Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Sunday, 21 February 2010
How to raise kids and assassinate people
A question every new father eventually has to ask himself is this: Am I spending enough quality time with my PlayStation? The answer, of course, is that there’s no such thing as enough, but that hardly matters when you’re spending the majority of your days scraping Gerber oatmeal off your pants.
My wife Kara was away for the day, trying on bridesmaid dresses for her friend’s wedding this summer, leaving our son Evan with me for a big father/son bonding day. My enthusiasm for creating lasting memories with my son was somewhat tempered by the fact that he won’t remember anything that happens for at least the next two years. As much as his gummy smile turns my heart into a puddle of single-grain rice mush, if a pack of wolves took over the parenting responsibilities from this point on, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t notice the difference, except maybe that his new den was awfully clean.
While I’d planned to spend Evan’s precious naptime that day assassinating bad guys in Renaissance Italy, the real drama and intrigue was occurring at David’s Bridal, a place that must witness more arguments than your average Supreme Court justice. I’d discuss this topic in further detail, but it’s much safer to wade naked into a piranha tank than into someone else’s wedding drama.
I carefully pulled the PlayStation controller in front of me, gently pressing the power button. Catching Evan during a nap is the rarest of opportunities, one that fleetingly presents itself only to those who are patient and attentive, like the flower of a night-blooming cereus, but way more beautiful. It was a golden moment, one not likely to be repeated before the cows came home under a blue moon that was eclipsed by flying pigs that were being struck twice by lightning while mixing several metaphors.
You might be thinking, “Well, does he also nap when Hades freezes over?”
Maybe, but due to the opinion espoused by certain spousal units, I’m not allowed to say “h-e-double-hockey-sticks” in our house anymore, despite the fact that it’s not a bad word, and that anybody who employs the phrase “h-e-double-hockey-sticks” not in the service of making fun of someone else who said “h-e-double-hockey-sticks” deserves to catch a hockey stick in a place that, if recorded and submitted to America’s Funniest Home Videos (which seems to still exist somehow), would result in much merriment and laughter for everyone but the nearly sterilized person rolling around on the floor.
In any event, pressing the power button had no effect.
“No,” I whispered out loud, pressing the button again. And again. After frantically tapping it a hundred more times, I was confronted with the cold reality that the batteries, like my hopes and dreams, were dead.
I wanted to turn towards the heavens with my arms outstretched, shouting, “NOOOOOOO!” as the rain poured on my face and the camera ascended into the sky, but that definitely would have woken up the baby.
Pathetic times call for pathetic measures, so I attempted the unthinkable: moving a sleeping baby. Gingerly lifting him off my lap, I moved him to the next couch cushion as if I was handling high explosives, which in many respects I was, especially if you count his most volatile orifices.
In the end, using the power cord for the controller, I successfully rekindled my relationship with the PlayStation for a solid ten minutes, before my indefinite suspension from the game began again. If you’re a bad guy in
You can sneak up on Mike Todd at
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Home is where the torment is
“Already? It seems like we just tortured him,” I replied.
For the past few days, we’ve had to give our son Evan nebulizer treatments every four hours, a painless procedure that requires him to breathe in a near-odorless mist for fifteen minutes while he screams with his amplifier turned to eleven. The screaming part might be optional, but for us, Evan has always been willing to go the extra decibel.
The excitement began last Thursday, when we received this phone call from his daycare: “You need to come pick up Evan. He’s having trouble breathing.”
There’s nothing like that sort of call to transform what had seemed like monumentally important work into inconsequential pixels on an irrelevant computer screen.
I recently heard a comedian comment that once you become an adult, unless you’re a professional athlete, you never have to run as fast as you can anymore. That sounded pretty true until last Thursday. I didn’t break any world records on my way across the parking lot, but I’m pretty sure I set a personal best, which would have been more of an achievement if the competition hadn’t been so out of shape.
Outside of Kara’s building, I rolled down the passenger window and she dove in like Bo Duke. She almost dove in like Daisy Duke, but her pants were covering her butt.
Seconds later, when we got to Evan’s daycare with Kara’s legs still kicking out the window, it turned out that his trouble breathing was of the slightly raspy kind, not the choking on a pork rind kind. We took a collective deep breath, and as the adrenaline surge began to subside, my mom’s head floated in the air above us, saying, “This is what I always meant by, ‘Just wait until you have one of your own.’” Or that could have just been the peyote wearing off.
At the medical center an hour later, when the doctor first said the word “nebulizer”, I thought he was telling us about his favorite weapon from a Ratchet and Clank video game.
“I prefer the alpha cannon, though an upgraded plasma whip is tough to beat for close combat,” I replied, in my mind.
“You need to give him this treatment every four hours,” the doctor said, holding the mask over Evan’s nose and mouth while Evan screamed, mist shooting out the holes on the sides of the mask like he was an angry cartoon bull.
Back in the day, when babies got colds, you gave them some Dimetapp and moved on with life. Now, babies can rent cars before they can take cold medicine. We’re also more civilized now, which is why we prefer to put our babies in half nelsons and gas their colds into submission.
Kara and I are discovering that being a parent means that you have to torture your child at times, from sucking things out of his nose with a bulb syringe to cooing at him while the nurse pricks him for a blood sample. Parenthood is not all baby powder and laughs, like the brochures promised.
Once we got home and I administered his first treatment, Kara said, “Oh, you did a really good job with that. You’re way better at it than I’d be,” using the same mind trick that I’d tried on her with ironing.
As much as the treatment has at times seemed worse than the symptoms, Evan has finally started to get used to being nebulized, and it’s helping to clear him up. Still, it’s hard not to feel like I should be walking around the house shirtless, wearing a leather apron and a dark hood. At least he’ll get to torture me back when he's a teenager.
