Growing up there were many things I did that I would call character builders (AKA miserable experiences). One of those things, football, was at the top of the list and my experiences with it were a reason I was not going to allow my kids to play football. I had the brilliant idea when I was in sixth grade that I should play tackle football. I always wanted to be a quarterback and had the irrational confidence to think that I could be the starting qb for Byron Center’s sixth and seventh grade rocket football team. Unfortunately, I had two things going against me, the first being the coaches son was already penciled in as the starting qb and the second thing was that I lacked the requisite amount of athletic ability and arm strength to play quarterback or any other staring position on the field. I like to think of myself as a late bloomer and it’s likely I won’t reach my full potential until my sixties. My recollection of that portion of my life had me going to school, doing my paper route and then hustling to football practice, not sure which activity I hated more but I didn’t run the risk of being beat to a pulp by Mike Kerkstra when I was delivering papers or attending school. Mike was a lunatic and ironically our paths would cross again when I took a job with Bruce Vansolkema working on a celery farm, which was another “character building” experience. There are two occurrences that season that really stand out to me. The first was when we played Kellogsville and for some reason I was in the game (it’s likely we were down by at least five touchdowns at this point) and playing on the defensive line. The kid across from me had a mustache and sat on me every time I crumpled to the ground. It wasn’t much of a surprise that I saw him drive away in a car after the game. The second memory that stands out is when my friend Greg Schruer, who I somehow talked into signing up for football with me, made a touchdown saving tackle against Allendale when he was on the kick off team. He actually just kind of ran along with the pile of kids, fell down, and happen to have the ball carrier trip over him at the two yard line. However, the coach didn’t see it the way I saw it and he used Greg as an example of how he wanted everyone else to play, he actually huddled the players going out to the field on defense up and pulled Greg aside and pointed him out to them. Pretty sure Allendale scored on the next play.

Earlier this summer Parker told me he wanted to play tackle football, I have no idea where he came up with the idea, but in hindsight I should have said no. However, if there is anyone besides Aiden who needs some character building in an attempt to overcome extensive coddling from Shirley, it’s Parker. Luckily I found a helmet at Play it Again Sports that I thought fit perfectly, it only made his ears bleed a little bit when you took it off or put it on. Parker’s coach emailed the team members parents instructing them to make sure their kids engaged in one hour of helmet time a day to prepare for having to wear a helmet during practice. So, I told Parker to make sure he wore his helmet an hour a day to prep for the rigors of wearing a helmet. This lasted maybe a day or two before he left it laying around and Max, our Australian Shepard who is a complete dick but super cute, chewed the chin pads out of it. Fast forward to last week when practice began on Tuesday. The first day of practice they did not wear their helmets but the second day they were going to be wearing them. Before we left for practice Parker flipped out because his helmet was too wiggly due to the fact he didn’t have chin pads. I”m pretty sure I had tasked Shirley with the getting replacement chin pads and somewhat lost it when it became evident the helmet was almost as useless as the Detroit Lions. I went into some diatribe about how I have to do everything when it comes to signing the kids up for sports, camps, and activities, which I do. However, to her credit Shirley does work a lot, and not just a lot more than me, because that’s not a high bar, but a lot for most people. On top of that she pretty much leaves me alone and doesn’t interfere with my hobbies, other than scheduling a dinner in Saugatuck tomorrow night with her boss and her bosses husband which I am not looking forward to and interferes with pickle ball. Ultimately, Parker missed practice as he and I searched for a helmet. I was in a foul mood as a result of Parker missing practice and having to drive all over town at the last minute to not find a helmet. I was so mad that not even a trip to Culver’s, after waiving the white flag on the search for a helmet, could make me feel better.

Shirley ended up tracking down a replacement helmet for Parker and I dropped him off to practice on Thursday before heading to play tennis. All seemed to be right with the world and I was by far the best player on the DU tennis courts that night, granted I was going against a guy in his sixties a guy whose average serve speed was 3mph and a guy who was wearing running shoes to play tennis, but I dominated. Doubles isn’t typically my preference when it comes to tennis but since it was hotter than the center of the sun I was ok with it. When I looked at my phone after tennis I had a text from Parker’s coach that Parker wasn’t feeling well. I also had a text from Shirley that Parker only lasted 15 minutes. This didn’t stop me from going to Railtown Brewery after tennis and when I returned home all the lights were off. Sometimes I think Shirley sees me coming down the driveway and turns all the lights off in an attempt to avoid my advances but it was possible that three days of getting up early to get the kids off to school had caught up with her and she was actually sleeping. Regardless, I was unable to question her about Parker’s convenient illness. However, the next day she explained that the helmet Parker had on loan didn’t fit right and kept coming down over his eyes. We rigged up his old helmet with pads from the loaner and Friday’s practice went off without a hitch. The first actual Monday of the school year was yesterday due to the kids starting school last Tuesday and stupidly I did not plan ahead so I had to stop at the store on the way home to pick up some stuff for dinner before I brought Parker to practice. Shirley sent me the following text “I am pretty tied up and can’t help much get Parker ready. Are you home soon?” Try not at all, there was no assistance and I had to get dinner going and get Parker set up for practice, fortunately I am a great driver and didn’t kill two pedestrians walking down the road who took me completely off guard on my way to Duncan Lake Middle School to drop Parker off. One gave me a surprised/dirty look when I narrowly missed the pair probably because he pooped his pants a little bit.

We were the last to arrive and I had to put Parker’s cleats on which were in quadruple knots thanks to the handiwork of Shirley. Houdini would have struggled unknotting those shoe strings and I was at an 11 on the 10 point exasperation scale after double knotting both of Parker’s cleats and trying to send him on his way. However, his helmet didn’t fit right and I had to spend minutes we didn’t have getting it properly adjusted. Finally he waddled over to practice and began to participate with his punctual teammates. He lined up wrong for the first drill and gave minimal effort. The coach yelled at him and not knowing he had just arrived asked him if he was tired already. Parker being chastised in front of his teammates opened up a lot of wounds that I thought had healed so I retreated to my truck to have a good cry. I did have to move my truck from its original position so I could see practice better and at the first water break I saw a kid retreat to where my truck previously was parked. I jumped out of my truck and headed over to where the kid disappeared behind a different truck hoping I wouldn’t discover Parker. Sure enough it was him and he immediately began crying claiming his stomach hurt when I stumbled upon him (maybe tacos before practice wasn’t such a good idea). I only have one approach, it’s the what the fuck lose your shit approach. Fortunately for Parker Shirley arrived seconds after I lit into him because she was going to watch practice and drop Aiden and Parker off to me so I could head out to Green Lake.

Had it been up to me, Parker would have immediately returned to practice but Shirley let him sit in her vehicle and calm down. I moved my truck next to them but that only exacerbated the problem and eventually I left to get gas and a much needed six pack of beer on my way to the lake. However, I didn’t exactly trust that Shirley would make Parker go back to practice so I took a detour on my way to the lake to check up on things. Sure enough Parker was sitting next to Shirley on the “sidelines” as his team practiced. Frustrated, I decided to head to the lake so I could start putting a dent in my six pack. Eventually I received a few photos and video clips of Parker participating in practice from Shirley. I should have asked her to hold up the days newspaper in the background to prove that they were current photos and video clips. I guess the good news is that despite what looks to be an underwhelming athletic career for the one kid I held out hope for, I still have Max. I’m just going to need Shirley’s help building the training obstacle course in our backyard.

