Diapers To Donuts

Dear Declan

(In today’s post, I would like to share a letter to my three and a half year old son, Declan. I’m afraid this won’t be nearly as funny as my other posts, but I haven’t been doing a lot of laughing lately. I promise that happy Sean will be back in the next post.)

Dear Declan,

Last Thursday, I received a voice mail message from your mom that I hoped to God I would never hear.

“Sean, the doctor looked at hip x-rays… and Declan has your condition.”

Yes, Declan, I’m afraid that it’s true. Thanks to your father, you have something called Stickler Syndrome, a genetic malfunction in the tissue that connects your bones, heart, eyes and ears. This Stickler thing comes in many different forms, but the version we have seems to attack hips and eyes.

It seems silly for me to have to explain all this, because soon enough you’ll know what this “condition” is – first hand, you’ll experience the never ending pain that comes from a hip that just won’t do what it’s supposed to do, that somehow manages to hold together despite becoming more deformed with every passing day.

Declan, I wonder if the kids at school will laugh at you the way they laughed at me? Will they call you penguin for the way that you walk and taunt you for being the slowest person in the class, like they did to me?

Will you have to make up all kinds of reasons and excuses not to attend gym class, for fear that someone will notice how one hip is larger than the other?

Even worse, when you’re 15 will all hell break loose for you like it did for me, and will you have to spend 3 months in a hospital while world famous doctors struggle to keep you from going blind?

I guess, most of all, I want to say that I’m sorry. Sorry because you’re the last person in the world that I would ever want to hurt. And yet, I gave this to you. I did this.

I also want to tell you that there will be times when you wish you didn’t have this. Maybe it will be at 3 in the morning when you can’t sleep because your entire leg is on fire. Or the first time you can’t do something because of your hips, like play a contact sport or go jogging or ride a horse.

But here’s the thing I need you to know most of all:

You will overcome this.

Because let’s face it, no one is perfect.

No one.

Some people may hide their imperfections better than others but in the end we all have things about ourselves that we wish we could change and life is all about making the best of what you’ve got, period.

And our success in life isn’t determined by what we start with. It is the result of who we prove ourselves to be over all of our days on this planet.

You may not be a track star or a world famous athlete, but that leaves about a million other wonderfully cool things you could be in this life.

True, you have your daddy’s hips. But, you also have his heart.

Now let’s stop worrying about these creaky hips and start changing the world.

Love,

Dad

Since When Did I Become A Grumpy Old Man?

Don’t kids just drive you nuts?

I mean, they’re always laughing and giggling and playing. What’s their problem, anyway? Why are they always SO happy? Don’t they know that adults like me have SERIOUS things to worry about?

Like the other day. After a long, incredibly stressful day, I asked my son Sean how HIS day went.

“Well, it wasn’t so good... But then we saw 4 caterpillars. So I guess it WAS a great day.”

Right. With logic like that, how could you go wrong? Wish I could tell that to my boss.

“Sure, I just lost a $2 million dollar account but on the bright side I saw 2 bees, 1 butterfly and 3 frogs so what’s the big deal?”

And what’s with all this laughter? Is it really healthy – or necessary – to laugh that much? Do they have to laugh SO LOUD? Can’t they just be quiet so I can sit there and worry about all of my big people problems.

What’s so darned funny about words like “fart” and “poopie” and “peepie” anyway? And how is it that a simple word like “underwear” can throw a kid into fits of laughter so overwhelming that they just might pass out if you follow it up with “bum bum.”

And is it really necessary to have so many darned questions? Can’t they just accept life for what it is like the rest of us? Why oh why must they dream all of the time and ask me crazy things like:

“Daddy, do you love the dog more than me?”

“Daddy, where did the moon go? Did it turn into a butterfly?”

“Daddy, why does the bank have all our money?”

And why are they always looking for puffy clouds in the sky so they can give them names like “fudge sundae” and “lemon drop” and “teddy bear” and how could they never seem to see the rain clouds that surely must lie just beyond the horizon? Is all that optimism really necessary with so many problems in the world?

My one year old son Luke recently discovered leaves. Now all he wants to do is look at leaves. For God’s sake, Luke, there just isn’t enough time to spend all day looking at leaves and rainbows and the sunshine cutting its way across the golden leaves on a Fall afternoon.

There just isn’t time for that! Adults like me have so much more important things to do. Like worrying about bills and responsibilities and deadlines.

