Category: Fatherhood

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So easy, even a Caveman could do it…

caveWith CareerMom out of town again, it’s just us boys here at the house. Now, when I was single, I was a pretty neat guy. In fact, my condo was usually cleaner than most homes you find today, and I’m still pretty clean, generally speaking. However, I must say that with no estrogen-influence wafting through the house, hygiene and general cleanliness is more of an effort than it normally seems to be.

DIY has a show called, “Man Caves” and it’s basically where a homeowner carves out a spot in the house somewhere, typically a basement, for the man of the house. What the man does down in this area usually revolves around a large-screen television and a wetbar, although I suspect these are just the things publicly disclosed. Well, without CareerMom here, our whole house feels like a Man Cave.

So far, I’ve contemplated not shaving, not brushing my teeth before bed last night and I literally had to drag my butt up today and throw a load of laundry on to wash just so the boys would have some jeans to wear tomorrow should the cool weather hang around. When CareerMom is here, these things aren’t even a conscious decision; I just do them. Without her here, I have to make myself comply. It’s eerie! And this doesn’t even begin to cover how many times someone has said, “I tooted!”
I’m not sayin’ that I said that, just that someone has said it on numerous occasions. If you haven’t noticed yet, fart humor is highly prized by the “Boys under 10” crowd.

Now, in my defense, part of this has to do with the fact that when CareerMom is here, I have help–I’m not doing everything myself. So by the time I have a few minutes to myself–like now–catching up on the household chores is about the last thing on my mind.

Oh, and let me complain for just a second here: CareerMom arranged for her mom to pick up the boys from Daycare tomorrow evening to give me a bit of a break. But the catch is, I have to pick them up by 6:30.

6:30?

At the risk of sounding ungrateful…um…why bother? That’s like a whole hour later than I’d normally have them home anyway. And I’m betting there will be no free dinner involved either. Wow! What ever will I do with myself for that extra hour?

Probably the dishes.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Forget Waterboarding, Try Childboarding

carseatdanget Never having experienced true torture beyond that which my older brother subjected me to growing up, I can only judge torture by its outcome. In the immortal words of Star Trek’s Spock, I believe that,

“…the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the
few or the one.”

With the exception of maybe paying taxes, I agree with Spock and as such, I’m all for torturing known criminals when the ultimate goal is saving lives. Recently, Waterboarding, an arguable form of torture involving holding a person’s head backwards while pouring water into their breathing passages, has become something of a debate. Some say it IS torture while others say it is not.

I say, “Forget Waterboarding!” I have a much more effective form of torture that is sure to bring a callous, grown man to tears within an hour. Here’s how it works.

Take a small-to-medium-sized pickup truck and clean everything out of the back cab area. Then, take two Graco or Cosco (or really any brand will do) car seats and force the person to install them in the back behind the front seats. Make him or her put them in and tighten them down, then remove them again and start all over. Force them to do this over and over again ’till they break. If you can do it in a hot garage, even better!

It’s that simple, and if you don’t believe that it’ll work, I invite you to come over to my house and try it out.

I know this is torture because I had to do it last night and I have the scraped knuckles and peeled back fingernails to prove it. I just don’t understand why they have to be so friggin’ difficult. I mean, I’m a small man, with fairly small hands and I can just barely get mine in that tiny little tunnel in the back of the carseat where you’re supposed to thread the shoulder belt through. And forget using the latch thingies in the back of a pickup truck because once you get two of these gargantuan seats in there, there’s no room for your hands to go digging down behind the seat in search of the buckle.

Ohmylord! I spent nearly thirty minutes struggling and swearing reasoning with our seats last night before finally coming to the conclusion that you could only do one of the following:

  1. Put one car seat in the back of cab behind the passenger’s seat and another in the front passenger’s seat
  2. Go purchase a “booster seat only” for our four-year old and put that either in the front seat or in the rear behind the driver
  3. Say “screw it” and work from home on Monday so CareerMom could take my truck to the airport, while I took the boys in to daycare. This way, I get to keep the car all week while she’s in San Francisco. (While overall the most attractive option, I hated to do this because I’m already going to work from home most of the week and figure I should at least go in on Monday)

When I bought my truck, a Dodge Dakota with a club cab (not the cab with extra doors), I did so because it was the only medium-sized truck that let you put car seats in the back without having to spend the extra $3K on the quad cab. And at the time, I was only thinking about one car seat, not two. I didn’t consider that when one child was older, and we had another one to contend with, the older child would need not only room for the carseat, but also room for his legs.

Silly me!

Anyway, we chose option # 2 and got a booster-seat-only thing and put it behind the driver’s side. It’ll still be cramped, but at least he won’t be in the front seat (although that would be kinda cool for him!)

