July 30, 2008

On Vacation With the Kids

Off to see the Atlantic Ocean and visit our nation's capital.

I'll be back August 9th or 10th.

July 29, 2008

Why Three?: Parenting Marginal Cost / Economies of Scale

Some people have asked me why we had three children, so I figured I’d answer it in my next few posts (actually, these are the reasons that I claim now: the real reason is that my wife controls the birth control and she wanted three ... but anyway...)

People seem to understand why people with two kids of the same gender would try for another. But we “already have one of each” with a girl and a boy, and thus had no reason to have a third.

There are a number of reasons for this, but a big one is the “economies of scale of parenting,” by which I mean the fact that, once you have one child, each additional one is marginally more attractive to you (for the economists in the crowd, it’s all about marginal cost: and the first child has the huge marginal cost; the rest are nothing compared to the first one). Another, less kind, way of putting it is the “My life is already ruined anyway” way of thinking.

Financially, the economies of scale are clear. You already have the crib, the diaper table, the pacifiers, the bottles, the breastpump the 3 strollers, the car seats, the ultrasaucer and the baby books. Not to mention enough onesies (mostly stained, but still) to choke a cow. If you have another kid, you don’t have to re-buy all that crap. If you can double or triple up on gender, you don’t have to redecorate or buy much in the way of new clothes AND you can double up on rooms. Other than food, a second or third child of the same gender is practically free.

From my perspective, as a father whose wife stays home with the kids, I always noted that I wanted to “get my money’s worth.” Since we were sacrificing an entire second income and my wife was going to stay home with the kid(s) no matter how many of them were running around, I figured that I might as well give her as much work as possible to do. I was mostly adding to her workload; not mine (at least when I was at work).

Outside of the monetary reasons, there are practical economies of scale as well. If you’re going to sit around singing ridiculous Raffi songs, there might as well be two small pairs of ears listening to you instead of one. Getting multiple uses out of the Robin Hood animated DVD (i.e., now 2 or 3 different children can watch it 8 times each).

Anyone being honest would admit that having a kid takes its toll, emotionally, financially and freetimily. I mean, really, if you have a kid, you’ve just ruined 18 years of your life. If you give that kid a sibling when he’s two, you haven’t doubled the ruination. You haven’t now ruined 36 years of your life, because the years overlap. You’ve only ruined an additional 2 years, for a total of 20 years, which isn’t that bad, come to think of it. A whole extra kid for just 2 extra ruined years seems like a bargain after the first one.

I don’t mean to say that there aren’t emotional and other benefits from having children. There definitely are, and I think it’s a good trade on balance. But the benefits are paid out over time; the change in lifestyle for you is abrupt and definitive. And crap. Your life goes from 40% fun to 20% fun. If the fun percentage went down equally for each subsequent child, at two kids you would be down to 0% fun and you’d be absolutely miserable. If this were the case, no one would be stupid enough to have a second child. The planet would be China, but with the one child policy being self-imposed instead of imposed by the government.

But in actuality, once you’re at 20% fun, you’re pretty much at the bottom anyway; it can’t get much worse. So you might as well have another. Then life is still 16% fun. Three only takes you down to 14%, so why not?

July 27, 2008

Refreshment

Refreshed.

That’s what people say. They go on vacation from work, and they get back and you see them in the hall, or talk to them on the phone, and you say “how was the vacation” and they say “I’m refreshed. I’m ready to get back at it.” Or you read a study saying how vacation is important for the mental health of workers because it refreshes them.

Me, personally, after a weeklong vacation, I get back to the office and start to work (normally digging out from under god knows how many emails, voicemails and interoffice memos) and, at some point, I look up and check the clock for the first time of the day, and it will say “9:36” or “10:09” and I think to myself “In no way, shape or form do I feel refreshed.” For me, vacation just reminds me that working kinda sucks when compared to life at home or on vacation.

