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Originally published in June 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.Two episodes of Joe Powell’s family life as recalled by his son.

Mom makes corn bread in a cast-iron skillet, usually in triangular pieces that fit nicely in the hand. It’s crunchy, filling stuff that tastes wonderful when it’s right out of the oven, so hot you could burn your lips on it, and it’s great the next day, cold and not very crumbly.

Dad likes it either way, but he often prefers it after it’s had a little time to age.

One morning in the early ’70s, not too long before he retired from the Air Force, Dad took the last piece from a batch of corn bread on his way out the door to eat on his way to the base.

At the end of the day, he came home and told us he had accidentally dropped the corn bread out the car window that morning before he got a chance to eat any of it. As I recall, he went without breakfast that day. At the least, he went without the breakfast he wanted.

As a kid, I’d get in a twist about the strangest things, and this was one of them. I was convinced Dad’s feelings were hurt and I felt awful for him. So bad I still remember that dropped piece of corn bread more than 30 years later.

I think he felt pretty bad too or he wouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place.

We still talk about it from time to time.

I was lucky enough to grow up under a roof my father shared with his family – except for a year the Air Force sent him to Southeast Asia – so naturally we butted heads from time to time. We battled over hair length, friends, bedtime, TV … you name it.

Clothing was an obvious point of contention, and when I was in fifth or sixth grade, we got into a long, serious discussion about T-shirts.

I don’t mean the kind of colorful T-shirts you buy with logos on them. I mean white T-shirts you wear under another shirt. In other words, undershirts.

Dad believed undershirts should be worn every day, hot or cold. His assertion, as I morosely understood it, was that they were necessary in winter because they helped you stay warm, and in summer because they soaked up your sweat before it showed on your outer shirt.

I looked at pictures of actors with their shirts buttoned halfway down over bare, manly chests and knew I had no hope of doing that myself with a stupid white T-shirt on.

This wasn’t the first time we’d disagreed over what I thought was Dad’s laughably outdated approach to getting dressed.

He’d come out on top in the Great Hanky Skirmish, which resulted in me being the only boy in grade school who carried a handkerchief in his pocket every day (the habit is so ingrained in me now that I feel naked without one, even if I’m in a swimsuit). Now I feared I’d be the only boy wearing an undershirt.

So I dug in my heels and spent 20 minutes that felt like an hour and a half trying to talk Dad out of forcing me to wear T-shirts every day. He made his points several times, I made mine.

It was touch-and go; I contemplated outright rebellion, such as wearing the undershirt out of the house and ditching it on the way to school.

Then we compromised: I’d wear them when it was cold and couldn’t leave a lot of buttons open anyway, and wouldn’t have to when it was warm.

That’s still the rule I live by, although these days I make sure to wear plenty of anti-perspirant when I stop wearing T-shirts come spring.

Originally published in May 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

Gnomes, rabbits, deer and I think even a couple of frogs populated Mom’s flower gardens. Shiny pots held plants all over the back porch. Ghosts, jack-o’-lanterns, a witch and black cats with sparkling beads for eyes took up residence in our living room every October. In November, two pilgrims flanked a turkey in the room. Then, in December, we shared our space with reindeer, angels, choir singers, several versions of Santa and Mrs. Claus and, most notably, a multi-piece Nativity set.

All these things were ceramics, and all were lovingly brought to life over the years on my mother’s work table.

Mom’s interest in ceramics is an “always” thing for me; I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t involved with them. While other hobbies – such as macramé and collecting little spoons – came and went, she stuck with ceramics and learned so much about them that I’m sure she qualifies as an expert. Mixing and storing the materials, casting, tools, kilns, lighting, various glazes and paints … this is just some of the stuff I know she knows. It’s stuff I learned about through years of watching her, and also watching Dad, who took charge when it was time to work with the heavy molds.

To me, Mom’s brightly colored ceramics were the best. I remember walking through ceramics shops with her and frowning at the painted pieces on display, thinking, “Mom could do better.”

My favorite of her pieces was probably a pretty simple one to paint: a ghost carrying a jack-o’-lantern. It looked like a person with a sheet over his head, cradling the pumpkin under one arm. The ghost was all white, the pumpkin orange, and the eyes on both were holes, showing the shadows behind them in the hollow figure.