Every night, when I kiss my three year old son Declan good night, he asks me the same simple question:

“Daddy, are you going to work tomorrow?”

If I tell him yes, he wants to know if I’m going to come home at the end of the day.  I tell him, “Yes, of course” and he is happy.

If I tell him that I don’t have work tomorrow, then he wants to know if we’re going to eat cinnamon buns together in the morning. I tell him, “Yes, of course” and he is happy.

Is that not the craziest thing you ever heard? What is it with kids these days? Is that really all it takes to be happy? A simple promise to come home at the end of the day or to eat cinnamon buns together in the morning and then wham-o everything is as good as can be?

Oh, to be a kid again! I’m starting to wonder if they’re the wise ones, and if we are the fools, so bogged down in our day-to-day worries that we can’t see the joy and the wonder right in front of our faces. Now pass the cinnamon buns and be happy!

Nothing Like Ear Pus To Make You Hungry

I have always been a little finicky about food. I have all kinds of rules about different foods and when they can or can’t be eaten.

For example, I absolutely, positively can’t stand food sweat. Food sweat is basically the little droplets of condensation which form on containers when microwaving food. As a general rule, I believe that any food which sweats like Brittany Spears on the dance floor should never be eaten (Food Rule #1).

And whenever my wife cooks a turkey, my kids always come up with lots of appetite-killing questions, like:

“Where did the turkey’s head go, Mom? Don’t turkeys have heads?”

“Why isn’t the turkey talking? What’s his name? Is that the same turkey we saw on TV last week?”

“Make sure to save the skin for me. I only eat the turkey’s skin. Do turkeys get warts just like human beings?”

Now, questions like that make me never want to eat another turkey for as long as I live. They have the ability to entirely ruin a Thanksgiving Day Feast. So Food Rule #2 is a very simple rule that my children can understand: “Whatever you do, don’t ask me any questions about the turkey. And no, I don’t know where it was born or who its mommy is.”

Which brings me to Food Rule #3.

Because I have an hour and a half commute home each night, I don’t usually get to eat dinner until after reading stories to the kids, saying prayers and tucking them in.

By the time the kids are in bed (usually around 7:30), the dog is starting to look like an awfully tasty meal and I wouldn’t be opposed to eating a profusely sweating dancing turkey at that point while at the same time talking about the peculiarities of turkey anatomy, which are clearly in violation of Food Rules #1 and #2.

So you can only imagine my anticipation the other night as I sat down to a meal of orange chicken with rice prepared by my wife, who has this amazing ability to cook a five course meal in less than five minutes using nothing but a microwave oven. She has single handedly exalted the art of microwave cooking to an art form. My only concern with all of this is that if some day a scientist discovers that the practice of “nuking” food makes people glow in the dark and grow five heads, then my nine hundred heads would most certainly shine with the brightest of them.

So there I was, eagerly digging into a meal that even Emeril Lagasse would be proud of, when my eight year old daughter MaryKate, who had gotten her ears pierced several weeks back, came down the stairs with some fateful news to share.

“Mom,” she said. “There is green stuff oozing out of my ear.”

Now that statement certainly slowed the pace at which I shoveled the steaming orange chicken into my gullet, but given the level of starvation on my end it wasn’t enough to stop the food parade.

But then, for some inexplicable reason, my wife decided to do her best Howard Cosell impression as she described in minute detail each of the steps involved in cleaning my daughter’s ear lobe.

“Wow, there sure is a lot of pus in there! How much pus can a single ear hold? Where is all this pus coming from?”

OK, that slowed me down a little more.

“I never knew pus could be so many different colors. Honey, would you look at this? How could it be green and grayish and kind of maroon like that?”

Now I was crawling to a halt, having to think twice before going back for another bite. This was a contest of mind over ear pus and in this case the multicolored ear pus was clearly getting the better of me.

“Wow, it’s almost like her ear lobe is one big giant zit. I wonder what will happen if I squeeze it?”

That did it. I gave up. My hunger had suddenly evaporated, a casualty of Food Rule #3:

“Never talk about Ear Pus while Daddy is trying to eat dinner.”

Seems so simple on the face of it, so much like common sense, and yet some people just don’t seem to get it. I guess one day I will have to publish a book of my food rules for all to follow, most especially my entire family who seem to take great delight in spoiling my appetite on a daily basis.

