It’s a Wonderful Dad’s Life

Weekly Roundup

William came home with a black and blue mark on his forehead. According to the teachers at his preschool, another boy hit him in the head with a block during cleanup. William’s story is a bit more interesting. He said that Zachary hit him with a block because he was hitting Ella with a block and he wanted to stop him from hitting Ella. I was very proud that he would stand up to the boy to protect Ella. Ella if you remember is his favorite friend and a girl that he likes to play with at school. Ella tells his mother about Will. And Will talks about Ella quite a lot.

This week, William is recovering from the flu. He was very sick last weekend and the sickness has lingered as a cough for the week. This morning, Will is complaining that his ear is starting to hurt. We will give him Motrin and warm compresses and get him to the doctor tomorrow morning.

Which brings up another thought. Today was the first time that Will started to tell us that his ear hurt. And when I wanted to give him medicine, he just took it. No fuss. No complaining. He just drank the liquid. Finally he is starting to work with the program and not so completely against it.

Will is also much more communicative these days. He can really express what he wants and except for the fact that he now wants everything (no sharing), this is good. This morning, he asked for pancakes for breakfast. He also wanted to help make them. Of course after making them, he didn’t want to share the pancakes with anybody, especially Katherine. He did accept though that Kat would get a few pancakes of her own…eventually.

Kat is turning into a little girl and is starting to to have the elementary issues.

It’s weird, she told me today. I caught Zachary staring at me. When I queried her about the staring, she informed me that that is what boys do when they like you. They sneak peaks at you. Zachary she tells me likes her. This came when I suggested that she and Zach have a play date. Obviously, she doesn’t feel that comfortable with that plan.

Kat is also very good at needling William. She is learning to really push his buttons at times. I have tried to push her to stop, but I think this is a losing battle right now. It is just a part of this stage I am afraid. I will keep trying though.

But don’t take that as a reflection of her relationship with Will. Kat and Will are really becoming best of friends. Kat and she run through the house playing games and having a lot of fun together. Usually, it games that Kat initiate right now. William it seems just loves to be a part of the games.

This week is the last week before the family heads down to Santa Barbara for president’s day weekend. We are all looking forward to it. Annette and Daniel will be coming up for another fun filled weekend with family.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I have taken time off from work and I will be taking the kids to Disneyland. It is going to be a lot of fun. William is finally of the age where the magic of Disneyland will hit him with full force. I expect that we will have a hard time getting him to leave. Melinda and I have joked that it is good that we can text each other because we expect that Kat will want to go in one direction and Will in another. I am sure that we will be able to catch up at times.

I know that my entries have not been as frequent as I would have liked. I am very busy at work. To do a really good job with the projects and people I am managing requires that I spend much more time at the office. Especially now with the yearly planning, yearly reviews, setting people’s objectives, hiring (yes, I am hiring) on top of my normal duties, I just don’t have enough time to get everything done. Furthermore, I know that I am a bottleneck on a few things. As such, I am putting extra effort into changing things so that I can as much as possible remove me as a choke point for the group I manage. To streamline things requires that I put some other methods and procedures and tools in place.

The end result of all of this is that by Friday, I am simply wiped out. Since the start of the year, Saturday I feel like a zombie, unable to function and constantly wanting to just sleep. Hopefully, things will settle down soon.

Anyway, that is all for now. I hope you all have a great weekend.

Weekend Wrapup

This weekend, I spent the weekend basically recovering from working extremely long hours this past week. I had absolutely no energy on Saturday. On Sunday, I had more and ended up doing a lot of cooking and things. Tonight, I am more or less back to my normal self.

William is just today recovering from the flu. He has been sick for a few days. It peaked on Friday, with him having a fever of 103 for most of the day. (controllable with Motrin and Tylenol). Him being sick did not make him easy to deal with. He was very grumpy and demanding.

Kat had a hard time dealing with his grumpiness. Especially since his grumping ended up getting focused on her a lot. And because while he was being a real pain at times, we were very focused on him. She didn’t thing that our focus on him was quite fair.

Hopefully, this coming week I will slow down my work schedule and return to a normal 8 or 9 hours a day at work. 12 is just too much. It takes too much out of you.

Daddy Long Legs

Tonight, Melinda and I went to Theatrework’s latest musical, Daddy Long Legs. Melinda and I agree that this is one of the best shows yet. It really was amazing. The acting blew me away. And I loved the music. It was funny, poignant and uplifting all at the same time. The story reminded me a lot of Anne of the Green Gables. And perhaps because the show reminded me of Anne of the Green Gables, while watching the play, all I could think about was how much Kat would love to see this show. With that in mind, I ended up purchasing tickets for the show for next week so that Kat and I can go. I am very, very excited to take her.

Kat and Will were watched by Claire, a new person we hired for the night through our nanny service. She was wonderful. The kids immediately took to her. Even the orange cat liked her. We hope to see her again.

Last Pumpkin Pie of the Season

I used the last pumpkin of the year to make a final pie. Looking forward to eating it.

