three neighbor boys were over. they're all brothers, the oldest being alex's age. i was in my office and they were in bella and alex's room and making an astounding amount of noise, hysterical laughter mostly. i've been responsible for little humans long enough to know that such chaos, while good at the minute, can be short-lived for several reasons, many of which you'd never guess were even possible. having a few such debacles in my portfolio, i decided to look in on things.

in the middle of the room was a running fan. the protective grill on its face was missing (a casualty of anthony knocking it off a stool days earlier). in alex's raised hand was a peach-colored ball of goop, very similar to a product called 'slime' when i was a kid. this goop concoction makes orange marmalade seem like rock candy, and given its runny, sticky, gelatinous composition puts it in great contention to be the $800 answer to the question 'things troy would most hate to come into contact with'. that's all you need to know about the goop. well that and that at the moment i appeared in the doorway, alex's hand flung the nebulous mass directly into the spinning fan blades. upon contact, the goo jettisoned from the fan as if shot from a gun, flying straight towards the doorway i just darkened and hit me square in the junk.

the room went silent. all five boys gaped at me with frozen, open-mouthed expressions. after a moment of complete stillness, aside from the fan which was ramping back up to full speed, i grabbed my groin and doubled over in an exaggerated manner, dropping to my knees. the astonishment level in the boys faces heightened, if you can believe it. i looked up to alex and in a pained voice asked why he shot his father in his wieners. if you thought there were hysterics coming from the room before, my performance took these young men to an all new high. i'm glad to see that even in the age of the wii, a good sock in the crotch can still win a room over. it's hope-inducing.

alex recently told me where hiccups came from. he said, "your diaphragm falls asleep and then the snoring makes the hiccups come out."

the really sad thing is that is a better-sounding answer than i could have come up with in a pinch.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. dry meat

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.

there are dad HOURS and there are dad DAYS. dad HOURS happen every week, or are supposed to at least. dad DAYS happen once a year. a dad HOUR is when i and one of my children go out, just the two of us, and do something, something of their choosing for one hour in the week. for these bella usually picks rollerblading or ripsticking, aleo picks tennis or a sushi lunch, and anfer almost exclusively ...

for those left unconvinced after yesterday's evidence.



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if you ever see marty or i and we look fatigued, the below image will begin to explain why.



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i was trying, ineffectually, to photograph the sunny shimmer of spiderweb we came upon during a trail-hike. apparently the waiting kids lost their patience for my craft and began entertaining themselves. i proved so focused on the elusive web that i didn't even notice the hijinks in the background. fortunately my camera proved more aware than its owner to know where the better picture was to be had.



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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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at the camp outing we recently took, i only broke my camera out once. it was after lunch while taking a break from the water. the below collection of shots were captured in a time span of less than five minutes amidst a flurry of laughter and goofiness. the kids who are not our kids are friends of ours who are our camping mentors and make it look both easy and fun, which i'm ever thankful for.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. beatdown

my sister-in-law has four kids, most of which are older than ours (the eldest is already driving-age). at a recent gathering the sister-in-law and marty were exchanging notes about their summers thus far. marty commented how our bedtimes had already shifted back an hour or two and how it changed our home's dynamic, especially for her time-sensitive-regimented-neurotic-insane husband. the sister-in...

the kids had negotiated with marty the right to sleep through the night in the forts they made in the living room. once the unorthodox arrangement was penned, the kids got extra ambitious in their plans so that by the time i got home from work the entire living room was blanketed with sheets and stacked chairs and pillow doorways. when the bedtime hour arrived marty reminded them that if they screwed around and didn't go to sleep they'd have to go up to their regular beds. the brood excitedly acknowledged the terms and then scrambled towards the mayhem each dropping to the ground and crawling in various crevices and tunnels towards each of their individualized sleeping nooks.

