Best news story EVER

This may very well be the coolest news story I have ever read.

A bald eagle (which are terrific with a sesame-ginger glaze and a nice Sauvignon Blanc) caused a big power outage in Alaska when it crashed into a power line. It seems the eagle was having trouble flying because its chosen cargo was too heavy.

What was the bald eagle lugging around that could have caused such a problem? Nothing less than a severed deer head.

Now seriously, you sit there and think about that for a moment and tell me that’s not the COOLEST STORY EVER.

It’s got everything you need:

• a bald eagle – which should give any real American goose bumps at its mere mention
• a severed head – which adds a whodunit/murder mystery flair
• a disastrous, life-ending crash – which brings in a goofy slapstick element

It’s the total package. The hat trick. The trifecta.

Sure, I feel bad for all the people in Alaska who were without power. From what I’m told, the temperatures get a little nippy up there this time of year. (Though I’m also told it’s a dry cold, so it may not even feel cold. I don’t know who to believe.) But to all my Alaskan friends, I must remind you that part of what makes this country great is that from time to time, a few are called on to sacrifice for the good of the whole.

Just look at our tax system. Or Social Security. Or the first few weeks of American Idol.

May you rest in peace, bald eagle. Your country mourns your loss. And grins widely at the story you’ve given us.

A place for kids to play and puke

It won't be long until we're holed up here in the house, kickin' it Howard Hughes-style. Hair and fingernails growing wild. Jars of our urine arranged in neat rows. Groceries left on the doorstep.

Why?

Because the world is full of vicious germs.

Yesterday we loaded up the chariot and got some lunch at Roly Poly. Afterward, we decided to take the kids over to the local hands-on kids museum to let them run around and blow off some steam.

As we approached, I was in the clueless father zone, scanning my surroundings for shiny things, cool noises, or stuff to eat. Wife, however, had her mom antenna turned up high and picked up on the fact that a young child was vomiting on the sidewalk outside said kids museum, and that the kid's mother was mumbling something about a stomach virus.

I missed those details completely. And by "details" I mean: the kid, the vomit and the mention of stomach virus. Which explains why I didn't understand the look Wife was giving me as we moved through the ticket counter and into the museum.

Soon enough, though, she shared with me her cause for alarm. Germs. Stomach virus germs. The only kind of germs we haven't had yet.

We called an audible and told Daughter we wouldn't be going through the whole place, just playing on the playground equipment for a few minutes. Daughter was okay with the new plan, so she trotted off ahead of us to climb on the playground. Yet, as we arrived on the scene, just past where Daughter was playing, roped off to warn of danger and/or impending clean-up, was an additional deposit...

More vomit. Left by a different kid.

By this point I could almost hear the stomach virus germs laughing at us. You remember that scene in Silence of the Lambs where Agent Starling goes to visit Hannibal in prison for the first time, and all the prisoners go nuts? Screaming at her, taunting her, throwing things at her? It felt like the germs were doing that to us.

We snatched Daughter up and zipped Son's umbroller out of there so fast I don't know if anyone even saw us leave. I think there was just a streak and sort of a floating cloud where we once were.

Luckily, the germs haven't gotten us so far. Unless you count Daughter's ear pain and crazy high fever today.

The inner freak, exposed

Have you ever seen someone get "outed" by their cellphone ringtone?

I'm not talking Lance Bass outed or Dude From Grey's Anatomy outed, but have you seen someone get their inner freak exposed by their ringtone? I've seen it happen a couple of times recently, and it's pretty funny to watch.

Case #1 was actually about a year ago. I was in an attorney's office with a couple who were signing their wills. The attorney asked his assistant into the room to witness the couple's signatures, and while the assistant was signing/notarizing, her cellphone starts blasting some ridiculous, borderline-inappropriate country song. She got it under control, and her boss shot her a look. A minute or so later, it happened again. I don't think she and her attorney boss had a very nice chat after we all left.

Case #2 was earlier this week. I was in the cramped kitchen of a surgeon's office meeting with him during his lunch break. While he and I were talking, one of the young girls who works in his office came in to dig for something in the fridge. While she's juggling things in the fridge, her phone starts blaring the nastiest rap you can imagine. There was kind of a weird silence as the doc pondered whether to fuss at her and she tried to figure out whether to apologize or just get out of dodge as quickly as possible.

