Umchina, That Guy is Good! - Repost

I have an Amazing Facts desk calendar, and I have to tell you, a lot of the times the facts are slightly less than “Amazing.”

For instance, today I learned how many times some actor named Max Schreck blinked in the nine minutes he was on screen in a 1922 movie. It was once.

Earlier this week I learned that badgers have helped make a number of important archeological discoveries, none of which I cared about.

I even learned how much genuine yak hair the Broadway run of Cats went through making wigs in the eighteen-year span of the musical. It was 3,247 pounds. Not only did I not care at all about that statistic, but I also reacted poorly to it on a personal level since my mom made me go see an off-off-off-Broadway (Sacramento, CA) production of Cats when I was young, and I still haven’t recovered from how much I disliked it.

I’m not going to lie to you. This calendar is not great. It’s not even very good. But I stick with it each day, just hoping for that odd gem that might make learning about yak wigs at the world’s worst musical all worth it. Well, on Wednesday, September 27^th my perseverance paid off.

On that fateful day I was treated to one of the funniest things I’ve learned in a long time. And after I got done laughing, my heart immediately went out to all the young Korean men out there.

Here’s the “Amazing Fact:”

 

Umchina, a Korean term meaning “mom’s friend’s son,” is used to describe a person who’s better at everything than you are.

 

How prevalent moms shaming their kids for lack of achievement must be in Korean society to have a one-word term for it. Wow! Nice job, Korean moms. Maybe take it down a few notches, huh?

I’d be willing to bet that even if the term wasn’t invented to be spitefully humorous, that’s at least how it’s used by today’s Korean youth. At least I hope so.

 

“I’ve got no chance on this test. Mr. Umchina in the front row is going to blow the curve for all of us.”

 

“How’d the game go, honey?”

“Not great. Their starting lineup was Umchina city.”

 

When I told one of my buddies about this fabulous new word I discovered, he asked what the Korean term for “wife’s friend’s husband” was. Now that’s one we need to know!

I hear about him all the time. That guy is good!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

You Crazy Bunch of Mothers

If the cops didn’t get called on your Mother’s Day brunch, then you might be hanging around with the wrong mothers.

At least, that’s what I’m told.

I went to a perfectly normal Mother’s Day brunch on Sunday. We had fresh fruit and quiche. I was up in Oregon, visiting my parents and my oldest sister, and our brunch was lovely. I then got on a plane to come home to what I thought was going to be a Mother’s Day tri-tip dinner, cooked by my sons. I came home to something a little different than that.

You see, our good friends down the street hosted a neighborhood potluck Mother’s Day brunch on Sunday morning, and I was thankful for that. I was going to be out of town for the morning, so I was happy my wife and boys would be down having a nice time at our friends’ house. The plan was for them to go enjoy the brunch, then I would get back into town and we’d have dinner all together.

I kinda got the impression the plan was changing when I got to the airport in Portland and started texting my wife and boys about what time I would be arriving. No one texted me back. I had sent a long string of unanswered texts by the time I was in my seat being told to turn off my mobile device or switch it to airplane mode.

I had a text from my wife waiting for me when I landed at 6:00 pm, saying that we were probably going to hold off on cooking the tri-tip for tonight.

I arrived home to an empty house and the sounds of laughter and the pop-pop-pop of street pickleball coming from the other end of our little road. I threw my suitcase in the house and strolled down to what turned out to be one of the most epic Mother’s Day brunches ever held.

It had started at 9:00 am, and was still going STRONG at 7:00 pm. There was a live garage band – courtesy of two slightly intoxicated musical dads with acoustic guitars – along with a pool party, a hot tub party, and a cornhole tournament in progress in the back yard, and a pickleball game in the street in front of the house where the moms playing were required to do shots whenever the total score became evenly divisible by five. (It was a loose rule). A large cheering section in lawn chairs had gathered, and I’m pretty sure some of them had wandered in from other neighborhoods.

I’m not sure what kind of traditional brunch food was served in the morning, but they had been through all of that, then onto lunch, and by the time I showed up the party was knee-deep in take-out hot wings and delivery pizzas. My wife was one of the lawn chair spectators, waiting her turn for another pickleball match, and when she saw me she gleefully told me the cops had been called on them.

Our friends’ house sits at the end of our street, between two tee’s of adjoining streets, so it happens that very few cars ever actually drive past the front of their house. You are either turning off our street before you get there, or you would have come around from the other way if you needed to be on the street at the end of ours.

This low-traffic phenomenon makes it a near-perfect spot for a street pickleball court. When you bring the net out, the court sits lengthwise with the road, up against their sidewalk, so there is a full car-width lane to get past it on the other side if you happen to need to drive past their house. Someone – and no one knows if it was a neighbor, a pedestrian, a motorist, or a member of a tennis league – called the police to complain about the “illegally closed off road,” or the “crazy out of control street party,” or something. No one was really sure, including the cop.

Apparently, the cop pulled up, took one look at what was going on, and just shook his head in the “I can’t believe some idiot wasted my time and the taxpayers’ money to have me respond to a Mother’s Day brunch” kinda way. Before he left, he wished all the ladies a Happy Mother’s Day and dutifully reminded all the pickleballers of the obvious, “try not to get hit by any cars.”

Anyway, the music continued, the pool party raged on, and when the sun went down, the floodlights came out to make sure darkness wouldn’t slow down the pickleball tournament, or the mom’s mid-game shots.

My wife, who isn’t as young as she used to be, tapped out at about 9:30 pm, with over twelve hours of Mother’s Day brunch under her belt. I’m a full five months younger than her, so I was able to make it another fifteen minutes or so before I had to pack it in and head for home.

Anyway, happy belated Mother’s Day to all you wonderful ladies out there doing the hard work! And hey, if you don’t have Mother’s Day plans for next year, I’d highly recommend coming by our street. The brunches are legendary.

In fact, it’s possible that Sunday’s brunch is still going on. I left before it broke up, and I haven’t gone back down to check.

It wouldn’t surprise me.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

Umchina, That Guy is Good

I have an Amazing Facts desk calendar, and I have to tell you, a lot of the times the facts are slightly less than “Amazing.”

For instance, today I learned how many times some actor named Max Schreck blinked in the nine minutes he was on screen in a 1922 movie. It was once.

Earlier this week I learned that badgers have helped make a number of important archeological discoveries, none of which I cared about.

