Once our cats are gone, we're taking a break from having pets...or at least that's what we tell ourselves.

We owned all of these guys at one point. Now only the two on the left remain.

We currently own three cats: Ginny (11 years old), Molly (9), and Cheddar (age unknown, but probably 8-ish?)

I love them all. They're affectionate – each in their own way – and they cause minimal damage to our house.

Actually, they cause zero damage as long as Ginny is on her meds. A year or so ago she started peeing in places she wasn't supposed to, so the vet prescribed some Happy Cream. Every night we rub a small dab of the cream inside her ear, which keeps her both content and continent, if somewhat zoned out.

Apart from that, all three are pretty healthy felines, at least for the moment. We've been down this path several times before, so we know in a few years they'll start declining.

It will be sad, and we will love them until the very end, but Terry and I came to the decision a while ago that these are the last three in a long line of Tennant cats.

We've owned cats together since before we were married. For the three months leading up to our wedding in 1992, I lived alone in the house we had bought with a little kitten named Alex. He was the first of our many four-legged, fuzzy friends.

Over the subsequent 34 years, we've owned as few as one or two cats at a time and as many as five. Our current three feels like a good number, especially to me as the person who daily feeds them and cleans their litter boxes.

When we lost our boys Fred, George, and Charlie in a 15-month span in 2022 and 2023, we were down to just Ginny and Molly. And that seemed fine.

Then Cheddar unexpectedly joined the team in the spring of 2024. You can read about that here, if you're interested.

Now I truly think we're playing out the string. I don't mean that to sound heartless. As I said, we love our three kitties and will continue loving them until it's their time to go.

But I've been doing the litter box/cat feeding thing almost every morning for 3+ decades. I wouldn't mind hanging up my scooper. And Terry and I would both be OK not having to worry about aging cats using our basement armchairs as scratching posts or surrogate bathrooms.

I say this as someone who has had at least one pet in the house consistently since birth. I grew up with dogs and fish, while our kids have owned cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, rats, chinchillas, mice, and fish of their own.

I've taken care of more than my share of furry and non-furry creatures. As sad as I'll be to lose Ginny, Molly, and Cheddar, I'm ready to take a break. A permanent break.

And this time, I mean it.

It says here I'm older than three-quarters of the people I meet

There is a website called oldfart.io that exists solely to let you know what percentage of the population is younger than you.

You just enter your birthdate and the specific group to which you want to compare yourself (the entire world or an individual country), and the site will instantly crush your hopes and dreams.

Actually, it only crushes your hopes and dreams if you're of a certain age. I'm not sure what that age is, but I feel like I'm coming up on it awfully quickly.

According to the oldfart.io calculator, as someone who is roughly 56.7 years of age, I am older than 82% of people in the world and 72% of people in the United States.

The difference, I suppose, is that the world's population includes many countries with relatively low life expectancies compared with the U.S.

And let me just say, for as much as we Americans act like we have the best of everything, we do not rank highly in the life expectancy department. Depending on the source you consult, we have something like the 60th-highest life expectancy out of 230-odd sovereign nations in the world.

The top-ranked country, according to worldometers.info? Monaco, with a life expectancy of 86.7 years for both sexes combined and 88.8 years for women specifically.

At the bottom of the list is Nigeria, at just shy of 55 years overall.

Worldometers.info has the U.S. coming in at 79.76 (82.2 for women, 77.3 for men).

You only have to be a person of somewhat advanced middle age like me to find yourself more chronologically gifted than three of every four people you meet. This is somewhat disconcerting.

Still, I can't deny it's true. I'm thrilled at work when I'm not the oldest person in a meeting. Most of my colleagues were born sometime after I graduated from college.

There are positive and negative ways of looking at this situation:

• POSITIVE: I am a person with many years' experience in the full-time workforce, giving me wisdom and insight I can share freely with my younger co-workers.
  
  
• NEGATIVE: I am going to die soon.
  
  

I'm kidding about the dying thing, of course...I think...at least as far as I know.

I've only become aware of my impending senior citizenhood over the last year or so. Before that, it never really occurred to me.

That's mostly because I don't feel especially old. I have no chronic pain, I still move well, and I still heal up pretty quickly (if not as quickly as I used to). I'm winning the battle against aging in my mind, at least.

But eventually, we all lose the battle against math, by which I mean not the school subject but the inevitability of time.

The numbers are what they are, and they say I am older than 75-80% (or more) of anyone I'm likely to meet on this planet.

On the other hand, I don't feel so bad showing up at a restaurant at 4:45pm for dinner. Call me an old fogey, but I'm opting to beat the crowds every day of the week.

(NOTE: Not to emphasize the age thing, but happy birthday over the next week to my older siblings Mark and Debbie. Mark's birthday is this Friday, while Debbie's is next Monday. They both make aging look easy.)

Parents, make sure you get video of your kids doing everyday things, not just the big holidays and special occasions

 

The advent of home movie cameras in the mid-20th century (and later the camcorder revolution of the 1980s) meant that families for the first time could capture video of events formerly documented only through still photos pasted into scrapbooks.

