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Conversations in the Car

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by ghosteye3 in author, humor, parenthood, Uncategorized

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boys, children, dinosaurs, fathers, kindergarten, parenthood, parenting, sons, stegosaurus, Stephen Roth, summer, winter

“Daddy, do you wish that dinosaurs were still around today?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.”

“But if you thought about it, would you want them to still be around?”

“I don’t think so,” said the middle-aged man. “It would be kind of scary, having those big dinosaurs stomping all over the place.”

The little boy sighed, as if frustrated by always having to explain everything to his imagination-starved father. “But it would only be herbivores stomping around. No meat-eaters allowed.”

IMG_0919

“Okay. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better.”

“What’s your favorite dinosaur?”

“Hmmm,” the man said, looking both ways before pulling onto the main road. It was a question he’d gotten a lot recently, so he should have been ready with an answer, but he wanted to come up with something flashier this time. “I’d have to say my favorite dinosaur is…the Stegosaurus.”

The boy giggled. “That can’t be your favorite dinosaur. That’s mine!”

“Why can’t we have the same favorite?”

“Because it was my favorite first,” he said. “I like how Stegosaurus has spikes on his tail, so he can use it against his predators.”

The father nodded, having seen his son demonstrate a Stegosaurus “tail sweep” more than a few times in the downstairs TV room.

The child looked out the window at the beige winter landscape. “Daddy, do I have to go to school today?”

“Yes, you do.”

“I wish it were summer already.”

The dad chuckled, thinking how the swimming pool would open in just three short months, which would have seemed like an eternity back when he was in Kindergarten.

“It’ll be here before you know it,” he said, trying to sound hopeful.

The Words Get in the Way

23 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by ghosteye3 in A Plot for Pridemore, humor, my life, observations, parenthood

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

boys, children, communication, fatherhood, four-year-olds, humor, parenting, words

I’m a word person. I work as a copywriter during daylight hours, and I write creative prose and essays in my spare time. I have also been told – usually by a supervisor who is trying to find something positive to say in my performance review – that I have excellent verbal communication skills.

In short, I am good with words.

Why is it, then, that I struggle to communicate the most basic things to my own four-year-old kid? Last night, my son was in the bathtub, and he wanted to get out. I have been trying to teach him that he needs to pull up the plug before exiting the tub, allowing the water to drain. For some reason last night, the right words weren’t coming to me.

“Pull the thing! Pull the thing!” I commanded as my son dangled a wet leg over the tub.

“What thing?” he asked.

“The, um, the metal thing that holds the water in,” I stammered. “The plug! The plug!”

He smiled at me and started singing a song he had made up about his favorite colors. Then he wrapped his arms around my legs and got my jeans wet. He loves doing that.

Even the king knew how to talk to his children.

Even the king knew how to talk to his children.

A few minutes later, as I was coaxing him to put on his pajamas, he asked me what the term, “inside-out” means.

“Well,” I said slowly, trying to conjure up the right words, “It means that the inside of your shirt is on the outside, so your shirt looks funny when you wear it.”

He gave me a puzzled look. He was standing naked in front of the TV, clean pajamas and underpants scattered around him on the floor.

“It’s the opposite of the way you should wear your shirt,” I tried again.

“But what does inside-out mean?” he asked.

“You know what it means?” I blurted. “It means you need to put on your pajamas by the time I count to three, because you know what happens when I get to three?”

He looked down. “I go to Time-Out.”

“That’s right,” I said, feeling a little bit more in control.

“But what does inside-out mean? You still haven’t told me.”

I know why I sometimes have trouble communicating with my son. First, when I am around him during the work week, in the early morning or after six o’clock at night, I am often tired and my brain is not functioning at its sharpest. Secondly, shifting gears from interacting with adults all day to breaking a concept down so a small child can understand it takes a lot of thought and patience. Finally, I have never been comfortable issuing directives, which, unfortunately, is a big part of managing life with a four-year-old. Sometimes when I tell him what to do, I talking haltingly and sound unsure of myself. The right words do not always flow naturally off my tongue.

