Because I Said So: Season of transition a fashion nightmare

My mother will take great pleasure in this week's "Because I Said So" column because I mention that my sons wear jackets to school regardless of the temperature. I did the same thing as a boy and it drove her crazy. I know it drove her crazy because it drives me crazy to see them leave the house with them on and then return home, when the mercury is hovering in the 90s, still wearing them. They say their schools are cold, but I've been in both of their schools in the past week and did just fine without an extra layer of fleece.

Today's column is about the transition from summer to fall, and the requisite lengthening of sleeves and pant legs that comes with cooler weather. For the smallest children, it's as though I'm asking them to hunt and kill a caribou, skin it, tan the hide and fashion their own winter wear.

I'm almost certain I've written a very similar column before, maybe last fall if not the fall prior, but that's what being a parent is, isn't it? It's that endless repetition of seasons and laundry and fits and tempers. For some reason, with each change of the season, I think it's going to improve. I really believe that this year I'll say, "You should wear long pants and a sweater" to whomever the youngest might be and they'll say, "Good thinking, sir, I'll go change into that right now." It's folly to think they'd ever call me "sir." And it's the blind optimism – or shortness of memory – that makes parenthood work. We have to think each year, each season, every day, will get better and easier because if we didn't we'd go mad; or madder.

So pull on your woolen socks, slip on your favorite cardigan, have a seat and enjoy this edition of "Because I Said So."

Season of transition a fashion nightmare

I just returned home from walking a few of my kids up to school, and there was something in the air this morning. It wasn't the apprehension of a looming quiz or the incomplete homework stuffed into backpacks, not this time. I walked on one side of my daughter, holding her hand, while the crispness of autumn touched the other. The sun was lower in the sky at that early hour, and we all remarked on the temperature difference from the previous day's walk.

It isn't cold, not by any stretch, but the thermometer does herald cooler days, days when we'll be donning coats and hats and gloves for the two-block walk each morning.

For now, though, it's simply cooler out, a refreshing respite. Perhaps a light jacket or sweater will suffice; a pair of long pants, certainly. Not for my daughter, though, not yet. For a 6-year-old, these are the days (weeks?) of transition. This is the end of the shorts and short sleeves, the end of sandals and skirts, but it's going to take some time to get used to such a sartorial shift.

Genevieve refused leggings worn beneath a skirt this morning, based solely on color. Navy blue? Not school sanctioned, according to her. The same jacket she wore every day last winter, in and out of school, is suddenly not a proper uniform cover-up. Not that sweater, no, not ever. "But they actually call it 'sweater weather,'" I pleaded.

Her parents, of course, don't know what they're talking about when they assure her that she can wear blue pants, that she can wear that very same jacket she wore only six months ago, that the sweater looks cute on her. But how could we possibly know anything?

This fight doesn't apply to the boys. To be fair, though, my sons have been wearing fleece jackets to school all school year — a year made up mostly of the month of August — as if their first class of the day is Intro to Igloos. It burns me up, literally, to see my son walk in at the end of a school day wearing an admittedly school-appropriate jacket, when the heat index is 103.

I've asked my sons not to wear jackets when it's still so hot outside, but they say their classrooms are cold. I tell my daughter she should wear one because it's cold in the morning, but she says it will be hot at dismissal. I stop talking. I need to have faith that somewhere, maybe in the pockets of that coat, they carry with them the common sense to stay warm or dry, to not succumb to heat stroke in the name of — or the profound lack of — fashion.

When we got to school this morning, we met up with Genevieve's friend, a little girl wearing navy blue pants who seemed comfortable in the morning air. I saw the opportunity to make a point. "See those pants, Genevieve? What color are those?"
The look she returned was chilling.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Forty-eight months old

The first Because I Said So column I wrote for The Commercial Appeal appeared on April 17, 2008. Four years ago today. And it's still in the archives!

We still had a kid in diapers and daycare then, and we were probably just a little in awe (and fear) of what we'd produced. It was an exciting time, wasn't it? There seemed no end to the subject matter and fodder for columns. I hope you have all enjoyed the ride, I know I have, even if we haven't successfully colonized the moon ... yet.

