The Goalposts got moved

Caps for Sale

I have written about my youngest daughters rejection of me here concerning clothes.  And then my test of patience with her HERE.  But in actuality I was getting better with her.  I truly was becoming more patient with her.  And maybe she was becoming "OK" with me.  I realized that she liked Mommy better but hey, I'm cool with that.  I know Mommy has to give her a bath or shower, I am cool with that too.  I think it was the test I had with my Mother in law.  She nearly broke me.  In fact my test of patience did not get a passing grade with her and I have only seen her once, at Christmas, in the last six months, though on my honor I am ready to do the garden thing again once the planting season starts in March. And.... well.... I will try my damnedest to um... um... oh yeah, be patient with my Mother in law.

So I am getting better all the time... at some things.  Look, me and the youngest did a 1000 piece Disney Mickey Mouse puzzle together.  Talk about bonding.    We took an exercise class the past two years where I had to exercise with her.  That should have made us the best of buds.

I thought the terrible twos, "I like one parent (Mommy) better than the other parent (Daddy)", would have finished by the time she was 4.

Sadly mistaken.

So what happens?  My youngest daughter moves the goalposts and makes it that much harder for me to stay patient with her.  Do you want to hear how she has further bloodied and battered my ego and patience skills?  This is where you say `yes` because I am going to tell you no matter what.

Before I wasn't allowed to dress or bathe her.  It was hell trying to brush her teeth.  Now, she dresses herself, and she is so proud of that that she comes running out after she is dressed and yells, "I'm dressed" to let the whole apartment building know.   Now she stands (relatively) still while I brush her teeth, twice a day!  We have moved on, which means now she cries about other things she doesn't like me doing.

 She knows darned well that her parents take turns taking each girl to school.  We  trade off,for instance I take one girl one day and then the other the next day.  She knows that.  But what does she do after her Mother has left taking her sister to school?  She sits there and cries in the hallway for ten minutes.  She cries the whole time she or I are trying to get her winter clothes on, which makes us late in leaving.  I hate getting to her pre school late, the teacher always yells at me.  And ITS NOT MY FAULT.

So after she has cried for Mommy for fifteen minutes, the only way to calm her down is to promise to carry her to pre school.  Its getting late so I have to carry her anyway to get her to school faster.  Its just down the street, up the hill and up the stairs.  Here below is the hill I have to carry her up on my shoulders.

                                              And then up the stairs to the school

Mother Theresa wouldn't have been so magnanimous to carry her.  I m her father so I have to.  Otherwise she would either just sit down on the street or we would be late and I would get scolded by the teacher.  I might as well die a martyr right now.

I m not a drinker like some other Fathers I know, instead I feel like crying the whole walk back home.  Luckily its downhill.  My patience is gone.   I lost it somewhere crossing the street.  I guess it got run over by a car,  or a mountain goat.  

And now she has a new game.  I am not allowed to touch her bed.  She screams for ten minutes in the evening if she sees that I made her bed in the morning.  So I have to leave it a mess, which is not in my nature to do.  Oh why couldn't she be simpler like her older sister.  The second Born's are always more hellish.

Now if I even go near her bed in the evening she starts hitting me.  She takes ten minutes to straighten it out after we turn out the lights.  One night she started screaming at me for what reason I don't know.  I was standing next to their bunk bed and singing to her older sister who sleeps on the top bunk.

 "What what what?  What I d do?"

  It turns out I was standing too close to her bunk and was upsetting the aura around her bed.  It caused her great mental anguish and she started hitting me in the legs.    

Excuse me while I just go kill myself right now.

Listened to this while writing

 

Father Today, not as much in the past year

 Today was the first "working day"  in a long time that I have picked up my kids from school and taken care of them in the evening.   I haven't done it since the Fall.  I guess it hasn't been soooo long.  But still I have to thank my wife for picking up the slack of Parent when I have had to sit at my job over and above what I was doing.

See, we try to trade off.  I have a couple days during the week when I am free from my business to pick them up and do whatever needs to be done.  We switch off.  Mostly I was doing two days in the working week with them.  That is why I call myself Daddy 40 per cent.  Because I was daddy two working days out of five.  40%.

