The edge of seventeen

Greetings blog readers. It's been a hot minute

Welp, they turned seventeen years old today. So I thought I might dust off the old blog and memorialize this by looking back and looking forward. 

By way of update, two years ago we moved to Northern California from our home in Dallas. We get asked all the time about why we did this, but the simplest answer possible is that we wanted to do it. So we did it. There's layers and layers wrapped into that, but there's no reason to broadcast that here. It is lovely here, California is breathtaking in every way you could imagine. The kids are thriving here and growing into remarkable adult beings.

I stopped writing new material for this blog because the children were getting old enough that it felt invasive of their privacy to have their dad write about their lives to strangers. Today is an exception. They turned seventeen today, which sent me looking through photographs and videos of them as babies. It was an emotional journey. Seventeen sounds like a lifetime ago, but it also feels like it was just yesterday. The mundane memories of life with infant twins has washed away, protected by the parental reptilian brain that removes all recall of sleepless nights and vomit so you might be encouraged to reproduce again. 

It's this parental amnesia that makes me thankful that I was encouraged by so many to write down our experiences when they were younger. 

The wife and I are reminded that our time with them in the house is finite. They will not be here with us for much longer. The college evaluation process began months ago, and the reality is that within the next 18 months, they will both be living on their own somewhere else. This is the part of being a twin parent that nobody tells you about. You get told about buying two strollers and how to get them both to sleep and how to manage feedings, but once you get your twins to the age where they care for themselves, everyone presumes you've just "got it". I'm not sure that we do. Neither of us really even recall what it's like back in the "before times" when we had all the freedom in the world to do as we wished. It is a scary horizon, but watching them go off to school and figure out their lives will also be rewarding, I'm sure (or I hope). I find myself being jealous of parents who popped kids out one at a time, because they get to break in the college flight from home process and get used to the emotions for the next kid. 

I have questions about how they'll care for themselves. I feel like I still have to remind them to brush their teeth or wear matching socks. Or wear socks at all. But I was a total wreck of a human being until I was about 43 years old so I'm sure they'll figure it out. 

By way of update into their lives, both kids discovered musical theater (or theatre if you're being that way). They've fallen in with a remarkably creative group of friends and continue to amaze both of us with their growing dedication to the arts. Singing and dancing was not on my list of things I expected from either of them, but here we are. 

In that vein, our daughter always wrote creative stories. She wrote her first book (unpublished, barely read) when she was in 8th grade. She's in a creative writing program at her high school now and pops out some amazing work. I wanted to leave this entry with one of those stories. 

She and I were at a flea market in Petaluma. She spots a bucket of old keys marked "11 pounds, old keys". And she asks me for it. It was 25 bucks. I was like "I'm not paying 25 bucks for 11 pounds of old keys." Nevertheless, she persisted. She took on this vocal affect and ran the words together to be "elevenpoundsofoldkeys" but said like an old man saying a singular word. Then it somehow became "llllevenpoudzaholdkeyz". Whatever, we negotiated the bucket of keys down to 20 bucks and drove off with a shitload of keys to nothing. 

On the drive back home, I commented to her that each of those keys once did something. They once had a purpose and a meaning before they ended up in a bucket at a flea market for some weird artsty kid to buy. That was it. That was the extent of the conversation. 

Six weeks later, she turned this out, and I think it's the best way to close out this entry. It's one of my favorites of her work. Thanks for checking in with us, if you're new here take a walk back through the ridiculous history of raising these twins. I'll update this again in a few more years. 

11 lbs. Old Keys

By LB

This one is red and unlocked a record cabinet,

for the woman with sticky-handed toddlers:

A girl with a smattering of freckles,

and a boy with thin blonde hair, who always seemed to be missing a tooth.

The records were a gift from woman’s mom,

who died a year before the twins were born.

This tiny key opened a diary

that a little girl vowed to write in every night.

She got caught up in elementary school and her chickens,

but sometimes she would come back to it,

to reread the blocked letters

that insist her best friend is a girl named Annabelle

This one was made for a safe, broken, and never used again.

This rusted one opened a family’s first house,

where they had their first kid,

where they lost their first kid,

and was discarded at the doorway

when they moved away next year.

This one unlocked a classroom door.

This one has a blue head, and opened his locker.

It was often fumbled in sweaty hands, straight out of soccer practice.

Once, it was pinned between his fingers and another’s,

as he broke every rule his parents ever made

for their straight son.

This one unlocked a closet.

This one unlocks an old lady's home.

The first and last place she lived. She was raised in the hills.

A girl with the sheep.

She died in the hills.

A woman – with a wolf of a husband.

I have counted 553 keys in this jar.

Passed from hand to hand, life to life,

An explicit history in every flick of dust and long-gone ridge of a fingerprint,

And now to me, who has only managed to tell you

about 8 of them.

Nobody told me that elementary school graduation would be this traumatic

 

No photos in this one, I'm trying not to share kids images any more on a wide open platform like this. 

Hello friends, it's been a few years since I had any kind of substantive update on the twins, but they basically operate on auto-pilot these days anyway. Take heart, new parents, especially parents of multiples, it does actually get to be pretty fun after a few years of just trauma. 

This blog was created to remember and memorialize the landmarks and achievements in the kids lives as they developed. Things that I knew I'd forget over time. In that sense it has served its purpose. Sometimes, however, an event kicks you square in the teeth and it's something that you know at the time you'll emotionally lose track of in the future. I want to remember those events, or at least have a callback to those feelings for that time not far from now when we watch the taillights disappear as they go to build their own lives. 

They leave elementary school this Friday. Elementary school graduation is one of those events that non-parents scoff at and cynical people mock. After all, how big of a deal is it to "graduate" sixth grade? The answer is that it's not a very big deal in the grand scheme of things. But in the little scheme of things it seems like a lot. 

