Category: Family

Years ago, a co-worker was debating whether or not his new daughter would be introduced to Santa Claus.

His conundrum was whether or not he was lying to this child, and if that was a precedent he wanted to set. At that time, I already had two kids, and we were full on into the “Of course you lie to them” mode, so I explained that lying to your children was probably one of the few things that would get you through parenting relatively sane.

Now, I’m not talking about big, impactful, harmful lies. I am talking about lies of extreme convenience. Maybe, just maybe, all McDonald’s weren’t actually closed for the day. Maybe, just maybe, the store wasn’t actually out of candy. Or maybe, just maybe, failure to eat your vegetables will not, in fact, result in all ponies being eradicated from the earth. But they didn’t need to know any of that at the time, and we had to sidestep some issues.

But Santa is certainly in the harmless camp, and can even be justified as not technically a lie, but a little necessary misdirection. (Quick aside: I read a comment on the web a while back that, when the Santa mythology was being formed, we should have all gone with the narrative that Santa actually leaves all of the kids’ presents with the parents, but not until kids are asleep. That solves bedtime and when a kid wakes up and walks into the den as you are cursing the fact that you are starting to assemble an indoor play fort at 11:00 and have just realized the directions are only in Mandarin.)

During this discussion with the co-worker, another chimed in with this two-word response: “10 years.” When pressed for what exactly that meant, she explained that kids have 10 years of their life when they are aware enough of the world to actually understand it but also not have (hopefully) a care in the world. A 10-year block when your parents are perfect and the world is still magical. There is plenty of time later in life for soul-crushing reality. Give ‘em some Santa for that blissful decade.

My kids are beyond that decade. They now know the full realities of the world: McDonald’s are open but I’m not stopping because I would like to get to Atlanta before next Monday. The store had plenty of candy but I’m not your personal candy dealer. And eat your vegetables, don’t eat your vegetables. I don’t really care, but rest assured when you get hungry later you’re on your own.

But there is always a little bit of Santa magic left in everyone (I hope). Santa still delivers gifts in my house. Granted, the way the kids write their Christmas wish lists are a little different these days. My kids used to love getting a toy catalogue and circling everything they wanted, or going to the store and sharing with my wife and me the various things they REALLY hoped Santa would bring them.

Our son is 14, and really into fishing. His main way of sharing his Christmas list: Rattling off a long line of fishing equipment he wants, with names that I will never remember so I end up saying, “Yeah, can you text me those?”

Our daughter is 17, so her Christmas list is really simple. “Cash. And ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ on vinyl.”

All that said, come Christmas morning, Santa will have come to visit, and he will every year for the foreseeable future. By now, it’s a collective lie that we are all a part of of, and we are all OK with. Because sometimes these things aren’t so much lies, but rather the spirit that lets us grab back a little of that decade where everything was perfect.

Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, he now lives in Mt. Pleasant. You can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.

 

As a parent of two teenagers, I spent a good bit of my time asking, “What are you talking about?”

This can range anywhere from goings on at school to current pop culture to inside jokes that I probably don’t want to know what they are talking about.

But of late, the main cause of this line of questioning has been related to fishing.

Yes, fishing. My son got into fishing a few years ago, and he was content fishing the way I did as a kid: You had a pole and maybe some worms or two and you just did your thing. The point really wasn’t to catch fish, but rather enjoy some time at the water. If you caught a fish, bonus time!

What a difference a few years makes. Since that time, he has taken himself to the furthest corners of the online fishing universe. He follows fishing YouTubers and is constantly watching to learn new techniques. (From some of these YouTubers, I have learned there are a surprisingly high number of people who fish in urban sewers.)

And he studies up on various lures and fishing add ons. This is where we have found a great divide.

My fishing gear vocabulary consists of pretty much rod, reel, line, hook, weight, bobber and bait. And that has served me pretty well for most of my life.

Not Parker. He has amassed multiple rods and multiple tackle boxes for different occasions. Every month or so, he spends some time on the floor, rearranging his tackle boxes and working on his lures.

