How St. Nick and his posse made me an irredeemable fibber

Last week I mentioned the fact that we need to deal with the whole Santa Claus/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy issue and the way in which it turns parents into rotten stinking liars.

Right? I mean, no matter whether you're someone who celebrates Christmas, Easter and edentulism, the fact is that if you encourage a belief in these beloved characters among your children, you're deceiving them.

And please understand, I don't see anything wrong with it. I've done it myself with my own kids. I grew up enjoying presents from Santa, candy from the Bunny, and cash dough from the Fairy.

It's just, you know, you tell your kids not to lie and then you...lie.

Well, you don't "lie" really, in the sense of a malicious attempt to distort the truth. But I don't think "deceive" is too strong a word to use here.

Though it still has a pretty negative connotation. Can we say you "deceive with positive intent?"

Sure. But you still deceive.

As much as I love Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, the only way they work is if you distract your child from what is a pretty obvious reality. For their own good, I agree, but there's still a little sleight of hand at work here.

In a nutshell, here are the main factors in deciding whether to do S.E.B.T.F. (Santa-Easter Bunny-Tooth Fairy) with your offspring:

PROS

• It's fun! I love the looks on the kids' faces when they come down on Christmas or Easter morning, or when they proudly show off the quarters the Tooth Fairy brought them (and their newly formed gap-tooth smile).
• You did it yourself when you were a kid, and you want your own children to have that same joy.
• All the other parents pretty much do it and, let's be honest here, who wants to be the freak who doesn't? (The answer, by the way, is "plenty of people." I know several of them.)

CONS

• Did we mention you're a rotten stinking liar?
• It's also expensive. Seriously, there's money to be shelled out in every instance.
• L-I-A-R!

I honestly can't say I'm in any way morally conflicted by this. I just think it's funny how we all collectively have decided that this particular lie is OK.

I always enjoy when the kids get older and you can see they just can't bring themselves to believe in S.E.B.T.F. anymore (and of course once you figure out that one is fake, the other two dominoes fall pretty quickly). In many cases, though, they don't tell you they've caught on because they're afraid the present/money train will pull away, never to be seen again.

Which is really only true of the Tooth Fairy, I guess. Once they know what's going on there, we stop giving our kids money for lost teeth. But even if you get past Santa and the Easter Bunny, you still get presents on Christmas and chocolate on Easter.

At least that's what I've always promised my kids I would do. I hope they still believe me after I've lied to them for so many years.

Do you get enough sleep? I don't think I do...

I love reading those magazine articles with headlines like, "The Five Things You Should Be Doing to Live a Healthy Lifestyle," or, "Are You Taking Care of Your Body? This Quiz Will Tell You!"

In most cases, these articles make me feel good because they almost universally advocate exactly what you would think they advocate: maintain a healthy weight, eat nutritious food, exercise, etc. And I do all of it.

All of it, that is, except the one thing that seems to be on every one of these lists: Get enough sleep.

I'm not alone in this, I know. Americans in general just don't sleep enough. We talk a lot about sleeping and how great it is. We just don't do enough of it.

In my case, it's a schedule thing. I have a lot to do, and admittedly a lot of it is stuff I choose to do. So I get up most days at 5 a.m.

If I'm going to get the recommended eight hours of sleep a night, that means I have to be in bed by 9 p.m. And that, I'm here to tell you, just ain't going to happen.

For one thing, I've been working a lot of long hours lately, and some nights I'm not home from work until 7:30 or 8 o'clock. By the time I eat dinner, spend some time with the kids, make my lunch for the next day, shower, etc., it's well past 9 p.m.

I'd say I average 6 to 6 1/2 hours most nights, and generally I feel pretty good. Tired in the afternoon sometimes, but generally fine.

They say people's sleep needs vary, and I can see that. Terry would never get by on 6 hours of sleep a night. She just wouldn't. That doesn't mean she isn't tough (she is). Her body just requires more sleep than mine does. It has always been this way.

I am almost invariably the first one up in our house in the morning. Seven-year-old Jack is often second. In this, I think, he takes after me.

When I was in elementary school, I needed hardly any sleep at all. I regularly woke up at 4:30 and spent the first couple of hours of every day in my room just passing the time reading and listening to the radio.

More than once, I called the overnight DJ on the old WWWE radio station in Cleveland to request a song because I was wide awake. One time she asked me my name and how old I was, and she laughed when I told her (I think I was 8 or 9 at the time).

She played our little conversation on the air and then dedicated a song me. I think it was the theme from "The Goodbye Girl," which I found strange. But hey, I was on the radio!

Even when I don't have to get up at any certain time in the morning, I rarely (rarely) can sleep a full 8 hours. At some point my body just says, "You know what? We're getting up. Let's do this." And so I get up and do this.

