Paper Parents Pop Quiz #8 (PPPQ8)

Last night you were working in the basement when you heard Avery getting loud with your wife, Laura. You knew Avery was a bit tired and cranky and wanted a treat or whatever....the details weren't clear. What was clear was that she was speaking to Laura in a way that wasn't acceptable. You were boiling. So you sat for a minute and weighed the pros and cons of getting in Avery's face and making sure she understood good and proper that she was not to speak to her mother like that again...ever.

Pros...she needed to know in no uncertain terms that raising her voice in defiance was NOT going to happen regularly...at least not that loud.

Cons...interject and you risk coming across like the "heavy" and usurping Laura's authority and ability to deal with situations like that as she sees fit.

An interesting dilemma. It took about 40 seconds to come up with the action plan....did you...

A) Let Laura handle the situation...to rush upstairs would be to give Avery the impression her mother couldn't be strong and that was the overriding consideration...

B) Stay in the basement and have a talk with Laura later about how you thought she should have been a little tougher on Avery...

C) Get your ass upstairs and get in your daughter's grill. "Usurping authority" or no, Avery will not address her mother in that tone and that's really all that matters. Time for you to take control...

D) Run upstairs screaming at the top of your lungs and frothing at the mouth -- something akin to a rabid rhino on speed. Get in your daughter's face. Make her cry. Terrorize her. This way you'll ensure she'll never raise her voice to her mother again. Hell if you play it right she may never again address her mother above a whisper for the rest of her years...

And the answer is? Boy D was tempting but I went with C on this. It was an easy decision actually...yes Laura can handle herself. But when you heard Avery upstairs your mind immediately flashed back to one day in Lake Placid five years ago. To one of the hundred stores that cater to tourists on Main Street. A four or five year old kid was being the biggest brat and addressing his mother in a way that should never be. And she just let it happen. Of course Avery wasn't at that age or stage but it's up to you as a parent to make sure she will NEVER get there.

So you went upstairs and got in her grill. Told her she will NEVER talk to her mom like that again.

You knew she'd cry. She did.

You knew she would run to her mom for a hug. She did.

She'll also know better next time and hopefully in the deep recesses of her mind there will be a voice telling her how far she can and cannot go. This is is essence of parenting...and it is why the decisions you make in these situations lays the foundation for tomorrow and the rest of their lives. And that is why the easy thing with your children is often the wrong thing...at least in this parent's mind...

Not to mention you know that Avery is strong. She may have been in tears for five minutes but you knew ten minutes after that the two of you would be playing ball again. And you were. The house didn't collapse. She didn't curl up into fetal position. She simply got a lesson at high volume for about a minute...and I believe the effects will last a lot longer...

Mirror Mirror

Today you rocked Logan to sleep and watched yourself do it in the standing mirror you have in your bedroom. Just you and your tired little 6 1/2 month old infant in afternoon's fading light. You thought a lot in those five minutes about how you were a better father to Avery than you have been to Logan. How you've seen a lot worse dads but then you've seen better and so that wasn't a lot of comfort...

You wanted to make a New Year's Resolution (in February) to be better but those are always gone within a week so instead you just rocked her back and forth and looked at her eyes fading and you caught sight of yourself a lot, thinking you could be the greatest father or the worst and the world could care less. But this is your testimony. Every day. And you could maybe be doing better. And even without a "resolution" you quietly felt resolved...

The Chef

Some photos don't need a big story. This is one of them. Taken by Laura on her IPhone during dinner prep. I believe that's a strainer in Avery's hand. I'm not sure she's actually going to use it and I'm not sure she'd actually be straining anything coming out of an oven set to 450. But that's besides the point. I've looked at this photo 50 times and it makes me smile every single time...enjoy...

Dr. Happy Hands and 8 Hours with Buddha and Damien...

I equate 8 hours solo parenting two very young girls as sort of like going to the proctologist. First there's that awful sense of dread days before the event. The absolute, abject fear that permeates your existence for days. Then you finally get down to it and the whole damn experience flies by. Hell you even find that if you relax enough, you enjoy it in the end...

That's what today was like. Day one of Laura studying to become a pilates instructor, and the first time I'd spend 8 straight hours with Logan (Buddha) and Avery (Damien). I mean, don't get my wrong. I LOVE my time with my girls and I get plenty of it. But usually it's two hours here with Logan, then two hours with Avery, and so on. Never anything like today. And I was slightly fearful, to be honest. But Laura wants to learn how to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan and so I became Mr. Mom for the first of many days.

