Family photos

Being a photographer, I often kick myself for the number of cool family moments I didn’t photograph. I’m ok with it, because I was too involved in being a part of those moments and I could have cared less about photographing them. The tradeoff is that, down the road, I would love to have photos from those awesome times in my family’s life. No worries. This past summer I was able to do both – taking photos were a part of a hugely fun afternoon playing in the swimming pool with my oldest daughter. Between then and now, we moved, I had hernia surgery, and we had our second child (it’s a girl! Yay!) so, I have finally gotten the images from that day in the pool with my daughter printed, framed, and hung! It was worth the wait, because they are as amazing as I knew they would be. See for yourself!

Your wedding album will last longer than your computer!

Here’s the thing – if you are planning your wedding, you have spent a huge amount of time and money picking out and paying for every… single… last… detail of your wedding day. Often, paying for your wedding photographer and the services and products your wedding photographer provides comes after several other (often surprisingly expensive) aspects of your wedding day have been picked out. Your budget is shrinking. You’ve signed lots of contracts and written lots of deposit checks. And now your favorite photographer (who is also expensive… isn’t anything about this day going to be affordable?!?) wants you to pay for a wedding album as well. Well… decisions have to made, money has to be saved, something has to give somewhere! So, the decision is made to go with a photography package that doesn’t include an album. You tell yourself that you will design your own album later, or that you only want digital files anyway.

Here’s the thing. Discs go bad. Hard drives crash. You buy a new computer and never get around to transferring the files from the old one. You and your new husband get really busy with making this new and amazing and very, very busy life together. Those discs of over one thousand photos that you got from your wedding photographer haven’t been touched since you got them in the mail. Who wants to sort through over one thousand photos?! Jump ahead five years. You’ve moved a couple of times, boxed and unboxed everything you own (including those discs), life is even busier than it was right after you got married. Every anniversary you think to yourself, “It would be great to look through those photos”… wherever they are. Your wedding photographer only kept backups of the images for two years after the wedding. You’re pretty sure you know where those discs are… you think. You have no photos of your wedding day framed and hanging in your house. You have no album.

It’s not like my wife and I look through our wedding album once a week or anything! But a couple of times a year? Yeah, definitely. It has a prominent place on our bookcase. When we have moved, it got wrapped in bubble wrap and put in a box that we know we are going to actually unpack when we get in our new house (we usually end up sitting on the floor, flipping through it when we unpack it). I have several hard drives and discs of old photos. Never look at them.

My wife never wears her wedding dress, it is sealed in a box that apparently could last until the end of civilization. Our daughters won’t wear it at their weddings (yours won’t either – how do I know? You’re not going to wear your mom’s dress, are you?). It will sit in that box forever, unseen. The cake is gone, the food eaten, the alcohol consumed, the amazing tent and lighting has since been packed up. That amazing honeymoon trip is over. You have your ring, your photos, your memories, and your husband. And if you didn’t get an album, the photos will sit on those discs until the discs fail (in about 5 years, 10 if you are lucky) and then you won’t have any photos.

Your wedding album is the chronicle of the day you and your husband began a lifelong journey together. If you have a professional photographer, he or she will provide you with an album that is a visual narrative that tells the story of this most important day. It will last for 100 years and beyond. Your children will, at some point, want to see it. You will want to see it. No one will want to load up a couple of discs that contain over 1ooo unsorted, unretouched, unedited images and try to find the good ones.

A professional photographer (or in my case, my incredibly talented retoucher/designer and I) will select, edit, retouch, layout, and design a beautiful, archival, visual chronicle that will preserve for you and your kids and your kids kids the story of the day that you and the person you love more than anyone in the world held hands, kissed, and swore to be together forever in front of everyone who was important to you. Your wedding album is the one thing that you paid for when planning your wedding that lasts past the wedding day. And, if it was professionally printed and bound, it will last for generations. It is the one record you have of all of the details you worked so hard to pull together.

