I’m not always a great Dad.  I understand that, and I try to work on it.  Like anyone, some days I do better than others.  For the most part, I think I’m a good Dad.  And every once in a while I feel like I get it right.  Joining karate with my daughter was one of those victories, giving us something to do together every week, an hour of working out and the drive to and from, just the two of us.

Another was with my four-year-old son a while back.  He had been having trouble settling down to bed.  We’d put him down at nine, and he’d bounce right back out into the living room with the cute grin on full power.  (Cute grins are deflector shields for preschoolers, protecting them from parental wrath.)  We tried a number of different tactics with little success.  Then one night I tucked him in and asked if he’d like a song.

He said yes, of course.  Usually mama sings and I tuck him in, but this was a chance for a bonus song from Daddy!  He loved it.  So I told him he could have a Daddy song the next night too … as long as he stayed in bed tonight.

For the rest of the month, there was maybe one night when he didn’t settle down.  That cost him his Daddy song the following night, and he’s been fairly good about settling down ever since.  Victory!

Then last night I was working with him on drawing, learning to hold the crayon and important things like that.  He’s a bit behind his class when it comes to fine motor skills, so I figured it would be good to practice.  But he gets frustrated when his physical coordination can’t keep up with his brain.  We were working on drawing circles, and he was getting cranky and frustrated and wanted to quit.

So I said, “Now we’re going to draw bad circles!”  He got a goofy smile on his face.  “Bad circles?”  I scribbled a zigzag on the paper.  “That’s a really bad circle. Can you do that?”

We had a blast taking turns trying to draw a worse circle than the last. And then something odd happened. He scribbled a quick loop on the page, and it was the best circle he had done all night. More importantly, he was relaxing and having fun. He even colored a (bad) picture of Optimus Prime that I drew.  (My Megatron was apparently unrecognizable, even to my Transformers-crazed boy.)

None of these are huge triumphs for civilization.  But sometimes the small victories are just as important, and just as worthy of celebration and sharing.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Totally random and sappy parenting moment. Feel free to skip.

My son is almost four years old. Every time he takes a bath, he insists on staying in the tub while the water drains out so he can play with the whirlpool.

I love this. I don't know why, exactly... Maybe it's because I remember doing the same thing. Maybe it's the simple fascination and obvious delight he takes in poking the whirlpool and watching it spin back into place. But it's a wonderful moment every time.

That is all. Have a great weekend!

The joke for a book contest is still going on. Follow the link for a shot at a free copy of The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy]. I'll probably do voting on the finalists later this week.

So Friday night, another family invited us to go sledding. My daughter is old enough that she ran off to sled with the other girls, but my son is still three, which means the two of us went down together. I asked him which hill he wanted to do, and he didn't even hesitate. He wanted to do the big hill. So we follow the girls up, and I take a look at this sucker. The park has some respectable hills. Not ski resort size, but impressive.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"I want the big hill!"

So down we go. This was the first time I've been on a sled since ... um ... I don't actually remember the last time, but I'm guessing somewhere in the 10-15 year range. Long enough that the first time down the hill actually left me with that stomach-in-throat roller coaster feeling. There were plenty of bumps, and we were on a rented tube which almost bounced me off at one point. (There was room for him in the middle, but Daddy was riding on the ring itself, gripping the hand loops and praying.)

The instant we reach the bottom, he grins up at me and says, "Let's do that again!"

Being the obliging Dad I am, I pulled him up the hill and we did. Probably 20 times or so over the next hour, and each time he responded with, "Let's do that again!"

By the end of the night, his asthma was acting up, he was getting tired and cranky, and it was time to stop. Me, I had a cramp in my gut from hauling him up the hill so many times, and I was ready to collapse. But I wouldn't trade it for anything.

The sad thing? I almost did. When the sledding idea first came up on Friday, my initial response was a pained groan. Maybe I'm old, but it had been a long week at work, I had a ton of writing-related stuff to do, and I just didn't have much energy left for anything. I have a lot of evenings like that, actually. Evenings where I know I should want to do family time, but what I really want to do deep down is collapse and stop for a while.

I'm not the greatest father in the world, and I know that. The world's best dad wouldn't have hesitated over the chance to go sledding with his kids. But then, I suspect I've got a romanticized view over how "good" parents should think and feel and act.