It bothers me that much of the time I spend with my child occurs when I’m tired or, if it’s near the end of the week, exhausted. I also worry that my son sees his father as this tongue-tied guy who stammers to express even the simplest, most rudimentary thoughts. As the week winds down to Thursday and Friday night, I feel like a middle-aged Forrest Gump, a kindhearted but mentally feeble man, struggling just to get his kid out of the bathtub and off to bed. Sometimes, when I’ve turned off the bedroom lights and my child looks up at me, eyes wide open, and asks one of those Troubling Questions, (“Why do people die?” “Why do I have to go to school?” “Why can’t we have a cat?”), I actually wish I was Forrest. He always seemed to know how to tackle the big issues with a little metaphor that sounded simple, but had a more depth to it once you thought about it. “Life is like a box of chocolates,” sounds more profound than “Life isn’t fair,” although they both pretty much mean the same thing.

Forrest Gump: a man in command of his words.

Forrest Gump: a man in command of his words.

Hopefully, when my kid reaches the age of 10 or 12 or 25, he and I will able to sit down and have a conversation that doesn’t revolve around finishing his dinner, brushing his teeth, or watching very carefully while I tie his shoes. We’ll sit down and have a real, heartfelt, man-to-man talk (in between whatever programs he has queued up on Netflix, of course). Then, my son will realize how thoughtful, wise and articulate his dad really is.

That’s the hope, anyway.

Stephen Roth is author of the humorous novel, A Plot for Pridemore. Be sure to “like” his author fan page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenRothWriter

Herbie Goes Bananas

14 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in fiction, growing up, humor, my life, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

1980, boys, childhood, golf, growing up, herbie goes bananas, parenting, Stephen Roth

A70-3309My best friend in third grade was a ginger-haired, freckley kid named Rob Fairchild.

Even at nine years old, Rob had a swagger of someone who expected success. He won at every sport he played, and was one of the best golfers for his age in the state. He was a straight-A student who finished his homework each afternoon before getting off the school bus, and whose diorama book report on Charlotte’s Web was something the teachers raved about for years after the fact.

He was a good-looking kid, a kind of a 1970s, bowl-cut version of Ronnie Howard, whom you could easily imagine yelling “Hey Kool-Aid!” in those ads than ran between our after-school cartoons.

The teachers loved Rob. The parents admired him. The girls wanted to do the Hokey Pokey with him at the Skate Inn every Saturday afternoon. The boys liked Rob as much as you could possibly like someone who towered over you in every measurable way.

“Sure,” they’d say, eyes twitching around the schoolyard to see where he might be lurking. “Rob’s pretty cool.”

We didn’t have a term for it back in third grade, but Rob was an Alpha Male. Years later, he applied all that charisma and confidence toward becoming a successful entrepreneur. He patented a bath towel with a Velcro strip that make it easier to wrap around your waist. He called the invention The Belly Hugger. Rob sold millions of Belly Huggers on late-night television and became a minor celebrity in the process. I understand he now has his own island now somewhere near the Caymans.

Rob and I had little in common in third grade. I was a “B” student whose mind wandered into a world of talking cars and space adventures at the first mention of multiplication tables. I played soccer, which in those days was the sport of choice for kids not coordinated enough to throw and catch. I also took piano lessons, which was not real high on the coolness meter back in elementary school.

We were best friends mostly because our dads had management jobs for the same company, and we were the only two kids our age in the still-developing neighborhood between the local golf course and the lake. Nevertheless, Rob and I shared a bond. We used leftover lumber from the home construction sites to build a network of little forts in the woods that surrounded our houses. We stockpiled pine cones to hurl at Rob’s sister on the rare occasions she tried to play with us. We fished, we swam, we rode our bikes and we built rock dams in the creek beds. We often played until sundown and then got yelled at by our moms for tracking red clay into the house. It was a Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn kind of life, and it didn’t seem to matter that Rob could already drive a golf ball 120 yards while I was lucky to get mine past the ladies’ tees.

Things were different between us at school. Rob was aloof and standoff-ish around me. During recess, he was more interested in playing sports than Kick The Can or tag with me and all the motor skill-challenged kids. Then he got mean, heckling me when it was my turn at the plate in kickball, teasing me when a teacher caught me not paying attention in class. Of course, he managed to do all this in a disarming, Opie Taylor sort of way that made the teachers want to do little more than squeeze his freckley little cheeks.

I didn’t get it. Rob and I were best friends back in the neighborhood. We were “blood brothers,” like Bo and Luke Duke. Why would he turn on me in front of the other kids? Many times I wrote the friendship off, certain that Rob Fairchild wanted nothing to do with me, and I with him.

