July 2009 - Posts

• Here’s a Tip… Don’t Put Your Crying Baby Under the Table

  So, on day’s where I’m struggling to find something to write about, or struggling to decide whether or not I should write about something (hoo boy.  Tune in tomorrow), I will turn to our local news networks for inspiration.  In their desperation to have some reason to be on the air for 24 hours straight they consistently start including events under the heading of “news” which clearly are not. And there’s usually a blog in that.  Believe me, you’ll never run out of ideas mocking cable news. Anyway, I flipped over there and found this article: “20 of the Greatest Parenting Tips Ever!” http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/07/30/p.parenting.tips/index.html It was apparently taken from Parents magazine, which should know what the 20 greatest parenting tips are since they religiously recycle the same dozen or so tips each month with new names. January:  New tip for soothing your baby called the “Whisper Method” February:  New tip for soothing your baby called the “Shhhing Method” March:  New tip for soothing your baby called the “Breathe Hot Air in Their Ears Method” April:   New tip for soothing your baby called the “Updated Whisper Method” So, anyway, I decided to take a gander at the wisdom that Parents magazine is giving us.  And not just any old wisdom, mind you.  This was a list of the GREATEST PARENTING TIPS EVER! Wow.  I can’t wait! Well, at first blush, the list seemed pretty…. (First blush?  What does that phrase even mean?  The only thing I can think of is kind of inappropriate) Anyway.  The list seemed ok, but then I started looking at it a little more carefully. The very first set of tips they have is on how to soothe a crying baby.  (boy, have I got some experience in that area).  Their first tip is: “Rub lavender essential oil on the back of your neck for a calming scent (feel free to swipe your kid's Johnson & Johnson lotion). Then wrap your baby in a blanket and gently bounce on a fitness ball” Ok…  Now I’m a big believer in swaddling.  I swaddled each of our kids and, while I don’t mean to brag, I am the King of swaddling.   I mean I could swaddle a nest of cobras that had just been dipped in peanut oil and  two minutes later they would be immobilized and snoozing blissfully, dreaming of Riki-Tiki-Tavi getting hit by a car. So I buy the swaddling, but the lavender oil?  Really? If there’s one thing I know about babies, it’s that they don’t really seem to care too much about odors.  My kids could have sat in a diaper filled with rotting fecal matter all day long, playing happily.  They truly didn’t care.  I can’t imagine a little hippie lavender essential oil is really going to woo them into slumber.  It will cover up the stench of the rotting fecal matter for you though, and I suppose that’s important. The next tip is (I kid you not) that when your toddler is throwing a tantrum, you should make a “toddler cocoon” to block out stimulation.  Dr. Nokids suggests that you put a blanket over a table and put your child under the table to help them calm down. Really? When my two year old is having one of his roll-around-on-the-floor screaming hissy fits you want me to put a blanket on the table and roll his kicking and screaming hiney underneath there? I’ll say it again. Really? Let me share with you how that would work. He’s screaming and arching his back on the floor and kicking at me when I try to pick him up because of some horrible injustice such as, say, I wouldn’t put my flip flops on when he wanted me to.  So I go get a blanket and put it on the table.  Then, while he kicks me, I kind of shove his body under the table while he thrashes around.  At this point, the screams intensify until he sits up, slamming his head on the table supports and breaks into louder screams, complicated by the trickle of blood that keeps getting in his eyes.  This turns into hyperventilating until he passes out and…. Oh, I take it back.  I guess that would totally work. Moving on. I will now reprint, in full, a list of ten things that this magazine suggests you can learn to do with one hand. “1. text-message 2. make spaghetti 3. feed a pet 4. wrap a present using a mini-shopping bag, tissue, and a stick-on bow 5. brush an older child's hair 6. fold baby clothes and put back in drawers 7. repot a plant 8. write thank-you notes 9. whip up a smoothie 10. tend to husband's personal needs (if you know what we mean)” Um… ok.  Let’s just work our way down the list, shall we? #1.  I know this is meant to seem impressive, but unless you’re still using one of those old bag phones and the trick is that you can unzip the phone with one hand, I’m not real impressed.  I mean, isn’t the whole point of texting that you can do it with one hand.  I mean isn’t that why you’re texting instead of sitting down with a quill and parchment to draft a letter in the first place? Alright, #4 impresses me, although I must say, wrapping a present in a shopping bag seems pretty lame.  “Hi, I was busy so instead of using wrapping paper I used a Food City bag.  I hope you like it.” #7.  Now, I know whoever put this in wasn’t a real parent.  And I’ll tell you why.  I have never in my life been so busy that I could only use one hand (because, say, I was holding in a baby in the other) but had simultaneously gotten so much accomplished from my to-do list that “repotting a plant” had somehow made it to the top.  This one is a bold faced lie. #10….. Ok….. uh…. where to begin?  Alright, first of all…. I didn’t need to read that … particularly directly after “whip up a smoothie.”  Secondly, and I have to say, I feel like this is a very important, very legitimate question…. Ahem… What exactly are you doing with the other hand? What is going on in your life such that this is the area you choose to multitask?  With the other hand are you, perhaps “writing a thank you note” or “repotting a plant?”  Please tell me you’re not “brushing an older child’s hair.”  And please, please, please tell me you’re not still holding the baby, wrapping it in blankets, rubbing lavender on your neck and bouncing up and down on your exercise ball. Speaking for all fathers and men in general: Honestly, we can wait. You know, there are a few other tips in here I find somewhat questionable including a section on how to pee and breast feed at the same time and some somewhat odd uses for an iphone (poopy diaper tracker?).  And there are some good suggestions as well, but I suppose, overall, my concern is this: These are the 20 greatest parenting tips ever? I know that’s just a phrase used to get people to buy magazines or click on a website, the same way CNN uses the phrase “Best Political Team on Television” when it’s pretty clear to everyone that they’re “above average” at best. But I’m pretty comfortable stating that these are not the 20 “greatest parenting tips ever.” I know this is not the greatest list ever, because it doesn’t include one of the best parenting tips I’ve ever heard: “If your child keeps waking up crying in the night, get a large box fan, place it in your bedroom and turn it on high.” I’ve got to tell ya. I don’t know how it worked, but once we started using the box fan in our bedroom, we never heard our kids cry again.  I never did figure out what a fan in our room did to make our baby sleep down the hall, but, boy, it sure did work.  And you can’t argue with success! So, Parent’s Magazine, you keep trying!  I’m sure you’ll come up with a good article soon.  And if you don’t and this depresses you a little, just run some essential lavender oils on your neck and bounce up and down on a rubber ball.  I’ve heard it helps. Posted Jul 31 2009, 06:21 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Better off Dad, parenting, babies [Edit Tags]

• I Have a Nightmare

  Audra learned of the existence of racism for the first time last night. From a fairly unlikely source – Martin Luther King Jr. Our 6 year old had dug out of her bookshelf an “I CAN READ” book about King and had wanted to read it with my wife Sarah.  Sarah didn’t think anything about it at the time.  The book is about as innocuous as a book about MLK could be.  It is mainly about him growing up and ends with a reference to the “I have a Dream” speech.  It contains bland phrases like “Some people didn’t like what Martin said, but most did.” Uh huh. Well, despite the fact that the book glossed over most of the more horrific aspects of the civil rights movement and King’s life, it still scarred Audra.  She was literally horrified at the thought of the “white’s only” signs and the segregation it alluded to. It had never occurred to her to value the distinction in skin color any more than the distinction in one’s hair color. After they finished the book, which ended with the phrase “Today, many people remember his dream and try to make the world a better place for everyone,”  Audra told Sarah that she was going to have nightmares about the book. Nightmares. I’m not surprised.  I remember having the same kind of reaction, although not till much later.  My parents had made a conscious decision not to expose me to the existence of racism and I was apparently pretty slow to learn. I was bussed to a predominantly black school about half an hour from our home.  My mom tells the story about how in second grade she was curious as to whether my music teacher was black or white but didn’t want to explicitly ask me, in fear of alerting me to the issue.  She said it was about 6 weeks into the school year before she figured it out. I also remember an incident at that school where I turned to a little girl beside me in class and asked her whether black people had red hair.  I remember being genuinely curious.  I had red hair and I knew this other white kid that had red hair but all my black friends had black hair.  It seemed like an innocuous question. It was not. Instantly the girl shot her hand in the air, getting the attention of our black teacher.  “Mrs. Johnson!  Mrs. Johnson!  Marcus is asking me rude things about black people’s hair!” I distinctly remember thinking “Woah!  That’s not at all what I was doing.” Regardless, it led to a several minute chewing out by the teacher where she said that “of course black people had red hair” and that “her aunt had red hair” and while I don’t remember the rest of the words she used, I remember the feelings and it was clear to me that she thought I was a rude, ignorant little boy.  If I had understood the concept better, I would have understood that she clearly thought I was “racist” as well. I still remember how horrible I felt and how confused.  I also remember spending the next couple of years on the lookout for a redheaded black person without much luck. But still I hadn’t quite figured all of this out.  I basically just new some people were a little overly sensitive about red hair. It wasn’t until 7th grade when a particularly progressive Social Studies teacher decided that the text we had wasn’t particularly detailed on the subject of the civil rights movement.  So he decided to supplement with videos and handouts and magazine articles. I remember we watched segments of the “Eyes on the Prize” video and that I was simply aghast. What the hell? I mean, what were people thinking?  Were those angry white people literally insane?  Had none of them read the Bible at all? What was going on? After that, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement became a minor obsession.  I just found the whole thing utterly astounding.  It seemed so at odds with everything our country pretended to be about. Of course, like so many things, once your eyes are opened, it’s not so hard to see the reality all around you.  Even in a community that was 90% white, it wasn’t difficult to begin seeing the tentacles of racism peek around corners and underneath school desks. I became fascinated.  I read a number of books, rented documentaries from the library and, for a white boy from the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, became a bit of a minor scholar on the civil rights movement and its different players. This background hit me even harder when, after college, I wound up teaching in the Mississippi Delta and lived just down the road from where Emmit Till whistled at a white woman, I taught students whose parents were in the same jail Fannie Lou Hamer spent time in and I was even in a play with the niece of Medger Evers’ assassin.  I was teaching in a community that was maybe 60/40 black/white, but where the public schools were 100% black and had been since integration orders were finally enforced in the early seventies.  The house I rented was a couple of blocks away from the community swimming pool which had been filled in as soon as it was clear that the white community would have to allow blacks to swim in it as well. My students all lived in decrepit run down shacks whereas the white residents all lived in modest, but nice tract homes and ranchers. Racism wasn’t just alive and well in the Mississippi Delta, it was a way of life. As Faulkner said, about the South, “The past isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past.” So, here we are a decade later.  We live in a predominantly white, upper middle class community. I have two black former students of mine living in our home while they try to jumpstart their lives.  We attend a church that is somewhere between 80 and 90 percent black and my daughter attends a school that is 95% white (if not higher).  And the only president my kids have any recollection of is a black man. My three lily white, pale as an Irish coal miner, children have grown up in this somewhat odd environment - never questioning it as anything but perfectly normal. Until now.  Now, Audra’s eyes have been opened, however slightly, to the fact that her “big brothers,” Aloysius and Jessie, may not be seen by the rest of the world in the same way that she sees them. She now has the slightest inkling that perhaps there’s still something a little wrong with America.  And despite the fact that we have come so far and accomplished so much, racism and prejudice still exist.  It’s just a little more subtle now. For instance, when I have to counsel Jessie to not buy a “box Chevy,” because a police officer friend of mine told me he would get pulled over more often.  Or perhaps Audra will start to wonder why all of her black friends attend her church, but not her school.  Or maybe she’ll begin to notice that even though there are no longer any “whites only” placards hanging on the walls, there still seem to be stores and restaurants and the occasional pool that have managed to achieve that without the benefit of written notification. As she gets older, she will be wise enough, and thoughtful enough to begin to connect the overt legalized racism that she reads about in her history books to the insidious after shocks that still manage to divide us by neighborhood, school, church and university. And though, like all good schools, each February she will hear, year after year, about Martin Luther King and how he had a dream.  I am quite sure that she will remember this moment when she first understood what that really meant. And she will recall that sometimes, even now, that dream is still just a nightmare. Posted Jul 29 2009, 06:23 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Better off Dad, Mississippi [Edit Tags]

