Archive | June, 2008

On our way upstairs for bedtime tonight, Daughter informed us that she had special powers.

What special powers, you ask?

In her own words:

• changing picture frame colors
• making banana cakes
• running really fast

She also gave herself a superhero name: Lya.

As it turns out, not only does she have superpowers, but she’s the keeper of the superpowers, because before bedtime was over she named the rest of us and told us our powers.

(I feel like that last sentence needs more commas. Or less commas.)

Wife is named Ava. Her powers are:

• changing picture frame colors
• power to clean

Son is named Pava. His powers are:

• making apple cake
• changing the sun going down and the moon coming up, and the moon going down and the sun coming up
• making phones and fans

By the time we got around to me, she ran out of steam. Her naming and power-granting just weren’t very inspired.

My name is Kava. My powers are the same as Son’s.

Phoned-in, eh?

Anyhow, all of that is to say that if you notice the sun going down or the moon coming up at a time that doesn’t seem quite right, don’t worry. It just means I’m testing out my awesome new powers.

A few weeks ago, Wife found her old My Little Ponies and Care Bears in a storage room upstairs.

I suggested she eBay the things and we go spend a month at the Plaza in New York with the money.

She opted to give all the vintage toys to Daughter. Whatever.

Anyhow, with all the extra toys, the girl’s room can get pretty cluttered. So Wife spent about 30 minutes cleaning up Daughter’s room this afternoon.

The room was immaculate when she finished.

It looked so good, in fact, that our own bedroom must have looked shabby by comparison.

How do I know this?

Because Daughter left this instructional tale in our room for us:

Apparently she thinks we need some organizational help.

Last week I started a new feature here called Friday Fives.

The basic concept is this: I make a list of five things. I post it on Friday.

If you need a more detailed explanation, email me and I’ll elaborate.

Anyhow, here’s this week’s Friday Fives:

FIVE DAYS I’D LIKE TO RE-LIVE:

1. College graduation – May 1998
Graduation day was the perfect blend of all my favorite things: my college, my friends and my family. The commencement ceremony was powerful (bagpipes and what-not) and the day was just full of goodness.

2. Wedding day – November 1999
Our wedding capped off a long weekend full of friends and family, and finally starting to build a life as a married couple with Wife was incredibly exciting.

3. Daughter’s birth – October 2003
I know that labor and delivery is a disaster for the woman doing it, but childbirth is such a cool thing to share as a couple. I’ll never forget the look in Wife’s eyes and the way she would squeeze my hand with each contraction. And naturally, I’ll never forget what it was like to see my child for the first time.

4. Son’s birth – September 2005
Just as every child is different, so is every labor and delivery. Son’s birth seemed more fast-paced and frantic than Daughter’s. Once he was with us, it was awesome to see Wife holding our nine pound boy and stroking his bright yellow hair.

5. Fifth anniversary – November 2004
I surprised Wife with a trip to Las Vegas for our fifth anniversary. “Vegas?” you ask. Having just celebrated Daughter’s first birthday, we wanted to skip town and pretend we still shared a shred of youth and coolness between the two of us. Even though we’re not big party people or gamblers, we had a great time.

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This certainly isn’t a comprehensive list of the favorite days of my life, because there are many, many more.

Why don’t you share a few great days from your life? Leave me a Comment, or make this a little meme and post a list over at your place.

Have a great Friday!

What a difference a year makes.

Here’s what was on the horizon this time last year:

• We had just sealed the deal on moving to our new home
• We were planning a July 4 road trip to Philadelphia to see my brother and sister-in-law
• We were planning a July trip and August trip to Nashville for a friend’s wedding events
• We had a condo reserved at the beach in August to cap off the summer

All of which helps me make the point that: last summer was INSANE.

A lot of fun, but truly insane in terms of all the coming-and-going.

What truly defined last summer, though, was all the packing for our move. Packing was the big, dark cloud that was hanging over us at all times. It was an additional full-time job for the Wife.

