Fine, sleep in there. Whatever. Just sleep.

There is a glorious part of the day after the children go to bed…wait, wait that’s not quite right.

There’s a glorious part of the day after we lock the children in the rooms and pretend we can’t hear them crying but before we have to go to bed.  I’d like to think we spend a lot of time in training montages for various sporting or intellectual pursuits, but at the terribly late hour of nine o’clock, that ain’t happening.  So we watch TV.

After watching enough reruns of Wings to remember that sitcoms in the 90’s were kind of terrible, I was desperate for new things to do.  The Littlest Wife doesn’t have hobbies per se, aside from drinking tea and talking about feelings, so I’m the Entertainment Czar for our house.  I’d briefly made an attempt to get her to play video games like Space Marine Shoots Blue Goo at Green Aliens and Dwarf Axe 2: The Endarkening of Elidrailierhaven a few years ago.  This nearly ended in divorce, so this time I figured I’d move down the list of “things my wife hates to do,” skipping past “bright light,” “eating after midnight,” and “getting wet” to “playing board games.”  I promptly bought like eight board games and proceeded to put her through a grueling ritual that has gone on unabated for months now:

Incredibly Handsome Man: “What would you like to do?”

Littlest Wife: “Man, it was a tough day, maybe we could relax, watch some TV or someth-“

Incredibly  Handsome Man: “I JUST BOUGHT A NEW BOARD GAME IT GOT HERE IN TWO DAYS BECAUSE OF AMAZON PRIME ITS SO COOL IT ONLY TAKES EIGHT HOURS TO PLAY BUT I MADE A VARIANT THAT ONLY TAKES SIX SO YOU’LL LIKE IT LET’S PLAY IT RIGHT NOW.”

Littlest Wife: Sigh.

I tend to go whole hog into something once I get excited about it, like a dog in a room full of balloons.  The Littlest Wife humors me when I scour the Internet for Wiggles bootlegs, or when I try eighteen times to make beurre blanc sauce.  She just shrugs at my wacky hijinks while taking notes for the inevitable custody battle.  There was one dark corner of my travels she couldn’t follow me down, however.

Space Alert.  There is literally nothing about the board game that would appeal to the Littlest Wife.  It takes place is space, which she says is scary and I’m not allowed to go there.  This is the only reason I’m not currently a heroic astronaut with a heroic moustache.  The game is unnecessarily complicated.  You have to decide what to do in ten minutes or less, so it’s high pressure.  And there’s so much cardboard and wooden cubes in the box that it probably killed every last old growth tree in the Czech Republic.

Deciding it’d be pathetic to fight pretend aliens in space in real time by myself, I settled for trying to figure out what to do with the now useless board game.  Board games that aren’t Clue are ludicrously expensive, and I hate wasting money, aside from buying boxes full of cardboard to begin with.  So, I did the only logical thing.  I approached a complete stranger on the Internet and asked him to trade his copy of Castle Ravenloft: A Dungeons and Dragons and Nerds game for my copy of Space Alert.

Finn Incognito

He was local, so clearly the best course of action was to meet in person to trade games and maybe be murdered.  As insurance, I decided to bring my family along because who would want to hurt such a cute little family.  A psychopath who is willing to meet a complete stranger on the Internet to trade board games, that’s who.  We set a date and a time in a public place with a helpful description of how handsome I am (So Handsome).  The Littlest Wife despaired because we didn’t have a silver briefcase to make the trade with, and also that I hadn’t disclosed that this is what I would do with my free time when I passed thirty.

If the Bourne Identity has taught me anything, it’s that it’s a good idea to get to the meeting place early.  I established a foothold on the high ground so I would have good sightlines and be able to get the drop on him, should it come to that.  The ninja-ness of this was somewhat negated by the family eating peanut butter sandwiches while wearing sunscreen four inches deep.

Not sure which Bourne movie said two pairs of sunglasses make you twice as inconspicuous.

Eventually we made contact with the emissary and I traded the game and awkward small talk.  I was finally rid of my nerdy game, and it had been replaced by a gigantic box proudly declaring itself to be a game with dungeons, dragons, and vampires.  Luckily, this is Seattle, so within minutes a pasty dude that was sitting nearby noticed the game and wanted to talk about how it related to the original campaign setting.  For the second time in an hour I was forced to talk to stranger and, exhausted, I left the park as quickly as possible.  It was not very fast since the box was heavy and large enough that Finn got confused into thinking we’d had another baby, so he insisted on being carried too.

