How to be a Parent

Two things occurred to me this morning at 3:15 A.M., while I sat on the floor in my boys’ bedroom, wiping pee off my three-year-old’s legs. The first thing was that parenting, despite some of the odd hours and strange tasks, is still the greatest thing I’ve ever done with my life. The second was that people who don’t have kids yet might not realize that sometimes people with kids are sitting on the floor at 3:15 A.M. cleaning up pee. So I thought I would try to use some of my experiences to help prospective parents prepare for life with children.

If you happen to be someone who has their first child on the way, or someone who is just thinking about starting a family, and you find yourself wondering what it will be like to live with, and be responsible for, small children, I can help. I have developed a series of real-life do-it-yourself examples that will help prepare you for parenthood.

Since we already touched on the subject of odd-hour odd tasks, let’s start there.

Nighttime

You never know what you’ll need to be doing when you’re woken up in the middle of the night by a child, so here’s how to prepare:

Get yourself three new alarm clocks. Have someone you know and trust set each one for a random time between the hours of midnight and 6:00 A.M. Start yourself off easy and only activate one at a time for a while. On the first night, when the alarm goes off, get out of bed and do laundry. On the next night, get out of bed and pour yogurt on your shoulders and the carpet, then do some more laundry and clean the carpet. On night number three, get out of bed and go to the store and buy cough syrup, milk, yogurt, oatmeal, diapers, children’s suppositories, and a humidifier. Then come home and change all the sheets on all the beds in the house. Then pour the yogurt in your lap, pour some of the milk on the couch, do laundry, clean the shower, and go back to bed. You can work up to having all three alarm clocks activated at once.

That should cover you for the standard issues, but it is really only a simulation for having kids ages one through eight. If you really want to prepare for what it’s like when you bring a newborn baby home, just stay up for 19 days in a row.

Morning

Once you have kids, you will never sleep in again. That is a hard reality to accept, so here’s how to get ready:

Set your regular old alarm clock for 5:45 A.M. Get up every morning at that time no matter what day it is. Do this forever.

Ages Zero to Four

You carry the young kids a lot. To get ready for this, buy a 30-pound bag of flour or rice. Carry it on your hip everywhere you go. You can only set it down for two minutes at a time, every two hours. If you ever drop it on accident, you have failed.

Random Daytime Shopping Emergencies

Kids are demanding, and their schedule almost never fits yours, so try this. Once or twice a month, leave work at an unexpected time and go to the store and buy cough syrup, milk, yogurt, oatmeal, diapers, children’s suppositories, and a humidifier. Then go back to work.

Volume

As the kids get older, they get louder. They are never louder than when you’re on the phone. To simulate what that will be like, go to a garage sale and find an old “boom box” portable stereo. Stock it with new D-cell batteries and have it with you at all times. Keep it tuned to a talk radio station. Whenever your phone rings, before you answer it, turn on your boom box and put it on your left shoulder, on volume level 10. Then answer your phone, put it up to your right ear and carry on your conversation as you would normally, only whenever you hear the words “and” or “the” from the radio, say, “Just a minute, please. Mommy’s on the phone.”

Driving

You’re a great driver. You’ve been driving for a long time. Driving with kids in the car won’t be an issue, right? Think again. The best way to simulate driving with children in the car is to get your hands on three cats and a rhesus monkey. Put all three cats in a medium-sized burlap bag, and place the bag in the back seat. Place the rhesus monkey on top of the bag. Drive as you would normally.

Ridiculous Emotions and Fake Problems

Kids have great imaginations and also lots of emotions they cannot fully control. Lots of times, those two forces collide and you are faced with cleaning up the teary-eyed mess. To prepare for this, search out and befriend someone who is notoriously neurotic and irrational. Follow them around and attempt to solve every one of their most inane daily problems. It is critical that you develop the ability to seem very concerned and forlorn about their most trivial issue. When you can say, “I’m really sorry that happened. What can I do to help?” with a serious look of concern on your face when they tell you that their imaginary friend lost her imaginary cat, you’re ready.

The Questions

Parenthood, when really boiled down to its essence, is about answering questions. An average child will ask approximately five bazillion questions by age seven. To get ready, buy all 26 versions of Trivial Pursuit. Carry the cards around with you all day, and every two minutes have someone ask you one of the questions. It is not critical that you actually know the correct answer, but you need to be able to come up with a plausible answer without hesitation. Have the person ask you three follow-up questions about your answer. Again, the actual answer is not critical. The ability to answer is what counts. That being said, it wouldn’t hurt to pay close attention to the Trivial Pursuit Ultimate Disney Edition. That will come in very handy. 

Home Improvement

Remove the existing can lights from your kitchen ceiling and install track lighting. Three days later, remove the track lighting, because it “just doesn’t go as well with everything else as she thought it would,” and put the old can lights back in.

(Sorry, this was accidentally transferred from the list of real-life do-it-yourself examples that will help prepare men for getting married. My mistake.)

Sports

As the kids grow up, they start getting interested in hitting things with sticks and bats. Often times, when minding your own business, one of those things is you. You’ll want to toughen up a little for this. Get a plastic Wiffle ball bat. Every day, hit yourself in the shins, knees, calves, and occasionally, the groin.

Toys Everywhere

Kids come with toys, and the toys live on the floor. Normally, that’s not a problem, but with older kids, you will need to be prepared for one major hazard: Nighttime Legos in the carpet. Since you don’t have kids yet, chances are you don’t have a lot of Legos available to you. No problem. Broken glass is a perfectly realistic substitute. Just break a few wine bottles and scatter the shards around your living room carpet. Turn off all the lights and walk across the room barefoot. When you can do it without yelping loud enough to wake the dead, you’re ready.

That should just about do it. Now, please don’t get me wrong. This list won’t fully prepare you for parenthood, but it will give you some very real-world practice so you won’t be caught too off guard when that first bundle of joy arrives. Have fun!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

April Fools

Since I am a self-employed performing artist who owns an Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property and also produces Cellulosic Biofuel, and my registered domestic partner is an Indian Coal Producer who also has healthcare expenses related to black lung, and we have both been receiving Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement Payments, needless to say, our taxes were a little complicated this year.

Filling out my federal Form 2106 for the special handling of my performing artist expenses was easy. The problems arose when I tried to figure out if I could claim a deduction for my registered domestic partner’s health insurance costs. Since he is an Indian Coal Miner, I am unclear on whether California recognizes the fact that I am self-employed and paying his insurance premiums since he is also self-employed. Kind of vague there.

We also got a little confused about what to do with the interest we have received from our Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement Payments. The federal government lets us deduct them, but California won’t. Does that mean that we have to give the money back? Believe me, I don’t want to give those Ottoman Turks another inch!

Figuring out my Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit was no picnic, either. I read Form 8911 in its entirety, but I’m still confused. I produce and sell biodiesel mixed with ethanol, natural gas, hydrogen and wheat grass juice specifically formulated for today’s greener vehicles, and today’s less discerning alcoholics. The fact that I own the only vehicle that can actually run on this fuel is a moot point as far as I’m concerned, and the IRS agrees.

The problem is that Form 8911 says that the following are alternative fuels.

-          Any fuel at least 85 percent of the volume of which consists of one or more of the following: ethanol, natural gas, compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, or hydrogen.

