Cheeky's Hideaway

The Obligatory Halloween Pictures: 2007 Edition

It was actually pretty easy to capture pictures of Cheeky in costume, since she's been demanding to wear it every day since Saturday.

She wanted to go as a black cat because "black is very slimming."

The ladies modeling for the camera.  What's hidden in this picture is the cookie monster band-aid, which will remain there until her high school graduation if necessary.

There was a "parade" in our neighborhood, which in Brooklyn roughly translates into "lots of people milling about in a confused and annoying manner."  Also, it was freezing, and no, I'm not wearing a jacket. 

Here's Cheeky and Oodgie on the promenade, with what appears to be a super-nova in the background.

Although Cheeky was certainly the cutest kid at the parade, I have to admit there were some pretty creative costumes.  The N train is notoriously slow and unreliable, and I wonder now if it's because the conductor is five.

Some people stop and stare when they see car wrecks.  Others, when they see midgets. (trust me, I know a guy)  For Cheeky, it's pumpkins.

There was a kids festival at an over-priced private school nearby.  This would be the "bag toss" or--the way Cheeky plays it--the "bag shove through the hole."  Teach 'em to cheat early, I say.

I think she had a fun day.  What do you think?

Happy Halloween!

Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?

This weekend, in a desperate attempt to find something--anything--to do that didn't involve squishing Playdough into our carpets, we visiting Packer, a local private school, for their annual "Pumpkin Patch."

Our main objective was to give Cheeky a chance to cram toothpicks into apples and squirt paint onto spinning paper, but the excursion had an unexpected effect on me.

As we walked through the wood-paneled halls of what looked like Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and stepped out into that rarest of Brooklyn spaces--a giant, leafy yard--I was caught up in images of Cheeky prancing down the halls, storing her lunch-pail in a little nook and learning from a caring teacher whose best friend isn't a talking monkey.

The snide egalitarian in me turned to Oodgie and sarcastically asked, "Doesn't pre-school cost $25,000 per year here?"

"No, pre-school is only $13,000 per year.  Kindergarten is $25,000."

To put things in perspective, the MBA program at Stanford is only $20,000 per year.

WTF??????????????????

There's absolutely nothing I value more than a quality education (not even nachos).  It's so blindingly obvious to me that having access to caring teachers in a safe, nurturing environment is the key to long-term success in life that I'm perpetually astounded and enraged that it's not an inalienable right of every child in America.  The sheer arrogance of schools espousing the values of personal growth and diversity but restricting admission to investment bankers and trust-fund babies turns me makes my head want to explode.

Metrodad wrote a thoughtful entry on this a few days ago (and curse you, Pierre, for yet again beating me to the punch on a topic I've been planning for a while) but he and I have somewhat different perspectives on this.  He went to a private school and is consciously electing to send his daughter to a public school, for a wealth of very good and noble reasons.  I'm a product of public schools, and although I came out freakin' great and have no real issue with sending Cheeky to one, I'm furious that in the eyes of the New York education establish I'm apparently an unwashed peasant, and I therefore have no choice.

I'm the first to admit that I'm a Marxist towards the 'elites' in our society, who (with a handful of notable exceptions) seem to be primarily skilled at being well-connected and making me want to punch them in the face.  And our neighborhood is full of them!  Everybody is sending their kids to one of the local private grade schools, which means all of Cheeky's "friends" will be heading off to places with the words "academy" and "institute" in the title while she's choosing between home ec and auto shop.  Meanwhile, we're hearing rumors that there may even be a waiting list for the local public school. 

We're looking into good Islamic schools just in case.

This whole thing has got me freaked out.  I feel like we have to plan years in advance, bringing cupcakes to kindergarten administrators and wearing a shtreimel to interviews to impress the faculty.  It's even raising the specter of moving to the suburbs just so we have a fighting chance of giving our child the education she deserves. 

I whole-heartedly agree with MD that this whole mess would be better if public school teachers were paid something remotely resembling their worth.  With all the money going into blowing other people up, I don't see that changing much in my lifetime, and certainly not before Cheeky's giving her valedictory speech at graduation.  I'll do whatever it takes within my admittedly limited power to give Cheeky the best possible educational opportunities, and to compensate for what she lacks at school with the some first class tutoring at home. 

It just infuriates me that it has to be this way. 

Anyone have any words of encouragement or, better yet, vouchers?