Trucks (and a fifth of bourbon) knock him right out.

As soon as Finn was old enough to no longer truly appreciate the lyrics to ‘You Shook Me All Night Long,’ I switched over to telling him stories at bed time.  The routine has been the same for almost two years.  We read a book while he drinks milk.  As soon as the milk supply is depleted, he demands water.  He sips at that until the book reading is done, then he tries to run away before we start brushing teeth.  We fight to brush his teeth, then we turn out the light and tell a story.  After the story, he begins trying to cajole me into staying there for, as near as I can tell, forever.  His tactics have changed over the years from crying out “Daddy” at the top his lungs repeatedly, to demanding a never-ending stream of kisses on various parts of his face and the “big-big-big-big-biggest hug in the world,” to his current tactic of negotiating the time remaining before I leave.

“You should stay here for FIVE more minutes.”
“I’ll stay for two more minutes.”
“You stay here for TEN more minutes.”

I’m not sure he’s ready to take lead next time I negotiate to buy a car, and at some point I just leave because he can’t tell time anyway.  He gives me a parting demand that “you should come back and check on me.”  I usually do, unless I forget.  If I do come back in to check on him and he’s awake, he accuses me of being a bad checker, and I can’t really refute that since I only come back maybe half the time, but dammit, Bones isn’t going to watch itself.  Although after six seasons it seems like it’s writing itself with no actual humans involved, like a plot by numbers robot obsessed with corpses and awkward sexual tension.

Every night, Finn gets a new story.  This is partly because it’s fun making up new stories, partly because I get bored telling the same stories, and partly because I don’t remember whatever story I told him last night while half-falling asleep on his truck bed.  They all blur together, especially since all he does is demand train stories most nights.  I acquiesce by having the stories start on a train, but quickly find reasons for the main characters (a daddy, a little boy, a dog, and a cat, and that genius is trademarked so don’t even think of stealing it) to leave the train and do something else.

The other story he will sometimes demand is a story about “nothing”, which is an incredible challenge as a storyteller.  Easier is when he demands short stories.  “Once upon a time, there was a rabbit and it won a race, The End.”  “Shorter.”  “Once upon a time, there was a frog, The End.”  “Shorter!”  “Ham.”  “SHORTER!!!!”

If I do tell him a story he’s heard before, he catches on and demands a rewrite.  I have a story I like about a little boy who builds a ladder out of Legos up to the clouds.  So I start,

“There once was a little boy who had sooooo many Legos.  Boxes and boxes and boxes of L-“
“He better not build a ladder.”

How do you respond to that from an almost-three year old?  He’s already on to my game.  Also, I realize I’m using the verb “demand” a lot, but story time is a high pressure situation.  There are certain parameters that I must meet, or Truck King Finn will have me beheaded, or at least not settle down enough to go to sleep without me checking on him, poorly, eight times.

He even licks everything in the fridge.

This week, though, we finally had a breakthrough.  For months I’ve been trying to get Finn to do co-operative story telling.  Ideally, I do a sentence, he does a sentence, and on and on until one of us falls asleep.  His usual response has been, “No, you do it.  Youyouyouyouyouyouyou.”  But now he’s been coming up to me at random times of the day, when I’m doing dishes, when we’re in the car, while I’m pooping, and saying “we should tell a story together.”  I usually ask him what the story should be about, and he says, “It should be about a man who ate too much.”  Like 90% of time.  I have no idea why he’s obsessed with gluttony.  It could be all the ice cream I eat in front of him without sharing, but who knows.  The other 10% of the time he wants a story about a baby who licks everything the man owns.  Ripped from today’s headlines.

Last night though, last night was something special.  He didn’t get a story because he hadn’t been helpful (our fancy code for being pissy) so he said, “I’m going to tell you a story.”  Here it is, in its entirety:

“Once upon a time, there was a train.  And a house.  And everything was fine.  But the train went to the house.  And everything was fine.  But the train had an important load.  And it was fine.  There was a man and a little boy who had to go to a teacher class, but the class was only for little boys, so the man and the little boy said, ‘the class is only for little boys.’  The End.”

Are you shitting me?  That’s the worst story I’ve ever heard.  It’s M. Night Shyamalan bad.  You don’t just introduce characters in the third act.  And where’s the conflict?  Where’s the drama?  It’s like it was written by a three year old.

