We thought we were out of the woods.  We thought the days of coloring on the walls were behind us.  We bought a pad of art paper so Jimmy would have a specific place for all his drawings and a specific case for all the various supplies – the idea was to deter him from drawing on the wall.  And it worked…until he figured out how to outsmart us.  Sometimes, you just have to smile at the ingenuity of a kid when they get bent on having heir art on the wall.  This was one of those times.  At our house, it isn’t uncommon to see artwork magneted to the refrigerator or even, if it particularly good or shows a distinct step in the process of artistic development, framed and on the wall.  So at first, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but then I took a closer look.

Jimmy had used the special paper and drew a gorgeous butterfly for Lois.  Then he glued it to the wall.  Not tacks, not tape.  Glue. Specifically, it was Elmer’s White Glue.  Once I calmed down, I called him into the hallway.

“Hey, Budders.  What’s that?”

“It’s a butterfly, Dad.  See the wings?”

“Yeah, Jimmy, I see the wings.  But do you see anything that might be wrong with it?”

He thinks for a minute.  “YES!  There’s no frame.”

Fatherhood is full of surprises and unexpected laughter.  I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always respond properly when something happens that is so nonsensical that it defies reason.  But one thing is for certain – just as he is continually learning the ins and outs of life, so am I.  He and I are the same, I’m just older and have more experience.  When I get frustrated with being a daddy or upset for logic-defying, childish shenanigans, I have to remember that I’m learning, too…

Babies and Whistler Bombs

This afternoon’s drive had been a nice one – up Highway 50, out of the city and into Sacramento’s satellite communities in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The air was warm, the radio was loud, and I was engrossed in my book while Lois drove.  I was half-paying attention to the conversation, but there was a moment when the bomb’s whistle started making noise.

The innocent-enough conversation start with a chat about a friend’s baby.  The hair on the back of my stood up because, with inquisitive as Lana is at her mere 7.5 years, I knew where it was heading.  She’s been asking questions for the better part of a year now, and Lois answers them as succinctly as possible.  Me? I dance.  Breaking, ballet, lindy hop, salsa…I’ll even throw in a cabbage patch and a krump so I don’t have to answer those questions.  If that doesn’t work, I’ll change the subject so fast it’ll give you whiplash (by the way, I learned today that 7 year-old girls have no interest in talking baseball when there’s already a conversation about babies going on).  I know that there’s nothing to be afraid of or embarrassed about, but discussing things of a sexual nature with my daughter is not something I wanted to do.

Jim Burns, author of a series of books that teaches parents how to discuss “topics of a sensitive nature” with children, would have laughed at me, though ultimately understood my discomfort.  We met briefly at a marriage seminar a few years ago – we shared an elevator at a hotel.

He asked, “How are you guys enjoying the ‘retreat’ so far?”

“We’re enjoying it a lot.”

“Great!  You guys should try the waffles in the restaurant in the morning.  They’re amazing.” And that was that.

I’ve read the book series and I agree that they’re all age appropriate and full of useful information.  But I must admit that when the time came for The Question, I freaked out.  The whistling bomb was suddenly silent then from the back of the van, “But how does the baby get into the woman’s womb?  Does it just randomly appear there?”

Lois just chuckled and said, “Not exactly.  We’ll talk about it later.”  But Lana pressed.

“Why not now?  I’m just curious about the way the world works.  How’d Jimmy get into your tummy?”

I kid you not – if we hadn’t been moving at 55mph, I would have jumped out of the car and run into the hills.  I was tempted to do it anyway.  Instead, though, I let out a whimper.  I am just not ready for this.  But Lana, being Lana, picked up on my discomfort.

“Geez, Daddy, what are you worried about?”

“Nothing, sweetie, I just wasn’t ready for this conversation, that’s all.”

“Well, I doubt you’d be uncomfortable if you were a girl.  But you’re a boy and you’ll never have a baby come out of your vagina because you don’t have one.”

This was also the first time that I’ve ever second-guessed our decision to teach our kids the appropriate terms for our private parts.  We felt it was important because a teacher-friend of ours was caught in a horrible position of a student continually telling her that his “grandpa petted [his] puppy.”  It happened most every Monday, as the boy spent a lot of weekends at the grandparents’ house.  When it came time for parent-teacher conferences, the teacher made a point to ask after the family dog.  The only problem was that the family didn’t own a dog.  ”Puppy” was the name that they had taught the boy to call his penis.  He was being molested for months, reaching out for help, but no one knew because of the code name.  Ultimately, obviously, I’m glad our children know the proper names, but in that moment, when Lana identified that I don’t have a vagina, nor would I ever be having a baby, I wanted to find a hole to crawl into.  No amount of dancing was going to get me out of the car.  Thankfully, I have an amazing bride.

