Yard O' Death

Yesterday morning I looked out our bedroom window and swore; I thought the dogs had scattered our garbage across the lawn again.  I envisioned spending the morning picking up smelly diapers, coffee grounds, and old Lotto tickets.  I even entertained the option of trying to mow up the garbage like it was fall leaves.  It was early -- maybe 6:00 AM -- and my eyes were a little blurry and when I rubbed them clear I saw that the "garbage" was nothing more than the usual assortment of dead and decaying things that litter our lawn all winter.

It's disgusting, and quite possibly unhealthy, but we have four dogs that feel it's necessary to provide us with lawn ornaments.  We'd settle for gnomes and flamingoes, but they prefer the macabre.  Yesterday, as we all sat outside and soaked in a little afternoon sunshine, I heard Regina gasp.  I looked up to see Chowder bringing in a fresh decoration.  Horses, like dogs and good cats, are buried on our ranch, but somehow Chowder, or bears, or the wild neighbor boys, dug up one of our old faithfuls and exposed an entire foot for the dogs to bring in.

Currently on our lawn (and I just inventoried), we have parts of the raccoon that attacked Chowder the day after Christmas, a complete coyote skull, half a cow skull, an assortment of large bovine bones, twenty or thirty chewed up shed antlers, several freshly killed squirrels, the hoof, and a pile of feathers from some dim-witted bird (the cats felt like they needed to contribute as well).  It's like a touch-and-feel Natural History Museum.

I have great promise for Dylan's soccer skills because she's A) 1/4 Brasilian, and B) has learned to run and weave around the bones like Pele through defenders.  Aside from the smell of rotting flesh and the flies they attract, the upside is that our kids are getting terrific anatomy and skeletal lessons.  Dylan can differentiate between coyote and cow teeth and Grady can tell you that magpie feathers taste very different from pigeon feathers.

I'll have the lawn mower ready soon, but if I want to save my blade, I'll need to clean up the bones first.  It's amazing what a little spring-cleaning will do.  The smell will go away and friends will feel that it's safe to visit again.  I'll probably bury the bones and carcasses so they don't keep reappearing and someday, a thousand years from now, some robot-archeologist will excavate them and conclude that a horse-cow-coyote-bird-raccoon creature once ruled Hartstrand Gulch.

Boys Night In

With Regina out of the house for the weekend, I did what any guy would do: I called up my friends for a guys night out.  Sounds wild, right?  And just a few years ago, it would have been "Fight For Your Right (to Party)" crazy.  Things would have gotten broken, blood would have been spilled, feelings would have been hurt.  Now, it means calling up your friends whose wives are also out of town and telling them to bring their boys over for pizza and Coors.

Immediately after the wolf-pack arrived (four boys, two dads), the power went out, which turned the party into a Man vs Wild survival-fest.  Grady's food was warmed on the wood stove and our night out for pizza changed to a night in for crackers and cheese.  We considered BBQing some road-kill or eating one of the horses, but when someone mentioned that Coors has the nutritional equivalent of a "pork chop in every can," we decided we'd leave the grill off.

Dylan passed around flashlights and I dug through our pretty-smelling candle and sharp-knife drawer until I found enough Christmas candles to illuminate a runway.  Flashlights and open flames are the ultimate in fun for little boys, and it was easy to keep track of where they were playing (we'll include Dylan in with "the boys" henceforth).  Finally, the batteries died on the last flashlight and one of the boys started singing "Happy Birthday" and blew out all the candles.  We were in total darkness.

Our manly survival instincts kicked in as we found our way through the dark without running into walls, tripping over toys, or colliding with each other.  The boys found their sleeping bags, Dylan found her princess bed (which instantly removed her from the wolf-pack club), and the adult-boys found the cooler for more Coors, or pork chops, whichever.

When our wives returned we had soot on our faces, awesome B.O., and beer breath.  They regaled us with stories about pedicures and wine tastings and when we were asked about our evening, we just grunted as a reply, 'cause that's what wolves do.

Baby Olympics

Now that the winter olympics are over and I no longer have an excuse to check my trap-line for Johnny Weir's next costume or quit work at noon so I can catch the China v Sweden women's curling semi-finals, I've actually had to spend "quality" time with my family.  Realizing that I can only stand losing so many straight games of Candyland without having a breakdown, I've come up with the Baby Olympics.

