to my daughter.

Dear Sweetheart,

There were magazines lined up by the counter. Each one with a headline about ten ways to be sexy or who has the best beach body or why breast cancer is preventable. I look at my pregnant wife, not yet showing, but full of baby nonetheless. And I thought how tough it is to be a woman in this generation.

Like when you buy a new car and everybody else you see has the same exact car, or so it seems, I saw these magazines everywhere. At the grocery store. In the trash can. At work.  I was barraged with images in commercials, television shows and on the front of magazines all with this same modern, often-Photoshopped standard of beauty. And I started to get what God and apparently the editor of every glossy cover wanted me to know: get ready for a girl.

I saw you this week. A black and white movie of you. It wasn’t much, just an ultrasound glimpse. But it was enough. You were everything I expected and secretly wanted.

You are a girl. My beautiful daughter.

You don’t know me yet. Not well at least. I’m the voice yelling at your brother to not jump from the top of the couch. I’m the guy who will put headphones on mommy’s belly. I’m the dad who will push you in a stroller and push you when your car stalls in the middle of the road because you thought quarter of a tank is enough to get you home.

There’s a lot of things I can’t verbalize right now. I cannot tell you what it meant to see your mom see you for the first time on the screen. And I cannot tell you how long I’ve prayed for you. I cannot tell you that I’m going to like every decision you make and I cannot promise to love you perfectly. I am trying to come to grips with the fact that often the life of a little girl is reliant on a mixture of forces both seen and unseen. And I may not be at the center of all of them.

But today, I am a dad who is blessed to be a part of your story. To have the privilege to share a life with so many people who have made you, your brother and your mom possible.

It was nice to meet you this week, sweetheart. I’ve been told that little girls love their daddys. I hope so. Because I’ve loved you for so long already.

Daddy

i write when i grieve. an open love letter to the office.

Dear “The Office”:

This much is certain when you end your 206-episode run this week: we will go on. That seems like a weird way to start off a love letter, but you’ve never been one for convention.  

Whatever happens on screen this Thursday, I know I will be annihilated by emotion. I’ll be very retrospective throughout the day, finding YouTube clips of the best Dwight moments or most awkward exchanges between Toby and Michael and then I’ll go home and tear up most of the evening. Screw it, you know me too well, I’ll weep for a solid ten minutes then pretend to need to use the bathroom to mask the pain.   

Let me be clear and say I’m not a fan boy. I haven’t made the exodus to Scranton for an office-con and I don’t own any “Michael Scott’s Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race for the Cure” t-shirts (for those so inclined, size large would work). I don’t even watch all the shows live. That’s what DVRs are for and I have a three-year old.

And you aren’t even my first love. You aren’t the Jetsons, West Wing, Friends or Bewitched. Those shows transport me to another place, another island, another era. You don’t force me to escape my comfort zone, help me understand the eating habits of zombies or solve a crime.

You are none of those. You were real life and current. You got me. I found you at a time when I could understand everything; the laughs, the awkwardness of growing up, the veiled sexual references, the confusion about “The Others” on Lost.

I’m just a guy watching a television show and finding himself in every moment. Even in the awkward and innuendos, I find a parody on reality that is not really a parody at all.

When I thought about you ending your show after nine seasons, I thought about all the things I could say. I could write about how we all think we are smarter than our boss. Or how we regularly get drinks after work to talk about “the oh-my-gosh-did-you-see-what-she-he-did.” Or that we’ve all been in a place where we think we could start our own company. Or how every office has a Vikram and a Meredith and a Hunter. Or how mad you’d be if you cooked chili all night only to spill it five steps into the door. Or that Threat Level Midnight wouldn’t be the worst thing that Hollywood has produced. Or that I think parkour every time I see a refrigerator box.

But this isn’t what this love letter is about.

You are about much more that. Much more than the quirky little show that made it. You struggled with relationships in the workplace and I worked thirty feet from my wife every day. I struggled with finding the balance of fun, future and friendship in my career and you gave us Michael, Andy, and well, Creed. You went through that awkward phase (i.e. DeAngelo Vickers, Charles Miner and Robert California) and I went through my month of belt buckles and cowboy hats. You were everything about life that was so funny it made me cry and so awkward my stomach hurt. Every time you’d end for the night, I’d slip into a post-episode depression and wish my job, my workplace, my co-workers were just like you.

