a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. the bedtime story

bella has candy hidden all over the house. if we serve a meal she is not interested in, she will sit down at the table, make a face and oftentimes groan in some exaggerated way. soon after this she will ask to be excused. we offer her an alternative such as yogurt, fruit or a muffin to which she will many times decline. we remind her that this is dinner and the kitchen is closed afterwards. she nods in understanding and repeats her request to be excused. we thank her for joining us and send her on her way.

then in-between conversation points you may hear from the next room cellophane being opened or paper being torn. this is bella hitting one of her many candy stashes. we call her back to the table. when she arrives the smell from her sugar of choice is in the air. we explain that eating candy in private is not a healthy or honest choice and that if she is hungry she needs to eat something more substantial. after tolerating the advice, she smiles broadly, claims that she has had enough dinner and confidently asks, can i have dessert now?

last year we had a santa mis-step. bella had left him cookies, eggnog and a note. in the morning the cookies were chomped, the eggnog chugged and the note held a quick scrawl from the man himself. it was something simple. something like a short hello and thanks for the eats. it seems bella had it in her head he was supposed to take the note. that he did not was an egregious trespass. one year later she had no intention of letting him forget anything when he left.



her solution was to put the chair and table that held all the goods directly in front of the fire ensuring he wouldn't miss anything this time. i told bella that he was kind of a big guy and she may need to give him more room to get out of the chimney and her setup may be too close. she explained that if he could fit down the chimney he should have little problem getting by the table and chair. as it turns out, he was able to successfully navigate the space although the agile santa didn't see fit to leave me better reasoning skills so i could stop getting schooled by my kindergartner. sees everything my ass.

i recently built a bench at the foot of our basement steps. my intention for the seat was to provide a place where kids could undress after playing in the snow/mud before tramping through the house. before the bench could be used a single time, bella commandeered it as her own. and not as a mutli-function and utilitarian staging area but as a long worktable to accommodate her most recent project, dissecting each and every block of styrofoam in our home and surrounding community, one squeaky nodule at a time. she has twelve mason jars lined up on the nearby shelves which she intends to fill with the small white balls and then walk the country feeding hungry animals. when i told her that i didn't think animals ate styrofoam, she made a quizzical face and wordlessly walked away which is pretty much how people at work respond to my insights also.



here she is seen with the new neighbor girl who moved in three days before christmas. it took bella all of three hours to recruit her for the task. the first day the new girl, sofia, came down she was at our house for six hours, five of which was spent toiling at bella's makeshift workshop. listening from the top of the steps, they sounded like two waitresses working the night shift. while much of the banter centered around the pending christmas holiday, sofia at some point informed bella that she was mispronouncing the word breakfast (bella has always called it bresfast). in that this was one of my very favorite bella-isms i was a little miffed that my bench was the glue that made that learning moment possible. oh well, i still have bagina.

"A sphincter is a circular muscle which normally maintains constriction of a natural body passage or orifice and which relaxes as required by normal physiological functioning." - wikipedia

a body has many sphincters but at the end of the day you only care if one of them is working as advertised; the anal sphincter. this is one of those hyper-smart organs that can discern what's what with great alacrity and precision. right now, three of the five sphincters in my home are malfunctioning at the hands of some twisted and humorless virus. mine is one of them. bella's is another. and alex, well poor alex has all sorts of evil stuff going on.

as a parent of a school-age bella, the stakes of having an unpredictable digestive illness such as this are much greater, because she greatly delights in sharing everything about our home with her classmates (i mean does the child have no sense of propriety). so if my sphincter were to deceive or fail me while, say, sleeping on the couch and bella came to learn of this misfortune, she would be sure to regale her wide-eyed, floor-sitting schoolmates with the story about how everyone in her house is potty-trained except her baby brother and father. please wish me luck in holding the line.

and for those keeping score at home, i still haven't puked.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. currency

bella clips her own fingernails. toenails too. has been for well over a year now. she's quite adept at contorting her hands and feet in all sorts of crazed poses to get just the right cut. the thing i love most though is how meticulous she is about cleaning up. as clippings drop she plucks them from her thigh or shirt and adds them to a small pile of prior victims. and, if a shard jettisons through the air she tracks it with eagle-like awareness and then retrieves it, even getting up to recover the runaway if necessary.

