Escape Adulthood with Kim & Jason | Live life with less stress and more fun!

The Adultitis-Free Laundromat

wasbar-interior

“There’s nothing about a washing machine which says it has to stand in an unpleasant space.” — Ruud Belmans, Creative Director of Pinkeye

He’s right, you know. Washing machines may come with bulky instruction manuals written in seven different languages, but there has never been one printed with a rule stating that it should stand in an unpleasant space. Rules that don’t exist are EVERYWHERE, but they are so ingrained in us that we don’t even consider the benefits of breaking them.

The Belgians who dreamed up Wasbar did when they set out to design a new kind of laundromat. Continue Reading →

Meet Ian Wilkinson

ian-stormtrooper The Small Rebellion is a playful group of escape artists who share a joyful, indomitable childlike spirit and are not afraid to let that spirit come out to play! They’re united by a common goal of fighting Adultitis and the doo-doo heads who embrace its ideals. Quite frankly, they’re pretty much the coolest people on the planet. Here’s one right now…

• My name is… Ian Wilkinson.

• My hometown is… Lubbock, TX

• My biggest dream…I would like to go into space someday. Continue Reading →

What Success Really Looks Like

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Everyone has their own definition of success. Mine is not to own a jet, hobnob with CEOs, or work a mere four hours a week. My definition of success is to be a force for good in the world and to make a decent living doing what I love while spending lots of time with people I care about. So far, so good.

The middle part — the “making a decent living doing what I love” part — THAT took the longest. Way longer than I’d imagined or hoped.

Success is not that hard. But it is rare because not many people are willing to do the work. The biggest requirement for success is just sticking to something for as long as it takes until you get the desired result (or something better.) Continue Reading →

Career Is Never As Important As Family

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Basketball Hall-of-Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recently wrote an article for Esquire magazine entitled, 20 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 30. This one is my favorite:

9. Career is never as important as family. The better you are at your job, the more you’re rewarded, financially and spiritually, by doing it. You know how to solve problems for which you receive praise and money. Home life is more chaotic. Solving problems is less prescriptive and no one’s applauding or throwing money if you do it right. That’s why so many young professionals spend more time at work with the excuse, “I’m sacrificing for my family.” Bullshit. Learn to embrace the chaos of family life and enjoy the small victories. This hit me one night after we’d won an especially emotional game against the Celtics. I’d left the stadium listening to thousands of strangers chanting “Kareem! Kareem!” I felt flush with the sense of accomplishment, for me, for the Lakers, and for the fans. But when I stepped into my home and my son said, “Daddy!” the victory, the chanting, the league standings, all faded into a distant memory.

I struggle with this one almost daily. It’s hard when we are wired to spend more time on the things that give us an immediate or financial payoff. And it’s especially tricky when one’s career is very mission-based, like mine.

Adultitis will use anything it can to distract us from the things that are most important. Sometimes it can be pretty darn convincing. Continue Reading →

The World Would Be Better if We Had More Giant Rubber Duckies Floating Around

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I’ll just state the obvious, because we’ve all thought it: We need more giant rubber duckies floating around in our lakes, rivers, and harbors. We also need more artists to think of ideas like this.

The giant yellow ambassador of fun pictured above is the work of conceptual artist Florentijin Hofman, who states: Continue Reading →

Help Wanted: Family CEO

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Help Wanted: Family CEO
Applicant is responsible for the management and safety of her subordinates at all times. She will be responsible for the overall health and development of those under her supervision, including, but not limited to, ensuring proper regular hygiene, ethics instruction, and recreational activities. She will foster appropriate communication and team building skills within her unit, which shall require expertise status in the areas of conflict resolution and communications. Being particularly fluent in primitive languages is a plus. Continue Reading →

Serving Fun as the Main Course with a Side of Crazy

missy-herman-spatula-city

Spatula City is a meal in which everyone eats dinner with unconventional utensils. Think spatulas, spaghetti forks and soup ladels.

Barbarian Spaghetti is when you eat spaghetti without plates.

Crazy might be when you combine them both. Continue Reading →

Woman Sees City Streets as Giant Take a Penny, Leave a Penny Repository

big-penny

Mary Nuckolls is a Champion of Childhood because she gives away money.

But not the way you think.

She’s not some rich heiress who has so much money she doesn’t know what to do with it. She’s not a professional philanthropist. She works at a preschool. Continue Reading →

Why Homeschooling Is For Us

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Kim and I attended our first homeschooling conference this past weekend. With a December birthday, Lucy wouldn’t be entering kindergarten for another year and a half, but we wanted to get more information about this life-changing decision we’d been considering. To be honest, we each felt a little uncertain and overwhelmed at the prospect of going all-in. Continue Reading →

It’s Kind of Fun to Try the Impossible

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It would seem that the subject of possibility and it’s pessimistic cousin, impossibility, is shaping up to be quite the theme around here. Not only did I make art and write about it, but I just read a book about it and I’m finding that I’m living it as well.

