting in 100% ugly, and amazingly, had done nothing to remedy the situation for the next year. Here it was, 2010. And there I was, standing in the garage, staring down at two malfunctioning light strings, trying to stop my eye from twitching.

I needed to make a decision. The way I figured it, I had two choices. It made no sense at all to put these lights back up on the house. Why would I intentionally make my house look like the Christmas equivalent of an abandoned Chevy Nova? No, the lights would not go up. I could either go inside and tell my wife that I would not be decorating the house this year, or I could put up some of the first string, wait until no one was looking, “fall” off the ladder in order to intentionally break my arm, and spend the rest of the day at the hospital.

I didn’t like option two at all, and after pondering option one for a minute, I decided it would likely end the same as option two. I was badly in need of a third option.

I was just about to start calling around for Mexicana Airlines one-way ticket pricing when it hit me like a ton of bricks. “The LightKeeper Pro!”

I had heard about this unbelievable tool last year when I was calmly discussing my five-foot outage issue with someone at work. He had heard from a friend of a friend about a mystical gun-shaped tool that fixed Christmas lights in the blink of an eye, just like magic. For some reason, 2009 Marc stored it away in his memory, but neglected to actually buy one for 2010 Marc. That guy is really starting to irk me.

I stopped dialing my travel agent, and dialed my local Ace Hardware instead. Justin answered the phone, and I inquired if he happened to have any LightKeeper Pros left in stock. He said that he had only a few left, and he had already sold 15 of them that morning. It was only 10:00 am. He promised to keep one at the counter for me if I promised to be there in ten minutes. I made it in four.

I slid sideways into the Ace parking lot, dove from my car, hurled open the doors, and pounced on Justin. He informed me that he had indeed saved a LightKeeper Pro for me, and asked if I could please let go of him and let him up. I dusted him off and gladly paid him $21.64, and raced home with the tool that I hoped would be the key turning point in my relationship with Christmas lights.

It did not disappoint.

Please know, I do not say this lightly. (Get it?) The LightKeeper Pro is the best thing that has ever been invented, anywhere, anytime, by anyone. The space shuttle, canned beer, baby wipes, the microchip, the wheel, bottled beer, air conditioning, disease resistant crops, nuclear fission, draught beer, soap, penicillin, the printing press, spandex, and even the home keg-erator all take a back seat to this marvelous, magical, marvelous, marvelous tool.

You simply pick any one of the tiny bulbs in the section that isn’t working, plug it into the front socket on the LightKeeper Pro, pull the trigger, and presto, the section lights up. I have read up on how it works, but I wouldn’t dream of boring you with the technical stuff. The only thing you need to know is that it works. It is amazing.

I happily hung up all my lights. Half of them didn’t work. I didn’t care. I hung them up anyway, and 10 minutes later, with the help of my new LightKeeper Pro, the entire house was lit continuously from one end to the other. There are really no words to describe the sense of sheer relief that this marvelous, marvelous tool has brought to my life. This small, hand-held, light-weight, twenty dollar tool not only saved my house from another year of neighborhood shame, but it may very well have saved my marriage and even my life in the process!

To top off the day, as if my new-found tool-of-the-millennium wasn’t enough, when I was hanging the lights my six-year-old came outside and announced that he would like to rake the leaves in the front yard… for fun.

Some days are better than others.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Speed Limit

2011-11-23T15:50:00.001-08:00

Our two oldest boys, Son Number One and Two, have started taking an interest in speed limit signs. We tried to put a stop to it, seeing that it could only lead to a bunch of annoying questions, but they are persistent. So we've been fielding questions like, "How come you're going 4-5? The sign said 4-0."

The other night, I was driving them home from a pizza party and had this conversation:

“Dad, you should be going 2-5, but you're going 4-0!”

“Why do you think I should only be going 25?”

“There was a sign back there that said 2-5.”
“Well, yes, son, but the 2-5 sign had the word 'school' over it. That means I only need to go 25 if kids are in school. It's night time. Do you think there are any kids at that school right now?”
“No.”
“Let me ask you something else, son. Can you reach the pedals from back there?”

“No.”

“Then stop trying to help me drive!”

Actually, I didn’t say that last part, but I was thinking it. What I did do was decide that I did not want to keep fielding annoying questions about the speed limit, so I decided to just go ahead and explain everything to them right then and there.

Turns out it's pretty hard to explain the speed limit to kids.

“OK, boys, here’s the deal. Speed limit signs are really just a guideline. A set of suggestions, if you will. But, that’s only in town. They mean totally different things on city streets than they do on the freeways. They are a hard and fast limit on the freeway, but nowadays they are really the reverse of what they were originally meant for. It’s complicated.

On city streets, technically they are a rule about the maximum speed you can travel, but realistically they are a guideline for more or less what speed you should be traveling. Think of them as a suggestion of a safe speed for a mediocre driver. If it says 40, then you can really go anywhere from about 35 to 50 miles per hour, depending on how good a driver you are. And believe me, there are all different skill levels of drivers out there. If you are a teenage girl holding a cell phone, you ought to be more or less parked, but definitely going no faster than 15. If you are like Daddy, and are a highly experienced driver with reflexes like a cat, you can go 55.

Unless there is a police officer behind you, then they are a rule.

On the freeway, the speed limit signs are something totally different. Technically they are the same thing as on a city street, but realistically, they are totally the opposite. They are supposed to be the maximum speed you are allowed to travel, but really, a speed limit sign on a freeway is the absolute minimum speed that anyone traveling behind you, including police officers, will tolerate. So, really, they are still speed limit signs, they are just the minimum speed limit. If you are going under the posted speed on the sign, you will be unsafely tailgated by everyone behind you, and if a police officer sees you going below the speed limit, he will pull you over to make sure you’re not crazy or on drugs.

There is an actual freeway maximum speed limit, but it is an unwritten rule of somewhere between 15 and 25 miles per hour above what is written on the signs, depending on which part of the state you are in. If you are in the range between the speed on the sign and the unwritten maximum, you’re OK. If you go over the unwritten maximum, however, and you get pulled over by the police officer, he will cite you for going over the posted speed on the sign.

Does that clear it up for you guys?”

“Uh, Dad?”

“Yes?”

“What does ‘technically’ mean?”

“Never mind.”

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“What’s the difference between a stop sign and a stop light?”

“Good question. They mean the same thing, only you always have to stop at a stop sign, but you only stop at a stop light if it’s red. But the stop signs only count if they’re on a real road. The ones in the parking lots are not real and don’t count.”

“So, you have to stop at all the stops signs on the real roads?”

“Yes.”

“But, Dad, you and Mom don’t stop at stop signs like you stop at red stop lights.”