In any event, my parents, who live about an hour away, took the kids and had them sleepover for the last three nights. My folks are good like that, taking the kids 2-3 times a year to give us a break, sometimes so we can get away for a quick vacation, other times so we can stay at home and “do projects.” We have high hopes at the start of these visits. “We’re going to paint the bathroom” we’ll claim and then we end up acting like lazy bums all weekend, gloriously sleeping in until 10 a.m. each weekend day and then still lying down for a nap in the afternoon or playing tennis together or actually having a beer with friends after work and marveling at how wonderful it is to do all that. So we get nothing done, really, and we didn’t get anything done this time either, but it was nice.

Just a few minutes ago I got home from picking the kids up this fine Sunday morning. At the end of these visits, I do start to miss the kids; I get a kick out of seeing how excited they are when I pick them up. You forget how they were a pain in the ass and whiny just 3 days ago and how you couldn’t wait to get rid of them. So the drive home was great, with us laughing and talking and singing and joking them telling me about the weekend. These weekends away do “refresh” me as a parent. And it “refreshes” your kids in some ways: they actually seem to appreciate hanging out with you.

For a while.

At some point, it wears off and the feeling of refreshment ends on both sides.

In fact, I’ve figured out a formula to figure out how long the refreshment lasts. Get out a pencil and paper! Take the number of days your kids were away and convert it into hours. Add 15 and then take the square root and add 12 to that. Then double it. Then take that piece of paper, crumple it up, get out a new piece of paper and write “90” on it.

That’s how long you’re refreshed. 90 minutes. Enjoy those 90 minutes, but don’t expect to get more than that.



July 19, 2008

The Only Rule of Coaching

This year, my 4-year old son is playing T-ball for the first time. My 8-year old daughter is in her 4th or 5th year of tee-ball and softball. As the years have gone by, I’ve become more and more involved in helping out at games and practices. In the 100+ hours I’ve spent on this stuff, however, I’ve only learned/noticed one non-obvious thing And that is this:

When your kids are young, don’t coach your own child

My daughter's coach is a woman we know pretty well. She’s a short-haired athletic woman of about 40-years who plays softball herself. She’s known for her somewhat boisterous personality and yells at the girls in a lovingly joking way. She’s a good coach. Another coach in the league is a very nice, super-positive guy; he wears baseball pants, so people are afraid of him and are skeptical at first, but he’s great once you get to know him. He’s a darn good coach.

The female coach’s daughter has refused to wear helmets, refused to play the field, refused to “take a walk” after missing 8 pitches in a row and sat out entire practices and games a couple times. The male coach’s daughter, instead of throwing the ball to the pitcher of the opposing team, kicks it … very slowly … back to the pitcher. She loves to play first base, largely so she can chat with the opposing team. You can see how it troubles these coaches – two people that love baseball – that their kids clearly just aren’t that into it. It doesn’t kill them, but you can see that it does bum them out somewhat.

So me and another mom, to avoid having our being the coach make our kids act like little shits and/or make them dislike the game hatched a plan last Saturday. We decided that next year, when my daughter is in 3rd grade and hers is in 4th grade, I would coach her daughter’s team in the 4th-6th grade division, and she would coach my daughter’s team in the 1st -3rd grade division. Thus, no coaching our own kids: no problems!

Of course, I agreed to this before realizing that a man volunteering to coach 4th-6th grade aged girls, when that man has no familial relationship whatsoever with anyone on the team isn’t the type of volunteering normally accepted by a standard park and recreation department (I can just see myself writing “I just really enjoy working with girls of that age” on the form: that would go ever well, I’m sure). So I doubt I’ll follow through, but it seemed like a reasonable idea earlier this week.

July 13, 2008

How the 1970s Hold Up


I was a fan of Star Wars. I was about 5 years old when the first movie came out back in 1977 and I remember it as the first movie I ever saw in the theatre that wasn’t animated. I got the toys, did a Halloween at age 7 or 8 or so as Luke Skywalker (with my sister as Leia). I remember taping Star Wars on VHS off TV in the early 1980s and watching it 13 times, partially so I could brag to my friends that I watched Star Wars 13 times. I was a fan, but I never became one of those teenaged Star Wars geeks that just wouldn’t let it go (like these guys).

