Happy Thanksgiving

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Mr. Mom

My wife had a conference in Phoenix last week, so I was in charge of both of our girls for three days (and nights).  While having two kids is more demanding than two, at least you’re not outnumbered when both parents are present.

I was outnumbered last week.

I’ve learned that when there are more children than adults in a household, you have to switch from man-on-man coverage to a zone defense.  I was essentially trying to cover the middle third of the field and not give up any big plays.  Fortunately, we are blessed to have two very good girls and there were no major catastrophes, but any time you have sole responsibility over a 1 year old and 4 year old, there will be some stress.

Take dinner time for example.  I like to eat.  I enjoy dinner with my family.  I even like to cook!  But when all the extraneous demands of parenting hit at once, dinner can easily become a race to see how fast I can get my kids to down cheese toast covered in ketchup (hey, that’s what they wanted) before anything too bad happens.

As a special treat, I cooked my homemade pizza Friday night.  Here’s a rundown on how this went:

I’m about to take the pizza out of the oven.  Olivia is watching iCarly.  “Olivia, go wash your hands.  We’re about to eat.”

“Ok, daddy.”

I begin slicing the pizza.  What’s that smell?  Amelia walks by – gotta change a diaper.

I change the diaper and bring the baby back downstairs where I finish slicing the pizza.

“Olivia, wash your hands, please.”

“Ok, daddy.”

I get the plates fixed up for the girls and put Amelia in her high chair.

“OLIVIA, WASH YOUR HANDS NOW!”

“Can I pause the TV?”  My 4 year old daughter knows how to operate a DVR – if only she could teach my wife.

The girls are at the table, blessings have been said, and I’m about to take a bite out of my delicious pizza.  Olivia takes her bite first and the 4000 degree molten cheese under a pepperoni scalds her mouth.  I get her to drink her milk and after much consoling convince her to continue eating.  Now I can enjoy my dinner.

Not yet!  Amelia thinks the tomato sauce from her pizza would make a wonderful shampoo.  Not only that, but she thinks it feels wonderful in her ears. 

I get her cleaned up.  Olivia needs more milk.

I get Olivia more milk.  Amelia needs more food.

With everyone temporarily satisfied, I get ready to take my first bite.  Before I can even get my slice of pizza off my plate, Olivia says, “I need to go poop.”  While she’s old enough to go on her own, I still have to clean up.  So I put down my pizza and wait for her to take care of business so I can clean her up before eating my dinner.

Back at the table, I finally get to enjoy my room temperature pizza.  It is at this point that my dog, who is under the table, decides to release some of the nastiest gas that has ever emanated from any creature.  I finally get to eat my cold pizza while smelling dog gas after recently wiping a child’s rear end.  How appetizing!

 

Too Much of a Good Thing

I like muffins.  Who doesn’t?  When you think about it, the word “muffin” is really little more than a euphemism that makes us feel slightly less guilty about having cake for breakfast.  I made some muffins the other day, but rather than using our regular brand, I tried a Fiber One muffin mix.  I wanted to try the Fiber One mix because I am pretty health conscious and try to take care of myself (okay, I had a coupon).

After having my muffin breakfast, I soon realized that my stomach was making noises that sounded like a spirited debate between humpback whales. 

The debate escalated.

I checked the nutritional information on the muffin mix to learn that each muffing had 5 grams of fiber.  I ate three of them.  In case you’re wondering, this means that I had about 60% of the recommended daily fiber intake over a span of about 5 minutes.  Oh yeah, and that was followed by three cups of black coffee.

Normally this wouldn’t be too big of a deal, but I would soon be teaching a two-hour long class.  I made it through the class, but I had to time my voice inflections just right to drown out the cries of rage from inside my stomach.

