One Nation under God...

I am a proud member of Red Sox Nation. It hasn't always been easy, and it hasn't only been since '04 when they "broke the curse". Living in Massachusetts I can honestly say everything starts and ends with the Red Sox around here. The New England Patriots win 3 out of 4 Super Bowls? You'd think they'd gain in popularity on the Red Sox, you'd think wrong. The year the Patroits won their 2nd Super bowl in a row, Tedy Bruschi one of the star players, and most likable guys on the team makes an appearance at our local shopping mall and about 500 show up and wait up to 2 hours to try to meet him and get an autograph. Later that year Johnny Damon, centerfielder and Jesus look-a-like from the Sox has an autograph signing at the same mall...over 3,000 people show up. The line started forming 3 hours before the mall opened, and most people couldn't even get near Johnny, they just wanted to snap a picture from the 3rd floor. The Red Sox had finished 2nd in their division that year, and had gotten swept out of the playoffs by the Chicago White Sox...that's how things go in the Nation. I was at the shopping mall that day and as I stood looking down at the mayhem I noticed an "old timer" standing there wearing a faded Sox hat on. "You'd think they had won the World Series this year" I say to the guy, then I mention that the Bruschi autograph signing didn't bring even half this many people out. "This has been and will always be a Baseball town, and there isn't anything those boys out in Foxboro can do to change that...". I don't think I could have said it any better myself.

It's late summer / early fall 2004 and it's time for my Wife and myself to start our birthing classes in preparation of the birth of our daughter. Of course these classes take place at night, from 7 to 8 pm every Wednesday night for about 6 weeks. What else is going on during this time? The last couple of weeks of Baseballs regular season, and the Red Sox are battling with their bitter rivals, the New York Yankees for the division lead. I sit listing about how to massage my Wife during her obviously painful labor process, the breathing, the copious amounts of fluids that will be involved...and I can't help but think how the Sox are doing. I know I'm not alone in these thoughts as a quick survey of the room announces no less than 3 dark blue hats with the signature red B on them, a few more have Sox t-shirts, and I even noticed a few other Dads-to-be have Red Sox bumper stickers. I thought about asking if we they could put the ball game on the little radio they have there, even if they want to turn it way down...but think better of it as I'm sitting in a room with women completely strung out on hormones. I settle for constant text messages at the end of each inning updating me on the score. We end our birthing classes just in time...for the playoffs that is. My Wife's due date is bearing down on us with surprising speed, and I'm deathly afraid I'm going to be "that guy". You know this guy, he's the one you read about who's in the birthing room and has the nerve to ask one of the nurses "Hey can we get NESN on this thing?". Yeah that guy, it is now my biggest fear. The ALCS starts and we are 3 weeks away from our due date. Game 1, Red Sox lose. Game 2, Red Sox lose. Game 3 Red Sox get crushed 19 to 8. It's all but over, no team has ever, EVER come back from a 0-3 deficit in any playoffs in any sport, and now it's October 17th night of Game 4
still 2 weeks away from our due date. Unlike 90% of Red Sox Nation, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I somehow knew we would come back to win, I had accepted that the Yankees would do it to us again...but on the upside the whole ordeal would over and I could focus on the whole having a baby thing. Well wins in Game 4, Game 5, and Game 6 bring us to Game 7 October 20th one WEEK away from our due date. I'm scared...I'm scared that the Red Sox will do it to me again and blow this great comeback they were working on, I'm scared that my Wife will go into labor due to the excitement of the game, I'm scared of what my reaction would have been if she had gone into labor...during Game 7 of the ALCS Sox versus Yanks. Well I'll spare you the drama...Sox won, and no labor in site. Great, except now the Red Sox are going to the World Series, which means more games and we're now within days, HOURS of my daughter being born.

I know, I know the birth of my first child is a once in a lifetime moment...and some of you may be saying "How can you possibly compare a simple sporting event to the birth of your child?". Well...let's keep this in mind, the last time the Red Sox actually won the World Series....1918, so that's 84 years ago...so it would appear that this could also be a once in a lifetime thing. We watch the Sox win the first two games of the World Series, then we head into the hospital for a scheduled induction the night of October 25th. Luckily for me, there's no game, it's the off night for travel. Curiously we are sent home, with no baby, the morning of the 26th. I won't bother with the details of that little ditty here, maybe some day, but this isn't the time. Regardless, we go home on the 26th and I have mixed emotions, I was expecting to be somebodies "Dad" by now and that was postponed for a few days, but on the plus side I get to watch the Sox game. The Red Sox went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series in 4 games, the last one on October 27, 2004. A trip to our OB's office on October 29th and end up scheduling our C-section for Tuesday November 2nd.

