Things that amuse me, Vol. 18

So where was I? Oh yeah...

Four kids is a lot. Did you know that? Anyway, here are a few of the things that have been amusing me during the past several months:

1.  Before I had kids, I can very confidently say that no one had ever happily stepped on my taint to get a boost up.

2. How many episodes of Mad Men does it take before a woman stops saying things like, "What?! He's married!" The world may never know.

3. My 9-year-old son D- recently found out that dyslexia is a real condition, not just some kind of unhelpful super power of Percy Jackson. Since he got four books and one movie into the series before realizing this, he still might not be able to resist following slow readers around school, watching for magical fight scenes to break out after the tears and misplaced anger blow over.

4.  I'm becoming convinced that it may be the primary purpose of dry cat food to serve as bait to draw mice into The Kill Zone. Either way, the cats get fed, though, right?

5. My 3-year-old son E- opened a fortune cookie to find the observation, "You are never bitter, deceptive, or petty." And that's how we discovered the unwritten label, "Fortune Cookies not intended for users 3 or older."

Classic quotes, Vol. 31

Here's a selection of some recent quotes from my 4-year-old daughter M-, 7-year-old son D-, and wife J-:

D- (to my mom, after he chose to dump unhealthy amounts of cinnamon on his toast): Your cinnamon is really HOT!

M- (missing the point of a race during Cars 2): Why are they driving so fast??

J- (mindlessly talking aloud to herself, after realizing Father's Day was approaching): Oh, sh*t, that's coming up already...

D- (as my dad tried to point out that he wasn't listening to the requested story he was reading aloud): What??! I can not hear you over the sound of me talking!

M- (shouting at J-, who had quietly advised her to really start sleeping, while she was pretending to sleep): I am, MOM!

J- (suffering through a diet, as M- pulled a pack of Hostess cupcakes off a grocery shelf): Put that down right now! (muttering to herself) Put it down before I buy them...

M- (ending a series of overly dramatic comments about a forklift she was hearing at Costco): Watch out, that fork lifter's going to fork us up!!

Amusing searches, Vol. 13

If I ever found out more about the people who arrived here via Internet searches, I think it would only be a letdown compared to the outlandish caricatures that spring to mind for each search (complete with funny voices). If one of these people is you, well, you'd better start upping your game.

Anyway, here's a grab-bag of some of the most amusing searches that have brought people here.

(All search strings are reprinted exactly as they were entered, and the search text links to the post at which the visitor arrived.)

• Goldfish crackers MSDS (Saginaw, MI) - While they may be as addictive as cocaine or as dangerous as other chemical substances, I'm pretty sure Pepperidge Farm still is not required to issue an MSDS for Goldfish crackers.

• but it is indisputable that while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake? what does this mean (San Antonio, TX) - Why Google pointed you to my main page for this, I don't know, but maybe they're on to something, because I just so happen to be able to pass you, dear reader of Great Expectations, along to this dictionary entry for genteel. I'm pretty sure the rest is self-explanatory.

• why raisins are gross - I'm glad Google's fighting the good fight to present my own views on the wonders of raisins whenever someone so foolishly puts a statement such as this out there. I can only hope this searcher was looking for reasons someone with no taste buds might make this claim, so that they could most effectively refute those reasons. Yes, I take my raisins seriously.

• sexually irresistible woman (Haradok, Belarus) - You know, I've been called a lot of things in my time, but I think that's a first. To my face, anyway.

• spongebob vagina (Leer, Germany) - With someone as absorbent, yellow, and porous as he, I would think even a scientist would have trouble distinguishing one orifice from another. Sorry to disappoint you, Extremely Disturbing Person.

The downside of exposing children to classic novels

Quoting the escaped convict in Great Expectations recently, my 6-year-old son D- threatened to cut out the liver of his 4-year-old sister, who refused to be quiet at bedtime.

Needless to say, she didn't get the reference.

