The deck chairs on a sinking relationship

“I can’t believe she dumped me for a LAWYER!” my friend Johnny said last week.

“What does it matter that he’s a lawyer?” I asked.

“It just makes it worse,” he replied.

Johnny is my connection to the dating world, a strange and fascinating place where complete strangers meet online, then come together over sushi to discover that they don’t like each other.

“Didn’t we spend our last three conversations going into great detail about how insane this girl was?” I asked.    

“Yeah, but I still thought I had a chance,” he said.  When you reach your mid-thirties and you’re looking for a life partner, insanity is no longer a disqualifying personality trait.

A few weeks earlier, I talked to Johnny after he’d just gotten back from his first date with her.  While we were talking, he received a text that read: “I think we can both agree that didn’t go so well.”

From that inauspicious beginning, things somehow got even less auspicious, with their brief relationship degenerating into multiple text battles, ugly words exchanged and, most bafflingly, more dates.

The rules must have changed since I was on the dating scene.  My wife Kara and I have been together since the year 2000.  Back then, cell phones were still used for making phone calls, and the Internet was still primarily used for circulating naked pictures of Jenny McCarthy.

Technology and dating seemed to purposefully have very little overlap.  Dinners, for example, were often served by candlelight, even though light bulbs had recently been invented.  

Back then, text and friend weren’t verbs, and “getting to second base” didn’t mean telling everyone on Facebook that you were “in a relationship.”  That’s still not what “getting to second base” means, incidentally, but one could argue that tagging someone as your significant other on Facebook should at least count as a ground rule double.

After listening to Johnny’s stories from the front lines, it’s clear that I wouldn’t survive long in today’s dating world, especially if Kara found out.  I don’t even have unlimited texting on my phone, so it would be especially disheartening to receive insulting messages from my dates afterwards.  I’d have to pay twenty cents for that salt in my wound.  Please break my heart via email, so that I can save the twenty cents to apply toward my next ill-fated spicy tuna roll.

“When we were in college, nobody had a real job, so that wasn’t even a factor.  Now, if you’re not a lawyer or a CEO, you’re starting out with one strike against you.  Why did that guy have to be a lawyer?  Why?” he asked.

“I’m not sure being a lawyer is as awesome as you think it is.  There are plenty of miserable lawyers.  I suspect there’s one more in the world right now,” I said.  Never mind that Johnny only knew this guy’s profession because he received a text stating: “I’m dating a lawyer now.  I’d say good luck, but I’m not sure you deserve it.”

 There are plenty more fish in the sea besides jellyfish that sting with their text messages.  And Johnny’s back to trolling for them, hopefully in saner waters this time.

Meanwhile, the biggest drama in my life is that our three-year-old might be starting to figure out what’s happening when Kara and I look at him and say, “Maybe it’s time for him to take an ennaypee.”  He might not know that we’re spelling N-A-P, but I think he’s starting to catch on, and it’s only a matter of time before ennaypee and bee-ay-tee-aytch lose their clandestine power altogether.

How do parents communicate with each other after their kids learn to spell?  Successful parenting is all about love, and also subterfuge.  Maybe I need unlimited texting after all.  

After reading this column over again, I can see why Johnny and I spend more time talking about his problems.

You can stand up Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The impression that I don’t get

“I’m Miss Lisa,” my three-year-old son Evan said a few nights ago.  Then he just stood there, staring at me.

“Are you being Miss Lisa right now?” I asked.  Miss Lisa is one of the teachers at his daycare, a woman who somehow manages to care for four infants at the same time, which seems a lot like juggling four chainsaws all day, except chainsaws would demand less attention.  And be much quieter.

Evan nodded and continued standing in silence.  This was his version of an impression.  I’d never really noticed Miss Lisa just standing there like that before, but Evan seemed to think he was nailing it.

“Now do Richard Nixon,” I said.  More silence.  Somewhere, Rich Little was breathing a little easier, confident that this young upstart wouldn’t be stealing his gigs anytime soon.

“You be Mommy,” Evan said, breaking character.  It took me a moment to respond -- I’d been so entranced by Evan’s deft mimicry, I’d almost forgotten who I was talking to.