I carried that ghost around the house so much when I was little that I’m sure Mom had to periodically wash off finger smudges.

Today, that same ghost haunts my hobby room 11 months out of the year; during the 12th month – October – it moves out to our living room where anyone can see it. It’s still my favorite of Mom’s works, but it’s far from the only one we have.

In our house, we also have holiday decorations, a wizard, a carousel dragon, the clown night light Mom made when I was little and afraid of the dark and, outdoors, a glossy black horse (which I think is my older girl’s favorite).

Next time I get back to Colorado Springs, I’m going to grab the ceramic space capsule container that holds my baby teeth and collection of money Dad brought home from Southeast Asia in the early ’70s. I’m also going to finally bring home the Peanuts characters who smiled at me in my bedroom for so many years.

Reminders of Mom’s love of ceramics are still all over my parents’ home. Those gnomes and animals are still in the gardens, the pots on the porch, the holiday figures in their storeroom. The basement is full of unfinished pieces, her kiln still stands in the laundry/workroom, her paints are still on the shelf, and her table is where it has been forever.

I think she still gets downstairs once in awhile to do a little work, but haven’t seen her do it in years. Sometimes I miss that, but looking around at all the lovingly crafted pieces shared with my family and my sisters’, I know the work of Mom’s hands will be with us, our children and hopefully even our children’s children for a long time to come.

We all have a few possessions here and there that are worth a few bucks, but the ceramics … those are truly valuable.

Originally published in April 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

Our older girl, 5 1/2, knows Easter is near and she’s excited. She wants to hunt plastic eggs filled with prizes. She wants to dip real, hard-boiled eggs in vinegary cups of coloring at the kitchen table. She wants to wear something pretty.

Go to church? Not so much that, but she’ll do it and resist the urge to fidget. Some weeks, I wish the people running the services appreciated just how strong the urge to fidget grows after an hour for both of my daughters (not to mention me) and cut a song or two short, maybe saved some announcements for the bulletin.

Our oldest doesn’t recall much about past Easter Sundays because she’s too young, but she does remember last year, particularly the office Easter egg hunt, and she knows she had fun.

At 2 1/2, our younger girl hasn’t reached the stage where she gets worked up about much before it actually happens. But come Easter, she’ll throw herself into whatever we do with her usual gusto, having a ball while my wife or I keep watch to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.

All this Easter stuff is old hat to me, of course, the same way all the Valentine’s stuff, the St. Patrick’s Day stuff, even some of the Halloween and Christmas stuff are old hat. First I did all of it year after year during my own childhood, now I’m repeating it with my kids.

For the first three or four years, I was able to get into the spirit of things the way a parent is supposed to, seeing how much fun the girls were having and enjoying that. But the luster has worn off and too much of what the kids consider “fun” I think of as a “parental responsibility.”

If we’re at a store, I glare wearily at the crowded “seasonal” aisles and want to dodge my daughters’ request to travel through them.

“We’re not buying anything today,” I tell them, but that never puts them off. They’re happy just to sightsee, so I start navigating through the people and try not to run over plastic Easter ducks previous visitors dropped and never picked up.

What I try to remind myself when I feel bored with the holidays is that someone in my position – a father – has a lot of power to ruin what should be great occasions for kids.

Want to make sure your kids’ brows furrow at the thought of you when they get older? Then show them your own furrowed brow and make “hurry up” noises while they’re trying to balance an egg on that cheap wire dipper that comes with packages of coloring. Better yet, groan loudly when one of those eggs rolls off the dipper and hits the floor.

Really, it takes only a little effort to make something special for my kids. Not lifelong memories, maybe, but enough to make them happy.

Sometimes, they need us to stay out of the way for a while and let them run and play with the other kids. That’s sometimes hard for me, particularly when I see little bullies or sick, dripping kids whose parents plainly weren’t worried about spreading germs.

If I watch, though, I might be rewarded with a moment in which one of my girls points me out to another Easter egg seeker and says without reservation: “That’s my daddy.”

It’s always a thrill to see my daughters don’t hesitate to tell the world I’m with them. I’ll never be ready for the day when they won’t want me there, but I hear it’s coming.

