last weekend bella and i completed our last two training rides in preparation of next weeks ms-150. on sunday we rode 28 miles following that up monday, on bella's insistence, with a 30 miler. we planned on thirty each day but a sudden cloudburst had us call the first day's ride short as biking in rain isn't ever really fun. this upcoming weekend, we'll complete the two forty mile options for bella's first organized distance ride.

for reasons i can't explain i never envisioned the part of parenthood where you get to do things you, and not solely your children, enjoy doing. i'm equally unable to express how impressed i am with my twelve-year old daughter's athleticism, commitment, persistence and agreeability even in the face of daunting endeavors (e.g. a surprisingly long hill twenty miles into a ride) which are surely pushing her beyond what she thought capable just a short few months back.

some of my latest, favorite observations i've most enjoyed about riding with bella:

• how when i pull up next to her and start talking about something she might say, "just so ya know dad i can't hear a word you're saying because there's a good song on i'm pretty sure is better than whatever it is you're talking about".
• how she refers to the homes in rich neighborhoods as "drama houses".
• how she asks me, on virtually every ride, if her biking calves are coming in yet.
• how she occasionally compliments me by saying stuff like, "you're not doughy compared to that guy who just went by".
• how after i asked if she wanted to replace the side view mirror that broke in an spill she took, she replied, "nah, i think i like going old school and just looking over my shoulder."
• how bella reacts when we catch guys overtly checking her out from cars, bikes and sidewalks. one poor kid looked so dumb-struck i thought his gum was going to fall out of his mouth. as bella was expressing surprise at this change in her life, i told her the bad side of the story is some people will wonder if she and i are a couple. to this, she looked as dumb-struck as the poor kid who almost lost his gum in the front seat of the family car. yes, every bright tale does have a dark-side it seems.

and there's still room on both of our pledge cards (granted there's way less room on hers than mine) should you be interested in supporting our ride and/or the ms organization.

bella and i are biking the ms150 charity ride next month. although the event formally stages two 75 mile days, they began offering other distance options to increase interest and participation. currently we plan to ride two forty mile days, although if bella continues to improve at her current rate, we may do 75 miles the first day and 40 miles the second day (to get her over 100 miles for the weekend).

my interest in this distance ride, one i've done four or five times in the past, is biking-related. in typical fashion, i thought this was true for all riders. but as she has done so many times already in her twelve short years, bella has exposed how little i really know about the world around me for she is ravenously interested in this ride but not for the ride itself but instead for the opportunity to raise money for folks in need.

when the topic first arose i told her that such a ride was a reasonably serious affair and something that would require training. without pause, she said no problem. in the last few months she has gone from a girl who struggled through a reasonably tame seven mile park track to a girl who last weekend completed a twenty-five mile road ride without issue (and even bleeding the last ten miles after a reasonably nasty skin-abrading spill). fact is she has improved so much my concerns about the ride no longer focus on her ability to complete the miles as much as my ability to keep up with her as there have been a few times i've gotten distracted by something, like my bike computer, only to find she pulled away from me and it took a surprising amount of effort to catch back up to her.

and i really can't enumerate all the ways training with bella over the summer has been wickedly cool but it definitely marks an evolution in our relationship. it also indicates a shift in my parental role (marty too) as we are now be able to do stuff with the kids that isn't just geared towards the kid's level or likes but are things that marty and i enjoy doing just as much. a few of my more favorite moments during our training:

1. after passing a ripped woman in a sports bra, bella called over her shoulder, "boy, she sure earned that skimpy top." ever since then whenever we see a shirtless male or the naked mid-riffed female, a quick call by one or both of us, and sometimes simultaneously, of "earned it" or the less desirable "didn't earn it" gets called out.

