Solving the Rubik’s Cube

“Buddy did a great job today,” a grade school teacher said to me as I walked by her in the hall.

“Oh, yeah? With what?” I asked.

“He solved the Rubik’s cube under the Elmo,” she replied.

We had walked past each other at this point, so even though I had no idea why Buddy would hold his hands under a stuffed Sesame Street character when solving the Rubik’s Cube I said, “That’s great” and continued on my way back to the high school and my own class.

It turns out that the “Elmo” is a document projector and Buddy had solved the Rubik’s cube while it was being projected up on the big screen during an assembly. Pretty cool stuff for a 10 year old.

One of the things that educators love is to see independent learning. One of the “opportunities” that big families offer is a lot of independent learning. Mom and dad often have too much going on to hold the hand of every child in the home.

I had shown Buddy a You-Tube video on how to solve the Rubik’s Cube, but that was it. After that, he was on his own. I did not even know that he had finally got it down until I found out in the hallway conversation above that he not only had it down, he was performing for the school.

Well, when one brother does something sweet like that, another brother wants in on the action. Little Foot got Buddy to show him the You-Tube video and he then learned how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. Pretty cool stuff for an 8 year old.

Beggar's Night Costumes

Little Miss Anna dressed up as a cheerleader.



F.G. as a black Crayola crayon.



Little Foot as a bow hunter.



Miss Bookworm and Ed as injured soccer players. This fit pretty well since Ed could not play in the tournament this weekend since she has pneumonia.


K.D. as a rock star.


Buddy as a headless man walking on his hands. He sure got a lot of comments on his costume as we roamed the neighborhood.



Here are the pumpkins this year. One was designed by Miss Bookworm and the other by Buddy.

Needed: Nurse’s Clipboard and Second Thermometer

“Hi, hon,” I said. I was calling CrazyMom on my way home from work on Monday to let her know that which she already knew – I was running late. I was expecting her to start reminding me about how I only had 11 minutes before I had to leave for the soccer fields.

“I have four kids with fevers in the house,” she said.

“Four kids? How can that be?”

I was incredulous because this fact went against my understanding of how this world should be dealing with us. It all started a few weeks ago when the first kid got sick. We were pretty much processing the kids sequentially – when one kid would recover, the next kid, who was secretly incubating, would go down.

On Sunday CrazyMom was not with me at church because she was home with a child who was nearly recovered and another child who was the latest casualty. I remember telling others that we were basically out of the woods now. We were running out of kids to get sick, so the end was near.

Well, I was wrong. Now it was Monday evening and kids who had recovered were relapsing.

When I got up this morning and came down for breakfast, only two kids were up and able to make it to the breakfast table. It sure made for a quiet breakfast.

Later in the day, I got an email from CrazyMom giving me the current medical status of each child at home. At the end of the message she wrote:

“I need a nurse’s clipboard and a second thermometer.”

Camping with Friends

“Oh, I have been meaning to tell you,” said CrazyMom as she sat next to me in the RV. “F.G. is missing school on Monday.”

We were packed up and heading out of town to go camping with friends on what we thought was a long weekend for the family. Managing all of the different school schedules got the best of us, however, and we did not realize that F.G. would miss a day of school. Our big-family friends ended up having the same problem for their kids as well. But we did not let a little school ruin a fantastic family outing. Here are some photos of the trip.

bump . . . Bump . . .BIG BUMP!

While I am by no means a packrat, there are a few odd things that I have hung onto over the years. The other day I went up to the attic and pulled down the scooter that I use to ride around campus in my college days. Yes, I did say scooter and I do mean the type that you push with your foot.

The front tire was rotted out, so I called CrazyMom on her cell and had her stop by a bike store to pick up a new tire on her way home from doing errands.

When she got back to the house, I was hunched over the scooter on the garage floor working on it with kids around me. She handed me the tire and said, “bump . . . bump . . . big bump.” I looked up, caught her eye and grinned as we exchanged knowing glances among kids wanting to know what was going on. It was the same phrase that I had been thinking of ever since I pulled the scooter down from the attic and to hear it in her own voice, albeit devoid of the urgency with which it was originally spoken, was delightful.


