School Vacations Should Be Outlawed

Back to School Today.

OMG what a royal pain in the arse it was getting ES to go back to school today. He refused to get out of bed. He refused to get dressed. He refused to tell LW what he wanted to lunch. He ate his breakfast with the speed of a desert tortoise trying to devour a rubber ducky. He refused to do anything LW or I told him in order to get ready to leave for school. I dropped him off at school on my way to work, and it's a miracle we were just barely on time.

Then, tonight, we had another episode with trying to get him to do his homework. I mean, it's FIRST GRADE. His homework is three simple worksheets that I KNOW he's perfectly capable of doing. He could have finished it in 15 minutes EASILY, but instead he wastes an hour and a half with high drama - pretending he wasn't done with dinner (because when he asked to be excused, we told him yes and to go do his homework), dragging his feet, claiming he can't find a pencil (there's a box of them on his homework table), making long dramatic sighs and holding his head in his hands, whimpering and crying. He NEVER would have finished if I hadn't stood there behind him directing him to do each task. With the commotion he was making, LW jokingly asked from the other room, "Is Daddy pulling out your finger nails in there?"

YS was also a challenge to deal with today. At one point tonight, he was wearing this headband with three colored feathers sticking out the back like a Native American warrior, and it reminded me of one of my favorite stories my Grandpa Ernie used to read to me when I was a kid. It was a short story called The Ransom of Red Chief by O Henry, and it was about a couple of not-so-smart criminals who kidnapped a holy-terror of a boy who pretended to be an Indian savage named Red Chief. Much to my surprise, I found the entire story available at this website.

Aside: Although I'm complaining about what a pain the boys were today, I have to offer two disclaimers. First, LW is the one who bears the brunt of the boys, and I applaud her for her patience and ability to deal with the frustration our boys can produce at times. I don't have as much patience as she does, and I tend to snap a little easier or a little sooner than she would. Second, we have to count our blessings. Our boys can be frustrating at times, but overall they're very good boys and we're very truly blessed to have them both.

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Small World.

I just about fell off my chair when I got an email from one of my Nav-ET's from my previous boat yesterday. He's stationed in the DC area now and living VERY close to where we used to live in Ashburn, VA. He recently discovered geocaching, and as he was finding some of the geocaches around Ashburn he kept noticing this name "blunoz" and thought that sounded kind of like a Navy-related user name. He looked up this "blunoz" guy on the geocaching website and was blown away to find out it was his old Navigator. Turns out there are two other guys from my usetafish that are also living out in Ashburn and working in DC now. Small world. What are the odds of reconnecting with an old shipmate like that???

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Unexpected Visitors.

Yesterday (Sunday), I went with ES and his Cub Scout Pack on a tour of USS RUSSELL, an ARLEIGH BURKE Class DDG. I was really impressed. They really put on the full-court press for our tour. They had static displays set up all over the ship with crew members standing by to show us guns and torpedoes and fire-fighting gear and fire hoses. The tour concluded on the bow of the ship with chocolate chip cookies and fruit punch. It was great!

Daddy and ES on tour of USS RUSSEL

As we were standing on the flight deck with a crew member showing off his Visiting Boarding Search and Seizure (VBSS) gear (black vest, black helmet, black goggles, black knee pads, black rifle, black pistol...), I looked across the water at the sub base side of the harbor and did a double-take. I said to myself, "Self, that is most definitely NOT a 688 Class submarine parked over there!" I was pretty sure I read the name on the brow banner correctly, but confirmed it with another bubblehead in our tour group.

It turns out, a long time friend of mine is on that boat. Nate and I were classmates and became friends in Nuclear Power School in Orlando and then roommates in Prototype in Charleston. He's the guy I previously mentioned I had gone to the Army-Navy Football Game with in '95. Later, we were both Navigators at the same time in San Diego. Then, we both went through the Submarine Command Course together.

So after leaving the RUSSELL, ES and I headed over to the other side of the harbor to welcome our unexpected visitors and invite Nate to dinner. We took Nate down to Ryan's in the Ward Center for an excellent dinner (see my previous post for more info about Ryan's). This time I had the corn chowder and the fish tacos. They were both really good. I think the corn chowder was a little bit of a rip off though - 5 bucks for a very shallow bowl that didn't hold much. Although the fish tacos were not at all like Rubios (THE best place for fish tacos in SoCal), but they were still really really good.

