A Sabo family Christmas story: Time stands still

There's so many of us now it's hard to get everyone in the photo...

Maybe it's true what they say about time.

That it goes faster the older you get. That one day, like today on Christmas Eve 2017, you wonder how you got here so fast.

A hundred yesterdays, a thousand actually, have passed.

What happened to summer? Let alone fall.

In a few days, the calendar turns again. And in a year from now, I imagine that once again I'll wonder what happened to the time.

I imagine I'll ask Julie where the days went and how the kids got so big and wasn't it just yesterday we wondered what it would be like to have kids who are in college and married.

And wasn't it just yesterday we'd wonder how crazy it must be to think about holding a sweet little grandchild.

Those yesterdays are here. What seemed to be so distant, so crazy to think about, wasn't so crazy after all.

Those little kids are in college and married and working and buying houses and having babies and doing all those things that I think makes time speed up.

When the older ones come home and all 14 kids are here together with two daughters-in-law and one grandson and we're trying to fit around the dinner table it's big kid, little kid, grown kid, little kid, big kid, grown kid and so on to try and fit everyone in.

It's kind of impossible.

But as we're all laughing to the point of tears and passing food the wrong way and spilling seafood chowder, we laugh some more at what the little kids have been saying lately and laugh about the legendary stories about the crazy things the older kids used to do ... and then we laugh some more ...

It's these moments right here that for a brief moment time stops.

And I think to myself that these are the best days of my life. Not yesterday or maybe tomorrow, but right here.

I look around and all our kids are together again.

No one's off at work or away at college or living somewhere so far away.

They're all right here, sitting with us at the dinner table.

Love is the sound of raucous laughter.

Love is the amazing family stories that everyone's heard but still make us all howl.

Love is baby James' big, toothless grins that make everyone coo.

It's selflessness and caring and compassion and forgiveness and easy apologies, the things that make a big family work and that are all the things that can be so rare in this world.

It's joy and laughter-induced hiccups and big hellos and goodbye hugs.

It's a collective faith in Christ and knowing that hard days and good days may be His equal portions, but His love for us transcends the darkest nights.

I think to myself how amazingly blessed I am. God pours out His grace and mercy and love on me in abundance.

A man for whom, however briefly, time does stop.

And I make this memory: We're crammed around the dinner table, all my kids, my beautiful wife next to me, and we're all roaring, some of us wiping our eyes we're laughing so hard.

It's a moment I'll carry in my memory forever. That picture is ingrained in my mind, never to fade.

So yes, actually, time does stand still.

Every once in a while it stands still for me.

I'm thankful.

Merry Christmas. God bless you all.

Some `expert' blames husbands for 7 hours of extra work for wives

There's not much room to put my feet up after a hard day's work with all the folded laundry on the coffee table.

Few things in life annoy me more than academics and scientists and their bogus studies. For example, a recent study found that bogus biomedical studies with results that were flawed or outright fudged cost the government and private sources $28 billion a year. A billion dollars here and a billion dollars there and pretty soon we're talking about real money, especially considering you and me taxpayers are paying for guys in white lab coats or plaid coats with elbow patches to gin up some pseudo-science.

But what really got me riled up today was an article I found while surfing the net hard at work on my couch with a cup of coffee within easy reach writing really important stuff for one of my company's clients. This University of Michigan study, which I fully expect will be quickly disproved and outed for its obviously flawed research, made the outrageous claim that husbands cause their wives on average an extra seven hours of work per week. While wives save their husbands from an hour of chores a week.

This is just the latest example of husband hate out there. First of all, who comes up with these ideas? What professor was sitting around on his couch in his cushy University of Michigan office while on sabbatical and had a moment of inspiration that led him to illogically think that it's even remotely plausible that husbands specifically, and maybe even men in general, are slobs and quite possibly good for almost nothing around the house?

I brought this bogus article to Julie's attention as she was helping six of our kids with their schoolwork while she was folding her second basket of laundry, right after she helped them with lunch and right before she got them snacks. She could only shake her head! Something doesn't smell right with this research!

According to the highly dubious "science" in this article, women with more than three children spent 28 hours a week cleaning, cooking and washing. If my math is right, that's an average of four hours a day on household work! Can they really be serious?

It was a little frustrating trying to read the article in its entirety to Julie because she kept getting interrupted. Someone had to go potty, there was a question about what to do for dinner and what needed to be fetched from the grocery store, then someone said we had no toilet paper, then one of the boys said all his jeans had holes in them and wondered if he could get some new ones ... all I wanted to do was read her this article! I just can't get a break!

By the time I finally got through reading the article, after she put the roasts in the crock pot for dinner and got one of our little kids some chocolate milk and took a phone call from the doctor's office about one of our kids' recent appointments, I figured out I was going to be late for a meeting for work if I didn't leave pronto. So I really needed Julie to make me a sandwich while I got out of my jammies and got dressed. It was noon after all.

Of course, I couldn't find my shoes. I ran through the house looking EVERYWHERE before Julie finally found them. Someone had put them under a pile of my clothes in the bedroom from the past few days that hadn't made it to the laundry basket in the garage. I'm sure it was one of the kids who hid my shoes. Do they really think that is funny?

