Horse Camp Retrospective, Part 1: Night of the Seven-Year-Old Howler Monkeys

A year ago, Lyla intercepted the Girl Scout camp catalog before I had a chance to hide it. That's how we found ourselves at horse camp over Father's Day weekend--because what better way to honor fathers than to bounce their crotches around on horses?

Below are excerpts from the Moleskine I kept in the event I didn't survive.

Lyla and I pass the lice check with flying colors. Welcome to camp! Step this way, please, and allow these teenagers with rubber gloves to inspect your scalps. She lingers I believe too judgmentally over my burgeoning bald spot before grunting and waving us through. Lyla allows me to run back out into the rain by myself to retrieve all our gear.

I return half-soaked to find Lyla getting her nails painted by her new best friend Ailbe, pronounced Al-Vah, whose Irish dad in his Appetite for Destruction t-shirt gets his nails painted too. Then Al-Vah dumps powdered Gatorade into all the other girls' water bottles, and Lyla is in cracked-out heaven. The other dads and I sit on our bunks and eavesdrop. I am quite proud when my at-times shy daughter regales everyone with the story of the pancakes she ate at Perkin's.

We dads are delightfully anti-social with one another. We nod and grimace pleasantly, but that's it. There's a tacit agreement that the intense and temporary camp friendships are better left to our daughters, who are now laughing like howler monkeys at something one of them said.

Later at the evening large-group gathering, Lyla and I discover we have the same attitude about singalongs, which is that we hate them. However, we differ profoundly in work ethic. As a boy at camp, my goal was always to avoid work at all costs, but Lyla, ever her mother's daughter, signs us up for "Dinner Hoppers" for tomorrow night, which I think means we'll have to fill waters and fetch food. Or at least she will. I'm going to try to get out of it.

Back in our bunk room, I lie on my plastic institutional mattress. All the girls are still tripping on Al-Vah's Gatorade, nail polish fumes, and the promise of an absurdly late 10:30 lights-out. The dads continue the grimacing and nodding while the girls play tag and chuck stuffed animals. It's an asylum, or at least a juvenile detention center. It's Orange Is the New Black, the dads and daughters edition. And it's only 9:51.

Several grievances

We have spelling bees at dinnertime. It's not some overbearing tiger-parent thing; the kids demand it. I don't know how it started, but I guess when two nerds love each other very much and decide to make babies, there's a chance it might result in spelling bees.

"Lyla, spell 'development'."

"No, Rowan."

Maybe it's time to sign them up for team sports.

Julie gave Lyla "grievance," which she spelled "greevence." So, no dessert for Lyla. Just kidding.

"Do you know what 'grievance' means, Lyla?"

"No."

"If you have a reason to complain about something, then you have a grievance."

At that instant the floodgates of 8-year-old disapproval burst open, and Lyla aired grievances for the next 10 minutes.

"Lyla, if you decide to share these concerns with your teacher tomorrow, make sure you use the word 'grievance'."

"Okay, I'll tell her I have a grievance."

"Several grievances."

"Yeah."

Mathematically Proficient Human

Time-tests in math class are still a thing, for some reason. It must be important to know how to do arithmetic quickly. Apparently the universe wants to negate that last sentence because I spelled "arithmetic" seven different incorrect ways before getting it right.

In Lyla's class, you have to get 50/50 correct for three Tuesdays in a row before you get moved to the next kind of math. Many kids are still hacking away at addition, while a handful are getting clobbered by subtraction. When Lyla graduated subtraction, she came home worried.

"What if next Tuesday I don't get very many multiplication problems right, and other kids see?" Second grade logic at its finest.

"Lyla, some of these kids struggle to add their own fingers together. You're the only kid on multiplication, right?"

"Yeah."

"So, even if you get every single problem wrong, you're still the most mathematically proficient human in the room. Not that anybody cares."

"Yeah, but."

Checkmate. No arguments hold water against an 8-year-old's "yeah, but." So Julie made her a bunch of multiplication tables, and Lyla taped them by her bed. At dinner each night, we analyzed various scenarios. And for the next three consecutive Tuesdays, Lyla aced the multiplication time-tests. You'd think she'd end-zone spike the test on her teacher's desk or mic-drop her pencil, but she hardly even talked about it. At some point, time-tests stopped feeling like a big deal to her--which is what time-tests should be: not a big deal.

So now she's pretty chill about division, and I couldn't be happier about that. If we even remember to ask her on a Tuesday afternoon how the time-test went, she'll say she got 28 or 30 out of 50, and then she'll nonchalantly change the subject.

But I do take a certain paternal pride that her teacher struggled to actually locate a division time-test; she'd never had a kid graduate multiplication. And I can say that without sounding boastful because clearly Lyla doesn't get it from me. I can barely spell arithmetic.

Cookie Czar

At the grocery store when the jolly cashier holds out an animal sticker, Lyla glances up with head slightly lowered, making her eyes look like they got stuck mid-roll. "No thank you," she says, barely audible with a dash of attitude.

I love the way she remains basically polite without compromising her standards of good taste. Animal stickers are, like, so first grade.

Nevertheless, one could argue that it's important to learn how to be socially adept with strangers. I'm speaking theoretically, of course, not from any personal knowledge or skill set. Barely audible with a dash of attitude is fine when you're 8 and rejecting a dopey sticker, but it won't get you a job.

Enter the Girl Scouts and their cookie cult.

It was Lyla's idea to fill up the bike trailer and drag it around the neighborhood like the cutest mule on Earth. Pretty good business plan, if you ask me; most people took one look at her and just grabbed their wallets. For the others, I believe her spiel went something like this: "Ahem, do you want cookies?" For a kid who does not love mindless pleasantries with random people, being the neighborhood cookie czar was excellent practice.

