SHERMANHOOD
One man's quest to maintain his televised sports intake while raising a child
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Hot Wheels hijinks
Of all the toys that I was most excited to introduce Elliott to, I think Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars might have been at the top of the list. While G.I. Joe characters had flair (and guns) and Playmobil and Brio are timeless, there was something I always appreciated about the simplicity of a toy car.
I have come to realize that, for little boys, the No. 1 requirement for a successful toy is, undoubtedly, durability. And nothing beats a Matchbox car in that respect. Over the years we had Playmobil figures lose legs or their hair (which meant those characters could only be used when battling Indians where they were quickly scalped.) The connectors on Brio pieces broke and needed to be glued back together and I’m sure every one of our G.I. Joe figures suffered a snapped rubber band at some point in his life. This was a fatal condition until my little brother figured out how to reassemble them with replacement rubber bands (a day that probably ranks in the top 10 of my childhood.)
But Matchbox cars? Sure you could bend an axle and give them enough dents and dings to make them something less than street legal. But to do enough damage to truly take them out of commission you’d have to put one in the microwave.
Naturally, I took their fortitude as a challenge and put my entire fleet of cars through a set of endurance feats that probably ranks just slightly shy of sadistic. One of the earlier games I created involved holding a car in each hand and throwing them against each other as hard as I could. If one ended up on its back and the other stayed on its wheels, the surviving car got a point and the game continued as a best-of-three series.
One of my more inane games involved taking cars out to the backyard and throwing them down our slide one by one. The car that bounced the shortest distance away from the slide was eliminated and the entire process was repeated until a champion emerged.
As I got older, I became more and more well-versed in the intricacies of every car. I had my favorites and had extremely uncreative names for many of them (such as Fast Yellow). Shortly after I was introduced to the beauty and majesty of the NCAA college basketball tournament, I created my own bracket that pitted 64 cars in a single-elimination tournament, putting two cars at a time in a flimsy two-vehicle shooter (the best $2 my parents ever spent) and racing them across the room. Following each tournament I would then adjust my Matchbox car “power rankings”…. Yup.
I do not expect Elliott to have the same obsessions I did growing up. But, at the same time, I’m pretty excited about playing with cars again. We even put a Hot Wheels car on our registry before Elliott was born. He already has a decent arsenal and has recently graduated from simply putting them all in his shopping cart and then ramming the cart into a wall, to driving individual cars on our tables and walls, complete with vrooming sounds. In short, we’re getting close.
There’s only one problem. Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars these days suck. It’s a travesty. The cars are no longer entirely metal. Producers have instead opted for a flimsy plastic chassis. I am sure that this has made the cars cheaper to manufacture and it also makes them far less likely to give a younger brother a concussion when a well-aimed Corvette connects with his temple. Yet it also makes for a vastly inferior product.
These cars wouldn’t last 30 minutes with my 7-year-old self. And my 10-year-old self would be appalled at how the newer lightweight vehicles made their racing performance wildly inconsistent, leading to unpredictable spin-outs. To make matters worse, we were at Fred Meyer the other day and I was going to pick up a new Cars-themed vehicle for Elliott as an impulse buy. Another beautiful thing about old Matchbox cars was their ability to pacify a 5-year-old for 49 cents. I reached to grab the Hudson Hornet, I noticed the price tag at $4.99. Are you freaking kidding me?
I realize that my disillusionment with items from my past is only beginning but I am appalled at how much something as simple as a metallic toy car could have been botched in 20 years. Fortunately, my vast collection of well-used yet still perfectly functional cars still exists at my mother’s house and I can use them as a monument of the way things used to be to Elliott.
This is the kind of awesome technology the '80s gave us. Color Racers. Cars that changed color with the temperature. Necessary? No. Awesome to 9-year-olds? Yes.
My son the sadist
While all 2-year-olds are naturally sadistic I have found recently that my oldest child has a particularly ghoulish streak in him. I am not concerned by the tantrums thrown when he is informed that he can't watch the mind-numbing "No more monkeys jumping on the bed" video on youtube. Nor am I really bothered by his new obsession with grabbing a piece of paper, showing it to me with an impish smirk on his face and then sprinting down the hall with me frantically chasing him before he attempts to flush it down the toilet.
What concerns me can be evidenced in the following pair of situations:
1. One of Elliott's favorite past times is to stack up blocks and then gleefully plow into them at full speed on his fire truck. He learned this game a few months ago when he was being babysat by my younger brother. (For revenge I will be getting his daughter Emma a subscription to Tiger Beat for her 8th birthday.) The other day Elliott brought his blocks out to our living room and dumped them on the ground. We were having fun stacking them and even more fun watching them fall over. Eventually Elliott brought out the fire truck and, after I completed my scale model of the Chrysler building with them, he destroyed it happily. I gathered up the wreckage and started the process over again, this time putting together a structure inspired by the Notre Dame cathedral.
"Oh, look at my pretty, pretty tower!" I said as I put the final block onto my masterpiece. ("Pretty, pretty" is one of Elliott's newer phrases. He likes being in the bathroom when Shelbi is putting on make-up and having her put moisturizing cream on his cheeks. He then runs down the hall to look at himself in the mirror saying "pretty, pretty!" while I say a silent prayer, pleading to God that he won't get the crap beaten out of him in a junior high locker room some day.)
