Life and Limb

The hospital across the street from Widget1’s new school should have been a warning sign. On the first day of kindergarten, my daredevil son fell off the monkey bars and broke his elbow. The teacher emphasized in her incident report that my son had tried to climb the bars without her help after she turned her back to him. A convenient interpretation for liability purposes, but probably the truth. At his previous school, I watched him swing his face into a metal climbing bar and nearly get a concussion. His clumsy path of destruction rivals Dick Van Dyke in all his stumbling, fumbling glory, minus the black and white stage and Mary Tyler Moore. But such is boyhood I suppose. Or are there more sinister forces at work?

Tonight it just occurred to me that there’s also a firehouse next door. Should we buy Widget1 a flame-retardant smock just in case? The school did give the kids plastic firefighter helmets, but I’m pretty sure those melt at high temperatures. If they open a police station nearby, I’m also buying him a bulletproof vest.

Brains

Do you know how hard it is to raise a child who can’t consume dairy products? We have to order pizza without cheese. WITHOUT CHEESE! Thankfully, they’ve got this almond milk ice cream we recently found that tastes a lot like the real thing. It’s also just as cold as the real thing — but Widget1 was too excited about trying his new treat to mind the temperature. So he gobbles it up like gangbusters, and you know where this is going next…a punishing bout of brainfreeze. At which point our horrified kindergartener clutches his left ear and cries out, “IT’S ATTACKING MY BRAIN!”

Miscarriage

As I write, my wife is rushing Widget2 to Urgent Care. He did a face-plant on the sidewalk, blood everywhere, and now he’s got a nasty gash on his nose.
After the barrage of unfortunate events this past month, though, a few stitches feels like a successful evening.
I won’t bore you with my list of grievances. But there’s an important part of the story I’ve been keeping to myself for far too long now. You see, this post was supposed to be the announcement of the coming of Widget3.
Instead, it’s an obituary.
Two weeks ago at church, while I performed the closing music of the service, my wife went to the bathroom and miscarried. She was 7 weeks pregnant.
Word didn’t reach me about the miscarriage until after the service, when she was already on her way home with the pastor’s wife. The following night, I rushed her to the emergency room with excessive bleeding. Evidently, the “plug” that had kept the bleeding to a minimum at church had finally given way, and now the rest was flushing out.
Over a week later, the last of the bleeding ran its course. Now life goes on, fast and furious and too many tasks for too few hours, as if nothing ever happened.
Most obituaries come with a portrait. But what do you do when the only image you have is a blurry gray blob on a sonogram print? There was no face. No voice. No personality. Maybe not even consciousness. But for those seven short weeks, my wife carried the mystery of life. And that life had a heartbeat.
Call it providence that shortly before we lost our little heartbeat, I came across a Christianity Today article about men and miscarriage. The article itself wasn’t particularly memorable, but the photo illustration grabbed me. It was a picture of an empty swing, set against a shadow of a child on the sand. The picture reminded me of our first miscarriage last year, when my wife returned from her sonogram and handed me the results. I expected a growing fetus. What I saw was nothing. No baby, no biological matter; just an inexplicable void. The loss had caught us by surprise. Our boys had gone with her for the appointment, and Widget1 was with her in the room, trying to understand why he couldn’t see his little sister on the screen (we thought this one would be female). He still talks about her sometimes, and he asks questions about death. I watched him tell a complete stranger how he has a brother who lives with him and a sister who lives in heaven.
He doesn’t know about miscarriage #2. We’re in no hurry to tell him.
But I keep seeing that swing set. Now with two empty swings. And the boys swinging beside them. It’s like those macabre family portraits from the late 1800s that included deceased relatives dressed in their Sunday best.
Carl Sagan famously said that humans are star stuff. I think that’s a problem. Because the stars are fading and the galaxies are dying, and the soul wants to live forever. But if the dust is all there is, then at the end of it all, we’re just so many empty swings. And the cosmic joke laughing back at us through the vast depths of space is that the swings were built for riders who never were and never will be. Or maybe they’ve been there all along, and maybe life is more mysterious than a fuzzy blob on a sonogram.

Reasons My Son is Crying

A colleague directed my attention to a revolutionary blog called Reasons My Son is Crying. Such a convenient, user-friendly resource, I thought, to embarrass and humiliate my children while scoring social networking points.

