In what had to be the most perfect day of the summer so far, last Saturday Diane and I took Agalia and DJ to meet another family at a children’s amusement park in a neighboring city.  Temperature was in the low 70’s, cloudless skies, the occasional wispy scent of old grease from a short-order kitchen hanging in the air.  And sometimes, you could detect the wispy scent of uncleaned urinal.  Like I said, it was perfect.

DJ was still too small to ride some of the rides.

But I did manage to lie about his age convincingly enough to take him for a few trips down the huge slide.

Diane and Agalia got scrambled.

The aggravating thing for me when I was a new parent was how every child became a yardstick of development for every other child born at roughly the same time.  This was true for the daughter in the family we met up with on this day, who was born within a few weeks of Agalia and was her first friend.  Our parenting styles were very different and I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth if I didn’t tell you that there was some mental wringing of hands over those differences.  Where we respected Agalia’s fears or disinclinations for activities, Agalia’s friend was pushed toward them.  When Agalia fell and cried, we held her and kissed her owie.  When her friend fell she was whisked to her feet with a sing-songy voice telling her she was fine and to go play.  To them I’m sure we looked like coddlers on our way to raising another entitlement child.  To us they looked like they were forcing things, stretching a rubber band that would one day snap back hard at them (though part of me also thought they might be the ones doing it right; get her out there, let her get hurt, let her get up and get on with her life and learn to be self-sufficient).  Were we doing it right?  It never seemed like it.

Though I’m not sure we would have felt differently no matter how we chose to raise her, as Agalia grew I felt like we were making the biggest gambling play of our lives in the ways we chose to parent her.  But instead of chips, we were sliding our little baby girl to 33 black and spinning the wheel.  C’mon, black.

And maybe the results so far have more to do with Agalia’s mental strength and confidence than with anything we did or didn’t do.  All I know is Agalia was leading the charge to all the scariest rides, spitting in the face of fear while her friend lagged behind.  We held off on many of the really big rides because her friend simply would not acquiesce to them.   So I guess you can chalk one up in the Clay family win column.  Maybe respect for the child’s fears and concerns allows the child to hash things out for herself and decide what she will and won’t be affected by.  Yeah, this win feels pretty good.

I’m a bit of a freak when it comes to telecommunication in the 21st century. I have a cell phone, but it’s almost never on my person. And the only time it’s on is when I’m actively making a call; otherwise it’s off. How do you reach me during the day when I’m on a job site working, you might ask? By the antiquated device known by drug dealers in the eighties as a pager. This is not blackberry enabled or blueteeth wizzamacallit, it’s a black matchbox that beeps. Or buzzes. And if you want to send me a text note, you have to figure out how to do it using the numbers on your phone, like you did on your calculator when you were 15. 80085, for example. Or if you don’t know me that well (or don’t have any 80085), then maybe 07734.

My problem is I have this fear of microwaves. Not the kind that pop your popcorn or dry your cat; the kind that go to and from cellphones. They’re really, really small. And back in the early 90’s when the first cellphone brain cancer scare happened, the foremost authority on all things physics and science pulled out his calculator and typed 80085. and using the data from a news report about the issue, crunched some numbers. My dad (said expert) then proclaimed “Yup. The size of the waves emitted from the antenna are small enough to fit between human tissue cells and start wiggling things around and cause some damage.” The researcher for one of the biggest cellphone makers on the planet agreed. Especially when that researcher showed the folks at 20/20 the X-rays of the antenna-shaped tumor in his brain.

Since then I’ve done all I can to keep that antenna away from me. And that fear extends beyond cell phones. We no longer use a wireless router when viewing pr0n the internet, because hello? Brain cancer? Baby monitor transmitter placement has always had to meet my prior approval because hello? Baby brain cancer?

Recently even Larry King had one of the foremost (real) experts on the issue discuss his concerns as it pertained to a well-known patient of his who died of brain cancer, OJ lawyer Johnnie Cochran.

But the thing that drove it home for me that the chance to get cancer from using a cell phone was legit? A competitor of mine always used his cellphone. Kept it in the same back pocket all the time. It was always on. After several years of use, one day he found a lump on his ass. On the same cheek and in the same spot that cellphone rode in his pants. Before this moment, had you ever heard of ass cheek cancer? Well now you have.

Dude survived, but barely.

Can you do me a favor? Watch those videos? Get a hands free (not the friggin’ bluetooth, btw) thingie? And don’t leave a powered-on phone in a pocket near your 80085? Or your ass?

Thanks.

So I was over at From Here to There and read the post about Nat’s son freaking out over a bug in the house. Being a big brother to one little sister, I made a comment only a big brother would make.

Tonight was a perfect evening to eat dinner on the patio. Cool evening, sun going down, cool temps. Perfect. We ate a simple dinner, and as I was cleaning up the dishes, bringing them back into the house, I felt a little pinch on my forearm, inside my sleeve. As I scratched at it I swore I heard a high pitched “That’s karma, baby!” Immediately afterward, this fell out of my sleeve.

I’m not a wizard in the kitchen, but I know enough to know that ‘beaters’ are not the guys you call when you have an ice skating competitor you need removed. Or a group of teenage boys that hasn’t had feminine contact in a few weeks. And I’m not afraid to say I make a mean pot roast, though it’s hard to take much credit for that; sear a side of beef, chop up a bushel of veggies, throw it all in a pot and let it cook for the day and you have several meals worth of meat and potatoes. I’ve stuffed a few shells. Made some pretty tasty blackened steak, too.

