Mundane Thoughts That Pop Into Biller's Head

Law and Disorder

2005-10-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

You’re going to spend a lot of time investigating the criminal activities of your children. Crimes such as The Peanut Butter and Barbie Sandwich Affair and the string of compact disc thefts from late 2003 still haunt our tiny house. And residents still whisper and lower their eyes when speaking about Crayongate. Yes, life with young children will often present you with mysteries which are difficult to solve for a variety of reasons, including uncooperative witnesses (the kids), inept law enforcement (the dog), and corrupt judicial officials (that would be me – I’ve been known to sink pretty low to get results. The Snickers Bar bribery scandal comes to mind).

My most recent investigation involved the dining room table, something sharp and one of the children’s names. I was setting the plates around the table – a job normally reserved for the children, but for some reason I was doing it myself – when I noticed one of the children’s name was carved into the table in letters about half in inch high. A rookie investigator would have been tempted to immediately call the usual suspects into the room and immediately begin interrogating until he had answers. But I have been at this game too long to dive into interrogations without a little preparation. Plus, I had a Thai coconut squash soup on the stove and it needed to be stirred or else it would get all lumpy on the bottom and nobody wants that. Not to mention the cheddar crisps I had toasting in the oven. No, I would need to prepare myself for what was sure to be a test of cunning and intelligence. Would I be able to outwit a three year old and her four brothers and sisters? Only time would tell.

The first thing I did was set a plate over the evidence. That way anyone who may want to glance over at their handy-work would spend a little more time gawking around as they tried to find the carving. Criminals almost always return to the scene of the crime – they like to rub our noses in it. Also, it was dinner time, so the criminal was forced to return to the scene of the crime, but never mind that. As the children ate dinner, they all looked fairly shifty to me – probably because they had all been up to something or other, but this was the only crime I had proof had taken place. Since no one spent and inordinate amount of time trying to look at the table, I moved on to the second phase of the investigation: casually buttering them up.

Not, you know, putting butter on them – I can see why, since this was at the dinner table, you might be confused by the term “buttering up,” but it just means to build up their confidence and lower their defenses. We haven’t had to actually apply dairy products to a child since the Skunk Taunting Milk Bath of 2001.

“So, how was everyone’s day,” I asked. I watched carefully to see who looked away. All of them did. Then they ignored me completely – this didn’t surprise me, as they were merely following Kid Law, which clearly states that unless an adult as you, specifically, a very specific question about your day, you must not answer that question. Group questions were right out. If I ask a specific kid, “How was your day?” I can expect that he will answer, “Fine.” He’ll give that answer even if his school day was marred by a terrorist in the cafeteria. Had there actually been a terrorist attack on the school, I would only be able to get that information from him by asking very detailed, very specific questions.

“How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Did you do anything fun? Did you learn anything?”

“I guess.”

“Did anything exciting happen today?”

“No.”

“Did anyone try to detonate a dirty bomb during lunch?”

“Yes.”

I move on to asking each child specific questions, but I stay away from tipping my hand too early. I am tempted to ask Achilles when was the last time he had seen his pocket knife, just to see the reaction of the table, but I bite my tongue – seriously, I bit my tongue eating a piece of pecan pie we had for dessert and my investigation stalled.

While we were clearing the table, I had my accomplice, Junior Detective Stacy, pretend to find the carving. I then called all the children into the room and swung my investigation into high gear. I put them at the end of the table like a police line-up and I launched into my speech.

“Someone has been playing games. Someone has been destructive. Someone has decided the rules just don’t apply.”

Five blank faces.

“I want you all to take a look at the table – right there at the end. What do you see?”

Five blank faces.

“Well, what do you see?”

“Wood,” says Suspect One.

“The table,” says Suspect Two.

“A wooden table,” says Suspect Three.

Suspect Four has forgotten the question.

“I wanna tell you sumpthin,” says Suspect Five. I know from experience that what Suspect Five, being three years old, wants to tell me is, “I love you,” because that is what she always says when she senses tension. I don’t suck for her tricks.

“Does anyone notice the name carved into the table?”

Five blank faces.

I change the question. “There is a name carved into the table – whose name is it?”

“I wanna tell you sumpthin,” says Suspect Five.

“It says, ‘Queen Mab,’” says Suspect Two.

“That’s true, it does,” says Suspect Four.

“I see wood,” says Suspect Three.

“That’s not how I spell my name,” says Suspect One.

And it was true. Despite the fact the Queen Mab’s name was the one carved into the table, I had already pretty much decided she was probably not the culprit, given that her sixth grade education would almost have certainly allowed her to spell Queen Mab without using a K. Suspects Two, Three and Four all turned to look at Suspect Five, as if I might buy the fact that the three year old had carved the name in the table. I wasn’t ready to totally eliminate anyone as a suspect just yet, so but I decided the focus of my attention should probably go elsewhere.

“You know what I think,” I asked Two, Three and Four? “I think it was one of you three.”

“It could have been one of use,” said Two, “But have you considered the fact that it may have been Queen Mab trying to get one of us in trouble?” Two is the junior lawyer in the family and often tries to argue himself out of trouble based on semantic technicalities – his win to loss ratio is atrocious, but he tries hard. In this case, he didn’t think this was an absurd idea at all. Truth be told, I had briefly considered this scenario already, but Suspect One didn’t fit that profile. If she had an axe to grind with one of the other children, she would hit them with it – that’s her profile. Suspect Two sensed I wasn’t believing this, so he shut up. A wise move.

Suspect Two does, in fact, own a pocket knife, so he was pretty high on the list, until I remembered that he had been at a friend’s house all afternoon, which was the time frame forensics had given me for when this crime took place. That left only Suspect Three and Suspect Four. They both looked guilty to me, so I just stared and waited.

“Can I speak to my lawyer?” Three asked.

“Mom is working on the dishes,” I replied. “If you cooperate I can make sure things go smoothly
for you on the upcoming Hidden Candy Bar Wrappers In The Bedroom Case.”

Suspect Three mulled this over for a moment, looked up at the ceiling, down at her shoes and said, “I ain’t no rat.”

Which, actually, she was, since she was pretty clearly indicating that it wasn’t her, which only left one suspect – Number Four. I pulled the hanging dining room light over the top of Number Four’s head.

“We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” I told him.

In retrospect, I probably should have cuffed him immediately, because I left the room to refill my coffee mug and he fled through an open window. After a short bicycle chase which ended in a fiery crash on a neighbor’s lawn and a foot race across the park, I once again had the suspect in custody. You can catch the whole thing on COPS this Saturday night.

A Word About Trophies

2005-10-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I want to talk for a minute about trophies and why, exactly, it is that kids even play sports. As a psychology major, I greatly enjoy dissecting and analyzing why people – kids included – do what they do. Sometimes I am completely unable to understand a person’s motivation for a specific act and sometimes I think I understand, but I am waaaay off. Like the time I claimed that Jennifer Aniston was such a bad actress because she was signaling to me through the television. I have since discovered (and I discovered this before the retraining order, so I was not in violation) that this was not actually the case – she merely has bad timing. In my defense, I’d like to point out that I was not attacking her – I was merely trying to get close enough to explain that I am already married and I cannot possibly have the kind of relationship with her that she is asking for. So, sometimes I’m wrong.

But, I feel fairly confident in saying that the reason kids play sports is not to get a trophy at the end of the year. Although it is just my opinion, I believe there could be no trophies given to each team member at the end of a season and it wouldn’t increase or decrease the number of kids participating in each sport. For those of you who are reading this in preparation for your child’s first season of organized athletics, let me fill you in on what the heck I’m talking about.

At the end of every sports season your child will receive a trophy. Nothing terribly elaborate – maybe a little six inch high job with a baseball player or a soccer player or what have you. The name plate generally won’t be personalized but will list the year and sport played. And Junior is going to get one of these every single season. Every season.

The reason I comment on this is because this is Not How It Was When I Was A Kid. Now, as I have mentioned, I was a pretty good athlete. Captain of two teams, winner of three state championships – have I mentioned it? Anyway, I mention it here to point out that I was not a bookworm who never participated in sports (a fact which can be verified with my old report cards) – I played three sports a year from the time I was in second grade through high school. And I was 14 years old before I received my first trophy.

Ah, I remember it well – Coach Page’s summer basketball camp. I received a Player of the Week trophy – the smallest trophy I ever got, I think. A little granite base holding a gold basketball player shooting the most awkward one handed shot imaginable (I think Coach Page had this designed especially for me). I remember the incredible amount of work it took to earn that trophy – how much extra hustle I had to put in, how much sweat and effort. I earned that trophy and no one else. The other players could have earned it, but it was me who beat them out – for that week, I was the star.

I had to ride my bike home with one hand to carry the glorious monument to my hard work and effort and I intentionally rode through town so that anyone who happened to see me would know that I – Aaron Bradbury – had won a trophy. During the next four years I received probably half a dozen individual trophies and they were all great, but the feeling I had from winning that first trophy was amazing. It was a beautiful thing and I can honestly say it was one of the prouder moments of my life.

Kids These Days don’t get to experience that feeling. And I don’t say that to be the crotchety old guy who thinks everything was better when he was young. As a child of the 70s and 80s, I can say with great confidence that everything was definitely not better when I was young. For proof positive, I give you disco and the Police Academy movies. I say kids don’t get that feeling because these days kids get trophies for every sport they play; therefore, it is impossible that they are getting any sort of a rush out of receiving one. After all, if you play Little League, you get a trophy, regardless of whether you were good, bad or even owned a glove. You can be the worst damned player in the history of the sport and still get a trophy. You can show up for half the games and play like a monkey humping a football during the other half and it doesn’t matter – you still get the trophy.

I’m sure this all started as a misguided effort to boost all the kids’ confidence and make everyone feel like they were a valuable part of the team. I’m sure that the same type of adults who decided every player needs a trophy were the same group that decided we shouldn’t keep score during soccer games - misguided individuals who either don’t have kids of their own or never talk to them if they do. These are the kind of adults who think kids are too stupid to keep track of the score on their own. I have news for you – the only people not keeping score are the adults. Every kid on the soccer field knows the score. Do these people really think kids can’t keep track of a game that is going to have a final score of 2 to 1? Or in the case of some of my teams, 10 to 1?

Trophies are the same kind of thing. When a kid gets a trophy at the end of the season he isn’t fooled into thinking he was instrumental to the team if his biggest contribution was accidentally tripping an opposing player on the sideline. He can see all the other members of the team getting the trophies, too. It’s not rocket science to understand that every player getting a trophy means the trophy is worthless.

To be honest, I blame my parents’ generation for starting this. When I was a kid our school held an annual field day – kind of a mini-Olympics where we did all the run and jump track and field events. At the end of the day, the first second and third place finishers for each event at each grade level were given a blue, red or white ribbon denoting their accomplishment. And anyone to uncoordinated to get a real ribbon was given a green “nice try” ribbon that my brothers and sister used to refer to as a “loser identification badge.” I never understood the concept. By sticking a green ribbon on these kids, it just advertised to the whole world that they didn’t win a damn thing that day – that just seems cruel to me. After all, if they were wearing no ribbon at all maybe other kids would just think they won a real ribbon and had decided not to wear it. Of course, that is probably also wishful thinking, because Poindexter probably wasn’t going to fool anyone into thinking he actually placed in an event – everyone has seen him during dodgeball in gym class and it would be pretty unlikely that he was anything other than entertaining during a footrace.

But you know what? Poindexter had every other day of school to shine – he got straight As and never once got yelled at for wiping boogers on the pigtails of the girl in front of him. Field day was the one day of the year where a guy like me could shine, so why give the losers ribbons, too? No teacher ever thought to give me a B just because all the other kids got an A and I shouldn’t feel left out. Shouldn’t the message be that everyone is different and some people are good at the long jump and some people understand what the quadratic equation is – it doesn’t make one person better than the other (although, statistically speaking, it makes one kid more likely to go to MIT and then make tons of dough upon graduation).

Again, my guess is that this all started as a misguided attempt to make kids who didn’t do so well feel as good as the kids that did, but it misses the mark. It’s patronizing and the kids know it. Unfortunately, there is not much to be done now – I’m not about to be the guy who crusades for taking trophies away from kids. The damage is done and the only thing left to do is make the best of a bad situation. That’s where my plan comes in.

Instead of having a banquet or cookout to give out the trophies to everyone, the coach needs to visit each player’s house individually and present the trophy to the kid in private, telling him that nobody else got a one, but that he deserved a trophy. Tell him it has to be kept secret because, well, I don’t know – make something up. The trophy is a matter of national security and must be kept in a safe and completely hidden place such as the back of the closet.
I’m not sure that kids will buy this, but it can’t be any worse than what we do now.

What the hell is this thing called spare time?

2005-10-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from my new book about children's activities - I'm about 1/4 of the way through so far. This is first draft material, so don't let typos and nonsensical sentences bog you down.

From the section dealing with youth sports:

What kind of coach are you?

I ask what kind of coach you are because you will coach. Seriously. The league will ask you and you will say yes because you don’t have any will power when it comes to things like that. Actually, this applies to every activity your children have – the organizers will ask and you will say yes. It’s as much a rule of nature as survival of the fittest or that lottery winners will find a way to become poor again. When you sign Junior up for Little League, they will ask you to coach and you’ll cave like a Kentucky coal mine.

The most important thing to do is categorize yourself as a coach. If the internet has taught us one thing it is that there is a lot of pornography out there. A lot. Like, so much that it is amazing that you have to start asking yourself, where are all these naked women coming from? Statistically, we must be getting to the point where some of these women are going to be from my own neighborhood and I’ll start to recognize them at the supermarket, picking up the kids from school, etc. I’ll wander up and say, “Don’t I recognize you from somewhere?” And the woman will answer, “You may have seen some of my work at HornyMomsAreWaitingForYouSeriouslyWe’reTotallyNotEvenKidding.com.” I won’t know what to say next and I’ll probably be embarrassed and walk away which works out well since Stacy probably won’t be too keen on me talking to amateur porn stars anyway.

But if the internet has taught us anything else, it is that humans fit neatly into different categories and those categories can be easily defined by taking a simple, 30 question true or false quiz where you are not given the option of answering “I don’t know” or “Maybe.” I enjoy being alone more than I enjoy being with people – true or false. No ambiguity allowed – you’re either a Unabomberesque hermit who hates people or a Paris Hilton-like attention seeker who will die unless you are the focus of at least a roomful of people.

A quick search for “personality quiz” on Google.com (Google.com: Making meaningful research totally antiquated and irrelevant) shows a total of 2,200,000 different hits. Among these two million plus sites designed to help quantify (does that word work here?) yourself, you can use short quizzes to determine your Simpsons personality, your Harry Potter personality, your Lover personality and your Personality personality. You can take the Free Five Minute Personality Quiz, the World’s Shortest Personality Test (and, one assumes, with a little digging the two million sites, the World’s Longest Personality Test), The Church of Scientology Personality Test and the What Poetry Form Am I? Personality Test.

All of these personality quizzes give you neat little answers to let you know who you are – like a lifelong quest for self-awareness, except you can do it on company time without leaving your chair. After you take the test, you will be lumped into one of – usually – between 5 and 10 categories. Sometimes the answers suck and they just tell you who you are, which isn’t much help.

You are Dr. Julius Hibbert.

Sometimes they have semi-helpful explanation of what your personality is all about, so you can begin planning your life around whatever foolish category you have landed in.

Short, terse, unfriendly,
Yet sometimes quite emotive;
I am the Haiku.

And, of course the best tests give you famous people who also fit your personality.

Some Famous ENFJs:
David, King Of Israel
President Abraham Linclon
Randy Quaid of Bye-bye Love and Moving
Oprah

Which then leaves you wondering when the hell David, King of Israel and President Lincoln had time to take a Meyers-Briggs personality test, but you try not to let that bother you, as you have Oprah and randy Quaid in your lifeboat, too.

The point is, everyone is quantifiable and fits neatly into some category. Coaches are no exception. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find any tests designed to tell you what Coaching Personality you are (I mean, they probably exist somewhere in the 2 millions Google hits, but I lost interest in searching), so I decided to create one on my own. Then I discovered how much work it really is (hint: just enough to keep me from completing it) and I decided to just give you the answers and let you make up your own mind which coach you are based on the examples you have seen. Or don’t – lie to yourself if you want. It won’t bother me.

The Coaching Types

Clueless: Clueless can’t believe he got roped into coaching a sports team. The closest he’s ever been to a sporting event was when the Star Trek convention was held across the street from Fenway Park. Everyone knows Clueless has no idea how to play the game, but by the time the season starts they are so desperate for coaches they’d take anyone with a pulse – or even a guy without a pulse if they could get Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman to drag him around the field.

Because Clueless has spent his entire life being such a non-athletic nerd, he will have developed the condescending notion that there is nothing more to sports than brute strength. Therefore, when he finds out he will be coaching, he mistakenly believes that he can Google “soccer” or “basketball” and find out everything he needs to know about the game in 15 minutes. Thus, when he shows up for the first practice, he may have some vague idea how the game is played, but he quickly discovered that every sport has approximately six trillion subtleties built into it that take years to figure out. For instance, if he is coaching Little League, it will be at the first practice that he discovers he has no idea which is left field and which is right field. I know, athletes reading this are saying, “Right field is to the right, Poindexter.” Ah, but the right in relation to what? The fence? Home plate? I only bring this up because one of my children had a coach that asked this very question not once, but twice last year.

Clueless has two bits of good news coming to him, though. First, there will be no shortage of parents who do know what’s going on and aren’t afraid to scream it from the stands. My advice is to pretend you don’t hear the shouts – don’t even acknowledge that someone is yelling at you, even if it is over the fence from four feet away. Wait thirty seconds, then do exactly what the yelling parent said to do. The delay will serve to piss off the moron who doesn’t understand he is watching 7 year old play basketball and no amount of incorrect coaching (or correct coaching, for that matter) will effect the score a noticeable amount. Also, the delay will give the impression that whatever you were doing wrong was completely planned and on purpose. Of course you knew you only had three players on the court – it’s all part of The Plan. But now that you’ve bewildered the other team, maybe you’ll go ahead and slide those last two players out onto the court.

The second piece of good news for Clueless is that his job is completely safe. No matter how many fans and parents are screaming for his head and no matter how many times he forgets the rules of the game and no matter how badly the other team is destroying his team, he will make it through the season without being replaced. Why? Because if they could have filled the position with someone more competent than him they would have done so at the beginning of the season.

How to tell if you are Clueless: This is very simple. Ask yourself the following questions. 1. True or false: When I found out I was going to coach the team, I went out and purchased a whistle and an outfit suited to the particular sport I am coaching. 2. True or false: I researched the sport before the season.

If you answered true to either question, you are Clueless. Good luck – you’re going to need it. Of course, Win At All Costs will also answer true to both of those questions, but he won’t have been wondering whether or not he is Clueless. He’ll be sure, for reasons which will be apparent, that he knows his sport.

Season Prediction: 0 - 10 (that’s no wins and ten losses, Clueless). Unless another team fails to show up and is forced to forfeit. But, there is a chance that Clueless could lose even that game. On the plus side, Clueless won’t care, because even at the end of the season he’ll still be under the impression that it isn’t about winning or losing.

Win At All Costs: Most everyone will hate Win At All Costs – the parents, the players, the refs, the league, his own kids. He will be universally despised and talked about like he is a lower life form (Which he is. Which explains why he has the ability and time to become so invested in a youth sports league).

The most interesting aspect of Win At All Costs is that he is the only category of coach that may not have children of his own on the team. Sometimes he actually has a kid on the team. Sometimes he kid will be on the team in a few years and he’s building a team in the meantime. Sometimes he won’t even be married and will have no children of his own, which means he’s either a Pervert or he is such a moron he thinks coaching a Little League team is his first step toward being picked up as the manager of the Red Sox. If you are a parent of a child on the team, pray he’s a pervert – he’ll do less damage to your child’s psyche.

Like Clueless, Win At All Costs has done research to prepare for the season; however, Win At All Costs didn’t Google “soccer” and call it good. No, he spent weeks watching World Cup video, a month breaking down an offensive play called “Walking The Line” and at least half a year researching obscure rules such as 501.8c – “A player wearing green socks may obstruct the ball out of bounds only if the opposing team maintains a three goal lead (I made that up, Clueless, so just ignore it).” And then he’ll find a way to use it during a game that season. Interestingly enough, Win At All Costs can remember every rule in the book, but he can’t remember the PIN for his debit card without writing it down – but he “cleverly” writes it backwards on the protective envelope so no one will ever figure it out. This pretty much sums up Win At All Costs’ life and why he’s living in a van down by the river and eating cardboard for dinner.

Without sports, Win At All Costs would probably be in prison (in fact, he may have done that, too). Unable to relate to people on a normal level, he talks in sports analogies with everything he does. He talks about hustle and spirit and grit. He’ll bluntly inform you that your kid isn’t playing because he sucks and has no coordination. He’ll bench his own kid for two games because of a fielding error. He’ll make a star athlete wonder if it’s all worth it. He’ll make a spastic nerd kid want to quit during the first 15 minutes of practice. By the time the season is over, the parents won’t know whether to lynch him or chip in and buy him a present.

Win At All Costs isn’t all bad – he will win games. In fact, should he ever lose a game the players will be so traumatized after his tirade that the lesser players will quit en masse. He’ll scream and spit and froth and tell the players they play like little girls (even if they are little girls, which will still be an insult for some reason). He’ll hold double session practices for the next week and pretty much make everyone’s life a living hell until the team they play next has been absolutely humiliated in a crushing defeat. And even them he will wake with cold sweats in the middle of the night thinking about the one game they lost. Anything less than absolute perfection will not be tolerated.

When I said he isn’t all bad, I guess I mean if you are just like him you may not think he’s all bad.

Season Prediction: 9 – 1 if he has a bunch of no talent hacks on the team – undefeated if he is lucky enough to have a few quality players.

The Pervert: Fortunately, the Pervert is much less common today than he was years ago. Today sports organizations generally have the good sense to run background checks on the coaches, so at least all the pervs who have been arrested are weeded out. Remember back in the early nineties how you would constantly see news articles about how Mr. So and So who had coached Little League and was a Scoutmaster for 37 years was discovered to have been arrested 17 times for distribution of child pornography? Background checks have eliminated that sort of thing, so now you know that if the coach is The Pervert, he’s been hiding it pretty well.

Of course, the Pervert is still easy to spot – he’s the coach that’s waaaay too interested in the kids and never seems to even be aware that there is a game happening. 90% of the time he’ll have an arm around one of the kids, giving them a “pep talk” and completely creeping them out.

Unfortunately, because all the pervs who have prior arrest records have been weeded out, what we are left with is, essentially, the competent pervs who know how to hide it well. So, be careful, as the Pervert has been known to disguise himself as Clueless, Too Good To Be True and Mr. Laid Back. As a general rule, you won’t find him masquerading as Win At All Costs or The Screamer since he won’t want to make the kids afraid of him.

Season Prediction: No record – parents will quickly start pulling their kids when he is discovered to be a big perv.

The Screamer: During the first game, most people will incorrectly identify the Screamer as Win At All Costs. After all, he yells, he freaks out at the smallest things – sometimes getting in a lather over what appears to be nothing at all. Parents figure he must be Win At All Costs, right? It’s only when the team falls to 1 – 3 that everyone realizes the coach is actually The Screamer – mostly hot air.

The Screamer may sound like Win At All Costs, but he actually has a knowledge base of his sport more along the line of Clueless. The Screamer believes that the best way to mask his total incompetence is to simply yell at everyone he sees. Kids can’t hit the ball today? A good tongue lashing ought to motivate them. Other team seems to be scoring at will? A good old fashioned tirade, complete with throwing equipment should do the trick. Sometimes the Screamer resembles the Tasmanian Devil as he flails around and kicks at dirt.

The child athletes aren’t the only people to get yelled at – the Screamer has no problem bombing targets of opportunity as they arise. The more people he screams at, the better job he must be doing. Parents who bring their children late to practice often find themselves on the receiving end of the Screamer’s invective. Umpires and referees will be completely bewildered by the Screamer as he disputes calls which went his team’s way. Nobody will be able to figure out why he yelled at the concession stand attendant.

There are other ways a coach can become The Screamer. In the old days, the Screamer might have been Drunk Coach – the kind of guy who could coach Little League because he didn’t have a day job. These days it seems parents have decided to reconsider the wisdom of dropping a kid off at practice with a guy drinking tall boys at 3:15 on a Tuesday. Drunk Coach usually didn’t care too much what happened on the field, so long as he greatly inconvenienced by the game, i.e., he runs out of beer before the sixth inning. However, now that Drunk Coach is no longer socially acceptable – in as much as he was ever socially acceptable – he usually ends up becoming the Screamer as he finds his tolerance for young children to be much lower when he has to wait until 5:00 pm for his first drink. He may or may not understand the rules of the game and how to play, but none of that really matters as he’s still seeing double from the bender the night before. He finds the easiest thing to do is just yell at someone every so often.

Season Prediction: 6 – 4. The Screamer’s team wins a surprising amount of the time, given that he isn’t really coaching. Fear, it turns out, will motivate many of the players to actually try harder in a vain attempt to avoid becoming the object of a full-blown rage. If the little boogers were smart enough to figure out that there is no way to avoid the Screamer’s fits, they’d all quit – fortunately for the Screamer, they never figure that out.

My Kid Plays: There is an unwritten rule of kids’ sports: If you are willing to devote the time and energy to being the coach of the team, you have earned the right to play your kid slightly more than the other kids/more than he deserves. Sure, once in a while you’ll hear The Complainer (a sports parent type) whine about how his kid should bat lead off because he has a higher OBP than the coach’s kid, but any reasonable parent who thinks about it for a moment will agree that the coach’s kid should get more playing time as a thanks that you didn’t have to coach. There aren’t too many perks to coaching the Under 8 St. Mary’s Basketball Team, so rational people should begrudge the coach’s kid extra playing time even if he has the coordination of a newborn fawn.

My Kid Plays, however, misses the point and clearly has chosen to coach for the sole purpose of making sure his kid plays every second of every game, even if the kid hate’s the sport. At first, it may My Kid Plays is making the reasonable choice to bat his kid lead off every game – but when he decides to bat him every other man, people start to notice. My Kid Plays will always put his kid at pitcher, even if the kid throws like a right handed girl throwing left handed (Whoah! Put away the pitch forks and torches – I have a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why “throwing like a girl” is a valid description which does not warrant a lynching of the person who uttered it – watch for it later). My Kid Plays is operating under one of two assumptions: either he has totally fooled himself into believing his kid is the next Michael Jordan, or he believes playing as much and as often as possible will transform the kid into the next Michael Jordan. Unfortunately, the sad truth of the matter is that the kid is usually mediocre to terrible and generally couldn’t care less if he played or sat the bench.

My Kid Plays is often an ex-athlete himself who dreams of glory for his spawn – he should read my notice to new fathers at the beginning of this section and just stop.

Season Prediction: 7 – 3. Then they lose the first round of the playoffs because My Kid Plays decides his kid should start at center against an opposing center a foot taller.

Other Minor Coaching Types

Mr. Laid Back: Easy to spot in his Hawaiian shirt and sandals, Mr. Laid Back is just there to get the job done. Usually Mr. Laid Back has a relatively respectable knowledge of the game and its rules – he just doesn’t care. The upside is, all the kids will play the same amount. The downside is that all the kids will play the same amount.
Season Prediction: 5 –5

Too Good To Be True: Maybe he is more coach than you deserve, maybe he’s pervert in disguise, but the one thing that is certain about Too Good To Be True is that he will make you feel totally inadequate as a parent when you discover that he coaches the team, volunteers down at the senior center, reads to the kids and tucks them in bed at night and still manages to hold a job earning $150k a year.
Season Prediction: 8 – 2. The kids will do well, but he doesn’t demand perfection. Go ahead – hate him for being perfect. Everyone else does.

So there you have seven basic types of coach. Feel free to pick a style for yourself, but be sure to dress it up a bit and make it your own. If you want to be the Screamer, carry a machete just for the reactions it will get. If you’re going to be the Pervert, be the best pervert you can be – carry good quality candy not American chocolate to lure children behind the dugout.

Remember, choose something you’ll be comfortable with because you’re going to have this personality as long as your kid is a kid. Why? Because only thing you can be sure of than being asked to coach is that if you say yes once, you’ll be coaching forever.

Secrete Motorcycle Plans Realized

2005-09-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Here she is - $500 worth of beauty. I've ridden 4k miles on that $500 so far, so I guess I've done alright.

Anyway, this week I didn't have much of anything to post, so I'm making one of my many blogish posts that I promised never to make and I will now proceed to tell you all about what I had for dinner last night and how I was feeling when I ate and after I ate and all that crap you don't care about.

Actually, I think I'll post a bunch of pictures that I have hanging around. Because that sounds like fun.

This is my grill. Behold its majesty. I said behold it.

This is a shot of me and the boys.

...and with the older girls.

This is my son who has tragically mutated into Michael Chiklis.

And, finally, this is the Duchess and Lady Macbeth, hamming it up for the camera.