I'll spare you all the gory details of who pee'd when and what diapers were changed where. It was a GREAT day. Aided somewhat by a 90 minute workout at the gym where childcare was provided. Home, gym, bank, lunch, bookstore...I felt like we lived the whirlwind and daddy kept it all together. And that might have been the greatest lesson for today -- keeping it together. When you're on the move with a six-month old and a three year old, having the details straight is imperative #1. And not that I needed it, but boy did it deepen (yet again) my sense of marvel at how mom keeps everything in order.

Every time I moved a limb I had a mental checklist of at least a hundred things; where is the next diaper? what time is the next feeding? where are the snacks? their bags...hats...jackets...all the things that a mom thinks of routinely I had to concentrate on, hard, if the ship was to keep running smoothly...

By the time mom walked in I was exhausted. Not because the day was difficult. Like I said earlier it was GREAT, pretty low stress compared to what my mind imagined. I was tired because following two small kids around is simply exhausting even on the best of days!

...At the risk of telling any moms out there what they already know....

"That's Just the Way it is...."

As much as you would like it to be different you pretty much realize when you’re a parent that the sun rises and sets with how your children are doing. For roughly the past month Avery has had huge separation issues when we drop her off at school in the morning. It’s bad with me, worse with Laura because the mother/daughter bond is different. So I end up dropping Avery off at school most days.

Two days ago she had to be ripped from me by her teacher. She was stuck to me like a barnacle. She had my shoulder in a death grip and clung to me as if she was being consigned to spend the rest of her childhood in a Thai sweatshop. No matter how you tell yourself it’s normal, that this is a phase, that she’ll grow out of it in a month, the pain you feel in your stomach is visceral, real. She was pulled from me and I wanted to go into the nearest closet and cry. I talked to her teacher for 20 minutes and that helped but when you see your child suffer that way...the creases of their face...the wrenched look of pain and abandonment....that stays with you for hours if not days.

Today she was a little better. I found myself tap dancing in the car; singing, joking, anything to keep her in a good mood so she wouldn’t be petrified when I left. She bounced on the trampoline for a few minutes and seemed so happy. Then I moved to leave quickly and she bolted off the tramp and ran after me. I had to leave. If I stayed it would have only made things worse. As I type this all I can really see is her face as she chased after me. That look that said "why are you leaving me when I need you to hold me, daddy?"

Laura will pick her up. She will have had a great day, bouncing on the trampoline, playing on the swing, eating four bowls of sweet rice…but right now all I can see is her face, chasing after me like she’ll never see it again…

Paper Parents Pop Quiz #7 (PPPQ7)

Here's the scenario. The family is at a birthday party for a local boy. He's turning four and the party is at a kids' gym with tons of activities. Lots of kids around and parents and the usual.

God damn Avery reminds me of myself. Perfectly. She acts exactly as I would. Running around and engaging when there's an activity she likes. Being timid and shy the next minute. So shy sometimes that she doesn't want to join in to some of the activities. She's always been a cautious child but I'm dying for her to break out of that a bit. The kids are all playing in the middle of the room and I'm trying to having her join in but all she says is, "I don't want to..."

I'm in a quandary. I want her to join the other kids but I don't want to force her. I'm sitting right on the fence on this one. Push her a bit past her boundaries to show her she can or let her develop on her own when she's ready...so what do I do?

A) Don't push at all. If she wants to join in she will. If not, she'll develop at her own pace and hopefully time will make her a little more daring...

B) Suggest a number of times that it would be fun. Push a little bit but let her make the call in the end according to her comfort level...

C) Make her join in to some of the events even if she doesn't want to. Odds are she'll really enjoy it if she just breaks through the initial resistance barrier. Hold her hand, hold BOTH hands if need be but push her to join in a bit and in the process expand those boundaries...

D) Pull her aside. Call her a "sissy," and insist that she either joins in with the other kids or none of them will ever come to any of her parties. Make sure she knows she'll be celebrating her "Sweet-16" at a table for one in the local diner. Then make her join in anyway and ask her in a loud voice "why aren't you more like other kids here???" Embarrass her a bit. That's what dads are for...

And the answer is?

B

But wouldn't D be fun? No, B was the call....I asked a few times, let her know that I'd be there with her. I pushed a little bit but in the end she wasn't comfortable and at 3 years old she gets to make that call. I figure let her get to 4 and then it's time to drop "D" on her ass....