It all started in January when Kim and I declared our intent for our business to become debt-free by the end of this year. We have a fairly sizable loan we are slowly paying back, a formidable pile of liability accumulated during our early years in which we were figuring out how to turn our passion into a real business. Alas, the real business was found but the debt remains.

Now, we pay down this loan little by little every month, and should all go according to plan, it will be absolved in the summer of 2017. Getting rid of it by the end of 2013?

Impossible.

And yet, as the year goes on, what once seemed unthinkable is gradually becoming inevitable.

I picked up this t-shirt at Disney World a few weeks ago. I had to have it, because even though it features a quote by Walt Disney, it had my name all over it.

This year has been a year of renewal for me. I have given myself permission to dream again. Not that I ever stopped, really. It’s just that over the years my dreams have imperceptibly gotten smaller as various failures and disappointments piled up. But this year, my dreams have gotten bigger. (Thanks Mary and Judy!) I have been getting back into the habit of not only dreaming impossible things, but trying to DO them as well.

And it turns out that even the trying is fun.

So far, this has been a most exciting year. New opportunities are springing forth. We are experiencing unprecedented growth, and we are on the verge of doing things that once seemed unfathomable. Will we achieve our goal of becoming debt free by the end of 2013? The jury is still out; I believe that we will. But even if we were to fall short, this is already shaping up to the be the most exhilarating, rewarding and fun year in business we’ve ever had.

Here’s what I’ve come to learn: not only is it kind of fun to DO the impossible, it’s even fun just TRYING the impossible.

Sure, when you try the impossible, you might not make it. You may fall woefully short. But at least you know you tried. And you might make it farther that you ever imagined.

Besides, it’s way more fun than expecting the worst, playing it safe, or settling.

The Power of Bam

Yep, it’s official. We need more “Bams” in the world.

I don’t care whether you work at Wal-Mart or on Wall Street, you are viral. More than ever, little things are big deals.

In the fight against Adultitis, you can either be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Which do you choose?

Play This Game Like the 8-Year-Old You Used to Be

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This tweet was about baseball, but if we looked at “life” as a game, it would still serve as a stirring rallying cry.

When you were a kid, you spent a lot of time imagining the day when you would finally be grown up, with all the amazing powers that came with it, like independence and height and a drivers license. You had dreams and visions of the great adventures to be had, once you finally had the chance to call your own shots and live your own story.

So, are taking advantage of the opportunities now before you?

Are you playing this game of life with the heart and passion and fire of an eight year old?

If not, get to it. This game only has so many innings.

Small Talk in 140 Characters

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Sometimes I long for the days when an Etch-a-Sketch was the most technologically advanced gadget I owned.

Yes, I love my shiny iPhone and all the wonderful things it lets me do.

But I hate when a family is out to eat and I see them all face down in their smartphones. I hate it because it reminds me of how the pull to check email or send a tweet or scan status updates on Facebook pulls ME away from actually being present in my real life. It often distracts me on my dates with my daughter. And it sucks up the mental space that could have been used to pray or think or — gasp! — just BE.

Oh, the internet and smartphones and wi-fi has gotten us more connected than ever. But are we making any connections?

Everything seems so surface level these days; our conversations have deteriorated into small talk boiled down to 140 characters or less. It’s boring, meaningless, and a tragic waste of our precious time. Perhaps the reason we are the loneliest, most depressed, most drug addicted society that has ever lived is because we are lacking real connections.

We deserve better. Our family and our friends deserve better from us.

If you agree, here’s a crazy idea: Next time you’re with someone, put down the phone. Slow down. Shut your pie hole.

Instead, look. Hear. Be. Practice being present once in awhile.

Open your heart, offer your attention, and make a real human connection.

A small thing, perhaps.

But it’s a Small Rebellion of epic proportions.

[ About the Art: Just a little drawing in Photoshop about one downside of our technological renaissance. I was going to draw iPhones starting at iPhones staring at iPhones, but I didn't want your head to blow up. It's weird to think that in five years (maybe less) this drawing will have become adorably antiquated. Maybe I should have cut to the chase and just drew bag phones. ]

How to Break the Cycle of Adultitis

Where does Adultitis come from? As a very contagious disease, it’s an important question.

Many times, it’s passed down from generation to generation. This cycle needs to stop. But how?

The best way is to model what an Adultitis-free life looks like. Like this Dad:

Our kids listen to what we DO, not what we SAY.

With respect to Adultitis, the prognosis for these girls’ futures looks very positive.

Children’s Hospital Hires Spiderman to Fight Grime

spiderman-window-washer

It seems ridiculous at first. What if we dressed our delivery drivers like the Flash? Or the crowd control team at the stadium as Stormtroopers? Or our window washers as…Spiderman?

