We are overjoyed to welcome Landon Douglas Locklair into our family! He was born today, July 18, 2012 at 1:01 pm. He weighs 7 lbs 12 oz and is 20.25″ long. Penny and I went to the hospital this morning and had a smooth relatively quick delivery. We are thankful, relieved, ecstatic, and exhausted all at the same time. We will have more photos to come, but this is one of my favorites so far. Thanks for your prayers! They have been answered in so many ways.
We have been preparing for our garden for some time now and Planting Day finally arrived. We always plant on the Saturday after Good Friday, which puts us a little later in the season this year, but no worries. We had to clean out the winter growth from garden bed. Our good friends Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo made a generous donation to our venture this year – a truck load of rich organic mushroom mulch! I snapped a few shots over the past couple of weeks and then set up an interval timer series with my Nikon D200 on a tripod while we were actually planting the garden.
This year, we are just planting basic, staple vegetables – zucchini squash, yellow straight neck squash, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, sweet red peppers and cantaloupe. We may try some smaller raised box beds on another part of our yard that gets full sun nearly all day. Our sycamore trees have gotten tall and are shading our garden bed more than I like, but they still get 5-6 hours of full sun. We’ll post updates as things grow…
Recently, the girls had an opportunity to attend a friend’s birthday party at the Charleston Museum. Penny went with them and Logan and I went around the corner to the Children’s Museum were we also have a membership (go Groupon!). He and I don’t get to spend one-on-one time as often as we’d like and we had a great time. Nowhere to be. Nothing else to do. No one else to pay attention to. We just did whatever Logan wanted to do. No limitations in the craft room. No rushing through the little grocery store. Played pirates to our hearts’ content. It was a great day!
Penny and I were, on a rare occasion, casually strolling by ourselves through a department store looking for a few things for our girls to wear. I passed by a rack of clothing in the shorts department, and then another… and I noticed an alarming trend. Because I have no sense of how kids’ clothing sizes work (and don’t even get me started on kids’ shoe sizes) I asked Penny, “How old are the girls that buy and wear these shorts?” She looks at a couple of tags and told me with a serious face, “Well, the shorts on these racks are sized to fit girls between 7 and 16 years old.”
I dropped my jaw and found myself just…… angry.
But I didn’t know, at the time, with whom I should be angry.
You know, I’m 47 years old. And I realize just by virtue of the fact that I use the word “hip” when I tell you that I am not “hip” anymore, that I am indeed not at all “hip”…anymore. Or cool. Or the bomb (?), etc. I realize that I am becoming my father and he told me and my brother and sisters that we would understand one day, when we had children of our own, why he wouldn’t let us bring to fruition many of the hair-brained, stupid ideas that we constantly conjured up in our little heads. Those days are here now and I am discovering more fully every day that my dad was a genius!
So who’s to blame? Who deserves the weight of my anger and frustration and disbelief? A short, true story may illustrate…
When I was in college, I worked for a little copy shop downtown and one day we got an order to design and print some small table tents for a local restaurant for that evening’s special on “Crab Cakes.” (By the way, I know it seems very convenient for the purposes of my story, but it’s a true story, so I must confess that I was out of town when this series of events occurred and only got the story when I returned.)
The rush order was taken at the front desk from the restaurant representative. As far as we know the order was taken correctly at that time. The order went to the desktop publishing department where it was typeset in all caps and set 2 to a page. The job was then photocopied onto neon yellow card stock, trimmed down and folded into table tents. The delivery person picked up the order and delivered it to restaurant about 6 blocks away. A waiter received the finished table tents and immediately distributed them around all the tables in the restaurant. Within minutes it had to be a customer of this popular dining establishment to point out what a half-dozen people had missed – that all the bright neon yellow table tents happily informed shocked customers that the special fare of the evening was indeed “CRAP CAKES!” Let’s just say that it all rolled downhill from there…
I do remember the next staff meeting was not pretty, but it pointed out the answer to my earlier questions – EVERYONE is to blame. Because at any point in the process, someone had an opportunity to stop the horrible wrong that was being carried along by blind or uncaring worker bees.
And so it is for this fashion monstrosity. I’m interested in opinions and solutions that others might have on the topic. For me and my house? Well, we certainly won’t be buying any shorts like this for our eight- and ten-year-old girls, so… voting with our dollars and all that. I will be going to department store managers to start a dialogue on what they think about their own children wearing these type of clothes. I’m still working on the rest of The Plan…
The Bible calls us to modesty in I Timothy 2:9 – “I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety,…” I know this makes me sound like one of the “black and white guys” in the movie Pleasantville with their seemingly unreasonable set of rules, but we have to protect our children from being seen as sex objects. I affects their view of us as parents, of themselves in their own eyes and the eyes of others. How can we change a culture to have them respect their bodies?
Sabotaged by a 4-year old. I doesn’t make me feel any less outsmarted to think of him as “almost five.” Here’s his latest…
I got Penny a card for Valentine’s Day and wrote a nice, long heart-felt love note to her inside. We’re not huge Valentine’s Day folks, but this year, I thought I’d take it up a notch…you know, from nothing. I was so pleased with my note and placed it at the perfect angle next to her toothbrush in the bathroom, where she was sure to see it when she awoke.
