Tag: Kids

Last Night

Last night was a fun night. A number of the ladies of the game night group went out to dinner together, so one of my oldest and best friends ever, Larry, and I hung out at his house. It was kinda like old times except it wasn’t. This time we were joined by a six year old. Instead of the usual stressing about life and the trials and tribulations of taking a shot at the whole adulting thing, we watched Larry’s son drive his RC car up and down the driveway. It was great!

We took a shot at watching Highlander while editing it for television on the fly. You edit movies on the fly through the use of the fast forward function, reaching out and covering little peoples’ eyes, and strategic use of singing, “La La La!” really loud. We were successful for a good part of the movie, but once you get into the last third of it the intensity ramps up, as does the violence, so we stopped. It’s okay, Highlander will still be there the next time. Someday that six year old little man will be old enough to sit on the couch next to his old man and watch the greatest movie even made about an immortal sword fighter from 16th century Scotland and his adventures in New York in 1985. After all, there can be only one.

The initial plans for last night also included Mike the Lizardfish Bass Player, but he had spent the previous two days on top of a mountain and probably needed some sleep… and maybe some Tylenol or something. That just means we have to try it again soon.

As I was getting ready to leave, Larry’s son told me I should just stay over. “You can have your own room,” he said. He’s the same age now that my step daughter was when I first came into their lives. If you could go back in time to any point prior to 2007 and ask me what I think about kids… my response probably wouldn’t have been all that positive. Not bad, really, just indifferent. I didn’t think I wanted kids. I had almost no experience with them. A few little cousins and small amounts of time with friends’ kids. Not enough to form an informed opinion.

Today, I have two step kids, three nephews, one niece, and a whole pile of friends with kids of their own. Ask me how I feel about kids now? I’ll tell you. They are the best thing that could ever have happened to our universe. My step kids… I can’t rave about them enough. There are no adjectives in the English language that can accurately describe just how much I love those two people. I don’t know how I got so damn lucky. I mean first I meet Jen and fall in love with her, then her kids are both superhuman amazing? What did I do to deserve this, and how can I guarantee that it will last forever?

Thanks to Larry and his son for having me over last night. I had a lot of fun. It was great to see you guys again.

Know what else is great? When I got home I had to bring the trash barrels in from the street. As I was carrying them up to the garage, my beloved bride, Jen pulled into the driveway. We were about three minutes away from getting home at exactly the same time. If you didn’t know better, you’d think we were meant to be. You’d be right, we were meant to be.

Tonight’s Events

Tonight has been interesting. After work I went to a spelling Bee. Both kids won their English class spelling Bees and earned the chance to compete for best in the school. They did not win, but they both did a great job. My step daughter the eighth grader made it through three rounds, and my step son the sixth grader made it through five. I’m very proud of both of them.

When I got home Jen was working on her computer in the living room so I went down cellar to watch a bit of the Bruins game. There I found a bit of a surprise…. Water. Three large puddles. It seems that while the Patriots and their deflated balls were beating the Colts in the pouring rain, some of that rain came in through the cellar window. I shop vac’d up the worst of it, but I can only imagine how wet it was on Sunday night.

And that, loyal readers, was my Tuesday night.

Best Thing Ever

I am pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that one of the main reasons I wanted to play in a band again was jealousy.

Both of my step kids have been playing piano for years. They’ve both dabbled in saxophone too, and my step daughter is very active in her school chorus, while my step son plays bells in his school band. He has also recently started taking guitar lessons. His teacher took a few of the students and formed them into a band. They rehearse on Saturdays and are going to play some Christmas music at an upcoming recital. Their big number is “Jingle Bell Rock”.

The first time I sat in the hallway listening to them play I decided it was time for me to get back into the game again. No more sitting on the bench for this fat boy.

Anyway, last night was my step daughter’s school chorus holiday concert. My wife, step son, and I were sitting together enjoying the show when the select chorus started singing “Jingle Bell Rock”.

That was the moment when the Best Thing Ever happened.

When the song began my step son smiled like he was going to split in half. He was getting a serious thrill out of hearing (what he probably thinks of as) his song. Then it happened. The little rocker dude started air guitaring. Like a Boss. Even better? With his left hand he was fingering the chord changes. He was air guitaring the actual chords!