We moved to this neighborhood in 2013 because of the school. It was where we wanted our kids to go. In that first year in the neighborhood, we'd walk or drive by the school and point out to the kids in their car seats the "big school" that they'd be attending next year. It seemed unbelievable that our small fragile children would be tossed into the meat grinder of a school! It was exciting but also came with its collection of anxiety. What if they didn't make it? What if they got hungry, or needed to go to the bathroom? Would they make friends? Would they be sad?

They started kindergarten in the fall of 2014. Our daughter has been there since then. My son started with her but moved over to another school two years ago. You can walk this blog back to when this started. I was 38 years old and was part of a group of parents in our neighborhood who were sending their first borns to kindergarten. Tears and hugs, uncertainty and the new freedom of having our local public school take care of our kids during the day. 

The parents came together too. Friendships forged over daddy-daughter campouts and my double dipping into the father-son campouts too. Most of us were new parents, just figuring shit out as it came up. Some of the dads were older and had been through this all before. Old salts that had a confident calmness to how everything went down. Many days and nights were spent over a campfire or at a mass birthday party back in the days when everybody was invited where the parents forged friendships with previous strangers. We were all brought together by our shared experience. 

The pickups in those days were fun. Mass afternoon gatherings of the parents, most of whom we knew, because the only parents who were picking up their little kiddos were in our group. The other kids at the school were so *big* - like people. They got dismissed through the far door - the "old kids" door - at the school. And they went off on their own when they were dismissed. No parents, no pickups, just these growing young adults who were giants compared to our kids. 

Years go on, and the new routine of the school becomes old hat. The fundraisers, the auctions, the drinking events, and the non-drinking events. We became experts at all of it. The new parents that came in behind us were so young, and so ignorant about how this school operates. We got grayer and older and eventually developed that calm confidence that parenthood and time teaches you. Our childrens' friendships fractured into the predictable cliques. Unfortunately that took down some of the antecedent friendships between those kids parents that looked promising once upon a time. 

Our kids started walking to school. When we did drop them off, they didn't require the hugs, or the reassurances, they just went. We still had birthday parties and events with friends, but not in that grand forced gathering way that it was when they were smaller. Those forced gatherings served their purposes, and we moved into our little bands within our tribe. 

Covid messed up a lot of last year, including the spring break that ran from March 2020 through the end of the summer. When we started back, our daughter did virtual classes for the first semester. When we returned to live school in January, she went in through the "big kids" door, the one farthest away from where all the parents were dropping off their little ones. She'd go in with her classmates, kids that I've known now for almost seven years, and they're all so big. Not grown, mind you, they're all right on that doorstep for the first significant kick in the ass for when your body and hormones tell you that life isn't all fun and games, but they're giants in comparison to the small children hopping out of their parents cars and marching up to the door that our kids used to march up to. Years ago. 

After Friday, she won't ever go to this school again. She's going off to another school next year, and not even one that her classmates are heading off to. For the rest of her life, she will never again be in an academic institution for as many consecutive years as she was at Moss Haven Elementary. The consistency of the last seven years, the calm knowledge of how it all works, the society of the children and parents, it's all about to change. I fear how that will change us, as parents, as our kids go off to schools outside our neighborhood. I trust that the group that was around when this journey started in 2014 will always feel the bonds that this experience brought us. 

This has me reflecting a lot on the prior post on this blog, the one about my mother's house. We're getting older, not the kids, the parents. The neighborhood continues to turn over with younger and younger people moving in. People with babies or very young kids who are about to start school at the same place. People who are exactly like we were seven years ago. 

Those parents are about to go through a growth cycle that only this experience can give you. As much as our children learned in the last seven years of schooling, I really believe we as parents learned more. First, and most importantly, we learned how to be parents over this time. How to adjust, how to be patient, how to use kindness when anger feels like the thing you really really want to use. But we also learned how to be better neighbors, and how to be a part of a community in a way that really wouldn't have happened if not for the forced society that our kids brought us into. 

We have no more kids, this chapter of a "parent of elementary school kids" is now gone in my life and will never return. I'm surprisingly sad at this. There will be no more school events with this group. All those times of thinking "this will be fun next year" are gone, because there isn't a next year. My daughter's volleyball team has been together for four years now. They just played their last game as a team. They'll never play together again with that team. Her softball team, which has almost all the same girls on it as it did when they started five years ago, will play their last game together tonight. Those girls have grown up together, forged friendships and broken others. Both her softball and volleyball teams enjoyed the enormous sports privilege of being league champions. 

And now that chapter has ended. 

These things sneak up on you, parents. Enjoy the little things. The walks, the campouts, the birthday parties that you're only attending because everybody in the class got invited. Enjoy the dropoffs, because before you know it, they won't need them any more. 

Family Dreams

The family moves in. It's a nice family. The wife and the husband have been married for about seven years. They have a girl and a little boy, who is almost two. The dad has a good job, and the mom stays home with the kids. She's 33, he's 37. They're moving here from Farmers Branch, seems they ran out of room at their old house. They've finally got enough money to buy a brand new home. It's a new house, in a great neighborhood that's developing. Highlands North, they call it. Good families, great public school system.

The year is 1978. It's a house in the middle of a quiet street. A good development. Brick homes, big alleyways, new streets. A two car garage which is perfect for mom's rust red 1978 Oldsmobile and dad's brand new 1979 10th anniversary
silver Trans Am with an 8-track tape deck, t-tops and the giant bird on the hood. There are two trees in the front yard. They're small now, but they'll grow. The maple tree will end up dropping propeller seed pods that will create endless fun for the kids. At night, you can look up to the left and see Orion.

When you move in, you have to remember to take photos of the house for insurance purposes. It's brand new, nobody has ever lived here before. Nobody ever used that shower, nobody has played baseball in that back yard, nobody has ever cooked a meal in that kitchen, nobody ever burned up their Saturday playing Atari on that TV, nobody has ever fallen in love in this house, or had a fight in this house, nobody ever had Christmas in this house, or stayed out too late, or said things they wish they hadn't. Nobody ever laughed too loud in this house or drank too much in this house. The sounds of the piano, and the oboe, and the trombone, never filled this house. Nobody ever practiced their flag drills in the back yard for the marching band. The house never saw a game of hide and seek. The cat never barfed on the carpet. None of this happened. It was all brand new.
All that there was were the hopes and dreams of this young family and the promise that their kids would have a nice safe place to grow up.

