She's lucky she's cute....

So, it was a good morning. The weather was crappy, but I got up before the kids, which meant I didn't have to corral them, or beg for ten minutes to have a shower. I was able to start on my schedule, which is always nice, rather than having to hit the ground running all the time.

So after I got William to school, I was back in the bathroom, when Abby came in and wanted a bath. She has her bath at night, before bed, so I gently told her that it wasn't bathtime. Still, she decided that she was done with her shirt. I took her shirt off, then she decided pants weren't her thing this morning, either. Then she started tugging at her diaper, saying that she wanted IT off as well. Any parent will tell you, kids love to be naked for some reason. I got tired of saying no, and I thought those words that can only spell disaster for the parent of a small child: "What harm can it do?"

Parents have already guessed what harm can be done when you let your two-year-old run around for longer than fifteen seconds without a diaper on. My daughter took a dump in the middle of the living room floor.

I apologize if anyone is reading this while eating lunch at their desk. But when you have kids, all of your stories involve poop one way or another. My daughter had decided that it was perfectly acceptable to relieve herself where she happened to be when the urge struck her. So I came downstairs, and got a whiff of that all-too-familiar smell.

Now most people would be upset, at finding poop in their living room. I tried to get agitated about it, but you see, my daughter is just so damned CUTE. And it's the worst in the morning. I think there's something to this whole "beauty sleep" idea, because my daughter is at her maximum cuteness factor between nine and ten in the morning. She recharges her cute cells overnight somehow, like her dimples are lunar-powered, or something. This phenomenon has saved her life on more than one occasion. Since it took her almost ten months to learn to sleep for more than two hours at a time, there were several mornings that her disarming smile was the only thing that kept her from meeting a horrifically violent end, probably involving every drop of blood leaving her body and one if not more broken windows. That's one of the things they don't tell you when you have kids -- you have vivid, full-colour fantasies about visiting grievous harm on them when they mess up your sleep. That's WHY they're so cute. If they weren't, you'd kill them.

So I cleaned up the poop, and we lost one of her toys in the process, because it was not anywhere near popular enough with the kids to warrant any kind of salvage effort. My position is, if she wanted it, she shouldn't have pooped on it. That seems reasonable to me. And I went on about my day. There was probably a teaching moment in there somewhere, like when you rub a puppy's nose in their business so that they learn not to do it any more. And it crossed my mind to have a little heart-to-rectum with my daughter about the most appropriate time, or for that matter, at least a less INappropriate time to void her bowels, but she had already moved on, and was lounging on the couch, watching Thomas the Tank Engine. And she was so cute, and it's such a short time she'll be two, that I decided to let it go.

But if she's still pooping on things when she's fifteen, I'll DEFINITELY say something. Probably.

After lunch.


Thanks for reading!

No more new jeans

On the advice of my wife, I went this week to the mall looking for a new pair of jeans. I have lost a fair amount of weight over the last year, mostly because of eating breakfasts and lunches that consist of only the food left behind by my two- and five-year-olds. If my wife didn't come home and feed me at dinner time, I suspect I would look like an Olsen twin with a beard. I'm now six foot two, a hundred and eighty-three pounds, which means that I have only just now, according to the universally accepted Body Mass Index, reached 'healthy'. So my jeans are a little loose now, and my wife suggested that I should buy a new pair, presumably something more flattering to my butt. Or perhaps a pair that makes me look like I might actually have a butt in there somewhere.



At the mall, I went to several teenager-infested stores with salesclerks with piercings and visible tattoos, and felt old. That doesn't really bother me, when I was a teenager I thought that people who were as old as I am now got their first jobs waiting tables at the Last Supper. So fine, I'm old, I can deal with that. What I can't deal with is that it seems there are no new jeans in existence. All the jeans that are for sale now look as if they have been picked off the carcasses of recently deceased homeless people, because apparently the style is now "distressed", which means "looking as though they have spent five months in a logging camp or commune and were washed once before coming to the store to be resold".



