Death By Children

My Kids Are Trying To Kill Me.

Open Letter to Internet Porn Trollers Visiting This Blog

I’m talking to you, Mr. “Border Collie Licks My Toes.” I don’t know what perverted sociopath t-boned your childhood like an off-white van t-bones a brand new porche, and I don’t care. Stop. Stop now. As much as I like the traffic stats on my Google analytic page, I really REALLY don’t want your kind attentions.

Even though I am deeply reassured by the scarce 1.42 seconds you spent on my blog before you realized it wasn’t dog porn, I am equally deeply dismayed that you found your way here at all.

And the rest of you. Seriously, move to Singapore or something. I can’t stand the “key word results page” stats any more. I’m supposed to find out people are searching for “highly articulate hilarious parenting humor” not “gay dog”.

So, in the immortal paean of every Irish cop in every family movie car crash scene ever, (ahem) “Alright, move along, nothing to see here.”

Freelace Writers Don’t Get Sick Days.

s you know, I work at home. When I came up with a career change I thought to myself, ok, brilliant, I’ll work at home, write, become famous, make a bajillion dollars, and live like a rock star. I envisioned myself draped over my leather chair with a laptop and a cappuccino interviewing Obama for Rolling Stone.

I knew that was a fantasy, I knew I’d be writing stock entries for digital camera retail sites and B2B literature instead of the great American novel and I was and still am ok with that.  My principle complaint is that in each of the myriad fantasies I entertained about the glamour of the telecommuter life, I was always BY MYSELF, not embedded with the groaning, moaning, hacking, wheezing, snot sluiced rheumy eyed boredomites I am bivouacked with currently.

Tuesday at 3:48am (AY EM!) my daughter woke up screaming. [My Attorney] was propelled from the bed, leaving a body shaped smoking hole in the floor as she manifested by her screaming daughter’s side, then remanifested by my side to tell me I had to take the girl to the emergency room because her ears were exploding.

By 4:25 I was standing in the ER with the screamer who had swallowed two hulking horse pill sized [brand name aspirin who won't play ball with me that rhymes with "stylenol"] expecting to still be standing there four hours later explaining to them how I am not actually an indigent, but a possessor of gold plated POP insurance benefits that allow me to handpick new organs and pays in cash. However, I didn’t have that experience. I was processed with such alarming efficiency that I am compelled to believe they were tracking me by satellite and knew I was coming and why. The girl and I found ourselves in a room post haste and before the blue curtain unswished itself, a doctor came breezing in, looked in my daughter’s ear and proclaimed, with grave authority: there’s nothing wrong. We were home by five.

I know I’m supposed to wax joyously about such efficiency in our health care. I mean, people complain all the time about lag time at hospitals and doctors’ offices, myself first and foremost. I hate it. I hate that I have to answer the same questions three times in the same visit; I complain that I have to fill out the same form every time I show up even though I haven’t changed my name or grown a new arm; I complain that when I tell the nurse the girl had no fever the attendant then asks if she had a fever and then the Doctor asks if she had a fever and then they take her temperature. I dread the ER like I dread the draft and so when it works they way I’ve always shouted that it should I shouldn’t bitch but here’s the deal, if it works, then what am I going to write about?

And the kids are sick. The girl really does have a hideous and disgusting ear infection, the kind of thing that spews whale vomit from the side of her head like a punctured jugular. The boy and [My Attorney] may have strep; at least they’re acting like they do when they have strep. The boy has a horrible stomachache and [My Attorney] sounds like a third level Star Wars alien bar-scene voice-over. She usually sounds a little like Demi Moore when she’s sick, but not this time. She’s on a trial and so tired and sick her eyes actually fell out of her head this morning and she just left them there on the carpet in the wadded up tissue and spent diet coke cans like two quail’s eggs in a crow’s nest. She turned to me and said “Hrrrgh frogsnot didjkse ughtra clambake?” As she passed into delirium, I crept out of the room.

And, worse, as [My Attorney] waivers in and out of consciousness, she’s losing track of time like some kind of Alzheimer patient in the last throws of losing their mind, and keeps nagging me out of sequence, like I’ll hang up her jacket and she’ll say thank you then ‘did you take my jacket to the dry cleaner?’ and ‘is the baby ok?’ and my favorite ‘he’ll never know; is a hundred enough?’ which I hope is about a birthday present.

