My design..yes...my design!

So, as I get back into maintaining this blog, I have decided that I am going to give it a bit of a personal touch. This is one reason that I switched from Tumblr to Blogger as Blogger allowed me some freedom to do what I wanted with it without a lot of coding hassle (I simply do not have time to code).

One way for me to 'personalize' this blog is to make the background image a picture that I took. Not some stock photographer that is monetizing on his or her skill (but good for them) but a picture that I spent some time thinking about and creating. I have many of these type of pictures in my arsenal and will likely change the background and look of the blog monthly.

This month's background is one of my wife's favorite pictures. I called it 'Mossy sunlight' and I took it in an abandoned old farm house in Wisconsin during a men's retreat at Camp Wapogasset.

enjoy....

Stagnant

I hate having this blog stagnant. I have been way too busy to post anything lately. Baseball, running marathons, and a four year old daughter who only stops if she hits a wall have been keeping me in a sort of writer’s funk.

I do have a post in the works regarding my 3-tier backup strategy (by request) and hopefully soon I will have more info about Mission : Photographable! My new Photo Tips blog for the camera newbies.

Anyway, sorry for the pond scum of late. As I get more active with the blog, the stink should go away!

Fairy, Fairy, Fairy...I will not suck my thumb!!

We all have a security blanket of some sort. Over the years we may have changed our blankets to more socially accepted things, but we all have them; humans are more like the Peanuts’ character Linus in more ways than we would probably care to admit.

My four year old daughter’s Linus trait is sucking her thumb; a disposition that I am sure she had even in the womb and one that has been extremely hard to break. If she had been sold on the pacifier I kept trying to stick in her face as an infant, I would be in the process right now of simply denying her said device (easy). But since I cannot remove her thumbs (legally), my daughter and I seem to be at a standstill.

So, in the war of the digits….think like your enemy.

My opportunity to gain advancing ground in this war was when she had a slight accident that caused her to have a loose front tooth. The dentist explained carefully to her that she could no longer suck her thumb. This violation of her first amendment rights did not sit well at first, but she agreed to comply in the end. It did not take long however to break the law of the Dictator Dentist, and she reverted back to her underground movement of thumb sucking.

Then it hit me. I need to make a game out of it.

Since my daughter has been enamored by fairys and fairy-land stories lately I decided that I would use her love of them as a weapon. The next time I saw her sucking her thumb I took her aside and convinced my daughter that a fairy cannot suck her thumb and fly at the same time. I also told her that every time I said the phrase “Fairy, Fairy, Fairy” she would have to take her thumb out of her mouth and say to me loudly “I WILL NOT SUCK MY THUMB!” This worked so well that we repeated the phrase/game for about a half-hour at her request. By the end if that thirty minute brainwashing session, she was fully trained to stop sucking her thumb at my magic phrase.

It has been months since I struck the final blow in this battle. Every once in a while I will catch my daughter with her thumb in her mouth trying to start the war all over again. Still, all I have to do is say my Napalm phrase and her thumb is right out of her mouth as if it were poisonous. Now, if only I could figure out a phrase to stop her from dating when she is older…..

Kicking the Nintendo DS in the butt

There is a Nintendo DSLite in my garbage can today. It works (mostly). It was put there by my ten year old son, on purpose.

We have always believed that outside time, family time, any kind of activity is far better for our kids than an XBox, Nintendo, Wii or Playstation. I think most people would agree, yet I see far too many kids active on these systems more than they are outside. With many forces against us and peer pressure from friends, we had stayed the course and not bought one of these systems for my son.

Until recently….

My wife was scheduled to have major surgery last December and she knew she would be mostly unable to entertain our son through these winter months during her long recovery period. At the same time, my son, seeing what must have been a very rare chink in his mother’s armor, happened to mention that not having a game system was, among the status of his friends, like bringing a BB-gun to a war with real bullets. It was at this point that my wife caved. I am not sure if it was because my son slayed the dragon with his logic or if she actually realized that this would help keep him occupied when he could do nothing else.

But we had to compromise. If we were going to let one of these machines that eat valuable time in the house, it was going to be the one that would eat up your time but keep you somewhat active while the electronic monster gobbled up your brain cells. So, I told my son the only system we would let in the house would be the Wii. We enjoyed (and still do enjoy) the Wii but it has not really changed my son in any way and we do not play it as much as I thought we would. In short, the white wonder that is the Wii has not become a problem.

A few months ago my son received a Nintendo DS-Lite for free. It was an older version and had a broken touch screen but it could still play games. It was really not worth much but to my son it was like gold. We were reluctant to let him have this new toy because we have seen his friends and other kids become totally engrossed in these portable demons. But we gave him some strict rules and he assured us that it would not be an issue for him. After about a month of owning this contraption, my son saved up some precious allowance to buy a Pokemon game for this DS-Lite so he could play and trade digital Pokemon’s with the neighbor kids and his friends, and I believe this is where it reached out it’s digital claw and clutched him.

We started noticing that certain friends were always coming over with their little portable boxes of digital cocaine and they would sit in my son’s room playing Pokemon and having battles and trading and whatever else you do with Pokemons (the whole Pokemon thing confuses me as an adult). Instead of going outside or having Nerf gun battles, they were getting a LCD suntans on their faces.

Last night, I was thinking about having a “conversation” with my son regarding the DS-Lite and what I am witnessing with his friends. We have preached the dangers of this digital addiction to him before he even got the device but it seemed to me that he needed a reminder. It was then that he surprised me by coming upstairs and throwing his DS-Lite in the trash can. His statement was that it had control of him and that by throwing it away he feels like a great weight has been lifted from him. When asked why he did not give it to a friend or try to sell it he stated that he did not want to have some other kid addicted to this thing and that it was better off to throw it away.

So, wow! The smile on his face and the sense of relief I saw in him made me a proud and happy father. I am still waiting for the shock to wear off from realizing that my 10 year old son was able to notice something about himself that most adults are unwilling to admit or even face in their entire lives.

Ohh, and no digging through my garbage for a free DS….that is just Section-8