The stuff dreams are made of

I am a prime example of the idea that just because someone CAN have children does not mean that they SHOULD have children. Given the fact that I have two boys I can safely assume, barring any unfortunate confessions from my wife in the near or distant future, that I CAN have kids. The question now becomes SHOULD I have kids. I'll leave the following item as evidence that the answer is probably "no".

As mentioned in another post, I have recently introduced my oldest son, Ryan, to one of my favorite rock bands, Metallica. Not exactly children's music by any stretch of the imagination, but his favorite new song is potentially scary even for adults. The lyrics in "Enter Sandman" consist of the lead singer espousing the little boys and girls of the world to say their prayers every evening so that they will be protected from the nameless evil that lurks in the room after the lights go out. Additionally, there is reference to the idea that kids should sleep with one of their eyes open so as to ward off the "things that bite" and the "beasts under your bed, in your closet and in your head". Also, these things might take them to a place called "Never Never Land". Just writing this stuff down makes my bladder weak.

Now every time we get in the car he asks if he can listen to Metallica. I was all for this at first because he seemed to dig the song and I thought it was cool when we would sit at a stoplight with the windows down jamming out to what is arguably one of the best rock songs ever. Then, the other day, I hear a little voice in the backseat.

"something...something...little one don't forget my son...something...something"

Uh oh. I turn the music down from ear bleeding to barely audible. "Ryan?"

"Yeah?"

"Are you singing along?"

He laughs. "No!" He's a little shy when it comes to this sort of thing. He never cops to it when we catch him singing along to something.

"Ok..." Crap. He is singing along and appears to know some of the words. My wife is not going to be happy.

So I turn it back up loud so we can get the whole business of hearing damage out of the way before he hits puberty, and pretty soon I hear "...and of things that will bite..." from his high pitched voice. He is singing more loudly now and appears to be getting his whole body into it with the head banging and his little fists pumping. I can tell because I am secretly watching in the rear view mirror - he'd never do that if he knew I was paying attention.

When the song is over, he wants it played again, and of course I oblige. We both like it, and after all, it's just a song, isn't it?

Jen has already told me that the first time he wakes up in the middle of the night complaining that there is something under his bed or in the closet, I get to deal with it.

For my mom

Here it is, Mothers Day, and I am reminded once again that I don’t have one. Well, I did have one, but she died when I was 12 of a massive heart attack brought on in no small part by the way she smoked and drank excessively for most of her adult life. I say this not so you will get the impression that my mom was a bad or weak person, because at least in my memory she was one of the greatest people I have had the pleasure of knowing. I say that so you will simply know a small fact about her to help round out the picture of this amazing person.

I can talk about these things with my wife, family members, and friends, and I do as often as the memories come to mind, but for some reason I just decided that I wanted to write this out as a tribute to my mom. She was something else.

There are many gaps in my memory regarding the first 10 years or so of my life, but when I think of my mom the first thing that comes to mind is that she never met a stranger. She was always able to make a “5 minute Best Friend” wherever she went. These were people who took our order at McDonalds, bagged groceries, or happened to be standing too close when she wondered out loud where the hell the mayonnaise was in this godforsaken store. I have this ability too – more than one helpful soul has helped me locate the goddamn mayonnaise - but I keep it turned off unless I am either really in need of something or really bored. She was always on.

I also remember that she had a mouth like a sailor on shore leave and never hesitated to throw out some expletive laded diatribe when something didn’t go right. “SHITFUCKPISSCUNTWHORE!” was the poetic cry of this damsel in distress, and it would come out for a wide variety of reasons - when she dropped a lit cigarette on her lap and was now slightly on fire, burnt dinner, cut her finger, or simply had enough of the noise my sister and I were generating. I even asked her about it one time when I was around 10.

“Mom, I know what shit, fuck, and piss are, but what’s a ‘cuntwhore’?”

These might be the first things that jump to mind, but they are by no means the most meaningful. There are obviously many meaningful things that I can remember – she was my mom and I would have to write for days to do justice to all the little things – but the thing that sticks out most was her total love for her kids. She used to bring my sister and I little things from the trips she had to take every now and then for work. She’d cheer me on when I was up to bat at little league games (and there was one memorable time when she got the whole crowd to chant my name when I had the chance to knock in the winning run, which I promptly did on the first pitch. That’s right - I was awesome.) She took care of my when I was sick.

