Dear Friends and Family,

It’s been a crazy 2017 and as we close it out the Jansmas would like to extend holiday wishes to everyone.  I know traditionally people send a Christmas card via USPS first class mail, we even did a Christmas card a couple years ago, which was the last time both of our kids were able to successfully pose for a photo at the same time.  In my mind the family Christmas card is the holiday version of Facebook with the only difference being I feel compelled to look at the Christmas cards that are mailed to me, possibly due to the effort put into taking the photo, printing the card, and mailing it to of all people, me.  So many questions regarding the protocol for a family Christmas card.  First of all, how do you decide if you go entire family, just kids, or just kids and the family pets?

In all honesty, there are people sending me Christmas cards who I haven’t seen in years sending me cards that only have their kids on them.  The troubling thing is I have never met their kids and could care less what they look like, I want to know how their parents have turned out twenty years after graduating from college. Do they still have hair?  Is their wife still hot?  Are they in better shape than me?  Also, when do you stop producing the family Christmas card?  If you send out a Christmas card aren’t you kind of locking yourself in to making it an annual occurrence?  (unless your the Jansmas, who decided there was no way to outdo the masterpiece of the 2014 Holiday season and decided to call it a mic drop, never to send out another Holiday card again).  What’s problematic is that if you traditionally send out a holiday card and suddenly decide not to do it it’s going to leave a lot of people scratching their heads as to why they were left off the mailing list, when in all reality everyone was left off the mailing list.

What may have led to our families decision to be a one and done when it comes to Holiday cards is the fact that our kids are only a few years away from being truly awkward.  You want to make a kid going through puberty pose for a holiday card? Also, do you want to stake claim to ownership of said kid by sending a card with your name on  it depicting everything that could go wrong genetically with your blood line?  Acne, braces, a nose twice the size of the rest of the face it is attached to.  Mother Nature is a cruel bitch and there is no sense of commemorating that fact with a Christmas card that can be pulled out of the archives at a moment’s notice.  I actually took my kids to JC Penney (It’s the only place that has an actual photo studio from what I could tell from my internet research) to get some photos as a Christmas present for Shirley.  The person taking the photos could have just as easily been operating the cash register at Speedway and was asking me of all people  for ideas as far as poses.  Once we were done with the shoot they uploaded the photos and there wasn’t a keeper in the bunch.  I narrowed down my choices for prints not by picking out the best but by eliminating the worst, there were no bests.  My kids are moderately cute and I had chosen nice outfits for them to wear, but there is something that happens to a kid when you throw them in front of a camera and tell them to pose, it’s the same thing that happens to me only I have a shiny head with no hair on it that makes my photos even more frightening and awkward.

Getting back to the year that was in 2017, a year where something that has almost no actual value is the rage of the financial world, somehow bit coin has taken the world by storm even though there is nothing backing it and to my knowledge only one bank that will accept it in return for a legitimate currency.  I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me though, Amy Schumer has no actual talent and still seems to be making movies and touring the country talking about her stinky vagina.  The Jansmas had a pretty remarkable 2017 with Parker learning the nuances of what it takes to create a Dutch Oven.  “Dad, I just gave my self a Dutch oven!”

“Parker, it’s not unnatural to enjoy the smell of your own farts, but you need to give that gift to other people particularly your brother, don’t be so selfish, what you need to do is let one go under the covers when he’s in bed with you (they sleep in the same bed until they move to the floor next to Shirley between midnight and 3am, then they sleep on the same floor together) and then pull the covers over his head but not yours.   Someday you will have the pleasure of leaving one behind in your own car and upon your return hours later the smell will still be there to greet you, that is the ultimate farting accomplishment.”

While Parker was a quick learn on the Dutch Oven front, he outdid himself one morning when he was completely naked on our bed for some unknown reason.  He decided to rub his ass all over my pillow and said to me “I’m rubbing my butt on your pillow dad!”  I would like to think he will excel at sports some day and become a successful athlete, but if he doesn’t this may end up being my proudest moment as his father.

My hopes for Aiden are a bit tempered, at least on the athletic front, I asked him earlier this year if he wanted to play basketball and he said no dad, I want to take piano lessons. In theory that’s a perfectly fine response, but I have a vague notion of what it takes to be good at playing an instrument, practice, and my fear was that it would be a constant struggle to get Aiden to work towards becoming his generation’s Mozart was well founded.  He has practiced piano a grand total of 17 minutes since he started taking lesson in October. On a positive front, Shirley purchased a Nintendo Switch this fall and Aiden has really taken to that, I’m pretty sure that spending hours honing your video game abilities is a template for success in adult hood.

