Five Things I Hate Today

In which your humble narrator enumerates five things from the past week which which have caused him much consternation.

1. Mothers who mousse their toddler's hair. And I'm talking about toddler boys. Last week at the big Mall I overheard an Evil Mommy: "Cody! Don't touch your hair! You're messing it up!"

2. The Jay Leno Show

3. The bizarre propensity of undergraduates to avoid the preposition "on" in favor of "off of." Thus, "based on" becomes "based off of." Why would you replace a perfectly good preposition with two?

4. The anti-vaccine crazies

5. Public Radio Pledge Drives

The High Tide of Stupid

In which your humble narrator rambles incoherently about babies and fantasy phone calls and sink drains and then compares himself to a popular television program from late in the previous century.


Child #2 was sleeping through the night three weeks ago. I'm pretty sure she was. I vaguely remember being able to engage in logical processing. For a week now she's been completely weird at night. She wakes up every two hours. She thinks it's time to get up for the day at 4:00 a.m. She cries in her sleep without waking up.

All of these charming idiosyncrasies of slumber have led to me not having more than three hours of uninterrupted sleep in about a week. And the stupid is taking over my brain. I've become clumsy. I cut my finger on a vegetable peeler. I keep spending the day worrying about returning phone calls that I received in my dreams. Also, I keep starting weird projects with a feverish urgency. Today, I unstopped the slow-draining upstairs bathroom sink with a bent bobby pin, a coat hanger and a baby bath tub. Child #1 watched from outside the door, looking at me like I was completely nuts. Maybe. Or maybe I'm MacGyver. Or maybe I need a nap.

The sweet, sweet taste of drudgery

In which your humble narrator escapes from the children in order to think about things and grade terrible papers.

On Tuesdays, our super-awesome liberal-arts college, Wisconsinite, baby-sitter comes to the house to care for the children for three whole hours so that I can escape the occasionally mind-numbing drudgery of house-husbandry/child rearage. Not that I don't love Child #1 and Child #2 with an easy intensity, but stunningly scintillating conversationalists they are not.

When I was younger, freer and stupider I had lots and lots of time to goof off. And so I did, with wild abandon. Bear with me now here. You may be expecting an "I'm so-o-o-o busy raising my w-o-o-o-nderful children" type diatribe about how "difficult life is with kids... blah-de-blah... no one understands my woes" type of lament. And if you're wincing in anticipation already, rest easy, gentle reader. I wouldn't do that to you. In fact, anyone who bitches about how busy they are more than once a month should be condemned to hard labor on a chain gang overseen by Carrot Top.

Here's the secret: people that stay home with their little children aren't busy, they're bored. But it sounds really lousy to complain about how boring your kids are. After all, most Evil Mommies and Evil Daddies will go on and on about how wonderfully expressive and interesting little Logan and Gwyneth are if you give them the slightest prompting. But they're not. Kids are great, especially mine... but it's not like I make it a point to be friends with small children (Sprechen sie creepy? Yah!). Their worlds are constrained, they aren't very funny, and you can't go to a bar with them to hang out and shoot the shit*.

Babies need attention. Not stimulation, not educational activities, not enrichment, attention. And they need it constantly. And you have to give it to them, which means you can't read a book or a magazine or watch anything besides Finding Nemo or Thomas the Tank Engine or Curious George on television, or mess around on Facebook or cook something interesting, or even grade the crappy papers of crappy undergraduates. You're tethered to a little child's universe and you have to commit to it. And if you don't, your children will grow up to be serial killers or republicans or Woody Allen.

So even though my brief stretch of freedom (spent on the couch at my Mom's) is going to be consumed by grading truly horrible papers and writing one rambling blog post, it's totally worth it. Plus I haven't had to change a diaper in almost three hours.

* Have you noticed an uptick in profanity in this post? Do you think it might be related to being away from the children? Explain your reasoning using correct grammar and punctuation.

Say it ain't so, Sven

In which your humble narrator pleads with Swedes to undo their misdeeds.

Yesterday, Wife and Sister-of-me accompanied me and the children to our local IKEA for some super-cheap breakfast and crazy-fun time playing on the furniture displays. For those of you who do not have small children and don't live on the frozen tundra I should explain that when the cold winds of winter begin to blow in October, house husbands, like your humble narrator, become desperate for something to do to get out of the house with the offspring. IKEA serves as our own personal indoor playground for the snowy/rainy/freezy months.

