A Trip to Bond with Dad

Every year I take each of my kids on a separate trip alone with dad. My nine year old and I share the passion of baseball, so we go to spring training each year. We go to about 4 games each trip. We get to each game about 2 hours early to watch batting practice and get foul balls. I really enjoy watching my son manuever to gather autographs. This annual trip is special because we visit my dad, who also has the love of baseball in his DNA.

Last year, I took my daughter to the red carpet premier of the DVD release of Cinderella in NYC. This included a Cinderella Ball after the Disney premier. My daughter dressed up in a Cinderella gown. I think that she really felt like a Cinderella princess because many New Yorkers stopped to ask her if she was the real Cinderella. I will never forget that day as long as I live.

I older son loves to fish, so our last trip was a fishing trip. (I hate fishing.) We decided to go to beautiful Seattle to fish Silver Salmon on the Sound. We got a private boat and a captain. After 4 hours, we had 5 fish and lots of laughs. I was thankful that my son got the biggest fish. He was so proud about that that he bought a T-shirt to tell the world that his fish is bigger than his dad's fish. He needs wins.

This weekend my older son and I are in Chicago. His other love is cars. So we are at the 2007 Autoshow. I like cars more than to fish so I am happy. We listened to Michael Savage on the way up. He got his first dose of conservative politics. I was surprised how attentive my son was and that he did not want to change the channel for some rap music. He even commented that Michael Savage should run for President to protect this nation.

My wife is a stay at home wife and gets a lot of individual time with the kids. These trips allow me to bond each kid. I highly recommend it.

Electricity, Ice, Life, and Fear

An ice storm knocked out our electricity and cable (phone, internet and TV). I am in constant awe of nature. Perhaps more impressive is the power of electricity. Electricity has the power to keep families separated with distractions. On this cold, icy, stormy night, my wife, my three kids and I played the game of Life without distractions. I enjoyed this time tremendously.

As I reflect on the game. I realized that this board game quite accurately illustrated our real lives. My nine-year-old son won. Life comes so easy for him. My six-year-old daughter insisted on doing everything herself as she laughed her way through a very successful life. My older son, who struggles with real life as he battles ADD, struggled in this board game as well. His first spin was a 1. His second spin was a 1. His third spin was a 1. He started off slow and as a result struggled to catch up. He ended up with the least amount of money and then blamed his misfortune on everyone else. My older son did not speak a word until he was about three. He has been catching up in real life and blaming others for his misfortunes ever since.

Truth be told. My older son is the reason I started this Blog. I could not reconcile the vast differences in my kids. I also struggled to understand my son’s issues. He looks like a normal kid on the outside. I can only image the pain he has on the inside. I struggle to understand him because I am so different from him.

We are like night and day. I was a hardworking kid. I made money from the time I was 10 years old. I had so much money at age 12 that my dad and mom borrowed money from me when they needed help with a down payment on a new home. I brought that work ethic to school as a result I did better at school than I really should have.

Fear was my motivating factor. I never wanted to disappoint anyone including myself. I also feared looking stupid. This particular fear did not dissipate as I achieved more and more, in fact, the better I did in school the more fearful I became. Which makes sense because the expectations by me and others always seemed higher. This fear drove me to succeed from my days in elementary school until I graduated with my a Ivy League Masters Degree.

I remember the first fearful day of engineering college. It started with a speech from the dean. He said look to your right and look to your left, those people will not graduate with an engineering degree. There were 628 students in that auditorium non more fearful than me. True to the dean's word, about 210 graduated. I worked my ass off and graduated 26th in the College of Engineering and 5th in Mechanical Engineering. But it came with a price. I sacrificed fun and friends to succeed in college. As a result I made no good lasting fun friendships. But fear is no fun so I didn't really have a choice.

So you can understand why I struggle to understand my son's lack of motivation in school, in forging and maintaining friendships and in the real game of life.