“Well, son, we live in California. What we do at stop signs is called a California stop. You’re not really required to come to a complete stop. Unless there’s a police officer behind you. It’s complicated…”

Turns out it's pretty hard to explain stop signs to kids.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Boys Versus Girls

2011-11-16T18:48:00.001-08:00

The other day we had some friends and their kids over for one last backyard barbeque hurrah before old man winter puts the kibosh on that sort of thing. As will happen in the classic American barbeque scenario, the men ended up out on the back patio standing around the grill holding beers and watching the kids play, and the women ended up in the kitchen and living room drinking wine and complaining that the men were not watching the kids properly. At least that’s what we assumed they were talking about, since no man in the history of the classic American barbeque scenario has ever been foolish enough to go inside and inquire.

As you know, we now have a gigantic redwood play structure in our backyard that we got for “free.” The running total amount that the play structure has actually cost me is still climbing, what with the roofing materials I bought for it last week and the medical bills from the broken leg that are still coming in. I don’t want to talk about it. Anyway…

As the men huddled around the grill, and the women did whatever the women do inside the house, the boys were all playing joyously on the play structure. Six out of seven were playing on it, anyway. Our youngest son, who was the play structure’s first victim and the main reason for it not being very free at all, and who is still busy mending his femur in his Spica cast, was inside with the women. Poor kid. Anyway…

The other boys were having a great time playing some sort of fort/swing/cricket/dodge ball/jai-alai hybrid game that continually evolved with rotating team members and flexible rules, as kid’s games often do. It was hard to follow, but the kids seemed to always know what was going on. As near as the dads could figure, if you got hit with the batted Wiffle ball while in motion on one of the swings, you had to jump off the swing, climb up onto the play structure platform, and throw soccer balls at the guys with the bats. If you got hit with a soccer ball, you had to drop your bat and quickly get up to the platform and go down the slide before you were hit with one of your own Wiffle balls. If you caught the Wiffle ball, you had unlimited bomb powers… Like I said, it was hard to follow, but it was mighty entertaining.

A few times during the action one or two of the moms stuck their head out the sliding glass door to inquire about the safety of the game, but we assured them that Wiffle balls are mostly harmless, and the kids were just having fun, so everything was OK. They seemed unconvinced, but didn’t push the issue.

The game ran its natural course, lasting the standard 10 to 15 minutes of semi-coherent action, then devolving into small roving bands of children sort of still playing that game, but kinda playing something else. It eventually morphed into one small soccer game and a separate swinging height contest, both of which were far less entertaining for the adults. Just when we thought all the good action was over, a bright spot could be seen shining through the haze. One of the seven-year-olds seemed to have a quest. He had found our “Big Wheel” tricycle. You may have known it as a “Green Machine,” or by some other name, but if you’re my age, I’m sure you rode one as a kid. The all-plastic design, with the low-slung seat set back between the small-diameter wide rear wheels and the handlebars high above the large-diameter skinny front wheel with the direct-coupled foot pedals. An American classic. The Radio Flyer of the 70’s kids.

Our young beacon of hope had found the Big Wheel and was in the process of holding it by one of the handlebars while walking up the play structure’s slide, dragging the Big Wheel behind him. We dads thought that was fairly impressive, since Big Wheels, despite being made of plastic, are pretty heavy for a seven-year-old. He made it all the way to the top of the slide and onto the platform with his load, and then began getting into position.

The slide is plastic with wooden side rails, and only about 20 inches wide. He put the large front tire in the middle of the slide heading down, but since the Big Wheel’s rear axle was too wide for both back tires to fit on the slide, he had to cockeye the back end and put only one back tire on the slide, with the plastic undercarriage near the other tire resting up on the wooden side rail.

Quickly assessing the situation, using the innate risk versus reward software that men hone and refine in our brains over our lifetimes, we dads concluded that the drag from the plastic undercarriage on the wooden rail would offset the low-friction rolling wheels, keeping the rider at a relatively safe and manageable speed. He would need to pull up hard on the handlebars for the launch off the end of the slide onto the lawn, and then cut it hard to the right to avoid a head-on with the fence, but he could definitely pull it off. His worst case scenario was a few scrapes and splinters. Assessment: Totally worth it.

Approving of the venture, and eagerly anticipating the first test run, we watched as he worked out how to get onto the Big Wheel without it starting down without him. He was just making his way into the seat when a whole gaggle of moms came bursting from the living room and kitchen onto the patio, shouting, “No!!!”

We turned around in surprise to face the horde of naysaying mothers, shocked to see them glaring at us with icy, dagger-throwing eyes.

“It’s alright,” I said, trying to calm the group down. “That plastic frame isn’t going to hurt the wood.”

As it turns out, that wasn’t what they were concerned about at all.

As we listened intently to the ladies concerns, and I watched the young boy’s mom dismantling what would have been a perfectly mostly safe and totally awesome test run, a thought occurred to me. This is why there aren’t too many female test pilots.

When a girl looks at a steep hill, she thinks to herself… I honestly have no idea what she thinks to herself.

When a boy looks at a steep hill, he thinks to himself, “You know, if I was on something that had wheels, I could go really fast down this sucker!”

When a girl looks at a bike, or a skateboard, or a scooter, she probably thinks to herself, “That looks like a fun and effective mode of transportation,” or something like that.

When a boy looks at anything with wheels on it, he thinks to himself, “You know, I bet that thing would go faster if the back end of it was on fire.”

Boys are doing math at a young age, constantly putting two and two together. Play structure plus Big Wheel equals fun. Pool plus roof of house equals bigger splash. Firecracker plus anything else equals awesome.

I have tried, but it seems to be a very hard concept to explain to my wife. I just don’t think women really get it.

He totally would have made it!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Dog Collar

2011-11-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

There is a chill in the air. The mornings are crisp, and the afternoons are staying cool. The calendar says November, and that can mean only one thing for yours truly: Pheasant season. I am a bird hunter, and have been all my life.

You know the old saying; the only thing better than owning a swimming pool is having a friend who owns a swimming pool? The same is true for dogs if you are a bird hunter. I don’t own dogs, but my friend does. Actually, he’s also the one with the pool. He’s a really good friend!

I had been toying with the idea of getting a dog of my own, but there was an incident the night before opening day a few years back that changed my mind forever. I never realized how dangerous dog collars could be.

During the summer my friend had purchased two new remote collars for his pair of German Shorthair pointers. Dogs are supposed to stay close in front of the hunters during the hunt, but occasionally -- especially at the beginning of the season when they are extra excited to be back in the field -- the dogs get a little overzealous and get too far out in front. Just like my children, when dogs are excited about what they’re doing, they apparently lose the ability to hear their master’s voice. That’s where the remote collars come in. (For the dogs, not the kids.)

The collars have two modes of operation. They have an audible tone that alerts the dog that his or her attention is needed, and a small electric jolt that commands the dog’s attention if the tone is ignored. My friend’s brand new setup had a single remote that controlled both collars, and it wasn’t until the night before opening day of pheasant season that he realized he hadn’t even taken them out of their packaging yet. He put the two new collars on the wall charger, got batteries for the remote, and, being male, threw the directions in the trash can.

