Playing favorites with your kids (or, preferably, not)

Chloe was talking about this blog the other day and asked, "Why is it that you post something really nice about Elissa, but the only thing people who read the blog will think about me is that I'm crazy and loud?"

My first thought was, "You ARE crazy and loud." Which is in no way a bad thing. "Crazy" and "loud" are two of her greatest strengths. They're the main reasons why she will one day rule the world. I'm not kidding. Chloe is an absolutely remarkable person who, if we know what's good for us, we will place into a position of global leadership soon after she graduates from college.

But her question raised the larger issue of how we as parents try to treat our kids absolutely equally from the moment they're born. The last thing you want is for them to grow up and for one to say to another, "Mom always liked you best."

At the same time, any honest parent will tell you there are days when you simply like one of your kids more or less than the other(s). If a child is cranky and just plain getting on your nerves, it's perfectly natural that you would want to throw that child from the top of a large building. Don't feel bad about it (but you also don't want to actually follow through on this desire...the namby-pamby liberals have apparently made this ILLEGAL somewhere along the way).

Over the long term, though, most parents are looking to be as fair and equitable as possible in the way they deal with their offspring. This starts from a very early age. Say you have a couple of toddlers/preschoolers sitting around the lunch table. Their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches must be exactly the same size. If a child thinks their sibling's sandwich is even the smallest bit larger than theirs, they suddenly become tiny civil engineers with an innate ability to eyeball size differentials down to the 32nd of an inch.

And Christmas presents? Oy. Every December, as Terry heroically works her way through the process of buying gifts for five children, she will invariably say to me (at least 10 times), "I'm really worried about <INSERT CHILD'S NAME>. I don't feel like I bought <HIM/HER> enough." This genuinely eats at her. Then Christmas morning comes and you realize that each of your children has opened the retail equivalent of a small county's gross domestic product, and everything is good.

As hard as we try to be fair in our approach to parenting, there's no denying that firstborn kids are inevitably treated differently from the baby of the family. Especially if you have, say, three or more children. With the first one, you do everything the baby books say, you photograph everything they do, and you put every piece of parenting advice you've ever received into practice.

But the last one? I always say Jack is essentially raising himself. Not that we ignore him. Not at all. It's just that I think we're probably a little more lax with #5 than we were with #1, and we realize we could have been that way all along and everything would have been fine.

With the first one, you're just learning to be a parent. I tell Elissa she's the guinea pig for all things new. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad. I have to believe she has turned out pretty well.

The kids always probe and prod to figure out which of them are our "favorites." And when we tell them we don't have favorites, they refuse to believe us. Mostly, I suspect, because they've never been parents themselves. They don't yet understand how your love will multiply with every child, and that each of them holds an impossibly large and permanent place in your heart.

Not that I don't consider throwing them off a building from time to time, mind you. But in the end, I still love 'em all the same.

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I apparently lack the ability to speak English

I've always thought of myself as somewhat articulate. I can form a complete sentence and write a coherent paragraph.

But over the past year, it has been brought to my attention that there are at least two English words I have been pronouncing incorrectly my entire life. I was stunned to learn this.

The first is "warriors." Say that word to yourself: "warriors." How do you pronounce it? Probably correctly: "WAR-ee-ers." Not me. I've always said "WER-ee-ers." Not only did I have no idea I said it this way, I didn't even realize it was wrong.

My wife was the one who pointed it out. I don't remember why the word came up in conversation, but she looked at me funny and said, "Worriers? Did you just say 'worriers?'"

"No, of course not," I replied. "I said 'warriors.'" (only I pronounced it "worriers")

"Exactly! You said 'worriers.' It's 'WAR-riors.'"

And then I said the word to myself several times over. I quickly realized I had been mangling it for years. Then I tried to say it aloud. Only I couldn't. Seriously, I couldn't. It took several tries and a concerted effort before I could say it right: WAR-riors.

This happened about a year ago. And to this day I'm still self-conscious when I say that word. I have to say it slowly: WAR-ee-ers. Not that it's a word I use often, but when it comes up, I'm stumped.

The other word I've been mispronouncing, apparently, is "crayons." How do you say it? I've always said, "CRAY-ons." Just like it's spelled. But my wife and son informed me the other night that most Americans say it differently. I don't really know how to render it phonetically for you, but apparently the common pronounciation is "CRAY-ens," with the "ens" part said very subtly and almost softly.

