A Letter To My Kids

This is a post for my children. Someday, I hope they are reading through the massive amounts of writings that I have done through the years and come across this and realize a few things…

This morning, I woke up, poured myself some coffee and watched my wife, your mom, as she was preparing your school lunch. She had already been up for about 45 minutes and had already gotten a shower as she was getting ready to go to work at 8am. It was 7:05. I asked her if I could help get your lunches ready and she told me I could make the sandwiches if I wanted to do something. As I was making your turkey & cheese sandwich with mayo, mustard and lettuce sandwich on hawaiian rolls (she was VERY specific about this), I noticed that she was also preparing you a side salad with carrots and a little cup of dressing that she was putting in little Tupperware cups, vegetable soup that she had made from scratch and was heating up on the stove, a small bowl of strawberry jello that she had made and a snack bar. I note the contents of what she packing because, quite honestly, if it had been ME packing your lunches, you would have gotten a peanut butter & jelly sandwich on regular white bread, some potato chips, maybe some grapes and a juice box. I MIGHT have POSSIBLY used wheat bread (if I’d seen it in the bread drawer first) but a SALAD with SOUP that I had made from SCRATCH? Not a chance.

Sounds like an average morning so…my point to this is?

Well…it’s not that your mother loves you more than I do. We both love you equally. However your mother goes ABOVE & BEYOND when it comes to taking care of you and she loves you so much that she will take the time to make sure you have the best she can give you. And this isn’t just in the case of just your lunch box either. Your Mom works harder at making sure that you have a great childhood than I have ever done in your short time here on this planet. Despite what you may think of her sometimes, there is no one who will do the things that she does to make your life as good as it can be. I’ve watched her. I’ve seen her struggle with you over your homework. I’ve seen her bust her butt to make sure she can get you, Christopher, from practice then to a game, pack you a bag of clean clothes so you can change, make sure someone can take you home, run to the store to get a gift so that she can take you, Ava, to your friend’s house for a birthday party, drive across town so that she can get something from someone for some charity engagement she has that night, drive back to get Christopher from the game, take you home to get a shower, take you to your friend’s house to play for a while then go get you, Ava, from the party, drop you off at another friend’s house then go home, change, and then go to a meeting, etc & so forth. Just WRITING this is exhausting to me, so DOING it sounds like a nightmare! But she does it and she doesn’t say a word about it to either of you.

Your mom makes sure you have what you need and gets you to where you need to go to get it. She makes sure that you understand all the things that are happening in your life. She is concerned about your future. She worries about you when you’re unhappy. She takes care of you when you’re sick. She has never once complained about doing ANY of these things. When I get frustrated when you whine about someone not passing you the ball during the game or dealing with having to make you something for breakfast that’s NOT cereal (seriously…what is WRONG with just eating cereal for breakfast?!?!), she will take the time to listen, she will make you eggs, she will understand your logic and make it all work.

My point is this…love your mother. Unequivocally. Don’t ask questions. Don’t talk back. Don’t take her for granted. Don’t think for a second that you can live without her. Because I’m here to tell you…you can’t.

I’m a a 44-year old man and I still have an undying love for my Mom. She did for me exactly what your mother is doing for you today and she has never asked me for anything more than a hug and a kiss before I leave her home. Your mother will be the same way. Live your life, enjoy it! But don’t EVER think you got it for free. Your life was not free. Your mother gave you your life. She gave birth to you, she cares for you, she loves you and when the shit hits the fan, she is gonna be there to help you get through it. Will dad be there? Of course I will. But trust me, MY take on things will always be peanut butter & jelly to her turkey & cheese sandwich with mayo, mustard and lettuce sandwich on hawaiian rolls. And it’s in THOSE details where you will find that she matters the most. I’m not belittling the things that I do for you. Trust me, I know my role. But it’s your Mom who is the angel on the top of your tree and so any time you think it will be okay to mouth off, be disrespectful, complain about the little things that don’t really matter, I want you to think of ALL of the things your mother does for you and I want you to reflect on those things.

