500lb Midgit Octuplets

Yup. THAT got your attention, didn't it? It's my next billion dollar idea. and I am going to own the Neilson Ratings with it. It's my new reality T.V. show: "The Five Hundred Pound Midgit Octuplet Family".  I'm not kidding at all. We've clearly reached that point in this country, so I might as well make some money off of it. Don't believe me? Look at what's on television now. I'm flipping around Direct TV the other night and what do I wander across? A show that can be best summed up as "Hey look, we're midgits." That's all it was. It was a regular family doing all of the exact same things any other family in this country does. Same eating. Same activities. Same everything. They just happend to be mostly shorter than a Boston Terrier. The only thing that makes watching that show any different from video recording yourself during the day, then sitting down in the evening to watch a replay of exactly what you just got done doing all day, is midgits. And you know what? That show is in at least it's second season, and you guys are freakin' watching it! If I told you that I was going to walk across the street to stare in my neighbors window because they were midgits, and I found that fascinating, you would all condemn me. "Midgit stalker!" you might call out. But as soon as you were done condemning me you would walk back inside your own house and flip on that midgit show! You should be ashamed of yourselves. 

"Hey Bob, wanna come over and watch a show about real people doing increadible mundane things?"

"Uh.. not really"

"It's got midgits!"

"Woohoo! I'm in!!!"

And hey, let's not make this post all about midgits (because that would just be weird). Advertised on that very same midgit show was The 500lb Family. Even worse! And just between you and me, I don't think 500lbs refers to the sum of all the family members. At least little people being people do something. They work. They play. They move. What does a 500lb person do? Attract flies? Should I be obvious here and say "eat"? I just want someone who watches that show to respond to this post and tell me how they can possibly fill 30 minutes of showtime by filming a human being that has become so fat that they are incapable of moving themselves. What are you actually watching? Have you no pride? Are you seriously telling me that there is nothing going on in your lives that is more important than watching a volskwagon sized pile of cellulite occupy space?

And so, as long as we're talking about large amounts of person, let's talk about the octuplets. Once again, all over the television and probably lining up for a weekly T.V. show. All I can think of is "Why do we not require a license before you can have children"? We license guns. We license cars. We license fishing for God's sake. Don't you think the ability to inflict yourself on helpless, unsuspecting, innocent little children should be licensed? And I feel guilty because it's MY tax money that's supporting this lunatics ability to keep popping out kids like a Pez dispenser. Doesn't that make me somewhat at fault? Should I show up at the woman's house, scoop up the FOURTEEN CHILDREN and say "Hey, I'm paying for these kids, I'm at least going to take them home and try to raise them in some sort of normal, non-self-absorbed-psycho-delusional type environment? Or, should a turn off the stupid television and spend that time writing a letter to my congresman, telling him that if he doesn't put an end to the stupid entitlement laws supporting this kind of behaviour, I'm going to drive down to his house and horse whip him with my fully licensed fishing rod?

So there it is. Three case studies clearly indicating Five Hundred Pound Midgit Octuplets will take the television world by storm. Sure, I after all the complaining I just did I could take the moral high ground and not produce such a show, but the last time I checked the exchange rate, the dollar was killing moral highground.

P.S. The entire time I was writing this post, my wife was saying Ray Lamontagne's name in various french accents.

Child Roots

If money is the root of all evil (and I’m not ceding that it is) then children are surely the root of all myths. The root of this root (feel free to go for the “root squared” pun there) is the fact that children are all very, very different. If children were the same we would have figured them out 5000 years ago, and the Baby Wise book would not only have been written in cuneiform on clay tablets, but it would also work. As it stands, the myth of Baby Wise and other such “methodologies” is carried forward by those people who happen to have born unto them what is referred to as a “good” baby, good in this case being defined as a child who sleeps upwards of 22 hours a day, and is only slightly more mobile than a lawn ornament. Those of us who do not have such a child will eventually figure out on our own how to best keep our children from destroying us, themselves and everything around them, but we won’t be writing any books about it. We won’t create any advice columns, any songs, or any oral history documenting our discoveries and failures, because we’re going to be tired. In fact, we will probably be asleep, so don’t call us to ask how it’s going, or what we did. We don’t know. We can remember colors, sounds, a word here and there… maybe the random, odd, vivid memory that stands out in perfect detail but without context, but we can’t put any of it together. You see, we’ve been living a Clockwork Orange like experiment in sleep deprivation and emotional manipulation, and all that we really know is that we think it’s getting better, and “shh… the baby’s asleep”. What this dichotomy in baby experience leads to is a one sided story of how to raise your children. Those people who have babies that spend their first 12 months in a narcoleptic trance are getting plenty of sleep and feeling chatty. They also, like every single parent since the invention of the printing press, have purchased a book on how to get your kid to eat/sleep/not cry/count cards in Vegas… whatever. So chatty, happy, sleep lavished parents are now walking around telling everyone that “Book X” worked wonders for little Jeffery. “Book X” is the bomb. It’s not occurring to them that potting little Jeffery down in a planter next to the begonias would have also worked well for him, because Jeffery just so happens to be one of those babies programmed to sleep, and sleep often. I suppose it’s just a great success story for marketing, relying on some well placed targeting of parental insecurities. “Read our book. Did your baby fall asleep? You’re welcome. He didn’t fall asleep? Well clearly your child is retarded.” And people buy into this stuff. The ones whose babies aren’t sleeping like a cursed Disney character are wondering what’s wrong with the kid, or what’s wrong with themselves as a parent. That’s it. It’s (A) Bad Parent or (B) Defective Kid. They’re not turning the sheet over and seeing “(C) Uh… it’s a baby. Babies are like that”. I have to tell you the truth. I’m actively working towards becoming more cynical, because I want to reach the point where I can write one of these baby books, knowing full well what I’m doing, and not care, because folks, there is a lot of money in the Babies for Dummies business. I’m thinking that a properly sized royalty check would go a long way towards assuaging any guilt I may run into on that.

