Superpower pirates: Bonding over games of one-upmanship

“Arghhhh, ye’ve grazed me hair with yer fire sword!” I bellow in my best swarthy pirate voice.

Never mess with a boy holding a flaming sword. Especially if it can also
shoot lightning, "volcano lava," super-hard metal walls, and more.

“No, it hit you right in the face!” my 6-year-old boy fires back.

“That were afore what I conjured me an ice shield with me trusty rapier!”

This game goes on and on, shifting between remarkably versatile weapons – i.e. sticks – sheared off the same tree in the park near our home. His stick spews “volcano lava” and mine strikes back with a wall of icy water to cool the ground into smooth pāhoehoe lava that leaves me a perfect path to the boy. His stick shoots lightning toward me and I absorb it in mine, which has just become heavily grounded rubber.

I get aggressive and shoot a sheet of ice toward him. He dodges and scurries underneath the play-set to severe the supports of the ship we’re fighting on.

Ice cream dump

Kids don't always know the words for things, and I sometimes love the results of them trying to figure things out. Tonight, we were dishing up home-made ice cream that had hardened into something more similar to a strawberry-pineapple iceberg.

But oh was it good…

A non-artist's (bad) rendition of homemade pineapple-strawberry ice cream.
 Come on, you know you'd love to eat this!

Anyway, I usually just use our spoons to scoop the ice cream since the two years I spent post marriage shopping for the right silverware were well spent. My wife frequently tells people how we agreed to disagree on silverware for those two years. But the good news is we came out better for it. Too many of the sets we found were just sissy looking and feeling. I want beefy silverware - a fork I can cut meat with if needs be. A knife that's consequently only used for sawing through butter or spreading peanut butter. A spoon that can scoop ice cream like nobody's business. 

So in that shopping period, I subjected every rare set of silverware we agreed to aesthetically to the “ice-cream test.” This is Guantanamo Bay for spoons.

Fatherhood tips: Trust falls

My oldest son doesn't always trust me. In fact, he's often downright scared of things I ask him to do and will flatly turn me down. Lately there's been two of these trust issues, as I see them.

Oh he'll jump off inanimate objects to the cold, hard ground, but
you put his loving father at the base to catch him and suddenly it's too scary.
Trust issues? I'd say so.

1. We have a bunk bed the kids line up on top of and jump to me. The two girls, ages 5 and 2, will sky toward me without a second thought, but our 6-year-old boy will stand there for 10, 20, 30 seconds as the girls and I coax him to jump. Sometimes Ms. Mischief will even try to push him off, which really freaks him (and me) out. Finally my arms get tired and I let the girls have another turn. He gets upset that I move on, even though he obviously doesn't trust me and/or himself enough to jump. Mostly me. 

2. My wife has been teaching the kids biology lately and we got talking about knee-jerk reactions. I set up a tall food-storage bucket in the living room and started whacking the girls' knees with a wooden sword to show them how it worked.

The Perfect Moment: A Family Portrait

A camera wouldn't do it justice. A video camera would only be a shallow representation. The perfect moment cannot be captured in any place but your mind.

I had one tonight. It'll be there forever. I had no camera, no videos, and I don't care. It's better in the mind anyway.

I had taken my kids to the park to play while their mommy made dinner. They played, I watched with a smile. They brought in random strangers to be friends in their routines, both adults and children. They used the horseshoe pit at the park as a sandbox, driving toy tractors they had hauled from the house in my oldest daughter's pink bike bag over manufactured hills and valleys.

As I watched them play with a warm smile, my wife unexpectedly came to join us with a stroller used as a dinner cart. Had we been there so long already? She pulled out soup and biscuits and we sat on a blanket. My kids built an imaginary fire by collecting all the loose branches they could into a pile and pretending to strike between one and five matches. We then made s'mores on the fake fire, describing every gooey bit as we stacked them up for each other. When I needed a marshmallow for my stick, my oldest daughter ran to a random point along the fence 50 yards away, grabbed marshmallows, and trotted back, placing the invisible fluff on every minor point she could find on my roasting stick. My younger daughter wanted more substance to her food. She had been begging for service berries from behind the fence. She asked with points and grunts since she is only 14 months old. I was happy to oblige.

No matter how well I describe it, what picture I take, or how you envision it, the full feeling will not be clear to you. It was special because it was us. Mundane yet unique. Simple yet perfect. I was in the park for 3.5 hours and never wanted to leave. I only did because it was the kids' bedtime. Family love can make just about any moment perfect. And for me today, it was an unexpected picnic in the park with the people I couldn't live without surrounding me. There is an underlying power in family. Despite imperfections, moments like this speak of perfection more than any art masterpiece. Yes, despite flaws and problems, a family is a perfect unit.