All I know is I'm glad we went, and I had a wonderful time once we got there. The first time he asked to go again, the look on his face, I wouldn't trade that for anything.

Except, of course, that sometimes I do. We all have a finite amount of time and energy, and we all make choices about what to do with it. Sometimes I think it's too easy for me to lose track of priorities.

I'm just glad I got it right this time.

Thank you to everyone who commented and shared their stories yesterday. I wish I was able to write the kind of thoughtful replies to everyone that you all deserve, but unless I quit the day job or abandon the family to be an Internet hermit... So thank you, both for sharing, and for keeping a potentially inflammatory topic relatively safe and respectful.

Today I find my brain mostly burnt out, and I think I used those last few brain cells working on the Mermaid rewrite, so here's a knock-knock joke from the 3-year-old:

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Banana orange!

At this point, Mama and Daddy start laughing because we know what joke he's trying to tell, even if he doesn't quite get it yet. He sees us laughing, and assumes he's telling a great joke. Thus is banana orange reinforced and told again and again and again.

Let's start with the updates ... page proofs of The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] are read and marked up. Hopefully tonight I'll finish writing them all into an e-mail to DAW, and I'll be officially done with that book. Just in time to talk to my editor about Mermaid revisions :-)

After the first 24 hours, the auction for Stepsister Scheme is up to $103.50. That means whoever wins, you'll be getting at least one bonus prize in addition to the ARC. Thank you everyone who bid, and/or who spread the word about the auction. I obviously hope that price will continue to climb, but even if it doesn't, we've still raised over $100 for NCADV.

Which, in a weird way, transitions into what I wanted to write about today. Originally I was going to post a photo of our house with its nice new roof, with no rusting basketball hoop, no crumbling shingles ... it's very exciting*.

Except that I can't. For the same reason we pay the phone company an extra fee every month to remain unlisted. Because my family had has ... let's call them stalker issues.

It's weird. I don't want to call him a stalker. As soon as the word was down, I wanted to start explaining how it wasn't that bad, and he wasn't a real stalker, not as dangerous as he could have been. I'm absolutely certain he wouldn't consider what he did to be stalking. And it's true, on the grand scale of things, this wasn't as bad as it could have been. When we refused to invite him over, he'd show up anyway, staking out a spot in the driveway and waiting. If we didn't come home after a while, he'd head over to my wife's parents' place.

There are other issues as well, things I won't talk about here**. However much I want to minimize it though, the fact is that when we moved four years ago, we did start paying the extra monthly fee to make sure he couldn't find us. When we went through the court system, we asked them to remove our address from all of the official paperwork. And I still feel uncomfortable posting a photo of my house on a public blog, because it's easy enough to find my hometown, and that photo could be enough for him to find my family.

I wonder if he's shown up at my parents' house yet. My father's name is also Jim and they live in the same town, so if this guy checks the phonebook for Jim Hines, he's going to end up at their place. If so, he didn't stick around long enough for my parents to notice***.

It's annoying. We ended up in court several times, and the judge basically handed him his own ass on a platter. We haven't seen the man in several years. He is an insecure, paranoid, spoiled, and clueless little child of a man, and we've done just about everything to take away any power he might have had. Yet I still worry.

For a long time, our justice system didn't recognize stalking as a crime. "So he followed you around. He didn't actually hurt you, right? Go away and come back after he beats you. Then (maybe) we'll press charges." That's changed some over time, with the advent of stalking laws and personal protection orders and such. But even a PPO can't guarantee your safety. It might guarantee consequences for the stalker if he chooses to continue, but those are still after-the-fact consequences.

It's about power. It's about the stalker planting that idea in your head, making you lie awake at night thinking, Sure, he hasn't done anything yet, but.... So much about domestic violence is mental and emotional rather than physical. Messing with your brain. Physical violence is only one tactic. Those tactics can be economic, emotional, physical, or in most cases, a combination. The goal is power and control over another human being. They don't necessarily have to hurt you; they just need to make you realize that they could, that the threat, however small it might have been in our case, is still real.

In our case, after several years, this man is an irritant. We've fought our battles, and he lost in every way that matters. Even so, the tactic works. He's still got that one hook in my brain. I may not waste a lot of time thinking about him, but every once in a while he still has the power to affect my choices. Even writing this blog entry, a part of me wonders if he's going to read it. If he's going to take it as a victory.