And we did. The neighborhood filled up with families and their young kids. The Starks, the Werners, the Jablos, the Colemans, the Dillingers, the Bernsteins, and the Newbrands, and the Zapolskys, and the Sherouses, and the Shillers, and the Francos, and the Spillmans, and the Bertchers, and the Reaves, and the Suttons, and the Chases, and the Cottens, and the McElvaneys, and the Flutches, and the Hultzes and the Minters and the Pattersons and the Greys and the Ellises and the names that go on and on and on. They all came. They all had their dreams. And the promises of their kids.

The parents were all young. The kids were all .... kids. We went to Bowie and we rode our bikes and we heard about how Reagan got shot, but we didn't know what that meant. We rode our big wheels in the street because there was never any cars, and besides, we had a big flag sticking up on it so cars would see us. We weren't allowed to cross Meandering Way, but we sure could ride our bikes in the dirt under the powerlines. We played with Star Wars figures until they broke and our mothers glued them back together again. We played tackle football in front yards in bugle boy pants pretending we were the 1985 Chicago Bears.

Mom and dad had friends in the neighborhood. They would get together and stay up late and make noise and laugh and play music after the kids were supposed to be asleep. When you came in the house and the kitchen was filled with cigarette smoke and laughter, you knew which friend that was. It was a new neighborhood with young people.

The house got older. Things got spilled and broken. Friends came over, we hosted Thanksgiving, Santa Claus came every year, looking remarkably like the older neighbor one street over. The backyard grew a swingset, which replaced a custom-built bicentennial "Sprit of '76" sandbox. We got a VCR in 1984, so now we could record anything we want to watch. Bones got broken, bikes got wrecked. Pets came and pets left. Bottle rockets exploded in the back yard. Attic spaces became filled with boxes of mounting memories. Friendships began and ended and began again. Fights happened. Sometimes fights you don't want to remember. But they happened there. In that house where that young family took those photos for the insurance company so they'd remember what they had.

It was the mid 80s. The Challenger exploded, I broke my leg, we got an Apple IIGS Computer with the Oregon Trail and a dot matrix printer and call waiting. We played soccer and baseball and went to the mall to play video games.

But the perfect families are never perfect, and our neighborhood was no different. Moms and dads split up. Some families went through unspeakable tragedy. Sometimes we knew. Sometimes we didn't know until much later. Sometimes we went through our own tragedies. Sometimes people knew, but a lot of time they didn't. Then came one day when we were sat down in my room to have a talk about how dad would live somewhere else. And then it was three of us in our house in our nice neighborhood. Mom was in her mid 40s at this point. And now she was alone with just a teenage daughter and a troublemaking son. She didn't stay home any more, she taught school, but not at our school. So this home became more independent. We let ourselves in, we heard the term "latchkey kids" but didn't understand why that was such a bad thing. After all, we could drink as much soda as we wanted when we got home, there wasn't anyone there to tell us no. The kitchen oven made frozen pizza taste like it came from a restaurant.

Mom eventually dated, some of these guys were pretty nice. But nobody was really into both us and her, which is to say, nobody was right. Until somebody was. Mom got remarried in 1994. By then, the house was showing its age. The latch on the fence broke. The basketball goal started falling apart. Some walls cracked. The maple tree in the front yard got too large and sick and had to come out. Fortunately, this new guy knew how to fix this stuff. Soon the linoleum floor in the kitchen gave way to tile. Counters changed. Appliances change. Some scars of time stayed. The holes in the wall where I tried to hang my CD case, the cracks in the garage floor where the settling happened. Wood in the house was new in 1978, but now it was rotted and had to be replaced. The brick containers by the alley for the trash bins that all the houses had started disappearing one by one until nobody had the brick containers for their trash bins any more.

The house was there for my sister and me as well. Bikes gave way to cars, which led to the inevitable bad decisions of 16 year olds driving cars. The 1984 Honda became a 1985 Honda after the 84 model got wrecked. That 1985 Honda barely survived the torture its manual transmission was run through from both my driving and the demands of delivering Campisis Pizza throughout North Dallas and Plano.

The house saw my sister and me grow up, moving from Bowie to Westwood Junior High on to Pearce. We had our crushes and their loves and their heartbreaks. First kisses and long telephone calls. New friends at new schools and the drama of getting older. Days and nights safe in our rooms in our safe house in our safe neighborhood listening to music or just thinking about our place in life. The house heard the laughter of singing made up songs about how a "boligrafo" is not a "pluma" for some unknown reason that they didn't teach you in Spanish class. It saw the bad ideas connected with a three person singshot or a half dozen 17 year old boys riding around in a Jeep Wrangler in the spring. It saw my stepfather "hide" the beer he found in my car so mom wouldn't find it. He hid it in his belly. It saw Friday night band parties after football games. It saw prom and the folly of 18 year old kids acting like grown up sophisticates in their tuxedoes and dresses and rented limousines.

It was the mid 90s. Bill Clinton became President, Kurt Cobain died, Waco burned, some asshole blew up a building in Oklahoma City. My car stereo had a cassette player.

Sister went to college in 92. I followed her in 95. We'd both come home to visit, and for holiday breaks. We still had Christmas. And summers, although those became less. We had new friends from school, and they didn't live in our neighborhood. We got jobs of our own. Colorado and Utah, and Arizona and North Carolina. Graduate schools and relationships that began to look like families of our own.

Families moved. Some moved up, to bigger neighborhoods with wealthier neighbors. Some just moved on. One by one all the names of the neighborhood became the "old 'X' house." Oh that house? That's the old Smith house. Because the Smiths didn't live there anymore. After a while, you notice that there are more "old 'X' houses" than there are familiar neighbors.

Parents split up. Some parents died. Friends of mom and dad died. How could they get cancer? They aren't that old. Or am I just remembering the version of them from 1982? The kids became adults and they fluttered away like butterflies in a field.