after they disappeared from view and seemed to arrive at their personal hovels (as the giggling and shuffling subsided), i pulled a chair (the last unused one on the main floor) into the foyer and setup with my book to ensure they stuck to their end of the bargain. after about twenty minutes i had to get something in the basement. shortly after leaving my reading post, i heard someone crawling around. by the time i got back upstairs marty had caught anthony out of his makeshift bed. when she asked why he was up he said, "dad wasn't guarding us anymore so i had to run to the bathroom all on my own." he ended this declaration with an exasperated drop of his arms as if we would be equally astonished at this treatment.

i don't know if i should file this under "delusions of grandeur" or a "misinterpretation of the world around him". could possibly go either way, maybe even both ways.

this weekend while lazing around the living room, alex asked anthony, who was wearing only underwear, if he wanted a wedgie. you'd think that might be the funny part of the story but it definitely got better after anthony said, "yeah, sure." marty and i took a break from our game of junior monopoly to watch alex position himself behind his brother, get a good hold on the elastic of his batman undies and near lift his brother off the ground. by my estimation it took an enormously long time for anthony to start rapidly saying, "ouch! ouch! ouch!" than i would have ever guessed it would.

and as if that wasn't enough, which i assure you it was, having anthony reach behind him and curiously feel the rope of fabric that was wedged between his paper-white butt cheeks with a wondrous look in his eyes as if her were petting a stingray at the zoo or touching a freshly born baby may have been the most unexpected bit of it all.

MARTY
"anthony, we don't close our penises inside library books."

the most interesting part of the story is not that marty had to tell our four year old to stop closing his penis inside a library book but that she had to go on to explain why.

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.

there is a detail i forgot to mention about aleo's bike crash episode last month. after i carried the bloody boy into the fire house and the paramedics looked over his mouth and head, one of them wanted to cut his pants off. when i asked him why he said that it looked like his legs got banged up given how torn up his pants were. i had the enviable task of explaining to the man that that was what his pants looked like before the accident.

there are two reasons for this predicament. first, alex has only ever worn hand-me-downs from his cousins and second alex ardently refuses to change clothes for days at a time. the result of this innocent combination is most days, aleo looks like a full-on vagabond (and i'm not even including his mop of hair which he's recently decided he doesn't want cut anymore). so as if his oral trauma wasn't grueling enough, i also got my first taste of feeling embarrassed by one of my children's appearance. and i know you're thinking i should have crossed this bridge long ago, but my children have historically been more embarrassing sounding than looking. like for instance, the time bella said to her preschool classmate's overweight nanny, after studiously looking her up and down, "boy, you sure are fat all over!" marty and the nanny just exchanged looks before smiling uncomfortably and walking their different ways.

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.

friday was anthony's last day of school. i left a morning meeting at 11am and set out on the ten minute walk to his school. on the way there, i reminisced on some of the moments from anfer's first year of school. like how he would occasionally leave his classroom for another if the other room looked to have better stuff going on than his own. or the time he he tussled with his best friend over a stuffed animal, which culminated with someone getting bit and me getting to apologize from my work phone and say that he wasn't usually a biter. or the time anthony left the school, as in left the actual building, because he was done for the day and was confident he could walk home "by his own".

after ten minutes of these mental rambling in spectacular mid-day weather, by the time i came upon the school i was feeling very sentimental and soft. i looked at the lawn of the school where the kids were lined up and sitting on the small grass hill awaiting their pickups. on this particular day, because of the achievement, there were many double parents and video cameras and grandparents in attendance. after anthony saw me approach, i knelt down for the big running hug i usually get from him when he sees me (his excitement stems from my presence usually meant he got breadCo for lunch). on this day though, he walked slowly towards me dragging his backpack behind him. when he got to me he looked at my face and loudly proclaimed, "my butt itches dad." with this unfortunately audible declaration, he reached around and dug in good and deep through his sweat pants. i raised up looking at my rooting kid. i then looked around at the other smiling, hugging, recording, gap-ad looking kids with my wispy bubble of anticipation freshly popped over my moment, leaving me dotted with the goo it was made of.