This has been an exciting entry, for sure. Next week I'll be posting cat pictures and talking about what kind of socks I bought. See you then.

New Book Section

2005-09-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

As the last major revision to my book, I have replaced the entire section about becoming a firefighter with the following section about feeding time at the zoo.

Meal Time Is Family Time

You know how sometimes you are cruising along in life thinking everything is just fine and dandy – perhaps you’re right where you want to be financially, you have the right job, your marriage is perfect, your car is perfect and you have a perfect tan, fresh from a vacation in the Bahamas? And then something happens to make all that go sideways in the blink of an eye? It may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it could be. Maybe it’s a layoff at work, maybe it’s a promotion at work, maybe it’s being chased by a pack of wolves on the way to work – it could be anything, but the point is that now your carefully balanced and perfect little world is suddenly thrown into turmoil and can’t tell which way is up and everything feels like you are sinking and surviving all at once and you lay in bed awake all night with a cold sweat and a feeling of anticipation and anxiety and nobody could possibly understand what you are going through but it’s real, dammit, and you have to deal with it no matter what you would choose to do and all you want to do it find that light at the end of the tunnel but you’re so lost in the dark you have no freakin’ idea which way to turn to look for the light and the next thing you know you’re yelling at the toaster because it’s so slow and stupid and you are certainly headed for a breakdown and SOMETHING FOR THE LOVE OF PETE HAS GOT TO GIVE? You know what I mean? You know that feeling?

Life at the Bradbury house doesn’t ever cruise along on an even keel – it starts at the crazy-yell-at-the-toaster stage as the calmest it gets. And, unfortunately, this level of calm usually only lasts for the fleeting moments when all five kids are asleep. The interesting crazy usually breaks out five or six minutes before I’m ready to get up in the morning, which I find to be the cruelest kind of joke. I can stay up all night long with a kid who has a 102 temp. I can jump up at 3 a.m. to respond to a little girl having a nightmare or to a strange noise downstairs. I can wake up at 5 a.m. to get started on a school paper I have put off until the last minute. I can do all that without complaint, and honestly, without being terribly tired. However, getting woken up at five to seven when my alarm is set for seven drives me mad.

No, I don’t have a good explanation for this. I have sort of a bad explanation, which would be that I suppose I feel that if I set my alarm for 7 a.m., I should be able to sleep until 7 a.m. without being awoken for some totally pointless reason like the cat being on fire again. For some insane reason I have gotten it lodged in my tiny brain that the time leading up to my alarm sounding is me time. Me time. That’s amusing, just thinking of it, writing this here in the fire station at midnight after I’ve already finished my other work. Ha. Me time usually comes so late at night or so early in the morning I can’t think straight and I have trouble focusing and remembering what the hell I was writing about and the next thing you know I’ve babbled on for two pages and absolutely nothing has gone well and I need to shake my head and try to remember what the hell I was writing about.

What was I writing about?

Oh, yeah – meal times. The reason I was leading into the eating section with chaos is because meal time is chaos time at the Bradbury house. Mostly because feeding seven people is a major production in and of itself and this has to be wedged into the rest of the day which, as we know, pretty much consists of driving around all day from one place to another in a mindless haze of sports, errands and shopping. Frankly, my life would be a lot easier if we didn’t need to eat. Not that I want to stop feeding the kids, because I understand that to be a Bad Thing, but that I wish none of us had the need to eat unless we wanted to. Of course, while I’m wishing for major modifications to the body’s grand design, I wish we didn’t have to sleep, either, but that’s neither here nor there.

Unfortunately, the kids do have to eat and I’m the one who feeds them. The best way for me to properly convey the feeding process is, as you know, interpretive dance. Since that still isn’t an option, I’ll just break down the way it goes – three meals and two snack times a day. We’ll assume it’s either summer or a weekend and the kids aren’t in school, so I’m going to oversee/prepare all feeding times at the zoo.

Breakfast
This is usually the thing that wakes me up five minutes before the alarm clock – some kid will burst into the room and announce that we “DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MILK FOR BREAKFAST!” “Enough milk” being defined as an amount sufficient as to allow five children to eat two bowls of cereal so disgusting and sugary it makes ants sick to their stomachs. Breakfast is, after all, the most important meal of the day, so it’s important to ensure that meal consists of the Recommended Yearly Allowance of sugar and chocolate. I’m not sure why or how it became acceptable to eat candy for breakfast, but it has. And I’m not just talking about sweetened cereal, either. For one thing, everyone loads the unsweetened cereal, such as Cheerios, with sugar – not just my kids, but all kids (except maybe few extremely odd people who must have serious, serious issues to be eating Shredded Wheat without sugar).

But sweets for breakfast isn’t limited to just cereal. I like to cook what we call at our house Big Breakfast, which generally consists of pancakes or French toast, along with bacon or sausage and possibly eggs. What goes on top of the pancakes and French toast? Liquefied sugar, of course, promoted under the pseudonym of “table syrup.” That’s the stuff that used to be called “maple syrup” until that freaking pesky FDA started demanding truthful labels on items and it became difficult to justify calling something maple syrup when the stuff consists of 99% corn syrup. So really, even when I get up and cook breakfast, it’s not really that much better for them. I may as well just inject some sugar directly into their veins, stick a diabetes medic alert bracelet on them and go back to sleep.

Anyway, after I wake up to a child informing me that there is no milk, I know in my heart that I need to run to the store to get a couple gallons. Why? Because the kids could sit there and fuss all day long about their cereal being dry and I could probably live with it, but I can’t drink my first cup of coffee with no milk, so off I go.

The upside to this process is that I get about five minutes to myself in the supermarket in the morning. I have to go all the way to the supermarket, because the people who own the convenience store at the end of the block are only a ski mask away from being armed robbers with the prices they charge for a gallon of milk, and I just don’t have the thirteen bucks or whatever they charge for a gallon of milk. The upside is that I like the supermarket when two things coincide: a few moments without the kids and very few other customers because normal people can remember to get milk the night before so they don’t need to run to Stop N Shop and wait for them to unlock the doors at 7 a.m. There’s nothing like a leisurely stroll through the American excess we call the grocery store to put things in perspective – as long as we still have enormous store with shelves stacked floor to ceiling with such necessities as Fruit By The Foot and microwave popcorn, I know that the terrorists have not won.

Anyway, I admit to taking more time at the store in the morning than I probably need – I don’t think it is absolutely necessary for me to stare with wonder for five minutes at the sheer variety of laundry detergents, and I’m almost certain there is no good reason for me to stop and read Star magazine and get caught up on Brad and Jen, but I am unable to help myself. The supermarket just makes me feel good. Don’t tell my wife that I take my time, thought, as the morning is fairly hectic and to have it discovered that I lollygag on my way to the dairy section – the dairy section cleverly located in the far back corner – could be detrimental to my Secret Motorcycle Plans.

When I finally get the two gallons of milk – we buy it two gallons at a time when we can’t afford three – I like to come back, place one gallon on the dining room table for the kids, then bring the other gallon to the fridge where I discover not one, but two gallon milk containers which are each half full. In the children’s defense, these containers are usually cleverly hidden behind…who am I kidding? The damn things are always right there, clearly indicating that the child who informed me we were out of milk is either going blind or is a liar bent on driving me crazy. Since they get yearly vision tests at school, I can only assume they are trying to drive me crazy. And I think it’s working.

The nice thing about breakfast is that I don’t have to do anything beyond provide milk from 17 cows and 32 bags of sweetened cereal (Yes, bags – we buy the store brand bags of cereal, alright? It’s cheaper and it tastes the same). From there, the kids are fairly self-sufficient – by which I mean they each pour their own cereal and milk, almost all of which goes in the bowls. One of them – I forget who – has been tasked with feeding Lady Macbeth, so all I need to do is make my coffee and go behind them and clean the tremendous mess they made – this has to be done in a hurry, because a Frooty O (that’s a Froot Loop that comes in a bag) which has been dropped on a dining room chair will not only stick with the tenacity of super glue, but it will leave behind a fruity color ring when it is finally dislodged – could be purple, yellow, red or green. As a general rule, I try not to consider that this thing which has managed to discolor a wooden chair is what I fed my kids for a meal.

Mid-morning Snack
“Mid-morning” is best defined as “twelve minutes after breakfast ends,” because that is when at least one child will begin asking me whether or not it is snack time. Snacks consist of two items – a piece of fruit and a piece of junk. The junk is packaged as real food, but it bears little resemblance to anything of nutritional value. Fruit Roll-ups – a perennial favorite – are to actual fruit what hot dogs are to canines. Chew granola bars probably contain actual granola, but they coat it with so much crap and then load it with chocolate chips and other weird items that they are really not much different from candy bars. Of course, by purchasing chewy “granola” bars instead of, say, Three Musketeers, I can continue my charade of healthy eating. Sometimes I buy the regular hard, inedible granola bars, but no on will eat them, and frankly, I’m not too sure what granola is or what it is made from or whether bona fide granola bars are good for you anyway, so it probably makes no difference.

Other snack items include the peanut butter crackers and cheese crackers family or foods and their bastard cousins, the cheese crackers with peanut butter. This is one of those areas I can’t quite remember who likes what and who likes the other, but I’m fairly certain that there are warring factions in my house and the line of demarcation is whether you are pro peanut butter crackers or pro cheese crackers. I try to remain neutral, like a snacky Switzerland. The only thing I know is that the “cheese” crackers don’t require refrigeration, so I think that tells us all we need to know about the dairy content of that particular item.

Peanut butter crackers also lead to a whole different set of problems when it comes to snacks sent with the kids during the school year. When I was a kid, peanut butter was not only a major food group to be eaten in at least three servings a day, but it was considered to be a relatively benign substance when looked at from a non-consumption point of view. Apart from misguided attempts to use peanut butter as an aid when attempting to extract a wad of chewed Bazooka from my sister’s hair, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time contemplating the brown paste, and I’m fairly certain my parents didn’t either – my mom would send us to Great Salt Bay school loaded with peanut butter and peanut butter related food substances and I can’t recall ever having Mr. Marchi freaking out over such an episode.

Sending a kid to school with a peanut butter sandwich today causes a slightly different reaction. I’d be better off strapping a load of TNT to Achilles’ chest and sending him to blow up the school bus than sending him with anything even vaguely related to the peanut family. Nut allergies are wreaking havoc on my lunch and snack plans. Slapping some peanut butter on two pieces of bread was always my fallback emergency snack when I couldn’t get my act together enough to get to the store for real snacks (“real” being defined as “sugar laden”). Things weren’t always this way, even for my kids.

When I first sent Mab to school, the nut allergy kids were sequestered at a single yellow table where peanuts were not allowed to venture – kind of a nut DMZ. The poor kids who were allergic to nuts had to sit by themselves and pretend they were normal, even though they were complete freaks. I kid, I kid. They weren’t complete freaks, but let’s face it, in 1976 if you had a kid in your class who had to sit at a table all by himself because your Fluff and Skippy sandwich might kill him, you’d have made fun of him. These days, of course, we don’t make fun of anyone and I’m pretty sure “freak” is not an acceptable term under any circumstances not involving a genuine circus act.

But even in that short amount of time since Mab started school, we are now to the point where nut allergies have completely dominated the children’s lunch menus. Some kids have such bad allergies that just being near the offending substance is enough to send them into anaphylactic shock, requiring a teacher to break out one of those nifty little EPI pens. Nut allergies are everywhere – so prevalent that establishments such as Dunkin Donuts feel compelled to post notices on their doors stating ATTENTION PATRONS: BANANA NUT MUFFINS CONTAIN NUTS, which seems like a waste of a sign, to me. It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for the people who have nut allergies and will never taste the deliciousness that is a banana nut muffin from DD unless it is during a suicide attempt – I feel for these people. Deeply. It’s just that if we, as a society, have come to the point where we feel compelled to point out that banana nut muffins contain nuts, well, it’s just a sad day.

I mean, come on – let’s be realistic. If you have nut allergies, you probably ought to be somewhat wary of ordering any food substance that has NUT in the name. It’s not as if Dunkins is trying to trick people into eating these muffins by calling them “blueberry muffins” or “sage and licorice muffins ” or “completely free from nuts muffins.” There are only three words in the name and one of them is NUT – if that doesn’t tip you off, I don’t think a little sign on the door further explaining that the muffins contain nuts is going to help. If you are allergic to nuts and you actually order a banana nut muffin, you’re a moron and probably living on borrowed time anyway. At that point, I think it’s inevitable that you will kill yourself in some spectacularly stupid fashion which will likely get forwarded around the world in e-mails with the subject line “Darwin Awards.” Of course, by the time someone sends it to me the subject line will read “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Darwin Awards.” Can’t you people at least change the subject line back to something normal and delete some of the attached crap when you send me one of these e-mails so I don’t have to scroll down for ten minutes reading past the e-mail address of every person in the world with comments like “Check this out” and “Funny.” And while you are at it, do yourself a favor and run your urban legends pas Snopes.com before you forward them, because they are never true. Ever. Seriously – a terrorist’s girlfriend did not get an advance warning of a plot to blow up a mall on Halloween, shampoo does not contain a chemical known to cause cancer, no one from Nigeria will be sending you $35 million in exchange for getting the money out of the country and BILL GATES IS NOT GIVING AWAY MONEY FOR FORWARDING E-MAILS.

Sorry about that.

Of course, as much as I’d like them to be, nut allergies are not urban legends and the number of people coming down with them are increasing every year, and nobody knows why. I have my own theories, but the last time I tried to explain it to someone, she made me a tinfoil hat and told me to stay away from the internet for a while. Whatever the cause, it makes my life difficult because peanut buttery things are easy to send as snacks. Actually, it’s more annoying for my kids who are much more likely to get apple and apple for a snack when I can’t send peanut butter.

Lunch
Around noon, I am usually alerted that we are out of bread and so I can’t make sandwiches for lunch. If I’m lucky, I may have some mac and cheese or a couple of packets of Ramen noodles which will do in a pinch, but if not we make another rush trip to the store, this time with all the kids in tow because Stacy is at work. This is a major project which can take hours to complete if I’m not careful, and I have to be careful because any long delay in lunch time means a long delay for nap time which comes directly after lunch. And you know how I feel about nap time.

The worst part of this major project is actually leaving the house. Never is parenting more like herding cats than when you are trying to get them in the car in a hurry. First I walk around yelling for everyone to put their shoes on because we are going to the store. Then I recruit the first kid dumb enough to walk by to put Lady Macbeth’s shoes on, too. About five minutes later, 60% of the children will still be barefoot and I have to yell again to “Get your shoes on, we’re going!” This is met with the sound of feet thumping on the floor upstairs as people begin to scramble for shoes. However, somewhere during the next few minutes, Lady takes off her shoes because the child who put them on her put them on the wrong feet. Also, another child takes her shoes off, having decided to wear sandals. Ten minutes into the project we are back at 0% shoe wearing numbers. Which means I have to yell again, only this time I use my Serious Voice which indicates that I am no longer just telling them to put their shoes on for my health and I have moved into Punisher Dad mode. Oddly enough, I look around and I am able to find one child playing Gameboy without shoes – this child is totally surprised by the fact that I am now screaming and red in the face. Why in the world is Dad so mad, he is saying to himself as he wanders around looking for shoes. Finally, 20 minutes into the project I have achieved 100% shod status if you count the kid wearing mismatched sneakers as being shod (I usually do).

Next, I instruct one child to put the dog into his crate, another child to take a bag of garbage out on the way to the car and a third child to strap Lady into her car seat. Unfortunately, this leave one child with no job, which means he has time to wander back to his room and pull out every single toy he owns and spread them all over the upstairs and the living room. The speed at which he creates this mess is remarkable – something akin to supernatural in scope. While I yell at this child to clean up the mess, I notice that the child who was supposed to be putting Lady in the car seat has gone to the car without her, which, one would imagine, makes it difficult to put the baby in the seat. More yelling. More scrambling.

After we catch the dog who has escaped because the child assigned to put him in the crate went back to playing Gameboy and forgot what he was assigned, we get in the car. Where we find Lady sitting, but not buckled in. Also, there is a bag of garbage in the car because I didn’t specifically say what to do with the bag of garbage and somehow, the dog is now in the car.

Ten minutes of arguing about who is going to sit where and we’re on the road. We usually get all the way to the store before I realize I don’t have my wallet. Once we get back to the store a second time, I have an argument with the oldest child explaining why she cannot stay in the car and finally we are ready to enter the store. Amazing.

This is where the real fun starts.

There are all kinds of things the children enjoy at the grocery store which make me nuts – many of them involve touching every single thing on ever single shelf. A favorite trick is to run a hand down the jars of spaghetti sauce until a jar falls to the floor. Then they look really shocked like this was something totally unforeseeable. There I was, their little eyes say, minding my own business, when a jar of Ragu just fell on the floor. What was I to do?

Of course, everyone’s favorite trick is much simpler – just ask over and over again, “Can we get this?” It’s like a mantra for these miniature people. I don’t think they are even operating on the same wave of consciousness as the part of their brains which are asking this – it has become so automatic and engrained that they are probably calculating complex physics problems in their heads while their mouths continue to ask, “Can we get this?” More than 50% of the time, the thing they are asking for is something they wouldn’t eat in a million years, but has a flashy package. Can we get this? Well, sure, but it’s a package of wild rice, so I’m not sure you’d like it. Can we get this? Can we get this? Can we get this? I can take only so many of these queries in a single shopping trip – that number if flexible depending on my mood, but it is always one less than the children actually ask.

Now that I’m at the store for a second time, I’m clever enough to purchase dinner, too. I may be dumb enough to need to make two trips to the supermarket a day, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to make three. Once I have my cart full of groceries, we make our way to the checkout where I am hit with another barrage of Can We Have This accompanied by children actually trying to put that damned candy on the conveyor belt – I’d like to strangle the guy that came up with putting candy in the checkout aisles.

Finally, it’s back home where I will discover three loaves of bread in the freezer.

Afternoon Snack
As you might have guessed, this goes pretty much the same way as morning snack, except somewhere along the line my children got it into their heads that they should have tea, so we quite often have that. I’m not sure if the children secretly have Mary Poppins as a nanny when I’m not around or if the queen regularly drops by or where this tea habit came from, but there it is. So, apart from tea, afternoon snack is the same as morning snack.

Dinner
We do two things for dinner at the Bradbury household that set us apart from many other families. First, we make an effort to eat together. We try to sit down and have dinner each night at 6:30. Now, as the children get older and have more activities which take them out of the house for longer periods of time (I’m talking about mostly sports practices, but there are other things) this becomes more and more difficult. However, we still try to sit everyone down together and eat at the same time as often as we can.

The second thing that sets us apart is that we don’t eat in front of the television. Even if we are having pizza, we still sit down at the table and eat it as a family. That makes us really weird to many of the people I know – most of my friends have long ago stopped pretending their dining room table is a place to eat and use it as a place to store keys, books, random scraps of paper, magazines and old bits of mail. To eat at one of these tables would require a clean up effort which would only be realistic in execution if the EPA declared the table a Superfund Site and sent a team of specially trained agents to help for a month.

As crazy as the rest of the feedings at the Bradbury Zoo are, preparation for dinner is somehow worse. This is the direct result of two converging facts. 1) I like to cook, so I’d like to be left undisturbed while I create dinner – all I ask for is a little peace while I practice my art. 2) This is never, ever going to happen.

Why isn’t this going to happen? Because at 5:00, when I want to start cooking, everything in the world starts happening. Actually, it doesn’t start – it just doesn’t stop. While I am cooking dinner, I must help the Duchess with her homework because she needs a little extra help and individual attention. I sit her at a table in the kitchen while the other three work at the dining room table. Working with the Duchess requires all my brain activity, so cooking is not only a side project, but it becomes something I can’t really think about, so I have to prepare a meal easy enough to complete on autopilot.

In between helping the Duchess with her homework and cooking dinner, I have to help the other kids with their homework. The other three, as a general rule, can complete their homework without my help. Can is the operative word there – not do. Usually they attempt some sorry effort to make the homework appear to be finished, but upon closer inspection, I discover that they have done the easy problems and filled in random answers for the rest.

“Are you absolutely positive about this answer, Edward?”

“Yes, sir.” In my daydreams they all call me sir and treat me with respect.

“You don’t think you should check over this work again?”

“No.”

“And you really want me to believe that eight plus six is green?”

“That’s how my teacher told me to do it.”

That’s how my teacher told me to do it – this is the last ditch argument by all my children when they don’t want to re-work a problem. Of course she did, I usually say. Most teachers specifically tell you that if you run out of room at the bottom of the paper, you shouldn’t get a new piece – just smoosh half a page worth into the bottom inch. Of course your teacher wanted you to skip every fifth problem – sounds logical to me. I completely believe your teacher wanted you to complete your homework in purple crayon. Absolutely. After all, I was born yesterday, and I wouldn’t have a clue what a teacher would or wouldn’t want you kids to do.

By the time I have checked everyone’s homework, sent them back to correct it, checked it again, sent them back again, and checked it a third time, we’ve killed an hour. And at 6:00 the telemarketers call. And call. And call. Of course, this problem has pretty much been solved by the invention of caller ID, which I will never again be without. Unknown number. Hmm, I wonder if I should answer it? College Loan, Inc. – yeah, that sounds like someone I want to converse with in the middle of dinner prep. Out of area. I’m not even considering picking that up.

In the old days (read: before kids) no one ever called Stacy and me. The phone would ring about once a week and we would stare at each other as if this was obviously someone calling to inform us that New England was missing or that the mid-West had suddenly blown up. Over the years, telemarketing became a wildly popular way to waste people’s time and company money. At first we picked up all the calls, usually long distance carriers. There was a time when they were sending us checks to switch back and forth - $50 from MCI, $75 from AT&T, etc. For about two years I honestly believe we were paid more in cash to switch than we spent on long distance.

Then the telemarketers stopped offering us money to do things that essentially didn’t effect us one bit – this was when telemarketing became annoying. It also ratcheted up about 50 notches in quantity – we went from getting almost no calls to getting 10 day, all of which were telemarketing. So, we went through a span of four or five years where we just didn’t answer the phone at all. That system actually worked fine and I would have been willing to stick with it, but the kids finally hit that age where they had friends with irritating voices and those friends started calling the house on a routine basis, so suddenly the phone started ringing and I had to pick it up again and it was either a telemarketer or a child with an irritating voice – a lose/lose situation. Anyway, that’s when we got caller ID.

Which, I realize, doesn’t have much to do with the story, given that I don’t answer the phone anymore except to say, “Mab can’t come to the phone right now, she’s on the toilet.” Which is what I say to any boys that call while she’s doing homework. She gets a big kick out of it when I do that.

Once dinner is finally prepared and the children have set the table (a chore they have done so many times it only requires me to yell once or twice to complete), we all sit down for a family dinner. This part I’m not joking about. We sit down together and discuss how our days were and what we did. Sometimes we play a game called High/Low where each person tells the best thing that happened to them that day and each person tells the worst thing that happened (we unabashedly stole this from a movie). Other times each child must tell three things they learned that day. The thing the kids like the best, though, is when we quiz them on different topics and kids who answer correctly get extra minutes on their bedtime.

Usually, this is the best part of my day. I get to hear about the kids’ days and my wife’s day and I get to explain how much laundry I finished. It’s a regular 1950s TV moment where things are semi-calm (in the sense that no one is actually shooting at someone else – it can be pretty loud, though, so I can’t swear with any certainty that no shots have ever been fired at the table) and everything is beautiful. Of course, that only lasts so long, and after that it’s rush around, clean up the dinner mess, showers, teeth brushing, reading, cleaning rooms and off to bed. But the brief time I get to spend with everyone at the table is something I am enjoying while I can, because I know it’s only a matter of time before I’ll be sitting around a big empty house with my wife and we’ll be wishing for those loud and obnoxious dinners when the kids tell us about getting a homerun in kickball or scoring 100 on a spelling test. A matter of time.

Rules number 4 and 5

2005-08-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

Rule #4

Don't make me slap you.

Rule #5

How to greet someone

Hugging. Women can hug women, women can hug men. Men do not hug other men. If you are extremely close to the other man – say, you fought the Taliban together in Afghanistan – you may give the “guy hug.” The guy hug is performed by shaking hands, keeping the hands together as you left arm goes up around the other man’s shoulder and you lean in with your shoulders. Your feet and pelvis should remain back where they would be during just a handshake.

Actually, that goes for women hugging men, as well. Unless you know the guy in the carnal sense (or want to), you hug with your shoulders. You should avoid pressing your boobs against him and your pelvic region shouldn’t even factor into the hug. I think this is an American thing, because when my female friends from other countries hug, they always give a full body hug which, while exciting and fun, can lead to confusing situations and unwanted arousal.

Kissing. You know what? Kissing should be regulated the same way as full body hugging – not required unless you are planning to make a move on the person. I don’t want a kiss on the cheek unless you buy me dinner first. No kissing.

Hand shaking. This is your go-to greeting – the old standby. Which doesn’t mean some of you aren’t so bad at shaking hands your attempt resembles a monkey humping a football. First, it’s not a contest of strength, Arnold. There’s no need to prove you’ve been lifting weights and sprinkling anabolic steroids all over your cornflakes – everyone will have already noticed that you no longer have a neck. On the other hand, don’t leave a limp wrist and hand out there that will make people question your sexuality (and, as with most rules of etiquette, the main point is to prove to people you aren’t gay and the second point is to not catch The Gay). Women can shake hands pretty much however they want and get away with it, although I still don’t suggest the power crush grip.

Waving and variations. This is a very complicated subject in and of itself, so I will need to save this explanation for a time when it can be its own entry. There are so many variables that I don’t even know where to start. Physical location, how well you know someone, etc. Really, it’s a nightmare that we should probably be working to destroy - there are too many ways to mess this up. When is a wave acceptable? When is a head nod ok? When do I need to stop and talk to someone? What is my obligation to wave if I'm walking toward someone I know I am going to actually speak to? It's all very complicated and I don't want to get into it today.

Because I'm lazy, that's why.

The Billing Clerk Story

2005-08-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

This is a story I wrote back in 1997 when I first became the Strange Biller. It basically describe the origin of Strange Biller and how he got here. I transcribed it quickly and didn't edit, because I thought that was truer to the original. Also, because as we all know, I am lazy.

The Billing Clerk Story

This is the story of a billing clerk gone mad. He wasn’t mad to begin with, mind you, which is why this is the story of a billing clerk gone mad, not a billing clerk who was always mad and tortured animals and stuff when he was a little kid. No, this billing clerk started out just as normal as any other billing clerk in the world – happy, oblivious and resigned to his sad and pathetic role in life as one of God’s crunchers of meaningless numbers in an industry of unholy terror. Health care.

His first day on the job he nearly died of a massive coronary as he was shown the 632 steps required to send a bill to a modern health insurance company. Fortunately, he was revived with defibrillators kept on site for just such an emergency – he was, after all, in the health care industry. Unfortunately, he was merely 127 steps into the process when he suffered this first heart irregularity. It was a long day for the billing clerk, as he required frequent defibrillation and plenty of water to keep him going. In the afternoon he was introduced to third party administrators and at one point was declared legally dead by a doctor on his way to pour a cup of coffee. Lucky for him, God Himself reached down from the sky and gave his heart one last jolt to get him moving.

God had a funny way of doing that to the billing clerk when he got himself into these situations. Like the time the billing clerk, then a restaurant critic, choked on a piece of pork at an upscale BBQ pit. Or the time the billing clerk, then an interior designer, spilled an entire bucket of lead paint on a rich client’s dog – a dog who later decided to take revenge on the billing clerk, then a postal worker, and tried to kill him with an exploding package. Or like the time the billing clerk, then a mercenary for hire, tried to join the Zapatista rebels, only to find both sides of the fighting wanted to kill him. You get the point – the billing clerk walked with Jesus and often found it convenient to have himself revived from otherwise fatal falls, gunshots and stabbings. The man kicked ass when it came to rallying.

But when it came to billing, the man took his profession seriously. He learned the ropes quickly, including the dangerous process of completing HFCA 1500s with the greatest of courage, once saving the entire office from certain destruction by throwing himself on a pile of EOBs that were about to go off. He was methodical, calculating and – deep down inside – just a little crazy to begin with, despite what the opening paragraph would have you believe. And every day that he billed the bills and walked the walk of an accounts receivable badboy, his brain became just a bit more unstable. More dangerous. More electric. Soon, the man was completely unglued and spewing heretical statements about BlueCross and BlueShield, Tufts and even (gasp) Medicare.

Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but he claimed God had spoken to him in a dream and told him to build a billing machine. The biggest, most impressive billing machine the world had ever seen. The kind of billing machine God would build if God needed a billing machine. Of course, God doesn’t need a billing machine any more than he needs, say, baby powder, but the point is, this would be God’s Billing Machine, powered by the Holy Ghost, baby. Take a ride on the wild side with Jesus driving your billing machine.
Your mad, they said. Insane, they said. Actually, they said these things to him on a regular basis in months preceding his announcement of plans to build God’s Billing Machine, but up to that point there had always been a little bit of doubt in their voices, like they thought he might be crazy but couldn’t be sure. And then this – he comes to work one day covered in chicken blood (again), raving about some sort of machine powered by God that would revolutionize the industry. What does one make of that sort of thing?