All from this neighborhood where their parents moved in with the hopes and dreams of young families and the promises that their kids would have a nice safe place to grow up.

When the original families started leaving, they were replaced by new families, but who could relate to them? They were all so young. Families in their 30s with infant children. What were they doing here? The neighbor in the house across the street? Don't know them. Come to think of it, I don't know anybody on the opposite side of the street. Who lives in Nathan's old house? I don't know. What about the Sutton's place on the corner? Never met them.

Grandchildren came along, four in all. They stay overnight in the rooms that had been their parents rooms when they were children. See that weird hole in the wall? I did that in 1991. That cross pattern still indented in the carpet, that was from the waterbed. "What's a waterbed?" Well that's a longer story. See this tennis ball? I bet you can't throw it over the roof ... we used to call that a "roofer." The grandchildren play in the sandboxes in about the same spot as where their parents played in their "Sprit of '76" sandbox, but time is a relentless villain. Before you can blink, they're too old for that. Too old for plastic pools in the yard and water fights with grandma.

After a while, the home that held the promise of the future in a neighborhood of shared promise stands out like an island. It's just this old house with this old couple who have been there since the place was built, if you can believe that. Way back when insurance photos were in black and white. That little boy in the photos is now that old guy with the graying beard who sometimes shows up with his family to visit. He's 43 now. His parents are well into their 70s. The house is so big. And it's just them. They're the last original owners on Kevin Drive.

and that's when you know it's time to go.

After 42 years, it's time to give the keys to someone else. So they can live their hopes and their dreams and give their children the promise of a nice safe place to grow up, in a neighborhood that's now full of young families like them. Families that will see their kids grow up, and fall in love, and have their hearts broken, and fight and laugh. Families that will watch their kids become adults and leave, only to return with kids of their own. Just like we did.

The homes are all older, I think that means this is an "established" neighborhood, but what it really means is that everybody has to factor in the cost of opening a kitchen up and scraping the popcorn texture off the ceilings when they buy the place.

All of the stuff is gone. The home is reduced to what amounts to a large garage sale wiping out the detritus of four decades of living that you don't really need. The built up collection of clothes and pictures and boxes and unfinished projects and dated furniture that was once brand new and frames and books and baseball cards. it's all gone. The slate is clean for a new set of memories. For a new family. 

It's still a good safe neighborhood with excellent public schools. Take the pictures when you move in. For insurance purposes.

Life is not a sack race

The twins are going to be nine years old in November. In about six weeks. They've in the third grade now. My last blog post about them was four years ago.

Let me tell you new parents about the glory of public school. After two (or three, or more) years of shelling out thousands of dollars every year for preschool education, where your little angels learn about their colors and their shapes and when to eat lunch and when to play outside and how to use the big kid potties, you eventually reach this excellent age. The Kindergarten Age! At that point, you've really done something as a parent, your tax dollars finally have a a real, tangible, direct benefit to you. You get to drop your kids off with the government for like 7 hours, and you don't have to pay (extra) for it. Goddamn, those first few weeks of kindergarten were really breathtakingly wonderful. Now that a few years have passed, I feel like we're becoming complacent for the excellence of our government babysitters.

Public school also brings the community together. Through our kids involvement in the local public school, we've made wonderful friends who we only met because we happened to have kids born at about the same time. The other day, the wife and I were having a conversation with one of these friends. We were discussing a recent event with our cats involving the death of a mouse that ended up getting a lot of traction on Facebook. It reminded me of the events captured from this blog post written in 2010.

That blog post was seven years ago.

When the twins were babies, there was a saying the wife and I would use to placate ourselves when things got crazy. There were two, really. The first one was "pass the wine." But the other one was "the days are long, but the years are short." We didn't believe that at the time. Or at least we didn't understand it.

After sending our friend that link above, I got to re-reading the blog entires I wrote in those late nights in 2008 onwards. Things I totally forgot about came rushing back. Memories of the challenges, and the joys, and the hopes for the future all punched me right in the chest over and over again. I didn't know then what I still don't know now. But I do know more now then I knew then.

I know now that my son will not be interested in sports. At least not for a while, if ever at all. We tried it, soccer, T-Ball, that kind of thing. It didn't go well. He just wasn't engaged at all, more so than the normal issue of five year old kids playing sports. Shortly after starting kindergarten, we receive the news that he is on the autism spectrum. Autism is a tricksy little bitch. There are people with autism who exhibit clear, outward expressions of autistic behavior. Things that children recognize and can accommodate. And then theres the other side of that spectrum. Kids who appear mostly like other kids. But they don't participate with other kids. Loud environments create problems for them. They can't focus on discrete tasks. Relationships are hard, and making friends or being a part of a team are just not part of what they do. That's our boy, and for the last three years, that's been the minefield in which we've been walking. It was easier in first grade than it is in the third grade. He's getting old enough now to realize that he's not quite like the other boys, and that creates good days and bad days.

I also know who he is and who he is becoming. He is curious and caring, even if he can't always express that in ways that people understand. He likes to crack jokes and chase his sister and her friends around the house. He loves our cats and dogs. He is excellent with Legos, which I know is a super stereotypical thing for spectrum kids, but it's also true and it's awesome to watch him assemble his little structures from the instructions. He's become fascinated with whatever the hell "Five Nights at Freddy's" is. More recently, it's been something called "The Grossery Gang," which seems like a new version of Garbage Pail Kids. I wasn't allowed to have Garbage Pail Kids when I was a kid, so I'm kind of being a dick about him having any of this Grossery Gang stuff as some kind of passive aggressive clapback to my parents. I'm reading this over again and I know that I'm becoming my parents. I have negative thoughts about this.