OK, before I go I want to cover one more thing. Most of you will have surmised by now that my newest daughter is not in the “good baby” category, if you are following the above definition of “good baby”, so I want to make something perfectly clear: There are no good and bad babies. There are just babies, and they are all pretty awesome. My child happens to be able to operate on 5 hours of sleep a night and about 2 hours worth of naps, but that’s OK. Some people think that’s a sign of genius. She also gets bored quickly with each new form of entertainment that you present her with, but again: sign of genius. You hand her a Rubic’s Cube and in a matter of minutes she clearly and succinctly lets you know that “Hey, I’ve figured this out. I know exactly how I would solve this if my fingers were working, but they’re not right now, so go ahead and bring me something new. Thanksabunch.” She has hands that strike like a viper, and she can move her head faster than a frat boy trying get his bangs to lie just right, but it’s all good. You just have to be aware that if anything passes within arms reach of her it *is* going to instantly disappear and reappear in her mouth, and probably keep in mind that at any given moment she may decide to toss herself over the side of your arms like Jacques Cousteau going over the side of his boat. She’s just interested in everything. A lot. It’s like she thinks she was born late and has a lot of catching up to do. At her current clip I expect her to pass in me in her understanding of the world in about a week, and that’s O.K. too. Some of you may have read my previous post about the difficulties my daughter had at birth, so the fact that she has spent her first 5 months so incredibly alive, alert, and interested in the world around her is really a blessing. I have to say that it’s all worth it, too, because I think our daughter is quite possibly the happiest baby that I’ve ever seen. Even when she is upset, she does this silly, theater face logo thing where she smiles and cries at the same time, because all she really wanted was you. She just wants her people to be near her, to show her new things, to carry her to places she can’t reach, and maybe, just maybe, let her try one bite of whatever it is that you’re eating at the moment.

So recap: All babies are good, all babies are unpredictable, all baby books lie, but buy mine anyway when it comes out.

Clean as a Whistle

I took a shower today. I know, I know; it was a brave thing to do with the weather as cold as it is, but I'm just the kind of guy who's willing to stand up to, if not on, freezing cold floor tiles (editor's note: I wrote this several days ago when it actually was cold). I'm a man of principles, damnit, so all ahead full. I began by washing with the Irish Springs body wash soap purchased for me by my wife, when I noticed this quote (more or less) on the back of the bottle: 

"You're holding an entire country of freshness in one convenient bottle". 

An entire country of freshness. This actually disturbed me just a little, and not just because upwards of 3/4 of any given population stink like a mexican land fill. I mean, do I really want to smell like a country? And if so, is Ireland the country I want to smell like? You see, my wife has been to Ireland. She loved the place, but she once described it to me as thus (paraphrasing to follow): 

"The entire country smells like shit. I got off the plane, stepped on the tarmac, and thought 'Wow, we must be right beside a farm... but no, come to find out, it was the entire country that smelled like that. "

Mmm... let's make a soap out of that! Yes!!! Apparently Ireland is made up of approximately 32% rock, 15% alcholol, and 48% sheep dung. The remaining 5% consists of a couple of patches of grass growing on the rock, and a single tree hidden somewhere on the island. The lack of actual wood really plays into it to this "national identity" because the Irish really like their fire places. So, you might ask, what does one burn when the nearest firewood is a rather longish boat ride away? Why, sheep dung, of course! Yeppers, just toss that pie right in the 'ol fire there. And they *never* run out of that, because Ireland's entire GDP is sheep. I currently work for a company that has a more diversified portfolio than the entire country of Ireland. This is how I know that Global Warming is just a great big joke perpetrated on the commoners by our "World Leaders", because otherwise Ireland would be crapping itself over the possiblity of the the wool market going in the tank. Instead, they're breeding more sheep and those sheep are, in return, ensuring that Ireland retains it's "distinct, regional olfactory identity".

