The Spica Cast, Part II

My three-year-old smells horrible. The boy reeks. He smells so bad, he’s hard to love. We are a little over two weeks into our Spica cast adventure, and it’s getting hard to take. If you do not know what a Spica cast is, please stop reading this and go back and read the “Just a Smidge” October 19^th post entitled, “The Spica Cast.” We’ll wait for you.

OK, so now we’re all on the same page.

Turns out, the Spica cast on a preschooler has a few hidden logistical issues. For starters, the only parts of him that are not in the cast are half a leg, some shoulders, arms and a head. That means that almost 80-90% of his skin is under the cast. Anyone who has ever worn a cast on any amount of their skin will attest to that being a major problem from the sweat/itch/stink “trifecta of fun” standpoint.

Now, for the mostly potty-trained preschool crowd, add wet diapers to the mix, and you’ve got yourself one smelly party.

During the day, pee is not an issue (as long as the parent running the urinal bottle has their head in the game). At night, however, the diaper occasionally gets peed in during a deep sleep. If all parties involved are sleeping, that diaper can stay wet and tucked inside that cast for hours.

Mind you, the diaper is doing its job. The people at Huggies® have got super-absorbency down to a science. There are no liquids getting into the cast. But keep that wet diaper tucked inside a hot, sweaty cast for a while, and the vapors tend to migrate up into the cast lining. The result is a three-year-old with such a pungent ammonia smell about him that if you get within three feet of him, your eyes water.

We, as his family, have the ability to get away from him if we need to. He is trapped, however, with his nose six inches from the top of the cast. If he comes through this with any sense of smell left at all, it will be a miracle.

During many of the daytime hours, my youngest son can be found lying on his stomach on top of his beanbag chair, sans diaper, proudly airing out his butt. It’s not dignified, but it is necessary. Besides, he’s three, so he could care less.

There’s one other reason I’m really glad he’s only three and doesn’t have a developed sense of dignity or shame. That would be the Summer's Eve® feminine deodorant spray. My wife has been scouring the internet, reading Spica cast tips from parents who have gone through this, and feminine deodorant spray was one of the suggestions to combat the stink.

I read the directions printed on the back of the flowery pink and white aerosol spray can: “Shake well; remove cap. Hold can 8-12 inches away from your lovely lady parts, and spray away.”

I’m so glad he probably won’t remember this.

After watching my wife spraying the exact opposite parts intended for use with said deodorant, and getting a whiff of the now flowery smelling ammonia cloud, I decided a more manly approach was required. Something with 110 volts. Something with some serious CFM. Something with spinning rotor blades and pressure differentials. We needed air flow, people. We didn’t need to cover up the smell, we needed to blow it away!

I set out into my garage to make a ventilator for the boy. We would be cooling him off and airing him out in no time.

Prototype Number 1 involved a 20” box fan, like the kind you use to ventilate a whole room. I fashioned a giant pyramid-shaped funnel out of cardboard and a half a roll of duct tape that necked the 20” square fan housing down to a 3” hole. My plan was to duct tape a vacuum cleaner hose to the hole, with the crevice tool attachment on the end of the hose. We could then stick the crevice tool down his cast, fire up the fan, and de-stink-ify our patient.

The only problem with the final product was that it was really big. It was lightweight and had a convenient handle, but the whole thing ended up being the size of a small filing cabinet. Just prior to attaching the hose, I happened to be in our bathroom and noticed -- perhaps for the first time in my whole life -- that my wife’s hairdryer had a “cool” button.

I charged downstairs and confronted her. “Your hairdryer has a cool button!”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“All hairdryers have a cool button. Why would I have told you that?”

“They do?”

“Yes, moron. How is the house-sized ventilator fan coming?”

Prototype Number 2 involved a $10 hairdryer, and the vacuum attachments I was going to use on Prototype Number 1. It was a lot easier to make, and only took me about 10 minutes to put together. I proudly displayed the new anti-stink solution to the family.

“What happened to the giant, inconvenient fan?”

“I ended up going a different direction. Say hello to the hand-held model.”

With the cool button locked down, I fired up the Conair® Cast Savior 2000 and felt the perfectly cool air rush out of the crevice tool and across my face. Oh, the joy. Oh the ventilating that would soon… wait a minute. The cool air was suddenly not so cool. In fact, it was warm and getting warmer. As it turns out, hairdryers were not meant to force air through three feet of flexible vacuum hose and a skinny nozzle. The motor couldn’t handle the pressure it was being asked to produce, and subsequently began heating up. Forcing hot air down an already warm cast seemed like a pretty bad idea. Starting an electrical fire near an immobile three-year-old didn’t sound like such a great idea either, so I was back to the drawing board.

“What’s wrong, honey? The ‘cool button’ not working out for you?”

“I just need to make some minor adjustments, that’s all.”

After my walk of shame back to the garage, the first adjustment I made was removing the hose from the hairdryer, and throwing the hairdryer in the garbage can. Now all I needed to do was figure out what to attach the hose to. Would my pride let me go back to the box fan? Would my wife ever let me live that down? Probably not, but it would be worth it if we could get rid of the ammonia smell… Suddenly, it hit me. The Aerobed®!

Of course! Why didn’t I think of this before? Our inflatable Aerobed® portable mattress has a big, beefy air blower on it. That thing is so powerful you can lie on the mattress while you’re filling it up. That baby will surely do the trick. I ran upstairs to the hall closet, yanked it off the shelf, brought it back to the garage, and pulled it out of its carrying case. All I have to do is take the motor and blower off the mattress and then… Oh, darn…

Can I really justify this? I could always go back to the box fan... But this would work so well. He really, really stinks. She’ll probably understand…

Ten minutes later I walked back into the house holding Prototype Number 3. The coffee can-sized black blower motor was skillfully attached to the vacuum hose with enough duct tape to adequately cover up the ragged edges of blue mattress vinyl that I had to cut with my razor blade knife to free the molded-on pump housing from the mattress itself. For good measure, I used enough silver tape to cover up the Aerobed® logo on the motor.

As I opened my mouth to tell the world of my triumph, my wife called to me from the kitchen. “Come here, honey. Look what I found online. It’s called the CastCooler®. You just wrap it around the cast, hook up your vacuum cleaner’s hose to it, turn on the vacuum, and it pulls fresh air into the cast and removes all the moisture and stink. I just bought one on Amazon for $39.99.”

“Wow. Sounds great, sweetheart. That should really do the trick.”

“Did you want to show me something?”

“No. I’m just going to head back to the garage.” I need to go get rid of a queen-sized blue tarp with the giant hole in it and order a new Aerobed®.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Spica Cast

“Daddy, I need to pee.”

“OK, buddy, hang on. I’ll be right there.”

My fully potty trained, three-year-old son is lounging on his back in the corner of the living room in a borrowed bean bag chair. He cannot be bothered to get up. I grab the plastic urinal bottle out of the “potty bucket,” and get down on my knees in front of him. I undo the protective outer size-6 diaper, and pull the inner size-4 diaper from its tucked-in position. I slide the plastic urinal between the bean bag and the wooden dowel, get it into position, and tell him to go for it.

Suddenly, everything is going wrong. Pee is spraying everywhere. I frantically try to reposition the bottle, but the pee just keeps going everywhere except where it is supposed to. What is happening? Why is this not working? Why am I an idiot? I left the cap on the urinal bottle. I think we’re going to have to keep this bean bag chair.

Such is life with a groggy dad and three-year-old in a Spica cast.

Son Number Three broke his femur last weekend, and we are in the middle of week two of the Spica cast. In case you are like me and had never heard of a Spica cast before, allow me to explain. SPICA stands for Sadistic Physician’s Inconvenient Children’s Apparatus. At least, I think that’s what it stands for. They didn’t actually tell us.