I even learned how much genuine yak hair the Broadway run of Cats went through making wigs in the eighteen-year span of the musical. It was 3,247 pounds. Not only did I not care at all about that statistic, but I also reacted poorly to it on a personal level since my mom made me go see an off-off-off-Broadway (Sacramento, CA) production of Cats when I was young, and I still haven’t recovered from how much I disliked it.

I’m not going to lie to you. This calendar is not great. It’s not even very good. But I stick with it each day, just hoping for that odd gem that might make learning about yak wigs at the world’s worst musical all worth it. Well, on Wednesday, September 27^th my perseverance paid off.

On that fateful day I was treated to one of the funniest things I’ve learned in a long time. And after I got done laughing, my heart immediately went out to all the young Korean men out there.

Here’s the “Amazing Fact:”

 

Umchina, a Korean term meaning “mom’s friend’s son,” is used to describe a person who’s better at everything than you are.

 

How prevalent moms shaming their kids for lack of achievement must be in Korean society to have a one-word term for it. Wow! Nice job, Korean moms. Maybe take it down a few notches, huh?

I’d be willing to bet that even if the term wasn’t invented to be spitefully humorous, that’s at least how it’s used by today’s Korean youth. At least I hope so.

“I’ve got no chance on this test. Mr. Umchina in the front row is going to blow the curve for all of us.”

“How’d the game go, honey?”

“Not great. Their starting lineup was Umchina city.”

When I told one of my buddies about this fabulous new word I discovered, he asked what the Korean term for “wife’s friend’s husband” was. Now that’s one we need to know!

I hear about him all the time. That guy is good!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

Catch Up if You Can

Motivating your children can be hard to do, especially these days when they all seem to be inexplicably drawn to a life of drooling in front of a tiny screen watching thirty-six-hour YouTube compilations of cats getting scared by cucumbers.

Son Number One is sixteen years old, and he was born with a little more than his share of the “I want to sit in front of this screen for the rest of my life” gene. As such, apparently, I am not above using a criminal as a motivational role model. I found that out the other day when I was watching the movie Catch Me if You Can. Number One came in and I paused the action to catch him up, explaining who Frank Abagnale, Jr. was, and what he had accomplished in just a short period of time.

If you are unfamiliar, Abagnale was a con man and a forger. He wrote his first bad check at the age of fourteen, and in the early 1960s, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, he was impersonating an airline pilot in order to cash fake payroll checks and get free rides all around the country riding in the spare seat in the back of the cockpit.

My dad was an airline pilot and remembers getting the FAA memo about an imposter riding jump seats posing as a Pan Am pilot.

Abagnale pioneered several check forging techniques before he was caught, and afterward, worked with the FBI to help them catch other forgers.

There’s really no telling what Abagnale could have done if he’d had the computer and internet tools at his disposal that kids have today. He had to steal all his money using a typewriter, for goodness sake.

The other day, I needed to pay Son Number One some money and I didn’t have enough cash on me, so I wrote him a check. He’s had a checking account for a few years now, and uses his debit/ATM card to buy things and get cash, but apparently no one had ever written him a check??

He kept it sitting on his desk for a week before he came to me and said he had no idea what to do with it. He didn’t use the vast resources of the internet to even attempt to figure out how to deposit it. He just stared at it for a week and then complained.

It was at that point that I used a con man and a thief as an example of what to live up to. I’m not saying I’m proud of that, I’m just saying it happened.

Come on, man! Frank Abagnale was actually making fake checks when he was your age, and you can’t even be bothered to try to figure out how to deposit a real one into your account? He was impersonating an airline pilot, and you don’t even have a job at a pizza place. Those are federal crimes, man! Not just some little local misdemeanors. Show some initiative, will you?

Follow me for more parenting tips.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite T-shirt is at SmidgeTees

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

49 at 49

I turned 49 years old two days ago. I was feeling a little down about entering the last year of my 40s, but it didn’t last past the afternoon. I ended up needing to make a trip to Walmart that day, and five minutes of mingling with the regular clientele had me feeling just fine about my life. I would highly recommend this form of self-care.

Now, getting old obviously has some disadvantages, but they do say that with age comes wisdom. Unfortunately, I wish that were more true. Nonetheless, in honor of living through another trip around the sun, I have added to my list of thoughts, observations, and acquired “wisdom.”

Here it is - one for each year. You’re welcome, America.

 

1.  I have coined a new term based on 2020-2021: “Bummerang” – When the same bad news or depressing situation keeps returning again and again and again.

2.  The recent advent of axe throwing places that serve alcohol could very well be the thing that brings this country back from the brink of bubble-wrapped, snowflake entitlement and saves the America we know and love.

3.  There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who prefer the toilet paper to come off the top of the roll, and those who are wrong.

4.  Things would be a lot better if everyone just drove while driving.

5.  I don’t understand the debate about vaccinations. It’s sort of like worrying that birds are getting into your cat's dish and eating the food. It seems like an issue that will eventually just take care of itself.

6.  Pi and the circumference of a circle have a similar relationship to pie and the circumference of a person.

7.  Here’s one of the main differences between men and women: Men can look at an ad for women's underwear and get excited. I’m not talking about women in underwear, just the underwear itself. Women do not get excited looking at pictures of boxer shorts.

8.  You are wholeheartedly fooling yourself if you think the government is efficient at anything except taking your money.

9.  The clearest evidence that capitalism beats communism is that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both own multiple space rockets. Suck it, North Korea.

10.  The three-second rule has a lot of leeway depending on if what you dropped was the last one.

11.  Owning a pool in the winter is like making payments on your new snowmobiles all summer.

12.  You cannot use the phrase, “To be honest with you...”  without giving the listener the impression you aren’t always being honest.

13.  When pulling a stump out of your front yard with a chain and your truck, make sure the roots don’t have ahold of your water main. Trust me.

14.  When packing thirteen suitcases into the car for your wife, is it impossible to have ten of them be “on top” so she can get to them easily.

15.  If one of my boys saw their brother in a fight, I'm certain they would jump in and help. I'm just not sure which side they'd be on.

16.  You can ask someone to do something, or you can tell them how you want it done, but you can’t do both.

17.  A good indicator of where you are in life is this: Does the advertisement of free food still affect your decision making?

18.  Fabric softener sheets go in the dryer, not the washer. Just FYI. I’m not saying I didn’t know that.

19.  There is no “t” or “t” sound in the word across. There is no “b” or “b” sound in the word supposedly. Please pronounce accordingly.

