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?

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.

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!

Yup, a buddy just stopped by and the tutor said "I'm tutoring, catch ya later" to his friend. So I'm right about their working relationship here.

What strikes me though is that there's precious little learning or teaching going on here and that this relationship is much more characterized by the tutor dictating concepts to the student.

What's interesting is that the material is broken down both into categories (Animal Stories, Biographies & History, Classics & Poetry, Fables, Fairy Tales & Myths, Fiction, Mysteries, Nonfiction, Parenting & Teaching, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Study Guides & Foreign Language) and by age and school grade.

Now maybe it's just me, but do we want kids listening to parenting audio books? :-)

Shopping seems like a fun social experience mostly, a chance to people watch and see a much wider variety of folks than I usually encounter on my day to day adventures in homogeneous Boulder. It's also a nice place to go for a walk if the weather outside is frightful, though that's less of a legit excuse as we're in the spring moving into summer!

I've also enjoyed shopping online, more because of the great variety of selection than anything else. But in the last few years...

What's curious, however, is what they most like me to sing: The Beatles. Maybe it's because I'm a boomer myself and so I am quite familiar with all their lyrics, but I also think that I have the same tonal range as Paul McCartney, so the songs are easy for me to sing.

I mix it up a bit with Elvis, James Taylor and even Jim Croce, but given a choice, we seem to migrate back to Lennon and McCartney.

And the song they most prefer?

In Pirates of the Caribbean Life, there's a "RAID" square you can land on, which then lets you attack another player and, if the spins are in your favor, steal their ship or otherwise steal money from 'em. It is, after all, a pirate-themed game, so you should expect some level of hostility and aggression.

Not with my kids, though.

It's annoying that companies now routinely put these stickers on our products at the factory (sometimes with alarming results: when I was researching LCDTV systems I really liked a particular Phillips unit, except for the customer complaints that they couldn't get the stickers off the TV screen itself without damaging the TV!) but it's downright weird how many people leave the stickers on once they start using the product.

When I got to Linda's house, K- was home with A-, our 11yo, and Linda was off running errands. When I walked in, I could see that K- was engaged, and it wasn't too much of a surprise when she told me that she didn't want to come with me. She was happy to see me, as she always is, but after a little while I said we needed to start getting ready to go so we could have a nice dinner and play a game at my place, she burst into tears. Next thing I knew, she'd called Linda and was hysterically saying she wanted to stay there, not go with me.

Twelve years later, I am quite in love with the little nipper, she's the proverbial apple of my eye, along with my other two terrific children. Damn, I just have really fabulous kids, as was driven home to me by playing "big person" Monopoly with my 8yo this evening before bed and laughing again and again as we wheeled and dealed on property exchanges and rent payments.

Nonetheless, I think back to what was going on when she was conceived and how much has happened and changed since then and have to say that there's a touch of melancholy, a sadness over what could have been, perhaps, rather than what is...

Dave Taylor: How did you get started blogging, Kelly?

Kelly: I first published online in 1994. Since then, I've been writing in one form or another on the web. I've always been a firm believer that good stories are more important than the medium you use to tell them. As more people read online, it makes sense for me to tell my stories there.

However, I didn't start blogging until 2004. I started with kellycrull.com, a blog about my first years in Spain, and later Spain Dad, a baby blog, which I started writing as soon as my wife and I found out she was pregnant--even before we told our family or friends.

I was reluctant to start blogging initially because, as I said, I'm a firm believer in good stories. It wasn't until I ran across blogs like The Attachment Parenting Blog or Dooce or Waiter Rant that I saw how to blog and be thoughtful. Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer to read blogs that have been written with care, even if that means the authors post less often.

DT: You disclose quite a bit of personal information on your blog. What’s your view on privacy in this regard?

Not because of the chaos, not because they wake me up - all of that is [begrudgingly] okay - but because of what to do after they've fallen asleep.

You know what I mean, where you're in a good mood and happy until you bump into a friend who is down in the dumps, moody or angry. Then your bubble bursts and the bad mood infects you.

This doesn't always happen, to be fair, but it's more common than I'd wish. Fortunately, I've found that the more I can be conscious of this mood transference effect, the less it actually affects me.

But children, well, that's something entirely different...

For years Linda and I have disagreed on whether chores should have a financial value and/or whether perhaps doing your chores produces an allowance, but now that we have separate households I can reexamine this issue and consider how to ensure that my children help keep my house clean, neat and humming along smoothly.

The question, then, is should chores have an assigned value, and should it be financial in nature?