Just Humor Me

If only my goose was cooked

2012-01-22T23:03:00.000-04:00

“Please don’t attack me. I can’t even run,” I said as I limped toward the gaggle of geese that stood blocking and fertilizing the path to my car.

The goose on the outside of the circle sized me up, sensed that I was not made of cracked corn, and went back to pecking invisible goodies off the sidewalk.

I crept around the circle, holding my laptop bag like a riot shield, anticipating an attack at any moment. The movie “Godzilla” might have featured a comparable scene of Matthew Broderick gingerly stepping amongst hatching radioactive-mutant-dinosaur eggs in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, but I can’t be too sure because my brain pushed most of its Godzilla memories off the shelf long ago to make room for new Dorito flavors. I recalled that scene with perfect clarity until Blazin’ Buffalo & Ranch came along and then poof! Gone.

The longtime reader(s) of this column might recall that in the spring of 2010, I witnessed a colleague get assaulted in our office parking lot by a goose. Out of nowhere, the goose started hissing and flapping its wings at the guy, who was minding his own business a solid 50 feet away from the avian thug. The goose took off, turning itself into a low-flying missile that detonated right into the poor guy’s upraised duffel bag. If he hadn’t had that bag and some quick reflexes, that guy might well have found himself covered in various goose bumps and lacerations.

Ever since that day, I’ve regarded the creatures with a good bit more deference. Besides keeping an eye out for them in our parking lot, I also look for them on menus wherever possible. Invariably, this leads to disappointment, since hardly any restaurants offer entrees of the one animal I wouldn’t feel guilty eating. Cows and pigs just seem so nice, plus I’ve never seen them attack anyone outside of an office building.
I’d have no hesitation chomping into a nice McGoose Deluxe, though. The McGoose: Honk if you’re lovin’ it. The tagline writes itself.

I winced as I inched past the gaggle, my tendonitis keeping me from sprinting the final fifty yards. Incidentally, did you know that a “gaggle” refers to a group of geese on the ground, while a “skein” is the appropriate term once they’re in flight? Whether you choose to remember this, or that Smokin’ Cheddar BBQ Doritos exist, is entirely up to your brain.

The assault I’d witnessed happened in the spring, when geese are more likely to aggressively defend their nesting territory. The fact that I was easing past a large group of these feathered ruffians in mid-January did little to assuage my fear. Just two weeks earlier, as we said goodbye to my parents at the end of our holiday visit, I saw something strange and frightening beside their driveway, something that erased the world order as I’d previously understood it.

There, in the flower bed, was a small green shoot poking its head out of the ground. Then I saw the whole flower bed was full of them, poking up everywhere. Daffodils should not be sprouting in southeast Pennsylvania on New Year’s Day. Normally, it’s a happy event to see the year’s first daffodils, but this time, they had more the effect of zombie hands reaching out of the earth.

They were the Annuals of the Apocalypse. Or Perennials, whichever one daffodils are. When they were deciding what to call flowers that bloom once versus flowers that bloom every year, why did they pick words that mean pretty much the exact same thing? Just remember: Annual events happen every year, which is just like what annual flowers do, except the opposite of that. See? Easy.

In any event, I tiptoed through the minefield and made it to the car unscathed. The event made me wonder if we should find better homes for geese than our parking lots and our Wawa signs, though. Like under our deli counters.

You can throw Mike Todd some cracked corn at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Stuck in translation

2012-01-16T00:18:00.002-04:00

I teetered down the stairs, my sleep-deprived brain unable to process the commotion.

“Froot Loops need to be careful something something,” my wife Kara said, meeting me at the last step.

Behind her, our son Evan smacked his cereal bowl with a spoon, spraying milk like he was a drummer in a Blue Man Group rehearsal. The suction cup on the bottom of the bowl prevented it from launching across the room.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“We really need to be more careful,” she repeated. “I gave him Kix instead of Froot Loops today. He looked at the bowl and said that it ‘sucks.’ It really sounds bad when a two-year-old says it.”

Apparently, our self-censoring had failed to bleep at least one of our more colorful word choices. We’ve been so careful to clean up our language since Evan was born, but we’d neglected to stop using a certain word that is just so useful in describing some things, like the Eagles’ 2011 season, Cablevision, the electoral college, the driving skills of everyone but me and you, January 3-31, and what our vacuum cleaner both does and no longer does, because it’s broken.

I couldn’t picture Evan using that word, but my brain wasn’t firing fully anyway, due to the previous night’s adventures.

Just as I’d been drifting off to sleep, anxious to fend off a cold that had been tickling around my sinuses, trying to find a good place to land, Kara tapped my arm and asked the worst question anyone has ever asked another human.

“Did you move your laundry over to the dryer?” she asked.

I grumbled downstairs to the laundry room, my desire to sleep outweighed by my desire not to have my entire wardrobe smelling like Swamp Thing’s dirty hamper in the morning.

Back in bed, forty minutes passed before Evan started screaming from his toddler bed. Ahhh, Kara’s turn. Then, thirty minutes later, mine.

“Lamby fell down,” he reported when I stumbled into his room. Evan pointed to the lamb doll that had fallen six inches to the floor. I fixed the Worst Problem in the Universe and went back to bed.

“Finally, some sleep,” I said, pulling the covers back up.

“Why’s the fire alarm blinking like that?” Kara replied.

“It looks normal to me,” I said.

“No, it’s blinking all weird,” she said.

Sure enough, the little green light was blinking in an odd pattern. Still, I couldn’t imagine the user’s manual would say: “In the event something terrible is happening, your First Alert™ Smoke Detector will blink the Morse Code for ‘GET OUT OF THE HOUSE RIGHT NOW!’ with a tiny green LED bulb that will be invisible unless all the room lights are turned out.”

But Kara was convinced the alarm would sound at any moment unless we took action, so I crawled out of bed again to look up the user’s manual online. But our Internet was down, which is why Cablevision is on the list of things that su – excuse me, things that aren’t that great.

In the end, the main thing I learned is that whispering expletives into a phone will impede your ability to navigate your cable company’s automated voice prompts. And also, that the fire alarm needed to be reset in the morning, when high-pitched shrills were part of the daily routine anyway.

With Kara in her third trimester, I’m worried about how tired I felt the next morning. It’s like getting winded after a mile when you know you have to run a marathon in three months.

I walked over to check on Evan’s breakfast and his budding potty mouth.

He reached out and shoved his bowl, but because of the suction cup, it didn’t move.

“It’s stuck,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s stuck,” he repeated. Which is what he’d been saying to Kara. Turns out, we almost accused him of doing something he didn’t do, which would have really su – been bad.

You can blink “GET OUT!” to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Undecking the halls

2012-01-08T23:35:00.005-04:00

All that remains of Christmas 2011 is the memories, the love handles and the pine needles stuck in the carpet. Still, our son Evan isn’t quite ready to give up on it yet.

“Santa comin’ tonight,” he has declared every night since Christmas.

“No, buddy, he’ll come again next Christmas, but not tonight,” I’ll say.

“Okay. Santa comin’ tonight,” he’ll reply, undeterred.

Santa’s bigger than Elmo around here now. Not too bad for someone Evan didn’t even know about until a month ago. Santa must have an excellent publicist.

Here’s how Evan’s part of the conversation went when we explained the deal to him (paraphrasing): “Okay, so let me get this straight. A fat man flies through the sky with magic reindeer, lands on the roof, jumps down the chimney and sneaks around the house. Then he leaves a bunch of presents for me? Okay, I’m on board.”

Santa managed to deliver some pretty cool toys, even though Evan didn’t provide much input for potential gift-givers to go on.

“What do you want from Santa?” I asked Evan before Christmas.

“Presents,” he replied.

“What kind of presents?” I asked.

“Lots of presents,” he said, displaying a keen ability to grasp the spirit of the holiday.

“Okay, but what are your favorite kinds of presents?” I asked.

“Red ones. And white ones. And green ones. Those my favorites,” he said, listing the colors of sprinkles he’d just used to bury some sugar cookies.

I suppose it doesn’t matter how well you articulate your Christmas wishes when you’re completely stoked to get anything at all. Evan ooh’d and aah’d at each present for two seconds before jumping back into the pile, tearing at anything within reach.

“Whoa, that one’s not yours!” we’d say, but he’d already be dangling the necklace from his fingers, saying, “Lookit!”

Then he’d disappear back into the pile with wrapping paper scraps shooting into the air. It looked like there was a dog digging a hole under there.

“That kid need slow down,” the Tasmanian Devil would have said.

Besides a decent haul of loot from Santa, Evan also scored big from his grandparents, whose role at Christmastime becomes that of spoilers-in-chief.

“Vroom!” Evan said, pushing his new grandparent-sponsored racecar through his little town of blocks, speeding right past the cop car I had under my hand. He didn’t see the speed trap until it was too late.
“Here comes the policeman! You were going too fast – he’s going to take your money,” I said.

“Take money?” Evan asked, looking sad. To him, money is the thing that makes the helicopter ride in the mall go up and down, so he’s a big fan of it.

“That’s right, speed demon. You just got a ticket. You can show up to your court date or just fork it over now,” I said. Just as I had the inkling that perhaps I wasn’t encouraging Evan to have the healthiest attitude toward law enforcement, I looked up to see several family members giving me the “what’s wrong with you?” look.

“Babe, why don’t you teach him that the policeman is the good guy?” my wife Kara suggested.

“Sorry, I mean he’s here to help you change your tire, buddy,” I said, but Evan looked suspicious. His daycare might need a few visits from Officer Friendly to offset our playtime.

In any event, Christmas gets exponentially more fun when you have a kid who appreciates the finer points of getting spoiled rotten. This year was such a success, we may very well set out a cookie trap again next Christmas Eve to see if we can lure another visit from Santa. Or maybe we’ll just leave out the cookies that Evan put on the mantel again this afternoon.

You can put some bituminous goodies in Mike Todd’s stocking at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Goodfather

2012-01-02T23:35:00.003-04:00

The scene was straight out of The Godfather, except that the horse’s head lay surrounded by several other equine body parts.

“Dude, that’s one of Evan’s horsies,” I said, pointing at the pile of horse parts between our dog’s paws.

“I did not have anything to do with it,” Memphis said with her eyes, a hoof hanging out of her mouth. Our son Evan has always been careful about keeping his herd of plastic horses safely stored in its yellow bucket, but the Appaloosa colt must have wandered off by itself.

“Hide it, quick,” my wife Kara whispered. Our son Evan had his back turned to us as he rifled through his toy basket, so he hadn’t noticed the carnage that had taken place just a few feet away.

I scooped up the horse pieces and discreetly delivered them to the Great Trash Bag under the Kitchen Counter. When he turned back around, Evan didn’t notice the thinning of the herd, so we played it cool. I’m not sure how Evan would have reacted if he’d have seen how his favorite horsie went off to live on a nice farm, but it’s a safe bet that it would have been worse than the time Memphis snarfed the zucchini bread right out of his hand.

Though we take horse rustling very seriously at our house, Memphis couldn’t be entirely faulted for this particular indiscretion. She was temporarily insane because I hadn’t taken her for a walk in about a month, creating a surplus of destructive canine energy with no outlet. The old-man pains in my left knee had wrecked our nightly ritual, and the little Appaloosa had paid the price.

When you’re young, you’re hurt because you got beaned with a baseball, or you fell out of a tree or you wandered over to see why the firecracker hadn’t gone off yet. When you get old, you just wake up injured one day.

“Dude, my knee is killing me,” I said one morning, and that was the beginning of my month of limping around.

Being injured isn’t as much fun when you have a toddler in your house. You have to be careful about how much you complain, which ruins the most fun part of being injured.

“My knee hurts,” Evan announced last week, mimicking my limp.

“How’d you hurt it?” I asked.

“Because,” he replied. You’d be amazed how many questions can be answered that way.

Kara, now at the beginning of her third trimester, has much more to whine about than I do, but she also has to mind what she says in front of Evan. He recently walked up to us and announced in his whiniest voice, “I’m craaaampy.”

You do what you can for your children, but in the end, all you can really do is hope that your two-year-old experiences minimal discomfort with his uterus.

A few nights ago, I opened my laptop with our parrot/child in the room.

“Wanna push the buttons!” he said, trying for the keyboard as I brushed his hands away.

“I just need a second to finish this one thing,” I replied.

“Wanna push the buttons!” he insisted.

“Okay, okay. How do we ask?” I said, surrendering without wanting him to think he’d won.

“Pwease,” he said. I put the laptop into hibernate mode and pushed the keyboard toward him.

He mashed the buttons with glee, saying “Almost done, almost done, almost done.”

It took me a second to realize that he was imitating me, repeating what I say while I’m on my laptop.

“Push you down the slide, Daddy,” he said, bored with the laptop, motioning toward his big plastic school bus with the little three-foot slide on the back.

It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

You can bean Mike Todd with a baseball at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Sunbathing in a winter wonderland

2011-12-26T00:24:00.002-04:00

“What that guy doin’?” my son Evan asked as the flight attendantput on a yellow life vest and pretended to inflate it.

“He just has to show us a few things before we can go fly inthe sky,” I explained.

“Want that guy done so airplane take off,” Evan said. A keen student of the human condition, Evan hadquickly picked up on the importance of griping about the minor inconveniencesof air travel.

Thirty minutes later, as Evan played peek-a-boo with his momacross the aisle, I pointed out the window and said, “Look, Evan, we’re abovethe clouds now!”

I couldn’t wait to see his little eyes take in this brandnew sight, his sense of wonder taking flight as the heavens spread out beforehim. Evan looked out the window for amoment, saw the sun glinting off the countless miles of puffy clouds beyond theairplane’s wing, then pointed at the little TV on the seat back in front of himand said, “Wanna watch Dora.”

If he’d cared to look, Evan could have had a perfect viewout the window. He sat perched in thecar seat that I’d lugged from the airport parking lot to his seat on the plane,which was as easy as dragging a recliner for about two miles, stopping once towedge it through an X-ray machine.

When we left our house that morning, it was 40 degrees anddrizzly, perhaps the least pleasant type of weather that doesn’t require FEMAto assist afterwards. When we landed in Fort Myers, Florida,it was 72 degrees and sunny. Sometimes, it’stough to remember why living in the Northeast seemed like such a good idea.

We were travelling to Floridafor the wedding of Kara’s cousin, Lori, at the beach. Before we left, as I packed my sandals andbathing suit, I realized that the Northeast did have at least one major thinggoing for it: The promise that you’ll never have to take your shirt off inpublic for at least five months after Thanksgiving. This is quite a benefit, since vast swaths ofmy body have recently become indistinguishable in many important ways from pecanpie filling.

I’m not the only person to recognize this benefit. When he could pick anywhere in the world tolive, why would Santa choose the North Pole over Naples? So he’d never have to take off his big red suit in front of anyone,that’s why. Around Christmastime,there’s no guarantee that you’ll get to keep your bowl full of jelly underwraps unless you live in a frozen wasteland.

“Kwissmas lights!” Evan said as we drove around Naples in the eveningwith the windows down, admiring the palm trees wrapped in lights. The scene was beautiful, but not right. Christmas is supposed to be a holiday thatdistracts you from the misery of winter. When a warm breeze is caressing your skin, good tidings and cheer just feellike overkill.

Also, what do you get your dad for Christmas when theweather never gets cold enough for him to need a sweater? No thanks. You can keep your seventy-degree Decembers, Florida. I’ll be whistling as I chip the ice off my windshield at the mall, Dad’ssweater in my shopping bag, the evidence of my Thanksgiving indiscretionssafely tucked beneath seventeen layers of down and Gore-Tex.

We’re hopping back on a plane tomorrow to come home, and asmuch as we enjoyed the perfect weather and the beautiful wedding, we’ll be gladto get back to our little piece of frozen wasteland. If we stayed here any longer, we just might startto think that the most wonderful time of the year doesn’t have to involve bodilyfluids frozen to our faces.

You can put Mike Toddinto his upright and locked position at mikectodd@gmail.com.

An unlikely vehicle for good news

2011-12-19T01:02:00.003-04:00

My wife Kara and I stood on either side of the front door, watching the red beams of light streaking across our yard from the ambulance in our neighbor’s driveway.

“Should we see if there’s anything we can do?” I asked, already knowing that of course there wasn’t.

“I can see that your house is full of emergency medical personnel, but I just wanted to let you know that I got my lifesaving merit badge in tenth grade, in case you need me.”

So we watched for a few more moments, long enough to see a cop car roll into Jimmy’s driveway, then decided that we were inching towards crossing the line from concerned neighbors to gawkers, so we went back to the living room.

“I guess we could wait and see if he needs anything later,” Kara said.

I tried to picture a circumstance under which our checking in with Jimmy would be more helpful than intrusive.

“Anything I can do for you, Jimmy?” I’d ask.

“Oh, yeah, this devastating life event just reminded me – we need milk. Think you could pick some up for us?” he’d reply.

In the end, we decided that the most neighborly thing to do would be to let Jimmy and his wife Christina have their privacy, then check in with them later.

A few nights after that, I took our dog out for a stroll and saw Jimmy in his garage, banging things around. It seemed a good sign that he wasn’t wearing a full body cast, though we hadn’t seen Christina since that night.

“Hey, Jimmy!” I called out from halfway down his driveway.

“Whoa! You scared me,” he said. Someone should invent a wristwatch with one of those friendly little “I’m sneaking up behind you” bells that little girls and Dutch people have on their bikes.

“I saw the ambulance here the other night. Just wanted to make sure you guys were okay,” I said.

“It was nothing. I just had a little heart attack,” Jimmy replied, in the same way he might have said that he just had a little snack to tide him over ‘til dinner.

“Oh my god, Jimmy, are you serious?” I asked.

“No, no, no,” he said, laughing. “I don’t think I’ve told you, but Christina’s pregnant. She was having some pain, and we’re both worrywarts, so I called 911. As soon as I dialed, I thought maybe I shouldn’t have done that. They took her to the hospital, and we were back home in two hours. She’s totally fine.”

This is their first pregnancy, so they’re understandably jumpy. Kara is entering the sixth month of her second pregnancy, and after enduring all-day morning sickness, stretched ligaments and pinched nerves, we continue to be amazed that there are so many humans everywhere. Seems like more people would have decided that they’d rather just get a pug instead.

“Christina has been sick for five months straight,” Jimmy said. “She says, ‘I thought this was supposed to be a magical experience. Except for the fact that there’s a baby at the end of this, there’s nothing magical about it.’”

Then he paused and said, “It’s good to be a guy sometimes, isn’t it?”

So instead of having a calamity next door, it turns out that we’re getting a new little neighbor. As a nice coincidence, Christina and Kara are both due in April, so we won’t be the only ones in the neighborhood with our lights on at 3am this spring.

Misery might love company, but so does crazy baby-induced exhaustion. And joy.

You can sneak up on Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

It’s beginning to look a lot like bedlam

2011-12-11T23:25:00.001-04:00

“What do you think you’re doing?” my wife Kara asked. I froze. Once that question has been asked, it’s a safe bet that it’s already too late to provide a satisfactory answer.

“Eating a candy cane?” I asked.

“Right, you’re eating a candy cane ten minutes after we hung them on the tree. Candy canes are ornaments,” she said.

“Delicious ornaments,” I agreed.

This is our first year with a Christmas tree that came from the ground rather than Home Depot, so we’re still getting our traditions in order. Kara grew up in a candy-caneless household, so she can be forgiven for not knowing standard consumption practices.

“Each person is allowed to eat two candy canes per day,” I explained.

“Two a day? The tree would be barren in a week. Let’s just buy some extras, and you can eat them out of the box,” she suggested.

She’s so funny sometimes. Eating a candy cane out of the box when free-range candy canes are hanging in their natural habitat in the next room would be like strolling through a ripe orange grove while drinking a glass of Tang.

Kara and I never bothered with making too much of a fuss over Christmas decorations in the past because we were never home for Christmas, always turning our menagerie into a roadshow. We want our son Evan and his forthcoming sibling to grow up having Christmas at home, though, so this year, the grandparents are trekking to us, and our old plastic tree is keeping the squirrels company in the attic.

“This one’s all scraggly,” Kara said as we wandered around the tree farm last weekend.

“This one’s too short,” I said.

“Dis one!” Evan said, pointing to a sprout that would have been better qualified to serve as a garnish at Christmas dinner.

Eventually, we found a winner, though I’m not 100% sure that the tree viewed it that way.

When we decided to get a real tree, we didn’t quite understand the responsibility we were taking on. Getting a real tree is like having a new pet in the house. You have to constantly give it water and clean up after it. You wouldn’t think that a dead tree would require that much care, what with it already being dead, but nobody seems to have told the tree, which is drinking like a former child star.

I’m not sure the trees in our front yard appreciate the Christmas treatment, either. As I wrapped lights around our weeping cherry tree, occasionally snapping off twigs and apologizing, I got the sense that the tree viewed this experience the same way a pug might view being dressed up in doll clothing.

“Oh, we’re doing this again? Fantastic. Yes, please, make me beautiful. Oh, I look so much better now. Clearly, you have a better aesthetic sense than nature does,” the tree would say.

But all the hubbub does seem to be working its magic on Evan, who gets more jazzed about Christmas every day, which is really the point. Last year, he understood that wrapping paper was fun to wave around, and that was about the extent of it. This year, you can already see the Christmas spirit taking hold.

“Luvoo, Wemphis,” Evan said after he helped hang some candy canes on the tree, expressing his love for our dog, Memphis. He walked over and wrapped his arms around her. When he noticed that Memphis was just standing there, not returning his hug, Evan looked up at us and explained, “Wemphis no have arms.”

Which will significantly reduce her chances of getting in trouble for plucking candy canes off the tree.

You can dress Mike Todd in doll clothing at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Heeding the call of duty, and nature

2011-12-04T23:26:00.001-04:00

“No, Evan, those aren't yours,” I said, proud of myself for being a good parent. If Bernie Madoff’s dad had taken similar corrective action many years ago, the world might still think that a Ponzi scheme is a mischievous but harmless plan hatched by Potsie and Fonzi, perhaps to steal some of Mrs. Cunningham’s meatloaf.

“Wahpops!” Evan protested, holding out his ill-gotten Dum Dums. Just moments earlier, I’d watched Evan root around in the back of the cubby next to his, pulling out two small lollipops. He knew exactly where they were, so he must have watched his mark stash them there earlier in the day.

We were the last people leaving daycare, so nobody else had witnessed Evan’s first attempt at grand theft sucrose.

“Those aren’t your lollipops, Evan. Please put them back, right now,” I said.

“Wahpops! Wahpops!” he cried as he put them back into his friend Logan’s cubby.

The tears continued well into the ride home.

“I’m sorry you’re so upset, buddy, but it’s not nice to take other people’s things,” I said.

The hollering was tough to listen to, but I was glad that Evan’s first experience with stealing was unpleasant. A little shame goes a long way. My parents caught me stealing a pack of gum from Wawa when I was four, and the experience so traumatized me that I never stole anything again while they were looking.

At Evan’s daycare, the kids earn lollipops in return for successful visits to the potty. Ordinarily, I hate to miss out on Evan’s learning experiences during the day, but this is one activity I’m happy to farm out.

Before I’d ever changed a diaper, I assumed that any sane person would want their kid potty-trained within about the first week home from the hospital. You’d just prop your kid on the john until things started clicking, then you could spend all the time you would have spent at the changing table on the couch playing Call of Duty.

Now that Evan’s two-and-a-half, though, he’s having to drag me into the bathroom, demanding to be potty trained.

“Go potty, Daddy,” he’ll say, tugging on my hand, and I’ll sigh.

“Okay, okay,” I’ll reply.

We’ll spend the next two minutes getting him ready, peeling off clothing and arranging his seat and stepstool. Then he’ll sit down, kick the bowl with his heels three times and say, “I’m done.”

“You didn’t do anything, Evan,” I’ll say.

“Done!” he’ll reply.

Then we’ll spend the next five minutes putting his clothes back on and washing his hands, getting ready to repeat the process again in half an hour. After some initial signs of progress, we've gone 0 for our last fifty attempts. We're in danger of becoming less productive than Congress.

