Recently, one of the parents of Riley's schoolmates called to arrange a playdate between her son and Riley. I don't remember having so many playmates as a kid, and I certainly don't remember how my parents arranged them. Even though I appreciate the opportunity to socialize Riley among his classmates outside of school, this whole process seems kind of strange to me.

It's not so strange that our contact information is available. The home and school association produces a White Pages-like book of student names and addresses, organized by grade. You can opt in/out each year, but most parent include their addresses for purposes of convenience, like setting up playmates. I assume it also helps for homework help, since some of Abby's classmates have called asking for clarification on something they were doing in class.

What really perplexes me, though, is how the playdate itself is supposed to work. Maybe I put too much thought into this whole thing, but take this most recent instance as an example. A strange woman calls the house and asks, "Are you Riley's dad?" Uh, yes. "I'm Riley's friend from school's mom. You know, Riley's friend, Bob." Uh, ok. "Bob wanted to invite Riley over for a playdate." Oh! That sounds great; I'm sure he'd like that. Now what?

Maybe it would be easier if I wasn't so weird about it myself. But like any meeting, you arrange a place and time. Usually it's at the caller's house, after all, you don't call someone up and say, "Hey, we've never met, but I'd like to come over and hang out!" The time is a weird thing, too. We talked about summer camps, which seem to be the thing parents do around here - send their kids off to camp for the summer. Riley had a week of day camp this summer, but mostly he's been at home, so he's free during the day. Sort of.

Have I mentioned at all about how I'm becoming more like Mr. Mom? Back during the weeks I was carting the kids to and from day camp, and between activities, it felt more and more like I was a stay at home Dad with a part time job. While I find nothing wrong with that lifestyle (if one can afford it), I don't want to be perceived that way unless that's really how it is. I find myself vociferously defending my work, how I work from home, etc. As if everyone is now unfamiliar with the concept. (It seems that half of the men on my street work from home at some point or another, at least. Weird I never see them, though...)

So yes, I can cart Riley over mid-day for a playdate. Am I expected to stay? As a parent, should I be wanting to stay and observe this stranger's environment that my kid will be playing in? What if they have knives? What if Riley comes home with a tattoo? Aren't these things I should be worried about? "It's ok if you just want to drop him off."

I'm telling you, there should be a manual. I've met only a few parents who I would not want to leave my kids alone with, and combined with the number of people I know who are not parents that I absolutely would not leave my kids with, I believe I have a healthy enough fear of leaving my kids with anyone. On the other hand, I've seen parents participate in playdates as if the kid's presence was contingent only upon their ability to dote. I've seen other parents behave as though they were the ones coming over to play. So who knows. Me? I'm happy to leave Riley to play with other parents that seem sane and responsible. Maybe that makes me neglectful in the eyes of the doting won't-leave-my-house playdate parents, but I find that I am not really trying to hard to please random people in the school directory.

Oh. Another problem. What happens when you make all of these plans with this "friend of your kid's" parent, and then you go talk to your kid and his eyes get wide and he says to you, "I don't want to go!" and then runs off and hides in a corner somewhere? Yeah. I guess I should have asked him first. But how do you do that in the middle of a phone conversation? Moreover, what do you say to the parent when you get back to the phone from that discussion? Oh, sorry, Riley doesn't like your kid, so thanks anyway.

And that's not even the case. My opinion, lacking any evidence otherwise, is that Riley is simply reluctant to leave his routine of being at home. He's not really making "best friends" at school because, apart from him being a kind of shy, slow friend-maker, the school actually dissuades them from making "best friends" (yeah, I should write a whole post about this, too). As a result, visits to classmates outside of what's required for school are an expected uphill battle for us.

Well. I personally can't wait for Riley's playdate. I'm going to get all this awkward parenting nonsense ironed out. Awkward human beingness, really. And then I will be formidable. And the kids will learn from my example. Yeah, looking forward to that.

I have what I think may be an unhealthy fascination with bags. I like to have containers for things, and efficient methods of storage. Finding the perfect travel laptop bag has been an excruciating exercise, but one that I've enjoyed partaking in.

On the way home from school yesterday, Riley explained his idea for his own backpack. In the morning, it was reasonably warm and sunny, but in the afternoon it rained, so all of the kindergarteners were left without protection from the rain. Riley was going to hold his backpack over his head to keep his head dry.

So together in the car, we came up with a scheme by which no kid would go without rain cover. We'd build in a sort of head covering/poncho to the backpack in a small hidden area at the top. When it's not raining, you roll it up, tuck it in is pocket, and forget it's there. On the days you forget your umbrella and it rains, you unroll the attached hood from the backpack and cover yourself. Brilliant!

It was just a matter of time until I lured them into my hobbies. Abby and Riley have both been playing Torchlight on the Xbox lately.

I sat with Abby as she chose her character and went through the first 6-7 levels of advancing her character. Her choices were interesting. When choosing a character to start, there are only three options -- two male characters, and one female. She chose the female character reluctantly, saying that she was wearing too little clothing. Abby doesn't care for immodestly dressed women. I'm not sure where this comes from, but she doesn't care for most magazine ads, either. I told her that as she played the game, it was likely that she would be able to acquire different clothing for her character, so this worry passed.