Controlled by the Logans

Last night, Rowan decided he will bequeath this shirt to his younger cousin, Cam.

"Too small for you?"

"No."

"You just think Cam will like it?" When Rowan gave Cam his old backpack, Cam wore it for approximately 172 consecutive hours. Cam is like Rowan's Dobby the House Elf.

"I don't know." He looked down and kicked at the floor with his big toe.

"What are you thinking about, buddy?"

"I just don't want it anymore. It's...embarrassing."

"It's embarrassing? Like, you're embarrassed to tell me?"

"No. The shirt is embarrassing. Because it says 'Daddy' on it."

A single trombone played a dirge in a far desolate corner of my brain, but I played it cool.

"'Daddy,' huh? Not what the kids are saying in kindergarten these days?"

"Everybody says 'Dad,' and when I said 'Daddy,' Logan laughed at me."

"Ah."

Now didn't seem the time for a pep talk on being one's own person. Nor did it seem the time to address inconsistencies in his feelings of embarrassment, such as his literally wide open attitude toward bathroom doors. And it definitely wasn't the time to remind him that sometimes he still calls me Da-da.

"Rowan, Cam's going to love that shirt."

"Never mind, Daddy." Okay, he did NOT actually say, "Never mind, Daddy." But in a more cinematic version of this story, that's what he said. And in that version, I held out my hand, but instead he came in for the hug, and the credits rolled. In the real version, the perfectly imperfect version, he just nodded and ran off, and I started (and continue) to think about how to teach him not to be controlled by the Logans of the world.

Dog person

I'm not a dog person. They smell, they invade my personal space, and they don't appreciate sentence structure. I realize I've also just described babies, who I love without exception. Lend me a baby and I am a cooing, burbling idiot. Not so much with dogs; I do appreciate your love for your dog and its objective worth as a living thing, but it will not send me into spasms of affection. This is one reason you're a nicer person than me and have more friends.

My two dog-exceptions (besides your dog, who is lovely) are Daisy and Tulip.

Tulip is the little blurry blob in the lower-left, eating feces. Daisy is the big thoughtful sentinel, gazing fearlessly at the horizon and the promise it represents.

In December, Daisy died. She was old, and she had cancer. After strong medications gave her a couple more acceptable weeks, she stopped having good days, and we made the hard decision.

How do you euthanize a pet when you have children who are small? What's the proper way to go about it? Probably there's not a wrong way as long as your intentions are loving and sensitive and thoughtful. For us, that meant bringing a veterinarian to our house and saying goodbye as a family.

It was hard. I don't really want to go into it. Hopefully the kids learned what it means to be humane and what it means to say goodbye. They handled it more matter-of-factly than I imagined they would. But people's reactions in difficult times aren't always predictable. While Julie and the kids sat in quiet, solemn reflection, I doubled over and sobbed.

The Test

At Rowan's last checkup, the doctor told us he is in the 40th percentile for height and 14th for weight. We only give him helium balloons indoors. Looking ahead to middle school, when ordinary children become Lord-of-the-Flies savages, he might need more than a conch shell to survive. Hence Kung Fu.

I wish I could say I decided on Kung Fu after careful analysis of all the martial arts, but it's just the one I happened to see on the community education website. It's like when I was 10 and my family moved down the street from a Lutheran church, instantly rendering us Lutherans.

Yesterday, with the verve and defiance of a young Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door, Rowan passed his white belt test.

And sure, that behemoth in front of him blocked him off to half the Jedi council judging panel, but it didn't matter. His skills were apparent whether you could see him or not.

Afterward at Culver's, Rowan didn't eat his cone; he five-point-palm-exploding-heart-techniqued it into oblivion. Many napkins perished.

Kung Fu Master

Rowan is on the path to becoming a Kung Fu master. It's a slow path. The previous eight weeks of Friday evening classes have all led up to today's big test, held at a middle school in a neighboring town, after which Rowan will add to his curriculum vitae the title of "Kung Fu White Belt."

I thought he'd get the white belt on the first day, like they'd just hand them out and then work on the first real belt. You're alive and your dad paid the $79? Here, kid, tie this around your waist.

In actuality, white belt means you've mastered a series of blocks and punches that'll allow you to survive an attack by another white belt. The infinitely patient instructors would demonstrate a move with perfect form, and then they'd shower praise while their charges flailed around like little flamingos. Then they'd do it again. And again. Week after week. And the kids got better at it.

Last night, I told Rowan not to stuff his uniform in the hamper; he'd need it today for the test.

He's ready. He's in the zone. It's ON. Jackie Chan, you've been warned.

Luck o' the not-very-Irish

Julie texted me a warning: Both kids left their bedroom doors open this morning so that a leprechaun would have no problem sneaking in to leave magical treats and surprises.

Previous St. Patrick's Days have yielded zero leprechaun visits to our house. I am 1/8-Irish, and Julie is 1/4. That makes our kids (carry the 2, square root the whatever) 3/16-Irish, in other words unlikely to attract the attention of anybody named Seamus, let alone a leprechaun. I explained this to them in the car.

"But a leprechaun left candy in Hannah's room and also turned her toilet water green," Lyla pointed out.
 
"We'll check our rooms just in case," added Rowan.

"Yeah," said Lyla.

"Yeah," said Rowan.

"Yeah," said Lyla again.

"Okay, but seriously, you're not going to find anything from a leprechaun. There are childhoods that involve leprechaun visits and elves on shelves, but those are not your childhoods. I'm sorry."

It was silent as we drove up the hill and turned onto the street before the street before the street we live on. Then Lyla asked if we could order pizza and Rowan asked if they could have an Ice Breaker mint. I said sure, and fine cheer was restored.

As I type this, Rowan is turning an empty Kleenix box into a leprechaun trap. Just in case.