The Words Less Spoken

Successful parenting, as "they" say, is 8% patience, 22% common sense, 14% genetic roulette, 13% yelling, 18% luck, 6% tolerance for foul substances and sleep deprivation, 3% television, 8% wise and memorable parental-style nuggets of advice, and 18% what you don't say. The same formula applies to marriage, by the way, although you need to swap out "moods” for “substances”, “sex" for “wise parental-style nuggets of advice, and "telling your wife she looks great no matter what she is wearing" for “genetic roulette”. Anyway, it is the “what you don’t say” category of the parenting formula that is the focus of today's post:

The scene: Me, in shower, 6:30 a.m., Owen peeing in toilet 3 feet away;

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[NOTE FROM REDPLANET: THE MIDDLE OF THIS PREVIOUSLY POSTED ENTRY HAS BEEN DELETED AT THE REQUEST OF THE REDPLANET POSTING STANDARDS BOARD, SO YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO LET YOUR IMAGINATION TAKE IT FROM HERE - SORT OF A "CREATE YOUR OWN CLOUD EIGHT POST" FEATURE. YOU ARE SET UP FOR A GOOD START, AS ANY STORY THAT STARTS WITH SHOWERING AND PEEING IS NATURALLY GOING TO BE HILARIOUS. GOOD LUCK, AND, NOW, BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING.

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What I said: “I have no idea.”

See, this parenting stuff is a breeze.

P.S. If you added up the percentages above and were tempted to point out that they totaled 110%, you: (1) have way too much time on your hands; and (2) must be a bad parent because all good parents know that if you aren’t giving 110% your kids will end up in the juvenile home.

3 Hours

Both Deanna and I work in demanding jobs. I often leave the house prior to 5:30 a.m. in order to bill enough hours and still make it home to relieve the nanny by 6. Deanna takes the opposite shift, leaving when the nanny arrives at 8:45 a.m. and often working late or after the kids go to bed in order to get her work done.

While our work schedules frequently leave us wishing we had more time with the kids, I am sometimes amazed at how much we can fit into the time we do have. Tonight, for example, I got home about 6. Deanna called from the office to inform me that she would be arriving home after bedtime and that it was the night to pick up the food we had ordered through Owen’s (now former) Catholic preschool. I changed my clothes, got the boys shoed and the twins plugged into the stroller and we set off down the block.

On the way, Owen kept up a constant stream of chatter. Over the course of our walk we talked about why leaves turn brown on branches that fall off trees, which roofs we would be scared to stand on (consensus, third floor is too high to be hanging out on the roof!), what car companies DON’T make gas-hogging giant SUVs (i.e. Porsche, Saturn, etc.), the price of gas, and why different kites need different amounts of wind to fly. We lamented the passing of our local coffee shop (abruptly closed down due to a lack of business), marveled at the tallness of particular trees, decided to refer to our kick-ass Graco double-stroller as a Graco Turbo to give it a bit more cache, speculated about which houses we might consider moving to, discussed why guys using jack hammers wear so much protective gear (and consequently look like bugs), chatted about my old summer job during college at a municipal wastewater treatment plant, argued about how many banks are in town, and kicked around a bunch more things I am sure I have forgotten.

We picked up the food from the school (all frozen), ordered food for takeout at the local Bohemian restaurant, spent a bit sitting next to the railroad tracks for a premium view of trains going by, and made it back home where we gorged ourselves on breaded pork tenderloin, dumplings, potato pancakes, cooked carrots, beef noodle soup and apple sauce. After hosing down the dining area, I herded everyone upstairs for baths. Baths were followed by a lot of crazy running, with the twins popping their little heads around corners and yelling “boo” as loud as they could. Owen set up a race course using red blankets and a checkered flag, and drew large numbers on paper which he proceeded to tape to everyone's backs like we were running a marathon. The twins were finally wrestled into bed by 8:30 or so.

Deanna arrived home and she, Owen and myself took in a bit of a PBS show on Great Lodges of North America which in turn caused us to explain to Owen what a lodge is (tougher than it sounds, really, even if we certainly know a lodge when we see it. I was surprised to find myself winging this one a bit, as opposed to, say, my aforementioned concise and scientifically accurate exposition on kite sizes and wind speeds) and to explain what a glacier is. All in all, not a bad way to spend three hours.

Dinner Menu at Cloud Eight: Decibels and Spills

For those of you don’t have three boys aged five and under, or haven’t had the pleasure of dining with us (come on over, I’m making Daddy-Os!), it would be hard to describe the chaos that is dinner at our place. The energy and noise levels are, in a word, “high,” while the competency levels with basic eating skills such as use of a cup or spoon might best be described as “less high.” I have taken to announcing the time of the first spill, much like a doctor pronouncing a patient dead – “Time of first spill, 42 seconds into the meal.” Not a great analogy, I suppose, since if we actually had a dead patient for each spill, our license would have been yanked months ago and all three boys locked up in debtor’s prison for eternity, what with all the malpractice and wrongful death judgments against them. I suppose actually giving them glasses as opposed to sippy cups makes me contributorily negligent, so I would be on the hook as well, but they have to learn somehow. Thank God the only real casualties are our newspapers, work clothes, patience, etc.

