All posts in Family

When Pey­ton and I go out for walks around the neigh­bor­hood (which has become more and more fre­quent since I’ve started work­ing from home) he notices lots of things. He likes to talk to Twister, the horse that lives across the street, and he likes to yell, “RUN!” and then run, and he likes to play with leaves. His great­est obses­sion though started prob­a­bly a year ago, while watch­ing “Blues Clues”.

Pey­ton really grew to love the show. I like it too, as any­one who has read this blog before can attest to, and I’ve got my favorite char­ac­ters on the show, but Peyton’s has become Mail­box, who shows up rarely more than once a show after Steve/Joe have sang their mail song and always deliv­ers “a let­ter from our friends”. Mail­box wants to be a standup come­dian some­day but he’s rooted in place in the front yard, so it will prob­a­bly be hard for him to travel.

But Pey­ton loves the guy (or girl, it’s hard to dis­tin­guish, since his voice has a strange tim­ber to it) and always sings along to the mail-retrieving songs that Steve/Joe sings. And this love has trans­lated into our every­day lives as well now. So while we’re out Pey­ton will now want to look inside of the mail­box when we leave on our walk and also on our return to the house. And he likes the van­ity mail­boxes, like the mail­box that looks like a dog at the end of the street or the stone one that has vines grow­ing on it. But he loves all of them pretty equally.

So the next time if we show up at your house with Pey­ton and he has a pile of your mail in his hands, you’ll know why.

Man, I haven’t writ­ten on here in about a month I think. A lot has hap­pened since I last wrote any posts. What has hap­pened? I lost my job. Got let go.

And look­ing for work hasn’t been ter­ri­ble. I’ve had quite a few nib­bles on the resume, had an inter­view, work­ing the emails and the phone. Some­thing will hap­pen soon, I can feel it. Then I won’t be Mr. Mom anymore.

But that’s not what this post is all about. It’s going to be a very big week around here. In no par­tic­u­lar order -

1. Noah starts kinder­garten. Mon­day August 25th, 2008. Today. Ms. Owen is his teacher. Is daddy ner­vous? Oh lord yes. He will be a Sea­hawk, as the pic­ture to the right shows. That’s the school mascot.
2. Pey­ton starts mother’s day out. Is daddy ner­vous about this? Nah, not as much. It’s mother’s day out, not kinder­garten. Minor league stuff.
3. I am finally start­ing the long march to the Master’s degree this week out at UTA. Colo­nial Amer­ica to 1763 will be the first class. I couldn’t be more excited and ner­vous at the same time. It’s going to com­pletely rock.

So that’s life right now. I miss writ­ing here. Gotta fin­ish up that Oper­a­tion Down­fall series. How will it end? Who knows.My bet? The Amer­i­cans win. I’ve got a shiny penny rid­ing on the out­come, believe me.

The other night I drove over to Cen­tral Mar­ket. I was osten­si­bly going there to get Kim some cof­fee [1. decaf Snick­er­nut] but the real rea­son I was going was that I was out of beer. The last Späten Opti­ma­tor was gone and I’d tried a sin­gle of Cooper’s Stout but the Tra­di­tional ‘Lost’ Beer [2. It’s a tra­di­tion now. I just have a beer, in my Guin­ness pint mug, each week dur­ing ‘Lost’. Just some­thing I do.] had been missed last week because I drank the Cooper’s dur­ing ‘Bat­tlestar Galac­tica’ so I needed a new six pack.

But what to get? So many to choose from. I wanted some­thing dif­fer­ent since I’d been drink­ing stouts for so long. Anchor Steam would have been fine but they were all sold out. Started look­ing around at all of them. Samuel Smith. Späten vari­a­tions. Maybe a six pack of Cooper’s? The Rar Brew­ery from Fort Worth? They have about 300 beers so it’s hard to choose.

So I decided to wing it and try Coal Porter from the Atlantic Brew­ing Co. I wanted some­thing dif­fer­ent, a porter would do. When held up to the light I couldn’t seen through the bot­tle which is usu­ally a good sign. Just not a fan of those Bud-esque light-as-water beers.

It sat in the fridge for a night and then I was going to have one last night dur­ing (don’t laugh) ‘Danc­ing With the Stars’ when my in-law’s showed up. My father-in-law hit the fridge [3. Some­thing he does with fright­en­ing reg­u­lar­ity] look­ing for some­thing and out he brought a cold vir­gin Coal Porter. I hadn’t even had one yet and he was tak­ing one.

I hadn’t offered one to him. The damn stuff cost $10 a six pack, so I was reluc­tant to part with one for just any­body, but he’s my father-in-law, so what are you going to do? Tell him he can’t have one? I lived with the guy for a year while my cur­rent house was being built, I’m too stingy to offer him one beer?

He opened it and drank and his eyes went wide. “Wow…that’s strong.” 3 more swal­lows and he was done. He set it down and walked to play with my kids.

A wasted beer. One freak­ing wasted beer.

I wasn’t going to drink after him, that’s just not what I do. I don’t take free sam­ples from peo­ple hand­ing out food unless I’m at Sam’s, so I wasn’t going to drink after him. We (the fam) just got over a virus, who the hell knows what he’s car­ry­ing in that mouth?

That bas­tard beer sat there on the kitchen counter until 10 pm that night. After Yam­aguchi had won the com­pe­ti­tion I went and poured the remain­der in the sink. Hershey-brown liq­uid headed for the drain, n’er to be seen again. With it I placed my other pint glass that had once held the sec­ond Coal Porter, now drained into me.

It was pretty good. A lit­tle thicker than the usual porter I like, but pretty good.

So yeah, I’m a beer snob. I don’t want peo­ple touch­ing them with­out ask­ing, capiche?

A cou­ple of days ago I was get­ting up and Pey­ton, the baby of the fam­ily, was wak­ing up too. Rather than put him in the bouncy seat, or let him play on the floor and bang a lot of toys on the tile, Kim sug­gested that I put him into the shower with me.We have a pretty big shower. It has 2 heads and is about 6 by 6 feet. Glass walls, very cool.

So I put him in there with me. I was tired, half asleep still and not fir­ing on all cylin­ders. Pey­ton, naked, was on the shower floor. Usu­ally in the morn­ing one of the first things that Pey­ton does is poop. After that I change him and we both go on our merry ways, but like I said, I was tired, half asleep still and not fir­ing on all cylinders.

So after rins­ing the sham­poo out of my hair I look down at him to make sure he’s fine and not splayed out on his back. And then I saw it — there was poop all over the shower floor. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I prob­a­bly lost all the color in my face as I went sheet white. There was garbage all over him and he was just about to start play­ing with it.

I grabbed him and held him up to the water, a cas­cade of poop rain­ing down onto me.

Couldn’t get worse, could it?

I washed him off and set him down and started to clean myself up. After hav­ing been both peed and pooped on I wasn’t too wor­ried about me; skin is water­proof, and noth­ing was going to get into my blood­stream unless I wanted it to, but still, it’s poop. It’s what your body doesn’t need or want, that’s why you get rid of it.

I looked down again at him. He’d pooped again.

Now I had two watery piles of poop on the shower floor. We’d reached Def­con 1 in my opin­ion. I called for backup.

Kim came and helped me out. She’d been asleep. I hate wak­ing her up, but I felt that this mer­ited a lit­tle teamwork.

We got him cleaned up (no more poop­ing after that) and then I scrubbed myself down. Later Kim, the saint that she is, Cometed the shower floor. What kind of woman would love you enough to clean up garbage? Like I say, she’s a keeper.