Oh, it was.  Damn.  That’s…that’s pretty impressive.  Finn is amazing.

A dire warning to all other bear toys.

Much to Finn’s chagrin, Rhys is now fully mobile.  He crawls, he cruises, he eats old food off the floor.  This has made him a clear and present danger to Finn’s toys.  Rhys has his own box of stuffed animals, rings, and bear heads on a stick to play with, but he’s no fool.  He sees the possibilities of things with wheels and speed-crawls his way over to whatever Finn is playing with, intent on claiming it as his own through the classic “if I drool on it, it’s mine” gambit.

Finn has developed a couple coping mechanisms.  The first is the same tactic he takes when “friends” come to visit.  He rolls back and forth on the Love Sac complaining to anyone who will listen, “I don’t want to share.”  Sorry, that probably doesn’t convey the true terribleness of the sounds he emits at this point.  Let me try again.  “I don’t WAAAAAAAAANT to SHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRE.”  The fact that his friends want to play with his toys when they visit makes them indistinguishable from enemies to Finn, so that’s probably healthy.

With Rhys, this tactic hasn’t bore fruit the way one would think.  I don’t really care that Finn doesn’t want to share, and Rhys understands Whine about as well as he does Swahili.  Finn does make a powerful argument, but he’s got to stop being antisocial like his dad at some point.  Stuck with a not-really-at-all-scarce resources (his toys) and higher than expected demand (one toddler and one drooly mouth), Finn earnestly tries to convince Rhys that Rhys’s toys are a valid substitute good to ease the demand on Lego trucks.

This manifests in the market as Finn saying, “No, no Rhys.  Don’t play with that.”  Finn and his lack of pants (he has decided lately that he is “No Pants Man,” despite our insistence that “not wearing pants” is not an internationally recognized superpower and is, in fact, the opposite of a superpower) scamper over to Rhys’s toy box, which is cleverly disguised as a box diapers we never got around to recycling.  He comes back with a toy, usually something underwhelming like a tiny giraffe finger puppet.

Pictured: A gold mine

Rhys is not swayed by this, despite Finn’s marketing efforts.  “Here Rhys, this is a good toy.  You should play with this.”  Finn’s next plan of attack is to double down and bring in a little stuffed zebra.  His youthful optimism assumes that he’ll eventually find the proper exchange rate between his die cast trucks and Rhys’s kitchen utensils that the Littlest Wife incorrectly identifies as toys since all she cooks is soup so she can continue her life’s work of proving that all food should be eaten from a bowl.

The supply/demand curve manages to reach a temporary equilibirium at about the time Finn upends Rhys’s toy box on top of Rhys, leaving the baby to swim his way out of the sea of toys.  It’s only a matter of time though until the market, saturated by sub-par product, increases demand for things with wheels due to artificial scarcity by crawling to the nearest toy and putting it in its mouth.

At this point, Finn’s only option is to take his toys to higher ground, hoping to avoid the floodwaters of drool.  As Rhys is getting more and more competent at pulling himself up to get at the toys, Finn has to seek out higher and higher ground.  This arms race will likely end at about the time Finn has stacked three chairs on each other to reach the top of the fridge and Rhys knocks them all over, ending in a pile of broken toys and children.  I’m pretty sure Finn will find that result satisfactory, given that the alternative is sharing.

Cute, but sick.

One of the “fine print no one reads” aspects to having young children is that they are disease vectors.  They go into the world to innocent, cute activities like toddler groups and fight clubs, then come back laden with pathogens that will strike down an entire household within 24 hours.  Your child is happily playing trucks with another child angrily glaring at another child who has taken his truck, defined by any truck, anywhere, ever.  That’s when you spot a small drip of slime oozing from the playmate’s nose.  By then, it’s too late.  You can dunk your child in a comically oversized vat of Purell, but your child just got disease’d and you’re going to get it too.  There’s nothing left to do but clear your calendar and spend the next week blowing your nose while trying to track back your activities to Patient Zero.

For most of the winter, we battled through a never-ending stream of minor colds that kept everybody home and sad while the trash can filled with discarded Kleenexes.  Some of us took it pretty well, like the Littlest Wife.  Some completely fall apart and wail and moan at anyone who will listen, throwing tantrums at the slightest provocation then descending into sobs, begging someone to take the misery away, like myself.  The kids are sometimes tough to deal with too.  Luckily, Finn and Rhys mostly just get colds, making them grumpy and gross, what with the oozing and secreting, but placatable.

