Happy Halloweiner!!

I have fond memories of Halloween as a kid, before it was dubbed the devil's holiday. Back in the 80's it was about kids dressing like The Hulk or Wonder Woman and frolicking around the picturesque neighborhood, whimsically asking people for some candy. Everyone seemed happy and everyone was filled with the crisp autumnal air.

Over the past two decades, however, Halloween has lost its luster with me. It has become another highly marketable event for people to drop some serious coin on candy, deco and booze. And is an alibi for women to dress up as "a sexy (fill in blank with any occupation or character here)." At work I had built a rapport for some inventive costumer-y, but even that has faded a bit. I am pleased to announce that thanks to Benjamin, me and Halloween are back!!

I've heard before that when you have a child you get to relive some parts of your own childhood (hopefully just the good ones), and I can attest to how great this Halloween was seeing it through Benjamin's 21-month year old eyes. He had wide-eyed wonder trying to make sense of all these people running around with crazy wigs, rubber masks, and ill-fitting pantaloons.

We started off at his cousins' Halloweiner cookout where neighborhood kids gather to feast on salted meats before they chase it with sugary treats. He was able to debut his Itsy-Bitsy Spider costume for the family and get hugged to death by nearly everyone at the party - mental note: cute baby in spider costume could be the key to curing arachnophobia.

While Emily was visiting with some friends, I walked hand in hand with Benjamin to his first "ToT" customer. You could tell that he had no idea what we were doing or why he was carrying a plastic jack-o-lantern that was bigger than his torso. We quickly went over our lines, "Trick or treat" and knocked on the door. A nice lady answered and Benjamin peeped, "Tweet? Tweet?"

She "ooh'ed" and "aah'ed" and then she said, "Aww... she is the cutest little octopus I've ever seen!!" Candy obtained = (1) Tootsie Roll® midget

Little did Benjamin know that he just got about the worst loot you could get on Halloween - one inedible brown nugget. I'd rather get a penny. BUT, the fact that she dropped something into his little bucket, the entire "extort cuteness for candy" concept immediately clicked in his head. He was now a spider on a mission.

Benjamin didn't want to be carried, he wanted to hoof it on his own, but he was moving really slow for having 8 legs (RIMSHOT!) So he and I are holding hands while other kids and turtles are passing us, but I'll be darned if he never complained, never dropped his bucket and never threw a tantrum for the entire night. The funny thing to me is that Benjamin has no concept of candy and wasn't terribly interested in the stuff - he just enjoyed people putting stuff into his bucket. The one exception is when he scored a mini Play-Doh® container, he recognized the shape and thanked the couple with a, "Whhhhooooaaaa..." You'd think Indy had just discovered the Lost Ark.

We make it back to the house and ended the late night with the ol' candy dump to see whatcha got. I loved this part as a kid. Letting your eyes take in a treasure trove of brightly colored candies and discover new unknown treats (What's an O'Henry Bar?!). I have never been into candy, but it was the currency I would use to trade with friends in order to score an action figure or two. I may have been the world's first candy-launderer.

Benjamin dumped out his bucket and the little guy scored a nice mound of goods. We've never given him candy (except for a Dum-Dum® during hair cuts) so the fun-size bars were lost on him. The true delights were the stickers, a fake spider thingie, said mini Play-Doh® and a full size bag of Goldfish - which was definitely the score of the night.

The costume, the pictures, holding hands, walking down the dark streets and the smile plastered on his face were the ingredients I needed to welcome Halloween back into my good graces. After 20 years of Halloween being filled with scantily-clad vixens and various brews, I had forgotten who the night was truly for - the kids who get excited about dressing up like their favorite heroes, going on a quest for a bounty of treats, and blissfully falling into a candy-coated stupor.

Realistically Benjamin won't remember anything about his first "real" Halloween, but I will every time a midget Tootsie-Roll® is dropped into his bucket for the next 10 years.

"What'd you do this weekend?"

You know how Mondays go - easing back into the work week, remembering all of the things you put off on Friday, and sharing "happy talk" with coworkers about what you did over the weekend. I work with a smattering of single people and hear their weekend exploits and it goes a little something like this:

"Yeah I didn't really do too much, we went out for drinks on Friday night and then went over to this club and ran into a bassist I knew in this samba band. We went back to his loft with a couple dozen people and ordered $400 of tapas and feasted on the sweet meats until 4AM. Saturday we just cruised on my friend Theo's yacht and did some whaling. The weird part is that we met up with some Mer-people and they took us to this sunken ship where we found gold coins and precious gems. After that, we hot-air ballooned back to shore and walked across hot coals, straight into a trance-Goa rave. Sunday was super low-key, we just had brunch with Obama at The Hague."

As these people are talking, I'm trying to think back to the weekend and tally up all of the cool things I did. Let's see - looked after Benjamin, maintained my home, went to church, ate 7-9 meals and didn't get enough sleep some how.

Ta-da!!

