The kale of the wild

“I think you’re going to starve here,” I said to my friend Josh on the phone, just before his visit to our house.  Josh is a vegetarian who doesn't eat any processed food, so he was unlikely to find any sustenance in our spray cans of whipped bologna topping.

“Don’t worry about feeding me.  Seriously, don’t even try,” he replied.

“I can’t think of a single thing in our house that you’d even eat, except maybe the birdseed in the garage,” I said.

“Is it thistle or suet?  I’m not allowed to eat suet, but I could go for a nice sack of thistle.  Maybe I could wash it down with some of that red hummingbird juice,” he said.

Josh wasn’t always this way.  When we were roommates at Penn State, we’d eat anything that cost less than four dollars, provided it didn’t have visible mold colonies growing on it.  Or that the mold couldn’t be easily worked around.

“Hey, want to get some pizza from across the street?” I’d ask.

“Doesn’t that place always give you violent gastrointestinal distress?” he’d ask.  We always spoke in clean language like that, just in case any of our words would be quoted in a family publication thirteen years later.

“Yes, but a whole pie is only six bucks, split two ways.  For a three-dollar dinner, I’m willing to accept the consequences,” I’d reply.

Three hours later, Josh would knock on the bathroom door.

“You okay in there?” he’d ask.

“It was worth it,” I’d mutter.

But those days are long gone.  Josh has turned over a new leaf, and probably eaten it.  He’s joined the ever-growing list of friends and family members who have gone vegetarian.  I greatly respect these people and their willpower.  The world would be a better place if everyone did what they’re doing.  I’d join them, too, if chicken tasted like asparagus.  Unfortunately for chickens, it tastes like chicken.

An average meal for Josh consists of a smoothie made from things that an average caveman could have gathered in an afternoon, assuming that the caveman had access to a GNC store stocked with protein powder.  He puts in lots of stuff that a normal person would eat, too, like strawberries, blueberries and almonds, but then he told me the secret ingredient that holds it all together.

“Kale,” he said.

Vegetarians are always trying to tell people how awesome kale is.  This undermines any other argument they might make, because the rest of us have seen kale.  We haven’t tasted it, but we’ve seen it.

Josh might have his near-vegan lifestyle, but I also practice a strict nutritional regimen.  Even when I think I can’t possibly muster the discipline, I dig deep and squeeze hard, squeezing and squeezing until all of the excess mayo oozes out of my McChicken sandwich and onto the napkin.  Voila!  Diet McChicken sandwich.

A variation on that dietary technique can also be applied to pepperoni pizza.  Before you take a bite, hold the slice over your plate for a minute, letting the grease and calories drip harmlessly away.  I call it the Gravity Diet, because anyone who practices it must be really serious.  This is not to be confused with the Gravitas Diet, which went out of fashion at the same time John Kerry did.

In any event, Josh did come to visit for the weekend, and everyone managed just fine.  Our success was most likely due to the fact that we didn’t attempt to eat together.  While I cooked dinner, Josh went outside and stood under an oak tree with his mouth open, hoping for acorns to fall in.

You can clog Mike Todd’s arteries at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Restaurant for the weary

“I want to come with you!” our son Evan said, his face stretched into a pout so long that a horse wandering through our living room at that moment would have paused and said, “Now THAT’S a long face.”

“Mommy and Daddy have a date tonight,” Grandma said, hugging Evan with one arm and shooing us out the door with the other.

We hustled down the stairs, professing our love for our son while trying not to prolong a goodbye that had already taken a turn for the traumatic.

“Evan’s not used to getting ditched.  That’s not really a bad thing,” my wife Kara said, trying to make the best of it.  It was a rocky start to our first evening out together since, well, since neither of us could remember.

We were ready for a break.  Living with a three-year-old and a colicky three-month-old offers many joys, but it can be difficult to appreciate those joys when you’re blotting the barf off your iPad.  If there’s one lesson parenthood has taught me, it’s that the quality of one’s life is inversely proportional to the number of times in one’s household that the word “projectile” is used as an adjective.

