Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

It’s hard to tell from this picture, but Olivia just got a haircut – one that cost two times what it costs to cut my hair, but a mere tenth of what this vainglorious bastard paid for his. Thankfully, she doesn’t obsess about her coiffure like the man in the video does his, but she does seem to obsess about the topic of haircuts. Case in point: we have checked out all the haircut-related books from the library, including ones involving dogs. (We currently possess the one below.)

No Such Thing as a Fun-Free Lunch

Olivia and Emmy at lunch today

I have some random memories from my grade school lunchroom: the time I found a tooth in my hamburger, the day chocolate milk became an option, the oddity that was the “salad lunch.” None of these memories came flooding back when I dropped in on Olivia’s lunchroom, but I was reminded just how fun a thirty-minute stretch in the middle of the school day can be, especially when you add food and friends to the mix.

Olivia put on quite a show, from walking down the halls holding Tre and Emmy’s hands to fluttering about the lunch room as its resident social butterfly. I can see now why she comes home most days with half her lunch uneaten. I reported my observations to her mother, and she in turn asked Olivia if she had ratcheted up the antics because Reed and I were there. Our daughter’s response? Yes, she said, I was so excited to see Daddy and Reed there, and so I threw in some extra jokes.

To Blog, or Not to Blog

An excerpt from a February article in Details on overparenting:

It's not like we're the first generation to turn out Frankenkinder. Since the dawn of time, parents have been dressing their kids in ridiculous sailor suits and dragging them on ski trips to Gstaad. But lately it feels like we're scaling new heights as bad examples. We create parenting blogs that transform our preschoolers into fetishized celebrities.

And a snippet from a September 2009 article in Newsweek about the risks we parents incur when we broadcast the every whim of our children:

Ouch. And that was before blogs, or Facebook. Thanks to three of the hallmarks of our age—oversharing, overparenting, and narcissism—the intimate details of the lives of many little ones, from toddlers to teenagers, have been pasted in public forums by their mothers and fathers. Soiled nappies, tantrums, mental illness, meth. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes comforting; sometimes it touches on something important.

And sometimes it just seems wrong. Some broadcast the exploits of their offspring in a way that violates not just their privacy but their trust. I can't be the only one who is very glad my parents never wrote about my formative years.

Both articles touched a nerve with me because I’ve been consciously grappling with the issues the authors bring up – celebrity culture, rampant narcissism, privacy concerns, the risks of alienation and embarrassment – ever since I started this blog four and a half years ago. I suppose it’s true that whenever parents write and share in a publicly accessible forum the stories involving their family, they’re one step closer to the aforementioned repercussions. But I would argue that the sheer act of sharing is not enough to take us down this undesirable path; content, manner, and frequency of distribution play a much larger role in leading us to such an abyss.

And so as your humbled blogger who’s appreciative of all those who stop by this blog, I thought it was important for you to know that I am constantly weighing all these forces when deciding what to share – I post the things I feel my family and friends might enjoy and even cherish, and I leave out the stuff that my kids might point to years down the line as a reason for why they hate me. (The only time I go rogue is when there’s some delicious wordplay to be had, at which time all deliberate considerations as to what I share go out the window.)

I write the blog because I enjoy the exercise, but I also write because I want to be able to go back and remember the significant – and less significant – times we spent together as a family and with friends. If that makes me narcissistic and exploitative, well then, so be it.

Allergic Overreaction

The nights when our children coordinate their long sleeping spells are few and far between, but last night’s non-sleep regimen was especially hellacious. Reed’s winter-long cold has been more fierce as of late, and so his slumber has been interrupted by congested airways, and Olivia climbed into our bed early this morning crying that her tummy hurt.

I don’t know if it’s from our perpetual sleep deprivation or neuroses or a combination of the two, but theories abound – from the conceivable to the unfounded – whenever and as to why our children are ill. Chinese drywall – although we have no evidence the previous homeowners remodeled with it – is what’s trending this week, but we do allow for the more mundane possibility of food allergies as to what’s ailing our daughter. Olivia’s stomach pains kept her from school today and caused her pediatrician enough concern that he ordered x-rays and blood work, which of course did nothing to temper the wild speculations coming from the parental camp.

Update: the nurse called to say that the x-rays and blood work showed nothing out of the ordinary. Phew. Crisis averted – at least until the next theory we cook up or subscribe to.

Valentine's Day Card

(card –noun
Informal. a. a person who is amusing or fastidious.
b. any person, esp. one with some indicated characteristic.)

Be still, my heart, for there is a child whose love of wordplay is tantamount to that for whom you lub (love?) dub, lub dub, lub dub…

Presidential Address

As you’ll see, Olivia is quite the Lincoln scholar, even though she misses his birthday by some 1,800 years. (Give credit to early exposure – this trip was made when she was a year and a half.) Our daughter celebrated his birthday by drawing a sketch of him that’s better than anything I could come up with and then ably (Abe-ly?) encapsulating his life in under two minutes. (Note: the word she’s trying to come up with around the 1:19 mark is “slavery.”)

Abe Magnate from chris k on Vimeo.

His Curiosity Piqued, He Peeked Curiously

The featured attraction

Peek at (Baby,) Boo! from chris k on Vimeo.

Super-Duper Party Trooper

Our coltish child ain’t always saintly, but he had an MVP performance playing with among a football team’s worth of children roaming the basement of my boss’s house during his annual Super Bowl party.

A Snow-Win(ter) Situation

Eskimos may have a large number of words for snow – they don’t, by the way, but repeating this oft-cited “fact” will make a bunch of linguists mad at you (and they have a large number of ways of calling you an idiot) – but in our family, we’re most interested in two varieties: snowman-snow and sledding-snow. The former is wetter and denser, perfect for creating snowmen, snowwomen, and snowchildren; the latter is the light and fluffy stuff that’s ideal for sledding. After failing to get much traction in the snowfamily-creation department, we were hoping to literally fail at getting traction for some sledding fun at the local elementary school. After a couple of runs on the sled, Olivia eventually ditched it when trudging through massive snowdrifts became an option.

Matter of (Mini) Course

It was Kenny Rogers who warned that you got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, but I’d be willing to gamble a chicken restaurant that he wasn’t singing about origami or talking about holding and folding sushi rolls. But I was.

I had agreed to help out at Olivia’s school with mini courses, which are classes taught by parents or community members. My class was titled “A Trip to Japan,” in which I taught two sections of twentysome K-3rd graders the fine arts of origami and sushi roll assembly. My goal coming in was to teach the kids how to successfully fold a samurai hat and for them to sample a slice of the rice-and-seaweed roll, but I revised that on game day to making sure my course was more entertaining than the one featuring Sniffy the Sniffasaurus, the dinosaur that promotes natural-gas safety.