Daddy / Daughter Evening

Last Friday was one of those hallowed occasions that Lauralee circles on the calendar and anxiously anticipates: Girls Night Out. Every time she goes to Girls Night Out, I'm left at home to ponder many things, and it's not uncommon for me to drift off into a philosophical tangent -- when I really should be...you know...feeding the kids and stuff.

I often wonder why Guys Night Out has never caught on in my circle of friends. Perhaps it's because I don't have enough friends to make a complete circle. Still, I wonder why Guys Night Out has not caught on among my arc of friends. I think about this when I really should be...you know...giving the kids a bath and stuff.

If the definition of Girls Night Out is just a night where the ladies don't have to watch the kids, then I guess I do get Guys Night Out pretty regularly. I just don't spend them with other guys. I have Guys Night Out with the lawnmower. Last Saturday I had a Guys Afternoon Out with a new ceiling fan. I really shouldn't be complaining, I guess. Especially since I should be...you know...putting the kids to bed and stuff.

Anyway, I told you that story to tell you this one: Last Friday Lauralee had a Girls Night Out. To her credit, she took James with her, leaving me to watch only Emma. Emma's been around for awhile now and I'm getting pretty used to her.

We're going to be moving Emma into a toddler bed sometime soon, and we thought that maybe it would be a good idea to prepare her for this change. The crib she currently sleeps in has an assembly option to remove one of the side rails to make it seem more like a bed than a crib. We thought we'd give this a try, so I reassembled the crib in the new configuration. I called Emma up to her room. She seemed to love the idea of a "big girl bed" that she could climb in and out of with ease. She would climb in, read a book, climb out, run around, climb in, jump on the mattress, climb out.

Me: "Emma, do you want to sleep in this big girl bed tonight?"
Emma: "Yeah, I do!"

Fast forward to bedtime. Lauralee had been gone for several hours. I had somehow managed to feed and bathe Emma between my Guys Night Out ponderings. We went through the usual bedtime routine: jammies, books, prayer, singing and rocking. It should be noted that up to this point Emma had shown no trepidation regarding the new look of the crib. I stood up from the rocking chair to lay her down in the crib and Emma said: "Put the lid on."

It's not unusual for me to have no idea what my 2 1/2 year old is talking about, so I went ahead and laid her down on the bed.

"Daddy, put the lid on."

Still not sure what's up, but now fearing that this bed transition was not going to go well, I gave her a kiss, walked out the door, and started my stopwatch. 6 seconds. My daughter lasted 6 seconds in her big girl bed before she got out, opened up her door, and came running to me, whining "one more song, one more song." I'm not a good singer, even by William Hung standards, so I knew that something was up. I walked her back to her room, but when I picked her up to put her back in her bed, she turned into Jack Jack from The Incredibles -- just a big, writhing mass of fury. Finally I got it: she pointed to the unused crib side rail on the floor and said "Put the lid on, Daddy." She was upset about one of the side rails missing.

Some people (and some No Fear shirts) will tell you that quitting is not an option. That's a bunch of baloney. Sometimes quitting is the only thing that makes sense, and this was one of those times. I did try briefly to sit with Emma, hold her hand, etc, until she fell asleep. But it became very apparent very quickly that this was not going to happen tonight. I also felt that we would go through this rigamarole again when we moved her into her actual toddler bed. So, I thought, why not eliminate the middle man? Why fight this fight only to fight it again in a few weeks? And that, my friends, was when I quit.

I pulled out the screwdriver and hardware to begin putting the crib back together. Emma was delighted. She just ran around her room in a circle, pausing occasionally to ask "What doing, Dad?"

Here's a transcript:

9:37 PM
Emma: What doing, Dad?
Me: Putting the lid on.

9:41 PM

Emma: What doing, Dad?

Me: Putting the LID on.

9:43 PM

Emma: What doing, Dad?

Me: Putting the LID ON.

9:44 PM
Emma: What doing, Dad?
Me: PUTTING the LID ON.

9:45 PM
Emma: What doing, Dad?
Me: PUTTING THE LID ON! GIVE ME BACK MY SCREWDRIVER!

Because it wasn't difficult enough for me to balance one side of the rail on my knee, steady it with my chin, hold an Allen wrench in one spot and screw a Phillips head into another spot at an awkward 90 degree angle. Nope, I had to have the toddler who was constantly peppering me with questions grab the screwdriver and run to the other side of the room.

After some deep breaths, the crib was finally put together, Emma was corralled and on my lap, and I was singing Shebangs...er, I mean Give Said the Little Stream. The sweat was wiped from my forehead, my blood pressure back down to normal. I laid Emma down in the crib and was just about to walk out of the room when:

Emma: "Daddy?"
Me: "Yes, sweetheart?"
Emma: "Did you put the lid on?"
Me [in a calm voice, but through clinched teeth]: "Yes."
Emma: "Cool!" [rolls over and starts to fall asleep.]

It's totally Laura's turn to put her to bed when the toddler bed gets here.