I guess you're not supposed to say it like it's spelled. The word ends in "ons," so I say "CRAY-ons," with a distinct short "o" sound on the last syllable. Terry tells me I've been saying it wrong for years but she just has never called me on it.

Again, this is stunning to me. I'm a father of five kids, so believe me, crayons have been an almost daily part of our family lexicon for years. And I've been saying the word wrong.

It makes me wonder what ELSE I've been pronouncing incorrectly. Do I not speak true American English? Where did I pick up this speech impediment?

The whole thing is very disconcerting (dis-con-SERT-ing...I think), to say the least.

Don't give the controller to Daddy!

There was a time when I was pretty good at video games. This was approximately 1982 to 1984. Then I started a long, slow decline that continues to this day.

The result is that my kids make fun of my gaming skills, or lack thereof. This actually happened: Jack was playing "Super Mario Bros." on the Wii the other day, and when I asked if I could join him, he hesitated for a second and then said, "OK, but don't be sad when your guy dies."

Slightly offended, I asked what he meant. And he said, "Well, it's just that you're not very good."

Please note that I had never actually played Super Mario Bros. on the Wii before. Jack was just assuming my incompetence.

It turned out he was right, of course. Back in The Day (I find myself increasingly referring to The Day in conversation), I was pretty good at Super Mario Bros. on the old Nintendo NES system. But this new version of Super Mario Bros. is much more complex. Whenever I play, my character must look out of the screen, see that it's me controlling him, and decide it would be just as easy to commit some form of electronic suicide.

Now if we were playing the old Atari 2600, it would be a different story. I could play me some Atari 2600. Didn't matter what the game, I was probably pretty good at it. Combat? Pac-Man? Air-Sea Battle? Basketball? I was The Man at virtually every Atari cartridge.

The main reason for this was that I actually had time to play and practice. You can get good at just about anything if you have time to work at it. When I was 12 years old, I had time for everything. Teachers hadn't yet started doing that thing where they give two hours of homework to elementary school children every night, so time is the one thing we had in abundance (of course, my generation is also functionally retarded when compared with a lot of kids today, so maybe that homework thing would have been a good idea).

Do you remember that scene in the movie "Groundhog Hog" where Bill Murray is teaching Andie MacDowell to flip playing cards into a hat? He tells her, "Six months, four to five hours a day, and you'd be an expert." That's how it was with my friends and I when it came to video games.

It helped that my dad was a Gadget Guy. And by that I mean we had most of the cool new electronic gadgets of the 70s and 80s before anyone else had them. I was playing pong on my TV in 1977, thanks to the Radio Shack console Dad brought home one night. We also had the Atari 2600 long before most of the families in my neighborhood. So I was able to get pretty good at almost everything.

Then came the arcade craze. I spent a lot of paper route money pumping tokens into everything from Space Invaders and Centipede to Donkey Kong and Galaga. My friend Mel and I would ride our motocross bikes up to the game room and blow $3 to $5 (that's usually as much money as either of us had at any given time) in an hour or two. We would be wearing our 80s-style painters caps decked out with metal pins of our favorite New Wave bands like Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls. We thought we looked cool. In reality, we must have looked like The Incredible Dork Twins.

My favorite game was one called Track & Field. You would participate in a variety of track events by repeatedly mashing a pair of buttons in rapid fashion to make your onscreen athlete run faster or jump farther. I was good at this game. Good to the point that I once played a game of Track & Field for a full hour on a single quarter.

Once I started high school in the fall of 1984, the time I had available for gaming dropped dramatically. There were sports practices, extracurriculars, actual homework assignments, etc. And the video game world quickly passed me by. I lost track of what was new and hot, and sadly the arcades started going out of business. By the mid-90s, video games cost upwards of a dollar to play and could only be found in the lobbies of movie theaters.

Now I'm reduced to the role of Inept Daddy. We'll be playing Super Mario Bros., and when I inevitably fall off a ledge or run into something I thought was friendly and die, one of the kids will give me the ultimate insult: a condescending head shake, a small laugh, and the words "Oh, Daddy." The message being: "We only let you play so we can laugh at you. You're more entertaining than the game itself."