-          Any mixture which consists of two or more of the following: biodiesel (as defined in section 40A(d)(1)), diesel fuel (as defined in section 4083(a)(3)), or kerosene,  and at least 20% of the volume of which consists of biodiesel determined without regard to any kerosene in such mixture.

-          Electricity.

Now, my special blend is only 75% ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen, but it contains biodiesel. Just not diesel or kerosene. You can see my obvious dilemma. I tried to read section 40A(d)(1), but I fell asleep. I don’t know if I qualify for the credit. If only the federal government were more specific on the treatment of wheat grass juice with respect to taxation, I would have some clear direction here.

Then there is Form 6478 – Alcohol and Cellulosic Biofuel Fuels Credit.

I need to determine where my cellulosic biofuel ranks from the following options:

- Alcohol 190 proof or greater and alcohol 190 proof or greater in fuel mixtures

- Alcohol less than 190 proof but at least 150 proof and alcohol less than 190 proof but at least 150 proof in fuel mixtures

- Qualified cellulosic biofuel produced after 2008 that is alcohol (see instructions for election)

- Qualified cellulosic biofuel produced after 2008 that is not alcohol (see instructions for election)

You can see my dilemma here, again. I know my cellulosic biofuel is alcoholic, because when we drink it, we get plumb tore up! But I’m really not sure what proof it is. Every time we think to test it, we end up passing around the Mason jar and forget again.

Also, the IRS has informed me that before claiming a credit on Form 6478, the alcohol fuel mixture credit must be taken against any section 4081 liability on Form 720. Any credit in excess of the section 4081 liability can be taken as a claim for payment on Form 8849 or an income tax credit on Form 4136. Clear as a bell.

Also, figuring out my registered domestic partner’s Form 8835 - Renewable Electricity, Refined Coal, and Indian Coal Production Credit has been no walk in the park. I do know that Indian coal means coal which is produced from coal reserves which on 6/14/05 were owned by an Indian tribe or held in trust by the United States for the benefit of an Indian tribe or its members. I also know that resources means wind, closed-loop biomass,  poultry waste, open-loop biomass, geothermal energy, solar energy, small irrigation power, municipal solid waste, hydropower production, marine and hydrokinetic renewables, refined coal, and Indian coal.

What I can’t figure out is how Form 8835 relates to Form 990-BL - Information and Initial Excise Tax Return for Black Lung Benefit Trusts and Certain Related Persons. We know that my registered domestic partner’s black lung issues are a direct result of both his Indian Coal mining activities and also his excessive intake of my cellulosic biofuel.

Should we try to combine Forms 8835, 990-BL and 6478 to give the IRS a clear picture of the predicament we find ourselves in?

Oh, forget it. Where’s that jug of biofuel?

If you ever get the impression that the tax code has anything to do with revenue collection, you need to think again.

April Fools Day is not April 1^st. It’s April 15^th!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

Mostly Proud Father

I had a very almost awesome, mostly exciting experience as a father the other night that left me half beaming with pride.

Son Number One, the oldest of the three, is seven years old. He’s on a seven and eight-year-old baseball team this year, and he is most assuredly in over his head. He is on the young side of the roster in the first place, but add to that the fact that he could care less if he is any good at baseball, and you have a kid who should really still be playing with the six-year-olds. He enjoys playing for the most part, but the internal drive and fire to be the best player he can be is completely missing. He strikes out, and runs back to the dugout with a smile on his face, just as happy as can be.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not the kind of dad that needs his kids to be all-stars. In fact, I have a “better living through mediocrity” philosophy when it comes to kids’ sports. I end up with a lot more free time if they stay middle of the road, athletically speaking. When you have an all-star, all of a sudden every single one of your weekends is spoken for with one tournament of champions or another. To that, I say no thanks.

That being said, I would like my eldest boy to be slightly more into the game of baseball than he seems to be. It doesn’t seem to faze him in the slightest that almost every other kid on his team can hit, field, and throw better than he can. He’s still having fun, though, and that’s what counts in my book.

So, anyway, the other night he had the game of his life. His usual M.O. at the plate is to swing at the first three pitches, no matter what they look like. Also, when he swings at them, he makes sure that the ball is already in the catcher’s mitt before starting the bat around. It makes for a pretty entertaining at-bat when the kid pitching bounces it in the dirt twice before it crosses the plate, the catcher loses it between his legs and is scrambling for the ball behind him, and then the batter swings. We’re having him tested for near-sightedness, far-sightedness, and blindness.

His first at-bat went as per usual. Three bad pitches, three late swings, and one happy kid running back to the bench. On his second at-bat, however, it was time for the coach to be pitching, so he got some balls that actually came across the plate. Out of nowhere, the planets aligned, the stars crossed, the bat started moving at the right time, and Son Number One ripped one up the middle past the second baseman for a single that moved his runner from first to third. Standing there on first base, beaming proudly at me, was the first glimmer I had seen all season of an honest-to-goodness baseball player. I was beaming back at him from the stands just as proud as I could possibly be. I was glowing.

It didn’t last long.

In the middle of the next kid’s at-bat, my superstar future Cal Ripken was not poised with one foot on the bag, stretched out and ready to run to second base. He was, instead, standing with both feet in the middle of the bag, facing away from second base, looking alternately at me and his base coach, holding his groin with both hands, hopping up and down, and generally giving us the universal “I’ve gotta pee really bad!” signals. When I suggested from the stands that he might want to hold it, his pained expression was replaced with a look of abject terror that immediately caused his base coach to call a pinch runner out of the dugout. Off went Son Number One like a rocket, straight off the field, through the dugout, and heading for the restrooms, abandoning what might have very well been his one base running opportunity of the year. I hung my head, and climbed out of the stands to follow him to the potty.

He was in the door to one of the restrooms well ahead of me, and when I opened the door to follow him, I was prepared to give a rather stern talking to about holding it next time in the middle of the game to a boy with his pants around his ankles, peeing into a toilet. What I found, however, was a heartbroken little boy, crying next to the potty, still fully clothed. He hadn’t made it in time. My seven-year-old had peed his pants. My heart melted, and I immediately switched to consoling dad mode. He was embarrassed, and terrified that everyone would know.

While I worked on stopping the tears and calming him down, I pieced together what had happened. As it turns out, the required athletic cup can backfire on this age group. While it is meant to be a protective device, it very much limits the wearer’s ability to “squeeze it off” in a pee emergency. Live and learn.

At the beginning of the year when we received my son’s uniform, I took one look at the pants and said to my wife, “You’re kidding, right?” White pants with red pin stripes, combined with red socks, navy blue jerseys, and black hats. They sort of look like the miniature Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. That night, however, I was thrilled with the white pants. After an initial examination of the damp young man, I was very happy to report to him that it was impossible to tell that his pants were wet. He would have to live with the fact that his underwear was squishy, but the general public would never know anything was amiss. The white pants had saved the day. We wiped off the tears, put a smile on our faces, and raced back to the field.

Some kid on the other team had made an unassisted triple play at third base right about the time that we had hit the restroom, so Son Number One’s entire team had already taken the field, and they were yelling for him to hurry up. Due to his late arrival, he was placed at the pitcher’s mound next to the coach instead of his usual spot in left field. Besides the fact that he ran out to the mound with his feet spread wide apart, waddle-running like his pants were wet, you never would have been able to tell his pants were wet. Crisis averted!

