Let the Games Begin!

I came in from feeding cows last weekend and, as casually as a UC Davis campus cop pepper-spraying a crowd, Regina informed me: "It's begun."

I knew exactly what she meant.  It really could only mean one thing:  Potty Training.  The thing about starting is that there's no turning back.  It's a big commitment.  Your brain pushes out all thoughts except for pee and poo and you turn into a parenting parrot, chirping, "Want to go pee-pee?"  "Polly want a poo-poo?"  It's not that we are in love with changing diapers, but to be honest, we're used to them.  I don't gag anymore and sometimes changing a diaper can be cathartic.  Plus, it's a hell of a lot cleaner than teaching a boy to crap on a toilet.

So now Grady's trucking around in his sister's old pink pull-ups and wondering why we incessantly ask if he has to go poopy.  We started off with a grand-slam.  Day 1, 1st Toilet Sitting -- Grady pooped!  I acted excited and even gave him a few M&M's ("A Candy For A Dandy"), but I'd been burned too many times by Dylan when she was potty-training to really celebrate.  Sure enough, Day 1, 2nd Toilet Sitting -- Grady peed on the floor before I could get him seated, splashed around his piss puddle with his hands, sat on the toilet and did nothing, then, when I took him off, peed more on his clothes.  Sigh.

Potty-Training is Exhausting! 

Regina and I are learning that potty-training in cold weather is no picnic.  First, there's no peeing outside, which is what all country kids do.  Dylan had a pee (and sometimes poo) tree designated for said purpose.  You can spot it, it's the one with the vibrant green leaves and dead grass around its base.  We could send Grady out in the rain and tell him to use the pee-tree, but the gale-force winds would probably topple him.  Inside, when Grady stands tall, his weinus is still 6" lower than the rim of the toilet, so everything has to be done seated.  And when little boys are seated, their little junk doesn't "dangle" down.  When I sit in front of the little man and encourage him to push like we're in lamaze class, I feel like I'm staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.  If that thing goes off, I'll take a direct pee shot to the chest.

I made the mistake today of catching Grady mid-poo, taking off his pull-up, and putting him on the toilet.  No, no, no.  Bad idea.  His legs, butt, the toilet seat, and a 3' radius around the toilet were smeared in his doody.  All I could yell was, "Help!" as Regina ran in with a pack of wipes and a hazmat suit.

There's no turning back and we look forward to the day of skid-marked chonies rather than poop-filled diapers.  With a little patience, and a whole lot of 409, we'll make it through this alive.

Mia Hamm-Bone

Dylan's just completed her first ever organized sport: pee-wee soccer.  Unlike t-ball, which is slow and painful to watch, pee-wee soccer is a fast-paced, nail-biting, painful sport to watch.  At one point during the season, I thought wagering on the games would spice up the action.  Apparently, it's frowned on as we "don't keep score" and doesn't promote "good sportsmanship."  I had to be a little stealth about it, but I managed to offer Dylan five candy bars of her choosing if she scored a goal.  Sure, some would call that "bad parenting," but you should have seen her hustle.  One of the other dads heard my motivational strategy and doubled the offer for his son if he would, for once, "Just kick the damn ball."  Both kids burned off a lot of energy trying, and both dads never had to pay up, so win-win.

This season, the league had seven teams.  It seems like a lot, but consider there are only five players to a team.  Pee-wee soccer often looks like a rugby scrum, with every single player, goalies included, roiling around a ball that no one seems to be looking for.  Limit the number of players and you limit the size of the scrum -- it's good logic.  The fun thing about our league is that if you have an extra kid, say, one that's too young to play yet, no one cares if the younger sibling throws on a jersey and plays for a while. We tried to keep a short leash on Grady, but he often wandered out onto the pitch, much like a streaker or lost cat, and disrupted the games a few times.