20.  Men are far more likely to clean things with spit than women are.

21.  Money and toilet paper have something in common – They’re both easy to take for granted until you run out. Also, in totally opposite, but equally dire situations, they can be substituted for each other.

22.  There are very few things in life that can make you feel as special as the phrase, “or current resident.”

23.  If you ask any guy to tell you a story about a time he almost died, he will have four stories just off the top of his head, and one will be from this year. If you ask women the same question, most of them will look at you like you’re crazy. We guys are much, much dumber.

24.  Nothing says I never want to have a real job quite like a neck tattoo.

25.  Guys: Sitting down to put on your pants is one very clear tipping point toward old.

26.  In life, it is very important to remember where you are and why you're there. That way, when your podiatrist tells you to drop your shorts, you’ll ask some questions first.

27.  Your dog has saved you from being murdered at least a thousand times by barking at the front window, and yet you remain completely ungrateful.

28.  Hold out as long as you can before putting on your first pair of magnifying “reader” glasses. The second you do, your eyes give up like a tired marathoner crossing the finish line.

29.  People who don’t use their cruise control on the freeway should be pulled over and waterboarded.

30.  You can't take bell peppers off a pizza.

31.  Pointing out that Van Gogh’s “girlfriend” was actually a prostitute during a fifth-grade art docent lesson is not helpful for anyone involved. I’m not saying I did this, and I’m not saying I didn’t do this – I just want you to know.

32.  It’s hard to claim to be a grown woman, fully capable of taking care of yourself, and also claim that you do not know how to operate a toilet seat.

33.  The fact that there is such a thing as the American Cemetery Excellence Award is proof that there is no industry that will not self-congratulate.

34.  Don’t waste your time trying to have a logical conversation with a teenager. Their brains are physically incapable of sustained logic. Instead, just give them healthy food in large quantities and cross your fingers that they leave your house at some point in your lifetime.

35.  “To be or not to be” is not the question. The real question is which towel in the guest bathroom am I allowed to use to dry my hands?

36.  Give a boy enough time with any object, whether it be a stale Cheerio, a bouncy ball, a doll, or a book, and he will eventually turn it into a weapon.

37.  Its not interchangeable. (take all the time you need)

38.  If you get a paper cut while reading a book about Navy SEALs, you’re not allowed to say ouch.

39.  The idiots who wear their pants down below their butts and have to waddle with their legs spread to keep their pants from falling to the ground are the same idiots who are most likely to try to run from the police at some point. That makes me smile.

40.  Scientists recently discovered that female dragonflies will fake their own death to avoid mating with males. I’ll bet all the married scientists were like, “Yup.”

41. We would be in much better financial shape as a nation if we just instituted my new $100 Million Rule. No matter what the project – bridge, building, plane, ship, department of department compliance, whatever – you get a one-time check for $100 million and if you can't get it done for that, too bad. It obviously wasn’t meant to be. No more money for you, ever.

42.  The problem with raising independent, strong-willed adults is that you have to live with independent, strong-willed children.

43.  Guys, do you ever have trouble figuring out if you’ve had too much to drink? Here’s a handy guideline:

“There is no way I can scratch that itch on my ankle while I’m standing here peeing, so I will not try.” – You’re still OK

“I can totally do it without peeing on myself.” – You’re drunk

44.  Be wary of any celebrity’s restaurant endorsements if that same celebrity also does ads for Prilosec.

45.  No matter who you are, no matter where you're from, there is one shared experience that binds us all together as one people: The sheer horror of the ketchup or mustard water falling from the unshaken bottle and ruining your perfect bun. I feel your pain.

46.  If you are looking to try it, kombucha is an acquired taste. Meaning you have to acquire one of those long skinny cheese graters and completely scrape all the taste buds off your tongue. Then you can drink it.

47.  If you have to choose, it makes more sense to become a strong swimmer than a strong runner. You don’t automatically die when you stop running.

48. It’s time for text-in radio contests to stop saying, "message and data rates may apply." At this point, if people don't understand how their text and data plans work, they should learn the hard way.

49. You can give a teenager reminders about your departure time every fifteen minutes for hours ahead of time, but they still will not start looking for their shoes until you are sitting in the car.

 

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite T-shirt is at SmidgeTees

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

A Dangerous and Disingenuous DMV

Yesterday I took my first steps into the valley of the shadow of death. Yes, that’s right. I logged into the DMV website to set up a driver’s permit test for Son Number One. Please pray for our family.

I would love to be optimistic about what’s about to happen, but let’s be serious. This is 2020. The year of the train wreck. And never mind the calendar, DNA simply is not on our side at the DMV. I was a horrible driver as a teenager. I couldn’t stop wrecking cars, and my wife was no better. There are auto salvage yards across California named after our family, and not because we own them.

The only good news here is that as far as our kids go, I think Son Number One is probably our best bet to be the safest driver. He’ll probably only wreck a couple of our cars while he’s in high school. The other two are going to be far worse.

Son Number Three is really the one we all need to worry about. Fair warning to all drivers and pedestrians of Northern California – you have three more years to get your affairs in order.

Because it’s 2020, the DMV isn’t making any new appointments, so Number One and I get to go take a number with the unwashed masses. Six feet apart wasn’t far enough at the DMV before COVID. But possibly worse than actually going there to wait in line could be the experience of navigating the website to figure out what we had to do in the first place. I would blame COVID for that, but we all know better.

It only took me a couple hours to finally have a vague idea about what forms we needed to fill out and which documents we needed to bring to prove that our son who lives in California with us at our house is related to parents that live in the same house and can vouch for the fact that he lives in the house that is located in California, provided we bring documentation proving that the house is in fact in California, the fact that we own it, the fact that we also live there, and the fact that he is, in fact, a human who was born. And also passports.

About an hour and a half into my online adventure, lost somewhere in the circular rat maze of non-informative information pages, I came across something that shocked me to the core. The dangers of COVID are far worse and more widespread than we ever could have imagined.

Due to COVID-related scheduling issues, the following temporary changes are in place:

• License holders 69 and younger (Beginning March 1, 2020): Most drivers now qualify for online renewal

• License holders over the age of 70 (March-December 2020 expirations): Automatic extension valid for one year from original expiration date.

