Weekend

So, yesterday afternoon was sort of busy. The Boys had their first “soccer practice.” The Wife signed them up for soccer lessons with this local soccer academy (because the town we live in does its soccer bass-ackwards and you have to sign up in January to be able to participate in spring/summer soccer. And get this, unlike in the rest of the civilized soccer playing parts of America where soccer is a fall sport, it’s spring/summer in our town. Go figure) for their final three weeks of the session.

However, Slash being the stubborn pain in the you-know-what, refused to go play in the younger kid group (ages 3 and 4) and forced us to let him play with Axl’s group, which was 5 to 7 year-olds (and I use the term “play” loosely, it was all drills and skills). As I sat there in my canvas folding chair, sweating my balls off, I had a glimpse into the next 10-15 years of my life.

But they had a great time, and then we went home, had a little ice cream, and then it was off to Wegmans for me and the Boys (The Wife stayed home to nurse The Rocket Queen. I’m not saying The Rocket Queen nurses all day every day or anything, but I’m not saying she doesn’t either. Plus, The Wife has become a mega-germaphobe, so she doesn’t want to take The Rocket Queen out in public, or at least Wegmans, until she’s about 13). So we pile into the Tour Bus and head to Wegmans. As we walk up to the front of the store, there’s an older man (he looked like he could be anywhere from 55-70) standing outside, smoking a cigarette:

Axl: (pointing at the man and speaking in his usual loud voice) Daddy look, that man is smoking. Gross!

Me: I know, yucky, right?

The man looks at us:

Axl: He’s going to die, right?

Me: (a little nervously) Um, maybe.

Axl: But I thought you said that smoking kills you?

Me: It does.

Axl: So he’s going to die.

Me: Hopefully not right now.

Slash: (holding his nose) I don’t want to smell it. Yucko, yucko, YUCKO!

We made it through Wegmans without further incident. In the late afternoon/early evening, we took The Boys to the Father-in-law’s golf club so they could hit some balls with him, ride in a golf cart, and we could eat at their Sunday night barbecue. Putting aside that I always feel one of the dudes from Caddyshack who doesn’t quite belong there, it was pretty uneventful until about midway through dinner:

Slash: Daddy, I have to go to the potty.

Me: Ok Slash, let’s go.

I take him to this really nice bathroom inside and I start to lift the toilet seat for him so he can pee:

Slash: No Daddy, I have to poop AND pee.

Me: Oh, okay, sorry about that.

Now, Slash doesn’t usually sit right on the toilet seat because he usually takes care of this business at home and sits on one of his little potty seats that sits on top of the regular seat. But he parks himself on the seat and holds on to the side (which was far less gross than at soccer practice, when we went into the public bathroom at the park so he could pee and he ended up grabbing the edge of the toilet bowl after he and g-d knows who else peed all over it, only to find out that there was no soap in the bathroom) and drops the deuce. We wash hands and walk back to our table, which is outside on a covered patio, surrounded by lovely looking people who are all enjoying their dinner and cocktails in relative peace and quiet until:

Slash: (running into the Mother-in-Law’s arms and speaking in his regular rock concert loud voice) Tata, I made a HUGE POOP!

Good times.

Baseball

So, we've playing a lot of "baseball" in our front yard lately. Our baseball games consist of me pitching it to Axl (who can really hit it for a 5 year-old) and then him running to one of our bases (the tree planter is first, a little blue plastic spade is second, and a little yellow plastic rake thing is third). Our games usually come to a grinding halt when Slash wants to hit because he's almost 3 and a half and just can't hit as well, though he does always end up making contact.

When Slash comes up to hit (but I have to say, he's totally got the stance down), I have to stand very close and toss it underhand and try to guess exactly where his bat will be when he swings it so he can hit it.

We have now had the following conversation a number of times:

(I pitch and he swings and misses)

Slash: (making an angry face and sort of clenching his teeth) Daddy, you're not a good pitcher!

Me: Just because you don't hit it doesn't mean I'm not a good pitcher.