Whatever, you little brats. Once they invent time travel and we go back to the 80s, I'm dragging all five of them to the arcade and I will school them. And I'll make them wear painters caps, too. Then my revenge will be complete.

When I Was the One

As a follow-up to Monday's post about kids growing up and the sentimentality of it all (along with the great comments here and on Facebook), I thought you might like to take a listen to a song by John Soeder, a longtime Cleveland-area music writer/critic who, it turns out, is also a pretty good musician in his own right.

The song is called "When I Was the One," and it dovetails nicely with the thoughts I expressed about Elissa. You can listen to it and read the lyrics here. Enjoy.

My daughter is HOW old again?

I suppose this is only going to get worse as time goes on, but these days I think a lot about when my kids (the older four, anyway) were little.

Not that I really want to return to that time, to be honest. Been there, done that. It was fun and now we're into another phase of life that I really enjoy. But parents always look at their kids and remember what used to be.

I do it a lot with Elissa, my high school senior who will turn 18 later this month. I realize billions of parents throughout history have gone through this before – watching your child become a legal adult – but it's my first time and it's a little bittersweet.

On one hand, I'm amazed when I look at this young woman in front of me. Because that's clearly what she is now: a young woman. Definitely not a child, and seemingly not even a teenager anymore in some ways. She's smart, she's caring, she's accomplished, and she's just so with it and organized. Sure, she still needs us for a lot of things, but that list gets progressively shorter all the time.

This weekend she'll be driving herself down to the University of Dayton to stay a couple of days and decide if that's where she wants to spend four of years of her life earning an undergraduate degree. Not long ago, the thought of her driving anywhere outside of an empty parking lot scared me to death. Now she's going to drive 400 miles round trip by herself, and I know she'll be fine.

We no longer have to manage her calendar, and it takes a concerted effort for us just to keep up with everything on her plate. There was a time when I got her dressed and gave her breakfast and lunch almost every day. She would be outside playing and would fall down and come to me crying. And that time is gone now, which is fine. It's the natural way of things and I'm glad.

But still...

I catch myself staring at her sometimes, which if she noticed would totally seem creepy (sorry in advance, 'Lis!) In some ways it definitely seems like 18 years have passed, and in other ways it's impossible even half that much time could have flown by. Does it get easier when they turn 20? 25? 30? I don't know. I don't want to know, actually. I have quite enough to deal with in the here and now, thank you very much.

This has been our first experience with senior year of high school. I've enjoyed it and look forward to the last few months. The only drawback is that everything is a "last": last football game, last homecoming dance, last school play, last concert, etc. Which, if you're already feeling a little melancholy about the whole thing, makes the emotional roller coaster that much more bumpy.

I'm becoming a sentimental old man in my early 40s, which I find pretty funny. And it's not like there's only sadness in play here. More than anything, this is an exciting time for Elissa and for us. Lots of new beginnings and new opportunities. Plenty of new ground for us all to cover.

It's just that, you know, 18! I remember being 18 pretty clearly. I think it was last week. Maybe last month. Definitely no farther back than last year. And suddenly my daughter is that age. Oh boy...

This is one of those posts that have no real point and that I'm using as a way to just vent, I guess. Well, not "vent." "Vent" implies anger or frustration. And I feel neither of those things. It's whatever the equivalent of "vent" is when you're feeling happy, sad, excited, afraid and borderline confused all at the same time.

It's a good thing Elissa has it all together, because her father certainly doesn't. Happy birthday in advance to my little(?) girl.

When a child chunders

I applaud all of you single parents. I don't begin to understand how you do what you do, but you do it, and for that you deserve all the credit in the world.

There are certain parenting situations that, to my mind, require two people to handle. And here I'm thinking specifically of those inevitable times when a child throws up in the middle of the night.

All of the kids' rooms are upstairs in our house, while the master bedroom is on the ground floor. Therefore, Terry and I never actually hear it when someone blows chunks in their bed. Instead, we are jolted awake when they come into our room and say those terrible, terrible words: "Mommy? Daddy? I threw up."

Whenever this happens, I try to lay perfectly still for at least five seconds. My dearest hope in the world is that it's all just a dream and I can fall back asleep peacefully. But it never, ever happens that way. It's always real, and Terry and I throw off the soft, warm covers to head upstairs and survey the damage.