• So Many Lives, So Little Life

  I wouldn’t call myself indecisive, necessarily. It’s not that I can’t make up my mind, or even convince myself to be happy with my choices.  It’s just that I am constantly intrigued by all the other options available. For instance, housing is a good example. I like our house, but it doesn’t take much for me to drive by someone else’s home and think, “wow, I wish we had a nice glass front door like that.”  Or, “I’ve always wanted to have a cupola.”  Or, “Boy, it would be nice if our house were a mansion sitting on the waterfront.” You know, things like that. I believe in church it is called coveting. Everywhere else it is referred to as “the economic engine that keeps our capitalistic society chugging along.” Anyway, this is an easy enough situation to deal with in regards to housing, right?  You just buy a new door, or call “Bob’s Custom Cupolas,” or you invent a super absorbent rag, come up with a flashy name, sell it on TV and then buy a mansion on the waterfront. Simple really. No, the problem I have is with the intangible stuff. You see, at different moments, I find myself wanting to live different lives. I have a lot of interests and only one life to pursue them and that makes things rather complicated. Growing up, life seemed much simpler.  In some ways, the whole world was open before you, but in other ways, you didn’t really know that. To an 18 year old, your choices appear to be “go to college or work at McDonalds” and then as a 22 year old, your choices appear to be, “take that one job offer you received, or go live in your parents’ basement.”  Again, a fairly easy choice.  I think for most of us, it doesn’t really occur to us how many options we really have. I remember a few years ago, I met someone who after graduating from college went and got a job in London.  I remember thinking, “You mean I could have done that?!?  Well Crap!” It just had not even occurred to me that that was an option.  And then, of course, once I realized that going and living in London was an option, it kind of occurred to me that I could have gone to live anywhere.  I could have lived in Switzerland or in Colorado or San Diego, or Guam. I know this seems fairly obvious.  But it had truly not entered into my head that I had that level of control over my life  -  that with a little bit of effort I could have finished college and instead of going to Mississippi, I could have lived anywhere in the entire country or world.  When this revelation finally hit me, I remember thinking, “Wow, I could have lived anywhere in the entire world and I chose….. here?” Then, of course, it’s not too much of a leap to the realization that, “well, I’m not dead yet…. I suppose I could still live anywhere or do anything…. ….except for those darn kids.” Yes, the children thing complicates matters.  Children, the house, the mortgage, the job - It makes it easy to think that all of the decisions are made and that we have to stay committed to this job and place and life we’ve already committed into. The reality is that this isn’t actually true.  You could still do anything,  it’s just harder.  And the risks you take are no longer risks that you take alone, but risks that you are imposing on your family as well. We could still pack up and move to London or give up all of our family security and pursue my dream of being a world famous jingle writer or something.  The world is still our oyster, it’s just harder to crack now. So what to do?  Do we make the choice to double back and try one of those paths that we seemingly left behind so many years ago? I mean, there are days I dream of leaving all the craziness of living in suburban DC behind and moving to Vermont to be a sheep farmer. There are days I wish I had kept on teaching and become a principal and created a place where we only left a few kids behind.  (maybe just the ugly ones) There are days I want to stop doing everything I’m doing and dedicate my life to writing award winning children’s books or articles for the Onion, or light religious satire for Progressive Methodist magazines. There are days I’d like to be a travel guide who took families on trips to Europe.  I’d be the really good one who always knew that perfect place to recommend for dinner. There are days I wish I had been stupid enough to pursue my teenage dream of acting on Broadway. There are moments I wish I had pursued a job in government and was working 20 hour days in a Senator’s office changing the world. There are times I wish I had learned to play the guitar really well and become a folk protest singer, traveling around writing snarky songs about the government as well as the occasional unrequited love ballad. There are days I wish I’d gone ahead and gotten my PHD and actually created that teacher training program I designed that that would actually train people to be teachers. There are days I wish I had pursued journalism and become an NPR correspondent so I could hang out at the holiday party with Scott Simon and Nina Totenberg. Just about every day, I wish I had done whatever it is you have to do to be a travel writer (how great is that job?  They pay you money to go to exotic places, stay in the nicest hotels, eat in the fanciest restaurants and then write about it.  What’s the downside to that job?) The thing is, you see,  that I’m not unhappy with the life I have.  It’s just that I sort of wish I had more than one life to live.  (that would make an awesome TV show: “And now we return to ‘More Than One Life to Live’.” I don’t regret the choices I’ve made or the path that I’ve taken, it’s just that I wish I had the time and the ability to take all of those paths. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who was pretty good at a lot of things, but not really good at anything.  Which, of course, makes me wonder if I had kept on working at one or two of those things I have a little bit of talent in, could I have turned that into something remarkable? But the truth is, that as much as I find myself tempted by “possibility,” – as much as I can be inclined toward believing that the grass is always greener down some other path, I am also a pragmatist. I know that I would get bored pretty quick in Vermont.  I know that my assessment of my acting skills led to me to a good choice in not moving to a 1 bedroom flat in Manhattan with three other people.  I know that as much as a PHD seems impressive that it’s no guarantee that you get to do what you want in life.  I know that working in a Senator’s office would have left no room for children or probably even a wife. The travel writer job still nags at me… but I’d probably just feel guilty all the time. The truth is that no life is perfect.  There are always things out there that in the abstract seem more exciting or more appealing, but the truth is that there are lots of things about my life now that many people would envy. If I had become a marginally famous folk singer with a record deal with some independent label who’s reception area always smelled like incense, how many songs would I have written pining for the beautiful wife I never met and the adorable children I never had. The truth is that when I really think about it I know that you can’t take every path.  You can only choose a couple over the course of your life.  And for right now, there is no doubt in my mind that I have chosen the best possible path for me.  {Note:  I am trying desperately to write a touching “gosh darn it I’ve made the right choice, I love my kids!” ending to this blog while AT THIS VERY MOMENT they are running around screaming “Dad! Micah took my cereal!  DAAAAAAAD!  Asher Stop it!  No, that’s MINE!”........... It’s making it very hard for me to lie about how happy I currently am and be the least bit convincing} Ahem So, I guess what it comes down to is this:  Despite my dreams of grandeur and the occasional creeping doubt or regret.  The truth is that I love staying home with my kids.  I love the life that Sarah and I have created.  I even love writing this blog while my children disintegrate into chaos around me.  The truth is, I guess I really am Better off Dad. Posted Jul 28 2009, 06:24 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Better off Dad [Edit Tags]

• Why Save the Dance for the Reception?

  This is a Piffle. A trifle. A bit of Friday afternoon nonsense. Not like the stuff I usually write which is deep and thought provoking and changes lives. No, this is just a bit of silliness from the youtube that I came across a little while ago.  I don't tend to post or forward Youtubies because I feel like there are enough teenagers and vaguely computer-literate aunts in the world forwarding stuff that the last thing this planet needs is one more idiot sending around a link of a monkey waterskiing, babies dancing  or Burt Bacharach tripping on the sidewalk, but this seemed a little different. This is not someone trying to recreate the star wars trilogy using only peeps and a greenscreen (although that would be AWESOME!).  Nor is it a video of some moron trying to ride his bike off of the roof of his house and into the lake. No, this is simply a wedding.  Perhaps the coolest wedding ever. I won't say any more.  I just want you to spend 5 minutes of your life watching how one wacky couple decided to begin their life together.   So, what did you think? For me, I smiled all the way through it. It was just a pure, unbridled glimpse at joy. I remember my wedding day very well, and although there is no way in the world my wife would have wanted to boogie down the aisle of the Newark Valley United Methodist Church, I remember feeling the same amount of joy, excitement and giddiness that was expressed by those crazy kids dancing. I wanted to be there.  I wanted to be part of that congregation watching that group of friends dance down the aisle.  My only regret is that the bride's father was not there beside her doing the foxtrot.  I can't say that this is exactly how I had imagined my daughter's future wedding, but if she asked me to, you better believe I would dance to whatever choreography she wanted. For me it was beautiful. My other thought was, "How cool is that minister?"  Don't you just want to find out where that church is and switch your membership?  I just wish I was there for the planning session.  "So, pastor.  Instead of coming down the aisles to a Wagner tune, we were kind of thinking that we would use this house music and a lot of jazz hands." "Ok, just make sure we sing something out of the hymnal at the reception." "Fair enough." Yes, this was non-traditional, but it was also beautiful.  It makes me want to find my wife (who I imagine is slaving away at her desk in downtown DC) and kiss her and find an aisle to dance down. It makes me remember all of the joy and excitement and glorious naivete of young love. I hope this couple stays married for 50 years and has the most awesome "Renewing their vows" ceremony ever. And I hope they invite me.   Posted Jul 24 2009, 12:27 PM by superdad with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Better off Dad, videos [Edit Tags]