We started the season with just one practice.  It began with no one listening to the coach's instructions and ended with everyone using the sideline cones as hats.  Christina, the coach, has the patience of a saint.  After that practice, she asked if we should try another before our first game.  "Would it matter?" I asked.  It wouldn't, so we didn't.  What the Pacific Power Blue Jets lacked in talent and skill, they made up for it in lack of concentration and goofiness.  We knew we were in for it when, upon arriving to our first game, I spied the other team running passing drills and stressing "teamwork." It was like playing against a German olympic squad.  "Klaus, why are you not running?  Stop crying!  Teamwork!"  "Nine, Dietra, stay in your zone."  Needless to say, they kicked our butts.  The Blue Jets spent the entire game picking the ball out of the back of our goal.  That team soon became known around the league as The Team That No One Liked.

The Blue Jets only could get better from there, and they did.  Dylan, as a forward, is a good player.  She's aggressive, likes to run, and got to where she could dribble and run (for a while).  The next game she even scored a goal (this was pre-candy bribe).  But, when Dylan played anywhere but forward, her attention to the game fell apart.  As a defender, she's indifferent and as a goalie, she's distracted.  "What's going on over on that other field?" seems to be her only thought.  I couldn't even offer a candy bar bribe that she'd buy into as a goalie, that's how little she liked the position.

The Blue Jets improved significantly as the season progressed.  If our games were two, instead of four, quarters long, we'd of had a winning record.  But, while other teams replenished electrolytes and talked game strategy at the breaks, our team took the cones and chased each other around the field, pretending they were unicorns.  They were so exhausted by the third quarter that no one wanted to run anymore.



The last game ended with cupcakes, candy, and trophies.  Dylan was awarded "Most Enthusiastic," which is coach-speak for The Kid Who Won't Stop Running.  Dylan still sleeps with her trophy and talks about the goal she made, so the experience was a good one.  The Blue Jets could care less what the final scores were or how they played.  They had fun, they spazzed out, and now they're ready to hone their skills in the off-season so they can collect on those candy-bar bribes.

The Routine

The calves are weaned, the hay is (nearly) in the barn, and our back porch smells like baby chicks (sounds cute, smells awful) ... it must be fall.  It also means that the kids are back on The Routine.  No more of this sleeping in until 6:30 -- no sir-ee.  We are on the clock these days.

And by on the clock, I mean this:  I try to to sleep in as long as possible, Regina wakes up at some horrible hour to run, and, usually when I just hit REM sleep, Grady starts yelling for milk.  And The Routine begins.  Grady gets his milk-fix, a banana, and a clean diaper (usually not in that order), then he's off on his own to go roll cigarettes or whittle.  It doesn't matter, my attention is now on the girl.  Dylan is pretty good at getting up, but pretty bad at getting going.  She tells us she's going pee, then will spend ten minutes making faces in the mirror.  All the while we just think she's constipated until Regina goes and checks on her.  Then I have get to pick out her outfit for the day.  I usually choose a skirt, then grab fourteen shirts that I think have the possibility of matching and show them to Regina while she's showering.  Next, I do her hair.

My brothers used to have illustrated diagrams of the four hair styles they could pull off.  Their girls would point at one (pig tails, pony tail, side pony, or top pony) and they'd oblige.  I don't have a cool cheat-sheet, so every morning is a new adventure in hair styling.  I try to get away with the easiest, the pony tail, but end up getting conned into something elaborate (for me) like a braid.  Dylan keeps asking for a side pony, but I feel like I have to draw the line somewhere.  I know, the 80s are cool again, but there are just a few styles that should have stayed there.

Dylan, now, is an old hand at pre-school.  Her dad, however, isn't.  She'll remind me for a week that show and tell is on Friday.  Usually by Tuesday we'll put something she can share in her backpack.  Then, come Friday, I have a trip to the bakery on my brain and the backpack gets left in the car.  Dylan's been carrying around a shed lizard skin for three weeks now, just waiting for her time to shine.

