Learning to read

I come into the living room and my wife and daughter are watching HGTV while my daughter lays on my wife's curled up legs. I smile broadly as I look at my daughter.

She looks up and me and says, " I know why you are smiling at me like that."

"Why's that?" I respond.

With a sweet little smile she answers, "Because you love me."

This blog has gone in the crapper....

Reoccurring theme... Alex makes his way into the bathroom while I'm (ahem) taking care of business. I get finished and do what one does when one is finished with such things and Alex shouts, "Good Job!".

Nothing like positive reinforcement.

Big man in Pampers

From an email my wife sent out about Little Man (now 21 months):

[Little Man] peed in the potty for the first time today (it was a fluke) [and of course we praised him incessantly]; but now he thinks he's ready for fast cars, women and cigars. You should have seen him when it was time to put his jammies on - by himself - . His britches ended up on his head.

Oh, how did I end up with TWO strong willed children?

On losing a close friend

It's been one week and a day since one of my best friends (T.P.) passed away unexpectedly. There is an amazing distance between fact and realization of that fact. I know my friend is dead, but I really have not wrapped my head around his absence. There is a hole somewhere in my conscious understanding of the world that he use to occupy that I have not yet stumbled into.
His passing has been weird to me. Usually when someone close to me dies I tend to examine my own mortality. This time I just feel numb to my own existence. Don't get me wrong, I love life and I love MY life but I just feel numb. I also feel ashamed that I have so much and that my friends wife and parents have lost so much.
The other strange thing is that I can't stop thinking about my friend. My mind wanders back to something or another he said, or some action he made, or just the way he looked. I know of the brevity of life and I know that life's brevity is a large part of what makes it so sweet. But I just can't wrap my head around a world without my friend. Honestly, I never would have thought that I would miss him so much.

Back in the saddle again...

Well I've completed my first year teaching and my kids are obviously much older since my last post. I'll get things ramped up shortly. One of my goals for the summer is to do a lot of writing, so stay tuned!

A long day

My wife/Princess's mom: "Time to say your prayers."

Princess: "I'm tired. I've had a very busy day, you say them."

My wife/Princess's mom: "Why did you have such a busy day?"

Princess: "I got to Granna's and I had to have breakfast. She gave me
toast and eggs. Then I had to watch Ariel."

My wife/Princess's mom: "What did you have for lunch?"

Princess: "I had tunafish."

My wife/Princess's mom:"Was it good?"

Princess: "It was really yummy. Then I had to take a nap and I woke up
really grumpy. So you see I had a really busy day."

It was not tunafish, it was a pimento cheese sandwich and she hated it.

Hair today, gone tomorrow...

I'm sitting on the couch watching TV or surfin' the net (I can't remember which) and my nine month old son crawls over. He reaches under the sofa and pulls out a lock of hair. Peculiar... extremely. What really mystifies me is that I can't figure out the hair. Its is not mine... its too long. Its not my wife's... its too curly. It is not my son's... its too dark. Apparently, if we can be divided into a dichotomy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's two most famous characters, then I am Dr. Watson.

Sometime later, I notice that my 3 year old daughter's hair looks different. I shrug it off as my being the effects of a redesign by my mother, who has been watching my son and daughter while I ran an important errand. I pinned my daughter's bangs up and left her long, flowing, curly hair down in the back (perhaps, fair reader, you have come to realize what I had failed to... but bear with me a moment longer).

My daughter's beautiful. Any father would say that, but I have heard many a person say that she is cute... even impartial and very blunt individuals. Perhaps her cuteness will not extend beyond the cruelty of puberty, but I think I can say, with as much objectivity that is possible for a proud father, that she is a cute little girl. Her most striking feature is her long dark curls.


My advice to those future and present parents who shall grace this blog is this: never put scissors in your child's art box!
Or else, your daughter shall look (as Mary the hairdresser says) like Joe Dirt.

My daughter's new, self-imposed,
hairstyle before emergency "hair" surgery.

Fortunately, there is a good hairdresser in our town and princesses have short hair, too.