So where does that leave me in regards to personal cleansing choices? Ireland is a place where sheep dung covers the ground, suffuses the air, and having witnessed some of the national dishes I suspect it may be in the food. Within about 24 hours, any matter in Ireland currently identifiable on the periodic chart will have bonded with sheep dung molecules to form Ire-Matter, a matter identified not by it's component molecules, but by it's smell. Clearly this was not intended by God to be made into a soap. However, the bar soap was a full six feet away, five of which was over cold morning floor tiles, so the end was never in doubt. It's "smell like Ireland" day in Steve Land, and as it turns out I highly doubt they actually bottled Ireland. If they did, my wife was kind enough to not comment on the smell. Thanks babe, you're the best.

Station off the air...

Two / three weeks ago I spent 8 days in Walt Disney World with my family, my daughter's six person kick arse 3v3 soccer team (children have kick arse teams, adults have kick ass teams), and the mass of families connected to the team. I'm not going to count them all up, but off the top of my head that's around 28+ humans, with 10 of them coming in between the ages of ten and six. Toss in a pair of infants (one of which spent much of the time riding on my back) just to make sure the challenge is interesting. I think I could end this post here, and be deserving of at least the Congressional Medal of Fatherly Stupidity, but I'm going to continue.

 

Professional football coaches are paid millions of dollars a year to coordinate 22 people for a few hours a day, one day a week. There is one leader, and he is typically are true hard ass. These "men among men" typically wash out of the league within a few years. About .000001% of the population can handle that kind of pressure... for a few hours a day... one day a week. And we did it for 8 days, all day, every day. In fact, to be completely honest, I think Walt Disney days actually run about 35 hours each. The conniving little bastard was just that clever. But we did it, by God, we did it… (cue the music from Private Ryan). I’m just not sure we didn’t leave part of ourselves behind.

 

Children in Disney World go to bed hopefully by around 11pm, if you employ water boarding and veterinary strength sedatives. Tired soccer dads sometimes gather together afterwards for a late night drink and a futile, almost laughable hope of retaining our sanity. This causes us to go to bed even later. Infants in Disney World, or any place else really, get up at 7am. They also get up at 3am. Sometimes midnight, too, because they might have missed something. OK, maybe that's just my infant, but it counts for our purposes here. You'll notice that leaves about five hours for sleep, thoughtfully spread out over a larger period because you wouldn't want to use those precious hours of sleep up all at once. All that's OK, though, because when you’re in Disney stress is almost non existent... hehe... heheheh... HAHEHEHAHEHAHEH!!! Sorry... got away from myself for a second there. No, the reality is that withstanding the onslaught that is Disney is like drugging yourself with both uppers and downers, then picking a fight with a bunch of English soccer fans in the middle of gigantic, high speed, padded blender... while listening to three different songs at different volumes, one of which has the secret security code that will get you out of the blender embedded in its lyrics... in a foreign language. So it's doable, just a little wearying. You know, I think I could have just written that last sentence, called it a summary, and been done. Well, I've gone this far now. I would like to finish, but everything is starting to go gray around the edges again, and the high pitched, child like voices are getting louder. Perhaps now would be a good time to slip off and cash in another one of my 1.5hrs of sleep chips… It’s OK... I’m home now… I home… 

How to win over other parents

Yes, long time no post, but I swear I've got a backlog of good ones in my head. Posts that is. So I'll get back to it with a short one:

We had a busy weekend this last weekend: two spend the night guests for my daughters, and at least one other friend over for a play date. It's hard to keep track of actual numbers with children dividing and multiplying the way they do. So we had a lot of little girls over, and of course their parents coming in and out to drop them off. Wait. Let's start over. Go back to the night before this all started. A Thursday evening...

So I'm outside Thursday night taking pictures of the moon, because that's what I like to do. Take pictures. The camera has to be pretty still to get a picture at night, so I have it mounted to my tripod. Everything is going well when my youngest daughter begins screaming at me in near panic from the front door because, of course, her friend is on the phone and she has to solidy spend the night plans *right. this. second.* or the earth will stop spinning and we'll all go flying off into space. She's thoughtful like that. Now I don't want to leave my camera sitting outside, so I bring it in, and drop it off in the nearest child safe room: my bedroom. Still mounted to the tripod. Facing the bed. Fast forward to the weekend.

I think the post has already explained itself at this point, but I'll sum up. I don't know how many of the parents actually glanced through the open door into our bedroom, but is was Sunday night before I realized that upon looking into our room, the first three things you saw were: 1) A small bookshelf, 2) the bed and 3) the camera, mounted to a tripod, facing the bed. These would be parents who were leaving their young daughters under our care. I'm not expecting to see many of them again, unless it's flanked by a pair of police officers. Honestly, at this point I can't decide if I should move the camera, or just go all out and replace the novels and political commentaries on the bookshelf with various transaltions of the Kama Sutra.

Apologies and Wakachicka

First, I want to apologize for the lowered post output recently. I've just been very busy, but I do have an gigantic backlog of worthy commentary just waiting to spring forth soon, so stay tuned. By way of "inching back into the pool" I leave you with this actual quote from my wife:

"Wakachicka wakachicka wakachicka"

She was listening to Barry White at the time.

