bella handed these out to her friends. so did alex. even anthony handed some out. and i'm sure marty slid one or two to her friends. i figured if they can invite folks so can i. so if your people know where my people stay, you're invited to our humble and sometimes excitingly dangerous (via little flaming balls of fire -- very game of thrones) smores fest.

and if you do come, you'll note i never touch the things. regardless of your math skills, i promise you can't compute how far out of bounds something that sticky is for me.

i suited up to bike the park on a beautiful sunday afternoon. as i stepped onto the porch, bella asked if she could go. while i needed a hard ride only a fool would turn down such a request from an eleven year old daughter. so i waited for bella to throw on her helmet, slip into some crocks and wheel her bike to the front. we were off.

on the tail end of our eight mile ride, we ran into a stretch of fine gravel, more like silt really. when we first hit this new surface (most of our route was a paved track) bella's tires slid as she pedaled through sharp turns. i began to caution her about biking on this type of terrain but stopped myself from saying anything. i'm trying to talk less and let my kids experience more first-hand. this new troy is probably shocking to any who know me fairly well. but those who know me well should also know there is always a new troy in the works. less than ninety seconds after biting my tongue bella turned into a corner hard and both tires slid out from beneath her. i pulled up next to her and asked if she was ok. she said she was. i commented that this silty stuff can be slippery to bike tires. she said she saw that. we stood her up. her knee had a small cut. i squirted some water on it and asked if she was ok. she was. we pushed on.

that night while dining on the front porch, i recounted the moment to the family, adding that i considered cautioning bella about the peril but decided to let her find this out on her own. i was mildly prepared to get some pushback in the "thanks a lot" variety but got none. i'd say the kids, bella and alex at least, not only understood but appreciated the looser hand.

we went on to talk about how mom and i would have to sit back in the future when the kids entered new waters and how some things have to be learned and not advised, especially in the world of dating. marty and i knew we'd have to just smile and let them watch the tires slide out first hand. when they said that was kinda sucky, i agreed but also assured them we'd be here to squirt water on their scrapes when it was done.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. don't walk

what strikes me about the kids' gifts to marty this year is that they came without any sort of prompting. i never said "remember to do something for your mother" or "remember tomorrow is mother's day". this was all done on their own accord. fact is, i didn't even know they had done anything until i saw it unfold as marty did. and even with anthony i knew he had done something but he kept it secret until the gave it to her in bed that morning. most cool.

birthday parties at our house have a ritual called the birthday spoiler. when kids aren't looking the birthday spoiler takes and hides their party gear (pinata, games, cake) but leaves clues as to where the items got to. the kids have to solve the clues to find their stuff for the party to continue. this year alex used this tactic on marty.


TRANSCRIBED:
dear marty,
hi. i know you haven't heard of me. i am the mother's day stealer. i hid alex's mother's day gifts. you might find alex's mother's day gifts. but since i am nice, i will give you a clue. it is in a room where you go poop.


TRANSCRIBED:
marty,
i tricked you. but i will make sure you don't find it. here is another clue. it is somewhere where you send email.


TRANSCRIBED:
marty,
you found it. next year i will hide it even harder.

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 ...

i have a spring cold. i caught this one from anthony. upon getting up in the morning and realizing i was fully sick, i said bye to the kids and then let my office know i'd be out for the day. i then fell back into bed and didn't wake until 2pm when marty and anthony came home. it was a beautiful day so i moved out to the porch to get some fresh air. in time, marty had to go get bella and alex from school. anthony didn't want to go so stayed with me. as soon as marty biked away anthony came up to me and asked if i would read to him. i said not today. he asked if i would play with him. i said no again. he asked why not. i told him it was because i wasn't feeling well and needed to rest. i said he'd have to go find something he could do by himself like play in the backyard or ride his bike. he proceeded to make a booby trap for robbers in front of our house with a ball of twine while i sat on the front porch with my eyes closed, occasionally coughing. after one of the rounds of coughing, anthony came up on the porch.

ANTHONY
i just heard you cough and then suck snot in your nose. that is what i do so do we have the same kind of sick?

TROY
yes. i think we do. i think i caught my cold from you.

ANTHONY
then i don't understand why we can't play together if we have the same kind of sick.

TROY
because i still don't feel well.

