Saying Goodbye to Blogging

I can't keep up on blogging. As much as I'd love to continue to document all of our endeavors in parenting, as much as I want to continue recording all the funny things, silly stuff my daughters do and say, lessons I've learned, I fail miserably at it.

Over and over again, I tell myself I'll blog more. I try, I fail, I try again, and I fail again.

If blogging were my full-time job, maybe things would be different. I don't generate enough traffic on these things to make that happen. Maybe my stories aren't that interesting. They matter to me, and I write these to keep records of what I can as my kids grow up, but I feel like the more I fail to write, the more I do a disservice to my kids and to myself.

My hope is that one day Evie and Izzy will stumble upon this blog and know forever and always they were loved.  In spite of all of my failings as a dad, they'll know I gave it my best and that I always put their wants and needs ahead of my own.  My wife wants to print these off and give them copies when they're older.  Maybe we will.

I'm not deleting this, I'm just going to stop. Rather than recording memories, I'm going to dedicate more time to making them with my kids.

I suggest one thing to every parent before I go. Put down the cell phone, take a day off of work, and spend a little more time with your kids.

Goodbye.

It's been 6 years...

It's been six years since my oldest child was born. Well, give or take a couple of days. Today we celebrated it.

I am so proud of the little girl she's become, and can't wait to meet the grown woman she will one day be.  Evelyn remains positive in the face of so much negativity - whether it may be kids at school, negative circumstances in her parents' lives, or even when she's just having a bad day - the kid just stays positive and as happy as she can.

She did not inherit that from me.  I don't know how she became that way, but I'm so glad she is.  I admire people like that, and I'm very happy that she's growing into one of those people.

Happy birthday, Evie. You're growing up to be even more awesome and amazing than I ever thought possible.

Sick Day.

I'm not a panicky parent. I don't freak out too often about stuff.

At least, I don't think do.

Sure, if a kid walks in the room with a staple driven through her gums (like my sister once did), I'm going to freak the freaking freak out!  If Eliza, our 4 month old, were to hover above our bed, covered in blood, then I'm going to lose my mind.  Not saying I see that happening, but you know, babies are weird sometimes.

Today, Evie had a sore throat and complained that her neck hurt.  Immediately, my wife made a doctor appointment and called the school to let them know she would not be there today.

I took her to the doctor because, to quote my wife, "any time a child complains about their neck hurting, you should take them to the doctor because there could be a spinal injury!"

Now, it isn't like Evie's been playing full contact football. She barely watched half of the Super Bowl.  But, she does get dinged up as kids do, so I agreed to take her.

Nothing was wrong. She's got a cold.  That's it.

So she stayed home with me for the whole day for no reason, and it was fun.  We went to Burger King and got a little snack. We binge-watched some tv on Netflix.  We drove to Mandan so I could see about trading my iPhone for a Galaxy S6 (ended up backing out on the deal because the seller's phone was a little too scuffed up).  It was a good day, overall.

I'm not complaining that my wife was concerned.  I'm glad she is. It evens us out when my attitude is, "Meh, she's probably not gonna die from it."  I'm pretty grateful she keeps our kids from "probably not dying."

Considering some new endeavors

It's easier for me to sit and talk about stuff than it is for me to make time to type everything out. That's just the way I function. Editing a video on YouTube is just easier for me than sitting down and making sure everything I've just blogged is grammatically correct.  I have a YouTube channel (two, actually) that I'd been working on and abruptly stopped working on once kid #2 came around.  It's just sitting there with nothing going on.  So, I'm trying to decide which direction I want to take it.

I've thought about doing it like some sort of podcast.  That would be fun, but do you want to sit and just watch me talk for 30 minutes about stuff? I don't. So then I thought, instead of watching me, maybe I should just do a podcast?  Once a week, sit down and ramble for a while about stuff that's interesting to me.

I don't know. The jury is out on that one but it's something I'm considering because, what the internet needs is more podcasts and blogs and people blathering on about stuff, right?

Why not mine?

Oh, and if you wanted to check out my YouTube channel, search for SpreadTheWordNerd.