“Lana, honey, I’ll be happy to talk to you about that some other time.  Daddy is a little uncomfortable with that topic, so you and I will talk about later, okay?”

“Daddy’s a dork.  But okay.  I don’t want to make him uncomfortable.”

At that very moment, I felt like I was Neo in The Matrix when Agent Smith unloaded a clip of 9mm bullets right at him.  I simply bent back and, with a flamboyant waving of my arms, dodged every bullet.  Like a boss!

It isn’t that I’m fearful of grossing my daughter out, nor that I’m a big weenie when it comes to serious discussions.  It is that there are some things that I’m just not ready for.  That is one of them.  In a sense, I feel like if she’s “in the know” about sex and sexuality, Pandora’s box will ultimately be opened.  The thought of a boy-crazy Lana is stomach turning (seriously, as I was writing that, I threw up a little in my mouth) – I can’t fathom that I am old enough to have a daughter who gets crushes.  I thought I had a least another 10 years before that happened.  In the meantime, though, I’m going to partner with my wife and set the best example possible for her in every way.  We’re committed to giving her a stable relationship to look upon for reference.  We’re committed to a home environment where she knows that she is loved, unconditionally.  And, lastly, we’re committed to bringing her up with a church family that helps us teach her and Jimmy good manners, proper actions, and who will help us give her a moral compass that leads her to a fulfilling, inspired, amazing life.

With that being said, I challenge you, my reader(s), how did you handle The Question?  If you’ve got kids who are older than mine, how did The Question compare to The Talk?  I’d love to hear from you!

Gardening in Shade – A Beautiful Way to (Not) Grow

Considering I grew up on the Central Coast of California, the fact that gardening is relatively new to me has a tendency to shock some people.  In Santa Maria, my hometown, strawberries are grown over every hill around the valley.  In nearby Guadalupe artichokes can be seen sprouting up, but are always lopped down to go to market before they’re allowed to bloom their gorgeous purple flower.  And it seems that a majority of people have a backyard garden that makes farmer’s markets all but unnecessary.  I distinctly remember my friend Ryan Schneider’s mom giving me a zucchini as big as my arm and a recipe for a casserole that would get entered into the family cookbook as “Nuke-a-Zuke.”  But at my house?  Not so much…

Most of us can be found in a variety of places on the scale of green-thumbery, ranging from avocado (growing “champions”) to nearly brown (growing “challenged”).  My mom’s thumb is black.  When my grandmother died, our friends sent silk flowers to the house knowing that too much death in one place would only add to our depression.  Needless to say, with such a Harbinger of Plant Perdition in the family a backyard garden was out of the question.  We tried, once or twice, but simple things like “planting seedlings in direct sunlight” and “watering” just didn’t seem to make sense.  In the end, we ate a lot of Mrs. Schneider’s extras and veggies fresh from the freezer.  As great as that was, though, that wasn’t what I wanted for my kids.

Lois and I waited for years to have a home with a yard big enough to plant a garden and I was determined to break the family curse.  The fall before the first spring in our new house, we got three DIY gardening books and studied on the various aspects of growing our own food.  We drew maps, diagrams, built spreadsheets for growth charts, and determined a watering schedule to keep everything alive and thriving.  Three months later, we had an explosive garden with tomatoes, zukes, cukes, spaceship squash, beans, and a whole smattering of other stuff to eat.  At that point, it seemed as if we’d turned the genetic dysfunction of the inability to grow plants into a thing of the past.  And then came this year.

We wanted to give the kids more room in the backyard to play.  Our backyard is pretty big, but we’ve recently made some friends who have three kids and when we’re all together more room would definitely be welcome.  Over the winter, we decided to build some planter boxes and move the whole garden back ten feet.  On the clear days in winter, the new location has full sunlight all morning and into the afternoon.  Right in front of the chicken coop and adjacent to the trees, the raised beds were sure to at least double our yield.  But then came the spring.

The trees that I mentioned are not small bonsai trees or even weeping plums (that top out at about six feet tall).  No.  They’re 80′-90′ fruitless mulberry trees that not only regrow whatever leaves were lost the previous autumn, but grow new sucker branches each year, sometimes 10′ long.  And this spring, all of those leaves grew in over our new garden beds.  Then the suckers filled in wherever sunlight was managing to squeak through.  Now are garden is pretty much shaded from sun-up to sun-down.