As much as changing diapers isn’t the most fun thing to do, there are scarier things to contemplate. When a dog has accidents, you’re pretty much guaranteed that they’ll happen on the floor. With a kid, there’s a decent chance you’ll have to burn some furniture in the backyard. When I look at our couch and how it fits perfectly in the room, I think I’ll be fine with changing Evan's diaper until sometime just before his prom.

The morning after the Great Lollipop Caper, his teacher met us outside her classroom as I dropped Evan off.

“Oh, did you see that Evan got two lollipops yesterday for going to the potty? He was so proud, he ran over and stashed them in his cubby to show you later,” she said.

This time, the shame was mine. Evan had stashed his rewards one cubby to the left by accident, and was too upset by my reaction to explain what had happened.

Sometimes, when you least expect it, the Dum Dum turns out to be you.

It's easy to take candy from Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

It’s a male pronoun!

2011-11-27T23:36:00.001-04:00

“I can’t get him to turn the right way,” the nurse said as she slid the wand across my wife Kara’s gooped-up belly.

I glanced at Kara to see if she’d picked up on what the nurse had just told us.

Three years ago, when I accompanied Kara to the ultrasound for her first pregnancy, the nurse made a big deal out of telling us the baby’s gender.

“Are you sure you want to know?” she asked. We both nodded, leaning in.

“It’s a boy!” she said with a big smile. Balloons and confetti fell from the ceiling, and Kelly Clarkson walked slowly into the room singing, “A Moment Like This.”

For the second pregnancy, though, the nurse didn’t bother with the big reveal. If I’d understood correctly, she had just informed us via pronoun choice.

“Everything checks out! You have a healthy baby,” she said as she put the wand away and snapped off her gloves.

I raised my hand. A dude in a gyno’s office needs to be careful not to speak out of turn.

“You’ve said ‘him’ several times. How sure are you that it’s a boy?” I asked, after she called on me.

“It’s still early to tell, but I’m 90 percent sure,” the nurse replied.

Kara and I had been careful not to have a preference about the gender, since our preferences would have little influence over the outcome, kind of like watching an Eagles game this season.

Still, now that we knew we were having another boy, I started to get nervous. Our debut boy had been such a success, had we set ourselves up for a sophomore slump?

“We’re good parents. We’ll be fine,” Kara said.

But already, by the time we got home, the slacking off began. With Evan’s ultrasound three years ago, we scanned it immediately and emailed the grainy images to our parents, plus anyone else who would look at them and probably several more who wouldn’t. You couldn’t tell whether you were looking at an image of a baby or a satellite map of the Eastern Seaboard, but during those first few weeks, we were second only to Ken Burns in making people look at black-and-white photos.

This time, though, a couple weeks after the appointment, Kara said, “Oh, we never scanned the ultrasound pictures.”

“Meh, the scanner’s not plugged in. Too much hassle,” I replied.

This is how it begins. The firstborn gets a hand-embroidered birth announcement, a scrapbook detailing
every moment of their first year and enough photos to create an animated flipbook that would take a year to flip through. The next child has to search through newspaper archives to find proof that they were born.

We’ve heard from many parents who say they simply didn’t have time to focus on taking pictures or doing arts and crafts once they had more than one child. The historical record stops upon the second child’s birth, leaving future archaeologists scrambling to piece together the events that led to the choice of a rubber ducky theme on the second child’s first birthday.

Kara and I have vowed not to let this happen to us, but it’s already happening. Last time, we painted Evan’s nursery several months in advance, agonizing over the color choices, straining our eyes to see the difference between Polar Sky, Morning Glory and Cloudy Day. Paint companies could spare us all a lot of hassle by just having four colors to choose from, calling them: Kitchen, Living Room, Bedroom and Apartment/Ceiling.

To get the second nursery ready, we’re just arranging a pile of old clothes into a nest in the corner of the garage.

No, actually, we’re already looking at swatches again. And hoping that his older brother will help our next son prepare for the parent paparazzi.

You can make a nest in your garage for Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Turning over some old leaves

2011-11-21T00:34:00.001-04:00

I snuck around the corner with my camera, unaware that I was about to get blindsided. Photographers often get attacked by their subjects, but I’d been lulled into a false sense of safety, perhaps due to the lack of grizzly bears in the area, or perhaps because I was in my living room.

My son Evan yelped as he scrambled around his little inflatable ball pit with his older cousin Jordyn. “I’m going to get you, Evan!” Jordyn said, and Evan squealed with delight.

I crept into the room slowly, as to not alert my quarry. As the camera came up to my eye, Evan spotted me. He stopped playing and looked distressed.

“Aw, he’d rather I joined in the fun,” I thought.

“Go ‘way, Daddy,” Evan said. My heart, and then my camera, dropped. I thought he wasn't supposed to
talk to me like that until he was a teenager. My demotion from Hero of the Universe to Embarrassing Loser Who Follows Me Around happened about a decade sooner than I’d expected.

“Evan, that's not very nice,” I replied.

He looked away, and I could tell he felt bad about hurting my feelings. He didn’t want to be not very nice. Fortunately, I’d just taught him an important lesson about being polite.

After a few more beats, Evan looked back at me and said, “Pwease go ‘way, Daddy.”

It was an improvement of sorts, like putting fresh-grated parmesan on moldy pizza.

I couldn’t really blame him for wanting some uninterrupted time with his cousins, though. Our house, which is normally the most boring place without CSPAN cameras, was buzzing with cousins last weekend for a family get-together. Or beeping with cousins, rather than buzzing, since most of them spent a good deal of time gazing into various electronic devices.

“Do you have an iPod Touch? An iPad? A Wii? A laptop? What’s the password on the computer?” my little cousins asked as they scoured the house for entertainment. Even the old Playstation2 in our basement, a relic of the Great Nerd Era of my early twenties, was unearthed. If the microwave had a bigger digital display, the kids probably would have played that, too.

I’m pretty sure the kids all realized that I was part of the family, but it’s entirely possible they thought I was live-in tech support.

Of course, when I was a kid, I was equally entranced with video games, and back then, games consisted of four rectangles of various sizes moving around the screen, set to rhythmic monotone beeping. If I was ten years old right now, I’d probably see less sunlight than your average slot machine.

Actually, the kids did break away from the video games for long enough to scrape together a leaf pile in the front yard.

“Weaf piyoh! Weaf piyoh!” Evan yelled. As far as I know, he’d never seen a leaf pile before, but it seems to be one of those things that come pre-loaded in the human brain under Things That Are Awesome, which consists mainly of the subfolder: Things I Can Jump In/On.

Before our guests arrived, I’d spent several hours blowing a Shenandoah’s worth of leaves off of our yard. To assemble a decent leaf pile, the kids dragged the leaves back out, creating large trails as they walked their armloads across our property. You have to respect the initiative of children who are willing to unrake a yard by hand. Too bad I couldn’t figure out a way to harness that energy to get them to do my chores.

In the end, I was glad they did it. Leaf fights are good for the soul.

When they were done, for the first time in at least a decade, I got to enjoy jumping around in a leaf pile, too.

Until Evan kicked me out.

You can rake Mike Todd off your yard at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Trying to change the Chanel

2011-11-13T22:44:00.001-04:00

“Babe, please don’t make a scene,” I begged.

Kara coughed and waved a napkin in front of her face.

“I can barely breathe. It’sso strong I can smell it with my eyes,” she wheezed.

I smiled at the waitress as she walked past, glad that she didn’tstop to ask any questions.

Usually, when an aromatic offense has been committed, I’m willing toclaim whatever culpability can’t be pinned on the dog, but in this case, myinnocence was never in doubt. Theperpetrators had just been seated in the booth directly behind us, three womenwho must have applied their perfume in the parking lot, using sponges borrowedfrom a softball team’s carwash. When Iturned around to sneak a glance at the cause of the assault on our nostrils, Iswear I actually saw shimmering plumes of perfume rising off of the women likeheat off a desert highway.

Our friend Jim, sitting across the table from us, smiled and waitedto see what entertainment might ensue.

On a normal day, Kara wouldn’t have made a fuss. But she’s four months pregnant now, so normaldays don’t happen anymore.

If you’ve never spent time with a pregnant woman, you might notrealize that they aren’t like regular people. Their noses have evolved to give them Super Scent Sensitivity andEnhanced Revulsion, perhaps the most useless superpowers of all.

The last time Kara was pregnant, we ventured out for a nice birthdaydinner, and I made the mistake of applying a single squirt of cologne first.

“What’s that awful smell?” she said as we drove to the restaurant.

“I’m wearing the cologne you got me, the stuff you said I shouldwear more often,” I said.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she said, hanging her head out thewindow.

At lunch with me and Jim, though, she didn’t have the luxury of notkeeping her head and arms within the vehicle at all times. She scanned the restaurant, looking for anescape. To protect the anonymity of theperfume-bathers, it’s probably best not to mention which restaurant we weredining in, except that when we there, we were family. Paying family.

Our drinks, salads and breadsticks had already been delivered, somoving to another table discreetly would have been impossible, and might haverequired a U-Haul. The tables around uswere packed, anyway.

“Seriously, I think might be sick. I have to move,” Kara said, waving the air in front of her nose. I glanced behind me again, checking to see ifthe women had noticed the commotion. Fortunately,it didn’t seem that they had. Webenefitted from the cover provided by the hairdo of the woman sitting closestto us, a perfect globe that would not have fit through a regulation basketballhoop.

All of a sudden, Kara had a brilliant idea, one that would justabout solve the problem.

“Jim, will you switch sides with us?” she asked.

Jim, being a good sport who also happened to not be pregnant, agreed.

We slid our plates and drinks around and surreptitiously reseatedourselves.

“Ah, it’s better over here,” Kara said, and I agreed. The women, still involved in their own conversation,seemed none the wiser. Almost everyonewas happy.

Jim’s eyes started to water. He seemed to be having difficulty breathing.

“I think this might be Chanel Number Infinity,” he whispered. We decided that a simple mathematical errormight have caused a regular bottle of Chanel #5 to become Chanel^5. Whether this was Chanel to the Fifth Power ornot, this was not a fragrance that was meant to be worn in any venue smallerthan the Superdome.

In the end, we all survived, even Jim. And Kara and I won’t be surprised if our nextbaby is born smelling like Marilyn Monroe.

You can fail Mike Todd on hissniff test at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Bull Hill

2011-11-09T21:59:00.000-04:00

Here are some pics from Monday, when the pooch and I took a hike up Bull Hill in the Hudson Highlands. Decision to burn a half-day of vacation: validated.

Strip mining in the morning

2011-11-06T23:45:00.001-04:00

I could no longer sit idle and watch the desecrationcontinue. Evan’s plastic spoon moveddeftly through his Lucky Charms, strip mining out all the marshmallows and leavingnothing but oat rubble behind.

“No strip mining,” I said, pointing to his bowl.

He stared back at me from his high chair, his ability tocomply hindered by his limited knowledge of mineral extraction techniques.

When I was a kid, myfavorite cereal (that I was allowed to eat) was Raisin Nut Bran, whichconsisted of delicious, nut-rolled raisins surrounded by flakes made of 100%fancy recycled resume paper. I’d noticedthat General Mills had stopped putting enough raisin nuts into the cereal, and,in desperation, considered switching to my parents’ fiber fests.

Then one day, I saw my big sister Amy pour a dry bowl ofRaisin Nut Bran, pick out all the good stuff one-by-one, then pour the flakesback into the box.

“What? The flakes aregross,” she said to my protestations, which is where the conversation ended, sinceshe could beat me up.

“Eat the other stuff, too, not just the marshmallows,” Iexplained to Evan, lest he follow in the path of his wayward relatives.

“Marshmallows,” Evan agreed as he fished a purple horseshoe outof the bowl.

I shook my head as Evan popped the marshmallow into hismouth and started digging for more. Whilehe was distracted, I snuck another sip of orange juice and quickly set the cupback down behind the cereal box.

He glanced up,sensing that something sneaky was going on. I played it cool. In a moment, hereturned to digging. The coast wasclear, and I took another sip. Lettingyour child catch you with juice is like letting your prison guard catch youwith a file. It will be confiscated.

“Juice! Juice!” yourchild will yell, pointing at the cup. After you hand it over, you’ll be forced to watch, powerless, as yourchild pours half of the juice into his mouth while the other half cascades downthe shirt you put on him ten minutes ago.

There was a time when fathers didn’t hide their orange juicefrom their children, but all those dads died of scurvy, so now my kind is all that’sleft.

Having a child who can talk is fantastic in many ways. “I can’t wait to hear what this little personhas to say,” is a common sentiment expressed by parents whose child is not yetof talking age.

Assuming that Evan is a representative sample, though, I cantell you that the children of Americawould like you to know that they want more juice, Daddy. Also, you just drove past a tractor. Tractor! Did you see the tractor? Tractor!

I’m not wild about Evan eating sugary cereal, mostly becauseI never got to eat any when I was a kid, so he should suffer, too. If he wants Cinnamon Toast Crunch, he should spendthe night at Johnny Poole’s house, like I did.

Incidentally, does anyone make regular cinnamon toastanymore? I don’t think I’ve seen a sliceof it in fifteen years. If the world wasa fair place, we’d have kept the cinnamon toast and ditched the Funyuns.

“He shouldn’t be eating this. I never got to eat anything sweeter thanCheerios,” I said to my wife, Kara, as she joined us in the kitchen.

“It’s only on weekends. Besides, you grew up dumping spoonfuls of sugar on everything,” shesaid.

I keep forgetting what she knows and doesn’t know about myupbringing.

She sat down at the table and picked up the cereal boxbefore I had time to react.

“Juice!” Evan yelled.

You can strip mine thegood stuff and leave Mike Todd behind at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Over the railing and through the roof

2011-10-30T22:33:00.001-04:00

“I think I’m going to be sick. I can’t stand this worrying,” my wife Karasaid.

“Mmmph,” I replied.

“Did you really just fall asleep?” she asked.

“Maybe a little. Weall deal with stress in different ways,” I replied.

Kara was tossing and turning because a few hours earlier,our son Evan had taken some big steps towards becoming a big boy. Unfortunately, those steps sent him over therailing of his crib headfirst.

We were standing just outside his door when we heard thewhump and hollering, and we already knew what had happened before we pushed hisdoor open, holding our breath that he’d be okay. And he was, not counting a bloody nose thatstopped after a moment, though Evan seemed to think that counted.

“Climb over the bed and fall on the head!” he proclaimedafter he’d settled down, perhaps inventing a new slogan for a public serviceannouncement.

The conventional wisdom is to leave your child in a cribuntil they won’t stay in it anymore. Ofcourse, toddlers don’t really have a great way to communicate that they’re notso keen on staying in their crib anymore, except to fling themselves over therailing, which does get the point across, but something a bit less dramaticmight be nice.

Most parenting advice is insanely cautious, sometimes borderingon paranoid. Let your child eatpopcorn? Don’t be ridiculous. That’s a choking hazard. Push him around on a Big Wheels without ahelmet? No, a child must be encapsulatedin plastic if moving faster than 1.5 mph. Let him trick-or-treat without SPF 50 rubbed onto his eyelids to keephim from getting a twilight sunburn through his Elmo mask? That’s a trick question. He’s not allowed to wear a mask.

But letting your toddler plummet headfirst from a height thatwould make Greg Louganis flinch? Oh, that’sjust your child’s way of telling you that it’s time for a big boy bed.

The next day, Kara ordered a toddler railing for thecrib. Basically, it’s the same as therailing that’s already there, except that it’s topped with coils of barbedwire. We’re told that this should keephim safe, as long as he doesn’t have access to a spoon and a poster of RitaHayworth.

While we’re waiting for the rail to get here, we’ve piledenough pillows and down comforters around the crib that Jackie Chan could falloff a scaffolding and enjoy a fluffy landing there.

Of course, once Evan’s crib is converted into a bed, we’llbe thrust headlong into yet another new phase of parenthood, the phase wherethe child is no longer caged for half of his life. The idea is frightening. If given the choice between having a toddleror a hyena roaming our house at night unattended, I’m not sure which we’d pick.

The first round of baby-proofing we’d performed over a yearago assumed that a parent would be in the room with the child. Now, we have to assume that Evan will haveaccess to some areas of the house while we’re asleep, a prospect that iskeeping us both up at night, some directly, some indirectly.

“Our room is a deathtrap!” Kara declared last night in thedarkness, picturing Evan scaling every unsecured piece of furniture.

“Mmmph,” I replied.

“Really? How can yousleep?” she asked.

“I guess I can’t,” I said.

Round 2 of baby-proofing the house has already begun. I’ll be spending the next several daysbolting and strapping every loose item in the house to our walls. By the time I’m done, you’ll be able to openall of our doors and windows, pick our house up and shake it, and nothing willcome out.

You won’t really be able to do that, of course. The doors and windows will be nailed shut.

You can drop Mike Toddon his head at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Hike the Hudson Valley

2011-10-27T23:19:00.000-04:00

For the past year, Evan's been dragging me along on tons of hikes around the Hudson Valley. We decided it would be a fun project to build a website documenting those hikes, and creating online trail guides so that other people could get out and enjoy these cool places.

The result, hikethehudsonvalley.com, just went online last week. I know 50% of the people who read this blog are my mom, and the other 50% might never visit the Hudson Valley, but I sure wouldn't complain if anyone wanted to like the Facebook page for the site, or click the "Like" button at the top of the homepage.

Whether anyone uses the site or not, it's been a fun project. Here are some shots from some of our adventures:

Evan's big announcement

2011-10-23T21:12:00.001-04:00

“Should we just tell her?” my wife Kara whispered.

“Give her a minute,” I said.

Our dog raced in giant circles around the yard, stretchingher legs after the four-hour drive. Ourson Evan did the same, running through the waist-deep pachysandra, giggling. When we arrive at a destination these days,we fling open the car doors and things come flying out like we’re driving Pandora’sBox.

When my mom came out to greet us, we thought she’dimmediately notice the “I’M GOING TO BE A BIG BROTHER” T-shirt that Evan was wearing,since we hadn’t yet told her the news. Butafter many anticlimactic minutes, we were about to give up.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Kara said, and she headed downthe walkway.

Just as I went to grab another duffel bag out of the car, mymom bent over and started reading Evan’s shirt out loud.

“I’m going to be a…..” she said, then her eyes did thisthing like she was a rubber frog and someone just stomped on her butt.

She looked at me, mouth agape, and I nodded.

“Oh! OH! OOOOOH!” she yelled, and she clapped herhands over her head as she ran to hug each of us. Evan seemed excited, too, and he’ll probablyremain that way until he learns what the word “share” means.

We had expected my dad to be home on that Friday afternoonas well, but he was still at work. Dadactually retired several years ago, and he stayed that way for about aweek. Then he went back to work for thesame company as a contractor, working a few days a week, which now means the daysfrom Monday to Friday. To the untrainedeye, retirement looks a lot like work. Somebody needs to give that man a ukulele and a hammock.

“I can’t wait to see how long it takes your dad to noticeEvan’s shirt when he gets home,” Mom said.

I didn’t hold out much hope for Dad. He’s a wonderful person in every imaginableway, but he wouldn’t notice if Don King got a crew cut. He’s just not the kind of guy to payattention to a thing like a toddler’s T-shirt. To be fair, toddler’s T-shirts don’t usually have much important to say,beyond letting you know that the wearer is a fan of dinosaurs and/or the Gap.

When Dad finally got home, he gave Evan a giant hug, saidhello to everybody, then went back to his room to get changed.

“He didn’t notice,”Mom said.

A few minutes later, down in the basement, we kept givingEvan excuses to face his grandpa.

“Bring this puzzle to Grandpa,” we’d say.

“Oh, why thank you,” Grandpa would reply, helping Evan putthe puzzle together without passing a glance at his shirt.

Mom frowned at me, and I could tell the clue-giving wasabout to begin. Subtlety, not practicedvery often in my family, wasn’t doing the trick.

“What nice T-shirts you both have on,” Mom said, deciding togo the Big Bad Wolf route.

“Thanks,” Dad replied. He looked down at his Modesto Nuts minor-league baseball shirt that mysister had given him, and agreed that it was a fine shirt indeed.

Mom frowned again.

“Evan’s shirt is nice, too,” she said. Dad nodded, in complete agreement that navyblue looked nice on Evan.

“It’s a really nice shirt he has on,” Mom said.

Dad’s radar finally picked up something out of the ordinary,and he squared Evan’s shoulders so that he could get a good look.

I snapped a picture of Dad’s face in the exact moment that thewords registered.

All the better toremember it with.

You can wish Mike Toddthe best of luck at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Things that go insane in the night

2011-10-16T22:54:00.004-04:00

“Shut up!” I yelled, flinging a pillow into the darkness. The pillow hit the wall without finding itsmark.

“I’m not sure that’s the most constructive way to handleit,” my wife Kara mumbled.

“Woof!” our dog Memphissaid for the twentieth time, refusing to be cowed by my downy projectiles. She kept barking and running around ourbedroom, making it nearly impossible to lock on to her. Being high-strung might be a nice trait for somethings, like phone poles, but it’s not the best quality for a dog in the middleof the night.

“It’s five-thirty in the morning and you’re going to wakethe baby. Let us sleep, animal, please!”I pleaded.

“You’re being louder than the dog,” Kara said as I retrievedmy pillow from the floor. “And whileyou’re up, could you grab me some string cheese from the fridge? I’m hungry.”

I grumbled down the stairs with Memphis close behind. Rain streaked down the windows and poundedthe roof in the darkness. If not for thepiercing sound that shattered the relative silence, I never would have noticedthe bearded face pressed against the glass beside our front door, peering in atme.

“DING DONG!” the doorbell called out, and I jumped out of mymasculine pajama pants. Memphis went berserk, skidding across thefloor, her Scooby-Doo legs churning before her feet had traction, her barksechoing off the walls and gaining strength from each other.

If someone had transcribed her barks and typed them intoGoogle Translate, selecting to translate from Dog to English, the resultingtext would have read: “I was right! Iwas right! I was right! I was right!”

I ran to the front door and opened it. Kara’s sister Jill, her husband Kris andtheir dog Luna were huddled under our small overhang. We’d said our goodbyes the night before,since they were leaving our house at an insanely early hour to join some oftheir friends for a day of rock climbing, after the showers passed. We’d heard them clunking around while theywere leaving in the wee hours, but the house had been quiet for quite a while.

“We locked our car keys on your kitchen counter,” Kris said.

“How long have you guys been out here?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Fifteenminutes or so. You weren’t answeringyour cell phones,” he said.

“You could have rung the doorbell earlier,” I said.

“We didn’t want to wake anyone up at first, but I’ve rung itabout fifteen times,” he replied. Ididn’t realize that we couldn’t hear the doorbell from our bedroom, since nobody’sever tried it while we were sleeping. Ormaybe they have, and we’ve missed out on countless late-night opportunities toorder magazine subscriptions or change our religion.

Memphis,meanwhile, was slapping her tail against the front door, taking a victory lapfor actually being right for once. Forthe past four years, if Kara or I set a book down on a table, or hit our elbowsagainst the wall, or tapped our fingers on a countertop, Memphis would fly into a barking frenzy,convinced that someone was at the front door.

But when an actual person showed up, I’d listen to therumble of their engine in the driveway, their car doors slam, and their footstepscoming up the walkway while Memphiswould sit there silently, wondering if there was anything important she’dforgotten to lick.

This time, though, Memphiswas right, and if not for her willingness to drive us all insane, and Kara’swillingness to make me get stuff out of the fridge for her in the middle of thenight, Jill and Kris might still be huddled by our front door, waiting forsomeone selling magazine subscriptions to come rescue them.

You can launch projectilesat Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Attack of the flying syringes

2011-10-09T23:12:00.001-04:00

“Don’t get bug bites all over his face,” my wife Kara saidas I took our son Evan out the door for an adventure.

“We’ll be moving too fast for the bugs to catch us, rightbuddy?” I said.

“Seriously, though. School pictures are on Monday at daycare. Don’t bring him back with bug bites,” Karasaid.

I waited until the door shut behind us to roll my eyes.

“Ready for an adventure?” I asked Evan.

“Benture,” he agreed. Kids are game for pretty much anything, because they have no idea what’sgoing on.

