Intermission: Dream #2 support or fatigue of the creative process

Why does "he" do this?  It rattles me so.  It really does.  I end up tired and even exhausted from... a trip FROM the brain, trip from the brain. 

It seems like your brain can be your own worst enemy sometimes.  It insists on dawging you in your sleep with things that never happened that you only worry could have happened or which happened in a lesser version but are blown out of proportion by the brain.  I don't get it.  Why would your best friend want to hurt you so?

My dreams do not follow to the best of my knowledge any ideas about the purpose of dreams.  Sigmund Freud said dreams had to do with wish fulfillment.  I cant think of one dream that I have had in the past.... say, fifteen years that has been concerned with wish fulfillment, oh maybe except that one about climbing to the moon.  Otherwise they mostly have to do with scaring the wits out of me in one way or another whether it deals with someone being on the other side of that door trying to get in and they are not my friend or I am at the pool swimming except there is no water in the pool and I am swimming on the pool tile.  Its not something I ever really wanted to do or to happen to me.  But strangely it happens to me quite often in my dreams, or else the water turns to snow.

Nor can I fathom any latent meaning in any of these dreams that represent wish fulfillment.  Well, of course except for the obvious that I am dreaming of swimming which represents the fact that I really want to wake up and relieve myself at the toilet.  I am not a psychologist or even therapist, so I could not say this from intellectual study, but the only wish fulfillment I see is that I wish I would stop vivid dreaming.

And others say dreaming is a way of either memory consolidation or working through problems from the day.  Uh, for me, ... no.   If anything my dreams just add to and exaggerate my problems.  For instance at this time in my small business I owe a lot of people money.  But what does my brain do?  It makes me dream of owing TWICE as many people TWICE as much money.  So much that I have lost track of the list and I am trying to cross the people off the list of people I owe, but the list seems to grow with each cross out I make.  Maybe that was the same night I had my dream of climbing to the moon?  No, in fact it was just climbing to another tier of people I owed money to.  There were three levels of people I owed and I was climbing up and down.

And memory consolidation?  Why does the brain find it so important to store the memory of a picture of a poster I saw for a split second while walking to work of a clown in a circus?  I couldn't even remember what the poster was about, but for some reason my brain felt it so important that it had to incorporate that poster into my dreams and even make it a vital element of the dream.  That's called memory consolidation?  I call it waste of brain cells.  Sheesh, I might as well have drunk a beer and killed those brain cells if all they were going to do was store the image of a poster of a clown for absolutely no good reason.  And let me tell you, I never used any information from that poster or picture, but I still have the picture stored in my brain. Something like this picture, except in black and white.     

Frustrated after reading reams of studies on dreams and not finding one plausible explanation for my dreams and more so my ability to remember them in detail,  I therefore made up my own.  In fact my brain is pushing me to get to action and write and be creative.  I notice that sometimes my vivid dreaming becomes more intense during a fallow period of little or no writing.  So my brain is pushing me to get started again.

 "And oh by the way, here are some ideas  that you should WRITE ABOUT.  Get the hint dude?  Get creative, get writing.  You can write about swimming in a pool without water."

 "No no brain, you always give me that one."

"Well then  how about not having gone to a class all semester and the exam is tomorrow and you have no idea what the course is about.  Oh and the exam will be taken on the 19th floor of the building and there is no elevator so you have to walk up and in fact on the 19th floor lives... Satan Satan Satan.  Bahahahahahahah."

"Yeah brain, that is an interesting twist on the usual idea you send me about failing a class, but, you know what brain?  I think its better if I just write the story and you... you let me sleep please.  I have some ideas in my head for some stories which I think are a bit more... um... creative than yours, although don't get me wrong brain, I appreciate your sending me the pictures and ideas, but could you just let me work on them now and you let me sleep?  Let me get some peaceful sleep?  You haven't sent me a good idea since that dream about living right next to that electric power company which spewed out such soot that it shut the town down for hours during the day.  That was a good one, rather disturbing, as are most of your ideas, but I did use that one.  But since then.... nothing really good."

