Do Your Best

With the warmer weather of spring we have been spending more time outside. I love the fresh air and the healthy activity level that outside play provides. All at a great price too...free!

In the winter typically it takes 30 plus minutes to get snow pants, boots, hats, gloves, etc on and if it is a cold enough day we are ready to come back inside after about 10-20 minutes of fresh air. In the spring and summer, the neighborhood is filled with kids running around and the hours of play seems to fly by.

This spring the girls received softball helmets and a set of bases from the Easter Bunny. "The bunny" got the wrong size helmets, so the helmets haven't made their debut yet. There are two challenges here. First, finding a place that had a good selection of sizes of pink helmets. Second, how to explain to an inquisitive 4 year old how you set up an exchange with the Easter Bunny!?!?!

This new equipment has led to frequent tee ball games in the back yard. They both love to hit the ball and run the bases. I love to pitch to Lucy, set the tee up for Paige, and chase them around the bases.

Growing up sports was a big part of my life. A lot of great childhood memories were created playing football at recess, shooting hoops with my brother, or playing baseball with extended family on vacations. I am excited to see the girls smiling and laughing while enjoying sports.

As I grew older and played high school sports I developed a real passion and intensity for the sports I played. I wanted to be the best player I could and when competing I wanted to win. I learned many life lessons from the hard work and ups and downs that come with sports.

Knowing that passion and intensity for sports exists in me I have often thought about how that may affect how I coach the girls. It is very important to me that we focus on the fun and doing your best with sports versus the win at all cost mentality that is often seen on TV. Frankly, if you watch enough ESPN the "refuse to lose" attitude is often praised in our sports heroes.

To step back for a moment, the girls are two and four so we aren't at a major crossroads regarding playing for fun or playing to win. It should be 100% focused on fun at their age. At any age it should be fun and even when in competitive situations the focus should be on doing your best versus winning. This concept was confirmed for me when I stumbled across a speech by John Wooden.

When the Internet dries up of interesting things to do I often jump out to www.ted.com. Ted (Tech, Entertainment, and Design) is a series of global conferences where, simply put, people present ideas. On this site their are lots of videos of smart people talking about a wide variety of unique topics. This is where I found a speech given by John Wooden on true success. It is a great speech that contains a lot of information regarding life and sports.

John Wooden was a legendary college basketball coach from UCLA. He won multiple national championships and coached the best of the best in college basketball, including Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton. In the speech he says, "Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best that you are capable of becoming."

When you translate that to a four year old (or a high school kid probably) what it means is do your best! If that is a good enough measure of success for John Wooden, it certainly will be for me as the girls grow and pursue various things.

While we are currently at this stage of sports (Paige hitting video), doing your best will be our top sports motto regardless of what society says about winning and regardless of how well your helmet fits!?!?!?!

Post Script: Another great quote from Wooden in the video, “You can lose when you outscore somebody in a game. And you can win when you’re outscored.”

Halloween Preperation

Lucy is very excited about Halloween this year. This Tuesday she asked how many days until trick-or-treating. She has asked again every day since.

Lucy is old enough now that she remembers trick-or-treating last year and is very excited to do it again. She also remembers the compliments she received on her costume last year (Candy Corn Princess) and how fun it was to see other people dressed up.

Of course before any trick-or-treating happens a costume needs to be decided on. As you all know this is a decision that many youth do not take lightly.

Figuring out a costume for Paige is easy. She was a pumpkin last year because that is what we dressed her in. She will be a cupcake this year for the same reason. Although she is too young to care about what she wears she is old enough to get excited about dressing up. It will be fun to watch her giggle and get excited about candy this year.

Lucy's excitement has her pouring over all of the Halloween catalogs we have received in the mail. She loves looking at all the options and often can be heard laughing out loud about some of the costumes. So far we haven't had the heart to tell her that there is a zero percent chance we are ordering the $78 magical mermaid costume that comes with a tiara for $14, a wand for $8 (almost like they are giving it away!?!?!), and sparkly cape for $48. Even if we won the lottery I don't know I could see myself dropping $150 on a outfit for one day.

