Life Choices

Jamie Dimon wishes he had your job

Some mornings, like this morning, the torture of the getting dressed process is so bad that it makes me begin to question my choices in life. What if we hadn’t started a family? What if Andrea and I had stayed childless, climbed the corporate ladder, worked on our golf games and become socialites? Do senior executives have to deal with this Baloney?

I can just envision the CEO of the public company where I work in a scene like this…

Investor Relations (IR) guy: [Calmly and smoothly] Okay, Steve, do you remember what we talked about yesterday? You have an analyst call today. It’s time to get your suit on!

CEO: I don’t want to get dressed!

IR: But Steve, you know you have to get dressed to present to the analysts!

CEO: I don’t want to get dressed! I want to wear my jammies!

IR: [A little strained] You know you can’t wear your jammies to the analyst call. You have to wear your suit. Look at this beautiful outfit I picked up for you! It’s Brooks Brothers.

CEO: I don’t like it! I don’t want to wear it.

IR: And I picked out your favorite tie. You know, the Hermes with the stagecoaches on it?

CEO: I don’t like that tie! I won’t wear it!

IR: [Frustrated] What do you mean you don’t like it? It was your favorite last week!

By now, the CEO is lying on his side, kicking his feet back and forth in a “running man” motion.

CEO: I’m not getting dressed! I WANNA WEAR MY JAMMIES!

IR: That’s it, I’m getting your VP of HR.

The HR guy comes barreling into the room.

HR: WHADAYA MEAN, you won’t put on your suit! We’ve talked about this a million times, mister. If you don’t put on that suit and tie this instant, I’m not letting you fly the corporate jet to Vail this weekend! And you’re not getting a sticker on your sticker chart. I mean it this time!

A heated standoff ensues for several minutes. Eventually the CEO relents and puts on his suit and tie in a huff.

IR: Now was that so bad? Ok, time to comb your hair.

CEO: I DON’T WANNA COMB MY HAIR!

***

The funny thing is, if you knew our CEO, the above scenario doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

We all make choices in life, but I wonder how many of us are fully informed about the consequences. My friends who went to law school dreamed about courtroom drama scenes. What their roles mostly entail today, unfortunately, is 80-hour weeks of relentless high-stress wordsmithing drudgery. Parents start families for the beautiful babies and the rosy thoughts of high-school graduations and weddings someday. What they get is the relentless strain of just trying to get through the basic acts in life – getting dressed, feeding, getting in the car, bathing, going to bed, and then waking up to start it all over again the next day.

In the end, it’s foolish to question life’s choices. I’m sure there are aspects of my CEO’s life that are unpleasant, stressful, not living up to his expectations. I’ll bet that private jet to Vail isn’t so great. The leather seats probably get too hot and the Perrier doesn’t stay fizzy enough. I’m sure he’d do almost anything to experience the joys, just once, of getting two kids dressed and out the door for school. It beats an analyst call any day.

I'll Be Back

This is pretty much my kids
around electronics

Quite a while back, I wrote about how electronics were invading our family’s lives. I called that post “The Rise of the Machines.”

Little did I know at the time that back in April was just the dawn of the rise of the machines. That time was Terminator 1 – the kids and their Leap Pads were a low budget and bad acting affair. Their Arnold Schwarzenegger Cyborg desire to play Wii was menacing and tireless to be sure but nothing that couldn’t be handled by Linda Hamilton and me, and a huge industrial hydraulic press.

Unfortunately, our small victory over the electronics was short lived. The machines learned and rose and multiplied. Today the kids’ desire to be constantly inundated by electronics is Terminator 4’s Skynet – all knowing, all powerful. That one robot skeleton that attacked in the first installment has been replaced by armies of killer androids. They come in unending waves and attack from all sides. “Can I play Ipad?” says one from his evil skeletal maw, “What about Wii?” “Can I play on your phone in the car?” “Can I watch a show?”

There’s a scene in the HBO movie Stalin where it’s the middle of World War II and Josef Stalin is being shown a military map of the battles by his head general. Things are not going well, and the general tells Stalin that the Red Army is losing and retreating “here, here and here.” Stalin flies into a rage and starts screaming at the quaking general (who, since Stalin had executed all of his predecessors, had little grounds for debate) “I vill tell you vat ve vill do!” he screams, slamming the map at each location “ve vill attack zem HERE AND HERE AND HERE!!!”

That’s my kids: ve vill attack zem HERE AND HERE AND HERE!

Ve vill attack zem before they are awake, ve vill attack zem in their bed: “Can we play Scooby Doo on the Wii?”

Ve vill attack zem at Breakfast: “Can we watch a show?”

Ve Vill attack zem in ze car: “Can we play on your phones on the way to school?”

Ve Vill attack zem after school: “Can we play on our Leap Pads?”

