Mario: the Once and Future King

While social media might bring together families in the here and now, it takes a video game company like Nintendo to draw families together in the past. Don’t understand that? Yeah, me either but let me try and explain it to both of us.

I grew up on Nintendo. We had a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) back in the late eighties and I played Super Mario Bros more or less 27 hours a day. Mario and me stomped on Koopas, beat up Bowser and saved the princess more times then I really want to get into now, mainly because it’s depressing how much of a loser I was (also: don’t mention to a Gen Xer that in a few years the NES will be 30 years old, unless you want to see that Gen Xer cry). And I wasn’t the only one if the amazing amount of Mario and Nintendo references in all modern media are to be believed. If you don’t believe me, go find a large sewer pipe sticking out of the ground and paint it green. Then sit back and see how many thirtysomethings have someone take a picture of them squatting down on it. When people start coming dressed in overalls, red hats and fake mustaches you can come to my house and apologize for not believing me in the first place.

Of course, Mario is still around and kids today can play with him not only as he saves Princess Peach but while he races go carts, plays a vast number of sports or goes head to head with other Nintendo characters and they beat the crap out of each other. And there are my kids playing with Mario and his brother Luigi, the patron saint of younger siblings all around the world. Of course, the games that the kids play today make the ones I played at their age look…well, crappy.

And thanks to Nintendo, I can show them EXACTLY how crappy. For those of you not in the know, Nintendo’s current gaming console, the Wii, offers you the chance to download old games from their past, including Super Mario Bros, the game that started it all. So now, kids that have fun with Mario moving all around a world filled with everything imaginable, with amazing colors and sounds, get to see what I had as a kid: a big bowl of suck.

Super Mario Bros is a side-scrolling platformer. You can only go forward and are stuck to one path through the level, which is timed. This is the anti-modern game, where you can go to almost any level you want, stay as long as you want and go where you want. The boys thought it was broken the first time they played it.

“Dad, something’s wrong! I can’t go back,” Big Bits told me the first time he played it.

“Yeah, that’s how it was back then,” I told him. He just stared at me for a moment.

“Na-uh,” he finally laughed. It took me a while to convince him otherwise. It also took me a while to convince him that the little, pixelated mess of a character was the same Mario he knew and loved from the nearly 3D animated games he played before.

“Na-uh. It doesn’t even sound like him.” I just shook my head.

“Games didn’t talk back then,” I told. He stared at me some more before coming back with a witty retort.

“Na-uh!”

Yes, son, I was born in the dark ages, count yourself amongst the lucky ones.

The Middle Aged to Oldish Man and The Creek

Kids look to their parents as gods and the Bits are no exceptions. We control when they sleep, when and what they eat, where they go and just about every aspect of their lives. We have god like power over them and for the most part parents like this arrangement (Yes, I realize this will all go out the window when the kids hit puberty but let me bask in the glow of my deity status while I still can). There are times when it comes to bite me in the butt though. Now Big Bits is going to The St. Louis Language Immersion School, he wants to know what things are called in French. My knowledge of French ends at omelette du fromage but when he asks “How do you say this is French?” and I say, “I don’t know” he looks at me for a moment and then laughs, “Yes, you do!” I have one other place where my knowledge is lacking but so far I’ve been able to hide it from him: I know next to nothing about fishing.

This lack of knowledge is not restricted to fishing; there is a lot of things I don’t know about but Big Bits has not asked about how a carburetor works or how a DVD plays a movie so I’ve been in the clear. But he has asked about fishing. And so far, I’ve been able to fake it.

It started last year when Big Bits was deep into “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess,” an amazing video game everyone should play. In it, Link, the hero, finds time while saving the land of Hyrule from slipping into ever lasting darkness to take in some fishing, a hobby Big Bits decided he wanted to try in real life. And here starts our problem.

I’ve been fishing before but it had been almost thirty years so my “skills” were rusty (“Lacking in their entirety” might be a more apt description). Luckily we have relatives who LOVE to fish so off to my sister- and brother-in-law’s we went. Sarah and Chuck took us out to their favorite fishing hole and we set up to fish.