A conversation with D- and M-: The forbidden fruit

What better and more appropriate way to start out the year --after having closed out last year with a brand-new baby-- than with this recent conversation with my 6-year-old son D- and my then-3-year-old daughter M-?

D- (reading a joke from somewhere): What kind of fruit do ghosts like to eat?

Me: I don't know, what?

D-: Boo... (switching to spelling mode) B-O-O-B-E-...

M- (jumping in, proud to show off her impressive "reading" skills yet again): Boobies!!

D- (shocked, confused, sure this must somehow be a dirty joke he accidentally read, but slightly amused): Heh-heh.

Me (obviously now relating a much-less-funny joke): Boo-berries. ...Not boobies... It's "BOO-berries", because pretend ghosts* say, "Boo!", right? ...Boo-berries.

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* Must always be on guard-- no, ghosts aren't real, go to sleep!

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You may enjoy my previous M- conversations, D- conversations, and J- conversations.

Things that amuse me, Vol. 4

Here, as the title might suggest, are a few more things that have been amusing me lately:

1. After being forced to half-watch the new Tinkerbell movie, I have to wonder how my daughter will handle it once "Tink" is picked up for all that soliciting her wardrobe tells me she must be doing out there in Fairy Hollow.

2. His careful sounding out of written words means that my 6-year-old son D- provides me small pleasures like listening to him loudly announce, "Ass... Ass... Ass..." across the house.

3. Aren't dreams supposed to be the realm of unattainable fantasy and unbridled imagination? That's what I always thought, until I realized that my recent uneventful dream of shopping online for pedometer batteries was definitely par for the course.

So it would seem that sleep is just an extra 5-6 hours (at best) for me to nag myself and continue leading a thoroughly tedious existence.

Important Question: Or is that kind of sleep orgasmic enough?

These are the things about which one begins to wonder when forced to read or watch a story more than 10 times:

If the nice fairies in Sleeping Beauty had the power to alter the evil fairy's killing spell, why didn't they just say that when she turned 16, she'd touch a spindle, receive a deliciously near-fatal orgasm, and then develop a lifelong obsession with spinning wheels?

Why make her, the royal family, and everyone who works in their castle, fall asleep indefinitely while waiting for a chance encounter to bring them back to daily life? How is that the easiest solution, even if we decide they were limited by adapting the language without the intent of the spell?

Can you imagine missing out on a decade without realizing it? Strutting around with bell bottoms and pork-chop sideburns when everyone else is gelled up with Hammer pants... the horrors go on.

Which decade would you pick to skip, and why?

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After you're done pondering this, you might want to weigh in on some other of Life's Most Important Questions, especially the original.

Developments at our house, Vol. 16

Here are some of the latest developments around here:

1. After 5 years of reading both the classic original stories and the cartoony Disney version of Winnie-the-Pooh, my son D- finally realized that the lead character's name is "poo".*

2. I was made aware that my current roommates are so tiny I can unknowingly smuggle one of their socks in my freshly-laundered underpants for at least several hours before noticing it.

3. It says a lot about my currently uncertain status in life that I get e-mails opening with lines like, "Congratulations, you're a 2009 Mother of the Year!" and including videos like this.

I think I need to go slather myself with motor oil and kill something that only seems not defenseless.

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* He was amused.

Awkward moments, Vol. 1

As an antidote to all those ubiquitous Precious Moments things, here are a few of the most Awkward Moments my children have seen fit to drag me into, just in the past week and a half.

Please note that while I include the word "loudly" in all three entries, I'm sure you know I had no need to mention it even once.

1. While enduring an excessively long checkout process at the store, my 2-year-old daughter M- loudly pointed out that supermodel Giselle Bunchen, posing effectively in the nude on the cover of this month's Vanity Fair, had no shirt on, before speculating that "the lady [was] going to take a shower, probably," and then following up in graphic detail with all the steps she would be taking next.