2. while biking through a fancy rich neighborhood, bella said, again over her shoulder, "boy, someone sure loves their kids". when i asked what she meant, she pointed at the enormous corner lot and said, "look. they built their kid an entire, full-sized soccer field ? with goals". this comment made me smile wide and long for both its curious wit and that i now have a relationship that includes such comments with a child of mine.

so that's the plan. and if you are someone who supports the MS organization, bella and i (bella less than i -- cute kid and all) are still taking pledges for our ride. you can email me if you'd be interested/willing to pledge a few bucks.

the interested in boys switch got thrown on bella recently. both before and after the switch a few boys have shown interest in bella. obviously since the switch, bella has shown interest in a few boys. also obviously, bella has been asking when she can start dating. the short answer has been "not yet". her repeated and consistent reply has been "then when?". marty is inclined to say something like...

part one is over here

towards the end of king's memoir he penned a sample passage of a bar scene. in reading it bella ran into a number of words she didn't know. this turned into concern about fighting with the language and that this struggle might take away from her enjoyment. she expressed this to marty first. marty said she should maybe wait to read them. bella agreed.

when she mentioned this to me i reminded her we would be reading them together and i could help with any words she didn't understand. she said it wouldn't be the same and we should wait.

i'd be lying if i said the notion of sitting in bella's new bunk bed reading stephen king books with my daughter every night of the summer didn't have me bristling with anticipation. i already had it planned out. we were going to start out by reading them in the same order i met stephen king: pet semetary, it, tommyknockers, needful things. from there we'd branch out. i saw a large part of my summer hopes slipping away with my daughter's prudent decision making.

seeing my uncertainty, bella said, "it's like you say dad, sometimes wanting is better than having".

boy do i hate it when my good advice sinks its teeth into my own buttock.

update: in the end the pull of trying him out proved too enticing so on saturday june 8th at 10:03 pm, my daughter and i began our first joint-reading of stephen king beginning with the same book i first read when a little older than her, pet semetary. we would have started at ten on the dot but i had to pee. unfortunate timing that. but we sat on the porch with multiple candles burning. i read the first chapter, using my clearest and most measured reading voice. when i finished the chapter i excitedly looked over at my daughter who was sitting on a deck chair facing me. her hand extended toward me, palm up, requesting the book. she said, "nice try dad but you don't have what it takes. hand it over." so she now has the reading duties and she is quite good at it. i'm convinced she learned most of her character voice skills from her mother when marty read all seven of the potter books to alex and bella a few summers back, employing a wildly impressive array of voices and energy. after i handed the book over, bella leafed through the pages i just read, finding passages and telling me "this should have sounded more like this dad" and would then re-read the lines with am admittedly higher level of enthusiasm and skill. aside from struggling with the elderly neighbor Jud Crandall, who via bella sounds more like a young hiphop artist, she's knocking it out of the horror aisle.

and now that we have a few nights under our belt, i must say that these neat and tender reading moments i'm sharing with my eldest child makes all the early years, fumbles, questions, trials, sacrifices and challenges of getting to this comfortable, close spot we can share together and look forward to every day ... well ... it just makes all that early work and effort seem crazily trivial.

part one is over here

one thing i haven't mentioned through all of this is why bella is so ravenous to read stephen king. the reason is bella fancies herself a bit of a horror writer. she has written a number of scary short stories. they definitely are not what you'd expect to come out of a twelve year old girl, who otherwise seems as normal as bella seems at least.

she mostly has done this in her free time and just shared it with family and friends but one day she asked me to proof-read a school assignment for her. when i did it was one of her horror stories.

TROY
what is this for?

BELLA
english class.

TROY
you can't turn this in at school.

BELLA
why not?

TROY
because the department of family services would come here and take you away from us.

BELLA
why?

