My Daducation

Posts Tagged ‘Life’

The furor over the memos describing methods of torture used by our intelligence services hit a fever pitch in the last several weeks, and I couldn’t help but be surprised by it all. While my friends and family know me as a political person I made a promise to myself that this blog would not be a platform for my views. So I  can’t comment directly on my opinion on this matter, except that I’m pretty sure “pretty please” won’t work with a terrorist.

Anyway, I figure there has to be a compromise somewhere in this mess. And I think I’ve come up with a game plan that can work. In fact, I’m sure those scumbags will be begging to tell us everything in no time.

First - Soften Them Up

The plan to soften them up involves my five-year old. His unique talent is his ability to repeat the same question over and over again. And again. And again. And you think he will stop. He doesn’t until you cave. He’s tough as nails with this.

Example:

Five Year Old: Can you get my box down out of the closet?

Me: Yes. Give me five minutes and I’ll come down.

Five Year Old: Dad?

Me: Yes?

Five Year Old: Can you get my box down out of the closet?

Me: Yes. Give me five minutes and I’ll come down.

Five Year Old: Dad?

Me: Yes?

Five Year Old: Can you get my box down out of the closet?

Me: Don’t ask me again.

Five Year Old: Can you get my box down out of the closet?

Me: I said don’t ask me again.

Five Year Old: Can you get my box down out of the closet?

Me: YES JUST WAIT A MINUTE!!!!!!!!!!!

Five Year Old: Can you get my box down out of the closet?

At this point I feel like running out of the room screaming. And I do.

Second - Embarrass them with their terrorist buddies.

My eight-year-old has a knack for repeating many of our home conversations in public. Since I usually speak sarcastically he doesn’t always “get it” and notifies some people about my thoughts and opinions because he got a chuckle out of it and thinks they will think its funny too. No, I don’t get invited to many parties anymore in case you were wondering.

Example:

Me: Wow, that kid in your class has a huge head. Does he have to wear a helmet so he doesn’t hurt himself banging it on doorways?

Eight Year Old: (laughing) No. (laughs some more)

Me: Poor kid. I bet he has to step into his shirts.

Eight Year Old: (laughing) No. (laughs some more)

Two days later…

Eight Year Old: My teacher would like to talk to you.

Me: Why?

Eight Year Old: Oh, I told everyone what you said about that kids big head.

Basically I am ready to throw myself at the mercy of the school as I’m sure they will think I’m a jerk. For good reason. I know I’ll have to give up some volunteer hours to make everyone happy or face their wrath.

Third - Sleep Torture

My one-year-old has mastered sleep torture in a very unique way. We spent a great deal of time and energy training her to play in her crib when she wakes up in the morning or after her nap. We have a monitor on to keep tabs of her while she plays. This monitor is next to our heads. While we are sleeping.

Unfortunately she likes to play with her Elmo Music Box. Right now it has “Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood” in it. She pushes a button to play the song. She usually pushes the button about 38 times. In a row. While I am trying to sleep. I am not sure if you appreciate the agony of hearing Elmo shriek the words to “Who Are The People In Your Neighborhood” 38 times in a row. It has literally driven me to the brink of mental collapse. I hate Elmo. I am thinking about accidentally dropping that music box in the driveway. As I’m backing out.

So now we have a three-tiered system of attack where my kids can effectively force any hardened terrorist into providing whatever information is necessary. If the terrorist can withstand the indefinite repeated questions from my five-year-old he must still contend with my eight-year-old who will be more than happy to tell his terrorist buddies that he saw him sneaking a snack when he was supposed to be fasting. Oh the humilation. And lastly, if none of that works, we will bring on my one-year-old and her Elmo music box, which will be sure to destroy any remaining resistance he has.

If you can recommend any other alternative methods, lets make a list.

Update: Please change any use of the word “terrorist” above to “man-caused disasterist.” Thank you.