As we started our hike, I forgot all about the bug spray inmy backpack. Even if I’d remembered, Iprobably wouldn’t have put any on Evan. Getting a few bug bites builds character, just like every other bad thingthat happens to you. If you getintroduced to someone with a lot of character, you’ve probably just met someonewho’s had a rotten life. Also, when Iwas twelve, I got some bug spray on my rain jacket, and it melted the sleeve,so I worry that putting too much of that stuff on Evan, especially around hisface, might turn him into The Joker.

About fifteen minutes into the hike, I noticed a buzzing inthe woods, the hum of a million tiny helicopters. I wanted to stop and dig out the bug spray,but with Evan comfortable on my back, I decided to just keep plowing ahead, likea cow swimming through piranha-infested waters.

Something about the wet weather this year has created insaneswarms of radioactive mosquitoes. Regularmosquitoes are one thing, but these were X-Men mosquitoes, flying syringes, mutatedto extract more blood than the Red Cross, without even giving us free pretzelsafterwards.

By the time I got to a stopping point to put some bug sprayon Evan, it was too late. You couldn’treally tell that anything was awry when we got home, but the next morning, whenEvan woke up, he looked like he had chicken pox. Somehow, the mosquitoes knew to zero in onhis face, which had blazing red bumps taking up more surface area than MikeTyson’s tattoos.

“His school pictures are tomorrow!” Kara said as I slatheredCortaid on Evan’s face.

“He’s resilient. It’ll look much better tomorrow,” I said.

A few minutes later, as Kara showered, I lay on the floor playingblocks with Evan, contemplating what a terrible father I was.

“Push the wagon,” Evan said as he pushed his plastic wagonaround the corner, out of my line of sight.

I could hear him emptying his wagon by the front door.

“Don’t leave your toys by the door, buddy,” I said, then Iheard a WHAM! followed by much screaming.

By the time I rounded the corner, Evan had a goose egg onhis forehead that made him look Cro-Magnon, with three small scrapes on hischin. It was the worst his face hadlooked in his entire life, possibly excluding his zeroeth birthday.

“What happened?” Kara asked, running down the stairs.

The truth was, I wasn’t exactly sure. Evan’s face had made contact with his wagonat high velocity, but the details weren’t clear. He could have been riding the wagon like askateboard for all I knew.

“I might skip applying for Father of the Year this year,” Isaid after his crying had subsided.

In the end, Kara didn’t have a thing to worry about. Evan might have been a little banged up afterour weekend adventures, but those photography companies airbrush schoolpictures like they’re going on the cover of Vogue. Besides, I’m pretty sure that if you lookedin-between all the bumps, scrapes and mosquito bites on Evan’s face, you couldsee lots of brand-new character.

You can swarm Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A basement over troubled water

2011-10-03T00:02:00.000-04:00

“Could we live at your house for a few days, or maybe aweek?” our distraught friend Anna asked early on a recent Saturday morning.

“Let me just check with Kara,” I said, but Kara was alreadynodding her head. She’d heard the entireconversation, since I had it on speakerphone, my office-worker arms too weak tohold the phone to my ear for any extended period.

The decision to open our house to Anna, her husband Allenand their two cats was an easy one. Onceyou get into your thirties, you don’t have as many opportunities to be a goodfriend. It was easier in college, whenany given evening might require you to scrape a friend off the sidewalk andfireman-carry them home, where you could safely draw on their face.

We needed to bank some friendship tokens anyway, since we’dmissed the party where some of our other friends had assisted Anna and Allen infortifying the perimeter of their house with sandbags. Having a toddler might prevent us from takingcool vacations with our friends, and we haven’t seen a movie in the theatersince the original Home Alone cameout, but at least parenthood also occasionally gets us out of dragging 100-lbburlap sacks through the muck.

In the end, even with sandbags piled around their house, theencroaching drainage pond behind their property was not to be denied itsquarry. The constant rain, which seemedto have begun sometime during the Nagano Olympics, refused to relent, and therising water poured into their newly finished basement.

“I think I can, I think I can,” their sump pump said, but itcouldn’t.

Anna and Allen decided that continued battle with theelements was futile. They cut the powerto their house and came to stay with us until the world dried out.

Benjamin Franklin said that fish and visitors stink afterthree days, but his visitors probably didn’t bring awesome kitty-cats thatcould entertain his toddler for hours on end, allowing him to sit peacefully onthe couch, playing Tower Defense: Lost Earth on his iPod, only glancing up everyfew minutes to thwart his toddler’s stated intention to “sit on kitty.”

For their part, Anna and Allen spent much of their timetrying to figure out how to get their lives back to normal. If you’ve spent any part of your day tryingto get ahold of FEMA, you’ve probably had a pretty rough week.

A few days into their stay, Allen parked his motorcycle inthe garage we weren’t using while Kara’s car was in the shop. When someone parks a Harley-Davidson in yourgarage, and you have to walk past it to take out the trash, did you know that it’simpossible to resist the urge to sit on it, grab the handlebars and go “Vroom,vroom, screeeeee!”? The strange thingis, you’ll feel a little bit cooler afterwards, even if you’d have died ifanyone had caught you doing it, kind of like spray tanning.

About a week after they moved in, just as we’d gotten usedto having dinner conversations that didn’t revolve around horsies and tractors,Anna announced, “It’s safe to move back to our place now. We’re going to go home and start tearing theplace apart and putting it back together.”

We’d never had guests stay for that long, and after theyleft, the house felt just a little bit empty, the same feeling I rememberhaving as a kid when the slumber party was over. The next morning, our son walked around ourbasement, searching in vain for a cat to sit upon.

“No kitties,” he reported through his tears.

With their own basement gutted and dried out, Anna and Allenhave started reclaiming some sanity in their lives. Everyone in their house is breathing a littleeasier now. Especially their cats.

You can sandbag Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Hyundai of the Apocalypse

2011-09-25T22:05:00.005-04:00

“Dude!” my buddy Rob yelled, but nothing could be done. The white Hyundai continued hurtling towardsus, on a collision course with destiny. Destiny being, in this case, the rear bumper of my wife’s Honda Civic.

When I’d picked Rob up at the train station moments earlier,the day seemed full of promise. “You’regoing to get into a wreck very soon,” was not the promise we were shootingfor.

Prior to last week, I was building on a seventeen-year streakwithout a car accident. Cal Ripken, Jr.’sstreak was a measly sixteen years. Butyou know what they say about streaks: If you have a good one going, some moronwill probably mistake their gas for their brakes and that’ll be that.

As we drove about 25 down a crowded street, the white bulletshooting out of the driveway to our right didn’t warrant much attention, untilits complete lack of intention to stop became clear. I swerved left and pressed the gas, and forthe moment just before impact, wondered if I’d accidentally driven us into a demolitionderby.

With an expensive-sounding SMACK!, the Hyundai T-boned our rearpassenger side, jarring me and Rob to the left.

“Boy howdy!” I yelled, because this is a family publication.

Rob whipped around in his seat and reported, “Dude, they’relaughing.”

I pulled off onto the right shoulder as the Hyundai cruisedmerrily past, its two occupants chatting and smiling.

We pulled back onto the road and followed them into the leftturn lane.

“Maybe they’re pulling into this strip mall to talk to usthere,” Rob said.

But the car turned left and just kept on going down a side streetas if nothing had happened. If youhaven’t laid on the horn and blinked your lights at anyone lately, it’s reallymuch more therapeutic than you might think. Still, they just drove along as if we weren’t there.

The car turned into a college campus parking lot and tookits time going up and down the lanes, looking for a spot.

When it finally stopped, Rob jumped out and leaned intotheir window.

“Is something wrong?” one of the girls asked.

“You just smashed into our car back there,” Rob, for somereason, needed to explain.

We should have transcribed the stories that poured forthfrom their car over the next few minutes, in case we ever wanted to adapt theminto a screenplay. The driver wasn’tpaying attention. She mistook the gasfor the brakes. She’s still learning todrive. In any event, neither of themnoticed the accident, as if the huge dent in the front of their car hadappeared there through immaculate collision.

The fact that Rob saw them laughing immediately after impactdid support their contention that they hadn’t noticed anything, which wouldlead a reasonable person, and perhaps even the reader(s) of this column, to wonder,were these two people on drugs? All Ican tell you is that I spent five years at Penn State,including two years living in a fraternity house, so I have no idea what aperson on drugs might look like.

I can tell you who looked sober, though: the owner of thecar, a friend of the two menaces, who came out to survey the damage, and whopromised that we were in good hands. Healso said that, like a good neighbor, he’d be there. This was quite reassuring, since he had noinsurance. He did produce what I believeto be the only driver’s license among the three of them, though.

So our Civic’s in the shop right now, getting $700 inrepairs that, ideally, somebody else will pay for. If you think there’s a great chance of thathappening, though, you’re probably in no condition to operate a motor vehicle.

You can take MikeTodd’s fender on a bender at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Nooks and craggies

2011-09-23T20:15:00.001-04:00

My buddy Rob and I met up last week for a hike in the Mohonk Preserve, up at Bonticou Crag and Table Rocks, just outside of New Paltz, NY. Here are a few pics:

Tell me you don't see Abe Lincoln's profile in this rock.

The pied sandpiper

2011-09-18T23:30:00.001-04:00

“Party rub! Partyrub!” my son Evan screamed, pointing at the front door of the beach house.

“Party rub?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied, glad that I understood. I had no idea what a party rub was, except thatit sounded like something that, if it ever became public, would probably forceyour congressman to resign.

“I can’t say with certitude whether that party rub wasmine.”

But Evan continued pointing at the corner of the door,distressed, yelling “Party rub” over and over.

We had just returned from an afternoon at the beach justoutside of Duck, North Carolina,where Evan had found the sand to be both diverting and delicious.

“At least he’s getting his roughage,” I’d say as Evan plowedthrough the sand with his face, burrowing past the beach chairs of his extendedfamily. He’d then wrinkle his nose and tryto wipe the sand off his tongue, but he’d only succeed in licking more sand offof his hands, which at that point could have been used to take the edges off ofrough-hewn timber.

“Thand in mouf,” he’d say, gesturing toward the situationthat several adults had tried to prevent. Children at the beach are endlessly creative, especially regarding waysto pack sand into their orifices.

Fortunately, he had plenty of other distractions to keep himfrom dwelling for too long on his fifty-grit tongue, like terrorizing thenative waterfowl. Seagulls seemed toknow better than to hang around a two-year-old, taking off for England any timewe wandered close, but sandpipers made tempting targets, always just out ofreach.

“Catch birdie. Catchbirdie,” Evan whispered, arms extended, as he walked after the sandpipers, whichscurried to stay a few steps ahead of him. The birds were in little danger of becoming a toddler’s pet. Since they spend their whole lives skirtingthe edges of crashing waves, sandpipers have plenty of experience staying safelyout of the clutches of destructive forces of nature.

The regular reader(s) of this column might recall that lastweek, I complained that the most damaging storm to hit the East Coast in recentmemory had the audacity to cause me some minor inconvenience, mostly in theform of string cheese that was trapped in my parents’ no-longer-electrified refrigerator. It’s stressful trying to grab food out of someoneelse’s fridge when the power’s out. Ifyou hesitate for one moment too long, you might doom their other perishables tobeing tossed, including their 96-ounce bottle of ketchup, nine years ahead ofits time. It’s easier to drive pastArby’s every fifteen minutes to see if their lights are on.

In any event, North Carolina cleans up hurricanes faster than we evercould have hoped for, allowing us to visit for a shortened week. Just a few days after the storm, Evan wasplowing his face across the beach, getting his US RDA of quartz near the very placeswhere Weather Channel reporters had recently stood, ponchos billowing,demonstrating the havoc that nature can wreak on even the sturdiest hair.

Early in the week, we were returning from the beach to hoseoff Evan’s face and put him down for a nap when he started yelling about theparty rubs.

“Is he pointing at a spider web?” my mother-in-law asked,and the case was cracked. Spiderweb. ‘Piderwub. Party rub.

“Dude, I had no idea what the kid was saying, either,” Dr.Doolittle would have said.

Apparently, spider webs are scary even if you don’t reallyknow what a spider is, and even if nobody’s ever told you how many spiders, onaverage, crawl into your mouth and die while you’re sleeping every year. Which is at least three, according toreliable playground sources when I was in the fourth grade.

You can pound sand with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Rain delay

2011-09-11T22:34:00.000-04:00

My column didn't run in the Roxborough Review last week, due to a confluence of several events that I should probably list here to throw you off the fact that I really just missed my first deadline since the day Evan was born. The earthquake, the hurricane, the Labor Day weekend, my vacation, the ensuing flooding. At least one of those things had something to do with the column not running.

Since this blog is a week behind the paper version of the column, even though we're back on schedule for the print version this week, I need to take this week off from the blog to get the schedule synced up again. My apologies that my degeneracy has prevented you from reading about 630 words that may or may not have made any sense.

Still, how can you be mad at me when you're looking at this picture?

You can't. It's not possible.

'Til next week!

Down the shore

2011-09-06T18:52:00.000-04:00

We just got back from a truncated (and awesome!) visit down to the Outer Banks with Kara's side of the family. North Carolina sure knows how to mop up a hurricane in a hurry. Thanks for cleaning up the mess so that we could come visit, hurricane moppers!

Here are some pics from the week (and in case you're my boss, yes, it's awesome to be back in the office):

The outer banks of sanity

2011-09-04T22:24:00.002-04:00

All this giving my dog bottled water would make me feel like a celebrity, if I had showered within the last 48 hours. As it turns out, using bottled water for everything only makes you feel rich and famous if you don’t have to relieve yourself in your parents’ pachysandra several times daily, a fact that becomes clear when a hurricane knocks out their power and water for two days while you’re visiting.

We’d initially intended to visit my parents for just one night, leaving our dog with them before heading down to North Carolina’s Outer Banks for a week’s vacation with my wife Kara’s family. This sounded like a much better plan when the Outer Banks still existed.

Actually, Hurricane Irene didn’t cause the complete devastation we’d all feared, but it did drag the entire Northeast through enough of a car wash to snap off several antennae, leaving us stuck at my parents’ non-electrified, non-plumbed house, which is functioning more like a tent with windows at the moment.

If this column seems more romantic than usual, that’s because it’s written by candlelight, using the last of my laptop’s battery. Now might be an appropriate time to uncork a nice bottle of Riesling and check the front door to see if I sent you any flowers, too.

Fortunately, before the storm hit, we all charged up our electronic devices. You know what they say about hurricane preparedness: Buy plenty of water and make sure your iPad is charged, otherwise you may be forced to go days without hydration or Angry Birds.

A fun way to pass the time when there’s no electricity is to make an announcement to everyone in the room about once per hour: “Okay, everybody, check this out. The power is going to come back on in 3…2…1…Bang!” Then point at the ceiling.

It hasn’t worked for me yet, but if it ever works for you, you will forever be known as the Babe Ruth of Electricity. Don’t say it more than once an hour, though. You have to strike a delicate balance between increasing your chances of being right and decreasing your chances of being slapped.

Otherwise, we don’t have much to do but sit here in the dark, expecting the power to come back on any minute now, for several thousand minutes now. I’m writing a play about this experience, tentatively titled “Waiting for PECO.”

“The hurricane ruined my vacation” is not a headline that’s going to win any Pulitzers or garner a whole lot of sympathy, but that doesn’t make this whole thing any less annoying for us. At least the direst predictions didn’t come to pass. From the initial news reports, it sounded like civilization on the Eastern Seaboard would cease unless we all sprouted gills like tuna or Kevin Costner.

The past few weeks have seen Mother Nature reneging on her deal with the Northeast. We handle all of the country’s stress and banking while everyone else is off munching granola and drinking microbrews. They get the good surfing spots, we get the Jersey Turnpike. They get Jimmy Buffett and Scarlett Johansson, we get The Situation. In return, they get all the earthquakes and hurricanes. That seemed like a pretty fair deal until this August, when we started getting natural disasters, too. Clearly, Scarlett Johansson is going to have to move to Camden to restore the balance.

In any event, our family is waiting in limbo to see if we’re going to have a truncated vacation or none at all. If we don’t end up going to the beach, it’ll be a shame that I’ve spent the past few months cultivating these six-pack abs for nothing. If we do go, though, it’ll be a shame for Kara’s family to see what a lie the previous sentence was.

You can send Mike Todd a Category 4 email at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Change you can put in

2011-08-30T21:02:00.002-04:00

*Apologies for the slight hurricane delay. If the storm affected you at all, I hope all's back to normal now.*

“I married the cheapest man on Earth,” my wife Kara said as our son Evan sat in the lifeless toy helicopter at the mall, mashing the coin return buttons.

“I’ve probably saved enough money to pay for his first year of college by not pumping quarters into these things. Besides, as far as he knows, the coin returns are the main event. He’s having a ball in there,” I said.

As if sensing an unmet potential for entertainment, Evan pointed to the slot that accepts coins with one hand and tugged on my shorts with the other.

“Put in,” he said. And with that, the jig was up.

“Who taught him that?” I asked. If there’s one thing I try to teach my child, it’s how to remain ignorant about pastimes that require money to be fun. If I have anything to say about it, he won’t find out about ice hockey until he turns eighteen.

“My parents let him ride on the chipmunk at the ice cream place, and they actually put quarters in,” Kara said.

“Put in,” Evan agreed.

As Kara and I pumped three (three!) quarters into the toy helicopter to make it bob up and down for thirty seconds, I realized that we’d just passed into a new, coin-operated phase in our lives. Evan, for one, seemed happy to be there.

At least he did at first. His face lit up when the ride started, but after a few moments, our little helicopter pilot looked focused and determined, gripping the controls like he was attempting a foggy nighttime landing. With toddlers, you often can’t tell how much they’re enjoying something until you attempt to extract them from it. The resulting decibel level is directly proportional to the amount of fun they were having ten seconds ago.

We were eventually able to coax Evan out of the helicopter without too much fuss, and in a moment we were heading down the mall towards the escalators, or, as I like to call them, the poor man’s merry-go-round. The escalators may not have prancing plaster ponies and festive carnival music, but what they lack in flash, they make up for in cost-effectiveness.

“Babe, not again,” Kara said as Evan and I rounded the corner for our third trip upstairs.

“More!” Evan said as we carefully stepped back onto the magical growing stairs.

A pleasant byproduct of Evan refusing to sit in his stroller anymore is that we’ve been freed from the shackles of mall elevators. Over the past couple of years, Kara and I have learned the location of every mall elevator in a fifty-mile radius, including the ones hidden deep within the bowels of Sears. Now we no longer have to wander down those creepy beige hallways by the forsaken bathrooms, wondering if we’re walking down the very hallway where once, many years ago, Roebuck disappeared, never to be heard from again.

At the regular elevator out in the middle of the mall, you’d be surprised how many people wait in line through several cycles to ride the elevator for no obvious reason. No stroller, no wheelchair, just a dude standing there, eating an ice cream cone, taking up space that could be used by someone who needs it. From what I can tell, our society has achieved such a level of sloth that many of us can’t even drag ourselves the extra ten yards to the electric stairs.

Now that I’ll be spending the majority of my rainy weekend afternoons riding the poor man’s merry-go-round, perhaps I should be thankful for the extra elbow room, at least until Evan gets bored and wants to do something else. Which brings me to my point: Can I bum a quarter?

You can rock Mike Todd back-and-forth until he gives you your money back at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The ding-a-ling’s speech

2011-08-21T22:38:00.000-04:00

As I took the sheet of paper out of my rented tuxedo pocket and cleared my throat, I tried not to dwell on the sea of formalwear spreading out before me, its inhabitants waiting patiently for a speech.

My body responds physiologically to public speaking the way a normal person’s body responds to being tasered, with the attendant loss of control of multiple organ groups. Fortunately, my bladder has always hung in there, but as the microphone quivered under my chin, weaving back-and-forth as if getting an early start on the Macarena, I realized that the circuits connecting my hands and my brain were already fried.

Fortunately, I’d folded the page containing my speech into quarters. One lesson I’ve learned the hard way: If you’re giving a speech, never give it from a loose-leaf sheet of paper. Once your hands start shaking, a full sheet of paper becomes a flopping rainbow trout that you’re grasping by the tail.

“It is my great honor to be speaking to you today,” you’ll begin.

“Flap, flap. FLAP FLAP FLAP FLAP!” your speech will say as it jumps out of your hands and wriggles into a nearby creek.

Some people will tell you that it’s helpful to picture members of the audience naked. The male mind pretty much does this by default anyway, so that advice doesn’t really help.

I found myself in this fix because, at great risk of forever tarnishing the superlative, my buddy Derek had asked me to be the best man at his wedding two weekends ago.

That’s a lot of pressure to ask a friend to absorb. Not-too-shabby man? I could handle that. But best man? That sounds like a superhero that never really caught on. Plus, the only way I’d ever honestly describe myself as a “best man” would be if I could add some heavy qualifiers in there, like, “I’m the best man standing in line at this Taco Bell at the moment.”

But just plain best man? Of course I was honored to be asked, but I was far more nervous to be Derek’s best man than I was to be the groom in my own wedding.

For the groom, your main responsibilities are to brush your hair, dress yourself and show up on time, basically all the things you were expected to do for your first day of kindergarten.

The best man has to deliver a speech to a ballroom full of people, treading a fine line of threatening to embarrass the groom without actually saying anything bad about him, all while being funny, touching or both. And he must do all this even if he is the kind of guy who gets nervous and flubs his order at the drive-thru.

Here’s a little excerpt from my toast, which helps to explain why single-occupancy rooms in college are so popular:

“One year, Derek and I shared a townhouse with four other guys, and the only way those four guys and I could survive on our own was to forage through Derek’s cabinet and eat his Doritos. Derek just wanted to keep his private Dorito stash, but every time he bought a bag, we’d wait ‘til he was gone and plow through them. Eventually, Derek put a Kryptonite bike lock through the handles of his cabinets. I think the low point of his college career might have been the time he came home to find his cabinet doors locked together, sitting on the floor with their hinges removed, with an empty Doritos bag on the coffee table.”

At that point in the speech, I handed Derek a new bag of Doritos, hoping to make amends. I learned from Gallagher and Carrot Top that good props can make up for bad jokes.

Anyway, despite any speech-giving travesties that may have occurred that day, Derek and Becky got off to a great start. I probably shouldn’t have eaten their new bag of Doritos, though.

You can help Mike Todd figure out how to work his cufflinks at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The thundering hoarders

2011-08-14T21:43:00.000-04:00

“At least I don’t leave yogurt in the credenza,” can become a rock-solid defense of your personal cleaning habits, but only if you’ve properly level-set your spouse by making her sit through a few episodes of the show “Hoarders” first.

“I don’t think I can watch this anymore,” my wife Kara said as the reality show cameras paused for a moment on a hoarder’s bed, which was adrift in a sea of soda bottles and Taco Bell wrappers, with a liberal dose of rotten ground beef and tortillas stirred into the mix, just begging for the right rodent infestation to come along and making our own boxer-short-festooned bedroom look spotless by comparison.

Kara and I had been trolling through our viewing options via our Netflix instant-streaming account, and the only two choices were “Hoarders” and the 1993 season of “Beavis and Butthead,” which was once considered to be a low point of our civilization, until the next two decades happened.

Watching “Hoarders” was the best choice we’ve ever made, but eating dinner during an episode might have been the worst. It’s difficult to chew while watching an old lady scrape a rotten pumpkin off her living room floor, reaching into it to retrieve a few seeds for future potential use. I could feel my stock price rising, though, as Kara began to understand that there are worse things than leaving a few dishes on the couch. No show on TV serves as a better bar-lowerer.

Inspired by the show, I decided to tackle the closet under our stairs, which had begun requiring ever more inventive door-shutting techniques to avert a total trashalanche.

To be fair, the stuff in that closet wasn’t all trash. It was half-trash: stuff that you don’t need, and probably never will, but you can still construct elaborate future scenarios where it might come in handy someday.

That iron that’s still in the box, even though we already have one upstairs? What if Kara and I both had to iron something at the same time, even though we only have one ironing board that neither of us knows how to unfold?

