Yesterday I was complaining to Emma about Mia's WWE maneuvers when she was in my bed. In her sweet little 6-year-old voice, she said, "Dad, when she wakes up early why don't you take her out of her crib and put her in the play pen in your room?" Well guess what, Log? I tried it this morning and it totally worked. Mia woke up around 5:15...I brought her in my room and laid her down with her mighty stuffed animal army (it has ballooned recently to a teddy bear, sock monkey, cuddly dog, and duck with a rattle inside it...if you ask me the duck can't hold a candle to the other 3 but good luck telling Mia that) in the play pen and she fell right back asleep and didn't make a peep until about 8 AM. It was delightful. Also James chose to play Indiana Jones rather that Star Wars this morning and went to the trouble of moving big old folding chairs out of the doorway so he could shut the door and keep it quiet. In other words: I finally got my beauty rest.
Emma got to spend time at Grandma Lavender's today, so I did what any dad with two (but not three) little kids would do with some free time: I went to Harbor Freight Tools. As it turned out, no other dads had taken their little kids to Harbor Freight Tools. There were a couple of guys there who had only a few more teeth in their mouth than I had kids in my cart.
The entertaining thing about this trip was that I only knew slightly more than James about the tools we were looking at.
James: "What's this, daddy?"
Me (squinting to see the description on the price tag): "It's a c-clamp, son."
James: "What's it for?"
Me: "Uh...for clamping things...that...uh...are too big for a b-clamp."
One nice bonus about taking James to Harbor Freight was that he could be customer #2 when using my "one coupon per customer per day" coupons.
This afternoon I had a brilliant idea: take the kids over to the church and let them get some energy out by running around in an air-conditioned gym. I got the kids all packed up into the van, along with an assortment of tennis and kick balls. It was win-win: I tire the kids out and don't melt into a puddle while doing it. I was pretty happy with the idea. I rolled down all the windows in the van and cranked the Adele. I even passed some neighbors on the way to the church who yelled out, "We love your blog!" Yep, I'm the shizzle, I thought to myself. I've totally got this daddy thing down.
Fast forward 50 yards to the church. Trust me when I say that nothing exciting happened in that distance.
As I pulled up I saw a sign out on the lawn of the church. Hmmm. Is it a Relief Society reminder? A DI drive? Then I saw it, and my heart sank: Blood Drive. Today. In the gym. Curse you, American Red Cross!!! My plans, foiled by the selfless, again!
The kids did not take it well. How am I going to get out of this one? As soon as I unbuckle them there's going to be a mutiny. Maybe I can go the rest of the day without unbuckling them? No, I'm pretty sure that's illegal. I drove around the area, looking for something to do that could be both energy expending and not 150 degrees. I asked all the kids to put on their thinking caps -- and was delighted to see Emma pantomime a cap placement, when I spotted the random "Brickyard Park" in Bountiful...you know the one: next to the Bountiful Jeep Posse building? It was a godsend. The playground was entirely shrouded in the shadow of several large pine trees. We stopped.
The kids had a great time. There was a tiny kid slide that Mia could climb up and go down all by herself; she must have gone 50 times while we were there. There were also two parallel bars that sloped down like a slide. Emma and James had contests where they went down the poles in different ways. But the best part was that they name all their routines, so that when Emma slid down the poles laying all the way back she said, "I call this one "Relaxing."" "Sideways Style" was going down on one leg. I even invented one called "The Butt Slapper" which the kids did not think was as fun as I did.
After the park we grabbed a pizza and came home for family movie night. Tonight was the special night I introduced them to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Then on to bed. I had the kids promise me that since I was letting them stay up late to watch a classic, heartwarming, and ultimately life-changing movie, the least they could do was get ready for bed in a hurry. This specifically included NOT HIDING from me, with is one of my biggest bedtime PET PEEVES. We can spend 15 1/2 hours together in a day, and during those 15 1/2 hours, it does not dawn on any of them to ask to play hide-and-seek. But when bedtime rolls around, my goodness, they cannot hide fast enough. Well, sure enough, when I came upstairs with James' medicine, he was nowhere to be found. I shot him "the look" -- I know I've only been doing this for 3 days now, but I've already developed a "look" that I assume comes naturally to every care giver. He immediately blurted out, "I wasn't hiding from you, Dad. I waaaaaaasssssss........(his little 4-year-old brain desperately trying to think of an excuse) ...hiding from me! Not you. Yeah, there were two Jameses and I was hiding from the other one. Just picture a 4-year-old Tommy Flanagan.
After bed, I brought some of the more important laundry down: my hockey jerseys.
I also did some laundry for the kids, but the real interesting thing about the laundry was not that I was doing it, it was what I found wedged in back of the washer: a wet pull-up. Well, it had been wet once. Now it was more crystalized. But it still smelled like a wet pull-up. I couldn't tell how long it had been back there, and the heck if I now HOW it got back there. I'm waiting for the carbon-dating test results to come back.
Today was kind of slower than the other days so far, and this gave me a change to philosophize a bit:
- Does fruit punch have to made with red coloring that stains so badly? Are there really not any red dyes that are just "kind of" red? We can put a man on the moon, but we can't make a red dye that doesn't leave my kids looking like the Joker after drinking fruit punch at lunch?
- If a child sneezes, and it sounds like a booger came out, but you can't find a booger anywhere: does the booger exist?
- Luckily for us, cheap hairspray gets cheap ink off of cheap furniture. If we ever bought expensive furniture, would we need to buy expensive hairspray?
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