Ordinarily my shoulders slump a little bit after we do this exchange, especially when their response is something to the effect of, "Oh, well that sounds fun too...(ahem)...(shuffling of papers)"

But things shifted into perspective for me Labor Day weekend. We got back to the office on Tuesday and I'm hearing of people riding on wild unicorns and circumnavigating the Earth on the Concorde, and I thought to myself "Man! I had a great weekend!"

While these people were ticking off things on their Bucket List I was able to hang out with Benjamin during the sweet "play time" part of his day. We had family walks, kicked around a ball at the park, got in a work out, made and ate some delicious meals at decent times, went swimming with cousins, had a night away with the Missus, saw a movie IN the theatre, and still got some stuff done around the house.

I didn't get into detail when so

meone asked what I did that weekend, because I think they would still give me the "you poor suburban schmoe" look. But I truly think I had the better weekend filled with laughs, baby hugs, naps, some more first words, kissing of boo-boos - all thanks to Emily and Benjamin.

So next time you feel like you're getting big-timed by someone comparing weekend feats, just conjure up a little moment in time where your

little one put their head on your shoulder, laughed at your antics, or just splashing around during bath-time. You've got them beat, hands-down.

Photo Fun

This is short and sweet and more about the pictures than anything else. Benjamin is a real hoot the more and more he attempts to speak. It is almost a little game trying to discern what he means when he blurts out "Dah..." Is it "door" or "dog" or "dock" or "dork"?

I do sense that he is on the verge of some major speaking breakthroughs. And I secretly look forward to answering the endless string of "why" questions.

Enjoy the pics.

"Hi, I'm a Hollywood baby. See how casual I am?"

Not a bad family pic considering it is 9AM and both parents were running on zero sleep.

"The siren's call of the sea beckons me. It is rivaled only by the call of my Goldfish snack crackers."

It is still undetermined which side of the family he gets his latent vampirism gene.

A Complete Tragedy

No, you haven't accidentally logged into a different blog. And no we haven't undergone Father/Son plastic surgery. This posting is dedicated to a truly great friend of mine that recently passed away - Shannon Childre.

I really have (and still do) the best intentions of posting more often, but his death has forced me to hit the pause button on a lot of things over the past two weeks. Shannon and I have been creative partners for a good portion of the past 10 years. When I was an intern, he was the first person to really give me a chance and show me the ropes around the agency. We had plenty in common so we hit it off and made some great memories over the past decade together.

Shannon and I traveled out to San Diego for Comic-Con 3 weeks ago with some other coworkers to help our client man their booth. The second day we were there, he went out for a jog along the boardwalk by our hotel and collapsed from a heart attack, at the age of 39. One of our mutual interests was eating the right kinds of foods and giving our body a good sweat when we had the chance (it's harder to work it in with kids). A total and complete biological fluke left him dead shortly after he got to the hospital.

To add to the situation, he wasn't carrying an ID and we didn't discover that he was truly missing until he was a no-show at dinner that evening. We raced around the city to try and put the pieces together, went to the hospitals looking for injured John Does, and we sadly discovered him as a deceased John Doe. My body went into a complete shaking shock, the only other time I experienced this sensation was right before Benjamin was born. Except that was shaking from excited shock, not sad shock.

The whole event is filled with a series of "firsts" that I never wanted to perform a "second." Packing up his hotel room, flying his stuff home, trying to find words that will console his wife and two children, planning a memorial service, trying to work with his blatant absence. The entire flight home my body was completely tensed up trying to fight off tears, and I couldn't wait to get home and hug Emily and Benjamin.

There is hope though. Shannon's death has brought people and emotions out of the woodwork. About 500 people attended his memorial and is was a time for tears, laughs and celebration of who he was and a chance for all of these people who he positively impacted to get together in the same room to say "thanks" to him. And "thanks" to everyone else there. Compliments came off the tongue easier, people told one another how appreciative they were of one another - it was a great evening.

The tragedy is that Shannon wasn't there to see it, and that it took his death to shake people out of their rat-race funk and rediscover their own humanity. I eulogized him at the service (another First) and I tried to leave people with a positive message that they were his legacy, and for them to recognize the traits they admired in Shannon and apply them to their own lives. I also tried to pass on a simple lesson that came out of a conversation Shannon and I had - he recently started to learn how to speak German. I asked him, "Why?" and his playful response back was, "Why not?" It was just something he had always wanted to do, so he made a move to learn German.

My challenge to the audience at the memorial and to you today is to say "Why not?" more often in your lives. Yank those things off the backburner and just do it - take that trip, learn that skill, take a class, volunteer somewhere, or suck it up and ask that person out that you've been eyeballing for weeks. Shannon's passing is proof that life is clearly to short to not roll the dice more often.

The saddest part of this whole incident, and one that I haven't cared to dwell on too much, is the fact that his 2 year old boy (Griffin) and his 1 year old girl (Lily) will have to learn about their dad through stories, old pictures and mementos from his past. Something no child should have to endure. This obviously makes my imagination go crazy thinking how that could have been me and what Emily and Benjamin would do if I were gone. And that really makes me sad.

