Going Out

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

I suspect that growing up in a home with only brothers helps to reinforce the idea that girls are weird. You don’t get a lot of exposure to the feminine side of the equation when you’re always around your brothers and their friends. Even though some of those friends have sisters, what they tell you about them just reinforces the point. Girls are best avoided if at all possible.

Being reminded that your mother is a girl and she’s OK to be around doesn’t really help. Sure mom used to be a girl, but that was a really long time ago. And besides, that’s different – she’s a mom.

Then one day your world suddenly changes. Read more »

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Hobbies

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

As the boys were growing up I tried to include them as much as possible in the hobbies that inspired me. As I’ve mentioned before, I inherited an insatiable desire to learn new things from my dad and his dad, and I wanted my boys to share that. Inevitably my enthusiasm for a particular activity outlived theirs by a long shot, but we still had some memorable experiences together.

When the World Wide Web was still a relatively new thing, I combined my interest in the web with my curiosity about the weather around Huntsville by creating a weather web page.  Gerrit and Tucker followed suit by creating their own personal web pages. We learned a lot together. Their original pages are long gone now, but Gerrit has since started his own web authoring business and has a career in computing. His skills eclipsed mine long ago, but I like to think I had a hand in getting him started. :-) Read more »

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Pets

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

Our dog Maggie died over Christmas break this year. She was almost 13 years old and had developed an enormous tumor in her abdomen. The tumor would probably have been inoperable regardless of her age, but her quality of life had also been declining for several months. It was time.

Pets can be a big part of a boy’s life. We understood this early on, but it took us a while to get past the practicalities of the whole thing. No matter how hard you try to convince yourself that a pet will be low maintenance, they rarely are. Especially when you have young kids in the house.

Karen and I acquired our first pets before Gerrit was born. After an attempt at adopting a kitten from the German ASPCA ended in tragedy (the kitten died within days), our sympathetic German landlords found out about a litter of kittens that had been born in a barn just up the road from our house. We decided to go take a look.

This was our first mistake. Read more »

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The Talk

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

As toys go, Transformers are amazing. Even if you’re not aware of the story lines associated with the characters, the concept of an ordinary car or truck magically becoming a powerful robot with impressive powers is fascinating. With a little unfolding and an extension of this or that, an ordinary thing suddenly becomes something extraordinary!

They’re especially interesting to boys, probably because boys are born with one attached to them. Read more »

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School

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Dave Burke

Like most parents, Karen and I wanted to make sure that our children had every chance to succeed in school. We sometimes joked that this was because we were anxious for them to get successful jobs and move out so we could have the house to ourselves, but that was just our warped senses of humor talking. What we really wanted was to make sure that they would one day be financially secure enough for us to move in with THEM.

Call it our retirement plan :-)

After spending our own childhoods moving around and changing schools every few years, it was our hope that moving to Huntsville would provide our boys with more stability. As it turned out, it did. We’ve been here for over fifteen years now and, besides Gerrit getting jerked around a little between Kindergarten and the Second Grade while we got settled, our boys have been able to go all the way through elementary, middle, and high school without a move. Read more »

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