Looky, Daddy!

All Over but the Crying

Santa Claus must work fast at my parent's house. Between the twins and Kathryn, there's only a 45-minute window the night before Christmas during which all three kids are actually sleeping. Thank God for coffee. If my brother ever has kids, too, Santa might have to switch to methamphetamine.

At one point late in the evening, someone without kids had the idea to go outside and make simulated Santa noises to coax my kids to bed, a technique about as effective as waterboarding in creating a rest-conducive environment. Does anyone remember back in the 80s when Manuel Noriega was holed-up in the Vatican's embassy in Panama? For days we tried to get him to surrender, surrounding the embassy with loudspeakers and playing non-stop rock music at excruciating volumes. Far more effective would have been to send in a two-year-old and, very softly outside, ring a single sleigh bell. Noriega would have surrendered within the hour.

Kathryn's list to Santa was a short and inexplicable affair, the two major items being a digital camera and a mood ring. She got them both and proceeded to use one to snap hundreds of 5-mega-pixel shots of the other, resulting in photographic evidence that she experienced every possible emotion all before 7 AM Christmas morning. Like we needed proof.

The mood ring has been on her Christmas list for months, ever since she found one on the playground of her school. It wasn't hers, obviously, and she knew it had to go to the lost and found, but first Kathryn had to assess the mood of each and every person she encountered along the way. It took hours. The last person to wear it was the principal who, Kathryn reported matter-of-factly, was "aggravated."

The twins celebrated Christmas as countless two-year-olds before them have, by screaming with glee about each present that was theirs and then simply screaming about each one that wasn't. They asked for no specific present from Santa, mainly because they were not yet aware that they could. Santa-wise, the twins were in that blissful state of ignorance that allowed us to set our own rules, kind of like those delightful summers long ago when Kathryn still thought the ice cream truck was the "free music van." It will be sad to see that time go. Still, the twins handled the excitement of the day well, and only sporadically did they gift us with their own special presents of snot and tears, which is probably more than the Vatican can say about Noriega.

In Case You Weren't on the Plane

Happy Holidays from Lila, Victoria, and the rest of the crew.

Hold Your Applause

It was all over when they clapped. Any chance that anyone had of a restful, quiet 4-hour flight to Dallas was all over when the people in rows 18 through 20 clapped.

Victoria loves her some clapping.

As always, we waited until the last minute to board the plane for our annual flight to Texas for Christmas; pre-boarding kids is like showing up to a Kevin Costner movie early enough to see previews of other Kevin Costner movies. So yesterday morning, when everyone else was on board and strapped in, my wife and I herded our girls onto the plane. And as Victoria climbed up into her window seat at 17A, she saw the people behind her.

"Oh, hi!" she said to them. "I'm Victoria! And this," she pointed to me, "this is my Brian!"

The laughter was their first mistake. Talking to her was their second.

"Your Brian?" the woman directly behind questioned.

"Yes! My Brian! He's my friend! And now I'm going to sing a song!"

And so she did, standing up in her chair, looking out over the sea of  people in the rows behind her, she belted out "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." And the people clapped.

They clapped because she knew the words. They clapped because she sang those words well. They clapped because it was probably the cutest thing they had ever seen before 7 AM on a plane heading to Dallas. But most of all, they clapped because they did not know how many Christmas songs Victoria knew.

They know now.

38 Degrees and Full of Beer

I have very little left to live for. When I was in my mid-twenties, I put together a list of the things I'd like to do before I died and now, with the new house, the last item can finally be scratched off the list: Own a beer fridge. Down in the basement of this old, drafty home, is an old, drafty fridge that is now stocked, from top to bottom, with bottles of beer. The fact that I spent both time and money doing this may very well collapse what remains of the hollow shell of my marriage, but c'mon, it's a full-sized beer fridge. Full-sized. With beer.

The fridge itself is a bit of a mystery. It was not included in the list of appliances we were to receive with the house, nor is it actually necessary since no room of this house can actually be heated over 40 degrees Fahrenheit to begin with. The old, plaster walls are all freezing to the touch and there are three windows, including one in the master bedroom, with gaps in the panes so large that two people, one inside and one out, could engage in any number of fairly traditional sexual acts with no difficulty whatsoever. Through the one in the living room you could have a threesome.

The old furnace in the basement is no help at all, preferring to spend its time and energy making noise rather than heating. It clamors on and off several times each night, shaking the house with useless clanking, like the ghost of some very, very cold Christmas past.

"Take heed, rise and walk with me."

"Through the window?"

"Are you afraid?"

"But I am a mortal, and liable to fall."

"Then let's go through the one in the living room."

Prior to purchasing this house, our inspector gave us a list of the items we needed to address. Third on the list, between "Front room is attached to main house by a single 2x4 and a dream" and "House is located in New Jersey" was "Master bedroom has no source of heat." We investigated and found the radiator that used to heat the master bedroom was now in the garage, supporting a wall that would apparently come down otherwise. At the time, I justified the lack of heat in the bedroom by assuming that this room must have gotten too hot in the winter and the removal of the heater was to establish a balance with the rest of the house. Now I realize it was because the previous occupants were yeti.

Still, and I type this with mittened fingers, I am happy to be here. For one thing, the house has obscenely beautiful hardwood floors throughout.

And since we haven't any area rugs yet, I now have a use for all those mismatched socks in the twins' sock drawer.

But really it's about the beer fridge. How many people, at the ridiculously young age of 38, can say they've finally completed the list of accomplishments they wrote for themselves way back in their twenties?

Of course, some items on the list were scratched off as technicalities, because I doubt when I wrote "Sleep with blond twins" I had meant for either one of them to be two years old, or for either one of them to have the stomach flu, or for me to be holding a trashcan at the ready.

