Since Berta started her new job this summer, I've been responsible for getting the kids to school. I wake both kids at the same time, if Abby doesn't get up on her own, and get them both ready in time for Abby's bus. As the seasons change and the weather gets confusingly colder, it's been difficult getting Riley ready for school in the mornings.

Riley is very picky about the clothes that he will wear. There is no pattern to his preferences as far as I can tell. He will seem to like the shirts with motocycles on them, and then the next day, hate all shirts with motorcycles. Also, I have to watch carefully to make sure that he doesn't re-wear the Spiderrman socks day-to-day, since he seems to love those. But the biggest challenge in the colder weather has been switching to long sleeves and pants.

Whether or not it's true that Berta put away all of his short-sleeved shirts for the fall/winter, that's what I told him, and he seemed to be ok with that. The pants have been a real issue, though. In an effort to appease him and keep my sanity (he does this crazy thing where rather than tell me his problems with his clothes, he'll just sit in his room and not get dressed, throwing off the whole morning schedule), we've made a little deal.

The deal is this: If I make him wear pants on a day that the temperature goes above 70 degrees, I will take him out for ice cream. So far, this deal is utterly failing to avoid ice cream.

The problem is the uncooperative weather. I'm not sure what the deal is with this weird weather where it's 50 degrees in the morning, but then 75 in the early afternoon. I guess that's fall.

I'd think he'd be more comfortable standing outside in the morning in long pants. I do remember tolerating the weather differently when I was a kid, so I'm trying to be flexible when the kids say, "But I'm not COLD!" Still, I would like some absolute measure of tolerability that we can all stand by to get the morning going. I should make a chart and put a thermometer in his room.

Meanwhile, Abby completely dresses herself. She's going to be one of those kids in high school that wears the somewhat questionable "artistic" clothing styles. That's my prediction. But at least she accounts for the weather. For everything but her shoes. If I see those blasted Crocs one more time... I should just accidentally drop them in the trash.

So yeah, ice cream. That's the deal. And we've had to go out for ice cream inconveniently on demand at least once already.

In case anyone wonders, I did eventually find a reasonably reliable source of historical temperatures, which is useful when you're trying to prove to your 4-year-old that the temperature did not, in fact, exceed 70 degrees. You would be surprised how hard this information is to come by. You can find the historical weather (at least for the current day passed, which is all I wanted) over at the Weather Underground.

A month or two ago, Abby and Berta had tickets to some musical, so I decided to get monster truck tickets for Riley and I so that we could have a "guy's day out". That didn't work out so well. They warn you that the trucks are going to be loud, and we had earplugs, but they weren't working. Riley was rightfully scared of the noise, and so I bought him a set of the wheel-shaped earmuffs that they sell at the concession stands.

I put it on his head and he started yelling about how he didn't want to wear them. They hurt his head. Granted, they were tight - they'd have to be to stay on. But if you left them on for a little bit, you'd get comfortable with them and they'd block the noise well. He wasn't having it. There was no convincing him to keep them on, thus there was no convincing him to stay. More than $300 in tickets (I had to buy three for the two of us, and they were really good seats because that's all they had left by the time I found out the girls weren't going to be home and decided to do this) down the drain.

Today, the girls are out again at another show. In spite of the last time, I do like having alone time with Riley to bond. I clearly don't have enough, because we've had another failure. And this time, it wasn't something as scary as monster truck noises.

Every year, the neighborhood plans an Easter egg hunt around the landscaped cul de sac that ends our street. There are plenty of kids, and each parent brings 12 plastic, candy-filled eggs to hide for each child that comes to hunt. With the girls away, it's just up to me and Riley to go do the hunting.

So we assembled the eggs and went up to "the circle", as the kids call it. Riley and I stood around with the other kids and parents, waiting to begin. Now, the kids must all go someplace to hide themselves so that the parent can hide their eggs in secret. All of the other kids left running toward our neighbor's yard, and Riley just stood there.

"Go hang out with the other kids while I hide the eggs," I told him. But he wouldn't go. I tried explaining the whole process of the hunt again, in case he didn't quite understand. "Just go hang out with Gracie and George (our neighbor kids from across the street) until we're done hiding the eggs." He wouldn't go.

Steve, Gracie and George's dad, helped try to persuade Riley to go with them. Riley said he didn't want to be alone. "Alone? All of the other kids are there! And I'll be right out here when we're done hiding the eggs." He wouldn't go. "Ok, I'm going to count to three, and if you don't go over to the garage with the other kids, we're just going to go home. One... Two... Three." Didn't even move.

So we went home without hunting for eggs.

I feel bad for Riley. I don't know how you get like this as a kid, being so timid. Abby is this way too, a bit. They won't approach anything new, and they don't want to be left alone. It's really aggravating, not just because I know it's not good for their personalities in the future, but also because it's making me miss out opportunities to be with the neighbors instead of sitting at home alone. Ironic, that. I wish I knew better whether Riley and Abby are truly socializing at school; making real friends.