Daddy / Daughter Evening...again

As noted before, there seems to be a connection between Daddy / Daughter evenings and Emma’s bath night. In fact, I made a graph.
So imagine my surprise when Laura painted the town last week on a non-bath night. I was so happy I jumped on the bed, had ice cream for dinner, and shot my BB gun at sports action figures around the house. I’m pretty sure that was me. Dunno. In any event, all I had to do was keep her relatively clean between dinner and bedtime and I wouldn’t have to give her a bath.

Both of our next door neighbors are single, elderly women. I try to help them out where I can, but given my upper-percentile non-handiness quotient, this help has mostly come in the form of sprinkler repair, which has unfortunately become a forte of mine in these last 4 years of home ownership.

One of our neighbors calls on me for the simplest of tasks (last night I sprayed a hornet’s nest for her) that she could easily perform for herself, but I think she just likes the company. I wouldn’t classify this as one of those lonely older housewives / latin pool boy relationships just yet – even though I do flash a little butt crack now and then. It is purely the result of excessive belt-to-belly friction and not an innuendo.

Where was I? Oh, yes. One of our neighbors came over on that night to ask me for help with a broken sprinkler. She had run over one of her sprinklers with the lawn mower and bought a new one that needed to be installed. I grabbed Emma and we walked over to the neighbor’s back yard.

One thing I like about most sprinklers is that they’re easy. There’s one end that shoots out water; this is the end that you point at your lawn. My neighbor happened to buy a funky gear-driven shrub sprinkler. I swear it had a miniature nuclear reactor in there, plus little spoilers on the side to keep it from going airborne at high speeds. I believe that’s a new feature. Anyway, I remember thinking, “How hard can this be? It’s just a sprinkler, after all.”

As I screwed the sprinkler into the ground I looked up and noticed that Emma had found some flower pots in the yard that were filled with potting soil. She was picking up handfuls of dirt and letting it run through her fingers. Not a big deal. She wasn’t wallowing in it. Or eating it.

I got the sprinkler in and asked our neighbor to turn on the water. It had an adjustable orbit; I figured it would be easier to adjust the orbit once the water was on and I could see where it was shooting. It wasn’t like I had to type in GPS coordinates to the sprinkler – just turn a few knobs.

She turned the water on and the sprinkler…sprinkled…in a stream across the lawn. The sprinkler was located on the edge of the patio, and I wanted it to shoot a 180 degree orbit. When it got to 185 degrees, I hurriedly bend down to adjust it. I turned every knob on that sprinkler, but it didn’t deviate. 190 degrees…200 degrees.

Me: “Sprinkler, stop moving.”
Sprinkler: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Quinn.”

I notice out of the corner of my eye that Emma has inched over to the edge of the patio and is dipping the very end of her toe into the spray of the sprinkler adjacent to me. Still not a big deal; it’s only her toe, after all. Meantime, my sprinkler is now approaching 270 degrees and it about to spray a full blast of water onto my neighbor’s house, including kitchen windows. I look around to see where my neighbor is, and find that she has stepped over to the far corner of her yard to address some other issue. She is effectively out of earshot. I turn around again to see that Emma is now fully deflecting her sprinkler with her entire leg. “Still,” I reason to myself, “she’s only wet below the waist. This is certainly no cause for a bath." As for my own sprinkler, I have no choice now but to stand directly in front of it and deflect the stream with both hands so that it doesn’t soak my neighbor’s house.

Have you ever been sprayed with a fire hose? I have once: when Lauralee and I were making out on the Main Street Plaza and didn’t leave when asked. Well, this sprinkler didn’t sting like that fire hose, but holy cow did it get me wet. Oh, and it moved so s l o w l y. Picture me standing there, dripping wet, while I shuffle from right to left a millimeter at a time, blocking a sprinkler with my hands. It was a totally ridiculous sight. I look over at Emma, and she (no doubt inspired by her dad) is now blocking her own sprinkler with her hands, and the water is spraying everywhere. And she’s giggling uncontrollably. I can’t go get Emma, or my neighbor’s house will get drenched. I can’t tell my neighbor to turn the water off, because she can’t hear me. It was the longest few moments of my life.

Finally, the sprinkler began…sprinkling…on the lawn again, and I walked over to ask my neighbor to turn the water off. As we headed back to sprinkler box, we now saw Emma, totally devoid of any previous inhibitions regarding water, running around amongst the sprinklers with her arms out like an airplane. She kind of looked like a 1999 post-world-cup-winning-goal-scoring Brandi Chastain. Emma was so soaked, her diaper was practically dragging on the ground. Would she need a bath? Well, technically Emma was just covered in water, and what’s a bath if not covering your child in water? It’d be a tough decision, but I bet I could justify just drying her off and putting her to bed.

My neighbor got the water turned off, and I *gasp* read the sprinkler instructions on the back of the package. Convinced that I now knew what I was doing, I adjusted the sprinkler. Finally, it was working right. My neighbor thanked me, and I turned to leave when I noticed that Emma had revisited those flower pots. Only now her clothes and hands were soaking wet, so the dirt was instantly transformed to mud which instantly covered several large portions of her body. It was a lost cause. She’d need a bath.

