bella's class recently participated in a program called bizTown, or something of the like. for the exercise her grade (5th) got into a bus and travelled to some location where there were other grades from other schools. each kid in the class was given a job or duty to conduct. bella was the chief financial officer for her company (that morning she dressed up all business like in a long skirt and matching top - she looked quite smart got up so). when i got home from work i made dinner while bella sat at the kitchen counter with some homework. remembering about the experience i asked how her day as CFO went. she plucked a page from her folder and handed it to my as if i just requested a copy of some boorish report. below is what was on the page. i guess she got tired of answering the question, or any questions for that matter.



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marty stopped me from walking into the kitchen. i asked why. she said bella was making a call. i said so what. she changed the expression in her face to something i'd never seen before. she said bella was calling a boy. and it was best she wasn't disturbed. i nodded ascent. i then turned, raced upstairs, grabbed my camera and then slunk into the kitchen. i have subsequent pictures that show her tu ...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. misdirected

it's hard to remember a time before one or both of these ladies were part of my world. it's also hard to fathom a world without one or both of them. ...

bella turned eleven yesterday.

yeah, i know.

her gifts. marty gave her a house key and i gave her this.

my mother is the only person i've ever known harder to shop for than this small girl. she loves to read so you could get her a book or two but it's hard to compete with the library we have in walking distance given the pace in which she ravages books. the only other two things she's interested in would be a stable of animals and more hours in the day so she could draw more pictures of animals. to this end i also got her some proper drawing gear—sketch pads, pencils, colored pencils, pink pearl erasers, an art bin for storage—because to date she's been fully content drawing her horses on the backsides of scrap paper with nubby, eraserless pencils. it's certain she gets this contentedness from her mother which aside from good health is possibly the best gift one human can pass to another.

note: the knitting army logo was made and donated by designer extraordinaire, tracy dorsey.

our house has a swear jar. anyone caught using swears (e.g. damn, shit) or even simple potty words, sometimes called bathroom words, (e.g. penis, butt, nummers) may be called out and penalized. i know many homes with growing children employ this tactic to bring awareness to the use of such words, attempting to make their children more aware of their place in the vocabulary/society. our operation has the slight twist to typical installments in that bella began and governs our swear jar. what drove bella to this drastic, even if unoriginal (unless your qualify a child starting it), response is she is the last one in our house to giggle at creatively blended strings of potty words or lavishly crafted scenarios about bathroom happenings by her two younger brothers ... or her father ... and even sometimes her mother.

many a night bella has sat at the dinner table appalled at her brothers conversation and hysterical laughing at some extra-juvenile story. when she looks to me to correct and scold the boys, she may find me laughing right along side or even congratulating one of their boys for their detailed recounting. extra-exasperated she turns to her gender-comrade in arms only to find her with her head bowed and a hand covering her face trying to hide her laughter. in one of these moments bella, with all but a fist slamming on the table, called our behavior outrageous, and wholly embarrassing, and what if she had a friend over, and then she declared that going forward, people caught using such words, especially at our family dinner table, would have to pay a penalty, the amount to be determined by the offended party. i broke the unusually long post-proclamation silence (in an equally unoriginal move) by pledging five dollars to this swear jar and told bella to see my people when the balance was exhausted. more hysterics. while she didn't appreciate the added laughter she was quick and glad to accept her foundation's first funds.

it time, and after seeing she intended on enforcing her policy, after she'd announce something like, "ok alex. you owe the swear jar seventy five cents for that story" i came to the aid of my family. using my paternal authority, i proclaimed an amendment to the swear jar mandate. it was this: if the person telling the story can make bella laugh while using an offending word, the teller doesn't have to pay the fine. at first bella said fine because she would not laugh at such childish attempts at humor. but what she didn't prepare herself for was how the tales and descriptions would grow, as a desperate storyteller fought to get bella to crack a smile. the details became wild and grandiose and the imitations of sounds and shrieks became remarkably believable and piercing. this extra effort has saved the accused many a coin as for all bella's propriety and blossoming maturity, she too is a storyteller at heart and can't help but appreciate a good and spirited yarn full of juicy words and pulsing images.

over a decade ago i made the decision to close my kid's dedicated photo galleries after their fifth birthday (and one hundred photos). now that anthony has crested both of those milestones i find myself without an outlet to capture and share the occasional image of my people. while maintaining this website over the past twelve years has tortured me in a number of ways, it has also spoiled me in many more. my expedient ability to fix this sudden case of the jitters being one of the good sides. thus, allow me to introduce you to our family scrapbook.

bella has been between sporting endeavors (girls on the run and indoor soccer). to bridge the gap in the winter months i suggested she join me for swimming. she agreed and even sounded eager, that is until i told her to suit up because it was time to go. this was met with a surprised, "what? now?". after marty helped her get her stuff together we met in the foyer to head out. as i opened the door bella stopped me and asked:

BELLA
how long are we going to be there?

