Category Archives: Kids

AJ’s very wired and tired day

Family, Kids, Random Miscellany

Wherein my wife and I describe a day without meds, without sleep, and concluding with a horse tranquilizer. For AJ, that is.,

Intro

So my son has a pretty severe case of ADHD. And lest you nay-sayers pooh-pooh that notion, let me say that even when merely undermedicated both his pediatrician and psychiatrist remark that his is one of the more extreme cases of hyperactivity they’ve ever seen. Yet when properly medicated with methamphetamine salts he’s calm, collected, and controlled. (Mostly.) When completely off his meds? He’s a a wildcat on crank. But once in a while, even under meds, AJ will space out for a few seconds and lose time, lose his thread of thought, and just stare off into space. When he resumes he carries on with whatever catches his attention first. The docs thought, at first, that this would pass with time. But, really, it hasn’t.

So his doctor finally decided to prescribe an EEG for our little boy, just to check on things. But, thing is, the EEG requires that he be sleep-drived, hungry, thirsty, and completely unmedicated.

Boy, what a trip!

Here’s what my wife has to say about the day.

Jennifer’s Tale

So, Thursday I woke AJ up for school at 8:00 am. Went to school, came home, day goes on … time for bed. But I couldn’t give him his sleeping pill per Dr.’s orders. So, at 9:00 pm he’s in bed. At 4:00 am, we planned to wake him up because they wanted him sleep-deprived. But — he still wasn’t asleep!!!!

So, I took him downstairs where he ran around and goofed-off and played computer puzzles and made random noises with his mouth non-stop for the next 2 hours. Finally, I woke up Rich to take the next shift. He reports the same behaviour. Finally, around 7:30 am, they went to McDonalds where AJ had his breakfast and then ran around the playroom like a wild animal until it was time to come home at 11:00 am — still full of energy and random noise.

At 11:30 pm, we left for the hospital. Prior to driving there I was worried he’d fall asleep, but noo … Instead, I heard, “Mom why
 … ” fill in the question with anything you can imagine. He talked non-stop all the way to the hospital.

12:15 pm: AJ’s now been awake for 28 hours. Is he slowing down? No. Speeding up.

Run, skip, walk backwards, somersault, hop hop hop, wiggle wiggle, run jump climb hop run — all the while explaining to anyone who wanders by how lighting strikes work, the reason people get shocks when they touch something metallic, how positive and negative electrons attract and reject each other
 … and so on.

1:00 pm: 29 hours awake. … We get to his hospital room which has a bed. He quickly figures out that it has a brake to stop it from rolling, turned that off and starts jumping on the bed at an angle to get to speed across the room. Weeeeeeee! “What’s this?” “What’s that?” How why who what hop hop skip fly climb jump roll the bed hop karate jump and, of course, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

2:15 pm: 30 hours awake. Still blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Run jump hop skip. Bounce off the walls. Literally.

Finally they come in and give him the sedative. It takes 20 minutes before he starts to calm down and a little longer before he finally falls to sleep at 2:45.

They hook him up to all the wires (there was no way they could do it before with him vibrating like a Ronco bread knife) and watch him until about 3:30. “Now we’re going to wake him and he’ll be groggy, but we want to watch his brain in a wakeful state.”

So, the technician, the nurse and I start rubbing his arms. “AJ AJ AJ!” There is no response at all. All the monitors said he was fine. But he was totally and completely unconscious. We poured cold water on his head and there was no response that we could see, although his heart rate shot from 78 to 120. Yet as soon as the shock was over, it settled in the 80s.

So, we let him sleep another 30 minutes. Tried again. In order to leave the hospital, he had to eat, drink and open his eyes. But, he couldn’t talk and when he tried to, it sounded like a wounded animal screaming. Drool everywhere. Finally got a cracker in his hand and told him to eat it. Eyes still closed, his hands both shoot up toward his face, the cracker goes flying and both hands hit his forehead. It seems there was no small muscle coordination. (Yes, you may laugh — we certainly were.) We’d stand him up and walk him up and down the hallway. He’d screech with every step, and cold barely hold his own weight. The nurses named him “Our little drunken sailor.”

Now, don’t “poor AJ” yet, because they said this was mostly normal. Kids wake up hard from this stuff and he likely won’t remember any of it.

