When Did Back To School Become Its Own Season?

I knew it was going to happen eventually, starting a post with the phrase, “Back when I was young.”  So, here goes:

Back when I was young, we didn’t set aside the final three weeks of summer to focus solely on going back to school.  We just didn’t. 

 

Sure I remember buying some #2 pencils, and digging through my older brother’s dresser drawer to see if his school shirt from last year fit me.  We had to make sure it didn’t have too many stains, or that yellow tinge from the rusty water in our well.  But we’d usually do that the day before school started. 

 

What was so important she couldn't make it three feet
from the mailbox before opening?  Teacher Letters.

My kids, on the other hand, have been talking about back to school-related rituals and procedures since early August.   It began with the hype in advance of the so-called teacher letters – so-called because its from their new teachers, telling them which class they’d be in for the coming school year.  And, this year, two of our kids are moving up to new schools.  So it's a big deal, no doubt.  But, come on people. 

There were actually internet-based rumors in our town about when the local school would mail the teacher letters.  Vacations were scuttled so that families could wait by their mailboxes. 

Not us.  We happened to be out of town on the Saturday the letters finally arrived.  My wife and I got a text from a neighbor that the “letters have landed."  We decided it best not to tell the kids, to avoid them begging to go home early the rest of the weekend.  We told them on the drive home.  You’d swear we said Santa was waiting in our living room.

“Drive faster, dad!”

The letters are just the start.  Next, you have to read all that stuff.  Then comes the detective work determining which friends are in your class.  I almost needed another phone line to handle all the calls.

And the letters, of course, have within each a supply list.  That's when the real shopping starts.  Which is followed by the school meetings and tours.  Then more shopping.  There's more, but that's all I care to recall in my current back-to-school-season frazzled state.

Is there a Hallmark card for going back to school?  Maybe they’re behind this?

Or, maybe it’s a public school thing?
 
Growing up, we went to a small, private school – which was not nearly as fancy as that sentence implies.  It was very small, and not exclusive.  We went there because my dad’s family had a thing for Catholic school education.  And because the public schools near our suburban-D.C. home were too big and not known for being particularly good at educating children.

My parents may have been concerned about us falling in with the riffraff at the public school.  As it turned out, we were the riffraff at our private school. 

As school started, sure we’d do a bit of back to school shopping.  But we didn’t have some big, all-hands-on-deck, multi-store trip, where everyone got new clothes, sneakers, new book-bags and more erasers than even my kids could ever need. 

For one thing, we had uniforms.  We made, maybe, one trip to JC Penney’s to get a pair of khakis and gym shoes.   That was it for clothes.  And we’d be lucky if we got some new, lined loose-leaf paper, a few folders and a lunchbox that didn't smell from being closed all summer.

We also had small classes at our schools.  So we knew in advance who the teacher was going to be, usually the same teacher that had been teaching that class for decades -- Sister something-or-other.

The school year would start when we’d pull up to said school, get out of the car, and our parents would pull away.  There were no big, instruction-filled teacher letter packets that I recall.  No orientations.  No soft-grand-openings.  No two-page long lists of supplies.  Okay, maybe once I remember getting a Trapper-Keeper.  But only the once. 

Still, I'm pretty certain it wasn't quite like things are today.  My mom may remember it differently.

Am I wrong?  Or am I just getting old?

The Baggage That Comes With Being A Dad ...

In the mountainous regions of Eastern Nepal, high among the Himalayas, live a people called the Sherpa. They are known worldwide for, among other things, their ability to carry ridiculously large quantities of bags, as their Western traveling companions tag along on the trek unencumbered.     

I think of the Sherpas, and my connection to them, every time I go on a trip with my family.

This past weekend, my wife and I took our kids on an overnight trip to my family’s house on Lake Ontario. It was just one night. Did that stop us from stuffing the mini-van so tight that I couldn’t see out the back windows? No. It didn’t. 

"Honey, don't forget the beach toys." Grumble. Grumble.

We took more for this so-called night away than we packed for the full week we spent in South Carolina in early July. Heck, we packed more than I took with me when I moved away to college some two decades ago. In fact, if you added up all the stuff I had packed on various overnights and weekend trips during my pre-married, pre-child days, it would still be less than what we took for one evening at the old camp. 