(Bagged) Grapes of Wrath...

Children. They do this to you. Pictured left is my wife, Laura. Or rather my wife's hands. She wasn't quite feeling a perfect "10" at this point so she wouldn't let me include her face.

But I digress.

This is a beautiful picture of her hands. What is she doing? Yes that's right. She's squeezing a "bag" of wine. Yes that's correct I said a bag of wine. With the grip of an Olympic wrestler. She's trying to squeeze every drop of happy juice out of the bag. Why? Because the time is 6:04pm and both kids are still up. There's no end in sight...and there's wine to be consumed. And god damn it when will those kids go to bed so we can get properly tanked?

"Let There Be Yellow....!"

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages. Let me be the first to announce that our first child, Avery Anderson is finally, at long last.....on her way to being potty trained.

God both Laura and I thought she might make it into grade school wearing size 12 diapers. We tried subtle direction, cajoling, small amounts of bribery followed by obscene bribery...all to no effect. Avery Anderson is her dad as a female three year old; cautious and stubborn beyond all reason. But today I am here to announce that era is officially OVER. Today Laura sweetened the pot (pun intended), offering Avery toys, candy and vast, untold riches if she sat her fanny on the potty and lo and behold at around 3:46pm Avery Anderson requested her tush be placed on that most wonderful piece of royal blue plastic where she would be free to "stream at will" and no I'm not talking about the Internet.

By the time I arrived home at about 5:15pm she had already sat her keyster on the can AGAIN...and wonder of wonders, lightning struck for a third time at around 5:28 and 32 seconds I believe, though somehow I wasn't asked to participate in the live "streaming" session. After she dropped some liquid refreshment into her little potty she and mom poured said pee into the real potty and joyously flushed it all away...

Congrads little Avery. This is one small whiz for a little girl. One giant leap for this family. Oh I know there may be setbacks along the way. The road to porcelain is paved with mishaps...but this is a time for celebration, not contemplation. So the above picture is dedicated to you. With your rump making three visits to the plastic goddess in less than two hours you are well on your way to imitating that annoying, incontinent 90 year old uncle that everyone has. You know, the one who stretches minutes into hours, reading the paper cover to cover while sitting on the john till his legs have lost circulation...? That could be you....

You go, girl...

"It's Just That It's Delicate..."

Sometimes a song matches the mood you are in perfectly. Logan taking a one hour nap in her crib. Waking up as a fusspot. You walking her around and feeling her start to make a delicate nest of your shoulder. Damien Rice's brilliant "Delicate" playing in the living room. Filling every crack and every inch of space around you. No one else is home as Logan snuggles up and settles in. The light just starting to fade on the day. You listening to the wide open spaces in the song and swaying back and forth, imitating the quiet flow of a rocking chair. Kissing the back of her head and whispering in her ear. Knowing that she needs more sleep. Beaming inside that you might be the one to give it to her...

You moving to the sound of that sweet violin mixing in with the not so delicate sound of a six-month old snoring. That beautiful sound rising and falling like waves on the ocean and your shoulder is the beach. Feeling damp as a pool of saliva slowly spreads on your shirt. Thinking that you are happy no one else is around to disturb this...your back will soon ache and your arm will lose its strength but you're still happy no one else is around...you walk by the mirror roughly 56 times in the next 15 minutes and snap this picture...

As You Are So Shall You Parent...

So last night Avery woke up at 11:30pm earlier than usual and you tried to get her back down but it was no dice..so you slept in her big-girl bed five feet away but it didn't help and she woke up again and again and again crying and sobbing and nearly hysterical.

So then by 12:30am you brought her into bed with you and hugged her as tight as any lover but she wouldn't stop shaking and you hugged her and then let her go and then hugged her harder but she kept waking up and you didn't know what the hell was wrong and a few times you were pissed cause you thought she was just afraid of the dark or something but she kept waking up and sobbing and she couldn't tell you why.

You even enlisted mom to come in and help at 1:30am but by 1:45 mom was gone and your little girl was waking up every 20 minutes and nearly hyperventilating. So by 4:30am you weren't peeved anymore you were just dead tired and she was spitting and dripping saliva she was crying so hard and you still had no idea what the hell was going on.

