When Good Grandmas Go Bad

We took a road trip recently, and brought my mother-in-law along. Actually, I should probably say, “she came with us.” She’s not really old enough yet to be “brought along.” I think that phrasing changes as soon as the person stops being able to help drive. Or when they start to drool on themselves. Anyway, she piled into the Ford Expedition with my wife and me and the three boys, and we headed north for Portland, OR, a mere ten hours away. We left early, and had our first stop for gas two hours into the drive, at 8:00 A.M.

It was at this stop, inside the Shell station's convenience store, that I realized she is going crazy.

When the gas pump had finished draining my checking account balance into the tank, I went inside the store to buy a drink with my leftover change. There stood my seven-year-old, holding a king-sized Kit Kat bar the size of his head, asking if he could have it.

"Of course not.”

“Well, if he can't have that, can he have a donut?" inquired his grandma, on his behalf.

 "Absolutely not." I replied, slightly bewildered that I was having this conversation with either of them, but especially with the adult.

"Well, why not?" she asked.

 "Yeah, why not?" my son chimed in.

"BECAUSE IT'S EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING!”

"Well, what does that matter?" she asked. "It's a road trip."

She had obviously gone completely off her rocker. Why does it matter? Well, for starters, we don’t normally feed the children 18,000 mg of processed sugar for breakfast. We usually shoot for actual food. On top of that, we try to avoid feeding them enough sugar to power a small city when we are going to be cooped up in the same car with them for EIGHT MORE HOURS!!!

I jokingly say she had gone crazy, but that was obviously not the case. She was able to carry on a perfectly coherent conversation, despite the fact that she wanted to feed the children hyperactive fit-inducing amounts of sugar. Since she was lucid in all other areas, I pondered why an otherwise sane woman would want to lock herself in a confined space with three sugar-crazed Tasmanian Devils.

Only one answer makes any sense. She’s trying to earn points with them. You see, us parents usually have no concerns over being the favorite. The kids get one mom and one dad, and that’s it. You're stuck with us kid. Too bad. Grandmas, on the other hand, usually have some competition. Now, our boys’ two grandmas get along great. They love each other to death, but I am now sure that they are secretly at war for favorite grandma status. And sugar, in one form or another, seems to be the main weapon in their arsenals.

When my mother-in-law comes to visit at our house, she gets up early each morning to walk to the nearby gas station to get the newspaper because my wife and I don't subscribe. I would like to sound hip and say that’s because we get all our news electronically, but the real reason is that the paper is expensive and always filled with depressing news. Why would I want to pay to be depressed?

Anyway, she always comes back with the morning paper, and some form of Hostess brand sugar for the kids. She does this so often that our kids refer to Chevron stations as “the donut store.”

The first morning we were in Portland, she took the boys and walked from the hotel down to the grocery store a few blocks away and came back with the morning edition of the Oregonian, a gallon of milk, and two boxes of cereal.

Cocoa Puffs and Trix.

Really, grandma? Was there no cereal with a higher sugar content?

Our kids have never even seen or tasted those cereals in real life, but they have apparently been waiting for the right time to try and get their hands on some after seeing them on commercials. They are smart enough to know who to ask, because grandma’s explanation for the purchase was the ever-popular, “They asked me if we could buy them.”

Oh, well, then I understand. There’s no getting out of that trap once they ask nicely and all.

She followed that up with, “Don’t worry, we decided they only get one bowl per day.”

Oh, good. I was afraid it would take less than a week for them to develop diabetes.

I was raised on healthy food with no traces of processed sugar. I would almost go so far as to say my mom was a health food nut before it was cool. She put wheat germ on our cereal and yeast in our orange juice. It was special. Today, as a grandma, she still can’t seem to bring herself to give junk food to a child, so she has taken a different route. She vies for favorite grandma status by providing them with their favorite fruits. Since she is competing with pure, refined sugar, she has to go out of her way to find exotic fruits that my wife and I would never think of buying. It started with simple pears and pineapples, but it has ratcheted up as the years have progressed.

“Nana is here, and she brought us kiwis, papayas, mangos, passion fruit, and something called a cape gooseberry!”

I guess the sugar from the fruit is a little better for them than the junk food, but the “healthy” treats are not without side effects. I’m not sure which I like less: Dealing with the emotionally un-wound child who ate too many Ho Hos, or the digestively un-bound child who ate too much pineapple. Can I see what’s behind door number three, please?

As I reflect a little more on my own childhood, I realize the grandma/sugar conundrum is nothing new. My sisters and I only had one grandma, so she wasn’t even competing, and she still gave us “syrup in every square” on our Eggo waffles at her house. My mom would cringe when we told her, and we thought that was endlessly funny, just like my boys do today.

All the same, I wish the grandmas would compete with each other by buying the boys shoes or underwear instead. Those we can use!

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!

Tooth Loss

Son Number Two lost his first tooth the other night. He is six and a half years old, and he had been wiggling one of his lower front teeth for over a month trying to get it loose enough to come out, because the way he figured it, he was behind. His older brother started losing his teeth at age five, and being a naturally competitive middle child, it was not sitting well with Number Two that none of his had fallen out yet.

I pulled Son Number One’s first loose tooth out of his mouth with my fingers, and all three boys thought that was pretty cool, so ever since then, that has been the only acceptable way to lose teeth in our family. Other kids wait until they fall out in an apple or a sandwich, but not my kids. Number One pulled two of his own teeth out at school while sitting in class. My kids are kind of weird.

I knew Son Number Two’s first tooth was getting really close to coming out, because he could bend it back and forth almost 90 degrees. He was sitting in the back seat of the car attempting to pull it out of his head as we were driving to his soccer team pictures, so I had to beg him not to mess with it until later that night, or at least until after the team photo was taken. Luckily, he listened to me and I won’t have to have this future conversation:

“Great team photo. Which one is your kid?”

“The one with the missing tooth and the blood dripping down his chin. It was a rough league.”

After he had brushed his teeth that night, he was continuing to play with the very wiggly central incisor, so I reached in there and wrenched it from his jaw. This is one of the things that I just don’t get about kids and losing teeth. I ripped the tooth out of his mouth, and handed it to him. Instead of being upset about that, like any normal adult would be, he was beaming with pride and joy. He was smiling a newly-toothless grin from ear to ear, holding his own tooth in his hand, bleeding profusely all over the bathroom counter and sink, and joyously admiring his gruesome countenance in the mirror. He exclaimed, in a cheerful and blood-spattered voice, "I've been waiting for this for six and a half years!" Like I said, my kids are kind of weird.

Because Son Number One began losing his baby teeth when he was five, I have been thinking about this subject for a while now. My January, 2011 column, “The Tooth Fairy,” asked many questions that still go unanswered today. Namely, why don’t kids ask more questions about the Tooth Fairy and his or her motives? I also discussed the need for a universally adopted fee schedule, as well as solicited advice for what to do with all the teeth I am collecting.

While no one had any good advice for my wife and me on these pressing issues, one of our good friends did give us a book entitled Throw Your Tooth on the Roof. It’s about all the different tooth traditions around the world. While it was interesting and funny, all it really served to do was add to the list of questions I have about kids losing teeth.

Apparently, saving your kid’s baby teeth and doing weird things with them is not a uniquely American phenomenon. We even stole the Tooth Fairy from another culture. Why? Why would we have done that??? Why? Couldn’t the early Americans see that the end result of parents having to be the Tooth Fairy would be very, very annoying and expensive? They were visionaries in so many respects. How could they have been so short-sighted on this issue?