"No sirree Bob, I have to push you and send you more ideas and basically kick your arse or you just wont get to it.  So sorry, but more vivid dreams coming up for you.  You should write them down.  Why haven't you been writing them down again?"

"Oh bugger it."

Trip from the Brain, A-gain.   

My Father wrote very deep, intellectual books, the last one he wrote was about Hegel.  He used to take three hour walks along the Bruce Trail in Niagara Falls and St. Catherine's, Canada or the Mission Peninsula in Michigan to work on his ideas and consolidate and write and rewrite things in his head.  He was a very smart man.  Me, I just go to sleep.

 

     

 Above the first picture is the Mission Peninsula down the center between the bodies of water.  This lower picture is on the Mission Peninsula I am sure my Father saw it many times.  

Back to School again. Ugh, someone drag me out of bed please.

School started up on September 1st here.  I guess it had to come.  All things must pass said George Harrison.

I always hear about "what are we going to do with the kids in the summer this year?" as if it is a monumental crisis.  I have no problems with it.  I take my vacation and bring the girls with me.  Then when I am back, my wife sort of goes on vacation and I work. On vacation we go to bed a bit later because the sun goes to bed later.  We get up later because we are allowed to and do pretty much what we please according to our circadian rhythm.

For a while my girls were sleeping for 12 hours a night in the summer.  Fine by me.  If that is what they needed.  Great.


Along comes the spider and sat down beside her, I mean along comes the school year AGAIN and messes up everyone`s schedule and circadian rhythm.
 In the summer I was going to bed between Midnight and 1 am and getting up between 8 and 9 am.  I think that was very reasonable.


 Now, I still go to bed between 11.30 and 12.30 but I have to get up at 6.30 am!! Arg.  Not to mention that I usually have dreams about impending failure in Biology or Math class because I haven't gone to class all semester and I have the final exam tomorrow and I have read absolutely none of the reading.... grrrr.  And then my younger daughter calls me at 3am (she knows it is senseless to call her Mother because Mother will not hear her because she sleeps like she is in a coma) and I have to lull her back to sleep, but I don't fall back to sleep for another hour.  I am confronted with terrible sleep deprivation which makes me tired much of the day.  And ... what was the title of this post?  What was I talking about...?

Oh yeah, back to school.

I was originally looking for an article I heard about which talked about the busiest time of day for parents and children being in the morning before school and evening before bed, but instead I came across this article.  Now I know it isn't a reputable newspaper, or it has those sideline articles about Lindsey Lohann back in jail or the Kardashians new butt slimming diet (which obviously hasn't worked for them), all the same I had to take notice.

OK, you all read the article.   

But wait a sec, I am not a teenager?  And my girls are not teenagers yet either.   They say these problems commonly occur among teenagers.  The other article about circadian rhythm also mentions DSPS affecting teenagers and young adults, but usually going away by mid twenties or adult hood. (Ha, you think mid twenties is "adulthood"? Phh, where do you come from?) So why should I be interested?  I am in fact about middle age, at least it says so on my drivers license.  Well because for the likes of me, I can not go to bed before 11pm.  The last time I did that was when I got food poisoning in August 2014 and I was wasted from throwing up all day that I went straight to bed when I got home from work at 8pm.

Likewise, getting up at 6.30 is akin to, well, having food poisoning and having no strength in your body because you have literally thrown it all up.  You might as well drag me out of the bed across the floor to get me up.  It shouldn't be too hard.  We only sleep on a mattress on the floor so I wont clonk my head falling out of bed.  Suffice to say, I do get up, but it is like getting up after surgery.  In fact, making Dad wake up so early in the morning is plain cruelty (yes say it, cruelty to animals). 

Here is the last article, a bit more in depth and complicated, but quite interesting, about circadian sleep disorders.  It is called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome DSPS.

All this leads me to hypothesize that in fact I have the brain of a teenager. In deed I hope I have reached puberty.  But that could be debated.   