Note to cellphone manufacturers: can you create a way for us to know our phones are ringing without them actually ringing? I'm thinking maybe some sort of blinking or vibrating. Maybe we could even have the ability to switch back and forth between a regular ringtone and this other "silent" mode. Just a thought.

So have you ever seen it happen? Have you ever seen the old professor-looking man fumble to turn off I'm Every Woman? The prim and proper mom down the street thumping to Smack That? Your pastor ringing to That's That S*#t? The gothy, skater kid's phone blowing up to Friends Are Friends Forever?

When I finally got a cellphone that was capable of handling ringtones, I put a John Mayer song on there as my ring. No, not Your Body is a Wonderland. I put Clarity on there. But lately I'm rethinking about going with some Grillz or Top Back just to keep people guessing.

Am I standing up to her manipulation...

...or am I just a heartless jerk? That's the question I have to ask myself on a daily basis.

The reason I bring this up is because, as I type, Daughter is in her bed crying her eyes out. She's scared of the dark, she says. Scared of monsters. Scared of being alone. Scared of her cup of water. Scared of her favorite stuffed animal, probably.

Riddle me this: how am I to differentiate the times when she's just stalling because she doesn't want to go to sleep from the times when she's truly afraid that she'll be eaten in the night by a monster?

How do you know if it's a Turn Down the Monitor moment or a Go Scoop Her Up and Hug Her moment?

I don't know. I just know it sucks sitting here listening to her cry.

A little tear of pride in my eye

Music to a father's ear from tonight:

Daddy, can I have a blanket and a sign and a table for a lemonade stand and customers will come put money in my jar?

Yes, yes and yes. My little capitalist!

Okay, so maybe three years old is a little young for her to start her first business, but it beats the alternative:

Daddy, can I have a baby and no job and a Section 8 apartment and Uncle Sam will come put money in my jar?

My most expensive piece of clothing

Does not smell good. And doesn't even belong to me.

My company has bought a table for a big Regatta Gala (bonus points if you catch that reference) this Saturday, and it's a black tie event. So for the second time in a month, I've got to go rent a tux.

At what point does it make sense to just buy one?

Since December 2005, I've had to rent a tux four times. One time I went to a big chain to rent and it cost me $100. The next time, for a wedding, I used a local formalwear shop. That one cost about $90. This past December I rented one at the same local formalwear shop for about $65. Then you throw in this coming Saturday at $65, and I've laid out $320 in 13 months.

If I had a time machine, I'd go back to around the time Wife and I got married, and buy a nice tux with an adjustable waist. That thing would have paid for itself by now. Of course, if I had a time machine, a lot of things would be different.

I'd have won so many Powerball drawings and bet right on so many sporting events that I could buy a tux, wear it to the event, and use it for dish towels afterward. I could finish a spare bedroom for Ralph Lauren and he could hand-sew me a new one for each day of the week. Oh, if I had that time machine.

Anyhow, I figure to get a basic tux with shirt, tie and cummerbund would be about $500. About seven rentals.

It just seems like a goofy amount of money to spend at one time for a once or twice per year garment. Thoughts?

Current playlist

This was a good idea for a post started by Dad in Progress. Since imitation is the most sinceresterest form of flattery, I decided to post my own list on what I'm listening to these days:

Over My Head (Cable Car) - The Fray
Upside Down - Jack Johnson
Other Side of the World - KT Tunstall
Title and Registration - Death Cab for Cutie
Boston - Augustana
Nothing Left to Lose - Mat Kearney
Amsterdam - Guster
One Love - Hootie & the Blowfish
My Love - Justin Timberlake
Give It All Away - Aaron Schust
Another Place to Fall - KT Tunstall
Streetcorner Symphony - Rob Thomas
Look After You - The Fray
Two at a Time - Guster

As you can see, my musical tastes are akin to either (a) someone who would have been a college sophomore around 2003, which I was not; or (b) a 14 year-old girl, which I am not.

What are you listening to?

And good riddance

I think we've finally talked the Germs from Hell into getting a new place. We tried all the passive-aggressive stuff like Airborne, antibiotics and pink eye ointment. We tried sanitizing every doorknob and toy. We even tried - get this - cleaning our house. Yet they either (a) didn't catch on, or (b) just ignored us altogether.

Knowing that these are American germs living with us, we figured they:

1. Have a freakishly short attention span
2. Long for something bigger and better
3. Love malls

So we hit the mall yesterday. What else do you do when you've been trapped in your house with the Germs from Hell?