And it all started with dog puke. Ty blew cack on the boy’s bed three times in a row, which meant three huge laundry cycles on an already strained system that is trying to finish all the laundry that was soaked during the basement flood. He cacked on the new porch. Cacked in the kitchen. I took him to the vet and he cacked all over my car. The vet breezes in and gravely proclaims: there’s nothing wrong.

God help them if they get me sick. I will retaliate, I swear. I will puke on the dog. I will puke on [My Attorney's] jacket. I will puke on their homework and their book bags. They will rue the day RUE THE DAY if I  {haaaorf} get {wheeeze} even {hack!} the slightest bit {flaarrrrgh!} . . .  crap.

Originally posted 2008-09-19 11:55:02. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Frosting Cupcakes on Demand

Every other week I go to lodge and hang out with a bunch of like minded men. Pillars of the community, doctors, lawyers, builders, politicians, ordinary salary men, engineers, barbers, butchers, salesmen, and more, we sit down to a delicious dinner and discuss Family Guy trivia. It’s an exclusive, elite club and I’m proud to be part of it. During our meetings, we have a very strict NO CELL PHONES policy. I put mine on vibrate and hope the kids don’t implode while I’m semiincommunicado. I tell the kids: DO NOT CALL ME UNLESS YOU ARE ON FIRE!

In the two years I’ve been able to do this, the kids have NEVER called me. Ever. They have some weird respect for me when I put on the Vegas suit (meetings are a black tie thing). I’ve never had to rush out of a meeting. Until this last Wednesday night.

Now you have to understand: the daughter is afflicted. Along with her gifted status and the extra brain cells she got from [My attorney]’s DNA, the stuff that helps her explain polygon tessellations and get an A in Arabic language studies (she can sass me in two languages now), Rah received (from my DNADHD) a glitch. We’re not sure what it means, but, when we’re both away–the mom working, the dad smoking fine cigars–Rah tends to start baking.

This is highly alarming because the genius DNA means she can measure the ingredients perfectly but the DUH-NA means she forgets the oven is on,  takes a shower, tries to write a novel, then falls asleep.

Once [My Attorney] and I were on a date. The kids were under strict orders to not call unless

1. something was poking out of them, and
2. there was a lot of blood

Even then I’d better hear sirens in the background or they were grounded. Yet, between the appetizer and the main course, we got this call:

Dad?
Are you on fire?
I smell gas.
Your brother farted.
No, I’m baking.
It’s 10:30 at night!?
It’s my 11 monthiversary tomorrow!
Jesus Haploid Christ.
What should I do?
Give the phone to your brother.
…
Dude!
Are you in the kitchen?
Dude.
Do you smell gas?
Dude?
Turn on a burner.
(pffff)
Still there?
Dude.

So the next day I explain to my daughter that baking is to occur during daylight hours only, when I am there, and with the local fire department alerted.

Just before my meeting starts last Wednesday, I’m having fellowship (Stewie impersonations) during dinner (pizza) when the phone rings.

Dad?
Yeah.
Is the top of the oven supposed to get really, really hot?
[insert tirade here]

I explain that she is to turn off the oven as soon as the CAKE she is baking at 8PM AT NIGHT is DONE. Twenty minutes later I call her.

Is the oven off?
(totally dejected) Yeah.
Don’t call me again unless you’ve lost a limb.
(still remorseful) OK.

So I’m in my secret meeting, vibrate mode, in the middle of a lecture when the phone vibrates with such tintinnabulated seismic alarm it rips a hole in my pants and skips across the floor. I excuse myself under a cloud of raised eyebrows and glares, walk outside and answer the phone.

I’m thinking “Holy crap, the place is on fire.” I get this.

Dad?
Yeah.
On your way home can you pick up frosting?