Sackcloth and Ashes

I generally don’t make political comments on here, because people just can’t deal with it anymore. People have become mean spirited and close minded in regards to politics (or maybe they always were). I am going to say this much though: If Obama wins tonight like it looks like he’s going to, I’m going to wear sackcloth and ash to work tomorrow. This is not entirely a display of mourning, but also a reflection of my belief that after Obama implements his tax plan, his energy plan and his domestic ideas, all I’ll be able to afford is sackcloth and ash, so I might as well get used to wearing it. I honestly believe that it could be worse than the Carter Presidency, in which inflation, interest rates, and unemployment all hit double digits. I hope I’m wrong. I hope that I’m the one who hasn’t been paying attention, and if I do find myself in a better place in three years because of Obama I’ll take all that extra money and buy each of my liberal friends a glass of wine. Those of you in California may have to go in halfsies on the airline ticket. So, here’s to… Hope. 8^)

Next up: Thoughts From the Road (LA & PDC 2008)
(which I should have already posted, but I’ve been a wee bit lazy)

This Post Is Not About Flies

Let’s talk about flies for a second, just to set the stage for last night’s events. Anyone with children has become used to the idea that there will be flies in the house sometimes. This is not because children are unclean, which they are, but because children believe door hinges are sacred objects, and that to use them any more than absolutely necessary is to risk invoking the wrath of the door hinge gods. A child going outside to pick blackberries a block away from home will leave the door open on their way out because, well, they’ll be coming back through that door at some point and they don’t want to close it without good reason. The phrase “but I’m coming back in” has been wielded by children all over the world as an all powerful talisman against the bogeyman of needlessly closed doors, and it has worked for them. Along these same lines, a child also believes a conversation is only valid if one member of the conversing group is standing in an open doorway. As an experiment, I once gave one of my daughters a stern lecture about leaving the door open. I included all of the normal reasons, including incoming bugs and outgoing conditioned air. I gave her this talk *while she was standing in an open door*, distractedly swatting at the bugs that were attempting to fly past her, upstream into our house, their little wings working courageously against the torrents of powerful, conditioned air that were pouring out of our house in the opposite direction. I kept this talk going as long as possible, and never once did it sink in that she was currently doing exactly what it was that I was telling her not to do. For reference, both of my school aged children are straight A students. It’s just a kid thing.

So, the above is basically my excuse for having the occasional fly in my house, but as the title above states, that’s not what this is about. This is about what happened around 2am last night, in my bedroom (don’t get your hopes up). Let’s start with this: For those of you who don’t know it, the primary purpose of a man’s leg during sleep is temperature regulation. A little warm? Expose one foot. Really warm? Uncover an entire leg. Arctic chill? Retract both legs fully into the blanketed warming area. (Yes, I am aware that brings us dangerously close to being reptiles. Take it where you will.). Well last night fell into the “a little warm” category, and as such I had one foot properly exposed, as diagrammed in the male body temperature regulation manual. At some point after 2am, I felt a slight… crawling… on my ankle. My first thought was “Damnit, there’s a fly in here”. I shook my ankle once, frustrated in the knowledge that we were about to begin the fly version of “wash-rinse-repeat” in which every 30 seconds for the rest of the night I would shake my foot and the fly would take off, circle the room once, then say “Oh hey, look at that! A foot to land on!” and we would start all over again. Anyone who has played this game knows the joy of it. They fly, however, did not leave when I shook my ankle, so harnessing my growing irritation I gave it another really, really good shake. That’s when the fly… skittered. That’s the best word I can think of. It skittered up my ankle, squeezing itself between my calf and the bed. This brought me “moderately” more awake (in the sense that the Titanic “moderately” sank beneath the ocean), and allowed me to ascertain several things:

• The creature was much, much larger than a fly
• The creature was hard and spiky
• The creature was moving at a rapid pace up my leg towards regions where hard, spiky creatures are strictly forbidden (unless you’re Richard Gere).

At this point I did what any red blooded American male would do: I levitated. I’m not sure if any muscles were actually involved in this, or if it was sheer will power alone. I’m not even sure if I “rose” into the air, or if I just teleported to a position approximately three feet above the mattress. Either way, that’s where I went. Once there, I rotated face down and sure enough, there below me was a dark, fast moving thing roughly the size of a large pecan. The thought “house fly” was quickly replaced with the obviously more correct thought: “daemon imp from the blackest pits of hell”. After a brief moment of reflection, I came to the conclusion that sharing my bed with a skittering, spiky, daemon imp was probably not going to work out for the best. That decision made, and still hovering in the air, I called upon my years of martial arts training and assaulted the creature with an attack best described as “one man slap fight at 200 frames per second”. One of the approximately 4,000 blows I got off in the first 1.3 seconds of levitation made contact with the daemon imp, hurling it into and almost through the bedroom wall. This was good, because the sheets were already beginning to smolder from the friction created by my humming bird like assault on the creature. I was in no way reassured by the loud crack it made on impacting the wall, but I nevertheless allowed gravity to resume its normal governance over my body and lowered myself carefully to the floor. Upon inspecting the carnage I discovered that my adversary had, in its dying moments, managed to transmorgiphy itself from daemon imp into a dinner plate sized cockroach, which I think you’ll agree was infinitely more horrible. Well played, daemon imp.