I can only imagine what we looked like heading into the mall. You know those fish that live so deep in the ocean they never see light? The ones that are translucent so you can see their veins and stuff? That's probably how we looked after being holed up in our house for so long.

I carried Daughter so Germs could ride on the double stroller with Son, and you could sense the energy building as we made our way through a department store and on to our first destination: the food court. They were twitching in their seat, just ready to bust loose and meet some new people.

Once there, amidst all the giggling preteen girls, tiny children in strollers, and the occasional elderly couple, we ordered some lunch for the family and turned Germs loose to play.

Go! Run! Be free!

They bolted from our hands and made a few stops around the food court with us:

• On the plate of steak sandwich samples we tried
• On the cash with which we paid for our lunch
• On the table and chairs where we ate

For Germs, they are well-behaved, even if they don't have any respect for schedules, commitments or common remedies. By the time our lunch was finished, their patience with us had faded and we said goodbye to the Germs from Hell as they struck out on their own again to find a new family and new adventures.

Who was she talking to?

Daughter was playing up in my study room this morning with an old Fisher-Price kitchen that was Wife's when she was a little girl. It's a neat kitchen, with a faux rotary phone mounted to the wall

While I was in the next room, three year-old Daughter took a phone call. Since I did not have an extension to pick up, I didn't hear the other half of the call, but Daughter's half sounded pretty interesting:

Daughter: "We seem to have a problem."

(pause)

Daughter: "Brother is very sick and can't go to the nursery."

(pause)

Daughter: "Okay. Bye bye."

I'm dying to know who she could have been pretend-talking to. Some three year-old pediatrician friend of hers? Psychic hotline? Was she trying to beg out of some social commitment? Just chatting with a neighbor down the street?

Kate Spade may be trying to kill my wife - and yours

This was news this week:

Handbags a health hazard, women warned

If this is true, DO NOT go in Wife's closet. You may die on the spot.

I'm kidding, it's not bad. Her taste in handbags is outstanding and most, if not all, are of a size that is not hazardous to anyone's health.

But kudos to these researchers for tackling the big issues.

Wanted: arsonist

Will someone please come burn our house down?

I'm pretty sure that if I do it myself, the term "insurance fraud" might get thrown around a bit. And if you know me, you know I'm not cut out for prison. But I think if you do it, it's just a big unfortunate mishap and we still get to rebuild our house and replace all our stuff. I promise when I get the insurance check I'll buy you an iPod, or a carton of smokes, or season three of Full House, or whatever it is that arsonists-for-hire are into.

So why do I need my house incinerated? I can say with confidence it's the only hope we have of getting rid of the bird flu/anthrax/botulism crap that has been squatting here for a month. Let's just burn the thing down, hose the concrete slab down with bleach, and start fresh.

The latest germ that has come to roost here is pink eye, which means that at one point earlier this week, there was stuff oozing from literally every hole on Daughter's head. Since the medicine prescribed for the pink eye is this goopy ointment you rub in their eyes (add the inventor of that stuff to the Axis of Evil, too!), it's virtually impossible to fix the kid's problem without covering yourself with the pink eye germs.

If there's a silver lining to any of this sickness junk that lives in our house (now get out your stopwatch and let's see how long it takes for this next comment to come back and bite me in the booty), it's that I have steered clear of most of it.

Still, with the Germs from Hell lurking around every corner, I think we need a new way forward in our fight against them. I think a huge blaze is the way to go.

Any takers?
******
Dear Government Agents That Monitor All Web Traffic And Are Reading This Right Now, I was being facetious. I don't want my house burned down. If someone burns my house down, please catch them and throw them in jail. Thanks, MBI

Add one more name to the Axis of Evil

There is a glaring omission from the list of those identified as the Axis of Evil. In addition to Kim Jong Il and Osama bin Laden, we need to add:

• Dude that sells the frickin' Elmo balloons at Sesame Street Live

What a racket.

Wife and I took Daughter to see Sesame Street Live when it rolled through town recently. Last year, when she was two, this was a mind-blowing experience for Daughter. This year, now that she's so much older and so much more mature, the experience was...(shrug)...not so much. But that's beside the point.

Back to my case against Elmo balloon guy.