Anyway, after I said "look at my pretty, pretty tower!" Elliott uttered a somewhat evil chuckle and then promptly destroyed it. Once again I repeated the process as any activity that keeps him entertained for more than 10 consecutive minutes is, frankly, better than sex at this point. I completed another structure and Elliott climbed on his fire truck. I awaited my creation's demise but Elliott didn't budge. "Don't you want to destroy it?" I asked. "No... Pretty, pretty," he said. I paused for a moment with a look of confusion on my face before it dawned on me. It wasn't good enough for him just to knock over the tower that I had spent a good 45 seconds creating. He wanted me to say how pretty I thought it was before he leveled it. This sick little turd wanted me to fawn over how much I loved what I had just built so that he could increase his level of enjoyment when he took it away from me.
2. Elliott is a bit of a picky eater. He's not as bad as some toddlers but he has a fairly limited diet. He is extremely vocal and animated about things he doesn't like or want to eat. (Another new word is "yuck".) And while we don't try and force Elliott to eat many things that he finds repulsive, the one habit we are trying to break is keeping him from tossing whatever he doesn't want or is finished with on the floor.
The other day, Shelbi and I weren't paying close enough attention during lunch when he heard the unfortunate sound of plastic meeting artificial hardwood floors. Elliott had eaten half of his pasta and discarded the remainder of the meal, plus the bowl, to the ground. I sighed as I got paper towels and walked over toward his high chair. I knelt down and began scooping remnants of noodles and parmesan cheese into my hands when I heard "What happened Dada?"
On the dignity scale, scooping up pasta into my bare hands off the floor already ranked pretty low but now I was being mocked as well. "What happened? Well, what happened you little punk, was that instead of saying 'all done Dada', you took matters into your own hands and tried to feed the rest of your lunch to the dog. But I'm fairly certain you already knew exactly what happened."
He was like a bully from an 80s movie who knocks the nerd's schoolbooks out of his hands in the hall. "Hey Merkowski what happened? Stop being such a klutz and watch where you're going next time." Oh well, I guess those guys are always fairly popular.
Hypothetical Sports Question of the Week (Volume 2)
So, we decided to do it again. This question is one that my friend Pete and I probably could have talked about non-stop for 5 hours. Fortunately, thanks to an Oscar-worth editing job by Pete, he paired our discussion on how sports video games might change the way actual sports are played in the near future, down to a tidy 25 minutes. Here it is. Ready? Down! Hut! Hut! Hut! Hut! Hut!
(For Volume 1 you can either scroll down or click here )
A diary of Sesame Street
I know all of the new research out there says that children aren't supposed to have screen time until they're 2 years old. I know. And it's something that has been important to Shelbi and I. But, somehow, our son got addicted to Muppets a little while back. That's literally the most accurate way I can put it. So, a few times a week, particularly when there is housework to be done or a phone call to be made, Elliott gets to watch Sesame Street in the mornings. I grew up on Sesame Street. Most kids in my generation did. However, over the past few weeks I have been appalled at what has become of a formerly fine institution. So, the other day, I decided to sit down and record a diary of an episode of Sesame Street. With apologies to ESPN columnist Bill Simmons whose idea I'm stealing, here it is:
9:03 - Abby tells Telly Monster that "everybody out there" pointing to the TV "is wearing shoes." Elliott, in his sleeper, looks down at his feet and sees he is not wearing shoes. "Uh-oh!" he exclaims.
9:05 - Celebrity appearance by Neil Patrick Harris who sings a song about being the Shoe Fairy. I look around the room furtively, desperate to make an inappropriate joke to someone, anyone.
9:08 - Neil Patrick Harris is actually one of the better celebrity guests I've seen recently although he's giving it a little TOO much effort. There are a few types of celebrity appearances on Sesame Street. There are the ones like Robert DeNiro who appear to be only 50% sure of exactly where they are and who go through their entire segment with a look on their face that says both "I'm going to murder my agent in about 5 minutes." and "So help me God if Elmo tries to freaking hug me, there's going to be an incident." And then there's the celebrity guests that are hoping to send their clip to the Emmys. These are usually B-List celebrities who mug for the camera aggressively as if they think Robin Williams might show up at any minute and replace them. A handful of celebs have nailed it over the years. The best one recently has been Ricky Gervais.
9:10 - The Shoe Fairy gives Telly multiple kinds of shoes, all of which backfire and cause Telly physical pain.
9:13 - Telly decides his feet feel better without shoes. Thanks for wasting 13 minutes of our time Sesame Street.
9:15 - A skit with Grover and a pair of ballet dancers. They are trying to teach Grover what the word 'pirouette' means. Really? Come on, give my son something he can use here.
9:16 - More puppets falling and hurting themselves, much to the delight of my son.
9:17 - Murray, another new character, pesters young children in a park about the letter Z.
9:17 - It's a clever segue into an animated short about ants looking for food that starts with Z. Spoiler alert: It's zucchini.
9:18 - A new daily feature called Abby's Flying Fairy School in which three young animated fairies attend a very poorly run school.