That’s not to say the actual moving of our stuff was any picnic, but there’s more gratification in moving than packing because moving allows you to slowly see your new home come together.

This summer things won’t be so crazy.

We don’t have any trips planned. And unless Wife knows something I don’t, we don’t have to pack all our stuff into boxes and move it three blocks up the street.

So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

What’s on your calendar for the summer?

Last night I had one of the worst dreams I can remember.

I was working in a small town in China with another American. A previous American visitor to their town had committed some sort of crime, but slipped away before he could be punished.

Thus, the townspeople decided to punish one of us for his crime. They would give the two of us a battery of tests, and whoever performed worst on the tests would be punished.

In this Chinese town, the punishment for doing whatever this dude had done is execution.

So guess who failed the tests?

I’ve never been a strong test-taker anyway, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I even fail tests in my dreams.

With the results in, the local authorities came to me and told me I would be executed. Not a year from now. Not a week from now.

NOW.

As they walked me to wherever they were going to execute me, I screamed and wept and flailed.

I wept for my wife, who would be widowed. I wept for my small children, who would grow up without a father. I wept for myself, and all the great chapters of my life that would go unwritten.

It was intense. Very, very intense.

I felt it as if it were really happening.

Before the Chinese villagers could do the deed, I reached the point where I could look around and say, “This doesn’t make sense. Is this a dream?” and woke myself up out of it.

And even though it was all just a dream, I’m giving the wife an extra kiss and the kids a long hug before I leave for work today.

Because you never know when Chinese villagers might grab you, test you and punish you for another man’s crime.

A lot of people keep their homes company-ready at all times.

I’d bet this is particularly true in the South, where people still stop by to visit unannounced.

When your home is company-ready, there’s always a pitcher of tea in the fridge and there’s any number of fresh, clean spaces to sit and chat.

The same is true for blogs.

A good blogger always keeps fresh, snappy content at the top of the page. Just in case someone new stops by. Or in case a van load of people stop by.

That’s why I’m writing this post. I did not have fresh, snappy content at the top of my page today. And today of all days, that was a problem.

You see, Boomama posted a great item at her place today, and she put together a list of blogs that she feels exemplify the points she was making in her post.

I’m extremely grateful for the link. There are some incredible blogs on the list. But I cringe for Boomama in the same way that I cringe for the dude who discovered Pluto all those years ago.

At some point, the blogosphere will discover that I’m more of a tiny moon than a real, live planet.

Anyhow, thank you so much for clicking through to check out my little place here. The post that most folks saw earlier today was from Sunday, in which I recapped my weekend alone with the kids.

Not trendsetting blogging by any stretch of the imagination, but the post did contain this sentence, which I really enjoyed writing:

After recreating the Lincoln-Douglas debates – only this time with pink sparkle shoes – she took her shoes off.

If you’re new to My Best Investments, make yourself at home. Sure, there are piles of magazines on the couch and Weebles on the living room floor, but that’s how we roll.

If you want to read more, let me suggest a few of my favorite posts:

- Why daddies should date their daughters
- I’m a c-list invite, but I’ll take it
- But if anyone could pull it off, he could
- Storytime economics
- I learned the best lessons before I even got to the classroom

Enjoy!

It’s over.

My 48 hour stretch of single parenthood has come to an end. I’d judge our weekend a success for three simple reasons:

1. No one got hurt
2. No one called Child Protective Services
3. I still have my sanity (somewhat)

After I posted my first update on Saturday, I loaded up the kids and met some other dudes and their kids at the children’s museum. After a solid hour there, we made a run through Chick-fil-A and went to a friend’s house for a picnic and some trampoline jumping.

Here are a few thoughts from Saturday and Sunday:

Nice long naps are mandatory
When we got home, Son decided that he only needed a 45 minute nap. I disagreed, so I put one of his favorite toys in his bed with him and told him I’d be back to check on him later.

I heard silence from his room for another 45 minutes or so. (That’s right – my ears are so good I can hear silence.)

