Morning Greetings

James-
"Hey! Why did you sleep so late? I was wondering if you were ever going to get up and make me breakfast!"
"Is it 8:00 yet? Can I go outside and play football now?"
"I don't think the clock in the library is right. Does your watch say 8:00?"
"Hey, can you come look at the clock? Does it say 8:00. Yeah, I know how to read the clock. But do you think it says 8:00?"

Owen-
"Owen, go back to bed."
"I can't sleep in my bed."
"Go back to bed."
"Can I just sleep here for a little bit."
"You need to sleep in your own bed."
"Can I sleep in the bathroom?"
"No. Go back to bed. It's 4:30 in the morning."
"Does that mean it's almost time to get up?"
"It means it's time to go back to bed."
"Can I snuggle you for just a minute?"
....
"Can I look at some books? Will you read me some?"

Felix-
"Good morning, Felix!"
"Hi!"
"Did you sleep so good?"
"UH-huh."
"Are you ready to go get some breakfast this morning? A yummy smoothie?"
"I wan' a HOT dog."
"I don't think we're going to do a hot dog for breakfast."
<sings Imperial March>

Football and a Pink Camera

Football

These boys have gone crazy for football. James got one out of the prize box at the doctor’s office and immediately began acting out full seasons of Eagles’ football in the backyard, complete with preseason, postseason, scores, and rankings for all the other teams in the league.

Owen waited for months for Grandma Davis to bring back the football he left in Pennsylvania. Felix basically watched the older two until they were foolish enough to leave a football lying around, and then would snatch it up (“MY football”) and hold it until a parent separated the ensuing scuffle of crying little boys.

Felix got his own football a few days ago, and then traded it to Owen for the Bills football. A day later they traded back, and now Felix has the new football again. For awhile he was in possession of a falling-apart nerf football, but that one didn’t look enough like James and Owen’s. His new one is a legitimate ball.

I play catch with them in the backyard. They complain when I throw it too hard, but also when I don’t throw it hard enough. They tell me every time a throw is too high or too low, and Owen cries whenever someone else makes a catch and he doesn’t. They like to throw all three balls at me at the same time, and then they get upset if I don’t catch all three. It’s a very good workout.

They’re all getting a good workout too. They can play in the backyard unsupervised, and they’ll stay out for as long as we let them. They run in circles whooping and celebrating and making diving catches, and by the time they come in they’re drenched in sweat and covered in grass stains. They have not smelled very good this week.

The Pink Camera

Back in ancient times, before cameras came standard on smart phones, you had to have a camera that was its own device. I gave J a pink digital camera as a birthday present one summer when we were dating, and she used it to take pictures of her life at RWC and occasionally send me photos while I was living in Chicago.

Then we all got smartphones, and the camera was retired to half-unpacked moving boxes full of half-broken laptop parts and old pens. This year we unearthed that box and found the camera inside. It still worked, and we even found some memories (the stub of our admission ticket to the Butterfly Conservatory) inside the case.

We decided that it could be the boy’s camera. They ran the first set of batteries down within a day. Our first attempt to make a slideshow of their work didn’t pan out, but the next day we looked at their first attempts at photography.

Of the nearly 500 pictures that they took, at least 50 were of the FatHead Eagles logo that James has above his bed. There were also individual shots of each of their football helmet collections, and then shots of a toy Yoshi action figure wearing each of the football helmets. Owen took pictures of James running around in the backyard playing football, and then apparently took a number of photos of the inside of his own mouth.

James used the camera to take blurry shots of his favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips, and pictures (for some reason) of his favorite stuffed animals at incredibly close range. He found these pictures hilarious. 

There are a number of pictures of the clouds, the grass, the garden, and my car. I don’t know when they got it, but they apparently snuck up behind me and took a picture of my butt. Also, there about 30 pictures of a book on the New York Jets that they checked out of the library.

I remember when I got my first camera, and I think I used it in about the same way. Thanks to Dad for all the work that must have gone into actually developing silly five-year-old with a camera photos in a darkroom. It was much easier to just pull out the SD card and put it in a laptop.

