Dad
That’s me!
I am the father of the three critters.
I chronicle my kids’ antics and try take a laissez-faire approach to parenting until my wife whips me into shape. I like reading, writing and keeping an organized house. The latter is a rarity. I’m from West L.A., from an upper-scale neighborhood called Brentwood Glen that my four brothers and sisters and I managed to bring down a notch. We rode skateboards, threw things where they shouldn’t have been thrown and played punk rock, noisily and incoherently. A neighbor once tried to get rid of us. We stayed. We matured. Now we’re all-around good people with a tinge of rebel.
May my kids behave better!
by Charles Newbery
Posted in: Dad
Yeah, nothing like a good lie-in
My son is an early riser.
I can hear him turn on the television at the break of dawn.
A deafening thunder rattles me out of sleep. Then I hear him scrambling to find the controls before the volume comes down to a near silence.
I then hear my other two children, eight and three, wander down the stairs. The dog yelps and my wife, lying at my side, groans out just audibly, “The dog wants to go out,” before she pulls the pillow over her head again.
Then I hear my own footsteps going down the stairs and think, we need to get rid of the TV.
Or have the in-laws move in. [click to continue reading…]
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by Charles Newbery
Posted in: Dad
"I should have worn cutoffs!"
Merry Christmas!
We’re on the coast of Argentina for the summer holidays.
It’s hot and sunny.
This is very much a homecoming for my family. Every summer we come back to our house in a pine forest a few blocks from the beach. This is Pinamar. We lived here for a little over two years, a place that we came to call our pine tree paradise. They were hard but glorious years that suddenly came to a halt as the crappy global economy and the need for better schooling for our children and professional help for our son, who has autism, drove us back to Buenos Aires.
But every year we return to spend our summers here, and we pine for it throughout the year. [click to continue reading…]
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by Charles Newbery
Posted in: Dad
"You can do it Dad!"
Thanksgiving always brings back memories of my childhood in West L.A.
I was there on my own for two weeks in February and two years before that with my entire family.
But with three children it is getting harder to travel there from our home in Argentina.
Not mentally.
I can still remember most of the details of our old house, a bungalow with a huge bougainvillea out front. The house was torn down in the 2000s and replaced by another. The new house was trucked in during the night. The movers cut the new house – a two-storey house from Santa Monica – into four sections and moved each part on a separate truck. They had to disconnect and reconnect telephone and power cables to get it across town, from Santa Monica to Brentwood Glen. [click to continue reading…]
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