Back next week

Instead of writing a column last week, I thought it'd be more fun to tend to Zack's recurring ear infection (he's feeling better now).  I turned in this old column instead.  Back to regular programming next week.

In other news, the Poughkeepsie Journal might be running a story that includes some details on the hiking site I've been working on for the past couple of years, which would be pretty righteous.  They asked me to submit some pictures of our family out hiking in the area -- I've already posted most of these here, but it still makes me smile to go back and look at 'em.  

'Til next week!  Assuming everyone's ear canals cooperate.

Civic disobedience

“Good luck today,” my wife Kara whispered into the darkness.

“You’re going to need the luck,” I said, leaning to kiss her goodbye, then tiptoeing out the bedroom door, abandoning her to a few more moments of sleep before the morning routine with our two kids would begin, a ritual that requires the assistance of a small team of live-in nannies, but which we somehow juggle between just the two of us anyway.

I checked my tie in the mirror one last time, grabbed a granola bar off the kitchen counter, patted our dog on the head and dashed down the stairs, determined to catch a train for once in my life without the usual headfirst slide through closing doors.

After four months of planning and countless calls and emails with my fellow organizers, our big work conference was finally happening.

I hopped into Kara’s Civic in the pre-dawn gloom of the garage, proud of myself for departing in time to stop for gas on the way to the train station.

“Let’s do this,” I said, turning the key.

“Let’s not,” the Civic replied, adding, “Click-click-click, CLIIIIIIICK, click.”

The dashboard lights flickered then went dark.

Since Kara and I carpool to work in the big car, dropping the kids off at daycare on the way, the Civic usually sits in the garage, waiting for one of us to go on an errand without the kids.  In this way, it functions less as a car and more as an escape pod.

But on that morning last week, the Civic decided that the garage was a splendid place to spend the day.  It was cold outside, after all.

“No, no, no.  Not today,” I said, turning the key again, panic slithering up the back of my neck.

“Yeah, today,” the Civic responded, speaking in clicks.

I had two options.

Option 1: Get that car working.

Option 2: Flee into the woods, leave civilization behind and subsist for the rest of my life on my neighbors’ rhododendron.

Giving Option 1 a whirl first seemed like a good plan, so I put the Civic into neutral, leaned on the hood with both hands and pushed with all my insufficient might.  

“Come on, you weigh like three pounds.  Why is this so hard?” I said.

Finally, the wheels began to budge, and after much grunting, swearing and scuffing of wingtips, the Civic rolled to a stop in the driveway.

My automotive knowledge starts at changing a tire and ends at jumping a dead battery, with nothing in-between.  Hands shaking, I popped the hood, clipped the jumper cables to the battery and ran to retrieve the one functioning automobile from our garage, the one I needed to leave for Kara and the kids.

“Who cares?” I thought as our cars nearly collided in the driveway.  And I really didn’t care.  Getting the Civic running was the only thing in the universe that mattered.

I popped the hood on the big car and peered inside, using the flashlight app on my iPhone.  And what I saw was nothing.

“Dude, where’s the battery?” I said.

A few years ago, when we upsized our family car, we bought a hybrid, mainly due to its best-in-class smugness-per-gallon ratings.

“Stupid Earth!  I don’t even like you anymore!” I said, frantically Googling “jump a regular car with a hybrid car” on my phone.  I landed in a Car Talk forum that mentioned something about an auxiliary battery in the trunk of some hybrids, but we didn’t have one of those.  With a sinking feeling, I realized that I was going to have to do the unthinkable: read the owner’s manual.

In my mind, I could hear that train a comin’, and I wasn’t going to be on it.

In desperation, I jumped back into the Civic and turned the ignition again.  Click, click, click, VROOOOOM!  And then, with knuckles still white, a headfirst slide through closing doors.

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

The destructive potential of a sippy cup

“Stop eating drywall!” I yelled, then paused, wondering if anyone else had ever uttered those words.  Probably so, but it’s tough to imagine the circumstances.

Our dog Memphis looked up, then slowly opened her mouth, letting a chunk of drywall drop to the floor.

“Good girl,” I said.  Then I returned to stabbing the ceiling with my knife, spraying more delicious morsels about our dining room.  Memphis stared longingly at the biggest chunks, sniffing in their direction.  I had no idea that she would eat drywall if given the chance, but I suppose that’s a culinary step up from what I’ve seen her eating in the yard.