I had gone from super-proud and excited to less-than-thrilled and annoyed to empathetic and consoling to relieved and happy in the span of two minutes. As I sat back down in the stands, I was physically tired from all the emotions. I had barely caught my breath when I was back up on my feet, cheering wildly and beaming with pride again. For the second time that night the planets and stars all fell into place. The batter hit a dribbling ground ball back at the mound. Son Number One charged the ball, fielded it effortlessly, and pivoting on his right foot, threw a rifle-shot to first base to get the batter out by half a step. I have never seen him throw a ball that fast or that accurately. I was glowing once again.

The game ended shortly after that, and I bought him a celebratory Icee at the snack bar. We had a serious discussion about remembering to go potty before the game from now on, and more excited talk from his proud father about his hit and his play at the mound. We also decided that since it was a late game and his mom was home with his younger brothers, we would tell her all about his highlights, but keep the part about the pee to ourselves. We figured it was guy stuff, and since no one else knew, she didn’t need to know either. So if you happen to see him, just high-five him for the hit and the out. You don’t know anything about any accident.

True to form for my not-so-sports-oriented seven-year-old, however, if you ask him about that game today, he’ll probably remember only one thing. The Icee.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

Random Thoughts

As with most weekly column writers, I keep a list of possible future topics for my articles. At least, I assume other writers do this. I actually don’t ever talk to other writers since most of us tend to be neurotic weirdoes. Anyway, a lot of things end up on the list that fall into the category of single random thoughts. Not enough of an idea to write an entire article on (at least, not one that you would want to read), but still important enough to me to keep. Eventually they pile up and need to be freed from the constraints of the list and unleashed upon the world. These are they.

Why does everyone offer senior discounts? In my experience, seniors tend to be the ones with all the money. What we need is “guys in their 30’s and 40’s with three kids” discounts. We’re broke.

It makes more sense to be a strong swimmer than a strong runner. You never drown when you stop running.

I recently received a FedEx delivery slip that said, "Sign legibly." Sorry, FedEx, but you're going to have to pick one or the other.

More and more these days, every time I go to a discount gas station, it seems like I am the only person there not currently on, looking for, or selling methamphetamines. I pay more for gas now just so I can be around other people who still have all their teeth.

Why do we still say, “Hang up the phone?” At this point, shouldn't it be, “Push the button?”

All the hand sanitizer in the world won't help if your kid is going to lick the shopping cart handle.

I have never understood the saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Why would you want to “have” your cake without eating it? To stare at it because it’s pretty? Who wants to sit and look at a cake?

It has occurred to me that “multi-tasking” is the decision to accomplish multiple tasks poorly in more time than it takes to accomplish one task well.

I have decided that the best benchmark of where you are financially in your life is not your bank account balance. It is whether or not the advertisement of “free appetizers” has a profound impact on your decision making.

How come the word symmetrical isn’t a palindrome, like noon or radar?

The people at the Army need to talk to me. If you want to stop an enemy, simply steal their shoes and spread Legos everywhere. Nothing is more effective.

The other day, while trying to go to dictionary.com I typed in dictonary. They should probably have a function that just blocks you from the site for 48 hours to punish you for being an ironic jackass.

I received a letter the other day that had a return address of 3542 Solitude Way. Shouldn’t it be 1 Solitude Way?

Why do I have to spell approximately correctly every time?

I have found that if you donate enough money to the right charities, you will never have to buy return address labels as long as you live.

If you work at the Federal Reserve, wouldn’t it be easier if they just paid you in cash?

As I get older, I’m finding that gravity is really starting to let me down.

It is very obvious that classy is either inherited or earned. It cannot be purchased.

On my last trip to Las Vegas, I flew out from Sacramento on a flight that was advertised as a 55 minute trip, but my flight back from Las Vegas to Sacramento was billed as 1-1/2 hours gate-to-gate. On the return trip, the captain announced that despite leaving the gate 15 minutes late we would still be arriving on time. Is it just me, or are the airlines using fuzzy math?

Why are “sun-dried” tomatoes better than any other way of drying a tomato? A dried tomato is a dried tomato, right?

Why is abbreviation such a long word?

In my experience, people who have a lot to say often say most of it on the back of their car.

There should be a constitutional amendment banning the use of the number 0 and the letter O in alpha-numeric strings. It should also ban the use of the letters V and W. I can never tell if it’s a W or two V’s. Forget about it if they’re next to each other. Is it W-V, or is it V-W? Is it two W’s or four V's, or V-W-V?

Q is in the wrong place in the alphabet. There is no way it should be between P and R. It should be way at the end with V-Z.

Why is the grass in between the sidewalk and the parking lot at Walgreens and Arco always nicer than mine? That offends me on some level.

If you drop your vitamin-C tablet into a hotel sink, is that considered a stalemate?

Money and toilet paper have something in common. They are both easy to take for granted until you run out.

And finally,

How come you never see any bald Eskimos? Someone needs to figure out what’s up with their hair and patent it.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

I'm Listening, Honey

“My wife told me I never listen to her. At least, that’s what I think she said.”

It’s a classic joke, and like all good humor, it’s funny because it’s rooted in the truth. All my life I have been hearing about wives complaining that their husbands don’t listen. When I first got married I remember thinking, “Well, that’s silly. I would never do that to my wife. Why would you choose to live the rest of your life with someone, but choose not to listen to them? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Little did I know, it all makes perfect sense. You just have to be married for a while and have kids before it starts.

Ten year into the marriage and three boys later, I totally understand, and I’m here today to tell you ladies, it’s not that we’re not listening, it’s that we’re not remembering.

I’m almost 40 years old now, and I can say with absolute certainty that my brain is much, much smaller than when I was 30. At least it feels that way. It doesn’t actually feel like it has become physically smaller and rattling around inside my skull, it just feels like it cannot hold and process near as much information as before. It’s not necessarily slower, it just has less capacity.

I think it has been filled up with questions. When you have small kids, approximately 78% of your day is devoted to answering questions. This tax on your brain is exacerbated by the fact that your average day is now 78% busier than it used to be, specifically because of the kids. That’s the double-edged sword of child rearing from a brain capacity standpoint. Your brain is now doing approximately 156% more work than it did before you had kids.

Even though your brain is being heavily taxed at home by your children and your schedule, if you’re the dad with the job, you still have to go to work and earn a living. Unfortunately, even though you want to, you can’t just go into the office and stare at the wall and drool, like your brain wants you to do. You have to be at least a little bit productive or they are likely to stop paying you.

So with a brain going full-tilt nearly 18 hours a day, you tend to do information triage on all the incoming data. This is where the wives tend to mistake the husbands’ lack of recall for lack of listening in the first place. I can assure you ladies, we listened to everything you just told us, it’s just that we only retained the information that required our later action.

Allow me to explain with this totally hypothetical situation that happened last week:

My wife sits me down after the kids go to bed and tells me four things:

Wife’s information packet number 1:

We’re going somewhere on Wednesday night after you get home from work. We’ll leave from home.

My brain’s processing of that information:

She will tell me what to wear when I get home from work on whatever night that she just said, and then she’ll tell me where to drive the car. No action required on my part. No need to store this information. Immediately forgotten.

Wife’s information packet number 2:

We’re having some of our friends over for dinner on Friday night. They will arrive at our house after you get home from work. I am making food.

