He even knows how to go four-wheeling with his mommy!

Like all four-year-olds, Malcolm is as sharp as a tack. If it is 3:00 and you tell him that you’ll play a game with him in five minutes, you can bet your sweet bippy that he will come trotting up at 3:05 to remind you of your obligations. He can tell you which game of a three game series against the Cardinals last month the Giants lost 5-1. He remembers whether you told him earlier that he didn’t need to take a bath that day and can tell if you are in the kitchen eating chips (even if you try to eat them really, really quietly.) The kid knows a lot.

I am just glad that there is a lot of stuff he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that the Wheat Chex he loves so dearly have no chocolate in them, despite their dark brown appearance.

He doesn’t know that I sometimes let him tag me out when we play baseball. Also, I can throw my fastball much faster than I’ll let on.

I am pretty sure that he doesn’t know that most of the time when I lock the door in the bathroom, I am just hiding from him.

He doesn’t know that after he goes to bed, we have popcorn, and sometimes ice cream!

He doesn’t know that play dates are often more for the parent’s sake than they are for the kids.

He doesn’t know that there are video games out there where you can be a ninja, a sharpshooter, or even Pablo Sandoballs. (As far as he knows, the entire video game universe consists of boggle, scrabble and game called “The Kindergarten Game.” I’m going to keep it that way as long as I can!)

He doesn’t understand how easy it would be for him to reach his goodie bag (filled with candy, chocolates etc. and reserved for semi-special occasions) while I have myself locked up in the bathroom.

He doesn’t yet know how bad my taste in music is. For now, he assumes everyone listens to Weird Al.

Lastly, he is beginning to learn how to read, but I am super-stoked that he doesn’t know how to get to this blog. I think he might get upset at some of the content around here.

The beginning of the school year is a time honored traditional whereby the parents of school kids pretend to be really sad when their kids march off to school, leaving the house quiet(er) and the parents sane(r). Undoubtedly, mornings can get a bit hectic preparing lunches, washing accumulated grit off of faces, and cramming breakfast down tiny little pie holes. Even so, the euphoria that follows walking out the gate at your child’s school with the realization that you won’t have to pick them up for 3-6 hours is quite similar to the feeling one has after snorting cocaine off of a strippers’ chest. Yeyo! (If that metaphor doesn’t work for you, you are welcome to imagine the euphoria created by snorting cocaine off of the chest of playful little puppies.)

No, we're not having any fun this summer....

It seems that every kid I know has started school. While the stay at home parents of all these kids are kicking it by the pool, eating bon-bons and toasting martinis to their good lot in life, I am home with Malcolm. I am not jealous of them, I assure you. (It’s more like, “I would sell one of my kidneys to be like you!”) While they are out partying like rock stars, I am battling with Malcolm at the grocery store over whether he should be allowed to touch the stuff in other people’s carts. Sigh.

Before you go accusing me of being one of those stay at home parents who whines about being home with the kid, consider this: … Shit! I have no defense. I am now one of those parents who whines about about being home with the kids! I guess an attitude adjustment is in order, meaning I should start extolling the virtues of conversations like this:

Me: OK, Malcolm, it’s time to put your clothes on.

Him: No!

Me: You said you wanted to go play baseball at 11 o’clock, it’s now 11 o’clock. If you want to go play baseball, you need to put on some clothes.

Him: No!

Me: OK, whatever.

Him: Actually, I’m ready to put clothes on.

Me: Do you want to pick them out, or do you want me to do it for you?

Him: You pick them out.

Me: OK, put these clothes on.

Him: No! I don’t want to wear these clothes.

Me: Malcolm, I am going to drink the acid out of these batteries. That is going to make me take a long nap. I don’t want you to call anyone or do anything. Just wait for mommy to get home tonight, OK?

Him: OK.

I got two weeks until he goes back full time. I’d say wish me luck, but I don’t luck. I need cocaine and some puppies.

On Saturday, we took Malcolm out to go golfing. On the practice green, he started looking, well, a little green. After mumbling something unintelligible, he proceeded to projectile vomit all over that finely mowed grass.

It was like this, except with more chunder!

