This car needs a better horn. It sounds like I’m stepping on a Rubber Duckie.
– My Wife
I’m not awfully fond of it myself.
I’ve Become Enlightened
On the verge of our second family vacation since Twinification, a significant discussion point in the Pseudonymous Household as of late has been the Twins’ maiden airplane voyage. How will we keep them occupied/quiet/sedated? What do we do if all six hours of the flight are fortified with stereophonic banshee shrieks and full-body flails? And most importantly, is there an alcohol consumption limit for passengers–and if so, how can we beat the system?
Having scoured these Internet waters for answers, I made a startling realization–the answer was right there under my invisible stick-figured nose all along, in the form of my esteemed colleague Barmy Rootstock, self-insisted parenting guru and author of one of my very favorite blogs, the hilarious I’ve Become My Parents.
Like this:
One Year Ago (The Creation Myth)
“Did you see that link I sent you today?” my wife inquired, placing a bottle of freshly-pumped breast milk in the fridge.
I looked up from the boob-funnels I was washing in the sink as bewildered as the seventh graders I’d stumped similarly all day, searching my exhausted mind for the answer. At four months old, the Twins were still rarely allowing us more than three hours of continuous slumber, making us bumbling idiots more often than not.
“Boob-funnels” is a highly technical medical term. You probably know them as breast shields.
“I’m sorry, which link? Remind me.” Having vaguely drawn the line between today and other days in my sluggish mind, I could now narrow the possibilities to 3-4 links, as my wife sends me multitudes of information daily, ranging from infinitely fascinating to a notch above “waste of time,” but much more often the former.
“That stay-at-home dad article. From the newspaper.”
“Oh, right, that one. Yeah, I did.” Since our recent decision for me to quit teaching for stay-at-home fathering and Ph.D.-ing, my wife had taken to sending me SAHD resources during the workday, partly to show me there were lots of dads in my situation and partly (as I learned months later) because she was secretly terrified of me being in charge and was covertly boot-camping me up to snuff. This particular article was one of countless SAHD-penned rants about how when out in public during work hours, people don’t often understand why the kids are with their father, asking such intelligent questions as “Are you on vacation?”, “Where’s their mother?”, and even “Did you lose your job?”
“What’d you think?” my wife prodded.
“I don’t know. It was all right.” I gently adjusted the Baby Bjorn strap so as not to wake the napping son ornament on my chest. “I guess it was kind of funny, but not all that different from stuff already out there.”
“True,” she overemphasized, and fell silent.
Huh. That was weird. Where’s she going with this?
“You know,” she continued. “You could do better.”
Like this:
You Make Road Rage So Much Fun
We Need More Balls
“We need more balls!” my wife cried urgently.
Giggling, I replied “That’s what she sai–”
“Don’t. Just get another one.”
The Ball We Need More Of
We were in the midst of a Clash of the Ti-twins over a ball, only one of which was out in the living room with them. When an item changes hands between my loinfruits every five seconds punctuated by banshee screams and floor flails, it can get ugly pretty quickly, hence my wife’s desperation. She kept them separated like a boxing referee listening to The Offspring while I hopped the baby gate and scoured the playroom for more balls, trying to suppress the flood of terribly unfunny ball-related innuendos I wanted to crack.
Does ball size matter?
Where would you like me to put the balls?
Will the deflated balls still work?
See? Just terrible. Anyway…
Like this:
A Little Muh
My eyes still bleary despite a shower and the coffee I was nursing between snips, I zeroed in on the kitchen shear blades as I sliced strawberries for the Twins’ breakfast. A momentary lapse in concentration could end in a crimson sprinkle even harder to clean off our idiotically-stark-white kitchen counters than the strawberries themselves. (No, we did not choose this color scheme, nor do we own this house, so until this fine publication makes me a kajillionaire, we keep plenty of Magic Erasers on hand.)
We’ve just discovered this scissor method, as opposed to the standard knife approach. When you have to cut up food for two one-year-old mouths as often as we do, you’re willing to try just about anything to avoid the monotony of hacking at a plate-full of adult-sized food for what feels like half an hour. Initially, my wife raved about the new method, claiming, “This is awesome! I don’t hate it that much!”
Sadly, the novelty has worn off, and shearing food is now just about as fun as knifing it, but with the added thrill of increased-finger-loss likelihood. Still, I wasn’t feeling very knifey on this particular morning, so I went with the novel annoyance rather than the mounting one.