Back to the room, more pouring cold water over him … After an hour, the nurses said it’s no longer normal and they called the doctor on call. He took a look at what was going on, saw that AJ had been awake for 30 hours and told us to forget trying to wake him up. Did a bunch of tests and said he was fine. Tired. Very, very tired, but he was fine and it was safe to take him home.

It’s 6:40. He’s still sleeping.

We’ll know results in a few days or weeks. Depending on when the doctor gets them and calls us. We have an appointment in the 3rd week of October, so we’ll know for sure by then.

Conclusion

This is Rich again. Finally, at 7:30 or so I finally managed to annoy AJ enough that he woke up. But it took poking, prodding, wet towels and, at last, a forced march out in the chill night air. I was certain the neighbors would call the police: at every step AJ wrenche and flailed and howled and cried like the most severely abused child in all of Chicagoland.

This, kids, is apparently what happens when you take chloral hydrate when you’re sleep deprived. What is chloral hydrate, you ask?

It’s a horse tranquilizer.

Well, among other things.

Why was AJ without sleep for over a full day? Because he has to take clonidine to counteract the effects of methamphetamine salts which counteract the hyperactivity he normally experiences. At night, when the clonidine kicks in, his normal sleepiness takes over, and he can pass out. Without it, he’ll stake awake and alert all night long. Literally. And since we were instructed by the docs to not give him any clonidine the night before. Well, we had one very hyperactive, unmedicated puppy the next day.

After getting him awake, though, he perked up for an hour, ate voraciously, then promptly passed out when we put him back to bed.

Hopefully, Saturday will get him back on track.

[tags]add, adhd, AJ, alexander, attention-deficit, blogrodent, child, chloral-hydrate, clonidine, drugs, eeg, family, hyperactive, hyperactivity-disorder, kids, medicine, Rich-Tatum[/tags]

Podcast: AJ’s First Last Day – Graduating Kindergarten

Family, Kids, Podcast/Media, Random Miscellany

AJ's First Last DayLast week saw a milestone pass in our house: AJ enjoyed his very first last day of his very first year of schooling. He has now officially “graduated” kindergarten.

We are very proud.

[Blah, blah, blah — skip Rich’s philosophizing,
and go straight to the podcast!]

Never having parented before, and having no memories of Kindergarten myself (I never went, scofflaw that I am), I didn’t realize there was actually liturgy for Kindergarten graduation. Maybe this is something we only do here in the Midwest. Or maybe it happens all over the world and I’ve been clueless for 39 years. Probably the latter.

I think milestones are important to celebrate — even if there’s no real par-tay and spiked beverages involved. I mean, we really don’t do these things well in America and, growing up, my family did even worse. But despite not having enjoyed a bar-mitzvah myself, or First Communion, or even Prom, I sense that making a Big Deal out of seemingly little events can be an important marker for children growing up. After all, aside from getting the keys to Dad’s car, getting a license that says you’re eligible to get legally sauced, or graduating college, there really aren’t many things in American society that really tell a child, “Hey, you’re growing up. Time to start acting like it.”

I used to think High-School graduation served that kind of function, but having worked with college students for a few years as a Chi Alpha campus pastor, I now realize that college kids are really just High School kids with more expensive text books and a lot more license to misbehave. Why? I think one reason is that upon graduating high school, society places no expectations on graduates to actually grow up. That crisis really seems to occur only on the day a boy or girl receives their BA.

But, as usual, I digress

AJ's First Last DayAJ’s graduation ceremony was short, sweet, and to-the-point. The only real delaying element was a performance by the kindergartners in a typically off-key rendition of a few songs I can’t even recall the tunes to any more. I’m not sure I could identify the melody even during the performance, actually. But that’s beside the point. It was a chance for AJ and his peers to do something in front of an assembled audience that he learned in school. He’d never done that before. It was a first.

AJ's First Last DayUnfortunately, AJ didn’t even notice. Wherever I went with my camera, his eyes followed me, much like my grandmother’s eyes followed me in that creepy portrait that used to hang up on the wall of the mobile home I grew up in. You know the kind. You could press yourself flat against the very wall that painting hangs on and, still, you could feel those flat gray eyes boring into your skull. And if you dared look … yep. Still staring.

