Looky, Daddy!

I Should Stick to Writing

It didn't work. Well, it sorta worked, but not really. Anyway, I'm not going to spend any more time on it than I have, because while I was doing it for you, Gentle Reader, it also took me away from you for too long.

What it is is a multimedia Flash presentation of how my family's trip to Philadelphia went. You see, there are a limited number of ways you can describe traveling with twin toddlers and a seven-year-old, and I feel like I've exhausted just about all of them. So within five minutes of returning home, I decided to do something different and downloaded the trial version of Adobe's Flash, an application that I HAVE NEVER USED OR EVEN SEEN IN USE BEFORE, and attempted to make something with it.

It goes without saying how stupid of an idea that was.

Anyway, I'm on Day 2 of working on it sans sleep and my girls have watched all the PBS Kids they can stomach, so it's time to call it a day. So without any further ado, you can click below to see what I cobbled together. Just a warning, it's LOUD and it plays right away, the mysteries of the autostart and pre-loader not having revealed themselves to me. It also loops endlessly, the video becoming more out-of-synch with the audio with each iteration, an especially humiliating feature.

Oh well, it's not like this blog isn't a parade of my failures already.

And for you lucky ones who don't know, those animals are Webkinz. Web-kinz. It's pretty much the only word Kathryn says now. Well that and the words "I want more" and sometimes "please".

Enjoy! My Family Trip to Philadelphia

Six Flags, August 9, 2007

El Toro: 70-mph wooden roller coaster.

Dodging the Severed Finger of Blame

There is a startling disconnect with my daughter, Kathryn. Packed deep in her petite frame of blond tresses and winsome smiles is a frighteningly morbid little creature. Many of you, in comments and emails, have blamed me for being the tree from which this particular apple did not fall far (read it again, it makes sense) but I think the fault lies firmly with The Mom. To wit:

The cupcakes made by The Mom for Kathryn's birthday:

And the cookies:

Sure it was Kathryn's idea to have her birthday party be a "Summer Scare," but it was her mom who jumped on the idea and ran. Far.

I won't even mention the takeaway goodie bags, stapled shut so that the guests wouldn't open them on the spot and ask us the question that I'm sure they asked their moms later: "Where is the head to my new Barbie?"

Those two should really be separated.

Being Near John Malkovich

Where was I, you ask, while The Mom was hijacking my blog and racking up 20 times my usual comments not that I'm bitter? I'll tell you. I was not sitting in front of John Malkovich. That honor was instead held by Lila's godmother, Alexa. She had flown in for the weekend to see what's left of her self-destructing goddaughter and drink Dark and Stormies with The Mom into the wee hours while I, in turn, took the weekend off and traveled up to her place outside of Boston to drink beer and play cribbage with Alexa's husband, Mr. Paul.

Alexa and Mr. Paul are one of those modern couples who have eschewed children of their own and have filled that void in their lives with a fully-stocked liquor cabinet and fistfuls of disposable income. Which is why Alexa was within a peanut's throw of Mr. Malkovich on her trip, while I was traveling to her place, totally celebrity free, on the Chinatown Bus.

The Chinatown Bus between New York City and Boston is a fantastic way to travel. It picks you up on a seemingly random street corner in one city's Chinatown and deposits you hours later on a street corner in the next. You never really know where it is going to appear and, having traveled it a few times, I have learned that the best approach is just to walk the streets of Chinatown until it finds you. But before you head down there yourself, keep in mind the Chinatown Bus is only for you if you have all of the following: Fifteen dollars, a flexible travel time, and a complete and total disregard for your own personal safety. A disdain for celebrity sightings also helps, as does an acceptance of others who may or may not try to sleep on your shoulder. And drool.

The bus itself has all the amenities you need if all the amenities you need are tires. There is a bathroom in the back, but in the one English phrase I heard him deliver all trip, our bus driver warned us not to poop in it or we'd "be sorry". I'm not sure just how the sorry would evidence itself and I don't wish to dwell too much on it either. I recommend a seat near the front.

Of course, the front of the bus has its problems, too, namely that you are granted the ability to see the other vehicles on the road and take note of the various distances between them and your bus. If you are really foolish, you can sit close enough to the driver to see his reaction, or lack thereof, when said distances become closer that the one between you and Capt. Sleepydrool, your shoulder-nuzzling neighbor.