So this year, things are different from last; the ghost of my mother’s thumb still seems to be wreaking havoc on the foliage in our yard and where my neighbors are producing fruit by the bucketsful, our seedlings have barely grown at all.  But there must be a silver lining to every raincloud – I’m the only guy I know who can spend all day in garden and not get a sunburn.

Ethan, My 5 Year-Old Son, Graduates with Honors, Cords, and Colors

This is truly, truly sad!  All three people who read this blog probably assumed I meant that Ethan is a super-genius.  If charming the ladies with his red hair and blue eyes counts towards MENSA status, he’d stand a chance, but intelligence-speaking, he is strikingly average (and, according to comedian Bob Smiley, that’s okay!).  The commencement exercises that we experienced today was none other than a preschool graduation.  I’m not going to lie to you, as I never will, but I’m split about 80/20 on the appropriateness of this; on one hand, the realist in me points out that graduation should be a celebration of accomplishing something dramatic.  On the other, though, the kids were sure cute.

It used to be commencement exercises were reserved for high school, college, and post-graduate work. Those three things are truly accomplishments.  In high school, the celebration is for actually surviving (the teenaged angst, frustration, the opposite sex’s use of our hearts as a trampoline, oh…and 13 years of [mostly] successful education, too).  College, again, is about survival…you put in your seat time, take the tests, successfully jump through all the hoops the administration office requires and you’re ready to start a career (or, in the case of 85% of this year’s graduates, return home to mooch off Mom and Dad).  Post grad studies are a big deal, as well.  You’ve actually found something you love to learn about and want to absorb all you can.  Most people who attain a Master’s degree move on and actually make a difference in the world (except History Guy who focused in dead languages…he’s working at the bank, thinking up creative ways to overcharge us with extra fees).  For a job well done, and another chance to wear a goofy hat that wouldn’t make it anywhere near Milan, Paris, or even Toledo, ceremonies were held to commemorate these milestones.

At kindergarten orientation at Ethan’s new school, we were told that at the end of the year, there would be a graduation ceremony held in the multi-purpose room.  It was to be the night before the 5th grade graduation, which preceded the 8th grade graduation ceremonies.  So now there’s a graduation for preschool, kindergarten, going into and out of middle school/junior high, PLUS all the ones that were there before.  Why?  It doesn’t make any sense to me.

I love Jimmy with all my heart but at this point he hasn’t really accomplished anything.  Yes, he’s learned his letters, but just about pooped a purple Twinkie when Lois and I sang Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and the Alphabet Song concurrently.  He usually remembers to lift the toilet seat and can aim pretty accurately.  And he knows a majority of the colors in the rainbow (he usually says, “Inigo” instead of “indigo” which causes the wife and I always launch into Princess Bride quotes).  But what has he accomplished?  Why are we celebrating this?

I guess my main worry is that we’re devaluing high school’s big moment.  5 year-old kids wearing pink and blue caps and gowns?  Really?  Why is that on equal par with the 18 year-old in my youth group who has had to fight tooth and nail to attain the grades needed to graduate and get into college?  It doesn’t make sense to me.  For a little kid, the world is pretty much handed to them – we prepare their food, do their laundry, and tuck them in after bedtime stories.  Most people, though, get to a point in their lives when their parents load them with these responsibilities.  Then there’s puberty, growing pains, romantic attractions, and some teens have to get jobs.  Battling through school with all of these things contending for attention is difficult and it is an accomplishment.  When the biggest problem of your day is that Garret won’t play with you because he thinks your shoes are farting when you walk isn’t that big of a deal.

But then, again, those kids sure are cute!  The pictures are priceless and Ethan was asked by his teacher to be the flag bearer.  That was a pretty big honor, apparently.  All of the old ladies at the church (where the preschool is) were fawning over him and he loved every minute of that.  The cupcakes and cookies and punch were good, too.

In the end, I don’t know if the cuteness-factor is worth devaluing future, real accomplishments.  But even if it does, when he walked in, American flag in hand, looking like a mini-human being, chest out, smile pasted ear-to-ear, my heart swelled with pride.  I don’t know exactly what it is you accomplished, Budders, but well done.  Well done.

Can True Masculinity Be Found?

