Weekend Ephemera

First things first:  There’s a new contest up on my website and you should definitely check it out.  You don’t need to be familiar with my books to enter — all you need to do is read a story I recently posted there and tell me who should play the lead roles if it’s ever made into a movie.  Easy, right?  And if I choose your response as the winner, you’ll receive an autographed, hardcover edition of The Sorcerers’ Plague, book I of Blood of the Southlands.  So visit the site and check it out!

Remember the owl who showed up at our place a few nights ago and sat on the swing set?   Well, he came back last night, and he brought his brother.  The two of them were sitting together on the play set, looking around, making their little rasping call, waiting for Mama to bring them something to eat.  They hung around the house all night, actually, calling to each other, and fluttering from perch to perch.  They’re newly fledged and not very accomplished flyers.  One of them flew off the swing set last night without first deciding where he was going to land next.  He wheeled and turned and finally tried to grasp the trunk of a tree.  That didn’t work for long and eventually he had no choice but to drop to the ground in a most undignified manner.  He was fine and a moment later he flew back into the woods.  But he and his brother were back a short time later, ready to try it all again.  They’re very cool.

And now it’s the weekend.  Nancy is taking my older daughter and some of her friends out camping tonight.  So my younger daughter and I are having what we call a Daddy-Daughter-Day.  Not sure yet what we’re going to do.  A water park if these clouds clear and the temperature rises; otherwise a movie and sushi dinner (we’re both nuts for sushi).  Should be fun.

Hope all of you are enjoying your weekend.

Lazy Bones and the Three Stars….

My daughters swam in a meet this morning.  They did great.  Their relay teams all took first place, and between them in their individual races they took three firsts, a second, a third and a sixth.  They also had a great time.

My wife couldn’t be at the meet, because she was running (swimming?  Biking?  Doing?) what’s known as a sprint triathlon.  She had a great time, too.

And me?  I cheered.  I encouraged.  I praised.  And then I took a nap.

Thoughts on Honors Day

This is graduation weekend at my daughters middle/high school, and today was Honors Day, when students are recognized for achievements in academics, sports and community service.  I attended, because I’m on the parents’ council and our organization was sponsoring the event and the reception that followed.

I dreaded the ceremony, because it has a reputation for being long and boring.  But I enjoyed it, mostly because so many of the kids who were honored were friends of my daughter or children of friends.  It seems like a day ago that I was watching them play youth soccer and little league, or seeing them in the sixth grade play.  Now they’re juniors and seniors in college.  It goes so fast.  

My daughter was honored too, though because she’s only in eighth grade this year, she wasn’t eligible for most of the awards.  But she was chosen for a leadership position in next year’s freshman class, which is pretty cool.  Except for the fact that I REALLY can’t believe she’s about to be a freshman in high school.

As I say, it goes so fast….

A Post About… Well, I’m Not Sure What It’s About…

 Today’s post, “Are Our Books Really Children?  And If So, Whose Children…?” can be found at the SFNovelists website.  SFNovelists is maintained by approximately 100 published authors of fantasy and science fiction.  Please visit the site and enjoy the post.

I’m Well Into My Dad-Teens

Today is my fourteenth Dad Day.  I’ve been a Dad for exactly 14 years and I’m hoping for lots of presents.  Yeah, yeah, that means it’s also my older daughter’s 14th birthday, but this is about me, damnit!  This is my day to celebrate me, you know?  It’s my chance to kind of, like, reflect on everything that’s cool about me being a Dad.  And there’s A LOT for me to reflect on.  

In those first few years I kind of stumbled along, making mistake after mistake, and dealing with totally gross stuff like diapers and baby food and baby puke, which looked suspiciously like baby food, but smelled worse.   It was pretty lame actually.  I was pretty lame.  But not anymore.  I’m fourteen now (in Dad years) and I know everything I need to know.  Really.  I mean, sure there are people who claim they know more than me (Than I?  Oh, what-EV-er!).  These geezers have been doing the parent thing for-like-ever.  But that doesn’t make them experts, right?  I mean, experts are people who get on TV to talk about stuff that other people want to learn about, and who wants to see geezers on TV talking about this stuff?  I don’t.