So by 7:15am mom walked down with Logan and couldn't believe the battle you had gone through and she said to you "maybe she's sick" and the thought had never really occurred to you but she's NEVER like this and the fact is you never get very sick. You haven't taken a sick day in like 12 years and you'd NEVER let anything less then a full blown fever or flu keep you down and the fact is you never even considered that for your little girl. And then Laura takes out the thermometer and sticks it in Avery's ear and then announces that she has a fever of 101. And in a way you felt like a great dad for bearing the last 8 hours and boy did that feeling go right out the window in three seconds when you realized you never considered the most obvious thing...

And later that morning you confessed your idiocy to Laura but it didn't help much. You still felt like a giant tool anyway and sort of felt like you should apologize to your daughter and Laura took this picture of Avery napping and you wondered if she was dreaming of better parental care the night before...

"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star..."

Tonight contained one of those unexpected bits of sweetness that life as a parent sometimes brings. You were reading to Avery before she went to bed. It's your night time ritual. Upstairs. Into her pajamas. Reading "Thomas" the train engine book. EVERY night. Till your hoping that somehow on the next page Thomas has a nasty derailment that leads to a long career on the scrap heap...but you digress...

The book comes with a button that when pressed, plays "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star..." Avery wants you to sing it EVERY night. Tonight you did but you asked her to join in. Somehow she knew the words. Not just the "Twinkle Twinkle" part but the rest of the verse as well. There you were singing completely off key and holding your little girl while she mis-timed every word and it was glorious...and you both laughed and laughed and laughed for the longest time in her bed until your cheeks hurt and you wanted to cry...

You were amazed she knew the words and you're still not sure how or when she memorized them but as you ushered her into the bathroom to brush her teeth you picked her up from behind and gave her the biggest, most spontaneous hug you can ever remember for just making your day.

Paper Parents Pop Quiz #6 (PPPQ6)

The time is 3:45pm. You're alone with Avery and you're starting to watch her progressively melt down before your eyes. She has had a crazy active day and the chance that she'll make it to 7pm without emotionally disassembling is between slim and none and slim is leaving the townhouse.

You've got all the warning signs. Rubbing her eyes. Starting to overreact to little things. Usually the cut off for nap time is 2:15pm. You're way past that but you'll be staring in a remake of "Misery," if she doesn't sleep and you'll play James Caan's character. The down side is that by napping her and keeping it to 30 - 45 minutes you'll be waking her out of a deep sleep and be inviting Armageddon. Guaranteed she's a bear for an hour after that. Lock it in. But from 5:30pm on she'll be the better for it. A quandary to be sure...stick it out or put her down for a short nap....what do you do? And by the way the wife is out running errands so as much as you'd like to pass the buck and go cycling that's not on the table...

A) Against your better judgment you put her down for the nap. The FULL nap. Let her sleep till about 5:30pm and hope somehow she isn't thrown completely off her sleep schedule. Fat chance she'll go down before 9pm...

B) You put her down for the nap. BUT you wake her up around 4:30pm. She'll hate your guts for awhile and life will suck but she'll be ready to go down by 8pm...

C) Stick it out. Life is for the bold and you'll boldly hope she'll hang on till 7pm without an emotional apocalypse hitting North Boulder.

D) Start randomly calling sex hot lines and don't worry about it for a second. You're busy, so she'll figure it out on her own. If you see her slumped over on the couch with drool dripping from her mouth you'll guess she fell asleep. If not, who cares anyway, mom will be home to deal with the aftermath in 20...

And the answer is...?

B Holy crap she was a bear. She was snoring loud enough to shake the bed when you started waking her at 4:30pm. 10 minutes to get her out of bed. 10 to get her downstairs. Another 10 to get her to stop crying. You played your favorite new sing-along, John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" and that finally seemed to snap her out of it...you sang "Rocky Mountain Hiiiiiiiiigh" and she responded with "Colorado!" at the top of her lungs. It was actually a pretty sweet moment. And by 5:15pm she was back on her "A" game. Today you made the right choice...

Tonight's Thought

It always makes me chuckle that a number of people clearly look up to us as parents. I mean, if all of them knew the times I wanted to drop Logan in her crib and slam the door behind me...how many times I feel like we had zero clue what we were doing; letting Avery sleep in our bed one week, then making her cry the next and then choosing some entirely different path the week after that...

Parenting is taking the gobs of advice you get, filtering it into something workable that you and your wife/husband are comfortable with and then hoping for the best. Then it's about not getting discouraged and trying something else when Plan "A" fails miserably...

