The B12 (XII) Forum, home of the 'Front Porch, y'all' at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Chili weather is fast approaching

it has arrived in Iowa
brewed a batch yesterday

In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray's character says to Scarlett Johanson's character that ones children are the most delightful people one will ever meet.

True.

I'm not sure I have ever used the words "delightful" and "children" in the same sentence, personally.  I could actually come up with about 100 things that are more delightful than children but I suspect you would say "You don't know what you are missing".  However, if yours are delightful then count yourself lucky. Most of them do not seem to be that way.  ;-) 

Kids, much like dogs and spouses, are a lot like farts.  Everybody likes their own and cannot even imagine  How anybody else could possibly think they stink.

scariest moment of parenthood is when your child drives away in the family car for the first time

The thing about parenthood is that it damages your dignity.

When you hit puberty in middle school, you learn the importance of dignity.  Keep your head down, be inconspicuous, wear the right clothes, don't draw attention to yourself and if you do it had better be for the right reasons like you can tackle or sing or drive a cool car and not for the wrong reasons like your mom made you wear the cardigan your aunt bought you.

So we grow, picking and choosing with dignity and developing into a bright, charming, intrepid person with no baggage who can find a mate.

Then we become that fun, happy couple who has all the right taste, does all the right things and makes all the right choices.

And if we choose to have kids even that seems a cool choice at first because everything seems under control.  Then we start to lose it.

Soon we have multiple little people with their own strange interests and allies.  We're running them here.  We're running them there.  We're trying to fathom why they're rowdy, why they're coarse, why they're incorrigible, why they don't appreciate our sound judgment.

We wear $11 blue jeans so we can pay for select baseball, buy them laptop with enough memory they can dominate as a gamer, and pay for Rice.  Then they knock us for wearing dad pants.

Yeah, layer by layer, parenthood strips away every shred of dignity to the point that you're just happy to be alive and to be able to provide for the ones you know and love.

And that's a good thing.  It's like the enlightenment of a Buddhist monk.

Well, you do have an advantage that your parents did not-- you have a DVR. 



But I leave it entirely up to you whether or not you choose to employ that.  Typically in our neighborhood, the last of the trick or treaters come by around 8.  Maybe some roving groups of teenagers without costumes and kids bussed over from other neighborhoods after that, but they're fewer and further between.

Doesn't get dark here until almost 7, so we won't see many trick or treaters until then.  7-8 is the prime trick or treating time, then it tapers off quickly.