Dorky Dad

The Dork hits Vegas

2009-11-08T21:26:00.003-06:00

In the morning I'm flying to Las Vegas to attend a "conference," which apparently is some sort of pseudonym for "I'm going to gamble my life saving's away and wake up married to the waitress of a local diner."

I actually am attending a conference, but I suspect that it'll be a big challenge trying to resist skipping the whole thing so I can see repeated performances by Celine Dion and Wayne Newton. I could get a lifetime's supply of overperformed pop music and cheesy lounge tunes in three whole days. And while I'm at it I'll get my fill of neon and drunk people.

The truth is, however, that this will be my first trip to Vegas. I've never been there, mostly because I don't gamble.

(Note: According to something I looked up on the Internet by myself, only 5 percent of people admit they go to Vegas to gamble, but 87 percent gamble while they're there. So if I succeed in not gambling I'll be in the distinct minority.)

The thing is, gambling scares the hell out of me. Don't get me wrong -- the prospect of winning large sums of money appeals to me. The problem is that I have to spend money for the chance of that happening. I'd be far happier if I just walked in the door and they showered me with heaping amounts of cash. Heck, I'd be thrilled with just a few mid-sized bills. (Perhaps, if I worked hard enough, I could convince somebody to pay me to stay out of their establishment by repeatedly yelling "I HAVE A BLOG AND I'M NOT AFRAID TO USE IT!" But the prospect of the owner using a few big, beefy guys to toss me out keeps that from being a viable option.)

So gambling is the only way I'll get large amounts of money, and I hate gambling because I'm risk-averse. I once drove all night with a friend of mine from college. He was a gambler, and we passed a casino on the way home. "Hey, want to stop by quick so I can throw away what little hard-earned money I have?" he asked.

"Uh, sure," I said. He was driving, after all, and I have a hard time saying no.

I had $5 on me. I used all of it on the slots, and won $0.

He went and played blackjack. After 30 minutes he was out $100.

Guess who was more upset? Me. Sure, $100 doesn't seem like much, but we were in college and neither of us would be what anybody would term "wealthy." $100 at the time WAS a lot of money. And as I was subsisting on deer meat and government cheese from a roommate's friend at the time, so was $5.

I HATED losing that $5. I kept thinking about the gas station burritos I was going to use that $5 on and it made me sad and grumpy -- and hungry. The memory of tossing that $5 out the window has stuck with me so much I've refused to go into a casino ever since.

Which of course would make Vegas an unlikely option for me, despite my love of Elvis and tiger-loving magicians.

The good news, I guess, is that come Wednesday night when I come home I'll likely have the same personal net worth that I had upon my arrival there -- unless, that is, I give into my intense obsession with Cirque du Soleil and blow it all on tickets. Must ... see ... people ... who ... bend in ... odd shapes!

Night of the Zombie Dork

2009-11-01T07:21:00.003-06:00

Here's how I spent my Halloween: By walking slowly and stiffly, with a distant look on my face, groaning and grunting and scaring my boy.

Did I dress like a zombie? (BRRAAAAAIINS!) Hardly. I threw my back out.

(Excuse me now while I curse like a sailor and yell.)

I'd like to say that I threw my back out while valiantly defending my family from a gang of thieves or an army of black-clad ninjas; or that I was hoisting a piano upstairs by myself. The sad reality is that I hurt my back sitting down, which I still don't understand, because I sit down dozens of times every day. I'm an EXPERT at sitting down. At least I thought I was. Now that my lower back is screaming at me I have my doubts.

Much of the neighborhood knew that I did this because I screamed like a Packers fan after a Brett Favre touchdown (for the Vikings). This scared The Boy, who had to witness his father crumple to the ground, whining like a school girl. He usually only sees this when I realize that it's time to change the diaper pail.

"Is he going to DIE?" The Boy asked.

No, boy. I only FEEL like I'm going to die.

I hate back pain, because I feel so old. And this one was bad, too, so I feel really old -- zombie old. Every move I make is stiff and slow and is punctuated by a groan or a small prayer or a what-the-hell-am-I-going-through-this-for? Everything I do is preceded by a mental cost-benefit analysis (do I REALLY need to use the bathroom?) because its completion is just so difficult.

About the only good thing about my back is that it gets me out of baby care (either because I can't effectively pick up the baby or because my wife has legitimate questions about whether I really am a zombie) and house work. (I'm really sorry, dear, but I just CAN'T rake the yard; back problems, you know.) It also gives me something to complain about, and blog about. I'm getting waited upon by my wonderful wife, and I get to act like a zombie without her telling me "Hey, quit acting like a zombie."

(I know what you're thinking: "Hey, that back pain doesn't sound so bad!" But it's almost like I made a deal with the devil, or Alanis Morrisette: I get everything I want, but I have to endure a searing, debilitating pain to get it. I'd rather rake the yard and change diapers.)

So I'll have to go to the doctor today, and if I'm lucky he'll prescribe powerful painkillers and a cane. I've always wanted a really cool cane, which I could wave while chasing kids off of my lawn. Heck, if I'm going to feel this old, I might as well get some of the benefits.

Now excuse me. I've got a craving for some BRRRRAAAAAINS!!!

Dorky Dad and the Fondue of Death

2009-10-25T20:57:00.003-06:00

This weekend we went to a giant fondue party. I'd never been to one before, but apparently it involves a bunch of people getting together and eating small portions of food dipped in sauces. And then everybody hits McDonald's on their way home because there's no way you can get enough small pieces of bread to make a full meal.

Truthfully, it was a lot of fun, even with the presence of about 5 million distractions in the form of loud, rambunctious school-aged children and at least one baby (mine). But amidst the whining and crying I found myself at the fondue table, where I took my handy fondue fork and began to peruse the options.

(By the way, two days later I still find myself shocked -- SHOCKED -- that The Boy not once attempted to convert his fondue fork into a weapon in the midst of the crowded living room. I've decided that he was feeling particularly generous that day, and decided to spare his father from shouting his boilerplate "Hey! That [INSERT RANDOM OBJECT HERE] is not a [INSERT RANDOM WEAPON HERE]!!!")

I found plenty of options -- chocolate and caramel for my sweet tooth; cheese for my cheese tooth; chips for my salt tooth; crackers for my cracker tooth; apples, bananas, strawberries and pineapple for my fruit tooth and bread for my bread tooth. I also came across some sort of meat, probably chicken, soaked in an Asian sauce, probably teriyaki. I took some of that.

Everything seemed good. The meat was OK, though it seemed a bit funny, so I soaked it in the pile of cheese I took for myself and moved on to the next item on my plate.

Later, as I talked with another of my fellow party goers, I noticed about a dozen fondue forks in one boiling pot, next to the teriyaki-soaking chicken.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to the forks.

"Oh," the woman said, "you take a fork, stick it in this raw chicken here" -- and she pointed to the aforementioned teriyaki chicken -- "and then cook it in this oil. I'm not sure these are done."

Raw chicken? That chicken was supposed to be COOKED? I just ate RAW CHICKEN?!??

I just smiled and nodded in an effort to hide the fact that I suddenly felt like the pilot on the movie Airplane when he overheard the doctor's descriptions of the symptoms people feel after eating the fish dinner -- as he looked down upon his plate of fish bones.

"I'm totally doomed," I thought. A lifetime of living near and with moms has taught me that eating raw chicken is like skydiving without a parachute. I'll probably get salmonella, or I'll just gradually turn into one giant chicken.

I haven't started clucking yet. And I keep looking at myself to see if I've sprouted feathers. But if you check this blog in a day or two to find indecipherable chicken scratch -- more so than usual -- you'll know why.

See y'all -- CLUCK! -- later.

Parenting at 35,000 feet

2009-10-18T22:15:00.003-05:00

The Wife and I decided our lives were too easy, so late last week we loaded our borderline-hyperactive 5-year-old and our teething, ear-infection-prone infant into a plane packed with travelers and flew four hours to California.

Yes, I did this voluntarily, but only two things would drain my brain of enough mental capacity to enable me to make such a decision: A funeral or a wedding. Fortunately, it was the latter that prompted this particular trip.

I've said repeatedly on this blog that I hate flying, and though I've flown enough in recent years that I'm no longer crawling the walls whenever we enter a tad bit of turbulence, the rest of my anti-flying beliefs hold true -- generally poor customer service, overpriced meals, ridiculous luggage fees, the constant prospect of being strip searched, etc.

