Mouse on the Ice!

One sunny but wintry morning, Mouse and I took a walk along a stretch of the frozen Charles River. It was a peaceful, beautiful time. We laughed and talked, away from the cacophony of the other four people in Chez TimBeck6 -- a welcomed chance to reconnect with my little girl. 

Ever the joker with a unique sense of humor, Mouse asked, "Can I walk on the ice?" I tested it and, finding it solid, encouraged her. 

Mouse gingerly stepped on the ice, then more confidently strode along it. I watched as the ice sheet ground against the riverbank and the adjacent metal pier. Mouse then sat down on the ice and assumed the position below, pretending to be reading a newspaper. From the pier, I laughingly called out, "Why are you reading?" 

"Because," Mouse shouted back, "Debbie told me about an old man she saw reading a newspaper on the Great Salt Lake. He was sitting on the water! Did you know that water is so salty, he didn't float?!" 

And another fun memory was made, just me and my Mini-Me! 

More from Amherst + Western Mass

Our three-day mini-vacation in Western Massachusetts was a great time for our family to get away from the routines for a little bit. And taking a vacation where we all don't need to get on a plane is a big plus, so road trips suit us well right now. To celebrate our style of vacationing, we took our kids out for ice cream:

Here are the faces of us two adults after we waited in line for at least 45 minutes for ice cream in downtown Northampton. At times, it felt like I was doing my best impersonation of the Minuteman Statue on the UMass-Amherst quad:

Amherst Vacation!

For the second February vacation in a row, we Wilson Warriors jumped in the Blue Bomber mini-van to head out to my alma mater, UMass-Amherst. The only vacation pre-requisite was that our hotel have a pool. And, check! 

We had a fun three days out there, during which I had to squeeze in a phone interview and also made time for lunch with a friend of mine who works in my industry. His name is also Tim, and he works at Smith College. I failed to get a photo of us as our tribe and Tim walked outside through downtown Northampton on an incredibly warm, unseasonable day in which the temps hit the mid-70s. 

Becky and I also brought our kids to the cool Beneski Museum of Natural History at nearby Amherst College. This dinosaur bones exhibit has been on my "New England 500" bucket list for ages (pun intended), and it was so interesting to tour the rooms and see objects that are millions of years old. A little tricky trying to keep our almost six- and just-turned-three years old sons from touching and climbing on the exhibits.

Like last year, we ate pizza at the famous Antonio's in downtown Amherst, had lunch in the Bluewall lounge at UMass-Amherst, toured my old stomping grounds, and watched a lot of TV at night in our bedroom. Our kids also loved hotel breakfasts, so that was tops on our list.

Cheers to great times on a mini-vacation!

This is a Sign to Me!

I saw this card in the famous An Unlikely Story bookstore in the excitingly-named town of Plainville, Massachusetts today, President's Day. Why this bookstore? It is owned by the author of The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series of books, Jeff Kinney. Our Little Mouse, who is now eight, loves this book series. So I planned this outing around her today. It was Mouse's day, but her three siblings tagged along, and Mommy got the day off. Win-win-win for everyone, right?

I wasn't so sure, especially as I stood in this bookstore and saw dollar signs flashing through my mind. Scampering around me were my three cash-starved children, each holding at least one item they desperately wanted me to buy for them. My mind and mood were in a state of being that all too easily made me extremely unlikely to wage a contentious back-and-forth with them about why we were not going to buy their wished-for gift. Let's just say that my mood has been extremely overcast for days, in part due to the winter blues and in part due to the blues arising from a part of my life. 

Seeing this sign, though? That is a win for me! Little by little, some pieces and signs are coming my way toward that part of my life that has caused blues for quite a while. At one point in the blogging future, I will be able to fully disclose the facts and emotions about this stage of life that I've been circumspect and vague about for a while. 

When the next chapter unfolds, you can be sure that the chapter will be written on our blog!

Me, Lately

"In the bleak mid-winter," the song begins, and some days during that bleak mid-winter, it feels like it won't ever end. 