It was getting late, and we were meeting the next morning at oh-dark-thirty to hunt. When he decided it had probably been long enough, he took the two collars off the charger and began packing everything up. Then he had a thought: These collars were new, and the last thing he wanted was to be out in the field thinking the collars were working when they weren’t. He also wanted to make sure he knew which collar went with each set of buttons on the dual remote, so he wasn’t accidentally calling the wrong dog. He needed to test them.

He grabbed the remote and tested the audible tones. They worked great, and he was able to verify which buttons went with which collar. So far, so good. Then he tested the electricity. He put the power setting on level 1, and put his index finger on the silver contact inside the collar.

He pressed the button with his thumb.

Nothing.

Hmmm.

He touched the silver contact in the other collar, and pressed the same button.

Nothing.

Uh oh. Maybe he didn’t charge them long enough. Or maybe setting number 1 is such a small electrical current that it’s hard to actually feel.

Go to level 2.

Press the button.

Nothing.

Other collar, same button.

Nothing.

What is wrong with these things?

Let’s try level 4.

Nothing.

Dang it! I need these things to work tomorrow. They must have been charged up OK, because the tone works just fine, and it’s nice and loud. Maybe the electricity levels are just really light?

Try level 6.

Press the button.

Nothing.

Other button.

Nothing

Other collar, same button.

Nothing.

Other collar different button.

Nothing.

Damn it! Are these things defective? What kind of crap did I buy here?

All the way to level 10.

Nothing.

These things are broken! Now what?

Hmmm…

Maybe you have to be touching both silver contacts inside the collar?

Press the button…

Level number 10 on a remote dog collar is likely made for when your dog is over 20 miles away, or possibly when he is defiantly eating one of the birds in front of you, despite your verbal threats to his life. But even if you hit your dog with level 10, he would only feel a momentary shock. It turns out, however, that if you yourself are holding the button down, and receiving the level-10 shock, it works a little differently.

Since your body runs on electricity, adding more can cause your muscles to contract without your consent. If one or more of those muscles happen to be holding down a button, you may find yourself temporarily unable to release said button. It’s sort of an electrical “Catch-22.”

When my friend’s upper body hit the ground, his thumb finally came off the button. He found himself on the floor of his living room, still clutching the now smoking dog collar, having fallen forward over the ottoman, legs in the air behind him, face in the carpet, and drooling. There was a strong taste of burnt metal coming from the fillings in his molars, and he was pretty sure his heart had stopped for at least ten to fifteen seconds.

It was 10:30pm when he inadvertently Tasered himself. By 11:00pm he had somewhat regained his sense of direction and smell, but despite needing to be up at 5:00am, he stayed awake for another three hours, afraid if he fell asleep he might slip into a coma.

When he arrived to the hunt the next morning, I had never seen a man so deprived of sleep looking so wide awake. Or so surprised.

After I heard the story -- and after I got done laughing -- I gave up any notion of ever owning my own hunting dog. I don’t need any more electro-shock therapy in my life. I get enough already from my home improvement projects.

I’ll leave the dog ownership up to my good friend. (And the pool ownership, too.) Come to think of it, it’s a good thing he wasn’t standing next to his pool that night. That could have been ugly.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

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The Spica Cast, Part III

2011-11-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

I abandoned my principles on Monday, along with my scruples, my dignity and my pride. On Monday evening I went from solid, upstanding dad, to lowlife, begging, loser. It was really quite pathetic, but totally worth it.

As you probably know, my youngest son is in his fourth week of being confined to a Spica cast in order to heal his broken femur. He is dealing with being confined to his cast far better than his mommy is dealing with being confined to the house with him, but that is a whole other topic, and one I can’t really get into with you, for fear that she might kill me. Seriously, she’s that stir-crazy. Anyway…

All three boys were planning to be matching ninjas this Halloween. They already had their costumes, but when Son Number Three broke his leg and ended up in the mother of all casts, we talked pretty seriously about just getting four feet of gauze and covering up what was left of his skin, and going with “mummy-boy.”

He wasn’t having any of it. He politely explained to his mother that he would be a ninja, just like we had planned, because that was what he wanted to be, and also, “Mummies can’t pee.” We couldn’t fight our way through that iron-clad logic, so ninja it was.

Despite being completely rigid from the armpits down, he actually still fits in our stroller. We had already sold or donated our entire armada of strollers except one, which I had been constantly tripping over and cursing in my garage. I happily pulled it out of retirement when we realized he could “sit” right on the front edge. His cast is too wide for him to go all the way back into the seat, but if we stuff two bed pillows behind him he can kind of recline at a 30 degree angle with his leg sticking straight out in front, like a fiberglass battering ram. Cross your fingers that the miniature plastic stroller seat belt holds tight, and presto, movable child.

On the big night, my wife basically just sort of tied his black and red polyester ninja outfit to his cast. He was able to wear the torso portion and the ninja hood, but the legs of the costume were only able to lie on top of his legs. Fortunately, the costume came with ninja leg tie straps that I assume were supposed to simulate some kind of really inconvenient ancient Japanese footwear. On a normal five and six-year-old boy, they stay tied to their calves for about two minutes, then drag on the ground tripping the so-called ninja the rest of the time. On a three-year-old in a Spica cast, however, they are really handy for attaching the costume to the legs. A couple of black socks, and he was a mini ninja in a stroller. You almost couldn’t tell he was in a cast. That turned out to be the problem.

We set off into our idyllic suburban neighborhood to trick-or-treat. As we moved farther away from our house and our neighbors who already knew about Son Number Three’s leg, a strange thing began happening. My two ambulatory sons and their cousins would run up to a door, yell “Trick or treat,” get their candy from the smiling suburbanite, and make their way past Number Three and me who were last in line. The once naturally smiling homeowner would then force a smile, and almost reluctantly hand over another treat to the little ninja in the stroller.

The strange looks and forced smiles continued as the evening progressed, until I paused and assessed our situation. I came around the front of the stroller to take a look at my passenger. He was in good spirits and having fun, and his costume was staying in place nicely. That’s when it hit me. My wife had done too good a job of covering up the white cast with the black fabric. Standing there looking at him objectively, he looked like a perfectly normal three-year-old boy. A big, healthy three-year-old boy who should be walking, but instead was being lazily chauffeured by his ever-accommodating father. A boy at your door, lounging on two fluffy pillows, who couldn’t be bothered even to sit up from his slightly reclined position to accept your free candy.

Not wanting to continue to receive what I now understood were looks of scorn, and not wanting to have to explain our situation at each door, I simply removed the sock from the fully-casted foot, and adjusted the ninja pants a little, so that people could clearly see that his foot was in a cast. That should do the trick.

Holy cow, what a difference. We went from, “Taking it easy tonight, huh?” to “Oh, bless his little heart! Here, have five pieces of candy and a balloon.” It was a whole different world.

Things started to go downhill, morally speaking, from there. I have never been one to play the sympathy card, but the sheer increase in candy output we were seeing from the little bit of cast showing was astounding. Then the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups started showing up, and I lost all sense of decency. I love Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and the freer they are, the better they taste.