And so when I considered watching Star Wars with my daughter around the time that she turned five, I figured that it would be something that just she and I shared (and that the bigtime Star Wars geeks shared with their kids). It was, after all, a 25 year old movie. And the new series didn’t seem particularly popular. But soon after we watched the original Star Wars movie, my wife informed me that lots of kids were “into” Star Wars these days. A trip down the toy aisle at Target confirmed that kids these days were very much into Star Wars.

Certainly the new Star Wars movies had something to do with it, but it’s not like Spiderman had most of an aisle to himself, and he had popular new movies out too. So it was clear that Star Wars was something more. Kids were drawn to the whole universe like moths. This was something from the late 1970’s that kids took and claimed as their own. It had stood the test of time.

This led me to wonder exactly what else from the late 1970s (and in some cases the early 1980s) stands the test of time in the eyes of kids today. Here’s a short list of things I came up with and my thoughts regarding whether they hold up 30 years later or not:

Buck Rogers (1979-1981) Twiki-twiki-twiki. My wife rented this DVD the other day and tried to watch it with the kids. They were mildly interested for about 10 minutes. Also, my wife was right: Twiki’s head does look like male genitalia. Verdict: Doesn’t Hold Up.

(side note: Erin Grey, however, definitely holds up.)

Being Terrified of Teenagers. (Late 1970s/Early 1980s). Kids today don’t understand this, but in the 1970’s, us younger kids were absolutely terrified of teenagers. Teenagers were scary as hell. They were hairy. They had lots and lots of acne, since they had no Clearasil or Pro-activ to get rid of it. They were smoking and swearing all the time too. They would kick the crap out of you as soon as look at you.

These days, teenagers have clean faces and just sit there silently typing at their phones, well-dressed and not scary at all. Verdict: Doesn’t Hold Up.

Benji (1974) This is a close one. I watched this with the kids in the Spring. It has that 1970’s made-for-TV-movie touch with 3-minute songs accompanied by a montage of slo-mo shots of Benji running, as if he was Bo Derek coming out of the pool or something. It’s just weird. I blame the Graduate for stuff like that. But the dog-actor (who was apparently 14 at the time of the movie) was incredible. And animals doing their own stunts: that’s cool. And without all of the quick cutting, in your face, MTV-ish directorial style that movies have today, so the kids don’t feel overwhelmed (plus that makes the dog's acting all the more impressive). They can follow what’s going on (and they’ll be terrified by the scary teenage bad guys). Verdict: Holds Up.

Not Wearing Seatbelts. (1978) I was shorthanded on car seats the other day and had to hit the grocery store, which is about 2/3 of a mile from my house, so I told the kids, for the first time in their lives, to just hop into the back seat and they didn’t have to wear seat belts. You would’ve thought they were at a freakin’ amusement park they were so excited. The problem is that they were so used to their every movement being restrained, the younger two fell to the floor twice: once when I stopped; once when I went around a corner. Verdict: Mixed. Kids like it but don’t know how to do it anymore.

Cordouroys: (1976-1981) Still kicking around. I’ve noticed that the cords are tighter. Kids these days aren’t dealing with the quarter-inch sized cords that we had to deal with. But you still hear the familiar nostalgic zwhishing when a kid walks past you every now and again Verdict: Holds Up.

Adults Smoking. (1492-2004) Sadly, too many kids today have never actually seen an adult smoking in real life, so it is impossible to gauge how they would react. Verdict: Unknown.

Atari. (1977-1983) I got one of those fake Ataris – the Atari Flashback - a few years ago that comes with about 40 games built in and I play it with the kids now and again. Verdict: The games Pac-Man and Adventure hold up. Kids these days find it mind boggling (and thrilling) that in Adventure, “you are just a dot but you can still fight dragons.” Other games don’t hold up.

Shaggy Bowlcuts. (peaked with Adam from Eight is Enough in 1977). Hipster parent websites are trying to bring back plaid, but not even they dare to try to bring back bowlcuts. Verdict: Doesn’t hold up.

