at the tail-end the holiday break marty was woken up in the middle of the night by someone coming up the stairs. our kids are now old enough that we no longer have to participate in their bedtime rituals. that said, marty will still often do rounds of cuddles at bedtime but that tends to only happen on school nights because on the weekends and holidays the kids way outlast us, me especially as i t ...

i was talking to bookpimp on the phone catching up. i saw marty walk by twenty minutes earlier, giving a wave indicating good night. twenty minutes later i heard a dustup in the boys room. moments later alex meekly walked towards me and said, "i accidentally got gum in anthony's orange-a-tang and he's mad." anthony's orange-a-tang is a neon-orange stuffed orangoutang he saved from a give-away bag a few weeks earlier and has since had spot welded to his hip using it for both comfort (e.g. sleeping and reading with) and defense (e.g. rapidly windmilling it's long frame over his head to keep marauding ticklers at bay). a few moments after alex's report, a sour-faced anthony appeared with our kitchen scissors in one hand and orange-a-tang in the other. i asked bookpimp to hold on a moment while i looked in on the damage, which was not that great. i took the stuffed animal and scissors from anthony and carefully cut the small clump of gum-matted fur off the monkey's back. as i handed the limp primate back to anthony, anthony asked:

ANTHONY
will it grow back?

TROY
will what grow back?

ANTHONY
his hair.

TROY
oh. uh. i don't think so bud.

with this anthony turned and left the room, orange-a-tang pinned under his arm. lifting the phone receiver back to my ear, i then told bookpimp, who overheard the conversation, he just witnessed another piece of evidence supporting the fact that we, marty and i that is, may not need to bother saving for college. i have such examples from each of my children thus making me occasionally refer to their college fund as my mountain house account.

were marty sitting in on this conversation, she would be quick to tell you that given the accounts present state my mountain home may more resemble more of a suburban duplex outside of tempe AZ.

i've been asked two questions about the gallery picture, re-shown below, that contained a sign reading "yes dad you may NOT sleep in my bed tonight".



question one. why is the language worded so?
if memory serves, in a moment of frustration, i had told the kids that 'no' was not a word i should ever hear from them when i or their mother asked them to do something. the sign is bella's coy way of letting me know she can work around the crusty missives of her vexed father.

question two. why would you be sleeping in your daughter's bed anyway?
from the start of children i said i would one day build each of my children a custom loft bed. last spring, after months of planning and weeks of building i completed my first troy-designed loft bed for one of my children. to say i love bella's bed ten times more than bella loves her bed would a flagrant understatement. couple this builder's admiration with the fact that our house still has a bit of musical beds going on in the night and you have a scenario where i occasionally score the coolest bed in my home.

"penis! penis! penis! penis!"

the above is what anthony ran through the house screaming after i finished that night's reading of shel silverstein (this is what we read whenever marty is not around at bedtime as both the boys enjoy the poems). the reason he ran about screaming that particular phrase is connected to my promise (after reading shel in particular and before lights out) to turn a sentence said by one of the boys into my own shel-like-poem. anthony, obviously, wanted the first line of the poem to start with the winning phrase, penis-penis-penis-penis.

when instead, i chose to use one of alex's sentences, anthony became inconsolable. between groans of disappointment he said he wanted his sentence to be chosen. i explained that i liked the variety found in alex's sentences more. a moment later anthony went silent in protest. minutes in he broke his stand to ask what would happen if both he and alex said nothing but penis-penis-penis-penis after poems and before bed. i hesitantly confessed i guess the poem would have to start with penis-penis-penis-penis. suddenly his angst vanished and he raised his head to call down to alex in the bunk below, "alex! tomorrow night after poems you have to ..." i reckon you can guess the rest of the plan.

and i can claim yet another parenthood first for me--spending open neurons in my day trying to think of creative rhymes for the word penis. i'm pretty sure dr. spock missed that chapter.

the boys and i started a new bedtime game, especially after we've read shel silverstein. what i do is as we're approaching bed, i take a random sentence they say and then try to make a shel-esque poem out of it. as you'll see from last night's sample, the more bodily fluid and organ references that can be made, the better. the one below had them in hysterics (not the smartest pre-bed move) so much so they demanded a re-telling before they would go to sleep.

during the year i collect bits and pieces of information that i think might be helpful to share with my kids when the school year fires up. marty's insistence on a no-exceptions family dinner table makes for a perfect platform for me to subject enlighten my children with my sage counsel. a few examples.

we have been long told two things. one, that we have a certain potential fo...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. unexpected

after getting the boys ready for bed, i read them books alternating between ones each of them have picked out of their book bins. at 8:00 i say lights out, turn off the bedside lamp and we all hunker down, snuggle up and close our eyes. sometimes the boys try goofing around playing tunnel and touching each other with their feet but i'm quick to squash such nonsense telling them the days over and it's time for sleep. i'm quick to protect this time because most nights i take this moment to catch a twenty minute nap which works well for modeling because i'm usually the first of the three of us to fall asleep (i set an alarm for 8:30 to prevent my naps from going until 3am). last night as i was drifting to sleep anthony brought me back with the following.

