May 29, 2007

Training Session: Snack Food Storage

Session One: Famous Amos Cookies

Bill led a grueling session on opening a bag of cookies, placing the cookies into a Ziplock bag, and, crucially, pulling the white plastic zipper firmly from one end of the bag to the other to ensure that the bag is completely closed and the cookies will stay fresh.  Each boy then demonstrated his ability to 1) locate the Ziplocks and 2) open and close them without difficulty.  I presented a guest lecture on the necessity of transporting the bag of cookies from the counter to the pantry.  Unattended cookies left on the counter will be confiscated.

Session Two: Advanced: Application of Chip Clip

Bill oriented the boys to the secret storage place of the chip clips: the drawer to the right of the stove.  Each boy was given a bag and practiced neatly folding down the open ends and securing them firmly with a chip clip.  Again, I stepped in to emphasize that even beautifully clipped bags of chips must be deposited in the bin in the pantry or risk being impounded.  They may be retrieved only after payment of a five dollar fine and appropriate expressions of apology and sorrow.

May 25, 2007

Preparing For The Enemy

The twins aren’t relaxing their guard just because school ends today. Our house is a notorious girl-haters headquarters, as least where the eight-year-olds are concerned. That doesn’t mean some pesky females and their cooties won’t sneak over and try to kiss someone. Those girls will smooch anyone, I’m told.

After school yesterday, Drew and Porter commenced the creation of a complicated defense system designed to detect and intimidate any females under age nine who cross into Glamore territory.

The boogie board is mounted on a skateboard at the rear end for maximum maneuverability. The black tubes from the leaf blower provide dual functions: they act as telescopes while simultaneously imitating the look of gun barrels aimed squarely at oncoming interlopers. Those who venture too close to the mighty defenders will be caught in the basketball net and thrown in the trash can.
Here’s a look at the duo manning their battle stations.

Girls, all this may look like a ladder and some crap from the garage to you. If so, you are sadly mistaken. These guys mean business:

If I were you, I would stay far, far away.

May 23, 2007

Boring Blogger Has Career Day Envy

Getting a compliment from a sixth-grader is the highest form of flattery, so I was thrilled when a close friend’s daughter asked me to talk about writing at her school’s Career Day. Although I’ve never given this type of talk to twelve-year-olds before, I’ve done it in front of several adult audiences, and I figured I would be a huge hit with the preteen crowd.

I like to make sure I have a large film screen set up so everyone can see the screen well. I demonstrate how comments work, and how clicking on the name in a comment will take you to that person’s blog. I show them the back side of the blog where all the coding is and that generally draws a big response and much undeserved respect for my limited coding skills.

It’s also a cool touch to show the audience your stat program at the beginning of the talk so they can see how many readers have checked in, and then look again at the end of the presentation so they can see how many people clicked on the site while they were listening.

I figured I had it made. Internet, cool coding, funny stories, winning personality– I’d be the Career Day Star.

Things didn’t go exactly as I had planned. First, I’d assumed that the other speakers would have boring jobs. A lawyer (I’ve tried to tell my boys what I do in that job and make it interesting and that’s a losing battle), an investment banker, an accountant with a head for numbers and a personality to match.

Sadly for me, the other contestants speakers included representatives of the local NPR affiliate, a chef, an orthopedic surgeon, and a makeup consultant.

The NPR folks brought a microphone and Lord knows what else and let the kids stage a high-energy mayoral press conference. The pastry chef had mounds of fruit and melted chocolate and the students prepared chocolate-covered strawberries. The makeup consultant did a professional makeup application on one delighted sixth-grade girl, and handed samples of Chanel’s Chance perfume to everyone. Most thrillingly, the orthopedic surgeon showed clips of sports stars getting injured, then whipped out models of femurs and vertebrae and showed how he fixed the athletes. Blood, gore, sports– I never had a chance. Or a Chance.

Meanwhile, I was droning, “And after I’ve made sure I’ve used strong, vibrant words, I proofread again to take out all the extra commas that slow readers down.” Ugh.

It’s okay, really. I’d much rather concentrate on writing when I’m not practicing law. After all, I already spend a lot of time addressing blood and gore, though under less dramatic circumstances than the surgeon does. I interrogate my boys on a regular basis, so I have the art of the interview perfected at least as well as the talented folks at NPR. I’ve written plenty about my mad culinary skillz.
Next year I’m bringing sparklers and Pop Rocks for everyone!

