2 and a half

Ice rink

Today is the first day of summer so naturally we're talking about ice rinks. Or, their closest substitute.

We were in the backyard eating dinner and fighting off mosquitoes when Audrey exclaimed from the kitchen that Grace had dumped her bottle of Bubble Oodles on the hardwood floor. No big deal, I thought at first, hoping she didn't dump all of it. But when I heard a panicky cry and ran into the house, there was Grace, wriggling around in a massive pool of bubble solution. She struggled to stand up, like a newborn foal unable to get her footing. The surface was as slick as ice, and each time she tried to get up she fell again and cried harder.

I picked her up just as Audrey decided it looked like fun. She ran into the slick and immediately lost her footing and crashed to the floor. I expected tears but she laughed instead, getting up and trying to slide on her feet but then crashing again. It had to hurt and her head narrowly missed the corner of a drawer that protruded from the side. I demanded that she stop. The last thing I needed was a trip to the hospital with two little girls who had cracked their heads open.

I set Grace down to grab Audrey but Grace immediately ran back to the slippery mess, ostensibly forgetting the trauma she experienced moments earlier. Thump! Back on the floor. Both girls were covered in dribbling, gooey bubble solution by now. Think slightly runnier slime from Ghostbusters. If I didn't stop it all soon the encroaching solution would have me going down next.

My wife volunteered to take them for a bath since it was bath night anyway, which alleviated things - I was able to wipe Grace off enough where she could walk on dry flooring while Suzanne took Audrey upstairs. I followed, plopping Grace down in the bathroom so that I could return downstairs to clean up the mess.

You'd think the floor would be shiny after the cleanup but instead it has a dull, slightly sticky film on it. It will need a good mopping. 

No more ice rinks in the house.

Toys

What takes a parent a hour to create and a child only moments to destroy? Yes, you guessed it - a clean room. 

For me this phenomenon sometimes begins while I sit on our couch, maybe while watching a show on TV while telling Barry (the new dog) to stop jumping up on things while otherwise being a human jungle gym for Audrey and Grace to play on. And in the midst of the chaos I'll notice the mess of toys across the room.

I mean, the girls' dolls don't go in the same bucket as the plastic and wooden vegetables, do they? The Go Fish cards can't just be left out to get lost. And that blow-up pink floatie thing that looks sort of like a duck - that doesn't even belong in the living room. And so it goes, until the human urge to clean and organize kicks into gear.

An hour later, things look much better. Audrey and Grace even have "more" toys now, in the sense that they were so piled up and disorganized that they didn't even know some were there. An Elmo cell phone and a kaleidoscope have made a long-awaited re-appearance. That previously lost Go Fish card is back in the deck. And Audrey's gardening gloves, which somehow made it into the toy bin, are once again available for her to help pull weeds outside.

I sit back down on the couch, pleased with what I've accomplished. Maybe I'll relax and have a beer or something, I tell myself. But then Grace appears and out of the corner of my eye I see her checking out the new digs. She grabs the Elmo cell phone and holds it to her ear. "Haylo," she says. How cute, I think. 

Then Audrey rushes over because suddenly that Elmo cell phone - the one that has been lost in toy purgatory for weeks - is suddenly a critical "must have" item. Grace squeals as Audrey yanks it away. A small skirmish ensues but after a minute passes they both quickly lose interest; the fake phone crashes to the floor.

Grace then notices a bin containing dozens of small figurines and other trinkets. The one she wants must be hidden at the bottom because with a shake of her little wrists she dumps the entire bin on the wooden floor. Toys scatter everywhere and in my mind, as if in slow motion, I yell, "Nnnnnooooowwww!" But it's too late. Audrey eyes the doll bin and does the same thing. Then Barry scurries over chew on all he can get his paws on. 

Disaster has occurred, and it continues until the room has been returned to its prior, completely disheveled state. It's almost as if universal forces demand that it be so. Audrey and Grace, seemingly satisfied and completely oblivious to what has occurred, come sit down on the couch next to me. "I love you daddy," says Audrey. Grace smiles. I can't help but forget about it all.

And then, the next day, I find myself sitting on the couch... 

Vomiting and the science experiment

I was inspired to write this post while reading another post about a dad's baby who puked in the car. If you have a kid and haven't gone through this yet... you will. Just wait. And it will occur at a very inconvenient time. Just like when you get food poisoning or something in the middle of an important work week.

For me it happened on my way to work. I was driving to work in the morning when I got a call from my wife on my cell. Audrey had just puked all over herself on the way to school. The car seat, the floor, and of course Audrey, were covered in partially digested food from that morning's breakfast and remnants of the prior evening's meal.

I was about to say, "I'm sorry, honey - can you take her back home and get her cleaned up?" when my wife demanded I turn around to help her. I was halfway to work on a 10 minute commute - could I get out of it? No, I could not in good conscience. This was when we lived in San Francisco in a house with tons of stairs, including stairs from the street up to the front door, and getting a vomit-covered baby up to the house and then heading back down to clean up the car at a stress-filled point in time wouldn't be much fun. So I met her back at the house.

Poor Audrey - she really was covered. Normally I'm pretty weak when it comes to that sort of thing - the smell of someone else's vomit can make me want to throw up myself - but when it's your kid you'll put up with anything. It must be like the adrenaline rush someone gets when he sees a person get pinned underneath a car and lifts the car up so she can crawl out. Okay, well sort of. Maybe not really.

