How to defend the fast break

It was inevitable I suppose.  Connor has been running around the house like a lunatic for a while now and little Josie was content crawling up to something and cruising.  She also likes to be held and loves attention.  She also loves whatever Connor has in his hands at the time.  Actually a pretty funny example of sibling jealousy happened the other day.  We have this little puzzle box that has two 9-piece puzzles in it.  Connor was putting one of them together and Josephine crawled over to see and start grabbing pieces.  Nita was downstairs putting her contacts in or doing laundry, or something.  I was by myself.  Anyway, Connor was saying, “No Josie, No!”  So I gave Josephine the other puzzle, which became immediately more interesting to Connor.  He abandoned his puzzle and reached for hers.  So I allowed the switch.  And Connor was happy he had Josie’s puzzle and Josie was happy she had his puzzle…for about three seconds.  Then they looked at each other, looked at the puzzles, and wanted to switch again.  This went on four times.  I just laughed as I kept switching the puzzles, it could have gone on for half an hour.  I know it was kind of cruel, like the puppy or cat with the laser pointer type cruel, but funny and no one was injured in the filming of this episode.

Josie loves being around Connor and Connor recognizes he has mobility as his main asset.  So Josie starts coming and he takes off running.  She giggles and tries to follow.  The problem is, now I have to pick my favorite, because Josie can now climb up the stairs…all of them.  And Connor usually makes a break for the refrigerator, the scissor drawer, or to the bathroom where he is trying to set a record for soft soap pumping before being caught.  The upside is his hands (and our floor) are really clean and smell wonderful.  I had to change the French door handles to round knobs with safety knobs or outside would be the escape route of choice.  This is usually pretty manageable because we have a baby corral (which Josie will sometimes use) and Connor will usually obey as long as his little attention span will allow. 

Recently, while mommy was out doing something and I had both, I had the double diaper whammy.  Two curve balls in a row! For those of you who are lost, when calling for a curve ball you drop two fingers. You know a deuce, number two, a bear who likes honey.  Okay, we’re all caught up.  So I go to change Josie first, no problem.  Connor can play trains in the living room.  But this time he doesn’t.  He sprints out of the room just as I open Josephine’s ode to blueberries.  I’m calling for him and Josie who’s trying to say words is babbling attempting to mimic me.  So I get her cleaned up, re-dressed, and I go wash my hands.  I should have waited.  Connor has pumped half a bottle of soap on himself and the bathroom floor mat.  He smells of great tea and aloe…and poop.

We get Connor to the changing table (which used to be my study, but I won’t get into how much real estate I’ve lost in the house) and I put Josie in the middle of the floor.  I’m thinking she’ll be fascinated watching brother like always.  Nope.  She breaks for the entry way.  I figure, she’s going to the formerly formal living room which is now a play room.  (By the way, anyone want to buy an Edgar Kelly rug with blue Crayola marker on it?) Then I hear the familiar fump fump fump of her hands and knees working the stairs.  Shit, literally.  I just started the cleaning process.  So I beg Connor, “Connor please do NOT move, daddy will be back in 10 seconds.  Can you please count to ten?”  He says, “Yes daddy” and starts counting.  My boy.  I go around the corner and there is Josie on the fifth step. 

For all of you at home thinking, “Why don’t you just put a baby gate at the bottom of the stairs?”  Well, we bought our home from crazy people who did a custom build.  The spiral staircase is uniquely angled, unsafe, and wide.  I’ve tried every off the shelf baby gate and it won’t fit.  I’m in the process of planning to build my own out of a wrought iron gate section with spring hinges, but who has the time? Luckily we put hardwood on both the stairs and the entry way, so there’s no padding either.  Anyway, Josie is five steps up and I grab her with my wrists and forearms and put her back in the study.  Connor has just gotten to nine.  So I go to finish the job and Josie sets off again.  Now I’m pretty fast on the diaper changes, I mean NASCAR pit crew fast, I mean Guido from Cars fast.  But this was a, without going into overly graphic details a multi-wipe-lots-of-surface-area change.  He must have had peanut butter and mango for lunch.  In any case, Josie is off again. 

