After Work Hike: Russian Ridge OSP

Russian Ridge OSP on Skyline Blvd is the quintessential after work hiking area. It’s a 20 minute drive from the intersection of 280 and Page Mill Road so it’s quick to get to and it has more than a half dozen loops of varying length that can be done, ranging from the Ancient Oaks Loop, [...]

Big Family, Part 2

Usually when I tell people how big my family is they ask a few FAQs. So to forestall that, here are some of the answers.
1. No, my parents were, and are, not rich. We grew up pretty broke all the time. 14 kids will do that to you. We all wore a lot of hand-me-downs.
2. [...]

14 kids, 13 grandkids, my parents

I come from a large family. So when people express surprise when I tell them that we have 4 kids I always think that their horizons are a little limited.
When my parents had their third child the doctors informed my mom that she should stop having kids since all three of her children had been [...]

Pre-Christmas funeral and surgery

It seems like our family has a funeral or some medical crisis every year around Christmas. This year was no different.
My grandmother died on Thursday Dec 14 and her funeral was on Sunday Dec 17. Grandma died at home in Lost Nation, Iowa, of complications due to pancreatic cancer. She had declined rapidly after [...]

Painting Pumpkins

We live in pumpkin-growing country and we still had some uncarved pumpkins/gourds sitting around the house being decorative. This weekend we started putting out the Christmas decorations and it was time for the pumpkins to go. Bad move, big tears erupted from the Big Girl. So that was how I discovered that despite my misgivings [...]

Date night desperation

This weekend is the Half moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. Over Saturday and Sunday more than 500,000 people will come to our little town that normally has fewer than 30,000 residents for a massive craft fair and some pumpkin memorabilia. And one kick butt pumpkin parade.
The festivities are fun but they also serve to point out [...]

Left meets right

I gew up in Iowa and I consider myself to have a pretty solid set of traditional midwestern values, along with a severe case of Latent Midwest Envy Syndrome. California is a pretty place but the weather is boring and some of the natives are downright odd.
This weekend my traditional Christian conservative values collided [...]

On the busy social life of a 6 year old

One of the things that no one tells you when you start having kids is that they start to develop a busy social life about the age of three and somewhere around 5-6 the pace of that social life really takes off. I’m not talking about things like soccer, teeball or swimming lessons, those are [...]

Dads do it different

Moms and Dads do childcare differently. I’m not talking about Michael Keaton being incompetent in “Mr. Mom” or those three goofballs in “Three Men and a Baby“. Dads are competent and we love our kids but we *do* the tasks of childcare differently than Moms do.
Take tonight, for instance. Tonight my wife is at [...]

Wo Wo Girl

I don’t think I’ve mentioned our youngest two kids before. We have 4 kids, two boys, two girls. The boys came first and last, the middle two are the girls. Our second youngest daughter is Wo Wo, pronounced like “Woe” or “Whoa”, twice. She’s about 2.5 years old now and got her name when [...]