Wow. I think I just defined my bait and tackle right out of existence.

Anyway….what makes me a good fit for a reality television show about moms? Well, I have a good imagination. So, even though I don’t actually have a vagina (previous logical proof notwithstanding, which just goes to show you how well logic serves you), I can imagine what the life of a modern mom must be like. Given the existence of the vacuum, the dishwasher, the microwave, and the washer and dryer it probably only takes about 3 minutes per week to accomplish every household task the modern mom (still obviously at home, probably barefoot and pregnant) is assigned. That leaves her oodles of time for child-rearing responsibilities. But she’s also married to a rich, handsome white guy so she can definitely afford a nanny to take care of the kids (and for her husband to have an affair with), so in the end, apart from the 3 minutes per week of housework she has to do, the modern mom has no responsibilities. She doesn’t even have to sleep with her husband, because that’s what the nanny is for. She has almost nothing but free time, and she fills that time, I believe, with pillow fights, video games, and fancy dinners out.

Well, let me tell you, you could hardly find a better person to engage in pillow fights, play video games, eat out, and definitely not sleep with even the richest white guy than yours truly right here. I believe I can really get inside the head of the modern mom. I’m just the mom you’re looking for. So please consider me for Project MomCasting, and watch your ratings go through the roof. Especially for the first pilllow fight of the season when I announce that this time it’s shirts versus skins. You’re welcome, Project MomCasting.

Backpacking Dad

Cross-posted at Happy Healthy Hip Parenting

I like to explain things.

Enjoy. And while you’re visiting these sites why not comb the archives? They’re looking a little bed-headed.

“Daddy, I want some juice in a cup with a lid.”

She’s been drinking from “big girl” cups for a while now, but since Adrian has graduated from bottles to soft-lidded cups Erin has been wallowing in her memories of snap-on lids and cups without straws.

Seeing her framed in the doorway, posturing, not pleading, I was struck in my soft middle by adoration. “Come here, baby girl,” I beckoned; and when she drew near enough I engulfed her in my arms and held her close, burying my nose in her hair and then swinging her from side to side in paternal enthusiasm. I kissed her cheek and tickled her until she squealed, and when I finally let her go I was lost, fully converted to her religion.

“You can have anything you want. Tell me what you want.”

“I want a cup with a lid,” she replied, pragmatically.

“Okay, you can have it. You can have anything. Anything at all, just ask for it and I will get it for you.” I was completely in love with her, this Lawyer’s Daughter, and as any fool in love will do I pledged impossible feats to prove the depth of my feelings.

“Anything, baby girl. What do you want in the whole world?”

She considered the problem for a moment, clearly engaged in a long index of the world’s offerings, and then she revealed what she wanted most from me.

“I also want some juice, daddy,” said the Lawyer’s Daughter.

She may not be dreaming large dreams at the moment, but she’s certainly dreaming dreams without loopholes.

Coming up with the proper blend of herbs and spices for this new fragrance was not easy. I had to really smell myself over and over again and think about the notes I was giving off. But I think I’ve cracked the code.

SAHDness combines the earthiness of my front yard (still no grass) with the woodiness of the tree roots I’ve been digging up for two days. It introduces the tang of the pasta sauce I wiped off my foot (after stepping in the dinner my son flung to the floor) to the fresh apple sweetness of the detangler I spray in my daughter’s hair every morning to brush it out. A hint of rosemary from the bush I ripped out of the backyard complements the wet diaper and cat box odours that always seem to permeate the back rooms of the house. And finally, like the finish of a fine wine, sour milk and Mr. Clean blend together to carry the wearer away to a land of Band of Brothers reruns and and sprinkler systems that install themselves, a.k.a. heaven.

I am confident that you will enjoy SAHDness every bit as much as I do.

SAHDness, the scent of naptime.

“You’re coming with us, and you aren’t going to like it very much!” said one.

“You’re coming with us, and you aren’t going to like it at all!” said another.

“You’re coming with us, and we’re totally going to make you watch a Twilight movie!” said the third.

They were very insistent.

After generous application of a cattle prod to my back my kidnappers forced me out the door and into their kidnapper van. It was one of those vans with curtains on the windows. I hate those vans.

The kidnappers drove me to a movie theater, bought some goddamned Raisinettes and a Slushy, forced them into my hands, and then led me away into the darkness.

I don’t remember much about what happened after that. There was something sparkly, and a girl no one likes but everyone seems to be in love with, and a guy who couldn’t keep his damn shirt on.