It's nice to be put on a pedestal once in awhile. Good for the ego I guess...but pedestals always lead to nasty falls and I can't tell you with certainty that our children won't grow up to be crack-whores at 15. No one plans for failure as a parent...sometimes it just happens that way...

Wait till they're off to college, then judge us on the job we did...

Maximum Living and the Urge to Fly...

I love my children and I adore my wife. Let's start with that understood. I spent 20 years in sports television and made enough money to enjoy the insane things in life that only a small percentage of people would find remotely enjoyable; Ironmans, world travel, destination marathons, all that good stuff. If I saw a listing for a race and my eyes popped out of my head then that race became a mission.

That's how I ended up in New Zealand at the dawn of the new millennium, Iceland in the summer of 2001, Australia, Budapest, Austria, Penticton and a dozen other exotic locales too numerous to mention. Most of the time by myself. It was a tremendous life. I wasn't a pro. I wasn't great at racing, but after struggling for 30 years to find myself, I made damn sure to leave it all at every finish line and have the time of my life afterwards.

It was an existence that bears little resemblance to the life I have now as a husband and a parent.

With a wife, you can still live that existence. With two very small children? It becomes exponentially harder; life becomes a series of decisions and diapers and I don't mind making that trade-off. Being a husband and father is better than any race I will ever run. But at the same time, you need to focus on your children -- hard, if you expect to be a good parent. And with so much time and effort dedicated to them, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that something was missing. A friend of mine once said to me, "You don't do ordinary life well, do you?" and he was right. Too much "ordinary" living and I get antsy...edgy. I get the urge to plot races, to travel again to exotic locales. To find my next hunt and embark on another search and destroy mission...

There is a part of me that feels like a sharp instrument that's been blunted by domestication. Soft when I used to feel hard. I'm used to setting a goal and mowing it down. Now my only goal is to get my three-year old daughter to sleep through the night and be happy the next day. I am the knife that's gone dull through lack of use. And I feel the tug of the "extraordinary life" I used to live more and more with each diaper I change.

My fear is the ordinary; at work, at home, in life. One of my biggest fears is to be lying on my death bed at 90 with regrets, thinking..."I should have climbed that mountain or done the Great Wall of China Marathon or seen the Galapagos...but I didn't." This thought is present every day and it is beyond sad. With that in mind there are two missions that are kicking around my brain. And like in the days of old, my palms get a tad sweaty and my mind races when I start to ponder the details...

First, I have an urge to cycle all the way across our country. Coast to coast. I have a romantic desire to ride 100 miles, getting rained on and honked at during the day, then camping out under the stars in Utah, visiting a country bar in Texas and drinking homemade Kentucky moonshine at night. 30 or 40 days of exploration and pushing myself to the brink of sanity. Damn that sounds like an amazing way to spend a month, doesn't it? Now in reality, romance may give way to saddle sores and sunburn, but my heart pounds every time I really start to think about the feasibility of this mission...and that is my ultimate litmus test.

Second, I'm trying to convince the wife to take our two children (who'll be 5 and 2) and travel the world for a year. Thailand, Costa Rica, Brazil, France, Hackensack...the place or places are irrelevant. It's the experience that matters. Pushing the boundaries of the every day. My wife has been a bit resistant -- for good reason. Travelling with two small children isn't always fun, let alone setting up shop somewhere halfway around the world for six months. But I'm working on her. Every few days we talk about it and I throw some combat zen her way; "life is for the bold, hon," "think about looking back on this when we're 70, babe.." those are two of my favorites...and I think I'm getting to her...

Maybe neither of these fantasies will become a reality. Maybe both will. At this point I don't know. I do know that most people would be content with having an amazing wife and children. I am too...but then again I'm not. I hunger for more. To be challenged, physically, mentally, emotionally. The reality is that without a mission, without a hunt, a little piece of me is dead. Here's hoping that some day I can have both...

Our Daily Visit to the Town of Dumpos Muchos...

Here's one of the things they REALLY don't tell you about being a parent. The pooh clean-up. Witness this collection of soul-stirring photography above and see our sweet little Logan visiting Dumpos Muchos on a dialy basis and in the process separating myth from reality for prespective parents...

Myth: before you're a parent, dumps are probably the last thing you think about when painting a portrait of life with a child in your mind. If you do, there's usually a little fantasy you have that goes something like this...