In the middle of the show, they break for a 15-minute intermission. As the house lights come up and the parents stand up to stretch, Elmo balloon guy comes waddling down to the front of the arena with about 100 Elmo balloons in tow. And that's when everything goes to hell.

Elmo balloon guy backs you in to a corner with his bag of tricks:

• Elmo balloon guy knows your kid wants a balloon. He knows your kid is going to pull out all the stops to try to get one - fussing, fighting, pouting, sweet-talking, bribing.
• Elmo balloon guy knows that getting a preschooler to sit through a stage show is dicey to begin with. Just try to sit through the second act after depriving your child of the only thing she's ever wanted in her entire life, he says.
• Elmo balloon guy knows that the kid who just bought a balloon is going to come sit next to your kid, driving home the fact that you're a stingy, awful parent who doesn't love your child enough to - again - give your child the only thing she's ever wanted in life.

But we stood toe-to-toe with Elmo balloon guy and we didn't cave to his high-pressure sales tactics. No Elmo balloon this year. Not at $5 per. We're trying to teach Daughter that she won't get everything she wants. And there are far better uses for the money.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to run get some lottery tickets on my way to hear a timeshare presentation.

Buy your own gold watch

From today's Best of Today's Business on Yahoo! Finance:

NOTED: Retirement assets in IRAs and other worker-owned accounts reached $14.5 trillion in 2005, surpassing assets in pension plans for the first time. (Kiplinger's Personal Finance)

To translate, this means that for the first time in the history of our nation, we as individuals have more saved for retirement than our employers have saved on our behalf.

Interpret that how you will. I take it to mean that the entire purpose of the 401(k) is finally fulfilled - it is no longer your company's responsibility to take care of you in retirement. If you want to retire, your lifestyle will depend on the quantity you have saved.

The next statistic like this that I think we'll see will be when the health insurance burden is shifted entirely to employees. That event could be 10 years or 100 years in the future, but I'm confident that day will come.

What a combo

Wolfgang Puck, if you're reading this (and we both know you are), let the record reflect that we had this idea first. So when you steal our idea and serve this up at all the Golden Globe after-parties tonight, I expect a little wink or nod toward our ingenuity. I may even let you name your next restaurant after me.

Daughter has been under the weather (read: nasty sick) over the weekend, so her appetite has been lighter than normal. Saturday she picked at her breakfast and turned away lunch completely. In the afternoon, after two solid months of not napping, she took an awesome dead-to-the-world nap that lasted until about 6 p.m.

With a fever and being disoriented from the nap, she was a nutjob when we got her out of bed to feed her dinner. She settled down after a while and asked for some cheetos.

Just as an aside, we eat baked cheetos in our house. Since they're baked and not fried, I'm pretty sure they become the nutritional equivalent of a carrot or piece of celery, rather than a slice of bacon.

Anyhow, we obliged the request for cheetos because we were just glad she was interested in food. After a few minutes, Daughter asked for some ketchup in which to dip her cheetos.

Well, okay.

I hauled Son off for a bath (a nightly occurence since he started using his hair as his napkin) while Wife fixed a bowl of grapes for Daughter.

I came downstairs after Son's bath to find that Daughter had finished all of the cheetos, all of the grapes, and had put a serious hurtin' on the ketchup.

At some point, Daughter had asked: "Mommy, can I dip my grapes in my ketchup? It will be soooo good."

How can you argue with that kind of enthusiasm?

And so she dipped her grapes in her ketchup, and thus was born the culinary craze of the future: grapes and ketchup.

Is there a heaven?

Is there a heaven? Or do we all just go down the potty when we die?

That was the topic of conversation over eggs and bacon this morning:

Daughter: "Mommy, where's Dorothy's bowl?" (Dorothy is our recently-deceased goldfish.)

Wife: "Mommy put Dorothy's bowl in the garage because we don't have a goldfish anymore."

Daughter: "Why?"

Wife: "Dorothy was very old. Sometimes when things get very old, their bodies stop working. Dorothy is in heaven with Charlie (our dog - yes, pets are having a rough go of it in our house. Our cat is getting a little nervous), and Grandpa."

Daughter: "No, Dorothy went down the potty."

Wife: "Well, her soul is in heaven."

Victory

Score one for us. Our close friends who were dangerously close to joining the We Know We Need a Minivan But We'll Buy This Big SUV Instead ranks relented over the weekend. They are now owners of a 2007 Honda Odyssey and fellow members of the We Are Dorky Parents and There's No Denying It set.