Holy crap, people! The ninety-five-year-old man who went blind at the beginning of the year and is still driving because none of his kids want to be the one that told him to stop gets to keep his license for another year! That guy, hurtling blind down your neighborhood street in his ancient Cadillac is dangerous. He’s nearly as dangerous behind the wheel as a teenage boy!

That’s really the thing I don’t understand in all this. Why are they even letting him get his permit if they’re still worrying about COVID? That seems like disingenuous concern. I mean, they are even letting them go back to school part time now.

There is no question in my mind that letting high schoolers drive themselves to school is far more dangerous than COVID ever could be for them.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

 

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy! 

National Son's Day

Apparently, Monday was National Son’s Day. I didn’t know this, because I had never heard of National Son’s Day until yesterday. National Daughter’s Day was on the 25^th, and I only heard about that one for the first time this year, too.

(Side note: The fact that National “Son Day” is not on a Sunday proves that our leaders are barely functional morons.)

Why have I never heard of these national days? I have a theory. They sound very much made up, like Lifetouch’s recent “National School Picture Day.” Give me a break! What are these daughter and son days for? Mother’s Day and Father’s Day make sense. What am I supposed to be thanking my kids for? Thanks for being here? Wasn’t your choice. Thanks for taking all my money? Nope.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I love our three sons to pieces, but that doesn’t mean I think we should have a special day to celebrate their existence. We already have three of those. They’re called birthdays.

Since I don’t have daughters, I really have no way of knowing, but I assume they might take these things with a little more weight than the sons out there. I didn’t know about National Son’s Day, and as such, I didn’t post anything about how much I loved my sons that day. You know what the great thing about sons is? They don’t care!

If National Daughter’s Day needs to remain a thing because of all the emotions and whatnot, I understand. But I’m here today to let everyone know we don’t need this National Son’s Day thing. If we insist on keeping it, I would like to suggest that we at least practice a little truth in advertising and rename it.

Here are some possible alternative names, just off the top of my head:

National Please Stop Eating Everything Day

National Please Stop Clogging the Toilet Day

National For Goodness Sake Put Some Deodorant On Day

National Can You Please Quit Wrecking the Car Day

National Stop Beating Up Your Brother Day

National This is the Fifth Time I’ve Asked You to Take Out the Trash Day

National What Are You Planning to Do With That Lighter Fluid Day

National Please Take a Shower This Week Day

National Put Down the Phone and Read a Damn Book Day

National How Have You Lived This Long Making Decisions Like That Day

National This is Why I Have Gray Hairs Day

National Please Stop Wearing the Same Underwear Four Days in a Row Day

National How Did You Already Grow Out of Those Shoes Day

National Can You Please Dial the Sound Down Six Notches Day

National Please Slow Down in the House Day

National Take it Easy, This Room is Not Bulletproof Day

National Your Brother is Not a Punching Bag Day

National Seriously, How Are You Not Full Yet Day

National What’s That Smell Day

National Just Go into Your Room and Clean Anything Day

and

National Where Did All My Money Go Day

Those all seem a little closer to the truth.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

 

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy! 

A Shotgun Wedding? - Repost

My wife and I celebrated our eighteenth wedding anniversary a couple days ago with our whole family. That’s an amazing testament to the love we share… for our three boys, since they have been with us for fifteen of the eighteen years, and they have been loud and annoying the entire time.

Just so you know, fellas, we could have easily chosen to celebrate by ourselves. You’re welcome.

Anyway, in honor of another successful year of marriage, I thought I would once again regale you with the heartwarming tale about the night after the night I met my wife.

Unfortunately, the night I met my wife was fairly uneventful. (Besides the fact that I met the love of my life, of course.)

So instead, I will regale you with the shocking, explosive, frightening, and downright weird tale about the following night. It’s a tale of a dive bar, a truck, a barefoot man, a policeman, a bathrobe, and a shotgun.

A guy walks into a bar. It was me. I met my wife in a bar.

That’s not the whole story. It gets better.

It was only my first or second time at this particular bar, but she had been there for thirty-two nights in a row. She and her best friend were going for a combined personal record. It was her initiative and dedication to the endeavor that drew me to her. We were both college students in San Luis Obispo, CA, and she was working at a pizza place that summer. She would get off work at midnight and meet her friend at Bull’s Tavern to shut the place down. We met one evening, talked until closing, and said goodnight.

I thought she was really neat-o, so having heard about their record-breaking attendance goal, I had a good idea of where I might find her again the next evening. After missing her a few times, between the bar and the pizza place, we finally connected, and had another delightful evening of bar-booth conversation. This was the kind of bar where “delightful conversation” means you sat in a red Naugahyde booth, taking turns shouting into each other’s ears, in an attempt to carry on a conversation over the AC/DC blaring out of the jukebox.

After the last-call light came on at two A.M. – this was back when we could stay up until two A.M. – we walked back to the pizza place where my truck was parked, and carried on our conversation in the cab of my Ford F150. By about three A.M. I had convinced her that kissing me wouldn’t be so bad, and just when I was about to plant one on her, a sonic boom came rolling down the street. It would have been much cooler if we had heard the explosion as we kissed, but you just can’t plan for these kinds of things.

She said, and I quote, “That sounded like a twelve-gauge!”

I replied, scoffing-ly, “There is no way that was a twelve-gauge shotgun. It was probably just a car backfiring.” In my head I was thinking, Cool. She knows her shotguns. But that couldn’t have been a shotgun.

Roughly four minutes later a barefoot man in a bathrobe came walking down the street carrying a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Now, if I can paint the scene for you - It is past three o’clock in the morning, and the town has completely shut down. We are the only car parked on the street, directly across from the pizza parlor. The only other car that we can see belongs to a police officer who is parked in a parking lot across the intersection from the pizza place. The police officer is standing outside of his car, chatting with a man on a bicycle. They have apparently not heard the big bang and seem very relaxed. The pizza place is located on the corner of the intersection, and the man in the bathrobe with the heavy artillery is walking past the pizza place, toward the cop, but neither one of them can see the other yet. We are parked across the street and have a clear view of both of them, and a pretty good idea of what is about to happen. Between the five of us, we are the only people still awake in the whole town, and two of us are a whole lot more awake than we were a minute ago.

The bathrobe-clad gentlemen rounded the corner and came into view of the police officer, and they saw each other at about the same time. We were positioned at just the wrong angle, so when the cop drew his weapon, he was pointing it right at us. We both did that thing where you slide down below the dashboard in case the bullets start flying, but foolishly keep your head up high enough to see, because you don’t want to miss the action.