Gone are the days when I could just grab a change of clothes and a towel (a nod to the Hitchhiker’s Guide) and spend a week on the road. Don’t worry, I’d usually buy a tooth brush once I got where I was going. Usually. That was then.

Fast forward to this past weekend and we packed enough clothes for each kid to change outfits more than Cher at a concert. Plus sweatshirts, jeans and pajamas. We packed not only bath towels for each family member, but we also brought beach towels for each. We packed sheets, blankets, and pillows. Pillows!? As I said, in an instructional tone the morning of our trip, “When I was young, we used to roll up our jeans and use that as a pillow! C’mon people!”

We also packed sleeping bags, a tent, and the blow-up mattress, in case we decided to spend the night under the stars. Then we packed enough food to feed our entire family for the foreseeable future, including drink boxes in four varieties, snacks galore, water bottles and bottles of water (go figure), paper plates, paper towels, toilet paper, and dog food. As my wife said, you never know what the camp is going to need.

Let’s not forget the beach junk. We didn’t. Boogie board, umbrella, two beach blankets, three beach chairs, and 4 life jackets – in case we ended up on a boat, or a kayak, or a canoe. You never know. Sunscreen, bug spray, the camera, the phone chargers. You get the idea.

Once the van was completely packed – and I mean completely -- with enough provisions and gear to get us through fall, 5-year-old Sadie asked, in her concerned voice, “Are we moving?”

Luckily, we did have a van to actually transport the provisions and gear the 50 miles north to the lake house. Real Sherpas would have carried it the whole way. But I do feel bad for the poor soul who had to take all that stuff to and from the van, and then repeat the task the next day with 95 percent of the stuff. The kids drank the juice boxes, accounting for the missing 5 percent of cargo.

In our defense, we are packing for six people, nowadays. I must have heard that defense a hundred times, as I grumbled under the pile of blankets, or beach chairs, or whatever I was carrying.

I guess that’s one way I’m not like a Sherpa. They don’t complain. 

Oh, and they climb mountains.

I Really Hate a Good Read … Except This One

When it comes to other people's writing, there’s a scene from Woody Allen’s film Midnight In Paris, where Owen Wilson’s character asks Ernest Hemingway to read his unpublished novel, that says it all:
 

Owen Wilson's Character: “I would like you to read my novel and get your opinion.”

Hemingway:  “I hate it.”

Wilson’s Character:  “You haven't even read it yet.”

Hemingway:  “If it's bad, I'll hate it. If it's good, then I'll be envious and hate it even more. You don't want the opinion of another writer.”

I imagine the fake Hemingway speaks for most writers out there.  He even speaks for those of us who just fancy ourselves as writers.  When I read published work that’s just okay, or even bad, I think, damn, I could’ve written that.  Why didn’t I write that? And, why can’t I get the stuff I’ve written published?  Not just blog published, but really published.  I mean, this jackass got their stuff published.

When I read something that strikes me as pretty darn good, I am consumed with envy and self-doubt.  It’s disheartening, even debilitating.  I remember once when I was stuck while writing one of my currently-unpublished books, and I decided to turn to Angela’s Ashes for inspiration – a work I’d read and admired years before.  This time, I read a single page, then I curled up in a ball and didn’t write another word for a solid month.  It was that good.  

"You don't want the opinion of another writer."

But, every once in a while, I stumble on something that is immune to my writer’s envy.  Not that it’s necessarily better than Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes.  More that’s it’s so creative, and so personal, and so rich in voice that I feel there's no way I would ever write that way, because it's that writer's voice, not mine.  When that happens, I feel like I’m reading a writer's mind, not their words.  That’s a kind of writing out of reach of even my envy.

I read something like that recently.  It was a blog post by another daddy blogger.  That’s right, I’ve decided I’m a daddy blogger, and now I read other dad blogs. Yikes.  In a few hundred words, this writer, who goes by the name Black Hockey Jesus (and I've since read eschews the title daddy blogger), captured all the emotion I’ve tried to write about, the bittersweet stuff that every parent knows watching their kids grow up.  And he did it in a way that I never would have thought to imitate, accidently or otherwise, even with a hundred typewriters, a hundred monkeys and a hundred years.   I’m probably overstating it at this point.