A Conversation with Owen

Q: So Owen, what are you doing in that bush? <Owen is sitting in a bush>
A: Um, sitting.
Q: Why?
A: Wanna come in?
Q: No thanks, this chair is more comfortable. Is it comfy in there?
A: Yeah.
Q: How are you liking Kindergarten?
A: Good. I like reading and doing science and coloring things. <N.B. Owen isn't doing science in Kindergarten.> Drawing, too.
Q. What don't you like so far?
A. I don't really like doing things that are so long in my school.
Q. Like copying letter exercises.
A. I like doing that. I also like sitting in here.
Q. Felix was in there earlier, right?
A. Yeah.
Q. What were you guys doing in there?
A. We were having fun and Felix was tasting some tree things. And I want you to hold these while I'm in the bush. Can you? <He hands me some leaves torn up into shreds.> Make sure it doesn't blow away. Keep a hand on it, okay?
Q. Can you not feed Felix things that you find growing in the yard?
A. Why?
Q. It might make him sick.
A. I know.
Q. Is that like a secret clubhouse?
A. It's kind of like a thing that people sit in and they enjoy here.
Q. So, like a deck?
A. Kind of.
Q. But in a bush.
A. Yeah.
Q. What did you and James do during nap today?
A. We did a couple things. I played in James' bed. I got sad a couple times when I was making some LEGO things. I also got sad when I was trying his reading light.
Q. Are you going to eat your supper in the bush?
A. No.
Q. Why not?
A. Because I don't think I can eat it in the bush. I think I'll need to come inside after that. I'm doing some work, you know what it is?
Q. No, what?
A. I'm splitting leaves. I'm picking off leaves and splitting them. Did my other leaves blow away yet?
Q. No.
A. Good

A Liturgy for Cleaning the Bathrooms

For I will take you from among the Gentiles, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Ezekiel 36:24-25

Then He poured water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded. So He came to Simon Peter. He said to Him, "Lord, do You wash my feet?" Jesus answered and said to him, "What I do you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter." John 13:5-10

'But the man who is unclean and does not purify himself from uncleanness, that person shall be cut off from the midst of the assembly, because he has defiled the sanctuary of the LORD; the water for impurity has not been sprinkled on him, he is unclean. Numbers 19:20

O God who made us in your image, we thank you for giving us sweat glands, intestines, body hair, and buttocks. You send us the waters from on high and your Spirit moves over the waters of the deep that we might purify ourselves by the cleansing of water and present ourselves to you and to one another as clean. We thank you that we make ourselves more human by making ourselves clean. We praise you that by your Son we are made truly clean, and we acknowledge his teaching that our hearts must be cleaned before our bodies.

In this room where our loved ones will come to clean their bodies, may their hearts be gladdened and cleaned as well. Strengthen my knees as they bend and my elbows as they press to purify this room of cleansing. Check my spirit when I grumble that I am too important or educated for the scrubbing of toilets and teach me the example of your son, who emptied himself and became a servant. Bless all those who scour shit for their daily bread. Bless all those who don't remember their last washing or don't know when the next one will come. Bless all those for whom clean water is a precious luxury, and help us to remember that we mustn't waste it.

In purifying this room may we make a holy space for your holy people, O cleansing God. We ask this in the name of your son Jesus, who reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

Room Switch (Or, Baseboard Cleaning Part 3)

I have not yet walked upstairs at midnight, having just driven back from some far away city after a late night concert, shuffled into the dark room with my tie unknotted and a glass of scotch in hand, kicked off my shoes, and sat down on James.

But one of these nights I'm going to do just that, because we switched rooms.

James and Owen now have our big "master" bedroom, and J and I have moved ourselves out over the garage. So far everyone loves it.

We decided that we didn't have enough stuff to justify the big room. It was mostly empty, and all we really need are a bed, two end tables, a treadmill, and a dresser.

James and Owen, meanwhile, have a beautiful blank hardwood canvas to cover with a bazillion LEGOs and Hot Wheels. Actually, no to that. Picking up the LEGOs from their room was a traumatic enough experience for everyone that we decided to change up the rules about which toys they can have out. No matter what we moved, whether it was an old baseboard heater, a dresser drawer full of jewelry and nail polishes, or a crate full of library books, it was sure to have at least a dozen LEGO pieces at the bottom of it. In Owen's pants drawer we actually found a fully-assembled LEGO Jurassic Park jeep that he had apparently hidden (to keep it away from Felix) and then forgotten about before anyone could disassemble it and throw it into the collective heap.

