Family Life Class

There comes a time in every unsuspecting fifth-grader’s life when school suddenly becomes really weird and icky, and for some reason your parents want to talk to you about weird, icky stuff too. All you want to do is go outside and play some kind of animal/space invasion/kickball game, but the adults at home and at school want to talk about kissing and boy parts and girl parts and babies. It’s gross.

Son Number One is only about a week or two away from the “Family Life” portion of the fifth grade curriculum, and he’s not thrilled. “It’s going to be weird,” he says with an uncomfortable grudiggle (equal parts groan/shudder/giggle).

Since I have my finger on the pulse of American education, I was surprised when he told us.

“That’s in the fifth grade?” I said to my wife, incredulously.

“Yes, dear. Don’t worry, I’m on it.” Apparently, she actually talks to people, and she’d already gotten a book recommended by a friend, and she and Son Number One were already reading it together.

Hmm... Either she doesn’t trust me to handle this sort of thing, or else she asked me to handle it when I was watching TV and I didn’t hear her. That one could go either way, but I’m leaning toward her wanting to handle it herself. She is probably – very rightfully – worried about what I would tell him without a strict script. Can’t blame her there.

We got a consent form the other day from the school. I had to laugh. It said if you wanted to opt your child out of the Family Life class, they would do other work in an alternate classroom.

That’s pretty funny to me. I don’t care what classroom you send them to, they’re still going to be out on the playground. If you don’t want them to get Family Life information, the form should really just say, “Pull them out of school now.”

Without homeschooling, you’ve got two real choices: If you want them to get the actual Family Life information, have them stay with their class. If you want them to get a skewed, eleven-year-old-crowd-sourced, wildly inaccurate interpretation of the Family Life information, opt them out and they can hear all about it at recess.

Have you ever tried to extract verbally communicated information from a fifth-grader?

You: “Hey Jimmy. Tell your mom that we have her casserole dish. And the enchiladas were delicious.”

Jimmy’s mom the next day: “Jimmy told me you think we should enroll him in Make a Wish? And go to Ensenada for some fishes? What’s that all about?”

Good luck with that.

Our boys share a room, so all I know is by the time Son Number Three gets to the fifth grade (God willing), he’ll probably think he could teach the class, since he’s heard all about it after lights out. The information will have been so poorly transferred that he’ll think all babies are born in Virginia and circumstantial evidence means someone’s peep got cut off, but at least he’ll have the information.

The consent form also said that we could go to the district office on a particular evening to preview the material and the videos that the kids will see. I pointed that out to my wife and started to say, “Maybe we should...”

“No!” she shot back, not letting me finish my sentence.

She is, of course, afraid I’ll bring popcorn and narrate from the back of the room. She’s obviously right, but I don’t think that’s any reason not to go.

So I guess she’s going to handle the information dispensing for now, and she’ll probably hand the reins off to me when they get to high school. I’m still not sure why she doesn’t want me to impart my wisdom right now about the direct correlation between Chardonnay prices and pregnancy rates, but I guess it can wait.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

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The Bat Rays and the Bees

We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium this past weekend.  We saw trained sea otters perform amazing tricks like swimming in circles and eating fish. We saw huge bluefin tuna swimming at dizzying speeds in order to eat squid. We saw swirling silver clouds of sardines and anchovies eating krill. Basically, everything was eating. Except us. We did not have a spare two hundred dollars to drop on five sandwiches and a bottled water.

I say everything was eating, but that's not entirely true. The bat rays were engaged in another kind of life-sustaining activity. We were at the petting zoo portion of the aquarium, where you can lean over the edge of the shallow pool and pet a bat ray as it swims by you. I was on one side of the exhibit with our two older boys, and my wife and Son Number Three were on the other side. Suddenly, a great commotion arose around them. Thrashing and splashing could be seen from the water in front of them, and the crowd around them erupted in a mixture of oohs and aahs and laughter. All we could see from our side was the splashing.

I half-yelled over the water to my wife, "What's going on over there?"
"Uh... They're wrestling..." (sound of adults in crowd snickering)
"Is that right?" I replied, skeptically.
"Yep. Wrestling. Silly bat rays. C'mon, son, let's go see the otters again."

Since the bat ray petting pool is geared toward kids, I would expect the aquarium to try and limit any hanky panky by the bat rays to the holding tank in the back room. In their defense, however, I would imagine it’s pretty tough to tell the males from the females, given they all look like a squashed cartoon head with wings.

Speaking of inappropriate animal behavior, do you know what else is not geared for kids? Bat orgies, that’s what. The bat ray incident reminded my wife and me of another captive animal nookie situation we encountered a few years ago. I can’t remember if we were at the zoo without our kids (which seems highly unlikely), or if we had just abandoned them to fend for themselves (which seems totally plausible), but somehow my wife and I ended up in the bat exhibit without kids. That turned out to be a good thing. A very good thing.

The crowd in the bat cave was stirred up by something. Nervous laughter, giggling, exclamations of “Oh my!” and “Honey, close your eyes!” greeted us as we made our way to the glass. Inside the bat enclosure we were treated to a sight that still haunts me to this very day. Hundreds of horny little bats were engaged in what can only be described as a Sodom and Gomorrah-type free-for-all. It didn’t seem to matter to the male bats if the freaky winged mammal they were hanging next to had compatible reproductive organs or not. Bats apparently have a “love the one you’re with” mentality.

Bats are scary enough just in general, but what we saw that day cannot be unseen. I felt like I might need therapy afterward, so I don’t even want to imagine the fallout if our kids had been with us. I can tell you that a lot of little bats babies were probably made that day, along with a lot of uncomfortable situations the next day at the bat coffee shop.

“Oh, Jim, look. It’s Dave and Marcie. Let’s go say hi.”