Anyway, the boy and I talk a lot. Most of the time about the Grossery Gang or whatever. But sometimes he blows me away with these really thought out ideas about where we come from, about where we are. About the universe and the scope of life. It's a neat look into what's going on in his head. We usually walk to school, and that's a nice time for him and me. Sometimes we hold hands. I do this with his sister too, from time to time. I'm realizing though, as they get taller, bigger and older that the days of holding hands while we walk to school are coming to a close. Not this year, maybe not next year, but one day I'll look up and another seven years will have passed and they'll be driving themselves to school.

Our baby girl isn't such a baby anymore. She's in the millionth percentile for height for her age, which makes it really easy to find her in crowds. That will become awkward for her soon enough, but for now it's pretty cool. She's discovered reading. Which means she reads all the damn time. Breakfast, she's reading. After school, she's reading. She's sent friends away from the house because she wanted to read. I realize how this sounds, "Oh Parental Unit, you're so burdened by your kid who reads (rolls eyes so hard)." I get that, but it becomes anti-social because she'll do that to the exclusion of participating in normal things. It's nice though, I'd much rather her anti-social behavior be something like reading than painting our floors or cooking meth or something. 

The girl is about the most caring person I can think of. She gets it from her mother. We're trying to actually encourage her to think about herself more often, because her urge to meet everybody else's needs creates problems for her. We had a garage sale about five months ago, she ran a lemonade stand. At the end of the day, she had about 30 dollars. A handful of friends came by to "help" during the day, collectively they were there for about an hour. She distributed 29 of the 30 dollars to the friends who "helped" and only kept a dollar for herself. (By the way, if the parents of those friends are reading this, your kid did not drive that distribution, please don't think I'm suggesting she was taken advantage of). This is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.

The girl is also a super goober. She also gets that from her mother. She'll do something clumsy or silly and just laugh it off. She's great. But she can also be loud and bossy. And she thinks she knows damn everything when she gets mad. She gets that from her father. Recently, she and her brother get to yelling at each other, like brothers and sisters do, and it'll lead to some really self-righteous comedy gold. For example:

Boy: "I'm going to kick you right in the uterus"

Girl: "You are so dumb! UTERUS IS A PLANET!"

Raising geniuses over here. I had to spellcheck genius. So there's that. #genetics. She does this thing that I'm only writing about so I don't forget about it seven years from now in case she stops doing it next week. When you kiss her head or something, she'll "wipe it off" and put it "in her heart." It might sound a little weird, like Jason Kidd blowing kisses before free throws. But it's not super creepy like it was for Jason Kidd, who is a grown-ass man. It's like the sweetest thing ever and I hope she never stops doing it. But I know that one day she will.

We're a long way removed from the days of her father accidentally getting poop in her hair.

Twins. One boy and one girl. They're going to be nine years old in six weeks. Some challenges, some successes. I've learned so much from them, and I don't think they're ever going to really know it. I've learned what patience means. I've learned how having a sad child you can't console is the most helpless feeling in the world. I've learned that my parents sacrificed more than I ever knew, because it's not like I was the easiest kid in the world to raise.

I've also learned that I miss a lot of the things that I never thought I'd ever miss. I miss crawling, I miss them butchering words while trying to learn how to talk. I even miss the late night cries (sometimes). I miss feeding them. Those times are gone now. But the future holds so much. Sure, a lot of it involves a five year window where they'll both hate us with the fire of a million suns, but we'll get through that too.

All parents have challenges with their kids. It's easy to feel sorry for other parents who are in more challenging situations, and it's also easy to feel sorry for yourself when the challenges you face make it harder for your kid(s) to be "like the other kids." It turns out that parenting is really hard. A good friend of mine looked at me the other day, and said, "it's not a sack race. There aren't winners and losers." Best words I've heard in a long time. Nobody gets out alive, we're all trying our hardest to do the best with what we've got. It's been quite a journey and I think we're still just getting started.

The days are long. The years are short.

The idea that there was nothing to write about after they turned three was 100% wrong

I intended to shut this blog down after my story of Christmas craziness from 2011. The kids were three, they were both more or less using the bathroom on their own (mostly "less") and sleeping regularly through the night. They increased their independence and their ability to socialize to a point where our interactions normalized to a certain degree.

So I felt like there was nothing else to complain to the world about on this blog. So my plan was to let it stand as a marker of the first three years of life with our twins. I fully intended to close the blog down and let the tales of "Twindergarten" live as a cautionary tale to other parents of twins.

What I've found, especially in the last couple of months, is that the third year of life is a buffer zone of sorts. Yes, you have the "terrible threes" (a carryover from the terrible twos) where the children have to learn their boundaries, but the overall ridiculousness of the children's lives seems to dip down between three and four. Now that the children are four, I've found out that there is a whole new set of moments that force me as a parent to stop and take stock of what the hell is going on. I'll be writing about some of those moments over the next couple weeks.

I'll also be writing about some of the moments from 2012 that just deserve mentioning. 

So welcome back Nolan and Lilly, it's been a while since I've shared your lives with the world.  I apologize in advance for when you're old enough to be embarassed by all this.

 

I got a lot of questions last year regarding the last story I wrote on this blog, the one about driving to m-fing Tyler Texas to get a pony.  As you can see by the photos below, Lilly loved her Butterscotch pony.  She fed it the silly plastic carrot and she combed its hair and she would climb on it.  It was generally a hit.  For about six weeks.  Then Butterscotch became more of a "clothes horse".  Which is to say that we'd just stack our clothing on top of Butterscotch. 

We ended up moving last year, which meant that most of our less critical property went into storage for about four months.  During that time, Butterscotch collected dust in a storage facility and was basically forgotten.  Once we got into our new place, that silly horse went into Lilly's new room.  She's still there.  With the time off, it was like getting a new Butterscotch a second time. 

But now it's basically gone back to being a clothes hanger again.

I'm getting this goddamned Butterscotch Pony for Christmas -- and other thoughts I never thought I'd have

Christmas in 2008 was easy from a gift perspective. The kids were a month old and rarely slept at the same time so what did they care about gifts or Santa or whatnot? Christmas in 2009 was easy. The grandparents took care of the "big" gift and they didn't really know what was going on anyway. Christmas in 2010 was easy, but it was obviously a turning point. Again, the grandparents took care of the heavy lifting, but they "got it". They understood that a tree and colder weather and Santa and sweaters and family meant presents.



