Tag: parenting

The Halftime Ham

~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

That is Thomas hamming it up front and center. He ran onto the court and lined up with his classmates and got recognized for perfect attendance during halftime at a Gardner-Webb men’s basketball game. Gardner-Webb partners with local elementary schools, giving kids a free ticket who have perfect attendance for the month. It was Thomas’s first game in a “basketball stadium,” as he calls it, and he watched the game enthusiastically, leading cheers of “defense,” often when Gardner Webb had the ball–we’re still working on game fundamentals. 

Watching him, I couldn’t help but remember my own impassioned fanaticism when I was about his age. I have always been an NC State fan and my big brother was a Duke fan. It thrilled my heart whenever Duke lost, which in those days rarely happened because they had Grant Hill and Christian Laettner. My dad and I were in Houston, Texas, visiting his cousin, when Grant Hill hurled the basketball down the court with two seconds left, when Christian Laettner caught it and beat the buzzer, beating Kentucky and depriving me of my brother’s suffering. 

The stakes were not so high in this game between the Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs and Brevard Tornadoes, and Thomas has no brother, whose suffering brings joy, but he quickly became invested in the outcome, even if he forgot, from time to time, which team he was cheering for. A cheerleader threw him a rally rag and he maniacally whirled it above his head, and it was his most prized possession until I brought back Air Heads and Nerd Clusters from the concession stand, which was admittedly a bad decision on my part but I had waited in line for a long time and they had just run out of popcorn. What can you do? 

Thomas chomped. He cheered. He danced. He had an all around good time, and afterwards we went to look at Christmas lights in town. 

And he fell asleep in the car. 

In Defense of Compartmentalization

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

One drawback of the modern Sports Utility Vehicle is the fact that the trunk has been truncated into non-existence. Owning a SUV is like owning a house with an open floor plan. Sure, there is more space, but it is shared space, shared with all your cargo tumbling around in the back. Sometimes you hear the cargo tumbling, sometimes you smell it wafting, and sometimes you see it levitating in the rearview mirror (depending on how much air you got going over a speed bump). With a SUV, you have to live, or at least drive, in the presence of your possessions. You can’t just stuff boots in the back of your trunk and forget about them. With an SUV,  your wife would eventually smell them.

With a car, however, your options are endless. I have been riding around with a pair of old muddy manure-caked rubber boots in the trunk of my Camry for at least four weeks–and my wife has never even detected a whiff. Nor can she smell the contents of my tackle box in the trunk. I don’t go fishing much anymore, but that is exactly the point. There is fish grime and scented power baits in that tackle box that date back to the previous century. Sometimes it is nice to have a hermetically sealed trunk. 

And sometimes it’s nice to have compartments in life as well. One of my laments about modern society is that we can no longer compartmentalize. Everything is always open, always on, always accessible, always wafting into our heads, always vying for our attention. Through the conduits of wires and wifi comes an onslaught of electrons–emails, notifications, texts, videos, and social media posts–that bombard and erode the walls that protect our attention, focus, and sanity. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we found an old sedan somewhere, popped the trunk, and tossed our cell phones in there and forgot about them for four weeks. At the very least, we wouldn’t have to live with the manure wafting up from the screens. 

According to statistics, the average American checks their phones 144 times a day, and the average American checks their email every 37 minutes. I suppose I’m an above average American because I check my email every 37 seconds. I’m not sure what I’m checking it for, but I’m checking it nonetheless. Companies are now selling containers, basically lockboxes with a timer on them, so families can incarcerate electronic devices and reduce screen time for both parent and child. In other words, they are literally selling compartments so we can recompartmentalize our lives. 

Schools are also doing this. I guess educators realized that it’s probably not a good idea for students to be snapchatting with friends in English class when they’re supposed to be focusing in math class. In the past, such interdisciplinary communication was simply limited by classroom walls. Sure kids once passed notes in the hallway, but notes are a lot easier to police than electrons. 

All this is to say, sometimes technological progress is a synonym for societal regress. Let’s bring back the sedan, with a nice hermetically sealed trunk. 

Happy Is The Man Who Remembers

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

Thomas started kindergarten this week–kindergarten! Seems like just yesterday that we were dropping him off at daycare for the first time. Okay, maybe not yesterday, but it doesn’t feel like five years. Time is strange: days drag, years fly–unless you’re a new Kindergartener with no concept of time. For Thomas, a long time ago could be an hour, month, or year. He remembers a few things from two and three. For instance, he remembers his first tornado warning, in his three-year-old class, when he and his classmates had to huddle in the daycare bathroom.

I only have a handful of vague daycare memories. I remember once having my mouth washed out with soap for spitting. I remember once having a nightmare while laying on my mat during nap time. And I remember getting my “willy” caught in my zipper. That’s it. With predominant memories like that, it’s no wonder I can’t remember anything else, which is a shame because I’m sure daycare was mostly a fun and happy experience, full of blocks and trucks and dinosaurs, much like it has been for Thomas. Why I don’t remember the fun and happy part is beyond me. It is concerning, however. 