Were there just not enough good opportunities to give your kids money in the olden days, so they decided to pay them for their teeth? Why did we feel the need to complicate childhood tooth loss? At the very least, couldn’t we have adopted one of the other tooth-related traditions?

As the title of the book would suggest, a lot of cultures feel that throwing the baby teeth up on the roof is the way to go. The mythical end result varies from country to country, but basically, the overriding theme is good luck. I like it because no money is involved, and there is no need to remember to make the money/tooth switch at the hopelessly inconvenient drop location of directly under the sleeping child’s head.

Besides having an imaginary flying nymph pay for them, or throwing them into the rain gutters, the next most popular tradition was planting them in the garden. Again, I like it from the standpoint of no money and no time-critical, potentially emotionally devastating situation where the child wakes up to find his or her tooth still under the pillow, caused by tired parents going to sleep on the job. What I didn’t really understand is what is supposed to be accomplished. Since losing teeth seems like a really big event in any kid’s life, I would expect the planting them in the garden thing to backfire more often than not. I know if that was our family’s tradition, our kids would be at the garden every day, examining the exact spot where the tooth was planted, waiting for the magic beanstalk.

Maybe the parents sneak out to the garden after the planting, and replace the tooth with an actual seed. If that’s the case, I am less excited about that one, because based on my lack of green thumb, my children would be convinced that they had a mouthful of defective teeth.

The book outlined all the crazy tooth traditions around the world, but never answered the one burning question: Why? Why do we do anything with kids’ teeth? Why don’t we just high-five the kid and throw the tooth in the trash? Doesn’t that seem simpler to everyone?

And why do the kids get so excited about it? Why is it such a universally anticipated event for the world’s children? Things are falling out of your mouth! Trust me, kid, that is not a good thing when you get older.

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!

Swimming Upstream

Can someone please tell me what is so difficult to understand about “kick from your hips, not your knees?”

Pivot your legs from your hips. Don’t bend your knees. Well, bend your knees a little, but just a little and only on the down stroke. Keep them straight coming up. And you’ve got to keep your toes pointed. Point them straight back away from you, not down toward the bottom of the pool.

What is hard about that?

Apparently, a lot, because my boys cannot seem to figure it out.

A few nights ago was my oldest boy’s very first swim practice. I think we paid just under $47,000 to have him and his younger brother, Number Two, join the youth swim club for the two-month “Fall Program” this year. If we want them to keep swimming after October, we can make that happen for another $300,000 or so.

I was a swimmer and a water polo player in my youth, and I have visions of all three of my boys excelling in the pool and becoming Olympic water polo players. I was not tall enough -- or anywhere close to good enough, for that matter – to be Olympic-caliber. They just need to practice a lot, and beat the odds and end up over 6’-4” tall. I plan to feed them a lot and hang them by their ankles whenever possible.

So, given my dreams for their aquatic success, I was very excited about Son Number One’s first practice. I was so excited that I didn’t even bother to question where the practice might be taking place, and drove him to the wrong pool complex. Once I realized my mistake, I drove across town at 96 miles per hour, hoping to still make it on time and preserve our first impression with his coach. Instead of that, I was the parent that brought his kid to the first practice seven minutes late. Great.

OK, we’ll try to move past that, and just wow him with your superior swimming skills. No problem.

The first few swim practices of the year involve a lot of kick boards. There were a lot of kids in the pool, but since they are still small at six and seven years old, they had them three to a lane. (After getting a rough count of the number of kids and doing some quick math based on registration fees, I estimated that it must cost about three trillion dollars to run a kids swim program. That seems like a lot.)

Off they went across the pool, holding their kick boards out in front of them and churning up the water behind them with their little legs kicking like mad. All of them except my son. He quickly fell behind the group. There was no churning of water going on behind him. An occasional foot could be seen rising above the water near his butt, but that was about it. I could see his legs under water moving like mad, but he didn’t seem to be making any progress. At one point, I’m positive that he actually went backward for a little while.

To give you a good idea of how slow he was compared to every other kid in the pool, here is an example. At one point the coach was sending the kids in each lane one at a time down the pool, spaced out at reasonable time intervals to avoid having them too close together on their way down the pool. Son Number One was the first to be sent in his group of three. The second kid to be sent passed my son almost immediately, and when the third kid in the group had traversed the entire length of the pool and made it to the opposite wall, Son Number One was just approaching the middle of the pool. He had gone an astonishing five feet in the time it took the third kid to go 25 yards.

The coach was working with him as much as possible. “Kick with your whole leg, not your knees. Keep your legs straight and move them from your hips. Point your toes.” The coach didn’t have a lot of time for one-on-one instruction, though, since he was in charge of 65 other kids, presumably to justify his estimated 45 million dollar annual salary.

The practices are only a half-hour long, so it seemed to be over almost before it had really started.  OK, buddy, we’ll come back tomorrow night and work on kicking some more.

The next night, Son Number Two got to come to swim practice also. He had missed the first one due to a conflicting soccer practice. Don’t even get me started on that. Anyway, into the pool they went. They are a year and a half apart in age, but they ended up in the same group, which was slightly surprising based on what happened the week before at try-outs. They both did pretty well, but when Son Number Two was asked to show the coach his backstroke, I’m fairly sure it was the first time he had even heard the term, let alone attempted the stroke. He resembled someone who had been lying on their back in the grass, and suddenly realized that they were covered from head to toe with ants. It was not pretty.

Off they went across the pool, kick boards in front, little legs working like mad behind them. There goes the group, across the pool, and there are both my boys, still five feet from the starting wall, kicking like crazy and not going anywhere at all. It seems Son Number Two was born with the same inherent kicking deficiency as Number One, exclusive apparently, only to our family.

“Kick with your whole leg, not just your knees. Point your toes.”

Hmm… I’d better start working with Son Number Three right now.

Maybe they’ll do better when it comes time to start using their arms and breathing to the side. Or, maybe there will be some openings in the Olympic water polo team’s equipment management department.

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!

Computer Illiterate

Computers are funny. Short of perhaps, toilets, we rely on computers more than any other device today. Actually, I take that back. We could live without toilets if we had to. I mean, we all have backyards, right? Computers on the other hand, have become essential, yet almost no one knows how they work. If you look at our population as a whole, only a minute fraction of us actually know why and how computers work. The rest of us just use them.

Compared to my mom, I am an IT professional. And compared to most people over 80 years old, I’m Bill Gates. But that does not mean that I really know anything at all about computers, and chances are, neither do you. You may think you’re computer literate, but are you really? Can you look at the registry and spot an error? Do you really know what BIOS is? You might know what it stands for, but do you really know what it is? Do you have any idea what the company Oracle even does? I didn’t think so. Neither do I.

I would be willing to bet that even the most un-mechanical person knows more about the inner workings of their car than they do about their computer. I happen to know a lot about cars and how they work, but here’s what an auto-related problem would look like if my car expertise was as sub-par as my computer expertise:

Car stops driving correctly all of a sudden with a loud bang.

Pull over on the side of the road.

Turn it off and turn it back on.

Pull back out onto the road.

Same problem.

Pull over again.

Turn it off and turn it back on.

Try to drive again.

Same problem.

Pull over and get out.

Stand right next to the blown and shredded driver’s side front tire, oblivious to what the problem is.

Call someone to come and fix my unknown problem for me. “Car won’t go. Don’t know why.”

The thing that got me thinking about all this was a familiar pop-up message the other day, from the lower right corner of my computer screen.

