Tag Archives: Dads

It’s party time! Again.

After my First Communion, my family went out to celebrate. At McDonald’s.

McDonald’s! How awesome was that? It had to be a pretty special occasion to celebrate at McDonald’s.

Not only was McDonald’s the only fast food restaurant in the area, it was the only restaurant where I can remember eating until my teen years. Going there was a rare and enormous treat.

A few years after my First Communion, I got invited to a friend’s birthday party at McDonald’s. This was mind-blowing on multiple levels. First: a birthday party? Birthdays were when you got to pick what your mom would make for dinner, you ate some cake, and received one present from your parents. What was this crazy talk about having your friends come to your birthday? And they all brought presents, too? No way!

And celebrating a birthday at McDonald’s? McDonald’s was ground too hallowed for a mere birthday celebration. McDonald’s was for big, once-in-a-lifetime deals, like the Sacraments. I’m sure I could easily imagine couples having their wedding receptions there (if they were high-class enough to meet McDonald’s standards).

Despite my misgivings, I went to the party. Hell yeah, I went! I wasn’t about to miss a precious opportunity to enjoy the gourmet offerings of that palace of delicacies.

The party was short and sweet. We had burgers, fries, and some cake. The Birthday Boy opened our modest gifts, and then we went home. It was the single birthday party experience of my childhood.

My oldest son is five. He has been the focus of three birthday parties and a guest at dozens. None of them have been at McDonald’s. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Times have changed, leaving middle-aged bumpkins like me wondering what to make of things. McDonald’s has gone from treat to last resort. Birthday parties crowd the outside edges of our calendar.

Though it sometimes feels as though our weekends are drowning in kids’ parties, I can’t complain. To the extent that it is a problem, I’m a part of the problem. We play the party game too, and we do it without trying to make anybody eat at McDonald’s.

I hate cake!

We think we have a lot of parties, but they have to do this five times in each of our human years. (Image: Harry Whittier Frees)

I’m all about giving my kids good childhood memories, but sometimes I worry that these automatic birthday parties will lead them to believe that watching the calendar page flip a dozen times is a superstar accomplishment. When you’re 105, it may be, but you’re 005, it’s been done by plenty of other normal folks.

Then again, opening my mouth wide and letting a priest put a dried circle of bread on my tongue wasn’t the mark of superstardom either – those wafers dissolve in your mouth; you don’t even have to chew your way to success. Yet, I got what was, at the time, the best reward I could imagine for it. And after a few more birthdays, my son will have outlived my Catholicism, so I guess I’m the last one worthy to complain about undeserved honors.

So let’s party!

Whose turn is it to run away?

“I’m running away from home. I don’t know where I’m going, but I can’t stay here and let everybody be mean to me, so I’m running away.”

Did you ever feel like saying that to your kids?

I felt like that over the Martin Luther King Day long weekend.

The five-year-old had been home from school with the pukes on Thursday and Friday, so he was just a little stir crazy.

The one-year-old had inherited the bug from his brother. He wasn’t sure his fever was enough to let me know this, so he cemented my understanding by puking all over me. That was fun. It gave me another opportunity to bathe him, and if there’s one thing fathers love to do, it’s give toddlers baths – stinky, sick toddlers most of all. The best part was that I had to defer showering the puke off myself until he was clean. Society frowns upon letting a baby marinate in his own juices.

If I’d been smarter, I would have left the smell on me longer. This would have deterred the big boy from climbing on top of me, every time I sat down, with his One Hit Wonder, “Daddy, what game can we play?” Kindergarteners who have been away from their friends too long suffer a play deficit. The deficit deepens every minute, and it begins at crisis levels.

“How about we play that game where Daddy puts everybody to bed and opens a bottle of scotch at 11 a.m.?”

“No? Then sit quietly and think up other games and I’ll tell you when you hit one that’s better.”

Much crying and whining later, Mommy came home, upset over trouble with a sponsor for a school fund-raiser she’d volunteered to coordinate. She was so upset she didn’t even respond to all the crying and whining I was doing. The toddler was feeling well enough to fight with his brother, which took an iota of pressure off me to supply the latter with a marathon of fun.

Boys will be boys

“Break it up, boys. And don’t nobody puke on me anymore today.” (Image: Stanley Kubrick/Look Magazine)

When the boys quit trying to break each other, the big boy jumped on me, demanding that I assume the roles of his missed schoolmates. The little boy cried his I’m beyond comforting, but keep trying to comfort me anyway cry to remind me that, when he wasn’t hitting somebody, he was at leisure to remember his hurting tummy.

After dinner, I snuck away to the bedroom and turned on sports. I don’t remember what game was on, but peace was the prize. I couldn’t relax though. I kept thinking about poor Mommy, down there alone with those demons. I felt guilty about abandoning her. Finally, my conscience made me go back down into the vortex. The boys flew to my suddenly magnetic personality. Tumult ensued.

A while later, I realized Mommy was gone. I quieted the boys enough to listen for the upstairs TV. It was on, but it was no longer tuned to sports.

And it was still only Saturday.

Puking with a quiet dignity

“Daddy, I had to puke in the night,” he told me.