One the better inventions of the last century for kitchens everywhere was the dishwasher. The promise of never washing another dish, of easily cleaning up after dinner, of spending more time with the family……..what a crock. I have yet to see a dishwasher clean a dish without human intervention. It’s pathetic.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe my wife is in tune with this reality. Her confidence in our dishwasher is staggering. I have witnessed the depth of her confidence as she loads the dishwasher. I can see she believes she has a dishwasher that actually WASHES dishes. Spaghetti still on the plate? No problem. Oatmeal still in the bowl? Easy. Cake on a platter? Piece of cake. (sorry)

Of course, the reality is that the dishes are not clean. If there is a speck of dirt on them going in, it’s still there when you take them out. I’m not sure what is happening in there, other than jacking my water bill, but it certainly isn’t WASHING anything.

Yes, I’ve seen that advertisement from Maytag where the guys loads a full cake into the dishwasher and it disappears. What a total joke. What a great way to destroy your plumbing. I don’t care if it has chopping blades or not, can it scrape that grain of pulverized oatmeal off a bowl???

I’ve had friends tell me to try different detergent. So I did. This appears to be a whole other racket. Seriously, how many different detergents do you need? And how do you choose when NONE of them get anything any cleaner? Reminds me; I need to buy stock in these companies.

So, of course, I have been relegated to hand-washing each dish before placing it in the dishwasher. Now, mind you, this is only to rinse debris off the dishes, not an actual soapy cleaning. Why should the dishwasher get off that easy? No, our dishwasher is a sanitizer now. At least now I won’t know if it isn’t doing its job.

Which leads me to the next problem…..loading the thing. Not to brag, but I have the ability to organize the loading of a dishwasher pretty well. It is an art, because not only do you need to fit everything in, you need to do it so that the water reaches all the dishes. However, my wife does not appear to be concerned with this. Actually I would guess she loads the dishwasher using a horseshoe toss technique. From across the kitchen.

I open the dishwater to find bowls on top of bowls on top of more bowls. Cups turned over and full of water. The silverware is wedged in the tray so tightly I need a crowbar to extract them. A huge pot is turned upside down blocking all water from reaching the top rack, like a blast shield. The pot is huge. Real big. It should have its own zip code.

“Hey, ” I mention to her, “why didn’t you just hand wash the pot? It’s too big for the dishwasher.”

“Ah, it can handle it. Besides did you see how big that thing is? I’m not washing that in the sink. It won’t fit,” she responds. “By the way, can you load the dishwasher tonight?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Great. Make sure you throw in the toy box. I need it sanitized.”

I think I have to ban her from touching it.

So it follows not long after that I smell burning in the middle of the night. I rush downstairs to find the dishwasher near the end of its drying cycle. And something is smoking. That something is a plastic spoon that slid down to the heating element and melted into something that resembled the devil’s pitchfork.

But worse than this, there is a green film all over the inside of the dishwasher which does not want to come off. I scrape. I scrub. Not coming off. It is not until I look into the bottom on the machine and see a little green paper stuck in the silverware tray. It is the wrapping of a crayon. A green crayon.

“Oh yeah,” my wife says,” The one-year-old must have stuck that in there when she was playing with the dishwasher tray earlier.” She finds this hilarious.

“Of course,” I say. “Silly me, I didn’t know this was one of her toys.”

“Oh pipe down, slim,” she says. “She likes the dishwasher. Who cares if she plays with the tray?”

Apparently I am the only one with a hangup on a properly operating dishwasher. As for the green mess, well I am wondering if I can find a way to get the one-year-old to clean it up since she loves the dishwasher so much. Any ideas?

I can remember when I was a kid my parents had the curious obsession with assigning chores to me and my brother and sister. They tried different processes to dole out chores, starting with a list and working their way to my personal favorite, the “Job Jar.” This was a jar that had slips of paper, each containing a job, all thrown in. You had to reach in and grab a slip and perform that job. I can remember my own little tricks to try to get the best jobs, although I was rarely successful because all the jobs basically sucked.