ANTHONY
dad.

TROY
yes anfer.

ANTHONY
my penis feels like metal.

TROY
stop touching it and go to sleep anfer.

it is rare that one gets to feel like such an authority on matters as when it comes to fathers advising sons on their penises.

in our home we have a bedtime hour. in this hour, every motion, action and thought is to be directed at the transition from being a foul, bristling, engaged, sporting, singing, learning, living, sassing young person to a sound asleep human. this is an all hands on deck affair and anything short of full participation has the home listing and fighting the currents.

last night, just seven minutes into the bedtime hour, i found myself locked up with bella on what began as a simple matter of semantics. i learned long ago that heated debate is not a conducive facet of the bedtime hour, but here on this night, i was fully engaged. this distraction left alex and anthony free to bury each other in the multitude of blankets and comforters piled on a bed. seeing this, i ordered them to the bathroom to go potty and brush their teeth. after studying my taut tone for the briefest of moments, they complied. bella and i proceeded down our path. just as i (and the beloved art of logic) was making headway, alex dashed into the room saying, "look at what anthony did." i studied him and saw nothing. i asked him what anthony did. alex turned to show a long smear of fluorescent tooth paste down the back of his shirt. ANTHONY! STOP PUTTING TOOTH PASTE ON YOUR BROTHER! i ignored his return plea of, "but, i like putting toothpaste on yallix." i returned my attention to bella. as we continued our slow trek to understanding marty called up the stairs, "i have to run some cookies across midland. i'll be back in a few." at this hour, with this start, i'm unable to count the number of bad things that could go down in "a few" minutes. but here we were.

digging out begins with a single shovelful of dirt. i looked at bella and said, "i hear your point but i hope you hear mine. i needed you to do something and i took the time to explain why i needed you to do it. in the future i need you work with me on that." with as much compliance and respect you could expect from a willful eight year old girl, bella turned to begin her bedtime ritual. i turned to alex, asked him to lift his arms up and pulled the soiled shirt over his head and told him to follow me. i walked to the bathroom and pulled the toothpaste out of anthony's hand, picked his protesting frame up under my arm, walked him to his room, threw him in his bed, and told him if he got out i was going to frazzle his biscuits and make him sleep on the garage roof. by some karmic credit i accrued in a previous life, everyone was asleep within the hour.

if there is a human (non-sleeping) restful state such as the peace a person meditating finds, the experience of wrangling unwilling, untamed children without the use of physical trauma is the opposite of that restful state. and were you to remove all life-threatening scenarios from the picture, this act of directing children stands as one of the most trying human endeavors an adult can navigate. that said, we've had our share of moments where a call to 911 was surely in the cards, placing these matters occasionally into the life-threatening category (although, that is not the exact spirit i am talking about here).

and, to be fair, while marty isn't one of the most diligent practitioners of the bedtime hour given she's essentially been in a form of the bedtime hour all day at this point, she also does not typically leave the home and the night i described above was an unusual exception. but she may have also seen the dark cloud forming in my study and chose to save herself from the next fateful (and unpredictable) eleven minutes that unfolded in the upstairs of our home during the bedtime hour.

the kids were getting ready for bed. marty and i were in bella and alex's room. i fell into bella's lower bunk bed. marty wanting to tell me something grabbed a stool and sat on the side of the bed. she began filling me in on some school-related matters for alex. she paused waiting for me to say something.

TROY
i think i would have loved having a bunk bed when i was a kid

MARTY
would you have wanted the top or bottom bunk.

TROY
bottom. then i would have hung curtains so it was like a fort. i would have put a shelf up on the wall to hold my books. and had a light, like bella's, so i could read. it would have been awesome.

MARTY
my brother matt had a shelf next to his bed. he was on the top. i remember when he was gone i'd climb up there and look at the stuff on his shelf. he had an small engine he built that you could turn on and it would make lights flash. and he had a little silver radio with a circle dial. that was the first portable radio i ever saw. on sundays matt would sit up in his bed and listen to some guys top 100 countdown. i remember i'd hear the pop songs from the hall and think how i liked this one or that one.

TROY
you didn't go up in the bed and listen with him?

