Summer, Part I

My apologies to anyone who actually reads this for my 11 day absence. Busy, busy. Anyway, I've much to say about summer, but I realize that if I actually wait to cram it into a single entry, I will probably not get around to finishing it until fall! Therefore, I thought I would do it in several bits and pieces.

Even at my age, I am always amazed at the intensity of the seasons here in Chicago. The bitter cold and relative isolation of winter is such a stark contrast to the heat and humidity and intense socializing of summer. Although winter is somewhat broken up by a round of parties and get togethers around the holidays, it is a mighty long stretch between December and actual warm weather. So by the time summer arrives, people have been waiting for it in eager anticipation for what seems like forever. As I recall, Owen was anticipating getting his first summer dip in the backyard kiddie pool as far back as last October. I sometimes wonder if people in places like San Diego lose their appreciation for good weather, having to rarely, if ever, suffer through bad weather. Because the heat of summer here is essentially comprised of 12 or 13 too-brief weeks, people attempt to cram in an inordininate amount of activities - something we not so cleverly refer to around our house as "summer fun."

Because of the generally busy schedule and brevity of summer, things that don't qualify as summer fun sometimes strike me as monumental wastes of time. I was reminded of this at a recent gathering. This one was more obligation than summer fun on my agenda, but there I was, looking to make my own fun, embrace the moment, etc., when I spied a couple of the guests and kids tossing a football around. I grabbed Owen, who recently declared to me, brimming with young confidence after a successful Spring session learning to ride his bike with the training wheels, that he is now a "sportsguy", and we headed over to join in. Not only were we sort of spurned by the football toss participants, I was appalled when a little boy, 3 or 4, fell while running and began to cry, obviously hurting a little (or a lot, hard to tell), and his dad, instead of comforting him or even asking him how he was, yelled, in all seriousness, "c'mon Sally, get up." Whatever summer is, it is certainly much, much too short to spend any time whatsoever hanging around with dads who mockingly refer to their injured progeny as girls.

Party of the Century

We are 27 days into a raucous sex-drenched non-stop party in my neighborhood, the likes of which we are unlikely to see again for 17 years. Unfortunately, the invitees to this party are exclusively 17-year cicadas, although the rest of us have had, unavoidably, a front row seat for much of the action.

The whole thing has been a kid's dream. To say they have taken over the neighborhood would be an understatement. They first began emerging silently from the ground over 3 weeks ago, in some yards every few inches. In the space of a few days, the neighborhood filed up with slow-moving, freaky looking bugs that don't protest too much when caught and who don't sting. They have bulging red eyes and sticky little feet that allow them to cling to anything, including upside down on your hand. After emerging wingless, they began their march towards anything tall. Most gravitated to taller, older trees, but others were less picky, climbing up most anything; houses, car tires, swingsets, anything that would get them off the ground. They attached themselves pretty much at little kid eye-level and then proceeded to literally crawl out of their skins, coming out white until they darkened to black after a day or so. Hundreds of vacated shells surround the most popular trees (see picture above - all the brown things on the ground are vacated skins). Finally, their wings grew in, and the din began, as the males began trying to attract females by beating their wings against a hollow abdomen or some such mechanism. Walking to the train each morning, the hum has already begun. By midday, it builds to an incessant, deafening, pulsating roar. I think people on the block are starting to go a little batty from the constant throbbing noise, especially the stay-at-home moms. And they are EVERYWHERE. You can't avoid stepping on them since they cover the sidewalk so thickly. I had one flutter out of my shirt as I hung it in the closet after work. They are inside the car and clinging to the car tires. On the side of the house. On the deck and swingset, even showing up, somehow, in the port-o-crib inside. Because they are pretty vague flyers, they have a tendency to wack into the side of your head or otherwise land on you when you venture outside. When the mating frenzy was at its peak, we even had a mating couple crash-land at our feet while eating dinner on the deck. Owen proclaimed them to be fighting. Deanna told him they were "making eggs" and we left it at that. Between the noise and the sheer numbers, it is like living inside a science fiction movie. Large flocks of seagulls have flown the 8-miles inland from Lake Michigan to gorge on these tasty insect snacks, adding to the weirdness of the scene.

The gulls are on to something, because cicadas are supposedly, for the non-squeamish or those too young to know better, edible. The twins like to chase after them, most likely with the intent of popping them into their mouths. Although cicadas don't seem particularly bright, they are bright enough to evade a lumbering one year old coming at them, so I don't think any have actually been captured and/or eaten (at least as far as we know!). Owen did approach me with two dead cicadas yesterday and asked if we had any chocolate sauce. Not sure how serious he was.