Shirley has had a productive 2017 as well, this summer she spent an entire Saturday trying to negotiate the purchase of a travel trailer, which she decided she was going to buy that day, only to have the deal fall completely apart after the salesperson tried to throw on a $200 transactional fee.  As far as compulsive purchases go, that one would have been even more catastrophic than the Wave Runner whose purchase was pondered and finalized all in one Saturday morning.  Shirley has driven it five times in the two years we have owned it, and I winterized it this fall the afternoon before temperatures were to hit the low 20’s putting the functionality of the PWC in serious jeopardy, not that Shirley would have noticed, I could have just put it in the shore station at Green Lake for the summer and pretended like it was fine without her realizing the engine block was cracked. The holidays are when Shirley truly shines though, just this week she called me frantic because she arrived at the kid’s school with only enough gifts for Parker and Aiden’s teachers and their assistants as well as all ten of the girls who help out with Colt Care (the after school child care for kids whose parents prefer to spend as little time with them as possible) and nothing for all of the women who work in the office.  She wanted me to run out and get them something, a notion I scoffed at immediately.

In closing I am still waiting for this trend of Christmas cards to go electronic, it would be much easier and more simple to send an E Christmas card if the Jansmas decided to jump back into the Christmas card game, than having to go through the trouble of mailing them out the conventional way.  Additionally, the tangible version of the holiday card has a tendency to hang around way longer than necessary, if it came electronically the deletion of the card would be much easier.

Merry Christmas,

The Jansmas

This holiday season we have a special visitor at the Jansma house.  His name is Bo and he may be one of the most annoying creatures on the planet.  Last week we had Shirley’s Christmas party at our house and her Aunt had mentioned that they were going to have to put Bo in a kennel.  They even went so far as to tell us how they had driven by the kennel and it looked like a concentration camp for dogs.   I am pretty sure on their way from Fremont to our house there was a conversation that involved them saying lets pretend like we don’t want them to have Bo stay at their house for TEN days because we need to act like that would be asking too much but knowing them, well Shirley, they will continue to insist and let’s pretend like they wore us down and eventually give in to their demand.  If they didn’t want this scenario to play out they wouldn’t have gone into how they were keeping Bo at doggie Auschwitz.  Do I like dogs?  Of course I do, but dogs are like kids, you only like them if they are yours.  And Bo isn’t mine.  Furthermore, Bo is being raised by two empty nesters and gets way more attention than even a human should receive.  Apparently he is allowed on furniture at his house because he has already made our couch is own day bed.  Furthermore, he was dropped off yesterday at 4 and when I got home he had gotten into a box of instant oatmeal packs and discarded their contents all over our floor.  To even further endear himself to me he took a dump in the kids bedroom.  The dog has struck out more times than I do in a typical week with my wife.  One my think, he just needs to get acclimated to his new environment and everything will be fine, that’s what Shirley thinks, but there is one more troubling thing Bo does that usurps everything I just listed, he wakes up at 6:30, 5:30 this morning and runs around like a raging lunatic until you feed him.   Why do I know he is never going to acclimate appropriately, because Bo still has his testicles, and there is no way he will ever behave when you combine that fact with the non existent discipline that he has faced his entire life.

Everything the dog does is cute, I am sure if Cara’s aunt had been here when he took a dump in the kids room she would have laughed it off and said “that’s just Bo being Bo”.(I know a thing or two about shitty parenting by the way, I have a PHD in it)  I will admit, I had a weak moment when I agreed to this, and her aunt and uncle have done a lot for us, including helping us move while Cara was 10 months pregnant and I was playing basketball instead of getting the moving truck, how was I suppose to know it had to be picked up by noon?   I’d like to think I would never make that mistake again, but I have multiple times just in different shapes and forms.  My response to the request to house Bo should have been “he’s a dog, he will be fine at a kennel”. Unfortunately, I anthropomorphize animals, and thought he actually had feelings not just testicles.  On top of that I didn’t want her aunt and uncle to be troubled by the fact that their fourth child was in a kennel, but who am I kidding? Once they got to Florida and saw their two grandkids they would have completely forgotten about Bo.

