Keys

I can barely convey to you with words how well these two simple phone-snapped pictures capture the wonderful differences between my two boys. So I'll hush and let the pictures talk.

Happy Holidays, Internets!

So we sort of neglected to do holidays cards this year. Maybe we were intimidated at the prospect of trying to top the picture we used on last year's cards. Or maybe we're just lazy.

Anyway, season's greetings y'all. Hope they treat you right.

Movember: Please Come To A Merciful End

Allright, Mr. Mustache, you've got one day left. Hope you enjoy it because my face and I are quite ready to be rid of you. I'm tired of looking like a junior high basketball coach.

Now then folks, let not this mustache have been grown in vain. Toss some of your sweet American dollars at us to help fight the bastard whore's child that is cancer. As of this evening, team DadCentric looks to be a bit over $1100. Help push us even farther!

Movember Week 4

I was all set up to snap a picture or two to document the mustache's state here in the last quarter of Movember, but then a certain little Hamster came along and, well, we just ended up fooling around with Photo Booth. But where I go, the stache goes, so this counts:

  

We should take this act on the road. "Stache and Son" they'll call us. Remember folks, just seven more days to chip in to help us raise money to fight the evil dirty hateful bastard cancer. It's the handsome thing to do!

Cloudy With A Chance Of Rad

Every Friday in my oldest son's class, they have show and tell. Kids can bring whatever they like, but they're encouraged to bring something related to their topic for that week. Usually, this is no challenge. Transportation? Walk blindfolded through either of my kid's rooms (not advised) and you're likely to injure your foot on a transportation-related toy a few steps in. Space? We got that covered. Farm animals? No problem. Dinosaurs? Pshaw.

So this week, their topic is clouds, those big fluffy masses that float above our heads and occasionally dump all over creation. All week long, every chance he gets, the kid's been asking me what he should take, what he should take, "what should I take, Daddy?" and I kept repeating a slightly dismissive "we'll find something, we'll find something."

Finally, one evening on the couch, the tone of desperation in the kid's voice arced upwards towards panic levels. But still, I didn't know what to tell him. I thought surely he had a cloud-related book or a toy or maybe a picture or a...a picture! "Buddy, I got an idea."

I already had Wednesday off and was planning on spending it with him. The plan was to drive out to the summer camp where I worked during the summers of my teenage years and meet up with an old friend of mine who was out there with his son.

"Check this out, buddy. How about you take your camera out to the camp when we go, you take some pictures of clouds, and you can take those pictures to show to your class? What do you think of that?"

I liked this idea. I liked it a lot. It involved an actual activity, not just grabbing an object out of his room. And there's the fact that I thought of it. I was excited and I thought he should be too. And after I explained to him how the whole process worked, getting the pictures off of his camera, onto my computer, and printed out on paper, he was.

So that's what we did. He brought his camera and snapped some pics in the car and some out in nature when we arrived. When we got home and I was looking over the pics he'd taken, I tell you, I teared up a little. It's not that his little 3 megapixel images were especially profound. It's that they exist at all, that he made them, that he went and documented a little bit of the world as he saw it. And that I was along for the ride.

I'll be goddamned if this parenting gig doesn't toss you some nice easy slow balls sometimes. Every now and then, you get to feel like a minor genius for a couple of seconds.

Wanna See Ridiculous?

One week ago today, I took the razor to my own face and hacked my beard clean off. It had been there nearly two years, since right around the time Simon was born. We had some friends coming over to the house that night, so Ashley begged me, BEGGED I tell you, to keep just the mustache. And so...

So what do you think? Race car driver? Bear hunter? Coach? Personally, I'd go with bumbling British detective.

I say!

In case you haven't seen me in the past week, allow me to assure you that the 'stache has followed the rest of the beard down the drain.

Go Fly A Kite

My Mom came to visit us a few weekends ago, and among all the things that she brought with her, she brought a kite, a gift for Henry that she had promised on her previous trip. He had originally asked for a rainbow kite, and I believe her when she says she looked everywhere for it because she is the type to look everywhere for just the right gift. But in the end, it was a giant lizard kite, and from the way Henry reacted, you would think it was all he'd ever wanted. Any thought of a rainbow kite was completely forgotten.

The three of us, my Mom, Henry, and I, walked down the street to the elementary school at the end of the block. Next to the building, they have playgrounds and a  basketball court, but beyond that is a giant field, empty save a bit of plant life, plenty of room to let the wee folks set loose with their imagination. Or, as in our case, try to catch a bit of wind. The wind wasn't raging, but it wasn't exactly still either.