This is how, unbeknownst to her, my daughter allowed me to watch the greatest moment in Red Sox Nation history. Ironic since she hasn't been as forthcoming with the whole allowing Daddy to watch the game since she was born, but I still appreciate that she hung (literally) in there and "took one for the team".

Wifey and I will be going out to Boston next weekend to catch our first Sox game together. Hopefully it'll be the start of a long standing family tradition. Is it wrong that I can't wait to bring Ally to her first game?

Poopy, Pie, and Mommy the bocka, bocka...

Supper, night #1 in Lake George. We're at a semi "fancy" restaurant, just finished placing our order and Ally turns to me and announces, rather loudly, "Daddy, I need to go poopy". The younger couple trying to have a romantic dinner behind us glare at me. "Okay honey Mommy will take you". So Mommy takes little Ally to the bathroom. The couple behind me still staring at me, I wait for the triumphant return of my daughter, knowing all to well what happens next. "Daddy I made POOPY!!" Ally shouts as she returns from the table (she starts the shouting about 15 feet away). The glares from the young couple behind me continue, this time even more disapproving than the last. Typically I don't revel in the uncomfortableness of others, but I can't help feel just a tinge of pride knowing that these people are all out of whack because my 2 1/2 year old daughter happened to mention that she had made a poopy. I mean what's the big deal?...had they never made poopy before? Seriously she's 2 years old...what did they expect her to say "Daddy I went to the lavatory and had a bowl movement?" Heck even I don't say that. They should feel lucky she doesn't phrase things like her Daddy does, for example... "Honey, I wouldn't go in there I just took a dump...".

So after supper we decide to not stick around for dessert as who knows what other bodily functions Ally may need to announce to unsuspecting bystanders. We do a quick tour of the outlet stores then we decide to look for something sweet to bring back to the hotel for dessert. At the mercy of the suggestion(s) of our GPS unit, we make our way to a Getty gas station. I'm picturing getting a few Ring Dings, maybe we'll get lucky and they'll even have Chocodiles. On our way we run into the "General Store" of the area. I immediately forget about the gas station convenience store knowing my options are better at the family owned general store. I go in expecting to be able to pick up some cookies or something, and find out I hit the jackpot. Not only do they have homemade banana bread w/ frosting, but they also have a nice selection of homemade pies. After a bit of internal deliberation, I decide I'm not going to buy a whole pie, I'll just get a couple of cookies, milk, and some of the banana bread. I bring my bounty out to the car and relay all of this to my Wife. I'm instructed to go back inside and I'm not allowed back out until I am in possession of pie. Evidently my Wife was also jonesing for something sweet as well...at least we were both on the same wavelength. I go back in, the lady behind the counter looks at my with that curious "Didn't you just leave?" look. I walk over to the counter and end up deciding on a strawberry rhubarb pie. Not an easy choice, but looking back I think I made the right decision. So as Jack Kerouac says in On the Road...pie is the ultimate road food, it's wholesome, compact, and filling. This pie helped sustain our sweet tooth's in two different cities, over a 3 day period. It was the best $11.00 I had spent in a long, long time.

