Ian Admits Defeat

My five year old son Ian has some cute verbal peccadilloes: he says "usually" instead of "actually" as a transition (e.g. usually, I have to pee right now . . . usually, I'll have a cookie instead of licorice) and when we play chess and he inevitably starts to lose badly-- he's great at setting up the pieces and moving them correctly, but he gives away a lot of material in suicidal attacks-- then his eyes fill with tears and he says-- repeatedly-- "I'm done for, I'm done for," which makes me wonder if this is good for him mentally . . . but there's no way I'm going to let him win . . . I handicap him three or four strong pieces, but he still has no end game, so I tell him all the suffering and defeat will be worth it in the end, because, maybe, someday (like my friend Rob) he'll be President of the Chess Club (see the image above for the kind of babes you can pull as a high-ranking chess club official).

Expectations vs. Reality

The first morning of our vacation I got up early to read, and Alex woke up soon after and he told me his favorite part of the day was sunrise, when the sky was "purplish orange" and he sat down and looked at a book and everything was peaceful and wonderful and then he asked if we could play chess and I said, "Sure" and made him a bowl of cereal and then I went to the car to get the magnetic chessboard . . . and in the two minutes I was gone Alex violently bit his tongue, screamed bloody murder, ran to the bedroom to wake up Catherine, found the bed-room door closed, yanked on it-- not knowing that Ian, woken up by the screams-- was pulling on the other side, got into a tug of war with the door . . . which ended when Ian let go and the door smashed Alex in the face-- and all this happened while I was gone-- so I tiptoed back into the condo with the chessboard to this grisly scene and realized that vacation had officially begun.