In the next room, my wife Kara had our infant son Zack in his high chair, feeding him a bowl of oatmeal.  In a minute, the oatmeal would run out, then the screaming would begin, growing louder until someone corked the screamhole with a bottle.

For the moment though, it was quiet.  I thought about how to do an impression of Kara that would resonate with Evan.

“I’m Mommy.  Stop doing that dangerous thing you’re doing,” I said.

Evan just blinked.  It was my first impression since the brief period in college that I’d decided I could do a decent “Sling Blade” guy (“Some folks call it a sling blade.  I call it a kaiser blade, pass me another beer, mmmm hmmm.”), and I’d bombed.

Without missing a beat, Kara’s voice came from the other room: “I’m Daddy.  Do whatever you want.”
I had to admit, she’d really gotten to the essence of my parenting style.  Kara and I both laughed, and the variety hour might have continued if the oatmeal hadn’t run out right then.

No matter how much food you give Zack, when it runs out, he will scream.  This happens because babies, as it turns out, are really horrible people.  They’re quite unconcerned with your feelings, or whether you have a preference for the decibel level at which information is conveyed to you.

“Oh, you rearranged your entire life to care for me?  And now you’re suppressing your gag reflex while you shovel odd-colored mush into my mouth, when you should be watching the movie in the Netflix envelope that’s gathering dust on the kitchen counter?  Well, as soon as I see the bottom of that bowl, I’m going to show you my gratitude.  Oh, yes, the entire neighborhood will know of my gratitude,” they say, with their eyes.

Zack is actually a wonderful baby, and we couldn’t be more fortunate.  Which is exactly the point.  Even a wonderful baby loves nothing more than to scream in your face, preferably after waking you up.

Eventually, babies learn to talk and things greatly improve, but until then, they are pleasant about 20% of the time, which is the window during which their parents take pictures to post to Facebook.  Babies have excellent PR people.

As Zack screamed from his chair, Evan ran over to dance around and entertain him.

“Look at me, Zack, look at me!” he said, running around in circles and waving his arms in the air.

Zack stopped screaming and smiled at his big brother.  With each day, the ratio of pleasantness improves.  By the time they turn three, kids are fun more like 80% of the time.  I imagine that this improvement continues until the child becomes embarrassed to be seen with you in public.

You can do your best Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Getting on his low horse

The ranch owner approached us, towing a reluctant Smart Car of a horse behind her.

“Here's your pony,” she said, handing the lead rope to my wife, Kara.

Kara clenched the rope as if the pony might make a dash for freedom, though as the animal stood there, head down, it appeared that it hadn’t dashed anywhere since Roy Rogers was in training spurs.

“You can go ahead and put him on,” the woman said, motioning toward our son, Evan.

“Doesn't he need a helmet first?” Kara asked.

The ranch lady was old school.  She didn’t realize that parents these days like to put helmets on their kids if they're doing anything more dangerous than consuming McNuggets.

“We’ll get a helmet at the barn.  You’ll have to put him on the pony yourself.  I broke my ribs a few weeks ago,” she said.  She didn’t go into further detail, and I wasn’t going to pry.  Fortunately, the pony didn’t seem to have been involved in the rib mishap.  We would have wanted details if the woman had broken a shin.

I plunked Evan into the saddle and he gripped the horn tightly.  Joy spread across his face as he realized his lifelong (and also relatively recent) dream of riding a horsie.

Nitpickers might point out that a pony is not a horsie.  Horses and ponies are members of the equine family, but they’re not the same thing.  To these people, I say: Give me some credit for understanding that a pony is not just a baby horse.  It took me at least twenty-five years to get that.

“What’s the pony’s name?” Kara asked, hoping to help Evan strengthen his bond with Buttercup or Moonbeam or Elmer.  

“Oh, you would ask me that,” the lady replied, as if Kara had just asked her something totally off-the-wall, like how to calculate the volume of a triangular prism, or why the light bulbs at Outback Steakhouse are pink.

Another moment passed as she stared at the pony and tried to call up a name.  Then she said exactly what you want to hear from the person to whom you’ve just entrusted the safety of your three-year-old: “Honestly, I took so many codeine this morning, I couldn’t tell you my grandkids’ names.”