AJ's First Last DayI went stage-left. There’s AJ giving me a thumb’s up. I go stage right. There’s AJ looking over his shoulder to mug for the camera. I go to the far back wall. AJ’s still making faces for me. It cracked me up. Everybody’s all into the performance and watching the teacher, but AJ could care less. He wants to be in pictures, and he wants his Dad to give him a thumbs up to let him know the picture came out great. For every shot.

AJ's First Last DayAfterward, we went to Cracker Barrel to celebrate (one of AJ’s favorite haunts — because of the checkerboards and toys in the lobby), and I announced I’d interview him again later that day. He got excited. And before bed-time, he was sure to remind me, “Dad, after you put Ellie to bed, how about I stay down here and you can interview me again with your little computer?”

So, for your listening pleasure, I present to you my interview with Alexander James Tatum, Kindergarten graduate extraordinaire. And, as a special one-time only bonus, I’m also throwing in a short little interview with Elisabeth Rose as well. And just in case you missed the first interview, upon AJ’s first day in class, be sure to check it out.

Interview with AJ: (18:37) [download]

[audio:https://tatumweb.com/blog/wp-content/mp3/podcast-aj-kindergarten-end.mp3]

Interview with Ellie: (5:07) [download]

[audio:https://tatumweb.com/blog/wp-content/mp3/podcast-ellie-interview.mp3]

Man, they grow up fast.

Rich

Music Credits:

Excellent music samples by James Hersch. Check out his site, listen to his excellent music, book him for engagements, and buy his music. Really, he’s that good!

[tags]back-to-school, children, daddyblog, elementary-school, fatherhood, first-day, first-day-in-school, interview, James-Hersch, kids, kindergarten, mp3, podcast, school, secondary-education, last-day, last-day-of-school, AJ, Ellie[/tags]

AJ and his first day in kindergarten – a podcast interview

Family, Kids, Photography, Podcast/Media, Random Miscellany

Update: I’ve added Jennifer’s account of AJ’s first day in the comments section, for the interested.

Today we sent our little boy to school for the first time. Nobody wept. There was no gnashing of teeth, wailing, or sack-cloth and ashes. On our part, anyhow. Instead, we were excited to see AJ off to a new adventure in his life, one that promises whole new rafts of friends, future sleepovers, new books to read, realms of knowledge to acquire, and numerous — I repeat … numerous — parent-teacher conferences down the road.

AJ in the parking lot
He’s not angry, just surprised and squinting into the Sun. Or maybe he’s just part Ferengi.

Every parent believes their child to be the brightest bulb in the firmament — with the possible exception of overachieving, insecure parents who vicariously live through their childen, ever suspecting and fearing that their child will prove to be as colossal a failure as they imagine themselves to be.

Not us. AJ is not only bright, he is certifiably bright, even if nobody believes us the first time we warn them — err — inform them. My Bride and are enomously proud of our son (when we’re not enormously vexed by his impulse-control), and I’ve already been justifiably corrected by my son on many observations I’ve made. The days are few until he truly knows more about things than I do and I become the student. Nevertheless, I hope to remain in service as his father, mentor, and guide — even through High School.

Continue reading AJ and his first day in kindergarten – a podcast interview →

One good shave deserves another: My bald son.

Family, Kids, Photography, Random Miscellany

AJ and Rich, bald togetherSo, a couple weeks ago I decided I had enough of the receding hairline thing. I also woke up that Saturday and looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t like to look like Crusty the Clown. When hair thins, it doesn’t have fellow hairs to hang on to and cling to. Lonely hairs stand out, stand up, and wave about. It’s not pretty.

And I got tired of the wind, having to carry a comb everywhere, and just generally tired of managing dying hair.

So, I shaved. Not all the way, just enough to feel like I was shaved. I cut myself a little and it made me think that I should get a Wahl beard trimmer for next time. I left a wee little bit of hair behind. I wasn’t totally serious about baldness yet—besides, it’s still cold here in Chicago. I need a little bit of warmth left. Shaving For Bald Men can be hard and that is what has kept me from shaving all my hair off.

A week later, AJ followed suit.

“Dad, I like your hair.”

“Really? Do you want me to shave your head?”