I typed “define: masculinity” into Google earlier today because I’m prepping a youth group lesson about what it is to be a man.  The search engine came back with the vaguest of vague answers.  It said, “the properties characteristic of the male sex.”  While that seems pretty straight forward, the question begs to be asked, “What characteristics is it talking about?”  Physical, emotional, spiritual, mental?  I thought it was a pretty weak answer, so I am going to attempt to answer my own question.  What is an acceptable definition of “masculinity”?

The first thing that comes to mind is Mr. Caveman himself, Neanderthal.  Whenever I think about this guy, I see a hairy dude dragging some beautiful Neandergal by the hair to his cave.  He’s got a club in the other hand to ward off any bambiraptors that might be lurking in nearby bushes, looking for an easy meal.  While that might have worked for whatever generation of development that was, when I try to envision myself dragging Lois across the ground similarly, I laugh.  She’d stand up, grab the club, and beat me senseless with it. 

Next, I think about the things that are renowned as “manly:” cars, beer, fishing, hunting, whittling, bowling, cooking outdoors.  Suddenly, I picture myself wearing a tore up trucker’s hat, a too-small white t-shirt, and pair of jeans with a whole mess of unidentifiable stains.  That’s right.  Redneck.  Somewhere, Jeff Foxworthy is laughing (because he knows it’s true!).  There does seem to be a stigma associated with the aforementioned hobbies, especially when they’re all rolled up together; Must be a knuckle-dragging, no-tooth-having, NASCAR-loving fella.  Some would even go so far as to say that the modern redneck is nothing more than a more upright Neanderthal, though with a better vocabulary.  “Ugghh!” has turned into, “Hey, woman!  Gimme a beer.”  While I certainly don’t believe that all rednecks are like that, there does seem to be a propensity for that stereotype to dominate our thoughts when we think of those manly hobbies.

There are a lot of people, too, who think that the polar opposite of a redneck is masculine.  Book-smart, sharp dressers, who know how mix a variety of drinks and have a good time.  There’s something to be said for a guy who can feel comfortable wearing a blazer and jeans or polo and shorts.  A man of intelligence and who can hold a conversation about anything is a pretty good guy to have around.  He knows and abides by common manners and social mores, but in the same respect, that same guy might have a hard time getting his hands dirty; no gardening, changing of his own brake pads, or anything else that might mess with his manicure.

This endeavor, to find out what masculinity actually is, seems hopeless.  So I turn to where every guy should be able to turn for answers on manliness.  My dad. 

Jonathan is the kind of guy who would never think about dragging my mom around by the hair.  He has too much respect for her.  But, he can change his own oil and he can have talk to anyone about anything and sound intelligent while doing so.  We went fishing a few times when I was a kid – enough to make it memorable and so that I learned I was important to him.  But most of all, I remember my dad as being fair.  He wasn’t afraid to apologize if he was wrong about something and he expected my brother and me to own our behavior, for the good and the bad.  He gave to my brother and me with all that he had and some that he didn’t.  We were never without what we needed for our respective activities, all while he wore socks with holes in them because buying new ones wasn’t really an option.  That, I think, is the embodiment of masculinity – putting others before yourself.

It doesn’t matter what your hobbies are, what you wear, or how you speak.  Samuel Johnson said, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”  So when you’re looking to define yourself and construct a definition of masculinity that you and your sons can look to as a litmus test, look inside the man you respect most.  Find out what it is that makes you respect him, then emulate those qualities.  If more parents took the time to teach masculine behavior to boys in our culture, the men of tomorrow would be worthy of being looked up to.

An Untapped Source of Green Energy…

Kids are a marvel of the Lord’s engineering.  They’re like little people.  They have two legs, two arms, ten fingers and toes, and all the other appendages that their moms and dads do.  So weird!  The one thing that is different, though, is their ability to have an endless supply of energy.  I’ve often said, even before saying it was cool, that if there was a way to harness their energy, we could power a city. My thought was attach electrical doohickeys or magnetic sprockets or solar widgets to a teeter-totter or swing set and let their motion do all the work.  Turns out, Hyundai and some other smarter-than-me guys had the same idea, put their corporate muscle behind it, and created a concept for an energy-inducing play place.  Good for them…enjoy spending my millions, guys.

Isn’t that the way it is, though?  How many of us have had a brilliant idea, only to have it pooped on by those we share it with?  No joke, I had this idea in the 5th grade!  I remember telling my teacher we should attach some levers and pulleys and stuff to the swing set and the log roller at school to generate the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to power a school for a day.  She poopooed the idea, saying that because there was no way store the energy long-term, it was impractical.