As the party grinds towards its fifth week, it is finally starting to die down, literally, as the cicadas life-cycle comes to an end. As weird as the whole thing has been, it has also been miraculous (how do they all know to pop out of the ground the same year??) and a pretty cool way to kick off summer. Definitely a party to remember.

The excellent close up of the cicada near our house in the picture above was taken by my brother-in-law. Other selections from his gallery can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/titanvisuals/.

Book Review - "Noisy Friends"

Once upon a time, in what seems like another lifetime, my wife and I used to discuss current events, read actual books and see movies. We would debate the issues of the day and generally enjoy the type of discourse that over-educated people tend to engage in.

I recalled this recently and realized how much I miss such things, even if I don't always realize it, when I found myself analyzing and criticizing, in all seriousness, the story-line in "Noisy Friends". Noisy Friends is a piece of crap book put out by Fischer-Price that does not even bother to credit an author except in 10-point type on the back cover. It is a series of 5 illustrations, each of which features a different "noisy" friend; buzzing bees, a thumping rabbit, a croaking frog, tweeting birds and a chirping cricket. Indicative of the lack of effort someone put into the book is the fact that it is probably the first time that rabbits have ever been accused of being noisy. Anyway, what actually bothered me about the book was that in the third illustration, the croak of "Froggy" is telling everyone that "bedtime is near." This is further illustrated to the reader (or "looker" for the younger set) by the fact that it appears to be growing dark. The fifth illustration has a cricket making his nightime chirping through the night while the rest of his noisy friends sleep. The illustration in the middle of these two, however, is a mother bird bringing her babies their "favorite treat" (a strawberry of all things). Now that is all well and good but birds eating to me says mid-morning, not dusk. And the birds are bathed in bright yellow light - clearly mid-morning or afternoon. Although Owen helpfully suggested during my rant that the yellow might be bright moonlight, he is giving the "author" too much credit and, come to think of it, was probably just trying to shut me up so we could put the twins to bed and read a better book. At any rate, it is not a moonlight yellow but a glaring mid-day yellow. To me, the yellow of the illustration is a jarring interruption of the journey of our noisy friends towards their night of sleep (cricket excepted of course). Where were the editors on this one?? Its five pictures for God's sake. Couldn't they put them in some semblance of logical order. Even one year olds deserve to have their stories follow some arc and pacing.

Now, do I really believe that the repeated readings of Noisy Friends demanded by my one-year old twins will have any lasting impact, dooming them to forever look expectantly to the sky as night falls, waiting in vain to see mother birds swooping towards their hungry chicks, their beaks straining under the weight of their cargo of fresh strawberries?? Nope. And if the entire book were random, I don't think I would have thought twice about it. It was the half-assed effort of introducing some time progression at all and then ignoring it that really bothered me, and the sense that if you are writing for one-year olds (although the book brashly recommends itself, again on the back cover, for all ages), you can just slop it together. Kids deserve better.

Anyway, I feel better having gotten that off my chest. Clearly I need an evening out sans children in the near future.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

A note of uncertainty creeps into something previously assumed at work and I realize and appreciate once again how tenuous everything all is. Any relationship, job, or other thing that you think is solid and understood could be turned on its head in a day. Gone, or irrevocably changed.

This works both ways of course, as good news can come flooding in unexpectedly as well. Winning the lotto, an old friend getting back in touch, a cancer vanquished, a baby made, etc.

There is good and bad, but there is nothing we can build that is so solid that it can't be torn down. And it is how we handle the knowledge of that fact, I think, that governs our approach to life. Do we stay within a narrow and comfortable range designed, consciously or subconsciously, to limit the opportunity for the unexpected to find us? Hoping that by crouching low in the bushes, the winds of fate will pass us by, unnoticed.

Or is it better to live at the opposite extreme, dancing constantly along the edge, not only inviting and welcoming change, but inciting it, laughing at and tempting fate, living hard, as though every day was your last. Maybe. Although practically speaking, that sounds exhausting and is not very realistic for most of us.

As an aside, I am reminded of a news story I heard recently about someone who was diagnosed as having just months to live. They promptly quit their job and spent every last dime living their remaining days to the fullest. They then learned that they had been misdiagnosed and were not in any actual danger of dying anytime soon. This caused the person to promptly sue his doctors for lost wages, etc. And really, if you think you are dying and are then rewarded with additional time on earth, what better way to live life to the fullest than to embark on several years of soul-numbing litigation.

