Um... honey?

I think we'd better call the Exorcist.

Sneaker

Devious? Moi?

The other night, while wife was at the movies, I was going through the ususal bedtime routine with the boy: "Remember, no getting out of bed like you did last night, ok?" "OK Daddy." No sooner was I down the stairs then I heard him jump out of bed and the THUNK THUNK THUNK of his feet as he ran to the stairs to come get me. "Daddy, I scared."

This was a familiar ploy of his. When we first moved here we were a little concerned that he would be frightened due to his new surroundings, so the very first night, I turned out the light and sat in his bed with him and pointed to all the shadows that could be scary and showed him what was causing them. Well, this seemed to put the wrong idea into his head, because it soon became his excuse for getting out of bed. (He had never complained about being scared before.) We'd put him to bed and after five minutes we'd see him downstairs. When he realized he was caught, he say he was scared even though he clearly wasn't. We'd go back up to bed, I'd ask him what he was scared of and he'd point to all the shadows. Sometimes he'd get up two or three times in one night with a different excuse. ("I need a toy." "I thirsty." "The Democrats are hopeless.") This went on and on for months in spite of many attempts to stop him. And he was pushing his bedtime back from the usual 7:30 to as late as 10:00 and then he'd be grumpy the next day because he would still get up at 6am, no matter how late he stayed up the night before.

One night, when our friends Andre, Marianne, and their kids came to stay with us, Soen convinced Adler to sneak with him downstairs and they hung out in the laundry room, giggling, for probably half an hour before we found them. Another night, as wife and I were going to bed we found Soen fast asleep on the laundry room floor. Who knows how long he had been there.

Finally, Michaela had had enough and she said, "If you get out of bed even one time tonight, you lose all TV, all treats, and we're taking away every single one of your dinosaurs." He got the message. All was fine for a month or two until he started up again this past week.

Meanwhile, we had decided to try to attack the waking up at he crack of dawn problem by teaching him to tell time. We have a clock that has animals on it instead of numbers. So, we told him, "No getting out of bed until this little hand is pointing to the Seal (7:00). That took a little figuring out, of course, since the Seal is rather large, comprising at least an hour-long window. So he first came down at 6:30, confident he had followed our instructions.

Anyway, after this most recent outbreak of getting out of bed--one night getting out of bed three times after promising me up and down that he wasn't ever going to do it again, and making me realize that he has no idea what the word "promise" actually means--we brought down the hammer again: Stay in bed or else no TV, no treats, and we throw away all his dinos. After pleading with us, "No, Daddy! No! I want my dinos!" (God, we're so mean) we reached an understanding.

Last night he didn't get out of bed once. And this morning, he came downstairs at 7:30, clutching his huge wall clock, to prove to us that he had waited for the little hand to get to the Seal. Victory you are MINE!

Wanted for Assault, Battery, Screeching

Bonus points if you know whose mug shot I took this from.

Height: 29"
Weight: 21.8 lbs
Distinguishing features: Glare of death.

She really is as tough as this photo suggests.

Meanwhile my son was carrying around a stuffed bunny and kitty cat, which he referred to as his babies. When I asked him if they were boys or girls he told me, "Daddy be quiet! They're sleeping."

Frek

Wife's idea of play time.

As I was driving Soen to the beach the other day he asked me about this one scene in Shrek the Third (or as he calls it, "Frek"). It's a total throwaway scene where Frek is dreaming. But... let me back up three weeks or so when we saw it.

Every time I take Soen to the movies, he does the same thing. He's all excited in the car, all excited when we buy the ticket and go inside. Still excited as he sees the huge posters in the entranceway. But when we hand our tickets to the usher and head down the hall towards the theater, he starts getting scared. "Daddy, I don't want to see a movie." I try calming him down... "I want to go home!" I try some more... "No! I want my Mommy!" Eventually, we reach a compromise where we go inside the theater and stand near the door and inch our way towards the seating area while the previews run. By the time the movie starts, he's forgotten all about his fears and we can go sit down. Literally every time.

Anyway, we saw Frek a few weeks ago and as we were leaving the theater he asked, "Daddy, remember when Frek opened the door? What did he see outside?" I had no idea what he was talking about. "I don't remember, buddy." "No, Daddy, remember, he opened the door and saw... it wasn't a donkey? What was it?" "I don't remember, Soen. I'm sorry." "No, Daddy! Remember... was it a rabbit?" "Yeah, that must have been it." "No, Daddy, it wasn't a rabbit. What was it?" And on and on for the entire car ride home. Throwing out random animals didn't help either: "An elephant?" "No, daddy!" "A republican?" "No, Daddy!" The next morning: "Daddy remember in Frek...?" And the next day. And the next. And even now, three weeks later.