9:21 - Despite the exceedingly low teacher to student ratio at this school there is no lesson plan and very little learning so far.
9:25 - While chasing an escaped gerbil, one of the fairies shouts "He's heading for the border!" Is this entire skit a subtle analogy of immigration rights in the U.S.?
9:27 - The gerbil gets away but decides he misses the fairies and returns on his own accord. Another 9 minutes of wasted time.
9:28 - Murray is back to teach is about the number 15. Elliott loves this part because he gets to count on his own. His counting goes like this: He holds up one finger and says "Two, two, two, two!"
9:29 - 15 dancing creatures in African masks stroll by. Elliott approves by dancing although it's obvious his patience is wearing thin with the lack of puppets.
9:30 - Murray gets his own segment called Murray Had a Little Lamb. It's Murray touring a school with his friend who is a lamb. And also, the lamb speaks Spanish for some reason.
9:32 - Elliott is bored out of his skull with the Irish Stepdancing class that Murray is touring and starts doing somersaults on the couch.
9:32 - Not surprisingly, Murray the puppet falls while dancing, briefly getting Elliott's attention back.
9:35 - Murray plays 'sounds of the street' in New York. He hears birds, a car horn and a homeless man urinating in an alley.
9:36 - Hey, it's puppets I recognize! Ernie and Bert talk about their toes. Ernie, also known as the worst roommate ever, disturbs Bert's sleep for the 500th time in the history of Sesame Street by singing a song about his toes. Here's what I don't get about Ernie and Bert. They obviously own an apartment together and have to be responsible enough to pay bills and buy their own groceries etc... but their discussions over the past 30 years are extremely rudimentary. Ernie is obsessed with his rubber duckie. Bert collects bottle caps and loves pigeons etc... A while ago someone caused an uproar by surmising that Ernie and Bert were gay but I don't think that's true. I think it's more of a George and Lennie type relationship. Bert has an affinity for Ernie the simpleton even though his life would clearly be easier without him. Needless to say I don't think anyone would have liked the results if Steinbeck ever had the chance to guest direct an episode.
9:38 - Time for Elmo's World which now takes up the last 20 minutes of every episode. Elliott immediately grins and dances and is more transfixed than he has been all day. He loves Elmo. All kids do. I don't get it. It's like a group of scientists got together in the late 60s and spent two decades doing research to create a creature that no child under the age of 4 could possibly resist. I'm convinced that Elmo has been spewing subliminal messages to children for 20 years. Play the theme song of Elmo's World back and it probably says "Vote Republican."
9:39 - The theme of this Elmo's World episode is going to be about getting dressed.
9:40 - Elmo talks to his pet goldfish Dorothy pretending to field a question from him. Shelbi and I have both wondered at separate times how many "Dorothy's" they have gone through in the last 10 years. To my knowledge there has never been an Elmo's World episode called "Elmo deals with death."
9:41 - Oh boy it's time for Mr. Noodle, a live-action clown-type character who is a mustachioed 45-year-old man permanently living outside Elmo's window. He is mute and scares the bejeezus out of Shelbi. I don't think I even need a joke here.
9:41 - Mr. Noodle is also the dumbest man alive as a group of 6 year olds always has to tell him how to do basic functions. Today Mr. Noodle doesn't know how to get dressed.
9:42 - Quick thought: If you're at a point where you think pants go on your arms, perhaps having suspenders and a dicky in your outfit is a bit too complicated of an ensemble. Maybe start small with an adult diaper and a poncho.
9:43 - Now a variety of kids talk to Dorothy the goldfish about how they get dressed. Dorothy all but screams from her bowl. "I'm a fish! I'm living in a madhouse with a 3-year-old! Why has there never been an episode about how to feed a goldfish?"
9:45 - Now Elmo asks a baby how to get dressed in a running segment on Elmo's World I like to call "Let's Mock an Infant."
9:47 - Elmo is supposed to be 3 years old and has been unattended for 10 minutes now. Sesame Street has a laundromat, a general store and a fix-it shop but apparently no Child Services office.
9:50 - Elmo leaves us briefly as a 7-year-old teaches us, again, how to get dressed. Elliott protests his absence by getting up and turning the TV off.
9:51 - Elmo wants to watch something called 'the getting dressed channel'. I think that show is on at midnight on Fridays on HBO.
9:53 - In another animated skit, a woman gets dressed and, at the end, says "Now does anyone know a song about getting undressed?" Umm... yes. Every hip-hop song ever.
9:54- Elmo speaks to a talking book. I'm starting to think Elmo's world might only exist in Elmo's mind like the autistic kid in St. Elsewhere.
9:55 - Elmo's World is done and so is Sesame Street. The letter of the day is Z and the number of the day is 15. Elliott waves bye-bye to the TV and immediately runs to get his Elmo book for me to read to him.
Magic kisses
There are some things you end up doing as a parent that, no matter how much you swear you won't, are simply inevitable. You might find baby talk or, at the very least, talking an octave and a half higher than you normally speak, to be repulsive and grating but, maybe not as often as some people do it, you're going to speak to your small child that way at some point. You're going to spend an inordinate amount of time inspecting your infant's poop and talking about it with your spouse. You're going to memorize Good Night Moon. And you're also going to attempt to make your child's injuries go away by kissing them.
