Category Archives: It’s a Guy Thing

You can almost smell the love

It’s not quite time for the children to get up for school yet. They still reside in the happy world of dreams, peaceful angels in their slumber.  In the sleepy darkness before dawn, they have no inkling of the battle raging in the house around them.

Daddy is ready to leave for work. Showered and shaved, he has even applied the coating of lotion to his hands and face that Mommy insisted he start doing because she doesn’t want him to dry out like the old prune he is.

He steps into the bathroom where Mommy is drying her hair. He gives her a kiss and a “Love you,” then turns to leave, thinking he has escaped it this morning.

“Did you spray?” Her question freezes him in his tracks.

“No,” he sheepishly admits.

And then the chase is on.

It all started . . .

in the after-Christmas, clearance section of Target. Mommy found two half-priced gift boxes of scented items – one for Him and one for Her. Having both a Him and a Her in their marriage, Mommy deemed the pair of boxes a good bargain. They were lotions and perfumes (I guess men’s perfume is called cologne, but I don’t know much about it), the kind of gift that says “You were at the bottom of my list and I was long past being thoughtful by then. Also, you smell bad.”

perfume for manly men

Smelly enough for a woman, but made for a man. Say it with your deepest voice: “Cologne. “

Mommy was within her rights to pay half-price to smell the way she wished, but Daddy protested buying perfume to cover up his traditional Head & Shoulders scent (he still needs to shampoo the sides of his head). Daddy’s protests were in vain.

It actually all started . . .

decades ago on a dairy farm. Coming out of the barn, the boy Daddy learned the way to coexist with polite society was to divest himself of stink, not to purposely apply stink to himself. Nobody ever ran away from a farm kid they couldn’t smell. If he had nothing else going for him, at least they couldn’t blame him for smelling like air.

It also started . . .

in an upper-middle-class, suburban school, where the young Mommy’s friends wore designer clothes and had leisure to discover their own signature scents. They all smelled like something different, but none of them smelled like air or Head & Shoulders. None of the good ones did, anyway.

It ends this way.

Daddy runs. Mommy grabs the spray bottle of worldly man scent and chases him. After a moment, Daddy gives up his foolish hope of escape. All his flight will do is wake the children. He allows Mommy to shoot him a few times.

Mommy breathes deep. “Oh, you smell so good!” she says, dreamy in the eyes. But it’s nearly time for the children to wake, so she sends Daddy off to work to delight the nostrils of other people.

Daddy drives off to work, wondering if there isn’t a better time of day for the war to end.

A boy’s recipe for toast and good will

Whenever my wife has to work a morning shift, I go in to work late so I can take the boys to school. I don’t look forward to these mornings for many reasons. For one thing, I am using up my vacation time on something that is anything but a vacation. Also, none of the men in our household are famous for being morning people. The most infamous non-morning person is Big Brother.

It can be quite a struggle to get this sleepy 2nd grader out of bed and into his morning routine. But the last time this duty fell to me, he woke up by himself at the same time I did. This was a pleasant surprise, and it was only the beginning of his pleasantness.

As I was showering, a young voice was directed at me from beyond the shower curtain. “Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“I think I’ve done all my responsibilities. I got dressed and brushed my teeth. I made my bed and I got out the ingredients for toast.”

soon to be toast

Sorry, Soft ‘N Good bear. You’re about to be toast.

Dressing, brushing his teeth, and making his bed are all elements of the morning routine expected of him, but, to my knowledge, he has not been asked to help make toast. That he made his bed without being reminded was a good start, but getting out the ingredients for toast proved he was reaching above and beyond. He was spreading helpfulness around like sweet frosting on the cake of good behavior.

It was obvious which cake he was trying to frost. Since he woke up early, he figured why not try to get some screen time in before school. And what better way to get permission to play than to act like you’ve earned it?

“So, can I play on the Kindle?” he asked.

Just the fact that I didn’t have to drag him out of bed made it worth letting him play, but I wasn’t going to act like a total pushover. “Did you turn off your fan?” Everyone loves the white noise at night.

His answer was to leave the bathroom. Ten seconds later, he was back. “I turned off the fan. So can I play?”

“Okay. But just until your toast is ready.”

“I’m not making the toast,” he clarified. “I just got out the ingredients to make it, except the butter. I couldn’t find any butter.”

So, in other words, he got out the bread. But he couldn’t just say he got out the bread. It sounds much more impressive when you get out the ingredients to make toast, all of them except for one.

Hello, butter!

Sometimes you’ve got to open two refrigerator doors to find precious butter.

Usually, I prefer an economy of words, but I’m glad he chose to get out the ingredients for toast, minus the butter, rather than just getting out the bread. It tickled me, which probably made me more likely to let him play on the Kindle.

But then I bet he had taken all that into consideration already.

Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s hoping you find all the ingredients for your Turkey Day toast.

 

“I wanna do it!”

Whenever I go outside to do some man work, which hasn’t been often lately, I find an eager huddle of young helpers circling my ankles. You’d think we keep these kids chained in the basement for all their enthusiasm about going outside to dig a hole.