Eventually, I realized it was this dream sequence when Frek is scared about his impending fatherhood. He's imagining babies everywhere, and he opens the door and sees his friend the donkey, but when the donkey turns around, he has a Frek baby face. Understandably, the boy was confused. It's funny how this very quick and insignificant (insignificant to the plot, anyway) image stuck with him more than the rest of the movie. (Reminds me of this one minor scene in the Twilight Zone movie where this girl had no mouth. Freaked me out for days.)

Imagine the focus group. "Williams! Get rid of any scenes where Frek--I mean Shrek--opens any doors. It's freaking kids out." "No doors, got it!"

Why I heart Spongebob

Wax on.

Soen's new favorite expression is "Oh, barnacles!" This, from Spongebob, replaces, and is used in the same way as, "D'oh!" I always loved when he would say "d'oh!" but "barnacles" is way funnier because it takes more effort to say and is clearly not just an automatic exclamation.

Spongebob (a karate nut) is also responsible for Soen's new found love for martial arts. The other day we were watching dinosaur videos on YouTube and he said, "Daddy, I wanna watch Jackie Chan!" I nearly wept with joy.

Wife, surprisingly, was less enthused: "Do you really think it's a good thing to teach our three-year-old son the five fingers of death?" I now know that was a rhetorical question, but at the time I said, "Hey, he even does the sound effects! Hello?"

Travel travails, part deux

Sadie to USAir: "Eat my diaper!"

On Monday my father-in-law was flying back home to Providence from here -- on USAir, through Philly. He gets to the airport and they tell him his connection from philly is cancelled. No reason--not weather or anything justifiable--just cancelled. And he can't fly out until tomorrow. Luckily for him, he didn't have anywhere to be and was able to stay with us another night. We made sure to route him through any other airport than Philly.

This reminded me of one thing I left out in my last rant: Right after they gave my seat away, they proceded to cancel all the rest of the day's flights to my airport--all SIX of them. No reason given.

Anyway, I'm not turning this into an anti-USAir blog, but I did want to mention that from now on we are driving an hour and a half to Raleigh just to avoid having to fly with them.

In other news: We spent the 4th at the beach and the pool and Soen, who had always been afraid to jump in the water or play in the waves, suddenly had a breakthrough and did both. In fact he went from not jumping in the pool to doing all sorts of hilarious, death-defying, heart-attack-inducing-for-his-mother stunts in the space of about ten minutes. My favorite is this ballet move where he twirls around and spins his way to the edge, and the does the sideways leap into the pool, yelling "tannendall!" I tried to tell him it was "cannonball" but he informed me that I was mistaken.

for want of wine the flight was lost

Soen with anole--nothing to do with my story.

(This is a long story but I feel like I need to get it off my chest while it's fresh.) This week I went back to the office in Jersey for a day and a half of meetings. On my way out the door to get my return flight, I bumped into Morris (Chairman of the company) and thanked him for some delicious wine he gave us when I first moved down to NC, which I said (without exaggeration) was the best wine I'd ever had. Being Morris, he said, "let me give you another one." How could I resist? After all, this wine costs $140 and was my all-time favorite. In fact he gave me two bottles--that one and another type he wanted me to try. I thanked him profusely and ran out to the car so I wouldn't be more late for my flight.

I arrived at Terminal F, which is usually deserted, and saw a packed house. No problem, I had forty minutes before my flight and I didn't have to check my bag, so I got my boarding pass and dashed off to security. One of the TSA dudes said, "Oh no. Whose bag is this?" And he proceded to explain that I couldn't take these two bottles of wine on the plane--after all I might use them as a weapon. I said, "If you had any idea how expensive these bottles of wine were, you'd know there was no way I was going to do that." At least he laughed. I glanced at the clock and knew I could never wait in that line and make my flight, so I was just about to make this guy's day and give him my favorite wine of all-time, when he said, "Look, just go over there, cut right to the front of the line, get a baggage ticket and come right back here and you'll be fine." (Foreshadowing alert.)

After 10 minutes, I got my ticket and handed the bag to a security guy. Being in a rush, I didn't think to take my computer out of the bag with the two loose bottles of very expensive wine. I dashed back to security, and went to my gate, which was (of course) F36. Meanwhile, I heard no announcements, and the big board just said my flight was "on time" and not "boarding." I get to ny gate and the door is closed and no USAir attendants are anywhere to be seen, so I figure all is good. I still have eight minutes before departure. I sit down for a breather when I see them open the door and call out someone's name. They let out a "yes!" and head for the jetway. Uh-oh. I go over to talk to someone, although there's no one there, and a fellow passenger informs me that they stopped taking passengers with boarding passes for this flight ten minutes ago and now they're just letting stand-bys on. Then I see the plane pull away. Thyere are five of us--with boarding passes--who need to find another flight. I turn around at the "special services" line and see there are thirty angry people in front of me, all of whom seem to be chanting, "...and I'm never flying USAir again!" There are two people working a counter that normally seats eight.