another thing about bella is she's an improver. she often devises methods for doing things faster, smarter. at some point bella deduced that instead of handling every nail piece individually, it would be quicker to hold her foot or hand over some sort of container. this way, the debris, aside from the occasional shooter, would fall right in thus saving her a step. while you would think we could all celebrate such a handsome improvement i was quick to identify a slight flaw in her process. her receptacle of choice is my work shoe.

now it's not that bella is inconsiderate. when done, she carefully picks up the wingtip and empties it into a nearby trash can. after the initial pour, she'll peer into the dark recess of the shoe with squinty eyes. if she detects any hangers on she'll give it another tip and shake, possibly even clanging it against the side of the bin. when satisfied, she returns the shoe to it's home beneath my dresser.

this leads to a second issue in bella's workflow. if she's in the middle of her grooming and neighbor-molly sticks her head in our door calling for her, the clippers get immediately dropped and the shoe left in place as bella hurriedly scrambles down the staircase excitedly calling "coming molly. i'm coming." then at some later point in the day marty will walk by, see the shoe in the hallway, pick it up, quietly curse me and haphazardly toss the footwear in the direction of my dresser.

the next morning i will slide my socked and unaware foot into the loafer moments before dashing down the stairs to usher the younglings to school and then myself to work. i may notice something straight away but in the a.m. fervor don't take enough heed to do anything beyond wiggle my toes or shift my foot around. it isn't until hours later when i'm sitting in my office discussing some mundane matter with a colleague that it again occurs to me something is amiss. it is here that i roll my chair back, remove the shoe and tip it over. as i watch the translucent pieces of human waste tumble through the air before disappearing into the dull-colored carpet my mind screams "noooohhh!" i turn to look at the face of my alarmed co-worker. it is clear they feel are too near someone with an exotic disease that makes their toenails brittle and crumbly. and my condition appears so dire i can't even wait until i get home to attend to my illness privately and on top of all of this, am inconsiderate enough to just cast my withered body pieces all willy-nilly about the workplace.

have i mentioned that bella will also on occasion trim her own hair. that particular habit has 'night in jail' written all over it.

i was brought out of my sunday morning slumber by getting pushed on the shoulder by bella and told: i guess we've left the everyone-can-be-naked part of our life. or perhaps we've just left the dad-can-be-naked part of our life. i see a plush terry cloth robe in my near future.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. you should know

i have to go pee dad.

this is how it starts. with a small boy still in the rudimentary stages of potty-training tightly gripping his groin on a park playground. the more vicious the grip, the less time you have. you must also assess the feet because if they are fidgeting, time is extra-short. on this day, i gave the fist-feet combination a 7 out of 10 on the urgency scale. we were also about 50 yards from the indoor restroom. totally doable. i call across the park:

bella, i need you. come with us please.

why?

alex has to go pee.

ahhhh. i don't want to go.

come on, bell.

en route, i endure a lecture from bella about how she doesn't want to go to the bathroom and how she is old enough to stay at the park by herself. she informs me she is not going to go into the restroom because it is the boys room since mom is not here and boys are gross. and their bathrooms stink. and they can be mean. as we enter the rec center i point to a leather-bound chair and tell her she can wait there. she falls into it with an exaggerated huff.

when we get into the stall, i look at alex's fist and speculate his penis hasn't seen an oxygenated blood cell in four minutes. i lay a few sheets of toilet paper on the seat, pants the child and throw him on the commode. a heavy torrent begins the second his buttocks touch the seat, like there's some button-mechanism on his ass that controls his urethra's flow. when the stream ends, i ask him if he's done. a clenched face looks up at me, struggling to enunciate ...

i have to go poop.

oh. ok. that's fine. go poop.

in a still clenched and strained manner he informs me that he 'needs privacy'.

oh. sure. of course. i step out of the stall and lean against it. i take the first full breath of air since he announced his need on the playground. a guy at the other end of the long restroom calls out, asking if anyone has lost a girl.