“I forgot how much it hurts to wear heels,” Kara said as we strolled across the restaurant parking lot.  Somewhere, back in our bedroom, her yoga pants were crumpled on the floor, bereft, wondering what they did to deserve being forsaken for the first time in three months.

When the waitress came to take our drink order, we ordered our food, too, rather than waiting for her to come back in a minute.

“Dude, why did we just do that?” I asked.

“Do what?” Kara said.

“We just hurried.  We have no reason to hurry,” I said.

It’s tough to get out of the mindset that someone at your table might start screaming at any moment and you’ll have to flee through a fire door.  When the food came out after we’d only been there for fifteen minutes, I had to fight the urge to hand the waitress my credit card to speed things along.

“Whoa, this margarita is strong.  I’m definitely going to have to pump and dump when we get back,” Kara said.

If you’re not familiar with the practice of pumping and dumping, it’s when lactating women allow themselves to have some drinks, then use a breast pump later to extract the 70-proof milk, which gets dumped down the drain so that they don’t find out if their baby is a mean drunk.  This seems like an awful lot of work, but at least it allows new mothers to cut loose just a little bit, since they are the demographic group most in need of a drink.  

If you try to explain pumping and dumping to anyone in my parents’ generation, they give you a look like you’re trying to hook a breast pump up to their cat.  Back then, a little secondhand cabernet made a baby more refined.

By the time dessert rolled around, Kara and I had remembered how to enjoy a meal without trying to shovel it down as fast as possible, a lesson we promptly ignored as our spoons dueled over the remaining chunk of chocolate tort.

We arrived home to find the house much more peaceful than when we’d left.

“We promised Evan you’d tell him good night when you got home,” Grandpa said.

Evan shot up like a prairie dog when we pushed his door open.  We’d been trying all night not to think about his huge pout, but he didn’t appear to be holding a grudge.

“Love you.  Good night,” he said, giving us each a hug.

It’s good to get out.  And it’s even better when it’s good to come back.

You can dump Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The parents of hazards

“Dude!  Aw, dude.  Dude!”  I yelled, holding my infant son by his armpits as he did his best impression of a fire hydrant with the cap off.  There would be no shirtless children frolicking in this spray, though.  Just me.   

“Babe, I need help!” I called to my wife Kara, who was already dashing for the paper towels.  With two small children and a queasy dog in the house, we should really install overhead systems where emergency rolls of paper towels fall from the ceiling, like the masks in an airplane. 

I dangled Zack above the puddle he’d just spewed onto my lap, unable to move without a free hand to hit the button to unrecline the couch.  Until Kara got there to help, I was trapped in a reclining prison of barf.

Just then, the puddle on the cushion between my knees began running downhill, toward me. 

“Help!  Take him, take him!” I yelled, arching my back so that only my heels and head were touching the couch.

At that moment, I thought of the recent cover of People magazine I’d seen at the grocery store checkout, depicting a reasonable facsimile of Jessica Simpson holding a baby girl.  “BABY BLISS!” the headline shouted. 

The headline seemed to suggest that the baby was named Bliss.  As a celebrity baby, you could do a lot worse.  Most celebrity babies end up with names like Antietam Endtable.   

But the smaller text informed me and my fellow queued-up grocery-buyers that the actual name of the future Duchess of Hazzard was Maxwell Drew, which is still a pretty normal name for a famous person’s kid, if slightly Boy-Named-Sue-esque.

To my surprise, then, the headline was saying that having a baby confers a state of bliss upon the baby-havers, which is probably why you hear so many stories of new mothers going through post-partum ecstasy.  

It’s not that having a baby isn’t a blissful experience at times, but that one word doesn’t really sum it all up.  You almost get the impression that whoever wrote that “BABY BLISS!” headline had never been pinned to a couch by an ocean of vomit. 

Parenthood is a beautiful, disgusting, wonderful and exhausting thing.  In most publications, you only see the awesome side of parenthood, with mothers beaming beside cute little cherubs.  It’s the same with those Anne Geddes calendars, which show adorable, content babies dressed up like ladybugs or sunflowers.  I’d like to see what goes on behind the scenes when they’re shooting those calendars.  My guess is that there are at least a few screaming ladybugs spitting up on their exoskeletons.    

