Quiet time is my time

Aaahhhh ... it's 6:45 AM and all is quiet in our house, for now. One of the benefits of working from home is a lot less hectic schedule: no waking up at 6:00 and having the kids out the door by 7:15 so I can make it to work by 9:00 (and that's on a good day with minimal fussing). Now we let the kids sleep in a bit (7:30-8:00) and are a bit more relaxed with our routine. Sometimes we can realize the difference, especially with our daughter: she's more sprightly, cogniscent, happy, willing to work with us on getting her ready. Sometimes, she's not. But even on those days, because my schedule is not so rigid, we can take it in stride.

I would have mentioned problems with my son but I think he's still too young to enter Temper Tantrum land (at least about any fashion choices we're making for him). Give him time though.

Sing me a song

Here's a new game to play (and please send me your ideas/results):
Name a song that best describes an aspect of your child - maybe one that you sing to her or him at certain times.

For instance, my daughter is getting ... ummmm .... picky? ... about everything. So when she gets difficult, I start singing "You can't always get what you want, but you might, if you're really nice, get what you need."

On my son's side, every time I see him tearing through the house, I can't help but start singing the chorus to Franz Ferdinand's "Seek and Destroy."

Okay, now it's your turn.

Time to play a game

When the weather starts changing like it has been, from hot to cold in one day, that means it's time for the Strong family to start playing one of our favorite seasonal games: "What strain of the common cold - or worse - will my child bring home from daycare today?"

Points are awarded for overall severity, how quickly we (the adults) succumb to it, how many days off we take, how long before it travels from one sibling to another (and mutates anew) and how many days one of us has to sleep on the couch because the other one is coughing too loud at night.

Great, great fun.

Which makes me wonder if 300 years from now, scientists and archeologists studying these times could not believe that we didn't have a cure for the common cold. "But the answer is so simple," they will say. "We didn't realize they were so primitive back then."

Memories are made of this

Dear friends of ours just had a little baby girl, and as I look at her, I find that I don't really have any strong memories of my children at that age. Sure I remember each of their births, but the memory is fading. This makes me sad because I'm finding out that what a lot of older parents say is true, you do forget a lot of these moments but only because as your children get older you have other memories and moments to supplant them.

Still, as I sit there rocking my son to sleep, thinking about what an awesome kid he is, I don't want to loose those memories.

But I already have. If it weren't for some videos we took of our daughter when she was my son's age, I would have had a hard time recollecting her earlier moments too. So I guess it is inevitable, but I still think it sucks.

Yes, your majesty (and your highness)

Sometimes I think that my wife and I are merely court jesters in our children's eyes, and we are there solely for their amusement. Even worse, they judge us on whether we are amusing enough - that they will then deign to keep us around or not. Nothing worse than going stir crazy in front of them, usually while they're eating, only to have them stare vacantly in your direction, before shifting their gaze elsewhere without any response.

Am I doing the right thing?

I'm up late because I'm worried if I'm doing the right thing.

My daughter was playing on the couch tonight , fell off and banged her head on the side of the coffeetable. Blood everywhere, and she's screaming. I carry her into the kitchen, dab up the blood and see a nice gash about 1/2 an inch from her eye. This could have gone a lot worse, I realize in that instant.

But it looks like a deep gash and I'm thinking to myself (a) is this a concussion, and (b) oh sh*t.

She calms down pretty quickly though, and I bandage her up ("I want the BIG band-aid daddy, the BIG one. I bigger now.") and keep an eye on her (I'm also keeping an eye out for my 16 month old, because he's now starting to get into everything he's not supposed to.)

I go online and start researching concussions and decide that I am going to keep her up later than usual (8 is usually bedtime) just in case. Throughout the night I'm constantly asking her questions to the point that she's annoyed with me (as if that isn't a sign that she's okay) and starts falling asleep on her beanbag. So I try keeping her up some more, till at least four hours after the incident, and now she's getting p*ssed because she's tired. But one of the symptoms of having a concussion is ... being tired ... so I'm in a Catch 22 with her and not sure what to do. She won't let me take the Band-aid off, but she's not in pain, and I can hold up three fingers in front of her and she counts them (very exciting for her, really "Three!").

So I finally brought her up to our bed and let her sleep with my wife and so everything seems copacetic, but I'm still awake, and not because I've had too much coffee. I'm not worried about the concussion, but am about the severity of the gash, and am now double-thinking that I should have gone to the hospital for stitches. There wasn't anymore bleeding, so I'm guessing she's okay. Agh. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Can't stop singing

Listen to this and tell me that's not a catchy song ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyIEdTG1MUU

My daughter likes Veggie Tales, and I don't mind because it's usually a pretty hip show with good music and witty dialogue. And then there are songs like Billy Joe McGuffrey that just ... are, and are fun in all their weirdness.

Fun with words

Don't know why but this is has been in my head for a while so I needed to get it out of there.

Blogalicious
Blogarama
Blog on!
Blog and roll
Oh, bloggit all!
Blogocentric
Blog. And Son of Blog
Blogorrific
I am Blogholio (for all the Beavis and Butthead fans out there)

Everyone want's a Blog
You're gonna love it Blog
Come on & get your Blog
Everyone needs a Blog (for all you Ren and Stimpy fans out there)

Blog Blog Blog Bloggity Blog (for all you Monty Python fans out there)

To boldy blog where no one has blogged before (okay, that's kind of dumb, I'll admit).

You're such a bloggart

Blogachismo

A frog in the blog

Lindow man, the body in the blog.

