It was a momentous evening in the Reser household on Tuesday night. Sloan lost her first tooth.

And thank goodness, because our daughter couldn’t accept having a full mouth of baby teeth any longer. With most of her class losing teeth left and right, Sloan felt the Tooth Fairy had a personal vendetta against her.

After personally wiggling on a tooth that seemed loose-ish for a couple weeks, Sloan allowed her mom to finish the job. With a Taylor Swift song playing in the background to calm nerves, Sidney, who is a self-proclaimed “tooth puller,” extracted Sloan’s first tooth.

On Tuesday night, Sloan lost her first tooth!

I can’t express how thankful I am that my wife wears the pants in the tooth pulling department. I get queasy just watching Sloan wiggle a loose tooth, let alone see one pulled out.

It would have made your night to observe Sloan’s joy as she held her tooth. FaceTime calls were made, pictures were taken, and high fives were exchanged. We had the happiest 6-year-old in the world under our roof.

Sloan cashed in on her tooth by following a Mathis family tradition. In order to avoid accidents and sleep disturbances, a pillow was placed on Sloan’s dresser with a note of explanation: Dear Tooth Fairy – My tooth fell out today! We are scared it might get lost under my pillows with my brother. Hope you will still take it on the dresser. xoxo, Sloan

Sloan left this note for the Tooth Fairy right by the pillow she placed on her dresser.

Indeed, the Tooth Fairy did still take it. Sloan was a little richer this morning and she held her head a little higher when she walked through those school doors. Don’t Blink.

One of the truly great things about our new house is the location. Among many other things, there is a beautiful Safeway grocery store within walking distance of our home. I just need to look out the window and I can see it. Talk about convenience!

But can I make a confession? I miss Walmart.

It felt so nice to be back in Walmart this past weekend that I felt the need to take a photo of the experience.

The price difference between Walmart and Safeway is extreme. However, I can’t justify driving 10 minutes to Walmart when I can drive to Safeway in one. That is 20 minutes vs. two minutes for a round trip. My desire for convenience and gas conservation obviously trumps the grocery savings I would bank.

However, as I think about it more critically, maybe I should gladly drive the greater distance to Walmart. Why? There are a few things that irk me about my neighborhood grocery store like…

– The sky-high prices. It is offensive what grocery chains are charging these days and I think Safeway is the worst here locally.

– The out of control loyalty/membership cards. Just give all customers the sale price regardless of whether they have a card or not.

– The even more enraging “digital deals.” At Safeway, my silly loyalty status is now only good for scoring half the deals in the store. For the other half, I have to use my Safeway app to scan the bar code of the sale item.
At Walmart, there aren’t different colored tags on the products designating regular price, loyalty price, or digital price…there is just one single low price for everyone and it is already much cheaper than whatever deal Safeway is boasting.

Over the weekend I went to Walmart for the first time in months. I was only in need of three simple items (graham crackers, marshmallows, Hershey chocolate…guess what we were making?) but I wanted to return to a place that offers low prices and no gimmicks. It was nice and I saved a lot. But will I do this next time as well? Doubt it. Like I said, the laziness…I mean convenience…is just too great to pass up.

Am I doing the right thing? Don’t Blink.

Last week, news broke that Sports Illustrated is on life support. The publication failed to pay its licensing fees to the magazine’s parent company and now all of SI’s journalists are in jeopardy of being laid off. Unless readers want a magazine written entirely by AI, losing all of your journalists would seem like a death blow.

With the somber developments, I looked back at my own history with Sports Illustrated. I grew up in a time when Sports Illustrated advertised its product on television non-stop. Does anyone remember those commercials that encouraged you to subscribe in exchange for a gift? I will never forget the SI duffel bag my dad received for taking the plunge.

In high school, one of my English teachers, Glenn Williams, utilized the distinctive style of an infamous SI writer to encourage us to be more creative. Mr. Williams had us read Rick Reilly’s “Life of Reilly” column to spice up our own writing. We would read his work, analyze it, and then try to incorporate his techniques into our own writing.

Then, when I made it on my own, I subscribed to Sports Illustrated for many years. There was always something nice about opening my mailbox to find a glossy, crisp issue of SI. The Leading Off photography was always mesmerizing and first class. As an analytics person, I always appreciated the Go Figure side bar and it was always a thrill when a local product made the Faces in the Crowd section.

An X post I made all the way back in 2009. I enjoyed Sports Illustrated for many years.

But once I got past the regular departments, I would get lost in the long cover stories and other features. It truly was sports journalism at its best and as a single dude in his 20s, I was there for it. It is fascinating how things have changed.

When I look back at my past X posts that mentioned Sports Illustrated, they run the gamut from commentary on the cover to excitement for the swimsuit issue to actual story reaction. I loved reading through those pages and the enthusiasm was great enough to translate into my social media posts.

When I look back on it, my excitement for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue was pretty immature. This post was from 2012.

However, like many things, when I started a family my appetite and capacity for Sports Illustrated dwindled. I didn’t have time to devote to a weekly issue and we didn’t need the physical magazines taking up precious space either. I also think SI lost its way in recent years as well.

Despite the fact that Sports Illustrated pretty much has a non-existent place in my life today, I am still saddened to hear of its possible demise. I feel mostly for the journalists themselves but I also feel saddened that a publication that helped millions of people get excited about sports is on the way out. Don’t Blink.