“Adobe Flash Player needs to be updated. Click here to continue.”

I, of course, click on the message and say, OK. I feel like I have to, because the message didn’t say “would like to update,” it said “needs to be updated.” I take them at their word.

The update begins, which takes up my time. I am forced to answer inane questions like, “Is this the destination folder you would like?” What am I going to say? No? If that is the destination folder that you guys who wrote this software think this update should go, then who am I to argue?

Downloading commences, and the familiar status bar begins to fill from left to right, giving me something to do while I wait. Look, we’re over 50% complete! Yippee!

When it has finished downloading, it immediately begins installation. One hundred percent-filled status bar later, it tells me the installation was successful. Then it shares some other news with me.

Not only did it apparently update the Adobe Flash Player like it said it needed to do, but it also went ahead and installed Google Toolbar on my Microsoft Internet Explorer without asking me if that was OK. It also tried to install Google Chrome without asking, but it failed to do so, because I already had it installed.

Imagine if this computer was my car:

I hop into my Ford Expedition and open up the garage door. I start the car and am about to back down the driveway when I notice a Ford mechanic standing at my window.

He says he needs to change my fan belt right away.

I turn off the engine and let him get to work.

An hour later he knocks on the front door and says he changed the fan belt, and also replaced the rear cargo door on my Expedition with one from a Chevy Suburban. He tried to replace the steering wheel with one from a Suburban, too, but couldn’t get the bolts loose, so he put spinners on my rims instead.

Why is that scenario OK when it comes to computers?

Amazingly, at the end of my Adobe Flash Player update experience, I received this query:

Please pick 1 thru 5 stars to rate your experience with this update. Did this update accomplish everything you wanted it to? Yes/No

Well, let’s see. You told me you needed to update an Adobe product and then you installed two Google products onto my computer. I have no idea why I needed an update to the flash player, if you actually updated it, or even what the flash player does, so I guess I have to answer this way:

I don’t know what the update was supposed to accomplish in the first place. I didn’t want it, and I don’t know if I needed it. If this update miraculously kept my computer from crashing behind the scenes, then my answer to your question is yes.

On the other hand, if the “update” to the flash player was simply to change the name from 4.0 to 4.1 and the real reason for this exercise was that Google paid you a lot of money to install their products on my computer without my permission, then my answer is no.

I wish I knew enough to know if I should be mad or not.

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 Jigsaw is Up

I always knew my wife was smart. She’s an accomplished mathematician, a master statistician, and a wonderful teacher. She can even keep the official score at a baseball game. Also, she’s a whiz with whodunits. Here’s a typical one-hour murder mystery TV viewing experience with me and her:

Show begins:

Me – Glued intently to the screen

Her – Barely paying attention while playing on laptop and/or phone

5 minutes into show:

Her: “Bob did it.”

Me: “Who’s Bob? Did what?”

So, this weekend, when I discovered she was brilliant, it came as no surprise. It did come as a shock, however, when I realized she was using her powers for evil. She is brilliantly devious. I did not see that coming.

Truth be told, I can see now that she has been manipulating me for our entire marriage. I am sad to say I just figured it out this last weekend, but it’s all so clear to me now. My epiphany came on Sunday while I was on a ladder, 15 feet off the ground, painting our shutters.

Son Number One had a sleep-over at a friend’s house Saturday night, and I drove over to pick him up on Sunday morning. That was just the situation that my wife was looking for. In fact, I think my going to pick him up was no accident. The sleep-over itself might have been part of the master diabolical plan for all I know. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

I arrived back at the house with our son, and there it was. The setup. I have seen it before a hundred times, and it all seemed so innocent. The paint cans were out on the workbench in the open garage. The hand-held power sander was plugged into a 50-foot extension cord, strung out to the front yard. The extension ladder was extended, leaning up against the house at a funny angle. And there was my loving wife, standing below the ladder. Pretending to be just about to climb up.

We have three pairs of decorative window shutters on the front of our house. The lowest pair is easily 15 feet off the ground, and you have to walk up the steep concrete roof tiles to get to them. The other ones are higher, and can only be accessed directly from the ladder, leaned up against the house. It’s a toss-up which ones are more precarious to get to.

“Hi, honey. I decided I would paint the shutters today. It shouldn’t take me more than an hour. Do you think this ladder looks OK like this? I’m not really sure how to set it up to get up there. I’m a little nervous about it, really. That roof looks so steep and slippery. Oh, well, I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

I hadn’t even been out of the car for two minutes and I was standing on the steep, scary roof tiles, sanding the peeling paint off our decorative shutters. That was at 10:00 A.M.

It was at 5:00 P.M., when I was putting the first coat of paint on shutter number five of six, that it all became clear to me. Son Number Two had been hounding me from below all afternoon about helping him with a birdhouse project that he wanted to make out of Home Depot paint stir sticks. I kept putting him off, telling him I would help him when I was finished with the shutters. He was getting impatient, and it was a little hard to blame him, since he’s six years old and he’d been waiting for seven hours.

My wife, (probably feeling guilty, now that I can see it all so clearly), offered to help him with his project since I was tied up. Off they went to the garage, and up I stayed, paintbrush in one hand, ladder death-grip in the other. Ten minutes later he was back playing on the front lawn underneath me.

“Why aren’t you doing your project with your mommy? Did she have to go do something else?”

“No, we’re done already.”

“What do you mean? It’s only been ten minutes.”

“Yeah. She went really fast.”

I had some idea of what his project was going to entail, so I was very curious. Down the ladder I came, and when I looked in the garage, I knew immediately that I had been lied to for years and years. There, sitting on my workbench, was a birdhouse made out of paint stir sticks. By my estimation, at a minimum, she had used my back saw and miter box, brad nails, my cordless drill, my combination square, and the wood glue. There sat a bird house, firmly clamped in three of my bar clamps, letting the glue dry.

She never came out to ask me what tools to use. She never came out to ask me how to use the tools. She never came out to ask me where the tools were. She never came out to ask me anything. I didn’t even think she knew I owned bar clamps, let alone where they were or how to use them. But there it was. The evidence.

She’s handy!

Big deal, you say. She’s handy with tools. A lot of women are.

You don’t understand. For ten-plus years I’ve been tricked. Let’s say my wife wanted shelves put up in the bathroom. Did she ask me to put shelves up, letting me give input on design and schedule? No. She simply spread the shelf pieces and directions all over the bathroom, got most of the tools required for the job and some that were all wrong for the job, (on purpose, now that I can see it all so clearly), and then proceeded to ask me a question like, “Should I use the Sawzall or the claw hammer to make a hole in the wall for the shelf mount bracket?”

“What are you talking about? Neither. It should just screw into a stud. Let me see the directions.”

I was walking past the bathroom from my office to the kitchen when she asked me the question. Two and a half hours later, she’s getting home from the gym just about the time I’m finishing hanging the last shelf.

That scenario, in one form or another, has been happening for our entire marriage, but it took me until this past weekend, seven hours into a painting project I never consciously started in the first place, to realize what has been going on. I am a grown man, fully capable of making my own decisions, and I woke up that day having no intention whatsoever of painting shutters. Yet there I was.

It was then and there that I realized I have been continuously tricked into doing home improvement projects against my will for years now. Projects that she, herself, was more than capable of completing. The birdhouse was masterfully-built proof. She has been feigning incompetence this whole time! My wife has been manipulating me like a puppet on a string. She is an evil genius.

