Summer Vacation 2016 part I : The trip makes me need a vacation

Disclosure :  As I have said before, there is not a day that goes by that I dont thank the luck I have had and the upbringing I was born into.  It is the luck of the draw really.  I can complain about piddly things while I know many many other people have real big life threatening worries that they must live through every day.  I try to send my heart to them also.  God be willing all good people will be blessed in the end. 

Well.  At the time of this writing, my last post was at the end of JUNE.  Two months ago.  Kind of a long interval.  I pray the millions of my readers (take that statement with a mountain of salt.  I hope I have more readers than just the `bots` checking out to see if I have used any licensed material) didn't think I had packed it up and left the blogisphere.  I have not.  HOWEVER.   I did do some packing.

As I have said before, I often get nervous before a trip HERE. and also here some




Five days before this trip I was planning how it should go and getting nervous.  It was our big summer vacation trip going to visit Grandma in another section of the world.  I was running around trying to take care of everything and get my business in order which was a bit more difficult this time as I am moving my office down a floor in the building where I am.  It just meant that it made things more ugly,  cutting off my Internet connection, people yelling at me to get things done, and the likes, which puts a wrench in actually getting things done.  This always makes me want to cancel the whole thing and fagetaboutit and just stay home and sleep the whole ENTIRE time.  But that wouldn't be good, or responsible, or father like now would it?

But the thought of travelling, even moving,  can get me into a panic.

Well the big day came.  It always does.  We made it to the airport on time.  We usually do.  I have never been at fault for being late for a plane.  But what made me more nervous this time was that we were going through an airport (no names at this time) which had been a true hassle and nightmare the last couple times using it.  Long customs lines, and getting from one point to the other by bus and just so much moving from place to place, at an airport for jimminys sake.  The airport should move you.  You shouldn't have to move much in an airport.  Kind of silly reasoning these days when getting from one end of some airports to the other can be a trip in itself.   But to my utter bewilderment everything was OK.  And this coming on the tale end of world scares about terrorist attacks at airports etc.  I think there had been an attack at the Turkish airport a couple days before we left.  

What was disappointing and annoying to say the least was the airport at the OTHER end of the trip.  Since we were flying from overseas to the US, we had to go through customs and pick up our luggage and then check it back for the last connecting flight.  And this was not a huge airport.   But that whole process took well over an hour, an hour and a half.  And this after a 7 hour flight.

Imagine 500 people in this area

You have to go through one line and get a picture of all travellers, then go through another line to get through customs.  Each line was a couple hundred people.  Well, just as we were getting to the customs police officer to get questioned after swimming through two lines, my youngest daughter threw up.  This time I did not catch it in my hand nor did I even attempt to.  She had had only  water, so it wasn't much, but still.  They used to let parents with small children go ahead in the line, but not here it seems.  So we were standing there for over an hour after a seven hour flight.  THIS is too much for a little girl.  Out of contempt for the airport I just let her throw up on the rug.  

To be fair the customs policeman was nice to me then even though I had carried a forbidden apple from the plane onto American soil.  No fruits allowed.  Can you believe the dog sniffer sniffed out my apple?  Or maybe it was actually the leftover chicken bone.  Good nose on that pooch.  And maybe I should write the airport a letter asking if this particular day was bad because of some crisis or whatever.  But then we still had to get to the other end of the airport and it seems my daughter was in full movement sickness mode.  We were on a walking escalator and she did it again. And again I did nothing and just let the throw up go down between the cracks on the escalator.   Our gate for the connecting flight had to be a half hour walk away.  Down this long long hallway with no sense to it, no rooms off of it, no outlets, no stores just an amazingly long hallway.  I am not in airport construction nor design, so I don't know, but it made no sense to me.  It only serves to make people later for their plane, or good for movies of people running down the endless hall trying to catch their plane. But for poor little girls tired already from travel and sick to their stomach the consequences are not pretty.

Once we got to our gate both my children fell asleep, it being around 2 am our old time.

I knew what was coming upon my daughters waking, and it did.  This time, I had a Kleenex out and my hand ready.  This time I caught it and then I carried her under one arm and "it"in the other hand down to the nearest bathroom, leaving the other daughter sleeping stretched out on the waiting room chairs. Oblivious.  I got the sick one cleaned up and changed her clothes as I hadnt caught it all.  