A couple weeks ago my kids and I were coming back from Green Lake. I had NBA radio on, yeah, that’s a thing and they were discussing some of the free agent signings that had taken place and what the contracts were paying out to the newly signed players. Parker then asked me if the players were still paid even if they lost. I responded that their contracts are usually fully guaranteed regardless of how they do on the court. This made very little sense to him and he began to verbalize his displeasure with such an arrangement until his brother piped in from the back seat and responded “Dad’s a bad attorney and he still gets paid!” If I had feelings they would have been hurt. It use to be my kids looked up to me and thought I was awesome at everything I did, even lawyering, but now they realize I am a bald, pathetic, middle aged man whose best years are behind him. Other conversations about my ability have included wether or not I ever win any cases. It’s hard to explain to them that it really isn’t about winning in my line of business, it’s about doing the best you can with very little to work with. It’s like finding road kill and having someone expect you to turn it into a fine dining experience.

While the statement Aiden made about me being a bad lawyer wasn’t entirely accurate, I feel like I”m just okay, like I am with a lot of the things I do in life, he did make a comment that rung incredibly true when we were up in the UP a little over a week ago. We were all eating breakfast when Aiden started saying some not so nice things about one of his younger cousins who lives in Florida. I didn’t correct him since even though it wasn’t nice it was fairly accurate. Regardless, his aunt Lori did say to him “Aiden do you know what the golden rule is?” He didn’t but neither did she. She claimed that it was if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all. For those of you who are like Lori the Golden Rule is “do unto others as you would have them do to you”. Sadly, the golden rule wouldn’t deter Aiden because he doesn’t really care much what people say about him wether it be mean or nice. Shirley went on to say to Aiden that he shouldn’t talk crap about people because the people who hear him talking crap will wonder what he says about them when they aren’t around. Aiden responded “you should hear what my dad says about people when they aren’t around!” Granted, most of the stuff I do say I probably would say to people even if they were around but my kids have become more and more cognizant of what I say, as well as what Shirley says. Fat shaming, off limits. Vegetarians are no longer fair game. My dip shit brother in law, I can probably still blog about him unless my blog starts coming up in his endless internet searches trying to track down the latest conspiracy theory about China and the recent chip shortage. However, Shirley and I can’t discuss him in front of our children any longer which really sucks. It took me two days to get around to bringing up his latest thing, the fact he had to buy a brand new GMC Sierra because they aren’t making them anymore. That’s right, according to him GM as well as the other two thirds of the big three are no longer going to manufacture their most profitable vehicles, pickup trucks. He also indicated that China is going to invade Afghanistan and then Taiwan (where all the chips are made) after that.

It gets better though. Typically my philosophy with him is to not engage. I just let him say whatever stupid thing he is going to say and then move on acting like it was a semi logical statement. However, a sore subject for me is his claim that his use of plex to stream movies for free is not stealing. He claims that his brother has hundreds of movies that he bought the rights to and that he is just using plex to access them. However, this claim that his brother purchased all the content was immediately discredited when my sister indicated that she uses plex to access the full beach body catalogue so she can do workouts. My brother in law is a fat ass and his brother is a certified fat ass. So, there is no way that guy forked over any amount of money to have access to a full catalogue of work out videos.

My brother in law then went into some attempt at an analogy that legitimized his pirating of movies and streaming content. It was similar to me going to the MVP pool with my kids last Friday and walking in when the person doing the check ins had stepped away. My kids are not on my membership and I would have had to pay $10 each to get them into the pool. I justified it because I have been a member at MVP since it opened and they owe me some free shit for my loyalty to them even when they shuttered their doors during COVID and I was still on the hook because I had paid for the entire year up front because I was on my buddies corporate membership. (my analogy was much better than Super Dave’s but I didn’t mention it to him) On top of that, I didn’t need to relive what I went through in July when I took my kids to the Crahen MVP pool. This time there was an attendant checking people in and I had to pony up $20 to get my kids in to the pool. They immediately asked me if they could get dippin dots (the ice cream of the future for the past 30 years) and I said no because it sucks. They ended up getting smoothies and then swimming for roughly 23 minutes before they wanted to go home. When I told them we had just gotten there they claimed there were band aids in the pool along with a number of illegitimate complaints. When I was a kid I would have swam in a pool full of bandaids and STD infested water if the pool had a diving board and a slide. We ended up leaving roughly 45 minutes after our arrival and I couldn’t help but continually obsess about the $20 I had just wasted not including the money I spent on the smoothies they didn’t finish.

The MVP pool trip was in lieu of going to the Ionia Free Fair. I had made the mistake of suggesting a trip there on that particular Friday but we didn’t end up going for some reason I can’t recall. So, on Saturday with the heat index hovering around 95 Shirley and I took the kids and my nephews (Super Dave’s Spawn but much more likable and intelligent) to the Ionia County Free Fair. We split up upon our arrival with Shirley taking the youngsters and me taking Aiden and Parker. I forked over what was likely at least a days wages if not more for most of the people in attendance to purchase tickets for the rides but the good news was that the tickets were going to go a long ways since I wasn’t going to be riding any of the rides. My kids jumped in line for the gravitron which is a ride that pins you up against the wall as the floor drops out due to centrifugal force. I walked over to a bench to sit down and when I looked over to the ride as it was boarding my kids were running towards me screaming and crying. The look on my face probably said it all and they were really hamming it up for me. They both claimed that their stomachs hurt and that they didn’t feel up to getting on the ride. My response was that if they were scared they just needed to admit it instead of coming up with such a lame excuse not to ride the ride. They then went into how they didn’t feel like riding any rides and were ready to go home. That was the last straw I responded by saying “you pull this fucking bullshit all the time” literally that is what I said and it may have taken me out of the running for the 2021 DOY but I had had enough. For some reason it’s still remarkable when I swear in front of them even though they have watched roughly 40 rated R movies (including the most recent Suicide Squad that Shirley let them watch when I was at golf league) and heard the F word over a thousand times. Once we were reunited with Shirley and my nephews they immediately told her what I said and she was all over my ass like white on rice (can you still say that without offending anyone?) This should have been my breaking point but to my credit I did manage to keep it together somewhat despite the extreme heat and high concentration of tattooed people addicted to meth I was unnecessarily exposed to. As penance for my sharp tongue I took my nephews through the fun house which required me to rub up against at least twenty things those tattooed meth addicts had also rubbed up against. After the fun house we grabbed some elephant ears and slushies and got the fuck out of there. Ironically, I heard something on the news about a number of Ionia county fair goers testing positive for Covid that following week, pretty sure Covid exposure was the last thing any of those people needed to worry about.

