Small spaces are a little boy’s enemy.
Category: Family
It was a typical request from a grandfather to a grandson: “Go put the rat snake on the bird feeder.”
What? That’s not your usual Thursday evening entertainment?
It all started when I got a text message from a friend. It was a picture of a large snake on the top of a fence with the text: “Yikes! What is it?” I considered responding, “Relax — it’s a fence. They’re common.”
If there is one thing that a little brother can’t stand, it’s his big sister telling him what to do. I am reminded of this roughly 54,00 times a day.
This was on exhibit recently when I was at the movies with my kids and my two nephews, who are both seven. I opted to take four kids to the movies because I am a brave, brave man.
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Off to the mountains
Here’s a little known fact I bet you didn’t know: If you walk down 1,000 feet of stairs to the bottom of a gorge, if you want to get back to the top, you will probably have to walk back up those very same steps.
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The harrowing ordeal of computerlessness
Centuries from now, it is my hope that people of the future, when faced with adversity and challenges in life, will say what will surely become a reassuring phrase for the millennia: “May I overcome my challenge just as Mike Gibbons did.”
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Story Time with a big ol’ head wound
It’s really a pretty standard mantra of my life, as I am sure it is for you: Before reading to a group of kids, make your best effort to conceal your fresh head wounds.
Just me? OK, then.
This latest turn of fun occurred when I was heading to read to a group of kids at Story Time at Hopelands. I have read several times over the past few years and always have a good time engaging the kids and, hopefully, instilling a love of books at an early age.
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Guinness World Record, here we come!
I suppose the world will just have to treat me a little more special now that I can introduce myself as “Mike Gibbons, Guinness World Record Holder.”
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The awesome world of trampolining
Ladies and gentlemen, mankind has outdone itself again.
Forget space travel and organ transplants and As Seen On TV products. Those are yesterday’s news. I have experienced humanity’s latest great achievement, and it included me hitting a kid in the face with a rubber ball while bouncing on a trampoline.
If you recall the John Candy classic movie “Uncle Buck,” there is a scene in which Macauly Culkin’s Miles character rapid fires questions to his newly met uncle:
Miles has nothing on my son. Parker is 10. If there were a book entitled, “Every Question You Could Ever Conceivably Ask,” he would have more questions than that.
We are at our usual halfway point of starting out the New Year sticking to a weekly family menu.
Each year, we do our collective household New Year’s resolution that, during the week, we will eat healthy, eat at home and shop wisely. (We can schedule in a restaurant or a guilty-pleasure meal on the weekends. For what it’s worth, my son and I both share the same favorite guilty-pleasure meal – gas station hot dog. You say it’s awful? I say it’s awfully delicious!)