This is one of the reasons I chose NCADV to be the beneficiary for the Stepsister auction. I think we've made progress in how we deal with stalking and DV and such, but it's still not something we talk about as much as we should. Heck, I'm still fighting the urge to scrub this entry because I know this isn't as bad as it could have been, and maybe it's not a big deal anymore, and maybe I've been overreacting, and....

But maybe that's just more reason to post it.

-----
*Well, it's exciting to me. I suspect a lot of you might have been bored stiff. So maybe it's better that I didn't go that route.

**A few of you probably know who I'm talking about, and how complicated it got. Obviously, I'd prefer those details not be brought up here. Thanks!

***My parents also have big, loud dogs who like to bark at visitors :-)

First off, yesterday's PVP just insisted on being made into an LJ icon. I figure it should work well for those of you posting updates on the LHC. Though as a fantasy author, I'm tempted to make a companion icon that swaps "science" and "magic"....

And speaking of science, check it out -- DAW has released electronic editions of Goblin War (scroll down the page for links to Adobe, eReader, and Microsoft Reader formats). Amazon also lists a Kindle edition coming 1/6/09. I don't know if DAW will be going back and doing the earlier goblin books as ebooks as well (I've got an e-mail asking about this), but I'm awfully happy to see an electronic goblin. And I'm hopeful that this means the entire princess series will be available electronically as well as in print.

Okay, onto the more serious thoughts. I've been on LJ since very late 2002, and I don't think I've ever done a post talking about 9/11. But when I picked up my daughter yesterday after work, she talked about a project they did in afterschool care to commemorate 9/11. She knew it was about some planes that crashed into some buildings, and that people died, and that other people died so that they could try to save the people in the buildings. We've talked about 9/11 a little bit in years past, but she's young enough it doesn't really stick.

It was a good talk, with some good questions. What's a terrorist? Why did they crash the planes? How did they get away afterward? What's religion? (We've taken her to church and talked some about God and such, but I think the broader concept of organized religions is still nebulous.) Is believing in Santa Claus religious? What about the Easter Bunny? Does Halloween have a person? Is the devil real? If 9/11 was so bad, why do we celebrate it? Where do terrorists come from?

Some of the questions were harder than others. And it was hard at times to keep some of my own emotions and bitterness to myself. (What's 9/11? These days it seems like it's become a damned campaign strategy, and an excuse for people to continue being really shitty to each other*.) It's strange to realize that for her, 9/11 is as abstract a concept as WWII. More so, because she knows her great-grandfather fought in WWII. Maybe because of that abstraction, she never once talked about it as something to be afraid of.

I think that's a good thing. There's too much fear out there already, and I don't want her to learn to be afraid.

I'll be curious to hear her thoughts today after school.

---
*This line was edited for clarity.

---

We're back from the hospital. Got home around midnight.

I'm struggling with how much to talk about ... the Internet is both public and permanent, so I hesitate to get into too many personal details.

Bottom line, he'll be okay. The problem was more serious than we realized. The doctor did an ultrasound, and a few hours later he was in surgery. Surgery went fairly well. They found and fixed the problem that had been causing him so much pain for the past week. We don't know if it was fixed in time to avoid permanent damage. But even in a worst case scenario, the damage isn't something that would have any real impact on his life.

He's currently sleeping in his own bed, under the influence of several good drugs. Hopefully he'll be able to get some good rest tonight.

Thank you for all of your positive thoughts and prayers. It's very much appreciated.

Started to write about the school visit I did yesterday, which was a great deal of fun. (The kids decorated the auditorium with goblins, hobgoblins, elves, and a huge dragon -- it was awesome!)

However, I just got off the phone with my wife, and it sounds like there's a very good chance that my son is going to the hospital today for what will be the third time in the past week. This time he'll probably be admitted.

The doctors have assured us this is not a serious or threatening condition. However, it's very painful, and after a week it's still not going away. So I'm ... not really in the mood for blogging. I haven't written more than 200 words in the past few days, either. Go figure.