The policeman immediately started asking the nice man to kindly set his shotgun down. By “kindly asking,” I mean he instantly began shouting, “Drop the #$*%&@ gun right now! Drop it, #$@*&%!!!” I thought he was handling himself very well given the surprising circumstance he had just found himself in. The bicyclist he had been talking to before the rude interruption did something that still to this day I cannot believe, even though I saw it with my own two barely-visible-above-the-dashboard eyes. He dropped his bike to the ground and fit himself completely underneath the front bumper of the police cruiser. Next time you see an old 1990s police cruiser, take a look at the ground clearance. I think it might have been Houdini himself in that bike helmet.

Well, the nice man with the twelve-gauge didn’t drop his gun right away. He just sort of stood there, trying to have a conversation with the cop. He was holding the gun at a forty-five-degree angle toward the ground, not exactly pointing it at the cop, but not exactly pointing it away from him, either. As the police officer walked closer and closer to the man, yelling commands louder and louder, I was sure we were about to witness something very unpleasant on what had, otherwise, been a really nice night.

Thankfully, for everyone involved, the man finally decided to set his shotgun gently on the ground, and seconds later, the police officer set his knee not-so-gently on the man’s neck, and the stand-off was over. As Captain Bathrobe was led to the police car and Harry Houdini extricated himself from underneath the Caprice Classic, I started the truck and drove my date home in stunned silence.

Fortunately, she didn’t hold the incident against me, and we continued to see each other. We searched the local paper for two weeks straight after that night for some mention of the incident, partially to prove to people that we weren’t making it up, but mostly to find out for ourselves what we had seen. Why was there a man firing a shotgun in sleepy, downtown San Luis Obispo, and why was he then walking the streets with that shotgun, barefoot, in a bathrobe? We never found a single mention of it, and to this day, have no idea what happened.

We graduated, parted ways, and met again six years later at a mutual college friend’s housewarming party. We have been together ever since.

After meeting her father, I finally understood her knowledge of shotguns. And after getting to know my father-in-law, I had a strong suspicion that he and my wife might have known more about that night than they were letting on. He was a great guy, and he may have been accused a time or two of being “slightly overprotective” of his only daughter.

Now, he certainly wasn’t a bathrobe type of guy, but he did own a number of twelve-gauge shotguns, and if he was in town visiting and staying at a hotel, he would have had easy access to a nice terrycloth robe.

Where exactly was he that night? Out looking for his little girl, perhaps?

She still claims it wasn’t him, but she always smiles when she says it… I remain skeptical.

I also remain very thankful to have lived through that night and been able to celebrate eighteen amazing years of marriage.

Happy anniversary, baby!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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COVID-19 Shutdown Forced Homeschool Parent Log – Day 12

Forced Homeschool Parent Log – Day 12

Yes, we are on day twelve without school. I am counting the weekends, because weekends have no meaning when you know the kids won’t leave on Monday morning.

I’m not going to lie and say homeschooling is going well. We have already abandoned hope of any sort of educational advancement during these bleak times. We will be satisfied if the kids get out of this just not being dumber.

And please don’t get me wrong. Their teachers are doing a great job. At least, I think they are. I am basing that solely off volume of communications, not content. They are assaulting my inbox with email after email about this and that and the other thing. I would give you specifics, but I stopped reading the emails on Day 4. It was just too much. I have a life to lead over here!

We assume that our boys are reading the emails and doing the work, but it would simply be too much work for me to follow up. Instead, every once in a while, I just yell down the hall, “Did you get that email from your teacher just now?”

They say incoherent things back that I can’t and don’t want or need to understand, and I check the “homeschooled them” box for the day.

Son Number Three coughed yesterday morning. We quarantined him in the closet for the remainder of the day, not because we are worried about the coronavirus, but because he is very loud and we took the opportunity to mute him for a while. It’s our mental health that we’re concerned with, not the virus.

Meals are getting weird. In the before-time, when we had jam-packed schedules full of school and sports, we still managed to get an organized dinner on the table at least a few nights a week. Somehow, with all this amazing “free time” we’ve been given, dinner just can’t seem to bring itself together. We still have a fair amount of actual food in the pantry and refrigerator, but we keep pairing some snack mix with a can of olives around three o’clock, after the noontime cereal wears off. This pushes dinnertime out well into Cinema class (see below), which inevitably leads to popcorn for dinner, which is fine, because popcorn is a vegetable. Prove me wrong.

  

As part of my ever-evolving (some have called it lazy, but I can’t be bothered to argue with them) homeschool curriculum, I have added an Appreciation for the Cinematic Arts class in the evenings. This shelter-in-place seems to be the perfect opportunity to homeschool my kids about the magic of the silver screen in the eighties and nineties. Each night they enthusiastically tug at the duct tape binding their wrists and ankles as we watch another golden oldie, including, but not limited to, Groundhog Day, Adventures in Babysitting, The Great Outdoors, Fletch, Uncle Buck, Teen Wolf, Beetlejuice, Kindergarten Cop, Predator, and What About Bob.

They are loving it! Also, in order to properly scare them into staying home during this pandemic crisis, we showed them Outbreak. Highly recommended.

Even though we still have food, my wife keeps pestering me to go to the store. I don’t understand this, since I’m pretty sure I made my feelings on the subject very clear. I don’t want to go to the store. Last time I went I had to stand in line for an hour to get in, even though I wasn’t going to buy toilet paper. I don’t even like standing in line to go to things I actually want to go to. The grocery store certainly does not qualify for that list. Our corner gas station continues to sell milk, so I see no need to go back to that hellish line.

She showed me the grocery list she’s been compiling, trying to get me to believe we really needed things like green beans and broccoli, but I saw right through the lie. She’s almost out of chardonnay.

I don’t need to go to the store. I can wait her out. She’ll go. She might try to muscle though some pinot grigio for a few days, but she’ll crack.

I must sign off now and go get Weekend at Bernie’s cued up and ready for the nightly Cinema class.

Stay strong, people!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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The Weight of Christmas

Christmas used to be simpler. And harder.

It’s complicated.

One thing’s for sure, Christmas definitely used to be lighter.

When the boys were younger, there was a lot more to the Christmas prep. We had to be careful what we said. We had to make sure we visited Santa Claus somewhere at least once before Christmas Eve, ideally nowhere near a mall.