Since they cannot do orthopedic surgery on small children, apparently, the only way to mend a broken thigh bone in a three-year-old is to put him in the cast equivalent of a lower-body straight jacket. He is armor-plated and immobile from his chest all the way down to his toes on the bad leg, and to mid-thigh on the good leg, with a nifty wooden dowel spreader bar attached at an angle between the two legs to keep them apart and rigid.

Our once highly mobile little boy is now basically luggage. He stays where we put him until it’s time to pick him up and move him again. Unlike a suitcase, however, his seemingly super-convenient wooden handle is strictly off limits for lifting. Plus, he yells when he gets bored. My Samsonite never does that.

Our orthopedic surgeon told us, about the cast, “If we ever come up with a better way to do this, we will. But as of right now, this is as good as it gets.”

As we were getting the tutorial on how to kinda sorta stuff a diaper up in and around the poop and pee access hatch, and then kinda sorta keep it in place with a bigger diaper around the outside of the cast, and then just sorta try to keep everything as clean as possible for the next 4 to 5 weeks, I thought to myself, “We put a man on the moon, but this is the best we as a country have to offer in the area of preschooler bone mending? I don’t think we’ve really fully applied ourselves, here.”  

I guess I could put my engineering brain to work and try to come up with something more convenient, but it will have to wait. As the urinal bottle incident attests, I am not getting a whole lot of sleep lately. Just when my wife and I thought we were done with the sleepless nights of infant care and feeding, we’re suddenly back to sleeping in shifts. And the sleep we are getting is the non-satisfying light sleep that new parents and soldiers know all too well. Deep sleep never comes when your brain is busy listening for something all night.

We should be back to normal sleep in a few days. His pain level seems to be dropping off steadily, and he’s becoming his old cheery self during the days, albeit a little more hyper at times. We can’t fault him for that, though. When you cage a wild monkey, you’d better expect to hear the bars rattle.

On the first night that we were back from the hospital, I told him I was going to carry him up to his room, to which he replied, “Daddy, I don’t want to wear my cast to bed.”

He has since grasped the concept a little better, and has accepted his new reality a lot better than we thought he would. He even has a pretty good handle on the maintenance issues. His grandma and grandpa are here helping out, and the other night he announced that he had accidentally pooped in his diaper, instead of waiting for the bed pan. His grandma was the only one in the room when he made the announcement, and he looked at her concerned expression and asked, “Grandma, do you know how to do this?” When she hesitated, he said, “Go get Mommy, please.”

We can’t really leave him in the care of anyone not prepared to handle the Spica cast, which is pretty much everyone else, so his social calendar has been put on hold. He is playing hooky from preschool for the next month, and my wife’s daily gym visits have stopped abruptly. The good news on both those counts is that he is no doubt being read to more now than ever before, and his cast weighs as much as he does, so my wife is probably getting a better weightlifting workout at home.

You have to look on the bright side of things in this life. Our precious little baby boy is hurting, but we’ve received more casseroles and cookies in the last week than you can shake a stick at. Some clouds have a delicious, buttery, oven-baked lining.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The "Free" Play Structure

I now have a huge, redwood play structure in my backyard. It takes up one whole side of my back lawn. It has a big elevated deck with a sloping roof, two regular swings, a rope swing, a weird ball and handle swing, a chain ladder, a rope ladder, a regular ladder, and a slide. It even has an extra tire swing, if I could figure out where to mount it. The kids love it. Well, two out of the three love it, anyway.

We just got it this weekend. It was free. At least, my wife says it was free. I look at that a little differently. The price we paid for it was definitely zero dollars, as it was given to us by a friend of a friend whose family had outgrown it. The costs associated with getting this backyard behemoth to our house are another matter.

As my wife raves about our new “free” play structure, I just can’t help adding a few things up in my head:

Let’s see…

There were the three cases of beer that I bought for our friend and the previous owner as a thank-you. That was $49.

There was the 24-foot U-Haul truck that I had to rent to move the play structure from El Dorado Hills to Rocklin. That was $97.

There was gas for the U-Haul truck. That was $33.

There was the beer I bought for my brother-in-law and my friend who came over to help me retrieve, transport, and re-assemble the play structure. That was $32.

And lunch for the crew. One of whom ate three Chipotle burritos. $40.

And a pizza dinner for the crew and their families, since reassembly of the gargantuan play structure took all afternoon. Another $45.

If my math is correct, that already makes our free play structure cost at least $296. But let us not forget the hidden costs. I will inevitably have future work day obligations at my brother-in-law’s house and my friends' houses to properly complete the cycle of home improvement assistance reciprocation. Not only do those future days have gas and travel costs associated with them, but opportunity costs associated with all the things I won’t otherwise get done that day.  Also, I’m confident that my wife will want to get rid of the grass that is currently under the new play structure, and replace it with decorative bark. There’s another future weekend down the drain, and bark is not exactly free.

And as for this past weekend, we also need to take into consideration the gas my wife and I used to get the U-Haul and the meals. The gas my crew used to get to my house and back. The thirteen wood screws and two lag bolts that I had to find in my garage to finish the installation. All these things add up.

Then, there’s also the ER bills. And the cost of the overnight hospital stay. The bill for the team of two orthopedic surgeons and the anesthesiologist in the OR. The missed day of work I had while getting the three-year-old’s femur re-set in a cast. Those things might add up.

Did I forget to mention the broken leg?

Now, Son Number Three has been to the park probably hundreds of times. He has played on countless different sizes of play structures, both at parks, school playgrounds, and other people’s houses. He has never jumped off the top of any of those.

Apparently, however, when the play structure is suddenly located in your very own backyard, that obviously means that you can also fly. At least, to my three-year-old it did. Ten minutes after we finished the installation, that play structure got a whole lot less free when mini Superman learned a hard lesson about gravity versus imaginary super-powers.

I haven’t received any bills from the hospital yet, but after going back through my records on some of our previous ER visits and hospital stays, I’m estimating the “free” play structure is going to end up costing me about $27,000, give or take a few hundred bucks.

Outstanding. Oh, well. At least I have less lawn to mow now.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Great Juice Caper

Son Number Two is five years old and is almost two months into his first year of Kindergarten. (We are hoping it’s his first and only year of Kindergarten, but based on our experience, you never can tell.) He has a best buddy in his class named Luke, and he and Luke are as thick as thieves. Actually, they are thieves.

Now, it is no surprise when little kids get into mischief. What is surprising is when two five-year-olds get together, hatch a devious and complicated plan involving simultaneous stealth and deception in two separate houses, and execute the plan flawlessly every day for two weeks unbeknownst to their parents, only getting caught by sheer happenstance.

The silent alarm that these two miniature partners in crime unknowingly tripped came in the form of a casual conversation between a mother and a teacher. My wife was volunteering in Number Two’s classroom one morning, and had a few spare minutes to chat with Mrs. Camarda.

“Your son is a real pleasure to have in this class.”

“Thank you.”

“He is such a sweet boy. He and Luke are inseparable. They are so cute at lunch with their juice.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said he is a sweet boy…”

“No, no. About the juice.”

“Oh, you know. When he and Luke buy their juices at lunch. They think that is so fun.”

“He buys juice at lunch!?!”

“Well, not every day. Sometimes they buy chocolate milk.”

“What!?!”

Upon further questioning, it turns out that the cafeteria at my son’s elementary school sells juice for a quarter and chocolate milk for fifty cents. Number Two and his buddy had been throwing back delicious lunch-time school beverages every day for at least two weeks. Luke’s mom happened to be volunteering on the same day, so she was immediately brought into the conversation to compare notes. Both boys were being sent to school each day with a lunch box and a bottle of water, and neither one had ever been authorized by a parent to purchase any extracurricular liquids, nor was either one ever given any money to do so.

My wife called me later that morning in hysterics. Hysterical laughing, that is. She explained what she had learned, and amazed, noted that Number Two had somehow apparently been leaving the house with money in his pocket every morning without us knowing. The questions were plentiful. Where was he getting the money? When was he getting it? Was he bringing money for Luke, also, or vice versa? Why is juice only a quarter? Can I, as a dad, get in on that? Etc.