A man came up to me and said that he was a children¨s physician and if he could do anything to help?  And then his wife also asked if she could bless my daughter, which I had no reason to deny, the blessing that is.  At the least we now had the insurance of the doctor on our flight AND Jesus on our side, so I figured nothing more could go wrong.  No more bad would happen. 

She just had one more throw up to do once we got on the plane for our last connecting flight.  This one we caught in the seat pocket doggy throw up bag.  The lady sitting behind us said she was a children's doctor and if there was anything she could do, let her know.  I see, this was the flight of children's doctors going to some conference or other in the Northern woods on a lake.  Maybe.  I declined her help and she proceeded to talk to her seat mate the whole journey (luckily just half an hour) about how she loves driving her new big pick up truck and how she missed it even now.  I frantically looked in all the other seat pockets for another throw up bag, but this time not for my daughter but for myself.  I found none.  There might be more trouble coming from me and I hadn't been blessed by Jesus.

Oh man, I need a vacation after this trip.       

Bully part 2

I am not an angel.  But more angel than devil.  That is to say,  I did bully and harassed some people when I was a small kid, but mostly I was a bystander and didn't mess with people.  I can remember more bullying on me than me harassing other people.

I did harass this one girl when I was 7 or 8 years old.  Followed her home several times, perhaps chasing her or called her names.  I think it came to an end either when her parents called or her big brother came calling on me.  I think that effectively made me think twice about harassing others and from there after I was more a victim.  I still am deeply ashamed of even my little bit of bullying.  At a high school reunion in the early 2000s I apologized to the girl face to face for five minutes and told her how awful I feel about it to this day.   She let me off the hook and said it wasn't so terrible.  I didn't really do anything terrible.  All the same...  I wasn't good.  Shameful.

But I have to tell a short story of another middle school bullying incident which was just brutal.  It was brutal to watch even though, sadly at the time, I think most others just put up with it and really didn't do anything about it.  It disturbs me to this day thinking about it.   Someone should have alerted the authorities about what was going on.  But, I don't think High School kids work(ed) that way.

Well, in actuality there wasn't any violence or physical interaction, it was mostly just words.  So one guy, who was kind of nerdy himself and definitely was not handsome, though he was built with strength from sports he participated in, but not a regular sports dude, found out that it was quite easy to pick on this other guy of the same age who definitely was of small build with not much strength and on his way to becoming a math geek.  Whenever the bully saw this guy he would call him the stupidest name, namely his own name attached to the victims name.  But it got the victim so angry.  Or the bully would walk behind the victim and try to step on the heel of his shoe as kids did at that age to get the shoe off.

See, nothing really bad.  It never came to blows even though sometimes the victim would turn around and try to strike the bully,  in which case the bully would easily dodge the fist and laugh at him.  What made it horrible was that it was so incessant.  It was continual, whenever the bully saw the kid, easily 5 times a day which made it so disgusting.  At most someone would say, Dude, lay off the guy already.  And the bully would say, "yeah I know, its just so much fun".

I don't recall the exact year, but the victim did leave our school, I think after the second year (in 8th grade).  He went to another school in the area, a private school from what we heard.

Then he came back to our school in the second to last year or even the last.  And my how he had changed.

He had turned into a long haired burnout which is someone who smokes a lot, and not cigarettes.  On occasion he would ask me if I had some dope or if I wanted to smoke dope with him, I guess because he knew I was alternative and thought I smoked.  I didn't.  He was not a geek at all, or rather he was exactly a dopehead on a moped.  Still small in stature.  He wasn't doing well in school, nor did he seem to care.

What had happened to him?  Had he been bullied in the other school too and the whole thing had just drove him to drugs and dopeheadedness?  Or was it a natural progression from math geek to pothead? That was possible.  A lot of kids changed a lot going from 12 years old to 15.  But what worries me is that the incessant bullying from the first guy had just ground him down creating scars deeper than skin deep.  That the bullying was the direct cause of his dropping out of the regular school kid life and just destroyed him.  I wouldn't doubt it.  But even worse is that it may have scarred him for life by effecting which direction he was taking in life.  Or maybe it caused such a detour of his life that it took him so much longer to get back into the swing of life.  Or maybe he isn't even with us anymore.  I cant find his name on the regular social networks, but that's because his name is somewhat common.  Or maybe he is hiding out to this day.