Baby Olympics were inspired by Steve Holcomb, pilot of the US men's four-man bobsled team, which won a gold medal.  He looks like a meatball stuffed in a spandex body suit, with a beard.  In short, he looks like Grady in thirty years.  And I thought, if Steve can do it, so can we.

Actually, I haven't told my family about our olympic training regimen yet.  Right now, I'm scouting out the competition to see if we have a shot at the podium.  I joke, but parents do this all the time.  "Oh, your little Joey walked at five months?  Our Zeus walked at five weeks, then composed an original song about it."  I figured if parenting is always going to feel like a competition, why not get corporate sponsors and train for it?

As a baby, Dylan was always a heavy favorite for gold, or at least a strong contender.  She teethed, sat-up, crawled, walked, and spoke on or before the "normal" range.  She kicked a lot of diaper in most categories, but one friend of hers started walking at seven months old.  We had the IOC investigate and they found he was using performance enhancing formula and stripped him of his gold medal.  Dylan came out of the '08 Baby Olympics like Michael Phelps (with a lot of medals, not stoned).

Grady is another story.  He's the Uganda of slalom, the Jamaica of bobsled.  At eight months, he's toothless and can only sit up if you form his body into a tripod, and even then he topples.  Someone recently asked me if he was crawling and pulling himself up on things yet.  I just walked away.

Baby Olympics even extends to parenting.  I once read that Dave Grohl (see: Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Them Crooked Vultures, etc.) could change a diaper in seven seconds.  "I can top that," I told Regina.  I can, but when I do the diaper is so loose that it leaks pee like a crab pot.  I'll have to be happy with the silver on this one (see: US men's/women's hockey).

The Eastside Gang might not make the podium every event, but we've got lots of grit and try.  If you come to visit and hear Dylan humming the National Anthem while Regina's mixing a bottle (another new competition), and I'm changing Grady out of his jammies and into his red, white, and blue spandex body suit, just put your hand over your heart and sing along, it'll be quite a show.

The Poop Card

Dylan has a new trick.  Whenever she's napping, or, rather, not napping, and needs an excuse to come out of her room, she plays her best card.  No, it's not the race card.  Telling us she can't nap because she's Scots-Irish-English-Brasilian-German really doesn't go to far with us.  Dylan, in a brilliant strategy, plays the poop card.  What can we do?  "I need to poop!" always works because A) we don't want to call her bluff and wind up with a turd in bed and, B) see A.

Normally, I'm working when Dylan goes down for a nap, so when Grady started running a fever last week and didn't go to daycare, Daddy took the call to stay home with the monkeys and witness, first hand, Dylan's nap avoidance techniques.  The other get-out-of-bed trick she uses is: The Random Question.  Usually, the question involves Santa, but sometimes it's, "What do you call your birthday?" (answer: April 24th), and is followed by the Mumbling Question, as in, "Where did Mommy mum mum uum...."

So, on the first sunny days of winter, I sat in the house with a crabby boy and a stir-crazy girl.  After the first day's stab at a nap, I decided Dylan needed a little outside time.  Alone.  "Daddy, I chewed on my sock," she told me as I tried to get her dressed.  Sure enough, in her bed, I found a soggy sock.  In the year's most obvious question, I asked, "You put this in your mouth?"  She looked at me like I'd just asked if she'd like cookies for breakfast.  "Save yourself," I said, "go play."

We spent our days with naps, poops, puzzles, coloring, chalk, and, when the fog would finally burn off, I'd send Dylan outside for a run around the lawn and a jump on the trampoline.  This only lasted two days, but the fog and Grady's fever kept us cooped up indoors for most of the time.  I completely understand why, in the far north of Canada when the snow melts in the spring, local authorities go door to door to see who's murdered whom over the dark, dark winter months.  No wonder Dylan's chalkboard illustrations of the family closely resembled police chalk outlines.

