This last weekend was a rare treat: five days of solo time with G-, my 8yo son, and it was a delight. Five days of "dude time" with lots of bonding. We both really had a great weekend, and a busy one too, including hanging out with friends watching the final match of the Euro 2008 soccer competition.

Most of the time, of course, A-, my 11yo, and K-, my 4yo, are in the mix too, and while they all get along pretty well in the big picture, there are unquestionably moments when they aren't communicating clearly or their individual needs are, um, blinding them to the more harmonious path. (Did I phrase that elegantly enough?)

Okay, this is an update following my earlier plea for help metering video game time. You should start by reading that blog entry and seeing what I wrote about and, more importantly, the great comments people left with their own ideas and practices.

I took the different suggestions and thought a lot about the dynamics of my own children and what they do and don't need, and came up with the following...

It might be a sign of us buckling under to cultural pressure or perhaps the ongoing weight of constantly feeling like we're saying "no" to our children as they too process the divorce and changes in their lives, but Linda and I have agreed to let the kids have some Nintendo Wii play time this summer and each of us bought a unit and hooked it up.

First off, the Wii is one amazingly fun and brilliantly engineered device. With its motion-sensitive wireless controllers and the forced feedback mechanism, it's light years ahead of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, based on my experiences with all three.

[ this is one of the more peculiar press releases I've received in rather a while... ]

From Debbie Nigro
Chief Executive Girlfriend and Founder
First Wives World.com

Approximately 30 million women are transitioning thru divorce in the United States.

There are many different stages. Debbie put this friendly list together so both women and men can better identify the different levels before venturing into the dating scene.

DIVORCED WOMEN'S DATING STYLES

Damaged Daters - You don't trust anyone anymore with your heart. You've been burned. You are not so quick to jump back into another relationship, but you go anyway because you think you are supposed to at least try. Your cynical vibes smell defensive and stink up the room. Wear extra perfume.

I Don't Care Daters- You are not interested. You're energy is focused elsewhere. You need time to to find out who you are. You go just because someone's very nice but you really don't care, but you don't let him know you don't care. He doesn't pick up you don't care so he calls you again and you go again...even though you don't care.

... continues

I had a weird experience at the Post Office this afternoon when I tried to buy a roll of stamps and am hoping some of my blog pals can offer up some thoughts...

When I got the latest wave of credit cards I decided that this time, instead of signing them, I'd write "Ask for ID" on the back, as a bit of a fraud protection and identity theft prevention. So far, it's distressing to see how few people actually care about asking for my ID, even when I point out that's what I've written on the back. But that's another story.

This afternoon, we popped into the local Post Office and dutifully queued up until it was our turn, then asked for a roll of stamps, $42, and presented my credit card to pay.

Last night I was at a workshop until 10.30pm, which wouldn't have been a big deal if my kids would have cooperated with the babysitter and gone to sleep when they were supposed to. But they didn't and when I walked in, there they were, sitting in the living room, lights low, like zombies, waiting for me.

I chalked it up to the exacerbated separation fear brought on by our separation and the two different houses that they now inhabit: in fact, it was the first time they had a babysitter at bedtime here, rather than an afternoon playmate.

Still, it was a drag, and it took until almost 11pm for G-, our 8yo, to finally pass out, and his usual bedtime is around 8pm (though it typically takes him 30 minutes or longer to finally go to sleep).

Sometimes being a blogger is crazy fun, like when the PR agency from Hansen Beverage Company contacted me and asked if they could send along some product samples for the kids to try. The product? Their new "Junior Water" product.

I said "sure, but no guarantees anyone will like it, that we'll write positively about the product or that we'll ever actually write about it in the end."

They were okay with that clause and sent us a box of little juice boxes and a nifty little USB flash drive with product pictures thereon.

Unfortunately....

So here's something weird: I'm a huge fan of the cinema, both for the classic films and the latest big productions. I average a movie a day and have seen thousands upon thousands of movies in my life. I have seen about 95% of the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, for example (I blogged a while back about having seen only 89 of them, but have seen more since). Go to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) Top 250 Films and I've seen all but about 20 or so. (subtract all the Italian films and I've seen almost all of 'em. How about you?)

"Hi, my name's Dave and I'm addicted to films". "Hi, Dave."

The irony of this is that even after our split and the resultant morphing of our relationship into divorced adults, co-parenting, Linda and I are still intent on raising our children as media-free as possible. So, no movies.

Rather an amusing situation happened over the weekend: I was in the touristy downtown area of Boulder with G- (8) and K- (4) having a good time wandering around. We'd just stepped out of Ben & Jerry's after enjoying some delicious ice cream and G- spotted someone across the pedestrian mall with a basket and a sign that said

free condoms

It didn't take more than a second or two for him to ask "Daddy, what's a condom?"

Ah, well... Hmm....

Without doing any research or checking with anyone, when Linda and I separated, we decided on a quite complicated two-household arrangement that maximized the solo time each child had with each parent. We did check after a month or two with a local psychiatrist and her comment was basically "wow, if you can do this, it's good for the kids, but I think it's going to prove difficult."

Our arrangement, on a typical week, was: Monday: G- with me, A- and K- with Mom, Tuesday G- and K- with me, A- with Mom, Wednesday, A- with me, Thursday A- and K- with me, Friday A- and G- with me, Saturday no-one with me, and Sunday everyone with me. As a reminder, A- is 11, G- is 8 and K- is 4.

For those of you familiar with divorce and dual-household setups, what's wrong with this arrangement, over and above that each parent only has a single night where they're without children?

I feel a bit trapped right now. Linda and I are changing our parenting time arrangements so that all the kids are with her some days and then they're all with me on other days. If you've read parenting post divorce type books, we're probably going to be moving to a 2-5-5-2 arrangement. Prior to this we had a more complicated 2-2-2-1 sort of arrangement, staggered, so that each child had solo time with each of us every week. Too many darn transitions, though, so we're moving to a more normal, more common arrangement.

The question that looms before me now, however, is: what happens during the summer? As regular readers know, we have an 11yo girl, an 8yo boy and a 4yo girl and even during the school year, it's very tough when I have all three because the 4yo gets out of school at 12:30, so I end up with half-days of work unless I can arrange play dates or other afternoon activities for her. Worth noting is that our two houses are just barely more than a mile apart, so there's no distance or travel involved and the kids can easily keep all the same friends and social activities in either residence.

But summer vacation, stretching out a long twelve weeks, suddenly seems overwhelming to me because the days that I have the kids, I'm now thinking I will have to not work at all, effectively axing my available work hours by 50%, with a commensurate hit on my income.

First off, I will apologize that I'm not going to post any pictures of my kids here. I know that most daddy bloggers and mommy bloggers have a different perspective on things, but I don't have pics of my kids online because it's important to me that I put in all possible effort to protect their privacy. That's also why I don't refer to them by name but rather by using the admittedly Victorian convention of first initial + dash, as in D-.

Anyway, that doesn't change that we had a great time in Hawaii last month and are ready to go back (particularly since tonight we're supposed to see 3-5" of snow tonight here in Colorado). So let's jump in. What I'm going to do here is show a picture then have a commentary about it immediately following. The pics are big, enjoy!