Not wanting the 50 or so kids lined up for a youth golfing event to have to putt through any more puke, I picked him up and placed him in the rough next to the green. He continued to toss his cookies for another minute or so, while I rubbed his back and tried my best not to stare at the large chunks of fruit that were spewing forth from his mouth. Seeing all those kids with a hopeful and energetic look in their eyes was inspiring, at least until they saw what Malcolm was doing and started dry heaving themselves. After the episode finally came and went, I got some paper towels to clean up the mess. Let me tell you, cleaning sticky, chunky, gelatinous barf off of a tightly mowed green is a bit of a surreal experience. You should try it some time!!!

We got home and Malcolm threw up some more. Sadly, most of it went on our couch, which we had professionally cleaned last week. Timing is everything in life, isn’t it. I found out that two of the other kids at the play date were training to be supermodels on Friday as well. I think it may have been some bad cheese that we ate.

Ah, to heck with it. I don’t care. You know what time it is? It’s fantasy football time! I love fantasy football. If fantasy football were a gay man, I would marry it, even in a red state. If fantasy football wore Betty White’s dress to the Emmy’s, I would tell it it looked amazing. (And then take it home for some sweet lovin’!) Fantasy football could call me a racist, say that FEMA is building concentration camps, and compare me to Hitler, and I would still give it a big juicy hug at the end of each day. In order of awesomeness, my priorities are breathing, drinking, eating, Amy, fantasy football, money, a good toilet, Friday Night Lights, and then Malcolm. The hold that fantasy football has over me is stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Situation, put together!

Amy joined the party again this year by drafting her own team. She and her college pals started a league, and I helped Amy prepare for her draft. (That’s why she shows up so high on the priority list!) My draft is next monday. I will be feverishly preparing for the draft, so my posts my be a bit sparse this week. Wish me luck, and stay away from mozzarella cheese at my house, for the time being!

Daddy, that thing I just ate made me feel a little ... fuzzy.

I hadn’t really figured out how I was going to go about getting Malcolm to agree to go to Home Depot with me to begin the process of unfungaling and re-grouting our shower. Luckily, fate was on my side this day, as Malcolm threw a ball into his ceiling fan, causing the light  to shatter and sending shards of glass cascading everywhere in his room. I saw the opening and I drove straight through it: “Malcolm, now we are going to have to go to the hardware store and figure out how to fix the light. This is really bad thing that you have done.” Inside, I was beaming! Score one for the home team! Sure, this meant that I was going to either have to replace the light fixture on Malcolm’s fan (or worse, replace the whole thing!) but this paled in comparison to having a whining brat running all around the store, throwing merchandise everywhere and proudly informing anyone who would listen how much he hates my guts.

Malcolm was more than a bit puzzled as to why we spent most of the time at the store in the cleaning solution and caulking aisles. “Daddy, I thought we needed a new ceiling fan?” he asked, at one point. I assured him that we were almost ready to head over to the ceiling fans and constantly chastised him for why we were there, “Remember, you did a really bad thing.” Much to my amazement, this actually worked, and he was pretty well behaved while I read instructions on the back of anti-fungal cleaners. Sadly, Home Depot does not appear to sell replacement globes to the ceiling fans they sell, so I ended up having to buy a whole new fan. Even worse, the replacement ceiling fan we bought is awesome: the light is a mini-earth, and there are stars and moons all over the blades. I am sure Malcolm has taken away this from the experience: destroy something large in the house and it will be replaced by something way better. I’m pissed.

We got home and Malcolm got to watch me scrape all the infected grout out the cracks in the shower. To his credit, he did not ever say, “You missed a spot!” I offered him the chance to help, but he graciously declined, muttering something under his breath about not wanting to inhale potentially poisonous spores. Soon, I had the caulk gun out and was spreading sealer around like it was icing on a cake. Both of us were extremely happy as nothing makes boys giggle with glee as much as the words “caulk” and “gun.” Having assured myself that I had rid our bathroom of any further pizza ingredients, we piled back downstairs, started up a game of Life, and picked a date next year when we planned on replacing his ceiling fan. Remember that beer guy? He’s back!