So now I had a dead cockroach and a heartbeat of around 830 beat per minute to deal with. For the cockroach, I gathered him up in several large paper towels and headed to the bathroom, past my wife who was already up “doing things that mothers do in the middle of the night when they have a six week old child”. That’s when I made a fatal mistake, flushing away any chance I may have had of getting back to sleep that night (not that there was much of one to begin with). My wife asked “what was all of that?” and in my complete and total ignorance I replied “A cockroach just crawled up my leg while I was in bed”. You see what I just did there, don’t you? The shudder that went through her body at those words actually rattled dishes in the kitchen. Before I opened my mouth about it there had been exactly one half of the matrimonial bed that had to deal with heebie jeebies for the rest of the night. Now it was a clean sweep. Instead of lying down beside a beautiful, happy, tired young woman I was now going to be sleeping beside the equivalent of a blue fin tuna wired to a car battery. And I was pretty much in the same state. In fact it was fun, because we were close enough to set each other off, arcing back and forth like a pair of shock therapy patients on relays. One gets a jolt, the other gets a jolt. Yay us. And let me be honest, we went off several times during the remainder of the night, each of us convinced that every crease and crevice in the sheets was actually the starting line for the “Next Great Roach Race for the Crotch”. I may be exaggerating slightly there, but I don’t think so. Sleep was not an easy mistress last night.

So here I am this morning, once again tired and out of sorts. I left my wife at home this morning with very explicit instructions in regards to the exterminator we supposedly employ (the “explicit” part referring to the language she should use with them). I want to come home and see that our house has assumed the natural color of pesticide. I want to see already dead things digging themselves out of the ground to get away from our house. I want an old Indian man to walk right out of a Stephen King novel and tell me not to bury anything in the back yard, because the ground has “gone sour”. I’m calling in the exterminator, the catholic church, and the national guard because I don’t care how long you live in a house, to the question “how many times over a ten year period should a cockroach crawl across your sleeping body” the correct answer is indisputably “none”.

The Silver Lining: The funniest sounds you will ever hear are those made by someone who thinks a bug is crawling up their leg, even if that someone is you.

One Season to the Next

I took a walk at work today. It was a beautiful day for it, and my office is in a really nice neighborhood, so it just seemed like the only reasonable thing to do. I really enjoyed the walk, but I did notice something a little different when I walked by the big grass field. It's a field I used to play Ultimate Frisbee on before life got so busy. It's similar to the fields I've played soccer on, and flag football on, and even bears resemblance to the lined and leveled football fields of my high school days. It's the smell. That fresh, well kept grass smell that becomes so strong in Spring and Fall. It's always had that effect of instantly transporting me back to... somewhere. Soccer, football, ultimate, any of those places. It's always a good moment. It brings with it that little boost of adrenaline, that singularity of focus, and the happy, clean feeling of getting ready to walk out onto the field of competition. I've always loved that feeling, that smell. Today was different though. I walked by the field. I smelled the grass. I got transported... but I didn't go to my old football fields. I didn't go to the ultimate fields either. In fact, I didn't go to any of my old battlegrounds. I went somewhere else. Just like that, the second the smell hit me, I was at my child's soccer game. Both of my daughters play soccer now. They are both pretty good at it, and both really, really love the game, and I love watching them play. And that's where I went. So I don't know when it happened, and I don't know how it happened, but I think that what's going on here is that maybe that smell belongs to them now, to my little girls. My days on the grassy fields are drawing to a close, and theirs are just beginning to bloom, and honestly, I'm OK with that, although my wife might argue otherwise. I'll always love that air of competition. I'll always think I'm ten years younger than I am. Still, nothing I've ever achieved on those fields can bring with it the same joy as watching my children on their fields, finding out what they're capable of, running, playing, laughing, competing... growing. Enjoy those grass covered fields girls. I cede them to you without regret. I would tell you to make daddy proud, but I think you're already there.

There are two kinds of people in the world

Those that secretly hope that there are no monsters in their closet, and those that secretly hope that there are.

Career Choices

I hit the 5 year mark today at what I lovingly refer to as my "day job" and it brought with it a thought provoking contrast. Several years ago a good friend of mine left his "day job" and the company stroked him a check north of $30K for the effort. I've stuck around at my "day job" for five years now and they sent me a gift card... for $75. Basically what that means is never, ever, ever take career advice from me.