but as he always does, anthony pulled it out. while we strolled under the canopy of trees that line our neighborhood streets, anthony observed that the houses looked like they were made of candy and that he thought we might live in a fairy tale village. i smiled. he then went on to theorize that the sidewalks were made of candy books which further supported his suspicion that we lived in a fairy tale village. i smiled more at his fanciful take. and then when a neighbor stopped to talk for a minute, anthony, tired of waiting, said in full exasperation, "dad, let's go. my butt still itches!". more bubble goo.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. mouthache

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. punked

often times when i come home from work, i am lured into a game of ogre or tickle war. last week i was locked up with anthony and i was definitely getting the better of him as he was face down on the bed and i was tickling him madly from a combined neck, armpit and biscuits attack. after some furious laughter and struggle he broke free and spun away on the bed. he stopped facing upward and i leaned over close to let him know he didn't get away and i was about to start in again on his stomach and armpits. he held his hands up and said,

ANTHONY
STOP!

TROY
stop? why stop?

ANTHONY
because you just made me throw up.

in perfect concert with him saying the above sentence, i felt the moisture from his vomit soak through my $80 brooks brothers work shirt since in reaching for him after he rolled away i laid my torso perfectly on top of the spoils of my tickle victory.

ever the optimist, the good news to this tale is i've now made all three of my children barf through tickling. the bad news is, in regard to their collegiate and professional futures, they keep coming back for more.

how long it took for aleo and i to ride our bikes to the cub scout bike rodeo: 9 minutes.

how long it took before a fast moving aleo collided with another fast riding bike rodeo goer: 40 seconds.

how long it took for me to run to the nearby firehouse with a crying and bloodied aleo in my arms : 3 minutes.

how long it took for the paramedics to conclude there was no bodily harm but significant oral damage : 8 minutes.

how long it took me to explain to marty over the phone what happened : 1 minute.

how long it took marty to convince our family dentist to leave the restaurant he was eating in to meet us at his office : 38 seconds.

how long it took for marty to arrive at the firehouse : 4 minutes.

how long it took for us to drive to the dentist office : 7 minutes.

how long it took for the dentist to assess the damage : 5 minutes.

how long it took for the dentist to remove the damaged tooth : 12 minutes.

how long before alex recovered from the ordeal : 3 minutes.

how long before marty and i recovered : unknown as the clock is still running on this one.

in the end he lost one tooth on the playground and another in the dentist chair. he also has a gum injury which i will spare you from hearing more about (honestly, though, this is more for my sake than yours). fortunately, both of the lost teeth were baby teeth and will soon be naturally replaced by their adult counterparts. i don't know if the same can be said for the nerves marty and i lost in the wake of the night.

on the drive home, a spent marty dedicated her daily thankful to dentists.

i dedicated my thankful to our particular dentist, dr. chris who by every count and measure is a complete rock star and extraordinary individual. if we had more like him in our professional and familial ranks i'm certain our society would be an all-around better place. i thank whatever fortune put us in his path.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. take your meds

we've reached the familial milestone of having a child that can stay home alone. this is of course for short periods while one runs for milk or to grab a paper. fortunately our oldest is authoritative and respected enough to keep her brothers in check as well.

the other day, i called home from work to ask marty something and got bella. she told me mom was out. marty initially told bella not to answer the phone but for obvious reasons this made me nervous when i knew marty wasn't there and i couldn't raise bella on the phone just to make sure things were ok. in typical fashion, marty handled it.

intrigued, i asked bella what she told people who called when mom wasn't there (and that weren't her dad). she said in a very officious manner, "i'm sorry but she's not available right now, may i take a message?"

she further reported that she'd already taken two messages before i called. i complimented her phone manners and asked if she would have mom call me when she got back. bella said she would. i then asked if my message could be moved to the top of the list as i was waiting on something from her. i was told getting moved to the top was not possible and that was not how a "people-who-called" list worked.

i don't foresee any future charges of nepotism being leveled at my daughter when she's running a fortune 500 company and i'm pushing a broom around the lobby.