As this year’s football season officially closed out Sunday in joyous fashion with our New York Giants pulling out another thrilling victory over the Pats, it made me think about how much our house has recently become truly obsessed with football. Mommy and I are both getting glimpses of what it will be like around here with four males rooting for sports instead of just one. Needless to say, we have slightly different reactions to that realization, but to her credit, she’s at least talking a good game about preparing to ramp up her sports IQ. While time will tell if that happens or not, what seems most likely is that we will have a much larger huddle on the couch for the big games than we used to!

 The passion for the pigskin really started late this summer when our first grader played flag football, starting with the entire month of August with four night a week, two hour practices and a season that didn’t wrap up until mid-November. As an assistant coach, I should probably say that I signed up for flag football too. As we’re quickly finding, if your kid signs up for a sport, it is really the whole family that signs up for better or worse. His experience playing flag (which as I may have stated before is a lot more contact than the name flag would imply) emboldened him to daily challenges to his older brother for afternoon games of tackle football in our backyard. Sometimes with their plastic helmets, sometimes not. Either way, their Mother has decided that she can’t watch as they roughly pound each other into the dirt with glee. I have to give them credit, they very rarely come in crying or yelling and seem to find ways to work it out on the field. I keep a more closeful watch from my office window perch when I see their little brother chasing after them, but so far he’s only gotten clobbered once or twice…

Sensing this new found enthusiasm for football, my VA Tech season ticket holder father-in-law brought my son to the Tech / Miami college football game in Blacksburg midseason. This was the boy’s first experience at a big time football game. It didn’t hurt that the 60,000 fans in the stadium were rocking as the game went down to the final seconds and had the announcer saying it was one of the best game he’d ever seen. Needless to say, after his big game experience, he wore Hokies gear all the way up to the NFL playoffs when he switched over to Giants gear.

As the NFL regular season wound down, the boys both started to understand why Daddy studies a particular part of the newspaper more than others during breakfast and they started asking to look at the Sports section. Now that they can pretty much read, they’re really interested to see the standings. I’ve tried to explain to them that football standings don’t change on a daily basis like baseball. They’re also very interested in the betting line which they found printed in the paper, prompting me to instituted a formal no betting policy throughout the household. I’m not sure they understand that the team that is “favored” isn’t guaranteed to win.

 Reading has also helped them get into another thing that was fun for me growing up – card collecting. As a long time baseball card collector, I started trying to get the older boys interested in it last year. This fall, they started collecting football cards and it’s turned into a regular source of excitement for them. (and possibly me…) I realized quickly that they’re not yet ready to navigate the free market system by themselves so Daddy is the designated commissioner that has to approve all trades to prevent any intentional or unintentional funny business. We’ve finally started getting them into a routine of doing small chores around the house, and the last few months I pay them both a pack of football cards instead of cash. (Which of course brought on the first unauthorized break-in of the football pack stash in Daddy’s office so one of our players is on indefinite suspension) Pouring over their favorite cards really cements into their sponge-like brains the names of the different teams, players and positions. They are incredulous when Daddy doesn’t know the number of a certain player. I’m presented almost daily with the question of which NFL team is going to draft VA Tech’s star running back David Wilson or whether the Packers’ Aaron Rogers or Clay Matthews is the better player. It is hilarious, however, to see my youngest sport his older brother’s Packers helmet and run around shouting that he’s Aaron Rogers.

 The biggest thing to suffer with all of this football enthusiasm is probably my Sunday afternoon naps. It’s been much harder to get rest with the boys jumping around on the couch watching the games. But it is fun to have a ready-made fan base to join in the fun. Of course my oldest is usually determined to be a contrarian and root against whoever the rest of us are supporting, but he’s usually good natured about it. Thankfully, he’s still with me in rooting for the Yankees and as spring training starts to draw near in just a few weeks, I’m already looking forward to the boys and I rooting for the Yankees behind enemy lines through a long Virginia summer.

Sometimes I try to think about how different things would be if we had three girls…playing with Barbies, tea parties and princesses. But those thoughts don’t last very long because frankly, at this point, I can’t even fathom it. All I know right now is that my nearly-seven year old was bouncing off the walls Sunday night after he watched Eli Manning holding up the Super Bowl trophy under an avalanche of confetti. I’m not sure who was smiling wider - Eli, my son or me. And if you ask me, that is just exactly how it is supposed to be.

We all huddled near the door, nervous for what lay on the other side. We could barely hear the count from the din all around us but we tried to be brave. We could have been on a rescue mission, on a midnight ambush deep behind enemy lines. One, two, three – GO! The door slid open and we tumbled out into the maelstrom. The wind nearly knocked the first two to the ground as they braced themselves against the pelting rainstorm and ran for the entrance.

I was the last to depart and as I watched the boys disappear around the corner, I pulled the door on our transport shut and headed into the storm. But I looked back and realized the door hadn’t shut. It was pulling back open on its tracks while buckets of water blew in. I ran back and pulled again but just before the door shut, it stopped and opened back up again. Over and over we danced together; Daddy and the minivan, stuck in the gale with only the howling winds blocking out my angry words that were not meant to be heard. Finally, the blessed door closed and, soaked to the bone, I scampered head down through the puddles and met the boys in the lobby of the nursing home for the Cub Scout Christmas caroling event.

It seems like an easy enough task to take the boys to Christmas caroling.  (Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs…) And even though I still had my shoes on and didn’t have to walk on broken glass, I’ve found that those things expected to be the easiest often end up being the hardest. I thought that I knew which nursing home the caroling was at. I didn’t. I thought I could find the email with directions. I couldn’t. I didn’t think I’d be searching for it in the dark during an unpredicted near hurricane. I was. (Even if I watched the Weather Channel as much as my parents do, I still wouldn’t have known it was coming.) At one count, there were no less than three wrong turns, one near collision and at least that many times yelling to the boys to be quiet while Daddy tried to think.