Before going out, we bought Big Bits and Little Bits fishing rods, Spiderman for Big and Lightening McQueen for Little (Little Bits didn’t really care about fishing but if Big Bits wants to do something so does Little Bits, even if he has no idea what it is). Armed with their superhero fishing rods, they were ready to do battle with the fish.

First we had to bait the hooks which entailed impaling fairly innocent looking worms on big hooks. I’m generally against this, both as a Buddhist and as a person who doesn’t like things he would describe as “icky-poo.” Luckily Chuck did the impaling so my karma and stomach were feeling good. I helped Big Bits cast out a few times and got him into a good rhythm before helping Little Bits but he had found rocks were near the water and really couldn’t care less about fishing. He had a goal get ALL the rocks into the water and would rather be left alone.

With Big Bits doing well, I grabbed one of the many poles Chuck already had in water and took a cast of my own. The bait hit the water (already passing my wildest dreams for this entire trip) and I started reeling it in. Suddenly, the line got heavy, the pole began to bend and, low and behold, I had caught a fish! A epic struggle only Ernest Hemingway his own drunken self could properly describe began but I shall try to paraphrase: after a fight lasting at least seconds, I wound up with a three inch long fish on the end of my pole.

Big Bits’ eyes just about popped out of his head. I was a better fisherman of not only his uncle but of Link too! We cast the fish back out and let Big Bits reel him in a few times before Uncle Chuck took the fish off the hook (another icky-poo moment) and threw him back in the water. I was elevated to god like status in my child’s eyes and so the rest of the day was great as far as I concerned (no one else caught anything and I didn’t have kill any worms—woot!). We got home later and put the fishing poles in the basement, never to be seen again and my secret shame would be safe from the light of day.

Or so I thought.

Earlier this summer I was puttering around the basement and suddenly found Big Bits standing behind me. He, of course, saw the fishing poles and immediately wanted to go fishing again. With a sigh, I tried to think of a way out. Spotting my tool box nearby, I had an idea: practice. We could tie weights on the end of the line and go in the back yard to practice casting. The chances of catching a fish or having to torture a worm to death were slim, plus if we didn’t use hooks there was also little chance of the kids hooking their ears or eyes. I realized there were still a slight chance of all these things happening (our backyard is a strange place) but I was willing to take a chance.

So moments later the four of us were standing in the backyard (Tiny Bits joined us but mostly to play with the epic weeds growing near the fence) and with washers tied to the end our lines, we practiced casting. What should have been a relaxing afternoon of throwing nearly invisible plastic wire around the lawn became an unending quest to untangle invisible plastic wire from around fence posts, trees limbs and telephone lines. One time we even got the line into a tree on the far end of our neighbor’s yard. While it’s impressive Little Bits could cast a line that long, it was a pain in my rear to get it out of the tree.

So, did that placate Big Bits (Little Bits gave up pretty much the moment he realized there was going to be no body of water nor any rocks to throw into it)? Well, no: he wanted to know where MY fishing pole was and when were WE going to go fishing, as he put it, “With, like, water and stuff.” My fear was growing but not as much as my desire to make my boy happy. So, a day later we were standing in a large department store which shall remain nameless (but really likes the color red. That about hits it right in the bull’s eye) and I found myself buying a rod, reel and small collection of multi-colored, bug shaped lure thingies. So we had the equipment and were ready for some HARD CORE FISHING ACTION (but hopefully without catching any fish)!

My father-in-law grew up in a picturesque valley with a creek running down the middle, large trees and a actual log cabin built back in log cabin times. This place makes Little House on the Prairie look like an abandoned Detroit slum. It’s just a hour or so outside the city and so we go there every few months to chill out. This time we went with my in-laws for a camping adventure…and fishing. We hadn’t even gotten out of the car when the cries of “Can we go to the creek?” were echoing through our car and I could hear similar cries coming from my brother-in-law’s car as my nieces, Niece Bits and Cousin Bits, the 12 and 11 year old dynamic duo are the Bits’ favorite people, were chanting the same thing. So we switched into swim wear, bathed in sun screen and grabbed the billion and one toys, towels and sundries needed to go swimming in a six foot deep creek with five kids. I was hoping to leave my shame in the car but Big Bits shouted as we started walking, “Dad, don’t forget the fishing poles!”