Oh, well. I guess it’s no big deal really. I mean, the shutters do look good, and the home improvement projects are few and far between. I’m just glad she doesn’t have that kind of manipulative power over me with anything else!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. I just heard the buzzer on the clothes dryer. I have to get the clothes out and fold them right away. They’re too hot for my wife’s fingers when they’re just out of the dryer, but you have to fold them when they’re that hot or else they wrinkle permanently and you have to throw them away.

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!

Soccer Season

My boys started school this week, which is just wrong, because it is still August. School is not supposed to start until after Labor Day. That is how it was when I was a kid, so that is how it should be. School in the middle of August should be illegal. Anyway… as happens every year, along with the beginning of school comes the beginning of soccer season, and the end of parental free time as we know it. Now we have a very regulated schedule as to when and where we will sit in our lawn chairs and sweat, as opposed to July when we could sit and sweat anywhere and at any time we chose.

So there I sit. In my chair, at the park. Inexplicably watching a soccer practice. If you read my August, 2011 column “Soccer as Birth Control,” you already know all about my feelings on this subject. Somewhere on the timeline between when I was a kid and when I had kids of my own, parents developed the need to attend their children’s sports practices. My parents never attended a single one of my practices, and I think they would have been asked to leave by the coach if they had. Nowadays, parents are almost required by the coach to help out, and if you just drop your kid off at practice and leave, you are known as “those parents.”

“Billy fell down and scraped his knee. Quick, where are his parents?”

“Oh, they’re not here. They just dropped him off and left.”

“Oh, they’re one of those families, are they?”

So there I sit. In my chair, at the park. Watching Son Number Two’s soccer practice. Watching the poor coach try to get thirteen six-year-olds to all do the same thing at the same time. That is a statistical impossibility. Have you ever tried to get two six-year-olds to do the same thing at the same time? Very difficult. Five or more? Not going to happen. Do I feel sorry for him? No, because I coach T-ball, and as far as I’m concerned, he has it easy. Try to teach thirteen six-year-olds the rules of baseball some time. Talk about impossible. At least soccer only has four rules. Don’t touch the ball with your hands unless you’re the goalie, don’t kick the other guy above the waist, drink lots of water, and don’t kick it into your own goal. How hard can that be?

The infield fly rule. Now that’s hard to teach a six-year-old!

Actually, there may be a few more rules to soccer than that, but no one knows them. I’m pretty sure that is why the league was very adamant that every parent receive a copy of the “code of conduct” this year. We were even required to sign that we had read and understood it, and promised to abide by it. Strangely enough however, the code of conduct had very little to do with the player’s conduct. It was mostly about the conduct of the fans, meaning the parents.

We’ve all heard stories and maybe even seen first-hand the “nightmare parents” at kid’s sporting events. Those marginally sane people who take their child’s sports “career” way too seriously, and voice their opinions about the coaching decisions and referee’s calls obnoxiously from the sidelines. They exist in all sports, but soccer is the only sport where I have ever had to promise in writing that I wouldn’t yell at the ref. I would never yell at the ref anyway, but I can sort of understand why someone might. Americans don’t understand soccer. There is a good reason for that. Soccer is not understandable. Plus it is insanely boring.

The pros play for about ten hours on a field the size of Rhode Island, getting near the actual goal an astonishing three times, resulting in a 0-0 tie at the end of regular play. The referee then adds an additional 45 minutes of “stoppage time” at his or her discretion, resulting in a 1-1 tie after numerous “free kicks.” Thrilling!

The referee might give you a yellow card if you cause a foul, but he might also allow play to continue under the advantage rule, if your foul would have helped your team unfairly. If play stops, the clock doesn’t, so a common tactic is to fake injuries to run the clock down. Corner kick, goal kick, free kick, indirect free kick, penalty kick. Charging, sandwiching, worrying the goalkeeper, cautioning, dangerous play, encroaching, fair charging, obstructing, impeding, late tackling, off sides, on sides, yellow cards, red cards. I am willing to bet that at any soccer match at any time in the United States, only four people actually know what is going on. They are the ref, one of the two coaches (the one who played soccer in high school), and the European couple in the stands.

So, of course some of the parents are yelling at the referee. We’re not yelling, “What was that?” in the context of, “Are you crazy, he was totally off sides!” We’re yelling, “What was that?” in the context of, “What does off sides mean? I totally don’t even understand which team you just called a foul on, if indeed you just called a foul. You stopped the entire play, but the clock is still running, so shouldn’t someone turn it off? I have no idea what is happening, and I feel like I need to yell because you are out in the center of the field which is 2000 feet away from my lawn chair.”

Since I signed the code of conduct, I will refrain from yelling, “What was that?” at the ref. It won’t be hard, since I have no interest in soccer in the first place. I will simply keep watching my sons play, cheering them on in a positive and encouraging manner while not disparaging the other team’s players or their efforts, per the code of conduct, patiently waiting for the day they decide to skip the next soccer season to concentrate on baseball.

And if, while I’m trying not to be one of “those parents,” the coach asks me to help out at practice, I’ll do my best. I will encourage my son and his teammates to drink lots of water and kick the ball toward the correct goal. Hopefully that will be helpful. The most help I could really offer our coach however, is a simple suggestion. Have the rest of the kids always pass the ball to Felipe, the Brazilian kid. He’s the only one out there who looks like he knows what's going on.

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!

Caber Tossing Pongers

Last week I wrote about Michael Phelps, and what an amazing career he has just capped off at the 30^th Olympiad in London.  As a swimmer, he competes in a sport where it is possible to win a medal for each event he is entered in, and he is ending his career with a second-to-none count of 22 medals to his name. That makes him hard to compare on an apples-to-apples basis to a decathlete, who can earn just one medal while having to compete in more events than Phelps ever swam in any one Olympics. Medal count aside, however, there is no doubt that Phelps is one of the greatest Olympians of all time.

You know who is not one of the greatest Olympians of all time? Any ping pong player.

I have nothing against ping pong as a hobby. It goes great with beer and it’s a good way to kill a half-hour in a rec room. And I have absolutely no problem with professional ping pong players - especially the ones at the Olympics. They are phenomenal. I even enjoyed watching it for about three minutes. What I do have a problem with is the fact that someone can go to London, play ping pong really well, and end up with the same gold medal that Michael Phelps, Jessica Ennis, and Usain Bolt currently have around their necks. That is ridiculous.

To keep everyone on a level playing field, all the Olympic athletes are rigorously drug tested. If ping pong is considered an Olympic sport, then the International Olympic Committee has obviously lost sight of the reason for drug testing in the first place.

The IOC needs to apply a theoretical drug test to their screening process. They need to sit down and look at the list of events they are offering at the Olympic Games and decide if taking performance enhancing drugs would actually help the competitor win. If the answer is no, it should not be an Olympic event. Ping pong? No.

They try to dress it up by calling it “table tennis,” but let’s all be serious for a minute. You’re hitting a little plastic ball with a tiny wooden paddle. Take all the steroids you want. Get steroid injections between matches. Who cares? You’re still just playing ping pong. It’s not a sport.

If they don’t want to apply the theoretical drug test, they could apply a very simple theoretical alcohol test instead. If the game in question can be played while holding a beer in your other hand, it should not be an Olympic event.

Hammer throw – Pass. Ping pong – Fail.