Every afternoon after school, however, my phone would ring. Even before picking up, I knew it was Rob.

“Whatcha doing?” he would ask.

“Nothing,” I’d say, still miffed about the latest schoolyard indignity.

“Come up to the house,” he’d say. “I just found my dad’s Playboy.”

Or something to that effect. I usually went because there wasn’t much else to do but watch a re-run of “Happy Days” or play with my Star Wars figures. And each time I went to Rob’s house, it was good times again: exploring the woods, jumping our bikes off rickety ramps, snagging lumber from a construction site to build our latest fort. Rob and I, to borrow a phrase from America’s most beloved simpleton, were like peas and carrots again.

But the school days were bad, and I tired of my friend’s split personality. The sensible thing would be to ask him to stop being such a jerk. But you just didn’t do that in the Boy World. It was much better, I felt, to conspire against him and plan his eventual demise.

The summer of 1980 was a troubling time. There were hostages in Iran. The oil crisis was looming. Dudley Moore and Burt Reynolds were considered major box-office attractions.

It was also the summer I declared war on Rob Fairchild. It started with a phone call.

“Watcha doing?” Rob asked.

“Nothing.”

“Come up to the house. I got a new tetherball set.”

“No.”

A pause. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘no.’”

“Why ‘no?’”

I took in a deep breath.

“Because,” I said. “I don’t want to.”

He let out a little gasp, as if this were the first time anyone dared defy him. Then he hung up.

Oh, it was on after that. Rob and I recruited foot soldiers from around the neighborhood for the inevitable showdown. I got Marcus McLaughlin, a soon-to-be-second-grader whose chief skill was screaming at an intolerably high pitch. Curt got Aoki, whose family just moved in from Japan and who spoke about three words of English.
Marcus and I struck first, trashing a fort in the woods behind Rob’s house. Then Rob and Aoki ambushed us with a brutal pine cone attack. Then we had a wrestling match near the creek bed, which ended with Rob hurling a large rock at me and Marcus as our moms called us home.

It was a high point in the campaign, to be sure. But to claim total victory, I wanted to beat my enemy at something he held dear. Rob played 18 holes of golf almost every day that summer, usually with boys much older than him. He was becoming something of a local legend, and he almost won his age group in a statewide tournament that year. If I was to bring Rob down, it would have to be on the links.

I was under no illusion that I could do that myself, of course. But I had a friend, a ringer, whom I knew Rob despised and couldn’t resist playing. I set up a four-hole tournament between Rob and Jason Payne, with the prize being a packet of orange Titleist balls. My ace-in-the-hole was a little rule that, for every cuss word one of the players uttered during the event, a shot would be added to their score. Rob’s cussing addiction was well-known by then, even by the adults. I was confident he couldn’t play four holes without swearing.

I was right, sort of. He said, “God-dangit,” after teeing off on the third hole, which cost him a stroke and the match. There was a hot argument at the final green over whether or not this qualified as a true cuss word before Rob pinned my friend to the ground, grabbed the tournament prize and ran home.

Furious, I marched over to the Fairchild residence to retrieve my golf balls.

“You know, Rob won the tournament fair and square,” Mrs. Fairchild said when she answered the door.

“Yes ma’am,” I replied.

“He’s upstairs crying right now. He’s very upset.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“I’m giving you your balls back because I don’t want any more trouble between you boys. You used to be such good friends.”

“Yes ma’am. I know.”

I felt bad about the tournament. If I could have articulated it in my soon-to-be fourth grade mind, I would have said the whole thing made me feel petty and foolish. I had taken things too far, and I thought that maybe it was time to make peace with Rob Fairchild. Beside, another school year was looming around the corner, and I soon would be in the same room with him seven hours a day.

A week or so after the tournament, I bumped into Rob at the swimming pool, waiting his turn to go off the high dive. He sat on a concrete bench, making little white marks on the armrest with a spare golf tee.

“That’s pretty neat,” I remarked. “I didn’t know you could draw with a golf tee.”

“That’s because you’re stupid,” he said. Then he climbed the diving board and made the coolest back flip anybody had ever seen.

A few hours later, I was at home, watching an old episode of “F-Troop,” when the phone rang.

“Watcha doing?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Wanna go see a movie?”

