Weekend Warrior

What a great weekend. We got to spend a lot of time with friends and family, finished some yard work, and most importantly, I ate quite a bit of grilled meat. Mmmmm...meat.

I'd have to say that I really enjoyed the weekend. Although on Saturday our middle child (#2) woke up with the stomach flu. She awakened us complaining about her stomach hurting, then shortly after she vomited in the bathroom. That would be the first of 7 times that day. It was horrible. I am sympathetic to stomach flu sufferers. When I hear or see somebody throw up, I instantly feel like I am going to join them. My wife says I am ridiculously wimpy when it comes to that sort of thing. Whatever.

So, much of Saturday was spent helping her cope with her stomach issues. I felt absolutely horrible for her. She was so looking forward to going to a cookout we were invited to later that evening but of course she couldn't attend. Not to mention, she didn't feel well enough to play with her pet Mexican pig I bought off of Ebay last week. So sad.

I opted to stay outside most of the day, while my wife dealt with Velma Van Vomitheimer inside. That was fine with me. I managed to get the yard mowed, although my mower began acting screwy. It started making a weird knocking sound when I was halfway finished. My mechanical skills - which consisted of me turning the mower off(very important), flipping it onto it's side, and then kicking it a few times, failed to fix or diagnose the problem. The solution? I turned my headphones up louder. The noise was not nearly as noticeable. Fantastic.

After the mowing, I tackled cleaning out the gutters. Our gutter guards work - sort of. They do prevent "whirly birds" off the trees from clogging up the gutters. As shown in this picture. However, they do present another problem. What are the chances that a small object like this could fall from a 30' tall tree and find it's way perfectly into one of these small holes?


Evidently the probability is very high...sigh.



Although a tedious task, I still would rather pull an estimated 13,472 whirly birds from a gutter than have to hold a bucket for a vomiting 6 year-old. My stomach hurts just thinking about it.

Play Dohn't

I am not a fan of Play Doh. The kids enjoy creating things with it though. None of which are ever recognizable.
For example, “Honey, what’s that you’ve made, a snake?”
“No, it’s a horse.”
“Right. Of course it is. My bad. That is fantastic.”

I’ve learned to allow the kids to inform me of their creations rather than try to guess it. I don’t want to discourage their creativity. Having said that, they are horrible sculptors at this point.

Play Doh’s smell is absolutely nauseating to me. I’ve never been able to tolerate it for very long. I’ve felt that way since I was a young lad. I can’t imagine what it tastes like. Fortunately, I’ve never caught my children attempting to eat it either. No parent wants their child to be that kid.

However, I vividly remember an incident that occurred in my 2nd grade Sunday school class that really stuck with me. The pastor’s fanatical son, Scotty, sliced up a half dozen pieces of various colors and slurped them down one by one. He even seemed to enjoy it. He was a weird kid. And apparently he lacked the ability to taste. He was a weird, tasteless kid. I’m sure paste eating was another dietary hobby of his as well. As I understand it, paste is usually the introductory drug that leads to other such experimentation. (i.e. Play Doh, worms, Chap Stick etc.)

We find this pseudo clay all over the place after the kids finish making their distorted animals and other warped abstract configurations. I frequently find the dried bits and pieces in various locations other than where the kids were using it. It seems to travel around somehow.(similar to the Easter Grass - see "Easter Remnants" post)

The crusty leftover wisps disgust me even more than the pungent freshly opened kind. Play Doh scraps always have hair, crumbs, and other unmentionables infused into them. What starts out as being a creative means for children to unleash their imaginations inevitably ends up a germ infested, unusable, rock hard clump of grossness.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend everyone. Even you, Scotty, wherever you are.

So close, yet so far away

Man, I'm pretty tired this morning. Didn't sleep well last night at all. Some time late, my youngest daughter woke up crying. Laying in my bed comfortably, I had hoped she might fall back to sleep on her own. However, her weeping only became louder and I could tell by the shadows coming from her room that she was also roaming around. Crap.

I got up and entered her bedroom where I found her pacing around in circles, mumbling incoherently to herself. She whimpered about nonsensical things and kept stumbling around as if she was looking for something. My attempts to console her failed and she only cried louder and her tempo picked up speed. And as I began to wake up more, I realized the urgency to get her to the bathroom.