I probably have a light case of DSPS.  Thus I would like to make an individual plea to my daughter`s school: Look school system, all I am asking for is we get started at 9am instead of 8am and I can sleep till 7.30am.  That would suit me fine.  I wouldn't go to bed later, I would still get to bed at 11.30 pm or so.  Maybe I would even donate a fine goat to the school in appreciation... oh sorry wrong millennium and country.

And in fact my wishes were partly granted last year and continuing this year, for on Tuesdays and Thursdays my daughter can be in school at 9am because her first class is split in two.   Half the group takes the class at 8am and the other half in the afternoon (the other kids can go home sooner those days).

This has been wonderful.  You don't know how much I look forward to Monday nights and Wednesday nights.  If we get up early enough on Tuesdays and Thursdays my wife makes pancakes and we have a big breakfast and we have a nice morning.  Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are usually just grab a cup of tea and just make it out the door in time to not take the car and a brisk walk to school to be on time.  (I hate it when we are so late that we have to give in to taking the car to get us there on time.) 

Let it be known I feel embarrassed at my silly First World complaint and request when so many others are losing their homes and have to walk across Europe to find a place of safety.  I do think about these things, but all the same, I would like to air my request for a later school day start.  Granted it is very selfish as only 1 in 1000 people are afflicted with DSPS and even less have it past their twenties.  And I realize others have to be at work at 9am and they bring their kids to school before work, all the same, I thought it was important for it to be known that often other people do not fit into the exact same mould as the rest of society and even not through their doing, but through their  DNA. We should at least acknowledge that not everyone is the same even if they want to fit in with society "properly".  In other words, give those non morning people a bit of leeway and a little break.  Dont scoff at them and say nastily, "So and so is so lazy, he is always late to work."  Instead say, "So and so must have DSPS, he is always late to work.  Poor guy.  We should fire him."  Uh, except for that last bit. 

I will definitely be watching my daughters when they become teenagers to see if they show signs of DSPS.  If you have teenagers, maybe you should too.  Then again, they might just be on drugs, in which case you dont have anything to worry about with DSPS. Uh.... 

But for the time being, I ll take it and get up at 6.30 am and try to go to bed earlier and "fit in", because I love my daughters and love means that you often do things that you don't want to do.

Oh well, ten more months till Summer vacation.

I ll get some pictures in this post to brighten it up.  I just wanted to publish it on the weekend while weekend was still here.   Thanks for reading.  Make a comment, even call me names if you want. 

Summertime 2015 pt 2 : summary

OK, stop right here.  I wont be offended if you wont read this post.  You know why you wont read it? Because there will be absolutely no tension or bad things happening in this post.  It will be just sunshiny, wonderful, everything is "AOK", good news.  And you know what?  Nobody likes to read that!

You ever notice the tone of voice of the news presenters on the nightly news and the adjectives they use?   You would think the world is going to end tomorrow.  I even hear it on the BBC.  They even try to color the news so it sounds bad.  You know what?  I don't think it is the journalists fault.  I think people like this.  People want to hear bad news about impending doom.  The only people who like no risk and want calm are big financier investors and we all know how boring they are.

So, no need to read this post.  Because I have no bad news for you.

What was I going to tell you?

Oh yeah.  Summer was great.  I had a fantastic time with my girls all of July at my Mother`s cottage.

(Credit:  Picture by Ann Post)

(Credit: Picture by Ann Post)

Yep, that is my older girl driving the boat.  No she didn't crash it, though I thought she might.  Wish i had some pictures of them swimming, but I used those last year.

In three words, everything was wonderful.  It was especially wonderful when my older girl learned how to swim under water without breathing in water, albeit holding her nose.  We will work on that.

The weather was great most every day.  While everyone else in the US and Europe was in a heat wave , we had cooler weather with wind from the lake and in the woods.  We went swimming practically everyday.  I let them watch their favorite cartoon shows, "Arthur", "Wildkratts", "Dinosaur Train" and they liked watching Sesame Street which makes me happy because I remember watching it when I was their age.