The point of this story isn’t that I’m the original hipster (trying to create greenergy before it was cool), but that kids have seemingly endless amounts of energy!  Where does it come from?  I eat the same food as my children (Lana, 7, and Jimmy, 5).  In fact, I eat more of it.  Going by that video we watched in elementary school about nutrition and how our body turns food into fuel, I should be a perpetual motion machine.  But, alas, I start to fade around 10pm every night.

Yesterday afternoon, Lana and Jimmy had apparently started to randomly photosynthesize sunlight or something.  They were out of control.  As my dad said of my brother and me many times, “It appears they have been vaccinated with phonograph needles.”  So how did this Dad of the Year handle the situation?  He went into hiding.  My post from my Facebook last night: Lana and Jimmy are on FIRE tonight.  They seem to be making noise simply to make noise and are being absolutely crazy. I’m claiming sanctuary in the bedroom until bedtime.

To some, that appears cowardly.  To others, weak-minded.  To Call of Duty players it is apparently the wussiest of all the wussiest manuevers possible.  Any real man, though, like Army-hardened war general Norman Schwarzkopf, would tell you that if you’re outmanned, outgunned, and outsmarted, the smart thing to do is to retreat and live to fight another day.  Had I been unsuccessful in a bid to get them calmed down, I might have had a nervous breakdown.  Instead, I let the big artillery handle it.  The wife.  Lois can handle the kids’ energy…I cannot.  I know not what kind of sorcery this is, but I do know my limitations.  So…I hid.  It was a smart move, in my book.

Suffice it to say, I lived to write another day.  So did Lana and Jimmy.  And for that, we’re all incredibly thankful.

Granddad’s Tool Box

Granddad’s Tool Box.  Why would a 33-year-old man choose such a name for his blog?  The answer is simple.  I remember looking into my grandpa’s tool chest and seeing an absolute menagerie of stuff: nails, screws, sockets, awls, screwdrivers, sandpaper, lighter fluid, and who knows what else. Simply stated, it seemed to not only be different every time I opened it up, but there always something new, too.  Just like my plan for this blog.  A better name might be “The Potpourri Files” or something like that, but to be honest, it’s a little too chick-ish and I needed something manly.  What is more manly than a) my grandpa and b) a friggin’ tool box?

In truth, my plan is to pontificate about life, as I see it.  I’m a daddy, a husband, a youth pastor, and I have been a teacher, bus driver, police cadet, carpet cleaner, tour guide, actor, outside, cold-calling salesman, lifeguard, and pizza delivery guy.  I am an expert at nothing, but good at a lot.  My family seems to think that if there was a doctorate available in Trivial Knowledge, I could challenge every course and test and be given the PhD without batting an eye.

Whatever the case, with irons in so many fires, I have a lot to say about many things.  I don’t expect that you’ll like some of it, but keep your comments constructive and insightful.  “YOU SUCK!” shows you have about as much intelligence as a softball.  But a well-written challenge or question is always accepted.  We can’t grow as people if conversations are one-sided.  I’m open of differing opinions, but be respectful about it. 

Lastly, on this opening blog that probably no one will read as it is the first and I’ve yet to build up my cult-like following, a bit about me.  I’m irreverent about pretty much anything except God.  I like to challenge people and ideas.  I’m a gentleman who is striving to teach my son to be the same – I considered it a personal victory the other day when he opened the door before his sister, stepped aside, and waved her in with a bow…a little melodramatic, but monkey-see, monkey-do.  I’m real about real life.  I don’t have an answer for every question the kids in my youth group ask me and I often times answer their questions with, “I’m sorry.  I don’t know.”  Thanks to a strong upbringing, I’m not afraid to admit that I was wrong and to apologize for being a jackwagon, if in fact I was one.  I have a hard time, though, apologizing for something when I don’t feel I was in the wrong.  I enjoy a beer now and again, but also enjoy pirate juice…aka rum.  Haitian rum is the best I’ve ever had and it makes exceptionally good rum-and-Cokes.

So if you tune in to my Bat Channel each day, you’re going to read the thoughts of a worldly irreverant youth pastor (the only one that I know of that has ever failed Theology 1 in his master’s courses) who has an opinion on all the mundane things that happen in life.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll read some of my ficitional writing, should my fingers dance their way across the keyboard to create something worthwhile.

I hope you enjoy it…