My wife and I have been married for over ten years now (yay!). We have had amazing adventures together, but none of it compares to how amazing our wedding day was.

I am passionate about wedding photography (and wedding albums, obviously!) because I am good at it and I believe it to be one of the most important parts of your wedding. It is more than just snapshots of what happened. We create an archival visual chronicle of a day that changes your life. Don’t overlook how important that is.

Ashley and Andy tie the knot!

I recently wrote about how much I love my job. Here I go again. Ashley and Andy got married at Mt. Pleasant Presbyterian (in Mt. Pleasant,South Carolina, for those of you out-of-towners) and had their reception at Alhambra Hall (also in Mt. Pleasant). What can I say, I love these people! What a great family, what a great wedding! I have to give a big round of applause to the following vendors who made this wedding so beautiful:

First of all, my huge thanks to Sarah K, the ultimate second photographer and visual creative. Without her, what would I do?! Find her at www.sarahkdesigns.com.

Rachel Briggs with Duvall Catering and Event Design – Decor design, floral design, and wedding coordinator! She’s a triple threat (and great to work with)!

Emma Lesesne with Duvall Catering and Event Design – The one in charge of the elegant bar and catering. Yum.

Jim Smeal of Wedding Cakes by Jim Smeal – A gorgeous cake and yummy too.

Elizabeth McKeever – an extraordinary artist, she created a quite amazing painting of the reception… and finished it during the reception. I was blown away.

There is nothing like a wedding that is focused on love and joy. It was simply a joy to be there. Thanks Ashley, Andy, Brooke (gotta include Clay), and Mom and Dad Anderson for letting me be a small part of such a great day.

Enjoy the small sample slideshow below!

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Brooke and Clay on a shrimp boat!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

How much fun is it to have a job where you have this much fun?! First of all, big props to Brooke and Clay for idea of doing a couple’s shoot on a shrimp boat! Second of all, big props to our shrimp boat captain who decided to take us out into the Charleston Harbor (and let Clay steer the boat!). We ran all over that boat like crazy people, chasing the sun as the boat turned back and forth and around and around. Those two were awesome, climbing the rigging, run back and forth to get cool shots, all of us having a blast. To top it all off, we took a few shots with Brooke’s sister, Ashley and Ashley’s fiance Andy. (I have since shot Ashley and Andy’s wedding at Alhambra Hall in Mt. Pleasant, which was huge fun – another post on that later). Then, to really top it off, they invited me back to their house for drinks. Ya know, it doesn’t get much better than that! Wedding photography, as far as I am concerned, is about relationships. I love my job when my clients become my friends. Thankfully, I have had great clients. I have been blessed and lucky to have some of the best brides (and grooms, and Mothers of the Bride) in Charleston. So, thank you Brooke and Clay, thank you Ashley and Andy, and thank you to all of my awesome brides. You make this job fun!

Can you travel with your toddler (and stay sane)? Tips and tricks from a San Francisco journey…

The scenario – flying across the country with my wife and two year old daughter to spend six weeks in San Francisco. What should I pack? Should we fly with the car seat? Should we take a stroller? How do we carry all of our stuff for six weeks? Will we have the time of our lives, or will we be miserable and resolve to never travel again until our daughter is in college? Putting our trip together brought up these and many other gut wrenching questions. So, first some background! My wife and I spent over ten years travelling and having fun before our daughter came along. Thanks to Tim Ferris’ book, “The Four Hour Workweek”, we decided to spend our summer in San Francisco. I’ll pass along what worked for us and what didn’t and hopefully, as you plan your big family adventure, some of these tips will make every stage of your trip a little bit easier.

Now, your circumstances are going to be unique, and may call for different approaches. I’ll share with you our tips, but think of that only as a starting point. There may be a better solution and you may be the one to find it (if you do, please share it with me – anything that makes travel easier is great in my book).