Last Friday my buddy texted me roughly an hour before a scheduled tee time at Thornapple pointe golf course. Not having a whole lot going on I told him I was in and made my way to the course. We had a a threesome but not my kind of threesome, three dudes and the other two definitely were not my type. Regardless, there was a threesome in front of us that was even worse than being stuck behind a trifecta of 70 year old women. The threesome contained a dad and his two daughters, and he was teaching them how to play golf. The three of us had drives in the fairway on one and watched as the dad threw a ball into the bunker and was giving his daughters a tutorial on how to hit the proper sand shot. Finally I yelled “come on man!” and raised up my hands in disbelief and disgust. He looked at me in disdain and then proceeded to continue to instruct his daughters on the finer points of various golf shots. We ended up calling the clubhouse to have the ranger tell the guy he needed to let us play through. On hole two he didn’t let us play through but he finally relented on the third hole. If I were taking Aiden and Parker out for their first round of actual golf I would let everyone behind me play through so that we didn’t feel the pressure behind us of angry golfers (especially if any of them had the potential to get as angry as I can). My drive was on the right side of the fairway and dipshit dad and his two offspring were on the left so I did not have the potential for a run in with him. However, the other two guys were in the same cart and did interact with dill doe Baggins and he was a super douche. When one of the guys was being friendly (which I wouldn’t have done, killing someone with kindness has never been an option in my mind) and asked him how it was going the guy responded “it could be better”. This guy was oblivious not only to golf etiquette but also to how the world works. The guy, Dane, played football at WMU and is built like a brick shit house. It’s probably good I am not built like that or I’d be in prison doing a 5-10 year stretch for beating someone within an inch of their life.

On Monday morning, when I would typically be water skiing, I opted to go to the gym. The river is a mess right now with all the rain and skiing was not an option. My work out that day involved pull ups and the squat racks at MVP have pull up bars on them. One of the squat racks was occupied by a guy who was doing squats and after his sets would lay a towel down in the squat rack and res himself on his forearms and look at his phone. This made it nearly impossible to work in and do pull ups on that particular squat rack. I had never seen the guy before but I had seen the guy occupying the other squat rack frequently. He was about five foot five, wearing a Lululemon white cotton v-neck and his forehead had no expression what so ever due to a lot of botox, probably the botox equivalent of HGH that was in Barry Bond’s system when he hit 93 home runs in one season and his head wouldn’t stop growing. The guy had also had a lot of work done and you could tell he fancied himself as a pretty boy. Needless to say, even though I had never spoken to him, I fucking hated him. This tool bag was doing squats and then he had a mat placed right behind the squat rack so he could do planks and when he wasn’t doing planks he was doing some other squat type exercise directly behind the rack, making it nearly impossible to get in there and do pull ups. I say nearly impossible because I said fuck it and went in and did a set of close grip pull ups, not to be confused with wide grip pull ups, while he was standing back from the rack doing his squat type stretches. This pissed him off and he said to me “whoa, if you just ask I will let you work in and do your sets”. So, when I was ready to do my next set I asked if I could work in, his response was to indignantly step back and let me do my pull ups. However, when I completed my set he pointed out a different area where I could do pull ups. I told him I didn’t want to do them over there because that machine sucked and wasn’t as good for pull ups. (I’m very particular about my pull ups just as I am with a lot of other things in life). He went on to say he had the squat machine and it was for squats and that he basically didn’t have to share. However, if it was just for squats why would it have the pull up bars on it? I told him he could do his planks and squat stretching anywhere, to which he didn’t have an answer and could only say that he had been working out at MVP for a decade and had never had a run in. I attributed this fact to no one having the balls to stand up to the little douche bag because this was not the first time he had monopolized a piece of equipment and violated the basic tenants of gym etiquette.

Monday afternoon I was out at Green Lake with the kids and had to grab my dad from Railside assisted living to bring him over for dinner. I left my kids and their friend with my sister so I could get him and also go to Maple Hill to get my kids a golf bag for their clubs in preparation for their first session of golf camp at Quail Ridge. However, there were no individual junior bags for sale, the only way you could get a junior bag was to purchase a brand new set of clubs. The mark up was exorbitant and I was caught between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately I ended up buying a set for each kid going against everything I believe as a Dutch person. I dropped the kids off at their golf lesson on Tuesday morning and when I saw them later that day I asked them how it went. Aiden responded, dad, you bought me left handed clubs. What are the odds of that? Maybe one out of four, but in my defense the tailspin I was sent into by having to purchase new clubs distracted me from checking the box the clubs came in to make sure they were right handed. Fortunately, Aiden is so bad that having to golf left handed for a morning probably had little impact on his performance. I”m just glad I didn’t get Parker a left handed set of clubs.

Yesterday the Jansma family, including our new dog Max, were returning home from Green Lake. Aiden was in the back seat with Max on his lap and Shirley was riding shotgun. I pulled up to a stop sign and just as I began my right hand turn onto 68th street Shirley flipped her shit making me think I was pulling out in front of oncoming traffic. Immediately I veered into the ditch and stopped. To make matters worse some Good Samaritan motorist pulled off the road probably thinking I had had a stroke or a heart attack in response to my erratic driving. However, Shirley was not reacting to my driving but to the fact that Aiden had pushed Max off of his lap and onto the floor. If we were all trapped in a burning building, Shirley would rescue Max first. On top of all of it Shirley then began to freak out worrying the truck was going to roll over and end up at the bottom of the ditch. I tried to collect myself and remain calm as I determined what the safest course of action was. Realizing that there was no need to immediately do anything but yell at Shirley, I gave her a good tongue lashing for what she had done. It was the rare occasion where she admitted she was 100% to blame for the predicament we found ourselves in. I threw my new Ram truck into 4 wheel drive (probably unnecessary, since it’s a Long Horn) and backed out of the ditch and headed home. We managed to arrive home in one piece and I used the event as an excuse to stay behind as Shirley and the kids headed over to her sister’s above ground pool so that I could decompress (stay at home and watch the second half of game 7 of the Clippers Mavericks game).

Last week I received the following email from it turns out, Shirley’s aunt, who is well meaning but way too passive aggressive and oblivious.

I have been supporting a family this year with three boys who are struggling with emotional outbursts after video games and sometimes meltdowns. The preschooler is the youngest but the oldest in this family struggles the worst – but models the behavior for the youngest.  
This resource is spot on – but takes hard work and thoughtful reflection on the part of the parents.   I thought of you both who have boys that love their games and thought maybe there would be something supportive in here for you!  Let me know what you think!
video game addiction advice

(that was at least two too many exclamation points)

The email was sent to Shirley, Shirley’s two sisters, and one of the sister’s husbands. One of her sisters has two girls and no boys but she threw her on the email chain for good measure. When it popped up I was half engaged in what I was doing and saw the email thinking it was some type of prank or hoax. Who sends out unsolicited parenting advice like that? My mom when she was alive tried to get me to read parenting books but this is a whole other level of meddling in someone’s affairs and basically telling them they are doing a shitty job in at least one aspect of their parenting if not just saying they Suck all together. I tried to imagine myself emailing parenting advice to my nieces and nephews and their spouses and it made this email attempt at back seat parenting even more infuriating (and difficult since my oldest niece or nephew is 6 and hopefully at least 15 years from needing any parenting advice). I would never do that for a number of reasons the first being I don’t care enough to put together an email (regardless of how poorly constructed, and I’ll get to that later) and send it to anyone, especially family members. I had a T-shirt that I have since given to Goodwill, it read “world’s okayest uncle”. That is where I am at as a parent, I’m not knocking it out of the park but my kids are alive, not committing any felonies, and are faring decently in school despite my complete lack of assistance other than signing Aidens planner every morning indicating he has done his homework. “Aiden, did you do your homework?”