For me, it worked.  This blog post made me think about all the times in recent years that I’ve held my kids tight, on a down day, and just been thankful that I had them, and could hold them.  Living reminders of how lucky I really am, even when I don’t feel all that lucky.  This blog post made me think, that someday, I won’t be able to just grab them, and pick them up, and squeeze them tight.  It’s already started.  My 10 year old is getting too big to carry in from the car after she falls asleep on late-night trips home.  She stills fakes asleep.  But soon, even that won’t work.  I won’t be able to carry her.  Nor will she want me to.  

It made me think about the misspent times the past few years that I way too fondly reminisced about the freedom of my younger days, or even looked forward to the empty nest that’s a decade and a half away.   Recently, my brother,  who also has a few kids, began a sentence, "When we get our lives back ..."  I laughed and agreed, and our wives frowned.  What the hell were we talking about?  This full nest of ours is our lives, and it's what makes life worth living.  At least my life.  At least now.

This one blog post made me think about all this.  And it got me choked up.  I don’t like to admit it, but it did.  

Good writing can do powerful things. And this did.  Here’s a link.

Thank you, Black Hockey Jesus, for writing this.  I didn't hate it.  

The Year of the Turtle

Back in the mid 80s, when we used to take the extra fabric around the ankles of our jeans, then fold, wrap and roll it as tight as possible to our ankles -- in a fashion practice known as pegging -- I asked my mom how anyone could ever have thought bell bottoms were cool. She said, all things come and go. She even went so far as to predict that one day pegging would be seen as odd and bell bottoms would be back in style. I thought she was nuts. 

A decade later, she was right. It was the first time I remember seeing the pendulum swing so clearly, and it proved a powerful lesson. All things do come and go: even things as odd as excessively loose, or ridiculously tight pant ankles.

But even in her wisdom, I do not think my mother could have predicted a blast from the past that has come back recently to overtake our household. It’s a trend for sure, though not of the fashion variety, and it has become the singular obsession of my four children. Anyone who has interacted with my kids in recent months knows the scourge of which I speak: Turtles. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to be precise. Though, by my estimation, they are middle-aged mutants at best, by this point.

I remember the first time the series made waves in the late eighties. After that, I don’t think I heard a thing about them for a decade or two. Though I'm kind of out of it when it comes to trends.  Now they are back, stronger than ever, as a newly animated series has suddenly taken over Nickelodeon’s summer programing. 

How these four mutant martial artists made it back from obscurity, I haven’t a clue. Heck, I don’t know how the trend caught on in the first place. This was a television series that jumped the shark in the concept room.   

They're mutants. They're reptiles.
They're ninjas. And they're everywhere.

Still, my kids love it. They've gone so far as to each adopt the name of a favorite turtle, along with a preference for the color of their chosen turtle's headband and constant repetition of key quotes from that character.

There's Leonardo, the leader (blue); Donatello, the smart one (purple); Raphael, the tough guy (red); and Michelangelo, the dumb, but funny one who likes to surf and party a lot (orange). I never quite understood why the so-called “heroes on the half shell” were named after four great Italian artists. They just were. Again, the idea for this animated foursome passed the exit for absurd long before the names were chosen.

And, of course, each turtle also has its own specific martial arts skill and a ninja weapon or two. Which makes for hours of family fun, as the kids pretend to fight evil and I scream at them to stop hitting each other with fake ninja moves.  

 

I’m half expecting this year’s Christmas wish lists to include nunchucks and throwing stars, as well as all the TMNT crap our local, neighborhood Target can cram into the aisle that all the retail giants will most certainly devote to the mutants this shopping season. That is, if this trend last until Christmas.  

 

As the old saying goes, the flame that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. That's right: I just quoted ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu. Circa 550 B.C. That's because the kids have decided that I am Splinter, the giant mutant rat that is their sensei. I take my pretend dojo lessons vey seriously.   

We’ll have to wait and see just how long this turtle obsession lasts. But it certainly proves again that all things come and go. No matter how absurd -- like bell bottoms.  

Though, I’m still waiting for pegged pants to come back. Or, did that happen already?