Peanut butter and jelly will get you through, but turkey & cheese sandwich with mayo, mustard and lettuce sandwich on hawaiian rolls with homemade soup, salad and jello are the things that make your life special. Treat your mother with respect, love her as much as your heart will give and NEVER take her for granted. This matters very much to me because if you don’t understand that, then I have failed you as a father. Love your mother with all of your heart and your life will be greater than you know. Trust me when I tell you…mine has been.

Love you both,

Your dad

Ava’s 2012 ITouch Photos

A year ago, Santa brought Ava an ITouch for Christmas. Since then, she’s taken a LOT of pictures! She definitely loves snapping shots and so…after looking at a few of them…I thought it might be fun to share my daughter’s talents. At the age of 8, she has a flair for the goofy, for sure!

Old Ava

I don’t even wanna know…

Her new doll, Eva

Red!

Cousins!

Needless to say…the girl has some skills! Aaaand a somewhat wacky family…

Halloween 2012…OR…The One I Missed

Let me tell you…I HATE missing holidays with my family. HATE is a strong word but when I have to miss one of my favorite holidays? Yeah…HATE would be the appropriate term. So this year, I was in San Diego while my kids were trudging around our little town, collecting goodies and having fun. The weather wasn’t cooperating apparently. It was cold and crappy and so I was told there wasn’t a lot to miss but still…

I love Halloween! Not as much as Thanksgiving but maybe a little more than Christmas and a LOT more than Sweetest Day (which is a made up holiday!!!). Anyway…here are some photos of the kids as they trudged. The best part about all this is that I didn’t have to walk around in the rain and I still get to reap some of the winnings while the kids are in school!

Busy, Busy, Busy

Reese Cup Doesn’t Seem To Have ANY Worries…

Life is moving along at a fast clip these days. Let’s break it down…

• Summer has ended so the kids are back in school. This means homework. Lots of it.
• I spent 3 weeks total overseas in the last month (London & Dublin) and I’m completely jet lagged.
• This weekend is my 25th class reunion when all my high school friends will get together to get caught up and compare paunches. Totally looking forward to that!
• Our house is currently under repairs after a water valve broke in our upstairs bathroom and left 3 floors flooded. The home insurance covered the issues however we wanted to have the upstairs bathroom redone anyway so now the bathroom is being completely removed to give Stephanie & Ava a bathroom that is fit for 2 queens.
• Next week we are having 9 piers placed around our home to keep it from moving so much. With that repair, we should be able to keep our house in tip-top shape and repair some cracked walls and work on some other odds & ends that have been bothering Steph and I over the last few years.
• Ava is playing volleyball and cheering for the Spartan Pee Wees team.
• Christopher is playing basketball and is the starting QB for the Spartan Junior Youth team.
• Stephanie is working at Sephora and is team mom for Christopher’s football team.
• This Monday I start my NFL schedule. I have 26 games in 17 weeks. No problem! (yeesh)

Needless to say…we’ve been slightly swamped. With people coming in & out of our house to work, the kids’ schedule all over the map, MY schedule all over the map and Stephanie doing her best to keep everything in order, it’s a little overwhelming! But we’ll pull through and hopefully everything will be back to normal sometime in…oh…say…January?

Here are some more photos. Just random stuff from the last month or so. Just because I feel like I’m neglecting this little blog here…

Ava’s 8th Birthday Party: A Manicure With All Her Friends!

#10 Is Ready To Play!

My Volleyballer

First Day Of School (3rd & 5th Graders!)

Is this even ALLOWED in the animal kingdom???

Funny Face

Facetime brings out the best in me. And so does Ava…

Happy Birthday Ava!

It’s hard to imagine what might be in store for this coming year for my lovely daughter. 7 has been such a great age for her and she is growing so fast that it is hard for me to keep up with her. She’s very much an analytical, open-minded, caring and wonderful young lady and I love her so much. There are so many things about her that I love dearly but here is a short list of the things I love most about her…

She loves to sing her favorite songs.
She is a great friend to everyone.
She likes to get involved.
She loves animals (especially horses, kittens and dogs!)
She has a very creative mind and is a great writer.
She is not afraid to be her own person.
She is extremely strong-willed.
She is a great artist!
She is a great sister & an awesome daughter!