“yes”

“get me a pen so I can sign your planner”

I was half tempted to come out firing with both guns blazing but instead took this route and hit reply all with the following message:

“Is this real or some type of scam? Not sure I should click on the link, I”ve been burned before”

Shirley’s aunt responded to my email as follows:

“It is real”

Not only is her aunt a bit passive aggressive she also wouldn’t know sarcasm or humor if it bit her in the nose. I was infuriated by the email, or at least as infuriated as I get when I am not losing at something or my kids aren’t pissing me off, which isn’t that infuriated, so eventually I forgot about it. However, we ended up going to the Score for dinner and Shirley brought it up as the kids were off playing video games with the five dollars a piece we gave them (that gave us roughly 1 minute and 23 seconds of alone time). My anger came back but the problem was that Shirley was going to defend her indefensible aunt no matter what. Her aunt could go on a homicidal rampage in the Wal Mart’s parking lot and Shirley’s response would likely be “you know how my Aunt Jane gets when she has to go to Wal Mart instead of Meijer.” My first complaint about the email is how poorly constructed it was. If you are going to critique someone’s parenting and “suggest” ways they could fix it, at least lay out your case in a concise grammatically constructed email. This email may as well have been written in crayon as far as I was concerned. Shirley defended the grammar and structure of the email and it was as if I was playing tennis against my brother and we were in a tiebreaker. My voice began to raise and my temper began to flare. Shirley went on to say that her Aunt had good intentions and that it wasn’t that big of a deal. However, if one of my aunt’s,I don’t really have any aunts, but let’s just say one of my uncle’s wives had done that, pretty sure the reaction would have been completely different.

And now for the rest of the story. It turns out that Aiden had a complete meltdown when my mother in law was over because Shirley took a device away from him or threatened some type of restriction on his screen time and Aiden’s response was tell her to “fuck off”, literally fuck off. For some reason this was not communicated to me until last night when I went to the pool party after the Clippers game and my mother in law was talking to Shirley and I and the “incident” came up. If I had ever told my mom to F off the first person to be told what happened would have been my dad and he would have kicked the living shit out of me. So, Sue (my mother in law, who drives a Subaru and drives it at 60mph in the left lane routinely) told Jane (Cara’s aunt) about Aiden’s melt down and the rest is history. Finding out about the incident at least a week after it happened caused me to miss out on what would have been a top 3 disciplinary moment in my career as a parent. Unfortunately, or fortunately for Aiden, punishing him a week after his misdeeds would be like taking Max to the basement and rubbing his nose in the dried out turd I found when I went down there to watch hoops on Friday night so I didn’t have to watch Final Destination with Shirley and the kids. (Yes, Final Destination, which I have never viewed is likely inappropriate for an 8 and 10 year old, but so is Scream which we watched Saturday night, but I’m still blaming the fifth graders on the bus for Aiden’s foul mouth) I probably should have just taken Aiden down there and rubbed his nose in Max’s turd as a form of punishment for his mouth and terrible attitude, maybe next time.

This past weekend Aiden had a friend over and as I was driving his friend along with Parker back from Green Lake he asked me what an orgy was. I was half tempted to tell him it meant party but I’m glad I didn’t because it likely would have resulted in him using it completely out of context. For example I could see him sitting in his fourth grade class, yes he’s in fourth grade despite his advanced knowledge of sex and everything that goes along with it, and blurting out to the entire class thinking he was being funny “Who wants to orgy?” Instead I asked him where he had heard that word. He claimed it was from one of his mom’s shows which could easily be the case since she is really into Bridgerton. Unfortunately the inappropriate talk did not end there. His friend, we will just refer to him as C-Rad, blurted out that his mom and her boyfriend have sex on his sister’s bed. I know I shouldn’t have but I just couldn’t resist asking why they would do that when they have their own bed to have sex on. He claimed that their bed was too small which is an explanation that makes no sense at all. Earlier that week Aiden had asked Shirley what a sex toy was. I knew we should have kept the kids in Christian school, although C-Rad still attends NPC.

We had friends over on Saturday night and were speculating as to where the kids were picking this stuff up and the consensus was that it was on the bus. Growing up I never rode the bus unless I was going to a friend’s house after school. Back then it was like Sodom and Gomorrah and I was thankful I lived within walking distance of school my entire scholastic career. Needless to say, I can’t imagine with the advent of Youtube and the increasing popularity and access my kids have to the internet, the bus has become a more kid friendly place. Fortunately, this will all be over for Aiden next year due to the fact that it is the fifth graders, at least according to my kids, who are the bad apples on the bus. Next year he will be in fifth grade but the Caledonia School system is sending fifth graders to a different campus so Aiden will actually be the youngest kid riding the bus and will be traveling to school with kids ranging from fifth grade to high school. The kid is afraid of going to the other side of the house by himself, I can’t imagine him riding the bus with kids who are on the wrong side of puberty is going to be a positive experience for him.

The couple that came over this weekend brought their daughter who is actually going to be in the same school as Aiden next year, she’s ten and is the starting pitcher on her softball team comprised primarily of 12 year olds. Needless to say, she is the opposite of Aiden, popular, athletic, and normal. Before they arrived Shirley and I instructed him to try to act normal basically telling him not to be a fucking dork. It had zero impact on him and he was his usual awkward inappropriate self. Fortunately B to the Rook is really nice and tolerated his behavior and was willing to hang out with him and Parker. However, his interactions with B to the Rook made me quite confident that he will be the last person in his peer group, if he has one, to get laid. I kind of think this is a good thing since teenage pregnancy is the wrong way to get a family started. If he is the other half of an unplanned and likely unwanted pregnancy, at least he will be in his 30’s and hopefully no longer living in our basement.

And then there is Parker. It’s hard to believe they are brothers. Parker wants to play football and Parker seems to be popular. He’s good at stuff and this morning said to me as I was trying to get all my stuff packed in my truck, “dad I need to show you something” I was somewhat preoccupied wanting to make sure I didn’t forget anything I needed for my tennis match that was set up for later in the day but asked him what it was. Turns out it was his standardized test scores that he took at school. I don’t want to brag, but the kid kicked ass in everything. Sadly, so did I when I was a kid and I ended up being a criminal defense attorney. However, I am hoping Parker has a little more drive than I did when I was going through school. That is what Aiden has on Parker at this moment, when Aiden gets home he goes directly to his homework and gets it done, Parker is more like me and doesn’t really seem to get the concept of homework.

While the kids being separated by a grade has probably been a good thing, Aiden going into fifth and Parker into Third, it became problematic this week when I was looking for a summer camp to send them to. As usual I was not on the ball and was looking for camps within an hour of Grand Rapids, there weren’t any so I had to broaden my search. I located a camp near sleeping bear dunes and checked with Shirley to make sure it was acceptable. She hesitated until she watched 30 seconds of the camp video and gave me the go ahead. This place has everything and it made me want to be a kid again, although that would do me no good because my parents would have never shelled out the coin it takes to attend this camp. Is it a fair amount of money? Yes, but would I pay 10 times more to have both my kids gone for an entire week, the same week? Of course I would. The only problem was that instead of asking for the kid’s ages on the application form it asked for what grade they were going into. The cutoff was fourth. I couldn’t let this dream die due to a minor technicality so I put that Parker was going into fourth grade. When I got home that night I asked Shirley if she told the kids about the camp, she hadn’t. At first Parker didn’t want to go until I showed him the video, when he realized they had paintball he was all in. This was when I decided it was best to spill the beans about the fourth grade thing and Parker possibly being forced to lie so he doesn’t get sent home. Shirley wasn’t down with it since she is what you would call a rule follower. I am what you would call not a rule follower and my kids seem to be taking after me. On top of it all, it’s a Christian camp. Shirley has since asked me if I will contact the camp to make sure Parker is ok to go even though he’s only going into third grade. I figure if I keep ignoring her requests she will just forget about it.

