Halloween Killed Blogging

My son told me he is really irritated by how my daughter does her homework.

“Dad, you know she has Netflix going the entire time”

I ask him to tell me what I am supposed to do about it.

“You are our father, you don’t need me to tell you what to do. You just need to tell her to stop.”

I ask him if he knows she has straight A’s and if he remembers she is taking all honors.

“Yeah, but you could still tell her to quit.”

I laugh and tell him he is better off minding his own business. When he asks why I let him go through it all I tell him I wanted to see if he had a clear understanding.

“Your sister works hard and she has figured out how to work the angles. Maybe you ought to think about working the angles too.

Halloween Killed Blogging

I talk to the kids about working smarter and not harder but want to make sure they understand you can’t always work the angles.

But if you can do so without compromising quality or developing bad habits it is worth thinking about.

That is part of why I used chose the headline I did.

Any time you include blogging in the headline you will see a jump in traffic and it is multiplied by saying blogging is dead or dying.

I don’t know who started that particular rumor but it wasn’t true then and it is still not true now.

The closest I have seen it come is when my kids were little and I had to take them out trick or treating because sometimes it used all of my free time which meant I had none left for blogging.

Speaking of Halloween tomorrow marks the first Halloween I haven’t spent with my kids.

Part of me is ambivalent because they are too old to go trick-or-treating and part of me is kind of sad because I remember how cute they were and how excited they got each Halloween.

My Favorite Ages

When people ask me if I have a favorite age I usually say whatever ages my kids are at that particular time.

That is not an exaggeration or me avoiding the question, it is the truth. I really do like those ages best, but as I said earlier there are some things I miss.

Right now I miss the lack of sleep I got because of babies who hadn’t learned how to sleep through the night because some of the teenage stuff is really challenging.

I never doubted that I would eventually have kids who could sleep and that I would get a solid 6 or 7 hours.

Now I find myself pacing the floor trying to figure out answers to questions that make me want to bang my head against the wall.

It is not a nightly thing, but it happens enough for me to wonder if it would be easier to have a colonoscopy with no anesthesia.

And in the midst of it all I remind myself about how cute they used  to be and figure if my parents didn’t kill me when I was a teen anything is possible.

Once Upon A Maybe

Something about this particular moment in time has me thinking about walking through Jerusalem as a teenage boy.

Maybe it is because I am trying to send myself back in time to better remember what it was a like to be a 16-year-old kid so that I can better understand my oldest.

That is not to say I am totally lost because I am not but there are a few things where I can’t follow the logic or see the train-of-thought.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work and instead of gaining clarity I remember thinking about how cool I thought it was was to stand in a pub and watch Live Aid with my friends.

Beers in hand we did our best to impress the girls and tried hard to convince them to go back to the dorm with us or to take us back to theirs.

That I remember as do I remember dancing in the clubs and talking about what we would do when we joined the army.

These are all fine memories and part of good stories, but none of them help me figure out what angle to work here.

So maybe it means there is no angle and we are just going to have to bear down and knuckle our way through it.

That brings us back to the present and the hard truth that I won’t get to charge my children “Dad’s tax” also known as the candy I get to eat for having taken them out trick or treating.

Nor will I have to help eat any left over candy we didn’t give out to trick-or-treaters, unless I go buy some.

I might provided I am honest enough to say I’ll probably eat most of it.

Better make sure it is Three Musketeers, Milky Way or Reese’s Peanut Butter cups. If you are going to do it, well you might as well do it right.

• Saved: Children