2. Walking by a woman carrying her child with a beautiful (and probably very expensive) head of cornrows, M- and her 5-year-old brother D- said hi, each referring to the child as a different sex (due to this apparently unfamiliar hairstyle and ambiguous clothing colors), and then they began loudly debating whether it was a boy or a girl, including the heretofore uncharted territory of a "boy-girl".*

3. Just days before the normally large Immigration Rally here in Chicago, and in the midst of all this swine flu nonsense, a Hispanic busboy** began clearing our table while we were gathering up our supplies to leave a local pizza pub, and the kids coincidentally decided to start very loudly chanting the refrain from one of their recent favorite books (Gotta Go by Sam Swope): "Gotta go to Mexico!!"

Luckily for us, neither of them were frowning or pointing at the time they issued this grammatically ambiguous statement/command.

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* For the record, I had been 99% sure it was a girl until I heard these two arguing. I don't feel too badly about this uncertainty, given the number of times D- was misidentified as a girl in his first 2 years of life, and the handful of times M- was as a boy, but if anyone ever thought either was a boy-girl/girl-boy, they had the decency to keep it to themselves.

** Seems a demeaning job title, considering that the guy is at least 40. But "Busman" just sounds like a really, really low-budget superhero. Like Batman if he wasn't a billionaire. Guy's gotta get around somehow, right?

Book Review: The Story of St. Patrick's Day

I know that I already wrote a St. Patrick's Day post on the day itself (and if you read that post, you already know that the day is properly referred to from now on as SpongeBob Day), but after rereading this book, The Story of St. Patrick's Day by Patricia A. Pingry, for the first time in a couple years last week, I just couldn't resist sharing it with you all:
We got this book cheap somewhere maybe 4 years ago after St. Patrick's Day, figuring it would be a good idea to have around, since my side of the family is predominantly of Irish heritage, and my son was born pretty close to St. Patrick's Day.

The book starts simply enough, before tipping its hand a couple pages in:
Before you question the composition of this image, you must remember that this all took place before the Irish fell under the yoke of English tyranny, before they were manipulated into slavish subsistence farming and dangerous over-reliance on a single crop, when they had much more time in the middle of the day to sit about in a field in mixed company, picking clovers and being amused by the ramblings of a curious foreigner with a tragically compulsive hair-cutting obsession and the good luck of living in an age with a definite scarcity of mirrors.

So this is probably at least 93% accurate as to how it went down.

Of course, it wouldn't be a book about St. Patrick without mentioning the snakes:

What they seem to be saying here is that St. Patrick was a Parselmouth, and what's more than that, he was apparently a very irritating one. I believe in this picture, he's offering to hand out religious pamphlets, asking if they've heard "all the many great stories in the Bible featuring the courage and ingenuity of Our Serpent Friends..."

Note that most of the snakes have given up moving laterally along the ground and are resigned to flinging themselves off a cliff. Pretty much the same reaction I have whenever Jehovah's Witnesses come a'calling.*

And finally, we have to deign to acknowledge those persistent pagan traditions that weren't co-opted for expediency in winning converts:

"And now, kids, ha ha, for a break from all that Real, Fact-Based Learning, here's a fun little story about how some silly people believe that tales of beings with magical powers who had wild, implausible, and unprovable exploits long ago are immutable fact, and that these beings continue to invisibly rule the world of the present day, watching over us all with stern disapproval.

"Remember: Though they may provide useful lessons and morals for all people, such stories are MAKE-BELIEVE and must always be clearly classified as such!"

I would love to see the lady's face on the page where one of the kids asks a question innocently making reference to "that story where Jesus cursed some guy who tried to take his pot of gold or whatever?"

So, to sum up: Guy shaking a stick to singlehandedly drive every single snake off an island the size of South Carolina: Fact. Leprechauns: Make-believe.