Anyway, I live somewhere in the middle, as I expect most people do (that's what makes it the middle!). Despite being the most easy-going member of my family growing up, the most easy-going person in a family of worriers is still a worrier. Further, the crush of responsibilities that comes with adulthood and kids has not done me any favors in this regard. Still, the challenge that I face is to take this awareness that all things are fleeting and that change, for both good and bad, is inevitable, and to use it as a positive force in my life. To appreciate the small happiness's that are part of every day if you are looking for them, to hug my wife and kids every day and tell them that I love them, to push myself to take chances, keep growing and learning, embrace change as part of life, and to generally strive to live joyously and in the moment rather than beholden to any vague fears about what may come to be. And, to the extent that I have been increasingly successful in this regard in recent months, it has been a pretty damn good year so far.

Bon Jour!!

Having survived some serious sleep deprivation during the past year, and particularly the twins first few months, I am much more appreciative of a good nights sleep than I was pre-kids, although I probably only average about six hours a night. Only six hours is partly because I function pretty well on that amount, and partly because I don't have my wife's gift of going from carrying on a coherent conversation to sound asleep in the space of 60 seconds, but instead have a tough time getting back to sleep after waking up, especially if it is after 5 a.m.

That is why, last Saturday morning at 5:15 a.m., I was groggily displeased to hear the phone ringing. A phone call at 5:15 a.m. is never a good thing. It is either a wrong number or some sort of family emergency. I stumbled out of bed with some trepidation and answered the phone.

"Bon jour!!" said the cheery voice of my mother-in-law. Although she did not as a matter of course speak French, I foggily recalled that she was in France. Well, Disneyland Paris, to be exact, which may or may not actually qualify as France, depending on who you talk to.

"Hi" I mumbled.

"Are the kids asleep?" she perkily continued.

Instead of answering "Its 5:15 in the morning, what the hell do you think?" I quietly gave some sort of affirmative response, retreating into the bathroom in an effort not to wake the rest of the sleeping family.

"Are you okay, your voice is sort of faint?" she then asked. Having by this point then grown clear-headed enough to grasp that there did not appear to be any imminent emergency, I asked her if she knew what time it was. "No" she responded, sounding surprised.

Over the next 30 seconds I was able to gather that my morning's sleep had fallen victim to some bad international time/math skills on the part of my father-in-law, who I then heard my mother-in-law berating. 30 seconds after that I was tucked back into the bed, where I lay awake for another 45 minutes in the blissful early morning quiet before the first faint wail of an awakening one year old sounded from the room across the hall. C'est la vie.

Heaven is a Cornfield

Ever since Owen learned to talk, I have been bracing for the onslaught of difficult questions - about heaven and hell and the existence of God, the meaning of life, and various science-related questions that I have absolutely no answers to. So far, the challenges have been minimal. There have been some vague heaven-related inquiries recently in the wake of the recent death of his great-grandfather Paul, but he hasn't really taken it in a direction that would require much knowledge on my part. Tonight, however, he did ask me whether people who died in Illinois, or Iowa, or Wisconsin, were all in the same place up in heaven. Can't say I had a prepared answer for this particular inquiry, as I had never considered whether heaven adheres to the arbitrary state or international borders that exist here in everyday life. So I stammered something about everyone being with the other people they knew up in heaven. As good an answer as any, I suppose, since I doubt even theological theorists have spent much time on the governmental subdivisions that might exist in heaven. Upon further reflection, however, supposing heaven does exist, I would like to think everyone from Illinois got to go somewhere a tad more scenic.

Listmaking I

I once had a co-worker who was into keeping mental lists. It was a small office so I saw enough of him over the course of a couple years that it became amusing to me. If you talked to him one day about U.S. policy in South America, he might suddenly stop you and proclaim you to be "one of the 10 smartest people I know." Interests outside his sphere of knowledge might earn you a spot on the "10 most interesting people I know" list, and so on.

Lately, with four year old Owen in list-making overdrive, I feel like I am back in that office 24/7. With Deanna out of town for 3 nights last week and 3 nights this week, I have been peppered with lists and, more often, demands for my own lists. These range from the mundane (my favorite color: burgundy), to the thought provoking (my "unfavoritest color": yellow), to the bizarre (my favorite Mazda: who has a favorite Mazda?? I suppose some people do, but I lamely offered up the RX-7, which I thought was very cool 20 years ago, and which I am unsure is even in production anymore). Categorizing things through lists is an interesting and manageable way for a kid who is learning more about the wider world every day to organize his thoughts on various subjects and to learn from others. Owen has an elaborate and ever changing list of his favorite colors, which I currently believe runs along the lines of red (always number 1, for its "fastness"), grey (he copied my 2nd favorite - very flattering), blue, orange, purple, pink, gold, silver, and on down to his unfavoritest color of white. I haven't taken on the challenge of explaining the whole "white as absence of color" concept to him, as who needs that at age 4.