There was a time in my life when I was taking medication for asthma which was, for all intents and purposes, adrenaline in a pill form. I had it pretty bad for a while and my doctor had prescribed that I take two of these pills a day, one in the morning (which was no problem – I needed a little pick me up many days as you will soon see) and one at night. The night pill was the worst. I would take it as directed around 7 pm and then proceed to spend the next five or six hours completely wired. Bedtime was around 8, so I’d spend a few hours staring at the ceiling, trying to go to sleep.

Did you ever try to go to sleep? Everyone knows how on Christmas Eve Santa doesn’t come until you fall asleep, and that the sooner you fall asleep the sooner Christmas morning comes. Kids around the world (at least those who believe in Santa and Christmas) spend hours on Christmas Eve, eyes closed, willing themselves to sleep. It never works. These kids spend most of the night worried that they won’t get to sleep in time and that Santa won’t come and that Christmas will be cancelled all because they can’t get to sleep and oh god it is now 11 o’clock and Santa was spotted by the local airport a few hours ago and he’s got to have moved on by now because he has to get to the ENTIRE world in one night and I’ll never get that Transformers toy that I so desperately want and I’ll have to wait another whole year which is really WAY too long and I might just have to go insane because by next year I might not even WANT the Optimus Prime and the milk and cookies and carrots will all be left out and the milk will sour and smell bad in the morning which will be just a GREAT thing to go downstairs to…etc.

I had several months straight of Christmas Eve’s in which I spent many hours each night with nothing much to do except lay in bed. I couldn’t play because my sister’s room was right next door and she’d wake up and tell mom and dad. I couldn’t go watch TV because the only set was downstairs in the basement and I’ll be damned if I was going to go down there all by myself, finished basement or not. Monsters don’t care if the floor is carpeted – in fact it is probably easier for them to sneak up on people because their footsteps are muffled.

Anyway, every now and then it would get to be too much for me and I’d venture into my parents room to tell them I couldn’t sleep. Surprisingly enough, my dad’s response didn’t help much. “You’ll never fall asleep wandering around the house – go back to bed!”

My mom, however, always took the time to give me a hug and walk me back upstairs where she would tuck me in and run her fingers through my hair or rub my back until I was relaxed enough to finally fall asleep. Some nights this was a short process, but other nights it would take 20 minutes or half an hour of this before I was able to sleep. She never seemed put out by this either. No matter how often it happened, she was always willing and able to get up out of her bed to take care of me.

I am now the proud father of 2 young boys who are wonderful in every way. (The littlest one, Ethan, has the ability to make these mind blowing poops that are so big they have their own gravitational pull, so that isn’t very wonderful, but aside from that, I have perfect kids.) It is the memory of my mom, waking up on a regular basis to deal with my insomnia problem, that comes to mind whenever I have to get up in the middle of the night to take care of one of my boys. I am not as willing to get up in the middle of the night as I remember my mom being, but I always try to put on a happy face when either of them calls so that whether I enjoy getting up at 3 am or not, my boys will always feel loved and cared for the same way I did when I was young.

She was great, and while I am sure I learned some bad things from her as well, I gained quite a few positive attributes from watching her over the years. Her memory lives on in my actions. I am who I am today in no small part because of her.

Being a hominid is bad. Who knew?

I was out walking the dog with Ryan the other day in the glorious 50+ degree weather we are having. After finding out that, at preschool, he has been playing with his friends, learning about clouds, and that the toy cash register needs batteries, we started talking about Daisy, our dog.

“Daisy is a good girl,” he says, forgetting that she nipped him the other day and that at the time he asked if he could put her in the garbage.

“Yep. She is normally a good girl,” I reply.

“She is so cute.”

“Yep. Cute as a button,” I say. “Just like you.”

“I’m not like a dog, Dad.”

“Sure you are. You have 4 feet, right?”

“Nope. Two hands and 2 feet. Not four feet.”

“Well, you are both tetrapods, aren’t you?” I ask this trying to refresh his memory of earlier conversations.

“Oh. Yep. We’re both tetrapods. 1-2-3-4.”

“See? You are just like a dog.” Now I am just messing with him. “Soon you’ll be barking and eating your food out of a bowl.”

“I am not a dog!” he says, sort of laughing.

“Sure. You are not just LIKE a dog, you are a dog.”

“NO,” he yells, “You are a DOG!”

“I am not a dog,” I say, reaching down and tickling his belly, “you are!” This goes on, back and forth, for a while.

So I managed to take what was an enlightening conversation with my son in which I was learning about his time at preschool and his friends, and turn it into a “You’re a dog!”, “No, YOU ARE!” back and forth. Yep, I am a great dad.

