How to Raise Children

I often tell people that I am writing a book on how to rear children. In my mind it will actually be more like an encyclopedia that, when placed on the bookshelf, the splines of about 20 volumes will be seen, each volume being about an inch thick and all numbered from 1 to 20.

Ah, raising children.. all my wisdom will be included in this 20 volume set, everything from: “Pregnancy: what Dads Suffer”  to “What to do with your teenagers when you can no longer spank them” to “How should Dad explain the unfortunate accident when the toddler flys down the stairs in the walker while Mom is away and he’s playing on the computer.“ There will be chapters on how to respond calmly when teenage boys destroy yet another wall in your house and three whole volumes on teenage girls alone.  I also see several essays on topics such as “How to use your toddler as a vacuum cleaner” and “Pee on the toilet seat:  how little boys make Mom’s life less boring,” and “Bed time and Benadryl:  the ethics of drugging your child.”

Ah, the wisdom!  It will all be there for generations to glean its truth.  I can also see the young mother with volume one spread across her lap while burping the baby, and volume six opened up in the front seat of the car while the parent takes yet another ride to the hospital with a young boy who has broken yet another bone, and volume fourteen, fifteen and sixteen arrayed across the kitchen table when the father has to deal with the hormonal teenage daughter.  It will be glorious, every page of it.

The only problem is, I’ve barely started the project and I have 9,753 pages to go. I have the first sentence written – “Seek God” – and that covers everything, I think.

Thank You, Dear Reader

I don’t have any statistics and the results of any studies are not in, and I’m really not old enough to be commenting on this occurrence in modern life, and perhaps I’m just overly sensitive to the social situation at hand, but it seems to me that strangers have no problem flipping you off these days, and gone is something quaintly called politeness.

By mistake I texted a stranger a week ago (I had the wrong number), and the person had no qualms about describing me in the most vulgar way, as if had beat their mother over the head with a baseball bat. I’m just going about my business on the web (of all places) and the comments on YouTube, for instance, show a grievous lack of civility and most likely intelligence. I play chess online and had to change my username to PoliteChessOnly because I was tired of other players swearing at me. And then there’s driving, where other drivers seem to have no problem hoisting the bird – none whatsoever, and into our lexicon came the phrase Road Rage in the 1990s, which says it all.

In the old days before we were so modern and hip, parents taught their children to be polite; this was a virtue, something that everyone should practice to be good, upstanding citizens. The idea is that when dealing with strangers, we would treat them with some respect and especially woman, according to the great adage, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” So we would say “Please,” for instance, and not just make demands or grunt, and when someone did something nice for us, like holding the door, there was a nice phrase we could say in response: “Thank you.”

I’m not saying that this has completely vanished, but especially among the younger generation, politeness seems to something that belongs to the history books. Perhaps I’m just too old and recall the “good old days” when everything was better, but I see all this as a symptom of a greater societal decline, where we are slowly abandoning that great notion called civilization and descending into a semi-tribal state, where established order is broken down and all that remains is the law of brute force. As a middle defining organizational idea for holding society together – someplace between Christianity and the law of the jungle – enter godless humanism, that great religion espoused by the EU and more and more in our great America. This is where we are now.

It is difficult to solve all the world’s problems in one little blog, and in writing this I am reminded myself to be polite to strangers, especially bureaucrats on the phone. But I do ask, Oh Great God of Humanism, where is your “Do Unto Others” saying, and isn’t it, “#%^@ you,” as soon as one of your precious rights or comforts is violated, even in the most trivial matter? The barbarians are no longer at the gate, for they were let in a long time ago.

My Stand on Beards

In our household, there is near unanimous agreement among everyone that I should have a beard;  there is only one holdout, and that is me.

Me in 2014 with of all things a beard!

I approach all facial and other types of hair on a purely rational basis:  there is the cost of ownership, and the benefit, so all facial hair has to undergo the classic cost/benefit analysis as is done when buying a house or figuring out cancer treatments.  First, the cost:  the thing has to be kept trim or else you end up looking like a street person or someone from the outback or a timber man or some sort of alien.  That’s the cost.  Then there is the benefit:  first, no more shaving on a daily basis and, though much easier than what woman go through with their periods, it is something of a hassle.  Finally  you can make an argument that beards help keep you warm in these winter months, but I am skeptical about whether that really amounts to much.