It's an odd phenomenon that can probably be traced back for centuries. It has always seemed a bit bizarre to me, not to mention a terrible diagnosis for the majority of injuries. And yet, with Elliott, it has been a common occurrence for months. My son is, to say the least, a bit injury-prone. Virtually every time we change a diaper we'll discover a new bruise or scratch on his legs. He also has yet to learn how to walk. Oh, don't get me wrong, he can run. His technique is lacking but he can definitely run. However, to my knowledge, he has never simply strolled calmly from point A to point B in his life.
That being said, scraped knees and hands are routine. He knows about 10 words and one of them is 'bonk.' Another is 'uh-oh'. We will often hear a small thud, look around the corner to find Elliott sitting on the ground, holding his head in both hands looking like he has just received horrible news from a telegram.
And ever since Shelbi first kissed his head following a 'bonk,' it has become the only remedy he'll accept. He's like a professional athlete who gets hooked on pain-killers. If he stubs a toe he immediately runs to mom for a kiss... then to dad, just to cover his bases, and then back to mom for another one like a patient upping his morphine drip. But, a few days ago, Elliott pinched a finger and quickly brought it to my magical healing workshop. I kissed it and he started to go back to playing. Then he looked back down at his finger and held it back up to me. I kissed it again. Again he stared at his finger with a somewhat perplexed look on his face. It dawned on me that, to my chagrin, he was starting to put 2 and 2 together. His finger still hurt. He was realizing that, not only was I not magic and all powerful, but, even worse, myself, and perhaps his mom as well, may have been putting on a ruse for months.
Obviously I knew the day would come when he would realize how fatally flawed I actually was. Tickling and swinging upside down won't always be cures for a bad mood and getting him untangled from one of Shelbi's shirts won't always draw a round of applause from him but I didn't expect it to start happening before he was even two years old. I guess I liked the power trip that came with my magic kisses. I've always been a big fan of stepping over and extremely low-set bar and receiving the accolades. Thank goodness we have another one on the way who will hopefully take a bit longer before he or she draws back the curtain.
Top 5 Depressing Moments in Parenting
Shelbi and I made a brief excursion to Target a couple of weeks ago. (How's that for an opening line that makes you want to read more?) It was about 6 p.m. on Labor Day and we were shocked by the jammed parking lot. We figured there must have been some giant pre-sale on fake Christmas trees or something as we filed through row after row of packed consumers roaming the aisles. We were just about to chock up the store's overcrowding as another unsolveable mystery along the lines of why the Winco on 82nd street was jammed full of what appeared to be 500 of escaped convicts and/or methed out miscreants at 11:30 p.m. a few years ago.
But then we turned a corner and the puzzle was solved. In front of us was Target's Back to School display and it was inundated with swarms of frazzled parents and small children. The older children were a healthy combination of mortified and depressed at the concept of being out with their parents at Target on their last night of freedom. The majority of the younger children were in tears either from tapping into their parents' stress level or because, at such late notice, the store was out of Transformers folders meaning a handful of 7-year-old boys will likely be sporting Bratz dolls on their Pee Chees this year.
And, as we passed the chaos, I got to thinking about where this scene ranked on my list of Depressing Parenting Scenes I've Witnessed. Here's how I have them ranked:
5. The parents who waited until Labor Day evening to buy every school supply on their kids' list. It was sad and I was devastated for the children who didn't get the type of new lunchbox they were hoping for or, even worse, won't have school supplies that the store was sold out of but, at the same time, there is at least a small chance that this is going to happen to me at some point in the next 20 years. It is not out of the realm of possibilities that Shelbi and/or myself will put this off so I will cut this group a bit of slack.
4. The woman behind us in Safeway last year. She and her mother were arguing loudly with a child in the grocery cart. Eventually, after another slew of profanities from the mother, the grandmother snapped, saying "If you talk like that in front of my grandchild again I'm not going to buy any of your groceries." The mother snipped back, growing angrier and the grandmother simply left the store. The mother followed angrily, leaving her full cart in line and snatching away the book from her daughter that she was told she could have. Shelbi left the store in tears. It wasn't that poor kid's fault. Had it not happened so quickly Shelbi almost certainly would have bought the book herself and ran it out to the little girl.
3. It's far too long a story to convey entirely in an already too long blog post but here are the high points. Shortly after Shelbi and I moved into our house, a young couple began renting the house across the street from us. They had a 6-month-old child. Not long after they moved in, the woman knocked on our door needing to use the phone because her boyfriend was out and they didn't have a land line. This soon became a common occurrence for us and the rest of our neighbors. Visits came constantly sometimes as late as 11 p.m., every time with a new sob story until we eventually stopped answering the door. Over the course of a few months we learned that the girl's boyfriend was certainly cheating on her and that she was ready to leave. One night Shelbi and I even helped her pack up a cab to leave for her parents' house in Vancouver. Less than a month later she was back and... promptly got herself knocked up again. They finally moved out when, after a particularly big fight, she called the cops and informed them of the identity theft ring her boyfriend was operating out of the garage. It was like we were on simultaneous episodes of Candid Camera and Maury Povich.
