My son was the first casualty. It started about 5 in the morning, when he came into our room and said, “Argggle. Clack. Snort.”
Or something like that. He was stopped up and sniffling, and his throat was hurting, which he countered by doing that weird clicking thing kids do to somehow offset sore throats.
If you’ve ever had seven teenagers having a sleepover at your house, you know that your house will immediately become the loudest one on the block.
If all seven teenagers are super duper into Broadway musicals, you may very well have the loudest house in the county.
My wife and I have been married for almost 17 years. Thus, if I say, “Honey, can you look at this?” there is a good chance I’m going to ask her to look at something gross.
It’s not that I am trying to be gross. It’s just that, well, sometimes significant others are tasked with the unfortunate job of, well, looking at something. Something gross.
It’s always fun when you can shatter a treasured childhood memory in one simple crushing blow of honesty.
It happened the other night at dinner. I’m not even sure how the topic started, but my daughter said, “Remember when we had that Disney castle poster hanging up in the pantry, and I had to earn all of the princesses and put them on it in order to get a trip to Disney?”
Clearly, I need to brush up on my Spanish.
While I would never say that I was fluent, I took several years of high school and college Spanish, and at one point I could probably limp my way through a Spanish conversation.
Like most of you, I use my phone as far more than just a phone.
In fact, “phone” is actually a bit of a misnomer. It’s the Swiss Army knife of technology. Come to think of it, calling a Swiss Army knife is kind of inaccurate as well. If you went around calling it your Swiss Army corkscrew, people would look at you funny.
Should you be concerned with overfishing throughout the world, I can safely assure you of this: It’s not my family’s fault.
I can prove this by the fact that, since my kids have gotten new fishing poles, we have caught exactly the same number of fish had we asked them nicely to join us on the dock.
During a recent visit to Atlanta, my father-in-law, son and I made one of our routine visits to The Varsity in downtown Atlanta.
I am a real Christmas tree person.
I have nothing against artificial trees or the people who employ their use during Christmas. In fact, some members of my very own family have switched to artificial trees, and I have yet to judge them for it publicly.
It’s not the kind of phone call you like to get. When I answered, I heard, “Is this Parker Gibbons’ dad?”
I had the typical parent reaction when I heard this, which was to assume that my son had either found a cure for cancer, saved a teacher from a bear attack or successfully created a perpetual motion machine.