I have started my first official year in a MSW program this week. I have been pissed off about my profs emailing reading assignments that are due at my first class, completely inappropriate, the class starts on a certain day, that's when the work should start, it's like having to check your blackberry every few hours on your vacation, technology has eradicated all boundaries, when you are affiliated with an institution it's like no time is solely yours anymore.

Nagged

My kids are out of summer camp and it has taken three days and bout of asthma reinforced by hysteria to derail the best laid schedule of Daddy Camp!

I have to catch up on some chores, but some how telling my 9 yr old to read to pass the time is like telling him to pull his nails out with pair of pliers. "Why isn't anyone home when we call for a playdate," and after we leave a message, every time the phone rings, "Who's that, who's that?!?"

How old are kids when they become in charge of their own social calendar?

I guess the plus of not being nagged for things to do by your kids is negated by the fact that parents are usually no longer considered when planning their tweenaged agendas.

Kid Sun Bake Soccer Cup, last team not suffering heat stroke wins!

I am torn, it is 100 degrees out and will be the same tomorrow, and my 9 year-old son has a soccer tournament this weekend, where they play two games a day. My wife is freaked out because some cadet at West Point died in the heat yesterday, and the tournament in Upstate NY. We decided to not have him play. I called out doctor for his opinion, he got back to us after we made up our minds and my wife and kids went to the shore for the next day and a half.

The doctor said it is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to make sure the kids stay very hydrated, get frequent breaks and stop playing as soon as they get any symptoms like dizziness or nausea.

My gut feels like things would have been okay, and I do not want to be the kind of parent that gives into fear because something bad happened somewhere once in the world in a similar situation, but when I called the tournament and they said there is no set temperature where they would cancel the games, I was like fuck it, they seem more concerned about not cancelling games and having to refund teams than playing it safe, so hopefully the second day of the tournament will be under 100 degrees.

Fever

My 6 year-old son has had a fever since Monday, he is missing the kindergarden presentation, and the kids have off from school next week, and I have my final term paper due on my birthday in less than weeks, but have not had any time to work on it this week because I have continuously believed that my son's fever would be gone tomorrow and hence spent my time tending to things around the house because once I start on writing the paper I won't have much free time, three days in a row and they are home next week, wait, I did just sign them up for spring break soccer camp, thank god, that at least gives me about three hours a day, well closer to two and a half because we are always late and I have to leave our house about 15 minutes before the camp ends, so yeah we will have to go to the doctor tomorrow, hopefully this will clear up soon we have a really busy weekend like literally seven events/activities planned, and then Bloomfest on Sunday, what a drag it will be if he stays sick ...

Less Distractions On Campus

So after missing three weeks of class I has a midterm last week. I am not going to try to make up all of the reading I missed, but I have a paper and some blog entries due that I missed, plus keeping up with the current reading and and starting to research my major term paper.

Studying at home is often hard, we have had all of these house issues like possible two dead animals under our back deck that stink to high hell once the temperature sniffs 50 degrees, our heater has cut off twice and we have had to have someone come and service it to get it running again, and we had people come by to give estimates for trimming trees on our property, the guys we picked were suppose to call to give a heads up as to when they were free to come.

Well as I sit trying to figure out what the hell I am going to write my make-up paper on, and where am I going to find the research sources online, and being mad at myself for not getting any of it done earlier in the week, particularly because my kids have a half day to day and a play date at our house, so I will have less opportunity to work on the paper today than any other day this week, the tree trimmers show up. So there a bunch of Latin dudes high up in trees over my house with chainsaws and a giant truck sized wood chipper buzzing away as I type, not exactly an environment conducive to higher level conceptualizing. Also two worries have begun to creep in, one, this service was so much cheaper than the others, are they insured if one of these giant branches falls on my roof? Secondly, are we removing enough or too many branches? Too many may be safer and have less leaves to deal with in the fall, but it may look bad, and make the tree lean and force the roots to start coming up. Too few and we are still in danger of having a large branch fall on our house during a storm.

Oh and there are the squirrels who live in the tree, I am a little worried about their stress level.

Holiday Issues

Our hamster died at one year and 11 months, just shy of the normal hamster life span, which was good considering she had cancer since being one month old. She had been slowing down for a month and two weeks ago it did not look like she was going to make it through Xmas. She bounced back the past week to the point we thought that she had gotten better, but it was just that last burst of energy that we often get right before giving birth or dying.