We decide to check out the Olympic Ski ramps that still reside in Lake Placid on Sunday morning. We take the short ride over and peering at us over the tall pines are two towering structures. These are what we had come to see. Standing at about 150 feet high are the ski rams left over from the 1980 Olympic Games and are used today as tourist attractions. People plop down $10 each to ride to the top look around and come back down. We get our tickets and make our way over to the welcome center. Making our way over I already see a problem...the only way up the hill to the bases of the ramps is....a chair lift. I already know this isn't going to fly with Ally nor Mommy. A quick chat with the people over at the welcome center confirm my suspicions...that this is the "primary" way to the top. My Wife looks at me, then the lift, then back at me...and I already know what's going to happen. "Is there a 'we are too chicken to take the chair lift route to the top?'" I ask. I'm told that there is a separate alternate route to a parking lot for people with SPECIAL NEEDS. This is what we're told, and a quick glance at our program guide we got with our tickets confirms this. So after navigating our way to the "special needs" parking area (and yes we were the ONLY car parked there) we make our way to the elevator that waits to bring us to the top of the ramp. We exit the elevator about 130 feet higher than we started and we're on an indoor observation deck. I start snapping photos here and there hoping there's going to be some sort of exterior photo area. Luckily I find a set of stairs that brings you up to just such an area. A quick glance at the top of the stairs and I know that Ally and Mommy need to come up and see this. It's an unobstructed view of the surrounding area and it's beautiful. Mommy doesn't want to go up, Ally couldn't be happier to run up the metal stairs as fast as she can. Mommy goes against her better judgment and decides to join us at the exposed upper level. Now here's something I didn't know about my Wife...she has an unexplained fear of heights. How do I NOT know this?....we've been together for 13 years and I am a fairly observant person. I'm assuming that she's either been really good at hiding it, it's something new, or we just haven't been high enough to bring out this fear before. Anyway back to the story...I'm near the railing looking out over the landscape, I turn around and my Wife has a death grip on the back railing with one arm, and she's desperately trying to hold on to Ally with the other. The tears begin to roll not too long after this. Oh boy, okay, obviously either I've taken this situation too lightly, or my Wife's taken it too seriously...either way I know I need to do something because my Wife's now babbling through the tears, sounding like Rain Man, "Too high, too high, I can't, no let go, too high...". All I wanted was a photo with the three of us looking out at the nice scenery, instead I got a picture of my Wife grabbing my daughter and latched on to the railing like Bubba to a doughnut. "Okay Honey, let's go down now". Ally looking over the situation decides to try to sooth her mother the only way she knows how..."Mommy's a chicken, hey Mommy....bocka, bocka, bocka...". It was an interesting stop, a wide range of emotions were involved, and I learned a few things...#1. My Wife has a new (or is it?) fear of heights, and #2. My daughter enjoys seeing her parents squirm.

Road Trip

Our daycare person had this past Thursday and Friday off, so it was my turn to stay home with Ally. A quick email to the Wife tells me that she's got nothing planned for this weekend. I decide I don't want to spend the weekend at home just hanging around so I hop on the internet and start searching. My mind is racing with possibilities...the Cape, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, the options seemed endless. A couple of quick searches on Expedia tells me everything I pretty much needed to know...that I'm a moron for thinking there's going to be an availability at any place remotely worth traveling to. Great. So I email this to my Wife listing the few options I had found. Literally 2 minutes later I get an agenda from what appears to be a licensed travel agent. It had points of interest, prices, times, hotels, directions, estimated arrival information, the works. I get this and immediately think to myself...evidently it's been too long since my Wife's last vacation.

So like the all great road trips we start in the planning/prepacking stage. We've laid out our route: West through Massachusetts to the New York boarder, continue West to Albany, then North to the great Adirondack mountains with stops in both Lake George and Lake Placid. The trip revolves around our ability to deal with two very important pieces of electronics, which are important for two different reasons. The first is a borrowed GPS unit to help us navigate the trip, and the second is a borrowed DVD player to keep Ally quiet while Mommy and Daddy try to get everyone to the vacation spot all still alive. Let's start with the GPS unit. It is fairly easy to use and works well...the scary part about the little unit is how dependent you quickly become on this thing. After as little as 1 hour on the road I am now completely relying on this little electronic gizmo to keep me going in the right direction. Once we get off the highway and a turn or two later and that's it, no matter how ridiculous it's directions are...I am now committed to following them.