Welcome to the Lazy Lawn-Mowers Club

Any homeowner from Upstate New York knows the four seasons: Shoveling, Spreading Mulch, Mowing, and Raking. 

Right now, we are deep into mowing season.  So deep, in fact, that we’re in the rare time when the heat stunts the growth of the lawn, and it only needs to be mowed once a week.  This is far more manageable than the twice-a-week mows, which are needed from early Spring through mid-July, and again from late- August until the leaves fall or the snow flies, whichever comes first.

Like most, I take a certain amount of pride in my lawn.  Just, not that much. 

I rarely have time to mow on the exact day my wife thinks it needs to be done.  And, let’s just be honest, mowing twice a week is nearly impossible.  That said, I certainly don’t want to be that guy on the block known for the long lawn.  

As wet as it was this year, I fear I may have become that guy.

Friendly Neighbor Hand-me-down Toys ...
Or Best Lawn-based Insult Ever?

In my defense, it was a very wet spring.  If you failed to mow on the only day of the week it didn’t rain, you’d have a jungle out there by the time the rain stopped long enough to mow again.   

I missed the optimum mowing window more than once this mowing season.  I’d stare through the rain-spattered windows at my long, wet lawn, as my wife reminded me its "needs-to-be-mowed" status and as the neighbors would drive by real slow just shaking their heads.   

The worst of it occurred during our vacation week.  I’d planned to mow it the day before we were leaving, thinking it would grow just a little too long the week we were gone, but not too much to get attention.   Of course, it rained for a solid three days before we left, and I didn't get a chance to give it the pre-vacation cut.  By the time we got back from our annual excursion, the lawn had gone more than two whole, wet weeks without so much as a trim.

I practically needed a machete just to get the lawnmower out of the shed.  And it took me two mows over the next three days just to get caught up.

In the midst of the catch-up mows, I went out onto the lawn one morning to find a little gift:  Someone had deposited two plastic kid lawnmowers right in the middle of our yard.  These were toddler toys that looked like they’d been enjoyed for quite a few years.  

Maybe it was just a friendly neighbor whose kids had outgrown these toys, and thought my young brood would play with them. 

Or maybe it was the most clever lawn critique ever.  Maybe all the neighbors had talked, and come up with a plan to get these crappy toys from some yard sale and stick them in my yard, in a subtle tribute to my lawn-care lameness.

I still don’t know.   

Now that we’re in the summer doldrums, I’m staying on top of it without any problems – except for the darn crabgrass.

So, I’d like to take this opportunity to publically apologize to my neighbors and the rest of the lawn-mowing world, and ask if I can be let back into the well-kept-lawn club.  Besides, did you see the lawn of that guy on the corner?  It’s a total mess.

Missing When Summer Break Was an Actual Break

Few things can change your opinion about something as efficiently as a change in perspective. 

Take summer break, for example.  When I was a kid, I loved summer break, or summer vacation, or whatever you want to call it.  More than two whole months off from school?  What’s not to like? 

Then I became a parent of school-aged children.  And oh, how my perspective has changed.  Don’t get me wrong, I still love summer.   But from the day school gets out until they go back after Labor Day, my wife and I spend almost every second that we are not working or sleeping, coordinating the full-time entertainment and transportation of our four children.

I know, I know. That’s what parents do (when teachers aren’t available).   But it seems things have gotten worse with the recent generation. 



Where I'll be spending most of my
summer.  In our minivan, on the road.
(This is stock image. Our van is much
older, and less sleek looking)

When I was a kid, we’d spend half our summer days in the woods behind our house, and the other half at my grandmother’s house on Lake Ontario.  We were very lucky, I know.  

But the days were ours, free from schedules, camps and swim class.  Sure, I remember going to one summer camp for one summer – a day camp at a local community college.   Other than that, we entertained ourselves.  Okay, maybe an exaggeration.  My parents always did their share to keep us busy with activities.  But still, it was different.

Now, I’m on the road a few hours each day picking up, dropping off, and delivering one or more of our children to the various camps they attend, so that their parents – my wife and I – can continue to earn a living. 

