“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.
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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
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.
“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.
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