Over the July 4th weekend, I planned on doing one caulking project to ease myself back into the world of the useful. Somehow I was able to complete this project without any of the hindrance known as little boys being helpful. For all the good the project accomplished I might as well have had truckloads of their help.

I meant to relax the rest of the weekend, so as not to lead my wife into the illusion that I would be regularly useful around the house, but we stumbled into a trees and shrubs sale at buzz-kill Home Depot.

hunt and peck

“I wanna do it!” syndrome affects inside jobs as well, like computer work. This one’s helping me write my blog.

For years, we’ve had boxwood, or dogwood, or some horrible wood-suffixed plant growing in front of our living room windows. Whichever [random noun]wood bush smells like cat pee on a summer breeze, that’s the one.

Some half-priced rose bushes were just screaming to take the whateverwood’s place. I, and more importantly, my wife, heard their cries.

On Sunday afternoon, I hitched up my big boy pants and headed out to make the switch. I was followed outside by two boys, who having missed their earlier chance to pitch in, would not be denied this opportunity to help.

The first task was to trim the urinewood so I could get at its roots. The moment I started clipping, Big Brother was all over me. “I wanna do it!” he demanded.

Buster wouldn’t be left out. “I wanna do it!”

housework

“I wanna do it!” love for the vacuum cleaner wears thin as soon as they are actually capable of pushing it.

Big Man had been made to stay in the house, and now he looked out at us through the window screen, giggling and making Dada words that certainly translated into a one-year-old’s version of “I wanna do it!”

When boys say “I wanna do it!” what they mean is: I want to use these tools to do something that is less work and more fun than what you want me to do with them.

As soon as I had instructed them what to do with the tools that their budding reservoirs of testosterone had commanded them to co-opt, they were off cutting bits off every plant in the yard except the one I had pointed them at. That one was too hard to cut. Gladiolus shoots were much easier, and proportionally more fun, to clip.

Fortunately, it only took clipping a few flowers for me to get at the roots of the shrubbery, 15 feet away. The task of picking up and carting off their clippings and mine cured them of their desire to help. Anything that resembles cleaning up will do that for boys. They found their own games to play and I dug three holes, free and clear of the burden of help.

It turned out to be a lovely afternoon.

The new babies have big shoes to fill.

The new babies have big shoes to fill.

Doctor say it bleeding

The boys were a  dream over the weekend. Unusually well-behaved and full of imagination, they provided several snippets worth remembering.

It began Thursday night, at the book release party my wife threw for A Housefly in Autumn. There were other events at the venue, with lots of people in fancy clothes attending them. As he helped push our wagonload of books into the elevator, Big Brother looked up and asked. “Daddy, do all these people know you’re famous?”

“No, I’m pretty sure they don’t,” I replied.

“Why not?”

I changed the subject. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. I should have said, “Someday, they’ll know,” but I didn’t think fast enough. Anyway, it makes me proud and humble enough to know I’m famous to him.

On Saturday, Mommy went away on an overnight visit, bravely leaving her house in the hands of us four men. We didn’t break the house, as far as Mommy knows, and we had lots of fun. Big Brother invented two new jokes.

Q. What does corn call its father?

A. Pop Corn.

Q. What does an apple call his grandmother?

A. Granny Smith.

You can see the pattern he was working on for his comedy that day.

After jokes came wrestling.

blanket lump

When Mommy’s away, two boys and a blanket lump will play.

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Did that blanket just give birth to a Big Man?

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You boys go about your play. Big Man’s on the march.

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Why is he climbing up the stereo?

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Of course! An extension cord will make the perfect addition to the stash of useful objects he keeps in his hole behind the stereo.

 

On Sunday, Big Brother said he was worried. “Mommy hasn’t called or texted or anything!”

I reassured him that she had texted me. He looked disgusted. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Now that I know he’s a worrier, I’ll be sure to keep him in the loop. He’s right to worry about Mommy’s safety, considering that I’m the only parent he has in reserve.

We were low on food, so I got to do one of my favorite things in the world: go grocery shopping with three boys. Before we left, Buster insisted I help him tear off a piece of Scotch tape. He attempted to wrap the tape around a “Boo-boo” on his baby brother’s finger.

“That’s not a Band-Aid,” I said.

He nodded to reassure me. “It is. It is Band-Aid,” he insisted.

I finally convinced him to leave Big Man alone. He contented himself with wrapping the tape around his own finger. In the car, he tried to convince Big Brother his finger was bleeding.

“It’s not bleeding,” Big Brother insisted, because he’s a pathological corrector, even of  three-year-olds with big imaginations.

“It is bleeding!” Buster shouted back. “Doctor say it bleeding.”

For the rest of the ride, Big Brother attempted to pin Buster down as to exactly when he had been to the doctor.

Buster gave up the argument, secure in his own knowledge that he possessed both a bleeding finger and a Band-Aid. Sometimes, you just have to ignore the skeptics.

Big Man slept through most of the supermarket, and the other boys were surprisingly good. We hit almost every aisle and I didn’t have to break into a run once.

We went home and had sloppy joes, corn on the cob, and watermelon. Then Mommy came home and they ran to her as if she were all that could save them from the collapse of society.

I’m still not as famous as Mommy, but all the blood was imaginary, so I guess we did all right.