Tag Archives: boys

Daddy’s alternate ending to “Love You Forever”

There is a downside to child-friendly eateries. When children realize an establishment caters to their desires, they tend to relax from their best eating-out behavior and view it as a playground with chicken fingers.

We have one or two restaurants where our kids need help remembering they are there to eat, not run an obstacle course. With the younger boys, I have more patience, but I had to explain to the older boy exactly what payback he was setting himself up for.

I told him that in a few years (perhaps as many as 10), it will become his duty to come fortnightly to the nursing home and pick me up. He will spend every other Friday night taking me out for casual dining, in a restaurant very similar to the one in which he is currently taking liberties.

I'll be waiting

Six o’clock sharp, every other Friday. I’ll be waiting for him in my overcoat, and whatever other clothes I’ve remembered to wear. (Image: Josh Vichon/US Farm Security Administration)

I will behave and make it seem like a pleasant visit with his old dad, until halfway through dinner, at which point I will have one of my spells and begin throwing chicken with ranch dressing and the ice cream flavor of the day onto every window my eroded flinging skills can reach.

Everybody in the restaurant will stare at us. They will conclude that I am in no condition to control myself and wonder why any responsible adult or teenaged boy (as the case may be) would bring me where I would so predictably disrupt the dinner-time peace of many innocent bystanders.

The manager will come to our table with a wad of napkins and assorted damp rags and nod meaningfully at the soiled windows. My son will begin to clean the windows, only realizing he has mis-prioritized his tasks when I hit him in the back of the head with a hunk of chicken he assumes is intended for the window. He will backtrack and clear my area of weaponizable foodstuffs before returning to the secondary task of cleaning the mess.

As he begins to make progress, I will have an “accident” (wink) in my adult diaper, causing many complaints, and leading the manager to ask him to take me out, regardless of his progress on the windows.

Yeah, you're probably not gonna want to hold me on your lap after dinner.

Yeah, you’re probably not gonna want to hold me on your lap after dinner.

It will be a relief to get me away from there, except that, despite my mental feebleness, I’m still spry, racing among the tables, taunting him with my nimble kicks.

He and three employees corner me. As he escorts me to the car, I wail in piercing tones that I haven’t had my ice cream.

He’s humiliated. I ask how many days until our next outing.

I am not sure this prophesy has any lasting effect upon him, but while he’s shaking his head in horror and thinking up excuses for missing our inaugural Friday appointment, he’s not playing tag with his brothers.

For the record, my children don’t throw food at the windows. Also, dementia is a tragic and serious illness, and I will only fake it as a last resort if my children keep pushing me toward payback.

 

Is the sibling who was mean to you in this courtroom today?

One of the joys of parenting growing boys is watching them mature to into playing cooperatively together. Seeing them sit and help each other tear apart a LEGO set I spent hours helping them build, so they can mix the pieces irretrievably among the remains of other disassembled LEGO sets I invested hours in, is pure gold.

Seeing any two of them sit shoulder to shoulder in the chair, quietly intent upon the cartoon on TV is a gratifying experience. Even when Big Brother helps Buster through one of the difficult parts of a video game, though I’m kind of supposed to feel bad for letting them play so many video games, I get a feeling of pride for my boys’ desire to be friends with each other.

two mintes of peace

The boys are playing nicely together. Grab the camera!

Of course, nothing gold can stay.

The giggly roughhousing turns sour when somebody catches an elbow. There’s one, insignificant LEGO piece that every boy needs to have in his hand right now, though it’s only value to him is that his brother wants it. Big Brother helps Buster with his game to such lengths that his assistance has turned into a tug-o-war over the tablet.

Peace between young brothers is so gratifying because it is so fleeting.

tackle

It’s always fun until somebody loses a temper.

The two most common phrases in my house are currently, “I’m telling!” and “[Brother’s name] is mean!”