We all know that fiber is a good thing, but get too much at once and… well you know how that sentence ends.  In fact, too much of anything (even if it is supposed to be good for you) is bad for you.  A little sunshine lifts your mood and provides a dose of vitamin D – too much and you get cancer.  If you hear Hanson’s Mmm Bop once (yeah, you remember that song) it can put a little pep in your step – hear it more than once and you become a threat to national security.  We’re supposed to drink a lot of water for numerous health reasons, but guess what – you can even die from drinking too much water!

The point is, just about anything taken too far is going to have some negative effects on you… and it doesn’t end with what we eat and drink.  Too much work, too much play, too many responsibilities, too many commitments – sometimes it’s best to just simplify.  I’m all for setting the bar high and striving for great achievements, but sometimes the act of pursuing an achievement can get in the way of that which we wish to achieve.

 

What Did You Do With Your Extra Hour?

There was a time in my life when rewinding of the clocks by one hour in the fall represented an extra hour of sleep.  Unfortunately my two little girls can’t tell time.  I was up a little before 6 am this Sunday to put milk in a cup, a S’mores Pop Tart on a plate, and to turn on Little Einsteins. 

It was still dark.

That’s fine with me.  I’m usually an early riser and the whole getting an extra hour to get stuff done is fascinating to me.  I spent my hour making spreadsheets for one of my MBA classes… exciting, I know.

I don’t like the sun going down earlier, but I love the one 25 hour day of the year.  As I go through the house turning those clocks back, I feel like I have somehow cheated the space-time continuum.  I feel so much more efficient and wonder why every day can’t be 25 hours long.

Aside from the fact that this would require the rotation of the earth to slow substantially, I’m not sure if it would be such a good thing.  Although I got a lot done and felt great all day long, I woke myself with a loud snore in my chair at 9:15 that night.

Maybe more time isn’t the answer.  It seems that my mind and body can only take a 24 hour day.

 

Do You Have the Charisma to Lead?

This is an excerpt from a book I am reading by Seth Godin (Tribes).

Think about the charismatic leaders you’ve encountered.  They might be young or old, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, extroverted or shy.  In fact, the only thing they seem to have in common is that they are leaders.

I think most people have it upside down.  Being charismatic doesn’t make you a leader.  Being a leader makes you charismatic.

There are leaders with speech impediments and a fear of public speaking.  Leaders way down the corporate ladder and leaders with no money or obvious trappings of power.  There are ugly leaders too, so charisma certainly isn’t about being attractive.

It’s easy to give in to your fear and tell yourself that you don’t have what it takes to lead.  Mostly, people give up when they get to the charisma part of the checklist.  “I wasn’t born charismatic, not like those other guys, so I guess I’ll just settle for following.”

The flaw in this reasoning is that those other guys weren’t born charismatic either.  It’s a choice, not a gene.  Many of you have a vision for how things should be, but fail to act on that vision because you are afraid that you don’t have the mo-jo to get it done.  You are afraid you will come up lacking.  This is the birthplace of procrastination and the cradle for a lack of significance.

 

My Daughter the Philanthropist

I have a coffee mug on the window sill in my closet where I throw loose change at the end of the day.  It was just about full, so my wife emptied it into a larger jar.  No big deal, right?

Well once my four year-old daughter discovered my coffee mug was empty, she started acting faster than Congress with a bailout check.  Olivia ran into the living room, where I was watching football and muttered something about change and a coffee cup.  I had no idea what was going on.  She ran up to her room where I heard some banging around, her incessant rambling, and the sound of loose change pouring in to the floor.  Then she ran past me and into my closet.

This process repeated itself about 4 or 5 times until she finally came downstairs with her whole piggy bank.  That’s when I realized what was going on.  I walked to my closet to find her sitting in the floor, shaking out her piggy bank, and filling up my coffee cup.  Moved by her generosity, I told her that she didn’t have to give me her money.

Her reply was, “No daddy.  I have enough money and you don’t have any.  You can have some of mine.”

I almost told her to stop emptying her piggy bank and keep her money for herself, but didn’t.  Here was a simple, honest act of generosity.  Who am I to stifle that?  I thanked her for giving me her money and let her know how nice it was for her to give me something without me even asking for it.