Speaking of lures, in my youth, there were, simply, lures. I was an unrefined fisherman. My son delights in telling me about all of the lures he has and their functions. And when he has saved up some money to go buy some, I stand utterly clueless as we are at the sporting goods store and he tells me is looking for, among other things, a lipless crank bait, a swim jig, a jerk bait, a senko, a rattletrap, a whopper plopper or a chatter bait. He will pace the aisles, and say, “Dad, I can’t find a buzz bait.” I am pretty much as helpful as a hologram at that point, because I can’t find something if I have no clue what it is.

We also got him something called Mystery Tackle Box for his birthday. This is something that arrives each month in the mail, and it contains a handful of “mystery” lures. This is pretty much the highlight of his month, and something I proudly lord over him.

ME: (Holding the box high in the air): Look what arrived today!

HIM: MYSTERY TACKLE BOX!!!

ME: (extending it a little higher)

HIM: I know. Homework and room cleaned…

One month, the box came, and once I finally stopped being mean making him do homework first he tore into it. He looked at the contents list and screamed, “OHMIGOD! A Project Z Shroomz Micro Finesse jig!!!”

I responded, “What are you talking about?”

He explained it to me, but was speaking at such a fast rate I have no idea what he said. As he searched the box, he found the packaging for this prized inclusion. And he saw it was empty. Somewhere along the way, the packaging had come open and Project Z Shroomz Micro Finesse jig had not made the journey. The look on his face was as if I had said, “Hey, by the way, Christmas, Star Wars and Alabama football have all been canceled forever. Also we sold the dogs.”

I assured him the folks at MTB would take care of this, and a quick email exchange confirmed just that. In no time they had righted the situation, and a package arrived a few days later. As my son was frantically tearing open the package, he again explained to me just what this exciting addition to his collection would be used for.

I responded, obviously, with, “What are you talking about?”

Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, he now lives in Mt. Pleasant. You can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.

 

My daughter and I were in the car the other day, listening to a stand-up special we had downloaded from Netflix.

Before I continue, please take a moment to realize how awesome that is: I pushed a couple of places on my phone screen and an hour-long stand-up special was suddenly playing over my car speakers via, I guess, magic. Or maybe technology. Who really knows.

Anywho, the special was from comedian Hasan Minajh, who is an eloquent and gifted storyteller. His special weaves in both stories of his life as a first-generation American with immigrant parents as well as general stories from life.

One of his bits was about being a child and dreading when the phone would ring, out of fear that your parents would answer it before you. It’s a great bit, and I won’t unfurl it here, as you should listen to him tell it, as it’s his comedy.

That said, I told my daughter, “You will never know the struggle of trying to make a late night phone call with a friend.”

She gave me the look that can only be interpreted as, “You’re old.”

“Look,” I said. “You’ve got it great. You can talk to your friends whenever you want. You can text, call, Snapchat whenever you want, and you can do this in your room.”

Again, Dad is old.

That’s when I decided to lay out the “I walked five miles uphill to school both ways in snow and the occasional lava flow” for my generation.

“You don’t know what it’s like to try and coordinate a late-night call with someone using call-waiting and the movie listings recording!”

Blank stare.

It occurred to me that my daughter has no idea what call-waiting is (was?) or that there was a time when you had to call the movie theater and listen to a recording of what was playing when.

That second one hit her especially hard. “That seems awful…” Indeed, child. The struggle was real.

I explained to my daughter that if you wanted to talk to someone late at night, without your parents being woken up, you had a very well coordinated strategy.

Step one: Synchronize your watches. Gotta get on the same time page.

Step two: Designate a time for said phone call. 11:00 was usually a good time, as parents were presumably asleep.

Step three: First person calls the movie theater at 10:59 to listen to the recordings of movie show times. (“Adventures in Babysitting will be playing at…” “Revenge of the Nerds 2: Nerds in Paradise will be playing at…”

Step four: Second person calls your home number at 11:00.

Step five: Click over to accept call.

Step six: Victory. And a 30-minute conversation about probably some of the stupidest stuff ever uttered into a phone.

My daughter’s response: “That seems like a lot of work just to talk to your friend.”

A lot of work indeed, child. A lot of work indeed. We did the heavy lifting of the 80s that I can only hope ushered in the era of technology that lets you communicate ad nauseum with your friends into the wee hours of the night without disturbing your parents.