Why I Can't Blame God Tonight

This is going to be a little rambling, and is definitely a divergence from my usually lighthearted post, so bear with me…

Barney the cat passed on today, six days after our new daughter, Wren, was born. He had developed some sort of bladder condition with a long and impressive sounding name, the short of which was that his bladder was blocked, backing urine into his kidneys, and hurting him pretty badly. It would eventually kill him. For $700 to $800 we could purchase a “chance” at getting him better, with the high probability that the problem would recur again in the very near future. The other option was the one that most pet owners have to face at some time in their lives: when is it best to let your pet go in the most comfortable, happy terms you can arrange? That was an especially difficult choice for such a good cat, a creature that had been with my wife through so many hard times, and who had so clearly and visibly loved her and this whole family. I won’t go into a long litany of everything he did for us, I’ll just say he’s the best male cat I’ve ever known, and even had the good graces to not trigger my cat allergies.

The decision we made was very, very hard on my wife (ok, on me too), and is only one of many crappy things my wife has had to deal with during what should be a beautiful time in her life. Things like my ex who decided, in the middle of Kari’s pregnancy, to sue for custody of the kids she gave up 7 years ago. Kari is one of the most wonderful, thoughtful, caring, beautiful women I have ever known and she deserves more than anything to enjoy her time growing and caring for Wren. She doesn’t deserve all hardships put on her lately, most certainly not to lose a creature that had been like a best friend to her, days after what should be one of the most joyous events of her life. It’s the sort of thing that really pisses me off, and would generally make me scream and rage against the injustice of the world, and maybe even call God out by name on it. I’m not going to do it this time, however, and if you’ll bear with me a little longer, I’ll tell you why.

I used to tell people that the scariest moment of my entire life was the day I was playing with my oldest daughter, then about 3 years old I guess, in a plant warehouse. We were playing chase. She was running from me, laughing hysterically, when she hit a thin puddle of water on the finished concrete floor. Her feet went out from under her faster than you could process it happening. The first thing to hit the concrete was the back of her head, and it made a sound like a high powered rifle going off. In that brief moment, I was sure that her brain had been hurt. I don’t think I had ever really known fear before that moment. Despite the fact that my daughter was in fact fine, I still have trouble even thinking about that day. The ghost of that raw, chest crushing fear is still right there. I tell you this as introduction to the “other” day in my life when I really, really knew what freezing, crushing, pleading to God fear is.

My newest daughter, Wren, was born at 1:22am last Thursday morning. She is a beautiful, healthy baby who at age 5 days already shows all the signs of being a future world leader. My incredible wife had a somewhat difficult labor (never ever trust anyone who says the word “cervidil” to you) but came through it like a champion. Those of you who have had kids will know the combined sense of joy and relief that comes when you see your healthy baby child come out of the womb looking healthy and whole. It is an incredible, euphoric moment because as much as we don’t like to admit it, we all have hidden fears of the worst and finally seeing our healthy child alive and well, well it’s just a good thing. So Kari and I both had that moment of utter happiness when Wren came into the world, and all was good. In our case, several nurses from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit were already on hand because of a fairly common condition which basically boils down to “the baby made a poo while still in the womb”. This happens all the time and the NICU folks were just there to suction her out really well in case any “myconium” (baby poo) had gotten into her nasal cavity. As soon as Wren was out the doc handed her to the NICU staff to do their thing. They put her on the warming table and got started in a fairly standard fashion. Then things started to turn. A good ten seconds passed, and we had not heard Wren cry yet. I cannot and will not try to convey the feelings that started up then. Another ten seconds went by. From my standing position by my wife I could see them get out the respirator bag. My wife and I both heard the word “intubate”. More time passed, but I don’t know how much. The world started to turn over. I remember my wife, with tears running down her face, praying one word, out loud, over and over again: “Please… Please… Please”. I remember the most terrifying moment of all, when all of the nurses in the room suddenly gathered around the warming table, not working on Wren but trying to act as if they had all just casually drifted into a little clump around the table. They were clearly doing what they had been taught: shielding me from seeing what was happening to my child. This more than anything convinced me, as I stood there gripping my wife’s hand, that our daughter was laying on a table dying. I wanted to run to her, but I wanted to stay out of the way. I wanted to cry to her that I was there, but I wanted to hide from my wife what it was I could see in the nurses faces. I felt a huge, gaping void open up inside me, and then I did what probably millions of people before me have done. I tried to make a deal. I said “God, please don’t take my baby. Don’t take her, and I promise that I will never forget that you gave me a miracle today. Please God. Please”. I prayed that over and over in my head, and whether or not that prayer had anything to do with anything, God didn’t take her. At some point we finally heard her cry, and we got to hold her, and she was beautiful, and healthy, and alert. She was alive.

So all of the above is to tell you why I can’t blame God tonight. It hurts to have to let Barney go, and it hurts to see my wife have to let him go. It hurts to look around the room and see his toys there, to see the catnip filled scratch box that he used to flip upside all the time. He really was a good, good cat, and he put up with more out of our crazy family than any one cat should have to. He deserved a long, happy life. He deserved better than some stupid bladder disease, and my wife deserves better than having to tell an old friend goodbye when she should be celebrating a new one. I’m going to grieve for both of them, and for myself, but I’m not going to get angry. Five days ago I made a deal. I got a miracle. And I remember that. And as cliché as it may sound, I think maybe Barney’s job was to get Kari safely to me, to this family, to this time with our new baby girl. Maybe he did his job. He was there when Kari needed him, and he was there for this family when me, Kari, and my two daughters were learning how to *be* a family. So maybe he did what he was supposed to do, and maybe he has a new job now. I hear that cats make great guardian angels, and I happen to know that there’s a new little girl in town that is going to need one. I think she would like Barney the cat.

