Scott Nagele's Blog, page 30

We don’t need no stinking scarves; we’ve got fun to keep us warm

We’ve had old-school winter weather lately. It’s makes me nostalgic for Seals and Crofts music because it’s just like the ’70s again. Though I don’t hate snow, I don’t have the same high regard for it as I did when I was nine. My boys love snow; that’s why I can’t dislike it. Shoveling is […]

Life as an interchangeable part

Toddlers have a way with words. Their own way with their own words. They are some of the few people on Earth who say exactly what they mean. Pity we can’t understand any of it. Our one-year-old has mastered his pronunciation of the words Mama and Dada. This was a happy milestone, until we realized […]

Happy New Year! Now, here’s something you could work on

I’ve never made a New Year’s resolution. This year, I am going to break tradition and make some resolutions I think would make me a happier person. They may be difficult and take a lot of hard work to accomplish, but that makes them worthwhile, right? I am committed to these resolutions, foremost because they […]

2013: The year in reruns

You know those sitcom episodes where they don’t have any new shows ready but they need to air something, so they dig up old clips and the writers show up to bang out a few sentences of intro for each old segment on the way to pick up their paychecks? If there were any paychecks […]

Our Christmas with PEZidents Lincoln and Garfield

Regular readers of this blog may recall that our five-year-old holds a certain reverence for Abraham Lincoln. The boy was affected by our visit to Ford’s Theater and has since speculated upon the secret burial place of the 16th U.S. president. I bought a PEZ candy dispenser collection of five presidents. PEZ has many presidents, in […]

Christmas and presents

All the presents are wrapped. The stockings are ready to be filled. All that’s left is for Santa to show up and move everything into place in the dark of night. Sometimes Christmas seems more like a deadline than anything else. But when all the goals are met with a day to spare, the relief […]

This is how they do it in the UK

Our kindergartener is into flags and geography. Whenever I’m looking at something on my WordPress dashboard, he always wants me to click on the stats page. “Can we see what flags are there?” he asks. (For those unfamiliar with WordPress, the stats page shows the flags of the countries from which visits to your blog […]

Should I immunize my child against the scourge of adverbs?

One Saturday morning, our kindergartener was watching cartoons when one of the toy commercials that saturate children’s programming came on. I don’t remember what the toy was, but it doesn’t matter; just as he does in response to every other toy commercial, my son told me that he wanted it. He’s like fish in a […]

The gift of an hour

I was in the living room with our one-year-old when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard my wife’s voice on the other end of the line. That’s when it hit to me: The call was coming from inside the house! But this is more of a Christmas than Halloween story, so nothing […]

We hope you had fun at our Christmas potty

I spent an hour in the mall over Thanksgiving weekend. That alone would be worthy of pity, but hold the sympathetic tears for a minute; it gets worse. I spent half of that time in the men’s room. Okay, let the wailing begin. While on our mall visit, my wife, who is uncannily in tune […]