“No! We’re leaving, honey. Don’t make eye contact with them. I don’t want to talk about it.”

I’m just saying, zookeepers of America, a little sign or something at the door would be nice. “Warning, bat orgy season. May not be suitable for children or most adults.”

At least put a coat hanger on the bat cave doorknob to warn a guy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I realize nature is going to take its course. And, nowhere is that more evident than the sleepy little beach town of San Simeon, California. It is sleepy for most of the year, actually, except when the elephant seals are in town. For reasons known only to these ridiculously large sea mammals, they show up every year on the same beach to breed.

A few years ago, we were visiting the coast, and we were told by some locals, “You must go see the elephant seals. They’re amazing!”

So we went to see them. When we got there and witnessed the scene, my wife and I immediately wondered why the folks that told us to go there didn’t mention what the seals were doing there.

The seals go there to do other seals, if you know what I mean. Seeing two gigantic male elephant seals fight is pretty impressive. Seeing a gigantic male elephant seal “wrestle” with a female elephant seal is also impressive, but in a much different way. Boy, can those things wrestle!

Like the bats, they really aren’t too shy, either. The San Simeon Elephant Seal Voyeuristic Society has even erected, if I can be so bold as to use that term, a nice wooden boardwalk overlooking the breeding beach, with fun facts about the elephant seals.

“Never go near an elephant seal, especially during breeding season.” Yeah, based on what I’m seeing here, that one didn’t really need to get written down. It’s fairly obvious that I do not want to get in the middle of any of the activities I’m seeing here.

Luckily, the kids were all pretty young at the time, and the “wrestling” up on the beach was explained away, and we could fairly easily divert their attention back to the bloody tusk fights taking place out near the water.

“Why are they fighting, Daddy?”

“To see who gets to… uh…”

“To see who gets to do what?”

“Uh… to see who gets to eat all the food. They’re very hungry. Speaking of food, let’s go get some in another town.”

Son Number One is in the fourth grade now, and the boys are already coming home from school with all sorts of fun “facts” they learn on the playground. I know it’s getting close to the time when I’ll need to start having “the talk” with my boys, but I’d like to put it off for a while longer. And I’d like to have that talk on my own terms. I’m not interested in having any unplanned visual aides to explain. Bat, bat ray, or otherwise.

One thing is for sure. If we are going to keep taking the boys out to view the birds and the bees, I need to have the talk pretty soon, or “wrestling” is going to start taking on a really weird connotation for them.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

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

Fifty Shades of Shark

This past week the internet was all abuzz with the trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie version of the number one best-selling “adult erotica” book ever, written by a previously unknown British woman. It’s basically the Harry Potter of sex books. Never have so many housewives been so openly and publicly (I hope I spelled that correctly) excited about a porn movie coming out. Anne Rice could be heard saying, “Aw, come on, man!”

My guess is that married men accounted for at least half the book sales, although not a single man was actually reading the book. Men were buying the shelves clean of Fifty Shades on the advice of buddies, who were reporting major upticks in bedroom activity while their wives were reading the book. No one knew what the book was about, and frankly, no one cared. The results seemed fairly universal, and no one was going to question it.

To date, I believe Dave Barry is the only man to have actually read it, and that was purely for research, since his wife had not read it (yet). My wife hasn’t read it (yet) either, and I am just not willing to duplicate research, so I just read Dave’s take on it to get the gist. Apparently, women like poorly-written stories about hot single billionaires who like kinky sex. As average-looking, married, non-billionaire men who are just fine with regular sex, we all had no idea this was the case. If we had known, we all would have sat down and penned our own poorly-written stories like that to give to our wives.

You see, a man’s interest in sex stays at the exact same level his entire adult life, and that level can generally be described as, “high” and “ever-present.”

Whereas, women’s interest in sex seems to take a rather dramatic downturn when children are introduced into the picture. This may be - at first, anyway - because children are usually introduced through one of the fun parts and then claim immediate ownership of the others. After that initial phase is over, but still not helping the situation at all, the kids tend to hang around. This leaves all of us married men wondering what the hell just happened and how to get things back to the way they were. None of us have come up with any good long-term answers yet, mainly because asking the kids to leave the house and not come back is frowned upon for the first eighteen or so years. So we swarm to any temporary solutions we hear of, and the aforementioned best-selling socially-acceptable book full of smut seemed to be one of those temporary solutions.

While my wife is well aware of our differences in what is an assumed good time for “it” - meaning she understands the difference between anytime and not tonight - I was recently able to really highlight the difference through a deft and rather humorous analogy with a household appliance.

We have a Shark steam mop for our hardwood floors. Operation of said steam mop over the last year has fallen to me in my capacity as Mr. Mom. It had been almost a year since she had used it when she fired it up to mop the floors last month. She was halfway through when she started to get frustrated.

“This thing keeps stopping!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It stops steaming every once in a while and you have to wait for it to start again.”

“I know,” I said, “it always does that.”

“No it doesn’t! It never did that before.”

“It’s done that ever since I started using it,” I said.

“It’s broken. How can you stand it?”

Hahahahaha, snort! (sound of me laughing hysterically)

“What’s so funny?”

“Well,” I laughed, “I guess I’m just used to having to wait for things to get steamy, whereas you are used to dealing with things that are always ready to go.”

I’m pretty sure she enjoyed the humorous and incredibly insightful analogy as much as I did. Or was it a metaphor? Who cares, it was funny. And I’m fairly sure she took it to heart, too, because for our wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, she got me a brand new Shark steam mop.

Oh, yeah! You know what that means! My wife is very, very interested… in clean floors.

Oh, well. At least she has a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. She hasn’t read it yet, despite the many, many times I have moved it to the top of her stack, but it’s only a matter of time.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 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!