PACKING

Packing for six weeks in San Francisco was fairly straightforward when it came to clothing. July and August in San Francisco is consistently cool and foggy. I knew I would go for occassional runs. We also had a weekend trip to Napa planned. For me, that meant my clothing consisted of the following – two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shorts, two pairs of running shorts (which doubled as my evening lounge-around-the-house shorts and swim trunks) two collared shirts, four pairs of underwear, three pairs of running socks, 1 pair of running shoes, 3 pairs of regular dark socks, 1 pair of all purpose “dressyier” shoes, assorted t-shirts, a scarf, and fashionable hat, a functional knit cap, and a thin sweater. First, let me start by saying the apartment we rented had a washer and dryer, but if it had not, I would not have packed anything more. To fly I wore the dressy slip on shoes, jeans, and a decent looking shirt, and the slip on dress shoes, so those things did not have to get packed.

PACKING AND SHIPPING KID STUFF

Baby stuff that we packed was another matter. We ended up shipping quite a lot of baby stuff and some wife stuff to San Francisco via UPS. Not the cheapest thing to do, but for the shipping cost ($250, roughly) we shipped our folding stroller, a bunch of clothes, toys, stuffed animals, and books. Bear in mind that had we tried to pack that stuff and check it, our baggage fees would have been close to the shipping cost, and our bodies would have been broken in half. Honestly, I would rather spend the money with UPS, which cares about serving its customers versus spending the money with the airlines, who seem to care most about screwing their customers out of every penny they can. It meant we were able to fly with one small bag per person and travel comfortably. On the return we shipped even more of our stuff so we would have even less to carry on the plane. It is definitely the way to go. There are even services that will come and pick your stuff up and your house and handle the shipping for you. Just search for “luggage shipping services”. Honestly, they are not worth it, in my opinion. Every thing we shipped, we stuffed into trash bags (don’t ship suitcases – the weight and dimensions will drive the cost of shipping through the roof) and took it all to our local UPS store. They boxed it, and sent it on its way. Then, in San Francisco, like any delivery, it was delivered right to our door. We rented a townhouse, so it was a regular residential delivery. If you are staying in a hotel, just check with UPS and the hotel to make sure that delivery is not a problem (it shouldn’t be, but it is better to check) For the outgoing shipment, we paid for three day delivery and just made sure we had what we would need for the first few days. On the return, we shipped all of our junk by the slowest and cheapest means possible. We have plenty of clothes and stuff at home, we wouldn’t need our travel clothes right away once we got home.

A big question is whether you should travel with a car seat or not. We labored over this as do so many other parents travelling with kids. We thought our daughter would be happier and more comfortable in her carseat (0h yeah, safer too). The drawback was our connecting flights. The thought of lugging the giant Graco super-duper mega carseat through multiple airports made my back hurt in anticipation. The solution we found was the PorterCase PCX Lite carry on. While it is the most boring and ordinary looking rolling carry on, it is anything but. The bag quickly converts to a luggage cart that will carry up to 100 pounds of luggage on top of it! This thing is brilliant! In the photo below, the PCX case is the bottom most bag. We had our carseat, my carry on backpack and my wife’s laptop bag strapped to it. Once you get to the plane, unload the stuff on top, reattach the handle to the back of the bag, and it fits easily in the overhead compartment. Then you know you have a supply of diapers, change of clothes, stuffed animals, whatever your travelling munchkin might need.

We used a short strap to attach things to the handle (you could also use a bungy cord or something similar to hold things to the cart). We also used the cart before we left San Francisco to haul our bags and boxes of stuff to the shipping store that was several blocks away.