• Top Ten Things I missed in America

  I loved our little trip to Ireland, but let me tell you, it sure is nice to come home. One of the nice things about going away, whether it’s to a foreign country, or to your aunt’s house for the weekend is that you invariably come back with an appreciation for home.  I’ve found that if you stay anywhere long enough, even somewhere spectacular, eventually you start missing the little things about your own house and community that led you to settle down there in the first place. So here’s a short, very random, occasionally embarrassing list of things I missed back home.    1. The Sun Oh, the sun.  Ye mythical object that floateth high above us shining your golden rays upon our shoulders, making us happy.  It tis good to see you again. The Irish don’t really have the sun.  Oh sure, it pops up every once in a while, like a new TV series starring one of the actors from “Friends,” but it never hangs around long….. again, like a new TV series starring one of the actors from “Friends.” Of the two weeks we were in the Land of Leprechauns, we had maybe two days where the sun was a visible presence.  The rest of the time it was cloudy, and a little grey, with occasional rain showers and a nice cool breeze.  It wasn’t unpleasant, but we didn’t plan any picnics either. Apparently, this summer has been sunnier than average in Ireland, because I talked to one man who said that he had gotten a sunburn for the first time since he was 8. Wow. I kept thinking how much different this must have felt for the Irish family we swapped houses with.  They came to the U.S. where we had two weeks of bright sunshine, no rain, and temperatures in the 80s.  What must they have thought?  Did they think this was some magical utopia, or did they spend the whole time buying cheap sunglasses at gift shops and cursing the blazing heat coming from that blinding round thing in the sky? 2. Roads wide enough for my car I don’t know how we decide the width of our roads in America, but I suspect it goes something like this:  We measure the width of a really wide car, we add a few feet just for safety’s sake, then we double that, and then we add a few more feet just for good measure and then we add a few more feet on either side of the lines just in case. In Ireland, I suspect it goes more like this.  They measure the width of the smallest car made in the country, they add a few more feet because they…. then they get distracted and go get a pint somewhere. I have never driven on roads so small.  The “highways” which tend to be two lanes, are fine, but the “secondary roads” are inconceivably tiny. I say this with no exaggeration whatsoever:  Many of the secondary roads – the kind you would take to drive to your home – are literally only large enough for one car.  The solution is that you barrel down the middle of the road as fast as you like and then when you see another car barreling down toward you.  You pull into someone’s driveway, or you drive into a hedgerow, hoping there’s not a stone wall behind it or you swerve erratically into a field of sheep and wait for the other car to pass. I don’t mean to sound all “rah rah America, we’re so much smarter,” but in this country, on a two way road, we would make the road wide enough for two cars.  The great irony here is that it’s not like there was no room to make the roads wider in Ireland.  It’s not like your driving through downtown Manhattan and you think “well, heck.  They couldn’t squeeze in an extra lane, because the Chrysler Building’s right there.”  I mean, on either side of the road are acres of green fields with sheep.  Nobody wants to cover the country with asphalt, but I think making a road wide enough for the minuscule pocket cars that drive on it to not have to risk a head on collision around a blind curve every time they pop out to get a quart of milk is not asking too much. But what do I know? 3. Ice The Irish love their hot tea.  I do too.  I thoroughly enjoyed making a little pot of it every morning.  And honestly, when you wake up in July and it’s 57 degrees and raining, a pot of tea with a little cream and sugar hits the spot. But I also like drinking cold beverages.  I know this is crazy, but I do. In Ireland, this is simply not done. Sure, you can get a coke, but it’s frowned upon.  And Ice?  Ice is available only for keeping fish cold or transporting hearts for transplant.  The Irish really have very few cold beverages available and almost none with ice. I was not surprised that the dorm fridges they had in the home didn’t have ice makers, but they didn’t even have ice cube trays.  It wasn’t even possible to make ice.  On top of that the largest glass they had available was an 8 oz glass. 8ounces?  I can drink 8 ounces in a single gulp.  Now I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a drinker.  I like to drink.  In an average day, I’ll have an orange juice, 3 diet sodas, 3 large glasses of iced tea, 3 cups of coffee, an iced coffee and about a half gallon of ice water. I drink a lot, I don’t know why.  They tell me it will keep me healthy.  And by “they,” I mean Oprah.  Reducing my liquid intake was perhaps my greatest sacrifice while abroad.  With only access to these little sipping cups my drinking was reduced to a few sips here and there.  It was hard, but somehow I survived, and it is good to be back in the USA where an Irish large coke at McDonalds is literally the smallest size we offer.  I like living in a place where it is an option to get a cup of soda at the gas station in the half gallon size. We may be gluttonous, but we are a well-hydrated people and that should keep us dominant for some time to come. 4. My Iphone I am fully aware that saying I missed my Iphone makes me a total dweeb.  However, I really, really, really missed it.  We would be driving somewhere and I would want to text someone, or check my email, or use google maps to find the nearest playground and I would have to think to myself: “ok, you can do that, but it will cost you a hundred million dollars in international roaming charges.” So for two weeks I carried my phone with me, like a security blanket, knowing that if I had to use it, it was there, but that I really shouldn’t.  It wasn’t Sophie’s choice, but it may have been, say, Agnes’ choice. The other half of my Iphone covetousness was that I also really missed my music.  I have about 1,000 CDs at home, ranging from blues, to opera, to folk, to rock, to pop, to whatever kind of music They Might Be Giants is. The Irish had about 20 CDs and they were all Romance compilations, movie soundtracks and gaelic europop. Not a single Tina Turner disc in the mix. So, I spent two weeks driving around Ireland either listening to old Phil Collins love songs or whatever top 10 syrupy adult Irish Contemporary stuff was on the radio, punctuated by endless news stories about the grain commission and the electricians strike. Boy, what I wouldn’t have paid for a little Private Dancer around day 6. 5. Chipotle Ireland has lots of wonderful things to offer.  A cheap lunch and a decent Mexican burrito do not appear to be among them. I can’t speak to the why of this issue, but there are no half decent places to go for a cheap lunch in Ireland.  You can go to a pub for a 10 Euro ($14) lunch special, but there’s no where to go for a decent sandwich for $5. And I must admit, I have grown sadly addicted to the Big Burrito that Chipotle purveys with such panache.  As our plane landed back in the USA, I have to admit I was very excited about getting a decent iced coffee and getting a big burrito at Chipotle.  Unfortunately we were in the crappy Philadelphia airport so I had to settle for a re-warmed slice of pizza at Sbarros.  Just kill me now. 6. My car It’s funny, while I was in Ireland, I didn’t really think much about our minivan.  I enjoyed driving a stick shift, and I was very happy that our car was not one millimeter wider than it had to be as I tried to navigate the roads that were clearly designed for sheep carts, but when we arrived back into the muggy traffic of DC and I slipped back into the driver’s seat of our Toytoa Sienna, it was like heaven. After two weeks of driving a tiny 4 cylinder stick shift over rocky, bumpy, ill maintained roads, it was like being transported into a Hawaiian spa as I pulled the minivan out of the parking space, gliding on a cloud.  As we drove home it felt like I was driving a Mercedes.  We floated along, air conditioning humming, the kids silently watching a video, my own music playing through the speakers. If this is American decadence, sign me up. 7. Friends Yeah, it’s cornball, but I missed my friends.  Most of them are relatively nice people who I enjoy hanging out with, so it was nice to be back around them.  Except for the ones who don’t read my blog.  They are dead to me. 8. Decent TV I know, I know, we Americans are such terrible people.  We love terrible things, like TV and guns and deep fried oreos. Why don’t we just read a book? I don’t know.  And as much as I like to read, I do enjoy some good TV…. and that is not something the Irish have. The Irish have four channels.  One shows old American TV shows in Gaelic, “Slainte Matlock!” One shows weird produced locally stuff with the production values of a high school media center and with topics like “The World’s Oldest Mums.”  The other channel shows British shows, but not the good stuff, and the other one shows American movies and TV shows from a few years ago. “Later tonight:  the premiere of Lethal Weapon 3!  But first, Locke finally discovers what’s in the hatch on the season finale of Lost!” 9. Meals not accompanied by potatoes So, a hundred and fifty years ago, or so, all the potatoes got the “blight” and died.  (No one ever says what “the blight” was, it’s just mentioned in a whisper, as if it’s too terrible to say out loud – the potato disease that must not be named) and all the Irish moved to Boston. It was very sad. I half expected the Irish to be angry at the potato.  I mean 2 million people either died or left the country.  I thought, perhaps, the potato would be verboten. Boy was I wrong.  I don’t think I had a single meal that didn’t have a potato in it.  Steaks came with French fries, ground beef had mashed potatoes on top, Chips were ubiquitous and in flavors that seemed questionable (Buffalo?).  Now, don’t get me wrong, I love potatoes, in just about any form you can concoct, but after two weeks, I wanted a stalk of broccoli more than I’ve ever wanted one in my life. It just got to be too much.  What have they got against the green bean?  Give a carrot a chance!  What about watermelon or squash?  Heck, Id’ve settled for a baked sweet potato.  I’m not picky. Variety may be the spice of life, but to the Irish, a Guinness and some fries are all the variety they need. 10. My Own bed There are pleasures big and small about coming home. But, perhaps, no pleasure is as pleasurable as sinking into your very own bed once more. The bed we had in Ireland was nice.  It’s probably nicer than our own bed which is nothing more than an old mattress and box springs lying on those cheap rail things they sell to college students and newly weds.  There is no head board, no down comforter, no magic button that allows me to find my perfect sleep number.  It’s just a cheap, old bed with an aging, limp pillow. But, it’s my cheap, old bed, and my aging, limp pillow. And at the end of a 2 hour drive to the airport, three more hours worth of security and immigration lines, an 8 hour flight, a 4 hour layover and another three hours of flight, luggage collection, driving home and putting kids to bed, you better believe I was ready for nothing more in the world than to lie down and fall asleep in my own bed. And eat a big burrito. God Bless the USA. Posted Jul 23 2009, 07:54 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: travel, Vacations, Better off Dad, Ireland [Edit Tags]