As a father, you develop certain skills, certain ninja-like qualities, that can’t readily be explained to the unspawned. The dadface is a father’s principle skill, along with all it’s declinations, like the uttering of the word ‘boy’ with barely constrained menace; like the whistle your son can hear down in his bones even though he’s six miles away with his Xbox headset clamped across his ears in the middle of a tactical assault yet still reacts with robotic efficiency and primal urgency; like the face that answers questions like ‘can I watch Naruto?’ asked rhetorically as they reach out to swipe the remote from your easy-chair lair, then glance over and freeze in place as their soul is melted by your Medusa-like perfunctory glare. These are important tools of a parent and to them I have added a new skill, a modern age technique for cell phone use: the silent glare. After about forty seconds of lethal silence, Rah says: Oh, were you in your meeting? I’m sorry! White frosting, ok?

Apparently it doesn’t work on girls.

I get to the store rack up a basket stand in line realize I forgot my wallet when I changed into the Vegas suit drive home walk into the house and she’s asleep.

Snoring.

The kitchen’s been cake-bombed. The counter top is a foot deep in mixing bowls, measuring cups, flour sacks, cook books, wooden spoons, spent diet coke cans, food coloring, cupcake wrappers, cupcake pans, cake pans, cake mix boxes, and, inexplicably, a ball of yarn with two knitting needles stuck into it like a rabbit ear antennae.

In the center of it all is my enormous clear glass mixing bowl filled to the rim with a broken strawberry cake. It looks like it was raped by a squirrel.

This explains the tons of dejection and remorse I heard in my last call to her. I remember now why she’s baking: it’s her boyfriend’s birthday the next day and she wants to celebrate at lunch and was going to bring him a cake. A cake that is now shredded and useless.

Then, tucked behind the huge glass bowl, I see three perfect cupcakes. They are naked and unfrosted.

Here’s where awesome dad proves he rules with a velvet gauntlet.

I make icing from scratch, from a secret Amish recipe–frosting so white and light and delicious, angels appear halfway through mixing it, and at 12:22 am, while she’s snoring in the other room, amid the debris of exploded pastry, I frost my daughter’s cupcakes.

Originally posted 2009-01-24 12:04:37. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Death By Children Rescues a Man from the Brink of Certain Demise!

I received this email this morning and it really brought home to me the importance of being an accident prone articulate smartass:

bloodyowl has left a new comment on your post “The Water Pik Netti Pot Listerine Don’t Try This A… “:

AHH! I reached this mess by Googling “netti pot listerine” to see if I could! I saw Water Pik, and said in my congested head, “Yessss, I totally have one of those!”So, thankfully, my ADD held off long enough for me to read the outcome of your fiasco… otherwise, I would have whitewashed the oldest and deepest parts of my brain with straight Listerine.Thank you for saving my life, and doing it hilariously.But I’m curious: are you still stuffed up?

Originally posted 2008-04-29 09:07:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I am Heroic. Period.

My daughter’s friends were over the other day. My daughter’s friends are all hyper intelligent and busy as hell just like my daughter but, unlike her, they all have hero quality dads who bend steel bars with their bare hands for a living and rescue babies from vats of molten lead and, most of all, go away during the day to return haggard and stoic and dead tired sometime after 5pm.

I, on the other hand, wrestle laundry to the basement and immerse myself in the minutiae of dishwasher load planning and the use of “bluing” to make my whites whiter. I also make twisted knock knock jokes¹ and have a tendency to sing where I ought to mumble and I have, somehow, become their hero.

I didn’t mean to and I say somehow but I’m being unnecessarily (and uncharacteristically) modest–I know exactly how I became their hero: I told them I chart my daughter’s . . . um . . . I keep a record of, uh . . . I mark the calendar for. . .

I’m steadfastly abreast of her punctuation.

This is not the lowest depth my steady emasculation, by the way. That’s surely marked by me sitting through a stuttering presentation of a Hugh Grant movie so insipidly British even Hugh Grant was rolling his eyes–IN THE MOVIE HE WAS STARRING IN! It was a chick flick so flicking chicked I think I grew breasts while I was watching. But, such is marriage. I made my attorney sit through Spawn once so I owe her forever.

It is, however, a most unmasculine thing to do, to chart the, er, grammatical manifestation of your little princess. In fact, if you are a man, just Stumble elsewhere. I’m embarrassed, ok? Chicks, keep reading.