We had to “mail” letters to the North Pole, which really meant we had to make sure we read the letters without anyone finding out, then I was in charge of making the letters disappear. And make no mistake, that was probably the most life-and-death job I’ve ever had as a parent. The world would have come down around our heads if one of the boys had ever seen me shredding their Santa letters and hand-decorated envelopes. Thank the good Lord they never insisted on walking them down to the mailbox themselves!

We had to put out carrots and milk and cookies for Santa, and I had to eat the cookies and drink the milk. That job was tolerable. But I also had to chew up the carrots and spit them onto the lawn, and collect dirt and freezing cold hose water to make mud in order to manufacture reindeer “hoofprints” on our front walkway at midnight. That job was cold and messy and tasted like carrots, which are not nearly as good as cookies.

Basically, we had to lie a lot and stay up late. But at least the gifts were smaller.

I mean, sure, I spent my fair share of Christmas Eves assembling new bikes and Fisher-Price scoot-around cars, or whatever, but they were all manageable one-man jobs. The boys are older now, and the big gifts have grown with them.

This year was almost too much for me to handle. Son Number Two and Three got an eight-foot-tall lacrosse bounce-back from us this year. The UPS guy could barely get the box up our driveway. He and I managed to get it stored in the garage out of sight, but last night I had to put it together. It’s basically a trampoline the size of a large coffee table, sitting vertically up on a tube steel frame. It has various places where it folds up for storage, but God help you if you fold it all out, stretching all the springs tight, before you thoroughly read the safety precautions section of the manual.

There are two places that require safety bolts to be placed through the hinges before you move on to assembling the rest of the very heavy framework. If you don’t put the safety bolts in, it’s possible for the whole thing to fold in half very rapidly as the springs collapse, beating the holy hell out of your right foot that happened to be standing on one side of the frame. That situation is also very sudden and very loud, which causes your heart to stop for three to four full seconds, which can’t be good for you.

The problem was the giant upright trampoline turned out to be the light, easy gift to assemble. Son Number One wanted a weight bench. I bought it at a local sporting good store, and between me and the five-foot-two-inch female store manager, we managed to get it into the back of our SUV. Just imagine a full-size wight bench with all the weights and everything, tucked into a reinforced cardboard box the size of a standard filing cabinet.

I had to keep it in the box in order to hide it in the garage. Ironically, Son Number One would have been an excellent choice to help me move it there from the back of the car. His brothers couldn’t be trusted to keep the secret safe, so I handled it myself. Luckily, that was about a month before Christmas, so I had time to recover from the hernia surgery before I had to assemble it last night.

It was all actually going pretty well, taking locking plate #24 and using two #37 bolts plus two #78 washers and #45 nuts to secure crossbar #17 to main beam #12. That was fine. It was the un-numbered items that gave me a little trouble. Specifically, the twenty-five-pound plastic-coated weight that slipped out of my tired fingers around midnight and bounced across my already spring-loaded right foot.

That kind of thing never happened with the Fisher-Price stuff. Like I said, Christmas used to be lighter.

On the upside, the boys didn’t wake us up at 4:30 this morning like they used to.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to continue to ice my foot.

I hope you all have a very merry Christmas!

Until next year,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

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A Letter from Your Loving Father

Our family lives very close to the epicenter of the California Gold Rush. We happen to have moved here for the schools (and the abundant Chipotle locations), but a long time ago a bunch of people moved here for the gold. Ground zero for the gold frenzy was a little town called Coloma. All three of our boys got to go on fourth grade field trips to Coloma, to stay three days and two nights and learn all about the life of a gold miner.

One of the things the teachers ask the parents for, besides a ton of money for the trip, is a letter written to your fourth-grader as though they were an actual forty-niner in the gold fields.

For reasons unknown to me, my wife decided I should be the one to write those letters. Apparently, she doesn’t read this column.

Son Number Three just found the one I wrote for him last year, and I thought I’d share, as an example of how my wife is not paying attention.

August 16, 1849

Dearest Son Number Three,

Your ma and I hope this letter finds you alive and well in California. We sure hope you made it all the way out to the diggins in Coloma, and you’re not dead on the Missouri Trail somewhere.

I know the trip to the Mother Lode couldn’t have been easy for you, what with your wooden leg and all. Hopefully you still have it attached, and you didn’t run into any weirdo leg robbers, or God forbid, a pack of angry beavers. I know I taught you well with the shotgun, so hopefully you gave any highwaymen or uppity rodents a backside full of buckshot.

We miss you here on the farm in Indiana, especially now that your older brothers have up and left us as well. Son Number One ran off with a traveling circus act that came through Fort Wayne earlier this summer. He claims to be making decent money, but his official job title is Head Pooper-Scooper for the elephant show.

Son Number Two has gone off to run a barge company on one of the Great Lakes. The good Lord only knows what possessed him to become a sailor, but he seems to enjoy it. He brings iron ore from Michigan to Wisconsin and returns with tons of cheese. Go figure.

We had high hopes for all three of you, but so far we have one son who picks up giant piles of elephant dung and another who is a cheese boat captain. Hopefully you will make something of yourself out in Coloma and save the family name.

One piece of advice for you when it comes to gold diggin: Don’t handle any quicksilver. Stay away from it altogether. A lot of the uneducated prospectors out there will tell you it’s the best way to attract the gold dust and collect it, and it does work great for that, but they will all end up with mercury poisoning. As they get sicker they will make gurgling noises when they talk, they will shiver and shake, their pee will be a funny color, and eventually they will all go bat-guano crazy. Then they’ll die.

Ma says hello.

Best of luck. Try not to get shot by a claim jumper.

Love,

Pa

I have no idea why my wife puts me in charge of these things.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

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Laugh Track

Raising kids is hard. There’s no getting around that fact. And these days, I think it’s safe to say we have a more challenging job raising kids than our parents did, with the added pitfalls of the internet, smartphones, social media, and mind-melting video games lumped on top of all the age-old problems associated with trying to mold quality adults out of little idiots.

At the end of most days, we’re left exhausted on the couch, still dumbfounded by their apparent inability to co-exist even on the same planet with their siblings, let alone two different rooms, and annoyed by the attitude we received regarding the dinner we so graciously provided them.

And especially as they get older, it seems they give us less and less to smile about each day, let alone laugh about. But the silver lining to this change, as they become older and more annoying, is when they do give us that gem to laugh about, it’s all that much sweeter.

