I’ve mentioned in the past that my daughter participates in the school’s “Power Of The Pen” stuff. It’s basically competitive writing. Last year she made it to regionals as a 7th grader – which is pretty good. We recently got word that this year she’s the 8th grade team captain. Plus, she’s doing the math team too (assuming that the dates don’t conflict with the writing thing) – it’s like straight out of Mean Girls. She’s a mathlete. She’s the only girl on the team and even she calls it Nerd Club. “Dad, I need picked up after school. I have Nerd Club tonight.” We’ll see how that goes. Also, word on the street is that there’s potential for an Honors Band invite in her future as well.

I get to talk about my son more during football season, but he does his thing in school too. He’s had his work make the district art show every year and as of yesterday he’s also received the school’s “Citizenship Award” every year too. They give one out per month. Not sure entirely what it’s based on other than being a decent person. It seems more like a “Your Kid Doesn’t Act Like A Complete Asshole” award. At any rate, it’s cool that he’s gotten one every year now.

That’s what my kids are up too. I tend to take a lot of it for granted. Sometimes I’m not sure we, as parents, make as big a deal of these things as we should – or at least as big a deal as other parents would. That sounds bad, but it’s not like we go, “Yeah? Whatever!” Quite the opposite really. But…you know what I mean.

My kids are still kicking ass.

EDIT – In the couple of hours since I wrote this, my daughter did indeed bring home an invitation to try out for District XII Honor Band.

Can’t complain too much. We got exactly five years out of that Wii. Scored one the day they were released in 2006 and had it under the tree for Christmas that year. That thing got played an obscene amount. Back then the kids were 5 and 9. It was pretty perfect. I liked that it was mostly breezy, non-commitment type stuff. Nintendo changed the fucking game with the system. Everyone pointed and laughed at first, but Sony and Microsoft sure did rush to do motion control of their own. I don’t think either of them would have if the Wii hadn’t come along. It was nice to see Nintendo on top again. I’m a fanboy – always had Nintendo systems. When they’re on, they’re the best.

When I was a kid, I lived in the same house from a few months before my 4th birthday until I moved in December of the year I turned 18. That was 20 years ago this month. I lived in that house for 179 months – just shy of 15 full years.

In the 20 years since I moved out of my parents house I’ve moved 17 times if you count the short stays at hotels when we’d make big moves. If you ignore those month-long stays and just count it as part of the moving experience then I’ve moved 13 times. Of those moves two were short stints back to the parents for a total of 3 months. Those moves take place over 6 different cities/areas.

We bought this house three years ago and as of this month, it’s the longest I’ve lived at one address since leaving home as a kid. In April, the Dayton area will serve as the area I’ve spent the most time since then.

I guess for us this area has slowly become home. Both my wife and I were born and raised in western PA. Different areas, but still western PA. My daughter still identifies with western PA to a small degree. She was born there, although I doubt she remembers it as we moved when she was about a year and a half old. But we returned in 2003 and stayed until we headed out here in 2006. She’s 14 now, but she was 8 when we moved here. She was a third grader starting at her third school in 4 years. My son however, pretty much knows this area as home. He was born in Jacksonville, FL. We left there before he was two months old. When we came to Dayton he was just 4. He’s 10 now. It’s all he knows. The only school he’s ever gone to is the one he’s at now.

It probably seems crazy to move around that much, but I don’t think it was bad. It’s easy to get complacent and jumping around as much as we did for so long kept it exciting. We generally followed the opportunity first and foremost. Now that the kids are older, the focus has shifted more towards stability. When you’re the ages of my kids, moving would suck balls. However, I do think all the moving when they’re younger is good. They see a lot of things, meet a lot of different people – generally learn to be adaptable.

We don’t really have a hard, concrete plan looking ahead. The general goal is to try to stay here until the kids are adults…which means 8 more years for the youngest to hit 18. Realistically 9 for him to finish school. After that, who knows? Suddenly, we’re not quite as tied down any more. Possibilities are endless…except for Florida. Florida is the worst. We’ve gone twice and couldn’t wait to escape both times.

At any rate, it’s weird to think I’ve spent more time in this house than anywhere else I’ve lived since that house I spent my childhood in. Even if we do stay here another 9, that puts us up to 12. I wonder if I’ll ever live at one address as long as I lived with my family in that house as a kid?

Oh, he likes to build hybrid human/mechanical cyborg demon dragon-beasts from hell that only Ninjas of Death can subdue and ride.

But your son’s little truck is nice, I suppose.

For the record, 80′s hair band White Lion had Vito power.

So to start thinking Xmas and maybe start scoping trees we decided to go check out our local Christmas Tree Shoppe. We knew a little about it and had been wanting to check the place out for a while. Well, our mistake for not looking into it more, but it’s probably the worst place in the world. I expected a cute little seasonal holiday-type place. It’s actually essentially a Big Lots with 1/4 of the store filled with seasonal holiday items of the Big Lots quality you’d expect. It fucking sucked. If it burned to the ground tomorrow, I’d chuckle with approval. I actually wished I were in a Big Lots. (for the record, Big Lots is one of my least favorite places on Earth)

Just a big fucking waste of time.

We noticed there was a Burlington Coat Factory in the plaza. We hadn’t been to one in ages, but we used to find pretty great deals at the one in Allentown when we lived there.

Mistake #2.

It smelled…mostly like sad. And there was absolutely nothing worth seeing there…except (and I swear we found these there) for the boys mustard yellow courduroy pants straight off the kids in early-70′s Sesame Street episodes. I had flashbacks.