Conversations

While standing next to the stove, I see a cabinet door coming towards my head. I move my head just in time to avoid getting hit.

William: Be careful.

With that he starts to go through the contents of the cabinet he just opened.

This Week

This week has been the busiest week I have had in many years. I literally worked 12 hour days trying to get as much done as I could. By Friday, I was pretty ready to be done, so once the CEO delivered the Q4 results to the team, I decided to take my leave and head home. Results were good btw.

My thought was that I would come home and spend time with Will. Will is under the weather and this morning did not want me to go to work. And the thought of him just simply wanting me to hold him stayed in my head all day at work. And so I came home early to be with him. But Will wasn’t at home. So I ended up falling asleep on the couch until everybody showed up.

William of course came through the door sick and I held him for a while, until he decided he had enough. Poor guy, even though he got the flu and H1N1 shots, he seems to have gotten the flu. Hopefully he gets through it soon.

This evening, I did some laundry and ironed this week’s shirts. I have gone back to ironing my own clothes whenever I can to save money. So each Friday or Saturday, I spend an evening watching TV and ironing. Today I watched the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and then a Q&A session between President Obama and the GOP House Members at some GOP House summit.

The Economy

I have been spending as much time as I can thinking about the economy. I have concluded that right now, it is a crap shoot. It is anybody’s guess. There are just too many variables, too many unknowns to make a solid guess.

One of the big events this week that will shed some light is the Massachusetts senate race to be decided on Tuesday. If that seat goes to the Republicans, there is a good chance that fiscal restraint will be the battlecry of 2010. If that is the case, the anemic recovery should start to peter out as tight money policies start to choke off the flow of money.

This would end up repeating the events of the 1930s, when the Republican congress choked off government spending programs, revering the recovery out of the depression and creating the “double dip.”

Thus, I am suggesting that if the Senate seat goes Republican, it is time to plan for the economy to slide back down. If this happens, I will take the opportunity to feed off the wallstreet euphoria to lock in my hard earned gains and take my money back off the table. I had a 50% gain last year. I don’t want to lose it.

Even if the Democratic party does hold that seat, it may not be enough to hold back the general trend of fiscal restraint. The basic talk right now is that government spending is bad. That the deficits are growing too big. That we have to live within our means. If this changing attitude is reflected by congress, even with the current congressional make up, we will end up cutting off the recovery.

Basically, what I am saying is that my biggest concern right now is that congress will choke off the recovery due to politics. So I am watching the environment, waiting for a clear sign. If that sign doesn’t materialize, we might have a slightly up year. If it does, the dow could drop back down to 7500 by the end of the year.

I don’t want to sell off my holdings without a clear sign. After all, you cannot make money if you aren’t in the game. Thus for now, I am going to continue on with my ear to the ground.

Conversations

Katherine and her friend Sophia were talking today during a play date:

Katherine: I wish I was an only child. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with my pesky brother.

Sophia: Yeah, at least when you are an only child, you don’t have to compete for your parent’s attention.

Biscuits

Being a southern boy, biscuits are a part of my identity. Every time I bite into a well made biscuit, I remember back to my childhood and having fresh biscuits placed on the table with nearly every breakfast. I recall the breakfasts at my grandmother’s house, where I would watch her create biscuits by hand for her huge family. How she would make these biscuits by hand, cutting in the shortening and rolling out the dough. How she would talk about how she would never dream of taking shortcuts on such an important item. How each bite of these amazing pieces of bread seemed to embody the love she had for her family.

In a way though, the memories of these amazing biscuits have a bitter-sweet quality. In my mind, my grandmother’s biscuits were about the closest thing to heaven I can think of. However, the recipe, the one that she lovingly passed down to my mom was later lost. And so, whenever I eat a biscuit, I always think about the fact that I can no longer make these little rounds of love.

I did spend a considerable time trying to find a recipe that closely resembles my memories of my grandmother’s biscuits. I talked to my mother, I searched the Internet. I purchased numerous books on Southern cooking. Finally, I have come to rely on Marion Cunningham’s recipe for Baking Powder Biscuits in her Fannie Farmer Cookbook. For me, these are a close second to my grandmother’s lost recipe.

The trick to making good biscuits is not too far off from making good pie crust. You need the shortening cut into the flour and not overly mixed into the dough. You need to make lots and lots of layers by flattening out the dough and then folding it into quarters and repeating many times. When done correctly, biscuits come out light and flaky, the hallmark of a good biscuit.

When I make biscuits, I do have the desire to make the best biscuits I can for my family. I don’t want to take shortcuts. I like to think that by folding the dough repeatedly and creating these delicious rounds of bread, I am adding love. In this sense, I am using my grandmother’s recipe. Now that I think about it, maybe my grandmother’s recipe isn’t lost after all.

Conversations

William: Can I have chocolate?
Me: Will, I am cooking breakfast. It will be ready soon.
William: Can I have chocolate while I wait.
Me: I am sorry Will, you cannot have chocolate right now.
William: Don’t say no. Saying no is rude!