Usually parenting involves taking the time to teach valuable lessons to our children.  Sometimes they are the teachers.

 

Freedom of Choice?

Our culture is inundated with choices. Want a new TV? Look at how many models are available. Plasma, LCD, or LED… 19”, 60”, or anything in-between… 120 Hz, 240 Hz, 760i, 1080p, 1080i…LG, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, Vizio, Sony, Panasonic…and where should we buy it?

Growing up, I had 5 television channels and two of them showed the same thing. Now, I don’t even know how many channels I have. I have to set up my “favorites” on my remote… more choices. If you still need evidence that the number of options available to us has gotten excessive, just take a look at the cereal aisle the next time you go to the supermarket. To make it even more interesting, take a four year-old who has just been watching Nickelodeon.

Not only are there a seemingly infinite number of choices available, but we are daily bombarded with marketing that tells us that there is an option out there somewhere that is just right for us – one that will make us happy. So you better make the right choice, or you’ll end up regretting your decision when you find a better option down the road.

The problem with having so many options and making so many choices is that it can easily lead to analysis paralysis. We want to make the right choice, but there are so many options and we don’t want regret our decision… so we make no choice. We procrastinate.

The same dynamic exists in our careers. I read an article a while back that said the anticipated top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t even exist 5 years ago. Think about that. As we have more choices in what to do with our lives, people are increasingly deciding to do nothing – at least nothing significant.

Here’s what I think. Instead of beating yourself up on where you will work, focus on what it is that you were created, gifted, and prepared to do. Guess what – that thing that you were created to do may have nothing to do with your current job, but that doesn’t mean you have to quit your job tomorrow. It just means you have to figure out how to incorporate your mission into your job. Or maybe, just maybe, you were meant to find significance outside of your professional career. What??? A life outside of work? Yep, the most important things you will do, the greatest significance you will find, and the most lasting legacy you leave will probably not be career-related.

 

I Need a Vacation from my Vacation

The family and I rented a cabin in Gatlinburg last weekend.  I remember when vacations were relaxing, fun-filled, and I never wanted them to end.  Then we had two kids.  Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, but let’s just say by the time I got home, I had my fill of family togetherness.

The 3 ½ hour car ride started out with us getting stuck in road construction.  A short while into the drive, the fuse in the A/C adapter on the kid’s DVD player blew.  With no DVD to watch, Olivia started going through the bag that she packed on her own.  The first thing that she found was her harmonica… which she played for the next two hours.  It was cute for about the first 5 or 10 minutes.  The next 110 minutes… not so cute.  Then Amelia chimed in by crying for the last hour through the mountains.

We got to our cabin and unloaded.  The backseat of our car looked like the floor of a recycling center.  Apparently, Olivia had packed her emergency food reserve as well.  There were Reese’s wrappers, juice boxes, loose change, and various components of toys everywhere.  I don’t know how we missed this during the drive, but Olivia managed to eat a Halloween’s worth of candy during the drive.

Loaded up on sugar, we took the girls to a restaurant.  Olivia was like a squirrel after five cups of coffee.  So much for a relaxing dinner.

The next day, we went out to Cade’s Cove.  If you’ve never been there, it is about a 35 mile drive from Gatlinburg (through slow, winding mountain roads) and once you get there, it is an 11-mile one-lane loop.  People drive slower than a tranquilized sloth on this road.  I guess I’ve been in Atlanta too long, but I couldn’t resist tailgating the minivan in front of me that refused to use the turn-outs to let me by.  Twice they stopped in the middle of the road for about 10 minutes to take pictures of deer.  Deer!  Not bears or mountain scenery, deer – the same animals that you see all the time at home.

