Our oldest has recently discovered the wonderful taste of chocolate milk thanks to his grandparents. Because he doesn’t quite understand the name differences between milk water and juice he just calls everything water.

So now every morning for the last week he runs to the fridge pointing at the door and yelling “water!!” I of course hoping he means just regular milk act dumb and pull out the milk carton. “Here you go!” I say in my most convincing voice while pouring his sippy cup full. Once he takes his first sip you would think I had punched him in the face. With his most frustrated look he again keeps repeating “water!” while pointing at the fridge.

Well I have tried opening the fridge and saying there is no water but he figured out where we hide the chocolate syrup and ends up grabbing it and putting it in my hands. Then of course he continues on with his water request now combined with a look that I can only describe as self pity for having such an idiot dad for a parent.

I can only imagine what is going on in his mind… “What is wrong with this guy? Do I have to do everything for him? OK, Dad here is the milk, here is the chocolate syrup, now you pour them in a glass together… Good job daddy! Now stir them really good… OK now put the cap back on and hand it to me. Yay for Daddy! You get a gold star!”

Well in the end I had to tell him that he can’t always have chocolate milk and that he would have to just enjoy what we give him and be happy with it. He of course just replied with… “water!!!!”.

I used my imagination as a kid growing up on a daily basis. We didn’t have cable and we were only aloud to play the Atari and Nintendo once in a while. Whenever going to town I would beg my mom to stop by the local Sears to look for cardboard boxes. Washing machine boxes were considered good, but refrigerator boxes were the best. I think I must have had over a hundred homes growing up made out of these boxes but the most memorable one was probably my last one.

My siblings and I had acquired a bunch of these boxes and decided we were going to make some houses out of them and then sleep outside. Where we grew up there was no yard just open desert behind our house which was subject to wind at times. So me being the brilliant boy that I was decided I would just nail my house to the ground with 2 inch nails. I guess I didn’t realize that cardboard isn’t the most steady of materials to be nailing to anything let alone dirt.

So my siblings and I set out to spend the night in our cardboard boxes all vowing not to go in until the morning. It just so happens that this ended up being the night that we would get huge gusts of wind that shook my box like crazy and kept me up all night shivering. I of course assumed everyone was outside with me so I hung in there holding on for dear life until about 6:00 am. At that point I checked outside and noticed all of my siblings boxes had blown about 100  yards away. I ran over to check on them and realized they weren’t even in them.

Come to find out all of my siblings (which of course were older) had all pooped out hours ago leaving me their younger brother outside by himself. Wimps! Anyway this happened to be the last time we tried this, but to this day I still bring home cardboard boxes for my kids to play with. I don’t however let them sleep outside in them

Sometimes I wish I could just go back in the past and punch myself in the nose right before I am about to do something incredibly dumb or life changing. Like continuing to drive my car when there is steam coming out of the hood, or jumping into a pool that has ice on the top, just to name a couple. I wonder though if I really would be the same type of person I am right now if I had stopped myself from making some of those stupid decisions. If I had for instance stopped driving my car when it was smoking I may  not have had a great walk home with my sister at midnight and one of the greatest talks we have had in our life, or if I hadn’t jumped in the ice covered pool I may not have appreciated the warm of the hot tub afterwords as much.

Then again wouldn’t it be nice if you could go back and change some of the events from happening while still watching like a movie what would have happened if you had actually carried them out. I can imagine me telling myself “hey lets see what would happen if you jump in the pool” and then sitting on a nice couch with some popcorn watching this skinny teenager jump into a frozen pool and almost contract hypothermia in the process. “What is that guy thinking?!” I can imagine me saying to myself.

I think if there is ever a time machine invented they should also invent a way to show what would have happened if certain events are carried out. Then you could totally decide what is the best course of action in each circumstance. Imaging seeing yourself ask every girl you want to the prom just to see which ones would actually say yes, or see which major you will be most happiest with in the end at college.

This all seemed really exciting when I first started writing it but now the more I think about it the more I realize that most of the fun would be sucked right out of life if you always made the right decision. I never thought I would say this but I guess its a good thing to make mistakes over and over again because it really makes life interesting.

With all the mistakes though I just hope if there is a time machine invented sometime that I can go back and buy some stock in Microsoft when it was only $8 a share.

This past weekend I tried snowboarding for the first time. It wasn’t as difficult as I imagined it would be, but still I came away pretty sore. I have gone surfing almost every summer for the past seven years  with my brother and most people said if I can do that I should be able to snowboard no problem. What I didn’t think much about was that when you fall snowboarding the snow is much less forgiving than the ocean. Falling while surfing is actually fun while falling in hard packed snow is anything but.

I did have a great time however learning to carve back and forth down the mountain trying not to hit trees or accidentally go over a jump. By the end of the day I think I had moved from beginner snowboarder to slightly experienced beginner snowboarder. I definitely did not feel as confident as I would like to but hey at least I am trying.

I am supposed to go on a trip again pretty soon with my brother and hopefully I will not have forgotten what I learned while on the mountain.

We used to take vacations each year to interesting places like Mexico and Canada. One one trip to Canada in our motor-home that wouldn’t go over 55 mph, we devised a plan to remove the boredom from our two week long trip. My siblings and I created a “road show” production which consisted of us doing karate tricks and mock ninja fights in the back of our motor-home for anyone who could see through our back window. We had signs created and bandannas made of t-shirts wrapped around our heads.

We began to get lots of cars who would tailgate us to watch our show and then move on when we were finished letting the next car tailgate us and watch. We at one point had a car video-taping us which of course got us all excited and wound up.

We never really got bored of doing our little act for the whole two weeks and gratefully our parents never told us to quiet down either. As we got older we replaced playing in the back with listening to headphones or reading but the memories are still pretty fresh of our roadshow we put on for those other travelers on our road.

One vacation my family and I went to Canada. While in one of the cities on our journey we discovered that a restaurant had thrown out a bunch of soda cases that had one or two bottles broken in them. We of course thought this to be a terrific bargain since there were a good 5 or six bottles in each case that were perfectly good except for being covered in sticky soda that had been spilled from the broken bottles. My dad organized us into rescue parties gathering all the bottles we could and cleaning them up.

One of my sisters (I won’t say which, you know who you are) of course was pretty disgusted by this and wouldn’t help. In fact she just hid out in the camper hoping no-one would see us. In the end we ended up with cases of free soda for the rest of our trip. I don’t think my sister ended up ever wanting to try any of it but oh well… more for us