There’s a picture of my two sons hanging on the wall at the top of the stairs, just outside their bedroom. They’re both wearing Bears jerseys, and they have their arms around each other. They look so genuinely happy that I smile just thinking about it. The picture was taken in April 2009, when my older son was four-and-a-half and my younger son was almost three.It might as well have been taken yesterday for how vividly I recall seeing it for the first time.
They share a bedroom, and when I tuck them in at night I look at that picture. On the two flights of steps up to the bedroom, we’ve got at least a hundred photos of the kids and our family in collage frames. Sometimes I take my time as I go up or down the stairs and look at the pictures showing trips to the park, vacations, silly moments, special holidays, or just an instant in time that my wife had the talent and foresight to capture for eternity.And I can’t believe it’s 2016.Wasn’t it just yesterday that my youngest daughter ripped my wife’s earrings out of her ears when I picked the two of them up for our first date?How have almost eleven years passed since we worried as my older son had surgery when he was three weeks old?I can still feel the cold, wet dew on my feet as I scrambled out the front door without shoes on in the middle of the night when my younger son was born.And I think I’m still smiling from the swiftness with which my youngest daughter began chewing on her hand the moment she entered the world.Yet years have passed since all of these things happened. Thousands of days. And despite my best efforts to slow down and appreciate every day, it still seems like it’s all gone too fast.A video on Facebook drove this point home this morning. It showed the different phases of a young girl’s life. It shows her interests, her style, her friends, the ways that she changes over the years. It captures a feeling to which every parent can relate and appreciate. The video is very well done, but its true impact comes when you substitute the girl in the video with your own child or children. (Note: I borrowed the title of this post from that video.)It conjures the same feelings that arise during the montage of Jessie’s owner growing up in Toy Story 2, or when Andy goes away to college and leaves his toys with a little girl in Toy Story 3.It’s the feeling that childhood is a phase. But it’s not just one phase, it’s a series of phases, some overlapping, some leading into the next. And the beautiful heartache of watching our children grow and learn and mature while we realize that when these moments are gone, they’re gone. And sometimes we don’t even know a phase is near the end until well after it’s over.Other than birthdays, or last days of school, or new years, or other calendar markers, there’s almost nothing that tells us when a phase is over or a new one begins.One day my older daughter just stopped pronouncing hamburger as “hambahder”. She liked cats. She hissed like a cat. She liked frogs. She sewed. She liked hippie stuff. She liked Hannah Montana. She liked Twilight. She liked The Fault in our Stars. She graduated high school.My older son had meaty drumsticks. He liked Elmo. He’d repeat in a whisper words that he heard. He slept with a cuddle blanket. He loved flags. He loved sea creatures. He liked Handy Manny. He liked Super Mario. He played soccer. He played baseball. He took swimming lessons. He liked Minecraft.My younger son didn’t like me for the first nine months of his life. He had very straight hair. He’d act out scenes from Toy Story. He was obsessed with Caillou. He took swimming lessons. He played baseball. He wore an eye patch. He did planks all the time. He counts steps on a Fitbit.My youngest daughter wore cloth diapers. She had very dark hair. She repeated the same two sentences once a day for well over a year (“Remember when that dinosaur spit on mama’s camera yesterday? That was so funny.”) My wife took at least one picture of her every single day for the first couple years of her life. She took ballet. She likes Caillou. She says “Chicken butt.” She’s a vegetarian (except for pepperoni).These are things that we’ll remember about their childhood. The phases of their lives. Some continue, most are over. Those phases, along with all the moments captured in the hundreds of thousands of pictures my wife has taken, and the books we’ve read, and the movies we’ve watched, and the places we’ve gone, and the zoos and parks and museums we’ve visited, are the stuff memories are made of. The stuff life is made of. It’s why I tuck my kids into bed every night, and why my wife bakes with them, and runs with them, and paints their nails, and celebrates days like National Chocolate Cake Day.In my house we have a couple of tangible things that have marked the phases of childhood. There’s one bedroom that each of the four kids have called their own at one time or another. It was pink when we built the house, then we painted it yellow, and now it’s purple. And there’s a spot beneath the window, right up next to the trim—you have to get down on the floor and look up to see it—where you can see all three paint colors. And that one section of wall reflects the phases of childhood.We also have a wall in a closet in the basement in which we’ve measured the kids every few months for the past ten years. We began when my oldest son was about a year old, and continued as all four kids have grown. There are dozens of marks on the wall, each with an accompanying name and date. If anyone ever painted over that wall I’d cry for months.Childhood is a series of phases. But that wall better be like the memories we’ve created: Forever.So pay attention. Get involved. They're your kids, and they're only this age once. There are no do-overs. Live this phase. No matter what it is.Because tomorrow it might be gone.IF YOU LIKED THIS POST I BET YOU'LL ALSO LIKE: The 939 Saturdays of ChildhoodPREVIOUS POST: We Can Do Better Than Donald Trump, Can't We?Want an e-mail every time I write something new? Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. 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A Dad's Review of Taylor Swift's '1989'
First of all, I know that I’m probably not Taylor Swift’s target demographic. She can’t possibly sell too many albums to married thirty-six-year-old dudes. Not counting those dudes who are buying the albums for their daughters, of course. So Taytay probably isn’t going to shed too many tears or pump too many fists over what I have to say.Also, I don’t think it’s fair to judge her music from my point-of-view. Every work has an audience, and I’m not her audience. So for me to listen with my ears is missing the point. Instead I’ll pretend I’m one of the roughly sixty trillion girls who go crazy for her and her music. (I’m not really going to pretend that I’m a teenage girl. That’s just creepy.)T-Swizzle’s latest release is called 1989. She should send an apology to the year 1989, and anything else that happened in 1989, because she’ll automatically dominate any Google search containing that number for the rest of eternity.And even though 1989 the year was a quarter of a century ago, 1989 the album brings a brand new Taylor Swift. Gone is the girl strumming along on her guitar and belting out songs that she wrote by herself. Her full-on transition to pop music is aided by two of the most prolific music producers in the business, and their influence is irrefutable. The New Taylor sounds more pop princess than young musician.Still, there’s plenty here that Taylorites will enjoy. And when an artist has been as deft in creating a relationship with her fans as Taylor has been, those fans will probably go anywhere she takes them.Now just a few general observations:She’s got some sort of red lips fetish or something. In one song she talks about “the red lip classic thing” that some boys like, and then in another song she’s talking about “cherry lips, crystal skies” and in yet another she sings about “red lips and rosy cheeks.” Looks like Chuck Berry’s not the only musician who owes a debt of gratitude to Maybelline.She’s a skank. No, not really. I’m kidding, pipe down. But checkout some of her lyrics. “Got a long list of ex lovers,” “I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt,” “we were lying on your couch,” “his hands are in my hair, his clothes are in my room.” And it goes on from there. Damn, Taylor, you’re not a teeny-bopper anymore, we get it!She’s worldly. The first song is called "Welcome to New York" and she talks about “searching for a sound we hadn’t heard before” and “you can want who you want, boys and boys and girls and girls” and maybe my favorite line on the entire record: “everybody here was someone else before.”On one of her previous albums she told mean people that one day she was going to be living in a big old city, and now she is. Don’t worry though, she can handle it: “The lights are so bright, but they never blind me.”There’s no virtue in criticizing Ms. Swift. She’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but she’s also not trying to be. She knows her audience, she knows they trust her, and she’s betting that they’ll like the new side of her and her music.If not for my seventeen-year-old daughter, I’d probably never listen to Taylor Swift, and probably never miss her either.But my daughter likes her. And last night we got 1989 and went to the basement and listened to it together. My daughter’s excitement over that album reminded me of my own excitement over a new Pearl Jam album. She swore she’d listen to it a dozen times this week. She declared it awesome. She slept with it next to her in bed.As part of the deluxe version of the CD, Swift included some mock Polaroids with hand-written lyrics at the bottom as a little bonus for her fans. I showed my daughter Pearl Jam’s 1996 album No Code, which also came with an assortment of Polaroids. We shared enthusiasm.So in the end, 1989 actually reminds me of an old Pearl Jam song called "Not For You" in a couple of ways. First, the title of the song, since 1989 obviously isn’t for me. And second, in one of the lines of the song: “All that’s sacred, comes from youth.”I told my daughter I wanted to listen to the album so I could write a blog post about it. But really I just thought it’d be fun to spend some time with her, just the two of us, enjoying something she was excited about.I was right.Hey you, Blog Reader Person, how 'bout you do something nice and like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes?
