Talent show champs!

It seems like forever since I've been able to jot anything down here. We've had everything from Noah's and Gabriel's performance in Oliver! (I didn't direct this one; in fact, I was distinctly hands-off until the last week when I chipped in where I could), I just started a new leadership program (it's the beginning of another Master's program if I want it to be; we'll see how much the state is willing to pay for), and I'm completely buried at work. Suffice to say, my personal writing has been on hold.

However, I have to relate the kids' Talent Show experience from last night. Every year, Gabriel's school holds a talent show and, being an elementary school, it's usually pretty cute. Painful at times when magic shows and card tricks go awry, but you can never see too many first-graders tap dancing. No, really, I mean that.

This year, they invited siblings and other young members of the community to join in, though, and, of course, Gabriel's brothers couldn't be left out of the action. OK, well Stormy tried to be left out of the action because he's 13 and is utterly embarrassed by EVERYTHING, but he was ultimately drafted by Gabriel's Kindergarten teacher, who is remarkably persuasive.

Colby and I wrote a skit in which Colby played an angel, our neighbor played the devil, and both argued over Gabriel's immortal soul. Well, not his immortal soul, exactly; the devil tried to get him to steal a hamburger, but it was still pretty cute. Here's the script:

The Decision

The scene: Gabriel is sitting at a table eating lunch by himself. An angel and the devil walk in from opposite sides with trays of food and ask to sit with him. Gabriel politely answers yes and the scene unfolds.

Devil: Care if I join you?

Gabriel: Sure...go ahead.

Angel: Can I sit here?

Gabriel: Yeah, fine.

Devil (to Gabriel): So you done anything fun lately?

Gabriel: I played Animal Crossing...

Devil: No, I mean really fun...like mean fun...

Angel: Would you leave him alone? He's just a little kid.

Devil: Gotta start 'em young, I say...So how 'bout it, Gabriel? I know you must have done something naughty, right? Maybe told a little lie to your parents? Cheated on a test? Maybe grabbed an extra snack?

Gabriel: No I have never done any of those things

Angel: Of course he hasn't! His name is Gabriel, after all!

Devil: Ahh come one just one little lie...or something you might have done in Animal Crossing. That is a pretty great game. I bet I could find lots of ways to be naughty there.

Gabriel: Well...

Angel: Nothing...really...nothing at all...

Devil: Yes, what did you do Gabriel

Gabriel: Well, I pushed Mott around in animal crossing.

Angel: Well, that's not so bad, right? It's just a game... (looking nervous)

Devil: Well, it certainly doesn't sound very angelic. If he can push around a lion in a game, I bet he could do something naughty right here.

Angel: Come on now...Animal Crossing is rated E for everyone, although online interactions are not rated.

Devil: I'll tell you what, Gabe...how about you take the cheese off that cheeseburger there, and go tell the lunch lady that you should get the burger for free? It was missing the cheese, after all...

Angel: (looking horrified) That would lying! Gabriel, just eat your cheeseburger. It's tasty, isn't it? And it's a balanced, nutritious meal prepared by your hard-working lunch ladies!

Devil: Ahh, come on...he's already headed down a slippery slope in Animal Crossing...the least he should do is get a free burger!

(Gabriel looks back and forth as they talk, as if he is watching a tennis match)

Gabriel: Don't worry, don't worry...I'm a pure meat-eater! (he takes a big bite)

Angel: Don't you mean a peer mediator? You mean you can help us resolve our problems?

Gabriel: No, I mean I'm a pure meat eater! I'm eating pure meat!

Angel and Devil get up and walk away together, arguing about the best way to corrupt small children...voices fade as they walk away, leaving their trays behind them.

Gabriel, looking around sneakily, grabs the burgers off both the angel's and devil's tray, and puts them on his own. He gives a great big smile as he takes a big bite of one of his 3 burgers now.

Gabriel (leaping up with a flourish): Now that's how you get a free hamburger!

It was pretty impressive, actually. Gabriel's timing was impeccable (for a six-year old) and Colby may have finally found his voice.

