Monthly Archives: May 2013

You can lead a kid to water, but it might cost you

Sometimes the idea of a thrill ride is very inviting, especially when that thrill ride is somewhere else.

As you get closer to the ride, and begin to appreciate how tall it is or how fast it goes, the thrill can slip into fear. I’ve had this experience, and now my son has, too.

We were visiting a hotel that housed a couple of enclosed water slides. We had to bide our time in a regular pool for a while because a thunder storm had closed down the metal slides. My son has a love-hate relationship with water, so we passed the time having a squirt gun war that consisted of him squirting me and then complaining of Geneva Convention violations every time I attempted to squirt him back.

He rarely entered the pool, though the water barely reached his waist, because standing up to your hips in water is half-way to the horror of putting your head underwater. It’s a slippery slope, and even a four-year-old can figure out that the slopes must be slipperier around the pool, or they wouldn’t yell at you so much for running.

Just as our little swimmer was in danger of getting wet, we learned that the slides had reopened. We hurried back, excited about the thrills that lay in store. In our minds, those thrills were enclosed completely within the envelopes of our comfort levels.

1900 water slide

I didn’t get a picture of our water slide. Fortunately, these 110-year-old kids got one of theirs. Just imagine this, with more metal, curves, and color.

At the stairs leading to the top of the slides was a wooden squirrel with a measuring stick. The squirrel said you had to be yea tall to ride the slides. While I picked out a two-person tube, my son approached the squirrel. Every step of the way he carefully examined the stairway that rose so high that it disappeared into the roof of the building.

I could see the exact moment when that squirrel changed his tune. As my son drew close, the squirrel whispered that you have to be shorter than the line to have an excuse for not riding the slides. My son stood up next to the yard stick. Too his dismay, he learned that he stood a good two inches above the exemption line.

Stripped of his technical disqualification, the boy’s only recourse was the ugly truth. “I don’t want to go.”

Caution can be a good thing. This boy’s cautious nature has surely saved us trips to the E.R. Yet, what parent wants their kid to be the one who is sidelined by caution while the other kids are having fun? There has to be a middle ground. That middle ground was the tube slide.

Mother and father conspired to trick coax the boy into helping us carry the tube up the stairs. At the top, it took 15 minutes of negotiation and the bribe of new camouflage shorts and a trip to the toy store to get him into the tube. We had to launch quickly, so he ended up riding with his mother.

playing in the kiddie pool

Fearlessly protecting his little brother from water spouts in the kiddie pool. No time for any more thrill rides.

I went down both slides, and the one he took was much less intense. Still, he did not enjoy it. This made us feel bad for a while, but it didn’t harm him, and now he gets to collect his rewards. All in all, he’s a better man for it.

As for the parents, well, the slides were supposed to be cheap entertainment. Let’s see how much that one ride ends up costing us.

It’s a long story

Lately, whenever I ask my son a question like, “How did the [busted item of the day] get broken?” he heaves a big sigh and replies, “It’s a long story.”

He does not attempt to relate that long story, because it is clear that a father with such a short attention span would not be interested in the burdensome details.

“It’s a long story,” is not at all an introduction to an informative tale. Rather, it is the boy’s way of telling me that a lot of unnecessary information will not fix [busted item of the day]. It is his counsel to not cry over spilled milk and just get on with the business of living life. What’s done is done.

I could not figure out where the boy picked up such an evasive strategy, until I recalled a conversation we had at a restaurant a while ago.

Out of the blue, and just as I was about to shovel the first forkful into my mouth, the boy asked me, “When I was a baby, how did I get into Mommy’s belly?”

Why do they always pounce when I’m weak from hunger?

Put on the spot, my panicked mind bounced between two options. “You see, son, when a man loves a woman . . .” was the option from which my mind ran screaming.

“It’s a long story,” was the defense mechanism for which my mind leapt. It worked, or so I thought at the time.

Before the boy could renew his assault, a man wearing an Air Force uniform was seated nearby. My son, who is going through a period of fascination with all things military, forgot about the origins of his species. “Is that man in the Army?” he asked.

I explained that he was in the Air Force, which was like the Army, but with jets. My son soaked it all in. “Why don’t you go in the Army, Daddy?” he asked.

“I’m not so good at following orders,” I replied.

“You could be the boss of the Army. Then you could give all the orders.”

“But I’m too old. They wouldn’t even take me.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have to be in the battle,” he assured me, as if the Army has a row of rocking chairs ringing the combat area for its aged recruits.

Old soldiers

Maybe I could join up with this outfit of old soldiers. We’d play cards, listen to the battle on the wireless, and, time permitting, argue about where babies come from.

We then went on to discuss related topics. The subject of where babies come from was forgotten. I congratulated myself for dodging a bullet, for the time being anyway.

Well, maybe he forgot about the topic of the conversation, but he did not forget about the device Daddy used to steer the conversation elsewhere. He remembered that all too well. Now I have a house full of broken stuff and a child full of long stories that are too cumbersome for Daddy’s simple mind.

You reap what you sow.

And that baby question will come up again anyway. How will I handle it next time? Well, that’s a long story.

Your jokes are stale and your nipples are useless

The baby has discovered separation anxiety – not at being separated from me – people all over the world rejoice daily that they are separated from me. The baby has developed a deep dislike for being separated from his mother. This includes separations of as little as a few feet.