Ve Vill attack zem before dinner: “Can we play on your computer?”

Ve Vill attack zem after dinner: “Can we play on Mommy’s Ipad?”

Andrea and I, the defenders, (the Nazis? God, this metaphor has gone astray!) are losing this war of attrition. Our meager forces are being ground to dust. Morale is low. We are suffering from trench foot, scarlet fever and dysentery. There are food and ammunition shortages. And I have to tell you, desertions are common. “Can’t you kids just go play with toys?” We beg, “Can’t you behave like normal children and play outside?”

But no. They are not normal children. They are tireless, relentless, future-cyborg-hopelessly-muddled-metaphor-with-communist-Russia-Red-Army electronics consuming armies.

Which leaves humanity with only one hope. We must send a freedom fighter back in time to destroy the early electronics and impregnate Sarah Connor. Even then, I think we are in for endless high-budget sequels. I can tell - every time I turn off the Wii I hear a faint phrase in a distinctly Austrian accent:

I’ll Be Back.

More Hints on Holiday Cards

Now that we’ve gotten hints on how to take the perfectholiday picture from Kate, I’d like to offer a few of my own perspectives. Now that you have your pictures, I’d like to talk a little about Christmas card layout.

It seems whenever I open a Christmas card these days, I have the same heartfelt reaction: “Who are these children?” There, smiling up at me are one to three darling, well appointed, beautiful children whom I have never met in my life.

See here’s the thing. If we went to high school together, or college together, or you are childhood friends with my wife, or our mothers play bridge together, there is a real possibility I have never laid eyes on your children in real life. The last time I may have seen their likeness, if ever, was on last year’s Christmas card. You see your kids every day, but I don’t, and trust me they’ve changed a lot since last year.

So please, please, put your picture on the card somewhere. Your picture. The Adults. It doesn’t have to be the big picture. You can be off to the side. Or better yet, make the adults the big picture in the middle and put the kids small on the back. Put your names in big letters with arrows drawn to the person named. This would be a huge help with the kids (which one is Breanne again? Are they in order by age or the order they are standing in this picture?). I’m telling you, that would really make my holidays happy.

Here’s another hint: Use your names. Your full names. Half the time I struggle to remember who “Jeff, Gina, Haley and Chloe” are. Sometimes the last name isn’t on the card. Sometimes only the last name is on the card (Merry Christmas from The Rowlands!). Come on, people! Sometimes the last name replaces a maiden name that I once knew (how do we feel about cards saying “Seasons Greetings from the Martins nee Smith?”). The point is, full first and last names are the way to go.

And sometimes, and this is happening more and more as I age and the kids destroy my memory, I do know your first and last name but man, a visual reminder would sure help. So, once again, please put a picture of the adults on the card. Any other memory triggering clues will help. If you could take your picture in the location where we met, that would be great. Ages would help a lot, too.

To summarize, here’s an example of great Holiday Card:

Happy Holidays from the Rowlands

Jeff Rowland (38)

Gina Rowland nee Smith (36)

Haley (7)

Chloe (4)

 

(Plus a nice note) Hey Ol’ Buddy! Been missing you since our moms quit playing bridge together after you moved from Tulsa!

 

 

 

Here’s something I almost forgot, and this harkens back to my post on dogs. Some people insist on putting their dogs on their holiday cards. Please, stop the madness. Combined with my points above, I have literally gotten Christmas cards with a picture of a child and a dog, and I can’t tell whose name is whose (Merry Christmas from Jack and Hunter!). So once again, if you absolutely insist on putting a dog’s picture on your card… I can’t even complete the sentence. Dear God, make it stop!

Since I’m on the subject, think you could do the same with your Facebook avatar? Yes, we are “friends” but again a little visual reminder would help me out a lot. Please make it a picture of you, from the relatively recent past. I can’t always remember who you are from the picture of your kids, or a Barrack Obama logo. And determining your identity from your baby pic is no easier than from a picture of your baby. If you absolutely must include your child or significant other in that less-than-one-square-inch of real estate, well, I suppose I can live with that.

It’s just that easy! These simple steps can greatly improve your Holiday Card/Facebook profile. Your mailing list will thank me.

Yours truly,

Robert (your buddy from KiddleDad blog and/or we went to school together)

The Perfect Family Holiday Shot

 

Follow these simple steps and you can create
gorgeous holiday card pictures like this one!