Wet Kiss

Cooper starting kissing us last week. This currently consists of lunging at our faces with his tongue stuck out while making a humming noise. Very cute (and wet)! It did occur to me, however, that he will need to refine his technique over the next 12 or 15 years if he wants to go on any second dates in the future.

First Year in the (Curious George) Books

The twins turned one this past weekend. Like any decent parents, we honored the twins request for a large birthday party. We limited it to relatives - 22 of them, including us - ignoring their insistent demands that we invite their large circle of little friends.

Seriously though, it does seem odd to have a big party for little beings who couldn't care less, who are as entertained by the ribbons as anything that comes inside the wrapping paper, and who would probably be happier just hanging with us than a bunch of semi-strangers who are insistently cooing in their faces. Once you factor in the time involved in prepping for a big gathering - time where you are trying to minimize the time spent catering to the babies so you can actually accomplish something - the whole thing is a bit absurd. Ultimately, it is probably best to admit that the party is essentially for the parents rather than the honorees. It is true, in support of the concept, that turning one is a milestone birthday. In addition, my wife's family has a history of big first birthday parties. In the final analysis, it is as good a reason as any to drink mimosas at 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

We went with a Curious George theme and put a lot of time and effort into the whole thing. We made monkey face cupcakes by using black and red frosting for the mouth, nostrils, and eyes, nilla wafers as the base for the mouth and nose, marshmallows for eyeballs, and mini-s'more cookies for ears. We made five different quiches with primate-themed names, such as "the Jane Goodall", and hung stuffed monkeys from the chandaliers and other various spots. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to do a stuffed monkey recreation of the infamous ether sniffing scene from "Curious George Gets a Job." Just as well, as that one would have gone unappreciated by the vast majority of attendees anyway. In the end, it was definitely a worthwhile endeavor as the weather was awesome, the guests had a lot of fun, and the babies eventually warmed up to the crowd and had a good time.

Three-On-One Breakaway

Going from one child to three with the birth of the twins a year ago has been challenging. Someone once made what I have since found to be a dead-on analogy between the number of little kids you have and basketball defense. When there are two parents and one child, you can double-team. Two and two, you can play man to man. But once it is two adults to three kids, you are forced to go to a zone defense.

For several months each Spring my wife Deanna is frequently away on business one or two nights a week. I'm not sure there is a decent basketball analogy for when it goes to three on one. More like a hockey team where my team has two players in the penalty box. I just go into penalty-killing mode until they (or in this case she) comes back again.

Mostly, these nights are routine enough and fairly fun. Other times, they break down into chaos. No matter how well you baby proof, there will be things you can't control when it is three on one. My favorite example of this happened a couple of months ago. I set out to give all three boys baths at once. I had Hayden (then 10 months) stripped first and in the tub when I noticed floating poop. This, of course, precipitated getting him out, draining the tub, and starting over. Tedious but necessary. I put Hayden back in, stripped Cooper (also 10 months) and was about to put him in too when I noticed poop stains on his feet. Although in retrospect I should have gotten more suspicious at that point as to where this was all coming from, trying to bath three little kids at once does not lend itself well to measured deductive reasoning. So, I took a quick look around, saw nothing that would really explain it, got his feet cleaned up and put him in.

Later on, after baths and preoccupied with getting the other two boys ready for bed, I went looking for Hayden, already in his PJ's, and found him sitting by the bathroom sink with a handful of shit and incriminating stains around the mouth area, including of course a literal "shit-eating grin". After sweeping out his mouth with my finger, I placed a panicked call to Deanna in her hotel three hours away, asking, theoretically, if one of the babies had eaten poop, whether the baby would be okay. After she confusedly replied that she supposed so as it was organic but what the hell was going on, I told her things were too chaotic to talk now and hung up. She really enjoyed that. I became suspicious of four year old Owen after I spied whole kernels of corn in the evidence, something the babies had not been chowing down on in recent days (CSI: Chicago). Owen initially claimed the poop must have been Cooper's, but eventually confessed that maybe it had been his. He said that earlier in the day, he had used the bathroom, and while he was subsequently busy washing his hands and "making faces in the mirror" some more "may have come out". I'm not sure why pants hadn't been pulled up at that point. Or why one wouldn't take a good look around on the floor to verify whether "some more" had indeed come out. The offending matter had apparently bounced off the little stool (no pun intended) Owen stands on to use the sink and underneath an overhang where the cabinets under the sink jut out so as to be not so visible to an adult but apparently in plain and tempting view of those under three feet tall.

Hayden, thankfully, suffered no apparent ill effects, by the way.