MARTY
oh god no. you only went into the boys room when the boys were away.

shortly thereafter the kids walked in. as soon as bella saw me lazing in her bed she walked to the side, made a hitchhiker thumb and said, "out mister". however much the world changes, there are certain immutable facets that always remain the same.

to bed ...

to bed alex wears the clothes he wore to school that day.

to bed bella wears the clothes she is going to wear to school the next day.

to bed anthony wears whatever we can fight him into.

to bed marty wears christmas pajamas a surprising number of times throughout the year.

to bed i wear, well, they're all nuts so i wear nothing at all.

p.s. the first time i saw bella getting dressed for school the night before so she could sleep ten extra minutes, my heart burst with pride. she may as well have sat down at a piano and banged out a bach concerto.

p.s.s. for adults, wearing clothes/pajamas/underwear to bed is like, if i may again use my movies to sleeping comparison, is like wearing a tuxedo to watch an installment of american pie at your local cine.

marty went to a play with her mother last night thus putting me in the box with the kids. dinner (custard french toast) went well. immediately after dinner alex and anthony played trains while bella snuck in some computer time. a neighbor girl called asking if she and her brother could come over to play. whispering into the phone, i told her i didn't think it would be a good idea tonight. i whispered my response because i didn't want the natives to know i was nixing a play date. but it was getting late. and i was alone and greatly outnumbered already. i had reasons. to my whisper, the girl whined out a long 'pahhhlleeeezz' and added that they'd be no trouble at all. going against my better judgment i greenlit the visit.

i could picture the groan in bella's face when the knock rung through the house. computer time is sacred to child with no television. after being let in, the visiting girl immediately came upstairs and found me. she asked, "will you play ogre?" this time my face groaned. i said no. she asked why. i said because i didn't want to get everyone worked up just before bed. another whiny pahhhlleeeezz rolled out of her saggy-shouldered body. no trouble my ass.

after a short while of non-ogre play time the girl's mum called and the kids went home for bed. i ushered my kids to the bathroom for peeing, pooping, brushing and the hearing of the petitions to sleep in the clothes they'd been wearing all day. then anthony, alex and i moved to the upper bunk for reading. bella was below reading her own books. even though no one is listening to her story she reads out loud. i've asked her if she can read in her head when i'm reading to the boys because her reading when i'm reading is distracting. she argues that if i get to read out loud she shouldn't have to read in her brain (her words) and she doesn't care if her reading out loud is distracting when i'm reading out loud because my reading out loud is distracting to her trying to read in her brain. this girl could twist a physicist in knots in minutes.

alex starts fading first. i'm about three minutes behind him. staying awake at this moment is the hardest thing i've done all day. i always fall asleep after reading to alex. sometimes he goes first. sometimes i go first. but we both go and we usually do so within minutes of one another. i usually sleep for twenty minutes to an hour. it's my pre-night power nap that allows me to work until 2am. but tonight, tonight i can't fall asleep because i do have anthony and i don't have marty. but i do fall asleep. anthony, bored, leaves. i sense him leaving but can't open my eyes. i groggily hear bella call out "it's ok dad. i got him." more sleep. i hear anthony call out. it's been just minutes. not hours. i force myself up and down the bunk ladder. i walk to my bedroom where i hear voices. bella and anthony are snuggled, sitting up on the pillows with the covers pulled up over their laps. a mess of books are spread out before them, but they aren't reading. bella is holding anthony's fist out in front of him and is modeling his fingers in different poses. she's saying: i know it's possible to get through life without a village, but i gotta say life's much more pleasant with one.

in dating you have something called hand. the notion of hand was probably best handled and described by seinfeld and team. if you haven't heard the term it pertains to the battle for influence between a dating couple. i believe it is an abbreviated phrase for 'having the upper hand'.

in the world of parenting, hand is replaced by something called currency. as a parent it is always your job to know what your child's currency is. currency in this context refers to any object or event your child especially loves. with this knowledge, the theory goes, you're able to influence your child's behavior instead of beating them with a switch.

but, children also have their own currency. a child's currency is what they can do to sway the behavior of their parent. such currencies for children include looking cute, acting sad, throwing a tantrum, making lofty promises, embarrassing their parent or saying they hate the parent. these are all antics done in the hopes of causing a parent to buckle. as an aside, all child-currency has an inflated value in public. and the more public, the greater its rate. children who understand this principle of micro-macro-economics can often be a handful and are known as children who wield their currency with great expertise, getting the absolute most for their money.

the other night alex and i got into a row at bedtime. i wanted him to go to sleep. he wanted to invent things to delay his going to sleep. after threatening his currency he stood for a few moments and then turned to me and shouted, "FINE. THEN I WILL GO TO BED WITH NO STRAWBERRIES AND NO BOOKS!" after this outburst he scaled his ladder and threw himself into his bed and was asleep moments later. this would be an example of me using my currency with greater alacrity than he used his. while one may be inclined to gloat, i suggest your do not because we all have the occasional weak outing. like the time i threatened to take bella's play horses from her for a week. without a hint of emotion she suggested i take them for two weeks and offered to throw in all of her dolls for added measure. that was a solid counter-move on bella's part and easily trumped my dated notion of her currency. then there was this time when alex got me all twisted up:

TROY
alex if you don't put that stuff away like i've asked i'm going to take away your transformers toy.