Like, the other day one of my daughters (I forget which one, and really what difference does it make?) was complaining about feeling sick and having a fever and throwing up and being achy and tired and stuff.  And I was like, “Okay, get over it already!”  I mean, ohmyGod, how much of that stuff can one person listen to, right?  And this is just what I mean.  Back when I was five or six in Dad years I would have been, like, “Oh, poor baby!  You need to lie down.  We’ll take your temperature and put a blanket on you and get you some gatorade or something.”  Lame, right?  And those geezer-guys will tell you to take a kid like that to the doctor or to read some lame All-About-Sick-Kids book.  Like I have time for that, right?  I mean you have no idea how hard it is being me.  Being fourteen in Dad years is really, really, really hard, even when you know as much as I do.

But today isn’t about the hard stuff, like, you know, kids and things.  Today is about me and my fourteen years as a Dad.  So let’s eat some cake and open presents!  

Um, will presents make my face break out…?

Let’s Call it a Week…

This week slipped by pretty quietly. That is, until a bunch of fourteen year-old girls showed up for my older daughter’s birthday party tonight. Nothing quiet about that at all. It was supposed to be outside at a lake over in town, but the thunderstorms and tornado watch kind of changed our plans. But they’re mostly gone now, our house is returning to normal, and our daughter is very happy. So the noise was definitely worth it.

I may have some book news next week. Here’s hoping. We’ll see what happens.

Two Sides of Growing Up

This was dance weekend in our home and our little town.  Both my daughters take dance lessons throughout the school year, and their annual recital was on Saturday afternoon.  The younger one takes tap and ballet; the older one takes tap and jazz.  So both of them had two performances in the recital, and both of them did great.  Nancy and I were very proud, and kept thinking back to the days when they were just starting out, wearing stiff little plastic tutus and ribbons in their hair.  They’ve both come a long way.

But this weekend that was especially true of our older daughter.  In addition to the regular dance classes, this year she auditioned for the University’s dance performance, which was also performed this weekend.  She’s only in eighth grade, but she’s very good and she got into two dances — an Irish dance and a modern hip-hoppy sort of thing.  She was the youngest person in the program, but you wouldn’t have known it to watch the dances, and to the credit of the college kids, you wouldn’t have known it from how they treated her.  She was one of the dancers, nothing more and certainly nothing less.  It was a magical experience for her, a tantalizing taste of what she has to look forward to in years to come as her dancing improves and she gets into even more dances in the college program.

It was quite an experience for Nancy and me, too.  Seeing her up there dancing with those older men and women and fitting in so well — it brought home to both of us just how fast the years are going by.  She started dance nine years ago, and it seems like yesterday.  She leaves for college in another four years or so.  How quickly will that time go by?  (Rhetorical question; believe me, I know the answer.)  It’s hard to fathom, but it’s exciting for all of us.

But these changes have a darker side, too.  

On Sunday night a girl my daughter knows — a high school student three years older than she — was killed in a car wreck on a rural highway a few miles from here.  My daughter wasn’t terribly close to this girl, but that didn’t keep this tragedy from having a profound effect on her.

I’m a middle-aged man.  I’m used to confronting my mortality, to being reminded every day that life is transient and fate capricious.  But this is new to her, and a part of me grieves to see her forced to confront such hard truths at such a tender age.  I realize that she’s not as young as I think she is, nor as unprepared for the real world.  But it’s hard to watch nevertheless.  She’s a teenager, as are her friends.  And she’s finding out that bad things happen to good people.  She’s realizing that those stupid rules her mother and I impose (like, for instance, she’s not allowed to ride in a car with a teen driver) have their roots in justifiable fears.  She’s starting to understand that “growing up” is double edged, and that the freedom she covets comes with dangers she hadn’t fully considered.

I know that these are important lessons for her to learn, though right now the price of them seems far, far too steep.  I find myself struggling with the (mistaken) urge to shelter her.  I want to hold her on my lap like I did when she was four and was getting ready for that first recital.  I want to tuck her in and sing her to sleep.  Parenting was easy then.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was.  And so when she comes to me and tells me how freaked out she is, how sad for this girl’s family and her close friends and her new boyfriend who lost his first love, I’ll listen.  I’ll resist the urge to reassure her, because really, what assurances can I give?  I’ll avoid the temptation to try to draw lessons from this experience for her; she doesn’t need my help with this one.  And when she tells me that she’s scared, that the uncertainties of life seem overwhelming, I’ll nod and tell her that I’m scared, too.  Because I am.  And she’s grown too old for easy lies.