ANTHONY
but i'm still sick.
(here he makes a fake cough followed by a tiny snort of his nose)
see. and i'm playin'.

i have a couple of friends who give me nudges like this to coerce me into things i'm not up for. i'm far from thrilled to see my children (esp my five year old) prodding me similarly. i now don't know if the problem lies with me or them.

saturday at a family easter celebration, one of alex's found eggs had a mood ring inside. on sunday morning he and i were sitting on the steps in front of our house. we were mostly just sitting there. alex was focused on a captured caterpillar crawling up his arm. i was leaned back enjoying the quiet morning. an older couple walking a dog approached us. just as they got even with us, a nine-year old alex, after glancing at his mood ring, said to me, "i'm feeling romantic right now dad."

it has been awhile since DFS has been by. it should be nice to catch up.

i don't think marty will ever be accused of over-protecting or mollycoddling her children. and for as much slack as she leaves in the line, the woman has yet to have had to rush one to a hospital. granted there have been a few moments where i though it might be in order but when i asked marty about it, her typical response was "just rub it" or "that one might need a band-aid". she would then turn ...

having grown up in colorado, i surely remember taking advantage of many an overflowing gutter for boat-running and dam-building, but such affairs always took place during or after a rain. in saint louis and all the august-beating backyard pools, this storied child's affair can take place on any day, rainy or blue, that someone needs to drain a pool. and no one will ever say those dearmitt boys did ...

a former student of mine, super-sam, recently dropped in for dinner with us. as the adult conversation hit its stride the kids tuned out of the boring side of the table and chatted and goofed among themselves. this time though, my guest, caught the kids ears when he said he was interviewing for a job with a game development company. surprising everyone at the table, after this comment was made, alex spoke up interrupting sam and asked what he just said. sam repeated his hope and intention to get a job making video games. to this alex started asking sam if he's heard of many of the games alex has been playing. it was a hit and miss list. in time the conversation moved on.

a few days later alex handed me a letter. i thanked him and started opening it thinking it was another one for me. sensing my mistake alex said, "it's not for you dad. it's for that boy, that boy that is going to make games. it is some ideas morgan and i had of games he can make." sam, who went on to get the job, hasn't even been assigned a desk yet and already has a creative team doing his bidding. truth told, i expected no less.



firstly, alex is not good with names. he just calls most people who visit our house "that boy" or "that girl" so that he put a male name in that spot at all is a bit surprising. marty caught the mistake and had him fix it, but he only corrected the name on the outside of the envelope where it said "opin". additionally, you can't expect the creatives to have to bother with unimportant things like their boss or client's name. they have more pressing neurons to tend to. and speaking of creativity, i'm not sure if the world is ready for exploding babies yet but if it is, with the insight shared in this napkin pitch, sam may get the jump on the market. the letter transcribed and corrected follows: on the second game idea, i'd guess they either ran out of creative steam or morgan's mom called and said it was dinnertime.

anthony initiated a most unexpected play-date. it was unexpected because it was with, of all things, a girl. i say unexpected because to date most of anthony's sentiments regarding the fairer gender have been more along the unoriginal, five-year old "i don't like girls--they are dumb" lines of logic. this time not only did he acknowledge this play-date, the morning of the play-date, he announced the following in the foyer while putting shoes on:

ANFER
i'm going to marry with edie.

(to this everyone in the family raised their head up from what they were doing)

BELLA
but i thought you were going to marry with me.

TROY
and i thought you were going to marry with mom.

ANFER
nope. now i'm marrying with edie.

MOM
does edie know this? usually both people have to agree to such an arrangement.

ANFER
yes she knows. yesterday at school i said i was going to marry with her and she said she was going to marry with me.

i would encourage edie to consider upon a longish courtship. this way she can see if anthony outgrows his near perpetual need to incorporate the word poop or penis or butt into every conversation, regardless of their contextual relevance. there are other points i could raise regarding a cautious entry into matrimony, i just don't think there's need to add evidence to an already sound position.

the official ogre rules (as divined and governed by the dearmitt clan)

CORE RULES

1. a dad or a mom or a much older kid plays the ogre.
2. the kids are the food for the stewpot.
3. the ogre chases the kids.
4. if the ogre tags a kid, the tagged kid must go to the stewpot (typically a bench or a tree or the like)
5. the only way to get out of the stewpot is if another kid who has not been tagged comes to the stewpot and tags you out.
6. the ogre wins if he gets all the kids in the stewpot.
7. the kids win if all but one kid is in the stewpot and that last remaining free kid tags all the captured kids out of the stewpot before getting tagged by the ogre (when only one kid is left is, for sure, the loudest and most exciting part of any ogre competition).