Probably the most difficult thing to convey to her was that you need to pick up everything in these games. Especially in Tochlight, where you can send your animal companion back to town to sell your junk, there's no reason not to pick up every last thing you find in the dungeon. It was difficult to get her to stop killing monsters and pick up the things she found along the way. Of course, this led to another interesting problem.

It was difficult for her to choose between the things she found in the dungeon to determine what she should keep and what she should sell. I think this is difficult for any player. Torchlight tries to make this a bit easier by using indicators to show which thing is better or worse compared to your existing equipment, but this only uses the absolute attribute of the item. So a helmet with an armor rating of 4 and no magic is shown as better than a helmet with an armor rating of 3 that can obliterate your enemies at will. As a base determinant, this isn't bad, but it gets a lot more complex very quickly, and figuring out what you should sell or keep of all the junk you pick up is a real challenge.

Riley played the game for a while when Nana was home. I didn't see how this went. I imagine Nana spent a lot of time reading the prompts for him, and being frustrated by having to sit through another video game, even if she wasn't playing. Riley occasionally makes Nana play Lego Batman with him, which she's not a fan of. Riley says he read most of the words himself, but Nana was helping. This could be a nice gateway into Riley wanting to read for himself, not that he doesn't, but he doesn't really seek out activities that demand that he read. Anyway, Riley did reasonably well with his lizard companion, getting to 3rd or 4th level. He enjoyed killing lots of huge monsters.

I'm anxious to get back to my game as well. Torchlight was a lot of mindless fun when I played it on the PC, and I want to see what awaits me at higher levels than what I was able to achieve there.

For Christmas this year, the kids got iPods. Abby's been using hers for an alarm for a while now, which is a mystifying use of the iPod to me. I'm really taking this as the first signs that I'm getting irretractably old - I like watches and traditional alarm clocks, and don't understand the use of cell phones and iPods as primary timekeeping devices.

Riley, on the other hand, is not taking to the alarm as well as Abby. At first, we were having trouble getting him to charge his iPod because, unlike Abby who already had a clock with a built-in dock, he was plugging his into the wall near his bed on a short cord, and would often forget to charge it. More than that, since it's only using the iPod speaker, it wasn't loud enough to rouse him from sleep when the alarm went off.

I have since acquired an LED clock with a charging dock and speakers, which is not only a good place to dock and charge the iPod regularly, but also a way to get the required volume for getting the boy out of slumber. At least, that's what we expected.

At first, we were using the pinball noises as the alarm. It turns out that this is simply not loud enough. When there's heavy rain, the pinball noises are hardly louder than the drops hitting the roof. This is not enough to wake up Riley, who definitely takes after his dad in terms of wanting to get out of bed in the morning. We're both late sleepers.

We've now set the alarm to the "alarm" sound, which should be renamed "klaxon" because it sounds like some kind of biohazard alarm. When plugged into the dock and ringing, it is audible from anywhere in the house. Like the basement. This is still only just scratching the surface of wakedness for Riley, though, since the alarm went through two full cycles this morning before he apparently yanked it out of the dock, tossed it on the floor and went back to bed.

I have some pity for families who have kids that are sports players, and I suspect that as our kids get older we'll start sharing some more of their issues. We've started Riley at a karate (technically Kenpo) school that is nearby to his after school daycare. Yesterday was an interesting day, running back and forth between places, trying to get the information needed to sign him up properly. I spoke briefly with the woman at the desk there about how insane our schedules have become, running the kids to their various activities.

Abby has Orchestra and Chorus on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so Berta runs her to school early on those days. Riley's half-day kindergarten is a royal pain -- I'm not sure how other parents deal with it and why the school district doesn't just switch to full-day. But on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we send Riley to his after-school daycare, and on Tuesday and Thursday I pick him up and bring him home where Nana watches him. On those days he has after-school daycare, the karate school busses him from daycare to their location for the hour lesson and then returns him to the school, where Berta eventually picks him up on her way home. Sometime during all of that, Abby comes home from school on the bus, where I have to be home to wait for her. All of this is subject to the Girl Scout schedule, which often changes how things work on Fridays, and to Nana's schedule, which includes occasional doctor visits and art lessons that make it impossible for me to be out at meetings past 5pm (which might not be when the meeting is scheduled, but would include travel time home from the city or elsewhere).

Yes, it's headache-inducing.

One of the perplexing things I was talking about recently is how the extracurricular classes in our area tend to offer classes for kids at 4pm, which is great because it keeps them occupied from when they get home from school until when their parents would be home from work. But there's no way for people to get the kids to the class unless they're already not working. This is one of the great things about the karate class in that it picks up Riley from his daycare. When summer comes, I'll end up having to cart him over there myself two days a week, and then in September (since the karate school is a minimum 6-month contract -- why do they do this?) it'll be an additional after-school activity that we'll end up running the kids to.

It's a good thing we keep all of our family appointments in the Google calendar, otherwise we'd be completely lost. Each of us has our own calendar, plus a shared family calendar to keep things straight. I've even allocated scpecific time on my work calendar to make sure I'm not scheduling things during times I need to pick up Riley. Although, it would be handy if the scheduling system was somehow smart enough to know that I shouldn't schedule a meeting that's 45 minutes away to end right before I need to pick up a kid. Perhaps they'll add this feature for beleaguered parents.