A conversation with M- and D-: I see your unbeatable strength, and raise you my imagination

While setting up a sort of industrial-strength collapsible steel bin in the garage yesterday, I stood on it so I could reach each of the sides at once. My 7-year-old son D- and 4-year-old daughter M- were immediately shocked that this device could EVEN hold up DAD!

I informed them that it could probably hold up an elephant, since it's made of centimeter-thick hardened steel bars crisscrossed in a grid of one-inch squares, supported by large, thick, solid-steel feet. I made the mistake of adding, for effect, that they couldn't break it if they tried.

They immediately took this as a personal challenge, and sought to undermine it the only way they knew how.

D- (conversationally): Well, the Incredible Hulk, if he was here, he could just SMASH it like that. Right?

Me (distracted): Sure, I guess... since he's not real, and they can make up anything they want about him.

D- (strangely triumphant): Yeah, so he could...

M- (looking to contribute): And they made up that he's the strongest guy in the whole world... so HE could break this if he wanted to, but we couldn't.

D- (exultant, but now totally off topic): HE could break ANYthing... he's so awesome. ERRRRRRGGHHH...

M-: Yeah!

This went on for a few more idle minutes. Meanwhile, thoroughly put in my place, I continued to feebly assemble this contraption as their own personal ball- and toy-storage bin. And of course, I then had to lay down for a few hours to regain what meager strength I manage to muster each day.

If you first smash it beyond recognition, there is ME in team

Though my daughter M- is still only 2, her communication abilities are far enough advanced that we're able to get an even better idea than genetics has given us of her future temperament and predispositions.

Chief among the latter is most certainly not, it seems, willing cooperation with her peers, any more than those peers will be likely to enjoy the credit they're due for their contributions to groups including Miss M-.

This is a girl who, some time after hearing me idly singing, "We're following the leader, the leader, the leader..." one day, began marching about the house very seriously chanting, "Be. The. LEA-der! / Be. The. LEA-der!"

I haven't yet had any of my patented Extra-Boring Heart-to-Heart Talks with her about this theme in her life, but just in the past couple of weeks, she's crafted gems like these, the only ones I happened to write down before I forgot:

M- (after putting on her own shoe): I did teamwork!!

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Me (to a now-smiling D- and M-, after they had been loudly fighting over who would lay where at story time): So, did you guys find a way to cooperate?

M- (proudly singing it out over her brother's more subdued response): I did!!
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Can't wait till 5-and-under softball! Though maybe football is more her speed... her teammates can either crush the selfishness out of her until she's just cautiously individualistic, or strategically piss her off each game before handing her the ball and getting out of the way.

Based on our experiences already, this plan shouldn't be too hard to execute, and it would be devastatingly effective.

How else can one harness convulsive rage and a steadfast maverick streak to unleash his or her full potential? Politics? Ultimate Fighting? Competitive eating? I'm not sure which is the least undignified, but then there's very little dignity in the contorted faces she wears while trying to inflict pain on those who displease her, in her smiling-monkey-faced footie pajamas.

She can transition easily from that into cramming the faces of her enemies, as carved into pie crusts, down her food chute at rates never before seen, thanks to that dash of OCD I contributed to her mother's genetic material.

Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket... she'll miraculously stay as lean and mean as her Japanese opponents, and with her Threats and Intimidation skills, she'll win such an assortment of global endorsement/protection deals that she'll be able to support her father in the luxurious lifestyle to which he only wishes he could become accustomed.

I can't quite reconcile what's best for her with what's best for me... either way, I'm prepared for quite a lot of notes to be sent home from kindergarten.

Mano a womano, eggo a eggo

I should have learned after all these years not to enter into any kind of atypical, nonathletic competition with my wife, but I think by this point it's clear that nature just won't allow me to pass up the chance.

Of course, among the most imposing barriers to my abstaining from such competitions is the fact that I often don't know I'm in one until it's over.

