Parenthood and Children – Page 3

2020 Nutshells, Family, Parenthood and Children

Coming to terms with a daughter driving … and soon!

December 1, 2020 No Comments

All year long, it’s been months away. Plenty of time to plan for it. To ponder its meaning and significance. To get myself mentally prepared. To decide how best to handle it. Or even avoid it. You know … how to make sure it NEVER happens.

“That’s 11 months away. Plenty of time.”

“Not really thinking about it. We still have 8 months before that’s an issue. An eternity in dog years!”

“Sure it’s coming, but it’s still half a year from now. And I’m able to put it out of my mind fairly easily … thanks to bourbon.”

And I would have successfully kept going like that if not for the ticking of time, and stubborn family members who keep asking: “So, Brian! What are you doing about your daughter’s birthday?”

“Um … who? ‘Daughter,’ you say? Don’t remember having one.”

“Yes, you do. The pretty one? With the brown hair? The one who is, you know turning 15 and will be able to get her learner’s permit to drive?”

2020 Nutshells, Animals, Family, In the News, Parenthood and Children

When surreal elections and real life collide

November 9, 2020 No Comments

I looked back 4 years to see what I wrote after the 2016 election had finally wrapped up. This is what I said: “It’s over. The presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is mercifully over. Look, forget who won or lost, just for a moment. If your candidate won, you’re still smiling and gloating. If your candidate lost, you’re still researching real estate in Canada. I get it. It’s been a tough one on all of us. It’s been emotional. It’s been trying. It’s tested us, individually and as a nation. But mercifully — whether you won or lost — there is this: We can all start to get our lives back.”

Rings true again today, doesn’t it?

I looked it up because I felt I had said it before. That I had FELT it before. Another time. Another place. What seemed like ages ago, but was just some 1,460 days in the past. (Yeah … I can do math. Not well … but math.)

And I’m feeling it again. Exhausted. Glad it’s over. Won’t tell you who I voted for. But I will tell you about what I’m sure a lot of us feel: Elation that we don’t have to deal with the election anymore. We can start to get on with … well … whatever did we do before there was an election. And no one quite knows what that is.

What did we do before the vote counting went on for days? Before we swiped endlessly at our phones for the latest updates, or sat glued to TV’s talking heads – all remarkably good at saying the same thing over and over again as if it’s always new and profound and full of revelation. Before the debates and the conventions. Before the primaries, and back and back and back.

What did we do?

2020 Nutshells, Coronavirus, Family, Parenthood and Children, Travel

The dad and daughter drive

October 8, 2020 No Comments

“Wo,” she told me while sitting down in the passenger seat. “I’ve never gone on a trip this long upfront.”

“Wo” was right, as the same thing struck me.

A 3-hour car ride to Tampa. Just a few inches apart. What in the heck does a dad and his 14-year-old daughter talk about for that long?

Wo!

It was just a dad and his daughter getting away to visit some family. The two of us. My sister was in town from Chicago. My dad wanted to show off the tear-drop trailer he was building. We hadn’t seen my aunt in who-knows-how-long, and you always need to make sure she’s staying out of trouble.

It was something we hadn’t done – couldn’t have done – in the longest time as everyone battened down the COVID hatches and stayed close to home. As safe as we were being – masked up and carrying an extra 50-gallon drum of hand sanitizer – it was stretching us out of our safe confines and comfort zones.

2020 Nutshells, Animals, Childhood, Family, Florida, Parenthood and Children

The Lizard Hospital opens for patients

September 23, 2020 No Comments

“Good morning, Lizard Hospital. How may I help you? Oh, I see. You’re looking for a family of suckers who will take in injured everyday Florida yard lizards, nurse them back to health and potentially adopt them for life? Yep! You’ve come to the right place. Let me just go flush the rest of my sanity down the toilet and I’ll be right with you.”

My house is now … a lizard hospital.

There are two reptilian ICU containers sitting in my dining room. Stuffed with grass and sticks and pieces of drying ground beef. YouTube videos are on the computer about caring for injured lizards. A syringe sits in a bowl of water in the kitchen waiting for my daughter to dribble drops into their mouths.

I hope these two critters have insurance. Someone is going to have a hefty bill for this top-shelf care.

It all started a week ago. My daughter returned from walking the dog to recount the trauma she had witnessed: A massacre! Lizard carcasses scattered about the sidewalk. (There was a flat frog in the street, too, but that was a different problem. Speeders!) The lizards must have had a run-in with a cat. An angry cat. With a grudge. He left the broken bodies as a warning to others.

“It was awful!” she said. “There was just one survivor. And as you can see, he’s not doing so well.” She shoved the lizard in my face. He had one eye bulging out. It’s an image you’ll never forget.

2020 Nutshells, Childhood, Coronavirus, Family, Parenthood and Children

COVID crisis meet high school trepidation

July 15, 2020 No Comments

Come on, COVID crisis. Because going to high school isn’t, like, scary enough without you lurking around. Because I mean, like, oh my God! It’s high school, you know?

Shoot, just the thought of it has me talking like a goofy late-80s teenager.

Thanks a lot, COVID-19!

You just had to pile on with fears of contracting your virus and agonizing over whether to send my only child off to her freshman year in a pandemic. Because going to high school in normal times wasn’t hard enough?!?

I mean, most of my memories of the high school experience lie somewhere between being stuck in a vice grip and dropped in a sausage maker. Plus, I still have regular nightmares over how to say “algebraic.”