Hammer throw. Now there’s an Olympic event. Pick up a 16-pound lead ball on the end of a steel cable and throw it as far as you can. A gentleman from Hungary just won the gold medal in London by tossing that measly little hammer 264 feet. He could probably eat a ping pong table. The hammer throw has deep Olympic roots, and is also an integral part of the Scottish Highland Games, which also features the caber toss, the only throwing-heavy-stuff event that is cooler than the hammer throw. A caber is a log that is 19 feet long and weighs 175 pounds. Pick it up and throw it. Plain and simple.

It is patently obvious that the caber toss should be immediately added to the Olympics to take the place of ping pong. And on top of that, every medalist in ping pong since its bewildering inclusion to the Olympic Games in 1988 should be forced to enter the caber toss in 2016, just so they can get a feel for how ridiculous their medals for ping pong really are. We could force them to enter the swimming events, but I thought it would be a little harsh to actually drown them, which is what would obviously happen.

I am not saying that professional ping-pongers don’t need a competitive venue to showcase their “sport.” Like I said, I think they are amazing, but let’s remove it from the Olympics and leave the table tennis pro tour where it belongs – in Las Vegas at the Horseshoe on a Wednesday.

If the IOC fails to take my incredibly insightful advice and get rid of ping pong, then the least they could do is make the medal sizes proportionate to the events. If you medal in the decathlon, you should get a medal the size of a truck tire. If you medal in ping pong, it should look like a dime on a string. The silver medal could be an actual dime.

Other dime-sized medal “sports” would include race walking, badminton, and trampoline. Come on, IOC! Really? The race walking course was 31 miles long. Big deal. It’s still walking. My mother-in-law just did a fundraiser where she walked 30 miles in a day, three days in a row. I guess that means she’s a three-time Olympic hopeful! Badminton is just a larger, but somehow less exciting version of ping pong, and don’t even get me started on trampoline. Have you ever seen a kid throw a 16-pound lead ball on a steel cable 264 feet in the backyard for fun? Enough said.

The medal ceremonies should be proportionate also. Actual Olympic-caliber events can maintain the current pomp and circumstance, but the ping pong players should just be handed their dime-sized medal on their way out of the arena by one of the ushers. “Here you go, big guy. Great match.”

To any Olympic ponger, fast walker, shuttlecocker, or bouncy-bouncer that disagrees with me, I offer this simple solution: Get a tape measure and lay out 29 feet on your floor. Now stand back and look at it.

That’s how far Carl Lewis flew in a single long jump.

By the way -- huge congratulations to Jike Zhang, Long Ma, Hao Wang, and Xiaoxia Li for their amazing gold medal wins at the 2012 Olympic Games.

Who?

Exactly. Good luck in the caber toss, boys.

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!

Marc Spitz Hot Dog at Phelps

Michael Phelps just turned in one of the most amazing sports careers of all time. He leaves the sport of swimming at the end of the London Olympic Games with a career 22 medals, an astounding 18 of them gold. No other single Olympian in history even has double digits in gold. In fact, he has more gold medals than the entire country of Argentina. He has more career Olympic medals than India.

At the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Phelps made history by winning eight gold medals in eight straight events. He broke the long-standing record of fellow American swimmer Mark Spitz, who went seven golds for seven events in Munich in 1972. When Phelps broke Spitz’ medal record, the world crowned him as the new “Greatest Olympian,” and there was very little public debate about it. Now, as Phelps finishes up with his astonishing career medal count, crushing former Soviet female gymnast Larisa Last-name-ina for all-time individual medals won, and ending up with twice as many career medals as Spitz, he will be written into the history books as the greatest, bar none.

I am here today to dispute that. I am here today to tell you that Spitz was better.

My case for Spitz being a more dominant swimmer doesn’t even take into account that he won most of his 1972 Olympic races by body lengths, or that he set new world record times in all seven swims. I’m not even focusing on the fact that he swam without goggles, that he swam without a cap, or that he swam with an afro, all of his rather prodigious underarm hair, and a Tom Selleck moustache. My argument even ignores his 1970’s red, white, and blue Speedo, which is hard to ignore.

My argument has to do with eating. A lot of fuss was made during the 2008 Olympic coverage about how much Michael Phelps ate every day. While it was certainly a lot, in the world of competitive swimming, it was pretty standard. World-class swimmers do two things. Swim and eat. When I was swimming in high school, I would come home from practice and eat the entire right side of the fridge. That’s just par for the course, swimming-wise.

The amount of food that Spitz and Phelps put away during their swimming days is not where my argument lies. My case for Spitz’ athletic superiority comes from the amount of food he could put away during a race.

When I was in high school, our swim coach told us a story about Mark Spitz. Back when Spitz was in high school in Santa Clara, California, Coach Pete had seen him race at a nationals meet. Spitz already held national high school records in every stroke, and he was heavily favored in every one of his races, but when the swimmers took the blocks for one of his events, he was absent.

His name was called over the loudspeaker, and everyone at the pool and in the grandstands began looking around for him. When the race officials called his name again, telling him to report to his lane to start the race, he was seen jogging toward the starting blocks from the snack bar. He had three hot dogs in one hand, and he was eating another while he was running toward the pool.

He reached his starting block at one of the middle lanes of the pool, chewing the last of the hot dog he had been eating while he ran. He handed two of the three remaining dogs to the timer behind his block, asking the man to please save them for him. He then joined his opponents, stepping up onto his starting block, still holding a hot dog.

Now, let’s be clear for a minute. We’re talking about an Oscar Mayer wiener, in a bun, with the condiments of Spitz’ choice. In his hand. On the starting blocks. Of a nationals race. He had just wolfed down one of them while running. He was now standing over the end of his lane holding another.

As the crowd looked on in awe, amazement, and amusement, Mark Spitz proceeded to stuff the entire hot dog into his mouth, reach down to touch the block at the “take your marks” command, and dive into the pool with seven other swimmers, starting his race while chewing and swallowing a whole hot dog on lap number one.

He beat the nearest finisher by almost two body lengths.

Michael Phelps is undoubtedly awesome, but all he ever did was swim. It probably never even occurred to him to combine competitive eating with competitive swimming. Mark Spitz was a trailblazing, groundbreaking, lightning fast, “I can eat a hot dog during this race and still whip your ass” kind of an athlete. Wait 30 minutes after eating before getting in the pool? No thanks. I’ll eat while I’m swimming.

Phelps says he did everything he set out to do. That may be true, but until he can do that, Spitz is still the greatest swimmer that ever lived. In my book, anyway.

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!

Vanity Sizing

The other day we visited some friends that were having a garage sale. My buddy’s wife had ransacked his closet and had a lot of very nice clothes out for sale. Figuring that I would get the friends and family discount, I dived right in. It was at that moment that I discovered perhaps the most disturbing and diabolical issue facing America today.

I was amazed by the variety of different brands of clothing that they were selling. It became obvious that our friends shop for clothes at higher-end retailers than I do. I get all my clothes from Costco and Target. This was my chance to score some good quality clothing at rock-bottom prices! The problem arose with the sizing.

The pants were OK, because all pants are sized in inches with a waist measurement and an inseam measurement. I know my numbers for those. I wish I could buy my pants as “large” or “XL,” but I understand the need for having a true measurement system, what with all the short, fat men and the tall, skinny men, and the short, skinny men, and the medium-sized slightly overweight men out there. The waist/leg discrepancies are widely varied.