But I’m not crazy, he said, and I’m not insane, and I’m only a little bit nutty. He was possessed by the spirit of greatness and greatness is often misunderstood. There is a fine line between insanity and greatness when inventing something as complex as a billing machine or a peanut butter hat. Still, the billing clerk pitched his idea for a billing machine for years, all to no avail. Doctors laughed at him. Practice managers threw him out of the office. Nurse practioners covered him in honey and lapped it off like naughty little puppies – bad doggie, bad. The billing clerk never gave up, though. He knew God had chosen him to build the billing machine for a reason and he promised he would never quit. I’ll show them, he would shout at squirrels in the park. I’ll show them all. You’ll see.

One day, a stroke of luck, twist of fate, turn of events - whatever you want to call it – happened that was so important to our story that it deserves its own paragraph.

The billing manager died.

No one was quite sure how and no one really cared why, but while on hold with Harvard Pilgrim Community Healtcare to check the status of a seventeen year old claim, she up and kicked it. The billing clerk tried to revive her by waving a fresh batch of insurance checks under her nose, but it was too late – she had gone to that big waiting room in the sky.

Which left the billing clerk in charge. No asked him to be the manager – no one even wanted him to be the manager, but it was too late. He had assumed command of the SS Billing and was charging full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, prepare the coordination of benefits for firing. His dream was finally within reach, and he began working on his billing machine.

Built from old banana peels and discarded Chevy parts, the machine was a behemoth of biblical proportions, just as it had been in his dreams. It was a thing of beauty, running on a combination of Mountain Dew and diesel fuel and a touch of cough syrup (a little Robitusin for the machine, a little for the clerk). The machine sat there in the middle of the office belching black smoke and toxic fumes for weeks on end. Skeptics continued to talk behind his back, mocking his creation. Disbelievers abounded. Annoying flirts walked by in sweaters so tight you could have bounced a quarter off them. Not one person believed the machine would work except the billing clerk.

One day the billing clerk came to the realization that the machine didn’t have any function except billing, and for some reason he couldn’t even make it do that. It was finished – that much he was sure of. After all, he built it and he dreamed it, so he should know whether it was finished or not. But how to make it bill?

The billing clerk struggled with this question for months, to no avail. He could not make the machine bill, no matter how he struggled. Then came another dream.

He dreamt he was looking back at his life, mapped out in footprint in the sand on a beach. During the good times of his life, there were two sets of prints, side by side. But during the bad times, there were only one set. The billing clerk confronted God and asked why during the most demanding and trying times of his life – such as the time he was caught in the ladies dressing room trying on ladies underwear at Filenes – did the Lord abandon him like day old bread? God looked at the billing clerk and shook his head. You sorry fucking bastard, He said.

Then it was 6:00 a.m. and the billing clerk’s alarm was going off, signaling the start of another work day in which the billing clerk would monkey with the billing machine which would never, ever bill. Why? Because this is the story of a billing clerk gone mad, not a billing clerk who revolutionized billing. How did you think it would end?

More Etiquette Lessons With Professor Henry Biller

2005-07-23T13:46:00.000-07:00

This week's entry is rushed and poorly edited (by which I mean, not edited at all). You probably won't be able to tell the difference from an average entry.

Rule #3 – Men’s room behavior

In case you lack a penis and the appropriate disguises to infiltrate the men’s room, you ladies may be unaware that there are extremely important guidelines which must be followed at all times and with the precision of a guided missile (Ha! Look - the first double entendre of the column!).

To begin with, when you first enter the men’s room to take a leak, you are faced with the immediate decision of which urinal to choose. If there are three urinals, you must chose one of the end two. That way if another man shows up after you, he won’t have to stand right next to you, as he will be free to use the other end urinal. If a man is already using the middle urinal when you enter the bathroom, you are advised, but not required, to use the stall. If there are two urinals, you are free to choose either one; however, should a man already be using one, it is advised, although not required, that you use the stall. If there is only one urinal and someone is already using it, you must use the stall, because the only other option is to pee on the back of his legs, and this is almost universally considered to be bad form. (I’m sad that I have to describe peeing on someone as “almost” always a bad thing.)

Which segues nicely into our next point: Do not stand in line and wait for a urinal when there are other options open, i.e., another urinal or an empty stall. It’s just creepy.

In those situations where you absolutely must pee standing next to someone (a club or ball game where all urinals and stalls are in constant use), you are to step forward toward the urinal, keep your eyes glued to the spot on the wall in front of you and for the love of all that’s holy, DO NOT TALK TO ANYONE. Hell, you shouldn’t even look at your own junk, let alone strike up a conversation with the guy next to you. This is just a common sense guy rule for all times – do not strike up a conversation with anyone who has a penis in his/her hand. It’s either his own, which leaves the conversation one sided and awkward, or it’s someone else’s, and while I have no personal experience with this, I’m pretty sure it would make for an even more awkward conversation.

The obvious exception being that it is ok to talk to someone who has your penis in his/her hand. You may, however, wish to restrict your comments to talking dirty and avoid discussing last night’s ballgame, etc.

Moving right along….

Should you need to use the stall for its intended purpose of dropping the kids off at the pool, you’re pretty much on your own with whatever freaky weird paranoid routine you have of lining the seat with toilet paper, wiping it down with a portable Lysol wipe you carry in your pocket – whatever it takes to put you in the mood, Skipper. There are only two rules to follow. First, you are required to lock the stall door. It may seem obvious, but too many men just pull the door shut which leaves the chance that another man will just pull the door open, putting him at risk for an accidental penis viewing, which, as we all know, is the easiest way to catch The Gay.

Second, when you are alone in the bathroom, sitting on the hopper and you hear the door open, you are required to rustle some toilet paper, rattle your belt buckle or cough to alert the other man to your presence. Why? So he doesn’t start doing something freaky before he discovers you are there. I don’t even want to get into the number of freaky things he could be doing. If the internet has taught me one only one thing, it’s that my own fairly perverted sexual fantasies look like Amish porn compared to some of the things people desire.

Last, when you are done with your business, wash your hands and get the fuck out. There is no reason to hang around in there – leave that to the ladies. Public men’s rooms are dirty, filthy places where men take their pee-pees out – it’s not a place to discuss a work problem or the latest trend in music. Every minute you spend in there increases the likely-hood that you already have The Gay or you’ll soon contract it.

Next time: The proper way to greet and say good-bye.

To Pee Or Not To Pee

2005-07-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

Currently, when I am finished using the toilet in the Bradbury household, I leave the toilet seat and cover in the down position as a routine course of action. After considering the reasons why I do this, I have come up with only one motive: Fear. I’m afraid that if I leave the toilet seat up one more time, my wife will make good on her promise to shoot me in the face with a rocket launcher. Today, however, I began to examine her argument for leaving the seat down, and I can only conclude that her case is illogical.
To begin with, I use the bathroom more often than my wife. I drink more coffee and water than the average person, so I spend more time standing in front of the toilet; whereas, my wife hardly uses the bathroom. As far as I can tell, the only time she needs a restroom is when we are driving in the car and we have just passed the last exit for another 45 miles. I’m not sure if this is a biological oddity or just part of a larger plot to drive me insane, but either way, I end up using the home bathroom much more often, so it stands to reason that my preference should get more consideration.
My preference in this situation, it turns out, carries the same weight as a Gore voter in Florida. My wife’s “preference” or “command,” as I like to describe it, is to keep the seat down at all times when the toilet is not in use. The first reason she gives is that when she uses the bathroom at night, she likes to leave the light off, which means she runs the risk of accidentally sitting on the bowl rim if the seat is left up. Now, I can agree that sitting on the rim of the bowl would be a disgusting and possibly traumatizing experience. However, I would argue that if a person needs to sit down every time she uses the toilet, it would make sense to develop a habit of checking to see if the seat is down. It seems like a quick flick of the wrist and - bam! - the toilet seat is down or she finds out it is already down. Obviously, my wife is displaying signs of mental illness every time she just sits without looking.
Speaking of crazy, her secondary argument for leaving the seat down is just as bad. Her back-up position is that it is more sanitary to leave the seat and lid down. This is so crazy it forces me to consider calling the men in white jackets to take her away for a 24 hour stay in the hospital to make sure she isn’t a danger to herself or the public. As my first piece of evidence that this is flawed logic, I would like to point out that she doesn’t complain when only the seat is left down and the lid is up. If it were truly unsanitary to leave the seat up, surely it must be equally unsanitary to leave just the lid up. I’m not a microbiologist, and I don’t have a Ph.D. from Harvard in communicable diseases, but I’m pretty sure that any germs that decide to make a run for freedom out of the toilet bowl are not going to be deterred by just the toilet seat. Along those same lines, I don’t really see how keeping the lid down will prevent any germs from escaping, either. In case it is not clear to anyone but me, there is a big gap between the toilet seat and the bowl rim, and again, I’ve never studied germs in any in-depth way, but I’m pretty sure almost every germ in the world is small enough to fit through that crack. That crack is only slightly smaller than the crack in my wife’s final argument.
Her last stance is that the toilet just looks better with the seat and lid down – this is the way it is designed, she says. Again, crazy talk. Not only am I not a microbiologist, I’m not an interior designer, either, but even I can tell that a toilet is an ugly, ugly appliance and there is no way to make it look better. Face it – our toilet is a large chunk of white porcelain with a plastic lid and seat. The best that can be done with it is to keep it clean. Beyond that there is no way to make it look “better.” Leaving the lid down as a beautification project is like hanging a pair of fuzzy dice off the mirror of your rusted out 1986 Oldsmobile. The improvement effects are so minimal as to be considered inconsequential. And inconsequential effects should not carry weight in this arguement.
A problem which should get consideration was actually brought up by someone other than my wife. A friend of mine suggested that a reason to keep the lid down is to prevent things that have been dropped in the bathroom from going into the toilet. Now, I said this problem should get consideration, and as I considered it. Then I came up with a solution: Stop doing things over the toilet which puts you in jeopardy of dropping items in the bowl. What are people doing, putting together model airplanes standing over the toilet? The only possible thing I can think of is that people may be dropping toothbrushes in there, but that’s just weird. Don’t brush your teeth over the toilet. Try standing by the sink.
In the end, I believe that my leaving the toilet seat down is an action that I can continue to take, however, not because it makes sense, but because that’s what my wife likes and I’m a nice guy. But in order for me to “remember” to continue leaving the seat down, I think a concession must be made. And that concession is for my wife to start leaving the seat back when she gets out of the car. That is an argument with a logical basis.

I can't remember if I already wrote about this

2005-06-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

Something tells me I have already written this before, but I needed something for a class in school, so this was what the teacher got (45 minutes worth of hard work).

Super-strength is the best super-power

You are walking alone on a long stretch of beach when you come across an old lamp. When you rub the side of the lamp to clean it, a genie appears and informs you that as payment for releasing him, he will grant you one super-power. You must chose between the traditional comic book super-powers: super-strength; invisibility; flying; x-ray vision; or control over the weather, fire and water. There are other super-powers comic book heroes have possessed in the past, but these are the choices the genie has given you. And super-strength is the only logical choice.

To begin with, super-strength is the best choice for the intimidation factor alone. Let’s say you have a super-villain cornered in an alley and you would prefer that he surrendered rather than fight. And really, isn’t it always preferable to have the super-villain surrender without a fight, avoiding millions in property damage caused by throwing each other through buildings? What’s more intimidating: picking up a car, crushing it and then hurling it a city block, or using x-ray vision to see what the evil-villain has in the pockets of his tights?

“Aha! I can see you have your car keys and a tube of Chapstick! Surrender now or I shall be forced to look at the contents of your wallet!”

Super strength also carries with it the implied secondary aspect of invincibility or at a minimum it provides increased resistance to physical harm. Clearly you need stronger bones, skin, and muscle tissue in order to prevent, say, your arms ripping out of their sockets as you lift n entire building. No other super-power carries an inherent secondary power as useful as invincibility. However, if you still are not convinced, compare super-strength to the other powers individually.

Invisibility loses out because it’s really only useful if you want to do dishonest or perverted things. Sure, it’s an excellent super-power should you decide you want to be Hanging Around In Women’s Locker-Rooms Man or if you want to be a super-villain who uses invisibility to rob people. But even then, there are no guarantees that current motion detectors won’t be able to foil your invisibility, so it is entirely likely that even if you plan to turn to a life of crime, modern technology will still be one step ahead.

Many people will try to sell you on flying as the best super-power, and I’m not going to argue that flying would anything short of exhilarating; however, the practicality of fighting crime with the ability to fly is extremely limited. Even if we assume that your ability to fly means you can fly incredibly fast (but wouldn’t it be a bummer to chose flying, only to find out it means you can fly only as fast as you can run and it makes you just as tired?), that only means you can get to the site of a battle quickly. By no means does this ensure victory on your part.

Imagine you learn there is an evil genius rampaging through the other side of Metropolis in a gigantic robotic spider, so you fly over to the scene. Apart from getting there quickly and, admittedly, being able to find it easier because of your high perspective, what else have you got? Now, you’re pretty much just a normal guy except you’re wearing a spandex suit with your underwear on the outside of the pants. You are no more able to defeat the robotic spider than the police when they show up, so what good are you?

Which raises the excellent point of why there exists a never ending supply of evil-geniuses whose preferred method of world domination revolves around giant robots which they pilot from seats behind the eyes – some super-hero with a free weekend should find this island (and we know they come from an island – it’s always an island, right?) and destroy the place. But that’s neither here nor there.

As far as control over the weather, fire and water goes, at this point you’re hardly even contributing to your Justice League or Hall Of Super-Friends or whatever guild you have joined. So, you can make it rain or shoot fireballs – so what? Most super-villains have to ability to hatch secret evil plans that could work around your super-power. I’d hate to think some madman finally destroyed the world (which, it seems, is priority number one for all evil-geniuses and super-villains) because he was wearing a fire retardant suit and carrying an umbrella.

Of course, there is always the chance you are more concerned with everyday life instead of saving the world. Even if you choose to eschew the crime-fighting lifestyle, however, super-strength is still number one. How often have you ever really, really needed to look through a wall or become invisible? But, I bet a day doesn’t go by when you don’t wish you were just a little bit stronger so you could, say, open a pickle jar or lift the entire couch off the floor to vacuum underneath. Given the practicality of super-strength in both crime fighting and everyday life, it’s definitely the way to go when the genie asks you which power you want.

Strange Biller’s Unwritten Rules of Social Etiquette

2005-05-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

I admit, the fact that these are unwritten rules may be part of the problem. People are too busy, dense and self-absorbed to figure these things out on their own, so as a public service, I will begin a series of entries dedicated to helping people stop being jerks.

These rules are presented in no particular order except the order they come up in during my life.

Rule Number 1: We’ve been over this before, but apparently I need to say it again. When the elevator door opens, you have to wait until the people on the elevator get off before you can get on, you ignorant fucking dipshit. In actuality, this isn’t even a rule of social etiquette, it’s a basic law of physics. You can’t get on the elevator and occupy that space until the people coming out vacate that space. The same goes for subways and buses.

Rule Number 2: When you are traveling on an airplane, bus or train, nobody wants you to chat with them. Keep in mind that I may be the chattiest person on the face of the planet – my wife says I won’t shut up for love or money (which is a demonstrable lie, I might add, as I have often stopped talking for some loving – no one has yet offered me money to be quiet, so I can’t comment on that) – but that doesn’t mean I don’t have at least the tiniest thread of common sense about my blathering.

The key things to remember when you are traveling on a plane, train or bus are that a) you are stuck with this person for a couple hours and b) you have limited personal space.

Now, personal space is an issue in America we take very seriously, and for the most part, people understand the general rules of personal space. If you don’t believe me, the next time you go to, say, the bookstore, walk up next to someone who is flipping through a book and stand six inches away from them while flipping through a book yourself. When the person starts to creep away (and they will), creep along with them. See how long it takes before they say something.

Which is not to say there aren’t those people who don’t have any understanding of the concept of personal space. Those people can be neatly divided into two categories: people with bad breath and drunks. Being drunk seems to eliminate the need to respect other people’s personal space, to which I think anyone who’s ever dealt with a drunk can testify. And apparently there is some sort of law of inverse proportionality governing how bad your breath is to how much personal space you give people.

However, on the whole, Americans like there personal space and understand how to respect the rules associated with it:

The distance you stand from someone during conversation is directly related to how well you know the person - 24 inches is minimum distance you stand from someone when talking to them unless you are sleeping with them, at which point you may feel free to snuggle.
Men do not touch each other after the initial handshake (or half-hug if you know the guy like a brother – something we’ll discuss during another rule. Hugging seems to have a whole host of problems which people don’t understand, not the least of which is an international translation issue).
Do not lean in toward the other person unless you are plotting something on the level of a governmental overthrow.
And for the love of Pete, do not stand six inches behind me when we are in a line – that minimum is a foot, no, a foot and a half.

When you are engaged in conversation with someone, you are automatically invading their personal space. Don’t get freaked out – this is acceptable. When you converse with someone, you start to share their personal space. The good thing is, when you stop talking, you stop being in their personal space unless you are closer than five feet. If you are closer than five feet when you bring the conversation to a screeching halt by bringing up you intense and burning love for donkeys, you are obligated to move out of the other person’s space (move more than five feet) or at least let them move away from you.

These are rules everyone seems to embrace – except for your occasional idiots, we all observe these rules everyday without even realizing it.

So why is it that when people get on planes, all these rules get tossed? First of all, when you are sitting in the seat next to me, I can’t get away from you, so it would be a better trip from Manchester to Austin if you didn’t mention your fury fetish before the plane even taxis to the runway. Now I’m stuck with you for four hours trying to mentally scrub the images of you from my mind. But chances are, you won’t stop talking to me for another three hours to give my poor mind a rest, anyway.

True story: on a plane ride last week, as guy was chatting me up and I tried to brush him off by being semi-curt with my replies – this didn’t work. I then put my book up in front of my face like a person reading a book in a movie – he still talked. It was amazing. He talked about everything. He analyzed the snacks like they were ….

Where is this going?

Oh yes, I remember now. On a plane/train/bus you are automatically violating personal space boundaries – that’s just the nature of the beast. But to talk to someone and not be able to take the hint that they don’t want to talk to you is not acceptable because you are already TOO FUCKING CLOSE AND THE OTHER PERSON CAN’T RUN AWAY!

I don’t know – this seems obvious to even me and I’m not the sort of person who is ever at a shortage for words. Bah. Stupid people.

I have been drinking caffeine laced beer

2005-05-08T18:39:00.000-07:00

Remember when I was going to start updating more often – I think I said once a week? Wasn’t that funny? I mean, did anyone who read that actually say, “Yes, I’m sure he’ll update all the time, now.”

Big deal. So I lied to you. I lie to people all the time. Just last week I told my own mother I was dying and needed $20 for an operation. Granted, she called my bluff, as I had already promised to be dead by now, due to a brain tumor I had developed in the middle of the winter, but that’s neither here nor there. On a related note, did you ever notice that there is a distinct lack of people who are begging in the streets because they or a loved one needs an operation? I mean, to watch a movie from the 1930s, it appears the streets used to be lousy with kids trying to put together enough money to pay for their mother’s “operation.” Probably because these days anything more complicated than a root canal comes with a prices tag higher than your average suburban home, so it is even less likely that young Davey will pick up enough spare change to cover it. I’m guessing most people just say, “Fuck it – who doesn’t have $50k worth of credit card debt?” But I digress.

Isn’t that a great word? Digress? Digress, digress, digress. I’m not even sure I know what it means, but it sure sounds nice.

In case you are wondering, and I know you are, I have moved on to the marketing/continual revision stage of my book. I have had a few people proof-read, a few more still have it out and I am still going over it (and I’m still taking volunteers), but I have it where I feel comfortable starting to submit it to literary agencies. Currently it is visiting an agency with offices in San Francisco and New York. I’ll keep you all updated on how things go.

This year I’m going to write a novel. I’ve written two before, but I was never happy with either. The first one I wrote when I was 21 and to re-read it now is painful. It causes actual physical discomfort to those who read it. Luckily, all copies but one are either under my control or have been destroyed. One remains unaccounted for – it was last seen in the hands of a friend whom I mysteriously stopped speaking with a few years later.

The second novel was better, but still not good enough to even revise. If I ever get super-duper fame from being an author and writing is what I do all the time, maybe then I’ll revise it, but I would be a larger undertaking than just writing a new novel. It has some good stuff, though, unlike the first book which was so bad I think even my copies need to be destroyed for fear that that terrible writing would infect other people in the house and doom my children to a life of preachy, terrible writing.

I did actually have about 20,000 words of a third novel which I liked, but it was lost somewhere along the line. Not lost like I stopped writing and couldn’t get going again, but lost like a computer ate it or something (yes, I was a good one for not backing things up – I’m over that now). Somewhere in my zillion pages of writing is about the first 10,000 words of that book in hard copy, so if I can ever get motivated to dig through all the boxes, maybe I can find it. What I’d really like to do it rewrite that story, which involves a drunk painter – no, not an artist, a house painter – and a war against something or other – yes, an actual war in the suburbs. Kind of a class war type of thing, but not serious at all, only serious. At one point the protagonist and his protégé are attacked by a rival painting crew who fire a squirrel gun into their van – not a squirrel gun like a gun you might use on squirrels, but a gun that fires actual squirrels. Live ones. Typical stuff, really.

Anyway, this blog entry is now beginning to resemble all other blog entries in the world and I am treading dangerously close to drifting into a zone where I tell you about what kind of sandwhich I had for lunch (peanut butter and jelly), so I’ll just go now. If you are nice to me, next time I’ll post some portion of the book that hasn’t made it up yet.

State or federal, it's all good

2005-03-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

Massive, steroid abusing baseball players are ruining this country and must be stopped at all costs. These men are the scourge of the nation and no problem is more pressing, no issue more important than whether or not Jose Canseco gave Mark Maguire a shot in his ass.

How do I know? Because Congress evidently has nothing better to do than worry about who has been taking steroids. So much so that rather than enacting a bunch of great laws this week – let’s just say proclaiming it National Strange Biller Week and creating a law designed to provide free beer to people who are Strange Biller – they spent their time asking people who are obviously taking steroids whether or not they have been taking steroids.

Not for nothing, but I didn’t need a Congressional hearing to tell me Mark Maguire and Sammy Sosa are juicing any more than my wife needs to appoint a fact finding committee to learn whether or not I’m in the mood – the answer is so obviously “yes” that to even ask makes you look somewhat retarded. Of course, looking retarded is what our elected officials seem to do best.

For further proof, I give you the Big Dig. For those of you not “in the know” or not “up on current events” or those of you who are members of Congress and are clearly operating at intelligence levels on par with a wedge of cheese, the Big Dig is an enormous tunnel that was built under the city of Boston and the harbor, ostensibly to relieve traffic congestion. In reality it hasn’t relieved all that much traffic and is cost over $14 billion dollars. Billion. A 14 followed by 9 zeros.

Now, we can sit here and debate the merits of the Big Dig - which I have done before in previous columns – and you probably aren’t going to convince me that the project should have been undertaken in the first place, but I’d be open minded and I would hear you out. However, for my $14 billion, I do expect the fucking walls to repel water. I’m not an engineer and I know nothing about construction, but I believe that if you gave me $14 billion dollars, I could probably come up with a reasonable solution to keep the ocean on the outside of the tunnel.

How bad is the problem? Well, how bad would you think the problem was if I told you there was one leak? How about if I told you there were ten leaks? Imagine now, for a moment, that the tunnel is riddle with hundreds of leaks, some flowing thousands of gallons of water per day. Does that seem right to you? I was pissed when my hot water heater died and had one leak of about two gallons of water a day.

The good news is that in November some independent scientist/construction guy (Ha! If you believe there was a truly independent review of the Big Dig, I have a leaky tunnel to sell you) confirmed that the tunnel, while leaky and annoying, posed no threat to people driving through the tunnels – meaning even though some lanes may need to be shut down because they are, technically, part of the ocean, at least the entire thing isn’t going to have a catastrophic failure and crush/drown the hundreds or thousands of unlucky souls who happen to be driving from the North shore to the South shore. At least we have that going for us.

The bad news is that last week the same guy came out and said he was wrong and he can’t vouch for the safety of the tunnels.

That’s right – no one can vouch for the safety of this $14 billion dollar project. There are no words to describe the 67 different levels of lunacy the Big Dig has created. No words.

At least my government has the whole problem of steroids in baseball under control and we expect that after pouring $14 billion into the issue, at least a portion of the players will be steroid free. That portion may hover around 3%, but still, your $14 billion doesn’t buy as much these days as it did in the past.

Changes in my posting

2005-03-10T10:01:00.000-08:00

Blog. I was a blogger long before blogging was cool, but I didn’t call myself a blogger back then. In those days I referred to myself as an on-line columnist, which, while not completely a lie, was not completely true, either – I think in order to really be a columnist, one must have a following. But that doesn’t matter, because now blogging is the cool buzz word, so I’m a blogger. Once blogging becomes passé, I’ll call myself something else – folklorist or storyteller. Whatever.

Now that I have that out of the way, let me explain a few changes taking place on my blog that some of you have been reading (Hi, Mom!). First, I’m going to be updating more frequently – I’m shooting for getting back to once a week, but we’ll see. Second, while I’ll probably still be talking quite a bit about the adoption and the kids, I will once again be touching on politics, celebrity trials and the complex business that is the world of international romance. No, not international romance. I meant the complex business that is getting on an elevator. YOU HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THE PEOPLE ON THE ELEVATOR GET OFF BEFORE YOU TRY TO PUSH YOUR STUPID ASS ON, DIMWIT – IT’S A SIMPLE MATTER OF PHYSICS!

Also, I promise to have 100% fewer entries like this one where I talk about my blog in my blog. Sweet Pete, it’s like watching another fucking movie about being a struggling script writer. When will Hollywood stop green-lighting that crap? If that is all there is left on the entire West Coast to write about, then someone please just call me and I’ll give you a story about the time my friend Jeremy Brenner put Cheez Whiz on his forehead, stuck a condom to it then climbed and fell off a telephone pole all in the span of about thirty seconds – what a night that was. I’ll give you that story for free if you promise to shoot the next hack that tries to sell you a script about writing scripts. Or a script about being a struggling actor. Lord.

Anyway, since I already am talking about my blog in my blog, I should give you the update on what happened to my blog so far. You may remember that the entries in my blog were all part of a book I was writing. Well, now the book is finished (the first three drafts, anyway) and there are a whole bunch of new sections not published here. I also managed to find an order for all the stories, which I think worked out really well. Blah blah blah. I couldn’t be more exciting with this update, now, could I?

Bottom line – if you would like to read my book as it is written now, e-mail me and I’ll e-mail you a copy of it free of charge. It’s about 200 pages and would have been written in crayon had it not been written on the Lappy. All ask is that you don’t sell it and if you must sell it, I think I deserve at least some of the profit. I’m thinking in the neighborhood of half of what you get – even if that is half of an old burrito or some pocket lint. Undoubtedly, open sharing of my work on the internet has some potential down sides, such as someone stealing it and publishing it under their own name, but I’m not worried because you guys are my witnesses that I wrote this, right?

In case you are wondering, I’m currently shopping the book around to agents and having it read again by other people because I suck at editing my own work, as evidenced by all the grammatical, spelling and, quite possibly, mathematical errors in this blog.

Now, without further ado, on to this week’s feeble entry.

I’m walking to school with Lady McBeth yesterday so we can pick up the other four rugrats and we pass an old lady (well, she wasn’t that old – probably 60s or 70s, but old lady sound better) and she looks down at Lady McBeth and says, “Aren’t you tan?” and keeps on walking.

Tan? Old woman, is there something wrong with you? I honestly couldn’t think of what the hell to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. I should have said something to the effect of, “You should see her in the summer” or “That’s because she’s a Negro.”

The incident isn’t really offensive, per se, as it is instructive of just how far outside the realm of people’s reference points our family is – this woman didn’t look at me and Lady and assume I was married to a black woman and she certainly didn’t assume Lady was adopted. I may as well have been walking a Martian down the street.

On an only somewhat related note, what the hell is wrong with people who still tan, anyway? I drove by someplace that had a sign advertising “High Performance Tanning.” As opposed to what? Low performance tanning salons where you get sunburned in a little circle on your stomach while your legs remain pasty white? I suppose it’s better than calling it “Extreme” which is what they call everything else these days – maybe you and the tanning bed could be pushed from an airplane.

Anyway, that’s it – there is no more to the story. I don’t really have a point (as usual) and I really don’t want to continue working on this column. I mean blog entry. So I’m ending…now.

The Initial Placement

2005-01-18T07:23:00.000-08:00

After we had made our decision to move forward and meet Edward and the Duchess in person, we had to wait two weeks – perhaps the longest two weeks ever. Why the long wait? Who knows – I gave up trying to figure out DSS a long time ago. I could make up an explanation for you if you’d like. How about this – aliens abducted all the social workers and brought them to the outer regions of Orctar Six where they conducted behavioral studies before returning them to Earth two weeks later. Sounds good to me.