As the holidays approach, we thought our readers could use some helpful hints to help make things more manageable. Today's blog is a guest post from Kate Rose, who brings us her expertise in today's post - The Perfect Family Holiday Shot:

What annual occurrence causes my pulse to race, my palms to sweat, and my lungs to constrict with each breath?  April 15^th, you ask?  Taking my kids for their flu shot? A visit from the in-laws?  No. None of these occurrences cause the fear, the frustration, the anticipation, and (hopefully) the eventual exhilaration of, wait for it…capturing the Perfect Family Holiday Shot.  That’s right, that picture which will go on our annual Holiday Card. That picture which will hang on the doors of friends and family for an entire holiday season.  That picture, which defines our family unit as well as my worth as a mother.  That picture which conveys all that we are pretending our past year together as a family unit to be (educational trips to the Botanical Gardens, flawless piano recitals, siblings embracing while singing at church).  In reality, though, what we want our family definition to be and what our family definition actually is (peanut butter causing an eyelid to stick shut, tantrums at the mommy-and-me music, goldfish-crusted car seats), are usually two very different things.

There are many steps that go into creating the Perfect Family Holiday card, from cropping, printing, mail merging, and stamping, to shoving those things into the big blue mailbox 3 days before Christmas.  While those are all important and tedious steps, today I am here to tell you about the most important, agonizing, heart-wrenching, wine-inducing step of them all.  We will refer to this step as “OBTAINING THE PERFECT FAMILY HOLIDAY SHOT” 

There are two schools of thought regarding the Perfect Family Holiday Shot, and I am going to briefly address both, and provide some valuable tips to help ensure your card will be the envy of all your family, friends, and of course, the all important frenemies. 

The first option (and one which my family has subscribed to for the past 5 years after 3 years of trying option 2) is:

OPTION 1: Starting January 1^st, take a camera everywhere, and torture your spouse and children by snapping shots ALL.THE.TIME. 

1.)    This option does require the entire family to dress nicely every day.  Or at least be showered.  Or maybe just have combed hair. 

2.)    You never know the time and place that the magic moment will occur…are you all together at the dentist, Dunkin Donuts, the grocery store?  Don’t hold back!  Snap, snap, snap and quite possibly you will end up with the perfect family shot (no one will ever know you were all at the DMV!)

3.)    (In direct opposition to number 2) Consider your background.  Hey, everyone looks happy at the beach!  Who doesn’t love walking through the woods! Even the most terrible-two-toddler can look cute making snow angels! 

4.)    Know your family’s limits.  If your 3 year old (for some God-forsaken reason) cannot understand how to ‘peak out’ from behind a tree, then he just can’t understand how to ‘peak out’ from a tree.  Leave it.  Don’t yell.  Don’t compare him to his siblings at that age.   Don’t take 80 shots.  Just leave it. 

5.)    Bribe, bribe, bribe!  (“I’ll give you an M&M if you’ll peek out from behind that tree!”) 

 

On to Option 2.  I’m going to be honest here…Option 2 is not ideal…I mean, go for it if you think your family has the wherewithal…I am going to give some tips, but really, I mean, really think about this before you commit…

 

OPTION 2:  Take your family to a photo shoot

1.)     Probably only have one kid (or less) if you are considering this option.

2.)     No drinks.  Nobody!  Or anybody.  Nobody drink anything for at least 24 hours before the appointment.  Parents—this is so there won’t be any puffy eyes or hang-over signs. You CANNOT be the limiting factor in these pictures.  Kids—nothing worse than breaking the photographer’s rhythm because Jonny “has to go potty”, or worse… “just did”. 

3.)    Identify the weakest link.  Does mom have a tendency to do “pouty lips” in pictures?  Does Bobby close his eyes when he smiles?  Does Mary scream when separated from her “My Little Pony” doll?  Whoever the weakest link might be…yell, threaten, and bribe.  Fix it, people. 

4.)    The photographer is joking when he asks if the family brought a change of clothes.  NO!  Are you kidding me?  You think anyone can drag three kids here in their holiday finery, snap a few shots, and then change their clothes? 

5.)    These professional places take 300 digital shots for a reason.  All you need is ONE.  Identify it.  Pay for it.  Mail it out. 

 

In summary, this post is titled “The Perfect Family Holiday Shot” for a reason.  Regardless of whether you decide on Option 1 or Option 2, I really wanted to call this post “The Perfect Shot”.  Because that’s what all parents will need after attempting to get the beloved holiday picture.

Dogs

"Want me to, hmmm, deficate on your rug?"

Every so often, Andrea says that she might like to get a puppy. All I can think is, “are you nuts?” You don’t have challenges enough already that you want an untrained juvenile animal running around your house? You want stains and surprises everywhere? You want holes chewed in your carpet? You want dog hair on all of your clothes? Not to mention the furniture - Cody wetting himself on the dining room chair, as he sometimes does, would be like an expert refurbishment compared to what a dog would do to it.

Never mind that Andrea is – ahem – a clean individual. The kids are – ahem – not. And dogs are – ahem, ahem – really not. Our children making messes creates enough friction. At least they are flesh and blood offspring and some evolutionary emotional restraint kicks in before things get too severe. I’m not sure what would save poor Fido.