But what that kind of scheduling does for you in terms of productivity may be offset, I'm afraid, by an eventual deterioration in health. Like I said, I generally don't feel tired or run down, but when someone puts a numerical goal in front of me (like 8 hours of sleep) and I don't meet it, I feel like I must be failing somehow.

What's worse, they say you need less sleep as you age. By the time I'm 80, I'll be sleeping 2-3 hours a night, max. If you happen to be listening to the radio at 3 in the morning, I'll be the guy calling in to request a song...

Sometimes having a kid in college is like not having a kid at all

As you may know, my oldest daughter Elissa is a sophomore at Cleveland State University. Unlike most CSU students, however, Elissa lives on campus.

This concept is still foreign to me, more than a year into her tenure there. Cleveland State was always a commuter school when I was growing up, and it still largely is.

Elissa is a member of an elite group of 1,000 or so kids (out of a total student body of 17,000-plus) who live their lives mostly within the physical confines of the university. For the second year in a row, she calls the venerable Fenn Tower in Downtown Cleveland home.

Cleveland State is only 20-25 minutes from our house, and last year Elissa kept a car on campus. Which meant we saw her all the time. Which in turn meant it never felt like she was really living "away from home." We saw her so much that it was like she was just having a series of really fun, academically themed sleepovers at friends' houses.

But this year Elissa chose not to pay the $500 parking fee to keep a car at CSU, and she works right there on campus. So the only time we get to see her is when she bums a ride home or when we bring her here ourselves.

Now, for the first time, I'm experiencing what it's really like to have a child away at college. And I'm not sure I like it much.

For nearly two decades, Elissa has always been nearby. And while, geographically speaking, she's still nearby, she may as well be going to school in Shanghai, for as much as we see her.

She still has a bed here at the house, of course, though now she has to share a (large) room with Chloe. Over the Labor Day weekend, we moved Melanie out of Chloe's room and into The Room Formerly Known as Elissa's Room, a move with which Elissa wasn't especially happy.

But let's face it...we're not going to maintain an empty room for nine months of the year while Elissa is off doing whatever it is that college kids do (which I'm sure consists only of going to classes, doing homework, and watching reruns of "Little House on the Prairie"). For the relatively small portion of the year when she lives with us, Elissa can share a room with her sister.

I'm actually glad we did that, because the sight of that lonely, empty room really made me miss her. I know millions of parents have been through this before and everything turned out just fine, but that doesn't make it any easier.

For the first few years of Elissa's life, she spent most of her days with me. I worked nights while my wife worked days, so we never needed a day care provider. I would take care of Elissa from about 8  in the morning through 5:30 in the afternoon, at which point Terry would come home and take over childcare duties while I went off to work.

The result was that I became extremely close to my daughter, and knowing she was living just upstairs these last several years has been a comforting thought.

Now she's almost 20, and the paradigm from here on out will be NOT seeing her far more than actually seeing her. That's just the way it is when your kids become adults, and the logical half of my brain is perfectly fine with this arrangement.

But the other half, the half that's more "Daddy" than "Father," isn't quite ready to accept it. It chooses to ignore the fact that what Elissa needs at this point in her life is independence. She needs to stretch those proverbial wings, make her mistakes, and become the grown-up we want her to be.

I just wish there was a way she could do all of that here at home. She could even have her old room back. I just need to tell Melanie...

The Tooth Fairy must have won the lottery

According to a study that was (for reasons that elude me) conducted by the people at Visa, the Tooth Fairy is becoming increasingly generous.

Kids nowadays are apparently getting an average of $3.70 per tooth lost, the study says. And that's just the average. The suggestion is that some kids are getting way more than that, which is mind blowing to me.

My kids have always gotten a quarter per year of age. So if they lost a tooth at 5 years old, they would get five quarters, which for the math-impaired is $1.25.

In order for my children to reap even the average award in the Visa study, they would have to be losing teeth well into their teens. And, as my dad no doubt would have said, they actually may start losing those teeth as teenagers if they complain about the amount of cash they used to get from the Tooth Fairy and I have to smack them in the mouth.

Before we get into this issue of how much Ms. Fairy gives out, let's return briefly to the question of Visa conducting this study. Why do it exactly, unless it's just simply an interesting little bid for positive PR and press exposure? Is there anything in this for Visa? Are they envisioning a time when 6-year-olds have Tooth Fairy debit cards you can simply reload every time an incisor falls out?

(Actually, I sort of like the idea of little kids having one of those old-time credit card swiping machines under their pillows. A tooth falls out, you give 'em your Visa card, they write you out an invoice for 5 bucks and swipe it, and everyone's happy.)

Anyway, back to this business of giving out nearly 4 bucks a tooth. I can see this maybe for the first tooth they lose. That's kind of a momentous occasion and all, and it's a fun way to celebrate the milestone.