We win again, Big SUV people! Your above-traffic views and 4-wheel drive are no match for our remote sliding doors and fold-flat third-row seats!

Nirvana is a pair of good britches

For a couple years now, I've been hearing about and have seen ads for a clothing company called Bill's Khakis. One of the high-end men's shops in town carries them, and I've heard them advertised by my favorite radio guy, Glenn Beck.

For the past few years, I've been looking for a good pair of pants. I've tried a few different approaches.

1. They're just pants. It's not an artificial heart, it's a few pieces of cloth sewn together. Every pair is probably sewn by the same kids in the same plant in Morocco and then labeled with Dockers or Gap or J. Crew. How much difference could there be between a $25 pair and a much more pricey pair?
2. Ok, the cheap pants are cut weird, so let's try a specialty name. During this phase, I bought a couple pairs of Polo Ralph Lauren khakis. One pair in red, one pair in a mossy green. Much better fit, but still not 100%.

Then I broke down and invested in a pair of Bill's Khakis. I say "invested" because the things aren't cheap. The pair I have on right now (which rarely leave my body) set me back about $100. But I have at least that much $$ in bad khakis hanging up in my closet right now not being worn.

The pair I got is flat-front in a traditional khaki color. You buy them unhemmed, so I had the men's shop put a regular hem at the bottom. They will be with me for a long, long time.

If you have that feeling like something is missing from your life, and if you think that something might be a high quality, good looking pair of pants, try a pair of Bill's Khakis. Your lower body will thank you.

Blog redesign

Welcome to the grand opening of the new and improved My Best Investments. There's cake and punch and free balloons for the kids. Help yourself. Later on, some folks from the chamber of commerce will be stopping by to help with the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

So, like the new look?

I decided to redo the thing earlier this week. Blog envy got the best of me, so I had Jules at everyday design do a custom masthead for me. She also redid some of the layout and colors. She did an awesome job. It's exactly what I wanted. How she read my mind just by trading a few emails, I'm not sure, but she did. Thanks again, Jules.

Winter crud, week six or so

You ever see a tennis match where the guys are back on the baseline volleying back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth for what seems like an eternity? That's what the kids are doing with these nasty winter cold germs. One gets sick, the other gets sick. One gets healthy, the other gets him/her sick.

On Dec. 23, Son woke up with croup. On Christmas Eve, Daughter wakes up while Santa is in the house with a 104-degree fever. The kids get better long enough for Wife to get sick, then Son comes down with the Nastiest Cold Ever late last week. He's on the mend, so last night Daughter gets sick. Among other things, she was complaining that her ear hurt.

"Maybe she has an ear infection," Wife says. I agree.

Doctor reveals today that - how bizarre is this? - her eardrum is blistered. From coughing too much or sniffling so much or something. Strange stuff. Lots of germs in the house.

But I stand by my decision to allow them to play in the pile of bird corpses on the patio. I can't see any cause-and-effect there.

MBA update: Algebra II all over again

I'm not exactly what you would call a math guy. I know enough math to get by on a daily basis, but not much more. For instance, if I am about to walk out the door with one sock on, I can quickly (and without pencil and paper) determine how many additional socks I need to complete my outfit. The answer is usually one. Beyond that, math is a struggle, what with the coefficients and mu and all.

With that said, I was a little nervous heading into the beginning of my latest MBA class last night - Quantitative Analysis & Research Methods. Within minutes of the class starting, I was right back in my Algebra II (one of the rock-bottom experiences of academic life) classroom in high school, with the subject matter whizzing by and the rest of the class seemingly having no trouble. It was awful. I was about as lost as a person could be.

I grasped the concepts, but I was a little slow in learning how to solve some of the problems. Upon further reflection, I have narrowed down the possible root causes for last night's struggles to these:

1. I am not a math person.
2. I did not do the required homework.

One of the great things about life is that we get chances to redeem ourselves for past failures. I think, with some effort, there's still time to transform this experience and be successful. This doesn't have to be Algebra II all over again.