Friday: My son turned three. How did that happen? His favorite present is a Spider-man costume. He wore it most of the weekend, so much that the seams are already starting to tear in a few spots. When he woke up on Saturday, the first thing he wanted to do was run out and put on his costume :-)

Saturday: After taking my son in so he and I could both get blood drawn, it was off to Flint for two booksignings. The first was a group signing at Barnes & Noble. Those darn romance authors had the biggest crowd, but I sold a few books and got to chat with some nice & local authors, as well as a few illustrators. I actually sold one book to the store manager, and another employee came in on her day off to have me sign hers. Bookstore employees who are also fans are a very good thing :-)

Later on that night, I headed to signing number two, only to find that they had plenty of copies of Goblin War, 7 or 8 of Goblin Hero ... and no copies of Goblin Quest. Apparently, they had ordered 25 copies of Quest, but sold out before I got there. Definitely a good news/bad news sort of thing. I sold out of Hero before I left, and I'll be stopping back there on the 28th to sign a new batch of books.

It was strange trying to sell books 2 and 3 in a series without the first one. Fortunately, Hero stands alone pretty well. It makes me want to work harder on Mermaid's Madness to make it as independent as possible.

Sunday: Son's birthday party. This should have been a much more enjoyable day, and probably would have, if I had gotten a halfway decent night's sleep. Exhaustion makes me a cranky Dad, I'm afraid. Still, it was a fun party. J wanted a superhero party, so he got to wear his Spiderman costume, and his sister dressed up as Supergirl. He now owns lots more superhero toys as well as some Transformers. All in all, a very good birthday.

And at some point this weekend, I started in on the taxes. Whee. But on the bright side, the refund will be helpful. (I still have my day job tax me as a single man with no deductions, because it ends up covering the taxes on my writing income as well.)

Now if only my brain would wake up a bit so I could concentrate on the rewrite I'm supposed to be doing instead of playing around on LJ...

A month or so back, we started my seven-year-old daughter S in a self-defense course teaching Sachin-Ryu karate. It's a community education program that meets once per week on Mondays.

I had wanted to get S into something like this. In part, I'm an overprotective Daddy and I want my daughter to be able to protect herself if she needs to. From my own experiences in Tae Kwon Do, I know it will be good for her balance and coordination. The class also talks about things like bullying and home safety, which I like. So it seemed like a good idea.

It was a great idea. I love this program. In the first class, they had everyone chant, "I will mess up!" Two minutes later, the black-belt teaching the class stumbled over his instructions. He just grinned and said, "See? I told you I was going to mess up." It makes for the most relaxed environment I've ever seen in a martial arts setting.

On the very first night, they invited me to work out with the class. I passed, but appreciated the invite. They asked the next time, and again on the third. I didn't feel pressured; they just wanted me to know I was welcome. So I asked S what she thought, and she wanted me to join in. (Sneaky dad that I am, I figured this would also let her teach me at home when we practice, which would be fun.) So I'm now the newest white belt, and have participated in two classes.

I'm having a lot of fun. It's great being able to do something with S, and how can you not like a style where the "ready stance" involves knees bent, feet in, fists ready, and smile! One hour a week isn't much in the way of exercise, but it's a step up from what I had been getting. Curse the sedentary writing lifestyle! I'm also struggling to retrain 20-year-old habits. (Sachin-Ryu kicks are lower than what I learned, the fists are held differently, etc.)

On a more serious note, I'm very glad S is in the class and likely to continue. When I was doing rape advocacy and education, I had conflicted feelings about the self-defense for women thing. Understand, I don't think self-defense is a bad thing at all. What bugged me was the way they were presented as The Solution. Like, if we teach women to protect themselves, that will take care of that whole rape business. Every newspaper article about rape on campus would talk about what women should do, and never said a word about the guys. Because even though the vast majority of rapists are men, it should be women's responsibility to fix the problem, right?

That said, I want my daughter to have every tool she can to protect herself. I want her to be confident enough that predators will hesitate to mess with her, and if they do, I want her to be able to put a fist through the bastard's solar plexus.

I think these classes could help on both counts. Once per week isn't a lot, but we can look into other options eventually. I'm pretty sure there are more regular classes. Best of all, it's something the two of us can do together, and I'm really enjoying that.

Happy birthday, hamadryad11!

Normally this is where I would share something entertaining and/or insightful. (At least, that's what I like to believe.)

Unfortunately, my son was throwing up all night, starting at 11:30 pm. So I don't have much brainpower left. The laundry list by this morning included: four sets of PJs, three pillowcases, one bedsheet, three washcloths, and one mattress pad. I got a call from my daughter a little while ago, and she said he was sleeping now. Poor guy.