As any good parents would do, we weighed our response options. How should we handle this? Should we sit him down and have a talk with him, or booby trap his piggy bank and scare the living daylights out of him? We debated for a while, but in the end, our hand was forced by the sheer lack of information we had. The junior juice larcenists had us in the dark. We had no idea where the money was coming from, so we were forced to talk with him without setting any elaborate trip wire/air horn devices. Oh, well.

Aside from being a key player in a beverage crime syndicate, Son Number Two is generally a very honest and generous boy. We were sure of a few things: If he was getting the money from a piggy bank, it would be from his own. (His older brother, Son Number One, would have been a whole different story.) Also, it was possible that he was funding the whole operation. He would happily buy his friend juice every day without thinking twice about it, and that would put us in the awkward position of needing to praise his generosity while chastising his deception.

As it turns out, each member of the Capri Sun cartel was paying his own way. Upon intense questioning by two moms who were trying very hard not to laugh, both boys sang like canaries. With an odd mix of relief and disappointment, my wife found out that Luke was the mastermind. It was his idea to steal the car, and our son had decided to come along for the joy ride. Number Two had been sneaking downstairs to his piggy bank early each morning to get his daily quarter and secret it into the pocket of his school clothes before getting dressed. As it turned out, Luke didn’t have access to his piggy bank, so he had been swiping coins from him mom’s kitchen change jar that was meant for vacation spending money. Busted!

They were getting together each day to decide on juice or chocolate milk, so they would know if tomorrow would be a one or two-quarter day. That is seriously long-range planning for five-year-olds, and amazing when you compare it to their lack of ability to remember almost anything else about their daily routine. Number Two can’t remember to brush his teeth even though he has to do it every morning and evening. He can’t remember to wash his hands even though he has to do it before every meal. But when it comes to deception and covert refreshment operations, he can remember to hold daily planning meetings, remember what the next day’s cash requirements are, and remember to pilfer the correct amount each morning before dawn. Go figure.

When all the details of the caper were uncovered, the four parents had a good chuckle, but our reactions to the miniature crime spree were mixed. We all had the same general thought, but the men and women viewed it from slightly different sides, as is so often the case.

Both mothers said, “Oh, great. They’re able to fool us already, and they’re only five years old. High school is going to be a disaster!”

Both dads said, “Holy cow. They can already fool us at five years old. That is so cool. I wonder what kind of stuff they’re going to be able to pull off by the time they’re in high school?”

Women are always looking at things so backward.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Kids Say the Darndest Things

One of the great joys of parenthood is, of course, making stuff up when your kids ask you a question that you can’t answer. It really is the part of parenting that I enjoy the most. The thing I enjoy the second best is hearing the random thoughts, jokes and words of wisdom that come out of their mouths. Here are some of my three sons’ highlights:

I was eating lunch the other day with Son Number Three, who at three years old is a notoriously slow eater. He actually ate his lunch at a reasonable pace and finished before me, and wanting to praise that behavior, I said, “You finished before I did. Good job buddy!”
He replied, “Yeah, I beat you up."
"No, you beat me."

Driving with Son Number Three, he pipes up from the back seat and says, “Daddy, if you need to use the phone with two hands, the car will drive itself.”

“I don’t think so, dude.”

“Mommy does it.”

I guess Daddy needs to have a little chat with Mommy.

One of Number One’s best buddies was over at our house, and all the boys were playing Star Wars. The six-year-old guest runs up to me wearing a Darth Vader cape and brandishing a red light saber and says to me in a very serious voice, “You cannot estimate our powers!”

I think you mean, “Don’t underestimate the power of the Dark Side,” buddy.

Son Number One, while eating lunch, sets his sandwich down, sighs heavily, and says, “Wow. It has been such a long day already, I feel like it’s tomorrow.”

Been there, man.

Son Number Two, while on a bike ride around our neighborhood says to me, “Dad, I’m thirsty.”

“OK. You can get some water when we get back to the house.”

“Yeah. I’m going to have a bagel and some water.”

Huh?

While riding in the car with the whole family, we had a very rare few moments of silence. Prior to the calm, we had not been discussing anything remotely associated with food, so it caught my wife and me slightly off guard when Son Number Three comes out of the blue with, “Mommy, if you give me four cookies, then I could have a cupcake.”

While I appreciate your optimism, I’m not following your logic.

Our boys have always picked strange things to be jealous of their brothers over. Son Number One has allergies, and Number Three was apparently feeling left out when it came time for medicine.

“Mommy, I have allergies.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do. I have two allergies in my eyes.”

We don’t have medicine for that.

Upon entering a public bathroom, Son Number Two says to me, pointing to the opposite wall, “Look dad, confetti.”

“You mean graffiti.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Son Number One and Number Two were attempting to play Frisbee. They were too far apart from each other, and having no luck getting the Frisbee to fly straight, so I offered some advice.

“Get closer to each other like when you play baseball catch so you can control it better.”
“Dad, we don't control Frisbees. Frisbees control themselves.”

I can’t argue with that. That has always been my experience, too.

We had finished dinner and were in the middle of a dessert of fresh fruit. Son Number One had apparently had his fill, and asked to be excused. When I told him that he needed to stay at the table and visit while everyone else finished, he asked for some more strawberries and watermelon. When he had finished his second helping, I asked if he wanted more. He said, “No thanks,” and then asked to be excused again. When I said no again, he asked for more fruit. At that point his mom asked him why he kept eating after he had asked to be excused. He replied, “Well, I don’t want to waste my time just sitting here.”

When it comes to food, growing boys are all business.

Son Number Two, eager to show off his new math skills, exclaimed, “Dad, listen, I can count all the way to one hundred!”

“Let me hear it.”

“One, two, three, four, five, six, I can’t really do it. I can count all the way to ten, though.”

He hasn’t quite mastered the art of under-promise and over-deliver yet.

Our three boys share a room, with the oldest being in his own bed, and the younger two in bunk beds. As I was turning out the light one night, Son Number One made the observation about Son Number Three, “We’re next-door neighbors when we sleep.”

Number Two calls down from the top bunk, “And I’m their up-door neighbor.”

Can’t argue with the logic.

One morning, at four years old, Son Number Two ran excitedly into our room and yelled, “Daddy, my chin weighs six pounds!”

(After lying prone on the floor with only his chin resting on the digital bathroom scale.)

Son Number Two had croup when he was four. After a bout of coughing, he thought for a second and said, “Maybe I’ll cough up this bug and we can see what kind it is.”

I wonder if he got croup from lying on the bathroom floor with his chin on the scale?

I made a special outing with all three boys to get In-N-Out Burger milkshakes. We had ordered and were waiting in the drive-thru line. There was a diesel pick-up truck in front of us, and when I rolled down the window to pay, Son Number One asked, “Why is it so noisy?” I told him it was the truck in front of us, to which he responded, “Oh. I thought it was the blenders.”

How big do you think these milkshakes are going to be?

Speaking of fast food restaurants, I was eating at a Wendy’s with Number One and Two, and we were having a very father-and-sons kind of time, so I thought I would take the opportunity to tell them about the wonderful story of Dave Thomas, Wendy’s founder. I explained to them that he was adopted as a child, and how he always appreciated that fact, so with his financial resources from his business he created the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. The boys listened attentively to my story, thought for a while, and then Number Two looked up at me and said, “Dad?”

“Yes, Son?”

“I have a motorcycle on my shirt.”

Swing and a miss.

And my personal favorite…

I had just come home from a long day at work, and I trudged upstairs to find my boys playing in the game room. When he saw me, the first words out of Son Number One’s mouth were, “I’m the town constable of Uranus.”