It all started because [My Attorney] is pretty much too frikkin busy to pay attention to her own [red swarm]. One day she was working hard, staying up late after a 14 hour day deciphering antennae displacement graphs or something equally insanely technical. She was sleep deprived and focused with such unwavering intensity that she actually burned a hole through a deposition with her very eyes.

She said “God I feel like crap. I feel bloated and woggly and irritable and—“

“You’re getting your [red tide]”

“I just had my [monsoon wedding]!”

“Yeah, 27 days ago.”

She’d been working so hard she’d actually lost her sense of time. I think if she didn’t have a calendar on her blackberry, she wouldn’t know what day it was. So her [mighty mighty bosstone] snuck up on her and smacked her across the head. I felt sorry for my little legal Lolita and decided to add her [insane in the membrane] to my automatic calendar and I’ve been charting ever since. To the minute.

Being that busy, she never really explained to the teen that this is a regular occurrence, that it can be expected, that JEANS DAY on the calendar is not referring too a dress code.

So, in for a dollar if you’re in for a dime. The next time my daughter screamed “PAD!” from the bathroom, I tossed a couple in (like grenades) and put her on my calendar too.

So there she is, hanging with her friends—ok. Hanging is way too energetic to describe what they do. They flop. They flop over the chair. They flop down in front of the TV. The flop down the steps, flop into the car, and flop out. They’re virtually boneless. They’re all draped across the furniture expending less energy than most dead field mice when I casually mentioned to Rah that I’d stocked the bathroom with [ammunition] and she might want to remember that since she was due for her [screaming orc horde].

Her friends howled with approval and the Polish one screamed out YOU ARE MY HERO!

So there you go. My ability to suppress my natural male tendency to fish and work on trucks in favor of ticking off the days until the women in my life are assaulted by their respective [mammy tsunamis] has elevated me to the level of hero. I should have a statue.

I can see myself now, standing tall, cast in bronze, a metallic cape forever blown behind me in chunky statuesque bravery, my brow pointed ever eastward, my countenance ever grim, ever focused—-a fistful of tampons at my side.

—————————
(1) KK/WT?/Dyslexic interrupting cow./Dyslexic–/Ooooom!

—————————

Originally posted 2007-08-23 17:19:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Happy Pulaski Day! A Day in the life of a nearly 10 year old boy

[My Attorney] went to Delaware this week for a patent trial in which a lot of people grumble and kvetch about who owns the intellectual rights to the number 7. So I’m left at home with the monkeys.

Girl monkey tells me she doesn’t have school Monday. I ask why. She declares: It’s Pulaski day!

Boy Monkey chimes in “Oh yeah, we don’t have school either–happy Pulaski Day!”

My kids go to different schools. Monkeyboy goes to a Catholic school and girlmonkey goes to a public school. They’re both geniuses and their state-manded ISAT scores pretty much lend measurable evidence to the idea that they’re smarter than me. This is a concept they exploit mercilessly and they’ve come to accept it as fact. So they assume any idea they have for putting one over on me is a perfect idea since by context it will exceed my stated level of understanding. I firmly believe that they sometimes think that when they talk in my presence I think they’re speaking a different language. Their arrogance is unfathomable.

And dead on. When Monkeyboy said he had Pulaski day off, I didn’t even blink I just thought ‘great, I can sleep in’.

His school wakes me up at 8:45.

“We’re just calling about Connor’s absence.”

“That little bastard.”

“Pardon me?”

“He told me it was Pulaski day.”

“That’s not a Catholic Holiday.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“So he won’t be coming in?”

“Oh, he’ll be there.” [evil music rises . . .]

When I want to, I have a voice like a cannon. I reserve this voice for unsolicited calls from mortgage resellers and republicans. I used vox artilleria to wake up Connor by loudly wishing him HAPPY PULASKI DAY! He leaped straight out of the covers and landed feet first in an excuse.

“I said I thought we had Pulaski Day Off!”

I hadn’t done laundry—Pulaski day, right?—so the only gym pants he had were a pair discarded by his sister. They were too big and sagged around his ankles like he was wearing swanky potato sacks. I almost made him walk but I honestly believe it’s so cold outside his brain might explode like an ice-decavitated Pepsi can.