It’s probably for the best if Memphis never realizes that the whole house is made of her favorite new taste sensation.  That would be like keeping a kid in a gingerbread house and yelling at him every time he tried to taste it.

I kept chipping away at the ceiling, scared at what I might find up there.

A few months ago, we noticed a small spot of water damage above our heads in the dining room.  A few days before that, our son Evan had dumped an entire sippy cup of water on the floor upstairs overnight, letting it sop into the carpet for hours before anyone noticed.  Rather than blame the shower that sits on the other side of the wall from Evan’s bedroom, just a couple of feet away, we decided to blame the sippy cup for the water damage, mostly because you don’t have to pay a plumber to fix a sippy cup.  Also, the sippy cup, unlike me, didn’t recently install a new shower head with a connection behind the wall, so it made a convenient scapegoat.

The spot kept getting worse and worse, not really getting bigger, but definitely developing more personality.  

“That sippy cup really did a number on the ceiling,” I’d say, enjoying my last few days of denial.

Next came the puddle on the dining room floor, the rare catastrophe that didn’t originate from one of our offspring.  Turns out, we overestimated the destructive potential of a sippy cup, and the leak was coming from our shower.

“What kind of plumber’s putty did you use when you put on the shower head?” our friend Allen asked me.

“There are kinds?” I asked.  I defer to Allen on these types of questions because he has both a beard AND a motorcycle, so his man credentials are unimpeachable.  (Even without the beard and motorcycle, it takes a two-thirds vote of the Man Congress to impeach anyone’s man credentials, and we can’t get everyone to stop playing Call of Duty long enough to reach quorum.)

My wife Kara, listening to our conversation, eyed me suspiciously.  My last foray into do-it-yourself plumbing had resulted in the flooding of our basement three weeks after we’d finished it, so it’s not like I don’t understand her skepticism.

The next night, after I’d cut a fist-sized hole in the ceiling and tried to peer through it, I couldn’t see a thing.  I looked down, realizing that I had become completely blind.  Incidentally, our son Evan was assisting me by taking the strongest flashlight in our house and beaming it straight at my face.

“Evan, dude, not in my eyes, please,” I said.

“Okay, daddy,” he said, turning the beam to Kara’s face instead.

Once the beam of light, through sheer random motion, rested upon the hole for a moment, we saw the shower’s drainpipe in the ceiling.  I ran upstairs and turned the shower on, catching the water in a bucket.  No leak.  Then I turned the shower off and dumped the bucket down the drain, which sent a cascade onto the dining room floor.

“It’s the DRAIN, not the shower head!  Vindication!” I yelled.

Our house may be falling apart, but it’s not my fault.  That’s the important thing.

You can pair Mike Todd’s drywall with a nice Riesling at mikectodd@gmail.com.

San Fran-pic-so

I didn't have time to write a column for this week.  We were too busy whooping it up in San Francisco with my sister Amy, her wife Jaime and their awesome new daughter, Anjali.  I realize posting pictures from this trip might be redundant, since my mom has already seen them, but I'll put them out here anyway, just in case the Russian comment-spammers who visit this blog want to see some cute kids.

Dumbo vs. Diego

“Five!  A new high score!” I yelled.  I was playing a game we invented in our house called “See How High You Can Build a Block Tower Before One of Your Kids Knocks It Down”, the rules of which are fairly self-explanatory.  The game is so difficult that the bar for success is very low, like how cowboys only have to stay on the bull for eight seconds.

“Again!” my son Evan squealed as he surveyed the wreckage he’d just created.

“This game is tough.  You’re quite the demolition man,” I said.

“No, I’m Diego.  I’m an animal rescuer,” he said.  Then, in case I wasn’t familiar with the scope of his professional obligations, he said, “I rescue animals.”

He learned about the exciting and vibrant field of animal rescuing from his favorite show, “Go, Diego, Go!” which teaches kids that you can keep the food chain from happening if you have a positive attitude, apparently unlimited funding and a backpack that turns into a hang glider.

Just as I started to build another tower, Evan danced a little jig and groaned, throwing himself doubled-over onto the couch.

“Need to go potty?” I asked.

