Archives for May 2016

This post will be shared in a number of places but relatively few people will read it because we are all too busy trying to get others to read what we just wrote.

On a different day, in a different place and in a different mood I’d say it is a question of engagement, or a lack thereof that distinguishes what will or won’t be shared.

It is not the only reason things may or may not be presented to others, but it is a factor.

Still this is not that day or that time and I am not here to discuss it because I am behind the eight ball and running to try and catch up so that I can finish other work.

If You Are Late Why Are You Writing?

Because you don’t become a better writer if you don’t work at it and push yourself to do it under any condition.

I push myself to write under any condition so that when I call upon the words they know to answer, that is why this post is being shared with you today.

Can Blogging Help Us See The Future?

Maybe, sometimes by looking into the past we can get a glimpse of what the future might look like. Sometimes we can see something we missed and use that as a tool to help us in the future we are heading into

Sometimes we can see something we missed and use that as a tool to help us in the future we are heading into.

Looking backward isn’t always done for nostalgic purposes, sometimes there are other reasons.

Join me as I go back ten years to a time when my kids were still quite little and I was a blogger who had no idea about how dramatically social media would impact my life.

My Son’s First Day of School

The grand adventure begins tomorrow, or perhaps I should say that it continues. My eldest is heading off to kindergarten. After much stress and debate we decided to send him to day school. I don’t know who is more excited, him or me.

We spent a big chunk of the day at my folk’s house where we enjoyed a fabulous Labor Day barbecue and talked about what it is going to be like to be in kindergarten. I told him a little bit about my experience and related how it was way back in kindergarten that I met G.

In a corner of the living room my father, grandfather and I shared stories about what school was like for us. The kindergarten classes of 1919, 1948 and 1974 recounted tales that in some ways will not be so different from the class of 2006.

In some ways it was rather surreal how some things never change. I began school a relatively short time before the end of the Vietnam War. My father was a few short years after WWII and my grandfather started during WWI. Not a very impressive comment about people, is it.

Anyhoo……….

We spent a little time getting his school supplies together. There were new kippot to buy, a new backpack, some pants, shirts, a couple of books and some assorted odds and ends. And throughout all of this there was this little smile on his face and a look in his eyes that made it clear that he is aware that this is a big event.

I suspect that tomorrow is going to be hard for me. He is so very big now. I used to carry this little boy tucked into the nook of my arm. I could hold him and pretend to be the Heisman Trophy. But not anymore.

From time to time he still falls asleep in the car and I still get the chance to carry him in to bed. Only now when I hold him I feel his feet dangling against the middle of my legs and at 45 pounds he has metamorphed from a light package to something more challenging. Now on the odd occasions that I have more than a five minute walk from the car to the bed I begin to notice the extra weight.

The baby talk disappeared ages ago. He still makes the occasional mistake. The other day he said that he wanted to be the betterest but the big guy doesn’t ever call me da da anymore. He doesn’t always want to crawl into my lap to play with his toys. Oh, he’ll still do it from time to time but I see the impact of the older brothers and sisters of his friends and I see him weighing things.

He is more cautious about doing things that mark him as being a baby.

Tonight as he lay down to go to sleep he asked me if Grandpa S. knew that he was going to start school. I said that I thought so and he told me that he missed him and I said that I did too. And then he told me that he loved me and asked if I thought that my daddy missed his daddy.

He is really starting to understand it all. He gets that grandpa is not coming back. He told me that he wished that Grandpa was still here because when he learns how to read he wants to read him a story.

I was happy that it was dark because that caught me off guard. My grandfather would have so very much loved to have heard that.

Well, I have rambled and muttered enough. Hold onto your loved ones and hug them tight because time has a way of moving all too quickly.

In a few short hours my little man will walk into class and I’ll head off to work. If I pass you in the parking lot you’ll forgive me if I don’t look up or say goodbye because I think that even though it is a happy day it is going to be a hard moment.

We’re a couple of weeks away from the end of school and the boy who was starting kindergarten in the story above is talking about driving.

Got a few months before I have to worry about that and all that comes with it.

The kid will start 10th grade in the Fall and I’ll look at him again and wonder if we can slow time down for just a moment longer.

I’ll silently ask to be given a moment to catch my breath but it won’t come and we’ll all run towards something.

We’ll hope it is the future we want and that it is filled with the things we need. Time will tell.

There might have been a moment where my then 7-year-old son misunderstood my explanation about how babies come into the world.

