Help! My kid won't eat cake

I knew that my eldest was going to be trouble at mealtimes early in his solid food eating career.

He was six months old, by then a grizzled veteran of dry baby cereal flakes who had graduated to baby food and yogurt. The yogurt, he liked. For some reason, he didn't seem to enjoy the jarred baby food.

I have no idea why, of course. Frankly, I find nothing better than meat and vegetables that are pureed in a blender so they have a nice, bland gray color and loaded with preservatives. Mmmmm. The applesauce-like texture of pureed turkey with carrots is making my mouth water as we speak.

Yet The Boy would have none of it. The moment he saw that heaping spoon of pureed peas heading straight for him, his mouth clamped down hard, and no matter how much we coaxed him, he wouldn't open up. So I got him to laugh. Then I'd shove the spoon in his mouth in mid-guffaw.

He didn't stop laughing the next time we tried it -- he just laughed with his mouth shut. And for a few weeks he subsisted on breast milk and yogurt.

It has been a nightly mealtime wrestling match ever since.

While many of these matches are over what you'd think -- You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat, Boy! -- a surprising number are over his strange unwillingness to eat most sweets.

My eldest is an oddball. He doesn't like pie. Most chocolates are out, though he likes Gummi candy. Ice cream is a total crapshoot -- sometimes he likes it, sometimes he doesn't. And whether he eats God's candy, M&M's, depends on his particular mood that day.

While most 4-year-olds would dive headfirst into a cake if they weren't being held down by his parents, my kid would rather have a big hunk of cheese or a Triscuit. He never eats it. At birthday parties I don't get a piece of cake for myself, because I know that I'll be the one with the responsibility of keeping my son's barely-touched piece from going to waste. (And wasted cake is just wrong.)

But at least he likes frosting, meaning that there is at least some hope for him. So, if I'm making some frosting-like substance, I ask if he wants to lick the bowl.

Me: Hey Boy! Try this!

Boy: What is it?

Me: Try it! It's good!

Boy: (Looks skeptical and slowly backs away)

Me: Come on! It's yummy frosting!

The Boy, hearing the magical "frosting" word, proceeds to inch ever-so-slowly toward the frosting-coated spoon in my hand. He stretches his tongue far enough to make Gene Simmons jealous, takes a tiny fraction of a sample and then backs away as if he just pulled a live grenade.

Then, of course, he returns quickly and demands whatever that remains in the bowl.

Me: Seriously, Boy, do you have to act like I'm trying to poison you?

Most of you will read this and wonder why I'm griping. Not only is my sweets-avoiding son giving his teeth a better shot at life but he's leaving more of this for me. Indeed, I've licked many a bowl that he's avoided while enjoying an extra day's worth of peanut butter cream pie.

In fact, now that I bring it up, I'm wondering why I'm griping about this myself. In fact, I think I'll go get myself another whoopie pie that my son won't eat.

Mom kills 'em

My mom has been writing books and trying to get them published for as long as I can remember. On the day I was born, Mom was jotting down ideas for her next mystery novel between contractions. Later, when her sister asked how things went, Mom said, "Oh, great. I think I've got my ending now."

"No," my aunt said, "I mean did you have a boy or a girl?"

(Mom will vehemently deny this, of course, but I know it to be true. I was there, after all.)

Mom has been writing for so long she pounded her first book into a stone tablet. Then she broke it over her agent's head after getting her first rejection notice.

In reality, she's been a model of optimism. She's kept writing, and kept sending books in, and kept getting rejected, for decades longer than I ever would have -- as a natural pessimist, I would have officially given up after Rejection No. 1 and taken up something less stressful, like lion taming or brain surgery. That said, I never would have received a rejection letter because you need something called an attention span to write a full-length novel, and I have no such th ... uh, what was I talking about?

Mom was so optimistic she paid close attention to the type of rejection letter she got. I remember that one day she ran into the house after getting the mail, jumping for joy like she just won the World Series.

US KIDS (Thinking that we were headed for instant wealth): WHAT? WHAT? Did they buy your book?!???

MOM (About three hours later, after finally calming herself down to speak coherent English): NO!!

KIDS: Uh, then why are you jumping up and down?

MOM: Because it was a nice rejection letter!

KIDS:

Mom used these positive comments, along with inspirational stories from other published writers to keep her going through all these years. And so it was especially satisfying for everybody when a year ago my mom, at the age of 74, finally got one of her works accepted by a publisher.