TROY
an hour.

BELLA
an hour! can i take a book?

TROY
no you can't take a book.

BELLA
why not?

TROY
because you're going to be swimming.

BELLA
for the whole hour?

the answer, of course, was yes for the whole hour. i told bella i would explain how it worked during the walk there. to this she said, "WE'RE WALKING!". the answer to this, of course, was again yes we were walking.

after we arrived to the pool, changed in our respective locker rooms, and met at a lane, bella was heard to say the following things during the experience:

• ok. so maybe i'm glad i didn't bring my book. this is fun. (her giddiness was largely due to the discovery that she, at ten, could swim faster than me. i wish i had a worthy excuse but the girl seems to have about four gears i'm missing).
• i thank you for not wearing a swim suit like the guy in the next lane. (he was in a speedo. after glancing over i told bella i was sure everyone at the pool was thankful i didn't wear a speedo).
• next week ... (i'm intensely glad she's excited about next week)
• they were from another country so they couldn't help me. (when i sent her into the locker room, since it was her first time at this gym, i told her to ask someone in there to point her to the general use lockers. the only girls in the locker room were part of a basketball team from another university and didn't know what to tell her. bella deems anyone not from our town to be from another country.).

marty brought the boys to the gym while we were still in the pool. there was a basketball tournament going on and we were going to watch some of the games after our swim. they watched us for a little bit from the windowed observation deck before heading to the gym. after the swim and the game when walking home, i asked alex what he thought of me and bella swimming and if he'd like to do it when he gets his skills up a bit more. he said, "no i don't really want to jump off the diving board." alex has connected swimming laps to going off the diving board because our summer pool makes swimmers show they can swim a lap before going off the diving board. he must think bella and i really, really, really want to go off the diving board given all the laps we swim.

you may remember when bella took a break from her reading to describe me in my biking shorts as definitely not being eye candy. the next time i passed her geared up for my exercise, she stopped me long enough to say i had to stop walking around in those because i was now giving her "eye cavities". it's most evident they're cute when they're young by design. many wouldn't make it otherwise.

our bathroom sink was recently broken for about five weeks. our experience camping has never paid more dividends as once the sink was declared inoperable marty set our camping sink up on the bathroom radiator and after their initial "why's the camping sink up here?" question and subsequent shrug of their shoulders, the kids never looked back or groaned.

a few weeks into our family's no-bathroom-sink lifestyle marty told me she was thinking of inviting a new family she met over for a brunch. they have a son who a daughter of ours might be mildly smitten with so marty asked bella if she would mind if we had the boy and his family over socially. after a beat of silence bella asked, "will the sink be fixed before they get here?"

bella recently asked me to establish an email account for her. i told her that i would under the condition that her first ever email be sent to me. she readily agreed.

here's the first ever email she received: and the first ever email she sent: it's hard to not appreciate a healthy dose of self-awareness and candor.

phone etiquette and kids stands as a most schizophrenic affair. they come across, sometimes simultaneously, as both more and less mature than they really are. how someone hasn't dedicated a show to capturing these early fumblings is a real miss. obviously my kids are no exception. here's a present observation on each of mine.

BELLA (age 10)
four out of five times bella answers the phone one of the first things she says is, "no, this isn't marty. this is bella. marty's my mom."

ALEX (age 8)
anytime alex calls home from somewhere else, the first thing we hear is, "hello, this is alex, alex dearmitt." conversely, whenever he answers our home phone he says, simply, "what?".

ANTHONY (age 5)
someone called the other day during marty's morning BM. upon hearing the ring she decided to let it roll to voice mail. then she didn't hear a second ring. what she did hear was anthony's voice from my office saying in a business-like tone, "my mom's going to the bathroom". then without another word of discourse or courtesy she heard the plastic clack of the phone being returned to the cradle (yes, we use decades-old, corded, wall-mount phones — of course).

while guarantees in life must be issued judiciously, i feel safe in promising that the phone skills coming out of my house will do nothing but improve and improve dramatically in the years ahead.

we recently had our parent-teacher conferences for bella and alex. during bella's, her teacher slid a folder across the table and said it was story bella had written for an assignment. he said he felt it was very good and suggested we read it. he then said he wanted to ask permission from bella and marty and i if he could offer it to other teachers in the school to be used as a teaching aid for students learning to craft stories.