More importantly, we have to know when our girls need us to pay attention. That means a lot of encouragement, an occasional boost and a little applause.

Throw in a snack and some laughs and pretty soon the holiday’s a success for everyone.

Originally published in March 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

When you’re in your early 40s and say, “My wife is pregnant,” the first responses you get aren’t the same as the ones you might have heard as recently as your mid-30s.

“Congratulations”? Nope.

“Great news”? Uh-uh.

“About time”? Get outta town.

Instead, the response I heard to the news that Lisa is pregnant – news I started selectively sharing this year around mid-January – usually amounted to, “Is this on purpose?” Which at least wasn’t the snort of laughter I got from one person, or the unabashedly flummoxed/amused wide eyes I saw on another.

Isn’t it interesting that even when dealing with someone as socially withdrawn as me, many people – including some I really don’t know all that well – scarcely think twice about asking such an intensely personal question?

Let’s acknowledge that such responses amount to this: “You’re so freaking old, Todd, and with two kids already, Lisa and you have already made your replacements. What were you thinking?”

Well, to quote some younger fathers-to-be – many of whom were less married to the significant women in their lives than I am – I wasn’t thinking.

At times, I feel like pointing out Tony Randall and James Doohan became fathers when they were twice my age. Then I remember they’re both dead now and hold my tongue.

At least I can look to my favorite literary father figure, Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He’s described in the book as being almost 50, which means I’m in roughly the same ballpark, and unlike Atticus, I get to raise my kids with my wife instead of with a loving maid and opinionated sister.

Heck, just last week I heard someone describe 60 as the “new 40,” which by extension could mean that 40 is the “new 20” and therefore I’m on the young side of things.

Yeah, I’m just going to keep whispering that to myself over and over. “I’m a young man. I’m a young man.” If I avoid eating pizza after 7 p.m. and make sure to get 10 hours of sleep every night, I even feel young.

Well, maybe not young, but less … mature, maybe?

OK, here’s the simple truth that I know I don’t have to share if I don’t want: This isn’t what we expected. I’m going to be almost 42 when this next little one arrives, which means I’ll be almost 60 when she or he reaches legal adulthood.

So no, we didn’t “plan” it. To be blunt, we didn’t “plan” any of our kids.

When I found out, my own response held considerably more shock than anything I’ve heard from anyone else, and not a whole lot of amusement.

Starting the whole process of raising a third kid – diapers, feedings, bottles, yadda yadda yadda – is intimidating.

For a few days after getting the news, my brain played the opening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” over and over in my head. You know, the part about how he went out for a ride and never went back, Jack.

Having lived more than five years with night lights in every room (so the kids won’t trip if they get up in the night, or so we won’t trip ourselves if we have to rush to them), I keep thinking about how much I miss simple, genuine darkness.

At the same time, the two kids I already have make me so stereotypically happy it’s goofy. People who tell you how great kids are may irritate you by coercing you into looking at endless stacks of boring snapshots of toddlers playing in water, but they’re right about how good it is to be a parent.

God only knows what a third one will bring, but I bet happiness will be a big part of it.

Originally published in February 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

Calling it a “cold” seems wrong considering how much my nose burns. It’s kind of stinging and grooved, too, like it’s been used to strike matches or maybe sharpen pencils.

Kleenexes rub like dollar-store sandpaper, the handkerchiefs Dad long ago badgered me into the habit of carrying gross me out after only four nose blows. Every morning I spend 15 minutes clearing a biohazard out of my head and throat. My eyes water and ears ring.

Last week, my conscience kicked in and wouldn’t allow me to go along on a dinner gathering during a meeting of Cox Newspapers features editors for fear of exposing my peers to germs. I missed out on a meal at the Salt Lick, a barbecue restaurant in Austin, Texas.

Woe is me, right?

Yeah, I know – wah wah, boo hoo, go cry in someone else’s coffee, pal. You got to spend three days in Austin on someone else’s dime and you’re whining about a cold?

No one is better at feeling sorry for me than me, but self-pity has been a particular challenge of late no matter how bad the taste of my Target Cough Formula DM (a buck and a half cheaper than the Robitussin formula it copies), or how embarrassing it is trying discreetly to blow my nose in a crowd.