She's also learning jokes, and so we've been perfecting her stand-up routine.  Right now she has a solid fifteen minutes, but it falls flat after that.  Well, right now she has a lot of "conceptual comedy."  This means she understands the cadence of the set up, but doesn't think the joke clear through to the punchline.  I get lots of: "Knock-knock." "Who's there?" "Giraffe." "Giraffe who?"  Long pause, then laughter, "Giraffe carrying a monkey!"  It isn't Richard Pryor, but I laugh anyway.

I'm learning things at pre-school, too.  No, I'm pretty good with my colors (just not matching them), but I learn things that most parents never need to know.  For example, last week the teacher told me that we had a dead calf in one of our pastures and it was starting to stink.  Sure enough, I went down and checked and she was right.  Pre-school: it's good for everyone.

Grady is back at the Greatest Place on Earth (daycare) and is loving the constant attention and hot toddler babes.  The kids come home either energized or completely wiped out.  If they want to party, Regina turns them loose with the chicks.  Grady's gentle, but so was Lenny in Of Mice and Men.  Regina now calls him King Kong because he wants to hold those cute little chick soooooo badly, but his grip goes from 0-10 without much in between.  And while Grady tries to squeeze them, Dylan tries to keep them all bunched together, like Mick, Greg's Border Collie.  If they're too exhausted, Grady gets a knife and a hunk of wood and Dylan works out a few Knock-Knock punchlines.  By then, we're all exhausted and we go to bed, ready to try it all again in the morning.

3 Lake Challenge

A few years ago, Regina and I decided that we'd go to a different lake in either the Trinity, Russian, or Marble Mountain Wilderness areas each summer.  By the middle of August we hadn't done so much as a drive over Shasta Lake, and we knew we had to act quickly or we'd be hiking through snow drifts.

We have a few limitations: Despite my large ears and great ass, I'm not a mule and won't carry all the gear required to spend the night, so the lake has to be a day hike.  I'm fat, so long hikes are out.  We could ride horses in, but of the fourteen or so horses mooching off the Bench H gravy-train, I'm not sure we have three or four that could make it up a mountain trail.  So we hike.

Lake 1:

After yet another failed attempt at getting to Paradise Lake, we quickly decided on Campbell Lake.  I don't know if hiking makes Dylan nervous or excited, but something about it makes her chatty.  Weird-chatty.  She talked the ENTIRE hike.  She talked to Regina and me, she talked to herself, she talked to her dolly (of course she brought a dolly), she talked to the few people we passed.  It was over eight miles to the lake and back of this:  "You want to hear a song? Here are your choices: alphabet, monkey in a tree, or butterfly."
"How about the monkey one," I'd say.
"I don't know that one.  Here's the alphabet song.  Sings...  You know how to say alphabet in Spanish?  It's Butterfly."
"I don't think that's right," I'd say between deep breaths.
"You know how to say butterfly in Spanish?  It's Cabootyloo.  Want to hear another song ..."
And on, and on.  Regina finally snapped.  "QUIET! You hear that?  It's just the wind in the trees!  Isn't that nice?  And peaceful?  Listen, just listen.  Please!"
"Want to hear a song about trees?"

Lake 2:
This one doesn't really count because we go to Lake Siskiyou every year, but the following weekend we loaded up the nieces and nephew, and the kids, and went to Mt. Shasta.  There's no hiking required to get there, and there are giant bouncy toys in the water that some old fat guy tried to bounce around on and instead looked like a bad audition tape for "Wipeout."  And, man, it really wore me him out.

Lake 3:

Paradise Lake has been our golden ring -- only because every time we decide to go there, there's road construction blocking the road in.  So we slipped past the loaders and backhoes and made it to the trailhead.  It's half the distance to get to as Campbell, but twice as steep.  So much so that Dylan was quiet the first mile in.  Then her little legs warmed up and the rambling started.  I packed Grady and he spent most of the hike removing my hat or dropping his in the trail behind us.  As if the hike up weren't tough enough, hat-retrieving leg-bends with an iron weight on my back about did me in.  Paradise Lake was aptly named -- at least I felt like I was in paradise when I took Grady out of his pack and scarfed down two burritos.


