"I'm Your Father! It is Useless to Resist!"

I'm beginning to have an appreciation for poor Darth Vader's frustration in getting his kids to heed his advice...

I have to fight my natural tendency to dictate the family Halloween agenda. I've always loved the creative aspect of the holiday and I cringe every time I seen an uninspired power ranger or Toy Story Woody. "My kids will never do that," I say through clenched teeth. "They will do something brilliant. Unique. Something exceptional!" But I've learned that kids don't want exceptional. They don't want unique. They want the common, the tried-and-true, the safe. I feel like weeping. But I will be strong and if my kids want to be Ariel or Lightning McQueen I will set aside my wounded elitist pride and let them be... common.

The process of nailing down this year's Halloween costumes has taken us through a number of intermediate destinations. We were going to be sharks at one point. (Lots of potential there, I thought!) Spiders were in the running for a while. (Yeah!  We could get creative with spiders!) But we seem to have settled now on a rebellious alliance...complete with injection-mold plastic masks and mass-produced faux wigs. I will submit to it, though the Force within me is somewhat disturbed. As if millions of sparks of creativity suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...

Hey you on the right!  Aren't you a little short to be a stormtrooper?

Thou shall not _________.

N was lollygagging before church today, playing with his toys and not getting dressed. He got a sharp rebuke from his Dad which sent him crying to his Mom. "But Mommy," he piously wept to Stacy, a snotty mess of tears, "Daddy's making me work on the Sabbath which is supposed to be a day of rest!"

I wonder if he thinks any other commandments were infringed upon this morning...

When One Life to Live Is Just Not Enough

Last week I noted N's willingness to take on the burden of playing all roles in a cut-throat game of Monopoly^®. This morning I came into the living room to find that, having conquered Monopoly, he has moved on to mastering Life^® itself. Not content with a solitary life experience, and impatient with any concept of reincarnation, N prefers to live all his lives in parallel, simultaneously.

Monopolizing the Game

N has been obsessed with the game of Monopoly lately. He wants to play it 24/7 (when he's not playing Angry Birds, that is).  He's always trying to enlist family members to play with him. Unfortunately Monopoly does not hold the level of sway over the rest of the family that it does over N, so he is generally at a loss for fellow players. That is scarcely an obstacle. He may not be able to secure any parents or siblings to sit down and play the game with him, but that doesn't stop him from getting their permission to play the game in their behalf. So N will set up the game, deal out the money, and lay out the player tokens for Mommy or L or me without any particular need to have any of us at all involved, or even in the house. He will then roll the dice, take the move and make all the monopolistic financial decisions required of the game on our behalf. He is very conscientious, however, to give the full play by play of the game to anyone who might be virtually playing so they we know exactly where we landed, exactly how much rent we paid, and exactly which property (that N bought for us on a previous turn) that we have now mortgaged. The accounting is precise and detailed.

N:  Mommy, you landed on Park Place.  It had a house on it.  I've mortgaged your Railroad
Mommy:  Uh-huh.

N:  Daddy, bad news!  You landed on Chance and you lost the beauty contest.
Daddy:  Uh-huh.

N:  L!  Do you want to buy Baltic Ave.?
L:  <crickets>
N:  OK.  I'll buy it for you.

 

I have to admit I haven't paid enough attention to my farings in these games of proxy to know whether I consistently do well, or whether N wracks up the dough an inordinate amount of the time, but I do sense that something important is happening here and that I should probably take action. At a minimum I should check to see if there are any intern positions available at Bain Capital.

Pooling our Resources

Daddy's too cheap to put in a pool...

The Lord kids next door wish they had it this fine...

40 lbs. of N in a 10 gallon drum

If I Had a Hammer...

This weekend N got promoted to the "Big Boy" club.

Now we gotta work on hammering out love between my brother and my sister...

Reason to Re-Joyce

I am ever mindful of the net gains Stacy's gene pool brings to the family mix. Take her Aunt Joyce, for example. When she was 19 she was crowned "Miss Washington" and spent a year sitting on convertibles, smiling and rotating her hand from the elbow. Unfortunately, in keeping with the misguided times of the late 60's, early 70's, she was inexplicably overlooked for the national title.  They must have had replacement referees that year.

Stacy was working through some old family photos and pulled out some of these.

Joyce is one of those rare people who are drop-dead gorgeous and commensurately as warm and sweet in disposition as you always hope beautiful people will be, but know enough not to get your hopes up. Sometime I'll look at L (or N, when he's wearing L's dresses) and see a flicker of Joyce and think, "Whoo-Hoo!  My genes got trumped!"

Aunt Joyce with Grandma Ann and Grampa Ed

OK, so maybe it wasn't all glamour and glory...

Our Joycers