The funny thing is, most of what I remember of that day's kite-flying is repeated frustration. Again and again we tried to get that lizard up in the air, but most of our attempts ended with the kite slamming itself back down to the rain-softened planet. We had a few successes, but most of those were short-lived.

But now as I flip back through the few pictures I managed to snap that day, just about everything I see shows that kite in the air. Selective documentation at its finest.

Then we went and sat by a dinosaur. Good day.

Gun For The Whole Family

I need to get some blood pellets...

My son has guns that he keeps strapped to the ends of his wrists. He sticks out his index, pops up his thumb, then curls in the other three fingers to create the universal sign for firearm. He shouts out his shots like BANG! BANG BANG BANG! BANG! Sometimes it’s out of anger, the barrel of his gauge aimed at the object of his ire, be it baby brother, Mom, me, some stranger who gave him a funny look, not funny ha-ha, but funny BANG BANG! Other times he does it to amuse himself. He blasts with a laugh, giggling with every trigger pull.

I know he didn’t pick this up at home. That may sound defensive, but it’s not intended as a defense of our parenting, just a statement of fact about how things are around here. We don’t keep guns under this roof. The Ash and I don’t play-shoot each other. Aside from a spacey looking bubble blower, the boys have no toy guns. And I never quite got the hang of that two pistols greeting thing that some guys are so good at. Maybe he picked it up at school, I don’t know. And you know, so what if he did? Now he’s the one passing it on to other kids. To be honest, I have a hard time getting myself too worked up about it. I’m not even sure that he “picked it up” anywhere. I think back on my own experience of being a boy, of boys I was friends with, and the boys I taught for all those summers, and gunplay was always present in one form or another. Flip through a picture album of me as a kid and you’ll see picture after picture of me carrying toy rifles, pistols, machine guns, uzis, laser blasters. I might not have been wearing anything more than tighty-whiteys and a cowboy hat, but I was strapped with my gat.

 

I’m not saying all this as some sort of “boys will be boys” defense, or to suggest that it’s healthy in some way. All I’m saying is that It Is. Gunplay is there, er, here, no matter how the wife and I may feel about the reality of guns. I don’t remember what kind of thoughts went through my head back when I was a kid going around everywhere armed. Maybe they weren’t the kind of thoughts that made their way up to the surface enough to be articulated so as to be burned into memory. But what I do remember is that the fascination with guns among boys (probably some girls too) bordered on near universal. And when you think about it, why not? Guns represent instant power, something that most kids are pretty short on. Power to do what you want, power to move obstacles out of your way, power to make the world go your way. And yes, that power comes from the ability to dole out death, but I wonder if maybe that understanding dawns a bit later on. Or hey, maybe these kids know exactly what they’re imagining, but they know they’re just imagining it. Maybe my son knows perfectly well that he’s pretending to install the contents of his clip in dad’s chest, but that it’s just pretend. Chill out old people! We’re only play killing here! Jeez!

Or not.

I have faith that this kind of thing works itself out in the long run, provided we do our jobs as parents. There are a lot of important lessons to be taught, and sometimes you have to get creative with how you instill those lessons. So I’m going to get some blood pellets, and, along with a bit of inspiration from Arrested Development, I'm going to set up a little lesson about the reality of what guns can do. Next time we're sitting at the dinner table and Henry points his little hand cannons at me and BANG BANG BANG!s away, I’m going to drop my silverware and clutch my chest, smashing those pellets open so that bright red blood runs down my shirt. I'll scream “MY GOD! YOU’VE SHOT ME!” I’ll have a pellet ready in my mouth to bite into for some instant internal bleeding. I’ll fall to the floor, smearing blood all over the white tile, clutching at the sucking chest wound out of which my life force is leaking. I’ll ask over and over again “Why, Son? Why?” I’ll get the wife in on the act too. She’ll kneel down by my dying form and cry out to the heavens, “No God, please don’t take him from us! My son knows not what he does! We tried to tell him not to shoot people but he wouldn’t listen and now he’s shot his father and there will be no one to take care of us and we’ll have to live on the streets and I’ll have to sell my body just for a loaf of bread, which I will in turn trade for crack to feed the drug habit that I will now inevitably pick up!”

And then, I’ll sit up and look my son in the eye and tell him, with all the gravitas I can muster, “And that’s why you never pretend to shoot people!”

Of course, the little punk may be laughing his ass off.