2. The line 60-deep of parents and kids waiting in Party City as the store's suicidal teenage employees try to find specific Halloween costumes the afternoon of October 31. I have had the misfortune of being in Party City on the day of Halloween twice in the past six years. If I was making a list of the things in my 30 years of existence that I am least proud of, I don't think I could top that last sentence. It is an awful, awful experience. The first occasion occurred while Shelbi was still working as a server at Chili's. The wait staff was all dressing up for their shift that day and Shelbi wanted me to pick up something simple like a cat mask and maybe a tail. No problem I thought. I walked into Party City and it was sheer madness. Every single aisle was torn to pieces, the floors littered with items that had been pulled off shelves. There was screaming and crying and shouting. The row of costumes was completely impassable. The format at Party City is that a child or parent selects one of the 100+ cheaply-made, pre-packaged and surprisingly expensive costumes, then waits in line while an employee heads back to the storage room and retrieves it. On normal days, it's not a bad system. But, on Halloween, and with the oldest of the store's four employees on duty checking in at 19 years old, it's a monumental cluster$#@&. The absolute worst part is having an employee walk out from the back to announce "We just sold the last Batman and Princess Jasmine costumes!" setting off a barrage or groans, tears and curse words. Then a handful of parents have to get out of line, search for another costume, get behind another 60 people and pray that their new selection will be in stock by the time they get back to the front. It took me close to an hour to pick up a tiger mask and an extremely long unmatching tail that proved to be very impractical for a waitress. Four years later I had forgotten about that experience when, again on October 31, I wanted to purchase some Halloween-themed cheap glasses for our annual party. Sigh.
(Note: Narrowly missing the top-5 were the parents who were trying to piece together their kids' Halloween costumes at the Value Village thrift store on Oct. 30 only because, if you're savvy, you can actually come up with a decent costume there.)
1. As difficult as it was to top the Party City fiasco, it happened a couple of years ago. I found myself at Rite Aid late at night on Christmas Eve. Again, not my finest hour but this was before Elliott was born and I believe I was purchasing some cheap champagne for mimosas the next morning. I made my selection (a lovely $5 bottle of Cook's if I remember correctly) and, on my way to the counter, passed the row which I feel should be labeled "Cheap crap, Stuff that will break on your way to the Car, Easily Solvable Puzzles, Rip-offs of more popular toys." And, in this aisle are a pair of individuals in their early 40s who perfectly fit the bill of what you would expect to find at the 24-hour Rite Aid at 10 p.m. or later. The man was in sandals and a pair of very short, blue cotton athletic shorts, a medium-sized tank top that had come to an agreement with the man's gut that it would be best to not even attempt to cover it and a mesh cap with a Budweiser emblem. The woman was also in sandals and some semblance of a robe. In essence, it was what you would expect a couple to look like shortly in the moments following a late-night earthquake which sent them scrambling into the streets in a panic.
But, from this couple's conversation, they were clearly doing their Christmas shopping. To be fair, there is a chance that the shopping was being done for a niece and nephew but, there is a fairly high chance that it was for their children. Now, don't get me wrong, I like the cheap crap aisle. I may have even purchased a goofy stocking stuffer or two from this aisle in the past. When, on a previous trip to Rite-Aid, Shelbi told me to "bring home a present" , I may have walked out with a set of jacks for 99 cents which saddled her with a silmultaneous look of confusion and melancholy. But these people were not making a last-minute venture for stocking stuffers. No, this was their Christmas shopping. The fact that the items being considered were so crappy didn't bother me that much. Perhaps it was all they could afford. I can understand that. But it was also evident that these people knew absolutely nothing about the people they were buying for. "How about this dinosaur? Christopher likes dinosaurs doesn't he?" Shrug. "Here, what's this? Dora the Explorer? Would Emily want to color on this?" Ugh. I'm hoping this stays at No. 1 for a very long time.
Hypothetical Sports Question of the Week (Volume 1)
Caution: Proceed at your own risk. For at least a year, my friend Pete would call me on his way home from work and, often, one of us would hit the other one with a random, hypothetical sports question and the ensuing conversation would then eat up the next 20-30 minutes of Pete's commute while I paced in front of my office, holding a notebook so that it would look like I was conducting an interview. A few weeks ago we got together and, for some reason, decided to formally record one of these conversations. Below is our inaugural attempt. It's imperfect but, hey, we made ourselves laugh a few times.
Download | Duration: 00:31:00
Summer Vacation Part 2
So we started driving. We made our decision so quickly that we didn't take a lot of time to process anything. But, in essence, we were trading in our four-hour flight (a flight that we were exceedingly worried about Elliott being able to handle while maintaining his sanity) in exchange for 32 hours stuck in a car seat. But, at least this way, if our kid went crazy, he would only be bothering two individuals instead of 200. On our first night, we arrived in San Francisco at around 9 p.m. Elliott handled the nine hours relatively well. The portable DVD player was our savior although Shelbi and I can, quite literally, recite all of Muppets Take Manhattan and The Great Muppet Caper verbatim.