I’ll get into the thing most of my readers prefer to hear about before I detail more of my adventures on vacation. We have continued to make attempts to interact with our kids via facetime while on vacation and they have continued to rebuff us in those attempts. They are grumpy and surly every time we touch base with them, which is quite alarming considering they are a long ways off from being teenagers. I signed them up for tennis lessons and those take place on Wednesdays. When signing them up for the class they were in, it was suppose to be for 7 and 8 year old children. However, due to an apparent lack of interest Aiden and Parker’s other two classmates likely still wear pull ups at night. Sadly, their skill level is on par with Aiden and Parker despite the fact they still piss themselves while sleeping. Normally this wouldn’t bother me, Aiden and Parker resemble the kid everyone grew up with who was held back three times and had armpit hair in elementary school when put up against their two classmates, and it’s funny to see them in the same tennis class running drills with these two kids who probably still have nap time at school and aren’t allowed to use scissors. This is problematic due to the fact that my kids are master manipulators and they will come up with any reason they can not to do something. Their stated reason for not going to tennis lessons (the real reason is it forces them to take an hour away from their devices) is that they aren’t babies and they should’t be forced to be in a class with these small children. That argument would work if they didn’t suck at tennis, if I put them in the next level up they would look like special olympians and completely disrupt the class. The good news is Al and Sue stayed the course and took them to their tennis lesson yesterday afternoon, we told them to that they had to make sure the kids went to tennis but I’m almost certain I would have caved and let them skip.

This vacation I am doing some things that I haven’t done in a while, and one of those things is reading a book, not remarkable by any means but for the fact the app on my phone must have some preset goal for reading and it congratulates me after I get through four pages by telling me the following “congratulations you’ve reached your reading goal!” Really, all I need to do is read for two minutes? That would be like lasting 3 seconds during business time and getting an atta boy from Shirely (although she may prefer that duration of time). While my phone has set a very achievable goal when it comes to reading, my Apple watch also sets goals for me to achieve during the day, week, and month. Standing, moving, and exercising are the three things that I can accomplish to achieve affirmation from my watch. Earlier on vacation my watch told me I needed to burn 200 calories to hit my move goal and that I could still do it, I told Shirley I might have to wear my watch to “bed” if I were going to hit my move goal, and I would likely have to be a bit more active than normal. While it may seem weird to wear your watch during coitus, there are plenty of guys who wear them on the basketball court to track what they do out on the hardwood. This seems odd to me, I would think wearing a watch would be a nuisance while increasing the chance of injuring a fellow player, or worse, your watch.

I love my Apple watch and dropped it on the bathroom floor causing the face to take a direct hit and crack the glass face. Initially when I received my first watch I didn’t think there was anyway I would love it as much as I did and the thought of purchasing a replacement within months of my first would have been inconceivable to me. While my watch does achieve a lot of what I look for from a “Smart” watch it can be somewhat annoying when it tells me I need to breathe or reminds me to do other trivial tasks like stand up. That being said, imagine a smart watch that keeps track of the truly important things, such as how many times you have had sex, or for women how many times you have avoided having sex? My watch keeps track of how many times I exercise in a month and stacks it up against past months while also giving me goals for the current month. I don’t wear my watch during hoops so my watch has no idea how truly awesome at fitness I am, but I still stay on track to hit most of my exercise goals. But if a watch was there to tell you “Three more runs at your wife and you will have hit your February sex goal!” or “Turn your husband down 2 more times and it will not only destroy his already fragile ego but also break your all time record for consecutive days without sex, way to go!” A second thing the designers of the Apple watch missed out on tracking was bowel movements. Who wouldn’t want empirical data about their morning shit? You burned 97 active calories and 126 overall calories dropping that load!” or “Three more dumps and you will break your previous record set in January of 2019, keep it moving!” I feel like I would burn a lot of active and total calories due to the fact that I have frequently had our automated lights turn off mid crap at my office restroom, which leaves you feeling quite vulnerable.

Probably should wrap this up, Shirley and I have been having an enjoyable time in St. Thomas primarily because we have been doing a lot of nothing. My routine is to get up and get coffee, make breakfast, get shot down by Shirley, goof around on my computer, go for a run and then hang out by the pool. Shirley’s routine is to make earrings all day on the beach. Initially I thought this trip was going to drag but here I am saying “It’s already Thursday! WTF!” Which is good because saying it’s only Thursday would have meant something went way wrong. On Tuesday we went on our one adventure over to St. John’s Island. It wasn’t too terribly eventful other than no one wanted to sit next to me on the taxi ride we took in a converted Dodge pick up truck with three rows because I have officially become the creepy old guy. I knew it was just a matter of time, but I thought it wouldn’t become official until I hit my fifties (which isn’t far off). Shirley and I ended up at Trunk beach which is a national park and they had chair rentals there. We rented a couple of chairs and were ready to be on our way to the beach only to encounter people who thought the chairs were free and started walking away with them. The chair rental people were distracted and didn’t notice but there was no way I was going to let these people walk away with free chairs after having properly rented mine. I immediately told them the chairs weren’t free, somewhat chastising them for their foolishness. Upon reaching the beech Shirley put on the snorkel gear and left me to watch our belongings. Being the creepy guy I have always known I am but was cemented today by the taxi ride I decided to scour the beach for hotties. As I got my creep on a girl did a cartwheel causing me to wonder if Shirley could accomplish such a feat. I have known Shirley since 2006 but had no idea if she could pull off a cartwheel. My suspicions were that she couldn’t and when she returned I asked her, leading her to ask me the same question. In my mind this was a question that need not be asked, I take stairs one at a time due to the severe aging my joints have taken from too much running and too much basketball and I can barely pull off a jumping jack. I was spot on in my evaluation of Shirley’s gymnastic capabilities, wonder what else I am going to discover about my bride of almost a dozen years in the next few days.

When I planned the Jansma annual winter break vacation in December it was with the idea that the entire family would be going to the US Virgin Islands. However, that was when we thought Shirley’s parents (Al and Sue, those are their real names) were stuck in Arizona at their winter home. Fortunately, they were able to get scheduled for vaccines in Newaygo County, return to Michigan in January, and are currently minding our kids as Shirley and I take a much needed vacation. Not much planning went into this trip, I booked airfare and a place to stay. So, when we arrived and we realized there were no rental cars at the airport I began to panic. I am claustrophobic in all areas of my life, it goes beyond small spaces, it can be my home, or even a resort in a tropical paradise. Even on vacation I have to get out and go to the store on a daily basis as well as make a morning Starbucks run. Sadly, I don’t think there is a Starbucks here so I have had to settle for imitation cold brew from the breakfast place at our resort, and when I say resort, I mean that in possibly the loosest way you can use the word resort.

When we arrived last Thursday I received a call on our way to the place that I thought we had booked telling me we had been upgraded. I couldn’t understand much of what the guy was saying, just congratulations and upgrade. Hard to get excited when you have no idea what the place you originally intended on staying at was like nor any clue what the new place holds in store for you. The shuttle driver dropped us off at the original place we booked because I figured they just changed our room to a better room. Turns out they changed our entire location and we were now staying on the beach roughly 300 yards from the original booking site. The office was a converted guest room that didn’t exactly instill confidence in our new digs and when I couldn’t get the door to our room to open I began to have serious reservations. Turns out because it had rained prior to our arrival the door had expanded and the door needed someone with a little more know how than what I possessed to get it open. After a day of traveling I needed a shower and discovered there was no hot water. Ultimately I endured two days of luke warm showers before we spoke to someone who fixed the issue only to have the hot water go out again 24 hours later. The sketchy place we were staying at recommended a rental place a couple miles down the road and I blame myself for what ensued. Why wouldn’t a sketchy vacation rental place not be in bed with a car rental place at least as shitty as they were, if not more? I left them my number when they told me they didn’t have any cars, George called me back on Saturday informing me that a car had been returned and wanted to know when he could come and pick me up. In my excitement I didn’t ask anything about the car or the price and told him I”d be ready in ten minutes.