Toddlers Do The Strangest Things

The other day, my wife finally convinced me to buy a new Honda Odyssey.  This is something I have been trying to avoid for almost two years now. For one thing, our previous car was perfectly fine if you ignore the fact that it had this obnoxious habit of breaking down in McDonald’s parking lots. From my standpoint, this was actually the car’s way of telling us that we should never be eating at McDonald’s. And so, my argument for keeping the car was the simple fact that it was clearly a long lost descendant of Herby the Beetle and if we just waited long enough it might just start talking to us and doing all sorts of amazing tricks.

Now, all of this blather was really just an ill-conceived ruse to prevent adding yet another monthly payment to our already strained finances. I was actually surprised at how long it worked when you consider that the notion of anthropomorphic cars is inherently illogical, despite the fact that they make great movies.

Anyway, I eventually had to concede that cars can’t think for themselves or talk, and if they could do either of these things they probably wouldn’t object to fast food as a general concept, and so we decided to buy a spiffy new Honda Odyssey despite the fact that my wife really wanted a GMC Yukon, which is only slightly larger than a U.S. battle destroyer but capable of consuming about as much gas.

The Sunday before we were due to return our old car, my wife (who basically rules my “out of work” time with an iron fist and a kind heart) decided that a great Sunday activity would be for my three year old son Declan and I to clean out the car.

Now this particular suggestion didn’t seem to ME like a great way to spend a Sunday, for some obvious and other not-so obvious reasons.

For one thing, cars that have been inhabited by children for any more than a couple of months slowly become their own self-sustaining ecosystem, whereby the discarded gummy bears, mangled French fries and half-eaten lollipops actually begin to mutate into a kind of primordial ooze. In other words, it’s just freaking gross in there and I’m absolutely certain that there are viruses in there that could unleash major damage on the human population if allowed to escape.

And for another, it’s hard (but not impossible) to watch football and clean out a car at the same time, especially if you’re trying to do a good job of either task. We all know that watching football takes dedication and focus if you want to do it right and should not be taken lightly.

But I am a loving and dedicated husband and so I found myself in the back of our car with my three year old son Declan trying to pry lollipops off the floor.

At one point, Declan discovered a Munchkin lodged way back underneath the third row of seats and was able to dig it out with his tiny Toddler fingers. There is no telling how long that Munchkin had been there – for all I know, it could have been purchased on the day we bought the car five years ago. I’m sure we could have used some sort of cool high tech process like carbon dating to figure it out but alas, there is no way to know for sure.

At the time Declan discovered this morsel, I was scrounging around in the second row of seats trying my hardest to scrape what appeared to be three year old bugger snot off the leather seats. I looked up to see Declan examining a little round ball of dough (Exhibit A: “The Munchkin”) with a huge smile on his face, almost as if he had discovered the one and only ring to rule them all (please excuse the Lord Of The Rings reference).

Really, though, it would be hard for me to overstate the extent to which he seemed incredibly happy at that moment. I ask you, is there anything more rapturous when you’re 3 than finding a donut under the third row seat of your car?

Then something very, ah, unexpected happened.

He ate it.

Just like that. The kid ate the donut.

He ate what may have been a FIVE YEAR OLD donut. Now granted, I can’t vouch 100% that it was a five year old donut but let’s say it was a one year old donut. Does that make the act any less disgusting? Even if it was a 6 month old donut, I wouldn’t wish that fate on Duke, the mean bully who used to beat me mercilessly after school (but that’s another issue altogether).

I blinked several times just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating (maybe the bugger snot had gone to my head). But there was no denying the simple fact that the donut was gone and Declan had a “five year old donut eating grin” on his face. He was pleased, truly please with himself for what he considered to be a major accomplishment.

At this point, there was really nothing else to do, other than to pray that there wasn’t such a thing as ‘donut poisoning” and that his 3 year old digestive system could handle the indignity.

At which point, something entirely unexpected happened yet again.

He peed on the floor.

That’s correct – RIGHT ON THE FLOOR!

The very floor of the car we were about to replace with a shiny new Honda Odyssey. Declan (who was potty training at the time) just decided to let it fly, right down there amongst the discarded onion rings and last year’s goldfish crackers.

Now look, I can’t make this stuff up. That car lasted five years without anyone peeing in it. What are the odds of my three year old son deciding to pee in the car on the day before we are supposed to trade it in?