Ah, Time to Rant a Little

I admire single parents. I do. I know it's cliche to say they're "so brave," but I cooked dinner tonight for the whole family while my wife worked late, and let me tell you, people are either already crazy, going crazy, or some of the strongest willed people on God's green earth.

Seriously, respect.

Here's a breakdown*.

5:30 pm: I get home with Evie and decide to make dinner.

5:32 pm: I text my wife and tell her, "Hey, don't stress about food tonight, I'm going to cook since you're working late." Wife is happy.

5:45 pm: I make the final decision on what I'm going to make; Chicken breast sandwiches with a side of shells and cheese.  Sure, simple enough, but wait.

6 pm: I have beat the crap out of the chicken breasts to tenderize them. I'm a man, I have a blunt object and I just hammered some dead birds' chest meat for five minutes straight.  Punk had it coming to him.

6:15 pm: Chicken is cooking, water is boiling.

6:30 pm: Wife gets home, looks at chicken breasts that have are done. Tells me they aren't done. I cook them again.

6:35 pm: Shells & Cheese are done and thickening up nice. Chicken is done again (almost). Buns are being toasted.

6:45 pm: We sit down to eat.

7:15 pm: Dog poops in floor. I clean it up. Wife is changing a poopy diaper.

7:30 pm: I put the dishes in the sink and declare I'm going to write my blog.

7:55 pm: Still writing blog. Evie just mysteriously said "Ow" after what sounds like she was running around the living room. Wife is probably nursing the baby.

If I were one person doing all this, I think I'd go crazy. That's just one meal. So yeah, props to moms and dads who do this act solo and never once think of selling off their kids to pay their student loans off or something like that.  Not that I've though that, I'm just saying... I've heard parents think that sometimes.


*Time are not accurate, I'm estimating. Sort of.

The Morning Routine

Remember as kids, all the commercials showed mom and dad sitting at the breakfast table with little Johnny, with the dad hoisting a hot cup of coffee to his mouth while mom poured him a balanced breakfast of pancakes, bacon, Lucky Charms and whatever else?

That is the biggest pile of bull crap I've ever been fed from TV.

Well, that and the belief that I'd grow up to look like a GI Joe or He-Man, but one has to start being realistic at some point in life.

Our morning routine is something like this:
Wife feeds baby and gets ready while I wake up kid #1. I may or may not get an extra fifteen minutes of sleep, depending on both how loud my wife is being and how late I worked the night before.

Wife makes up her lunch for work and if she's not too far behind, may make a pot of coffee for the both of us.

I put together the lunch for Kid #1 while simultaneously trying to wake her up and convince her getting dressed is an actual part of the day.

Kid #1 spends 20 minutes using the bathroom and singing to herself.

Baby goes back to the bed and chats with the bears on her mobile above her bassinet.

I make breakfast for Kid #1, take dog out, and come back inside to convince Kid to put on her coat, only to discover we need to look for her gloves and hat for the next ten minutes.

Wife has baby in car seat, her lunch is made, and she'll give me a quick kiss on the cheek before leaving.

I find my shoes (no time for socks), my coat, and maybe a hat and now spend five minutes looking for the lunch I just packed for the kiddo.  Then we're out the door.

She's on time for school, I've got a few minutes to clean myself up before I head into work.

Chaos.  They promised me a peaceful breakfast with a hot cup of coffee, pancakes, sausages... I got chaos.

And I love it.

Too Much Emotion!

Yesterday, I received two texts within a minute of each other.

One was from my sister, Keshia, and the other from my wife.  Keshia was texting me about a dream she had while my wife was asking if I'd read the text from my sister.

"Not yet, I'm in a meeting," I texted back to my wife.  Then read the text from my sibling.

"Last night I had a dream that mom [who died over ten years ago] was rocking a baby boy in a rocking chair, and I asked her whose baby that was. She said, 'It's Jeffrey and Jennifer's boy..."

I was thought that was a weird dream, and texted my wife my thoughts. She replied, "Well, the first thing I thought of was the baby we lost [in 2012]."

I didn't know what to say to that. I just put my hand down, slipping my phone back into my pocket and pretending to listen to my manager drone on about Black Friday or something.

My phone buzzed again.

Text from my wife.