“You know how sometimes Mommy has a tough time and needs you to be quiet so she can figure something out?” I tried to explain to them. “Well Daddy is having one of those times right now so keep your mouths shut!”

After an ill-advised U-turn into yet another wrong nursing home parking lot brought us to a screeching halt, my son piped up from the back, “Daddy, you’re having another one of those times, aren’t you?”

We ended up being just 15 minutes late to the caroling and we squished our way down the hallway to contribute our holiday joy to our pack.

“What’s that smell, Daddy?”

“Just keep walking, it’s old people, Son.”

We snuck over to the side of the room just as We Wish You a Merry Christmas was winding through its more obscure verses.

“Daddy, what in the world is piggy pudding?”

“Figgy pudding, and I’ll tell you later – just sing!” There’s nothing like trying to get a first and second grader to keep up with reading a song sheet to verses they don’t know. Thankfully there were enough parents there to carry things.

My phone buzzed with a new text message from my wife who was at the kids’ elementary school running the Holiday Shoppe program. (You know, the event where parents give their kids money to spend on dollar store type presents so that they can feel like they’re buying something.) I reached into my wet pocket and read her text. It said that she heard the power was out at home and a tree had fallen across the road before ours and that it might be tough getting home. While this wasn’t good news on any day, it was particularly challenging tonight as I had to be home for an unusual 8PM conference call for work to talk to a handful of the nation’s top Urologists (and who says work isn’t fun!). We might have to cut things short.

We carolled up and down a few lonely hallways and stayed just long enough for the boys to down a couple holiday cupcakes with (hopefully) decorative plastic colored light bulbs on top. Ironically, the van doors had no trouble opening and closing on our way home since the rains had stopped. It turned out that the tree blocking the road was just past the turn to our house, so we were able to make it into our driveway without event. We stumbled through the front door in the darkness and found my mother-in-law reading by flashlight to our thankfully still happy two-year-old in the family room. Since he’s always playing with the flashlights, he was quick to show her where one was located after the power went out. After rounding up enough candles around the house to allow everyone to safely find their way to their bedrooms, I grabbed another flashlight, my laptop and notes, and set up shop out in our sunroom where my cell phone gets the best reception. An hour and a half later and now coughing from sitting half wet in the cold, I wandered back into the quiet dark house.

The children were thankfully quiet. My wife had arrived back home. The power was still out. I changed into some warmer clothes and sat down on the couch, dreaming of bed but stuck with visions of BPH and overactive bladder in my head. Like many days, surviving till the end of this one was an accomplishment in itself – some days are just more challenging than others!

Sometimes it seems as if our two and a half year old is growing older by the minute. Well I guess he actually is, but you know what I mean. He still takes a decent nap in the afternoons and on many days when I’m working from home, Mommy uses the time to get out to the store, help at the elementary school and go other often unnamed but surely important places.

Our little guy is just about through potty training but still sleeps in his crib, locked in by his crib tent. We’ve set up a twin size bed in his room with a guard on it for when he or we are ready for him to move, but a few half hearted attempts to try it out haven’t really been successful so far.

This afternoon, Mommy put him down a bit early so she could go help in the cafeteria at the older boys’ school while I worked at home down the hall from him in my office. After twenty minutes or so, he still hadn’t gone to sleep and was in fact yelling, “Come back here!”

I popped my head in to check on him and discovered that he was wide awake and barefoot. He’d pulled his socks off - not a good idea on this chilly day and since he was still getting over a cold. I looked around his crib, but the socks were no where to be found. He was zipped inside his tent so there were limited places he could have put them.

After the initial search proved fruitless, I got tough and shined the nightlight in his eyes and turned his sound machine volume up to ungodly levels. He finally broke down and confessed that, in a fit of desperation thinking that Mommy would never return, he’d stuffed the missing socks under his crib sheet and mattress pad. Of course he did.

He then threw a fit when I tried to put the socks back on him, so I had to wrestle him down and finally was able to get the blessed socks back on his blessed feet. I then left the room despite his loud protests. I swear, now that he’s talking in full sentences, I look at him sometimes and feel like I’m talking to that baby in the E-Trade commercials.

As I finished up a conference call, I could still hear him griping in his crib, this time about having to go pee pee. I went back to his room to see what trouble he’d worked himself into and discovered that he’d taken off his pants and his diaper and had peed in his bed.

“Why did you do that?” I asked him.

“I don’t know…where’s Mommy?” was of course his reply. At least his socks were still on.

I changed him into dry clothes, put a thick towel down on his crib and talked about how it was now time to go to sleep. “But I’m not tired,” he protested, followed by, “I want Mommy to come check on me.”

“Mommy’s at the boys’ school,” I explained, “She’ll see you when you wake up.”

He decided to try another approach – “I want to wrestle with you Daddy!”

I told him how Daddy was supposed to be working and if I didn’t get my work done we wouldn’t have any money and he’d have to sleep naked out in the woods. (OK, I didn’t say quite all that). But I did put him back in his crib and shut the door.

He proceeded to yell that he was not tired and that he would “never, ever, go to sleep.” “EVER!” he repeated about 10 times as loud as he could yell just in case the entire neighborhood had not yet heard him.

My iPhone chirped that I needed to jump on my next call. I sent Mommy a quick text and pressed the MUTE button on my headset as my conference call began. Fun times.