We didn’t speak again until Evan had his helmet on.

“You can go wherever you want,” the woman said, motioning toward the barn and pastures.  Then she walked away, and we never saw her again.  Wherever she is, I hope she found what she was looking for.  Probably more codeine.

So Evan rode through the pasture on a horse with no name.  Kara and I took turns leading the pony, and Grandma and Grandpa would cheer every time Evan rode past.  His huge smiles more than paid for our afternoon trip to the country.

“Are you having fun, Evan?” I asked.  

“Daddy, you just stepped in it!” he answered.  I’d been trying to steer the conversation away from manure, but Evan wasn’t having any of it.  With so many horses wandering around the farm, Evan never ran out of conversation material.

“Look, we can go ride around those barrels over there,” I said.

“The horsie just stepped in it, too!” he replied.

For its part, the pony seemed rather indifferent to the whole affair -- Evan’s enthusiasm was only contagious to humans.  Every time we circled past the barn without going in, the pony let out a little sigh and trudged on.

After about thirty minutes in the saddle, our little cowpoke got tired.  We unsuccessfully scanned the horizon for our doped-up guide, then returned the pony to the nearest farmhand and headed home.

It was a special day, and we’ll always carry some of that farm with us.  Mostly on the bottom of my shoes.

You can lead Mike Todd to water at mikectodd@gmail.com.  

Week two of two-week hiatus

Back with original programming next week.  Until then, pictures of my offspring!

Two-week hiatus

You ever get that feeling that you'd rather just send an old column to your editor instead of killing yourself to write a new one?  Dude, I had that same feeling!  Two weeks in a row, unfortunately.

Here's the one I sent in last week.  It makes me worry that I was a funnier person in 2006.

Anyway, if you can't dazzle them with a new column, baffle them with cute baby pictures!

Send in the headless clown

If you're going to decapitate a clown, the best advice I can offer is to try not to decapitate one that has sentimental value to your wife.

I found this out the hard way about eight years ago, when we were moving into our first house, which was the size of many people’s first Tupperware.  I leaned a rug against the wall, which seemed like a harmless thing to do, until two hours later, when the rug slid and landed squarely on a ceramic figurine of two clowns that I’d never noticed before, smashing the head of the formerly happy guitar-playing one.

When Kara came into the room to see me sweeping up the carnage, she started to cry.  It’s true what they say: there’s nothing sadder than a headless clown.

“I know it’s silly, but I’ve had those clowns since I was a little kid,” she said, picking up the now-macabre knick-knack and rotating the base.  When she let go, the figurine played “Send in the Clowns” as it slowly spun on the floor, a strangely wistful song for a kid’s toy, as if it knew things weren’t going to end well.

I dumped the clown-head shards from the dustpan into a baggie, tucking it aside as if someday, armed with some Elmer’s glue, I’d reassemble the seven million fragments.  Over time, I came to accept that even a best-case scenario would have the reanimated clown looking like Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.  Once you’ve decapitated something like that, it’s very difficult to recapitate it.

A few days ago, just before our eighth anniversary, our son Evan found the headless clown on a bookshelf in the guest room, where we’d put it to remind our guests what happens if they step out of line.

“That’s a great idea!” I said as Evan spun the base wrong way.

The eighth anniversary is the pottery anniversary, and my attempts to get Kara to start smoking so that I could make her an ashtray had failed.  Replacing her beloved and beheaded clown, though, was the perfect gift idea.

Finding a thirty-year-old musical clown on eBay took about three minutes.  An hour later, the auction was over and the figurine, a near-perfect match, was mine.

If you want to be a thoughtful gift giver, it turns out that a really effective method is to destroy your significant other’s sentimental objects so that you can replace them eight years later.  It’s called playing the long game.

We needed a little romance this year, too, since we spent our anniversary with our infant and our constipated three-year-old.

“Gotta go poo poo!” Evan yelled, prancing in place to celebrate his parents’ big day.  We were in the woods behind our house, turning over rocks to find critters.  We had just hit the mother lode: a salamander.  When Evan stopped paying attention to it, I could tell the situation was serious.