"At least your mom has one grandchild with her in Heaven now."

I replied, "OMG STOP! I DON'T WANT TO START CRYING AT WORK!"

"Sorry," she sent back.

I mean, how are you supposed to react to something like that?

A Short Story Lengthened

So in a previous blog I mentioned that we moved across the country, a lot of stuff happened, and I thought I'd take a few minutes to flesh this out a little.

I left my job as a probation officer in Indianapolis on November 14th, 2014. My wife stayed behind to work and make a few extra dollars while my (then) only kid and I drove up to North Dakota.  My daughter stayed with my wife's family in one town, while I worked halfway across the state and her mom worked halfway across the country.  We were all divided up in the name of making money and getting ahead.

My wife ended up staying with her family about 4 weeks later when she moved all of our stuff into storage (with the help of her brother and mom).  So she was with our daughter while I stayed in a really, really crappy hotel. I'm talking, "I'm shocked there's not that many dead hookers in this place" bad.

I had to pass a test to keep my job. No, I had to pass a few tests to keep my job that I moved halfway across the country to work at.

And I passed them. All of them.

While I was studying and passing tests, my wife was finding us a place to live in Bismarck.  Rent here is ridiculous and nobody wanted us to bring our idiot dog. I don't blame them, I wish my wife would have "forgotten" him in Indiana.  Or maybe forgot she tied him to the bumper of the moving truck like they did in that Chevy Chase movie...

Anyway, we got all moved in and then there was talk of lay offs, or as they liked to call them, "furloughs." So I chased work.

I had to go to another city, live out of my car (only for a couple of days, thankfully), and work some more, only to ultimately be laid off after about another month, and having passed more tests that enabled me to do more work for a company that no longer needed me or about 300 other guys they'd promised "so much work and money" to that "we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves."

I roomed with my friend Justin for that month, was away from my family except when I'd got a day or two off and could drive home.

I wasn't a dad for those months I was away. I wasn't a husband. I was a constant paycheck and part-time face in the house.

At least that's how I felt.

Then I was laid off and the company that had promised so much cared just enough to remind me that Union dues would still be coming out of my last paycheck, and that my insurance would last only a few more months (which was fortunate, since we now had a baby on the way).

I was out of work for a couple of months before I could find something else that would at least offer full-time pay and benefits.  My wife found a job, despite being pregnant, working for the state.

We're far behind on bills, we're struggling to find a daycare, but at least we're all together now as a family.

We're moving forward and soon, I hope, we'll be able to look back at this year as the year we moved to North Dakota and though it began rough, it turned out great.

So there you have it. That's the basics of my last year. Sure, there's more to the story, like the names of friends I made along the way, the time I almost got ran over by a train because a coworker wasn't paying attention, and how my wife hit a deer and totaled our car... but you probably don't want to read about that stuff.

Kid #2

I bet you saw the title of this and thought, "Oh, he's going to talk about the baby!"

WRONG.

Kid poop is nasty.  I mean, I'm a grown man, so I've done my fair share, but kid poop is so gross.

How does a child, that only eats breast milk, crap what appears to be small sunflower seeds?

That's just nasty.

How does a five year old, whose head only reaches the top of the counter, drop a turd the length of my arm?

I'm only slightly exaggerating...

My oldest daughter farts like a 60 year old man and laughs about it each time.  I mean, don't get me wrong, farts are funny. They're basically nature's oldest one-liner, but each time? This five year old can break wind 5 times in 6 seconds and laugh hysterically after each one, say "excuse me" and let 3 more go.

But poop. That's gross. Kid poop.  And if they get sick, they get it everywhere.

If I had a dollar for every time my wife said, "Shed blew out her diaper and got it all over her clothes again" I'd have around 20 dollars. The kid is about 2 months old.  Almost 50 percent of her life, she's crapped herself to the point she's had to change clothes. That's an amazing feat in and of itself.

Being a parent is full of challenges, as I've noted numerous times on this blog, but poop... that's not a challenge. That's a battle sometimes.

So if you need me, I'll be hiding behind the mountain of wet wipes, huddled into a corner, crying a little and promising myself things get better.

They do get better, right?