You didn’t exist within a utopia of virtue. You’re too “that’s what she said” for that.  Nor do you exist in a myriad of lackadaisical effort, never getting to the work at hand. We see Jim, Angela, even Kelly actually in the business of selling paper. But there was this universal feeling that we were all in this together.

The conversations you had are far more meta, less about the day-to-day, more about the stories and the relationships and the people.

That’s how life works and that’s why you worked. You always left room for humanity.

And this Friday, I’ll wake up with that “having cried myself to sleep” look which luckily for me doubles as my spring allergy season look and pick out a Casual Friday outfit (no sandals right, Toby?) and go on. Because that’s what you always did. We’re better having known you.

Thank you for everything.

Fan

three. it seems so much bigger than two.

Dispatch to Kaeden

We’re on our way home from daycare, or what we call school for purposes of simpler conversation, and you’re in the middle of a story. You’re talking about how you fell and got a boo-boo, but you “not have to go to doctor” and “it not broken” and that a girl in your class kissed it.

The conversation continued. Something about coloring and dirty pants. But I stopped listening. One day I’m sure you will repay the favor by not listening to Mom and I. This was a real conversation. A two-minute discussion with a plot; a beginning, climax and end that didn’t involve Yo Gabba Gabba or Lightning McQueen. You were at that moment officially old, well, older than you were last year and older than you were when we went to the beach and older than you were when you first saw our faces at 11:15 p.m. on a Friday night in May. These conversations are no longer novelties we talk about to prove the genius of our children. This is now every day. And you’re no longer two.

Today you are three years old.

—-

When learning about numbers, it’s really quite simple. It’s one and two and three and four and five and so on. They roll right off the tongue, one after the other, subtle in differences. One doesn’t seem that much smaller than two and three is only one syllable away from four.

But for you, when I think about turning three, it seems so much bigger than two. In the last 365 days, we’ve played in makeshift tents, threw rocks, been to the emergency room and made a mess. You’ve been sick, cried and cuddled. You’ve been the reason why we’ve woken up and the reason why we come home. We have dealt with things no one else knows and played when no one else was there.

I don’t really know how to feel about you turning three. It’s not a milestone birthday, you’re not going to kindergarten and it’s not sixteen and a driver’s permit. But I do know you are getting older. You can take over a room with your precociousness and your giggle. And you know what you like and know how to get it. You’re predictable half the time, which makes you more like an adult than a baby. You throw temper tantrums about sports and food, not because you’re infantile but because you’re so passionate, which again unfortunately makes you more like one of us.

On your third birthday, parenting still feels new, so new we still operate without a basic set of rules of action and response. We call it as we see it; one day, one hug, one sleepless hour at a time. You still need us to be loving and strict. You still need a bedtime and safety latches on the cabinets.

But in one moment, at least one time a day, you are older. Everything comes together and it feels like a moment, not an Instagram moment, not a Facebook post moment, not something we can put into words or a great achievement we can benchmark. You do something entirely different, something more subtle, something that a two-year old wouldn’t do. In these moments – a glance, a sentence, an act of independence – we know we aren’t changing the world that much, but we’re living out love in our little part of the world and that’s okay with me.

Last night on the eve of your third birthday, you were everything you always are. You laid down, held my hand and prayed. You prayed for three things: mommy, daddy and baby. You had me wrapped around your finger, hanging on every word. Then you smiled and grinned.

And you said “poopy booty. I pray for poopy booty.”

Moment over. Here’s to 365 more days and nights of being three. I love you. Always have. Always will.

Happy birthday and amen.

Daddy

brotherly love

Dispatch to Kaeden

My earliest memory is somewhere around four years old. It’s a medley of smells and colors and scenery. And for you, it’ll be about the same. You’ll have another year of firsts and lasts, tests and exhilarations that will be captured not by your brain, but by Instagram, Twitter, Shutterfly and my posts.

None of this you will remember. You won’t remember the dancing, the loud music, the bananas you spit out, the baths you hated, the trips you took, the people we lost, the oceans we surfed, the diapers we changed and more than everything, the three minutes it took for you to enter this world to totally and utterly consume our lives and steal away everything we thought we knew.