I don’t know if the five year old donut has anything to do with it. Maybe in his toddler mind this was some bizarre form of celebration. Maybe the donut itself triggered some sort of chemical reaction – after all I’m sure medical science doesn’t have a lot of information on the effects of five year old munchkins.

All I know is that right now there is a 5 year old minivan driving around New England which has a rather distinctive smell back in the third row. On the positive side, I can safely say that there aren’t any donuts left in the back seat thanks to the donut chompin’, back seat peeing toddler known as Declan.

The World According To Luke

Ah, the life of a one year old. It is a study in perpetual motion, a classic text book case study in the manic swings between the polar opposites of joy and angst.

Take, for example, my one year old son Luke.

As Luke sees it, the most mysterious thing in the entire world is a belly button. What the heck is in there? An endless supply of Cheerios? Or maybe cheese nips? Luke believes that if you stare long enough at a belly button, eventually whatever is hiding in there will come out. And while you’re waiting for something to pop out of there, there’s no harm in jamming your finger into the belly button to see what the heck is going on. And why not take a quick smell while you’re at it! It smells just like cheese!

Juicy cups aren’t meant for drinking. They really serve two purposes in Luke’s world. For one thing, they are a very efficient way to drip liquid on the floor in strategic positions so that when your three year old brother comes flying down the hall in search of his tenth snack for the day he will slide across the floor, catapult into the air and go flying into the wall in an amazing circus-like show that only a one year old could love. Which brings us to the second purpose for a juicy cup, which is to throw it at your three year old brother’s head after he’s been lying on the floor, apparently knocked out after the aforementioned “stunt”. What better way to wake him up?

In Luke’s world, the appropriate way to indicate that you are done with your meal is to take the full plate of pasta and sauce and either dump in on top of your head or hurl it across the room to see if you can hit the dog.

Oh yes, the dog. According to Luke, dogs don’t like it when you pet them. No, Luke has decided that the most enjoyable experience for a dog is to be swung around the room by its tail. And God invented ears so that you would have a handy way to pick the dog up when approaching from the front. In general, though, dogs prefer it when you approach them from behind – especially when they are sleeping.

And if Luke could talk, he would tell you that there is nothing in all this world more delicious than dog food, which is especially tasty after being dunked in the dog’s water bowl. A close second place would be a bizarre combination of ham, pickles and ice cream that he somehow managed to cobble together the other day from scraps lying around the table.

Surprisingly, in Luke’s world the greatest, most amazing toy in the entire world isn’t Tickle Me Elmo. It is a telephone. Corded, cordless, cellular – you name it. There is literally no end to the joys of the phone. For one thing, you can try to make as much noise as possible by pushing the buttons in rapid fire sequence. And when you’re bored with that, you can introduce yourself to the nice recorded message on the other end of the phone. And if all else fails, you can conduct your own science experiment by dismantling the phone to see whether there really is a gerbil inside there.

Of course, when it comes to toys, nothing is better than someone else’s toy. It doesn’t really matter WHAT it is exactly, the key thing is that your brother or sister are using the toy at that very moment which will propel you into a fit of absolute longing and rage until the object of your desire is your’s completely, at which point it ceases to have any value in your world because a toy you have in your possession is about as interesting as spinach.

Why This Site Isn't Called EarHair.Com

Why is it that when taking a shower I can think of about a million things to write about but as I sit here in front of the computer the only thing I can seem to come up with is writing an extended essay about the incredibly long piece of hair that keeps growing out of my ear?

I mean, don't get me wrong, this long piece of hair is really rather amazing in that for the first 34 years of my life it was nowhere to be found but now it sticks out of my ear with this uncanny ability to defy gravity. Most hair that I'm familiar with bends earthward but not this sucker. In some amazing physics-defying stunt, this piece of hair manages to rise skyward almost as if it were possessed by some otherworldly poltergeist whose sole goal in life is to make ear hair stand on end. Who ever thought of such a beast! And who am I kidding - we're not talking about a single piece of hair here. This guy has lots of buddies, almost like there's a hair party going on in my ear and I'm the last one to find out.

Which begs the obvious question: who the hell has ear hair like that and just where did it come from?

Or, perhaps even more obvious: why am I talking about ear hair on the very first post EVER on a blog called Diapers to Donuts?