Lucy was pretty settled on being a cupcake with her sister and having her dad dress up at a baker for the trick-or-treating walk around the neighborhood. Our neighborhood has a traditional of all the kids gathering for a group picture and then the dads taking the kids trick-or-treating around the neighborhood while having a couple beers. The cool dads even dress up!

This week Lucy received a Little Red Riding Hood dress for a belated birthday present from her special great Aunt Suzie. Lucy is now undecided about what to be for Haloween. We will certainly keep you posted on what she decides.

While her costume is still unknown, Lucy does have one halloween item fully prepared.

She learned this pumpkin poem from Nona, Lib's mom, when we went for visit a couple weeks ago. Nona did a great job teaching it to Lucy and Lucy is glad to say the poem whenever the topic of Halloween comes up.

As discussed in the previous post, Paige of course have to give the pumpkin poem a try too.

Good luck to you on your costume selection and Halloween preparation.

Anything you can do, I want to do too

Regardless of the angle of the sun or the time of day Lucy always has a shadow. The shadow is her younger sister Paige. Ocassionally Lucy gets frustrated by having a constant follower or observer, but she does very well with it the majority of the time.

The best way to get Paige to eat a banana is to give one to Lucy and have Paige see her eating it. The same is true with getting dressed. Paige is typically content running around the house in just her diaper, until she sees Lucy putting on her daytime clothes.

While eating healthy food and getting dressed are productive examples of this game, there are multiple funny example of this too. When we brush our teeth, Paige uses the toothpaste you can swallow because that is exactly what she does...chews on the brush until she has swallowed all the toothpaste. Lucy knows the traditional routine of brushing, spitting, rinsing, etc. When Paige is done "brushing" her teeth she always insist that we hold her up over the sink so she can "spit". Paige's spit consists of her leaning her head down into the sink and making spitting noises. She aways pops her head back up with a look of accomplishment.

I am optimistic this monkey see, monkey do routine will be beneficial for potty training. Already Paige is asking to sit on the potty after Lucy uses it. So far Paige hasn't gone potty, but she has the rest of the routine mastered. She will sit on the pot, smile, hold her arms up to get down, and then lean over to get wiped. We have been amazed at the detail of her observations and ability to remember routines.

This sword cuts both ways of course. When Lucy is jumping on the couch, running around the house, trying to hang upside down off the swingset, not wanting to share, or not wanting to sit at the table to eat you can bet Paige is trying her best to do the exact same thing.

As much as we appreciate and enjoy when Lucy sets a good example it is important for us to remember she is only four. While being responsible and setting a good example are skills we want Lucy to develop, we don't want her to feel pressure to be perfect all the time.

Observing what is sure to be a lifelong friendship is ultimately a lot of fun. We also know that there may be periods of time in the future that Paige and Lucy might not want to spend as much time together. Until those days come Paige will continue to shadow Lucy and learn life lessons including: how to stand when dad wants to put sunscreen on you, how to plug you nose when you are by the compost pile, and that there is never a bad day to rock a birthday party hat.

Getting back on pace...hopefully

Yesterday I ran my first marathon. I am proud of my accomplishment and plan to blog about it more in the near future. Today my legs are sore. My fingers are not sore, so I am turning my focus to another goal: 100 blog posts this year.

While I trained and ran the marathon I spent a lot of time looking at splits and calculated my pace. For example, if I ran a 8:30 mile I would often think about how long a marathon would take at that pace. Through the running and pace analysis I was able to put together a reasonable plan to complete the race. Regarding the goal of completing 100 blog posts this year I did not make a plan and it shows.

So far this year I have completed 16 posts. My last post was July 25th. I have completed 3 posts since June 1st. This is the equivalent of crawling the first 2 miles of a marathon and expecting to finish at a reasonable time. To complete the goal of 100 posts in a year I should have posted 8 or 9 times per month. I am way, way off pace.

I have 89 days to complete 84 posts. In an unrelated story, there are only 82 more shopping days until Christmas!?!?! After crawling the first two miles of th 100 blog posts marathon I now need to stand up and sprint the last 24.2 miles. This is basically impossible, but as a poster in most elementary and middle schools across the country reads, "If you shoot for the moon and miss, you can still land among the stars!"