The next day, we went to Pigeon Forge where we decided to try the Jurassic Boat Ride.  I paid my 40 bucks and we climbed in the “boat” where we were taken on a ride that will induce nightmares for a 4 year old and had enough noise, special effects, and pitch-black darkness to cause a one year old to cry uncontrollably.  When the ride ended (10 minutes later) the parents all looked at each other as if to say, “Well, there’s $40 I’ll never get back.”

After we got home, Olivia kept talking about how much fun she had and how she couldn’t wait for our next vacation.  With all my frustration and impatience, it took a four year old to help me realize that it was all worth it.

 

Stressful Times

While doing some reading for one of my classes, I came across the following summary of a study on workplace stress and aggression:

• 65% of workers said that stress caused physical and physiological difficulties
• 25% view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives
• 14% reported that they had felt like striking a coworker in the past year, but didn’t (that’s all?)
• 25% felt like screaming or shouting because of job stress
• 10% are concerned about an individual at work they fear could become violent
• 9% are aware of an assault or violent act in their workplace, and 18% had experienced some sort of threat or verbal intimidation in the past year

Generally speaking, we are growing more stressed with each generation.  Why?  Well, first we have to define stress.  The textbook I am using defines stress as “the excitement, feeling of anxiety, and/or physical tension that occurs when demands placed on an individual are thought to exceed the person’s ability to cope.”  Technically this is distress or negative stress. 

There is such a thing as positive stress and that is the stress that pushes us to perform at optimum levels.  Here’s my take.  One reason so many people feel distress is because they introduce demands in their lives that are not in alignment with their talents and passions while neglecting the opportunities they are uniquely gifted to pursue.

Think about the things that are causing negative stress in your life.  Are these the things that you are really excited about or annoying responsibilities that “have to be done?”  Do they fully employ your talents and skills or do they require you to forsake your gifts in order to do something that makes you feel inadequate?

There are many stress reduction techniques (prayer, meditation, yoga, exercise, etc.) and they have been proven to help people reduce their stress level.  Those are fine, but what if, instead of trying to cope with some of the major stressors in your life, you made some real changes and started pursuing the things in life that are really important to you?  There will still be stress, but there will be much less distress.

 

The Superhero Upstairs

My four year old daughter, Olivia, has been doing some interesting things after we put her to bed at night.  The old routine was for us to take her upstairs, read her one book, say her prayers, give the hugs and kisses, and she would silently drift away.  Not anymore.

In just the past week, I have found her in several interesting situations.  Olivia has had this deal for a few months now where we have to leave her big overhead light on and shut her door when we put her to bed.  I usually go up after an hour or so and find her sound asleep so I open her door and turn out her light.  That hasn’t been the case lately.  She’s been dressing up princess figures until past 11:00, tuning in some sweet jams on her karaoke machine, and playing dress up with her jewelry.

One particular night stands out.  After I walked up the stairs and opened her door I was relieved to find her asleep, but I almost erupted in laughter when I saw her.  She was lying in her bed with a picture of her and her older cousin, Blake, on her lap, adorned with a full complement of necklaces and bracelets, and wearing a cape embroidered with “Princess Olivia”.

I don’t know what motivated this outfit, but I can only imagine that she was dreaming of being a superhero.  Who doesn’t want to be a superhero?  We all pretended to be one when we were kids.  Even adults may watch movies and daydream about what it would be like to be one.  The funny thing is, we daydream about being Superman or Spiderman, yet spend our lives trying to be Clark Kent or Peter Parker.  I omitted Batman because Bruce Wayne would be a significant upgrade for most of us.

Now I realize that as we age, the realities of life begin to erode away at our imaginations as we give in to more “realistic” expectations.  I realize that it may seem more “responsible” to settle for a job with decent benefits and a little security.  I realize that a cape and pair of tights will not enable us to fly, climb buildings, see through walls, or gross $200 million at the box office.  But I also realize that there’s a little girl upstairs who, at least for now, thinks I’m a superhero… and she’s watching.  If I settle for mediocrity – if I limit my existence to the daily routine – she will soon look for a superhero elsewhere.