It doesn’t really matter what kind of day you’ve had after hearing that. That’s funny right there!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Tough Mudder

Twenty-five seconds into the course my thighs were on fire. My first thought was, “Oh, no. That can’t be good. I’m going to be running out here for three hours, and I’m already tired! ”

I was wrong. I would be out there for five hours, and I would not be running. Not very much, anyway. About thirty-five seconds into the course I had to stop running and start trudging. Everyone did. We were going straight uphill, and not just any hill. We were at 6200 feet in elevation going straight up a ski slope at Squaw Valley, CA.

Half a minute earlier, on that clear, sunny day, I had been full of energy, jumping around, yelling, chanting, high-fiving, and raring to go. Now I had my head down, watching my feet, power-walking and breathing fast and hard. How quickly things change at 6300 feet.

There were 600 people in my starting group. There were 2400 people already on the course, and another 4800 people that would come behind us, one group every 20 minutes. We all had the same information going in. It would be a 12-mile course with 20 different military-style obstacles. What we didn’t realize was what a truly sadistic course designer has to work with when putting together a 12-mile trail at Squaw Valley. We were in for a few surprises.

At mile marker one, we were face down in the water, belly-crawling across granite under barbed wire that was hanging so low, you had to put your face under water to get underneath it. It was at mile marker one that I realized that hearing or reading “military-style obstacle” is very different than actually tackling a military-style obstacle. They kinda hurt.

Out from under the barbed wire, up on your feet, and headed straight uphill again. Only soaking wet now. Two miles and 1000 vertical feet later and we were at another water obstacle. Jump into the chest-deep cold water, duck under the plywood divider, and climb out the other side. Keep running. A mile later and another 500 vertical feet, we arrived at the High Camp Bath and Tennis Club. It sits at 8200 feet above sea level and is apparently very nice. We didn’t get to look around much. On the tennis courts sat water obstacle number three. Same as number two, but with ice water. You literally had to fight your way through the floating ice cubes to get out.

We went into the water five more times over the course, spaced out so as to keep you wet and cold for the whole run. In between the swims, we got to climb steep walls, hang from monkey bars, shimmy up ropes, crawl through pipes, traverse over and under log walls, and even crawl under a cargo net on some of Squaw’s year-round snow at 8700 feet. The obstacles ended up being a fun diversion from the really nasty part. They were not content to march us straight up to the top and back down again. We went up, then came down, then went up higher, then came down lower, then went up even higher than before, then back down… You get the idea. We made five different “death marches” during the course.

At the half-way point, after carrying a log around a ¼-mile steep rocky loop and depositing it back on the pile for the next victim, we made it to the very top of the mountain on death march number four. Mile marker six was on Squaw Peak at 9000 feet. We had made it to the top of the world. That made the fifth death march a little surprising. Somehow they found a way to go up again after we came down off the top. Go figure.

Two hours later, when I got hit with the 10,000 volt electrical wire, 20 feet from the finish line, I was done being surprised. This was the Tough Mudder, and they don’t mess around.  

With the high-voltage current still bouncing around my synapses, I made it across the finish line to collect my trophy orange head band, my t-shirt, and my celebratory beer. Dos Equis amber and bananas are not known for their complimentary flavors, but at 2:30 on Sunday afternoon, nothing ever tasted so good!

There were three kinds of people on the course that day: The GI Joes, the average Joes, and the gym rats. As for the military personnel, there were a lot of them, and they were right at home. More than a few of their groups felt the need to make the course a little tougher by carrying something. I saw one guy carrying a 2-foot diameter wooden wire spool over his head, a Marine sergeant wearing a 20-pound weight vest, and even a team of Special Forces guys that carried an inflatable raft through the whole course. The US military simply puts out the best of the best. Super tough.

The gym rats on the other hand, are not tough. They are just young and pretty. They have shaved torsos, low body fat percentages, shiny muscles, and they can run really fast when they are warm. They are not cut out for the Tough Mudder. They don’t react well to being wet and cold. They were cramping up all over the place. Us average Joes have been training for this. We’re the ones who constantly have to be in the pool/lake/ocean watching the kids while the gym rats sun themselves on the deck/shore/beach. At home, us folks with young ones are constantly giving a squirmy kid a bath, getting peed on or being thrown up on. We’re wet and cold all the time. That kind of on-the-job training, plus our superior body fat percentages acquired through old age and Little Caesar’s five dollar pizza, gives us an edge.

Water events aside, being a suburban parent has a lot more inadvertent Tough Mudder training components than I had realized. Going over fences after lost Wiffle balls, walking barefoot across Lego minefields, slithering under the dining room table to play in the “fort,” putting fitted sheets on a bunk bed, crawling around on the floor of the SUV looking for the lost sippy cup; it all helps. My dad-ly training even came into play during the log carrying obstacle. The gym rats were foolishly trying to carry their logs on their shoulders. I just cradled that sucker in one arm and rested it on my hip. I’ve been carrying 35-pound kids like that for years.

All in all, it was a great experience. While I might not ever need to experience it again, I am very glad I did it. I was expecting to be completely immobile on Monday, but my legs were in surprisingly good shape. I am pretty well bruised and banged up everywhere else, though. I sneezed midday Monday and almost cried. I have taken more Advil in the last four days than in my whole life prior to now.

I seem to be healing up at an average Joe pace, so I can’t complain. I’m not allowed to anyway. It’s part of the Tough Mudder credo. No whiners.

The really good news is the involuntary flinching from the 10,000 volt shocks has fjgfyfncxvhbcu pretty much stopped.

The crazy Tough Mudder events (www.toughmudder.com) and the crazy people who enter them have raised over $2 million for The Wounded Warrior Project (www.woundedwarriorproject.org), which is a fabulous organization that helps injured service members through their challenges back at home. The NorCal event at Squaw Valley raised more money than any other Tough Mudder event to date. Thanks a million to all who donated to the WWP on my behalf. The Marines from the course send you a big “OORAH!”

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Soap, Part II

Our boys have started to take showers on their own. Up until now, we had been giving them baths. The decision to move to the shower was spurred mostly by the fact that all three of them don’t fit in the bathtub together anymore, and giving three individual baths really cuts into my TV time.

I still have to give Boy Number Three baths, but it was about time the older two started pulling their own weight in the personal hygiene department. Plus, we really wanted to see if the shower in their bathroom actually worked. We have lived in our current house for almost three years now, and up until this week, no one had ever used it. When I finally got the handle to turn, after the loud clanging noise subsided, water actually came out of the showerhead, so we were good to go.

After the Body Wash Incident of Early 2011 (See “Soap,” posted February 2, 2011) my wife has been sure to keep me stocked with plenty of good old-fashioned bar soap. Since my wife has inexplicably stuck with the body wash, and the kid’s baths get done with baby shampoo, up until now, our bar soap had been used only by me. So, this week was Boy Number One and Two’s first experience trying to wash themselves with a big bar of soap. Witnessing that slippery learning curve instantly flooded me with childhood memories of soap. I had a strange upbringing, soap-wise.

My dad was a pilot for Delta Airlines. In the early days of his career, with a wife at home raising three small kids, he would always bring the little bars of unopened hotel soap and the small bottles of shampoo home from his trips to help with the household budget. His flight schedule usually had him gone multiple days at a time, so he collected a lot of soap. So much so, that we never ran out. As the years went by, the Hilton/Marriott/Ramada soap harvesting never stopped. I showered with a tiny, fits-in-the-palm-of-your-hand bar of soap from my very first shower until I was 18 years old. (Actually, I showered with a different one every other day. They don’t last very long.) As a result, I never had any early childhood regular-sized soap training.