It was a warm evening back in our college days when I was giving a ride to CrazyMom (I guess it was CrazyGirlfriend at the time) on my scooter. She would stand on the front part of the foot area while I stood on the back and reached around her to hold onto the handlebars. As we were weaving our way through streets and parking lots, we finally came to the sidewalk outside of her apartment building. CrazyMom saw that the pads were uneven ahead creating a bump in the sidewalk.

“bump,” she said in a normal voice to point out to me what was ahead.

Now, us guys are a funny breed. We have a streak in us that produces everything from knights in shining armor to cocky boys full of themselves. This streak kept me on my current course.

“Bump,” CrazyGirlfriend said again a little louder clearly communicating that we were coming upon a dangerous situation.

Little did CrazyGirlfriend know that earlier I had jumped two side-by-side parking curbs with room to spare. This two-inch rise in the pavement paled in comparison to that. I held my course, flexed my knees, and prepared to wow the woman of my dreams.

“BIG BUMP!” came her cry as I pulled up hard on the front handlebars. The front wheel did not clear the bump and CrazyGirlfriend went over the bars and into the pavement only to have me then land on top of her.

This was not the last time that CrazyMom would utter a warning that I would not heed, but over time I have finally come around to listening to them. Now when we are driving in a car and CrazyMom yells, “CrazyD!” I automatically hit the brakes.

Gone Camping

“But in a motor home the kids could play cards as we went down the road,” CrazyMom was saying. All nine of us were packed into the van on a road trip to Grandma and Grandpa F’s house (my folks). CrazyMom and I were reliving the same debate that we had been having for the last five years – she wants a motor home, but I want a travel trailer.

“The last thing we need is another engine to maintain. Plus, they cost a lot more money,” I said as I had said over and over for five years.

Then I looked in the back bench of our twelve passenger van. Miss Bookworm was sitting there reading.

“Hon,” I said in a softer, different tone. “Miss Bookworm is 13. If we talk about this for five more years, then it will all be over. She will be out of the house and we will never have been a camping family. I don’t care if it is a motor home, travel trailer, or a pop up. We need to get something - even if it is the wrong thing - this summer and just start camping.”

CrazyMom agreed and we purposed to find something soon.

The next day we were sitting in the shade in Grandma and Granpa’s yard watching the kids roll by on the go-cart. In my line of sight was their camper sitting in the field where it had been parked for a year or so. I did not think anything of it until the night before we were to leave their place.

“Hey Grandpa F, what are you guys doing with that camper?” I asked. By the next afternoon, after a tow out of the field, a new battery and right front brake calipers, we were on our way, driving the RV.

Here are some shots of our first camping trip that we did at the end of summer. It was a fabulous time together as a family and we are looking forward to our second outing this fall.

First Day of School

We are a multi-school type of family with kids spread all over the place. Each year CrazyMom and I put our heads together to figure out what would be the best option for each of our children. This year Miss Bookworm and Ed will be homeschooled, F.G. will be in a public school, and Buddy, Little Foot, K.D. and Anna will be at the private school where I teach.

We (almost) always snap a few photos as we send them off to school on the first day. It is fun to see these photos over the years to see how the kids change physically, but also to see how excited they are each fall to kick off a new school year.

Anna's "Gift" to Ed

“Mom, I want somebody to sleep with me,” Anna was saying as CrazyMom put her to bed. It is part of the nightly routine for Anna. We tuck her in bed and pray with her being sure to include the phrase “no bad dreams, only good dreams” verbatim. Then she tells us how much she wants somebody to sleep with her and where their bed could go in her room.

But this night Anna got an idea.

“Mom! I know! Tomorrow is Ed’s birthday and I will let her sleep with me!”

Ed was a great sport about her birthday present and spent a night on the floor next to Anna.

Cactus Rolling

As soon as I heard CrazyMom’s scream coming from the bathroom, I knew I had done a very stupid thing. In fact, the scream carried with it certain unique tones that instantly conveyed to me that this was clearly the stupidest thing I had ever done in my life.