I paused before answering. “What’s playing?”

“Herbie Goes Bananas.”

In those pre-cable, pre-Internet, pre-everything days, you didn’t turn down an invitation to a movie, even from your nemesis. It just wasn’t done. Besides, I had always liked ol’ Herbie and had seen multiple advertisements about the new movie on TV. For a night, anyway, Rob and I could be friends.

“Okay,” I said.

Sitting in the front row of a theater watching a movie about the Love Bug breaking up a counterfeiting ring in Mexico might not seem like quality entertainment to you, but to a nine-year-old boy in 1980 it was about the most exotic thing imaginable. Rob and I ate our Sweet Tarts and chewed our Lemonheads, and there was no mention of our three-month war as we took in the talents of Cloris Leachman and Harvey Korman. Afterward, Rob and I sneaked into The Blues Brothers and got to watch the scene where the National Guard and about 50,000 Chicago police chase down Jake and Elwood. The car crashes, we both agreed, were top-notch.

“Whatcha doing tomorrow?” Rob asked before his mom dropped me off at my house.

“I dunno,” I said. “Watching TV, I guess.”

“Come over to my place. I got a new Sea Monkeys set.”

I pause for a moment, suspecting that we were falling back into a familiar routine.

“Okay,” I finally said, “that sounds cool.”

Happy Birthday To You

22 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by ghosteye3 in humor, my life, observations, parenthood, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

birthday, boys, disney world, family, fatherhood, fourth, kansas city, kansas city royals, parenthood, parenting, playgrounds, summer, toddlers

IMG_1572Dear Son,

Saturday is your fourth birthday. I hope you will enjoy it. Nothing could top your third birthday, which we celebrated by spending a week at Disney World. You may remember your birthday dinner at Chef Mickey’s in the Contemporary Resort, the procession of Disney characters who stopped by our table, working you into a sugar-fueled, nap-deprived frenzy. You became so uncontrollable – rolling around the floor, hooting and screaming, doing somersaults out of our booth – that we had no choice but to put you in time-out right next to the gift shop and below the monorail station. Your mama and I felt awful about it, but that was the only way we could calm you down. It was really the one black mark on a trip that involved four Disney parks, countless character encounters and, amazingly, us training you how to go potty on your own.

Your fourth birthday, which will be spent with your friends at an indoor inflatable playground, won’t hold a candle to Disney World. But it will be the celebration of a year in which you continued to grow and thrive and learn so many things. As already mentioned, you graduated from diapers (at least during the day). You spent almost the entire summer at the swimming pool, finding the nerve to hold your head underwater, paddle around the shallow end, and even jump in all by yourself. You rode a big-boy bike with training wheels, learned the basics of football, soccer and basketball, and saw your first movie in a theater (Turbo: the animated tale of a snail who has the need for speed). You sat still and paid attention in your pre-K class, earning innumerable smiley faces on your performance chart. You learned that a pepperoni and sausage pizza from Casey’s General Store was the best food in all the world, except for your mama’s own spaghetti and meatballs.

The year 2013 was a challenging one for our family. You were a joy and inspiration through it all, however, even after you stopped taking naps on the weekends. When the weather was nice out, we toured the area playgrounds, including your beloved Penguin Park. When it was lousy outside, we did puzzles, played “catch” in the basement, and watch the same episodes of My Little Pony over and over again. We took you to your first Kansas City Royals baseball game, where you sat through two innings, devouring a hot dog and Cracker Jacks, before moving on to the outfield playground. You began a fascination with dinosaurs, and the T-Rex Café became your favorite dining spot.

Through all of this, you talked, sang and laughed constantly. Not a day passed when you didn’t say or do something that cracked your mama and me up. You showed a knack for one-liners, as I sometimes documented on my Facebook page (Me: We don’t ever whine in this house, now do we? You: Yes, but we can pretend to whine). You were smart-alecky, sassy and spoiled, but a blast to be around most of the time. When you got out of hand, you would reluctantly accept time-out, serve your punishment, then greet us with a grin and a hug. You were happy most of the time, and you never held anything against us for very long. Every single day, you said “I love you” to us, and that more than made up for all the unfinished meals, spilled bath water, and arguments over TV time.