An unfortunate obstacle that has challenged Beau over the past few months is nightmares. Since the early fall he has routinely had bad dreams a couple times each week.

When the nightmares hit he will run into our room and jump into bed with us. While crying he will tell us he had a bad dream and then he will do something that a lot of us probably understand: he will refuse to go back to sleep.

Beau will kneel between Sid and I at the top of our bed and not dare close his eyes because he “doesn’t want to go back into it.” After my attempt to settle him down I will drift off to sleep only to awake an hour later to find Beau in the same position with eyes wide open. I vividly remember feeling that same fear when I was a little boy and I actually still feel it to this day. If I wake up from a nightmare I know the moment I even think about shutting an eye that I will find myself right back where I was prior to waking up.

Beau after a night of no bad dreams.

I recently did a Google search about peacefully falling back to sleep after a nightmare. Some good tips were given: turn on the TV to something lighthearted, eat a snack/drink some water, or find a pet and cuddle it for five minutes.

Perhaps the next time Beau comes into our room after a nightmare I will fix his favorite drink (hot milk). We don’t have any pets and although I could turn on a Peppa Pig episode I am so burnt out on that show I am pretty sure it would only trigger nightmares for Sid and I.

Maybe the best option after a nightmare is just to pray? I am sure some of our nightly prayers would do a good job at soothing Beau. As for my own bad dreams? I don’t think there is anything that could make the evil go away faster than reciting the St. Michael prayer.

But what about all of you? After considering the Google search and my own personal solution, do you have any remedies for returning to sleep after a nightmare? I would conclude this post by writing “sweet dreams” but I think that is a little cliché so I will just end like normal (which actually works 😂)…Don’t Blink.

I was probably 10 or 11 when I understood what mental illness was. My dad played on an “Over 40” recreational baseball team. Much to the delight of my brother and I, my dad would haul us with him to all games and put us to work as the team’s bat boys. We got to sit in the dugout and really feel like part of the squad. Needless to say, it was quite the experience for the two of us to be in close proximity to so many grown men with competitive juices flowing and no filters.

My bro and I had the pleasure of lending our bat boy services to the Spokane Marlins for two seasons. Although not much changed from one season to the next as the Marlins struggled to win more games than lose, there was one noticeable difference…

On a team with a lot of loud mouths and characters, there was one person on the team who was rather reserved that initial season. I will call him “Joey,” a quiet man who would join my dad, brother, and me for sessions of Pepper prior to the ballgames starting. He didn’t say much but could swing the bat and hold his own in the field. Glen and I looked up to him.

The next season Joey returned to the team but something was off. No, it wasn’t just that his batting mechanics deteriorated and he could no longer track a pop fly. Rather, skill level regression be damned, it was how he acted in the dugout. Once the reserved and polite presence on the bench, Joey was now unhinged. He would say wacky things—not in an overconfident, over-the-hill bravado manner—but in the same vein as a child would. It seemed as if Joey had turned into a big kid.

Of course this was pretty jarring to my brother and I. We laughed with some of the other guys at first, thinking it was Joey just being funny, but it didn’t take long for us to know something wasn’t right. I remember going home after a game during the start of that second season and asking my dad about Joey. My brother and I still remember his words…

“Joey is really sick, guys,” my dad explained to us.

Although it took some thinking on the part of my brother and I to know what my dad meant (as we naturally thought ‘sick’ in the physical sense), we came to understand what he meant.

—-

On Saturday night, my wife, kids, and I went to a diner in the Spokane Valley for dinner. This particular restaurant caters to truck drivers so naturally the food is delicious and the portions large 😂. The bitter cold weather we have recently experienced in the Inland Northwest kept the crowd away on this particular evening. Just one table was occupied with a handful of truckers and then a woman held down a booth in the corner. Our family sat in a booth near the woman. Sloan and I sat on the side within eyesight of her while Sid and Beau sat across from us.

An episode played out a couple booths behind where Sidney was sitting.

I quickly noticed her uncontrollable fidgeting and audible conversation she was having with herself. With the frigid temperatures outside and my assessment that she probably didn’t have anywhere else to go, I felt bad for her.

As the meal went on and the server brought food to both the woman’s table and our own, I noticed she was becoming agitated. I don’t know if it had something to do with the food or another factor, but after the check was brought to her table, I watched as she jumped out of her booth and sprinted to the front of the restaurant. She had some type of conversation with the hostess and returned with a to-go box. She proceeded to violently and loudly shovel her remaining food into her to-go box while engaging in an argument with people who weren’t there. At this point I had given Sloan my phone to watch so her attention wouldn’t be drawn to the transpiring scene.

The episode concluded with the woman making another mad sprint but this time she completely exited the restaurant, running out into the dark, cold night. She left all of her stuff in the booth but did not return before we left.

—-

The Saturday night incident could have been a teaching moment for Sloan. But I still think she is too young and I kept her eyes shielded the entire time. Instead, I let it just serve as another reminder of how rampant and debilitating mental illness is.

Also, over the weekend, I was able to watch a film that I am convinced was commentary on what it is like to live with metal illness. If you have the chance to watch “Self-Reliance” on Hulu (Jake Johnson and Anna Kendrick star) give it a chance. I think it is insight into what Joey and the woman at the restaurant must go through. Let’s pray for everyone with mental illness and their families. Don’t Blink.