This morning after Ryan woke up and had his breakfast, I started with the “You’re a dog” thing and he returned with “No, you’re a squirrel!”

What? That’s not the game. He apparently forgot the rules during the night.

“No, you are a dog!” I say, hoping to get it back on track.

“You’re a jellyfish!” Now he is really off track. Oh well. When in Rome…

“You are an elephant!”

“No. You are a rabbit,” he says, laughing.

“Well you’re a hominid!”

“No I’m not! Wait…what?” Now he is confused.

“I said, ‘you are a hominid’. And you are.”

“No! I’m not a hominid!” Now he has switched from joking to being pissed.

“Yeah, you really are. All humans are hominids.”

“Not a hominid!” He is adamant that he is not a hominid. This is sort of reminiscent of the “It’s NOT DIGITAL!” argument I had with him when he was 2. Poor kid. But, I can’t back down because it is true. He is a hominid, as are all humans.

Now Jen gets involved. “What are you telling the boy now?”

Crap. Now I am busted for messing with the kid. “Just that he is a hominid,” I say.

“What is a hominid?” she asks.

“You know… humans, Neanderthals, and other human ancestors. It really isn’t anything bad.”

“No, I don’t know, and neither does he. Quit messing with him.”

So I had to stop for that day.

Now whenever I tell him that he is a hominid, he gets angry. He even is projecting his feelings onto other people. This morning, I told him that not only was he a hominid, but so was Ethan. He got upset and said I shouldn’t say that because “Ethan feels strange about that”.

Apparently my son is a creationist. I’ll need to work on that.

He was in your WHAT?

The other day, Jen went out shopping with her mother, which left me home with the two boys. This is fine because I am a fairly capable father in that when it comes to Ethan, the 6 month old, I know where the diapers are, what body parts they are supposed to cover, and what to do with them when they become full and/or smelly. Plus, I can put food into his mouth in either bottle OR cereal form. I am that good. I am also more than able to handle Ryan, who can be a bit of a turd sometimes, but more often than not is a great kid.

On this night of nights, when the boys are out on the town hitting hot spots like Bed Bath and Beyond (holy crap are their humidifiers expensive!), Target, and Noodles and Company, the conversation flows like wine. Ryan asks questions, I answer, and Ethan drools. Scintillating. So during dinner in which Ryan had buttered noodles, sat on a booster seat without complaining for the first time in his young life, and, in general, was fairly adventurous food-wise, he looks out the window and notices a large castle next door. This castle is another restaurant whose name escapes me at the moment, and I had been in there exactly one time since we moved out here.

”What is that?” he asks.

“That’s the (insert name here – I could read it at the time, I just don’t know it now). It is actually one of the last places mommy and I ate before you were born.”

“Oh,” says Ryan, unimpressed. “Ethan was in mommy’s uterus.”

“Yes, he was. Now try not to be so loud about that, people don’t always want to hear about internal organs while they are eating.”

“Is a uterus an internal organ,” he asks, louder this time. “What is an internal organ?”

“Internal organs are the bits of you that are inside your tummy,” I say, sensing another science lesson coming on. “They are often squishy and gooey, but they help turn your buttered noodles into energy for you.”

“And poop!” he says laughing.

“Yes. And they turn your buttered noodles into poop.”

He looks at his bowl for a second, then back at me. “I don’t want poop noodles anymore.”

“They aren’t poop now, in the bowl, but they will be later after you have digested them.”

“Ok. Can we still get milkshakes?

“Sure,” I say, thankful that we have moved onto a topic more suited for public discussion.

Later that night, while we are brushing our teeth getting him ready for bed, Ryan tosses out another of his famous non sequiturs. “When I was older, Ethan was in my uterus and he grew to be big and then he is now in his crib.”

What? How are you, as a parent, supposed to handle comments like that? Clearly the kid is high. I opt to start with the part I am most sure of.

“Ethan was never in your uterus,” I say confidently.

“Yes he was. He is my little brother and he was in my uterus for 42 days,” he says, equally confident.

“No, he wasn’t. You want to know how I know this?”

“No. He was.”

“You don’t have a uterus. You are a boy. Boys don’t have uteruses.” I wasn’t even about to get into the whole “uteruses/uteri” discussion with him. If he doesn’t know that he doesn’t have a uterus, enlightening him on latin plurals would be a wasted effort.

“I don’t have a uterus?”

“No.”

“Do you have a uterus?”