There were times in earlier years when I was doing hundred per cent.   But I have to say that this last year, I haven't been as much of an at home Father.  Not through my own fault.  As I said, I had to deal more with my faltering business and my wife had more time to pick up the reins.  Though I am saddened by the fewer hours I was with my kids.  They always seem to latch on to me more and like me to a greater extent when I spend extra hours with them.  We are creating stronger bonds.

But I am very thankful for my wife.  I am thankful  that we have a better relationship and a good working relationship as well, that we both want to try to do the best for our kids.  So that if one person is being handicapped or has to do something else, the other tries to step in.

This last year I have been, sadly, Daddy 10 per cent, more like it.   I don't like it.  But as my Bio in Google states, I have a small business.  And in the last year, it just was not working out with sales and with the workers.  There were so many complications and business was worse again.  And as I have written in another place,  I am a Father, a small businessman, and trying to learn investing.  Sometimes it all works, sometimes it doesn't.  This last year, it was not working as well. 

But that is why I am thankful that it is the two of us, two parents.  Two parents always works much better than one.  I look at single moms and for the life of me, I don't know how they handle both a job which usually they MUST go to (I can usually fiddle around with the times or days I go to work) and also bringing up their kids.  I don't think this is good for anyone.  And statistics show that single parents are more likely to be under the "making ends meet"  or even in poverty.  That makes me sad. 

That is why I think it is more important these days to, and I am going to go off on a tangent maybe here,  1) have protected sex or rhythm method sex,  and 2) be with someone who you have tested and you want to be with.  Raising kids is difficult.  It can really strain the relations of the parents.  But breaking that relation damages everyone, probably most the kids.  And the aforementioned fact that it is just harder to bring up kids with just one parent.  Sadly many parents fall into poverty doing it.

So, I really recommend you stay away from raising kids until you have a partner that you want to raise the kids with.  And remember,  nobody is perfect.  You have problems and faults too.  You will have problems and stresses, but stay strong if you have kids.  If you are having problems in your relationship with your spouse, go to a marriage counselor.  Really, it isn't terrible, it can be necessary and the right step. 

I can not stress enough that two  happily married parents are so much better for everyone.

Here is a song I have been listening to a lot which fits into the topic.  Give it a listen, hope you like it
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDo0cCtUulE


1000 piece puzzle done

Let it Snow

Let it snow let it snow let it snow.

Last weekend the snow hit the pavement.  It seems it hit it all around the upper hemisphere of the globe.  (Oh wait, there is no upper and lower on a globe in space.  Oh wait, why do people always say "its gone south" meaning its hanging way low, hanging down?  Thoughts for someone else s blog).  I am quite far away from the path of what was called Superstorm Jonas.  And yet, we got a winter wonderland galore here.

Fathers of 100% down to 10%, it doesn't matter, now is your opportunity to shine.  Now is the time to be a Dad to your kids in conditions which were made for Dads since the first cave men came out of the caves and made carriers from animal hides and sticks to sled down the hills.  

Really, if you are a male who grew up in the northern Hemisphere where it snows, you know how to handle the powder snow (does it snow in the southern hemisphere too?  Really?).  And the first big snow of the year is always cause for celebration and makes it even easier to be with the kids.  The first one is the best.  You aren't tired of it yet, its new and fresh and beautiful and FUN.  Now is the time to take the old metal saucer, or the even older wooden sleigh with metal runners and hit the snow with the kids.

Sledding isn't like skiing or snowboarding.  It doesn't involve being good on the ankles, strong enough in the arms, or for you to balance yourself to try to get the hang of that ski lift rope.  Sledding needs no education.  You just get on the sled and push off down the hill.  And if it is getting a bit fast and scary, you just put your boots down into the snow, turn and wipe out onto the ground.  Simple as that.

I have to admit at this time that one of my scariest recent memories and it may be one of the scariest of my younger daughter`s if she remembered, but she doesn't, was of me sledding with her.  Well, at the time she was about 15 months old and for some reason my wife thought it was safe for all of us to go sledding..... down a mountain of Alps height and length.  Along the path in the map on the right, we started out in Southern Poland, went through the Czech Republic and ended in Slovakia... in about forty minutes.