The same goes for hair on the top of my head:  it succumbs to the same cost\benefit analysis.  In my book, the costs of hair are enormous, especially if you end up with a “bad hair day,” when the stupid strands of protein won’t stand down no matter how much water you put on them:  it’s just too much overhead in these busy times, and who has time for it?  So my solution is always the same:  away with it!  When the barber asks me in a conversational way as I am getting into the chair, “How do you want it cut today,” I always know what to say:  four on top, two on the sides.  I don’t really know what these numbers mean, but I always walk out with hair how I like it.  Now, if I’m feeling especially vengeful against hair, I throw out “Three on top, one on the sides,” and come out even more hairless.

But back to beard.  I let my kids talk me into one a few years ago because they said, “It gives you a more authorative look,” and I figured I need all the authority I can get around the house, so I embarked on a beard like a potato going old.  The thing sprouted out in every direction and, the more it grew, the more they liked it, and, as I had more authority, I couldn’t shave it off, now could I?  But even with my greater stature, the beard eventually came under the same cost\benefit analysis, and off it came one day.

I’m growing a beard again but it’s not because of my nuanced and penetrating analysis of weather it benefits me or not.  I lost my razor; looked up in the bathroom cabinet one day, and it was gone.  Who knows what could have happened to it in our house, as with a bunch of teenage boys, they might be feeling the need to shave off the cute three hairs they happen to have on the end of their chin.  But with a large family, sometimes you get dragged into things despite all your intellect.  But, hey, at least I have more authority now!  Maybe the cats will even listen to me!

 

I Shed a Tear

Something was wrong with Mr. Kitty. The animal was unusually grouchy and walked as if one of his legs was injured or even his back was perhaps broken in some way. Bounding up the stairs, he did no more, but walked as if they were too high. When anyone got near him, he would meow plaintively and when someone picked him up, the same. Even worse, he lifted the paw to me when I walked by him once and hissed at me, and I never allow such insolence from an animal.

Mr, Kitty sleeping on the printer

We made an appointment with the vet and, as we often say, it’s only money, since dear Mr. Kitty could be in great jeopardy. When we walked him to the car in the cat carrier, I remember thinking that this could be the last time we saw the animal, as we had discussed possibly putting him down if his medical condition was too dire and too expensive. I thought: if death is the outcome for this animal, even I might shed a tear.

We got to the animal hospital and soon the vet started her examination. Mr. Kitty was not pleased and gave that typical You-All-Really-Tick-Me-Off look but was compliant; he didn’t scratch or try to jump off the table, but let the vet check his teeth and his underside. Also, she did felt the scars along his back from the many fights he had picked and settled – all on his terms – so all our suspicions about his outdoor life were correct.

The vet finally said what she thought was wrong with Mr. Kitty. It was tense in the room.

She said, “I think Mr. Kitty is constipated.”

Yes, constipated!

The animal was constipated, and needed to be hospitalized and have an enema, and maybe two or three. Now, this is an animal that expects life to come to him on his own terms and if it doesn’t, he’s prepared to order the universe to his own liking with a big fight; usually the universe succumbs, and he then walks around being peeved that it even thought to resist. Now the animal has to have an enema, and maybe not one, but two or three, along with laxatives.

Life has many twists and turns, but this for the poor animal might be too much. I was going to shed a tear perhaps when they put the old fighter down, but I ended up shedding tears in laughter. But I thought to pray for the old gentleman warrier. I was wondering if, when they started the enema, he would be sorry for all the small animals he’s killed with reckless abandon. Like the inmate on death row, he might want to issue an apology and ask for forgiveness. That’s what I was thinking, but my wife told me that as soon as he entered the door of our house, outside was the only thing he wanted, and the small game had better be shaking, because Mr. Kitty was in a bad mood.

Eight Children: Perspectives

We happen to have eight children, and I count:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, a fact that never ceases to amaze people.  “You have eight children,” they will exclaim when we tell them, and I’ve heard more than one waitress or nurse say when we told them this in the course of conversation, “You have eight children!  I can barely handle one!”

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We do have eight children.  The thing is, God gives them to us one at a time, so we build up to it slowly;  we just don’t get eight kids at once. We didn’t open the door one day and see eight babies in baskets, nor when we looked up into the sky one day did we see eight storks flying our way.  No, they come slow but sure, one by one, delivery by delivery, until the magic number of eight was reached, then no more.

One secret people don’t usually recognize is that it’s all a matter of perspective.  When we had one child, we never thought we could ever handle a second, but then God sent a second.  Then three was unthinkable, but not for God, and he thought of our third.  We were now warmed up, so when number four came, like a machine we popped the kid out after only four hours of labor.  After number five it was all downhill, and soon we were on six, and by this point it was still probably true that we still could only handle one, but somehow we managed.  Number seven and eight came as an afterthought, but rounded out the family well.