Then I began to reconsider. I think we have moved beyond that level as a family. A truly meaningful blog for us would be “Reasons My Son is NOT Crying.” Because, to be honest, there are scant few things that haven’t made them cry. You know the saying, there’s no use crying over spilled milk? Well, Widget1 found a use for it. He spilled his milk and cried. Sometimes his crying is forgivable, like the other night when his regularly scheduled programming was interrupted by the State of the Union Address (actually, I may have been the one who cried). But then there are times like tonight, when an empty toilet paper roll inspired crocodile tears of despair. A woman recently told him not to cry like a sissy girl. That really isn’t fair to the girls, because most of them don’t cry half as often or half as loud. Then this evening, Widget2 became hysterical after tossing his drum stick across the train table beyond his reach. He was so upset about not being able to stretch his go-go Gadget arm far enough to retrieve the drum stick that it took a couple of minutes for him to remember that he knew how to walk. Finally, he toddled around to the side of the table and easily reached his goal.

I’m hoping this means that the boys will grow up to be very passionate artists who channel their misery into million dollar paintings.

At any rate, I can’t really criticize them for it without pointing a finger back at myself. I still vividly remember bursting into tears in the 1st grade after a classmate stepped on my newly purchased cupcake on the hallway floor. It was a long time ago, and my therapist says I’m making strides, but I still get a chill up my spine whenever the church bulletin advertises a bake sale.

Children’s Book

Having failed to write a novel that adults will voluntarily read (let alone pay money for), the next step of my two-step business plan is to fail their children as well. I am attempting to write my first children’s story.

Technically, I’ve already written the story – but as my college professor used to say, there are no final drafts, only deadlines. So I’m taking the short story I wrote for my son and expanding it into a chapter book. This may have been a bad idea. #1, because finding time to write a chapter book is about as easy as ironing my shirts while changing diapers. #2, because children will run away screaming from the mean hairy man at book signings. #3, because my experience in children’s literature consists mostly of memories of asking my mother to crack open Richard Scarry’s “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” for the billionth time. And that wasn’t really literature so much as a collection of cartoon vehicles, so I could learn to identify them on sight should I ever cross paths with a cartoon on the road. Another book I liked was a morality tale about a boy who steals a humongous gumdrop from a candy store and then feels guilty and returns it. I’m not sure that I cared about the story per se, but the gumdrop looked juicy and delicious. Then there was Grover’s “The Monster at the End of This Book,” which was probably the root cause of all my chronic anxiety later in life. There was this horrifying buildup as Grover broke the fourth wall and begged us, time and again, not to turn to the next page. Which, of course, we always did. And then the last page would come, and the truth would dawn on Grover that the “monster at the end of the book” was only Grover himself. My mom, by the way, did a spot-on impression of Grover.

Here is a sneak preview of my in-progress chapter book, “The Goblin who Chased the Moon.”

***

On a clear autumn night in the deep dark woods, way down in the thick, wet undergrowth, a pair of eyes opened.
Goblin eyes.
Or to be more precise, a goblin child’s eyes.
Now as everyone knows, goblins live underground in the oldest, blackest caves. Their homes were carved by long-forgotten floods and long-forgotten creatures from long-forgotten days. The reason goblins are rarely seen is that they never leave those caves. Never, that is, except on very special occasions when the night sky shines brightest and a deep sleep covers the land.
That’s when the magic calls them.
It was on just such a night that this particular goblin, whose name was Muddle, grabbed hold of a dangling tree root. He grabbed the root tight and climbed it through rock and soil to the surface of the world. The goblin hole ended on a mossy patch in the shadow of a great gray tree. Out came his hands, his head, his arms and legs and long pointy feet. Then, as Muddle wiped away the dirt and opened his eyes to the roofless, endless “overworld” – that’s the goblin name for the place that we humans just call the world – they were met by a blinding light.
The goblin child blinked, then looked, then blinked, then looked, then blinked and looked again. He could hardly believe his eyes! Far up beyond the highest, thinnest branches of the tallest trees was the most amazing sight – a gigantic, bright white…
“Ball!” said Muddle.
“No, silly,” said his goblin brother, whose name was Fuddle. The taller, stronger, smarter goblin had followed him up the root and caught him by surprise. “That’s not a ball. That’s the moon,” he said. Then he whispered a warning, “Keep quiet or the humans will eat you.”
“I want it! I want the moon!” said Muddle. He had never heard of a moon before, but he knew it must be a special thing to have. He wondered what games he could play with it. The moon was so big, so shiny, so perfectly round, so everything amazing. There was nothing like it at home. He just had to capture that great pale disk that floated so high above.
Ignoring his brother’s warning, Muddle pointed his crooked goblin finger at the sky. “Come down moon!” he shouted. Then he waited for an answer.
But the moon didn’t come. And the humans didn’t eat him.