Men’s torsos, on the other hand, come in six general sizes. Small, medium, large, XL, 2XL, and NFL linebacker. If you want to, you can get a lot more refined than that if you are shopping at one of those stores that have people that actually help you. They have shirts that use numbers, just like the pants. Shirts that are only sized in numbers might seem like a logical way to go for all shirts, but that would really be adding unnecessary complication. I would then have to remember my shirt numbers. I think I’m a 46 with a 17 neck, but I’m not really sure. Long or regular? Come on! I already have to remember my pant numbers, as well as my address, my zip code, and my phone numbers. That is plenty. I can’t have my life get any more complicated.

I wear an XL shirt, and I have since high school. Up until this point, if the shirt said XL, it fit me just fine. Not so, however, with the higher-end shirts at the garage sale. I pulled out one of my buddy’s golf shirts that had “L” on the collar. Normally I would have passed it right by, but it looked like the right size. Sure enough, it fit great. Hmm… That’s weird. I pulled out another one that said “XL” on the collar. Normally I would have bought it without trying it on, because I am a man, and we don’t like trying on clothes. This XL, however, looked more like a medium to me. I pulled it on over my t-shirt and sure enough, it was tiny.

I remarked at how small the “XL” was, accusing them of selling it because they had accidentally shrunk it in the wash, when I was corrected and told that it was actually a result of vanity sizing.

Vanity sizing!?! For a men’s golf shirt!?! Come on! For dudes?

As limited as my fashion knowledge is, I have actually heard of vanity sizing for women, and in their case, I can almost understand it, based on their seemingly endless preoccupation with their dress size. They don’t seem to mind that they are anywhere from a size 2 to 14 depending on the brand. That is probably due to the fact that they love to try on clothes. Men, on the other hand, do not love to try on clothes. We don’t even like to try on clothes. Actually, we hate to try on clothes. We don’t even like being in the store.

I don’t even understand the concept of vanity sizing with men’s clothes, since apparently, the change in sizing goes both ways. Some companies are catering to men who want to seem smaller than they really are. We will call that group the wo-men. Others brands are catering to men who want to pretend they’re bigger than they really are. We’ll call them the gro-men.

This must end. Whoever you are, and wherever you are, you corporate clothing company executives in charge of this sort of thing, I implore you, please stop. Whatever small percentage of wo-men and gro-men are out there that you are trying to garner favor with by messing around with sizes in some crazy plan to stroke their egos by making them feel either smaller or bigger than they really are, you need to think about the rest of us. The rest of us are actually grown men, and as I’ve stated, we hate trying on clothes.

We had a deal. We expect a “large” from your company to be the exact same size as a “large” from your competitor. We expect to be able to buy shirts and jackets out of catalogs and online, because we are not always near a Cabela’s or an L.L.Bean. We expect to be able to take a blue shirt off the rack, because we need a new blue shirt, and if the tag says “XL,” to be able to proceed immediately to the register and buy it in order to get out of the department store as fast as possible. If the sleeves are a little longer or shorter than our other shirts, we’re willing to live with that in exchange for not having to go into a dressing room and try it on. Provided, that is, that you kept up your end of the bargain and made the torso part of the shirt the size you said you did.

The common sizing rules are what knits this country together. When you start messing around with that covenant so some yahoo can feel good about buying one size smaller or larger than he actually should for some God-only-knows-why idiotic reason, the system starts to unravel. Darn it, if you keep this up, the very fabric of our society will be hanging by a thread! (Note to the general public – Sorry for all the clothing-related puns there, but I was trying to use language that fashion people would relate to. It seamed like a good idea at the time.)

Maybe, instead of punishing the rest of us by messing around with the sizes, you could keep the sizes the same and market a high-priced line of fake size labels that these ridiculous hyphen-men could iron into the collars of their shirts. You could market these tags in whatever magazines these wo-men and gro-men read. I’m assuming Vogue and Soldier of Fortune, respectively, would be a good start.

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!

Smuggling Made Easy

Since we are right in the heart of baseball season, I thought I would write a “public service” type column this week in an effort to help you, the baseball fan, combat the high price of ballpark food and beverages.

I can get you into the park with your own beer. No longer will you need to pay $27 for two Miller Lites. It’s simple. It’s ingenious. It’s a little weird.

You just need to buy a used breast pump.

You see, my wife and I, through some strange circumstances, stumbled upon the absolute best way to smuggle almost anything you want into a sports venue.

When Son Number Three was just a baby, we received two San Francisco Giants home game tickets as a gift. They were phenomenal seats, right behind home plate, at one of the best ballparks in the major leagues. They were not to be missed.

Son Number Three was only a few months old at the time, and my wife was right in the thick of the breastfeeding. He was drinking a lot, and she was making a lot. That presents a problem when said mother needs to be away from said child for eight hours. Her body would keep making milk for him, even if he wasn’t there to drink it.

If you have never witnessed the miracle of breastfeeding, you are really missing out. If a mother is on a regular schedule with a constantly hungry child, her body produces milk at very regular intervals. When a mother’s milk “comes in,” it is something very akin to inflating balloons from a high-pressure helium tank. Wham-o! Not wanting her breasts to explode in the fifth inning, and not wanting to miss going to the game, my clever wife devised a plan.

She would bring her breast pump to the game, excuse herself to the family restroom when the time came, depressurize her chest, pour the milk down the drain, and return to her seat where I would fill her in on what she missed. Brilliant.

We drove to San Francisco, pulled into our complimentary parking spot that came with the tickets, and made our way to the turnstiles. Prior to entering the park, we had to stand in line for a bag check. It was there that our great discovery was made. I naturally assessed line length versus apparent line speed and chose the optimal line. It happened to be manned by a twenty-something-year-old male bag checker. When we got up to his table, my wife opened her purse for him to peer into. Satisfied with her purse, he then asked to inspect the rather large pouch hanging from her other shoulder.

The modern-day breast pump is an efficient machine. It is made for ease of use, and ease of portability. This model had an integral carrying case, with two main access panels. The first access panel revealed the working front of the pump, with all its hose attachments, knobs, and buttons. The second access hatch opened to a rather good-sized storage compartment, ostensibly to hold the bottles and suction cup devices necessary to do the job.

My wife set the breast pump down on the inspection table, with all the flaps still closed.

“What is this?” the young man inquired, as he opened the first flap, revealing all the knobs, buttons and hoses.

“It’s a breast pump.”

“A what?” he asked, as he bent down to squint at the strange apparatus.

“A breast pump,” my wife repeated, as he began spinning it around to look at the back side. “I just had a baby, and I’m breastfeeding. This is a pump that…”

She didn’t get to finish her sentence. A light went on inside the young man’s head, and all at once he realized just what it was he was touching. He recoiled straight backward, five feet away from the table, as if he had found a coiled rattlesnake under the flap of the bag.

He continued to back farther away from the table with both his hands up in the “I surrender” position as he begged us to not only have a great day, but also enjoy the game. We were to immediately leave his table area and go about our business, no further questions asked. He was fifteen feet away from the table and still backing up when we thanked him and passed through into the park.

It’s that simple, ladies and gentlemen. Go to the second hand baby stuff store and buy a previously-owned breast pump. You could easily fit three or four cans of beer in the standard storage area, but if you felt the need to smuggle in a six pack and some sandwiches, you could always cut open the bottom and hollow out the inside. Just make sure to leave all the knobs, hoses, and buttons, and at least one of the suction cups visible under the first flap.

At today’s ballpark concession prices, a $50 to $100 investment will pay for itself in no time. There are only two cautions with this ingenious new smuggling plan. First, you need at least one lady with you, so this won’t work on the guys-only outings. Second, and most importantly, you need to go to a young man for the bag check. The 50-year-old mother of three will tear that thing apart, because she knows all about the storage compartment, and she won’t be afraid to touch 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!