Lake George is a wonderful area. We stopped at a children's park called Magic Forrest. It's a nice little park in the idea of Mountain Park, which is an old amusement park from the town I grew up in. Magic Forrest is also home to the nations last diving horse show. Now for those who aren't familiar with that term...it's basically a show where they have a horse run up this long ramp and then "jump" (okay it's more like fall/slide) into a 14 foot deep pool. In case you are wondering, the show is everything you're thinking...yup a horse falls into an above ground pool. It takes about 45 seconds tops. If you're ever in the area, you should definitely stop in and check it out. We walk up and down the strip checking out the numerous outlet stores, make a few purchases here and there. Then it's back to the hotel and Ally's favorite part of the vacation by far...the pool. This pool actually has a water slide too. Nice. Ally and I go down the slide a few times until a gaggle of preteens arrive and take over the pool area. How nice, some nice "responsible" parents brought all 29 of their children to the same hotel as ours and decide to let them descend on the pool all at the same time. Great. Now preteens don't really look out or wait for the 2 1/2 year old waddling by...so it's the end of pool time for us. Back to the room.

Pillows. Pillows were our downfall this night. We're talking no neck support, squishy, crappy, $2.50 freakin pillows. Everyone is allotted two pillows (Ally's sleeping in the bed w/ Mommy and Daddy). This does not work. Ally evidently likes to play Twister while she sleeps. Right foot Daddy's groin, Left hand Mommy's face...you get the point? Let's just say she quite the "active" sleeper. So between the trying to find a comfortable spot to sleep and trying to defend myself from Ty-Kwon-Do Ally I find little sleep this night. But alas we all go to bed before 8 so getting up at 6:30 was no big deal.

Natural cave and bridge trip. This is our first trip of day 2, heading towards Lake Placid (home of the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics). The cave/bridge attraction is a good one. First of all, at $22 total for the family, it's an economical trip. It was also a great little bit of exercise, it was about 2 hours of fairly intense hiking over a "trail" looking at a nice gorge and into some smaller caves. The problem we ran into is our daughter is: crazy, independent, and currently in the middle of a HUGE defiant streak. This is a GREAT combination of attitudes to bring a 2 1/2 year old over a bunch of cliffs and very narrow passes all made of rock and loose stone. Needless to say...great levels of both caution and patience were required in order for everyone to make it out alive.

Lake Placid. Beautiful. Peaceful. This is where we should have came straight away. The lake is great, the Olympic stadium cool (some how I still hear Al Michaels "Do you believe in miracles?"), the shops are neat and the people are generally nice. So here I am sitting in the Golden Arrow Hotel and resort bringing you this blog entry. There's more to this trip (like the Asian fellow trying to throw my daughter into a gorge at the cave attraction) but I won't bore you with ALL of the details just yet. Tomorrow (hopefully) we'll check out the ski jumps (140+ feet high) from the 1980 Olympics, then it's either on our way back south or we'll try going across a ferry into northern Vermont. Either way we should find a few other fun things to share.

Until next time...thanks for checking.

- J

The first lie is always the hardest....

2 years, 8 months and a few days.

That's exactly how long it took my lovely daughter to tell us her first lie. Actually let me rephrase that...it's the first time we caught her in a lie. Since the fact that this one came so naturally to her (almost as if she's had weeks of practice) that it wasn't technically her "first" ever. What was the motivation behind this lie to begin all lies? Chocolate, what else? (I mean she is a female after all). We had just finished supper and Ally doesn't finish her meal. "Ally you need to finish your supper if you want any dessert" I say reviewing our fairly consistant meal time rules. Ally decides to not finish (not really touch actually) her turkey burger. Mommy decides to finish off her meal with a square or two of our favorite chocolate. Ally clearly wants more than anything to follow suit. "Ally honey, if you want a piece of chocolate you need to finish your burger" my Wife says. Ally goes back to the table, pushes the food around on the plate decides she'd much rather save room for chocolate than actually eat any more of her supper, so the bargaining begins. "I want some chocolate, I eat it all"..."Actually Ally I don't see that you ate very much of your burger at all"...."Yes I eat it all...I want chocolate"..."No Ally you need to finish your sandwich"..."No yucky, I want chocolate"..."I'm sorry Ally if you don't finish your meal, you won't get any chocolate"....then it happened..."Daddy said I could".

And that's how it starts. I'm thinking when did this happen?...or maybe the better question is How long has this been happening? Needless to say Ally didn't get any chocolate until she finished her supper, but I couldn't help but feel we'd reached some sort of developmental mile stone. One that parents magazines and doctors offices don't keep tract of....smiling?...check, crawling...check, walking?...check, talking?...check, LYING?...check. I couldn't help but feel a bit of a failure as a parent, here is my 2 3/4 year old daughter lying to her parents...for a piece of chocolate....great. I guess in the big scheme of things, throughout her life she'll lie hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, hopefully she gets worse at it (she was pretty convincing, I was even thinking...when did I say that?) or we get better at seeing through her...but at the end of the day we just want Ally to know she doesn't need to lie to her parents, she'll get her chocolate one way or another.