• Ten Things I’ll Miss from Ireland

  So, I’m sure I could prattle on about our trip to Lucky Charms Land for another week or so, but my fear is that I am starting to get boring.  I am afraid that my blog is starting to resemble your grandparents’ slide show from their 1986 trip to the Grand Canyon:  “And here we have another shot of the canyon.  And here is Paco, the donkey that took us down into the canyon.  And here is Paco walking in the canyon.  And here is another shot of the canyon.  And here is Paco relieving himself in the…..” So, it’s time to wrap things up so I can start boring you with things about the U.S. all over again.  Suffice to say, the rest of our trip included visits to more castles, wandering in more verdant fields, a few more pubs, riding a horse, griping about the tiny roads Blah, blah, blah. So instead, I’m going to leave you with the following: a list of 10 things I am going to miss about dear old Ireland. (P.S.  It is apparently time for me to get a new keyboard. As I type, the keyboard keeps inserting random \ and the letter b.  So, the last four words of my previous sentence read like this:  “babout dear\ old Ire\land”  I will try to correct this absurdity as I go, but if you see any typos today, we’re blaming it on my possessed keyboard.) So, without further ado: Things I miss about Ireland 1. The Accent Is there anything in the world better than listening to an Irish accent?  With the guys, you just want to drag them to a pub and let them tell you stories until the wee hours of the morning.  And with the girls you want to take them behind a hedgerow and kiss them until their freckles blush. You will be pleased to know that I didn’t do either of these things, although the temptation was there.  What I did do was spend most of the trip talking in an Irish accent.  Not in public, mind you, but in the car, or to the kids or to my wife, or to myself. Everyone loved it! Well, maybe not everyone.  My wife, Sarah, was somewhat derisive.  She updated her facebook page with this statement: “My husband's Irish accent keeps switching between sounding like the Lucky Charms leprachaun, Groundskeeper Willie, and Mrs. Doubtfire.” Ha, ha. What she doesn’t understand is that of course my accent changes.  I’m using different accents to mock different kinds of people.  If I were to use the same accent to mock the weather forecaster as I did to mock the checkout lady, then THAT would be racist!  Assuming that everyone you’re making fun of uses the same outlandish Irish accent would be very offensive, which is why I use a variety of outlandish accents to mock different people. Sheesh! 2. The Scenery Oh, it’s beautiful in Ireland and a very different kind of beauty than we have here.  They’ve cut down just about every single tree on that island and work hard to make sure they don’t grow back.  Many of the sheep farmers are subsidized by the government to ensure that the sheep will continue to graze and maintain the wide green fields that are so iconically Irish. It’s odd.  A vast treeless landscape doesn’t sound all that appealing, but somehow it is. It’s funny how, in the US, we fight to protect our trees and forests and demand that when a tree is cut that another one be planted.  Our country (large portions of the west excepted) is nothing but dense foliage, forests and wooded hillsides.  It’s interesting to see what different cultures value and protect.  I, for one, love our forests, but I sure did enjoy spending a couple of weeks driving through those green fields separated only by ancient stone walls. 3. The Pubs In Ireland, a pub (at least according to my guide book – which would never ever lie or exaggerate) is the center of the town social scene.  It is where men and women and families gather to eat, drink, talk, dance, and watch sports.  And believe it or not, this seemed to be the case. It was funny because in every town we visited there were a half dozen or so pubs that looked exactly like the stereotype of an Irish pub that I had in my mind.  They all had long wooden bars, signs for Guinness everywhere and crusty old Irishman belly to the bar nursing a pint.  I had assumed that this was just marketing for the tourists, like those red phone booths in London, but no.  These are the real deal. In the pubs we had some wonderfully bad for you food (fish deep fried in a batter of beer anyone?), heard some great music and enjoyed a pint or two ourselves.  We watched old local couples dance to the live music on Saturday night and learned that if a Guinness has been poured properly you should be able to carve your initials in the foam and they will still be there when you take your last sip. We don’t really have anything similar to a pub in America.  The closest thing we have is an Applebees.  And that’s like saying the closest thing you have to a Ferrari is a Ford Fiesta. 4. The Aisle of cheese When you go into a grocery store in Ireland, they have many of the same things we do: an aisle of chips, an aisle of sodas, an aisle of frozen foods.  But where we have a sorry cheese selection that includes a pack of Kraft singles, a block of bright orange mild cheddar and a pack of Swiss cheese for the “fancy people,” they have an entire aisle of decadent cheeses to choose from.  They must have 20 different varieties of cheddar alone for you to indulge in.  Every time I went to the store I bought new cheeses to sample and then we would go home and I would stay up late clogging my arteries with unusual and decadent flavors and varieties.  It was truly heaven for a fromagaphile such as myself. 5. The Old things We don’t really have old things in the U.S.  We have houses that are a hundred years old and are therefore protected by the government and we have twinkies that are still good after 5 years, but we don’t really have old stuff (Larry King excepted). But in Ireland I stepped into a 1200 year old church and walked around a 2,000 year old stone fort and visited a stone burial site that was over 5,000 years old 5,000 years old!  That’s just a few hundred years after creationist say that the world began (presumably giving conclusive evidence that the Garden of Eden was in Ireland!) I was just constantly amazed at the history of the castles and forts and graves and churches and sites we visited. 6. The Temperature The highest temperature we had while in Ireland was about 72 and most of the time the temperature was in the mid 60s.  For me, this is just about perfect - 60s and 70s with a nice breeze.  We wore jeans and a short sleeved shirt every day.  That’s about my ideal temperature – not too hot, not too cold. Now, granted, it rained almost every day and the sun was only a faint memory, but as far as temperature?  You can’t beat it. 7. The Wacky Playgrounds Because the Irish are apparently now allowed to sue each other, they all have these bizarrely wonderful and horribly dangerous playgrounds.  There are contraptions that will spin you around as you hang upside down 10 feet off the ground.  And there are merry go rounds that have long been removed from American playgrounds and there are climbing structures that ought to be sponsored by the local orthopedics office.  But boy oh boy did the kids have a good time on these playgrounds of death.  It was so much fun for them to climb and explore on new structures instead of the same handful of slides and ramps that they’re used to.  Sure, they might break an arm, but they’d have a good time doing it! 8. The McDonald’s Fried Apple Pie Again, it’s a simple thing, but isn’t it the simple stuff in life that truly makes life worth living? 9. The Sheep I like sheep. There’s something wonderfully calming about looking out on a giant green hillside covered with little fluffy white dots grazing slowly along.  There’s something soul lifting about waking to the sounds of sheep baaing in the distance.  And there is something immensely satisfying about a leg of lamb roasted to perfection. In my more desperate moments of feeling stressed out and overwhelmed, I fantasize about moving to Vermont, buying a sheep farm and spending my days walking the bucolic hillsides tending to sheep, spending my evenings knitting by the fireside and, of course, that would be a great place to go falconing as well. When I think back on our trip one of the things I remember the most is the omnipresence of sheep everywhere we went.  We woke to their bleating in the morning and there was hardly a church, ruin, or castle we visited that didn’t have sheep roaming nearby.  I will miss them as the furry, not particularly smart pets / dinners that I may never have back home. 10. My family It’s corny, but the thing I’ll probably miss most about Ireland is my family. I’m a stay at home dad, so I see the kids plenty, but my wife went back to work the day we returned and she often works long, hard days, and all too often our weekends are busier than we like. So, I think the thing I’ll miss the most about our trip to what is lovingly referred to as “East Boston” is having the chance to spend two uninterrupted weeks together as a family.  We are a different, better group when all of us are present and I will miss the decadence of having such a long, extended time to be with one another. And I know, that’s pretty cheesy.  But as I already stated in # 4, I do love me some cheese. Posted Jul 22 2009, 07:43 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Vacations, Better off Dad, Sarah, Ireland [Edit Tags]

• Ireland Day 7 - Romance, Raptors and a Little more Romance

  The fifth of July was our anniversary.  We don’t tend to make a huge deal of our anniversary.  We’ve never really exchanged gifts or anything.  Normally, if we had been home, we might have gotten a sitter and gone out for a nice dinner at Chili’s.  Or perhaps used our anniversary as an excuse to buy a new end table or something like that.  But we were not at home, we were in Ireland.  And if we were to spend our anniversary at an Olive Garden in Killarney, that would be very depressing.  Especially since it was our 12th anniversary.  (That’s the moist towelette anniversary!) Since my parents were in town I arranged for them to watch the kids and planned an outing for Sarah and I.  After breakfast, I went upstairs and told her to pack a bag and get in the car, because we were going on an adventure! The last time I did this, we went to Texas, so I know she was excited.  (hmmm, I hope she hadn’t been secretly hoping that we would go to Texas….). So, we got into the Renault Scenic (known as the “most romantic” of tiny 4 cylinder sub-compacts) and took off.  We were heading north up past Galway, and we were going to pass the home of W.B. Yeats.  I thought it might be nice to stop by and see it.  Now, I can’t actually remember anything about Yeats.  For instance, I had no idea he was Irish.  But I thought it seemed nice.  And if my memory served me well, he wrote romantical bits of poetry, and I thought if I read some to Sarah, she would swoon.  “Oh Roses are red And air quotes are parentheticals Why don’t you come over here And kiss me with your eyes closed” Actually, Sarah’s not really the swooning type.  She’s more the “I think you pronounced ‘parenthetical’ with the emphasis on the wrong syllable’ type.”  But still, it might be fun. So, we arrived at Yeats house, but it wasn’t clear where the house was, so I went up to a woman who was unloading a horse to ask her.  As I walked up to her, she said, “Oh Richard!  It’s so good to see you, it’s been a long time.” “Uh….,”  I said, trying to decide whether the woman was confused, or crazy, or if I had at some point in my life pretended to be a man named Richard and had just forgotten. “Yes,” she continued, “I didn’t recognize you with the beard.  You must have just…..” and it was at this point that she began to realize that the blank look on my face indicated that I had no idea what the heck she was talking about.  She apologized profusely and we both laughed and then I asked her about the Yeats home.  She said, that, yes, it was right down the road and that we really ought to take the little path and walk out to see the mill. “It’s the same mill that he wrote about in all of his poetry! It’s really quite lovely,”  she said. “Yes,” I said slowly.  “The mill…. In his poetry…. Of course… that mill.  How could anyone forget the famous mill in all of the Yeats poetry that I have of course memorized.” I had no idea what she was talking about.  I only remember about 5 poems by heart and two of them are limericks.  I couldn’t remember a single thing that Yeats wrote.  All I knew was that he was a poet, that I have some recollection of liking him, and that I remember he was in my Freshman Anthology of English Literature. The Yeats’ home turned out to be an old tower with a cottage attached to it.  On the tower was a stone with this inscription: “I the Poet William Yeats with old millboards and sea-green slates and smith work from the Gort forge Restored this tower for my wife George And may these characters remain When all is ruin once again.” I turned to Sarah, “You never restored a tower for me.” She replied, “maybe you should have married a woman named George.” Hmmmm.  She was right.  It seemed like a fair trade off. Anyway, the Yeats tower was closed because it was Sunday and apparently the whole world’s economy is in the pits and so Ireland is cutting services such as letting ignorant Americans tour Yeats’ home on a Sunday. So we walked out to the mill, which was indeed lovely.  It, of course, didn’t mean anything to me, but I figured that one day I might be sitting around reading a Yeats poem about a mill and I would casually say, “oh yes, I’ve been to that mill.  It IS quite ‘effervescent of the towering green.’” Then some old guy with wild unkempt hair, a giant bushy beard and dark beady eyes came out of the woods behind us.  I decided that he was either a Yeats scholar, or a serial killer.  It had never occurred to me how similar these two types were, but it was certain that he was one or the other and since it is virtually impossible to distinguish between Yeats scholars and serial killers, we decided to head to the car. Don’t believe me?  Check out this Yeats Scholar.  Or is it a mug shot? http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth199 So, we were once again on our way toward our mystery destination.  We stopped for lunch at a pub and I discovered something peculiar about Ireland:  There are pubs that are purely bars, filled with drunken hooligans drinking away their families grocery money before they head home to pass out in the living room and there are pubs that have menus and serve fish and chips and shepherd’s pie and Guinness stew and the like.  The problem is that these two kinds of pubs look IDENTICAL from the outside.  I’m sure the Irish have some kind of uncanny ability to distinguish which pub is which, but to the untrained American eye, they both seem pretty darn similar.  There is one sure way of figuring it out though.  If you open the door to the pub and 15 heads all wobble in your direction and stare at you with glassy, suspicious eyes – this is not the pub you want to be in. If, on the other hand, you open the door and there are elderly couples having lunch and watching weird Irish sports on the telly and no one even notices you came in, then this is a perfectly lovely place to have lunch. After a couple instances of peeking in the wrong kind of pub, we did find the nice welcoming pub and went inside.  While we had lunch, we watched Gaelic Football, which is essentially a combination of football, soccer, rugby, and basketball.  From the best I could tell, the main rule was “get the ball in the net.”  Other than that, it appeared to be a free for all.  They used a soccer ball, but they could kick it or catch it or carry it and then occasionally they had to pause and dribble it like a basketball.  They also seemed to be allowed to tackle each other however they wanted to.  So there was a lot of grabbing someone by the collar of their shirt and then swinging them to the ground like a roped calf. Charming sport. We appeared to be in the middle of the regional finals and people were very excited - not sure about which team exactly - but very excited nonetheless. After lunch we headed a short ways up the road to our final destination – a castle.  That’s right folks, we were staying at a castle.  And I don’t mean one like that “Knight’s Inn” on I-40 outside of Knoxville, I mean a real bonafide castle.  It was built in the 1200s by some King or Duke or Earl or something (maybe even the Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl…) and then later was owned by the Guinness family and then it became a hotel.  We knew it was fancy when the receptionist asked if we’d like for her to take us on a tour of the castle.  Nobody ever asks if you’d like to receive a tour of the Holiday Inn Express.  And then she led us to our lovely room on the top floor of the “old part” of the castle.  I like the fact that in America “old part” would mean, say, 100 years ago or so, while, in Ireland, “old part” means “before we even knew your continent existed.” Sarah started to unpack, but I told her that we didn’t have time to dilly nor dally, because we had falconry lessons. I dare say, she had the same reaction you just did. What? We headed out of the castle and down a beautifully manicured path toward the “Irish School of Falconry” for our lesson. I know that the 12th anniversary is not traditionally the “hunting with birds” anniversary but I figured this was something that may not be available to us in Maryland. Well, for the next hour and a half we walked through the fields and woods hunting with our hawks.  They would perch on our arms and then we would send them off to perch in a tree and wait for a tasty morsel to run across their path.  Sure, it was raining a little, but rain can not dampen the heart of a true falconer. I have to say, it was the coolest thing I have ever done in my life. Sarah enjoyed herself, but I came back hooked.  I have already asked for a falcon for Christmas.  Sarah says that this is silly, but I have already pointed out many handy uses.  For instance, yesterday we looked out our window and saw that a small mouse was running across our pool cover.  I had to go outside, walk all the way down to the pool and get the net and try to scoop him up.  If I had a falcon, I could have just stood on the deck and sent him down there. Think how much time a falcon would save! Plus, it would be a real moneymaker. Lots of suburban families are deeply frustrated by all of the squirrels that keep attacking their bird feeders and eating all of their seed.  Squirrels are a giant pain and virtually impossible to get rid of. But not for a falconer!  I could hire myself out on a “per-squirrel” basis to rid homes of squirrels through natural eco-friendly means. I think it’s big business!  I mean,  in a few years I could have a fleet of “Marcus’ Anti-Varmint Falconry Vans” prowling the DC Metro region. You know how all of the Best Buy “geek squad” guys only drive VW bugs? We would only drive 1978 Firebirds. I mean who WOULDN’T want to give me a small business loan to start that up? Anyway, after falconing (the sport of Kings! … and tourists) we headed back to our castle where we had a lovely dinner and then journeyed into town to hear some traditional Irish music at the pub.  Then we went back to the castle and lounged in the piano bar where an old man sang us a song because we looked so romantic together and stuff (unlike the couple from Jersey who went up to put their kids to bed and then came back downstairs to sit on opposite couches – ouch!) It was a perfectly romantic evening, and then, when the clock struck midnight and the piano player sang his last tune, we returned to our room for a night of…. Well, none of your business really. Let’s just say we missed watching whoever won the Gaelic Football championship.  It was just a night dreaming of sweet, sweet love… …… and falcons. Posted Jul 20 2009, 05:43 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Vacations, Better off Dad, Sarah, Ireland, romance [Edit Tags]