Take just our oldest as an example:  the summer began with a two week theatre camp, full day.  Now she’s in a one week soccer camp, which is only half day.  Next week she goes to a two week session at a real camp, meaning a camp in the woods with a lake.   Her two sisters have their own camps, as well.  

These are all just day camps, not spend-the-nights like in the movies.  That means we are carting their little butts all over town -- twice a day, every day.  And that’s not even counting the swim classes they all take at different times throughout the week.

It beats the alternative, which is them watching television all day long as we work, with them saying how board they are fifty-thousand times before the sun sets.  (For those who don’t know, my wife and I both work full-time jobs from home.  We’re very lucky, I know -- Sort of.  But that’s a whole other blog.)  

I wish we had enough funds to have one of us take the summer off, just to hang with them.  It’d be nice to play in the yard all day, or do outings to the library, and the park, and the zoo. But we have four kids, so money remains tight.

Back when we started this brood, we swore we wouldn’t be the type of parents that over-schedule their kids to the point where we’d end up just a taxi service for familiar little strangers who’d rather be at some random activity with their friends than spending time with their family.  Swim.  Soccer.  Dance … every minute scheduled.  We were against the whole notion.  We weren’t going to be those parents.

It seems to have happened anyway.

So tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day after that, my wife or I can be found most mornings, at lunch and in the evening, cruising the local roads in the minivan, trucking our kids all over creation.

It gives me two thoughts. 

First, I have new-found respect for teachers, and bus drivers.  And I'm not just saying that because I'm a Democrat.  

And second, I miss when summer break was actually a break.

Underdressed and Overtired

Don’t mean to brag, but back in High School I was pretty fast.  Not sprinter speed, or anything, but fast enough to play varsity sports.

You wouldn’t have known it today if you’d seen me “sprinting” down the block, trying to catch up with the two-year-old boy who'd decided he wanted to go with his mother when she went to drop his sister off at a friends.  Of course, I was barefoot and a bit underdressed for our little neighborhood stroll, wearing my standard-issue, home-project attire.  But at least I had clothes on -- which is more than I can say for the boy.

Many young kids get upset when a parent leaves the house on an errand without them.  I’ve seen one of my daughters cry at the window for a full hour waiting for mommy to come back from the grocery store.

Occasionally, one of the kids has the bright idea to go outside and wait for mommy to come back.  It’s cute to see them sitting out on the lawn staring down the road looking for that familiar blue van's return.  

But in all my days as a parent, I have never had a kid who would go outside and then proceed down the block in hot pursuit of the missing vehicle.  The boy has done it twice.  The first time he was fully clothed, and he slowly meandered down the sidewalk as he cried, “I want mommy.”  He was easy to catch at that speed.

File footage of Overtired Boy on the run
-- properly attired this time. 

This time, he was running as fast as he possibly could, screaming “I want to go,” without a stitch of clothes on.  And his naked little butt is quite fast.  I was rumbling after him wondering whether I was more likely to pull a hammy or trip and crush my only son.  Despite my speed back in my glory years, I was unable to gain any ground.  I felt like I was in a scene from an Adam Sandler movie on parenting. 

 

For the record, Drew usually has clothes on -- usually.  Lately, he’s been disrobing whenever the urge compels him.  He'd just gone potty, and that was enough.  So it was off with the clothes.  Try as I could to convince him, he wouldn't put his outfit back on.  Then mom announced she was taking his sister to a friend's house for a party.  He wanted to go, naturally.  I told him he couldn't go unless he got dressed.  That caused him to have a meltdown, which ended in his birthday-suited dash down the block as they drove away.

 

Had he been clothed, he probably would have been able to go on the trip.  The irony was lost on this particular two-year-old.   

The whole being-naked thing is just part of a recent increase in antics by the boy, which my wife attributes to him being “overtired.”  Overtired is how she has explained our kids’ worst behavior ever since she read that book on healthy sleep habits and well-behaved children almost ten years ago.

By my count, Drew has been overtired since he turned two, eleven months ago.   Don’t even ask how long our ten-year-old has been behind on sleep.

You know who’s really overtired?  Here’s a hint: the guy who was just outrun by a naked two-year-old.