Not to be outdone, Noah joined a bunch of teachers, moms, and, ultimately, all 3 of his brothers, for a Zoomba dancing performance. Zoomba is not so easy to explain, but it's the latest quasi-aerobic dancing exercise craze to sweep the nation (or at least the middle of nowhere New England). Although Colby danced pretty hard, Gabriel was just cute because six-year olds doing Zoomba are inherently cute, and Stormy was worth a chuckle with his stony face, Noah let it all hang out. Even if his chemistry grade keeps him out of Harvard, the boy has a future in Zoomba.

Of course, none of them was crowned Talent Show Champion because that level of competition isn't politically correct. However, between the skit and Zoomba, I think they pretty well swept the show.

My kid gave me ringworm

It was the little guy. He seems remarkably sweet and innocent. I could see Stormy giving me ringworm...He's not too big on the whole personal hygiene thing, but Gabriel likes to be spotless. It all started with a little rash that looked innocuous enough. Probably just a bit of dermatitis or eczema, I thought. Then it started to spread.

For those of you with multiple kids, you'll know that the more kids you have, the more cavalier you tend to become with illnesses. By kid number four, there's very little you haven't seen. You've been barfed on, teeth have been lost, dog food has been consumed in vast quantities (but not by the dog), falls have been survived from higher and higher locations. You get the idea. My wife is fond of saying that your first kid is like your best china, your second kid is Corel Ware, your third is Chinette, and your fourth is a napkin held as you eat over the kitchen sink.

The point being that we didn't exactly rush to the doctor when kid #4 got a rash. This isn't the sort of thing you get fussed about if it isn't accompanied by anaphylaxis. Once some hydrocortisone didn't take care of it, though, we decided to take him to the doctor.

She diagnosed him with ringworm. Really? Apparently, just one of the lesions had the ringlike structure of dead skin associated with ringworm, but the other bumps and such were ringworm, too. Did you know that ringworm is caused by the same fungus responsible for jock itch and athlete's foot? It's not actually caused by a worm. It's also highly contagious. That's fun, huh?

So a few days later when the back of my leg started to burn and itch, I was suspicious. Trying not to look like a dog chasing his tale, I tried to see what was on the back of my leg. As I spun around, I caught glimpses of a couple of red lesions, not unlike those on Gabriel's belly.

My kid had given me ringworm. There was a fungus amongus and it stinks. It didn't help when a friend of mine said, "Ringworm? He's got ringworm? That's the biggest pain in the ass. Make sure you put cream on it every day...it can take months to go away!"

Great. So now I've seen ringworm too. Noah was itching last night before bed. I have to wonder if it's just his mild case of hypochondria or if Gabriel infected him too. The little rugrat.

Why don't you just read Dad's Twitter feed?

The other day, I came home from work and started telling my wife a story (she'd asked how my day went) of a particularly irritating event. Noah walked in and said, "We know, we know," and finished the story.

A bit of background is necessary here, by the way. My wife and I have taken to setting the kitchen timer for 10 minutes after we all get home so that we can recap the day, exchange information as needed, and otherwise have a few minutes of uninterrupted conversation. Such conversation is generally not easy to come by in our house, so it's a valued commodity.

He turned to my wife and said, "Why don't you just read Dad's Twitter feed? Then you two wouldn't have to set the timer every day." It's not a bad point, actually, but, of course, he missed the part where I actually like talking to my wife. She's the only one in the family who doesn't read my Twitter feed or my blogs, though.

My mom, a regular reader of my Tweets and blogs, gets far more information from them than from our occasional phone calls. While my wife always tells me I should call her more, I always respond that I don't need to. She reads my Twitter feed, after all.

Dinosaurs! And werewolves. And some more dinosaurs.

Gabriel has a vivid imagination. Really vivid. Maybe it's because he has three older brothers who pull his leg all the time, or because he's already been in a couple of Noah's plays (bit parts, mind you, but enough for him to talk about them incessantly). Maybe it's because he reads a lot or simply because we don't discourage it. He is six, after all. How long do kids get to believe in whatever makes them happy?