Goodbye Barney. Thank you for taking care of Kari until I could get there. You're a good, good cat.

I am so outnumbered

So I'm about to have my third daughter any minute now. Well, technically my wife is going to be the one having her, which works out pretty well for me, but the point is still the same: That Steve Guy is getting to be severely outnumbered in the 'ol hacienda. The count will be 1 wife, 3 daughters, one female rabbit and one extremely smart female dog against me, one male cat, and one male dog that is sporting the approximate intellectual capacity of quartz. A special note on those two dogs, the female (Savannah) is so "alpha" and the male dog (Patch) is so "not alpha" that I actually saw her humping him once. That story is 100% true. So as you can see, I'm working with a pretty short deck when it comes to male camaraderie around the homestead. To make matters worse, the other two males in the household are now starting to defect. Again, true story: I looked out the window into the back yard just the other afternoon and saw Patch, the "male" dog, squatting to pee. I kid you not. He saw me catch him too, the defector, and I swear to you he shrugged. It was mostly with his eyes, but I saw it. "Et tu, Patch"? So clearly the dog has cached it in, and it was just down to me and Barney, the male cat. Notice I say "was". Barney the cat is in serious danger of turning his man card in as well, as I witnessed him just last evening... this is hard to say... running... from the rabbit. This is not a big rabbit. In fact, it's downright small. It also has the approximate texture of your typical Elvis painting (velvet, for those of you not from Tennessee), and is the only rabbit I know that will hop in your lap and start licking you. On a scale from one to intimidating, it clearly rates as "primary character from a childrens story book". Barney tried to act like a cat at first, getting excited and stalking the rabbit, but was immediately put off his game when the rabbit spotted him and ran towards him like a long lost lover off the cover of one of those books my mother used to read. Since then the cat has had no idea what to do with the rabbit and has mostly stayed out of it's way. That in itself is understandable. It's when I see Barney doing the "fast walk" all over the house, looking jittery, with the rabbit hopping along behind and sniffing his heels that the cat starts to lose points. I had hoped that they would get along with each other and play together, or at minimum tolerate each other. Having the cat run from the cute and fuzzy bunny wasn't really a consideration. So there it is. I'm starting to feel very, very alone in guy land. Once the baby is born I think I'm going to call a guys only meeting, just me, Barney and Patch. We'll discuss restoring a little, just a little, testosterone to the house. Wish me luck. Maybe I should bring some Zima.

Crazy Driving

True Story:

We're driving home from my wifes grandparents today. I'm typically a very "aware" driver in that I try to pay attention to what's happening in a 360 degree radius around the car, as well as far ahead of us. Because of this, I was not particularly caught off guard when, as we drove along in the left lane of the highway, two cars in the right lane suddenly decided to hit their brakes and swing across our lane and into the left turn lane beside us. I was also completely aware of the car zooming in on our right (also known as "my wife's side") from the merge lane there. I did a quick set of mental calculations (insert joke about mental abilities here), figured out that at everyones current speed I could just drive straight through on my original vector, and did just that. At no point was any car closer to us than the standard highway manual would approve. We neither swerved nor braked. If you're eyes had been closed you would have never known that we had had a moderately close encounter with a group of standard issue highway morons. It was smooth as silk, and if I may say so, by the book. Several seconds later my wife gave her carefully considered and insightful assessment of the entire episode with the following sentence:

"You drive like a maniac."

I briefly attempted to argue that I had not, in fact, been in any way, shape, or form responsible for the driving of the other three motorists, but my wife, wielding her 9th month of pregnancy like an iron mace, crushed my flimsy arguments and cast them into the soundless realms of "Husbands who know when to shut up".

On a side note, I think it's best we avoid restaurants while she is still pregnant, lest I accidentally cook a bad meal while we are there.

Gas Giants

It's official. The three most massive objects in the solar system are now the Sun, Jupiter, and my wife... and like Jupiter, my wife can now be officially classified as a gas giant. Those of you who have never experienced pregnancy are now thinking "How could he write something like that about his pregnant wife?!?! What a jerk." The rest of you, those who have experienced pregnancy, are thinking "Ahh... she's into the last two weeks then. Good for her". In the spirit of fairness, according to the "gas output" barometer of pregnancy, I've been in my ninth month since before my wife and I met, so I can't exactly complain. In fact, to be totally honest, it's been a little bit liberating. The new rule in the house, at least until the baby moves out of the majority of my wifes torso and into a baby crib, is "do what you got to do." I think I'm winning.