We never get to see those pictures, though.  The Anne Geddes Outtakes Calendar: Brought to you by Trojan.

So that’s what I thought about as Kara took Zack from my arms and started cleaning him off: the lack of journalistic balance when it comes to the experiences of new parents.  Actually, I thought about how I’d just washed my jeans.

“Man, those jeans had at least three weeks left in ‘em,” I said, throwing them into the washing machine, where they joined the rest of the day’s detritus. 

As the onesie popped over Zack’s head, his face reappeared with a giant smile on it, a trick he’d just picked up a few days prior. 

“How adorable is he right now?  You’d never know what just happened,” Kara said.

Zack stared right into Kara’s eyes and cooed, kicking his little feet.

“I got Daddy good, didn’t I?” he seemed to be saying.  And just like that, baby mayhem turned to baby bliss.  I ran to grab the camera before the outtakes started again.

             

You can blot Mike Todd with paper towels at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Back to regular programming next week

Sure, I may have taken Memorial Day weekend off from writing the column (the columns posted here are delayed by a week), but how can you be mad at me when you're looking at this picture?

The ten that got away

“Son, I’m going to teach you to be an idiot,” I said to my son Evan, in effect, as we came upon a ten-dollar bill in the grocery store parking lot last week.

We were lions that had just happened upon a wounded gazelle, but no, we would not pounce.

“Look, buddy, there’s money on the ground.  It’s not ours, though.  We’ll leave it there in case whoever dropped it comes back looking for it,” I said, a bluebird lighting on my shoulder.

“Leave it?” Evan asked. 

“That’s right, we’ll leave it right there,” I said, picturing the sweet old lady who would drive back into the parking lot any moment now, so glad to find the money she needed for her prescriptions right where she hoped it would be.  Then she’d pat us on the head, call us Sonny and give us each a Werther’s Original.

Evan watched from the cart as I loaded the groceries into the car.  Somehow, I’d just spent $100, even though I’d only gone there to get toilet paper.  Groceries seem to breed in the cart.  You can’t leave Mr. Clean and Mrs. Butterworth alone for a minute.

As I worked my way through the unending bags, I glanced over at the ten spot on the pavement just a few feet behind me.  I thought about walking over and snatching it up, but this seemed like a good opportunity to teach my son something.  What exactly the lesson was, I hadn’t sorted out yet, but surely, he would learn something important.

A woman in her early twenties strolled past us, carrying a single bag of groceries.  After about ten feet, she stopped, looking back toward the store.  She seemed to be trying to read the denomination on the bill using only her peripheral vision, like how guys check out women when their date is sitting across the table.

She hesitated, then circled back toward the store, walking straight past the bill.  Then she stopped again, and you could almost see a visible beam coming from the money, pulling her back.  She was Gollum, and the ring was calling. 

The woman looked in her grocery bag and pretended to remember that she didn’t need to go back into the store.  When she was standing directly over the money, she dropped a package of marshmallows on the bill, knelt down and scooped everything up in one swift motion.  Then she beelined back to her car, probably caressing the money and muttering, “My precious!  My precioussss!” to herself.

Evan and I watched her from under our tailgate, a lion and his cub doing nothing while a hyena dragged their gazelle into the bushes.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.  No head pat.  No Werther’s Originals.  The whole show with the marshmallows was only necessary because the woman must have assumed there was a decent chance that the money had fallen out of my pocket, and she was quite happy to take it anyway.

Hopefully, she’ll use that money to buy a case of Ramen noodles for the orphanage she runs.      

As I closed the tailgate, I wondered: what did I just teach Evan, anyway?  It would have been far better to have him deposit the money in a charity bucket in the store, a game plan I didn’t develop until about three hours too late.  Anything would have been better than letting the marshmallow ninja run off with it. 

While I latched Evan into his car seat, I thought about how the bill was folded in half, exactly the same way I stuff wads of cash into my pockets. 