The bully, nothing happened to him.  In fact he is an attorney in the city he grew up in.  I was told by another friend what happened to him, and his trajectory through life was fairly straight and successful.  I am told he has a big mouth just like he had in high school which probably contributes to his success.  Also probably contributing to his success is his belief in himself and the thought that he is on the right side. He argues strongly because he strongly believes he is correct.  He has done no wrong in his mind.  And he is able to drive to work every day and argue his clients cases because he has the strength of personality to do so.  Probably if I met him toady he would barely remember, or would just say, "oh yeah, I remember that."

It makes me hope there will be justice sometime, maybe in the after life.
This is not how I want my kids to grow up, to bully.  They will know from the beginning that bullying is wrong.  

There are pictures of the bully, but I wont put them up.   Instead: to the victims, stay strong.

Another Doctor Story. A hatful of sky and a handful of...

 I think Doctor stories are becoming my biggest issue on my blog.  There must be three or 4 of them

up by now.

Dads, I know there are a lot of you with muscles of steel and iron will temperament.  A lot of you have seen action and seen your buddies get their legs blown off.  I remember reading Viet Nam war stories with the sentence, "I strapped my best buddies innards back inside of him waiting for the medic to come."  Or, "I looked at his leg, it was hanging together by one tendon. `You are going to be all right`, I lied to him."

That is not me.

Sure, call me a coward, call me a wuss, whatever,

But the point I am leading up to, is that, I hate trips to the doctor.  And now my wife says as a 40 per cent Dad, I have to take the kids to the doctor more.   I am the Dad, I have to live up to my position and moniker,  Dadnamit.

Taking a trip to the doctor gets me as nervous as having to take a bus trip (see this story).
I start getting nervous the night before.  I have a few trips to the doctor already under my belt, and I think I have it in control.  Uh..... maybe, maybe not. 

Yet, the further point of this story is is that I experience everything my daughter experiences.  Its not like I can close my eyes when she is getting punctured and is screaming and then say, "See, that wasn't so bad now was it?  Keep a stiff upper lip little girl".  So I have to watch and...  I don't like the pain.   Lets face it, many women can take the pain and the blood and punctures better than men.   For certain reasons they are used to having blood run out of their bodies and can take or watch pain better.   I assume. I  may be wrong or stereotyping.  I hope I am not Donald Trumping.

Fathers, prospective Stay at home Dads, I hate to say it, but some of your duties will call you to view the pain of your children at the hands of the doctors.  I have seen enough of them, my daughter crying when they punctured a ball in her ear to let the pus out.  I was at the major one when they took her out of Mothers stomach and she was hanging by a thread so to speak to her Mother, which was actually a strange one to see.  But today's view was having to watch them stick a Kleenex into each nostril all the way to the bridge of the nose.  She didn't scream, but I could see when they were putting it in it was terribly uncomfortable for her and she wanted to cry.  I have to admit I nearly broke down crying for her.  While looking at your buddies leg hanging by a tendon would be 10k times worse, having to watch your helpless, very sweet daughter who you love more than anything, nearly life itself, sitting there in discomfort with two Kleenex up each nostril...  just drives the adrenaline from my body, drains me out, saddens me, depresses me ad nauseum.

What is worse is she probably has some allergies, so I will have to be bringing her to the doctor from the Fall once a month for all these tests, and, ......... I wont get the medal of honor for doing so.  Just all in the days work of the stay at home Dad, bringing up daughter, but who cant stand to see his little girl in pain or discomfort.  Lord give me strength.

B.  A Hatful of Sky.  A Handful of...
So we are riding back on the tram back from the doctor.  And this is the second ear nose and throat doctor, and after a complete test for allergies earlier in the year, this second doctor tells us it is probably allergies, it is not due to sickness and your daughter is not sick. Come back in the Fall.  My daughter is suddenly very tired, has a headache and her stomach has been hurting all morning.  She is sleeping on my lap.  "Not due to sickness," were docs words. 

"Daddy,  I think I am going to throw up" were her sudden words while riding back on the streetcar.   Now for someone who rides the street cars every day, the disdain of having what you think is drunks puke on the floor is mighty.  So, these words caused just a bit of forward movement in the noggen muscle;  it got the wheels in the head turning VERY quickly.  I said, "We have one more stop, after this one, can you hold it?"  With stupid questions come answers.  Within two seconds, I knew the answer would be  a resounding NO.