A fun as fevers, nap-tricks, and cabin fever are, my days with the monkeys wasn't all fun and games.  Grady's fever kept climbing and I finally took him to the clinic.  He had massive congestion and an ear infection.  Despite knowing what we were up against (and why we hadn't had a good night's sleep in a week), knowledge wasn't really power.

When Regina came in from work on Friday, she took one look at me and said, "Take me to bed or lose me forever."  Okay, she didn't, and I often confuse our life with Top Gun, but she was wise enough to tell me to get out of the house and go for a bike ride.  Instead, I played beach volleyball, then flew my fighter-jet super fast and made the fat guy in the control tower spill his coffee all over himself.

By tonight, Grady seems to be nearly over his fever and Dylan's been able to at least go outside and feed cows.  She even got to spend the afternoon (after another non-nap) with her cousins up the gulch and have a chocolate chip cookie dinner.  Watching your kids fight a fever (real or cabin) always sucks.  Grady just needed antibiotics, rest, and time, while Dylan just needed to figure out how to successfully play her Brasilian-Irish card.

Monster Truck Valentines

Valentine's Day is, by far, the most awkward of all holidays.  I'm never sure to what lengths I should go to impress my bride.  A chest waxing?  Private dinner at Chez Panisse?  A monster truck, suspended by a hot-air balloon, ride?  If I believe the media hype, nothing short of a twelve-carat diamond, twenty pair of frilly thong chonies, and a giant teddy bear holding a red heart submerged in Dove chocolate, will do.

My last non-awkward Valentine's Day was in 1993, just five days before I met Regina, and that nearly ended in a misdemeanor.  Since then, I've had mild panic attacks each February 13th.  Did I get enough?  Will the hot-air balloon hold the monster truck?  Is she still into Scott Baio lunch pails?  Will St. Valentine fill my stocking? (No, that's not intended to be innuendo.)  Of course, it always turns out fine ... small gifts, a great dinner-date, followed by food induced comas.  Ah, love.  But, honestly, the excitement of Valentine's Day is usually right up there with Arbor Day or carpet shopping.

This year, though, Dylan added a new and unexpected element to the day: she made it fun again.  It started with a Valentine exchange at daycare.  We spent the night before "making" cards for her buddies.  It made me think of the Valentine cards I used to make with my mom.  We'd spend hours glueing heart shaped doilies to red crepe paper, each personally decorated with glitter and crayon.  The memory depressed me, only because I sat with my daughter, taping M&M's to Walmart cards that she'd scribbled on.  We didn't even get to use yummy practical Elmer's Glue.

I got over my lack of Valentine's Day artisan skills as soon as I saw the loot Dylan collected.  Valentine's Day = Candy.  I did not know that, but it's good enough for me.  To reinforce the point, Regina brought home cupcakes that our neighbor -- a high school junior -- made and was selling at school.  If God laughed so hard that he shot milk out his nose, those milk drops would fall to earth in the form of those cupcakes.  That's how awesome they were.

Valentine's Day finally ended, after a four-day sugar bender, with a mommy and daddy night out.  Every Valentine's we go to New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro, one of our favorite restaurants, for some serious eating and excellent wine.  This year's meal was one of the best.  I won't go into the menu, mostly because I can't pronounce or spell half the things we ate.  I felt compelled to eat whatever Regina couldn't finish, so by the second course I had to loosen my belt, by the third I popped a belly button on my shirt, and by dessert the over-eating cramps started.  I could only say, "Oh, that was good .... Oooohhh, my stomach hurts," the whole drive home.

Now that I share my Valentine's Day with the two women of my life, I have a renewed sense of appreciation for the holiday.  Dylan and I get tons of sweets, Regina and I always renew our wedding vows (we don't, it just sounded sweet -- we do get a great meal though), and all without the dread of finding the perfect heart-shaped gift or the fear of a misdemeanor.

Ranch Diagnosis

We, like most ranchers, try hard to keep our cattle in the best health possible.  They're fed well, have clean water, are given salt and minerals to make up for anything lacking in their diet, and are vaccinated and dewormed regularly to prevent sickness.  If one happens to get sick, we try our best to treat it as quickly as possible.  There are some rare occasions when a cow or calf is sick and doesn't respond to treatments, or when one is unhealthy and we (or the vet) cannot determine the cause.  My uncle has two catch-all diagnoses for these animals.  If it's a calf, it must be an unclaimed twin.  If it's a cow, she's swallowed a wire.  Whether these two options are probable or not usually require further investigating, but at least they offer some kind of answer.