To say the car was a giant pile of shit would be an insult to giant piles of shit. It was a Ford Focus that was probably an early 2000’s model. Stupidly, I got in the car and he drove me to the rental headquarters which was a trailer a couple miles away from the resort that would not be suitable to inhabit even in Allegan or Ionia County. For some reason I didn’t balk at the rental fee of $65 a day nor did I protest the $4 government tax, that actually seemed like a bargain. Furthermore, I opted for the $15 a day insurance coverage even though the car had no actual value based upon its current condition. I never opt for the insurance, but they drive on the left side of the road here and George claimed a lot of insurance companies from the states use that fact as a way to dispute any claims made by their policy holders when they are down here on vacation. I drove away and immediately had buyers remorse. The interior door handle was missing a piece and was rubbing up against my leg and causing me a moderate amount of discomfort, way more discomfort than you should receive for $84 a day (I also had to throw down a $500 deposit, which was about 500 times the value of the car).

To be honest, I was in a bit more vulnerable state on Saturday than normal, the night before I was over served to the point that my alter ego Steve only had a five minute window to enjoy my drunken state before I went into full on black out mode. Shirley and I had decided on getting pizza and by the time we began to eat I took on the persona of wet noodle mumbling a lot of non sense and claiming that I had the investing savvy to allow us to retire immediately. I had just opened up a TD Ameritrade account in October to jump on some Hertz and now was off and running with a lot of hits, and a few misses, so it wasn’t all drunk talk, I”d easily be able to navigate us into retiring by our late 70’s with my investing prowess as long as I could disable Shirley’s amazon prime account. On our way out of Red Hook prior to getting a taxi back to our resort which was less than a half a mile from our resort, we stopped and made a reservation for dinner the following night. It went against every fiber of my Dutch being to not walk into and out of town but helicopter rides are safer than pedestrian walking on the streets of St. Thomas.

Saturday morning Shirley gave me a hard time about how inebriated I had become the night prior, the good news for her is I was in such a disabled state I didn’t even make a play for some business time, the bad news for me was that when I made a play for it Saturday morning I got the heisman, it was a stiff arm even more debilitating than anything Derrick Henry could dish out. I was also warned that I had to be on my best behavior if I was going to cash in later that night. (I didn’t even remember stopping to make the dinner reservations) The reservations we had made were for four people enhancing my chances of Steve staying away for the night. Shirley had met a couple from North Carolina on the beech on Friday and they had invited us to go to St. George Island with them on Saturday. Steve had agreed to this adventure but Jason wasn’t feeling it out of fear of being trapped for the day, and in true Jansma fashion Shirley agreed and texted our new found friends that we were out for the day trip but still on for dinner. We slowly made our way out of bed and headed to the breakfast place for the first time. Shirley asked the man behind the counter “how’s your sausage?” My response was “that’s kind of a personal question isn’t it?” The guy didn’t even smirk making me think he either didn’t hear me or he was a democrat.

I have made little mention of my kids and the reason for that is those little assholes don’t even miss us. The only time they reach out to us is when they want more screen time. We have face timed them a couple times and they have about as much interest in us as Shirley has in hanging out with Steve. To make matters worse for Al and Sue the kids have winter break and today was a snow day so the only respite they have this week is a half day of school tomorrow. On top of that, while I was typing this blog Aiden contacted Shirley because he couldn’t get on Roblox, he thought Shirley pulled the plug on him but it was corporate. Apparently you aren’t suppose to say inappropriate things on Roblox, even if you spell it wrong, and he called someone a bich in the chat and was red flagged for it. Kids is a chip off the ole block. Failing as a parent when your kids are there with you is one thing, but I never would have imagined we could do it when we were thousands of miles away from our kids. The right thing would be to keep him off Roblox for a month which I heard Shirley mention but didn’t really catch what she was saying until I heard her tell Aiden “ok, I’m going to get you back on Roblox but you can’t say any more inappropriate things because I assured them you wouldn’t and I don’t want you making me look bad the Roblox people (whoever that is).”

This morning as we were getting ready for school I told Parker he needed to sit down and eat his breakfast. He responded that he had to wait to pee because he had a boner. I agreed that it’s really hard to pee when you have a boner. However, I filed the boner thing away and thought I should ask him on the way to school how he knew about boners, not exactly how he knew about boners but mainly how he knew the proper medical term. On the way to school I asked him how he knew about boners and both he and Aiden said they had asked Shirley about it. Apparently they were watching a movie that referenced boners, not hard on boners, but the other kind of boner, a mistake. The grandma in the movie had a t shirt on that said I don’t make boners (this is also a T shirt many wives could feel comfortable wearing). For some reason this led to the kids asking Shirley what a boner was. I asked them why they didn’t just wait and ask me and they claimed I wasn’t around, fair enough. However, having only boys I figured I would be the one to tell them what a boner was, but that it would probably be a few years down the road. Parker also added that he gets boners a lot, especially when he has to pee at school and that he has to stand above the toilet when this happens. I tried to flush it out to determine what he meant by “above the toilet” but couldn’t really determine what he meant by that, as long as he’s not peeing on the ceiling I’ll just let him keep on keeping on. Thanks to Shirley buying the birds and the bees book on Amazon coupled with the fact that we let them watch a lot of TV-14 and up content, my kids have an extensive knowledge about sex. I suppose it’s still better than the alternative, learning about sex from Darlene Doornbos at recess.

On Wednesday morning I was unable to sleep so I got up and blew out the driveway. The amount of fallen snow was at an in-between point where it probably wasn’t necessary to blow out the driveway, but I didn’t want Shirley on my back when she woke up telling me to blow out the driveway. This year I am foregoing a plow service and I definitely don’t need to hear “I told you you should have gotten a plow service!” That being said, at this point I don’t mind blowing out the driveway, its a way to get outside and put on a podcast and not have to worry about anyone bothering me, similar to mowing the lawn in the summer but without a place to put my beer or any real practical way to drink it if there was a place. When I got in the house I went and tested the down stairs toilet because it wasn’t flushing properly the night before, someone had likely dropped a concrete turd in it along with way too much toilet paper. Since installing the new toilet down there last summer there had been zero clogs and I was concerned I would have to contact a plumber. Sure enough it still wasn’t flushing. I was going to run to Home Depot and get a snake to try and unclog it when Shirley told me we already had one, I managed to locate it in the garage and went to work, the only problem is I couldn’t get the thing to unwind properly so I had to do it manually which required me to put my hands in the toilet water that still had poop remnants floating around in it, and it wasn’t my poop, which wouldn’t have made it great, but it would have made it better. I jammed the thing down there as far as I could and moved it around and then pulled it back out. Voila! The toilet flushed completely and I avoided the unnecessary trip by a plumber to fix the clog, Yeah me!

