We're back!

After her three-martini lunch, Barbie found herself half-naked on the roof.

At least, that's kinda what the girls claim happen. In reality, they're claiming ignorance -- but that only goes so far. Because somehow a naked Barbie doll is still sitting on the roof and she didn't climb up there. Or maybe she did. Maybe that's the part from "Toy Story" they didn't show.

Becky saw her sitting up there last week. And was obviously caught off guard. Leigh and Elsa have been playing dolls most of September and October with Ari, our next-door neighbor. Near as we can tell, at some point during their play, Barbie took a flying leap to the Barbie Great Beyond. We all blame Elsa.

What's really funny is that the doll is still up there. No one's put forth the effort to go get her, 'cause, really, what's the point? She seems happy enough.

Becky's birthday was Tuesday, which means I'm blogging again. We were sitting around late last month reading through the girls' books of photos and memorabilia and in them we'd stuck a bunch of the stories I'd written about them on the blog. Most of them were memories we'd all totally forgotten. And that's enough to inspire you to get going on something like this again. Before all memory of the girls' childhood is lost to the broken synapses of my brain.

And even though it was Becky's birthday this week, it was still somehow Leigh's week. She got her ears pierced on Thursday and then had her first basketball game on Saturday at the obnoxious hour of 8:30. Both activities were executed in classic Leigh fashion.

She was so excited to get her ears pierced that that's all she talked about for two weeks. She talked about it so much that her friends and sisters eventually told her to shut up about it. Which is amazing, because in a family of talkers, Leigh's the kid that usually keeps her thoughts to herself. The excitement didn't really turn to nervousness until she sat in the chair and the piercing girl loaded the studs into the nail gun-like device they use for piercing at the mall. The excited smile became a nervous smile, but a smile nonetheless. She tensed up a little right before the shot and that was it. No tears, no screams, no cursing (you never know what'll come out of her mouth considering how her mother speaks).

That same smile was on her face at her basketball game this morning. She was nervous for her game -- nervous, I think, that she'd do something wrong, something unacceptable. She was up at 6:30 getting ready a full two hours before the game.

The girl's got no killer instinct. She's polite, obedient and considerate to everyone around her. You can imagine what kind of basketball player that makes her. She didn't want to get to close to the other players, wasn't keen on touching the ball and just seemed to be happy moving around on the court. But players kept stealing the ball from other players -- that seemed suspect -- so near the end of the game, she asked her coach if it was okay to steal the ball from people. She got a resounding yes. And so by the end of the game Leigh was playing a little more aggressively and even managed to steal the ball once or twice.

It's been fun. And, believe it or not, it feels good to be writing again. Doing that family column at the Searchlight really burned me out. More than thought it had. But, you know, three years later, I think I'm ready again. We'll see how long it lasts.

I'm on like Dr. John

Hey, last video post and then I'll get back to real writing. I promise. But this is really too good not to share. And by "too good" I mean absolutely epic. Grover as Ad Rock, the Grouch as MCA and Cookie Monster as Mike D. I could watch this forever.

Sesame Street breaks it down from Wonderful Creative on Vimeo.

Not fireworks, Marvin-works

Well, as another Fourth of July wraps up, I thought I'd leave you all with a little lullaby to close out your day. From a few years ago:

It's Marvin Gaye performing one of the single greatest interpretations of the national anthem I've ever heard. And just today I've heard three terrible versions.

So this is -- for you, for me -- the perfect antidote to Lee Greenwood's embarrassingly gauzy and jingoistic "God Bless the U.S.A." Use Marvin to wash it from your mind.

Polly Pockets and brain surgeons

Polly Pockets are insane toys.

For those of you who don't have girls or who never had sisters, let me give you a crash course. Polly Pockets are like miniature Barbie Dolls. They come with their own little cars and houses and clothes. Except, because they're only 3 inches tall, their clothes -- all made of this stretcy rubber material -- are ridiculously small. Especially the shoes. Oh, the shoes. I have fillings in my teeth bigger than these shoes. And because they're so freaking small they go missing with impossible speed. They also turn up in really strange places -- the inside of my guitar, the bottom of my pillow case, the spare tire well in my trunk.

The worst thing about Polly Pockets, though, is how appealing they are to really young girls -- like 4, 5 and 6-year-olds. A 4-year-old will sit down to play with a Polly Pocket and because she doesn't have the fine motor skills of a veteran brain surgeon, she'll have no way to pull on the stiff rubber shirts and the stiff rubber pants and she'll certainly have no way to get the impossibly tiny shoes onto the dolls impossibly tiny feet. Which, of course leads to maddening frustration and then copious amounts of tears.