These are just a few of the observations I can conjure up from what was another memorable, discovery-filled year with you, son. I know your fifth year is going to hold even more adventures, shenanigans and hilarious quips (“We ran out of batteries!” you said when the house lost power last summer). I can hardly wait for it to begin.

Love,

Daddy

My Little Brony

24 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by ghosteye3 in entertainment, my life, observations, parenthood, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

boys, bronies, build-a-bear, kids, my little pony, parenthood, shows, super hero squad, television

photoAs is the case with a lot of things, I was the last person in my office of young, hip professionals to learn about the Bronies trend. Bronies, I am told, are a growing demographic of young men ages 18 to 35 who are fans of My Little Pony, a cartoon TV show created in the 1980s and originally aimed at little girls. Hasbro decided to revitalize the franchise with the release of the 2010 movie, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and found an unintended audience of young men who liked the upbeat storyline, the anime-style animation and, well, ponies, I guess. The Bronies trend is now officially a thing, so much so that there is an acclaimed documentary about this community of men who celebrate, and sometimes dress up like, little ponies.

Upon learning about this from my hipster co-workers, then doing a quick Google search, my reaction was disbelief. Why on earth would adult men, some of them middle-aged adult men, obsess about a cartoon for little girls? I even thought about writing a smug, what-is-the-world-coming-to blog post about a fanboy trend run amok. Then, something curious happened. My three-year-old son started watching My Little Pony. It soon became his favorite show.

And you know what? It’s not too bad. It’s well-written, the animation is sharp and inventive, and there are many pop culture references (scenes lifted straight from movies like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example) that adults can appreciate. Unlike some kid shows, the overarching theme is positive and socially progressive – it’s the story of how six very different ponies join forces and learn that they can accomplish almost anything if they work together. I like it better than one of my son’s other favorite shows, Super Hero Squad, which is about the Marvel superheroes working together, mostly to blow stuff up.

A few weeks ago, we went to the mall with our son and stopped by a Build-A-Bear Workshop. He had no interest in building and naming a Teddy Bear. From the time we walked into the store, all he wanted was the baby blue Pony, Rainbow Dash, which also came with her own set of roller skates.

We got him the stuffed animal, which he immediately wanted to take outside. My wife, seeing an opportunity, strapped the pony to the back of his mostly neglected John Deere bicycle, and suggested he take his new friend for a ride. Our son got on the bike, started peddling, and has been crazy about it ever since. He doesn’t even need Rainbow Dash to accompany him anymore on bike rides to the playground. Still, she was the catalyst. I guess that friendship really is, as they say, magic.

A Boy and His Wolf

28 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by ghosteye3 in humor, my life, parenthood

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

bad guys, bedtime, big bad wolf, boys, dads, evil, fatherhood, humor, three little pigs

Most of us are fascinated by bad guys. Doesn’t matter if it’s Lex Luthor or Saddam Hussein or Bernie Madoff. We are repulsed by their terrible acts but we also wonder what causes them to behave that way. Maybe we recognize in ourselves some flaw or weakness that, if provoked, would turn us into villains, too? We are taught from an early age to believe there is some shred of humanity in even the worst of us, which make explain why evildoers are so interesting. Even the devil was once an angel. Bad guys have layers, man.

For my three-year-old, the ultimate bad guy is that infamous threat to homeowners everywhere, the Big Bad Wolf. My son finds him terrifying but also strangely alluring. As a result, the Golden Books version of The Three Little Pigs is well-worn in our household, as is the satirical True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, which tells the wolf’s side of how things went down.

This fascination has taken over bedtime. “Tell me about the Big Bad Wolf,” my son says as I tuck him into his toddler bed and turn out the light. “Tell me how the Big Bad Wolf come to our house.”

“Well, okay,” I reply, getting on my knees so I can look into his gleaming eyes. He wants to hear a story I concocted in which the Big Bad Wolf emerges from the woods behind our house and attempts to, well, blow our place down. There are several opportunities in the story for my son and I to recite the “I’ll huff and I’ll puff…” line, and, in the end, our heroic Australian Shepherd Keiko runs out of the house and chases the evil wolf out of the backyard, across the creek, through the woods and into the next county. “And,” I always conclude, “we never saw the Big Bad Wolf ever again.”

"Little pig, little pig... Let me come in!"

“Little pig, little pig… Let me come in!”