Will I survive the ten days with Bo, probably, will our house ever smell the same?  Probably not, it already smells like wet dog.   However, that isn’t the only impediment I have faced to holiday bliss.  This past week was the last week the kids had school and Parker is in two distinct classes so he had Christmas parties on back to back days.  For some reason the school, particularly the teachers, think parents should attend functions during the school day with their kids.  Fortunately, winter is a bit of an off season for me and I don’t have golf and water skiing consuming my time, the only thing I am juggling is work and pick up basketball.  (I have a place to play hoops twice a day every day of the week, sometimes three times, as well as a weekend landing spot each day, I am 43 years old but walk like Yoda, especially traversing stairs). Aiden also had a party this week which I will get into after discussing the back to back parties.  The Monday party was also attended by my father in law, a fact that allowed me to pop in and make an appearance but not have to endure the entire party.  I was there for approximately seven minutes which was about five minutes longer than I had hoped for.  Ultimately, Parker asked me to go to his party the following day, and it was on the way back to my office after my lunch basketball run so I figured why not.  The problematic thing about these parties for me is that once I get there I am continually looking for an excuse to leave.  Both parties involved craft stations where the kids make a Christmas ornament that you would never hang on your tree or some other conglomeration  of paper, glue, and glitter that will ultimately end up in the recycling bin.  I spend plenty of time with my kids on the weekends, ok, spend is probably over stating it, I occupy the same space as my kids a whole lot on the weekends and feel it unnecessary to see them during the school day.

Aiden’s party was on Thursday and he had no one other than me to attend the party on his behalf. Obviously he would have preferred Shirley or anyone else on her side of the family, but I was all he had and he seemed like he genuinely wanted me to attend.  I asked Shirley what time the party was and she said from 1 to 3.  Perfect I can hit it on my way back from hoops around 1:30.  I rolled into the school and everyone was looking at me at bit funny.  Once I got to his class room I realized something was amiss, there were no parents, only kids and a teacher.  Aiden was up in the loft with another kid and his teacher didn’t seem at all surprised to see me even thought the party was at 10am.  Obviously I had missed the party but his teacher told me I could read with Aiden.  Why would I want to do that, I was mentally prepared for a Christmas party, not for reading to my kid.  Besides, the firm Christmas party was at Clique lanes and I was hoping to get a few practice rolls in before we started bowling for real.  I went and talked to Aiden, and some kid with an even bigger head than his was in the loft with him.  I asked Aiden if there were a lot of parents at the party and bigger head said “all of them were here”. I wanted to call him out on it because my buddy has a kid in Aiden’s class and I know he wasn’t there.  However, I just smiled and laughed.  Besides cross examination 101 tells you to never ask a question when you aren’t certain what the answer will be.

No holiday season wold be complete without me upsetting my wife.  Last Friday the kids went for an overnight with the grandparents they like (not my parents) so I was planning on a date night.  However, Shirley and I rarely talk during the week, the less time you spend with a spouse or talking to a spouse the higher likelihood your marriage will survive (I think there is an algorithm that proves this) so I sprung my idea on her at 3pm on Friday.  I actually asked her if she wanted to meet up with couple friends of ours for a drink or two and then go hit dinner.  “hell no!  I’m already at home and I’m wrapping presents all night!”  So, I ended up meeting up with the couple flying solo, which was probably better, when Shirley isn’t around it’s like taking the governor off a go-kart, I can say pretty much whatever I want, making me much more funny as well as offensive.  After a few drinks with the couple friends I called Shirley and we decided I would pick up some take out on the way home.  When I arrived she was hard at work wrapping presents and I headed to our TV room to watch the Pistons.  As she continued to wrap I could hear her shouting instructions at me as to what she wanted me to do with all the boxes filled with wrapped gifts but I didn’t budge and ultimately fell asleep in my recliner.  When I awoke I was planning on going to bed and getting some sexy time but my failure to assist Shirley resulted in the Heisman.  With sex off the table I decided I may as well lay it out on the table.  I went off on how Shirley spent an entire weekend making candy covered oreos for her co-workers, how our kids have way too much shit already, and how ridiculous it is that we have to buy gifts for every single one of her cousins kids even though most of them live thousands of miles away.  All my points were valid by the way, but the proper approach if I had hoped to take full advantage of a kidless night would have been to say “honey, I really appreciate all that you do, Christmas is such a wonderful time of the year.  I can’t wait to face time with your cousins and their kids and watch them open their gifts, face time is great by itself but when you throw unnecessary gifts into the equation that brings it up to an entirely new level.  I love you, oh and I will do all the things you want me to do in the morning because I routinely wake up way too early so no need to be upset about the perceived lack of effort on my part.”  (I did get up early that Saturday and cleaned the kitchen, took care of the gift boxes, and went to Meijer to get everything we needed for HER families Christmas party at our house later that day).   December 26 can’t get here fast enough.