The silver lining is that by the time you register memories, combine people with places and happiness with family, you’ll never know when you weren’t loved. But maybe more importantly, you’ll never have a memory that won’t include being a big brother.

I still cannot believe I wrote that sentence. A pregnancy test and an OB/GYN visit later, you are soon going to be a big brother.

And I write to you now because you don’t have a clue. When I asked you if you wanted a brother or a sister, you said you wanted a basketball. Ironically, with you, your mommy said she felt like she was carrying a basketball.  

There are so many and yet still not enough words to describe our feelings about your future sibling. They will mean the world to us, just as you did. They, whether boy or girl, will never know how much they don’t have, rather that what they have is more than enough.

But today, and every day from now on, we’ll have to learn how to manage your life and a new life. We are caught— in our desires, in our choices, in our weekends, in our plans, in our wants, in your needs, in their needs – in a net of questions. We’ll have to figure out room arrangements, travel plans, money issues not just with you in mind, but with a whole other person.

But because of you, we cannot wait to try. You gave us the courage to have another. You turned our sofa into a trampoline and life kept moving. You were the future we always wanted and now we get to live it every day. And more often than not, you waited for us as we were finding our way, each mystified and confused look after another. In truth, you are our greatest adventure.

I will promise to tell you I love you enough. And I will promise to make you feel like you are still the best thing to happen to us.

I don’t know exactly where we are going, what house we will live in, what paths our careers may go, or how you’ll react to another person sharing your space, but I feel it deep in my bones that we’re headed somewhere good.

love,

daddy

 

freaking out.

My first memory of my anger is playing Monopoly with my mom during summer break. She beat me so badly that I threw the game board and her 17 hotels across the room. I stormed off and my recollections pretty much end there. I don’t remember if she got mad at me or figured it was her penance for putting a hotel on every other plot of land successfully scaring me away from a career in real estate.

Suffice it to say, I don’t play Monopoly anymore.

My parents occasionally remind me, though I don’t need the cues, that I used to explode and enigmatically break things. I would work myself up into a blind rage and only the shattering of tangible items would give the sweet release of endorphins and freedom. Freedom that was quickly followed by a consequence. I’ve been so angry that I knocked a kid out with a lunch room tray in middle school and punched a hole through double-paned glass.

I was not a bad kid, at least in hindsight, but my trail of tantrums was far and wide. Many of which I keep secret until I can fully remember which ones I’ve told my parents about and which ones I haven’t. To my future children reading this, this is why you don’t tell lies because eventually they run together.

—-

I read about terrible twos and the often-described-as-worse terrible threes. But I assumed it was rebellion in the form of “no’s” and unwillingness to listen. I thought it was touching everything on the way out of the sporting goods store and not being able to leave the grocery until a “special snack” was purchased, opened and consumed.

When Kaeden threw his first fit, his first real “run-out-of-breath-because-you-are-screaming-so loud, fists-against-any-object-within-five-feet, flying-cup-flying-food-flying-spit, snot-running-out-of-both-nostrils” fit, I knew exactly what was happening. They say an addict can spot other addicts, right?
 
The more he screamed and kicked, the more I got it. His tears of rage were me years ago. The inability to process frustration, no matter how normal, was something I wanted mightily for him to avoid.

—-

He throws fits when he wants to wear his socks on his hands, not on his feet. Or when he wants to wear the shirt he wore yesterday again today. When the radio is too quiet. Or too loud. When I tell him his shirt is red but he thinks it’s orange. Or if he wants to eat a pancake, not the one on his plate, but the one on mine. Because three minutes is too long to wait for macaroni and cheese to heat in the microwave. Or because there is no basketball on television at 5:45 in the morning. Because he doesn’t want to roll his sleeves up when he washes his hands. And then when his sleeves are wet after washing his hands. And all too often because the morning is not an appropriate time for ice cream. Or a lollipop.


When I started writing this, I only wanted to record for our future selves the many things that make Kaeden go full-moon crazy. For the record, he only throws fits about once a week. The rest are solved with a kiss, a fist bump or a lollipop. But it turned into more than that; it reminded me why I care so much when he does.

Everybody sees a two-year-old throwing typical tantrums. I see a vision of my younger self slamming a door so hard that frames shatter falling off the wall. For as long as this phase lasts, we’ve been forced to learn more about our son, his cues, his tipping points and to get creative in the resolutions. We’ve learned that there’s a science behind fits, toddler’s inability to self-regulate their emotions and how parents should lovingly guide them through.

