while getting ready for bed, anthony pleaded, as he often does, for a quick round of ogre or pillow wars before having to relent to sleep. to raise the stakes, he added the following details: it's hard to say what's more twisted about this little guy, his creative spirit or his culinary proclivities.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. enjoy your anger

in honor of anthony's first week of school, let's keep the anthony roll running. i mentioned (i think) that we had been doing some last minute potty training with him to get him ready for school. that went well and good and thankfully fast. the best part is i can round out our picture series of our family using the rest room.

please note the complete set is only viewable in our bathroom. i thought i had posted more of them but a quick search says otherwise (just aleo). so sorry but i think that a picture of me moving my bowels would probably be counter-productive to my employability but i figure if you're a guest in my home, you can deal.

yesterday was anthony's visiting day at preschool. he was ready eager to go sitting on his bike in the front yard a full thirty minutes before we had to leave. i couldn't hold him off to the for real time so we left quite early and arrived before the doors had even been opened to the public. he made himself at home in a sandbox he has played in many times before due to its close proximi...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. crystal clear

anthony regressed in his potty training. out of fear of him not being able to go to pre-school, marty panicked. she agreed that every time he went pee or poop on the toilet he'd get twenty minutes of computer time. this plan turned the tide, saved the day and was working famously.

on saturday i passed by the kitchen and heard bella "encouraging" anthony to drink a large glass of water. he resisted saying he wasn't thirsty. she then countered in a sing-songy voice that if he drank a bunch of water, he'd have to go pee more which would mean extra computer time. after a pause of contemplation, i heard the glass get lifted off the counter followed by bella saying a conspiratorial, "good boy anthony."

sure, as a parent, there are plenty of perks to having older siblings around your younger ones. but subjecting younger siblings to the equivalent of a fraternity hazing rituals so you can draft on their extra minutes of pbsKids.org does take a few marbles out of the good deeds jar.

a picture of anfer and i from our neighborhood's fourth of july party someone just recently passed on.

we're potty training anthony in preparation of him starting school in the next few weeks. this means we hear funny things get shouted in the house. funny things like ...

I WENT POOP!

following this call you'll see marty alertly moving towards the noise. on this particular occasion, she charged around the corner to find anthony standing in front of the toilet peering and pointing into the bowl. when he saw marty coming he excitedly re-announced that he had pooped. as she approached she saw a small turd on the floor between his legs as well as a chocolate smear on the back of his calf (presumably where the floor turd grazed his skin on the way down).

marty pessimistically assumed this dropping on the floor was what anthony was celebrating but as she got to him she spied resting in the bottom of the bowl an artifact that looked like it was left by my college roommate and not our little blonde human. what was in the commode was huge and surely explained why this pebble-sized cudgel on the floor went so unnoticed (as well as the smear on the leg). when you're dealing with bm's of this magnitude, a little shrapnel like that is just the cost of doing business.

anthony turns four today. when marty asked him what he would like for his birthday dinner, he said, "meat with a bone." at four years of age he's already challenging his father for the title of most manly member of the home.

and i don't know what's more telling. that anthony asked for meat with a bone for his dinner or that i interpreted that as porterhouse or that marty interpreted it as a chicken leg. i guess it's easy to see who pays the bills in our house.

this past weekend marty's family gathered at the lake house of one of the in-laws. anthony believed, until we arrived, that the lake of a lake house existed inside the house instead of next to it. he was only partially convinced otherwise upon arrival. this weekend replaced the annual camping trip marty's family used to take before her father passed and the family camper was sold. while there were still blow-up mattresses involved there were now also king-sized beds, private bathrooms, docks with tall water slides, jet-skis, and boats good for fishing, water-skiing and/or giant-raft pulling.

the three-day weekend began with a morning of tubing. on anthony's second round out (with bella and i) a bout of wake turbulence bounced him into the air and out of the raft. seeing him fly out of sight i rolled backwards into the water (navy seal style!) and after twisting and rolling in the waves i came up to spot him bobbing in the water about twenty feet away. i quickly swam to him and and when i arrived he crossed his arms and dejectedly told me, "i no like tubing anymore!" to which i said i understood and we'd take a break, which we did, which was fortunately easy given all of the other equally fun distractions.