If recognizing how good is life in general weren’t enough to keep me from griping, all I’ve needed to do is look at the black circles surrounding the blue-green eyes on the ashen face in my home, or the blonde hairs curling out from under the quilt covering that same little face on the living-room couch.

I’ve had a cold and some fluid in my lungs. In the last week and a half, our older daughter, age 5, has experienced: a bad cold, strep throat, infections in both ears and pneumonia in one lung. Some days she slept so much it was almost scary and her waking hours were bleary except for brief stretches of energy that followed battles to get nasty-tasting medicines into her.

My wife, Lisa, and younger daughter, 2, have had the cold; the 2-year-old also had an ear infection, which she endured cheerfully.

Instead of some cleanup and repairs Lisa and I hoped to do the last couple of weekends, we’ve largely stewed in what has become our own little sick house. The basic necessities have gotten done, but more than a few small messes have been left where they fell until we’re ready for a major cleaning when we all come out the other side of this. The only thing that motivates me to pick up dirty tissues around the house isn’t the fact that they’re a mess, but that our dog enjoys eating them, which is disgusting.

Germs always have and always will settle in for visits in our home and I’ll never get used to it. Again, though, all I have to do is pay a little attention to know things in general are going pretty well.

Recently, I listened to a man I respect describe his teenage son’s suicide attempt. Now, the boy’s family watches constantly for signs that he’s planning another attempt. Naturally, the father is deeply concerned, but he also noted the experience has made him closer to his wife than they’ve been in a long time.

Periodically, my family and I cross paths with a mother whose son – about the same age as my older girl – plainly has substantial physical and mental problems. We’ve seen this boy many times since he was an infant and never have we noticed signs from the mother that she’s angry or overwhelmed by her situation. We have, however, seen her kiss and hug the kid plenty of times.

We’ve got colds. Yuck. But we’re getting better.

Originally published in February 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

Thanks to a combination of my wife’s tenacity, a great lesson book and the pupil’s interest, our 5-year-old daughter has a good head start on reading.

She’s even gone beyond the point where she has to sound out every letter; some words are familiar enough that she recognizes them right away, others she’s usually able to figure out pretty quickly – or at least a respectable approximation. Naturally, this delights Lisa and me and we encourage it.

So when she saw a sign as the four of us (two girls, Lisa and me) left a restaurant after lunch recently, she didn’t think twice about trying to read it aloud even though a steady line of strangers was walking past us on the way in.

The first word was familiar: “Happy.” The second wasn’t, but phonetically, she knew it should begin with a “huh” sound, there was an “o” in the middle and an “err” sound at the end.

Speaking loudly and clearly, the way we’ve taught her, she asked, “What’s ‘happy whore’?”

Man, for just a second I was flat shocked. What could inspire my empathetic big girl to use such a harsh word? My eyes jerked around, looking for … something. I wasn’t sure what, but it wouldn’t belong there. What I found was the sign advertising the restaurant’s happy hour, and the most interesting mix of emotions arose.

The strangers filed past, one after the other, on their way inside. Had they heard what had just happened? Did they recognize what an incredible thing it was for a kid not yet in school to get so close to reading something that began with a letter that’s just there for decoration and has that difficult “ou” in the middle?

Of course, what she came up with was kind of a dirty word.

Lisa practically vibrated with suppressed laughter. Chuckles escaped through my nose.

That night we had a brief discussion with our daughter about why she shouldn’t say “whore” even though Mommy and Daddy found it such a funny word.

Really, she can embarrass me like that anytime. I doubt anyone who passed us actually thought I was raising a foul-mouthed 5-year-old and anyone who did can go jump in a lake. It’s nothing like the time I pointed out the great big fat lady who once shared a department store elevator with Mom and me.

Young minds also produce unexpected things when no crowds are around. Sometimes they do it when they’re asleep.

Lisa and I can only guess what was going through our potty-training 2-year-old’s mind when she woke up crying early, early in the morning last week.