Here were the major challenges of moving rooms:
-Scotch tape everywhere. Literally whole rolls worth of scotch tape to be peeled off of floors, windows, walls, doors, and furniture. A blanket ban is now in effect. Those kids are never allowed to have their own roll of scotch tape again.

-Stickers everywhere. Mostly in horribly hard to reach places like right at the baseboard level underneath the bunk beds, or in the corners of the walls where they meet the ceilings.

-Children that stand right in front of where you're about to step as soon as you pick up a heavy piece of furniture and only get out of the way when you threaten to set the bedframe down on top of them.

-Finding discrete ways to throw away half-broken toys that you know the kids would want to keep if they saw them but would never have any chance of actually playing with again.

The project ended up taking two full days, the first of which was entirely peeling off strips of tape and stickers. But we really are all happy with how it turned out. And do you know why it's such a remarkable thing that I could accidentally walk into James and Owen's room and mistake it for my own?

Because, at the moment, the floor isn't covered in LEGOs.

Square Footage

One of the childhood experiences that J and I both went through was our parents asking "where are we going to put all these kids?"

For J, it meant that her family sold their "in-town" little home as the kids grew bigger and built a gorgeous 4 bedroom house on the top of a rural hill several miles away. She helped to roof, paint, and finish the floors herself.

For my family, it meant remodeling the kitchen and adding a large extra room above it. These were huge quality of life improvements for our family--no one was sleeping three to a room, there was an extra bathroom installed in what became my parent's new bedroom, my mother finally had space to turn around in her own kitchen without bumping into a teenager, and everyone finally had a little bit of privacy.

There are many EXCELLENT reasons for needing more space than your standard three bedroom (i.e., our current house) offers. But I'm thinking out loud about how good OUR reasons would be for needing more space.

I suspect that there has been some cultural creep in the American assumptions about how much square footage per person a household needs. According to an AEI study the median new house size has increased over 1,000 square feet per home since 1973 to almost 2,500 sq ft. (Our house, by the way, is definitely not that big.) At the same time, average household size has decreased from 3.01 to 2.54 persons over the same time frame. More space, less people. My growing up experience of forever sharing a room with a sibling (or, in some cases, more than one) would be unthinkable in the way we design and inhabit homes. (Or, at least, new homes.)

Things aren't too different in Canada, apparently, with the average square footage coming in around 2,000 sq ft per new home, and houses in Australia might actually be bigger, depending on which study you use. But in the UK (818 sq ft), France (1206 sq ft), Italy (872 sq ft), or poor tiny-homed Russia (614 sq ft) you have to somehow withstand your family in more confined quarters. (The lowest household size of those countries, by the way, is France, at 2.38 persons per household.)

We've tried to rethink a number of assumptions in the way we run our house--should we own a TV? Should our kids' primary social circle be members of their peer group? Is going to the same church really necessary? What's the point of a silverware drawer? Or of owning fewer mouthpieces than there are days of the month?

Now we are trying to figure out whether privacy and an isolated space is actually important for a teenager or not. We can survive this phase in our current house. We can probably have college kids come back to our house and get along for a week using just the one bathroom. But could we survive three teenage boys in 1400 sq ft? And (this is the part where it gets really juicy) IF (that's a BIG and in no way committal IF), IF we had another child at some point (not anytime soon) could we be a household of six in 1400 sq ft?

Survivors of teenage-boy-parenting, this would be a good time to hear your advice.

Clippings

I haven't finished A Gentleman in Moscow yet, but I checked Amor Towle's other book out of the library within reading a chapter of this one so that I could put it in my queue right away.