• Ireland Day 6 – Patriotism, Parapets and Penicillin

  It was the 4th of July. The day when all good Americans celebrate their country by eating hot dogs  and watermelon and then attending parades where old men in funny hats drive little tiny cars around in circles and then we finish off our day by staring in awe as we shoot mini explosions into the sky. God Bless America. But what is one to do, if he is stranded so far from his homeland in a place that just refers to “THE FOURTH OF JULY!” as “July the 4th.” Well, luckily, we were in Ireland instead of England.  It’s always awkward being in England on the 4th of July.  It’s sort of like running into an ex-girlfriend at your wedding. “Hey…. So…. What’s up?  How…. uh…. have you been since, well…..you know.” Luckily we were in Ireland.  A fellow fighter who threw off the shackles of their imperialist overlords…..well mostly (and not till 1921 – Good Grief, take your time why don’t ya)  It would sort of be like if after the Revolutionary War, England still controlled everything from Pennsylvania north.  But still, they had tried and isn’t that what counts? I think it must be because of that commonality – the fact that we had both gained our freedom from the Brits that we actually discovered that the Irish were having a party just for us Yanks.  We were searching around on the web for what to do and we discovered that Blarney Castle was having a “4th of July Celebration!” There was going to be “American Footballers” and “barbeque” and a “moonbounce,” - all things that Americans love.   Well, there really was no decision to make.  You mean we could visit a castle, kiss the blarney stone AND see “American Footballers?”  How could we pass that up? When we arrived, the party was already in full swing.  There was a beer tent set up that sold Guinness AND Budweiser (the King of Beers!).  There was a barbeque tent that had “hamburgers,” “Bratwurst with Parsnip chips” and “sweet crepes.” All the things we Americans enjoy! And there were indeed “American Footballers” and by “American Footballers” I mean short, beefy Irish chaps playing flag football. It was very cute though, because they spent the time teaching bemused Irish children how to play “American football.”  We watched for awhile.  I didn’t see a single touchdown but they scored 32 points off of punting. After our delicious meal of parsnip crisps (truly better than they sound….. but not much) we headed off to tour the castle.  We had made our way into the castle and were about to start climbing the rickety stairs up to the blarney stone when a tour group of 20 or so obnoxious Italian teenagers pushed past us, ignoring everything about the castle on their way up to the stone.  We stepped aside to let them pass, but they just kept coming.  We stood there for several minutes until a couple hundred or so teenagers had swarmed past and created a line that circled from the very top of the castle (where the stone was) all the way to the basement (where we were).   We stared for a minute and then decided to come back later.  It is difficult enough traveling with three kids without standing in line for an hour with teenagers. So we went out to the Castle gardens and toured things such as the “poison garden,” “the witch’s kitchen,” “The fairy garden,” “the wishing steps” and a bunch of other nonsense they made up for the tourists, But it was very pretty.  And after we had killed about an hour, we headed back to the castle to once again tour the building and kiss the magical stone. Now let’s take a moment and pause.  What exactly did you think the Blarney stone did?  Think for a moment. I guess I thought it gave you good luck… you know, the luck of the Irish (although good gravy!  You look back at their history and it’s not exactly brimming with “luck.”  That’s sort of like saying that if you kiss the Berlin Wall you get the humor of the Germans) It turns out that the stone actually gives you the “gift of gab.”  You’re supposed to be able to talk well after kissing it. Oh. Is it ungrateful of me if I thought to myself “big deal?” We did ask the guy working there if it works in reverse.  For instance, if you already talk too much, will kissing it make you stop?  He said, no, so we told Audra she couldn’t kiss it.  We weren’t taking any chances with the rock making her talk any more than she already does.  We did think of dangling our 1 year old who has speech delays upside down and making him kiss the stone, but that seemed a little dangerous. One of the interesting thing about Blarney castle is that nobody has done anything to it.  It is probably one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country with thousands of people streaming through a day, and yet they have done NOTHING to the site.  You walk into one of the small rooms that was a bedroom 500 years ago and there is literal rubble on the floor, little stones that used to be part of the ceiling or floor, or whatnot, are just scattered all over the ground.  Now, I didn’t exactly expect (or want) them to restore the castle to its original state, but I did think that maybe they could have swept up a little. The other thing I noticed about Blarney, and Ireland in general is that there must not be an easy way to sue people, because this castle was one of the most dangerous places I’ve ever been and there are no guard rails or sticky things put on the stairs to help you grip them, or emergency fire lights imbedded in the old stone work.  No, It’s just half broken steps circling upward without a handrail leading to a parapet with openings at waist level on both sides that plummet down to your death. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, necessarily, but in America the whole castle would have been plastered with “warning” signs and “If you are old, pregnant, or have a heart condition” signs and hand rails and glass panes at the top to keep people from falling and … heck, the whole thing would have been declared unsafe, and people would have only been allowed to come within 50 feet to take photos and the stone itself would have been removed and put in a glass case where you could “virtually” kiss it through a dental dam that was sprayed with purel after each kiss by some embittered security guard. But not in Ireland! You climb the same rickety steps as they have done for hundreds of years and then walk across the precarious parapet to where the stone is and then there is a man there to hold you as you lie down on your back, grab some rails behind your head and pull yourself backward and down to kiss a stone as the man holds on to your legs to keep you from falling through the wide bars that are the only thing that separates you from the ground 100 feet below. So, did we do it?  Did we risk life and limb to kiss an old rock? Heck yeah we did! Ironically, the week before we left on this trip I read an article by some health magazine stating that the Blarney stone was the most disease ridden artifact in the world (the Portland wall of used chewing gum coming in second – 100% true!) I have to admit that as I walked up to the stone and then was dangling upside down about to kiss it, I couldn’t help but think about those hundreds of skanky Italian teenagers who had all just kissed the stone.  And for the rest of the day, I walked around sure that my upper lip was tingling, probably from some kind of Italian mouth herpes pig flu or something. I was telling Sarah about this and she pointed out that she had kissed the stone after me and that she was recovering from strep.  Somehow this didn’t make me feel any better.  I immediately went out and bought a coke. I figured that if anything could kill those crazy germs on my lip, it would be a good old American acidic Coca Cola. I don’t know if that is what did the trick or not, but I will say, I have not developed any kind of blarney stone mouth disease… so far. As far as the gift of gab?  It’s a little harder to say.  I did just write 4 pages about the Blarney stone.  So judge for yourself. Posted Jul 16 2009, 05:55 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Vacations, Audra, Better off Dad, Sarah, Ireland [Edit Tags]