Today, I break one of “The 50 Rules Of Having A Daughter.” I can’t be with her on her birthday today. But I hope she understands and knows that I love her with all my heart. Here are some pictures of Ava that I’ve taken this past year. She is my grandest achievement and as she grows, I can’t wait to see where her life will take her. It will continue to be a glorious journey, I’m sure!

Prince…NOT Prints

Ok…maybe I can see where there MIGHT be some confusion…

So the musical education of my children continues. Of course, Christopher is into the rap music and Ava is partial to all the Disney tunes right now, but occasionally I try to mix in something that they haven’t heard in order to try to get them to come to their senses. So tonight we were driving back from a fun family outing and I had the radio on and a Prince song came on. I took the opportunity to educate Ava in all that is Prince…

Me: Ava…this is Prince.

Ava: Prints?

Me: No…PRINCE.

Ava: Oh…PRINCE. I thought Prints would be a weird name.

(silence)

Me: This was a popular song when I was a young boy. I thought it was a pretty good song.

(silence)

Ava: Dad?

Me: Yes…

Ava: Is it a boy or a girl? ‘Cause it sounds more like a princess.

Me: (changing the channel) Nevermind…

THE END

Ava Art

My daughter is an aspiring Van Gogh (minus the whole “cut off my ear” thing). She LOVES to draw and I often catch her scribbling on blank sheets of paper, creating designs and coloring in hearts, stars and balloons. With the recent spring cleaning event, some of them had to be…ahem…removed to make room for many more (I’m sure). But I didn’t want to let these go without giving them their due. Here are some of Ava’s finest creations…including a “booklet” that she created for her brother. As much as they can squabble, this REALLY tells the story…

Sushi! & A Smart Cookie

Tonight we all piled into the station wagon (with the wood siding…remember those days? LOL) and headed out to Ava’s favorite buffet place. The reason she likes it so much? The sushi…of course. And since no one else could decide (I didn’t care, Christopher wasn’t that hungry & Steph just didn’t want to cook), we went with Ava’s gut. And I gotta tell ya…when the girl is hungry for sushi, get outta her way ’cause she had a craving of epic proportions tonight!

So we get to the buffet, order our drinks and Ava takes off. I see her somewhere between the rice and the egg drop soup and she already has 3 or 4 different foods on her plate and she hadn’t even stopped at the sushi bar yet. After filling my plate, I head back to our seats where Christopher and Stephanie are seated and eating. I look around and I kid you not, I see Ava at the sushi bar, literally eating stuffing sushi rolls into her mouth!!! It’s an all-you-can-eat bar! She can go back all she wants but she is EATING AT THE BAR?!?!

So I call out to her and she looks over at me and smiles with her mouth full of sushi roll and I can’t help but laugh at her. What a great kid she is…and what a sense of humor!!! And what a stomach for sushi!!!

After dinner and a quick round of sushi sword fighting, the waiter brought us some fortune cookies and Christopher’s said this…

I’m not sure if this was meant for Christopher or for me but it works either way. I told him he should frame that because honestly…it’s the most truthful fortune cookie I’ve ever seen!

Oh yeah…and here’s what sushi sword fighting looks like…in case you were wondering…

Morning IChat

So having Facetime has been a huge asset when I travel. I get to talk to my kids like I would if I were right there in the room with them! Or do I?

Here’s a sequence of events while chatting with my daughter this morning. She was somewhat distracted by the television and her favorite Disney Channel show this week. Here’s what I saw throughout most of our “chat”…

If there’s one thing about my daughter it’s that if she ain’t interested, she’s not gonna fake it. LOL!

So now I have a new segment for this here blog…and I’m sure, through the years, it’s BOUND to be interesting…or not.

The End?