Case in point – the other week I got a call from an unfamiliar number. The word is out on the streets of India that I have a website, and as a result, I have been getting mercilessly spammed by phone calls from friendly website hosting and design firms, so I have been a little gun-shy about answering my phone. But this was a local area code, so I picked up and cautiously said hello, ready to demand to be put on the Mumbai telemarketer’s do-not-call list.

But low and behold, it was a familiar voice on the other end of the line. Son Number One was calling from the middle school front office.

“Hi Dad.”

Uh oh, I thought. What happened? Is he sick? Did he get hurt? Did he burn down the science building? (Based on his track record, I was obviously leaning toward arson.)

“What’s up, buddy?” I asked, ready for the bad news.

“I forgot to bring my gym clothes this morning. Can you drive them over here real quick before gym starts?”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

“No. Good luck in gym class.”

Oh, man. That was a good one! Thanks for that, buddy. I really needed a good laugh.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

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An Open Letter to Our Parents

Dear Mom & Dad,

I want to apologize for everything.

Your eldest grandson is now thirteen years old and has become a total butt. This development is probably no surprise to you, but we were caught completely off guard. He used to be so nice and now he is a moody, stubborn turd.

I mean, we still love him and all. It’s just that we don’t want to live with him half the time anymore. Come to think of it, this is probably why they invented boarding schools on the east coast, huh?

Anyway, like I said, this probably isn’t a shock to you, since you had me. Hence my apology. Looking back on it all, I remember knowing everything there was to ever know. If only I knew half as much today as I thought I knew then!

I was always right. I was convinced of everything. I had opinions that could not be argued. I didn’t want to hear it. I was not nice. I was probably mean to my sisters but thought they were really the ones being mean to me.

I had no goals or plans or skills of any kind. I had nothing to do all day but still complained about doing anything at all. My judgement was crap and my ability to plan was even worse.

My comprehension of cause and effect was nonexistent. I was impulsive and dumb and unable to come up with a good reason for anything I did, other than, “Whatever. I don’t want to talk about it.”

I understand now that this all stems from the prefrontal cortex of the brain. The prefrontal cortex – which, as any reputable brain surgeon will tell you, is probably located directly north of the post-rearward cortex – is the part of the brain in charge of not being a giant butt face. Apparently, no one’s works at thirteen.

The nice folks at the middle school sat us down at the beginning of the school year and told us all about the lame-o prefrontal cortices of thirteen-year-olds and what to look forward to. I’m not sure I totally believed their hype at the time, but now I’m thinking they might have held back some of the more disturbing information just to keep us from trying to preemptively sell our kid.

Too late for that now. Anyway, I just wanted to say sorry for my teenage years. Sorry for being such a turd, and thanks a million for never kicking me out of the house.

To return the favor, I guess we will continue to provide room and board to your intolerable butt of a grandson.

Love you both,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

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Canine vs. Teen

Today is Son Number One’s thirteenth birthday, and the new Lab puppy is officially five and a half months old. It’s tough to say which one of them smells worse.

You might not think it, but besides their general malodorousness, there are a lot of other striking similarities between a teenage boy and a half-grown dog. Let’s stack them up against each other and see which one you’d rather have in your house, shall we?

Obstinance is a key similarity. Both are testing their personal authoritative boundaries by pretending not to hear my voice. This rarely ends well for either of them. This is a draw.

Urine continues to be an issue. For the dog, she has mostly stopped peeing in the house, with only an occasional excitement dribble now and then. For Son Number One, toilet spray issues have not improved for the last eleven years. Advantage dog.

Constant noise – For the dog, it’s barking. Thankfully, not at night {sound of me furiously knocking on my wooden desktop}, but many times during the day, both inside and outside. For the boy, it seems to be a lot of excess energy escaping his body via his mouth, like a boiler’s pressure relief valve. He emits a near-constant stream of random noises in the form of yelling nothing in particular at the top of his lungs, incoherent screaming, singing, clicking, popping, smacking, yelling at his brothers, and occasionally, being dumb enough to yell at us. We have purchased an anti-bark training collar for the dog that vibrates and beeps at her when she barks. It seems to be working. So far, I have not been able to find any such (legal) device for the boy. Advantage dog.

Eating food as fast as I can prepare it – The dog eats like an industrial suction truck, but at least I can buy a thirty-two-pound bag of her food for under thirty bucks. The boy is an avowed carnivore, just like the dog, but he eats more than she does, and his food seems to always cost way more than a dollar per pound. Advantage dog.

Rambunctiousness – Both animals have a ton of excess energy, but I can usually pair them up with each other or one of the other boys to burn it off. Draw.

Chewing up shoes – The dog will maul any unsupervised footwear she can find, sometimes even while it’s on a foot. The boy chews up shoes almost as quickly through scooter riding and general outdoor play, but he’s growing so fast, it tends to be a moot point. The only real issue with his shoe abuse is that Son Number Two gets fairly shredded hand-me-downs. (We help assuage Number Two’s concerns about this by reminding him that life isn’t fair, and to shut up.) Advantage boy.

Dog breath – they both seem to have it, but only one should. Advantage dog.

Messing up the house – They both come tearing in the house leaving a trail of muddy footprints behind them almost every day, so this aspect is a draw. They also both spread clothes and toys all over the house like it’s their job, but occasionally, under the right circumstances – usually involving threats upon his life – I can get Son Number One to pick up after himself. Slight advantage boy.

As we can clearly see from this list, it is far more enjoyable to raise a puppy than a boy. Simply getting another dog based on this evidence doesn’t make any sense, though. It would need to be a trade, ideally with a full-grown and matured dog that’s well-behaved, for my teenager. But besides the fact that no rational person would consider that a fair trade, it’s also probably illegal, so don’t even think for a second that I was seriously considering it. (Unless you know someone who could broker the deal.)

Happy birthday, Son Number One. You get to keep living here, for the time being. Now go share your dinner with the dog.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Clean up on Child Three

The hardest part about going on vacation is coming home. That’s probably mostly because of the stress of smuggling five suitcases full of tequila, illegal Mexican fireworks, and my cool new switchblade past the customs agents at the airport. But also because we had to come back to the reality of having kids.

We were only in Mexico for five days, but, apparently, God thought we were getting a little too comfortable in our south-of-the-border kid-less bliss So, He smacked us straight in the face - mostly the nose, really – with reality. Literally the first thing we had to do when we saw the kids was clean up vomit.