Magically you somehow sense that your child has had a "movement." She coos as you undress her. You peel off her diaper and the smell of a dozen roses fills the air as you easily slip off the soiled diaper and slip a fresh, clean one on under her tender bottom. She continues to giggle. Then you button up her onesy, both laughing and fully embracing the father/daughter moment, wishing you could savor this and every other second for all time...

Reality: shit happens. All over the place. Usually down her leg in the form of a mustard colored semi-solid with the consistency of a thin stew. No diaper could contain this. So BOOM, your're cradling your little girl in your arms and your hand finds something really wet on her leg. You really hope it's a drool-stain but who are you kidding...drool stains rarely make their way to your daughter's hamstring. So you look down and inevitably you catch sight of a rapidly spreading yellow stain on her leg that your hand is caught smack-dab in the middle of...

The diaper changing is the easy part; peeling it off and all her clothes and trying hard to keep her toes from kicking turd all over the living room. Next step is the oxy-clean. Full disclosure, the wife always handles that. I would be tempted to look at the onesy and mutter "Stay safe" before tossing it in the garbage. But since we don't have unlimited funds Laura has scrubbed with oxy-clean so often and bought so much of the stuff that she should own shares in the company. EVERY DAY. Scrubbing rancid turds out of clothes...usually right before we have to leave for an appointment. So enjoy the pictures. Give me another month and I'll give you 30 more...

The....Horror (Volume 2)

You don't write about the wife a whole lot. Maybe you take her for granted a bit. But she's the foreman at the plant...the backbone of the operation here in Boulder. Last night you were sleeping in the guest bedroom again because Logan had a cold and you all knew it was going to be a long night.

At 11:45pm you heard Logan crying and you came down to see if you could help the wife at all. She was cradling your little daughter. Rocking her back and forth gently, the way only a mother could. You felt like the spare tire on your car. Useless except in case of emergency. Logan still had her cold. Still congested and waking up every hour. You looked at your wife as she held Logan in her arms and prepared to sleep sitting up for most of the night. Your wife's eyes said everything through the silence. They told you "the next seven hours are going to be brutal but I'm her mother and I'll find a way......"

You wanted to help but you knew that if anything was going to give Logan sleep it was going to be the nipple -- Laura's, not yours. You felt useless. All you could do was prop a pillow under Laura's arm and wish her good luck. You left the room at 11:50pm. Feeling a little shorter than when you came down. Wondering if your will would have been as strong...thinking you knew the answer....

"So tell me again why you're tired?"

This is what non-parents tend to ask me a lot so I thought I'd detail a normal weekend day such as today...

6:45am...Laura wakes up with Logan who definitely has a cold. A 5-month old with a cold is not a good thing. They can't eat or sleep for long because they can't breath. And unlike you or me they can't pick or blow their nose. So they're screwed, and so are you by the way...

7:30am...I get up. I slept longer because I was up till 1:30am on the computer. And I got up twice during the night when Avery had nightmares...

8am...Breakfast is a 90-minute process of cooking and handing Logan off like a football while Laura preps...I have the first of many memories of when Laura and I were childless and we vacationed in New Orleans. Stumbling around Bourbon Street at 1am is the memory I'm rehashing right now....might as well have been 20 years ago...

9:30am...House clean-up. We're breaking in a new babysitter and the place is a disaster. "Clean-up" is actually inaccurate. Think of it more as placing crap in semi-neat piles all around the house. With two kids tugging at you...

10am...Taylor arrives and Laura immediately preps to go to the gym. I'm heading out to get some more java at the local coffee shop. Logan is already down and Laura is leaving in 10 minutes. I'm absolutely sure that Logan will wake up as soon as Laura's car has left the garage, and she'll scream so loud and long that our new babysitter will be turned into a suicidal wreck within 15 minutes. So I need to get back by 10:25am to talk her off the ledge...

10:30am...I get back home. No ledge. Logan is still down, thank the lord...

11am...I actually get some work done on the computer while Taylor entertains Avery and Logan still sleeps.

12:30am...Laura gets home and I immediately prep for the gym. By 1pm I am out the door. Body is tired from lack of sleep but that's life and I'm a bear when I'm not active...

3:45pm...I have a two hour workout and get back home before 4pm, ready for the dinner time "grind." Dinner is usually a beast because we have to trade Logan off twice as often as we did at breakfast. She's sick and the closer she is to 7pm bedtime the rougher it usually gets even when she's well...

5:30pm...Avery has had a great day but she didn't nap and now she's falling apart. I raised my voice on two separate occasions and she burst into tears. I was right to raise my voice but seeing your three-year old turned into a sobbing mound of jelly is not fun. I'm too tired to really feel bad. She'll get over it...