So there you have it, two new lakes, one summer.  I'm not sure if that makes us exempt from hiking in 2012, but you can bet that we'll be gunning for a new lake anyway.  Regina will study her maps and find something only lost PCT hikers have ever seen.  I'll be in the round pen, trying to get a horse or two ready enough to ride.

Five Days of Fair

The carnies have snubbed out their last cigarettes, the corndog grease has been carefully preserved for next year, and the chicken poop has been hosed out of the poultry barn -- the fair must be over.  Fair time is always a little bittersweet: kids never want it to end, but, like holiday weekends in Amsterdam, if it lasted just one more day they'd probably end up in a gutter.  On Saturday, I explained to Dylan that there was only one more day left of the fair.  I should have kept my trap shut because it led to a twenty minute conversation on why we can't go to the fair every day of the year.  The Amsterdam analogy didn't work so well on her either.

This year, we were fair-heros, at least to Dylan and Grady.  We took them every day.  We learned that Grady loves sprint cars, but hates the earplugs we made him wear.  This made for him being happy-sad-happy-sad at fifteen second intervals.  The cars would scream past us and he'd smile, but when they hit the back stretch he couldn't see them so he'd yank his ear plugs off and start to cry until they zoomed past again.  Smile, cry, smile, fuss.  Over and over.  It was even exhausting for the strangers who sat near us.

Dylan got to sit front and center for the rodeo and, we thought, had the time of her life.  Then Lefty the Rodeo Clown didn't throw her a trick rope and she missed her chance at getting a free t-shirt and suddenly the rodeo wasn't fun anymore.  She told my sister the reasons as she counted them off on her fingers.  "One, I didn't get a yellow rope.  Two, I didn't get to throw the ball.  Three, I didn't get a t-shirt, and, four, I didn't get a blue rope."  She changed her tune when grandma gave her five bucks to buy the clown's "special trick rope" (four feet of cheap rope with a bead on the end), and now she wants to be a rodeo queen again.  Although, she still won't Mutton Bust (to my relief).  We asked her if she'd like to ride a sheep.  "No," she replied, "I'll just ride a bus."  Good enough.

Grady's at the awkward age and height where he can't go on too many carnival rides.  By "too many" I mean he can't go on anything but the little train.  While it was the only ride he could go on, it was the only ride I couldn't (too many corndogs in my belly), so we had to recruit friends, family, or random passersby to escort him.  Dylan went on all sortsakinda rides (her words), and couldn't get enough of the Fun House, until she fell on her butt and had to be carried out.  I was pleased that our spin on the Dizzy Dragons didn't make her as nauseous as it made me.

On the fair's last day, we packed in as many rides, fried foods, walks through the livestock barns, Smokey Bear hugs, and shaved ices as we could.  And it worked.  Grady fell asleep in his stroller (which he never does), and Dylan didn't protest at all when we told her it was time to go.  We have spent the last two days getting the fair out of their systems.  Fried fair food is fun to eat, and even more fun when it's released as a gas.  Dylan and Grady's farts would knock a buzzard off a meat wagon.  But, if that's the worst result from five days of debauchery, then we're doing alright.  It's sure cheaper then sending them to Amsterdam for the weekend.

Nearly Home Alone

Regina's plans were to take the kids to the Bay Area for the weekend.  My plans were to stay home, cut hay, put hygiene on hold, and eat hot dogs.  We'd both been planning for months.  Regina packed, I Googled "hot dogs + bourbon" and found several dinner ideas. I put Red Dawn and Uncommon Valor on my Netflix queue.  It was going to be a spectacular manly weekend.  But sometimes life gets in the way and Regina, instead, went to Bakersfield and left me with the kids.