i think she's mine. bella?

father. where are you? you guys are taking sooooo long.

bella, we're almost done. alex is going poop.

i'm done dad.

ok alex. i'll be right there. bella. wait right there.

dad, i'm done.

i know alex. i'm coming.

but dad. i've got to go too.

uuhhh, bella. ok wait just one minute. let me get alex.

dad. where are you? i'm done.

coming alex.

but, dad i have to go right now.

ok bella. coming.

i wipe alex and raise his two pair of underwear, one pair of pants and two pair of shorts. don't ask. meanwhile, bella has gone into another stall and is working on getting on the toilet. i come in, get her on the seat and am told she also needs privacy. i step out. she tells me to lock the door. i explain i can't lock it if i can't be in there. alex crawls under the stall before i can shriek for him to get off the ground. bella counsels him on how to work the lock. after he secures the door, she instructs him to leave. he crawls back out of the stall. more ground. more shrieking. bella calls that she's done and needs wiped. i explain i can't get in there because she locked the door. she clarifies that she didn't lock it and that alex did. during my eye-roll, alex shoots back under the stall. i've since surrendered that battle. he unlocks the door. i get bella out and place both kids in front of the sinks, even though what i really need is a mild acid and fire-hose. bella uses this time to reiterate, loudly, her male theory explaining how boys are dirty and gross and mean. three men standing at urinals turn their heads our way. i smile. they don't.

we make our way back to the playground. it's now twenty-one minutes since alex first called me. three minutes later alex approaches me again ...

i'm thirsty dad. can i have a drink?

no.

why no? i'm thirsty.

because then you'll have to pee again.

this is my third wednesday of eating lunch up at bella's school. now feeling chummy with the crew, i asked if anyone knew what they would be dressing up for on halloween. this question was met with a resounding yes followed by an inventory of characters. i then asked if they knew what joke they would be telling while trick or treating (a definitively saint louis thing). this culminated in a barrage of impromptu knock-knock jokes most of which punch-lined with the word 'dumb-head' or 'poop-head' and as best i could tell i was always the one in the simple/fecal-headed seat. the melee climaxed with this final knock-knock joke which i was actually pretty excited about in the early stages.

VICTOR
knock-knock

TROY
who's there?

VICTOR
for real, you've got spaghetti on your pants.

TROY
for real, you've got spaghetti on your pants who?

VICTOR
no. you really do have spaghetti on your pants. look. (he points under table where i see a smallish pile of meaty pasta resting on my knee)

TROY
oh, dang. i thought that was your knock, knock joke.

VICTOR
i said 'for real'.

TROY
yes you did victor. you did say 'for real'. sorry i didn't pick up on that.

if these youngsters don't get a little more precise in their consumption of food, these wednesday lunches may be short-lived.

bella's single complaint about kindergarten, to date, is that it is too long. when marty consoled her by saying it would get easier and she would get used to it, she replied ... "but it's just too hard to go all day without loving you or father." those are called 'mad skills'.

days later, a teacher told me that parents are welcome to come and eat lunch with their children. curious about h...

the kids and i biked to a nearby park last weekend and i bumped into an ex-colleague. we were close enough to the playground that bella and alex continued on while i stopped to chat with my friend and his family. after bella got off her bike, removed her helmet and was ready to proceed she started calling for me. i was busy bringing my pal up to speed on my life; bragging on how well things were going with the new job and even newer baby. he asked how the kids were adjusting to anthony. i explained, honestly, that they were great. bella is doting and alex impressively gentle. overall things were very warm and loving. i should mention that the whole time i was talking bella was thirty feet away yelling at me, bike helmet in hand.

dad, we're ready to play.

dad!

dad get over here.

dad get over here right now!

dad git!

father. if you don't come here right now, you're going to be fired.

dad!

DAD! you're fired.