This year is a whole new ball of string. For starters, the kids aren't toddlers anymore. They're kids. They have their own thoughts and understanding about the world. And they talk about it. A whole bunch. They also socialize with other children. Some older, some younger. But these interactions melted into their brains the concept of Christmas. The gift concept, not the whole Jesus being born thing. We're remembering the reason for the season as blatant capitalism and marketing at this point.

I leave most of the gift buying in our family to my wife. It's a shameful thing, I feel awful about my lack of participation in the process. I just don't get too involved in what we get the children at this point, except maybe to just inquire about what "we" got them.

I've never understood the parental gift surge of adrenaline that makes people crazy. I remember parents fighting over Cabbage Patch Kids when I was a child, and I thought they were all pretty stupid. Come to think of it....my sister had a Cabbage Patch Kid one Christmas. I wonder if dad ever threw a punch to get a doll.

This all changed last Sunday night. We were at a friend's parents house. They have a granddaughter younger than our kids. They had this horse-thing that the kids can ride on. Plus, it makes noises. AND it'll "eat" out of your hand. It also swishes its tail and makes little horse noises. Our kids loved this thing. It's name is Butterscotch. Well...at least that's it's commercial name. The particular horse at this party was named Buttermilk. The kids acted like it was a part of the family.

At this moment, I snapped. Something in my head went haywire. My brain decided at that point that my baby girl would have herself a Butterscotch/milk for Christmas. (Yes, the boy loved it too, but I see this as a gift for my baby girl. Don't mess with me. I'm all jacked up on gifting adrenaline).

When we got home, I hit the internet. Turns out that this particular toy isn't available anywhere. Toys R Us had it marked way down, but the website indicated that availability was limited. Undaunted, I drove to Toys R Us the next day during lunch to find Butterscotch! I was going to get that horse for my girl!

This brings me to my next detour on this story. Holy shit ladies, are you fucking serious? Toys R Us reminds me of a zoo. Not figuratively. It's literally a human zoo where people's worst primal actions are realized in a consumerish petri dish. From the fighting over parking spaces to the crowding out of customers in the aisles by other customers, it's just a nightmare! I was waiting for one of the alpha moms to fling poo at another alpha mom. I think somebody got bitten by another "adult". If you've never been to Toys R Us in December, just don't go. It sticks with you. Like the first time you learned what a Cleveland Steamer is. It's something you don't forget soon.

So there I was in Toys R Us, throwing elbows looking for this fucking horse that almost certainly wasn't there (short supply, remember). Finally, I found a very nice young man who helped me look this horse up. I kept calling it "Buttercup" instead of "Butterscotch", which harmed the searching process. It also hurt my man status. I mean come on folks, there's a reason men don't do most of the shopping. Here I am, 35 years old, gray hairs, professional beer belly asking another grown man about a goddamned robotic horse I'm calling "Buttercup". It's emasculating. Although the repetition of the word "Buttercup" reminded me of a happy time from my youth.

Eventually the search corrected itself. Turns out that not only were there no Butterscotches in this Toys R Us store, there was none in any Toys R Us store in Dallas. The computer system showed that there were four in Tyler.

Tyler.

From the stats I receive on this blog, I know that many of the people who read this aren't "from around here".









It's not close.

So I'm left with a Sophie's Choice of sorts. Either drive for over three hours to Tyler and back for something I'm not guaranteed will even be there, or don't get my baby girl her Butterscotch for Christmas.

You see where this is going, no?

So there I was, heading east down I-20. I tried calling the Tyler Toys R Us to confirm they had Butterscotch, but the phone network in Tyler is apparently run by squirrels, tobacco juice, homophobia, twine and tin cans. I couldn't get through to a live person to explain my plight. Nevermind the conversation that would entail. "Yeah, I need to know about a horse. Named Butterscotch." How on God's green Earth do you have that conversation with another human being and not explode from the shame? Why couldn't the horse be named "Bullet" or "Flying Death" or something awesome?

On the way I called the wife. She expressed reservation. But I was undaunted. "This is what Christmas legends are made of!" I exclaimed in my proudest Clark Griswold moment. The computer said they had FOUR of them!

I rolled into the Tyler Toys R Us as the sun was setting. I went inside and began scouring the place for Butterscotch. No luck. Eventually I asked another grown man where I could find Butterscotch. This was becoming too routine. He directed me to the rocking horse area. I wanted to kill him. I don't need a fucking rocking horse, I need Butterscotch! At this point what I really needed was 18 year old Scotch.

I detached from this salesperson and got hooked up with a younger guy. Maybe 19 or 20 years old, with one of those ear piercings that is more like a hole in your ear to hang other jewelry. Yes, I know how old this makes me sound. I think his name was Donald. I only mention that because if the manager of the Tyler Texas Toys R Us happens to read this story and he recognizes this young man with the short black hair and the hole-in-his-ear for an earring with a name sounding sorta like Donald, you should keep him around. He's a good guy.

I explained my plight to "Donald" and he was dumbfounded. I think he was either impressed that I drove from Dallas to Tyler for a horse, or he thought I had lost my shit. In any event, he helped me look for Butterscotch. Then he showed me how to search the upstock above the inventory. I looked in the upstock on one half of the store, he looked on the other half of the store. I'd see him from time to time gazing up at the boxes. It made it look like he was daydreaming, but I knew he was searching for my baby girl's butterscotch. It really meant a lot to me, especially considering how busy the store was. I also think he was scared to come back to me and tell me they didn't have it, seeing how I told him I couldn't go back to Dallas without it.

This search lasted about half a hour. It turned up nothing. Donald agreed to go into the warehouse and look. According to him, the warehouse is nothing more than a random collection of shipping boxes. There's no organization to it at all. He stayed back there for another 20 minutes or so. I was losing my hope. Eventually, he emerged and broke the bad news. There was no Butterscotch. He walked me through the Babies R Us side to look to see if it might have been misplaced in the upstock there, but it wasn't to be. He could not have been more helpful.

