A Little Chaos

The moral of this story

When you are seven, I don’t suppose there is such a thing as delayed gratification. It’s now or never. Being the world’s most stupendous dad, aside from being a general burden, also gives me the incredible insight into how to turn this drive for ‘have it now’ into a moment of learning that will stay with my son forever.

Or put him in therapy.

This week it was a Super Mario Sluggers game for the Wii. We use gamefly to rent videogames, just like Netflix for movies. Keep em as long as you want. Well, about a month ago Kylen discovered the Wii through Super Mario Bros. Brawl, a cartoonish fighting game with all the Mario characters. Being the budding builder he is, he started creating levels on the game and his addiction thus started, refused the consider sending this game back.

Enter Riley. We haven’t bought a game in a while, so I told him I’d buy him the Mario Sluggers game, and I found it online for $37 and free shipping. Downside: shipping takes time. This was followed by a temper tantrum and my rescinding the offer. Insert begging here. So I struck a deal with him. The game in the store would be $53 with tax. I said if he wanted to get it today, he’d owe me for the entire cost of the game, to be worked off at $5 an hour doing chores I chose. This was eagerly met with and “Oh yes, dad! I’ll do all of them, whatever you ask. Can I start now?”

Uh huh.

So to drive my point home I asked three different ways if he understood the ‘free versus 10 hours of work’ differential. He assured me he did, but also knew I was trying to teach him a lesson. Finally he said “I know you want me to pick the other one, so stop trying to make me feel bad.” He had a point, so I told him he’d made a grown up decision and good for him, so no regrets and get to work. I bought him the game later that day.

He gave me a good hour in the yard picking up sticks and didn’t complain.

The wailing coming from the bedroom at about 9 that night startled both me and Traci, as we sat winding down our day. Traci scooted in to see what was wrong. The first words I caught were “I made baaaad choice!” I walked in and he was sobbing. Instant gratification quenched, his decision finally set in. “I don’t wa-wa-wa-want to work for 9 more hours! Can we take the game back???”

“No buddy, they don’t take them back.”

“Can I work inside instead of outside?”

“No, I need the yard cleaned up.”

And on it went. After a few minutes I made him the deal I probably should have made at the beginning. He owes me three hours of work to make up the difference between the game I told him I’d pay for and the ‘have it now’ price of $53.

He still owes me an hour, but he’s done the first two without complaint. And hopefully a lesson learned.

Check back in 15 years and I'll tell you how it all worked out.

The ingredient list

I finished Bill Bryson's great autobiography, The Life and Times of the Thunderbold Kid about his years growing up in Des Moines in the 1950s. It was surprising to me how similar it was to my own memories of the 70s in Buffalo...endless summer days outside, a million kids on daily adventures, and the feeling of safety and well-being that seems incredibly alien today. 

He spends some pages talking about the infallible belief in science in the 1950s, all the wonders of the time, and especially the food. And I remember it too. The stuff we grew up on should safely preserve my liver and other vital organs as effectively as if I were mummified. It occurred to me what a huge generational gap exists between that generation and the one now finding adulthood. My parents had (and largely still have) a belief system born of that time. If it's on a store shelf, it's just fine to consume. I've swung completely the other way.  While I have faith in science to solve many of our challenges, I harbor a huge skepticism that the process that brings science to our lives is necessarily safe. A drug that makes it through the FDA is not something I hope to be the first to try. Vioxx and a host of others have proved this point. But with food it's even worse. Manufacturers don't have to prove food additives are safe. It's that simple. So all that stuff we put in our bodies--tens of thousands of ingredients--if not natural, have been concocted in a lab or a bakery or a food plant somewhere and just thrown in if it seems to make the food taste better or last longer. 

Good luck with that. 

Pump up the cows with antibiotics so they don't get sick on the corn their bodies can't digest effectively but which makes them fat and tasty. Ignore an ingredient list that runs the length of a box of cereal (Smart Start cereal being the greatest irony...take a look next time). Remember Olestra? BHA, BHT, HFCS, Sodium Nitrate and on and on. 

And I don't think i'm even over the top with it. It's just become more apparent to me that the stuff I put on my shelves is going into my kids and at some point there is a price to pay, positive or negative. The zucchini fritatta last night may not have won smiles, but neither did it cause cramping (although some amount of grumpiness). 

In true hypocritical fashion, there is one exception, and it's based on those early days of childhood, too powerful to ignore or fight against. Pop Tarts. Deadly or not, Pop Tarts rock. 

Dog Poop Sunday XIII

CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, PA — The 13^th Annual Dog Poop Sunday was held here today, with a raucous crowd of one cheering on the only team to compete in the annual event. As in past events, this year’s festivities were moved to Saturday to take advantage of the weather, but this marked the earliest the event has ever been held, surpassing the ’04 mid-March opening day by nearly a week.

Once again, Doug Borsch opened the contest with the much anticipated Unveiling of The Shovel, and in a twist anticipated by exactly no one, also introduced a Pooper Scooper, shocking the audience to plead “I wanna use that!” After a few minutes of patient negotiation, Kylen was unofficially added to Team Borsch, thus eliminating the entire audience and slowing the all important Speed Round to a near crawl.

Taking advantage of the second year in the new location, Borsch again decided to forgo the garbage bag and instead use the copious wooded surroundings for disposal, which allowed for the unusual Pooper Scooper-to-shovel transfer technique, much impressing Borsch himself and earning occasional self-congratulatory statements.

One fact could not be ignored. Yield was down significantly this year, reminding participants of the tragic loss of Trudy, longtime companion of the Borsch family. A moment of silence was held on a clean patch of ground before the festivities continued late morning Saturday. And while yield may have been reduced, the quantity of ‘scoops’ was nearly steady from last year, with the addition of the prodigious pooper Sasha. Further augmenting the take was the occasional pile donated by Annie, the extra-large next door Doberman, and sometimes mistaken for horse droppings by Mr. Borsch, Kylen and often both.

“Wow!” was a frequent refrain from the smallest Borsch.

“I’m fairly happy with the take this year,” said Mr. Borsch afterward, casually checking the bottom of his shoes. “It’s been fairly dry, making the work a bit easier, although that little dog just shits herself silly, doesn’t she?”  

Plans for the post-event celebratory lunch were scuttled when Kylen, nearly exhausted from providing absolutely no help whatsoever, asked to be excused to play the Wii.