The Lemonade Stand

The other day, my boys got a good lesson in business, economics, marketing, and most importantly, what it’s like to do business in California. They had their very first lemonade stand. Actually, it was a combination lemonade stand and bike and scooter wash. They figured a diversified product and service offering was key to their success.

My wife had bought them a four-foot-tall, $20 cardboard lemonade stand kit, which I was tasked with assembling. The boys “helped,” so it only took us a few hours to put together. We brought it out to the front yard, and the education began. They just thought they were having fun and making money, but unbeknownst to them, they were learning valuable business lessons all day.

Advertising

We started the day by scouting our neighbors’ lots for good lawn sign locations, then knocking on doors to ask if it would be OK to put a sign on their lawn for the day advertising the new business. We live in a nice neighborhood, so that went really well.

Site Layout

With an operation that put off a lot of drain water combined with an operation that relied on a cardboard structure, they had to be careful. We ended up locating the bike wash on the opposite side of the front yard from the lemonade stand.

Supplier Issues
Their business model depended on providing customers with “Homemade Lemonade,” or at least, that’s what the pre-printed sign said on the lemonade stand. Their supplier could only deliver lemon-flavored Crystal Light drink mix. Since Mom, Inc. has a monopoly on the food service supply chain in their region, all they could do was cross their fingers and hope the public wouldn’t know the difference.

Workers Comp Claims

Son Number Two took a chunk out of his finger while messing around with a bike chain during a wash, and a lost-time accident occurred. He was rushed to the kitchen first-aid station and was allowed to return to work later that day, but the damage was done. The “Days Without an Injury” sign went to zero, and upper management was not pleased. Neither was Son Number Two!

Health Code Violations

Shortly after his return to work, Son Number Two’s Band-Aid came off and he ended up bleeding on the lemonade stand. Thankfully there were no customers present at the time, but upper management was not pleased.

Disaster Recovery

In the late morning, the wind picked up a little and blew the cardboard lemonade stand down the street. All business activities ceased as the employees rushed to re-build their storefront, weigh it down with rocks, and get their mom to make them some more Crystal Light.

Human Resource Issues

The two main business partners had some tough decisions to make regarding a certain employee. Their younger brother, Son Number Three was simply not pulling his weight. At four years old, he could not be trusted to serve lemonade or make change, and instead of helping with the bike and scooter wash, he would tend to just splash in the buckets, put soap in his hair, and wander off during the slow times. They really needed self-starters.

Staying Focused

The long-term sustainability of their business model was brought into question when two of their friends came over and the entire organization abandoned the business to go on a scooter ride. Upper management was not pleased.

For all the challenges they faced, there was one area where they excelled: Sales.

The Art of the Sales Pitch

It helps to have a diversified product line, but you have to know how to sell it. A week earlier we had been given a large box of individually wrapped gummy treats in the shape of spiders, and my wife and I did not want the kids to eat all of them, so she suggested they offer them for sale along with the lemonade as a way to make more money. When the first customer pulled over and got out of her car, Son Number One looked her square in the eye and asked, “Would you like to buy a glass of lemonade or a tarantula?”

Who could resist that sales pitch? She bought two lemonades and eight gummy spiders.

Unfortunately, besides being good at sales, they were also a little shady with their business practices.

The Bait and Switch
The sign for their bike and scooter wash operation advertised a bike wash for 50 cents and 25 cents for a scooter wash, but when I pulled my mountain bike out of the garage, they charged me three dollars! They claimed that the 50 cent price tag was only for kid-sized bikes, but later in the day when their grandparents showed up, they only charged them two dollars to wash their Toyota! Upper management was not pleased.

Besides being mildly worried about their business ethics, I was also concerned that they might get an inflated sense of value and worth, since every single adult who came to purchase lemonade and spiders ended up paying them 3-5 times the asking price of 25 cents. Because of that, they ended up having a pretty good day, despite a pretty low sales volume. They brought in $21.75, and to make it even better for the two business partners who were really pulling their weight, their mom was able to convince their younger brother, the soap-haired slacker, that his take-home share of 25 cents was a pretty good deal. Four-year-olds are really gullible. (I wonder where they get the questionable ethics from?)

Not wanting them to have an overly Pollyanna view of doing business in the great state of California, I stepped in before the money went in the piggy banks. Time for the real lesson of the day.

I explained that before they counted their “profits,” there were still a few costs to deal with. They still owed me for lemonade stand set-up construction costs, driveway rent, leasing the $20 cardboard lemonade stand, sidewalk rent, water costs, soap costs, sign rental, material costs for the Crystal Light, and of course, consulting fees. While they thought that they had each made $10.75, in reality, they each owed me $734.

To make it even more realistic for them, I also charged them a business license application fee, deducted income tax, slapped them with an excessive wastewater output fine, and then sued them for fraud and false advertising.

I also threw in lawsuit for emotional distress, claiming that I had spilled some of their excessively cold lemonade on my pants.

That will teach them!

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!

Independence Day

The 4^th of July holiday is known all over America for its fireworks. I happen to live in California, however, so municipal firework shows are all we have. Personal fireworks are a no-no. Good ones, anyway. This year, we ended up at my sister’s house in Oregon on the 4^th. I was excited, because I thought I would have more access to better personal fireworks in Oregon. Unfortunately, it turns out they are just as lame as California. When we pulled into town, I went to the Junior League’s firework stand in the Safeway parking lot, hoping, at a bare minimum, to buy some honest-to-goodness Black Cat firecrackers. No such luck. The selection was exactly the same as the stand in my own town, at my own Safeway parking lot. I left with the $50 “Safe and Sane” Family Disappointment Package, cursing the leaders of both states under my breath.

So-called “Safe and Sane” fireworks really suck. There is no better way to put it. They just suck. The sparklers even suck. I’m not sure how it was possible to make a sparkler lamer than the ones I grew up with, but they managed to pull it off. To make it worse, we had spent the whole day of the 4^th driving, so my wife was insistent on getting the kids to bed at a reasonable hour, so they wouldn’t be cranky the next day. The sun doesn’t go down in northern Oregon until 9:30 at night in the summer, so my after-dinner fireworks non-extravaganza took place in the daylight on my sister’s driveway.

By the fourth fountain it was obvious that the safe and sane package has exactly four tricks up its sleeve: White shower of sparks, colored shower of sparks, crackling shower of sparks, and whistles. The “large” fountains reached the staggeringly breathtaking height of three feet. Happy birthday, America! Sorry this sucked.

Our boys actually enjoyed the first few, but even at seven, six and four years old, they are still male, so they became bored rather quickly. They began to ask impatiently for me to “do bigger ones.” I was then faced with the challenge of trying to explain that we were celebrating the birth of the freest nation on earth with ridiculously bad fireworks because we were not free to buy the good ones in this particular part of that same nation. I was halfway through the explanation when our savior arrived.

Matt, my sister’s neighbor from down the street, came strolling up to the driveway with his wife and daughter, two armloads of fireworks, and a big smile on his face. We had heard some very loud explosions from the direction of his house earlier in the evening, and when we asked if they were from him, he replied with a wink and a nod that he had no idea what we were talking about. He had the larger $80 Safe and Sane Family Disappointment Package under his left arm, and a bulging brown paper bag under his right arm.

We invited them to join us, and now with more safe and sane firepower, we began clustering four to six of the “large” fountains together and lighting them all at once. That made them mildly tolerable. When I inquired as to what might be in the unmarked bag, Matt said, “I’m glad you asked.”

