A Near Disaster

Tragedy struck at Patrick’s soccer game today. We got to the game with plenty of time to spare, which I should have taken as a sign. After parking I walked with Samantha, taking care that she didn’t kick her soccer ball out into the traffic of the parking lot. Patrick was a little behind us, and had climbed up a small embankment that runs parallel to the row of parked cars. I have been encouraging Patrick to dribble his soccer ball instead of carrying it so that he can get a little more practice handling the ball, and he was taking my advice.

As he dribbled along the top of the embankment the ball got away from him and rolled down the hill. I turned when I heard him screaming about his runaway ball. I saw the ball just before it rolled underneath a parked SUV. On the other side of the parked vehicle I spotted an old Jeep pickup truck headed down the hill. Just as I was thinking to myself What are the chances he’ll hit it? I heard a loud pop that sounded like a gunshot.


The driver of the Jeep paused momentarily before driving away, and we were left with the sound of Patrick’s screaming. If I hadn’t seen what happened I would have thought he had been run over.

“Papa! Papa!” he screamed. “That freaky truck ran over my ball!” It took a long time and many promises of a new ball to get him calmed down, and we almost had to leave for home before the game started.

Fortunately by the time the game was over he was recovered from the trauma of a smashed soccer ball and he was able to have a good time at the game. And I was able to find a ball exactly like the one that is now in my garbage can.

The Dangers of Being the Youngest

I usually only post once a week, but we had an incident that prompted a second post this weekend. Last night while Whit and Patrick played upstairs Bean and Samanthat were left alone in the playroom in the basement I was in the family room watching college football when I heard Samantha’s raised voice. I didn’t pay much attention because Samantha’s ire is not uncommon. Plus, I was watching separation Saturday, so I was somewhat zoned out after watching BYU choke against BC and Notre Dame suck against Michigan.
Suddenly there was a crash and Lauren started in on an ear-piercing scream. I ran downstairs to find Lauren bleeding from a gash under her right eye. Apparently Samantha had been playing with a toy garbage truck and her big bad one-year-old little sister had the nerve to try and play with it too. Samantha picked up the truck and threw it at Lauren’s face, causing the bloodshed.

I took Lauren upstairs where Kate and I washed the wound. After a short break about whether or not she needed stitches, Kate loaded Bean in the car and drove to her mother’s house for a second opinion. The cut wasn’t long, maybe ¾ of an inch, but right under the eye, we didn’t want scarring.
After Pat examined the wound, Drew was dispatched to the grocery store to buy some superglue. And instead of taking the baby to the hospital for a stitch, Kate and Pat glued the wound closed. This may seem odd, and a bit dangerous, but emergency rooms have been doing this for years, and Kate and Pat are both nurses. So Lauren now has a nice little cut under her eye with a little bit of leftover superglue, which just looks like dried snot. She looked like a prize fighter after a tough boxing match.
The swelling has gone down today, and she looks much better. But this isn’t the first time Lauren has been injured at Samantha’s hand, nor will it be the last. A few months ago I came down to the family room to find Patrick and Samantha rolling balls down the stairs into the playroom. They have a bucket full of basketballs, volleyballs, soccer balls, and the like. I didn’t see any trouble in this so I admonished them to be careful.
A few minutes later I heard a cry from the basement and looked to the playroom to see that Bean was right in the path of the rolling balls and that Samantha had just beaned her with a soccer ball.
“Be careful, guys.” I said to Patrick and Samantha. “You just hit the Bean.”
“But we’re trying to hit Bean.” Patrick explained. “We’re bowling.”
I felt bad putting the bowling game to an end, but Patrick and Samantha had to find a new ten-pin.

Thievery, larceny, shoplifting!

I’ve been caught stealing;
Once when I was five.
I enjoy stealing.
It’s just as simple as that.
Well, it’s just a simple fact.
When I want something I don’t want to pay for it.
I walk right through the door.
Walk right through the door.
Hey, all right! If I get by, it’s mine!
Mine all mine!

