Things that amuse me, Vol. 14

Here are a few of the things that have been amusing me recently:

1. The Angry Birds folks obviously have very effectively marketed themselves to potential advertisers, based on ads that have popped up when I've played recently, such as "Time Management Problems?" or "Having Trouble Getting Organized?".

2. Santa is not yet my 2-year-old son E-'s favorite Kringle, since he was exposed to the delicious pastry of the same name, and immediately decided to add it to the elite team of words that is his currently limited vocabulary. "King-goh!"

3. It's recently come to my attention that the Fates have decided to challenge me --a man who has been known to create the world's most perfect food by slapping two slices of pizza together like PBJ, and who considers mashed potatoes a viable condiment-- with a sandwich-impaired son. Faster than I can contain messy nutrients in handy shells of bread products, my E- pulls it all apart and consumes most of it separately. Why this? Why now? Why me??

4. When you're stretched out on the couch with a laptop, plugging away at the same old mindless tasks while working from home, and you start floating up toward the ceiling, it's likely that you seamlessly nodded off at some point without noticing the difference. Also, you were probably mock-typing in the air like a puppy chasing invisible rabbits for longer than you think. It's not disappointing in the same way as a cheap twist ending in a stale TV show, but it's arguably much worse in a more meaningful way.

A conversation with M-: Count me out

After more than eight years of parenting, my wife J- and I consider ourselves pretty skilled at manipulating each of our three kids like puppets, using whatever tools fit each kid at a given moment.

Sometimes, though, they show flashes of the similarly wonderful parents they may become themselves, someday:

J- (wanting a favor from our 5-year-old daughter M-, spinning it with a reliable phrase): So M-, can I count on you?

M- (not in the mood to help, and looking for a loophole): Ummmm... well, no, not today. (walking out of the room) I don't want anyone counting on me today.

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You may enjoy my previous M- conversations, J- conversations, and (8YO son) D- conversations.

IL to ME Odyssey: Indiana, Ohio & Pennsylvania

Here are more of my observations on our car trip from Chicagoland to visit family in Northern Maine, part of the series of posts: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio & Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.

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INDIANA
Distance Traveled: 154 miles
Bathroom Breaks: 2

• Indiana's most noteworthy form of welcome to weary travelers of I-90 is the stench of a sewage treatment plant for at least the first 20 miles. What could be more likely to invite us to get to better know our neighbors to the east? Perhaps a series of spike strips across all inbound lanes?

Or maybe a high-pitched noise broadcast across all channels and through the air, counteracted only for locals by special government-issued noise-canceling earbuds worn at all times? Seems like something those stinky old spiteful Indianans would do.

• The rest stop in Portage, Indiana amused me by having the Girls of Playboy pinball machine in the entry to their game room, right next to the children's claw game filled with Dora and Minnie Mouse dolls. I guess this just means Indiana is fun for the whole family!

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OHIO
Distance Traveled: 245 miles
Bathroom Breaks: 3

• As you can see, we got a lot better about bathroom breaks, thanks largely in part to threats and bribery. It figures, though, since the pricey Ohio Turnpike (more than half our journey through the state on I-80/I-90) is unbelievably clean, well-lit, and lavishly appointed. It makes me wish I could meet all my bodily needs for the entire trip during only those 2 of 22 hours.

• After stopping at a gas station for our final bathroom break (since I-90 splits off the Turnpike proper, it figures), we decided begrudgingly to give up for the day with less than a third of the trip covered after the first day, in about 9 hours. That's right-- only 9 hours, and only 430 miles or so.

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PENNSYLVANIA
Distance Traveled: 40 miles
Bathroom Breaks: 0

I can't tell you how happy I was to start out the day knocking down a whole state without a single bathroom break, or, at least, I won't tell you. Even though we were just clipping the corner of an otherwise large state, I'll still just quietly treasure it as my own secret little joy in this cold world.

By the way, in case you ever take a similar trip, please make sure you (like us this time) follow I-90 instead of I-80 when they split in Ohio, Especially if it's any time within a few hours before sundown. Otherwise, you'll just have to describe to us all how tender is the face of God, either from beyond the grave or having been blessed to narrowly escape it.

