Diapers To Donuts

The Secret

About two months ago, I stumbled upon a movie called “The Secret” while perusing through the “On Demand” movies offered by my cable provider.

What really got me was the preview, which pretty much promised that if I watched the movie by the end I would be rich enough to hire Donald Trump to wash my car while George Bush rotated the tires.

This sounded perfectly legitimate to me, except for that part about Donald Trump because I doubt he even knows how to wash cars, and so I eagerly hit “buy” on my remote and was bombarded for almost two hours with all sorts of “positive thinking” imagery that boiled down to this single premise:

“Whatever you can visualize will come true.”

“Wow!” I thought. Who knew it could be THAT simple? Now, there have been many not-so-proud moments in my life whereby I suspended all disbelief and tried one hair-brained scheme or another. Usually this occurs when I am particularly desperate for money, like the time I tried to convince my friends and family that they should join a network marketing company where the main product was an e-book that appeared to have been written by a fifth grader under some type of duress, in which the over-arching theme of the book was the notion that you could “retire quickly” if you got a job that paid you more money. Pure genius!

And so, I gave it a shot. For the past two months, I have been visualizing myself as a fabulously wealthy author with a penchant for fish and chips loaded with extra salt and vinegar. I don’t know exactly why, but the extra salt and vinegar has played a key role in my visualization exercises, to the point that I have spent more time thinking about the salt and vinegar than all of the money I’m supposed to have as a fabulously wealthy author. And oddly enough, in my imagined life as a famous author I apparently have an overwhelming affection for Cool Range Doritos which I tend to dip in bowls of Cherry Diet Coke when no one is looking.

The first time I tried this visualization exercise, the results were less than stunning. Within minutes of imagining myself eating fish and chips while being interviewed for the New York Times Book Review, I suddenly felt a couple of drops of rain on my head. Now ordinarily this would not be a big deal but for the fact that at the time I was sitting in my kitchen and what was a couple of drops quickly escalated into what felt like a Peruvian waterfall. Granted, I have never been to Peru or Peruvia for that matter but it was a lot of water. Long story short, my visualization exercise had managed to clog the upstairs toilet and flood my kitchen with what my children referred to as “poo-poo and pee-pee” water.

Strike one.

The second time I tried it was on a plane to Atlanta while on a business trip. This time, I imagined that I had become famous by writing a cookbook about the many different ways to cook fish and chips and that my big breakthrough was a recipe in which the batter was made of Cool Ranch Doritos and Diet Cherry Coke. In this visualization, Martha Stewart decided to buy my cookbook franchise and we were in the middle of arguing about her desire to sell my cookbook at K-Mart which I strenuously objected to. I was right in the middle of explaining to Martha my rationale – basically that I didn’t understand what a “K-Mart” was but it sounded too much like “Special K” which is a cereal I despise – when the plane hit some kind of supersonic speed bump that catapulted my Diet Cherry Coke through the air, causing it to ricochet (love that word) off the seat in front of me and dump its content right on top of my Thinkpad T60 thus rendering it completely inoperable unless its sole purpose was to act as some kind of square alien Frisbee with an amazing ability to stick to things (thanks to the Cherry-ness of the Coke it was, shall we say, super sticky).

Strike two.

The last straw happened this weekend. I was sitting in my living room attempting to once again visualize myself eating fish and chips while sitting on a stack of dollar bills. In this particular visualization, they had just brought Jack Lemon back to life in an amazing scientific breakthrough so that he could star in the movie version of my tenth novel. My visualization this time was rudely interrupted by my wife Clare, who informed me that there was a suspicious puddle of water underneath our hot water heater. This led to a series of events whereby some guy named Butch showed up at my house, took one look at my hot water heater, announced to the entire family that it was deader than Jack Lemon (ah, the universe can be so cruel), and proceeded to write up a bizarre invoice that didn’t mention anything about fish and chips or my world famous book but that did inform me that I had just joined some sort of “Gold Club” that would entitle me to a $60 discount off the $2,300 he was about to charge me to replace my water heater.

Strike three.

And so, the next time someone tells you that simply by imagining something you can make it happen, my advice to you would be to go eat some fish and chips and leave it at that. You may not be rich but at least you’ll be happy. And don’t forget the extra salt and vinegar.

Love Is A Girl Named Clare

Here I am, sitting on the plane back to my hometown of Boston returning from yet another business trip. I gaze out the window and study the blanket of clouds beneath us, my eyes continuously drawn to the sun’s glow as it slowly drops below the horizon and on to faraway lands unknown.

Surrounded by total strangers who don’t even know my name, I feel a strong desire to be home NOW instead of in 3 hours. Perhaps the very fact of knowing that soon I will be home makes me want it even more. I long for the sound of the garage door closing behind me, the dog’s inevitable barking as I climb the steps from the garage into the house in that last act of a man coming home to his family.

