The Fourteen Year Itch

Fourteen years ago today, at this very time (9:30 a.m.) I was already starting to get drunk for the first time. Mid-afternoon, I would get married to my first wife (who is determined to be my last wife by driving me to an early grave), and then I would get drunk a second time that night.

I would not get drunk twice in one day again until last Saturday (Christmas Day), when Uncle James and I spent much of the sacred day bombed off our asses. Around 3:00, I laid down for an hour long nap and woke up with a hangover--the first time I've ever had one in the middle of the afternoon. But I soon drank it away and everything was better. It was a truly blessed day (and I will put up a big long Christmas post filled with several days of pictures and videos at some point in the next few days--whenever I get more than a few minutes to sit at the computer).

But back to my 14th anniversary today.

As I'm sure everyone already knows, the 14th anniversary is the "ivory anniversary." To celebrate, I have a special treat in store for Libby when she gets home from work tonight. It's taken a little doing, but I've managed to set up a two-shall-enter-one-shall-leave style Mad Max Thunderdome in our backyard. Only, this time, three shall enter and I shall leave as I use a walrus as a club and beat an elephant to death with it. Then I will take all of their tusks and build Libby a series of fourteen stylishly scrimshawed bird cages that she can hang around our yard (probably in the non-Thunderdomed parts). Then, every time a songbird takes a shit in one of these birdhouses, Libby can think of me. Very poetic and appropriate, I think.

And that, I think, does a pretty good job of summing up how great the last fourteen years have been. Thanks, Libby! You're a peach and WELL worth the effort of beating an elephant to death with a walrus!

The Day I Dropped the Bomb

A little while ago, I noticed that our Christmas tree was out of place. For the past few years, we've been using a little four foot "porch tree" as our only Christmas tree. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) it can be placed up on a table away from our children, and 2) we are lazy and a small tree takes far less time to decorate. This year, we have it up on a cabinet in our dining room. It's high enough that Norah can't reach it, and we didn't figure we would have as much trouble with Gabe this year. Last year, we had the tree behind the couch in the living room and, by the end of the season, he wasn't messing with it anymore. We figured he had moved beyond that stage where he had to mess with the ornaments all the time.

Not so.

A couple times this week I've noticed the tree pulled out to the edge of the cabinet, and it's been turned a few times. Gabe has obviously been doing an inventory of the ornaments and pulled the tree out so he could reach more of them. A few times, I've found little, unimportant ones (the ones we purposely put close to the bottom of the tree) lying on the floor, and each time I've picked them up, chewed Gabe out, and hung them back up. After the first few times, I threatened to put the Christmas tree away if he didn't stop.

And it sort of seemed like he had. Until today. When I went over to push the tree back against the wall, I noticed that it seemed kind of thinly decorated. Closer inspection showed that, indeed, more than a dozen ornaments were missing.

I immediately went to the first place that I now look for ANYTHING when it's gone missing in our house, behind the couch to Gabe's little hoard. He is keeping everything back there now. Food, drink cups, trash, toys, books, more trash, vermin, you name it. After pulling out all the blankets and pillows, I quickly spotted a couple of the ornaments. I called him over and told him to find them all for me.

For ten minutes, he found ornaments. Lots of them. Some not in the best of shape anymore, and all of them missing their hooks, which I'm sure will end up in my foot at some point in the not too distant future. He had, apparently, been stockpiling them every time I wasn't paying close enough attention and I just hadn't noticed since not TOO many of them were missing.

The end result. It was quite a collection, and I'm pretty sure there are still several back there.

As he kept pulling them out, I made the ultimate threat. The child threat equivalent of the nuclear option. I built on my previous threat of taking down the tree thusly:

"That's it!" I said. "I'm putting away the Christmas tree, and if we don't have a Christmas tree, then Santa won't know to come to our house. No more Santa! No more Christmas!"

Not surprisingly, Gabe started to cry. He sobbed and bellowed and made some excuse about needing more light to see the ornaments and that was why he took them back there. The kid is improving slightly on his lying skills, but he really needs to work on his concept of plausibility. I let him cry for a little bit and then he promised that he wouldn't take down any more ornaments. I agreed that I wouldn't take the tree down and end Christmas, but if he touched even one more ornament, Christmas was over and all of his presents were going to Finn (in retrospect, that was probably not a good threat as it might make him start to hate Finn--but I know from experience that he doesn't understand the concept of "the less fortunate" so I had to go with something I knew he'd get).

So now we see how well the nuclear option really works. It's been clearly placed on the table, and now I just have to hope that he doesn't force my hand, because I have several presents in here that I really want to open up.

Dad-Type Man Strength to the Rescue

There are advantages to having a stay-at-home dad around the house as opposed to a stay-at-home mom. Probably many advantages--though I can't really think of any others, and even this one is an incredible stretch.