My brain’s processing of that information:

Do we have beer in the garage fridge? Yes. OK. Husbands and I are all set. She will tell me what to wear when I get home from work on whatever night that she just said. No action required on my part. No need to store this information. Immediately forgotten.

Wife’s information packet number 3:

The boys have back-to-back baseball games on Saturday. We’ll all go to the fields in the morning in two separate cars, and then after Son Number Two’s game, you will stay to watch Son Number One’s game with Son Number Two and I will take Son Number Three home for his nap. You will bring Number One and Two home after the second game.

My brain’s processing of that information:

She will tell me what to wear when I wake up on whatever morning she just said, and she’ll tell me where to drive the car. No action required on my part. No need to store this information. Immediately forgotten.

Wife’s information packet number 4:

The guest bathroom faucet is dripping.

My brain’s processing of that information:

That is the lever kind of mixing valve where you need to replace the plastic cartridge underneath the handle. I’ll have to turn the water off under the sink to do it, and sometimes when you do that, the seals in the shut-off valve go out on you, too. I’d better make sure I get a couple spare shut off valves along with the cartridge when I go to the hardware store. I’d also better remember to find my big shut-off wrench in the garage and have it handy before I get started in case one of the valves under the sink does start to leak and I need to shut the main water off out by the sidewalk in a hurry. I have that all-day meeting on Tuesday, but I can probably get to the hardware store Wednesday on my lunch hour and knock that out on Wednesday night.

“Do we have anything going on Wednesday night?”

“Arrrggghhhh! I just told you five minutes ago that we’re going to the Johnson’s for the piano recital. You never listen!"

I hope that little example helps you ladies out there to understand where we husbands are coming from. We’re not ignoring you. We’re just trying to use our smaller brains as efficiently as possible so we don’t forget to pick up the kids when you ask us to.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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 Leprechaun Trap

Last night I found myself in one of the classic dad-with-elementary-school-kids situations. My wife looked at me lovingly over the dinner table and said, “Honey, after dinner you need to help your son build a leprechaun trap for school. It’s due tomorrow.”

“It’s due tomorrow?!? Why am I just hearing about it now?”

“You’re not. I told you about it twice last week, and again two days ago. Would you like me to tell you the exact times, dates and locations when I told you, or exactly what you said each time I told you?”

“So, a leprechaun trap, huh son? I have some great ideas of what we’re going to build tonight!”

Luckily for me, I am not only trained as a mechanical engineer, but I also happened to have a good sized piece of cardboard, some metal coat hangers, and a roll of duct tape in my garage. Also luckily for me, I was an expert trapper in my youth. I never actually trapped anything, per se, but I did own one heck of a cool galvanized steel, two-door, tray-triggered animal trap when I was a kid.

I saved my money and bought it from a mail-order trap manufacturer whose ad I had been studying for months in the back of Outdoor Life magazine. It was easily the coolest thing I had ever purchased, and at ten years old, I had visions of wearing a coon-skin cap and running a lucrative trap line business, with a large knife on my hip and a rifle over my shoulder, just in case. As it turns out, the fields behind our house weren’t exactly a trapper’s paradise, and my mom wouldn’t let me walk around town with a rifle, so eventually the trap was retired to the rafters in the garage and my career aspirations took a new path. Looking back on it, I’m glad I never trapped anything, because it would most likely have been a skunk.

Anyway, I remembered exactly how the trap door mechanism worked on my old trap, and it was perfect for a leprechaun trap that needed to be built in a hurry, on (arguably) short-notice. Off to the garage we went after dinner, to start the often challenging, yet always rewarding process of building something with a 5-five-year-old. Being a semi-seasoned father of three boys, I was prepared for the logistical challenges ahead involving overanxious young helpers and sharp cutting implements. I was totally unprepared for, however, all the questions about leprechauns.

Apparently, St. Patrick’s Day is a pretty major holiday at the elementary school level, and apparently the existence of leprechauns is the overriding theme. Apparently, this time of year, preschools and elementary schools are overrun by mischievous leprechauns, who apparently invade the classrooms at nighttime, in search of gold and snacks. It is apparently the duty of every God-fearing American boy and girl, ages three through eight, to help attempt to trap these Irish varmint-sized marauders, and take their gold.  

“Dad, there must be lots of different kinds of leprechauns, right?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there are so many of them.”

“Why do you think there are so many of them?”

“Because there are a lot of schools, and they come to all the schools, right?”

“Sure they do.”

“Why do they come to schools, dad?”

“Pass me that blow torch, son. Have I ever shown you how to weld?”

I’m still trying to keep my story straight on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. It’s hard enough to explain how and why they all know to come to your house, but now I have to try and explain why leprechauns sneak around, also?

“Once there was green leprechaun pee in the toilet at the pre-school. How did he use the toilet if they’re so small? What are they looking for at the schools? Why do they like glitter? What do leprechauns eat? What do we do with them if we catch one in the trap?”

How am I supposed to know? This is (arguably) the first time I’m hearing about this. I’m just trying to get through the already challenging task of building a working scale model of a trigger-door animal trap using cardboard and coat hangers, and now I’m fielding a bunch of questions and trying not to contradict the unknown-to-me answers that the teacher may or may not have already given.

To add an extra layer of difficulty, my design is being constantly monitored by a little kid who believes that his trap will actually need to snare and contain a small magical Irish elf, so I am needing to bend to some design constraints that wouldn’t otherwise be a concern, such as, not putting any of the connecting duct tape on the inside of the trap because, “the leprechaun would just tear it off and escape.”

On top of the mechanical, mental and mythical challenges the project presented, the other two boys added their own level of difficulty. As Son Number Two sat at the workbench and “helped” me, Sons Number One and Three tore around the garage playing Star Wars. So, as I tried to put the trap together and carefully answer and/or evade the leprechaun inquiries, I was constantly being hit in the legs with plastic light sabers and repeatedly shot with Nerf bullets. The evening reminded me of what astronaut training must be like. Doing complicated math problems while pulling four G’s in a spinning chair and getting Ping-Pong balls and jets of hot steam shot at you, just to see how you react to the chaos.

I am happy to report that I survived the space training exercise, and ended up with a pretty awesome leprechaun trap for my son. We couldn’t reproduce my old animal trap’s food tray door trigger, so we went with the tried-and-true “stick propping up the door” trick. 

“So, when he moves the stick, the door will fall, this latch will swing down into place to keep the door shut, and bam! You’ve got a leprechaun in your trap.”

“Why will he move the stick, dad?”

Why will he move the stick? It was my last mental exercise of the night. Why would he move the stick? The “stick” happened to be a piece of a Home Depot paint stir stick, so it was flat and had some room to write on it. A green Sharpie solved my last design hurdle of the evening.

“Dear Mr. Leprechaun, move this stick to get treats.”

That was perfectly logical in the mind of the five-year-old leprechaun hunter, and he went to bed satisfied that he had the best trap ever. I went to bed about three minutes after he did, completely mentally exhausted.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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 Trade Show

To: Richard Weeden

Vice President of Sales

Standard Pharmaceutical Corporation

From: Sylvia Gardner

Human Resources Manager

Consolidated Global

Dear Richard,

Judging by the large amount of recent emails that have arrived at our Human Resources department from yourself and your employees, it appears that you and Standard Pharmaceutical Corporation may have been the victims of fraud. The man you are attempting to reach, John Smith, is no longer an employee of Consolidated Global. I’m not sure if you are currently communicating with John via phone, but if you are, be advised that he is not acting as an authorized agent or employee of our company.