We know a family that has nearly twice as many children as us:  16 to be exact.  Sixteen kids!  How do they ever do it; but somehow they do.  They once told us that when half theirs were gone, it was so easy – so easy for them with eight children!  Well, we were barely hanging on with our eight, but for them eight was nothing.  It turns out that when some of ours were gone and we were left with four – well, how easy was that!  Anyone can do four, we thought! Now, the ones who found four easy (us), were the same ones who couldn’t handle one, let along two, and the ones who had eight (us again), were pegged, but not so with the ones with 16;  to them eight was nothing.

What can we learn from this?  We can learn it’s all a matter of perspective.

Lets return to the waitress or nurse who can only handle one child.  Single.  Uno.  I respect how they feel, that’s for sure, and I’ve heard this saying:  one is like none, two is like ten.  Still, one has the capacity to so uproot your life, the thought of two can be considered form of reproductive lunacy.  I can understand that also.  I can understand it all.

But after you’ve had a few, you’re crazy anyway, so adding a few more on has the same effect as touching up the trim in the insane asylum.  Why not a few more?  It’s all perspective, and God has the best perspective, for he knows really what we can handle.

Food Fights in the Stahl Household

It is an established fact in our household 95% of the fights are about food.

The latest example happened just this evening:  Angela, my dear wife, made excellent home-made turkey soup, which we all enjoyed.   Later in the evening, I was a bit hungry and, thinking about the said soup, thought I would like a few scoops or so.  Over to the kitchen I went where on the stove sat a large pot of soup, still half full.  When I scooped a ladle of it into my bowl, I realized – to my horror – that the soup had been castrated.  The turkey was gone.

Someone had skillfully extracted all the turkey from the soup, leaving only the broth.  There were a few chunks of celery floating around and a stray carrot, but they were mostly gone as well.

Then an hour later we found the instrument used in the crime: a strainer that showed evidence of a highly sophisticated industrial Turkey-taking scheme, right here in the Stahl household!

Now, the search for the guilty is often unsatisfying in a large family, as of course no one took the turkey or strained it or would ever think of doing so, so again it must have been the cat.

Somewhere way back in either my genetics or my wife’s, someone married a squirrel, because all my children have also become adept at hiding food.  “Where’s the oranges,” we once asked, as they had vanished five minutes into the house.  A few days later in my son’s bedroom I noticed a bag of oranges, as he had not fully closed his dresser drawer.

The first question when me or my wife arrive at home is not, “Glad you had a safe journey on these dangerous roads,” or a polite, “Hello Mom, nice to see you who gave me birth,” but rather – and it never varies – “Did you buy food?”  At times my littlest one has been the squire who ran through the house as if the King had entered the walls of the town, exclaiming, “We have food!  We have food!”

And there are complaints in our household that are always the same, the same: “There’s no food!”  These three words There’s no food is spoken in a language known to teenagers ; when translated, it means, “There’s no food that we can microwave!”  A burrito from a bag is food;  pizza from a box is food;  ice cream is food.  These are all foods, but the overhead of cooking eggs makes these wonderful sources of protein not a food, and the same goes for tacos, all of which have to be prepared, which is why God made mothers.

Chocolate is at the pinnacle of the food pyramid in our house.  Buying chocolate and bringing it through our doors is like spreading gasoline in a match factory.  The entire house is aflame when chocolate is known to reside someplace.  They cannot break a piece off and hand a square to their dear sibling; no, they lunge and grapple, and have been known to run away with the blessed bar, siblings not far behind.  I recently confiscated and hid such chocolate before they were even out of the grocery bag, the father finally getting some brains.  Now, when they want chocolate, they have to be humble, and respectful, and ask in a way that tilts my mood to being nice to them; then I lock the door to my bedroom, find the bar, and come out the benefactor, giving chocolate to those who please me.

I do remind them that we don’t have any food because they eat all of it, but they are never sorry for my enormous food bill but expect the food truck to backup to our house every other day, and for some reason it doesn’t, which means it must be my fault.  I was born to drive them places and to keep them well fed; anything less than that in their eyes is outrageous – like living without a smartphone or making them do the dishes when they could be listening to a Youtube video of a man dancing with a gorilla, or something.

I also remind them that if we all had a feeding tube like I do, life would be simpler, as gone would be shopping, cooking, eating and the cleanup;  we would just hook ourselves up to a machine every night, and miss all the complexity.  But alas, God made us with these stomachs, and they must be serviced three times a day.  Just how it is.

