Normal?

There is no such thing as normal.

What is normal? And to whom?

Let me illustrate first some "definitions" of normal:

In behavior, normal refers to a lack of significant deviation from the average. The phrase "not normal" is often applied in a negative sense ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_(behaviour)

conforming with or constituting a norm or standard or level or type or social norm; not abnormal (unattributed)

From Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary:
2 a : according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, or principle b : conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern

First let's examine average. What is the average? Well, that depends on quite a bit.

Where are you? If you live in Manhattan, average income exceeds $100,000 as of the 2005 census. I would imagine that it could be higher today. If you live in Mississippi, per capita income is $31,836 in 2009. Mississippian's, if they bother to be curious enough to check such things, should be very happy that they don't live in India. In India, per capita income is $1,016, ranking it number 142 in the world. I don't know how many countries were ranked.

But a monetary valuation of average is only one way to measure such things as averages, and really useful only because it is easy to quantify. Other things are much more important. Way of life, for instance.

Normal in Seattle, Washington:



Even that image is not a "normal" Seattle home. It depends on where you live in Seattle.

Normal in Afghanistan:

In the villages each family generally occupies either one mud-brick house or a walled compound containing mud-brick or stonewalled houses. The same pattern prevails among the nomads, except that tents replace the houses.

Twice a year groups of nomads may pass through villages on their routes from summer highland grazing grounds to the lowlands where they camp during the winter. The villagers traditionally permit the nomads to graze their animals over the harvested fields, which the flocks fertilize by depositing manure. The nomads buy supplies such as tea, wheat, and kerosene from the villagers; the villagers buy wool and milk products from the nomads. For food and clothing, the nomads depend on the milk products, meat, wool, and skins of their flocks; for transportation they depend on their camels. Nomadic women are freer and less secluded than the village women.

Normal for a ghetto kid is growing up with a distrust of and little esteem for officers of the law.

Normal for a Montana farm boy is learning how to ride a horse and working with your family in the fields.

Or is it...

Things that go thunk in the night

6-year-old boys probably didn't immediately pop into your mind.

But last night around midnight, the thunk in the night was Noah, who either fell out of bed, or tripped getting out of bed. No screams of pain. No crying out loud. Just a boy with a lot of blood coming out of his nose, quietly wimpering in the bathroom.

I heard the thunk (all of our bedrooms have hardwood floors), and knew right away what had happened. Because it happened a few months ago. I don't remember if it was Noah or Grayson that time, but I'm thinking that it might have been Grayson.

Theresa was not far behind me as we discovered Noah, doing the potty dance in the bathroom (because he still had to go), but he wasn't really awake yet, and didn't quite know what to do. So I grabbed some tissues and squeezed his nose. But he had been crying for a bit and had a fair amount of mucus in his nose, so I told him to blow and blood flies everywhere! And then Theresa says "You don't have them blow their nose during a nose bleed". Good to know... about thirty seconds before.

We got the bleeding stopped and he crawled into our bed as we cleaned up the bloody trail that he'd left behind. (So how many of you are really freaked out by the liberal use of the words blood, bloody, and bleeding in this missive?)

As Noah got into my side of the bed, I looked very closely at the pillow before I lay down next to him. Apparently we had applied pressure for long enough, because there was not a drop of anything to be found. (You thought I was going to say blood, didn't you?)

Makes us kind of rethink the bunk beds that we've been considering.

The importance of touch

What is he talking about?

Huh?

I imagine those could be two typical responses to reading the title of this post. I believe that occasionally my writing is too oblique for some to easily follow. Perhaps I should say for many to easily follow. As you saw if you clicked on the word oblique earlier, one definition is "not straightforward: indirect; also: obscure". I read so much, that I actually do use words like oblique, but my mind is such that I believe that sometimes I think obliquely. Although I do not intend to be devious or underhanded, I will accept that I may confuse, rather than illuminate. (See what I mean?) :)

So what am I talking about? Good question.

Once again, my reference comes back to Noah and Grayson coming into bed to sleep with us at some point in the middle of the night. There are those that would say six year old boys shouldn't be sleeping with their parents. I can't say that I disagree.

And there are those that would say "What's wrong with that?" Again... I can't say that I would disagree.

The night before last, I woke up for some reason at about 4:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. This is a really rare occurrence for me, for which I am extremely grateful. But interestingly enough, Noah joined us in bed a few minutes later. He will generally walk around to my side, and slide in next to me. And so he did, and was fast asleep inside a minute or two. So I was kind of wedged in between Noah and Theresa.

As my thoughts drifted from place to place (what else are you going to do at that time of the morning when you can't move and can't sleep!) I soon found that Grayson had decided to join us. He walked around to my side of the bed and as I kind of popped up to look at him, he smiled and tucked himself in next to Noah. I reached across his brother and placed my hand on Grayson's tummy, and he immediately placed his hand atop mine. Grayson too was fast asleep inside a minute or two. (Good thing we have a King-sized bed!)