With the giant snow storms that hit our area I had lots of snow to shovel, then the next day I built my kids an igloo with entailed a bunch more shoveling, then since I did not want to go snowboarding I agreed to my wife's B plan of tubing, the next day we spent the whole day shopping so tons of walking and carrying big boxes, this all lead to my back going out at a restaurant. We got home to see our hamster dead which lead to the kids climbing all over us because they were upset, which lead to them sleeping in our bed, neither or which was good for my back.

We also went out to lunch with my parents who we have not seen in more than six months due to a some major family issues, though everything went fine the lead up did add stress to the week.

So like many breaks this one ends with me accomplishing less than half of things I thought I would at its onset.

Me, Petty, No?

I had two conversations over new year's eve where separate friends debated little factoids I brought up as being incorrect. Now neither one is of any ground shaking importance, one is about the history of the town we all live in, the other about a soccer tactic used in a recent match. As a residue of growing up rather shy I usually don't make statements that I am not sure of outside of speaking with my immediate family, therefore I am usually sure of my statements.

So I politely let my doubters know that I stood by my statements and that I could back them up with documentation, which still didn't convince them. So big deal right, well my issue is not with them it is with my desire to send them web links to prove that I was not speaking out of my ass. As I write this I realize my problem is that I hate when people go on about shit they know nothing about, or stand strong on points where they can easily be proved wrong, so for someone to think that about me places me in a zone of discomfort. This has to do with me not allowing myself the freedom to be wrong. I understand that I am frequently wrong across many subjects, but I apparently can not deal with others thinking I am wrong when I am not.

So my desire to email friends links proving that I was not talking out of my ass is petty, no?

There's No Crying in Therapy!

I am currently in my third stint of going to therapy, since I was about 25 I have done about four years of therapy, which is a pretty lame percentage of time for someone who has a psych degree and is working to become a therapist, but anyway I cried for only the second time during a session in all those years of sessions, the strange thing is that it was after remembering that I had to quit my high school Freshman basketball team because my parents couldn't pick me up after practice and they did not bother and try to set up any alternate means for me to get home. My therapist thought that since it made me cry and I usually don't cry that it was a breakthrough, but I wonder if realizing that your parents did even a poorer job than you already thought they did really a breakthrough? Maybe I guess?

Which leads one to wonder, "How much fodder for the therapist's couch am I giving my boys on a daily basis?"

SCHOOL PICTURES, THE REMIX

My kids school pictures did not come out too great. I felt like, life is not perfect and this is a representation of it, my 8 year-old is entering that awkward stage and sometimes does not look like the perfect little boy he use to, and he is growing his hair long again and it is now in an in-between stage, that's life. My little guy had a weird smile in his picture.

I had talked to the boys about their pictures how they were not perfect, but that it did not matter, and I pointed out some of the positive things about the pictures. They eventually came around and no longer

My wife was really unhappy with the pictures, so when we received an email about retakes she wanted to have them redone. I did not really care about it, but worried that it would send a mixed message to the kids because I had recently spent time getting them to be okay with the imperfect pictures.

Fast forward to this morning, picture retake day, basically the boys were neurotic basket cases worrying about their smiles for their pictures, and spent all morning trying on various smile faces, sometimes laughing at themselves and each other, sometime confused as to why this particular smile made them look more insane than happy (I never couched it this way though, I would say, that's not the best I've seen you make, less/more teeth depending on the smile).

So we wind up being late for school, I get home turn on the computer to blog this entry, then I get a phone call from school, my oldest son forgot to put the envelope with the money for the retake in his back pack. I find the envelope and adding to the confusion realized that my kindergartner had the 3rd grader's envelope, which was my fault. So I had to drive back to the school and straighten this all out. Which was actually pretty easy to do, just annoying.

More Man Than You & Other Tales of Secondary Sexual Characteristics

My son who is in third grade is kind of hairy, which makes sense because I am very hairy. The other day a male classmate of his saw his arm hair and said, "Eeeuw, you are pretty hairy!" My son looked that the boy, who he said actually had a decent amount of body hair himself, and said, "It just means that I am more of a man than you are," and the kid dejectedly let out a sorrowful, "Oh," and slunk off.