Let's all tell Congress it's okay to earmark a little something extra for PDOT (I've decided they must call it this if it's not already) to upgrade this road, perhaps at the very minimum by adding some reflectors on the lane lines, and maybe some new reflective paint. Or, they could issue everyone night vision goggles at the border. Which is cheaper?

IL to ME Odyssey: Illinois

I figured I'd break down my observations on our car trip from Chicagoland to visit family in Northern Maine into a series of short posts of thoughts on our time in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and almost all of Maine.

For a bonus, on our way home we also added Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

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ILLINOIS
Distance Traveled: 30 miles
Bathroom Breaks: 3

• We started out the trip only about an hour behind a schedule we never intended to keep, but then my 5-year-old son D-, who had recently fallen at my parents' house and hit his head, said he had a headache.

Coming from a kid who is as oblivious to such concepts as can be, we figured we had to get his doctor's opinion on how we should handle this. She, of course, said we should bring him in to the emergency room to confirm he was okay.

Thankfully, they said he was fine, but this meant we were now leaving several hours behind schedule, and just in time to catch the beginning of rush hour in Chicago.

• Before we left the ER, the very nice doctor helpfully offered the kids popsicles for their trouble, which might sound wonderful until you remember we were just getting into the car. My 2-year-old daughter M-, to say nothing of her older brother, is so proficient at making messes that she has been known to somehow create a permanent stain on furniture with a single piece of popcorn placed directly in her mouth, while you stare at her chewing it.

• A combination of slow rush hour traffic and my children's desire to see me repeatedly bash my skull into unconsciousness against a car window had us stopping for a bathroom break about 10 miles from our house. Now, if you've been in gas station bathrooms before, you pretty much know what you're getting into each time, so the one side benefit is you can only be pleasantly surprised.

But this particular gas station we picked, from a choice of about 63 within a two-mile radius, happened to possess the exception to this rule. When I scouted ahead and asked the attendant about the facilities, he responded cryptically that, "it's kind of out of order... but you can use it if you don't mind."

Without having even the slightest picture in my mind of what I was agreeing to, I said that was fine, since the kids had to go and we were here. I didn't add that I absolutely had to know what he could have meant by "kind of out of order," regardless of my kids' willingness to endure it.

When I came back with the kids, he pointed me over to what (oddly) was left of the entry to a short hallway mostly blocked by a refrigerated display case, but he said we'd have to wait since someone else had just gone in.

When the man walked out a few minutes later, I didn't think he was nearly broken-up enough about the fact that, in his succinct words, "it splashed me in the face."

Given this setup, I was actually disappointed, rather than pleasantly surprised, to find that this toilet merely had no tank lid, a broken flush chain, minor staining, and absolutely no toilet paper. A roll of paper borrowed from the store shelf allowed me to impenetrably protect the kids from germs, and a simple lack of flushing avoided any unwanted toilet-water showers.

And like that, plus a few hearty foot swipes on the rug at the exit, we had notched the lowest marker on our road-trip bathroom ladder, meaning it was all looking up from there. I waved a thank you to the attendant on our way out, not envying him for the puddles he'd be standing in later when opening the enormous safe in the corner of the bathroom, and we headed back into our place in the rush hour conga line slowly carrying us out towards the open road.

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Thankfully, not every state boasted anything as traumatic as this, so you won't be getting 10 individual posts after this one. I promise.

No, Babe won't give you herpes

Consider this post an early Mother's Day present for my mom, who for the past two weeks has been ranting about how inane the swine flu hysteria is almost as fiercely as I do about random things like the suddenly high percentage of crossword puzzle clues relating to rap/hip-hop in the Tribune lately.*

I've endured this "swine flu" nonsense for about as long as I can take, and while I usually steadfastly ignore fads that try to compel me to acknowledge them with at least outrage or satire, I just couldn't resist after reading this article:

Flu fears alter life at U.S. universities

No, the take-home lesson of this article is NOT how easily life can be drastically thrown off its axis by overhyped paranoia spread by 24-hour news outlets,** but rather how little a college degree is apparently worth in America today.