I wish I could describe the pain I felt in my eyeballs, but I don’t have a way with words. It was kind of like stabbing your eyes with knitting needles seven times then tilting your head back and pouring vinegar into your bleeding eye sockets. It was like passing a kidney Lautner. It was like getting punched in the face by the Friendly Giant after he’d had a few and had stepped on his tiny furniture and was totally pissed off because he was going to have to go to Amish country to get some new tiny furniture for all of his tiny guests to sit on.

My kidnappers drove me home and tossed me out of their van like yesterday’s Twilight movie. I stumbled back inside the house and collapsed in a heap, eyes still aflame with ocular Chlamydia.

And then I died.

********************************************************

This story brought to you by the fact that I totally slammed the toes on my left foot in the door and the nail on my second-smallest toe immediately turned blue and will probably fall of any second now. I didn’t really see a Twilight movie. But you know how when you’re in pain they say you can take your mind off of it by getting hurt somewhere else? I just wanted to imagine the worst pain possible to take my mind off the fact that I nearly cut my toes off with a door.

I do hate Raisinettes and vans with curtains on the windows, though.

Driving down highway 17 through San Jose traffic stopped just before the junction with highway 85.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Emily said. So we went, off the 17 and on to the 85, on our way to Monterey.

Driving down the 85 we joined the 101, and paralleled the distant coast.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Emily said. So we went, on highway 129, into the hills to Watsonville.

Driving through the mountains we passed cyclists and overlooks, then stopped at a berry farm just outside of Watsonville, which is not the Artichoke Capital of the World. That honour is Castroville’s. The berry farm sold pies and canning supplies and berries and apple juice and we bought everything but the pie. Then we ate our berries and drank our apple juice and did absolutely nothing with our canning supplies (because what are you going to do with canning supplies when you’re having a picnic?) and let the kids play on old tractors and tiny four-wheelers.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Emily said. So we went, driving out of Watsonville and joining highway 1 as it paralleled the nearby coast.

Driving south on the 1 we were stopped in traffic again, and realized it was beyond lunch time. So we stopped at Moss Landing and had lunch at The Whole Enchilada (rather than The Haute Enchilada, the only other enchilada joint in Moss Landing, but clearly inferior for being snooty).

“Let’s go to the beach,” Emily said. So we drove down highway 1 until we came to Marina State Beach.

And then we went to the beach.

As it turned out, Marina State Beach was less of a swimming beach than it was a hang gliding beach…

The waves at the beach were unpredictable, but getting soaked unexpectedly was fun.

“Let’s go home,” Emily said. So we left the beach and drove with the masses fleeing north. And we passed through Castroville, the Artichoke Capital of the World.

This means that she has seen Toy Story too many times.

However, I prefer this to another phrase she has picked up from Pixar’s Bug’s Life: “Do I look stupid to you?”

And I prefer that, or just about any line from a Pixar film, to the muttered phrase she seems to have picked up from either her mom or me: “Dammit dammit DA-mmit.”

If she starts saying “fucker fucker fuck fuck” then I’ll know to blame that one on her mom. She’ll get “Oh, fuck me” from yours truly.

And yes, I have considered how hilarious it would be if she started wandering around daycare muttering these expressions to herself. I’m not sure her teachers would approve. Or the other parents. But come on, the kids are going to learn sometime; best they learn from their parents or friends instead of picking it up from some street urchin who will then also lead them to a life of crime.

I’d be doing those kids a favour if I taught Erin how to swear properly.

As we were remodeling this nightmare of a house we ran into a problem with the gas meter. We wanted to move it next to the garage from its original location, which, given the new floor plan, would have been in the middle of the kitchen. For some reason PG&E needed about an extra foot of horizontal clearance away from the house in order to inspect the pipe the meter was being installed on, and this extra clearance meant asking the neighbour if we could (1) take a part of the fence down that divides our properties and (2) dig about a foot into his garden.

He was very accommodating, requesting only that our contractor put everything back the way it was and that he be present when the filling and rebuilding of the fence happened. The contractor took the fence down, dug the hole, moved a couple of plants, and called PG&E to inspect. Everything went well and things were put back the way they were.

Today, however, while I was watching Dexter in the living room during the kids’ naptime (because serial killers are not allowed in the living room when the kids are awake lest they suffer from slightly less disturbing nightmares than the ones they already take with them to bed thanks to the Wonderpets. This is sewious.) I saw a head peeking in my front window, reflected in the TV screen that pretends to display everything in High Definition but which really only displays things in Toddler Fingerprint Definition.

The reason the head was peeking in the window was because I have a fake doorbell that people ring but which does not make a noise in the house. I think we broke it somehow during the remodel, and now it’s on The List. Or it should be. The neighbour, whose head was doing the peeking, had pressed the doorbell and had heard no movement from within, nor seen me stir from my lounge on the couch where I stared at Dexter as he performed a forensic analysis to prove that a police officer had killed her own family, thereby making her a legitimate victim for his dark passenger. How creepy to have someone peek in your window as you immerse yourself into the world of a serial killer? Not very. I’m kind of inured to the world by this point. But it could have been creepy, right?