And that moment might have led to him announcing to his grandparents and everyone else at Chilis that I had peed on mom twice.

That moment followed times when he was about three where he told two different cashiers at the grocery store that his dad has a big penis.

One of them laughed and asked if he told the truth and I said size is relative and sort of shrugged my shoulders.

The other looked at me as if I had dropped my pants and urinated all over her register.

Sometimes I miss the good old days when blog fodder like this flowed fast and furious because the kids did all sorts of fun, memorable stuff.

I couldn’t even keep up with all that I had to write about, it just shot out of me like lava.

Hell, if I wanted to I could go back and share ten thousand stories that never made it here because I was too tired or too busy to put it in.

I could weave those posts in between the cool stuff like love stories that sound antiquated because writing about Instant Messenger no longer sounds like advanced technology.

Now it is just dated, like talking about how excited we got when we moved from modems that were 14.4 to 56k.

Or we could refer to our feature photo and talk yet again about walking through Jerusalem and the choices I made that kept me in the states or moving between LA and Texas.

But then again, it might be useful to remind some of you new parents that you are obnoxious.

Yeah, let me write that two or three times because you are so damn tired you’ll pretend you didn’t catch it.

“New” Parents Are Obnoxious

I wasn’t going to waste words and breath on some of you because I’d rather focus on posts like How A Writer Writes or put together something about how we are killing Twitter.

Hell, I almost wrote something tongue-in-cheek about how I am going to single-handedly kill dad blogging by writing a post saying it is dead but a couple of incidents pushed me the other way.

I don’t know, maybe it is more accurate to say there were a collection of moments that included some posts I read.

Self-congratulatory pieces that went off on how much better parents are today because they are better informed, better educated and more progressive than older parents.

Did I mention that one of them said that anyone that has kids that are older than 12 comes from a generation that is unlikely to get it. 

I don’t know if getting it means a double dose of stupidity and a shot of ignorance but I don’t want or need it.

And dear neighbor, I am sorry you thought my stereo was preventing your baby from taking a nap but you are an idiot.

Not because I wasn’t the one who was blasting the music but because if you don’t teach your child how to sleep with some noise you are creating a horrible situation for yourself.

Kids and adults can learn how to sleep with some noise around but if you teach them they can only sleep when in a tomb-like environment you’ll hamstring them and you.

I am not just the dad with the whose kid told a checker he has a big penis. I am a father that is teaching his children how to go along and get along in the world.

That includes standing up for what is right and protecting our principles but also recognizing that sometimes the smart response to being offended is to change the channel or shop elsewhere.

We don’t have to be tolerant or everything but we don’t have to be so intolerant we demand anything that bothers us be fixed.

There is nuance and sophistication that comes with those discussions and they have been some of the best I have ever had with my kids.

Little Kids, Little Problems– Big Kids, Big Problems

I used to hate when older parents would tell me that little kids had little problems and big kids had big problems because it sounded so damn condescending.

And then my kids moved into middle and high school.

That doesn’t count some of the crap that happened in between like the second great Depression (how I refer to 2008) and the shit that went down when I lost my job and couldn’t get hired.

Doesn’t count having to tell the kids that we were going to sell the house because dad couldn’t find a way to provide for his family, yeah, it still irks me a little bit.

I was a high flyer for a long while, was the sole provider for 8 years but that is a whole different post.

The real focus is that when you get to middle and high school and your kids really start to spend chunks of time in the real world without you things get interesting.

Flotsam and Jetsam

My oldest was in middle school when the Newtown shooting occurred. He and the other kids found out about it pretty quickly thanks to the Internet.

Steiner the minor told me not to worry about him because he sat near the door and if someone came in with a gun he could run away pretty quickly.

That is the kind of thing that warms the cockles of your heart.

And then there was the kid who tried to bully him and caused issues. We found out that his father was beating him up and had yet another interesting conversation with the kids about child abuse and bullying.

These days things have progressed further because old Steiner the minor is in high school and will begin driving soon.

So we have talked about drugs, alcohol, sex, driving and all sorts of other stuff.

New parents, man I feel for you. I remember those days and sometimes I miss them.

There was joy and innocence just as there is now, but it is different than it once was.

My kids have figured out that the wizard is just a man and that sometimes the flying monkeys win.

But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you know all that much more or have access to that much more information than those who came before you did.

There is not manual and we all stumble through some of this blindly and do 0ur best to make things work with the resources and opportunities we have.