We checked into our hotel and were planning on heading to bed rather quickly in preparation for a full day on the town beginning next morning. After a long car ride, the phrase "I need to burn off some energy" is always used liberally and I had always believed that they were basically figures of speech. Just because you've been cooped up somewhere for a long period of time doesn't mean you've somehow accumulated an excess amount of energy that must be evacuated, right? Well, we learned our lesson fairly quickly. Elliott got into our hotel room and instantly took on a form that I have never seen before.
He dismantled the hotel room telephone, unplugging it from the wall and the receiver from the console and dragged both pieces around the room. He crawled up on the bed, spun around in circles before flopping down face first and giggling uproariously. He yanked at the blinds, he changed the air conditioner settings, he knocked over a lamp, he turned the TV on and off 56 times. He somehow figured out how to open the door and was halfway to the elevator in just his diaper before we caught him. And all of this was done to the tune of high-pitched screams as the majority of the hotel was likely trying to sleep. That night he refused to calm down. We put him in his Pack and Play and he promptly pulled off his sheet and then folded up his mattress before tossing it over the side. He ran around in circles before eventually stopping and staring at us like a creepy kid in a horror movie. After a minute of this we got: "Dada? Dada? Dada! ... Mama! Mama!... Mama. Mama?" We put him into bed with us and he promptly started a one person game of steamroller. I have no idea how long it actually took him to fall asleep. Shelbi and I were so tired that after midnight, for all we know, he could have been dancing on our faces for hours and we could have slept through it.
The day in San Francisco was fun . We went to the wharf, ate chowder, saw the sea lions etc... Early in the day I achieved what, until that point, I had failed to realize was a mandatory step in parenthood. I stood outside a carousel, waving at my child and taking blurry pictures. It is absolutely one of the 20 most likely things you will do when you become a father right between "begrudgingly accepting the fact that, no matter how annoying, kids freaking love Elmo." That night I purchased tickets to the Giants game and we sat in the third deck at a cold at windy AT&T Park. Again the portable DVD player saved us. We estimated that it only had around 80 minutes of battery power left and, in my mind, I would have been thrilled to make it past the fifth inning. But somehow, like the Hanukkah oil, the battery miraculously lasted 3 hours, making it possible for me to see my team lose a heartbreaking game.
The next morning we headed down to Yucaipa, California. For the uninformed, Yucaipa is roughly halfway between Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Hell. From April through October when you wake up in Yucaipa, there's a good chance that A. it's going to top 100 degrees and B. you're going to question every decision you've made in your life that has led up to that point. Fortunately, our hosts were extremely gracious. Over the course of four days, my brother and sister-in-law endured
A. Shelbi dropping a few Froot Loops under a recliner which, in turn, attracted 6000 ants into their house overnight.
B. My sister-in-law's shorts getting ruined while riding in my car because, for some reason, I had a votive in my back seat that melted.
C. Both Shelbi and I getting snippy and childish during games of Settlers of Catan.
D. Elliott dumping an entire bottle of water on their bed.
E. Elliott breaking their show rack within 30 seconds of our arrival.
On our second day, we ventured down to San Diego to give our hosts a much needed respite from us and to take Elliott to Sea World. I was skeptical about Sea World. But it turned out to be an incredibly fun place for little kids. Currently, Sea World has an entire Sesame Street exhibit which we immediately went to. Elliott rode a few of the very tame rides, pointing at all of the drawings of his favorite characters. Then, just as he and Shelbi were stepping off Elmo's Flying Fish ride, a handful of live-action characters appeared for a short performance. Elliott saw them and his eyes got huge. He squealed and pointed at them and ran over to them with the most insane smile on his face I have ever seen. He watched, entranced as they sang their few songs, occasionally glancing back at us as if to say "Are you seeing this?! Holy crap! They're real!" We then stood in line for a chance to meet Elmo, Cookie Monster and Zoe. Shelbi and I weren't sure how Elliott would react. In the past, he has been curious but generally petrified by people dressed up in furry costumes. And, I estimated that about 40% of the little kids in front of us either refused to go within 10 feet of the enormous Muppets or started bawling uncontrollably when Cookie Monster reached out to take their hand.
It was Elliott's turn and we set him down. He took off toward Elmo like a shot and, for the next two minutes, walked up and down the line, giving all three characters hug after hug, pausing reluctantly for a few seconds to get some pictures taken. It was, unequivocally the happiest day of his entire life and likely will remain that way until he sees his first pair of breasts.
The drive home was relatively uneventful. We were smarter this time around and let Elliott out periodically to run around like a madman. Our only casualty occurred on the home stretch. After what was to be our last stop before home in Roseburg, I let Shelbi take over driving as I had handled those duties for the entire way back from Yucaipa to that point. She took the wheel, promptly drove past the on-ramp to get back on the highway, realized her mistake, did a U-turn, and slammed into the curb, knocking off a hubcap and denting the rim of my tire. Only the grace of God kept my poor tire in tact. After I let a supremely rattled and perturbed Shelbi calm down, I equated her performance to that of a terrible relief pitcher. To that point I had thrown eight scorless innings, walking just one batter, yielding two hits and striking out nine. I left with a three-run lead and she gave up back-to-back-to-back home runs on three straight pitches. She was the Armando Benitez of our road trip.