I vividly remember the first time I used a real bar of soap. I was at least 6 or 7 years old, and we were staying with my grandparents while my parents went on a week’s vacation. I stepped into the unfamiliar shower and was immediately transfixed by the GIGANTIC bar of BRIGHT GREEN soap. (The hotel soap was white, tan, or the occasional exciting off-pink.) This was Irish Spring, and it smelled AMAZING. (The hotel soap smelled like almonds, talc, or nothing.) This giant, magical, colorful, brick-sized bar of cleanliness filled the entire shower with some heavenly, yet previously unknown fragrance. Apparently – based on the TV commercials of the 1970s -- it was supposed to remind me of the wonderful smell of a lush green Irish glade near a waterfall where I was walking hand-in-hand with a bonny lass in a turtleneck sweater, but since I had never done that, I didn’t recognize the smell. To me it just smelled strong and wonderfully different.

Then I tried to pick it up and use it. Now, big bars of soap are hard to handle for any six-year-old, but to a lad that had previously only worked with soap the size of a bite-size candy bar, this slimy behemoth was almost totally unmanageable. I must have dropped it, picked it up, and dropped it again a hundred times. The racket coming from the shower got so loud, my grandma came in to check on me, but I was so embarrassed about not being able to work the soap, I told her that everything was just fine, and that I obviously didn’t need any help. She left unconvinced.

After a half-hour of soap hockey, I finally ended up attempting to soap myself up while holding onto the massive slippery green bar with two hands at once. That is a pretty difficult maneuver, and I'm not sure how clean I actually got myself that day. Marginal hygienic success aside, it was one of the most memorable days of my childhood, so taken was I by the giant, fragrant green soap.

If asked to come up with the defining TV characters of their childhood, most guys my age would probably list the likes of Superman, The Fonz, Mean Joe Green, Bo and Luke Duke, etc.

I’m guessing very few would list an actor from a soap commercial. To my list, however, I must include the guy in the snappy turtleneck and sport coat, standing in the field, cutting the bar of Irish Spring open with his pocket knife. When I saw that commercial as a kid, I thought to myself, “Yeah, I was that guy for a day. Fresh and (insert wolf-whistle here), clean as a whistle!”

But alas, that one shower was the extent of my Irish Spring glory as a child. My parents came back from vacation, and it was small soap business as usual again.

There was, however, one major up-side to growing up with miniature soap. As kids, we never had our mouths “washed out with soap,” a la Ralphie in A Christmas Story, sitting with the bar of Lifebuoy in his mouth. My mom was probably afraid we’d accidentally swallow the hotel soap.

My boys won’t be so lucky. I’ve got plenty of full-size bars of Irish Spring. I love that stuff!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

This Will Be the Day That I Die

I am pretty sure that I will die on September 18^th, 2011, either during the day, or in my sleep that night. That’s a little disheartening, since it’s only about a week and a half from now. How do I know the exact day I will die? Because my toe hurts. Allow me to explain.

I woke up this morning, and out of nowhere my big toe on my left foot hurt so bad, I almost couldn’t walk. It was fine when I went to sleep, and I’m quite sure that I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary to injure it. So why does it hurt? I have no idea, other than the simple fact that I was born almost 40 years ago and now my body doesn’t work right anymore.

Well, alright, you say, but that still doesn’t explain why you know the day you’re going to die. Just be patient, I’m getting to that. I know the exact day, because I lost some weight a few months ago. Allow me to explain.

In March of this year, I decided that I needed to lighten my load a little, since I seem to be getting on in years, and I was having trouble seeing my toes for the first time in my life. I devised a simple weight loss plan and went to it. I lost about 20 pounds in a little over a month. Apparently, having great success with weight loss either sends one into a euphoric state of stupidity, or I am just naturally an idiot. I’m really not sure which. (That might be a clue right there!)

You see, I didn’t lose weight by exercising. I did it by eating half of what I normally eat, and going from 7000 fluid-ounces of Coke per day down to only 24. It was simple, and it worked great. The problem was, at some point when I was getting close to my weight loss goal, I must have thought to myself, “If I have enough will power to eat only half of that Chipotle burrito, then I should obviously enter an 11-mile obstacle course event billed as the ‘toughest event on the planet.’” I must have thought that, because that’s what I did. I am a fool.

I signed up for a race called the Tough Mudder. The fact that it is an 11-mile run with 20 military-style obstacles designed by a couple of ex-British Special Forces guys isn’t even the worst part. It’s the location. Since I live in Northern California, I stupidly signed up for the Northern California event. Probably sounded like a good idea at the time. They even told me where it would be held. They said “Squaw Valley” very plainly on the website. I know where Squaw Valley is, but the only thing that went through my head was, “Oh, that will be nice scenery!” I am a fool.

For those of you not current on your Northern California geography, or your history of run-down, overpriced ex-Olympic ski resorts, allow me to explain. Squaw Valley is a very large hillside in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe, with a base elevation of 6200 feet above sea level. I said BASE ELEVATION. It has a summit elevation of 9050 feet. The map of the Tough Mudder obstacle course boasts an elevation gain of 2300 feet. That means that the lowest elevation that the top of the course can possibly be is 8500 feet.

I was vacationing with my family at another breathtaking spot in Northern California this past weekend; this one being on the coast. Most of the coast here in California is at sea level. In preparation for my idiotic event, I went running one morning on an old logging road in the forest. It had some pretty impressive elevation gains, also. I would venture a guess that I saw elevation changes of nearly 100 to 200 feet on my 20-minute run. Unfortunately, I got pretty winded.

Now, if there is one place in the world with a lot of oxygen, it’s a redwood forest at sea level. If there is one place in the world where there isn’t a lot of oxygen, it’s at 8000 feet in the air, anywhere in the world. Which is apparently where I’ll be running on September 18^th, 2011. Up hill. I am a fool.

I have no idea why losing a few pounds by not drinking my body weight in Coca-Cola every day translated into me thinking I was a cross between Lance Armstrong, Rambo and Chuck Norris, but apparently it did. Now, as the cold reality sets in, and I feel my nearly 40-year-old body getting winded while jogging in what amounts to nature’s oxygen tent, and I can apparently hurt myself while sleeping, I must face the facts. This race will kill me.

If you will excuse me, I need to get started putting my affairs in order. Honey, please promise me you’ll remarry, for the sake of the boys. They’ll need a strong father figure in their lives. Hopefully one a little smarter than me.

I’m hoping to die on the course, instead of in my own bed later that night. My bed is close to sea level, so if I die on the hill at Squaw Valley, and I do make it into Heaven, it will be a shorter trip.

At least my demise will be for a good cause. The crazy Tough Mudder events (www.toughmudder.com) and the crazy people who enter them have raised almost $2 million for The Wounded Warrior Project (www.woundedwarriorproject.org), which is a fabulous organization that helps injured service members through their challenges back at home. I can’t think of a better reason to do this! If you would like to help this most worthy cause with a few dollars instead of dying on a hillside like I’m going to do, you can donate to my race at https://www.raceit.com/fundraising/donate.aspx?event=3355&fundraiser=r1386483, or directly at the Wounded Warrior site above. Thanks!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Soccer as Birth Control

As an example of how crazy we have become, I will start with communications. When I played soccer as a youth, I am quite certain that my parents probably saw one flyer at the beginning of the year, outlining the practice schedule. There was probably a one page flyer handed out at the first or second practice that outlined the game schedule for the entire season, and that was that. With two pieces of paper, everyone knew where they needed to be and when.

When it was time for soccer practice, I was told to get on my bike and go to soccer practice. Why on Earth would my parents have driven me there, let alone stayed for the entire practice to watch? That was what the coach was for. When practice was over, the coach told us to go home. Simple.

Fast-forward to today. As I write this, I am sitting in a lawn chair watching Son Number Two's soccer practice. The miracle of modern tablet computers makes this possible, but does not answer the question of, "Why am I here?"

When did a child's sports practice become so important to us that we feel the need to have it take up an hour-plus of the parent's time also? I don't have the exact answer for that, but I do know it happened sometime in between when I was a kid and when I had kids of my own.