Random thought: toddlers don't understand the whole throwing up thing. He's old enough that if I hold a bucket, he aims for it. (The trick was getting there in time.) But he doesn't understand why it's happening. Once he finished, he'd start yelling -- partly because he's tired and upset, but he also sounded royally pissed off. Like, "I didn't want to eat this chili and rice in the first place, and now I have to see it again? WTF, man?"

And in a totally unrelated note, my Czech publisher made an offer on Goblin Hero. Yay!

So last night I took my son in for a sleep study, a preliminary step before we have his tonsils and adenoids removed.

For those of you who might be curious, a sleep study involves taping 26 or so wires all over the subject, particularly around the eyes and head. You also get a microphone taped to your neck, a weird probe thingie taped to your upper lip, and two bands around your chest.

My son is not quite two years old.

As you might imagine, this did not go smoothly. He was very, very good about letting her tape the wires to him while Daddy read him a book. (Over and over and over and over ... he's at that stage.) But he didn't want to settle down to sleep. I couldn't blame him. He had a ton of wires running all over his body, which makes it a little hard to get comfortable. They kept coming off, and so the nurse kept coming in every 10 minutes to reconnect him. He's supposed to sleep through this how, exactly?

Eventually, the nurse left him alone and disconnected until he fell asleep. Even so, he tosses and turns a lot, so he was constantly kicking wires loose or getting himself tangled up, and the nurse continued to have to come in and fix things.

He slept poorly. I slept even worse. I kept having to help the nurse move him around to reconnect the wire behind his ear, or untangle the wire he rolled on, or find his toe so she can reconnect the pulse monitor. And when we weren't doing that, my wonderful son who I really do love, was snoring and rolling and kicking, all about two inches from me.

Thankfully, at about four a.m., the nurse said they had enough data and offered to unhook my boy. I mumbled something along the lines of "Hell, yes!" I actually managed 2 or 3 hours of sleep after that.

So now I'm back at work. I did about 1000 words on Goblin War, but I'll have to re-read to figure out if they made any sense whatsoever. Jig is reunited with Smudge. Yay! And my research suggests that potatoes would be another wonderful food for my humans to feed their goblin prisoners. (Apparently, potatoes were originally food for animals, not people.)

Tomorrow I'm off to Ad Astra, so I doubt there will be any more updates. Aside from maybe a panel schedule, for anyone else who might be attending.

We didn't do our Valentine's Day dinner until last night, since Wednesday was crazy. Skylar had a library thing, we had parent-teacher conferences, and it was just nuts.

So last night, we had lasagne and this:



Why yes, that is a homemade brownie-crust cheesecake, as a matter of fact. And yes, it's as good as it looks :-)

Hey, amylynnhines! I wanted to let you know that the past three years have been the best of my life. (That's right -- even better than winning at Writers of the Future ;-)

I love you. Thank you for putting up with me for all this time.

So let's see here ... traditional gifts for the third anniversary would be glass, crystal, and leather. Anyone have any recommendations? :-)

There are many things they don't warn you about when you become a parent. Here's today's tip.

You might be prepared to get silly kid-type songs stuck in your head. The theme song from Go, Diego, Go! Anything Barney-related. That bug song from the Miss Spider show that my daughter sang for a while...

But there is no way to prepare for the day when you can't get Oscar the Grouch's song "I Love Trash" -- as sung by Steven Tyler -- out of your brain.

ETA -- the CD set is available on Amazon, for the curious. There's a RealPlayer preview of the song under Disc 3. I'm also fond of the Spin Doctors and Melissa Etheridge songs on that disc...

Overheard while on the phone with my wife.

"Jamie! Don't eat Yoda!"

No time for a real entry, so here. ( Look at the cute one-year-old. )

My son turned one year old this morning. As expected, I'm feeling a bit stunned and confused. I'm pretty sure somebody drugged me for much of the past year, because there's no way that was a full 12 months. Still, it's hard to argue ... the kid's walking and trying to run, he's outgrown his first car seat, he's always trying to push his baby food aside to eat what everyone else is having....

( Pictures behind the cut tag )

I almost forgot. Someone got his first haircut last week...

( I don't think he was impressed. )

My father was giving me a hard time for not having the camera when Jamie took a few steps earlier this week. So last night I managed to capture this, which will hopefully get him off my back :-) (The file is about 860 K, and should open up in Windows Media Player.) The giggling you hear at the end would be Skylar.