6pm...She falls apart again and all I can do is laugh...she's transitioning out of taking naps and once in awhile she goes haywire around 5pm because she's exhausted. Lucky us. Today is one of those days.

6:05pm...I ask Laura if she wants me to go out and get wine. We have none. Since we've been back from Florida we've been on this "sobriety kick." It feels moronic and ridiculous right now but we heard somewhere that not every set of parents blows through a bottle of wine every night. I haven't met them....

6:15pm...Hand off time. Laura is cooking and I'm walking around a dead tired infant who wants nothing more than to fall asleep on my shoulder. But 6:15pm is too early so I do a half hour dance with Logan; she cries, nearly falls asleep, then cries again. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile I'm also trying to keep Avery entertained while Laura cooks...easy, right?

6:30pm...I ask Laura again if she wants wine. My shoulder has a grapefruit sized drool stain on it courtesy of Logan. I've been carrying around an 18 pound sack for 20 minutes and my back aches. I'm dead tired and I want alcohol. Even if I have to consume it under a park bench out of a paper bag...

7pm...Dinner. Thank the lord. No wine....

7:08pm It's great to be able to take 8 minutes to sit down, relax and connect with your family after a long day but the table has to be cleared, dishes have to be done and two kids have to be put to bed...

7:15pm...Laura puts Logan down. An extended affair because Logan still can't breath so she has a hard time falling asleep. I read to Avery and I can tell Logan has given her the cold.

7;45pm...Laura looks like a truck ran her over and dragged her three city streets for good measure. I probably look the same...we pay bills while collapsing on the couch and staring at the floor...

8:15pm...This is where the two of us should be working on our five small businesses. Planning the future. Getting creative. Sure. I can barely type. Laura heads upstairs. Logan will be up ten times tonight guaranteed because she can't breath. At some point Laura will sleep sitting up with Logan attached to her boob, snorting...

8:45pm...I was trying to rally and get some computer work done, ahhh but there's Avery crying now because she woke up since she can't breath....she's exhausted and congested and I rub her back for 5 minutes. I contemplate sucking the snot out of her nose with my mouth. I don't but I think if I had the wine I might have....the Eagles lyric from "Lyin" Eyes" plays in my head...."Another night....it's gonna be a long one...."

So go ahead, ask me again why I'm so tired??? Answer: cause I'm a parent, that's why...

Big Love

It's a show on HBO. It could just as easily be a documentary on Logan's thighs. Holy Mackerel. We call her "Buddha" because she has this round head that sits on top of a circular body with zero tone. But we're always drawn to her legs.

Changing her diaper is near impossible until you peel back the fat layers. Here are two pictures at the start of the process. Where do I start? Picture one illustrates the point. By picture two she was feeling shy and tried covering up the leg-lard.

Nutri-System anyone?

Satisfaction...

The satisfaction of being a parent can sometimes be felt in silence. In a glance between you and your wife on a flight. Both of you wishing you were home and your children are snoring and you catch sight of Laura's weary eyes. For all of two seconds. And you break out in smiles as wide as canyons while you both cradle your little girls. Like look at the two of us and who would have ever imagined and being in the back row holding these two is better than first class could ever be...

You could spend the rest of the flight giving words to that moment, but sometimes silence is better...

Travel Snippets...

Snapshots from a loooong day of travel...

1). A crappy nights' rest because Avery kept kicking me in her sleep. Laura having even less success with Logan and waking up grumpy. I walked Logan around the lobby for 45 minutes just to give the wife 20 minutes of pure sleep....

2). Wondering if we really woke up in Miami. It was 35 degrees at 8am....

3) Wearing the same undergarment for two days straight is Rough. Note the capital "R." It's there on purpose.

4). Deciding NOT to spend $70/$75 to drag 4 tired humans around the Miami Zoo for an hour. So the kids are bored but surviving at the hotel with lots of TV. Yuck...

5). Waiting at the gate at the airport for two hours. Avery exhausted from inactivity, curling up and falling asleep in my arms. You can't beat boredom, can you? It might have been the first time she fell asleep on me since she was 1 1/2...it was uncomfortable but nice at the same time...

6). Already feeling like a zombie as they close the forward door to the plane. It's supposed to be snowing in Denver and 13 degrees without the wind chill. I'm wearing sandals, shorts and a very light fleece, and it's a 10 minute walk to our car....s'all good.