Unused brackets for window blinds. Karate pads that haven’t heard a good “kiyup!” in twenty years. Cables for computers we no longer own. A VHS copy of “She’s All That.” A George Foreman Grill.

Each of these things has no power on its own. If you don’t throw it or give it away, though, your half-trash will join forces with itself like the lion-shaped robots from Voltron, fusing together to become an awesome super-robot that your neighbor Louie will have, but you never will.

This super-robot will crawl into your storage space and grow stronger, adding your microwave from college to its biceps and your old ferret toys to its pecs. Also, it will have the face of Freddie Prinze, Jr., which will make it even more terrifying. Eventually, you’ll be too scared to open the closet door, and you’ll start storing stuff on the kitchen table, which is the first step to earning a guest appearance on “Hoarders.”

Determined to avoid that fate, I threw myself into our closet last week, dismantling our super-robot piece-by-useless-piece, throwing away everything that didn’t beg for mercy and setting the rest aside for Good Will. At the back of the closet, I found three large boxes that had been moved to two apartments and two houses, but never opened.

Inside those boxes were Kara’s old college textbooks, which I distinctly remember lugging into our first house ten years ago.

“I might want to look at them again,” she said, as my discs audibly herniated.

Those books won’t be causing us any more problems. They’re sleeping with the Prinze, Jrs.

You can toss Mike Todd to the curb at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Getting our goat on

2011-08-08T21:47:00.002-04:00

Here are some shots from our visit to Sinon Farm and their little petting zoo last weekend. Evan voted to stay there forever, but we're back home now.

The Adventures of Squirrel Boy

2011-08-07T23:20:00.000-04:00

“This isn’t going to be pretty,” my wife Kara said as we approached what would be our prison for the next several hours.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said, but we both knew it wouldn’t be.

“More nuts,” our son Evan replied, scanning the lawn of the restaurant for anything vaguely nut-shaped.

A month ago, my sister Amy took Evan around my parents’ front yard, collecting walnuts. Since then, nuts have become Evan’s obsession, transforming him into an insane toddler-squirrel hybrid.

“More nuts,” he says anytime he’s outdoors or can see the outdoors, applying the phrase to anything from pinecones to crabapples. For Halloween this year, we’ll probably just throw a top hat and monocle on him so he can be the Planters peanut.

Incidentally, why are monocles associated with rich people? Seems like if they were really that rich, they could afford the other half of their glasses.

On this occasion, we were bringing our little squirrel into a fancy restaurant for dinner with extended family on our last night of vacation in Maine. Given certain family members’ proclivities for screaming loud enough to knock the signatures off the wall art, Kara and I had recently given up on sit-down restaurants, boycotting any establishment that didn’t stick a toy in Evan’s meal box.

We lifted the moratorium for this night, though, completing a reservation for eighteen people and figuring that Evan’s little cousins could help keep him entertained. Ninety minutes in, the appetizers hadn’t come yet. His cousins could have juggled flaming bowling pins while singing Elmo’s entire song catalog and it wouldn’t have been enough. Apparently, in the fine dining establishments of the Maine backcountry, people only move fast if a moose is chasing them.

If you’ve never sat through a long dinner with a toddler, for a rough approximation of what we were experiencing, try keeping a Tasmanian devil contained to a wooden stool with a waist strap. You can also bribe him with Goldfish crackers.

Fortunately, the restaurant was converted from an old farmhouse, so the grounds had been designed to corral wild creatures. Various gracious family members took turns running around with Evan outside as he continued his quest for nuts. Two hours in, though, the rain started.

Searching for something on the covered porch that might keep Evan entertained and dry for a moment, I pointed at the only thing I could find.

“Look, Evan, a dead moth!” I said.

His cousin John came running over to check it out. Kids may have iPads and Nintendo DSs these days, but it’s nice to see that a good dead bug hasn’t lost its kid-attracting power.

Just as Evan arrived, John attempted to pick up the moth. It broke into two large pieces.

“Ew!” John said as he ran off, leaving the two pieces on the floor.

“Apart!” Evan said, distressed, pointing at the pieces.

“Yeah, it came apart,” I replied.

“Apaaaart!” he said.

“It’s not alive anymore, buddy. I bet he had a good life, though,” I said, looking to see if Evan understood.

“Sad,” Evan replied. He’d never used that word before, and I didn’t know he knew it. It’s always a shock to see the sensitive side of a person who, just moments earlier, had shrieked you out of your share of the nachos.

I realized that Evan and I were having a very serious conversation, and I struggled with the correct words to explain such weighty things to a person who thought the world mainly consisted of brightly colored singing puppets.

“Well, buddy, life is complicate…” I said.

“More nuts!” Evan interrupted as he ran off the porch into the rain, concluding our discussion. I hope the birds and bees talk goes that easy, too.

You can put a toy in Mike Todd’s meal box at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Getting the call at 3am

2011-07-31T21:01:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine recently awoke in the middle of the night to the terrifying sound of a voice speaking to him from beside his bed. The voice was saying the last thing you’d ever want to hear said at 3am.

“I want pancakes,” said the voice.

Commercials for home security systems regularly feature scenes that would be preferable to the one facing my friend Josh that night. Instead, he had facing him a three-year-old boy who thought Josh should be open for breakfast 24 hours a day, like Denny’s.

“Man, what did you do?” I asked. Josh was telling this story around a table at our friend Derek’s bachelor party, where we were sipping tea and playing bridge, according to the phone calls most of the other guys were making home.

A couple of the other dads turned to listen to Josh’s answer.

“I made him pancakes,” Josh said, and the table erupted with so many guys yelling, “Aw, dude!” at once that I almost spilled my chamomile. Fortunately, my pinkie was out, which helped me maintain my balance, much like how a lemur’s tail works when it’s hopping from tree to tree. That’s why you should always drink tea with your pinkie out, in case things get rowdy.

“They were the microwave kind,” Josh explained, and while that didn’t seem to win too many people over, at least he wasn’t whipping up nocturnal delicacies from scratch.

As much as I’d criticize Josh for giving in and making on-demand pancakes in the middle of the night, I’ve never had to walk a mile in his bunny slippers. My own son doesn’t have the ability to place bedside orders in our house because he’s still young enough that he sleeps in a crib, which is what parents call cages so that people don’t look at us funny. The primary difference between cages and cribs is that cages have doors, because the idea of a ferocious animal escaping is less worrisome than a toddler on the loose.

“Go fish,” our friend Kellerhouse said, or something like that. I’m not sure what people say when they’re playing bridge, but rest assured, Kellerhouse said one of those things right then.

“Listen, I can take ten minutes to make him pancakes, then I can go back to sleep. Or, I can take a stand, listen to him scream from 3am to 6am, then go to work on three hours’ sleep,” Josh said. “It’s not really a tough decision.”

“Dude, you need to give that kid a timeout,” one of the guys said. I nodded. The timeout has been the primary defense against the forces of chaos in our house for several months now. With timeouts, our son is about as well-behaved as we could expect for a two-year-old. Without timeouts, there would probably be a smoking crater where our house used to be.

Some people are against timeouts, and they’ll tell you that it’s important not to say “no” to children too often. You can tell these people by the bags under their eyes and the scribbly crayon murals in their living rooms.

Whether Josh decides to implement timeouts in his house or not, the fact that we were having this conversation at a bachelor party illustrated one plain truth: it’s so hard to be cool once you’re a parent. Someone either goes out like James Dean, or they live long enough to procreate and have to tell a little human not to rub applesauce on the plasma screen 20,000 times. From there, it’s just a short jump to socks with sandals.

In any event, we managed to throw Derek a proper bachelor party, even though we aren’t cool anymore. The next day, I swore off chamomile forever.

You can lock Mike Todd in his crib at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Parenthood is a slippery slide

2011-07-24T23:02:00.001-04:00

Staring into the void before us, fear overtook my son.

“No, no, NOOOOO!” Evan shrieked, clutching my arms.

“Okay, okay, we’ll go back down the stairs,” I said, pulling him out of the maw of giant tubular sliding board.

“NOOOOO!” he screamed louder, pulling me back toward the void. Nobody ever got into parenthood because they wanted more rationality in their lives.

When I was a kid, sliding boards were sheets of tin that cooked in the summer sun until they got so hot that when they weren’t blistering your rear end, they could be used for smelting iron ore. They also launched you into the ground at about 40mph, so that you could pass the time waiting for your next turn by picking the mulch out of your various orifices.

These days, though, most sliding boards have turned into giant plastic tubes, because we’ve collectively decided that hamsters shouldn’t be having all the fun. The tubular design no longer bakes the backsides of America’s youth, but at least for Evan, the new slides seem to have added an element of sheer terror, a development that I wasn’t aware of until Evan tricked me into bringing him to the entrance of the slide at a nearby playground.

“Slide! Slide! Slide!” he said, and I obliged like the rube that I am, bringing him up the stairs to the little platform.

Before having a baby, I always thought that being a parent would provide the perfect socially acceptable excuse to play with Legos and Transformers again (Megatron and Bumblebee still have some unfinished business from my ninth birthday). I didn’t realize that it also meant I’d have to master using playground equipment as an adult, which would make me feel a little bit like Gulliver stomping around Lilliput, if I understood that reference. On the plus side, monkey bars are much less taxing to navigate when your feet touch the ground.

As Evan sat in my lap, staring into the great tube whose twists and turns made it impossible to see beyond the first few feet, he had a change of heart. That’s when the screaming began; a toddler’s changes of heart are rarely quiet.

“Nooooo!” he screamed as he scanned the area for a non-terrifying route down. When he understood my intention to bring him back down the way we came, the screams intensified as he scanned the area for a non-boring route down.

In the end, I decided to follow the advice of the scream-o-meter, which functions like an applause-o-meter, except that the quieter side wins.

“Here we go, buddy,” I said, putting him back in my lap.

If I’d been trying to stuff my child down a laundry chute, it would have sounded exactly the same. His little fingers reached out for the edges of the tube to keep us from moving forward, but he was too late. We were already on our way.

Halfway around the first corner, his screams turned to laughter. By the time we popped out of the tube to see my wife Kara standing there, shaking her head, Evan was squealing with delight.

“That went well,” I said.

Evan agreed. “Slide! Slide! Slide!” he yelled as he ran back to the stairs.

“It sounded like you were torturing him up there,” Kara said.

“Only psychologically. Your turn now,” I said.

Kara brought Evan back up the stairs to the platform as he whispered, “Slide, slide, slide,” to himself.

When they got to the platform and he looked into the abyss, the screaming started again. It says good things about Kara’s maternal instincts that she didn’t enjoy stuffing her screaming child down a giant pipe, but I think Evan probably won’t see that playground again until he can drive there himself.

You can stuff Mike Todd down your laundry chute at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The great indoors

2011-07-17T21:53:00.001-04:00

“Use the Razor Wind, not the Zen Headbutt!” my little cousin John yelled, looking over the shoulder of our cousin Ryan.

Ryan held a Nintendo DS in his hands, a device that has a similar effect on my little cousins that the One Ring had on Gollum.

“My turn! It’s my turn now!” one of my cousins will yell.

“My precioussssss,” the other will hiss, diving into a nearby pond.

No, they actually behaved quite well as they coached each other through various battles with their Pokemon characters. For those who aren’t familiar, a Pokemon is apparently a small Japanese creature with the power to trap children indoors on perfectly beautiful days.

“Anyone want to throw sticks into the pond with me? Memphis is itching to play fetch,” I said last weekend, during the small family reunion that my parents were hosting at their house.

A couple of heads turned my way as the kids decided who would be their spokesperson. Finally, an indeterminate voice from the other side of the couch said, “We’re good.”

At that moment, I had a flashback to me sitting on that very same couch twenty years ago, back when it had upholstery the color of Snuffaluffagus.

“Michael, you’ve been playing Nintendo all day. Go outside,” Mom said as the birds chirped in the afternoon sunlight.

“I’m almost done this level,” I’d reply, guiding my superspy down elevator after elevator. I’d continue being almost done that level until dusk, when the comedies came on, keeping me entertained while, just outside, the lightning bugs probably danced and twinkled against the night sky.

There I stood, twenty years later, the roles reversed. You know you’ve gotten old when you have the urge to tell someone younger than you to go outside for no reason.

“Hey, kid, go outside,” you say, not exactly sure what you expect to happen on the off chance that the kid complies.

The idea seems to be that kids are guaranteed to have magical experiences just because they’re on the other side of the sliding glass door, but they’ll probably just end up back on the couch in a few hours with sunburn and Lyme disease.

To their credit, my cousins actually did fend off the lure of the Pokemon for a much bigger chunk of the weekend than I would have done at their age, and the dog spent each evening slumped on the floor, recovering from a full day of fetching sticks. With five kids standing on the shore winging sticks over her head, Memphis was like Lucy trying to keep up with the chocolates on the conveyor belt. As the unfetched sticks piled up in the water, the kids came very close to building their own beaver dam out there.

While I felt like one of the kids standing at the edge of the pond, cheering on the dog while holding my toddler Evan in my arms, I found myself proving even more that I’d become an old person.

As a rain of sticks splashed down in the distance, I looked down at Evan and noticed a fleck of dried yogurt on his cheek. I held Evan tight, licked my thumb and started squeegeeing his face. Evan squirmed, determined not to lose the yogurt he’d rightfully accessorized, but I persisted, working my thumb up-and-down like I was challenging him to a thumb wrestling match.

The point I’m trying to make here is that old people love licking their fingers and scraping things off of kids’ faces. We don’t really know why we do it, but it passes the time if we can’t find any kids to force outside. Until we learn how to land a Comet Punch in Pokemon, it’ll have to do.

You can dodge Mike Todd’s Zen Headbutt at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Terrible Thirty-Threes

2011-07-10T23:12:00.002-04:00

“Can we get some pabbas for dinner tonight?” I asked my wife Kara on our drive home from daycare.

“Pabbas!” our son Evan yelled from the backseat. Pabbas is a foreign delicacy made of dough, cheese, sauce and your choice of toppings. Many people who aren’t our toddler refer to it as pizza.

“Pabbas!” Evan reiterated, making sure his pro-pabbas vote had been counted.

“Mmmmm, pabbas,” I agreed.

“Babe, don’t call it that,” Kara said to me. She’s worried that repeating his baby-talk back to him will encourage him to keep using the wrong words forever, like how he’ll probably show up to his first job interview wearing Buzz Lightyear shoes that light up when he walks into the conference room.

“Dat! Dat!” Evan yelled. I have a vague memory of a line from an old movie about how the only thing psychiatrists do to earn their money is repeat the last two words their patients said, but make them sound like a question: “Kill somebody?” “Parents’ fault?” “Pickled peppers?”

If that’s true, Evan’s already halfway to getting his psychiatric license, except he usually prefers to shout the last word back.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up in front of him,” I said. “We can just distract him by driving past this truck.”

“Dutch!” Evan yelled, pointing at the delivery truck as we drove past, doing his best to repeat the last word I said and keeping alive his chances of pointing out a million consecutive trucks.

“It’s like having our own parrot in the backseat,” Kara said.

“Polly want a cracker?” I asked.

“Cwackoo,” Evan replied, then he lifted his sippy cup over his head and spiked it onto the floorboard, screaming, “No milk! No!”

He’s not happy that we graduated him to sippy cups from bottles of milk. Evan has been drinking water out of sippy cups for a year, but for some reason, he can’t stand having his milk served in anything other than a bottle. I guess I’d be a little miffed, too, if all of a sudden people started serving me coffee in margarita glasses.

We had to be the cruel parents and take his bottles away because he turned two years old a few weeks ago. The other two-year-olds at daycare are already using sippy cups and reading Proust. We feel bad taking away something he likes just because he’s too old for it, but he’ll get us back in fifty years when he takes our car keys.

When people find out we have a two-year-old, they always bring up the Terrible Twos, which must be a phrase invented by someone who didn’t have kids, but occasionally had to suffer their tantrums in the grocery store. Infants are infinitely more difficult than two-year-olds, plus their necks don’t even work.

The other day, when I came to pick Evan up after work, he ran across the playground yelling, “Dadda! Dadda! Dadda!” and threw his arms around my knees. Even just a few short months ago, when Kara and I would walk into daycare, he’d glance in our direction, then ignore us and start playing faster. You could see his little mind thinking, “Oh man, I gotta bake this one last pretend muffin before they take me back to Boringville.” And a few months before that, we’d be lucky to get a belch hello. If two is terrible, then I hope three is even worse.

As we continued our discussion about dinner on our way home, Kara said, “I don’t know, we just had pizza.”

“Pabbas!” Evan yelled. I like the voting record our new dinner swing voter is compiling. I just have to remember to never end a sentence with the word “asparagus” around him.

You can hit Mike Todd’s eye like a big pabbas pie at mikectodd@gmail.com.

When it rains, indoors

2011-07-05T08:56:00.001-04:00

Being a homeowner warps your mind in unexpected ways. For instance, when you step into a puddle of unknown origin in the center of your toddler’s bedroom, you’ll find yourself hoping that maybe your dog isn’t as housebroken as you thought.

“Please, let it be the dog,” you’ll say to yourself before you look down at your soggy sock, because you know that if the liquid originated from anywhere other than an organic life form, you might as well start using twenty-dollar bills to sop up the mess.

This happened to me a few weeks ago, and it was the only time in my life I can remember hoping that I’d just stepped in a puddle of anything the dog might have created.

No such luck. It was water.

“Babe, nobody’s been in here all day, but there’s water on the floor in Evan’s room,” I called down the hall.

“You sure it’s water?” my wife Kara asked, coming into the room with Evan padding close behind. Life was so simple before the dog and the baby, back when indoor puddles would make Kara bat an eyelash.

Just then, the thermostat clicked and the air conditioning turned on.

“Aythee, aythee!” Evan said, pointing up at the vent.

“Yup, that’s the AC, buddy,” I said.

If you’re a bus, a tractor, a cow, an airplane or an AC unit turning on, you will not get past our son undetected.

We stood in a small huddle around the towels that were now sopping up the puddle, trying to determine why Evan’s room was slowly transforming into a rice paddy.

That’s when I noticed the water dripping down the wall. I tensed, wincing, too scared to look up, like a henchman who just realized that Batman is probably hanging from the gargoyle overhead. As if to confirm that we were getting closer to solving the mystery, a drop landed on top of the towels.

Kara looked up.

“It’s raining from the ceiling, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Oh, man,” I said, looking up to see the puddle on the ceiling, and the blistered paint that I’d applied two short years ago.

“Aw, maaaan,” Evan agreed.

I’ve lived in two houses over the past decade, and I can think of at least six occasions when rain has fallen from our various ceilings. I’m starting to think that water hates me, and the feeling is becoming mutual. Ever since that day in Evan’s room, I’ve been boycotting the stuff, getting my hydration by inhaling steam and swallowing ice cubes whole.

The rain in Evan’s room was especially mystifying since it was a beautiful day outside, and there’s no plumbing above his room, just attic space.

I pulled down the ladder and stuck my head into the great pink cavern. Each time I’m in the attic, for whatever reason, my primary goal is always the same: to no longer be in the attic. It’s either 107 or -15 degrees up there, and you can taste the scratchy insulation like you’re breathing in a wool sweater.

It only took a minute to locate the culprit. There, just above Evan’s room, lay a smashed PVC pipe, its shards resting on the soaked insulation underneath. Apparently, the small drainage pipe that transported water from our air conditioning unit to the outside world, like so many things, worked better when it wasn’t obliterated.

In a distant part of my brain, I could hear a replay of the plastic crunching sound I heard last time I was in the attic flinging heavy things around, getting our Christmas decorations properly stored before the 4^th of July. At the time, not spending another five seconds up there seemed way more important than investigating what just got smashed.

I’ve learned my lesson. From now on, we’re leaving the Christmas stuff out year-round.

You can boil Mike Todd a drink at mikectodd@gmail.com.

What happens in the Cin City...

2011-06-26T22:55:00.004-04:00

As we flew into Kentucky last weekend, I realized that we’d made a horrible mistake.

“Wait, the wedding’s in Cincinnati!” I said.

“The Cincinnati airport is in Kentucky,” my wife Kara replied, shattering the foundations of everything I thought I knew about Cincinnati, namely that it is in Ohio, somewhere between Pittsburgh and Denver.

Snobs sometimes refer to this region as Flyover Country, but the last time I was in Ohio, back when I was a poor student at Penn State making my way west for the summer, Drivethrough Country was a much more accurate term, handily describing both my mode of travel and my culinary proclivities.

Cincinnati was a source of mild annoyance for me through much of my childhood, since that city dressed up its professional baseball players to impersonate my favorite team.

“Hey, the Phillies are on!” I’d yell, flipping through the channels.

“Wait, never mind,” I’d say, noticing that the fans weren’t booing.

Beyond hosting the parallel-universe version of my baseball team, though, Cincinnati hadn’t really entered into my consciousness since the days of WKRP. On the plane, as I thought about that show, I realized that the men of the world can be divided into young and old by whether or not they have, at any point in their lives, thought that Loni Anderson was hot.

“Who?” Kara asked as I explained my theory.

“From ‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’” I said.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Exactly,” I replied. Sometimes, the three years between us are a chasm that cannot be crossed, especially when it comes to old sitcom references. Don’t even get me started on her lack of “What’s Happening!!” awareness. You might as well be saying, “Hey, hey, hey,” into the wind.

When we landed in Kentucky, I was most excited to see if their local fried chicken restaurants were abbreviated as just “FC.” But Cincinnati was only a short drive away, so I didn’t get a chance to find out, though I did have the opportunity to grab a local toast-topping delicacy in the airport. It was a big disappointment, though. Like Australians and their vegemite, I think I'll leave Kentuckians with their KY Jelly. That stuff just can't compete with Smucker's.

As it turned out, we found Cincinnati to be a beautiful city with friendly people, interesting architecture, picturesque bridges and even a few hills. It was a perfect setting for Kara’s cousin Shawn to get married, and for all the young couples in the family to get grilled on their future plans, which might not be what a wedding is really all about, but it certainly is a popular pastime.

If you have a significant other, are you getting married? If you’re married, are you having kids? If you have kids, are you having more? If you had a vasectomy, are you getting a dog?

“I have a scientific theory that explains how our species survives,” my cousin-in-law Roscoe said as we passed the ravioli around the table at the rehearsal dinner, after the topic of babies came up.

“You store long-term memories when you sleep,” he continued, “So after you have a baby, a year or two later, you forget all the bad stuff that happened because you didn’t sleep for more than three hours the whole time. That’s when you decide to have another kid.”

Roscoe’s Unified Theory of the Propagation of Humankind may not have been published anywhere yet, but it easily passed the peer review at our table.

In any event, I’d like to dedicate this week’s column to Shawn, Amy and a lifetime of happiness together. And also to my spellchecker. I still have no idea how to spell Cincinnati.

You can assure Mike Todd that you’ve at least heard of Burt Reynolds at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Good rockets make bad neighbors

2011-06-19T22:22:00.000-04:00

The instructions on the side of the rockets clearly stated that you were supposed to put them in a hole before lighting the fuse.

“Meh, whatever,” Mr. Gartner must have said before flicking his lighter, setting into motion a series of events that my young brain wasn’t quite prepared to handle, much like the first sex ed filmstrip I ever saw. Incidentally, there should be a similar filmstrip that guys have to watch just before turning 30, one that gives us another heads-up about hair that will soon be growing in new places, like our shoulders and ears.

As Mr. Gartner stepped back from the sizzling fuse, the crowd of assembled neighbors watched as the twenty-five red mini-rockets, each about the size of a crayon, began shooting of their box, screaming into the air and leaving fiery trails behind them.

After about the tenth rocket, it became clear that the instructions had been offering some pretty decent, if unheeded, advice. The box flipped onto its side and started firing rockets indiscriminately toward the spectators.

The “oooohs” and “aaaaahs” turned to “AAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!s” as people ran for their lives.

My mom has no recollection of these events, probably because they happened more than twenty years ago, back when ordering a small soda at a fast food place yielded an actual small soda, rather than a popcorn tub. But I, for one, remember with clarity all the times in my life I’ve had rockets fired at me, and that night at the Gartner’s house ranks among my top ten closest calls with Mike-seeking rockets.