I am sure my daughter has a new appreciation of the struggles of my youth and is now eternally grateful for how easy her life is compared to the hard scrabble world of an 80s kid. Should she, at some point, fail to show that grasp of the divide between our worlds, I will have no choice but to sit her down and have a long talk about what encyclopedias and card catalogs are.

Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, he now lives in Mt. Pleasant. You can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.

 

We were having dinner the other night, and we decided a good topic of conversation would be “The times we tricked you foolish, foolish children.”

OK, so that wasn’t expressly what was stated at the beginning, but the conversation did head that way. My kids are teens now, and we find it fun to look back on when they were little and my wife and I navigated the parenting waters and we maybe used a smidge of literary license to help us get through the day. I am sure other parents can relate. For those of you with young kids or planning on having kids in the future, tuck some of these away for future use.

• We were at Disney years ago, and they had a station where you could make and then buy your own Star Wars light saber. My son was about three, and he was very excited about building his own. At the conclusion, I told him, “OK, now put the parts back in their right places so other kids can build them.” I never mentioned that you could actually buy your creations. Dutifully, he put all the parts back, and we didn’t buy one. Lest you think I am awful, remember that this was rather smart savings, as there was roughly a 100 percent chance that the light saber would not have made it out of the store intact.
• The ice cream truck went through our neighborhood a good bit. And we USUALLY went out and got a treat. But some days, ice cream is just the last thing we wanted to contend with. “Yeah, I used to turn the TV up so you wouldn’t hear it sometimes,” my wife confessed. Sometimes, the ice cream truck just isn’t in the day’s plans.
• We used to live in a very popular Halloween neighborhood. The kids would come home with pounds of candy. They could have eaten nothing but candy until the next Halloween and had plenty left over. After they went to sleep on Halloween, we would get a decent selection for them to have over the next week or so, and the rest would magically disappear, often at our places of employment. One year, we decided to store all of the candy in a bin and just hang onto it until the next Halloween, at which point we could repurpose it for trick or treaters. Fun fact: If you store candy in a bin where squirrels can get to it, you will, a year later, find yourself a bin with nothing but shredded candy wrappers and squirrel droppings.
• Never upset cows. We were riding home from a trip, and the kids were starting to squabble in the back seat. As we rode through some rural country land, surrounded on both sides by cow pastures, my wife loudly announced, “KIDS! QUIET! THERE ARE COWS!!!!” Both kids went silent immediately. I glanced at my wife. “Cows?” I mouthed. She shrugged. But they were quiet for the next half hour or so.
• We used to have a pool, and we would always sit with the kids when they were swimming. One of our strongest rules: Thunder = no more pool. In the house. Now. There MAY have been a time or two when, as both kids emerged from underwater, I said, “I heard thunder. Everyone inside.” Sometimes,  you’ve gotta get homework done.
• Turns out, dentists do not require you to come for a wiggly tooth. When my daughter was young, my wife informed her that a tooth that was dangling by a single nasty little thread had to be dealt with, or, per our dentist, we would have to come in for an appointment, that we may have told her was already set. Thank goodness she did not call the bluff and she let my wife deal with the tooth, so we didn’t have to fast track a non-necessary dentist appointment.

Now, I know some of you are perfect people and never stretch the truth to fit your parenting agenda. And congratulations. You’re better than we are. I think our kids have grown up just fine, and I kinda enjoy sharing with them the stories of how we had to creatively parent at times. Hopefully, this will help them when they are parents, and their children are upsetting the cows and the thunder is getting closer.

Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, he now lives in Mt. Pleasant. You can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.

I think we can all agree that the single most fun day a family can celebrate together is Cleaning Day.

Just listen to the shouts of joy from the kids! (Teenagers shouts of joy sound strangely similar to whines and moans.)

Yes, we (and by “we” I mean my wife and I) decided we (and by “we” I mean “my wife and I and the kids even if they came kicking and screaming”) were all going to knock out some housekeeping. My wife and I dutifully informed the kids that they both had a few chores they were going to have to take care of. We informed them of this when we were in a moving car so they had no escape and would have to listen to what their tasks would be.

