Tag Archives: Dads

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like a house with the right kind of bed in it

On the days I pick my son up from kindergarten, we come home through the neighborhood. There are a lot of very nice, roomy houses on the school side of our neighborhood. The homes get smaller and plainer as we get closer to ours. When there is nothing left to envy about the houses we pass, we know we are home.

dream home

What our house surely looks like from the other end of the neighborhood. (Image: Marion Post Wolcott/US Farm Security Administration)

There have been three or four houses for sale along our path since we began taking it. They are all near the school, over on the swanky side of town. We couldn’t afford to upgrade to any of them, but with the addition coming to our family, it is tempting to fantasize about living in a bigger house.

My son always points out each house with a for sale sign in the front yard. We make a game of picking out which property each of us thinks is the nicest. It’s kind of a stupid game, since they are all nicer than people of our ilk can afford. But it passes the time.

One day, on our trip home, I asked the boy, “Would you like to move to a new house?”

“No.”

“Not even a nice, big, fancy one like these?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because the new house might have a girl’s bed in it.”

“A girl’s bed? What does that mean?”

“It might come with a girl’s bed in my bedroom instead of a boy’s bed.”

I’d never thought of that. Who would want to take such a chance? “When you move to a new house, you take your own bed with you,” I explained.

“Oh. That’s a good idea. I should keep my same bed.”

Yesterday was my morning to take him to school. All of his favorite pants and shirts were in the hamper, so we had to make do with whatever was clean. He balked at the two pairs of pants I could find that fit him. Then, when I finally got him to understand that there were no other choices, he complained that the shirt I found went with a different pair of pants. The situation escalated. I yelled at him to just put something on before we were late. He whined and got all pouty about having to wear such unappealing clothes.

fresh laundry

All his other clothes were dirty. (Image: Dorthea Lange/US Farm Security Administration)

And there I was arguing fashion with my five-year-old son. I’d never imagined a scenario that would lead me to this result.

It’s a good thing I don’t have any money to buy a new house. There was an hour yesterday morning when I might have shopped for one that came with a girl’s bed.

That knee-jerk reaction faded fast. It soon occurred to me that he was arguing about his loss of control more than about fashion. Even so, he can be into fashion or whatever else he wants. He’ll always be my boy and he’ll always be able to bring his own bed wherever we might go.

Bar tender, my darling, let’s have another round over here!

It occurred to me recently that children are like drinks of scotch. After you’ve had a couple, someone will attempt to take advantage of your impaired condition to convince you that just one more would put you right smack dab in the zone of happiness. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve suffered headaches caused by your liquor or your kids. It’s not like you’re going to have half a dozen more, just one, and a little one at that.

Since I’ve had children, I don’t spend much time with scotch anymore. Only time will tell if I made the right choice.

I hope it’s the right choice because we’ve made it again. We’re going on this exciting and frightening adventure one more time.

Here comes the stork

I sure hope they’ve updated the safety regulations on stork transportation.

It’s exciting because my children make me happy, albeit with undertones of aggravation. A third would, by my calculations, increase that happiness by 50%. That doesn’t even account for compounding, but I want to keep any math I have to do as simple as possible.

It’s exciting because I’m still thrilled that a woman of my wife’s caliber would agree to mix her excellent DNA with my swill just once, let alone three times. My wife is amazing; her only failing is an occasional lapse in judgment.

You’d think that by the third go-round, the fear factor would be mitigated. It’s not. It’s a different fear. It’s not that old fear of being sent home from the hospital with a living creature and inadequate training on how to keep it that way. It’s the fear of stretching resources beyond their limits. The house suddenly seems too small. My car is definitely too small. College just became an even fiercer financial dragon. I don’t even know how these kids are going to pay off their preschool loan debt yet.

Retirement? Never heard of it.

After the sixth child, Teddy Roosevelt kept a shot gun filled with bird shot next to his bed. (Image: Kermit Roosevelt)

After the sixth child, Teddy Roosevelt kept a shot gun filled with bird shot next to his bed. (Image: Kermit Roosevelt)

Since we can’t trade in our house, we’re looking at minivans. I hate to give up the 15-year-old car, fully equipped with power nothing, that used to be the symbol of my Spartan existence, but I can’t find any infant seat anchors on the hood. And minivans aren’t so bad. I’m actually looking forward to taking 20 minutes to place an order at the drive through (30 minutes, if the kids want something to eat).

I recently learned from one of my favorite Mommy Bloggers that I’m some kind of hipster because I got married in my late 30s and am producing offspring well into my 40s. First off, she’s confusing trendiness with the inability to get a date for 20 years. Secondly, I just got a whole lot more hip, sister! And it’s not because of the replacement surgery. Not this time.

So the cat’s out of the bag. A bun is the oven. Where’s the scotch?

P.S. I want to send thanks to couple of fantastic blogs. Randomnessessities nominated me for the Liebster Award and Are You Finished Yet? nominated me for something I don’t quite understand but I’m sure is a high honor. Both are very well written blogs. You should check them out.