We went to the bigger beach on the bay a couple times, pictured above, Bryant Park.  The second time we had big waves which were great fun.  I let them eat potato chips and drink root beer (one can of bio organic root beer shared between them) once a day.  We had pizza a couple times, but more often wonderful Michigan corn on the cob which they really love.  They played board games with their Grandma and got to know Grandma better and vice versa.  Neighbors took them for a boat ride on the lake pictured above.  They went to bed a bit later because the sun went to bed later there too.  I read to them every night... I could go on, and on, but I think you get the point.

In other words, it was a perfectly, wonderful vacation.  Every day of it.  There was no tension or riveting bad news (except when there was a severe thunderstorm which might have been a small hurricane which knocked out the power for two days,  Maybe I should write that tale of that "horrid" experience). There was no doom and gloom.  In other words, by journalists standards it was probably boring to tears.  But isn't that what life is like?  I mean the really, awful newsworthy plot twists just happen like a blip and are gone.  Most of life is just "normal" and "boring" and routine, but that is where most of life takes place.

So, if you are looking for the nightly news,  "topping tonight's news a car crash, a fire ball explosion, a landslide, people beheaded, a scandal, corruption", OK, go ahead my friend, you can train to be James Bond 007.  But for the real meat and potatoes of life, all you have to do is wake up, get out of bed, drive a comb across your head, put on your clothes, hopefully eat your breakfast and brush your teeth and walk out the door, the same as you do every morning.  And THAT will be life.  And THAT will be wonderful.  

OK,  now the message for stay at home dads, or dads that want to spend more time with their kids:  Dudes,  I spent a month by myself with my young girls.  Yes, my Mother (their Grandma) put in  valuable assistance and support, but their Mother was not there.  If I can do it, you can too.  And I took them on a plane ride half way around the world to get there.  But...  don't wait for next summer, spend quantity and quality time with your kids this weekend, tomorrow, right now.  And then when next summer comes, plan the big kahuna vacation with them, just you and them.  You can do it. 

My kids love this show and it is good educational TV. 

Summertme 2015 epiphany: "I`ve got it"

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I was home at my Mothers  for all of July with my two girls age 6 and 3 at time of writing.  We have a cottage right near where the star is on the map I have included here.    I asked my Mother several times throughout our visit if it was OK?  Were the kids difficult?  Did they tire her out?  Should we take a shorter vacation next year?  Should we go away?  My Mother is getting on in years and I know that boisterous, little ones can really tire you out.  But always she said, "no no no, I m fine, I love them.  I`m so glad you are all here"

So I found it strange that on our last day when our vacation overlapped with other visitors there, my sister`s friend said something to me between, "They certainly have a lot of energy, you are a great Dad to be able to handle them" and "Wow, how do you handle their noise and running around and incessant screaming?" with exasperation.  She had only been with them for less than 24 hours and half of that was spent on sleep.  My Mother had been with them a full month.

I just shrugged and said nothing to her, but I had several answers in my head.  One was, "Oh you can get the app download.  Just wire your computer to your brain and download the `nerves of steel resistance to toddler boisterousness` app.  Works quite well."  Another answer was, "it doesn't bother me at all.  What`s the problem?"  And yet a third, variation and a bit snarky, "What?  I don't know what you are talking about.  Is there some problem?  I don`t hear or see any problems.  Can you explain yourself?".  Realistically I would have answered, "Oh, they aren't so bad and I can handle it."

But suddenly it occurred to me this morning two weeks later (well, for me that IS suddenly.  I`m a bit slow with reactions) that, hey! maybe I am wired to handle it.  Maybe I was equipped with the natural app even before I was born!  Don`t get me wrong, I`m not saying it is in my DNA, cough, cough, hack, yes, cough, I , cough, am, excuse me, some rhubarb bread caught in my throat.  As I mentioned in my last post we lay people get things wrong by saying DNA is accountable for about 50 per cent of our actions.  There is no such theory out there of that sort (except mine, cough).  So I won`t spread bad science.