There has been an obvious shift in how safe we feel the world is, because parents today don't let their kids travel across town by themselves as readily as our parents did. As a result, we are raising a generation of kids who get lost a block from their own houses, but that's a separate subject. The safety issue explains why the parents drive their kids to practice, but not necessarily why they stay to watch. I guess a lot of it has to do with excessive trips. Once I'm here, I might as well just hang around until it's over. The occasional parent runs a quick errand, but for the most part, they just pull up a lawn chair and worry about their child dehydrating, or marvel at why two grown men can’t get nine five-years-olds to stand still in a straight line even if their lives depended on it.

Now, back to the communication issue. In stark contrast to the two paper flyers that handled the logistics for an entire soccer season of my youth, today's soccer leagues run on e-mails. A lot of e-mails. Based on my experiences so far, to run a youth soccer team these days requires approximately three e-mails per day be sent to each parent, starting two months before the first practice and never missing a day throughout the whole season.

There are vital logistical issues to address on an almost hourly basis, such as team banner design and procurement, uniform sizes, proper cleat specifications for the particular league, the heat index, the air quality index, proper child hydration techniques, acceptable soccer ball sizes, fluctuating practice schedules, fluctuating practice locations, raffle ticket distribution and sales, team sponsor procurement, team parent selection, game day halftime snack coordination, team sponsor patronage, game day-post game treat coordination, game day halftime snack and post-game treat food allergy considerations, coach and team parent fingerprinting and FBI background check verification, elementary school extracurricular activity scheduling conflicts, end-of-year party location and party theme, individual end-of-year trophy selection and procurement, game day sideline bench procurement or manufacture, game day sideline bench assembly duty schedule, opening day ceremonies schedule, sideline shade tent ownership queries, game day sideline shade tent assembly duties, coach and team parent end-of-season gift coordination, proper shinguard selection and management, picture and video collection for end-of-season media DVD, game day jersey color, etcetera, etcetera.

I have no good reason for why the amount of perceived soccer team management logistical hurdles has increased exponentially since my youth. Is it because now that we all have e-mail at our fingertips every minute of the day, we can finally take care of EVERYTHING that NEEDS to happen? Would all of these issues have been addressed in earnest if our parents hadn’t been severely hampered by a lack of technology?

Somehow, I doubt it.

Like I said, I don’t know why soccer has become so complex, but I am convinced that its newfound complexity is having a major impact on our society. Specifically regarding how many children we have. I truly believe as new families are growing, and young parents are considering adding a new bundle of joy to the lineup, the logistics of having those kids eventually play soccer has more of a role in the decision making process than almost anything else in the mix today.

"Honey, I realize that we always wanted a girl, but with two boys already in soccer, how can we even think about a third child? We don't even have enough time to keep up with the practices and e-mails with the two kids we already have."

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Hacker Grammar Bad

When my sisters and I were growing up, my mom constantly hammered home good grammar and spelling. If we said, “Me and my friends went to the park,” we were immediately corrected with, “My friends and I…”

“Ain’t” was forbidden to be uttered within a six-block radius of her home, and any misspelled words were underlined for correction before homework was allowed to be returned.

This continued through our high school years, and beyond, into college, and even continues today if I have a rare grammatical slip-up while talking with my mother on the phone. Anyway… When I was sent off into the world with my impeccable grammar and spelling, it started to become clear to me right away why my mother was so insistent on using English correctly. Good grammar is one of the trademarks of polite, civilized, educated society. There is no quicker way to be dismissed in business, or to be discounted as a miscreant, than to not know how you should talk good.

Yet, as with so many annoying things your parents did to you, only after you become a parent yourself do you truly understand the value, and truly appreciate their efforts. Poor grammar offends my very senses, and misspellings jump off the page at me as if they were highlighted. Today, I am riding grammatical herd on my boys, just like my mom did with us. “You didn’t throwed the ball, son, you threw it.”

And as with all labors of love, many of the fruits of said labors aren’t realized until much, much later. My mom could have never have known it at the time, but she was helping the next generation fight off computer hackers. Way to go, Mom!

Hackers, as a rule, have atrocious grammar. I’m not sure if this is because they are all phishing from North Korea, China, and Nigeria, and just don’t have the lingo down pat, or if they are simply American-born-and-raised ne’er-do-wells, or both. I guess it really doesn’t matter, as long as they keep tipping their hand with missing verbs. Here’s an example of something I received the other day:

An e-mail from an address that was vaguely official, but not quite, like “manager@creditaccount.com,” with a subject line reading, “Your Credit Card Overdue.” (Good start, guys!)

Dear Customer,
Your Credit Card is one week overdue.
Below your Card information
Customer 7990682142
Number XXXXXX
Card Limit XXXXXX
Pay Date 29 Jun 2011
The details are attached to this e-mail.
Please read the financial statement properly.
If you pay debt within 2 days, there will be no extra-charges.
In 2 days $25 late fee and a finance charge will be imposed on your account.
Please do not reply to this email, its automatic mail notification.
Thank you.

The attachment was a zip file titled “account_information.zip,” that surely contained a password stealing program or a virus of some flavor.

Now, come on, fellas! How stupid do you think I am? I mean, how hard would it be to find someone who can actually speak and read English to proofread your idiotic fake account alert?

The ridiculousness of it amazes me, but at the same time, it is totally understandable. If they had more smarts, they wouldn’t be criminals in the first place. Like the dynamic duo a few years ago that tried to rip an ATM out of the ground with their pickup truck. They attached a chain from their rear bumper to the ATM, and then hit the gas. The ATM stayed put and their bumper ended up on the ground. They had long since sped away from the scene of the almost-crime when the police arrived. The cops simply ran the license plate, found still attached to the bumper that was still attached to the ATM, and drove to their house to pick them up.

For a minute or two, you shake your head and wonder to yourself, “Why didn’t they at least retrieve the plate, let alone the bumper and the chain?” But then, the more you think about what they tried to do, and how they tried to do it, you say to yourself, “Of course they left it behind.”

Same thing is true, I guess, of communist North Korean hackers. If they had enough smarts to figure out how to do it right, they’d probably already be South Koreans. And if the American computer virtuoso-gone-hacker had an ounce of common sense, he would be writing programs for Microsoft instead of writing worms for the Russian mob.

I have to give the Nigerians a little credit, though. I have been getting scam e-mails from them for over ten years now, and at least they embraced their limitations early on.

“Look, guys, we can’t pretend we’re from their bank. They’ll never buy it. We can’t spell, and between all thirty-seven of us in this room, we can’t put together one decent sentence. Let’s just pretend we’re the son of a deposed king from right here in Nigeria. That way the grammar will be excusable. Hold my machete, Motumbo, I’m gonna start typing.”

As more and more of our every-day personal financial transactions are handled online, there is a cosmic leveling of the playing field when it comes to something as old-fashioned and fundamental as good grammar and spelling. The bad grammar of the hacker world is really quite handy. If the e-mails in your inbox were customers at a 7-Eleven, the bad grammar is the ski mask. See it, and you know something bad is about to go down.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to call my mom and thank her. Its cause a her learnin’ me right them hackers ain’t gonna git me!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Losing Our Remote Control

Our whole world changed this morning. Our oldest son learned how to use the remote control. Now, granted, he is only a few months away from being seven years old, so before you accuse him of being of below-average intelligence, allow me to explain. He already knew how to use the remote control, in the sense that he could turn the TV on and change the channel. We actually taught him that at an early age out of a desire to sleep in. Our boys naturally get up much earlier than my wife and I really want to, so it was either teach him how to turn on the Disney channel in the morning by himself, or we would need to go to bed earlier. We chose the TV option.

I know some of you out there are now thinking, “How much TV do these people let their kids watch?” I can assure you it is way less than nine hours per day. We actually tried other forms of pre-parental-consciousness morning activities, such as Legos, sword fighting, and wrestling, but watching TV was the only thing that didn’t consistently end in a loud argument or an even louder head injury.

