Dodging an early delivery

The regular reader(s) of this column might recall that last week, my pregnant wife Kara and I had a scare, wherein our unborn son showed some signs that he might attempt to procure a social security number three months before we’d intended.  Everything turned out fine, except that Kara’s doctor sentenced her to three months of soft time on the couch.

But then a few days ago, Kara once again sensed that something wasn’t quite right and dropped in for another doctor’s appointment.

“My doctor said I’m having contractions right now,” she said over the phone.  “Can you pick me up at his office and bring me to the hospital?”

Suddenly, what I was going to eat for lunch that day no longer seemed of consequence.  Modern cars should really come equipped with “I don’t normally drive like this” indicators, just so other drivers don’t get the wrong idea.

“It’s going to be okay.  Really, everything’s fine,” Kara said as she scooched into the passenger’s seat and our car’s tires became reacquainted with the pavement.  The assurances really should have been flowing the other way.  A pregnant lady having to settle down her husband is a bit like Tom Brady reassuring the water boy.

A hospital greeter met Kara with a wheelchair, and the three of us headed down the long hallway to the elevator, then the maternity ward.  In a few more minutes, Kara had a bed in the triage area, and the nurse had hooked her up to a seismometer-type device, complete with scribbling pens and graph paper.

“We’ll just monitor you for a few hours and give you some medication to stop the contractions.  You can relax,” the nurse said, though we were not feeling disposed to comply.

“I wonder if they’re going to put me on complete bedrest now,” Kara said, once we were as alone as you can be when your walls are made of sheets.

“If they do, would you mind living on the couch instead of our bedroom, so I don’t have to carry dishes up and down the stairs?” I asked.  

“Oh, don’t make me laugh,” she said, holding her side.  Just then, the nurse poked her head in and said, “You can go grab lunch down the hall if you’d like.”

I’d almost forgotten why visiting the maternity ward again, almost three years after the birth of our first son, had been such a powerful experience, putting a lump in my throat and bringing back a flood of fond memories: the buffet.  Seriously.  Modern medicine may have a long way to go in other areas, but it has conquered the maternity ward buffet.

As I walked down the hall to get us some lunch, I passed the room where Evan had been born two months ahead of schedule, so fragile and thin.  These days, it’s easy to forget about the time when he was just a tiny wisp, especially when he’s executing a flying knee drop onto your crotch.

After a couple of hours, the pens on the seismometer, which had been tracing the peaks and valleys of Kara’s contractions, flatlined.  Her test results came back negative, which was positive.  According to the doctor, she now had a 99.2% chance of not having a baby in the next two weeks.  They didn’t even put her on bedrest, so she will hopefully just go on thinking that I was kidding about the dishes.

We drove home that afternoon, exhausted and relieved.  This pregnancy is keeping Kara off her feet and on her toes.  Hopefully, the next time we’re back in the maternity ward will be in about ten weeks, right on schedule.  And if we’re extra lucky, perhaps it will be baked ziti day again.


You can nudge ahead of Mike Todd at the buffet line at mikectodd@gmail.com. 

On early childbirth and zombies

The last thing you want on a Monday afternoon is to have your baby born three months prematurely, but as I sped to the doctor’s office last week to meet my pregnant wife, Kara, that possibility loomed.

“My doctor thought that I might need a steroid shot to help the baby’s lungs develop faster, just in case labor is imminent,” Kara told me over the phone, and I was out the door.

We met at the maternal fetal specialist for an impromptu appointment.  Two-and-a-half years ago, our son, Evan, caught us by surprise and insisted on being born two months early.  Nobody knows why that happened, so Kara is in the high-risk pregnancy category this time around, which means that she spends more time in waiting rooms than the receptionists.

This appointment had a special urgency, though, since neither of us knew if Kara’s aches and pains during the preceding day had actually been the start of an even earlier labor, as her regular doctor had suggested.  I started to get that same feeling I’d had when Evan was born, the feeling that this kind of life event should really be reserved for someone better equipped to handle it.

But then the fetal specialist entered the room, looked at the ultrasound and said, “Your cervix is beautiful.”
I was pretty sure he was talking to Kara.

“So everything’s okay?” she asked.

“Yes, you’re not going into labor now, and I don’t see any great reason to be concerned,” he said, and the examination room shuddered with our collective sigh of relief.

“But you do need to take it easy,” he continued, unfortunately still not talking to me.  “I won’t call it ‘bedrest,’ but you need to keep your activity to a minimum.”