This is when we fall into our assigned roles. As I've mentioned on Facebook before,  we are a top-notch Puke Response Team. Neither of us has to say anything like, "OK, you do this and I'll do that." We just know.

Terry's job is to attend to the Vomiting Victim. Are they OK? Do they feel like they're going to throw up again?  What is the condition of their pajamas? Do they need to change? Did any of it splatter into their hair? Do they need comforting? Terry runs through this mental checklist in about two seconds. It's beautiful to watch.

I, meanwhile, am in charge of crime scene clean-up. This generally involves three things:

(1) Cleaning as much of the excess vomit -- solid and liquid -- off all surfaces with which it has come into contact, usually the bed or the floor.

(2) Taking soiled sheets and clothes (which Terry will have quickly removed from the child and passed on to me) downstairs to the laundry room so I can throw them into the washer.

(3) Dealing with any vomit stains on the carpet. On my way back up from the laundry room, I'll grab a bottle of spray cleaner from underneath the kitchen sink and apply it to all areas of the carpet that have been violated by barf. As I'm waiting for the cleaner to soak in and do its job, I will sometimes fall asleep as I stand there in the child's room. This has happened several times.

Having taken care of the immediate needs of the little horker, Terry must now make the decision as to where the child will spend the rest of the night. If they seem to feel OK, and her motherly intuition tells her it's safe, she will throw a comforter over the now-stripped mattress and let the kid sleep in their own bed. If there seems to be more imminent danger of pukage, she will put the comforter on the living room floor next to the couch and have the child sleep there. In either case, a bucket is kept close by the would-be upchucker in case of a repeat incident.

By this time I usually have sponged up any floor stains and returned the cleaning materials to their proper place. We meet back at the bed and discuss vomit-related strategy for the rest of the night. Then we put our heads down and are both asleep in seconds.

All of this happens quickly, but it's exhausting. It interrupts the whole sleep-cycle thing and takes away several precious minutes of shuteye. And that's with two of us on the case. I can't imagine doing this myself over and over again, yet you single parents do just that. You all deserve a medal.

And a clean set of child-sized bed sheets, too.

1986: Mr. Cool takes his girl out on the town

Twenty-six years ago tonight, my wife and I went on our first date.

I know this because I am the designated person in our relationship whose job it is to remember dates, anniversaries and the like. My short-term memory is slipping year by year, but March 1st, 1986, will be forever seared into my brain.

For a long time, I thought Feb. 27th was our dating "anniversary." But then a couple of years ago I looked at a calendar from 1986 and was surprised to see that the 27th was actually a Thursday...which made sense when I thought about it. I asked Terry out on a Thursday afternoon, and it was on Saturday that we actually had the date.

The "ask" was the hardest part of the whole thing. Terry was a junior, while I was but a lowly sophomore. She was -- and forever will be -- eight months older than me, but we were both in band, which for whatever reason is a place where age differences tend to matter less than they do elsewhere in the high school ethos.

Being a football player, I was only in concert and jazz bands, not marching band, where a lot of band relationships were born. But as fate would have it, Terry and I both spent our second-period study hall that year hanging out in the band room. And somehow (who knows how these things work?) we started noticing each other.

We talked a lot during those study halls, and she seemed to laugh at my jokes (she doesn't really bother doing that anymore...we both know the only one who thinks I'm the least bit funny is me, so why pretend?) Any idiot watching from the sidelines could see we were rapidly falling in "like."

But I wasn't just any idiot. I was an idiot actually involved in this thing, and I was scared to death to ask her out. Oh my goodness, she was so pretty. I mean like make-my-heart-race-and-my-stomach-flip-flop pretty. She still is. That's one of the reasons I love coming home so much.

It took a wise and mature 18-year-old senior, Connie Meier, to play matchmaker for us. I think Connie got tired of us skirting the issue and just decided enough was enough and that SOMEONE had to prod this moron into asking Terry out. So when I asked Connie if I had a shot, she said something to the effect of, "Uh, yeah, dude. Don't be so dense. Ask her."

That was about as much encouragement as I was going to get, so the only thing to do was to pop the question. Now if you've ever been in high school and have gone through this, you know you don't just ask someone to go out. You have to set it up. You have to figure out all the angles. You have to determine the right time and place. And most of all, you have to be Mr. Cool.