Today, we had our first real emergency in quite some time. We've had many minor emergencies. Like when Norah discovered that she could climb over the back of the couch on the short ends and ended up toppling head first over the back. She landed without harm thanks to the pile of blankets and pillows, but she also landed with her head buried in the pillows so she couldn't move and had a proper freak out because of it. Valuable lessons about gravity and chubby, not entirely dexterous body parts learned. And there have been plenty of slammed fingers or pushings or pokings or what-have-yous. But no proper emergencies of the get-the-blood-flowing variety.

Until today. I left the kids upstairs to play for a little bit while I came down to sort some laundry. Norah's been enjoying the time up there for the past few weeks and Gabe loves it when I leave them alone up there because he can get up to no good without me noticing right away. And that's what he was doing. He decided that he needed to get into the drawers in the armoire. Yeah, the same armoire he broke the door off a few weeks back. The thing is proving to be quite a lot of trouble lately.

Anyway, he had no reason to get in the drawers because they just have some baby clothes we haven't gotten rid of yet and some extra sheets and stuff in them, but he likes to do things he's not supposed to for no other reason than to do them. And, of course, Norah joined in on the fun because she just loves to do whatever Gabe is doing.

"Daddy!" I hear from upstairs. "The door is stuck and Norah is trapped."

"Huh," I think. "That's not one I hear every day." So I run up the stairs figuring he's just closed a door tight and can't turn the knob for some reason or other.

Not so. What he had done, in fact, was close the door to Norah's bedroom. And, while the door was closed, Norah pulled the big bottom drawer in the armoire out behind it, effectively locking the door shut.

Now, as a stay-at-home DAD, I was able to perform a feat of strength that, I think, most women would not have been able to perform. Sure, sure. You hear the story about the adrenaline fueled mother lifting a car off her infant, but this was a different situation entirely. There was no real and immediate danger. Norah was trapped, and she would have gotten very unhappy about it before too long, but she wasn't in any danger (at least not until I started performing my feat of strength, then there might have been the potential for danger), so there wasn't an adrenaline surge to work with.

Because this armoire backs up to the headboard of the bed in the room, and that headboard has a slightly recessed area into which the armoire was backed into, I had to effectively push both the armoire and the bed back by sticking my arm through a three inch gap in the door. And I did. It took much grunting and Gabe probably picked up a few new curse words in the process, but, by god, I saved my child from a boring death in her own room! Hurray for brute man strength saving the day!

Now, this, of course, ignores the fact that my options for opening the door went as such.

First, upon seeing what was keeping the door from opening, I tried to push it in--resorting to man strength immediately to fix the problem. It did not budge easily. It didn't, in fact, budge at all (this was because it wasn't just the armoire but the bed--both of which are pretty hefty and I was completely lacking for leverage). So light exertion man strength wasn't going to solve the problem.

Second, I tried to push the drawer back into the armoire, thus allowing the door to freely swing open. This MIGHT have worked, except that my strengthy man arm was too wide to get in but a very short distance and I couldn't touch the drawer without pushing the door firmly against it. Thus, I couldn't close it because my own brute man strength was exacerbating the situation (at this point I actually thought to myself, "I wonder if I could call Libby and get her home before Norah completed freaked herself out since Libby has such nice, skinny, girly arms that could probably squeak past the door and move the drawer out of the way," but that is beside the point of all this entirely, I believe).

Third, I briefly considered finding something that I could slide in the crack in the door to latch onto the drawer and close it. This would have been physically impossible to do, however. And not even a woman could have done it. There was just no way to maneuver something around that tight of a corner, latch the drawer, and pull it closed. Directions and mass and propulsion and inertia all probably would have played a part and only a stay-at-home inventor could have figured out a way around it. So I put the plastic hanger down that I grabbed to try to do the job.

So, finally, with my options effectively being to call the fire department, call Libby and hope she could get home quickly, or give man strength another go, I went with man strength, hoping that I didn't hyper-extend myself or dislocate my brain pan and have to rely on my three year old to find the phone and dial 911 to save us all.

And I won! Take that stay-at-home moms who could not have done this thing I did!

Why Teachers Should Make Doctor Money

As the days pass, I am becoming increasingly convinced that, once he's in school, Gabe is going to be "that kid." You know the kid I'm talking about. The one who, at the school program, is dancing in place or pulling someone's hair instead of singing the song he's supposed to be singing. The one who never sits still and, several times a day, gets in trouble for disrupting class. The one that teachers have to plan their days around.

He's got all the marks of being "that kid." He's pretty smart. He's high energy and doesn't care for sitting still. And he's got a short attention span and gets bored easily. He's going to be a handful for all of the teachers he has, probably until high school.

Now, to my reasoning for the title of this post. I have to find ways to keep Gabe at least passably entertained every day. It's not an easy task--and I have to admit that I spend a great deal of my energy trying to steer him towards activities that will keep him in one place and get him used to the twelve years of school he's going to spend sitting in small desks--but I only have ONE other child in the house that I have to keep occupied at the same time. Imagine trying to juggle a classroom full of children, all with different needs, AND having to contain/entertain/contend with one or more of "those children." These people should be living sumptuous lives of luxury when they aren't working, and that's all there is too it.

