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.

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.

I'm a hustler, homey

Man, I don't know how my Mom did it.

See, I grew up the only child of a single mother. Pops was nowhere to be seen on the scene, so it was just me and Mom. Like most single moms, she had to work, which meant she had to arrange childcare for me. And even when I hit school age, she had to find one means or another to make sure I was taken care of after school got out every day, not to mention the summers. I remember being in at least two different daycare centers. I remember riding home from school with various friends' parents or teachers, staying an hour or two after school at different friends's houses. I remember watching TV at a neighbor's house while eating bowls of rice with soy sauce or spaghetti or pudding or whatever the hell she had available that day. Even after I got old enough to stay by myself at home, that same neighbor would check in on me to make sure I was allright. She came over one day while I was playing with some matches and asked why it smelled like smoke. I said I didn't know. She asked if I'd been playing with matches. I lied.

Another time, I had to stay with a different neighbor across the street. She put on the TV for me, but I had been grounded from TV for one reason or another -- probably for playing with matches -- and I was such an honest little shit, I actually told her that I wasn't allowed to watch TV. She looked at me funny.

My point is, it took a lot of people to watch over me growing up, some of them paid to do so, others out of the goodness of their hearts. And it must have taken a hell of a lot of hustling on my Mom's part to pull all this care together. At the time, it never felt like I was being shuffled around, but looking back at it through my parenting lense, I see there must have been a lot of behind-the-scenes scrambling to make this all happen. And she was all by herself.

Now The Ash and I are in that same boat. It's not our ideal situation, but our lives are such that we both have to work, which means we have to hook it up with care for the boyos. Our first couple of tries with daycare went horribly, but after much arranging and rearranging, we finally worked out a situation where Simon spends the day with his grandparents, while Henry spends the morning at a Montessori school and then joins up with Simon and the grandparents in the afternoon. It's never been a perfect situation, and in fact there's plenty of complaints that could be lodged against it, but it's at least kept everybody in one piece and mostly healthy most of the time.

Except now we're back in hustle mode. The Ash's folks have some bigger fish to fry these days, so the boys simply can't stay there anymore. In truth, this is a relief because our concerns about them staying have been growing in size and number. But all of a sudden, we find ourselves needing to find full time care for the both of them. By the time today had come to a close, we had worked it all out, but the arranging and the calling and the adding up the fucking cost of it all made for a bit of a trying day. I was ready for a stiff drink by the time lunch rolled around.

It's all gonna work out. I know this. It worked out for my Mom and I, and it'll work out for us now. I've always appreciated my Mom for taking care of me, but as I learn more and more about the nuts and bolts of this parenting shit, I appreciate her on a whole different level.

Gotta hit the sack. School tomorrow.

Seven + Seven

Sometimes you're just walking down the street minding your own business when POW! some dirty ninja jumps out from behind a dumpster and zings you with a damn ninja star. And then, as if you weren't already bleeding all over the pavement, another ninja swoops down from above an awning and pops you with yet another ninja star.

So it was that I got tagged not once, but twice for the same meme by two different people, Cami and Sybil. It's that seven things meme where I'm supposed to tell you seven random facts about myself, and seeing as how I get dosed twice, it appears that I have to come up with seven + seven things to share with you. Since I've been letting the old blog get cold with neglect, I'm going to cheat a little bit and use some of those seven + seven things for updates on the latest in the wide world of the Holmes.

1) For those of you who don't read my wife's blog, first of all, shame on you, and second of all, it looks very much like we will be moving in a couple of weeks. No, you didn't miss anything, our place has been off the market for a while now, but that didn't stop it from getting an offer. Here's hoping it all goes through.

2) Clrly i neds mor lernings:

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3) Speaking of which, I have to pat myself on the back just a wee tiny bit because I realized that this time around on the higher education trip, I'm taking the whole thing much more seriously. Part of it, of course, is that I'm paying for it myself, along with all the support I get from my wife in giving me time to go to class and do the work I need to do. Plus the fact that I feel pretty compelled to move towards this line of work. They say you get out of education what you put into it, and I have to confess, I slacked a lot on the putting in part when I was in college. I got decent grades, sure, but there's more I could have done. But I had a great time.

4) My son is crazy. Or rather, he's cwazy. No really, he'll tell you so himself. One of his latest things to inform us is "Henry cwazy! CWAAAZZY!" Then he'll run real fast, fall down, lift up his adorable little head, and say, "Cwaaazy! CWAAAAZY!"

5) I crave real true community, the kind where people know and care for each other. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what this means to me, and how to find it, but I sometimes feel really disconnected from my fellow earth dwellers.

6) The Catcher In The Rye was the first book to change my life.

7) Between getting sick a few weeks ago and the demands of school, I haven't done anything resembling exercise in about a month. My clothes still fit, so I can't complain too much, but I find that with decreased physical demands being placed on my body, I'm more susceptible to eating sweets, particularly donuts. I asked my friend Brandon about this, and he filled me in on the fact that as you lower your amount of exercise, your body actually starts to smell like a donut, leaving you more vulnerable when actual donuts are available. Who knew?

8) I mentioned my wife's Hollywood crush a while back, which prompted her to ask if had any such crushes, which made me realize I sorta don't. My only famous-person crush would have to be Liz Phair since she sings dirty songs about love and pain and is hot while doing so, though I don't think she counts as a celebrity since I've never seen her on Famecrawler.

9) My wife sometimes accuses me of being ghetto because I'll do things like eat a half-piece of toast that's been sitting on the counter for a few hours, but she's the one who wants to keep chickens in the back yard at our new place. Chickens. In the middle of the city. Now who's ghetto?

10) I don't know all that much about Scotch, but I know enough about it to know that if you want to buy me a bottle of liquor for a gift, a bottle of something single-malt would be well-received and shared.

11) I'll spend a lot of time thinking about trying to accept people as they are, faults and all, without judging or stereotyping or hating, and I'll think about how people are the way they are for a reason, and people each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and how even though somebody might do or think something that I absolutely loathe, I might very well be just like them had I walked in their shoes, and I'll get to thinking about all this stuff and get this warm fuzzy love the world vibe going, and then some jackass in a Beemer will cut me off or tailgate me and I'll instantly shove that person into the profile of someone I hate.

12) I made up a playlist of all my favorite heavy music to listen to when I'm by myself, but I find that on the rare occasion I am by myself, I rarely listen to it. Kids are loud enough.

13) As regular readers of this blog know, I started a masters program in counseling at a seminary last spring. As the first class day was approaching, I pulled out the pink sheet of paper with the schedule printed on it to get some piece of info, and realized that I had missed the first class day! Holy shit! Not how I wanted to start out my graduate career! Frantic, I looked up the professor's email address in the school directory and went to email him, though I don't recall what I was planning to say. But when I pulled up my email, there was a message from the director of my program stating that the first day of class had been cancelled due to the sudden death of the professor's mother. So you can imagine the series of emotions that hit me in the next split second. I started to blog about it back then, but just felt too, I don't know, too weird about it.

14) I dislike dancing, so don't ask.

I'm supposed to tag seven people now, but there's no way that's happening. I'll just tag Ashley since she needs a good taggin.