TROY
because this is twisted and deranged. i mean don't get me wrong, it's very good. the problem is its almost too good and thus twisted and deranged.

it turns out she was very excited to turn it in and had already talked it up to her friends and teachers. our compromise was she had to include an author's statement with the assignment. what she quickly penned to appease her stickler-father follows:

part five

part one is over here

yesterday's mention of bella giving up television reminded me of a related story.

now that bella is older, about a year back, marty suggested we get a proper television so she could comfortably have girlfriends over and for gatherings, sleepovers and the like. our conversation quickly and excitedly turned into a top-down redesign of our living room, sketching out a remodel to take it from its present state--which is about two steps from looking like the monkey cage at the zoo (we're missing simply a swing-rope from the ceiling)--to a fully re-imagined space that included an L-couch, a wall mounted flat-screen, surround-sound, a stained-wood mantle, matching built-in bookshelves lining the walls, and new natural-wood, functioning french doors (note: these were recently installed). marty envisioned herself curled up under a fleece blanket watching some of the series-tv she's missed over the last decade. i imagined myself buried in the couch's corner, watching weekend football, wearing a pair of tired sweats, a fresh bowl of stove-top corn on my lap and a few logs popping in the over-sized fireplace. both marty and i were plenty eager to assume these relaxed positions.

a few weeks later while out with bella on our dad-lunch, i revealed this plan to her. instead of the shriek i braced for, i received an inflectionless response that she kinda liked not having a tv didn't want to get one. i almost reached over to her feel her forehead thinking she must have taken ill in the time it took me to utter my sentence. this sorta moving target is one of the core reasons parenting is often named the hardest thing you will ever undertake.

later in the day when alone with marty i began a conversation with the words, "you're not going to believe this but ..."

TROY
you're not going to believe this but when i told bella about our plans for the living room, she said she didn't want a television.

MARTY (stopped what she was doing and looked at me)
what?

TROY
yeah, she said she didn't want a television. she liked not having one. she said having one would change, ruin even, the tenor of our home.

MARTY (after a brief pause)
well screw bella. i want a television. when she has a home of her own she can preserve the tenor of it all she wants.

this would be that target i'm trying to aim at picking up and moving again. and not just like moving two paces to the left but like moving in a fast and serpentining pattern that i'd need an uzi to hit, and as confessed before i'm working with a home-made slingshot. truth is, ninety percent of the surprises i contend with come from the two women in my life saying things i don't expect (and sometimes just the plain, darn opposite of what they said before). the other ten percent comes from the boys in my life doing things i don't expect, things like:

• dropping toys down the neighbors sewer vent.
• riding red wagons down hills while standing on top of them, surfer-style.
• climbing trees so high you can't even yell loud enough for them to hear you screaming, "get down! now!"
• or like, our six year old arriving at the dinner table with hundreds of dollars in his piggy bank and saying it's just his chore money from the last few months. of course when you combine (1) the fact that he gets fifty cents a week and (2) his brother and sister's banks are suddenly empty, his defense starts plummeting faster than his computer time over the next two weeks.

but at least with the boys, while i may not expect all the things they do, i do understand them. this is what makes raising men a more tenable undertaking for another man.

but moving back to the original topic, bella and television, don't think that the rapidity in which my daughter accepted stephen king's advice (mentioned yesterday ), which she encountered exactly once before mine (and having shouldered my advice dozens of times) has been lost on me. i see it. i see it most clearly. i also imagine it is not the last time she will accept notions from a fella new to our lives before she would take my own, identical, tested and trusted counsel. i'm sensible enough to see that coming and yes, i'm already saving money for the therapy i'm sure to need when the dark scenario actually happens for real.

and for any other people possibly fighting this fight, or other similar fights, with their small humans, i will share the closest i ever came to persuading bella to abandon her digital herion (without the assistance of a best selling author at least). the nearest my methods took me happened after we attended a school event (her induction into the national junior honor society--sorry, proud father, couldn't resist). before the ceremony began two students from the school performed for the audience, singing and playing acoustic guitar. they performed beautifully, so rife with confidence and composure, especially for two junior high age girls sitting in front of better than a hundred people. after the event the pre-show music came up in discussion. bella acknowledged who they were and said they were amazingly talented. i asked bella if she thought she would be as good as those girls if instead of watching shows on her computer time for the last two years she had practiced guitar. bella thought for a moment and said probably. i repeated her 'probably' and added had she done that people might be watching her playing guitar on television instead of her watching other people do enviable things on television. i watched her reaction, closely, and saw something happening but admittedly the success lasted about as long as a netflix login. that said, that brief moment is the closest i ever came to getting bella to put the media needle down.