ADDITIONAL RULES

1. you must be in the stewpot before you can be tagged out (that is, you can't be tagged free while walking to the stewpot).
2. there is no base or safe spot for the kids.
3. you have to stay inside the prescribed area, usually a playground or the shallow end of a large swimming pool.
4. if there are more than five kids playing, you may add a second ogre.
5. you must honestly obey the rules of the stewpot (e.g. pretending to be tagged free when you weren't) or the game is immediately over and cannot be played again on the same day.
6. it is fair to pretend to be in the stewpot when you are in fact free, tagging kids who have been sent there. however if an ogre discovers you using this ploy, extra attention may be given to properly keeping you in the stewpot.
7. it is suggested that ogres wear their running shoes and eat their wheaties prior to a round of ogre.

for those that asked about yesterday's sassafras picture, re-shown below, here's a more revealing picture of what he was climbing. these tolkienesque huts were erected in front of the art and architecture buildings of the university by our home. we passed the recently completed structures while coming back from roller blading/skating in forest park (and headed to breadCo for hot chocolate). i had seen the early stages of their construction a few weeks earlier but dismissed it as something not meant for me. coming upon the completed version my foot quickly moved to the brake and i pulled over for a closer look as they definitely jump out in front of your eyes. seeing the grandeur and stability of the edifices one of my kids, i forget which one, called for an impromptu game of ogre. the kids won in a best of three affair, anthony winning the third and pivotal round. and we concluded that when we play ogre in funny shaped buildings like this, instead of a city park or swimming pool, it will be called smurf ogre.



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the day after halloween i found this note on my desk with a orange pumpkin half-full of candy.

how such a specific bowl comes to be is when the kids (and any accompanying friends) come home from trick or treating they spread out in a room, dump their candy out before them and conduct a fast and loud series of trades in attempt to upgrade their candy stock. you hear things like "i'll trade five dum-dums for one snicker" or if something is really hated, "anyone what this pile of sour-patches ... it'll just cost you three peanut butter cups". alex is a great person to have in your trading circle because he doesn't like chocolate. what i didn't know, before this week, was that there is a special 'hate' bucket where the candy that nobody likes gets tossed into. and if you're curious what some of the terrible sorts of things found in there might be: tons of almond joys and loads of peanut m & m's, two of my favorites (and to the more refined palettes go the spoils.)

yesterday was a wicked long day (on the tail end of a wicked long ten days). and then in the evening, marty had a meeting which put me in the barrel getting all three kids down. i read to alex and anfer and then hung out with anfer while he went to sleep. before moving in with alex i stopped in the bathroom. when i opened the door to exit, there was a piece of paper on the floor. it is shown below. if you subscribe to the bucket system (a paradigm that likens your emotional needs (e.g. esteem, energy) to buckets that can be filled and emptied by various actions), this modest token penned from a child's emotion is the equivalent of having a dump truck's worth of water deluged atop a small, tattered bucket. i post it here so down-the-road on another low-level day i can come back and ladle some of its pooled goodness into my wanting bucket.



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while walking home from our dad-day lunch, anfer he found a penny on the ground. upon spying the unexpected treasure he let out an unabashedly excited, 'oohhh, penny', crouched down, and raised it in his pinched fingers. he held it inches in front of his eyes as if inspecting a fine gem. suspicious, he held the penny higher for me to observe. he asked if a real penny could be this skinny. i lowered my glasses on my nose, glancing at it. i confirmed it looked to be the real deal. he responded with a hushed "yesss" as if he didn't want any passersby to learn of his luck. he then looked down at his right hip, patting it with his hand checking for a pocket. finding none he swung his gaze over to his left hip. again no dice. without pause he slid the thumb from his free hand under the waistband of his shorts and underwear and pulled them them both away from his body. he then held the penny over the open chasm as if lining it up for some sort of carnival game and let it drop into his shorts. once it disappeared his thumb released both elastic bands and they tautly snapped back in place. confident his treasure was safely concealed he resumed his wistful march towards home.

