Tagged: Easter Bunny
Ways I Have Attempted to Con My Kids Into Putting Their F*cking Shoes On: A Non-Exhaustive List
1. Telling them, “Okay, it’s time to go. Kids, please get your shoes on.”
2. Adding, “Kids. Get your shoes on.”
3. Acknowledging that, yes, I KNOW they’re drawing pictures, but like I said, it’s time to go. Like right now.
4. Yes. Right now. This very instant. This moment in time. NOW.
5. Telling them to stop claiming they don’t know how to put their shoes on.
6. Telling them Santa is watching.
7. Reminding them that our Elf on the Shelf is right over there. See?
8. Saying that I’m sure the Easter Bunny is taking notes, too.
9. Telling them, no, Easter is not for a few months, but the important part is getting their f*cking shoes on.
10. Reminding them that Jesus is watching, too. Surely Jesus would get HIS shoes on.
11. Telling them that Big Brother is also watching, and realizing that it is a reference they will not understand, and explaining that, no, they do not have another brother, but that they DO have…to put their f*cking shoes on.
12. Saying I’m leaving without them.
13. Telling them no, no, no, of course I would never leave without them…as long as they put their f*cking shoes on.
14. Asking them to stop crying, I’m seriously not leaving without you. But now that I have your attention, please put your f*cking shoes on.
15. Telling them their shoes are hungry for feet. Look! Their tongues are sticking out! Continue reading
Two Easters
ONE YEAR AGO…
I awoke to a pixie whisper in my ear. “Daddy!” my daughter hissed. “I fink da Easter Bunny came!”
“He did?” I yawned. “Well, I guess we’d better go wake up your brother and see what he left you. Do you want to?”
“Yes!” she hissed. “Yes, Daddy! I do!”
“Shh!” On the other side of the bed, my wife did a half-kick as she insisted, “Wait. I need five minutes. My stomach’s killing me.”
I plodded alongside my skipping daughter across our one-story rental house’s living room (past the two baskets expertly hidden by the Easter Bunny) and into my son’s room to begin the twenty-minute process of waking him from a sound sleep.
Aside from it being Easter Morning, 2014, this was pretty much business as usual–my daughter being the first one awake, my wife wanting “five more minutes,” and my son seconding his mother’s sentiments by demanding the remainder of the day to sleep, as he had already “telled me firty-seven times” to “stop talking to me. I don’t want to do nuffing!”
Sure, my world was pretty nuts, but things were also looking up. With the Twins in a school we’d grown quite fond of and my doctoral coursework in the bag, I had just taken a job I was fairly happy with–one requiring me to wear a tie and commute 45 minutes to downtown Phoenix. While I was not particularly a fan of the obscene amount of time I was spending ironing, attempting to color-coordinate shirt-tie-pants-socks-shoes combos, and coming to a complete stop on the freeway, I was very much a fan of the sudden influx of real, actual grown-ass man income I was earning after slumming it as a student worker for years.
This was also about the point when I had about 30 pages of my dissertation written, and was just starting to kick my own ass every frickin’ night once the Twins went to bed with ice-cream-and-beer-fueled “THIS!IS!SPARTA!” thesis-writing binges usually lasting until about two in the morning. Although the topic of my wife and me having more kids would occasionally come up from time to time, it was primarily as a ridiculously funny joke, as several medical professionals had deemed our reproductive organs to be barren wastelands of fossilized sperm with no tails and one of those egg cartons everyone leaves on the grocery store shelf because it got dropped by that guy who wasn’t paying attention while he was checking the expiration date because he was obnoxiously talking on his cell phone about his entire life story for everyone in the store to hear. These, of course, are highly technical medical terms.
Ruh-Roh! (The Pee-Pee Prophecy)
I took a deep breath as I plopped onto the couch. It had been a marathon day for our family, kicking off with a frantic search for the baskets of goodies the Easter Bunny had hidden for the Twins in the living room the night before, followed by church, a breakfast/Easter egg hunt at my in-laws’, a lunch/extended hangout at my parents’ house (which also included my in-laws), and an epic, multi-generational game of Spoons resulting in literal bloodshed for several family members.
Yeah, that’s right. I’m writing about Easter Sunday 2014, which I realize was three months ago, but there’s a reason for that. Let me do my thing here and I promise I’ll get there. Cool? Cool.
We’d just gotten back home from the festivities at about four in the afternoon. My daughter, who had fallen into a post-candy coma in the car, was still passed out on the couch, while my son was assessing his toy/sweets inventory on the living room floor, unpacking his three Easter baskets (yes, the Easter Bunny visited both grandparents’ houses, too) and lining up his loot.
I am not a napper, but after the day we’d had out in the Arizona heat, I was just about to nod off when the silence was broken.
Very dramatically.
“JOHN!!!”
It was my wife. I’ll admit that my initial reaction was annoyance because she’d used her Desperately Important Tone of Voice, which is usually reserved for Dire Emergencies, like when it is critical that I retrieve a box of her scarves I did not even know existed from the top shelf of our closet, or when a bug that was “crawling across the floor, trying to eat her” turns out to be a ball of lint. You know, the heavy shit.
Sighing lazily, I rose from the couch. “I’ll be right back, Buddy,” I told my son.
“Okay, Daddy,” he said, eyes still on his gear. “I’m just going to sit here and line up all of the things that the Easter Bunny brought me because I got a lot of things and I’m putting them in a line so I can see the ones that I have and then I’m going to play wiff them.”
“Sounds good, Buddy.”
I headed into our bedroom, ready to be underwhelmed by my wife’s latest “crisis.” But when I saw her standing in the bathroom with ET-sized eyes, I knew right away that something was different. This might actually be A Big Deal.
“E.T. phone husband.”
Twinfamy 