I picked her up and hung her in front of one of the sprinklers to get as much mud off as I could. Puzzlingly, she did not enjoy this as much as running through the sprinklers on her own. Kids.

Daddy / Daughter Evening

This past Tuesday, Lauralee was at a wedding shower, and I was left home to baby-wrangle that little ball of energy that we call Emma.

I needed to run a few errands, so I took Emma with me. We went to Smith's Marketplace, where I am always obliged to check the menswear clearance racks for deals. I didn't find any, but I did learn two things: 1) the clearance racks always contain a large number of those skin-tight workout shirts (Under Armour style but with some knockoff name like Energy Zone) in sizes XXL, XXXL and -- yes -- even XXXXL. Now what on earth would an XXXXL man need with a skin-tight workout shirt? And really, if an XXXXL man wanted a skin tight shirt, couldn't he just buy a Medium? The second thing I learned was this: Emma has a razor-sharp ability to identify, grab, and pull price tags off of any article of clothing. It's like she locks-on with her little laser Terminator eye and won't stop until that price tag is ripped off the little plastic price tag holder thingy. We left a wake of them behind our shopping cart. It was embarrassing -- but there is just no way to reattach a ripped price tag to the little plastic pricetag holder thingy.

You know the old comedy routine where somebody is holding a ski or a broom or something on their shoulder, and when they turn around, the ski whacks somebody behind them, and then when they turn around to see what they just whacked, the ski whacks something else on the other side of them? Well, picture a child pulling price tags off of their little plastic pricetag holder thingies and dropping them on the floor. Picture her dad moving the shopping cart so that she can no longer reach those items. While the dad bends down to pick up the pricetags, the child -- undeterred by her father's well-meaning but obviously inadequate attempt to stop the carnage -- coolly reaches over the other side of the shopping cart and begins pulling pricetags off of the clothes on the other side of the aisle. I'm not saying that that's what happened. But I'm not saying that it didn't.

We went over to the shoes to see if I could find some cheap sandals. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did get to hear Emma say "Shoes!" 981 times as she pointed to each and every pair. She sure has a thing for shoes lately. Later, when we were in the Electronics section, I wanted to give her a taste of her own medicine by shouting "Playstation game! Playstation game!" and pointing as we walked by each one. But I didn't. There were too many people there.

We went home and found that Lauralee had left for the wedding shower. I have often stated that there is an apparent correlation between Lauralee leaving me home with Emma in the evening, and that evening being bath night. The last time these two events coincided, there were some near-disasterous results (click here for a refresher).

Bathtime actually went well. Emma usually enjoys her baths -- except when we pour the water over her head to rinse her hair. She still goes into panic mode, holding her breath and wiggling a little. It kind of makes me feel like a CIA agent using a questionably-legal method of torture interrogation technique.

After the bath, I pulled the drain plug and took Emma into her room to dry her off and get her ready for bed. She kept pointing at something across the room and saying (what I thought was) "hat." This is another word that she has learned recently, and she takes great pride in pointing out who is wearing a hat. I didn't see any hats in the room anywhere, so I didn't pay much attention. I set Emma on the ground and started looking for her pajamas. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her run out of her bedroom. I knew I had pulled the plug in the bathtub and that enough time had passed for it to drain, so I wasn't so concerned about her if she wandered into the bathroom. Still, after a minute, I walked out to see where she was, and I discovered three very important things: 1) the washrag had fallen into the tub and covered the drain, so that the bath was still relatively full 2) Emma must've had her Winnie the Pooh in her arms when she fled from her room and 3) Emma hadn't been saying "hat".... she had been saying "bath". Yes, Emma -- no doubt invigorated by the bath she had just received -- had decided that Pooh needed a bath, too, and *plop*, she had dumped him in the bathtub.

(I apologize for using "Pooh," "plop," and "dumped," and "bathtub" in the same sentence. It seemed less graphic when I wrote it than it does now, looking back.)

I snatched it out of there and began thinking of how best to dry this thing, when I had a serious case of deja vu. What had happened last time, when Emma dumped her bear in the bathtub? Well, first, I grabbed the bear out of the bathtub, then while I was trying to figure out how to dry it and had my back turned, she ran away, came back with an armful of books, and dumped them into the water. As soon as I realized this, I spun around to see that old predictable Emma had, indeed, fled the scene of the crime. I wasn't going to be fooled again, so I stood there by the tub and waited for her to return. And right on cue, she came toddling back into the bathroom with her baby doll, ready to throw it. But I would not be outsmarted by a 1-and-a-half-year-old this time! I grabbed that baby doll right out of her hands, finished draining the bathtub, and took Emma back to her room by the arm to read books. Yeah, I pretty much saved the day. I'm not so dumb as I look, or at least how dumb I imagine I look to my toddler.

The moral of the story? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice.......you're not gonna fool me again.