obviously quite proud, i later asked bella if i could post her story on my website. without looking away from her book she said "sure, the more people that hear the message the better, right?" some parents are nice to their kids because they know that one day in the future their children will be responsible for their care and they want them to have fond memories so they care for them well in their old-age. the only difference between me and and other parents of ten year olds is i fear that day is going to happen about six months from now.

so allow me to present bella's first bound, and by bound i mean triple stapled, story, Something I Learned From Another, or it's alternate title, Knitting Army.


click to download pdf

so this week of occupied marty has given us a pretty realistic taste of what our life may look like after marty goes back to work. my only salvation rests in the hope that the real change will come with a little better notice so we can plan and prepare a touch better. my residual fear is that it is hard to prepare for a constant state of unbalanced back-peddling.

and the below image is in no way intended as a guilt-inducing tactic. it simply stands as my favorite visual that captured the sense of the week. we all, including marty, wanted to lean on a similar defense this week (in case you're not seeing it, spy bella's note to her teacher above the grade).



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marty got called up for jury duty. this is the third time since we've had kids. the first two times she got out due to breast feeding. this time she felt she should step up to it. she worked hard to figure out the logistics of getting kids where they need to be for the week. the mornings are are pretty much all me. yesterday morning, the first morning of the week, the three children and i were all in the foyer, minutes from jumping on bikes. the boys were putting on their shoes and i just removed some braids from bella's hair and was brushing it smooth. alex looked up and with great sincerity said, "wow. your hair looks beautiful bella." to this bella matter-of-factly replied, "well, don't even think of falling in love with your sister dude. there's too many girls in the world for that."

i'm quite confident if i spent more time with my kids, documenting their innocent, daily banter would become a full-time effort.

bella had an homework assignment. it asked her to envision what the start of a day would look like in her adult life. in the middle of working on it, bella read a cut at the work to the boys and i as we settled into bed for reading. it went:

i walked into my room for a pair of socks at 9pm. bella sat upright in the bed reading by the light of a lamp on the nightstand. i was basement-bound to do my night's biking/spinning. she glanced at me in the dim light. i stood by my dresser shirtless and wearing only my bib-style biking shorts. she placed her open hand flat on the page of her book and asked:

BELLA
what are you wearing?

TROY
oh. these are my biking shorts. this kind is called a biking bib and they're kinda like overalls to help keep them up and in place.

BELLA
well ... i'm going to have nightmares from your biking shorts.

TROY
yeah, they do look a little funny before i get my shirt on. after i get a shirt on they look pretty normal.

BELLA
i gotta say it is definitely not eye-candy.

and i gotta say bella's dress-down of me standing there in nothing but a pair of bib-style biking shorts planted several flags into my gelatinous esteem as i found myself pushing a little harder than usual that night on the trainer. in fact, so good was the workout, i'm considering letting bella verbally abuse me before every aerobic endeavor. if she gets good enough at it, she could possibly become a new sort of fitness trainer that does nothing but berate her clients into action.

a year or two back i was in a large bathroom stall of a public toilet with all three of my kids. one of them had just gone to the rest room and i leaned over to flush the toilet. bella put her hand on my arm and said in an alarmed tone:

BELLA
whoa! what are you doing?

TROY
what? i'm flushing the toilet.

BELLA
you can't do it like that.

TROY
like what?

BELLA
standing like that.

TROY
why not?

BELLA
don't you know that a toilet can shoot spray from the bowl, like, twenty five feet into the air when it is flushed.

TROY (straightening back up)
uh. no. i didn't know that.

BELLA
uhhh. yeah.

TROY
where'd you hear that?

BELLA
at school.

TROY
oh.

BELLA
and just think if there is pee or pooh in there.

some things:

1. what bella doesn't know is that while i'm surely fearful of pee or pooh being jettisoned at me in the form of a fine mist, clean water from a public bowl disturbs me almost to the same degree.
2. since that day, i have never flushed a public toilet without thinking of that moment with bella (not to mention using an outstretched foot and turning away as soon as the flush begins).
3. also since then, i've come to believe that she (and her teachers) are right in that a few times after flushing the toilet in my office, thanks to a bright frosted window in the stall, i can see small droplets flying through the air in volcanic-like antics.
4. and, by the way, where the hell was that lesson in my sixteen years of schooling?
5. i will confess that, as a grown man, it sucks to have your eight year old child so effortlessly place more obstacles for your neurotic mind to navigate. she's exerted more energy asking to have the potatoes passed her way.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. the c-word

bella loves containers. all sorts. all sizes. by most counts and any definition she's a container collector. as for what she does with them, she puts all the other things she collects (including containers) in them. her love of containers became curiously useful about midway through the last school year as bella went through a few-month period where she didn't want to go to school. she'd begin eve...