So, I put my hand up to her mouth and caught about 50 per cent of the vomit.  The rest, as it turns out went on her jacket, pants and my pants.  But none, let me repeat that, NO VOMIT got on the floor of the street car.  So for the next ten seconds until we reached a stop, I was holding a handful of vomit.  Now believe it or not, this did not bother me at all.  And the interesting part of it was that she had eaten exactly nine strawberries, strawberries being in season at the time of this writing, for breakfast. So in fact it was strawberry vomit.  In those ten seconds, I thought about all the Strawberry Shortcake and Pinkalicious story books I read my girls and thought it a perfect oxymoron that here I am holding a handful of strawberry vomit.

Without any problems I hoisted all our stuff, my 22 kilo daughter and a handful of strawberry vomit all off the street car without spilling a drop.  She promptly threw up on the sidewalk outside the tram.  Cushlemacree.   I have to say the whole thing was pretty amazing.

As I am wiping her down on a bench in a park at the stop, I again remembered that wonderful Joan Rivers joke where Joan Rivers has absolutely no problem taking a piece of food from her daughters mouth that her daughter doesn't want to eat and eating it herself.  Parents do these things.  Like holding a handful of strawberry vomit until it can be displaced in a not so unreasonable location.  I was totally calm through the whole thing as I wiped the vomit off her pants and coat and my pants.

One for the grandchildren.  One for the Gipper.    

The Big Bully. Part 1

It is a big topic.  I intend to write a book about it, but I have to say, as a Father concerned and taking time to be involved with his kids upbringing, I think there is one thing I don't want my children to be.  A Bully.  If my children are being bullied, I am going to go to the proper authorities and make some noise.  If my child is bullying and I find out about it, and she initiated the bullying then there is going to be some serious talking to my child and probably some crying too and guilt on her part.

In fact both have already happened.  My girl was pushed into the boys bathroom and they barred the door on her once, and then she was tripped on the stairs.. and things kept happening.  My wife went to talk about it with the teacher and the teacher agreed there was a problem.  The bully`s parents came in and it appeared the bullier was having trouble at home because of a new baby brother.  She probably didn't think she was getting the love she used to get and was probably angry about it and took it out in part on my daughter who was actually her friend.  They never stopped being friends, but it was touch n go for a while.  We didn't want her to be friends with someone who was pushing her around and hurting her physically sometimes. 

The thing is, it seems, bullying and bullies existing in childhood is endemic,  even across all generations and countries.  Can we divide kids into three groups?  The bullies, the bullied, and the bystanders who usually don't do anything but are usually a friend of bully or bullied.

It makes me wonder, the sociologist that I am, whether there is some inherent purpose for bullying?  It  either plays a role of vying for head of the group or functions as socializing youngsters to act the way of the group.  For example the bullied can often be the weaker "weirdos" who profess an alternative way of thinking or acting than what is normal.  Then you get the bully to put them in their place and make them act "like the rest of us" and doesn't let the person be alternative because that would destroy or weaken the mores, the social fabric, of the group.  

Or else bullys form some pecking order of strength, like in a gang or a circle of people.  The best bullyers will of course be the leaders. The real tough guys.  In the past the biggest bullies in fact might have been rewarded with the best food or the best mating choices.  Maybe they still do.  

Bullying grows out of some social purpose for carrying forward group mores and group socialization.  Or else it establishes the leader and hierarchy of the group.  And humans are a very hierarchical animal.  Here is a good article, strangely from Forbes magazine, which puts the finger on the issue  

That is,  in the old days when it was Us vs Them.  Haven't we evolved to, "Us vs Ourselves"? 

 Haven't we evolved, outgrown this earlier "need" for both the method for achieving a hierarchy (through bullying) and the necessity to spurn those different from us?  In fact  these days, we need differences in communities and groups.  The more diversified a group you grow up in, the stronger the individuals we have for society and for even leading society.  Sadly, the bullying still exists and has not kept up with our evolutionary growth.  Or, just as sadly, bullying still is an effective method for both "putting people in their places" and establishing who carries more weight around in this street, school or community.  

In my next installment I will be remembering a bully from my time and see where he is today.  

Memory Dept 1: A Couple Crude Things I Might Teach My Children

I am not happy about this.   I don't want to be a crude Father and I am not the type of Father to let my children say bad words, use bad sign language (the middle finger), or bathroom humor in general.  My older daughter got a serious yelling at recently when she gave the middle finger to some older kids.  