This aching for home makes me sad, but in a good way. I can practically hear my daughter calling “Daddy’s home!” while she rushes to hug me. If I close my eyes I can feel my wife’s embrace and all of the emotion that comes with it, that feeling of having reached a point of completeness, where all of the world’s indignities seem to melt away, where all of the anger and frustration that comes with being a human being suddenly seem so very small against the backdrop of a love that knows no end.

But that embrace is far away, and so as I sit here on this lonely plane flying above this even lonelier planet my mind begins to wander.

It was only ten years ago, in the summer of 1997, that I walked into the English Education department at Columbia University Teachers College and a woman who I had never met before looked at me and said my name without even hesitating, as if she had known me my entire life.

“Hello Sean,” she said all those many year’s ago, looking at me with those dark brown eyes that I have come to adore and love, her life-giving laugh filling the air. To this day I don’t know how she could possibly have known my name. But somehow, she did.

If Hollywood and Popular Culture is to be believed, love is a fleeting, temporary emotion. It is something that comes and goes. It is disposable, an emotion of convenience that is only worthwhile as long a it feels good. And once it no longer suits our personal satisfaction, it should be thrown out the window like a used paper cup.

If a man cannot recognize his true love when he comes upon it, if he is so self-focused that he is unable to see with eyes unencumbered when loves stares back, then he is ultimately a hopeless cause and will be doomed to see love the way that (sadly) most people do.

But not so for me. Ever since that fateful day, I have experienced what it means to love and to be loved in a million different ways, big and small, each moment and each gesture serving as a constant reminder that I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Truth is, my wife and 4 kids have taught me everything I ever needed to know about love.

Love is the happy chaos of a house filled with children playing, some of whom are your’s and others who are children drawn to your house from down the street simply because they smell happiness and want to be near it.

Love is having a vacuum cleaner that only works when it wants to, and having a wife who not only doesn’t mind this fact but who is happy to drop everything she is doing when it finally decides to turn on every 10-15 minutes.

Love is giving far more than you take but still getting more than you ever wished for.

Love is wanting to scream at the top of your lungs with every fiber in your body but resisting the temptation to do so because little hearts bruise easily.

Love is a lazy Sunday afternoon spent chasing your kids around the front yard, with no other objective other than to watch them grow before your very eyes.

Love is never forgetting the promises you made on the day you were married and on each day your children were born: to honor, to love and to cherish.

Love is finding that one person in the world who knows your name even before you can speak it.

Which is why, for me, love is a girl named Clare.

“Hello, Sean,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation.

It was almost as if God had whispered my name to her on the day she was born and said, “Show this man the meaning of love.”

And somehow, she did.

The Secret To Life

There I was at 7 AM in the morning, rolling along on the train to work, completely engrossed in (of all things) an Excel spreadsheet. Oh what joy! Is there anything more fun than editing tiny little worksheet cells while your laptop bounces up and down rhythmically on your lap? Needless to say, I was annoyed and felt tired even before the day had begun.

But then a tiny, quiet voice inside my head told me to look up. You know, THAT voice. The one we are usually too busy or too tired or too wrapped up in something else to notice. The voice that is as wise as it is quiet, that contains more wisdom in a single sentence than most of us can muster in an entire lifetime. After all, God doesn't yell. He whispers. And you have to listen hard if you want to hear him.

So, I reluctantly pulled myself away from the laptop not knowing exactly what I was looking for, and lifted my gaze to the wintry scene outside. My breath caught in my chest as my eyes struggled to take in the beauty of the scene before me. It had snowed the day previous and thanks to a thin layer of ice the snow still clung to each tree. The whiteness of the snow mixed with the blueness of the morning sky in a way that when illuminated by the golden rays of the sun created a tableau of astonishing beauty.

It spoke to me of being a child again, of winter afternoons spent flying down a hill on my trusty metal sled, of feeling like you could literally launch into the sky and never come down, powered by nothing more than the conviction that little boys were meant to fly.

It was an astonishingly beautiful scene, especially in contrast to the painfully ordinary interior of the train with its mute colors and grimy floors. And the saddest part of all was that everyone in that train car was too tired or too busy or too preoccupied to even notice.

Suddenly I wanted to stand up and implore everyone to look out the window, to beg them to put down their books and their newspapers and their laptops and to really appreciate the world around them instead of always being so focused within.

Here it was, right there for those who cared to look, a scene of such overwhelming and utter beauty that the troubles of mere mortals would simply pale in comparison.

And so, I started to think about all of the things I had missed because I was too engrossed in my silly little world to notice the spectacle of life all around me. All the times I had rushed right through my time with Clare and the kids, too worried about some looming deadline or presentation to be fully there.