(I pitch it again and again he swings and misses)

Slash: Daddy! You're a bad pitcher!

Me: Then I guess Mariano Rivera is a bad pitcher, and Nolan Ryan was a bad pitcher, and Roger Clemens was a bad pitcher, and Randy Johnson was a bad pitcher. Should I keep going?

Slash: Stop talking!

Me: If you want me to be a better pitcher, hit the ball.

Inevitably, after about 10 swings, Slash will inform me that he wants me to pitch in slow motion because he starts swinging his bat in slow motion. It always makes me laugh because the ball still comes at the same slow speed, but he swings the bat so slowly he couldn't hit a turtle.

Good times.

Medicine

So, tonight sucked. It wasn't just a sucky night, it was a suck-a-thon, a suckfest of the highest order. It was total crap-ass (as I wrote that last sentence, The Wife just said, "Tonight was awful" in the other room to noone in particular. Or me).

Slash suddenly started coughing an awful cough on Saturday night and it got worse yesterday. At one point yesterday morning after my parents left (my mom had been here for the week helping out and my dad joined her on Friday), Slash was lying face-down in the front yard and said his stomach hurt. Great, stomach virus here we come. Happy Father's Day to me! Yay! He also felt pretty warm, and seemd to be feeling crappy when I took Axl to the birthday party. By last night, he was hacking up a lung and he woke up with a fever this morning (so he stayed home from school).

I spoke to The Wife on the phone during the day and she told me that not only would Slash not take his medicine, but when The Mother-in-Law (she was at our house helping The Wife out)finally got him to take it, she did it too fast, he gagged and he threw up all over her (insert your own mother-in-law joke here). No problem I said, I got him to take his medicine this morning, I'll get him to do it when I get home.

WRONG.

So before dinner I mentioned the word medicine and Slash said that he wasn't going to take it. I was trying to get him to wash his hands for dinner and he kept saying that he wasn't going to take his medicine:

(We'll pick this conversation up mid-conversation)

Me: Fine, I'm not talking about medicine. I'm talking about dinner. Don't you want to eat dinner?

Slash: Yes.

Me: Okay, then wash your hands.

Slash: But I don't want to take the medicine!

Me: (I feel like I'm talking to a wall here) Ok, fine. Just wash your hands.

Slash: Daddy, can I tell you something?

Me: What?

Slash: I'm going to wash my hands, eat dinner quickly, then run upstairs and get into bed and go to sleep.

Me: That's great, but you'll have to take your medicine.

You see where this is going.

So we eat dinner and he's totally stalling. When it finally came time to give him his medicine (generic children's ibuprofen and some cough medicine the doctor gave him today), he looked at me slyly, got off his chair and walked into the play room out the bck of the kitchen. I knew what he was up to, so I walked around the other way just in time to put my arm out and catch him as he tried to run past me. He started to scream that he didn't want to take his medicine.

The Wife set the scene by telling him that if he didn't take the medicine, we were going to have to take him to the...(as I type this, there was a loud thump and Slash fell out of bed. The awesomeness continues)...doctor to get a shot. I picked it up and ran with it. I told him that if he didn't take the medicine, we would have to go to the hospital tonight for shots. I then placed a pretend call to the on call doctor, who allegedly told me that he would need 6 shots (why 6 you ask? The Wife had mentioned 4 shots and that didn't seem to scare him enough into taking the medicine), and that he'd have to stay in the hospital overnight without Mommy or Daddy or his baby.

The stubborn little mofo still wouldn't take his medicine. So I told him that if he didn't take it right then, we were going. He wouldn't take it, so I picked him up and walked outside to the car:

Slash: No Daddy! I want to go home!

Me: Will you take the medicine?

Slash: Yes!

LIAR!

We went back inside and he still wouldn't take it. I screamed at him to take it now:

Slash: (tears streaming down cheeks) Don't scweam at me! I don't want to take it, I'm tired! I want to go to bed.

Me: (calmly) Slashy, please, I don't want to scream. I just want you to take the medicine so you can feel better. The sooner you take it the sooner you can go to bed. Please sweetie, just take it.