Your company is apparently not the only company that Mr. Smith defrauded, and we are still trying to piece the details together on this end, but it appears that Mr. Smith attended a pharmaceutical trade show in Las Vegas a week after he was let go from Consolidated Global. It seems that Mr. Smith had registered for the trade show and pre-paid his travel arrangements and lodging with a company credit card without his supervisor’s approval or knowledge. It also appears that Mr. Smith misrepresented himself as a current employee of Consolidated Global at the trade show, and apparently placed fraudulent purchase orders with at least a dozen companies, including yours.

We have been in contact with quite a few salesmen from other companies that John apparently defrauded at the recent Las Vegas trade show, and all of them tell a similar tale. John arrived at their booth, was immediately interested in their most expensive product lines, claimed to have immediate needs for large numbers of products, and then set up a series of meetings over the course of the week-long trade show, all involving either a meal, cocktails, or various forms of entertainment. Based on the information that we have already gathered, it would seem that John ate over $5,600 worth of food in less than five days, drank over $9,000 worth of alcohol, and racked up over $4,500 in room service and mini-bar charges to the tower suite that we unknowingly paid for.

He also managed to cause $23,000 worth of damage to the hotel’s rooftop pool complex. One anonymous sales representative told us that John insisted on testing some sort of proprietary water gelling agent he was “planning to buy a butt-load of”  in the hotel’s 20-person hot tub. This “test” apparently took place at 4:00 am after the sales rep and his team ran up an $800 bar tab at the Fandango Lounge attempting to close the sale with Mr. Smith. The general manager of the hotel described the scene as “an enormous bowl full of clear JELL-O.” It apparently took the Las Vegas fire department over an hour to free the nice couple from Kansas who were unfortunate enough to be sitting in the hot tub when John applied the gelling agent.

As we have stressed to the hotel manager, the other defrauded companies, and Jim and Jill Meyers from Topeka, our legal department is quite certain that we have no liability with regard to Mr. Smith’s actions at the Las Vegas trade show. We had no knowledge of where Mr. Smith was or what he was doing, he was not an employee of Consolidated Global at the time, and he was certainly not acting on our behalf. Any damages that your company wishes to seek in this matter must be taken up with Mr. Smith directly.

Obviously, we cannot honor any of the fraudulent purchase orders that John signed in Las Vegas, including the ones that he apparently gave to Standard Pharmaceutical. We’re not really sure why Mr. Smith even chose a pharmaceutical trade show. We are a worldwide manufacturer of toilets, and as such, we have absolutely no need for thirty-six “Omegatron centrifuges” or seventeen $280,000 autoclaves. We actually don’t even know what those things are.

Again, if you have been defrauded in any way by Mr. Smith, or incurred any costs associated with this incident (and judging from some of the pictures your salesman Steve Wonowski has sent via email, you have), please take it up with Mr. Smith himself. He may be difficult to track down, however. We have reports that he was last seen early Saturday morning boarding a plane at McCarran International Airport bound for Cabo San Lucas with three sales reps from Pfizer and the entire Friday night shift of waitresses from the Fandango Lounge.

As we have asked the other companies, please let us know if you do learn of Mr. Smith’s whereabouts. His landlord has reported that he vacated his apartment here in Tennessee without notice just prior to the trade show, so we really don’t have any idea where he might end up. After reviewing the company credit card account Mr. Smith used to book his trip to Las Vegas, we also learned that he pre-paid for a week-long limousine rental, and bought over $25,000 in Las Vegas area Groupons. We have reports from some hostesses on the strip that Mr. Smith was selling these discount coupons out of the back of his limo at even further discounted prices, presumably as a way to turn them into cash for himself. It appears that Consolidated Global has unknowingly paid for some great deals on laser lipo, botox, permanent makeup, orthodontics, gym memberships, and cellulite reduction treatments for quite a few Las Vegas area women.

We apologize for any inconvenience while, again, reminding you that Consolidated Global is in no way liable for any losses incurred by Standard Pharmaceutical as a result of these unfortunate circumstances.

Best regards,

Sylvia Gardner

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

Leap Year

It is February 29th today. There is not supposed to be a February 29th. Not normally, anyway. It’s a leap year. The whole concept of leap year, and our calendar in general, is very strange. I have never agreed with how our calendar works, and I have decided that it is time to stop the madness. I hereby propose that the world adopt the Smidge Calendar.

Our current calendar is complicated. This stems from the fact that the earth takes 365.2422 days to go around the sun.  If we didn’t do the leap years, we would lose six hours off the calendar every year. That’s 24 days off in a hundred years. Not good. I mean, what if your birthday was in that lost month? No party for you. What if the lost month turned out to be October, and we lost Oktoberfest? Totally unacceptable.

A long time ago, Julius Caesar, a huge fan of Oktoberfest and birthdays, introduced leap years to correct for the 0.2422 day problem. Julius decided they would do a leap day every four years no matter what. That is actually too many, since the day fraction is 0.24 and not 0.25, so things started getting out of whack. Fifteen hundred years later, after people got tired of spring starting in the middle of summer, someone developed a formula. To be a leap year, the year must be evenly divisible by four. If the year is also evenly divisible by 100, then it is not a leap year, unless it is also evenly divisible by 400. Simple, right?

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, and I don’t really have a problem with the leap year math. It’s necessary. What is not necessary is having our months all different. Why have some months with 30 days, others with 31, and one with variable days? It’s too complicated. When I was a kid, my dad taught me a way to tell how many days a month has in it. You count on your knuckles. Start on the knuckle of your index finger as January. Count the months down your fist, landing alternately on your knuckles, and the valleys between your knuckles. When you get to your pinkie knuckle (July), start over on your index knuckle (August). If you are on a knuckle, the month has 31 days. If you are in a valley, it has 30, unless it’s February, then you have to refer to the complicated formula.

The knuckle trick is handy (get it?), but it shouldn’t be necessary. With the Smidge Calendar, you will never need to count on your knuckles again. My months will all have 28 days. Gone will be the days of not knowing what day of the week the 12th of March is. The days will always be the same number. The month will always start on Monday the 1st. Sundays will always be the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th. Simple and easy.

Holidays will always be on the same day. You will always know when Thanksgiving is going to fall, and with the new calendar, we can move some of the more flexible holidays to always fall on a Monday or a Friday. Three-day weekends made easy.

Now, with 28-day months, we'll need to have 13 of them, to make a year.  We’ll have to come up with a name for the new month. We'll make it fun and have a national contest, and pick the most popular submission. This will be a worldwide calendar, of course, but we'll retain naming rights. This is our idea, and everyone else can just get on board. It won't be a hard sell, due to the New Year’s factor.

Thirteen months at 28 days each only gets you 364 days. The all-important 365th day will occur on what is currently known as January 1st. However, it will be known only as New Year’s Day. It will not have a number. It will not be a Monday. It will simply be "New Year’s Day," and it will be a freebie. No work will occur. Nothing will be accomplished. It's a phantom day that doesn't exist on the calendar. Relax and enjoy!