ALEX
i have a transformers toy?

TROY
uhhm. well yes. i mean, i thought you did?

ALEX
can i see it?

TROY
i don't know. i'm not sure where it is right now.

ALEX
what does it look like?

TROY
i don't think i know that either. maybe we should pick another toy.

ALEX
ok. but if you see my transformers toy, can you show it to me?

TROY
uhhm. yeah. sure.

in reproduction, there are two kinds of impotence. there's the physical kind that doesn't allow you to have children and then there's the emotional kind that happens after you have children. the research isn't entirely conclusive as to which of the two is more psychologically crippling to the male esteem.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. stand-off

when i'm the one who reads to the kids at bedtime, one of three things happens:

1. bella falls asleep first.
2. alex falls asleep first.
3. i fall asleep first.

last night was a number three night. when a number three night happens one of three things occurs:

1. some time later, marty kicks me in the feet and tells me to get up because i'm snoring and it's keeping the kids up.
2. i wake in the middle of the night lodged uncomfortably between the two sleeping children.
3. after about thirty minutes i stir on my own, get up and resume my evening.

last night was a number three night. i woke with a start and lifted my head. alex was asleep on one side of me and on the other bella was sitting up reading a book in the dark. she looked at me guiltily knowing she was not to be reading but either sleeping or trying to go to sleep. i was about to say something when she brought her hand directly towards me and started scratching the top of my head. my face fell back on the pillow and i was back asleep in seconds.

everyone in my family knows there are few things i like more than having my head scratched. seeing bella's hand come toward me in my groggy state reminded me of a movie scene where an addled patient wakes momentarily only to see a blurry vision of a doctor's hand depressing the plunger of a syringe returning them into darkness. after an unknown period of time, marty's voice talking on the phone downstairs woke me again. as i lay there, i'd hear bella occassionally turn a page in her book (my face was looking away from her). she was not scratching my head but if she sensed i was starting to wake up by my movements or breathing her hand would mindlessly return to my head and scratch it a circular pattern giving me another dose of medicine while she continued to read.

marty ended her phone conversation and started coming up the stairs. bella stopped scratching my head, snapped her book shut, slid it under her covers and (i'm sure) laid her head on her pillow in a closed-eyes, angelic pose. all was still when marty passed the doorway. i then heard marty in the ping-pong room typing at her desk. back out came the book. after a few minutes i lifted my head. bella again looked at me guiltily. i put a finger to my lips (shhh sign) and got up. i leaned in, kissed her on the forehead and thanked her for my head-scratch. she softly said 'you're welcome' and i left her.

i'm certainly in no rush to have my first child grow up but can honestly say i'm ravenous to see what kind of adult she becomes.

our house has been caring for a one-legged cricket named jumpy. bella found him struggling along while she walked home from school. once home, she and alex prepared vast accommodations housing him in a large glass aquarium (suitable for a guinea pig) with cardboard huts, tunnels, water dish, and vegetable pieces. i dislike these sorts of games because of the kids perfect record in caring for living things. and that is perfect as in mortician-perfect, not hospital-perfect. a few weeks passed and jumpy was doing well. this was for sure a new milestone. he had even moved to the kids room and sat atop a dresser because, i was told, he got lonely at night having to sleep in the breakfast room all alone.

the other night bella and i got into a familiar spat about bedtime, the spat being it was bedtime and she did not want it to be bedtime. as she resistantly headed for the stairs she knocked some coats and backpacks off a coat-rack. i made her stop and hang them back up. she paused from her frustrating task long enough to say to me, "jumpys dead. i wasn't going to tell you because i know you don't like it when life dies, but he did so there."

i silently took this news in. i was silent because as a parent it is the right thing to do with a child's rage and because i was a little sad to hear of jumpy's demise. i was starting to like having him around. but i guess it was either that or the kids' perfect track record which is long enough now you sorta hate to see it get marred.

during one of our bedtime story-tellings i shared with bella and alex how i once used an outhouse when i was a little kid and staying in a relative's hunting lodge. three days later bella told a table-full of dinner guests that her daddy pees in a bucket in the garage. i didn't hear this first hand because i was in the kitchen getting something for the meal. it was only later when one of the guest pulled me to the side and asked "do you really urinate in a pail in your garage?" the saddest part of this is i was a little uncertain how i should answer that question.

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. the bedtime story

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.