As our neighbors scattered, I froze, stuck to Mr. Gartner’s front steps, because cowardice is sticky. I’m not entirely clear what happened next, since it’s hard to collect data while you’re performing whatever version of duck-and-cover your instincts pick out for you. When the rockets stopped screaming and so did I, though, we found that one of them had whizzed between me and another spectator, landing harmlessly on the front porch.

It wasn’t until I thought about the incident maybe ten years later that I realized that a direct hit from the rocket probably wouldn’t have done much damage. I just always assumed that it was a brush with death that I was fortunate to survive, a made-up fact that I shared at every cafeteria table in a twenty-mile radius. In my version, though, I dodged the rockets in real time, perhaps inspiring at least one Matrix movie.

I was reminded of all of that yesterday, as I mowed over the husk of a recreational mortar that a neighbor had fired into our yard a few weeks ago. I’d have found it sooner, but I like our yard to have that unkempt, Brad-Pitt-between-movies look.

I knew exactly when that Moonbeam Missile landed in our yard, because that was the night that one of our neighbors had apparently said, “Hey, it’s 9:00! Let’s wake up all the babies and terrify all the dogs in the neighborhood.”

“I’m going to call the cops,” my wife Kara said as another crack-sizzle sent our dog under the reclining part of the couch, and we braced for the sound of crying from the baby’s room.

“Are you sure we want to get on their bad side? We already know they have explosives,” I said.

With the exception of the Fourth of July, we’re not the biggest fans of amateur fireworks displays. Even if you didn’t have rockets fired at you in your youth, you automatically become less fond of booming nocturnal noises once you have a sleeping baby in the house. The single solace is that fireworks are kind of expensive, so every boom is the sound of self-absorbed people getting poorer.

Of course, in a few years, our toddler will appreciate the free fireworks shows coming from up the street, or at least what he can see of them from inside his chainmail suit.

You can show Mike Todd the rocket’s red glare at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Toddlers don’t do solemn

2011-06-12T22:39:00.006-04:00

“I could tell from the beginning that Russ and Esther had a special connection,” the maid of honor said into the microphone, while our son Evan delivered a real-time rebuttal from his highchair.

“This! This! This!” he shouted, pointing to the Hershey’s Kiss on the table in front of him as heads swiveled to see where the commotion was coming from. I like to think that Evan was offering his own advice to the bride and groom, letting them know that it’s okay to demand a little sweetness in your life, even if it means you have to loudly beg for kisses at inappropriate times.

I scooped Evan out of his chair and ran through the ballroom doors, a maneuver I could have performed blindfolded by that point.

Earlier, during the wedding, my wife Kara and I passed Evan back-and-forth between our laps, doing our best to keep him entertained as the solemn ceremony proceeded. Toddlers do a lot of things well, such as turning applesauce into spackle, but solemnity isn’t one of their known strengths.

As Russ and Esther exchanged vows, Evan tugged on the large bow tied to the seat in front of him.

“That’s a bow,” Kara whispered.

“Bow? Bow! Bow!” Evan shouted, proud of his new word.

“Be solemn!” I whispered, to no avail.

“Bow! Bow! Bow!” he screamed.

We were sitting in the corner seats of the row closest to the door, an area that should probably be labeled as the Escape Hatch. Perhaps, someday, forward-thinking wedding planners will equip those seats with eject buttons, but in the meantime, I’ll continue packing my own starting blocks in Evan’s diaper bag. I achieved a personal best as I dashed for the ballroom doors with Evan under my arm. He continued yelling his favorite new word all the way out the door, graciously giving the other guests a free demonstration of the Doppler Effect.

We’d traveled to State College for the wedding, the town where Kara and I first met. We hadn’t been back in many years, and it was a surreal experience visiting Penn State’s campus with our son.

Every place we visited was packed with memories from an existence so alien to the one our family is living now, one in which the evening didn’t get started until at least two hours after our current bedtime.

As we walked down College Avenue with Evan holding his arms over his head, clutching one of our fingers in each hand, I half-expected a version of me from a decade ago to round the corner, stop dead in his tracks and say, “Wow, Kara married me?”

We’d high-five and spend a moment reveling in how we pulled that one off.

“And dude, is that my son?” he’d say. “He’s adorable! Oh, this is so awes -- wait, is that my bald spot, too?”

In the end, Russ and Esther’s beautiful wedding went off without a hitch, or with one very successful hitch. My only worry is that the huge candy table at the back of the ballroom – a rainbow-colored festival of sugar and chocolate that would have made Halloween jealous – might have overloaded Evan’s brain.

“This! This! This!” he murmured throughout the day, no matter where we were, pointing at the candy table that only existed in his mind.

Also, as it turns out, a pleasant side effect of bringing your toddler to an afternoon wedding, besides the opportunity to poach his leftover chicken fingers, is that his naptime will force you to make a graceful exit before you have a chance to execute the Blend-Into-the-Crowd Shuffle on the dance floor.

You can throw Mike Todd out of your ballroom at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The itchy & scratchy show

2011-06-05T22:56:00.001-04:00

I’m pretty sure our son Evan is going to play major league baseball someday, if only for his highly advanced scratching abilities.

“He’s really going to town,” I said a few mornings ago as Evan delivered a performance that Lenny Dykstra might have been hesitant about giving in public. Evan had always displayed a predilection for big-league scratching, but this time, he was really putting some extra mustard on it.

That afternoon, his daycare provider said, “Evan seems a little itchy today. I think he might have a yeast infection.”

I was shocked, mostly because I didn’t know that was possible. I’d have guessed that he had a better chance of acquiring his own daytime talk show.

“She knows he’s a dude, right?” I asked my wife Kara on the walk to the car.

“Guys can get them, too,” Kara explained.

It’s amazing, the things you can manage not to learn by the time you turn thirty-three. That guys can get yeast infections, for instance, or that peppers are officially a fruit, or that the word “ramekin” exists.

“Can you get me the ramekin out of the cupboard?” Kara asked a few months ago.

“You just made that word up,” I replied.

Now I can’t step out the door without hearing someone mention ramekins. Ramekin this and ramekin that. It’s strange to hear so many references to an object that wasn’t even invented until late February.

In any event, we took Evan to his pediatrician the next day.

“It’s jock itch,” she said.

“Nice work, Buddy!” I wanted to say, but it didn’t seem appropriate in front of the doctor. Still, it was hard not to be proud. He’s not even two years old, and he already itches like a professional athlete.

Actually, Kara and I both felt guilty for not bringing him in sooner. We thought he’d been spending the last few days preparing to moonwalk or be a center fielder, when he’d actually been trying to tell us something pretty important. Perhaps it should have been a tip that his favorite three words were truck, bus and itchy.

“Evan, no, you don’t need BBQ dog bones. Or eye drops. Or incontinence pads,” I said, chasing him around the CVS as we waited for his prescription to be filled. “Well, not that kind of incontinence pad, anyway.”

“Or fish oil pills. Or wrapping paper. Or eyeglasses,” I said, pushing his hands down to his sides.

We’d played with the sparkly hula hoops and the beach toys. We’d ridden in multiple shopping carts. We’d said hi to every stranger in every aisle. But Evan was like a shark, needing forward motion to keep him alive, and stopping him from destroying any of the millions of colorful objects within his reach was becoming impossible. I’d done everything I could to keep him entertained, but he was hungry, tired and jock-itchy, all the ingredients for a perfect tantrum.

When I picked him up to inquire how much longer we’d have to wait, Evan erupted into a series of shrieks that nearly knocked the inspirational literature off the nearby rack.

“Mr. Todd?” the pharmacist asked from the back, freshly inspired to hurry our order along.

Anyway, the medication worked in a matter of hours, and Evan is back to scratching like an amateur. That’s very good news, but I feel like he may have lost some of his competitive edge. If he’s going to play ball someday, it looks like he’ll have to get there based on his other abilities. Fortunately, he’s already working on his throwing arm, practicing his fastball by hurling meatballs and iPods around the house.

Also, CVS really needs a jungle gym.

You can use Mike Todd as a scratching post at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Cape crusaders

2011-05-29T22:27:00.007-04:00

“We have to leave right now,” my wife Kara said as I nodded and shoved the final three bites of breakfast sandwich into my mouth.

I scooped up as many pieces of crayon shrapnel as I could find on the floor, plunked them on the table and grabbed our son Evan out of his highchair, which he had converted into a podium for addressing our fellow patrons with his high-decibel State of the Toddler address. The state of the toddler at that moment was strong, red-faced and extraordinarily loud.

Fortunately, we always pay our checks as soon as the food comes, in preparation for the likely eventuality that we’ll have to flee the premises.

“Uppie!” Evan yelped as he pushed off my chest. To him, “uppie” can mean either pick me up or put me down, and when he means the latter, he usually says it in the same way Mel Gibson said “Freedom!” at the end of Braveheart.

Evan struggled and squirmed, turning so that I ended up carrying him like a surfboard under one arm. I pondered if anyone had ever carried their toddler like a surfboard toward a restaurant exit after a pleasant dining experience, and decided it was unlikely.

As I turned to check on Kara, who was just finishing stuffing all of our failed distraction paraphernalia into the diaper bag, Evan saw one last opportunity to reach out to his constituents. “Bye bye!” he called out from under my armpit, waving to the assembled audience. Several people turned and smiled, probably because we were leaving.

In his defense, Evan couldn’t really be expected to be on his best behavior. We’d been visiting Cape Cod for three rainy days at that point, and our poor meteorological luck was taking its toll on all of us.

We’d been trying to make the best of it, riding bikes in the rain, walking down the beach in the rain, complaining about the rain in the rain, etc., but it’s tough to maintain your cheerfulness when Dracula has seen the sun more recently than you.

Rainy weather on vacation used to be relaxing, an excuse to read a book, see a few movies or spend some long meals lounging at new restaurants. After having a baby, though, you can forget about all of that, at least until the child reaches Gameboy-playing age. At that point, your kid becomes like a newborn without diapers, and you can just stick him in a corner and do whatever you want while he drools and stares blankly for hours on end.

The biggest challenge we faced during the week was deflecting the puddle-emitted tractor beams that latched on to Evan in every parking lot, pulling him helplessly into their watery maw. Actually, I’m pretty sure he went voluntarily. Amateur puddle jumpers experience puddles with only their feet, and Evan turned pro long ago. He doesn’t jump in puddles so much as sop them up.

By the end of the week, though, the clouds parted long enough for us to verify the sun’s continued existence, and the puddles dried up enough for Evan to turn his attention to the ocean, where he taught us that no matter how persistent you are, or how graciously you offer, seagulls won’t eat a pile of sand out of your hand.

Even though we might not have visited during the ideal week, in the end, our trip gave us the kind of family bonding you just can’t get at home. If we’d stayed home, we never would have stood at the edge of the sea, introducing our toddler to this amazing, infinite puddle, which he did his best to sop up.

Also, Kara probably wouldn’t have eaten that bad clam, which kept her entertained for at least two days.

You can carry Mike Todd like a surfboard at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Schunemunkin' around

2011-05-26T20:35:00.005-04:00

Here are some pics from a hike the Wee Man, the pooch and I took a few weeks back to Schunemunk Mountain, just south of Newburgh, NY. I hadn't been there in several years, but man, I'll be back again soon. What a nice spot.

Partly dreary with a chance of insanity

2011-05-22T22:35:00.001-04:00

“I’m trying not to be filled with rage about it,” my wife Kara reported after checking the ten-day forecast, which resembled a flip book for a short animation about a really sad cloud that had no intention of going anywhere. Not a single orange pixel had been spent on the entire forecast.

Incidentally, does anyone else find it somewhat presumptuous of the weather-predicting industry that the 10-day forecast has become the standard?

“Man, we’re really nailing all these 5-day forecasts,” they must have said a few years ago. “What’s it going to take for us to be ridiculously unreliable again?”

I understand that trashing weather people is unfair, and that their jobs are not easy, but if they’re really going to pretend that they know what’s going to happen in ten days, they might as well go the full Spinal Tap and turn it up to eleven days.

Kara and I have been watching the forecasts closely because we just booked a last-minute vacation in a little cottage on Cape Cod, trying to get out for an adventure before some looming job responsibilities pinned us at home. But from the looks of the forecast, we just put down a deposit on a 600-square-foot screened-in cage, in which we’ll be trapped with a bored toddler for a week.

“I almost want to cry. I can’t believe we’re going to the beach and it’s going to rain the entire time,” Kara said.

Bad weather on vacation somehow manages to be at least 75% more depressing than bad weather when you’re home, probably because bad weather when you’re home only really affects you on the walk from your car to the Applebee’s entrance. Then your gloom gets drowned in Mexi-ranch dressing.

After spending a week obsessively checking the ever-worsening 10-day forecast, we began to discuss the idea of forfeiting our deposit and staying home. The idea had its appeal, but staying home and being severely disappointed would only be fun if it was free. Once you start throwing around phrases like “forfeiting our deposit,” much of the luster of eating Special K for dinner on the couch begins to rub off.

Of course, bad weather on vacation is a problem on par with crabgrass in your lawn. If that’s what you’re worried about, you’re officially out of real problems. Seeing news stories about terrible flooding in other parts of the country makes me feel especially shallow for getting depressed about our own situation. But as much as I recognize and appreciate our relative good fortune on an intellectual level, other people’s suffering never seems to cheer me up like it’s supposed to.

In any event, we’ve decided to go ahead and make the best of it. Kara ordered a toddler’s raincoat for our son Evan from zappos.com, since we couldn’t find any in his size locally.

“Raincoats are out of season,” a cashier told me, without irony, as it poured outside.

I’d just read a news story that said Zappos is one of the first major online retailers to begin editing its users’ reviews and comments, automatically correcting spelling and grammatical errors. Apparently, people are more willing to purchase items when the user reviews are well-written, regardless of whether the comment is positive or negative.

So if you try to leave a comment like this: “this ranecote rox!!!11!!”, you could probably come back the next day to find that it has been changed to something like this: “Forsooth! I declare this precipitation-defying attire to be of exquisite quality!”

Smart people are always saying “forsooth.” That’s how you can pick them out of a crowd. Unless that crowd is on Cape Cod on the rainiest week in history, because then all the smart people will probably be back home on their own couches, having forfeited their deposits.

You can rain on Mike Todd’s parade, and his vacation, at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Bedtime stories, pyromania and audiotape

2011-05-15T21:51:00.000-04:00

“In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon, and a picture of, yes, that’s a fire,” I said.

Evan sat in my lap, pointing at the roaring fireplace on the page. The fire plays no part in the story of Goodnight Moon, but it is pictured on several of the pages, which always seems to generate an alarming amount of interest from our toddler.

“Goodnight kittens, and goodnight mitt…okay, yeah, that’s the fire again,” I said.

Perhaps his interest in fire is genetic. I spent many years as a member of the Young Pyromaniacs Club. Excuse me, I’m being told that the official name is actually the Boy Scouts of America. In any event, we set a lot of stuff on fire.

I prefer reading Goodnight Moon over his other favorite story, Green Eggs and Ham, which is the War and Peace of kids’ books. You might have good intentions of reading every word to your child, but when the pages are made out of paper instead of cardboard, that’s a solid indication that you’re going to be there all night.

“Yeah, on a box, with a fox, yadda yadda,” I find myself saying.

When Evan points at the fire in Goodnight Moon, I try to get us back on the script of saying goodnight to everything in the great green room with the creepy bunnies in it. I need to be careful not to stray too far from the script when reading bedtime stories, since my family has a troubled history with children’s stories and improvisation.

“What’s the bear doing, Daddy?” my sister Amy asked my dad thirty-five years ago, pointing at the bear on the page and initiating an exchange that would be recounted at family gatherings a million times over.

“He’s standing on top of the mountain,” Dad replied, repeating what he’d just read.

“What’s the bear doing, Daddy?” Amy asked again.

“He’s standing on top of the mountain,” Dad replied, trying unsuccessfully to turn the page.

In the interests of brevity, I’ll cut out several iterations of their Q&A session, but you aren’t missing out on much. The Qs and As remained identical, until the final A.

“What’s the bear doing, Daddy?” Amy asked again, her hand on the page preventing the story from moving forward until this important plot point was resolved to her satisfaction.

Neither of them knew that moments earlier, Mom had placed a tape recorder under their chair with the intention of capturing a precious family moment to mail to our grandparents. Our sweet, sweet grandparents, who never uttered an indecent word in their entire lives.

When Dad realized that giving the answer, “He’s standing on top of the mountain,” was his contribution to trapping them both in an infinite loop, he decided to try something different.

“He’s scratching his back,” Dad replied matter-of-factly, except he didn’t say “back.” He used another word which probably isn’t fit to print in a family publication, at least not in this context. It would be appropriate in plenty of other contexts, though, like the ones in which the singular form of this noun is used to denote the piece of equipment that is central to many different sports, including basketball, baseball and football. If you guessed “athletic supporter,” you’re wrong, but very close, geographically speaking.

Amy was too young to understand the full meaning of the words that had just entered her ears, and we’ll never know whether that answer would have finally allowed them to move on to the next page.

“Maurice!” Mom yelled as she charged into the room, and that’s where the tape cuts off. Oddly enough, I don’t think Grandma and Grandpa ever got that package.

You can tuck Mike Todd in at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Into the especially wild

2011-05-08T21:50:00.003-04:00

It would have been a quiet afternoon in the woods, if not for all the screaming.

“Sarah, what do you want? Are you hungry? Or thirsty?” asked her father.

“Or cold? Or hot?” asked her mother.

Sarah sat neatly perched in her daddy’s backpack, snapping live branches off nearby trees with her screams.

We’d entered the woods for a three-mile hike with some friends, including Mike, Heidi and their toddling daughter Sarah. Even as we climbed up a fairly steep slope, things were going downhill fast. What had originally begun as an exercise in getting some peace, quiet and friendly conversation was devolving into a full meltdown. The three-mile hike was becoming Three Mile Island.

“Let us know if there’s anything we can do,” my wife Kara said.

“I think she’s mad at us because we’re switching her to cold milk from warm milk. She’s been grumpy all day,” Mike replied.

How liberating it would be to have the epicurean sensibilities of a toddler.

“I ordered this filet mignon medium rare. It’s not pink enough!” you’d yell, spiking your steak on the floor like you’d just run it in for a 40-yard touchdown. Then you’d watch the dog eat it before screaming, “Wait, I just decided I want that!”

Spiking food on the floor is the toddler way of returning it to the kitchen. The closest we can get to that satisfaction as adults is going to a restaurant that lets you throw peanut shells on the floor, which isn’t as much fun because it doesn’t torment anyone.

As we strolled along, Mike and Heidi tried every combination of variables to set Sarah at ease, to no avail. She didn’t want to be set down or picked up, fed or not fed, and she didn’t want her shoes on or off.

I once heard a childcare professional say, “A crying baby is like a puzzle. You keep trying things until you solve it. I always thought it was fun.”

That must be the least fun puzzle in the universe. I’d rather have to solve a Rubik’s cube that you couldn’t beat by peeling off all the stickers and re-applying them to the correct sides.

When your child is screaming, every non-essential brain function shuts down except the part that’s trying to fix the problem, and also the part that creates headaches. I could see this happening to Mike and Heidi as their shoulders tensed and their brows furrowed. Incidentally, do brows ever do anything besides furrow? Seems like they should learn to do something else.

As the hills came alive with the sounds of wailing, I felt some guilt about how I was still enjoying the hike.

“If it’s any consolation, she’s not bothering us,” I offered, though it didn’t seem to be much consolation at all.

Still, I was reminded of a scene from the old movie “The Right Stuff,” where two potential astronauts were subjected to a series of intense physical and psychological exams that caused one of candidates to lose his mind, while the other one whistled and read a magazine. Apparently, if it’s not your kid doing the screaming, you can just keep flipping through the latest issue of Newsweek, until it goes out of print in a few weeks.

After a few more harried minutes, Sarah suddenly recovered and started chattering and giggling. Nobody does a mood swing like a toddler. Smiles replaced grimaces as everyone enjoyed the rest of the afternoon.

Sarah must have come to recognize the inherent awesomeness of getting a free ride in a backpack, which might be one of the coolest aspects of toddlerhood. I wish I could ride around all day in a giant’s backpack, as long as he wasn’t taking me back to his cave to devour me.

You can send this column back to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The reluctant lords of discipline

2011-05-01T22:37:00.001-04:00

“Don’t you dare,” my wife Kara said. “This is your warning.”

Our son Evan stared at her, not breaking eye contact as he slowly pushed his plastic Sesame Street guitar off the coffee table. It landed with a thud on the dog, who scrambled across the room to find an area less likely to play host to a toddler’s experiments with boundaries and gravity.

You have to feel for the dog that lives in a house before the baby comes along. Two years ago, nobody gouged Memphis’ eyes or bounced toys off her back, and I can’t recall ever using her fur as a handhold to pull myself up to a standing position.

“Ahhh, what a sweet gig,” the dog thinks, quietly chewing her Nylabone, blissfully unaware of the tail-pulling maelstrom to come.

Then again, two years ago, nobody dumped full bowls of macaroni on the floor, so from the dog’s point of view, this whole thing is probably a wash.

“Okay, you’re going to the Naughty Step,” Kara said, taking a newly penitent Evan by the hand and leading him to the Staircase of Discipline.

“I’m putting you on the Naughty Step because you didn’t listen to Mommy and you kept pushing your toys off the coffee table,” she said.

Evan looked at her with giant eyes as Kara walked away and gave me the signal to put one minute on the timer. To my amazement, Evan sat there on the step, tapping his feet against the riser to pass the time.

Viewers of the show Supernanny might recognize Kara’s techniques, since we lifted them directly from the eponymous British taker-of-no-guff. We thought it seemed like a good idea to try the Supernanny’s methods, mainly because she’s British, and everyone knows that British people are awesome at discipline, probably from all those years of forcing kids to eat British food.

So far, it seems to be working. Evan knows the routine, and threatening a timeout is all it takes to end the current game of whack-a-dog. Still, I can see why some parents are scared to discipline their kids. The first time I gave Evan a timeout, I felt reluctant, worried that someday he’d end up complaining to his therapist about his tyrant of a father who never let him smear toothpaste on the couch.

But then I remembered the pushover parents of some of my friends in high school. There always seemed to be an inverse relationship between the amount of discipline in a house and the likelihood of having an infestation of drunken teenagers in that house’s basement. I mean, until we came over and kicked out the bad kids so that we could play chess.

Before Supernanny, back when Kara and I didn’t have any canine or human minions but were toying with the idea of both, we’d watch Dog Whisperer to get ideas on handling pooches. I’m realizing now that a listing of our DVR queue over the past few years would serve as a comprehensive history of our anxieties.

But then Memphis turned out to be a well-adjusted dog with no obvious psychoses, so Dog Whisperer became less fun to watch. Plus, the Dog Whisperer’s methods didn’t translate well to parenthood. Making a “tsssst” sound and poking Evan in the chest never really turned him into a more submissive pack member.

When his minute was up, Kara knelt in front of Evan. “Can you say ‘sorry’ to Mommy for not listening to her?” she asked.

“Dawy,” Evan said, and they hugged. Then he was back to his toys, lesson learned and incident forgotten.

After Evan went to bed, we watched an episode of Jersey Shore, and I really hope we didn’t learn anything that might ever apply to real life.

You can put Mike Todd on the Naughty Step at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The clothes make the man crazy

2011-04-24T21:23:00.003-04:00

Surveying the pile of old clothing that I needed to bag up and haul off to Good Will, I couldn’t help but feel angry once again at the fashion industry for tricking guys into wearing carpenter jeans while I was in college.

“That looks ridiculous,” I said the first time I saw a friend wearing jeans with a hammer loop partway down the thigh, about two months before I bought my first pair. Eventually, every guy had a hammer loop on his jeans, even though very few of us were building barns. These days, you’ll still see a rogue hammer loop from time to time, the useless vestige of a bygone era, like the wings of a flightless bird, or cursive.

I’ve come to imagine that fashion is, quite literally, a group a people sitting around in a room trying to figure out which clothing items everybody just threw away, so that they can make those items cool again.

