10 years later

I still remember this happening. My son turned 10 today. In the previous weeks when asking what he wanted to do, he said he wanted to skip school. His mother was on the fence about it when I plainly reminded her that I never go to work on *my* birthday.

Of course, I still go to work on my kids birthdays, so my dear wife gets to shuttle the birthday boy around.

10 years, wow. I gotta stop thinking about it.

Caffeine free

I can't exactly tell you when it happened, but I realized that getting out of bed should not be a chore after sleeping in. I decided I needed not just to cut back my caffeine intake, but to cut it out.

I started with metered doses, cutting it down little by little to stave off the headaches. That took a week. The slight grogginess throughout the day took awhile longer. It's been several weeks and I haven't had any caffeine at all. Honestly, I sleep so well. I lay down and *pop* I am OUT. I wake up in the morning and I'm... awake. Just like that.

The biggest thing is the stress. I normally deal with a degree of physical stress as a result of my job, but that's external. I used to feel physical stress that was more internal. I'm so much more relaxed.

Bonus: 90% of my caffeine intake came through soda. I just removed a wild majority of sugar from my diet, with all the bonuses that entails.

The Lion, The Witch, and the bedtime

After encouraging my children to wrestle for an hour while I made dinner, I found a movie that's almost 2 and a half hours long that they haven't seen in at least a year. My daughter fell asleep on the couch. Two of my sons are nodding off. The last one should be a shoe-in.

Remind me to tell you how well it worked.

Science unfair

Ah, elementary school science fairs. Where...

No, I'll be nice.

My wife decided to make it easy on me, since I was going to be the one taking them. Instead of my three sons all doing different projects, she insisted on them doing one group project. It meant that I could be in one place during the event.

Except I had 4 kids with me at the time, and *some* fool decided that two large bowls of candy needed to be made available at the main entrance.

I'm playing this up as a difficult task, but somehow my kids didn't drive me insane. They stayed with their project when they needed to, they didn't run amok, they... listened to me.

They all got ice cream.

Notes

I need to start keeping notes handy.

Throughout the day, a thought pops into my head and I'll realize that's something I can blog about. Soon after, I'll forget what that was.

I need to start writing these things down.