The Discipline of Fatherhood

A couple years ago, I read a great book by Kent Hughes titled Disciplines of a Godly Man. It contains a great chapter on fatherhood. In the chapter, he says we as fathers must evaluate the job we are doing by asking ourselves these questions:

• Do you criticize your children, or build them up?
• Are you overly strict, or reasonably strict - gradually granting your child greater freedom?
• Are you impatient and irritable, or patient and self-controlled, when dealing with your children?
• Are you consistent in your expectations?
• Have you kept your promises?
• Do you show favoritism?
• Are you tender with both your sons and daughters?
• Do you share in the discipline?
• Are you spending time with your children, as a family and individually?

When I read the book the first time, Daughter was tiny, so I passed these with flying colors. Now that she's three, they're a little more convicting. Yet they remind me that every day is a chance to be a better parent than the day before.

Coolest things I heard today

The two funniest things I heard around the house tonight:

"I'm like a human Kleenex." - Wife, commenting on the beating her clothes take with a sick toddler in the house

"Mommy, can I get a saxophone for Christmas?" - Daughter (3 yrs old), total non sequitur

Like a good neighbor

State Farm is there. And by "there" I mean: paying for the damage to the family truckster.

Cost to us: $0 (Give or take some time, frustration and anger.)

Cost to Old Lady's insurance company: $819.57

A tribute

From the "Best of Today's Business" column on Yahoo Finance:

The noodle man's gift to us all

The "ramen noodle man" left us all the gift of progress before he died, says Lawrence Downes in The New York Times. Momofuku Ando passed away last week at 96, nearly 50 years after his quest for "cheap, decent food for the working class" led him to invent ramen noodles. Unlike macaroni and cheese, ramen noodles are a "dish of effortless purity" that require no mixing, no careful attention -- just hot water. Now that's progress. "Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don't have to teach him anything."

That is one of the finest pieces of prose written in the history of the world.

Well shut my mouth...

Whodathunkit? They did it.

Not to steal all the credit, because I think the guys on the field made a contribution, but I think my negative predictions directly impacted the outcome of the game. If I'm reading my Sitemeter right, I got a hit from the general vicinity of a stadium lockerroom in Arizona right before the game. I may, in fact, have been a part of Coach Meyer's pregame speech.

Anyhow, behold the power of me betting against you. If you'd like to know which stocks or lottery numbers I don't like, let me know.

The old ball game

Let me just get on the record with a few predictions in the minute or so before this BCS game kicks off.

1. Florida will miss at least two FG attempts
2. Florida will lead the game at least once
3. Florida will eventually lose the game
   

This is not a wish list. Just a prediction list based on watching them for most of the season. I want my Gators to win this thing, but I'm trying not to get too invested.

Oh yes, it's ladies night

The small college where Wife and I met didn’t have sorority houses. The explanation was that an old law on the books classified any house in which four or more women lived together as a brothel. Consequently, groups of undergrad women united by the bonds of sisterhood couldn’t have a place to call their own without the house being deemed a brothel.

A brothel on our college campus. If only.

What would those old lawmakers do with what’s going on downstairs at my house right now? A large assortment of women is in my house laughing and talking and carrying on. And did I mention the drinking? And the gambling?

If Elliott Ness could come back to life, he’d die all over again if he walked in tonight, Bunco night.

Quick update on Too Cool for Minivan friends

The couple we hang out with that I referenced in an earlier post is inching closer by the second to taking the leap into We Are Dorky Parents and We Know It. The guy wants a Tahoe or Land Cruiser. His wife wants something easy to haul the kids around in.

She called my Wife from behind the wheel of a Honda Odyssey today, raving about the way it drives. She's got a Lexus RX300 right now and says the ride and quality are comparable.

I think I smell a purchase.

My wife went to the grocery store...

And came back with milk, bread and a gashed up car.

As I was posting about my night with our Son, Wife sat in our sweet-ass (and previously untarnished) minivan at the grocery store and watched an old lady drive right into her.

The players in this little drama are Wifey and the Minivan vs. Old Lady and her Apparently Unmanageable Avalon.

Scene #1: Wife finishes loading our groceries into our awesome chariot. As she's digging for her keys, Old Lady creeps past the front of the store, eyeing a resting place for her Avalon.

Scene #2: Old Lady turns into Wifey's aisle, then is faced with the critical decision of making a very slight right turn into a parking spot with the flow of traffic - or - trying to slide the car around Dukes of Hazzard-style into a spot going the opposite direction.

Scene #3: Old Lady chooses poorly. Old Lady rams our precious Honda, makes eye contact with Wifey as if to say, "I know I just hit you," then proceeds to pull forward, extending the gash from the door panel to the front left fender panel. Why ruin one panel of someone else's car with you can do two or more, right?