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* Our downstairs neighbor let them in the building one time, and now I'm pretty sure they legally have a permanent invitation to ring the buzzer, per God's Law of Awkward Guilt.**

** Case number God v. Who The F*** Do You Think You Are?

Ingredients in my shampoo that may kill me

I like to read. I love to read when doing other things, like eating cereal, powdering my nose*, or showering.

Because of the difficulties in enjoying most other reading materials in the shower (come onnnnn, waterproof Kindle!), by this point I know pretty well the ingredient lists of the various shampoos, conditioners, and other such products with which my wife fills our shower.

The following is a list of the most strikingly named components, which I'm a bit concerned may eventually kill or at least severely incapacitate me, based on the fact that they each sound an awful lot like some fiendish poison a Bond villain might slip into my martini before pouring out the only antidote just to watch me die a painful, undignified, hysterical death:

1. Dimethicone

2. Quaternium-15**

3. Ammonium Chloride

4. Glycol Distearate

5. Cocamide Diethanolamine

Maybe I'm just thrown by the number of times the sound "die" appears in the names of most shampoo/conditioner ingredients. I can't help but read these lists like a threatening letter... a threatening letter that at least smells fantastic.

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* I AM a lady, after all.

** This one just has to be radioactive. They want to kill you after they squeeze you for dozens of dollars over the course of several blissfully ignorant years. Gluttonous mountebanks!

To deck a mockingbird

My 4-year-old son D- recently sat down with his 2-year-old sister M- to very cutely read from a little book with an adorably harmless bird on the cover, and, taking a page from Atticus Finch, he made sure to pass along sage bits of advice like the following (delivered in a ridiculously saccharine voice):

"Do you see those sharp claws? If you would bop that bird on the head, it would take them and... [demonstrating] smear across your face, and you'd be bleeding. So, don't ever punch a bird in the face."

Book Review: Daddy Goes to Work

When perusing the children's section of the library, my 4-year-old son D- loves to pretend he's picking his books completely at random, while he's actually fulfilling his intricate agenda to provide us with as diverse and challenging an array of reading material as he possibly can.

I welcome the variety of viewpoints, subject matter, and age-appropriateness even if it invites many questions whose answers involve almost nothing related to his carefully established knowledge of the world or its people.

Along with the usual traumatizingly graphic or outdated tomes that make you wonder who's monitoring the children's catalog, this child, who has absolutely zero religious education of any kind, has added classics like the following to one sub-series of his larger work entitled Why Did They Let Me Pick The Books, Again?: The Best Eid Ever, Starlight and Candles: The Joys of the Sabbath, and K is for Kwanzaa.

He picked this latest one out one day while I was chasing his little sister M- back towards the kids' play area in the library. He later checked the books out himself at the self-checkout station, so I didn't see everything we'd borrowed till we got home.

I can't help but see his latest noteworthy choice as not only a heavy-handed and judgmental suggestion but an outright personal affront. It's called Daddy Goes to Work, by Jabari Asim.


This is the kind of unsubtle signal that only a small child or a complete asshole could so calmly provide to an unplanned stay-at-home father.

I'm thinking if he resigns from this tact, after the message seems to have flown right over my head, that I may find him digging through the shelves to find Daddy At Least Gets Off The Couch And Shaves Once In Awhile.

Stories for the newly hearing impaired

Well folks, it's Friday morning, which means it's time for me to grab my ear plugs and head down to the library for M-'s story time, where we all get to huddle on the outskirts of the crowd gathered in relative safety about 15 feet away from the (very nice) ringleader herself.

The first week, a few of the other 2-year-olds understandably plopped themselves down right up front when things started, but, being creatures who act on instinct at all times without care for others' feelings, they unsubtley hit the deck when the volume dial broke off at 11 and didn't let up.

It came right as I was wondering how they could take it while I was struggling all the way in the back of the tragically tiny room-- all three kids simultaneously threw themselves backwards (in that way little kids do) outside the blast radius of this woman's voice.