My oldest son has reached the age where he needs to become responsible for doing his own chores. While certain tasks were always his, such as cleaning his room or putting his clothes in the laundry, he never had to do jobs that were for the household in general. While he is a sweet boy, I would never confuse with him someone that looks out for the needs of the household.

In a effort to make it more interesting, my wife offered to let him create a chart of chores he could do, and as a bonus she allowed him to assign allowances to each chore. If he did the job he got paid.

Shortly after the chart was created and placed on the refrigerator, a curious thing happened……he completely forgot about it.

So, as parents do, whenever an opportunity came for him to perform a chore on his chart we reminded him of it.

“Do I have to?” he would ask.

“Yes,” we would say.

He would proceed to grumble under his breath, a talent learned from his mother, while he did the chore. Of course, saying he did a good job with the chore is like saying Britney Spears did a good job raising her kids. Which leads to the next problem.

“That needs to be done again,” I tell him as he emerges from making his bed.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because ‘making the bed’ means actually making it look like no one slept in it. Yours looks like you wrestled a monkey on it. I’m not paying fifty cents for THAT,” I inform him.

“Fine, but I want a dollar because I did it twice,”  he says.

I explain to him that he doesn’t get paid for a job done poorly. He asks me what Mom takes away when I don’t do what she asks. I tell him to mind his own business.

So the chart continues to sit on the refrigerator, only garnering interest whenever the new Lego catalog arrives each month. Like a junkie, he immediately starts hitting me up for cash. I point to the job chart. He bites his lower lip and begins to try to find an easy job. Reminds me of someone…..

Anyway, we have started working out the kinks in our household version of a “Plan To Create Jobs.” While I know the folks in Washington think they know how to create jobs, they have nothing on me. I’ve got a list of tedious crap a mile long. It’s not that I don’t like doing them and think someone else should……well, maybe it is. It also has to do with that fact that he might actually learn something by doing them. He might gain a new respect for how much good ole Mom and Dad do for the family.

I believe our eight-year-old will come around and realize there is no use fighting it. He knows we want to him to learn responsibility. He knows we want him to learn accountibility. He knows I don’t like changing the litterbox.

On a more positive note, the little brother seems to have an interest in helping with chores. But, man, his prices are high!

As a kid I remember going over to a friend’s house was always a neat experience because it was interesting to see how other people lived. I had a friend whose parents yelled at each other in a combination of Italian and English. He and his sister would fight once a day. Not yell at each other. Fight. With fists. And hair-pulling. It was great theatre. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

One thing I saw from time to time was that they stored their books, magazines, and newspapers in the bathroom. For years I never said anything, because who was I to tell them where to store things in their house. Finally one day I asked my friend.

“Why do you keep your books and magazines stacked in your bathroom?” I asked.

“That’s where we read. Where else would we keep them?” he said.

I am floored by this at the time. I had no idea people did this. Bathroom time was always a SEAL operation for me. Get in and get out. Sitting and reading was not an option. For that matter I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose that as a reading spot. What’s wrong with the couch? Or a recliner? Personally I liked to sit on my bed and read. I still do to this day.

For years after I can remember going to visit people and seeing a library in their bathroom. It seemed to be more often than not people maintained a book depository in the water closet. For years I shook my head in amazement. Why would you pick this place to read??

One day the realization comes crashing home to me. It happens shortly after my  second child has learned to walk. While an independent sort, he liked to walk around and find out where you were. This is cute. For a while.

Most parents get into a pretty good groove when they have the first child, learning how to skillfully hand off the kid from one parent to the other when something has to be done. It’s a tag-team deal and it works pretty well. When the second child comes along, you shift the defense to man-to-man coverage. This seems to work fine, until one of you actually needs to get something done. Then someone is on double duty.

After a few years of double-duty, finding some peace and quiet is mandatory. Little did I realize the ONLY place to do this is the———BATHROOM. Not the bedroom, with the door locked. Not the office, with the door locked. The bathroom. Because you have an alibi.

Yes, sometimes it is necessary to head in with a good book and catch up on some reading. Sometimes they hang around outside. It can be a little hard to concentrate with all the yelling:

“What are you DOING in there?!”