“Let’s go!” I said, scooping Evan up, already running as I slung him over my shoulder.  Evan had been using the potty exclusively for about two weeks, and I had no intention of having his first accident be on my shoulders.

Like a great freight train, we barreled across the backyard, CHUGGA CHUGGA CHUGGA CHUGGA gotta go POO POO!

“What’s going on?” Kara asked as the door flew open and we stormed past.

“AAAAHHHHH!” Evan replied.

 Skidding into the bathroom, I dropped Evan to his feet and yanked his shorts down.

“Did we make it?  Did we make it?” I asked.

Evan looked at me as if I was unhinged.

“Don’t hafta go,” he said.

Someday, our anniversaries will once again be marked with nice dinners.  Until then, all I can do is wait, and maybe rip the arms off of Kara’s old teddy bears.

You can skip to the loo with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

If a tree falls and a toddler hears it…

With several cracks and a boom, the old oak tree shattered the silence of the evening, losing its lifelong battle with gravity.  At the first crack, we glanced around the patio table at each other.  At the second crack, we all turned to look into the woods.  When the whole tree started to come down, we jumped up from the table, trying to decide whether we were about to become acorn cobbler.

Rather than falling toward us, though, the tree folded in on itself, imploding like a well-executed building demolition.  Our friends Julie and Sergey, who might have since decided that they’d prefer to dine in places less prone to arboreal ambush, looked at each other and said, “Whoa.”

Evan, our three-year-old, was inconsolable until we explained, in a move we have since come to deeply regret, that the tree had been weakened by the heavy storm that blew through a few days prior.  This information, combined with a recent power outage and an afternoon thunderstorm at daycare that sent all the kids scurrying inside, has swirled into a perfect storm of childhood fears.

“Go give Grammy and Grandpa a hug,” I said to Evan as I plunked him down in their driveway last weekend.  Usually, he runs down the walkway to wrap his arms around their legs.

“Is it gonna thunder?” Evan shrieked, hands over his ears, pressing his face into my shorts.

“No, Evan, it’s beautiful outside,” I said.

“Is it gonna rain?  Is lightning gonna come?” he cried.

The rest of the weekend, if you dragged him outside, he’d put his hands over his ears and cry.  The ability to ride out beautiful weekend days on the couch will serve him well as he enters his prime video-game-playing years, but as the mountain of angry birds that he’s shot backwards off the screen will attest, he’s not there yet.

Evan is coming to grips with the idea that the world is full of things that even his parents can’t control, which should have been evident after the Eagles’ 2011 season.      

“Tomorrow, we can go to the playground,” I said, hoping that the lure of the slide would tempt him outdoors again.

“NOOO!  I don’t wanna go!” he screamed, eyes wide with terror.

The stormy weather this summer has probably caused many parents to struggle with their kids’ irrational fears of the outdoors, so just in case other families can benefit from our experience, here’s a little script I prepared to help little ones understand the world around them.

“Dear child: I, your parent or legal guardian, have everything under control, and you are perfectly safe.  Thunder can’t hurt you.  It’s just nature’s way of letting you know that random bolts of electricity are shooting from the sky, occasionally destroying things and/or setting them on fire.  If you just flee inside, you should be okay, as long as a tree doesn’t fall and crush your house.  Oh, and watch out for hornets.”  

This isn’t exactly the speech I gave to Evan, but as he kept probing to find out more, I found it tougher to dodge the fact that sometimes, the world’s just not the friendliest place.  We’ve been steadily working on setting his mind at ease, though, helping him to see that most of the time, nature is just begging him to come outside for a frolic.

It is slow going.  It’s difficult to reason with a person who thinks that Captain America is his uncle.

This morning, though, for the first time in several days, Evan ventured out to the car without putting his hands over his ears or mentioning the weather.  The mental storm damage appears to have been temporary.  Which is good, because someday, when he discovers girls, he’ll have all the terror he can handle.

You can make acorn cobbler with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

It’s a dead mouse, after all

“Dude, what’s that sound?” my sister Amy asked from her air mattress in our basement. I shrugged, pretending not to hear the skritch-a-skritch coming from behind the drywall.  Then Amy turned her truth-extracting eyeball beams on me. She’s had them her whole life, but being a lawyer made them worse.