The chores were fairly simple. Granted, based on their reaction, I think it’s a pretty good thing my kids weren’t born into Little House on the Prairie.

My daughter is 16, and we let her have as much privacy as possible in her room. And as long as the door can shut, we don’t really care too much what her room looks like. But every so often, we are greeted with two options: Good ol’ cleaning overhaul or we cut that section out of the house, move it safely away, and burn it.

She set off on her room cleaning initiative with minimal grumbling. I clean at a rather frenzied pace, so I decided I would let my daughter clean without being near her as she cleans at the speed of a very tired sloth, and it probably wouldn’t be very productive if I kept saying, “CLEAN FASTER!!!”

I did offer to assist by taking down any cups she had in her room. Fun fact: A teenage girl’s room can house well over 1,000 half-full Tervis tumblers.

Our son’s assigned chore was very specifically geared toward him: Clean up the giant tackle box that our front porch had become.

He is an avid fisherman, and he spends as much time when he’s at home at the ponds near our house. He keeps a lot of his fishing gear right at the front door so he can grab his stuff on the go.

Unfortunately, over time the gear gets rather spread out, often occupying the table and chairs on our front porch. My son doesn’t quite get the need for organizing something such as fishing gear on your front porch. He also doesn’t get the need for shoes, showers, shirts or eating off a plate. (We do hope one day to fully domesticate him.)

His first attempt to get out of the chore was to tell me that his tackle box was broken. I pointed at the very much not broken tackle box sitting amidst the lures and hooks and such. He informed me that was his saltwater tackle box. Oh, silly me. How foolish not to know.

Then, in what can only be described as a brilliant Jedi mind trick, we soon found ourselves at the store, picking out a new tackle box for his freshwater stuff. And a new rod. And some bobbers.

Oh, wait it can be described as something else: I’m a sucker.

In short order, he had his new tackle box organized, and the front porch looked far more orderly. He was off fishing in no time. (For what it’s worth, I am sure the order will be maintained for, oh, let’s give it two hours.)

So their onerous workday complete, both kids were able to resume their life of leisure and get back to doing the thing they love most: Not having to clean. Ma and Pa Ingalls would be so proud of their efforts.

Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, he now lives in Mt. Pleasant. You can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.

 

We were bored on a recent Saturday night, and my kids were wanting to do something fun. We weighed our options.

Board game? Nah. Movie? Nah. Chase you sister around the house with a Nerf gun and shoot her all night? One yes, one no, one abstention.

My daughter said, “We should make slime!”

Now, keep in mind my kids are teenagers, and well past the age when they were first introduced with making slime in school. That said, it kinda sounded like something fun to do, so why not.

I sent the kids to the store to get the required ingredients, which are incredibly complicated (glue and Borax). For all the parents who dread their kids driving, trust me, there are perks. Wanna make slime on a Saturday night? Fine. Go get the stuff yourself while I sit in a quiet house for a few minutes.

They were back in no time with the ingredients and in short order we had slime. I posted a picture on Facebook with the kids making their concoctions, with the post “Never too old to make slime.”

A teacher friend of mine commented, “I’m sorry, but that stuff is the bane of every teacher’s existence.”

And teacher friend, I feel your pain. My mother was a teacher, and I know how hard it is to be a teacher, and not just because my mom had the unfortunate teaching experience of having me as a student.

There are quite a few annoying fads that teachers have to deal with, and more pop every year. I remember when I was a kid, and one fifth grade teacher had to put a moratorium on bee catchers, these little paper contraptions we concocted that made a fantastically annoying clacking noise when you smacked them back and forth. We found them delightful. The adult tasked with trying to teach us math? Not so much.

There are several other fads that are quite popular right now that I am sure teachers cannot wait to see them go the way of the bee catcher.