Earlier this week I had called my buddy to rehash what had happened at lunch basketball (don’t tell anyone in the Whitmer administration about this, this is really dangerous and I’m sure someone from the health department will be tasked with finding where we play and shutting it down out of fear that the business allowing it will make a profit and somehow be able to remain viable) and he told me he loves winter and was saddened by the fact that there’s only six weeks left. I was shocked because I hate winter and can’t wait for it to end. Due to every night being a movie night since the lockdown started the Jansma’s are running out of movies to watch (movie watching is a key to keeping the cold dark nights of winter from passing by at a snails pace) especially since Shirley has grown a conscience and won’t let the kids watch a lot of the questionable movies I had planned to fill the content void. She even came down to the basement and put the brakes on me and the kids watching Mad Max Fury Road a few weeks back. To be honest, I think the kids were a little freaked out by it, but they weren’t going to let me know because they could tell I was really excited to watch it with them. For those of you who haven’t seen it it’s post apocalyptic and is wall to wall action and violence. Also, Shirley may have came down at the worst possible time due to the fact that the scene that was playing involved five scantily clad women in the middle of the dessert taking a water break and hosing themselves down. Had I not been with my kids I would have labeled the scene bonerific. So, in light of the fact we are going to have to wait at least a good six months for the kids to mature to the point where I can unleash the questionable content I have picked out to watch, we have turned to streaming tv shows, in particular the Goldbergs. I never paid much attention to this show when it was on the air and dismissed it as not being funny, even though I had really never sat down and watched an entire episode. However, it takes place in the 80’s the same time I was growing up, and it is quite witty and relatable to even my kids. One of the reasons is because the mom is over the top in her love for her kids and smothers them in every episode and the dad just sits in his recliner with his whitey tighties watching TV, paying little attention to his kids. Obviously the gender roles are reversed and the only difference is that Shirley doesn’t wear white tighties, although she use to have some Grannie panties that were even more objectionable than whitey tighties, but I managed to get throw those out a few years back without her knowing.

The show has really grown on me and my kids also love it. However, there is always a problem with shows that cast young actors, it happened with Leave it To Beaver, Wonder Years, Family Ties, and many other shows (it didn’t happen in Webster or Different Strokes because their child actor was a midget) The young actors morph into akward teenagers and the show typically looses its charm. I jumped in on season 2 of the Goldbergs which involved Adam, the youngest of the Goldberg children beginning 7th grade. We made it through season 2 this week and started season 3 last night. Adam is now going through puberty and the show is using that in its plot lines to document what an awkward and awful time puberty can be. However, the years to follow are going to be difficult and while the show somehow has managed 8 season I can see where this is going. Unwatchable TV is just down the road but my kids will likely insist on riding this thing out until the very end. The only way to avoid such a painful existence as the winter drags on is to come up with an alternative show to garner their attention and sever their allegiance to the Goldbergs. Now I just have to figure out if I should start with The Sopranos or Breaking Bad as the new streaming path to send my kids down to eradicate the Goldberg when it becomes unwatchable?

Ted Williams was the last major leaguer to bat .400 over an entire season. Batting 400 is impressive unless it’s the success rate in acquiring sister and brother in laws. I’m two out of five, and the catastrophe that is my siblings choices (and one of Shirley’s sisters) impacts me more than I ever could have imagined. Granted, had my brother and sister listened to me when I told them they were making a huge mistake (I’m not the type of guy who sits back and lets shit go wrong without trying to intervene) I could be batting 800 (there’s no way I was talking Shirley’s sister out of marrying her husband). Regardless, my brother came home this weekend from Seattle with his Debbie Downer of a wife and I realized why they don’t typically come back to Michigan together, because she’s a bitch and she can’t stand my brother, two things that don’t bode well for spending time together when visiting family members back home.

Where I am at right now, and some of you may know this some of you may not, is my mom has moved out of the house we moved to when I was in second grade and is living in my tv room on a hospital bed and the house has been sold. However, all of her shit is still there and I am tasked with getting it out of there prior to February 1. Since my brother was back from Seattle my other brother came up from Gary Indiana (yes, he lives in the butthole of Indiana) and the two of them along with my sister and I converged on the home of our youth (as well as when I was 30 and lost my job and had to move back in with my folks and share a room with my brother Andy, needless that was the low point, I had nowhere to go but up). My mom maybe the only organized hoarder on the planet, she collects food from Big Lots, clothes from everywhere that isn’t fashionable, as well as antiques and nick knacks. The good news is due to the fact that the house has two working toilets there were no five gallon buckets with human shit in them to dispose of. Every room, every closet, every cupboard was filled with something, and 99% of the time that something had absolutely no value. We moved most of it into the garage which from there it will be thrown into a roll off to be taken to the dump. As we emptied the various crevices of the house it became obvious we weren’t eradicating the home of everything that day and that the smart move would be to just make it a one step process for everything still in the house and get a roll off to place in the driveway.

My mom actually had a pioneer satellite radio adapter in her “craft room” that had never been open. It would have been fun to call the number first of all to see if anyone answered and then screw with them and tell them you wanted to hook up your pioneer satellite radio. Eventually we decided to call it a day and headed over to my sister’s new house for dinner. Like I use to do when every single Jansma family get together was at my house, I smoked some meat, this time I did baby back ribs and they were fall off the bone delicious. Shirley, my kids, and my mom had been watching my sister’s brood (4 kids 5 and under) so she could help with the dismantling of my parent’s former house, even though she showed up two hours late and claimed she had been getting diapers. When we rolled in to her house all of the kids were making a movie and my brother’s kids were also there, my brother Jesse from Seattle has a five year old daughter and a one year old son and my brother Andy has a 9 month old daughter. My kids are 7 and 10 and were the creative minds behind the movie. Jesse’s wife, we will just call her eeyore, came storming into the room where we were watching football complaining that my kids kept using the word murder. This upset her for some reason, not sure why and I responded to her that their dad is a criminal defense attorney so what did she expect? She responded that she didn’t want her daughter going to daycare when they got back to Seattle and saying she was going to murder her daycare mates. She poked the bear and I told her that my kids were awful and this was how they were. The reality was that when I was a kid my friends and I constantly played games where we pretend killed one another, as well as real BB gun wars where we shot one another. My kids mentioning murder really wasn’t that big of a deal and if eeyore thought it was she was bringing it up to the wrong person. I’ll yell at other people’s kids, so obviously I don’t have a problem when other people yell at mine or reprimand them. So, she was free to do so without any brush back from me.

The next morning my brother Andy came over for breakfast with his family and when Eeyore finally appeared around 10am Shirley made the mistake of asking how she slept, “Not good, it’s just so loud in your basement, you can hear everything!” It couldn’t have been that bad, she slept in two hours longer than anyone else did. On top of that, since I have never slept in my basement, I was able to seek out a third party to determine if Eeyore’s claims were valid, Andy and his wife have slept in our basement dozens of times, and they said it is quite peaceful and they have never noticed any noise. My brother Jesse, who has to plan things behind his wife’s back so that he can just take off and do it and deal with the consequences later, made the mistake of telling her about a Sunday lunch he had planned with someone that Eeyore flipped out about. I had made plans to go watch football at a buddy’s bar with a few guys and that also pissed her off, knowing that my brother would be off having fun with out her even though she doesn’t particularly enjoy being around him but seems to still want him around to torment him and have him help her with their two kids.