• Ireland Day 5 – Sea Mammals, Scenery, and Salvation

  My parents arrived in the land of rainbows and potatoes today. We had some extra room in the house we were swapping and they had a little extra vacation time built up, so we said, why not fly across the Atlantic and visit. They arrived around noon after spending the night before sleeping on the floor of Heathrow airport waiting for their 6:30 am connecting flight.  They were happy to be here, but understandably a little tired.  So, after showers and a short nap we loaded up in our two cars (you didn’t think they were going to fit in our Renault Scenic did you?) and headed for the Dingle Peninsula. The Dingle Peninsula is one of the many little peninsula things sticking out all over Ireland.  Ireland’s kind of like a giant Rorschach blotch and the Dingle Peninsula is on the part of the blotch that makes you think it looks like a butterfly (or a gunshot wound if you’re a sociopath). The little seaside town of Dingle is about 40 minutes away over one of Ireland’s traditional steep, windy, tee-iny little roads (I think the roads were all built by the leprechauns as superhighways, but are just too small for us human types).  Dingle is famous for being cute and for having a dolphin named Fungie. Apparently, there are a number of dolphins around Ireland, but this one dolphin has adopted Dingle and swims into the bay every day and cavorts with the fishermen and follows the boats in and out of the day.  He has become a local celebrity and they have pictures of him all over town, have painted a giant mural of him on the side of a building and they run boat trips for tourists to go out to see Fungie and everybody loves him. This is nice… But I can’t help thinking that maybe there’s something a little wrong with Fungie. Why does he like people so much?  Why doesn’t he hang out with his own kind?  I kind of assume that Fungie is sort of like the Yakov Smirnoff of the dolphin world.  He has abandoned his true heritage to pal around with human boats and entertain them.  He jumps and does flips and otherwise humiliates himself and his dolphin upbringing all for a few rounds of applause from Dingle tourists.  And all the other dolphins hate him for selling them out like this.  Dingle harbor is Fungie’s Branson, Missouri. It’s all very sad.  I’m sure that when that last boat heads into dock every night, poor Fungie is left alone, alienated from the rest of his kind and just lolls about staring at his distant mural on the land he can never touch and tries to keep himself from crying until that first boat heads out into the harbor in the morning and he can, once again, take to the stage and be a star. So, anyway, Dingle has a dolphin.  We didn’t see it, but that’s what they tell us. A friend of mine had told me that his favorite thing about Ireland was going to the Blasket Islands.  These are a handful of small islands a couple of miles off the coast of the Dingle Peninsula.  They used to be inhabited as recently as the 60s but then all the young people discovered that people on the mainland had crazy cool stuff like electricity and heat and they all left, so it was just a couple dozen sad old people walking around an island herding sheep and eating turnips until finally the government said “for crying out loud!  Get off the stupid island!  You can watch Jack Benny over here on the telly!”  And now, you can take a little boat over and tour the Blasket Islands. Ok. So, here’s the question…. Why? I trusted my friend who recommended the island tour, but I couldn’t help think that maybe he was a little nuts.  Why would I want to drag my small children on a rickety boat to travel out to some abandoned island that was so miserable that the government forced people to leave it for their own good. Well, luckily, I ignored all logic and decided to rely on my friend’s recommendation and go anyway. It was fantabulous. There were old abandoned homes to explore, donkeys who followed us along trails, sheep baaing all over the place, seals frolicking in the surf and an island surrounded by cliffs and inlets and crashing waves.  I could have spent all day there, but unfortunately the last boat back to the mainland was at 5:00 and if we didn’t catch that we would have the pleasure of spending all night there, and that sounded less fun. But for reasons, I can’t entirely explain, viewing this abandoned island was one of the highlights of our journey. Which probably explains why I wasn’t very popular in High School. After arriving safely back on the mainland from the Blaskets we hopped back in our mighty touring caravan and headed off for the other most famous sight in the area, the Gallarus Oratory. The what? You might ask. This is a 1200 year old church that was one of the very first in Ireland and what makes it special is that the whole thing was built by laying stones on top of one another.  No mortar, no cement, no super glue, just piling rocks on top of each other and making a building and then you go inside, praise Jesus and hope the whole thing doesn’t collapse on your head. It was amazing.  This tiny building is in the exact same condition as when it was built a millennia ago and yet, if I snuck in there at night, I could take all the rocks off and strew them around and ruin the whole thing.  But for 1200 years, the wind, the rain nor the teenager have displace a single stone.  That and the darn thing is watertight!  We’ve lived in 20 year old houses that weren’t watertight.  I guess I should have just piled a bunch of stones up. But enough history stuff. The cool thing about this ancient church is that it has this tee-iny window on one side and legend has it (and by legend, I mean the guy from Jersey who was touring the place when we got there) that if you can fit through the window, then you will go to heaven. Okey doke. Now, I’m no Biblical scholar, but I don’t remember anything about that in the good book. That being said, who am I to turn down an easy pass to the great hereafter? There was, of course, the matter of would I get stuck in the hole and have to die there.   Which I assume would put me into purgatory, which I’ve always assumed was a lot like a waiting room at the doctor’s office in Akron and I didn’t really want to do that.  But the Jersey guy had gotten through and he was considerably heftier than I was, so I decided to give it a shot.  I hoisted myself up and with some amount of twisting and turning and a brief moment of claustrophobia where I thought I might have to live forever part way in a thousand year old wondow, I slid through, thus saving my immotal soul. With this level of confidence, suddenly everyone wanted to go through.  Audra and Asher slid through no problem.  Micah wasn’t so sure, but we decided it was better to send him through now, while he was small, just in case he plumped up in his old age.  My mom was determined to make it as well and while we have some awkward photos of me, hand on buttock, shoving her up toward the hole, they won’t be shown here.  Sarah was last to go and said she was concerned that she might, too, get stuck and have to be read a sustaining book like Pooh, but she also slid through no problem. My dad didn’t want to do it.  So I guess we should pack some barbeque sauce in his coffin when he goes. Well, with 6 out of seven of us going to heaven, we decided to head back to Dingle and grab some dinner - fish and chips of course, I mean this is a fishing town. And as our stomachs marinated in a broth of fried fish and Guinness, we left Dingle and headed home.  On the way out of town, we waved goodbye to Fungie who was somewhere moping around the inlet wondering if he’d made the right choices in life. What a Country! Posted Jul 15 2009, 07:02 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Vacations, Audra, Asher, Better off Dad, Sarah, Ireland [Edit Tags]

• Ireland Day 4 – Commies, Caves and Cathedrals

  When Sarah woke up today, she was ready to admit defeat.   While our daughter, Audra, was completely over her sickness, Sarah was not.  It was time to call the doctor.  She was pretty sure that the fever and intensely painful sore throat were, in fact, strep, and not “just something she ate.”   Unfortunately, our doctor was a couple thousand miles away, so we would have to settle for whatever doctor we could find here in Ireland.  Luckily, our house swap hosts had left a list that included the name of a local clinic.  So, we called them up but they were full of honest hardworking Irish families and didn’t need our dirty American illnesses clogging up their waiting room.  But they gave us the name of another clinic who could take us at 10:00.   So we drove down there and I dropped Sarah off and took the kids somewhere that didn’t have a bunch of sick people trying to avoid small children running around and screaming.   But, I have to admit, I abandoned her with some degree to trepidation.  Oh my, what would it be like?  This was the dreaded…. SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!!!!   I had heard all about this from Rush Limbaugh.  If I remembered correctly, Sarah would wait in line for approximately 5 weeks, be told that her illness was not covered and then leave with a 62% chance of dying within the hour.   And she was so young….   I knew then and there, that this whole healthcare reform thing is crazy.  It’s just like bussing all over again!  Sure, it’s fine for someone else, but all of a sudden when it’s your wife who’s about to go under the knife by a doctor who probably WASN’T EVEN TRAINED IN THE US, it doesn’t seem like such a good idea any more!  Can we have white flight from healthcare reform?  Where would we go?    Oh what had I done, what had I done?   It’s a good thing the pubs open at 10.   No!  No! That’s not the answer.  I decided I needed to go find a playground for the kids and not breathe a word about what happened to Sarah.  They’re too young to know the awful truth.   It took a while to find a  playground.  We had a GPS and I kept driving toward large green areas marked as “park,” only to discover that they are actually huge overgrown fields with barbed wire and debris in them, presumably where the green-trash leprechauns live.   I eventually found someone with kids and asked them where the nearest playground was.  We drove there and parked and just as I had unloaded all of the children and begun walking them toward the park, Sarah texted me and said she was ready to be picked up.   What?   I looked at my watch.  It was 10:40.    Oh NO!  There could only be one explanation!  They had already rejected her treatment as too expensive to cure under their damned Commie medicine guides.    Sarah would die.    Her strep would spread to her cheeks and eyes and before you know it, she would have strep brain and that would be it.  Oh, if only we had never left the sacred borders of our American capitalistic health system.   I picked Sarah up, tears streaming down my eyes and asked her how long.   “24 hours.”   What?  Oh sweet Lord in heaven above don’t take my bride so young! Then she explained that she meant that she was only going to be contagious for 24 hours.  She had already seen the doctor, been diagnosed, gotten a prescription, walked down the street, had the prescription filled and taken the first dose and the whole thing had cost about $60, you know, since we weren’t part of the socialized medicine system.  Othewise, it would have been free.   Oh.   Hmmm, I guess maybe that socialized medicine stuff isn’t as bad as we’ve been told.  I can’t believe that Limbaugh would have lied to me, or possibly had his facts wrong?   Maybe all those people who say the European medical system is so bad are just a bunch of dumb arses?   Surely, not.   Anyway, Sarah was already feeling better.  I asked if she wanted to go home to rest, but she said no, she was ready to go explore all that Ireland had to offer!   Unfortunately, what Audra had to offer at the moment was pouring rain (those isles don’t turn emerald on their own!)   So we looked at our options.  Ireland has a lot to offer: castles, hiking, beautiful vistas, boat trips to abandoned isles, but most of those things are not indoors.  And most of the castles are roofless with giant holes in them.  So we flipped through the 5,000 brochures we had and came across this one indoor activity:   Crag Cave.   So, apparently, it rains a lot in Ireland, the rain soaks into the ground and makes caves through the magic of green clovers yellow stars and, NOW, purple horseshoes!   I know it’s more complicated than that, but I am a simple man, who simply did not do very well in 7th grade physical science.   So, we took the family on the tour of the cave.   There were stalactites and stalagmites and stalagamitetites where the two had grown together like some kind of harlequin romance for rocks.   They also had a rock that people said if you looked at in just the right way and squinted a little and turned your head to the side, kind of looked like the Virgin Mary.   It did not.   It did kind of look like this girl named Mary that I knew in high school, but if the bathroom stalls are to be believed she was not exactly virginal.   Anywho.   The cave was lovely, but even lovelier was the fact that apparently some young enterprising Irish capitalists have discovered that it rains a lot in Ireland.   Who knew?   So, they built a giant indoor playground next to the cave, because if there is one universal truth that crosses all cultural and international borders, it is this:   Parents will pay a lot of money to get their crazy kids out of the house on a rainy day.   So we, like about 400 other Irish mothers ponied up a few bucks to let our kids run and climb and slide and bounce and dive head first into a pit of plastic balls on a dreary rainy day.   Needless to say, the kids had a blast.  And after two hours when the last synapse in my head had ripped in half as a result of the screaming of 1,000 small children, the rain stopped and we walked back outside into the grey but dryish countryside.   Well, it was only 4:00 and the sun wouldn’t set for another 7 hours, so we decided to squeeze in one more activity.  We looked at a map and found that the ruins of Ardfert Friary were not too far away.  So we drove there parked and began to explore.   This was another one of those wonderful ruins where all the state bothers to do is mow the grass and put up a sign that essentially says, “try not to die.”    So, the kids ran and played, climbing over the ruins and exploring the old rooms and doorways, while Sarah and I walked around trying to imagine what it would have been like to be a monk 500 years ago living in a small stone room and walking up and down dark hallways, tilling gardens and spending your leisure time copying the Bible in long hand and trying to resist the temptation to add things:   “11th Commandment:  Thou shalt profess to all that monks are, like, totally awesome!”   After we had climbed, explored and discovered the room where all the local Irish rednecks (green-necks?) get together and drink cans of Carlsberg and throw them on the ground of an 800 year old holy site, we began to walk back toward our car.   As we walked I tried to see if Audra could say the phrase “Ardfert Friary” three times quickly.   Then I made up a little song:   “Ardfert And you’d fert And we’d fert together Ardferting all day long!”   It wasn’t a very good song, but it passed the time as we perambulated.   (that’s an SAT word!)   And then we were back in our mighty Renault Scenic, winding our way home where I would grill a meal of porkchops with Guinness sauce, potatoes and peas, and we would all give thanks for this beautiful country, the beautiful sights and the beauty of socialized medicine.   Posted Jul 14 2009, 05:19 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Vacations, Audra, Better off Dad, Ireland [Edit Tags]