“Okay, okay, we have mice in the wall. But they just hang out in there. They probably won’t come out,” I said.

She took the news better than I’d expected. After one lap around the room, checking for possible entry points, she climbed back into bed, probably deciding that if a mouse came out to visit, she’d just subpoena it to death.

A few days later, we had to start storing our dog food in plastic bins. Some critters had been pillaging our pantry, burrowing holes into the bottom of our fifty-pound kibble bags. Then my wife Kara moved some old boxes in our laundry room to find that the corner of the room had become something of a rodent rest stop.

“This is so nasty. They carry diseases. We need to get rid of them,” Kara said, with “we” being me, and “get rid of” being used in the mobster sense of the phrase.

“What if I just housebreak them one-at-a-time instead?” I suggested.

In the end, I found myself at the hardware store, reluctantly choosing between various instruments of death, like a gladiator preparing to enter the coliseum, except less happy to be there. Poison? Too medieval, plus the unpleasant thought of mice keeling over in random places throughout the house. Glue traps, which just stick a mouse to a sheet that you throw in the trash while they’re still alive? Honestly, if you put down a glue trap, it’s not that you’re a terrible person, it’s just that a non-terrible person wouldn’t do that.

Staring at all the chemicals and devices that were designed to transport cute little critters off this mortal coil, it was hard not to picture the mice in red shorts, holding hands in our basement and singing “It’s a Small World.”

 The least awful solution seemed to be the old-fashioned mousetrap. I thought somebody was building a better one. What ever happened to that? Still, if a mouse had come shopping with me and witnessed the disturbing array of other options, I feel like he would have said, “Fine, yeah, just get some of the regular ones. You people are sick.”

That evening, donning my coonskin cap, I set about preparing the varmint traps. With peanut butter smeared on the triggers, I set the traps and placed them around the house, careful to put them where I wouldn’t catch a dog or a child. We have enough of those already.

In the morning, I approached the first trap with trepidation. What grisly, splattery scene would I encounter, causing me to get nauseous and leave the room whenever the movie “Ratatouille” came on?

As it turned out, mousetraps don’t actually catch mice, but they do make excellent mouse feeders. All of the traps had been licked clean during the night. One of them had a Post-it note stuck to the trigger, with a tiny scrawling that read: “Do you have anything in a super chunk?”

I could picture the mice fluffing the insulation inside our walls, flopping down with their bellies full, saying, “Do you think that was store brand? I think it was store brand. Would it kill him to give us some Skippy?”

My dad suggested a modification where you tie the head of a Q-tip to the trap with some dental floss, then coat everything in peanut butter, which makes the mouse work a little harder for what is about to be its final snack.

The next night, I tried his technique. At least none of them were wearing red shorts.

You can give Mike Todd some cheese at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A very dairy crisis

The overhead light flickered out, leaving me hunched over the quick-start guide in the dark.  The storm hurled rain onto the garage door as if the house were riding through a carwash.  Other than my tiny flashlight, the only illumination came from the strikes of lightning that seemed to be feeling their way to our front door.

“Showtime,” I said, putting the flashlight in my mouth and the funnel in what I hoped was the hole where the motor oil was supposed to go.

“Add .63 qt motor oil.  DO NOT OVERFILL,” the instructions warned.  I turned over the motor oil bottle to see that it contained 942 ml, which meant, by my quick calculations, that I needed to pour in somewhere between none and all of it.

It was the first time I’d looked at our new generator since I’d taken it out of the box two months ago.  If it didn’t start up soon enough to save the contents of our fridge during this power outage, though, I’d need to save some of our gas to power an escape vehicle.

“Please work, please work,” I pleaded as I dragged the hundred-pound machine to the front of the garage.  The issue wasn't that we were worried about our ice cream stash, or that we'd lose our collection of condiments that, on average, had expired in 2007.

Our freezer was packed full of breast milk that my wife Kara had spent the last four months pumping.  To lose that milk would mean heartbreak for her, and possible arm or legbreak for me, since I’d had months to prepare for the likelihood of a power outage.

