faulker009

Disclaimer : If you are a parent, you will probably do a lot of nodding during this blog.   If you don’t have any kids, you will probably do a lot of nodding off. Either way, I hope you enjoy it.  It is Sunday night and we just completed a marathon. Not a real marathon, that’s too much work, but... It all began Friday night with game one of my son’s weekend baseball tournament. Following a satisfying win and an even more satisfying meal with the family, we got back home at around 9:30. It was a quick lights out as the alarm clock was scheduled to go off at 5:50am to get us ready for game two. A quick lights out for everybody but me. I’ve always been a night owl and no matter what is scheduled for the next day, I always have a hard time getting to bed early. I have this little unwritten rule in my head though, as long as I sleep five hours or more, I am fine.   Four hours and 59 minutes or less and it is guaranteed to be a two coffee day. For this night, my goal was Midnig...

HELLO SABERS!!! With those two little words, my daughter’s life changed forever. Of course, when you are 13 years old, your life changes forever every 7.4 minutes. But when my daughter got the news that she had been promoted to a new dance team this year, it left quite a mark. I have never seen her so happy. Or perhaps even more important, I have never seen her so proud. To understand the present, we must first understand the past. Since we moved to this area about five years ago, my daughter has been dancing in the same studio. For the first three years, she was pretty much with the same troop of a dozen dancers. But there were a pair of girls that joined my daughter to make an inseparable trio. They danced together.  They hung out together.  They carpooled together. They danced together -- to the tune of about 12 hours per week. School, who needs school? Well during those first three years, there was a bond that nothing could break. Until year four. That was the year that my...

I’m guessing that my 12-year old daughter was not the inspiration for the Jackson 5‘s hit Dancin’ Machine, considering that “I” was only six years old when the song came out in 1973. But like the song says, she is “movin and groovin” pretty much every day of the week. Whether it’s in our kitchen or in the dance studio, where she spends more than 12 hours a week, she loves to dance. Hip hop, jazz, pom. You name it, she’s in. Last Friday night, she took on a new kind of dance -- a middle-school dance. My wife and I chaperoned, giving us a night out and giving me a chance to forget that I was unemployed. The theme was 80’s night, which was right up our alley. One of the first songs we heard was Bryan Adams classic, “Heaven”. Except, it wasn’t Bryan Adams. It was a dance version released in 2002 by DJ Sammy and Yanou. Totally not the 80’s. As the evening went on, we heard Journey and Wham, Miley Cyrus and the Black Eyed Peas. Perhaps, the song that got the biggest reaction was...