It’s Christmas Day! What the hell are you doing checking some glorified redneck’s blog on Christmas Day?

Santa came to our house last night, dropped off toys for the boys, ate some cookies, drank some milk, and watered his reindeer from the bowl we left outside.

Today the boys will play with their new toys, we’ll have a couple of grandmothers over for visiting, and everyone will open their gifts.

Merry Christmas, y’all,

Bullgrit

Last Saturday, I had Calgrit8 with me when I stopped in a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket. On a lark, I got him to pick out the numbers for me. He wasn’t interested – he had his eyes on the candy – but he did pick out four of the five main numbers. I picked out the fifth main number and the powerball number.

The next day, I checked the winning numbers, and lo and behold, we had 3 matching numbers. That’s seven bucks!

Is this a sign? Does my son have the gift? In the three years I’ve been playing the lottery, I’ve only matched at most 2 numbers three or four times, (winning $3 and $4). I didn’t tell Calfgrit8 that his picks won.

A few days later, before the next drawing, I stopped by the store and picked up a blank lottery form. The next morning, I had both my boys each pick a full series of numbers on the form. Two chances to win, both chances using my children’s luck.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we won the jackpot from the choices of an 8 and a 5 year old? If we won, I decided I wasn’t going to tell anyone that my boys picked the winning numbers on their first tries. What would happen if I did tell? What kind of weirdness would come up if people thought one or both of my young boys had the ability to predict the lottery numbers?

The drawing was Wednesday night. Thursday morning, I checked the web site. Nothing. We didn’t match a single number. Nothing even close.

Oh well. Our lives are probably better off without some strange future-telling magic powers complicating it.

Bullgrit

If everyone knew how incredibly hard it is to raise children, no one would ever have children.

If everyone knew how incredibly wonderful it is to have children, everyone would have children.

The thing that worries me the most about raising my kids is the fear that my errors could screw them up for the rest of their lives. And sometimes I don’t even learn that I’ve made an error until a long time after the mistake. I’m afraid that I’m going to make some subtle mistake today, but I won’t learn of the dramatically bad results for another twenty years.

Having two children just means I get double the chances to screw up, or I get double the results from just one screw up. No, wait, I take that back. It’s not a multiplication equation, it’s an exponential function.

With two kids, I get: errors = x².

There are 1,440 minutes in a day, and each minute gives another chance to really screw up raising a child. So with having two children, I can make 2,073,600 mistakes each day.

Yeah, I totally feel this way. This is why we decided to stop at two children. When I meet parents who have three, or four, or even six kids (like when my mom and step dad combined all of us), it just boggles my mind to contemplate the potential number of serious mistakes that could be made.

And then I see something like this parked in the local mall parking lot:

Bullgrit

One of the worst things we inadvertently taught our boys was the “loving headbutt.” You know how when you’re loving up on someone, and you lean your head forward or to the side to gently touch theirs? Our Calfgrits learned this little gesture too well.

I’ve seen them do it properly: hug and gently touch heads. But much too often I’ve seen them do it with a little passive-aggressive intention to strike each other without looking like they’re hitting.

If Calfgrit8 gets frustrated with his little brother, he’ll hug him a little tighter than necessary, and then give a headbutt as punctuation on the thought, You make me mad!

If Calfgrit5 doesn’t get his way with his big brother, he’ll lean forward and headbutt him just enough to pass loving and score as a hit, but not so far as to actually hurt him and draw a reprimand.

It never crossed our minds how they might take and use our little loving gesture. We had no idea it would turn into a way to cover an attack. It’s especially frustrating to us when the first headbutt draws a fist hit or foot kick in retaliation. It’s hard to scold both when one says, “I was just hugging him!”

Like true, close brothers, they’ve managed to turn a kind, gentle, and open-hearted embrace into a concealable weapon.

Bullgrit