I do not recommend canoeing as a first date if you hope to reach date number two.

My wife and I canoed on our first date, and it was very nearly the last time we did anything at all. I thought it went great. Deserae did not. Here’s how it went:

HOUR 1

Dustin’s version:

It took a couple minutes for us to get on the same page.

Deserae’s version:

Dustin could not stop running into rocks. He just kept zig-zagging back and forth into Every. Single. Rock. Continue reading →

The regular marriage vows cover a lot of ground. For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. For richer or for poorer.  

For my wedding, I was adamant that we stick with the original. None of this “I promise to forever be your Rock of Gibraltar.” You can feel OK sailing away from the Rock of Gibraltar if it starts acting crazy. “Til death do us part” leaves much less wiggle room.

This is all very important, because I walk in my sleep. Continue reading →

As a homeowner, I pay thousands of dollars in taxes to my city throughout the year for things like police, fire, schools and garbage removal. Every couple of years, the city asks for a little more money. “We’re running out of money!” they say. “If you don’t give us more money, we’ll have to fire most of the police officers, then all the criminals will know about the city that has no police officers, and they will rob your house over and over again.

So I give them more money, and they say, “Thanks, we won’t fire the police officers now!” And then they spend it all on fireworks. Continue reading →

Deserae and I are amazing at getting free to almost-free things. If you’d like, we can give you the rarely requested “free” tour of our house, where we point out all of the free things we own – this couch, those TVs, that soundbar, etc. During the tour, we are at our most insufferable.

We are especially good at going on vacations for free. Thanks mostly to credit card sign-up bonuses, we’ve booked trips to Bermuda, the Bahamas, Hawaii (multiple times) and Australia for basically free.

So when we got a poorly written, poorly designed invitation in the mail to a time share presentation that promised a free 3-day/2-night vacation with flights for two just for attending, we could not have been more excited. Continue reading →

 As a kid, I really liked baseball. I also really liked the idea of getting rich quick.

That’s why I own thousands of baseball cards.

For kids who liked baseball in the 90s, baseball cards were basically penny stocks packaged with terrible bubble gum. We told ourselves that we collected cards because we loved the sport, but really, we were all dreaming of trading in that Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card for $50 and retiring.

Because without the promise of fast cash, baseball cards are pretty lame. Can you imagine trying to get a kid excited about baseball cards today? Continue reading →

Thanks to Toni and Tim Hanrahan for our first guest post! If you’ve got a hilarious parenting story to tell, email dustin@thelifelessonbook.com.

My cousin Toni, her husband Tim and their kids Wesley (age 1), Drew (3) and Titus (4) recently travelled to Pensacola, Florida to watch Toni’s brother graduate from college. A full day of flights with three kids under five years old isn’t usually a fun experience, but the worst part of the day for Tim and Toni definitely came after they arrived at their destination.

Here are Toni and Tim to set the scene.

Toni: We had been up since 4:30 a.m. and done two flights with three kids.

Tim: By the time we got to Pensacola, we were pretty much done.

Toni: So we land and we’re getting our luggage, and I notice that the case for Tim’s iPod Touch is empty. I go, “Tim, you know where this is, right?” And he just looks at me for a second and then turns to Drew and asks, “Drew, what did you do with my iPod?”

Tim: The three-year-old doesn’t remember. Continue reading →

I am skinnier than the average guy. According to a quick Google search, I am also skinnier than the below average guy and the underweight guy.

You know those growth percentiles parents can’t stop sharing sharing? (Amelia Rose is in the 75^th percentile for her weight, 64^th percentile for height, 98^th percentile for head size, etc.) Those were the most important stats of my teen years. The doctor would bring my mom in after a physical and give her a grave look.

“Dustin is doing well, but…”

Here it comes.

“He is in the 5 percentile in weight for his age.”

Sigh of relief and silent celebration. I had been in the 4 percentile the previous year.

Although living below the 7 percentile has had its benefits from time to time (hide-and-go-seek, reaching change between car seats, etc.), it’s not something I’ve always been happy about. Especially in high school. Continue reading →

My wife Deserae, and I recently took a once-in-a-lifetime-now-we-can-have-kids trip to Australia. Going to Australia has been a dream of mine ever since I was little, and it exceeded my expectations in every way. Well, maybe except one – the trip back home.

Between America and Australia is a mysterious thing called The International Dateline. I’m still not sure what The International Dateline is all about, but I do know that it involves a fair amount of time travel and can make for some very strange days. In our case, The International Dateline gave us The World’s Longest Day.

From midnight in Brisbane to midnight when we finally fell asleep in a Dallas hotel, 40 hours had passed. In those 40 hours, we encountered the grumpiest Australian, a homeless Spider-Man, a team of racist breakdancers and the best meal of our lives.

You may enjoy a running diary of the day’s events. Continue reading →

Hello, my name is Dustin, and I am addicted to iPhone games.

I don’t know how it works for most people, but when I download a game, I am unable to stop playing it until I beat it. This is a problem for two reasons.

1. Most iPhone games are really long.
2. I am terrible at all of them.

Over the last several years, I’ve gotten smarter about downloading these games. For example, I deleted Candy Crush after two hours when I realized the game has 500 levels, forcing me to choose between nine months of colorful candies and my marriage. After the Plants vs. Zombies 2 disaster of 2013, I finally decided to become an iPhone teetotaler, and stopped downloading games all together.

I had been clean for five months, then 2048 happened. Continue reading →

The Cleveland Marathon is this weekend. I ran the race five years ago and wrote about my experience. If you’ve ever wanted to find out what it’s like to run a marathon without actually running one, this is for you.

Pre-race
It’s 5:45 on the morning of the race, and I’ve just discovered my car has been egged.

I promise, I’m not surprised. In the weeks leading up to the race, I’ve dreamed that my car wouldn’t start, that I had forgotten to sign up for the marathon all together, that I’d gotten lost on the way to the race, and, of course, that I had run the whole thing in my underwear. Really, I’m relieved that an eggy car is all I have to worry about. Continue reading →