Kara began inquiring about what exactly he meant.  Could she still go to work?  Go shopping?  Go to the mailbox?

“If it doesn’t involve sitting down, you probably shouldn’t be doing it,” he said.  

“What about doing my own laundry or even putting my dishes away?” Kara asked.

“Nope, you can’t do any of that now,” the doctor replied.

“Aw, dude,” I said, in my head.

So for the past few days, we’ve started adjusting to our new reality, one in which Kara isn’t allowed to get up from the couch.  It’s not that I’ve ever been jealous of a woman in her third trimester, exactly, but I can’t help feeling that she’s squandering a golden opportunity.

“It’s a shame you don’t play video games.  All this quality couch time going to waste,” I said.

“The only thing I’m allowed to do for the next three months is go to the bathroom and gestate,” Kara said.  “I’m an incubator with feet.”

“We have Call of Duty in the Playstation right now.  I can show you how to throw grenades the right way and everything,” I offered.

“No thanks, babe.  I’ll just read,” she said.

“But you can play against zombies!” I said.  For reasons I still cannot fathom, she shook her head.

Sometimes, just when you think you’re beginning to understand women, they’ll refuse to throw a grenade at a zombie.

“Fine.  I guess the zombies win, then,” I muttered as I wandered off to cook dinner.  Okay, order dinner.

Kara might very well lose her mind sitting on the couch for the next three months, but at least it looks like the baby is staying put, for now.  It probably helps that I constantly remind Kara to “keep holding it in.”

For now, all is well.  And in just three months, if we keep going at this rate, we’ll have a beautiful baby boy and a memorial wing at our pizza place.

You can send Mike Todd a premature email at mikectodd@gmail.com.

An aye for an aye

As I approached the podium, I could feel the TV camera following me, broadcasting every movement to the cable boxes of television sets across the county.  Fortunately, this was a public access channel covering a zoning board meeting, and we were up against American Idol, so my bald spot probably only graced the TV screens of any nearby living rooms where a cat had stepped on the remote.

The guy who went in front of the board before me didn’t say a single word.  He’d just stood at the podium while the zoning board, comprised of four unsmiling faces behind a raised table, mumbled incomprehensibly about ordinances and sideline variances, stopping occasionally to take turns saying, “Aye.”

“Aye.  Aye.  Aye.  Aye,” they said, and that was that.  The guy turned from the podium and walked out the door, presumably to start building a shed too close to his property line.

“I hope ours is that easy,” I said to our contractor David, who’d come to help convince the board that my wife Kara and I should be allowed to transfer lots of money to him.

“The guy on the left didn’t like us last time,” David whispered.

At the previous meeting one month prior, Kara and David had gone before the board to get permission to build a screened porch on the corner of our house, to protect our family from the Predator-drone-sized mosquitoes that can often be seen picking off squirrels in our backyard.

We thought it would just be a formality to get permission from the zoning board, since our proposal only required a variance of a few feet, and the neighbors on the other side of our backyard had agreed that the new structure would in no way impede our mutual ability to not know each other’s names.

Instead, the board grilled Kara and David while throwing out some of their own ideas on the project.

“I think you should put the screen room somewhere really stupid instead,” the guy on the left said, in effect.

“Aye,” the others agreed.

After we’d spent months deliberating and being meticulous about every consideration and detail, the board liked its own solution better, which it had drafted in forty-five seconds without ever having seen our house.

“Are they trying to turn us into libertarians?” I asked when Kara returned to give me the news that the board’s decision would be deferred to the next month’s meeting.

If libertarians ran things, we could build a skyscraper in our backyard if we wanted to.  Then we could run clotheslines out of every window and put sheds on every corner of our lot, with screen porches on everything.  And we could let the grass grow wild, which would help hide us from the roving cannibal hordes.

Anyway, David and I were hoping for a better result at the next meeting, and Kara had enthusiastically embraced taking her turn staying home with our son.  We could have both gone and brought Evan with us, but toddlers these days just don’t appreciate municipal proceedings like they used to.

When our turn came up, David and I stood at the podium and waited for everyone to get done saying, “Aye,” so that we could start discussing our proposal.  The guy on the left rolled his eyes when the discussion started, and I realized that he was our zoning board’s mean judge, who would probably have a British accent.

 Fortunately, we also had a Paula Abdul, who had come to our house in the intervening time and vouched for our plan.  David and I hardly needed to speak.  After a minute of discussion, the board said, “Aye.  Aye.  Aye.  Aye.”