To celebrate the latest inductees into the elite club that is the enormous percentage of our extremely populous country that has graduated from college, the wizened elders of the prestigious Northeastern University scrambled to make sure there were sufficient quantities of anti-bacterial lotion on hand at the graduation ceremony Friday to combat the (excruciatingly inefficient, it seems) killer virus that has so many people helpfully pitching their pork chops into the trash heap these days.***

Neighbor dogs have never eaten so well! And they won't again until the killer bacteria, perfected by the hyperactive evolution chamber that is our modern "anti-bacterial" society, finally emerges to leave us all as main courses in the Gutter Buffet our dogs will treasure until the germ can tweak itself enough to take them out, too.

Happy Wednesday!!

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* I pick an example like this just because I don't want to dare imply that she's even flirted with the intensity of my rants about the few things that matter more than my weekly State Of The Crossword speech.

** So far, this new strain of known flus has proven to be equally as infectious as every other common flu virus, and, by my observation, dramatically less lethal. So if you haven't died from a flu in the past, even if a few viruses manage to perform the near-impossible feat of getting past your force field of Purell, you probably won't die this time, either.

If you HAVE died from a flu in the past, well, let me apologize for my smarmy tone, and also for the overly chewy texture of my precious, delicious BRAAAAAAIIIINSSSSS!!!

*** Just to re-state for the record, and not because I have any particular love for the pork industry, eating pork can NOT give you any kind of swine flu. If you're worried about eating the flesh of an infected animal, your biggest concern should be nothing more than whether that pig's final coughing fits toughened up the meat too much and made it slightly less delicious than that of its blissfully immobile and fatty compatriots.

Developments at our house, Vol. 13

Here are some of the latest developments around here:

1. We've all found change in the washing machine now and then, but since we obviously have to watch every single penny around here, the only currency I've found there in a very long time is trace amounts of macaroni and cheese, source unknown. I think it bodes ill for our future health that those tiny noodles can survive such an ordeal completely intact.

2. I've had a whim that in order to intimidate other parents this summer, I'll start bringing a set of chess pieces with us to the park, so D- and I can use them to play checkers on those mounted boards.

As long as we sit and stare awhile before each move, no one's likely to remember that pawns can't traditionally jump over rooks. Another plus in our favor is that D- frequently forgets how to play checkers during the game and just starts sliding pieces in whatever direction he feels like, so it'll probably end up looking a bit like chess anyway.

3. I've decided that no matter the savings of reusing everything from one kid to the next, recycling my son's "Thank Heaven For Little Boys!" bibs for my 2-year-old daughter is just too disturbing. I'm not quite ready for that yet.

4. My son D- turned 5 years old, which is as unbelievable to me as it was when he turned 4. I guess I'll have to update my About pages across the Internet again.

Your post title is on its way!

Upon reading the slip of paper (I can't even bear to call it "a fortune") hidden inside one of our fortune cookies recently, I knew I had to ridicule it in print, in the probably vain hope that whoever wrote it might know how much shame they have brought upon themselves and their already-pretty-pathetic profession.

As lame as the so-called fortunes usually are, given that they are often either blind guesses at facts about your present or past, or generic bits of reassuring advice, this one takes the stale cookie.

After barely rescuing this paper from the furious snatches of my starving litter of rabid fox kits, I had to allow my eyes a second chance to focus on the words before reading them again in disbelief. I was insulted with the following message, which isn't even worth adding "...in bed" to (as discussed in this past post):

Your fortune is on its way!

What is this, some kind of sick karmic IOU? Call me a self-absorbed, overreacting prick, but I declare this to be absolutely Unacceptable as a fortune. I reject it and demand a replacement, or at least immediate delivery of the actual fortune promised by this one.

Also, I demand a bag of free cookies to dull my rage, but not the awful ones-- the good ones that people are always expecting when they bite into a fortune cookie, assuming anyone still makes those.

I suppose I should be grateful they used the correct its... Otherwise police all along the multi-state cookie supply chain might be desperately chasing the aptly named Stale Cookie Impaler.