“No, I don’t have tooooooo,” he said, straining as if he was bench-pressing a mini-fridge.  I’ve heard that in kids’ minds, once you make the urge to go to the bathroom subside for a moment, you think you’ve vanquished it forever, even though you’ve only forestalled the inevitable, which will only be worse when it comes back.  This thought process seems insane, but then Congress does the same thing every few months with the debt ceiling.

“Come on, bud.  Let’s go the bathroom,” I said.

“Nooooo,” he replied.

“We can watch cartoons in there,” I said, pulling the iPhone out of my pocket.

“Okay,” Evan said, waddling towards the bathroom.

Bribing him with cartoons has been way more effective than prunes.  But I worry that the cartoons I’ve hooked him on, cherished Bugs Bunny cartoons from my childhood, aren’t teaching the best messages.
Evan’s cartoons are about teamwork, exercising to be healthy and rescuing animals.  When I was a kid, cartoons were about pushing adversaries off cliffs, dropping anvils on their heads and shooting them in the face at very close range.

In the bathroom, Evan laughed as Elmer Fudd got his barely deserved comeuppance.  

“It’s not nice to put a stick of dynamite down someone’s pants, right?” I explained, just in case he ever has the opportunity.  To be safe, I’ll probably put another padlock on the TNT shed in our backyard.

I can’t even bring myself to show him my old favorite Tom & Jerry cartoons, which regularly featured the main characters drinking, smoking and hitting each other.  It’s what we watched before “Jersey Shore” taught us that this kind of entertainment could be achieved without animation.

Even old family favorites aren’t always safe.

“Look, Evan, it’s Dumbo!  You’re gonna love this movie,” I said when the title became available to stream on Netflix.  My wife Kara sat on the couch with Evan, excited to relive a classic with him.

A few minutes in, we started to rethink our enthusiasm.

“I don’t remember this movie being such a downer,” Kara whispered.

Evan squirmed as Dumbo was torn from his mom and tormented by clowns.  Do you remember how Dumbo flies for the first time?  He gets wasted on the clowns’ discarded booze, hallucinates, blacks out and wakes up in a tree.  When my friends in college discovered magical abilities that way, they often ended up needing stitches afterwards.

Dumbo doesn’t even fly non-wasted until the final few minutes of the movie, which he mostly spends exacting vengeance on the clowns.

Too bad Diego wasn’t around to rescue him sooner.

You can smoke dynamite with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Home alone, with Daddy

“I’m so sorry to do this to you,” my wife Kara said last week, right before she left me.

Her bags were already in the trunk of her car, and there was no talking her out of it.  Once she walked out that door, she’d be gone forever.

Well, for three days, but when you’re taking care of two small kids without any help, three days and forever are pretty much the same thing.

“Mommy, where are you going?” our son Evan asked.

“I have to take a trip for work, but I’ll be back on Thursday,” she said.

“Sunday-Monday, Tuesday-Wednesday, Thursday, Friiii-day, Saturday,” Evan sang, repeating the no-frills mnemonic jingle he’d learned at daycare.  Singling a list makes it easier to remember, apparently, which is why I’ve started setting our grocery list to Ride of the Valkyries.

“Get some CREAM CHEESE and some BROCC-LI and sliced TUR-KEY, da da da DEEEEE!”

If the list gets longer than three things, though, I have to resort to the tried-and-true method of writing down a list and then forgetting to bring it with me.

As we packed up our two cars that morning, mine headed for daycare and work, Kara’s headed for the wild paved yonder, Evan started bawling.

“Aw, hey, buddy, what’s wrong?” I asked, but I already knew.  Any kid would be distressed at the prospect of getting ditched for even a few minutes, let alone a few days.

Kara got out of her car and walked over, her lower lip pushed out in sympathy.

“My banana has stringy things on it!” Evan wailed.

“Dude, seriously?  That’s part of the banana.  You can eat those things.  Maybe you’re really upset about Mommy leaving?  She’ll be back in a few days,” I said.

“No, the banana,” he said, sniffling.

On the drive to daycare, Evan stopped projecting his separation anxiety onto his breakfast produce.

“How much time ‘til Thursday now?” he asked every five minutes, reacting with genuine surprise when he got the same answer each time.

After work, I took Evan and his baby brother Zack to the grocery store, which might sound ambitious, but grocery carts are like cages on wheels, perfect for containing children and killing time.