But in the end, I lost. It was not to be. We were not going to have Butterscotch for Christmas.

I filled the truck up with gas and headed back to Dallas. I got home after the kids were asleep. I explained to the wife the events of the evening and settled in to feel the shame of bad parenting. The wife suggested that I look on Craigslist for Butterscotch. I already looked on eBay, saw a few (but the shipping was crazy and not guaranteed for xmas), but I neglected to check Craigslist. I was not hopeful.

Well miracle of Christmas miracles, it turns out that a nice lady in East Dallas was selling Butterscotch. I immediately e-mailed her and made arrangements to pick it up. Her price wasn't cheap, but it was reasonable and at this point I would have sold a kidney to get this stupid fucking horse.

I e-mailed her and explained my ridiculous situation. She said that she had two other potential buyers and to let her know if I changed my mind. I replied as calmly as possible that I just got back from driving to fucking Tyler for this horse and that I wasn't going to change my mind.

I met with her this afternoon. Lovely lady. She sold it because she didn't feel it was "fair" for her to have it when it was just for her granddaughter, who only occasionaly visits. She felt it belonged in a home where it'd get used every day. You don't meet people like this every day.

Did I mention she lives less than 100 miles from where I do. I should know by now that Craigslist is a savior.

So now I have a horse in the back of my truck. A robotic horse that "eats" plastic carrots. And I have my first truly proud parental "gift moment" for my kids this Christmas.



Look at this girl. Do you really think I was going to leave her without her horse for Christmas?

Why won't they just shut up?

Good things must be taken in moderation.

I remember when I first started drinking socially. It was in high school, and it was awesome! Drinking was a form of social door-opening, it introduced me to a new group of people my parents warned me about. It also taught me about the joys of tossing inhabitions to the wind.

Then I got all big-headed about it and started thinking of myself as the 17 to 18 year old division drinking champion of the world. And I ended up meeting a toilet in some Corpus Christi hotel room for the evening. Photos exist of this event. I'm not proud.

I had lessons to learn from my behavior. I learned that when drinking tequila, you don't have to drink all the tequila in order to have a good time. A keg of beer is not a "serving size" (college taught me that one -- thanks Texas A&M!). Our bodies have this defense mechanism that kicks our ass once we start pushing the boundaries. It saves us from ourselves.

Unfortunately, there is no built-in ass-kicker for toddler talking.

From the moment our kids were born, we hoped for the day when they'd talk. We analyzed every single coo and goo to decipher if the kid just said "momma" or "daddy" or "transcendentalism". Eventually that day arrived. And it was a special and beautiful thing. So special that I don't exactly recall what their first words were. I'm sure my wife wrote it down. She's good about that.

As time went by, we watched our kiddos learn to communicate. One word turns into two. This turns into phrases. Phrases turn into butchered sentences. These become responsive to questioning. Eventually, marginal subject-verb agreements started occurring. And then the questions started. And the chatter. And the random thoughts of the day. And the questions. Did I mention the questions? And then the interrupting. And the questions! Jesus fucking christ are you kidding me? Are they still fucking talking?

The arc from the sweet flower of learning to talk to please just shut the fuck up already is profoundly short. They go from their first beer of speech to hanging their heads in the toilet in no time flat. Unfortunately for us, there's no physical safeguard against this incessant chatter.

Lilly and Nolan went from calm speech to talking all.the.time over the last few months. All the time. They're always talking. With the one exception of when Dora is on TV. Other than that, if they're conscious, they're yapping. And they're not exactly reciting War and Peace, or providing insight into how to best cook low-fat food that is also delicious and nutritious. Nope. They're busy chattering about their baby jaguars, or their toy cars, or the fact that Diego has a penis, and that's what makes him a boy, or talking about how we can go to Tiki Beach, or blabbering about how they'd really like to watch the Dora episode with the robots except that theres a volcano in that episode and that's scary and we can't watch that, to talking again about Diego's anatomical setup and how that makes him different than Dora.....

I'd really like it if they'd just shut the fuck up for a bit. Just a couple hours. Please. Just shut the fuck up already!

We spent this weekend at my mother's house. My sister, through some cosmic joke, had twin boys in February of this year. She and her husband were spending their first childless time out of town together since their twins were born. Having survived this myself, I was all too happy to help out with the childcare.

But we had to take our kids with us. And they never shut the fuck up!

The car ride from my house to my mother's house is about 10-15 minutes. It's only 15 miles away. We're not talking about the kind of trip we need to pack a lunch for. As soon as we hit the road, Nolan began asking about the "cop car". "Mommy, did you see that cop car?" "Hey Daddy, is that a cop car?" Over and over and over again. Nevermind the fact that there was no fucking cop car anywhere around. Where the boy got this line from is unknown to me. As is his other current favorite, "hey, it's the police!" I don't know where this is coming from, but I'm beginning to wonder about what happens at the house while I'm gone.

OK, so this "cop car" bit started about a sidewalk crack after we got past the end of our alley. It didn't stop. I want you to think of the "cop car" bit as the bass line to this opus of speech. It's the pulse. The opening bars to Gustav Holst's "Mars" if you will.

Of course, the greatness of Holst is that there are a ton of other parts going on over the droning "cop car" bass line. Mixed in with this was Lilly asking a series of random questions. Inquiring about the location of her Witch doll, for example. So now it's "did you see the cop car?" with "hey mommy, where did my witch doll go?" Over and over. Occasionally, we'd get lucky and they'd change it up with "Hey, I dropped my drink" or something similarly charming. Of course, while this is happening, the wife and I are trying to have a conversation about actual events that need to be discussed.

That last part was a big mistake.

We've noticed that we can't actually talk to each other in the car anymore, because the children will get jealous and start talking over us. Jesus, this is aggravating. Think about driving the drunk guy home after a long night. Eventually he'll just randomly string a sentence together just to interrupt the conversation and keep people talking to him? Yeah, my daughter does that. Probably shouldn't have given her that beer.