The thing is, since I spent the past two weeks trying to come up with a name for this blog I don't really have any energy left to figure out  what the heck to write about. I mean, it has just been totally exhausting spending every single second of every single day trying to come up with a snappy name that would roll off the tongue.

What amazes me about the process of finding a name is that there actually are morons out there who had the same crazy ideas before I did. For one thing, I just don't understand why an obvious candidate like earhair.com is already taken. How could that be? Is that not unbelievable? Does someone really think that one day they will be able to make a million dollars selling earhair.com to Gillette for their new space age ear hair trimmer with an amazing 589 blades because 588 blades just aren't enough to tame the ear hairs of America? That just totally torqued me off like you wouldn't believe. I lost at least a day stewing on that.

Part of the problem has been that the only time I ever come up with great ideas is in the shower. I don't know exactly why this is but it's the God's honest truth. If I spent all day in the shower, I positively guarantee you that I would be the next Einstein only in my case I would be a whole lot cleaner that the old grease ball himself who always looked like he had a massive case of bed head. Now, the main problem with "shower power" as I like to call it is that by the time I am done with my shower, I have already forgotten every single idea I had while in the shower. So, there again, I need to come up with some sort of cubicle set up whereby I sit under a constant flow of water while typing at a waterproof computer. If such a set-up existed, then I most certainly would become the King of The Universe or at the very least would get to choose the movie on Friday night instead of having to watch some movie chosen solely because it stars Oliver Platt.

But , I digress... which by the way was another idea for a name I had while in the shower. Kudos to me for remembering it, pox on the schmuck who registered it before I did.

My point is that I've been so wrapped up in trying to come up with a cool and snappy domain name that I barely have any life left in me to come up with my first post. And so, in rather bizarre fashion, I just filled up the first half of my very first post talking about ear hair which is not at all what I intended when I came with the name Diapers To Donuts.

On the one hand, I chose the name Diapers To Donuts because, as I said, I couldn't find anything better and my wife was getting really tired of me throwing random names at her all of the time. And she didn't find it particularly amusing when I woke her up at 3 in the morning to declare that the name for my site was going to be "AssKickingChicken.com" which by the way is a perfectly good domain name that I went ahead and registered although I have no idea exactly what I'm going to do with it.

On the other hand, I chose the name Diapers To Donuts because it summed up rather nicely the range of topics I would like to cover on this experiment in free form journalism known as a blog. You see, I am a dad. And while I could have created yet another technology blog talking about the "hottest, latest, newest gizmo that will make it so that you never have to talk to another human being again as long as you live", I wanted to create a place on the Internet where I could talk about the single most important thing that I do each and every day.

I wanted to talk about my life as a father.

I've got a got great job as a Vice President of  Technology for one of the best advertising agencies in the world - I absolutely love what I do. But in the end, the most important title I have is the one my children gave me: DADDY.

"Daddy, will you read me a story?"

"Can you give me a hug, daddy?"

"Daddy, is it true that frogs are really just turtles without the shell and why don't snakes have legs and oh by the way is it OK if I kissed a caterpillar in the backyard or am I going to turn into a butterfly now?"

When I come home at the end of the day, my one year old son Luke could care less if I'm the President of the free world and my VP title certainly won't stop him from peeing on me if he gets the urge while I'm changing him.

And often, at the end of a long day at work, I'll pause just before opening our front door and listen to what's going on inside our house. I'm not going to lie - it usually sounds like a complete and utter zoo in there. Sometimes I'm convinced I must be at the wrong house. Could my kids really be THAT loud?

In that moment, as I hover on the threshold between my business life and my family life, I am most acutely aware of the the tug and pull of two very different worlds, my days spent as "the businessman" and my nights and weekends spent as a loving father and husband.

The door opens. A transformation occurs. Suddenly, the guy who just hours before basked in the glory of a big client win is the VP of Diapers and Books, is chasing his nude 3 year old son down the hall who just made a jail break from the bath tub because there's really nothing better than running down the hall dripping wet when you're 3.

Now THAT is the stuff that memories are made of, that make a life worth living. From Diapers To Donuts, the moments we share with our families are the ones most worth savoring, treasuring and writing about.

I intend to capture such moments here not simply because I am an egomaniac who likes to talk about himself, but because by retelling these stories I hope to remind myself, and you, that what your children said last night during dinner is a hell of a lot more important than all of the other meaningless diversions we fill our lives with.

And so, let the stories begin.