As we prepare to don our thinking caps for the coming holiday season, I thought I'd share a few recent wins I've had on the gift-giving front. Perhaps it may help any with a blank space or two in their gifting spreadsheet this season (I mean, you do have a gifting spreadsheet, right?).

THE CHALLENGE
Many would agree that finding gifts, let alone inspired gifts, is one of the most chal...

For most of their lives my children didn’t know a website existed that chronicled a great number of the things they did and said. Upon learning of it, their...

PART 3 - What makes the perfect gift?
(In case you missed part 2, it is here)

The logical continuation of this conversation is how did it come to this? How does something like shopping on the bed come into existence? When I give it a few minutes thought, I can see how this might happen. Fa...

PART 2 - Shopping on the Bed
(In case you missed Part 1, it is here)

Another big difference between Marty's experience and mine was where the gifts that lined the tree came from.

For me, part of what made Christmas morning so exciting was the complete mystery of it all. While you...

PART 1 - Two Schools

When young, in the weeks before Christmas, after getting home from school, I would walk to the tree and scan the gift-landscape for any new additions. When found, my eyes would zero in on the tag. If it read something other than TROY, I'd give it a scowl and move on. If the festive label had the magic four letters, I'd pull it from the disarray and ha...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. rockwell christmas

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. house rules

i heard of the greatest christmas tradition this week. the husband of a woman i work with, since the year they got married, has saved a section of the stump from their family christmas tree. he dates the wooden discs, adding significant detail(s) from the year in his custom scrawl. the end result is a rich and personal presentation on their family mantle. this discovery snuck in just before year's end as the idea i most wish was my own. the man to credit for this excellent bit of creativity and foresight is one joe erker. in case it is not apparent, i couldn't be more envious of the thoughtful gift he has made for his family and the future generations it will surely touch.

and, if that large centerpiece stump with the single word POP on it doesn't elicit emotion from you, wether you personally know who pop was or not, you are not properly wired (or you haven't yet lost one of the most important people in your life). powerful stuff. as the movie says, life is beautiful.

click to enlarge

a large part of the reason i didn't emerge last week can be attributed to marty's holiday schedule. to recap:

friday	kids built gingerbread houses, an annual tradition at a neighbors (troy at work)
saturday	family swim outing (2nd annual)
sunday	christmas
monday	marty's family christmas
tuesday	roller skating, friend's house & xmas lights display
wednesday	kids rule day
thursday	girls' meltdown
friday	go-karts, rock climbing, and laser tag
saturday	new year's eve party
sunday	city museum
monday	dinner with the dunns

kids rule day is a day where the kids got to do whatever they want from breakfast to bed. to say the least there was much screen time, candy and junk food throughout.

the girls' meltdown day happens once on every extended run of family together-time. the boys have learned to give them lots of room and keep our snide and judgmental comments between just the boys.

as with all vacations since having kids, i return to work to rest. i have no idea where marty goes to recover.

also, as of today marty and i have been together twenty-two years, fourteen of them married. we're often asked if there is a secret to this success and there is, two of them in fact. the first is marty keeps me so busy (and entertained/distracted - see above) i don't have time to question or plan an exodus. the second is i'm tolerant as a monk [ ;-) ].

if you're wondering what we're doing to celebrate this hefty milestone, we'll be hanging out at the kids school tonight making pancakes for a buncha folks i don't know and trying to keep anthony from talking to adults. so, i guess, the veiled answer is not taking things too seriously.

a memorable moment from each of the kids over the last few weeks.

everytime we drove by a nativity scene, anthony would call out, "hey! baby genius! baby genius!"

and during our christmas meal thank-yous at my parents house alex led off with "i'm thankful we have food to eat and that none of us died before this christmas day."

and while driving home from visiting friends bella enlightened the family with the following bit of wisdom:

BELLA
don't ever say 'sitting' while holding your tongue.

TROY (after thinking it through)
where'd you learn that?

BELLA
school.

TROY
from who?