Now, notice how quickly the conversation went from AJ just generally appreciating how “crunchy” my hair feels, to me offering to lop off his mane. My wife is in the corner shaking her head.

“Sure!”

After talking it over with me, and with plenty of rounds of me saying, “But it’s just hair. It’ll grow back. He’ll be in soccer this summer, he’ll need to keep cool.” And so on. She relented. The “It’s just hair, it’ll grow back” argument helped. Mostly, she just didn’t want hair to be the battlefield she died on.

That’ll probably be bows and arrows or target pistols or something silly like that.

Click the picture to see our glorious baldness!

Ellie’s Tresses, if you’re wondering, are still intact.

[tags]BlogRodent, kids, photography, bald, shaved, hairless[/tags]

Telling lies for fun and profit: The Tooth Fairy

Family, Kids, Photography, Random Miscellany

AJ missing a toothLast night I enjoyed one of those moments of fatherhood I never thought about before we had kids: pulling teeth. Twice now I’ve gotten some dental floss from the cabinet, tied a knot around a loose tooth, and pulled, to reveal a bloodless tiny kernel of dentition in a tangle of nylon twine. AJ has now lost his front two lower teeth, and he’s already got the tips of the new one poking through the gum-line. (Those were the easy teeth. I worry about the others now.)

Before Jennifer and I married, we discussed what we would do about Christmas, Halloween, Easter, and other childhood stories. I was adamant: no myths. No lies. No Santa.

And as AuthorityDental.com says:No. Tooth. Fairy.

I would not lie to my children for the sake of Continue reading Telling lies for fun and profit: The Tooth Fairy →

Eight Michigan Photos: AJ, Lighthouse, Lake, Church.

Family, Kids, Photography, Random Miscellany

Just before leaving Muskegon, Michigan, this Thanksgiving, AJ started asking us about Lake Michigan, and we realized we hadn’t taken him to see the lake for a couple years. He’s nearly five, now, so he has no memories of seeing it before. So, after driving around and trying a few frozen over access points—and one over-run by hunters—we took AJ to the pier/lighthouse where I proposed to Jennifer in 1997. There was a massive ice-shelf extending into the lake (beyond the lighthouse) when I proposed (I was literally standing on nothing but ice!), but it wasn’t that cold yet this weekend, so we thought it would be a great time to visit.

Boy, was it cold. Ice had already started forming on the lighthouse and the pier leading up to it. We couldn’t get any closer than what you see in this picture because the concrete was far too icy and slippery. There were three hardy fishermen out there with us and AJ stopped and inquired of each one if they’d caught any fishies. Nobody had.

I was glad we happened to have Jen’s digital camera handy, so I could catch a couple snapshots. Enjoy the coldness.

Oh, and on the way back we stopped by a church with some of the most unusual architecture I’ve ever seen. St. Francis de Sales church is a monumental concrete structure that is simultaneously imposing and inviting, disturbing and refreshing. It is a favorite for foto bugs in town—but photos simply cannot do it justice.

(The “Unprocessed” link below each image will lead you to the original, out-of-the-camera, unprocessed shot, if you’re interested in seeing what a little work in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro will do. I generally just played with the histogram and made slight cropping corrections. However, the lighthouse required a little extra work to preserve the red color, AJ’s pants required rescuing from becoming black holes, and the church photos were turned to grayscale before I made histogram adjustments.)

(Click the  button if you’re interested in seeing the original, raw photo.)

 

I had a great Thanksgiving, by the way!

[tags]BlogRodent, St.-Francis-de-Sales, Muskegon, photography, lighthouse, light-house, Lake-Michigan, pier, landscape-photography, architectural-photography, black-and-white-photography, digital-photography, kids, AJ[/tags]

Kids and rituals

Family, Kids, Rage and Rants, Random Miscellany

Friday night we went out to eat with the kids to AJ’s current favorite watering hole: Cracker Barrel. While my favorite foods are spicy Thai curries, the rest of my family prefer blander fare. Well, Jen likes Italian and TexMex quite a bit, but the kids? Oh, mac-and-cheese or boiled eggs is about as sophisticated as their palate gets. So, southern-style cooking is just fine for AJ and Elisabeth.