A couple weekends ago, though, Finn came down with a genuine stomach virus where any food he took down immediately came back up much more disgusting than it went down.  That’s saying something given what the Littlest Wife tries to feed these guys in the name of health.  He only chucked a few times, but after an hour spent scrubbing a trail of vomit out of the hallway carpet, left from a vain attempt to get a currently puking child onto a tiled surface or possibly outside, we were on edge, trying to read every little cue for hints of an impending cookie tossing.  An entire day spent watching children’s television while holding a pitcher in front of your son makes you really feel like you’ve earned your parenting stripes that no one wants to see and he’ll never thank you for.

I mean, watching a little person puking less than a foot away from your face is pretty bad, but have you seen children’s television?  Finn wasn’t up for much that involved moving or not being wrapped up like a burrito on the couch.  So that left us with a ton of TV to catch up on.  Even in his sickened state he didn’t want to watch anything decent, like sitcoms or anything involving busty coeds.  Nope, he insisted on watching Busytown Mysteries.  This is a show about a mystery solving cat named Huckle that runs at about 4 frames of animation a minute.  Each mystery takes about ten minutes to solve, and it feels longer than Das Boot because of the recycled music numbers and animation.

LET ME BREATHE ON YOU

They’re not even solving real mysteries, like Huckle the Cat vs. Jack the Ripper or whatever.  No, it’s all, “Hey, I drew a chalk picture on the sidewalk next to a sprinkler system, went away, and now the chalk is gone and the sidewalk is oddly wet OMG HUCKLE ONLY YOU CAN SOLVE THIS MYSTERY!!!”  There’s this little bug that comes out of nowhere whenever Huckle and his gang find a new “mystery” to solve to interview them for “Action Bug News.”  He comes out of a van and has no camera with him, just a microphone that’s not plugged in.  Either he’s using his van to stalk these iterant youths as they wander around town with no parental guidance, or Busytown is not as busy as its name implies and Huckle’s mysteries make the lead story every night.  I’m not sure which is worse.  Okay, probably the van stalking.

Watching too much children’s TV is like staring through the lens of madness.  I start analyzing little details as my brain desperately tries to avoid a slow death from boredom.  I was even excited to see the origin story episode of Bob the Builder.  That was a letdown.  I’m condensing here, but: his name was Bob.  He learned how to build things.  The End.  Not exactly Batman, here.  So even if you love mucus, you just can’t get enough of it, sick children are no fun.  They have terrible taste in television.

Still, there’s a moment when I was holding Finn in bed because he’s too sad and scared to go to bed alone since everything hurts, where I felt closer to him than I ever do when he’s healthy.  I stared at the back of his head for an uncounted number of minutes as he slowly fell asleep, memorizing the topography of the back of his head.   I know I’ll remember exactly how he looked at that moment even when he’s forty and I’m the one pooping myself.  Then I remembered that my face has been four inches away from his in a closed house for the past 48 hours so I might as well go ahead and call in sick to work now.

Sushi

At some point over the past couple of months, we accidentally established Sushi Saturdays.  If someone had told me that one day I’d be going to eat sushi frequently enough that I felt the need to come up with a cutesy name for the ritual, I’d have punched them right in the face for being a witch who could see through time.  I also wouldn’t have believed them.  It was seven years ago when I first learned that the Littlest Wife loved sushi so much our entire marriage would essentially be a three-way.  This confession occurred during that delicate time in a relationship where you start sharing secrets like, “I fantasize about sushi,” “I think ‘Baywatch Nights’ was an underrated show,” or “I’m Batman.”

Sushi was just not on my radar as something I would ever eat.  It’s raw fish on rice.  That’s just lazy.  Why would I pay someone to not cook food for me?  But, the Littlest Wife doesn’t give up.  She made me take her to any place that sold any type of sushi, no matter how far down the menu it was buried.  She’d lure me into places saying, “Look, they sell mozzarella sticks too!  You like mozzarella sticks,” all for the hint of California Rolls made with authentic Krab and Miracle Whip.  After years of scraping through life looking for sushi in the Olive Garden dumpster like a Japanese hobo, I consented to take her to a nice sushi place that served nothing but sushi, in the hopes that we could then go back to eating normal food, like steak and kidney pie.