I turned to David.  “Hey, that’s great..”

“Aye.  Aye.  Aye.  Aye,” the board interrupted.  We gathered our papers and left, while the ayes still had it.

You can only have ayes for Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

If only my goose was cooked

“Please don’t attack me.  I can’t even run,” I said as I limped toward the gaggle of geese that stood blocking and fertilizing the path to my car.

The goose on the outside of the circle sized me up, sensed that I was not made of cracked corn, and went back to pecking invisible goodies off the sidewalk.  

I crept around the circle, holding my laptop bag like a riot shield, anticipating an attack at any moment.  The movie “Godzilla” might have featured a comparable scene of Matthew Broderick gingerly stepping amongst hatching radioactive-mutant-dinosaur eggs in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, but I can’t be too sure because my brain pushed most of its Godzilla memories off the shelf long ago to make room for new Dorito flavors.  I recalled that scene with perfect clarity until Blazin’ Buffalo & Ranch came along and then poof!  Gone.

The longtime reader(s) of this column might recall that in the spring of 2010, I witnessed a colleague get assaulted in our office parking lot by a goose.  Out of nowhere, the goose started hissing and flapping its wings at the guy, who was minding his own business a solid 50 feet away from the avian thug.  The goose took off, turning itself into a low-flying missile that detonated right into the poor guy’s upraised duffel bag.  If he hadn’t had that bag and some quick reflexes, that guy might well have found himself covered in various goose bumps and lacerations.

Ever since that day, I’ve regarded the creatures with a good bit more deference.  Besides keeping an eye out for them in our parking lot, I also look for them on menus wherever possible.  Invariably, this leads to disappointment, since hardly any restaurants offer entrees of the one animal I wouldn’t feel guilty eating.  Cows and pigs just seem so nice, plus I’ve never seen them attack anyone outside of an office building.
I’d have no hesitation chomping into a nice McGoose Deluxe, though.  The McGoose: Honk if you’re lovin’ it.  The tagline writes itself.

I winced as I inched past the gaggle, my tendonitis keeping me from sprinting the final fifty yards.  Incidentally, did you know that a “gaggle” refers to a group of geese on the ground, while a “skein” is the appropriate term once they’re in flight?  Whether you choose to remember this, or that Smokin’ Cheddar BBQ Doritos exist, is entirely up to your brain.

The assault I’d witnessed happened in the spring, when geese are more likely to aggressively defend their nesting territory.  The fact that I was easing past a large group of these feathered ruffians in mid-January did little to assuage my fear.  Just two weeks earlier, as we said goodbye to my parents at the end of our holiday visit, I saw something strange and frightening beside their driveway, something that erased the world order as I’d previously understood it.

There, in the flower bed, was a small green shoot poking its head out of the ground.  Then I saw the whole flower bed was full of them, poking up everywhere.  Daffodils should not be sprouting in southeast Pennsylvania on New Year’s Day.  Normally, it’s a happy event to see the year’s first daffodils, but this time, they had more the effect of zombie hands reaching out of the earth.

They were the Annuals of the Apocalypse.  Or Perennials, whichever one daffodils are.  When they were deciding what to call flowers that bloom once versus flowers that bloom every year, why did they pick words that mean pretty much the exact same thing?  Just remember: Annual events happen every year, which is just like what annual flowers do, except the opposite of that.  See?  Easy.

In any event, I tiptoed through the minefield and made it to the car unscathed.  The event made me wonder if we should find better homes for geese than our parking lots and our Wawa signs, though.  Like under our deli counters.

You can throw Mike Todd some cracked corn at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Stuck in translation

I teetered down the stairs, my sleep-deprived brain unable to process the commotion.

“Froot Loops need to be careful something something,” my wife Kara said, meeting me at the last step.

Behind her, our son Evan smacked his cereal bowl with a spoon, spraying milk like he was a drummer in a Blue Man Group rehearsal.  The suction cup on the bottom of the bowl prevented it from launching across the room.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“We really need to be more careful,” she repeated.  “I gave him Kix instead of Froot Loops today.  He looked at the bowl and said that it ‘sucks.’  It really sounds bad when a two-year-old says it.”

Apparently, our self-censoring had failed to bleep at least one of our more colorful word choices.  We’ve been so careful to clean up our language since Evan was born, but we’d neglected to stop using a certain word that is just so useful in describing some things, like the Eagles’ 2011 season, Cablevision, the electoral college, the driving skills of everyone but me and you, January 3-31, and what our vacuum cleaner both does and no longer does, because it’s broken.