The result, for many of us, is a library of old reel-to-reel, VHS and Super 8 tapes on which our moms and dads recorded birthday and graduation parties, Christmas morning gift openings, and other such notable celebrations.

All of those are wonderful, and I'm grateful for modern conversion devices that allow us to transfer those memories into longer-lasting digital formats. But as a parent of grown children, I will say this: My favorite videos aren't necessarily the parties and school concerts, as great as those are.

My favorites are when we thought to record the kids just doing normal stuff. Whether it was playing with toys in the living room, interacting with siblings, or even something as seemingly mundane as reading a book on the couch, the clips I most value are the ones that remind me of the stuff of everyday life all those years ago.

The video above is an example of that. It was shot by Terry in late August 1999, just as our oldest child Elissa was starting kindergarten. It shows Elissa getting on and off the bus, and her almost-three-year-old sister Chloe saying how much she would miss her.

That's it. Nothing seemingly special, yet it means everything.

It brings me back to a time of the most enjoyable chaos I've ever experienced. It triggers memories of family dinners with young children, cherished bedtime stories, and everything else that made up the fabric of our existence.

So parents, keep on taking video of the big things. But every once in a while, record the smaller stuff, too. One day you'll be grateful you did.

(NOTE: Speaking of Chloe, she begins her 5-year medical school journey today with a week of orientation at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. Good luck, Dr. Edmonds! By this time in 2031, you will officially be Dr. Dr. Edmonds. Or Double Doctor Edmonds. We'll have to figure out how to say it...)

The Tooth Fairy always stocked up on quarters in our house

Strangely enough (to me anyway), one of the most-read posts in the history of this blog is one from 2013 in which I wrote about the fact that our children never received as much money from the Tooth Fairy as other American kids.

For those scoring along at home – which is to say only me – that post is #2 all-time in blog page views, a distant second to one in which I offered up my top five daddy-daughter songs.

Anyway, I thought about the Tooth Fairy again recently when she was the subject of a New York Times Strands word search.

The rule in our house when our kids were growing up was that, when you lost a tooth, the Tooth Fairy would give you one quarter for every year of age. So if you were 10 years old, you ended up with $2.50 in coins under your pillow the next morning.

This system mostly worked well, though it made quietly placing the coins under the sleeping child's pillow a little trickier than using paper money. There was always the risk of the coins clinking and awakening the little guy/girl.

It never happened, but we came close a couple of times.

I recently asked Google how much kids nowadays receive from the Tooth Fairy. The average amount, according to the good folks at Delta Dental, is $5.84 per lost fang.

A child's first lost tooth commands even more cash, averaging $7.17.

Either way, and even when accounting for inflation, that's more than we ever gave our kids.

Seven bucks = 28 quarters. Good luck slipping that under a pillow without making any noise.

It may simply have been that we were young parents who didn't know any better. Or maybe it was that we had five kids and lacked the disposable income we have now.

Either way, I feel like we owe our children some sort of dental reparations. I'll be sending them each five pounds of quarters to make up for it.

I have had to relearn where everything goes in our new kitchen

This is our new (and somewhat confusing to me) kitchen.

We recently undertook a long-overdue kitchen renovation. And when I say "long overdue," I mean it. Apart from the flooring and appliances, we hadn't made any meaningful changes to the kitchen since we bought our house in 2003.

It was the same kitchen the previous owners had had since 1995, so it was time.

This is the point when people generally ask, "Did you do it yourself?" This is also the point when I laugh heartily and pat them on the head for being so adorable.

No, we did not do it ourselves. We hired a guy named Don to do it, with substantial guidance from our awesome neighbor Lisa. The result was new cabinets, new countertops, a new sink, a new over-the-range microwave, and a new paint job (the painting having been handled by our go-to painter Erin).

I have neither the skills nor the time to have done any of that myself.

It now looks like a completely different kitchen, which is how it should look when you shell out as much money as we did.

The new cabinets are not only nicer, they're also bigger. To the point that Terry spent a few agonizing weeks trying to figure out how to reorganize everything to take best advantage of our newfound storage space.

She did an excellent job, but she also moved a lot of stuff to completely different areas of the kitchen.

You will note I didn't necessarily know where 100% of our stuff was supposed to go in the old kitchen. When I would empty the dishwasher, I would constantly go to Terry with some kitchen gadget in hand asking where it should be placed.

Since the remodel, the rate at which this happens has risen somewhat.

We're now a couple of months into having this new kitchen, and while my understanding of the layout is better, it's not thorough. I still go to the wrong place when I need a fork, and I still have to stop and think for a second when I'm looking for a storage container or citrus peeler or some such culinary paraphernalia.

I'm getting better, but progress is slow. If Terry isn't home when I can't find something, I end up opening every single cabinet and drawer. Sometimes twice.

Or I just give up.