-"How would a princess spend her day?"
"Like any young lady," answered the Count. With a nod of the head, the girl encouraged him to continue. "In the morning, she would have lessons in French, history, music. After her lessons, she might visit with friends or walk in the park. And at lunch she would eat her vegetables."
"My father says that princesses personify the decadence of a vanquished era."
The Count was taken aback. "Perhaps a few," he conceded. "But not all, I assure you."
She waved her fork. "Don't worry. Papa is wonderful and he knows everything there is to know about the workings of tractors. But he knows absolutely nothing about the workings of princesses."

-From among them, Nina picked up what looked like a delicate spade with a plunger and an ivory handle. Depressing the lever, Nina watched as the two opposing blades opened and shut, then she looked to the Count in wonder. "An asparagus server," he explained. "Does a banquet really need an asparagus server?" "Does an orchestra need a bassoon?" And Nina returned it gently to the shelf.

-"So," said the Count, "are you looking forward to your visit home?" "Yes, it will be nice to see everyone," said Nina. "But when we return to Moscow in January, I shall be starting school." "You don't seem very excited by the prospect." "I fear it will be dreadfully dull," she admitted, "and positively overrun with children." The Count nodded gravely to acknowledge the indisputable likelihood of children in the schoolhouse.

-As yet unchallenged, somnolence continued to cast its shadow over sights and sensations, over forms and formulations, over what has been said and what must be done, lending each the insubstantiality of its domain. But when the Count opened the small wooden drawer of the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that very envy of the alchemists--the aroma of freshly ground coffee. In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of the birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things.

From Circe (Madeline Miller)
"Will you tell me, what is a mortal like?" It was a child's question, but he nodded gravely. "There is no single answer. They are each different. The only thing they share is death. You know the word?" "I know it," I said. "But I do not understand." "No god can. Their bodies crumble and pass into earth. Their souls turn to cold smoke and fly to the underworld. There they eat nothing and drink nothing and feel no warmth. Everything they reach for slips from their grasp." A chill shivered across my skin. "How do they bear it?" "As best they can."

From Endure (Alex Hutchinson)
-That lesson, he recalled, stuck with him--first as an athlete and later as a scientist: "You have to teach athletes, somewhere in their careers, that they can do more than they think they can."

-Even the humblest Kenyan runner, he noticed, wakes up every morning with the firm conviction that today, finally, will be his or her day. They run with the leaders because they think they can beat them, and if harsh reality proves that they can't, they regroup and try again the next day. And that belief, fostered by the longstanding international dominance of generations of Kenyan runners, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

-Researchers in Scandinavia have recently shown that glycogen stores in your muscles don't just act as energy reservoirs; they also help individual muscle fibers contract efficiently That means your muscles will weaken as you burn through your glycogen stores, sapping your strength long before you're actually out of fuel. In effect, your muscles have a cunning self-defense mechanism that's totally independent of the brain, the equivalent of having your car's maximum speed linked to the level of its fuel gauge. Moreover, they'll preferentially burn some of the glycogen within the muscle before turning to glucose from your bloodstream--which means, in practical terms, that all the Gatorade in the world won't stave off fatigue indefinitely.

From What the Dog Saw (Malcolm Gladwell)
-We shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree--and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.

-The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it's a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before we settle on one.

From Rabbit is Rich (John Updike)
-From a certain angle the most terrifying thing in the world is your own life, the fact that it's yours and nobody else's.

-How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

-He doesn't see what Harry sees in [golf]--infinity, an opportunity for infinite improvement.

From Rabbit Redux (John Updike)
-Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

-There is that scent in the air, of going back to school, of beginning again and reconfirming the order that exists. He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar; but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him.

From Enlightenment Now (Steven Pinker)
-It's not that Goldilocks is always right and that the truth always falls halfway between two extremes. It's that current societies have winnowed out the worst blunders of the past, so if a society is functioning halfway decently--if the streets aren't running with blood, if obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition, if the people who vote with their feet are clamoring to get in rather than racing for the exits--then its current institutions are probably a good starting point (itself a lesson we can take from Burkean conservatism). Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated government more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

From The Sense of Style (Steven Pinker)
-Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

-Researchers are apt to lose sight of whom they are writing for, and narcissistically describe the obsessions of their guild rather than what the audience really wants to know.

-Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.

-The early bird gets the worm, for example, is plain. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese is classic. Classic style overlaps with plain and practical styles.