Ethan's career

Todd: Do you have a job at school?

Ethan: No, but I have a career.

Todd: What's your career?

Ethan: I'm an artist. I'm Emily's personal artist.

Todd: Does that mean she pays you to draw pictures?

Ethan: Uh-huh. For the good pictures she gives me two cents. For the bad pictures she gives me one cent.

How to eat 3 donuts without even trying

1. Come home from work and see the box of donuts that your spouse has purchased and left in plain sight.

2. Look at them and think, "Ooh, I'll have a little bite before dinner." Eat half a chocolate donut.

3. Come back in the kitchen a couple minutes later--dinner's not quite ready--and nibble another quarter. Decide to save the other quarter for after dinner.

4. After dinner, decide to have HALF a donut for dessert, calculating (correctly) that eating only a quarter donut will only make you hungrier. Eat half of a new one, leaving the remaining quarter of the first one.

5. Immediately eat the remaining quarter of the original donut, because it's practically a crumb, and, you know, why not?

6. Think, "Man. Those chocolate donuts are GOOD. Why doesn't Jennifer buy them more often?"

7. Figure that no one else will really want to eat the half of the second donut that you've left. It's like leaving half a slice of pizza. Eat that too.

8. Figure, "What the heck, life is short" and scarf down the third one really fast.

9. As you're popping the last bite into your mouth, realize that you should've given your youngest son one little bite so that when your spouse says, "Hey, who ate all the chocolate donuts?" you could've said, "Me and Ethan" and not be lying. Darn.

10. Feel a little guilty and hope your spouse doesn't read your blog.

Big night in the Tarpley household

The framing store delivered Samuel's newly framed "Back to the Future II" poster this evening.

That was right before we saw another package in our foyer: it was the leaf blower that Samuel won on eBay last week, with which he plans to make a hoverboard.



At 8:40pm Samuel, Ethan, and I made a mad dash to Staples and Essentials to buy an extension cord for the leaf blower and picture hangers for the poster. Then Jen helped hang the poster in his room while Samuel gave the dogs a heart attack by testing his leaf blower.

Samuel is finishing his homework now. He just walked out and said, "I'm happy."

School photo day

It was photo day at school, so the boys took showers and washed their hair this morning. They wore button-up shirts instead of t-shirts, but they were so unused to wearing button-up shirts that when I only buttoned a couple of Ethan's buttons and expected him to button the rest, he just looked at it and said, "Dad, this doesn't look right--my whole belly is showing."

On the bus to school, he finally realized that something was up. He said, "Dad, why are we dressed up all fancy today?"

It finally happened

We went to the shoe store this weekend to buy Samuel a pair of running shoes. We discovered that he has grown from a size 5 at the beginning of the school year to a size 8. His shoe size is now bigger than mine. By a full size.

Bites the dust

Barbao, the restaurant at the end of our block, just closed.

I always thought it was a bad name for a restuarant, because it sounds like Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby racehorse that was euthanized a few years back. No one wants to eat in a restaurant that sounds like a euthanized racehorse.



You might as well just call it "Dead Racehorse Grill."

This is just another example of people who should've asked my opinion but didn't.

We were the ones who didn't get an iPad this weekend

Yeah, that was us. Someone had to keep Apple's sales from reaching $876 zillion on the first weekend, so we opted for a more low-tech activity: the circus.


My personal history of Madison Square Garden events goes something like this:

1984: Bruce Springsteen with college friends
1987: Tina Turner with a girlfriend
1997: Indigo Girls with Jennifer
2001: Elmo Live! with Jennifer and Samuel
2007: 11 minutes of a Knicks game with Samuel & Ethan (we left once the Knicks were down by more than 25 points)

Note the disturbing trend of increasingly less cool events. Barnum & Bailey may not be as cool as a Springsteen concert, but it halted the downward slide. If I can keep from attending a Hannah Montana concert at some point in the future, I'm safe.

The boys' favorite part was when seven motorcycles rode at one time inside a globe-shaped steel cage. They ranked the circus #1 of fun things they did on Spring Break.

With $11 cotton candy and $10 lemonade, I think we spent more than the cost of an iPad.