the weekend ended with alex becoming an accomplished jet-skier. when he began on day one he didn't want to go more than 10mph, even as a passenger. by the end of the weekend he was charging over waves at more than 40mph. for his last ride, alex insisted on taking his uncle mike out to show him how good he was doing. afterwards, mike commented to me how coordinated alex was at handling the ski (e.g. body lean on banking turns and rooster tails). he added i should hope this zeal never translated to a motorcycle. as for bella, she broke the 30mph mark within five minutes and the 40mph mark about seven seconds after that.

below are a few pictures from the weekend. the anfer picture shows him lazing in the water after going off the dock's water slide. the next two are of alex and bella piloting the jet-skis (and represents what i saw for a very large part of the weekend). the picture of bella ain't so hot but properly framing a shot ain't so easy when, between the chop and erratic accelerations, you're fighting to not get thrown from the seat. and with aleo, it's curious as a passenger to look down and see arms as wispy as his confidently governing something he just began learning days earlier.

thanks aunt chrissy and uncle mike for the invitation, all the effort and the bounty of experiences. my family's sunday dinner table conversation after arriving home was rich and alive with excited retellings and rehashings of the weekend. big and memorable fun.

fin

on last year's vacation, you may recall, we issued vacation moniker's to the kids based on a prominent behavior we observed given all the time we spent in and around each other. this year we did the same. this is the result:

• isabella 'bella daddy say whhaatttt??' walter dearmitt because of the mannerism she picked up from her hannah montana/miley cyrus marathon on one of the five televisions at our house rental. this is apparently something miley/hannah says at least once in every show using a funny, sing-songy affect which bella seemed to have perfectly captured.
  
  
• alexander 'nuts and weiners' walter dearmitt because of how silly he got running around with a friend close to his age that stayed with us in the house. these games rapidly devolved into the boys (via alex's tutelage) constantly referring to, singing songs about, or threatening to karate chop everyone's nuts and weiners in the house. i couldn't be prouder that my boy was the one to teach their boy this lovely and becoming mannerism.
  
  
• anthony 'pee-face' walter dearmitt because this is how he tries to keep up with his nuts and weiners older brother by calling everyone a pee-face. in mulling this over i've come to consider this an impressively effective and entirely under-used phraseology and one i will be introducing to my corner of society in the near future. which i guess ultimately means that in this cycle alex influences anthony and anthony influences me and this would be just about where i've always fallen on the trend-setting train my entire life.
  
  

and i reckon if we can brand the kids with personality-illuminating nicknames, there is no reason the courtesy shouldn't be extended to the parental units that allow the obnoxious behavior noted above to happen.

• marty 'twin bed' jean walter because even though our room had a spacious and inviting king sized bed with an expansive ocean view, marty slept on a twin mattress on the floor (with an obstructed view of the window) because she couldn't deal with sleeping with more than one person in the bed (anthony and i) regardless of its size. by the end of the week, marty was blissfully alone on her twin mattress on the floor while i slept with not one, not two, but all three of our children in what proved to be a veritable tangle of humanity and limbs.
  
  
• and i think i would have been branded troy "georges" lane dearmitt in honor of the book i was obsessively reading every free moment i could steal. the severity of my condition was fully exposed when i was caught reading in the corner of the toilet nook in our master suite's bathroom. i could see how an outsider might call it a bit off but this stool sitting beneath a skylight even if smack between the comode and the two-head, walk-in shower was made for a private moment and a good book, which georges by dumas so completely was!
  
  

we've been dog sitting for the last five weeks. he is a small, light-shedding, black and white terrier of some sort named oscar. he was obtained from a shelter by the family of a friend of marty's. he is very mellow and easy going which can be mostly seen in how he shoulders the unpredictable life of sharing living quarters with anthony.