So in the midst of "did you see that cop car" and "where's my witch" and "Hey, get my drink" we're now met with Lilly's "Ideas". Lilly started doing this about two months ago. She'll say "Hey (mommy/daddy), I have an idea!" We'll respond "what's your idea, honey" and she'll say (literally), "Hmmm, why don't we alldalala and then speckalala, and then Tiki Beach, but we can't go to Tiki Beach because we falffalalala, and plaaa, but then we could sllalalda and then maybe we could aligasha." She couches a series of gibberish as her "idea". Sometimes there will be random words mixed into it to make it interesting. It's just a sham so we'll pay attention to her. Unfortunately, it's also fucking adorable, which is why we tolerated it for so long. It's not adorable anymore.

"Hey, did you see that cop car"
"where's my witch"
"get my drink!"
"what are we doing for dinner tonight?"
"Hey, I have an idea"
"What's you're idea"
"Hmmm, flalafa and beach and allgasholyppiads and Julio Franco was a butcher at second base"

Spin, Rinse, Repeat.

By the time we were about two miles from my mother's house, I realized that our once quiet Honda had become a chattering box of noise. I couldn't talk because my ears were trying to process the sounds of at least three other voices, one of which very well could have been mine. Nothing was making sense. It was just noise! Like the sounds movie actor extras make during large crowd dinner scenes to create an authentic environment. It was at this point that I became my father.

"ENOUGH!" I said. Not quite yelling, not quite not yelling. Enough to get some attention. Suddenly, the car was quiet. "Daddy is going to talk to mommy for a little bit, and you're going to be quiet!" Shit hell if this didn't work! I think I scared them. For the next thirty seconds, I didn't hear anything about a cop car, any witches, ideas, Dora, or Diego's penis. I thought I won. I ignored the fact that I just did the classic dad move of complaining about "those kids" and "all that damn noise". I started feeling a twinge of pride. Then I heard

"Hey Daddy, did you see that cop car?"

and I'm right back to regretting the day they learned to speak.

God, can't they just shut the fuck up?

Updates, Memories, and things I don't want to forget

This blog was always intended to be a humorous look at parenting. Something washed free of the bubbly varnish that parents understandably assign to their children's early years. Over the course of the last two and a half years, I've tried to write about things in a manner that reflected my personal view of events at the time they were happening. From early adventures with poop disasters to learning how to sleep through the night to having the audacity to call my little brilliant angel "tarded", I've tried to make light of the process of raising children.

This post is not written to humorously recount tales of parental tragedy. Nope, this post is written to remember the things they do now that I hope to never forget.

Let's start with Nolan

Nolan says certain words wrong. He calls "olives" "owibes". He says the words "There" and "Here" with an unusually strong Texas accent. "Thay-re" and "Hay-re". I find this so damn cute that I honestly hope he never learns how to say these words the right way. He used to call his sister "Lolly". Speaking of lolly, he used to eat the sticks on his lollypops. Nolan is a curious boy who loves his puzzles like his Russian nesting dolls. If he understands something, he wants to explain it to people. He gets loud when he gets frustrated, as he doesn't understand how to express himself in those situations. If he's anything like his daddy, he won't figure that out until his mid-20s. Maybe not even then.

Nolan's memory is striking, and a little frightening. He will randomly bring up details of an event that occurred a year ago. Literally. He remembers specific details of when he was just 18 months old, and talks about them at random times when something in his brain triggers that memory. I remember memorizing the Dallas Cowboys roster from a McDonald's poster when I was 4 years old. I memorized every name, number and position, including the coaches. I don't know why I did this, I just did. I think Nolan got that. It's strange to watch on the other end of it.

Nolan is beautiful. Sometimes I'll catch a glimpse of him smiling or laughing or something and I'm just dumbfounded at how cute that kid is. I don't mean this as some sort of annoying parent-bragging thing. The boy has a happiness about him that makes me wish I could tell him how special this part of his life is. I wish we could all have some retroactive appreciation of the innocence of youth.

And Lilly

Lilly is brilliant, despite her appearance in this photo. I think she's smarter than I am now. And she's not yet three. Lilly possesses a powerful sense of empathy. She's legitimately concerned about the feelings and well being of other people. My mother has been dealing with a family issue that's been very hard for her lately. One afternoon about a month ago, we took the kids to see grandma. Lilly, knowing almost nothing of the situation went up to her grandma and held her hands out palms up and asked "Grandma, are you having a bad day"? What two year old does that?

Lilly is a chatterbox. And she's bossy as hell. But she's bossy in a really sweet way. She'll tell Nolan to "be careful" or "don't do that", but she's doing it so Nolan doesn't do something he'll regret later. And Lilly is my little angel. If she bumps her knee or gets a boo-boo and starts pouting about it, it makes me crush a little on the inside. Honestly, if she seriously asked me for a pony tomorrow, I'd probably make that happen. Lilly has a smile and a humor about her that makes others around her want to be near her. It's magnetic. The thing she does that makes me laugh like crazy is when she comments on Nolan when Nolan is acting bad. She'll say, "Nolan is being....a butt." But she'll run the words "a butt" together so it sounds like one word... "abutt". She doesn't know what it means, she just knows it makes her daddy laugh under his breath, knowing that's not the sort of thing Lilly should be saying about her brother. Lilly is the most beautiful, smart little girl I've ever seen or known. I often have to pinch myself when I have one of those moments where I think that she's my daughter. I'm a lucky person.

Honestly, I could go on for hours about the things both Lilly and Nolan do that amaze me every day. After a while, it'd just sound like proud poppa stuff. Nobody wants to read that.

The early days of raising twins is awful. I really don't have much of a memory of the details of the first 18 months or so of the kids lives. I'd hate to develop that sort of amnesia about the last 14 months. Their role in my life is something I'd never thought I'd have. Every day I learn something about them as they learn something new about their world. It's a gift. And without any sarcasm or attempt at humor, it's been the greatest thing I've ever had a chance to experience.