Take, for example, our evening of egg-dyeing yesterday. Possibly because she knows me too well, the moment my first egg touched the dye, my wife excused herself from the room with an egg she'd already dyed earlier.

After quite a few curious moments during which I had to explain to both the kids, repeatedly, why they could not drink the delicious-looking colored liquids from the whimsical bunny mugs (D- eventually retreated to just loudly announcing how thirsty he was every two minutes), and only after the kids had used up all 18 of the eggs, J- returned to check on my finished product, which had the surprise* message, "DADDY RULES!" written in wax across its face.

She offered some patronizing encouragement before dropping this bomb on me:
Sure, you're probably thinking, his right hand is upside down, and he's somehow managing to harness magical egg powers to hold a beer stein with his wrist**, but you have to admit, this is pretty much like bringing a gun --and not a quaint foam scrapbooking one-- to a rock-paper-scissors match.

Here's the side-by-side comparison:

Tell me which YOU think is better, keeping in mind that I, myself, am better, and that if you don't pick me, considering all the mitigating factors I've revealed above, I just may epically pout and stop posting my ridiculously overwrought anecdotes here forever.***

(A bonus mitigating factor: in case you've never tried, I assure you it is very difficult to write on an egg with a generic orange crayon not expressly made for that purpose.)

Lastly, please do note that one of the contenders is clearly labeled as the unquestioned master of all, humans and ovums.

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* The surprise, of course, was not the message itself, but rather that it happened to appear on that particular egg.

** J- would no doubt whine that it's not her fault the Chinese Scrapbook Sweatshop managers found it irresistibly cheaper to sell twice as many left hands and feet in a package while cutting production of rights altogether.

*** And if all you ladies stab me in the back on this vote out of some kind of twisted "ho's before bro's"**** nonsense, I'll instead resort to posting only about sports and painful jock itch. Or better yet, everything you never wanted to know about me, me, me, like a bad first date, three times a week. You want that on your conscience? Or in your feed reader?

**** I feel honor-bound to point out, for those who were taken aback, that those apostrophes above were included to replace the many missing letters# in the words, not out of disgraceful confusion over possessives versus plurals. Who thinks of impossibly rigid grammatical rules when creating the music of the streets? Not enough people, I think.

# Yes, I'm aware that this then means there should be an apostrophe before "ho's", but it just seemed a bit much. Much like this beast of a footnotes section.

I am the hero I've been waiting for

Though he may be a whole 5 years old now, my son D- is more importantly a man in training, and following that storied tradition, he constantly asserts his superiority in every way over almost everything he looks at, hears of, or thinks of, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So I walk a fine line every time I'm challenged on strength, speed, intelligence, agility, or proficiency in many of the world's most inane activities.

I don't think it's healthy to completely disillusion and demoralize him, but I think it's equally unhealthy for me to set him up for any harder of a fall than he's already due when released into the wilds of full-time school next year.

I mean, a kid needs all the confidence, whether completely off base or not, that he can get in this world. So if he starts out thinking HE'S the strongest man in the world, instead of me, then that just gives him a leg up over all the other boys, right?

Here's a conversation snippet, issued out of the blue while walking through the library, from the kid who's told me (verbatim) more than once, "I know Everything. Not everything-everything, but I know Everything," just minutes before and after asking me entries in that day's long list of questions about how the world works at the most fundamental of levels:

D-: I'm even stronger than you.

Me: Yeah?

D-: I'm so strong, that if there was a robot, up in space, and I was up in space? One punch, and he'd be dead. If I punched a big robot one time, he'd be dead.

...I'm thinking that "leg up" just may land him upside down in a cafeteria garbage can one day. Maybe I should grab his ankles and wrists with one hand and hoist him helplessly into the air like a safari prize more often while I still can.

We all know this world is nothing if not humbling, and I've always found a steady diet much easier to take than the sudden compulsory feast days that are one's only alternative. So I suppose I'll have to take it upon myself to begin a campaign of careful destruction and reconstruction of his ego, via the most fun, ridiculously lopsided competitions I can think of.

And once he turns 10? Then, my friend, we move on to a crash course in Trash Talk 101 delivered by the one true master greater than Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Jordan, and your mom combined.*

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* I mean me.

Macaroni-and-Death in the Garden of Good and Edam

As those of you outside what I'll call The Snow Belt may have heard, the rest of us are currently dealing with the kind of snow that builds you a fort all by itself, and the kind of cold that freezes your tongue to your coat zipper the second your foot hits the front porch.

Sharp cold wave shocks upper Midwest, temps to -36

In times like these, disaster is rarely located anywhere but Right Around the Corner:

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"Indiana police reported numerous crashes on slippery highways, including a truck that overturned and spilled 43,000 pounds of cheese, closing a busy highway ramp during the night in the Gary area."

---

Far be it from me to provoke an intra-national incident or incite legendary food-fight-related violence, but I think I speak for all of us when I say it should be clear to the people of Wisconsin that this willful distribution of copious amounts of free cheese to the public by the people of Indiana constitutes an act of war.

I believe I'll munch on some gravel-laced Gouda while I mull the implications of this tragic, region-shaping attack.

A conversation between M- & D-: Just after eleventeen

As I mentioned recently, my four-year-old son D- has a beloved Corduroy bear who's seen more than most bears his age ever will or want to.

His nearly four-year relationship with Corduroy is slowly becoming something of an obsession for his almost-two-year-old sister M-, who seems to have taken the concept of hand-me-downs to the extreme of now excitedly waiting to consume her brother's entire existence as she grows up.

Case in point, this conversation that took place in the hallway last week while I was in the shower:

M- (pleasantly, with her hands out): I can have Corduroy.

D- (graciously, as he often is): No, not right now, sweetie.

M-: Yeah, when I'm BIG-GER.

D-: ...No, he'll always be mine, even when you're bigger, but you've got a bear, too, remember?

M-: No-- I can have Corduroy when I'm BIGger.

D- (remixing lines he's been fed before): No, M-, you can't have him when you're bigger, cause even though I'll be bigger, too, he'll still be my friend. But you can hold him sometimes, still.

M- (with an audible blank stare): ...And I can have Corduroy when I'm bigger, when I'm fifty-bigger!

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For more such posts, check out the other (4 YO son) D- conversations, (1YO daughter) M- conversations, and (wife) J- conversations.

A conversation with D-: You are an idiot

The other day, while my 4-year-old son D- was showing off his typing skills to my mom, the following absolutely 100% true conversation took most of the suspense out of the question Will he turn out just like me?:

D- (pointing to "PQ" on the screen): See here? I typed "Pa".

My Mom: Oh, you mean like Pa in the Laura books? Actually, that's P-A. You wrote P-Q, but that's pretty close-- good job!

D-: ...Umm, actually, it's spelled like that.

My Mom: "Pa" like Laura's Pa is spelled P-A. Maybe we could go get one of the books and you could see, to help you remember.

D-: I think we should get the book, so we can look at it, and you can say, (adopting appropriate voice), "Oh, I was wrong!"

My Mom (deftly masking her disbelief, she grabbed The Long Winter): Here you go, see there? It's spelled P-A. But that's okay...

D-: I'm never going to read those books again.

Pantsed in Candyland

For those of you not down with the C-Land lingo, you may as well stop reading, because you don't understand my people.

In the spirit of a great blues musician, I've come here to proclaim my troubles to the world in hopes of gaining some relief:

Like golf*, Candyland is a game of sheer chance and luck designed to illustrate the futility of continuing to live. I'm a relative newcomer to this game, having come from a house full of boys and a wannabe-boy, but we bought it for my daughter at Christmas because J- is a lifetime fan, and D- has since wanted to play it at least once a week.**

So without toughened skin from years of experience, I was distinctly unprepared for the feeling of the potent one-two punch in the gut that is your opponent drawing a single orange block card and then the pink Lolly card. I got Rainbow railroaded. Even with him getting stuck in some licorice and losing a turn, I was toe-tagged after only 20 cards.

Twenty cards! That's ten turns. There are over 60 cards in the deck, and we've been known to go through all of them before finishing.

This site, which is my kind of site, states that the average two-person Candyland game takes, mathematically speaking, 52 cards.*** So this was clearly an aberration existing only to balance out the 200-card games out there, and my son was given the plum role of The Hand of Fate.

Care to guess what I heard from this little upstart, who regularly has to be reminded (incredibly unselfishly, I might add) which direction he's supposed to be heading on the board, and whose backside I've so graciously returned to him 95% of the time we've gone head to head? "Oh wow Dad, what luck I'm having! That's the way the cards were cut, I guess," or some such zen platitude?

How about instead you guess, "Ha, ha" as he cruised towards the finish? You'd be warmer than Gloppy on fondue night.

---

* For instance, I once spent a week going by the nickname "Tiger" and during that time I did not win any sweet green jackets or get paid millions of dollars to wear one hat versus another. Go ahead and try to explain that one away.

** Once equals one session of at least three games...

*** Am I revealing too much about myself in having sought out this guy's painstaking Candyland analysis?

Respect my Au-THOR-a-tie!

I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that after much watching and wonderment on my part, my Technorati Authority rating has gone up to 68,* which apparently puts me within the top 97,000 blogs out of many millions, and surely entitles me to some kind of cash prize, secret club membership, or that many virgins awaiting me in the afterlife. Or maybe I'm confusing several different brochures I've been handed recently.

What I can say for sure is that while I may be no Dooce or Sneeze or Black Hockey Jesus or even Brittany the Barefoot Foodie, I'm pretty happy with dropping below six digits.

Of course I must acknowledge that this is not so much a reflection on me or anything I've done, but instead it's an indication of how many of you kind people have linked to me in a forgettable drunken haze or whatever other extenuating circumstances explain it. So thanks for that, whatever the cause.

Having as short an attention span as I have, though, and as well-developed a sense of entitlement as I do, I'd now like to double this figure within, oh, say the next week or two. Anybody know any of those crafty spamming folks who so efficiently create and abandon junk blogs every day? If so, could you ask them to link to me before abandoning their pages? I just might be able to become virtually more popular than Dooce, and then wouldn't some people not existing solely on the Internet be mildly impressed THEN?

The cake under that icing is that once the systems get cleaned up and my artificially inflated rating begins plummeting, I have reason to believe I will receive several billion dollars from the federal government, to help cushion the blow for me and to feed their hope that I won't wipe out my entire blogroll and start a chain reaction that will bring down the egos of the entire blogosphere.

If anyone is deserving of that kind of power, grandeur, and unrestrained discretion, it is undeniably yours truly. After all, I can almost see Canada from my house.

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* I'm gunning for you, Kevin.

Tinkle, tinkle, little star

In her continuing effort to become 5 years old in 2 years or less (she currently seems to be speaking and thinking at about a 3-year-old level), my 19-month-old daughter M- woke up mostly dry the other morning and immediately peed in the toilet upon waking.

Now, I don't know about you, but that first pee in the morning is generally very refreshing and primally satisfying, and given that this was her first-ever Morning Pee on a toilet, where she could hear that satisfying splashing sound instead of feeling that unnerving warmth, I expected great giddiness. However, she was mostly excited about getting "a treeeeeeeat", and this moment I captured seems to suggest that even that high wasn't made to last long:
Maybe she just knows it marks the end of an era, a glorious time of life* when you can just let loose whenever you want and know someone will clean it up for you.

Honestly, though, based on her usual morning mood, I think the look may have understandably stemmed from getting her picture taken while on the toilet (again). Still, being as angelic as she often is (I just can't bring myself to exaggerate by not including this qualifier), she couldn't hold out for long:
Full Disclosure: I had just reminded her that she could have extra treats for actually making pee, one of which is finally getting to use some of that highly-sought and entrancing toilet paper.

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* To clarify, I mean the time of life when you don't feel guilty or depressed about that habit.

Just a little sleight of heel

I have reason to believe my daughter is a computer prodigy at the tender age of 1.

As this blog and my job history (as well as, among others, my wife, my family, casual acquaintances, and anyone sitting in my house throughout a typical day who's capable of understanding how a clock works) can attest, I've put in the time to become much more than familiar with the ways of a computer.

I live for shortcuts and for new ways to make my life easier and therefore less meaningful. I have spreadsheets of useful Alt codes and other keyboard/mouse combinations that can work miracles and wow the uninitiated, but I generally don't need them, because my inexplicable feeling of need leaves my brain wide open and receptive to these new tidbits and tricks, which are immediately written to permanent file storage.

That being said, my daughter has the ability to, while I am staring right at her, press buttons and make things happen on my computer that I didn't even know could happen, much less how to bring them about via shortcut. She conjures new effects, windows, and even programs right out of thin air without me being able to tell how she did it.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, know that even if you doubt my claim that I have never, ever exaggerated at all in my entire life, I am absolutely telling nothing but the straight truth right now.

And, just so you know, I'm not talking about old-school peanuts like holding down SHIFT for 8 seconds until FilterKeys comes on, I'm talking about stuff like this:

Now, users of the Opera browser might be familiar with this option, but I'm a relative newbie to it, and I'm only mostly sure that this dialog box came from that program. She summoned it, or possibly called it into existence entirely, this morning when climbing up on my lap for comfort while dealing with her fever, using only her heel! Her heel!!

Oh, how she mocks my confused desire to play apprentice to her wizened master.

She makes it look so easy

You know, as someone who at times works too hard to be funny, I have to admit that I feel more than a little bit jealous that someone like M-, my 16-month-old daughter, can just grab a random hat that's too big (or better yet, something that's not even a hat), put it on her head, then toddle out and say, "Ott!" (hat) to get big, well-deserved laughs all around.

For example:
I could write more, but I'm too busy playing Salieri to her Mozart. Perhaps I should just stop here, to imitate her minimalist style.

...

Is it working?

Damn.


* (see picture) In case you have the same jammies at your house and you're wondering if that is indeed an oversized zero-to-3-months-sized nightgown, the answer is yes, yes it is. To further spite the titans of the children's clothing industry, it also used to be D-'s. Three points for us!

My pity party: What did you bring me?

Let me start off by winning you over to my side: I cleaned the toilet the other day. Voluntarily. Just because it needed to be done.

I believe this deserves some kind of formal recognition, and I'm sure you agree. Granted, for most people, this might not be especially remarkable, but J- and I got married at (barely) 21 and 22, respectively, so we started out living like carefree college kids, which we actually were until a few big Cares entered the picture (then we were just college kids).

We've never really had time since those days to make conscious changes to our lifestyle, beyond those forced on us by life's meandering path. Our normal cleaning strategy has long been just to not to, as they say. So doing something as significant as this makes me feel like we might soon have a real household, like real people, all because of me. I think that's worth at least an hour of videogames, an extra day to sleep in, and a week's worth of free lecture notes, don't you, dudes?

Actually, since J- is going to have to take some extra courses to complete her Illinois teaching certification (Maine doesn't require as much special ed coursework), she'll temporarily be a college kid once again. Maybe I can offer to write a term paper for her if she dusts something or washes the bathtub. There's got to be a first time for everything, right?*

Now that I'm sure you're almost fully in favor of my position, I'll add that I also have recently taken up making sure the kids vacuum pretty regularly, along with personally sweeping the kitchen and dining room. On one or more occasions, I've even mopped and wiped our counters and stove. I mean, did you hear that? Mopped!! I will admit that I had little choice, what with all the cereal, milk, and urine, but still-- let's give credit where credit is due, please!

And now that I no doubt have much sympathy and support from across the country and indeed across the world**, I shall prepare to present my case to my wife. Wish me luck!


* In rereading this, I realized a footnote was in order to barely keep me out of potential trouble: I mean to say not that J- has never cleaned things, but specifically that neither of us has actually scrubbed our tub since we moved in last summer (there's a window in the shower that seems to keep things at bay), and we don't even own any type of dusting apparatus, technically, beyond some washcloths that might be employed for such a purpose. Does this make us bad people?

** Some of you regular visitors are from at least 6 different countries, and we have occasional guests from 23 total so far-- isn't that fun? Who knew that they had The Internets in other countries now? I should alert "our president" to this potential excuse to raise the Terror Alert Level!

Support your local blogger!

I just wanted to call time out to shamelessly take care of a little business:

I realized that those of you receiving my posts via e-mail or feed won't see that I've put up an announcement on the blog itself about my nomination for Best Daddy Blog at the Best of Blogs site. Vote for me today and tell all your friends to do the same, or so help me, I will begin tickling this baby, and I may even eat her tummy-- I'm just crazy enough to do it!

It's the second-best way you can support this blog, to keep the rambling stories and parenthetical statements coming!

As long as I'm shaking you down for votes and clicks, I'll also mention that I recently signed up at a fun site called Humor-blogs.com, a pretty self-explanatory index of funny blogs that are peer-reviewed and rated as well as ranked by the amount of traffic they drive to Humor-blogs.com from their site. So any time you're in a mood to peruse some other attempted-humor-based blogs similar to but better than this one, please do click through to that site. Even once this post gets buried, you can still find the link in my Of Interest to Me and Membership lists to the right.*

Okay, now I need to go take a shower to remove the stench of desperate self-promotion, along with that of baby pee. Though when you think about it, the shower is probably the worst place at our house to hide from pee. Nevertheless, I shall endure, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of whatever it is I do. While I'm gone, please read, or re-read, through previous posts to remember me in more humble and amusingly painful times...

* In addition, I always encourage you to visit the blogs of my readers who have them-- MamaNeena, SherE1, Cassey, Mama Dawg, Christy, TerriRainer, Mrs. 4444, Rikki, Mrs. B Roth, and Feisty Charlie. (Let me know if I missed anyone.)

Oh, that's an old bowling injury...

J- discovered, as did I many months ago, that with the advent of Wii Sports, it's possible to strain much more than just your thumb while playing videogames. Two hours of Wii Bowling may get you (J-) a lot closer to Professional status (a.k.a. Dan League), but it can also get you a sore shoulder and hamstring.

As a seasoned veteran, I know enough to recognize Wii Shoulder on the horizon and to switch to lefty in response, so I was in the clear the next day. There's nothing like watching someone lay on the couch after a long day of work only to hear her complaining about being sore from all the videogames she played on the weekend.

The sad thing is, you may have noticed we're on a bit of a Wii kick of late, and odds are good we'll both be right back at it today. She should probably let herself heal up before facing me again, but then she's just as competitive as me. Maybe I'll do some Wii boxing during naptime today, to keep it fair. With our luck, we'll both be stiff as zombies tomorrow.

Wii will crush you

You know what's great?

Spending an evening repeatedly playing all of the wide-ranging games on Wii Play, as well as a (baseball) hitting contest and a Power Throws (bowling training) match in Wii Sports, with your impressively competitive wife, and completely dominating her across the board like the house against a compulsive gambler on a down day.

You know what's even better?

Knowing she's going to read this and immediately demand a rematch. Moohoohoohahahaaaaa!

Only now will I have a worthy competitor again.

P.S. She may make me cry a little bit after her hurricane of game-related pain has passed.