My hope is that, by the time this current edition of the kitchen is in need of renovation, I'll have a firm grasp of where 85% of our stuff goes.

Maybe 70%.

50% for sure.

In my Grandpa Era

With apologies to Ms. Taylor Swift, I'm thoroughly enjoying being nearly 10 months into my Grandpa Era. Here's a quick photo essay documenting a small part of the adventure so far...

This is my favorite shot of my grandson Cal and me. I think it was taken when he was just a couple of weeks old. Now he's almost a year, and of course he looks much different, but I go back and look at this picture a lot.

This was in the hospital right after Cal was born, as you can probably tell from the generic hospital baby blanket. He was relatively big by newborn standards, but he still seemed impossibly small to me. I couldn't get enough of him in those first few weeks. I still can't get enough of him.

When Cal comes to my house or I go to his, I'm often tasked with diaper changes and giving bottles. Of course I never say no. He will outgrow bottles at some point, so I try to savor each feeding. It's a nice time for us to be close. I talk to him while he stares back at me and eats. I think we both enjoy it.

This was us wearing our holiday sweaters on Christmas, the day Cal turned 4 months old. I don't know how often we're doing to dress alike as he gets older, but I do look forward to taking him out for Grandpa-Calvin days. Hockey games will be high on the list when he's ready, but even simple trips to the park are going to be so much fun.

When Cal's mom Chloe was little, she used to love carrying around a little plastic orange hammer. She would take it everywhere. So Terry got Cal one just like it. So far, he sees is mainly as something to teethe on, but to each his own.

From the time he could smile, one thing that has always made Cal happy is when you whistle at him. Or at least it works when I do it. This shot was taken on Easter, and I think I'm whistling to try and amuse him (otherwise I can't explain my face). My guess, though, is that someone off camera is responsible for Cal's big grin, because I'm not sure my whistling was ever that amusing.

Grammy and Grandpa with little Cal. One of the things I've enjoyed about being a new grandparent is sharing the experience with Terry. We talk about Cal all the time, and we marvel as he reaches new milestones and learns new skills. I knew we would love him, and I knew we would enjoy being grandparents. I just didn't know we would love it all so much. It's wonderful.

Our $50,000 hockey investment has yielded a million dollars' worth of family fun and memories

I had never been a season ticket holder for any sport when the Lake Erie Monsters came to Cleveland in 2007.

But I knew I liked hockey, and we had a bunch of young kids who I thought might feel the same. So Terry and I took the plunge and bought two season tickets for the Monsters' first season.

Actually, we got involved so early that the Monsters didn't yet have a name when we wrote our first check to "Cleveland Pro Hockey Ltd" or some such legal entity. I was at then-Gund Arena when they later announced what the team would be called.

Since then they have morphed into the "Cleveland" Monsters, and we recently finished our 19th year as full season ticket holders.

That puts us in relatively rare air. Back in 2016-17, the team's 10th year of existence, they put the names of those of us who had been full season ticket holders (officially "Monsters Hockey Club members") from the very beginning on one of the dasher boards at ice level. Here's Jared and me posing with that list of names in February 2017:

While there may appear to be quite a few people there, it's still a small list when you consider the team now averages more than 11,000 fans a game and annually leads the American Hockey League in attendance.

Next season is the Monsters' 20th, and I hope they do something similar to recognize those of us who took the plunge early and never left.

More importantly, I can't say enough about what a great thing the Monsters Hockey Club has been for our family. 

In 2020, the team was kind enough to make a video about us that was shown several times on the arena "Humungotron" and shared on the Monsters' social media channels:

Of greater worth is the one-on-one time I've spent over the years with Terry and each of the kids at those games. Sometimes we watch and comment on the hockey, other times hockey is just the background to deeper conversations about life.

We've also met many wonderful fellow hockey fans who sit near us, some of whom I chronicled in this blog post.

We've cheered game-winning goals, mourned lost opportunities, and eaten more arena popcorn than anyone probably should.

Recently I tried to calculate how much money we've spent on Monsters hockey over these two decades. I don't have records of how much we've paid each year for our tickets, but I seem to remember them being as cheap as $1,700 total for the first season and as expensive as $3,000 for the 2026-27 season (which in fairness includes a couple of hundred additional dollars for the AHL All-Star Game being held next year in Cleveland...also in fairness, we have really good seats).

Figure our average ticket outlay over the years has been somewhere in the middle, say $2,300 a year. Multiply that by 20 years and you get $46,000. Then there's the food and team apparel we've bought, which is somewhere well north of $5,000 at this point.

All told, we've sunk $50K+ into this team – and it has been worth every penny.

I had no idea it would last this long for us, and now I can't foresee a time when we're not season ticket holders for our favorite local hockey team.

I've already told my 9-month-old grandson Cal how much I can't wait to take him to the arena. He smiles back at me indulgently, figuring that whatever Grandpa is saying, it must be something fun.

Oh, it is, buddy, it really is.

Go Monsters!