As always, Lisa was the one to get our little girl when she woke (no matter how exhausted she is, Lisa can rouse herself at a moment’s notice if the girls need her, while you practically have to pry me off the bed with a spatula). It was obvious right away that this wasn’t a typical discomfort wake-up. Our girl was wailing about something, seriously distressed.

What’s wrong, Lisa asked, what hurts? She kept asking until she figured out the reply mingled with the cries.

“I have to go potty,” our daughter was saying, “and I have a tail!”

Gee, no wonder she was upset.

Funny as it was, it must have been a powerful dream, maybe so strong that she actually still believes she temporarily had a tail. Every night since then, around bedtime, she shakes her head at me and says, “I don’t have a tail.”

No, sweetheart, I say. You don’t have a tail.

Then her big sister reads her a storybook. Sometimes a word comes out wrong, but we don’t worry about that.

Originally published in January 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

A few new memories:

— Our older girl, age 5, has decided my wife and I need some help raising our 2-year-old, and we’re not embarrassed to admit she’s sometimes better at parenting her sister than we are.

Sometimes our younger girl won’t eat, which can lead to bad moods and delayed or shortened sleep. One night, faced with this situation, Lisa and I resorted to our usual bag of tricks, which involves coercion, threats, deception and begging.

Seeing this wasn’t working, our older girl offered this bit of information to her sister:

“The potatoes hate the meat,” she said, “so put some potato in your mouth and it will chase the meat down your throat.”

I’ve used that line many times since then. I have no idea where my daughter might have heard it, or if she made it up herself.

— Some of my heroes are liars … of a sort.

Harper Lee. Stephen King. J.K. Rowling. Dr. Seuss. These people and others like them make a living making up stories loved by millions.

If you can’t be such a person yourself, wouldn’t it be nice to be the parent of one? And if you are such a lucky parent, how do you learn to recognize when a “lie” is good and when it might be an indicator of something insidious?

For now, I’ve decided a great big smile means something positive is happening. That’s what I saw on our 2-year-old’s face last week when she told me about a death-defying feat.

The story sprung from an everyday event: A trip to a lake with her mother and sister to feed the geese. The girls stood too close to the water for Lisa’s comfort, so she told them to back away or they might fall in. The girls obeyed by backing away, then they got close again. So Lisa made them sit down. Shortly afterward, they walked around the lake.

Our 2-year-old decided to spice up the tale a bit that night at dinner. She told me about being too close to the water and then, in an apparent moment of inspiration, made up something new. “I got too close to the water,” she said (basically), “then I fell IN the water and started swimming all around the water.” Her arms pumped as she mimicked swimming and her smile grew and grew in proportion with the bright pink shade her face turned.

Flabbergasted, all I could think to do was laugh. Mommy’s eyes and mouth were both open wide, in a good way.

Sweetheart, I asked, wasn’t the water cold?

No answer, just a bigger smile. We’re going to be in big trouble when she develops a poker face.

— If there’s a cheesy movie you loved when you were a kid, there’s a good chance your own kids will get a kick out of it. Our daughters have enjoyed “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” the campy 1966 big-screen version of the “Batman” TV show with Adam West and, particularly, “The Wizard of Oz.”

Over the weekend, I served up the ultimate cheese: “King Kong vs. Godzilla.” The fuss over the current “Kong” remake has led to older films about the character being re-released to home video, including the two made by Toho, the studio responsible for Godzilla and many other giant rubber-suit monsters, and I rented it.

The movie has a giant, fire-breathing reptile, a giant gorilla and a giant, land-walking octopus. Homes are smashed and tanks are melted. It’s got everything a kid could want.

Well, maybe everything a boy could want, but my girls were less than enthralled. Aside from the 2-year-old slapping her belly while Kong beat his chest on screen, they largely lost interest about halfway through and I suspect they only stuck with it to humor me.

Originally published in January 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

Businesses that want to try getting our money have permission to send my family junk mail, as long a they’re honest about it.

This being America and all, I figure people have just as much right to use the nation’s Postal Service to try selling me their product as they do their religion … although some businesses approach selling with more fervor than most missionaries.

However, the sellers have to make it obvious from the get-go that what reaches my home is an ad.

They must put a business name on the envelope’s face, or better yet, a big, colorful logo.