the first week oscar was with us alex kept a small supply of dog food in an R2-D2 toy clipped to his belt-loop. every time alex would pass oscar he'd stop the dog, hunch himself over, pat the dog on the head, and ask if he wanted a treat. the first few times oscar would sit there jittery with excitement, his tail swishing erratically behind him. alex would then fight to open the small toy given it's awkward position at his waist. once open, alex would pluck a few pieces of dog food out and lovingly say, "here you go oscar-boy" holding his palm out to oscar who would nudge and push the small bits around with his nose before tentatively pulling them into his mouth with a lapping tongue. after oscar discovered these seemingly sacred and hard to get to treats were no different than the dry food he was already neglecting downstairs, oscar's body language emanated an "are you kidding me" affect and the impromptu R2-D2 snack breaks waned.

a few weeks in, the dog's owner, marty's friend, called to check on things. alex was the one to answer the phone. before marty became aware the call was for her, alex had told the lady that oscar threw up on a rug and pooped in the basement and that these things made his mom yell. by the time marty intervened, alex had the poor woman on the brink of packing up her family and returning home early in attempt to salvage this maimed relationship. marty, using all of her skills and grace, demoted alex's apocalyptic descriptions as mere transition pains and said everything was good and fine.

because i nickname everyone and everything, i took to calling the dog osky. one morning when i passed through the kitchen for breakfast and bid osky a good day, anthony told me not to do that and that osky was a bad word. before i could defend myself, bella jumped in, telling anthony that osky wasn't a bad word. after a pause and a reflective grunt from anthony bella added, "that is unless you change the 'aaww' to an 'aahh', and remove the 'skee'. then you had a bad word. and if you added the word 'hole' on the end of that word, then you would have an especially bad word." there is something to be said for getting what you know will be your most terrifying and surprising moment of the day out of the way before you have even have pants on.

two days before oscar was to leave, i asked bella what she thought the best thing about having oscar was. she thought for a moment, just a moment, and said the best thing about having a dog was it brought our family closer together. i asked her to explain why. she went on to say that since oscar needed lots of walks it caused people in the family to go out together; she and mom, she and i, anthony and i, she and alex. and also, there were several times where we'd gather around to see how someone was playing with oscar because it was cute or funny. i will give it to the girl, she can make a solid on-the-fly argument that is more cogent than i've seen grown men make in the heat of debate. in thinking about her observation, i would say that in the last five weeks just about the only one on one time i shared with anthony was while he and i were out walking oscar. although i guess i should also count the numerous times when i was explaining to anthony, one-on-one, that a dog's anus is not its GO button even if it looks like one and pushing it does, without fail, make the dog go.

in the end, we've learned the kids are closer to being ready for a dog than they were a year ago. we've also learned the same could be said of their father even if my progress hasn't been as significant. and we've learned that when all is going well, marty could possibly be caught petting and loving on the dog. that said, we've also learned that when marty's not feeling the life with a dog, the dog and whoever is responsible for bringing the cur into marty's home better sleep lightly until marty's funk passes.

it's that time of year again when i join the rest of blog-free america for a month. this year, i almost decided to not take my usual sabbatical but then a few things happened, three things to be exact. the first thing i wasn't around for personally, i just heard about it afterwards but when i heard what i missed i was beyond bummed. i thought if i had more time perhaps i could have seen it first-hand. the event in question dealt with a mother's outing (yeah, i know i'm a natural fit for that group) from the neighborhood. one of the women, who was quite drunk, turned to another one of the women, who is a hard-bodied, personal trainer, and told her that if she were a lesbian she'd be really, very attracted to her (the personal trainer lady). why can't the drunk people i'm around ever say classic, sexy stuff like that. instead, the drunk people i see say nothing but inane, bumbling, and predictable nonsense not worth remembering or repeating.

the second thing making me decide to take the month off is the last few days. usually i say i need time away because i'm getting hammered by life and am tired and burned out and spent and fed up. but this time it is the complete opposite. i'm none of those things. i'm stoked about my work, my kids, my wife, my days, my challenges. and i feel like i'm making ground and progress on all fronts and spending my days as i want to. this can very much be seen in my last four days which saw the following:

• i made big ground on a long-standing work to-do
• i received multiple, disconnected professional kudos and compliments
• my kids began their summer break
• alex and i went on a great end-of-school adventure (go-karting)
• three great-weather days (!!!) at our community pool (a pool i love to spiritual degrees) just opened up
• i made amazing progress on my mission to swim a mile (a goal currently two-years overdue but not forgotten or dashed)
• a family tennis outing
• great quality time with family
• time with friends i haven't seen much of
• time with marty (someone i also haven't seen enough of recently)

simply put, life is crazy good at the minute and i want more, more, more of it and want to live as distraction-free as possible for a bit.