All Wifey could do was sit there and take it. She did a great job keeping her composure and got all the relevant info we need to make sure Old Lady takes car of getting our esteemed ride patched back up. Old Lady's insurance agent is apparently on-call 24 hours a day, so I'm pondering waiting until about 10:30 tonight to call him and tell him what his client did to us today.

Or if anyone is reading on the West Coast, I may have you call him after we've gone to bed.

He's sick...

One cough crackled through Son's monitor this morning at 2:30. Wife sat straight up in bed and said, "He's sick."

Sure enough, the little dude had a fever and his nose was running like a Kenyan in the Boston Marathon. One cough and she knew. Amazing.

It's even more amazing when you consider that Wife has selective hearing with Son's monitor. He could be in his crib screaming an Andrew Dice Clay routine and she'd sleep right through it. In her defense, she has freakishly-good hearing when it comes to Daughter's monitor. She can tell what Daughter is dreaming about by the sound of her breathing over the monitor.

I am generally useless when it comes to a lot of things, so I tend to sleep through most of what happens. But between the two, I'd say I'm more attuned to his monitor. Since I tend to her him and Wife tends to hear her, Wife and I balance each other nicely in the area of baby monitors.

Wife has been battling the Cold From Hell all week, so I had to go relieve her after she rocked and consoled Son for about 30 minutes. Little dude was not up for sitting in the rocker with Dad, so I stood up to put him back in the crib. I paused before I laid him down and put his head in the crook of my elbow and held him just like I did during the many, many nights we spent together when he was a newborn. I swayed him back and forth for a few minutes and watched his eyes fall into the goodnight sequence:

1. Staring at Dad's face
2. Long, heavy blinks
3. Long, heavy blinks with eyes going in weird directions
4. Out

There is a very short list of things in this world that compare to the feeling of holding the limp weight of your sleeping child against you. It makes 3 a.m. bearable.

Now that Daughter is a preschooler and Son is a full-throttle toddler, those sweet, quiet moments are fewer and farther between. But it's in those moments that I am everything they need me to be - strong, comforting, loving and present.

Bad news for parents

This lead from a Reuters story today:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Adults living with young children eat significantly more fat than grown-ups with no kids at home, a new study shows.

I also read earlier this week - no joke - that having children is the single biggest predictor of future bankruptcy. The timing of all this research coming out is pretty uncanny, as I have spent a few months working on some parenting-themed greeting cards. Among the ones I think will do well with this new info in mind:

1. The Get Well Soon Card: "You may be fat, but at least you're not broke."
2. The Thinking of You Card: "You may be broke, but at least you're not fat."
3. The Expectant Mother Card: "Children are a miracle. Try not to get fat and broke."
4. The Expectant Mother Card 2.0: "If you're thin and rich now, get ready! Things are going to change!"
5. The Newlyweds Card: "Congratulations on your wedding! Take lots of pictures so when you have kids, you can show them what you looked like before you got fat and broke!"

Anybody have an email for Hallmark?

Wanted: new guilty pleasure

Word out of Hollywood today is that a former guilty pleasure shared by me and the Wife, The O.C., has been cancelled. Gerald Ford dies, that plane crashes in Indonesia , and now this. The humanity.

Truth is, the show died sometime early last season. There’s only so many times you can watch Ryan Atwood get in a fight, and only so many dirty criminals Marissa Cooper can hook up with. We gave up on it about the time they put it up against CSI on Thursday nights. And now that it's up against Grey's Anatomy and probably some reruns of Nash Bridges, forget about it. No contest there.

We do mourn the early days of the show. The O.C. was the source for all the teen angst and brooding we lost when Dawson ’s Creek went off a few years ago. There’s a certain charm to watching a gang of twentysomethings portray teenagers by reading dialogue written by thirtysomethings. I guess we’ll have to go slum it on the WB (or whatever they call it now) to find our new guilty pleasure. Or finally take ownership of our Beauty and the Geek fetish.

Now the death watch switches to ER, which lost us years ago. I think the third intra-ER shooting was the final straw for us. Or was it the fifth stabbing? Or second helicopter crash?

First campout

Daughter summoned me up to her room tonight when I got home from work to show me what she had been working on. She had pulled the window-seat cushion into the center of the floor and covered it with a blanket and tiny pillow.