Are we not at one point or another weary commuters on a train, so beaten up by the concerns and cares of the world that we are unable to see the beauty that surrounds us?

And how many times are we so focused on getting THERE that we don't enjoy BEING HERE?

How many times are we so wrapped up in our own concerns and cares that we miss some glorious scene right outside our window, right there in front of our very noses?

And how often do we fail to listen to that voice, the one that tells us to look up, to open our eyes, to really see the beauty all around us instead of being trapped in our own little world?

Sometimes the secret to life is as simple as looking up. Looking up and seeing the beauty that is right in front of us if we would only take the time to notice.

Not Just A Train Table

This is a story about a train table.

Well, not really.

This is really a story about a man and his daughter and how sometimes the passage of time hurts more than we'd like it to, especially when we are too busy to notice its passing.

So there I was, sitting all alone, staring at the three foot high train table that is often the center of attention in our living room, the train table where we have created countless combinations of wooden railroad tracks over the years. My two year old son Luke had just abandoned me to see what his two brothers were up to downstairs, and I was sitting there wondering what to do next.

Suddenly, my nine year old daughter MaryKate fluttered into the room. I say "fluttered" because MaryKate doesn't so much walk as bob and weave through the air like a butterfly on a Spring afternoon. That is just her way.

"Hi Dad!" she said.

Then, something amazing happened. As she began to play with the train table, pushing Thomas The Really Useful Engine around the track just like she did when she was two, a switch went off in my head and it was as if for every moment that had passed between now and the day she was born a memory played in my head.

I remembered what it was like to be a Dad for the very first time, excited and terrified all at the same time, always wishing someone would tell me exactly what to do but always having to somehow figure it out.

I remembered searching furiously for things like juicy cups, teddy bears and pacifiers. How she used to carry her teddy bear with her everywhere, the very same teddy bear that now spends half of its time under her bed or stashed away in a corner, the teddy bear who recently gave up his nighttime spot on her pillow to a dog named Princess.

I remembered how sometimes she would fall asleep on my chest, how she used to burrow her head under my chin and how I would lie awake listening to all of eternity in the inhale and exhale of a baby's breath.

I remembered how she used to scream "SALSA!" at the top of her lungs because she knew it would make us all laugh, and inevitably it did.

I remembered the Christmas when she was given that train table, how excited she was as she ran to it for the first time, her curly blond hair bobbing up and down like Shirley Temple, how she used to laugh as we played for hours.

Strangely, too, I remembered those times when I myself didn't want to play with that train table anymore, when after what seemed like hours of pushing a locomotive around a wooden track I could imagine a million other things to do. What I wouldn't give now to be there then.

I remembered all of these things and it made me wish that I could stop time from its inevitable march forward, that I could hold THIS version of MaryKate in my heart for just a little while longer, and stave off the day when the train table will be nothing more than a silly piece of furniture and playing with Daddy will just be an annoyance.

"Oh why don't you play with your father one more time?" my wife will say one day in the not too distant future.

"But MOM, it's just a train table!" MaryKate will respond.

Just a train table?

JUST a train table?

True, maybe to some, this is just a lousy old train table.

But once upon a time, I met a two year old girl named MaryKate at this very same train table. She was the first child I ever held in my arms as a father. She was the one who taught me what it really meant to be a Dad, those hard learned lessons at 2 AM when all I wanted to do was go to sleep and all she wanted to do was scream at the top of her lungs because of a cold or acid reflux or because sometimes that is just what babies do.

And so, I hope she will forgive me for wanting to play with her just a little while longer, for wanting to sit at that train table and hold on to every last vestige of the child she was and the girl she is now. Forgive me for wishing that, at least for a little while longer, I can still be Daddy and she can still be my little MaryKate.

How To Get To Heaven Via Prime Rib

Recently, my wife decided to send our Priest a Christmas card in Latin. Now, since my wife does not in fact speak Latin, she used Latin.com to create the text for the card. This can be dangerous, because as it turns out we sent our Priest a card that said, "Father, we hope your bush doesn't burn too brightly this Christmas!"

Naturally, this piqued our Priest's interest. I'm guessing the train of thought in his mind went something like this, "Burning bush? What are they doing over there at that crazy Flavin house?" and so he promptly called to investigate. Somehow, this simple investigatory phone call lead to a full fledged invitation to Saturday night dinner.

As you might imagine, the week of preparation was pretty intense. Our biggest challenge, if I may call it that, was to secure a new toilet seat. That's right. Toilet seat. Let's face it, my boys are as adorable as can be but they lack a certain amount of accuracy when it comes to their bathroom rituals. And without going into too much detail, they have clearly decided that NOT using your hands as a way of ensuring accuracy is a particular badge of honor. This is all a nice way of saying that our original toilet seat was so disgusting that even our dog had taken to avoiding the downstairs bathroom. This is the very same dog who enjoys eating out of our trash can.