• Ireland Day 3 - Illnesses, Long Walks and a Taste of Home

  So, I woke up today with a sad little surprise.  Sarah, who had not been feeling all that great over the last few days, decided she was down right miserable.  I told her that she should stay home and rest and that I would take the kids somewhere and try to keep them from jumping to their death off a battlement.   I then went downstairs where the kids were playing.  As soon as I walked in the room, Audra told me that she wasn’t feeling well.   I suppose I should have been more sympathetic, but Audra’s a bit of a hypochondriac.    In my entire school career I bet I went to the school nurse twice.  Audra goes every week or so.    Her throat hurts, or her ear hurts, or her head hurts, or she feels funny, or she has an odd feeling about the realistic future of Miley Cyrus once she enters adult hood or…. on and on and on.   So, we don’t tend to jump too high whenever Audra tells us she’s not feeling well.   We do tend to jump a little higher when that complaint about not feeling well is followed by vomiting… which is what she did.    My poor baby went to the bathroom and hurled up all the Tony the Tiger “Frosties” that she had just eaten (really?  “Frosties?”  Are the Irish so turned off by the phrase “Frosted Flakes” that they had to call them “Frosties?”  Is nothing sacred?  We invented the darn stuff for Pete’s Sake!  Why are we giving in to their every whim?)   Well, with my wife ill upstairs and my daughter vomiting downstairs, there was only one thing to do:   Get the hell out of the house!   I put some orange juice by Sarah’s bed.  Put on a video for Audra and gave her a bucket to sit with and then I loaded up the boys and hit the road.   I know this seems cruel, but, honestly, the last thing you want when you’re ill is two little brothers running around screaming and pulling your braids (It’s all so little house on the prairie)   So, Asher, Micah and I loaded into the mighty Renault Scenic (think Ford Fiesta) and headed to Killarney.   The only thing I knew about Killarney is that Bing Crosby sings this song about “Christmas in Killarney”, so truly, all I know is that it is not a town of complete heathens (actually I read a statistic that 90% of the Irish attend Mass…. Well, not so much the Northern Irish, but the rest of them love the Pope big time.)   We arrived in Killarney and headed to the Information Center.    In most European cities there are information offices funded by the state which direct tourists to various activities and answer questions.  In the U.S. we tend to just put a rack of brochures at the entrance to the Denny’s and call it good.   I talked to the guy at the info center and asked if there were any castles.   Well, of course there were.  It’s Ireland!   (side note, while I’m writing this, Audra and Asher are playing dolls in the next room.  I just heard this exchange.  Audra: “So your mom and Dad have just died, so I’m going to be your babysitter forever.  Does that sound like fun?”  Asher: “Yeah!”)   The Info guy said that Ross Castle was very nice and right on the lake with lovely views and that you could just follow this path and walk there and…   “You can walk there?” I asked.  I was surprised, because I had seen it on the map and it seemed kind of far away.   “Oh, yes sir.  It’s only about five kilometres to the….”   Five kilometres!?!   In the U.S., that’s a race!    We train for that!    In the U.S. it’s not considered “walkable” unless it’s shorter than the distance from the parking lot to the Old Country Buffet!   Sheesh.   Well, if we were going to go on that kind of long distance trekking, we were going to need some sustenance.  So we wandered around downtown Killarney looking for somewhere to eat.   Ok, I have a confession to make.  We ate at McDonalds.   I know!  I know!   Now before everyone gets on there all high and mighty “oh, you sad American” soapboxes let me explain. First of all, the Irish seem to have missed the concept of a cheap lunch.  I found almost nothing for less than £10 ($14).  I’m not whining about a lack of fast food, but they seem to have nothing in the category of the half decent but cheap lunch.  Where is the Chipotle or Potbelly or sandwich shop of Ireland?  It doesn’t exist.  Sure you can get a nasty old egg salad sandwich at the gas station, but that’s just gross.   So, as a single dad with two boys, McDonalds was a pretty good solution economically.   Secondly, did I mention that I was in Ireland?  I mean, I understand that you are worthy of ridicule if you go to France and eat at Applebees, but come on, it’s Ireland!  Their main food delicacies are fried fish and hamburger meat with mashed potatoes on top!  I’m not exactly passing up a culinary masterpiece here.   And thirdly (and this is where the shame comes in).  I always crave to go to McDonalds in Europe, because they still have the real fried apple pie.   Do you remember that?  Back in the 80s before we Americans got all health conscious (I know!) and MickeyDs switched from fried pies to those nasty cardboard baked pies?  Remember?   Oh, I loved those fried apple pies with their flaky crust and hot filling.  Mmmmmm.   Well, guess what!  They still have them outside of the US!  So, I specifically sought out a McDonalds just so I could once again savor that crunchy sweet taste of my youth!   Plus, it’s the only restuarant in the country that puts ice in the cokes.  It truly is a magical place.   Anyway,   After lunch I loaded the boys in the stroller and started strolling toward the castle.  It really was a lovely walk.  There were fields and a little stream and horse drawn carts passing us.  It was kind of nice that there were no cars, even if this was a long frickin path.   It was nice to talk to the boys as we walked and to see their excitement whenever they heard the clip clop clopping of hooves behind us.  And after an hour or so of walking, we finally arrived at the castle.    It was beautiful, standing there across a little bridge, looking strong and foreboding against the lake, right across from the …. CAR PARK?!? You mean we could have driven!?!    You know, I feel like that’s the kind of thing the information guy could have mentioned.  I mean, I’m standing there in the info center trying to wrangle a three year old and a one year old.  I don’t think it would have been out of line for the guy to mention that in addition to the “lovely five kilometre walk” I could also have driven there in a couple of minutes.   (sigh)   So, we parked the stroller and went in to the castle and bought a ticket for the tour.  This was a fancy castle with a guide and everything, not like one of those sad neglected heaps out in the bog.   As it turns out, though, guided tours aren’t so great for small children, because they include lots of times where soft spoken thirty year olds working on their post doc in history wax philosophically about the various processes of feces removal and dispersal from a fifteenth century castle and the ….   Whatever.    I was just trying to keep the boys from squeezing through the stone windows or wearing the 800 year old tapestries as capes and running around the castle yelling “Superman!”   But we managed to get through the tour and the boys did pretty well and none of us broke a leg on the tiny stone circular staircases (Did you know that these medieval castles were built with “trip stairs?”  The stairs were crafted at varying heights so that if invading Vikings were charging up the stairs to slaughter everyone they would trip and hurt their knee….. This turns out to still be a very effective design feature.  It’s a good thing that the invading vikings never had to try to attack while holding a squirmy 1 year old on their hip.  It’s very tricky.)   After the castle tour we went out and began the long walk home.  As I was leaving, it started to sprinkle and I thought about the 5 kilometer walk back to our car.  I looked over and saw all of the old horse carts lined up.  I went over and asked how much to get a ride back to town and this crusty old guy came up and said, “Ay, for you and the wee ones it’ll be twenty euro.”   I said, “Well, for that much, I think I’ll just walk.” And I left.   I really meant it.  I wasn’t trying to bargain, I jus thought that seemed a little steep.  But then, behind me I hear, “Uh, sir!  Sir!  How about 15?”   Honestly, I was thinking more like 10, but that just seemed rude, so we loaded everyone up and began trot trotting back into town.   Unfortunately, by this time, Micah and Asher were both exhausted.  Asher just sat in his seat looking shell shocked and Micah just clung to me for dear life as we bounced up and down.  I, however, thoroughly enjoyed the trip.  This was truly how people would have travelled back in the seventies or whenever before cars were introduced to the Irish.  How quaint.  I figured I would ask the driver about the area and hear tales of suffering and woe and dancing and drink, all delivered in his thick, Guinness soaked brogue.   And then, from somewhere, I heard the theme song to Hawaii 5-0 and the next thing I knew my cart driver was talking on his cell phone. Somehow the mystery was gone.   But we got to the car before the rain really started to fall and a few minutes later we were hurtling home on the 5 foot wide roads, dodging tractors and animals like an old pro.   I arrived home to find that neither of my patients was significantly better, so I made the boys sandwiches, and put them to bed.  Then I hooked up the Wii that was at the house and raced little go-carts with Audra for a while and then put her to bed.  Then I ate a plate of leftover spaghetti and watched an episode of survivor dubbed in Gaelic.    Not a bad end to not a bad day.  The only thing that would have made it better was a pint of Guinness ….. and maybe a fried apple pie.   Posted Jul 10 2009, 01:42 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Vacations, Audra, Asher, Better off Dad, Micah, Sarah, Ireland [Edit Tags]