The morning we were to meet them I couldn’t believe how nervous I was – I just didn’t know what to expect. Everything DSS ever told us basically prepares us for the worst case scenario, and I knew that, but that didn’t help with the fact that this was a complete unknown. Before Mab and Achilles were born, I had met other parents who had given birth to children. I’d had the opportunity to ask questions and to observe on a somewhat close and intimate level with friends. But with adoptions, I’d only spoken to people who had adopted infants or toddlers, so there really wasn’t any frame of reference for me.

These kids were old enough to understand what was going on, even if it was in an abstract in somewhat unconscious way. They could understand the concept that their birth mom couldn’t take care of them and they were about to meet people that might take them home to live forever. I couldn’t imagine what they were feeling. I couldn’t even understand what I was feeling. All I knew was that I was nervous. Extremely nervous.

Stacy and I had put together a scrapbook to give to the kids – it had pictures of the kids, the house, the car, the cat, the bedrooms, etc. It also had pictures of our extended families and friends. It was a great snapshot of our lives at that particular moment and we hoped that Edward and the Duchess would enjoy it and want to see all the people in the pictures.

We sat in the hallway of the DSS office – which looks like a prison holding area complete with bullet proof glass – waiting for them. Stacy and I could hardly contain ourselves and every time we heard someone come around the corner our excitement reached a fever pitch. Each time a kid walked around the corner we made a mental calculation as to whether or not this is one of the kids from the pictures we had seen. Nope, too old. Nope, too young. Nope, lighter skin. Nope, straighter hair.

They were a little late, as expected, but when they came around the corner we knew instantly who they were – we knew these two kids were going to live with us forever, become part of our family. I can’t speak for Stacy, but I know I had to fight back tears for just a brief moment – I didn’t want that be my first impression. Instead, we watched quietly as Betty led them into one of the visit rooms, then came out to get us.

This was precisely the point when everything in our lives turned into a combination of a guessing game and an intellectual exercise. Do we give them a hug, shake hands or neither? How do you greet a four year old and a six year old who are going to become your kids? And do it without weirding them out, but without appearing cold. Make them feel loved at once, but don’t move to fast.

And like everything from that point on, the correct answer was to just let the situation develop and do what we felt was right. It’s still a big intellectual exercise and guessing game, but in the end, we mostly end up just doing what feels right.

In this case, Edward and the Duchess gave us hugs the minute we came into the room, alleviating the need for us to guess what would make them comfortable. How sincere those hugs were is still open for debate – as I’ll explain, there was lots of room for interpretation with everything the kids did at that point.

Another interesting aspect of this situation was that the Duchess and Edward hadn’t seen each other in over a month at that point. Because they had been separated earlier in the year, they only saw each other once a month or less, even though they lived within walking distance of each other. Why had they been separated? Good question, but no one could ever answer it except to say the foster family they had been living with requested that Edward be moved. Why didn’t they both move, you might ask? Beats me – I asked too, but like everything with DSS, approximately 900 social workers each have a different piece of information, but no one social worker has all the pieces and most of the time they can’t even tell you where to go to get the answers they don’t have.

For example – somewhere along the line it snuck into a DSS report that Edward and the Duchess’ biological father, Edward Sr., had been deported to the Dominican Republic. And for a year we thought Edward Sr. was Dominican. However, more than a year after the placement, we find out that not only has he not been deported, but he is probably not even Dominican. Apparently this one erroneous line made its way into the file and was duplicated over and over. Nobody can explain how it got there in the first place or who put it there (nor would it matter who put it there, because turn over is fairly high and the worker who screwed it up would likely be gone on to other things). In fact, this little error would come back to haunt us in terms of finalization of the adoption, but that’s a story I probably won’t get into until Year Two.

Anyway, the kids hadn’t seen each other in a month. Nice situation. Nice planning. Nice follow through. Why don’t you take these two poor little children who have abso-fucking-lutely nothing but each other left in the world but each other to cling to in this miserable world and split them up? What kind of idiocy is that?

For us, though, it was wonderful know they were together again after a month, although the two of them were so emotionally stunted at the time that they didn’t even know how to act. Basically they pretended it was perfectly normal – as if they had seen each other all along. Of course, pretending nothing is wrong is probably a survival technique I’d hone pretty damn quickly if I were in the foster care system, too.

Another thing the kids picked up in their travels through life is how to quickly figure out what a person wants to hear and say it whether you can follow through or not. For instance, Edward says within 30 seconds of meeting us, “I want to come home and live with you.” Pretty much for no reason – he just blurted it out because he knew it would pack a big emotional punch.

Instead of sitting around inside the visiting room at DSS, the whole gang went to a local McDonalds which had a big play area attached – you know the kind with a giant tunnel system that looks like it was designed by the North Vietnamese Army? And the large ball-pit-of-unsanitary-condition? Kids love that kind of thing.

We all bought a meal and sat down to eat it while we quizzed the kids on different things.

“Edward – do you like to be called Ed or Eddie?”

“No.”

“Do you have a nickname?”

“No.”

“OK – it’s been nice talking to you.”

Later, we asked the Duchess whether she had a nickname or not. Not being the sort of kid to pass up an opportunity, the Duchess tried to quickly think of a nickname for herself.

“Big D,” she announced.

Which, if you are a linebacker for the New England Patriots might be a good nickname – the kind of thing that inspires fear in your opponents eyes. But as a six year old girl, I think she might have been able to do better than “Big D” had she been allowed more time to think.

This was my first introduction to the world of “truth,” “truth” and “I think this is the truth” that Edward and the Duchess lived with. Essentially, the truth can mean, “something I just made up to get me out of trouble,” or “something I made up because I thought this is what you wanted to hear,” or the ever so popular, “something I made up to get you to stop talking.” In the first few months, the truth was almost the truth.

Hell, no one had ever taught these kids how or why to tell the truth. As far as they were concerned, the truth was whatever popped out of their mouths. Add that to the fact that they had to do what they could to survive without the emotional bonds of a strong parental figure and you have the perfect recipe for not even understanding the truth, much less placing a value on telling the truth.

Anyway, Big D decided pretty darned quickly that she had made a mistake and didn’t want to be called Big D. Of course, after she’d been part of the family for a while, that nickname came back as part of our family in a fun way.

Up to that point in my life I had done some things that required stamina – stayed up for three days straight without food when I was in the Army. Worked two full time jobs at the same time. Went to school at night while working full time. Run road races. Quit smoking. Things that take a lot out of a person before during and after.

But this visit was absolutely exhausting. Unbelievable. I was sweating, tired, disoriented and completely lost by the time we said good-bye when we dropped them off at their foster homes. I’d spent about two hours keeping myself “up” and worrying that I was coming on too strong, not strong enough, too nosy, not interested enough – it was all incredibly confusing and like nothing I had ever done in my life.

And we were doing it again two days later. At our house. Without a social worker present.

Because it was already July, we needed to get the visiting process finished a bit ahead of normal schedule so we could have the kids in the house for at least a couple of weeks before school began. The visiting process usually takes about a month and includes a couple of overnights, then a weekend, etc. This is to help prevent people from returning the children like cold soup at a diner.

We had a plan for the next visit to be a day trip, followed by a couple more day trips and then an overnight, then a weekend, and then the move in, so we were cruising right along. We knew there was no way these kids were ever going back nor would there be any chance they weren’t moving in with us – we were invested emotionally now and I don’t think I could have handled the process being interrupted at that point.

So I spent quite a bit of time driving back and forth between Holyoke and Arlington. The ride was exactly 93 miles and took 1 hour and thirty something minutes on the way out, but for whatever reason it always took an hour and forty five minutes on the way home – go figure. I had all the rest stops, gas stations and landmarks mapped out in my brain and could almost do the trip in my sleep. Keep in mind that each visit required me to drive out and get them, bring them to Arlington, then drive them home at the end of the day, then drive back to Arlington.

Was this required? Technically, no – I could have made the social workers do it, but that would have meant waiting around for specific days when they could schedule it and coordinate for one worker to pick up and one to drop off. Worse, it could mean a social worker sitting there and watching the visit, which was always a pain because they just didn’t seem to understand when to shut up and let things happen on their own. Which is why I ended up making the trips each time we had a visit. As a general rule, I would drive out and pick them up while Stacy was at work and then when I got back she would come home.

Rather than give you a detailed (read: boring) description of each and every visit, I’ll just tell you about the highlights of the visit process.

During that second visit, Achilles and Mab met Edward and the Duchess – at that point, to them this was just a big play date so there really weren’t any problems with the dynamic. It was a semi-cautious affair and everyone (including Stacy and I) spent most of the time being extra attentive and generally trying to be as nice as possible (“nice” being the perfect word for it – bland and cautious “niceness”). It’s hard to really get to know someone when you aren’t just becoming friends, but becoming related. I would imagine the bride and groom in an arranged marriage must experience similar feelings.

We brought the kids to the playground, the beach, and the water park to avoid just sitting around the house during these visits. As time went on and the visits got longer and longer, Edward and the Duchess’ personalities started to come out more, which, because of some strong and sometime very annoying habits, made things a bit more dicey, but we’ll get to that later.

The visits are over, the placement is a go and we are scared shitless the night before the move in.

Of all the things that happened and all the emotions I felt throughout this entire process, the one time that stands out the most was the night before the kids moved in. I was scared. Very scared. More scared than I have ever been in my entire life. More scared than the time the grenade blew up beside me, more scared than the time I was hanging upside down underneath a helicopter 100 feet in the air. Thoughts were racing through my mind and I almost couldn’t get a hold of myself – it was like nothing I had ever experienced.

What have I gotten myself into, I was wondering. And I felt awful for thinking that way because already I loved Edward and the Duchess and I knew I wanted them with me, but I was starting to really panic and worry that this was a mistake.

First off, there was my energy level. I was exhausted beyond any exhaustion I had ever felt before. I mean, I am talking exhausted beyond the point of being able to even think, and that was from visits that were lasting a couple hours or a night at a time. I could tell this was definitely going to be the most difficult undertaking of my life.

Now, I’m not one to worry in a big way – I don’t lay awake at night worrying about much of anything at all. Ever. Ask my wife, who is a worrier and doesn’t understand how I can shrug some things off with a “Eh, whatever happens, we’ll deal with it,” attitude. I don’t know how I’m able to do this, given that I am certainly able to get agitated at something as it is unfolding – if someone decides to run the clothes dryer full of rocks and sticks to “fluff them up” then I can assure, I will get angry – noticeably so. But, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I know three days in advance one of the children is going to attempt to ruin a major appliance. How? I don’t know – pretend I was looking for my bowling ball in the hall closet and I found a fortune telling monkey who agreed that if I released him he would tell me what will happen in my laundry room three days in the future – even with the curse of having this knowledge, I wouldn’t stay awake worrying about it because there is nothing I can do – the monkey said so.

That doesn’t really make any sense. Just pretend I didn’t write that. The monkey wrote it.

Where was I? Oh yes, the point is that I don’t worry about things, but I was worrying all night thinking we might have gotten ourselves into something we couldn’t handle. There had only been one other time in my life when I felt a similar feeling of Dear Sweet Pete What Have I Done.

My first night in the Army I arrived at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri at about 0200 – that’s two o’clock. In the morning, for all you civilian types. It was another 2 hours until we completed paperwork and finally got off to bed. Obviously, I had been prepared to get up early when I joined the Army, but in this instance I actually thought to myself, “I only went to sleep at 4 in the morning – clearly they will let us sleep until eight or nine.” You can imagine my disappointment when a sergeant woke us up by walking down the aisle banging a lid on a garbage can.

I jumped straight out of bed with a feeling that can only be described as a cross between abject terror and complete Dear Sweet Pete What Have I Done.

That feeling was back as I imagined what the coming weeks were going to bring. I tried to calm myself by telling myself that the things I knew – this was merely a single difficult stage in this process and that it couldn’t possibly be this hard forever, right? The kind of things I knew were true, but they did no good at all. I was completely freaked out. Freaked out. All night long. Freaked. Out.

Move In Day

The best part about move in day – and by “best part” I mean “worst part” – was that they were thoroughly baffled as to what was really going on. That’s not to say it hadn’t been explained to them because we had been telling them for weeks that when they moved into our home they were never leaving again (although there is some question as to how well the social workers had actually explained it). I mean, we didn’t say it so it sounded creepy, like a guy from a horror movie talking about hitchhikers who ask to use the phone or something. But we spent a lot of time trying to tell them that this was their “forever home.”

This may have been where we went wrong. “Forever home” is a term that get bandied about in the DSS system – kids who are in foster care are told they are waiting for a forever home. The problem is, most of the kids end up jumping from foster home to foster home, so the idea of permanence becomes kind of lost and forever home becomes a fairly meaningless term. The kids here the words, but don’t necessarily grasp the full impact of the meaning (obviously, this varies with age, mental ability, length of time in foster care, etc. As always, your mileage may vary). Consequently, we discovered fairly quickly that Edward and the Duchess weren’t fully prepared to accept that the family they just joined was going to be their family forever.

When Betty showed up with the kids, the Duchess had a duffle bag full of clothes and a case of old Barbie dolls. Edward had a duffle bag with clothes but no toys. The clothes both of them owned were almost entirely second hand – Edward had a couple of t-shirts with dates of events that happened before he was born. Imagine that you are five or six years old and everything you own in the world fits into a small bag and is second or third hand.

These kids were starting from scratch with us – no, I take that back. These kids were starting at less than scratch – scratch was fifteen thousand feet above where these kids started with us. Not only was their birth mother totally unfit to take care of them, but there wasn’t even an extended family qualified to take care of them (and hell, to DSS “qualified” simply means “not high when we drop the kids off”).

Think about your family growing up – even if you think you had a dysfunctional family that didn’t seem to get along or have anything in common. Think of your mother and father. Now get rid of the father and replace him with a series of other men, none of whom treat you well, many of whom have been in and out of jail and have drug and alcohol problems. Imagine your brothers and sisters and how even if you weren’t best friends, you were there for each other in the worst of times. Imagine your older sister has to take on almost all of the parental duties because your mother is so depressed she can spend entire days without getting out of bed. Your older sister - only 8 years old herself -has to get you dinner and keep track of you. The closest thing to support you get from extended family is when an aunt threatens to call DSS if your older sister doesn’t start going to school.

Now imagine your mother – who has had an open file with DSS for more than a decade – starts to leave you and your siblings alone, including the new born. She is warned by DSS repeatedly not to do so, but continues. Your life is not going very well for you, but at a very minimum, you have a place where you belong. A family. To an outsider, this is a dangerous situation and it’s only a matter of time before one of the kids gets hurt or dies from the constant neglect, but as a kid you don’t think this way – you just know how this is how things are and always have been. As far as you know, this is the only way life goes on for anyone. This is life – it’s just how things are. You may be hungry much of the time, you may be neglected by your mother and your father has never been around, but this is your family – this is your life.

Then it happens. Your mother leaves you alone again and someone from DSS comes by the house while she is gone. And everything you know – everything you are comfortable with, everything you love in the only way you know love comes crashing down.

Then, the police come into the apartment. Then, other social workers arrive. The few clothes you own are put in a bag or a box and you are taken away – crying, frightened and confused. Your brothers and sisters are split up and taken to different homes. Some go with their fathers, some go to foster care and you and one sister go to a kinship placement with a distant cousin. Everything you know is gone. The only thing you have left is your one sister out of the six siblings.

This kinship foster placement quickly turns into a nightmare itself. No effort is made to welcome you into the fold. Already in a fragile state, you are treated with disrespect and mentally abused. The only good thing is that this placement doesn’t last very long.

You and your sister move to a group foster home (known in the old days as an orphanage). From there you are sent to another home. More than a year has gone by now and your mother has not visited you once, even though she had the opportunity and permission of DSS.

Then comes the straw that broke the camel’s back – you are moved from this foster home without your sister. As always, you have no idea why you are being moved and you are scared and now completely alone in the world. You spend three nights in a row in three different houses while they try to find a more permanent foster home. This new home is full of foster children – the foster children are a job more than anything else for your new foster parents.

This is where you are starting when our family wants to take you in. This is what you have been through when our family promises to love you forever and never let you go, no matter what. This is what your view of the world is when you move into our house, and now we’re going to ask you to try to start moving forward and become part of our family.

If you were in this position, how vulnerable would you be willing to make yourself? How open would you be with your heart and your feelings? Would it be easier to love or to hate? Would you even be able to tell the difference?

Needless to say, Edward and the Duchess had developed a slightly armored outer layering. By “slightly,” I think you know I mean, “slightly more armored than an M1 Abrams tank.” Both had their own special defenses which were as different as they were annoying. Is annoying too strong a word to use for my own kids? Maybe, but that’s the way it was – these were defense mechanisms which got in the way of reaching Edward and the Duchess on any level.

The Kids

The Duchess is a big girl. Her birth mom is slightly taller than average and her birth father was six feet seven inches. She’s tall enough compared to everyone else her age that we have often questioned whether or not there is a possibility her birth certificate is wrong and that she’s not a year or two older than they thought. On top of her height is the fact that she is solidly built – not that she is heavy, but she is rugged.

Consequently, people always think she is older than she is and even those who know how old she is tend to subconsciously expect more from her because she seems older. Which was extremely unfortunate for her given that she was actually less developed mentally than the average six year old. At the time she moved in, she sucked her thumb whenever she was in any situation in which she felt uncomfortable. The situations that made her feel that way were varied, but can generally be summed up as “most of the time.”

Whenever you got anywhere near the Duchess or made any sort of contact with her, whether it was to hold her hand or grab her arm to prevent her from stepping in front of a train, she did the same thing: squirm out of the way and make a tremendously obnoxious “Nnnnnnnn” sound. She cried several times a day about pretty much everything. She talked about missing her babies (meaning the two youngest girls – one of whom she had never lived with and, at the time, had probably only seen once or twice), but it was obvious she didn’t feel as much for them as she did Juliet who had really been the closest thing to a mother she had known. When she cried that she missed Juliet, it made my heart break. I wanted her to be able to see her siblings and her mother, but that wasn’t the way things were working at that point. It was tough.

Both Stacy and I spent many nights lying with the Duchess in her bed as she cried herself to sleep. She was a mess, just like you would expect her to be.

Edward handled things in a different way – where Duchess displayed her emotions openly and frequently, Edward would simply pretend nothing was happening. He was so detached from everything that went on it was incredible. Had they give and Academy Award for Best Actor in a Shitty Situation, he would have been up on stage thanking his agent and all the people who made it happen. When I say Edward didn’t show his emotions, don’t mistake that to mean he didn’t show emotions at all – he showed all kinds of emotions; unfortunately, none of them were ever what he was actually feeling.

By the time Edward came to live with us, he had become a master manipulator – he could and could read people immediately when he met them and within a few seconds he could decide which personality to give them to get what he wanted. He could give you his Mr. Happy and upbeat personality, he could give you his Mr. Angry and defiant personality, he could give you his sad and withdrawn personality. As I introduced him to friends and family, I was always amazed to watch him work his magic, particularly when it was compared to the Duchess. When Duchess met someone new, she would grunt and flop around and generally act like a mutant on drugs to prevent having any real interaction with people, whereas Edward would just work them and work them until he had them wrapped around his finger.

Unfortunately for Edward, his act didn’t work with us. After you know him for more than a week, you can actually start to see what he is doing when he talks people. So, Stacy and I had to be careful what kinds of strings we let him pull. Obviously, we wanted him trying to make connections with us, but we wanted him to be the one making the connections, not some concocted personality. That way, when I tucked him in one night and he touched my face and said, “I wish I were white like you,” I could tell he didn’t really wish that, but that he was saying something he thought I would like to hear. Having a child who is constantly wheedling for attention in this way can be disarming and dangerous – disarming for the parent and dangerous for the child. If Stacy and I had let ourselves take the things Edward said at face value, we could have ignorantly assumed he was well adjusted and happy without a care in the world and nothing could have been further from the truth.

Here’s a peculiar way Edward’s defenses manifested themselves: he couldn’t feel pain. Literally, he was almost unable to register when he had hurt himself. He certainly couldn’t cry even when he had done serious harm. For example, a little more than a month after he moved in, Edward cut his finger off - this is a long story explained elsewhere in the book, but for this part we’ll make it interesting and say that he lost a finger in a sword fight with a pirate – and he never cried. He got up, whimpered for a moment and then never said another word. Never complained the five hours he waited to got to surgery, never complained in the recovery room, never complained the four weeks he wore a cast, never complained when the doctor used a pair of pliers to pull the pin out of the bone and through the end of his finger with no anesthetic. No pain at all registered in his brain.

Like physical pain, Edward was able to shelter himself from emotional pain. The second visit we had with bio-mom didn’t go particularly well – it was one of those situations where bio-mom was in a very depressed state and the kids were tired anyway and it was a very teary and emotional good-bye. When we got back to the car, Duchess was a mess – a complete basket case and I literally had to sit on the sidewalk with her for 20 minutes while she sobbed in my arms. When I finally got her calmed down enough to get in the Red Dragon and go, Edward says to me, “I didn’t cry.” Which was true – he didn’t cry. And you would have to be made of stone to not cry at that visit. It was a nightmare.

Things have changed for the healthier with both kids, to be sure, but those first couple of months were both heartbreaking and extremely grueling.

Every School Year Is The Same

2005-01-16T19:32:00.000-08:00

The first day of school is such an exciting event – the children are happy to go and see their friends and eager to meet their new teachers, school clothes have been bought and the day has finally arrived when the children who have been waiting with great patience finally get to wear them. Their mother and I hold hands with each other as the children skip merrily along their way to school, each with a new backpack filled with binders, pencils and erasers. The sun is shining, birds are singing, and the smell of hope is in the air and you can just see the joy in their eyes as they embark on the brand new journey that is another year of education.

If you believe anything we have ever done in this family resembles something that organized and peaceful, you obviously haven’t been paying attention. Here’s the way it really went last year:

The night before the first day of school we end up scrambling to purchase one new outfit for each child so they can at least show up the first day in new clothes. Why didn’t we go shopping before? Possibly it was because we are lazy morons, but also possibly due to the fact that we were short on money and time until that moment (and we probably still had neither the time nor the money to get the job done). After the kids were in bed, I sneak back out to find school supplies, but because most other families in the state were more organized than I was, the supplies are sold out – Staples looks like it has been looted in a riot. The only thing left in the store are six other disorganized parents and a box of pink typing paper. I kick one of the other parents out of the way and purchase the typing paper – it will have to do for now.

Even though we planned to get up and get ready over an hour before school starts, we managed to get out of bed with 30 minutes left, which means we must START DOING THINGS AT FULL SPEED AND FULL VOLUME SO THAT EVERYONE WILL KNOW I AM SERIOUS AND THERE ARE ONLY FIVE MINUTES LEFT HURRY UP AND EAT YOR LUCKY CHARMS! Once breakfast was over and the teeth had, ostensibly, been brushed (that is, if teeth can be brushed in the five seconds they were in the bathroom claiming to have brushed them – never mind, they’re mostly just baby teeth anyway), we rush out the door, run half way to school, realize that two kids have forgotten their backpacks, another has forgotten to pack snack and another feels like he is going to throw up.

Note: Whenever we have mass confusion at the house or anywhere else, the children find it helpful to either throw up or threaten to throw up. If they can’t muster a vomit, it is completely acceptable for the dog or cat to vomit as an alternative.

We neared the playground as the bell rings and made it to the lines just as they are filing inside. Because the first day of school is always special, I snapped a photograph of the back of their heads as they went into the building. Then I went and sat down, exhausted, and rejoiced at the fact that I now had six hours alone. I’ll tell you how I screwed that up in just a minute.

Note: Perhaps you are thinking that it is a shame that I was only able to capture the back of the children’s heads in the photograph, but you’d be wrong – it doesn’t matter what the photograph actually looks like because no one will ever see the finished product, anyway. What happens is this roll of film stays in the camera for about a year, then when it is finally finished it gets thrown into the bin on top of my dresser with the other 90 rolls of 35mm film which have been there since the beginning of time. I suspect that if someone were to develop those rolls of film there may be photographs of actual dinosaurs on there – that’s how old some of that film is, I tell you. The point is not to get the picture and look at it, the point is to take the picture and know that I’ve taken it. I think.

Because I had six hours each day, I decided to take a job painting a friend’s house. Which made no sense at all. I’d decided to go back to school, try to keep up with the housework and be home in time to pick up the children each day, so I added painting a house on top of all that? What can I say – I don’t learn well from my mistakes.

As if that were not enough of a drain on my time, the kids all came home from school with the dreaded “information cards.” Let me explain these little things to you with a metaphor. If I you were to read a book that was equal in length to the amount of time it takes to fill the forms out relative to the amount of time I have available to fill them out, you would need to read Don Quixote and the bible during a commercial break while watching Friends.

Each child in school (and there were four of them remember) had three of the little forms to fill out. All three forms are exactly the same. Why did I need to complete the forms in triplicate? Why wouldn’t one form be good enough for all the children? Why did I have to fill out the forms again every year – couldn’t they have just verified the info from the year before? Why was the system not computerized? If not computerized, could they not at least have been on carbon paper? Are our schools so backwards that we have not yet reached the same level of technology as people in 1806?

I never got an answer to these questions. I never had time to ask these questions. I was far too busy filling out these forms on 3x5 paper. Each form had a lot of questions – I didn’t count, but if I had to guess I would say it was in the neighborhood of 11,000 questions. In triplicate. For four kids. Many of the questions were simple, such as the child’s name, and my name and pi calculated to the 23rd decimal (3.14159265358979323846264, in case you are wondering). But as I went along, the questions got a little harder. At least, they got harder for me.

Race (check only one): White/African-American/Hispanic (not black)/Asian/Native American

Now, in case I failed to mention it, or haven’t otherwise made it perfectly clear, we have race issues in our family. I don’t mean we have a race problem – we haven’t had riots in almost a year – but race is an issue we have to deal with. The Duchess, Edward and Lady McBeth are all Puerto Rican and, as such, have dark skin and curly hair. To look at Edward, you might assume he is Hispanic, particularly if you are Hispanic and are hip to the subtle differences, but the majority of white people would just call him black. Duchess and Lady even more so because their facial features are even more African in nature. Which makes sense, since black Puerto Ricans are largely descended of people from the Congo. They also have much influence from the Taino population which was native to Puerto Rico prior to Columbus. In truth, there is also a heavy dose of white European ancestry as well. Due to the conditions the natives and slaves endured in the 16th and 17th centuries, Puerto Ricans are a heavily mixed ethnic group, as well as a very confused group (it is almost impossible to accurately track lineage). Essentially, to be Puerto Rican means to be part native, part African and part European.

So what the hell do I check off on the little cards?

In reality, this is not what ran through my mind when I was filling out the forms. My first thought was that I would need to have at least one beer while I was filling out forms. My second thought was that it would probably require two or three. But my third thought was that this was a bullshit way to phrase the question.

Hispanic, not black? What the hell? They are Hispanic and black. And Native American, too, although the Native American is not recognized by the federal government (like the Inuits in Alaska – also not recognized as “Native American.” Funny, I don’t think they got here after us). And the Hispanic is Spanish, therefore, white. Why can’t I chose more than one? This doesn’t even make any sense. This little form was beginning to piss me off.

In the end, I chose “African-American” because that is how they will be perceived by most people who meet them. Still, I couldn’t help but feel I was betraying some of their heritage by not choosing “Hispanic.” I crossed it out and thought some more.

Having an interracial family presents some challenges, sure, but it also provides some entertainment. For example, the Duchess was playing basketball last year at the Boys and Girls club. She and Stacy were sitting on the sidelines waiting for her group to start as the previous group was finishing up. Apparently there were a few African American families there, which stands out a bit because Arlington is a fairly white suburb. Duchess picked up on this and said, “There’s a lot of brown people here.” Stacy agreed and nothing more is said for a few minutes, then Stacy asked Duchess if it bothered her to have a white mother. Duchess laughed and said, “Does it bother you to have a brown kid?” It’s so nice to hear little kids talk about race because to them it’s all simply about what someone looks like – there are no culture differences, there is no history, there is no racism. If only there were some way to keep them in that state of innocence.

With race, that’s just the beginning. I like to refer to our family as interracial, because, duh, that’s what it is – it covers more than one race. Intertwined. Intermixed. Interracial. I’ll also accept multiracial because, duh, that’s what it is – more than one race. However, a leading adoption publication, Adoptive Families, refers to it much of the time, if not all the time, as “trans-racial.” How can a family be trans-racial? First of all, using the prefix “trans” seems to imply that we are somehow crossing over race, which doesn’t actually work for me, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. I suppose it does, technically, work in our situation. But then I started looking up the terms and I found that most of the time (in the world according to Google) when people are referring to “transracial” they mean adoption, when they say “multiracial” they mean individual people who consider themselves to be of more than one race and when people say “interracial” they are talking about couples of more than one race.

