I hate Mothers Day!
I am not a misogynist. Far from it.
In fact, I love and respect women –especially mothers.
Particularly my own mother and my wife, the mother of my children.
Yet, I hate Mother’s Day.
Yes, I do think mothers deserve a special day. Yes, I do believe that mothers are the glue to our society.
But I still hate Mother’s Day and here’s why. Continue reading
My dad came of age in the 1940s.
Everyone smoked in the 1940s.
Every morning, he would reach for a cigarette. He smoked Kool. As he got to a certain point in life, he surely realized smoking was not cool.
However, he like many of his age and time period, was already addicted.
My dad quit smoking when he was 60. He went cold turkey. No bumming a cigarette here and there for him either. He got to the point where he could not stand having cigarette smoke around him.
While I can’t attest to his mindset as to why he quit, I can tell you his secret.
It was the sticks. Lollipop sticks that is.
My dad’s new addiction was lollipops. He preferred Tootsie Pop lollipops to be more specific. I don’t think it was the sugar that he craved though he certainly had a sweet tooth. No, for him it was about the stick that remained after the Tootsie Pop lollipop.
Anyway, it got to the point that those lollipop sticks were everywhere in the house, my dad’s office, and his car. Where ever he was, a lollipop stick was not far. Yes, a chewed on lollipop stick was always lurking.
To confirm what you may be thinking, it was gross. However, the other option of stinky cigarettes that made my dad hack up to the point where it scared me was much worse.
So, I choose the sticks.
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BR is slim. This is not because he has a healthy diet. This is not because he is always active. This is not because he has those type of genes.
BR takes medicine for ADD. An unintended side effect of the medicine is that his appetite is suppressed. He goes through long stretches of the day where he is not interested in food. Sometimes, he complains of nausea.
There is one food that BR has never turned down – popsicles.
Every morning, he goes to the freezer to reach for a popsicle. BR eats multiple popsicles throughout each and every day.
By the way, my wife makes the popsicles from sugar free juice. The popsicles are not my wife’s greatest recipe thought it is surely her most appreciated.
BR eats the popsicles down to the stick. In fact, he often bites the stick as well.
As you must know, chewed up popsicle sticks are nasty. And these nasty popsicle sticks can be found in BR’s bedroom, in our sofas, and on the computer desk.
Now, I would rather BR eat a healthy nutritious diet in which popsicles are not the staple. Well, at least he is eating.
Ultimately, I choose the sticks.
I’d like to think that somewhere, my Dad – who shares a name with BR – is smiling about the new generation of ‘sticks’.
Sometimes things touch us, move us, affect us.
The Nick and Zack Song by my fellow Dad Blogger, Bill, did this for me. Bill and I belong to the same Dad Bloggers Facebook Group. Everyone in our group knows him as the wise and sensitive sage and the best compliment giver.
Anyway, I’ve been reading his blog, I Hope I Win a Toaster, for some time now. I quickly learned that Bill is a loving father and a sensitive soul.
Besides blogging, Bill is a Stay-at-home-Dad, husband, guitar player, trained actor, and reader of books on spirituality. Bill prides himself on being a “meat whisperer” meaning that he can take any meat and any source of heat and make it good. He swears it’s a gift, God-given and very handy.
Prior to becoming a Stay-at-home-Dad to his twin 9-year old boys, Bill spent nearly thirty five years in the restaurant business. He says it prepared him for life as a Stay-at-home-Dad. Besides the food prep and safety and all the obvious stuff, he learned about prioritizing and triage.
Check out Bill’s post below for the back story about the song and then make sure to give the Nick and Zack song a listen. I promise it will make you smile. Once again, you can check out his blog here: Bill’s Blog.
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When our twin sons were born in the Spring of 2005, I was 44 years old. Six weeks later my wife, a youth minister at the time, went back to work, and I stayed at home to look after the boys. I hadn’t had much experience with newborns – as in, I think I’d held one once. But, I didn’t have much time to learn things.
I think you can guess what happened: I fell in love with them. So, what does a guy raised up in the sixties and seventies do when he is in love? Right, I wrote a song about it. I had penned dozens of love songs up to that point but never for a couple of infants.
Listen, when a guy writes a love song for a girl he is doing it for a reason… I’ll leave it at that. In fact, I wrote a song for my wife asking her to marry me. It worked. I didn’t know the reason I was writing this song. That came much later. One summer my family and I were camping. I was playing a few tunes around a fire, and I asked Nick what he’d like to hear.
“How about that song you wrote for us?”
“Yeah,” Zack chimed in, “I love that song.”
And, we all sang it together
I love this song too, and, it seems to have done what I had hoped – it cherishes them. And, they understand that.
A while back I began to worry that there wasn’t a recording of it, so, I sat down in front of the computer, faced the camera, and sang it for them. I’m glad I did.