“Cheez Its!  We need Cheez Its!” Evan said, lunging from his perch by the cart’s handle.  He whiffed.  One of the first skills you learn as a parent is to never push the cart too close to the merchandise, lest you spend all your time wrenching Fruit Roll-Ups out of little fingers.

“Sorry, no room in the cart,” I said, which was true.  With a kid sitting by the handle and a car seat filling up the cart, you can’t actually buy anything.  You can try to balance a loaf of bread on the baby, but he’ll either chew on it through the plastic bag or mash it into matzo.  But even though you can’t purchase any food, you can kill a solid four minutes standing next to the poor man’s Camden Aquarium, also known as the lobster tank.

The next morning, for the first time in over three years, I awoke to the sound of an alarm clock, rather than to a baby screeching.  Most things can be done while wearing a baby on your back and having Dora the Explorer babysit your three-year-old, but showering is not one of those things.    If you don’t get up before the kids, I’m not sure how single parents bathe themselves without wheeling a shopping cart or other child-trapping device into the bathroom.

On Thursday afternoon, Kara texted: “Tell Evan not to brush his teeth until I get home.  I’m bringing something for him.”

Empowered by my success at handling the kids on my own, I replied, “Don’t worry – he hasn’t brushed them in three days.  A couple more hours won’t hurt.”

You can snatch some Cheez Its with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

There’s no “me” in “vasectomy”

“So maybe you’d like to make an appointment to come see me?” the urologist said, and from the twinkle in his eye, I could tell that our conversation had gone dangerously off track.  I replayed the previous few moments in my mind.

“Evan looks great.  This should be his last follow-up,” the doctor had said after checking the healed incisions on my son’s abdomen, Evan’s minor surgery now a distant memory.

“That’s great.  You did awesome, bud,” I’d said to Evan, thinking it was time to head for the front desk to check on the lollipop situation.

“Does he have any siblings?” the urologist asked.

“Just a younger brother,” I’d replied.

“Planning to have more?” the doctor asked.  Right there, alarm bells should have been ringing in my pants.

“Nope, we’re two and through,” I’d said, proud at the insanely high number of children Kara and I had produced.  Two children is also one child below the mandatory minivan threshold, which seems like a good place to stop.

As soon as I’d confessed that we were out of the procreation business, the urologist asked me that question about making an appointment.  With terror, I realized that he was already giving me a vasectomy with his eyes.

“Whoa, you know, my wife and I haven’t really talked about that yet.  Maybe we’ll be 100% sure in a few years,” I said, buying enough time to get me far, far away from that office.

Last year, the contractor doing work on our house for the better part of the summer nonchalantly mentioned that he’d had a vasectomy.

“How bad was it?” I asked.

“It’s really not a big deal,” he said, then he went on to describe, in vivid detail, what sounded like the opposite of a not big deal.  He told me about the scalpel, and something about a hook going into the (small!) incision and pulling some duct work (briefly!) out to be snipped.  After that, all I really remember is the smelling salts helping me come to.

“Do you have kids?” I asked the urologist, attempting to turn the conversation away from neutering me.

“Nein,” he said, switching to German and nodding.

Then he continued, “The youngest is six months old.  I’m forty-six.  Man, I’m getting too old for this.”

Wait, nine kids, not nein kids?  That was English?  Physician, snip thyself!

Someday, a date with that scalpel awaits me.  But there’s no way that the person wielding it will have nine kids.  First off, he clearly has no first-hand knowledge of being a patient for this procedure.  Sure, by that logic, I’d also have to refuse brain surgery from anyone who hasn’t been lobotomized, but whenever someone starts waving sharp objects at my groin, logic isn’t my top priority.  It just seems like having this guy do the procedure would be like asking a vegan to cook my filet mignon.

Second, it’s not that you necessarily have to be crazy to have nine kids, but all else being equal, someone with nine cats is much more likely to be sane, and the odds aren’t great for either of them.  At least if you have nine cats, you can still leave the house for a family outing without renting a school bus.

When I got home, I told Kara, “You’ll never believe what that guy wanted to do to me.”

I told her a harrowing tale of adventure, appointments avoided and scalpels dodged.

She rolled her eyes.  Trying to get sympathy from someone who’s delivered two children is really difficult.