"Come on, Sweetie, let's go to the potty!" I urgently suggested to her. "Hurry, go to the bathroom right now."

She nodded in agreement and scampered toward the bathroom still talking to herself. I switched on the lights and began helping her remove her pajamas.

I can't exactly remember what I noticed first...the smell, the wet warmth on my feet, or the sound of a trickling waterfall gently splashing onto our bathroom floor.

"Oh come on!" I exclaimed aloud. At that point, there wasn't much I could do but to let her just stand there and finish. Once the flood gates had opened, there was no stopping it. "Wow, that's a lot of urine," I thought to myself. Watching the sea of gold spread across the floor really accentuated it's sheer volume. I soaked up the mess with a towel and cleaned her up as well. Undoubtedly, she had to feel much better as she then jetted off back to her bed.

I don't know if she ever was awake the whole time, but by the end of the saga I was wired and had difficulty falling asleep. Hence my 3 cups of coffee this morning. Admittedly, I'm having a hard time motivating myself today. Getting peed on in the middle of the night can do that to a person though.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a bath towel that is in need of a thorough washing.

Graff kids pics

Here's a few pics from a recent shoot. These kids were great to work with as well as their parents. We couldn't have asked for a better day of weather.

Stay-At-Home Dad's observation #8

Come on, man. Seriously? Just a little effort would be nice.

April Fool

With this blog, I try to be as honest as possible. I think I owe it to my blog’s readers – all 3 of them. On occasion, I use poor judgment and make mistakes. No, really I do. I was thinking of one such instance and here’s my account of the situation. Maybe some of you have similar experiences yourselves - probably not though.

Last April 1st I had settled the girls in their beds for the night, and brainstormed the ingenious idea to prank them. As far as I knew, it would be their first April Fool’s joke experience.

“Well, girls, I have something to tell you,” I started out. “As you all know, Mommy hasn’t felt the greatest lately. She’s had an achy belly and has felt yucky. Well, she doesn’t have the flu.”

“What daddy? What does she have?” my oldest daughter asked.

“Well, she has something called ‘morning sickness’. Mommies get ‘morning sickness’ when they are pregnant and are going to have a baby,” I informed them. I could hardly say that with a straight face, believing this to be a grand joke on the three unsuspecting girls. I expected their reactions to be of shock, maybe perhaps of absolute terror at the thought of their mom having another baby.

Wrong.

“You mean, Mommy is going to have a baby?” my oldest daughter questioned with her big blue eyes welling up with tears of joy.

At that moment, I realized that her father was an absolute idiot. My heart sank, as I now knew that I horribly miscalculated how they’d receive that news.

“Ummm, April Fool’s!” I shouted, nervously awaiting their response. Fortunately, I think I confused the younger two with the term ‘morning sickness’, and they stopped listening to me a while ago. However, the elder sibling still sat there, confused as ever.

“You mean, Mommy isn’t going to have a baby? Why would you say that then? Who’s April Fools?” she asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

I briefly described the principle idea behind April Fool’s Day and then started to sincerely apologize for the joke gone horribly wrong. She listened, still a little excited from the initial thought of having another baby in the family. For a moment, I actually considered how fun it would be to inform the girls if we really did have another baby. That brief moment gave way to reality, as I snapped out of that insane notion. Now that would have been the ultimate April Fool’s joke if my wife became impregnated. By “joke” I mean “nightmare”. If that were the case, I’d definitely have some strong words for my urologist.

My daughter, still slightly disappointed in the fact her daddy was a jerk, rolled over and undoubtedly continued to think about what might have been and never will be.

Hilarious.

Easter remnants

It's been approximately 33 days since Easter Sunday and I'm still finding this crap in all sorts of weird places -fake grass from Easter baskets. It's like a green plastic plague that refuses to go away. It sticks to the broom, the dog, the furniture and sometimes the children.

This is one of many domestic issues that I probably wouldn't have noticed before my conversion to stay-at-home dad status. I keep fighting the good fight, throwing away these annoying strands of debris, but just when I think I'm winning another one pops up someplace. It may be breeding - can't say for certain. I've even found some in the dog's piles in our backyard. Apparently she's eaten some of it before. Maybe if I don't give her dog food for a couple days she'll eat more of it.

Have a great weekend.