I frequently drag some relation out to breakfast at the IKEA once a month or so. It has child-friendly, bland food and a family of 4 can have breakfast for less than $8.00. And as long as you're cool with the bus-loads (literally) of developmentally disabled folks that have also discovered this happenin' breakfast spot it's a good way to kill a morning. The food is not so great. They eggs have a distinctly industrial color and freakishly uniform texture. The bacon is more like the ghost of bacon. But the potatoes... well those were good. (Cue ominous music.)

Child #1 has been a big fan of the potatoes at breakfast. Tasty, finger sized cubes of potatoey goodness perfect for dippin' in ketchup. (Or as Child #1 says: Topatoes in Chup.) But the potatoes have changed. Not longer are they perfect little bite-sized cubes. Now the potatoes are a part of some un-Godly frozen vegetable hash with the following components: tiny greasy onion bits, microscopic red bell pepper fragments, green bean bits, itty-bitty carrot strings and unidentifiable yellow things (in IKEA-speak: "Weyrdyelobitz*").

So, please Overlords of Crappy Swedish Cafeteria Breakfast, change the damn potatoes back! I can't handle this sort of change. 

*There should be an umlaut in here somewhere but I can't figure out how to make blogger do that. Please imagine it over the vowel of your choice. Hell, imagine two of 'em. I won't judge.

My Kingdom for Some Earplugs

In which your humble narrator wishes that the damnable flying machines would cease flying over his home.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marinaavila/ / CC BY 2.0

This is a good representation of what the upward view from our house looks like every 3-4 minutes right now. The Metropolitan Airports Commission is reconstructing one of the parallel runways at the airport which means that they're using the transverse runway (which they normally never do) all the time. The transverse runway points pretty much directly at our house.

So until October 30, (or whenever they actually finish this project) we get to add constant jet noise to the near constant Ethel Merman impression that Child #2 is cultivating.

This morning I dreamed that I woke up with cotton stuffed deep into my ears and had no idea how it had gotten there. Do you suppose that means something?

People will send you bunches of paper in the mail with words and pictures and stuff

In which your humble narrator wrests back his money from a conniving purveyor of magazines and encourages you to waste the time of of your corporate oppressors.


I realize that magazines and newspapers are old hat and that a person in my demographic should eschew them in favor of a strict info-diet of web news aggregators and the blogs and what not, but I love magazines. Also, I'm just not willing to take the laptop with me to the potty.

I've loved magazines since I was a wee child with subscriptions to Highlights and Cricket. I've subscribed to initial issues and I've seen many a good magazine through until their untimely deaths, but yesterday I canceled two subscriptions. We have this evil credit card that I just paid off. After many months of throwing all of our extra money at the account, last month we got it down to 0, nada, nothing, zilch. So I open the e-statement yesterday to discover a new balance of $49. The charge was for a 1-year renewal to the Atlantic.* So since there was a subscription card in my last issue for $28 for a year, I called to get a lower rate. I called the number on the credit card statement but was connected with some automated clearinghouse system which asked me first if I wanted English or Spanish. Then the Automated Computer "Lady" asked me if I wanted to push buttons or use the voice system. Buttons, baby! I'm trying to do this while caring for my loud offspring.

But as soon as I push the button corresponding to "cancel this mother and give me my money" (since there was no option to talk to an actual person) I got switched over to the voice system which promptly got all confused when I closed the microwave door to make a bottle for the baby.


Me (and microwave door): Slam.
Automated Computer "Lady": I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. 
Me: That's because it was a microwave door slamming you, vile computer wench.

Automated Computer "Lady": I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.
Me: Yo' Mama was a programmable toaster.
Automated Computer "Lady": Your new subscriptions to Tiger Beat, Golf Digest, and Ladies' Home Journal have been processed. Your credit card will be billed $8000.

