Yeah, wouldn’t we ALL like to ‘go out for a bit’. I’ll donate an organ to sit on a folding chair in the garage, absorbing dark silence for a few minutes.
Ava walked into the living room the other day while I was feeding Charlie. She had a pair of Uggs on the wrong feet, pants hiked up to conceal her diaper, slid on shades and pulled her sucker out to tell me that she was, ‘going out for a bit’.
AVA: ‘DADA. DADA. DADA.’
ME: ‘YES, Ava, what is it?’
AVA: ‘Charlie got sick in your hair.’
Really? Is that what I needed right now?
Run and get some paper towels for Daddy. And a t-shirt for chrissakes, I’m on the internet.
Forget journaling, sex, planting a garden, aromatherapy or yoga, I found my outlet.
When Jen had Ava, someone gave us the ‘Gripper’ as a gift. Normally, I’d assume it was for folks on assisted living, to grab cans of soup from their Rascal or pick up the phone without getting off the recliner.
Not true.
MULTIPLE USES.
I found joy in this specific moment, pinching this baby doll’s head, hoisting it to an altitude where it annoyed my daughter. It released all of my stress. I stopped shaking and felt like I was floating above the crowd. It was like Scotty beamed me to a white sand beach somewhere where Verizon ‘COULDN’T HEAR ME NOW’, where I sprawled in a hammock, reading one of the 3 dozen books I haven’t started. It was being a kid and hitting my first home run, seeing my first naked booby calendar in my uncle’s auto garage or sipping one of my dad’s Heinekens while he wasn’t looking. It was just one of those great feelings.
I was reborn.
I guess it’s the little things, right?
Read More Post a comment (4)It’s the end of the year and my wife is kicking into high gear, squeezing in all of our doctor appointments before the end of the year. Says I pick at my skin and never wear sunscreen so I have some questionable freckles on my back. She calls it ‘something we have to do’ as responsible adults. I call it a ‘shitty nightmare’.
Today was the dermatologist. We went together before she went to work, so one of us could watch the kids while the other one got a body scan. What’s a body scan? That’s when they say ‘strip down to your underwear, and put this paper dress on. The doctor will be in whenever she decides you’re at the absolute breaking point of wrestling with your kids, while wearing a gown, under artificial light’.
Careful readers noticed the word ‘she’. Yep, you got it. My wife booked the FEMALE DOCTOR.
Every. Dudes. Nightmare.
By the time she finished with her scan, Ava and Charlie had struggled enough to tear my evening dress in three places. I turned the kids over to Jen and assessed the damage.
There was no point in privacy or protecting my innocence. I stood up and ripped it off in frustration. Ava was throwing a screaming fit as our female doctor came back into the room with a female receptionist, so that Ava might go with her to the waiting room for a lollipop. But she didn’t want to go. So it was a giant stand-off.
So there we were. My wife, the screaming kids, a lady doctor and cute receptionist.
And there I was. 35 years old, a slight holiday belly, wearing black underwear and white tube socks with a wristwatch.
That’s how my morning started. What about you guys?
Read More Post a comment (3)Interesting. Maybe that’s because it’s not a skirt. It’s a plastic shopping cart.
Am I not allowed to leave the room for two seconds to take a whiz without a national crisis forming?
I hope the guys at Little Tikes are having a good laugh this morning as I smear Crisco on my daughter’s hips so that she might live a normal life. However, maybe this could come in handy when she starts dating…
Have a case of the Mondays?
You should tell your boss to suck it and find one like mine.
Half-bent on a juice box, blowing through the toy aisle wearing a New Year’s Eve hard hat, telling me to MOVE. OUT. OF. THE. WAY. DADA.
Holy. Shit. I need a raise.
Read More Post a comment (2)The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey is an American multi-mission, military, tiltrotor aircraft with both a vertical takeoff and landing, and short takeoff and landing capability. It is designed to combine the functionality of a conventional helicopter with the long-range, high-speed cruise performance of a turboprop aircraft.
In this photo, it drops a hummer onto the battlefield, to help our soldiers on the front line.
The Kulp-Kroucher Defecation Bomb is an American civilian daughter, tiltrotor toddler with both vertical takeoff and landing, and short takeoff and landing capacity. She was designed to combine the functionality of a construction worker needing to take a spontaneous dump on the job site with the short-range, low-speed bomb-dropping performance of a diaper-wearing 2-year old.
In this photo, instead of taking out an enemy bunker or dropping aid to the villagers, she lays a bomb down on the inside of a #4 Huggies while reading ‘Elmo takes a bath’ in the middle of my parking structure.
My daughter, the Osprey.
Read More Post a comment (0)My wife says that everyone has stopped reading my blog because they’re sick of hearing about our road trip across the country where nothing happened.
FINE.
This will be the final chapter in the ‘reverse Griswold’ saga. Here are the Cliff’s Notes.
We left Texas and briefly drove through Oklahoma.
As road weariness, saggy eyebags and a dead-leg set in, I opened the moon-roof to put my hair in the wind, a little Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing style. Instead of acid and filter-tipped cigarettes, the hallucinogenic properties of the Diet Cokes and beef jerky had me listening to this cloud. It was luring me into the next state.
Welcome to New Mexico. I had only been through this state once on my way to Los Angeles via train, back in 1997. I don’t remember much, thanks to Bloody Mary and her dumb friend Heineken, the only two drinks Amtrak would serve.
Something told me that we were about to be enchanted. I wasn’t certain whether or not it was the landscape behind the welcome sign, or the Aquafina bottle half-filled with piss at it’s base, but we were in for a real treat.
If I were lucky, I’d have a kid that licked stripper poles or ate cigarette butts off the ground.
Nope. Not that fortunate.
Ava wants to eat tic-tacs and medical waste. Blood transfusion tubes make great straws and our morning snack could be a lanced mole or, if we’re really lucky, maybe an AIDS needle! Mmmm…good!
