Typically I could count on Ava (5) or Jada (3) waking up between 5:45 and 6:15. This was perfect for me. At the latest I need to be up by 6:30 and out of the house by 7:15. Sure, I could get out quicker if need be but I hate to rush my mornings and I do quite well on little sleep, depending on who you ask. The last few months though they’ve been sleeping later, staggering from their room closer to 6:30 or 6:45. It was on one of these late mornings when Ava had asked about the lines.

I was rushing to get my laptop into its case when Ava called from the kitchen, “Daddy, what are those lines?”

“What lines? What are you talking about?”

“Those lines, right there!” she said.

I love it when kids do this. They reference something that is clearly in sight but fail to be specific enough for you to know what it is they are referring to and then they get exasperated because of your cluelessness.

“Ava, you’re going to need to point at what you’re talking about or describe it better because “lines” just doesn’t tell me enough.”

At this point she pushed her chair away from the table (I mentioned exasperated right?) and makes her way over to me. By this time I’ve collected most of what I need to make it out the door and am getting my shoes on. My own bit of exasperation is mounting.

“These lines” she says as her hand touches my face just outside my eyes.

“Oh, those lines.” I reply, grinning.

“That’s cool! I can see them better now.” she expounded.

“Well, that’s because you made me smile. They’re called smile lines. I have them because you and your sisters make me smile so much.”

“I want lines too” she said.

“Soon enough kiddo. Soon enough”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her they are also called crow’s feet. I give my kids enough reason to ridicule me. Intentionally loading them up with ammunition just doesn’t seem wise.

Everybody sing it! from simplyChuck on Vimeo.

Jada was doing a bit of caroling all by herself, much to our pleasure. Precious is as precious does.

After church last Sunday I took the family to a local Chinese Buffet establishment. At the front door there is a little waterfall vignette with a moat around it. My daughter marched right up to the moat, dipped her right hand in the water, started making the sign of the cross, recited “paw, san, hoy spit, emen”, which in grown up speak stands for: In the name of the Father, and of the Son and The Holy Spirit, Amen. We all had a big giggle over her zeal.

After lunch we went to the grocery store do some shopping. As we walked in the store my wife asked me to change the baby’s diaper as she started shopping and we’d meet up in store later.

I took the baby in the Men’s Room and plopped her on the changing table. After I changed her diaper, I put her back down on Terra Firma and started putting away assorted diaper changing paraphernalia. I heard a little voice say “paw, san, hoy……..”, and I turned around to see what she was doing.

She had walked over to the little boy’s urinals and had dipped her hand in the unholy liquid.

I let out a blood curdling shriek that scared her stiff. I grabbed her wrist before she could put any of the pee water on her person, ran to the sink, and washed our hands, and her forehead(just in case), in the hottest water we could stand, with loads and loads of soap.

After I dried her hands we rushed out of the Men’s Room, I dumped her in a shopping cart and we hurried to a portion of the store that I knew had complimentary anti-bacterial gel in a convenient wall mounted pump dispenser. I continued to pump alcohol laced gel on our hands and scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed until I felt reasonably certain that all the germs, and a few layers of skin, were completely gone.

*DEEP BREATHLY!*

Maybe we need to convert. Buddhism perhaps? Ommmmmm……

According to the Roman Zodiac I am a Libra. It’s the Scales which symbolize Libra, and just like that balancing mechanism wants to stay even, Librans want to be on an even keel.

I want to confess I have a sickness. I don’t know what it is called (probably OCD), but I do know it exists. I feel the need to have sets, pairs, or kits of things. Nothing makes me happier than a complete tool kit, with every single socket in its intended spot. On the flipside, nothing makes me feel despair (yes, it’s that bad) like an empty spot in the tool kit from a socket, or when a 12 piece flatware set has a missing teaspoon. I have been known to spend 4 hours tearing apart the garage looking for a missing 3mm socket (a useless socket size that comes in the kits) that I didn’t need for the 10 minute job I needed the 7mm socket to do.

Recently I needed to start getting allergy shots 2 times a week for 4 months. I hated the thought of getting shots and was going to ask them to stagger the shots, left arm on Mondays, right arm on Thursdays, just so I could get the balance of both arms hurting. When I arrived at the Doctors office for my first shot I was “pleasantly” surprised to find out that I was allergic to so many things that they had to give me 2 shots per day, one in each arm. Oh joy – true balance. See, a sickness. I told you.

My two youngest children are Libras just like me. I noticed my 9 year old son’s penchant for sets and kits a long time ago and chalked it up to just having a similar personality as mine. The recent occurrences regarding my 2 year old daughter, however, took us completely by surprise.

Last weekend, on her second birthday, I sat and played with my little girl and I marveled at the changes she had gone through just in the last year. There were the visible physical changes, but what struck me most was her burgeoning personality. I play rough with all my kids. No one gets treated differently because they are girls. I might hold back on the baby a bit, but that is just because she’s still small, but that too will change as she gets older. I made her voice sound funny as I playfully batted at her cheeks with my right hand. She was giggling and laughing until I stopped. “NO, NO DADDY!” she shrieked. “OTHER HAND!” she demanded. So I continued the cheek patting with my left hand as she continued to enjoy herself.  I thought about it for a bit and, after a few pensive minutes, came to the conclusion that the odd behavior was due to being a Libra, just like me. She wanted the balance of equal cheek smacking time from both hands. We all had a chuckle at her silliness.

