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It Actually Works!

I liken parenting to running a marathon.  There is  nothing short, fast speedy, quick about being a mom or a dad.  Parenting is a long journey.  In a marathon, you may feel great at mile three, crappy at mile nine and great again at mile thirteen.  In a marathon, you may feel dehydrated, tired, pull a muscle and maybe collapse.

As a parent, all the business distracts you from the passage of time.  You live in a world of carpools, homework, science projects, essays, church activities, sports, piano lessons, tap dancing or whatever it maybe.  Time takes on the dimensions of do this and don’t do that.  Did you say please?  Did you say thank you?  Look the person in eye and say hello.  Sit up straight.  Eat your vegetables.  Stop crying.  No biting.  Time is moving at a much faster rate than you realize when you’re parenting.  All the business of parenting makes the years go by fast and pretty soon you look in the mirror and say what the hell happened to me?  You just hope and pray that everything you have tried to teach them will sink in and they will grow up to be good people.

Every Sunday morning, Karen and I go swim for an hour and a half.  We then race home, change clothes, eat something real quick and then race to church with the kids.  On Mother’s Day, before Karen and I left for the pool, I told the kids if they didn’t have anything for their mother, they had a good hour or so to make a card, eat some cereal and be ready for church.  We had a dinner party the night before and still had the banquet tables out and the kitchen was full  of dishes.

Lo and behold, when we got home, there was a present and cards on the table.  The banquet tables were packed  up and put away.  Decorations were put up on the walls.  The dishes were all cleaned.  Our bed was made and my son had bacon, eggs and toast all ready for everyone.  All three of them worked together in harmony to honor their mom who does so much for them.  We were surprised and tickled pink.  This was the best mother’s day they could have given their mom.  I am so impressed that I don’t expect anything for father’s day.

Feeling pretty good around mile fifteen right about now.

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Flu This

The Hooks family just completed one week of barf-o-rama.  So far, I am the lucky one that seems to have eluded the illness but I do have an impending sense of doom that something bad is going to happen at any moment.  It all started eight days ago when we got the call from school that Jacqueline was vomiting and needed to be picked up.  Karen leaves work early and then has to stay home on Tuesday while our little one just lays on the couch and watches television and sleeps.  It’s not too bad staying home from school for the kids when you have three hundred channels to choose from.  I remember when the choices were “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” or “That Girl” and you were dying to go back to school just to get away from the bad television and the boredom.

Of course, Karen had planned on taking Veteran’s Day off but had to work after missing the day before, so I decided to stay home last Wednesday.  It was a good day.  I had the kids work like slaves and we cleaned the place up nice and neat.  We decided to go to the new Sonic that opened up that all the kids are talking about.  Crazy, the line of cars was an hour long for food.  It’s sad that the most exciting thing to happen in Vista in the last twenty years is a Sonic opening up, but who am I to pass judgement on this little town.  Anyways, all was good until Jennifer walked in the door from her friend’s house at 5:15pm bawling her head off.  In trying to console her, we gathered that she had puked in the street right before walking in the front door.  We got another sickie poo!  Wait, what is that I hear?  Mom just got home and she’s puking.  We’re on a roll now.  Stewart gets it on Friday, but didn’t actually puke until Sunday.  Weird.  I’m just thankful that I have still dodged the bullet.  The puking comes on suddenly with no warning.  I sat in a conference room with twelve people all day Friday praying that I wouldn’t spew all over everyone. 

All I see and hear about seems to be getting vaccinated for the flu and H1N1.  No, thank you.  My father had heart disease and was strongly urged to get the flu shot every year by his cardiologist.  He and my mom got the flu shot every year and then proceeded to get the flu about two weeks later.  Call me superstitious.  Karen got the flu shot and then she gets the flu.  I think she might even have had the flu twice in the last month and now she has to get the H1N1 shot because she works for a health care provider.  Suey! 

I hope everyone has a healthy Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Nothing worse than being ill over the holidays.  Take your vitamin C.

Flu this.

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Fundraising From Hell

I want you to think back to when you were a kid.  Do you remember “No Soliciting” signs on the front doors of businesses and houses?  It was a different time before email and websites and eight hundred television stations.  There were actually door to door salesman that would walk around trying to sell you stuff because it was one of the ways available to get their product in front of you.  It actually was so prevalent that people would get pissed from having their front door bell rang all the time, they put these signs up giving you fair warning not to knock on their door.  I can still remember my father slamming the door in the face of some guy from Greenpeace way back when.

When we signed our son up for little league, you had to assist the league in fundraising.  This was done by having each family sell a box of about twenty candy bars.  You either take the time to sell the candy bars or you pay an additional forty dollars cash up front for the registration fee if you want your kid to play baseball.  We take the chocolate bars and walk around the neighborhood once and sell maybe one or two candy bars.  What are we gonna do with the rest of them?  You give it three or four weeks and they magically disappear into my mouth, my wife’s mouth and my kids’ mouths.  Now, we’ve eaten all the candy and have to pay for it.  Good grief! 

The door to door salesman still exists but in a different form and for a different purpose.  They are all cute little boys and girls walking around the neighborhoods in some kind  of uniform or another with freckles and ballcaps or ribbons in their hair.  The typical for sale items are magazines, wrapping paper, popcorn, candy and cookies.  It’s the perfect scam getting the children to do the dirty work for all of these organizations that supposedly need money and it’s high time it stopped.  It’s the same old sob story with the teacher’s, the schools, the pta, the girl scouts, the cub scouts and so on.  If we don’t fundraise, then programs and activities are going to be cut.  I’ve been hearing this same old tune for a long time and it never seems to change and the programs and activities always seem to grow and never diminish.

The ultimate question is where does all the money go?  Do you remember the director of the Red Cross here in San Diego whose salary was $400,000.00 per year?  You ever notice there is never an accounting made available of what the funds are for?  What’s the cost of the actual goods being sold?  Whose really benefiting from the proceeds?  How much of the proceeds actually ends up at the local level?  When did this become the children’s responsibility to do this?  How much free labor did these organizations just receive from us and our kids? 

I know a lot of you think I sound like a curmudgeon.  What put me over the top?  The schools sure do seem to send a lot of papers home with the children.  Usually, my wife reads all of these papers and I never looked at them until recently.  My eight year old daughter brings me a piece of paper saying I have to fill it out because she has to return it in the morning.  It’s an order form to buy books.  The schools’ and the teachers’ are now peddling books to the children through the classroom and I have to fill out a form saying yes or no.  Why can’t they read the books at the school?  Isn’t the library good enough?  Shouldn’t our taxes cover this?  Please don’t tell me some kid isn’t going to learn how to read if I don’t help out.

Do people question things anymore?  Are we all so busy in our own lives that we don’t notice the slow transformations that have taken place incrementally over time?  Are we all ever going to stand up and say no to some of this stuff or are we too afraid of conforming and keeping our mouths shut?  I sure have a lot more questions than answers.

I won’t slam the door in your face, but the answer will be a polite, “No.”

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