7) A four hour flight home at flight level 320. An 18-pound butterball in a onesy being passed back and forth between the wife and I....ahhhh who am I kidding, the wife did most of the heavy lifting...

8) Doing a 5 minute dash to the car. 10 degrees. Snow. Frozen toes. Me slip-sliding the wrong way down an airport on-ramp.

9) Feeling happy to be home but happier if I could actually see it. Windshield wipers are crap and I can barely see a thing in front of me with lots of precious cargo in the passenger seats.

10) Collapsing into a freezing cold bed.

The girls were warriors. They put me to shame and handled a brutal travel day with grace. Thank the lord for small favors...

Leaving On a Jet Plane....

Today was supposed to be our big day or travel back from family vacation in Florida. We made it through a 90 minute drive, clueless Marge at the ticket counter and then battled through security. We were set to fly from Miami to Charlotte and then connect on through Denver. A brutal day of travel to be sure...then they make an announcement that the flight to Charlotte was over sold. Way over sold. 12 passengers over sold somehow as the ticket agent told me.

Next thing I know he's offering me 600 per person(!)to bump us to a flight tomorrow that will get us DIRECT to Denver. I nearly lept over the counter to accept the offer. Somehow staying here one night in a pretty nice Doubletree will pay for the flights on our next two family vacations. The rest of the night was not so amazing to be sure. Logan was fussy and Avery was bored. We've got to think up something fun to do with the kids until our 6:15pm flight tomorrow night.

By the way whenever we have a long family travel day in front of us it always helps me to mentally prepare for the absolute worst; Logan screaming from the second we plop her in the car seat to the second we take her off the plane. Avery fussy as hell. A brutal, bumpy plane flight and me in a middle seat with heartburn and foot fungus. Somehow that puts me in a better frame of mind for the trip. I expect brutality. I usually get something better so it helps put a smile on my face.

Tomorrow we're going "home" to Boulder for our first time as a family. Here's hoping it won't be nearly as nasty a trip as it is in my mind. And if it is, it's ok too because I've got $1,800 good reasons to tolerate it....

Sleep....

One of the hardest things to communicate to prospective parents is just how tired you are every night at 9pm....wait, make that 8:30. And how most of the time you don't even care.

A good friend of mine asked what we did for New Year's Eve and for a split second I was slightly embarrassed. The wife was snoring by 9:45pm. I made it on the computer till 12:02am. I would have knocked off at about 11pm but it was New Year's Eve after all and if there was a night to bang on the keyboard an extra hour this was it. No "Midnight Run" in Central Park in NYC. No projectile vomiting in an alley at 4am like I did after a night of severe alcohol intake about 15 years ago. Hell we didn't even bang pots or anything. For a second I thought, "Is this what our formerly exciting life has come to???"

I entered parenthood thinking that things would be different for us. Actually I remember telling my wife often that if we couldn't keep a good chunk of the life we had built for ourselves intact than I might not want to be a parent. We had such an exciting, fun time as a couple that I imagined resenting an infant or two robbing us of the ability to stay up late night doing whatever we darn well pleased...

In the end I think the transition to 8:30pm exhaustion is like a receding hairline. It happens gradually. You aren't always happy about it but it sort of feels natural. Every once in a while you resent it but then you look back and remember all the energy you devoted to your children in the last 12-14 hours and you don't wonder much further about why you're a mental zombie when the sun goes down. And if you do it doesn't matter much because you'll probably be asleep in ten minutes anyway....

More Potty...

As gloriously detailed in Paper Parents Pop Quiz #4 (PPPQ4), our first daughter is slow on the draw with regards to sitting her fannie on the potty. She talks a good game but when it's time to deliver she looks at me with those innocent eyes and says she wants to pooh in her diaper as opposed to sitting on the dumper.

My patience is starting to wear a bit thin. Maybe being around other potty trained kids in school will fix things over time...maybe not. She's been in school for three months and it hasn't so I'm feeling the itch. We've tried bribery, and if promising her a full day's worth of ice cream doesn't work, nothing will...I'm running low on options, but one of them is still to let "nature" take its course. This is becoming a bit more difficult as time goes by because I don't clearly envision something coming along to change the situation.

I am open to suggestions for sure. Right now we're a bit stuck on what to do if anything at all! But I can tell you I'm wanting to feed her a gallon of laxative and tie her to the can until she craps her brains out! Probably not advisable though....