I’m escorted out of the house in the mornings by rock stars and super heroes.
A father's struggle to capture his children's brief moment of youth in words and pictures
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Clara’s new bedtime routine is to beg for me to read her the most grown up looking chapter book she can find in the house, as long as it still has pictures in it. So, for the past few nights I’ve been reading to her from an old history text book with stories about explorers and inventors in early America. So far, in the past week, we have read about Christopher Columbus and Henry Hudson, and then tonight we covered Robert De La Salle. I was proud of her for paying such close attention throughout each of the stories, since they often get bogged down in some really mundane details. Details that even I can’t be bothered to recall when we get to the…
I pulled into the Walmart parking lot this evening and turned to help unbuckle the two girls in the back seat. Clara was already halfway out of her shoulder straps, but Lydia was staring strangely out the window into the night sky. I stopped and watched her for a moment. She seemed to be alternating between opening her eyes as wide as she could make them then squinting with a sudden grimace. “Lydia, what are you doing?” I asked. Without looking at me she explained, her face contorted into a strange smile, “I’m making the lights come to me.” She said. I watched a few seconds more. “Excuse me, what?” “I can make the lights come to me.” I looked at her sister for…
Today we celebrate Gideon’s first birthday, so I decided to share this video I put together exactly one year ago.
“Every moment’s built to last, when your living without a past, in a magic world.”
I was in our closet the other day quietly getting ready for work when I heard something outside the door making strange noises. I stood still and listened, imagining the dark room outside the closet, with Andrea sleeping soundly in the bed, the girls down the hall fast asleep in their own room. A smooth tranquility, and order to life. The chaos of daytime laying motionless across the floor. Everything sleeping. Everything as it should be. Everything as it has always been. But in this stillness a noise. A brief squawking sound every few seconds. A deliberate honking. A wild thing in the calm moonlight. I slowly opened the closet door casting a triangle of harsh light across the bed. A little boy was…
“MMMmmmyoda-oda-oda-oda-oda-oda-oda-oda-oda-ooooooo!” I yodeled at the girls as they ate their dinner at the kitchen counter. I finished and opened my eyes to find the two of them staring at me in frozen surprise, bits of pizza hung precariously out of Lydia’s dropped jaw, and Clara’s eyebrows had retreated up into her hairline leaving a concerned furrow behind. The two of them looked at each other, and then back at me. Finally Clara spoke up, “Sorry Dad, but that was the worst magic trick I have ever seen.” I shook my head at her. “I didn’t say it was a magic trick. You asked what it meant to yod-” She cut me off, “Here. I’ll show you a magic trick.” She hopped off her stool…
During an uncommonly quiet moment in the car this morning I heard Gideon suddenly make a strange wet gurgling sound in his seat behind my head. Andrea immediately spun around to look. “Oh no!” She said. “Clara, can you help your brother please?” “Do I need to pull over?” I asked. “No, just…” A flutter of napkins were pulled from the glove box and released into the backseat like a flock of frantic birds. “Why did he even have that?” “I don’t know mom. It’s so gross!” “I know it’s gross, but stop trying to put it back in his mouth.” “I’m not he’s trying to. I’m trying to stop him.” “Well stop letting him eat the napkin. Just get it out of his…
Where Are We Here? 