A few years ago, we were headed north to the now defunct Kaywood Cottage for a long weekend of partying, hanging out in Traverse City, and some much needed R & R with our best buds Chuck and Dale. I stopped for some provisions on my way home from work the day we left. My hastily scribbled grocery list had the following:

Beer
Wine
Tequila
Cat food.

Apparently, I had somehow managed to pick up Amy Winehouse’s grocery list by mistake. The only thing missing was heroin. Those halcyon weekends of idle chit chat, reading magazines, and staring at the lake are gone, mostly in part to the fact that the cottage is no longer available to us.

But also, life with a kid is much different.

We had talked about this prior to the adoption, and we were okay with the stuff we might be giving up to start our family. I must say that my days of thumbing magazines are pretty much gone for now. I used to subscribe to the likes of Gourmet, Food and Wine, Spin, Utne Reader, and a whole host of other “lifestyle” magazines. This was way before reality hit and made me realize that Rachael Ray may indeed be the Messiah.

I recently went through my recipe collection, a somewhat organized collection of clippings and whatnot from the many years of pre-Anna epicurean journals. I tossed most of the recipes for kindling in the fireplace and stuck with what worked. I kept the dinners that got me out of the kitchen in less than 30 minutes and didn’t require a trip to Trader Joes, Whole Foods, or sneaking on to the set of Iron Chef to steal that week’s secret ingredient. Anna is getting interested in cooking, and will help with MUCH supervision, but that’s okay. Everything starts small, and if it takes me 20 minutes to make “instant” pudding, so be it.

Our diets have suffered because of this, but I am not complaining. The first year of Anna’s life, we lived off of Dream Dinners. Tod stoically prepared the meals for us with his coworkers each month up in Lansing, and it did indeed make life easier. It didn’t help matters that we are also a block away from a Little Caesar’s Drive Thru and have easy access to their delish hot n’ readies.

My thumbing material is now Family Fun, Parents, and Adoptive Families. My only hold out from my pre-Anna days is Entertainment Weekly. You can have that subscription when you pry it out of my cold, dead, hands beyotch! Thankfully, the aforementioned journals are easily read during my morning constitutional and don’t require much thought or time commitment.

Am I bitching at this point?

No, the time spent with Anna is a gift. Sometimes it’s a gift you want to return, as she is firmly in the Miss Independence State right now, and every little thing is a challenge. But mostly it’s a great time full of laughs and exploration. We’re headed to Chicago next week for a belated Christmas celebration with Tod’s side of the family. It will be Anna’s first time in the Windy City, and I can’t wait to share with her all the sights and sounds of this amazing place. The world is a big place, and there is much to see and take in, but when you look at things through the eyes of a child, the world seems much smaller and tangible. I am very eager to view Chicago with my Anna eyes on.

My Hero

I spent the day yesterday at Tod’s school talking to his team’s students about the local oratorical contest addressing art and culture. The question posed by the group sponsoring the contest asked a pretty long-haired question, so Tod’s team asked me to come in and get all college like on their kids. We put together a pretty interesting and funny presentation, and I headed off to talk to the kids for the day. I didn’t identify myself with my last name, since it’s the same as Tod’s; rather, I was just Professor Tom. The day went well and I had a pretty good time talking with the kids about art and the stuff they see each day around town here in Jackson. The kids were respectful and seemed to like what we were talking about (especially Tim Hawkinson’s art).

But after school, the drama began. A young woman who was very attentive and involved in my first group came up to Tod after class and said:

"I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I have been hearing from a lot of people that you are Gay".

Tod’s reply… "So?"

And her response… she looked at him and walked away.

It amazes me the amount of chutzpah some of these kids have. I wouldn’t have dreamt of asking any of my teachers anything like that when I was in school. I accidentally found my 5th grade teacher smoking behind the dining hall when we were at camp one year (I was taking out our cabin’s trash). I thought I was dead, that I had unwillingly crossed some line that would have me expelled or worse yet, talked to by the Principal. But apparently it’s open season now. I came in one afternoon to pick up Anna while Tod did Market Day and a young boy came up to me and said: "how is she related to you?" while pointing at Anna. I didn’t know what to say so I just looked at him and moved on.

But apparently you can just give them some of their own medicine and they crumble. Tod’s response of “So?” said very little in quantity, but it spoke volumes in terms of message:

I DON’T CARE YOU NOSEY LITTLE BITCH AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU!

Class dismissed.

More about me...

This was done on Facebook, thought it was mildly interesting and might generate some conversation. Leave a comment and let me know who YOU are dear reader. One of these is not true, by the way.

1: My grandparents are all deceased and I miss them much.

2: I collect autographs.

3: My favorite band is Erasure.

4: I DJ'd in a past life.

5: I dream of winning the lottery so I can focus on my kid and not have to work.

6: I love tofu, it’s vastly misunderstood.

7: I have way too many cookbooks.

8: I lived in Venice, Fl. for almost a year.

9: I can eat a whole large pizza by myself in record time, but I need beer.

10: I have a great dude named Tod and a rockin’ babe named Anna

11: I am planning on going back to school for the rest of my life.

12: I used to help my grandparents run liquor over state lines.

13: The Sound of Music is my favorite movie.

14: I enjoy writing random, off the wall stuff on other people’s blogs.