The good news didn't last long. The publisher went bankrupt just before the book could get printed, because the publishing industry is one big crapshoot. But she quickly got picked up by a young, small e-book publisher out of California. That book, Murder By Mistake, was released last week.

It's a mystery, because that's what Mom likes, at least judging by the amount of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen that she force-fed me growing up. I haven't read it yet, but I'm guessing that somebody will die early in the book, and another person will spend the balance of the pages solving the crime. The investigator will succeed in the end, but the perpetrator will be somebody unexpected.

So consider this a modest plug for my Mom's modestly priced book, which you can find right here.

Way to go, Mom.

The dreaded computer scream

The Boy recently learned how to use a computer, which is bad -- not because I'm worried about what he might find online, but because of what he does to my laptop. We had two computers in the house, but he used mine because it's convenient and it enabled him to coat my keyboard with guck of indeterminate origin.

I'd regularly open my laptop to write these important screeds on my life, only to find my thumb stuck to the spacebar with a sticky goo more potent than Superglue

So when my workplace decided to unload a couple of old iMacs I jumped at the chance to get one for The Boy. He'd get his own computer, and my laptop wouldn't feel like the floor of a movie theater. Seriously, every time I use the laptop I half expect to find a half-eaten box of Raisinets on the screen and a spilled bucket of popcorn. And I keep waiting for some zit-faced teenager to mindlessly take my ticket.

(That is what it's like at movie theaters, isn't it? It's been so long since I've been to a real live movie theater that I've forgotten what they're like; for all I know the staff might be made up entirely of former professional wrestlers while an army of Roombas patrol the theater floor, sucking up all manners of garbage. And come to think of it, why are there NOT any Roombas patrolling the theater floor? Heck, the theater could practically go out an buy one with the cost of a single ticket these days.)

Anyway, we put the computer in the basement, and The Boy began to excitedly use it to view his various preschooler-oriented Web sites, over and over again. Relieved, I returned to the living room and happily began surfing on my non-sticky laptop.

And then my peace was broken by a scream.

Uh oh.

My parental worry skills kicked in. I jumped up from my recliner and flew down the stairs to find my son, thinking horrible thoughts. Maybe the computer fell on him! Maybe some creep has found him online! Maybe he's discovered his old man's blog!

Instead, I found him calm, using his computer to surf the Internet.

ME: What's wrong? Why did you scream?

BOY: It wasn't working. But now it's working.

ME: Ah.

I should have known that scream. It was the scream of frustration from an irritated user of household electronics. I'd like to think that this is a common scream among the general public, but I'm afraid it's probably a genetic trait he inherited from his old man. I tend to scream at my computer for not working. Or my over-the-stove microwave for not installing itself properly. Or the batteries for repeatedly jumping out of the battery-powered piece of electronic equipment I happen to need at the moment.

The Boy has grown up seeing me scream at the blender for being a total piece of crap, or at the junky piece of do-it-yourself furniture we just got from IKEA that refuses to put itself in the right place when I need it to.

Screaming at appliances, of course, totally works. It may not actually fix the specific problem, per se, but it enables you to get your feelings of momentary insanity off of your chest without resorting to actually throwing said appliance across the room.

And nothing, of course, makes me scream more than computers, which generally suck because they're made by a group of people -- geeks -- with a strong yearning for revenge against the population as a whole. So they've developed a society in which we've become dependent upon these little machines and yet strangely tolerant that every now and then they just won't work for some random, totally inexplicable reason.

Maybe I should stop The Boy from screaming, because it's not really that good to be screaming at appliances for several reasons that I can't think of right now. But I have little credibility on that front and besides, the computer deserves it. So go ahead, Boy. Scream away. I won't stop you.

But you might watch out for your mother.

Cat herders have nothing on preschooler parents

Someone needs to explain to me why The Boy can spend a couple of hours running the equivalent of a marathon while simultaneously climbing the equal to Pike's Peak, yet when we ask him to walk 100 feet in a mall he acts like he's being put through the Bataan Death March.

Cue the dramatics: "No, Daaaad! My legs are tired! I can't walk this far! Carry me, Dad! Carry me! I can't go on any longer. (Falls to the floor) I can't! Just go on without me, Dad! I'll just sit here at this bench and wait for sweet, sweet death! But remember me, fondly, Dad! Remember me!"

Such is life with a preschooler.