I finally persevered. Magazines were successfully canceled, but only after I had to listed to three "special offers" to continue my subscription. And then I had to do the who thing again for magazine #2. The whole stupid phone call lasted 12 minutes. And people wonder why everyone is so crabby all the time. It's little, evil  things like automated phone trees and telemarketers that make people go slowly insane. I like to cope with this indignity by pretending to be an old person whenever I deal with customer service or telemarketers. Once you get a real person on the line, turn off your brain. Just keep saying "can you explain that again?" After stringing along a telephone sales rep for 40 minutes, ask them to mail you some materials so you can think about it some more. You'll feel as giddy as a school girl when you start thinking about how much of their time you've wasted for a change.


*Formerly the Atlantic Monthly, but a year or two ago they decided that the "monthly" part made them sound old and fuddy-duddy like "Hieronymous  Q. Staffordshire's Monthly Compendium of News both Politick and Cultural for the Enlightened Burgher."

Force Feeding a Yen

In which your humble narrator uses cunning and guile to outwit the overwhelming negativism of Child #1

Child #1 is two years old. In a streak of developmental conformity, he has appropriately discovered the joy of "No!" Since he decided to leap ahead from slightly behind the normal language development curve to well ahead of it in the space of the past eight weeks, his "no" usage has blossomed into an array of negative statements such as, "I don't like [insert object of disdain] anymore," and "I don't want [insert reviled object] right now." Each diaper change requires a lengthy two-year-old treatise on how he no longer enjoys diaper changes, thank you, and would prefer to wallow in his own filth. The implication seems to be that diaper changes are an activity that I, his cruel and overbearing father, find so rewarding that I insist on several a day to feed my constant need to deal with urine and excrement. When I've tried to inquire that perhaps he might like to do his business on the potty, negating the need for diaper changes, he's told me, "No, I don't think so."

The enchantment with negativism has affected his diet considerably as well. The number of foods that his little majesty deigns to eat seems to decrease regularly. He currently survives on Trader Joe's cereal bars. I expected that there would be some dietary restrictions at this age but it makes me a little sad none-the-less as he used to be such a good little eater. I figure that he'll come around again eventually.

The problem presented by his refusal to eat anything is that there's not a lot of protein in his diet. He won't drink milk and seems to have lost all interest in meat, dairy or legumes. After two or three days with protein he starts getting crabby.

I love food. I love cooking. I'm a relatively adventurous eater. I don't believe in forcing little kids to eat things. Meals should be enjoyable, not venues for pitched battles over trying things and "two more bites" and cleaning your plate. But earlier this week I made macaroni and cheese for lunch and he wouldn't eat it. I prepare bland, quintessential kid food and his little majesty turns up his nose. "No! I don't like macaroni any more! No! No!"

So I took his plate away and puttered for a moment while he wound down his exposition on the evils of macaroni. Then when he wasn't paying attention I approached from behind his chair and shoved a forkful into his mouth. His little features crumpled as if I had slapped him across the face. It was that crushing hurt/angry/shocked look that little kids give you right before you break down and buy them a puppy. I was horrified at what I had done. Then he chewed it up and did a dramatic gulp of a swallow. And he said, "Nummy. More. Put it in a bowl. Macaroni now." He went on to eat two bowls and to declare repeatedly, "Ooooh! Delicious!"

This week I'm going to teach him to say, "My Daddy says I can be a real stinker."

Five Things I Hate Today

In which your humble narrator enumerates five things which vex him mightily.

1. Undergraduates who are in love with the word "impact" in made-up and innappropriate forms. Impactful. Impacted. Impactuated. Impacticized. Unless you're talking about your colon, "impact" is a noun. Example: I will hit you on the head if you use that word again. The impact will kill you.

2. Unraked autumn leaves that have been snowed on and now are moldering in the yard.

3. People with "philosophies" of child rearing. Here's my philosophy: 1. Keep children alive. 2. Prevent trauma if possible. 3. At end of day, check to ensure children are still alive. 4. Pour drink.

4. Fake plastic mullions in windows.

5. The unending need of Minnesota drivers to cut you of in traffic and then slow down to 15 miles below the speed limit.

Sofa Bites Man

In which your humble narrator gets a cold, fords a river of snot and is victimized by an overstuffed sofa.

Everyone has a cold. Wife brought home some hideous virus from her workplace where (she says) many people do not wash their hands after using the restroom. And this is a department in the medical school at a giant mid-western university. (I'll give you a hint: Its first initial is "U" and its last name is "of Minnesota.") Anyway, the department where Wife works is also a clinic so there are all sorts of members of "the public" who probably sneak down to Wife's office and lick her doorknob on their way to the bathroom.