part four

part one is over here

i put two conditions on bella's reading of stephen king. the first was that we would have to read the books together. the second was that before we start, she had to finish reading his memoir, On Writing, a book i had given her several months earlier.

the only issue with the first condition is she said i'd need to find five hours a day to give to the effort. i'm confident i do not need to go into the nine kinda ways this was not going to happen so we quickly negotiated that down to a more realistic thirty minutes a night, and maybe the occasional hour depending on my schedule and the plot line.

regarding the second condition, the moment we concluded our time-each-day bargaining she turned and ran from the room. over the next several days every time you'd see her she'd have king's memoir on her; either opened for reading, stuck in her armpit if walking, or resting on her thigh if sitting. a brief aside—on the top of bella's reading log for the library's summer program, she added the words 'you can't compete' followed by three exclamation points. i, the library staff, and multiple summers worth of other kids in the reading program can attest to the undeniable truth of this declaration.

an unexpected bonus from sir king totally came when he slammed, viciously, television saying time spent watching was wasted, forever lost and offered no redeeming value, namely in this case, to one's writing skills. bella said she got that and was considering fully giving up tv and computer, replacing it with reading and writing. while my mind furiously staved off a that's-what'-i've-been-saying message bella continued on, "so who would have thought you and stephen king feel the same way about television. crazy." spared.

but, for any ground i gained on the television front, my dinner table suffered as he also says that if you really want to be a writer you cannot let things like social norms stand in your way and to properly hone your craft you might need to read during certain social routines. he named family dinners specifically. bella informed me, so i wouldn't be surprised, that she will now be showing up to dinner with a book or writing pad in hand and i couldn't protest because she was just following the advice of someone i told her to read. un-spared.

part three

bella, who just turned twelve, has been asking pleading to read stephen king for the last two years. of course, each time my response has been a wordless glance over my glasses. she knows what this means. and she hates it. still without a word from me, she exclaims, "why not!". i explain she is too young for the likes of stephen king. to her huff i explain he will still be there when she isn't too young. to her second huff i explain she needs to save some things for when she is older because if she consumes it all now there will be less to enjoy later. to her third huff, i explain she only gets one childhood and it is my job to protect her from leaving it too early, for the wrong reasons at least.

that talk happened more than a year ago. over the last few months bella has built a shrine to King on our family bookshelf, meticulously organizing all of his works, all that i own at least, onto a single shelf. i've caught her a few times either (a) re-scanning the shelves for any books she may have missed or (b) staring longingly at the bindings of the collected works and maybe even placing her fingertips on the glossy wall of bindings in a way that could only be described as reverent. the other morning i walked by while she was in the second state. i asked what she was doing. she said sadly she was waiting until she was ready. i replied i thought she might be ready. her head snapped up and her eyes shot open. she asked me to repeat what i just said. i did. she asked me to repeat it one more time just to make sure. i did again. she danced in place. she hooted. she screeched. she whirled in circles. she reached her hand out towards the books touching them softly, letting them know they'd be together soon and softly, but excitedly, ran her hand down the length of the volumes reveling in the memorable moments awaiting her.

while we walked to the bus stop fifteen minutes later she asked why i changed my mind, what was different. i said she was different. she was more mature. she asked for specific examples. i recounted the night before how i asked her to walk a dog that was staying with us (due to bella's dog-sitting business). it was late and she didn't want to walk the dog and said as much. i explained that other people in the family had taken the dog out that day but she had not and it was her turn and she told her clients she would so she had to do what she said because someone was paying her money based on that understanding. she turned and left the room. she got dressed and took the dog out. and not just for a quick circle of the block as i expected her to do but for a good, proper walk. she came home still mad but instead of injecting her mood on the home, she retired to her room, went to bed and woke pleasant as usual. i explained that one of the reasons for green-lighting her was her more mature handling of problems which even six months ago would have been a big dramatic affair.

