It's Time To Write Again

I've had the audacity to dedicate most of my time each day to teaching my children.  That has left very little time for writing a blog.  I know.  I need to get my priorities straight.  I've neglected this place for too long.

Since last December, all of my writing has been for Home Educating Family Magazine and their accompanying website, Home Educating Family Association.  I was blessed with the opportunity to write a regular column for their magazine, and a monthly blog entry for their website.  The magazine comes out four times each year.  The blog entry is the first Monday of each month.  This opportunity is a dream come true. 

I've been struggling a bit when faced with selecting topics to write about, as well as finding my usual style for presenting my ideas. The problem is that I haven't been writing enough. Writing is like any other activity: you have to practice if you want to get better.  There's no better place to practice than write here. 

Melissa commented to me the other night that some of my funnier blog posts were answers to questions presented in memes that flew around the blogosphere a few years ago.  She found one online and posted it to my Facebook wall.  It was a public challenge.  I picked up the gauntlet, tucked it into my belt, and sat at the keyboard.  It was fun. Here goes...



ONE OF YOUR SCARS, HOW DID YOU GET IT? Some people have cool scars from bar fights or spectacular car wrecks.  I have a scar on my right forearm from a box of fish.  But it was a big, heavy box of fish. It had been shipped into Kanas City from Boston, and when I picked it up from the belt loader as it came off the plane I sliced open my arm on the corner of the box.  It was so cold out that I didn’t feel the cut, so I shrugged my shoulders and kept on working.  Apparently, it needed stitches. 

WHAT’S YOUR WORST FEAR?  Being eaten by a shark.  In my underwear.  I don’t know how the shark gets into my underwear, but it’s still pretty frightening.  (It's an old joke, but be honest. You smiled,)

WHAT KIND OF HAIR/EYE COLOR DO YOU LIKE ON THE OPPOSITE SEX?  They have eyes?  I never noticed. 
 
FAVORITE PIZZA TOPPING?  Beer.

ARE YOU DOUBLE JOINTED?  No. I can only smoke one joint at a time.

FAVORITE CLOTHING BRAND?  Fitz.  “Do you like it?”  “Yeah, it Fitz.”

SAY A NUMBER FROM ONE TO A HUNDRED:  There.  I said it.  Out loud.  Everyone in the kitchen heard me, too.  Bet you wish you were here, don’t you?  I guess you’ll never know.

FAVORITE QUOTE?  “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet simply because there’s a quote and a picture next to it.” – Abraham Lincoln

HAVE YOU BEEN OUT OF YOUR HOME COUNTRY?  I’ve been to Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, Fiji, and the exotic Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. 

MET ANYONE FAMOUS? I met former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne’s husband.  He gave me an autograph that reads, “You should try my pork chops!”   He forgot to include his address and phone number, the cheapskate.

FIRST JOB?  I delivered newspapers written in Polish to little old ladies who smelled like cabbage and tipped me with rotten fruit and Halls Mentho-Lyptus.   They meant well.


HAVE YOU EVER HAD SURGERY?  Yes, and if my wife ever gets pregnant, there’s a urologist who’s gonna get a beat down.

WHAT DO YOU GET COMPLIMENTED ABOUT MOST?  The back of my head.  It usually comes when people say, “Hey, look!  He’s leaving!”

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE TYPE OF CANDY? Eye candy.

HAVE YOU EVER REALLY AND TRULY HAD A BEST FRIEND? Yes.  And I was smart enough to marry her.

WHAT IS YOUR HAIR COLOR?  It varies, depending on whether you are looking at my nose or my ears.

EYE COLOR?  I color.  You color.  We all color.  Coloring is fun!

FAVORITE RESTAURANT? That place where my wife sits across from me, a cold beer sits between us, and the children sit at home with a babysitter.  I LOVE that place!

PLAY ANY MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS? I love playing with musical instruments.  Oboes are surprisingly aerodynamic when you don't have a javelin, and the bean bag toss into a tuba bell is fun, too.