So my wife decided to get a new toilet seat in preparation for the arrival of his most Priestliness. Over the week leading up to the Good Father's arrival, we launched a massive search for just the right toilet seat which required a great deal of trial and error. We must have tried at least 5 different toilet seats. Now, I have to be honest, I didn't even KNOW how many different toilet seat sizes and shapes were in existence until this whole travesty began. It got pretty exciting as I found myself rushing home each night to test out that day's model. In the end, we settled on a seat that most would consider too large for the toilet with the thinking that we wanted to offer his excellency a truly spacious experience. Some people like to "trick out their ride" but we Flavins prefer to "trick out" our toilet seat. That's how we roll!

The preparation was pretty grueling. The trick was to try and make it seem like we were a totally normal family with children who don't spend half their day screaming for the butter or a juicy cup or another toaster strudel. An almost impossible task! Why ask politely when screaming at the top of your lungs gets the job done much faster and even might make your fellow siblings laugh if you're really obnoxious about it? It was also important to clarify things for the younger ones about our dinner guest. No, God was not coming to dinner. No, our guest doesn't know Manny Ramirez or David Ortiz or any of the Boston Red Sox but he is STILL important.

After an extended culinary debate ranging up and down the Northeast involving multiple levels of familial relations, my wife decided to cook prime rib instead of meatballs and spaghetti. After all, this man of God deserved a "meal fit for a king" which of course made me wonder why I'm always eating the aforementioned toaster strudels... but I digress.

Problem was, my wife has never made prime rib before. So now it is time to record rule #122 to the Book of Common Sense: when you have a Priest coming to dinner, don't cook a meal you've never cooked before unless it involves 3 easy steps and a Microwave.

Luckily, my wife's sister sent us a prime rib recipe tiled, "How To Get To Heaven Via Prime Rib" which included the classic initial instruction: "Before you start anything bless yourself and ask for the spirit of Julia Child to guide you on this cooking journey."

Everything seemed to be going smoothly with just minutes before the Priest's arrival. Luke had managed to touch only about 50% of the appetizers vs. his usual 95% rate, which I thought was rather remarkable... But then, disaster struck.

It turns out that there are these things called "meat thermometers" which are used to ensure that your guests don't keel over from some crazy meat borne disease. This all seemed well and good until we discovered that if you leave certain meat thermometers in the oven, at some point they will actually start to melt. And it turns out that if you actually read the directions, there is something in there about this whole bizarre meat thermometer melting phenomenon! It would have been nice if Julia Child had mentioned THAT.

At this point, my wife was pretty much at the breaking point. It didn't help that Luke had decided that this was the perfect time to start sticking carrots up his nose and exhale as hard as he could, thus propelling the carrots through the air and into the ranch dip as his intended (but often missed) target. With snot laden carrots flying haphazardly about my hair, I was instructed to find the nearest meat thermometer PRONTO.

That's when I knew I needed THE MAN: Tom Da Bomb, my next door neighbor who has every single gadget known to mankind including some crazy device that will even tell you when and where you should be fishing. I called over, and of course the man had the most technologically advanced meat thermometer ever devised: the Meat Thermometer 3000 ("The Meat Thermometer for The Next Century and Beyond"). This thing had all the bells and whistles. It was digital and made all sorts of noises in concert with the status of the item being cooked, none of which I understood. The thing reminded me of R2D2 insofar as its ability to beep in some secret code that probably only Tom Da Bomb could decipher.

Then something very odd happened. As soon as we inserted the Meat Thermometer 3000 into the prime rib, this modern miracle of science informed us that the prime rib was technically hotter than the earth's core and in danger of transforming into plasma anti-matter at any given moment which seemed to run counter to my wife's desire to honor the Priest's request of a medium rare meal.

Suddenly, the kitchen was transformed into an episode of ER as we tried to save the prime rib from total disaster.

"Crash cart!" I screamed. "Give it 10 CCs of saline STAT! Where the heck is Dr. Greene? I'm gonna need the defibrillators!"

That didn't get any laughs, but boy was I amused. Suddenly, I looked at my wife and she appeared to me to be transformed into the ghost of Julia Child, floating at least three feet off the ground, surrounded by the steam and fury of a woman whose prime rib was on the verge of an unfortunate metamorphosis.

With bits of carrots and cheese flying every which way (Luke had added cheese to his repertoire) we had to focus on saving this poor prime rib from total disaster. We immediately throttled the oven temperature down. Like a bunch of first year med students, we discussed all sorts of revival techniques.

Ice water injected directly into the prime rib via turkey baster? Not practical.