Still, toddler puke does clean up mightily easy off hardwood floors. Especially when it's frozen.

Especially for Dads!

I used to love to move. I used to love to do a lot of things, actually. Ten years ago, if you had asked me to list the things I love, I would have rattled off a list as long as your arm. Now, I'd probably just break down in tears of thanks that anyone even bothered to ask.

Not that you did.

Today, as I was unpacking a box directly into a trashcan, I came across a file of papers given to us by the hospital when we brought the twins home almost three years ago. There, deep in the file, was a folded brochure with the inviting title Especially For Dads! and trapped within, unread for years, were these helpful suggestions. I thought I'd pass them along to you.

A massage can help a new mom relax.

Postpartum moms have tender feelings and mood swings; they need to hear, "You're doing a great job."

Many mothers do have less interest in sex during the first few months after childbirth...This doesn't mean she loves you less or needs you less.

New mothers may need help with household chores.

New mothers may have trouble finishing their sentences. Often they may sound incoherent or they may babble.

New mothers may not be as attentive to their appearance. Encouraging words like, "Your boob is showing," can be helpful.

New mothers hate you and what your penis did to them.

There may be times when a new mother will give anything to remove her own breasts and place them on your body. Do not give her the opportunity.

Do not turn your back on a new mother. Always back away smiling.

Okay, maybe not all of those were in there, but dammit, they should have been. Any more you might like to add?

There Goes My Productivity

We only moved one mile down the street, but it took the Internet over two weeks to find us. But find us it has, and in celebration, I present to you a post composed almost entirely of the Google search terms that have found my site in the past three hours. That, my friend, is the power of the Internet.

There's a nude woman jogging in a sweater that says Grammy past the trees squirrels pee in, loudly wondering can I see someone poop online , when she stubbed her permanent fake toenail on John Malkovich as he was convincing wife for kinky sex but she wanted no part in his hot kinky twin fantasy with those twins that were born inside each other because she was too busy finding songs for my mom's funeral which is weird because my mom isn't dead but she will be if she learns about the pictures of dad's pubic hair he took at the potty playdate party that was cut short due to the sewer poop smell in the house from the anal glands in humans attending to say nothing of the severed finger or the seven-year-old vomiting on and off for three days and the daddy and babysitter sex, but that girl is a fockmom so who can blame him, really, but even she won't touch him when daddy pees in diaper like a baby, so she went back to her videogame obsessed boyfriend and his poopy pull-up with her shopping bag full of cow colostrum for human babies.

Rat-a-tat Cat

For 10 days, I stalled. At first it was easy, there were too many things going on, too much confusion, it was for their own good. Then The Mom went off to California for a week and that made it ever so easy to be neglectful. But yesterday my hand was called and so, tail between my legs, I drove our minivan through the snow-plowed streets to our old house and picked up the last two things left there: The cats.

How long do cats live? These guys have been with us now for six years and that seems just about right. They could die any time and I would consider their lives full and complete.

They've lived longer than any of my other pets, to be sure. Significantly longer than my first pet, a mouse I had when I was eight. My mother did not like the little caged rodent, and she forbade me to pet it, fearing that it would bite me and impart some kind of frothy mouse disease, but secretly I opened the cage and stroked its gray fur whenever my mom wasn't around. I was fascinated by the way its whole body twitched as I gently ran my finger over its sleek back, and it wasn't even days until it got used to the attention and stopped its nervous convulsions. And it wasn't even days after that until I realized he was dead.

Looking back on it now, those few days between its death and my realization of its death were probably the best days I spent with that mouse.

My first cat came decades later, just after The Mom and I married. It lived a grand total of a year before a car knocked it through a stand of oleanders and into a ditch beside our Arizona apartment. We didn't see it there, not for days, and by the time we found him, he had grown dessicated in the desert heat. In the phone book, I found the number for an animal disposal company that promised they'd whisk our stiff friend away and return him in an urn suitable for any mantle, all for a reasonable price, but when the guy showed up, the first thing he said was, "Hell. Nobody told me the cat was in a ditch."

I looked at the guy. I looked at the cat. I looked at the ditch. "I didn't think it was relevant," I replied.

"I can't get an animal out of a ditch. Union rules."

We stood there for quite some time, he and I, not five feet from my dead and virtually mummified cat, while he detailed for me the various risks he would be taking if he ventured into that ditch, risks that his union considered too great for a grown man such as he. "So what do we do?" I finally asked.

"If I give you my gloves, can you go down there and drag the carcass out about two feet from where it is now?" he asked. Two feet was about half the distance between where we were standing and my cat. He was not kidding.

"Gimmie the damn gloves."

The cat was on its side, dried out with its legs splayed, looking like nothing so much as a child's stick-figure drawing of a cat. I went down and put a gloved hand on the part nearest me, a hind leg, then I grabbed and lifted. The cat rose in a single, stiff unit, but it was heavier than I had anticipated. I grabbed another leg. Now, with one hand on a back leg and one on a front, I looked to all the world like I was wielding some kind of cat machine gun. I had the urge to sweep it around in an arc at the unionized animal disposal guy with a "rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat," screaming, "What does your union think about that?! Huh, big man? I killed you with my cat!"

But I didn't. Instead I set the cat down at his feet, took off the gloves, and said, "He's all yours."

Two days later the cat was mailed to us in an urn and it wasn't until then that we realized we didn't have a mantle to put it on. We dumped the ashes in the backyard and threw the urn in the trash.

Two years later, when our next cat died under similar circumstances, it was double-bagged and in a curbside trash can before my wife had even left for work. I'm no fool.

Now we have strictly indoor cats, which have the distinct benefits of not being exposed to street traffic, but also the drawbacks of naturally long lives.

It's a devil's bargain.