(That said, I've got to say that my trip was uneventful and pleasant, at least from a customer service standpoint, and I'm not just saying that because my airline, Delta, is taking me to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks and thus has my future in its hands. Nice, Delta. Niiiice, Delta.)

Adding kids to a plane trip is like adding Diet Coke to Pop Rocks. Everything is far more difficult and combustible -- getting tickets, checking luggage, going through security, walking past the rows of stores hocking overpriced food and tourist items without spending an entire paycheck in an effort to keep your child pacified, etc.

The older one, wiggly as he is, is relatively simple once we get him on the plane: Just plug him into a DVD player and spend hours in quiet-child bliss.

(Seriously, in my before-kid days I swore I'd never get portable video players for a vehicle or for a plane flight and had no idea what true use they had; then I had a child and realized that my pre-child self was a complete and utter idiot.)

The infant is not so easy because he's simply try to eat the DVD player. And, upon entering the plane, the baby makes one of two choices:

1. I could spend much of this trip napping and quietly eating and playing with the small selection of toys brought to pacify me with;
2. I could decide to not sleep and instead scream bloody murder the entire trip so that most of the passengers will be wishing to toss my parents from the plane. At 35,000 feet.

Children so often pick Option No. 2 that parents actively encourage loading the baby with over-the-counter depressants. As we waited for our first flight, in a kids' play area, we talked with another parent who had taken his 3-year-old on so many flights that the kid had enough frequent-flier miles to buy an entire ticket. When we told him how long our flight was, his only tip was, "Uh, Benedryl."

So I knew that my baby would take Option 2, and so to spite me he took Option 1 on both flights (though he didn't fall asleep on the way there until two minutes before the plane landed.)

But we were provided with a little perspective on both plane flights in the form of another set of parents, with three children -- the same set both on the way there and the way back. On both flights, the youngest of the three decided to skip past Options 1 and 2 and go straight to Option No. 3 -- The Nuclear Option. She literally screamed the entire trip. (This, by the way, was an absolutely adorable girl who, at one point during the trip there, decided to say "Hello" to every individual passenger.)

All I could do is look at the Dad with sympathetic eyes while thinking to myself, "Oh, Thank God I'm not him."

But it was a good trip. The wedding was fun and I got free cake and copious amounts of decidedly unhealthy food that was funded by someone else. We got to visit San Francisco where we ate sourdough bread and In-n-Out Burger and I got chastised by a cable car operator for my wayward elbow. And then we performed a death-defying drive along narrow, windy roads up and down a mountain in search for big-ass redwood trees. And at some point a woman woke up much of our hotel by screaming and pounding on doors and breaking things. We had a bonfire on the beach and caught wafts of marijuana being smoked by this neighboring party apparently filled with people who need the drug for medicinal purposes. And I now know the definition of "beach bum."

I also got a kid story. The Boy, who is 5 and is eager to spell words, looked out the window as we ate lunch at In-n-Out and noticed a sign to a neighboring restaurant.

"I can spell THAT word, Daddy!" he said, proudly -- and in his normal volume, high.

"OK," I said, not knowing the word of which he spoke. "Spell it."

"H-O-O-T-E-R-S!"

(Pause for laughter from me, The Wife and most of our fellow burger eaters.)

"What does that spell, Daddy?"

"Just wait a few years, kid, and you'll find out."

A Sonnet For Feminine Cheese Sticks

2009-10-08T22:31:00.005-05:00

In honor of National Poetry Day, which by the time many of you read this will be long past, I've composed the following sonnet. A poorly written, badly rhymed sonnet that will probably make Bill Shakespeare's ghost scream in agony before it searches me out and rips the laptop from my arms and tosses it out the window.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

I'VE NEVER CLAIMED TO BE A POET.

BUT THAT'S NOT STOPPING ME. BAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

OK. On with the poem. And off with the caps lock button.

A local shopping mall today we went
Because we still had some dollars unspent
Let us go all! We said, and with a laugh
For we both knew that this would be a gaff
But bribed, did we, our son so blond and tall
Not much would he not do for a gum ball
Behaved, did he as we both walked the aisles
He did not climb or run or show his wiles
But this is not a tale of his good deeds
It is a cute kid yarn, I do concede
We walked through Target looking all about
When from behind me I heard The Boy shout
"CHEESE STICKS" he said; I turned to look upon
And saw him eying some women's tampons

Holding On To Summer

2009-10-05T23:25:00.003-05:00

It's cold here, which shouldn't be surprising because I live in Minnesota and if Minnesota is known for anything it's cold -- which I had been reminded of about 50,000 times in the month before I returned to the frozen north three years ago from South Carolina.

(Seriously: If I had a nickel for every time I heard the phrase "Minnesota? You know it's cold up there." I'd have a healthy amount of cash. It'd all be in coins, but cash nevertheless. My boy would never want for nickels to put down those, uh ... wells where the coins spin down a drain. What the heck do you call those things, anyway?)

While I like autumn here, it's tough letting go of summer. I try to cook out as much as possible in the last few nice weekends of September. I go for walks. We soak in the sunshine and schedule outings. So, in a sense, I can understand The Boy's reaction a week ago when I set out a pair of jeans for him to wear to school last Monday.

BOY: DAAAAAAAAAAAADDD!!! YOU GAVE ME PANTS!!! I DON'T WANNA WEAR PANTS!!

ME: Uh, boy, it's going to be cold tomorrow. Too cold for shorts.

BOY: BUT I DON'T WANNA WEAR PANTS! I WANNA WEAR SHORTS! (Yes, by the way, he yells. In fact, yelling is his normal voice volume. Unless you want him to talk about his day or talk to another adult. Then he's mouselike.)

ME: It'll be too cold. You have to wear pants.

BOY: NO IT WON'T! IT WON'T BE TOO COLD! NOBODY ELSE WILL BE WEARING PANTS!! PANTS ARE THE WORK OF THE DEVIL! THEY'LL BURN MY LEGS OFF! I CAN'T DO IT DAD! I CAN'T DO IT! DON'T MAKE ME WEAR THOSE SATAN SLACKS! PLEASE DAD, PLEASE!

I did not relent, mostly because I feared a phone call the next day from school, wondering what the heck kind of idiot parent would let his FIVE-YEAR-OLD CHILD risk hypothermia wearing shorts in 40-degree temperatures with high winds. And when he got on the bus wearing pants I thought the issue was done, because he acknowledged that it was cold. But the next day, he was at it again, protesting the pants. And he rejected the jeans again the next day.

I could deal with it no longer after that, and I let him wear shorts on the fourth day, fully convinced that the moment he waited for the bus with bear legs he'd realize his folly and run inside to get a nice, warm pair of pants.

Instead he stood outside, his legs coated in goosebumps, insisting that he was warm.

And it continued like this on Friday, and then into the weekend and again today. Not once did my eldest acknowledge the impact that the cold was having on his bear skin. He simply acted like it was July and he was thoroughly warm. (By the way, on most mornings his first order of business is to go from his room to the living room where he'll bundle himself up in a big pile of blankets ...)

Finally, today, as I picked The Boy up from school, he informed me that he must wear pants tomorrow.

Why, I said.

"Because nobody else at school wears shorts," he said.

And?

"And because they won't let me play on the playground if I'm not wearing shorts." Alas, the teacher who runs his afterschool program laid down the law. No pants, no monkeybars.

Hmmm ... I wonder if that will get The Boy to pick up all his toys ...

Getting rid of unwanted visitors, parent-style

2009-09-29T22:16:00.004-05:00

We've all had this problem from time to time: People who just don't seem to get the hint when you want them to go away.

You try everything: Tapping your foot; yawning; falling asleep; coughing up blood; faking your own death. And still they drone on and on about their latest vacation to Branson Missouri, ignoring you as you frantically search for a bottle of sleeping pills to swallow.

But I'm here to tell you to fear not! I have some solutions that will drive them away immediately. There is, however, one caveat: You must have a child. If you do not have a child, feel free to borrow one from a friend or a neighbor. Preferably multiple children with a reputation for obnoxiousness.