What’s funny is that isn’t what they want to know. What they really want to know is if they can come in and harass me some more, and how come I won’t let them in to do this. If the book is good enough I don’t hear them at all.

So I am wondering if any of you parents can recommend a good book to take in with me next time?

When I was a kid I went to Kindergarten pretty much as a blank slate. I knew some letters and numbers, but I certainly wasn’t a speller and I couldn’t write my name. It seems however that I must have graduated to first grade relatively unscathed as I recall. I don’t remember my mother crying about my lack of Kindergarten knowledge. She usually cried about other things, probably having to do with my existence.

Anyway, fast forward to my senior year, where I have apparently passed the public school’s standard to graduate from high school and proceed to college. Not that the public school standard was that high in the first place. By then I could spell my name and do basic math, so I guess I was good to go. They handed me my diploma and asked me never to come back. I can’t say my Kindergarten experience impacted me in any way. Maturity was never my strong suit anyway.

So fast-forward again to my parenting years. As our first-born neared the age required for him to start school, my wife began to go through the enrollment process. She reports her findings pretty quickly.

“He needs to know ALL of his letters and ALL of his numbers,” she says.

“Really? That’s a lot of numbers. He’s only five,” I say.

“No, I mean one through ten, wiseguy,” she says, ” I doubt you even know all your numbers.”

” Hmmm. Does he know them?” I ask.

“He knows his numbers. We will have to go through his letters and see what we need to work on.”

“Uh OK,” I respond.

“He also needs to know how to write his name. And his address. And phone number. And his geometry. And cutting.”

“Ummm. OK. How about Linear Algebra?” I ask. “What exactly are they planning on teaching him when he gets there?”

“I’m still working on that,” she says.

So we put the five-year-old through his pre-Kindergarten paces, making sure he is well versed in the fine art of writing his name, address, phone number and numbers. He is also skilled in the art of naming his shapes (including the parallelogram) and cutting out shapes.  He appears to be ready to go. If anything I now know all that stuff as well. I thank my wife for her help.

So we decide to go to the enrollment open house at the school. It is a madhouse. There are people everywhere. Then I realize we are standing in line for the refreshments.

We make our way to the Kindergarten area, where we get the opportunity to speak with the teachers. We are given a stack of papers we are to fill out. They are in Spanish. We realize we are in the wrong line again.

Finally we get our chance to speak with the teachers. She asks her round of questions. Our answers seem to be correct. I know this because she hasn’t asked me to leave yet. We finally get to ask ours.

“What exactly will they be learning in Kindergarten?” I ask.

“Spanish,” she replies. And she is serious.

She chooses not to elaborate after this. We suddenly have an urge to be in another room at that moment. We thank her for her time and quickly make our escape.

Oh well. Home school, here we come.

I’m not sure what dinner-time is like at your house, but frankly it has become such a chore at ours that some days I would rather send everyone to bed starving. I think God invented mealtime as a form of birth control.

Our kids represent the first three stages of chaos:

Our 1-year-old is an eating machine. It’s actually like feeding a snapping turtle. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

Our 5-year-old’s tastes change as often as his underwear. This week he only wants to eat things that contain chocolate. So I have been telling him that broccoli is made of chocolate.

Our 8-year-old has improved his eating habits but will not eat fruit, or sit next to anyone eating fruit. Don’t ask.

The following things happen through the course of “dinner”:

1. The 1-year-old tosses her plate of food across the room. Thank God for hardwood floors.
2. The 1-year-old cries because she has no more food. I inform her it is on the floor. She seems surprised.
3. The 5-year-old informs us that the chicken that has been made “tastes like garbage.” Since he has never eaten garbage we are pretty sure this is a ploy to move on to dessert.
4. The 8-year-old begins talking about who got in trouble at school.
5. The 5-year-old spills his cup of water.
6. The 1-year-old spies my iced tea and demands a drink. She demands this by making a noise that sounds like angry monkeys.
7. While I am cleaning up the 5-year-old’s mess the 8-year-old informs us he did not get in any trouble at school.
8. The 8-year-old decides he needs to pee. He is allowed to leave, lest there be an accident.
9. The 5-year-old decides he needs to pee. He is told to stay in his chair, as we know this is a ploy to move on to dessert.
10. The 1-year-old has consumed 10 mandarin oranges in 0.3 seconds, a world record. I checked.
11. The 1-year-old demands more food. Loudly.
12. The 5-year-old spills his cup of water again.
13. While cleaning up the 5-year-old’s mess, the 8-year-old informs us he may have gotten in some trouble at school.
14. Under harsh questioning the 8-year-old folds and explains that he really didn’t do anything wrong, the teacher just thought he did. We are fuzzy on the details, but I am at least relieved he was not eating cake off the floor.
15. The 1-year-old begins testing the acoustics of the room. It is becoming impossible to talk over her.
16. Not happy with “fuzzy details,” my wife gets the 8-year-old to admit he was talking in class.
17. The 5-year-old spills his cup of water. Yes, this REALLY happens three times.
18. The 5-year-old is made to clean it up.
19. I regret having the 5-year-old clean up the mess.
20. I clean up an even bigger mess he made.
21. My dinner is cold. I eat it out of spite. My wife is exhausted. She is staring at the clock. I think I hear her muttering something about their bedtime
22. Everyone is cleaned up and sent to their respective play areas while my wife and I recover.

Yes, dinnertime. The cure for conception.

I don’t consider myself a rabid football fan. I follow the sport, I know most of the players by name, and I can usually give you a pretty good indication of which way to go if you are betting a game. In fact, I am not particularly interested in watching the Super Bowl. I find it anti-climatic. And since I am an Eagles fan I find the NFC Championship is anti-climatic. For 4 of the last 8 seasons. Let’s not go there.

The Coveted Fantasy Football Trophy

My wife would disagree with all of this. She thinks I watch football ALL THE TIME. However I have to point out that in order to watch games ALL THE TIME I would need to be watching them on Sunday afternoon. Which I rarely do. Sundays we are usually running errands or going to my in-laws. So watching an entire game is impossible. I may catch 10 minutes here or there, but that’s it.

The problem is the 24-hour sports news cycle. Between ESPN, NFL Network, and Comcast Sports Network I can catch up on football at anytime. So I do. A lot.

I may end up watching the same sets of highlights four or five times in order to get any additional info I may have missed.

So why would I bother with the constant watching of the same sportscasts over and over? I’ll tell you. I have a disease. It’s called Fantasy Football.

Thankfully, fantasy football has been over for several weeks. Well, not really. There is a draft in April to prepare for. Life is semi-normal now. However, my family is definitely wondering what the hell they are going to do about it next season.

The thing is its kind of pathetic. Fantasy Footballers are regular guys who create a league on the Interweb where each can own a football team and draft players, living out the FANTASY of being a real football GM. Each team then matches up each week and points are tallied based on the real players actual performance on the field. Wins are determined by the greatest accumulation of points by the team. I usually lose.

Imagine me explaining this to my 8-year-old and my 5-year-old. This happens one day when I am screaming at my live stat-tracker.

“What are you so mad about?” the 8-year-old inquires.

“I started the wrong running back today. I thought Gore was injured,” I say.

“Started him? Started him how?” he asks, confused.

“I made this football team online where I pick real players and I get points when they do well,” I explain.

“Why?”

“To win the game,” I say.

“No, I mean why would anyone want to do this?” he asks.

“Don’t you have chores to do or something,” I ask, perturbed at the fact that he doesn’t see a football genius at work.

“So it’s not a real team?” he asks.

“No.”

“Does Mom know you do this?”

“Yes.”

“Come on,” he says to his brother, “he’s gonna hog the computer all day. Let’s go to the garage. I have this book that shows you how to blow stuff up.” I think he is kidding.