Both children briefly turned their attentions from poop-making to snot making. We're talking rivers here. In case you do not have experience with small children, I will tell you something else. Small children hate having their noses wiped. Child #1 has become so good at avoiding the Kleenex that I have resorted to lying in wait behind pieces of furniture until he walks by at which point I leap out, tackle him and then wipe his nose. This is mostly so I don't have to watch him lick the snot from his upper lip, a charming little habit that makes me want to throw up. Children are revolting.

To add insult to an already crappy weekend I cut my finger on our living room sofa. What the hell? I was doing a real vacuuming job in the living room, moving furniture and the whole shebang when I noticed that the back of the leather sofa by the window was pretty filthy since our main cat and our emergency back-up cat (also known as Retardo Montalban) sleep up there and drool and shed. So I got a dust rag to wipe off the cat detritus and managed to catch the very edge of a strip of velcro that holds the cushion to the back of the sofa in between my fingertip and the nail of my right middle finger, slicing deeply under the nail. It hurts out of all proportion to the severity of the injury. Plus there's not a big scabby wound or anything to elicit the sympathy that I so richly deserve.

Bastard sofa. From now on only our least-liked, most-flatulent guests will be sitting on you, friend.

Some days I have smartness in my brain-thing

In which your humble narrator tries to turn back the tide of fluids spewed regularly at him by Child#2.

Child #2 is a spitter. She's a drooler. She's a pooper, and she's a screamer.  Some people call her a Space Cowboy... no wait that's not right.

I simply was not prepared for the mess-making capabilities of Child #2. Child #1 was a scrawny, colicky infant who screamed pretty much non-stop for his first four months of life, but he was tidy. Child #2 spits up copious volumes of milk after every feeding (no matter how much I try to restrict the number of ounces at any one feeding). She also drools disgusting milky drool while she drinks from the bottle. This runs down her neck into the fat-folds of skin where it sours and then collects lint. Or it alternately soaks her shirt. Bibs do nothing, leaving me with the joy of going through about six outfits per day (four for her, two for me). I don't have a big enough wardrobe to continue feeding this child. By the end of the week I'm forced to wear ancient, ill-fitting, strange clothes. If you drop by on any given Friday you may find me wearing holey corduroys with a tuxedo shirt and track jacket. It's a look borne out of desperation not to smell like sour milk.

In my continuing battle against the moisture generated by my daughter, this morning I purchased some amazing, space age super towels at the local Trader Joe's. They come in packages of 2 10"x14" towels. I cut one in two, and made a second curved to fit around Child #2's neck. It worked pretty well. It's much more absorbent than any of our 12 million bibs.

Sometimes I do have smartness in my brain thing... but only when backed up against a typhoon-like wall of spit-up.

My Mom made me go to Girl Scout Camp... which wouldn't have been so bad if I weren't a boy

In which your humble narrator discusses the requirements that must be met to keep his house from disintegrating, discusses home improvement peer-pressure, creeping socialism and imparts a moral he learned when his mother made him go to Girl Scout Camp.


On Child #1's birthday a few weeks ago I was all set to have a new water heater installed. Our water heater is over 20 years old. The thermostat seems to be going (some showers are tepid, some are searing) We've been informed that the bottom could drop out at any moment, flooding the basement with scalding hot water and potentially burning the cats' feet if they were unfortunate to be using the litter box at the time. In the morning, our plumber arrives with new water heater in truck and goes down to the basement to start draining the old one, and unhooking the venting whereupon he discovers that we don't have a metal-lined chimney. Instead, (like virtually all houses built before 1975) we have a clay liner.

"According to code I can't put in a new water heater until you have the chimney lined," he says.
"Boo!" says I.
"You have to get it lined so that you don't have carbon monoxide leak into your house," says he, "Everyone else has a metal liner in their chimney," he told me, trying to peer-pressure me into it.
"But I don't believe in code! I'm a Maverick. I've gone rogue! This is socialism! I don't care what other people are doing! The government can't tell me how to line my chimney!"

