Like me, I’m sure you have found strange personality quirks in your children. I’ve already documented my youngest son’s obsession with DVDs – not watching them, but playing with the actual disks. His obsession is weird, annoying, and expensive, but probably not as frustrating as my two-year-old daughter’s obsession with writing instruments and causing as much destruction as possible with them.
In the Valley of Dudes: Stay At Home Dad Tells All
I don’t reblog often, but this one was too awesome to pass up.
Being a stay at home dad is weird. People ask me all the time what it’s like to stay home with my kids while my wife contributes to the Gross National Product every day, and the best way I can describe it is, “weird.” Not because I’m a man and she’s a woman—that’s not the weird part. The truth is, I know lots of stay at home dads. (We call ourselves SAHD’s. Pronounced “sad.”) I live in the “Valley of Dudes” where women work and men cook and change diapers. We all have beards, rarely wear closed-toed shoes, and find good excuses to get together and drink beers in the afternoon. Suck it, dudes with jobs!
There’s nothing weird about that. What’s weird, is hanging out with two five year old kids all day, everyday. Let me explain.
Being a stay at home dad is…
…A lot like being a…
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The “summer’s over and I didn’t do most of those things I promised myself that I would” Edition
Motivational business articles often suggest that the most successful people are those that keep to-do lists. I agree there is gratification in the simple act of crossing something off a list, enough so that I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t make one for the summer, which has now officially ended. Apparently, crossing items off a mental list just doesn’t have the same effect.
The Five Stages of Parenting Embarassment
I know as parents, we often hear about how our kids are supposed to be embarrassed by the things that we do. However, not much ever gets reported about how our kids embarrass us.
To demonstrate that this phenomenon does, in fact, exist, I am presenting the five stages of parenting embarrassment and how I came to realize the existence of each stage when taking the kids to the library last week.
I Hope You Enjoyed Your Childhood. Now, Pay Up!
Exciting news! Although he’s only three, Grayson is already showing potential for a promising career in science.
A couple weeks ago, he decided to conduct an experiment to see how well my 51″ plasma TV would hold up when struck repeatedly by a flying sippy cup. His experiment had a very conclusive result. TVs, in fact, do not hold up well when having sippy cups thrown at them. His findings showed, with little margin of error, that doing so results in premature death of the TV.
For his next experiment, he decided to test the longevity of our Kindle Fire under harsh impact conditions. Specifically, he tested the Kindle Fire’s natural reaction to being dropped on the hardwood floor. Again, the results were conclusive. The shattered screen corresponded directly to the height from which the unit was dropped.
His findings also suggest that an increase in broken electronics correlates to a decrease in checking account funds. I told you, he has scientist written all over him.
Taking the Kids out to Eat (aka Why do I Continue to do this to Myself?)
One evening last week, the weather was nice (finally) and the wife had the seemingly excellent suggestion for the six of us to go out to eat and then go to the park afterwards. What was she thinking?!?
We went to a local sandwich place, which was an innocuous choice at first glance. It proved to be anything but that.
I could look past the kids climbing on chairs and tables and built-in furniture. Nothing new here. I could disregard them weaving in-and-out of line, standing with other families, and pulling chip bags down onto the floor. It happens all the time.
Are You a Word Counter?
This will be a very short post tonight as it’s late and tomorrow is going to be an early Saturday with kids and sports and birthday parties.
So, how closely do you monitor your word count when writing? Is it more important to you with longer works (e.g. novels) vs. short stories and the like?
I am in the process of writing my first novel, and while I have always kept an eye on my word count, I haven’t been hung up on it until recently. But, when I say ‘hung up,’ it’s not in a bad way. I’m not letting my word count drive my work. I won’t judge whether or not my book is a success based on the number of words in it. However, I have been using it as a motivator, and it has been working.
Craft of Writing: Let the Reader’s Imagination Do the Heavy Lifting
I rarely re-blog (in fact this is my first time), but this gem from The Daily Post contains excellent advice regarding two opposing stances: the thorough descriptive author vs. the author that prefers leaving most of the imagining up the reader. Which type of author are you?
Personally, I like well described settings and scenes, but I also know they can hinder fast-paced action. As a writer, I try to be somewhere in the middle, but if I lean toward one side, it would be the descriptive.
This is the kind of flowery we can get behind. Flowery Piano by Andreas(CC BY-SA 2.0)
In storytelling, description and detail translate what’s in your imagination into scenes and images in the reader’s mind. Can bloated description detract from your work, fill your reader’s brain with too much information, and distract them from the story? The answer is yes. In today’s post we’ll look at how to know when enough is enough.
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Going Gray?
For the last few years, I have had a single gray chest hair. I have never understood why. The blame likely goes to my oldest daughter, Alexis, who takes pride in aging her dad well beyond his years. But, who knows?
Now suddenly, as if overnight, I have four. Now, I’m not narcissistic enough to check for this sort of thing every day, so perhaps they have been there for a week or two, but today was the first time I discovered them.
On Reading and Writing
This will be a short, somewhat random post – an update, if you will.
I’ve been making decent headway in the novel over the past two weeks. Word count is now pushing 44,000 and late last night, I finished a core scene that I have been planning since the very first concepts of this story began to materialize four years ago. I feel a sense of completion and good about how it turned out. I’m sure I will revisit it several times in future drafts, and I’m looking forward to seeing what others think of it, but for now, I’m ready to continue to blaze forward (well, as blazing as a dad of four can get).
I have also been reading a lot! In a previous post, I mentioned that I had finished the Hunger Games trilogy. Since then, I have read an interesting mix of books: The Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, and half of Matched (before I abandoned it) by Ally Condie. I’ve also started Divergent by Veronica Roth (I know, color me trendy), and The Maze Runner by James Dashner.
Active Dad at Home 