But after that, I'm sorry, the negotiated rate has to go down.

Plus, as I said, Terry and I like to do this in quarters. And the more quarters you're putting under their pillows when they're asleep, the harder it is to get in and out of their rooms quietly without waking the little cash hounds.

This has always been my job, by the way. For whatever reason, it usually falls to me to wait until after the kid is asleep to creep quietly up the stairs, open the door as silently as possible, tiptoe to the head of their bed, and try to slip the change under their pillow without the coins clinking together.

Through nearly two decades of parenthood and five kids, I've never had anyone wake up on me, but I've come close. Lots of near-misses.

Of course, we've also completely forgotten about it a couple of times. The kids loses the tooth at school, brings it home, we all look at it and admire the newly created gap is his/her mouth, and then we forget about it.

The last time this happened with Jack, Terry and I panicked when he came downstairs in the morning with a sad look on his face and informed us that the Tooth Fairy had apparently neglected him on her nightly rounds.

So I quickly rounded up the requisite number of quarters, told Jack that maybe he just didn't look hard enough, and went upstairs with him to check again.

I made a point of going first, hurrying into his room and shoving the change under his pillow before he could see me. By the time he got to his top bunk bed and lifted up the pillow, the quarters were there waiting. His face lit up. Crisis averted.

This is of course why, biologically speaking, God sets it up so that it's generally younger people who parent young kids. We middle-aged folks forget stuff like this and traumatize our children, so God makes them grow up before we get old and senile (most of the time).

At some point we here at Blog Central need to deal with this whole question of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, etc. and how we, willingly and collectively, lie to our children about a range of things in the name of holiday fun.

But for now I'm sticking to my guns...I'm not shelling out 5 bucks for a rotting old baby tooth.

Worrying about my health is making me unhealthy

Had he not passed away suddenly in the fall of 1999, my father would have turned 84 years old today.

I'm only being honest when I say I would have been shocked had my dad made it to 84.

For one thing, he smoked for decades. I hated that. I've always hated smoking. I think it's filthy, disgusting and stupid. It's one of the relatively few things that I'm unequivocally against.

Smoking and Cleveland-born Steelers fans. They both rank low on my list.

There were a few years in the early 80s when my dad smoked only pipes, and I could live with that. It wasn't really any healthier than cigarettes, but it definitely smelled better. I loved to open his tobacco pouch and take a whiff.

But he went back to cigarettes sometime later, and I'm sure the little cancer sticks were instrumental in the heart attack that eventually killed him.

He also had a good-sized belly. As far back as I can remember, my dad had that belly. Which isn't a surprise when you consider what he regularly ate (fried meats, straight buttermilk, etc.)

Simply put, he was the product of a time and place where people didn't pay much attention to the dangers of such things, either because they didn't know or they didn't care.

None of this paints a very pretty picture of my dad, but he really was a great guy. And an excellent father. I wouldn't trade the 30 years I had with him for anything.

But there's a part of that is determined not to follow in my father's footsteps.

As I've mentioned here before, I worry quite a bit about my lifestyle. Am I eating right? Am I exercising enough? Is my weight acceptable? How about my cholesterol?

Actually, the fact that I "worry" so much about those things is a bit of a problem. Increasingly, it seems, medical researchers are finding a direct link between the way we manage stress and the length and quality of our existence.

I have quite a bit of stress in my life. Or at least I see it as stress, which is essentially the same thing. I've gotten better in recent years at dealing with it, but I still have a long way to go.

More than once, I've considered taking a tai chi class at our local community center. I could attend eight two-hour classes for just $39, which seems like a good deal. I hear great things about tai chi in terms of its physical, mental, spiritual, and stress-relieving benefits.

But I've never taken the class. Every time a new session starts, I come up with some excuse not to give it a try. "I don't have time," I'll say, or, "The morning runs I do are enough to keep me healthy."

Still, something tells me I'll be needing some outside help in the stress management department. No amount of planning or to-do lists is going to teach me how better to deal with the curveballs that life inevitably throws at each of us.

The thing is, I don't often ask for help in anything. Not for the typical male reasons of pride or anything. It's usually just because asking for help takes time, and I have this illusion that I have no extra time whatsoever.

And it really is just that - an illusion. When people say they don't have time to exercise, you'll often hear personal trainers and doctors reply, "Well, do you have time for clogged arteries and chronic disease? Because that's where you're headed if you don't make time to take care of yourself."

The same holds true for stress. I'm afraid that if I don't make time to learn how to deal with it, it will very quickly catch up with me. And I don't want to think of what that's going to mean.

Of course, this all raises the question of just how long you want to live. Some people justify their unhealthy habits by saying they don't want to get to 95 years old anyway if it means life in a nursing home where you're unable to take care of yourself.

