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.