Later: at school, he and his friend-who-just-happens-to-be-a-girl whom shall never be referred to as a girlfriend, __ __ __ __ ___ __ __, have a knock down drag out over which dog is most popular, Border Collies (ours) or bulldogs, (hers). Pretty soon they have the room divided and at each other’s throats like one of those weird psyche experiments from the 60s and he and __ __ __ __ ___ __ __, his friend-who-just-happens-to-be-a-girl, aren’t speaking. Which is ok because, ‘dude, she’s a girl.’

Later: To fulfill a promise, I take them to dinner at Gino’s East where you can write on the walls. I heard they serve pizza but scribbling on the bench is the principle attraction. I stop by Walgreen’s and bone up with sharpies and gel pens and we get a booth and start drawing on everything in sight. The simians disappear into the Gothic depths and I busy myself with some intricate graffiti. The male child comes back with the satisfied swagger of a dictionary-loving preteen who’s managed to write a word on the wall so vulgar and satanic a nun would drop dead after one syllable. He also sports a dumbass badge of truly classic stature: he’s used the brown sharpie to draw a mustache on himself.

A. Sharp. Eee.

I crack up and he tries to shrug it off but I catch him trying to read the fine print on the marker later on.

“Dude, are you aware you have a mustache?”

“Yeah!”

“Are you aware that a sharpie is a permanent marker?”

“Yeah, uh, what?”

“You’re going to have that mustache for three weeks.”

“I can get it off.”

“How?”

“Spit.”

“Jesus Hapolid Christ. Why’d you draw a mustache on yourself.”

“I didn’t—Sarah did.”

“Well—why—what–how” the kids know when I’m about to ’splode. He cuts me off.

“Dude, I let her.”

“Why?!”

“Because she bet me I wouldn’t do it! Duh!”

Later: we get home and the Roon is declaring himself bored and I’m writing and I keep hearing this clickity clickity sound.

Let me admit here and now that I have an affliction. I can’t handle little clicky sounds when I’m trying to work. I fully understand that this makes me a whacked out freak hell-bent on one day driving a car with little plastic airplanes superglued all over the top. I understand that. But. The. Clicking. Has. To. Stop.

After the fourth snarling imprecation for him to CEASE! I turn around and give him the hairy eyeball. I hold out my hand and tersely demand that he give up whatever he’s picking his teeth with. I’m expecting a toothpick or a crayon or something marginally believable but instead he hands me a tooth. A fnarcking tooth! He lost it yesterday and I had him put it in a little bowl in the china cabinet and here he is sitting on the sofa driving me crazy by PICKING HIS TEETH WITH A TOOTH!

Little freak.

Originally posted 2007-03-05 20:01:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Wordle

Wordle is so cool. It made this image out of my resume. It’s small here, I don’t know why. Please click and dig.

Originally posted 2008-09-12 19:04:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Recipe #5: Pepperoni Pancakes

You start by offering breakfast to the 537 tweens and teens bivouacked in your abode. After they shrug, as if the effort to speak their thoughts aloud is too much for them, as if the arduous mechanics of sucking in air and expelling it in such a fashion that it may communicate something is beyond the scope of their hive-mind ennui, as if the words f a willing and competent chef are like the indulcent tones of a facks moh dehm, a 2oth century relic of low baud telephonic comm service–after that, feel free to interpret their collective disregard as “Please, sir, make us something truly and indelibly hideous!” Make them this:

1. Bisquick in the usual fashion.
2. Add sliced pepperoni.
3. Cook.

Serve with syrup and the option of a little red sauce.

Originally posted 2008-05-27 21:21:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Punch Buggy Pugilism and the Black Parade

Maybe it’s part of getting old, but I can’t seem to spot Volkswagen beetles until it’s too late. By too late, I mean my son has drilled me in the bicep with a Chuck Norris knuckle punch and I’m howling with pain and barely able to drive us through insane Chicago traffic to the next Volkswagen beetle, which I will not see. Again.

In case you are just now walking out of a life in a cave, punch buggy is the emerging Olympic sport of sighting Volkswagen beetles and then, upon said visual identification of said beetle of Voklswagenistic orgin, promptly beating the crap out of whomever you’re sitting next to. This game is played in the car, while driving, so if that person is the driver, then they better be able to maneuver sans left hand because the moment the person riding shotgun sees a buggy–WHAM–dead left arm.