I don’t want to relive my downward spiral of shame and peanut buttery goodness in too great a detail, so let’s suffice it to say that by the end of the night I had the entire cast on display, a three-year-old who was trained to say, “It just hurts so much,” whenever I said the code phrase, “little trooper,” a stroller underside cargo basket loaded down with 45 pounds of candy, and no dignity left whatsoever.

Was it worth it? Were the endless peanut butter cups worth the price of my soul? Absolutely! Dignity is overrated, but Reese’s can’t be beat.

All I can hope for is that Son Number Three is too young to remember the lesson he was taught by his unscrupulous reprobate of a dad. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go buy his older brothers’ silence with some more of my Kit Kat bars and grab another peanut butter cup from my stash. Man, those things are good!

See you soon,

-Smidge

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The Spica Cast, Part II

2011-10-26T18:17:00.001-07:00

My three-year-old smells horrible. The boy reeks. He smells so bad, he’s hard to love. We are a little over two weeks into our Spica cast adventure, and it’s getting hard to take. If you do not know what a Spica cast is, please stop reading this and go back and read the “Just a Smidge” October 19^th post entitled, “The Spica Cast.” We’ll wait for you.

OK, so now we’re all on the same page.

Turns out, the Spica cast on a preschooler has a few hidden logistical issues. For starters, the only parts of him that are not in the cast are half a leg, some shoulders, arms and a head. That means that almost 80-90% of his skin is under the cast. Anyone who has ever worn a cast on any amount of their skin will attest to that being a major problem from the sweat/itch/stink “trifecta of fun” standpoint.

Now, for the mostly potty-trained preschool crowd, add wet diapers to the mix, and you’ve got yourself one smelly party.

During the day, pee is not an issue (as long as the parent running the urinal bottle has their head in the game). At night, however, the diaper occasionally gets peed in during a deep sleep. If all parties involved are sleeping, that diaper can stay wet and tucked inside that cast for hours.

Mind you, the diaper is doing its job. The people at Huggies® have got super-absorbency down to a science. There are no liquids getting into the cast. But keep that wet diaper tucked inside a hot, sweaty cast for a while, and the vapors tend to migrate up into the cast lining. The result is a three-year-old with such a pungent ammonia smell about him that if you get within three feet of him, your eyes water.

We, as his family, have the ability to get away from him if we need to. He is trapped, however, with his nose six inches from the top of the cast. If he comes through this with any sense of smell left at all, it will be a miracle.

During many of the daytime hours, my youngest son can be found lying on his stomach on top of his beanbag chair, sans diaper, proudly airing out his butt. It’s not dignified, but it is necessary. Besides, he’s three, so he could care less.

There’s one other reason I’m really glad he’s only three and doesn’t have a developed sense of dignity or shame. That would be the Summer's Eve® feminine deodorant spray. My wife has been scouring the internet, reading Spica cast tips from parents who have gone through this, and feminine deodorant spray was one of the suggestions to combat the stink.

I read the directions printed on the back of the flowery pink and white aerosol spray can: “Shake well; remove cap. Hold can 8-12 inches away from your lovely lady parts, and spray away.”

I’m so glad he probably won’t remember this.

After watching my wife spraying the exact opposite parts intended for use with said deodorant, and getting a whiff of the now flowery smelling ammonia cloud, I decided a more manly approach was required. Something with 110 volts. Something with some serious CFM. Something with spinning rotor blades and pressure differentials. We needed air flow, people. We didn’t need to cover up the smell, we needed to blow it away!

I set out into my garage to make a ventilator for the boy. We would be cooling him off and airing him out in no time.

Prototype Number 1 involved a 20” box fan, like the kind you use to ventilate a whole room. I fashioned a giant pyramid-shaped funnel out of cardboard and a half a roll of duct tape that necked the 20” square fan housing down to a 3” hole. My plan was to duct tape a vacuum cleaner hose to the hole, with the crevice tool attachment on the end of the hose. We could then stick the crevice tool down his cast, fire up the fan, and de-stink-ify our patient.

The only problem with the final product was that it was really big. It was lightweight and had a convenient handle, but the whole thing ended up being the size of a small filing cabinet. Just prior to attaching the hose, I happened to be in our bathroom and noticed -- perhaps for the first time in my whole life -- that my wife’s hairdryer had a “cool” button.

I charged downstairs and confronted her. “Your hairdryer has a cool button!”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“All hairdryers have a cool button. Why would I have told you that?”

“They do?”

“Yes, moron. How is the house-sized ventilator fan coming?”

Prototype Number 2 involved a $10 hairdryer, and the vacuum attachments I was going to use on Prototype Number 1. It was a lot easier to make, and only took me about 10 minutes to put together. I proudly displayed the new anti-stink solution to the family.

“What happened to the giant, inconvenient fan?”

“I ended up going a different direction. Say hello to the hand-held model.”

With the cool button locked down, I fired up the Conair® Cast Savior 2000 and felt the perfectly cool air rush out of the crevice tool and across my face. Oh, the joy. Oh the ventilating that would soon… wait a minute. The cool air was suddenly not so cool. In fact, it was warm and getting warmer. As it turns out, hairdryers were not meant to force air through three feet of flexible vacuum hose and a skinny nozzle. The motor couldn’t handle the pressure it was being asked to produce, and subsequently began heating up. Forcing hot air down an already warm cast seemed like a pretty bad idea. Starting an electrical fire near an immobile three-year-old didn’t sound like such a great idea either, so I was back to the drawing board.

“What’s wrong, honey? The ‘cool button’ not working out for you?”

“I just need to make some minor adjustments, that’s all.”

After my walk of shame back to the garage, the first adjustment I made was removing the hose from the hairdryer, and throwing the hairdryer in the garbage can. Now all I needed to do was figure out what to attach the hose to. Would my pride let me go back to the box fan? Would my wife ever let me live that down? Probably not, but it would be worth it if we could get rid of the ammonia smell… Suddenly, it hit me. The Aerobed®!

Of course! Why didn’t I think of this before? Our inflatable Aerobed® portable mattress has a big, beefy air blower on it. That thing is so powerful you can lie on the mattress while you’re filling it up. That baby will surely do the trick. I ran upstairs to the hall closet, yanked it off the shelf, brought it back to the garage, and pulled it out of its carrying case. All I have to do is take the motor and blower off the mattress and then… Oh, darn…

Can I really justify this? I could always go back to the box fan... But this would work so well. He really, really stinks. She’ll probably understand…

Ten minutes later I walked back into the house holding Prototype Number 3. The coffee can-sized black blower motor was skillfully attached to the vacuum hose with enough duct tape to adequately cover up the ragged edges of blue mattress vinyl that I had to cut with my razor blade knife to free the molded-on pump housing from the mattress itself. For good measure, I used enough silver tape to cover up the Aerobed® logo on the motor.

As I opened my mouth to tell the world of my triumph, my wife called to me from the kitchen. “Come here, honey. Look what I found online. It’s called the CastCooler®. You just wrap it around the cast, hook up your vacuum cleaner’s hose to it, turn on the vacuum, and it pulls fresh air into the cast and removes all the moisture and stink. I just bought one on Amazon for $39.99.”