My daughter has a unique sense of humor and has been bitten by the writing bug here lately (wonder where she gets that trait?). So she bought a journal and has been writing about love, God and…well…other topics. Here is one such story…

I truly hope this wasn’t “The End” of this love affair! LOL! As for the handwriting and the gaffes, I will defend my daughter by saying she really has very nice handwriting and is doing great in her spelling class. So this leaves me to believe that this particular story was doomed from the very beginning and was headed for the trash bin.

I dunno about you…but I’m glad Steph found it! Hahahahahahahaha!!!!

11th Anniversary Weekend

Guess who the big winner was THIS year?

October 14th, 2011 was the 11th anniversary of Stephanie & I. Seeing as how I broke the bank last year for our 10th, we both took the low road for this one and decided to spend less money on each other and just take the weekend to enjoy ourselves and that’s what we did. On Friday the kids were off from school so we went shopping for Halloween costumes and Ava went to Justice to get some school clothes! It was a relaxing day with nothing really happening except for Stephanie’s cold making her miserable. And then in the evening we hung out with Stephanie’s bestest friend Jennie and sat around the fire pit trying to keep warm. Believe it or not…it was probably colder in Jennie’s house (their family likes the house to be a balmy 27 degrees).

On Saturday, Steph & I hopped on a bus with 36 of our best friends (mostly friends and parents of kids who go to Christopher & Ava’s school) and headed down to Keeneland in Lexington for some horse racing. The weather was perfect and we ended up winning about $200 (only brought home $75 which went directly towards paying the sitter!). We had a great time with all our friends and didn’t get home until 9pm! Funny story was that I ended up winning with 2 tickets that the window takers got wrong…but I’ll take the money and run! Hey…it’s not MY fault they can’t hear through those glass windows!

I THINK I won this race also…

On Sunday I was able to watch Ava cheer for the Spartan Starter team and Christopher play against the Bengal Tigers in the morning. Both did great with the cheerleaders performing their dance routine that they did for a competition and Christopher scored on an extra-point and had a lot of scoring opportunities! Later that evening we went to visit my friend, Newman, and had dinner with he and his family.

All in all, a great way to celebrate our 11th year of marriage! Now…what are the betting odds for year 12?

The World Of Ava

There is a lot going on in my daughter’s world right now. She’s a cheerleader for the Spartans Starters football team, she’s playing violin, she’s doing great in school (she & I built a diorama for her science class) and she’s been concentrating on a cheerleading competition that happened today. Her team came in 3rd overall but took 2nd in the dance category. I am SUPER proud of her and I have neglected to post pictures of her lately. So here is my daughter, growing bigger every day and getting a little too pretty for her age.

It’s gonna be a long 13+ years…

The Cougar Diorama

Spartan Spirit!

Blowing Kisses

It’s her superstar alter-ego!

Dessert Is Served!

Today was “Daddy Day” as Stephanie had to work and so I was left to my own devices as far as entertaining the kids. Although this might sound like a daunting task for some fathers, we all know that filling 12 hours or so of the day is a no problem proposition for this daring dad! So today we went to the pool for a few hours, headed to the movie theater to see “Kung Fu Panda II” (which wasn’t NEARLY long enough!) and then we headed home for me to make a delicious dinner of metts, beans and french fries. After dinner, Ava proclaimed that she was gonna make her “Super Secret Dessert!”

Well…how could we POSSIBLY turn that down? So we wrangled up some ingredients she needed and left her to make her delicious concoction. Here’s how you do it…

INGREDIENTS: Banana, tapioca pudding, chocolate syrup, whipped cream.

INSTRUCTIONS: Peel the banana, cut into pieces and place in bowls. Scoop in a generous portion of tapioca pudding, cover in chocolate syrup. Top off with whipped cream and serve!

If you have a sweet tooth…THIS will hit the spot! Give it a try and remember…Ava made it first!

Hoops Action!

This weekend I stayed home to watch Christopher & Ava as they hooped it up here in northern Kentucky. Christopher’s Wildcats had a game and Ava is one of the cheerleaders for his team. I haven’t been able to see them in action this season so this was a real treat for me. Here are some pictures and a short video of the game!

And the final score was…

And THAT gave me something to cheer about!