However, I would like to theorize that maybe there is some God given gift  (whoops now I have even strayed out of science and into creationism) of being able to parent.  Not everyone has it, an ability to be a parent,  to "put up with it".  It can be inside of women or men.  And likewise either gender may be lacking in the quality.  I`m reminded of three females right off the bat who obviously were deficient:  Yoko Ono, the Mother in a short story of Annie Proulx who throws her small baby in a river because it is crying a lot, and said friend of my sister.  I am sure there are many others.  

Uh, granted, my sister`s friend has never had kids and has never had to deal with them.  And she is a bit older than I am.  She could be a grandma herself if she had had kids, so she probably likes a more calm life by now.  And... she likes turtles.  But that is beside the point.  Which came first the chicken or the egg?  Did she not have kids because she didn`t have "it".  Or does she not have "it" and probably can`t stand my kids even for a day because she didn`t have kids?  Born with or without this necessary trait?  Or developed after you had kids?  Nature or nurture?  I would go with the nature because many mothers who have kids are still really bad mothers.  Obviously they did not develop "it" or were not even born with "it". They have no chance of getting "it".

I, on the other hand, pat pat, congratulations dude, have... "it".     Please please, no applause.  Or even applesauce.

The point being either way, if "it" comes from nature or nurture women OR men can have it.  The point being that for pretty much most of humankind's history men have been stifled and their talent wasted if they had the trait to become a good father and help, nay even do everything in bringing up the kids.  The point being that NOW lets turn this ship around and realize that men can be just as good with kids and can be the primary care givers just as much as women.  The point being... lets do it.  If you `ve got "it"  use "it".  You know, flaunt what you got, baby.

I would like to finish with a quote from Trump.   No no, not that Trump, but in fact his daughter Ivanka Trump.  She is 33 years old with two young kids, husband, and works in her fathers real estate business.   She said in an interview in magazine `Business Insider` January 26, 2015:
  
Ivanka Trump: We live in an interesting time. Work is changing for men as much as it is for women. Men expect and want to be part of their children's lives. They're living in a different way than their fathers did.
(Read more) 

And it brings me to a final conclusion which I brought up last year at this time in a post called Universal Mommy.  It was also a post from summer vacation.  Not many people read the post so I will just repeat that I came to the conclusion that the traits of the "mother" were universal across both genders.  Both my friend, a father of a girl close to my daughter`s age, and I were acting just like "mothers" in taking care of our kids.  So, it`s just the way you act, it is the process and work of parenting and doesn`t matter if it is employed by male or female.  But you have to know how.  You have to have "it"  in the first place.     

Turtles reading the comics and doing a crossword puzzle.

I Neanderthal part 3: control your impatience and even worse your violence

This story came out in June of this year and I don't know why I have to dwell on it because it just saddens me no end every time I look at it.


That is the other reason men can not become good fathers.  What is it?  Why so much violence?  Maybe it is still from the hunter

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gatherer days of battling woolly mammoths and sabre tooth tigers for food before we settled on the farm.  The violence in men is certainly Neanderthal.  (Now someone will come to tell me that actually Homo Sapiens are much more violent than Neanderthals.  Well, it could be)

 While no doubt, women can also be violent, probably more so with verbal violence rather than physical violence, make no mistake about it, the overwhelming amount of violent crimes, homicides, rapes and abuse are committed by men.  I could take time to research and present you some numbers, but... I think it`s a no brainer, everybody pretty much knows that men are more physically violent. Prove me wrong!   But where does this violence come from?  That is the more necessary question to research as it could help in the settling and calming of men`s temper.

These days I am hooked up on the question of DNA quite a bit, so I am apt to say it is some sequence in our DNA which triggers violence.  But I have been warned by geneticists not to place too much emphasis on DNA as a a causation for what happens in our life.  In other words you don't become a writer or mathematician because you have some sort of DNA.  Beethoven did not write his heavenly 9th symphony because he had some DNA which caused him to do it.  I disagree at this point in time, but I will have to give it more thought and research and not stress DNA as I am not a molecular biologist and I was sent  a lengthy article on the pit falls of pinning too much to DNA.  If you are a good reader here is the article.  Basically it says that lay people (that would be me) mistakenly and sometimes detrimentally attribute too much to DNA when there is in fact no connections.  People like me say this and this is caused by DNA when it in fact can not be proven.  So....  Admittedly I have fallen in that trap, but I should at least warn you about it.

