Category: family

for those of you who know and love my wife (and lets face it – if you know pam then you love her – she’s just that type of woman) you probably want to know that she defends her dissertation tomorrow at 1 p.m. i know she would appreciate your prayers.

after she defends her dissertation she will head from baton rouge to be one of two speech pathologist on the hondurian operation smile project. that means she is gone from home for two weeks. i’m not sure the boys and i can survive off of my cooking for two weeks.

SIDE NOTE – i think one of things i am going to have a hard time adjusting to will be how much sooner it gets dark in wisconsin. being further north means less daylight in the winter. now that day light savings time has ended it is completely dark at 5:06. in alabama & louisiana that would have happened around the time of the solstice.

actually this title is misleading because it’s not so much about my family reading together as much as it is about my wife and kids assigning me books they like. i’m not sure how it got started but somehow pam, adam, and noah gained the opportunity to tell me a book to read and then discuss it later. it’s been great. all three of them gave me wonderful works of fiction to read that i probably would not have read with out them. i love my family.

here are the three books they assigned me:

• “anne of green gables” – pam picked this one – it’s a chick book that i never would have read on my own but it was great. it had some incredible insight into church within it. i love that pam knows what i will like even when i don’t.
• “fahrenheit 451” – adam picked this one – i can not believe that i have never read anything by bradbury before. the book was fantastic and i’ll have to pick up some more bradbury. it led to some great conversation with adam and i in turn was able to introduce adam to “animal farm” (which i love).
• “things not seen” – noah picked this one – i was familiar with andrew clements because of “frindle.” he writes wonderful preteen books and this one was a pleasure to read and discuss with noah.

since i always try to keep a work of fiction and a work of non-fiction flowing through my head at the same time i now have to find some new fiction recommendations. i would probably ask my mom to recommend something (she reads more often than she breathes) but she would probably tell me about some cookbook that i absolutely have to read.

considering my last post concerning my failure as a dad i thought i would post how i just improved a little. earlier today as i was packing to move to stevens point i found an open can of gun powder in our garage. i had this on hand from an explosive announcement video we did awhile back. i didn’t really want to travel with gun powder packed in the uhaul truck and i didn’t really feel good about throwing it in the trash can for a nice little surprise for the trash compactor. therefore, i had to come up with a good way to dispose of the gun powder. i could have just washed it down the storm drain but what fun would that have been? instead i decided to pretend like we were in a western movie and form a line of gun powder along the street in front of our house. i called the boys out to watch as i lit it (they shook {correction per my mom} in fear because i don’t have the best record with fire – lost body hair count thus far is: one eyebrow burnt off 3-4 times, both eye brows burnt off 1 time, right arm hair burnt off 2 times, left arm hair burnt off 1 time, and hair on the head singed more times than i care to count).

it was great. i lit one end and the gun powder shot a flame of fire up from the pavement approximately 4 feet high as it snaked down the 30 foot line. it sent out so much smoke that one of our neighbors down the street thought my car was on fire.

i’ve improved as a father a little by this random act.

my boys rate “return of the jedi” as the best of the star wars movies and they rate “revenge of the sith” as the second best over “the empire strikes back.”

where have i gone wrong.

i have been married to this wonderful woman for 17 years now.

saturday we took montana and roux to the brec dog park (located at forest park). it’s a great place for our dogs to run around and socialize with other dogs. montana and roux loved the place. the played with other dogs, sniffed everything imganible and and “marked.” the biggest problem was that roux and montana are short, large dogs. all the other large dogs were at least a foot taller than them. that’s how the problem happened.

roux decided to go act “tough” around a boxer that was there. roux had his hackles up and he had “puffed” his chest up to twice it’s normal size. he was as large as i have ever seen him and quite impressive looking. in fact, i thought he was a terror to behold. the boxer didn’t even notice him. instead the boxer just lifted his leg, “marked” roux and walked off like nothing had happened.

i guess that’s what happens when you’re a short dog.

since i didn’t have my camera with me at the time i decided to draw a recreation of the event.