In retrospect, I find all of this hilarious. I already had it on pretty good authority that Terry was with the program here. No fancy prep necessary, really. But as per usual for me, I was far, far too stupid to see this. So I took a couple more days to figure out how and when I should execute my plan.

It helped that our lockers were right near each other. It was the last period of the day on Thursday. I was in Mr. Robertson's history class (poor Mr. Robertson...such a nice man and a great teacher. He would pass away the following year from, I believe, cancer). I knew I would see Terry when I went back to my locker, so I decided this would be it. This was where I would make my stand, for good or bad.

As I walked back to my locker after the final bell rang, I had that dry throat, sweaty palms thing going. Why was I nervous? Connie told me this would work. What I jerk I am, I thought. This can't be that hard.

I get to my locker. Terry is standing at hers. Oh my gosh, she's so pretty. No way I can do this right now. Seriously, no way. But oh man, she's just beautiful. Look at her! And she's not dating anyone! And she likes you, you big dummy! Just do it! JUST DO IT!

ME: "Hey, Ter." (This is what I've called her for the last quarter of a century: "Ter," rhymes with "air." I'm pretty sure that's what I called her at that moment. At least that's how I remember it. I'll have to ask her if she remembers it the same. In any case, I tried to do it in my casual Mr. Cool voice, though I'm sure I was squeaking like the frightened 16-year-old I was.)

HER: "Yeah?"

ME: "You wanna go out tomorrow night?"

HER: "Oh! Uh, no, I can't."

OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO!! SHE'S GOING TO SAY NO! FULL EMBARRASSED PANIC MODE! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

HER AGAIN (quickly, probably seeing my look of alarm): "Only because I have a youth group meeting at church! I can do it Saturday night!"

ME (intense relief, trying without success to slip back into Mr. Cool mode): "Oh! OK, cool. We can see a movie or something."

HER: "OK, we can do that."

And then I don't remember a thing for two days. I remember being on Cloud Nine. I remember being happy, relieved, and nervous for the actual date. But the details of the next two days are forever lost. On Saturday, I picked her up in my styling yellow 1979 Chevrolet Chevette. Nothing, I mean nothing, says "Chick Magnet" like a yellow 'Vette!

It was a snowy might. I took her out to the Mentor Mall, where we saw "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" with Nick Nolte and Bette Midler. Then we drove to Willoughby and I treated her to a gourmet dinner at the only place the wages I earned working at Wendy's could afford: McDonald's (I do see the irony there.) Then I took her home.

As I drove down her street, I couldn't remember which house was hers. They were all made of brick, and at the time they all looked alike to me. I was cruising along at full speed when she suddenly said, "Stop, that's my house!"

So I hit the brake and immediately began skidding across the snow-covered pavement. The car turned 90 degrees to the right and came to a stop right in front of her house -- actually facing her house, as it turned out.

Terry's house had a good-sized front window. And standing there as my car swerved crazily and ended up facing the house, as God is my witness, was Terry's father. I could have died.

I sheepishly backed up and pulled into her driveway. I walked her to the side door. I told her I had a good time. She said the same. Mr. Cool leaned in for a goodnight kiss. And I kid you not, just as our lips were about to meet, I burped. I NEVER burp. Seriously, I'm almost incapable of doing it. I burp maybe 5 or 10 times a year. And the God of the universe, who has never lacked a sense of humor, found that exact moment to be the time when I should take a step toward meeting my sparse Annual Burp Quota.

I was mortified, of course. I think we both laughed. But then we kissed anyway. And it was wonderful. I'm telling you, it was something. I will never forget it. I wish I could tell you at that moment I was thinking, "OK, this is the person I'm going to marry," but I don't think I was nearly sharp enough to know that. I just knew that this beautiful girl had just gone out with me. Had had a good time with me. And had kissed me. Whatever is 50 feet higher than Cloud Nine was where I spent the rest of the night. I went home a happy man in the yellow Chevette.

As it turned out, we would be engaged less than three years after that and married in a little more than six years. Kids would come one after the other for a 12-year period starting in the mid-90s. And it has all been amazing. Seriously, I can't imagine I would ever change a thing.

Except the burping part. If I could go back, I would do everything humanly possible to hold in that burp. But other than that? Paradise.