After dinner, Nate came over for a while for us to play some Halo 3 on the XBox and reminisce about old times.

The boys were both really excited and looking forward to going for a tour of Nate's boat today. After I picked ES up from school this afternoon, we headed over to get the tour. In spite of his excitement beforehand, YS complained almost the ENTIRE tour, "I'm thirsty," or, "I'm want to go home." He was a real joy (tack this comment onto the first section above). Anyway, it was good to see Nate, and good to see what life is like on a floating hotel.

Things that go "Bang!"

I think it's genetic. Something is hard-wired into the male brain that creates this obsession with things that go "Bang!" Or maybe that Y-chromosome lacks something that inhibits this obsession in girls. We start out as little boys in awe of obvious, overt things that go bang like guns. Over time, we mature and gain appreciation for things that go bang in different ways like an internal combustion engine or a nuclear power plant. I can look back and see this development in my own life. As a kid, my dad would take me to visit the ships he was stationed on, and all I cared about seeing were the GUNS and the MISSILES, and he always seemed excited to show me the engine room. I didn't get it back then. I think I was in high school before I saw my first LM-2500 gas turbine on an AEGIS cruiser and think that was pretty darn cool.

What made me think of this is watching our boys and their obsession with guns. I think ES's drawings of ships with guns all over them are very similar to the drawings I remember making when I was less than 5 years old.

Quick Tangent: How do I know it was before I turned 5 years old? Because I remember the house we lived in at that time. As a military brat moving from place to place, you can generally place any memory, song, or movie within about a 2-year timespan because you remember which house you lived in.

LW and I have tried, and still continue to try, to suppress some of this obsession with guns. Back while we were in VA, I wanted these really cool miniature remote control tanks for my birthday that shot infrared beams at each other and could tell when they had been "hit." LW said no, they were too violent. We didn't let the boys watch violent movies or play violent video games. Yet, walking through Home Depot one day, I found the boys sitting in the basket had picked up the allen wrenches I was going to buy, and were using them as "guns" pointing them out of the basket and "shooting" at people. So even if we don't get them toy guns, they make toy guns out of Legos or tools or pencils or whatever else they happen to have handy. So we figured it was hard-wired in little-boys brains and our attempts at keeping them isolated from all things "violent" weren't really working, and we slacked off a bit.

I feel like it's a little out of control now. 3 1/2-year old YS particularly worries me. If the doorbell rings, he runs to the front door and assumes the Weaver stance to "shoot" whoever is behind the door. I don't think 5 waking minutes goes by without YS making one of his three favorite sound effects:
1) "shpew!" - his shooting noise. This is usually preceeded by favorite sound effect #2.
2) "chk-chk" - the sound he makes like he's pulling the slide back on a semi-automatic weapon and chambering a round (followed soon thereafter by assuming the Weaver stance and sound effect #1, or running into another room holding his hands in a two-handed pistol-grip).
3) "ching-ching-ching" - the sound he imitates from Age of Empires for swords clanging in a sword fight. This sound effect is evoked with chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant, or drinking straws at just about any other restaurant, or a Halloween pencil he got at the fall festival.

Tonight, LW made some awesome huevos rancheros for dinner. One of the boys looked at the shredded cheese on his plate and said, "Look! It's a gun!" Somehow three pieces of shredded cheese laying on his plate looked like a gun to him. LW and I asked them why they couldn't say it looked like a tree or a flower, and ES giggled because the thought we were being pretty silly. LW says she wants to have one day of nothing but Barbie dolls, no guns allowed, but quickly realized they would somehow convert the Barbie dolls into guns.

BTW - Have I mentioned that LW has started making comments how she wishes we had a girl so there would be someone in the family who would be excited about going shopping with her? I asked her if she really wanted to go back to poopy diapers. She said no. We agreed two kids was enough for us. The two we have are a handful as it is, and it's not worth the health risk to LW after her past two C-sections.

I feel like LW and I have become broken records - "Stop that! No shooting Mommy / Daddy!" "ES/YS, we don't shoot people, that's not nice!"

I sincerely hope that my theory about obsessing with things that go bang is correct, and that over time the boys' obsession will mature into interest in things like engines that harness the "bang" to do something productive instead of destructive.

There is a silver lining of sorts: At least when we're in busy department stores (NEX, Hilo Hatties...), it's not hard to find our boys. Stealthy they are not. If you hear "chk-chk", that's generally a warning that somebody is being snuck-up on and about to be "shpewed."