Anyway - I helped Audrey out of the car and my wife took her upstairs for a bath while I cleaned up outside and I'll be darned if I didn't do a great job. We had to dis-assemble and wash the car seat, of course, but the car smelled pretty decent afterward. I didn't even have access to that sawdust stuff the janitors would use when kids puked in class in grade school. All I needed were some towels, baking soda and a little elbow grease.

But speaking of car messes, my wife's car - as she will attest - is a bit of a science experiment. Only one puking incident has occurred but the foods and drinks that have been consumed, spilled and spread around her car have resulted in some pretty putrid smells.

Once we thought an animal got trapped somewhere in the car and died. The smell was horrible. After a couple weeks of enduring it and hoping it would go away, I took my flashlight and checked underneath the seats and in the back and under the dash and examined the engine compartment (me, examining a car engine, is quite humorous by the way) but found nothing. Then one of us (I can't recall whether it was me or my wife) got close to the floor behind the passenger-side front seat while picking up some stuff one day and got a whiff of a horrible odor. It was the rug. Audrey had spilled something on the rug - probably months before - and there it resided, probably bristling with odor-producing bacteria.

So we proceeded with a thorough professional cleaning and then doused the area with baking soda for several days and eventually the smell went away. But not the problem.

Eventually we ended up with two babies and now the car is doubly full of food and spills. We'll occasionally find a pile of "Puffs" (think, organic Cheerios with ridges) on the floor, or a moldy chunk of a "Z Bar," which is a kid's version of an energy bar, under the seat. There are back-seat cup holders and sometimes I'll find a bottle of milk that has been sitting there for weeks. It's nasty. Dumping the bottle in the sink releases fumes that will melt your nose hairs.

The front is just as bad because the girls will constantly hand food items to you and request other things in return. The to-and-fro gets so busy that the adult stuff and the kid stuff just gets mixed up and sometimes forgotten. So on the floor you may find empty coffee cups that were mostly drank but have a wedge of sugar sludge hardened at the bottom. Or an old banana peel that is black and rotted. The front cup holders may have a sticky film on them composed of a number of adult and kid beverages.

But you know what? Who cares? It's our family car and I'm proud of it. It takes me and my wife and our girls wherever we want to go together and protects us and them from the other idiots on the road. And all it takes is a car detail to get our family-mobile back to as-good-as-new. We may implement a "no food and beverage rule" someday but I doubt it because we'd be hypocrites - we like to enjoy food and beverage while we drive just as much as our girls do. So maybe we'll do this instead - I hear there's a science fair coming up. We'll eat and drink (and maybe even vomit) a few times and submit the car as an exhibit. Maybe they'll fill up some test tubes and come up with a cure for cancer.

A wine bottle, a vacuum and a kite

This post originated as a Facebook status update but a friend got a laugh out of it so I thought I'd elaborate here.

You know how when you're cleaning you're sometimes moving pretty quickly and sometimes things just go wrong? Well, they did. I picked up a closed bottle of wine from the counter to put into the wine rack and accidentally bumped the shelf above and it fell from my hands, flat on the counter, shattering into a zillion pieces. 

Naturally it was red wine - white wine would have been too easy to clean up - and it soaked our white cupboards, trickling down toward the floor and running into each drawer and each cabinet on its way. And when it reached the floor it landed on our soft grey rug that just doesn't handle red wine very well. 

After cursing myself for a bit I began the cleanup. After picking up the largest shards from the counter and the floor, I took a thick wad of paper towel to soak up broad swaths of wine from wherever I could. The drawers and cupboards came next and I had to tediously move pieces of silverware and other kitchen items to get to the pools of red wine accumulating everywhere. And as soon as I'd soak some up more would drip down.

And then came those little tiny pieces of glass that are impossible to pick up with a paper towel and almost as difficult with a broom, but if you miss them they are the most dangerous part. They are sharp as ever and you just can't risk any being left lying around when two little girls are motoring around everywhere during the day.

After collecting as many pieces as I could I examined the floor and the counter closely and then vacuumed the area to make sure I didn't miss anything. And then I spotted some glass across the room. How had it gotten over there? I went over to vacuum that spot as well. When I came back to look along the floorboards, there laid another piece of glass. I shoved the vacuum in there to get that piece also. 

Now I was really paranoid so I began vacuuming everything again. This is where insult was added to injury. The kite Audrey and I had flown that afternoon at the park laid on the floor, a picture of Cinderella staring at me. The kite's long pink tail meandered lazily on the floor, as if to tempt the vacuum. And tempt it did. All of a sudden the plastic tail got sucked into the opening and wrapped around the rotor. And since we have a high-powered vacuum with some serious torque the tail melted a bit as it wound itself up. Fortunately for me the tail broke off and the rest of the kite was saved. But I was left to extricate the pink plastic ribbon from the jaws of the vacuum. And eventually I did.

Like any good dad I tied what was left of tail back to the main body of the kite and it almost looked passable as a kite tail. Almost. We'll see what Audrey says next time we go fly it.

The whole process took well over an hour and by the time I was done I was so flustered I couldn't even explain to my wife what had happened. Maybe I shouldn't clean anymore.