My wife and I flew back from Mexico into the San Francisco Bay Area and stayed the night, and Grandma drove the boys to us the next morning so we could all continue on a family vacation for a week. Grandma has apparently lost the ability to say no, or the ability to make good decisions, or both, because on her way she said yes to cherry-red Slurpees for breakfast on the road. Son Number Three’s body rejected the eight A.M. overload of high-fructose corn syrup and red dye #40 about a block from our hotel.

Welcome back. There’s red puke all over the inside of your car. And your son. And one of your other sons. Road trip!

There’s not too many things that can make me miss the unpleasant wafting aroma of the under-engineered Mexican sewer system, but cleaning bright red Slurpee vomit off the back seats of the car with a baby wipe at a gas station is one of them. It’s great to be back with the kids. Thanks for watching them, Grandma. I guess we forgot to mention it, but “No” is an acceptable word to use with the children when inside a 7-Eleven.

(Please don’t misunderstand – even though Grandma seems to be losing it, we will still gladly use her babysitting services in the future. It takes a lot more than projectile Slurpee to get fired from that job!)

Our destination was San Diego to stay with relatives for a few days in their beautiful, upscale, clean, well-appointed home. We arrived and promptly took over their laundry room to de-puke-ify the contents of our quarantined trash bag. After the laundry was finished we went to bed happy that the clean-up was behind us.

I guess God thought we hadn’t quite paid for all the time off.

The next morning, I woke up to Son Number Two in the kitchen with bright blue hands and ten dismantled ball-point pens on the granite countertop, trying to wash off the blue ink that had spread everywhere inside his backpack. He was busy trying to wash the pens. The pens! Because to my eleven-year-old, saving the twenty-four cents’ worth of crappy pens was the main concern.

I traced the ink spill back to his bed on their living room couch, where he first discovered the Bic-xon Valdez had run aground. There I found the backpack, and various items from within, all a vibrant fresh blue ink color, many of which, in his haste to save the precious disposable plastic pens, had found their way onto the sheets, the staircase next to the couch, and the large area rug.

After I collected all the little pieces of my head that exploded all over the room, I spent the next hour perfecting the technique of using rubbing alcohol to get ink out of a carpet. Given enough time and excruciatingly-manufactured patience, rubbing alcohol and an endless supply of clean rags removes bright blue ink from carpet fibers amazingly well, which is the only reason Son Number Two is still with us here on Earth.

It was starting to look like penance for a week off from parenting was going to involve a crazy mess from each child. We’d had bright red and bright blue, so it was looking like a patriotic theme was developing.

We kept Son Number One away from marshmallows and milk for the rest of the trip.

It’s great to be back.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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A Clean Sleep

I have discovered the key to great parenting. Sleep!

I don’t mean sleep for you, the parent. Don’t be silly. You won’t get another good night’s sleep until you’re dead. Sorry, but it’s true. First you have the kid(s). Getting any sleep with an infant in the house is simply not possible. In the roughly five years that we had little crying diaper fillers in the house, my wife and I slept a combined total of twenty-seven hours.

Next, they grow up a little and start coming into your room to wake you up in the middle of the night about crazy dreams, bodily functions, or late night sibling injustices. Once they get to high school you’ll lose sleep over where they are and what kind of trouble they’re getting into.

Send them off to college and now you have to get up early and work late to pay for it all. Think you’ll finally get some sleep when you retire? Nope. Sure, the house is quiet, but you have to get up three times in the middle of the night to pee.

Now you’re really wishing you slept more in your twenties, huh? I hear you.

No, I’m talking about getting the kids enough sleep. We have an early bedtime for our three boys, and up until this morning, I hadn’t realized one of them might not be getting enough sleep.

It all started when I realized his mattress was sub-par, at best. You see, they are all in the same room, and Son Number Two has the top spot in a bunk bed. Since I am afraid I’ll destroy the entire structure and crush his little brother underneath if I get up on it, I have never actually been on his bed.

So, a few weeks ago, he mentioned something about his mattress being slightly uncomfortable, and I climbed up the ladder to inspect it. I’m not even sure where or when we got his mattress, but after feeling it, it appeared to be about three hundred years past its prime. I’m not shocked very easily, and I have very few, if any, feelings of sympathy for my children. But something akin to guilt and shame washed over me, momentarily anyway, when I felt his mattress.

It felt like someone had placed a thin sheet over the top of a pile of rebar. It was awful. You could easily make out the shape and diameter of every spring. It was borderline child abuse. I have no idea how he ever slept on it at all. So, as a loving and caring father, I looked him in the eye and said, “Looks like you need a new mattress. Well, goodnight.”

Then I wrote it on my to-do list under fifty-seven other things and forgot about it for two weeks. Like I said, little to no sympathy. He should just be happy there’s a roof over the top of his crappy mattress, dammit.

We finally made it over to the bargain cave in the back of RC Willey yesterday, and picked him up a brand-new discount budget mattress. I splurged and spent the extra twenty-five dollars on the “European top” model, since the lower-priced version reminded me a lot of his current torture device disguising itself as a bed.

I managed to haul the new mattress upstairs by myself, and swapped them out. The trip downstairs with the old one was easier. I just folded it in half a few times and carried it downstairs one-handed. Bedtime had him remarking how nice and comfy his new bed was.

For me, last night anyway, the new mattress was just a check mark on a to-do list. Another chore taken care of. It wasn’t until this morning that I realized how much more it really was to our family.

Son Number Two slept all the way until the alarm - something he rarely did in the past.

He didn’t start a fight with either of his brothers – something he always did in the past.

He joked with me instead of complaining to me – very rare indeed.

He swept the floor – unheard of.

He swept the floor. (I just wanted to say it again, because it was so amazing.)

He actually got out the broom and swept the kitchen floor because it was messy. Unprompted. All on his own. He did something to help without being asked. My well-rested son cleaned something!

We have a five-bedroom house. I need an office, and we want to have a guest room, so that leaves two other rooms for three boys. This is why they’re all in the same room. We don’t want to play favorites or have some kind of complicated biannual room swap to deal with.

I’m only dealing with one night’s worth of data, here, but if this type of behavior keeps up from Son Number Two and I can attribute it to better sleep, I’m going to start playing favorites in a big way.

If I can get him to keep cleaning the rest of the five-bedroom house, I’ll give him his own room with blackout curtains, a white noise machine, and a five thousand dollar Tempur-Pedic mattress.

Totally worth it.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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