Walking with The Boy is about as easy as walking a bull on tranquilizers, albeit an easily distracted bull with selective hearing. Most of the time it's an effort to get him -- The Boy, not The Bull -- to move a few feet, either because he has no interest in the task at hand or he's found something vastly more interesting, like a one-foot pile of snow-and-salt-crusted ice along the side of the road.

Trips to the mall have become next to impossible, especially when we pass by a local kiosk selling Asian Kung Fu movies. The kiosk at our local mall has a TV broadcasting a loop from a fight scene in one movie. Fights, especially fights involving swords, are like crack to The Boy. He can't keep himself away, and usually our efforts to pull him from said kiosk involve ropes and teams of large, sturdy horses.

(Invariably, by the way, the friendly sales person at the kiosk will try to sell us a movie. No, man. I'm not going to get my kid a kung fu movie, are you NUTS? Kung Fu Panda was bad enough. The kid was karate chopping everybody even BEFORE he saw that movie. No. In fact, I'm going to avoid this mall altogether until he's, oh, 45.)

This weekend, however, The Boy decided that he no longer wanted to be left behind, but that he was going to take the initiative to go somewhere before we got there -- and he chose this moment at, of course, the grocery store.

On at least two, maybe three or four occasions during a single trip (I can't remember, for I blocked most of them from my mind), The Boy wandered off in search of something vastly more interesting than his parents comparing the price of toilet paper. (At 15 cents per foot, this deal is better than Costco. We save $1.50. WOOHOO!)

It takes a considerable amount of skill and surprising stealth for my boy to wander off because most of the time when we take him to grocery stores I'm watching him like a hawk watches a mouse to make sure that he's not breaking anything. (He did, too, not long ago, having dropped a dozen eggs while we stood there, powerless; he spent the next few minutes worrying that the grocery store was going to put him in jail.)

My eye is usually fixed upon his present location. But periodically, my eye gets distracted. (OOOH! A sale on turkey hot dogs!) He picks that split second to take off for greener pastures, specifically, anything else.

A few seconds later, I realize that The Boy has escaped. Common sense tells me that he's nearby, probably ogling the cheap, plastic junky toys that grocery stores always sell. My parenting sense, however, insists that he has run off to join the circus and that the next time I'll see him he'll be tattooed from head to toe and balancing a chair on his nose during his wedding to the bearded lady who trains cats to leap from a tall platform.

We ultimately find him and scold him and then punish him, but apparently no punishment we give him is worse than the punishment he gets having to wander through the baked goods aisle watching his parents debate whether to use the regular evaporated milk or the 2 percent for that upcoming pie recipe. So he'll do it again.

Perhaps we should end this punishment by ending our weekly tradition of dragging the kids to the grocery store, but why would I do that? Most of the time our trip to the grocery store is the highlight of our week.

Going left to avoid the mechanic

I was feeling entirely too wealthy this week, so I took my car to the mechanic, gave him a general description of my problem -- Uh, it's making a noise somewhere up front -- and told him I needed it fixed.

After the mechanic whooped and hollered, hugged a few of his coworkers and called his wife to shout "WE'RE GOIN' OUT TONIGHT, BABY!" he solemnly took my keys and vowed to get to the bottom of the problem.

My car began complaining whenever I asked it to make a right turn, as if I was somehow violating its liberal politics. (No, I don't think cars themselves have political leanings, they're made of metal, for crying out loud, they don't have feelings. That said, my car is a Civic, which would almost certainly be liberal, albeit more of a modest and quiet librarian type of liberal, rather than the naked drunk college student type liberal.)

I had no idea what was causing the noise, which got progressively worse. So I was confronted with two choices: Take the car to the mechanic or quit making right turns.

I hate going to mechanics, as you're finding out now. But I hate left turns even more. I spend much of my driving life desperately trying to avoid the dreaded left turn. On many a long road trip I've brought my vehicle to the verge of running out of gas simply based on my refusal to go to a gas station on the left side of the street. Left turns suck. Right turns are easy and are almost never encumbered by traffic control.

Facing the prospect of a life taking only left turns, I swallowed my pride and went to the mechanic. I hate taking my car to a mechanic for plenty of reasons, most of them having to do with the idea that I'm tossing a large sum of money at a guy and will, in the end, have exactly the same thing I started out with. Which is really boring. If I'm spending hundreds of dollars I want something to show for it, like a piece of electronic equipment or a remodeled bathroom.

