I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating… “I LOVE being a Dad.” No matter what kind of day I have at the office or what’s going on in the adult world, my kids can brighten my day with a smile, a giggle, or a hug. I am constantly amazed by how smart, funny, and beautiful they are, especially with my genes.

As I reflect on Father’s Day coming this weekend, I realize I’ve learned a lot from my kids:

• Anything that begins with, “(Child’s name) has something to tell you” is NEVER good news.
• You can yell your child’s name at the top of your lungs and they won’t hear you, but they can hear a text message on their phone anywhere in the house.
• Home Depot makes you have to pee.
• Siblings get along famously, until the phone rings and you’re on an important call. Then all hell will promptly break loose.
• If you give your children a choice between two things (i.e. where to go for dinner) they will always have opposite choices… ALWAYS!
• If your child volunteers to go with you to run errands, they always have an ulterior motive.
• For some reason, parental absence is considered permission.
• You can explain how you want a chore done in detail, and you’ll still end up redoing it yourself.
• If you plan an activity with your child, five minutes into it… one of their friends will knock on the door wanting to play.
• Kids have an uncanny way of knowing they’ll hate any food item without testing it.
• No matter how late your children are up the night before, they will be awake at the crack of dawn.
• Ketchup makes everything taste better.
• Lowes makes you have to pee.
• No matter how much money Dad & Mom pay for a vacation, kids would always rather swim in the hotel pool.
• There is some sort of magical transformation that occurs when your kid becomes a teen that turns you from funniest guy alive to biggest embarrassment.
• How bad your child “has to go” is directly proportionate to how far way the nearest restroom is.
• People that call them the “Terrible Twos” don’t let their kids live to be three.
• The volume level of your children in the morning is directly proportionate to how badly you want to sleep in.
• “Going before you leave the house” makes no difference.
• The same kids that have to be dragged out of bed at 7am to go to school, wake up on their own at 5am on the weekends.
• Kids love to share. If they’re eating potato chips, and take a swig of your soda… they’ll always leave some for you.
• There’s always room for ice cream.
• You can never have too many bouncy balls.
• If you fall down where no one sees you, wait until you have an audience before you start to cry.
• If Dad says no, ask Mom. If Mom says no, ask the grandparents.

Feel free to chime in with your own… I could go on all day. Go hug your kids and if you don’t have kids… call your folks.

Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan attacked (Jan. 6)
Major earthquake jolts Los Angeles (Jan. 17).
Clinton ends trade embargo on Vietnam (Feb. 9)
Four convicted in World Trade Center bombing (March 4).
O. J. Simpson arrested in killings of wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and friend, Ronald Goldman (June 18).
Major league baseball players strike (Aug. 13).
IRA declares cease-fire in Northern Ireland (Aug. 31).
Baseball owners end season and cancel World Series (Sept. 14). Powerful earthquake strikes Japan (Oct. 4).
U.S. sends forces to Persian Gulf (Oct. 7).

Randy & Amy Shannon get married (May 28). Happy 15th Anniversary, Honey!

I have two children - both girls.  One is eight and one is twelve.  There is nothing I enjoy more than being a dad.  Aside from the whole “paying for two weddings” thing, having girls is great.  I love taking them shopping, to plays and musicals, shopping, getting their hair and nails done, shopping, etc.

There are moments as a dad of daughters that every man dreads.  The first is the day you have to take them shopping for bras for the first time.  That begins the era of policing every item of clothing they buy.  You must make sure the neckline or the waistline isn’t too low.  Prepare for rolling eyes and complaining… it’s unavoidable.

The second would be when you have to deal with the arrival of “that time”.  We were on our way to go hiking, and made a pit stop at a gas station to grab water and snacks.  All of a sudden, my kid comes running out of the restroom and announces loudly what she thinks has happened.  I calmly bought the needed supplies, gave them to her… and went out to get mom out of the car.

Thankfully, my wife decided she wanted to care of the “birds & bees” conversation.

Which brings me to the latest hurdle.  She’s 12 1/2 years old and over the weekend she wanted to talk to my wife and me to set up a timeline for when she’d be able to get more independence.  Specifically, she wants to know when she’ll be able to:

“Go to the mall with her friends without us”
“Have a ‘boyfriend’ she can hold hands with”
and “Go on group dates with several friends”

My life just got very complicated.  I’ve been curled up in a fetal position all week. 