(alex was standing there sucking his thumb and looking elsewhere through this whole lambasting until that last line at which point he removed his thumb just long enough to say in his soft, partially interested voice)

yeah dad. you're fired dad.

i was specific in directing the warm and loving sentiments of my children towards their new brother, not their old father.

we had a child born two weeks ago. we had another child begin full day kindergarten one week ago. and gluttons that we are, we're making yet another child enter half-day preschool this week. with so many balls in the air we didn't really get a chance to counsel alex proper on what to expect at his first school experience. what to ask. what not to do. where the bathroom is. you know the basics. fortunately for us, we have bella and it is apparent from the below 5-second time lapse photo that she has privately schooled him on the powers of manipulation, or as she would contend, the powers of survival, happiness and household dominance.

i just can't figure out if the photo on the left is his mean-mug or his just got mean-mugged face. knowing bella as i do though, i'd say that is the face of someone committed to keeping the thomas-train table all to himself.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. dad has to go

this is unfortunately not an atypical dinner conversation at our table

BELLA
dad, you're going to die first.

TROY
what? me? why do i have to die first?

BELLA
because you're the tallest and the tallest means the smallest life.

TROY
well, i'm not such a great fan of that.

MARTY
it's ok troy. someone has to be first.

BELLA
and mom, you're next.

bella starts kindergarten today.

as if i'm not already enough of a mess with this looming milestone, i've had a number of veteran parents tell me that the period before your oldest child starts full-day school is the golden era of parenthood. the rationale claims that once a child enters school-proper, parenting becomes more challenging given the child's exposure to people you haven't liked enough to personally invite into your home. the theory does seem sound. the theory also does seem to suck a whole lot. on the positive side though, while some of the folks bella will be forced to interact with will be evil, the process is sure to bring some experience-rich personalities to the table she/we would not have otherwise met.

and as proof of the universe's incontrovertible balancing act, the same weekend our golden era ends, bookpimp's journey begins. congratulations michael and christine on the birth of your first child.

wish me luck. wish bookpimp luck. wish anyone responsible for tiny heart-absconding humans luck.

04.30am		put my computer to sleep after working on a site design for 7 straight hours
04.35am		get undressed in the dark and fall into bed only to learn alex is sleeping in my spot. i yank my pillow from under his head and drag it behind me to his bed.
04.40am		listen to bella grind her teeth for five minutes and do some unqualified projections on what orthodontic expenses will look like in ten years.
04.45am		fall asleep
06.18am		roll over and smash my face into a metal thomas the tank engine toy. attempt to throw it across the room but send it into the wall next to the bed. fall back asleep.
07.30am		get pushed in the head by alex's foot and told to get out of his bed. i push him away telling him to go ask mom.
07.34am		get shoved again by alex, this time with a hand, and told more emphatically to remove myself from his bed. i repeat the instruction to take it up with his mother. he leaves.
07.50am		pushed in the back by marty and told to get up for work.
07.53am		bowl of grapes spilled on my head and chest as alex roughly climbs over me for the thomas train that accosted my cheek and nose earlier.
08.00am		pushed harder in the back by marty and told she's not telling me again to get up.
08.06am		tickled by bella and excitedly told 'first one to the tv room gets to pick first show'. i tell her i hate the formulaic brainwashing that happens on modern broadcasting and am fifteen hours into a boycott. moments later i hear her shout her first-show victory through the house.
08.10am		again shoved in the back by marty and told i am ruining her morning.
08.32am		i wake, naturally, and stumble to the bathroom feeling surprisingly refreshed and have a notion it is going to be a good day.
08.35am		i find my electric toothbrush lying behind the toilet. it seems the good day hunch was a tad premature.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. three shows

the day after sassafras was born, i took the kids to the hospital to meet their younger brother. bella immediately latched onto the newborn making various cooing and gooing noises at him while waggling a finger over his face and belly. alex immediately went to marty taking his rightful spot on her lap. about five minutes into the visit bella spoke up and said she knew what we should name the baby. we asked what, preparing our poker faces for the worst. she confidently announced Abrey. after her proclamation she turned and hunched back over the infant as if the matter were resolved. marty and i both made faces, but they were different.

TROY
i kinda like it.

MARTY
what did she even say, avery?

TROY
no, abrey.

MARTY
spell it.

TROY
A-B-R-E-Y.

MARTY
abrey? that's not even a name.

TROY
sure it is. everything is a name.