Tossin' around the ol' groundhogskin

In honor of this most somber of all major holidays, I'd like to set a moment aside to recognize the sacrifices of the many brave groundhogs who have fought and died for this country over the years, gnawing tiny paths to the heart of freedom so that its light might shine upon the darkest corners of the world.

Or, wait... let me read that page again... Nevermind.

In other news, congratulations to the Pittsburgh Steelers for coldly robbing the Arizona Cardinals* of their one triumphant moment in the accursed half-century since they turned tail and abandoned Chicago.

Sorry as everyone may feel for them right now after a remarkable postseason and a fantastic championship game, they knew what they were getting into when they hit the bricks for St. Louis (before moving on to retirement in the desert).

Regardless of all this ancient history, I was still a neutral fan this year, nursing a broken heart since my team, the Giant Foam Cowboys, didn't go all the way:

And now, to instead honor the other Groundhog Day, you should read this post again, ad infinitum, until you Learn Something Important.

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* My condolences, of course, go out to Renee, beth, and any other Arizona residents/Cardinals fans reading out there.

Name that tune!

At the behest of my wife J-, who conceived this post, I bring you a list of children's songs as identified by my extremely verbal 1-year-old daughter M- (who can sing most of them in their entirety):

• Din Dan Don

• Ants

• Ebbysee's

• My Son

• Weensy Eensy

And finally, the true tiebreaker:

• Tree-Ba's-ful

How many can you recognize? I would be floored if anyone who didn't know her got all six, and very impressed if someone got four.

One way to offend your wife

I figured it'd be nice to counteract the burgeoning waves of sappiness threatening to spill over here due to my round-the-clock care and constant companionship of my poor, ailing wife for the last two weeks, so I thought I'd offer the husbands out there just one of many clever ways you can offend your wife whenever necessary.

Example Number 1: When taking a pause from reading her copy of a junior high sci-fi novel, such as The City of Ember, turn towards her --doing something sweet and innocent like playing her pink Nintendo DS on the collapsible bed she calls her invalid home-- and lay this truth on her:

"If there was a secret room in our post-apocalyptic world stocked with aisles and aisles of rare delicacies, you'd definitely be the one passed out in the middle of it OD'd on sugar and power."

I'm not sure why my own wife took issue with this earnest observation so strongly, but apparently it's quite a potent weapon to store away somewhere for a rainy day.

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.

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* 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?

A conversation with D-: Party every day

Here's a little conversation I had with my 4-year-old son D-, wherein he spontaneously recalled a summer picnic thrown two years ago by the company I used to work for:

D-: Remember at [old company's name] there was a party, and there was a stick, and a bag* of candy that you could hit with the stick, and all the candy would come out?

Me: Yeah.

D-: We should go back there and hit that bag of candy with the stick, so we can eat some more of that candy.

Me: I don't think it's still there, bud-- that was a long time ago. Plus, that's a long way away**, back in Maine. Remember how long it took us to drive out here to Illinois?

D-: Yeah. But we should go there.


* This word was apparently selected for lack of a better one-- though they certainly don't have many Mexicans in Northern Maine outside of broccoli harvesting season, it was indeed a genuine piñata.

** It's also a long way away in the sense that the company as we knew it no longer exists, thanks to the people put in charge by the corporation that bought it.

You mean I get to sleep 8 whole hours?

This is the very definition of a short post today, but them's the breaks, my friends. We should be back to our regular scheduled programming next week. I'll try to respond to all your wonderful comments (and catch up on blog-reading) whenever I get a chance.

Anyway, I just thought that those of you who are familiar with the "in bed" addition to cookie fortunes would enjoy this near-perfect trifecta we got the other day:

• You will be showered with good luck.

• Your new ideas will be rewarded.

• The fun side of a relationship begins to unfold.

In case you're particularly disappointed with today's little post, you can always console yourselves by reading my old posts about the two most important actual cultural exports from Asia: karaoke* and mail-order brides.