(From wikipedia) The concept of spacetime combines space and time within a single coordinate system, typically with three spatial dimensions: length, width, height, and one temporal dimension: time.

Now I didn’t finish college, so I don’t really understand that stuff, but I can surely grasp the concept of time slowing down to a crawl at the beginning of a new year.  At my house the countdown to Christmas starts a few weeks before Halloween.  Seems early, but bear with me.  My girls are still young enough to be excited about trick-or-treating, so the countdown is always on for that.  My birthday is in early November.  My oldest daughter’s birthday is around Thanksgiving.  Two weeks later we’re celebrating the youngest daughter’s birthday, and then it’s just a short two weeks to Christmas.

Just about everybody looks forward to the holidays.  Even the people who rally against religious holidays can look forward to a couple free days off(Hypocrites).  Things just seem to slow down.  We all take more time to think about family and friends.  Sure the gift buying and traveling can be hectic, but especially between Christmas and New Years Eve we all find ourselves dozing off on the couch while watching football.

Then, just as our bodies start to get used to sleeping in, staying up late, and lounging around… it’s back into the rat race.  And nothing to look forward to until Memorial Day weekend.

No wonder this week is moving so slow.

My youngest daughter turned eight last week.  Having a birthday close to Christmas can be kind of a bummer.  We always go out of our way to make it special.

This year she wanted to have a bowling party, but we waited too long to book it and two weeks out they were booked solid.  So instead we decided to have a party at home.  With the weather taking a turn for the frigid, we hosted a Luau.  It was really cute.  I had a dozen second graders in my house all wearing grass skirts, flower leis, and flower ring on their heads.  They did the limbo, some beach ball games, and pin the coconut on the palm tree.  We did kind of tie in the holiday season, though.  Instead of a birthday cake, Gillian opted for a huge sheet sugar cookie.  We cut it into segments, picked up some of that squeeze frosting, and let the kids decorate and eat their own cookies.  That was a LOT of frosting, believe me.

I’m sure it was a bit of a shock to leave our house and step out into temps in the teens and snow.  The kids all had a blast… and I’ll be picking up pieces of dried grass out of my carpet for weeks.

(Mele Kalikimaka - “Merry Christmas” in Hawaiian)

Every year I take grief from Jesse because I have a fake tree. I blogged about it around this time last year where I detailed some of the reasons I don’t get a real tree.

This year I just want to point out that I am not alone and that many people who are not (as has been said on our show) “scrooges, shut-in’s, or old” still prefer the beauty and convenience of an artificial tree.

Here’s some excerpts of a recent CBS news article about the rise in popularity of artificial Christmas trees:
“Some would recoil at the thought of an artificial tree, but it’s a choice that many Americans make. Traditionalists love real trees for their scent, and some people like cutting their own tree. But artificial trees leave no needles to clean up and come in a variety of styles and colors. Prelit Christmas trees, which come with the lights already on them, are very popular.

Buying a Christmas tree is practically like buying a car, what with all the options. [Like] an upside-down corner tree and a half tree that can be used as a space saver. Some trees are made out of polyvinyl chloride.

Prelit trees also come with a variety of lights: white, colored, two-tone, fiber optic, and LEDs, or light emitting diodes. Some lights look like pinecones with melting snow.

There are also the trees that don’t try to hide their fakeness, like tinsel tree and ice crystal tree.

Certainly the artificial trees are fast and easy — two qualities Americans look for in everything. More than half the Christmas trees displayed in our homes this year will be artificial.”

If doing the real tree forest trek is your thing… that’s cool. I’ll be sitting in my living room - with the tree already done - watching Jimmy Stewart on TV and drinking hot chocolate.

Ho Ho Ho!

Weight that is.

You may have heard me talking about being on the Slim 4 Life diet on the air, and it’s worked great.  At the beginning of the year (and you can go back and read the blogs) I was tipping the scales at just over 200 pounds. I go in for my final official weigh in today, but on my unofficial scale at home this morning… 168!