Another instance: We have two mirrors in the bathroom upstairs and after she gets her ponytails done in the morning she has to look at herself in both mirrors before giving them the “stamp of approval”. When we don’t have enough time we do the “Fountain”. We collect all the hair on the top of her head and tie it up with one rubber band. She dislikes the mono-pigtail, but will tolerate it if she gets to see it in both mirrors.

I cited her other odd behaviors to my wife, ones that we’ve had difficulty understanding until now, which served no other purpose than to solidify the Libra stigma.  My wife rolled her eyes and said, “you and all your kids are freaks”. Having no evidence for a rebuttal, I concurred.

My Roman Zodiac Sign = Libra

My Chinese Zodiac Sign = Monkey

I come from a large family, and cramming 7 kids and 2 adults in a 5 passenger Japanese car (don’t forget luggage) was a common occurrence for us. This was back in the day when child safety seats and seat belts had not yet been invented, or enforced.

A little background:

We lived in a podunk little backwoods town and the closest "Metropolis", was over 500 kilometers, which equated to 10-12 hrs due to bad roads. We would journey to the big city every summer to get school clothes, visit relatives, and see the sights. This was also a business trip. Mom and Dad had a small grocery store back then, and Dad was always searching out new products to sell in the store. He would buy samplings of new items from the big stores in the big city and put them on our shelves back home to see if they would sell locally.

The road to Metropolis was called "South Road". It was mostly a two lane road riddled with potholes, switchbacks, hairpin turns, road construction and the occasional washout (roads destroyed or carried away by heavy floods). This was THE only road from the North to the Southern part of the island, and because of this, Diesel exhaust belching commercial vehicles plied up and down its length like confused Salmon to deliver goods and passengers to the rest of the island.

Back to the story:

In an effort to get on the road early to beat the traffic Mom would boil eggs and hotdogs in the wee hours of the morning and put some boxed orange juice on ice in a cooler. She would then wake each of us up, have us change into comfortable clothes for the trip and they would both hustle us into the waiting vehicle and bed us back down in specific locations, which was dependent on our sizes, ages, and tolerance for one another. We’d be on the road by 4 or 5 am and Dad would drive for about an hour or two before some of us would start waking up looking for something to eat.

The fun begins….(not really):

Mom would start handing out paper towels with a hot dogs and boiled eggs to each kid. After eating we’d be thirsty so out would come the triangular juice boxes we called "Tetra Paks". They tasted like unsweetened fake orange juice concentrate.

I’m a poor traveler to begin with. An inner ear problem necessitates me to be able to see the road so I can face my head in the general direction of a turn. Looking in one direction while turning in another causes me to get dizzy. Compound this with sitting in the back seat (can’t see the road) with a "hey look at that!" head snap, the smell of boiled eggs, hotdogs, diesel fumes, freshly paved asphalt, Dad’s jackrabbit pothole avoidance slalom, the country’s summertime temperatures and humidity…..it was just too much for my poor stomach to handle.

Sometimes I’d get my head out the window fast enough, sometimes I wouldn’t. Either way, and at those speeds, there was always the dreaded "splashback". Dad would grumble and pull over and I’d get out quickly and let my stomach retch the rest of  breakfast up. While the nasty, fake orange juice’s acidity burned my nasal passages Mom would clean me up with some lemon scented wet towelettes, make me rinse out my mouth, give me a mint or some gum, and off we’d go again, to the tune of 6 siblings calling me names and chiding me for my weakness. Woo-hoo, only 8 more hours till we get there.

So at this point I just added 3 new "scents" (lemon, mint, puke) to the car that could trigger another event. This is about the same time that the digesting boiled eggs and hotdogs started making themselves known in the car’s cabin. More "scents" added on their part = more fountain action on mine. It was at this point in the trip that "Pull over Dad! He’s gonna blow again!" would be shouted repeatedly for the rest of the trip. By Lunchtime I’d be dry heaving; Time to reload. More new smells, more new projectiles – yay! This scenario was replayed several times a year for well over a decade. I AM SO GLAD I’M ALL GROWN UP!!!!

People have the misconception that I am a control freak because I insist on driving during long trips. Oh contraire! They don’t understand that I NEED to be behind the wheel for the sake of the rest of the vehicle’s occupants. It’s been many, many years since the last time I emulated the Diet Pepsi/Mentos phenomenon, and if I play my cards right, it’s going to stay that way.

The "Silver Lining":

It wasn’t all bad. Because of my solid reputation of being a bad traveler I always got a window seat, No one’s arm or elbow was resting on my stomach, and everyone always gave me a wide berth. When you have a hair trigger stomach, while in hot, cramped, fetid quarters, that’s a good thing.

Just for the record, now that I’m an adult, my own family goes on road trips all the time. Five people – air conditioned, DVD player/video game havin’, seven passenger vehicle. No hotdogs, boiled eggs or paint stripper fake orange juice allowed. My kids will never know how good they have it.

Mom and Dad….I forgive you.