Summer Vacation Lessons Learned

In a fit of over-caffeinated ambition, My Love and I scheduled more family trips into eight weeks this summer than the Brady Bunch did in five years on television.

It didn't take a crazy old prospector to lock us in an abandoned jail for us to soon realize the pitfalls of all this family togetherness; however, I suspect the engine fire in our minivan may have something to do with an ancient tiki. It also may have had something to do with my speeding through a Lake Michigan sized puddle lined with dead leaves and pine needles in an effort to get away from the constant howls of "How much longerrrrrr?"

Nevertheless, it was an adventure-filled two months.

We experienced Fourth of July among the dehydrated waves of grain in the Great Plains.

We visited the birthplace of the women's suffrage movement in upstate New York where we spent most of our time visiting a museum dedicated to the movie "It's a Wonderful Life."

We rode a boat under Niagara Falls, boogie-boarded in the North Carolina surf and learned the art of heckling the opposing pitcher in near-empty minor league baseball stadiums.

Here are a handful of lessons and observations from our summer vacations:

The annoying mosquito to parental drivers' ears is no longer the backseat bellow of "Are we there yet?" It's the middle row of the minivan whine of "When will we start getting 3G again?"

According to my 12-year-old daughter, when going on a weeklong trip to the scalding flatlands of Nebraska where we'll spend most of our time in towns smaller than her middle school with her grandparents, who are farmers, and my wife's best friends, who are undertakers, the most absolutely necessary item to bring is a flat iron for her hair.

If you think the United States has cornered the market on gaudy tourist traps, you've never visited the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. It's as if downtown Las Vegas and Times Square birthed a circus geek.

The first question children ask when you arrive at your lodging destination has evolved from "Does it have a pool?" to "Does it have free Wi-Fi?"

Provident Bank Park, the Westchester County home of the Rockland Boulders baseball team of independent Can-Am League, is one of the nicest minor league ballparks you'll ever visit. Unfortunately, the quality of pitching embarrasses Little Leaguers.

Sonic Drive-Ins offer 54 types of milkshakes. I kid you not – 54. However, whenever we stop at one, all my daughter wants is a cup of their ice pellets.

Environmentally conscientious coastal communities, such as those on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, have banned supermarkets from using plastic grocery bags. This is good news unless you bring your dog with you on vacation. And he's prone to traveler's diarrhea. Like ours.

The people of Nebraska love shooting off fireworks, just not fireworks sold in Nebraska. Those are "church fireworks," in the words of my wife's brother. Instead, you need ones from neighboring Missouri, which contain enough liftoff and explosive power to qualify as military grade anti-ballistic missiles.

There are many reasons why you can always get a table for four at the Hard Rock Café at the height of the dinner hour. Not one is good.

A modern family of four now packs more electronic communications devices for an extended weekend trip than it does pairs of clean underwear.

The best beach time on the East Coast is after 5 p.m. when the shadows grow longer and the adult beverages have sufficiently numbed the burning scrapes caused by sand inside your bathing suit liner.

Vaccines We Really Need

A successful school year for your child starts with his or her good health, and that sure beats it starting with you cleaning up Lucky Charms vomit off the Turkish rug.

While there are many tricks to raising a healthy scholar, tricking children into what's good for them is frowned upon these days. Blame those self-appointed "experts" who subscribe to the child-rearing theory known as the Sanctimonious Helicopter Attachment Drone of Uptight Parenting, or just SHAD-UP.

So what can you do as aside from giving junior daily baths in free-range, grass-feed hand sanitizer?

Poke the kid silly with syringes! Preferably ones loaded with bacteria and viruses!

Vaccines have proved to be highly effective at warding off many childhood diseases, so make sure your little one is up-to-date on all required shots before the school year starts.

But wait – there's more!

Scientists who actually got out of the lab enough to meet members of the opposite sex and spawn a child or two, sometimes on purpose, are developing some super new vaccines. The following are currently under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (now a fully owned subsidiary of ConAgra Foods, a division of Google and a Spike Lee Joint):

Continue reading on DadCentric.com > >

What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Attend BlogHer ‘12 in New York

For those heading to the annual BlogHer conference in New York City next week, I’ve compiled a guide to set your expectations. This is based on my experience as an occasional visitor to The Big Apple (I live in Connecticut, the neighboring state trying laughably to steal its neighbor’s tourism business), my being a ‘BlogHer in NYC’ veteran, and a half-dozen gin and tonics:

The smell

The first time I drove through Nebraska during the summer, my olfactory center suddenly seized up like a Boy Scout official stumbling into a Gay Pride Parade. Turns out we had just passed a pig farm/slaughterhouse.

After I mentally retched, My Love told me what her Cornhusker grandfather would say when one of his brood whined about this particular odor: “Smells like money.”

My Son, The ‘Play Boy’

I’m sending the sheared crusts of Excitable’s peanut-butter-on-sourdough sandwich swirling down the disposal when the boy himself bounds into the kitchen. He speaks with an uncharacteristic early-morning verve as I tie the handles of the plastic bag bearing his name, underlined and in bold black letters.

“At camp yesterday, we were playing card games and a boy named RJ brought out a deck from Canada,” he says, “and on each one …”

“Is the word, ‘Eh?’”

“No!” his enthusiasm undampened by my interruption. “On each card was a bikini model!”

“Oh.”

“Yeah! But then the counselor took them away. After that, the game just wasn’t the same.”

Oy.

Giving Drivers A New Finger

I recently spent the better part of a week driving around Nebraska and, boy, is my finger tired.

We visit my wife's family and friends every year or so out there in that area of the country they also call the "Heartland of America." Whoever "they" is, they have a great sense of irony. Whenever I'm there, I clog my arteries on three square meals of red meat, buttered sweet corn and marshmallow Jell-O platters. (To be fair, the Jell-O usually features fruit. Canned in heavy syrup fruit. Prevents scurvy just the same as the fresh stuff, Dr. Oz.) I indulge in these Cornhusker staples/delicacies because they taste good and a stuffed mouth prevents me from showing the natives just how ignorant I am about the ever-present topic of college football.

Between meals, we always seem to be driving. Unlike our New England ancestors who knew "good fences make good neighbors," the settlers of Nebraska knew better --30 miles of cropland between signs of human life makes it pretty hard to tick off anyone. But that was before cars and commuting.

The Thrilling Ride into Summer

Summer's arrival in our house has nothing to do with calendars, temperatures or fireworks. It starts with a steady ascent of anticipation, teases us with a quick dip then throws us a curve before plunging us into the thick of it with a rattling headlong rush.

Summer comes on the Dragon Coaster.

Unlike many who grew up a short trip from this 83-year-old wood-beamed marvel, I have almost no childhood memories of the rollercoaster or the Playland amusement park that surrounds it in Rye, N.Y. That's what makes our annual trip there as special to me as to my two children.

This ritual started a few years ago the way the best things tend to, not out of the need for nostalgia's comfort or the desire to begin a grand tradition, but through the lowered expectations that come with not having to pay an admission fee. The local Make-a-Wish folks had given us a handful of free passes owing to Li’l Diva’s juvenile myositis so I figured, at worst, using them would give us a few hours away from our one true summer ritual at that time: the two kids bickering over who got to choose which Disney Channel rerun to watch for the 47th time.