Okay, I'm done now. On to more serious things.

Revisiting yesterday's post

I think what I was trying to say yesterday, to be succinct and now that I had time to really think about it, was not that I wanted to diminish a mother's importance in a family, but I wanted to raise that of the father's to her equal level.

Memories are made of this?

I've been seeing previews for the new Brad Pitt vehicle, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The movie is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story of the same name (you can read the whole story online here for free) that was part of his Tales of the Jazz Age (1922); something I had read along time ago and hadn't given much time to - like most college lit assignments, anything that was required reading never carried the same weight of excitement as my self-discovered literature treasures.

I think because at the time children were the farthest from my mind, the story had little connecting me to it - an absurd, darkly funny premise brought on by a comment by Mark Twain about the best part of life coming late in life and not earlier (OOPS, SPOILER ALERT). (George Carlin also riffed on this idea, talking about how great it would be to start out as an old, wise man and live backward until you die as an orgasm.)

Now that I have children ... the story kind of freaks me out. Okay, it doesn't kind of freak me out. It really creeps me out. I look at my 16 month old son and think, God, how horrible it would be to actually loose your memory and get younger, and forget everything you've learned along the way. I don't know, maybe I'm overly sensitive, but the thought depresses me. To me, one of the main points of our existence is to learn from yesterday and apply it to tomorrow, to grow and push our cognitive envelopes. The idea that I would get younger and forget everything ... I get shivers thinking about it (and maybe I'm thinking about it too much, eh?)

I think there was a scene in the movie trailer that did it for me - it's almost to the end of the trailer, where there's a silhouette of a woman holding a baby's hand and walking outside, and so presumably that's Benjamin Button in his "later years" as he has digressed back to infancy. And maybe because my son looks a lot like that child (he just started walking a couple of months ago), the mental picture is too real. Either way, whenever I start thinking about the movie, I want to run and grab my son and just hug the crap out of him.

And yes, maybe I'm also afraid that growing old is going to mirror what happened to Benjamin Button, and my memory will slowly start fading until there's very little left, and my last memories will be fuzzy images and warm milk. Which makes me want to go hug my children all the more - so if I do end up forgetting that I did hug them, they won't.

(SIDEBAR: Speaking of hugging your children, have you ever had - and fought -the urge at night, after the kid/s have finally fallen asleep, to just run into their room and grab them and hug them tight and just rock with them for a while and just be like Damn I love you! No? Maybe it's just me then.)

What is this all about, anyway

Well, so far so good - just got a nifty calendar added to BAKidsMagazine.com and a forum (all at readers' requests, so there you go), and did some more tweaking of this and that. Always with the tweaking, me.

Anyway, I've been asked, in so many words, "Why Bay Area Kids magazine, Everard. Why?"

There are several reasons behind the decision to launch this magazine:
(1) As a husband and father to two little children (my oldest, a daughter, is three years two months, and my son is going on sixteen months) who is deeply involved in their lives, I am constantly being offended by the current portrayals of husbands and wives that I find in today's media. Whether it be commercials or television shows, the man is usually depicted as two IQ points above a wilderbeast, and knows nothing beyond what is favorite beer is and who's playing whom this Sunday on ESPN. That he might possess any knowledge - or ... gasp! an opinion ... on family matters seems unfathomable (and on that point, it also seems unfathomable why a woman would want to attach herself to such a useless example of humanity, and then go the extra step and actually decide to reproduce and pass on these bad DNA to her offspring).

Most parenting magazines are directed squarely at mothers and nothing but mothers - the idea that Daddy might pick up the magazine and read it himself seems like an alien concept. And yet if you walk down to the local park, the zoo, or other places where parents bring their children to play or be entertained, you do see more and more fathers coming with their children, with and without their spouse. And (again with the gasping), they seem to handle it all quite well, and enjoy themselves in the process.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not excluding mothers at all in this equation: God bless you one and all for what you're doing. It's that I believe that the structure of a modern family is shifting. One of the reasons I chose the tag "A Modern Resource for Modern Families," was to get away from the "for mothers by mothers" that just about every other magazine (including local ones) seem to use. There are stroller groups for men only, men who have quit their jobs, or decided to reconstruct their careers to be able to work from home or less hours, all to be with their children more. It is my belief that many of us look back at our own parents, and though they worked very hard to provide us with a living, there was a heavy cost involved, and we don't want to carry that cost on to our children.

This is not a soapbox I'm on, and this is not an agenda for Bay Area Parents, but it is a social awareness that is happening around us, and Bay Area Kids is taking it into account within its editorial mission statement.

Going back to our tag, "a modern resource for modern families," that is our mission. To provide the best resources for families to provide the best for their children, at the same time providing a look into the changing roles of today's families, and how these roles are impacting our children, our society, and our world.

Ciao,

Everard Strong,
Publisher and Editor,
Bay Area Kids magazine,
Father of Two

p.s. I know this is a long blog, but thought I had to put this out there. Your feedback is very welcome and encouraged.

First in line

It's 12:30 in the morning and all is quiet ... finally. I'm exhausted so this is going to be very anticlimactic for a first blog, but it's been a busy day. I just finished updating the web site, www.bakidsmagazine.com to include a calendar of events (which I now need to populate), and a forum for people to ... what's that word ... communicate with each other. Yes, at Bay Area Kids magazine we listen to our readers.

Phew.

Tomorrow I think will be a more "official" introductory posting.

Ciao,

Everard Strong
Publisher, Editor, and Father
Bay Area Kids magazine