But, c'mon people, its fifteen dollars. So if your blog is getting hijacked and you've got an iPod loaded with hours of Savage Love podcasts (don't click on the link, Mom), then there's really no better route to Boston. Especially if you don't like being knee-deep in John Malkoviches.

And How Was Your Mother's Day?

Ice for twenty minutes, then heat for twenty minutes. Ice for twenty minutes, then heat for twenty minutes.

Apparently there is such a thing as a "cortisone flare." This is when, for reasons that I cannot begin to understand, a cortisone shot designed to relieve joint inflammation crystallizes instead.

They last for a few days, those millions of sharp little crystals and, according to my wife, rank a 7.5 on the 1 to 10 pain scale when injected into your knee.  They are also how my wife spent her Mother's Day.

And the parade of laughs continues...

The Cold Ones Are on the Bottom

At some point, the horrible turns fun.  There is a point, a tipping point, when things go too far beyond the acceptable, and they become a laugh riot.

A drop of chocolate syrup on a clean shirt is annoying. A food fight, sublime.

A slip in a mud puddle can ruin a whole day. A mud-wrestling match can make one.

Half an inch of water in your basement, soaking laundry piles and wetting the bottoms of those boxes that you meant to store better can be quite nettlesome. Enough water that you can fill an ice chest with beer and float it to your spouse? That's a party.

Nor'easter

Our living room right now.

Our dining room.

Two and a half years ago, we moved from an average-sized home in Austin, Texas to half of a 140 year old New Jersey duplex. Knowing that we would be pressed for space, before moving we purged ourselves of a ridiculously large amount of crap. Mountains upon mountains of crap.

When we got here and tried to unload the moving truck, we realized we had barely scratched the surface.

Luckily, New Jersey homes come with these enormous spaces underneath them. They call them basements. And our basement was just the right size to fit all of our extra crap.

Sadly, apparently our basement cannot accommodate both our excess baggage and thousands upon thousands of gallons of water simultaneously.

Our basement right now.

It took a mere three hours for us to go from picking up a few items of laundry from the floor so they wouldn't get wet, to watching cat turds float by as we scrambled to get all our stuff up to the relative safety of the first floor.

If you had asked me this morning what I'd be doing at 10 PM this evening, I doubt I would have said, "Making snap decisions as to which of my family's possessions I save, and which I let the water claim."

One Giant Leap...

Author's note: I'm done. I'm tapped. If exhaustion were a tangible object, something you could point to and say, "Look, there's my tiredness," mine would have it's own orbit. It would glow red in the night sky and be feared by villagers and prophets alike. Virgins, no doubt, would be sacrified to it. Still, in my sleepless hours, I happened across this post I wrote a week or so ago, cleaned it up a bit, and I'll offer it to you now. Be nice.

The Three-Martini Playdate went on the road. We hit the city. New York City. All three of us, Jennifer, Camilo's dad, and I, driving the seemingly insurmountable 13 miles to the center of the universe. It was not pretty.

Our town is only 13 miles from New York City, but that's not where we live. We live in isolation. We live on the moon. Three adults, five children two-and-under, we have about as much chance of seeing the skyscrapers of New York as we do the Sydney Opera House.

But not this time. This time we made it. The Three-Martini Playdate went partying.

There were hollers and hoots. There was table standing. We annoyed, we were beligerent, we were not cool. Everyone knew we had kids, everyone knew we stayed home with them. We were pitied and feared. Everyone knew that crossing us was to take their life into their hands.

There were offers. The ladies knew I was the go-to guy if they wanted twins. They knew Camilo's dad had mystical powers. They knew Jennifer was thirsty and dangerously on edge.

The concert was horrible. The sound man was a monkey. We didn't care. We were out. We left early. We prowled the streets. We were immune to the cold.

We would not go home. There was fun to be had, noise to be made, hoots to be hollered. Drinks to be drunk.

We were uneasy. We had forgotten something. We looked around, then we remembered. We relaxed. We laughed.

We went out. The Three-Martini Playdate went out.