Maybe I could run around the front yard while blowing on it? Might work, but it was risky: the Priest could show up at any minute and such a maneuver would only confirm his suspicions that we were in fact completely crazy.

Maybe a trip to an ice cold tub? This idea was nixed for health reasons. God help a prime rib revived in such a fashion, with soap scum and little alphabet letters floating about. It might be saved, but it would certainly have an interesting TASTE and might actually verge on inedible.

Maybe it wasn't too late to make a last minute call to Domino's? Maybe THEY could make a Prime Rib pizza!?

That is when a miracle of epic proportions happened. Suddenly, the Meat Thermometer 3000 made a series of unintelligible hiccups and blurps and its temperature readout began to drop. With each successive drop in the temperature, my wife looked a lot less like Julia Childs and a lot more like herself.

Even the little bits of carrots and cheese and now pretzels bouncing off our heads (again, thanks to Luke) started to feel like warm raindrops on a beautiful summer day as our troubled prime rib began to achieve temperatures more becoming of a top notch piece of meat.

Within minutes, the patient had stabilized. The Meat Thermometer 3000 stopped beeping and whirring. Little Luke had grown tired of ejecting food from his nose and had moved on to chasing his brother Declan around the house with a whiffle ball bat, which was far preferable behavior from our parochial standpoint although I suspect that Declan might not have agreed.

We both hugged each other for joy. It was a truly special embrace. It was as if, in facing the challenges of the prime rib, we had become even stronger as a couple. We had after all faced the abyss and returned to tell about it. This was the kind of story that belonged on Oprah.

And so it was, at this very moment, with the prime rib snuggled comfortably in its perfectly temperate spot at EXACTLY 135 degrees that the door bell rang. Thanks to the wondrous and all powerful Meat Thermometer 3000, dinner was saved! Now the real fun could begin.

A Father's New Year's Resolution

This year, I am going to do things a little differently. Well, A LOT differently.

I fear I have become one of THEM – those tired, weary fathers I see making their way home on the train each day. You know who I’m talking about. The ones who like to make jokes about hiding in their basement to watch the football game. Yeah, them.

I don’t want to be one of THOSE guys. I don’t want my children to grow up like Britney Spears, raised by Bratz dolls on some kind of Godless culture where little girls are told to act like supermodels and boys are immersed in countless images of violence while Daddy is busy at work or hiding out watching the game on TV.

This year, when I come home completely exhausted and cranky from a nightmare client meeting to the point that all I want to do is focus on my own sad little problems, instead I’ll focus on you.

This year, when you ask me in your completely sweet and tiny little voice if I’m mad, and when I see you peering up at me as if the look on Daddy’s face could make or break your world, I will make sure to smile because you’re worth it.

This year, I won’t allow myself to become so lost in all of my problems that I don’t see you out of the corner of my eye pretending to be shaving just like Daddy. I will stop myself and watch you trying your hardest to make sense of your world and the people God placed in it, and will take the time to help you on this journey called life.

This year, I will make sure to ask you what your favorite food is, what your favorite color is and what you want to be when you grow up. I will take the time to understand what things are important to you, what questions you have and how I can help you become the person you want to be.

This year, when I have to choose between that super important meeting that “absolutely can’t be missed” and a piano recital, I’ll make the right choice because after all you’ll never be this age again and no money is enough enticement for me to miss YOUR childhood.

And when the kitchen ceiling starts leaking because you decided to stuff five rolls of toilet paper (and God knows what else) in the upstairs toilet thus causing a torrent of water to come cascading down on the night’s supper, rather than screaming at you I shall take the opportunity to dance with you in the rain. After all, what’s a little water when weighed against the unwitting damage that my angry voice could do?

This year, I will read “Goodnight, Moon” at least once a month. I will read it to you just like my mother read it to me, in a soft, whispering voice that speaks of a parent’s warm, soft embrace. I will read it that way because that is how my mother read it to me and I want you to feel as loved as I did when I was a child. I owe you that, at least.

And on Sunday afternoons, when that weekend lull hits and I start feeling tired to the point that I’m counting the minutes until you fall asleep and I too can go to bed, I will remind myself that a day will come in the not too distant future that I will wish I could go back to that very moment and do it all over again. I will stop wishing the day would go faster, or the night would come quicker. I will stop looking forward to tomorrow, or next week, or next month. I will remain in the here and the now because you are here with me here and now and one day you won’t be here anymore.

And this year, I will always remember that each of you are only visiting. That one day I will turn around and you won’t be here anymore and as much as I wish you were still here there will be nothing I can do to get you back.

And so, every night when I come home from work I will take at least 5 minutes just to look at you. To see how you’ve changed, to see what you’ve learned and to really know you as a person. I will listen to your day’s stories with all of my heart and attention, even if the only thing I want is to eat dinner.

