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.

There's a baby in the Vaseline!

Me holding the naughtiest thing on the planet at
String Lake in Grand Teton National Park.

I'll never be able to figure out how my one-year-old daughter crams so much naughtiness into that tiny little body.

Take tonight's good news/bad news, for instance. I'll give you the bad news first: while I did a 30-second errand to a different part of the house, Cute Little Head, my daughter, had to see what trouble she could cause, obviously.

So when I returned from the brief errand, I found an open Vaseline jar repeatedly slipping out of her newly greased hands.

I didn't even know we had Vaseline. Where'd she get that? How'd she get it open?

Now when I say greased, I mean completely and helplessly at the mercy of a half-inch thick layer of petroleum. She could have picked up small rocks without using her opposable thumbs, which have probably gotten more workout than the chubby digits of any child her age because of her food-scrounging habits.

After the Vaseline jar clattered to the ground to spread grease in a bouncy smear across the wood floor - thankfully not the carpet -  I watched her flick her hands wildly to try and get rid of the slime. Tiny bits of Vaseline rocketed off her jiggy hands and attached to the wall like little slugs. That didn't do much to fix her situation, so I had to intervene. When I picked her up from the tornado-like circle she was turning to try and dislodge the Vaseline from her paws, I realized it was worse than I thought. Her chubby hands were barely visible through the thick layer of grease she had managed to get almost up to her elbows, jammies and all. A murky outline of round digits waved up through the pure petroleum. I spent the next half hour cleaning up after her.

When I got her to the sink, she desperately lunged for the spigot, dropping her little tushy into the sink to try and get the water running. Of course, since water is useless against the fiend that is Vaseline, all she really managed to do was soak her jammies from the waist down with cold water and make the circumference of the faucet handle a little bigger by adding a layer of petroleum.

I stripped her down to her diaper and started by using my hand as a squeegee to get as much of the sticky slime off her hands as possible. Since I had to be firm to maximize effectiveness, she looked at me like I was a villain and jutted her chin out at me so her two bottom teeth pointed at me accusingly.

After a long stay in the sink with a washcloth and jammies converted into a backup washcloth, her hands and arms looked sunburned from all the rubbing. Other than the glares, though, she took it pretty well. And now you could shine a fleet of cars with those two pieces of fabric.

Now the good news:
1. My hands feel softer than they ever have.
2. The wood underneath the disaster zone is uber shiny.
3. I could go swimming and a good portion of my body would come out dry with only a few beads of water left atop the film of Vaseline still hanging out there.
4. I'm pretty sure I could do the Tom Cruise underwear slide down the hall without wearing socks.
5. We're pretty much out of Vaseline.
6. No greased babies slipped from my hands during cleanup.
7. Mine and baby's fingerprints will be visible to the naked eye for the next week, making crime seem less tempting.
8. Baby is asleep as I write this.

You may think this is funny. If you do, stop laughing. Karma will make your kid do something even worse. I think I have to improve my zone defense.

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.