How to drive a toddler over the edge

This truth is self-evident. One-year-olds are patriots in their zealous devotion to the pursuit of happiness. They want happiness, and they want it now. They’ll let you know, quickly and unambiguously, when the path they are on deviates from that ultimate goal.

The path deviates regularly, because the things that make a one-year-old happy are often disruptive, destructive, dangerous, or all of the above. Further frustrating the pursuit of happiness is their reluctance to abandon the notion that parents can make all their wishes come true, regardless of the laws of physics or better judgment.

Our one-year-old’s happiness is hindered by baby gates. He isn’t bothered that they prevent him from going down the stairs; someone will carry him down, if he asks. Baby gates frustrate him because they have a mechanism that he cannot operate. He doesn’t need freedom to pass the gate; he wants the knowledge to open it, to liberate himself from ignorance.

gateway to hell

This gate has a long history of vexing one toddler and numerous adults. It has been pulled out of the wall twice – probably not by the toddler.

Once, when he was especially frustrated by the gate atop the basement stairs, I tried to explain the purpose of baby gates to him. I told him that baby gates wouldn’t be useful if all manner of little people could operate them. I was careful in my explanation, but he acted like he didn’t even understand most of the words.

I asked him if he would like me to take him to the basement. The look he shot me said, “Mommy, my juice, and the gate I was working on before you butted in are all up here. What the hell would I want with the basement?”

Toy trains are another frustration to the boy. He loves playing with his big brother’s trains. Big Brother, in adherence to rule number one of The Boys’ Guide to Optimal Utilization of Toy Trains and Real Dads, owns several incompatible sets. The cars of one set won’t hook to the cars of another. This drives the one-year-old into a toddler-sized fit of apoplexy.

His dream is to make a single chain of all the diverse engines and cars in the house. He gets annoyed when he can’t get two cars to hook together. Then, he taps me with his hand and points to the troublesome connection. Since I can’t make incompatible trains fit together, I’m left trying to explain.

the problem with trains

All the connectors are the same color, but somehow that’s not enough. Were the baby Vanderbilts saddled with such trials?

Incidentally, if you want to know what frustrates a man in his 40s, it’s trying to explain compatibility to a toddler.

I finally got him to understand the color coding – blue hook doesn’t fit into white hole. Then he brought me two engines with only white holes as connectors, tapping me on the shoulder and pointing to the work he needed done. You should have seen his face when I tried to teach him that the two whites couldn’t connect without any hook pieces. Knowing what I know of his toddler language, I’m pretty sure he called me a lying sack of something or other before he flung the engines across the room.

How could any child build a viable transportation system with parents like this?

Stuck training the new guy

If you’ve ever had to train a new employee, and the guy was taking a long time to catch on to tasks you could do without a moment’s thought, you might have found yourself thinking the same things as I did the other afternoon.

I was attempting to train a new worker how to use the leaf blower to herd dead leaves into one big pile. There is a profound difference between creating wind and using it to affect some purpose. His insensibility to this, and the resulting random rearrangement of leaves, led me to my first great trainer’s cliché. “It would be so much easier to just do this myself,” I thought.

But that would mean sending my trainee away discouraged. I worked with him on the rudiments of directional leaf blowing. It was a hard sell, which inspired my next trainer’s lament. “This guy has the intellectual capacity of a five-year-old,” I said to myself.

I spent 20 minutes walking sideways with him, shrinking the perimeter of ground covered by leaves. It was probably that I was uncomfortably hunched over the entire time, helping him aim the blower nozzle, that led me to my final nugget of trainer’s wisdom. “I’d be better off trying to teach a first-grader to do this,” I muttered.

This is when I discovered that statements made to relieve frustration (and back pain) lose much of their impact when reality robs them of their comforting hyperbole.

The new employee had the intellect of a five-year-old because he was exactly five years old. It wasn’t my idea to hire him for this work. He volunteered. In fact, he volunteered so vehemently that I’m sure he would have run into the house crying if I’d denied him his training.

Little boys are fascinated by power tools. Combine the necessity of plugging it in to an electrical outlet with the magic of creating wind, and the leaf blower is a kid magnet. Unfortunately, the power of the gods comes with a steep learning curve for a kindergartener.

To his credit, he stuck with the training, and the associated parental scowls, long enough to get the hang of it. When our herd of leaves was under control, I let him go solo.

He even earned a short break for the obligatory leap into the pile.

rewards of hard work

I just hope this doesn’t make him think that after his first day of training at McDonald’s they’ll let him jump into a pile of hamburgers.

But the days grow short this time of year, and there was a large pile of leaves to vacuum and bag. He wanted to take training on this process too, but the machine was a little tall and heavy for him to hold upright. It was clear that his workday was over when he began throwing armfuls of leaves at me and shouting, “Confetti!”

Leaf fort

Makes you wonder how many children get bagged up and carted away with the leaves every year.

In the end, he learned a little bit, and I learned a lot. I have to practice being more patient with my volunteer helpers. As to whether I would be better off trying to train a first grader, well, I guess we’ll find that out next year.