This year, I won’t rush through your bedtimes stories as if I’m somewhere else, all the time thinking about something that someone said at work, forgetting to act out the lines or make that funny Elmo voice. And when you ask me to read that one incredibly long story that seems to take forever, I won’t beg you to pick something else. I will read it because I am your father and if I don’t read it to you, who else will?

This year, I will stop to listen when you laugh. I will let your laughter fill my heart with gladness and joy, for if a man can’t find salvation in the laughter of a child then he simply isn’t a man.

This year, I will make every moment with you count. I won’t allow my mind to wander on to all of those other concerns that plague the 30 something mind. I will tell my mind to stop wandering, to stop searching for answers when right before me is the beauty of God and that nothing in all the world can be more important than really knowing you.

And if I have done my job, at the end of this year I will feel as if it was a year well spent.

Sure, I will be sad because you and I will be a year older and our time left together will inevitably be shorter. Alas, there is not much I can do about that. But at least I will know who you are, how you think, what you like and what you ARE like. I will have been there during all of the good moments and the bad ones too when you really needed me. I will have been the father God asked me to be on the very day you were conceived and your life was set into motion.

All of this is true. But even more importantly, I will not feel as if I have squandered my time with you on this earth on account of such trivial concerns as work or money or the big baseball game on TV. If all goes to plan, I will not find myself crying as I am now typing these very words, filled with sorrow for all of the wonderful things about you that I missed, wishing for the return of a year that will never come again in a life as precious, special and truly holy as your’s.

I will finally have loved you, as a father should. And THAT, sweet child, shall be my New Year’s Resolution.

Just Plain Mixed Up

So everyone wants to know why it takes me so long to write new blog posts and I’m just going to tell it like it is.

As you know, I am a parent to 4 beautiful children. Now, parenting has many different responsibilities of course and can take quite a bit of time if done properly (after all, setting up the DVR so that it records every single episode of Lilo and Stitch requires time and great concentration), but the God’s honest truth is that as far as I can tell 90% of being a parent consists of handling poop in all of its various forms. The other 10% involves trying your hardest not to scream when your three year old son informs you that the brown stuff on his fingers is not from a Chocolate chip cookie (as you wishfully suggested) but is in fact… poop.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t have time to write every day because when I’m not at work, I’m busy picking up poop in all of its various forms and in about a million different places it was never meant to be.

In fact, I think all of those parenting books are a total waste of time. What they should be focusing on is various techniques for dealing with Poop. For example, Chapter 1 should focus on teaching parents visualization techniques whereby they can “imagine” themselves on a Carribbean island as a way of coping with a particularly odoriffic (I just made that word up) poop. You know the ones I’m talking about, that truly memorable poop that you just can’t forget even years later, where the smell is so bad that even to this very day your mind wanders back to that first whiff whenever your nose meets a smell it doesn’t like. I’d like to see a Dr. Spock chapter on THAT.

And while I’m on the topic, was the idea of creating a children’s book character named Winnie the Pooh some English guy’s idea of a sick joke because I don’t think it’s funny anymore. I doubt he had four kids and I certainly doubt that he has ever had to catch a poop in midair (as I once did) in an amazing display of parental dexterity combined with pure stupidity (diaper changing rule #1 is, of course: NEVER let the poop roll out of the diaper and on to your Mom’s couch unless you want to hear about it for the rest of your life).

Now, in my case, this important job has been overly complicated by the fact that my three year old toddler Declan has decided that he is a dog, which means that he now takes a poop whenever the mood strikes him, right there on the floor. He has also decided that he doesn’t need to tell anyone when this happens, which I’m guessing is the result of his desire to be as authentic as possible in his emulation of a dog. After all, dogs don’t walk around telling everyone about their latest poop, and so why should he?

What’s even stranger about this is that our dog, upon witnessing this behavior, has decided that he is a three year old toddler and whenever the mood strikes him he will pee right on the bed. The amazing thing about this is that the dog also walks around the house with a pacifier in his mouth, which he has a habit of stealing from my one year old son Luke. Once again, I can only assume that this behavior is intentional on the part of the dog as he tries to act like a toddler with as much realism as a canine can muster.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out how in the world this happened. The toddler won’t listen to me when I tell him he is not a dog, plus the dog doesn’t want to hear anything about not being a toddler. They’re all happy as pigs in poop but I frankly find the situation untenable.

And so, the next time you wonder why I haven’t posted in three days, just remember that I’m probably busy scraping three day old poop from my bathroom floor while muttering under my breath about that big jerk Winnie the Pooh. Such is the life of a parent in this mixed up world.

Happiness Is A Big Candy Bar

Every year, I have a hard time figuring out what to be for Halloween.