... Had to Cruise On Back Home

It’s that time of year when many of us take vacations, stay-cations or even just a few good, long weekends.  It’s a chance for us to forget about work; to unwind with family; and maybe to enjoy the little ones in our lives.  If you’re a neurotic, anxiety-prone, middle-aged father of four – hypothetically speaking – it's also yet another opportunity to obsess on all that you still want to accomplish in life.

 

Too much sharing?  Maybe.

I, for one, just love vacation.  I love the feeling you get when you first arrive at your destination, unpack your bags, and are able to mentally and physically step away from all the things that cause you stress on a daily basis – the bills, the work deadlines, the endless afterschool activities, the lawn, the laundry, the everything.   When, for a brief moment, you're able to forget all that junk and fully decompress.  It’s a feeling that really only comes in the first few days of a break from the daily grind. 

Sometimes, I wish I could take that feeling and bottle it.  Then I’m reminded, someone already has.  It’s called rum.

But seriously.  I'm not talking about the rum-induced feeling some of us also get on vacation, but that natural one that umbrella drinks can only try to imitate.  It's that feeling of true vacation relaxation, and it is special.  

Looking for seashells as the sun rises.

Over the course of the week that our family spent away from it all, I thought about that feeling a lot – that Jimmy Buffet-song inspired attitude most of us are only able to enjoy once we’ve set the autoreply on our work email accounts to “out of office,” and after we’ve traveled quite a distance to some random island, or beach, or cabin by the lake. 

Our family chose a beach on a coastal island in a warmer climate for our break from it all.   And relax we did – as much as possible, anyway, for a neurotic, anxiety-prone, middle-aged father of four and his immediate family. 

We spent our mornings on the sand, and our afternoons at the pool.  We planned our meals based on what we wanted to eat, not on what we had time to make between soccer practice and dance class.   And we woke each day because we wanted to, not because we had to.   

We got up early one morning to see the sunrise over the ocean.  We stayed up late one night to watch the fireworks.  We went for long walks in the evening, and bike rides at low tide.  And we got caught in a rainstorm, or two, or three.  But we didn’t mind.  Because we had nowhere else to be, no real reason to stay dry, and no one else we’d rather get caught in the rain with.

And when I thought about all the things I have yet to accomplish in life, all the goals yet achieved, all the stories yet untold, I kept coming back to that feeling.  Sure, I’d like to find great success in my career.  I’d like to be rich.  I’d like to get published.  (Those two are not related).   But what I really want is to do is find that feeling more than once a year.  I’d like to find a way to get that feeling every day.  I’d like to live a life with that feeling as the norm, not the exception.

 

Maybe that’s impossible.  Maybe, no matter what you do, it becomes the daily grind. And the only way to find that feeling is to break the routine, go someplace else, and do something else, if for only a few days.

Maybe the phrase, "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there," applies universally to all things related to vacations.  

Maybe you can only get that particular feeling once a year?

 

I don’t know the answer.  But I’d sure like to try and find it.

 

Too much sharing?

Road Trips and Sushi ... What Are Two Things That Do Not Go Well Together?

It may go without saying, but I’m saying it anyway:   If you ever embark on a 16-hour all-night car ride with children, and as you leave town you stop by the grocery store to get some snacks for the trip and one last non-fast-food meal, and the person running into the store to buy the food asks, “Do you want sushi, or something else?”   The answer is: something else.  Anything else.

We learned this lesson within the first half-an-hour of our annual overnight pilgrimage to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina.   At this point there may be questions.  Let me answer a few.

Yes, we go to Hilton Head almost every year.  My wife’s parents have a timeshare there, which we started visiting when our first-born was little.  It has become something of a summer tradition.

And yes, we drive straight through to get there.  It makes the trip affordable.  And we’ve learned that piling on the miles while the kids are sleeping is the only way to make it manageable.  By leaving at night, and filling their little gullets with food on the way out the door, we’re able to get a solid ten hours on the road before one of them wakes up, usually somewhere in North Carolina, complaining about the sleeping arrangements and asking how much further.    

Sure, it’s a long drive.  But it adds to the mystique for the kids -- at least the younger ones.   On recent trips, Maisie has said, after an hour on the road, “If we flew, we’d be there already.”  My retort, “And if we took the private yacht it would take weeks to get there.”  