However, I went to bed late and the girls got up early to make Mommy breakfast, so Penny got up before I did. More importantly, Logan got up before I did. Big mistake. Penny comes in and gently asked if I had gotten her a card with a yellow envelope. I smiled and said I had and asked if she liked it. She smiled right back and said that she did – when she finally found the card underneath the kitchen table and the envelope next to the bathtub on the floor!
Logan! Seriously, dude? He said that he liked the card too and thought it was for him. Anyway, good laughs for the day…until our next holiday. What is that, St. Patrick’s Day?
Dad, we miss you so much and think of you every day. I don’t know where a year has gone, or how we have made it without you, but we are healing, growing and remembering – day by day. We love you.
So, I had a brief dialogue with Logan earlier today about the hierarchy of leadership in our home. I had this little talk with him after he decided to not accept my decision on when he could have a piece of gum – after I finished lunch vs. now. I had him come stand in front of me and we had this calm little chat that went like this:
“Logan, who is the Daddy?”
“You are.”
“And who is the son?”
“Me.”
“And who is the boss?”
“Mmm… Mommy.”
“Ah…hmm…I see. Well go ask Mommy when you can have a piece of gum…”
And…backfire! I guess I’ll do some research and write another post on the authority of the father in the home. In the meantime, cancel your plans for tonight and go see Courageous at a movie theater near you. Excellent, impactful movie!
Today, Erin had her first major Big Wheel wipeout, which produced a vibrant quarter-sized scrape on her knee, but not a daunted spirit. She got a gauze pad and an extra large Band Aid. Logan was a great in trying to console her, even at his young age of 20 months. This photo shows him standing by to comfort her and love her… and probably take a sip of her tea when she’s not looking.
I recently read that Will Smith is producing a movie called Monster Hunter. It’s a comedy about a child psychologist with the ability to see the monsters that hide in kids’ closets and under their beds. On his latest case, he encounters a particularly formidable opponent. Sounds interesting…hate to have that job, though.
Recently, Merritt, our 7-year-old has taken to pulling back the shower curtain before she uses the restroom in our upstairs bathroom. This drives Penny a little crazy, so she asked her why. She said, “I just wanted to make sure there was nobody in there.”
Merritt — I’m right there with you.
Occasionally, when I’m here by myself, I check closets, doors, under the bed and, yes, even behind the shower curtain, once in a while. It’s funny how I’ve grown up my whole life like that and my fears of the bogey man still surface once in a while.
Not counting Jaws, I can only remember seeing one horror movie my whole life, He Knows You’re Alone. I saw it when I was in high school in the early 1980s at Kay Meyer’s house with a bunch of other folks. Bit of trivia: it was Tom Hanks’ first movie…minor role.
It was about this lovelorn psycho guy that gets dumped by his fiancée, snaps and then starts killing brides-to-be all over the place — with this big knife. There was a lot of jumping out from secret hiding places, sneaking up behind people and the like.
There was this scene (minor spoiler — like anyone’s going to see that movie these days) where this girl came home to her empty house — or so she thought. Before it was all over, yep, her head was at the bottom of the fish tank with her neon tetras and guppies nibbling on the bottom of where her neck used to be.
Listen to me when I say this — never ask “Is someone there?” — just start screaming, swinging and running all at the same time. Of COURSE someone is there…or if you’re wrong, the worst is that you just got a good workout.
Then there was this victim in a movie theater that the killer stabbed through the seat timed just right with a scary, screamy moment in the movie (that they were watching in the movie). I still size up folks sitting behind me in a movie theater…and lean forward a little.
Even in college, I was in the shower in my dorm room one day and I freaked out when I saw the shadow of this hand coming up over the shower curtain. You guessed it — my own hand. Shouldn’t have told my roommate, though. Next day he really scared the the fool out of me…
Then, when we were kids, my dad used to tell us stories about this John’s Island Bigfoot of the Marsh sort of the creature that the locals called “Plat’ Eyes” because it was supposed to have really big eyes, the size of small plates…or something. Anyway, so my younger brother, Mark, and I go out shrimping one night when we were maybe 11 and 14 respectively. We’re out in the Kiawah River casting the shrimp net in the shallow water. It’s dark and we’ve got these lights on the sides of the little boat we’re in. We’re scanning the marsh 20 feet away every now and then, keeping an eye out for ole’ Plat’ Eyes…just in case.
But Plat’ Eyes was sneaky, just like in the movies — he attacks from the rear…or so it seemed. In reality, it was a school of dolphins surfacing loudly behind us that enabled us to set the world record for the highest vertical distance ever jumped by two white kids in a boat on the Kiawah River. We later determined that we may have also set records for audio decibel levels produced by human vocal chords, but we never really called in either one, so I guess we’ll never know.
Penny, Merritt, Erin and I had a great adventure recently: we went to the Coastal Carolina Fair in Ladson, SC. Nanny kept Logan for the night and we went to the fair for nearly 7 hours!? I didn’t know that was possible. Here are some observations from our adventure:
Take a look at a few more photos of our adventure here.