and the third item is a blend of the above two and deals in time and in family. yesterday anthony was helping me do laundry and, more importantly, i had the time to let him help. he's actually a surprisingly good assistant. to begin, i deliver the laundry to the upstairs laundry chute. anthony's job is to send it all down the chute to the basement. granted you get a couple of bonus items like alex's shoes and anthony's train cars and bella's books but you also get all of the soiled clothes through his efforts. then downstairs anthony climbs into the laundry chute collector and pushes the clothes out onto the sorting table. when done there, he stands at the end of the table where i hand him the clothes an article at a time and say 'near one' (whites), 'middle one' (lights), or 'far one' (darks) and he throws them in the designated basket. the proper delivery of each article is met with great celebration and i can assure you a more exuberant laundry-man could not be found. during yesterday's laundry sorting when anthony was in the laundry chute pushing the clothes out, he paused for a moment to look up the hole as if something caught his attention. after a moment and as if he was speaking to someone he saw, he yelled, "if you're up there and can hear me, you are a pee-face."

it was at that precise moment i knew i needed to take my monthly sabbatical to BE with my family because while i'm always present i'm not always there and that is the very last thing i want to be remembered for. as always, i leave you with the monthly vomit:

what i'm eating
what i'm reading
sassafras tea
june gallery

i'll be back on tuesday, july 6th hopefully with many great stories and experiences to share and tell

anthony. anfer. anferoni. an-fun-nee.

a few recent observations and happenings regarding our blonde-headed child.

the first comes from a college student who watched anthony. no bella. no alex. just anthony. the student was an experienced babysitter. the student enjoyed, even loved small kids. when his tour was up he looked haggard, he looked older. the first thing he said to the ...

the third thing marty said to me the other morning was, "tonight i think you should get an erection at the dinner table and then show it to everyone."

if you're wondering how such a request comes to pass, this is how.

1. it begins with an unfinished patio project in the backyard.
2. this is followed by a two-hour game of boats and moats which involves the muddy patio pit, a running garden hose, and my three children (as well as a few neighbor kids).
3. then comes a dinner call.
4. before children may enter the home, they must be hosed off. for the older children, this can be done by them holding hands out and pulling pant cuffs upward. for the three year old, nothing is salvageable and he must be stripped of everything and hosed down like a reluctant prisoner being processed for incarceration.
5. next comes the three year old's very usual reluctance to put a diaper back on which results with him eating dinner naked.
6. shortly after thankfuls, the three year old looks at his lap and says his penis is 'giant'. to this, his biology teacher mother flatly says, "that is called an erection anthony which means a lot of blood has gone to your penis but you don't usually see it because it is usually hidden in your underwear" to which he says a reflective "kewl" and to which his brother who is already keen to the giant penis condition says nothing but his sister (who is not so keen on the condition) says, "neat, can i see."
7. to this anthony says sure, stands up on his chair, juts his groin forward making his miniature staff hover over his prepared dinner plate of french toast and syrup.
8. alex and marty paid him no mind. bella craned forward to see better. i sat taking the whole scene in and guessed this very scenario had probably never gone down in our eighty year old dining room and thought it was super cool (kewl) it was unfolding (pun prop) right before me. standing there as he was, he looked like a miniature gladiator home from expanding the empire, and for me conjured images of roman decadence and pride.
9. without looking up, and while stabbing a few bits of french toast marty said (again flatly), "boys at my dinner table don't show off their penises while the family is eating so please sit down and finish your meal."
10. and once again, marty earns our home's title of 'spoilsport'.

after getting the boys ready for bed, i read them books alternating between ones each of them have picked out of their book bins. at 8:00 i say lights out, turn off the bedside lamp and we all hunker down, snuggle up and close our eyes. sometimes the boys try goofing around playing tunnel and touching each other with their feet but i'm quick to squash such nonsense telling them the days over and it's time for sleep. i'm quick to protect this time because most nights i take this moment to catch a twenty minute nap which works well for modeling because i'm usually the first of the three of us to fall asleep (i set an alarm for 8:30 to prevent my naps from going until 3am). last night as i was drifting to sleep anthony brought me back with the following.