Crap. Now I have to figure out whether I am going to change the way I describe our family or if I want to walk around worrying I am offending people if I continue to refer to us as interracial. Why didn’t someone give me a book on this, for crying out loud? There’s no manual, no answer key – I’m out here winging it. I even took a race class at night to try to get some answers. Unfortunately, it just opened up even more questions. Is ethnicity the same as race? What defines a race? What defines an ethnicity? What about people who have mixed heritage? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck had a black mother and a Spanish father?

I know that this isn’t necessarily the school’s fault – they have to answer to the state and federal governments with the answers to how many black children are in the school and how many white children, etc. And I know that the government is reflecting the general American attitude that things must be one or the other, black or white, on or off, right or wrong. American’s, for whatever reason, hate to recognize anything that might be a shade of gray. It’s everywhere – look around if you don’t believe me.

When a politician fails to adhere strictly to his party’s policies and occasionally votes with the opposition party, what do they call him? He gets labeled a fence rider or middle of the road. And it ain’t no compliment. Never mind the fact that it probably means he actually thinks about each issue individually instead of toes some ridiculous party line that he doesn’t happen to agree with. We like our politicians to be easily categorized – liberal or conservative.

And we like our people to be either black, white, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. Choose only one. Don’t choose two, because it’s absolutely ridiculous that someone is going to claim to be black and Hispanic. Or Hispanic and white. That’s just crazy.

I decide that I am taking this race question way too seriously and I just pencil in what they call themselves: brown. Which is entirely more accurate than any choices already on the form.

The rest of the forms are fairly standard – stupid questions that have absolutely no basis in reality. For instance, they want my health insurance policy number and our pediatrician’s name, address and phone number. Which makes no sense.

First of all, this information is perfectly useless in an emergency. If my child has such an emergency that he has to be rushed to the ER and neither my wife or myself are available, it’s not as if the school is going to fill out the insurance forms for me – those will be waiting when I get there. Nor are they going to call the pediatrician for any reason at all – what are they going to do, make an appointment for a physical for the kid? Medical emergencies are going to require one of two courses of action for the school officials: 1) call me or Stacy and have us come and get the kid or 2) take the kid to the ER because it is a genuine emergency and Stacy and I can’t be reached. Neither scenario requires a pediatrician’s phone number and address nor the insurance info.

I grudgingly filled it out. Three times. For each child.

Then I came to the section where I am supposed to list who to contact in case of emergency – they demanded three local names and numbers (“you must provide three names” or something like that). Hell, I didn’t know three people I wanted to list there – I didn’t even know one person I wanted to list there. I had only moved there the year before and, quite frankly, we haven’t made a lot of friends I would trust with that kind of responsibility. So, I left it blank. Screw those bastards for rubbing it in my face that I don’t have any friends.

Next was the Scary Section: Is there anyone your child is NOT to be released to?

Um, yeah – everyone who is not me or my wife. Is that specific enough? But, in reality, I had to list the children’s birth mother – not that I was all the worried about her getting motivated enough to come and get them. After all, she couldn’t be bothered to look after them when they were living in the same house and she couldn’t be bothered to visit when they were in foster care with her cousin in the same area of town. Hell, the odds of her actually getting on a bus, researching and tracking us down would be almost a million to one. Still, I wanted to be sure that school never even considered letting them go with her, so I put her name and all her aliases on the list and then wrote “DO NOT RELEASE TO BIRTH MOTHER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.”

Then I felt kind of bad for Mab and Achilles because they didn’t have anyone in their “Do not release to” sections, so I wrote in, “George Bush, Dick Cheney and Carl Rove.” It made me feel a little safer to know that even though I hadn’t listed all the bad guys in the country, some of the most unsavory were eliminated.

Finally, the forms ended with a riddle and three more math questions, all of which I ignored. By this time the sun was ready to rise again and the second day of school was about to begin. It was comforting to know that I had completed these forms and wouldn’t need to fill them out again for another year.

That comfort, of course, lasted approximately six hours as each child returned home that evening with the dreaded fundraiser information. Fundraisers – a subject we’ll get into as soon as I catch up on some sleep.

Fundraisers, or, One More Reason Coworkers Hate Parents

I don’t blame co-workers for haring parents. If there is anything less interesting than hearing about someone else’s dreams, it’s hearing a story about their darling, precious children. And I tell these stories all day. I am a sad, sad man.

Off the top of my head, let me give you all the fundraisers I was either involved with or ignored last year – the PTO fall fundraiser (wrapping paper), the PTO spring fund raiser (candles), Pop Warner (a combination of begging on the street as well as selling something which escapes my memory), Little League (raffle tickets), Boy Scouts (crappy popcorn related items), and Girl Scouts (cookies). There were probably half a dozen more, but this is the list I came up with without thinking real hard (something I try to avoid). Keep in mind that as always, everything is times four. So, not only do my wife and I need to sell overpriced wrapping paper to my unsuspecting co-workers, we have to sell enough to cover four kids.

I have to get sneakier every year – once fall rolls around, people I know start avoiding me like I’m that little monkey from the movie “Outbreak.” I have to wear camouflage and sneak into their offices before work so I can hide behind the water cooler – then when they stand around the water cooler to discuss last night’s episode of The Surreal World and what that crazy Flava Flav is up to, I jump out and yell, “CAN I INTEREST YOU IN SOME SHITTY WRAPPING PAPER TO BENEFIT MY KIDS’ SCHOOL?”

Sure, they try to run, but as an experienced parent, I have anticipated this move and laid traps with poison darts at all the exits. “I have the antidote for anyone who has been ‘accidentally’ stuck with a poison dart – I’d be willing to part with individual doses for the modest price of, say, a dozen rolls of holiday wrap.” And, of course it’s “holiday wrap” because just mentioning a catalog of “Christmas wrap” into the school would cause the building to spontaneously combust. I’m not complaining, mind you – just pointing out.

Note: Did you ever notice that when someone says, “I’m not complaining,” it almost always comes right after or before something that sounds a whole lot like complaining? “What a fucking idiot my boss is – I’m not complaining, though.”

As I see it, there are two main problems associated with fundraisers. Two problems, I mean, apart from the fact that it makes everyone I know despise me, but that’s nothing new. I have five kids and no life outside my home which means I am compelled by forces well beyond my control – nature, God, zombie trance, whatever you want to call it – to talk about my kids non-stop and like they are the smartest, best looking kids in the world; therefore, my coworkers have learned to hate me long before I ever showed up selling tins of caramel popcorn.

The first major problem of fundraising is that, for whatever reason, the fundraising activity/product is never anything useful. Does anyone I know really need an oversized container of Gummy Worms? Probably not. Does anyone I know really want a pack of 10 year old cheerleaders to wash their car with sponges that have been dropped on the ground so many times they now bear less resemblance to sponges than to 100 grit sandpaper? I’m going to say, “no.”

The only two fundraisers which come even close to being exceptions to this rule come from Pop Warner football and Girl Scouts. Pop Warner doesn’t go with the pretense of selling you something you really don’t need. They have chosen a more honest and direct approach – out and out begging. Which is a fabulous idea because the only thing each kid needs is an old can to hold while they stand outside some unsuspecting business and shake down all the customers for loose change. Not only does this separate people from their money without requiring a follow up visit to deliver a product, but it is fantastic training for anyone on the football team who may decide later in life that “wino” is the career path for him. Except, we didn’t spend the money on wine. Not much of it, anyway.

And, obviously, Girl Scout cookies are a staple of every American diet. I can safely bring the GS order form into the office and not have anyone take a swing at me because people actually like GS cookies. See, the Girl Scouts have found something that works for them and they have decided to stick with it – a solid business practice that has resulted in my never having to pay for any trip or activity the girls participate in (well, except selling the cookies, which takes nearly as much of my life each year as I spend watching Monster Garage – let me tell you, that’s no five minute commitment).

The best fundraisers I have ever been a part of, though, were both when I was a kid. The first was when I was in sixth grade and we were raising money for a week long camping trip to a national park. Someone had the genius to sell light bulbs. Hear me out, now, because this was genius. Why? First, because the way the fundraiser worked was that each kid was given a big box containing perhaps 100 light bulbs packaged in pairs. Because they were light bulbs, the box was light enough to be carried by a sixth grader. The idea was that we would go door to door and sell the lightbulbs for, I can’t remember, but let’s say $10,000 a package. We got paid on the spot and the customer got their light bulbs on the spot.

What made this such a great idea is everybody needs light bulbs – they are one of those items that you usually forget until it becomes absolutely necessary to go to the store and purchase a box. And when is it absolutely necessary? When you no longer have any lamps left in the house to steal bulbs from to put into the overhead fixture in the kitchen. Admit it, you’re reading this right now by the light from a bulb you transplanted from a lamp in the living room and you haven’t been the basement in a year because that was the first place you stole bulbs. All that remains is your one bulb you keep taking from room to room. The problem is, when you do remember to buy the bulbs at the store, you buy, what, eight of them? And when you get home and start screwing them into the empty sockets, you find that you don’t have any left over at all, do you?

So, if some kid came to your door right now and offered to sell you a few boxes of bulbs, that would be pretty useful, right?

The other fundraiser we did was more along the Pop Warner begging vein, but a little more work for us. The soccer team did a “bottle drive” which was where we went around door to door asking people to donate any deposit cans and bottles to the team – at the end of the day we took all our bottles to the redemption center and turned them in for the nickel apiece. This was nice because it was a bit of the begging – Can we please have something of yours that is actually worth money? – and a bit of doing something for you – You know you were eventually just going to throw them away because there is no way you’ll ever get motivated enough to bring them to the redemption center.

For whatever reason, though, fundraisers today seem intent on selling things that nobody needs or selling things for prices no sane people would pay for them or the dreaded combination “Overpriced Crap You Don’t Want Or Need.”

The second major problem with the fundraisers is that it is no longer the kids’ job to go out and raise funds. It’s the parents’ job. Why? Because sometime before today but after 1982 when I sold light bulbs door to door like a miniature Willy Loman, parents decided that perhaps it is not the wisest thing in the world to send a 12 year old to random houses without supervision.

All of which means parents are forced to bring fundraising order forms to work and annoy as many people in their captive audience as possible. Last spring, though, was different. Fed up with the concept of selling things to coworkers (also I didn’t, technically, have any coworkers apart from Lady McBeth, the cat and the dog), so I decided that the Girl Scouts, Mab and the Duchess, would go door to door selling cookies – I would walk with them while they went up to each door and made their pitch. Clearly, I had been inside long enough all winter that my brain had ceased all cognitive function and was running on animal instinct, which, for some reason, was telling me that this door to door thing was a fantastic idea.

And it was, for about thirty minutes. Then I realized it was taking about ten minutes per house for the girls to make their pitch, get the order, then write it down. The writing part was what was killing our production time, so I soon decided that I would help with just the writing part while the girls still made the sales pitch. However, after a few more houses, I realized the girls were still pretty shy which was causing them to have to repeat a lot of things louder – you know, stuff like that which was still bogging us down. So I decided I’d just help them out with a few of the key points – you know, how much each box cost, how long until the order would come in, etc.

Twenty minutes later I’m ringing the doorbells, making the pitch by myself and writing the orders down. At one point the girls went back to the house to go pee, but I kept on working. Which turned out to be a mistake.

“Honey, call the police – there’s man on the porch claiming to be a girl scout! Pervert!”

When the orders came in, I had to write a check to cover every box myself, which meant that anyone we couldn’t get in touch with that had ordered cookies was going to cost me money. Logically, this meant I was the only one motivated to actually distribute these cookies, so every night I was the one on the phone, I was the one who had to go back door to door when it was convenient for the customer – it was a nightmare and we won’t be doing that again.

Lest you think I am just a big Complainy McWhinypants who has only criticism and no solutions, let me offer you my alternatives for these useless fundraisers:

For schools, wouldn’t it just be easier to fund them properly in the first place? Wow – was easier to come up with than I though it would be.

For all extra curricular activities, set up a concession booth at every event that sells hot dogs, chips and drinks – parents are always trying to fit dinner in before a scout meeting or right after soccer practice, etc – this kills two birds with one stone. And if you really wanted to put your organization over the top, financially speaking, sell draft beer at $4 a cup. I guarantee sales beyond your wildest expectations.

The section in which we go into therapy...

2004-11-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

...as a group. And fail. Miserably.

The process of adoption is littered with booby traps. Actually, that isn’t really the right way to describe it, but I bet I got a chuckle out of some of you just be saying “booby.” I know it got me giggling.

Anyway, we did encounter a few tricks when dealing with DSS, mostly during the one-million-questions-which-will-make-my-head-asplode phase. Most of the questions are fairly loaded and require careful thought so as to phrase things in a way that won’t make you seem unfit for parenting.

“Have you ever been arrested?”

“Define ‘arrested.’ Are we talking about being brought down town for questioning, or formally charged? Look, a duck!”

Every once in a while they would catch me off guard and I’d answer too quickly.

“Have you ever been in therapy or counseling?”

This seemed like a straightforward and easy question because I hadn’t been in therapy or counseling and neither had my wife – an argument could have been made that serious mental health intervention was in perfect order when we decided to start collection kids like there were baseball cards, but that’s a different discussion. However, in my fervor to appear as sane and as not crazy as possible I may have gone overboard in my answer.

“Hah! Of course not! Do I look crazy? Hah, hah. I’m the normalist person you’ll ever meet and I wouldn’t ever go to a shrink because I don’t need one! I’m a man, dammit!”

I’m not sure those were my exact words, but you get the idea. The social worker interviewing me pinched her lips, narrowed her eyes and made a growling kind of noise. Then she reached across the table and ripped my face off. Which is only partly true – she helped my wife rip my face off.

Turns out, DSS wants me to have a favorable view of counseling and therapy because, duh, the kids would undoubtedly need some kind of therapy. Despite my miserable failure on that question, we still managed to talk them into placing us with some children after I promised to be nice and keep an open mind about therapy.

Getting into therapy wasn’t as easy as it sounds – for one thing, as psychology major, I’ve seen some of the people who make it through school to become therapists, particularly licensed independent clinical social workers (LICSW) who have a masters in social work and a few years supervised experience in counseling. I’ve taken classes with people who wouldn’t have been competent to advise someone how to butter toast, much less guide them through repairing the psychological damage done by years of neglect.

I started by asking the social workers for recommendations as to where to get a competent therapist who specialized in adoptions. They recommended a place called Center For Family Connections. I asked on an e-mail list server in our area and received multiple recommendations for CFFC. A woman I met with two adopted children recommended CFFC. After reading about CFFC’s services, they seemed to be the clear choice for parents in our situation.

Except the fact that they didn’t take the state insurance the kids had.

It was like being a Red Sox fan – you get so close to your goal you’re pretty much settled into the idea of winning, then something drastic and irreversible happens and you have to start from scratch.

The rest of us have Stacy’s HMO from work, but we weren’t allowed to add the kids until the petition for adoption was filed and there was a six month wait period on that (like a Brady Bill for adoption). And paying for it out of pocket was right out because it would have been about $100 a week, at the minimum. I’m sure some of your are wrinkling up your noses and saying, “You should have just paid it because it’s for the welfare of the children, blah, blah, blah, I’m a rich smart-ass without any children or experience of my own blah blah blah.” But you know what else is good for the welfare of the children? Grocery shopping. And paying the rent on time to avoid eviction. So, just shut it.

We had to settle on our second choice, which shall remain unnamed because I’m going to try to avoid a lawsuit here. Let’s call them the Center For Uselessness (CFU). Even though this was our second choice and no one had recommended them specifically, they still had impressive background working with families and, they claimed, adopted children. Sounded good to us, so we made an appointment.

The first appointment was for Stacy and I only to discuss our objectives. We explained, rather explicitly I think, that we felt Edward and the Duchess needed individual therapy and perhaps some time in therapy together. For the most part they had been making good, albeit slow, progress during their transition, so this was mainly to just ensure that things continued to progress as they were.

For some reason, though, this therapist – Odd Out Of Touch Hippie Person, or Lori for short – insisted on seeing the whole family at once. Why, you might ask? I have absolutely no duck-strangling idea. Then why did you agree, you follow-up with? I don’t know. Why can I never remember to get the garbage out to the curb until I hear the truck coming down the street? I know which day is garbage day – it never changes. And I actually remember five or six times during the day to bring the garbage out, but I’m so wound up cleaning ground up Cheerios out of the rug that it zips out of my brain as soon as it gets in there. It’s similar to trying to remember a phone number when 38 people are standing in the same room shouting random numbers.

What were we talking about? Oh yes, I was obfuscating on the question of why we agreed to a family therapy session rather than individuals like we wanted. Answer: we screwed up. In hindsight, we probably wanted the individual sessions, but didn’t realize just how important it was to us until after the fiasco that was the group session.

And trust me, fiasco is the best way to describe the session.

First of all, because the therapists are normal people and not vampires, they work during the day. Which means Stacy has to leave work for a couple of hours to get there, have the hour session and get back to work. Given that the last thing her boss needs is more excuses to find fault with her lifestyle, this is a problem right off the bat.

Let me back up, though. I forgot to mention the kids’ reaction to being told we were going to attend therapy together. Mab and Achilles reacted in a way one would expect a person to act who had been informed of the death of a loved one, completely with wailing, gnashing of teeth, throwing themselves prostrate at my feet and begging. Edward and the Duchess, who had previously attended therapy and had been fairly agreeable about starting again, decided that Mad and Achilles’ reaction looked like so much more fun that they joined in the dramatics.

On the day of the session, we all piled into the van and drove to the CFU office in Somerville. At this point, problems start compounding upon themselves. Taking a car ride of more than 30 seconds with everyone gets annoying because the kids are forced to sit right next to each other in the back seat – three across. Therefore, there is always an argument about who gets to be the one person to sit in the van’s middle seat next to Lucy in her car seat. This argument takes place despite the fact that I have taken the preventive measure of setting up a system wherein a different person sits in the seat each ride – it’s a simple rotation based on age. But then you’ve got to argue about who sat there last, and whether or not it was actually their turn or did they sit there because they traded with someone else and does that constitute a turn or was it simply a trade and finally I have to yell as loud as I can that I DON’T REALLY CARE WHO SITS THERE BUT SOMEONE’S ASS BETTER BE IN THAT SEAT BY THE TIME I COUNT TO FIVE – ONE, TWO, FIVE!

Anyway, because the kids have to sit three across in the back, they are forced to sit in a manner which causes parts of their bodies to touch each other. You might assume that means their legs are touching or their shoulders, but it doesn’t stop there. Anyone who has spent any time around children knows that if kids are required to touch each other, even for a benign reason like sitting in a car, they will eventually fight because one of them will be hitting, another pinching and another licking and before you know it the van is rocking back and forth at each stop light because the three children in the back will be fighting and screaming so loud that even with the radio turned up all the way I cannot hear the right wing nutjobs on the talk station so I have to shout again for everyone to please use their indoor voices.

That’s just paraphrasing, of course. And by “paraphrasing” I mean leaving out the swear words.

We finally get to the office and there is mass confusion about what insurance is going to cover this and is it our Harvard Pilgrim or the MassHealth and for the love of Pete I though I straightened this out with you people on the phone before but apparently this is now different because we have everyone which is precisely what I didn’t want in the first place.

Here’s a quiz for you to see how well you’re getting to know us. While Stacy and I are filling out the paperwork and arguing with the receptionist, the children see this as an appropriate time to:

Play tag and scream
Climb a book shelf
Throw toys across the room
All of the above

If you answered D, you’ve been paying attention.

Since we were in public – at the therapist’s office, no less – I couldn’t really raise my voice and had to settle for my Stern Voice. The Stern Voice is when I grit my teeth and whisper that they had Better Behave. Right Now. Frankly, I wasn’t real sure what to use as a consequence – normally I can threaten to take them home and they won’t get to participate in whatever we’re doing and that works well. But none of them want to be at the therapist’s office in the first place, so threatening them with going home won’t be terribly effective.

Which, it occurs to me now, might be what they were trying to accomplish with the behavior.

Anyway, as if things weren’t off to a bad enough start, Lori hippies her way out to us and brings us into one of the therapy rooms. I have no idea what I thought the therapy room was going to look like – I guess I assumed it would be rather sparsely decorated if it was decorated at all, maybe have sort of a sanitarium look about it – I don’t know. But this room ended up being more like a hotel room without beds. It had a kitchen suite, couches and chairs, etc. There were toys for the kids to play with, cookies and soda laid out to snack on. It was all very nice if someone was stopping by with their children for a little visit.

Except that this was the worst possible environment for my children to work. Worst. Possible. Environment.

First, there was the soda. What the fuck? Soda? Who gives kids soda, anyway? I don’t give my kids soda except on rare occasions. I certainly don’t give them soda and cookies and expect them to behave and participate in a therapy session. And the toys might be nice for one or two kids who want to play while you talk kind of indirectly to them. But these are four children who don’t watch a lot of TV, so they can actually, you know, engage in play with the toys and completely block out everything else.

Anyway, Lori starts off the session by talking – blathering on about something. The kids are completely ignoring her. Some of the children are playing and wouldn’t notice if Kool-Aid crashed through the wall and yelled “Hey, Kool-Aid!” and others are actively ignoring, by which I mean mentally transporting themselves away from the entire picture and, I don’t know, basking in the sun on a beach in Tahiti. I can’t understand what Lori is saying because I’m too busy trying to get the kids to pay attention, which is about as fruitful as ordering your coffee mug to complete an action item at work (I don’t really know what I’m saying there, either – work with me here).

Finally, I have to take the toys away from the kids and make everyone sit on the couch and chairs. Lori continues to attempt to engage the children in conversation.

“What do you like to do?”

“What kinds of things do you do as a family?”

“Do you like living together?”

To Queen Mab: “How did you feel about having to share a room?”

”Do you think your parents love you?”

These are just a sampling of questions that were silly and pointless for several reasons. First, it’s hard to get a serious answer out of people who are literally climbing on a curtain and standing in the chairs. Second, there is a room full of people, including the parents – you think the kids are just going to blurt out something negative about the situation even if that’s the way they feel? I’m no psychologist (yet), but I’m pretty sure there needs to be a long period where the patients build up trust with the therapist and the rest of the members of the group in this setting before they might want to share some feeling of a deep and personal nature, particularly if those feelings might be negative. Also, it is probably not that easy to get deep and personal thoughts out of a kid who is jumping off the heat register like Superman.

It was a mess. A big mess from start to finish. What is it that I’m trying to think of to compare the children to?

Monkeys. Drunken monkeys. Drunken monkeys with bad attitudes.

Suffice it to say, the first session didn’t go too well. Unless you’re scale of “well” starts at “useless” and gets steadily worse.

The next session was scheduled for just Mab, the Duchess and I. Why? Because I was desperately trying to pare down the number of people sitting in on these useless sessions and the best I could do was to convince Lori that it would be best to see only two kids at a time for a couple sessions. So I left Achilles and Edward with a babysitter and we went to see Lori again.

This session was unproductive on about 30 different levels for entirely different reasons than last time. At the time, Mab was so against the therapy in general that Lori could have offered her a driver’ license and a new car and she would have complained. Also at that time, the Duchess was still learning to come out of her shell and even talk to people in a “normal” manner – she didn’t have the tools to share anything even if she wanted to.

It was about 5 minutes into this hour that I mentally fired Lori – this was just not going to work. That made me feel a little better about sitting there for the rest of the session, but it still seemed to take forever as Lori asked question after question after question that one girl wouldn’t answer and the other couldn’t. It was a nightmare.

I didn’t officially fire Lori right there in person – I made the next appointment which I planned to cancel over the phone. And then a funny thing happened. She fired us.

When I called to tell her we wouldn’t be needing her services, she tells me she doesn’t think we really need group therapy and that we seem to be doing a pretty good job. I was as confused as you probably are. But it made things easier for me, so I went with it.

We actually took some time off from the therapy in general to let the kids all get the bad taste out of their mouths – a bad taste like licking an ashtray. I can’t say I blame the kids for any of their attitudes toward therapy. I was trying to think of three things I’d rather do than go back to therapy with Lori.

1. Kiss a live alligator.
2. Chew my leg off at the knee.
3. Eat a broken glass pie.

But the therapy is important, so we’ve gotten Edward and the Duchess into a new therapist and maybe someday we’ll try the group thing again. Maybe. Someday. But it’s just such an awful thought to go back to that group – like the ashtray licking I mentioned – that I’m beginning to think it would just be easier to let the kids grow up to resent me.

Deciphering Kids' Language

2004-11-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

Guess what?

Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad – guess what?

Kids are persistent little boogers when they want to be. And the time they want to be persistent is when they are trying to interrupt your conversation or train of thought.

For instance, let’s say the setting is family dinner around the table at home. The topic of conversation is what brand of mini-van we are going to purchase and Stacy and I have been struggling for two weeks trying to decide between the seven passenger van with the best mileage or the eight passenger van which has extra room for all the Kid Gear we drag around. The decision has to be made ASAP because the old van has 175,000 miles, a bad transmission, a leaky radiator and the sliding door won’t shut or open unless you know a secret maneuver.

Suddenly, the solution pops into my head – it’s all clear to me now which mini-van to buy and I have the perfect reason why. I open my mouth to relate this idea to Stacy. I begin with, “You know those trips we have to take to Maine throughout the summer and at Christmas to see my parents? Well, I was thinking…”

All appears to be going well – the rational thought train has left the station and all passengers are aboard and accounted for. I’m on a roll – first a logical thought and now a logical and coherent line of speech is flowing forth from my mouth. I know I have to hurry because…

“Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad – um, Guess What?”

Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh! The dreaded logical thought terminator! I make one valiant effort to ignore the little knee biter who is interrupting me and I try to press on with the mini-van related conversation. “Um, since we, uh, usually end up loading the van down more than, um…”

“Dad, guess what!?”

Ignoring it doesn’t work. In fact, ignoring things in general may be the single least effective parenting strategy of all time accomplishing nothing more than filling the world with teenage pregnancy and suicides. It’s time to try a more direct approach.

“Honey, don’t interrupt,” I say in the general vicinity of the tiny creature attempting to destroy the only rational thought I have had all day. The children generally respond to this first minor admonishment by actually being quiet for a moment. Less experienced parents would be fooled into thinking their child has learned a valuable lesson in manners and would proceed at a leisurely pace with their mini-van analysis. However, I know that this temporary reprieve is only a cruel trick by the youngster used to create a false sense of security before he or she launches and all out verbal offensive which will decimate my logical thought capabilities.

I try to spit it all out super fast, but in my heart I know that battle is over. “Anyway, the bigger, I mean smaller van with the longer – no wait, shorter…”

“Guess what? Our teacher told us frogs are liars – you know, phibians?”

Blast you! A full frontal assault on my senses! The game is finished – attempting to maintain any shred of the thought I had previously housed in my brain would only cause more misery. All connected mini-van reflection is immediately replaced by the children who are now singing “It ain’t easy being green.” I finally give up entirely and delve into a half hour conversation about frogs covering everything from Kermit to mutated frogs in the Rain Forest.

The mini-van conversation is so blown out of the water we end up buying a third model to avoid making the decision.

Repeat. Repeat approximately one hundred times a day.

Guess What? The dog threw up on the rug.

Guess What? I saw a bee today.

Guess What? Rocks aren’t sharp. Except the sharp ones.

Sometimes there are worse things to hear than, “Um, guess what?” For instance, “Dad, I accidentally…” I’m not sure if this it’s due to a secret government plot or a coincidence of human nature, but for some reason “I accidentally” is never followed by anything good. Never. Ever. Not once have I been reading a book or doing laundry and had a kid come into the room and say, “I accidentally…” and follow it up with “…cured cancer.” Or “…discovered gold in the back yard” and to an even more realistic extent, “…cleaned up my room.”

In fact, “I accidentally…” is quite frequently followed by something so mind bogglingly crazy and asinine that I find myself in a state of shock and disbelief, unable to comprehend the magnitude of it all.

“I accidentally shaved the cat.”

“I accidentally ate a bag of sugar and a can of coffee grounds.”

“I accidentally went to your tool bench downstairs [where the child doesn’t belong], constructed an improvised explosive device, built a timer, planted it in the washing machine and set the timer for five minutes. Then I accidentally forgot to come and tell you for three and a half minutes, so you have 90 seconds to disarm it.”

Let’s go ahead and clear this up, once and for all. If you have kids, call them into the room and make them have a seat, then read the following section out loud.

You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means.

When you say, “I accidentally climbed on the roof and parachuted off with an umbrella,” you’re using “accidentally” incorrectly. An accident is when you are carrying your plate from the dining room table to the sink after dinner and you drop the plate – you were hanging on to the plate and it slipped and dropped. An accident. It is not, however, an accident when you bury the plate in the flower garden.

Your parents may not be the smartest people in the world. For the sake of argument, let’s say they are the dumbest people in the world – let’s say they drool when they talk and have to be told not to chew on their own arms. Even he dumbest, drooling arm chewer knows that you can’t bury a plate by mistake. Nor can you “accidentally” throw a ball in the house, eat candy without permission or sit on your brother’s head.