Once everyone else was swimming (I’m not a big fan of swimming in natural water; it’s murky and murky water can hide things…things that can hurt you: sharp toothed fish, crawdads, whales…it’s all very frightening) I headed off down the creek to where the water was calm and clear enough you could see the little fish swimming around. Cousin Bits, an avid fisherwoman, came with me with Little Bits’ fishing pole in hand. I cast into the creek (hit the water again!) and let the little, yellow, bug looking lure with it’s sharp, fish catching hook sink into the water and with it any hope my son would not know how much of “a neo maxi zoom dweebie” I really am.

But maybe not. For once again the moment I started reeling in the line my rod bent and I had hooked another fish. Cousin Bits let out a cheer and Big Bits came running. My father-in-law called the four inch, quarter pound wiggler Blue Phil but I thought he looked more like a Green Carl. We let Big Bits take a close look at my trophy fish and then my father-in-law unhooked him and let him go. My son looked up at me with admiration and that’s the best trophy of all.

Koi pond: Is it real or Fish TV for kids?

My kids are obsessed with animals. We have three at our house: a cat who thinks he’s a dog, a cat who thinks she’s a god and a rabbit, Capt. Jack Remmington, III, Esq, the world’s only rabbit/pirate/lawyer. That isn’t enough; we have stuffed animals and we watch videos about animals and since they’ve discovered YouTube, we watch animals bloopers until I want to throw up (because it’s the internet and of course I watch it with them. I’ve seen the news and I know internet predators can now reach through the monitor and take your children right off the couch. You can’t fool me). And now they’ve found something even better: our neighbor has Fish TV.

My kids’ other obsession is water. Any water will do: baths, rain, sprinklers and especially ponds and rivers — anything they can fall into and possibly die. And now the kids have discovered our neighbor has his own pond in his backyard, complete with koi fish and almost scarily large goldfish.

We were out playing in our front garden: the wife and roommate were planting, the boys were searching for worms and I was being grunt labor, dragging yard waste to the alley Dumpsters. Our neighbor was also working on his (much nicer) front garden and offered to show off his newly sodded backyard, which looks like the grounds crew at Busch Stadium did it. I went back to take a look and while my neighbor and I discussed sod and sod care, the boys quickly discovered his koi pond, a beautiful little pond surrounded by expertly placed flat, gray stones. The boys were mesmerized quickly as the two dozen or so fish swam around.

I don’t know if my sons knew what to think of this situation. They’d seen ponds, but those were what ducks swam in — everyone knows that — and they’d seen fish in fish tanks but those were up on tables and normally surrounded by crab rangoon and fried rice (we go to a lot of Chinese restaurants). They had seen TVs embedded into the floor at their favorite burger restaurant and I have a feeling this is what they thought they were seeing: an outside TV stuck in the ground that only showed a fish show.

That was until Tiny Bits, our curious 18-month-old, decided the best thing to do to TVs stuck in the ground is to throw a stick at it (this is his go-to move for most things). This fish reacted by swimming up and seeing if they could eat it. This widened all the boys’ eyes; sure, they’ve seen Dora and Elmo talk to them but never has a TV show reacted to what they had done. They quickly figured out this was no TV show but real, live animals right in front of them and what do you to with real, live animals? Pet them!

This was when I discovered the stones surrounding the pond were not all glued down (or grouted or nailed or whatever you do to keep stones from falling into a pond they are surrounding). Tiny Bits decided petting the fish was something he needed to experience RIGHT NOW and nearly threw himself bodily into the depths of the pond but I was able to keep him and the stones safely dry. Then my neighbor, not knowing my children quite as well as I do, showed the boys what happens when you feed the fish. Mainly, they go crazy nuts — the fish and the kids — and the boys immediately wanted to feed them more. I don’t know a lot about fish, but I’ve heard if you feed them too much they die or explode or something so we had to put a stop to our little visit before one of them stole some fish food and decide to feed the fish themselves. Or before they got bored with trying to kill the fish and decided to see what it would take to wipe out the sod.