Then I heard him playing and laughing at his toy for a while. The toy in the bed bought me an extra hour. Well played, dad.

Things changed on Sunday
Daughter woke up on the wrong side of the bed on Sunday. In her grumpiness, she opted to wear her church shoes with no socks.

I suggested that her shoes might rub her feet if she didn’t wear socks. She thought that was crazy-talk and put them on anyway.

As I reached for the door of the nursery at church, she pulled up lame and clutched my leg as if she’d been shot in the foot.

She needed socks, she explained.

I told her she could wear her shoes or take them off. She angled for a third option: go home and get socks and come back. After recreating the Lincoln-Douglas debates – only this time with pink sparkle shoes – she took her shoes off.

Things are back to normal
Wife pulled into the driveway around 3 p.m. Peace and order have settled over the house.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

As I mentioned in my last post, Wife has jumped ship and headed for a weekend in the mountains with some friends.

That leaves me in charge of my progeny for the whole weekend. And as much as I’d like to be the one surrounded with adult friends and an hour removed from soiled diapers and temper tantrums, I still have a lot of fun on these special weekends.

Plus, who’s to say that there won’t be any temper tantrums in a house full of grown women?

Even though we’re only 15 hours into this adventure, things are going well to this point. Here are some of my significant accomplishments:

There were no tears at bedtime last night.
Granted, things move a little slower when it’s a 1:2 parent-to-kid ratio, but I was still able to navigate the gauntlet of drink requests, story demands and bathroom tasks known as bedtime.

I put all the dirty dishes in the dishwasher last night.
It’s way too easy to let that stuff pile up while the little lady is out of town, but I don’t want to spend my entire Sunday afternoon cleaning up before she gets home.

I watched the last 30 minutes of Karate Kid.
This isn’t so much an “accomplishment” as it was a nice bonus. The last 30 minutes are the best part of the movie, full of cool quotes like “Sweep the leg!” and a healthy dose of Elisabeth Shue.

I went to bed at a reasonable hour.
I fought my inclination to flip channels for hours on end, even though there was a husband-and-wife-go-out-on-a-boat, wife-goes-missing, gee-do-you-think-maybe-the-husband-is-guilty story coming on truTV.

I got up early this morning.
I can’t sleep much past 6:15 anyway, so this really didn’t require much effort.

I made the bed.
Like the dishes in the dishwasher, I could have easily skipped this one. But it makes me feel like much less of a slob to climb into a made bed at night.

There were no fights at breakfast.
Nobody fussed about me about having too much or too little milk in their cereal. The kids didn’t tangle over who was being touched or not touched. And they ate all of their breakfast.

As you know, things change very quickly when you’re dealing with preschoolers. I may be singing a different tune after our trip to the museum and lunch today.

Today marks the beginning of a new feature called Friday Fives.

Five Things I’d Like to Do This Weekend While Wife Is On A Girl Trip

1. Get out and do something fun with the kids on Saturday
Noggin is my escape hatch when I don’t have anything planned for the kids, and I want to avoid the TV as much as possible. I’d like to get them out and run ‘em around at the park for a few hours.

2. Get the kids up, dressed and get to church on time on Sunday
Anything is possible when you get up early enough. I think this goal is within reach.

3. Weed out another flower bed
In an effort to save a million-year-old oak tree in our front yard, our tree people turned a 40-foot circle around the tree from grass to dirt and mulch. Guess what likes to grow in dirt and mulch? Yep, weeds.

4. Write some good stuff for the blog
I should have a few solid hours after the kids are in bed each night to get a little writing done. Or to watch Will Ferrell movies. We’ll see which one wins.

5. Keep my sanity
Barring any major calamity, I think the kids and I are going to have a great weekend. They seem to be bouncing back from the crud they’ve had this week, so good moods will help us all.

And with that, Friday Fives is born. If you’d like to do a Friday Five at your place, let me know in the Comments so we can come see.

Have a great Friday!