Tag Archives: community

The boys have really great grandparents

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During this vacation I have been getting a lot of time not being dad duty. Time spent doing not much of anything and it has been restful and fun. I have watched a bit of Little League, some PGA Championship, and of course some HGTV. I realize how lucky I am to have parents on both sides of our family that love spending time with our boys and who are adventurous and capable. I have some friends whose parents like being with their grandkids but they end up not giving the parents a break because they aren’t up for the tough stuff. They will play with them if they are happy and clean but if there is a need for discipline or a dirty diaper they pass them back off. While it’s nice to get any breaks it is the tough stuff that we need the most help with.

Thank you Grandma and Papa, Grammie and Tom Tom for being such fun and supportive grand parents. You guys are down for the fun times and the hard times and as parent I am supper thankful. When you have the boys it is truly a break for Beautiful and I. You guys are encouraging of our parenting choices, respectful when you don’t agree, and offer great advice even if we don’t take advantage of it enough. You love your grandkids enough to honor their parents, and this seems like it would always be true but I have seen that it is not. I have seen how lucky we are to have such a great support system and for our boys to have a fuller community. Thank you

Part of the Fatherhood Friday group of blogging Fathers and Mothers over at Dad Blogs. Please click on the image to the left to find more great writing from other bloggers trying to make sense of this whole parenting thing

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Great big family dinners

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Last night we had a dinner that was so familiar and yet hadn’t happened in a long time. My brother and his wife are here with their 11 month old, my mom and dad came up from Clatskanie and our friends from Vancouver that we grew up with in Southern California came over for some grilled goodness. When we all lived in Santa Barbara this was an almost weekly scene at one of our houses but happens less often now that we have spread out. We had marinated steaks, corn on the cob, fresh french bread, and an apple walnut salad. There was watermelon slices and ice cream sandwiches for dessert and friends and family as far as the eye could see. For the first time we even had a kids table that none of the kids wanted to sit at. We felt so grown up.

Gathering for big meals is a fundamental part of our community and big part of our continued closeness. When we are sitting around the table, passing the butter and the stories, we are reminded of how lucky we are to have each other and to still be so close. Guys that we have known since we were in Junior high are still friends, and when we come together even after a long time we pick right back up. We are trying to get my brother and sister in law to leave the sweltering summers of Arizona behind and join us in the lovely Northwest but I think that is going to be a tough sell. The love the area and being close to family but they have a community there that will be hard to leave. The rest of those guys we grew up with are there in the Phoenix area so we will need bigger guns. The fishing trips, and snuggly nephews helps but we need jobs more friends to join them on the Oregon trail. We will keep the pressure up with dinners like the one we had last night, wining and dining them until they come around.

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Thinking of a time now past

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Before moving to Portland we lived in Indiana in this great downtown neighborhood called Fountain Square. It’s one of those neighborhoods that was cut off from the city center when the freeway came to town but has bounced back all these years later. This sunday as I think of what I will make for dinner in our new community here in Portland, I think back to the community we had there. Below is a post from my old blog about Sunday Nights in Fountain Square:

Sunday nights we have dinner with a growing group of people in our neighborhood. The meal is hosted by a different family each week and we now have 9 different families who host meals. The host invites whomever they want to join the core group and the meals are always great. This past Sunday dinner was at the Aalsma’s house which is one of my favorite places in the neighborhood. The Aalsma’s are just so cool that you could easily be intimidated, but they are too friendly for that feeling to last long. Their house is big with lots of great art, funky old furniture, stacks of books, and toys for kids of all ages. They had two tables set up in the dinning room and kids running around everywhere as parents took turns eating and watching each others kids.

Like I said the meals are always great but part of the magic of Sunday nights is community. The living of life in close proximity to each other. I got my haircut in the middle of the room where the babies were pulling every toy they could reach out of the box on the floor. Older kids ran around Tina as she deftly maneuvered her pregnant belly and scissoredhands without hitting me with either. College Basketball played silently on the TV in the corner even though very few beside me cared what happened between Kansas and Kentucky. A friend of one of the families, who happened to be a pediatrician, stopped by to check on an ear of one of the kids. Around the table Beautiful was recruiting writers for the neighborhood paper and babysitting duties were traded like baseball cards.