We quickly slipped out of there and beelined to the other location we planned on hitting – Hobby Lobby. I don’t think I’d ever stepped foot in one prior to this. We saw an ad that said they had a buttload of trees in all shapes and sizes at great prices. It may have been a bit of an oversell. They had one 12-footer, but it didn’t look very real and was a bit bare…and even with the 50% off sale on all Christmas decorations, still came in at a price closer to four digits than two. Meh.

What a waste of a couple of Friday hours.

On Satuday, we had football equipment turn-ins in the morning, then my son and I decided to drive across town to see one of the semi-final tournament games. Looked to be possibly the best game of the entire tournament at the 4th grade level. One team was a sleeper that went undefeated and gave up just one touchdown in the 8-game season and only two TD’s in three tournament games. No one ever put up more than 6 against them. They were playing the team that has been a thorn in our side not just once, but twice in the past. They’re consistently good and passed us in the final week of the season for the highest scoring team in the 4th grade.

On paper it was the unstoppable force against the immovable object.

It didn’t play out that way. The sleeper team gave up 28 points. In one game they gave up more TD’s than they had total in the 11 games prior. We still had fun. Might go to the championship game at UD next weekend.

It was also my daughter’s birthday. I have a 14 year old. Her party was last weekend, so she got to spend the day alone while my wife was at work and my son and I were at the game. She got a cake from Ritters. She wanted a Mud Pie cake. Too chocolatey for me. A weird little quirk of mine is that I’m not fond of chocolate ice cream. Even worse, chocolate ice cream with more chocolate shit mixed in…and then topped with more chcocolate. Not my thing. But Ritters is awesome. It took us a while to discover them (we’re DQ people for childhood), but we haven’t been to DQ in ages. (for the record my very favorite ice cream is Whitehouse)

Tomorrow? Little stuff around the house and a Steelers game tomorrow night. Normally we rake/blow leaves the first weekend in November, but all the leaves haven’t fallen yet. Trees are still surprisingly full for this late in the year. Maybe next weekend.

I’m livin’ it.

We’re busy right now with the annual halloween/birthday party for my daughter. My son usually has a friend over too and they run around the yard and the woods trying to scare the older kids. Last year was a ‘generic’ halloween theme – standard scary stuff – titled “Lucky 13″ for her 13th Birthday. This year it’s a research lab accident/mad scientist/shit has gone bad theme. We did invitations that we’re all official sounding – as if you we’re privvy to inside info. Very subtlely at the bottom in small font we put: www.researchfacility14.com password:number14

The kids seem to dig it. We’re in the process of setting the garage and deck up and getting it all into theme. Hopefully, I get some photos or video or something. The bad news is that the Camaro doesn’t get to sleep in the garage for the next 4 nights.

I’m also semi-simultaneously working on this year’s DVD set for the football team. Last year’s was such a hit that I think I’ve become the guy who does this for the team. Recording the games is cool and I know the coaches use it as a tool, so I’m contributing in my own special way. The parents and boys love the DVD’s. The entire season’s games are on there along with highlights, music videos and more candid stuff. It’s my job to make 10 year old boys look like rock stars. Amazing how some decent football plays edited in sync to some pump-up music can achieve this to great effect. I have less than three weeks to deliever a finished product to everyone at the end-of-season party. The weird thing is that I actually feel some pressure to up the ante, so to speak. You kinda have to outdo the last one, right?

Then it’s Thanksgiving…and holiday shopping and X-mas and New Year’s and stuff.

So this year, they’re telling us that if we plan on standing out front and picking up our kids that we instead have to go to the gymnasium, wait for our child and sign them out. But if we pull along the side of the school and stay in our car the kids can just come out. Also if your kid is a walker and walks home, they can just leave.

How little sense does this make?

My kid is free to roam whereever he wants as long as I’m not present. As soon as I show up, there’s special areas and procedures. Weird. Not sure why he can walk to the side of the building and get in any old car or walk home and run into God-knows-what, but he can’t walk out and meet me if I’m also out of the car and just standing there.

First night of Football practice too. No drama about splitting up the teams this year as there was a pretty large influx of boys this year. Each team should have 17 or 18. Luckily that influx happened because I guess as for a while it was looking like we’d be going down to two teams (like was threatened last year) and, oddly enough, our team had the fewest returning and would’ve been broken up.

Kind of a surprise as a couple of core boys who’ve been there a few seasons didn’t return as well as a couple of one-timers. Should be interesting to see how the dynamics of the team change and if we can maintain our general ability to win.

Life goes on.

Oh yeah, and my internet has been REALLY slow since we got back from Columbus this morning.

It’s really an interesting journey. We’re going into it with heat advisories and by the time we pop out the other side (and, man, does it go fast) it’ll be the Halloween/Thanksgiving season.

Basically, that means a decent chunk of the blog will now become about 4th graders playing football.

I am a little torn that I have to start thinking football while enjoying Pirates baseball so much.

UPDATED – Here’s where I stood last year at this time. I think that’s when I started tagged posts with ‘football’ – there’s older football talk, but I don’t think I was tagging it as such.

It’s not full-blown clown purple. Not really. She has a hairstyle where it’s not symmetrical and the one side has the long bang chunk. We bleached that chunk, but left the rest natural. The we went over the whole thing with purple. I can’t wait to see it in the sun. The bang piece is purple. Just fucking purple. The rest looks normal until you stick her under a bright light and then there’s a purple hue about it.

It looks pretty neat.

I almost dyed my beard purple for fun too.

On a side note, when I mentioned the idea to my son, he was concerned that we’d go to jail if we got fireworks. Which was really cute and made me realize that we’re doing something right. I’d be lying if I said a small smile and a bit of a tear didn’t come to my eye.

Then I told him, “Fuck the police!”