Among those:

• Bottle flipping. For those of you not familiar with this, bottle flipping involves a partially full bottle of water that is flipped, with the goal of landing it right side up. Or, you can really show your pro level and “cap it,” meaning you land it on the, surprise, cap. If you have never been around a bottle flipper before, do this: Have someone every so often come and just slap the table you are sitting at. Or the coffee table next to you. Or just any surface near you, in particular when you are sitting at your computer trying to compose an email.
• Your mom. Not, not yours. But apparently, responding, “Your mom” is the trendy way to respond to any and every question. Seeing as how this was a popular thing back when we were making bee catchers, I’m not sure this one will die any time soon.
• Fidget spinners. If you’re not familiar with these, they are these little spinner devices that kids love to constantly spin. And fidget. And there is a reason most every teacher on planet earth currently wants all fidget spinners to disappear forever.

I am sure there other annoyances teachers would love to see go away, and I’d love for you to share them with me. I’ll be happy to write a follow-up column. Until then, remember, summer is close. And you will soon be out of the bottle-flipping, fidget-spinning, your-mom nightmare. I just hope I haven’t inadvertently starting a resurgence in bee catchers.

Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, he now lives in Mt. Pleasant. You can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.

 

I’m no fan of cliches. I try to avoid them in my writing and in my everyday speech. In fact, I avoid them like the plague.

Ha! See what I did there?

Anywho, I recently rattled off a couple of cliches that, in retrospect, were two of the most true things I’ve ever said: “I’m just glad no one was hurt” and “We can replace a car. We can’t replace you.”

Yes, my daughter has had that unfortunate life experience to check off the list: a car wreck.

We got the call the other evening. My wife came darting to the porch where I was sitting. “Come on. Allie’s been in a wreck.”

She filled me in as we sprinted to my car. Allie had rear-ended someone a couple of blocks from our house. She was OK, my wife told me, but obviously a wreck emotionally as well.

When we pulled up, we saw the two cars in the middle of the road. Allie’s car was all kinds of smashed up, with the hood buckled and airbags deployed. The car she hit had much less damage, with just a bit of a mangled rear bumper.

This was one of those parenting moments where you realize that the cliche really is the only thing that’s accurate at that point. It’s like when your wife is pregnant and someone asks if you want a boy or a girl. Yeah, most of us just really are hoping for a healthy baby. Or when you are  a dad out with your kids and someone says, “Babysitting today?” and you respond, “No, I’m parenting.” While that last one might not be a cliche, I felt it needed to be said.

The officer came and gave us an accident report (yes, it was her fault), and car was soon on the back of a truck headed to a tow yard.

I started the insurance fun the next morning. The day after that, we got the news we kind of expected: the car was totaled.

Quick backstory on the car: The car was a Christmas gift to her a couple of years ago from my inlaws. It has been her great uncle’s car, who passed away at the age of 94. Her grandparents decided that it would be a good first car, and surprised her with it. We even had an elaborate reveal that involved a scavenger hunt and concluded with her grandfather, rocking a Santa shirt, pulling it out of the garage to surprise her. The look on her face was priceless, and she loved this car with all her heart. It was her baby.

So, needless to say, the news that it was totaled was devastating.

And while that news stunk, I prefer to look at it this way: The car took the brunt of the wreck so that my daughter didn’t. It was the K-2SO of cars that day. (If that makes no sense, ask a Star Wars fan to explain.) Thank you, Chevrolet, and the safety engineers who made this so. Thank you, Nana and Pop, for passing down a car that she would not only love, but that, far more importantly, would keep her safe.

Allie got back behind the wheel a couple of days after the wreck. The first time I offered the chance, she politely declined. I think she was considering just how bad it would be to ride a bike everywhere from now on. But alas (cliche alert) back on the horse.

We have definitely used the experience to be overbearing parents with copious amounts of lectures and lessons learned. Our daughter has dutifully endured them.

We will figure out what we do from here. She made a mistake, but we all do. I had a wreck when I was her age, as did her mother, and we both became much better drivers as a result. You’re in charge of a one-ton rolling box that, while designed to protect you, is not perfect. Don’t make the same mistake twice.

So we move on. And in the interest of avoiding any more cliches, I will just remind my daughter that her future driving performance should be improved by this, if she learns the lessons it taught. I am confident she will be a better driver now. And she will she show us that is the case with safe driving from here on out, as actions speak louder than words. (See what I did again?)

Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, he now lives in Mt. Pleasant. You can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.