May 21, 2007

I Lied When I Said It Would Be Fun

I christened this past weekend The Immaculate Glamore Home Extravaganza! and publicized it well in advance.  I bought real Cokes for the boys to drink in honor of the occasion, although in general I’m violently opposed to the consumption of sugary carbonated beverages.  As a final touch, I rigged up the iPod and speakers to blare the boys’ favorite songs (except those by Weird Al) in the driveway.  There was an undeniable party atmosphere hovering around our house.
Early Saturday morning, Finn, Drew and Porter had been won over by the enormous preparation and my constant assurances that they were about to experience “a weekend you won’t forget.”

But as soon as Bill and I pulled out the pruners, the leaf blower, the ladder, the hedge trimmers, the hoses, the rakes and the wheelbarrow, they recognized the weekend was really about yard work.  Unfortunately for them, the fact that they’d caught on didn’t provide an escape.  We were all laboring together.

Porter derived a modicum of enjoyment from climbing the ladder while Bill held it and poking under the gutters with a stick to loosen the unsightly debris.  He grew pouty when we forbade him from actually climbing on the roof, so we diverted him by letting him use the leaf blower to blow all the gutter trash into a pile.  He spent the next hour sorting through the pile, pulling out legoes, balls, nuts, interestingly shaped sticks, and other treasures, which he set aside until the trash pile was reduced by half.  When he wasn’t looking we bagged his “treasure” and hid it in the neighbor’s trashcan.

Meanwhile, Finn used the electric hedge trimmer to prune the azaleas and Drew piled the cut branches in the wheelbarrow.  We let Finn shear the azaleas however he wanted, figuring that the poorly executed X-treme pruning he favored was better than no pruning at all.  I followed behind them and raked the leaves out from under the bushes so we could fertilize them.

As I raked, I unearthed numerous balls, mainly baseballs.  Together they represented the entire life cycle of the baseball, from brand new to scuffed and worn to decayed.  The squashed piece of corroded leather drew plenty of attention, especially when Drew poked it with a stick and ants scuttled out of it. However, there is a time and a place for science, and the Extravaganza! was not that place.  I ordered them to finish the pruning.
The boys were flagging so we gave them a short lunch break and some Coke.  We headed back outside and I switched the music to U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” thinking that the combination of the caffeine, sugar and a martial drum beat might encourage them to quicken their pace a little.

“Time to wash windows!” I trilled.  “And I bought the FUN kind of window cleaner!”

Finn gave me a sullen look.  “I can’t believe you just used the words ‘fun’ and ‘window cleaner’ in the same sentence,” he said.  “That’s so uncool.”

As a result of his surliness, we assigned Finn the task of removing the screens from the windows, and gave Drew and Porter the privilege of using the Windex Outdoor cleaner.  We set each of them up with a hose and a bottle of cleaner.  The bottle screws onto the hose and has a knob that turns the cleaner on and off.  They sprayed the windows with water, turned the knob and covered the glass with suds, then rinsed the windows.

The beauty of the Windex Outdoor is also its drawback– it works so much like a watergun that if you are an eight-year-old boy in possession of one, and your parents go in the back yard to start working on the windows there, thus leaving you unsupervised, you might forget that your objective is to clean the windows and not to squirt your twin brother in the genitals.

At least that’s the way it happened at our house.

After the windows were done Bill and I let the boys watch a movie, and they promptly fell asleep.  We fertilized the azaleas in peace then woke the guys for a celebratory screening of Shrek the Third.

Our Extravaganza! was a great success.  Rather than counting pruned bushes or cleaned windows, I decided the following was the best measurement of our accomplishments:

Total balls recovered:

From gutter:

8 baseballs

From bushes:

2 footballs

5 tennis balls (2 in advanced stages of decomposition)

3 golf balls

7 baseballs

1 wiffle ball

And three grimy, exhausted boys.

May 16, 2007

Follow (Some Of) Your Dreams!

We’ve raised the boys to believe they can grow up to be anything they want, as long as they work hard, get plenty of sleep and don’t overdose on Froot Loops and Sprite first.

That’s why it was disconcerting for me to hear the following exchange while I was eavesdropping on the twins’ bath:

Drew: “When I grow up, I’m going to be a lawyer, a chef, a famous artist or a drunk hobo.”

Porter: “If I can’t be an inventor guy, I’ll just be a mama’s boy.”

The empty nest isn’t looking so empty any more.