In addition, going to a mechanic always demonstrates exactly how much I do NOT know about cars. I've had a lot of cars over the years, only a few of which were kind enough to wait longer than a few weeks before dying, usually in some big plume of gray smoke. Theoretically, given the number of old cars with lots of problems that I've owned, I should have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the things that can go wrong with a car by now. Yet I've never had the same problem twice, and every time I go to the mechanic the diagnosis gets more exotic. To wit:

ME: OK, Mr. Auto Mechanic Guy, what's the verdict?

MECHANIC GUY: Yeah, it seems as if the vertical pressure regulator is malfunctioning. We could replace it, but it would cost just as much for us to replace the entire carbonated regulating apparatus and then you won't ever have to worry about it. And because we're not entirely sure exactly why you're vertical pressure regulator malfunctioned we went ahead and looked at the cause and found that there is a short in your differential condenser torque box. You'll need to fix that, otherwise you'll keep having the same problem over again.

ME:

MECHANIC GUY: And don't worry, we're going to use only remanufactured parts for this, which will save you a bundle.

ME: Uh ... how much will this cost?

MECHANIC GUY: $3 million. But you really need to get this done, otherwise your car will blow up with you and your children in it, probably while it's stopped next to a busload of nuns on their way to deliver food to starving children in an African orphanage.

ME: Didn't I come in here to buy new windshield wiper blades?

In the end, I usually do it, because my brain is so busy trying to decipher exactly what the guy just said that it doesn't think clearly. So I just nod and grunt.

But this week, I'm proud to say that I put an end to this madness. After the mechanic told me that I was going to need my entire car replaced (or something like that) and that it would cost me a price roughly equal to the gross domestic product of Egypt (or maybe a bit lower), I told him no. I'll see if by some miracle I can find someone else who is less inclined to run up the tab. I took my keys and left.

And I took only left turns home.

Pinocchio's bad influence

Being a parent means controlling what is showing on the television, at least during the child's waking hours. So most of the time I have to wait until the kids are asleep before I watch movies like Bloodthirsty Murderous Naked Nurses Destroy Dallas.

(This results in an internal debate: I could watch all the TV I want, so long as I set their bedtime at 6 p.m. But if I do that then the little rugrats will get up at 4 a.m., just after I finished watching the latest movie involving hot, young, gun-toting, female superspies wearing high heels and skin-tight outfits who torture bad guys while repeatedly shooting off witty one-liners. Alas, the part of me that enjoys sleep defeats the part of me that enjoys R-rated flicks.)

Knowing that my son is an impressionable young man, as all 4-year-olds are, I carefully control his television habits, because I'd have a tough time explaining to the authorities how my preschooler decided to steal my car and go on a five-state bank-robbing spree. I've gradually moved him from The Wiggles to Blues Clues to Disney movies and am now taking risks with movies like Star Wars. All of these are good wholesome movies that, at worst, will result in my kid being overloaded with poor dialogue. And he might think that all long objects in the house are hand-slicing light sabers.

(Alas, however, he still doesn't quite understand that storm troopers are bad guys. I'm a storm trooper! he says. But I have a light saber! And I'm a good storm trooper! Um ... Why don't you just be a Jedi, kid? If you really like the costume, just go ahead and steal one. You can say it's in the name of The Force or something.)

I had no idea, however, that I'd have to consider placing classic Disney movies alongside Quentin Tarantino movies on my "Maybe He Shouldn't See This" list.

Peter Pan was bad enough. I'm not the most politically correct human being out there, but I was cringing in the days afterward when my shirtless son paraded around the house yelling, "I'm an Indian!" (For those of you who haven't seen, there is a nice, lengthy scene involving a bunch of stereotypical natives ...)

But that was one thing. Pinocchio was entirely different.

It had been ages since I'd seen it -- I was, perhaps, little older than The Boy. All I knew is that it involved some wooden marionette brought to life by a fairy whose nose elongates when he fibs. And he talks to a cricket, proving that even 19th century writers enjoyed dabbling in a little opium now and then.

The DVD opened with an anti-smoking ad, which seemed innocuous enough. But then, midway through the movie, Pinocchio is led along with a bunch of other boys to a mysterious island where they're allowed to go on all the rides and do all the fun things that they want without parental guidance.

Pinocchio and his friend are the last ones in the pool hall, where they spend time guzzling beer and smoking.