* Pronounced, as always, like "kah-ROE-key", or possibly "karah-OKEE"-- we don't "carry" any "okee"s around these parts. We take things at face value and pronounce them the way they were intended. Hence the name.**

** Of us and our blog.

Sometimes you feel like a nut

I think it says a lot about my religious outlook that when faced with the crossword puzzle clue Peter or Paul, but not Mary, I was dismayed to find myself unable to remember enough trivia about the' 60s folk movement to come up with the seven-letter answer.

Only after later getting 4 of the seven letters* did it suddenly strike me that these classic names are such because they appear pretty frequently in the New Testament, and that the clue was not exactly requiring me to have a degree in Religious Studies. Or to have taken even one course in it.

Alex Trebek would be so disappointed in me-- has he wasted all these years teaching me most of what I know about the Bible?

I'm going to go with the explanation that I have replaced what little knowledge I had of the New Testament with Dan Brown's version of events, so the answer Apostles would never have occurred to me when the clue was excluding Mary.

That gives me some grounds for credibility, right?

Popular fiction-- is there any amount of ignorance or boneheadedness it can't help us explain away?


* If I hadn't gotten this many letters, upon revisiting the clue, I probably would have gone next to candy-oriented trivia.

Developments at our house, Vol. 9

Here are some more recent developments around these parts:

1. M- has taken to singing along with our cell phone ring tone, which is the Super Mario theme song. She figures with the icy knife of cuteness that is a 17-month-old saying, "Doot, doot, doot, doot-doot-DOOT!" she can control us like marionettes. She's probably right.

2. I realized while briefly lecturing D- on something that he has no basis for understanding what air quotes are supposed to signify, so I'm left wondering whether he gets a vague understanding from their context or if he's totally lost. I'd love to see the world through his eyes for just minutes at a time.

3. The shampoo I'm currently using is made to smell like a Fresh Berry Smoothie. It smells good, but I'm not sure how they arrived at this particular flavor of shampoo. I think flavor has got to be the right word, because that's what they seem to be going for, rather than having people just smell like something clean. I think I might submit the idea for a "Fresh Cheeseburger" flavored shampoo to all the major players, to see how many million-dollar offers I get.

4. After a handful of experimental instances over a couple of days, D- very solemnly declared one evening over a game of Cariboo that he now has new names for us-- "Dad" and "Mom". I don't think it's possible to type out how deliberately he pronounces these truncated names for us, so I won't even try, but each time he says them I'm struck with the reassurance that it will soon pass, at least for five more years.

I'm thinking of starting a pool with J-, and anyone else who wants in on the action, as to how long this will last before he forgets all about it. I'm also thinking of starting a separate pool with everyone but J- on whether her obvious irritation with this will make it stick before he can forget*.


* Properly pronounced "free-get" if you are a 4-year-old, it seems.

I have met The Man, and he is four

Here's yet more free advice from the voice of experience-- don't ever give your kids any authority over you, even in a seemingly harmless game. Case in point:

After watching The Incredibles again yesterday afternoon (with my parents, as a consolation for not getting to go on a hard-core bike ride and run/walk with J-, Katie, and I), D- was very much in a mood to wrestle people and hit things and somehow be both a hero and a villain at the same time. Not unlike The Shield, I suppose.

Anyway, this is a very common and predictable effect, so I figured I would indulge these impulses by wrestling with him for a while when we got back. Unfortunately, while it helped somewhat, it did not stop the baby testosterone from surging the rest of the day, so we had to try again later in the evening.

This time he ended up sitting on me and declaring me "under wrestle and in JAIL now!" I went along with this, since it meant I could just lay there on the floor and relax, or at least relax as much as one can with a hopped-up 4-year-old threatening supposedly fictional violence and a 17-month-old stalking around wielding a bear with 8-pound shoes who's as happy as she is to have a grownup at floor level and who both express said happiness by jumping onto anything soft.

With his tough-guy attitude (plainly underlined by his repeated declarations that "I'm TOUGH!") and arbitrary bossiness in full bloom, I chose to continue my ongoing explanation (despite his clever insistence that I was not allowed to talk while in jail) to D- that even when you are a police officer/prison warden, you still have a boss in the form of the law as determined by the people and their representatives.