In years past, I have been known to don my full-size Tigger outfit but I stopped doing that when it became obvious that a) I was scaring little kids and b) their parents clearly thought I had mental issues, especially when I started bouncing around on one foot and screaming things like “Oh the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is I’m the only one! Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!”

I can only infer from people’s reaction upon seeing me do this that only children are supposed to dress or act like Tigger, and adults like me are supposed to walk around doing adult things like talking about football and mowing the lawn. But we all know that Tiggers don’t mow lawns!

So this year, I decided to dress up as a tired, stressed out businessman who just can’t stop thinking about work especially because his boss keeps calling him on his cell phone even while he is in the middle of pushing a one year old dragon (Luke) and a three year old Superman (Declan) in a stroller down the street while a six year old Navy SEAL (Sean) and an eight year old cowgirl (MaryKate) sing songs about talking farm animals.

My neighbor Tom (who shall heretofore be referred to as Tom Da Bomb) also brought his two children in the form of a three year old Superman (whose primary super power was an absolutely amazing ability to fall flat on his face every 5-10 feet) and a six year old “half angel, half devil” whose wings kept falling off.

I’m sure we were quite a sight as we worked our way down the street. For one thing, my son Declan (he of the Superman costume) was still a bit wobbly after being sedated the night before for an MRI procedure. With the drugs still in his system, it was rather amusing to watch Declan zig zag his way to each house in a bizarre impression of what Superman would look like if he were in fact three years old and completely drunk off his rocker.

My neighbor Tom has a longstanding Halloween tradition whereby he loads up his Little Tikes wagon with beer for the long house-to-house trek. While in general I think this is a rather spectacular idea, it means that neighbors who I only see but once a year think that I am a drunken lunatic with 4 unruly children since the only time I ever show up at their house is to beg for candy with a beer in my hand. It also didn’t help when they saw Declan, my cute little drunken Superman, zig-zagging his way to their front door.

And there is no denying the fact that when you’re a kid, sugar makes you do very strange things. I wonder what it is about a child’s metabolism that after five Snickers bars, three Kit Kats, one Charleston Chew and four Nestle Crunches that suddenly all of the brain centers handling logical and responsible thought are completely shut down. A better way of saying that is that sugar makes kids become complete and utter knuckleheads of the highest order.

Suddenly, grabbing a half eaten Baby Ruth bar directly from your sister’s mouth while she is in the process of eating it starts to seem perfectly brilliant, just so long as she doesn’t manage to bite down on your fingers.

Jamming so much candy into your mouth that you have to choose between breathing and eating (and choose eating, naturally) seems like a perfectly normal thing to do.

Stealing candy from your one year old brother – an act more commonly known as “stealing candy from a baby” – starts to seem like a good deed worthy of praise and merit.

And making fun of perfectly good neighbors who give you crappy Halloween treats like apples and pencils starts to make all of the sense in the world! After all, if they are going to hand out apples, the least “the bastards” could do is coat them in caramel first.

At one point, Tom Da Bomb and I watched in horror as his son (Superman #2) actually opened the front door of a neighbor’s house on his own – an act which I believe is technically called breaking and entering – because they were taking to long to answer the door. Luckily we caught him before he could use his x-ray vision to find the candy that Lex Luthor had stashed in the house last Halloween.

My attempts to control the situation were hampered by several issues. For one thing, I find that it is never easy to control four children regardless of whether they have eaten more than their body weight in sugar. But, as noted earlier, the sugar certainly doesn’t help. I also find that trying to juggle a can of beer in one hand while pushing a baby jogger with your other hand significantly reduces your ability to respond in real-time to unexpected events. And finally, the effects of beer on adults is not entirely dissimilar to the effects of sugar on children which means that by the end of the night I too thought that howling at the moon for my next Butterfinger bar was a perfectly logical thing to do.

And so, while we started out as a merry band of mutant superheroes, it wasn’t long before the candy and the beer took its toll and caused an “Incredible Hulk” type of transformation. By the end of it all, we became nothing more than an unruly, roving gang of beer-soaked chocolate addicts who would do anything for our next big sugar fix, living a nomadic existence where happiness was determined by the size of our last candy bar.

Luckily, just as we were about to reach a state of total anarchy, Tom Da Bomb ran out of beer. And so, we went home.

Dear Declan

(In today’s post, I would like to share a letter to my three and a half year old son, Declan. I’m afraid this won’t be nearly as funny as my other posts, but I haven’t been doing a lot of laughing lately. I promise that happy Sean will be back in the next post.)

Dear Declan,

Last Thursday, I received a voice mail message from your mom that I hoped to God I would never hear.

“Sean, the doctor looked at hip x-rays… and Declan has your condition.”