I've been living through such a stretch these last few days, mostly related to stuff outside of the home. The more things look like they might change, the less they actually do change, and the more they stay the same. And I'm second-guessing some important decisions I made at the beginning of winter. 

I feel adrift, going through the motions. Valentine's Day was nice, but most of that was thanks to Becky's and our kids' efforts. There was some great news for colleagues/friends of mine, but no indication at all that this good fortune would also extend to me.   

It did not help that the last two weeks featured four of the six of us getting hit by the stomach bug, one night after the next for four nights and days. Then, mere days after that was over, we each came down, over successive days, with the flu, fever, cough, congestion, and generally cold. Our kids missed school, I missed three days of work, and then we got three successive snowstorms.

My blog has suffered mightily, as anyone can tell. But thanks to those of you who have checked in since January 1st.  

Maybe it's a February thing? Two years ago, this was a post chronicling the then-current events in our family. Last year, after six weeks of consistent working out, in mid-February I was finally starting to see results, so not every February is going to be crummy. 

But this February feels a lot like February 2015. I just hope that the rest of this year goes better than how that year, 2015, continued. Work sucked. Weight got gained. Stress mounted. 

We're halfway through the month. I'm hoping for a turn-around, a re-bound, something to get excited about and see some long hoped-for dreams come to fruition. I hope to be able to report on those as the year continues. 

I've Got This Going On

Yes, I'm about to tell you this, not that I didn't already put it on Insta-book earlier this year: my toenails got painted in the wintertime this year. In fact, I was the one who painted them, a few times, trying different colors. When I posted my most recent color on social media, fan reaction was surprisingly positive, even though hashtags included #whatfundadsdo, #tmi, #dadofdaughters, #pinktrumpsorange, #whatgendernorms.

The first seed of this new trend was planted in December 2016, when our daughters painted our nails one night for fun. Here is that post. I gotta admit, I liked having a splash of color in my life. Because history is one of my favorite things about life, I looked into the history of men wearing nail polish; turns out, for what seems like eons, in different parts of the globe, men joined women in painting their nails, wearing what we'd nowadays call gender-neutral jewelry and clothing, and dressed in styles that today's generations would view as feminine. 

Why was this done, and why did the practices fall out of favor and fashion? That needs more time than I currently have to investigate. But I feel fine admitting that I liked having my nails painted, and that friends, including immediate family, found this funny and likable, even if they did not know all of the reasoning behind it. I chalked it up on social media to strictly being about a fun dad thing to do. 

There was more to it: a coloring up in the winter blahs, a desire to be myself and not have society dictate that, embracing a feminine side (since I believe we all have femininity and masculinity built into our DNA, but bow to society and other institutional views in how those are expressed), a joke, a desire to show our daughters and sons that they can express themselves in myriad ways,

A yearning to be slightly different - because I have felt pretty much unchanged over these many years. We'll see how I feel once warmer weather arrives and beckons me to go shoeless! Maybe it will make me reconsider. 

But for now - in the words of my awesome sister-in-law who I told about my painted toenails - "I've got this going on."

Wave of Desolation

The song title (if not the lyrics) that best summed up the last few weeks of our family's life: the Pixies' Wave of Mutilation. Although there were times when I wanted to channel the lyric, "Drive my car into the ocean!" 

All six of us got sick starting around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, starting with the stomach bug. Yours Truly was the only one who did not contract that, which featured three successive middle-of-the-night episodes of kids barfing in their beds, in their crib, all over their bedroom floor and bunk bed and clothes and bins of LEGO blocks. Days after that wave ended, I came down with a sore throat, which inevitably always leads to a head cold. Our girls got it worse than I did, especially Goose. As they slowly recovered and missed school, Our Baby Grouse came down with it. Seeing our most helpless one down for the count was tough. He's also a daddy's boy, so when I was home from work, or working from home, or at night or on the weekend, he clung to me something fierce. 