ANTHONY
dad.

TROY
yes anfer.

ANTHONY
my penis feels like metal.

TROY
stop touching it and go to sleep anfer.

it is rare that one gets to feel like such an authority on matters as when it comes to fathers advising sons on their penises.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. i get your wieners

they say a picture is worth a thousand words. rarely does it seem this true.

while alex and anthony were taking a bath together, alex started playing a puppeteer game with his penis (a surprisingly under-mentioned perk of not being circumcised). after taking this show in for a few moments, anthony asked, "why do you do that with your penis yallix?"

alex matter of factly said he did it because it was funny.

after watching and listening to alex's antics a few more moments, anthony brightly called out his agreement saying, "it is funny alex. it is!"

chalk this up as another reason younger siblings are on the concord of development. without an older brother to teach him, anthony may not have discovered that his penis could double and a funny finger-puppet until he was four, maybe even five.

we're dog-sitting this week. the biggest change to our home is that i say the phrase, "anthony, stop eating the dog's food" more often than i would during a week we weren't dog-sitting.

bella was messing with anthony and he got upset. marty entered the scene and told anthony that if he didn't like what bella was doing he could tell her so. with this counsel, anthony turned to bella and said "bewah, you are breaking my spirit!"

if marty can do that with a three year old just imagine what she could achieve with someone who actually cared if they were sitting in their own feces.

morgan is a bad kid. if you listen to anthony at least. actually if you listen to anthony, morgan has to be one of the worst kids ever. every bad choice made in our house over the last eight months was made by morgan. for example, i recently found one of marty's valentine's decorations on the floor. it was a red cupid that was adhered to an upstairs window. i found it on the hallway floor and miss...

in reviewing this week's entries it felt like i needed to give anthony some love (or explain why we haven't yet bartered him to a circus passing through town).

number 67 on the REASONS TO KEEP ANTHONY list is the cute way he has of announcing his hunger which is to say, "my stummy go gummel, gummel" while looking up at you with his big round eyes and gapped and chipped teeth.

for those that thought yesterday's homage to life with anthony was tame for one of our children, you were impressively right. i wasn't implying that that was an example of true anthony chaos. not at all. that was actually an example of anthony being cute.

if i wanted to tell of an anthony-disaster, i would have told of last friday when i came home from work. the first thing i found upon walking in the door was marty and alex curled up on the chair and a half, under a blanket, talking quietly. this was one of the closest and warmest moments i can recall seeing them share. i gave them a wave, dropped my bag on the bench and bounced upstairs to change clothes. when i arrived to the top step i was met with a haphazard trail of white viscous fluid that travelled the entire length of the hallway and turned into every doorway it passed. it looked like a giant Jurassic slug had been slithering the halls, leaving its telling trail behind. upon further investigation i learned that it was anthony walking around with a full liquid soap dispenser pinned to his chest with one forearm while pumping it effortfully with his free hand. obviously this close body technique meant he had smears of the white liquid covering his forearm and pantlegs. fact is, given how hard he had to work to manage the awkward (and now slippery) pumper, an impressive amount of the soap was clearing his body and making it onto the hardwood.

when he saw me enter the room he gave me a big toothy grin. i began scolding his choice, grabbed the bottle from him with one hand and picked him up by the armpit with the other. i carried him at arms length while tiptoeing over the soap smears to the bathtub and dropped him in there. hearing the ruckus, marty appeared. she put a hand on my shoulder and told me to go change and go downstairs and set up for movie night. i looked at her for a moment and then decided to take her up on this smart offer. when marty and anthony later joined us downstairs for the start of the movie, she said when those things happen, you just have to calmly explain the rule, clean it up, and move on. this varies considerably from my solution of yelling loudly, beating children randomly, and creating moments my kids would go on to talk to shrinks about for unforeseen decades to come.

in my defense, here's another bit of anthony's handi-work. and when this happened, bella and alex, owners of the wagons, would have firmly voted for my yelling and beating program in this particular instance