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Saturday, 13 February 2010
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Journey to the center of the kitchen
“Of course. Sort of,” I replied from under the kitchen counter, exploring the cavern where our dishwasher used to be.
We’d begun recovering from The Not-So-Great Flood of 2010, the aquatic event that sloshed from our kitchen down to the basement while we were on vacation, making our return home disappointing not only in that thousands of dollars of damage had been done while we were gone, but also in that we had apparently just missed seeing Mickey Mouse chasing a bunch of anthropomorphic brooms around the house.
After our contractor Sal replaced the kitchen cabinets, we couldn’t bring ourselves to re-install our old dishwasher, which Sal had described as a “builder’s special.” Apparently, the attribute that made it special was not the ability to wash dishes.
I pooh-poohed the idea of paying the $100 installation fee for our new dishwasher.
“Oh, no way, I can do that myself,” I grandstanded to the salesman, not letting my complete lack of relevant knowledge or experience get in the way of a money-saving opportunity.
Besides the obvious cheapness factor, there’s a certain shame involved with paying a contractor to do a job that you should probably know how to do yourself. It’s basically saying, “Well, since there’s not a real man around here, I guess we’ll have to hire one for the day.”
Even so, the array of skills that a person needs to master to stay alive today seems rather unfair. There was a time when all you had to know how to do was pounce on things and eat them. Now, you have to know how to install dishwashers, register vehicles, change diapers, unclog drains, update Facebook profiles, manage retirement plans and refinance mortgages. The paperwork alone would probably have killed most Java people.
So I found myself crawling around under the kitchen counter last week, yanking on various pipes and wires.
“Are you sure you cut the power to the right breaker?” Kara asked.
“Here, I’ll check,” I said, pulling the power cable out of the wall and touching the bare metal end with my finger.
When doing electrical work, once you’re pretty sure you’ve cut the power, it’s best to go ahead and just touch all the wires right away. If you’re going to spend the rest of the day dead, you should at least get out of doing some work.
Just then, Kara’s computer rang from across the room. Ever since my parents gave us a webcam so that they could see their grandchild, and Kara’s parents got hooked up as well, we’ve spent more time in front of the camera than Beyonce . I know this technology has been around for over a decade, but still, when you’re talking to your parents on the computer screen for the first time, it feels like you’re on the space station.
“Yeah, he’s installing the new dishwasher tonight,” I heard Kara telling her parents. There was a pause, and I pictured a look on their faces similar to the one they might have had if Kara had just told them that I’d decided to quit my job to sell Beanie Babies on eBay.
“Should he be doing that?” my mother-in-law asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” Kara replied. They acted as if the flood was caused in the first place by an improperly kinked hose on a piece of the kitchen faucet that I installed. I don’t know where they get these crazy ideas.
In the end, the dishwasher was installed using fewer expletives than I’d anticipated, and the basement, as of this writing, remains unreflooded.
“There, it’s all done, and we saved a hundred bucks,” I said, gleaming.
“Maybe we should get granite counter tops to match,” Kara replied.
You can defibrillate Mike Todd at
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Our agent of destruction
That old house had a lot to teach us, namely that after seventy years, houses begin to biodegrade. An old house just wants to give itself back to nature, and the only thing that can keep it from crumbling into a heap of splintered beams and broken shingles is your credit card.
We lived there for five golden years, four plumbing mishaps, three basement floods, two leaky skylights and a partridge skeleton in the heating duct. Actually, it was a rat skeleton, and we only lived there for four years, but you get my point.
Kara and I like to think that by the time we sold that house, things were generally in decent shape, but with an old house there’s always a feeling of impending destruction, that at any time, something is going to snap off in your hand, fall on your head or slice a hole right through your checking account.
“Don’t sneeze,” we’d say to each other as we quietly backed out the front door, stepping on the slate tiles that would flip up like garden hoes from a Three Stooges routine.
“I see you two have been busy,” our old agent Sandra said to us, peering into the stroller and waving at our son Evan.
Seeing her again brought back all the memories of our old place, and reminded me that there are some things I’m extremely glad not to have at this point in my life: diphtheria, twins, a real estate agent.
“Well, you better enjoy them when they’re this age,” she said, turning to face her teenage daughter, “because this is what they turn into.”
She threw her head back and laughed, while her daughter glanced up from texting just long enough to shoot a glance that said, “OMG, UR NOT FUNNY.”
When older parents see our baby, they invariably make a comment about how they wish their kids could be six months old again, which strikes me as completely insane. Sure, Evan is cute, and he’s even beginning to enjoy books, in the culinary sense. That is, he tries to eat them. He’s quite the consumer of literature.
But as much as we appreciate the small joys of his age, we’re looking forward to a time when he can interact more with us, share his opinions and torment the dog. I think parents who wish their kids were babies again are repressing about 75% of their memories, or at least the memories that occurred between 2 and 5am.
After a few minutes of catching up with Sandra, her daughter, who had been quietly attempting to explore the outer limits of unlimited texting, started rolling her eyes and tapping her foot.
“Maaaah-aaaaahm,” she whispered, nudging her mother’s elbow without looking up from her phone.
I could empathize. There’s nothing worse than being a kid and waiting for a boring adult conversation to wrap up. At least half of my childhood was spent waiting for my folks to get done talking with some boring adult about Freon levels or local politicians. Still, it was sobering to realize that we had somehow become the boring adults who were keeping this girl from her life of adventure on a Saturday afternoon.
I tried to think of a conversation topic that might not bore her to sad-faced emoticons, but I had no idea where to start. iPhones? Learner’s permits? The Jonas Brothers?
In the end, we cut the conversation mercifully short, said our goodbyes, and headed home, where we’ll hopefully have a few more years before the roof caves in.
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