There, I found out that the more complicated you make sushi, the less like raw fish and rice it tastes.  They put like, sauces and stuff on it.  They even cook the formerly raw fish a little bit!  Armed with a newfound appreciation for sushi that doesn’t taste like sushi, I found a sushi place that puts their wares on a conveyer belt.  This goes a long ways to keeping Finn and the Littlest Wife entertained, watching, entranced, as little bits of food on colorful trays float by.  Combined with eating as fast as the conveyer belt goes I Love Lucy-style, this makes sushi one of the easiest places to eat with small children.

Jackie Chan likes sushi!

This may have led the Littlest Wife tell you that Finn likes sushi.  This is not true.  He likes the egg sushi. And even then he demands I remove the rubber band of seaweed tying the egg to the rice so he can just eat the egg.  So he likes eggs, not sushi.  I am not paying $1.50 a plate for my son to whine until I pick mini omelets off of rice for an hour until all the black pieces of seaweed are gone.  So we bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for him as back-up, which is the exact opposite of sushi on the food spectrum.

Wiping jelly off of my son’s extremities gives me plenty of time to engage in my favorite pastime: being too meek to inconvenience the sushi chefs by asking for sushi directly.  I sit there, watching octopus sushi after octopus sushi go by, hoping that if I wait long enough, something good will be added to the rotation.  After half an hour, Normal People Lunch turns into Passive-Aggressive Lunch  where I loudly say things like, “Man Lion King rolls are so great.  Do you see any? I don’t see any…”  Then Finn abruptly decides egg sushi dissection is no longer interesting and begins to wander around the restaurant aimlessly like a broken robot.  I leave sad, my head hung down, vowing next time to actually order food at a restaurant.

This weekend, we went to the Museum of Flight.  We’ve enjoyed it previously as adults, and we thought Finn would like it since it has lots of room to run around.  We’ll never know if he actually had fun, because he’s currently in a sullen teenager phase where everything sucks.  Toddler group is “boring,” a friend’s house “has no toys,” and Daddy “smells like burnt cheese.”  So he doesn’t get to vote on what we do on any given day.  Besides, the museum’s only six dollars!  That’s amazing!  I can barely begin to regret the choices that led me to eating a McGriddle at McDonald’s for six dollars, and here I can look at a bunch of planes and stuff.  Well, more accurately, I can stare at the patch of ground one foot in any direction around Finn while he runs through a crowd of people and jagged metal while looking back at me.

Most things are best seen from my shoulders.

Still, he did run around, pointing up excitedly and saying, “There’s an airplane!” over and over.  He also correctly identified the airplanes that were only partially built, which is frankly about as far as my knowledge of things that fly goes as well.  When I tried to show off how much I know by giving him context for why the Mars Rover thing was cool, I said such brilliant things as, “Mars is far away.  It’s, um, like the moon, but red.  See, there’s a red rock!  So they send a rocket all the way to Mars…”  Finn would point to the Rover and say, “It has a tire!”  So really, we all learned something that day.

He was also excited about the commercial airliner hull he could go and sit in, which sure is a novel experience for our family.  He and his mom would also climb into some of the open cockpits together, just to prove how tiny my family is based on volume.  Speaking of tiny, Rhys had fun at the museum too:

Rhys looking at the space exhibit.

Rhys at the airline stewardess fashion exhibit.

Rhys getting to meet Xzibit.

In fact, the only thing that was weird was the “No sack lunches” policy for the cafeteria.  A while ago, I was introduced to the concept of not spending money to buy terrible-yet-overpriced food at museums, zoos, and Quiznos by bringing your own food.  This trip was no exception, since once I found out it was only $6, I was determined not to spend a penny more for the entire day.  So rather than having a bunch of children eating over a tiled surface with tables and chairs designed to be hosed down at the end of the day, possibly with children still in them, there’s a line of children eating things made of jelly and crumbs lined against the wall leading into the somber “People Died in World War II” exhibit.  So that’s probably a net win for the museum.

The Express Train...to Death!

For a while now, Finn has been a big fan of playing with his off-brand Larry the Locomotive Guy train set.  His most recent twist is to carefully remove critical parts of the track, turn on his battery powered train, then sitting patiently on the Love-sac waiting for carnage to ensue.  When the tiny derailment happens, he declares, “That was pretty cool!” and cackles at the train’s misfortune.  The Littlest Wife tries to salvage this somewhat creepy scenario by meaningfully pushing some emergency vehicles towards the wreckage, asking, “Who’s going to help the train?”  Finn’s reply: “No one is going to help you!”