• Ireland Day 2 - A Castle, a Windmill and a Famine

  Ok, so we didn't exactly adjust to the whole time change thing right away. This was somewhat indicated by the fact that we all slept till about 11:00. I mean, I know it's a vacation, but we're not teenagers. But eventually we managed to rouse ourselves and had a delicious breakfast of Golden Nuggets and Cheerios (Do you ever worry that the British think we are mocking them with the cereal? It would be like if they had a cereal called "Hey Y'all.") By now, the day was half gone and unlike the beautiful sunny weather that we had managed to sleep through the day before, we now were looking out at a dreary drizzle. We decided to stay close on our first day. So we looked through our guidebooks and picked out a castle to go see. That's what's great about Ireland, they have castles all over the place. They have big castles and small castles and well preserved castles and castles that look like they are just a couple of rocks away from crumbling into a pile. Castle castle castle. Heck, half the castles aren't even in the guidebook, you'll just be driving along and pass a tower. No sign, no marker. No giant billboard saying "COME VISIT THE AMAZING CASTLE OF LORD SEAMUS O'DOOLEY!" Nope. Just a tower in the middle of a field with sheep grazing around it. So we picked out a castle and headed up toward it. On our drive in from he airport, we had been mainly on the highways so hadn't gotten the fulll effect of Ireland's country roads. Well... roads might be a strong word for what they have. Ireland's secondary roads are about the width of 1 and 1/2 cars and have 10 foot hedge rows on either side. And they curve and wind as if they had been laid out by a drunken .... oh, let's say a drunken German, since we're , you know, in Ireland now..... So, you're traveling along (speed limit for these roads is often around 65 mph.) and it's just fine as long as the only one on the road is you. Then you can just barrel along on these quaint little roads which are choc-full of blind curves (thank you 10 foot hedgerows) and there is no problem. It's a fun little trip! The difficulty is that other people DO drive on these roads and that complicates matters considerably. If you can see another car coming, it's not a big deal. You just slam on the brakes, drive your car half way into the hedgerows and pray to sweet Jesus above as the other car barrels by you at top speed, inches away from your mirror. (This explains why every hedgerow has a small line of indention at car mirror height running through the middle of it) Truly, no big deal. After the first four or five incidents, you hardly even pray any more. The problem is that, quite often, you can't see the car coming. The hedgerows and curves are such that you often can't see the car until it is part way imbedded into your drive shaft, so I have taken to rolling down the window and listening for cars as we drive on the roads. This is less effective than you might think. I am also very fortunate because Sarah appears to have an invisible brake pedal on her side of the car that she uses frwquently, and I believe this has saved us from possible death a number of times. So, after several mild coronary attacks, we arrived at this massive castle out in the middle of nowhere. It appeared to have been a massive single tower sitting in the middle of the bog, except that the front part of the tower had a giant gaping hole as if a series of flaming balls had been catapulted into it. ( I wonder how that happened). We parked next to what I am pretty sure was a gypsy caravan (hide the children!) and walked toward the castle. We looked around for somewhere to pay, but there wasn't any. In fact the whole thing was complerely unattended. It's just sitting there in the middle of the bog waiting for tourists to visit, or teenagers to break in and drink cans of Budweiser. That's right. In Ireland they have so many castles they can't even bother to take care of them all. Some of them they just put a sign in front of and say "go at it. Nobody's destroyed this building in 1,000 years, I don't reckon you're going to do much harm either." So, we went inside and climbed all over that sucker. Here's another thing about Ireland. They clearly don't have a lot of lawsuits, becuase safety seems to be sort of a secondary concern. There's this massive castle that has had no significant improvements in 1,000 years or so. There are steps that are crumbling away, no hand rail any where, and any number of places where a slight slip would get you a free trip to an Irish hospital or graveyard (at least they would probably sing "Danny Boy" at your funeral!) In one way, it was totally awesome. I loved that there was not someone telling us to "not climb that" or "don't touch this!" You could touch whatever the heck you wanted to and climb anything you liked. You could also die a sudden and painful death falling 50 feet onto a stone floor. Needless to say, we spent lots of time holding very tight onto the children and telling them to "not climb that" or "don't touch this!" We had a terrific time wandering around the completely unmarked ruins guessing what might have been here and acting out various scenes from Camelot or Beauty and the Beast. We then walked back through the drizzle and got in our car and headed back into the hedgerow slalom. We ate peanut butter sandwiches in the car and drank an overpriced Coke Zero for lunch, because.... well.... we're kind of cheap. Then we arrived at our next stop for the day - A windmill! Yep, that's right, a windmill. All I know is that the guidebook said that it was the largest windmill in Ireland and that it was close by. Good enough for me! The windmill was interesting, because I had never actually been inside one before, and it helped me understand the whole "henny penny" story a little better. What was more interesting was a completely unrelated exhibit they had about the potato famine. Apparently, one year there was a "blight" (whatever that was) and no one grew any potatoes and since the Irish didn't eat anything except potatoes they all started starving. And when I say all, I mean pretty much ALL. Over 2 million people either died or left for America. It was apparently very bad. (There are now more people of Irish descent in America than there are in Ireland!) So, that was random, but interesting. So after risking our childrens lives as we climbed up and down the rickety wooden ladders of an old windmill, we came home and cooked supper (Fajitas! With some weird sauce that I'm pretty sure they don't sell in America) and let the kids play on the playground out back. Then, in an effort to overcome the time change, we put the kids to bed early where they thumped aorund in the broad daylight for several hours before falling asleep while we watched weird Irish television (Look! A vicar is in the drunk tank! Call Father O'Malley! Ha ha) and old CSI re-runs. We also ate a potato, just because we could.     Posted Jul 08 2009, 01:49 AM by superdad with no comments Filed under: Vacations, Better off Dad, Ireland [Edit Tags]

• A Family Trip to Ireland - Day 1

  There are people out there who would tell you that you shouldnt take three young children under the age of the 6 on a trip overseas. They may be right. I don't actually agree with them but somewhere over the Atlantic at 2:00 am when I was trying to keep our 1 year old from crying and desperately wishing I could be asleep, the idea occurred to me that perhaps this wasn't our best idea. To be fair, the same idea occurred to me two weeks ago at a hotel in Kentucky when my middle child wet himself in the middle of the night and I had to figure out how to clean all that up without going into the bathoom which was where our youngest was sleeping (don't ask). So, maybe there's just something wrong with my kids. Well, whatever concerns I had over Greenland were quickly eliminated as we arrived in Ireland. We had made it! I won't say it was an easy trip, and I won't say that we got much sleep, but we survived and we landed in the emerald Isles on a beautiful sunny day. We said goodbye to our woefully lame airplane (US Air! The Greyhound of the Skies!) and made our way to where our car was waiting. Because this was a house swap, we were also swapping cars, which is of course much cheaper than renting a car, but has the added dilemma of you not wanting to crash the car because, say, you forgto to drive on the left side of the road. Obvoiusly, you don't want to ever crash a car, but with a rental car, who cares? You just buy the insurance and say, "alright stone walls and hedgerows! Bring it on! Scrape me if ye must!" Then you just return the car and go on your merry way. Of course, it's ideal to return a perfectly intact car, but speakigng as someone who has returned a car that was plowed into by a U-haul, it's not that big of a deal. The whole thing's a little different when it's someone else's car that you are borrowing and that they presumably want back in more or less the same shape that it was left in. So, after we squeezed our three kids and luggage into the little european hatchback I decided to take a few spins around the parking lot. ThIs would help me get used to the fact that I was sitting on the right side of the car, that I was supposed to be driving on the left, that the car was a stick shift and that the stick shift was inexplicably under my left hand. All of this was very different from my Toyota minivan. That all being said it's not nearly as hard as you might imagine and within a few minutes we were hurtling down the highway..... excuse me the "double carriageway"...... toward the town of Tralee, Thank Heavens we had a GPS. There were about a dozen turns on the 1 1/2 hour ride from the airport and most of them were not ones we would have found under normal circumstances. Half the time, we'd be driving alogn and the lady on the GPS would say "turn left" and I'd say "Really? That looks like an alley!" Then Sarah would frantically consult the GPS, and then one of the kids would say "I want to go to Chik-fil-a" and I'd yell (for the dozenth time) "There is no $#*!(@ Chik-fil-a in Ireland!" Then Sarah would say, "Yes, Yes! Turn here!" and I'd turn down the teeny tiny alley only to discover that it wasn't an alley after all, but actually the main road in to town disguised as an alley. And then Sarah would scream "AAAAHHHH! There's no one driving that car!" before we'd both realize, that they were just sitting on the wrong side of the vehicle. It was sort of a baptism by fire, but we made it. We arrived at our absolutely stunning home powered by 2 hours worth of sleep, a coke zero and a fair amount of adrenalyne. The house was near the top of a hill overlooking the town of Tralee. It had stunning views of the countryside spilling out before us in fields of green grass outlined with hedgerows and dotted with sheep. It was one of those postcard views of Ireland and it was out our front window. Looking around the house, I had the same thought I always do when I travel to Europe - everything is just so much more nicely made, The houses aren't neccesarily as large and they're not as filled with as much stuff (what? No blooming onion slicer and deep fryer?) But the whole structure just seems more solidku built. The doors are all made of this foreign substance called wood. The windows are those expensive kinds that no one ever chooses when the Pella salesman comes by and the appliances are all kinds of fancy with buttons hidden on them in secret places. Granted, the appliances are sized for a small munchkin family. The fridge is like a large dorm firdge and the washing machine will only wash a pair of jeans and a t-shirt at a time, but by golly they're high quality. Certainly, there are some things that you immediately miss from home, such as the presence of a sheet on the bed (who needs em!), an ice cube (Bah! I like my water tepid!) and hot water (what are you? A wuss?), but there is an awful lot to like. Sarah said, that she felt like you could travel the world and discover the absolute best way tot do everything and then create the perfect community: A community with quality construction AND decent water pressure. A community with historic villages AND webpages about those villages that weren't designed by 8 year olds for school credit. A grocery store with a whole aisle dedicated to different kinds of cheeses AND peanut butter that doesn't taste weird. It would be a utopia. A dreamland where the best of Europe and the United States co-mingled to form the perfect country. Maybe we could all pitch in some money and buy Bermuda and give it a try - it's kind of half way. Anyway, back to our story. So we arrived in the land of leprecauns and immediately took a nap. I know this is not what travel folk say you are supposed to do. You're supposed to stay up, forcing yourself to adapt to the time change, but I'm pretty sure that the travel folk don't have children, because if they did, I'm pretty sure they'd recommend monster naps upon arrival. And I've got to tell you, this was one of the most delicious naps I have ever taken. The windows were open, the sun was streaming in and the breeze blew by in the most delectable way imaginable. I could have slept forever, but as I mentioned before, we have children. So, once we were woken up, we all ventured into town to find a grocery store. I love grocery shopping in foreign countries. I am always fascintated to see what kinds of things they have and what kinds fo things they dont. For instance, the Irish have about 500 kinds of yogurt and rice pudding things and a billion different kinds of cheeses and a bunch of other stuff mafe out of dairy, but not a single container of sour cream. Who knew? I also enjoy checking out the cereal aisles. They have a few things that are the same, albeit with different names. Hey look! There's Tony the Tiger on a box of Kellogg's "Frosties!" But they also have a lot of stuff that's similar but different. The stuff that looks like captain crunch, is being shilled by some giant rug shaped muppet called Muff. And the Cocoa Puffs don not have a mentally unstable bird hawking them, but rather a monkey. I would love to know ths history of this. Exactly how did this come about? Were they all sitting in a meeting somewhere and the Kellogg's guy says, "Well, we'd like to start selling cocoa puffs here in Ireland and we have this charming bird that runs around saying that he is Koo-koo for our product" an then the Irish guy says, "Ay, but that'll never work here. The Irish don't care for talking birds, especially crazy ones! But dy'know what we love? Monkeys! Ay, we love the monkeys!" And it was done. They also, not surprisingly, don't have any lucky charms. They do have this cereal called "Golden Nuggets" that is being marketed by an old, overweight, bearded, hillbilly prospector and his bucktoothed donkey, so I guess there's a little tit for tat. We often try to venture out of our comfort zone and buy something local when we travel. We usually buy lots of cheeses no matter how peculiar looking or stinking and enjoy them very much, but there are also things that we choose not to partake of. For instance, I passed on the container of duck fat and also on the bag of shrimp flavored potato chips. And when we were looking through the frozen foods we came across a box of what looked like Aunt Jemima frozen waffles, but they were not. They were potato waffles. "What the heck?" I asked myself, but then I looked more carefully and it said very clearly on the box: "Made with real mashed postatoes!" Now I understand that coming from a country that sells "cereal straws" (straws made of cereal that kids can suck milk through and then eat) I'm not really in a position to criticize, bur come on.... mashed potato waffles have got to be pretty gross. So, we finished our shopping trip (and I must say, that Irish groceries are relatively cheap compared to other places we've been..... like the Safeway in Annapolis) and headed home to cook dinner. We made spaghetti and the kids played outside on the playground in the backyard and Sarah and I sat together watching the sun go down. We sat. And sat. And sat. And...... Jimminy Christmas when is that blasted sun going to set?!?! Turns out, around 11:00pm. It has something to do with being so far north and some spell that the fairies put on the land many moons ago to... I don't know, I just know we were all lying in bed at 10:00 at night with the sun streaming into our room. (Just so you know, in the time I have been sitting here writing this, the weather has gone from bright and sunny to pouring rain, to completely foggy to clear again. It's like the weather is being decided by some kid and his magic 8 ball: shake, shake, shake - "I believe the answer to your question is fog") But, eventually, our exhaustion caught up with us and we fell asleep. Happy to be in Ireland, happy to have driven here without crashing, and happy to not have to wake up to a breakfast of frozen pressed mashed potatoes. It's going to be a great vacation. Posted Jul 03 2009, 01:37 AM by superdad with 1 comment(s) Filed under: travel, Vacations, Better off Dad, Ireland [Edit Tags]