Apparently, behind my back, my brain has been conspiring against me and erasing my happy memories without my consent. This is a treacherous thing for a brain to do, which is why you should keep your friends close, but your brain closer. Admittedly, I haven’t been checking in with my brain much, so without my support it decided to make mischief. I’m not sure I can blame it. It probably gets bored sitting up there, wobbling around all day, and doesn’t have much else to do. Or, maybe my brain is just a fan of ‘90s teen dramas, which is why it retains so many cringeworthy memories from high school–I’d rather have my infantile memories from daycare. 

By the time Thomas is my age, some technocratic billionaire will likely have developed a microchip to implant to store happy memories and bypass mischievous brains. Until then, the best we can do is check in our brains from time to time to see what they’re up to. 

Anyway, Thomas has had a great start to kindergarten. Despite all of our worries, he seems happy as the proverbial lark. And despite his happiness, when we ask him what he did in school each day, he says, “I can’t remember.” 

Forgetting happy memories starts early. 

Thomas on his first day!

The Hunt for Color-Coded October

~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Once in a blue moon, I’ll actually grow hopeful that my wife has finally shaken free from the shackles of her obsession. But her newfound freedom never lasts. Secretly, she’ll start planning meals for the week, color coding and syncing calendars, and getting a little twitchy whenever I suggest that we just enjoy life and go with the flow. Before long, she will once again be Captain Ahab at the helm, hunting for the illusive white whale or, in her case, the illusive routine. 

photo of planner and writing materials

“If only we could get a routine,” I’ve heard her say a thousand times. 

From stories I’ve heard of old, routines did once exist. Now, most grizzled millennial parents seem to believe that routines, if not already extinct, are on the verge of extinction in our modern era. Ours is an era of endless options, when stores never close, when youth sports have no offseason, when work (through conduit of the internet) sneaks into our homes and intrudes on domestic downtime, when everything (through the conduit of the internet) vies for our attention, our time, and mostly our money. When no boundaries exist to protect our space or contain our movements, it’s no wonder that we’re “all running around,” my wife says, “like free-range chickens with our heads cut off.” She has never been a fan of free-range living. 

Admittedly, she is the chief fence builder for our lives. I have always hated building fences, both literally and figuratively, and generally recoil from the task, much like a spinning jenny recoils when I accidentally let a high tensile wire slip and spring back to form a bird’s nest tangle fit for a pterodactyl. My wife, however, has some natural aptitude toward figurative fence building, for planning and organizing and scheduling (yuck, I recoil at even typing the word). To build a routine, you have to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same order, day after day, which sounds really boring to me and really wonderful to her. 

To achieve such a boring pattern, you use things like alarms, calendars, and planners–all tools of the devil. Do you think Adam and Eve set an alarm clock in the Garden of Eden? Do you think Thoreau scheduled out his days on the banks of Walden Pond? Do you think Jimmy Buffett color coded his calendar in Margaritaville? No, he didn’t even color code his wardrobe. He just picked a parrot shirt and went to the bar.

The point here is my wife has a problem, namely her obsession to stamp out disorder in a disorderly world. Please put her on your prayer list.

Learning and Relearning

~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

Thomas is a fun-loving ball of energy. If something fun is going on, Thomas wants to be in the middle of it–no hesitation, no apprehension, no fear. Some folks wade into a pool–Thomas runs, jumps, and yells “cannon ball.” The only problem is he can’t swim. Which is a pretty big problem for a child with no fear around water. 

But he is getting close. Last week, we took him to the pool at our local YMCA, where he has done swimming lessons each year for the last three years–and this time he actually made good forward progress, kicking his legs and doggy-paddling. I suspect it won’t be long until he basically turns into a fish. This year, he was the smallest child in his group at swim lessons, but the biggest dare devil by far. 

Lifeguard: Who wants to jump off the side?

Thomas: [hands shoots up first] Me! Me! Me!

Lifeguard: Who wants to go down the slide?

Thomas: [hand shoots up first] I do! I do! I do!

Despite being only five, Thomas has gotten a lot of exposure to water, mostly because I have to travel frequently for my day job, which is unfortunate because I hate hotels. The problem is I can never sleep well in hotels because I’m always afraid of oversleeping. I’m not sure why this bothers me because I always oversleep my alarm when I’m at home, where I’m a fourth or fifth snooze type of person. But with hotels, I basically associate them with the fear of oversleeping, missing my presentation, losing my job, and becoming destitute and homeless. 

Thomas, however, associates hotels with swimming pools. He loves hotels. Or mostly he just loves Fairfield Inns because that is the hotel I nearly always stay at–I’m a creature of habit. Most Fairfield Inns have the exact same floor plan, and down the hall from the lobby is a small indoor pool. Despite being an indoor pool, the water feels like it has just been piped in from the arctic, so it takes a few minutes to wade in and get acclimated, at least for me. For Thomas: ”Cannon ball!” 

Sometimes I wonder where his fearless instinct comes from. But deep down in the crevices of my brain, I think I can conjure up memories of a time when I used to be the same way, when I used to be a cannonball, dive-right-in type of child instead of dip-my-toe-and-wade-in type of adult. I don’t know what happens as we get older; it seems like we learn to hesitate, worry, and fear, and fear is a strange thing. It’s good for staying alive but not necessarily for living. 

Maybe I can learn a thing or two from Thomas. Maybe I can learn to reassociate things with fun instead of fear–or at least I could reassociate hotels with something more pleasant than destitution, maybe something like free bacon at the continental breakfast. 

white metal railings near swimming pool