Jim Van Slyke's blog

I have no idea what to get my wife for Mother's Day once again. It's not that she's hard to shop for -  I know what she likes and dislikes (no to jewelry, yes to practical - thank you, Honey!), but I have a difficult time deciding if there is truly any gift on Earth that would come close to saying how much I appreciate the things she does as a mom.

I know it's coming. One day my boys (ages 5 and 2) will be teenagers. I have hard time seeing it, though. My boys, though big for their ages, are in these small, seemingly perfect, bodies. Their voices don't crack and they don't have oily skin. They aren't hooked to an MP3 player or zoned in on a Nintendo DS for hours at a time.

I feel bad for my wife. Growing up with just one sister, she didn’t have the luxury of witnessing how little boys turn into big boys and, hopefully, men. She doesn’t know why playing with frogs is cool or why getting muddy – at any time – is a good idea.

OK, a girl has called our house. One girl, not girls. But isn't that how it starts? Once one girl has broken through the phone "wall" my wife and I have erected around our sons, won't other girls rush through the hole created by the first call like soldiers rushing through a hole in a castle wall? It's not going to stop is it?

A little bit of my soul died recently when I overheard a woman talking about how she and her husband were going to buy their only child a new swing set. While giving a child a swingset is a good idea, the woman said she wanted to get a new swing set because their current swing set only had two swings while their neighbors just bought a swingset that had three swings.

I'm quite sure my parents think my two boys are the best behaved children on the planet? Why? Well because everytime we take to the kids to my parents' house, the kids don't yell, run around the house, attack each other, refuse to eat foods they have loved their entire lives or break things.

One thing I realized in my daze of waking up at 3:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning to take care of our oldest as he coughed up enough phlegm to fill one of those tall water towers we see while driving around Hampton Roads, is that a family is only as strong as its sickest member.

Full disclosure: I didn't watch Tiger Wood's press conference live and have only seen the "highlights." But I've also read numerous articles about the conference, and about half of them seem to think Tiger was sincere and human and the rest still think Tiger is an emotionless, robotic mess.

Recently, our oldest child had a meltdown in his kindergarten class. He didn't listen, disrupted class and even wrote on another kid's face with a magic marker. He claims the marker assault was an accident, but if he was having a tough day I can see him acting out.

It struck me just the other day as the snow was descending nicely on Hampton Roads and my two boys (ages 5 and 2) were truly experiencing a real dose of the white stuff that I have no idea how to relate to them. I grew up in standard household (at least back then) that featured my mom, my dad, my younger sister, my cat and my dog.