Summer Vacation Part 1
Two Wednesdays ago was supposed to be a monumental step in Shelbi's and my life as parents. We were ready to attempt Elliott's first ride in an airplane. From the moment our trip to Chicago had been conceived many months ago, I had literally played out every scenario of our flight in my head. Situations ranged from:
Elliott being an utterly delightful toddler for four hours, happily eating his snacks and charming everyone in the cabin including, by monumental coinicidence, the CEO of Huggies who happened to be riding in first class and offered us millions of dollars to make Elliott their new poster baby.
to
Elliott running up and down the aisle the moment the plane took off, spilling drinks, ripping headphones out of businessmen's ears, biting flight attendants and developing a raging ear infection.
Everything was on the table. Many parents who have what I like to call "boring babies" don't have to worry about things like this. They have toddlers who are perfectly content to sit still for hours at a time, slowly and politely flipping through the pages of book after book without uttering a sound. This is not our child.
Ours is the one whose idea of coloring is to see how many crayons he can fit in one hand before beating the crap out of a picture of Barney with them like a meat tenderizer. He is also the child who recently started climbing up on our small coffee table, counting to three in gibberish with his fingers in the air and then stepping off into the nothingness on his way to a spectacular fall. Clearly a calm four hour flight was not something we were banking on. But we were prepared. While we have tried to limit his television watching, we fully planned on letting him gorge himself on Muppets. After all, he was on vacation too. We were armed with a CD case full of Sesame Street and Muppets (even the crappy more recent ones) and Shelbi had even made Elliott practice using headphones for a week prior to the flight. We were as ready as we possibly could have been.
But a funny thing happened. You see, we were flying standby. I knew that flying standby was a risky proposition but I really never anticipated the eventual results. We arrived at the airport at 4 a.m. on Wednesday. Elliott was fantastic waiting at the check-in line and through security. We got him a blueberry muffin and cracked open a new Sesame Street book. So far, so good.
I first sensed problems when a handful of other travelers straggled up to the ticket counter to ask questions about standby. Then came the announcement where the attendant referred to the 6:12 a.m. flight as "extremely full". Perhaps the worst sign was when a pilot approached the desk hoping to hitch a ride and was quickly turned away. An actual pilot was not getting on this flight.
No big deal. We figured we might miss the first flight to O'Hare. Hopefully a handful of seats will open up on the 8:30 flight. After multiple loops through the terminal and even a 20-minute nap in his stroller, Elliott was more than happy to play on the moving sidewalk for 45 minutes. It was so successful that I'm having one installed in our house this weekend between the couch and the refrigerator.
Passengers started arriving to catch the 8:30. The first announcement was made. "Ladies and Gentlemen this flight is oversold." Not encouraging. "If anyone on this flight would like to give up his or her seat for a $400 voucher please see the front desk." But then came the kicker. "Please note that if you are giving up your ticket, your travel plans should be flexible, and I mean EXTREMELY flexible." What this basically meant was: "We can get you to Chicago at some point but it might not be during this equinox, you're going to have to bring a parachute and, I'm going to be honest, one leg of the trip is going to be on a camel."
This was bad news. As it turned out, two passengers who had paid full-price for tickets and had reservations were bumped from the flight. Then the fun started. Actually, it would have been a lot more fun to watch if Shelbi and I hadn't been in a constant state of panic that our tired and confused son could, at any minute, blow a gasket and sprint down the ramp while waving his hands in the air, causing the airport to shut down entirely for two hours.
Airports are fascinating places. People are constantly on edge and often at their absolute worst. While Shelbi took a turn riding the sidewalk back and forth, I watched the pair of ticketed passengers go through the 7 stages of grief with the airline employee. Well, actually, it was pretty much just seven different levels of anger.
It was interesting to watch the two passengers' approach. After the initial shock wore off, one went with the well-tempered, "how can we work this?" approach. The other went with full-fleged venom and personal attacks. I'm still not sure if this particular airline attendant simply had no soul or if she was just brilliant at her job. Nothing fazed her. These people were not getting on the plane and, frankly, were probably not getting on any plane until at least tomorrow. There were a few insincere apologies and then a lot of loud typing at a computer, minimal eye contact and shoulder shrugging. I'm pretty sure if I had been in the same situation this woman would have somehow made me feel guilty for her company's enormous gaffe.
A few minutes later, when the counter was clear, I very nicely approached and asked what our chances were of getting to Chicago at any point today. The woman clicked a few keys and read the verdict. The 10:30 flight was also oversold. The 1 p.m. flight was completely booked. The evening flight was oversold and the red-eye had one seat left which would assuredly be taken soon. In fact, in seven hours at the airport we had actually lost ground on the priority list behind overbooked passengers. It was the equivalent of waiting all day in a half-mile long line at Disneyland and taking 5 steps backwards by the time the park closed.
There were only two pieces of good news. First, our bags had not been sent to Chicago without us and were easily retrieved. Second, there were a handful of people at our gate who were having a worse day than we were. And that's always nice. Here are the people we encountered who had the worst days:
1. The middle-aged woman and her wheelchair-bound mother who were in front of us on the standby list. One seat opened up on the first flight of the day and the woman's husband took it as the group assumed it would be easier to get two people on a plane later in the day than it would three. Who knows how long that man spent in Chicago awaiting the rest of his party. At least 48 hours. Probably longer.