“Bellbottoms! Corduroy! Huge sunglasses!” they yelled out at a recent meeting.

“Tight jeans on dudes!” someone called out, and a hush fell over the room.

“Yes, tight jeans on dudes,” someone repeated, slowly, as everyone nodded.

Their diabolical scheme appears to be working. On a recent visit to New York City, I noticed a disturbing proliferation of tight jeans on dudes, which means they’ll be coming for the rest of us soon enough. Apparently we, as a gender, can be convinced to do just about anything. Either that, or we’ve decided to try harder to get someone to objectify us.

Fashion has been on my mind lately, in part because it’s time to clean out the closet, but mainly because we’re coming up on the season when dudes must dress themselves. Your average slob gets enough help during the holidays that he can probably coast through the cold months wearing shirts that somebody else bought for him. But in the warm weather, a man must fend for himself.

“Dude, Abercrombie?” my buddy Jered said recently, pointing at the cargo shorts I’d been wearing since college, implying that my bald spot disqualified me from wearing them any longer.

Jered failed to understand that my ultimate goal with any garment is to get its per-wear cost below one dollar. At an initial cost of forty bucks, after ten years, those shorts probably cost me about a penny per wear, making them excellent performers. My wife Kara has a closet full of shoes that have the same per-wear cost as their original cost. And I suspect that calculating the per-wear cost for some of those shoes would require dividing by zero, a feat I haven’t attempted for fear of creating a rip in the space-time continuum.

As much as it pains me, it’s time for those shorts to go in the Good Will pile, too, knowing that they can never be replaced. A simple stroll past your nearest Abercrombie storefront in the mall will explain why my last pair of their shorts is behind me.

“Pleh! Ew, dude, I can taste the cologne,” Kara said as we pushed the stroller past our mall’s Abercrombie, where they must blow Axe body spray out the door the same way Cinnabon wafts the aromas off its bubbling cauldrons of lard and yeast.

I looked through the doorway to see a photographic mural of an athletic, topless teenage dude, his gigantic nipples following me like the eyes in a painting on a PBS murder mystery.

“It’s too loud in there. How does anyone think?” Kara shouted over the pounding music.

That, of course, is the point. The doorway to Abercrombie is designed to be an assault on the senses of old people. It’s like those ultrasonic shrieking devices that keep gophers out of gardens. Teenagers don’t even notice, but it makes adult heads explode.

You can dress Mike Todd up and take him anywhere at mikectodd@gmail.com.

When pregnancy and anti-pregnancy collide

2011-04-17T21:12:00.001-04:00

“Where’s the little guy?” the sandwich artist asked as he slid my footlong down the line.

“Probably picking up some new viruses at daycare,” I replied. We’d become regulars at this Subway when our son Evan was very small, helping to decorate their floors and walls about once a week with whatever shredded lettuce Evan could get his hands on.

After many visits, we became such VIPs that, not only did they agree to sell us select footlong sandwiches for just $5, but we were also admitted into the elite fraternity of people who know the secret difference between two nearly identical menu items.

“What’s the difference between the spicy Italian and the Italian B.M.T.?” I asked one day as the lady assembled my sandwich.

“There’s no ham on the spicy one,” she replied.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” she said.

This revelation explained why you so often enter a Subway restaurant to hear someone exclaim, “Yeeeeow! Sorry, I just burned my mouth on this complete lack of ham.”

Anyway, on this visit, the ponytailed sandwich-maker threw my sandwich into the giant toaster and said, “You know, I’m a dad now, too. My son was just born a few weeks ago.”

“That’s fantastic, congratulations,” I said. “What did you name him?”

I expected him to say a new-sounding name, like Aiden, Hunter or Teflon. Naming children has turned into an art form, where giving your kid a name that someone else might already have apparently turns your child from an original work into a print. It makes sense, I guess. In the third grade, I had two other Mikes in my class, and my resale value plummeted.

“Jacob,” he replied, and I was taken aback. A normal name? People don’t do that anymore. Hopefully, he spelled it Jaykob, or else he might have already ruined an otherwise mint-condition child.

Fortunately, we won’t have to worry about the stress of picking out another baby name, as long as my wife Kara’s pregnancy pillow stands guard. A giant U-shaped fortress, the pregnancy pillow conveniently doubles, after childbirth, as an anti-pregnancy pillow, complete with defenses that are, appropriately, impregnable.

“Are you still over there?” I’ll ask Kara from my side of the bed, the full-length pillow between us towering toward the ceiling.

“Shush,” I swear the pillow says as it pushes me into the bedside table.

In any event, the new father at Subway seemed completely enthused about being a dad. We had a nice little talk about his life as he finished making our order, and he was happy to chat about his new family. Afterwards, I realized that it was probably the most personal information that had ever been transmitted to me across a sneeze guard.

A few months later, I stopped back in and saw him again.

“How’s fatherhood treating you?” I asked.

“Great! It’s so much easier than everyone says,” he replied. My face agreed with him, but my brain did not. Many words come to mind when I think of the work that goes into raising an infant. Most of those words are positive and some of them are not printable in a family publication, but none of them are “easy.”

I’d expected to commiserate with him about how tough it is to raise a baby, but instead I searched my mind in vain for any anecdote that might conform with his conclusion about how easy it is to do something so extremely difficult.

“Except every night, he screams for two hours straight, like clockwork. The doctor says it’s colic,” he said, somehow smiling.

That didn’t sound easy at all. I wondered how he wasn’t curled into the fetal position, hiding under a pile of 9-grain honey oat loaves. But then we got distracted and chatted about other things, and in a few minutes, I was chomping away, trying not to scorch my mouth on the absence of ham.

You can write fresh to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Parenting is such a gag

2011-04-10T22:06:00.002-04:00

“I’m losing my mind,” my wife Kara said last week as we drove home from a weekend visit at her parents’ house.

“Hwwwwargh!” our son Evan replied from the backseat, his fingers crammed down his throat.

“No, Evan!” Kara said, whipping around in her seat and grabbing his hands out of his mouth. He giggled and kicked his feet, excited that Mommy was still playing the new game he’d invented earlier in the weekend.

While parenthood holds many joys, there’s not really a great way to prepare yourself for some of its horrors. A potential parent surely knows to dread the changing of diapers, though the reality of that chore has only rarely reached the level of cataclysm that my pre-parenting imagination had once conjured. But if you’ve never had kids, how could you possibly imagine a future that involved lunging into the backseat to keep your child from intentionally barfing on himself? You couldn’t, unless you had the kind of twisted, deranged mind that might be better put to use writing bestsellers.

As soon as Kara settled back into her seat, Evan started playing again.

“Hwwwwargh!” he said, his eyes watering. He’d invented this game on the drive up, two days earlier, which is when we discovered how the game ends if we choose not to take our turn: with a stop at the next exit to change all of Evan’s clothes, and a search for some kerosene to torch his old ones.

“If you pay me attention, I’ll never stop. But if you don’t, I’ll barf all over myself. It’s quite the Catch-22, isn’t it?” Evan said from the backseat, with his eyes.

“We’re never going anywhere again,” Kara said, her head between her hands. “If it’s further than the grocery store, forget it.”

“Can you tie his sleeves together?” I asked, immediately mortified that I was dead serious. Every parenting expert will tell you: when you can’t get your toddler to behave, you should attempt to fashion a crude straightjacket out of his clothing.

“Hwwwwargh!” Evan said.

“Stop it!” Kara yelled, unbuckling her seat belt and diving for Evan’s hands, to his great delight. The dog jumped up from the other seat to lick Kara’s face.

I stared straight ahead, trying to keep focus on the road as pandemonium ensued throughout the vehicle. Before you have kids, you should really have to take the driver’s test again. But this time, the tester should sit in your backseat, gag himself, scream, throw sippy cups at your head and dump full bags of Goldfish on the floorboard. If nothing else, that guy would have the best job in the entire Department of Transportation.

“Evan’s waging biological warfare against us,” I said.

“I think I’m having a breakdown,” Kara replied, buckling back in.

“Hwwwwargh!” Evan said.

To keep the proper perspective, you have to remember that children are not urinal dividers. You won’t always be glad that they’re there.

Once we got home, the Internet told us that we didn’t have anything to worry about. Pediatricians have advised that gagging “is a new sensation for the toddlers! It feels weird and strange to them and wow, what a reaction they get from their own bodies and their parents!”

Still, some parents have taken to dunking their toddlers’ hands in vinegar, which is a variation of a technique we once used to keep our ferret from chewing on our electrical cords. Perhaps, with some time and patience, we could also train Evan to roll over in exchange for raisins.

Already in the past week, just as the Internet promised it would, this phase shows signs of ending. Which is good, because we’ll need to leave the house again at some point; the cupboards have been bare for days. Fortunately, we’ve been able to survive on the Goldfish from the floorboard.

You can refuse to pay Mike Todd any attention at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Theater of the lost mind

2011-04-03T21:38:00.002-04:00

Arm-in-arm, we approached the ticket taker, excited to be out on the town once again. This was our first time in a real theater, the kind with a mezzanine and velvet ropes, since our son Evan was born almost two years ago.

“I hope this goes okay,” my wife Kara whispered to me.

“Enjoy the show,” the ticket taker said, and we followed the crowd inside, ready to take in a matinee performance.

The first indication that we weren’t attending a normal show occurred a moment later, just inside the doors, when an usher turned to us and asked, “Would you like a booster seat?”

“Sure,” I said, taking the foam pad. Evan followed close behind, his arms over his head, grasping the fingers of a grandparent on either side.

“Hey buddy, are we going to see Elmo?” I asked.

“Welmo,” Evan agreed.

Evan had brought his entourage to see Elmo’s Green Thumb, a Sesame Street Live production designed for the more discerning theater-going toddler. The hallways buzzed with hordes of kids sporting $15 Elmo T-shirts and spinning $15 light-up Elmo toys. Elmo’s thumb obviously wasn’t just green because of his gardening acumen. The fuzzy little guy didn’t miss any opportunities to create some commerce. Perhaps the show should have been called Elmo’s Green Palms.

But the price of admission (and accessories) was worth it as soon as the characters started coming out on stage, with Evan waving to Cookie Monster and Big Bird from his booster seat. There was magic in the air as Elmo enjoyed the loudest reception that our nation’s youth bestows upon any non-Bieber entity.

Evan absolutely loved it, for at least ten minutes.

To be fair, that was eight minutes longer than the previous record for anything holding his attention, dethroning a Taco Bell sauce packet.

About halfway into the second musical number, I pontificated on the nature of survival instinct. Is it truly an instinct, or is survival a learned behavior? I began to lean toward the latter as Evan attempted to climb over the mezzanine railing.

“No, Evan,” I said, pushing his knee back down. We were in the first row of the mezzanine, which is a much more relaxing place to be when nobody from your party is attempting to hurl themselves over the edge.

“No, Evan,” I said as he tried again. And again.

“AAAAAHHHHHH!” he screeched, turning around to glare at his unreasonable father, who never lets him do anything fun.

We took turns passing Evan between the four of us, trying to keep him involved in the show. During one of my off shifts, I peered over the railing to see half of the audience playing with its twirly Elmo lights.

“Why don’t kids have any attention spans?” I thought. Then I noticed that the other half of the audience was texting.

Toward the end of the show, I followed Evan as he explored the empty seats at the back of the theater. It would have taken a rig similar to the one from Clockwork Orange to get him to watch the rest of the show from his seat. As he climbed into each seat in row ZZ one-at-a-time, I looked down to see his mother and his grandparents learning important lessons from Elmo about, well, about something, I’m sure. I have no idea what happened after intermission.

After the show, Evan bopped down the sidewalk with a $10 Elmo balloon floating over his head, all smiles. Our first theater experience as parents may have been a bit more aerobic than we’d expected, but we felt a sense of accomplishment for lasting until the final curtain. Still, we’ll probably wait a decade or two before tackling Phantom of the Opera.

You can keep Mike Todd from climbing over the railing at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Sometimes, the gym hits you back

2011-03-27T22:18:00.001-04:00

If these words appear to be written by someone in peak physical condition, it’s only because we just put a new elliptical machine in our basement, and the effects are starting to kick in. I haven’t actually used it yet, but with the amount of money my wife Kara just spent on this machine, I’m already feeling the burn.

Actually, it’s kind of nice knowing that the machine is down there. Just being in proximity to exercise equipment makes you feel like you’re in better shape. It’s a similar theory to how just smelling doughnuts makes me fatter, because then I eat them.

As Kara has noted several times, we’re going to save money on this deal. She just quit the gym, so with no more monthly membership fees, we’ll break even on this purchase sometime around the Tuesday before the sun burns itself out.

You might notice that I only mentioned Kara quitting the gym. I tried to quit, too, but we ran into some murky issues when it became apparent that I’d never been there before. The gym is a place I’ve avoided ever since teachers stopped making me go there, in part because it’s a fundamentally dishonest place, designed to fool your body into thinking it needs more muscles than it actually does, and in part because of all the oddly unashamed naked people wandering around.

“This lady was just standing there naked,” Kara reported after a recent visit to the locker room. “Like, not to get changed. She was just chatting and hanging out as if she had clothes on.”

In my limited gym experience, it seems that one’s proclivity for walking around naked is directly proportional to how many years a person has under their nonexistent belt. I’m not sure if this is a generational phenomenon, perhaps inspired by gym classes of yesteryear in which kids were comfortable showering and changing in front of each other, or if you get to certain point in life when you think, “You know what? I’m going to wander around for a while before I put my pants on.”

When you go to the gym, you’re telling your body that you need more muscle to perform your daily activities. But if that was true, wouldn’t you have those muscles already? The cavemen who needed to catch animals ran faster because they were chasing animals all day. The ones who needed to carry rocks got stronger from lugging rocks around. The ones who developed caveman software got flabby. And they were happy with that, until their systems crashed and they got the Blue Rock of Death, which was much more gruesome than its modern counterpart.

So Kara and I have called another piece of exercise equipment into being. I’m not saying we won’t get our use out of it, but the vast majority of these dust-collecting basement-dwellers are born of hope, only to die of neglect. Perhaps the lone exception is my dad’s old exercise bike, which was purchased in 1971 with three pinto beans and an extra scratchy burlap sack, and which he still rides several times per week. That thing has more miles on it than Air Force One.

We might as well decide we like having the machine in our basement, since it’s four inches wider than the only exit door. I’m pretty sure the delivery guys welded it together down there, creating our very own ship in a bottle. People may come and go from this house, but that machine isn’t going anywhere without a long visit from a blowtorch and a hacksaw. Hopefully, when we stop using it for exercise in a few months, it’ll make a nice drying rack. And I can always use the cup holder in front for my chocolate shakes.

You can snap Mike Todd with your towel at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Thirty going on therapy

2011-03-20T22:51:00.001-04:00

“I think I’m having a premature midlife crisis,” my friend Josh wrote to me last week, his nerves fraying from the pressures of work and parenthood. Josh isn’t the kind of person to complain, so I understood that he must have been in serious need of a sympathetic ear.

“Don’t worry, man,” I told him. “It’s not premature.”

It’s a strange phenomenon that the better friends you are with someone, the worse of a person you can be toward them.

“I don’t feel like you’re taking my MLC seriously,” he responded. At that moment, I realized the severity of the situation. If you’re planning on saying “midlife crisis” so much that you can save yourself a significant amount of time by acronyming it, you probably need your friends to act more like friends, and less like the people who used to draw anatomical diagrams with Sharpies on your face when you’d been drinking too much. (Note to our children when they’re old enough to read this: Drinking too much warm milk.)

“Let’s catch up on the phone soon. If that doesn’t sound like a plan, you could always just purchase a car with eight cylinders,” I replied.

I recently bumped into an acquaintance from college who overachieved on his own midlife crisis by purchasing a car with twelve cylinders. That’s at least 50% more cylinders than the average fragile male psyche requires.

“You know, there are twelve cylinders in there,” he said, pointing at the hood.

“What a colossal waste of gas,” I thought.

“Cool car,” I said. I had to be nice, since we weren’t really friends.

When Josh and I finally caught up on the phone the next day, he said, “Remember when we used to complain about having a quarter-life crisis?”

A quarter-life crisis happens when you worry about getting a job after you graduate. A third-life crisis follows shortly thereafter, when you worry about getting married, having kids or how you’re going to avoid doing either one.

I didn’t have the heart to tell Josh, who is gainfully employed, happily married and frantically child-rearing, that once you’ve weathered the 1/4- and 1/3-life crises, any subsequent crises must be of the midlife variety, since we’ve run out of denominators greater than two. Nobody has a two-fifths-life crisis.

Really, though, I have a hard time mustering sympathy for anyone who gets well into their thirties without even a hint a bald spot, as Josh has done.

“I lost my job,” a friend will say.

“But you have a full head of hair,” I will reply, as if this evens things out.

As a small group of friends drove to lunch last week, our friend Judi commented from the backseat, “Nice haircut, Mike,” which was clearly a setup for a punchline.

“Thanks,” I said, bracing myself.

“You can barely see the combover anymore,” she said.

As someone who has been ever-vigilant about striking down proto-combovers when they appear in the bathroom mirror, I took great umbrage at the suggestion that I’d ever let one take root. Still, as my hair continues its great migration from my head down to my shoulders, I am developing a new understanding for how Giulianiesque cranial situations occur. A couple more hairs jump the part every day, innocently enough. Repeat this process for years or decades, though, and your ear becomes the only thing stopping your part from sliding right off your head altogether.

The good news for Josh is that even though he got no sympathy from me due to his unfair follicular advantages, his crisis appears to be short-lived.

“Everything’s fine. I’m just stressed out at work, but that should get better in the next few weeks,” he said.

If not, he can always count on a little extra support from his friends. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the dealership.

You can invite Mike Todd to combover at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The roof might be on fire

2011-03-13T21:51:00.000-04:00

Last week, for perhaps the first time in my life, I paid attention to the stop sign in our neighborhood, mainly because I was on foot. I still didn’t come to a complete stop, but I did break stride for a moment when I saw this message about halfway up the signpost: “Welcome. This is a neighborhood watch community.”

Was anyone going to tell me? We’ve lived here for almost four years, and our neighbors have gone dangerously unwatched the whole time.

“I’m a little offended nobody’s tried to deputize us,” I said to the dog as we rounded the corner, scanning the horizon for any suspicious activity.

While we didn’t find any crime out of which to take a bite, I did notice that several of our neighbors still had Christmas trees at the ends of their driveways. The trees had been buried for the past couple of months, just recently left behind like old mammoth bones as our own personal glaciers finally began retreating. The bedraggled things sure didn’t look too festive anymore. Perhaps their owners could stick some Guinness cans in their branches to turn them into St. Patty’s trees.

In any event, you’d think the Neighborhood Watch would be banging at my door to sign me up, since I’d recently invited half the emergency response vehicles in the county to come visit us.

Several weeks ago, when the snow was still deep enough that you could only be halfway sure that your patio furniture was still under there somewhere, I took the dog out for her morning constitutional at about 6am, shortly after the toddler had crowed. As soon as I stepped onto the deck, I heard, “Beep beep beep beep beep,” coming from the neighbor’s house.

A moment later, I reemerged from the house in snow boots and jammies to figure out what was going on. The best detective work is always done in flannel pants.

In a few minutes, I’d determined that our neighbor’s fire alarm was going off, and either they weren’t home, or they slept wearing air-traffic-controller earmuffs.

Fortunately, they’d given me their cell phone number, so I called them and found out that they were away for the weekend.

It’s funny how when you tell someone, “Don’t worry, I don’t see any smoke billowing out of your windows,” it doesn’t really seem to stop them from worrying.

After I took a stroll through their house and couldn’t find anything wrong except the cleanliness of our own house by comparison, we decided that I should call the fire department. I got the answering machine there, so I had to call 911 for the first time in my life.

“Hi, this isn’t really an emergency, I don’t think,” I started.

A few minutes later, a cop car rolled up. I made an excellent sidekick.

“That beeping? That’s what tipped me off,” I told him.

“We should really stay out here, in case it’s carbon monoxide,” he replied, and suddenly, I was even more relieved than usual to still be alive.

A few minutes after that, a fire truck roared into their driveway. You might not realize this until you’re standing next to one, but you never really lose the awe you had as a three-year-old for fire trucks, especially if you’re still wearing your jammies.

“They’re lucky to have a neighbor like you,” one of the firemen said before heading inside, apparently not familiar with my “The Wind Will Take Care of It” leaf raking strategy.

Still, getting complimented by a firefighter felt pretty awesome, like I was a kid he’d just let borrow his hat.

“Thanks, Mister,” I almost replied.

In the end, the problem turned out to be a fire alarm that was dying, but didn’t feel like going quietly. So my vigilance didn’t actually stop anything bad from happening, but I fully expect to be invited the next time our Neighborhood Watch forms a posse.

You can let Mike Todd borrow your hat at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Awesome by omission

2011-03-06T22:20:00.000-04:00

A colleague I’ve always respected retired this week, after forty fruitful years spent basking under fluorescent light tubes.

“Don’t worry, that will be us before you know it,” another colleague said to me, smiling.

“I sure hope so,” I replied, then immediately thought that was the most depressing thing I’d ever said. Yes, let’s just skip the next thirty years and cut right to the retirement cake, especially if it has a chocolate pudding layer.

I do envy certain aspects of retirement: freedom from worrying about professional calamities, getting to watch Judge Judy in real time and having plenty of time to spend with the people who really matter – your Facebook friends, who would like you to know that they finally rented “Inception” and didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Also, they could use your help wasting their lives in Farmville.

Retirement sounds like an awesome never-ending snow day, but the tendency to wish away all the time in-between seems unhealthy to me. Every time somebody retires, the people with long careers ahead of them make comments about being jealous. Perhaps this is just polite small talk, but if not, this sentiment is the saddest thing since the ending of Old Yeller, which I’ve never seen, but I have on good account that it was the saddest thing to have happened since 1957.

If young people are unhappy now and wanting to fast forward to their mid-to-late-sixties, it might just be Facebook’s fault. My wife Kara and I recently read an article that said Facebook is making us all miserable by making everyone else look so happy. Since people only post pictures that show themselves having a fabulous time, we assume that everyone else’s life is more fun than our own. People with toddlers are especially susceptible to this phenomenon, since they are far more likely to have recently suffered an exploding diaper incident, which makes everyone else’s pictures from Paris look that much more awesome by comparison.

That article got me thinking about how my life would appear to someone who only saw the pictures I posted online, which mostly feature our son Evan doing something adorable or our dog Memphis romping through the snow.

A few nights ago, exhausted from caring for a toddler with an ear infection and mild bronchitis, Kara and I pulled up the covers and turned out the lights, collapsing into the pillows.

“Finally, some rest,” I thought. Just as I was losing consciousness, I heard the sound of a bubbling cauldron. In a moment, I snapped awake, realizing that the cauldron was in our room, and it was our dog’s stomach. I opened my eyes just in time to see the silhouette of Memphis barfing in our doorway.

The regular reader(s) of this space might note that Memphis also barfed in last week’s column. If this is becoming something of a recurring theme, it is only because I am just now beginning to understand the full power of the ancient Sicilian curse: “May your dog have a sensitive stomach. And also, may your toddler throw the vast majority of his food on the floor.”

As I stumbled into the kitchen to retrieve some paper towels and carpet cleaner, I didn’t take a single picture, making our lives seem that much more awesome by omission.

To give the world a more accurate sense of our lives, after taking some pictures of Evan holding his mommy’s hand and laughing, I’d also need to take a picture of him screaming and arching his back so that I can’t fasten the car seat straps across his chest. It’s just that it’s really tough to get a good clear shot with all that struggling going on.

You can fast forward past this column at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Less splish, more splash

2011-03-06T12:17:00.001-04:00

Becoming a maid man

2011-02-27T22:52:00.000-04:00

“That’s it, I’m calling a maid service,” my wife Kara threatened as she surveyed the wreckage where our living room probably was. I couldn’t be exactly sure which room we were standing in, since most of our home’s distinguishing characteristics were obscured by colorful plastic objects that sing cheerfully when you stub your toe on them.