So I came home jeans-less, and I got onto the Internet to find out where all the NEW jeans are, and I discovered a very disturbing fact: no new jeans have been produced since 1995. See, jeans are made of denim, which we get from Denim Buffalo, who were originally discovered by miners near San Francisco in 1835. The great Denim Buffalo herds provided all the denim needed until the California Gold Rush, during which time the herds were decimated and driven north into the mountains in Washington. There they flourished, and their numbers were approaching healthy levels again, until the grunge music movement started in Seattle, and denim was once again required to meet an insatiable demand for clothes from disenfranchised slackers who had no problem with spending upwards of $90 on a pair of jeans and $6 for coffee. The great denim herds were hunted to extinction, the last one being killed to make a bathmat for the floor of Eddie Vedder's tour bus. This fate was very nearly shared by the flannelbeast, whose ranks were driven to the brink by overhunting until only a few specimens remain that are now kept in zoos. A breeding program is in place to try to revive the species, but there is a problem, as it seems that all the flannelbeasts in captivity appear to be lesbians.

So it looks like there will be no new jeans for me. However, on the bright side, it looks like I can sell all my OLD jeans back to stores and recoup my investment. Some of them even already have holes in them. Maybe if I wear them a few more weeks, I could even be 'cool'. Except that I have no butt.

Thanks for reading!

Can I be funny on paper?

I'm a funny guy. This entire blog is based on this premise, so I'm not gonna shy away from that point. There are some cases where I have actually made liquid shoot out of someone's nose. Now granted, that was twenty-five years ago, when we were ten, and a well-timed fart could make liquid shoot out of someone's nose, but I'd like to think that I've retained the ability, even though my humour has gotten more sophisticated than flatulence.

The problem is that my humour is dry. Dry like the desert. Dry like a martini. Dry like your grandma's shortbread cookies that you choke down every year with about three gallons of eggnog because you don't want to hurt her feelings. Now that's fine in person, because a knowing glance, a wink, a particular lean of the shoulders can convey the message that I'm kidding (unless you're my mother-in-law, who has no idea when I'm joking unless I tell her). But will that translate on paper? Here's the first rule of thumb: if there's any doubt about whether I'm kidding, I'm probably kidding.

For example, when I was in the grocery store, I saw a sign on a bulk bin of chocolate covered peanuts that said "WARNING: MAY CONTAIN PEANUTS". Now, if I said that any idiot with a fatal peanut allergy who looks at a box of chocolate covered peanuts and thinks, "Well, if there were peanuts in there, they would put a warning on it," deserves to die of anaphylactic shock, I'm kidding. Barely.

The second rule of thumb: if I offer any advice or instruction, I'm telling you what worked for me personally, and it is not my fault if it causes you pain, heartache or a horrible itchy rash. Any advice is offered on an as-is basis, take it or leave it. I'm not telling you how to live your life. I'm just telling you what I think.

The rest we'll work out as we go along. Thanks for reading!

Welcome to the party!

As many of you know I've been unemployed since last June. What you may not know is that when I took a career planning course last year, one of the things that came up as a possible choice for me was "comedy writer". It's something that I would love to be able to pursue, and to that end, I'm starting a blog to polish my writing skills.

I say 'polish', but in truth, I'm pretty much starting from the ground up. Each week, I'll take on a new topic that strikes my fancy, and give you a few hundred words about what I think. Hopefully, it'll be funny. If we're REALLY lucky, it'll make you think, too.

If anyone has any suggestions for topics that they'd like to kick around, I'm open to suggestions. Fifty-two blogs a year is a pretty tall order, and I'm lazy, so if you want to do half my work for me by deciding what I should write about, I can take Mondays and Tuesdays off. There are no subjects I won't tackle, and anyone who writes will get a personal response. Thanks for making my life easier!

So here we go! I hope this is not just an exercise in pointless navel-gazing, and I hope that other people actually enjoy what I write. If you like it, tell your friends! If not, then keep it to yourself, my ego is already fragile enough right now!

GP