I have been trying to teach my son the art of the witty comeback as a non violent defense mechanism, and I am glad he is developing that ability. It is cute to see the difference between him and my 5 year-old who is afraid of getting in trouble for telling mean kids to "shut up," but thinks an okay response to a verbal insult is to "punch him in the penis!"

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I am currently reading about adolescent development and writing a paper on it in which I had to interview a teenager. One point is that as a girl's body mass increases during puberty and they often develop a negative body image because of it (Steinberg & Morris, 2001). Reasons for this are developing earlier than their peers and the media portrayal of a thinner pre-pubescent body type as beginning the standard for beauty.

I am sure this is not new news to anyone reading this, but I find it sickening that girls in our society are lead to believe that there pre-pubescent bodies which are really their pre-sexual bodies are more attractive, beautiful or sexually appealing than their post-pubescent bodies, which by definition should be more attractive because they are now physically ready for intercourse (not mentally ready in our society of course) and childbearing. It is totally ill, a completely unhealthy view that our society perpetuates.

It seems that tween girls long to grow up to be "mature" teenagers and once they do some long to not have physically mature bodies. It is like society is set up to make us not be satisfied with who we naturally are.

Slow Down and Let Them Learn

I need to slow down and leave enough time to let the kids make mistakes. Just as people I know let there kids act up and then cave into them because they, "Don't get to see them much, so they don't want their time together to be spent in conflict, with the kids unhappy and crying," which I see as either a lack of will on the parents part, laziness on the the parents part, or at least the wrong way with dealing with the time crunch that all seem to unnecessarily have in our post-modern lives. Me not making my kids learn how to properly tie their shoes or having them use cups with lids because I don't have time to clean up spills in the morning or afternoon or at dinner, expresses more about me than there ability to complete those tasks.

Both of my children are perfectionists and part of that may be genetic, but I know my wife has a tendency to couch things about school in a way that would lead to kids not feeling comfortable with possibility of failing, but I have to recognize that some of my actions in trying to make life run smoothly also does not allow them to go through the process of attempting / failing / learning / and eventual mastery of a task, which teaches them it's better not to try, or let Dad to it for me because I must not be able to do it.

Nothing builds confidence like overcoming an obstacle or mastering a task.

Starting over kind of sucks

I am trying to get my reading completed for my first week of school, and I am just so damn slow, it's really frustrating! I am barely finished with my first chapter and I have another one and like five articles to read that I have to download off of the University website, but I have to get a NetID account which I have not done yet. My wife was like, that sounds better than having to buy an old Kinko's packet of copied text, and responded no way, I'd rather have everything in front of me so I can highlight it and read it anywhere rather than being tied to the computer.

Anyway I am afraid to blow through the reading like I would a novel of fiction because I really want to retain everything, but at this rate I will be weeks behind if I don't pick up the pace.

I just stepped outside and smoked a cigarillo while shooting some baskets on my kids mini hoop, which actually worked to chill me out, but not sure if that will help my reading tempo and comprehension.

Hits From the Palm: 2 year old notes about dying

this passage has been sitting around in my palm pilot since at least 2008:

Before I had kids the idea of dying was palatable to me, you get old, you ware down, you kind of get tired of things in general, and then you're ready to go.

Now I find the idea that death is an inseparable part of life horrific, I guess I didn't love myself, or life in general nearly as much as l love my kids and wife because the idea of my children having to sit through my funeral is the most inconceivable heartbreaking things i can think of until i think about the fact that my boys will one day die as well.

I have come to understand the profoundly deep love that parents can have for their children, and there was no way to understand prior to having children, which isn't a put down to people without children, or a condemnation of their ability to love, somethings have to be experienced to be understood. It's like when you see a Hollywood rendition of an alternative lifestyle that you are familiar with; punk, stoner, club kid, whatever, and you realize that the writer has no first hand knowledge of their subject matter, "No self respecting punk would dress like that," or "Nobody acts like that when they are high."

Having a second child really taught me how one's capacity to love can grow exponentially.
I have always intellectually thought that one can have almost infinite love to give, but pre parenthood it was mostly tied to some sort of poly-amorous concept.

So basically I don't want to die, ground breaking I know.