I guarantee that if you use one of the following steps, you'll get rid of the unwanted visitor who won't leave your house. Got an annoying, talkative neighbor? Be gone! Jehovah's Witness? Shoo them away! Just use any of these following tips and your annoyingly lonely friend or hanger-on will suddenly remember a dentist appointment.

Give your kids Jolt Cola and chocolate and tell them that it's time to play "Living Room Olympics." Nothing gets people out the door like loud, obnoxious kids. Indeed, most parents of young children should not have to resort to such tactics. Unfortunately, plenty of visitors have kids of their own, and are impervious to average kid antics. They require maximum strength childishness.

Talk about the afterbirth. Plenty of conversations focus on the birth: The length of time in labor, the baby's weight, various curse words Mom screamed at Dad, etc. Nobody talks about the afterbirth, and for good reason. It's disgusting. (Indeed, I'm sure roughly half the readers of this blog, all five of you, probably hit the back button the moment they read that phrase; and yes, I know that half of five is 2.5 and that it's thus a physical impossibility to have half a person.)

Two words: Dad breastfeeds. (Yes, this requires an infant, though the same affect could be accomplished by having dad use a baby doll while pretending to believe that it's a real, live infant in need of male breastfeeding.) CAUTION: This recommendation has been known to result in damaged doors and broken windows as visitors were too quick to leave; use only in an absolute emergency.

Ask the visitor to change the baby's diaper pail. All I know is that every time The Wife asks me to change the diaper pail I'm looking for the nearest exit, so I can only imagine that would work on a visitor.

Household screaming contest. Tell your kids that the one whose scream drives the annoying visitor away will get a toy, then let them at it.

Dress-up time. Tell the kids that your visitor wants to be a mummy for Halloween and give them several rolls of toilet paper and a spray water bottle.

Target practice. Give the kids several Kool-Aid-filled water pistols and let them have at it. (Yes, I know that this tip, and the previous one, could conceivably result in minor assault charges, but as a defense ask the judge to have a personal, one-on-one meeting with the "victim." Assuming the judge survives the meeting, he or she would never convict you.)

The dangers of a mobile baby

2009-09-22T22:51:00.003-05:00

The Sequel is newly mobile, which means that life around my household is like playing shortstop for the Yankees -- I spend much of my time diving in an effort to catch my youngest son from doing something he's not supposed to. (And, like the Yankees, making errors in the process.)

It's not easy. Mobile babies are excited about their mobility and are eager to employ it to its fullest extent. They're also endlessly curious, and have a remarkable ability to find potentially dangerous/breakable/flammable/valuable items in the vicinity.

To wit: The Sequel is typically surrounded on all sides by toys when he's on the floor in our living room. Most of the time he simply crawls past them, directly toward my computer. His goal is to accomplish one of the following tasks:

1. Eat the computer
2. Eat the cord

He apparently prefers the cord, probably because he can get more of it into his mouth at a time and, I'm sure, it tastes better. Regardless, he bypasses toys of all colors, shapes and sizes, then reaches as far as his little arms can to get that cord, this time bypassing various contraband to get at it. At least I should give him credit for making an effort.

Of course, The Sequel rarely considers the size of the object he tries to insert into his mouth. So long as the item in question is smaller than a Toyota Corolla he will do what he can to get that item between his cheek and gums. Come to think of it, make that a Chevy Suburban. I think I've seen him try to get our Corolla into his mouth once.

When he is not making every effort to manhandle my laptop, The Sequel is trying to open doors into cabinets with hazardous chemicals or drawers that probably contain sharp objects we forgot place out of reach. Or he's reaching for important papers we forgot to put away or slobbering on guests sitting on our couch.

And when he's not doing these things, The Sequel is making a beeline for our steps into the basement, which are just off our living room and are protected by an iron gate with openings just large enough for a determined infant to slip through. He breaks land-speed records when heading for these steps -- I swear once I heard a sonic boom, then saw my youngest only a couple of feet from his goal, forcing me to play shortstop again to keep him from the steps.

We could, and do, baby-proof to our heart's content, to the extent of wrapping the entire house in bubble wrap, but he'd still find his way toward something he should get. Like, say, the bubble wrap.

Experience with my firstborn tells me that there is only so much I can do to keep The Sequel from hurting himself. He's going to do it. It's inevitable.

The Boy once discovered that he could use the handles of several drawers in our kitchen like a ladder, enabling him to climb atop our counter and access his favorite food: Cheese-Its. I removed the handles. He simply began pushing the chair to the counter. I could have decided to go Japanese and sit on pillows, but The boy would probably move the table, then stack the pillows atop the table ... one wonders why kids don't apply this level of innovation to their schoolwork.

Dang. Now I really sound like a parent.

Psssst. Wanna buy a cheese ball?

2009-09-14T22:24:00.005-05:00

You THOUGHT it was safe.

You thought you were protected in the company cafeteria. You figured it wouldn't be a problem answering the phone from your brother. You were excited to hear about your grandchildren when the phone rang, showing your daughter's number. You were happy to see your neighbors and their son, knocking on your front door.

And you habitually clicked on Dorky Dad's latest blog post.

You had no idea of the horrible fate that awaited you. The dreaded ...

(DRAMATIC PAUSE)

School fundraiser!

Every fall, schools across the country send out armies of children, many as young as 5. They will be armed only with a brochure and innocence. But it is efficient and effective. Friends, neighbors, family members and, mostly, their parents' coworkers will fall victim, mindlessly opening their wallets and their checkbooks in the promise of Christmas ornaments or spinach dip that they don't need, which will arrive in some distant, indeterminate future.

The brochures will make their way through carpools, buses and trains and onto cafeteria tables or reception desks. Guilt will radiate outward from the brochure, catching unsuspecting employees, luring them into its pages with guilt. "But it's for the children."

And then, without even knowing it, your mind will race through the possibilities. "If I don't spend an inordinate amount of money on pre-shaped cookie dough, this young child will not be able to go on a summer trip. Or he won't win a prize. He'll be shunned by his classmates. I cannot, in good conscience, leave a child to a lifetime of ridicule and schoolhouse torture. GIVE ME FIVE BOXES!"

But that is nothing compared with the slave-like obedience of friends, relatives and neighbors. Backed by the power of the Dreaded Fundraising Brochure, the child will extract concession after concession from loved-ones unwilling -- or unable -- to disappoint such a sweet, innocent face.

"I have no power against that small child. That face. That sweet, sweet face. It makes me ... do things. Horrible things. Like buying five boxes of Sweet Jelly Pepper Cheese Ball Mix."

But nobody -- nobody -- is as powerless as the parents. Wanting to see their child do well in his fundraiser, and already unable to resist the power of school-age salesmen, they weakly submit to emptying their bank accounts so they can purchase 20 red meat slings. Worse, they become pawns in the game, mindlessly spreading the brochures and infecting everyone they know in the name of their child's education.

Alas, this is what I face. So if you see a somewhat doughy middle aged man with thick hair, a round face and an air of dread clutching a brochure of gift wrap and chocolate, turn around and run away! Quickly!

But not until you buy some stuff. You know, because my kid really wants a koosh ball.

Sending the kid off to priso ... er, school

2009-09-08T21:01:00.004-05:00

We sent The Boy off to kindergarten today, officially his first day of "school," the outset of a 13-year stretch where he'll learn to make spitballs, to copy his friend's homework, to dress like an idiot during homecoming week and, if I'm really lucky, some math skills.

Here's what I told The Boy during the days leading up to this monumental event:

It'll be the most fun you'll ever have! You'll meet lots of new friends! You'll learn and grow and sing songs and play games! You're a big boy now! You'll love every second of school! When we pick you up every evening you'll be doing everything in your power to crawl your way back into the building! You'll declare yourself a ward of the state in an effort to spend more time there! School is easy. Eeeeeeeeasy!

Here's what I was actually thinking:

School sucks. Perhaps later in life you'll look back and think you liked it, but for the most part you'll dread every waking moment you're there.

That's right. I lied to my kid. Not for the first time. Probably not for the last.

Of course, I was hardly about to go to the bus stop dressed in black and humming Darth Vader's theme music while warning my child of 13 years of pure terror. For one thing, The Wife wouldn't like it. For another, well, I'd probably have trouble getting the kid on the bus. Which would make me late for work.