And unlike Monopoly or any other board game, we can’t compare stacks of love units and cash them in for a quick end to this unnecessary temper tantrum.

—-

Parenthood comes with a very special kind of guilt. The kind of guilt that makes us, as adults, feel responsible for every action and inaction by our children. As another blog so matter-of-factly put it, “a guilt that terrifies you into thinking you are not only making a mess of your life, but a brand-new person’s as well.”

I’m sure like most things I do as a parent, I’m overanalyzing his temper tantrums. Most of the time, it’s simply an effect of subcortical brain activity, terrible twos and the impending terrible threes. Here’s to hoping the fours are fantastic and not like the movie series that starred Jessica Alba and still put me to sleep.  

But on the slimmest chance that these outbursts are caused by a DNA mutation that I passed along, I refuse to attach a label to it and will say I know the feeling and love him all the more.  

32 (new) things about my son, parenthood and fish tacos

Because we don’t write in his baby book, a new list of likes, dislikes, firsts and lasts just in time for Kaeden’s 32nd month of life:

1) The moments immediately after a massive fit is a narrow fulcrum in which the next 15 minutes hangs. If in the right mood, the massive fit can be parlayed into a hug and a kiss and a teaching moment. Or I can get slapped in the face and be told to “leave me alone.”

2) “Leave me alone” is Kaeden’s favorite new phrase.

3) There are fewer acts of parental sacrificial love than paying the last remnants of cash in the bank account to subject ourselves to a two-hour Yo Gabba Gabba Live concert. Screaming kids. Crying kids. Kids dressed up as characters. Parents dressed up as kids. Or is it really considered sacrifice if you enjoy it, even for a little bit?

4) If I can believe my two-year old, all he does at school is color for eight hours a day with his two best friends, Olipop and the other Kaden. Or he has learned not to tell the whole truth. See number 6.

5) Among the many household items he’s already broken, including a personalized wedding vase (in a fit of steroid-fueled rage), the most expensive is our 40-inch plasma television. Yes. We, as parents, take some of the blame. We let him play baseball in the house because we’ve endured many grueling conversations that end timeout about laying the bat down after hitting the ball. But, on this star-crossed night, he must have hit a walk-off home run because the bat flew out of his hands directly into the TV. On the other hand, if he ever plays baseball on a higher level, I’ll be reminiscing about this story for years.

6) Remember when Kaeden accidentally broke the TV, he also spent 15 minutes telling me, “I not do it.” All with a touch of sadness and a smirk. Cue my parents saying, “I told you so.”

7) Kaeden is nothing but consistent. His current loves, rather obsessions, are: Toy Story, sweet tea and carrying around DVDs.

8) Every character on Toy Story is named Buzz.

9) To a two year old, sweet tea mixed with water tastes the same as sweet tea. Sweet tea is also sometimes called lemonade. Unless he really wants lemonade. It’s confusing.

10) When he says he wants to hold a basketball, sometimes he wants to hold an actual basketball or just the Backyardigans DVD with basketball portrayed on the label.

11) His “pink” basketball is really a faded red basketball. His pink football is really a pink football for breast cancer awareness.

12) Gentleness is his best trait. On weekend mornings, he’ll quietly lean over and softly say, “time to wake up Mommy.” If he thinks you are in pain, he’ll cautiously look and say “you have boo-boo Daddy” and will kiss you as to not cause more pain.

13) After a long day of work, the best words to hear are, “Daddy and Mommy want to play Wegos (Legos). We build a castle.”

14) At what age can we officially diagnose hoarding? Kaeden sleeps at night with the following: a large Mickey Mouse, a small Mickey Mouse, a conjoined Mickey and Minnie Mouse, a brown bear, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Max (from How the Grinch Stole Christmas), Big Red, Pluto, Donald, Plex (from Yo Gabba Gabba), Brobee (from Yo Gabba Gabba), Ernie, Elmo, a plastic giraffe and polar bear (from his aforementioned Lego Duplo set), a blue blankie, a brown blankie and a personalized blankie.