Reality Knocks

So we’ve been thinking recently that our house is no longer just right for our family needs.  The space worked great when we were the parents of a six year-old and a two year-old, and even a ten year-old and a six year-old.  But now we’re the parents of one teenager, and it won’t be that long until we have two teens.  We need a different layout, a way to separate our world from the kids’ world.

With this in mind, we’ve looked at a few houses and thought about putting our house on the market.  We did the paperwork last week, and made an offer on a house.  But even then the whole thing seemed like an experiment, you know?  It didn’t seem real. 

Well, today we got a counteroffer on the house we’re interested in buying.  We have 48 hours to respond.

Suddenly this feels VERY real.

My Many Hats, Vol. 4 (I think)

If ever there was a day of hats, this was it.  I wrote my 2000 words in the WIP (Writer Hat).  I took care of my younger daughter , who stayed home from school with a bad cold (Daddy Hat).  I had some work to do for our local organic food buying club, of which I am Big Boss Man (Co-op-Coordinator-Guy Hat).  I wrote up an alumni interview that I did for my alma mater — Brown Class of ‘85, Baby!  Woot-woot!  (Brown-Interviewer-Guy Hat)  In my capacity as 8th Grade Parent Council Representative at my older daughter’s school, I wrote a tribute to the teachers and staff for Faculty-Staff Appreciation Week (School-Parents’-Council-Guy Hat).  I did some laundry and the after-dinner dishes (Husband Hat).  And now I am about to dun the weirdest hat of all.  Nancy and I are part of a little, VERY informal wine club here in town (we get 5 bottles of relatively cheap wine — $10-20 range — gather at someone’s house for munchies, and taste the wines to see which are worth getting again and which suck).  Well, this week Nancy and I put together the program, which means that we chose and bought the wines that all of us will be tasting.  Our theme was Shirazes from Five continents (Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America).  And I now have to write up the tasting notes for the tasting.  So I get to put on my Pretentious-Wine-Guy Hat! 

“It’s an ambitious little red, but I think you’ll admire its presumption….”

Finally, today I’ve also had on my Son-Hat, which is one I don’t get to wear very often anymore.  My Mom would have turned 87 today had we not lost her to cancer way too early (1995).  She was a brilliant, kind, sensitive woman who taught me to love the written word, to believe in myself and follow my passion, and to value family and friendship above all else.  There isn’t a day that goes by without me wishing that I could call her or visit her, tell her about her granddaughters or ask her for some parenting advice. 

I love you, Mom.  Happy Birthday.

A Little Kid-related Bragging

None of you who know me would ever, EVER confuse me with a football player, right?  I mean there’s just no chance of that happening.  Same with Nancy.

You ever heard of “Punt, Pass, and Kick”?  It’s a program sponsored by the National Football League.  They go into schools and have kids compete by punting, throwing, and kicking a football.  The object is to get the greatest distance and accuracy in each event.  It’s a national competition and at the end of the football season the winners in the various age and gender groups are honored at the Super Bowl.

Well, my youngest daughter, who to my knowledge had never thrown or kicked a football in her entire life, won her age group competition at her school.  This was last month, and this past Saturday Nancy and I drove her down to Chattanooga for the regional competition.  We thought it was pretty cool that she had done so well at her school, and we figured it would be a good experience for her.  We also figured that at the regional level she’d be overmatched by bigger, stronger kids whose parents had actually been working with them on these skills for the past several years.  (I should note here that my daughter and I did spend this last month occasionally throwing and kicking a football around.  It was mostly for fun, but she did her best to improve her skills, and I helped where I could.)

Long and short:  She did better than we thought she would in Chattanooga.  She did really well actually.  She came in second, and brought home a big honkin’ trophy and a medal.  We couldn’t believe it.

I have two girls, and I never played football at any level except in my yard with friends when I was a kid.  My daughters are swimmers and soccer players and we have plenty of medals and trophies.  But I never thought in a million years that we’d have a football trophy in our house.  Life is full of surprises….