Next week the dinner will be at our house again and it might be nice enough to be outside. I can’t wait to see what happens, who comes, where the conversations goes, what gets broken. This week beautiful and I will worry about what to make, not with any unhealthy pressure to impress, but with the desire to cook something fitting of the great people that will come. We will invite someone from Beautiful’s work that she wants to be friends with and neighbors from down the block. It will be a great night and most of us will not realize just how great until years later. We don’t often get a sense for how great something is until much later in life but lately I have had a real tangible sense of how great Sunday night is. There is something so beautiful about the time, the people, the whole event that I sometimes start to think about when it will inevitably end and can’t help but get sad. But it is not ending this week, and this week we get to have our house over run with life and the energy of it lived in such close proximity and it makes me smile.

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She’s a keeper my Beautiful

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Last night for dinner we had a great Smoked Salmon gnocchi with asparagus out on the deck. A nice Rose wine and some fresh bread rounded out a great meal. We were sitting on the benches Beautiful made and eating off the table she made as well. There was an old door behind the house that she built a base for and put the two together for a long deck table. She cut flowers from our front yard and a table cloth that was purchased for my birthday party, then lost, then found days later completed the presentation.

Now we are all about tweaking traditional gender roles in our house what with a stay at home dad and shared cooking responsibilities, but Beautiful seems to be taking it to whole new level. She is both the traditional man and the traditional woman leaving me wondering what she needs me around for.

Before we got married she worried that I would make her wear long flowing dress and bake cookies for the bible studies in our basement but it seems much more likely that I will be clearing out that basement so her table saw and serger will fit with the welding machine and boxes of ribbons. The truth is I love it. I love the creativity that comes spilling out of every nook and cranny of that house. We are just as likely to have a new piece of furniture she made as we are to have a new painting in the guest room she whipped up to tie the room together. The boys have the shirts Beautiful made them as they play with the parking garage she made out of left over wood scraps from the addition she put on the back of the house. (OK maybe she hasn’t done that, yet)

She does so many things better then I do but sadly, in our kids eyes, there is one thing that Daddy does better and it’s a big one. When it comes to Saturday morning pancakes there is no competition. I have a gift for slap jacks as my little brother still calls them, and try as she might she can’t get rid of me just yet. She wants those pancakes, she needs those pancakes. I’m safe…….for now.

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Dads night out

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Tonight I joined a handful of other dads at Posie’s cafe here in North Portland to do some beer tasting and help decide what their new seasonal beer will be from Dechuttes Brewery. I feel my being a dad, and loving beer makes me uniquely qualified for this dads night out assignment. We tried five different brews: two IPAs, an Amber, a Pale Ale, and a stout and for me the clear winner was the new Hop Henge IPA. It was an exciting and strong brew with a hint of Grapefruit and nice full taste. I can also see myself ordering the 22 ounce next time I’m here provided that next time isn’t music time with Mr. Ben. While the beer tasting was great what really made the night was the conversation with the guys that were here giving up their Thursday night for such noble beer tasting work. I have written before about how tough it is to have a good conversation with guys at the zoo with while we are looking after our kids but we had no such issues carrying on a conversation sans kids and with a tasty Black Butte Porter in hand. The conversation ranged from the best Sushi place in the twin cities to Solar options in South East Portland with tangents and stories coming fast and furious. After a really great day outdoors with the boys this night was a nice cherry on top of a great day. There are times when I am so ready to get out and away from the screaming and fights over cars but today was not that day. Tonight was not an escape but a nice time of talk that had nothing to do with Dinosaur Train or Good Night Moon. I highly recommend a dads or moms night out, it feeds the soul and if beer is involved all the better.

Fatherhood Friday at Dad Blogs

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