Aim for the head

I posted the other day about setting kids loose with cameras. Here's another example, fresh from our trip to Ft. Worth to visit my cuz Kelly and her husband-man Alan, of our 3 year old turned loose with the camera. Note the slow but steady progression:

I'm just gonna buy the kid his own camera

And I'll let him take tons of pictures like this:



Seriously, I love it. I know he almost certainly didn't mean to take this shot while he was snapping pics with the iPhone, but still, he ended up with an interesting composition. To me anyway. You may be looking at it and thinking "Yeah dude, that's uh, that's really great or whatever." Quit rolling your eyes. Shut up.

Anyway. Handing the camera over to the kids usually yields, well, usually a lot of blurry shots, often of crotches since kids are short. And pervy. But just as those googlemaps vans sometimes manage to grab some fantastic shots, a kid left alone long enough with the camera can sometimes make some cool accidental art. Or, you know, break your fucking camera.

--Posted from phone, so forgive typos or formatting weirdness. Thanks, you're the best.

The Hamster And The Bear

The post you see in front of you is a surrender, a surrender by me to the irrefutable fact that I’m just not going to be able to make it happen. My brain just doesn’t have it in it. You see, a few nights ago, I wrote a post all about how my boys fight a lot, how they beat the hell out of each other sometimes, but how they can also be really sweet to each other, especially when it really matters. And I really liked this post. It felt good to write and good to read when I was done with it. It included a reference to midget MMA, the thoughts of a mourning fighting cock, a sweet little scene between my boys in one of their better moments, nice transitions. I just felt really good about it.

You probably know where this is going.

Long story short, thanks to the treachery of this insolent Macbook upon which I write, I lost the post. I closed my laptop, and instead of just easing back its battery suckage and leaving everything else intact, it decided to restart, and do away with all unsaved work. Fuck me, right?

So this morning, I attempted to recreate it. I had no illusions that I would like it as much as the lost original, but I thought I’d at least be able to come up with something post-worthy. I remembered the midget MMA bit, the crying fighting cock, etc. But again and again, as I tried to make it happen, it just wouldn’t. I couldn’t get past four lousy lines. And so I wimped out and wrote this instead, a post about a lost post that will hopefully convey some of the thoughts contained in the original.

Look at this picture:

I don't know what it is about this picture, but for me, it has come to symbolize all the reasons there are to hope for a better world. It's true, my boys often beat the hell out of each other. And I know, I know, it's like some sort of law of nature that brothers are supposed to battle it out. But then there are moments like this where they feel nothing but joy in themselves and each other, where it's just the two of them in their little sibling bubble that no one else can enter.

A couple of weeks ago, the youngest one had a minor surgical procedure to help ease his breathing. Minor as it was, he didn't feel too great for a few days afterwards. At one point, we were sitting on the couch with him, trying to ease his suffering. He was in one of those states where all he could do was cry, and we were trying everything we could think of to help him, but to no avail. Big brother asked, "What's wrong with my baby?" This is what he calls him when he's in a nurturing mood: my baby. We told him that his baby wasn't feeling good. So he went and got his prized toy Lightning McQueen car, the one that he usually freaks out about if he sees it in his brother's grubby paws, and handed it over to his baby brother. The crying promptly stopped. True, it might have been out of shock that his older brother was actually letting him play with one of his favorite toys, but whatever. It was a sweet gesture, and it brought some measure of relief. It gives me hope that, even though these two will undoubtedly beat the crap out of each other more and more over the years, they'll still be there for each other when it counts.

Tough Guy

I love this picture because I love the little boy in it.

Guestposting

Hey folks,

I've got a guest post up over at MamaPop today. Check it out.

Now here is a picture of a kid and a monkey.

That is all.

Little boy, big world

I find something about this picture absolutely bewitching.


And here it is through the Tilt Shift Maker.

Don't keep your nose clean...

...stick it in your birthday cake.

Austin's bus system has problems

You think I'm locked in here with you, old man...

...but it's you who's locked in here with me.

Some antibiotics ought to clear that up

I think this camera-phone ownership thing agrees with me.

Exterior Window

The reflection of one bedroom window in another created this nifty little illusion, a window to an alternative universe just hanging there in the trees.

Pictures to prove it

So we turned Henry loose with our old old digital camera. The results were nothing short of fucking art:Note the deep reds of the fingers captured through the technique of placing them extremely close to the lens, obscuring most of the picture beyond, suggesting perhaps that as human beings, we are often unable to see beyond the blood in our own hands. Brilliant.

Of course, there were some rather frightening entries in his portfolio, like this one:

Perhaps the lumbering beast is dreaming of a letter that will come through that mailslot in the background. Such striking composition, and a bold move focusing on a subject so badly in need of a shave.

Little Simon AKA Turtle AKA Chubb isn't snapping any pictures yet, but he has learned what to do when the camera is turned on him: