Unless you’re Andre The Giant or a railroad worker (length of a standard rail), these dimensions mean nothing to you. However, if you’re a stay-at-home parent, they still have relevance.
As a kid, I remember watching old spaghetti westerns with my dad and it always seemed like the outlaws would stowaway on trains to elude the authorities. At some point throughout our Saturday afternoon, after my dad fell asleep with grass clippings pasted to his sweaty ankles (product of a healthy push-mow), me and my brothers started to ask questions. We were vigilante kids, cutting through his snoring, sticking him in the ribs with action figures and Matchboxes, trying to figure out why Clint Eastwood would suddenly go horizontal, putting his ears to the railroad tracks for no apparent reason.
BAILIFF: Ladies and Gentlemen of the courtroom, would you please rise for the honorable imaginary judge.
JUDGE: Everyone sit the hell down so we can get this over with. We all have better stuff to do online today; surfing porn, checking Groupon, finally giving in to LinkedIn invitations.
PLAINTIFF (me): Yes, of course your honor. Today I intend to prove, with photographic evidence, without a reasonable doubt, that our toddler is occasionally a violent lunatic who sometimes needs to chill out and take 5 without inflicting injury upon herself or anyone else.
JUDGE: Go on.
PLAINTIFF (me): Members of the jury…
JUDGE: There is no jury, get on with it numb-nuts.
PLAINTIFF (me): Ahem, sure, my apologies. It all started around 15 months. It was a regular Tuesday morning and I was getting Ava dressed for a walk. I paired a purple romper with a matching headband-flower and thought the outfit would really pop with some silver Mary Jane’s. Well, your honor, she didn’t want the MJ’s. I considered a compromise and asked her what ‘sues’ she wanted to wear. She responded by pointing at a pair of brown snow boots with fur trim and pom-poms hanging from the back, which were completely out of season.
JUDGE: This is getting a little gay, please continue.
PLAINTIFF (me): Your honor, as much as I wanted her to express herself and pick out her own accessories, I knew we would be a spectacle on the playground. So I sat her in my lap and went back to my original shoe choice. At this point, she began to thrash her body wildly back and forth, writhing around like i was wrestling an alligator in the Everglades. In the struggle, she blasted her occipital protuberance into my left orbital cavity.
JUDGE: This is not a real court case. Stop using medical jargon and give me the layman’s terms.
PLAINTIFF (me): She slammed the back of her fucking skull into my damn eye socket.
And with that, I present Exhibit A:
As parents, we love to get together from time to time for dinner and after the kids go to bed, get mega nuts (yeah right) drinking copious amounts of discounted wine from Trader Joe’s. This alcoholic grape juice allows us to initiate a competitive bragging session with little to no remorse, highlighting latest achievements and sharing cute photos of our little angels. For single folk and comedians, this provides endless amounts of ridicule and punchlines at our expense. But this is neither here nor there (whatever that means).
I don’t consider myself a shutterbug per se, but I do have dozens of amazing photos of Ava, donning awe-inspiring headbands and accessories, courtesy of my wife. However, every once in a while, you capture one of those rare moments where you have to question whether or not this is, in fact, your child or an alien spawn delivered to your house while you were sleeping.