The neighbour had come by to say that the pvc pipe running underground through his garden, next to the fence that had been taken down, had cracked and was leaking water. Could I come look at it?

Well, I’m no plumber, so the reason he wanted me to look at it was because he was certain the crack was due to the big hole we’d dug in his ground and then filled back in. At this point I had three distinct, though not all competing, reactions.

The first was THE MANAGER: When I used to run car washes I would get annoying people coming up to me fairly regularly certain that the car wash, the car wash employees, or a leprechaun hiding in the car wash somewhere had: stolen, broken, scratched, dirtied, or cursed their vehicle. Nine times out of ten this was unequivocally bullshit. (For the most part what would happen is the car would be clean for the first time in months and so damage that had been accruing over time was just now visible. I had one woman who was utterly convinced that during the hand car wash the employees had taken the plastic heads of the wash brooms and smashed them against her SUVs rear window repeatedly, leaving a buckshot pattern of chips just above the wiper. I was stupefied. I tried reasoning with her for nearly an hour, demonstrating the process (she was at first sure that we were a machine wash and that the terrible machine had done it), assuring her that, at the end of the day, the simplest explanation, and most likely the right one, was that the window had been chipped already and now the chips were visible, once the dirt was cleared off. She fumed, called me names, swore at me, and demanded my area manager’s number, which I was more than happy to give to her. She talked with him, showed him the “damage”, demanded that he take me to task for failing to offer to replace her window, and otherwise made him kiss her ass for a while. Then, a miracle happened. She went home. She pulled her car into the garage, took her groceries out of the back hatch, and went inside to call my boss again to apologize to him because she had been wrong the whole damned time. See, when she got home she opened the back hatch while she was in the garage, like she always does. And the door opened up…and up…and up…and stopped finally when it came to rest against part of the garage door mechanism that hangs down from her ceiling; the mechanism that tapped the window right above the rear wiper. Repeatedly doing this over a period of months had left a buckshot pattern of chips in her window. She was very contrite, to him. I never heard from her.)

My first reaction, as The Manager, was to wonder about all of the other reasonable, and simpler, explanations for what had happened, rather than to just assume that whatever the complaining party had concluded was right. Because in most of my experience that person was wrong. I was immediately suspicious that there would be a crack, and a leak, so far into the summer season when all of that work had been done in December. Why now? And he had been present when thing were put back the way they were, so wouldn’t he have noticed a big damned crack in his pvc pipe at the time?

My second reaction was THE LAWYER (or HUSBAND TO THE LAWYER since I am not actually a lawyer): If someone in the world accuses you of something, and it all ends up in court, there are acts you can have committed that might count as admissions of culpability even though you never intend them to be. When my neighbour said “I think your guys cracked this when they were doing that work” I definitely did not want to say “Oh yeah, that’s probably exactly what happened” or “You know, that could be it. Let me take care of it for you.” This is the kind of stuff that gets you a court decision against you for a million dollars of pain and suffering damages because his favourite roses died.

My third reaction, though, was THE NEIGHBOUR: I have to live next to this person (or his tenants, rather, since he rents the house out), and he had been very accommodating when we’d requesting his help with our gas meter issue. I was also in the middle of a pvc install in my own yard, so I have the tools, materials, and knowledge available to fix a cracked sprinkler system pipe all by myself. A good neighbour is someone who wants the neighbourhood to be a neighbourhood, rather than a collection of little fortresses, and I think I want to be a good neighbour.

So I said, “You know what. I have all of this stuff over there in my garage. Let me dig this out for you and fix it right now.”

And I did.

And now I sit back and wait for the other shoe, the smelly ironic one, to drop.

(Which it totally just did. Literally, literally, as I was proof-reading and about to publish this post, the neighbour came back over. He had tested the line for leaks since it had been an hour and I told him I’d go test it when the cement was dry in an hour, and lo’ and behold there is a second crack we didn’t know about two feet down the line. I am not entirely surprised, because the angle of the pipe looked so weird that there must have been more wrong than just a single crack. But damn. I can’t take care of it now because Emily went in to the office for a bit and the kids are awake. But apparently Dexter will have to finish off his murderous police officer without my help tomorrow. My nap time is all booked up.)

To understand what this is about, go visit the running fool, BHJ, and read about his pledge to run a continual BlogHer 5K until the cops come and tase him for being such a running fool.

So, since it’s my birthday, what you can do is chip in.

Send presents.