Even Big Man, who can’t pronounce any of the words, lets me know when one of his brothers is mean, and leaves no doubt about who is the culprit.

I most often overhear “I’m telling!” from the next room, but I have to look accusations of meanness right in the eye. It’s not always easy to do with a straight face.

It gets a little tiresome having to hear about mean people several times a day, every day. I’d like to hear about nice people every once in a while, but who notices, much less mentions, when his brother is nice?

Last time Buster came to me to file a meanness complaint against his big brother, I let out my exasperation with their perpetual denouncements. “I know, I know,” I told him. “Everybody’s mean.”

He shook his head. “Everybody not mean.” He held up a solitary finger. “Only one mean.”

“Who?” I asked.

He turned his little, bony finger across the room toward Big Brother. “That one,” he said in his best voice of condemnation. “That one mean.”

At least he didn’t call him stupid, that time. Three-year-olds love the word stupid. It’s their first insult, and insults and brothers go together like farts and giggles. Stupid is not a nice word, though, so we’re trying to get him to call his brother intellectually challenged instead. It will buy some time while he learns to pronounce it.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue acting like we’re listening to all the pleas and accusations that come running to us. In between, we’ll enjoy those fleeting flecks of gold that sparkle when brothers are best friends.

I’ll return your call as soon as the baby gives me my phone back

We’ve gone nearly two weeks without losing the TV remote. At first glance, this would seem good fortune. But it may be merely that the biggest culprit has moved on to hiding other things.

I’ve never owned a cell phone. Someday society will force a cell phone upon me, but I’m trying to hold out at least until 50, when age may make me less embarrassing to my family as I proudly wield my new, operator-assisted Jitterbug.

Jitterbug

Easy-to-read buttons will make it simple for me to phone customer service and complain about people calling me.

In these days when a reliable cell phone is a higher priority to most humans than a reliable liver, I am able to exist without one only because I have become a singularly unimportant and disagreeable person, so no one needs or wants to call me.

I have a home phone line. It is mostly used by telemarketers; they don’t discriminate against the useless or the surly. Occasionally, I use it to expedite my affairs, but mostly it’s just a tease for telemarketers.

Unlike his father, Big Man loves talking on the phone, even when he is talking to dial tone. He demands the phone any time someone has it in hand and screams bloody murder if he’s left out of a conversation. When he gets his hands on it, he walks around the house with the phone resting on his shoulder, oozing happy baby talk to the spirit of Alexander Graham Bell.

What? No smart phone?

His love of phones dates back to his childhood.

He knows more about using the phone than his father does. One day he changed the ring tone so it played Für Elise. Who knew it could do that?

We used to have two cordless phone sets. For the past few weeks, we’ve had one. The one that isn’t mostly broken disappeared. Rather, it was taken. Big Man climbed up the bar stool next to the counter, grabbed the phone from its dock, and scampered off with it.

That’s the last anyone saw of it. Now, we’re left with the one containing an unreliable battery. And the baby hasn’t even taught me if this one can play music when it rings.

I’ve searched his normal hiding spots for the good phone, not because I’m missing important calls, but because I hate to lose things, especially the less-broken versions of things. My wife pointed out Big Man’s abbreviated height. “It could only be in so many places,” she concluded.

And I’ve looked in all of them.

what's in this hole?

No, it’s not in your stash between the love seat and the lamp post. I already looked there.

I asked Big Man where he put it. He hid his guilt behind the excuse of not being able to speak English yet, but he gave me a little smile that said, “I’m sure a cookie would help me remember.”

Nuts to cookies! I know when I’m being played.

I don’t think he remembers where he put it. He’s moved on to Mommy’s iPhone now. Yesterday, he snatched it from her purse and purged her calendar. Mommy’s life is written in that calendar, or was.

That puts it into perspective for me. Poor Mommy has no idea where she’s supposed to be. I just have one fewer phone not to answer. I guess I made out pretty good.

“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.