So the time has come to find more wholesome activities for our toddler to engage in.  He’s always liked board games, by which I mean he opens the box, dumps out the contents, then sits on the box, crushing it under his diapered butt.  We picked The 90’s Game as the sacrificial game he got to play with even though he is not qualified to answer trivia questions from the 1990’s since he wasn’t even remotely born yet.  To be fair, being cognizant of the 90’s does not really make you competitive at that game, unless you remember every episode of the sitcom Empty Nest.  Not even Wikipedia has a list of Empty Nest episodes, which actually restored my faith in humanity a little bit (lost after the invention of spray butter.)

Granted, he’s only 2 ½, and most board games have age restrictions on them, like “3+”, “7+”, or in the case of Red Light District of Catan, “18+”.  We like to think Finn is pretty bright and also if I have to play another round of “you be this truck, I’ll be this truck, now let’s drive, no not like that, no you can’t touch that one, Daddy, are you freaking me out?” I’ll start my own personal revolution against Dictator Finn.

Not pictured: taking turns

His first real board game was the Goodnight Moon game, which actually is supposed to be age appropriate.  It’s about as exciting as you’d expect for a game based on a book about saying goodnight to inanimate objects that will never love you.  It’s the game equivalent of doing inventory at Home Depot, as you take tiles and organize them by picture.  It laid the valuable groundwork for teaching Finn about taking turns, specifically that he should take everyone else’s turn.

Finn was briefly interested in Zombie Dice, I game I had picked up for the Littlest Wife and I to play based on two factors.  One, it takes like forty seconds to play, so the Littlest Wife will only get distracted partway through fifty percnt of the time, and two, it doesn’t have a complicated setup that will end up spread all over the floor when Hurricane Finn sweeps across the gameboard, leaving nothing but ruin in his wake.  Every game of Memory has ended with Finn making a match or two then declaring, “I mix up the pieces!” and making good on his threat.  So a game that relies only on counting some dice is a good fit, as long as Finn never knows that it’s about shooting reanimated corpses in the head with a shotgun.

Global warming IN YOUR FACE

For Christmas, he got Don’t Break the Ice, which matches up well with his desire to hit things.  A little too well.  It might as well be called Die, Polar Bear, Die.  The game is pretty much two minutes of delicately placing all the ice cubes in the tray, Daddy tapping out a single ice cube, then Finn wailing on the polar bear until the ice is stained red.  Then he wants to play again.  The actual play time to “setting up all the little blocks” time ratio is actually so small that scientists had to invent theoretical numbers, called “Dark Numbers”, to describe it since they can’t observe the numbers directly, only by its effects on my mental health.

He also got a Richard Scarry game, which is not very scary, but does involve cars shaped like apples.  There are other cars, but I’m not allowed to be the non-apple cars, so I’m not sure what they look like.  Finn understands that cars cannot be bound by a concept like “spaces” and they drive with reckless abandon regardless of what the little spinner tells him to do.  As an ardent believer in being afraid of cosmic retribution should I disobey authority figures, I have spent my life blindly following what the spinner tells me to do in board games. 

"I got a two. I take them all off the tree!"

Finn has no such compunction.  In HiHo Cherry-o, he typically moves the pointer to the bird because “he’s nice.”  If he gets the spilled basket and is supposed to put all of his cherries back on the tree, he firmly says, “No, I don’t want to,” which I did not know was an option.  Not surprisingly, he wins every game.  This has by far been the most popular board game in our house, but this weekend we’ll see how he does at Axis and Allies.

I'm sure he's very nice in real life.

For the past couple weeks the Littlest Wife has been looking at pre-schools for Toddler Finntastico to attend next fall, since apparently describing in detail which celebrities I can and cannot take in a fight doesn’t count as an education.  Rupert Grint better hope we never meet in an alley!  It’d be awkward for him because I’m not very socially skilled.

Until very recently, I was unaware that there were types of pre-schools.  My only recollections of my pre-school experience are making bird seed art and singing songs about ice cream.  It’s totally possible that the experience fundamentally shaped me as a human being, but I’m pretty sure my mom just wanted me out of the house.