Well, I’ve used a fair amount of energy writing this and should retire to the kitchen to eat some Italian cookies that were frozen from Thanksgiving – homemade Italian cookies that my Mom made especially for me.  I saw one of my teenagers eating one earlier, as he had found it buried in the freezer, but the only question is:  will I find it there, or anything?

 

 

Just a Click Away…

In our highly technologicalized world, the evil is never far from us.  Indeed, it is only a click away, and quickly we are someplace we shouldn’t be, and in very deeply.  It is a world where you can be in a chat room talking to a pedophile and never know it, and the same goes for your child.  It is a world where you can bear your soul in social media, but this online world has no boundaries, and your message can end up with someone you wish it hadn’t; also, everything you say online – no matter how stupid – lives on forever.  It is a world where you can take on a totally different identity and become someone else, and oftentimes someone who might be nice in the real world is vulgar and rude in the online world.

But that is not all.  In the old days, before cell phones and tablets and PCs and other gadgets, if you didn’t seek out the evil, it would more or less leave you alone.  If you stayed away from the bad part of the city, you were good.  Times have changed, however.  In this online world, the evil stalks you.  Rather than you deciding to click on a bad link, it comes to you via a pornographic email, or someone on Instagram with vulgar pictures wants you to follow them and the pictures are shown below the request, or an innocent Google image search is 99 percent what you expected, but then there is that one picture….  You have done nothing wrong – just used this online world – but the evil therein is stalking you.  Beware.

Take great care in this age, as you might not know it, but you are a target.  Millions can be targeted with one click by a creep in a dingy apartment in some anonymous big city.  It’s that easy – and just as easy to become corrupted.

I wish you the best.

My Period. Period

I am not always the firmest apple in the barrel, so when I recently got some balls on and insisted that my kids help around the house, as we don’t want to work my dear wife into the grave, I learned later how this went down in the little teenagers head:  one teenager (name withheld) texted to the other teenager (name also withheld) that – and I quote – “Dad has his period.”

Japanese flag on pole against blue sky.

They are a good bunch, these teenagers, and the days of wiping bottoms and picking them up off the floor when they fell out of bed – those days are over, so now we are left with trees that mostly tower over me, the unwrinkled skin of youth, and sarcasm.  I used to be “Dad” or even “Father” but now I’m “Pops” and “Old man,” and “Hey, old man,” and the like.  They can be charming when they want something – such as a ride to someplace – and in the old days I would correct them when they dressed in plaid pants and plaid shirts to go to school, but now they have no fear to tell me about my shirt, “That’s so you.  It’s totally the 1970s,” and once one of these lovely teenagers, upon coming into my bedroom, said, “It smells like old people.”

I am getting off subject.  We were talking about me having my period, but I do daydream to the good old days when what I said really mattered – or at least I thought it did – and just taking them out to a park was all they needed to have something called “fun.”  Anyway, I didn’t rationally correct them for the period remark, calmly informing them that, no, I didn’t have my period nor have I ever had such a thing (something I am very thankful for), so I did not ask them to clean up their 139,203nd mess because at 55 years of age I suddenly started menstruating ; no, I didn’t.

Alas, one can analyze such remarks and read too much into them.  We just have to say that these children are uninformed and perhaps failed health class.  And what they say is all good for me and my salvation.  Now, what will they say when I ask them to do something today?

 

Snowday!

Today is a snow day, one of those semi-rare occurrences in Central New York that warms every child’s heart.  They can come at any time, and for a variety of reasons: tons of snow being the chief cause, but we’ve seen school closed for excessive cold, and also for just the possibility of a storm coming, even though if you look out your window all is serene – but its on its way.

They are shoveling the lawn to make an igloo on this snow day!

When the snow day occurrence is discovered, there is joy in the house, as the young child\ teenager doesn’t have to first move from his warm bed into a semi-cold room, grope around for clothes, and find the bathroom – all of which are if not cold at least cool, unlike the toasty bed.  This torture not being enough, the child may have to actually communicate with someone who is up and might happen to be jolly in the morning, and this someone may want more than a grunt.  To top it all off – as if this wasn’t enough – he has to exit the house into what is a large freezer with a cloud-capped roof, and often with wind to boot.