Who Taught My Baby How To Be A Jerk?

Is that bad, calling your baby a jerk? Benjamin has just turned a corner where his new found mobility has emboldened him to have a bit of an attitude. And some of the things he does, if any of us did them, we would be called jerks. Actually, we would be called something worse.

I'm not really calling Benjamin a jerk and he hasn't become "Damien" from the Omen movies, but he is definitely testing the limits.

For instance, if he's messing with an object he desires (phone, marker, remote, gold bullion) and we don't let him have it, he will run away squealing from us and then throw said object into the corner.

THEN, if we put the object back he will go back over to it, look you right in the eye and zing the object haphazardly behind him. And the look on his face says, "Oh yeah, you want this so much, go get it (ZING!)" There are some choice days where we call timeout for him more than the last 2 minutes of an NBA game.

And the absolute worse part is when he does the "Marlin" - a full body contort were his head and feet stiffen and fling in the opposite direction from his body. Much like a marlin jumping up out of the water and flopping around on the deck of your boat. At least now I know what it's like to be headbutted and kicked in the ribs at the same time. I could soooo make it in the UFC.

For full disclosure, he still has plenty of good moments and isn't filled with vinegar that often. The times that he has an attitude make up probably 5%, but going from 0% to 5% makes you think "oh no, is this it? Is the cheese sliding off his cracker? What did we do wrong? Whose teaching him this stuff?" Like everything else in the media, I guess we should blame the parents. Wait a second...

Life's a Zoo

Sometimes you just need a break, so I took one for 2 weeks. A break from pretty much everything except family. I had two big revelations, the first one is that I am programmed to remain busy. Even if I don't have work to do, I fill my time with some other form of work rendering me completely incapable of relaxing. That's why I never book a massage, I'd rather just rub my own shoulders so I feel like I'm accomplishing something.

The 2nd revelation is that every day I go to work, I am completely missing the sweetspot of Benjamin play time. I see him in the morning when he can't wait to eat breakfast, and then I see him at night when he can't wait to eat dinner, mess around a little bit and then go to sleep. I had two weeks of seeing him in his element and doing things that I didn't know he was able to do, like play piano. I kid.

(3rd revelation is how are all of these other people at Target at 2PM on a Tuesday??)

One treat is that my folks came in to town from TN to stay for about a week. They hadn't seen Benjamin since we was 2 weeks old, and Benjamin really has never seen them. They just looked like black and white polka dots to him. He had a blast, they had a blast, we all had a blast. They marveled at Benjamin's ability to do some things that are just kind of commonplace to us now. It was a great experience to see their joy from our little bundle of joy.

I did plan a family outing to the Ft. Worth Zoo while they were in town, which was the inaugural expedition for everyone. I thought that Benjamin at 16 months would be able to understand that there were exotic animals running around him, I was wrong. Let me set the stage a little bit with these three words - Texas, June, Hot.

We got there right when it opened to hopefully catch the animals in the midst of wrapping up their breakfast before they start running and swinging and breaking into dance in order to entertain the patrons. What we saw were animals submerged in water, huddled under any shade they can find or buried in a hole somewhere. To me, the looks on their faces read, "Please, send me back to Africa where it's cooler"

The animals that did play ball weren't interesting enough to pull Benjamin's attention away from people watching everyone around him. "Oh Benjamin, look at the huge gorilla right in front of your face... orrrr keep trying to touch that girl's barrettes in front of you" All in all we got to see about 1/3 of the park before we called it quits to find sweet relief in a room piping super cold A/C. And unfortunately there were no penguins to be found.

Spoonman

Benjamin's favorite appliance in our house is the dishwasher, sorry rice cooker. And the other day I was doing my household duty of emptying the dishwasher and Benjamin did something outside of his usual routine of trying to climb into the dishwasher.

He pulled out two spoons from the utensil caddy and trotted out of the kitchen. A few seconds later he came back to the dishwasher empty handed and pulled out two more spoons. I assumed he was playing a little game where he grabs the spoons, hoping that I chase him, and then tosses them into the dogbed like he does every other one of his toys (sorry Schmax).

I let him do it a couple more times until I realized he had taken every spoon we have and put them somewhere (these were clean by the way, so it also hit me that I have to watched all of the flippin spoons again). Curiosity finally won out and I followed him on his final spoon heist, only to discover that he has arranged (not thrown) all of the spoons on the window sill in our office.

Clearly, I know that he is not an artist in-residence with high-level cognitive thinking, but it was amazing to see how he was actually evaluating the current structure to determine where best to place the next spoon. It was a neat moment, and then a creepy moment. It reminded me of the Matrix where that little psychic girl is bending spoons with her mind.

Ultimately, it was one of those instances where you wish you could peek into someone's mind to see exactly what's going on in that noggin. There is, however, one thing I knew for certain - how Benjamin would react when I gathered up the spoons. Let's just say I'm glad they weren't knives.