DO show up for the ceremony. I know it is tempting to just go to the reception site early and starting drinking all the free booze, but occasionally something bizarre happens at the ceremony, and, when it does, you surely don’t want to miss it. At Saturday’s wedding the priest asked the bride and groom if they had a ferret. Yes, a ferret. This was right after “Love is patient, love is blind…” and right before “I will love and honor you all the days of my life.” Totally random! The only way to appreciate the awkwardness of this moment was to sit through it, and that is why you always go to the ceremony. DO NOT go to the ceremony and confuse the sacraments with free booze. Trust me, you should not be asking for seconds at the head of the communion line.

DO have a few drinks at the cocktail reception. Drinking alcohol at this time is socially acceptable and will help you deal with the people staring at your tits (I am especially self-conscious about mine, and it is so much easier for me to shout, “Eyes up here, buddy!!!” with a drink in my hand.) DO NOT do shots at the cocktail reception. I repeat, DO NOT do shots at the cocktail reception. You may have a shot later in the evening if you suck at dancing and want to get better at it. You may also have a shot later if the stranger you have been randomly making out with has breath reminiscent of a sea otter. Both of those loopholes occur much later in the evening, though. If you do shots at the cocktail reception, you will most likely be the be the guy mistaking the groom for a waiter. Don’t be that guy.

No dirty dancing here!

DO have a fun time dancing. It doesn’t matter if you are any good at it (I’m awful) as long as you bring enthusiasm and keep your elbows down. DO NOT dirty dance with the bride. For that matter, DO NOT dirty dance with any parents of the bride. In fact, let’s just say, DO NOT dirty dance. When you dirty dance, you are really just telling the world how sad and lonely you are. I guess I should also say, DO NOT break dance, dolphin dance or humpty dance. Nothing good will come of it. By all means, if “Total Eclipse of the Heart” comes on, DO NOT stay on the dance floor. I learned this one the hard way, and wound up at the bottom of a huge dog pile with beer and dirt all over my suit. That song just packs to much raw emotion and should be avoided at all costs. When you hear Bonnie Tyler say, “Turn around,” DO so, and run for your life!

DO thank the hosts of the wedding, telling them how lovely the event was. DO NOT nod at them on your way out the door, holding every unopened bottle of alcohol that you can manage to get your hands on and singing “God Bless America” at the top of your lungs. That is tacky, and I shouldn’t have done that. DO make an exit. DO NOT make a stupid one.

DO attend a post wedding brunch, if you are so invited. It’s a good way to wrap up the weekend and tell silly stories about what happened the night before. DO NOT stalk the married couple, banging loudly on their door early in the morning and yelling, “WHERE THE DONUTS AT?”

That’s about it, I have to find a dry cleaner and some donuts now…

Cake? What cake? I haven't had any cake. Where's a bat?

I care about this because I see the way Malcolm acts when he eats sugar. Malcolm has his good days and his bad days, but I guarantee you this, if he eats a bunch of crap, he is going to be a train wreck. All kids are both Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and getting them to be the sweet, fun, turtleneck-wearing Mister Hyde is almost impossible if chocolate is involved. (Doctor Jekyll is easy: sugar, sleep deprivation or exposure to Barney.) So while a somewhat healthy diet isn’t going to guarantee that Malcolm doesn’t make me want to chain him to the radiator, it sure is an important first step.

While at Malcolm’s summer camp sign in yesterday, I quickly glanced over the items that the other parents were planning to bring in for today’s potluck. I had planned on bringing some quick and easy spaghetti, but I decided after reading the “entree” list that an upgrade was in order. Hot dogs. Nachos. Kraft Mac N Cheese. (How do I know it was Kraft? It said so right there on the list!) My mind sprang into action attempting to come up with something that would actually serve a nutritional purpose, while still looking appetizing enough to compete with culinary heavy hitters like nachos and Kraft’s take on bright orange “micro penises.” After all, Ms. Delaware may be healthiest girl at the pageant, but if she has cauliflower ears and a spinach mustache, she isn’t going to become Miss America.

Taking all this into account, I rearranged my spaghetti into something somewhat healthy. Instead of the canned spaghetti sauce that contains sucralose or something called “acesulfame” (give ya a dollar if you can pronounce it!) I made my own, using some fresh pork sausage, whole tomatoes, and 2 hours of cooking time. To that, I added an equal part butternut squash puree, and the results were tasty. Not the best thing I ever made, by any sense of the imagination, but maybe, just maybe, some kid will eat it instead of the gross stuff. Will Miss Delaware edge out Miss Donut-Nachos. We’ll see!