Nailed

"Ladies and gentlemen, if you look to your left you'll see the Statue of Liberty.  And if you look to the right you'll see the sinewy expanse of inflamed flesh that once held Cheeky's toenail."

Nothing skeeves me out more than medical shit.  Those hospital shows, where they show people organs up close and they're tying things together with calipers and piano wire make me want to spew.  I'd rather eat a moldy smegma sandwich than watch a plastic surgery show on Discovery Health.  And when the doctor positioned a mirror so I could watch Cheeky's birth?  Guess.

When Cheeky opened a door into her big toe the other day I didn't think much.  I just held her, comforted her, and empathized.  God knows I know the pain of a stubbed toe.  Shoot me in the arm and I'll wince and curse, but when that little toe hits the bed leg I carry on like I'd been dismembered.  The poor kid was a mess, and I wanted so bad to make the pain go away.

Then I looked down at her toenail.  Or rather the corpse of her toenail. 

It was jaggedly sticking up at a 45 degree angle from her toe, exposing the tender skin beneath and poised to snag on the nearest available object. 

She didn't want to look at it.  She didn't want US to look at it.  And you'd better believe she wanted us nowhere near it.

So I'm faced with a sobering reality.  To spare my daughter unending anguish, I'd need to face my one of my primal fears and get close to that gross, nasty remnant of a toe to remove the nail. 

It was staring at me, mocking my pain, beckoning me to step forward and rip it free. 

So I did what any man of my courage and confidence would do when called upon:

I covered it with a Sesame Street band-aid.

I mean, it's gonna grow back, right?  And if it's under there it can't snag on anything, right?  I'll check it again in a couple days and I'll bet it will all be fine!  You'd do the same in my shoes!

I'm such a freakin' coward.

Will You Sign My Facebook?

I'm a little surprised to find myself quietly obsessing over Facebook.

It's stupid, really.  It's just another social media site, like MySpace without the annoying bands or deceptive angles. 

But I find myself logging in a lot, sniffing around for people I know to connect to, and trimming the hedges of my profile so everyone can see what movies I like, what countries I've been to, and dozens of other incredibly inane facts about me.

I do internetty things for a living, so I'm exposed to a lot of these sites.  I rely on LinkedIn regularly to keep up with my professional contacts.  I'm hooked into a music-lovers' site which makes me feel utterly out of touch with what the kids are listening to.  I've got a Virb account gathering dust somewhere.  And Twitter...well, that strikes me as technology-enabled narcissism/voyeurism; why anyone would be interested in whether I'm buying cereal or washing my hands at any given second is beyond me.

They're all silly in some way.  I've got a Zombie Ninja on Facebook that infects and attacks other users (do not attack Kara...her Zombie is like freakin' Chuck Norris).  People have written on my virtual wall and bought me virtual beers.  Ironically, I'd normally mock people who engage in such activity.  Yet hear I am, joining interest groups about Pluto and grammatical accuracy for no other reason than I can.

So what's the big deal?  I don't know, but I'm having fun with it.  An old friend from college found me on it the other day, and she put me in touch with another one, who has unbeknownst to me married yet another one.  So that's cool.  And I can apparently "Super Poke" other people, which sounds mildly dangerous and probably illegal in some states.

Maybe it's just reached a point where there's enough people on Facebook that I'm likely to know at least some of them.  And it's less work that going through my Google Reader and visiting everyone's web pages (as you've all surely noticed by now) even if it's not nearly as emotionally rewarding.

At least until the next big thing comes around.

We're Baaaaaaaaaaack!

I just flew in from Seattle last night, and boy are my arms tired.

Not just my arms, actually...all of me.  Even those parts of me that serve no other biological purpose than as signals to your brain that it's time for a nap and a deep-tissue massage.

What a week.  Six days on the left coast, five nights of fitful sleep, four flights, three time-zones, two grandparents, and one toddler with a proclivity for unpredictable and precipitous swings from delightfully cute to emotionally fragile.  The parental equivalent of Hannibal's march over the Alps. 

It started out well enough.  Cheeky was woken at 5 AM as planned, shocking us with her calm demeanor on the way to the airport.  She gamely took her shoes off at security, and excitedly reminded everyone on board that we were "going super-fast!!!" at the top of her lungs.  Sure, she practiced her screaming at the Salt Lake City airport (and let everyone within a 30 foot radius know that "Mommy is pooping") but it was mostly cute and fun.