As we approach this major milestone for my daughter, I’ve found myself reliving more and more of those wonderful days. Transported back to an era when I wore clothes so bright and colorful that it ensured retinal damage to anyone who looked at me. (On particularly dry days, I could even start brushfires.) Shirts were a patchwork of different fabrics that resembled a designer hobo tent. Yet, in spite of this and my poof-ball hair, I fancied myself a pretty cool dude, strutting about the halls in my skinny legs that looked like chopsticks in a pair of oversized canvas boat shoes.

2020 Nutshells, Coronavirus, Family, Parenthood and Children, Travel

Getting away in a mountain stream

July 1, 2020 No Comments

Dang! Dogs sure do love mountain streams. The cool, bubbling, rambling ones. Strewn in river stones where they can run and bound and realize how their little wolf-like paws were meant to tear through the world like a brush fire or a blast of wind.

Free. Frantic. Frenzied.

Oh, to be a dang dog!

Same with kids. They like them, too, those streams. With the same gusto. Even at 14. Big splashes. Shoes soaking wet. Egging the dog on. No care in the world. “Come on, Lily, this way!” they yell, and the dog jerks about and tears down the other way.

Not a care in the world.

There we were. Out along little trails with no one else in sight. Somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina. Near to Blowing Rock, but not really near to anything. Anything civilized, it seemed.

Or anything that started with “c” and ended with “virus.”

2020 Nutshells, Coronavirus, Family, Parenthood and Children

And then I guess we’re off to high school …

May 13, 2020 No Comments

Hold on! Let’s just hold on one minute!

Because I need to get this straight. I need to consult the calendar. I’m not sure it has totally sunk down into the recesses of my spongy brain, where actual working cells still live and breathe. I don’t think – as many times as my wife has told me … and she has told me a lot! – this fact has completely registered with me.

So, hold on … let’s work this out: We’re somewhere in the middle of May … haven’t fully figured out when, but somewhere. May is, if memory serves, traditionally the end of the school year. My daughter’s middle school has said this last week was it for new assignments in their online-learning environment. And this next week, which is when exams would have been if not canceled, is kind of the last week. At least, I think … scratching my chin … if I heard all this correctly.

Anyway, forget the details and complex calendar-ing. My point is this: The end of my daughter’s eighth grade year is upon us.

Which really means: The end of her middle school CAREER is just days away.

2020 Nutshells, Childhood, Coronavirus, Family, Parenthood and Children

Finding some freedom in a socially-distanced kayak excursion

April 29, 2020 No Comments

I knew I made a mistake when I sent the text.

Ever do that? Write a text or email, hit send and then think to yourself, “Wait a minute! What the heck did I just unleash!?!”

It was to my brother. The text read: “So what are you all doing this weekend? Amelie is wondering if a canoe expedition might be possible.”

The reply was immediate: “It is. Would you be rockin’ The Sea Eagle or did you grab an aluminum canoe?”

Mind you, I don’t have any flotation devices. “The Sea Eagle” is his inflatable kayak that is pretty easy to haul around, sturdy and can be blown up on short notice. But in my brother’s parlance, the name is less a brand or product, and more like Mel Gibson yelling, “FREEDOM!” in “Braveheart.” He talks about “The Sea Eagle” like it’s another family member – like they hangout and share a beer while discussing politics and manly things; like they peered into each other’s souls and formed a union.

My daughter had been asking about doing this for a while. Trying to get us all together. Trying to get me to buy a canoe. Trying to get us to go on one of these expeditions that my brother cooks up with his 6-year-old son, Striker. She’s gone on a couple as they traipse through the woods looking for old, forgotten railroad lines or “artifacts” along the Intracoastal that could be ancient Native American pottery, or maybe petrified poop. It’s kind of a hit-or-miss thing.

2020 Nutshells, Family, Getting old ... er ... older, Parenthood and Children

Does the mirror think I’m old, too?

January 29, 2020 No Comments

They’re not big numbers. Not on their own. As individuals. Leave them by themselves and people would think you were very young. A pup. So cute. Adorable, even!

But combine them as an age – just like that little gremlin of a daughter did to me the other day – and they sound pretty horrible. Angry. Tired and worn out.

I won’t say the two numbers that when put together mark my years on this Earth. They’re kind of painful.

But she did.

We were riding along, making idle chit-chat. Because she’s 14 and most of the time I don’t know what to say to her, I just pick random things that pop into my mind. Things I think a 14-year-old might find fascinating and REALLY cool. So, I said, “Can you believe it’s almost February?”

“Yeah,” she said, with the enthusiasm of a can of corn. “And you know what else? That means it’s almost your birthday.”

If she had just left it there, it would have been one of those “warm your heart moments.” What a sweet angel. She remembered my birthday is coming.

But … she didn’t leave it there.

2020 Nutshells, Family, Parenthood and Children

Lessons from a child going away

January 22, 2020 No Comments

The kid is back. After 5 days, a tremendous amount of cell phone data expended, countless hours on a giant bus and all manner of historic sites explored throughout Washington D.C., my 14-year-old daughter has returned from her middle school trip. In one piece. With all the stuff she left with. (How’d that happen?) Without getting home sick or demanding we come get her. And without getting left behind at a monument when she was supposed to be on a bus, but instead went looking for a pretzel. (How’d that NOT happen?)

To think just a couple weeks ago, my wife and I were worrying about getting her ready, getting her off and then what we would do with our time once she was gone. What it would feel like to be empty-nesters for a week, and whether it would take a psychological toll on us to have our only daughter go away.

Turns out it wasn’t that difficult, or different. There weren’t as many drinking glasses and candy wrappers left all over the house, and I never had to scream, “You had to walk farther to put that wrapper over there than if you just put it in the garbage!!!”

Boy, that was nice.