But it’s not the cooking that draws AJ there. It’s two simple things. No, make that three: First, an endlessly fascinating commercial enterprise with toys easily accessible to his grubby fingers. Second, a checker-board with rocking chairs right by the fireplace. (Our Cracker Barrel ritual requires a game while the drinks are coming.) Third, rocking chairs. After dinner, we tour the store, with a stop at the toy section. We pay our bill, and AJ gets to help with the transaction. We admire the pretty music boxes, and then traipse or tow each other outside for a 10–15 minute rest in the rocking chairs. Even Elisabeth is into it now, picking the pint-sized chairs for herself to enjoy. Usually, there’s nobody out there except for a random smoker or two, so we have the “front porch” all to ourselves. A Cracker Barrel jaunt is at least a two-hour affair, if not longer.

Why these three ingredients pull on AJ’s attraction I’ll never fully know, but I suspect it has to do with this: shared ritual.

Healthy families, I think, hum with numerous shared rituals—even if they’re small and not even recognized as such. From initiation into the joys of properly dunking Oreos (unlike the tragic experience mentioned in my previous post), to Christmas rituals, birthday rituals, dinner rituals, and on and on and on; these formalized ways of doing things (that differ from family to family) give a sense of identity, facilitate bonding, and provide a touchstone of familiarity for kids with brains and bodies in constant flux.

(Mom and Dad need rituals, too. The night-time greeting with a quick kiss on the lips, repeated affirmations of love and affection, and the warm hand on the hip as we fall asleep at night, keep us centered and tighten the bonds even when and despite inconstant emotional states from day to day.)

I think all this, and yet I was a coward Friday night when our most-excellent server shared with me her personal approach to nighttime rituals with her kids:

“Give me a kiss and go to bed.”

Elisabeth has been on an emotional, whining, crying kick lately. She’s wanting to stay up later and later, and her naps are being cut shorter and shorter. So, Friday night, while Jennifer escorted AJ to the restroom, Elisabeth started bawling, and there was nothing I could to to settle her down. Our excellent server (I’ll call her Dee, which is not what her name-tag advertised, to keep her anonymous) came by and talked to Elisabeth in the affectionately cooing way all moms have with babies. I appreciated it. But Elisabeth couldn’t have cared less.

Dee, a mother of three, ages 5, 7, and 12, astutely remarked, “She’s tired.” Yes. She is. But, I mentioned, even though she was going straight to bed the moment we got home, she’s been resisting sleeping lately. So it was going to be a fight.

Inspired by my revelation, Dee confided that in her house, bedrooms were for sleeping and changing clothes. Nothing else. All the toys were in the playroom in the basement. So, her kids’ rooms are sparse. (I imagined a gray monastic cell with a cot on the floor, for some reason.) And she doesn’t believe in none of this night-time ritual business. No playing, no stories, no prayers, no “ni-nights” and giggles. It’s all give-mamma-a-kiss-and-get-to-bed. “Now!”

I said nothing, but agreed that I could see her point. After all, she’s working the night shift to help make ends meet. Who am I to tell her that sounds heartless? She really didn’t seem heartless. Her “system” works for her. Plus, I avoid arguing with anybody with the power to covertly add phlegm to my food. I just nodded and smiled.

Coward.

But since that conversation, I’ve been thinking about this off and on.

Nighttime rituals are taxing sometimes. It’s late, I’m sleepy, I still have many things I want to do before I, myself, go to bed (like ego-surf my paltry blog stats). Life would be easier if I could get back the 30–to-60 minutes I lose each night once we start putting the kids to bed. But, you know, you don’t have kids to make life easier. If I had hoped to be a lazy parent, I should have gotten a cat or a guppie instead and spared my children the agony.

Elisabeth hasn’t been around long enough yet to grow her own set of rituals, but it won’t be long, now. With her, it’s mostly warm the bottle, entice her to climb the stairs, change her diaper and clothes while tickling her, sing her the ABC song, and after she’s inhaled her bottle of milk, repeatedly command her to lay down while she cries out the next half-hour.

AJ is now fully able to commence his nightly prep-work by himself, which gives us all a nice half-hour break at the end of the night. After he’s gotten his PJ’s on, pottied, and brushed his teeth, he usually waits in his bed, reading a book, while he waits for me. (How cool is it that my 4–1/2–year-old boy reads books in bed?)