Roon is addicted to this stupid game, a game surely invented by 10 year old brothers back in 1835 when they didn’t have the internet or cars or decent health care and, on more than one occasion, I am certain, some poor Swedish immigrant buried an extra son after a buggy punch incident went horribly wrong. I can see him now, Amish beard wagging in the afternoon sun, leaning against a hand-made shovel in his white shirt and stovepipe pants, wide brimmed hat held grimly at his side, “Vell, he vas a goot bouy, and he is viff Gott now–punch buggy! (slam!) ooh!–gott to digg another hole, yah”

The game and my son’s violent enthusiasm for it, are underscored by his new obsession with My Chemical Romance, a group that wears almost as much makeup as KISS and has almost the same weird marshall influence on its ravenous, zombiefied 10 year old fan base. I have to admit, I think they’re a good group and I can hear the guitar player pretty obviously ripping off Queen and I doff my hat (well, do-rag) to his ingenious and talented thievery. But the group revels in some kind of grave obsession with the color black and death imagery and are trying, I think, to single-handedly create a new genre combinging emo, which is like a curse word for 10 year olds, and goth, which is a level of cool ten year olds peer hopefully toward and whisper about and pretend to disregard almost as much as they pretend not to notice girls, a genre I think might be called Gothmo, or Emoth.

I remember when I was young I wanted to be in the KISS army. We all wore Army fatigues and KISS t-shirts and threw our horns-of-Satan salutes in the air and prayed for the coming revolt to be a violent, sustained, bloodbath of biblical scope during which our heroes would descend from a lightning streaked thunderhead and join us as we decapitated disco dancing yuppies with our razor-edged flying-v electric guitars.

My Chemical Romance inspires a similar, though wussed-out, semi military response in it’s fans although they’re all vegetarians and pacifists so instead of the KISS army they’re more like the Salvation Army, dancing, sort of. So I get the music thing but I never, ever, hit my dad. Evidence to this fact is that I can type with both hands.

Together, along with the inch and a quarter he gained since January and the ability to wear my shoes, punch buggy pugilism and the enthusiasm for the Black Parade are turning my son into that thing that’s older than a kid but not quite a tween yet and I can see the hairy gawky teen poking out of him like he’s wearing some kind of costume. Just the other day he was sitting on the couch and suddenly sniffed and said to the room “God, my pits reek.”

And it’s not the gleefully vicious thrill he gets spotting one of those stupid cars and punching me in the arm to the glumjoy cascade of electric guitar from My Chemical Romance that’s driving home the fact that I’m getting older and so is the mini-me. It’s not even the fact that I miss the same antibiotic-chalk-yellow buggy that’s parked in the same spot every damn day and take a hit for it because I’m getting older and so is it. It’s this: when he hits me, it’s not like a kid is hitting me, it’s like some dude is hitting me. It kind of hurts and after two or three buggies, I got to tell him to lay off and I pretend its because I think it’s boring but the truth is, my arm hurts.

Originally posted 2007-11-01 06:26:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Entreaty

I was talking to my dentist today, the best Dentist in Chicago (this is not hyperbole), and he mentioned that one of the things that he really likes about the blog is all the comments. He really likes reading the comments. Some other people have said the same thing.

I want to take a moment to thank everyone for their input. People like Sween, Miss Celliana, Oh The Joys, Drama, The Cleaning Lady, Miss Bliss, Jadegirl, Blogdog, everyone else but especially Anonymous because you’re, well, anonymous and it kind of weirds me out that you compliment me and I don’t know who you are.

I pray to god you’re an editor at a filthy rich publishing house and you’re considering giving me a 1.5 million dollar upfront deal but I am resigned to the more likely reality that you’re making license plates in a windowless facility in Tampa where you were incarcerated for repeatedly emailing the President the Hurley numbers from Lost. Nice one.

In any case, you guys all rock and I am very VERY grateful for the way you’re going to email a link to this blog to everyone you know and everyone you ever met and everyone in those address heavy emails about lost children and angels because you know how vital and important it is to the health of the very planet that everyone alive read my posts about my daughter’s boobs.

Originally posted 2007-03-01 21:16:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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