Preparing has never been my strong suit.  By definition, the thing you’re preparing for hasn’t happened yet, which means it might never happen, which means you could be playing Call of Duty instead.

“Is it going to work?” Kara asked from the doorway.  She cradled our youngest son, Zack, while Evan, our three-year-old, clutched her knee.  The dog cowered on top of her feet as thunder rattled the windows.  Presumably, cows were swirling around in the wind outside.

“Mmph,” I said, the flashlight offering a handy excuse to dodge the question.

I pulled the rope to release the garage door from the electric opener, so that I could manually open the overhead door like our parents and cavemen used to do.  I dragged the machine into the maelstrom and gave the starter rope a tug.  Who ever thought that the sweetest noise in the world would sound like a lawnmower engine?

Upstairs, dripping, live extension cord in hand, I realized that I’d need to move the fridge to plug it in, which hadn’t budged since two silverback-sized dudes wedged it into its slot two years ago.    

As I pulled the fridge with all my strength, determined not to be responsible for losing all that milk, I thought of the mythical woman who lifted a car off of her child.  An-inch-at-a-time, the fridge slowly slid across the floor, exposing the plug in back.  The adrenaline surge must have helped.  Also, the wheels on the bottom.

I marched into the basement, triumphant, anxious to regale my family with tales of heroism and humming refrigerators.  By the light of their flashlights, I could see that Kara had brought the iPad downstairs for Evan to play with.  When I was a kid and the power went out, we had to play board games by candlelight and talk to each other.  It was horrible.

But Evan wasn’t playing with the iPad.  With the thunder still rumbling angrily outside, he held Zack’s hand.
“It’s okay, Zack.  Don’t be scared,” Evan said, over and over.

It was enough to melt our hearts.  But not our breast milk.

You can knock out Mike Todd’s lights at mikectodd@gmail.com.

An advice column, minus the advice

Some advice is timeless and universal.  Don't keep your toothpaste and your Preparation H in the same drawer, for instance, unless you're ambivalent about which one you apply orally.  Or you're open-minded about which parts of you are minty fresh.  But parenthood invites all sorts of advice that isn't so clear cut.

When my wife and I were expecting our first child, I asked my friend Josh for his advice, since he’d already taken the parental plunge a year earlier.

“The number one thing you should be prepared for is crazy, conflicting advice from everyone you’ve ever met,” he told me.  “Just ignore it all and figure out what works for you.”

Josh was right about the amount of advice new parents receive, even when they’re not seeking it out.  One time, I even got parenting advice while waiting in line at the grocery store deli.

“He’s so adorable.  What’s his name?” a friendly woman asked, insisting that I go ahead of her in line.

“Quarter-pound of turkey,” I replied, frantic to start the cart moving again before Evan started wailing at the lack of motion.

“Sorry, it’s Evan, and thank you,” I said.

“Well, he’s precious.  Are you getting him vaccinated?  You should really look into it before you do.  Vaccines can cause autism,” she said, repeating polio’s favorite rumor.  Suddenly, there seemed to be a dramatic increase in the amount of bologna in the vicinity.

I reached into the car seat, putting Evan’s binky back into his mouth to buy a moment.  I understand why people are suspicious of vaccines – there does seem to be a global conspiracy to keep us all alive longer, perhaps so that we can purchase more drugs, which will also keep us alive longer -- but I’m much more suspicious of whooping cough.  

“Oh, I read that the doctor behind that study lost his medical license.  He’s a quack,” I replied.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Nothing.  Thank you so much for letting us go first,” I said, taking my turkey and hitting the road.  She was nice, after all, and I got the distinct impression that neither of us was interested in having our minds changed by some small talk next to the pimento loaf.

Last weekend, I found myself in the odd position of being the dispenser of advice.

“What are we in for?” my sister Amy asked during her weekend visit.  Her wife Jaime is pregnant with a baby girl, ensuring not only that our two sons will have an awesome new cousin to play with soon, and that I’ll be getting a promotion to Uncle Mike, but also that Amy and Jaime’s household will be in very little danger of ever facing an estrogen shortage.