At one point I actually put him in his car seat and started to drive towards the hospital until I got him to agree to take the medicine. It got worse. I finally decided that I would try to force him to take it, so I held his arms and tried to force him to take it. No dice.

In the middle of all this, The Wife gives The Rocket Queen a bath by herself for the first time, and as she's taking The Rocket Queen, wrapped in a towel, into our room to get her dressed, The Rocket Queen poops all over the towel.

No joke, this hell went on for over an hour. I felt like a total monster. I was traumatized, and I'm 36. I could only imagine what I was doing to the poor kid, but I didn't feel like I could give in. After more hell, I FINALLY got him to take the medicine upstairs in his room (I'd say he had less than half of each and his jammy shirt and pants got the rest), he was calm:

Me: See? Was that so bad Slash?

Slash: No.

Me: Was it really worth all that hassle and all that time?

Slash: I'm just joking.

Me: Oh, you were joking?

Slash: Yeah, I was playing a trick on you.

Me: Not funny dude. Not funny.

Good times.

Suburbs

So, that sound you heard on Saturday morning was the sound of my cool dying. That's right, folks, GoodTimesDad and The Wife now have a minivan. We traded in our Pilot for what I am lovingly referring to as The Tour Bus (pictured below).

All pretense of cool is now gone. As The Wife wrote on her facebook page yesterday, playing off the awesome song by Everclear, she signed Axl and Slash up for soccer classes, so she is now a Honda Driving Soccer Mom. Awesome. As I drove it out for the first time today (to take Axl to a birthday party), I was blasting Paradise City with the windows down when I heard an excited voice from the way back of The tour Bus:

Axl: Daddy, there's a speaker right next to me!

Me: (Oh shit) Oh, sorry sweetie, is it too loud for you?

Axl: No, make it louder!

Me: (smiling) Right on dude, but I don't want to hurt your ears.

Good times.

Crime Scene

So, last night was a decent sleeping night for The Rocket Queen. She slept from about 12:45 am until about 4:45 am with no incident. The Wife nursed her, and as usual, The Rocket Queen fell asleep after nursing on the first side. As per our custom, I took The Rocket Queen from The Wife to change her diaper, which almost always wakes her up enough to nurse on the other side.

As usual, I didn’t have my lenses in and I was not wearing my glasses, but I could see that (surprise surprise), she had a poop. So I get the little cotton wipes wet and start wiping her delicate little bottom when all of a sudden…

POOPSPLOSION!

I got my face out of the way in time, but the rest of the room wasn’t so lucky:

Me: Oh man, that was close.

The Wife: Oh…my…god. It is all over the place. You have to put on your glasses to clean that up.

Me: Yeah, okay, let me close her up and give her to you.

So I finish changing her diaper, hand her off to The Wife and go to the bathroom to wash my hands. I put my lenses in and walk back to the room. When I say she sprayed poop, I mean she really sprayed it. It was all over the wall, some on the ceiling, some on the door to our room, the floor, etc. It looked like a crime scene, only instead of blood all over the place, it was mustardy-yellow crap.

I spent the next half an hour cleaning it up and accepting that my night of sleep was done. However, what made the whole thing a little bit easier to take (other than the knowledge that I’d end up getting some decent mileage from this story, not to mention a post) is the fact that when The Wife began nursing The Rocket Queen, she for some reason went to the free movies on demand channel and started There’s Something About Mary, so I was able to listen to it while I worked and randomly recite quotes while scrubbing yellow shit off the wall.

Good times.

Anniversary

So, today is The Wife’s and my anniversary. We won’t be spending it exactly the way we spent our wedding night seven years ago (you know, crying in a hot-tub), though I DO expect to be up late dealing with a crying female. I love you The Wife, happy anniversary!

Good times

Morning

So, this morning I went into The Boys' room t get Slash up and get him ready for daycare. I kissed his cheek and rubbed his back:

Me: Come on Slashy, time to wake up.