Every week since then, that radius has been marked out by a field 2-3 cushions deep, which this lady must lay out in the vain hope that she's offering plenty of room and comfort to that one special boy --half deaf in his one functioning ear-- who will drift in from one of the nearby parks, as foretold in the prophecy, beckoned to the library by the siren song of a children's book read at a volume that finally allows him to turn off his hearing aid.*

Lest you think she's just one of those rare perky people who's raring to go first thing every morning, I assure you she is far from it. Rather, I believe she simply has to keep shouting as loudly as possible in an effort to keep herself awake, or possibly not dead. Kind of like that stupid Jason Statham movie Crank.

I'm thinking of asking the police department if they might be able to rig up their speed-monitoring trailer to instead measure decibels, so I could drag it into the back of the room like a scoreboard. I might be able to make some side money** wagering on this...

Hopefully I can make enough to cover the ear surgeries.

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* And then ask her if she might speak just a little more softly.

** By side money, of course, I mean my only money.

A conversation with D-: The story of sugar

The following is an exchange I had with my son D- after he drank what is probably the second and near-to-last Capri Sun he's had in his 4 years:

D- (eyes wider than usual due to increased heart rate): Daddy, one day, I wanna make this kind of juice.*

Me: Oh yeah?

D- (looking at the front of it): Yeah... it's about "apples".

Me: Yes, it might be about them, but I assure you it's not made from them, so I wouldn't really call it "juice".

D-: (blank stare)

His word choice actually creates an appropriate comparison, since Capri Sun has as much of a connection to actual fruit as, say, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

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* This means he wants to buy some but knows I'll say, "No, we don't need that," which I of course do quite frequently. He figures that by suggesting we make some ourselves, like the good, old-timey Americans we are, he might stumble through a back door to getting what he wants.

A conversation with D-: You are an idiot

The other day, while my 4-year-old son D- was showing off his typing skills to my mom, the following absolutely 100% true conversation took most of the suspense out of the question Will he turn out just like me?:

D- (pointing to "PQ" on the screen): See here? I typed "Pa".

My Mom: Oh, you mean like Pa in the Laura books? Actually, that's P-A. You wrote P-Q, but that's pretty close-- good job!

D-: ...Umm, actually, it's spelled like that.

My Mom: "Pa" like Laura's Pa is spelled P-A. Maybe we could go get one of the books and you could see, to help you remember.

D-: I think we should get the book, so we can look at it, and you can say, (adopting appropriate voice), "Oh, I was wrong!"

My Mom (deftly masking her disbelief, she grabbed The Long Winter): Here you go, see there? It's spelled P-A. But that's okay...

D-: I'm never going to read those books again.

One way to offend your wife

I figured it'd be nice to counteract the burgeoning waves of sappiness threatening to spill over here due to my round-the-clock care and constant companionship of my poor, ailing wife for the last two weeks, so I thought I'd offer the husbands out there just one of many clever ways you can offend your wife whenever necessary.

Example Number 1: When taking a pause from reading her copy of a junior high sci-fi novel, such as The City of Ember, turn towards her --doing something sweet and innocent like playing her pink Nintendo DS on the collapsible bed she calls her invalid home-- and lay this truth on her:

"If there was a secret room in our post-apocalyptic world stocked with aisles and aisles of rare delicacies, you'd definitely be the one passed out in the middle of it OD'd on sugar and power."

I'm not sure why my own wife took issue with this earnest observation so strongly, but apparently it's quite a potent weapon to store away somewhere for a rainy day.

Book Review: I Went Walking

As a blogger with most of the word literary in my name, I think we can all agree I'm a logical choice to review books for the masses not so terminologically blessed. Whether or not you defy me by not readily agreeing with my assertion, a presumably large number of book publishers and authors' representatives do agree.

After recently becoming inundated with review copies of books*, I decided it was time to stop ignoring my cultural mandate. To this end, I figured I would begin by offering the world some unsolicited but obviously very welcome reviews.