“Wow. Sounds great, sweetheart. That should really do the trick.”

“Did you want to show me something?”

“No. I’m just going to head back to the garage.” I need to go get rid of a queen-sized blue tarp with the giant hole in it and order a new Aerobed®.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

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The Spica Cast

2011-10-19T19:30:00.000-07:00

“Daddy, I need to pee.”

“OK, buddy, hang on. I’ll be right there.”

My fully potty trained, three-year-old son is lounging on his back in the corner of the living room in a borrowed bean bag chair. He cannot be bothered to get up. I grab the plastic urinal bottle out of the “potty bucket,” and get down on my knees in front of him. I undo the protective outer size-6 diaper, and pull the inner size-4 diaper from its tucked-in position. I slide the plastic urinal between the bean bag and the wooden dowel, get it into position, and tell him to go for it.

Suddenly, everything is going wrong. Pee is spraying everywhere. I frantically try to reposition the bottle, but the pee just keeps going everywhere except where it is supposed to. What is happening? Why is this not working? Why am I an idiot? I left the cap on the urinal bottle. I think we’re going to have to keep this bean bag chair.

Such is life with a groggy dad and three-year-old in a Spica cast.

Son Number Three broke his femur last weekend, and we are in the middle of week two of the Spica cast. In case you are like me and had never heard of a Spica cast before, allow me to explain. SPICA stands for Sadistic Physician’s Inconvenient Children’s Apparatus. At least, I think that’s what it stands for. They didn’t actually tell us.

Since they cannot do orthopedic surgery on small children, apparently, the only way to mend a broken thigh bone in a three-year-old is to put him in the cast equivalent of a lower-body straight jacket. He is armor plated and immobile from his chest all the way down to his toes on the bad leg, and to mid-thigh on the good leg, with a nifty wooden dowel spreader bar attached at an angle between the two legs to keep them apart and rigid.

Our once highly mobile little boy is now basically luggage. He stays where we put him until it’s time to pick him up and move him again. Unlike a suitcase, however, his seemingly super-convenient wooden handle is strictly off limits for lifting. Plus, he yells when he gets bored. My Samsonite never does that.

Our orthopedic surgeon told us, about the cast, “If we ever come up with a better way to do this, we will. But as of right now, this is as good as it gets.”

As we were getting the tutorial on how to kinda sorta stuff a diaper up in and around the poop and pee access hatch, and then kinda sorta keep it in place with a bigger diaper around the outside of the cast, and then just sorta try to keep everything as clean as possible for the next 4 to 5 weeks, I thought to myself, “We put a man on the moon, but this is the best we as a country have to offer in the area of preschooler bone mending? I don’t think we’ve really fully applied ourselves, here.”

I guess I could put my engineering brain to work and try to come up with something more convenient, but it will have to wait. As the urinal bottle incident attests, I am not getting a whole lot of sleep lately. Just when my wife and I thought we were done with the sleepless nights of infant care and feeding, we’re suddenly back to sleeping in shifts. And the sleep we are getting is the non-satisfying light sleep that new parents and soldiers know all too well. Deep sleep never comes when your brain is busy listening for something all night.

We should be back to normal sleep in a few days. His pain level seems to be dropping off steadily, and he’s becoming his old cheery self during the days, albeit a little more hyper at times. We can’t fault him for that, though. When you cage a wild monkey, you’d better expect to hear the bars rattle.

On the first night that we were back from the hospital, I told him I was going to carry him up to his room, to which he replied, “Daddy, I don’t want to wear my cast to bed.”

He has since grasped the concept a little better, and has accepted his new reality a lot better than we thought he would. He even has a pretty good handle on the maintenance issues. His grandma and grandpa are here helping out, and the other night he announced that he had accidentally pooped in his diaper, instead of waiting for the bed pan. His grandma was the only one in the room when he made the announcement, and he looked at her concerned expression and asked, “Grandma, do you know how to do this?” When she hesitated, he said, “Go get mommy, please.”

We can’t really leave him in the care of anyone not prepared to handle the Spica cast, which is pretty much everyone else, so his social calendar has been put on hold. He is playing hooky from preschool for the next month, and my wife’s daily gym visits have stopped abruptly. The good news on both those counts is that he is no doubt being read to more now than ever before, and his cast weighs as much as he does, so my wife is probably getting a better weightlifting workout at home.

You have to look on the bright side of things in this life. Our precious little baby boy is hurting, but we’ve received more casseroles and cookies in the last week than you can shake a stick at. Some clouds have a delicious, buttery, oven-baked lining.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The "Free" Play Structure

2011-10-12T18:10:00.001-07:00

I now have a huge, redwood play structure in my backyard. It takes up one whole side of my back lawn. It has a big elevated deck with a sloping roof, two regular swings, a rope swing, a weird ball and handle swing, a chain ladder, a rope ladder, a regular ladder, and a slide. It even has an extra tire swing, if I could figure out where to mount it. The kids love it. Well, two out of the three love it, anyway.

We just got it this weekend. It was free. At least, my wife says it was free. I look at that a little differently. The price we paid for it was definitely zero dollars, as it was given to us by a friend of a friend whose family had outgrown it. The costs associated with getting this backyard behemoth to our house are another matter.

As my wife raves about our new “free” play structure, I just can’t help adding a few things up in my head:

Let’s see…

There were the three cases of beer that I bought for our friend and the previous owner as a thank-you. That was $49.

There was the 24-foot U-Haul truck that I had to rent to move the play structure from El Dorado Hills to Rocklin. That was $97.

There was gas for the U-Haul truck. That was $33.

There was the beer I bought for my brother-in-law and my friend who came over to help me retrieve, transport, and re-assemble the play structure. That was $32.

And lunch for the crew. One of whom ate three Chipotle burritos. $40.

And a pizza dinner for the crew and their families, since reassembly of the gargantuan play structure took all afternoon. Another $45.

If my math is correct, that already makes our free play structure cost at least $296. But let us not forget the hidden costs. I will inevitably have future work day obligations at my brother-in-law’s house and my friends' houses to properly complete the cycle of home improvement assistance reciprocation. Not only do those future days have gas and travel costs associated with them, but opportunity costs associated with all the things I won’t otherwise get done that day. Also, I’m confident that my wife will want to get rid of the grass that is currently under the new play structure, and replace it with decorative bark. There’s another future weekend down the drain, and bark is not exactly free.

And as for this past weekend, we also need to take into consideration the gas my wife and I used to get the U-Haul and the meals. The gas my crew used to get to my house and back. The thirteen wood screws and two lag bolts that I had to find in my garage to finish the installation. All these things add up.

Then, there’s also the ER bills. And the cost of the overnight hospital stay. The bill for the team of two orthopedic surgeons and the anesthesiologist in the OR. The missed day of work I had while getting the three-year-old’s femur re-set in a cast. Those things might add up.