Slash: Grumble grumble grumble whine.

Me: Come on sweetie, we have to get ready for school.

Slash: (a little more clearly) I want to get up by myself. Get out of here Daddy!

Me: (laughing) Ok, I'll go.

Good times.

Punch

So, tonight as I was getting The Boys ready for bed, the following ocurred:

Axl: Slash, punch my back.

Me: No Slash, do not punch his back.

Axl: Punch my back.

Slash punches Axl in the back and Ax laughs.

Slash: Punch me in the back Axl.

Me: No Axl, do NOT punch him in the back.

Slash: Punch me Axl.

Me: I'm serious Axl, don't punch hm in the back.

Axl punches him in the back.

Slash: OW! Why did you DO that Axl? Daddy, he punched me in the back.

All I could do was shake my head.

Good times.

Environmentalism

So, as we were getting ready for dinner tonight, The Wife was nursing The Rocket Queen and The Boys and I were sitting on the floor in the playroom playing:

The Wife: There's about to be someone at our door (she's not psychic, she saw someone walk across our lawn from our neighbor's house).

Ding dong. Axl and Slash run to the door behind me.

I open the door, and there's a young woman with a pierced tongue holding a clipboard. I know where this is going. She's at my door from Greenpeace, or NYPRG, or Drugs are bad, Ginny eat something:

Girl: Hi, I'm Katie. I'm here to protect the water.

Axl: There's a Katie in my class at school.

Me: Let me stop you before you start. Are you looking for money?

Girl: Well, we're out here protecting the water, fundraising, getting signatures...

Axl: There's a Katie on my class.

Slash: Zoey's in my class.

Girl: Oh. Um...

Me: Now's really not a good time. Do you have literature you could leave with me so I can read it later?

Girl: No, they send us instead.

Me: Well, I can't really just put you on my desk for later, can I?

Girl: (crickets chirping) No. But we're looking for support so blah blah blah Haliburton (did she just say Haliburton? Halibut would be good for dinner...) and BP want to come here and drill and we need to protect the water, blah blah blah...

Axl: I like ice water.

Me: Listen, I can really appreciate what you're doing because I did it too when I was younger (there, that should get rid of her AND make her think I'm a good guy who cares about these sorts of things thus easing the sting of getting shooed away from my house without obtaining a signature or money) but I just don't want to sign anything now, but thank you.

Slash: (pointing at her and yelling) Poopiehead!

Me: Slash! That's not nice. Say sorry.

Slash: Sorry Poopiehead!

Girl: Ok, no problem. Just out of curiosity, which group did you work for when you did this?

Me: (Oh damn, think fast. She got me...) Oh man, let me think, it was so long ago. I'm having a hard time remembering.

Girl: Yeah, I'm just curious to know if it was in the same network or blah blah blah.

Me: Gosh, it was more than 20 years ago, I just don't remember, sorry.

Girl: No biggie. Good night.

Good times.

Girls

So, I have now been the father of a little girl for two weeks and it is awesome. The Rocket Queen is adorable and sweet. However, she has developed a couple of habits that are not awesome.

First, she poops more than anybody on the face of the earth. Seriously, more so than even her brothers, who both led the league in pooping (they pooped like it was their job). There have been very few diaper changes that did not have at least a shmear of poop. Which totally rules because changing a girl diaper is SO much easier than changing boy diapers. NOT. I don't know what to do with vaginas (I mean, I KNOW what to do, if you know what I mean. I think I just creeped myslf out, so, insert your own joke here...)

Changing her diapers is far more stressful than it ever was changing Axl and Slash. With Axl and Slash, I could wipe up, down, sideways, whatever. With boys, the poop can't get in aywhere. But with girls, that's not the case. As most of you know, it has to go front to back. For example, yesterday I went to change her diaper, opened it up, and there was poop all over the place including you know where:

Me: Oh god, oh god. Sweetie, there's poop all over her front. I need help.

So The Wife comes over and hands me two wipes.

Me: (looking at TheWife with a stare) Gee, thanks.