Where was I? Oh yes the violence of men.

While I have always thought men (and women) can become good or even great parents with little or no training, this is one area in which I would in fact espouse a training camp to become a better parent.  That is, a class to control your violence and  promote and nurture PATIENCE.  I have said it from the beginning that the three P s of parenting are essential.  Patience Patience and more Patience.  In so many stories or interviews I read about Stay at Home Dads, there always comes a point where the Dad says something to the effect that he wished he had more patience.   It is always there.  It must be in every man.  Realize that.  Your patience can snap or dissipate or disappear and then ...

The extreme is what happened here.  This poor beautiful girl lost her life.  Look how happy and bubbling with life she was in some of the other pictures.  (Crap, here come the tears again).  As much as I am devastated by this violence, I know exactly how it happened and what was going through the perpetrator`s mind when he basically beat the sh.. out of her (a two year old!!) and broke most of her internal organs along with her ribs.  I don't think he was an abuser or violent person, he just snapped.  She was crying incessantly, and yes while I did not have thoughts of beating or even hitting my child, I have been there too.  When the crying gets going and goes and doesn't stop it can just make you lose it.  You want it to stop, you have lost control and you want the control back, but it is not happening and then it is possible at this moment that you can break in a very bad way.  That is when we need training on how to deal with it. 

For this reason, and in this case I would recommend a class being set up to help parents, Fathers AND Mothers deal with a potential violence, or the loss of patience.  I guess there are anger management classes, but its not the same, and its for a different type of person.

At the very least Dads out there, see it in yourself and realize that the worst CAN happen and try to educate yourself and know a little about how to control it and know when it is coming.  Learn Patience.  I am sure there is a better way to say this... I hope you get the idea.  But also, look into the kids who you might get to babysit your toddlers or kids.  Do they have training?  Do they know how to control their violence?  Are they patient?  You don't want to leave your most precious things in life in the hands of the Tasmanian Devil. (I`m referring to the cartoon character from Bugs Bunny, just so you know I have nothing against Tasmanians)

OK, I will say a prayer for this girl for the next several nights and hope I can get it out of my brain, or at least hope she is in a better place.  Perhaps she was spared much sadness and all the travails that life can be.  I will leave you with a picture of my daughter`s Tai Chi class because she wanted to learn it and I want her to be able to protect herself. 

 

Summertime 2015 pt 1 : Are you (her) my mother?

It is a fact of life that when Dad takes the kids out or travels with the kids by himself  service people will look for the mother and refer questions to her and not the father.

A couple years ago in the summertime, myself and at that time one daughter and my brother and his wife went out with my Mother to a restaurant.  Of course the waitress asked my sister in law all questions pertaining to my daughter even though my daughter was sitting close to me and sister in law was sitting on the opposite side of the table next to my brother and it seemed obvious I was the father of my daughter.  But the waitress continued to ask my sister in law what my daughter would like, if she needed some coloring books if she was done with her food and basically everything.

It didn't bother me.  My sister in law was and is childless.  It was amusing.

Making my grand flight last week with both my daughters to visit my Mother, their Grandmother, I was sitting between my daughters in a four seat section on the plane.  On the end sat a woman who looked rather nice and pleasant but had nothing to do with our family.  Yet again the stewardess on the woman's side asked the lady all questions pertaining to my daughter who was sitting next to her.  Does she want ice in the apple juice, will she have the chicken or the pasta etc for some time.  To be fair the lady was sitting next to my daughter and could have been the mother, but something tells me even after the woman corrected her and told her, "I'm not with them," the stewardess still might have asked her questions pertaining to my daughter,  "does she need a blanket."