RELATIONSHIPS OR ONE NIGHT STANDS?  Two night stands: one for my side of the bed, and one for hers.  We can’t share just one night stand.  It wouldn’t be good for our relationship.

WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU BOUGHT?  Four boxes of Life cereal and a package of hot dogs. 

WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING?  Milton’s Paradise Lost.  It’s a delightful little tale where a man tries to justify the ways of God to man (as if that was really needed), and one of his characters admonishes another not to try to understand things that beyond his understanding. 

Going to Print

My first waking thought this morning was my last coherent thought as I drifted off to sleep last night. “Review your essay and submit it.”   It’s kind of like being back in college. I have writing deadlines.  Similar to my undergraduate years, I find that I do my best writing at the last minute, as the deadline looms.    I’ve turned in more than a few papers still warm from the printer.  Unlike college, I’m not writing for grades.  I’m writing for an editor.   This year, I was published.

Getting published was not a bucket list entry.  It has been a dream of mine since 1988, when I submitted my first short story to a magazine and received the first of many preprinted, “Dear Writer” rejection letters.  Last May, I was introduced through a mutual friend to a magazine editor for Home Educating Family Magazine.  She invited me to submit a story for their September issue.  I did, and it was accepted!  When the issue arrived in the mail, I was more than a little surprised to see the cover.

Homeschool Dad: Let Your Kids be Kids?  That’s my article.   This was an extremely satisfying moment in my life. 

   

If you click on the above title, you will be taken to HEM’s website.  On the left hand side of the page there is a red bar that reads “View Current Issue.”  Click on that and you will find my article on page 95.

I have no idea how well the article was received by Home Educating Family’s audience, but I was invited to submit another story for their December issue.   I saw a sneak peek of the cover of the December issue.  My essay title is on the cover.  Score!

Since then, I’ve been asked to submit two essays for their blog.  I emailed the second essay this morning, after I brewed a pot of coffee and reviewed the article.   Between the publication of the first article and the acceptance of the second, I received a check in the mail from HEM.  I do not know if it was for the first or the second magazine article.  I do know that I was paid for writing for a magazine.  That was just cool.

I think there are several reasons why I’ve experienced sudden success.  One is due to the fact that I have been regularly practicing the craft of writing in the blogosphere since 2007.  Practice pays off.  Another reason is that I have a unique voice in the homeschooling community.  I am a stay-at-home dad who homeschools.  Most of the men who write about homeschooling go to work each day while their wives teach their children.   But the biggest reason for my success is the passion I have for my subject matter: my children.  I’ve combined my love for my family with the frustrations of being a stay-at-home parent, my Christian faith and a healthy dose of humor.    I tell the truth, with maybe a little hyperbole for effect.  It’s been a winning combination.

 

Was Your Day This Bad? - A Writing Proposal

I can’t possibly be the only parent who has children who tape underwear to the front door of his house. There are more of you out there. I know there are. I know there are because I know that I am not the only parent who had a three year old son decide to drop his pants to his ankles and water the grass near the traveling Vietnam Wall Memorial in front of dozens of people including many faculty members of the history department at the high school where I taught.


I was so proud.

I know that I am not the only parent who has had a child loudly ask, “Is it time to go home yet?” during that one moment of silence in the middle of our pastor’s sermon.

I know that I am not the only parent who has had a child wondering why he didn’t have a younger brother, which led him to ask at the top of his lungs, “Dad, have you given mom any of your sperm yet?” on a crowded Southwest Airlines flight to Chicago.

I can’t be the only one.

Can I?

I ask because of Charles. Charles is the father of a scout in General Mayhem’s Boy Scout Troop. Charles walked up to me with a big grin at a scout meeting last month. “I almost called you today,” he told me.

“Why?” I asked. Charles never calls me.

“Because I thought I was having a bad day,” he explained. “I knew that if I talked to you my day would get a whole lot better.”