This is clearly all my fault, but I haven't the slightest idea how to correct it. More play dates? Therapy? I need therapy, at least.

As you might be aware, we have two kids. We also occasionally like to eat out at restaurants. Inevitably this ends up with an order of macaroni and cheese ordered from the kids menu. Abby is starting to order some more interesting things these days, but that's really not the point of what I'm writing here. What I'm interested in are the menus themselves.

Depending on the restaurant, you get a varying quality of children's menu. Some places simply have the menu as a box tucked into a corner of the adult menu, but the interesting ones are full-color activity booklets that come with a pack of crayons. I find these activity books interesting, and themselves widely varying.

There are some bad ones. For example, Uno Chicago Grill has one of the worst kid's menus around. It has a promising two-color outside, and a lousy activity center on the inside. The activities include basic maze that's so simple you can do it blindfolded, and a "find the differences" puzzle that is a poorly reproduced monochrome photograph too difficult to make out alone yet compare the two photos.

One of the better menus is from Cheeseburger in Paradise. Their full-color menu books have activities on every page. There is also a symbol code, as described on one of the pages, that runs in the border of every page. There is a requisite 80% blank coloring area for free-form doodles, and a few things to color in.

The bulk of chain restaurant menus fall in the range between these two. They're usually a newspaper-grade 11×17 sheet in full color with the restaurant's "kid mascot" plastered all over it with a handful of unimaginative, unchallenging games. Mascots include that dog "Scraps" at Max and Ermas, the eponymous "Red Robin", and some freaky little baseball dude at TGIFriday's.

Some of the menus have a theme, most that have a theme are usually themed for the restaurant. For example, Cheeburger Cheeburger offers nice quality photocopies of their puzzle menu, which include jokes about burgers and a hamburger to color. Nothing like brainwashing your kid into loving their food.

And the never-ending tic-tac-toe boards. Please. Abby has now mastered tic-tac-toe. At least, she has on a good day. When every game is a tie, it's time to move on.

What I always used to like were the Highlights Magazine hidden puzzles; the ones where they draw a scene and hide 10-15 objects in the lines of the drawing. So a tree might be hidden as a chef's hat, or a winter hat might be hidden upside-down as a sundae dish. Those are always good because they can also be colored if the kid doesn't want to hunt, or if the kid is through hunting.

Seek-n-find's are ok, but until Abby could read, we were just looking at the letters. Riley has fun with them now just circling letters he knows. I suppose that's fun enough. Still, more often than not the words are dry, all run the same direction, and don't even bother to cross.

I won't even talk about the lame crosswords.

We've had some fun lately with the coasters at Red Robin. They each have a clue on them from the game Buzzword. When the buzzword is "ball" every clue indicates an answer that has "ball" as part of it. So if the clue was "on top of spaghetti", then the answer would be "meatball". A menu-based game that was more involved like this would be more interesting.

Maybe what I need is an adult kid's menu?

Anyway, it's been my thought to concoct one of these things. I'm sure you'll need to be an eight-year-old member of Mensa to use it, but I think that a menu can be made that is both fun and involved. Usually when our kids want to take home a menu it's because they've colored something nice on it. That's great. But we often leave behind the ones with puzzles and stuff because they're just too easy or not worth the effort. What would be nice is a puzzle menu that makes you want to take it home.

It would be interesting to try to create a menu that makes people want to choose a restaurant because they know that their kids will be well-occupied by the menu contents.

I have some ideas. I want to build strata of puzzles, such that a larger, over-arching puzzle lays on top of the obvious ones. As a simple example, there might be a seek-n-find, but the letters left over from the seek-n-find might form a phrase that is useful for solving some other puzzle that is not quite so obvious.

There must be some company that specializes in creating menus such as these. I even have a similar plan for a car activity sheet, based on something I found in a kitchen drawer called a Scribblesmat. As it turns out, they offer custom runs of their products.

I'll add that as another item on my big to-do list and we'll see how it turns out. There is some irony to me in that list. Thousands of people want to write a book, but only hundreds want to read more. And apparently, I am the only person who wants to positively influence the world.

Anyway, over the next week I hope to kill off at least one of the items in that big list. Stay tuned.

In case you weren't aware, we celebrate my birthday on Wednesday this year, June 4th. My birthday is not actually on June 4th, but that's the day I've chosen to celebrate it. I think I've finally gotten everyone on board with the idea.

This year's event is on the Saturday after, and is a bit bigger than previous affairs. It's the culmination of two years' worth of home building, having moved in two years ago August. It's the first time that Berta will be inviting work people over for anything. I've been inviting everyone I meet to come hang out. We're inviting our neighbors all over, too, which is long overdue - I think they secretly think we're weird for not having done so already. So it's not just for my birthday, although that's how the date was chosen, but also just a general summer party, probably the biggest one we'll throw for a while.

