I Get It Now

Libby's family has some great stories. They could write a book. Actually, John should write the book since he plays prominently in about a third of them. But one of the first stories that I heard, and one of the stories that has stuck in my mind most clearly, is a little number about lima bean casserole and a feat of seemingly Herculean, rage-fueled strength.

As I remember it, the story goes something like this.

Karen (Libby's mom) had prepared a lima bean casserole for dinner. The family had always stuck with a family-dinner-at-the-table routine through the years, and Karen always did a great job of providing a variety of home-cooked meals, making use of whatever was available in the pantry and freezer. Usually, the meals were pretty well received. This particular meal was not. The children (I'm not sure which ones were involved or what ages they would have been--that bit of information has faded into the ether of my brain) ranted and raved and whined and moaned about the casserole, ultimately refusing to eat it.

This infuriated Karen. She snatched up the casserole dish, brought it into the kitchen, and then slammed the dish down over the center divider in their kitchen sink, breaking the casserole dish in twain. And, I'm sure, silencing her children.

The story has been told many times and is used as an example of Karen's rage at the children getting just a touch out of hand. As a young man, I shared in the good chuckle at Karen's expense, dismissing the incident as, perhaps, evidence of her mildly high-strung personality type. This response, while foolish and naive is, I'm sure, the same kind of knee-jerk response that pretty much anyone who has heard the story (but who don't have kids) would have.

As the kids have grown older, I've grown more and more dismissive of the events in the story. Having a toddler and an infant, there were a few moments where frustration took hold and I felt like checking out, but even then, things never reached anything near a boiling point. For that to happen, I think you have to be dealing with children of at least toddler age and above. But, even still, a small portion of my brain held onto the notion that "Maybe she over-reacted just a touch."

Until yesterday, when I came to fully relate and appreciate what she might have been going through. I did not break a casserole dish, but that's only because I did not have one readily available. If I had, I was in such a state that I might have tried to break it over my knee instead of having the sense to take it to the kitchen sink.

It was a very bad day.

Also, I wouldn't have had a casserole dish anyway because our stove is broken. It is just one of the things that has broken in the last month (stove, garage door, both cars, one car twice, air conditioner for the second time this year, both laptops, one laptop twice, the refrigerator and my desktop computer are both making weird noises . . . and I just can't go on any longer). I blame summer because it is a godless season where nothing good ever happens.

But the stove didn't break yesterday. Nonetheless, many other things went rather poorly.

First, two of our three big chickens were eaten by something. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not fond of chickens and, while I had grown to accept the existence of these three chickens in my life, I was hardly attached to them. But this was an ominous start to the day.

For some reason, we started the day by showing Gabe some of the videos from when he was a baby. He was enthralled. Couldn't get enough. He sat in front of my computer for almost a half hour while I ran him back a selection of the movies from his first year. Then I got bored with that. He didn't. So I told him I would try to burn him a DVD so he could watch the movies at his leisure somewhere other than in my office.

But I didn't have any DVDs. Nor did I have any idea how to make a DVD. Despite the fact that DVD burning technology has been around for something like a decade, I have never done it myself. I've had interest, but I just haven't had the gumption to actually do it. Or learn anything about doing it. But I decided that yesterday was the day that all that changed.

So we ran to Wal-Mart and I bought some blank DVDs. While we were there, I decided to be extra nice and I treated the kids to some new play-doh and some cheapish toys. It was going to be the best day ever. They'd get to watch home movies and play with new toys and then create something wonderful with their play-doh. They would love me forever and this day would stick in their minds as one of the best.

So we got home and I set to work on making the DVD while they played with their new stuff. I've never purchased a GOOD piece of DVD creation software, but I figured there would be something on the computer. DVD burners are standard now, so it made sense there would have to be something on the computer. I started out with Windows Movie Maker.

As it turns out, Windows Movie Maker DOES make movies out of clips, but it DOESN'T burn them onto DVDs unless you buy an upgrade. I didn't find this out until I burned what I thought was my movie onto what I thought was a blank DVD. Turned out it was just a Windows movie on a CD-R. Apparently, while looking at a box of DVDs, I bought a box of CD-Rs instead. So even if Windows Movie Maker did make DVDs, it wouldn't have done me any good.

So, after wasting a good hour on that, I gave up. We had lunch and I put them down for a nap, hoping to get a nap myself because I'd not had a very good night of sleep (probably I was hearing the chickens being slaughtered but didn't realize it). Neither of them slept. For two hours I fought with both of them to get them to lie down, shut up, and go to sleep. And, even though I knew they were both tired, they wouldn't do it.