As I headed out the door for my meeting with my sandwich in hand, I reminded Julie that she needed to pick up one of our daughters at work and that we needed potatoes for dinner from the store. Then I smiled. Would it be possible for her to make one my favorite cheesecakes for dessert?

As I walked to the car I just shook my head. The study really had me riled up. I think I'll have Julie reach out to that professor and set him straight. Oh, and one other thing. Go Michigan State!

Hello Again. Goodbye Again. When Kids Grow Up

Hello and goodbye. A perpetual family cycle.

We're at this stage of family life that we will be in for the next couple of decades. The kids come and go. It's off to college, back again, leaving again, then back and then at some point off to make their own lives, typically with a spouse.

It's a strange place for us.

We're used to having all these kids around, a full house with people everywhere, the cafeteria that's called our "kitchen" always open, the dishwasher always running, a basket full of laundry permanently ready to be folded.

I have no clue what it will be like to no longer exchange the dreaded "What are we doing for dinner?" look with Julie and thinking to myself, "Well, there's always pasta." I mean seriously, I'm forever in debt to the nation of Italy for its contribution to the menu of fairly simple to fix Sabo dinners that in some weeks might look like this:
Sunday--Spaghetti with meatballs
Monday--Baked ziti
Tuesday--Italian sausage and pasta soup
Wednesday--Lasagna
Thursday--Ravioli. With sauce.
Friday--Bowtie pasta with sausage and vegetables
Saturday--See all of the above (aka "leftovers")

There's nothing wrong with that, right? The beauty of pasta is that it goes a long way at a conveniently low price. And it's filling. That's huge in this house.

In 15 or 20 years when we're down to one, or maybe at most, two kids in the house, or it's just the two of us, what will dinner look like? Will it still be pasta up the kazoo? Or will we have graduated to more sophisticated dinners like wild-caught roast salmon and broccoli with chili-caper vinaigrette?

Then again, in 15 or 20 years I could have 30 grandkids, give or take a dozen or two. Hopefully we'll have a sizable group of grandkids that live nearby. That theoretically could come over for dinner and hang out and have a sleepover.

Maybe I'll hang onto those pasta-making skills.

Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 1. `Hey Dad. Where Are You?'

Let's see...a Taco Bell run or this sunset?

Do you ever get to a late Sunday afternoon, take stock of your life, check your mutual funds, contemplate the meaning of life, wonder if anyone working on Wall Street who engaged in shady mortgage fraud and insider trading deals has a soul ... and weigh whether it's worth it to cook dinner?

There's something about fixing Sunday night dinner that I find particularly agitating. Even daunting, repulsive and annoying. And I'm a dude who loves to cook. I can't put my finger on exactly why I don't like to cook on Sundays. After shedding my pastor duties after church I tend to "check out." You might find me in the garage piddling around making a coffee table. Sometimes I nap. I might take a jaunt to the store and act like I'm shopping for the week's meals and blow it all on ice cream and non-essentials like fancy coffee creamer and crazy cheeses made in Holland. Does this make me a bad person?

I mean, I'm usually a pretty good guy. I recycle. I put my shopping cart in the cart corral in the parking lot instead of in the space next to the van, even in hard rains. I clean up the lint screen in the dryer. I yield in the traffic roundabout and stop for pedestrians trying to enter crosswalks. I buy Julie raspberries because I know she loves them even though they're really expensive this time of year. Really expensive like cheeses made in Holland.

So we got to Sunday afternoon just before 5 p.m. and there were all these kids looking really, really hungry. The thought actually crossed my mind to cook something. The other thought I had was that they wouldn't starve if they didn't have dinner. I mean, we have bread and peanut butter in the house. But then I'm not going to eat a p.b. & j sandwich for dinner ... so I was faced with what's known as a "parental dilemma." You know the one. Where you have to decide if it's in the best interests of your family to eat at Hardee's or Taco Bell. I had a hankering for a burrito so the choice was fairly easy.

I got the lowdown from everyone of what they wanted from Taco Bell, loaded Seth in the van and took off down the street ... except I glanced at the sky and it was on fire. It's a three-block run down to the beach from my house and my intention was that I would race down there while obeying all traffic laws, snap a sunset photo and then get to Taco Bell before my children suffered privation leading to acute starvation and other health-related issues.

I got to the beach, told Seth to sit tight, ran out to the shoreline, snapped a photo and ran back to the van. Piece of cake. Except I knew that the show was just beginning. It would be a monumental sunset because literally the sky was aflame ... so I fetched Seth out of the van and we frolicked on the beach while I documented our interlude via my iPhone. Yes, I had total disregard for the well-being of my family. Yes, I got a phone call from someone high up in the Sabo household who was surprised to learn I had not even made it out of the neighborhood.

But I got some killer clicks.

Seth gets photo-bombed by the sunset.

Ultimately, I made it to Taco Bell. No one in the Sabo house had starved. They appeared perplexed at how long it took for me to make a Taco Bell run considering it's literally a few minutes away. But hey, boy did Seth and I make some remembories, as Evie used to say when she was a little girl.