Building on this lesson, I assured him that the law allowed for a pillow in a prisoner's bunk. He responded by fervently stating that prisoners are not even allowed a bed. I felt a moment of indignation at having my constitutional rights violated, then I took a breath and kept up the game by appealing to J- as an agreeable voice of reason. This did little to sway my captor, so I decided to instead go to the person much more likely to take appropriate action in a pretend game, and I asked M- to get me the pillow I knew I was guaranteed by the people of the United States of America.

She of course took right off to get one, because she is a good little girl, and like a dog spotting a small animal fleeing, D- jumped off his throne and snatched a pillow before she could give me the satisfaction. Coasting on this minor victory, I decided to get greedy, and the following conversation ensued:

Me: The law also says I get to have another pillow for my crotch. I feel a little vulnerable here.

D- (using mean voice): Okay! Here is another one, then!

He begrudgingly tosses a pillow down to me and goes back to the couch.

Me: Thank you.

After covering myself, I put my hands over my face and planned to relax for a few minutes while getting credit for Playing With Us.

M- (deciding after notable experience that my covering my face and laying on the floor must mean that she's hurt me): Sorry!

Me (uncovering my face so she could give me the kiss I could hear coming my way): That's okay, baby.

D-: No talking!!* (runs over and presses a third pillow to my face)

Me: Ooooookay, we're all done with this game now.

In his defense, the "no talking" rule had been clearly stated all along. If he's learned one thing from me, it's that you have to take swift, decisive action when needed. In that light, this brings a little tear to my eye, and not for the usual reasons.

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* The elite Arrested Development fans out there should undoubtedly be reminded of Take Your Daughter to Work Day at the prison.

Classic quotes, Vol. 3

Check out the Dad Blog Carnival at Discovering Dad, where yours truly is featured for my Joy of caprice post of a few weeks ago.

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Here are more things heard around our house recently:

D- (to our landlord): Bye! ...love you!

Me (to M-): Show me the money! (She was calling out "mon-nee, mon-nee" yet again, and I wanted to make sure she hadn't found a penny to swallow.)

D- (playing Connect 4): I want to make my own four-in-a-row here, so don't go in this row, okay?

Me: Please don't blow your nose on my clothes.

J-: Hish the push up!!! (during MarioKart-- meaning unclear... possibly "Push the up button")

Me: Keep your feet off the tablecloth, please.

D-: What is Daddy doing with my purse? (I was putting away an old camera bag full of Hot Wheels...)

Me (at a farm this weekend): M-, get your face away from the cow's butt, please.

A conversation with D-: The mysterious stranger

The other day I rediscovered how fun it is to immediately announce where my son is hiding after he tells me to ask "Where's D-?" while hiding himself. He doesn't know how to react to this, and the resulting awkward moment, in which he rediscovers the meaning of betrayal, is a great stress reliever for me.

He might grow into a great hide-and-seeker all by himself, but with my help, he can be The Best.

Here's a typical sample:

D-: When I hide, say (overly demonstrative) "Where's D-??"

Me: Okay!

(D- hides.)

Me: Where's D-?? ...Oh there he is, hiding under the blanket on the couch again!

D- remains silent for just a moment, in confusion. Then, in a muffled voice, presumably attempting to sound like a passerby, he throws me off the scent.

Passerby(?): No, he's not!

Me: (impressively keeping a straight face-- I'm a professional, after all) Yes, he is! He's hid there 10 times already this morning, plus I can see his foot sticking out!

After a moment's hesitation, D- then pops out from under the blanket with an expectant look, as if he has not overheard any of my exchange with the mysterious stranger.

Me: Yep, see-- there he is!

He then gets up to eagerly find a fresh hiding place, and I laugh hysterically to myself at my evilness. This seeker does not countenance lazy hiders.

Note: I only do this once in a while-- I'm not that big a jerk. I usually only do it when he hides in the exact same place 20 times in a row and I am bored out of my skull by it. I would also like to note that I was once driven to do this when D- was playing with his cousin of the same age, and the results were possibly more than twice the fun.

More Conversations with D-.