Raising Kids In Today's World

First, my thoughts and prayers are with those in Paris and the families of the victims of today's attacks.

Sometimes, one of my single friends will ask me, "How can you have kids today?"

I know what it is they're referring to. See the above statements about the incidents today in Paris, for example. Then, you have to account for all the conspiracy beliefs that fall in with the current government here in America - which is scary if even a tenth of it is true.

The gun violence in major cities. The child molesters. Human trafficking. How could I have two little girls in a world with so much drug addiction, hate, racism, cruelty, etc...

I read where a kid in Tampa is possibly looking at sexual harassment charges because he wrote a few love letters to a girl in his class - none of them sexual, all of them just saying why he liked her.

The kid is 9.

It's rough wanting to parent some days, even without the pressures from around society. Some days, you just don't want to get out of bed and make yourself breakfast, much less feed your five year old. Then, you add in all of the external forces that seem to be working hard to make you afraid  you and cringe.

But then you get your butt out of bed and fix the kid a bowl of cereal.  Or you mix up the pancake batter.  Or you toast some waffles.  You fry the bacon and beat the eggs.

You get on with your life and you parent, because that's what you do.

How can I parent in this day and age? How dare I bring kids into this world?

I don't believe in having a "spirit of fear."

Because I'm not a coward, and I'm not raising cowards.  That's the short answer.

It boils down to the belief that things will get better and your kids may be the ones who make it better. It boils down to faith. Things may get worse but eventually, it'll all pass away.

My 5 year old is in love with Jesus. She prays, she uses a little Bible devotional app every night, and she sings about her relationship with God. She's 5. When she and I have some pretty serious talks, she takes it back to what God wants, what Jesus wants for her life.  And, her life won't always be easy for her, but when the going gets tough, she's a firm believer in an even tougher God.

How could I parent kids in today's scary society?

Because we need more kids with faith to move mountains. We need more people in our world like my kids.  Maybe that's arrogant of me to think, but I'm a dad, so get over it.

Time Flies When You Don't Blog

I've repeatedly said I'm going to start blogging again and failed to do it, so let's have none of that.

Let's begin with... what all has happened since I last blogged?

Lost a lot of weight.Got a new job in a new state. Moved. Was laid off. Went through a period of feeling sorry for myself. Gained weight back. Got another new job. Wife got a new job. Had kid number 2.

That's about it.

Here we are.  Oh, and I also tried starting a YouTube channel that got maybe 50 views.  You may have seen some of them.

So what will I talk about now that I'm "back?"

Kid number 2. Kid Number 1. Life, the universe, and everything.

Being a dad in this day and age is hard work, even with a very present wife to share the load with.  I'll talk about that in a later blog, I think, but not today.  Today, I end this blog here.

I'm back. Again. For real this time. Maybe. Sort of.

Autumn Fun

One thing I love about the age we live in is that I can make videos of my kid easily. Any time we go to the park, I can take a few hundred pictures, the phone processes everything, and turns it all into one big video.

For instance, during a recent trip home, I video recorded my dad walking around a small pond. It strangely reminded me of another video.

Anyway, I went to the park with Evie a few times over the past couple of weeks and made some great little videos. During the course of one of the little trips, I noticed a distinct pattern in my child's behavior: she is fascinated with autumn leaves.

No, check that.

She's fascinated with throwing these leaves at her dad.

Evie will run all over the park and gather up as many leaves as she can, just to disperse them at me with the highest velocity she can manage with her little arms. She's also let me know that one of her deepest desires is to make a huge pile and jump in them, but since we have currently have no yard of our own and maintenance actually does a good (albeit annoyingly so) job of keeping the leaves picked up around our home, it's hard to get that arranged.

For the moment, though, throwing stuff at her old man really seems to keep her happy. It's just leaves, it's not like she's throwing daggers or small automobiles at me, so I guess I can't complain.

Puh... puh... POWER RANGERS???

One thing I've learned about being a parent is that no matter how well I know my kid, she still surprises me.

If I think she won't like one food, she'll love it. Once I think I've got her craziness figured out, she shows me there are methods to her madness. And, speaking of madness, right when I think she'll break down and have a fit, she laughs the incident off and prances along.