The fantasy football business comes to a head as I am offered a trade. I am cruising for the first pick in the draft next season, and the other owners want to see if they can pry it away from me. The trade is interesting. Interesting enough that I agonize over it for days. My wife is completely disinterested.

“What should I do?” I ask urgently.

“Rub my feet,” she says.

“No, I mean about the trade.”

“You need help,” she informs me.

“I know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“I mean professional help.”

Obviously I can’t count on her. As it turns out I negotiate better terms for the trade and make the deal. She is not impressed with my negotiating skills.

“Since you’re so busy with fantasies, why don’t you and your friends work on getting raises at work,” she asks. Smart aleck.

I’m not sure the family can tolerate another year of obsessive fantasy GM Dad. Maybe I could just call it quits. Maybe I could find another outlet. Maybe….

Nah. I have the first pick in the draft.

Before you bring your baby home from the hospital, the doctors and nurses run a battery of tests just to let you know if anything is amiss. One of these tests is a hearing test. I’m not exactly sure how they know they can hear. I’m pretty sure the kid isn’t raising his hand to let them know. But still, we take their word that everything checks out.

Over the last several years I have become convinced that my son is deaf. Or let me say more precisely, partially deaf. He cannot hear words like “clean your room,” “help your mother,” “make your bed,” or “stop teasing your brother.” He does, however, register signs of hearing when the words “cake is ready,” “you can use the computer,” or “no school today” are said. This is vexing.

Being the first born I am sure he has learned how to tune out background noise due to the crying he endured when his brother and sister were each brought home. This unfortunate side-effect also appears to help him tune out anything else he doesn’t want to hear.

This comes to a head the other night as the clock nears bath time. As is typical for this time of night I instruct him to clean up the toys in his room and head up to the bathroom for his shower. I come back a few minutes later to find him still playing with his Legos.

“What did I just tell you?” I ask him.

“Oh, I didn’t hear you,” he says.

“Yes, you did,” I say.

He stares at me blankly. He has mastered this stare. I am kinda impressed if he is faking it. But I don’t think he is. This stare usually causes me to repeat myself and give him another shot to stay out of trouble. Once again it works.

So after a few minutes he is in the shower. After several more minutes I inform him to wash up and get out. I have to inform him to wash up because there is a chance he won’t. His definition of a shower is to stand in the water until forced to get out.

After about 10 minutes he is still in the shower.

“What are you DOING in there?” I hollar.

“What?” he says.

“I told you to get washed and get out!” I say incredulously.

“Oh I didn’t know you meant NOW,” he says.

I am ready to throw him out the window. Or myself. After another 10 minutes I have to go back to bathroom to see what he is doing. He is dressed. He is ready for bed. He is standing in front of the mirror making faces at himself.

OK, so maybe he is not deaf. Maybe he is just eight.

OK, so this study was among my friends. But I stand behind it. However, I don’t think my wife agrees. Nor do their wives. In fact, they still think we’re idiots.

My wife recently wrote a post about my inability to read her mind. Now, she would say that it isn’t about reading her mind, but rather paying attention to what she is doing. I can respect that statement, however this assumes I am not doing something myself. Which is what she thinks, I’m sure.

Yes, my wife does a lot. More than me. I do a lot as well, including getting the kids up, fed, and to school in the morning. Some days I give my daughter lunch and put her down for her nap. I fold laundry when it is sitting there. I handle the kids while she is making dinner. Every now and then I cook meals. Sometimes I even make the earth stand still. OK, I may have dreamed all that.

However, the other day she was furious with me because she said I wasn’t helping her. I was in the living room with my daughter, and she had gone downstairs to put laundry in. After that she began to get dinner ready. We had earlier discussed what we would be having for dinner. We decided on cooking a frozen pizza. Fast and easy. However, after a few minutes she peers around the corner from the kitchen and shouts, “GEE, THANKS FOR YOUR HELP.”

I am stunned by this. Did I miss her calling for me? I didn’t hear any trouble in the kitchen. The boys were upstairs and my daughter was with me.