That was both comforting and made me shiver with a small amount of fear that my cold would relapse. To make matters worse, Mother Nature ended her Winter 2017 snow ban by finally hitting New England with some snowstorms, causing school cancellations and thus sheltering our tribe in our warm house with active illness bugs in the air. 

It was cabin fever at its finest, let me tell you! And it, for a brief moment, made me want to spend December through February in a place like Tucson, Arizona!

Moose in His Snowbank

After waiting through December and some of January for any snow, Mother Nature treated New England to some impressive storms this winter. We hire a snow plow truck to plow our driveway, since it's pretty long and wide. One side-perk of this is that, when we receive significant snowfall, the plow pushes about 50 feet of driveway's worth of snow into a massive bank at the end of our driveway. 

Over the last few years, such snowbanks have encouraged our kids' and my creativity in building complex snow forts. It's honestly one of my favorite things to do as a dad. The photos above show our most recent snow fort, which our three oldest kids and I worked on for hours on weekends and before school some mornings. It had at least three separate compartments, one made by each of our three oldest. There was a smoothed-out walkway connecting all three hide-outs from the back, up against the fence. 

Moose, in particular, could not get enough of this snow fort! I drive him to school most mornings, since his Kindergarten is on my way to work. I love this arrangement. It's fun to have a few minutes with just him each morning. So on these winter mornings, Moose would get dressed miraculously faster than normal (hey, where is that energy on now-snowy days?!) in order to get outside quickly to work on his snow fort. 

Once or twice, we may have gotten so carried-away by our snow creations that he was late to school and I was late to work. But it was well worth it! Happy kid, fun dad, and great memories. Happy winter!

Value + Respect [-Tolerance]

Following yesterday's post quoting Pope Francis to seek the faces of those we want to help, I came across this equally insightful comment from Prince Charles about the faith journeys that we each, individually, are on in life. 

"Whichever religious path we follow, the destination is the same -- to value and respect the other person, accepting their right to live out their peaceful response to the love of God." 

As someone who has walked on two distinct religious paths (Catholicism and Mormonism), while being interested in the other paths along the way (branches of Protestantism, Islam, Baha'i, Hinduism to name the ones that have most captured my attention), I can relate to the Prince's sentiments about distinct paths leading to one direction. 

And the Prince's use of the words "value" and "respect" strikes me as far more spiritually engaging and charitable than another word often bandied-about by religious people when they talk about others who believe differently: "tolerate." That word feels as uncharitable to me as the gag-inducing phrase "love the sinner, hate the sin." Tolerance makes one think of putting up with something that they'd rather not deal with. 

To put it in a real-world construct, when I think of the word "tolerance," I envision: the neighborhood bro who walks his pit bull and lets the thing unload on your lawn, despite the town's law and fine against not picking up after your dog. Will I really challenge a guy who owns a pit bull to curb his dog? Probably not. So I tolerate his deuce-dropping dog and his sheer disregard for the ordinance. 

Tolerance is a bad word. I want to take a page out of Prince Charles' playbook and go with value and respect for all of the people I encounter in life. I want to learn from their experiences, see their differences, and not tolerate their distinctness but embrace it and see what I can learn from their path in life.  

Pope Francis sometimes makes me wish I were still Roman Catholic, despite my many quibbles with the church, its positions, and its practices. At the end of 2016, the Pontiff offered these words of counsel to a world veering ever more quickly toward populism-fed xenophobia, nationalism, ostracism, and discrimination:

"Amid the challenges of our day, see the human face of those you earnestly seek to help."

Man, do we need that message today. But it also makes me sad, because it's a clear sign that despite all of humanity's advances in science, health, economy, the arts, people are still in dire straits, and their needs are not met as readily or fully as we are capable of. Like many other people, I find myself powerless and uncertain when confronted with my limited abilities to help on a large scale, where most of the world's limited attention span gets directed for each crisis or emergency. But by looking at the individual, at their face and their individual circumstances, help can be given and the world changed, little by little.

That is my prayer for me and humanity this year.