I will do everything in my power to protect the one entrusted to me.

Not much captures the feeling better than a photo like this, but it
is still a shallow comparison that lacks warmth and love,
especially for those outside my family.

It's a small world after all: How the world expands as we age

One of life's biggest paradoxes is that the world enlarges as we grow up. It's not that it physically expands, it's just that our perception of it does. Case in point: looking at a map of Australia, you think it's this tiny continent. Then you get there and try to drive from Sydney in southeast Australia to the Great Barrier Reef in northeast Australia. After several days of non-stop driving on the wrong side of the road without any sign of colorful little fishies and brilliant coral displays, you realize Australia is bigger than it's boomerang-shaped self looks to be on a map. This happened to me when I was 14. If I ever go back, I will fly to northeast Australia to experience the Great Barrier Reef since I never made it as a kid. We way underestimated the size of that world.

But that's nothing. We live in tiny Wilson, Wyoming. When I grew up, I remember the sign that read Wilson: population 100. Nowadays, it's a whopping 250 on that sign. The closest town to Wilson is Teton Village, basically a ski resort with a post office. The next closest town is Jackson, known by many as Jackson Hole, though that term technically encompasses the whole valley. We love to go to Teton Village on our bikes in the summer because 1) We have a bike path that leads there basically from our house and 2) They have a fountain/patio area with a stream running through it that our kids love to play at.

But Teton Village is something else entirely to our daughter: the edge of the world. We found this out today as we drove past the road leading to Teton Village.

"Look!" my 3-year-old daughter said excitedly. "I saw the way to Teton Village!"

I acknowledged her astuteness since she repeated the mantra until I did. When I did, it got cuter.

"I saw the way to Teton Village!" she said. "It's over there on the other side of the world!"

We laughed and she covered her adorable little face sheepishly. I didn't even bother to correct her, because to her, that's as far as we go in that direction, generally. So it's the edge of the world. That creek they love to play in at Teton Village might as well flow off a sharp edge and fall past a turtle holding the world on its back.

I don't know whether or not it's a good thing that I know a bit more than my daughter about how expansive the world is. On one hand, I have loads of amazing experiences getting to know the world I live in. On the other hand, the world no longer fits in the palm of my hands or revolves around me. If only I could remember what it's like to see the world as my daughter sees it - a small and friendly place where almost everyone loves me. How much would be different if everyone could see the world that way?

Go on. See the world like a child sees it.

Changing relationships with your kids: After the new addition

One of life's only true constants is change. I don't know who first became aware of that fact, but it's true.

This morning I realized how quickly those changes can come when my 2-year-old daughter sneaked up into bed with us and lay on top of me spread eagle for 20 minutes sucking her thumb.

This may not seem like an alert to change, but for me it was. Though my daughter will always find time to play with me, wrestle or build forts, cuddling has always been Mommy's domain. During family prayers, she sits on Mommy's lap. When she gets an "owie," she runs to Mommy. When she falls off the back of the couch right after we told her not to climb on the back of the couch, Mommy gets a cuddle buddy until its better.

This one has thrown a wrench in family workings. For me,
that has meant two other kids that love me a lot more for
coming home after work.

But since the arrival of our third child, I've noticed a change that's come over her. No longer does she arch her back in protest if I pick her up and cuddle her. Now she almost always chooses my lap for prayers - voluntarily. And this morning I got blissful wake-up cuddles with my beautiful daughter, even though Mommy was readily available, albeit less responsive. When I left for work, she cried. A month ago she would barely acknowledge me as I was leaving.

Now to the psychology of the matter. Since Baby's arrival, Mommy has been pretty wrapped up in feeding, changing and just plain holding the little girl, who often fusses because, well, she can't do ANYTHING for herself. This has left the kids more to their own devices, for better or worse. But when Daddy comes home, suddenly they've got someone there who isn't providing immediate care for someone completely helpless. Not that that means I don't ever have all three at once. Just last night I was sitting on our big, comfy chair while holding my youngest while my wife planned out a coming vacation. Soon my daughter came walking up with a book and made space on my lap so I could read to her. When my 3-year-old got the memo I was reading, he bee-lined it for my lap too, all but squishing the newborn between them on my chest. I literally had to find creative ways of holding the weight of the older kids off the youngest one while reading. I often used my reading arm to subtly push them away from the baby. Good times.

I guess my point is that sometimes it feels like your kids love you a lot more than other times. It's OK. It's natural. They'll come around. Just keep showing love and eventually it will be returned, even if it comes when the child makes it to adulthood. And the best part: When it hasn't always been that way, it feels so much better when your sweet little daughter cuddles into you for 20 minutes when she could have had her Mommy.

That is what parenting is all about.