"Look at my sleeping bag! Can I sleep in it?"

Being the smart father I am, I could neither confirm nor deny her request for a change of venue for bed time without consulting with the Wife first. She came down for dinner, and when bed time rolled around, Wife thought we should let her sleep on the floor if she wanted.

I read her Beatrix Potter's Tom Kitten Tales and we said prayers, then I pulled her blanket up over her on her tiny cushion bed so she could officially start her first campout.

Like most of my early campouts, this one didn't last long. By the time I got downstairs and got myself a glass of water, we could hear the nondescript whines over the monitor. After a moment or two of trying to decipher it was a Ehh...She'll Be Fine whine or a Houston, We Have a Problem whine, I settled on the latter and headed upstairs.

I opened the door to "Daddy, I want to sleep on my bed." Okay, little kitty, let's get on your bed.

As exciting as new adventures can be, there's a security that only your own bed can provide.

Cash

January marks a unique anniversary for Wife and me. This time last year we woke up with the all-too-common post-Christmas money hangover. We were looking some credit card balances in the face and said to each other, "This sucks."

Normally, that would have been the end of the conversation and we would have moved on to other things, namely chasing Daughter around and pacifying Son, who was just a few months old at the time. But for some reason, God laid it on our hearts to address the way we spend money rather than avoid it.

Our mutual conclusion was that we couldn't really point to where all our money was going each month. The solution, inspired by Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University, was to get ourselves on a budget. And I mean really, honestly plan how we are going to spend each dollar before the month begins.

People come up with a lot of different ways to do a budget. I had tried to do a budget before, thinking Quicken or Microsoft Money would be the answer. I linked our bank accounts to Money and downloaded all our transactions for six months or so. But then I got lazy and quit doing it. And then, when I got to thinking about it, I realized that Quicken or Money can't help you do a budget, in the same way that your car's odometer can't tell you how many miles you're going to drive in a month. It's a trailing indicator. It only tracks what has already happened.

So for us, we had to come up with a way to account for my income before it hit our checking account. Today, we have budget categories such as Groceries, Dining Out, Utilities, Diapers & Wipes, Babysitter, etc. At the beginning of each month, we plan how much we need to allot to each category, and when I get paid we take out the right amount of cash and fill envelopes bearing those labels.

Just as an aside, the bank tellers hate me. Every two weeks I come trotting in with my withdrawal slip and a handwritten breakdown of how I want the cash, i.e. two $1s, twelve $5s, etc. It's more work for them, but last time I checked, it's not outside the bounds of their job description to give customers they money they ask for in the desired denominations.

This cash system has worked well for us. It has given us a greater appreciation for how important every dollar is. It has also shown us that living on a budget isn't about being bean-counters or denying ourselves the things we want. It's all about choices. When there is a set quantity of cash coming into the house every month, you know that the money for an extra meal out or a new tie has to come from one of the other categories.

In the year that we've been doing this, we've arrived at a much greater sense of peace and control over our income. It's a great feeling, and it's a technique that will be incredibly simple to teach to Daughter and Son.

Minivan tension - will they? won't they?

You know from an earlier post that Wife and I wear the label We Are Dorky Parents and There's No Denying It. We earned that designation upon purchasing our Honda Odyssey earlier this year. You also know that there is another place parents of small children live, called We Know We Need a Minivan But We'll Buy This Big SUV Instead.

At our very small New Year's gathering last night, some friends who recently had their second child showed glimpses of joining us in We Are Dorky Parents and There's No Denying It. They've been looking for a new vehicle for months, and all the chatter to date has been Big SUV. Last night, for the very first time, it looked as if the table might turn.

So now we wait, with a Ross & Rachel-style will-they-or-won't-they drama playing out before our very eyes.

New Year's Resolutions

You're looking at my New Year's Resolution. My goal is to keep this blahg up and going for all of 2007.

I decided on this after nixing these other ideas:

1. Audition for The Bachelor. Figured this would be too hard to explain to the Wife.
   
2. Give up caffeine. Not ready yet. I may tackle this one in 2008.
3. Read all the Harry Potter books. Not really into fiction. Dreadfully slow reader. If I did try to tackle this, I would probably finish up around the time my preschool-age Daughter graduates from dental school.
4. Learn a foreign language. I speak 3 year-old and about 10 words of baby sign language. Learning something new would just be showing off.