I couldn’t picture Evan using that word, but my brain wasn’t firing fully anyway, due to the previous night’s adventures.

Just as I’d been drifting off to sleep, anxious to fend off a cold that had been tickling around my sinuses, trying to find a good place to land, Kara tapped my arm and asked the worst question anyone has ever asked another human.

“Did you move your laundry over to the dryer?” she asked.

I grumbled downstairs to the laundry room, my desire to sleep outweighed by my desire not to have my entire wardrobe smelling like Swamp Thing’s dirty hamper in the morning.

Back in bed, forty minutes passed before Evan started screaming from his toddler bed.  Ahhh, Kara’s turn.  Then, thirty minutes later, mine.

“Lamby fell down,” he reported when I stumbled into his room.  Evan pointed to the lamb doll that had fallen six inches to the floor.  I fixed the Worst Problem in the Universe and went back to bed.

“Finally, some sleep,” I said, pulling the covers back up.

“Why’s the fire alarm blinking like that?” Kara replied.

“It looks normal to me,” I said.

“No, it’s blinking all weird,” she said.

Sure enough, the little green light was blinking in an odd pattern.  Still, I couldn’t imagine the user’s manual would say: “In the event something terrible is happening, your First Alert™ Smoke Detector will blink the Morse Code for ‘GET OUT OF THE HOUSE RIGHT NOW!’ with a tiny green LED bulb that will be invisible unless all the room lights are turned out.”

But Kara was convinced the alarm would sound at any moment unless we took action, so I crawled out of bed again to look up the user’s manual online.  But our Internet was down, which is why Cablevision is on the list of things that su – excuse me, things that aren’t that great.  

In the end, the main thing I learned is that whispering expletives into a phone will impede your ability to navigate your cable company’s automated voice prompts.  And also, that the fire alarm needed to be reset in the morning, when high-pitched shrills were part of the daily routine anyway.

With Kara in her third trimester, I’m worried about how tired I felt the next morning.  It’s like getting winded after a mile when you know you have to run a marathon in three months.

I walked over to check on Evan’s breakfast and his budding potty mouth.

He reached out and shoved his bowl, but because of the suction cup, it didn’t move.

“It’s stuck,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s stuck,” he repeated.  Which is what he’d been saying to Kara.  Turns out, we almost accused him of doing something he didn’t do, which would have really su – been bad.

You can blink “GET OUT!” to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Undecking the halls

All that remains of Christmas 2011 is the memories, the love handles and the pine needles stuck in the carpet.  Still, our son Evan isn’t quite ready to give up on it yet.

“Santa comin’ tonight,” he has declared every night since Christmas.

“No, buddy, he’ll come again next Christmas, but not tonight,” I’ll say.

“Okay.  Santa comin’ tonight,” he’ll reply, undeterred.  

Santa’s bigger than Elmo around here now.  Not too bad for someone Evan didn’t even know about until a month ago.  Santa must have an excellent publicist.

Here’s how Evan’s part of the conversation went when we explained the deal to him (paraphrasing): “Okay, so let me get this straight.  A fat man flies through the sky with magic reindeer, lands on the roof, jumps down the chimney and sneaks around the house.  Then he leaves a bunch of presents for me?  Okay, I’m on board.”

Santa managed to deliver some pretty cool toys, even though Evan didn’t provide much input for potential gift-givers to go on.

“What do you want from Santa?” I asked Evan before Christmas.

“Presents,” he replied.

“What kind of presents?” I asked.

“Lots of presents,” he said, displaying a keen ability to grasp the spirit of the holiday.

“Okay, but what are your favorite kinds of presents?” I asked.

“Red ones.  And white ones.  And green ones.  Those my favorites,” he said, listing the colors of sprinkles he’d just used to bury some sugar cookies.

I suppose it doesn’t matter how well you articulate your Christmas wishes when you’re completely stoked to get anything at all.  Evan ooh’d and aah’d at each present for two seconds before jumping back into the pile, tearing at anything within reach.

“Whoa, that one’s not yours!” we’d say, but he’d already be dangling the necklace from his fingers, saying, “Lookit!”

Then he’d disappear back into the pile with wrapping paper scraps shooting into the air.  It looked like there was a dog digging a hole under there.

“That kid need slow down,” the Tasmanian Devil would have said.

Besides a decent haul of loot from Santa, Evan also scored big from his grandparents, whose role at Christmastime becomes that of spoilers-in-chief.