Before I click "publish post" tonight and get the ball rolling on posting spree from here until 12/31/11 (My family won't mind if I am posting during Thanksgiving dinner will they?), I want to apologize for a couple things. First, sorry about my over two month blog break. Thanks for sticking with me.

Second, sorry for posting probably my 3rd or 4th post about apologizing for taking long blogging breaks. Who wants to read a blog about a guy apologizing for not blogging all the time?!?!?

Finally, sorry in advance if you get sick of hearing from me over the next three months. My advice if you get sick of me would be to go get some Christmas shopping done or go for a run!

DUDE REPORT: Beer List

In a previous blog post I discussed how lucky we feel about the neighbors we have. Ross, who lives directly behind us, and I enjoy chatting over a beer whenever possible. They have three kids who are close in age to our girls. All five of the kids get along very well. The two main questions that we typically have to sort out when we are both outside are: 1) Are the kids going to play in our yard or your? 2) What beer are we drinking? (Assuming it is past noon and neither of us have work, a public appearance, etc. later that day.)

These two questions are usually answered quickly. The kids get along so well they don’t care where they play together and Ross and I like beer so much that we don’t care what we drink.
Ross and I both look for new beers to try. It is fun to discuss what we have each tried and debate our likes and dislikes. Ross has even ventured into brewing his own beer. He has created a couple good batches recently and I have been fortunate enough to sample a few.

Earlier this month we can across the American Homebrewers Association 2011 Best Beers in America poll. Over the course of future neighborhood grill outs, poker nights, and afternoon play dates we are hoping to try as many of these beers as possible.

The picture is of Ross and I are trying #2: Bell’s Two Hearted Ale and #20: Left Hand Milk Stout. (Sorry for the blurry picture. Camera lady(Libby) was drinking some wine that night too!?!?!?)

Although we have previously had some of the other beers listed, officially the two pictured beers brings us to 2 of 50 tried. In otherwords, we are early in our mission to try all 50.

The ale was good and was something we would both consider drinking more of in the future. The stout is more of a winter beer, so an 80-plus degree summer evening wasn’t quite a fit.

The full list is linked above. I would love to hear if you have tried/enjoyed/liked/disliked any of the listed beers. We will keep you posted on our progress through the list and we welcome additional participants anytime!

Review: Baby Driver

I don't drive a Subaru and I don't watch the Emmy's, but I did blog about a Subaru commercial last November that was recently nominated for an Emmy. I don't want to hurt my arm patting myself on the back, but it can't be ruled out that Tales from the Homefront played a role in the Subaru Baby Driver commercial nomination...maybe.

The commercial shows a dad seeing his daughter as a little girl although in reality she is 16 and taking the car out for the first time. Having to young girls, the commercial really stuck with me. It was easy to imagine me being that guy in 13 short years.

A friend posted a link on Facebook today saying Subaru's Baby Driver commercial has received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Commercial of 2011. This nomination makes me think, maybe, just maybe the committee has been keeping tabs on the Homefront blog, saw my November post, and agreed that it is a good commercial. More likely (much, much more likely) the commercial was nominated because it resonated with thousands of other parents like it did with me.

From my perspective, Baby Driver has some stiff competition in the category. (Look at me type like I know what I am typing about.) All the nominees can be viewed here. Sorry about the aggressive right hand column in the embedded link. I say baby driver has stiff competition because I remember laughing about the Conan commercial and laughing even harder about the Old Spice commercial.

Another nominee is a McDonald's commercial. In this commercial a dad who is driving his baby to sleep orders, pays for, and picks up McDonald's drive-through food without stopping his car. I have thought about trying this a couple times when I was hungry and driving Paige to sleep.

If you drive a Subaru, watch the Emmy's, have any tips for dealing with your 16 year old backing out of the driveway or have a vote for which commercial was the best of 2011 I would love to hear from you.

Answered Questions

There are a lot unknowns in our lives (including, but certainly not limited too, how to rotate a video posted to YouTube.)

I wanted to take a moment to step back and recognize what we do know.



Transcripts of what we do know:

"What's the largest pencil in the world?"
"Pennsylvania!"

"What's the best kind of work?"
"Teamwork!"

"Who's the boss?"
"Your the boss, Apple Sauce!"