Up until this morning, Son Number One was able to turn on the TV in our upstairs game room and change the channel to 303 for Disney. At 6:00 in the morning, the Disney channel is a safe bet to be appropriate for all age groups. Up until this morning, this was a satisfactory morning activity for Sons One, Two and Three. Up until this morning, I didn’t have to worry about what they might see on the TV screen.

That has all changed now.

We have a whole host of children’s shows that we record on the DVR (that stands for Digital Video Recorder, for those of you over 50 years old) for the kids to choose from when we parents are awake and able to operate the menu to get them going. Apparently, Son Number One has been paying close attention to us when we navigate the recorded shows menu, because that’s exactly what he did this morning.

Our soon-to-be-seven-year-old powered on the big downstairs TV that has its own remote, changed the TV’s input to the DVR, switched remotes, navigated his way through the main menu to the recorded shows menu, scrolled through the list until he found Tarzan, selected it, scrolled through the list of eight Tarzan episodes that were recorded, found the sequel to the episode they had watched the night before, selected it, found “play” among the list of options, and fast-forwarded through the commercials to the beginning of the show.

My wife silently witnessed the entire event from the kitchen, and after she picked her jaw up off the counter and regained some amount of composure, she came to find me upstairs and tell me that we had a big problem. “Number One can work the TV.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t understand. He just played Tarzan from the DVR.”

“He did what?!?”

Now, our shock and apprehension about this new skill our son has developed has nothing to do with Tarzan, or any other show we recorded for the boys. Those are fine. Even the commercials on the Disney channel are pretty harmless, although, my boys really want me to buy an ultrasonic noise maker that is supposed to keep pests like deer and raccoons out of our garden. I’m having trouble getting them to come to grips with the fact that we don’t really need that in our suburban backyard. They’re pretty insistent though. I think it’s because on the commercial it shows the imaginary semi-circles of sound emanating from the cheesy-looking green plastic device. I have tried to explain that they will not be able to see - or even hear - the sound in real life, but they’re not convinced I know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, our apprehension about Son Number One’s remote control skills has nothing to do with his shows. It has everything to do with our shows. We record a lot of police and detective dramas, and I don’t have to tell you that today’s shows are over the top. If our kids get curious one morning and end up witnessing an NCIS autopsy scene, or catch some of the dialogue from Law and Order: SVU, I’m not sure even a team of professional child psychologists could reverse that damage.

Now, AT&T U-Verse has already envisioned this problem, and they were kind enough to include Parental Controls software with the DVR. Apparently, we could simply set up a password, and block access to any of the shows we choose, thereby protecting young impressionable minds from adult language, descriptions of violent crimes, and the dissected spleens of unfortunate sailors. Sounds great in theory, but there are a few problems here in reality.

I’m not sure there’s a really delicate way to put this, so I’ll just come out and say it. We’re afraid if we add any more steps, we won’t be able to operate the TV ourselves. We already have three remotes, and at the very least, a nine-step process to actually watch a show. One more level of difficulty might very well put us over the top. And don’t even get me started on the grandparents! It’s like teaching Chinese algebra to a goldfish every time they come over to babysit and need to operate the TV. One more step in that process will not be good.

I guess we could teach Son Number One to help them with the operation of the Parental Controls, but that seems like a flawed system, somehow...

Maybe we should look at this new development not as a challenge, but as an opportunity to change what we watch and record, moving toward a more wholesome Discovery Channel and History Channel-only type environment. Or maybe abandon the idiot box altogether and move to a books-only lifestyle.

Naw… I think I’ll just start hiding the remotes. I’ll put them with his shoes. He can never find those.

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?
Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Finally Growing Up

There have been many significant events in my life that signaled to me that I was growing up. Getting my driver’s license, voting for the first time, being able to legally buy beer, getting married, and buying a house all come to mind. Those were definitely milestones on the path, but the big one was, of course, having kids. Or so I thought…

Up until recently, having children of my own was the most obvious (and most pungent) signal of my inevitable maturing. There is an in-your-face responsibility that comes with having kids. They tend to get louder and louder if you’re not taking care of them correctly, like an alarm clock that will not let you be late for work, no matter how many buttons you hit in an attempt to shut it off. Whatever you were planning on doing with your life before having children is suddenly a moot point. If it doesn’t fit with the new directive of caring for the child, it is not in the program. I figured that surrendering to that new reality and embracing it was the final step to adulthood. Not so.

The responsibility of providing for a helpless child is a big-time kick in the pants toward becoming a full-fledged responsible adult, but it is not the final step you must take to complete the transition to 100% adultness. I realized recently that there is one more step required.

Having a 401k, you ask? Hosting Thanksgiving? Buying life insurance? Writing a will?

No. The final step on the road to adulthood is not something you do, but rather, something you don’t do. You have arrived at your final destination of maturity and responsibility when you are able to look at your son’s Razor scooter, and not try to ride it.

When you can walk past an unattended skateboard, look at it, and say to yourself, “No thanks. I have to work tomorrow, and that’s going to be more difficult with a broken arm.”

When you can say that, you have arrived.

This last step towards a man’s adulthood has a definite age component to it. It happens around the age of forty, give or take a few years depending on the guy and his IQ-to-pain threshold ratio. In that regard, I am lucky that I had children somewhat later in life. I am almost forty, but my oldest son is only six and a half. They don’t really start owning incredibly dangerous wheeled toys until around age four or five, so I haven’t had too many pre-forty years with access to lots of ulna-snapping contraptions.

I pity the guys that had kids in their twenties, because the years in between thirty and forty are the most dangerous years of a man’s life. A young man in his teens and twenties will do incredibly stupid things, but this is counteracted by the fact that he has reflexes like a cheetah, and his body is made entirely out of rubber and steel. By his early thirties, the bones, ligaments and tendons have already begun to weaken and degrade, but the fear of becoming old, combined with the false ego of “not being old yet” form the perfect storm of stupidity versus degraded coordination and resilience.

Many are the thirty-eight-year-old men who have not been able to get out of bed the next day after doing nothing more than dancing at a wedding.

“I have shooting pain down my leg, my back is killing me, I can’t twist my neck to the right, and don’t even get me started on my rotator cuff.”

“Well, honey, you did dance for over an hour.”

When that man finally heals up from all the dancing and wakes up one day to realize that he likes being able to walk more than he likes trying to prove he can still jump the curb on a pair of rollerblades, he has made it into the club. Some would call that growing old. I call it growing up.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I promised my son I would teach him how to do a wheelie on his bike. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’m only thirty-nine. I’m not old yet.

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?
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Reclaiming Our Sand-ity

An interview with Bob Finnegan, head of the recently formed Federal Coastal, Tidal and Estuarial Sediment and Natural Mineral Resources Reclamation Department:

We actually started as a joint task force between the Department of the Interior, the EPA, and NOAA, but when we really wrapped our arms around the magnitude of the problem, it was obvious that a new federal department would be necessary. That’s how the FCTESNMRRD was born. We saw an obvious need for a solution when we did our initial study visits to coastal towns and confirmed our suspicions. We witnessed first-hand how much of our nation's precious coastal mineral natural resources were ending up on citizens' driveways and front walks near their garden hoses.

The problem stems from lack of education, and carelessness. Citizens will routinely leave the beach or riverbank with ounces and ounces of sand attached to their legs and swimsuits, and then wash it off at home onto the ground, and just leave it there! We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. We did some simple math and determined that if this reckless behavior on the part of our citizens was allowed to continue unabated, two-thirds of our nation’s beaches would disappear in less than five years. This was a crisis of epic proportion.

It was obvious that we as the federal government needed to set forth some very stringent guidelines. Our newly-formed department has tackled this issue with a three-pronged approach. Home-use sand reclamation tubs, centralized sand reclamation centers, and educational programs.