Since we can't do anything about the 0.2422 day problem, we will continue with the current leap year formula, and any leap year will have an extra bonus day, known as New Year’s Weekend. Two totally free days every four years. Winning!

While you will be encouraged to do nothing on New Year’s Day and Weekend, inevitably, a certain amount of children will be born on these phantom days. This is where the Smidge Calendar also has a bonus financial planning aspect. Any parent having a child on New Year’s Day will get to choose whether their new child's official birthday will be December 28th or January 1st. This will allow them to decide which tax year they would like their new deduction and tax credit to fall in. Just a happy bonus feature of a new and improved system.

In fact, I don't mean to brag, but the Smidge Calendar has no discernible flaws. It's way better that the current random 12- month system. The only potential downside I can see is a slight long-term hit to the calendar industry, since calendars will now be reusable.

Now, before all you accountants out there have a conniption fit, screaming about financial quarters, please try to relax. We'll still have quarters, they're just 13 weeks long now. You're supposed to be good at math, so deal with it. Like I said, no flaws.

I anticipate immediate adoption of the Smidge Calendar as soon as the word gets out. The only thing left to do is figure out where to put the new month. I'm thinking between September and October. They always seemed like they needed to be separated a little more. We could call it Smidgetober. It would be a fun month. We could introduce Smidgetoberfest, the Oktoberfest pre-party.

Just food for thought.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

Edible Stroller Recall

After we had our second child, Son Number Two, as we lovingly refer to him, my wife caught me at an extreme moment of weakness and convinced me to buy a stroller. Not just any run-of-the-mill stroller, mind you, but the Cadillac of strollers. Dare I say, the Ferrari of strollers. The B.O.B.

Those of you without young kids are probably saying to yourselves, “What the heck is a B.O.B.?” That’s what I asked when my wife said she wanted one. (It turns out, the original name for the stroller was Beast of Burden, but it was shortened to B.O.B.) When my wife told me how much they cost, I politely told her that it would be a cold day in Hades before I ever spent that much on a stroller. She then started spouting statistics about the B.O.B. resale values. I laughed and said I would rather spend the extra $20 and buy a mid-sized car for the boys. She then began telling me how unbelievably agile they were. I told her that gazelles were agile, too, and it would cost less to have a live one trapped and shipped to our house from Africa on a chartered plane. We could put a leash and a saddle on it, and the boys could just ride it instead.

Then, apparently she drugged me, or hypnotized me, or something, because the next thing I knew I was at REI test-rolling a B.O.B. Revolution Duallie, and saying, “Man, this thing is easy to push and can turn on a dime! And I love the shocks. Plus, the front wheel locks, so I could take the kids jogging. Wow, this is a nice stroller! It’s like the baby-buggy equivalent of a Jeep or a Hummer! This thing could fit three kids in it. Tell me more about the resale values again, honey.” Ten minutes later we owned a B.O.B.

What can I say? They really are pretty awesome, as far as strollers go.

Anyway, I told you that story so I could tell you this one. We used the bejeezus out of that stroller over the next five years or so. I would have almost gone as far as to say we got our money’s worth out of it, but that’s hard to do with a stroller that costs as much as a home mortgage payment. However, when Son Number Three was no longer in need of too much parental mobility assistance, my wife sold our B.O.B. to a nice couple in town for a surprising amount of money. Turns out she was telling the truth about the whole resale value aspect of the B.O.B. phenomenon, and after I wrestled the stack of cash away from her, and bandaged the bite marks on my hand, I felt a lot better about the purchase five years earlier. We really did get our money’s worth!

Anyway, I told you that story so I could tell you this one. Somewhere along the way, the B.O.B. stroller people got our name and address, because I received a safety recall notice in the mail recently. Since we no longer own the stroller, normally I would have passed that information on to the new owners, but since the entire sale was brokered on Craig’s List and transacted in the parking lot at the mall with cash, I have absolutely no record of who we sold it to. Normally, I would be concerned that the new owners should really be alerted to a potential safety issue with something like this, but after reading the Safety Recall Notice, I am not very worried.

“Our records indicate that you may have purchased a BOB Stroller that may present a potential safety hazard. The stroller canopy’s embroidered logo’s backing patch can detach, posing a choking hazard to babies and young children and must be removed to safely use the stroller. BOB is recalling this product in cooperation with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC) and Health Canada.”

I looked at the recall repair instruction sheet included with the letter, and the logo’s backing patch is a soft piece of fabric about the size of man’s thumb. Holy cow, that is dangerous! Since sitting in a stroller is the only place on earth where small children would ever encounter a rogue piece of fabric, I can obviously see the CSPC’s concern on the matter. If a small child ever took enough time off from trying to eat their own shirt, or their stuffed animal’s arm, they might be tempted to swallow an embroidery backing patch. Oh, the horror!

I read the recall notice and was immediately disgusted with lawyers, yet again. Not insomuch for the ridiculousness of the recall itself, but for their sheer lack of initiative. A group of lawyers decided to spend their time and energy to target the B.O.B. stroller company on a ridiculous waste of everyone’s time and money, yet they were so pathetic and small-minded, the best they could come up with was an embroidery backing patch? Have they ever even seen a B.O.B. stroller? I mean, come on! This is one serious piece of hardware, folks.

It has over-center cam-locking latches to hold all three wheels on. A kid could crush his or her finger in those latches, if an adult were present to help them close them tight enough. It has sprocket-toothed gears on both rear wheel hubs that mesh with a spring-tensioned emergency brake bar that you flip down with your foot. If your child was lying under the stroller when you flipped the brake bar down, the spring tension alone would be enough to knock them out cold. And don’t even get me started on what might happen if the kid was riding in the underside cargo compartment while the stroller was moving and they reached out and grabbed one of the wheel hub gears or got their hand or arm between two of the five-point molded plastic wheel spokes. Emergency room, here we come. Then there’s the ever-present danger of over-inflated pneumatic tire explosions and their resulting debris cloud and associated hearing loss issues. Also, there is a pull cord on the back of the stroller, and when pulled hard enough, two latches let go, and the entire stroller folds in half for storage or travel. Did anyone think what might happen if a parent folded their child up in the stroller on accident? Hello internal injuries and claustrophobia! Plus, the entire stroller is just plain heavy. I’ll bet our Duallie model weighed a good 35 or 40 pounds. Talk about dangerous. Add a kid or two, and you’ve got a 120-pound rolling menace on your hands. What if you hit another kid with it, or your kid jumps out and gets run over?

All I’m saying here, lawyers, is apply yourselves a little more. I mean, if you’re really going to try and keep us all safe, let’s concentrate on the steak and not the peas!

I have a feeling if the Consumer Product Safety Commission really had their way, the embroidery backing patch on the shade canopy would probably be the only thing on the entire stroller that the good folks at B.O.B. would actually be allowed to sell. 

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

Valentine's Day

I am coming up on ten years of marriage, so I thought, this Valentine’s Day, I would help all you guys out by imparting to you all of my knowledge about women. This should be pretty quick.

All you guys out there who have been married longer than ten years can refute this entire article, since marriage is an ever-changing, dynamic situation. All those of you out there who have been married less than ten years, treat this advice like the gospel itself. I know what I’m talking about!

All my vastly limited knowledge about women boils down to what I have learned about “quality time.”