Last year, he got into some fairly heated debates with some very down-to-earth girls in his Kindergarten class. He insisted that dinosaurs were real and that he had, in fact, hatched dinosaur eggs in our backyard. I tried a gentle scientific approach, explaining that we had found dinosaur fossils, so we knew that they were real, but hadn't lived on Earth for a long time.

He wasn't having any of it. Every slightly rounded rock that he found was a potential dinosaur egg. Of course it didn't help that Colby kept stealing the "eggs" and telling him that they must have hatched.

This year, Gabriel played a werewolf cub who bit Noah (the leading man, I might add) in our high school's production of The Werewolf's Curse. It wasn't long after that he woke up with a sore arm. I told him that he had probably just slept wrong, but Colby (what is it with Colby?) told him that he was a werewolf and had bitten his arm the night before.

Guess what Gabriel told his class during their next "sharing" (a modern and somewhat dissatisfying take on show-and-tell without the show-and)? He let them know that during the next full moon he would be transforming into a werewolf. According to his teacher, he was deadpan serious. Needless to say, she moved to the next sharing quickly (although she was remarkably cool about informing us and even gave us suggestions on how to keep him from being upset when he didn't transform).

For two weeks, we heard about nothing besides werewolves. He Googled werewolves. He watched the calendar for the next full moon. He considered who he might bite when he did transform (some bullying second-graders were tops on his list). When the day of the full moon came, we were scrambling to give him an out.

Some serious Googling turned up a blog post about how some werewolves don't actually transform, but instead just feel differently during the full moon. Another post suggested that it could take years to fully transform. Although it was a bit disturbing that adult bloggers were giving as much thought to werewolves as my 6-year old, we ran with it.

Colby actually wrote a post himself suggesting that if a werewolf didn't eat a pile of vegetables that he wouldn't transform. Since Gabriel hates vegetables, this seemed like a fine approach.

By the time the moon rose that night, Gabriel was pretty well convinced that if he did transform at all, it would probably just be into a cub or something vaguely furry and grumpy. Dodged that silver bullet, so to speak.

More recently, he carried on quite a conversation with his tooth fairy. We stick with the story that there are many tooth fairies, explaining why some of his friends might get more per tooth than he does. A rash of lost teeth led to several visits and Noah couldn't help but leave him a note from his tooth fairy. Gabriel wrote back (of course) and ended up corresponding via under-pillow mail for several nights. Finally, the tooth fairy wrote that he was headed to Jamaica for a vacation, so he wouldn't be able to stay in touch for a while.

Now, however, we're back to dinosaurs. For him, these beasts still roam the Earth (somewhere). He found more round rocks yesterday on a walk and brought them home to hatch them. They sat on a pillow, covered with a small blanket until Noah snagged them and hid them before we went out for the evening.

When we came home, we had to do a complete check of the house to ensure that the hatched dinosaurs had escaped and weren't waiting for us. Since they obviously escaped, Gabriel asked me to call Animal Control and alert them. He's quite persuasive, so I ended up having a 3 minute Bob Newhart-style one-sided conversation with "Animal Control" on my Blackberry.

The kid was nervous, but he's a glutton for punishment. He made me read a chapter of Jurassic Park for our bedtime story.

When it comes down to it, though, we all value his brilliant imagination so much, we just can't bear to sit him down and have the talk yet. He'll figure it out. For now, he certainly gives us stories to tell and the wonder in his eyes makes any extra work well worth the effort.

Missing my blog

I haven't written anything on this blog in too many days. Life and work have gotten the best of me and I'm still so bloody far behind I can't even see straight. Oh well...in between thesis work and appointments for the rest of the week, I have some funny stories to relate. Talk to y'all soon :)

Epic ice fishing FAIL

Image by Odalaigh via Flickr - Not a New Englander.

I went ice fishing for the first time yesterday. People here in New England think that ice fishing is a good time. Ice fishing, as the name suggests, involves fishing through ice. This, of course, implies that it must be cold enough to freeze a large body of water to adequate depth to support people.

I have been assured by experienced ice-fisherpeople that a mere 2 inches of ice can support a person, but this winter has been cold enough that our lake of choice (the site of an entire ice fishing derby) had about 8 inches of ice on top of it, penetrable only with a gas-powered auger. I don't own an auger, gas-powered or otherwise, but fortunately, many avid ice-fisherpeople in our area do and they were happy to make holes in the ice for us.

