Category: Fatherhood

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Ixnay on the iseaseday!

They (being the medical community) really shouldn’t give two very different diseases/conditions similar names. Really, it just causes panic and confusion.

MLE (My Little Extrovert = my youngest son) was all smiles and grinning last night as I lay in bed half-dead to the world from some temporary illness that rendered me incapable of doing anything but playing Unreal Tournament 2004 Online and reading my spy novels (it was a very odd and selective illness that I had). But, the minute we put him to bed, he started crying and such. This went on until about 11:45, after which he quieted down and slept the rest of the night.

This morning, he wasn’t his usual happy self upon waking and when CareerMom tried to leave him at daycare, he just fell apart. Knowing this wasn’t normal and suspecting he had a bit of a fever, she took him to the doctor where they proceeded to diagnose a fever, a bad ear infection and an ulcer that, “…you should keep an eye on in case he is g

I’m pretty ignorant regarding most of these conditions, so parlay that into a Google search term for the chronically lazy typer, and here’s what you get: “foot mouth disease”

foot-mouth-disease.jpg

Holy Crap! My kid’s gonna die!

But wait…it says, “not to be confused with hand, foot and mouth disease…”

A huge effin difference people of the medical community who name diseases! Gimme a friggin heart attack why dontcha?

So, worst-case scenario, he gets a bunch of little bumps on his hands, mouth and feet and we have to keep him home from daycare for a while. I mean, not the best scenario I could imagine, but certainly better than the alternative. I’m just sayin’, couldn’t they just call the bad one “livestock disease #453”?  Then, there would no confusing it with a common infant malady at all.

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My boys are growing up!

aidencake-for-blog.jpg

The 19th was my youngest son’s first birthday, but we did a little celebration on Sunday eve instead. Being his first, we didn’t make a big deal of it. I’m sure he won’t remember it anyway, so why go through the expense. CareerMom ordered from Olive Garden and despite their deplorably hokey commercials (“Just because it’s Monday!”), the food was actually very good and everyone had a great time.

If you have Publix grocery stores around you, you know that if you buy a birthday cake, they give you a smaller smashable one for the child to destroy. I don’t know what size kid they feel the need to make this big ol’ smashable cake for, but hey, it’s their flour (and my money I guess).

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Like my oldest son’s first birthday, my youngest didn’t really smash the cake; only mushed it up with his fingers a bit before attempting to get it in his mouth and mostly getting it ON his face.  But he’s a year old now. He’s walking; he’s doing some limited sign language to tell us what he wants, and before long he’ll be talking and dating and having “the sex!”  Oh Lord, make it stop!

Sometimes I want them to hurry up and get out of this “hold me” all the time phase, but then when I think of the alternative, I want to freeze this moment in time. Boy do I love these little guys!

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Just SHOUT! it out…

Like most of the people I call friends, I have a touch of the Obsessive-Compulsive. I wouldn’t call my level of it a disorder, per se, but I’m definitely what people would call “anal” about things. Like cleaning. With two large dogs and two young boys, my house is definitely not spotless, but generally speaking, at any time during the week, random strangers, say…the Harlem Globetrotters, could drop by and I wouldn’t be too embarrassed.

Recently, one of my ageing dogs puked on the carpet before I could get her to the door. After sponging up as much of the bile (yummy!) as I could, I got out our handy-dandy SpotBot to clean up the rest. The SpotBot is this little vacuum thingy that you just sit on top of the spot after filling it with cleaning solution, press a button and Presto! It cleans it for you in about two minutes.

The only drawback to the SpotBot is that it’s very small. As you can see from the picture below, it cleans a very small area. In fact, this “clean” area you see before you is the result of having moved the SpotBot three times.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Did you put bleach in the water? Cuz, you’ve got one bright white spot there.”

The answer is “Nope. No bleach. That area is just REALLY clean compared to the surrounding carpet.”  Now, I regularly use one of those home carpet cleaners, which I thought did a pretty good job, but I was apparently (dare I say, “horribly”) wrong.

Now, I have company coming in town this weekend, and a family get-together for my youngest son’s first birthday, and I have this un-ignorable bright white spot on my carpet that I will forever be explaining to people is NOT a bleached out spot and that apparently the rest of my carpet is just REALLY dirty! Not a conversation I want to have ad nauseum.

That leaves me three, no four options really.

  1. Employ the SpotBot roughly 300 times to clean the entire living room carpet
  2. Get on my hands and knees with carpet cleaner and a scrub brush and see what I can do manually
  3. Go rent a proper cleaner from the grocery store
  4. Call in the pros

Of the four choices, I don’t have time for three of them, and I don’t really want to spend money on the fourth. What to do, what to do?

You know, in the time it took me to write this, I could have moved the SpotBot twice already!

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My son’s middle name is “danger”

Danger!

Sometime around the 11th grade, I reached the tallest point in my life that I would ever reach—somewhere around 5’ 8”. CareerMom tops out at roughly 5’ 4”. My side of the family comes from short stock, but CareerMom’s side of the family is a mixed bag.

So, there was about an 80% chance that our kids would be on the smallish side. And it appears that will be the case.

My youngest son, of 11 months, is quite the walker. He toddles all over the house and when he gets near something he knows he shouldn’t—like the stairs or the fireplace—he’ll stop, look over his shoulder and if he thinks no one is looking, he’ll hit it full tilt. One of his favorite pastimes is wrestling with his older brother, and if I’m on the floor, he runs over to me and lays across me while I roll him front his feet to his head.

He likes the rough and tumble.

So why then, am I surprised when the daycare ladies asked CareerMom, “Has Aiden been more aggressive with Ethan lately? Because he’s become the class bully.”

And just to prove it, when CareerMom dropped him off this morning, he walked over to one little girl who was innocently playing by herself, and just smacked her on top of the head.

Part of me isn’t surprised. Quite the opposite of his older brother, Aiden is outgoing and loves to be the center of attention. It’s clear he has a dominant personality; but to see that little boy taking on kids older and bigger than him (well, some are younger and smaller, but most aren’t) both warms my heart and scares the crap outta me at the same time.

I don’t think there’s a father out there who, internally, doesn’t swell with pride when his son stands up for himself. But there’s a fine line between standing up for oneself and being a bully. And it doesn’t help that the daycare workers are so enamored of him that they don’t like to fuss at him because they can’t stand to watch his little lip quiver in response to the scolding.

The little booger has them all fooled. He pulls that trick at home and I just laugh at him and tell him “No!” He gets over it and moves on. Daddy doesn’t fall for those tricks.

It seems we have some training to do…and not just with the kids.