The snow day now being official, everyone is happy.  One of my teenagers who has had a bad cold/sickness missed the last three days of school, and now we add a snow day on to this, so you can say he is forging his own Winter Break; my other teen has a huge paper to due tomorrow, so the timing of the storm couldn’t be better.  We have one eight year old who is in Rochester today for a lip surgery; they have no snow there, so whoever is planning the storm should get a gold star.  And the last child, age 10, has no inhibitions about showing his happiness for the snow day – we all know it – and is now watching his vids and thoroughly enjoying his day off.

Yet amid all the happiness, we have found the seeds of discontent.  Well, not today, but other times when school would be first delayed for one hour and then two hours, so everyone would start off happy, only to find out that indeed school was on, and the big yellow bus would soon be coming down the road for them.  They were bummed out.  “School – we have to go to school?  Why can’t they just cancel it?”  I told them that this was an example their depraved human nature at work.  I told them, “Why not be glad you at least got two extra hours off, rather than want more?”  A human being, if left to himself, can make himself miserable no matter what the situation.

The snow keeps falling, and its dreadful outside.  Maybe we can get something done inside, but who wants to ruin a day of relaxation with anything that reminds us of work?  Maybe it’s good for all of us to take a timeout from life – a gift of the snow Gods!

The Bureaucratization of American Life

We have a great and glorious history as Americans, standing up to the British with only farm clothes for uniforms; hauling entire households across America in a train of covered wagons; inventing everything to the light bulb to airplanes and finally to landing a man on the moon, so it would be strange that such a grand nation – such a nation with such accomplishments – would be reduced to a dull bureaucracy.

There used to be a time when we would take our kids to the doctors, and we could then say: end of story.  Now, no, no, no; now we have to get a note from the doctor on our way out that says that, indeed, the young child was actually in the office, and this note has to make its way through the mother’s purse, into the child’s hand, to the child’s teacher, then from the teacher to the bureaucrat of choice, so it can be tabulated with all the other notes, categorized, maybe read (maybe not) and definitely stored somehow someplace.

But that’s not enough.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the school bureaucracy, someone with a job paid by us great taxpayers, that someone takes the time to tabulate all these notes and not notes and send us a list of all the days the dear child has missed and on which days he didn’t happen to bring in his little note.  We are then expected to call the doctor’s office so that they can print out the note and fax it to the school, where someone finds it and – someplace – indicates that on this date, indeed, Johnny was absent but for a good reason: he saw the doctor, and if anyone thinks the parents just took Johnny to the zoo or happened to have fun with the little fellow – no, that didn’t happen, as now there is a note.

A note!

A note for everything, if you want the child to go to swim lessons or not;  to be dropped off by the bus at the top of our road and walk from the end of it to our house or not (I kid you not), to be able to go to the Recreation Center after school or not;  to use the school computer or not;  to have his (or her) dear face be placed in the newspapers in case someone takes his picture during an event – or not, and we have not even scratched the surface of the vast extent of the Note Police’s Empire;  I spare you, dear reader.

Then there is the evil sister of the note:  the signature.  I, in my other life before children, reserved my signature for checks, and closing on a house, and buying a car on loan, and other important events.  My signature was important.  Just signing it was saying that I, David Stahl, agree to whatever I was agreeing to, and it was no small matter.

No more.

“Dad, sign this,” my 16 year old tells me, placing a paper in front of me as I sit eating soup.

“What’s it for?” I ask, innocently.

“Something stupid,” he says.

We both agree: it’s for something stupid.

I sign.

Likewise, my nine year old son asks me every night, “Can you sign?”

“What am I signing?” I ask.  “To give you a million dollars?”

He smiles, and I sign.

Actually, every night I have to initial his homework and sign in about four places, indicating that he did this or that, read this or that or went over his spelling words or something.  I really don’t know anymore, and really don’t have the time to figure out what I am signing.  I just sign.

I really don’t know what happens to all my signatures.  Where do they go, and what happens to them?   Who knows what lurks in the bowels of the bureaucracy, and what these bowels really contain!

Then again, what if one of my kids hires a hit man with a violin case to do the deed, and asks me to sign, and I do?  Or what if I am signing to give my consent for a lobotomy at my next office visit, and and my signature gives permission for one and all?  Imagine the possibilities!  No matter:  just sign, and everything is good, the Earth still spins and inner peace is found.

I cite the educational system but such nonsense is rampant. I think it shows that we as a society have lost all manner of common sense.  All that’s left is a hollowed out society of notes and signatures and various other empty contrivances.  Western civilization is upside down, and we are all walking on the ceiling looking down (or up).

To verify that you have read this blog and agree with its assertions, sign below and email it to c.n.y.stahl@gmail.com:

 

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