Thank you to my editor, Peggy Reisser, and partner in crime for so long, Stacey Greenberg. Thank you to my kids for putting up with being put under a microscope and in a clown suit by me for so many years.

I hope you will enjoy that very first column all over again:

Real kids shrink notions of big family

My grandparents, Bob and Shirley Fachini, raised seven children, a respectable number by anyone's standards.

It was the 1950s and '60s, a much simpler era, I'm told. Families were larger then because this country needed as many citizens as possible to fight communism, go to Saturday movie matinees for a nickel and colonize the moon.

They would later come to call these babies "boomers," because of how much noise that many children, at one time, in one place, will make.

Their house was warm and loving and, sure, it was cramped, but they made do. Bob built a table large enough for everyone to eat around, and Shirley sewed dresses for the girls.

It sounds like an idyllic time, and the stories of the antics of my aunts and uncles as kids have engaged me since I was a child.

It was those stories that had me wanting a large family of my own.

My wife, Kristy, and I have four children between the ages of 21 months and 10 years. And, as it turns out, we're done.

That's right. I don't know what got into my grandparents' brains to make them think seven kids was a good idea, but I'm afraid something had to be a little off for two intelligent people to willingly welcome that many little people to live with them.

By stopping now, we're not squashing my dream of raising a big family, because four is the new seven.
When Kristy and I tell people, especially new parents with only one child, that we have four, the look we get is generally awe and amazement.

Never envy.

Maybe just a hint of pity. Yes, mostly pity, now that I think of it.

The truth is, we weren't exactly sure at the beginning what we were doing.

Kristy researched parenting styles, while I was content, and over my head, just keeping the kid alive and somewhat happy. Ten years, and three babies later, it's still all I can do.

But our home now is full of love. Just as much with love, in fact, as it is with discarded Pop-Tart wrappers, broken and mismatched toys, half-emptied cups of milk and diapers, both clean and dirty.

Parenthood is an easy enough club to enter, though staying in the good graces of the club's membership board -- your kids -- is tricky.

Nothing was easy for my grandparents either, yet they signed on for seven kids and dealt with them as they showed up. And if they could handle seven, then four should be cake, right? Or at least a chocolate icing-smeared face smiling up at us.

We're doing our best with our quartet, in the spirit and with the tenacity of my grandparents.

We'll send them to the best schools we can, we will communicate openly with them and we'll raise them to be caring and informed citizens, who will one day, hopefully, grow up to colonize the moon.

Because I Said So: Bedtime pleas won't deter parents' voyage into silence

I only have one child left who will stand for me to read to her. The boys consider themselves too old and learned for that sort of thing and G, at 5 years old, will only be read to by her mother these days. But S still looks forward to being read to at bedtime. She doesn't look forward so much to bedtime itself, but seems to enjoy our time together and the stories told.

We just finished up "Treasure Island" and we both enjoyed it. I was worried she would grow bored with Robert Louis Stevenson's tale as it's written with all the formal, roundabout 19th-century speak of the Victorian language. But she hung in there. After a chapter - or during - I would stop and we would discuss what was going on so that we both stayed on course and understood just what the conversation and action was all about. And there is plenty of action for a 9 year old, from threats and gun play to knife-throwing, mutiny and desertion on an uninhabitable island.

It was great fun reading this classic to my daughter and I'm proud of her for staying with it, thinking about it and being willing to discuss it all.

The book and my daughter's own bedtime mutiny is the ballast for today's Because I Said So column copied below. S and I hope you enjoy it, mateys.

I've lately been reading Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" to my 9-year-old daughter at bedtime. Chapter by chapter, we've sailed into the world of buccaneers and squalls, nameless islands and chatty parrots. And night by night, Somerset has pleaded for just 30 more minutes to stay up. The thought of sleep to her, to most kids I would imagine, is akin to walking the plank.

A whole day's worth of fun, hours' worth of television, video games and arguing with siblings, she seems to think, are to be found in that final half-hour before lights out. The unfairness of being forced to her bunk at a reasonable time is quite apparent to her.

Like the characters of Long John Silver, Captain Flint and young Jim Hawkins, Somerset schemes and plots nightly to uncover the treasure of consciousness past the 9-o'clock hour. What fun must take place from then until morning with adults eating ice cream as though it were good for us, drinking a cask of rum, or watching television and movies with explosions and expletives.