i added that it was also her evenness and reliability. not only is she consistently responsible in her chores and duties (jobs and school) but she has also been steady in her conviction to read stephen king. she has shown it to be more than just a passing fancy.

and there is a third reason. i didn't mention it to her but it is something i've discussed here before (i think) and that is the school bus. based on her reports, the conversations are every bit as salacious as anything stephen king has ever penned ... and at least he's a grown man who has experienced many of the things he's writing about which trumps information that comes from older siblings, cousins, uncles and neighbors. so if she's going to hear such things, she may as well hear them from a human, mr. king, that has actually experienced such things (and while i'm there to bandy about the questions that remain).

part two

MARTY
you look good in those pants troy.

TROY
thanks.

BELLA
yeah, too bad you chose to wear that jacket with them.

TROY
ohhh. nice one bay.

BELLA
thanks. i try.

MARTY
you can thank the bus for that quick wit.

for all of the hours bella spends in the classroom and on homework, marty and i have found the bus to be one of the most truly educational spaces she occupies, and especially on afternoons when she stays late for some extracurricular affair because then all the club and detention kids ride together. for her age and given the diverse world she occupies, i'd say it's near equivalent of doing post-graduate work.

bella after finding the golden egg at the walter-extended-family easter gala. this is a coveted honor that more than twenty cousins vied for. this is bella's first time capturing the prize and she is busting, visibly, at the win.

and yes i know she looks like and is now a young lady.

(photo credit goes to cousin missy) ...

we're out west right now for spring break. in planning the trip, given the distance we were looking at, i assumed we would fly but two things got in the way. the first arose when i booked our flights and was asked to select seats. as i scanned the small craft (as that seems just about all that leaves our once mighty airport anymore) for open spots a thought surfaced: now that everyone is using these smaller planes, what happens when a family of five gets bumped from a flight. i thought back to times my flights got cancelled and how desperate and flimsy the search for new arrangements typically seemed. and that was for one human. one human that doesn't completely crumble emotionally when deprived of their proper bedtime. the thought of finding a new route home for five people left me staring at the screen in a paralysis of sorts.

the second hurdle of merit was the pricetag. once i'd selected the round trip option and the litany of fees (seriously!) were added, we were looking at about a three grand burn before even leaving the zip code. i knew this would tax marty's ability to enjoy our ambitious adventure and rightly so since we just recently re-entered the ranks of dual-income homes and have a bit of digout to go yet from our single-income decade.

the morning after i uncovered this travel dilemma, bella and i were waiting for the bus. sensing my distraction bella asked what was wrong. after apologizing for my stupor i explained the above two things to bella. with barely a pause for thought she began:

BELLA
why don't we just drive?

TROY
uhh. because it would be like twenty hours in the car.

BELLA
so.

TROY
so, i didn't think anyone would want to spend that much time in the car.

BELLA
dad, it's vacation. we go on vacation to be together right. and when we're in the car we're together. and, we don't have any distractions like work or school. isn't that what vacation is about.

so we drove. and i gotta say, it was beyond awesome.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. boyfriend

in choir bella (11) bent down to pick something up and hit her head on the back of the chair. she exclaimed an unchecked and uncharacteristic "shit!". when she stood up one of her friends had turned to her, held her arm forward offering her hand to bella and said, "bella. welcome to the dark side. we've been expecting you." then another friend standing behind them started breathing like darth vader. it seems bella was the last to utter a swear in front of the group, a group of playful and sweet girls, as evidenced by this wonderfully precious moment.

i later caught bella muttering the same swear around the house and told her she needs to mutter that more quietly because i didn't want my kindergarten boy taking it to school. after catching bella in the phrase a few more times, i asked a favor of her. i asked that whenever she says felt required to say shit, she extends the phrase to shitake as in shitake mushrooms. early on there was a prominent pause in the syllables as you'd hear "shit" then a few beats later a "... take mushrooms" tacked on the backside. but now, already, it pretty much just comes out as "ahh, shitake mushrooms".

while we're talking inside language, the phrase bella and i use to reference "girl things" is fuzzy pickles. this might go something like:

TROY
bella what took you so long? i thought you were ready to go.