I was pretty proud when I came up with this tale. Even a relatively clueless dad like me knows the story must end with the wolf vanquished, as opposed to going on some lunatic rampage through our neighborhood. Also, in making our dog the hero, the story seems realistic. My three-year-old would never buy into the idea that his parents, who struggle each morning just to pull him out of his Jake and the Neverland Pirates pajamas, would ever summon the nerve to defeat the Big Bad Wolf. Keiko, however, seems resourceful (and mean) enough to pull something like that off.

Now, being a word person, I enjoy telling a good story. Still, there’s a certain point when one tires of telling the same story over and over, night after night, just as I am sure that Bruce Springsteen sometimes tires of playing “Born to Run,” at every show, no matter how proud he may be of its creation. I told The Big Bad Wolf Comes to Our House every night for about a month, waiting for my boy to tire of the subject. Instead, his obsession grew.

“Tell me,” he growled each night in a way that was intended to sound just like the arch enemy himself, “about the BIG, BAD WOLF!”

So I mixed it up a little, inventing a story called The Big Bad Wolf Comes to Grandma’s House, which ends with the wolf falling into a big pot of scalding water. I also devised a gentler story about my son as a zookeeper who takes care of the Big Bad Wolf and eventually befriends him. There were other variations as well and, like most sequels, all were inferior to my original wolf story. But I had to add some new wrinkles to our bedtime routine just to keep from going completely insane.

So now I have a problem. We are six months into the Big Bad Wolf craze with no end in sight. I am officially out of wolf stories. And I am weary of recycling the old ones. I am tired of describing the wolf as having “beady green eyes that glow in the night,” and possessing “teeth as sharp as scissors.”

Now, I could easily tell my son that Daddy is a little sick of these stories about the Big Bad Wolf, and couldn’t we just read a nice book like Green Eggs & Ham instead? But what would that say about me, the self-fashioned “creative” dad? The one who invents stories on the spot to captivate and inspire his young son, even when that dad is so exhausted some nights that he finds himself sprawled next to the toddler bed, patting his child’s back and murmuring something about a wolf and the dog and Grandma and, are we getting sleepy yet? Want Daddy to go get you a cup of milk?

I know someday my son will tire of the Big Bad Wolf and will probably move on to something mind-numbing like Chuggington or the Power Rangers. One day, I’ll ask him if he wants to hear a story about the Big Bad Wolf, and he’ll say, “No. I want a story about Lightning McQueen.” And I’ll feel sad that one door of his toddlerhood has closed and another one has opened.

But, damn, right now I am sick of that psychopathic wolf. I wish he would go away, like he eventually does in all my made-up stories.

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So Many Miles

Thru-hiking. Truck-driving. Miles.

Jolie and Piper's Writing

Deidra Alexander's Blog

I have people to kill, lives to ruin, plagues to bring, and worlds to destroy. I am not the Angel of Death. I'm a fiction writer.

Five More Minutes.....

I am a mother of five active, sometimes aggravating children that drive me crazy, provide me with lots of entertainment and remind me constantly about the value of love and family. I am married to my best friend. He makes me laugh every day (usually at myself). I love to eat, run, write, read and then eat again, run again…you get it. I am a children's author, having published four books with MeeGenuis (The Halloween Costume, When Santa Was Small, The Baseball Game, and The Great Adventure Brothers). I have had several pieces of writing published on Adoptive Families, Adoption Today, Brain Child, Scary Mommy, and Ten To Twenty Parenting. I am also a child psychologist, however I honestly think that I may have learned more from my parents and my children than I ever did in any book I read in graduate school. This blog is a place where I can gather my thoughts and my stories and share them with others. My writing is usually about kids and trying to see the world through their eyes, a few about parenting, adoption (one of my children is adopted) and some other random thoughts thrown in… I hope you enjoy them! So grab a cup of coffee, or a glass of wine, depending on what time of day it is (or what kind of day it is) and take a few minutes to sit back, relax and read. Please add your comments or opinions, I know you must have something to say, and I would love to hear it. Thanks for stopping by. Anne Cavanaugh-Sawan

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Our Mission: Mercer University Press supports the work of the University in achieving excellence and scholarly discipline in the fields of liberal learning, professional knowledge, and regional investigation by making the results of scholarly investigation and literary excellence available to the worldwide community.

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Howdy! We're the largest independent bookstore in Texas. This is our blog.

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