The other thing that makes her diaper changes harder than The Boys' is when she pees. Yes, you're far more likely to have a boy pee in your face. The Rocket Queen ain't going to shoot it up that high, but it's like a game of Russian Roulette. With a boy, you can see where the schwenkfelder is pointing and have an idea where the stream will go. But with The Rocket Queen, I never know where it's going to go until it's going. Awesome.

But by far, my favorite habit of hers is how she lets me change her diaper, put her jammies back on, get her all swaddled, and then, only then, does she poop. And it's always a big one.

Good times.

Dessert

So, Axl is still learning how to spell and he thinks that if he strings together letters he's spelling what he means to spell:

Axl: (looking at me sweetly but devilishly) Daddy, I know what we can have for dessert.

Me: (nothing?) What dude?

Axl: Can we hav a n-t-e-y?

Me: (laughing) Sure sweetie, you can have an ntey (pronounced n-tay).

Axl: Did I spell cookie?

Me: No.

Axl: How do you spell cookie?

Me: C-o-o-k-i-e.

Axl: Can I have a cookie?

Me: No.

Axl: Oh mannnnnnn.

Good times.

Night

So, in the days and weeks leading up to The Rocket Queen's arrival, The Wife and I talked about how we neede to stock up on sleep (as if we were bears hibernating for the winter or camels storing water) because once the baby came, sleep would be hard to come by. Intellectually, we remembered that we would be sleep deprived.

That said, there is no way you can prepare for the feeling of an utter and complete lack of sleep. It's effing hard. I know, I know, it hasn't even been two weeks, but it has been rough. Let me use last night to give you a little glimpse into my world:

10:45: We wake The Rocket Queen up so The Wife can nurse her and she can go back to sleep and then we can go to sleep (I know what you're thinkng, wake a sleeping baby, are you crazy? The doctor said we should wake her every four hours at night until she gets back to her birthweight and until the little bit of jaundice goes away). The Wife nurses her, and all is looking good. As The Wife is nursing her, I set the alarm for the ungodly hour of 2:45 for her next feeding. She finishes the nursing, The Rocket Queen looks like she's asleep,we're good to go. I swaddle The Rocket Queen, who stirs a little but still seems to be asleep. I put her in her bassinet, help The Wife get set in bed, cover The Wife with the blanket (she had a c-section so simple things are tough and hurt) and walk to my side of the bed. I get in, lie down and no more than two seconds after I pull the blanket up enough to cover me, The Rocket Queen starts to cry.

She proceeds to cry and stay up until about 1:30 am. I held her and tried to quiet her down from 11:55 to 12:35. The Wife is sleeping, snoring like a cartoon character and not hearing a thing. Finally, at about 12:35, The Wife nurses her again until The Rocket Queen finally falls asleep at 1:30. I reset the alarm for 4:45 a.m.

4:30 a.m.: Seriously? Areyou kidding me Rocket Queen? You didn't even make it to the alarm? Ugh. I get up, change her diaper, and give her to The Wife to nurse. The Rocket Queen proceeds to spend the next two and a half hours nursing, crying, fussing, pooping, nursing, pooping some more, crying, nursing more, pooping more, and nursing. In that order. I'm not kidding, I changed 6 poops last night. Six.

I finally got back into bed at about 7 a.m., just in time for Axl to come in at 7:15 to announce that he's ready to go downstairs. Axl and Slash then proceed to spend the next hour fighting with each other about the Leapster or the gross domestic product of Belize and coming in and out of our room.

There were parts of today when I could literally barely keep my eyes open.

God times.

Health

So, as we were puttng The Boys down to sleep tonight, somehow, Thanksgiving came up:

Axl: Daddy, wha's Thanksgiving again?

Me: It's a holiday where we give thanks for everything we have.

Axl: Like all our toys?

Me: Well, more like giving thanks for all of the good things we have, like a nice house, enough food to eat, a healthy family.

Axl: I'm thankful for our germaphobe family.

The Wife and I burst out laughing. It's funny because it's true.

Good times.