Scott Nagele's Blog, page 31

No girls allowed

“Oh my! I already know what it is,” the ultrasound technician said as soon as she set her fancy air hockey paddle on my wife’s belly. She nodded toward the monitor. “That’s a boy – no doubt about it.” She typed the words “It’s a Boy!” on the screen with an arrow pointing to the […]

No, we’re not really morning people

My last post was about things I am thankful for. This one is about something I’m not thankful for. I am starting a new tradition (if it doesn’t already exist) that I will call the Post-Thanksgiving Bitch and Moan Fest. You in? Good. Because of the nature of the floating shifts at my wife’s part […]

Thankfulness run amok

Yes, I have a list of things that merit Thanksgiving. But rather than the commonplace “family and friends,” I’ve dug deep into my psyche to bring out these gems formed under the pressure of my heavy soul. Caillou’s static age It brings me some relief from his annoying cartoon that Caillou announces he is just four […]

The world according to Buster

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “I’m a lover not a fighter.” If our one-year-old could speak English, he would never say such a thing. He would proudly proclaim that he is a lover and a fighter. He’s a little scrapper, that one. He loves to roughhouse and he’s not above bopping a family member on the […]

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like a house with the right kind of bed in it

On the days I pick my son up from kindergarten, we come home through the neighborhood. There are a lot of very nice, roomy houses on the school side of our neighborhood. The homes get smaller and plainer as we get closer to ours. When there is nothing left to envy about the houses we […]

A child of the world

About a year ago, I wrote about taking the family to an international festival. This was the event where I won happiness by transferring M&Ms between dishes with chop sticks. At this festival, two Indonesian ladies showed us a traditional marble game called Congkak. They skillfully moved the marbles between wells cut into a wooden […]

Bar tender, my darling, let’s have another round over here!

It occurred to me recently that children are like drinks of scotch. After you’ve had a couple, someone will attempt to take advantage of your impaired condition to convince you that just one more would put you right smack dab in the zone of happiness. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve suffered headaches caused […]

How to drive a toddler over the edge

This truth is self-evident. One-year-olds are patriots in their zealous devotion to the pursuit of happiness. They want happiness, and they want it now. They’ll let you know, quickly and unambiguously, when the path they are on deviates from that ultimate goal. The path deviates regularly, because the things that make a one-year-old happy are […]

Stuck training the new guy

If you’ve ever had to train a new employee, and the guy was taking a long time to catch on to tasks you could do without a moment’s thought, you might have found yourself thinking the same things as I did the other afternoon. I was attempting to train a new worker how to use the […]

Conversations with my wife: Boob on fire

I was in the dining room, helping my son with a school project, when my wife hurried up to me and grabbed my hand. She clamped my hand over her left breast. She was clearly alarmed. WIFE: “Feel that. My boob feels like it’s on fire!” She had on a sweater over her shirt, but […]