Sure, all of that happens, but it's our right.

After four decades of living, my cumulative experience and wisdom have led me to understand one truth, one undeniable right as unwavering as the pirate's code itself: "zzz" marks the spot. Our children's slumber marks the spot at the end of the day when no one is asking for anything, whining over perceived wrongs, destroying my ship-shape kitchen or arguing with me. There is silence over the horizon of bedtime, and it's what we parents set our course for from the moment we wake. The S.S. Because I Said So is fully provisioned and looking to anchor in the protected Bay of Solitude.

My daughter pleads, rationalizes and emphatically insists that she is not tired. The dark circles, half-closed lids and general crankiness, however, tell me otherwise. By the end of a long school day, there is a map of fatigue etched across her face.

And still she begs.

She's not the only one. We've suffered through night terrors, bad dreams, needing another drink of water ... drink of milk ... hug ... trip to the bathroom. Children are a deceptive crew when it comes to evading sleep. The tricks seem to be universal, and not all that dissimilar to ones I employed as a child.

So perhaps I had it coming to me. Maybe we do reap what we sow. Maybe I should have welcomed sleep when I was 9, and looked upon it as the chance for rest and renewal. And if I had, maybe my own kids would think of bedtime in the same way and leave us with calm waters and balmy breezes each night instead of our regularly scheduled 8:30 p.m. mutiny.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Photograph

"I learned how to play this song on guitar when I was your age," I told my son and his friend as we pulled out of the friend's driveway earlier. My son sat beside me and continued to text while his friend worked on a candy bar in the backseat. "MTV had only recently been born, but we didn't have cable so I'd spend entire weekends at my friend's house watching the twelve videos they rotated through. This was one of them."

"What is it?" C asked.

I was elated he'd asked; elated that he was still breathing there next to me with his nose in his flip phone.

"'Photograph' by Def Leppard." I went on to explain who they were and that the drummer had lost an arm in a car accident yet continued to play with a specially designed drum set. Behind me there was the rustle of candy wrapper, and beside me, more click-click-clicking. "MTV began in August, 1981," I ventured, somewhat ashamed that I was able to reel it off quicker than I could any of my kids' birthdays.

I took guitar lessons when I was 13 or so. My poor instructor attempted to teach me the chords and theory and how to play the damn thing. I wanted to learn how to play 'Photograph' and, perhaps, 'Back in Black' by AC/DC. I was an awful student and it shows today, I still can't play. It wasn't completely my fault, though, or his. I have no rhythm. I could memorize the notes, I just couldn't do anything with them. The idea of learning the principles of music was as foreign to my newly-teenage, freshly-MTVed brain, with all of its lasers and pyrotechnics, as the idea of typing a message to someone on a telephone might have been then. 

I watch my kids now as they struggle to master whatever interests them and it's fascinating for me. They seem so naturally talented in ways that I wasn't, or in ways that I didn't recognize at the time. The other night, while the adults were sitting glassy-eyed and brain dead in front of the talentless field that was the Grammy Awards, JP sat at my computer and wrote a story about the Great Depression for school. It is a fantastic piece. I sat and watched S sketching a bowl of grapes with an onion resting beside it as I cooked dinner the other night and, while the proportions were slightly skewed, I saw the same determination and concentration in her face that I see in my sister's when she sketches. C is also a great writer, having won a Memphis in May short story contest last year, and he's an ever-improving baritone saxophone player as well.

I think one of the greatest things about having kids is watching them develop, seeing their talents and interests grow on a daily basis. They may not stick with each one, they'll probably find new ones to explore and work at as they progress through school and age, but I see now that they commit to ideas and see them through, and that they see the value in such endeavors.

It means a lot to me.

In the car this evening, I had a very distinct muscle memory for how to play the guitar solo in 'Photograph.' I'm sure I couldn't play it if you handed me a guitar because I wouldn't be able to play anything if you handed me a guitar, I have no aptitude for the instrument. And my kids may realize they don't have the talent it takes to continue on a particular track, but for now it's great fun for me to watch them and fun for them to make the attempt.

Much more fun, I'm sure, than a history lesson with soundtrack by The Buggles.