As a result of such the event, we've arranged for some special food and events. We ordered a pig from Brandywine Picnic Park. Just today I obtained a small moonbounce for the kids to play on/in. Berta got lamp oil for use in my flaming juggling equipment. I even ordered more than a few miracle fruit for our guests to try, although I've not heard anything yet about their delivery, so I hope they arrive in time or I'm going to have a lot of miracle fruit to eat by myself.

But one thing that's been occupying some significant mental time lately is the Pirate Quest.

At some point I came up with an idea to keep the various child guests entertained that involved using a treasure map to find a hidden treasure somewhere around the house. Since then, things have gone completely nuts -- I think we've spent like $200 on supplies to fabricate the treasure and the map and clues that lead to it.

Yes, there is a good-sized treasure chest that looks like a treasure chest. Yes, the chest has real shells and starfish in it. Indeed, there are (faux) jewels and gold in the chest, along with various pirate-themes toys and candy. Oh, but what of the map and clues?

I got a tablet of the largest sized watercolor paper they had and a kit that is used to make things look deteriorated. I've been ripping bits off and dunking them in brewed tea to give it an old look, and then actually burning the edges. I have wax to use to seal the map to make it look more authentic.

And the clues... Well, the clues are something we've finally worked out at lunch today. Keep in mind that we're dealing with kids here from the ages of 3 to 12. Few can read, much less do as complicated puzzles as I'd like to construct. So to address the age span, we've decided to produce a basic cryptic map, and then hide clues around our yard.

What I hope to do for the clues is have a small envelope that is printed with a specific stamp that clearly indicates a clue. There should probably be quite a few of these so that there will be plenty of chances for the little kids to find them. Think "Easter egg hunt" but with a pirate theme.

Each envelope will contain a piece of paper with a symbol and a line leading off one torn edge. These symbols will also appear on the map. Some papers may have a riddle instead that indicates one of the symbols. The paper itself will look like it was torn in half and is missing its pair, as this will be the case. When the clue paper is paired with its matching mate, the line will connect the two symbols. Hopefully someone will get the idea (or eventually be given the idea) to draw the lines on the map.

The lines on the map itself won't be of any use. But with the help of something I've had the most trouble obtaining - a UV pen - the lines will indicate a location on a second map, embedded within the first. This will be revealed with the magic of a UV flashlight. The UV map will be real, and the lines will point to a place on the real map where the treasure (or one last clue!) is hidden.

This is the kind of elaborate puzzle that I secretly hope that people involve me in when I attend parties. I love that murder mystery-type stuff. Ah, this reminds me of the time Berta and I dressed up in black robes and brought a book of mature campfire/horror stories to the Halloween party across the hall in our apartment. They were not dressed up and were cordial in their acceptance of our "gift", but then got down to the business of handing out drinks. Yes, I still have hope that at some point I will find a place to fit in, even if I have to make the opportunity for myself...

Anyway, I hope that the kids appreciate all the extra effort on their behalf. Hopefully they're not just expecting to be handed "treasure".

I don't know if I had mentioned this before. I say it frequently enough, so you might have heard me talking about it. The bottom line is this: I'm evil.

I used to think I was marginally "good", but you know what? It's hard work and doesn't really pay off. So I've just given up on the idea altogether. What does this mean for you?

Well, evil isn't always as rotten as it might seem. I mean, evil inspires self-interest. So for example, if I was walking behind you and you passed out - for lack of any good premise - I might still provide assistance, but not for your sake. Instead, any aid would be motivated by wanting to remain innocent of charges that I caused the incident.

I bring all of this up because I was being evil to the kids tonight at dinner.

I took Abby to the grocery store after her Girl Scout meeting to pick up a quick dinner. Included with the fried chicken, salad, and mashed potatoes, I picked up a small assortment of cheesecake wedges. They looked pretty tasty. And while Berta and I like cheesecake, I was pretty sure at that point that the kids would not, at least, they would be surprised by the flavor and texture after hearing the word "cake". Still, Abby seemed convinced by the look of the thing that it would be tasty.

So at dinner, the kids were doing their typical refrain of "I'm done dinner and I want cake" after two bites of fried chicken breading. I told them repeatedly that they would receive no cake unless they ate more dinner. Enticed with just the word "cake" at first, they ate more. Then enticed more with the presentation of the cake at the table, they ate more. Then enticed finally more with the slicing of wedges onto Berta's and my plate, they ate even more.

I don't want to give the impression that I stuffed the kids or forced them to eat more than they would or should have. But I know how they behave when they don't like the food they're given, or think they're getting a treat and would rather eat that instead. Using this knowledge, I put it to good evil use and got them to eat their dinner.

And after they gave up on a bite of cheesecake, Berta and I finished theirs, too.

This is but one small recent anecdote relating to my conversion to the dark side, where I'm likely to generate many more interesting stories to share.