You can also go for the full on Porter Case. The original rolling luggage/hand cart combo, it is the more expensive big brother of the PCX Lite. It converts faster, is more durable, and can carry up to Tw0 Hundred Pounds in its “cart” configuration! I bet you could surf it down the escalators too, but I wouldn’t recommend it. With that bag, I could put our carryons, my daughter and my my wife and there and roll on through the airport! You can’t get a manlier piece of carryon luggage, but it will cost you a good bit more than the PCX Lite. For what it’s worth, I found the PCX Lite conversion fairly quick once I played with the bag a few times. Convert it back a forth several times at home so you don’t hold things up at TSA checkpoints or at the gate.

My other recommendation regarding carseats and flying is to not fly with uber-mega Graco car seat we used. We love our car seat, but is designed to convert into different configurations as the child gets older and bigger. It has cup holders, and little storage pockets and is awesome when installed in our car. But, it is gigantic compared to some other car seats. On a plane, the only way it fit down the aisle was for me to hold it upside down over my head. It fit into the plane seat, but on one of the smaller planes, it barely fit. Also, judging by the behavior of the flight attendants, terrorism is nothing compared to the threat of parents flying with carseats that are not FAA approved. Every flight attendant asked in their best Keifer Sutherland-24-interrogation voice whether our car seat was FAA approved. I had no idea there was such a thing and after spending ten minutes with our first stewardess looking for the appropriate sticker, I still have no idea if the damned seat is FAA approved. Every stewardess that asked from there on I just lied and told them with great confidence that yes, this car seat is definitely FAA approved, no worries. All I can think is that FAA approved seats are smaller than the monster we travelled with. The takeaway is that flying with the car seat and the PCX luggage cart/bag was great for us and our daughter. It also made it easy when my cousin picked us up at the airport in San Francisco. We clicked the carseat into place, and, voila, our daughter was able to travel safely by car.

The other piece of luggage that is worthy of comment is the eBags MotherLode eTech Mini 21″ Wheeled duffle. I am a luggage freak. I always think the next bag will be the ultimate piece of luggage gear, only to be disappointed by the reality of travelling with the thing. Not so this time. The eBags bag is, first of all, not a “duffel bag” at all. It is a well designed rolling carry on suitcase. It is brilliantly designed, well built, and very well priced. It will be my go to bag for all travel from now on. I’m not keen on the small exterior pocket near the top of the bag (I, and lots of other people think the zipper should be on the other side), but it is still useful, if not as useful as it could be. I packed all of my clothes and stuff in that bag for the full six weeks. You can find really good reviews and a video demonstration of the bag at the ebags link above. It was my first experiment in the long travel-small bag style of packing, and I really like it. You don’t need to travel with all of that stuff you usually pack. Join the revolution! Pack less, pack lighter! Go to www.onebag.com for more information.

GETTING AROUND SAN FRANCISCO

Six weeks of finding our way around San Francisco led to some solid realizations of the things that help and don’t when getting around the city with a two year old. First of all, diaper bags. At home we usually carry a big, brightly colored diaper bag crammed with a wide assortment of kid related stuff. Trying to lug that around San Francisco sucked. Our solution developed into a two fold method. When we would go out for the day, my wife and I split up the kid necessities between her small shoulder bag and my SeV jacket. When we knew we would only be out of the house for a short while, we used my ScotteVest Tropical jacket/vest. I was able to put extra diapers, wipes, small toys, my Iphone, credit cards, ID, Iphone earbuds, snacks, bread to feed the ducks at the pond in the park, camera, water bottle/travel sippy cup, and just about anything else I needed to take with me while out and about with my daughter and not feel or look like a stuffed turkey. It is the man version of a diaper bag, except there is no bag! The jacket converts to a vest so it was perfect for those foggy,variable days in San Francisco in the summer that can range from the low 60′s in the morning to the high 70′s and sunny in the afternoons downtown. It is going to be a go to piece of dad gear for me at home too (once the heat goes away – Charleston, SC in the summer is not conducive to even the lightest jacket). The piece is well vented, but can be quite warm too. It is the ultimate undercover dad diaper “bag”. It also allowed me to do without my wallet I used some of the smaller pockets to carry my credit card, debit card, id and Clipper card (the new San Francisco public transportation pass). I wore it as my “carry on” for the flight home. I had a book to read, and a variety of other possibly helpful things on me at all times. By the way, buy the black jacket. It looks like every other black jacket on the street, meaning you look like a local. If you buy the tan colored jacket, you scream to the world, “I am a tourist! I’m subconciously trying to look like I am on Safari in Africa! Feel free to laugh and point/rob me!”