GLOSSARY – A guide to understanding the language of children and parenting

Craft supplies: a rather nebulous term varying in its definition depending on the user. When say “craft supplies” I am referring specifically to Popsicle sticks, glue and the occasional empty egg carton. When my kids say “craft supplies” they are talking about any object which every normal person in the world would regard as trash at first, second and third glance. Achilles, for example, thinks craft supplies includes, but is not limited to any and all empty boxes, old cans, rocks of all shapes and sizes, dead batteries, plastic and paper bags, used candy bar wrappers, wilted lettuce and dirt. I suppose it’s all in how you view things. Personally, I prefer not to even touch an empty tube of Chapstick lying on the ground outside a store, much less store it for later use, but maybe that’s just me.

Clean: Another term that varies greatly with the user. Clean can be used to mean, if I understand it correctly, “not dirty.” But, if you are seven, clean can also be used to mean, “not dirty as far as you can tell from here.” As in response to the question asked in the kitchen, “Is your room clean?” I ask that question every morning to all four of the kids and without fail they are all positive that their rooms are clean. We apparently have a poltergeist, however, that delights in completely trashing kids’ rooms because whenever I go upstairs to check, the rooms always look like some kind of missile testing has gone on in there.

“I don’t have to go”: This is what young boys reply when someone asks them if they have to go to the bathroom. This is always the reply regardless of whether they have gone to the bathroom five minutes ago or if they haven’t been to the bathroom in a week and are holding their pee pee and doing the itchy-twitchy dance.

“I’m hungry”: Translation: I want some junk food. Whenever a kids tells me he is hungry and I say, “Have an apple,” he never eats the apple. Apparently, hunger is a relative feeling.

Lost: This is a term used by a child to describe something he or she cannot find. Even though said item is exactly where it is supposed to be. “Dad, my jacket is lost,” one of the children will say. “Did you look on the coat rack?” I’ll query. “Yes,” is always the response, which is then followed by several minutes of the kid looking around for the coat until I find the jacket for him by, usually by looking at the coat rack.

A note about what you are reading

2004-10-26T10:17:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should mention that most of what you are reading here is to be considered a work in progress. It's the place where I am posting sections of my book as I write them and edit them.

Eventually all the sections you are reading will be combined and merged so that you are reading three different stories at once in order to create a sense of confusion - just like my life. When I have a completed version I will probably post it on a different site so it can be read as it will appear when I have it published. Exciting, no?

This doesn't really change the way you read my blog - I just wanted you to know that I don't consider this a finished work and neither should you.

Secret Motorcycle Plans

2004-10-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Because I love being a dad, I am willing to put up with a certain amount of humiliation. Humiliation, in this case, defined as being forced to drive around in a 1998 Dodge Grand Caravan Sport. Forced, you ask? To which I answer, have you ever tried to put five kids, your wife and the dog in a Corvette?

Don’t get me wrong – I like the mini-van, or the Red Dragon as the beast has been named. The “Red” comes from being red (but you perceptive readers probably already guessed that) and the “Dragon” comes from its ability to breathe fire. OK, so it doesn’t breathe fire, but that would be one hell of a selling point if anyone is reading over there at Daimler-Chrysler. Actually, we call it the Red Dragon because that was approximately 1000 times more manly than calling it the Red Pony.

Now, I’m not one to ask much of this life in terms of material goods – my television is second hand, my stereo came from a discount store and cost less than $100, I don’t buy expensive clothes and our house is far from being mistaken for a palace. I could count on one hand (two fingers, as a matter of fact) how many dinners Stacy and I have ever been to that cost over $100.

All this is fine with me. I really don’t care to do the things that are required of me to get ahead enough financially to keep me in caviar and silk underwear (that’s silk underwear and caviar, not underwear made of caviar and silk). I don’t want to work so much that I don’t have time to enjoy my children or my own life, for that matter. I don’t want to work overtime on Sunday just to squeak out that promotion to middle management and you know just working Sunday may not be enough because that bastard Johnson has been sucking up to the boss something fierce so I’ll probably have to…You get the point.

But I demand a motorcycle. That’s right - demand.

When I was in junior high I had a gray 100cc Yamaha Enduro motorcycle. It wasn’t legal for the road, wasn’t fast, wasn’t reliable and wasn’t attractive but I loved that bike. I would take it out on the snowmobile trails all summer long and just go, go, go. Then when the trails got boring, I would hop onto the nearest road and cruise around on that until the one cop on duty in our small town would see me and chase me until I could ditch back into the woods on the nearest trail.

Note: This is exactly why I have forbidden my children to read this crap. But if you have snuck and read this, Queen Mab, I’m just kidding – Daddy never did anything illegal in his entire life.

I was successfully nabbed by the police only one time when a state trooper happened upon me at just the wrong place so there was nowhere to go – I also had my little brother on the back, so there was no choice but to pull over and take our medicine. Fortunately, the trooper knew our father and after reading us a list of violations that lasted five minutes he let us off with a warning and sent us home with instructions to tell our father what happened – something we were sure to relay to him the first opportunity we got (that first opportunity came up about 13 years later, if I recall correctly).

The little Yamaha died when I was a freshman in high school after slamming into one too many trees and wiping out after one too many jumps. It lived a long and happy life, although it was never treated as well as it should have been. It was a proud death and I miss the little gray bugger. I’m getting a little misty just thinking of it <sniff>.

And I’ve never owned a motorcycle since.

Sure, I’ve had some classic cars ( in this case, “classic” means “huge, old and crappy”) – a 1977 Buick, a 1976 Buick, a 1977 Mercury, and a 1981 Lincoln for the big cars that I actually liked. The beginning of the end came when I got married, sold the Lincoln and bought a 1992 Ford Escort – a nice, responsible grown up car (which was also the biggest money trap I ever owned, but that’s another story). After the Escort, it’s been all down hill - two mini-vans, a Volvo wagon and a Saturn four door sedan. Again, I’m not complaining because I can appreciate the convenience of not having to bungee cord two of the kids to the roof every time I want to go to the store. In addition to the extra time this adds to every run for a gallon of milk, it draws stares from other motorists, particularly on the highway.

Back to the point – I need a motorcycle.

Need, you ask? Certainly you don’t need a motorcycle, you say.

But you are wrong – I do need a motorcycle. Allow me to explain.

I’m the kind of person who feels the need to be doing something productive at all times – never mind that “productive” could mean anything from writing a book to building a life size replica of the Sistine Chapel out of Popsicle sticks. I get ridiculously irritated after I waste time watching TV or if I take a nap. I have a hard time sitting still – I feel the need to be doing something.

Note: I recognize that this is merely part of a larger pattern of borderline obsessive behavior regarding the concept of time and my fears that I will run out of time before I get everything I want done in life. But that’s a long story for another time.

The major exception to my activeness is when I am hunting.

Note: Oh, go ahead – boo and hiss. Like I haven’t heard it before.

When I hunt, I prefer to stalk, which simply means I like to move toward a deer rather than waiting for the deer to show up in front of me. However, during the first hour of light and the last hour each day, deer are very active, so it makes more sense to sit down and wait in a field or a tree stand. During that hour I like to sit and reflect, calculate and generally think about the things that are going on in my life. It’s an opportunity to attempt to figure out how to be a better husband and father, or to contemplate what is really the best method to get gum out of dog fur. I can also enjoy the chilly sunset and truly appreciate the coming of another fall. Best of all, I can sit there and think of absolutely nothing – clear my head of all thought (my wife wanted to know how I am able to tell the difference).

I won’t lie to you, though – it’s a chore for me. I have to force myself to shut up and sit still. But I tolerate it for two reasons: 1) it’s outdoors, which, for some reason, makes me feel like it’s not quite as unproductive as doing nothing indoors (yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me either) and 2) because it happens for perhaps four days a year, so I am able to tell myself that this is my allotment of quiet reflection for the year.

As the kids get older I have more and more things happening each fall (and by me, I mean “the kids”) – school, Sunday school, soccer, football, boy scouts, girl scouts, PTO, fundraisers, sleepovers, etc. That’s not even including my own school and housekeeping. Oh yeah, and those rare days when I get to spend time with my wife. Four days of hunting are getting harder to come by – this year there is a good chance I won’t get out at all.

This tiny amount of self-reflection time, however, is very important to me. Because I am an extroverted, hyper guy, I tend not to spend any time in any kind of meditative state because it’s just not going to fit in the schedule. So the gradual loss of hunting days and, thus, self-reflection time is hurting my mental well being.

Which is why I need a motorcycle.

A motorcycle provides an experience that is similar to hunting. Basically, it’s the closest I can get to being alone and still maintain my busy schedule. And it would be completely guilt free self-reflection time because there’s nothing else to do while riding.

It’s different than in the car – for one thing, there is no radio. Sure, I could turn the radio off in the van, but I’m hyper impulsive guy, remember? The radio is something to do; therefore, I have to listen to it, change the volume, change the station, etc. A motorcycle offers no such options.

In addition, motorcycles go zoom really fast and I really, really want one.

Anyway, this section was supposed to be about Secret Motorcycle Plans, which involve my purchase of a motorcycle. Here are the plans so far:

1. Constantly whine about not having a motorcycle.

2. Spend 13 years trying to jockey into a financial position to purchase a motorcycle – store away spare change and loose one dollar bills in a sock drawer.

3. Be really, really good and act like a responsible adult so someday when we have a working combination of money and pity, bam – I get a motorcycle.

OK – these aren’t the most detailed plans ever to grace a battlefield, but I think they are workable nonetheless. Also, I like to use the word nonetheless and that sentence gave me just such an opportunity.

There you have it – Secret Motorcycle Plans revealed. Now, send good vibes.

Names Have Been Changed To Protect The Innocent

2004-10-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

...also because certain unnamed members of the house said I had to.

Anyway, after some discussion, we decided it would be better to change the names of the kids while I tell this story. Why? Because this is a very personal story and it really should be up to the kids to decide whether or not their names are associated with it and at this point they are simply too young to make that choice.

Rather than view this as a negative, I decided to give everyone a name from a Shakespeare play. This seemed like more fun than calling them Bob, Gus, Sally, Betty and Lady MacBeth. Oops. I did call one of them Lady MacBeth. Anyway, here is how they break down:

Queen Mab: our ten year old biol0gical daughter. While Queen Mab is not, technically, a Shakespearean character, she does get considerable press from Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.

Achilles: our nine year old biological son. From Troilus and Cressida, although for some reason my search/replace feature in Word insisted on writing it in all caps. I change them as I see them, but actually reading along and seeing ACHILLES like the name is being said with a lot of energy and at high volume is surprisingly fitting.

The Duchess of York: our seven year old adopted daughter. From Richard III, because I felt what this family was really lacking was a duchess.

Edward IV: our six year old adopted son. From Richard III and other plays, because I thought it would be silly to have a duchess and no king.

Lady MacBeth: our two year old adopted daughter. From MacBeth, because I really don't think she is to be trusted with sharp instruments.

So there you have it - new names for all the kids. Keep in mind this is only for the purposes of the book - in real life I continue to call them, "You damned kids" and variations on that theme.

Why I Am Such A Birthday Party Hating Jerk

2004-10-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

Birthday parties are the bane of my existence as a parent. Seriously. I mean it. If there were one thing about parenting I could eliminate, it would be birthday parties. I’m sure that sounds all Scrooge and such, but I’m not actually saying I wish to eliminate kids’ celebrations from the face of the earth (I’m not saying that, but I’m willing to hear arguments). I’m merely telling you my life would be approximately one hundred kazillion times simpler if birthday parties didn’t exist. It’s the difference between taking a calculus course and taking a calculus course where all the math has been removed.

The problem with kids’ parties is they are no fun. Pin the tail on the donkey? Piñatas? Musical chairs? Sure, these things seem like fun to kids, but kids also like Brittney Spears and powdered sugar with food coloring marketed as candy. They only think it’s amusing to participate in a three legged race because they haven’t ever heard of funneling beer, novelty cakes shaped like a woman’s breasts and streaking through the Denny’s parking lot at 2:00 a.m. I’m sure when these kids get older they will look back on their Buzz Lightyear themed party and wonder why it never occurred to them to order a stripper, but that doesn’t help me, as the dad, right now.

Of course I’m joking, as it would be entirely inappropriate to streak through the Denny’s parking lot and I’m pretty sure referencing children and strippers in the same paragraph can get you jail time in seven states. The problem is that kids want to do kid things at their birthday parties, which might not be a huge problem for me - as a guy some people have referred to as “immature” on numerous occasions, including this morning when I was making fart noises with my armpit at the breakfast table, I have to admit to liking a game of bobbing for apples as much as the next kid (by the way, it was my daughters, not my wife who thought I was immature). The problem comes when the kids expect me to be the guy running the game rather than playing and winning all the cool prizes, such as the awesome water gun that sprays, like, 30 feet and stuff. Instead of knocking kids out of the way and filling my shirt up with candy after the piñata bursts, kids expect that I will merely supervise.

What a rip-off.

The good news is that kids parties these days don’t have games like pin the tail on the donkey, three legged races and piñatas. Why, you might ask? Because kids these days don’t have their birthday parties at their homes – they have them at specific birthday party venues, such as Chuck E. Cheese, Gymboree, Dave’s House of Rock Climbing and Scissor Fights, and my personal favorite, House of Tacky Sculptures Your Kids Will Paint And Bring Home And You Will Never, Ever Be Able To Throw Away Because That’s What a BAD Parent Would Do. I might be able to get on board with the whole sculpture idea were it not for two things: first, the sculptures tend to be things that don’t really beautify the home or serve a useful purpose – I mean, a plaster sculpture of Pika Chu is nifty and all, but it doesn’t really go with anything else in the house. Second, these things are painted by kids, and let’s face it, you wouldn’t give a kids a paint brush and tell him to go nuts on the living room wall. Why? Because kids can’t paint – they’ve got no talent because they’re kids. And yes, this means your kids. Their artwork sucks and if you didn’t know who did it, you’d be horrified by their overuse of pastels and what can only be described as glitter cruelty.

In the end, what you are left with is a design that your kid didn’t have any part in designing and a really, really bad paint job. At one point we had a total of seventeen of these things hanging on the wall in our house. Seventeen. Luckily, when we moved to our current apartment we ended up some distance from the nearest House Of Plaster Crap (there is a House of Clay Crap up the street, but it must expensive because we haven’t been to more than three parties there).

The point is that most of the time kids have their parties somewhere besides their homes. Which is a semi-rational decision on the part of the parent – after all, it eliminates the need to clean up afterward so you can stop worrying about the fact that children eat cake like pigs at a trough. It also cuts out space and seating concerns. Best of all, it completely stamps out the idea that some parent will drop their kid off for the party then fail to show up for six hours, leaving you with an extra kid while you try to clean ice-cream stains out of the living room carpet. On the contrary, hosting a party at Chuck E. Cheese tends to encourage parents to stick around because of the aura of non-control and confusion that surrounds that place. No one wants to leave their kid somewhere that rambunctious where the parental oversight is that loose. In fact, you’ll find that as a general rule, the more confusing and idiotic the place you host the party is, the more parents will stay to help. It makes a good argument for having your next party at Steve’s Tire Fire and Dirty Needle Park instead of your own home.

The only exception to the no birthday parties in your own home rule is slumber parties, which apparently don’t lend themselves well to Chuck E. Cheese. Slumber parties are the proverbial double edged sword to parents – on the one hand, they are much more cost effective than hosting the party elsewhere, but on the other hand, about half way through the night you’d be willing to pay three or four times as much as an outing at Chuck’s to get these kids the hell out of your house. But more on that later.

In order to properly convey to you the sheer magnitude the effect of birthday parties – by my own children’s parties and the parties of others that they attend – have on me and my family, I want to share with you the events of a weekend not more then a month ago. One weekend. Keep that in mind – these events take place from Thursday through Sunday. So, not a real weekend – more like two thirds of a college weekend.

Let me start by giving a little background information on birthdays in general in the Bradbury family. The first thing you should know is that these kids always have a minimum of two parties in honor of their birthday. We have a party at the house with just the family on their actual birthday. Then we have a party at my parents’ sometime near their birthday – whenever we happen to be in Maine closest to the actual birthday. These two parties are a given. When the kids are in kindergarten, they get to have a big party with either the entire class or most of it – the following years they get a smaller gathering for a slumber party if it’s workable and we have time. Occasionally we will find ourselves at my extended family’s “monthly” celebration of whatever cousins, aunts and uncles happen to be having birthdays that month. There have been birthdays that get four celebrations, each time complete with cake and ice-cream.

I don’t mention this to complain – this is the result of having a close extended family that also wants to celebrate the birthdays of our kids, so I can’t find fault with this situation. I just want to mention it so you understand why I’m such an obnoxious complainer.

I should also tell you that last year when Edward IV was in foster care before he was placed with us, no one remembered his birthday. His social worker had taken him to a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon and the doctor noticed it was his birthday. “No it’s not,” Edward IV replied when the doctor mentioned it – he dropped it, but Edward IV’s worker caught it and stopped on the way home to buy him a present for around $15 because that was all the money she had with her. Contrast this with the four different parties Queen Mab and ACHILLES sometimes have.

Needless to say, we decided to be sure The Duchess of York, Edward IV and Lady MacBeth will all get the best birthday parties in the world from this point on, even if it means I have to go broke occasionally stay up for a week preparing.

Turns out that was a fairly accurate prediction.

As usual, I started off the series of mass confusion by making a monumental error in judgment. I had a specific place in mind to have The Duchess of York’s birthday party – a place called Gibbs gym which was owned a school years and years ago. We once went to another kid’s party there and it’s fairly inexpensive but very fun. One of the workers runs all kinds of games they play in the gym, like basketball and floor hockey, etc. The kids run and get tired (which, incidentally, doesn’t have any immediate visible effect – they seem to get more hyper the longer they run, but as soon as you get them in the car, they crash like a poorly made Chinese rocket) and all we have to do is bring the cake and ice-cream and assorted party favors. Where I made the mistake was assuming that because I had only been to one party there before that the gym would be easy to book. I’m not sure what gave me that idea, but it couldn’t have been more incorrect if I’d assumed President Bush would be making a case for invading the gym to free up space for our party.

When I called a month in advance, they laughed. Laughed like people who had heard the funniest thing ever from some random guy who called their switchboard. They called other people over to listen in on the conversation.

“Um, yes sir, I didn’t hear you correctly the first time.” <muffled giggling>. “Could you repeat what you just asked me?”

“Yes, I asked if you had an opening on the weekend of the 28st for a birthday party.”

<muffled hysterical laughter>

“Ok, <giggle> sir, let me just <snort> check on that for you.” At this point I could have sworn I heard someone peeing their pants. “Ah, yes – February 28th is no good. How about some time in the summer?”

<non-muffled hysterical laughter>

I’m willing to admit, now, that I may have underestimated the mass appeal of renting a gym and playing dodgeball for a birthday party. Of course, I’m admitting that to you, the reader. In now way, shape or form am I admitting that to my wife.

After calling 32 other birthday party venues, I begin to get discouraged. Discouraged in the sense that I was ready to throw myself in front of a train. Problems were beginning to stack up on each other. For one thing, I had no place to hold this birthday party and that was a big problem for the reasons outlined above, not to mention the fact that we had plans for another party at the house on the weekend of the 28th (more on that in a minute), and two Saturday parties in a row at the house seemed like enough to turn our downstairs neighbors into serial killers, and given the fact that they are the Best Neighbors In The World Whom We Intend To Take With Us When We Move I was concerned about their sanity.

The biggest problem, by far, was that my wife had been telling me for months that we needed to get this place booked and I told her she was crazy and this place would never fill up. Obviously, to tell her I couldn’t get a time would be to admit that she was correct, and that would give her the upper hand, which she would undoubtedly use to foil my Secret Motorcycle Plans (more on that story later). Clearly I needed to come up with a reasonable substitute to cover for my ineptitude.

I was on the verge of admitting defeat and throwing away all my secret motorcycle plans when the fates smiled upon me in the form of the Boys and Girls Club. One last call to the B&GC revealed that someone had tentatively booked Saturday the 28th but had never confirmed and never paid. I had to wait three days for the party coordinator to attempt to track this person down and find out if they were still interested in the time slot. It was like waiting for lab results to come back after a physical where your doctor “didn’t like the looks” of something – I spent three days in abject terror waiting for an answer, meanwhile knowing that if it didn’t work out I had just wasted three more days.

Thankfully, the original reservation was cancelled and I was free to take this lone spot. A spot at 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on a Saturday night. Exactly the time when everyone wants their kids getting all sugared up on cake and ice-cream. It didn’t matter to me – it was a time and a place to have a birthday party.

I called Stacy at work to give her the relevant info. Swimming for the first hour followed by pizza, cake and ice-cream the next hour.

“Isn’t that a little late for a first grade party?” Stacy asked me, suspiciously. She’s sharp, that one.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Lots of kids have their parties that late. The lady at the club said that was the best time spot because no one else but the cleaning crew would be there.”

“What happened to Gibbs gym?”

“The gym? What gym?”

“Gibbs gym – the place we decided to have the party?”

“Oh, yeah, the gym. I thought you were talking about my Uncle Jim. He said he couldn’t make it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oops, gotta run – dog’s throwing up on the rug!” Click. Phew! Dodged a bullet there – I don’t think she suspected a thing. Muwahahaha - Secret Motorcycle Plans still in tact.

So, that was one party set up, one to go.

For some reason, we decided to have The Duchess of York’s party the same weekend of Queen Mab’s party. At the time, it seemed like a scary, but sound decision. Why? To be honest, I really don’t know. I chalk it up to momentary loss of touch with reality – it happens to all parents. One minute you’re cruising along thinking you know what you are doing, the next you say to yourself, “The baby is tired and hungry and I really should get her some lunch and put her down to nap, but I think I’ll try to run to the China shop and pick up that new stemware first.” It happens.

Anyway, Queen Mab’s party was to be a sleep over with no more than three girls. Why a sleepover? Because Queen Mab has already had her big expensive party at a birthday party venue (a place called The Birthday Place or something of that nature) when she was in kindergarten. And you only get one of those in our house because they are expensive and I lack the requisite gold bricks shooting out my ass to do that for five kids every year. So, instead of a birthday party at Chuck’s, we have a few friends – no more than three, and I mean it – sleep over.

Once Queen Mab had decided which seven girls she wanted to spend the night, invitations were sent out and the party moved to the planning stage.

Queen Mab’s tips for increasing the number of guests allowed from 3 to 7.

1. Invite a set of twins – claim you can’t invite one without the other. For some reason this only counts as one person.

2. Invite one friend who you know will tell everyone else making the situation at school really uncomfortable and causing all kinds of problems with your other friends.

3. Beg and plead to have just five friends until Mom and Dad cave in.

4. Claim that now you’ve invited five people you can’t very well leave out your other best friend.

5. Or that other best friend.

Queen Mab’s party was set for Friday night and The Duchess of York’s for Saturday night. Hmmm – this seemed like a weekend that would make any parent want to hang themselves with crepe paper, but we like to overdo things here at Mission Control. Why have two kids when you can have four? Why not have a fifth? How about a dog? And a cat? Why not purchase a pack of rabid weasels?

After a little last minute scrambling, I managed to find three birthday invitations that I had forgotten about. Not three more invitations to either Queen Mab or The Duchess of York’s parties, but invitations sent to my children to attend other kids’ parties at various points during the weekend – ACHILLES and Edward IV were both invited to parties on Saturday and ACHILLES to another one on Sunday. Add that to Sunday morning mass and CCD, and that pretty well takes care of the weekend.

Now that you have a clearer picture of what the weekend schedule looks like, let’s go ahead and zip on back to Thursday. Oh, no, I want to go a little further back to Wednesday night when I was at class, because that was where confusion really set in and made a cozy little nest in our lives.

I have two classes on Wednesday nights – Developmental Psychology and Psychological Research Methods. My psychology classes are great, especially when they deal with children, like DP does. I find myself looking at the research and the writings and comparing it to my own children and I have come to one of two conclusions: either psychologists have children completely figured out, or they are complete morons. For some reason it has been harder than you might think to make the final determination.

I called home between classes to say hello to Stacy and she informs me that Queen Mab casually mentioned needing 24 of something – cupcakes, cookies, etc – to bring to class the next day to celebrate her birthday. Nice of Queen Mab to inform me at a convenient time – I have class until 10:40 that night.

When class is over, I go home and make cupcakes for everyone in her class. At about half past midnight I am putting the frosting on the cupcakes before I go to bed. But, at least I know that when I wake up, Queen Mab will be thrilled that I have worked so hard and late to ensure she has a snack to share with her class on her birthday. She’ll appreciate all my effort and the look on her face will be worth all the sleep I lost.

You parents can see where this is heading.

“I can’t bring anything in today,” she said the next morning. “I have to ask the teacher at least one day in advance.”

I gritted my teeth and reminded myself that despite what my instincts were telling me at that moment, prison is probably not easier than having five kids. I looked at Queen Mab and asked, “Are you serious?”

At this point Queen Mab, being a very perceptive child, felt that she has walked into some kind of trap - she did the only thing a kid can do in that situation: she backed away slowly until she was near the door, then fled.

After I get the older four off to school, it’s time for Lady MacBeth and I to start out mad scramble to purchase birthday presents and party materials for Queen Mab’s second birthday party (the first being the celebration with relatives in Maine, remember? You need to keep up). This birthday party is the family only affair, but this is where Stacy and I give Queen Mab her presents, so it seems wise for me to start shopping for them. Why didn’t do the shopping earlier? Why did I wait until the last second? Because, you fool, nothing gets done around here until it reaches CRISIS-RED-ALERT-WE’RE-ALL-GOING-TO-DIE level. See, if I do things before they reach CRISIS level, I might start doing things that don’t really need to get done, and I just don’t have time for that. For instance, I got a call from a teacher at school requesting that I send in 30 empty film canisters to be used in a class project. Because I am a moron, whenever people ask me for something I always say yes. Noooo problem, I told her. I would pick some up at the color lab where they have an enormous box full of them.

At this point, I have two options: I can go and get these film canisters right away, thereby eliminating the need for worrying about them. Or, I can opt to immediately forget about these film canisters and never give them another thought until the teacher calls one morning and says “We need them this afternoon.” If I go with number two, I find out how bad the teacher really needs these annoying things. If I go with number one, I might make an unnecessary trip to the color lab only to discover that the original project was cancelled and I have not only wasted time, but I now have this enormous bag of empty film canisters which I can’t throw out because that would be environmentally unsound but for the love of all that’s holy I must get rid of them before the children get home from school because the little rugrats are bound to spot them and they’ll fuss and whine until I let them have the entire bag for their “craft supplies” and despite my strenuous warnings that I’m going to throw these things out if I find them lying around the house but you and I both know that I’m going to be tripping over empty film canisters until the day I die and even then some kid will probably slip five or six into my coffin. In light of this likely scenario, I choose to wait until the teacher calls me and tells me she really, really needs them – like, right now.

This is how I prioritize things these days. If I have time for 3 to-do items today, but have 73 items on my to-do list, it is important to have a system for weeding out superfluous crap. Of course, if you know me and I’ve blown off something I was supposed to do for you, do not take that to mean I thought your stuff was superfluous crap – it just means you didn’t relate its relative importance to me in a strong enough manner.

Which means I end up shopping for birthday presents the morning of the birthday. And making a cake. And buying ice-cream, balloons, and various other party favors. And cleaning the house. And wrapping presents. And decorating the house. And getting all this done before nap time because as any parent who has a child who still takes a nap knows, YOU DO NOT MESS WITH NAP TIME. Luckily, I had a plan. My plan went something like this: run around like a chicken with her head cut off all day long until I feel like I am in danger of dropping dead after suffering adult-onset Freaking Out.

The day went as smoothly as could be expected. By “smoothly” I mean “not at all smooth.” I was going to attempt to relate to you all the chaos, scrambling and tension I experienced that day, but I have neither the time nor the patience to relive that particular period of my life. Also, somehow I squeezed more activity into that day than time would allow me to recreate here – it was as if I bent the time space continuum in order to finish my Herculean tasks (probably “Herculean tasks” is a tad misleading – if Hercules had been given my tasks, he would have given up immediately and resigned himself to being a farmer or a goat herder or a dung gatherer or whatever other uncool job he would have landed had he not been off tricking Atlas into holding up the world).

Instead, I figured I would simply try to relay it in terms everyone else can understand: Imagine that you had two dozen poorly trained monkeys loose in your living room, ten gallons of paint in open buckets, a foghorn which blasts every ten seconds in your ear and an evil robot that is armed with a hunting rifle. All these things are inside your house and you have to capture the monkeys, disarm the robot, disable the foghorn and get the monkeys to paint the walls without spilling any and accomplish all this before President Bush gets to your house, because he is hosting a summit on world peace in your living room with the heads of six rogue nation states and if you don’t get everything done by the time he shows up, the talks are off.

Yes, I know I just said “President Bush” and “summit on world peace” in the same sentence. Yes, I know I have a better chance of having 24 monkeys paint my living room while an evil robot takes random shots at me than having Bush show up at a peace summit. It’s just an example – work with me here, people.