I'd much rather he enjoy school, which would probably make it more fun as he has no choice but to attend for the next 13 years. Perhaps he will get his mom's more studious genetic material, rather than my decidedly non-studious genetic material. To this day I have no idea how I got through high school and college. Aaaaaah, the days before stringent educational standards.

The Boy hardly understood the significance of what he did today, probably because he'd been attending some school-like function every day for his entire waking life. So he entered the bus this morning with no problem, confirming the usefulness of sending him to preschool for so long. (You, too, can get your kid ready to stand in line and ride the bus before he or she hits kindergarten, all for the low, low price of $30,000.)

He'll repeat this task over and over again until he's 18, except for summers, holidays, random weeks in March, half of every December, days when The Boy fakes illness, snow days plus days when the school superintendent is either feeling like a freeze baby or just doesn't want to open school and uses the cold weather as an excuse, plus random days labeled teacher "inservice," whatever that means.

In the evening, we asked what The Boy's favorite part of the day was, and he told us in detail a story of how his teacher demonstrated the proper way of going to the bathroom (quietly) and the much funnier but not proper way of going to the bathroom (noisily and without washing hands). Clearly, The Boy got a kick out of the "wrong way," meaning his favorite part of Day One was teacher-led potty humor.

Sounds like he's in the right class.

I had no idea I was an astronaut

2009-09-03T20:44:00.004-05:00

I picked up The Boy from school this afternoon and was met by a young girl, maybe a year older than my son. She had determined look on her face.

"Have you ever been to outer space?"

I didn't even blink.

"Of COURSE I've been to outer space!"

She walked away, skeptical. As she did, I looked at The Boy, and noted that I covered his butt -- this time.

Apparently, my boy is so impressed by my career choice that he's telling his friends I'm an astronaut. It's possible, however, that he could mean this figuratively. He may also have heard me mumble about feeling like I'm on another world. And he may also know that plenty of people -- like most of you -- think I'm from a different planet.

But as my kid is 5, my assumption must be that my boy would rather I be some sort of spaceman. I can understand that. As a child I told my classmates that my house was haunted, mostly because I just thought ghosts were cool and I really wanted my house to be haunted. Plus I was a kid who wanted attention. And most of my classmates believed me. But one notably skeptical person refused to acknowledge the specter in my home and was reminding me of my fib literally years later. (Dude, we were 9. Get over it.)

And, though I have a good job, "astronaut" to a five-year-old sounds a heckuva lot better than "desk jockey." And telling people that "My dad blasts off in a rocket ship" likewise is more exciting than "My dad deliberately drinks too much liquid during the day so he has a reason to take frequent bathroom breaks."

There is little doubt that The Boy is into rockets lately. For his birthday he got a foam rocket launcher, which you stomp upon to launch a foam rocket high into the air. A few days ago he got a Nerf bow and arrow -- same concept, only you shoot the shockingly phallic foam object horizontally. Then, after watching a science teacher shoot a model rocket into the air this afternoon, he and classmates were given yet another foam rocket -- this one powered by a finger and a strip of rubber.

It appears in each case that the object of these toys is to land on the roof the garage or the house. And apparently there is some secret kid game that anybody who lands a rocket on a roof or in a tree and causes Dad to break out the ladder and climb upon said roof gets a point. Two points if Dad curses. Three if Dad says, "That's it. The next time you do that, you won't get it back."

Five points if Dad falls off the ladder and ends up in the hospital.

Indeed, as we speak, two of The Boy's rockets are on my garage roof now. He lost them at the tail end of a five-minute span in which he lost four rockets total. The first one I recovered. The second one is missing. He shot a third one up there, and then for good measure shot another one on the roof -- the same one I had already recovered.

So perhaps this is what The Boy means when he says I've been to outer space. Assuming that outerspace means the top of my ladder, and that the roof of my house is some sort of space station. It might as well be, given that I hate ladders and am generally afraid of heights. And I'm not too fond of my steeply slanted roof, either.

One dorky midnight meeting

2009-09-02T22:11:00.004-05:00

As a teenager, I once woke up to find a strange creature in my bedroom. He was a man, slightly tubby with big hair and a permanent scowl. Come to think of it, he looked a little familiar. But no less scary.

YOUNG ME: AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUGGGH! What are you?! KILL IT! KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

CREATURE: Calm down, you idiot. I'm you. Twenty five years from now.

(Side note: It's really been 25 years, a quarter-century, since I've been in my mid-teens?! Dang.)

YOUNG ME: What? You're me? I'm you? How? Why? AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUGGGH!

(My younger self then broke down and sobbed uncontrollably, and I spent the next couple of hours consoling myself. The conversation continued when my younger self calmed down.)

YOUNG ME: Why are you here?

ME: I am here by some mysterious force to give you a glimpse of your future.

YOUNG ME: Is it a good future? Am I rich?

ME: Well, no. Not even close.

YOUNG ME: Famous?

ME: Only for modeling women's undergarments. Please don't ask. In fact, if anybody on something called "The Internet" dares you to wear a bra, don't do it.

YOUNG ME: What's the Internet? And why would it make me wear a bra? I don't have man-boobs. But apparently I'm going to get them, if you really ARE me.

ME: These are pecs, not boobs. PECS! And the Internet is a place where you can be anonymously rude to other people for no other reason than to satisfy your most fiendish personal traits. But that's not important. Ask me more questions.

YOUNG ME: Do I get married?

ME: Yup.

YOUNG ME: Do I have kids then?

ME: Yes. Two of them. And you'll spend most of your time making fun of them on "The Internet."

YOUNG ME: Why would I make fun of my kids in public?

ME: Because you make fun of everything.

YOUNG ME: Oh yeah. Now tell me more about me.

ME: Well, you live in a house in the suburbs. You drive a minivan. You fret over the condition of your grass and you fight a losing battle with moles and gophers and box elder bugs.

(Young me then passed out and faints. I woke myself up by kicking myself in the ribs.)

YOUNG ME: You're still here? Crap. I was hoping this was some nightmare. Some awful nightmare. Come to think of it, this whole thing is stupid and pointless. Because if you really were me, you'd be giving me investment advice. You'd tell me who will win the World Series and maybe give me some lottery numbers. Yet all you're doing is scaring me by telling me I'm a tubby mole-obsessed suburbanite with a creepy van who lets computers talk him into cross-dressing. My poor, poor kids.

ME: Well, you do have a hot wife.

YOUNG ME: I do? WOOHOO!

Dorky Dad the Annoying

2009-08-30T21:04:00.004-05:00

I spent part of the evening inventing a game called "Top The Boy." As The Boy sat on the couch immersed in a computer game I tried tossing my baseball cap onto his head from three feet away. I awarded myself a point every time I topped his head with my cap without him screaming.

I played the game for several minutes. I scored a half-dozen points.

The game got boring, mostly because The Boy was so intently focused on his computer game that he was completely unwilling to scream -- he yelled once, even though I was doing play-by-play indicating that I'd lose if he screamed. He even stopped tossing the hat back to me. So then I put the hat back on my head and began staring at him from just above the computer screen.

"Daaaaaad," he finally said. "You're anooooooying."

Yes!

I have precious few skills. (You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills ...). But as you may imagine, the one at which I'm best, by far, is annoying people. This makes me excellent dad material, because one of the main tasks involved in being a dad is to annoy. It's a responsibility I accept with gusto.

The division of responsibility goes something like this: The Wife's job is to make the kid comfortable (you know, by kissing his booboos and building his self-esteem and by comforting him when he's sad). It's my job to make him uncomfortable. Mostly by annoying the heck out of him.

I've always gotten the impression that dads of all sort like annoying their kids, and their kids' friends. Perhaps dads annoy their kids because because they spend so much of their time annoying us -- like, say, those times I'm trying to have a conversation with The Wife only to be interrupted when The Boy decides to break out in song or loud nonsensical babbling or, most of the time, some evil combination of the two.

(Seriously, here's the deal: The Boy talks constantly. Except when we actually want him to talk. Then he shuts up. So he spends hours telling us about all sorts of things, or just mindlessly yelling. But when we ask him what he did at school that day he clamps his mouth shut like The Sequel does when I'm trying to feed him pureed peas. After 15 minutes of coaxing, we get a small, "I don't know" out of him and I feel like I just completed a triathlon. The kid is like that Warner Brothers singing frog. Hello my baby, hello my darling, hello my ragtime gaaaaal.)