This is the killer hill (pic courtesy Sankarska Draha)

My wife teamed up with my older daughter, 4 at the time, and I sat behind our littlest girl.  Needless to say, the trail was very steep and probably made for professional bobsledder trainers.  I pretty much went the whole way down with my boots full into the snow and even that didn't slow us down enough.  My wife and daughter were waiting for us at the bottom of the hill.  The bus which we were supposed to catch back to the hotel had left and we were a full twenty minutes later than everyone else.  "Where were you?"  my wife asked.  "What happened?"   What happened was that I was scared .h... less of going down a veritable several mile mountain faster than the 1 minute mile which is what we would have done if I hadn't had my boots down.  And scared of losing the life of my littlest daughter.  I really had no wish for my little little girl to lose her life even before it had really started, or to be maimed or paralyzed in any way.  Which is what would have happened if I hadn't put my boot down.... the whole length of the sledding trail.  I was scared freaky the whole way down.  Give me a couple years to get over it.  Its been three years and I still am not.

But this last weekend, we went to our nearby park which has "friendly" hill.  In fact I could be

"family friendly hill"  

fearless father.  I rode with my older daughter down to the very bottom of the hill consisting of three sections of the hill.  So if it had gotten out of hand we could have "booted it" in between section one and two.  But no, we did not!  We sailed over the sidewalk of section one to two and momentum kept going.  It wasn't too big to scare the bejeebers out of me.  And we kept going over sidewalk two into the third section of the hill where we gained the most speed and yelled at people to watch out and scared them and made them MOVE and bumped down onto the pavement at the very bottom and skidded to an easy standstill in the bushes at the very bottom laughing and adrenalized and wowing and oohing and reeking of the sheer joy the approximately twenty second trip had been.

So Fathers big and small, 10 per cent to 100 per cent, don't miss this opportunity.  Grab your sleds of all shapes and hit the hills with your kiddies AND BE A DAD.  You ll love it.  Um... a small word to the wise, just don't go down the super duper Alps or Rockies or Everest size hills.  Stick with your friendly sloping kiddy hills.   Have a good one.  

1000 picture puzzle update.  Just about there at the finish.

FAQ : How do I desprinkle my house of Barbie hair glitter?

Credit picture: Ann Post

I have been reading a lot of articles about familes with kids getting LICE. It scares me.  I really dont want to mess around with delousing my whole household or spending an hour every day combing through hair and looking for nits.  Or taking showers using mouth wash as shampoo (urban legend says this kills them) or even harder stuff like Crisco or Kerosene.  Yes, I have read that too.  Ugh, I dont even want to post a picture of the lice.  I was going to, but instead I had to put up something positive and nice, hence the cozy winter picture of a cottage in the woods. Nice. Not lice. 

I was very lucky not to have this condition when I was growing up.  We had a fleas infestation from our dog, but in fact I never even heard of lice until I came to Europe.  Well, in fact before that I read about lice in KIDS during World War 2 who got the critters from sleeping in hay in the barn.  I assumed it was a condition of ancient history or of "poor folks", sort of like tuberculosis.  

Truthfully I have not had the "pleasure" of having the louse experience and I thank my Lucky Stars for that, or the God above.  Though I am not sure it is God that is keeping my family from getting lice, though if it is, I thank the heavenly Father.  That is awfully kind.

That said, I have NOT been spared a 21 st century condition which while not as bad as lice, is certainly up there with menaces such as people talking too loudly on their mobile phones in public or in the park while they are supposed to be watching their kids, or teenagers smoking on the corner under our apartment,  That one REALLY gets my goat.

Barbie for kids with loss of hair due to cancer or diseases

I am talking about the menace of BARBIE R hair glitter.  Maybe even worse than lice  as you can not get rid of them to the best of my knowledge.  They will be there when you sell the house.

Not to make this into an X rated blog, but I have learned that a healthy male puts out at least 40 million spermatozoa in a 2ml semen ejaculation.  Now those little guys are microscopic and all 40 million can easily be wiped up in a little puddle with a Kleenex or easily washed off the hand or just as easily be spit out or swallowed from the mouth.  But imagine if those 40 million were each as big as a pin head and then were put into a little vile and then dumped on said Barbie`s R head, but in fact not dumped on the head, but spread all over. 

Just like sperm, these goobers have some sort of mobility and quickly and easily torqued throughout  said household.  First they disperse in groups of 100 000 or so.  Then 10 000.... down to 1 or a couple anywhere in the apartment from our bed to under the bathtub to a couple on my face.  If I clean one off one side of my face, there is another on my other cheek.  I ride the street car and if people look at me, I wonder if the sunlight caught a sparkle in my eye that they are looking at.   