Yesterday, however, was a trip down memory lane. I picked him up from summer camp relatively early so that we could go to the park for some baseball before watching the Giants-Phillies game on TV. I knew he was looking forward to it, because he left a game of freeze dance at camp to come with me, and one does not willingly leave a game of freeze dance without good reason. Once at the park, I began to sniff that something terrible was amiss when Malcolm broke out into a tantrum after a play in which he tagged me out. The reason? “Daddy you made me out of breath.” “Oh Jeez,” I thought to myself, “this is going to get ugly.”

Sure enough, after another tantrum in response to my calling a pitch that almost hit me a ball and not a strike, I said we were leaving. He erupted. After calling me every name in the book, he threw a ball at me. When that failed to sway me, he hucked the bat at me, hitting me in the spine. I would have throttled the little turd, except the little girls at a nearby lemonade stand were now paying close attention to us and I was feeling a little too much like an episode of Cops. Instead, I quietly ushered Malcolm into his carseat and began driving home. As we turned the corner, Malkie chucked a water bottle at my head, hitting the target and dousing the car with a fresh coat of H2O.

I wish I could print the things I yelled at Malcolm after this, but Amy’s family members who read the blog might object. It was not pretty. Now Malcolm can’t play with his baseball gear for a while, and can’t let my guard down while he is anywhere near my groin. I only hope that this was some sort of short term blip, and not the beginning of his transformation into this guy:

I used to think that giving your kids a million kinds of technology was ugly parenting. I would see kids playing games on their handheld Nintendos, Ipods, and PSPs and I thought, “Wow, their parents must be really fucking lazy. Tsk, tsk.” Having traveled all over the western United States in the past few weeks and asking Malcolm sit through things that no four-year-old easily consents to (like seven hour long car rides or lengthy waits at the doctor’s office to get his stitches removed), I now know that the parents weren’t lazy. They were fucking smart.

It’s a fact. Little gizmos make your kid tolerate situations they would otherwise drive you crazy in. Four-year-olds are hard wired to run, scream, and talk about their butts. This does not bode well for long airplane rides. Under the circumstances, you can either corral their fragile little attention spans by showing them Mary Poppins, or risk having your aisle-mates learn that your new nickname is “Poopy McPooperstein.” Sure, I could stash the technology away and try to to occupy Malcolm’s time by reading to him and playing games, but such heroic efforts at parenting are better left to people who aren’t busy downing as many rum and cokes as they can between takeoff and landing.

Additionally, “regular” parenting will always entail your child having at least one tantrum during plane flights. I swear, if there is anything I hate in this world more than the stink-eye that single airline passengers shoot you when your kid is screaming in their ear, it is the the patronizing tone that other parents use when they take it upon themselves to instruct you on what you should do to make your child happy. Lose, lose. Much safer to just plug the kids in, sit back and let the rum take its course.

Monsters, Inc. Life saver, or gateway drug?

In light of this reality, Malcolm now has a portable DVD player and my old Iphone. I try to limit what he can do on each of them, vetoing both his attempts to watch “Showgirls” on DVD and play “Ragdoll Blaster” on the phone. The downside is that he now asks for each constantly, and I am, for the moment, resisting. These tools are useful ways to survive significant hurdles, like sitting in the car for 15 hours in a three day span. They are not, for now, used for more mundane things like driving to summer camp or waiting in the car while I knock over liquor stores. Maybe one day Malcolm will win out and I will have to deal with a child that has absolutely no patience, but then again, that’s what rum and cokes are for, aren’t they?

I find this picture oddly arousing

A dave’s taco is simple: tortilla, meat, sauce. I could bore you with details about the grilled tortilla, or the oyster sauce marinated tri-tip, but honestly you could get that anywhere. The thing that separates a Dave’s taco from the rest of the taco world is the sauce. The sauce is good. Really fucking good. Smack yo momma good. Rich, orange and spicier than a baboon’s ass on the Fourth of July, the sauce elevates the taco into a symphony of heat and flavor. I don’t usually eat garbage, but when I see all the plates thrown out at Dave’s garbage can, I actually consider diving in there and licking plates clean. I’d tell you what’s in the sauce to make it so special, but I have no idea. Dave won’t tell me, and I am not sure biochemists could break down all the ingredients involved.