In San Francisco, public transportation is the way to go. 511.org, the public transportation website for the region, was phenomenal. Anywhere you want to go around the city or outside of the city, that website will tell you everything you needed to know to get where you were going, quickly and simply. Combine that with the public transportation Clipper card, and you will move around the public transportation system like a life long local. The Clipper card looks like a credit card. You load with cash at a variety of stores around the city (Walgreens drug store must have a monopoly on the city – they are the only drug store you will ever see… and you can load your Clipper card there easily). Once your card is loaded, you pass it in front of a card reader located on every bus and your fare is paid. It keeps track of your transfers, you can use it on the city MUNI buses, the BART subway and even CalTrain trains. Another nice little touch is that sometimes the card readers don’t work and the driver invariably just lets you ride for free. Forget trying to keep the exact bus fare on you or keep track of your transfers. I was able to use 511.org and my Clipper card to get from our rental place in San Francisco to a meeting in Palo Alto with total ease. I used buses, subway, and trains, and arrived at my destination within four minutes of the time 511.org estimated I would arrive. That is pretty impressive, and shows just how well integrated the public transportation system is in Northern California.

Navigating the city was infinitely easier with our Iphones. Maps, apps, Safari, a compass, a video camera, a regular camera, videos for our daughter to watch, games for my daughter to play, text messaging, and even a phone, all in one flat handy unit. Reception was ok in the city, calls were dropped occassionally, which was surprising, but all of the features I listed above made it an essential piece of living-like-a local in San Francisco with our two year old. All of the built in features made life easier, but being able to access 511.org and Yelp at all times made the Iphone indispensable. I’m sure other smartphones would be similarly helpful, but every single feature I listed above came in handy more than once.

The other crucial piece of our live-like-a-local trip to San Francisco was the website Yelp. Yelp has been around since 2004 to allow regular internet user type folks to review just about any sort of business or anything else you can think of. Now it’s got over 38 million users and over 12 million reviews. And, in San Francisco, anything you are looking for, anything at all, can be found on Yelp. How do I know? I wanted to go out one night and do some night photography, a hobby of mine. I googled “night photography san Francisco” and what was the first result? A list of night photography sites assembled by a yelp user. I used that list, selected a location, and captured amazing images of downtown San Francisco at night. I also used Yelp to find restaurants, a place to have a pair of jeans altered, the best place for a cheap cheeseburger, and the best playgrounds to take our daughter too (and there are some kick ass playgrounds in San Francisco!). The very best way we used yelp was with the Iphone yelp app. Using the Iphone GPS, the app would show us great restaurants nearby, wherever we were in the city. The best part – once you have chosen the place you want to go, you can tell the app to give you directions from where you are to your destination. One time, in dire need of a restroom, I asked it for a nearby coffee shop and was led to a nearby coffee shop (and restroom) that I would not have found otherwise. Anything we wanted to do, we were able to find on yelp.Yelp is also available in other cities, so try it out the next time you travel or the next time you go out at home. My one request – if you use Yelp, take the time to write a review or leave a comment or something. Give back.

With those few tricks up your sleeve, you will be able to navigate around San Francisco with ease.