“Go ahead and call them,” I said, “But then we’ll have to cut back on our chauffeur’s annual bonus.”

We have this discussion every couple of weeks, ever since our friends recommended a maid service that they’d hired to clean their house before a party. We hired the same service last summer, before our son Evan’s first birthday party, and the experience changed Kara forever.

“You mean, we can abdicate our responsibilities as adults and just pay someone else to clean up the messes we make? This is awesome!” she thought, or something like that.

I think my basic problem with the whole idea (besides the cost, which is my actual problem) is that it seems like a confession that we can’t handle things on our own. When you grow up, you have three basic responsibilities: overpay for cable; remember yourself as a much more attractive twenty-something than you actually were; and if you can’t find any decent YouTube clips to watch, clean up after yourself.

Now every so often, when I’m getting a little too comfortable exercising my self-given right to live happily in squalor, Kara will bring up the maid service, knowing that she’s pitting my sloth against my stinginess. Nobody wants to pay for the privilege of leaving their empty yogurt cups on the couch; living in filth is only fun if you can do it for free.

Of course, even if we did hire the service again, we’d have to clean the house before the maids came over anyway, like the bi-annual flossing you do before going to the dentist.

“We just need someone to give the place a good scrub down,” Kara said. “They do a better job than we do, and they dust everything, too.”

“That’s ridiculous. We do a fine job, and dusting is a chore for people who have officially run out of things to do,” I said, blowing across the top of the credenza to make my point. The resulting dust cloud shut down local air traffic for the afternoon.

Keeping the place tidy would at least be conceivable if we didn’t have a dog and a toddler for housemates.

Last week, Evan sat in his high chair, catapulting applesauce across the kitchen while saying, “Nono, nono! Nono!”

“Where did you get ‘nono’ from, buddy?” I asked. Has there ever been a toddler who learned to say “yes” first?

Just then, our dog Memphis began doing her heaving dance, the one she performs shortly before barfing on the most expensive piece of carpet she can find.

“No no no no no no!” I yelled, throwing the sliding glass door open and pushing the dog out into the snow, but it was too late. Perhaps it should have served as some small consolation that the Mystery of the Missing Crayon was solved at the exact moment that the dog barfed cadet blue on my foot. Or maybe it was periwinkle.

“Nono,” Evan said, smiling.

It’s a wonder Memphis still hangs out with me. If someone threw me into the freezing cold while I was heaving and retching, I’d have a hard time snuggling up to them later. But she trotted back inside without a care and went straight to the spot on the counter where we keep her treats.

When I held out a biscuit, she looked at up me as if to ask, “Got anything in a burnt umber?”

You can make Mike Todd sparkle at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Treading on thick ice

2011-02-20T21:34:00.001-04:00

We’ve finally hit the exact week in winter where the cabin fever has become so severe that I’m tempted to escape from our house by running through the living room wall like the Kool-Aid pitcher. I’d do it, too, but the living room wall just leads into the kitchen, so I’m still tweaking that plan.

All around us, you can see signs of captivity-induced insanity beginning to set in. Last weekend, I saw a neighborhood kid riding a bike around his front yard, on top of a foot of snow. The horrible layer of ice that has otherwise prevented any fun from happening since mid-January kept him from falling through, but I still expected him to vanish at any moment, the way our dog occasionally does when she’s out for a pee.

I have to give credit to the dog for remaining housebroken through this winter. If I fell through the floor every time I stepped into the bathroom, the dining room carpet would start to look pretty inviting.

“Finally, it’s not so cold out here,” I thought last week, standing on the deck in a sweater, waiting for Memphis to return from her visit to the permafrost powder room. Upon re-entering the house, I checked the weather app on my iPod to see how warm it had gotten. It was 13 degrees outside. I rebooted the iPod only to get the same response, which clearly indicated that between me and the iPod, there was some fried circuitry somewhere.

Our toddler Evan has taken to hanging out in the laundry room, the final frontier in a house in which he has drained every single object of its entertainment potential, from Potato Heads to dish towels. For us, this is a welcome reprieve from his frolicking in the dog’s water bowl, which he treats like his own personal Wildwater Kingdom.

Another discovery he’s made recently is the TV. My wife Kara and I have tried to keep him away from it for as long as we could, but during these long winter weekends, much like Simon and Garfunkle’s boxer, there were times when we were so strung out, we took some comfort there. “There” being Sesame Street, of course.

I’m impressed with how little Sesame Street has changed since I was a kid. It’s a little funkier and the effects are better, but the idea’s the same. The biggest change is the appropriation of almost the entire show by Elmo, who is, from what I understand, the love child of Grover and a Snuggie.

“Don’t worry. You just sit back and relax. Elmo will raise your child for you. Ha ha ha!” he says, in our minds.

Big Bird, who used to be the star of Sesame Street, is lucky if gets a cameo anymore. In the dressing room after the show, I picture Elmo tapping Big Bird on the shoulder and saying, “Elmo ruined your career! Ha ha ha.”

Kara and I are well aware that allowing your kid to watch too much TV during the first couple of years increases their chances of having ADD down the road, but we’re not sure what the implications are if your child already has the attention span of a goldfish.

“Hey, look Evan, they’re all learning how awesome sharing can be,” I’ll say, not noticing that I’m the only one still watching the show, and Evan is in the kitchen, putting the remote control in the recycle bin.

In any event, the most recent forecasts show that we might soon have the chance to emerge from the indoors, rubbing our eyes and breathing in air that doesn’t make our respective nostrils freeze together. If not, the next column might be brought to you by the number 1,000, which is how many miles south we’ll be moving.

You can fully winterize Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The sniffling, sneezing, so you can rest column

2011-02-13T23:18:00.000-04:00

Everyone talks about Nyquil as if it’s the most powerful drug you can buy without first consulting a doctor or the bad neighbor kid, so I was expecting that I’d either be comatose by now or running naked down the hallway, swatting at mosquitoes that aren’t really there.

Unfortunately, I’m still conscious and maintaining whatever grip on reality I could previously claim. I usually don’t even bother with taking over-the-counter medicine, since whining seems to be just as effective, and much more cost-effective. But this time, I’m willing to try anything, even if it costs five bucks for a pack of twelve near-placebos.

Do you remember when Cash for Clunkers was going on, and they’d pour liquid glass into old cars’ engines to make sure nobody could ever drive them again? Someone has done that to my head.

“Babe, you’re snoring again. Can you go sleep in the guest room?” my wife Kara said last night. Lest she be accused of lacking in sympathy, her head has also been clunkered for the past few days, and it does make sense for the snorer to be the one to take his blankie and his respiratory cacophony elsewhere.

Snoring is a proud tradition among the men in my family, one that thankfully skips over me when my cranial ductwork is functioning. If the situation doesn’t improve soon, though, I might wind up like other snorers in my family, who have to strap pointy cushions to their backs to keep them from rolling over in their sleep. If you ever see one of these Todd men heading to bed after donning their anti-snoring cushion, now you’ll understand why they look like a sleepy stegosaurus.

I was hoping I’d feel a little more festive today, since this is the sixth anniversary of the birth of this column. I suppose that would make it a birthday, not an anniversary, but the point remains that it is indeed possible to write 312 columns without dispensing a single fact or useful piece of advice.

While the vast majority of these columns have been produced shortly after their respective deadlines have passed, the only deadline I ever flubbed altogether happened on the day my son Evan was born, which I vividly recall because I had a really good round of Assassin’s Creed II going that day.

It’s funny how six years doesn’t even sound like that much time anymore. To a ten-year-old, being sixteen is an unimaginably distant future. As you age, though, time accelerates, so that if you put a Mama Celeste pizza in the microwave on your thirty-third birthday, you’ll be forty before the cheese melts.

It might not seem like that much time has passed, but there have been a lot of changes since I started writing this column, mainly that my bald spot has gone from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1. I always thought DEFCON 5 was the worst place to be, but Wikipedia informs me that DEFCON 1 is actually the worst, 5 is the best. Remember that the next time you’re the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

From what I understand of the demographics of my readership, if you’re reading these words, there’s a very good chance that you gave birth to me, married me or spent your childhood giving me wedgies. Even if you’re not one of these people, the very fact that your eyeballs are here is the main reason that this column has survived, and I sincerely thank you.

I’d also like to thank all the editors over the years who have done me the twin favors of dispensing wonderful advice while maintaining generously low standards. I’ve greatly enjoyed my time here, and I understand how lucky I am to have had it.

Also, this will be my final column. Not really, but it felt like the ending needed to be punched up a little.

You can mentholate Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A flurry of wintry thoughts

2011-02-06T23:18:00.001-04:00

At some point, it’s only natural to wonder how you’re going to attach a snorkel to your dog’s face. As the snow continues to pile up in our yard, every pee break for Memphis is becoming more of an adventure, with her nose just poking up above the surface. Another couple of inches and she’ll have to burrow her way out there like Bugs Bunny, popping up in the neighbor’s yard and saying, “Eh, I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

Somehow, even in the midst of the most snow-whomping winter in memory, I find myself rooting for more snow, even though the results are decidedly against my own interests. When you’re a kid, your brain gets wired to think that snow equals freedom and awesomeness, and a rewiring can only occur after several decades of snowfall yielding nothing but traffic jams and herniated disks.

It’s been slightly more difficult to greet the unceasing snow with a childlike enthusiasm lately, since our son’s daycare shuts down when the schools do, forcing my wife Kara and I to work from home in a blur of snow shovels, teleconferences, laptops and Matchbox car derbies. Have you ever tried to get in a full day’s work while chasing after a 19-month-old who refuses to be entertained by PowerPoint presentations? It’s not easy, but Kara and I manage to get by, mostly because we pass Evan back-and-forth all day, playing our own version of hot potoddler.

Whenever snow is forecast during the day, I can count on looking out onto our parking lot at work and seeing half of the cars with their windshield wipers pointed in the air. If I’m not mistaken, this is a relatively new phenomenon. Nobody used to do this. Ten years ago, when I was a student at Penn State, you’d see oceans of cars parked before a blizzard without a single windshield wiper reaching for the sky, probably because lifting your wiper there would have caused all of your parking tickets to flutter into the bushes.

The first time I saw the windshield wiper trick done, I thought, “Hey, that’s a great idea! It must make cleaning off your car so much easier.”

The next time we had snow in the forecast, I proudly raised my windshield wipers before heading into work. That evening, I returned to my car after several inches had fallen. Imagine my surprise when cleaning off the car turned out to be zero percent easier.

I have since run the same experiment in different types of winter storms, and have collected enough data to be fairly certain that putting your windshield wipers up before a storm serves no purpose except to say, “Look at me, everyone! I knew it was gonna snow!”

Which is perhaps better than some be-bowtied weathermen could do, but still seems hardly worth the effort.

In any event, this winter isn’t showing too many signs of letting up on us anytime soon, with more storms in the forecast and Jack Frost continuing to nip indiscriminately. This is great news for kids who didn’t do their homework, but even better news for global warming deniers, who can spend all day posting Internet comments to the effect that even though NASA reported 2010 as the warmest year in recorded history, snow in the Northeast proves that Al Gore was wrong. And also fat.

Even with the pummeling we’ve endured so far this winter, somehow, each time the snow stops falling, I get a little disappointed, partly because the backbreaking manual labor begins shortly after the last flake flutters to a stop, but mostly because being a child with a sled ruined my brain.

You can kick Mike Todd out of your snow fort at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Sometimes, forgettable is good

2011-01-30T22:55:00.000-04:00

“Well, at least tonight has been memorable,” I said. “Most Saturday nights just turn into a blur of pizza boxes and Netflix envelopes, but not this one, right?”

“Uuuuugh,” my wife Kara replied. She said something after that, too, but I couldn’t quite make it out, partly because she wasn’t enunciating, but mostly because her head was inside the toilet bowl, which apparently has very poor acoustic projection.

I couldn’t stick around to chat anyway, since our toddler Evan was busy in his crib doing his best impersonation of Linda Blair from The Exorcist, but without the head-spinning. At least I imagine that’s what the scene from The Exorcist would have looked like, if I was dumb enough to watch that movie. I handle horror movies about as well as anybody, as long as anybody doesn’t sleep for three days afterwards.

We were managing to put on a pretty good horror show of our own last Saturday night, light on the gore but heavy on the splatter.

It was all my fault. I had recently asked the question: “Did you ever notice that Evan never throws up anymore?”

“Don’t say that. You’re tempting fate,” Kara replied.

Turns out, Kara was right. I had put a rhetorical slice of moist strawberry cheesecake right in front of Fate, and Fate was very tempted.

“Oh, I really shouldn’t,” said Fate. “But what the heck. Just this once.”

And so our house was blighted with a 24-hour bug that took out two-thirds of its human occupants, sparing only me, perhaps because I was gracious enough to invite it in.

It’s a strange phenomenon, when everyone around you gets sick but you don’t. You know you didn’t do anything to deserve it, but you still feel kind of cool, which is how it must feel to win a Grammy.

Before witnessing the carnage last Saturday, I thought 24-hour bugs sounded delightful. Only 24 hours? Whenever I’ve gotten sick as an adult, the symptoms seemed to last longer than the Crusades, and I’d gladly have taken a condensed version instead. But now that I’ve seen a 24-hour bug in action, I think I’ll stick with the slow-burning kind that doesn’t turn its hosts into biological geysers.

If we had to guess where Evan and Kara picked up the bug, the safest bet would be the toddler playland where we took Evan earlier in the weekend.

“We’re taking Evan to a bouncy castle place,” Kara said to her mom over the phone.

“Oooh, those places are full of germs,” her mom replied, and Kara passed that information along to me.

“Aw, c’mon, germs are nothing to be afraid of,” I said, hours before the projectile vomiting began.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure Evan would still do the entire weekend over again. He spent hours inside the toddlers’ bounce house, laughing, screaming and running full tilt into the walls. That’s pretty much what he does at home anyway, but it turns out to be much more fun when the walls are inflatable.

By the time we left, he’d had so much fun that I think he would gladly sign up for another severe gastrointestinal event to do it all again. But if it does all happen again, I think we’ll either swear off bouncy castles forever or put Evan inside a giant hamster ball before rolling him across the drawbridge.

The next morning, everyone was feeling better, and our house had the slow, moaning and groaning vibe of a frat house after a great party. Kara and I had just survived the kind of night that you know you’re signing up for when you become a parent, and which gradually becomes part of family lore. Most importantly, though, we learned that having a night to remember is best left for people without kids.

You can dump sawdust on Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A real pain in the can

2011-01-24T09:31:00.001-04:00

As gasoline rained down upon my person and belongings last week, I began to imagine the conversation that must have taken place at the meeting where the new style of portable gas can was developed.

“Hey, let’s design a new kind of no-spill gas can!” someone must have said.

“Boooorrrr-iiiiiiing. How about we make one that shoots gasoline straight up in the air? You know. For some reason,” someone else replied.

“Good idea! That’s exactly what we’ll do,” said their boss, as soon as his keg stand was finished.

If you have recently filled up a lawn mower or snow blower with a gas can purchased in the last few years, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’re also probably reading this by yourself, since you reek of gasoline. Maybe these cans are doing us all a favor, since someday gas will be so expensive that reeking of it will be a status symbol, like driving a car that wastes it.

I first became acquainted with the new style of gasoline splatterer in our old house, when I went to fill up our mower with the can that my wife Kara had just purchased. As soon as I put the nozzle into the mower and let the weight of the can gently open the spout, gas began ricocheting in all directions, putting on a fountain show to rival the Bellagio.

“This is what happens when a woman buys a gas can,” I said, in my head, because saying sexist things out loud is not very smart, especially when you’re drenched in a highly combustible liquid.

I set out to find a can that worked like the one in my parents’ garage, which has spilled perhaps three drops of gas between 1981 and 2011. It was then that I realized Kara hadn’t made a poor purchasing decision. A conspiracy was afoot. Home Depot, Lowe’s, Sears – they only stocked the cans that looked identical to the one I already had, the kind that must be very popular with self-immolation enthusiasts.

It occurred to me last week, when I went to fire up our snow blower to clear a foot of snow off the driveway, that after six years of near-weekly use, I still haven’t figured out how to execute a refueling without turning the garage into a Superfund site.

Incidentally, whatever happened to 4 to 8 inches of snow? That’s what we always got when I was a kid. These days, it’s either a dusting or a foot. Mother Nature doesn’t do nuance like she used to.

“You know, they design the cans that way now so they’ll pollute less,” my friend Sergey explained after a recent refueling-fueled tirade.

“No, don’t tell me that. I just want to complain about them without knowing any of their good points,” I said, echoing my feelings about people who disagree with me politically.

As it turned out, Sergey was right. The new cans are designed to be ventless, so they don’t sit around emitting all over the place like your relatives on Thanksgiving. In fact, according to an EPA website, “reduced evaporation from these containers will result in gasoline savings over the life of the container that will more than offset the increased cost for the container.”

While I can certainly get behind the theory of Earth-friendly gasoline cans, I wonder if the implementation couldn’t be accomplished with a design that’s less likely to treat my garage like the Gulf of Mexico. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot innovation going on in this space, though, so I’m only holding my breath because I stink like gas.

Perhaps I can take some solace in the fact that the new cans emit 78% less benzene, which sounds like a good thing, and also suggests that I should find a new breakfast cereal to replace my Benzene-Os.

You can immolate Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Evan: Making the Internet cuter since 2009

2011-01-18T22:14:00.009-04:00

Gone in five seconds

2011-01-16T21:30:00.000-04:00

“Oh, man, I’m having retroactive shame,” I said to my wife Kara as we ate lunch yesterday.

Something in the way our son Evan’s grilled cheese sailed off his tray reminded me of a faux pas I’d committed a few weeks earlier. My brain’s shame backlog must have kept the incident from being processed sooner, perhaps because memories from a shirtless day at the beach got lodged in there and jammed up the queue.

The incident happened while we were visiting our friends Jen and Gary over the holidays. While we sat in their living room catching up, Evan clung to my leg, terrified, peeking over my knee at their friendly cat Nittany, who was preoccupied with the very menacing activity of licking himself.

I couldn’t really blame Evan for being afraid, since a housecat is chest-high on him. If a lion had wandered into the room, I would have been looking for a knee to cling to, too, no matter how much the lion seemed to be more interested with its own business.

After a few minutes, Evan started warming to the tiny carnivore in our midst, reaching a tentative hand toward Nittany. At about that moment, I dropped a cube of cheese off the plate I’d been holding. It rolled into the center of our small circle, like it had new dance moves to show off.

“Oh, you can just throw that out,” Jen said.

“Meh, five-second rule,” I replied without a thought, picking it up and popping the cheese cube into my mouth.

I wish Mom had taught me that there are actually two rules of thumb for paying visits: Don’t show up empty-handed, and probably don’t eat stuff off the living room floor, either.

The five-second rule implies that an infectious bacterium would have this conversation with itself: “Dude, what just landed on my head? Hmmm, smells like cheese. Should I hop on, or stay here? First, let’s weigh all the pros and cons. For starters, I’m already all comfy right here on the floor. Second, aw, dang! I missed my chance.”

Even on the dubious notion that bacteria pause for five seconds to consider whether or not to stow away on your food, I’m pretty sure any wandering hairs don’t suffer from the same indecisiveness.

In any event, Jen and Gary were quite kind to their foraging guest and didn’t even bat an eyelash, which might explain why it took three weeks for me to feel properly ashamed.

At our house, the five-second rule is never an issue, because food doesn’t hit the floor. Our dog Memphis catches it in the air, like the Blue Man Group does with marshmallows. She’ll park directly under Evan’s high chair, looking up, muscles tensed, waiting for meatballs from heaven to come showering over the edge of the tray. She’s rarely disappointed. The same kibble has been sitting in her bowl for six months.

The point, of course, is that it’s our dog’s fault that I’m not properly trained.

A moment after my breach of etiquette, Jen and Gary’s massive, 140-pound Newfoundland lumbered into the room, and Evan’s eyes grew proportionally wider. I watched Evan, expecting him to cower beside my knee again. Instead, he took off after the dog, squealing in delight, showing no fear toward an animal that could knock him over using nothing but its tongue.

Gary takes their dog to Penn State football tailgates, where he’s taken to telling students that the animal is half Labrador, half bear.

“You’d be surprised how many people believe that,” he said.

“I hope they weren’t biology majors,” I replied. Just kidding. I was too busy scrounging for crackers under the couch.

You can mop up the floor with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Happiness in a vacuum

2011-01-09T22:54:00.001-04:00

“Don’t get any ideas,” I said to my son Evan as we wheeled toward the hysterical child in the grocery store, whose screams were starting to rip up floor tiles and fling them against the poultry freezers.

“I told you no and that’s it!” his father yelled, taking the child by the arm and pulling him down the nearest aisle. The screams faded away as the happy family disappeared into the English-muffin-lined horizon.

“Uh oh,” Evan said.

“Uh oh,” I agreed.

Evan has said a few different words in his life (like “cow” and, I swear, “front door”), but mainly he just says “uh oh” for everything. Since there’s always a toddler around when he’s saying it, it’s usually in the proper context.

He’s developed an entire language based on that one word, like how “dude” works for teenagers. At least that’s how “dude” worked when I was a teenager, back when the world was new and text was a noun.

I’ve been watching parents in public lately, trying to figure out if they seem happier than people without kids. My wife Kara and I were recently shaken up by an article that quoted a Harvard psychologist as saying that spending time with her children gives an average mother the same amount of happiness as vacuuming.

“That’s a ridiculous comparison,” I said. “How can Evan compete if he doesn’t even have upholstery attachments?”

The article also said that while marriage generally increases happiness, having children generally decreases it. People living with small children are the least happy people of all, perhaps because they’re the only ones who haven’t been able to see “True Grit” yet.

My guess is that, at any given moment, parents of young children might not be all that stoked to be cleaning yogurt off the ceiling, or poop off of themselves. But there’s a satisfaction that comes from parenting, a fullness that can’t be earned any other way, except, apparently, from giving your carpet a good going-over. In any event, there does seem to be a general consensus among us breeding types that we wouldn’t go back. Or maybe we’d only go back long enough to take that trip to Scotland, but then it’s straight back to bibs, Boppies and barf.

For the child, the family arrangement is a pretty sweet gig. Imagine, for a moment, that all you had to do was go, “Mwaah!” to set a team of people trying to make you happy, like you were an Indy car with your own pit crew.

“You want food?” they would ask. “Bananas? No? Okay, you loved bananas yesterday. A slice of ham, perhaps, or maybe a grilled cheese? Or maybe you’re tired. Or cold. Or perhaps your ears just popped, or you have a new tooth coming in.”

Meanwhile, you can just sit back and relax. Or scream until they figure it out.

As I wrote the preceding paragraphs, my sister instant-messaged me from her vacation in Jordan. After checking in to see how we were doing, she wrote, “The Bedouin Desert Camp was truly amazing. We just took a jeep tour through the desert.”

Sure, seeing fantastic new places sounds nice and all, but having kids lets you experience new things without leaving the house, like scraping macaroni off the fridge, or watching various electronic devices bouncing down the stairs.

Whatever Harvard psychologists may say, for us, parenthood has been an experience we’d never trade. How else can you have adventures every day, right in your own living room? Without turning on the TV, I mean.

Anyway, the point is that Evan brings us happiness that we could never imagine otherwise. And it’ll only be doubled once we teach him to work the vacuum.

You can drag Mike Todd past the English muffins at mikectodd@gmail.com.

New(s) flash

2011-01-08T17:48:00.009-04:00

I've really enjoyed the baby-shooting camera that we got before Evan was born, a Nikon D40. But the stupid flash broke on it a few weeks back, and I found forums online where a million other people had the same problem. Nikon really should make cameras where the effing flash doesn't bust for no reason.

Anyway, rather than paying 175 bones to fix it, I spent 125 on an external flash that lets you tilt the bulb so you can bounce the flash off the ceiling. After seeing the difference it makes to have that capability, I'm actually kind of stoked that Nikon sold me a flawed unit that crapped out a few months after the warranty expired.

Check out the difference. Without bounce (flash aimed straight forward):

With bounce (flash aimed at ceiling):

Without:

With:

We've only had the flash a couple of days, but I think we'll have fun with it. Our flash pictures always looked funky, so we'd kind of stopped messing with indoor shots. This way looks way more natural.