But he was implacable. So we're supposed to have the chimney lined this week. And only then can we get a new water heater. Here I thought I might finally get to spend some money on something enjoyable for the house, but no. I'm gonna get me some metal tubing that I'll never see... the only purpose of which is to save me and my family from death by carbon monoxide. Lame.

So there's that indignity. I've been forced to spend money on another boring mechanical update. I remain sanguine, however with the comfort of a lesson learned many years ago when my mother made me go to Girl Scout Camp.You see, my mother was a semi-professional Girl Scout Leader and as such was entitled to free day-care at Girl Scout Camp in 1988. No problem for my sister, an acknowledged girl, but somewhat more tricky for me, a distinctly masculine character. So for a week I, and four other unfortunate boys were segregated into a "boy's unit" (No, really! That's what they called it! I didn't find this funny when I was 9, but there were adults who should have known better.) at Girl Scout Camp.

The theme of camp was "The Olympics" as they were happening in Seoul at about the same time. So at the end of the week there was a flag ceremony and a "games" wherein the girls did potato sack races and jumped rope or something. The boys weren't invited to the games but we were at the flag ceremony. Each unit (tee-hee) had constructed a flag for their assigned country (We were Belgium... a manly land if ever there was one) and we paraded them around while they played 'Symphony for the Common Man.'

And then the head Girl Scout Leaders judged who had the best flag. We won. And the girls booed. And hissed, like a den of vipers.

So not only were we poor boys forced to go to Girl Scout camp in the first place, but when we hoisted the most impressive flag, we were booed by hundred of girls.

Fortunately none of us were particularly traumatized because we knew that all the girls had cooties. Also it was fun to see the leaders yell at them.

My mother is a bit sensitive when I tell this story (Along the lines of "Here we go, how else did I ruin your childhood?). Which is, of course, the best part of telling it. Which brings us to the moral of our story.

There is virtually no experience annoying/stupid/humiliating enough that it doesn't end up being worth complaining about for the rest of your life. And if you enjoy complaining as much as I do... well then...

Bliss.

Child #1 mans up for a blood draw

In which your humble narrator takes Child #1 for his two-year check-up, marvels at his general toughness, especially when compared to his mother who is a giant weenie when it comes to needles.

We took Child #1 to his doctor today for his two-year check up. His pediatrician is a lovely family practice doctor who also delivered him (mostly)*. She's maybe a couple of years older than me and Wife. We like her and she likes us. I think since we go to a clinic in a low-rent part of town that we're probably the fanciest patients she sees in a typical day. I should also mention that we go to this clinic in a crappy neighborhood because Wife picked this doctor because she had the "friendliest" looking picture on the website of all the non-blond lady doctors at this particular health system. Wife refused to see a blond doctor. Wife is extremely prejudiced against blonds which is funny since she was a blond for most of her life (preganancy #1 darkened her hair considerably).

So we have a quick once-over of Child #1 revealing lots of information that we already know like: Child #1 is smart and verbal. Child #1 is tall and skinny. Child #1 is in seemingly perfect health.

No shots today, but we did have to get his blood drawn for a lead-level test since we live in a metropolitan area in an older house and we frequently encourage Child #1 to lick the window sills and eat dirt.Wife does not do well with blood draws. Not her blood, not the childrens'. So this is one of my designated "things."

I take Child #1 into the little cubby with the lab tech and he ties one of the tourniquets of the kid's arm. Child #1 is sitting on my lap and I'm explaining what's going on and that they're going to get some blood out of his arm, and it's going to hurt, but not too much, but there will be candy at the end, to which he responds, "Yes! Candy!"

The lab tech looks at his arm and we can see the vein which promptly disappears as soon as the needle is within an eighth of an inch of the skin. So he sticks him. And Child #1 winces, but just watches. And the lab tech tries to find the vein. And he can't. And the kid watches. And the lab tech roots around in his arm. And Child #1 winces and says "Ow. That's not good." And I try not to laugh while holding him.

The lab tech ended up having to prick his finger to get a sample. He said,"I wish everyone was this good."

Not a single tear.




*"Mostly" because she had to call in an OBGyn after 18 hours of labor and 4 hours of pushing to try to suck him out of his mother with a vacuum. Apparently family practice doctors aren't allowed to touch the baby vacuum. That didn't work so they got some salad tongs and finally pulled him out. He has the cutest little scar above his left eyebrow.