It also could be revenge for losing my childless dad freedom, not to mention bank account. But I'm simply going to say that dads annoy their children because it's just so dang much fun. And it'll only get better. Because soon The Boy will get embarrassed by my very presence and then my mere appearance at some sort of event will annoy the heck out of him. But that will be easy.

It's far more challenging now, because when I do something annoying he's much more likely to tell me to "DO IT AGAIN!" as he is to give me the "You're annoying" look. But I keep trying, time and again. Because that's what I'm supposed to do. I'm dad.

The irresistable lure of tasteless brown glop

2009-08-24T21:31:00.003-05:00

I think it's a little disturbing that the first solid food many of us consume has the look, consistency -- and often taste -- of barf.

We're feeding The Sequel baby "food." Some of this stuff is decent, like the peach "cobbler" I fed The Sequel this evening. But I wouldn't feed most of this crap to my worst enemy, even if it meant I'd be freed from a lifetime of torture. (OK, maybe I'd do that, but still ...)

The purpose of baby food, as you all should know, is to introduce little ones to the glories of food -- which, in general, is awesome. Yet if it weren't for the danger of death by starvation this baby "food" would probably drive the vast majority of people away from food. I can't imagine anybody saying, "I want more of this!" after a heaping helping of tasteless brown, barf-like glop.

We pretty much figured going into this whole parenting thing that baby food would likely taste like raw sewage, because that's how most canned vegetables taste like. And so we talked often about how we were going to be waaaay better than all those other parents by making our own baby food.

And then the kid arrived. He got old enough for baby "food," we looked at our suddenly-intense schedule and this whole make-our-own-food idea went out the window, where it landed right next to my plans to wake up in the middle of the night with my wife and our insistence that our children not get loaded with clothes based on licensed characters.

So we loaded up on jarred baby food.

But The Boy is far more, uh ... discerning* than that, and quickly rejected the baby food. He started off fine, when we fed him squash and carrots and applesauce. Then we made the mistake of feeding him jarred meat baby food, like chicken or beef, and suddenly the entire jarred baby food universe was suddenly off limits. Pureed meat with no flavoring whatsoever is about as delectable as mud.

(* Otherwise known as "picky.)

The Boy had a sixth sense whenever we pulled out the jarred baby food, and his jaw clamped shut. So we'd employ "tactics." We'd make him laugh. When he opened his mouth to chuckle, we'd shove a bite of food there. He quickly learned how to laugh with his mouth shut.

The Sequel isn't remotely as picky. But feeding him is like playing a video game, a really frustrating video game that you were forced to play by Death to earn your way out of hell. I have to get the food past his waving arms, timing my move exactly to when his mouth is open -- but I have to beat his thumb, which is usually headed straight for the same place as the spoon (I think it's an anti-baby-food defense mechanism). But watch out! One false move results in food splattered throughout the kitchen! Or, worse, a crying baby! (But an opportunistic parent uses the baby's cries to get more food in said mouth.)

All of this seems a tad ironic. I'll spend these next few years trying to pump his body full of food. When he gets older, everybody else will tell him to stop eating so much. (This wouldn't really be a problem if all we had to eat was baby food.)

Sometimes, if I'm successful at this baby-food-feeding-to-get-out-of-hell game, he'll stop waving his warms and will turn suddenly cooperative. And then feeding him feels more like I'm feeding gruel to a depressed and hopeless prisoner (which, given that he's strapped into a seat and cannot be removed until we say so, is about right). He sits there, emotionless, staring off into space while I shove some horrible gray muck into his mouth.

Mercifully, this phase is short -- not short enough, which would be non-existent, but short -- and soon he'll be coating the floor near his high chair with chopped-up bits of people food. But that is another blog post.

Avoiding the dreaded ear infection

2009-08-20T21:07:00.004-05:00

Some of you may find yourself completely shocked when you hear that I was not always gung-ho about having children. Indeed, like plenty of guys, I had second thoughts.

Why?

Did I fear that children would relegate me to a lifetime of poverty beginning with day care, continuing with the unending purchase of toys and electronic goods, then with their teenage human-vacuum-cleaner stage followed finally by -- gulp! -- college?

No, because I was already accustomed to a lifetime of poverty. I'd kind of grown to expect it.

Did I fear having no time with myself, subjecting myself to being constantly interrupted by screaming, crying, yelling or barging through the bathroom door?

No. I kind-of expected that when I got married.

(Note to self: Edit that out before The Wife sees it.)

Did I worry about subjecting the world to more of my genetic material?

Well, yes. But I took a gamble that my DNA would be watered down by The Wife's. (So far, it seems, that hasn't been the case. Stupid genetics.)

The thing I feared most -- and I mean THE MOST -- was either colic or ear infections.

I'd been around enough babies in my lifetime to develop a healthy fear of both of those conditions, and in my pre-kid days I'd been convinced that the baby gods would hand me children suffering from both afflictions.

I had no idea what colic was, except that it sounded like cowlick, something my hair has in abundance, and so for much of my life I thought that bad hair days made babies cry uncontrollably for hours and hours. My hair, therefore, would clearly scare the hell out of any and all babies. No kids for me.

Ear infections scared me, too. Again, I knew little about them. I just saw the sunken eyes and the gaunt faces of the exasperated parents who speak of ear infections in hushed tones and with a deep fear. Some then have to go change their pants after the mere mention of the word "tubes."

The simple truth is this: I feared most being a desperate, sleepless parent at wits end trying to calm an uncalmable baby.

So, after deciding to go ahead and reproduce anyway, I spent a few healthy pre-baby days praying that whatever child I was "blessed with" did not get either of these things, because I reasoned that they made parenting a living nightmare. And I had no desire to produce a living nightmare, no matter how cute.

When The Boy had his first bout of crying, my prayers got a bit more intense:

Oooooooh, please please please please please please please please please please pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease don't let it be colic! Not colic! I'll do anything just ... not ... colic.

Prayers answered. No colic.

Then, when The Boy got his first ear infection, I tried the same thing:

Oooooooh, please please please please please please please please please please pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease don't let the ear infections be reocurring! No reocurring ear infections! I'll do anything! Just let ... this ... be ... the ... only ... one.

And it was. WOOHOO! Two for two!

Now, I'm a big believer in the Law of Averages. I'm also not a risk taker. I knew that a second child would most likely have both colic and ear infections. Still, we had the child anyway. And I prayed -- again -- when that first bout of unexplained bawling took place:

Oooooooh, please please please please please please please please please please pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease don't let it be colic! Not colic! I'll do anything just ... not ... colic.

And -- once again -- No colic.

(I'm guessing that most of you by now know where this is going. But I'm going to keep writing, anyway.)

When The Sequel got his first ear infection a couple of months ago, I kept praying -- and why wouldn't I? Worked the first three times. Why not the fourth?

Oooooooh, please please please please please please please please please please pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease don't let the ear infections be reocurring! Please no reocurring ear infections! I'll do anything! Just let ... this ... be ... the ... only ... one.

Alas, the Law of Averages caught up with me. Or my prayer wasn't sincere -- probably because of my belief in the Law of Averages. In either case, The Sequel is now on his third ear infection. We've been filling him with more drugs than the east wing of a nursing home.

But I suppose three out of four isn't bad. And it could be worse. I could be the one with the ear infection.

Check that. I think I'd rather have the ear infection.

A new set of baby milestones

2009-08-16T21:07:00.002-05:00

The Sequel is nearing eight months old. These months have been filled with various "milestones" showing the baby advancing and, supposedly, learning more about the world. I know all about milestones because my wife tells me all about them all the time.

She, like lots of moms, tend to get a bit excited over some of these little events. "Oooooooh! It's his very first projectile vomit!" she exclaims as I clean off about a gallon of regurgitated breast milk from my face.

The Wife has thus informed me when The Sequel has learned "object permanence" and "cause and effect." And with each there is a minor celebration. But I have my own list of "milestones" that The Sequel -- and his predecessor, The Boy -- have passed. They rarely result in any sort of celebration, however:

HAIR REMOVAL: This is the milestone when the baby gets dad to forcibly remove hair from his head for the first time. Some babies do this early, like The Sequel did just before birth, by showing up a full week late and arriving on the first of January -- so not only does the birthday take place on a holiday, it comes mere hours after the deadline to qualify for that popular tax credit. In his post-uterine life, The Sequel accomplished this milestone the same day he learned "cause-and-effect." The cause: He drops his toy from his high chair to the floor. The effect: Dad grumbles and picks it up. Repeat. Over and over again. 'Till dad removes hair. Start giggling.