In the beginnings of marriage, usually, unless you did things in the reverse order from the standard procedure, you don’t have any kids. You both work, and other than that, you have no responsibilities whatsoever. It’s awesome. You come home from work, and spend the entire evening together. You go out to dinner all the time, and you have more money than you know what to do with, even though, at the time, you think you’re poor. Boy, were you wrong.

Then the kids come and you find out the true definition of poor. When the kids are newborns, you foolishly think that you have no free time, but again, you are wrong. It is only when they grow up and start going to school and playing sports, and karate, and piano that you truly have no free time.

As your married life progresses and the kids get older and stop staying where you put them, your couple’s together time gets less and less. After almost ten years of marriage and three children, hypothetically 7, 5, and 3 years old, you and your wife see each other for about 20 minutes a day.

As with anything in life, when you start running out of time, you invariably are forced to concentrate only on what is critical. For example, if you were only given five minutes per day to eat, you would not spend any of that five minutes chatting or doing the dishes. You would be stuffing your face with anything that was even remotely edible within arm’s reach for the entire five minute period.

I think, as a general rule, guys tend to be much more pragmatic in those squeeze-play situations than women do. For instance, if a guy is on a boat and the captain suddenly starts shouting orders at him in an excited voice, most guys will tend to just grab the winch handle and start cranking it clockwise like they were told to do. It is more of a female trait to pause for a moment and wonder if the captain doesn’t think they can follow orders without being yelled at, or if they did something earlier in the day to make him angry with them.

When the couple’s together time gets squeezed down to 20 minutes per day, both parties naturally agree that they’d better make that time count, and make sure it’s all “quality time.” This is where the differences between men and women come into play. Both parties yearn for “quality time” with each other, but unfortunately, both parties have different definitions of “quality time.”

Now, like it or not, us men are pretty simple animals. Our “quality time” standard is universal, and does not involve clothing. Enough said.

Women, on the other hand, are very complex and complicated creatures. Their definition of “quality time” is a fast-moving target, based on a multitude of different factors that may or may not include the weather, the rude clerk at the department store, the temperature inside the house, their awesome boss, the cable company, their idiot boss, the smokin’ deal on spaghetti sauce in the paper, the kids’ reaction to dinner, the tone of your voice, the cost of living, the note from the teacher, the situation in the Middle-East, your cute text this afternoon, your son’s snotty attitude, the neighbor’s stupid dog, and any number of other things that you cannot possibly know about, but have a heavyweight bearing on the situation.

Nine times out of ten, your wife’s definition of quality time that day involves you doing a lot of listening, and cuddling on the couch, usually fully clothed. When that is the case, guess what you’ll be doing?

If you thought that you would be receiving some incredible nugget of wisdom or some sage-like advice at this point, you were dead wrong. I’ve got nothing. I don’t know any more about women than I did ten years ago. In fact, all told, I know a lot less.

All I really do know is that you’d better get on board with her definition of quality time if you ever hope to have her get on board with yours.

Happy Valentine’s Day, and good luck out there, men!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

Low Tech, Low Fat Kids

My wife and I recently won two tickets to go see the Sacramento Kings play the visiting Portland Trail Blazers at Power Balance Pavilion. Since real babysitters cost money, and both sets of grandparents were out of town, we decided that I would take our seven-year-old, Son Number One, to the game and she would stay home with the other two. Win for me!

They were really good seats, down close to the court, so I was almost as excited as the seven-year-old, but he beat me out on the excite-o-meter since it was his first professional basketball game, and he got to stay up way past his bed time, on a school night, no less.

Almost immediately after we sat down in our seats, I became skeptical about the appropriateness of our surroundings for my son. The rap music that was blaring during the pre-game show contained some language that was less than desirable, and I had to answer some pretty interesting questions about the Kings' cheerleaders’ dance moves. Then there was all the swearing from the stands once the game started. (Actually, that was me. The Kings couldn't get a rebound to save their lives.)

It ended up being an enjoyable evening all around, but it served to reinforce my belief that I need to keep my children insulated from the hip-hop/sultry dancer/foul-mouthed sports fan side of life for as long as possible. There is a lot of trash out there, and it is just waiting to be a major influence on my kids if I let it.

The way I see it, the main way that the trash is attempting to enter my home is through the television and the internet. Technology, in general, seems to be my enemy in the battle to raise mentally and physically healthy children. Technology and fast food seem to be my top two foes. Anyone who has witnessed the crack addiction-like effects of television and French fries on a five-year-old cannot argue that point.

My kids sometimes think I'm being mean when I tell them they can't have a Wii, or can't eat every meal at McDonald’s and Taco Bell, so in an attempt to explain my position, I offer them this:

An open letter to my children

I love you very much, and I want you to grow up to be strong and smart. That is precisely why I have these rules:

You will be the last kid you know to have a cell phone. You don't need one. There will never be any hypothetical emergency situation that you can dream up that will change my mind. For the rest of your life, you will always be within three feet of eight other people's phones. You may get your own phone when you can afford to buy one and the airtime plan to go with it. It will be a flip-phone with no Internet access of any kind. If those are no longer available ten years from now, you will be out of luck.

You will never have an iPhone, an iPad, and iPod, an iTouch, or an iAnything. Apple products are expensive -- arguably overpriced -- and you don't have any money. My money is not for buying you iPads. My money is for buying you heat and shelter and food.

We will never own a Wii, an X-box, a DS, a PS3, or any other random string of letters and numbers denoting a video game console. The reason for this is two-fold. For starters, you get enough screen time as it is, since your mom and I taught you how to turn on the Disney channel in the morning so we could sleep in every once in a while. We're not proud of that, but when you have kids of your own someday, you will understand. I do not want you becoming pasty-white, fat little drooling slobs. At our house, your Wii is the back yard. Secondly, I do not want to spend my money on video games. I know you will get all the video game time you will ever need at your friends' houses, and that is a much more financially prudent solution for me.

You will be allowed to have a Facebook account when you are 18 years old, and not a minute sooner. You will be allowed to use the Internet under strict parental supervision to research school papers and look up cool videos of lions attacking zebras and such, but other than that, it is off-limits. If you need to talk to your friends, you may ride your bike to their house, or talk to them at school. If you are the only kid at your whole school that doesn't have a Facebook or Twitter account, I will take that as a sign that I am doing my job. If you don't like that answer, you may get your own job, your own house, and your own computer, and go crazy.

You have already eaten at more fast food restaurants in your few short years of life than I did in my first eighteen. As much as your mom and I try to avoid them, they are somewhat a fact of life these days, but the food at almost all of them is bad for you. I know it’s delicious, but it will kill you early. That is an important life lesson in and of itself. This is the reason that you have to eat all of your broccoli at home, and you never get soda. You will notice that whenever you complain about eating your vegetables, I smile. That’s because doing my job makes me happy.

In short, in an effort to make sure you grow up healthy and fit, your mom and I will feed you right, and strive to make sure that the only technology you ever own as a child is the GPS tracking device that we will have surgically implanted under your skin to keep track of you in your early teen years. You’re welcome in advance.

With love,

Dad

P.S. – No, you may not go get a second opinion from your mother.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

Sippy Cups

We did a happy dance at my house a few days ago. We are finally finished with sippy cups. Son Number Three is finally old enough to use a regular plastic cup and keep it at the table or the counter when he drinks. No longer is he allowed to roam free around the house holding a sippy cup of milk. This is a BIG deal for us, and I’m guessing that only parents who have experienced the modern-day sip cup can really relate, but I will try to explain.