So every time I am in Bakersfield, I treat myself to a taco orgy, consuming at least eight at each sitting. Dave still knows my name, despite the fact that I once went 10 years without eating there. And when I am done with my bender, my face and fingers still dripping with sauce, I wonder, “When will I be able to eat here again?”

I started thinking the other day about the things I would do if it meant I got to eat at Dave’s. For your enjoyment, here is what I came up with:

I would become one of those deodorant testers who stick their nose in other people’s armpits.

I would wear the Hot Dog On A Stick uniform in public.

I would go to Bakersfield, even in summer!

For a gallon of the sauce, I would watch a movie narrated by Bjork while eating popcorn seasoned with salmon salt.

If Dave opened up a delivery service, I would wear crotchless chaps in a mosquito breeding tent.

For a “Tacos of the Week” basket, I would use a Q-Tip laced with whale diarrhea.

If you gave me the recipe for Dave’s sauce, I would wash your back. If you made it for me, I would wash your front. (Thanks Fletch, for that one!)

Lastly, if you could somehow convince Dave to move into our guest bedroom (without a weapon and a few lengths of rope, which turned out to be not such a good idea) I would do it all, on national TV, on Superbowl Sunday. Naked. They are that good.

Speaking of tacos, it’s lunchtime here, and I gotta start moseying…

It was Saturday, and my eye wouldn’t stop twitching. It wasn’t twitching in a good way like it does on Christmas or the morning of our fantasy football draft. It was twitching, and for a brief, glorious moment, I didn’t know why. Then, I remembered.

I remembered that our cars and garage had been ransacked the night before. We had been back in town for a grand total of three hours when someone came down our driveway, opened up each of our cars and rummaged through them, going so far as to open the one suitcase remaining in the trunk in a search for valuables. Finding nothing but my sunglasses the thief then opened our garage hoping to find some good loot. Luckily, both the garage and our cars are in such a state of disrepair that the thief was unable to find much of anything worth taking. Joke is on you, thief!

I cursed my inattention to detail, but then cut myself a little slack because we had returned from our trip at midnight the night before. Why were we so late? We missed our original flight home. We were scheduled to fly out of Kalispell, Montana but after arriving a whopping three minutes after they closed the ticket counter (still 27 minutes before our departure time!) the good folks at Horizon Air decided to cancel our entire reservation and, as luck would have it, there were no seats out of that airport for five more days. Fortunately, there were seats available in Missoula (120 miles away) so we rented a car, drove like Helio Castoneves through Arizona, and made a connection to Seattle. In Seattle, they got Amy on an earlier flight to San Francisco while Malcolm and I had to beg and plead to let us on the last flight out of Dodge. Fortunately, the gods smiled on us (owing mainly to my story that mommy was “in heaven now” and that we were still getting used to traveling alone) and we got two seats to Oakland. We got home late, but it was sure better than spending a night in Seattle.

I then remembered why we missed our flight. Actually, there were two reasons. First, Amy and her mom (on my insistence) waited in line at a Mexican restaurant for what seemed like an eternity for a lunch. Even if we hadn’t wasted 20 minutes on a couple of tacos and a quesadilla, we probably would have made our flight, which explains why I took it upon myself to “run into” a Super-Target for some Children’s Ibuprofen. For anyone who hasn’t been to a Super-Target, “running into” a Super-Target is just about as easy as “running into” the Library of Congress for a newspaper. We had no chance, really.

This looks too eerily similar to a mugshot that I have no doubt will one day be taken.

The memory of  why we needed the Ibuprofen then came to mind. Earlier that day, Malcolm walked right in front of someone throwing a bocci ball, opening a gash on his forehead worthy of a IFC combatant. His face stained with blood, we took him to a local trauma center to get stitched up. (Since it was Montana, I was glad that he wasn’t getting worked on by a taxidermist!) Malcolm was brave, but I was braver, as I had to hold his head down while watching the doctor repeatedly poke Malcolm’s wound with a needle to give a local anesthetic. Yowza! Somehow I managed to avoid both vomiting and crying. Maybe I would have if I knew what the rest of the day would hold for us. Looking back at it, I was lucky to get out of it with a stolen pair of sunglasses and a twitchy eye. Some of us didn’t make it through so well.