BELLA
i don't remember. but they taught a bunch of people by telling them to all say "i was sitting on the toilet the other day" while holding their tongues.

i hope your break was equally irreverent, insightful, and educational.

my favorite family-mannerisms at the minute:

anthony
when anthony gets mad he flexes his entire body. he makes it so taught it arches in the middle as if her were a bow and the string was tied to his heels and the top of his head. his hands travel up his jutting stomach and search the clothing on his chest. he's looking for snaps or a zipper or buttons. if he finds th...

given that it's the holidays i guess it's only fair to make the following disclaimer should you find yourself celebrating at my home.

not only might you be asked to drink out of a plastic cup you had to write your name on with a sharpie, you might also be asked to do so after scratching out the name of the last guest that used that plastic cup at a previous party. if you're good with that, we're good with you. marty is at least.

alex got a fisher price digital camera for christmas. on christmas day he took 231 pictures. since then it's been like living with a three foot tall paparazzi. it also makes me sensitive to how often i'm naked. and he could not be a worse height to be taking pictures of me naked.

for you christmas listening pleasure(s).

Twelve Days of Christmas 1.8 mb performed by : truman state's True Men (site) album : Christmas 2005 (site looks woefully outdated, but the christmas album is quite good/fun)

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.

growing up in colorado i was taught the importance of layered clothing. somehow i genetically passed this insight onto my eldest son because getting alex dressed in the morning is like preparing an arctic explorer for a month-long expedition. his goal is obviously not warmth or comfort but simply one of wearing a multitude of his colorful shirts. so instead of settling he slowly moves through each item in his drawer holding them up, studying them, choosing items based on some internal measure. on average he will select three to four shirts. and given his slight frame he is easily able to accommodate multiple garments. some parents may be inclined to step in the way of such a childish obsession, but marty and i place it in the 'doesn't matter' column alongside making messy bubbles with straws and urinating in the back yard.

this year alex wore three shirts to our christmas celebration with marty's side of the family. when he opened a 3-pack of white t-shirts he elatedly ran to me requesting i help him put them on, all of them. i unquestioningly did so. three presents later he ran to me with three long-sleeve rugby shirts repeating the request. the kid already had six shirts on so i said i thought he should save these so he would have some clean ones to wear tomorrow. my suggestion was quickly called a bad idea and dismissed. on they went, albeit not as easily as numbers four, five and six. but he wiggled and i wrangled and sure enough, alex set a personal best of nine shirts, five of which were, impressively, long sleeved.



add to all of this the detail that if alex likes an outfit, and he inevitably likes them all, he refuses to remove it at night. this would be another arena marty and i elect to not engage. and don't think the efficiency-zealot in me doesn't see the time gains in just peeling a layer off a child each morning. doing this, we'd only have to get him dressed once a week. problem is, he's even less generous in the morning about changing than he is at night, so once they go on they in many ways become hermetically sealed to his frame. the above picture shows alex in his nine shirts. at this point they've been through two nights and are working on their third day.

and yes, i get that he may be a tad gamey under all that cotton and twill but i figure there's eight layers of insulation between his clammy skin and me. i'll take those numbers any day. in the end, i didn't see a real downside to all this until one of marty's brothers commented that alex, artificially bulked up so, looked like a miniature lou ferigino. my good parental mood was momentarily fouled until i reasoned that without the shirts he may instead look like a dark-complected erkel. and i'll take a little-ferigino over that any day ... and twice on bath nights.

the last two weeks of the year are my low-tech, high-slumber days. in this time, i try not to look at, think about, touch or dream of my computer. another thing i do during this block is to actually go to sleep when i'm tired. marty calls this listening to your body. i don't listen to my body too much the other fifty weeks of the year. over the last fourteen days, i went to bed anywhere from 8pm and 4am. additionally, i slept anywhere from two to thirteen hours a night. this is another way of saying, i'm quite screwed up right now and have about seven hours to get my game face back on since i'm expected back to work in the morning.



sleep-aside 1: in the days leading up to christmas, bella and alex drug anthony's crib mattress (as of yet unused by anthony) from our room and dropped it at the foot of their beds. i wasn't sure how this smaller makeshift cot was superior to their already touching beds but they both seemed quite certain of the change. after getting some covers in place, they crawled under the sheets and snuggled close, facing one another. you could hear them talking quietly of the pending christmas morn. they were quite bristling. as sleep approached, their voices got softer and then their words started getting elongated and unrecognizable until there was the beautiful sound of children being good body listeners.