Chainsaws work too, by the way, but no self-respecting, pragmatic New Englander would think of using a chainsaw when, not only will the saw get wet, but inexpensive tools are available to make holes of the perfect size and shape without risk to limb or saw. Chainsaws are for cutting wood, not ice, or so I'm told.

I've never had any luck fishing. I caught a minnow once with my uncles when I was a little kid, but that was only luck as I speared the poor little guy, swimming through some grass. I caught a fish at a trout farm, too, but that counts even less than catching the minnow.

However, I've inherited various fishing poles and tackle over the years and give fishing a shot in some form or another every summer with the kids. Gabriel especially likes the idea of fishing and begs regularly to go. We still never catch anything. Not one to give up, though, I broke out the rods and tackle at 7:00 Saturday morning, rounded up the kids, bundled up the wife, took a thermos of coffee, and headed to the lake.

As we all piled out of the car and grabbed our fishing poles, I had to wonder why people were chuckling. We weren't dressed in the survival gear everyone else seemed to be wearing, but I thought we looked respectable enough. I didn't think my fishing reputation preceded me, but we do live in an area where a lot of people are pretty good at living off the land, so maybe I just had the look of an unsuccessful fisherman.

It wasn't until our friend Jason (who was helping run the fishing derby and had invited us down) came over to us and said that we wouldn't need our rods that I really became confused. Were we going to spear the fish? Break out the unused chainsaws and rip them to shreds? Jason said that he and his dad had plenty of equipment for us.

"You can use those poles if you really want, but they're a little long. Most poles are only about this long," he said, holding his hands about a foot apart. The light went on then, as I imagined trying to get my line into a 6 inch hole 7 feet away from me and I quickly put the poles back in the car.

This was about the time that the real genius of ice fishing (despite the 25 degree temperature on the lake with bitter winds blowing off the ice that really made me question the advisability of our family adventure) became apparent. Most people, it turns out, don't even bother with poles at all. They simply use "tip-ups." Tip-ups are slick little spring-loaded flags that sit over your holes, dangling your bait in the water; when a fish grabs the bait, the flag pops up, you grab the line, and you've got yourself a fish!

This seemed like the answer for me: fishing that even I couldn't screw up. The fish just come to you! People were sitting in lawn chairs on the ice, sitting inside tents, building campfires (yes, on the ice) and cooking on portable grills, while their tip-ups sat over their holes. This could actually be a lot of fun if it wasn't so frickin' cold. It took me about 15 seconds to realize why everyone else looked like they were ready to climb K2.

Within an hour, Noah had snot icicles on then end of his nose. Fortunately, ice fishing is not the sort of sport enjoyed by the average high school girl, so he didn't have to worry about picking up a date on the ice, but he was over it. Luckily for him, the lake happens to be behind the high school, so as the snot icicle grew longer, I took pity on him and let him hang out in my office. The heat is broken in there currently and runs constantly, no matter what the thermostat setting, so said snot icicle thawed quickly at 80 degrees.

Within 2 hours, all of my hot coffee was gone and we hadn't caught a single fish. Flags were popping around us, but none of our three holes managed to produce anything more than ice that Gabriel kept scooping out with a special ladle (also, apparently, invented for the sole purpose of scooping ice from fishing holes created by augers invented for the sole purpose of making holes for fishing through ice).

Someone had made a giant Vat-O'-Clam Chowder. I've never eaten clam chowder at 9:30 in the morning before, but it was incredible. I'm still undecided whether it was genuinely good or I was just so bloody cold that anything capable of warming me from the inside out was a gift from God. I think it was a little bit of both.

We were pushing three hours and I had to get back to the house to meet with a couple of contractors. No, really, this wasn't just an excuse to get the hell off the frozen lake and thaw out in front of my pellet stove at home. Really. I swear.

Colby decided to stay and man our holes since several of his friends were there. The rest of us got in the car as fast as we could, tacitly agreeing that our next fishing trip would be in the spring. Late spring.