I finish off Connor, pick up Josie with my forearms again and bring her to the bathroom.  I wash my hands and.… where’s Connor.  He’s in the freezer looking for ice cream.  That boy!  So I get them both upstairs and we play trains for a little bit.  By play trains I mean Connor plays trains and builds complex bridges, tunnels and stations. Josephine does her best Godzilla and destroys the tracks and bridges he’s built.  Then mercifully Nita comes home and I can go to man cave and take a break and watch some football.  Seriously, how do you moms do it all day every day?  And some of you with three and four kids?  Apathy must enter the game somewhere and I don’t mean that as a criticism, I mean it as a reality for maintaining sanity.  I was talking to a buddy the other day and I think our athletic backgrounds actually hurt us.  It’s harder for us to relax and enjoy the kids playing. We’re always looking for the danger, anticipating the kids’ next move, the next object of potential disaster and trying to head off that danger. It’s exhausting!  I just don’t want them to end up on a Darwin award list.  So Nita and I are done.  No more kids.  Right now we can play man to man defense and occasionally defend the 2 on 1 break.  But I can’t see us playing a three on two zone or worse the three on one fast break, talk about picking the favorite.  Besides, we can’t afford the soap.

And I HELPED!!

And I helped.

Do you remember the old Shake and Bake commercial?  So to set the background, Nita and I plan our family menu each week on Saturday or Sunday morning.  We make a list of events, and then do one big shopping trip at the store.  We try to round out the menu with a chicken, beef, pork, and seafood and match up the veggies.  We try to keep it pretty healthy, figure out prep times and coordinate with our schedules and routines.  We even put it on a grease board so our nanny can coordinate lunch and not overlap. I know it sounds pretty hospital corners, but it makes things pretty efficient and we NEVER worry about what we’re having or missing ingredients.  We also have a pretty good inventory of our pantry and refrigerators and are able to purge the old stuff.  (We wouldn’t want a grandmother or nanny grabbing leftovers that should have been thrown away three weeks ago).  Anyway, we’re not trying to patent or defend the process, just share the methodology.

This past Saturday we started going through the menu options.  The only bad part of this is you have a tendency to pick some of the same meals over and over again.  So while trying to think of something different for poultry, “Shake ‘N Bake” just popped in my head.  I remember back when I first started in the Texas Senate, we had this woman named Cyndi in the office.  Her dad was a hotshot lobbyist and she was what we called a “political must hire.”  Not going to get into that but she always knew where the great lobby parties were during session and I can personally thank her for keeping me fed during that time (they didn’t pay us very much).  One time in the office, while she was nursing a hangover from a huge bender I remember, and actually cannot get it out of my head since, her talking about the “shake ‘n bake” commercial.  And with the thickest southern drawl she could muster saying, “It’s shake ‘n bake and I helped!”  She said it about 100 times, which is why it is so deeply ingrained I suppose.

Needless to say, I suggested that as our “chicken” dish for this week.  Well Monday was my day to make it.  I came home a bit early and Connor was outside and had just finishing gluing everything he could put glue on, had moved to painting, and was inching towards the dirt patch.  (See last week’s blog, at least we have some grass over the trench now, and the sprinkler head has been fixed, but are probably two more pallets from being done.) Connor was really excited about daddy being home and wanted me to play with him.  I told him I had to cut some veggies for dinner but I’d let him help with the chicken and then we’d play trains while it cooked. I went inside to start on dinner and Connor headed toward the dirt. Connor was crazy excited.

Once I got down to the shaking part, I called Nita to wash him up to come in.  When I looked outside the kitchen window, there was my son, buck nekkid, being hosed down by the fire hose nozzle.  I know.  And of course I couldn’t stop laughing…until I was told (by a neighbor) this is the new daily routine.  Anyhoo, I watch as my wife chases my wet naked son down the hall and expect him to emerge with some clothes on.  Instead, he’s in just a diaper carrying his little step up stool.  He’s ready to help.  So as promised I put some chicken in the bag, pour in the contents of the mix and hand it to Connor to shake.  I told him it’s “shake and bake” which means he has to shake it really well and then we bake it.  He shakes and giggles and shakes and squishes and shakes some more.  He does a pretty good job coating the chicken.  We put it in the dish and I put it in the oven.  Just then my mom comes over, and we invite her to stay for dinner. 

Once we get the table set and everyone’s ready, Connor is going to his chair and says, (You guessed it) “Abuelita, abuelita (grandmother in Spanish), It’s Shake and Bake and I HELPED!!”  I really started laughing.  Then before the meal, Connor usually leads the prayer.  This time he said, “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our ….Chicken!”  Now I couldn’t stop laughing.  One of those things were you almost can’t catch your breath and as soon as you stop you replay it in your head and start laughing again.  It was REALLY funny to me.  Of course Josie thought my laughing was hilarious and was cooing and clapping.  Could have been the bourbon, either way, it was funny.  By the way, his lack of clothing and the spontaneity of this kept us from getting any new pictures.  So I’m sorry for no new photos this week, just the link to the original commercial. J

Mud glorious mud

I suppose I should have seen it coming. We went to half priced books after dinner one night and they had a little Thomas train video that we didn’t have.  It involved a mud pit and a back hoe, front loader, dump truck, and a bulldozer.  Connor decided he loved this video for several reasons.  1. Because now he “needed” to have Jack the bulldozer and Alfie the back hoe. 2. He thought the mud splashing was funny. 3. He already has several dump trucks in the back yard and has been pushing those around for over a year. 4. Did I mention the mud?