15: I am a vegetarian and have been for many years but I will lapse into carnivorism when the meat is presented.

16: I like playing Zilch on line. Don’t look it up, it’s a big time waster. I would be so much more productive if I have NEVER seen this game.

17: I have a Maine Coon named Lola and a St. Bernard named Yukon. I miss Oscar

18: I have really super friends, thanks for asking!

19: I enjoy tattoos and other body modification.

20: I am a morning person, but with the right music and coffee can be a night person.

21: I am a very warmed blooded person. I put out a lot of heat. Most of us furry mammals are.

22: I'm proud to of been raised in Toledo and experience everything that I did, but I'm sad that I don't live there now.

23: I had my ears pierced two years ago, we were bored on a Sunday. I am over them now.

24: I love my Ipod, it makes walkies with the dog much more fun.

25: I love my friends and family.

1 Toddler 1 Cup

Of pudding that is...

Nothing like a good ol' bowl of chocolate pudding to end your evening.
Not quite sure what YOU were thinking about.

I robot

We have a backpack from Family Week that we use each week at the library. Anna can fill the thing up with as many books as she wants from the kid’s area. They just have to fit in the bag.

1. It keeps the books in order and easily found for return, keeping the fines down to a minimum.
2. It gives her a quest each week when we attack the various branches around town.

Sometimes she fills it with the board books; sometimes it’s a “whatever” situation and she just starts tossing arbitrary books in the bag. This is how we came up with the “SPACE ART” book from last week. We got home and headed to the living room to check out the books. Tod helped her pick a few to read and the space art book was one. They looked at all the projects and marked the pages that they wanted to do.

One of the pages was making your own robot. She loves her Yo Gabba Gabba and is fond of Plex, the yellow robot overlord of the YG2 crowd. So, I gathered up some recycling and a few art supplies that I just happened to have on hand and we began our experiment in toddler arts n’ crafts. Mind you, I am certified K 12 art, but this was a whole different ball of yarn. While most kids are compliant and just want to make something, Anna had to experiment and stack and restack, and experiment some more and wear my very patience to the ground. Remember, I am used to whiny college students who usually don’t have an idea from the get-go. Anna had 1, 000 ideas and was bound and determined to test them all out.

We finally figured out a basic body and Tod taped it all together for hot gluing later. The robot in the book was silver and covered in foil. I had some silver paint in my studio so I thought we could just paint the thing silver. Didn’t work. So, it ended up being a rather tarnished gold color. We spent yesterday afternoon accessorizing the creature with stickers and bangles.

As any good toddler with two Daddies knows: the only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.

Behold the finished product

While some may protest that little girls shouldn’t be making robots, we’re happy to announce that after the above bot was done, Anna promptly remarked that she wanted to make a Princess Robot. I told her that there had already been a Princess Robot and its name was Princess Di.


But it was prone to crashing.

Anna and W

My only disappointment concerning Anna’s birth was the fact that George W. Bush was in office the year she was born. We have left her baby books empty on that page, as we’d really like to think that he wasn’t, but the sad reality is that he was, and for eight years, America suffered.

I remember sitting in Applebee’s election night 2004 and all the televisions were on the various news channels monitoring the results. As the results moved towards Bush again, one of the servers walked by our table and did a high five with his coworker and shouted, “Four more years baby!” Now I am not a violent person by nature, but I wanted to pick up a chair, break it over his head and then stab him in the face with a broken chair leg. While some of the most amazing and wonderful things in my life have happened in the past eight years, they are all marred by the fact that Bush was in office.

For many, he is a hero, a misunderestimastood kind of guy who just likes to clear brush and feel up German dignitaries, but for me, he’s a symbol of all that was wrong with America eight years ago. The Culture Wars were starting, and the Gays were tossed under the Evangelical Bus to assist W. in his climb to power. Both 2000 and 2004 saw a variety of ballot initiatives aimed at the Religious Right/Evangelical camp: Gay marriage and Gay adoption being the top two.

The campaigns here in Jackson County witnessed increasingly vicious ads run by the top two Republican contenders, the nastiest ones coming from Rick Baxter, a one term state rep who used his position as a County Commissioner to enact an unnecessary “Defense of Marriage” proclamation here in Jackson several years prior. This got him on the Conservative radar and helped get him elected. Thankfully, he was only one term and was soundly beat by Martin Griffin last election.

For a political group that seems so focused on the family (ahem) their actions were decidedly against LGBT families. Instead of helping families grow, their actions and resolutions hurt LGBT families by restricting benefits and custody of children. But then many of the Republican/Religious Right idols began to fall. I listened with glee as Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, and Larry Craig all met their ironic downfalls. The 2006 midterm election saw a glimmer of hope for the country, as the Republicans and their ilk lost much of their clout and their credibility.

For the past eight years I have been an American, but not proud of that fact. When Obama was elected in November, that all changed. A new chapter in America’s history starts today, our first African-American President. Many of you might not know that Anna is multi-ethnic, so we have been watching this election with an eye not only for America’s future, but for our daughter’s and her mother as well. Anything is possible in America, and today we show the world just how true those words are.

Clarification

Some have wondered why the title of the blog... Jesus has Two Daddies.

I have wondered who hasn't been paying attention in Sunday School.

Let's review:

God the Father:

And, Jesus' adopted Father on earth, Joseph:

Any questions?