Childboarding may not be true torture by some folks’ reckoning, but you put a clean, calm, grown man in that situation and he’ll come out a different person altogether. And maybe he’ll be ready to talk too. I sure was. Of course, what I was saying wasn’t exactly fit for a child’s ears.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Marriage

Count your blessings, name them one by one…

Yesterday was one of those picture-perfect weather days here in Atlanta. The weather was in the cool 60s with very little hint of humidity. We spent the better part of the afternoon outdoors to maximize the “happy time” we get from the boys being entertained, which few things does better than being outside.

What gets me though, is how few other people do the same. Our neighborhood is about a mile long and there are a couple hundred houses here. We also have a neighborhood playground and nine out of ten times we’re the only family out walking or at the playground. We’ve been trying to hook up with other families that have kids the same age as ours and it’s darn-near impossible to do when you never see anyone else.

owlAfter the kids went to bed, I fired up the outdoor speakers and turned on some new agey/classical music and then CareerMom and I sat on the back porch in the glider and enjoyed a glass of Shiraz while watching the bats scarf up what few bugs are out this time of year. Just before it got dark, I got a shot of this fella (I do believe it’s a Spotted Owl)  perched on a tree branch over the creek waiting on some tasty night critter to come out. He’s bigger than he looks. He was about the size of a large hawk. Pretty cool huh?

Anyway, it was good to sit back and enjoy the weather. Sometimes in the hullabaloo that is life, it’s easy to forget what’s right outside your door. It’s also easy to lose sight of what’s right inside your door too.

I’ve got the best of both worlds. I’m pretty blessed.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Marriage

I’m not Irish, but occasionally I play one in my head…

Ordered Chaos

There’s an old Irish folksong (read: bar song) called “Seven Drunken Nights” and it starts with:

“When I came home, on Monday night, as drunk as drunk could be…” (here’s a link to the lyrics if you’re inclined)

…and it goes on through all seven days of the week and it details how this drunk keeps coming home finding items left over from his wife’s apparent “lover” though she pretends that he’s too drunk to see straight and explains to him that what he’s seeing is not really what’s going on (though it is).

No, no…my wife isn’t cheating on me. My point is that sometimes when I’m sitting there at home in my own little world of calm as the chaos swirls around me, these lyrics spring to mind and I chuckle at the absurdity of the situation. For instance, last night:

____________________________________________________________

CareerMom got home from her trip to Orlando at around 7:00 p.m. By then, I’d been feeding the boys sugary snacks in a vain attempt at staving off their hunger till she could get home with the dinner I called in to the local pizza n’ pasta shop. As we got the table set and just sat down to eat, CareerMom yells, “Knikki!”  (apparently, my Doberman was puking on the kitchen floor).

So I hopped up and opened the door and shooed her outside. I closed the door and sat down to feed MLE while CareerMom cleaned up the puke. Thanks heavens for linoleum!

About five minutes later, MLI says, “Why did Knikki puke on the floor?” and I explained that she’s old and sometimes her tummy gets sick. He nodded and thoughtfully poked at his food.

Five minutes later, “I’m done, may I be excused?” he says. I nod and he gets down from the table and walks into the living room.

“Eeeeewww! Knikki puked in here too!”

At this point, I knew the liquidity from the puke had seeped into the carpet by now leaving only “chunks” on top and also, I have supreme confidence in the aforementioned “SpotBot” to clean it up so I said to CareerMom, “Don’t worry about it. Enjoy your dinner and we’ll clean it up later.”
Then to MLI I said, “OK, let’s not talk about puke anymore.” To which he nodded and then went and sat on the stairs.

A couple of minutes went by, “I can see the puke from over here.”

“Honey,” I said, starting to get slightly annoyed now, “I told you already that I don’t want to hear another word about the puke. You already ate and now mommy and daddy are trying to enjoy their dinner. Not another word.”

A couple of minutes passed and by this time MLE was stuffed, and out of boredom, was leaning waaaaaay out of his high-chair in an attempt at escape, so we put him down on the floor to play.

Then  from the stairs, I hear MLI yell, “Don’t let him go in the living room or he’ll step in the puke!”

Which was true, but which also made “it” click in my head and then all hell broke loose. Dinner was over, regardless of whether or not I wanted it to be. Both CareerMom and I hopped up from the table. She grabbed MLE as he was running into the living room, where he would no doubt trip up at the critical moment and fall face first into “said” puke. I turned to MLI, “I told you not another word about the puke. Go to your room!”

“But why?”

“Because I said so and don’t talk back to me. Now go!”

He stomped upstairs and slammed his door, while life went on downstairs; just me, CareerMom, MLE and our beloved Spotbot.

Did I mention that I had on some lovely classical music in the background? Just another soothing dinner.

And then, like the closing of some gritty western, where the cowboy rides off into the sunset amidst the lonely whistle of a prairie song, I heard in my head, “…oh there’s a many a days I’ve traveled, a hundred miles or more, but a quiet dinner with my lovely wife…sure I’ve never seeeeen beeeefooooore.”

Yep, absurdity among chaos. That’s family life for ya!