Kids are confusing.

I love the fact my kid likes comic books. She wants to sit down and watch Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman in the Justice League cartoons I liked in Jr. High. If a cartoon gets too violent, she quickly loses interest, but overall, she likes seeing superheros do their thing.

A few days ago, I was scanning through Netflix for something to watch when I stumbled upon an area I thought was long, long behind me.

Power Rangers.

Back in August I went to Comic-Con and the Green Ranger was there. He's an MMA fighter now. So there's that. That's the extent of my knowledge about the Power Rangers after the movie they made where they all got new plastic looking costumes.

Then I hear, "DADDY! DADDY! POWA RANGERS! POWA RANGERS! I WANNA BE PINK!"

Long story short, my afternoon was shot.

If you call watching one of the shows you secretly liked when you were a kid with your kid a shot afternoon.

It was like the whole "Doctor Who" thing all over again. It was fun.

And man is that show cheesier than I remember!

Power Rangers, not Doctor Who. I love Who's cheesiness!

Habitually Trying To Get Back Into Blogging

I constantly tell myself I need to get back to my blog.

I need to sit down and write and move on with my life and put the past behind me and finally let go. This one blog post, probably the last I really threw my heart into, was re-read today. By me. It's been a while now, and I think I'm ready to start writing again. We have made so many happy memories since then with the child we do have, I have to get over the one that we don't.

Also, when re-reading that, I realized there are several spelling and grammar errors so if you read it and want to carve your eyes out with a fork - I understand.

So what to say? What to talk about? Hmmmm...

My daughter.

This kid is a joy. In fact, I am almost convinced she is pure joy personified. That, or she is sneaking candy when we aren't looking, but for now we'll just say she's a happy kid.

She's 3 and a half now, and starting to really show her personality. She looks like her mom, and often shows her mom's attitude, but there is so much of my geekiness in her it is so hard not to be proud. In fact, if you look at the pictures I posted before I sat down to write this, you may notice we had a lightsaber fight. This is actually the third time in the past few weeks we've been able to get outside and work on her Jedi/Sith skills. I'm actually quite proud of the fact that she wants to play with the toy light swords.

Sometimes, unexpectedly, my heart will melt when I pick her up from daycare and hear, "Daddy, I wanna watch Star Wars" from the back seat.

But then, then there are scenes like this.

I feel like a parent who does a pretty good job, but when you sit down to pray before a meal with your family, and your daughter offers to pray, or she starts to actually ask questions like, "Where is God?" and "Where is Jesus" it makes me pretty happy. It helps that I feel like I'm prepared to answer those questions, or at least break them down to a level she can understand.

Recently, at the dinner table, she prayed the whole "God is great, God is good, thank you God for this food" prayer, and when I prayed differently, she tried correcting me and told me that's not how you're supposed to pray. Imagine me, this 31 year old bearded sasquatch sitting down with this tiny 3 year old and explaining the intricacies of prayer, and why it's okay to pray your own way, because God hears the prayers of his children. What's crazy is that she understood it. The way I explained it must have clicked perfectly because she hasn't tried correcting anyone on how they pray, and has even expanded a little on her own prayers. Okay, they all still begin with "God is great, God is good, thank you God for this food" even when it's night time prayers and she's about to go to sleep, but hey, progress is progress.

Today, after we had our lightsaber fight, we went to Taco Bell and had lunch. I realized it's the first time we've been able to sit down one-on-one in a while. The lunches we used to have every Friday have dissolved since I transferred to my new job and new schedule. It really reminded me of why I loved them.

I got to sit there and talk to my daughter about anything. Mostly, the conversation was about the cinnamon twists and why Daddy wouldn't share ALL of his Doritos (she got half the bag, by the way). But it was nice just hearing the little girl across the table from me talk about anything she wanted.

Long story short, I'm going to try and blog more often. Again.

Some pictures (Because I haven't written lately)

So... I haven't updated nearly as much as I had hoped lately. But here's some pictures to make up for it.

And here's an older one, just because:

They Grow Up So Fast

All Done Daddy!

So this morning I was doing push-ups, minding my own business, trying to lose weight.