Grady has "swallowed a wire," or, in the non-cow diagnosis, he's teething.  Or so we thought.  He's been teething now for two months with no sign of a single tooth.  He started in December.  First, he broke his sleep-through-the-night rule, then he started drooling like a Labrador looking at a duck.  A tooth! we thought.  We ran our fingers across his gums every day, awaiting its arrival.  And we waited.  The drool piled up, our fingers got sore from Grady trying to eat them, and nothing.  It's nearly February and he's still as toothless as a crack-head.

We took him in for his six-month check-up yesterday.  You know those Test Your Strength: Swing the Huge Mallet as Hard as You Can and See How High the Ball Rises games at the fair?  That's like weighing Grady.  "How high do those scales go?" I finally asked.  Turns out, they go high enough, but Grady's a weight-savant.  97% in weight (and that's as high as our doctor's chart went).  If he were twice his age, he'd still be average weight.

No one at the pediatrician's office seemed concerned about his chubby-toothlessness, but Grady must have developed a little complex from all of the fat-jokes.  He spent most of the night, and morning, throwing-up like an actress getting ready for the award season.  Poor little buckaroo.  He's resting now, but it sucks to see your kids sick.  Unless, of course, barfing is symptomatic of teething.  If that's the case, welcome chompers!  Probably, though, he's just swallowed a wire.

G-Love

When my cousin, Scott, first moved to the ranch we gave him Lucky, his first horse. Like many Appaloosa horses, Lucky was night-blind. Unfortunately, he was also a little day-blind too. He had little cow-sense but was broke, sound, and willing to go. He turned out to be a good horse for Scott and a decent metaphor for the "new guy"; neither knew a lot about cows but both were willing to try.

Once, we were gathering cattle out of one of the alfalfa fields and a young cow bolted. Scott turned Lucky loose and the Appy, amazingly, spotted the cow and followed in hot pursuit. Greg and Grant trailed behind and when the cow ducked under a wheelline pipe, they eased up. Not Lucky. He pinned his ears back, leaped, and cleared the wheelline like he was in steeplechase. My brothers were shamed into spurring their horses on to do the same. When they all had landed safely on the other side and had the cow pointed back to the herd, my brothers looked at Scott like he was nuts. He didn't know that most eighteen-year old, blind Appys can't leap over small sticks, let alone a wheelline, and Lucky didn't know that Scott wasn't some old top-hand from the Rio Grande. The joke around the ranch was the neither knew any better. Scott was Lucky; Lucky was Scott.

Grady is the same way. He thinks that his big sister is the coolest thing since pee-pee tee-pees. We think it's because he doesn't know any better. Dylan pokes, smothers, head-butts, and smacks the little man around, but from the look on his face, you'd think she'd just offered a tub of applesauce and a warm bottle.

I was "in charge" of the rug-rats one day while Regina was out and turned my attention away for only a few minutes (I swear). When I turned back around, Dylan had stacked several large books on Grady's face, a giant, smothering pillow on top of that, and a blanket, which covered Grady's entire body, topped it off. My heart raced faster with each layer I pulled off. When I finally cleared the last, and largest, book from Grady's face, he was grinning ear to ear. Attention from my sister, his look told me, I love it!

This morning, Regina set Grady in his bouncy chair. Dylan was keeping him entertained and things were going well until Regina caught Dylan pulling the bouncy chair all the way to the floor, then boooiiiing, letting loose and using Grady as a human catapult. Fortunately, he's too heavy to really fly and he thought what his big sis was doing was the funniest thing in the world.

This mauling will continue, I'm sure, until he's old enough to retaliate. As long as he's happy with it, though, it's hard to get too angry with Dylan. She gets occupied with entertaining her brother, Grady's happy at being knocked around, and we get a few minutes of uninterrupted time to do things like use the bathroom or cook dinner. Besides, Dylan hasn't hurt him, yet. Maybe Grady is just lucky. Or, Lucky is Grady.