We haven’t had any rain here in a couple of months so there have been no puddles or mud.  We’ve been on watering restrictions and the ground really soaks it up.  However, (as with most government regulations) there was an unintended consequence to making me change my watering from 2 days to 1 day.  I merely doubled the length of time on my sprinkler systems.  This means the ground can’t soak it up like half the time twice a week.  Plus, remember that new play scape?  Well, because the ground wasn’t level before we leveled it and brought in some dirt to build up the sides and provide a slope rather than a steep drop off.   It hasn’t been completed.

Any of you who have read my Christmas letters know that I almost always have a project of some sort going on.  And 90% of the time it was done by a very good friend of mine (whose name I won’t mention to protect the guilty).  This friend can do some pretty amazing things, has a very diverse skill set and a lot of resources with different skill sets as well.  But if he tells you he’ll be there at a certain time, he may not even show up that day.  If he tells you that by a certain date you’ll be done, he may not even take your call for a week.  So Nita and I have had some wonderful debates around retail cost for reliable timely projects and the friend rates for more, let’s just call it flexible scheduling. J  We have since decided that real emergency projects or things that can’t afford to linger have to be farmed out to other people.  We categorize them as need to haves and nice to haves.  Friend doesn’t get the need-to business anymore. Anyway, the last part of our play scape plan was to put some grass down on the dirt that was spread on the slope. 

Connor loves dirt, sand and rocks.  But he really LOVES dirt! He can play in it with his shovel, a dump truck, a cup, hands, feet, you name it.  He channels his inner Huck Finn and just goes crazy.  Josie just sits in her little swing and watches him and giggles and points.

 So back to the watering.  Friend was also supposed to repair the irrigation system by raising the cannon in one of the zones that previously serviced where the play scape was.  Well that cannon was covered by dirt and I couldn’t wait three weeks to water my yard.  SOOOOOOO I ran the sprinklers and doubled the time.  This created a trench about two feet deep and ten feet long.  At the bottom of the trench was a mud pit.  I discovered the mud pit about 10 minutes after Connor did.  I was doing something else in the back yard and when I went to see him I just almost fell over laughing.  Also, that morning he was watching the Cat in the Hat.  The episode was a lesson in doing a forward roll or a somersault.  So of course he had to try it…in the mud.  Then his shoes got stuck, so he just unfastened the Velcro and stepped out of them. 

The next day he said he needed a big back hoe.  I took him to Toys R us and he picked out a nice green John Deere.  So he’s been living the dream back there.  And then it hit me.  With all his die cast trains, videos, technology, robotics, and remote controls, my son just loves dirt.  He loves playing in the pea gravel and shoveling dirt.  

I guess some of my country upbringing was genetic.  Because I was telling mom about this and showing her the pictures and she said I would spend hours digging a trench, filling it with water and then setting up 100 army men for a full scale assault.  And I’d come into the mud room, well filthy.  So although I’ve made some calls to get some grass on top of that dirt, it brought back some fun memories.  To be perfectly honest, it is refreshing to hear Connor ask to go outside to play every single day.  Even when it’s 104 degrees.  And worst case, I just need to turn on the hose for a few minutes for some of that glorious smile inducing mud.

Inspired by the blessings that annoy others

I’ve said it a bunch, but it seems like the more I pray the luckier I get.  A few pretty significant events happened to me this week, some directly, and some indirectly.  Of course I feel blessed that many of my friends from far off reached out to me and asked if we were okay as a result of the wildfires.  So thank you to those who reached out, and those who prayed, and those who just silently hoped for the best.  We’re fine, no worries and were never in any danger.

So as some of you who follow my facebook check-ins know, I was off on another trip this week. I was determined to take Connor to his first day of preschool with Nita and left later than one of my co-workers for our DC trip. I was lucky enough to get upgraded and was wondering if the meal would be crappy or not and perhaps even if the number 1 would do a pre-board cocktail.  It was on my first hop that I got a text from one of my colleagues that her plane had a security breach and they had to exit the plane.  When I got to Dallas, my co-worker told me the details.  Apparently two Somali men were moving around the cabin and changing seats prior to take off.  My colleague was former Army Intelligence (no jokes here people) J.  She said she noticed him and his partner and had that queasy feeling.  That’s when the flight crew said that they were to be delayed for a few moments.  Then the suits came on the plane.  One went right up to the guy she had a bad feeling about and who was one row up from her bent down and said, “Come on lets go…you know! And leave your bag.” 