Greetings and salutations

Peer pressure, Communism, Lyme disease, Global warming...I can't decide why I clicked on the "Blogger.com" site and logged in...but the name I had originally selected for this blog "It's cheaper than therapy..." probably best describes why I've joined the weblog world.

Let's get the introductions out of the way first. I'll be going by J, and you're clearly someone who must be incredibly bored if you're reading this. Good, now that we've been formally introduced let me catch you up on things. I graduated high school back in 1994, married my high school sweetheart in 2002, and our daughter was born in 2004. Our household also includes 3 cats who happen to think that they run the show. To be completely honest...I'm surprised one of them doesn't have their own blog yet.

More about me: I work in the health insurance industry (more on that later) and like most guys my age...I like sports (football & baseball particularly), expensive electronic gadgets, movies, and select TV shows.

I'm sitting here trying to think of something witty or interesting to end my first entry with and for some reason I can't decide if I should go with my "Unadvertised Sale" rant, or the story where my buddy and I come up with the coolest horror/monster movie concept ever. I'm going to pull a last minute switch-a-roo...and for the record none of this is fabricated or embellished, this actually happened...

It's 1994 and the trio of my future wife, my bestfriend, and myself are going to our local ice cream parlor for a treat. My mother asks us (me) to bring her back a hot fudge sundae made with her favorite ice cream...chocolate almond chip (nice choice). No problem. Backstory: my Wife had been trying to impress my mother for quite some time during our early courting stages to try to "out girlfriend" my previous girlfriend (who happened to be insane). Flash back to our story...so we go and get our treats and order mom's sundae. Problem...no chocolate almond chip ice cream. Now we were specifically instructed to not 'fall' for the "we don't have any of that ice cream" trick that they'd try to pull...we were to ask them to open a 1/2 gallon of the aforementioned chocolate almond chip ice cream and use that to make the sundae. My wife is...shall we say...averse to confrontation so we ask the fella behind the counter if we could buy the 1/2 gallon of ice cream and then have them make the sundae with it. He agrees. So far our plan is working flawlessly. About 200 yards from home a thought hits me like one of Zeus's thunderbolts.....What the heck are we going to do with the left over 1/2 gallon of "evidence" that we now had to tote inside? If my parents saw it they'd know what we did and throughly disapprove...and knowing my Wife I KNEW that failure on such a simplistic task was not an option. Here's what we came up with...me and Wifey-poo go in first, distract the parents with our successful procurement of the sundae, and then the best friend sneaks in and hides the "evidence" in the freezer and no one would be the wiser. This part is completed without incident. We adjourn to my room for debriefing. Upon further discussion it is determined that the hiding the ice cream in the freezer is an unacceptable alternative as my parents buy the groceries and they'll obviously know that there's an extra 1/2 gallon of contraband ice cream in the freezer. We sat quietly trying to come up with a suitable alibi if our ploy is discovered when...I came up with an alternate plan as to what to do with the ice cream. I turn to my Wife and with a completely straight face tell her "You need to go down stairs...get the ice cream...take it to the bathroom...open the window...and THROW IT OUT THE WINDOW INTO OUR NEIGHBORS YARD.". All is quiet in the room for about 3 seconds and then my Wife answered...and upon hearing her answer I knew she was the women I was going to marry...she said "You'll have to come and help me, I don't think I can throw it far enough". Some how my sweet, innocent, and gullible Wife thought I was serious. Well in the end we did nothing...zip, zilch, bubkiss...we left the ice cream in the freezer and no one was the wiser. I learned a few lessons that day but the most important was to never assume my Wife knew I was kidding...

When I get down, need a laugh or pick-me-up...I often dig deep in the memory banks for a visual of my wife opening a little crank out window in my parents downstairs bathroom and chucking a 1/2 gallon of Friendly's chocolate almond chip ice cream into our neighbors yard.

Thanks Honey.

- J