The All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. (1977-79). While it aired, this was perhaps the greatest television show on. It’s possibly the greatest show of all time (if you’re curious, the other competitors re It’s Your Move, Sledge Hammer, the Simpsons, Seinfeld, Homicide and the Sopranos; The Office is close). Only 24 episodes were made. After that, why mess with perfection?

Every kid in the universe has, at one time or another, sought to mix and match different fantasy character genres (i.e, who would win if Chewbacca fought Harry Potter?) Outside the world of comic books, rarely do the characters actually mix. Best I can figure, it’s happened 3 times. There’s Alien vs. Predator (twice). There’s Freddy vs. Jason. And then there’s the All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. And the All-Stars were doing it decades before the others.

You remember, don’t you? The three teams: the Yogi Yahooeys with Yogi, Huckleberry Hound and the whole A-team Yogi crew plus Grape Ape. These guys were so rich and famous already, they had nothing to prove, and competed accordingly. The Scooby Doobies (I can’t believe they got away with that name with Shaggy on the team) with Scooby and the gang, Dyno-Mutt and Captain Caveman, among others. And, finally, the Really Rottens, with all the bad guys, including Muttley, with his smoker’s laugh. The three teams would compete in simply bizarre events seemingly conjured up by a group of suspended-adolescent stoners.

It was the 1970s, where realism was king, so even in a cartoon show, the bad guys were allowed to win dozens of individual events and actually won 3 of the 24 episodes outright.

(side note: Why is “A-Lympics” spelled this way? It’s part of the beautiful mystery)

Of course, there is no DVD set and no plans for one. There is practically nothing on Youtube. There are apparently some 1996 VHS tapes of 8 of the 24 shows, but you can't even get those on ebay. And that’s it. So I couldn’t show it to my kids to gauge how it held up and had to simply explain the gist of what it was like.

I said it’s like Dora the Explorer, Diego, Franklin, Clifford and the Backyardigans against a team comprised of Pokemon, the Teletubbies, Boobah and the Wiggles against a team of Wall-E, Nemo, Ariel, Mowgli, Balloo, Tigger, Woody and Buzz Lightyear. This description certainly piqued their interest.

But they never saw the actual show, so it’s unclear what the verdict should be, so I have to guess at this one. On the one hand, this is the greatest concept of all time, so that’s a positive. But kids today have only a vague notion of who even Yogi and Scooby are, and the minor characters (Snagglepuss anyone?) are complete enigmas to them. Thus, sadly … Verdict: does not hold up. But only because the classics have been lost. If kids are prepped with 25 episodes of Scooby Doo and other 1978 Saturday morning cartoons prior to viewing, it would definitely hold up.

July 10, 2008

Understanding Child Abuse a Bit Better


A major impact of having children is that it grants you special kinds of understanding. Having children makes you understand many many things with a fullness that you never appreciated. You understand exactly the havoc that pregnancy wreaks on a woman’s body. You understand how it is possible to sleep next to a woman for over a month and not have sex with her even once, something the 18-year old version of you simply could not have comprehended. You gain an understanding of why it was that your father cracked open a beer Sunday afternoons a little earlier than seemed necessary and why there was a small smile on his face Monday mornings when he left for work. And one thing that you unfortunately gain an understanding of is the genesis of child abuse.

After we moved into our house a year ago, we noticed a strange thing. In the second floor hallway there was a hook-and-eye lock on the outside of one of the bedroom doors. Obviously it was there to lock a child in. Even worse, the lock was 7 feet from the floor, suggesting that the prior occupants of our house wanted to make sure that none of the other children would be able to rescue their brother/sister.