All the booze and cigars turn the kids into donkeys, but that didn't stop The Boy from walking around the house, pretending that he was smoking. Apparently, lame anti-smoking ads are nothing compared to a walking, talking, singing, wooden kid who smokes.

My only strategy now is to wait until The Boy has fully reached the "My Parents are Lame" stage of life. Then I'll begin spending most of my time guzzling beer and chain smoking. He'll thus decide that beer guzzling and chain smoking are lame, and I will have defeated Pinocchio's evil influence. Yes, I'll either succumb to cirrhosis of the liver, lung cancer or both. But I'll rescue my boy from that fate.

And isn't that what being a dad is all about?

(Wait ... Did my blog post just end with a moral? Dangit. I'm losing my touch.)

The power of a crying baby

The most powerful sound in our house today is that of my crying child. (This is opposed to the most powerful non-sound, the one The Wife doesn't make when she's really, really angry. On balance The Wife is the most non-intimidating human on the planet, but when she gets that look it immediately puts my survival instinct into high gear and I begin looking for escape routes. The Boy got that look a week ago and he still hasn't recovered from the shock.)

In the old days, back when The Boy himself was in his infancy, his crying would generate a flurry of activity among both of the adults, plus our pets and any other vermin that happened to have taken up residence, to search for ways to get that confounded crying to stop already. We'd run down our list of items -- Is he hungry? Has he been changed? Is it gas? Because if it's gas we need to pump him full of these drops here. Are you sure he's not hungry? Does he need to be rocked? Sung to? Tossed in the air? HEAVEN HELP ME MAKE IT STOP!!!

Now that we're both seasoned veterans of this parenting business, the reaction is a bit different this time around. While it's not quite white noise, like a train that routinely hangs out in your backyard at 2 a.m., it's still tolerable, like living directly under jets' path into the airport. So while we've grown used to it, nobody ever, ever, gets used to a diaper filled with human waste. And in our parenting history, the diapers Dad ends up changing are all far fuller, smellier and travel farther than anything changed by Mom.

It's entirely possible that, by responding to a crying baby, I'll have to change his diaper, and probably a lot of other things in the process, and so my natural instinct to avoid unpleasantness kicks in, as illustrated by the following, somewhat exaggerated and liberalized conversation:

ME: Doo-dee-doo. I'm just sitting here, minding my own business, productively warming the couch on this typical Minnesota winter day.

THE SEQUEL: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

ME:

WIFE: (Continues her frantic re-organizing of the entire house while simultaneously doing all the laundry, paying the bills, and writing a thank-you note to her aunt in St. Louis.)

ME: (Begins praying silently)

THE SEQUEL: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!! (Suddenly stops)

ME: Whew.

SEQUEL: Oh, wait. I'm pissed off. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

ME: Dammit. (Speaks several curse words under my breath in multiple languages before frantically looking for things to make me look busy, such as feverishly rearranging the magazines under the coffee table)

THE BOY: Stop crying, baby!

ME: Uh, Wife. The baby is, uh, crying.

WIFE: And? (Stops to answer a phone call from President Obama seeking her advice on how to fix the credit markets.)

ME: Well, uh, is he hungry? I don't have mammary glands, you know.

WIFE: I just got done feeding him ten minutes ago and really need to get all this done. I have to create more space in our kitchen cupboards; wash all the clothes; write our wills; do our taxes; disinfect all the boys' toys; find a workable solution to our economic conundrum and get ready for work in the morning. And I have to pee. What are you doing?

ME: Um, I, uh, really need to go change your oil.

WIFE: You've never changed the oil in my car before and besides I had it done last week.

ME: Heh. I meant MY oil.

WIFE: Since when did you start doing any preventive maintenance on your car? Your last oil change was in 1997. And your car wasn't built until 1999.

ME: See? It's really important.

WIFE: Sorry, you've waited 12 years, you can wait another 12 minutes. OR, I can take the baby, and you could do all these chores right after you change the oil. The dishes need doing too, you know.

ME: Uh ... Let me go get that baby.

(Yes, diapers stink, but I really hate getting dishpan hands.)

Hockey: Keeping the 80s alive

I went to a hockey game this evening, and thank goodness. I'd been behind on my annual dose of 80s hair metal and was getting a bit concerned.

Now I'm good until 2014.

Seriously, I think that hockey is single-handedly keeping that genre of music alive. I hadn't heard that much hair metal since I spent two hours in the basement of my local McDonald's with my friend Dean, listening to Great White while playing baseball using a plastic tray and crumpled up liners. (I lost, both at baseball and in my insistence that we not listen to Once Bitten, Twice Shy for the 1,041st time.)