Did I forget to mention the broken leg?

Now, Son Number Three has been to the park probably hundreds of times. He has played on countless different sizes of play structures, both at parks, school playgrounds, and other people’s houses. He has never jumped off the top of any of those.

Apparently, however, when the play structure is suddenly located in your very own backyard, that obviously means that you can also fly. At least, to my three-year-old it did. Ten minutes after we finished the installation, that play structure got a whole lot less free when mini Superman learned a hard lesson about gravity versus imaginary super-powers.

I haven’t received any bills from the hospital yet, but after going back through my records on some of our previous ER visits and hospital stays, I’m estimating the “free” play structure is going to end up costing me about $27,000, give or take a few hundred bucks.

Outstanding. Oh, well. At least I have less lawn to mow now.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

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The Great Juice Caper

2011-10-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

Son Number Two is five years old and is almost two months into his first year of Kindergarten. (We are hoping it’s his first and only year of Kindergarten, but based on our experience, you never can tell.) He has a best buddy in his class named Luke, and he and Luke are as thick as thieves. Actually, they are thieves.

Now, it is no surprise when little kids get into mischief. What is surprising is when two five-year-olds get together, hatch a devious and complicated plan involving simultaneous stealth and deception in two separate houses, and execute the plan flawlessly every day for two weeks unbeknownst to their parents, only getting caught by sheer happenstance.

The silent alarm that these two miniature partners in crime unknowingly tripped came in the form of a casual conversation between a mother and a teacher. My wife was volunteering in Number Two’s classroom one morning, and had a few spare minutes to chat with Mrs. Camarda.

“Your son is a real pleasure to have in this class.”

“Thank you.”

“He is such a sweet boy. He and Luke are inseparable. They are so cute at lunch with their juice.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said he is a sweet boy…”

“No, no. About the juice.”

“Oh, you know. When he and Luke buy their juices at lunch. They think that is so fun.”

“He buys juice at lunch!?!”

“Well, not every day. Sometimes they buy chocolate milk.”

“What!?!”

Upon further questioning, it turns out that the cafeteria at my son’s elementary school sells juice for a quarter and chocolate milk for fifty cents. Number Two and his buddy had been throwing back delicious lunch-time school beverages every day for at least two weeks. Luke’s mom happened to be volunteering on the same day, so she was immediately brought into the conversation to compare notes. Both boys were being sent to school each day with a lunch box and a bottle of water, and neither one had ever been authorized by a parent to purchase any extracurricular liquids, nor was either one ever given any money to do so.

My wife called me later that morning in hysterics. Hysterical laughing, that is. She explained what she had learned, and amazed, noted that Number Two had somehow apparently been leaving the house with money in his pocket every morning without us knowing. The questions were plentiful. Where was he getting the money? When was he getting it? Was he bringing money for Luke, also, or vice versa? Why is juice only a quarter? Can I, as a dad, get in on that? Etc.

As any good parents would do, we weighed our response options. How should we handle this? Should we sit him down and have a talk with him, or booby trap his piggy bank and scare the living daylights out of him? We debated for a while, but in the end, our hand was forced by the sheer lack of information we had. The junior juice larcenists had us in the dark. We had no idea where the money was coming from, so we were forced to talk with him without setting any elaborate trip wire/air horn devices. Oh, well.

Aside from being a key player in a beverage crime syndicate, Son Number Two is generally a very honest and generous boy. We were sure of a few things: If he was getting the money from a piggy bank, it would be from his own. (His older brother, Son Number One, would have been a whole different story.) Also, it was possible that he was funding the whole operation. He would happily buy his friend juice every day without thinking twice about it, and that would put us in the awkward position of needing to praise his generosity while chastising his deception.

As it turns out, each member of the Capri Sun cartel was paying his own way. Upon intense questioning by two moms who were trying very hard not to laugh, both boys sang like canaries. With an odd mix of relief and disappointment, my wife found out that Luke was the mastermind. It was his idea to steal the car, and our son had decided to come along for the joy ride. Number Two had been sneaking downstairs to his piggy bank early each morning to get his daily quarter and secret it into the pocket of his school clothes before getting dressed. As it turned out, Luke didn’t have access to his piggy bank, so he had been swiping coins from him mom’s kitchen change jar that was meant for vacation spending money. Busted!

They were getting together each day to decide on juice or chocolate milk, so they would know if tomorrow would be a one or two-quarter day. That is seriously long-range planning for five-year-olds, and amazing when you compare it to their lack of ability to remember almost anything else about their daily routine. Number Two can’t remember to brush his teeth even though he has to do it every morning and evening. He can’t remember to wash his hands even though he has to do it before every meal. But when it comes to deception and covert refreshment operations, he can remember to hold daily planning meetings, remember what the next day’s cash requirements are, and remember to pilfer the correct amount each morning before dawn. Go figure.

When all the details of the caper were uncovered, the four parents had a good chuckle, but our reactions to the miniature crime spree were mixed. We all had the same general thought, but the men and women viewed it from slightly different sides, as is so often the case.

Both mothers said, “Oh, great. They’re able to fool us already, and they’re only five years old. High school is going to be a disaster!”

Both dads said, “Holy cow. They can already fool us at five years old. That is so cool. I wonder what kind of stuff they’re going to be able to pull off by the time they’re in high school?”

Women are always looking at things so backward.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

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Kids Say the Darndest Things

2011-09-28T22:03:00.001-07:00

One of the great joys of parenthood is, of course, making stuff up when your kids ask you a question that you can’t answer. It really is the part of parenting that I enjoy the most. The thing I enjoy the second best is hearing the random thoughts, jokes and words of wisdom that come out of their mouths. Here are some of my three sons’ highlights:

I was eating lunch the other day with Son Number Three, who at three years old is a notoriously slow eater. He actually ate his lunch at a reasonable pace and finished before me, and wanting to praise that behavior, I said, “You finished before I did. Good job buddy!”
He replied, “Yeah, I beat you up."
"No, you beat me."

Driving with Son Number Three, he pipes up from the back seat and says, “Daddy, if you need to use the phone with two hands, the car will drive itself.”

“I don’t think so, dude.”

“Mommy does it.”

I guess Daddy needs to have a little chat with Mommy.

One of Number One’s best buddies was over at our house, and all the boys were playing Star Wars. The six-year-old guest runs up to me wearing a Darth Vader cape and brandishing a red light saber and says to me in a very serious voice, “You cannot estimate our powers!”

I think you mean, “Don’t underestimate the power of the Dark Side,” buddy.

Son Number One, while eating lunch, sets his sandwich down, sighs heavily, and says, “Wow. It has been such a long day already, I feel like it’s tomorrow.”

Been there, man.

Son Number Two, while on a bike ride around our neighborhood says to me, “Dad, I’m thirsty.”

“OK. You can get some water when we get back to the house.”

“Yeah. I’m going to have a bagel and some water.”

Huh?