Of course, my first feeling was one of concern; Mommy gets a tad bit grouchy when she has to add an extra sheet-washing to the schedule, and I have to live with her.

The boy was lying on the couch, watching cartoons instead of getting dressed. We had already determined that he was too ill for school. I knew he had a belly ache and a little fever, but I didn’t know about the puking.

Mommy didn’t know about it either. We didn’t know because there was no sign of vomit in his bedroom, which meant that he had made it to the toilet. That’s not so amazing; he’s a practiced puker who’s been well-schooled on the drill of running to the bowl.

What is amazing is that he did it without waking anybody up. This boy, who bellows about every little scratch and had already made sure I knew all about his upset tummy and aching head with repeated updates before 8 a.m., had gone about his puking quietly and climbed back into bed without anyone knowing about his midnight troubles.

We would not have been upset if he’d woken us for so worthy a reason, and maybe he should have, but there’s part of me is proud of him for being stoic about his business and not making a big deal of it.

This is a kid who will get out of bed and call for help on the flimsiest of pretexts. Aside from the normal crises of illness, bad dreams, and dire thirst, this child has risen from his bed to complain about the following list of late night circumstances:

  • His nightlight was in the wrong outlet.
  • His blanket was upside down.
  • His blanket was wrong side up.
  • His sheets were kicked all the way to the bottom of the bed and he couldn’t find them under the blankets.
  • He needed a fingernail trimmed.
  • He needed a BAND-AID for an infinitesimal, bloodless scratch.
  • He had needed to examine his scratch by the glow of his nightlight and couldn’t get the BAND-AID to stick anymore; hence he needed a new one.
  • His nose itched.
  • He was too hot, sleeping under three blankets and a comforter.
  • He wanted his radio on.
  • He wanted his radio off.
  • What he really wanted was a kids’ BAND-AID. One with Spiderman on it, which we don’t have.
I want a kids' Band-Aid

“If you don’t have the Spiderman bandages, I’ll take the ones with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them.” (Image: Keystone View Co.)

After all of these dubious disturbances to our nighttime peace, this boy gets up in the middle of the night, goes to the toilet, pukes, cleans himself up, and goes back to bed without so much as a Guess what I just did.

Remarkable? Responsible? Grown-up? Maybe, but once he’s feeling himself again, I have no doubt he’ll burst forth from his room at night to alert us all to the emergency situation caused by his incorrect arrangement of dirty clothes in his hamper or about how his hair hurts.

Desensitized to parenthood

We’re waiting for our third child to arrive. We’re waiting passively. It will be a great day when he comes, but we aren’t counting down the weeks. We did that once, and it was fun, but by the third kid, the waiting becomes routine. It doesn’t mean we’ll love him less; it means we know what’s in store for us.

During the first pregnancy, the excitement and nervousness kept us invested in every new development. Most things we couldn’t see; luckily, we had a book to tell us all the changes our unborn child was experiencing. We consulted that book for a Baby Development Review every week. My wife read the progress report aloud while I made amazed comments: “Wow! Our baby has a neck now!”

We always knew how many weeks we had invested and how many we had yet to go. If you’d asked me, “When is your wife due?” I’d have answered, “In sixteen weeks and three days; probably around 9 p.m., I figure.”

Things are different now. I couldn’t find that What’d Your Baby Grow This Week? book to save my life. We’re going on faith that if the baby doesn’t have a neck yet, he’ll sprout one by his birthday. We still do the fun stuff, feeling him kick and whatnot, but we’re not pressuring him into growing fingernails by a certain date. He’ll be ready when he’s ready. God willing, so will we.

There’s an edge to parents that gets smoothed down by each successive child. That’s a good thing, because that edge can get between two parents and scrape the thin skin off both of them.

I can see the difference between our first and second boys. With the first, my wife was particular about the routines she developed for him. I was defensive about my ignorance of these routines. I’d be giving the boy a bath and my wife could see I was doing it contrary to accepted practice:

WIFE: “That’s not how I rub soap in his hair.”

ME: “It’s how I do it.” (Thinking:  Everything doesn’t have to be done your way.)

WIFE: “Here. Just let me do it.”

ME: “No. I’m perfectly capable of washing his hair.” (Thinking: You’re not the only competent parent here.)

We’d be disgusted with each other all day.

Now, when I bathe the second child, (Thinking: Oh man, the ball game’s about to come on.) I’ll act clueless about washing his hair:

WIFE: “Is that the way you bathe him now?”

ME: “Yup. Daddy’s running this show.” (Thinking: Go ahead, step in and take over. What kind of mother are you, letting me do this all wrong? Just put one hand on the boy and this bath’s yours. Touch him. Just go ahead and see how fast I run away to the TV.)

WIFE: “Whatever.” Then she claims the TV for the Lifetime Network while I’m stuck washing the kid.

I sure hope there’s nothing on TV when this new one needs a bath.

Shut up kids. Our program's coming on.

“Dang it, Martha, those young’uns can bathe themselves; The Lucky Strike Hit Parade is about to come on the air.” (Image: Russell Lee/US Farm Security Administration)