Separation anxiety takes its toll on everyone. The mother is exhausted; everyone, except perhaps anxious babies and opossums, needs to be separated from everyone else for a little while every day. Otherwise, a fraying of the nerves sets in. This fraying is manifested in desperate pleas in the nature of: “Somebody please pull this baby’s tentacles off me!”

It is difficult for the father not to feel rejected. It’s as if the baby has contracted amnesia and has forgotten all the wonderful times we’ve shared. The baby and I have spent many good times on our own, from which we’ve built a certain bond. Suddenly, our games only inspire the baby to make that frown that says: “They say I used to like this show. I must have been very unsophisticated in my youth.” The frown is followed by the wail for Mommy: “Mommy, help! I’m trapped in the arms of a balding man who aspires to drollness and claims to be a relative.”

The baby is stressed out because he is living a nightmare where he can’t find Mommy and he is being stalked by a sad clown who thinks he’s a funny clown. And he can’t heckle me enough to make me stop.

Come to Daddy!

Who needs a tickle?

There are moments of light, in which the baby seems to recall that I am a loved one rather than a bad comic sent to annoy him. For a fleeting moment, he might coo sweetly to me. If I am extra lucky, he might even lean in and give me one of those kisses babies give, with their mouths wide open. If anyone but a baby kissed that way, it would be disgusting. In the next instant, the frown is back, as though I’m the one who gives disgusting type kisses. The wailing for Mommy is sure to follow.

I’m sure he’ll grow through this phase and retrieve his memory of me as a guy who did actually make him chuckle once or twice. Meanwhile, he’s Mommy’s ball and chain. If that sounds unsympathetic to you it only means that you have not been punched and kicked by him in his efforts to get away from you so he could crawl to Mommy.

“When will he reach that age when he only wants to be with you?” my wife asks me with a callow hopefulness. I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth: never. Even when his older brother spends the whole day eagerly lengthening the duration of my chores by helping me with them, he is always a single stern word away from running to Mommy. Mommy is the only one who can overrule Daddy. As such, she will always be needed.

Dandelion whine

I have a new toy for pulling weeds. Our lawn has lots of weeds. More accurately, our weeds have a little lawn in between them. During the summer, I can hide most of our weeds by mowing them to the same level as the grass. From the far side of the street, the green and level area surrounding my house looks almost like a regular lawn.

In Dandelion season, there is no hiding my shame. As my son used to say whenever he looked over our ¼ acre estate, “Look at all the pretty yellow flowers.” Dandelions send up a bright yellow flag of neglect, signaling to the world my impotence as a groundskeeper.

A lawn-full of Dandelions

“Look at all the pretty yellow flowers.”

I don’t mind Dandelions. My parents were farmers, and when you’ve got cows to milk, hay to bail, and a myriad pieces of equipment to keep running, it’s hard to give a rat’s ass about Dandelions. My parents didn’t, and up until now, neither have I.

But I don’t live on a farm anymore. I’ve started to concern myself with Dandelions because I’m beginning to feel like the Typhoid Mary of weeds in my neighborhood. Dandelions want a better life for their children. So they send their little seedlings this way and that to search for greener pastures, or in this case, lawns.

Periodically, I try to show respect for those around me. The latest flare-up of this civil attitude has inspired me to attempt to nip the coming neighborhood Dandelion infestation at it source. I’ve already tried to spray the horde into submission, but poison is an unreliable murder weapon. It left the Dandelions listless for a day; then it made them angry.

Dandelion choker

It’s nothing personal, Mr. Dandelion. You and I are just pawns in a wider Flora-Fauna conflict that neither of us are bright enough to understand.

They’ve come back with a vengeance. My new weapon resembles a metal cane with a circle of spikes at the bottom and a little ledge to step upon. You place the bottom of the cane on top of the victim, step on the ledge, twist, and pull out the weed by the roots.

Weed extractor

Fun for the whole family.

It works so well that the entire family wants to play with it. My son had to be the first to try it, but he’s too light to make it work efficiently. Then, my wife got hold of it.

My wife is a champion of maintaining the interior of a house, but her dominion ends at the threshold. She has rarely shown an interest in keeping up the appearance of the outdoors. This she considers to be the responsibility of Nature, with my occasional, if ineffective, help.

But once she tried my new toy, she was hooked. She’s spent two evenings in a row battling Dandelions. This sounds like a happy ending for me, right? No work and no Dandelions.

Except.

My wife, for all her strengths, is not the most proficient Dandelion hunter. Dandelion stems tend to lean off to the side (damn their milky souls), so if you aim for the bright, decoying flower, you will surely miss the root. My wife has made a regular hobby of missing the root.

She regularly pulls up out of the ground a wisp of Dandelion petal, a shock of our all-too-precious grass, and a clump of soil. Still nestled safely into the ground is the bulk of the Dandelion plant, waiting until she turns her back to send up a fresh stem.

I tried to show her how to locate the root, but she shook off my advice. “That stuff is all green down there,” she said. “How am I supposed to identify anything in that mess?”

“All you’re doing is surrounding the Dandelions with holes,” I told her. “There’s not going to be any grass left.”

She shrugged. “Well, it will just be the year without a lawn.”

And so it may be, if I can’t break her odd fascination with my new toy.

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful

Can’t we all just get along?