That said, I have to admit that some crude and rude things will be learned and TAUGHT by myself and I wont be able to help it.  It will be.  After long thinking I have come to the conclusion that the following, when the time comes, will be taught to my kids even against my better judgment not to.

1. Raspberry

This first happened already several years ago.  My first daughter was only three years old and couldn't do much motor wise with her mouth or fingers.  So it was a big thrill to teach her how to blow a raspberry.  At the time vocal sentences had just begun, but she couldn't even say all the letters of the alphabet, like L and forget about saying things like "thing" and th words.  So to teach her a rather crude, but tongue twister was a victory.

It was a Pyrrhic victory as it turned out.  Something I shouldn't have taught her.  It turned against me.

She did the raspberry so much and to everyone, but when she did it to Grandma, "No I don't want that Grandma, pftthh" (or however you spell the sound of a raspberry)  I had to yell at her hard and tell her she DOES NOT give Grandma the raspberry, not to mention people in the stores or walking down the street in the town.  Well.... I had to teach her.  But I think she has forgotten it by now and I wont teach it again.


2. Arm Fart.
These are really for boys and I actually learned how to arm fart from my older brother who was much older and thus a seasoned veteran, a professional, at arm farts.

Boys love farts.  Well, lets face it, all little kids love farts.  It is a source of joy for all toddlers and young kids (kids is defined loosely here, say age 5 to 15, or 65).  Girls at some point become too polite to fart, maybe when they go off to college or start dating older boys.  Women do not know what a fart is and will send you to the doghouse if you suggest that you heard them fart. Its not possible.  But boys love a fart, kind of the way drunken teenagers love to burp on the street that stops traffic several blocks away.  Or a two am burp on a deserted street which shuts up all the barking dogs not to mention stops all the church clocks from chiming. 

The arm fart is so satisfying because you can sit there like a chicken without its head, running all over the place with your hand under your arm flapping your arm and producing joyful squeaks till the cows come home.  Seriously, once you start doing it, it is hard to stop.  My brother the professional would fart out whole nursery rhymes which I remember 40 years (and counting) later.

Though I haven't yet, I am sure the day is coming soon that i will teach my girls how to arm fart.  The youngest one couldn't get it yet, so she would probably cry if I tried to teach them today.  But one day soon.  Rome wasn't built in a day you know.  But I am actually still in debate in my head whether I should teach my polite girls the awful crudeness of arm farting.

3. Exploding small milk cartons.
(Wait a sec.  I am not referring to the really dumb prank which was big a couple years ago of smashing pretending to fall in a supermarket while carrying gallon jugs of milk and the jugs smash and milk goes all over.  I am totally against that, and those were incredibly stupid. )

I have to admit that the memory of exploding milk cartons (after the milk was all drunk, we couldnt waste the milk) in lunch time is one of my fondest memories of grade school.   I don't know if they still sell the small milk cartons in school these days.  I think they wised up and give the milk out in a glass.

We had those little half pint/ 100 ml  ptl milk cartons which when empty and smashed upon with your shoe had the capacity to sound like a hand grenade went off.  I remember the two lunch ladies gave you hell if they caught you.  Sometimes they even sent you to the principals office and a serious penalty was waiting for you.  For that reason you had to wait till both lunch monitor ladies were way over on the other side of the room with their backs turned on you or that you were behind a pillar when you did it.  Timing was of the essence.  You had to sit down quickly and kick the carton away and get your best poker face on before either of them turned in your direction.  Difficult when your ears were ringing from the explosion.   Ah but such good memories I have of personally exploding milk cartons not once, but several times in one rather mischievous year.

I really want to teach my girls how to explode a milk carton, no doubt about it, rude and crude or not.  It is a must.  That I have already decided.  I only wonder if they still make the cartons.  I haven't seen too many around these years.  I think the national union of lunch monitors petitioned against them and they have been fazed out.  Pity if so.

On the other hand, these days it could be dangerous as people might think it was a bomb going off and maybe there would be a school lock down, the police called, fire engines, basic turmoil, turbulence, cacophony and chaos.  I am not too sure I want to be called down to the head of the police and made to pay some huge fine for the national guard being called out.  I better think this one through with precision and risk vs reward.

My how times have changed.