I’ll be honest and say that I simply do not understand the desire to get a pet. I have nothing against them, really, but it is simply not a compulsion that I feel. I would no sooner snuggle and hug and kiss and roll around on the floor with a dog than I would a sheep at the petting zoo. As far as I can tell, pets are almost as much work as children without the (for me) emotional reward.

(In case you can’t tell, I’ve softened my statements in the paragraph above. This is because you do not want to get on the wrong side of dog people, who can turn violently insane at rhetoric like that above. So therefore, dog people, I want to take a moment and be perfectly clear: It’s not you, it’s me. It is totally normal and rational to want another species in your house defecating on the floor and destroying your possessions. I obviously have a deep character flaw.)

Here’s our one family experience with pets: One summer, at the church picnic, the kids won two goldfish as prizes from one of the games. My reaction was “oh man, God hates us,” which didn’t take too long to prove true. We found the burden of feeding a goldfish daily and washing the bowl weekly to be too much to bear. Goldfish are normally a short-lived species. This was true for us for one of them, who met his demise within three weeks. For the other, we apparently got the Methuselah of goldfish. 18 months after that church picnic, we were still faithfully scrubbing his bowl each Sunday and counting down the days to his passing.

As the pets get bigger than fish, the commitment only increases. The tank you have to clean gets larger. The weekly scrubbing gets harder. I know people who literally have to schedule vacations around their pets. I just don’t have the time or patience for that nonsense.

Therefore, we will never, ever, ever, ever, ever have another pet in our household so long as I have a say. Which means that, someday, we will have another pet.  Because I don’t really have a say. The world, it turns out, does not function on rationality. Otherwise, Gucci and Hummer and the band One Direction would be out of business. And the species would probably be extinct. Because, let’s face it, having children is about as rational as having a dog. Children don’t tend the farm any more. We don’t need them to fend off saber-tooth tigers. But some of us, the crazy ones, manage to convince ourselves we do need them to help clean the dog doo off the carpet.

How does a Wookie brush his teeth?

All parents know that Chewbacca works hard
to keep his pearly whites battle-ready!

One benefit when Cody turned four was that he finally outgrew his morbid terror of brushing his teeth. Tooth brushing, which should be a quick and easy – even pleasant – undertaking, was a real challenge with Cody. Cody would fight and squirm and complain that I was hurting him while I brushed his teeth. I’ve always had very good dental hygiene and take it seriously, so when it’s my turn to aid with brushing I try to do a thorough job. Cody hates the thorough job.

To gain compliance, I had several tactics at my disposal. My native tendency – grabbing him roughly and screaming at him to brush – had obvious drawbacks. So instead, I had to get creative. Cody, as he’s aged, has evolved in his likes and dislikes, and so therefore my teeth brushing methods have evolved with him. Begging and pleading isn’t sufficient for the job, so I, as a grown man, became a twice daily circus act in the kids’ bathroom.

It all started with “Robot Toothbrush,” which goes something like this: Daddy stands and moves very stiffly and mechanically and repeatedly says (in his most metallic voice) “Robot Toothbrush. Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner.” The ner-ner-ners should coordinate with the up-and-down or side-to-side motion of the toothbrush in the mouth. Robot Toothbrush lasted for the better part of the two’s with decent success – so much so that Andrea started using it on her turns as well. As a side note, it’s one of life’s great joys to watch Andrea, whom I consider one of the most buttoned-up people I know, saying “Robot Toothbrush. Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner.”

Times pass, and the fascination with robots has faded (unless, of course, the robots turn into cars or shoot people, which makes them super cool). So we lapsed back into begging and pleading mode. That is, until our latest Star Wars craze and the advent of “Wookie Toothbrush.” Wookie Toothbrush means Cody and Daddy open our mouths as wide as possible to allow guttural Rrrrrowwwwaggghh sounds to come out… and the toothbrush to go in. The toothpaste suds foaming at the mouth helps with the analogy. Pretending to be a Wookie buys you a solid 15-30 seconds of quality tooth brushing.

In between Robot Toothbrush and Wookie Toothbrush, for a time I was grasping with straws. For a while the fascination was with super heroes, so we tried various forms of “Super Hero Toothbrush,” such as “C’mon Cody, want to brush your teeth like… er, um… Spider Man?!?!?” The problem is, it turns out that Spider Man brushes his teeth more or less like everyone else, so Cody was never really convinced. (This week’s challenge is for you to come up with Spider Man inspired tooth brushing method).

What finally solved the issue, once and for all as far as I can tell, is Cody turning four and deciding he can brush teeth all by himself. Cody can now lightly glaze the toothbrush over a subset of his teeth for 3-5 seconds and consider it done. It ain’t thorough. It ain’t hygiene. But at least we are back to raising a human boy and not a Wookie or Robot.

Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner!

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