BELLA
i was but had to deal with some fuzzy pickles.

TROY
oh. right. you good now?

BELLA
yep.

TROY
cool.

i like being part of a larger family far more than i ever thought i'd like being part of a larger family.

bella has an enviable stance on fashion. thankfully, her brain hasn't yet gone numb like some of her peers in regard to blindly following what they see others doing. i'm not entirely sure what has held this moment off as she's imbibing the same sort of music and media as her peers. but still, she routinely says things like "that looks funny" or when she sees the fancy stuff in a store will say "that seems like a lot of money. why wouldn't people just get something at goodwill?". in the end i'm confident we're seeing another show of marty's fine work.

a few nights back marty and bella went out to get some pants for a school concert and came home with, in addition to the black pants they needed, a pair of skinny jeans. the next morning bella happily sported them in the kitchen striking poses in her new fancy wear. as she vogued out, i thought of this quip i had just read in men's health: as bella continued the exhibition, i feared "the change" had arrived and i quietly mourned the moment over my oatmeal. then not ten minutes later at the bus stop bella dropped a pencil and after effortfully bending down to retrieve it said, "i think i just found a difficulty with my new jeans." thankfully through the day she discovered more difficulties, like the need to keep them from falling off her backside while running after someone down a school hallway. so the cry of wolf may have come too soon as my girl still seems to have enough tomboy and tomcat in her to keep her out of the high weeds of adolescent confusion and nonsense.

excerpt from bella's essay "what i learned from another" she penned when she was nine years old.

I learned to knit when i was six years old. My aunt had taught me. My family had went to Chicago to visit my Aunt Cherry and Uncle Tim. I had wandered into my aunt's room, I loved her room. Her walls were painted with the scene of a sunny beach, the rolling waves and the ladies tanning on t ...

View in Family Scrapbook >>>

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. realization

apologies for my absence. i had a project unveiling at work on tuesday and slipped into my obsessive persona to make sure everything looked fit and fancy for the first sets of eyes.

the showing went swimmingly.

then yesterday, wednesday, i had my first dad lunch with bella as a junior high student. the slight bummer is she only gets thirty minutes for lunch. and her school isn't near any eateries. in thinking things through i remembered a city park i used to play tennis at just over the hill from her school. it had some rolling grassy hills and lots of trees. so as time neared, i got a lunch together and headed to the school. after i got her dismissed from class we made the two minute drive to the park.

the day was crazy bee-you-ta-ful, especially on our bench in the shade. after getting settled i pulled from my cooler a snarf's ham and cheese (a favorite for bella and i), a bag of chips and a large ice water. we talked about a number of things: how this was different from elementary, how we were lucky this park was so close by, how we played ogre on the playground several years ago, bella wondered what we would do in the winter (i admitted that was a good question because we were surely not going to get weather this nice all year), and we might have even talked about boys for a minute or two. then as she was finishing up her sandwich i dove into my small cooler and readied the next treat i brought. bella leaned over trying to see what i was doing but i blocked her prying view with my shoulder. then, when i lifted the bowl of chery cobbler from the weekend out with two scoops of still firm ice cream on top, my girl's face lit up like the blue-sky day.

later that night, marty asked bella how our first dad lunch of the school year went. bella told her of the cobbler and ice cream. she then said that "dad did good".

it's funny how a room of adults praising a piece of my professional work that i've spent more than six months on felt good but didn't come close to the reward i felt in getting my daughter's "dad did good" seal after a thirty minute lunch.