“You know, one of these days, you’re really going to need to make an app…” she started to say, but I missed the rest.  Sometimes, it’s difficult to hear what your spouse is saying when you’re fleeing down the driveway.

You can try to fix Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

To Grandmother’s house we go

“We forgot Memphis!” our son Evan yelled from his car seat, looking around in vain for our dog.

“We remembered her, didn’t we?” my wife Kara asked.

“Dude!  I knew I was forgetting something.  I was hoping it was just my toothbrush,” I said.

Kara looked to see if I was serious.  Whenever she thinks something bad might have happened, like we might have let our insurance expire, or we might have forgotten to buy the eggs that were the whole reason for the grocery trip, or we might have left our dog alone in the house for the weekend, I have a compulsion to make her think the worst has happened, even though it hasn’t.  It’s a form of humor that became popular in this country right around the time that it became socially unacceptable for wives to hit their husbands with frying pans.

“Memphis!” I said, and a furry head popped up behind the back seat.  Before our second son was born, Memphis lounged in the passenger area, sticking her snout out the window and snorting and sneezing with glee.  Now, in case she had any question about where she fit into the new family order, her little bed squished beside the suitcases in the very back should have made everything perfectly clear.

We were travelling to Kara’s parents for the weekend, a three-hour drive that often reaches its midway point at about the time Zack, our ten-month-old, decides that his fellow travelers would probably enjoy listening to the unbearable sounds of his loudest vocal stylings.

The regular reader(s) of this column will remember that last week, I claimed that each day you spend with your child is easier than the one before, that every milestone reached is one step closer to the ultimate goal: Getting your children to the age when you’re allowed to take a nap while they’re still awake.

Right after I submitted that column, Zack submitted his rebuttal by reaching the milestone in which little enamel daggers started jabbing through his gums.

“Okay, you have a valid point.  Each day isn’t necessarily easier than the one before,” I said to Zack that night, slumped over his crib as he screamed and drooled Infants’ Tylenol.

Back when Kara was teething, her parents, driven to desperation, had employed the old whiskey-on-the-gums trick, which seems like a very frontier-parent thing to do, perhaps the only parenting technique they shared with Daniel Boone.  Of course, I don’t know if Daniel Boone ever had any teething babies, but it would explain why he spent so much time out in the woods.

On this car trip, the hour that Zack had been sleeping was about the longest stretch he’d managed all week.

“Peace and quiet,” I said to Kara, and she nodded.  In the backseat, Evan sat with his headphones on, glued to the Word World episode playing on the iPad strapped to my seat back.

We flinched as the silence shattered.

“THE PIG’S EATIN’ PIE CRUMBS OFF THE FLOOR!” Evan yelled, pointing at the screen.

“Evan, quiet!  You don’t need to yell,” Kara said, holding a finger to her lips.

“WHAT?  I CAN’T HEAR YOU.  LOOK AT THE PIG!” Evan yelled.  He hadn’t quite mastered the whole headphone thing.

“You’re yelling, Evan.  We can hear you if you talk much quieter,” Kara said.

“YOU’RE NOT S’POSED TO EAT THINGS OFF THE FLOOR!” he yelled.

Zack grunted and shifted around in his car seat.  We froze, wincing, waiting for the screaming to begin.  He sighed and fell back asleep, saving the energy he’d need to keep us up all night.

We arrived quietly, something we hadn’t done in ages.  It felt good to travel as a family without any major calamities, even though I forgot my toothbrush.

You can open the tailgate to let Mike Todd out at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Coat the world in Kevlar

“Dude, that gun shop is causing this traffic jam,” is a sentence I'd never uttered before last Saturday afternoon, but then, just a few miles down the road from our house, our family got stuck behind a Wal-Mart-sized crowd trying to squeeze into the little gun shop with three parking spots out front.

I almost beeped at one of the cars in front of me as it crawled through the gauntlet of shoulder-parked vehicles, looking for the least illegal place to park, but then I remembered that cars don’t cause traffic jams.  People do.  Well, now that I think about it, people and cars, together, cause traffic jams.  You really need both of them.

My first thought was to jump out of our car and join the crowd, since the zombies were clearly going to be upon us any minute.  But then I realized that these people were not scared of zombies descending upon us.  It was worse.  The sensible gun regulations were coming.  Possibly.