15) Kaeden needs grace. Lance Armstrong needs grace. Tiger Woods needs grace. I need grace. Too many people in this world need grace. Offering grace does not disregard understanding consequences. Grace is not only unearned favor, but it is favor shown to those who has deserved the very opposite.

16) Remember when Joey Tribbiani told his date that “Joey doesn’t share food?” He obviously never lived with a two-year old. Rather Kaeden fully believes and complies with the “what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine” philosophy. Unless…

17) An easy way to not share food with my son or wife is to order fish tacos.

18) Don’t ever turn off a song before its over. Especially if its “his song.”

19) “His songs” are: Fire and Dynamite by Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, Home by Phillip Phillips and Locked Out of Heaven by Bruno Mars.

20) People that don’t have children like to compare having children to having a pet. When is the last time you had to console a visibly-shaken pet after going through a car wash? When is the last time you cried because a pet played drums to his favorite song? Oh yeah. Never.

21) When someone does something that makes you so mad, don’t bring it home. Don’t blame your spouse. Don’t blame your kids. Also don’t send that long, passive-aggressive email you wrote to the culprit.

22) Kaeden still likes to surprise us. Like when he devoured broccoli at dinner.

23) When your child does something to surprise you, act like you’ve been there. Don’t make a big deal about it. Or he’ll stop.

24) It’s impossible to rationalize Kaeden’s temper tantrums. He’s two. He cries. He makes a big deal out of little things. Some days he loves daycare. Some days he hates it. We laugh. We hug.  

25) We are a family that hugs and kisses. They make you feel safe and feel loved.

26) Everything is about love. Every movie. Every song. Every action. Every TV show. Finding Nemo. Toy Story. Lost. Biggest Loser. Star Trek. Fringe.

27) I watched the series finale of Fringe with Kaeden. Walter looked at his son, Peter and told him, “You are my favorite thing, my very favorite thing.” I could only make out Kaeden’s outline through the tears in my eyes. Kaeden asked if I was sad. I couldn’t have been happier in that moment.

28) Keep in mind Fringe was a sci-fi show that had wormholes, alternate timelines, sheep parasites, shape shifters, fast-growing embyros and exploding heads.

29) The argument over who slept less is one you’ll never win. Wake up early. Because it’s the right thing to do.

30) Kaeden won’t go to sleep without praying. Sometimes about people. Sometimes about zoo animals. Sometimes about food. Always authentic. Amen.

31) Independence is a tricky thing to wish for. Sometimes it means taking 15 minutes to watch your child try to put their own shoes on, only to watch him inevitably get mad and throw the shoes across the room.

32) Exercising with Kaeden in the room always turns into using him as a weight. 50 Kaeden squats fits nicely into my Insanity workout.

things i love as a parent.

I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby during my sophomore year of high school. I got through ten, maybe 12 pages. I can’t remember because I rarely stop reading a book unless the last sentence of the paragraph ends at the bottom of the page. I didn’t get through much of the book before I stopped reading, borrowed a Cliff Notes version of the book and BSed my way through the lit comprehension exam.

Two years ago, I found the book on the clearance rack at a discount bookstore. I was 24 and it was the holiday season. Between Kaeden’s naps and back-to-back episodes of Baby Genius, I read the book in three days. If I had the money and less insecurity, I would get half of the text tattooed on my arm.

Maybe like wine, we are better with age. Or maybe like the single twentysomethings view parents, we, parents, are boring and like to spend time reading of an alternate baby-less reality. Either way, The Great Gatsby is now my favorite book. I made it official on my Facebook profile.

Something inside me changed when I became a father. Things I never thought I’d do and words I’d never thought I say and shows I’d never thought I’d watch are now a part of our daily routine. I lost the will to pretend I don’t enjoy them. i.e. I love hopping like a frog around the living room. It beats the hell out of flipping between House Hunters and Breaking Amish on the television and it is decent good exercise. I have become more emotional. I am continually overwhelmed, often in the form of waterworks, by the fact that I get to watch another human being grow from infancy, and that he continues to give me hugs and kisses acting as if I’m a decent father.

And I enjoy the smallest things. Newfound centers of enjoyment extend outside of literary novellas.

Summer time in the bathroom. Normally this season is reserved for the sweatiest of days. But in our house, the doors only fully latch in the summer when the house and drywall and foundation expands due to the heat. As much as I love Kaeden dropkicking the bathroom door open to show me a melted Kit-Kat bar smeared on his hands, I do enjoy ten minutes of bathroom time alone.

