Fight

I’m a lover, not a fighter. I punched Ryan Lawson in the face twice during a pickup football game in sixth grade. He went down and the fight was over.

Thirty-some years later and there was no avoiding this fight. I looked at my nemesis straight in his beady blue eyes. He had the smirk of an eight year old as he taunted me. “C’mon big daddy, show me what you’ve got. You are going down anyway.” His friend laughed and egged him on with shouts of “Beat him bad!!” They both wanted blood.

Big daddy? I’ll show the punk. The other guy will be next. My age doesn’t translate to wussiness. I raised my balled up right hand and leaned in toward the jerk. He crouched into a fighting stance. All it took was one more little taunt and we went at it.

Fists were pounding. I took a couple jabs that were hurtful rocks. I was losing the fight. But then I threw a few rocks of my own. He tried to cover up like wrapping paper but I countered with scissoring vengeance. Three times in a row and it was over.

I stood over the little trash talker and celebrated my victory. Nobody beats Daddy in Rock-Paper-Scissors, nobody! Will sulked away and Drew stepped up for a new battle.

One, two, three, four; I declare a Thumb War!

Masterpiece or Monsterpiece

I bought the boys an art set that comes with a bunch of colored pencils, pastel crayons and some water paint. We were inspired by a neat book called Drawing Lab by Carla Sonheim. I tried to steal Snow White’s copy since I’m a book thief, but she wouldn’t let me so I had to actually pay for my own. Although Snow White did buy me The Book Thief by Markus Zusak because she thinks she is clever. So I did score a free book out of that whole deal after all.

Anyway, the labs in the drawing book are really cool. They give you 52 different projects to help you advance your drawing skills and get you to experiment with a variety of methodologies and mixed-media. It is fun for adults and kids.

One of the first exercises is to draw a person’s face. You are supposed to mostly look at the person (over 60% of the time) and draw with your non-dominant hand. By using the ‘wrong’ hand, it forces you not to worry about clean lines or perceived mistakes. And you are supposed to do it quickly.

I have lots and lots of room to improve with my drawing. So I must say I was quite pleased with how my left-handed sketch of Will came out. I’ve never drawn anything this decent with my right hand.



Of course, until I drew him, I never knew my son looks just like Alfred E. Neuman. But not bad, right?

So then it was Will’s turn to draw me. He is a pretty good drawer for an eight year old so I was excited to see how he would do. I was thinking maybe he’d be a great illustrator for Disney or Pixar. His work would be in all the blockbuster kid movies. I smiled as Will focused on my face. He started drawing and although the head was quite lopsided and potato-ish, I regained confidence when Will announced, “Wow, that is pretty good. It’s just like your head.”

I tried to look even more charming in a less lumpy-head kind of way while Will worked on my ears. They seemed a little more protruding than I remembered, but I had just gotten a haircut, so perhaps the little Picasso was interpreting my Dumbo wings right after all.

I tried to pose in a nicely shaped nogginal way while I made my ears less prominent by relaxing my mind in effort to hear nothing. I figured less work for my ear holes would make my ears less perky. I watched as Will stared intently at my face while his left hand sketched my nose; my big upside down shield of Sir Lancelot nose. Wow, that is some schnoz. Well, I laughed nervously and reminded Will (and myself) that noses are often the hardest thing to draw. I mean, some artists just go with a circle or a dot.

So then I cocked my head to place it in a beautifully smooth and oval position thereby also reducing one side of my eardom to a tiny pinned back flap of goodness. I then discreetly pushed my upper lip down in order to stretch my nose more vertically resulting in a more portrait friendly vertical and skinny look as opposed to the ginormous reverse police badge of a honker Will’s shaky left hand had produced.

Will was on my eyes now. I have been complimented on the merry twinkle in my engaging brown eyes and I figured Will would kind of make up for some of his mistakes, I mean previous work, by nailing my knee wobbling gaze. Therefore I was a little surprised to see the beady googly eyes with the accompanying stress/worry/age lines below them. Well, heh heh, yeah, it was late and I was tired. I think it was around 7pm already that evening! We had been busy all day, um playing and drawing, and doing other really worrisome and stressful activities, like uh, Hide & Seek! I couldn’t find Drew anywhere in my two bedroom condo! It took like one and a half minutes! So maybe my eyes were a little off from the rough day.

I pushed my ears back with my hands and sucked in my nose while I held my head in a very pleasant orb-ish shape and gave Will a sparkling and deep gaze that I tried to maintain as in a staring contest which in turn may have made me twitch a little bit which might explain the crooked grin with intensely gritted teeth.

At this point, Will was laughing and said, “Daddy, I’m sorry I’m making you so sad!” I looked at the picture and noted that I was smiling and clearly happy, but then Will clarified saying he meant sad as in what a nasty and ugly fellow I was. Awwww, the little charmer.