Anyway, I had all these thoughts after watching Gabe at his pre-school program yesterday. It was short, about ten minutes. They prepared a few songs that they sang along with their teacher--which they'd obviously been working on for a little while at least--and it was, of course, adorable. Libby got some video of Gabe's "participation" throughout. Watch the videos and tell me that I'm wrong in my assessment of his future school life and how much his teachers should be making for dealing with him and the other kids that are like him.

Kids Say the Creepiest Things

Very brief post.

Libby got home from work a little while ago and had to pee. Gabe ran into the bathroom to pee first then was standing around waiting for Libby to go.

"Leave the room please, while I go to the bathroom," Libby said.

"I want to smell you," Gabe replied.

No further elaboration needed.

Down at Fraggle Rock

In an attempt to make Norah look more like Boo from "Monsters Inc.," Libby pulled back her first pigtails yesterday. Pigtails on little girls are, of course, an adorable staple. There is, however, one minor consideration that must first be addressed--is the hair actually long enough to pull it off.


In this case, I'm going to have to go with "no."

This picture is the one that prompted the title of this post. After getting the pigtails up, Libby decided that Norah looked like a Fraggle. This made me laugh. Maybe her name could be Buttser.

Yesterday (and today, and probably tomorrow, if I get right down to it) was Baking Day. I have not done a major Christmas baking day since the year before Gabe was born. Small children have a way to distract away from any desire to spend a few days cooking (though, I have to admit, that they are a GREAT reason to want to stay isolated in a kitchen for an entire day--seriously, I totally understand why earlier generations spent so much time cooking from scratch. I mean, besides not having fast food and prepackaged meals to buy at the store. It was the best way a mother could distance herself from her children and not be frowned upon by judgmental neighbors. I get that now. I really, really do.). But, this year, I decided it was time to revive the tradition.

And, because Gabe loves to help, I tasked Libby with the job of assisting Gabe in all of the cookie cuttering that needed to be done. Not surprisingly, since he's probably clocked about 1000 hours of Play-Doh cutting, he did a very good job of cutting out the Christmas shapes. The two of them worked on the dining room table.

None of this is particularly interesting, I know, but I needed to lead in to the picture I took.

After they finished the first few dozen cookies, Libby got tired of messing with it and moved on to other things. But she left the flour on the table, figuring she would come back to do more cookies later. In the interim, Gabe decided to play with it. About ten minutes after they were done cutting cookies, this is what I found.

The baby is obviously the creepiest part of this little tableau, with its head turned all the way around, resting in a pile of scattered "flour." It's like a scene out of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" or "Trainspotting."

Urine Is Sterile, Right?

Last night, when I took Gabe up to bed, he crawled in and did his standard inventory of friends and sleeping accessories, finding his binky and blankie and flashlight and the old cell phone that he calls Poppa or Fireman Sam on and his half a dozen books and the dozen or so friends that he's decided he simply MUST have in bed at all times. After that, he looked at me and asked, "Can you empty the pee pee out of my potty?"

"Why?" I replied. "I just emptied it out before your nap today. Did you fill it up already?"

"No," he said, trying to sound innocent. "Can you empty my pee pee?" he repeated.

So I opened up the potty and peered in. "Oh, Gabe," I said as I inspected the inventory within.

I spied one of his binkies and a pepperoni from a Melissa and Doug play pizza set of his. And two white, porcelain balls that I couldn't immediately identify. They looked like handles from a dresser or small doorknobs or something.

"What is this stuff?" I queried. "And why are they in your potty?"

"That binky is broken," he answered by way of explanation. Clearly, when a binky has reached the end of its line, a heavy soaking of piss is what it needs before its send off to the landfill.

"What is this other stuff?" I continued. "Where did these white balls come from?"

"The curtains," he said, and I realized what they were. We installed curtain tieback bracket thingies (whatever they're called, I'm too lazy to look it up) on the walls so we could pull the curtains over and hold them there. Each of them had a little decorative ball screwed into them. He had unscrewed them, during his nap yesterday afternoon when I THOUGHT he was quietly sleeping. Then, for reasons that he was unable to elaborate on, he'd put them in his potty.

Needless to say, we had a discussion of the inappropriateness of storing household items in a potty full of pee. How he managed to nearly fill it in one nap time is another matter for consideration later on.

Sadly, when I brought the potty tray downstairs, I was a bit irate, so I didn't think to take a picture. It would have been a quite interesting tableau, perhaps even delving into the realm of art. Too bad I wasn't thinking more clearly.

I did, however, snap a picture of him this morning that was a bit amusing.

He wore this basket on his head for about fifteen minutes. When I asked him why, he said, "It's my fireman helmet." This is especially odd because the ACTUAL fireman helmet, the one from his Halloween costume, was lying on the floor in the dining room the entire time. He might have kept it on longer but he realized, after that fifteen minutes, that he wasn't wearing it so much as it was stuck on his head. A short, panicked (for him) scene followed this picture a few minutes later when he realized this fact and I had to pry it loose from his head.