Like I said, Best Thing Ever.

Mondays Suck

Today is Monday and it is sure turning into a major league suck of a day. It’s not because of anything that’s going on today, quite the opposite. Things have mostly gone well today.

Our Monday morning kid schedule now involves leaving ridiculously early so a certain honors band member can get to pre-school rehearsal. That means I have a chance to get to work super early. It also means I can get to work early enough to watch the previous night’s episode of The Walking Dead on my phone while sitting in the car. I did that a couple of times last year using my old iPhone 5. I did it for the first time using my new humongous iPhone 6 Plus this morning and damn it made a difference. I had the entire #BobBQ on the giant new screen and it was awesome sauce.

But if the actual events of this Monday aren’t the reason why this particular Monday is such a jerk, then what’s wrong?

I’ll tell you.

It’s because of last night.

My step daughter has been developing this weird hang up about sleep. She gets really freaked out if she can’t fall asleep at night. I’m not talking about insomnia, I’m talking about a 13 year old kid who has a rocket scientist of a brain and who once in a while likes to sleep late on weekend mornings. Yesterday she slept pretty late, and when bed time came around she wasn’t tired enough to fall asleep again. The result? She was so scared about not being able to go to sleep that her mind raced in a million directions (which made it worse) and eventually she started to make herself actually physically sick. It was just an upset stomach, but I have no doubt it was stress related.

We talk about this a lot these days, and my take is that her occasional inability to go to sleep right away is normal. Absolutely 100% normal. I expect that every kid in the known universe experiences the same thing at least once in a while. Hell, every grown up does too. It happens to me all the time.

I used to try and explain it to her, but she would be so upset that I might as well have been speaking Swahili. Now I have a different approach. Now I just casually say things like, “Oh well. Go read a book until you nod off.” She’ll ask what happens if she doesn’t nod off. I respond with something like, you’ll go to bed early tomorrow. Usually if I go super casual, she’ll stop worrying and think that maybe it’s not that big a deal. Last night that didn’t happen. Last night she was nauseous. Now, she did spend the weekend in the house with her mother who is dealing with something that looks like the flu, and as I’ll explain later she wasn’t the only one with an upset stomach last night.

So while I was sure her stomach distress was stress related, it was definitely there. We had nothing in the house that could help so I went to CVS. This is about 10:30 last night. An hour after her bed time, and probably half an hour after I was ready to go to sleep. I got her some Pepto and by 11:00 she had take a dose… a small dose. I was still being as casual about the whole thing as I could, and was joking about how bad Pepto tastes when the night got really weird. That was the moment my step son came into her bed room asking me to get him some warm milk because he couldn’t sleep either. This was a new one at our house. He usually drops off nice and fast. Of course, as he gets older he too is discovering the joys of sleeping late on a Sunday, and that morning he had slept later than I’d ever seen him.

I told him he didn’t need warm milk. All he needed was to just unwind. I told him to grab a book and just read it until he dropped off. That’s one great thing about both of my step kids. They are super avid readers. Give them a good book and all the world’s troubles can melt away. He wasn’t upset in the same way his sister was, he was mad. “Urgh, why did I let myself sleep late today”, he said. I put a stop to that thinking as quick as I could. There was nothing to get mad about. Sometimes, people like to sleep late, and sometimes people have trouble falling asleep at night. It’s nothing to get mad about, it happens to everyone alive. Absolutely every single one of us.

As he went back to bed, it sort of set his sister back a little. She was freaked out again. She said that she didn’t like being alone in the house. She meant that she didn’t like being the only one awake. I asked her if I, fully dressed having just come home from the store, looked like someone ready for bed? I told her that there were four of us in the house, and three of us couldn’t sleep. She wouldn’t be alone that night, literally or figuratively. I think that helped. She relaxed a little and picked up a book.

Of course this whole thing had me so would up that there was no way I was getting to sleep any time soon. I unloaded the dishwasher and then scoured the house looking for dirty dishes. I did a quick cleaning of the living room, just straightening things up a little. I made my lunch for Monday, which I just finished a minute ago, and I took a dose of Pepto for myself. Why? I think it’s weight watcher’s simply filling’s fault. You see, that program lets me eat peanuts. In the last few weeks I’ve been hitting the peanuts pretty hard. On Sunday I went a touch overboard and I think it made me a little queasy. I eventually did go back to bed, but it was a little after midnight before I dropped off, and then I was up again briefly at 1:30, and then the alarm clock went off at 5:00.