DIAPER DODGING: The Sequel recently learned to "roll over." He has since employed this new skill with gusto on the diaper changing table. He did this to me this evening, and whenever I got him on his butt, where he belongs, he simply gave me a maniacal smile and started over again -- yes, my 7-month-old baby has a maniacal smile. I blame it on his mom.

PAPER CONSUMPTION: Forget the dog. The Sequel eats more paper than a, uh ... uh ... thing that eats a lot of paper. The Sequel's first stop upon learning to roll over was our magazine rack, where he carefully selected magazines we want to keep (Consumer Reports; Bon Appetit) while leaving those we don't (Forbes; all those dang gardening catalogs we keep forgetting to recycle). He then moved to the table and sought out coupons, but only coupons for things we like.

EXPENSIVE ITEM DESTRUCTION: This hasn't happened yet, but it will. The Sequel's No. 1 job right now, according to him, is to grab anything -- and I mean ANYTHING -- within reach of his little 10-inch arms, even if it means a death-defying lunge from his parents' protective arms. If while holding him we are idle for 5 seconds he will use that time to grab the nearest item, intent on shoving said item into his mouth. Never mind that it may be as large as an RV. He still thinks he can eat it. At some point, he's going to do this in an area with lots of breakable items, probably the Ultra Expensive Crystal Department at Macy's or some other store that smells heavily like perfume. As soon as this happens I'll just go ahead and stop by a bankruptcy attorney's office on the way home.

TRICKING DAD: The Boy has become an expert at this at the ripe old age of 5, and The Sequel is following in his footsteps. To wit: He began sleeping through the night at a mere four months old, enabling me to brag heartily to my not-so-fortunate fellow parents. Yet, a few weeks later, he began his midnight screaming again. I swear he gives me a maniacal smile every time he wakes up, too.

More van nonsense

2009-08-13T22:40:00.004-05:00

The first vehicle I ever test-drove was a van. This was in the 1980s. The van had mag wheels and was populated heavily with red and orange, both inside and out. It had a dark brown table and lots of shag carpeting.

Come to think of it, the van looked a lot like my house when we bought it.

A friend was trying to convince me to buy said van. I had two problems with this: I had no money. And I had no intent on buying a van with no money. Cool as this van was, it was nowhere near as cool as it was 10 years previous, which might as well have been a century to a teenager at the time. I shall never buy a van, I said.

Naturally, I'm about to buy a van.

I have yet to run into any vans with shag carpeting or painted barf orange. None of them have windows painted with scenes of sunsets or wolves or Native Americans or, if you're really cool, all three of them at once. They don't have oversized wheels. None of the vans have had ELO blasting in the 8-track player.

I had a neighbor who had a van like this back in the 70s, when most of my formative years took place. Though I was young, even then I knew that these vans were designed for two purposes: Doing drugs and fornicating.

Indeed, it wasn't long after that when I found myself at the drive-in. I have no idea what movie was playing, for I was far more entertained by the scene taking place in the van right in front of us.

It was a white van. And its occupants were, uh, testing out the van's shocks. That thing was bouncing more at an inflatable jump castle at a 5-year-old's birthday party. Hey, why is that van bouncing? I asked.

And then some important looking dudes with flashlights surrounded the van from all directions and slowly descended upon it and its rabbit-like occupants, fully intent on preventing the conception of a future used car salesman. Or a drive-in theater manager.

The van's decline in the 1980s would make the art of disturbing lovemaking much more fun. Not long after I bought my first car, a fabulous puke green Dodge Aspen (I wouldn't buy a van, but I'd buy a Dodge Aspen? REALLY? WHAT WAS I THINKING?), myself and some friends drove deep into an area along the Mississippi known for being a popular hangout for couples too cheap to get a dang hotel.

Our job: Slowly drive up to said car with the lights off. Turn on the lights. Enjoy the show.

With vans out of the picture, to be replaced by tiny cars with names like Chevette, we got full views of people scrambling quickly in the back seats to clothe themselves and make it look like nothing was going on. In one instance, we were inadvertently provided with a full moon of a rather ample, and naked, backside -- right up against the window.

Vans are much more popular these days, but for decidedly dull reasons: To transport stuff, mainly excess family members. The only action that will be taking place in the van I buy will likely be fighting, probably between the two boys. Or the in-laws.

But maybe, just maybe, one day I'll get a babysitter. I'll take The Wife down by the river, blast the ELO on my iPod, and ... start driving around, looking for bouncing, parked cars.

I, uh, borrowed the image from this site here.

Here comes the dorky minivan

2009-08-10T23:13:00.004-05:00

Thirteen years ago I bought a little red pickup, and it was good. It had a bench seat, meaning it was as comfortable as a park bench. But it had oversized tires and mag wheels and a cool little topper and it was all mine.

(It was particularly nice because my previous vehicles had been given names like "The Frosted Pickle" and "The Eggplant." I had one that was known as "The Blueberry," but I didn't have it long enough for people to remember much about it, because the car literally blew up after I had it for two weeks. Aaah, good times.)

And then some old guy in Indiana decided to ignore a stop sign and cross a highway, placing his adult son riding in the passenger seat directly into my path. Fortuitously, I noticed my traffic-device-impaired friend and hit the back of his pickup, saving his son. But not my pickup.

So we decided to buy new. And I wanted another pickup, so that's what I got. The decision prompted my mother-in-law to note, subtly, that our vehicle lacked something.

"Don't you want something with more ... (pause) ... seats?"

Of course not. Why would we want extra seats? It's just two of us.

(Aaaah, good times.)

Five years later, The Boy was born. And then I looked at the extended cab of my pickup, and saw the pathetic excuses for seating -- both of them pointed inward and clearly designed for stick people -- and thought to myself the following: I hate it when my mother-in-law is right.

So I sold the pickup, and in my infinite wisdom purchased a Honda Civic.

The Civic was great. It was green and it had custom wheels and performance tires and it looked cool. Yet it meant that our big car was a Toyota Corolla.

So while we had plenty of seats for our little three-person family, we had the storage space of a shoebox. Purchases of anything larger than a bread machine required us to empty the vehicle of most of its contents, as well as its population, push down the seats, shove said box in the vehicle as far as possible, then secure the trunk closed with some rope.

I'd then drive home while praying the entire time not to be seen by a cop or a guy with a blog, a digital camera and a sense of humor. And then I'd pray that my purchased object would not free itself from its bondage and land atop another car or, worse, the cop. (But I'd be OK if it fell atop the dude with a blog, present company excepted, of course.)

But it was OK, for the most part. I don't like spending money on cars, because I'm cheap and cars by their nature lose value. So we held out. Then The Sequel was born, and I noticed that adding children to a family adds an exponential amount of stuff to the vehicle. So for the past few months we couldn't go to the grocery store without looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.

So I sold the Civic, and now I find myself shopping for used minivans -- which have more storage and seats, though I'm hardly naive enough to think that I still won't look like Jed Clampett on most family trips, even if I only have two kids. (As a rule, the amount of stuff you have expands with the amount of available space; so if I were driving a semi-trailer, I'd still find myself cramming stuff back there within a few short days ...)

Soon, lest my brain returns to its rightful place and stops me, I'll be an official, 100-percent suburban father. I'll have to enroll The Boy into soccer practices, of course, and drive the entire team there, then take them to the local Dairy Queen afterward.

I'll also have to choose how to drive.

There are, as I've said before, only two types of minivan drivers:

* People who have coronaries at the mere thought of driving on the freeway and thus always drive the speed of your average golf cart. On the freeway. In front of me.

* Complete nutjobs who, because they must compensate for the fact that they drive a minivan, insist on driving like complete maniacs. Nine times out of ten, whenever I'm cut off on the freeway, the vehicle doing the cutting is a male-driven minivan.

The Wife, for the record, has already said I'll probably be a nutjob. Correction: She already thinks I'm a nutjob. The van will just be my nutjobmobile.