“You’re a moron,” said the bluebird on my shoulder.

You can drop a bag of marshmallows on Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

One Liners!

I bet you I could stop gambling...

A liberal is just a conservative that hasn't been mugged yet.

There are two rules for success:        1.) Don't tell all you know...

Never go to bed angry, stay awake and plot your revenge. 

How long a minute is depends on what side of the bathroom door you're on. 

Teach a child to be polite and courteous, and when he grows up, he'll never be able to edge his car onto a freeway. 

The statement following is true. The statement prior is false. 

When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the Fire Department usually uses water.

With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine.

Virginity is like a soapbubble, one prick and it is gone.

A bus is a vehicle that runs twice as fast when you are after it as when you are in it.

Hallmark Card: "I'm so miserable without you, it's almost like you're still here."

Drink 'till she's cute, but stop before the wedding.

When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film.

In the home, ears are ringing

“I’m going as fast as I can.  If anything, you’re just slowing me down,” I said, but my two-month-old son Zack remained defiant, pouring every ounce of his energy into making sure I had sufficient motivation to hurry.

“Rinnnnnnnnnng,” he said, or at least that’s what registered in my ears, as Zack explored the upper ranges of what an adult eardrum can handle before it explodes like Greek debt.

“That is totally unnecessary, bro.  I’m already getting your food together.  Okay, okay, take your bottle, you ingrate,” I said, corking his screamhole with the nipple.

As he noshed on the bottle and peace settled over the room, the ruckus upstairs became audible.

“I’m going to count to three, and then I’m going to pick you up and put you in bed,” my wife Kara said.  Tiny footsteps galloped down the hallway as our son Evan shrieked and ran into his bedroom.

The chaos of raising two children often overshadows the tender moments, but they do happen.  

Earlier that evening, Evan stood on a kitchen chair beside me as I prepared scrambled eggs, the only meal I can cook without Mama Celeste’s help.

“That’s juuuust right,” Evan said, shaking pepper into the mixing bowl.  Then we both took out forks and whisked the ingredients together.  I stopped and watched my little sous chef plopping his fork into the mixture, his tongue sticking out with concentration, and the moment caught me just right.  That was my son standing there, wanting nothing more than to help his dad cook dinner.  My son.  Sometimes, I can’t believe that phrase applies to anyone at all, much less someone so insanely adorable when he’s not screaming.

I looked away for a second, feeling a little misty, and when I turned back, Evan was holding out his hand to me, signaling for me to take something.  I offered my hand, and Evan swiped his finger across my palm.

He stared at me, waiting for a reaction, and I realized what had just happened.

“You just wiped a boogie on me, didn’t you?” I asked.

He smiled and nodded.  That’s why they’re called tender moments, not tender hours.

Later that night, I could hear Kara upstairs, trying to extract herself from the bedtime routine.

“Mommy!  Mommy!  Mommy!” Evan yelled.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Zack will like red and blue when he gets bigger,” Evan said.

“Yes, those are good colors,” Kara replied, sighing.

She was caught in the Evan Vortex, the place where logic and reason go at bedtime to be crushed beyond all recognition.  The process takes a while, which is why it exists.  The only way to escape the pull of the Evan Vortex is to put a door between you and the source, and even that isn't always enough.

“Need to go potty,” Evan said, sensing that the door was about to close.

“You just went four minutes ago,” Kara replied.

“Need to go again!” he said.

Evan knows how badly we want him to start using the potty, so at bedtime he becomes more prolific than an incontinent racehorse.

When he returned to bed a few minutes later, I could hear Kara start to swing the door shut.

“Where’s Lamby?” Evan yelled, and Kara sighed again.  Evan spends the day stuffing his sheep-blanket Lamby into obscure crevices of the house, so that by the time you find Lamby and return him to bed, Jimmy Kimmel is already asleep.

But it’s kind of cute that Evan can’t go to bed without snuggling Lamby every night.  It’s like how Kara and I used to be, before we had kids.  Now we just collapse wherever we happen to be standing once the last kid stops screaming.

You can wipe stuff on Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.