As it turned out, it was almost 5:30 by the time Grayson joined us. My mind had wandered so much, I just hadn't realized the time that had gone by. And the power of touch - mom touching dad - dad touching son - brother touching brother - soothed me back to sleep. This, I believe, is a wonderful illustration of the importance of touch.

I was ahead of my time

Some have wondered about the title of my blog. You can see for yourself where the name came from in my very first post way back in 2005. As you can see in this article in the Wall Street Journal, the title of my post back then was prophetic. And as you can also see by the sole comment on that post, Theresa agreed with me. :)

Setting the wrong goals

Not long ago while reading the paper, or perhaps seeing a clip on television, I saw that two extremely well known women had lost battles with weight loss. This struck me because it concerns many, many people on an ongoing basis. Both Oprah Winfrey and Kirstie Alley, publicly and with great fanfare, had lost significant amounts of weight only to gain it back again.

I don't remember the details now, but I believe Ms. Winfrey wanted to reach a certain size and Ms. Alley wanted to reach a certain goal weight. They both had the wrong goals. It is almost predictable to see the result. Once the goal is achieved, another goal becomes their focus (or obsession) with the resultant weight gain predictable as their previous goal is no longer in front of them. In fact, Ms. Alley removed her exercise equipment and placed it in the garage, pleased to be rid of it.

A better goal in both instances would have been to live a healthier life. A consequence of living a healthy lifestyle would be loss of weight, if one is overweight. Also, the goal of living a healthy life is ongoing. There is no final achievement. There is no point where one stops exercising. Moderation in diet means just that. That doesn't mean that you can never splurge anywhere along the way. It just means that your goal is to be a healthy human being.

As an "advanced paternal age" father (I had my first child when I was 42 and the twins came when I was 45) I have a very strong desire to live a long and healthy life so that I will be around when my kids have kids - even if they decide to also be "advanced maternal/paternal age" parents.

So my goal is not to achieve a certain weight. Or fit into a certain waist size pair of pants. My goal is to live a healthy life, so that I will enjoy a long one, and be able to enjoy that life in good health.

I think I'll skip dessert tonight.

So...

You remember all of that Easter candy from my previous blog post, right? Well, one night after dinner the kids decided to have some. And when they were done, somehow a bag of Easter candy ended up on the floor. Normally not a big deal. But it got overlooked and didn't get picked up when everyone went to bed. Everyone except Mocha, that is.



And inside the bag were chocolate Easter eggs. As in past tense. As in Mocha ate the chocolate eggs.

Theresa was awakened at 4:something AM by Mocha barking. So she went down to see what was going on and he was scraping at his empty water bowl. So she gave him some more water and then noticed all of these little bits of foil - which was what the eggs had been wrapped in. And they were scattered all over the floor. So she hops online to check it out, and based on the amount of foil on the floor, and the weight of Mocha (about 10 pounds or a little over 4 kilos) she determined that he should probably go to the pet hospital to be checked out. I guess dogs and chocolate are not such a great match. So Theresa came upstairs and woke me up and said that she was taking Mocha and Mattea to the pet hospital because he ate a bunch of chocolate. So I did what most any husband would do at 5:something AM - I said fine and rolled over and went back to sleep.

By the time I woke up, Theresa, Mattea and Mocha were back with Mocha seemingly none the worse for wear. The tattooed and pierced vet had induced vomiting, and she said that Mocha did in fact appear to have eaten enough to be harmful, so it was a good idea that he was taken in.

I'm just glad that Theresa is the lighter sleeper of the two of us.

(No Mocha's were (permanently) harmed in the creation of this blog post)

Okay... so it's not red any more...

(Edited to require less thinking and processing) ;)

I decided that I didn't like the red links that I referred to in my previous post. So I changed the links to green. But the green was a subtle shade which did not provide a strong enough differential to the gray text. Especially for those of us that don't underline all links. So now I've changed the links to dark blue, with the post title in a slightly lighter shade of blue. I think I'll go with this one now. At least for awhile.

In any case... back to the so many things, so little time. Here's just a quick one that I meant to post a couple weeks ago.



That is a photo of our dining room table a couple of weekends ago (so around the first of June or so). I don't remember when Easter was, but it's in March or April, isn't it? (Baaaaaad Catholic...) (I went back and looked. It was April 12th.) Our kids still had not finished their chocolate bunnies, let alone the rest of the treats ensconced in their plastic eggs! Sure... they'll eat 12 pounds of fresh fruit in a week. (Now you know why I'm at Costco at least once a week.) But Easter candy? Naw... we'll just let that get dusty. (BTW, the bunnies are now toast. But there is still plenty of candy in the eggs.)

Go figure...