If they could always stay little

The end of the school year is fast approaching and with it my pre-schooler's graduation. I am experiencing very different emotions with his graduation than I did for his older brother's. The first time around I was excited for my little guy to be growing up and heading off the primary school, now I am afraid that I will be balling at the graduation. It reason must be that this is my youngest and we do not plan on having anymore children, so will always be our baby, and if he is growing up then I surely must be growing old.
Also he is so damn cute and one day he will not be, in the same way at least. Public grammar school also means a less supportive environment for him, homework, dealing with bad kids, over worked teachers, and having to actually make it to school on time!

School Board

My 2nd grader goes to a school that has an international studies theme. The aforementioned cuts have resulted in his school loosing it's foreign language program, which only consisted of Spanish. I have heard that only one grammar school in the district, the largest, will keep it's foreign program. Now this does make some sense seeing how the highest number of students will have access to the program at this school. However, with our school's theme being international studies would not it make sense for us to have a foreign language program? My boys are worlds ahead of where I was at their age with Spanish, having started with some instruction in preschool and having it twice a week in grammar school. Back in my day we were not able to study foreign languages until high school which has left me knowing a bit of French and Spanish vocabulary but not being anywhere near fluent in either language. I mean if they had to cut science programs from all but one school wouldn't it make sense for that one school to be the Math & Sciences magnet school? It sucks too because though my son stresses out about it, he is doing really well in Spanish and is at the point where he can go up in front of the class and recite a couple of paragraphs of information in Spanish without reading off of note cards. That will be lost if he does not have Spanish at school for the next three to six years. Also he has interest in learning other languages, if he is able to continue Spanish for the next three years he can gain a pretty good grasp of the language and move onto learning another in middle school. It looks like another case where if parents can afford it they will have to dip into their own pockets and pay for private instruction if they really want their child to gain knowledge outside of the three R's, or learn a sport, or get daily exercise, or participate in the arts .... double merde!!

HONORS?

I am currently filling out a graduate school application for a MSW, and there is a field that asks for honors. The first thing that came to mind was Dean's List, maybe but probably not those lame Key Club honors, but when I saw what they listed as the examples: ABRCMS, DAAD, FAMU, Fulbright, IRT Consortium; I realised that they might not view my lame Dean's List achievements as honors.
Any advice from ya'll out there on the "interwebs"?

I am definitely fearing that to get accepted to a competitive program I will need to put in a few years of dues working at DYFS to up my Social Work street cred.

Honestly if I could get a legit MSW from Git A Degree Online In Yr Boxers University, (GADIYB U for short) I would, but my research into those Online schools came up with them lacking, and a bunch of annoying sales-ish calls from "counselors" who seemed more like once promoted telemarketeers.

The Problem With Facebook

I find that facebook makes me feel more lonely than connected, at best it gets me to miss old friends that I rarely think of otherwise.

How many friends from your past do you think about on a regular basis without being prompted by a networking website or old pictures?

My aunt and my cousin's tween daughter recently friended me on facebook, now it's like my Mom is watching me online, not that I post much on that site, but now I will have to monitor what I do if I do.

There is also a group from my High School called Dearly Departed that notifies me when someone dies from my school, I thought it would be just from my class, but it's like all years, so at least every week I get a message about someone who died, some of them surprisingly young, not the fun I'm looking for from facebook.

Neurotic Sit-com #3 - I Am Just Not Going To Talk Any More

Episode 2 in the works so I'm skipping to #3.

I seem to keep putting my foot in my mouth in my attempts at small talk with the mom's I encounter taking my boys back and forth to school.
This refers back to the Pre-K Hugs posting from last week.
At my little guys pre-school a mom came up to me to tell me that her daughter and all her little friends love my boy, her daughter talks about marrying him, and I recounted how my son mentioned her daughter "Sally" and stated that sometimes other girls bother him, but she really plays with him, I was expecting a smile or some kind of positive reaction, nothing, so I repeated myself, a faint smile at best, OK, well see you around.
Fast forward a week of my smiling and saying hi to this mom, my boy and I are alone in their cubby room, I hear a mom say, "Sally, blah blah blah ...," I look up, it's not the mom I talked to the other day, not the girl I thought it was, I basically insulted this women after she recounted her nice story to me pointing out one of two shitty things, one, that's nice that your daughter likes my boy but he finds her annoying or I have no fucking idea who you and your daughter are!