In my quest to help my son, I met a man who is now a successful computer programmer. This man suffered or I should say suffers from ADD. Through telling me about his life experiences, he has opened my eyes that this is a real learning disability that requires real and unique strategies. I am in the camp that ADD and ADHD is over diagnosed. But I am now firmly in the camp that ADD and ADHD are real and they can be debilitating.

Fear may be my son's motivating factor too, except he is not motivated by it in a positive way. He is fearful that he will fail, so he does not try at all. Like I said, we are so different.

Now that I have finally announced this, I will share more on this subject in the future

Islam Teaching Hate

I blogged tongue in cheek about the Islamic curriculum of hate on Jan 15, 2007. I wanted to share more evidence that Radical Islam is raising a generation of hate mongers. Watch this 12 minute video Obsession Radical Islam's War Against the West.

I am not sure how Murtha or Clinton or Obama or Kennedy or Kerry or Reid can watch this video and not change their stance. I also wonder how they can put their ambition for personal power ahead of the safety of our children.

You are probably wondering what you can do to protect your conservative kids. I think that now more then ever we need a strong president. Newt or Rudy or Fred Daulton Thompson need to win in '08.

Anna Nicole Smith Martyr for Liberalism

I was listening to talk radio yesterday. The 2 1/2 minute Fox news capsule at the top of the hour led with the death of Anna Nicole Smith live at the autopsy, then went on to other less important national issues.

The 1 1/2 minute local news capsule followed immediately. They usually talk about a local murder, a fire or how much salt is left in the road salt pile, but on this day they led with the same Anna Nicole Smith story. Same facts.

While heroes are dying in Iraq fighting terror on foreign soil so we do not have to fight terror here, our media dwells on the death of a drug addicted cover girl. What does this tell our kids?

But I know why.

Anna Nicole was the poster child (or pin up girl) for liberalism. She did not want to work too hard so she decided to take money from the rich (bilking billionaire J Howard Marshall). When that did not work she looked in the liberal handbook and went to Plan B, the courts. She even went a far as the supreme court to sue for her bounty. Then of course, no liberal story would be complete without portraying a pole dancing, drug addict as a victim. But when a hero dies in Iraq or Afghanistan you hear a number.

Hello America, this is Katie Couric. There was an American Tragedy today. Anna Nicole Smith our liberal soul sister died a martyr for our cause. Followed by a 20 minute lovefest of pictures and interviews. In other news, number 3,115 died today in Iraq.

The media fuels the fire of Islamic Extremism and Murtha by giving them hope that America is going to quit the fight. Soon American women even the ultra sexy ones like Anna Nicole will be wearing burqas thanks to the media. Maybe then Ted Turner will wake up and rally the troops in defiance of his seditious wife. Or perhaps, Bill Clinton will walk down the hall and knock on his wife's bedroom door in the White House and urge Madam President to do something.

Amy Proctor tells of American success in Iraq not covered in the mainstream press.

Pelosi Wants An Umpa Lumpa Right Now

I can't believe that the person 3rd in line for the Presidency is whining and crying like a spoiled brat. Nancy, please try to set a better example for America's kids.

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House from the same party that gave us the multi-mansion owning, private jet flying, global warming alarmist, Al Gore, wants an Air Force Plane to fly around in. And not the little plane that former Speaker Dennis Hassert had, she wants a big one. And if she does not get her way, he is going call Mr. Bush a big fat sexist.

After 9/11, a person of this stature needs the protection of a private plane, but she does not need a jumbo jet.

Nancy, I guess you did not learn the lesson that Willie Wonka was trying to make. Bad kids get kicked off the chocolate factory tour for misbehaving. Good pure conservative kids get the prize. I always remind my conservative kids that good things happen to good kids.

Conservative Kids Like Green Snow

A major snow storm blanketed my city today. I left work at 3:15 to start my 25 mile commute home. After Three treacherous hours, I arrived at home. I decided to work off some of the frustration and tension of the long drive by shoveling the driveway. I asked my 9 year old son if he wanted to make a few bucks. He jumped at the chance.