It was not until many years later that I learned the name of my folly. It is called cactus rolling. A psychologist that spoke at a training seminar that I was attending told a fictional story about a group that was on tour of a botanical garden. When they were in the desert section, a man from the group suddenly threw himself headlong into the cacti and started immediately yelping in agony. A few minutes later when the medics had him on the gurney and were about to roll him away, another guy from the group asked the question that was on everybody’s mind – “What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” replied the man. “It seemed like a good idea at the moment.”

We have all gone cactus rolling before. We have what seems like a good thought, we act on it, and in the briefest of moments we realize that it was a really, really bad idea.

CrazyMom’s scream was the brief moment where I realized my folly. This happened back when we only had Miss Bookworm who was two years old and Ed who was five months old. While CrazyMom’s parents were visiting us, she was beginning to think that the unlikely had happened – that she might be pregnant again. Now we loved children even back then, but it was a little soon for us to be cranking out child number three.

CrazyMom did not want to take a pregnancy test while her parents were there knowing that I always liked for us to have some time before we went public with a pregnancy. After a few days the morning came for CrazyMom’s folks to go home. When they pulled out of the driveway, CrazyMom promptly went upstairs to take her pregnancy test and a shower.

When I heard the shower come on, I knew it must have been negative. I also knew that while the first line for the test shows up right away, it sometimes takes a little while for the second line, which indicates a positive result, to show up. So, an idea came to my poor little noggin. I picked up a trusty blue pen, slipped into the bathroom, added a blue line to the little window on the pregnancy tester changing the “-“ to a “+”, and slipped out again.

I was standing outside of the door grinning from ear to ear when I heard the water shut off, the curtain being drawn back . . . and then the scream. My grin turned to terror as I realized my folly. I burst into the bathroom to start undoing the shock that I had induced and I found CrazyMom still standing in the shower with her face buried in her towel.

Lucky for me, she was unarmed.

As you already know, our marriage has survived this and some of my other cactus rolling episodes. One of the great lessons I have gotten from this is that if a mature adult like me still goes cactus rolling, then obviously my children will too. When a child does something that is so utterly senseless and injures another child in the process to boot, I am tempted to yell at them WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!?! Rather, I should make it a teachable moment and say, “I bet it seemed like a good idea at the moment, didn’t it? That is what we call cactus rolling. Did I ever tell you about the time I had this trusty blue pen . . .”

When Low Capacity Leads to High Capacity

For Mother’s Day, I got CrazyMom a copy of Mary Ostyn’s book A Sane Woman’s Guide to Raising a Large Family. Evidently one of the things that Mary promotes is a high-capacity front-load washer and dryer. This idea has resonated with CrazyMom, but it is important to point out that these are expensive items and that we already have a functioning washer and dryer.

On Friday morning CrazyMom was driving me to the doctor to have a medical procedure done that involved me getting knocked out for a short period of time. As we were cruising down the interstate, CrazyMom started to explain to me how she started a fund to save up for a high-capacity washer and dryer. I did a little calculation in my head and figured it would take her about a decade to save up enough money, which was great since in a decade half of our kids would be out of the house and we would no longer need them.

Late Friday afternoon I got a call on my cell from my doctor to see how I was doing. I told him that I was recuperating just fine, leaving out the fact that I was standing at a counter in an appliance store purchasing a high-capacity washer and dryer rather than resting at home.


On the way home from the store I was feeling surprisingly happy despite the amount of money that I had just spent to replace our functioning washer and dryer. Looking over at my beautiful bride I said, “Would you have ever thought this morning that we would have purchased these appliances today?”

CrazyMom smiled back. “No,” she said . . . and then she dropped the bomb . . . “especially since the anesthesiologist said that after going under you should not make any big purchases today.”

So that was it. I was operating at a low capacity which is why we ended up with a high-capacity washer and dryer. That CrazyMom is a crafty lady. At least she did not take full advantage of the situation. It is hard to believe, but I also wanted to get a new refrigerator while we were there. Luckily, CrazyMom talked me out of it.