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The Cost of Raising a Child Debunked
In case you missed it, the USDA released its annual estimate of how much it costs to raise a child from birth to eighteen. I’ll spare you the suspense: it’s expensive.I think it’s also poppycock.According to the USDA, it’s going to cost $245,340 to raise a child born in 2013. Let me save you the math (my apologies for what’s going to be a math-heavy post, but I like numbers), and tell you that that works out to $13,630 per year, or $1,135 per month.(Just for the record, all of these numbers are based on costs for a middle-income family.)I’ve got four kids. If you believe the USDA numbers, then my kids should cost me about $4,500 this month. As a middle-income person, that’s quite alarming since my wife and I are also part of my family. Looks like she and I will be eating nothing but cheese sandwiches and stone soup for the month.And things are only going to get worse. Sure, cheese sandwiches are inexpensive, but what about gas? How am I going to get to work if I can’t afford gas? How am I going to pay the mortgage if those little weasels are draining all my money?What’s that you say? You want me to explain? Okay, but only because you asked.Housing eats up 30% of the total cost of raising a child. Again I’ll save you the math and tell you that, according to the USDA, each of my kids have me on the hook for a little more than $340 a month in housing costs. That’s $1,363 per month combined for the four of them!Are you kidding me?Does anyone want to buy some kids? I mean for $1,363 per month, I could buy some granite countertops!But before I post them in the Kids for Sale section of Ebay, I better think about this a little bit more.According to the USDA website, housing costs include: mortgage/ rent, taxes, maintenance, repairs, insurance, utilities (including cell phones), house furnishings and equipment.Holy cow! What kind of palace does the USDA think I live in? If my kids are costing me $1,363 per month in housing costs, then how much do I cost myself? Are realtors giving people without children better deals?I know, I know, more kids means more bedrooms, but $1,363 per month more? I’ve got to look at my cable bill a little more closely; I had no idea Disney Channel was so expensive!And transportation. If you believe the USDA, those parasites are costing me $159 a piece, or $636 total, each and every month in vehicle loans, gasoline, motor oil, maintenance, repairs, insurance and public transportation (including airline fares). Where the hell are we going?If only I had no kids I’d have an extra $636 per month in my pocket. Of course, apparently, I’d also stay home all the time since the USDA charges every dollar I spend for transportation to my kids.“But what about education and childcare?” the USDA apologist might be saying right now. And yes, that apologist is right. Education and childcare are expensive. If the precious child has two working parents, then obviously there’s childcare to pay for until kindergarten begins. Then there’s after-school care for years after that. I get it.The USDA allocates $2,453 a year for education and childcare expenses. That seems a little high to me, but I know childcare is expensive, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Still, that’s only $44,000 over eighteen years.All right, all right, I guess the kids have to eat. They cost me $181 a piece per month in food, says the USDA. I don’t know. That depends on the kid, and the year, I think. Especially if their awesome parents invent things like Eat Whatever you Want Day.My point is that the USDA figures are inherently flawed. Some costs are overhead costs. I have to have a house, and unless I’m the Duggars the size of my house probably isn’t increased all that much by having kids. Certainly not $340 per kid, per month.So I can spend that money on something really important. Like me.You should subscribe to this blog, don't you think? That way you'll never forget to come back. Forgetting is bad. So why don't you just type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. I'm not going to send you a bunch of junk, and you can ditch me any time you want.
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It's Eat Whatever You Want Day!
My kids start school in two days, which means today’s the last Sunday of the summer. In the Baker household, that makes today the 2nd Annual Eat Whatever You Want day.It’s exactly what it sounds like.Last year my wife and I came up with Eat Whatever You Want day as a sort of last hurrah for summer. Every year we try to make summer a big deal around here. Although there are plenty of hours in which the kids sit in front of any one of their assorted screens, our goal is to pack as many fun (meaning non-video-game-related) things into the summer as we can.Eat Whatever You Want day is the culinary, gluttonous, and irresponsible aspect of our summer fun.Here’s how it worked this year: each of the four kids gave us a list of items they wanted to eat today. None of them went too crazy with their requests. Surprisingly, when you tell a kid that he can eat anything he wants, he’ll have a hard time coming up with a decent list.In addition, we also told them that they could choose one restaurant at which they’d eat one meal, and also what they wanted for their other meals.Again, their responses weren’t what you’d think. We had a couple that chose pizza, one who told us she’d get back to us, and one who pretty much ignored our request.At the grocery store this morning I filled the cart with all sorts of things that I never buy. Here’s what it looked like all spread out.
My delay in getting the requested food pushed breakfast (Fudgesicles for two kids, half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream for another, and almost an entire package of refrigerated hash browns for the third) back to eleven o’clock.That made it difficult to fit in lunch and dinner, so the afternoon was filled with assorted snacks, and then dinner. No restaurants today. We simply ran out of time.There’s cheesecake on the horizon, before the kids settle in to an almost-normal bedtime. (Another of the Baker summer rules is no bedtime. This led to numerous nights of the clock striking midnight with everyone still up and at ‘em. Weeknight shmeeknight.)I joked with my wife that next weekend should be You Eat What We Want You to Eat day, but no sense in kicking them when they’re down, and I think they’re down about the end of summer.My wife and I are down about it, too.I’ve written before about how I’ve chosen to live vicariously through my children during the summer. I get just as excited as they do about the end of the school year. And when those Back to School ads start appearing after the Fourth of July, I want to go into Target and start knocking over displays of markers, glue and notebooks.Nothing will ruin a summer like dad spending time in the pokey though, so I stay away from Target. Instead I just mutter bad words to myself whenever a commercial comes on TV that shows some well-dressed kid with his chipper smile and enthusiasm about going back to school. I haven’t been in a fistfight since kindergarten, but I swear I always wanted to pack an extra knuckle sandwich in my lunch box for kids like that.For a couple of weeks now my wife and I have been saying things like, “It’ll be good to get back on a schedule,” and “It can’t be vacation all the time.”Those are just things we say to try and fool ourselves that going back to school doesn’t suck.Unfortunately, the only thing that sucks worse than that is being dumb. So while I’d like to extend summer vacation indefinitely, that’s just not realistic. The kids have to learn. There are books to read, and math problems to solve, and historical facts to memorize.They might even learn that ice cream for breakfast is a bad idea.Whatever. I’m not concerned about that. It’s summer. It’s Eat Whatever You Want Day.And that means tonight is Drink Whatever I Want Night.Time to get started.Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.
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