The woman next to her expressed her shock and my co-worker then said, “Wait, there is another one 15 rows back, and described his clothes.”  A minute later that person was also escorted off the plane.  They also asked everyone to de-board the plane and please leave all their carry on luggage.  Okay, here’s where I got a little miffed.  Apparently some narcissistic idiots who thought their blouse, ipad, and lipstick were more important than the safety of 190 people, tried to grab their belongings.  They were shouted down by several of the other passengers and other flight crew.  And much like the professionally offended acted like the victims.  The directions were clear!  DO NOT GRAB YOUR belongings.  Anyway, they asked half the plane to get off while the other half were allowed to retrieve their stuff.  Then they were escorted out of the gate and had to re-check through a closed security scanner.  Repeat with the other half.  The plane was decommissioned and swept.  All luggage and cargo was removed and all passengers were re booked on flights.  And of course there was the obligatory, “This is bullshit!”  It reminded me of the comedy routine Everything's amazing and nobody is happy.

In any case, she was re booked on my flight and as she happily went back to her seat with a great attitude of “at least I’m alive, thank God TSA did their job.” There was a low grumble.  My meal was now completely irrelevant, I was happy to be safe as well and just couldn’t wait to get home after a quick one night trip.

On my way home, I was able to bug out a bit early and caught an amazingly tight standby flight home.  I even got an exit row.  Then on the next leg, by the way Dallas to Austin on Thursday night is tough.  Even though there is a flight every hour and a half there are more Executive Platinum (EP) fliers in Austin than in any other major metropolitan area.  I’m not exaggerating; it has to do with number of flights because you always have to connect to either DFW or Chicago.  Plus, all the road warriors try to fly out Sunday or Monday and home Thursday to do Friday home office hours.  They go get dry cleaning, see the dentist, take kids to school, or just try to act like normal parents.  Anyway, if you’re platinum you have a chance to get on, gold almost none.  If you have no status, you are only wasting everyone’s time to try to standby. All the EPs who get in early always try to hop the standby. And they automatically move to the top of the list.  Plus if you are EP, there is a thing called “never full.”  So If an EP calls at the last second the agent has to accept the reservation and book them, meanwhile in the process, bumping someone else.  Back to my story.  So my original flight was scheduled to leave Washington at 7pm.  But I caught the 3:10 home.  I was booked on standby for the 6:55 and was the second to last person to get on the plane.  I made it, but had to gate check my bag.  Again, considering yesterday’s events and the fact that I’d get home 3 hours earlier, no big deal.

When I got to baggage claim I checked facebook to see if there were any more Aggie haters from the SEC move. I’ve been in a steady war (in a fun way) over this. Instead I saw a message from a dear old friend.  He said that a girl in his daughter’s first grade class had lost her home and everything in it in the wildfires spreading around central Texas.  He said he remembered a post I’d put about another friend who had a house for sale that was empty but they were willing to help a displaced family.  Well I put the two of them together.  What is even more adorable is my friend donating the house was almost apologetic.  Actually not almost, was apologetic.  She said, “Marco, there are only air mattresses and no furniture.  There are no cooking utensils, or anything.  I said, “my dear, that’s enough. We’ll get the family some sheets, pots, pans, plates, food, towels, toiletries, etc.  As long as you have AC, water, and power, I’m sure they’re happy to have a place.”  They were going to move into a hotel.

I can tell you as a guy who has lived in a suitcase, hotels are cool when they are part of a vacation or if someone else is paying the extra 2 million percent for room service.  Seriously, 50 bucks for a BLT and a cup of soup in my DC hotel last night.  That’s just stupid.  In any case, God bless you Shari and Mark Riddle!  You have changed someone’s life. By the way, I have countless stories of friends who have done amazing things for others in need.  This is just the most recent example.

So I pulled into my driveway.  Threw my arms around my wife and told her I loved her.  I checked on my sleeping kids on the video monitors and thought of how truly blessed I am.  And I have wonderful friends around me who continually push me to be a better person.  Isn’t it amazing that people are annoyed so quickly and can’t even see the blessings in front of their noses? I guess it’s still funny how the more I pray and surround myself with good people, the luckier I get.  May God bless and protect you all.