Brainwashing Your Kid Is Easier Than Washing Your Kid

Here's Remy on Inauguration Day sharing her enthusiasm for the new president with Molly (the little figurine). One underrated aspect about having a two year old is that with a little work, said two year old can quickly become fiercely partisan and a fan of all my favorite sports teams.

Meanwhile, Molly is thrilled about the closing Guantanamo Bay, having been a torture victim herself. While Molly has not been waterboarded, she has faced far worse advanced interrogation techniques, including, but not limited to being: covered in fecal matter, dipped in mustard, and force fed banana chunks that are as big as her head (and have been on the floor).

I Love Baby Wipes

Baby Wipes are wonderful. Baby Wipes are the answer. Baby Wipes are the shit.

I mean, for you. Having a baby gives you the freedom to purchase Baby Wipes embarrassment free. You see the CVS employee* and you're all, "Hey, I'm buying these diapers here so you know I have a baby, and that's who these Baby Wipes are for too."

So you go home, do your thing, then clean up with the Baby Wipes and think, "Aww, yeah." Then you curse every time you ever went to the bathroom using regular toilet paper. Regular toilet paper stops making sense. Regular toilet paper is the typewriter of ass wiping technology. Regular toilet paper is not the shit.


*Meanwhile, said CVS employee is a 23 year old dropout who only works at CVS because it's the easiest way to steal the Sudafed. He's ringing you up for your Baby Wipes and he's thinking, "Damn, I wonder if Dwayne** knows how much Sudafed I just put down my pants?"

**His manager.

My Car = Dumpster

The smell in my car was God awful and day by day it got worse. (The only smell I can compare it to is a Port-a-Potty on an August day that 90,000 Nascar fans with bad aim have all used.)

On day six, the smell was making it unsafe for me to drive. I was positive that I was going to pass out any second from the noxious fumes and cause a major accident. So I got a garbage bag and decided to clean my Honda up. I would find the source of the smell and remove it.

Easier said than done. My backseat looked like a garage sale for kids toys covered in a blanket made of Cheerios.

See, my daughter doesn't like the car. Twenty seconds into any excursion and the crying starts at decibiles that, frankly, hurt. (Now, I don't blame her, she has no idea where we're going or how long it's going to be, she's bored as hell from reading the same six books in the backseat nine hundred times each, and she's tied down like Hannibal Lector.)

So what do we do to quiet her down? One of two things:

1) We find a school bus and we tailgate the shit out of it. Then we give stream of conscious color commentary on every aspect of the school bus as fast as we can. "The kids are on the bus! The kids go to school on the bus! The bus is yellow! The bus driver is out of AA, etc..."

2) In the event of no school buses to tailgate, we ply her with food. Cheerios, Fig Newmans, apples, pretzels*, etc... (My daughter really likes food. Every day she eats like tommorow is Yom Kippur.)

When Remy is done with the food, she throws it on the floor.

So when I started wading through all the food, I couldn't account for the smell. I don't care how long Cheerios and Fig Newmans have been in the backseat, unless they're mixed with feces and milk that expired six weeks ago, they should not make THAT smell.

And then I found the feces and the expired milk. The feces lived in a diaper under a Maisy book, but that was actually the easy the part. The dagger was the milk. It was festering in a sippy cup under the seat and it wasn't milk anymore. Once upon a time it was milk. Now it was angry, gray cottage cheese. It was assisted suicide medication. It was weapons of mass destruction. It WAS the smell.

I threw the whole sippy cup out, used the crappy vaccum hose thing at the car wash, and it didn't take long before my car smelled as good as a 2001 Honda Civic as ever smelled. I also decided I was not going to give my daughter food in the car ever again.

But less than forty eight hours later, I couldn't find a school bus.


*My mother is reading this and having a heart attack. She would probably never say this, but I'm pretty sure she's thinking, "You give her pretzels? In a moving car! She's not even 2! She'll choke any minute! Why not just give her marbles to eat!"

Kid 'N Play

When you become a parent, there are certain things about your old life that you think are dead. And you’re right, many of them are.

(See: spontaneously deciding to tell everyone at work that you just puked so you can go to the bar and watch every game in the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament and drink amounts of beer not attempted since college, which does, in fact, lead to you actually puking.)

But some other things are still alive.

One of those things, that rises from the dead like a soap opera character after six years and no movie career, is a sense of freedom. That’s what today’s show is about. Freedom.

But before I get into freedom’s triumphant return, let me give you some context on its origins:

The summer after I graduated from high school, my parents went to Europe, leaving me home alone for two weeks. As they left, I remember thinking, “I’m going to do a lot of crazy shit.”*

This was a sense of absolute freedom I had never felt before.

(Side note: How dumb were my parents? Why didn’t they just buy me a keg and send Kid ‘N Play over? Seriously. Tanya Harding and Jeff Gillooly planned things out more thoughtfully than my parents did on this one.)

The two weeks were glorious, but with each passing day, I dreaded the end of my parents’ trip more and more. Unfortunately, they came back anyway and swallowed up my new independence like a donut on Rosie O'Donnell's nightstand. The good news is that my sense of freedom returned when I left for college five weeks later. And it never went away again.

That is, until my daughter Remy was born.