-Been Caught Stealing, Jane’s Addiction

Tonight Mike came over and sat with my girls so that I could take Patrick down to Target. The purpose for our outing wasn’t for school supplies or groceries. Patrick had to go to confess his sins. Kate had taken the kids to Target earlier, and while they were there Patrick saw a yo-yo he wanted. He was told no. Instead of putting the toy back he smuggled it out of the store.
It wasn’t until she got home that Kate realized what he had done. The yo-yo was encased in hard plastic, and had he been able to get it open on his own he might have pulled it off. But Kate busted him. She wasn’t so much upset that he had stolen the item as much as the fact that he was somewhat boastful about it. She didn’t have time to take him back, so I was asked to.
Before we left for the mega-store Whitney informed Patrick that he was going to have to go with the policeman because he stole. She also started to cry and asked me not to take him, yelling “I don’t want the policeman to take him away! I still want a brother!” I assured her that I wasn’t coming home alone, then calmed P, who thought he was about to be read his rights.
When we walked into the store we passed a uniformed security guard, who earned a sidelong glance from Patrick. We approached the customer services desk and asked for a store manager or shift lead. Since it was almost 9PM we got the latter. The twenty-something young lady came bouncing to the front of the store and asked how she could help.
“This is Patrick.” I said. “He has something to tell you.” She bent closer to him, but he just turned into my leg.
“It’s okay.” She said, patting his head.
He turned to face her, then turned his right shoulder toward her, resting his chin on the shoulder. He batted his eyes with his long eyelashes and innocently said, “I’m sorry. I stole this.”
The young lady giggled and rubbed his head, his hair still a little wet from his bath. “You’re so cuuuuute!” She said. “You can still come back in the store anytime.” He handed her the contraband. She looked at it and said, “Maybe Santa Claus will get it for you for Christmas.”
What? I thought. No! There’s supposed to be a lecture in here somewhere. There should be something like, “Thank you for being honest and bringing it back. Stealing is bad and thank you for not doing it again. Nothing! The little shit won her over. He pulled ‘The ladies’ man’ and melted her like snow in July.
It’s not that I wanted her to rough him up, make him cry, threaten him with the security guard. I don’t want him to be afraid to come clean when he’s caught doing something that he shouldn’t. But I did want her to say something to him so that he’d know that it isn’t just his mom and dad being dumb and making him follow the rules.
In the car before we came home I did finish the lecture about how it is wrong to steal and he promised that he’d never steal again. But during the whole episode I kept thinking of Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction singing, “Hey all right! If I get by, it’s mine! Mine all mine!” and wondering if that is what P was thinking at the time of his first act of larceny.

Discretion

While at work yesterday I received a call from Kate, and she was in tears over a shopping experience. I will attempt to relate the incident as it was relayed to me. Kate had to make her usual grocery trip to Costco and chose to do so while Whitney was at school. During checkout, our three younger children waited in the shopping cart while the cashier scanned Kate’s items. Before completing the transaction the cashier looked at our children, then looked over at the young man helping her and said to him, “People in Utah have way too many kids.” She made no attempt to lower her voice. The young man replied with a “Yeah.”
Kate couldn’t say anything to the cashiers and barely made it out of the store before starting to cry. She called me at work and asked me to call the store manager, because she knew she couldn’t do it right then. I called the store, and was met by the same girl who had made that comment to my wife. So I put on my best professional voice and said, “Hi. My name is Chris and I am calling from the Admitting office at University Hospital. I need to talk to a store manager or shift lead.” The young woman put me right through to the store manager. I expressed my concerns to the store manager, who was sympathetic and assured me that the actions of her employees would not be tolerated.
My concerns were thus. Employees have their own opinions and they have a right to those opinions. However, when operating as a seller of goods, they are not in the the appropriate venue to express said opinions. A person does not make that kind of a comment unless he or she is trying to elicit a response. Well, she got a response. And the response was that my wife was embarrassed to set foot in the store again, and sad that someone would feel that one of her children shouldn’t exist. It is amusing, however, that the girl thought that Kate’s three children were too many, when Kate only had 75% of our children with her at the time.