I’d like some indicator of what sales pitch is being thrown. “Big subscriber savings,” perhaps, or “Zero percent interest for one year!” Something to make it crystal clear this is advertising.

That way, we can throw it away without opening it.

It’s called junk mail because it’s garbage. If it comes to us, pretty much all of it is headed to the nearest trash can, preferably before it even makes it into the house. I hate to see the paper go to waste, but I’ve reached the sad conclusion life is too short to recycle everything.

Maybe once a year, we get a piece of junk mail that interests us and accept the offer. That might amount to one-quarter of 1 percent of all junk mail we get. If that’s enough to make it worthwhile for junk mailers, then as I said before, it’s OK with me if they want to keep sending it, as long as they’re honest. I’m not saying I like it because I generally sneer at junk mail, but it won’t get my shorts in a twist the way a telemarketer or spammer will.

Again, as long as they’re honest. What’s aggravating is when they try to disguise themselves.

Anyone with a mailbox knows what a disguised piece of junk mail looks like. It comes with “URGENT!” or “DATED MATERIAL – OPEN IMMEDIATELY” in large letters near your address. On the back flap, in small type, is a return address but no business name. There’s nothing to tell you this is an ad; instead, the envelope subtly screams that its contents are private and important.

Most of us have seen this trick enough that we know it’s junk, but it might not be. So we get a little closer to death opening the envelope. After confirming we’ve been lied to, we’re a touch more desensitized, and soon we’ll start pitching these letters without opening them … which might someday lead to ignoring something truly important.

In the last couple of years, I’ve started doing a small thing to get even with businesses that send me disguised junk mail. See, these letters almost always come with postage-paid return envelopes, so I put those to good use. After removing whatever papers might have our personal info on them, I shred the rest, put the confetti in the return envelope, and send it on its way.

I don’t know what happens after that, but here’s the best I figure I can hope for:

Some low-level cog in the junk mailer’s machine gets my envelope. This person probably knows what’s inside by the feel of it (I’m sure I’m not the first person to try this trick), but on the off chance he’s wrong, he has to open it.

If luck is with me, the envelope tears open sloppily or a stiff breeze hits and the little bits of paper scatter. The junk mailer has to dedicate a fragment of its budget to paying someone to clean up the mess I sent. Maybe some poor envelope-opener even gets sick of dealing with crackpots like me and walks off the job, forcing the hiring and training of a replacement.

Or maybe none of this happens. I don’t know. In the end, it would be nice to waste as much of their time as they did mine.

Originally published in December 2005, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

For my parents, these are the years of looking back and laughing.

Sue and Joe Powell have lived under the same roof without strangling each other for 50 years this month. They’ve spent all but 11 months of that time as parents, proof that whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.

Between the three of us, my sisters and I put them through plenty they can be happy to remember even though the actual experiences ranged from harrying to unpleasant.

The best of it would make others laugh too … but I can’t have that stuff getting out. In fact, if my folks wanted to, they could probably fund part of their retirement by blackmailing me into paying them “hush” money over some of the stuff I did when I was young.

But to give them some grins and a couple of eye-rolls for their golden anniversary, I’ll throw out some quick reminders of things they can enjoy knowing they survived:

• Firecrackers – two of them in the same night! – blowing up in the boy’s hand because he took too long to toss them away.
• Two daughters getting engaged in their late teens.
• The camper door stuck closed, a son and two friends trapped inside, desperate to get out. Kicking the door fails to open it but does manage to turn a temporary problem into a permanent one.
• A boy’s broken bedroom window in a practically brand-new house.
• The saga of the son’s blue Plymouth Duster. First a vandal throws a hammer through a side window. Then the teen driver loses control of it on a steep, icy road and crumples the door on a late-model Thunderbird’s fender. Miraculously, the T-Bird isn’t damaged. Weeks later, a school bus driver loses control on another steep, icy road and crashes into the Duster, which was parked. So much for the Duster.
• A camping trip, and a little girl who manages to slide from the tent trailer’s bed and land outside.
• Dealing with some disgusting illness on virtually every family vacation.
• Discussions about the injustice of requiring wearing T-shirts and carrying hankies.
• Battles over hair length.
• Battles over cough syrup.
• Report-card shame.
• Weird-looking friends.
• Countless runny noses.
• A trip to the emergency room with the boy who busted his chin on the porch step. The scar on his chin where the stitches were sewn.
• A trip to emergency room with the boy who woke up with stomach cramps.
• A trip to the emergency room with the girl who crashed a mo-ped.
• A trip to the emergency room with the boy who shook a glass Pepsi bottle until it exploded in his face. The scar on his forehead where the stitches were sewn.
• Karate lessons. Piano lessons. Roller-rink excursions.
• Fights between the boy and younger girl. Fights between the boy and older girl. Fights between the boy and both girls.
• Bullies.
• Tattling.