Due to the storms the day before, dozens and dozens of flights had been cancelled, and so USAir was placing as many stand-bys on flights as possible. But one passenger told me three crew members wound up taking our spots. Nice, huh? One woman told me she spent the night in the airport. "Sucks to be her," I thought not realizing it would soon be me, too. After two hours of standing on this line (literally), and after the USAir rep says, "You had a boarding pass--I don't undertstand why they didn't put you on this flight," I get put on standby to Charlotte at 5:55 with a standby connection to home at 9:40. I just had to go to A24 (of course).

Travelling tip #1: If you're going to be stuck in PHL for a long time, proceed immediately to Terminal A--the International terminal, where all the great restaurants and bars are--and where the staff is much more friendly. There I watched them hold a flight to Zurich ten minutes past its departure time so that all the passengers with boarding passes could be taken care of before taking stand-bys. That's when I decided to go for a drink.

My flight not only didn't leave at 5:55, but it didn't leave at 7, 7:40, or even 8. Meanwhile, I had a nice dinner, met a Sweedish dude who told me he travels 200 times a year (ouch), and bought a copy of The Tipping Point, which I would almost finish before I finally got home. I also met a guy from my neck of the woods, Johnny, who also had a boarding pass for the flight we were displaced from, so we commiserated over a couple of beers.

Finally the plane left the gate a little after 8 and we taxied for what seemed like forever. Then the announcement came: All traffic has stopped and we're shutting down the engines. The stewardesses started handing out water. So much for making my 9:40 connection. An hour later we took off and an hour and nine minutes after that we arrived at Charlotte, where I would wait in yet another line, during which the woman behind me said, "excuse me sir, but you have a cockroach on your back." I got a ticket for a 7:45am flight. Well, not a ticket exactly. When the woman printed it out, her colleague said, "You did it wrong" and she said, "oh, well that's all right" and handed me this piece of paper that looked almost, but not quite like a ticket. I said, "No, that's not all right. I want a ticket." She said it was fine, but took it, crossed out something and wrote "e-ticket" on there, which now REALLY didn't seem right to me. "You sure this is right?" They both assured me several times that it was. I walked away unconvinced. Just then all the bars and restaurants closed. Suddenly I was starving.

Johnny and I walked around to find food and/or a place to sleep for the night. We met a Marine who was late getting back to basic training and he said, "I just hope they beat me for my punishment, rather than a lengthy court-martial." I asked him how he could get introuble for something that was not his fault andhe said that basically, everything is your fault if your not where you're supposed to be. He saw Johnny and I look at each other and said, "At least I love my profession."

Johnny finally decided to go to the other side of security to get some food from an all-night Starbucks and I decided to bed down in the business center, where I scored a nice comfy chair. It was cold but I felt like I could at least get a few hours of sleep here. Then came the announcement: Everyone out. You'll have to spend the night in the ticketing and baggage claim area. Why? No one was very forthcoming in their answers, but I was told to hop to, mister.

I emerged from security and the ticketing and baggage area looked like something out of the Stand. There were bodies strewn over every square inch of the place. I found a coner right near another security entrance and settled in. A guy who turned out to be a minister handed me a blanket, which was nice of him.

Traveling tip #2: The Tipping Point is an excellent read, but at a mere 320 pages, it makes for a lousy pillow. At around 3am I wished I had taken my copy of the 564-page Satanic Verses from my bag.

At 4:30 security started opening up again. At this point the minister wanted to know all of our thoughts on the afterlife. Luckily some kid behind me got into a lenghty conversation with the guy so I wouldn't have to. I went back to my comfy chair in the business center and fell asleep for half an hour. The next few hours were uneventful, I mostly wandered around as a zombie. I made my way to the gate and showed a very grumpy USAir attendant my "ticket" and asked her directly if this was going to be OK to get me on the flight. She said yes, but I was still skeptical. Sure enough, when it came time to board, another USAir rep looked at my "ticket" and said, "this isn't right." I was about ready to explode. There was no way they were going to keep me off this damned flight. Luckily, this woman didn't have enough energy to put up a stink, she just said, "Oh heck with it. Go ahead." But even as I was sitting on the (very small) plane and watching more and more people straggle their way towards us, I kept thinking they were going to tell me to get off. That USAir rep even came out and with every step I was preparing my speech about all the travails I'd been through and if she thought she was going to... turns out I was fine.

I finally arrived at my home airport, went over to baggage, and was entirely unsurprised to learn that my bag wasn't there yet. As I was filling out a claim--and meanwhile all I'm thinking is that the wine bottles broke, spilling wine over my computer and ruining my bag and everyone else's (not to mention destroying a bottle of my all-time favorite wine )--when it occurs to me that my car keys are in my bag.

Never fear, Johnny offers to drive me home. So we get out to his truck and... his battery is dead. I'm not making this up. So, I run around the parking lot and flag someone down to jump his car, and he drives me home. Several hours later, my wife drops me off at the airport to check on my bags and retrieve my car. Much to my surprise, not only was my bag there, but the wine was... intact! I get home and showed the wife my wine and she says, "That's not the same wine we had before." It had better be good, damnit.