The “problem” is none of my clothes fit anymore and my wife has a rule that no one is allowed to buy anything for themselves after Halloween.  So, I’ve been cinching up my baggy pants for quite a while.  Finally, I had enough yesterday.  I went through all my clothes, tried everything on and gave all the clothes that were too big to Goodwill.  That left me with two pair of shorts and the pair of jeans I got for my birthday a few weeks ago.  So, I took my oldest daughter and we went shopping.  I now have enough pants to get me through the week.  That’ll have to do until Christmas. LOL.

Probably should’ve waited until after I gorged myself on turkey tomorrow.  I’ll be wishing I still had my “fat pants”.

So my father in law just called into the show and dropped the little nugget that my mother in law used to “cut my meat” for me.  This of course led - as it should - to much hassle and grief by the rest of the people on the show. 

Let me explain.  I’m perfectly capable of cutting my own meat and have been for most of my life.  There WAS a period of time when I did have my meat cut up for me, though.  About six months before my wife and I got married, I took a job in my wife’s hometown and needed to move there.  As we were getting married in six months and would be moving into our own place, my in-laws offered to let me live with them until the wedding.  My wife was still finishing college on the other side of the state.  I was making about $11K a year, so I agreed to live rent free and save money. 

I was doing a night show on the local radio station and my mother-in-law, who is very considerate, used to put together leftovers in Tupperware for my “lunches” at work.  Judy was concerned that there wasn’t a knife available for me in the break room, so she used to cut up the meat for me before she packed it.  She loves me, what can I say? 

So to reiterate… I AM PERFECTLY CAPABLE OF CUTTING MY OWN MEAT AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN!

Every year it’s the same argument.  Which type of candy to kids prefer - chocolate candy bars or other flavored canides like Skittles and Sweet-Tarts.  While I concede that kids like ALL candy and will take whatever you offer them, I say kids prefer chocolate.

This Halloween, I’m going to have two bowls:

A) M&M’s, Kit Kats, Snickers, and Twix bars.
B) Skittles, Sweet-Tarts, Tootsie Pops, and Jolly Ranchers.

I say in this scenario, the chocolate choices will be picked 2-1 over the other bowl.  I can only go by what my kids do, but if I offer to buy them a treat at the grocery store, they will go for something chocolate every time.  Feel free to weigh in, I’ll find out for sure this Halloween.

My wife got a job this week. Yippee!  She’s been doing the “stay at home mom” thing and it’s been working out ok, but especially with the higher cost of gas and groceries, things have been a little snug more often than not.

Yesterday she went in for orientation (first day).  She had to be there at 5:00pm, so that meant I had to take care of the kids after school.  No big deal… or so I thought.  First of all, as I have mentioned in past blogs, my wife is into healthy foods and plans out our entire weeks meals before she goes to the store on the weekend.  Her start date got bumped up a week, so I literally found out Monday night that she’d be working Tuesday night.  Not content to let me feed my children mac & cheese or frozen pizza like any other self-respecting dad, Amy points to a recipe ripped out of a Food Network magazine and says to me, “you can follow a recipe can’t you?”  This was the beginning of my bad night.

I “can” follow a recipe, but there are certain nuances to cooking that I do not excel at.  I can barely even keep my damn grill lit.  This was some frou-frou chicken dish that called for me to make homemade breading, cook them in a skillet with Extra Virgin Olive oil (whatever the heck THAT is) and then bake them in the oven.  My breading was falling off all over the place, but at least the chicken was white and not pink.  I was flustered from trying to get all that done so we had chicken and peas for dinner.  Tomorrow I’ll order in Chinese.

Then, it’s time to sit down and do homework.  It’s only the second day of school, so my 6th grader just had to memorize her combinations, school ID, etc.  But my second grader had to draw and list 10 or more things that had to do with Math.  As a 36-year old male, I could only come up with two.  Time and money.  These things are close to my heart because I have very little of either.

Then it’s get the little one bathed and ready for bed.  This went smoother than I anticipated although I never realized that mom reads to her, sings her songs, snuggles her, sets out her clothes for the next day and has a 20 minute debriefing of the day all before bed.  I think I may have been taken for a ride.

The big one wants me to help her find some songs for her iPod, so I’m off to do that.  Then I have to find some time to get things ready for the show tomorrow and still try to get myself to bed before 9pm. I may not make it through the week.

Send help.