It’s Tuesday evening, I’m writing a column, there’s a tropical storm cutting across the state … Do you know where your cans of tuna fish are? That’s all I’ve been thinking about. That’s my storm food if the big one comes. That, some canned peaches and a half-eaten jar of salted peanuts. I couldn’t wait. Who knows what we’ll be facing Friday morning when this newspaper hits driveways. Could be it’s a bright sunny day out. Or could be you’re reading this in four feet of water over a bowl of Fruit Loops made soggy by the steady drip coming through that hole in your roof. While I’m sitting here typing away Tuesday night, forecasters are pondering what to make of Tropical Storm Fay. She’s already made landfall twice in the state and is supposed to make a left hand turn back toward St. Augustine sometime … well … right about now. How will this all turn out?

How do you retire at 35 if you haven’t won the lottery, hit it big in stocks or invented something incredibly cool that everyone in the world wants, like an iPhone or spray cheese in a can? If you have some ideas, please let me know. Drop me a line, as long as it doesn’t involve knocking people off or me dancing. I have decided it’s time for me to retire. It’s not that I don’t like working. It’s just that I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to vacation . . . forever. I want to wake up, go to the gym, drink lattes and read the newspaper after a casual stroll. I want to live in a hotel room where I can get cookie crumbs and smeared chocolate all over the sheets. I want to swim in big resort pools with Mayan pyramids and water slides until the chlorine bleaches my black hair the color of snow. I want an endless supply of towels that I can throw wet on the floor. I want to sip rum drinks. I want to become one with my flip-flops. I want permanent stubble on my face. I want to eat greasy food and stay up late with my kid goofing off until we both pass out in bed, or my wife puts us in timeout. I want that lifestyle!

Boy, I remember the days when vacations were hard-chargin’ affairs and adventures to far off lands. We Thompsons would do ’em up right. There were cosmopolitan ventures to New York, and laid back sojourns to hammocks in the Keys. I remember times sitting on the dusty floors of Preservation Hall in New Orleans with a newly-bought flask whetting my whistle. We journeyed to Ireland to converse with the sheep, and even my trips to Cuba as a journalist took on tinges of vacation when the music started to drift through the Caribbean heat at night and the rum began to flow. I remember them just like they were yesterday, even though they’re a long time gone now. I think of this because the Thompson family will head out on a new adventure soon — our latest vacation. And this time we’re going somewhere very exotic and out-of-the-way … Orlando! Yippee. What a different world it is with a 2 -year-old. A few years back, if I was told I was going on a trip like this, I would have said, “No thanks, I’ll go to work instead.” I was a little bit of a vacation snob. But that said, the funny thing is, I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m excited, even thrilled. Part of me is a bit confused. We’re doing everything I used to dread. We’re staying in a Disney resort where my pillow will probably whisper in my ear, “Buy more Mickey Mouse toys.” We’re spending a day […]

As my wife and I strolled the cozy little streets of downtown Fernandina Beach, there was a moment when I think we both turned to each other and blurted out, “Where’s the baby?!?” That’s normally a running joke with us. If we go out to lunch sans the 2-1/2-year-old, someone will inevitably stop to ask where the kid is. “Oh my gosh,” one of us will say, hands clasped to face, “where’d she go!?!” or “I told you not to give her the car keys?” Sometimes people laugh; sometimes people call 911. It’s a mixed bag of reactions. But this time it didn’t feel like a joke. It really felt like we’d lost her — like we didn’t know where she was. “Um, didn’t you have her?” Here we were, a whopping 50-plus miles from St. Augustine, spending our first night EVER away from her. We felt naked, and it was kind of unnerving. A part of us — an important part — was missing. It felt weird, kind of awkward and almost like a guilty pleasure. Were we guilty of something?

Have there been many major scientific studies looking at why children, and especially toddlers, have so much energy when they consume so little food? Where does it come from? Do they eat batteries? There has to be a good explanation. And I know this isn’t a new question. It’s been debated for centuries, maybe longer. What drives them? Where do they draw the incredible flow of juice that lets them run about the house until they conk into a wall and knock themselves out? There are plenty of ways to burn off that energy. One friend mentioned she’s taken up running her child in the backyard in the evening. I picture a little dog track, but instead of a plastic rabbit chase-toy, a dangling cookie or a bag of sugar. I remember a night on the way home that my wife turned to me and said she was going to take our two-and-a-half-year-old outside and let her run wild in the sprinkler until she tired or completely pruned up.

We are such strange beings, us parental units. Things we would never have done in our former lives — that we would have turned up our noses and snorted at — we now do freely. Things that seem so outlandish, ridiculous, and frankly, disgusting. Take for instance the other day at pre-school as we dropped my two-year-old daughter off. I was in the passenger seat of the car giving her a kiss goodbye. My wife was carrying her and I noticed a little something in the little girl’s nostril. It was a “UNO” — an unidentified nasal object. I couldn’t let her go into school like that, and after failing myself to extract it, my wife — the old pro — went in for the kill, sans tissue. (We were already late and unprepared for duty such as this.) “Now what do I do with it?” she asked, stumped. Then, even shocking myself, I said, “Here, give it to me. I’ll figure something out.” My wife thanked me and trudged off with child, leaving me with the UNO. “Now what do I do with it?” I thought. But that’s the life of a parent. Never in my wildest imagination — not in some crazed hallucinatory delirium brought on by spoiled fruit or bad fish — could I ever have pictured this: me sitting in a car staring at a “boogie” on the end of my finger. I couldn’t even have ever imagined myself being so selfless, so thoughtful, and shoot, […]

Terrible twos? What terrible twos? Bah! Hogwash! Who says? I think it’s a myth. Of course, as I write this I’m also knocking on all the wood in the house with a sledgehammer, just to be safe. How many times have I written something like, “Never has the hot water heater exploded, flooding my house and causing it to float down the street” . . . only to have it happen the next day? Too many times. So knock, knock, knock! But for all the talk of terrible twos, it’s been quite timid at my house since little Amelie celebrated her second birth in December. Yet, everybody asks about it, and has warned us it was coming. “Oh man, talk about terrible,” we commonly hear. “My kid would scream so much, the paint fell off the walls. I’ve been medicated ever since.” People told us she would turn wild, like a jackhammer. That she would be mean, loud and angry. That she might pout and make unreasonable demands, like letting her drive the car. People said she wouldn’t listen anymore and would stomp her feet in protest at everything.