As I often do, I was listening to 98.7 on my Sunday morning Starbucks run.  Many of you are probably unfamiliar with what transpires on Sunday mornings on 98.7 so let me fill you in, they replay Kasey Kasem’s top 40 from the particular week on the calendar randomly picking the year.

(denim on denim with a tie?  This guy must of been quite something back in the day if he thought he could pull off double denim, there are only two people in today’s world who could pull off a similar look, Justin Timberlake and Adam Levine)

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the top 40 they play the Billboard top 40 hits of that particular week.  What is somewhat troubling about the format is that at the beginning of the show they replay the top three songs from the prior week as if those songs are going to plummet out of the top 40 and not be heard that week.  What is even more troubling is that they played 40 songs from that specific time period, try to come up with ten songs currently played on the radio that are “new” releases that you think would be worthy of some type of best of list.  No real surprise that they are typically scraping the bottom of the barrel until they get to the top three or four songs, and then it still can be dicey.  The song “Sugar Don’t Bite” made it into the top 40 at one point in Billboard music history and this is how it went:

Could Kenny have come along today and peddled his terrible music, awful movies, and mediocre chicken?  Probably not, he was in the right place at the right time, as were Jon Tesch, Jimmy Buffet (his net worth is north of $450 million, and I have contributed at least $100 to that fortune by attending two of his concerts and drinking to the point that I didn’t hear his awful music anymore) Adam Sandler, and a host of other people who have bamboozled society into thinking they have actual talent.  But to Kenny’s credit he was indirectly responsible for comedy gold and when it is all said and done I’d like to think he will be most remembered for “The Chicken Roaster” episode 8 season 8.

Kenny Rogers’ Roasters sets up shop across the street from Jerry and Kramer’s apartment. Unfortunately, their unusually large chicken sign causes problems for everybody. Kramer and Jerry …See full summary »

Director:

Andy Ackerman

Writers:

Larry David (created by), Jerry Seinfeld (created by) |4 more credits »

Stars:

Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards |See full cast & crew »

Reviews

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The two boys had their Christmas program this past Tuesday and it was the second year the Jansma family attended.  The program consisted of children varying in age from 4 years old to 5th grade and started out, as it did the year before, with the fifth grade orchestra and band preforming 25 second parts of various songs.  First of all, the orchestra was three times larger than the band while at the same time had three times more potential to create audible terrorism.  Violins, Cello’s, and various other instruments with strings that require bows to play all seemed to be incapable of being in tune.  To their credit, they had only two months of practicing to get to the point they were at, and their awfulness was acknowledged by the fact that they didn’t play anywhere close to an entire song.  While the band consisted of much more mainstream practical and fun instruments such as the saxophone and the trumpet, their performance may have been even worse.  The last song they played was indiscernible and I had no idea if it was Joy to the World or Grampa got ran over by a reindeer that they were actually trying to play.  However, the entire time they were playing “Make it stop, Make it stop, Make it stop Please” to the tune of jingle bells was going through my head.

In between the band performance and the actual Christmas play various children played pieces on the grand piano with varying degrees of success.  My oldest is taking piano lessons, while there is little chance he will last beyond the winter in his pursuit of becoming a pianist (he practices an average of 3 minutes a week and is no where near the prodigy that wold allow him to put so little effort into something to be good at it) I can’t imagine hm performing a piece in front of the entire school and an audience of parents.

The problem with the Christmas story is that you can’t really vary it up a whole lot, there’s Jesus, Mary, Joseph, shepherds and wisemen.  Every year the same basic story is portrayed and there is little that can be done to change things up to make it interesting to those who are repeat attendees.  This year there was an effort to incorporate the animals that were allegedly present in the manger when baby Jesus was born.  There was one particular animal that stood out form the rest, a rooster, it stood in the background as shepherds, wisemen, and angels said their various lines (or forgot them) into the microphones at the front of the stage.  It was like having the clown from Stephen King’s IT incorporated into the play.  Pretty sure a homicidal chicken wasn’t in any of the gospels.  There were eleven songs sang during the play (I counted them in the program before it started) along with speaking parts between every song.  This seemed to me to be a bit ambitious considering there were a flock of four and five year olds on the stage along with fifth graders who had been through this thing for 6 or 7 years straight, and looked to be suicidal by the time the play commenced.  I kept a steady eye on my kids for most of the play and they looked to be actually singing the songs about 3 % of the time.  When we got home I asked my youngest how the program was and he first said “good” but then decided to be forthright “boring, it was really boring”. I agreed with him and gave him my condolences since he still has 6 more years of the program to look forward to.  At some point I will have to discuss the importance of doing everything in his power not to land a speaking part in the play.