But the hockey game was good, because it included plenty of heavy hits, which made up for a dearth in unnecessary fights. (My favorite joke of all time: "I was at a fight the other day and a hockey game broke out." This is my favorite not for its hilarity but for the look of annoyance I get from my wife every time I say it. Fifty seven years of marriage and she still hasn't figured out that such looks only encourage me.)

I brought The Boy, who paid little attention to the game and instead saw it as a chance to have his old man drain his bank account to pay for a series of overpriced concessions. This is what I heard all game: "Dad, I want a hot dog." "Dad, I want another hot dog." "Dad, I want ice cream." "Dad, I want popcorn." "Dad, why are you looking at your wallet and crying?" "Dad, why are you taking so many pills?" "Dad, why are you taking off your wedding ring and giving it to that greasy fat man holding a wad of bills in a dark corner?"

The truth is, it wasn't as if The Boy's old man wasn't enjoying the chance at eating a string of junk food. That's the American way: We spend huge amounts of money to sit on our butts and get fat so we can shout cuss-laden criticisms at a bunch of athletic foreigners.

But the truly odd thing about taking my child to athletic events, other than the lifetime's dose of four-letter words he hears in an hour's time, is this simple fact: He hates the noise.

I know what you're thinking: "So? Of course he hates the noise. Arenas are ear-splittingly loud places. Hockey games break more ear drums than a, um ... serial ear stabber. Besides, standing and yelling and clapping every couple of minutes makes it impossible for me to concentrate on this bucket of chili cheese fries and the extra large hot fudge sundae that I just sold my first born to purchase at the concession stand."

Yet my boy is loud. He knows no other volume, except during those moments when he's in trouble and suddenly gets as quiet as a mouse. I figured that he'd enjoy spending a couple of hours in an environment in which, unlike almost every other moment in his life, he is actively encouraged to shout and scream until his voice box packs up and moves to Africa.

Not so. Apparently, he only likes to be loud when he's the only loud person in the room, for full, adult-annoying impact. According to his pre-schooler brain, it takes all the fun out of being loud when everybody else is being loud with you and no parent or teacher is on his or her knees begging for a moment's peace.

So he just sat in his seat, watching the players, eating me out of a few paychecks and covering his ears when the big horn in the corner announced a goal.

And I was the one yelling. At the refs. The goalie. The players. Our neighbors, etc.

Now I'm off in search of my Cinderella album.

It's a poor, poor life: Parenting boys

I have a 13-year-old nephew. He's a good kid, for the most part, but he provides me with a regular reminder of the things I'm about to experience -- twice -- as the parent of two young boys myself. So whenever he's around I act like a school girl watching Friday the 13th just before she's about to go to summer camp for the first time.

(shudder)

Yesterday's lesson was on the young male appetite. His mom told us how he had three friends over, and how the four of them just devoured several frozen pizzas and a few bags of chips just before they went to see a movie.

Then, as a reminder, on the way out my nephew asked to stop somewhere for food. "But we just ate," my sister said.

"But I'm hungry again," he responded.

My sister looked at me. "And you're going to have TWO boys."

Dangit.

I'm about to have two kids in day care, meaning that all of my money is flowing out of my pocket and into a single-story brick building filled with screaming kids. The day care is next to where I work, which is good because every other Friday when our HR person hands out checks I'll simply tell her to bring mine next door.

So, though I'm loathe to see the young-uns grow up, part of me -- the part of me that is a micro-economist -- is eager for the day to arrive when they are both out of day care and can watch themselves.

But now I've realize that the moment that happens they'll be close to puberty, meaning they'll be eating anything and everything in their path that is slightly edible. I know this, because I remember those days, those glorious days, when we could have a full meal at dinner, then order a full pizza late at night. How we could make late-night taco runs, and how on grilled cheese day at the college cafeteria we'd pile our trays with them, then vacuum them up in about five minutes.

(Now, of course, if I eat even a single grilled cheese sandwich I have to go jogging for five hours to make sure that I don't gain 19 pounds. -- never mind how a 6-ounce sandwich can generate 19 pounds of fat. Cheese is a magical thing.)

So when my boys hit that age all our day care money will flow straight to the grocery store.

Maybe I'll just eliminate the middle man and start my own farm. But then I'd never get any food myself.