While riding in the car with the whole family, we had a very rare few moments of silence. Prior to the calm, we had not been discussing anything remotely associated with food, so it caught my wife and me slightly off guard when Son Number Three comes out of the blue with, “Mommy, if you give me four cookies, then I could have a cupcake.”

While I appreciate your optimism, I’m not following your logic.

Our boys have always picked strange things to be jealous of their brothers over. Son Number One has allergies, and Number Three was apparently feeling left out when it came time for medicine.

“Mommy, I have allergies.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do. I have two allergies in my eyes.”

We don’t have medicine for that.

Upon entering a public bathroom, Son Number Two says to me, pointing to the opposite wall, “Look dad, confetti.”

“You mean graffiti.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Son Number One and Number Two were attempting to play Frisbee. They were too far apart from each other, and having no luck getting the Frisbee to fly straight, so I offered some advice.

“Get closer to each other like when you play baseball catch so you can control it better.”
“Dad, we don't control Frisbees. Frisbees control themselves.”

I can’t argue with that. That has always been my experience, too.

We had finished dinner and were in the middle of a dessert of fresh fruit. Son Number One had apparently had his fill, and asked to be excused. When I told him that he needed to stay at the table and visit while everyone else finished, he asked for some more strawberries and watermelon. When he had finished his second helping, I asked if he wanted more. He said, “No thanks,” and then asked to be excused again. When I said no again, he asked for more fruit. At that point his mom asked him why he kept eating after he had asked to be excused. He replied, “Well, I don’t want to waste my time just sitting here.”

When it comes to food, growing boys are all business.

Son Number Two, eager to show off his new math skills, exclaimed, “Dad, listen, I can count all the way to one hundred!”

“Let me hear it.”

“One, two, three, four, five, six, I can’t really do it. I can count all the way to ten, though.”

He hasn’t quite mastered the art of under-promise and over-deliver yet.

Our three boys share a room, with the oldest being in his own bed, and the younger two in bunk beds. As I was turning out the light one night, Son Number One made the observation about Son Number Three, “We’re next-door neighbors when we sleep.”

Number Two calls down from the top bunk, “And I’m their up-door neighbor.”

Can’t argue with the logic.

One morning, at four years old, Son Number Two ran excitedly into our room and yelled, “Daddy, my chin weighs six pounds!”

(After lying prone on the floor with only his chin resting on the digital bathroom scale.)

Son Number Two had croup when he was four. After a bout of coughing, he thought for a second and said, “Maybe I’ll cough up this bug and we can see what kind it is.”

I wonder if he got croup from lying on the bathroom floor with his chin on the scale?

I made a special outing with all three boys to get In-N-Out Burger milkshakes. We had ordered and were waiting in the drive-thru line. There was a diesel pick-up truck in front of us, and when I rolled down the window to pay, Son Number One asked, “Why is it so noisy?” I told him it was the truck in front of us, to which he responded, “Oh. I thought it was the blenders.”

How big do you think these milkshakes are going to be?

Speaking of fast food restaurants, I was eating at a Wendy’s with Number One and Two, and we were having a very father-and-sons kind of time, so I thought I would take the opportunity to tell them about the wonderful story of Dave Thomas, Wendy’s founder. I explained to them that he was adopted as a child, and how he always appreciated that fact, so with his financial resources from his business he created the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. The boys listened attentively to my story, thought for a while, and then Number Two looked up at me and said, “Dad?”

“Yes, Son?”

“I have a motorcycle on my shirt.”

Swing and a miss.

And my personal favorite…

I had just come home from a long day at work, and I trudged upstairs to find my boys playing in the game room. When he saw me, the first words out of Son Number One’s mouth were, “I’m the town constable of Uranus.”

It doesn’t really matter what kind of day you’ve had after hearing that. That’s funny right there!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Tough Mudder

2011-09-21T21:51:00.001-07:00

Twenty-five seconds into the course my thighs were on fire. My first thought was, “Oh, no. That can’t be good. I’m going to be running out here for three hours, and I’m already tired! ”

I was wrong. I would be out there for five hours, and I would not be running. Not very much, anyway. About thirty-five seconds into the course I had to stop running and start trudging. Everyone did. We were going straight uphill, and not just any hill. We were at 6200 feet in elevation going straight up a ski slope at Squaw Valley, CA.

Half a minute earlier, on that clear, sunny day, I had been full of energy, jumping around, yelling, chanting, high-fiving, and raring to go. Now I had my head down, watching my feet, power-walking and breathing fast and hard. How quickly things change at 6300 feet.

There were 600 people in my starting group. There were 2400 people already on the course, and another 4800 people that would come behind us, one group every 20 minutes. We all had the same information going in. It would be a 12-mile course with 20 different military-style obstacles. What we didn’t realize was what a truly sadistic course designer has to work with when putting together a 12-mile trail at Squaw Valley. We were in for a few surprises.

At mile marker one, we were face down in the water, belly-crawling across granite under barbed wire that was hanging so low, you had to put your face under water to get underneath it. It was at mile marker one that I realized that hearing or reading “military-style obstacle” is very different than actually tackling a military-style obstacle. They kinda hurt.

Out from under the barbed wire, up on your feet, and headed straight uphill again. Only soaking wet now. Two miles and 1000 vertical feet later and we were at another water obstacle. Jump into the chest-deep cold water, duck under the plywood divider, and climb out the other side. Keep running. A mile later and another 500 vertical feet, we arrived at the High Camp Bath and Tennis Club. It sits at 8200 feet above sea level and is apparently very nice. We didn’t get to look around much. On the tennis courts sat water obstacle number three. Same as number two, but with ice water. You literally had to fight your way through the floating ice cubes to get out.

We went into the water five more times over the course, spaced out so as to keep you wet and cold for the whole run. In between the swims, we got to climb steep walls, hang from monkey bars, shimmy up ropes, crawl through pipes, traverse over and under log walls, and even crawl under a cargo net on some of Squaw’s year-round snow at 8700 feet. The obstacles ended up being a fun diversion from the really nasty part. They were not content to march us straight up to the top and back down again. We went up, then came down, then went up higher, then came down lower, then went up even higher than before, then back down… You get the idea. We made five different “death marches” during the course.

At the half-way point, after carrying a log around a ¼-mile steep rocky loop and depositing it back on the pile for the next victim, we made it to the very top of the mountain on death march number four. Mile marker six was on Squaw Peak at 9000 feet. We had made it to the top of the world. That made the fifth death march a little surprising. Somehow they found a way to go up again after we came down off the top. Go figure.

Two hours later, when I got hit with the 10,000 volt electrical wire, 20 feet from the finish line, I was done being surprised. This was the Tough Mudder, and they don’t mess around.

With the high-voltage current still bouncing around my synapses, I made it across the finish line to collect my trophy orange head band, my t-shirt, and my celebratory beer. Dos Equis amber and bananas are not known for their complimentary flavors, but at 2:30 on Sunday afternoon, nothing ever tasted so good!