While we were working, I asked him a simple question, "What color is the snow today". He turned and gave me a strange look and said, "It's white, today and it's always white."

I said, "Not true, when I was a kid, snow was green."

He said, "Green?, no way dad"

I said, "Well every time it snowed, I would go out and shovel driveways and make money, green money."

"How much?"

I told him that when I had a shovel I used to make about $50 every snow. But when I got a snowblower, I used to make $200 per snow.

"Can we could get a snow blower?"

I told him that I bought the snowblower with the money I made mowing lawns.

"Cool, I am going to buy a snowblower next winter. (He and his 11 year old buddy were recently contracted to cut a neighbors lawn this spring and summer.)

After we finished our driveway, my son teamed up with his neighbor buddy and shoveled three more driveways. They each made $40.

When I put him to bed I asked him if it felt great to earn that much money. He grinned from ear to ear and said, "Dad, I sure hope it snows again tomorrow."

Conservative Kids Need Balls to be Great Today.

Yesterday morning, I was in a warehouse breathing in the exhaust from a kerosene heater. I was in that warehouse turned indoor baseball training facility to watch my nine year old son's private hitting lesson.

When I was young, I played baseball all the time. When I was not playing baseball, I was playing whiffle ball. When I was not playing whiffle ball, I was playing stickball. In the winter, my best friend Joe and I would play ruler ball, an indoor baseball game played with a rolled up piece of tinfoil and a ruler. When we tired of that, we played Strat-o-matic baseball.

My oldest son never showed much interest in Baseball. Soccer was his passion. My youngest son, on the other hand, has an unbridled passion for baseball and skill to match. At the age of two, he could hit anything that you threw at him. At five, he was able to hit in a 35 mph batting cage with consistency. It made me proud every time someone looked at him in awe and asked me how old he was. Once organized ball started, he led his team and perhaps the entire league in hitting each and every year.

In the off season he would drive me nuts asking when baseball would start again. So I started taking to the batting cages once a week in the winter. Last year, I hired a highly regarded hitting instructor to keep him sharp in the off season.

So there I am watching him hit ball after ball of one hour with a kerosene heater screaming in the background. The situation triggered a memory of a bio I saw during the Olympics about a Russian gymnast who worked out in an old warehouse 2,000 kilometers from her parents and her home town. Can you even imagine sending your kid away on the hope they will be that one in a million kid to make it? But the world is full of fanatical parents who push their kids to pursue Olympic sized dreams. Or should I say wacky parent's dreams?

This is new right? Big money and ESPN fame must be driving this phenomenon. Right?

Well you may be surprised to know that parents have perhaps always been a little nutty when it comes to their kids.

Since the early days of the Catholic Church, Popes have looked for singers with unusually high voices for the Vatican choir. St. Paul forbade women from singing in church so any church musical piece that was scored for a very high voice required a prepubescent boy or a man straining to sing a high falsetto.

One day, someone realized that boys who were castrated (had their testicles removed) retained their high-pitched voices into manhood. Pope Clement VIII started employing the services of Castrati (castrated sopranos) around 1600. The Vatican Chapel choir used them up until 1902. (Three hundred years.)

The practice of castrating boys became totally acceptable in Italy by the eighteenth century. The Castrati were highly prized by opera companies. A successful soprano could become very rich. As a consequence, many poor Italian families with a young son possessing an exceptional soprano voice would have him castrated in hopes of becoming a big star in adulthood. Even though most did not find fame and many died of infection.

So after the hitting lesson, in the freezing cold warehouse at 9:00 o'clock in the morning when every missed hit ball stung his hands, I asked my son how the lesson was. It was a gut check to make sure I was not pushing him. He said, "Dad that was awesome. When is the next lesson?"

As long as he's having fun, I'll continue to build his confidence, I'll give him strategies to get better and I'll give him the financial support and resources to meet his goals. And I will sit back and watch him go balls to the walls to achieve his dreams whatever they may be.