All of this explanation is, of course, just an excuse to post more baby pictures. Toddler pictures? Anyway, roar!

Judging a book with no cover

2011-01-02T22:45:00.001-04:00

If I’m going to see any more heaving bosoms around here, I suppose I’m going to have to track them down myself, since my wife Kara won’t be bringing them into the house anymore. The same is true with half-naked pirates, though the loss there will be much easier to deal with.

The blame for this newfound propriety falls upon Kara’s new e-book reader, a Christmas present from her sister, which allows her to download romance novels directly to a piece of plastic, so Kara no longer needs to buy the colorfully covered books that have been festooning various household surfaces for the past several years. Goodbye, barrel-chested Highlanders. Adios, swooning maidens, with your certain body parts swooning more visibly than others. I wish you all much happiness on your voyages of self-discovery and other-people’s-selves-discovery, and I hope you don’t catch a chill.

Fortunately, the adjustment to e-books is made easier by the publishers’ policy of charging the same amount for the vast majority of their books, regardless of the delivery method. This affords you and me the advantage of not having to share in any of the cost savings from e-books. We’d probably just waste our share of the cash on SUVs, Snuggies and high-risk mortgages, anyway.

As much as it doesn’t make that much sense to me that a few electrons should cost the same as a product that has been chopped down, processed, printed, shipped and displayed, I do understand publishers’ desire to protect their intellectual property, and to keep paying writers for their work. I’m especially empathetic because the written word has been quite a gravy train for me over the years. As long as the train is pulling into McDonald’s, and sweet and sour sauce counts as gravy.

“I really like reading books this way. I didn’t think I would,” Kara said as she lounged on my parents’ couch after Christmas.

“Mmm hmmm,” I replied from the other end of the couch, my mouth stuffed full of caramel popcorn. I’d made the mistake of pulling over my parents’ barrel of popcorn from under the Christmas tree, the kind with dividers to keep the different flavors from consorting with each other.

These barrels have been diabolically planned. The saltiness of the cheese popcorn makes you crave the sweetness of the caramel popcorn, which makes you crave the saltiness again, and the cycle continues until your wife notices that you weren’t really massaging her leg, but wiping the cheese powder onto her lap blanket.

“I know you’re just doing that to get the cheese off your fingers,” she said, and I looked down in shame at the half-empty barrel on the floor. Ordinarily, a barrel that size has rodeo clowns jumping out of it, and I’d just mowed through enough of its contents that the dividers were starting to collapse upon themselves. I brushed the multi-flavored debris off my chest and shoved the container back under the tree.

“Look, you can play Minesweeper on here, too,” Kara said, handing me her e-book reader. “I cleared the easy screen in 42 seconds. See if you can beat it.”

After a few attempts, it became clear to me that Kara has missed her calling. With my thumbs clicking the buttons as fast as they could go and my dusted-off neurons firing harder than they had since Calculus II, I still couldn’t get under 50 seconds. More often than not, anyone depending on my minesweeping skills would have been joining me in Davy Jones’ locker, stuffed in there with Davy Jones’ sweaty gym shorts.

Kara should be working on a gunboat somewhere, standing in the crow’s nest, leaning forward with binoculars to her eyes. With her experience, she could quickly clear vast oceans of mines. And also spot any danger from half-naked pirates.

You can wipe your cheese powder onto Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

I prefer my rump not shaken, nor stirred

2010-12-27T09:10:00.000-04:00

With a flick of her wrist, my wife Kara sealed my fate.

“Dude, that’s not cool,” I said.

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” she replied. “Or at least really funny.”

Even after ten years of being with your wife, you can still discover whole new depths of evil she was hiding from you the entire time. If you’re anything like me, you won’t discover how sinister she can truly be until you’re standing in the middle of your in-laws’ living room, realizing that you’ve just been tricked into dancing to a song called “Rump Shaker” in front of a large percentage of your extended family.

This predicament began innocently enough.

“I think you’re all going to like the Christmas present that Dad and I got for each other,” my mother-in-law said to her three daughters and their respective hangers-on last weekend. We were celebrating Christmas a weekend early, in large part because Kara’s sister Jill is an anesthesiology resident at a hospital in Philadelphia, so her schedule has little time for things that don’t involve knocking people out. Even during major holidays, people still need to be knocked out. You can probably think of several people in your own family who could use it.

Eventually, doctors get enough vacation to spend more time on the golf course than your average sand trap, but they have to put in their time for many years first, working insane 30-hour shifts and 90-hour weeks. Jill’s schedule for the past several years has taught me a lot about our health care system. Apparently, our youngest medical professionals do their best work when they haven’t slept since last Tuesday. This seems like a good strategy, because we want these people as sleep-deprived as possible when they’re coming after us with syringes, scalpels, sigmoidoscopes and whatever other pointy instruments they can get their hands on.

“What’s the present?” Jill asked her mom. Incidentally, I’ve started practicing calling my mother-in-law “Mom” as well, just like her biological kids. You’d be surprised how many years you can coast by without ever addressing some of the most important people in your life by name. With in-laws, my limit turned out to be a decade, but I know some people who plan on calling their in-laws by various pronouns in perpetuity.

“I can’t tell you until we open it. But you’ll like it,” her mom responded.

“Did you get us all a trip to Hawaii?” Kara’s sister Sarah asked.

“No!” her mom replied.

“Hooray! We’re going to Hawaii!” Sarah said.

Sensing that speculation was going to run rampant until they opened their gift, Kara’s parents unwrapped a toaster-sized box to reveal an Xbox 360 with a Kinect sensor, which allows video gamers to act out motions to play a game, rather than using a controller. In the worst-case scenario, this means that to play a dancing game, you actually have to shake your rump.

While the technology is very cool, it seems to fundamentally miss the point that video games are supposed to be celebrations of sloth. Now I can envision a future in which I have to tell my son, “Sorry, Evan, I know you want to play outside, but you need to get your exercise in front of the TV first.”

To play the dancing game, you have to stand in front of the sensor and imitate the dance moves of the virtual dancer on the TV screen, right in front of the real people who are watching.

“I don’t think there’s enough beer in the world to make this fun for me,” I said. Undaunted, Kara dragged me onto the living room carpet and selected the “Rump Shaker” song while Jill taped the proceedings with her camcorder.

Hopefully, whenever someone tries to play that video, I can get Jill to knock me out first.

You can shake your rump with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Making Craigslist, checking it twice

2010-12-19T22:43:00.001-04:00

“Still available and in good condition?” came the promising response to my ad on Craigslist, the free online service that connects you with people of varying degrees of sanity to buy and sell items of varying degrees of brokenness.

I’d posted an ad earlier that day in an attempt to sell my 2003 Toyota Matrix, a car that had served me well over the years, but was not designed to handle a growing family that is often toting a dog, a baby and a stroller the size of an SUV. When we roll out of town for a weekend trip, we leave a trail of popped rivets behind us, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. (Figuratively speaking, of course. I don’t know if cars actually have rivets, but if they do, mine hasn’t popped any. Especially if you’re interested in buying it.)

Incidentally, are you familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel? The happy ending (spoiler alert!) is that the two kids murder the old lady who tried to eat them and end up back with the dad who tried to kill them by abandoning them in the woods in the first place. If I was a therapist, I’d advertise on the rear book jacket. No wonder we, as a culture, have switched to Dora the Explorer.

My wife Kara had already taken care of the haggling part of buying a bigger car, a feat she’d performed entirely over email. We’d read that this was a better way to do business, safely removed from the glower of the salesperson and their entreaties to increase your paltry offerings, lest you enrage the manager behind the curtain.

“They just asked if we wanted floor mats, too,” Kara said to me from behind her laptop.

I’d always assumed, incorrectly, that a floor mat was a part of the vehicle. Yes, we’d like floor mats, and we’d also like to upgrade to the package that includes a steering wheel.

In the end, Kara drove a very good bargain, so it was my turn to chip in and sell our current wheels. Enter our friend Justin Thurston, who sent the response to my Craigslist ad.

“Fresh fish!” I yelled, writing a thoughtful response to Justin, explaining the wonderful condition of the car and laying the groundwork for a business relationship that would benefit us both.

A few moments later, Justin replied again: “Good to have your reply. I am justin thurston from Vancouver, WA. andwould have loved to come and inspect it at your place myself, but I ama UNICEF work and presently off Haiti where there flooding and

Hurricane.”

I can understand how a 2003 Toyota Matrix would be really helpful in that situation, but I began to suspect that Justin was not being completely forthright with me. The rest of his message explained how helpful I could be if I just sent some very personal financial information his way.

Justin’s email baffled me in the way that most spam does. When I’m sending out an email to ten other people in my department at work, my finger hovers over the mouse button, twitching, as I proofread the note countless times, worried that coworkers might make warranted inferences about my intelligence if I mix up “their” and “there”.

If you’re a spammer, and your email is being sent to ten million people, wouldn’t you at least run it through a spellchecker first?

Anyway, if you take anything away from this column, I hope it is this: 2003 Toyota Matrix, power windows and locks, excellent condition. Dog and baby only barfed in it a few times. All offers considered, especially ones from actual humans.

You can verify your checking account information with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Evan's first word

2010-12-16T23:56:00.002-04:00

I don’t know the drill

2010-12-13T00:18:00.000-04:00

“Oh, I don’t know, whatever you pick out will be great,” my wife Kara said to her mom on the phone, as I waited for her to notice what I’d just done.

“What about you guys? You’re always so hard to shop for,” she said, my shame deepening with each passing moment, my failure nakedly on display but not yet noticed.

Kara finally looked at me and sensed something wasn’t right.

“What?” she asked with her eyes.

“I’ll fix it,” I mouthed. “And I’m sorry.”

Her eyes darted to the home worsening project I’d recently embarked upon. The original idea had been for the project to be of the home improvement variety, but things took a turn south once I started operating power tools.

“Oh, no,” she said.

Our silverware drawer sat on top of the kitchen counter, empty, the mighty wind of my humiliation whistling through the single hole drilled right through the front of it.

I’d been installing Tot-locks on our kitchen cabinets and drawers to make cooking as annoying as possible. That way, we’d have to eat more pizza to survive. The secondary benefit would be that our child would have to find a hobby other than dumping the contents of our kitchen cabinets all over the floor.

To our son Evan, the kitchen had become a giant Advent calendar, with every door hiding a wonderful surprise, a surprise that must be removed, spindled and mutilated as quickly as possible. He’d spent the bulk of the previous day standing next to our open kitchen drawer, gleefully tossing our most prized food preparation documents (takeout menus) into the air.

So I had started working my way around the kitchen, installing locks that would make even the most stubborn adult stop and ask himself, “How badly do I really need a spoon right now?” In our house, yogurt had just become finger food.

The Tot-locks open with a magnetic key that lives on the fridge, so when you’re installing the locking mechanism, you have to drill deep enough into the back of the cabinet or drawer so that only the thinnest sheet of wood would separate the lock from the key. This type of precision should not be expected from a person who finds a toilet to be an impossibly small target.

When the drill bit came roaring through the front of the drawer, right next to the handle, my shame was intensified not only because Kara was talking with her mom, instantly giving my failure a wider audience than I would have preferred, but also because I’d been using the fattest drill bit I could find, the kind you’d expect to see mounted on the front of a vehicle bound for the center of the Earth.

Hopefully, Evan won’t be afflicted with the same sort of mechanical ineptitude that plagues his old man. He’s already showing some promise at accomplishing tasks normally left to adults.

“Babe, why is our cable bill twenty bucks higher this month?” Kara asked recently.

“I have no idea,” I said, then we both looked at Evan, who was holding the cable remote up to his ear like it was a phone. He held out his phone and started dialing it by mashing random buttons.

“Mweh?” he asked when he held the remote back up to his ear.

As it turned out, it’s possible to order a Platinum Package from our cable provider simply by pressing a single button on the remote over and over. In a remarkable coincidence, that button happened to be the largest one on the remote. I wonder how many people have subscribed to HBO using nothing but their butts. Probably less than the number of people who can pinch a fork out of their kitchen drawer without opening it.

You can hide your power tools from Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A chomp off the old block

2010-12-05T22:46:00.000-04:00

I picked up this life-changing book the other day. Well, I assume it’s life-changing, once the reader moves beyond the purchasing phase and into the “reading the actual book” phase, but I’m not quite there yet, due to circumstances entirely within my control. Namely, the circumstance of preferring video games to life improvement.

A life improvement seemed in order a couple of weeks ago, when our toddling son Evan buried his cute little face into my shoulder.

“Aw, hey Buddy, what’s going OW!” I shrieked (in a very manly way, of course). You probably wouldn’t know this unless you’ve had them sunk into your shoulder, but baby teeth are like miniature samurai swords, not yet dulled from years of slashing through McNuggets. I don’t understand how pacifiers withstand the onslaught without being made of diamonds or Kevlar.

As I pushed Evan away, he smiled at me, my stretched shirt still caught in his razor-sharp choppers. Then he opened his mouth wide and went in for a second helping of shoulder sushi.

“No!” I yelled, grabbing him by the arms and giving my best angry father face, which is an easy face to make when your child has just treated your shoulder like Evander Holyfield’s ear.

“Baby! You can’t yell at him like he’s the dog,” my wife Kara said.

I looked back at Evan, immediately sorry for the emotional scarring his first fatherly discipline had inflicted on his tender, developing psyche.

Evan threw back his head, drew in a great breath and squealed with delight, clapping his hands and dancing. (“Dancing” is a term I use loosely here to define a semi-rhythmic bouncing achieved by flexing the knees, which also describes what I do at weddings when hiding in the bathroom ceases to be an option.)

Kara was right. You can’t yell at a baby the same way you would a dog because as soon as you do, the baby thinks he’s just invented a hilarious new game, while the dog would mope around until you apologize and rub its tummy.

Clearly, I needed a new strategy for communicating with Evan. He had no idea that his actions had failed to live up to our household’s high standards of non-cannibalism. Stern words and angry faces weren’t doing the trick, so I turned to the Internet and ordered Dr. Haim Ginott’s “Between Parent and Child,” a book that received high marks for helping to keep your children from eating you alive, figuratively and otherwise.

Last Saturday night, after Evan went to sleep, I found myself faced with the choice between reading a book that would help me to have a richer relationship with my son and playing a game on my iPod that consisted entirely of shooting birds out of a slingshot. By about the 700^th bird, I’d forgotten all about the guilt.

Another reason I have yet to crack the book is that Evan, for the time being, seems to have renounced his werewolfian ways. He hasn’t tried to make Dada-touille out of me since that one evening, but I think the episode officially marked the transition to a new phase of parenthood: the Age of Discipline.

Our neighbor with two elementary-school-aged kids had warned me that this day was coming.

“As they get older, parenthood becomes less physically trying, and more mentally so,” she said, standing beside her mailbox as her kids played in the yard. “You don’t have to carry them around and do everything for them anymore, but you always have to be thinking and steering them in the right direction.”

As if to emphasize the point, her daughter kneed her son in the crotch, functionally terminating the conversation, so I turned Evan’s stroller away and continued down the street.

Upon further reflection, I think I’ll buy an athletic cup when I go to pick up my new shoulder pads.

You can give Mike Todd a stern talking to at mikectodd@gmail.com.

On jury duty, the jury’s still out

2010-11-28T22:45:00.001-04:00

Sixty potential jurors cowered in the back of the courtroom as the lawyer spun the lottery jug with all of our names in it. Everyone stared at the floor, as if not drawing any attention would get them back to their regular lives sooner. It’s not always good to be selected, especially by nature, or a lawyer.

The scene reminded me of middle school gym class, when Louis Poois (not his real last name, at least not when he was within earshot) would get the ball during a game of dodgeball. The entire opposing team would hide in the corner, crawling over ourselves, trying not to be on the outside of our human shield of cowardice.

“Pow!” was the sound you’d hear emanating from the head of Louis Poois’ unlucky target, as the volleyball ricocheted into the gym rafters, perhaps never to be seen again.

Louis would trot back towards his team, arms held aloft in triumph, his armpit hair billowing in the breeze through the holes in his muscle shirt while his victim groaned on the gym floor, the word “gnidlapS” branded on his forehead.

A friend just told me that dodgeball is banned from gym classes in public schools now, and the fact that we began recalling dodgeball games with fondness might be a sad commentary on how much fun the rest of middle school was.

“Michael Todd,” the lawyer said, reading from the card he’d just pulled. Pow! The other potential jurors looked at me with relief as I joined the chosen ones in the jury box.

The jury selection process took the entire morning, as each person in the room had some terrible secret they wanted to discuss with the lawyers in private, out in the hallway. Those who successfully argued their inability to remain impartial disappeared forever. The others came back into the room, dejected, thrown back into the pool.

As the lawyers spent hours walking back-and-forth between their table and the hallway, I began to understand why every available surface in the courthouse had at least one water pitcher sitting on it. Those guys must get thirsty.

The highlight of the morning came when a lawyer asked an old guy whether he’d be able to remain on the fence until all the evidence had been presented.

“I spend my whole life on the fence,” the man replied. “It just depends which way my wife pushes me.”

In the end, I was among eight jurors chosen for a civil landlord-tenant case that ran for three days last week.

“Don’t talk about the case,” we were instructed at every break, so we played it safe by not talking about anything at all. For hours on end, we’d sit in a jury room the size of a cubicle like monks, pointedly not making eye contact.

After one day of this, it became clear that I needed a new game on my iPod. The most popular game in the iTunes Store was called Angry Birds, which involved firing birds out of a slingshot to knock buildings over. I knocked over a lot of buildings as a juror.

“How has the jury found?” the judge asked at the end of the trial.

“Your Honor, the jury has found that while the multi-shot birds do inflict more damage than regular birds, you just can’t beat the bomb-shaped birds for pure destructive capacity. Also, we the jury find that our battery is almost dead,” we replied.

Actually, in the end, we reached a verdict that seemed fair for all parties. I’ve since been lobbying for my friends to start calling me “The Verdict,” which is a much catchier nickname than “The Situation,” a moniker that clearly exceeds the maximum allowable nickname length by at least one syllable.

You can reach The Verdict at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Jury duty is de-liberating

2010-11-22T00:28:00.002-04:00

“When you get in there, try not to sound too reasonable. We have Thanksgiving coming up,” my wife Kara advised.

I still held the phone in my hand, shaking my head. The automated message had just confirmed that I would not be going to work tomorrow. Instead, I’d be performing my civic duty down at the courthouse, even though I’d just recently voted, which seems like it should have earned me a civic duty bye for the rest of the year.

You’d think someone with a bald spot that recently earned its own caption on Google Earth would have some experience as a juror, but this summons is the first one that has ever actually forced me to show up somewhere. Everything I know about jury duty, I learned from watching Law and Order reruns.

If there is a male assistant district attorney, I can probably expect him to be replaced after the first season with increasingly attractive females. Also, I’m not expecting too much wisecracking, since most of that will have taken place in the first thirty minutes of the episode, probably in the presence of a corpse, several commercial breaks before I get there.

“A hammer lodged in his head? This guy really got nailed.” That’s the part I’m going to miss out on.

The timing of this summons seems awfully coincidental, as if the court system realizes how much more valuable I’ll be as a juror now that I’m a parent. The past seventeen months have seen a marked improvement in my ability to detect a guilty party. For instance, when the dog trotted into the room this morning wearing a hat made of French toast, I almost immediately knew who did it.

Incidentally, a dog will only wear a hat made of French toast if it (either the dog or the toast) has been properly slathered in syrup. Otherwise, the toast just bounces off her forehead. My son Evan might not yet realize that trying to look up at a tall person’s face will make him fall over backwards every time, but he does seem to have an advanced understanding of canine haberdashery.

I’m torn between my curiosity of wanting to learn how a court case actually works in real life and my longstanding affair with not doing extra stuff. My number has been called, though, so I suppose my preferences at this point are rather moot. If being a juror is actually as big of a drag as the general consensus seems to suggest, the best I can do tomorrow is show up and hope they find me as unreasonable as the people who’ve known me longer.

My most memorable brush with the criminal justice system to date occurred at a dinner party several years ago, where the person sitting next to me was a defense attorney. The sentence preceding this one sure started with a lot of potential, didn’t it? Sorry it didn’t end with me face down on a gravel road, taser clips sticking to my back while $100 bills quietly fluttered out of the ripped-open burlap sack a few feet away.

Anyway, from her descriptions, it sounded like she’d defended some pretty unsavory people.

“Does it make you uncomfortable defending someone you think might be guilty?” I asked, doe-eyed. Woodland creatures began peeking through the window, wondering if I might lead them in a song-and-dance number as we cleaned the kitchen after dinner. A bluebird landed on my shoulder, shook its head and chuckled, then flew off.

“Oh, Honey,” the defense attorney said, putting her hand on mine and turning to me as if she were explaining the world to a four-year-old. “They’re all guilty.”

Come to think of it, that might be a good story to bring up tomorrow.

You can tell Mike Todd the truth and nothing but the truth at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Pigeon spikes, and other parenting tools

2010-11-14T22:35:00.000-04:00

As the fateful jogger approached, I smiled and asked, “How’s it going?”

He gave me a look that conveyed annoyance, as if I’d just asked how much money he made. He said nothing as he jogged past, and in a few moments his footsteps trailed off on the gravel behind us.

“What a jerk,” I thought, just for a second, and then my mind wandered to other things, like why are all the light bulbs in Outback Steakhouse pink? Do Australians like pink food? Do our minds make pink food taste better? And if so, would some pink light bulbs in our kitchen make my blend of Corn Pops and Special K seem more like something an adult should be eating for dinner?

As we continued along the loop trail under the nearly barren trees, my son Evan began complaining from the peanut gallery, which is the seat he occupies on my back.

Evan and I have been getting out in the woods pretty regularly this year, mostly because it’s easier to keep an eye on a toddler when he’s strapped into place. We haven’t figured out how to put this finding to use outside of the backpack, but if Babies R’ Us ever starts selling mini versions of the hand truck they used to wheel Hannibal Lecter around in the movies, I’d start digging through the trash to see if I’d recently thrown out any 20% off coupons.

When Evan’s riding in his backpack, he’s not climbing on top of our baseboards to give him just the extra height he needs for his head to loom over the picture frames on our end table like Godzilla’s head over the Tokyo skyline. As he gets taller, the items on our various household tables continue inching toward their respective walls, cowering in bunches for protection, just out of the behemoth’s reach. Perhaps installing pigeon spikes on the baseboards would buy us some time.

In any event, with my wife Kara out of town last weekend, I fled for the woods with the child on my back. Sometimes, I wonder if Henry David Thoreau, one of the few non-assassins who gets to be remembered with his middle name, also retreated into the woods because he was scared to have a toddler running loose all day in his living room.

Probably not. If he’d had a toddler with him in the woods, his quotes would read something more like: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, especially if they forget to pack a grilled cheese sandwich. Then the desperation gets really loud.”

About three-quarters of the way around the loop, I decided to give Evan and my shoulders a break. When I took him out of the pack and set him on the ground, he stood there with one foot up like a flamingo, grabbing onto my legs for support.

“Your foot fall asleep, Buddy?” I asked, then I saw the problem. He’d kicked off one of his shoes, a present from his grandparents, sometime in the last three miles.

I backtracked for ten minutes without finding anything. The thought of re-doing the entire hike was too much to bear, so I turned around and started plotting a course to the nearest children’s store, where Evan would get the cheapest replacements his daddy could find. It’s not like he’s trying to shave time off his 40-yard dash.

Just then, I heard someone yell “Hey!” from down the trail. The jogger was headed back my way, waving a small shoe over his head.

“When my kids were that age, my wife would have killed me if I’d have come home without their shoes,” he said with a smile.

I thanked him as many times as I could in the ten seconds before he headed back the way he came, then immediately felt terrible about judging him earlier. It’s true what they say: You can’t judge a look by its jogger.

You can enjoy some fava beans and a nice Chianti with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Treats, tricks and leaves

2010-11-10T21:41:00.005-04:00

Sorry for the Evan overload, rest of the Internet, but this was a special request from Grammy.