(Aside: My very first cake baking happened a couple months ago when Diane took the kids to see out-of-state family for a few days. The cake was part of a welcome home party I threw for them. I was once told by a mason that when mixing mortar, you know you have the right consistency when it’s just like frosting. One might then assume that if you had frosting, it’s properties might resemble that of mortar; able to build things up and stick things together. But one would be wrong if one were to assume that. Nat, I coulda used your help.)

Disaster cake aside, I walked into the kitchen with no trepidation. Tonight we were making eggs, in what might be my favorite dinner: breakfast. Typically Diane will make a batch of scramblies for all to share, along with some fruit, a little bacon (ooh, but it tastes so goooood) and toast. Not being satisfied with the status quo and with both of us having been disappointed in the kids’ eating habits lately, I decided to go big: omelettes for everyone. And to improve on the diet, each kiddie omelette would contain finely chopped broccoli and cauliflower. They both eat it raw with some dressing anyway, so why not add it to the omelette? They’ll never taste it. I’ll even mix in some mozzarella.

Earlier in the day we’d been to the grocery store to pick up a few things. When we arrived Agalia and I raced to the baked goods section of the store to see if they had any pies. Blueberry and Cherry were on display. Agalia decided on blueberry, but we still had one big hurdle: Diane. We had to convince her that although a pie was clearly not on the shopping list, it would be a worthy addition to our cart. Dad scoured his healthy food databanks…That’s Right! Blueberries can prevent or fight cancer. Knowing Agalia can sell Diane on things way better than I can, with far fewer words and no bartering for reciprocation, I have her do the dirty work, selling the pie idea to Diane. I send her with pie in hand to meet Diane at the deli, along with a short script to follow.

“Hey Mom! Blueberries, and um, cancer?”

Hmm, I didn’t remember giving Agalia license to riff. But as it turned out it didn’t matter, because we’d caught Diane at a weak moment; one of those moments that comes after being pummeled wit 6,000 requests for “Popcoh?“, having two non-napping children hell-bent on home demolition, and one adorable but talkative daughter who’s laid out 83 swimming showdown scenarios between Olympians Michael Phelps, Jason Lezak and Ryan Lochte.

We got the pie.

It can be dangerous, but in the carrot and stick game that is healthy eating bribed by dessert, the pie was my carrot, though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need it. After all, the omelettes I was making were golden, slightly brown at the edges, ketchup swirled over the top for presentation’s sake.

Agalia has this thing she can force herself to do. It’s a thing that if Fear Factor is still around when she’s an adult, she could pay her way through college. If we tell Agalia she needs to eat a certain thing she may not like in order to get to something she knows she’ll like, she can force herself to eat it. And quickly. Having learned this from when she was much younger, we try not to dangle that carrot often, because we want her only to eat when she’s hungry. Of course you know this means that in turn she will peck at her dinner but be capable of packing away an entire ice cream sandwich afterward. Screwed if you do, bum-surfed if you don’t.

After Agalia spent a few minutes pushing pre-cut pieces of omelette around her plate, we laid out Parameters for her receiving blueberry pie: eat most of the one-egg omelette in front of her. Immediately she grabs a piece of omelette in each hand (a fork had been made available, btw) and stuffs it in her mouth. Diane and I start chatting over an odd client of mine and we briefly lose track of what Agalia’s doing. A few minutes later, she lets out a huge belch, the kind you hear from a person with a nasty stomach flu, usually coming just before she expels the full contents of her abdomen for display across your room. Feeling awful ourselves for her Kobayashi-style consumption, we took the plate away and replaced it with a tiny salad and a few pieces of leftover chicken, which she gobbled up without issue.

So then came the big prize, right? Blueberry pie? Even DJ had changed his tune from “Popcoh?” to “Pah?”. I slice up a couple small pieces for each and place them in front of each child. After I see Agalia take a bite I turn to DJ, who’s trying pie for the first time. I give him a bite. He chews, swallows, then looks at his mother.

“Popcoh?”

A minute later and Agalia’s asking about the bylaws and contingencies of the aforementioned Parameters, and whether reward substitutions are allowed.

Two minutes after that, two kids have mini bomb-pops in hand, dripping in fructose and food coloring. Everyone is happy. Everyone except Dad, who made a dinner that nearly made his daughter throw up, then served up a dessert nobody wanted. Born to lose.

So I’m over at Mom101 - a place I don’t visit much (if you’re going to have a feed, why not provide more than the post title? Just a suggestion.), and I the watched embedded video:

And now here I am, swallowing hard, all blinkety-blink to drive the saline from the ductwork in my eyes. All at once this has to be the nerdiest, most uncool video I’ve ever seen, but somehow, with this cherubic white guy doing his snoopy dance, embedded deeply into the four corners of the world and all points throughout, all I’m seeing is hope for humanity. Like if this sore thumb can drop himself in the middle of 40 different cities, 40 different cultures (ok, not really 40, but whatever) and dance, and get the people of those same distant lands to get caught in the happy, innocent swell of joy his slightly ridiculous dance projects, then maybe there’s hope for Rodney King’s dream.

Where did this mush come from? What the hell is wrong with me?

Here’s a much older, self-adulating version.