2. The man who missed the first flight of the day by exactly 12 seconds. The doors closed, he walked up to the gate with a stupified look on his face. Not only did he miss his flight, he was immediately placed behind every oversold passenger for the rest of the day.
3. The first woman who was overbooked and bumped off the 8:30 flight. She was hoping to get to Chicago even earlier and opted to try and fly standby on the 6:12 flight. But what this did was take away her confirmed seat so, when the next flight was oversold, she had no seat reservation and was bumped for at least the rest of the day.
Shelbi and I were discouraged. That evening, we had grandma watch Elliott while we went to dinner and plotted Plan B. If we couldn't get on a flight the next day, we weren't going to spend all of my vacation time figuring out which Seattle's Best coffee shop made the best mochas in the airport. We thought about driving to Chicago, which would have been six days of solid driving and only two or three actually spent in Chicago. We thought about staying close to home and doing a few day trips. We thought about Seattle but had no place to stay. Eventually we decided that we would make a trip to California, spending a day in San Francisco and another in San Diego with the bulk of our time being spent with my brother and his wife.
With that plan in mind, we got up at 3:30 the next morning, headed back to the airport and, after making our way to the ticket counter, encountered another surly employee. But, this time, I was happy to see her. She, very blatantly, told us that there was a 0% chance of us catching a flight that day. She pointed to the flashing red lettering on the computer screen that described our stanby chances as "very risky". The only way it could have been less encouraging is if it also had a little skull and crossbones icon next to it. But that was the best thing that could have happened (aside from actually making the flight). We held onto our bags, didn't have to go through security and I could quickly call my mother and ask her to turn around. Plus Elliott got to ride the luggage carousels which are empty at 4 a.m.
We got home, took quick naps, and then promptly threw all of our bags into my car to start our drive to California.
Mall games
I took Elliott to the mall this afternoon for a couple of hours or until he completely melted down, whichever came first. We were getting out of the house today to give my sick wife some rest. (And yes that sentence was included as a gratuitous plug at showing what a good husband I am.) I needed to price new refrigerators anyway and I didn't feel like pirouetting Elliott away from his myriad noise-making toys for two hours while Shelbi was sleeping.
As I've mentioned before, I've ventured to the mall with much greater frequency since Elliott has been around. It's an easy way to get out of the house periodically and there's plenty for Elliott to enjoy. He loves those awful cars and trucks and make noise and move back and forth when you put money in them but, fortunately for me, he still doesn't have 50 cents worth of an attention span so he is more than happy to simply run between one vehicle and the next whether they're moving or not. He loves soft pretzels and he loves the plush Sesame Street characters and Barnes and Noble and he loves people.
I, however, am not much of a mall guy. I admit that I take a modicum of enjoyment out of going to the mall shortly before Christmas by myself with a set list of items to buy and seeing how quickly and efficiently I can accomplish my task. I weave in and out of Victoria's Secret bags and men holding 50 ounces of orange julius like a nimble running back. There is an adrenaline rush to simply embracing the holiday madness and then kicking it up a notch. It is also the one time of year that I will venture into certain stores. I hit up Bath and Bodyworks for approximately 5 minutes every Dec. 23rd. That's my limit. Any more than that and the skin starts peeling from my face. I had to go into Hollister a few years ago for a gift card for my sister and it was like I was hooked up to the machine in The Princess Bride that sucks your life force. "Not to 50!"
But it's simpler times in the summer. And today I actually found Elliott to be a valuable asset to my experience. It's always interesting to see people's looks when I am alone at the mall with Elliott. They range from 'Oh, isn't that cute?" to "Is that guy stealing a baby? Does some authority figure need to be contacted?" He is both an attention magnet as well as a deterrent which, to me, is far more useful. Clackamas Town Center is packed with kiosks which house the facility's most useless commodities. You've got your smokeless cigarettes, your cheaply built remote controlled helicopters and your calendars featuring impossibly cute cats and dogs. And the salespeople at these kiosks are always incredibly aggressive. You can do a masterful job of avoiding eye contact but, suddenly, one will still somehow be completely in your face asking if you have a minute. Usually I have to resort to making a fake phone call through this section. But today, while awkwardly pushing Elliott's stroller with one hand, holding his cup of milk and a Starbucks coffee cake in the other, I managed to not fit into these peoples' demographic which, prior to today, I thought consisted of the entire human race. Nope. They avoided me like the plague.
A similar thing happened in The Children's Place. I picked up a cheap pair of pants for Elliott and, right as the clerk was starting her speech about how I should sign up for a rewards card to save %5 blah blah, Elliott launched into one of his favorite games. I call it "Yelling to see if this room echos." It's not unhappy screaming. Far from it. But it's loud screaming nonetheless. And if he doesn't like the results, he's a persistent bugger and starts Level 2 of the game in which he yells louder in an attempt to force the room to echo. The sales clerk stopped dead in her tracks. I didn't even have to politely reject her offer with a "Maybe next time." Three seconds into her speech she realized that she wanted me out her store as quickly as I wanted out. So thank you Elliott. You're getting better ever day.
"All of our Japanese Cherry Blossom body butters are 30%
off today!"