When the Littlest Wife brought home a stack of flyers from a reverse job fair for schools, I picked up one that had three year-olds wearing uniforms on it.  She immediately said, “that one meets four times a week, so I’m not sure if it’s a good fit.”  The toddlers wear uniforms and it costs like $5,000 a year.  That makes it a bad fit, not that they’re willing to take the kid off our hands too much.  That just makes them brave.

The ideal learning environment.

There was another one in an extensive folder with inserts and complicated folding that had tuition set at $9,000 a year.  I’m sure at least half of that goes into pamphlet costs, but seriously, how do you spend $9,000 on a toddler for a year?  Toddler Finntastico has every toy truck in existence and that probably only tallies up to $100 or so.  Do they think my three year old isn’t just going to find the nearest thing with wheels and start driving it along the floor while making vroom vroom noises? Do trucks roll better on floors paved with gold?  If they manage to teach him anything other than “Trains are awesome,” they’re eight steps ahead of us.

There’s another one that meets in some lady’s basement that costs about as much as the one where they have uniforms.  The Littlest Wife has assured me that it is a very nice basement, but I’m pretty sure I’m a failed parent if I leave my child in a stranger’s basement with any regularity.  Then again, Toddler Finntastico thinks all vans have treats in them, and that you can tell what type of treat they have in them based on color.  Brown = chocolate, yellow = bananas, blue = cookies.  I’m not sure about the last one.  I can’t even teach him terrible things properly.

So maybe we should shell out for a nice pre-school.  There’s a lot of damage to be undone.  I just can’t imagine what difference a $2,000 school vs. a $9,000 school will make for a toddler.  On the surface, the biggest difference is the size of the application.  It’s like $75 dollars to apply to these things, and they have essay sections!  These kids are three years old.  They haven’t done anything interesting their entire lives.  “Why are they a good fit for our school?”  Because you teach toddlers and he is a toddler.  One wants letters of recommendation from other schools.  It’s pre-school!  By definition, there has been no other school.

Color-changing trucks are the closest thing to science in our house.

The whole thing reeks of capitalizing on a parent’s fear that their child will fall behind if you don’t send them to a private academy with uniforms you will have to wash every day because they are a toddler and can’t have nice things.  As long as the school has other children to play with and not a lot of knives lying conspicuously about, I think Toddler Finntastico will be just fine.

Cold: 0, Cuteness: 1,000

I’ve already made my position on Snowpocalypses clear, so I won’t belabor what happens when Seattle receives snow in excess of an eighth of an inch.  After almost ten years here, Stockholm Syndrome sets in and you begin to empathize with the incompetent city planners.  You can rationalize all the terrible decisions that led to your car spinning in circles while it slowly drifts into the nearest independent coffee shop. 

It was a cheap shot, however, for our power to go out while the streets were paved with snow and the blood of people who didn’t understand that SUVs don’t have magic anti-ice powers.  My knowledge as a homeowner without power was stretched to the limit when the Littlest Wife asked me why the heat was off if we had a gas furnace.  I mumbled something manly sounding about “fans,” “air movement,” and “going back to the kitchen where you belong,” then distracted her by pointing out how our youngest child was turning into a popsicle.  And not a tasty grape one either.  One with crazy eyes and hands that smell like hobo feet.

So to keep Hobohands and Toddler Finntastico from freezing to death, I embarked on using our fireplace for the first time.  We had plenty of wood lying around from always-promised-never-delivered romantic nights by the fireplace and failed IKEA assemblies.  We used the anachronistic telephone books that keep piling up at our front door for kindling, and managed to get an impressive fire burning with all of our eyebrows intact.  The power company promised that our power would be back at 4:30, so by a little after six we guessed that they were lying and went off into the frozen tundra to find sustenance and a place to spend the night.

Subway was kind enough to feed us, and our friends were kind enough to take us in for the night.  At home, we’ve carefully constructed a Toddler Containment Unit to keep Toddler Finntastico in bed long enough to go to sleep curled up around his trucks and under a pile of stuffed animals.  Getting him to sleep on an air mattress surrounded by toys, books, cabinets, and Danger! was a much trickier proposition.  In the end, I ended up co-sleeping with our toddler for the first time.  Well, the first time on-purpose.  After Stinkpalm was born, I started going to bed four minutes after Toddler Finntastico does.  My thrilling bedtime stories of daring adventure and trucks often ended with me falling asleep mid-story.  My avid listener didn’t seem to mind and would fall asleep as well until the Littlest Wife made her rounds and made fun of me.