Chain restaurants. Really it’s any place with a high chair, a kids menu, reasonable prices and some running room. Bottomless baskets of rolls and a service staff who brings out Kaeden’s plate first are a bonus.

Taking the batteries out of an annoying toy and saying it’s broken. We used to trick Kaeden into drinking milk when he asked for juice. That’s over. Now I take batteries out of remotes, cars, jukeboxes, anything that has the high probability to annoy. It’s a fleeting reminder that for now, I’m the boss. And if he ever wins an award based on intelligence, I can always tell the reporters I tricked him when he was 2.

Staying in. Our home is the only safe place that I know. It’s the only place where I don’t have to constantly worry about him knocking over precious, expensive items (of which we have none) or putting his finger in a light socket (of which they are all babyproofed). It’s where he naps the best when he actually naps and where he poops in the potty when he actually poops in the potty. Home is our safe haven; where we have the Backyardigans and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse stationed in two of our four rooms, fourteen of the only stuffed animals and characters he’d ever ask for, an endless supply of crackers and Cheerios, a place where a temper tantrum is only seen by those who dare enter the front door, a place where he knows exactly where the timeout spots are. 

a win for sleeping.

It’s not exactly how we planned it. But as goes in sports, it’s still a mark in the win column. Which is all parenting really is, a collection of hundreds of wins and losses throughout the day, right?  Last night, Kaeden fell asleep by himself for the first time in three months.

We converted the crib to a toddler bed four days after he crawled up and over the three-foot rails for the first time. In the weeks since, and the subsequent leg fracture, most of our nights and early mornings have been filled with screams and cries coming from his room.

But the lack of sleep, this seemingly-never ending nightmare was not going to beat us. We perused through dozens of sleep books and free online PDFs outlining no-mess, no-fuss, no-cry (ha!) ways of putting a child to sleep. We have Ferberized and incentivized, all to perfection. But paraphrasing the Bible, at two years old, it’s time to put down childish things and play with the big boys.

Willfully listening to a child screaming is not a pleasant experience. A litany of child sleep specialists call it “extinction.” In less Jurassic terms, he lays down, cries and eventually settles himself to sleep. It is a rather ruthlessly efficient way of doing the much-needed job of getting a child to sleep so that mommy and daddy can have alone time. Which I’m learning is a toddler’s sole occupation in disrupting.

Before bedtime, my wife explained to him that “mommy and daddy are the boss.” He smiled or smirked. I can’t remember which. I gave him a kiss and we prayed for a good night’s sleep and for baseball and football and the animals at the zoo. Some might call it tough love. I just wanted to cover all the bases.

He crawled right into bed and positioned his eight stuffed animals around the toddler bed. This is serious. He sleeps with Ernie, Elmo, Big Red from Western Kentucky University, Pluto, Mickey Mouse, Max from How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But that’s another problem for another day. As I leaned down to kiss his head, he asked for medicine. I’m not sure what medicine he thought would help or if it was a delay tactic, but I almost didn’t leave.

I rushed to the door and heard him follow. His footsteps are louder with a cast on his left leg. The screaming began. He pounded the door screaming Daddy. Mommy. He cried like he accidentally pushed the straw all the way inside his juice box. Each moment had the ability to feel like it’s the last cry for the night, the last sound until complete and utter exhaustion sets in and the pillow is his only respite. And ours, for that matter.

We used to have to walk on the other side of the house, which in a 1,000 square foot home only takes 10 steps, and close the door. We needed to put as much distance between the muffled cries and us. It was too hard. Was this torture? Will our child grow up to resent us?

Now, we can be only steps away watching Sherlock Holmes solve yet another crime because of the differing patterns of scuff marks from dress shoes. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. We feel the hurt, we’ve just learned to ignore and suppress. We don’t watch him scream on the video monitor because that would make his pain all too real and I’d prefer to not watch him go through the seven stages of grief.

Last night, the crying did not last too long. 8 minutes, 10 minutes tops. He laid back in bed and repositioned his eight furry friends in a mound along the side of his bed. It was a win and we’ll take it.