As she waited for an answer, my infant son, Zack, squirmed in my arms, wincing at the cold milk in the bottle.

“Don’t look at me, Mr. Brainfreeze.  You wouldn’t wait for the bottle to get warm,” I said.

With two young kids of my own, it seemed like I should have some advice for Amy more helpful than “go do everything you can’t do while toting a tiny screaming and possibly barfing human, because you won’t be able to do any of that stuff anymore.”

Otherwise, I’m not really sure what advice works universally for all parents.

“When they’re screaming, it means they want you to do something you probably don’t feel like doing.  Also, as long as you say it nicely, babies can’t tell the difference between regular words and cuss words.  That’s really useful for the first year,” I said.

Amy nodded, realizing that the Internet would be a much more valuable parenting resource than her brother.

You can get measles with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A real piece of road work

“We’re doomed,” my wife, Kara, said as a pulse of brake lights started at the horizon and streaked down the highway toward us.  In a moment, our own brake lights illuminated, and our hopes dimmed.  Our worst nightmare was coming true: a traffic jam with a toddler and an infant in the backseat.  Oh, and a dog, our loyal and much-loved afterthought.


“No, no, no, this can’t happen,” I said.  Children on road trips are like sharks.  They must maintain forward momentum.  Also, they might eat you.

As soon as the speedometer hit zero, Zack, our three-month-old, began voicing his displeasure with quiet, distressed grunts.  Evan, our three-year-old, recognized the warning signs and cupped his hands over his ears.

“Zack gonna start cryin’,” he said.

“ROAD WORK AHEAD,” the orange sign said, so I assumed (as foolish as it now seems) that someone up ahead would be working on the road.

“Evan, there’ll be some big construction trucks up here,” I said, trying to make lemonade out of lemons, and also lying.

“Trucks?” Evan asked, straining against his shoulder straps to look through the windshield.

“Well, not yet, but they’ll be coming up soon,” Kara lied.  Meanwhile, Zack started mixing in some little squawks, like an opera singer saying, “Mi mi mi.”

I really wanted to see some big trucks, bulldozers and stream rollers to help smooth Evan out, since he was still angry at us for not inviting him to our wedding.

That weekend, Grandma had been showing him the album on her coffee table, full of pictures where Kara looked radiant (just like she still does, and I’d say that even if she wasn’t the first person to read this column) and I still had the ability to clench my bald spot shut.

“That was a great party,” Grandma said.  Then she flipped the page to the wedding-cake-cutting, and Evan became incensed.

“Why can’t I have cake, too?” he asked.

“Because you were born five years after the cake was eaten, buddy,” Kara said.

“But I wanted to go to the party!” he screeched.

“We would have loved to have you there.  But Grandma would have been mad if you’d happened before the party did,” I said.

“I wanted the cake yesterday,” he pouted.

Comprehending temporal relationships is not Evan’s strong suit.  Yesterday happened yesterday.  So did his first birthday, and that time we saw a moose last summer.  The War of 1812?  Yesterday.      

So we idled down the turnpike, hoping to brighten Evan’s day with some heavy machinery, admiring each cone that occupied the perfectly good lane to our right.  Every time the car stopped, Zack screeched.

After a couple of miles, it became clear that the “road work” was actually just an excuse for the    Department of Transportation to display its beautiful collection of cones.

You could picture a highway commissioner sitting in a swivel chair inside one of those roadside buildings that’s shaped like an enormous breast, stroking the cat on his lap and saying, “What’s the point of owning seven million cones if you’re just going to keep them in storage?  Put them out for everyone to see!  Throw a few blinky barrels in the mix, too.  What the heck.”

As we neared the end of the cone display and could see the jam breaking up, it became clear that nothing resembling construction was happening on that sunny weekday afternoon.  Fortunately, Zack’s screaming began to die down as we sped up.

“Sorry, Evan, there won’t be any trucks.  They just put down a bunch of cones and went home,” I said.

“Why?  Why would they put down buncha cones and go home?  Why?” he asked.

“That’s a fantastic question,” I said.

“There should be trucks if there’s cones,” he replied.  When he grows up, he’ll get my vote for highway commissioner.

You can share a cone with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.