Then, my daughter, who had just finished her breakfast of waffles and strawberries, decided to show me the plate.

Up close.

In my face.

As I was coming down for another push-up.

FACE FULL OF SYRUP.


These are the joys of parenting.

Who You Gonna Call?

One thing you should know is that my daughter is very articulate. She doesn't say "Daddy" like a normal American child may. Whereas most kids say, "Daddee," my daughter puts an almost British sounding spin on it. "Dat-tee," she will often say. She has various tones when she says it, too. For instance, when I break wind, there's a tone of disappointment in her voice: "Daaat-teee!" or if she needs something, a sense of urgency, "Dattee! Dattee!"

It brightens my day when I come home and hear, "DAT-TEE!!!" and hear small feet pounding into the carpet as she runs up to give me a hug.

I mean, as big, bearded and manly as I try to be, I love the kid and it melts my heart. It is the kind of thing every father should want to hear.

Last night, around 4 am, I thought I was actually having a dream about it, too. Which, to be honest, sounds kind of weird now that I think about it.

Sleeping, I heard, "DAT-tee! DAT-TEE!"

In my dream, I was surrounded by darkness and I could hear my daughter crying out for me and I couldn't find her, and I woke up scared something had gone wrong.

It had. I woke up and stumbled in the dark to her room.

My daughter stood there, just peeing on the floor. I picked her up and moved her to the toilet quickly, getting that wonderful feeling of urine on my feet that most guys only know when they wake up in the middle of the night and completely miss the toilet. But that's their own brand, and this was my kid's. So... extra gross.

She was crying, sad that she'd had an accident. I cleaned up the mess while she finished on the toilet, consoled her, cleaned her up and changed her clothes. Then, I put her back to bed and went back to bed myself. My wife had dealt with these situations enough recently, I figured I'd let her sleep and not try to wake her up any more than I had to.

Right before I dozed back off I realized something that made my Father's Day...

When my daughter is scared, afraid to have an accident or just needs someone to help, she calls for her daddy.

Dessert is Heck

Imagine if you will, a soldier. He's trapped behind enemy lines, fighting each day just to survive. He sleeps maybe three hours a day, gaining sustenance from whatever roughage he can get his hands on.

In the afternoons, he runs from the enemy, hides from them, and does whatever he can to avoid them in hopes that he'll someday be reunited with his unit.

He's lost all contact with the outside world. What thoughts race through his head? "Is the war over? It has to be ongoing, otherwise why are they still chasing me? What news do we have from Washington? Is there even a Washington DC still standing? What about my friends? My family?" A million questions with a million possible answers are all he has for entertainment.

One day, after everything has taken its toll, he loses his last morsel of hope. He lays down in a field to die.

As he hears shouting and gunfire, all he can hope for is that his captors grant him a swift death before the vultures have the opportunity to pick meat from his weakened bones. But they aren't the enemy... they're his friends. He's been rescued. He's safe.

Now, imagine a 3 year old girl being told before a meal that if she cleans her plate she'll be given ice cream.

From my daughter's point of view, these stories are pretty much the same.

Don't Call It A Comeback!

So much has happened recently and I just feel the need to write again. To be honest, a part of me wants to clean the slate and start all over. I refuse to do that. It would be like erasing memories that I purposefully recorded and documented and to delete them would be, to me, a type of murder.

The murder of memories. 

On that note, I want to share a story. A funny, cute story that I'm quite proud of. I may not be updating this blog twice a week as I had done before, and maybe I'll open up the drawers of my heart and mind someday soon in hopes to explore why I stopped writing and everything, but for now: a story. 

My daughter's "thing" lately has been knock-knock jokes. She finds them hilarious. One thing you need to know is that she is not very good at telling these jokes. 

Yet. 

But she practices relentlessly. Annoyingly. All the time. 

With each joke having the same punch line, "Chugga Chugga Chew Who!"

So I recently had to break up the monotony. It went like this...

Me: Evie, Knock-knock. 

Evie: Who there?

Me: Doctor. 

Evie: Doctor Who?

Me: Exactly. 

*pause* 

Evie:  DOCTOR WHO!!! Good one daddy!

And my heart melted.