a collection of thoughts by a Stay At Home Dad
The kids started asking me riddles that they had learned in a joke book. It was clear that I was in a different state of mind than the kids…
Child: Daddy, what can you eat, but not for dinner?
Dad: Your words.
Child: Um, no. The answer is ‘lunch.’
Child: What can be served, but not eaten?
Dad: Justice!
Child: <pause for reflection> No. The answer is ‘a tennis ball.’
Child: What city has no people in it?
Dad: Detroit
Child: <sigh> Electricity!
We have been having many day trips to visit various parts of New Zealand and we try to find learning opportunities in them. We learn about birds, habitat, electricity, fluid mechanics. Fun stuff. Then, while driving by one of the numerous paddocks where cows are grazing, we hear a squawk of delight from the back.
“Oh My GOSH!! I just saw one cow jump on the back of another cow! They look like they are playing piggy back.”
Luckily for us parents, we haven’t started the Life Cycle of the Cow lesson yet.
“Yes,” I say, “Cows like playing piggyback.”
The kids are excited for my wife to come home in the morning after working a night shift. They want her to make them breakfast as they all hang around for an hour of social time.
As with most of us, some mornings are less perfect than others for my kids. And sometimes parents don’t have the emotional fortitude to not react.
Child: This crepe tastes weird.
Father to ungrateful child: You know what it tastes like? It tastes like the last crepe Mama will make for you.
It’s early morning and I’m organizing the kids’ school lessons for the day while the house is blissfully quiet. (Side note, quiet is only blissful in the context that the house will filled with ear-splitting noise in a couple of hours, otherwise, the quiet would be depressing).)
While preparing, I flash back to a memory from sixteen years ago. I had recently quit my job in manufacturing and was spending a year in the Pacific Northwest. Part of the reason I left was that I was burnt out working on the manufacturing floor; equipment breaks and I would get called in to fix it. Sometimes I’d end up being late on other assignments and get grief for that, and sometimes I’d be called at night or on weekends – whenever the plant was running was fair game.
I hadn’t planned to go back to being an engineer, especially in manufacturing, and thought maybe I’d do something like volunteer teaching or tutoring. I contacted the local high school and offered to help, saying that my strong point was math. I envisioned helping some kid by ‘turning the light on’ in a given topic, where they’d finally understand something that confused them and they’d be happier and more confident.
The school said they’d call when they needed me, and it didn’t take long. I got a call from the school with an odd request – their shop class had a small desktop robot. The robot had broken and no one knew how to fix it. Could I come in and see what I could do?
– sigh –
I visit the shop class and it’s a pretty cool shop. I had to admit that I did feel at home here. I get to work and fix the robot. Then, just for fun, I program it. I make a little material handling routine that picks up blocks from one area and organizes them on the other side. Students come by to check it out. I told the shop teacher I could come back tomorrow and he says yes. The next day I created an obstacle course and students got to learn how to program the robot to complete the course.
On the third and final day, I take a few freshmen to the chalkboard to explain how some of the mechanics work – how rotary motions can be made into linear motion and why that’s important. I start drawing lines and writing basic linear equations and explaining them. I explain that making the robot work is WHY we learn things like linear equations – it’s not just meaningless busy work. I was on a roll.
And then the bell rang. I stopped talking, a little sad that I was done here, and got ready to say bye to the students. They just stood there around me at the chalkboard. I asked them,
“Don’t you have to get to your next class?”
and one of them replied,
“We have five minutes until the next bell, you can finish explaining this.”
So I turned around and went back to finish the explanation. As I wrote that last “y = mx + b” on the board, I started to remember what I had loved about my job, what inspired me. There is some pretty cool stuff that can be done with math, with engineering, and with manufacturing; stuff so cool that a bunch of fourteen year olds would ask to stay after class to learn linear equations.
So here I am, sixteen years later, planning lessons for my kids. I don’t know what subjects will spark their inspiration, but I hope they find it. And it is nice that I can be here, helping them look.
Got the stretch washed for the first time in years. We can now see clearly the writing etched with a stick in the hood.
Someday soon my child, whose name begins with H A R, as shown in Exhibit A, will get smart and write something other than his name, and then we are in big trouble.
…so one of my other kids didn’t want to be outdone apparently.
Last weekend I was at our house mowing the lawn and keeping up the yard so it looks nice for showing (we are selling it). Said child has to do some business so I take him inside to one of the pristine bathrooms and get back to yard work.
Today I am back to clear out some remaining items and I go downstairs to do my periodic check and smell poop. I worry something went awry with the plumbing!
I was both relieved and irritated to discover that said child forgot to flush down his nasty (NASTY) colon cleansing.
My love never wavers, but sometimes my eyebrow twitches a little more
…so one weekend morning, I wanted to run out and get some ingredients to make a nice big breakfast but I needed to ensure Michele Lynn Sequeira could stay sleeping since she worked the evening shift the night before. How to prevent the kids from coming in and waking her up? A honey-trap!
In Photo 1, a kid’s eye view coming into Mommy-Daddy’s room, you will note the placement of the iPad in the lower right corner, already playing PBS Kids very quietly.
A kid’s eye view coming into Mommy-Daddy’s room
By Photo 2, the first wild Sequeirlet has been caught. On his way to jump on Mommy, he runs by at first, then slowly backs up and plops down in front of the screen, helplessly caught.
The first wild Sequeirlet has been caught.
By the time I got home from the store, all three Sequeirlets were sitting right in that spot, unmoved, unblinking, while Mama slept peacefully just a room away.