At this point I was having a lot of trouble posing in a way that highlighted my best features, or rather minimized my worst; and was relieved to find out all that was left was my hair and three day old five o’clock shadow. Will’s left hand furiously made single strokes around the perimeter of my goober head and proudly said, “Ta-dah!”

Are you ready for this?



Since I made Will look like the Mad Magazine guy, I guess it’s fitting that he can make me look like Shrek. It’s funny because my college roommates used to call me an ogre. I always thought it was because I slept in a lot. Oh well. At least when Will works for DreamWorks, he can show them how great he is at drawing cartoon ogres. Plus, Shrek ended up with Cameron Diaz. So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt

I stopped in Einstein’s this morning to get an egg sandwich, diet coke and frosted cookie, also known as the ‘breakfast of champions.’ People seemed really friendly. I saw lots of smiles. And while I was waiting in line to pay, I noticed a hot chick checking me out. Who cares that she looked like a college student, she was totally giving me the once-over with a big grin. I paid the cashier and she was also Miss Smiley Pants. Why were all these people so happy in the morning while I was still trying to wake up?

I sat down and began to eat while I read the paper. Being the large and sloppy consumer I am, a large bagel chunk broke off and rolled along my shirt to the floor. I looked down at my shirt to assess the damage. The good news was there was no egg bagel trail at all. The bad news was that there were a million little black fuzzies stuck all over my white shirt from the right shoulder and then diagonally down across my chest and to my left hip. It looked ridiculous.

I realized what happened right away. I played basketball last night and afterwards put on a black fleece pull-over. I had forgotten that when I wear that particular pullover and then drive; for some reason the seatbelt is like a fleece adhesive. I end up leaving tons of black fuzzies all over the shoulder harness portion of the seatbelt. If I have on my jacket the next time I drive, the fuzzies usually just get pushed off and don’t stick to anything.

But if I don’t have a jacket on and am just wearing a regular cotton shirt, it is like a fuzzy magnet and they end up transfering off the seatbelt and all over me. I’m not a morning guy at all and of course I did not notice that a gazillion black fuzzies made a big stripe on my white shirt. Hence all the smiles and chicks checking me out – laughing at me.

Oh well, I made some people happy today.

Shrinky Dink This

People ask how we will know if Drew outgrows some of his allergies. Short of taking him to the doctor to get poked and tested for everything, how do you really find out? Well, it helps to have a Daddy that keeps poisoning him by mistake. I didn’t know three chewy sweet-tarts the size of beebees had egg in them, much less enough egg to make my little angel throw up his slushy and a good portion of lunch during a matinee viewing of the movie Tangled.

Tell you what, Tangled is a great movie! Best Disney movie; strike that - best kids movie I’ve seen in ages. I’m man enough to admit it. All the monsters, cars, superheroes and toys movies can take a backseat to Tangled. And I missed fifteen minutes helping my son hover over the lovely movie theater toilet. Now I know there is egg in chewy sweet tarts and a red and blue slushy comes back gray.

Speaking of Shrinky Dinks, we had a Shrinky Dink festival on Saturday. It was a Christmas edition. I have permanent indentations on my right hand. I must grip the scissors too tightly. All those twist and turns create many challenges especially when a minor slip-up causes the plastic to turn into shards of mass destruction. I have cuts by the dents. And this is a kids’ craft? My ass!

The best part of Shrinky Dinking is when it’s over. The second best part of Shrinking Dinking is watching them cook. I put everything with a heartbeat in the first batch so I could make screaming sound effects. The kids loved it. Poor Santa, the angels, a reindeer, even a gingerbread man! They screamed like the wicked witch of the west. They curled up as they fried but then miraculously unfolded again and became flat little Christmas ornaments. See, they weren’t burning – just getting cancer causing tans that made all their body parts shrink. I have to admit, it was pretty cool.

We also did a ton of Christmas drawings and taped them to the walls. My condo looks like an art-house displaying the collective works of the mentally disabled. Little kid art looks like rih-tard art.

In other kid news, I think I finally taught the boys how to blow their noses. They have trouble blowing air out the nose so they just sniffle incessantly to the point where you can imagine sniffling being a more effective interrogation tactic than sleep deprivation. I mean, sniffling can cause sleep deprivation so it’s a torture on top of a torture.

So the boys and I were at a restaurant and the three of us were trying to push scraps of papers across the table by blowing air through our respective noses. It worked so well that the three of us needed to wipe our noses and in Will’s case, it worked so well that a disgusting giant brownish-green booger flew out and landed on the kids’ menu; appropriately next to the offering for chicken nuggets.

Is it clear to you or not clear to you that I have been with my kids pretty much nonstop since Thursday night? Vomit, Disney movie, Shrinky Dinks, rih-tard drawings, boogers. My mostly young and single co-workers asked me how my weekend was. I was about to recap the highlights and then I paused and said, “It was fine.”