Back to the questions:  Yes, our local grocery store sells sushi, as many attempt to these days.   And our local store is a Wegmans.  So it usually passes the smell test.  Literally.

So, as we pulled up to Wegman’s at 7:30 pm on Friday evening, 5 minutes into our summer vacation, and as my wife prepared to run in get some snacks and more substantive food, like chicken fingers, I suggested, “Maybe get me some sushi.  Spicy, crunchy tuna, please.” 

Maisie then shouted that she’d take a California roll.  And Sadie screamed: “Dumplings.”

These little guys are never going with us to Hilton Head, again.

As my wife departed for the store, she asked one more time:  “Who wants sushi, and who wants chicken fingers?”  It was almost unanimous.  Only Drew, who abstained from voting, got chicken fingers – and that was by default.

After she returned to the car, with some bags of snacks and a few trays of Wegman’s sushi, we were ready for our all-night, bleary-eyed, we’re-not-stopping-till-the-sun-comes-up drive south.   And off we went.

Not three minutes later, before we even got past the McDonalds in Lafeyette, we were sitting with our individual sushi trays open on our laps when all hell broke loose.  Okay, that may be an overstatement.   But from the back of the car, Chloe asked for help with something.  Her mother, reacting with the quick reflexes of a supermom, closed her own sushi tray, flipping the lid back on.  Unfortunately, she had already used the lid as a soy sauce dipping vessel.   Soy sauce went everywhere, including her lap, her seat and the pillow that was next to her seat ready for the long night’s drive.  Soy sauce splatter patterns were scattered throughout the front of the car.

She immediately called for the paper towels, as she danced on her seat trying to avoid the pool of soy sauce that had collected under her.  Of course, the paper towels were conveniently tucked in the back of the van behind the seat holding our two eldest children. They scrambled to get the paper towels, and in the process, Chloe’s ginger-infused dipping sauce for her dumplings fell to the floor.  Reports from the back of the van could not confirm whether the container’s lid was still on the ginger-infused dipping sauce when it fell.  And, now, the ginger-infused dipping sauce container itself was missing.  At least, neither properly-seat-belted child could get a visual fix on the sauce container.   I had visions of ginger-infused dipping sauce slowly soaking into our van’s carpet.

So, there we are, screaming down the highway – and I mean screaming, not driving fast – trapped in a van that was smelling increasingly like grocery-store-bought Asian food. 

Luckily, there was a truck inspection pull-off just ahead of us.  That’s where I pulled over and calmly (it's my blog, so my description) … calmly took care of the spill and the missing dipping sauce.  I also collected the remaining sushi containers and pronounced then and there that we would never buy sushi on a car trip ever, ever again. 

Not ten minutes into our annual vacation and we had already learned an important lesson.  When, embarking on a car trip, and asked if you want sushi, or something else, the Answer is ... all together now, "Something else."

Over the next 16 hours, the lingering smell of soy sauce reminded us of this lesson.

Would you like some Cheese with that Whine?

Case of Whiners

I could’ve written some cheesy Father’s Day essay chronicling the many deep thoughts and profound reflections that occurred to me during a family weekend devoted to dadhood.  But instead, I decided to show one of the gifts I got from the wife and kids.   It was a Father's Day gift to be savored. Literally.

This gift, which they called “A Case of Whiners,” shows in a pictorial the many reasons why I feel the desire -- no, the need -- to end so many days with a glass of wine (or even a bottle) in hand.  

 

The wife and kids were kind enough to attach each reason to a nice bottle of red, giving me enough wine to make it at least through the first few weeks of so-called "summer break."  Okay, maybe not quite.  But certainly through the next weekend.



Reason #1:  The first child's obsession with her siblings' earlier bedtime.

Reason #2:  The second child's inability to make the bus without stress  ... ever.

Reason #3:  The third child's hysterical screams whenever I pour cereal in
 the wrong bowl, pick out the wrong socks, or generally do anything for her.



Reason #4:  Has anyone seen reason #4? I mean child #4?
I swear, he was just here a minute ago.

Reason #5:  I JUST NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE FOR A MINUTE.
Maybe the dentist has an afternoon opening? Let me call.  

Next Father's Day, maybe they'll surprise me with an intervention.  We'll see.