He may be cute, but don't let him grab your nose.

For the first few hours, sleeping on an air mattress with a toddler went pretty well.  Then I had to get up and do some things that people of my advanced age have to do seven times a night.  Then, Toddler Finntastico woke up and started screaming for Daddy.  At three in the morning, it takes me a while to remember I’m actually this “Daddy” guy, but I eventually managed to flop back onto the air mattress and convince him that Daddy was never going to leave him again, no matter what my bladder told me to do.  The bond of trust was broken however, and for the rest of the night, whenever I opened my eyes, Toddler Finntastico would be staring at me, his tiny face inches from mine.  He would smile and say, “You go back to sleep.”

Pulling guard duty took its toll on Toddler Finntastico and he ended up sleeping in pretty late while the other children ran all around him since he was an interloper into their toy room.  For the next few mornings, whenever he woke up, Toddler Finntastico would inform me that the power was out, and I had to tell him no, it’s just nighttime, look, your night light and sound machine are still on do we really need to get into a discussion about how electricity works at five in the morning?  I can’t blame him for not getting over such a dramatic experience.  I still wake up in the dark of night, afraid to move for fear of a tiny toddler voice whispering at me, “You go back to sleep.”

Play with me!

Having a second baby has been a lot less stressful than having the first baby.  At this point, I know how babies work, or more accurately, don’t work.  They cry because they don’t have any food, then they cry because they have food and can’t digest it, then they cry because they crapped themselves.  At some point they tire of this and fall into a coma for anywhere from thirty-five seconds to six hours.  I understand that there is very little I can do to affect this process, so I mostly focus on multi-tasking by using my free hand to read a couple sentences in “Ulysses,” get annoyed at how masturbatory it is, then post on the Internet about how Batman could beat-up Captain Picard in a fight instead.

So the trouble isn’t the new baby, it’s when Toddler Finntastico is stomping around the house, shoving trucks into my free hand and demanding I play with them.  It does not help matters that he gives me the trucks that he does not like.  No, I get such luminaries as “tanker truck that had the tanker fall off of so it’s just some sort of a lame pick-up truck” while he plays with “race car truck,” which has flames on the side.  Life suddenly feels very busy when you’re wracked with guilt every time you can barely manage to half-heartedly go “vroom vroom” while the baby cries and the toddler looks at you with his, “Seriously, that’s all you got?” look.

It’s nice that Toddler Finntastico does not blame the baby for this.  He is very nice about patting the baby like a cat and handing one hundred and thirty four wipes to me while I change yet another diaper.  No, he blames me, but his poor trucks get the brunt of his anger as they are hurled mightily through the air, landing about six inches from him.  We need to work on his arm.  Then he gets a timeout for throwing, then he gets sad, and I get sad, and OH GOD LITTLEST WIFE SHOWER FASTER, FASTER, FASTER!  I am largely responsible for watching both children, alone, for about a half hour every day and I am constantly amazed that we all survive it.

I returned to work last week, and it’s great, because I get to talk to adults now.  Sure, despite being slightly larger than Teddy Ruxpin, the Littlest Wife is an adult, but our paths almost never cross paths without a child present, making our profanity-laced conversations turn into spelling bees.  That’s a little too much work to do at the late hour of 8:30 pm when all I want to do is go to bed, and we’re just going to talk about sleep habits anyway.

PLAY WITH ME!!!!

How much sleep did you get?  Who’s taking the monitor?  Are the batteries charged?  Oh no, it’s beeping at me!  Can I go into the bedroom to get the charger?  Is that the baby crying, or the ice maker?  Oh God, it is the baby, get him get him get him before he wakes up Toddler Finntastico.  This is all your fault you flushed the toilet too loud.

Planning how everyone in the family is going to get enough sleep to operate the next day takes up almost all of our baby-free time.  There’s enough hardware between  white noise machines and monitoring equipment to make NASA jealous.  In our house, bedtime is the most planned event since D-Day, and the stakes are much higher.  I think about it all the time.  It takes all my power to not stop random people in the produce section of QFC and tell them about the elaborate machinations designed to get me enough sleep to select the perfect peach to hand Toddler Finntastico so he can either put it in the cart or throw it on the floor.  It’s a 50/50 shot.