today i will walk my isabella to the bus stop so she may attend her first day of junior high. i'd tell you to send her some positive thoughts but i fear i may need them more. whatever happened to my baby girl.

and, like last year, we just snuck her dad day in before the end of summer. this year's day of decadence involved:

1. horseback riding
2. porterhouse lunch
3. bookstore hour
4. movie afternoon (step up revolution)
5. ted drewes custard

it was, hopefully, a day she'll remember. i know i will as i can't remember being that wiped out after a day.

and of all of that, i think she may have been most surprised and excited about seeing the step up revolution movie. at the end of the film she started an applause that the other patrons merrily joined in on. that may have been my favorite part of the day.

bella and i sat in chairs in the shade reading at our community pool. while there, a muscly guy showed up. he looked nearly like one of the guys you'd see in competition or on the cover of a magazine. covertly, bella leaned towards me saying, "check him out." after checking him out, she asked why i didn't look more like him. i commented that i wasn't sure we were the same species. then more seriously, i added that anyone who decides to look like that must make a life commitment to the goal, and i prefer eating dinner with my family. mildly surprised, bella asked why i wouldn't eat dinner anymore. i explained i would, i just wouldn't with her and mom and the boys. i asked her to guess where i'd be while they all ate. in a sober tone she replied the gym. right. i went on to explain that any extreme life achievement comes at the cost of other life experiences and given her, bella's, many proclivities, abilities and opportunities, these were choices she will have to one day face.

after a moment of quiet, i explained she got dealt a father who chased not a body, wealth or fame, but balance. with a grin i added that when you were handed looks as dashing as mine, it would be unfair to pile muscles on top of them. she grinned back and with that both our heads returned to the words in our books building the one muscle in our bodies that doesn't show well at the pool.

bella's grandma, marty's mom, is a master pie maker. given her years of making them, i reckon a momma-nat homemade pie is about as good as you'd taste anywhere. a few fridays back bella and her grandmother made an apple pie together. on the following saturday afternoon bella walked onto the porch carrying a plate with a slice of pie and some ice cream. having seen her already partake in several sn...

kids surely do revive what is special about summertime. without their energy and excitement to be out of school, as adults we tend to lose that youthful shine during those three special months (given we're still locked up under the fluorescents).

and please note alex's super awesome red pinstriped, seersucker shorts ... worn backwards. such style can't be taught. ...

alex is our consumer. when we travel and he sees commercial television, he has no defense for the highly fabricated and stylized advertisements that interrupt his shows (and that bella used to think were mini-skits so the shows actors could huddle and think what they should do next in their story). he watches with an open mouth miniature motorized cars make dramatic slow motion jumps over little plastic barrels. or he flashes an astonished face as kites easily do repeated loop-de-loops with a minor flick of a child's wrist. or sits mystified as a junior magician shows how to make an invisible worm writhe and wiggle (using hidden strings). after studiously taking in the presentation alex always says the same thing when it's done, "ohhh, dad/mom did you see that? i totally want one of those" to which marty and i always look away from our book or magazine long enough to reply "yeah it looked pretty cool".

the other day alex appeared at my desk and said he knew what he wanted for christmas. i turned in my chair, ready to listen, accustomed to such visits. ready for anything i told him to shoot. he said with an easy confidence that next christmas he really wanted a messenger falcon.

ok. so maybe i wasn't ready for anything.

when young i was permitted to do little more than hold the tools. i remember thinking that sucked. and later in life when i was handed a hammer or drill, i proved pretty unimpressive. in dramatic over-correction, i (and marty) have pushed our children to hammer nails, drive screws and drill holes. while they won't be putting and master craftsmen out of work, they also will rarely turn down the cha ...

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.

whenever bella hears me talking to anyone about swimming, she sidles up next to me and waits for a break in the conversation. when one comes she proudly announces that she can swim faster than her dad. then realizing she has cast me in an embarrassing light, she softens the blow by confessing, "but there's a reason. you see, i'm a sprinter and he's a lengther."