I've been working on a formula to accurately describe and measure the five days that followed.  It goes something like this:

# of time-zones traversed x (avg. daily hours of sleep – actual hours of sleep)
# of Swedish fish offered as bribes

X

good-naturedness of child - irritability of parents
(days remaining in trip)² x ounces of alcohol consumed by parents

I'm still working on it, of course.  It's a simplified formula which hasn't been tested for repeatability, nor does it factor in such highs as the Cheeky's first night in a "big girl bed" (which she would periodically leave the room to check on and show off to whomever followed her) or such lows as her fear and distrust of my Mom's Jack Russell terriers, both of which show affection the same way the infected did in 28 Days Later.  Stephen Hawking texted me back (we R bfz) and said he thought it was mathematically sound, so I'm going with it for now.

So anyway, you get the basic idea.  When Cheeky woke up at 4 AM the first day and announced, "I'm all done sleeping now!" we knew we were in for a long trip.  We shuttled between uncles, aunts, and grandparents for a few days, most of whom were so out of practice with toddlers that they spent most of their time staring from a distance with looks of cautious bemusement.  We took her out for some fun local activities, and unearthed some classics from my childhood found (fully-intact) in the basement.  We'd distract her as long as we could, knowing full well that the briefest lull could result in either hysteria or narcolepsy. 

Admittedly, we did most of this for ourselves.  We wanted everyone to enjoy Cheeky and celebrate the rare times when the family can be together.  And in that sense we largely succeeded.  The ultimate point of the trip was only partly to give Cheeky some quality WCG² time; it was also to take my dad--a huge Seahawks fan--to a game in Seattle.

A few briefs words about the game:  long-time readers know that I'm a hardcore Seahawks fan myself.  That's synonymous with disappointment.  So before anyone who watched the Sunday night game on ESPN makes any comments let me just point out that your slings and arrows cannot harm me.  I've got decades of callouses from watching Dave Krieg, Dennis Erickson, and the refs in Super Bowl XL; if that doesn't thicken your hide nothing will. 

But it was 68 degrees at kick-off on a beautiful Seattle day.  We had great seats at Quest Field with views of the skyline and Space Needle at sunset.  Retiring All-World fullback Mack Strong hoisted the '12th Man' flag before the game.  Geoff freakin' Tate sang the national anthem.  And despite Shaun Alexander's repeated attempts to impersonate Long John Silver (to quote Troy Aikman, "Looking for places to fall down") we all had a good time.

That didn't make the flight home any easier, of course.  But we're back in our own beds, getting back into the routine of bitching about less extraordinary events.  Thanks to my family for their hospitality and patience, and thanks to my wife for putting up with all of us. 

And thanks, Advil, for everything else.

Greetings from Spokanistan!

Holy crap.  We're flying to Spokane in two days.

Between work, parenting, and rehearsing for the Biggie Smalls tryouts, I'd sorta ignored the fact that we're traveling.  Across the country.  In TWO DAYS.

It hit me last night when I was fighting with my Mom over where we were going to sleep when we got there.  Options ranged from my old bedroom (dark, full of spiders, currently used for storage), my parents room (clean, but...it's my parents room...eeewwww), and a hotel (expensive and guaranteed to create a family rift the size of Snake River Canyon).  In other words, all solutions are bad.   And we have TWO DAYS to solve it.

As usual, I'm more stressed about the actual traveling than what happens when we get there.  When I'm by myself I can shrug off the indecencies of airline travel, but when a toddler and someone who is nicknamed "Oodgie" for a reason are with me the muscles on my back roll up like softballs. 

The only time Cheeky's really a pill is when she's tired (just like her old man), and we have to wake, dress, and load her into a taxi by 5:30 AM.  We're expecting turbulence.  And since there aren't direct flights we get to deal with bags, strollers, and friendly airline personnel at least twice each way.  We hope the excitement of flying will help Cheeky compensate for the time-difference, but she could just as well get there and crash harder than Lindsay Lohan on her third day out of rehab. 

Kill me now

Don't get me wrong...I'm excited we're going.  My parents don't get to see Cheeky nearly enough, and I know they'll LOVE playing with her.  It will be fun for us to spend time with my family, too, and we're puddle-jumping to Seattle on Saturday so the Seahawks can give my dad a belated Father's Day gift (they'd better, after this weekend's debacle). 

I just wish we had a transporter room.