Over the last couple years our bedtime rituals have evolved from simple, repeated “I love you’s” to: turn the lights down, close the door, tuck him in under his blankets, lay down with him, invent a story featuring a little boy or a little girl, go through a Q-and-A session about the story (AJ asks most of the questions), listen to his just-invented story (remixing several elements from the story I just gave him), review the events of the day, say our prayers (he prays first, and I follow suit), kiss, hug, say “I love you” (multiple times), cuddle for a few moments while he starts to get drowsy, and as I leave the room, we exchange a set of hand signals that feature blown kisses–the “I love you” hand sign, and a “sparkly heart” thing AJ invented.

Skip a step, and I’m courting emotional disaster.

Interestingly, Jen’s rituals with him are completely different. And he’s okay with that.

Some, reading this, may think I’m totally coddling and spoiling my kids. Maybe I am. But I work long hours with a long commute, and we keep the kids up late so I can maximize my time with them. These nightly rituals are a hugely important bonding time for us. Without them, I’m sure my son wouldn’t feel as close to me as I think he does; and my affirmations of love would sound more hollow in my ears—especially after he disobeys and I am forced to discipline him. No matter what mayhem AJ caused during the day, he still gets his daily dose of dad at night.

I look forward to experiencing our rituals as they evolve and mutate. They should never be writ in stone, because families’ needs change, and kids and parents need new and changing rituals to cope with the changes. Echoes of older rituals will provide the connective tissue into the future, and can always be reinvigorated with new meaning.

About a year-and-a-half ago, AJ took nightly walks with me, and he still talks about the nights we walked to the water tower to lay beneath it and look at the stars. We’ll be doing that again, soon, I think.

I’m interested in hearing about your rituals. Feel free to post a comment and share them.

[tags]BlogRodent, kids, children, rituals, bedtime-stories, childhood, toddlers, growing-up, family, family-rituals, parenting, parenthood[/tags]

I’m flush with Oreos–or AJ doing his part to ease world hunger

Family, Kids, Podcast/Media, Random Miscellany

When you’re four years old you can’t walk away from the chocolatey goodness that is an Oreo cookie. And there’s nothing better than a crisp Oreo dunked in cold glass of pristine milk–especially when you’re only four and a half years old. Well, perhaps reading while dunking Oreos might improve the experience. And you definitely should be relaxed, perhaps even seated.

So what happens when one is simultaneously relaxing his posterior, reading a good book in the best-lit room in the house, and dunking cream-filled discs of manna? Odds are, something will fall into the porcelain catch-all which supporting that tired derierre.

Hear why AJ was found brushing his teeth after experiencing an Oreo baptism I only shudder to imagine.

[audio:https://tatumweb.com/blog/wp-content/mp3/ajs-oreo-08-28-05.mp3]

(Or download the file, here.)

[tags]BlogRodent, podcast, kids, children, oreos, weird[/tags]

Half-Baked Hams

Family, Kids, Photography

Tada!So, the other night, I get home, and before I know it, I’m in the middle of a whirling dervish of kids spinning, crawling, leaping, and rolling. AJ’s been on this freerunning/parkour kick ever since we watched “Jump|Britain” on The Learning Channel a few weeks ago. At home he’s leaping from couch to chair to stairs, to carpet, clumsily rolling and flailing all the while. It’s unnerving, but we don’t discourage it much, despite the damage to our furniture. We like active kids. God knows we aren’t active enough ourselves. But in the middle of his demonstration, he stops to pull a magic trick on me. We had the camera out, so we caught it. As usual, our in-home pics aren’t all that impressive, but, hey, we’re proud parents.

Roll, take 2Roll, take 1While AJ is distracting us with legerdemain, Elisabeth quietly follows AJ’s lead with her very first somersault. Wow! I almost didn’t catch it. Jen missed it, so I grabbed the camera and we encouraged a few more rolls. We proudly caught snapshots on digital media for your own childlike vicarious thrills.

Next week: Tae-Kwon-Do classes for Elisabeth. She’ll need ’em.

[tags]blogrodent, kids, aj, photography, play[/tags]

Boys, keep away.