She crawled out of my wife’s body, grabbed my freedom, tied it up, and locked it in somebody’s basement.

Now, hang on a second… I just want to point out that this is not an “It Sucks To Have A Kid” blog. It’s beyond wonderful to have a kid. And while a kid does bitch slap your sense of independence, there are all kinds of powerful things that step up in its absence.

Quick example: when I pick my daughter up from day care, she smiles this gigantic, mid-debate Joe Biden smile, screams my name, then wraps her little monkey arms around my neck. That is a damn nice feeling.

But I digress…

Because at some point after the dregs of the umbilical cord fall off your kid’s body, (which, by the way, is weird and gross and reminds me of Gremlins) every parent has a chance to get away for a night. I don’t mean dinner at a restaurant. I mean, you get away, away for at least one full night. It’s a sleepover.

And there are two types of sleepovers:

1) Without wife
2) With wife

I’ve personally only enjoyed Category 1, but I hear Category 2 is pretty nice and relates to other somethings that you thought were dead.

Anyway, my first trip away from Remy was last year when I went to New York City for a conference (but had ever so wisely built in extra time for myself). She was 8 months old. As the plane took off from Burbank, I remember thinking, “I’m going to do a lot of crazy shit.”

Now, it wasn’t exactly the same kind of 18 year-old crazy shit, (with the exception of planning to drink heavily) but my list was pretty exciting:

I was going to sleep the fuck in. I was going to see a movie in the middle of the day. I was going to take a nap. I was going to not make any plans and just wander around NYC for hours and hours. I was going to watch Sportscenter three times in a row like I did on sick days when I was a kid. I was going to take another nap. I was going to eat something that was beyond bad for me, in a disgustingly ridiculous, somebody call a cardiologist, you-put-bacon-on-that-too? sort of way.**

Needless to say, the first twenty-four hours were everything I wanted and more. (I did put bacon on that.)

But here’s the thing: after the twenty-four hour mark, I suddenly started to really miss Remy. And I was only a third of the way through with my list.

Forty-eight hours in, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I was even having trouble on my second nap because I was just lying there wondering what she was doing. Was she saying new words? Was I missing, like, major milestones? Holy shit, was I a total deadbeat dad?

Then, seventy-two hours in, I was Bubs from The Wire. I was miserable. I was shaking. I was an addict and I needed a fix.

And this, right here, is the one major difference between the teenage incarnation of a sense of freedom and the adult version:

As a parent, I didn’t dread the return. I couldn’t wait for it.



*I’m not talking about like, doing lines of blow off naked hookers or anything. I mean, I was 18 and I grew up in Michigan. But you can use your imagination.


**This has nothing to do with being across the country from my daughter. This has everything to do with being across the country from my wife who rolls her eyes and makes comment after comment about the look/smell/idea of anything that combines red meat, cheese and more red meat. I love her to death, but she really sucks the joy out of me doubling my cholesterol in a single sitting.

What No One Tells You About Being A Dad #81

You think that's a pregnancy test? It's not. I'll explain...

The baby industrial complex demands you buy all kinds of shit you've never heard of, that you'll soon be told you can't live without. Unfortunately the stuff you really need is never passed on to you because no dad remembers.

Why?

Well, your dad has been out of the game for thirty years. He only remembers three things about your childhood:

1) The time you puked on his head.
2) The time you walked in seven runs in little league.
3) Something that happened to your brother that he's confusing with you.

Meanwhile, the guys who are three months to three years ahead of you in this new dad thing remember even less. They're so sleep deprived that they're walking around like Guy Pierce in Memento. There's really only one thing each new dad can remember outside the last fifteen minutes of his life, and that's the exact number of days in his incredible Cal Ripken style no sex streak.

With that in mind, here's one thing no one tells you to buy that you actually need:

A Secret Thermometer. For you.

Pete, my brother-in-law called this to my attention today because last night he thought he had a fever. The second he said this, I knew exactly what the problem was.

Soon, you will too. Because here's what's going to happen:

You'll wake up in the middle of the night and be sick. You think you have a fever. (This is what happens to people who never sleep and live with ten pound germ buckets.) No problem, right? Whip out the thermometer and take your temperature. In fact, at first glance, it seems easier now because with a baby in the house, you have a minimum of five thermometers in the drawer.

There's the old thermometer you've always had. There's the thermometer that your wife bought for the baby. There's a thermometer from each grandmother. There's a bonus thermometer from some lady your wife works with.

But they all look exactly the same and they've all been up your baby's ass.

Or, most of them have been up your baby's ass.

If you didn't know, you know now... babies have their temperatures checked rectally. Not under the tongue. Not under the arm. It gets lubed up and slipped in the back door.

So, maybe there's one fresh, unused thermometer in the lot, but again, they all look the same.

Your options are:

A) Play Russian Roulette with the thermometers.
B) Make a CVS run at 1am and buy a sixth thermometer.

My advice is the day you get that shiny ultrasound printout is the day you buy your own secret thermometer. Also, just to be safe, you should purchase a Sharpie and write, "NOT FOR ASSES. MOUTH USE ONLY" directly on the case. (Pete actually did this.)

Then hide the secret thermometer somewhere where your wife will never think to look, like, next to the condoms.