You asked for it: Another post on male nipples

2009-08-03T23:05:00.003-05:00

The Boy enters kindergarten in a few weeks. At day care, he is officially out of preschool and into summer camp. There, he is being exposed to older kids. Kids who know things, like the word "boob."

"I'm going to kick you in the boob," he said one day, to me.

Hey, Boy, I don't have boobs! These are pecks! Monstrous, muscular pecks! Got that?

"Dad, what's a boob?"

Aha.

The Wife, in her calm wifely manner, came to my rescue and explained in general terms that a boob is something mommies have and that they are definitely not to be kicked.

The Wife has become our designated Household Body Part Dictionary, on account of the fact that I'm usually too busy desperately trying to stifle laughter to provide much of an explanation for The Boy's questions -- laughter that would certainly result in him using whatever word on a frequent basis. Probably in company.

I could not, however, help myself the next time The Boy decided to show off his knowledge of the human anatomy.

I don't know where he was, or what we were doing. All I remember is that one day in front of both of us he lifted up his shirt and shouted, "LOOK AT MY NIPPLES!"

Thank you, Boy, for giving me another opportunity to talk about male nipples on my blog.

He did it again, and again. Then he stopped. And I wondered why he stopped, so I did it myself, just to remind him.

This got me in all sorts of trouble with The Wife, who gave me the "You're encouraging him!" shout. She, like most moms, is afraid that The Boy will one day do this in front of strangers. To this I say, "Good! Because him doing that would probably be better than whatever conversation I happen to be having at the moment." In fact, I'd love it if he did that in public.

Then again, I'm frequently in trouble with The Wife over my nipples. One of my favorite pastimes, at least on days I'm wearing a tank top, is to show one of them off. I then sit back and enjoy as she groans, covers her eyes and looks away and says something about me being disgusting.

Come to think of it, maybe that's where The Boy picked this up.

The incredible stress of picking a restaurant

2009-07-30T22:48:00.003-05:00

We have a friend visiting from out of town. She has no kids. I'm totally jealous.

Jealous, that is, of her ease in choosing a restaurant. In her pre-visit planning, we asked where she'd like to go. "Oh, I can go anywhere," she said. "I like anything. And, because I'm by myself and have no little hyperactive burdens coming along with me, I can go to just about any type of restaurant whatsoever."

From our end, of course, the choice was brutally stressful. We have a borderline hyperactive 5-year-old with typical 5-year-old taste-buds and a baby who, while generally happy and smiley and pleasant, is still a baby. That means he's a ticking time bomb who could go off at any moment and start screaming bloody murder for no explicable reason. Or he could excrete various bodily fluids on anything within a certain radius -- including other restaurant guests.

(I'll spare you the details of some of the worst moments but believe me, it's completely, totally and utterly disgusting.)

Therefore, on most days, our restaurant choices come down to two things:

* Does it have a menu that includes one of the following: Macaroni & Cheese, pizza, burgers or chicken nuggets?
* Will we be able to be served in said establishment in a short enough time that we can avoid provoking a major, international incident?

And as we are at heart pretty simple folks, this choice is pretty easy. McDonald's, here we come! Yet we could hardly invite an out-of-town friend to a restaurant in which helium balloons is the main form of decoration.

Of course, some people are easier than others. The Wife's family is infamously impossible to take out to a restaurant -- one person is a vegetarian; another doesn't eat beef or nuts or food cooked on stainless steel; a third is normal; another would be normal, save for various digestive problems that largely eliminates anything with spices. Some days it seems like it would simply be best to have family gatherings at the mall food court.

Another problem in choosing a restaurant for guests is that we are tremendously risk-averse, which plays out most when we're thinking of a restaurant. Sure, we'll try a new place now and then when it's just ourselves -- because we're crazy like that. But we're desperately afraid to try a new place with guests, because of the legitimate possibility that said restaurant completely sucks. We will clearly lose that friend forever if we take him or her to a restaurant that sucks.

(So if we don't want people to visit us again, we take them to a horrible restaurant. And if that doesn't work I strip to my underpants and start dancing and singing loudly off-key. In the restaurant.)

Suffice it to say, we successfully chose a quality, local restaurant on this night, thanks to several weeks of intense study of Internet sites, interviews with local chefs, a lengthy series of taste tests and consultations with local psychics. But now we know that people will be visiting us this Christmas. We might have time to pick a good restaurant.

My insane kid-filled weekend

2009-07-27T23:07:00.002-05:00

I'd have normally posted by now, but I was only recently released from the psychiatric ward following a weekend in which I hosted a party of sugar-loaded five-year-olds, then taught an unusually large Sunday school class -- with kids who must have had extra bowls of sugar-frosted sugar bombs with extra sugar and chocolate syrup for breakfast.

It was, to say the least, an interesting weekend, and I learned a few things -- mostly, that it's a really good idea to consult with my calendar before scheduling events in which I'm locked in a room with a bunch of kids too close together. And I learned a few other things, too:

* I need to hug my urologist, whose cutting skills assured me that my offspring count will be limited to two.

* Those two kids are boys, virtually guaranteeing me a lifetime of emergency room trips. During both the party and the Sunday School class, the boys were easily the more obnoxious and rowdy of the two genders -- such as time that several of them decided to pile atop one another, for no explicable reason. And that was in Sunday School class. At both the party, and the class, the girls mostly sat in their seats and didn't start running around until it was the prescribed running-around time. And for a fleeting moment I envied their parents.

* The most difficult task on Earth involves keeping a group of kids in a small room when a huge, indoor playground beckons just feet away. Not even pizza and cake -- CAKE! -- could keep them in there. Trying to keep those kids in that room was like trying to shove 20 grasshoppers on stimulants into a baby-food jar. And the kid who had the most trouble staying in the room? Why, my own boy, of course, the person whose birth was to be celebrated.

* I still don't know what kind of freak kid I'm raising. He doesn't like cake. He didn't even eat one of his own birthday cupcakes.

* You know that you've been a parent for a long time when your leg gets urinated upon and you don't even blink an eye. Yup, that happened to me this weekend when I removed a kid from my lap to discover that my leg was wet. And it wasn't my own kid who provided the urine.

* There is an absolute limit to the amount of pizza a person can consume on a weekend. We ordered entirely too much pizza for the birthday party, so we had to go home and over the remainder of the weekend consume what remained. Pizza for lunch. Pizza for dinner. Pizza for a midnight snack. Pizza for breakfast. Pizza for second breakfast. Pizza for lunch again. Pizza for afternoon tea. It got to the point that I was feeding it to the birds and begging neighbors to take some of it away. I hadn't consumed that much pizza since college. I might not eat pizza again until The Boy is in college. Ugh.

* A weekend full of screaming kids can make work on Monday look awful good. At least the screaming there seems like it has some sort of purpose. Well, most of the time, anyway.

* Teachers are WAY underpaid. I was nearly insane after just two small parts of a weekend with the little rug-rats and they spend the bulk of their waking hours with them. God bless 'em all, especially the one who is about to be stuck with my boy.

Snap! There goes the pants

2009-07-19T22:17:00.003-05:00

We had the big family birthday party this evening, providing me with another excuse to spend an evening stuffing my face full of food. We arrived with our contributions to the meal in the late afternoon and I began eating. When I was done eating I ate some more. And then when I was done eating that, I had cake.

So maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise a little later when, during a rousing game of front-yard softball, the button on my pants snapped off.

Oh, snap!

Inevitable? Maybe. As a rule, pants don't snap when it's convenient for them to snap, like when I'm at home, not surrounded by large numbers of people who would love nothing more than to see my pants fall down -- not, that is, because they want to see my underpants, but because it would provide them fodder to use against me for years.

Hey, Uncle Dork! Remember that time your pants fell down in the front yard and you scared the neighborhood children so bad that their parents called the cops and you got hauled off to jail for indecent exposure? And better yet, a TV film crew was on hand because they were recording "COPS In The Suburbs" and you became a nationwide celebrity -- so you had to change the name of your blog to Pantsless Dad!! That was AWESOME!! DO IT AGAIN! DO IT AGAIN!