Family, Kids, Photography

Elisabeth's smileEvery night I come home to a family. After nearly a decade of marriage and nearly five years being a parent, I’m still not entirely used to it. When it was just AJ and Jennifer waiting for me at home, I’d be greeted with a joyful, “Daddy’s home!” and a running jump from my ferret-on-crack son. Now, I still get that, but I also get the quieter (sometimes whinier!) love and greeting from my beautiful daughter, Elisabeth. (Jennifer took this picture, by the way. Click the thumbnail for a bigger shot.)

I don’t know what I’m going to do when boys start taking an interest in her.

Relocate to Montana.

[tags]blogrodent, elisabeth, kids, photography, smiling, face[/tags]

An Afternoon with the Kids

Family, Kids, Photography

I enjoyed a great afternoon with my kids this last Sunday. Since I’ve been in a new photo-sig at work, and since I started this blog a month ago, I thought I’d take my wife’s little 3-megapixel camera with me. Sure, it’s not an SLR, but why be a snob—especially when the images are free?  

We got a late start and didn’t head out for McDonald’s Playland until very late, and by the time we got down the road—I mean, all of about 15 minutes—Elisabeth had passed out. You can see here that she’s pretty groggy, and that was after she and AJ had slept in the van for about two hours.

Yes, you read that right. I’m a horrible parent. I made my kids sleep in an air-conditioned van. :: sigh :: Oh well. Once Elisabeth starts sawing logs, you don’t want to wake her up. She won’t go back to sleep, and we’ll all have battles on our hands until bed-time. So, I got to McD’s and ordered a cheeseburger for AJ (yes, more parental cruelty), and we headed off for a nice park with a shady tree where we all got to kick back in the van for a while, and I got to catch up on the latest Dean Koontz thriller.

After naptime we headed back home with a quick stop to pick up a salad for Jennifer, and then we were off to McD’s again. I’d promised AJ he could play at the Playland, and Jen needed some time off from taking care of the chirren for a while, so I was game to watch AJ knock himself senseless against the labyrinthine plasticity of Ronald’s House of Horrors…with fries. But I’d just picked up the camera when I dropped off the salad (nice trade, eh?), so I convinced AJ to let me stop by the park to shoot some pictures. It was the golden hour (see the colors?) and I didn’t want to waste it indoors. He agreed, so we stopped. The picture you see here is AJ and Elisabeth trying—and failing—to feel the joy in sitting on a bench mere yards away from the real excitement while daddy plays with zoom and flash settings.

I know. Dads have all the fun.

After a couple fruitless attempts at candid portraiture, I set the ankle-biters free to move about the playground. AJ decided he didn’t need to play in the McDonald’s spaceship after all, and he was quite happy to crash around the playground. After all, there’s wood chips here, and those are so much more edible than Ronald’s fries. Right? Elisabeth agrees.

Elisabeth was more than willing to try a little static-cling slide action herself. So, I had my hands full, what with watching her, keeping track of AJ (impossible under the best and least distracting of circumstances) and fiddling with the ever fidgetable digicam. But I did manage to point the camera and hit the button now and then. The impossible part is timing the shot with a 0.5–to-2–second delay (digital camera joy) so that I can actually catch an expression and not get backs of heads or blurred arm-waving. Both kids are so “active” (the p.c. term for “ants in their pants”), that unless we feed them valium, they are always showing up in our cameras as a multi-colored blur. (Note to law-enforcement: I don’t feed my kids valium. Not yet, anyway.) A more superstitious person might suspect we were harboring ghosts, not children.

I have an adage for candid photography and candid portraiture to remind me that timing is everything: “If you can see the shot, you’ve missed it.” You have to anticipate the moment, you have to set up things in such a way that the candid moments happen, and you have to know when they’re going to happen, and be prepared. If you can see it, it’s too late. And that’s never more true than with slow-responding digital cameras and chaotic quantum states like toddlers and pre-adolescent boys.

They didn’t teach me that in high school photography. All the books Edward Weston and Ansel Adams wrote said nothing about prescience beng a prerequesite for good photography. I guess, if you normally shoot sunsets, still-life, and old folks, you can take your time. But with kids? You can’t be “in the moment.” You have to be “before the moment.”