“No. I don’t have one. I checked. Only girls have a uterus.”

“Oh. Mommy has a uterus?”

“Yes.”

“Daisy has a uterus too, cuz she is a girl. And a tetrapod. 4 feet. 1-2-3-4.”

“You are amazing, you know that?” He is still a step above some of my AP Bio kids with that tetrapod thing.

“Papa and uncle Justin don’t have a uterus,” he states.

“Nope. Now you are getting it.”

“Ok. Can I have pudding for last call?” Last call is our way of making sure he knows that this is the last food he gets for the night. He became quite adept at staying up WAY past his bedtime by telling us he was hungry and needed food. Now we don’t have that problem.

“Sure,” I say.

I really gotta be more careful what I say around him. He is like a little defective sponge, absorbing everything and then leaking it all back at the wrong time.

If life is this interesting with only one that can walk and talk, imagine what it will be like when Ryan is telling Ethan everything he knows.

So I says to the guy...

My son Ryan. Smart, athletic, good looking, and only 3 1/2 years old.

I have a second little boy, but he is only 6 months old and not that interesting yet. Oh, sure, he does the occasional rolling over, almost crawling thing, and he smiles whenever he sees me, and he farts and makes Ryan and I laugh on a regular basis, but since he is not talking yet it is difficult to relate to the world how cool he is. To give you an idea of how cool he is, after a brief struggle in which he cried for a while to be picked up, he proceeded to sleep through the night last night, which is pretty much the last major hurdle we have until he decides to get married.

My firstborn, Ryan, is another story. When he was about 2 and learning to talk, I tried to teach him my favorite joke, which goes as follows: "So I says to the guy, that's not even my duck!" Not much of a joke per se, but it always makes me laugh, so I thought it would be cute coming from a little dude. And it would have been, if he could have ever gotten it right. After much trial and error, the best I could get out of him was "So I say to the duck...", or "I want a duck!", or "I was talking to a guy about a duck", or "So I says to the guy, hey, lets play TRAINS!" Basically all epic failures.

Well, it has been a long time since we worked on the delivery of that joke - almost 2 years - and the other evening, after a particularly long day of teaching, we were eating dinner together as a family and we have the following conversation.

"Daddy," says Ryan, "want to hear a joke?"

"Sure," I say. I love when he tells jokes. Most of them suck, but there is something about hearing them from my kid that make them funny.

"Knock, Knock." Great. A knock-knock joke. The lowest form of joke.

"Who's there?" I ask, on cue.

"Boo."

"Boo, who?"

"So I says to the guy, thats not even my duck!"

On the one hand, another epic failure, considering that the punch line is supposed to be "Boo-hoo? Don't cry!". On the other hand, however, he finally got the duck joke right, which is all a father ever wants from his sons.

So as I am laughing hysterically, he starts to laugh. "What's funny Daddy?" he asks.

I gave him a big hug. "You are. That was the best joke I have ever heard."

He still screws it up from time to time, but that is ok. He'll learn.

Remember Pauly Shore?

I am kinda glad that I have this little blog going. It gives me a chance to vent and correct the errors made when people like John Stossel write horrible, one sided, willfully ignorant pieces on things they know nothing about. Plus he has a funny mustache. There. I said it. John Stossel is a douchbag with a funny mustache and the brains of a trout. And not even a smart trout - one of those trout who gets caught on a hook, thrown back, and the caught on the SAME hook again because they are that stupid.

But enough about him for now.

The other thing I love about the blog is that it gives me a chance to write stories about my sons and share them with the world. Along with that, it gives me a place to store said stories so I don't have to keep them in my memory, which is, at best, a faulty storage medium.

So yesterday, I am driving home from swimming lessons when a song on the radio reminded me of an old Pauly Shore movie. In don't remember the name of this particular piece of celluloid excrement, and it doesn't really matter because they were really all the same: surfer dude is placed into an awkward situation where his idiocy and surfer charms win over the stiff establishment suits and then there is a big party where everyone exchanges Shore-isms like "Chillin' with the weasel, buddy!"

Anyway, I was reminded of a particular line, and said this line out loud with my little 3 1/2 year old in earshot.

"No weezing the juice!" I said loudly, with a trace of surfer accent.

"What?" came the reply from the backseat, where Ryan had been happily playing with his stickers and books.

"Nothing. Never mind."

Ryan, never one to give up on something he is interested in, asks again, "What did you say?"