Again, it doesn't upset me, it is rather funny.  No reason to get upset or fume over it.  However, it is yet another example where service and the general working society will not credit or maybe not recognize that the Father is the caregiver of the family even at that instant.  A mother is always looked for.  Granted Stay at home Fathers, even fathers taking their kids out without a mother is still a percentage wise anomaly.  Luckily it is (usually) harmless.

ON THE OTHER SIDE... I DO OBJECT!
When I was preparing for my summer vacation with my girls a friend of mine recommended that I get a witnessed signed letter that my wife was aware of and allowed her children to travel without her across borders.  Anecdotal evidence said that I COULD be stopped and held up at a customs area and given problems that I was travelling by myself with my young children.  Worse case scenario that they could have held me off the flight and questioned me for a "very long time".

I have to first clear my friends name and say that while he has a tendency to cover risks where risks do not exist he was only telling me what he had read on several trip prep sites and even US customs web sites.  It was not his idea alone.  But to this I objected and resisted quite strongly.

Mainly, it got me fuming that, by his wording, the customs officials were quite wary of Dads with children.  Now why is that?  Yes I understand that "due to a rise in child abductions by Fathers" (probably starting with John Lennon and Yoko Ono who actually did abduct Yokos child) Fathers travelling alone with young kids are profiled and put on observation.  But this struck me as akin though not as nefarious, as racial profiling.  In other words, what are you doing travelling alone with (your) kids?  That is strange, that is atypical, you must be up to something, ARE YOU ABDUCTING THEM?  Please step over here sir for a full strip search and questioning.  And we will pump your stomach too just to make sure.

For sure Stay at Home Dads have to rise and resist this stereotyping profiling.

And it got me to thinking that what if the police or authorities carried this out to the Nth degree?  What if fathers walking down the street with their kids, picking them up from school, taking them to the park without Mom, were also profiled as possible abductors?  After all, why should a father cross a border to steal his kids?  He could be surreptitiously stealing them after school or bringing them to the park before he "stole" them.  Then what?  I can imagine the police stopping me while we sat eating ice cream cones on the side walk.  "Are those your kids sir?  Do you have papers for them?  What are you doing buying them ice cream without their Mother?"

And then you have to go through the shame and embarrassment that in fact you are the primary caregiver and you are taking your kids out for ice cream after school.  And the police will look at you as if a) you are a criminal or b) you are a loser with no job because what Father is the primary caregiver for his kid?  What is a primary caregiver they will ask.  Oh you mean your wife works and you don't?   Bahahahahahha, Loser. And you know you just can't expletive deletive an officer.

So, I say, stand tall Dads and lets stop this in the bud before we have to start running with our kids every time we see police cars. We have to be worried about cops pinning us to the sidewalk beating us a couple times with their baton and saying we have the right to remain silent.

Or every morning we will have to go to the authorities with our wives and get our "papers" signed that yes our wives know and accept that we are with the kids without her.  And every time we hear sirens we have to fish around for our papers and get them ready to present.

I DID NOT get that paper with a witness signature that my wife knew I was travelling with our kids across the border.  And I was all ready to give them a piece of my mind, Harry, if anyone asked me or questioned me on this topic.  YES, I am travelling very far with my kids without their mother.  Yes in fact I will be on vacation with my kids for several weeks without their Mother and will be taking care of them, hopefully teaching them how to swim this summer, reading to them every night and being the sole brunt of their "Dad, I am bored"  "I don't like this food" complaints.  You want to make something of it?  Mr. Borderguard?  Huh huh?

No one questioned me about it.  No one gave a damn really.  Shucks.  I was ready.

Here is the message from U.S. customs and Border Protection>

Children - Child traveling with one parent or someone who is not a parent or legal guardian or a group

If a child (under the age of 18) is traveling with only one parent or someone who is not a parent or legal guardian, what paperwork should the adult have to indicate permission or legal authority to have that child in their care?

