Category: family

Attack of the revenge of “in May”

Having had two children in April (on purpose), the same month that tax returns are due and that Northern California weather starts permitting, nay, demanding trip-taking and visitor-hosting, means we’re doomed to have an inhumanly busy month each year, especially since we’re big believers in hosting giant birthday parties and also since I can’t resist a complicated, well-executed April Fools prank. Leaving Danger and concluding an epic job hunt (about which more in a later post) during the same month only meant that our utterances this year of our traditional April mantra were more frequent and prompted more easily than before:

“You need to shave.”
“In May.”

“Aren’t you coming to sleep?”
“In May.”

“Can you answer the phone?”
“In May.”

Addendum: Now that it’s the first of May and it’s possible to contemplate some of the things I’ve been putting off, among the other things that start today is my latest push to reach my target weight of 150 pounds. At a pound a week I can (coincidentally) reach it exactly on my birthday.

A full crowd scene at the food lines

The very day that I learned Microsoft would be buying Danger, and that I would therefore reap a small windfall, Andrea (not yet having heard the news) proposed the idea of hiring a Beatles cover band to play at Jonah’s Yellow Submarine-themed sixth birthday party. At once I thought of Jeff Spicoli, Sean Penn’s character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, of whom we’re told, via a title card at the end of the film:

Saved Brooke Shields from drowning. Blows reward money hiring Van Halen to play his birthday party.

Andrea had to do a lot of convincing, but once she got me past the mental hurdle of “hire a live rock-and-roll band for a party full of six-year-olds?” it became immediately obvious that it was the right thing to do, and we did it: we blew some of our “reward money” hiring The Sun Kings to play Jonah’s party. And it kicked ass.

For Grandma Flori

A few weeks ago, when we told the kids we’d be visiting New York, and that while in New York we’d be visiting the place where Grandma Flori is buried, Jonah volunteered this suggestion: “Can I make a picture for Grandma Flori and leave it at her grave?” He might just as well have asked, “Can I blow right past all normal limits of six-year-old sweetness and sensitivity?”

We were in New York all last week and visiting my mom’s grave was the first thing we did. Here’s the picture Jonah brought to her: “That’s a beach chair with Grandma Flori in it, and me and Archer standing behind her.” (By the time my kids knew her, my mom was already completely housebound. How could Jonah have known that a beach chair had theretofore been perhaps my mom’s favorite place to be?)

The best policy

[Moblogging from New York, which is why there’s been nothing new here for a while.]

Yesterday we took the kids to the American Museum of Natural History, where they were eager to find “Rexy” the T-Rex skeleton and “Dexter” the Capuchin monkey, characters in Night at the Museum. (And they did, among very much else.) We had some discipline problems, however, due in part, no doubt, to overstimulation from the bounteous exhibits and an excessively sugary cupcake at the museum’s cafeteria. So the kids lost their dinnertime dessert privileges.

As soon as we got back to my dad’s house, where we’re staying this week, Archer apprised him of their punishment. “We lost our dessert privilege because we did some bad things,” he reported cheerfully. “No dessert for us!” It’s a mark of how good the boys usually are, and therefore how seldom they’re punished, that temporarily losing a privilege can be an entertaining novelty (and maybe not as much of a deterrent as we’d like).

A little later that evening, Andrea and I went out to run an errand. The kids were in the care of my dad and his wife. My dad fixed them a snack and, having forgotten their punishment, included a few jellybeans on the plate. Jonah immediately reminded him, “We’re not supposed to have dessert tonight!” Archer repeated the reminder. Impressed, my dad withdrew the jellybeans and told them how proud he was of their honesty, which Andrea and I reinforced when we returned and heard the story. Today, as a reward: double the number of jellybeans they refused last night.

I’ll give you a pink pill for that

Briefly noted, since I haven’t managed to do any proper blogging this past week:

  • Roger Moore (who played The Saint on TV in the 1960’s) is behind a new push to revive The Saint yet again. Although he’s in good company (e.g., Barry Levinson), if past performance is any guarantee of future results, the new Saint will be sucktastic, at least compared to the canonical pulp-novella Saint from the 1930’s.
  • Way 11c: on Thursday Ken Jennings lamented the loss of the old meaning of “gay” exactly as I did in 2006 in the above-linked Saint post.
  • Strangeness update: the closer we get to consummating the Microsoft acquisition of Danger, the more I feel like Charles in the classic Ray Bradbury story, “Fever Dream.”
  • They stole my idea: the celebrated guerrilla-performance-art group Improv Everywhere planted sixteen “agents” in the food court of a Los Angeles shopping mall. At a signal, they suddenly staged a musical amid unsuspecting shoppers. Many years ago, in college, I tried to sell my friend Steve on the same idea: I wanted to perform the “Moses Supposes” number from Singin’ in the Rain in the school cafeteria. The main difference between me and Improv Everywhere is that they actually execute their hare-brained schemes…
  • It’s been a good week for darnedest utterances from my kids:
    • Me: It’s a homework night. (for Jonah)
      Jonah: Aww.
      Archer: Yippee!
      Jonah: Wouldn’t you rather play with me, than me doing homework?
      Archer, leaning forward and whispering: Then I can play with your toys.
    • Most mornings, Archer and I drive Jonah to kindergarten, and then I drive Archer to his preschool. We have recently developed a ritual for that second leg: we each chew a piece of gum, spitting it out when we arrive. Here’s how Archer chose to stage that ritual last Wednesday: “You give me the gum and I open it and take one myself, then I close it and give it to you and you take one. I unwrapper [sic] mine and you unwrapper yours and throw your wrapper away in the garbage. When we get to preschool you spit your gum into my wrapper and I spit my gum into my wrapper too. You spit yours first.”
    • Jonah, who’s been learning about Europe in kindergarten, identified Italy (the “boot-shaped country”) on a map. Trying to recall the name of the island off the tip of the “boot” — Sicily — he ventured, “Shitaly?”

Gentle giant

It all started when my dad painted a Friendly Lion to watch over my crib when I was an infant.

The painting hung in my room my whole childhood (and as of a few years ago hangs near my bed once more).

Years later I wrote a programming book for O’Reilly and Associates, a publisher known for decorating their book covers with animals. Their popular title Programming Perl is colloquially known as “the camel book,” for instance. I was hoping for a dog on my cover (after all, Alex the dog appears in the acknowledgments), but I was randomly assigned a giraffe. My disappointment was short-lived as the serene and stately giant grew on me.

The next year I went on a trip to San Diego and the famous zoo there. At the giraffe enclosure a guide explained that their youngest giraffe, Ahiti, was only just learning to eat acacia leaves by stripping them from the branch with his teeth. Some of us got a chance to feed Ahiti and help him learn! When it was my turn I held out an acacia branch.

Ahiti bent down, curled his long tongue around the branch, dribbled some surprisingly sticky saliva onto it and my hands, clamped his teeth and pulled his head back. Many of the leaves remained attached, sliding right through his inexpert bite. He tried once or twice more and did better — he was learning! Then it was someone else’s turn. But I was hooked: I had helped teach a baby giraffe to eat. Giraffes were now incontrovertibly “my” animal.

So when Andrea and I were expecting our first baby, the thought occurred to me that I ought to create a guardian animal for him like my dad had for me, and the obvious choice of guardian was a giraffe.

I abandoned my first attempt when I decided it lacked the cartoonish appeal that made my Lion so Friendly:

and settled on something much more stylized:

although we never hung it up by Jonah’s crib in favor of a beautiful custom quilt made for Jonah by a family friend, featuring giraffes and other animals.

As of a few days ago we’re now full circle: Jonah has just drawn his first fully realized giraffe, and it’s amazing.

power Power POWER!

So we went to a monster truck rally on Saturday, me, the wife, and the kids.

It was Jonah’s friend Liam’s sixth birthday. Liam’s into monster trucks and after the aforementioned party at his house most of the guests piled into their cars and drove to the OaklandMcAfee Coliseum. It was a miserable night, cold, windy, and wet.

Our first surprise came when traffic was backed up for two miles on the highway. All monster-truck traffic? (Turns out the Foo Fighters were playing next door at the OaklandOracle Arena at the same time, so it’s impossible to know how many were cool rock fans and how many were trashy demolition junkies.)

Our second surprise came when we needed cash to enter the parking lot and we had none. So we had to leave, get cash, and then re-endure the long line of cars.

Our third surprise came when we realized the monster truck rally was an outdoor event. Andrea and I were both fighting colds. Our sore throats tingled in unison.

I unhappily contemplated the possibility of another bout of pneumonia. The things we do for our kids…

Our fourth surprise came when we saw how many true fans had turned out in the cold and the rain for the dubious pleasures of sticking foam earplugs in their ears and watching those ridiculously modded vehicles struggling weakly through the mud, occasionally rearing up to expose their undercarriages, sometimes rolling over old, junked cars, but mostly doing donuts and spraying mud in all directions. (Surprise 4a was how often the crowd came to its feet. Surprise 4b was how often I thought of Fonzie and Pinky Tuscadero battling the Mallachi brothers in the demolition derby.)

Our final surprise came on the drive home, mercifully just an hour later, when Jonah said he’d like to return to another monster truck rally as soon as possible and Archer averred, “Monster Jam is cool.”