Although pictures in this case are not worth a thousand words, and I should actually attach an audio file, I have no idea how to do that, so pictures it is.

Above you can see Cooper participating in a favorite dinnertime game developed by the twins. Hearing any mention of the word chicken, both twins will start flapping their arms like a chicken and squawking loudly. After a bit of this, they both loudly yell “BBAAAAAWWWWK!!!” and throw their arms skyward. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Cute the first time, less cute the 187th time. Any fellow diner who sets them off by use of the word chicken is severely punished.

Here we see another popular dinner pastime: Monster. Rarely does a dinner pass without all three boys pretending they are monsters. One will start to growl in an appropriately menacing manner while extending his arms forward like Frankenstein. Soon the others join in the Monster chorus, and all three continue to make monster sounds simultaneously until we are able to restore order or something spills, whichever comes first. Although Cooper actually does the best Frankenstein face, I haven’t been able to effectively capture it on film (rarely daring to bring the camera to the table for fear of spills, fittingly). In the background you can see Deanna is quite enjoying this particular game.

You know, as a closing thought, as chaotic as things sometimes are these days, I am not so naive as to think I won’t someday miss all of this. When we are sitting around a quiet house years from now, with the boys long ago moved away to Canada (Owen), California (Cooper) and Prague (Hayden), these are the memories that will make us smile, and maybe even toss a glass of milk on the floor for old times sake.

Oh, Canada - Part Deux

Our foray across the border into Canada is complete, and I am here, as promised, to report back.

The majority of our long weekend was actually spent in Dearborn, Michigan, where we visited the Henry Ford museum and Greenfield Village. The museum is huge and features not just cars (including the Wienermobile!), but also big sections on planes, American life, etc. It was a pretty cool museum and we were all reasonably entertained, including the two-year-old twins. Greenfield Village is Henry Ford’s collection of historical buildings that he had torn down from various places and rebuilt in Dearborn – things like Thomas Edison’s house and the old Logan County, Illinois courthouse. The highlight for Owen was probably a couple of rides we took in the fleet of old Model T’s being driven around the grounds by retired guys. As if the whole Greenfield Village conglomeration of buildings wasn’t enough, there happened to be a big Civil War reenactment taking place throughout the Village. This meant that encampments were scattered throughout, and the Village was populated by both Union and Rebel soldiers and their girlfriends and wives, hanging out, cooking, playing instruments, cleaning rifles, riding around on horses, etc. Bizarre and fascinating.

Anyway, we set off for Windsor, Ontario after 5 p.m. on a Sunday. Having asked around some, I had learned before hand that Windsor is most famous for its high-end strip clubs. Since I had been the lone vote at the family meeting for a good ole’ fashioned strip club crawl, Sunday night seemed like a good bet. Upon reaching the border, we found that between my wife’s expired passport and our photocopies of the kid’s birth certificates (as opposed to actual certified copies), the Canadians were not anxious to let us in. Having successfully talked our way in, however, we commenced a whirlwind Canadian tour that included a quick stop at the tourism office, a lengthy visit to a Dollar store, where we dropped over $40 on cheesy Canadian souvenirs (nail clippers with the Canadian flag on them!?! I’ll take two please!!), scored a box of Tim-Bits at the local outpost of Tim Horton’s (sort of the Canadian equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts), played at a great playground along the river teeming with kids of seemingly every nationality, and had dinner at an old-time BBQ place (no broken plates, only three spills, and minimal peeved looks from other patrons – a good meal!) before heading back to the States.

As we approached the US border checkpoint, Owen, whose love of Canada had now reached a fever pitch, was loudly singing a song he had made up called “Bad America.” After our efforts to shout him down with an extra loud version of “My Country Tis of Thee” failed, we resorted to the old “you need to be quiet when we get to the booth so we can hear the man talk” trick, which, thankfully, worked like a charm. The jaded security agent at the booth asked us the standard questions in a bored monotone: “Where are you from”, “How long were you here”, “What did you do while you were here.” Deanna’s perky answers caught his attention and he looked up from her expired passport to skeptically drone “You drove all the way from Illinois to go to a dollar store???” Whether he ultimately believed us or not, Owen remained thankfully quiet in the back and we were eventually able to convince the guard, with some help from the hypnotic power of our rockin’ Canadian Dollar Store disco ball, that we weren’t spiriting Canadian children across the border to sell them to wealthy Americans. As we chugged back towards the Dearborn, Michigan Hampton Inn, Owen happily sighed from the backseat, “You know Mom and Dad, Canada is all about fun.” As I stuffed another Tim Bit in my mouth and watched one of our three Dollar Store Canadian Flag pinwheels lazily spinning in the gentle warm wind coming in through the rolled down car window, I could not have agreed more.