These are also the days of Mom and Dad getting last laughs. Particularly, it seems, with me.

Mom in particular loves it when I tell her about some irritant involving my girls. She greets my complaints with glee and reminds me that what goes around comes around. I can practically hear her sticking her tongue out at me on the other end of the line when I tell her about my 2-year-old’s continuing inability to master this whole “sleep” thing.

Yuk it up, Mom and Dad, you’ve earned it. Happy anniversary, I love you both.

Originally published in May 2006, The Daily Sentinel, Grand Junction, Colo.

“Plook” is a new word in the Powell family vocabulary, one I first heard about a week and a half ago during my family’s latest bout of illness. The word is the creation of my 2-year-old, who made it up while she was the first of us laid low by stomach flu, and I’ll bet you can guess what she meant when she turned purple and announced, “I’m gonna plook.”

Viruses are the inspiration for so many neat verbs.

Before my first daughter was born in late 2000, the only person I worried about being sick was me. Well … that’s probably not altogether true, it did concern me when my wife caught something, but I’m afraid I regarded Lisa’s illnesses as inconveniences and my own as catastrophic. Ain’t that just like a man?

I didn’t know how lucky I was that it didn’t come up often.

Now I’ve got two little girls and a third on the way (presuming the midwife wasn’t pulling our leg at the ultrasound), and these girls, inconveniently, want to get out and be around other people. Particularly children.

Do you have any idea how many of the kids you cross paths with are carrying nasty, plook-boiling viruses? A LOT. If you see a playground with 15 kids, odds are good four of them are carrying something you don’t want, and they’re happy to share it.

I might get annoyed about it if I didn’t know that my own little angels are occasionally the ones spreading germs like Rain Birds. We don’t take them into crowds of kids when we know they’re sick, but do sometimes find out later they had some crud that was simply waiting for a more inconvenient time to make them plooky. To the children who have picked up some nastiness from our kids, and particularly to their parents, I heartily apologize.

The stomach virus of a week and a half ago hit hard, but in a way it was more considerate than most. It struck our 2-year-old first, on a Thursday.

As she usually does, especially on work nights, Lisa took the lead in caring for our plooky little girl. I suppose I helped … well, I hope I did, but I can’t really remember doing much.

Next day, our little one felt better and she looked skinny. Kids that small have so few reserves. So Lisa and I made the big mistake of letting her eat one of her favorite foods at lunch: hot dogs.

That night, Lisa – 5 1/2 months pregnant – got plooky. Not long afterward our younger girl showed us how wrong it was to feed her hot dogs. I figured my priority had to be taking care of our kids so Lisa could at least be left alone, but I was only moderately successful. When she heard me scrambling around in the middle of the night, working on cleaning up our sweet-tempered, plooky daughter, Lisa got up to help, which was a big relief to me and I feel like a heel for that.

On the bright side, it wasn’t a work night, so I didn’t have to worry about how tired I was going to be when the phone at my desk rang the next day.

The last one to suffer a bout of plookiness was our 5-year-old, on Saturday night after her mother and sister were mostly finished. It was a relatively mild bout. She was pretty much out the other side by Sunday morning, by which time I was looking around at a house littered with cracker crumbs, tissue scraps and laundry.

Considering that mess, I spent awhile fantasizing about burning the place down instead of cleaning it up. As usual, though, Lisa did the bulk of the cleaning. Ain’t that just like a man?

The most glorious thing about this round of plookiness: I didn’t catch it. That probably means the next round of yuck will hit me twice as hard.