I'm Back

Well, I got totally blindsided with some really, really bad news a couple of weeks ago, so I've been completely out of my game. I don't think I'm going to talk about the news, but I am going to start back working, blogging, and getting back into the normal swing of things as much as I can. To that effect, here is a picture I sketched out a month or so ago of a waiter Mark and I saw downtown. The sketch is only a minor exaggeration at most. Mark and I both refrained from saying anything funny after he appeared for fear that the top of his head would slide off if he smiled any bigger.

No Excuse

There is really no excuse for not having one of these...

http://www.kidrobot.com/2008/munny/?p=about

Not Funny...

In the car, on the way to pregnant woman yoga class:

Wife: I think I have super hearing today.

Me: You do seem to have picked up on a lot of little sounds that I've missed today. Then again, I have a tendency to filter out annoying little sounds pretty quickly.

Wife: Ugh, we are going to be really late...

Me: Did you say something?

She didn't think it was funny either.

Why my children have no chance

Me: *says something totally gross during dinner. Think Nickelodeon kids game show gross.*

Eldest Daugher: Dad! That is totally innappropriate at the dinner table!

Me: Yes, but I leaned back when I said it so I technically wasn't at the dinner table.

Magic Numbers

OK, when I started this blog I made a conscious decision to stay away from politics because I can get a little fervent in political debates, and that’s not what I want this blog to be about. It was a tough decision at the time, because we all know that the U.S. political system provides the world with upwards of 2/3 of its entire global comedic output, but it was a choice I made. And now I’m going to unmake it, at least for one post. Today’s break from convention will be brought to you by: NPR.

I think most people with either internet connections or any small amount of working gray matter are aware that media outlets have long left behind the days of providing news, and have rather (or “Rather”) moved into the business of *making* news. We can argue about agendas and ideals later, but I think most of us would agree on that statement. Well one of NPRs big drives over the last two years has been to convince America that our economy is teetering on the brink of total collapse (I like any sentence that includes the phrase “teetering on the brink”). The only real problems they ran into with this crusade were:

a) Most of the key economic indicators (pre-oil-spike), including employment, seemed to categorically refute NPRs premise
b) The vast majority of U.S. citizens were of the opinion that they personally were in a pretty good situation, economically speaking.

So those were two pretty tough strikes against them. Given that, most of what NPR was able to do was put on display the general goofiness of most of us Americans when polls started coming out with results that showed that around 85% of nation felt that personally they were doing just great, but that they also felt that the rest of the country was having economic problems. That’s like ten people standing around in a circle, wearing black label Ralph Lauren, drinking Starbucks coffee, and blogging from their iPhones about how rough the other 9 people in the room obviously have it. We are indeed that easilly influenced. In fact, I’m pretty certain that right after I finish this post I’m going to start my own media outlet and convince people that the only way to stave off Armageddon is to send me all their money. I guarantee that 100% of every 20 cents on the dollar will specifically go to a cause of some kind. If you don’t believe me, just re-read the preceding two sentences until you do.

OK, back to the meat of the post: NPRs amazing street magic. NPR has apparently decided after two years to concede the fact that actual numbers show that we are not, in fact, losing jobs (although the economy is certainly slowing down), so this is what they did (and I’m seriously paraphrasing here). See if you can follow this:

Talking head #1: So Talking Head #2, the numbers don’t seem to be showing actual job losses. Why is that?

Talking Head #2: Well Talking Head #1, here’s my theory, {insert log and rambling story about immigrants here that most resembles an audio version of Three Card Monty}, so what I think is that all of the job loss is occurring in the illegal immigrant sector, so it’s not being reported.

Talking Head #1: OK, so there is some real job loss going on out there, how is that affecting our economy?

There… did you catch that? It’s a little subtle, isn’t it? THEY MADE UP THE NUMBERS THEY NEEDED! And they *told* you they were doing it. If this were a magic show, every single person in the audience would have just stood up and said “Uh… we saw that. You just pulled that straight out of your pocket. It wasn’t even subtle. ” At least my kids used to tell me to close my eyes when they were making things “magically” appear, and they were all of about 5 years old at that phase. And let me tell you, the NPR fellas didn’t even so much as pause to catch their breath as they whipped through that little trick because they knew that if they gave us even one second to digest that little tidbit, the entirety of their audience would suddenly turn to each other and say “Did that just happen? Really? They just did that?” I really can’t convey in this quick post how jarring it was, so if you want to go look it up on NRPs site the report was from Thursday, July 10th. It reminds me of all those movies where the cop tells the motorist “Hey, get that broken taillight fixed” and the motorist of course responds with “what broken taillight?” because he obviously hasn’t seen the other 532 movies in which the cop then smashes the taillight with his night stick. "Oh, those job losses. I didn't notice them until you whipped out the magic nightstick there". The key difference, of course, being that those are movies, something which at least 35% of the American public has come to understand as not being real life.

I have to say, I honestly can’t decide if I’m mortified or excited by this new frontier in news reporting opened up by NPR. On the one hand, all pretense of reporting actual news has just gone out the window, but on the other hand, we are in for some really, really good stories in the near future. Next up: the Fox News Special Report on Illegal Immigrants with Laser Beams on their Friggin Foreheads.