If only my day had been as simple as dealing with poorly trained monkeys and killer robots – instead, I got the completely untrained children and a killer headache. To give you an indication of just how well the morning went, I missed naptime completely – shopped right through it. You already know my feeling on naptime. Consequently, after I picked up the older children at school, I still had more running around, more things to buy, more things to wrap, etc.

Hopefully, at this point you are beginning to feel just how frazzled I was by the time I loaded all the children - who were chomping on massive amounts of Big League Chew that had mysteriously appeared from somewhere (at that point I didn’t care where they got it so long as no one used a weapon in the process) - and the dog into the van to go pick up Queen Mab’s requested birthday meal of KFC (why do I take the dog with me everywhere I go? Because having a puppy with that might uninate, deficate or vomit in a completely embarrassing place adds an element of danger and excitement to my day – it makes me feel like James Bond only not cool, not rich and not attracting the ladies). Time had nearly run out on my day – I wouldn’t be able to attend the actual birthday party because I had a class which was only meeting six times all semester, so I couldn’t ditch. I had about 20 minutes to drive to KFC, pick up some food and then get home in time to complete the duty swap with Stacy. Meanwhile, the kids – sensing they only have a few fleeting moments with me that day - are making a last ditch effort to scramble my brain completely with a combination of Gameboy noises, screaming and singing. Things seem to have reached a boiling point in my hectic day.

That was when ACHILLES yelled from the back seat, “Dad, I dropped my gum on the dog and it’s stuck.”

Dad, I dropped my gum on the dog and it’s stuck. I dropped my gum. On the dog. And it’s stuck. Gum. On the dog.

Did you ever have one of those moments where you seem to float outside yourself and watch the whole ridiculous scene from afar? People who have near death experiences describe this feeling, sometimes referred to as an out of body experience. I had that exact out of body feeling when ACHILLES announced that he had dropped his giant wad of gum into the dog’s fur. Of course, I wasn’t having the near death experience – ACHILLES was.

This was actually more of a moment of clarity – I get them every so often when I’m dealing with the kids. You see, I try to be very exact. I like schedules, I like order, I like knowing what’s expected of me and being able to accomplish my goals, which isn’t to say I can’t think outside the box – I can come up with very innovative solutions to problems including time constraints (for instance, how do you get Big League Chew out of Schnauzer fur in less than 30 seconds?). I don’t mind being overloaded as long as I know all the parameters of a given situation so I can effectively deal with it. The problem is, having children isn’t really conducive to that sort of management. I never know all the parameters to a given situation and I can’t even begin to make them follow a time line in a proper manner (which isn’t to say I don’t try to make them). But kids are kids and I’m certainly not going to change that.

Every once in a while, I get overloaded with Kidness (no, that’s not Kindness – it’s Kidness, which is that fluctuating sense of insanity and frustration and joy and love that is the spirit of being a parent). When this happens, I react in one of three ways: I might go completely ballistic and yell for five minutes straight at the kids whose eyes will immediately glaze over as they tune me out and stop listening because that’s what I have found my kids do when I raise my voice. Option two is to remove myself from the situation, go into the bedroom and maybe cry, then go back out to face the kids and yell at them for five minutes straight at the kids whose eyes will immediately glaze over, etc. The third option is that I start to laugh at the utter absurdity of it all, decide that there are much worse things that could be happening in my life and move on without pitching a hissy fit.

While options one and two are, unfortunately, easier to perform than number three, laughing at how silly it is to be so overwhelmed is so much more satisfying. It lets me step back and appreciate how wonderful life is and how blessed I am to have these five beautiful and amazing children. It makes me just look at the kids and hope that they enjoy their childhood as much as they can. It really is one of the most beautiful feelings in the world.

And when I figure out a way to replicate it, bottle it and sell it WITHOUT having five children who drop gum on the dog I’m going to make millions.

Because I had this moment of clarity, ACHILLES managed to make it out of this situation relatively unscathed. The dog, however, required a little hair styling as I was forced to cut a large chunk of fur off the back of his neck. “Try putting peanut butter on it,” Queen Mab suggested. I explained to the dear sweet child that at that point I would have shaved my own head before I put peanut butter in it had gum been dropped in my hair. I don’t have time for experiments like peanut butter. Besides, the huge chunk of missing fur makes him look like some deranged punk dog – I’m considering dying his hair green to match.

I finally arrived back home just in time to shave the dog and hand the kids off to Stacy who had to step into my birthday party plans and play master of ceremonies for the evening while I went to a psychology of learning class. But this was just the pre-party party – like stretching out before the big game. And in this situation, “the big game” was a slumber party with seven friends.

The next night was the slumber party. I just want to give a couple of pointers to all you slumber party novices.

1. “Eh – they’ll go to sleep when they are tired” is a bad, bad plan. I cannot stress this enough. They will not go to sleep when they are tired. When they are tired, they’ll wake up anyone else who might have already fallen asleep just for more company.

2. Bobbing for apples may seem like a sweet and charming kids game, and I’m sure when six year olds play it is. But when ten year old girls bob for apples in the tub, one will decide that “swimming for apples” sounds like more fun, which will cause the rest of them to follow suit.

3. A group of fourth grade girls will provide enough ear piercing shrieks in a 12 hour span to cause more hearing loss than working inside a 747 engine compartment for 30 years.

4. Make sure your smoke detectors are working.

5. Someone is going to end up crying because someone else said something mean about them. Usually it will be one of the parents.

6. “How much could they possibly eat?” will be taken as a personal challenge to the girls who will then force you to cook thousands of pancakes and consume them with ten gallons of syrup.

7. Try to have a television in your own room.

8. You’ll spend most of the evening feeling incredibly old and trying to remember when Friday night didn’t look anything like this.

9. You’ll feel even older as you get angry because the kids aren’t asleep at midnight and then you realize, “I used to just be getting started at midnight.”

10. You are not cool, you do not know any good party tricks and nobody wants to talk to you so would you puh-lease just go back in your bedroom?

The best part about this slumber party was that the next day was a large Girl Scout field trip to someplace and most of the girls were going, so I got to dump these tired, cranky girls all on a couple of Scout leaders and then go home. That worked out very well for me.

Imagine a scene where you are a Girl Scout troop leader and you’ve been planning a Saturday morning field trip for weeks, maybe even months – you put your blood sweat and tears into this thing to make sure everything is special for your little scouts. You have visions of this field trip touching the lives of these girls, perhaps even causing one or two of them to have life altering epiphanies as a result. This, you think, will be the most perfect Girl Scout field trip in the history of scouting.

You’re waiting in the parking lot of the school for your troop to arrive and your magical journey to begin. Suddenly, from around the corner, you see seven of them coming at you like a pack of wild dogs about to descend upon a road kill raccoon. None of them have combed their hair, they are dressed in a range of clothing varying from winter jackets to t-shirts, some have syrup in their hair, a few are already fighting with each other and all of them have big black circles under their eyes. Then they asshole in charge of them says, “Well, good luck wherever the heck it is you’re going! See you at drop-off!” and runs away like he’s absconding with the church funds.

I’m still not sure where the girls went, nor am I clear how the girls handled themselves – the troop leaders haven’t spoken to me since.

Later in the day I called parents of one of ACHILLES’s friends and begged them to let my kids hitch a ride with their kid to the birthday party for a third friend wherever the heck that birthday party may have been. Meanwhile, I planned to take Edward IV to a birthday party at a movie theater in the neighboring town. I had intended to simply send him with another friend’s parents, but he had been having one of his little “spells” where he was having trouble “listening” and “doing what he was told” and sometimes he needed a “strong voice of guidance” from me, so I decided to take him.

Now we’ve got kids spread out all over the map and Stacy still needs to drag The Duchess of York and Lady MacBeth around to pick up last minute stuff like a cake and some ice-cream – you know, the little extras that make a birthday party a birthday party. And it’s going to be a tight schedule all day long because Stacy needs to be back at the house in time to meet ACHILLES and Queen Mab when they get dropped off again and I need to be back at the house by five when Juliet’s family (Juliet is a bio-sibling to Edward IV, The Duchess of York and Lady MacBeth) is expected. Although the timing is very tight, we decide we can make everything work as long as nothing unexpected happens.

Nothing unexpected happened, alright. That’s because, as everyone expected, I screwed up the start and finish time of the birthday party Edward IV is going to and we arrive 45 minutes early which will make us 45 minutes later getting home. Edward IV and I take the opportunity to nap a little in the car (right - like Edward IV ever considered going to sleep – I did, though) because it’s just that perfect distance away from home where we don’t want to go back but we don’t really want to stay, either.

The birthday party Edward IV attended was at a movie theater – one of those old style single screen cinemas that people get super nostalgic about and chain themselves to the doors to prevent the wrecking crews from tearing it down to make way for the bazillion screen multi-plex. I, however, harbored no sentimental feelings whatsoever toward this theater after I sat in old seat, ate stale popcorn and attempted to determine if the sound from the movie was actually on or if someone had merely left a tiny AM radio going somewhere in the back of the room. Add to that 20 screaming kindergartners (yes, screaming – it was a private screening, which the kids mistook for “private screaming”) and you’ve got recipe for instant headache. Oh, also, the theater provided a bottomless cup of soda for all guests which was nice because what group of 5 and 6 year olds really need is 13 cups of Mountain Dew before they gorge themselves on cake and ice-cream.

Are you running out of steam with this birthday weekend story, yet? Are you tired of hearing about it? If you think it sounds long, you should have been there living it. Good news, though – we’re nearing the end of this story. Edward IV and I left the party a little early to go back home and meet Juliet and her family.

Juliet was in the process of being adopted by a wonderful family in Western Mass, the Capulets. They have two biological children – boys ages 16 and 12. Juliet had been with them just under a year at this point and things were going well for her. We had invited them to The Duchess of York’s party and they were nice enough to drive all the way out here for the pool party at the Boys and Girls Club.

I had me the Capulets on several occasions at DSS, so I wanted to make sure I was there when they arrived, as Stacy hadn’t met them yet. I made it home without about five seconds to spare.

The kids immediately took off started playing together. ACHILLES and Edward IV had a blast playing with Malvoleo, Juliet’s brother. The Duchess of York, Queen Mab and Juliet all had a great time playing together, too. After they played for a while, ACHILLES approached Stacy and asked her if Juliet and her brothers are friends or relatives or what. We weren’t really sure what to say to that because they almost are relatives in a strange round-about way. Eventually, ACHILLES came up with Frother as a term – a combination of friend, brother and other according to him. The term works well enough for me.

I have to be honest when I tell you that the rest of the evening is kind of a blur – I was completely exhausted and ready to collapse and only sheer willpower and the knowledge that it was almost over carried me thorough. I remember herding the whole crew over to the boys’ and girls’ club, having them change into swimsuits, buying a bunch of pizza, forgetting the ice-cream and running home to get it, serving food, watching kids swim, teaching someone how to play bumper pool, eating a bunch of crap, trying to fit six bags worth of garbage into the one garbage bag we had, sweeping up the floor in a trance, herding everyone back to our place, saying our goodbyes to the Frothers, sending the kids to bed, deciding that there was simply no way we were going to church he next morning, laying down on the couch with all my clothes on still sticky from the party mess and drifting off into blissful sleep.

Then I woke up with three kids sitting on me at 6:00 am trying to get reception for some cartoons on our crappy TV. That’ll teach me to sleep on the couch. (I should also point out – for you non parents – that kids get up at the same time no matter what time they go to bed. You can always spot a rookie parent when they say, “Well, junior is up late tonight but he can sleep in tomorrow because it’s Saturday.” Ha! He can sleep in, but he won’t – it’s part of the kids’ code.)

So that was the great birthday weekend of 2004 – never to be replicated until, what, 2005? You’re all invited

Department of Social Services Adoptions

2004-10-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

Yes, this walk through the park will include a few rough spots. Many of the rough spots are likely to come from people you may have previously thought were relatively sane. These people could be friends, family members or your employer, although often they are random people you just met.

Whenever we told people about our plans to adopt a sibling group through DSS, people inevitably fell into one of two categories: those that felt we were absolute saints with hearts of gold and those that felt we were absolutely going to screw up not only our own lives, but the lives of out biological children as well as the lives of the children we were preparing to adopt.

Now, I don’t place myself all the way over in the “saint” column of God’s big spreadsheet, but I’d like to think I’m not all the way on the other side in “moron who screws up everyone’s life” either. For some reason, people who thought we were crazy also assumed we had never actually considered the likely/possible impact of adoption – these people were absolutely certain we had come up with this idea on the spur of the moment and had simply failed to reflect on the probability that the sun would soon collapse and form a black hole sucking the entire galaxy into it as a result of our actions.

The best way for me to illustrate some of the attitudes we encountered would be interpretive dance; however, since the writing medium doesn’t translate well to interpretive dance (in fact, I’ve been interpretively dancing throughout the entire book and no one has picked up on it yet), I’ll skip that and relate to you a few of the actual comments we have been faced with. Mind you, these aren’t all of them by any stretch of the imagination - after a few months of these comments I learned an ignoring technique that involved mentally curling up in the fetal position and sucking my thumb while humming the theme from Star Wars to myself.

What made you decide to do that? Or Why would you want to do that? And other variations of this question. This was by far the most asked question. Which may seem innocuous enough to you – you might even be thinking to yourself, “Hell, I might have asked that question.” Well, it seemed harmless to me, too, until I’d been asked about 6000 times and I actually took the time to reflect on it for a moment.

We had chosen to adopt for a simple reason – we wanted a bunch of kids to mow the lawn and clean the windows and whatnot. We figured we may as well adopt some of the kids already existing rather than creating a bunch of kids that did not already exist (ok – the cleaning part isn’t true, but the rest is – good thing too, because not one of the kids are any good at getting leaves out of the gutter). However, many people in our position have much more personal reasons and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing polite people would ask. I wonder what people would have thought if I bluntly said, “Because my wife can’t have any more children.” It just seems to me that the potential to overstep social boundaries with this question is very likely. Yet nearly everyone asked this question right off.

What do your kids think of this? This is one of those questions that context either made really uncomfortable, i.e., asking me in front of Maggie and AJ or worse, directly to Maggie and AJ or context could make it mildly irritating, i.e., asking me when Maggie and AJ couldn’t hear. For one thing, asking the kids is a little odd. What people were expecting for answers? Were they thinking Maggie would tell them, “I think my parents are shitheads and I’ll hate them forever if they continue to pursue this ridiculous plan.”

And when the BioKids weren’t present mild irritation stems from the fact that simply asking this question implies one of two things: that we hadn’t thought to get the kids’ opinions on the subject or that we got their opinions and disregarded them completely. Because, obviously, if we were moving forward with this plan Maggie and AJ must have been at least nominally on board. Again, just one of those questions that I wonder to myself, What the hell is this person thinking he’s going to get for an answer?

Will you be able to give them back if it doesn’t work out? Unfortunately, this is a question based in some reality, because some people do actually start the actual adoption process and then send the kids back like a wrong order at a restaurant (I try not to judge people, because the Lord knows I’m not perfect [damn close, but not perfect], but this is something I truly don’t understand). The thing is, because this is such an appalling action that is sometimes taken, it’s not really something you would ask people if you had any common sense. I mean, I wouldn’t see a newborn child and ask the mother, “If he turns out to be crazy, will you give him away?”

When do you just tell them to “get over it?” This was an actual question from someone during a discussion in the pre-placement stages and was asked in reference to how long we should put up with a kid’s bad attitude just because he or she was abandoned by the birth parents. And, to be fair, most of the other people present were a little surprised to hear someone ask this, too. But it does go a long way in illustrating the difficulty people have with understanding the adoption process when they aren’t part of it. (The answer is, of course, three weeks after they have been living with you. Oh, wait, I was thinking of something else. The correct answer is, “Never,” unless you are raising serial killers, in which case this lack of understanding and compassion would probably go a long way toward achieving that goal. And if you are raising serial killers, raise your kid to be the best serial killer he can be because as my father once told me, if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Don’t raise the kind of serial killer that will have the cops saying, “Four bodies in the crawl space under the house? You call that serial killing?)

The big issue is not so much that people asked us questions which were inappropriate at best and extremely offensive at worst, but the attitude that drives people to ask these questions. People in general – and note that I have said “in general” – have tended to treat this adoption as more of a hobby than a family situation. They don’t really equate it to having biological children or even adopting infants through a private agency. To them, it’s more like charity work or some other function that is nice, but not necessarily vital to our own lives.

Let’s start at work. Well, at Stacy’s work, because she’s the one that had a job.

Note: I had a very detailed section prepared here to explain how on the ball Stacy was at work and how much her boss liked her prior to the adoption process actually beginning. But, after I re-read it several things became clear to me:

1. It sounded like bragging – it had the tone of one of those Christmas newsletters people make fun of (yeah, I send one of those out, too).

2. It was a lot of words to simply illustrate that Stacy was considered an asset to the firm before the adoption, but it still doesn’t present the reader with any proof per se, of that fact.

3. It was boring. Sweet Pete on a stick it was boring. Just erasing it took ten minutes because when I was reading it I fell asleep on the key board and inadvertently wrote 894 pages of jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj.

Instead, I’ll sum it up like this: Before the adoption process began Stacy=valuable employee in eyes of boss. After the adoption process began Stacy=completely incompetent and can do no right in eyes of boss.

First off, there was this prevailing attitude that what Stacy and I were doing was, again, something in the order of a hobby. One of the earliest signs that things were going to start going down hill was his comment that she would be out of the office more because of this. When Stacy reminded him that I would be at home full time with the children because I am, duh, a stay-at-home-dad, he indicated that it would be different and the children would need a mother more.

Huh, we thought. What an odd way to look at things. And by “odd” I think you know I mean “completely sexist, outdated and lawsuit inviting.”

The next thing he did was to tell Stacy which week we shouldn’t have children placed in our home because he would be on vacation and it wouldn’t be convenient for him. Incidentally, his vacation week was precisely the week the children were scheduled to move in.

From there, things got progressively worse. You know me – I don’t like to complain (except when I like to complain), so I’m not interested in dragging out the story of Stacy’s boss any longer.

He pissed me off. Enough said.

The more unexpected place we encountered resistance was from some family members. Now, this was truly an oddity to me, because it had always been made clear that this was the plan. Hell, I had a well publicized vasectomy a little more than a year after AJ was born (I think it was in the metro section of the paper – for some reason everywhere I went people knew about it. “Hey, how’s the vasectomy?” people would ask during random moments like church and the employee break room), so I know we shared our plans at least as far back as 1997. Yet, in 2003 when it became clear that we were actually going to follow through with this, certain family members (all on my side, I might add) took it upon themselves to express that they thought this was a Very Bad Idea. Which wouldn’t have been a terrible thing in and of itself, because family members do that sort of thing when they are concerned. So, the first time I heard this I thanked them for their concern, tried to explain a few things to alleviate their fears, etc., and just generally tried to ignore them.

Then it got old. Certain people just couldn’t let it go. They kept on and on and on, acting as if this were a decision that only they could see the true consequences of and those consequences were obviously Certain Doom.

With loose acquaintances it actually became amusing to hear them ask the dumb questions, but the whole thing with family going on and on about what a Very Bad Idea this was tiresome. And it persisted for months and months, getting to the point where I avoided talking to these family members for weeks at a time (which is a long time for us). Eventually it got to the point where I did have to tell one family member, and I quote, “OK – I’ve heard enough of your concerns. This is going to happen, so you’d better get on board. Right now.” That pretty much solved most of the problems, at least, it solved them to the extent that I didn’t have to hear about it anymore, which was good enough for me.

The point of these little stories – apart from relaying what an absolutely horrible person I think Stacy’s boss was through all this – is simply to illustrate how people view this adoption as more of a hobby than a family issue.

Look at it this way – if Stacy had said she were pregnant, would a boss in 2003 have had the balls to suggest that it was going to be tough for her because her mothering was going to get in the way of her job? Would people ask, “Why did you decide to do that?” when we announced that Stacy was pregnant? Would they ask what are options were if the child didn’t work out?

This is not to suggest that there was no support to be had from family or friends – some people went out of their way to do everything they could to show support. We actually received lots of encouragement in the form of words and material goods from the community we live in. And many family members are itching to meet the kids and say so at every opportunity (unfortunately, as of this writing, finances have prevented Stacy’s parents from being able to meet the kids in person).

It was just a little disappointing to not have total and complete support, because this was the time when we could really use support. When AJ was a baby, he was what psychologists, scientists and neighbors in the next apartment call a “difficult baby.” He cried a lot, had reflux so he vomited all the time and was generally fussy – nothing too unusual, but he did occasionally make me want to butt my head against the wall until my ears bled. What was nice was that I was able to talk to all my family members about this sort of thing because biological children sometimes have these issues and there isn’t any problem venting about them once in a while. Compare that with the situation we have now, where I wouldn’t even dream of mentioning a problem we’re having now to family members, because I know they are all going to be thinking (and maybe saying), “See? What did I tell you?” Even if the problem is minor or something to be expected of children, the attitude is that we got ourselves into this, so we have no right to complain or ever get frustrated.

At the end of the day, other people tend to view the birth of a baby as a joyous event that will not be without it’s ups and downs; whereas, this adoption is something so different that nobody is sure what to make of it, so they tend to come off as a little hostile.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all I have to say about that, because I don’t want to spend too much time on something negative. Plus, when my family reads this, they’ll be all pissed off as it is, so I’ll have to end it here and avoid further complaints. Besides, to be fair, all the family members now seem to have “gotten on board” and welcomed the kids into the family.

Again, the point of this section is to highlight just how outside the box this adoption must be to other people, not to complain. If anything, I want other people planning the same course of action we have taken to simply be aware that you will run into some very different attitudes. Now you know and you may as well get used to it, or if you are unable to get used to it, maybe acquire a taste for scotch (although, given the amount of scotch you’d have to drink to ignore all these bastards, perhaps something less addictive would be better).
Once again, your sense of humor is going to be huge. And a lack of a sense of humor will be huge, as well.

Go back to the beginning...

2004-10-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

Well, not the beginning, like crawling out of the primordial ooze and whatnot, but the beginning of my blog, at least. It won't make as much sense to start here.

Granted, I could flip the damn thing around somehow so that you could read in chronological order, but that would take some iota of computer savvy and clearly I do not possess such savvy. Just scroll down, mister.

The Adoption Process in Painful Detail

2004-10-12T10:37:00.000-07:00

There is more than one way to skin a cat and even more ways to adopt a kid. There may be even more ways to adopt a cat, but I have to be honest and tell you I don’t know for sure – and we’ll just pretend there’s no opportunity for a “skinning a kid” joke.

Some people adopt through a private agency, which can take one of two basic forms: Either a domestic or an overseas adoption. A domestic adoption through a private agency generally involves being matched with an infant either prior to birth or very soon afterward. Much of the time a couple (yes, I know – “couple” is entirely inaccurate here, as many single parents also adopt children – I just need to come up with a generic term and I went with “couple.” You’ll have to deal with it.) will correspond with the birth mother in one form or another, often paying for her medical care and expenses. These adoptions typically arise after a single woman finds herself pregnant with a child she cannot or does not want to care for, so she makes the incredibly painful choice of giving the child up for adoption. Couples usually have to wait years to before being placed with an infant and the costs can run into the tens of thousands.

An overseas adoption is the other method used by private agencies (some agencies do both domestic and overseas, but many do one or the other). This is just what you think it is – a couple adopts waiting children from an impoverished nation. China seems dead set on dominating the world by sending every female child born to Western countries, but South America and Eastern European countries also send their fair share of children to America. In this situation, the children can be any age, ranging from infancy to teens. The parents often travel to the child’s home country to accompany them back to the states.

The other major method of adoption in this country is through the Department of Social Services (DSS) or whatever it’s called in your specific state (Maine has the Department of Humans Services, etc.). This is the system kids end up in when they are removed from their parents for a variety of reasons, usually involving substance abuse, physical or sexual abuse or, most commonly, neglect.

I’m going to generalize a bit about human services departments around the country, but my only experience lies with Mass. DSS – I’m assuming the information transfers somewhat equivalently.

DSS had about 5000 children waiting for adoption in Massachusetts when we started the adoption process (which means that we have roughly .05% of that population living with us). About 85% of the time when a child is removed from parental custody, they are returned to the parent. Sometimes the end up back in state custody later, but the statistics seem to indicate that the majority of the time, when a mother has her child/children removed by DSS, it serves as a major wake up call which causes behavioral correction so she can get the children back. Then there are those 15% of women who do not regain custody of their children.

Yes, this is a generalization that women are the only people losing custody of these children, but it is mostly true. The only time men seem to be involved in the loss of custody cases is when they are the actual problem, i.e., the abusers. Most of the actual fathers are conspicuously absent.

I understand that this section is about as interesting as toenail fungus to most people, but it is sort of necessary for the background. Just stay with me and we’ll both get through it. Also, at some point I’ll throw in a fanciful lie designed to entertain you. Maybe.

Long ago we decided that when the time came we wouldn’t wait for an infant and we didn’t care if the children were white, black or green (turns out the green kids are harder to get than anything else – who knew?) and on top of that, we wanted to adopt a group of siblings – either two or three kids from the same mother. This progression led us to approach DSS because private adoptions are tremendously expensive and DSS had kids waiting right here in our back yard.

Decorum dictates that I should mention a few things in order to avoid offending people. My wife would tell you she has no idea when I started worrying about offending people, but occasionally I do experience these things called “feelings” and I want to make sure no one gets theirs hurt.

First, this work is in no way meant to look down upon those who have an overseas or domestic private adoption. For one thing, that’s the easiest way to adopt an infant, particularly a healthy infant that might look like you, especially if you happen to be white. If you go through DSS looking for a healthy white infant, you’ll probably wait quite a while, so it makes more sense to look elsewhere. Also, I can completely understand the concept of wanting to experience your child from as early an age as possible – we had that luxury with the biological children and had decided that we didn’t need to necessarily wait an extra period of time for an infant.

The bottom line is, different things work for different people – DSS worked for us. DSS is, however, an underutilized institution, in my opinion. Many people who are interested in adoption are very shy about using DSS, so they never fully give it the chance it deserves. This book is partly being written to share our experiences with you and hopefully dispel some of the myths.

Second, while I may sound confident of my ideas in this work most of the time and over-confident the rest of the time, please be aware that I don’t necessarily know any more than anyone else on this subject. I’m trying to relate our experiences with you and at no time should you infer that I am speaking for anyone but our family. Oh, yeah, and like I said before, I’m not always even speaking for my wife. Just thought I’d mention that again.

Now, where were we? Oh yes, the adoption process.

Step One: Call DSS and demand that they send a couple of kids over to your house right away because it needs to be painted. Tell them that if the kids do a really good job they can stay on a trial basis.

OK, so Step One is actually to develop a sense of humor and a thick skin. Not because of the things the kids will put you through, because of the things your friends and family are going to put you through when you mention adopting through DSS. More on that later.

Step Two: Now you call DSS, although you’ll want to hold off on the joke about asking them send kids to paint the house. The Massachusetts office gave us a list of informational meeting times and places where couples get their first contact with DSS. The meeting we attended had about six couples all sitting around a conference table and two social workers explaining the whole process and handing out literature. In addition to eating some nice cookies and drinking Sprite, we spoke briefly with a social worker after the meeting and decided we needed to wait a few months to go to the next step because we were getting ready to move to a larger place that could accommodate seventeen or twenty extra kids. This was in April of 2002. In July of 2002 we moved into a bigger apartment and continued the process.

Oh yes, it’s also worth pointing out that from that initial meeting we started letting DSS dictate our lifestyles in completely weird ways. We had intended to get a dog some time in the near future and wanted a German Shepard because we both had Shepards growing up (the dogs, not German guys who tend sheep); however, DSS regulations prohibit placing children in any home with German Shepards, pit bulls, rottweilers or specially trained attack hamsters.

Which is how we ended up with Magnum P.I., the 15 pound mini-schnauzer. He’s very manly, though.

Step Three: The first home visit. We called DSS again and told them we were prepared to continue the adoption process. At that point they dispatched a specialized team of some old woman to come to the house and ask personal questions such as, “Do you really, really want to adopt kids?” She also gave an initial inspection of the house to be sure it would be an adequate place for children, so it was good that we had hidden the meth-amphetamine lab and finally got around to putting away that bear trap that had been lying on the rug in the living room.

In the end, she gave us a passing grade and recommended we be placed on the list for parenting classes. It’s funny how each and every step of the way, we ended up getting the same feeling we had in school when we earned a good grade on a big exam. At least, theoretically, that’s what we felt – you’d have to ask Stacy what it was like to get good grades on exams back in school. My grades were, well, less than….moving right along.

Step Four: Parenting classes. The major step to having children placed in your home consists of creating what is called a home study. One of the requirements in this state is attending MAPP training, which I am almost certain stands for something (because MAPP is not a word and the way it’s always written in upper-case letters leads me to believe it is an acronym, like SNAFU or WTF?), but I can’t for the life of me remember what it is. Maybe if I get motivated later on I’ll look it up, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you – I’ve got only so much time before nap is over today.