As she was walking toward the car, getting ready to leave, I started to panic.  The stupid questions started flowing: Does Grady eat food?  What if Dylan starts the chainsaw?  Where are the hot dogs?  "You can figure it out. You're a big boy," she told me.  Exactly, I thought, the key word there being boy.  Who leaves their kids with a boy?

We are fortunate to live near family, and even more fortunate to live near family members who still like our kids.  So, while I worked, the monkeys spent time with their cousins, aunts, and grandparents.  My only directions were to make Grady walk as much as possible and to never, ever feed Dylan after midnight.

Our first day without Regina started rough.  Grady pooped his way through a pack of diapers and Dylan got in a MMA fight with a cat.  I thought, "You're a big boy, you can handle it," as I changed the ump-teenth diaper and cleaned up Dylan's wounds.  Luckily, it got better.  Each evening, I'd hustle home from work, pick up the kids, and get them ready for dinner and bed.  Grady would get his fraternity-shower (I'd rub a wet wash-cloth over him) and I'd put him down for bed.  Then I'd spend the next 2 or 3 hours listening to him reflecting on the highlights of the day.  Ah, hugging Nacho -- is there anything more fun?  Man, those cookies Julie made are going to go straight to my hips! and, I wonder if Gramma even knows I snagged her Lego-man?  He hollers, coos, sings, and yells until the party ends and he passes out.

I did the right thing and put the hot dogs back in the refrigerator and fed Dylan healthier dinners.  While we ate, she'd regale me with accounts of her day.  I usually didn't really understand who or what she was talking about and it took me until the fourth day to realize that she was telling me about episodes of cartoons that she watched that day.  She'd spend fifteen minutes watching "Olivia" somewhere, then spend the rest of the day playing outside, and all she wanted to talk about was Olivia's little brother who rode in a hot air balloon.

Currently, Regina is on a train heading north, and we can't wait to see her.  "I miss Mommy," Dylan keeps telling me.  And, instead of asking, "Really?" (which is what Regina said to me when I told her what Dylan said) I tell her that I miss her too.  Grady has some cool new walking moves that he's excited to show off, Dylan is going to recreate all the Shark Week episodes we watched together, and me -- I'm just proud that the house stayed reasonably clean, I didn't leave anyone in the truck, and there are still hot dogs in the fridge, just waiting for my next bachelor weekend.

Frankenbaby

As you may know, Grady spent last year in a funk.  No, he wasn't touring with George Clinton, he just wasn't himself.  Call it the winter-blues, or dark-times, but he wasn't too healthy (read: active).  Consequently, the hold button on his development didn't click "off" until last fall.  Since then, he's been progressing like a wild man and now, finally (big announcement music): he's walking.

I should say "walking."  Grady A) is the most cautious baby ever, and B) knows how to manipulate his parents.  We've received texts from daycare and family proclaiming, "Grady just walked across the living room!!!" "Grady's skipping rope!" and, "Grady just beat me in a foot race!" but when we get him home, he half-heartedly recreates his earlier feats.  Maybe he's worn out from all his showing-off, but I suspect he realizes if he fake-cries for long enough Mom and Dad will either leave him alone or pick him up.  We've caught him doing his Frankenbaby walk across our kitchen, but as soon as we acknowledge it, he drops to one knee.  Walking?  Me?  Nope.  Please hold me.  I may have pooped myself.


Last week, at Julie's, we were eating our cowboy lunch and Grady was playing in the other room.  As we were finishing up, we looked up from gorging ourselves and in strolled Grady.  He was turning corners like Dale Earnhardt Jr. and walking like a man on a mission.  Of course, we erupted in cheers and when he spotted me, a proud grin on his face, he tripped over a chair and took a header.  We hoorayed and whistled and someone at the table threw their chonies.  And from over the din, I heard one little voice -- Dylan's.  She was just as excited as the rest of us and in her exuberance she quoted one of today's wisest and most thoughtful poets: Ke$ha.  "Throw some glitter, make it rain," Dylan screamed.

I was so proud of them both.