A XXXL guy bopping up and down on a riding mower — yeah, no.
I never liked the optics of that scene, so I never painted it. Instead, I’d walk behind a push mower with a modest 21” cutting width, going back and forth and forth and back every 5-7 days during the dead of a Philadelphia summer, cutting...
June 23rd, 2018 | Parenting Blog | Read More
There’s been a one hour driving distance bubble encircling my immediately family for our entire lives.
At the end of July, my oldest brother (the one recoiling with iPhone in hand in the photo above) will move 10 hours south.
I could choose to be sad he’s fleeing the area. That’s one...
June 22nd, 2018 | Big Guy Car Guy | Read More
No one here tonight likely knows what the rusted Kellogg’s vending machine would have sold many years ago, but from outward appearances the still sunshine yellow M&M ice cream dispenser could pass for a functioning source of frozen treats to this day.
Both are tucked away, along with at least...
June 22nd, 2018 | Travel | Read More
There’s a helicopter museum near our house. I’m sure it’s lovely. I dunno, I’ve never been.
In the early days of my life as a stay-at-home dad a decade ago, that museum was something of a punchline in jokes volleyed between my wife and me. She’d wind me up with repeated nudging to take our...
June 20th, 2018 | Parenting Blog | Read More
Ten is 99.44% pure.
Ten is clean-as-a-whistle knock knock jokes on repeat and dirt beneath fingernails with hands in cookie jars. Ten is clean but needs to get cleaner every night to remove the smell of ten.
Eleven, thus far, a few weeks in, isn’t offering much relief from that smell. But the jokes...
June 19th, 2018 | Parenting Blog | Read More
Rickety knees have relegated the scaling of tall buildings to fantasyland for me; leaping those same skyscrapers in a single bound, what with that degenerative lower back and all, is, at this point in life, an even worse idea.
I may not have actual superpowers like Elastigirl, or even in the traditional...
June 11th, 2018 | Parenting Blog | Read More
We dream about these things — the moment we’ll first hold our babies snug in shaky yet sturdy arms, their first words/steps/soccer matches/graduations/and on and on. We also dream in technicolor about the moment we along with our children will first gaze out upon the sunken depths of Earth at Bryce...
June 7th, 2018 | Travel | Read More
For over fourteen years I’ve been waiting for the scales to level, for the other shoe to drop.
Things have been too smooth, too easy, relatively speaking, and while the shoe is still on today, the laces are undone and the seams in the socks are annoying as hell.
Parenting the 11-year-old has become...
June 7th, 2018 | Parenting Blog | Read More