Anyway, this was a little off-putting to me (notice that I don’t say “we” here – just to be clear). I mean, me? Taking parenting classes? I had nearly perfected the subtle art of parenting over the previous 8 years. I should have been teaching parenting classes. I knew everything there was to know about parenting. Dr. Spock used to call me and ask questions about tough parenting situations. I mean, before he died. He doesn’t call anymore.

Taking classes to learn how to parent seemed, to me, a little bit of a waste of time. Which is funny, looking back on the classes. I actually got so much out of these classes that I was beginning to think these classes should be compulsory for all pregnant couples. My local law enforcement officials, however, have since informed me that this is not really feasible or legal. My congressman refuses to return my calls on the subject.

I could spend an entire book on what we learned in these classes. In fact, the classes have an entire book that is used, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg. The best thing about the classes is helping to get you geared up for putting yourself in the children’s position and seeing things from their perspective. Basically, the class is good for non-parents to get a small picture of what parenting a child from DSS will be all about, and for couples already bound and shackled by biological children, it serves as a nice wake up call that everything will be very different with these kids. Again, I’d go into more detail, but it would be pointless to attempt that here.

Step Five: Completing the home study. This consisted of two more lengthy interviews in our home with a DSS worker, one with Stacy and one with me. These interviews were longer and ended up being made into a kind of biography of our lives which make up the home study. We got to read the home study, which is a bizarre experience. Most people who aren’t Ben Afflek and Jennifer Lopez have never read a 20 page biography of themselves and their spouse, so I felt a little bit like a movie star. I kept flipping through the bio and looking for the grainy telephoto shots of me changing into my bathing suit on the beach. Turns out those photos aren’t generally included in the home study.

Step Six: The waiting. This is the part that DSS will be warning you about from the first time you call them to the time they actually come up with a potential match. Waiting time lengths are bandied about like a beach ball at a Jimmy Buffet concert – weeks, months, years. The deeper you get into the process the longer you begin to think this wait will be.

Which means, of course, that we had a potential match with two children before our study was even completed. We’re still not sure what to make of all this talk of a long wait. And while I am on the subject, I may as well mention that we were also told numerous times that nearly all the kids in DSS custody would have serious medical and/or mental health issues, so we would likely need to wait an extremely long time and then be placed with a child with extremely difficult needs.

Perhaps I am also glossing over what other people might describe as “serious” medical and mental health issues, too. For one thing, almost all the kids in care have asthma; however, I don’t really consider asthma to be a “serious” medical condition, in the sense that it is a controllable disease, which doesn’t need to have a major effect on quality of life. Edwin, Dennisha and Lucy all have asthma and need to be nebulized from time to time and in the winter take preventive medicine, but I’d hardly term that as a “serious” medical problem to prospective parents.

Nor would I necessarily term attachment disorder as a “serious mental health problem.” And yes, most of the children in care have attachment issues and they all need therapy of one form or another, at least for a while.

So, there you have it – you’ll be told frightening things about the potential kids, but we found it to be a little overblown. Then again, we have been completely unsurprised by attachment issues and asthma, so your mileage may vary.

Back to the waiting time. I assume DSS gives a big scare about waiting time to people for two reasons: the first being that people who wait for infants – infant infants, not toddler infants – will have a long wait. And in this case, “long wait” can actually mean “forever.” Think of it this way – a child needs to be born, go home with his mother and screwed up by her for a minimum of a few months before DSS is going to have enough grounds to remove the child. In rarer circumstances, the child may be removed at birth for a variety of safety reasons, but because that’s rare, a child tends to be a few months old before he enters state care. The infant will then be in foster care for several months while the state determines whether or not this mother is going to put her life back together sufficiently to regain custody. Assuming she fails to clean up her act, the state may then start looking for a potential home, but by this time the infant is usually nearing one year old or more. And even if you are then matched as a potential adoptive family for a child in this situation, many people will be put off by the fact that this would be a very unstable placement in the sense that the mother will still have rights and could potentially pull herself together enough to regain custody.

The second reason DSS scares you with waiting times is, in my humble opinion, to have a nice excuse to stonewall potential parents who are right on the edge of being told they aren’t right for adoption, but lack any concrete reasons to be turned away. Being told constantly that they do not have a match will be less surprising and may just convince them to go away. But that’s completely my opinion (which, as we all know, is always right).

Anyway, we weren’t even done with our study when our social worker told us about a couple of kids that had potential for us to look at. She wanted to hurry our study through so we could start the process of further investigation as to whether this would be a good match or not. Basically, she would send our home study to the children’s social worker, that social worker would say yes or no to further action with us and we would move forward from there.

Our social worker told us the names of the children – Dennisha and Edwin – a brother and sister from Holyoke, MA. Immediately, I went to the library to search through the enormous book of children waiting for adoption they keep there to see if I could find a picture and a little more info.

More about the book. The book is called the MARE book, which I believe stands for Massachusetts Adoption Resource Exchange or some other such thing. Essentially the book has about a thousand pages or more, each page containing information about children who have the goal of adoption (not necessarily that they are “free for adoption,” but that DSS feels strongly that adoption is the best thing for them – more on that later). This book is every bit as sad and disturbing as you might expect.

I wasn’t using the book like some people do – as a way to line up potential matches on my own. I was simply looking through to find a pair of listing for Edwin and Dennisha. The problem was, when I started looking through the book, I started reading the 200 word or so blurb on each page. I was reading the stories of children who were older than Maggie and AJ and, therefore, not good matches for our situation. But I couldn’t help myself – I was reading each and every one, and before long I found myself sitting in the reference section of the library crying while reading this book.

Which must have been pretty amusing. Sure, you expect to once in a while see someone crying while standing in the middle of the romance novel section, but it’s not often you see a guy sitting there crying in middle of the encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Anyway, I finally had to force myself to stop reading and try to find Edwin and Dennisha’s listings. Eventually, I did. Then I started crying again. After I calmed down a bit, I photocopied the listings and brought them to Stacy.

This is exactly what the listings said:

Hi! My name is Dennisha.
“I love to draw and play with Barbie dolls.”

Let me tell you more about myself…
I also like to watch TV and play video games.

And here’s what others say…
Dennisha is a pretty girl of Latino descent who is looking for an adoptive home. Born in February 1997 she is currently in kindergarten, where she shows and ability to play well with other children. Behaviorally, however, Dennisha does have some difficulty sharing toys and following rules and directions. She can act defiantly when asked to do something and has shown some aggression towards her sibling. To help her with these issues, Dennisha has started individual therapy. Her adoptive family needs to learn about and understand her history and be supportive of the help she requires now and in the future. It is also important to know that Dennisha needs to be adopted with her brother Edwin. She is not legally free for adoption, but will benefit from a permanent family who can give loving guidance and be able to teach her to accept limits. With the care and commitment of her new family, she will grow up to be a loving individual.

If I could have my own special wish…
I would like to find a family who will show they really care.

Hi! My name is Edwin.
“I have fun playing video games.”

Let me tell you more about myself…
I like watching TV and going outside to play.

And here’s what others say…
Edwin is a cute and friendly young boy of Latino background. He was born in June of 1998 and presently attends a daycare program. Edwin and his sister Dennisha are both looking for a home where they can grow up together. Edwin has had negative experiences already at this young age and these have affected him emotionally and behaviorally. He can exhibit aggression towards his sister, will test limits and can have temper tantrums. He has recently started with individual therapy to help him with his difficulties. Edwin is not legally free for adoption but needs a permanent home where he will be nurtured and loved. He needs to be adopted with his sister, Dennisha, by a family that will understand their past and be willing to work with them through their difficulties.

If I could have my own special wish…
I would just like to be loved.

Now, I don’t know how anyone could read about a kid’s special wish being “I just want to be loved” and not break down. You’d have to be made of stone. Or something harder than stone. Diamonds cut into the shape of giant stones. It’s been quite a while since I first read that and it still makes me tear up when I read it.

But onto the bigger reason that I am telling you about these listings, and no, it’s not because I am attempting to completely fill these pages with schmaltzy items designed only to make you cry (although that’s not a bad idea – that sells books, from what I’m told). The bigger reason is to point out that these listing basically contained a whole paragraph’s worth of inaccuracies. In this case, inaccuracy means “could have been written by the Bush administration.”

Basically, the paragraphs explain all these weaknesses and low points, which would be bad enough, but those weaknesses weren’t even true. Dennisha loves to share her toys – that’s how she communicated when we first met her. She also enjoys having established rules that she can follow. She is the most rule oriented of my children. I have no idea what the aggression toward her sibling was all about, because I never saw it.

Edwin is described as showing aggression and throwing tantrums, both of which are completely false. He rarely displays outwardly anything that could be described as a real emotion at all, much less anything as animated as a tantrum. Perhaps in the first month after he moved in he had some more vocal episodes which could have been described as tantrums, but it was mostly a simple act of defiance – generally it wasn’t loud or dangerous so much as it was a refusal to do what was told.

I’m sure that the people putting these listings together do the best they can with what they have to work with, which probably includes little to no face time with the child, as well as a stripped down budget at DSS. However, the way these children were described was so far off base that people more easily daunted than Stacy and I might have never fully investigated adopting these children.

As it was for Stacy and I, there was no going back at that point. Having a human face and story put to the names I had been given was plenty. These children needed me – not “someone” and not “a good home.” These children needed me.

The next step was to set up a meeting with Edwin and Dennisha’s social worker. See, there are four basic sides to this adoption thingy, and most sides at represented by social workers. There is the adoptive parents’ side – us. There is the children’s side – Edwin and Dennisha. There is the children’s birth mother – Ms. X. And there is the state. Everyone except the state has a social worker assigned to advocate for them – I like to think of them as the “agents.” That way I can say, “Let me run this by our agent and get back to you.” It doesn’t really mean anything, but it makes me sound more important than I am.

Anyway, our agent set up a meeting with the children’s agent in Holyoke, MA. Now, if you’ve never been to Holyoke, MA, let me give you a run down of the differences between Holyoke and Arlington.

First of all, when I am in Arlington, nobody stares at me when I walk down the street. In Holyoke, I am clearly out of place because not only do I look different, but I’m the only one who speaks English. Except that guy we saw at McDonalds one time who was yelling at the French fries. Not his own, but in the packages by the deep fryer still waiting to be served. And sometimes the people working at McDonalds will have a fleeting grasp of English – perhaps just enough to get my order completed.

This would be a good place to add my disclaimer that I harbor absolutely no ill will toward anyone for not speaking English. I only mention it to illustrate the differences between the areas. The fact that I – a white male - become the minority somewhere is pretty amusing.

Also, in Arlington, people do not tend to have loud confrontations on the street. At least, not that I have ever seen. Whereas, the last time I was in Holyoke, as soon as I stepped out of my van, a nice young lady whose name I did not get – we’ll call her Suzie – was hollering up the street at another young lady – we’ll call her Sally – who was about a block away.

“You don’t want none of this, you skinny bitch,” Suzie exclaimed while gesticulating wildly. And, as it turned out, Sally didn’t want none of that, because she didn’t say anything back, but kept on going up the street. At this cowardly display, Suzie and her two friends started following her, continually shouting things one does not often hear coming from the mouth of a young lady, unless said young lady happens to be a pirate in training. After a moment, Suzie and her friends stopped following Sally and haranguing her and went the other way – one supposes they resumed their journey toward the tea party, which is where they were undoubtedly headed.

And very few of my children raised in Newton and Arlington have a story about being caught in a drive-by (so few that the number is statistically irrelevant. Also known as “none”). But the children’s social worker once related a story about one of the children in this family that included just that. Apparently, Betty (the kids’ social worker) and this young girl in DSS care were headed down the road and suddenly gunfire erupted somewhere near them, so Betty ducked them both down in the car. After it was over, Betty tried to calm the girl by talking to her.

“Are you ok? Were you scared?” she asked. The girl looks unfazed and calmly explains that this has happened to her before.

Huh, I think as the social worker is telling me this story - Betty isn’t telling me this story to explain just how outrageous it is that she was caught in the middle of gunfire, but that this girl had seen it before. The fact that people were shooting around them was completely secondary to the main point. Which is, of course, insanity.

I’ve completely lost track of this story. What the heck was I talking about? Oh yes, I have been telling an extremely long winded story about how we first came to meet Edwin and Dennisha. I think this story is about 7,000 words long so far, and it really hasn’t gotten anywhere, so I’m going to skip ahead. I’ll give you all the info you need, it will just be sped up and less coherent. It will be like watching The Godfather III on fast forward – you’ll be able to understand the plot and everything that went on, but the drawn out details won’t make you want to set yourself on fire in the theater seat.

So we met with Betty, the agent for Dennisha and Edwin. Our agent, Kerri Ann was also there, although she didn’t know any more about these kids than we did – I guess she was just making sure that Betty didn’t sell us a used car instead of talking about the kids or something.

Betty told us all kinds of information about the pair, half of it later turning out to be correct, the other half seemingly conjured out of thin air. We went over their file and read all about them according to state documents. Immediately, Stacy and I wanted to move forward and set up a time to meet with the kids in person. Betty and her supervisor wanted to wait just a bit so we could be sure and have a chance to talk between ourselves first. We waited until we had been driving toward home for about ten minutes before calling and telling them that we wanted to set up a meeting.

This is a portion which I debated whether or not to put in the book, because I can’t decide between giving the reader as much information as possible and making sure my kids have some right to privacy. In the end, I have decided to include enough information to give the reader a clear picture of what their background is like.

The story on Edwin and Dennisha.

Dennisha and Edwin are number four and five out of seven children born to the same mother, Ms. X. The number of fathers for these children varies according to reality versus legality – legally there are four fathers, but at least one child has an incorrect father listed on the birth certificate, so we don’t know for sure. Edwin and Dennisha were removed together when they were two and a half and four. The reason cited for the removal was abuse through neglect. Ms. X apparently suffers from severe depression which she does not follow treatment plans for. They spent much of their lives living with their grandmother before being removed altogether by the state.

Eventually, they were removed when Ms. X left them alone again (after repeated warnings from her social worker not to do so). Initially, they were sent to a kinship placement with a cousin or aunt (it is unclear which, even to DSS) which turned out to be a worse environment than living with bio-mom. Later they were turned over to state custody entirely and lived in a succession of group homes and private foster homes before we found them.

I think that’s plenty of information for now, on this particular subject. I’ll fill you in on other things as we go along and they become necessary.

To keep things lively, I’m going to skip around a bit – next week instead of telling you just how the initial visits and placement process went, I’ll give you a little insight on interesting reactions we have run into during this process.

I Wrote This During Nap Time

2004-09-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

Really

I wouldn’t lie to you – I have no other time during the day I could have written this. I’m racing against the clock here, because Lucy is 18 months and will soon outgrow the nap or at least start taking shorter naps and once nap time is done, this book will have to be done, too.

Here’s the scoop: I’ve totally lost my mind and suddenly I have five kids. I’m not really entirely sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, but you can be sure the deficiency of sanity and the increase in the number of children are definitely influencing each other.

My lovely wife, Stacy, and I began the adoption process in early 2001. During the summer of 2003 we were placed with two children, ages 5 and 6. Then, a few months later, we got another 18 month old baby. These additions rounded out our biological children ages 9 and 7.

And a dog. For some reason, a dog seemed like a sensible idea to have in the middle of all this. Because, if you are going through the kinds of issues we have been going through, it really helps to have a designated creature to crap on the floor at completely random moments.

Anyway, I’ll get into specifics about genders, names, personalities and all the rest of that a little later. Right now, I want to give you a little background on me. Why right now? Two reasons:

The baby is asleep and tiny microchips implanted in kids’ heads by an evil scientist cause them to do everything in their power to remind me that I am here to serve them and them only and I shouldn’t even think about myself, much less do something for myself. So if I’m going to tell you something about me, it will have to be done quietly while at least some of them are asleep. (Of course, that’s very tongue in cheek, as I couldn’t possibly begin to write something about them, either, when they are awake. The tiny microchip implanted by an evil scientist actually just causes them to have generally unruly behavior which prevents ALL rational thought and eventually makes you start to question how bad jail would really be if you were caught selling them on e-bay).

Because I used to be cool. Seriously. I was awesome. Now, I know every stand up comedian and humor writer who has kids talks about the contrast from when they were single and/or kidless, and how they used to go to bed at 5 a.m. not get up to feed the kids coco puffs, blah blah blah. But you know what? That’s the way you feel. One day your driving down the road in your mini-van with every single seat filled and floor mats suspiciously colored like Goldfish cracker dust and your on your way to karate which is costing you $300 a month which happens to be more than your mini-van payment except you don’t get to keep that karate studio at the end of 60 months and suddenly it hits you that you once held a girl up on your shoulders to flash the crowd at a Van Halen concert in 1985 and how in the hell did you get here?

So I’m will not go into too much detail about how cool I used to be, but I like to mention it once in a while to help keep me sane.

Daddy is NOT unemployed

My wife and our nine year old daughter were having a conversation the other day. They were discussing what she will do when she grows up (my daughter, not my wife – we’ve all come to the conclusion that my wife still doesn’t know what she wants to do when she grows up). After explaining that she’s going to get her belly button pierced, an earring in her upper ear and a tattoo of a sun on her back (I was so relieved to hear that she had all the really tough decisions planned out), Maggie rather matter-of-factly says, “I hope I can convince my husband to go to work.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Sometimes you just want to take the little boogers and shake them until they start talking sense. However, reliable sources, i.e., DSS, tell me that not only is that not an effective method of making them talk sense, it may, in fact, be the perfect method to ensure they never talk sense again. Whatever.

Note: My wife advised me that I shouldn’t open this book with a child abuse joke. “Really,” she says. “Child abuse jokes shouldn’t make an appearance in this book until the fourth chapter. At the earliest. If at all.” Hah! What does she know?

Anyway, for the record, I had a job. Granted, it was a lousy job that paid less than half of what my wife was making and they were apparently so close to firing me that when I gave two weeks notice they already had a farewell cake with my name on it in the break room. But that doesn’t matter, because you know what? Work sucks. Seriously. Work sucks worse than anything else I can think of. Changing dirty diapers and cleaning the toilet? Not a problem as long as I don’t have a boss criticizing the way I spray the Scrubbing Bubbles or apply the Desatin. Five hundred and seventy two loads of laundry a day and non-stop chauffer action for the kids after school? Piece of cake as long as there is no co-worker trying to tell me about her diet or her recurring dream about cats.

I’ve had so-called “real jobs” and without exception they suck. I’ve been a dishwasher, house painter, crypto analyst, a receptionist, a driving instructor, an infantryman, a floor waxer, a clerk in a toy store, a phone monkey in customer service, a medical biller, an operations manager and a security guard, to name a few. Some of these jobs have their high points. Some don’t even have high points. But all have low-points that make me want to stick my head in the blender and hit puree. (What is it with all those different names for the settings on my blender? Everything else I own has a normal system – variations of high-medium-low or numerics such as 1 – 10, ten being fastest/biggest/hottest, etc. But the blender company is evidently staffed with out of work thesaurus editors who think I have nothing better to do with my time than make me figure out if “chop” is a higher setting than “mix” or how “mix” can possibly be a higher setting than “liquefy.” I mean, shouldn’t “liquefy” be the highest setting? It’s taking solids and turning them into liquids – doesn’t that suggest the highest level of blending known to man? I’ve never hit that “mix” button out of fear that it will split the atoms in my food and cause a nuclear reaction [that bit of science is so off that it will undoubtedly cause nuclear reactions in the heads of any MIT scholars reading this work {who the heck am I kidding – there are not MIT scholars reading my work. That’s the last thing I need to worry about}]).

The point is, working stinks. I don’t have to tell you that, because you probably have a job that’s sucking the life right out of you as I speak – at best your boss is tolerable, at worst a tyrant. Your co-workers are insipid at best, vicious at worst (not to be confused with those gooey “viscous” workers and trust me, I know you have those, too) who’re just waiting for the perfect opportunity to take your spot. Even professional athletes complain about that aspect or working – someone is always waiting to take your spot. And coming from guys who who make millions to play silly games, that’s pretty tough to take. If Alex Rodriguez is always looking over his shoulder, you’re probably not as protected as you think from Brian in accounting – you know the guy: bad haircut and a $25.00 suit?
Me? I’ve chosen a higher calling. Staying at home and doing nothing. Oh, sure, in order to stay at home and do nothing, I have a few chores here and there - take care of the kids, clean the house, etc. But really, it’s worth it. I mean, for merely vacuuming the floor, doing the dishes and a couple of loads of laundry and some intermittent dusting, I get to drive the kids to, oh, say the beach for the rest of the day and let them play outside until they are sunburned to the point where strangers at the supermarket stare and are clearly thinking of calling DSS.

Note: My apologies for the constant DSS references. DSS is a constant theme in my life – a kind of deranged boogie man character with the power to fuck things up without even meaning to. That’s not to say we’ve had terrible experiences with them – so far. But getting assigned a 23 year old case worker fresh out of school with no children of her own who has to make judgments about our jobs as parents, well, that can be a little nerve wracking. We’ll get into that more later. The point is, we have lived for some time with DSS as the most fearful presence in our lives, so I always equate them with the boogie man.

In the summer time, we go to the beach, we go to the movies, we go to the museum, we hang out at the house and complain about how hot it is until we decide to set the sprinkler up on the lawn and then the kids run through it and I plan to just watch so I never change into my bathing suit but eventually I succumb to the refreshing allure of the sprinkler and I run through with my shorts and shirt on but I forget that I have a wallet in my pocket and everything in there gets wet and sticks together when it dries and the pictures get completely ruined but after maybe the third time I remember to take the wallet out of my pocket before going through the sprinkler.

I have the greatest job in the world. Staying at home is the Best Thing Ever. Best. Thing. Ever. That includes General Tso’s chicken, Aerosmith and the Victoria’s Secret annual fashion show. Sure, the pay is lousy and you have to deal with people who occasionally pee themselves because they “forgot” they had to go to the bathroom, but really, is that any worse than sitting across from Sheila from accounts payable in the lunchroom when she eats and hearing those sounds that are so much like a pig at a trough that she must be doing it on purpose?

I first began my career as a stay at home dad in the spring of 1999. My daughter Maggie had just turned five and my son AJ was three when I quit my job as a medical biller to stay home while Stacy went to work as an insurance drone or something.

Note: This book, while about the whole family which obviously includes my wife, Stacy, may seem to be somewhat lacking in her viewpoint. There is a reason for this and it is NOT that I am a controlling freak who is only interested in ensuring his own viewpoint is presented – that reason is completely secondary. The main reason Stacy’s voice isn’t completely prevalent in this narrative is that I am afraid of her. Seriously. I’m worried that every time I attempt to present her viewpoint I will screw it up and after this thing is published, she’ll read it, say something like, “That’s not what I thought/said” and then she’ll rip my face off. To be honest, we’ve had a long running understanding that I will never begin a statement with, “Stacy says…” So to avoid unpleasantries such as my face being ripped off, I will mostly be providing you with how I feel about certain situations, with an occasional “we” thrown in if I feel really, really confident I have her side of the story correct. Like, laws of physics confident. Besides, I’m writing this book – she can use the computer when I’m done and write her own book if she wants to dispute my claims.

That first summer I spent with the kids was interesting. For one thing, I had to learn to clean the house. Not just clean the house, but clean the house in a manner that it might pass inspection by Stacy. At the time, we had a child shortage and only two were living with us, so keeping the house to International Stacy Cleaning Standards (ISCS) was annoying and creepy, but not at all impossible. It’s easy to clean the house and keep it clean with two kids because I have two hands – one to grab each child with muddy shoes running across the couch.

What were the ISCS, you ask? If you think I’m going to tell you that and risk bodily injury, you’re crazy. Suffice it to say that ISCS were quite a bit higher in 1999 than they are in 2004. In fact, they are now referred to as ISCSWFK (International Stacy Cleaning Standards With Five Kids). These standards are somewhat more realistic. They demand that if the floor should become so covered in dirt that worms knock on the door and ask to move in, I must sweep. And the laundry should now be washed and dried, but folding and putting away are time-available optional.

In short, yes, the house usually looks like someone set a bomb off in it.

But none of that really matters, nor does it fit in with the book. In fact, I’m going to delete all of that when I get a chance. Now, where the hell were we? Oh yes, why I don’t have a job.

I’m basically lazy.

Note: I know you are tired of these notes already and we’re only a couple thousand words into this thing. Tough luck. I don’t have time to go back and rewrite entire passages and this is really the best way for me to fix things that are inaccurate/lies/misleading. What do you think – I’m going to change my entire style of writing just to satisfy you, you selfish jerk? I’ve got 83 individual stacks of folded laundry sitting on the bed waiting to be put in drawers and you want me to rewrite an entire chapter to update you on a specific situation? Tough luck.

Anyway, this particular note was to mention that since this was first written, I got another job, but it’s not a regular job. I got hired as a full time fire-fighter, which is the one thing I have actually wanted to do for as long as I can remember. More on this later.

The problem is finding a place to start this deranged tale of madness and joy. I suppose I could start in 1989 when I was graduating from high school and joining the Army and Stacy was dropping out of college and joining the Army. Or I could start in 1990 when we had our first date. Or in 1992 when we were married. Maybe 1994 when our first daughter, Maggie, was born. Or the following year when our first son, AJ, was born. Or the following year when I finished my second tour in the Army and we moved to Maine. Or the following year when we moved to the Boston area for Stacy to go to law school (she finished her BA when I was still in the Army – she’s an ambitious young woman). Or maybe I should start in 1997 when Dennisha was born in Holyoke. Or 1998 when Edwin was born. Or 2002 when Lucy was born.

There are so many starting points and so much background information I could give you – because, quite honestly, I’m the most interesting person you’ll ever meet (modest, too) – that I could go on for chapters and chapters and never get to the first year of the adotion. I figure if you wanted to read a book that makes it a chore to finish you would have just bought Ulyses or something by Michener. Instead, you bought my book. And that makes me happy enough to try just a little harder.

So, congratulations, I’m not going to give you a bunch of background – you just saved yourself several hours of pretending to be interested in my life. Which, I assure you, you are not.

“Today was the 476th day in a row where we did exactly the same thing.”

Anyway, I decided to start at the beginning of the adoption process and lead you up to the date that I actually publish this thing. You do need a teeny, tiny amount of background information – not a lot, just a little. I’ll keep it to the bare minimum. In fact, I’ll keep it to one sentence.

Even before Stacy and I were married we had talked about adopting children and when we were first married had considered not having biological children at all, but decided in the end that we would have two bio children and adopt however many more we could fit into our lives and so we did just that – gave birth to two bio children and then waited a few years until the time was right and began the adoption process.

There – not too bad. And keeping it to one sentence prevented me from going off on a tangent about how when I left the military the following year was really difficult because of the transition to civilian life and how really, really hard it was to get Stacy through law school…never mind.

Coming next time: The Adoption Process Begins

...and then I had bologna for lunch, but it wasn't very good because the bread...

2004-09-10T13:17:00.000-07:00

I think this is where I record my every thought, no matter how trivial or excrutiatingly boring they my be, right? Isn't that kind of the general idea of a blog? Well, I have to tell you, that isn't the kind of blogging I am likely to create. I promise to use this space to entertain you, the reader. Honestly, if a blog can't be entertaining, for example, http://badnewshughes.blogspot.com/, then why the hell would people read it? If it isn't interesting, for example http://PrettyMuchEveryBlogEverCreated.Blogspot.com, people probably don't read it, and if people don't read it, why should I bother writing it down in the first place? Writing things that other people won't read is called "keeping a diary" or, as I like to refer to it, "lame."

Because this is my opening post in what is sure to become an internet sensation, I will now give you a little background on myself and get it out of the way (geez - I've only been a blogger for five minutes and already I'm simply telling you boring details about my life instead of entertaining you - it's like a freakin' disease).

1. I am a 33 year old firefighter with a wife and five kids. What's it like to have five kids? About the same as keeping five pet monkeys, except the boy monkeys would probably pee inside the toilet at least once in a while (I mean, statistically speaking, even if the monkeys peed in random spots around the house, every once in a while that random spot would be the toilet, right? That's better than what I am dealing with now). Also, I suspect the monkeys could be trained to actually pick up dirty clothes and put them in the hamper, but I'm not positive. Having five kids will also give you a new appreciation for going to work (or, vacation, as I like to refer to it).

2. The kids are in school except the youngest, who is napping. That's when I get to write this. Each column or post I write can be no longer than a two year old needs for a nap.

3. Because I'm responsible, I refuse to drink before noon. And by "refuse to drink," I mean that I'll only drink beer until noon. Bourbon in the morning indicates you have a problem. So rest assured, as long as I write this column before, say, 2:00 pm, I'll be sober and remember to spell check it for you. Usually.

4. This space will talk a lot about kids and parenting, but not in a doting parent ooh, wook at my ickle widdle precious kind of way. It's more of a What The Fuck Is That Kid Doing sort of thing. Trust me, it's amusing to more than just me.

5. Beyond parenting, I'm likely to hit on drinking, politics, internet pornography, current events - fun for the whole family.

6. That's it - that's all the info I'm forcing on you - the rest will come out in the columns.