It also amuses me that the cashier was lamenting the fact that people in Utah have large families while working for a store like Costco. Why does she think that places like Costco and Sam’s Club are so successful in Utah? It is because people have large families and many mouths to feed, so they buy in bulk at places such as wholesalers. But I doubt that the girl has the capacity to think that broadly, or that she’d even care. She probably makes minimum wage, and is just collecting a paycheck.
The day of the incident the kids were sitting in the cart behaving themselves. I would be more sympathetic to the girl’s aversion of kids if my kids had been acting out. But they weren’t. One of Patrick’s most famous incidents happened in a Costco. He was in the cart and wanted to get out. Kate said no, so he stood up and took a swan dive onto a palliate of shirts. Kate’s mother was present for that episode and nearly blew a gasket. I would like for the cashier to have been there that day to witness P at his worst. But on this day he was behaving.

I would really like Kate to go back to Costco with all four of our children and go through the same checker’s line while giving her ‘the finger’ and saying, “Look, bitch. I’ve got more kids with me this time. Is four too many?” But Kate is far too nice to do something like that. So I’ll have to use my imagination. But I’ll bet I could get my father-in-law to go through the girl’s line and say in front of her, “There are far too many ugly girls working at Costco nowadays.” That would fix her wagon.

Are you ready for some football?

This labor day weekend marks the beginning of the college football season. But last weekend marked the beginning of the season for a different kind of football known around here as soccer. Whitney has been playing in the AYSO league for a couple of years, but this year Patrick makes his soccer debut.
Whitney was excited to learn that she gets to play on the bigger fields this year. She was also excited to find that one of her friends from the neighborhood is on her team. The girl’s mother and Kate are now co-team moms. So now I am officially married to a hot soccer mom!
Whit only has seven girls on her team, and the teams need a minimum of seven girls to field a team, which means that there is no issue about playing time. This year marks the first time that Whit’s team has had goalies. In the second quarter of the game she had the chance to try her hand at goalie. During that quarter there were only two shots on goal, and she stopped them both. After she was rotated out of the goalie position, her team gave up five goals, all without scoring one of their own. Not that she cared. She has a good time and made some friends, so I don’t care if they win or lose.

Patrick’s game was a little different. There are about fifty boys and girls in the four year old age group, so they are all just one team. Each week they spend the first thirty minutes teaching the kids stretching techniques and teaching fundamentals of the game. Then the kids are broken up into teams of five to play a scrimmage. So he will have different teammates each week. But I’ve found at that age group that the kids just don’t get it, which makes for very entertaining soccer. Patrick scored a goal, as did most of the kids on the team. Some of them even picked up the ball to get it away from the other kids.

Watching games this week reminded me of the difference in how boys are treated in sports. While watching Whitney’s game I also kept an eye on the game on the next field, which was boys of Whitney’s age, about 8 or 9. During Whitney’s game, a girl from the opposing team was struck by the soccer ball, being caught right under the chin. She went down, and the game was stopped while she was walked off the field in tears. Less than ten minutes later I witnessed a similar situation in the boys’ game. A young man who was playing goalie was struck by the soccer ball while trying to stop a goal. The ball had been kicked very close to his head and struck him directly on the ear. He stopped the shot, and his teammates took the ball in the other direction, while he stayed on the ground for a moment. The game was not stopped, and the boy got up, rubbing his now red ear. I guess that even at that age they teach the boys to “rub a little dirt in it” when they get hurt. It’s just not manly to cry or show pain. The boys of the league also get better colors for jerseys. The boys get hard colors like reds, blues and blacks. The girls on the other hand, get pastels, pinks, purples, and in Whit’s case neon yellow.
At any rate, a good time was had by all, and I am excited to see multiple games each week. Samantha enjoys the game too, because I let her take her own soccer ball and kick goals between quarters.




On another note….

This week while babysitting a neighbor girl who is Patrick’s age, Kate caught Patrick and the girl photocopying their faces on the copier in our office. I have no doubt that P was the ringleader of this malarkey. But I have added examples of the kinds of images Patrick made of himself. Kate was not as amused as I am. But then again I am a simpleton and easily entertained…