Originally published on Stltoday.com

Why can’t I take just one shower without the kids barging in?

I’ve never been someone who needed to be around lots of other people to feel comfortable. I’ve always enjoyed my alone time. Even if I was just lying on the couch reading a book while my wife was out with her friends on a girl’s night out, it was great to have the house to myself to just be myself. I knew having kids would change my life, but I had no idea how much my privacy would go out the window with the arrival of children. I assumed certain acts between mommy and daddy would have to be hidden from prying eyes, but sneaking around to get some kissy time with my spouse is just the beginning. There are a lot more basic needs that get interrupted by my offspring.

Just once I’d like to take a shower all by myself.

It’s not that I’m a prude but sometimes I just want to be alone in the bathroom. But kids just barge right in, like they own the place, regardless of what I’m doing in there. And our bathroom is small; it’s not like they can go play in the other wing of the bathroom while I shower. When they were really tiny I could wait until they were asleep and put them in their bouncy seat, put the seat in the bathroom and do a quick shower before they woke up. Then they started walking, that went out the window.

In the winter time it’s the worst: When the door flies open, all the carefully created steam making the bathroom into a comfortable womb goes rushing out of the room, and I freeze into a Popsicle in a second. Then the little head comes peeking around the shower curtain and looks up at me.

“Whatcha doing, Daddy?” I look down at him, covered in soap and shampoo, before answering.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Taking a shower.”

“Yup, that’s what I’m doing. Can I help you?”

“Nope…” Then they exit just as quickly, leaving the door standing wide open. I swear, if I hadn’t been in the hospital room for their births, I would bet everything they had been born in a barn.

Our 18-month-old, Tiny Bits, is the worst. His brothers love bath time. Tiny Bits thinks bath time should be outlawed by the United Nations. When I’m taking a bath, he barges in — this must be genetic; my family must have barged into bathrooms all throughout history — and pulls the shower curtain back. Then the screaming in terror begins, much like when he is in the tub.

I know what some of you are saying: “Why don’t you just lock the bathroom door?” That only works if your definition of a relaxing shower includes three little fists banging on the door, crying because obviously Daddy is dying in the shower and they need to save me. I should feel loved, and I do, but I’d like wait until I’m dried off and dressed before I return that love.

Originally published on stltoday.com

Getting kids to help with yardwork … what’s the worst that can happen?

Earlier this year we had a tree fall down in our back yard, and there it sat, killing my grass and being an embarrassment to our entire family. Well, by “grass” I mean the motley menagerie of crab grass, vines and vicious weeds that has taken over our back yard and by “embarrassment” I mean embarrassment.  It was cold, and I didn’t feel like freezing to death to chop it up and drag it to the yard waste Dumpsters in the alley. And although this isn’t something I look forward to — hanging out in the yard, fighting off pollen and bugs, getting sweaty and sunburned — I would have help: my two oldest boys.

Because they are small and not particularly strong, I figured I could get them to pick up the infinite amount of tiny sticks on the ground while I took care of the big limbs of the tree. All they would have to do is pick up armloads of sticks and take them to the Dumpster right behind our house. What’s the worst thing that could happen?

“What’s the worst thing that could happen?” is something I used to say ironically in situations where it was obvious everything could go wrong. Now I’m a parent, and this is a phrase that goes through my head multiple times a day, and I treat it very seriously.

First: At 6 and 4 years old, my boys see all things long, slender things as swords, so I knew I would have to watch them closely for fencing competitions to break out.

Second: Some of the sticks are sharp and what does every mom say almost constantly: “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.” The boys would have to be out of my sight for almost three seconds to go from the yard to the Dumpster. That’s 2.9 seconds longer than it would take to poke out all four of their eyes.

Third: I’ve been in situations like this, and I know exactly how this was going to go.