We’re here in Sunriver, Oregon, for a family vacation and, unlike our other vacations here, we are sharing the house with my inlaws and thus Team Sequeira is contained to one room so that we can fit all of us in the house. It should work fine as we have a full size bed and twin bunk beds – the boys can share the bottom bunk, our daughter, the oldest, can have the top bunk, Mama and Daddy can share the full size bed, and we’d all wake up rested and ready for the next exciting adventure. Not so. Here is a play-by-play account of our last night here, which is a fairly accurate account of each and every damn night here.
We start off in the theoretical best positioning – daughter on top bunk, boys on bottom bunk, Mama and Daddy on full bed. But then, my daughter starts fussing because she hasn’t had a night to snuggle with us, which is true since she has been sleeping on the top bunk, surprisingly, each night so far. Our daughter has the most sleep issues of our kids, chances are that if a child comes into our room in the middle of the night, it’s her. I suppose the reason for her good sleeping is the six-foot drop that awaits her outside the top bunk.
Mama acknowledges the unfairness of it all and invites her down to our bed. At this moment, I realize that I have only one chance for a decent night’s sleep so I take it. As my daughter vacates the top bunk to climb into our bed, I vacate our bed and climb up to the top bunk. Things settle down for a few minutes but then my daughter gets scared because she’s sleeping on the side of the bed that is next to the wall and she fears a monster is lurking in the gap between the bed and the wall. Mama calls me down from the top bunk to soothe the scare child and as I climb down, I feel that last chance for a good sleep slip away.
I am now positioned such that I am blocking the aforementioned gap. Our daughter calms down but now we can hear the antics of the boys. Apparently my older boy, who loves building himself a sleeping “nest” out of pillows, is frustrated because my younger boy keeps messing up his nest. Mama solves this problem by taking the blanket off the top bunk and giving to my older boy for his nest so that the younger boy can use the other blanket, allegedly for sleeping.
Things calm down but then the younger boy climbs into the full bed next to Mama. Mama snuggles with him and this sends my daughter into fits of rage, since she wanted this to be HER night with Mama and Daddy. Mama “solves” this by moving to the bottom bunk with my daugher and sending the two boys onto the full bed with me. I am only vaguely aware of the boys coming into bed as I have been ignoring my family for the last half hour with my back to them and my attention fully placed on the monster under the bed that I was summoned to guard.
I’m not sure exactly what woke me, although I can narrow it down to one of several kicks to the head and balls. I carefully climb out of the full bed, which is no small task as I am the furthest from the open end (guarding the bed monster, remember) and I must carefully position each arm and knee so as not to wake the boys.
I tiptoe over to the bunk bed and climb up to the top bunk, excited for the opportunity to get a half-night’s sleep. Up top, I remember that Mama removed all the blankets for my son’s nest and decided it was too much work to put them back when she switched beds and now she and my daughter are sleeping on top of all the blankets.
I weep softly as a crawl back over the boys into my bed/wall gap.
At some point later in the night, I am awakened by my daughter crawling on top of me. I feel another child sleeping on my feet but I’m too tired to figure out who it is. I am next awakened by my younger son and daughter fighting in their sleep. My son loves to suck his thumb and play with someone else’s hair and, since I’m completely bald (probably from the lack of sleep), he seeks out Mama and my daughter to satisfy this little habit.
Now that I’ve accounted for two of my children, I realize that I’m missing a third child. I crawl out of bed and find him sleeping on the bottom bunk. Okay, so now where’s Mama? I leave our room and find her, sleeping peacefully on the couch, using that damn blanket she purposefully withheld from me earlier in the night, curse her!
I crawl back into bed for the last time.
Unable to fall back asleep, I crawl out of bed for the last time, grab my glasses and laptop, and start writing this story. As the sun starts to reflect off the tops of the tallest pines here in beautiful Sunriver, I think to myself, “Yep, another day in paradise.”
My life is sometimes a fairy-tale. Unfortunately, that fairy-tale is entitled, “Baldylocks and the Three Boors” … Once upon a time, there was a kindly old soul named Baldylocks and he had three boors. Every morning, Baldylocks woke up to make breakfast for the three boors. The first boor complained, “My oatmeal is TOO HOT !!!” The second boor whined, “My oatmeal doesn’t have enough MILK !!!” The third boor sat quietly, because in his oatmeal just happened to be perfect on this day, so why bother saying anything if you don’t have something to complain about.
…so it’s been a rather unpleasant week with sick (and grouchy) children coupled with an ant problem that required rearranging the house to help address that issue. With all the disarray, I’ve been misplacing things like my phone, wallet, and computer, which really drives me nuts because I try to be diligent about putting things in the same spot so I can find them the next morning.
Today was a particularly bad day as my youngest stayed home with a fever, thus I didn’t get the house back in order and didn’t get other work done that I’d hoped to do. To top it all off, I lost my work phone right when I had a call to make. After searching on and off for over an hour, I finally gave up and used my personal phone for the call – something I don’t like doing because I like keeping work and personal life as separate as practical.
By night time, I was ready to put this day behind me. As the kids crawl into their beds, my youngest says to me, “Daddy, you left your phone in here,” and he pulls my work phone out of his bed. I realize then that it must have fallen out of my pocket when I lay down with him earlier in the day – he was horribly uncomfortable with his fever so I snuggled with him in his bed until he was finally able to go to sleep.
As I take my phone back and put it securely in my pocket, I smile to myself, happy that in the midst of all the chaos, I was able to keep my priorities straight.