Yes, Declan, I’m afraid that it’s true. Thanks to your father, you have something called Stickler Syndrome, a genetic malfunction in the tissue that connects your bones, heart, eyes and ears. This Stickler thing comes in many different forms, but the version we have seems to attack hips and eyes.

It seems silly for me to have to explain all this, because soon enough you’ll know what this “condition” is – first hand, you’ll experience the never ending pain that comes from a hip that just won’t do what it’s supposed to do, that somehow manages to hold together despite becoming more deformed with every passing day.

Declan, I wonder if the kids at school will laugh at you the way they laughed at me? Will they call you penguin for the way that you walk and taunt you for being the slowest person in the class, like they did to me?

Will you have to make up all kinds of reasons and excuses not to attend gym class, for fear that someone will notice how one hip is larger than the other?

Even worse, when you’re 15 will all hell break loose for you like it did for me, and will you have to spend 3 months in a hospital while world famous doctors struggle to keep you from going blind?

I guess, most of all, I want to say that I’m sorry. Sorry because you’re the last person in the world that I would ever want to hurt. And yet, I gave this to you. I did this.

I also want to tell you that there will be times when you wish you didn’t have this. Maybe it will be at 3 in the morning when you can’t sleep because your entire leg is on fire. Or the first time you can’t do something because of your hips, like play a contact sport or go jogging or ride a horse.

But here’s the thing I need you to know most of all:

You will overcome this.

Because let’s face it, no one is perfect.

No one.

Some people may hide their imperfections better than others but in the end we all have things about ourselves that we wish we could change and life is all about making the best of what you’ve got, period.

And our success in life isn’t determined by what we start with. It is the result of who we prove ourselves to be over all of our days on this planet.

You may not be a track star or a world famous athlete, but that leaves about a million other wonderfully cool things you could be in this life.

True, you have your daddy’s hips. But, you also have his heart.

Now let’s stop worrying about these creaky hips and start changing the world.

Love,

Dad

Since When Did I Become A Grumpy Old Man?

Don’t kids just drive you nuts?

I mean, they’re always laughing and giggling and playing. What’s their problem, anyway? Why are they always SO happy? Don’t they know that adults like me have SERIOUS things to worry about?

Like the other day. After a long, incredibly stressful day, I asked my son Sean how HIS day went.

“Well, it wasn’t so good... But then we saw 4 caterpillars. So I guess it WAS a great day.”

Right. With logic like that, how could you go wrong? Wish I could tell that to my boss.

“Sure, I just lost a $2 million dollar account but on the bright side I saw 2 bees, 1 butterfly and 3 frogs so what’s the big deal?”

And what’s with all this laughter? Is it really healthy – or necessary – to laugh that much? Do they have to laugh SO LOUD? Can’t they just be quiet so I can sit there and worry about all of my big people problems.

What’s so darned funny about words like “fart” and “poopie” and “peepie” anyway? And how is it that a simple word like “underwear” can throw a kid into fits of laughter so overwhelming that they just might pass out if you follow it up with “bum bum.”

And is it really necessary to have so many darned questions? Can’t they just accept life for what it is like the rest of us? Why oh why must they dream all of the time and ask me crazy things like:

“Daddy, do you love the dog more than me?”

“Daddy, where did the moon go? Did it turn into a butterfly?”

“Daddy, why does the bank have all our money?”

And why are they always looking for puffy clouds in the sky so they can give them names like “fudge sundae” and “lemon drop” and “teddy bear” and how could they never seem to see the rain clouds that surely must lie just beyond the horizon? Is all that optimism really necessary with so many problems in the world?

My one year old son Luke recently discovered leaves. Now all he wants to do is look at leaves. For God’s sake, Luke, there just isn’t enough time to spend all day looking at leaves and rainbows and the sunshine cutting its way across the golden leaves on a Fall afternoon.

There just isn’t time for that! Adults like me have so much more important things to do. Like worrying about bills and responsibilities and deadlines.

Every night, when I kiss my three year old son Declan good night, he asks me the same simple question:

“Daddy, are you going to work tomorrow?”

If I tell him yes, he wants to know if I’m going to come home at the end of the day.  I tell him, “Yes, of course” and he is happy.

If I tell him that I don’t have work tomorrow, then he wants to know if we’re going to eat cinnamon buns together in the morning. I tell him, “Yes, of course” and he is happy.

Is that not the craziest thing you ever heard? What is it with kids these days? Is that really all it takes to be happy? A simple promise to come home at the end of the day or to eat cinnamon buns together in the morning and then wham-o everything is as good as can be?

Oh, to be a kid again! I’m starting to wonder if they’re the wise ones, and if we are the fools, so bogged down in our day-to-day worries that we can’t see the joy and the wonder right in front of our faces. Now pass the cinnamon buns and be happy!