The sippy cup full of water is no big deal, but water isn’t why you bought sippy cups in the first place. You bought them so that your kid would stop splashing milk on the furniture and the carpets. A sippy cup of milk is no big deal either, until it goes missing.

Now, nobody has just one sippy cup. You have to wash them on a fairly regular schedule, and you might even have more than one sippy cup-using rug rat, so chances are you have at least two and probably more. This seemed like a good idea at the time. “We’ll just buy this convenient five-pack of sippy cups, that way we’ll always have them available for our precious offspring, plus they’re cheaper this way. Aren’t we smart!” No. As it turns out, you’re stupid, because now, since you have multiples, when one goes missing you don’t notice right away.

The problem is compounded by the multiple colors that the sippy cups come in. The ever so misleadingly non-convenient five-pack has five different color sippy cups. That makes sense at first glance, because you’re thinking you’ll be able to keep track of them better. That might actually be the case if the right color lid ever stayed with the right color cup. And they might if it was just the parents handling them. Insert kids into the mix, and suddenly it’s chaos. Blue cup with yellow lid. Purple cup with green lid. Anarchy. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a sippy cup in my house with the correct color lid.

What’s the big deal, you might ask. Well, I’ll tell you what the big deal is. The big deal is that when your wife asks you if you’ve seen the purple sippy cup in a while, you have no idea. You’re pretty sure you saw the purple one this morning, but it may have just been the purple lid you’re remembering. Or was it the red lid on the blue cup? Now this conversation is going to take a lot more of your time than it really should. Whatever you were doing is put on hold until you can verify the whereabouts of the purple cup and/or the purple lid. No luck? Well, sir, that’s not good. Now we’ve got a broken arrow. A sippy cup is officially missing somewhere in the house.

The modern day sippy cup is the result of years and years of post-moon landing-era engineering and material science. They are incredible. They only let the milk out when you suck on them, and they don’t let air in or out. They have plastic air-tight screw tops and removable silicone rubber one-way valves in the lids. This makes them expensive, hard to clean, and indispensable for parents who enjoy owning furniture that does not smell like sour milk.

It is their air-tight, spill-proof nature that is both their greatest feature and their fatal flaw. Since it is in a perpetual state of hermetical seal, a sippy cup full of milk can remain hidden under a couch or behind a desk for weeks without anyone noticing. It will only be searched for when its absence is noticed, not because it smells. Once you finally realize that you haven’t seen the purple one in a while, you have absolutely no idea how long it’s been gone.

Anyone who has ever owned a gallon of milk and a refrigerator has surely experienced what happens when the milk gets too far past its sell-by date. It develops a little film on top and starts to smell a little sweet. Let it sit in the fridge a few more days and you may start to see some curdling taking place, and the smell gets a little stronger. You then take it out of the nice, cold fridge and pour it down the sink while holding your nose and lamenting the fact that you didn’t get your money’s worth out of that gallon-gone-sour. Oh, well.

That is nothing like what happens to milk in a sippy cup under a couch.

Milk in a sippy cup underneath a couch at room temperature goes a whole different kind of bad. It undergoes a special kind of chemical transformation that is usually reserved for things at the dump or things in hell, and turns to a cross between tapioca pudding and beige house paint. The smell is almost indescribable. Crack the lid on a rogue sippy cup and you will be wishing for the carefree days of the sour fridge-milk smell. And, unlike the jug from the bad gallon of milk, you are obliged to try and salvage the sippy cup itself, since they are expensive. So, you are left at your kitchen sink, fighting back your gag reflex, and scraping chunky house paint that smells like death itself out of all the little cracks and crevices in the cute purple sippy cup.

Every time you do that, you think to yourself, "Man, I can't wait for the day I get to throw these things away. I don't ever want to smell this smell, ever again, ever."

It occurs to me, as my boys grow up, that much of the early parenting experience is marked by milestones that involve getting rid of smelly or annoying and inconvenient stuff. All told, I can't remember very much about the last seven years, since much of the early parenting experience involves sleep deprivation. I remember very clearly, however, the day that each one of them was done with powdered baby formula, and baby food, and diapers. I clearly remember the days that Number One and Two graduated out of their car seats, and I will always remember the day, just a few short days ago, when I threw away the last sippy cup we will ever own.

I mean, I think it was the last one. I hope it was the last one! It better have been. Although, come to think of it, I'm not sure I actually saw the purple one... Dammit! I'd better go check under the couches.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!

My Wonderful Husband

Hello to all the loyal Just a Smidge readers out there. Marc’s wife Sandy here. You can call me Mrs. Smidge. We are having a first here at Smidge World Headquarters. Our faithful writer is down and out with the stomach flu, so I am sitting in. This is a momentous occasion, since aside from a couple of “best ofs,” Marc has not missed a week since beginning this column in 2008. Such a remarkable man!

All I can tell you is that this must be one powerful flu bug, because Marc never gets sick. I can count on one hand the amount of times he’s even had so much as a cold in the almost ten blissful years we’ve been married. He’s almost bullet-proof! I’m so lucky.

Since the Tyrannosaurus Rex of flu bugs has reduced my amazing husband to a pale, quivering, sweaty, huddled mass on the floor, I was not able to get a good answer from him on what my topic should be. The fever must be making him slightly crazy, because all he could say was, “Please, no.”

So, since humor writing is not my forte, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a little about what an amazing man Marc really is, and how incredibly lucky I am to have him. Literally every morning when I wake up, I thank God for letting me spend one more day with Marc. His captivating optimism, his intrepid courage in the face of danger, his super-incredible manliness, what can I say? He’s just awesome.

And he is such a hard worker! Up and at ‘em every morning, raring to go. He’s an incredible provider for our family. And speaking of our family, how blessed am I that Marc has given me three beautiful, healthy boys! The icing on the cake is that they all look just like him. Not only will that help them out later in life, when they grow up to be big, strong, devilishly handsome men like their father, but having them around the house as constant cherub-like reminders of my loving husband’s face keeps me sane during the hard times when I’m away from him in the middle of the day.

And I can’t forget to mention how smart he is. I don’t know if he’s ever had an IQ test, but I’m just positive he would be up around genius level. He seems to know everything about everything. And he sure is handy to have around the house when something breaks. It doesn’t matter whether it’s our toaster or our car, he always knows exactly what’s wrong with it. It never ceases to amaze me how many different things have a McGruder valve in them. It’s just a shame that McGruder valves can only be fixed with the one tool that is too cost prohibitive to own ourselves. I’m so lucky I am married to a genius that knows those kinds of things!

And did I mention how good looking he is? I guess I already did, but he’s so good looking it really bears repeating. I just can’t believe how lucky I am to have him. I even think it’s great that he went bald. Not too many people realize this, but men go bald because of high testosterone levels, and let me tell you ladies, I’m not complaining about that, if you know what I mean!

I think I should stop here, because at this point it feels like I’m just bragging. Hopefully he’ll be up and around to take care of next week’s column, because I know that this kind of thing embarrasses him. Did I mention how humble he is? I can’t believe I almost forgot that! Humility is one of his finest characteristics.

I just really can’t believe how lucky I am.

See you soon,

- Mrs. Smidge

Copyright © 2012 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!