Elsa, our 4-year-old, seems to have found a way around this. She and our 8-year-old Leigh have begun playing real life Polly Pockets. Elsa becomes the Polly, holding he legs and arms stiff and straight, and she makes Leigh dress her in various outfits. To accommodate Elsa's fantasy Polly Pocket world, Leigh has to push Elsa's arms up when she puts on her shirt and then push Elsa's arms back down when she gets the shirts on.

To put this in perspective, it would be like if H.L. and I, as kids, dressed each other up like G.I. Joes and then just stood in the room admiring our handiwork. No, instead, we would just go the playground and act out our favorite G.I. Joe episodes on the playground equipment. We didn't need to dress up, we had our MINDS.

And I guess that's what Elsa has done. She used her mind to better the playing-with-Polly-Pockets experience. Somehow in that developing brain of hers, she KNOWS Polly Pockets were really designed for brain surgeons. And, as we all remember so well, knowing is half the battle.
And they love it. It's hilarious.

The Behind-the-Couch Post

You remember how sometimes your spouse will come up with a crazy theory to pin on you some type of bad behavior? I know. I didn't believe it ever happened either until Becky did it the other day.

She and Elsa were home after preschool, the older girls still at school. Becky went down stairs to work on the computer leaving Elsa upstairs to play on the organ. After a few minutes, Elsa calls out to Becky, sounding a little nervous and wanting her to come upstairs. Becky tells Elsa to just come down stairs. So Elsa hops down from the organ, walks to the stairs, moving a little quicker with each step until she's running down the stairs. When she reaches the bottom, she's moving at full speed and screaming.

Clearly, this girl has been genuinely frightened.

Becky gets her calmed down and asks her what happened, a little concerned. Through the 4-year-old speak, Becky puts together that Elsa was scared to be upstairs alone because she was afraid her pink, stuffed poodle and the bulk of Leigh's stuffed animals would come to life and kill her.

Now, rather than explain away this fear as simple cognitive development and anxiety phenomena that normally present themselves in toddlers and young children, Becky has the temerity -- the TEMERITY -- to suggest that this fear of her impending doom at the paws of stuffed animals awakened from their inanimate slumber was due to me. Specifically, she said, it was due to all those episodes of "Doctor Who" I had been watching with the girls.

I know, right?

So let me make a quick list of the episodes we've watched and the basic plot of each so you can see just how crazy this accusation is. I'll list them in the rough order we watched them and include some photos from the actual episodes to illustrate just how harmless this stuff is. (You can click on the pics to make them bigger, you know, if you want the full effect.)

"Blink" -- Angel statues come alive when you blink and devour what would have been the rest of your years on earth by sending you back in time.








"The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" -- Alien microgenes infect blitz-era London turning people into gas mask-wearing zombies. When the zombie-ness takes effect, the gas masks pop out of people's mouths. I might note that the episode ends on the rather up-beat note of the Doctor shouting, "Just this once, everybody lives!"








"Dalek" -- The Doctor discovers his ancient archenemy, the Dalek is still alive. The Dalek gets loose and kills a bunch of people.










"Bad Wolf/The Parting of Ways" -- Rose and the Doctor end up on a 51st century game show where the losers are killed. And then Daleks appear and start killing people.









"The Girl in the Fire Place" -- The Doctor discovers gear-driven robots are visiting 18th century France and stalking Madame De Pompadour. The robots hide under her bed and then attack her with little circular saws.







See? Pretty innocuous stuff. The idea that watching these episodes is somehow freaking Elsa out and that her fear is manifesting itself in ideas that stuffed animals could come to life and attack her is just absurd.

In fact, my solution, if we're to suppose Becky could possibly be right, is to simply explain to Elsa the reality of the situation. It's natural when you're a child to believe in monsters and to be scared of them. But, as the Doctor explained to a young Mde. De Pompadour, monsters have nightmares, too. Who do they have nightmares of, you ask? Of the Doctor. So don't be scared of monsters because you'll always have the Doctor to protect you.

Becky's not convinced that solution will do the trick.

No, if we're going to be honest with ourselves, we might have to admit Becky has a point. In England, back in the '70s and '80s, particularly frightening episodes of "Doctor Who" were called "Behing-the-Couch" episodes because the kids watching would jump behind the couch and hide when the scary parts would come on.

So really, we can all take heart. Elsa is simply taking part in the broader -- albeit distinctly British -- cultural experience of watching "Doctor Who" as a child. And the Brits totally turned out fine.

Dude, she's going to poop her pants!

Leigh remains our most interesting child. Which is a feat, considering how strange all three of our girls are.

Not to go all Baby Boomer, but she's definitely the George to Claire's and Elsa's John and Paul. No one in the family is Ringo because no one should have to be Ringo.

Leigh is old for her class and stands a head taller than most of her classmates, including the boys. Given her age and her height, she's become something of a dandy in her second grade class. Her classmates love her and when she's not totally ambivalent to it, she's happy to rally them around her to do her strange bidding. Recess usually involves games in which Leigh and her friends work on out-smarting the boys for control of favorite playground equipment. You know, sort of like the Cold War.