Charles went on to explain that after listening to me share the details of the day my sewer line backed up into my basement while I was teaching a homeschool writing class to a visiting student and simultaneously fighting with my plumber in an effort get him to honor his warranty and re-snake my lateral line, he realized that his tough day wasn’t as bad as he thought it was. That was an appropriate day to teach descriptive writing using words that end in “y,” such as “nasty” and “sh…” The more Charles thought about it he realized that he rarely has a day worse than some of the stories that I have shared with him. Now, every time Charles sees me he asks, “Is my day getting better or worse?” It’s rather annoying, really. He smiles in anticipation as he asks the question, certain that my pain will bring him great pleasure.

The sadist.

This came to mind when I read Papa Bear’s response to my underwear blog. Papa Bear sent me a message telling me that his autistic thirteen year old son decided to drop trou in his front yard and share a full moon with the entire neighborhood. Papa Bear lives on a corner lot, so his son’s lunar adventures were visible in every direction. If you have not read Papa Bear’s blog you should. He writes at Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  The link is on my side bar. (And yes, I share this with his permission.)

I sympathize with good humor and genuine understanding. While reading Papa Bear’s e-mail I realized that we have the making of a very good regular feature titled “Was Your Day This Bad?” Alliteratively, Wednesday would be a good day for this feature, although any day of the week will work. I wrote “we” because it takes a community of readers and writers to make it work. On “Was Your Day This Bad?” we each write a post about the hardest, funniest, most challenging and stress filled day that we’ve had during the previous two weeks, and share/vent on our blogs in the most humorous manner possible. I'm thinking of one post every other week. Maybe if we share the pain we can all laugh with each other rather than at one another.

Oh, who am I kidding? We’ll all be laughing at one another.

Any takers?

The Origins of Frecklations

I am surrounded by freckles. The Captain has them, although hers are the lightest and sparsest of anyone in the family. The General has them all over his face. The Major is the most heavily freckled child of the three, the one who most closely resembles his mother. She doesn’t have a bare spot of skin that has seen the sun and not become covered with those little brown dots. And I love them. Every summer the Boss’ freckles regain their strength and turn a darker brown, like a rechargeable battery after a night on the charger. It’s one of the many things that I love about her.

It was at dinner two nights ago that I wondered aloud if it were possible to detect a specific pattern of freckles on each of their faces. Did genetics allow for the possibility that each person had an identical spread of freckles in the same location much like a mole or a birth mark can be passed from one generation to the next, or were their freckles truly randomly spread? They each have so many freckles that it would be hard to detect a pattern just looking at them during daily interaction. We’d have to look at close-up pictures of their faces side-by-side.

“Do you mean a frecklation?” General Mayhem asked.

“Yes!” I laughed. “Freckle constellations on your faces.”

While the Boss patiently shook her head, we discussed possible names and stories for freckles on the nose, the cheek, or the chin. It could make for a fun homeschooling creative writing project. She thought that she had heard every freckle joke possible by this point in her life. That was before she met me and our heavily speckled off spring.

“Did you know that the word ‘constellation” is actually a mistranslation of the word ‘constipation’?” the General asked.

“Constipationem” and “ Constellationem” are fairly close. I guess it is possible.

“Does that date back to the time when the commode was outside and people who were waiting to go had nothing better to do than sit and look at the nighttime sky?” I asked.

The General started to laugh. The Boss grimaced.

“I suppose if you were pushing hard you might see double.” I puffed out my cheeks and made my eyes bulge. “That would explain Gemini, the twins.”

Since it was dinner, I reminded the young lad that we were pushing the envelope of acceptable dinner conversation quite far, a comment that received a nod of approval from the Boss. We dropped the subject.

It is fun to watch the General’s mind work. Some of the stuff he comes up with is original, surprising, and very funny. He’s a good set-up man. When he learns to finish the joke, I think he’s going to give me quite the challenge.

If anyone does assign a Frecklation myth as a writing project, let me know. We’ll post them here.