Due to the increasing incidents of child abductions in disputed custody cases and as possible victims of child pornography, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) strongly recommends that unless the child is accompanied by both parents, the adult have a note from the child's other parent (or, in the case of a child traveling with grandparents, uncles or aunts, sisters or brothers, friends, or in groups*, a note signed by both parents) stating "I acknowledge that my wife/husband/etc. is traveling out of the country with my son/daughter/group. He/She/They has/have my permission to do so." See our Q&A parental consent

.https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/268/~/children---child-traveling-with-one-parent-or-someone-who-is-not-a-parent-or

Oh, it does include Mothers that they should get the paper too.  Uh.  OK. That's fair.

Dept: Sentimental. Where have they all gone?

Another post I have been thinking about for a long time because it confronts me every day.  

Let me say first off that I am not a pack rat.  I have seen pictures of the stacks rats pack and I can`t believe it. It makes me itchy on the skin because in fact I can`t stand messes.  I would love to have as bare a house as possible (besides for my music collection of course)  That would make me feel better.  

Pack rats are ....  eyow.  All that junk lying around.  

No, my problem is that I am a sentimentalist.  Everything means something to me. Some memory, some feeling is triggered by looking at anything of memento.  A vinyl record, a ticket stub, a child's game, a sock, all stir memories and events in my life.  My problem is my long term memory is lucid and very open to me.  I flow in and out of periods of my life pretty easily in my thinking.  These little pieces of tangible memory are like portals to a past which is readily relivable and retrievable in my daily life in the present.  

(On the other hand, I have a terrible short term memory.  My wife often gives me a verbal beating because I don't remember what she said to me yesterday about where we are going today or what food I should have bought today.   This is a problem too.  A big problem)

My first topic in the sentimental department is rather unoriginal and banal, well aren`t they all?  But everyone has a joke about this.  SOCKS.  The missing socks department.

Where have they all gone?  

The washing machine ate them.  The goblins of the night take certain socks away just to mess with you.  I have heard there is a special place in heaven where socks are and when you die all your missing socks are found and paired back up.  Actually, I just made that up.  In fact that only gets me depressed, that these socks will be alone and unpaired perhaps the remainder of my life and only paired back up in the after life.  See, I told you I was sentimental.   

When we moved from one apartment to another nearly two years ago from this writing, I put all the single socks in a bag and brought them to the new apartment.  The thing is, I am not sure if I have ever unpacked that bag and maybe I have the matches waiting in a pile for me to find that bag now and put them together.  My short term memory lost track after we moved if I really did this. Or not. 

Currently unmatched

The point is, I keep a little box of the single socks in the girls room. After each laundry we go through the box and see if the laundry produced any pairs that weren't pairs


before.  It is a kind of ritual.  In fact each laundry does produce some pairs, but of course the opposite occurs at the same rate.  So there is a continual in and out of single socks in the box waiting for their significant others.  

New batch of singles after laundry.  Peppa pig a loser this time

Some have had to wait a long time.  One year we left some at Grandmas cottage from summer vacation time.  We retrieved them a year later and matched them up when we got back to the home apartment.  Thankfully my Mother had kept them for us.  

There was an incredible find recently when I found a tiny baby Mickey Mouse sock which had been missing for two years.  Of course by the time I found it nobody fit those socks anymore.  But that was not the point. It was the principle of matching the missing socks which mattered.  Strangely though, we lost the same sock a couple weeks later and currently Mickey Mouse is a loner again.  

speak of the devil.  Found this match after writing this post

Yes, in fact, there are some socks which have been lost since baby hood.  I have them sitting in the box by themselves but I cant give up on them.  I wont throw them away because maybe they will be found, behind the washing machine, in the bag of single socks I brought from the other apartment or the bad goblins will have pity and return some of them.   

But I have to face the fact that many  will only be matched .... when and if I get to heaven.  Or they may have to wait even until after my daughters time.  Which means that when I am a Grand Father I ll wander into my daughters` room where my daughters wont be anymore, but the box of unmatched socks will still be there.  I ll look at the baby socks, the toddlers socks, the Hello Kitty sock, pink socks, white frilly socks, and the whole collection of socks which lost their mate each year and I will remember, the life and times of being a Father to my little girls who are grown big now and gone from the apartment.