Now don't get me wrong, most certainly this is a "Western" first world complaint and I know there are bigger problems in the world, no doubt, but if every household with kids were afflicted with this nefarious condition, it would be a national calamity.

plus size Barbie R

My attention was first called to this problem a month or two ago after we got said Barbie R for a present.  I noticed some sparkles in the kitchen on the table and on the floor and just assumed it was some sugary ingredient my wife was glazing on a sweet role or something.  The sparkle was contained.  I wiped it up easily, so I thought it was under control.  Simple.  You can wipe the stuff up.  Besides, the kids didn't really take to the Barbie R doll. 

Huh.  If I had only known. I would have thrown said vile of glitter right then into the garbage and let the local land fill people deal with the problem of 40 million sparkles.  I didn't know.  The problem did not become apparent.

Whoa is to me as this last weekend, my older daughter  gave Barbie R a hair wash (who incidentally bought the Barbie R with said sparkles as a present with her own money for her younger sister.  You know who the present was really for, and who is playing with it right?).   And then she put the sparkles in her hair after I helped her blow dry Barbie R s hair.  I am rolling my eyes if you could see me, but it was fun(ny).  I looked at the sparkle and opened the vile and I opened it wrong because it looks like a lipstick container, but, well, a lot of sparkles fell all over the girls room.  Crap.  Then my younger daughter opened the vile and sprinkled the sprinkles on Barbie R s hair in large doses.  Too large.  It was all over the rug in their room and the sitting area.  I tried to vacuum it up, but it wouldn't.  Seriously, it wouldn't.  In fact, that just blew the sparkles around the room.   And from there, as I already said, they have some sort of mobility method and they could not be swept or vacuumed up.  And for all I knew, they multiplied too!  They each split in two and then each of those 80 million split again.  I feel like this is the sequel to the movie GREMLINS.  The little sparkles are going to grow and multiply and eventually push us out of apartment and from there, who knows.  A national calamity.  Call out the National Guard.      

Don't bother doing the math to figure out how many we have because  at this point the sparkles have kind of taken over  some of our apartment.  In one room it looks like this:


 In other places in the apartment you can just see a couple pieces of something shiny on the floor.  And that would be the sparkles.  Like I said, they are everywhere.  So when I wash my face in the evening.. they are there.  Luckily they haven't taken over our kitchen living room area yet, so we mostly stay in that area, but we have had to combine our bedrooms as the above picture is the original room where the sparkles were first "given water after midnight" and were dropped all over and expanded.

I will be contacting the Barbie R people this next week to ask them how to delouse, deglitter the apartment and I will post their answer, though they may not answer right away, as I don't think it is a "FAQ" yet.  But to be fair, ever since lead soldiers were scrapped as toys for kids (my Father had a collection of them when he was a kid and he kept them in our basement in a locked up metal suitcase for as long as we lived in that house) toy companies have been quick to recall dangerous toys or make changes to toys when it was found they could be a choking hazard, or at least to print on the box a warning that this toy is for above three year olds because it could be a choking hazard to three and below.  So I am confident that the good manufacturers of Barbie R will help me get out of my predicament.  Whether they answer in time will be another question.  at this point, I need a quick answer.   Wish me luck.   However, I would like to warn all readers that in my "limited" opinion, sparkles for Barbie R are in fact, NOT a good idea.  

Here is the update of our 1000 piece puzzle Santa got my 4 year old for Christmas.  Both she and I have been working on it before pre school in the morning and a bit before bedtime.  She works on it herself in the late afternoon before I get home from work.   

No Resolutions

Lentil Soup

Oh ye who have no faith.

I want to believe, I really do, but I don't know,... I have been doing this lentil soup business on the first day of the new year for several years and results have been mixed at best, and downright terrible at not the best.

But once again, on the evening of January First, I dug into two bowls of lentil soup in hopes that it would bring me good health and wealth for year 2016 AD.  

Come to think of it, I have been pretty healthy this last year.  If we count the two months I was sick last January and February to the 2014 year, then in fact I have not gotten sick at all, besides some small snuffles or cough for a week or less. I did not get my usual pre Christmas sickness in 2015, so maybe the lentil soup had some effect.   The thing is, I didn't have the lentil soup last January 1st, so that theory is shot.