Now the truth is I am just not sure of their names, and my son does like her daughter, he had mentioned a few girls that he is friends with, but I was trying to be nice by making it sound like he only mentioned her daughter.
This is one of those times where if I can't have a time machine, I wish I was a cartoon character so I could blow my face off with a cannon and snap back to normal a second later.

Forgetting that my son's little lantern light fell under the car when he got out of it for school I ran it over after telling him we did not have time to get it now and promising him that I would get it after dropping him off at school, but my mind was else where.
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Not as bad as the above but again not good, early this year my wife took our boys to her take your children to work day. My 2nd grader said I saw "Sanjay's" older brother at mommy's work.
So the next time I ran into "Sanjay's" mom outside of the grammar school I ask, does you husband work at XYZ Pharma?
her - No, he works at ABC Financials why?
me -oh my son thought he saw your older son on take your child to work day
her - what town is XYZ in?
me - "blah blah town" (a town 30 minutes away)
her - Oh yes, there are a lot of Sikhs in that area he must have seen another boy
me -oh ....

I did not cross my mind that he would have thought this other boy was one of hers because he had the same head wear that all Sikhs boys wear, I might as well said hey my boy saw your towelheaded little one the other day.
It's a case of my lack of prejudice meeting up with my lack of understanding how a little kid's mind works.

So again, I think I am just going to look at the ground and not talk to anyone any more.

Neurotic Sit-com

I got an invitation to open a facebook account from a mother of one of my 2nd grader's classmates a couple of weeks back, and last night I got a reminder. Since I already have an account I ignored it initially, but the message said something about kids pictures, and I know the last couple of times I have run into them I haven't been the most friendly person, so I figured it was a little weird, but she must be making some sort of facebook school parent's group so I would confirm the friend add, however I did not want to create a new account as the email was asking, so I went to my regular account and sent a friend add from it to what I guessed was her account, the name was the same but not picture.

So at my son's Halloween parade I run into her, and trying to be polite since I never directly replied to the add request I told her I got the add request but already had an account so I sent her a add request from my regular account. She looked at me and said I never sent you an add request, I was like oh, now I feel like an asshole, so I say well maybe you responded to a pop-up that was going to send invites to everyone in your address book, she was like I guess but had a what the fuck are you talking about vibe, if the roles were reversed I would have said that's weird, well don't worry about it, but in typical fashion for my life, I was trying to not make someone feel weird and I wound up feeling uncomfortable.
I started to get all Larry David feeling about it, and wondered why, then I remembered I hardly ate anything and have not gotten enough sleep for weeks, speaking of which I am beat from hanging with Dave so I am gone.

gansta lean

I recently realized that a lot of my back problems comes from the way I drive, or more to the point the way I position myself as I drive. I reach my left hand over to the other side of the steering wheel and place it at "2 o'clock," I lean my head over my right shoulder and I always hold the shifter, obviously with the right hand, even though I currently drive a manual car, I drove a stick shift for like my first 15 years of driving.
Now that the weather is getting colder my upper back keeps stiffening up, even later in the day after going to the chiropractor. A few days ago as I was driving my boys to school and fidgeting around in my seat trying to get my upper back comfortable I realized that the position the rest of my body felt comfortable in tilted my spine at the exact point of the problem, like a hinge in the center of my back.
I also wonder if I have looked ridiculous all these years driving like I am rocking some kind of gansta lean behind the wheel of my Camry?
So now I am trying to reposition myself as I drive, which relieves the pressure between my shoulder blades, but now the rest of feels totally out of sorts. I even do this on the computer, sitting slightly to the left of the keyboard and leaning my upper torso to the right to type and hold the mouse.
So this morning I stretched a little, sat on the couch with strategically placed pillows, DVR'ed a Halloween show for the kids and tried to relax the muscles in my back. after about 15 to 20 minutes I was feeling close to normal, close enough to do another round of more serious stretches. That did the trick, 90% back to normal.
About an hour later my wife called from a meeting to whisper to me that the lay-offs they have been fearing are going to happen and definitely will affect her small department.
Wow honey that sounds great, thanks for telling me.
- Well I wanted to talk to someone, you are my support (system or network or something like that)
Well, hang in there.

Ooouuuuuwuch, I can hear the muscles between my shoulder blades tightening up and the little crackle of my spine in one of the only spots I can not crack on my own without the help of one of those seat connected to the desk school desks they have in high school.