A Question for Parents of Multiple Children Who Share a Bedroom

How do you teach them to stop playing/fighting and go to sleep? Our kids were fine when Little Dude was in a crib--sometimes they'd make noise for up to an hour after bedtime, but they'd always fall asleep eventually. This summer he started climbing out of the crib, though, so we switched him to a toddler bed to prevent injury. Since then it's impossible to get them to go to sleep unless we put one down and then wait until he or she is asleep before putting the other down. Otherwise LD just gets out of his bed and into S-Boogie's--no matter how many times we go in there to put him back where he belongs--and they scream at each other for hours on end. Seriously, I know there are other children, even toddlers, who share bedrooms with their siblings. What is the deal with ours?

In case you're wondering what I do in my spare time

My brother gave S-Boogie a huge set of something like 250 crayons for her birthday. It's wonderful, but unfortunately the colors were just thrown in there haphazardly with no sense of order or aesthetics. It took me the better part of an hour, but I solved the problem.


I feel much better now.

Date with a Bike

At FoxyJ's suggestion, we've begun what we hope will become a monthly tradition of having one-on-one dates with our kids. This afternoon while she and S-Boogie went to an open gymnastics afternoon at the rec center, I loaded Little Dude in the bike trailer and took him on a bike ride across town. We did about half of the Davis Bike Loop, which would make the trip 6 miles each way. I was feeling pretty groovy as I explored the intricate network of bike trails going through campus, past an arboretum, under the freeway, around too many parks to count, and in and out of suburbs. Davis is an amazing place to bike.

Lest you think I perfectly fit the granola-fortified stereotype I try so hard to emulate, I must admit that the end destination of this trip was no farmer's market or liberal political rally or hemp t-shirt store. The honest truth is that I took my son to the other side of town so that we could buy cheap ice cream cones and play at the McDonald's Playplace.

But I'm still cool. Really, I am.

McCain, The Moral Choice

Because he's so darned honest.

(Via Chanson and Holly.)

Slipslope Mountain

Good morning and welcome to the MTC, elders. Today we're going to watch an inspirational film about the dangers of disobeying rules. While you're watching, think about how breaking little rules puts you on a slippery slope.

See these two young men? Jack and Ennis were hired to watch some sheep. Their boss was very clear about the rules: At night, Jack would stay with the sheep on the mountain while Ennis tended the camp. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?

But as you see here, simple rules are sometimes a little too tempting to break. What you're watching now is the moment when our young friends go wrong. Jack's a little tired of sleeping with the sheep every night, so Ennis offers to trade places with him. Seems innocent enough, right? Even noble, you might say, for Ennis to help his friend out like that. But breaking the rules never helps anyone.

In this next scene here you'll see how Jack and Ennis slip a little bit farther. Tonight, Ennis is feeling a little tired, so rather than go back to the sheep after dinner, he lies down next to the fire, promising he'll get up after a short rest and do his job. Elders, there is no excuse for shirking your duty.

Watch the dominoes continue to fall: Now it's the middle of the night and Ennis is shivering in the cold while Jack sleeps in the warm tent. We see again that Jack has what appear to be altruistic motives--he wants his friend to sleep better. So now Jack invites Ennis to sleep in the tent with him.

Now let me just point out that by this point these two young men have not only veered far from the counsel their boss gave them--for Jack to watch the sheep while Ennis watches the camp--but they are also breaking the number one most important rule you'll find in your little white bibles: Never ever sleep in the same bed as your companion.

Watch closely now and see what happens when Jack and Ennis break this rule. I know some of you will find this a little repulsive (and I hope you do), but I want you to keep watching so you understand what happens when you justify rule-breaking.

See?

See?

Now you don't want that to happen, do you? (If you do, go talk to your branch president now.)

As you can see, the scene cuts now to the morning after, and what's happened to the sheep? Yes, one of them has been killed, presumably by a coyote. That, elders, is the wages of sin. I'm going to stop the movie now on this image of Ennis holding a dead, bloody sheep, so that you remember this lesson. Don't let yourselves fall onto the slippery slope of rule breaking, or you just might end up like Jack and Ennis.

Did you go to a massive hippiefest in San Francisco today?

I did.

I have now been to three concerts. The first was a free Michael Franti and Spearhead concert in Salt Lake City two years ago, marking not only my first concert but also the first time I exposed my children to secondhand pot smoke (Little Dude was not quite six weeks old at the time). The second was a not-free Erykah Badu concert (opened by the Roots) that I saw in Seattle this past June. Not quite as much pot at this concert, but then this time instead of Foxy and the kids I went with a friend so it wouldn't have mattered as much. Today was another free Michael Franti and Spearhead concert and this time we brought the kids again. This concert, the annual Power to the Peaceful Festival at Golden Gate Park, was quite a bit bigger than the last two--Foxy heard them say there were about 50,000 people there and I'd believe it--and involved quite a bit more pot.