MARTY
well, i don't like it.

TROY
and if i do?

MARTY
i'm not naming a child abrey.

TROY
it's two against one.

MARTY
alex, come here.

here's a thing to know when negotiating with the human who just spat another, smaller human out of their special hole; they always possess more stock in the business at hand than you. so abrey was out. after a brief bout of panic and uncertainty a name was unanimously agreed upon ... anthony. anthony walter dearmitt.

that said, everyone in our house calls him something different. marta calls him anthony. i call him antonio. bella calls him abrey. and alex calls him sassafras. no reason to not get a quick jump on the schizophrenia his world is sure to bring.


click here peggy

labor began at 6pm, wednesday night. we left for the hospital at 3:30am. marty gave fully natural birth to a six pound healthy boy Thursday, August 17 at 1:54pm. the child is still as of yet, unnamed.

my mother watched the delivery, something she also did for alex. marty has now twice extended this very generous invitation to my mother since she never got to personally experience childbir...

on our trip to the beach last month, marty gave bella and alex disposable cameras. she explained there were a certain number of pictures and when it was done, it was done. we just now got the developed rolls back and i was impressed with alex's range.

• (top left) i've long been a fan of cattywampus composition and this shot was skillfully crafted. field of depth and division of color is wonderful.
• (top right) this looks straight out of a gap/j crew/fitch seasonal rag. it's a totally overdone technique, but if you can't nail the fundamental shots, you got no business being in the mix.
• (bottom left) the 'what's happening here' quality of this shot makes the viewer commit a few brain cycles in contemplating the action and more importantly why the action warrants being photographed. (spoiler: ethan just bested his father in a thumbwar and is counting his winnings)
• (bottom right) nailing the 'moment in time' shots is a skill any serious photog must be able to harness at will. sure, you wish the cup wasn't there and the window wasn't behind her but your gotta work with what you got.

the full collection, only excerpted here, had several shots of bookguy and his people so i forwarded the relevant ones on thinking he may like to see a photographic savant's early work. his reply ... imagine being privileged enough to also see the early steps of a future world ruler as well.

for about fifteen years i've kept a large glass coin-jug on my dresser. at the end of each day i drop my loose change into it. about once a year i pour the contents onto the floor in front of a movie and roll my bounty. the collection typically amounted to several hundred dollars. since bella became old enough to request the jug be handed to her my annual accounting has dropped from the just under five hundred realm to the just above forty dollar range because you see bella likes playing with coins. bella likes playing with coins a whole lot.

one of her favorite treatments is to sticker the coins. how this works is she will empty the jug onto the floor and go through them one by one checking each side. coins that already have a small random sticker on them go in one pile, coins that have no mark go in another. once divided, she places a sticker on each coin in the stickerless pile and when done returns all the coins back into the jug. such an audit, which occurs about once a month, can take anywhere from one to three hours and is typically spread over a full day.

bella has it in her mind that i get paid at the end of each work day with a small handful of change. she thinks the size and diversity of the mix indicates how hard i worked. if i tinkle a large handful of coins into her cupped hands she proudly says "boy dad, you sure must have worked hard on this day!". a telling thing about bella is when i have just a few or no coins to share she doesn't harangue me but quietly accepts the news, maybe even giving me a commiserating "that's ok dad, we've already got lots of coins". criminally precious.

several months ago a relative of mine, cousin debbie, was in town and staying with my folks. we went over one night for dinner and bella became quite smitten with her (that my forty-something cousin would hang out with bella under the dining room table played a great role in this friendship). when it came time for us to leave, bella very seriously told cousin debbie she should come live with us because it would be lots of fun. debbie gracefully declined saying she wouldn't want to impose. bella cheerily said it was not a problem because we were rich, 'we have piles of money in every room of our house.' truth told, that is a correct statement. although a minor omitted detail is the aforementioned piles range in value from $1.34 to $12.75 depending on how much bella lost sight of and how much you're able to find.

what bella said after returning from a play-date at a friends house. based on bella's description of what happened, i believe the non-kid show in question was ER, even though bella repeatedly referred to it as PM.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. look before you leak