So no nap and two hours of fighting small children had left me in a bit of a funk. All the same, I decided that I was going to press on and get the DVD made. So we ran out to the store, again, and this time I made sure I bought DVDs. I found another program on my computer, Roxio, that would burn DVDs. And I started the whole process over fresh with that program, inserted the blank DVD, and discovered that, for reasons I still can't understand, my computer was reading the blank DVDs as having zero available memory. No matter what I did, I could not burn anything on these DVDs.

So I decided to try it on my laptop. I had to install a newer version of Roxio, but I was able to make it work (but not until Gabe had already gone to bed--yes, I spent ALL DAY yesterday creating one 90 minute DVD).

Around 3:00 I decided to ride the stationary bike. I usually do it at 3:00 because that's when Wow Wow Wubzzy is on. I usually ride for about a half an hour, and Wubzzy is one of the few shows that they will both watch and be mildly distracted by. While I was riding, I heard this "tink, tink, tink" noise coming from what I thought was just outside the window. After it kept happening for a few minutes, I got up and looked outside to see if a bird was knocking around on something. Then I noticed that the sound was coming from under my feet. Specifically, from the heat register. And I could also hear laughter coming through it. Ugh.

I went into the living room and both kids were huddled around the heat register. For the past five minutes, they had been dropping ALL of their small toys down into it (they also removed the cover and broke both of the little flaps off it). Many were lost forever, I fear--too far into the pipe for me to reach. The rest of them were covered in dirt, food scraps they'd been dropping down there for years, and dead moths. I spent about ten minutes cleaning the stuff out during which time I sat the kids down in separate chairs and demanded that they sit quietly while I fixed and retrieved things.

When I was finished--bike ride aborted--I decided to see about setting up the laptop and burning that DVD. So I worked on that. Not five minutes after I finished cleaning out the heat register, I heard splashing coming from the other side of my office wall. The cat water.

I went around the corner and Norah was playing in the cat's water bowl. She had dumped a cup full of hard cat food in there and was splashing around, knocking soggy cat food and water all over herself and everything else. With forced calm, I stood her up, told her in no uncertain terms that we don't play with the cat water, escorted her into the living room, then went back in to clean out the water bowl. I picked it up and dumped it into the toilet (which Gabe had just peed in--and for some reason he refuses to flush these days, I guess to make up for the fact that he did nothing BUT flush it for nearly two years). Once it was all in there, I noticed that several of Norah's little toys were floating around in with the cat food. Several of her little toys that she has become VERY attached to. Several little toys that I"e spent many minutes searching for over the past few weeks. Several toys that I knew I couldn't flush down the toilet. So I stuck my hand down into the pissy cat food water and sifted through it for toys. I found a couple, but I fear I didn't find them all. So far, if I didn't, she hasn't noticed yet.

I sighed, cleaned off the toys, filled up the water bowl, and put it back. I closed my eyes and counted to ten (I didn't really because counting to myself does nothing but make me angrier because, let's face it, at that point all I'm doing is adding the waste of several seconds counting onto whatever is already frustrating me, but I did metaphorically count to ten by not punching the wall or doing something equally rash or violent). Then I sat down to try to focus on the DVD burning to at least get it started.

Two minutes later (I am not kidding here, it might have actually been less than two minutes because I had only JUST sat down), I hear splashing again. She had dumped another cup of cat food into the bowl.

I lost my mind a little and told her to go into the dining room and play. Gabe was in there playing with the play-doh at the table. While I was still dumping out the water bowl for the second time, I hear shrieking and screaming and whining, at great volume, coming from the dining room.

And then I actually did lose my mind. I won't go into details, but nobody was hurt and nothing was broken. The kids did spend twenty minutes sitting quietly in separate chairs in the living room with nothing to play with and no TV on. If you know how well my kids sit still, I think you might have a pretty good idea just what kind of impression my total lack of composure had on them. They were seriously not going to fuck with me anymore.

And they didn't for the rest of the day, which went rather well. I finished the DVD. They went to bed early and fell almost immediately to sleep because they hadn't had naps. And I got to spend a few quiet hours alone (oh yeah, did I mention that Libby worked until well after the kids are in bed last night?).

Lesson learned. Two lessons learned, actually. Lesson One: don't judge another person's loss of composure until you've been in their shoes (and, still, Karen had FIVE kids to deal with, I only have two, so I still don't have any real idea). Lesson Two: I don't care what the touchy feely parenting guides say. For being nice and keeping my cool I was rewarded with bratty children that kept pushing and pushing throughout the day. For losing my cool, I was rewarded with a few hours of peace and quiet and children who did what they were told to do. So, make of that what you will.

Oh, and the last chicken was eaten this morning, the garage door broke, my hot tub cover is falling apart, and when we went outside to play, within five minutes, the kids got into a sand throwing fight that resulted in Norah being pushed face first into the wet sandbox. So today isn't really shaping up to be any better. If they don't take naps, we might run to the store so I can buy the cheapest casserole dish I can find to shatter in my sink.