THE RETURN

The return flights were uneventful. We carried books and a dvd player, and stuffed animals and a change of clothes, and diapers, and anything else we could think of to entertain our daughter. From San Francisco to Charlotte, NC and Charlotte, NC to Charleston, SC she slept maybe 45 minutes. For the rest of the hours and hours, we either walked up and down the plane or played and talked with her or she watched kids TV shows on the Iphone. Repetitions of the same episodes of Dora the Explorer, Wonder Pets, and Go, Diego, Go kept her transfixed for huge stretches of time. We had to keep the volume low because anything audible to the flight attendants resulted in our getting chastised, but she was entertained by those shows for almost the entire trip. So, my recommendations for flying – try videos on the Iphone or Ipod touch. They were invaluable.

TIPS AND TRICKS

These are the things that worked for us. Some are universal, and some may or may not work for you.

Carry plastic bags big enough and watertight enough to catch kid vomit in. Our daughter has never shown any signs of car sickness ever before. Well, on the way to Napa Valley, my wife noticed she looked pale and clammy when she started fussing. We knew what was coming, but we had nothing to contain it with. Our daughter projectile vomited all over herself, ber blanket, her stuffed animal, my wife, and the car we were riding in. The poor thing puked a couple of times. We still had 20 minutes of driving to get to our destination. It was not pretty. Then, on the drive to the airport to fly home… the fussing started again. She even said, “I’m sick”, in a sad kid voice. Thankfully, we found spare dog poo bags in the car and my ever so talented wife caught every bit of it in the bag. Travel day saved. Since car sickness (or any other kind of sickness) can hit kids out of the blue, and you don’t want to spend a day of travel covered in your child’s regurgitated breakfast, carry plastic bags. Preferably once that are not transparent. For double coverage, carrying multiple bags and spare shirts for everyone is not a bad idea and will fit easily in your carry on.

We found flying with the car seat to be a big plus. Travel with one that is FAA approved, not too huge, and get the PCX rolling luggage/luggage cart to haul it around airports on. I would NOT recommend travelling with a car seat without the PCX bag. I don’t like suffering. If you do, feel free to carry a car seat through a major airport or two. Really, it’s that big a deal.

For kid entertainment – IPhone or Ipod Touch! The stupid, bulky, heavy DVD player never got used. If your child becomes as addicted to Iphone videos as our daughter did, I suggest getting a combination battery and protective case. Before you hand over your Iphone to your child, you need a good case. My wife swears by her Otterbox case. The battery/case combo is not something I have hands-on experience with, but should be just what you need for long travel days. Also, always carry a charger with you. Any time you can, charge that sucker! Even if only for ten minutes, that is more time your child will stay entertained. Trust me, it isn’t pretty when the Iphone dies in the middle of a Wonder Pets episode!

So, can you travel with your toddler and still enjoy the experience? The answer is a resounding yes. Plan your trip, step out of your comfort zone, take your family and GO! It will be great.

Other resources:

www.thefourhourworkweek.com

I’m not an actor, but I play one on TV.

We have been in San Francisco for three and a half weeks now. Just over two weeks left in our temporary San Francisco relocation. A few observations. Craigslist is a whole lot more interesting here than it is in Charleston. I had the chance to be an extra in a scene from a hard core porn video being filmed at a club in downtown San Francisco. I thought about going. I figured any scene they were filming in a nightclub had to be pretty much non-porn. But I found out it was for a really twisted porn site and it just didn’t seem like quite as much fun as I originally thought it might be.

I did find an independent film that needed extras in Palo Alto, so I went to Palo Alto to be an extra. It’s always fun to be on someone else’s set, meet new people, see what kind of project they have going on. The setup was very seat-of-the-pants, one guy, one camera, a few mics, and no script. Not even for the principals. Watching them struggle through what was a fairly important moment in the film, I realized just how professional our webseries truly is.

Our webseries “Naval Task Force: Charleston” doesn’t have a huge crew but we do have professionals. Professional lighting, professional sound, professional writing and direction, and I hope as an actor, I am becoming more of a professional thanks to the patient coaching and input from those around me. The people who form our team take it very seriously and work at being as professional as possible. It makes me even more proud of what we are creating with our webseries, Naval Task Force: Charleston. These are very talented and committed professionals. I realize how far I have come from my recent beginnings as an actor and I take some pride that I have grown. I can only hope that we can carry the project forward to the point where we can reach the next level of professionalism – paying these great people for their work.