Imitation is the Highest Flattery

Widget1 has a batman shirt with a Velcro cape attachment. Last night, Widget2 picked up the cape off the living room floor and hung it on his shoulder. The first time he did this, I thought it was unintentional. But then he put it back on his shoulder. As I watched, he continued this hilarious routine of picking up the cape, setting the velcro on his non-velcro-equipped shoulders, then walking in circles looking proud of himself while the cloth slipped back off. Eventually, I tried assisting him, so the cape would stay on better. He gladly accepted the help. Clearly, he had decided that if Widget1 can be Batman, Widget2 can be Batman too.

Earlier that day, the boys had gone to an indoor bounce-house/arcade park. Widget2 observed Mom using a money card to activate the arcade games Widget1 wanted to play. Then by pure luck, Widget2 found a business card someone had dropped on the floor. He swooped up the business card and, using his mental powers of advanced logical reasoning, walked around to every machine – and ONLY those machines – that Widget1 had played. Then, as any brilliantly single-minded 1-year-old would have done, he inserted the business card into the slots.

Watch out, world. This child is paying attention. A little too much attention.

Christmas Newsletter

Dear Family, Friends, Neighbors and Distant Relations,

It’s the season of sharing, and the time has come for my family to share its annual achievements with those who have none.

This year, poop production has reached an all-time high. As you can see on the flowchart handout that was stuffed in your Christmas stocking, not only did our discarded diapers meet our 2013 quota – we beat last year’s number by 200 percent! But that’s not the only record that’s been broken. In June, the vinyl edition of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was destroyed during a temper tantrum. And in October, I lost my entire ABBA collection. In addition, 90 percent of our good china has been removed from circulation, and all electronic devices now rattle when you shake them.

Full disclosure: the preceding paragraph was a lie (the hint was the ABBA record. I own no, nor shall I ever own any, ABBA related merchandise). But you’ve got to admit, it was more entertaining than hearing about how my son is an honor student, my wife just earned her doctorate in Smarter-Than-You-ology, and I got that promotion along with a hefty pay raise so we can finally purchase that family farm we’ve been dreaming about and start growing organic vegetables, raising free-range chickens and drinking non-pasteurized milk.

Full disclosure: the second preceding paragraph also was a lie. The truth is that I am currently recovering from my traditional Christmas holiday head cold, which Widget2 generously shared with me, while we spend the last two weeks of December at grandma and grandpa’s house in the cold north. I have no interest in writing a real newsletter, and besides who needs them in this day and age of facebook, twitter, blogging and neurotically networked people. Does anybody really want to hear about Widget1’s superior reading skills (which he does actually have) when I can instead give them the juicy details about how he tickled the man in front of us on our flight, or how he demanded the wheelchair-bound elderly man in front of us at the security checkpoint to get out of our way (speaking of which, we are fundraising to buy a new car to drive ourselves home since we can never again be seen in that airport).

As Seen on TV!

Television was invented by advertising executives to get direct access to the ones who control the purse strings – our children. Now I’ve got a two-legged pop-up banner ad who follows me around the apartment. I’ve learned that Stuffies are the most awesome toy ever (we had to take our son into a toy store, pull a Stuffy off the shelf and show him in person how little stuff one can actually stuff into a stuffy before a stuffy has enough stuff), girls’ toys are fun for boys too, mucus has eyes and a mouth (thanks, Mucinex), and we need to buy OxiClean.

Bonus: if you ask him, “Who you gonna call,” he responds with the jingle from the local auto dealership that ripped off the Ghostbusters theme song.

I’m thinking it’s time to turn off Sprout and blow the dust off our Teddy Ruxpin DVDs. We need to make some changes around here before he sees too much and asks his pediatrician whether Cialis is right for him.

Unpopular

Widget1’s reason why he loves Mommy more than Daddy: “Daddy’s not very squishy.”

No I’m not. Thanks for noticing.

Wired Christmas

The last thing I’ve been thinking this year is that we need to shop around for more electronics for Christmas. We’ve already got an Xbox 360, a Playstation 3, a Nintendo Wii, a Nintendo DS, a desktop PC, a laptop, a V-Reader, and various and sundry children’s toys that mimic the latest gadgets.

So I asked my 5-year-old what he wants for Christmas.

His answer?

One thing.

An iPad.

I hate you, Steve Jobs.

The good news is that if Widget1 doesn’t get his wish, there’s no danger of him experiencing a Santa faith crisis. He already knows Santa doesn’t exist. Just yesterday, my wife had an urgent conference with his teacher about how he is disrupting the social order by telling the other kids Santa isn’t real. Our child’s radical ideas must be silenced. SILENCED!

The bad news is that if Widget1 doesn’t get his wish, there’s no one left to blame except Mom and Dad. Nothing spoils my egg nog like having to deal with a unicorn-level meltdown on Christmas morning.

Did I mention I hate Steve Jobs?