Crap. Based on previous experience he is not going to give up until I tell him something. And I can't lie to him - I'm not good at it and he knows when I am doing it anyway. So through my negligence as a parent, I have now introduced Pauly Shore into the life of an otherwise innocent young child.

"It's a line from a movie. 'No weezing the juice'."

"No sneezing in the juice?"

"No. The line is 'No weezing the juice' - WEE-ZING. The first letter is 'W' which sounds like Wuh." Check it out. A phonics lesson from Pauly Shore. Who'd have thunk it?

"Ok. No Wuh-eezing the juice."

"Close enough. Now lets just forget this ever happened, ok?"

"NO WEEZING THE JUICE!" comes the reply from the backseat. Clearly this is not going to be forgotten.

"NO WEEZING THE SPRUCE!"

Great. Now we are improvising and adding material from books we have read. (BTW - "The Caboose Who Got Loose" is a great book for kids.)

"No weezing the fire hydrant!"

Ok. That doesn't even rhyme, but he is undaunted and now it is a game, and I am all for new games. "No weezing the tanker truck," I reply. Ryan laughs and is totally into this new pastime.

And so continues the car ride. "No weezing the..." whatever. Sign, red car, policeman, bird, daddy, etc. It doesn't matter. We are happily negating the weezing of whatever it is that our little eyes spy.

When we get home, it seems that Ryan has forgotten all about the new phrase and the game that goes along with it. However, at dinner that night, when we are all sitting around eathing tacos, Ryan shakes his juice cup, which is empty and says "No weezing the juice!"

My wife looks at me as if to say "Great. What have you taught him now?"

"No weezing the tomato," laughs Ryan.

So now I have to explain not only what our first born is saying, but where it comes from and why I said the phrase in the first place.

As of now he seems to have forgotten about the "Weezing" game, but I imagine it will come out at the wrong time in the wrong place. Perhaps at pre-school on Tuesday.

Won't that be fun? Good thing Jen gets to be the one picking him up!

Science Geek Son

Ahhh...the perils of having a science geek for a father.

The other day, my son asked me a question for which I didn't have a ready answer. "Why does Daisy (our dog) have feet?" he asked.

What?

Why does our dog have feet? I'll be honest, I had never once thought to ask myself that question. All dogs have feet. So do all humans. And cats, squirrels, chipmunks, monkeys, llamas - they all have feet as well. Hopefully none of this comes as earth shaking news to anyone.

So I laughed and asked, "Do you want the science answer or the short answer?"

He responded, "The science answer!"

Awesome. I love the science answer - it gives me a chance to talk science with my little boy and show him some of the marvels of the world, the beauty that is nature, and the fact that it is cool to know some of this stuff. Plus, if he gets bored with the answer, I can always toss in stuff about dinosaurs or giant squid if necessary. Those never fail to capture the imagination. (Although in this particular case, I wasn't sure how I could swing the subject from canine appendages to squid tentacles).

So I replied, "Because she is a tetrapod."

Insert puzzled look on 3 year olds face here. "What?"

"A tetrapod," I replied. "Any animal with 4 limbs is considered a tetrapod. It has to do with the fact that they all share a common ancestor which probably crawled out of the water sometime in the late Devonian period."

"Devonian?"

"Yep." I am now proud of my answer and of my son who is able to say the word "Devonian".

"So she has feet because she is a tetrapod," says the incredulous 3 year old.

"Yep."

"Am I a tetrapod?"

"Yep. Four limbs. Count 'em. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4."

"But I don't have 4 feet. I have 2 feet and 2 hands."

"Hands and feet are just modifications of the sets of bones which were present in the earliest tetrapods."

He looks at me quizzically for a few seconds. "I have an idea! Lets play trains!"

Clearly I am losing him. "Did you know that dinosaurs were also tetrapods?" I ask, grasping to hold his attention for a few seconds more.

"Dinosaurs were tetrapods?"

"Yes," I say, back on track.

"Ok. Is mommy a tetrapod?"

"Yep. Be sure to tell her that when we go upstairs for lunch. And while you are at it, remind her that mushrooms are fungi. She loves science words."

"Ok. OH! I have an idea...lets play trains!"

Resigned to ending another science lesson, I capitulate and we start building a track. Halfway through the construction of what has to be the worlds most amazing setup of plastic connecting traintracks, with my son pushing his trains -Thomas (the Tank Engine), Gordon, James, and Percy - I hear the cutest thing.

My son is speaking to his trains. "Thomas, you are not a tetrapod because you have 6 wheels and no feet. But I am, and so is mommy."

I love being a dad.