A few thoughts on being a father

When Marley was quite young (don’t ask me when – hell if I know, all I know is it was about a yearish ago, that’s parent time) we were introducing Marley to the joyous variety of baby foods out there, trying to get her to eat as a wide a variety of different colored organic pastes as we could. She took one tiny taste of the “green beans” (looked like green congealed spackle) and spat it out. Curious, I tried a little taste. The kid had great taste and good sense. That crap tasted like a green bean picked raw from the vine and rolled in dirt. My opinion of Marley went up a notch. It tasted like crap, and she knew it. Kelly and I cook most foods for the kiddo now, and our green beans are organic, pan sauteed in oil and garlic. Yummy. Marley still will have nothing to do with them. She is two now. I think she is still scarred from her green bean nastiness as a baby. I can’t say I blame her for her reluctance. I still remember how nasty that stuff tasted, and I don’t want to experience it again either.

We have a video baby monitor. A brilliant invention that is sort of George Orwell’s 1984 meets parenting. It is a great idea – when you hear that weird noise on the monitor, you can see what your baby is up to. A really, really good concept. The problem is the monitor part of the setup receives the video and audio feed via radio waves. And we get static. Not just static while the monitor is around electronic stuff. That’s to be expected. But, apparently, in the middle of the night, if I (some nights, only some nights!) put my arm over my head I generate loud static on the monitor. If Kelly rolls onto her left side, she generates sporadic bursts of static. Sleeping, in and of itself, will sometimes, around 3am, begin to generate static. That damned monitor will buzz with static in the middle of the night for its own mysterious reasons. We can’t turn it off, because Marley is too far away to be heard otherwise. Lack of sleep is a problem, not caused by Marley, but by the Mysterious Static Receptor that is our damned baby monitor.

Diaper bags. Ah, diaper bags. Conceivably, you could buy your own, cool manly diaper bag. Right. The truth is, all important baby stuff gets jammed into the main diaper bag. It is a ton of stuff, so unless you want to duplicate it all and risk forgetting something important (the one of a kind stange little doll that your daughter is madly in love with, for example) just suck it up and carry the main diaper bag. If you are such a spineless wuss that your manhood is threatened by carrying a bag that so clearly is there for a very utilitarian, you’ve got bigger issues to deal with than a diaper bag. The fact of the matter is, most everyone you bump into understands your plight. Anyone that doesn’t can shove a sippy cup where the sun don’t shine. Again, if your self image is so fragile that you give a damn what strangers think of you and the fact that you are father, you have bigger problems.

Another option, which I have just ordered and I think will provide a good secondary carry system for men and women in situations that do not call for the full diaper bag is a jacket by Scottevest. Enough pockets to hold all of your stuff along with diapers, wipes, toys, sippy bottles, etc for your munchkin. A day on the playground this morning with a spare diaper in one back pocket, wipes in the other back pocket, and a bottle of water in my jacket pocket made me realize Scottevest jackets are the perfect solution. I own one already, but it is way too warm a jacket, even for San Francisco in the summer, so I just ordered another, much lighter version. I’ll post a followup when I get the jacket, but I think it will offer the ultimate father-who-has-his-act-together-baby-stuff-carrying option.

This gives me warm fuzzies (and maybe a trip around the world)

Ok, I’m keeping this short so you won’t fade away – an author whose blog I follow, Tim Ferris, is offering to match every dollar donated before midnight this coming Sunday at this link.

It’s part of donorschoose.org, very reputable.

Also, he will pick one donor at random to win an around the world airline ticket. And he is giving away cool sunglasses.

You can give any amount. So, go do it, I did, and I never get sucked into these things!