marty and i have finally begun (begun!) working on a will. when we told the kids they would be spending the morning with their grandma nat, bella asked what we were doing. we told her. the rest of the morning she was asking me if she could have certain things, like my ipod and computer. i told her not to worry and that i was leaving her my wardrobe, every last stitch of it, or all 32 articles of it. she screwed her face up and told me she was being serious, and then after a pause she added, $25 dollars to her list, as if it were a penalty for my being flip.

days later i came upon this document on the cluttered breakfast room table. it read: so what if my daughter's will looks a bit more humanistic than mine. locks of love would never take my hair. is that somehow my fault? and i still stand by my argument that organ donation could be a rookie move as we don't know what we may or may not need in subsequent realms. although, now that we've had to put pen to paper, marty did get me to soften my request to be cryogenically preserved, a position that until this point i've stood resolute in, even though it compromised our children's college funds. when discussing such things, one can get a bit tunnel-visioned.

not sure if the self-portrait and the drawing of a "mopheaded" aleo were meant to be part of the document or just there incidentally. and last i checked, it isn't cruel to call someone mop-headed if they are mopheaded.



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bella keeps a dream journal.

most mornings you'll find her in bed, freshly woken, leaning on her pillow and furiously scribbling in a spiral bound notebook. if you walk in, she'll sharply hold her hand up so you don't talk to her. once you nod your understanding, the hand darts back to the page and continues its mad dash.

the other morning while i was showering, bella came into to go pee. she started telling me about her dream.

BELLA
i had this babysitter. and she was hot. and then a second babysitter came and she was also hot.

TROY
are you saying hot like hot-pretty or hot-sweaty?

BELLA
hot-pretty.

TROY
ok. that's what i thought.

BELLA
well, then they got into a catfight over who was supposed to babysit me. and, oh, they were wearing swimsuits.

i don't want to say this dream was wasted on bella, but seriously, in a just universe, the ten year old girl doesn't get this dream, her father does.

back when bella was about four or five years old, she and alex would occasionally stay the night at my folks house. on such weekends we would meet my parents at a mcdonalds that was halfway between our homes. there was a period where bella was saying the word "god" a lot, as in "oh my god!" if surprised or wowed. this was definitely gotten from her mother as i was trained young to never play around with the lord's name, even in any of its derivative forms like gosh or lordy or jeezo and the like (from my own mother). oftentimes on the drive to meet my folks i would remind bella that grandma didn't like that word and she should say something else when visiting. my dad recently told me, through great laughter, that at one of those pickups bella excitedly ran to the table my parents were sitting at and slid into next to them. before saying hello or anything, she animatedly said:

BELLA
i know the thing i'm not supposed to say at grandma's house.

GRANDMA
oh yeah. and what's that?

BELLA
'oh my god!' because grandma doesn't like it.

this was one of my folks favorite grandkid stories to tell to any who would listen.

the school bella has gone to since kindergarten just closed after its 98th year of operation. it is the oldest and possibly most storied school in the district. a number of things led to the changes our public school district is going through but things have sadly gotten to the point that the administration is stuck making decisions that aren't always done because it's the best or right option, but because it is the only option left. i was at the school when it let out for the last time. i was there picking bella up for her special end-of-year day out. there was lots of tears and hugs on the playground in what would stand as this building's last education-related act (it was very hard all year to not play the "this is the last time ..." game at every bend and turn). after saying our goodbyes bella and i stole away to begin our ritual-celebration of her completing another year of school.

later in the day while eating at a restaurant, bella slid her notebook across the table and said, do you want to read my story about delmar-harvard. this is what i read (transcribed further down the page)



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if i held it together on the playground, i surely almost didn't after reading my ten year old daughter's first reaction to the event. and i'm doubly impressed that she caught the emotions of the moment as it was unfolding. i'm crazy jealous of her work.

and i am to blame for her use of the word melancholy. she had asked me about the word and i gave her bum feedback for what she was looking for.

bella and a classmate had a cookie sale for the victims of the joplin tornado. seeing the diligent effort she put forth saturday morning making a few dozen cookies i planned to match their meager earnings as these affairs, by grownup standards, always seemed more of an exercise in adorability or americana than a way to move the world. later in the day a friend saw me at the pool and commented on bella's initiative. i agreed. the person went on to express surprise at what they raised in just a few hours. not having seen bella since dropping her off at the stand, i asked about the figure wondering how much i would be out. the answer was $340. i immediately began trying to figure out how to change my contribution to a request for a loan.