Indeed, I only wish this were the first time. My previous experience was during a family reunion for the in-laws, in Michigan. My shorts, for some reason, had been shrinking over the years. That day, they decided to give up. The button snapped, and I spend what seemed like several days in a park near Ann Arbor Michigan desperately wanting the event to end so I could get back to the hotel and my suitcase and a pair of shorts that actually worked -- and, for that matter, did not cut off the blood circulation to the lower half of my body.

At least in both cases my pants did not fall down, but they so desperately wanted to. Whenever I stood up, my pants wanted to remain sitting and I had to drag them up with me. If I had to carry something with two hands I had to walk like a penguin to keep my shorts from plummeting to the ground. And I routinely pulled up the zipper on my pants, regardless of whether anybody was watching or not, because they either watch me adjust myself or they get a long look at my naked legs and my underpants.

Truth is, they wouldn't see much different than they do normally, because I wear boxer briefs in various colors -- from a distance they'd look like a strange pair of shorts. Yet because they're my underpants, the last line of defense from my pasty-white butt, they remain a fearful object in the general public. Just the thought of Mr. Happy poking his head out for a look around is enough to frighten even the heartiest of nudists.

Fortuitously I managed to successfully keep the pants up without resorting to the use of a safety pin -- which, by the way, is dangerous on pants, I don't care what anybody says. Plus, it violates my policy of keeping sharp objects away from my genitals. And I made it home and changed pants and left the old pair for The Wife to mend, because she has Mad Button-Sewing Skillz.

And now it's time for me to do about 4,000 situps.

Bottling up the competitive juices

2009-07-16T23:17:00.003-05:00

The Boy played T-ball today, continuing the early stages of my grand plan to get him into the major leagues, thus providing me with a retirement income that would be much safer than Social Security.

At the end of the day's practice, the coaches gathered the players around and informed them that, next week, they'd be playing an actual game. Thus far, as they're all 4 and 5 year olds, they'd been practicing -- because it's a bit difficult to play a game when most of the players are more interested in kicking sand and picking their nose.

But next week's game would have a twist: They'll be playing the parents.

Kids versus parents.

"And," the coach said, "the kids WILL win. The adults are going to look rather silly."

That's what she thinks.

No way am I going to lose a game to a bunch of 5-year-olds. I'm entirely too competitive. They'll have to devise rules to prevent me from winning, or tie my feet together so I have to hop around the bases. But I'm going to do my best to win anyway, dammit.

The problem is that if I do win, I'd not only anger the coaches and make all the kids cry, but I'd probably be forced to sleep on the couch for the foreseeable future. Because my wife would be mad. Real mad. As in get-the-divorce-papers mad.

So my only choice, really, is to pull a hamstring. I could even pull a hamstring in some sporting event, enabling me to go down with honor. But it would be my luck that I'd pull my groin.

Dorky Dad the toothless hillbilly

2009-07-14T19:50:00.004-05:00

For the past two days, The Wife's evenings have been taken up by what she said were "meetings" involving "important work" that she "had to do." As a result, I've spent the past two evenings playing zone defense against my two kids.

Ugh.

Double ugh: The infant was screaming because he was teething and likely has an ear infection. The 5-year-old, meanwhile, was whining because I was paying too much attention to the screamer.

My life is hell, I thought. Several times. OK, about every five minutes.

This was inevitable. On evenings when I'm alone with the kids it is almost entirely likely that the little one will spend most of that time screaming. It's not like I scare him. Most of the time he's pretty thrilled to see me and on most days I'm the fun parent. I do fun parent things, like lift him in the air and give him zerberts and a variety of other cry-prevention efforts. That's my job as a dad. Indeed, I'd say it's the main reason I became a dad in the first place. (Along with the prospect that one of my children will play in the major leagues one day; in that sense children are like little lottery tickets that cost you a lot of money and most of your hair.)

But when Mom's gone it's like someone has turned on a switch, and my otherwise happy, calm baby turns into a 20-pound demon who screams and flails and produces excess saliva. And I'm reduced to a useless, drooling pile of flesh and bone.

As it is, I revert back to my bachelor days on evenings The Wife is gone. I'm the household cook, responsible for making often complex meals. Yet when The Wife is gone my kids are lucky if they're not eating the ravioli straight from the can. For each of the past two days tortilla chips played a significant role in the evening meal. And yes, salsa is a vegetable.

Activities likewise are light. OK, boys, what movie shall I require you to watch for the next two hours so I can recapture my brain power?

Don't even ask if I clean. OK, I don't. I hate cleaning. The biggest single reason why I'm the family cook is that, one day, I decided I needed to do more work around the house and gave myself a choice. It was a no-brainer and I started reading cookbooks.

Minimalist as my evenings as a single parent are, they are nothing compared to what my evenings are like when The Sequel starts crying and I'm the lone adult. When the baby is crying it's like I've been given a bomb and told to defuse it: As more of my efforts to calm said baby fail, the more frantic I get and the lower my IQ gets. A baby who is crying uncontrollably can reduce a Harvard professor to a toothless hillbilly in a matter of minutes.

Until, that is, The Wife gets home, when I fall down on my knees, lift my hands to the heavens ... and hand the kid over to her before passing out in a big, thankful heap.

Beware the fate of the love-earworm

2009-07-13T22:40:00.002-05:00

It's unlikely that any of what's left of my readership would qualify as teenagers -- unless they were reading for some strange science project on the exploration of a completely different species other than themselves. But a few of you, I'm sure, have teenagers. And if you do, or you know of a teenager, or you're like me and you have a future teenager living with you, then the following advice is for you:

Inform them that, under no circumstances, should they ever, ever consider having "a song" with a girlfriend or boyfriend. If they do, they will regret it for the rest of their lives. It is likely that whatever song it is will make it onto the regular playlist of most soft rock stations, resulting in a lifetime in which, every now and then, they walk into a reminder of whatever hellish relationship they had.

I, as you might imagine, am a case in point.

I've said before that my pre-wife lady friends were all completely nuts. (I'm not necessarily saying that they were nuts before I met them -- I fully acknowledge the possibility that time spent with me drove them nuts. Regardless, by the time of the breakup 100 percent of my girlfriends were nuts. In that case, then The Wife is proof positive that I do not drive ALL women crazy, though maybe she just has a slow go-nuts time.)

The result is that, while much of the time spent in those relationships was rewarding, in one way or the other, many of them had, say, a certain unpleasantness about them, like the unpleasantness of having my life threatened or of walking into a dormroom filled with torn-up pictures of myself. Or there are others that just make me wonder what the heck I was thinking. In any case, these are not necessarily memories I want to conjure up on a regular basis. Certainly not when I'm walking into a gas station in the middle of nowhere.

Which is what I did this past weekend. We were on our way to a friend's house in southern Minnesota and stopped by the gas station because The Sequel needed a sequel to his diaper. And as I walked into the gas station, I was met by Bryan Adams' "Everything I do," one of the single most annoying songs ever written -- made quadruply annoying by virtue of being a song dedicated to an early college girlfriend.

(Dammit. I have it in my head now. CURSE YOU, BRYAN ADAMS FOR WRITING THAT HORRIFIC EARWORM!!! CURSE YOU! CURSE YOU, I SAY!!)

One may wonder why I'd pick a song with lyrics that sound like they were ripped off a middle schooler's love note, and I'd provide this answer: I was on lots of drugs at the time. OK, maybe not. But the impact on the brain of an immature infatuation is quite similar, to the point that it's not really a good idea to drive or operate heavy machinery or be governor of South Carolina and be love-sick at the same time. That's to say, I wasn't really thinking straight.

I had no idea the fate I had brought upon myself, the periodic torture to which I'd be subjected for a lifetime. I don't go a month without hearing that stupid song in a grocery store, an elevator, a pharmacy or even the car as The Wife decides to change the channel to her favorite soft rock station -- the home of several of those old girlfriend songs. Most of which I'm desperately trying NOT to remember.

In the end, maybe it's my ex-girlfriends' ultimate revenge. I drove them nuts, and their songs are spending a lifetime driving me nuts.

So take it from me, kids. If your girlfriend or boyfriend wants to dedicate a song to you, make up some excuse. Say you've gone deaf. Fake a heart attack. Accidentally toss your stereo out the window. If you're in your car, drive off the road. But whatever you do, do not let that song be connected with that relationship until the woman has a ring on her finger and you've begun choosing florists for the wedding.

Even then, at least make it a good song.