Ever since the shootings that still make us cry if we think about them too much, guns have been everywhere, if not backing up traffic on our street, then dominating the discussion on Facebook.  The topic touched a nerve with me enough that I dabbled in a few Facebook arguments, something I’d never tried before, and never will again.  Arguing on Facebook is fun for a few minutes but ultimately unfulfilling, like eating caramel corn for lunch, and doing so while a high school acquaintance’s second cousin is calling you ignorant.

Nobody in a Facebook argument is ever going to say, “Wow, I see it differently now.  Thanks for changing my opinion.”

Your time would be much better spent sledding with your kid, or plucking nose hairs.

I understand that gun ownership is an important right, and that without guns, we’d have a national crisis of figuring out what the dads in country music lyrics should brandish to threaten their daughters’ suitors.  Pitchforks just don’t have the same cachet.

But I can’t understand why so many people think that anything we do to keep the most dangerous weapons away from the most dangerous people means that we’re sliding down the slippery slope towards government thugs coming in the night to confiscate Ralphie’s Red Ryder.

I don’t begrudge anyone their regular old house-protecting, deer-dropping firearms – really, nobody outside of the nearest drum circle does.  But if we can’t agree that it’s not a good idea for civilians to have access to military-style weapons, I may have to get my own Predator drone to follow me around all day, ready to rain down Hellfire missiles if things get out of hand.  That makes just as much sense, since Hellfire missiles don’t kill people.  People using Hellfire missiles for their intended purpose kill people.

Among the many illuminations I’ve received from Facebook, one recurring theme seems to be that a gun-toting populace helps to keep our government in check.  In theory, this sort of makes sense, but things get a little murkier when I think about what this would mean in practice.  Who, exactly, are we trying to intimidate?  If you’ve attracted the government to your house, say, in the form of a SWAT team, no offense, but there’s a 99.9% chance I’m rooting for the government.  I reserve the .1% in case you're Bruce Willis, in which case you're probably just a misunderstood good guy.

If you’re interested in doing pretty much anything that you’re legally allowed to do with a gun, seems like you could do it with a gun that shoots, say, six or ten bullets before requiring a little breather.

But that, somehow, is a controversial opinion, and one that sends mobs fleeing into the little gun shop down the street.  I hope those people feel safer now.  I don’t.

You can fire away (figuratively) at Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Crawl, then walk, then mow

“Babe, wake up!  You’re going to want to see this,” my wife Kara said, rousting me out of a slumber that had only just begun.

“I really think you’re wrong about that,” I mumbled.

I opened my eyes to see her standing there with our youngest son Zack wriggling in her arms.  He squealed and smiled when I lifted the blanket off my head, drafting me for my first-ever game of involuntary peek-a-boo.

“Dude, I just saw that guy like an hour ago,” I said, rolling back over.  I’d given Zack a bottle at 6am, plunked him in his crib and crawled back into bed, resting easy with the knowledge that the next time somebody cried, it was Kara’s problem.  These days, that’s the closest we can get to sleeping in on a Saturday.

“Well, check this out,” Kara said, placing Zack on the floor.  Off he went – one hand, other hand, one knee, other knee, creakily moving forward on his own for the first time in his life.  Well, the second time.  I slept through the first one, which would make me sad except that, dude, I was sleeping.

We clapped and cheered as drool leaked from his proud grin.

We have family friends who tried to delay their babies’ crawling as long as possible, handing everything to the child so that it wouldn’t feel the need to move.  This strategy, of course, failed.  They should have tried handing it a bag of Doritos and a remote control, which have been proven wildly successful at immobilizing adults.

When you tell people that your baby has become mobile, they say things like, “Oh, you’re in for it now!” as if things were so peachy before.  After having gone through this twice, it seems to me that parenting an infant is a gradual process of life getting easier every day.  Each milestone passed is something to be cheered, assuming you’ve put foam rubber on every corner in the house.  

I didn’t get enough sleep to lock in any memories from our sons’ earliest days, so it’s instructive to see what my sister Amy and her wife Jaime are going through with their daughter, born on Thanksgiving Day.

“She hasn’t taken a break from eating in like three weeks.  We don’t sleep anymore.  This is insane,” Amy reported.

“It gets so much easier.  Every day with your baby is the worst one you’ll ever have,” I told her.  It sounded more uplifting in my head.  