For the uneducated, as with every culture and religion there are traditions and suspicions associated with what to do on the first day of the new year.  In the tradition of the Slavs, or perhaps specific to the Czechs, but I think it is all Slavs,  you are supposed to eat two bowls of lentil soup in the evening of the First day of the new year and it will bring you (great?) wealth for the next year.  Some subsidiaries of these people believe you have to have a pickle in the soup too, or with potatoes of some style on the side.  Also in the Czech tradition, three Carp fish scales should be placed under the bowl to be found, or not found by the lentil soup eater.  If you don't find them, then you are out of luck in pecuniary matters for the next year.  If you do find them, you are in luck.  My wife stopped with that idea as we stopped with Carp altogether.  So I guess I am out of luck no matter if I have the lentil soup or not.

The thing is, in the past, it was finally leaked that Mother in law would put the three carp scales under her favorite son or daughter`s bowl, and the others got squat.  So that was kind of a scam of family nepotism.

What does all this have to do with the price of bread you ask?

Well, as many people will know, also in our Western modern, culture we have developed traditions for the First day of the new year.   We call it, making New Years Resolutions.  And the reason I mention the scam of the carp scales and the mixed, usually bad, results of my lentil soup menu is to rationalize my total, unfeeling, lack of resolutions I have made this year.  Ne, even scorn for the thought of making a resolution. In fact a negative resolution to continue on the path I currently trod that is leading me nowhere and progressing me in absolutely no see able forward movement.  At best sideways.  Flat.

Pt oi, phoi, spit, I spit on you, you resolution.

The reality being, that I think that it is a worthless act of self flagellation with the intention of trying to make ourselves feel good and be ambitious at the new year.  It is noted that people are usually more ambitious anyway at the beginning of the new year.  It has been analyzed even in the stock market that people are buying more stocks at the beginning of the new year and feel lucky.

This usually lasts ten days, maybe twenty.  After that we all get back into our routines and lose our shine and ambition and look at our bank account or mattress stash and see that we are deep in the hole from the holidays and we have gained ten pounds (4 kilo) to boot.  Then we realize or start to think that, its all a scam, I aint going to get rich quick.  And you know what?  For the most part you will not.  You know what the odds are of winning the lottery?  Get the picture?  The only way we get out of our personal holes is through steady day to day plodding, not running, not quickly, just plodding.  And sometimes there is gum on our shoes holding us back, or we step in some dog doo along the way.  My neighborhood is well known for its sidewalk treats (Which actually some people think is good luck, but I don't).  Deus ex Machina only happens in Shakespeare.   I rather follow Frank Zappa who said, "Watch out where the huskies go, don't you step in the yellow snow."

And you know what people?  The stock market is really starting out this new year, 2016, by tanking really badly.  Going down, losing percentage.  So you figure this year a lot a lot of people are doing what I am doing and ignoring resolutions also, because NO ONE is investing in the stock market this new year.  Its going down.  They are selling, not buying.  

The one year I made some resolutions and they worked was when I made my resolutions at the Jewish new year which is in September.  I  think I psyched my mind out and confused it so that the resolutions succeeded.  I had the same ambition as most people do at the beginning of the new year, but I didn't burn out by the 20th of the month because I was the only one making resolutions.  So I couldn't talk to other people at the end of the month and say, "oh yeah, my resolution was... was... was... but I stopped it".  I didn't talk to anyone about them.  I just kept them in my own heart and I kept working on them.  And it worked.  That was the year 2013 and although I didn't keep all of them, I did keep the resolution to start a blog which I did by December and another was to go to the back doctor and try to do something about my bad back.  I did and I kept with the back exercises till March of the next year!!

But besides that year, I don`t recall any resolutions that stuck or that got accomplished.  In fact I don't recall any resolutions I have made anytime in the past.

So folks, as I said in the beginning, its all a scam.  Your mother in law is placing the carp scales under her own daughters plate, not yours. You will not get rich overnight, you probably wont even get a raise this year.  At best you will break even.  So, fagetaboutit.  Just keep your nose to the grindstone and do your job and watch where you are walking especially in my neighborhood.  

There is one trick I have always wondered whether it would work, and that is REVERSE PSYCHOLOGY.     

        

Christmas present puzzle progress