Well, shortly before winter break, Leigh was informed by her friend Jenna that a deal had been brokered with the boys. Leigh was to race all the boys at the next recess. If she won, the girls would take control of the playground's coveted zip line. If she lost, the boys would take it and that would be that.

Leigh shrugged her shoulders and said, "O.K." The next day she raced each of the boys and won. What was fun was to have her come home that day and tell us about it, explaining it all very matter-of-factly, as though she simply completed an assignment in class. We're not sure just what makes Leigh's world tick, but I'm pretty sure it's not recess plots to maintain control of the zip-line.

That same ambivalence makes Christmas shopping for her interesting. At one point this season she wrote a letter to Santa telling him anything he brought would be fine. You'll remember, Leigh figured out last year that Santa wasn't real because she knew there was no such thing as elves.

Anyway, a couple times leading up to the Big Day, she saw those big art easels that double as chalk boards and white boards and activity centers at the store and fell in love. That's what she wanted for Christmas. Becky never let on, even demurred a bit to throw Leigh on the scent. When we finally went to the store to buy it, Becky grabbed one, loaded it into the van and said, "Dude, she's going to poop her pants!"

Christmas morning, she tore open the gift and politely smiled when she saw what it was. She was happy to have it and has used it daily since Christmas. But she did not poop her pants.

Which is fine. She responded in a very Leigh-like manner which is why we love her. Also, it would have been messy.

All hail Saturday morning

Somewhere between the time I was kid and when I grew up, Saturday mornings changed. I'm not sure when it happened, but, as you can guess, I started noticing when I had kids.

The way it used to be: You'd wake up at 5, grab a big blanket or quilt, a bowl of cereal and turn on the tube. You usually had four choices, NBC, CBS, ABC or the local syndication station. But at 5 in the morning it didn't really matter. All that was on were really old reruns of stuff like "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and "Pink Panther," or the Farm Report, if you landed on the syndicated channel. To make sure you didn't get busted by parents who I'm sure had only gone to bed a few short hours before, you had to keep the television down to levels so low sometimes you weren't sure if you were actually hearing the sound or just imagining it.



Usually by 6 or so, the real cartoon block started. In between the shows there were little message spots like "School House Rocks" and the one with that guy that looked like a walking yellow blob with a top hat and cane that strolled around your stomach telling you to eat healthy snacks. It was awesome. You sat back and watched everything from "SilverHawks" to "Superfriends." (Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice....) And then there was "Dungeons and Dragons." That show was in a class all by itself. So, so good.



The way it is now: You're kids get up and you rush them off to Leigh's soccer game. It's just not the same.

Well, that's not entirely true. Soccer's over now. So the girls get up, usually sometime after 7. Which is great for Becky and I. As a kid, waking up at 5, I'm guessing I melted into some sobbing emotional mess at the first request from my parents to do anything productive on Saturday morning.

And even though the girls get up around 7, there's still no cartoons on the Big Three until 8. They run morning news shows on Saturday mornings. It's almost heresy. Except all the kids are at soccer games, so they don't notice. Well, they're either at soccer games or tuning into Nick, Disney or Cartoon Network, which is, obviously, the real reason the Saturday morning cartoon culture is dead. There's no reason to get up at 5 on a Saturday to watch cartoons when you can tune into them whenever you want any day of the week on basic cable.


It will blacken your soul and destroy your mind

Lucky for my girls, we don't have cable (that's another post for another day). So they get up on Saturday morning, grab a box of cereal and watch stuff like "Sabrina" and "The Replacements." There's some new terrible "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" cartoon that runs now. They'll watch that from time to time. PBS has a channel that runs kids programming all the time, so sometimes they catch the occasional "Curious George" or "SuperWhy." You know, to keep Elsa placated.

But it's interesting. Even with the girls and their basic cable-less living conditions, there's no real reverence for the Saturday morning ritual we had as kids. And they seem relatively indifferent about the cartoons they watch. There's no one single show they spend the entire week waiting to watch. When I was really young, "Superfriends" only came on Saturday morning and it was one of the first cartoons on, so you had to make sure you were up good and early to catch it. I started counting down the hours until it aired on Wednesday. I couldn't wait for it to come on. My girls don't look forward to anything with that same kind of anticipation.

Which is probably for the best. They read at their age more than I ever did. And they're more active. Still. I can't help but think some of the whimsy, some of the innocence of my childhood will be something they never experience. On the other hand, when they reach 15 or 16 they'll never have to experience that gaping disappoint of realizing the Wonder Twins were the stupidest cartoon superhero duo ever to grace television screens. Form of an ice unicycle? Are you kidding me?