“Aww, I hope you’ll treasure every moment.  I wish my kids were still that size,” strangers will say to me, ogling Zack in his stroller.  They say this because they’ve forgotten what it’s like to spend time with a human whose sole method of communication is screaming until you figure out why.

Already, though, things are improving.  Zack has been crawling for all of two days now, and he’s instantly more pleasant to spend time with.  If he wants to yank on the dog’s tail, well, he just goes and gives it a yank.  The more he can do for himself, the happier we all are.  Except maybe the dog.

People wax nostalgic about infants because it’s fun to look back at pictures and see a beautiful little person beginning to emerge.  But I wonder if they remember what it’s like to hang out with an actual baby for more than an afternoon.  Fulfilling, sure.  Beautiful, meaningful, yes.  Fun, no.  And often stinky.

But we’ve crawled around a big corner at our house, and hopefully, things will just keep getting easier from here.

Keep on truckin’, Zack.  Grow!  Walk!  Talk!  Learn to pour your own cereal!  Then let’s talk about mowing the lawn.

You can open Mike Todd’s bag of Doritos at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Moans over my hammy

“There’s nothing to eat,” my son Evan reported from the dinner table, moving his head to the side so that we could see him behind the gigantic ham.

“Evan, you’re the reason everyone is eating ham tonight.  You like ham.  We can’t have chicken nuggets for Christmas dinner,” I said.

Our extended family, having traveled from Anchorage, Virginia Beach, Philadelphia and Binghamton, surrounded the table, using vaguely familiar utensils to scoop copious amounts of food onto fancy plates that hadn’t known the touch of an entrée since exactly one year ago.  

The one plastic plate on the table scooched toward the centerpiece, propelled by the fingers of a finicky three-year-old.

“Please, Evan, eat your dinner.  You like everything on your plate,” my wife Kara said.  Weeks prior, she’d decided to base our Christmas dinner menu on Evan’s tastes, which meant we’d either be eating ham or gummy worms.

Just then, a serving plate passed into my hand, and I looked down to see the mushy asparagus casserole that everyone somehow loves.

“No room,” I smiled, passing it quickly on its way.  Someday, I’ll teach Evan how to arrange his zucchini bread side-by-side, rather than stacked, to fend off ambushes from the asparagus casserole.  He’s on his own, though, until he at least learns to take a few token bites of his meal to deflect attention.  Right now, he’d just blow my cover.

“Don’t want ham,” Evan moaned, deciding that he only liked ham on occasions when there wasn’t one the size of Santa’s sleigh parked in front of him.

“There’s homemade mac and cheese, too,” I offered, plopping a spoonful onto his plate.  When all else fails at dinnertime in our house, mac and cheese always comes through.

Evan glared at the steaming off-white heap of deliciousness that had been lovingly prepared from his grandmother’s special recipe.  It wasn’t glowing a Cheetoey orange like mac and cheese was supposed to.

“Don’t like it,” he said, making an uneducated guess.

“Dude, you love mac and cheese, too.  Is peanut butter and jelly the only thing you’ll eat anymore?” I asked.

“Don’t like that, either,” he replied.

“No, I’m sorry, you still like peanut butter and jelly.  It’s all you’ve eaten for the past year.  I do not accept that,” I said.  Denial is the first step toward bending reality to your will.

“Don’t like it anymore,” he shrugged.

After dinner, having surrendered to Evan’s stubbornness, I joined the clean-up crew, a rag-tag troop comprised of everyone who’d been useless during dinner preparation.  Cleanup after a fancy meal is tougher because fancy dishes can’t be put through the dishwasher.  Somehow, we’ve decided that fancy things must be less functional than their cheap counterparts.  By this logic, Porsches should not have steering wheels.

As we put away the last of the weird cheese knives and little plates with snowmen on them, I felt a little wistful that we were venturing into the New Year, preparing to leave behind a holiday season that, according to the mall, had begun two weeks before Halloween.

After we’d made it look as if the dinner had never happened, except for the leftovers bulging the rivets on the fridge, Evan went around the circle of aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, hugging them goodnight in his new Buzz Lightyear jammies.

“To infinity and beyond!” he said as we went upstairs to tuck him in.

“It was a good Christmas, wasn’t it, buddy?” I asked.

“I’m hungry,” he replied.

You can send Mike Todd to bed without his dinner at mikectodd@gmail.com.