If I had noticed this 7 years earlier, before I had children, I would’ve been aghast. Actually, I’m still a little bit aghast now, but in many ways, now I understand how people could get to the point where locking your kid in their own room seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

Actually, these days, I’m pretty much ready to give the parents there the benefit of the doubt on just about anything. Even when I see one of those leash kids, I figure the kid probably deserves it and that it just might be necessary (well … almost … the leash kids probably cross the line, but the fact I’m even thinking about it shows how much less judgmental I am about stuff like that than I once was). You start to realize that even some of the stuff that would make you aghast might be necessary, like when this guy installed a lock on his the door of his autistic son's bedroom because he was sneaking out of his room in the night and had started a minor fire one night. You gotta do what you gotta do.

But that kind of thinking can also lead to problems. Most anyone who has had a particularly testy baby has had a moment that scared the bejeesus out of them: the moment of recognition where they said to themselves “I really want to do something unspeakable to this baby/child right now.” It happened to me once when I walked past an open second story window with my daughter after she had been screaming for an hour plus. I had the urge to throw her out similar to the urge many people (including me) feel to jump off a cliff if they get too close to the edge. I of course didn’t, but for a moment it seemed like a possibility there, and it was creepy scary.

These feelings thankfully pass, but after breaking down because of my kids’ behavior, I always feel a particular kind of shame, a blend of two wholly different kinds of pathetic. On the one hand, you feel pathetic because a child that’s been on this planet just a few months or a few years has, in some ways, beaten you by getting you so mad that you have to walk away. It’s like you are the one backing down (from a masculine perspective, it is very pathetic to be beaten by such a small creature). On the other hand, you feel pathetic because this is your child, and for some reason you haven’t raised them properly, because they are crying too much, or acting like such a complete jerk. And you’re pathetic for that reason as well.

An odd thing will happen to you when you’ve had a baby for a few months. You’ll be watching the local news and see a story where a father (or boyfriend) kills a five month old baby who just wouldn’t stop crying. And maybe for the first time ever, you’ll actually pay close attention to this kind of story. You’ll be interested in it. If you’re honest with yourself, maybe you’ll … in some bizarre way … realize that you can in some way relate to the guy.

In the criminal law, if you kill a guy in the heat of the moment after catching him in bed with your wife, that’s supposed to get you a lesser prison sentence than if you plot and kill some guy in cold blood. And there have been times that I would have strongly considered letting my wife cavort in bed with someone else if it meant that the baby in my arms would just stop crying. So if catching your wife doing it with the neighbor is a mitigating circumstances when it comes to murder, it makes you wonder why a baby crying for two hours can’t be mitigating as well.

Don’t get me wrong. You’ll still think the guy should be locked up for life for what he did; but that doesn’t mean that you don’t understand how it could’ve happened. And that’s an understanding that you previously never would’ve thought possible.

July 4, 2008

Sandra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic

This article, part book review, part essay, is perhaps the best thing I've ever read about working moms and the like ("so many roads lead to a wet wipe" is a classic.)

In fact, looking over Loh's last half-dozen articles, she's on a tremendous roll.



The Pattern of Life


I think I may have figured out how life goes.

Once you become a preteen up until you’re age 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or even 35, you spend a decent chunk of your life developing principles and thinking that there is a particular way that you like to live your life and molding your personality into the kind of person that you want to be.

At various ages, you decide whether religion matters to you; whether staying in shape via exercise or diet matters to you; whether you’re going to try recreational drugs or not (and whether you are going to continue to “try” them each and every morning after you wake up); whether you want to go to college and ultimately do with your life from a career standpoint; the types of things you save up for and spend your money on; what your political beliefs are; what clothes you wear and how that expresses who you are; what sports you’ll play; what clubs to join or hobbies to have; whether you’ll play video games or not; how to wear your hair; what car to drive; what music to listen to; what books to read; what TV to watch; what bars or clubs to hang out in.

But you don’t just choose religions and philosophies and art and material goods. You choose the people that you will live your life with. You choose your friends. You choose a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Lots of these decisions are big and lots are small, but in the 21st Century, your identity is no longer determined by who your family is, or what “class” you’re from. Who you are is based, in large part, by the choices that you make. Lots of people take this seriously, spending thousands of hours deciding who they are; making choices that they can respect the rest of their lives.