Matt had gone to Washington, just north of Oregon, a state that still believes that Americans should be able to celebrate Independence Day in style. Matt had a bag full of mortars. Mortars are not safe. They are not sane. They are, however, awesome! Mortars are basically a 1/4 scale of a real municipal firework. They rocket out of the tube with a bang, straight up, 150 feet into the air and explode with a huge shower of colored sparks. And when I say explode, I mean feel-it-in-your-chest explode. When he set off the first one from the middle of the street, I knew we were destined for a much more exciting 4^th of July. Our boys were loving it.

It turned out that Matt, being the kind of courageous American male that is willing to cross state lines with illegal fireworks in order to have a good time, was also the kind of American male that makes his own fireworks. He had some homemade “firecrackers” made out of something called flash powder, that apparently burns three times faster than gunpowder. They looked like a two-inch-wide triangular piece of flat cardboard with a fuse sticking out. When he lit the first one and threw it across the street, we immediately knew where all the loud explosions had been coming from. It shook the windows! Our boys were loving it.

At that point, my sister’s slightly eccentric neighbor, Mark, from across the street, came out to join us with some Roman candles. We held them up and shot flaming colored balls down the street. Now we’re getting somewhere! When Mark decided that the Roman candles weren’t good enough, he went across the street and came back with his own mortars. Now Matt was busy operating two mortar stations, sending fireworks high into the air to the delight of the crowd that was gathering. Our boys were loving it!

Not one, apparently, to waste an opportunity to party, Mark kept going back and forth across the street bringing different items over to the driveway. He had quite a collection of illegal fireworks, along with a speaker/amp for his iPod to add some music to the festivities, and some bootleg whiskey that his friend had sent him, to warm up the crowd. It turned out that Mark owned a gun manufacturing facility a few towns over, and he jokingly (I thought) asked me if I wanted to shoot some blanks out of an M-16. I, of course, said yes.

It was starting to get dark when things started to get a little out of hand. Some random guy from down the road wandered over wearing Coke-bottle glasses and rubber boots, with a beer in one hand and a mortar shell in the other. As people were lighting Mark’s spinning and flying fireworks left and right out in the street, Matt and captain rubber boots were trying to figure out which mortar tube would be best for the new random mortar shell, and Mark, wearing a white dress shirt, shorts and sandals, was standing in the middle of the street holding a glass of whiskey in one hand and an M-16 in the other.

Now, as an American male, I am pro-mortar. I am also pro-homemade fireworks, pro-loud music, pro-beer, pro-whiskey, and pro-machine gun. At 10:00 P.M. on the 4^th of July, however, when I surveyed the scene that had developed in the street in front of my sister’s house, I decided I am not necessarily pro-all-those-things-at-once when my boys are running around in the middle of it. It was starting to look more like a war zone than a barbecue. 

I packed up the kids into the car, and dragged my wife kicking and screaming away from the festivities. Mind you, this was the same woman who was insistent on getting the kids to bed right away – two hours earlier. Deep down, she’s secretly pro-all-those-things-together, too, which is why I love her.

We said goodnight, and left one heck of a party in our rearview mirror. I guess I’m becoming more prudent in my old age, or my parent-age. One thing is for sure, the younger, single me would have braved the flying fireworks and stuck around in hopes of firing some blanks out of that M-16! Oh, well.

We went back to my sister’s house the next morning to help clean up, and the house was still standing, so I guess the party didn’t get too out of hand.

Happy birthday, America!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

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The Dad-cation

What’s the next best thing to going on vacation?

When your wife takes your three kids and goes on vacation, and leaves you home. It’s called a dad-cation. You still have to go to work during the day, but you are back to being a bachelor in the evenings. My wife gave me a dad-cation recently when she took the kids to the coast for a week. She even helped out by emptying the refrigerator and taking all the food with her, so my temporary bachelorhood was more authentic. The only thing I ever had in my fridge when I was single was hot sauce, beer, and olives.

A dad-cation differs greatly from the old bachelor days in one regard. What the old bachelor me would have considered a very boring evening, the dad-cationing me considers bliss.

I would come home from work and the house would be quiet. For a while each night I would just listen to the quiet. Then, I would go up to my office and pay bills, or organize the health care files, or balance my checking account. It was great! And I would sit and think.

I never get to sit and think anymore. I’m fairly sure the human brain is only good for so many minutes of hard work in any given day. When you come home from work to a house full of kids, the brain up-time you have left over from work is quickly exhausted by your children. Rapid-fire questions, helping with projects, refereeing disputes, coloring, reading children’s books, and pretending to be the leader of a gang of puppies who are also spies who have laser beams and force fields and can also be cheetahs who are also truck drivers and jet pilots takes a lot out of you. By the time all the force field cheetah pilots go to bed, your brain just needs to be off. There is no thinking power left over for anything else. On the dad-cation, however, a man can think.

A man can also watch his own TV on a dad-cation. One of the big problems with trying to raise kids who are only allowed limited screen time each day is that you, yourself, get limited screen time as a result. During a typical day, the only thing I ever see on my TV is a Disney show. By the time the kids are in bed, I am too tired, or have too much to do, to watch a grown-up show. On the dad-cation I rented an R-rated movie and watched it while I ate dinner! How crazy is that? I also watched an entire baseball game, and even a comedy with questionable language. It was awesome.

I slept soundly on my dad-cation, too. Ever since we had kids, my nights have involved a lot of pee. I occasionally wake up to pee, but with three boys down the hall, someone else always has to pee, and 99 times out of 100, I am involved somehow. I either hear it, hear about it, help with it, or clean it up. There are far less pee-related activities on the dad-cation.

I slept well, too. When my wife is gone, the hump is available. You know the hump. The big ridge in the middle of the mattress that separates the 10-year-old sleeping divots on either side. I moved to the middle of the bed and slept on the only part of the mattress that still has its original firmness. My back loves the hump!

When my wife returned with the kids, I was well rested and in good spirits. I was also totally unprepared for their return. Now, don’t misunderstand. I missed them and was very happy that they were home, and thankful that they were home safely. I missed being a truck driving spy puppy, and I had been looking forward to their return, but as it turned out, I wasn’t totally ready for it.

Two minutes after I walked into the house from work I was refereeing an argument about who called who a butt face. Three minutes later, when one of them came to me complaining that his brother had punched him in the stomach, I looked at my wife incredulously and asked, “What happened while you were away? Have you been feeding them sugar the whole time?”

She smiled sweetly at me, the way you smile at an idiot, and said, “Honey, they’ve always been like this. Have we been gone too long?”

It’s amazing how fast you can slip back into bachelor mode on a dad-cation. They’re my own kids, but after a week off I was on total patience overload inside of a half-hour of their return. It was as if I was brand new to the whole thing. So, I have decided there needs to be an ease-in period from the dad-cation, much like getting into a hot tub slowly. You either need to be re-exposed to one kid per day for three days, or all three kids for 20 minutes the first day, an hour the second day, and so on, to ease yourself back into full-strength parenting.

The only problem with that is, your wife has been a single parent for a week and wants nothing more than to throw the children at you and run back out the door.

Oh, well. It doesn’t matter. Bachelors don’t know what they’re missing. It’s loud, you can’t think, you can’t watch TV, you can’t sleep, and your back hurts, but you wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

Bachelors hardly ever get to be motorcycle-riding saber-tooth tigers with jet packs and exploding throwing stars.

I do all the time.  

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!