We are in the process of outfitting every household within five miles of any one of our great country's coasts or waterways with a federally approved sand reclamation wash and collection tub. The tubs employ an easy sixteen-step process to collect, strain, and dry the sand, which takes less than an hour per beachgoer. The filters are useable only once to prevent cross beach contamination, but they are readily available for purchase at any federal sand reclamation station and all Ace Hardware locations for only $24.95 each. The tub manufacturing and distribution has been a real challenge, but we were able to keep costs low on the hundreds of millions of tubs needed by having them made in China and distributed by a logistics company from Norway. If you live near the water, you should be getting yours any day!

The sand reclamation stations are the most vital link in the chain. We need the stations to be conveniently located, since we can't just have citizens trying to return their reclaimed sand to the beach themselves. That would obviously be a disaster! Ordinary, untrained people cannot be trusted to make sure their reclaimed sand gets back to the same beach it came from. Inter-beach mineral cross-contamination is one of our greatest fears. No one wants to think about the potentially catastrophic ecological ramifications of getting sand from two entirely different beaches mixed up.

That is precisely why we have 40,000+ sand reclamation stations nationwide, with more being brought online every day. Depending on the size of the coastal community, each station employs between 100 and 300 new government employees, so you can see the obvious upside for the economy as a whole.

We employ quite a few scientists and chemists to take care of the typing and cross-matching of the sand as it is reclaimed. We actually got a lot of guys from NASA! We spent five years and 400 billion dollars on the front end of this project collecting and cataloging sand and sediment samples at 500-foot intervals along the coastlines and waterways of the entire country. That way, when we receive sand from a citizen, we can make sure to match it to the exact location that it was stolen – sorry… accidentally removed - from.

The scientific equipment and machinery required for this is amazing. We have to sort and identify each individual grain, since careless citizens will often ignore the guidelines and wash sand from two or more different beach outings into the same tub, instead of bringing the reclaimed sand to a collection station after each beach visit. That brings us to the third prong in our approach; Education.

We have a budget of nearly 700 billion dollars for sand and sediment education for the general public. We need to make every person in the entire country aware of this growing sand removal problem and the steps they can take to help. We are boldly tackling everything from proper use of the collection tubs and filters, to collection station rules and regulations, to proper sunscreen and child management practices to avoid sand removal in the first place.

We have even developed a fun mascot for the kids: Sandy the Gender-Neutral Sand Crab, who gets crabby when sand leaves his or her beach. He or she is the cornerstone of our youth outreach programs. We are also preparing to launch our nationwide elementary school curriculum integration project, to make sure proper sand management is learned at a young age.

For the adults, we have a massive project underway to place signs at 200-yard intervals along all of our nation’s waterways and coastlines, prominently displaying the 137 new federal rules and regulations regarding proper sand and sediment management. In order to have a readable font size, the signs ended up being 10 feet tall, and 30 feet long, so we are using cranes and pile drivers to set them in place. While occasionally blocking some established beach-front home’s views, the signs should end up providing some amount of shade for beachgoers, and some new seagull habitat, so we consider it a net positive. We also printed up a bunch of flyers.

The main focus of all our educational programs is, of course, having fun using our nation’s beaches and waterways, but in a sand-responsible manner.

All told, the FCTESNMRRD is off to a great start. The work at the collection stations is slower than we had originally anticipated, but we are making great improvements every day. So far, we have collected, properly identified, and returned over seventeen ounces of sand to its rightful home on the beach. That is just a great feeling for all of us, knowing that all our hard work and all those tax dollars are doing so much good!

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?
Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Going Bald

I started to lose my hair about six years ago. At this point, I am at least half way to being totally bald. Apparently it is a slow process. That is probably so you will have time to adjust. (My oldest son is six and a half. I don’t think that is a coincidence.)

I really miss my hair, but not why you might think. None of my reservations about going bald have anything to do with vanity. I will not miss my hair for one minute from a looks standpoint. I just never cared about it very much. If you took a look at my school pictures from K through 12, you would see that I never put much time into trying to have cool hair.

It appears that there was a brief period in the eighties when I actually tried to have a hair style, but unfortunately, like so many other things in the eighties, it was ill-advised. Apparently – and fortunately – it lasted less than a year, because it is captured for posterity in only one of my school pictures. Seventh grade will forever be known as the year of the part down the middle with super-cool feathered bangs. This was the same year that I had braces with headgear, so looking back on it, I was probably trying desperately to compensate for having a stainless steel wire sticking out of my mouth, attached by rubber bands to a “flesh colored” (read: pink) neck strap. That would also explain the rolled up cuffs on my jeans with the black-and-white checkered slip-on Vans with no socks. Trust me, at the time, that seemed to be the height of fashion. But like I said, it was the eighties. Bad choices all the way around.

I either got rid of the headgear, or just got tired of paying attention to my hair, because by the eighth grade photo I was back to short hair. I have kept it short ever since. Up until I went bald, I had never viewed my hair as an asset. I never really thought of it as a liability, either. I think I just never thought much about it at all. It has always been just a line-item on a to-do list. Morning: wash hair. Every two weeks: cut hair. In that regard, my hair is a lot like the front lawn. I don’t give either one much thought; I just water and cut them both on a regular schedule. Like the front lawn, I don’t mind cutting my hair, but past that, I want no other maintenance activities taking up even an extra minute of my time.

So, given that I put my hair in the same category as lawn maintenance, you may be asking yourself, why would he miss it? Seems like it would be a good thing not to have to deal with it anymore. I agree. I was actually pretty excited about the less-maintenance aspect of my hair loss. Until I went outside…

I’m not sure you can fully appreciate this unless you yourself have actually gone bald, but the hair on top of your head is an amazing source of insulation. When I go outside now in the slightest whisper of cold air, I am instantly freezing. If the sun is out and it’s over 65 degrees, I’m burning up. For the first time in my life, I am a wuss. I need a hat at all times.

I was blown away by what a difference having no hair makes on my body temperature. Apparently, it doesn’t take very much hair to keep you insulated, either, since my hair was never over a half-inch long. I guess as long as it’s evenly distributed, length really doesn’t count for too much.

This constant need for a hat has thrown me for a loop. It has introduced a whole new level of planning into my formerly simple life. I used to just go places. Time to go? Let’s see… I’m wearing clothes… OK, I’m ready! Now, when it’s time to go, I have to make decisions. Where are we going? What are we doing? Is it an indoor event? Is there even the remotest possibility that we will be outside, even for a few minutes? Not sure? Better bring a hat just in case.

Now I am forced to find a hat that will “go” with my clothes, or my wife won’t stand next to me. I am forced to choose from a selection of baseball-type caps, since I am not anywhere cool enough to be able to pull off the fedora or the Kangol driver’s cap look, and my cowboy hat always seems a bit much for a backyard barbeque. In hot weather, I always really want to wear one of my wide-brimmed, floppy, “boonie” hats, but they are all some sort of camouflage pattern, so I end up looking like I am there to invade the backyard, not just visit.

You would think the baseball cap would be good enough, but let me tell you, they are not without challenges to the bald man. The adjustable size varieties have the open semi-circle in the back. I found out the hard way that I still need to apply sunscreen to the back of my head to avoid a second-degree half-moon burn. Even if the cap is fitted and does not have the dangerous rear opening, it is still not 100% safe. I have had occasions when I have sat still in the sun for long enough – at a baseball game or an outdoor concert – that I have received six tiny little circular sunburns on the top of my head, through the pin-hole air vents on the top of the cap. Come on!

In the summer time, I just sunscreen my whole head on the weekends. It’s just safer that way.

It is a cruel trick played on the bald man. Whether he cared about his hair when he had it or not, as soon as it’s gone he is forced to accessorize. Coming from a guy who never accessorized anything, and always just had clothes instead of “outfits,” this has been a pretty big adjustment for me. My wife has started to look into online tests for colorblindness, just to make sure I’m not a total idiot. (I think she’s going to be sorely disappointed!)

Well, I’ve got to go. We’ve got a wedding to attend. Honey, which one of these ball caps goes with my suit?

I miss my hair.

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?
Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!