Ummmm……

I proceeded to ask her what she was talking about. She flips.

“Oh, I don’t know. I had to put laundry in and start dinner. Don’t you think I could use your help?” She yells.

“OK, I didn’t know you needed help unwrapping the pizza and throwing it in the oven. Nor did I know we were starting dinner now, since it is much earlier. Maybe you should have asked me to do it so I knew the agenda,” I say.

This apparently does not matter. I should have sensed what she was trying to do. Somehow. There were several walls between her and I at the time, so this may be why her ESP brainwaves never reached me.

I get irritated when I hear the “you always” or “you never” complaints even though a specific instance cannot be repeated to me. I employ the “give  me one instance” self-defense maneuver in these situations just to prove that I do help out. I have even heard these complaints while I am folding laundry.

I would never go so far as to say that there isn’t more I can do to help. However, some guidance on the agenda of the day would help me know what is going on in her brain and help me anticipate how I can help.

To me the essence of ESP is still verbal communication. It’s more about anticipation than reading her mind. But drop me a clue on what you are trying to get done that day so I can plan mine.

Now if I can just find a way to get these kids to do some of these chores, I’ll be set.

*DISCLAIMER*  This article is based on opinions from the author and doesn’t necessarily represent facts (as per my wife).

One thing I was proud of as a kid was that I was pretty athletic. In my neighborhood, my brother and I were usually picked first when we were lined up to pick teams for the sports we played. Whether it was football, baseball, soccer, or basketball I was usually picked first or second. Sometimes a kid named Robbie would be there because he was a cousin of a kid in the neighborhood, and he always got picked first when he was there, well, because basically he was Superman. He was also older than all of us. I think he was 27.

In second grade I joined my first team which was a Little League baseball team. I did pretty well, but the next year my Mom gave me the option of baseball or soccer and I decided to try soccer. I was a really good soccer player. I played all the way through high school. I was selected for a few all-star/traveling teams along the way. Unfortunately, it didn’t go beyond high school because I wasn’t THAT good.

So I was ecstatic when my oldest son was in first grade and wanted to play soccer. So we signed him up for a local youth league. He received his red #2 jersey and was ready for practice. Only I learned they don’t practice. Apparently they let them kick the ball around for 30 mins before they start the games. Practice? Who needs practice?

So the whistle blows and his first game is underway. The huddled mass of players move around with the ball, all kicking it, but mostly each other, with no real direction. The coach shouts for them to bring it down the field. We shout encouragement. The kids shout in pain.

So, as the kids wear out, they begin to disperse from the ball. Some of the more athletic kids start kicking the ball towards the goal and eventually score. I am looking for my son. I see him. He is staring at clouds.

I call for him to get in the game. He runs towards the ball, once again moving towards his goal. The ball goes right past him. He crosses his arms on his chest with a look of anger. I call for him to chase it down. He ignores me.

A few minutes later, the action is heating up. The ball is going back and forth. I spot him again. His arms are stretched out to his side as he imitates an airplane circling for a bombing run. He is oblivious to that fact that there is a soccer game taking place. Some parents are chuckling.

“Hey, Number Two,” I shout. “What are you doing?”

He is startled, but continues running in circles. I am perplexed. I run over to the coach.

“I think Number Two needs a substitution,” I say.

“Well, we’re a little short-handed,” he says.

“He needs a break,” I say.

So the coach pulls him and sends in a sub. The team quickly scores three goals. Then the coach takes me out of the game because some of the parents are complaining.

I pull my son aside. “Listen, buddy,” I explain, “you have to keep your head in the game. You have to watch what is going on with the ball and stay after it.”

“Hey, Dad?” he asks.

“Yes?”

“Did you see that butterfly? I think it was a monarch.”

On the ride home I look in the rearview mirror at my son. He is happy as a clam. I realize that in so many ways he is like me, but not in every way because he is his own person. He is going to grow up so fast, why should he spend it trying to do the things his Dad likes? If sports aren’t his thing, that’s OK. I’m glad he’s my boy, just the way he is.