Diapers To Donuts

Just Plain Mixed Up

So everyone wants to know why it takes me so long to write new blog posts and I’m just going to tell it like it is.

As you know, I am a parent to 4 beautiful children. Now, parenting has many different responsibilities of course and can take quite a bit of time if done properly (after all, setting up the DVR so that it records every single episode of Lilo and Stitch requires time and great concentration), but the God’s honest truth is that as far as I can tell 90% of being a parent consists of handling poop in all of its various forms. The other 10% involves trying your hardest not to scream when your three year old son informs you that the brown stuff on his fingers is not from a Chocolate chip cookie (as you wishfully suggested) but is in fact… poop.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t have time to write every day because when I’m not at work, I’m busy picking up poop in all of its various forms and in about a million different places it was never meant to be.

In fact, I think all of those parenting books are a total waste of time. What they should be focusing on is various techniques for dealing with Poop. For example, Chapter 1 should focus on teaching parents visualization techniques whereby they can “imagine” themselves on a Carribbean island as a way of coping with a particularly odoriffic (I just made that word up) poop. You know the ones I’m talking about, that truly memorable poop that you just can’t forget even years later, where the smell is so bad that even to this very day your mind wanders back to that first whiff whenever your nose meets a smell it doesn’t like. I’d like to see a Dr. Spock chapter on THAT.

And while I’m on the topic, was the idea of creating a children’s book character named Winnie the Pooh some English guy’s idea of a sick joke because I don’t think it’s funny anymore. I doubt he had four kids and I certainly doubt that he has ever had to catch a poop in midair (as I once did) in an amazing display of parental dexterity combined with pure stupidity (diaper changing rule #1 is, of course: NEVER let the poop roll out of the diaper and on to your Mom’s couch unless you want to hear about it for the rest of your life).

Now, in my case, this important job has been overly complicated by the fact that my three year old toddler Declan has decided that he is a dog, which means that he now takes a poop whenever the mood strikes him, right there on the floor. He has also decided that he doesn’t need to tell anyone when this happens, which I’m guessing is the result of his desire to be as authentic as possible in his emulation of a dog. After all, dogs don’t walk around telling everyone about their latest poop, and so why should he?

What’s even stranger about this is that our dog, upon witnessing this behavior, has decided that he is a three year old toddler and whenever the mood strikes him he will pee right on the bed. The amazing thing about this is that the dog also walks around the house with a pacifier in his mouth, which he has a habit of stealing from my one year old son Luke. Once again, I can only assume that this behavior is intentional on the part of the dog as he tries to act like a toddler with as much realism as a canine can muster.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out how in the world this happened. The toddler won’t listen to me when I tell him he is not a dog, plus the dog doesn’t want to hear anything about not being a toddler. They’re all happy as pigs in poop but I frankly find the situation untenable.

And so, the next time you wonder why I haven’t posted in three days, just remember that I’m probably busy scraping three day old poop from my bathroom floor while muttering under my breath about that big jerk Winnie the Pooh. Such is the life of a parent in this mixed up world.

Happiness Is A Big Candy Bar

Every year, I have a hard time figuring out what to be for Halloween.

In years past, I have been known to don my full-size Tigger outfit but I stopped doing that when it became obvious that a) I was scaring little kids and b) their parents clearly thought I had mental issues, especially when I started bouncing around on one foot and screaming things like “Oh the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is I’m the only one! Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo!”

I can only infer from people’s reaction upon seeing me do this that only children are supposed to dress or act like Tigger, and adults like me are supposed to walk around doing adult things like talking about football and mowing the lawn. But we all know that Tiggers don’t mow lawns!

So this year, I decided to dress up as a tired, stressed out businessman who just can’t stop thinking about work especially because his boss keeps calling him on his cell phone even while he is in the middle of pushing a one year old dragon (Luke) and a three year old Superman (Declan) in a stroller down the street while a six year old Navy SEAL (Sean) and an eight year old cowgirl (MaryKate) sing songs about talking farm animals.

My neighbor Tom (who shall heretofore be referred to as Tom Da Bomb) also brought his two children in the form of a three year old Superman (whose primary super power was an absolutely amazing ability to fall flat on his face every 5-10 feet) and a six year old “half angel, half devil” whose wings kept falling off.

I’m sure we were quite a sight as we worked our way down the street. For one thing, my son Declan (he of the Superman costume) was still a bit wobbly after being sedated the night before for an MRI procedure. With the drugs still in his system, it was rather amusing to watch Declan zig zag his way to each house in a bizarre impression of what Superman would look like if he were in fact three years old and completely drunk off his rocker.

My neighbor Tom has a longstanding Halloween tradition whereby he loads up his Little Tikes wagon with beer for the long house-to-house trek. While in general I think this is a rather spectacular idea, it means that neighbors who I only see but once a year think that I am a drunken lunatic with 4 unruly children since the only time I ever show up at their house is to beg for candy with a beer in my hand. It also didn’t help when they saw Declan, my cute little drunken Superman, zig-zagging his way to their front door.

And there is no denying the fact that when you’re a kid, sugar makes you do very strange things. I wonder what it is about a child’s metabolism that after five Snickers bars, three Kit Kats, one Charleston Chew and four Nestle Crunches that suddenly all of the brain centers handling logical and responsible thought are completely shut down. A better way of saying that is that sugar makes kids become complete and utter knuckleheads of the highest order.

Suddenly, grabbing a half eaten Baby Ruth bar directly from your sister’s mouth while she is in the process of eating it starts to seem perfectly brilliant, just so long as she doesn’t manage to bite down on your fingers.

Jamming so much candy into your mouth that you have to choose between breathing and eating (and choose eating, naturally) seems like a perfectly normal thing to do.

Stealing candy from your one year old brother – an act more commonly known as “stealing candy from a baby” – starts to seem like a good deed worthy of praise and merit.

And making fun of perfectly good neighbors who give you crappy Halloween treats like apples and pencils starts to make all of the sense in the world! After all, if they are going to hand out apples, the least “the bastards” could do is coat them in caramel first.

At one point, Tom Da Bomb and I watched in horror as his son (Superman #2) actually opened the front door of a neighbor’s house on his own – an act which I believe is technically called breaking and entering – because they were taking to long to answer the door. Luckily we caught him before he could use his x-ray vision to find the candy that Lex Luthor had stashed in the house last Halloween.

My attempts to control the situation were hampered by several issues. For one thing, I find that it is never easy to control four children regardless of whether they have eaten more than their body weight in sugar. But, as noted earlier, the sugar certainly doesn’t help. I also find that trying to juggle a can of beer in one hand while pushing a baby jogger with your other hand significantly reduces your ability to respond in real-time to unexpected events. And finally, the effects of beer on adults is not entirely dissimilar to the effects of sugar on children which means that by the end of the night I too thought that howling at the moon for my next Butterfinger bar was a perfectly logical thing to do.

And so, while we started out as a merry band of mutant superheroes, it wasn’t long before the candy and the beer took its toll and caused an “Incredible Hulk” type of transformation. By the end of it all, we became nothing more than an unruly, roving gang of beer-soaked chocolate addicts who would do anything for our next big sugar fix, living a nomadic existence where happiness was determined by the size of our last candy bar.

Luckily, just as we were about to reach a state of total anarchy, Tom Da Bomb ran out of beer. And so, we went home.