I’ve made the mistake of getting the boys to “help” in cleaning the house and to call the experience “frustrating” is laughably naive. You would think getting people to help you clean up one room of a house would make it go faster. This is not the case, at least with my little ones. Every toy has to be examined and played with. Which wouldn’t be bad as they would, ultimately, get the toys all picked up and I would be free to sweep, dust and organize all the things in the house that are out of place. But although they pick up the toy and examine it, they tend to just throw it back on the ground when they come to another toy; getting the toys into a toy chest or even just a bucket or box takes hours and the end of which I still have to clean up after them.

The best I could hope for was for all the sticks to be simply moved around the yard; the worst, having two newly blind children. So  I entered the yard alone, leaving the boys to hang out in the front yard with my wife, pulling weeds and preparing the yard for planting. Maybe she’ll be able to get them excited about lawn care. Or maybe I’ll go to the front yard at the end of the day and they would have pulled up all “the green things” and the front of our house will look as barren as our back yard. Either way, I’m sure they’ll have fun.

Originally published on stltoday.com

Everything I needed to know about kids, I learned from taking care of drunks in college

I learned a lot of things in my five years of college: how my body reacts to seven cups of coffee after being awake for two days straight, how to write five pages of semi coherent babble and still sound like I had actually read the book and how to look like I knew what I was doing while playing pool (I think I also took some English classes). But as I became a parent I realized I also learned a lot about raising children. Not from any early childhood development classes; I learned a lot by taking care of drunks.

I didn’t drink while in college (I got all my drinking out of the way in high school like a good American). Because  I was sober, I was always the designated driver, or because we usually partied at friends’ houses, I was everyone’s mom, taking care of puking twentysomethings. Oh, it was a good time: holding people up so they could empty their stomachs into the toilet or breaking up fights  — alcohol makes parties so much “fun.” And when I wasn’t doing that, I was bouncing concerts. Not that I’m a big, tough guy: I’m just a big guy. My job was to stand by the front door of the club, be bigger than everyone else and be on the lookout for the police. This was another job where I got to deal with drunks, although I didn’t know many of them so it was much easier to just shove them out the door if they were going to blow chunks or start a fight.

So I had five years’ experience with drunks and now I’ve had more than six years’ experience with kids, and I can tell you there are many similarities between the two.

Although belligerent, they are easy to please: A drunk friend will yell all night until he gets a bottle of beer; a baby will cry all night until he gets a bottle of milk. Basically if you can just get them what they want quickly, a drunk or a baby will be very happy and will show you great affection for your trouble; the baby will snuggle with you and the drunk will say, “I love you, man!” right before he passes out in the bath tub. One difference: your baby will rarely wake up in the middle of the night and demand you take him to the convenience store to get a microwaved barbecue pork sandwich.

Their violence is easy to avoid: As toddlers grow up, they start to establish their independence and many times that means they will lash out at their parents. Hitting, biting and scratching are common, as are screaming, temper tantrums and even literally shaking with rage. This is a phase all kids go through, and, if handled with compassion and patience, one that will pass with time. Plus, if they do hit you, they’re tiny, and it really doesn’t hurt. Drunks do the same things but that’s because they’re ignorant drunks. They can be handled with violence but mostly just talking to them will calm them down, and you might even get a drunken, smelly hug out of it. Plus, they have terrible aim and you can easily sidestep their wild, roundhouse punches.

Oh, the smells you will smell: Babies stink … bad. People who go on and on about “new baby smell” don’t hang around long enough to really sniff the horrors that can come out of a child. No matter what end of the baby you are talking about, smelly things come flying out of babies on a daily basis. And then there are the things related to babies that smell: highly fragranced baby wipes, plastic toys impregnated with fake fruit scents and the dreaded milk bottle found under the front seat of the car after a week in the August sun. But I was ready for this because of my college days dealing with drinking adults. Drunks just reek of alcohol and puke (which is bad enough) but in this case there is a difference in how you deal with them: Children you clean up and put into new clothes and lovingly hold them if they’re feeling under the weather; with drunks, you help them through the actual puking part so they don’t die then you put them to bed fully clothed and let them deal with their own mess in the morning.

I’m sure I learned other things about dealing with kids in college but, as with most things I learned in college, it was the good (and bad) times spent with friends that have stuck with me and now seem the most important.

Originally published on stltoday.com