Just in time, I think.

Snow Day

We live in a small house. Actually, we live in a medium house, but our family only gets half of it. The small half. And yesterday it was the smallest it had ever been. Yesterday was a snow day.

In our small house, the door to Kathryn's room doesn't hang correctly. If you are over four feet tall, you can lift the door by the handle and operate it almost soundlessly. If you are under four feet, you must put your shoulder into it and push, opening the door with a sound reminiscent of the cry a soul must make as it is dragged down to hell. Yesterday, at least five pairs of souls were eternally damned before 6 AM as Kathryn kept peeking out to see if any of us were awake and making the hot chocolate yet. With marshmallows on the side, if you please.

The day was an ugly day. There was hardly enough snow on the ground to make a decent snowball, and the hail, sleet, and freezing rain kept us from going out and trying anyway. And so Kathryn was a tornado, an indoor catastrophe of kinetic energy and frantic boredom. She approached the whole day of doing nothing with the intensity of a Wall Street floor trader on methamphetamine.

The twins spent the day occupied with their favorite hobby: crying for mommy. This time, however, it was different. This time MOMMY WAS IN THE HOUSE. She was here, upstairs, working. Meeting deadlines and making conference calls. And she never once, not once, came downstairs to mingle with her fans and graciously receive their gifts of snot and tears. No. Instead, her only interaction with the family was through a shower of tersely written notes that she threw down the stairs at odd intervals. "Coffee!" "Bagel!" "Nooner?"

The problem, as any well-bred Southern family with an idiot-child could tell you, was that it's completely impossible to hide an entire person in a house this small. There was always some noise, a cough, a laugh, a rattling chain, that drifted down to the twins' ears, spurring them on to new rounds of sobbing while I wove ever more complicated webs of deception. It was the wind, I said, or a radio, or the phone, and once I even said it was a TV which only shows how stupid I am because they love TV even more than their mother. But eventually the girls always calmed down and ended their vigil at the baby-gated stairs, going back to their normal daytime position of standing at the front door, waiting for their mother to come home, but this time with one eye on the downstairs TV just in case it happened to laugh like the one upstairs just did.

And let me just say here, in conclusion, that hearing The Mom laugh on the phone with her colleagues makes me even more secure in my knowledge that her job is one giant mai-tai holding, joke-cracking, conga-dancing luau, while the closest thing to highbrow humor that I see each day are the expressions on Lila's face as she systematically tastes each of the furry objects she finds under the couch.

Which is pretty funny.

Nuts

Thank God The Mom wasn't in the car. This was way worse than running over that pigeon.

The pigeon was really a non-issue. I didn't exactly run over it as much as I helped it along its way. I drove through a crowd of pigeons, and when they dispersed, one just happened to fly in the same direction as my car. Although I was driving slowly, the pigeon was flying more slowly, so naturally I helped it along its way for a while. Like a wave helping a surfer. And it was fine until The Mom asked, loudly enough for the back seat to hear, "Did you just hit that pigeon?"

The Mom is always saying stuff like that.

But this time was worse. The running squirrel was very visible to the taller elements of the back seat. The sudden braking was very noticeable as well. So was the thump-bump.

Kathryn is, shall we say, a sensitive child. She doesn't deal well with tragedy or death. Kathryn firmly believes that chicken nuggets are a product of chickens in much the same way that eggs are. At dinner the other night she entertained us all with a very detailed and convincing picture of farm hands going out in the morning, baskets in hand, to collect the nuggets. Tell her otherwise and there will be hell to pay. Big, nasty hell.

So I was surprised at how well Kathryn handled the squirrel-flattening incident. She understood that it was an accident, and an unavoidable one at that. Still, I'm waiting for the question. She won't ask it tonight; she likes to ruminate a while, waiting until at least one twin is in mortal danger before asking, but she'll ask it soon. Perhaps two days from now, maybe as Victoria stands on Lila's head to get to the hot coffee cup that's just out of reach, Kathryn will turn to me and ask, "Daddy? Do squirrels go to heaven?"

Of course they do, Kathryn. Of course. They all go to heaven, where they feast on heavenly berries and nuts and chicken nuggets, fresh from the basket.