One particular point of interest on our way to the car: Gabriel and I both needed a bathroom break, so we hit the porta-potty. This particular porta-potty had one of the little urinals attached to the side, making, thankfully, for some very speedy cold-weather peeing. The bottom of the urinal, though, was filled with salt, placed there to keep the urine from freezing. I thought that was a nice touch.

I came back to get Colby a couple hours later, fully expecting to have a tasty bass or trout for dinner waiting. I shouldn't have been surprised, however, when he informed me that we hadn't caught anything. Not a single fish.

I think I may leave ice fishing to the heartier New Englanders. Gabriel, however, is already planning our next expedition, this time involving canoes, the minute the ice thaws this spring.

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Music wars

My kids have, well, eclectic tastes in music. This is being pretty diplomatic, especially for Stormy, who has taken to listening to complete emo crap lately.

I know I used to drive my parents nuts with my music, too. Master of Puppets is made to be listed to at full volume, obviously, but I don't think this was obvious to my mother every morning for a year before school. I don't think she was relieved when I switched to the Use Your Illusions double album set either, especially since I skipped the more folksy songs.

So I try to have some degree of understanding. It's pretty bloody hard to be understanding when Stormy is singing along massively out of key with some new awful band called JetLag Gemini.

I single out Stormy because his music is the least tolerable. At least, however, somehow I've gotten him into thrash. We were both banging our heads to Machine Head's latest on the way home today, so there are brief reprieves from the torture.

There are no such reprieves with Colby. He, like me, can't carry a tune in a bucket. Imagine an asthmatic rhinoceros singing showtunes and you have Colby. He has a habit of memorizing bits of songs that Noah and Gabriel listen to (we'll get to those jokers in a minute) and then bursting into song. His other favorite pastime? Using lines from musicals to carry on a conversation.

"How was your day, Colby?"

"Disappointing."

"Really, why?"

"The caterine company laid me off."

"Colby, stop quoting Avenue Q! Seriously, how was your day?"

"(singing) I lay...in bed...all day long...feeling...melancholy..."

"Arghhh! Never mind..."

You think I'm kidding. Try talking to the kid. It might not be so bad if he knew more than 3 lines from every song.

Of course, his sparse knowledge of Broadway musicals is a direct result of his oldest and youngest brothers' obsession with modern showtunes. Fortunately, we're not talking Hello Dolly or South Pacific here. Gabriel has memorized most of the songs from Avenue Q, Spamalot, and Evil Dead (the musical); he's working on The Wedding Singer.

Gabriel's biggest disappointment of 2008, besides not being able to get his favorite female classmate under the mistletoe, was missing Spamalot when Noah and I saw it Hartford. And, promise not to tell my wife, but he was thrilled when I put the entire Evil Dead Original Cast Recording on his iPod. It includes his favorite song, "What the Fuck was That?" He knows not to sing that one out in public, but every time it finishes, he smiles from earbud to earbud and says, "I just love that song." I have to admit that it is pretty catchy.

I'm not sure which is more YouTube-able. That or listening to him sing "If You Were Gay" with Noah. Gabriel always insists on singing the part of Nicki (Avenue Q's moral equivalent of Sesame Street's Ernie). This is OK, though, because Noah has completely mastered Rod (a flamboyantly gay and closeted parody of Bert).

Noah has three things on his Zune. Musicals, Weird Al, and The Presidents of the United States of America. His musicals go a little deeper though. The Drowsy Chaperone (but only because it has Sutton Foster in it) and [Title of Show] frequently make it onto his playlist.

And then there's me. I was in my glory the other night at a Metallica concert (thanks to Laura and Jason for thinking of me when they had an extra ticket!), banging my head the whole time, and finally, belatedly, discovering Machine Head (and, in fact, rediscovering the entire modern thrash genre).

It's not all metal for me. Sometimes I'll break out some industrial goodness like Nine Inch Nails or the Prodigy. When I really need to get work done, out comes hard trance or hard house, the bass thumping in time to my typing.

We won't even talk about my lovely Luddite. I have just one word for you and then I can't bear to say any more: country.

We use our headphones a lot.