Fortunately, the day was still a little warm, and there was that once-in-a-weekend second or two where AJ actually stops and takes a breather. We’d recently watched a TLC program on “Parkour,” or “free-running,” titled “Jump|Britain,” and ever since then AJ has been a virtual whirling dervish, spinning around from one hard object to the next, looking for the next thing he can climb on or—usually—crash into and spin out of control off of. He thinks it’s great. My wife and I think it’s the funniest thing since drunken cats on stage. Neighbors are not impressed. But it keeps him active, he’s having fun, and it wears him out: and that’s all good.

Eventually, the light failed me, and all the shots I took were blurred images with a lot of camera shake and subject motion. So, I gave up and took some macro photos of things that didn’t move while I still had some twilight left. Those were some okay shots. Maybe they’ll turn up here later. Meanwhile, as AJ put some finishing touches on some new moves I helped choreograph (like that makes any sense, a 300 lb. behemoth with bad knees giving parkour pointers to a four-year old? Oh, the arrogance of fatherhood!) I managed to sneak one last shot of Elisabeth stumbling around the park bench near a very orangey–colored lamppost. What I intended to shoot didn’t happen, of course, but I still like the resulting image. The thumbnail makes no sense at all, you’ll need to see the full image. Even then, it may take a few moments. Look for the ears and poney-tail scrunchy.

Then AJ found a discarded toy basketball and asked me to throw it to him. When he handed it to me, I asked him to stop for a moment, and I actually got another “still” photo of the freerunning wunderkind. Of course, there’s still camera shake—even the fill flash didn’t save me there. You can see more ears on him here than he has genetic rights to. But, I am very taken by the image. He’s sweaty, disheveld, a little tired, but unable to own up to it, and he still wants to play. A few balls tossed, then, and it was time to go. The kids were fading fast, the sun was long gone, everybody had had their fun, and it was time to get some grub and get to bed. 

Unfortunately, as soon as we got everybody loaded up, the joy of the day evaporated in a cauldron of tears.

Who can explain this? Daddy can’t.

Praise the Lord for fast food, disposable diapers, and comfy beds.

—Rich.

[tags]BlogRodent, photography, kids, parkour, children, play, AJ, Elisabeth[/tags]

Thoughtful AJ

Family, Kids, Photography

thoughtfulAJ looking thoughtful/worried/constipated. Take your pick.

AJ is frequently “spacing out” with this blank look on his face, and about the only way for him to get out of his zone is for him to randomly slap his own forehead with his hand. It’s this weird zen-like form of autism, I’m convinced.

However, the doc says it’s fine, and Jennifer realized the other day that she does exactly the same thing.

And now she’s slapping herself on the forehead for no apparent reason. I guess I’m used to being around people with a thousand-yard stare. I’m not used to them smacking their foreheads!

Now, I don’t really know he’s “spacing out” here. This picture was taken by Jennifer. However, I suspect he is, because anytime there’s a camera within spitting distance, he can’t help but turn on the ham factor. So, in the absence of hammery, I conclude zennishness.

[tags]BlogRodent, children, kids, photography, AJ[/tags]

AJ at Sunset

Family, Kids, Photography

AJ Tatum at sunsetThis is a picture taken by Jennifer. AJ’s sitting happy as a clam (Are they, really, all that happy? Or is it just a sham to throw us off our game?), or something. That’s “Diesel #10” in his hands, and a Thomas the Train T-shirt.

Why do boys instinctively love trains? What’s that about? Are we boys hardwired somehow to respond to the power, the deep bass rumble, the dangerous machinery, the oil? Maybe trains remind us of God?

Click on the thumbnail to get a bigger version.


[tags]BlogRodent, kids, photography, trains, thomas-the-train, children, AJ[/tags]

Cheeseface!

Family, Kids, Photography

My incomparable daughter, Elisabeth, taken about two months ago. She was about a year and three months old when this picture was taken by my wife.

Sadly, it’s my wife’s camera, and so I don’t usually have it to take many pictures. Hopefully, that’ll change, and I’ll be able to post some new pix of my own here. Or I can convince Jen to use this site to upload frequent images of the kids here. That’d be fun!

I do love my kids.


[tags]BlogRodent, kids, photography, funny-face, Elisabeth[/tags]