So my Monday isn’t sucking due to anything that’s gone down on Monday, it’s sucking because there was almost no sleep on Sunday. I suggest that if everyone in the industrialized world would just go home and nap for 2-3 hours, then this particular Monday would improve greatly. It would still suck, it is still a Monday after all, but it would be better.

First Day of School

Just yesterday I met my wife’s kids for the first time.  There was a six year old who had just started first grade, and a four year old pre-schooler.  Somehow, just hours later, we have two middle school kids starting eighth and sixth grade respectively.  One of them is even a teenager!

Where the hell did the time go?

Wish my wonderful, brilliant, amazing step kids a happy first day of school.  Only 179 school days left until summer vacation!

Bikes

I’m working from home today and the kids are here with me.  It’s the first time all of the schedules have worked out this way and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the last Thursday of their summer vacation.

They spent most of the day doing what most kids prefer doing during summer vacation:  They sat on the couch watching Disney Channel On-Demand.  They may have snuck in a Disney movie on Netflix too.  Not sure about that.

Anyway, round about 3:30 (half an hour ago) they decided to go for a bike ride.  Excellent.  They both have two year old brand new bikes that if they have been used more than twice (hence my calling them two years old AND brand new) I’ll eat my hat.  I told them to check for flat tires, knowing full well that there would be four of them, and that there is a bike pump out there with their helmets.  Twenty minutes later they come in and tell me that they can’t figure out the pump. 

The pump is as simple as a bike pump can be.  Put the nozzle on, clamp it down, pump, take the nozzle off.  They couldn’t figure it out.  I think they may have been trying to put the nozzle over the air tube’s cap.  I demonstrated and came back inside.  10 minutes later I get called out again.  They still can’t figure it out.  When they take the pump off of one of the tires it goes flat again.  I did it for them, and I think there was a leak in there somewhere, but it was really just a matter of pulling the two pieces apart quickly and putting the cap on. 

My first thought through all of this was, these are the two smartest kids I’ve ever met (and I grew up with a lot of really, really smart kids) and they can’t figure this out?  Has Disney Channel melted their brains?

No, that can’t be it.  Next I started trying to think of how I learned to use a bike pump.  Someone must have demo’d it to me at some point.  But who?  And when?  And how?

There are two morals to this story.  One is to stop being an asshole and taking for granted that the kids know everything.  They know a ton of stuff about a ton of stuff, but they don’t know everything, and just because you were bike riding 10 hours a day when you were eight years old doesn’t mean that two genius level kids who barely ever ride bikes will know what you knew.

The second moral is… You’re getting old and forgetting stuff.  Stop doing that!

Lights Out

I’m tired, so tired. It’s bed time for ol’ Robbie and it ain’t ever 9:00 yet.

I wanted to get a ton of music done today. I got some, but not a ton. There’s another song ready to mix, and I added two more (bad) songs to the list. Forward progress, my friends.

Tomorrow should be music free. We get to drive through the wilderness to get the kids at camp. The last two nights have sucked without having them here. We will make up for it tomorrow night at the camp fire. I must check my camera’s battery!

Third Annual Really Sad Day

For the third consecutive year we are celebrating the Really Sad Day. By celebrating I really mean we are bummed out majorly.

The kids are leaving for a week at camp today. Dad is taking them there. Mom and I are going to pick them up for a short visit before they go, and then we’ll pick them up at the end of the week.

Because of some vacation schedule shuffling, this weekend is a Dad weekend, and so is most of next weekend. We’ll get them at camp and then bring them back to his house the next morning. That means we only technically will be without them for our two days during the week, but still… it’s one thing when they are at Daddy’s, two towns away. It’s another when they are half way to Albany.

Welcome to the Third Annual Really Sad Day. I hope this week goes by fast.

Last Day of School

I got to wish the kids a happy last day of school today.

Imagine it… having half of June, all of July, and most of August off.

If only the American workforce could get the same summer vacation as American school kids. That would be so sweet. I’m indescribably jealous.