Kaeden has always been a frustrating sleeper. We’ve gone through bouts of night terrors, insomnia, 3 a.m. poop calls and mom and dad sleeping on the floor. Some nights he’s out of his bed more than he’s in it.

We do not choose the things at which our children are good and bad. Some kids are great at puzzles and others conducting train tracks around the living room. Our son struggles with consistent sleep. But that’s okay, he throws a wicked spiral and can count to 10. I guess sleep is asking for too much.

a balancing act.

Dispatch to Kaeden

This post is two years in the making, it just took that long to get honest.

I’m scared of being a terrible father. And I don’t know what took me so long to realize it.

A friend recently reminded me that our most precious resource is not something we can control. It’s not money even when it seems to cure all problems. It’s not our clothes or the amount of books on the bookcase even if my lifelong goal is have a library of congress in our guest bedroom.

But time is the most precious of all. We can’t accumulate it like cash. We can’t overpower someone with it and we don’t have control over it. We can’t recover it no matter how hard we try to turn every moment into a Facebook profile picture.

Time has passed and I didn’t expect it to vanish so quickly and without leaving me a ransom note. From day one, anybody who has been a parent for a day told us how fast it would go and embrace every moment. And for a few days, we’d revel in the ecstasy of our son’s laugh and the way his nose crinkles when we tickle his toes. Then life happened and we’d hang up on each other because he’s screaming in the background that his chicken nuggets are too hot.

Then, we hear about parents who lose children to illness and accidents and time slows down again. We become vulnerable and we ache for those parents and hug our son tightly.

It became cyclical, life happened and we do it all over again. Two or three times a month, I realize that we can’t promise our children a world full of peace and joy and happiness and I hunker down and forget the time that’s ticking away. Then I wake up and my fear is realized. I’m a bad father who let time slip away. What did I miss? What didn’t I do?

The truth about time is that there is both more than enough and never enough. It’s in the balance that I struggle.

Yet, my growth as a dad is not about learning to live in the now. It’s about learning to live with what I can’t control.

Love is a sine qua non of parenthood. Well, love and crackers. And I have love, enough to form a currency. But time looms and I can’t balance. I cannot show the high without showing the low. And I cannot teach about heroes without teaching why heroes are needed.

But my best moments as a dad are always the result of perfect timing and perfect love.

I may never be able to quiet the silly narrative, overly-judgmental voice in my head, but the clock is ticking and it doesn’t really matter. 

the washing machine, the playground and a show i’d never watch

There’s a line in Yo Gabba Gabba that says “why are you sad? We want to go to the party, the party in your tummy.” It really has nothing to do with the story. I just never expected to hear it this weekend.

—-

I was soaked and I lost my paddle. Ten minutes into our rafting trip down the famed Ocoee River, the site of the 1996 Olympics whitewater program, I went, as the locals say, “swimming.” The last thing I remember was hearing our guide yell “hit the deck” which means fall into the center of the boat, paddles up and we’ll see you on the other side. For me, there was no shiny, metaphorical or physical light or grand experience or scars I can look to with pride one day. Chicks dig scars, right?

In all my safety classes I’ve ever had, the key concept, above all else, is to stay calm. Even when water is crashing into your neck forcing your head back into the water for more. This concept works. Or worked once. The rapid was nicknamed the Washing Machine. For reference, others on the five and a half mile trip were named Grumpies, Witches Brew, Devil’s Eyebrow, Double Suck and there was a rock called Birth Control. You’d think if people are scared of whitewater rafting, they could name them after things people enjoy, like puppies, cheesecakes or Jane Austen characters.

This particular Class 3 lived up to its name. On this day, I was the lone garment in its spin cycle. The rushing water swept me out of the boat. I took lifeguard training in middle school. Don’t panic and grab anything that feels sturdy. I immediately felt the boat above. The safety rope wraps around the boat and is available to all comers, seasoned or novice. Or in this case, a guy on his second rafting adventure who chose the front seat of the boat.

I didn’t know what was happening. All I knew was to keep breathing. The rapids kept crashing for what felt like five minutes. And apparently my wife, on her first trip in whitewater, was yelling “get him.” Lifejacket or not, I dolphin-kicked my way to the surface, swaying inside the rapid like a buoy in a hurricane.