This was everything you'd imagine a huge hippiefest in San Francisco to be: dreadlocked people wandering around in very little clothing, people wearing bellbottoms and peace signs, men wearing tux vests with tutus, people doing yoga stunts, people on stilts twirling hula hoops, people selling magic brownies and rice krispie treats, overweight lesbian couples painting little watercolor scenes... It was like being in Forrest Gump--or, you know, any other movie set during the sixties. There was a little flea market of shops selling products made mostly of hemp, vegan food stands, flyers going around demanding more thorough investigations of 9/11 and encouraging teachers to work a segment on cocoa fair trade into their curricula.



In all it was a six hour event and we planned to get there about two hours into it in order to make it to the scheduled kid-friendly activities, but between traffic and our underestimation of Golden Gate Park's size, we arrived two hours later than planned, which ended up being fine. We missed all the performers that I'd never heard of, slowly made our way through the insane crowd (with a stroller!) while Ziggy Marley performed, and found a spot to put down our blanket on the grass just as Michael Franti came onstage.


(With zoom.)



(Without zoom.)

Though we were ridiculously far from the stage, I enjoyed his performance. He did a bunch of favorites from past albums, as well as several from a new album that's going to be released this coming week--and which I bought today and listened to on the way home. I also bought a t-shirt because I wanted something to commemorate my first true hippie experience. I was hoping for something that said "I went to the Power to the Peaceful Festival in 2008 and I love Michael Franti and I think war is stupid and gay marriage is great but honestly I don't like the smell of marijuana," but as it turns out that shirt was about three sizes too big because of all the words. So I settled for this one:



The back has the number 10 on it so that when you're watching the Spearhead vs. Coldplay game and I'm running around on the field you know which one I am.

In summary, I had fun today. I liked being among such a huge group of freaky people, I liked freaking my wife to a sexy love song while everyone around did the same, I liked dancing to rebel rock while my children sat on my shoulders and swayed their arms. I will, however, never ever again attempt to push a stroller (or help someone else trying to push a stroller) through a crowd of 50,000 intoxicated people.

Odds and Ends

We're moved in, we've pretty much got the kids back to a regular sleeping routine, we've finished watching Heroes Season Two on DVD (including all the extras), and I'm mostly recovered from the delirium-inducing flu I had the beginning of this week, so I just might post here more often now. Probably not, though. I'm not particularly inspired to blog lately, which is probably the subject of another post. But I did want to mention a couple things:

1. A couple people have asked what exactly my job is all about. So here it is, in a nutshell. I work for a company that shall be known henceforth as The Company (remember, I just watched eleven episodes of Heroes in four nights). The Company has a contract with a search engine provider that shall be known henceforth as Mr. Searcho (I am contractually obligated to keep Mr. Searcho's true identity a secret; I am not contractually obligated to keep The Company's true identity a secret, but I don't feel like having web searches for my employer's name leading to my blog).

So anyway, my job title is either Annotator or Judge, depending on who you ask. What that means is that every day Mr. Searcho feeds me a bunch of queries that have been entered into his search engine (i.e. "pariss hilton" or "utube" or "free movie download" or "who is samantha stevens bestest friend ever"), along with a bunch of web pages that their search engine has provided as possible results for those queries, and I look at each web page and decide, in 30 seconds or less, whether that page is an exact match, a strong match, a weak match, or a super crappy match for what I think the person who typed that query into the search engine was looking for. The ultimate goal here, I believe, is to "teach" the search engine to improve its accuracy. Or something like that. A side effect, though, is that I see a lot of stuff--random trivia, four-year-old news articles about people in Alaska, blogs, website subpages that were never meant to be seen, movie and product reviews, message board arguments, and parts of women (and some men) I'd really rather not ever see (and some parts I don't mind seeing). After seeing 500-600 web pages a day for nearly four months now, I've concluded that at least 50% of the internet is spam.

2. The halfbike. I cleaned it up and put it back together last Friday. An important connecting bolt/clamp thing was broken, but I managed to improvise with a quick trip to Ace Hardware. And here's a picture of S-Boogie's new school transportation:


I love love love it. She gets to ride a bike to school, but we can go at my speed instead of hers and thus get there in seven minutes instead of twenty. And we produce no smog with our daily commute--only smug.