My mom rode with me on the way home and I made the mistake of discussing some parenting inconsistencies at the Jansma household.  Likely an epic mistake since my mom has not once, but twice tried to get me to read parenting books.  She obviously doesn’t understand that I read for entertainment purposes not so that I can be good at stuff, especially parenting.  The primary inconsistency, at least in my mind, is that I try to follow through on my threats at lest 20 percent of the time and Shirley, if making threats, forgets about her threats when it’s time to make the kids pay the piper.  The biggest issue we are facing currently is the kids desire to sleep on the floor next to us.  Sounds strange doesn’t it?  We don’t live in a third world country where the entire family sleeps together in their one room house on the floor, no we all have beds.  However, the kids have decided that they need to come and sleep on the floor next to Shirley’s side of the bed where she has created a mini bed for them with a comforter and pillows (enabling is one word for it, refusing to cut the cord would be an applicable phrase). Some nights they sneak in like ninjas and we just wake up and they are there and other nights they walk in our room and wake me up, causing me to routinely think I am in the movie the Sixth Sense where dead kids repeatedly popped up just about everywhere.  I have routinely questioned them as to why they want to sleep on the floor as opposed to their bed and their claim is that the floor is more comfortable than their bed.

Unfortunately for my kids, my mom gave me a nice little pep talk on the way home (while judging me as a parent the entire time) and I was ready to do some hard core parenting when I got home.  “did you or your siblings ever come in to our room and sleep in our bed when you were growing up?”  My response should have been no because we didn’t really like you guys, but I just said “no”.   I informed the kids when I got home that if they came into our room that night there would be no TV and no watching things on our phone the following day.  Instead of saying Ok dad,  they immediately started crying as if I told them they would have to participate in the Christmas program every day for the entire week.  Shirley stepped in and indicated that it was too late in the evening to spring such troubling news upon our little angels and began to console them.  Sure enough, that night the kids came into our room and slept on the floor.  When they got up they wanted to watch my phone while they ate breakfast and I told them no way.  I went on to say that they were not watching tv when they got home that evening.  They cried and carried on for roughly five minutes and then they were over it.

Typically they have my phone in the car and watch Scooby Doo, Wildcrats, or something else on PBS kids.  My oldest always asks me if I can put my phone on You Tube (blue tooth) when we get in the truck.  Guess what, with out the phone, I had to actually engage my children and we had a great ride into school.   Shirley created a character this summer named Chucky Chuckerson and the kids always want me to tell them Chucky Chuckerson stories where they are part of the story as a certain type of animal.  So, I crafted a story and incorporated a Megladon shark (not even sure if that is a real thing) and a Great White shark into my Chucky Chuckerson story.  The story involved a Disney Cruise where the Disney characters were thrown off the ship and consumed by the two sharks named after my kids.

That evening Shirley picked up the kids form school and had dinner waiting when I arrived home.  The kids were acting quite strange as if they had something to hide from me, the reality is that Shirley should have had something to hide from me, the kids had watched TV while she made dinner.  Just like anything, choosing your battles is one of the keys to succeeding in life.  Was this a battle I wanted to to fight?  Due to the fact that sex is still a preoccupation of mine that consumes my thoughts from sun up to sun down I decided against waging war on this matter because it would have evolved into a larger conflict than anything that could transpire between the United States and North Korea.  The sad reality is that women have quite a bit of leverage due to the distinct nature of their anatomy and men’s preoccupation with those particular anatomical traits we don’t possess.  You know what has never been thought or uttered by a women “I better not broach this subject, it may put sex in the near future in serious jeopardy.”

Confrontation, some of us are attracted to it like white trash to day time television and others avoid it like an attractive female (that’s probably all they had on the set) NBC producer avoids an invitation into Matt Lauer’s office.  Is it a genetic pre-disposition towards conflict or are we conditioned to becoming confrontational?  Most people who know me know where I stand when it comes to conflict, as the late great Tom Petty wrote “I won’t back down” an example of my illogical unwillingness to back down is exemplified in an e-mail exchange that took place in my neighborhood when the payment procedure for the plow service for the common roads was changed due to a family or two failing to pay their share:  (the names have been redacted to protect the innocent)

Hello All,