sleep aside 2: marty and i have real different notions on sleep. since having kids, it is something we 'chat on' quite extensively. one of the suck parts about it is in just watching my kids, i believe one's sleep proclivities are greatly genetic. no matter what time alex goes to bed, he naturally wakes up at 8:37 each morning. no matter what time bella goes to bed, she sleeps exactly eleven hours. and excepting four occasions, anthony refuses to sleep more than two hours at a time which means that excepting four occasions marty has not slept more than two hours in a row over the last four and a half months which makes her a much less friendly debate opponent because if she does not get a consistent and continuous eight hours, her demeanor gets all sideways and hostile. personally, i think she just gets surly with me to demonstrate the import of sleep. fortunately for me, i'm too fatigued to make the connection.

i'm the christmas person in our home. if i didn't set it up, it wouldn't happen. this year, the day we were scheduled to decorate, every time i'd pass bella or alex, they'd eagerly ask if it was time yet? and if i was going to bring christmas up from the basement NOW??? and could they help? and when, oh when, were we going to do it? this onslaught of energy told me this year's chore would place ex...

last night i went to a christmas party at my boss's house. monday night i go to one at his boss's house. i can't tell you how much i adore being out of multi-state, mega-corporation hell.

for our christmas meal, i made the best pie of my pie-making career. it looked leagues better than it tasted and therefore, for someone as vain as me, represented a culinary slam dunk.


and while i was still reveling in my success a full five days later, the good handwriting girl brought this modest effort to our new year's party. if you, like everyone who looked at it, are wondering about the dark chocolate leaves, they were individually poured and molded against ficus leaves from her backyard. i think it's safe to say this upstart won't have to worry about being invited to next year's affair.


and as for this damsel's moniker, i'm a bit of a handwriting fetishist. marty's printing has on numerous occasions been mistaken for printed text with people asking about the cool font. so, in the end, it was marty's high precision penmanship that made me covet her so and not, as many suspect, her charm, beauty or candor. as for how i came to admire the new contender, i was doing dishes after the party and washing the solo plastic cups (remember ... ) when i ran into this one with her daughter's name interestingly printed on its rim and became smitten in front of my sudsy sink and open dishwasher.


although, if she emails me saying this is her engineer husband's handiwork, i may be in a bit of a pickle, literally.

last night e-love's acapella group had its first concert of the season. the whole family was slated to attend until alex puked, or as bella would say, choked-up, all over the arm of his coat an hour after waking up. later, while walking bella home from school, i explained that alex was sick and i would stay home with him so she and mom could go to the concert. she turned to me and pleadingly exclaimed ...

but father, e-love is your best friend! you MUST go to his concert!

she's a smart girl and alex is a fake choke-upper because we collectively got green-lit for the show by our medical staff. a few songs into the performance bella got my attention and over the applauding audience screamed in my direction ...

father! thank you for inviting us to your show. i'm having so much fun i'm about to fall asleep!

and, that was not facetious. bella doesn't yet know how to be facetious. it was a four year old girl's unadulterated and delirious gratitude towards a father who snuck her into a concert under the hem of his coat.

and, wondering how one climbs the ranks of troy-peeps to hold the number one slot? a sure-fire way is to not only get a gaggle of guys to sing my all-time favorite christmas song but also to dedicate it to me every time you sing it at your christmas concerts. and i imagine e-love wouldn't mind my sharing it with you all. i hope you enjoy it, but not to bella-like levels because that would mean seventeen otherwise productive people would be sprawled back in their padded work chairs in blissful, flatulent slumber on the clock and how could the world's economy possibly hope to ever again right itself?


carol of the bells
performed by amen

i'm not the hugest fan of extreme home christmas displays but gotta say, if i lived near this guy, i'd camp out in front of his home every night.

dancing christmas lights
(and, there aint much point in viewing this if you computer doesn't have sound.)

and, i'd appreciate it if someone could tell me the title/artist of this music. UPDATE: trans-siberian orchestra's Wizard of Winter. me and my OCD thank dionna and kix for solving that mystery. it is appreciated.

UPDATE 2:
especially for e-love, here is another of this guy's video's.

growing up, there were seven kids in marty's house. as they awoke christmas morning they were to go to their parents' bed. only after all nine people were assembled could christmas begin. one at a time groggy children appeared in the doorway and slowly took account of who beat them to the christmas bed before climbing in themselves. excruciatingly, only after a majority of family members were pres...