On top of how exhausting it is to be around Eeyore, there’s also a somewhat complicated dynamic between my brother Jesse and I. We are quite competitive and even more competitive when competing against one another. I have broken countless tennis rackets playing him in tennis and we have gotten into a number of knock down drag out fights over such meaningful things as corn hole, washers, and racquetball. The competitive gene was not passed on to Aiden, but Parker is a fierce competitor (asshole) just like his dad and wants to win at everything. Lexi, Jesse’s daughter, is exactly the same the only difference is my brother goes out of his way to stoke her competitive spirit where as I try to find ways to curb Parker’s knowing if he stays on his current trajectory he may be even a bigger A-hole than I am. Eeyore set up an obstacle course in the kids playroom and Sunday morning I spent a chunk of it timing Parker and Lexi as they went through it with a spoon with a ping pong ball on it in their mouth. Parker nailed it and his times continued to improve as he went through the course. Lexi, who is five, didn’t have much luck getting all the way through the course but was determined to beat her older cousin. Strangely, I could feel her pain because I always want to beat my brother and since it’s winter right now all I had was board games. Qwirkle is a game of shapes and colors and you need to get all six shapes in row or all the shapes of one color in arrow to get a Qwirkle. My brother had never played and I ended up getting out to a commanding lead, but then he caught on and started getting intolerable after nailing a couple Qwirkle’s, my heart started pounding and my palms began to sweat. Was I going to blow what I thought was an insurmountable lead? Was I going to be the Detroit Lion’s of board games? I managed to put together enough points at the end to stave him off and was quiet in victory. The next night I beat him in another board game and was quiet in that victory. Unlike him, who is a complete loud mouth gloating dick when he wins, I keep my mouth shut for the most part in victory. However, when I lose that’s an entirely different story. We ended the night with a rematch in Qwirkle, and while it wasn’t ideal to lose to Shirley in Qwirkle I am glad she beat my brother so I didn’t have to hear him gloat.

I guess the good news is that they are now on their journey back to Seattle and I won’t have to see Eeyore for quite some time. She is the person who always goes worst case scenario with everything, the chances of Lexi murdering one of her classmates seemed pretty minuscule to me. The good news is, being 3,000 miles away keeps her from hearing some of the truly golden nuggets that come out of my kids mouths like the other week when Parker, who is 7 almost 8, asked Shirley and I what it looked like when animals had sex. “Well, Parker there’s this thing called doggy style……..”

Monday morning, the first morning the kids were suppose to return to school after Christmas break saw them getting tested for Covid to determine when they would be allowed back for in person learning. The following morning a heated argument arose between Shirley and I regarding who is to blame for this nightmare. She blamed me for bringing Covid into our house and I blamed her for making the epic mistake of getting tested and putting the Jansma family on the radar of the Fourth Reich (The Michigan Health Department). Typically I am willing to take full responsibility for my negligent behavior but in this case what I had pulled off was akin to Ron Jeremy wearing no protection his entire porn career and coming down with penal warts the day before he retires. Not exactly a win, but an accomplishment none the less. I made it ten months and had avoided a virus that is more prevalent than cheapness is in Dutch circles. I wore a mask, I social distanced, but I wasn’t going to change my pre-covid lifestyle to avoid contracting a virus I knew had little to no chance of having any type of significant impact on my health. I also knew it was inevitable that I would contract it at some point but in life timing is everything and this was the worst possible time to come down with the vid. Parker was in the room while we were going back and forth but high tailed it once he realized this was a code red after Shirley dropped an F bomb. Had I been thinking clearly I would have strongly opposed Shirley being tested, what good was it going to do? With Shirley’s positive test now it was a matter of hoping the kids tested positive so they could return to school sooner rather than later. The smart play would have been to forego the test and just keep the kids out of school for a week claiming some type of unrelated covid illness. Shirley’s concern was the danger we would put the people visiting my mom in now that she is living with us. However, we didn’t need a positive test to tell them to stay away for a week due to Shirley losing her sense of taste and smell as well as exhibiting other covid symptoms. We agreed to disagree as to who was at fault but I had logic on my side, what good did the covid test do? It’s like getting tested for Herpes, you already know you have it, why put yourself through the anguish of the testing procedure? Just get some black market Valtrex and move on with your life.

As I was getting the kids breakfast Shirley came down and said she spoken to some doctor who is in charge of something where she works and she had told him that she ended up getting tested, he told her that now she was on the Health Department’s list and a marked women along with everyone else in her household. Finally she acknowledged that maybe a test wasn’t the best way to go. Making matters worse, the kids came back negative pushing their return to school date out even further. Adding insult to injury, Shirley gave my cell number to Fourth Reich to circle back with me and tell me what I was suppose to do and not do. I was not making the same mistake Shirley did, no test for me. Sure enough Tuesday morning I received a call from a volunteer who was working for the Fourth Reich. Even the least perceptive person could sense the hostility as the conversation started. The women started out by telling me how seriously MDH takes Covid which was the window I needed to jump in and respond “yes, too seriously based on the mortality rate being .0006% of the population” she responded by saying it was way higher to which I countered that there was a huge chunk of the population who had it but never knew it and as a result were not tested, or knew they had had it and chose not to get tested like me. She started in about quarantining but I wasn’t having any of it explaining that I had it before my wife and that I was out of my window to quarantine. In closing I told her that the worker that spoke with Shirley would’t accept the date for her onset of symptoms and our kids are therefore being deprived of in school learning as a result. (we need those bastards back in school as quickly as possible, things are falling apart at the seems over here) She claimed she was going to speak to her direct supervisor about it but I doubt there will be any type of rectification of the onset of symptoms date for Shirley. I like to think it was refreshing for the volunteer to finally speak with someone who had it together and wasn’t playing the game, but I’m sure it probably ruined her entire day, she was a definite Karen.

I had sworn that if my kids were held out of school for any extended period of time we would load up and go to Florida. Unfortunately, Shirley isn’t too keen on this idea so we may have to make way for the Sunshine state under the cover of darkness. One of the problems is that I keep forgetting my kids, because they are kids and tested negative and have no symptoms and can’t pass it on, are suppose to quarantine. I wanted to take them to tennis lessons yesterday and get them started on routine of Tuesday and Thursday tennis lesson but Shirley squashed that idea immediately. The real problem is I know how things should be handled and the protocol seems to be the opposite of the proper way to deal with kids who don’t have Covid, can’t pass Covid, and need to get out of the house before one of their parents kills them. What makes matters even worse is that my idea about how things are done are typically shot down by Shirley, and she always adds that all of the doctors she works with disagree with everything I am saying. Well, guess who else is a Dr (besides me, a doctor of the law, but a doctor none the less) yes, Fauci is a doctor and he’s an idiot, so why would I listen to a doctor when I have ten months of dealing with covid under my belt? On top of all of that, Shirley finally snapped today and summoned me to come home and deal with the kids. I had a consult this morning as well as some virtual court hearings, the consult had to be at my office and the virtual court hearings were best to be dealt with from there as well. Shirley has been entrenched in her home office since the beginning of all this but claims I can use the auxiliary office which is really a spare bedroom down in the basement where Jasper sleeps most of the day away and just so happens to have a desk in it. She summarily jumped off the phone without me agreeing to come home. However, I canceled my 2pm tennis match and texted her that I would be home after I finished a couple things up at the office. I wasn’t planning on throwing my hat into the ring for HOTY (husband of the year) in 2021 having already claimed the championship belt DOTY in 2020 by taking my kids to a waterpark to close out the year, but why not? Why can’t I go back to back?