That’s exactly what John Hopkins All Children’s Hospital did a few months ago. Continue Reading →

Tinkering

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Sometimes living a better story requires making a big, hairy, scary change. Like moving across the country or taking a pay cut to do what you love. But most of the time we just need to be open to the art of tinkering.

The dictionary says that to tinker is “to repair, adjust, or work with something in an unskilled or experimental manner.”

Take special note of those words “unskilled” and “experimental.” For some reason, we grown-ups think we have to master something on our first attempt. Naturally, that’s impossible, so we don’t even try. Kids are under no such illusions. They tinker all day long.

And when you were a kid, so did you. Continue Reading →

Before There Were Teleportation Devices

penguin-impossible

I wonder if the Wright Brothers ever imagined that less than 100 years after their first manned flight, we’d have already taken air travel for granted. And we do, don’t we? Thousands of these “crazy flying machines” take off and land every single day. And yet, at one point, the idea was as crazy as could be. In fact, in 1902 (just ONE year before the Wright Brothers’ great success), Lord Kelvin — the dude who determined the correct value of absolute zero as approximately -273.15 Celsius — said, “No aeroplane will ever be practically successful.”

Back in the late 1800s, the idea of Orville and Wilbur building a flying machine is kind of like someone today boasting about working on a teleportation device. And they way we take it for granted is like my great grandchild giving a talk 100 years from now saying, “Can you believe there was a time we didn’t have teleportation devices?” Continue Reading →

Can Your Crayon Sharpener Do This?

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I have fond memories of getting the big box of 64 Crayola Crayons. All my artistic limitations were cast away as every color in the natural world was now at my disposal. (Mind you, this was before they came out with the massive 96 and 120 count boxes and way before Photoshop would provide me with a million possible color choices.)

Anyhoo, remember the sharpener on the back of that box? I mean that was the bomb. A luxury of luxuries. Well now they have developed the sharpener on the box to a level in which you can actually fashion the points into animals.

Believe it.

Actually, don’t. The photo above is the breathtaking, painstaking work of Diem Chau, a Seattle artist who came to America from Vietnam with her family as refugees in 1986. I’ve never met Diem, but I can only assume she is pretty low on the Adultitis spectrum.

Turns out that the greatest, most advanced tools in the world are still no match to the imagination of an artist who knows how to use them.

Ugly Cake Initiative: The Results

ugly-treat-results
The purpose of this post is to feature some of the repulsive results from the recent Ugly Cake Initiative (We shared our family’s experience here).

We heartily congratulate all the people who took up the challenge to fight Adultitis by whipping up something ugly in the kitchen. And we offer our sincere condolences to any brave souls who ingested any of the creations. (Although to be fair, most were reported to be very delicious.) Take that, Martha Stewart!

Without further ado, check out the gruesome goodness! Continue Reading →

The Power of Being Silly

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Amen, sister.

Let’s hear it for being ridiculous.

A Simple, Quick and Ugly Guide to Fun

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It is official: making ugly treats is a foolproof way to annihilate Adultitis. Indeed, forgoing the stress that can come from trying to create a confection that might make Martha Stewart weep tears of joy is not nearly as fun as concocting something that would have her wailing and gnashing her teeth.

Although we have extolled the virtues of cooking up ugly cakes and cookies for some time, we had not actually undertaken the task — until now. We used the latest Small Rebellion, aka The Ugly Treat Initiative, as a fitting excuse to jump right in.

It’s easy to be intimidated by some of the giants who have come before us, with cakes so ugly they’d make Sloth from The Goonies recoil in horror. But engaging in some ugly treat frivolity needn’t be a burden. We went a simple route, which proved to be quick and easy without shortchanging any of the fun. Continue Reading →

Are We Alive Yet?

are-we-alive-yet

When I was a teenager, I worked at a car dealership. The garage where I spent my days smelled of used oil, antifreeze, and in the summer, sweat (hooray for no air conditioning!). My job was to wash cars, run errands, and keep the shop relatively clean. It was good pay for a good job with good bosses and flexible hours. And I learned how to drive a stick shift and detail a car like nobody’s business, which will come in handy when I buy my Porsche someday :) By all accounts, it was a pretty great career for a teenager.

But that doesn’t mean I liked it. Continue Reading →

The Phone Call No One Wants To Get

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Cooties is pretty devastating.

But Adultitis is probably more so, because at least you can grow out of Cooties.

Awareness is the first step. Better get yourself tested.

My Birthday Comeback Story

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Birthdays come with a a lot of pressure! Everyone — including myself — hopes that it’s a GREAT day.

Some years this greatness is easier to achieve than others. Last year was a breeze. We played hooky as a family, savoring the early spring weather at the zoo. It was a VERY awesome day!

But this year (my 35th) was shaping up to be a real challenge. Continue Reading →