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:

imagine anthony nestled in a top bunk piled high with blankets and pillows given the fall morning chill, after his wake-up pee, flipping through the colorful pages of the first three installments of the Amulet, due to the thankful release of the fourth in the series, wearing nothing but a loose pair of shorts - backwards, no underwear, and with more than an hour before the school bell rings. that is a pretty good start to the day. and he doesn't even know how to read. jealous, jealous, jealous.

before hearing this story, you need to know one small detail about anthony: he vigorously contends that he is a robot, or at least that he has robotic innards. anytime i compliment him for doing something surprising or impressive his countenance sinks in frustration and he says, "dad, i keep telling you, i can do those kinds of things because i'm a robot. why can't you remember that?" and i apologize and say i forgot to which he gives an exasperated huff and moves on as if wondering how a boy robot got saddled with such an lacking human parent.

now the story. we were at our city park for alex's soccer game. bella was sitting on the bleachers reading. i was on the sidelines helping coach. marty was chatting with a friend and anthony was killing time on the playground. at one point marty looked over and saw anthony crossing a tall set of monkey bars. given their height she kept an eye on him. he had shimmied up the vertical upright to get started but once across, his legs couldn't reach the other upright or the top rung of the ladder. seeing him struggle marty ran over to help but before she got there, his grip gave and he fell, landing on his side in a hard, horizontal thud. given the height and the awkward landing, marty feared the worst.

when she crouched down next to him he pushed himself to a sitting position. marty asked if anything was hurt he. he grabbed his side and marty rubbed it testing his response. finding none, she commented that he was lucky he didn't break anything. in response, he explained that his side is his "metalist" part.

a few more feats like that and i may start giving some credence to the boy's claims of robotic componentry.

i was awoken by anthony rushing into my room waving his fist above his head. he moved right next to me, either not realizing or not caring that i was asleep just four seconds earlier. undeterred by my addled response, he instructed me to ask a question. the easy manner in which he did this would have told someone watching that we were ten minutes into a conversation and not that one of the participants was just pulled from a deep sleep. compliantly, yet groggily, i asked why he was waking me up and not someone else. to this anthony vigorously shook his hand back and forth a few times as if making a cocktail, and then stared at his palm. after a moment a deep baritone voice said, "the magic meatball doesn't think so." at this declaration, anthony shrieked with delight saying, "ahhhh! he doesn't think so dad! you lose." dropping my forearm over my closed eyes i retorted in a partially involved voice, "you do realize anthony he didn't really answer the question i just asked, right?" like with the sleep, anthony either didn't realize or care that his sage failed him. nor did he seem interested in talking to his real-life father over this mindless plastic bauble which, by my count, paid as much attention to the actual conversation at hand as my overly self-interested college roommate did back in the day.

as this experience, and volley of questions, continued i found myself ranking this waking to my list of worst wake ups ever. bella's cannonball into the small of my back has proven to be a real gamer that no one has ever come close to matching. while finding this moment's spot in the list, marty entered the room and after a pert, already-showered hello said to anthony:

MARTY (with a mischievous glance my way)
ask the magic meatball if dad is going to get busy today?

ANTHONY (excitedly to the toy in his hand)
magic meatball, is dad going to get busy today!?!?

MAGIC MEATBALL (with bravado and confidence)
the magic meatball says YEEESSSS.

ANTHONY (even more excitedly)
aahhh! you're going to get busy today dad!

anthony's rejoicing at my imminent fortune had both marty and i laughing heartily. and i may have been hasty in my judging of the meatball. he seems ok to me. but, before we stamp any thank you notes, i should add that his prediction may not have been as prescient as he led on because at the time of this writing, i'm rather busy-less. and i assure you no one is bluer on that count than me. truly. in fact, i'm miffed enough to consider a rebranding effort for the magic meatball to something a touch more accurate. fortunately for me, he already mostly has the appearance of the moniker i'd been toying with.

UPDATE: so after i posted the above and before midnight, the magic meatball's promise of good fortune came to be. my apologies mr. meatball.

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.

for those left unconvinced after yesterday's evidence.



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