Travis, our Robert Pattinson look-alike river guide, has a pet squirrel. Which doesn’t tell you anything except he must be a calm soul. He was the first face I saw on the way to the surface. He steered us out of the Washing Machine and my dad, as he did so many times in my life, pulled me back in.

The rest of the trip was relatively calm. Nothing like winning a championship in your rookie season or being sucked in a rapid in the beginning of a three-hour trip with a sore neck to boot.

—-

The other day I nonchalantly said I wished Kaeden was crawling again. It was in reference to how things change when kids start walking.

It was Kaeden’s first sleepover. The first time, in 28 months, we’ve had the courage to leave him overnight. And my oldest sister, who is reading this in sheer frustration, called me the morning after saying he was in a bit of pain. The day before, sometime between the Washing Machine and Devil’s Eyebrow, he had caught his foot going down the slide at the playground. He said ouch a couple of times, but nothing too alarming. I thought, maybe a mild sprain. The first of many for the boy who prefers SportsCenter over cartoons and NFL-sized footballs over trucks.

I’ve seen my son do a lot of things. Some things we keep private, but I’ve seen him fall off a bar stool and the kitchen counter. He climbs the wooden retaining wall at the park with scary ease. Getting hurt on a slide is relatively low on the ouch-o-meter.

But after taking him home, several hours of not walking and a forty minute span of not wanting to get out of bed, we took him the emergency room. Both the doctor and nurse knew pretty immediately. He fractured his left tibia, otherwise known as the strongest and most important weight bearing bone in the body. One ER doctor and one pediatric orthopedist later, his leg is stuck in cast minimum for three weeks. No baths, no last-minute trips to the swimming pool and no playing in the rain.

He was back to crawling. And scooting, something he rarely did when he was a baby. He made my nonchalant dream a reality. Yet he knows how to talk this time around. And hearing “daddy, I need help” is both the sweetest and dare I say, frustrating way to know your child really still needs you.

—-

When we planned this weekend, I expected to have a great story about whitewater rafting and how 680.7 mile drive should not be done in one day and that ocoee means “apricot place” in Cherokee. I could have written that story before I even experienced it.

There’s an old adage that says “God laughs at our plans.” Unpredictably is life. I learned that rearing kids in this young millennium. Nothing that happened this weekend, or even this month, is unavoidable. Not being sucked out of a boat and into a rapid that . Not Kaeden fracturing his leg. Not the transmission overhaul that cost three house payments. Not Kaeden’s ear drum leaking green discharge last month. Not locking our keys in the house a few weeks ago.

Unless we blew a giant bubble and lived inside, none of that is unavoidable. Living a life of meaning and adventure takes reaching out. It takes silencing a clamoring universe and living with the white noise.  

No I don’t understand it and nor should I. To actually understand it is to submerse ourselves in it and I can’t do that. We don’t have the time. We are living for today. For the next naptime. For the next paycheck. For the next quiet five minutes to pray in the bathroom. And for the next one to two weeks, the next stationary activity that doesn’t involve play doh, puzzles, coloring books or legos. Maybe wheelchair basketball?

—-

I have a rule: no Yo Gabba Gabba in the house. The show is frustratingly painful to watch. To the detractors, pro-Gabba Gabbaians say it’s visually stimulating and great for the kid’s imaginations. That can be said for a tie-dye shirt and a box of tissues. I’m okay with Backyardigans, a show with anthropomorphic animals or Jake and the Never Land Pirates, a show in which an old man dresses up and teases and tortures young children who live alone.

But I draw the line at Yo Gabba Gabba.

We were in the middle of a twenty fit tantrum. And it all came to a head; the pain, the inability to move, a long stay in the emergency room and the lack of an appetite. I had the trump card. The one thing I said I’d never watch, the one line I’d never cross.

“Want to watch Yo Gabba Gabba?” The crying stopped. I think my own heart stopped. My wife looked at me. I knew what she was thinking, “I knew you’d cave.” He looked at me with bewilderment, forgetting about the pain for a minute.

A few minutes later, holding a plate of Play Doh, a cup of milk, a bottle of water and Mickey Mouse, DJ Lance Rock sang a ridiculous song about a party in his tummy. There has never been a happier kid.

—-

Everything we have is more than we need even if its less than we want. And even if its watching Yo Gabba Gabba with a two-year old with a fractured leg with a dad with a sore neck.