What no one tells you when you’re 20 is that you shouldn’t spend so much time figuring this out, because you ultimately just give it all away.

For men, I think it starts with the girlfriend. Specifically, I think it starts with the first chick flick that a guy goes to see with his girlfriend. It continues when she buys him his first shirt with a designer label (yuck!) and gets him to stay home instead of going out with the boys. When I got married I was a little horrified to find my wife going to Jazzercise classes.

But the spouse or girlfriend is nothing compared to the children.

Earlier this week, I was flipping ahead on Turner Movie Classics and AMC, to see if there were any movies I wanted to TIVO this week. And I saw “Look Who’s Talking” come up and I thought “oh, the kids might like that” and I hit the Record button.

And it didn’t even hit me (that's probably the worst part). I didn’t even notice that I had, completely without irony, chosen to record “Look Who’s Talking.” I couldn’t help but flashback to the teenaged version of myself, when I believed Look Who’s Talking to be so odious and held it with such disdain as to not be worth mocking (since everything is worth mocking to a teenager, this means I held it in such low regard as hair metal bands, the song “I Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode, my sister's Jelly shoes and people who didn’t like Catcher in the Rye). The teenaged me wouldn’t recognize the man who just chose to record Look Who’s Freakin Talking without irony.

I think most people in their early twenties realize that on some level they’ll get more tolerant when they get older, or they start to realize this as they actually start to get more tolerant.

What I’ve just come to realize is that it’s your own damn kids that largely do this to you. You may have always thought playing with dolls and barrettes are silly, but you don’t think your daughter is silly, so if she cares about that stuff, ultimately you do too on some level. So I’m a 35 year old man that has opinions about the merits of different kinds of barrettes now. You might have thought, pre-children, that “People that have kids are just making excuses about not working out and I am going to work out six days a week after having kids” and then, when you have kids, that goes out the window (at least when they’re real young, it has to).

You start watching absolutely ridiculous TV hows, like that new show Wipeout or American Idol or (the worst) America’s Funniest Videos with the kids, simply because the kids love it. And after watching them crack up at 10 ridiculous videos of people falling off three-wheelers, it will be tough to maintain your dislike for that damn Tom Bergeron (or Bob Saget, if watching reruns). I mean, I’ve used flash cards with my kids. I’ve said “because I said so.” I’ve worked at a job I’m pretty damn ambivalent about for 9 years.

Hell, half the crap I write about in this blog is exactly this: me surrendering principles at the altar of my children.

You might hate McDonalds and fast food. But your kids won’t and they’ll mellow you out about it. You may have chosen certain sports to play in high school or at least favored those sports (I played tennis and would’ve loved to play football had I weighed over 140 lbs). And you probably thought some sports were silly (for me volleyball and, later, lacrosse). But when your kid is out there playing, your prior opinions will go out the window. So if my kids like it, it’s LAX for me baby!

The increasing-tolerance principles-out-the-window affect even applies to serious stuff. While there are certainly horror stories from the gay community about parents rejecting gay children, the more common outcome these days is for the gay child to convince the parents that there isn’t really anything wrong with being gay. And you hear a lot about parents and children fighting over politics only to come to terms with the other’s political beliefs a few years later.

It is a cliché how parents complain about how their grandparents coddle their grandchildren and how “things weren’t like that when they were raising me.” It is similarly cliché how “the first child has it the worst” when it comes to discipline. And while simple fatigue is part of the reason for this, half of this is simply because, at age 60, you don’t have the principles that you had at age 30. Maybe at age 60 you don’t think hitting someone because they took your toy isn’t really so bad; you don’t think kids making a little too much noise in a restaurant is such a big deal; and you realize that giving a kid extra candy now isn’t going to spoil them and ruin their life 20 years hence, making them so lazy as to be unemployable or something.

So that’s it. You gather up principles for the first quarter or third of your life and you spend the rest giving them away.

Finally, you whittle it down to just one principle.

And that last principle you give up is the principle that you like life more than death.