Thus, I offer you my inaugural book review here at LiteralDan: Sue Williams' I Went Walking:

Now, if you're like me, you can't help but be struck by how horrendously grotesque the drawing of that child on the cover is, and you're too terrified to open the book itself.

I'm sure it's a very nice story.

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* One copy** is enough to validate this statement-- every flood has to start with a trickle, right?

** It was not this book... I'm still preparing to read the one I was sent. It's only been a month: it's still good, it's still good!

I'll take my baby puree Rare

Even though my oldest child is only 4, I already know that for all the events and characteristics that seem to be hints at the kind of person a baby will become, most are just false flags and turn out to be nothing.*

Hindsight makes clear to me, though, that heavily repeated habits and happenings can indeed serve as a reliable forecast method, as can certain distinct moments.

This is all a way of leading up to telling you of a clear indicator that my 18-month-old daughter M- will not follow in her Aunt** Katie's footsteps by becoming a vegetarian.

As we flipped through a Baby Animal book before bedtime last night, I asked M- what cows said, and after correctly responding, "Moooo," she paused for a moment with her finger on the picture. She then raised it and firmly pointed at the cute lil' fella a couple more times as she added, "Eeeeat-it!!"


* See the famous 10 reasons my 3-year-old son may be homosexual post for Exhibit A.
** Side note to my wife J-: that's pronounced "ant", not "ahhnt", you lousy Yankee. Nice try.

Developments at our house, Vol. 7

Here are yet more developments at our house in recent days:

1. M- discovered that sweaty little baby feet can do double-duty as handy tools for recovering food dropped on the floor. As a bonus, you save time and money by never having to refill your salt shaker!

2. I'm thinking I'll have to update my (joking, of course) lists of reasons why D- may or may not be homosexual, given how consistently he has been picking either Princess Peach or Baby Princess Peach the handful of times I've let him play MarioKart Wii.

3. M- tried to inspire a new Conversation with M- by, once every day for a week, climbing up on my lap and then shouting "Ear!" before trying to stick something in my ear, such as a car, a toy phone antenna, and (on several occasions) the aglet from a bear's shoelace. At least she gave me some warning so I could dodge them, which is a lesson she apparently learned from when she ambushed me and my eye later on.

4. J- and I have decided what to spend our stimulus payment on-- gas for the car and food for our children! I can't wait till the installation guys deliver that stuff and plug it in! Woo!!

5. M- found that rather than silence the cries for breakfast (which take the place of greetings) that threaten to wake D- early every morning, Daddy sticking a goldfish cracker in her mouth before quickly carrying her out of the room merely allows her to reach a new tonal range on "hunnnnnngreeeeeeee!"

6. Continuing #5, I've learned that I need to stuff at least three Goldfish crackers in M-'s mouth when I get her in the morning, to make her believe she will be fed right away just like she is every single day. Even if she doesn't believe it, I suppose, she may at least find it more difficult to speak in this state.

That, or I may just end up with a couple of damp Goldfish stuck to my face.

7. I have decided that the world can ignore its meteorologists when trying to decide what the weather will be like on a given day, and instead rely solely on whether I am wearing pants vs. shorts and/or have a jacket or umbrella with me to tell them what the weather will not be like. It's been a logic-defying couple of weeks for this effect.

8. D- spelled the word "Bee" all by himself, which brings his total spelling count to about 10-- I told him how proud I am of him, but I kept to myself that the logical next step for the near future is for him to become Professor of English Language History at Oxford. He'll discover that by himself When He's Five (the glorified time in which almost all things will happen).

9. I've been absolutely overwhelmed by your response to my nomination for Best Daddy Blog-- you guys are awesome! I owe you all big time. Just let me know when you want to collect. One caveat: I don't do windows.

10. I'm exceedingly proud of myself for defying my OCD demons and leaving this list at 9 items instead of rounding it out to ten... dammit!