You can follow Tim Ferris and find out more about this program at this link

That’s it! So, click the link, give some money. Tim Ferris will match what you give, AND give someone a trip around the world! GO NOW

Caillou drives me insane

I can now sing the theme songs of about half a dozen children’s tv programs. Personally, the one I like best is the Backyardigan’s theme song. The fact that I have an opinion about the best children’s program theme song means I need to get my daughter the hell away from the TV. But, the fact is, there are times when plopping the munchkin in front of the TV gives us just a few moments of sanity. Yeah, it sucks, but so be it. (I also like Hip Hop Harry and I wish I could throw down as well as some of the kids on that show.)
But there is one show I am learning to hate. Caillou. I don’t know who came up with the name Caillou. Whatever. I can get past that. But that kid is the whiniest little wussbag kid imaginable. More to the real world point, there is an episode in which Caillou becomes afraid of monsters he believes are in his room when it is dark. Thank you oh-so-fucking much, Caillou writers. You are teaching my daughter, who currently has NO issues with night time, darkness or sleeping alone to be afraid of all of those things. You rat-bastards. I have to delete that episode from my Iphone so my daughter can’t watch it, but she has already watched it a handful of times (Caillou is her current TV show addiction). If she starts to have nightmares, or doesn’t want to go to bed, I am going to hunt you down and leave my daughter with you until she is no longer afraid of the dark. And change that kid’s annoying little giggly laugh. It makes me want to thump him in the forehead.

Marley is two!

My awesome daughter turned two today. Two years ago today, Kelly and I were huddled in a hospital bed together. Kelly was trying to deal with the effects of being overdoped by the jackhole anesthetist (there’s a word I don’t spell every day – had to look it up). She had also been so pumped full of fluids that her hands were numb and stiff. Marley was resting in the nursery, and I was just lying there, thankful that Kelly was healthy, Marley was healthy, and nothing had gone wrong or was going wrong. I was, I realize now, a little freaked out. I was also just very, very thankful to be curled up next to my wife, knowing she was ok, knowing my daughter was ok. At the time, all I knew was that the damn O2 sensor on Kelly’s toe kept losing signal every 15 minutes and an alarm would go off and the embolism prevention leg pump thing was obnoxious. Hospitals are not my favorite places, primarily because common sense seems to have been taken over by process. They kept telling us to get some sleep, and yet, when the O2 sensor alarm wasn’t going off every fifteen minutes, a nurse would come in to do inane and useless things every thirty minutes… and would them tell us to try to get some sleep. Thinking back on those two nights in the hospital, all I remember feeling was overawed, overwhelmed, and simply grateful that everyone was ok.

The first year was rough. I’m sure it’s a lot easier for some, harder for others. We felt so out of our depth, wading neck deep in waters we didn’t know anything about. I was always worried about any of one thousand different possible illnesses, maladies, and disorders that I had read about in “helpful” parenting books. Sleep came in chunks, confidence came in a very slow trickle.

Now, two years out, Marley is a vibrant, smart little kid who shows more personality every day. I don’t think I know any more about being a parent, but I’m far less freaked out by all of the possible things that could go wrong. And, of course, we get a whole lot more sleep than we did a year and a half ago.

The question I still get asked by those who don’t have children is boiled down to, “Is having kids worth it?” My answer is that things that are worthwhile are most often not easy. Like any rewarding and difficult challenge, having kids requires hard work and sacrifice in order to be good at it. Your life changes. Dramatically. But you figure it out. You pick up the parts and pieces from your pre-baby life and you figure out if they are important enough to you to find a way to wedge them into your new life. My daughter is two. She is awesome… and a pain in the ass. Something tells me that won’t change. Being a parent is not the glowing, shining, pot of rainbows and flower petals that so many parenting magazines make it out to be, but I have such great love of and pride in my daughter, that sometimes it overwhelms me. Being a parent is damned hard. But most things worth being good at are.