Others will tell you it doesn't need to be that way. That eating well and taking care of yourself will make even the last years of your life happy and relatively healthy.

Whatever the answer, I don't really have a "goal age" in mind. I just want to be around long enough to raise my children, be active with my grandchildren, and maybe see a Cleveland sports team finally win a championship.

I know, I know. I'm getting greedy with that last one.

My wife is pregnant

Just kidding! She's not. Just wanted to see if you'd click on the link.

Which I know is terrible. I'm truly sorry about that. And by "truly sorry" I of course mean "not sorry at all."

That's because I'm one of those people on the Internet who's trying to get your attention. There are millions of us out there, and we're all annoying in our own special way.

Many of us are bloggers. We jot down our thoughts a few times a week, build up a little following, and then hope you'll continue stopping by regularly to read our little missives. Whether or not you agree with what we have to say is almost irrelevant. All we want is for you to keep on coming.

Most bloggers won't admit it, but virtually all of us live and die by our page view and unique visitor counts. We measure ourselves by the size of our audience, and we're devastated when it shrinks for any reason.

Which is why I used that medically impossible headline today. I promote my three-times-a-week blogging habit through Facebook and Twitter links, and I notice that the readership on any given post is almost directly tied to the quality of the headline/title.

And that makes sense, of course. The only thing my readers and potential readers have to go on is the headline. I've set up short headlines and links to be automatically posted at 6 a.m. sharp every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

If the headline is compelling, you'll click on it. If it's not, you won't.

Now, what constitutes "compelling" is a bit more art than it is science. There are at least two types of headlines that tend to draw in readers:

(1) Ones that promise something that may be useful to you in your personal or professional life

(2) Ones that seem reasonably certain of making you laugh

If a blogger can combine the two, that's the holy grail right there, my friend. I've never quite achieved that ideal blend, but I continue trying.

I'm also an Internet consumer myself, of course, and I know what types of blog post headlines draw me in. Usually they have a number in the title that represents some sort of list. Like "5 Ways to Make Your Blog Bigger than Amazon" or "7 Things You're Not Doing to Advance Your Career Because You're a Lazy Slob."

Whatever the title, I'm likely to click on it if it seems like something that might benefit me without a great investment of my time.

Sometimes I look back at old posts from this particular blog and I wonder how/why it is that anybody at all read them. Like, for example, I had one called "The Never-Ending Horror of Laundry," or some such. That headline doesn't promise to make you any smarter, richer or happier. And I don't know that it was particularly funny. But more than 200 people read it.

Maybe they all came away from it disappointed. I don't know. But the fact is, they clicked on it. And any one of my posts that attracts 200 or more people is a success in my book.

Which, now that I think about it, indicates an acute, unhealthy need on my part for attention and validation, often from total strangers. That's kind of sad.

I think my next post will be headlined "17 Reasons Why My Self-Esteem Will Collapse If You Don't Read This."

September: The most deceiving month (along with March)

Happy Labor Day! It's one of those holidays where almost no one gives any real thought to the meaning of it. So get out there and, uh, celebrate.

The most significant thing about Labor Day is that it signifies the arrival of September. And I always start out loving September because there's a part of me that thinks fall is finally here.

Which is patently false, of course. Summer doesn't end until September is 2/3rds over, and around here in Northeast Ohio, summer does sometimes tend to hang on for dear life.

Which is kind of a ripoff, because I like the fall. A lot. I like the temperatures, I like the scenery, and I like the feel in the air.

But the first few weeks of September are almost always a lot like the last few weeks in August - summery. So I end up disappointed because, by this point, I'm kind of ready for summer to be over.

I actually spend a good chunk of the year in that state. When it's winter, I want it to be spring. When it's spring, I'm ready for the warmth of summer. And by the time summer is two months old, I'm ready for changing leaves, high school football games, and 50 degrees on the thermometer.

The only time I really don't look forward to the change of seasons is the fall-to-winter transition. That one can take its time, as far as I'm concerned. Yes, I do actually like the snow, but I like it in small, controlled doses.

And there are quite often times in my neck of the woods when the snowfall is neither "small" nor "controlled."

People around here tend to hate March most of all, because March is the ultimate tease. Yes, spring starts in March, but much like September, it makes you wait those extra few weeks before making it official.

We've had some of our worst blizzards in March, and those are just demoralizing. After weeks and weeks of battling ice and shoveling snow, you're ready for something warmer than 35 degrees, and March only gives it to you in frustratingly tiny sneak peeks.

If it weren't for the fact that we have so many March birthdays in my family, I would be all for eliminating it from the calendar altogether.

I'm writing this post a good two weeks in advance, so I have no idea what the weather will be like when you're reading this. But if it's sunny and 85 degrees, you can bet I'll be spending the day indoors with the air conditioning cranked up and wearing a sweater, pretending it's late October. I can dream.