There were three kinds of people on the course that day: The GI Joes, the average Joes, and the gym rats. As for the military personnel, there were a lot of them, and they were right at home. More than a few of their groups felt the need to make the course a little tougher by carrying something. I saw one guy carrying a 2-foot diameter wooden wire spool over his head, a Marine sergeant wearing a 20-pound weight vest, and even a team of Special Forces guys that carried an inflatable raft through the whole course. The US military simply puts out the best of the best. Super tough.

The gym rats on the other hand, are not tough. They are just young and pretty. They have shaved torsos, low body fat percentages, shiny muscles, and they can run really fast when they are warm. They are not cut out for the Tough Mudder. They don’t react well to being wet and cold. They were cramping up all over the place. Us average Joes have been training for this. We’re the ones who constantly have to be in the pool/lake/ocean watching the kids while the gym rats sun themselves on the deck/shore/beach. At home, us folks with young ones are constantly giving a squirmy kid a bath, getting peed on or being thrown up on. We’re wet and cold all the time. That kind of on-the-job training, plus our superior body fat percentages acquired through old age and Little Caesar’s five dollar pizza, gives us an edge.

Water events aside, being a suburban parent has a lot more inadvertent Tough Mudder training components than I had realized. Going over fences after lost Wiffle balls, walking barefoot across Lego minefields, slithering under the dining room table to play in the “fort,” putting fitted sheets on a bunk bed, crawling around on the floor of the SUV looking for the lost sippy cup; it all helps. My dad-ly training even came into play during the log carrying obstacle. The gym rats were foolishly trying to carry their logs on their shoulders. I just cradled that sucker in one arm and rested it on my hip. I’ve been carrying 35-pound kids like that for years.

All in all, it was a great experience. While I might not ever need to experience it again, I am very glad I did it. I was expecting to be completely immobile on Monday, but my legs were in surprisingly good shape. I am pretty well bruised and banged up everywhere else, though. I sneezed midday Monday and almost cried. I have taken more Advil in the last four days than in my whole life prior to now.

I seem to be healing up at an average Joe pace, so I can’t complain. I’m not allowed to anyway. It’s part of the Tough Mudder credo. No whiners.

The really good news is the involuntary flinching from the 10,000 volt shocks has fjgfyfncxvhbcu pretty much stopped.

The crazy Tough Mudder events (www.toughmudder.com) and the crazy people who enter them have raised over $2 million for The Wounded Warrior Project (www.woundedwarriorproject.org), which is a fabulous organization that helps injured service members through their challenges back at home. The NorCal event at Squaw Valley raised more money than any other Tough Mudder event to date. Thanks a million to all who donated to the WWP on my behalf. The Marines from the course send you a big “OORAH!”

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Soap, Part II

2011-09-14T18:03:00.001-07:00

Our boys have started to take showers on their own. Up until now, we had been giving them baths. The decision to move to the shower was spurred mostly by the fact that all three of them don’t fit in the bathtub together anymore, and giving three individual baths really cuts into my TV time.

I still have to give Boy Number Three baths, but it was about time the older two started pulling their own weight in the personal hygiene department. Plus, we really wanted to see if the shower in their bathroom actually worked. We have lived in our current house for almost three years now, and up until this week, no one had ever used it. When I finally got the handle to turn, after the loud clanging noise subsided, water actually came out of the showerhead, so we were good to go.

After the Body Wash Incident of Early 2011 (See “Soap,” posted February 2, 2011) my wife has been sure to keep me stocked with plenty of good old-fashioned bar soap. Since my wife has inexplicably stuck with the body wash, and the kid’s baths get done with baby shampoo, up until now, our bar soap had been used only by me. So, this week was Boy Number One and Two’s first experience trying to wash themselves with a big bar of soap. Witnessing that slippery learning curve instantly flooded me with childhood memories of soap. I had a strange upbringing, soap-wise.

My dad was a pilot for Delta Airlines. In the early days of his career, with a wife at home raising three small kids, he would always bring the little bars of unopened hotel soap and the small bottles of shampoo home from his trips to help with the household budget. His flight schedule usually had him gone multiple days at a time, so he collected a lot of soap. So much so, that we never ran out. As the years went by, the Hilton/Marriott/Ramada soap harvesting never stopped. I showered with a tiny, fits-in-the-palm-of-your-hand bar of soap from my very first shower until I was 18 years old. (Actually, I showered with a different one every other day. They don’t last very long.) As a result, I never had any early childhood regular-sized soap training.

I vividly remember the first time I used a real bar of soap. I was at least 6 or 7 years old, and we were staying with my grandparents while my parents went on a week’s vacation. I stepped into the unfamiliar shower and was immediately transfixed by the GIGANTIC bar of BRIGHT GREEN soap. (The hotel soap was white, tan, or the occasional exciting off-pink.) This was Irish Spring, and it smelled AMAZING. (The hotel soap smelled like almonds, talc, or nothing.) This giant, magical, colorful, brick-sized bar of cleanliness filled the entire shower with some heavenly, yet previously unknown fragrance. Apparently – based on the TV commercials of the 1970s -- it was supposed to remind me of the wonderful smell of a lush green Irish glade near a waterfall where I was walking hand-in-hand with a bonny lass in a turtleneck sweater, but since I had never done that, I didn’t recognize the smell. To me it just smelled strong and wonderfully different.

Then I tried to pick it up and use it. Now, big bars of soap are hard to handle for any six-year-old, but to a lad that had previously only worked with soap the size of a bite-sized candy bar, this slimy behemoth was almost totally unmanageable. I must have dropped it, picked it up, and dropped it again a hundred times. The racket coming from the shower got so loud, my Grandma came in to check on me, but I was so embarrassed about not being able to work the soap, I told her that everything was just fine, and I obviously didn’t need any help. She left unconvinced.

After a half-hour of soap hockey, I finally ended up attempting to soap myself up while holding onto the massive slippery green bar with two hands at once. That is a pretty difficult maneuver, and I'm not sure how clean I actually got myself that day. Marginal hygienic success aside, it was one of the most memorable days of my childhood, so taken was I by the giant, fragrant green soap.

If asked to come up with the defining TV characters of their childhood, most guys my age would probably list the likes of Superman, The Fonz, Mean Joe Green, Bo and Luke Duke, etc.

I’m guessing very few would list an actor from a soap commercial. To my list, however, I must include the guy in the snappy turtleneck and sport coat, standing in the field cutting the bar of Irish Spring open with his pocket knife. When I saw that commercial as a kid, I thought to myself, “Yeah, I was that guy for a day. Fresh and (insert wolf-whistle here) clean as a whistle!”

But alas, that one shower was the extent of my Irish Spring glory as a child. My parents came back from vacation, and it was small soap business as usual again.

There was, however, one major up-side to growing up with miniature soap. As kids, we never had our mouths “washed out with soap,” a la Ralphie in A Christmas Story, sitting with the bar of Lifebuoy in his mouth. My mom was probably afraid we’d accidentally swallow the hotel soap.

My boys won’t be so lucky. I’ve got plenty of full-sized bars of Irish Spring. I love that stuff!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!