“Vroom!” Evan said, pushing his new grandparent-sponsored racecar through his little town of blocks, speeding right past the cop car I had under my hand.  He didn’t see the speed trap until it was too late.
“Here comes the policeman!  You were going too fast – he’s going to take your money,” I said.

“Take money?” Evan asked, looking sad.  To him, money is the thing that makes the helicopter ride in the mall go up and down, so he’s a big fan of it.

“That’s right, speed demon.  You just got a ticket.  You can show up to your court date or just fork it over now,” I said.  Just as I had the inkling that perhaps I wasn’t encouraging Evan to have the healthiest attitude toward law enforcement, I looked up to see several family members giving me the “what’s wrong with you?” look.

“Babe, why don’t you teach him that the policeman is the good guy?” my wife Kara suggested.

“Sorry, I mean he’s here to help you change your tire, buddy,” I said, but Evan looked suspicious.  His daycare might need a few visits from Officer Friendly to offset our playtime.

In any event, Christmas gets exponentially more fun when you have a kid who appreciates the finer points of getting spoiled rotten.  This year was such a success, we may very well set out a cookie trap again next Christmas Eve to see if we can lure another visit from Santa.  Or maybe we’ll just leave out the cookies that Evan put on the mantel again this afternoon.

You can put some bituminous goodies in Mike Todd’s stocking at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Goodfather

The scene was straight out of The Godfather, except that the horse’s head lay surrounded by several other equine body parts.

“Dude, that’s one of Evan’s horsies,” I said, pointing at the pile of horse parts between our dog’s paws.

“I did not have anything to do with it,” Memphis said with her eyes, a hoof hanging out of her mouth.  Our son Evan has always been careful about keeping his herd of plastic horses safely stored in its yellow bucket, but the Appaloosa colt must have wandered off by itself.

“Hide it, quick,” my wife Kara whispered.  Our son Evan had his back turned to us as he rifled through his toy basket, so he hadn’t noticed the carnage that had taken place just a few feet away.

I scooped up the horse pieces and discreetly delivered them to the Great Trash Bag under the Kitchen Counter.  When he turned back around, Evan didn’t notice the thinning of the herd, so we played it cool.  I’m not sure how Evan would have reacted if he’d have seen how his favorite horsie went off to live on a nice farm, but it’s a safe bet that it would have been worse than the time Memphis snarfed the zucchini bread right out of his hand.

Though we take horse rustling very seriously at our house, Memphis couldn’t be entirely faulted for this particular indiscretion.  She was temporarily insane because I hadn’t taken her for a walk in about a month, creating a surplus of destructive canine energy with no outlet.  The old-man pains in my left knee had wrecked our nightly ritual, and the little Appaloosa had paid the price.

When you’re young, you’re hurt because you got beaned with a baseball, or you fell out of a tree or you wandered over to see why the firecracker hadn’t gone off yet.  When you get old, you just wake up injured one day.

“Dude, my knee is killing me,” I said one morning, and that was the beginning of my month of limping around.

Being injured isn’t as much fun when you have a toddler in your house.  You have to be careful about how much you complain, which ruins the most fun part of being injured.

“My knee hurts,” Evan announced last week, mimicking my limp.

“How’d you hurt it?” I asked.

“Because,” he replied.  You’d be amazed how many questions can be answered that way.

Kara, now at the beginning of her third trimester, has much more to whine about than I do, but she also has to mind what she says in front of Evan.  He recently walked up to us and announced in his whiniest voice, “I’m craaaampy.”

You do what you can for your children, but in the end, all you can really do is hope that your two-year-old experiences minimal discomfort with his uterus.

A few nights ago, I opened my laptop with our parrot/child in the room.

“Wanna push the buttons!” he said, trying for the keyboard as I brushed his hands away.

“I just need a second to finish this one thing,” I replied.

“Wanna push the buttons!” he insisted.

“Okay, okay.  How do we ask?” I said, surrendering without wanting him to think he’d won.

“Pwease,” he said.  I put the laptop into hibernate mode and pushed the keyboard toward him.

He mashed the buttons with glee, saying “Almost done, almost done, almost done.”

It took me a second to realize that he was imitating me, repeating what I say while I’m on my laptop.

“Push you down the slide, Daddy,” he said, bored with the laptop, motioning toward his big plastic school bus with the little three-foot slide on the back.

It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.


You can bean Mike Todd with a baseball at mikectodd@gmail.com.