My Christmas Vacation

I hadn't posted in a while. I'd like to say that I've been busy at work. Or that I've been on a special mission from the president. Or that I've been on an extra special vacation to some far-off distant land that is not filled with icicles, snow, glare ice, sanding trucks, snowplows and weather cursing. I'd even like to say that I've been spending the holidays in the home of some relatives.

I've been doing none of those. I've been home -- not even at work. I'm taking end-of-the-year vacation days, which just means that I'm too cheap to spend money on a vacation. And on this "staycation" I've been the picture of laziness. Well, at least since all the relatives departed after Christmas.

A few highlights from the past week or so:

* Life is interesting as a mouse. The Boy and I were in an evening Christmas parade just before the holiday, bedecked with mice costumes. He was a "mouse." I was called a "mouse chaperone," because "rat" apparently doesn't sound good enough. Several of us formed a mouse convoy down the parade, each of us holding the tail of the person in front. At first, we mice were shy folk, simply walking down the middle of the street and waving at spectators. By the end we were going from one side of the street to the other, high-fiving them. Whether they liked it or not.

* I'm raising that kid right, by the way. At one point I called him "cupcake," because he was being his typical, poky, 5-year-old self in the toy department at Target. His response: "OK, Jonathan." Touche, kid (he knows I don't like it when he calls me by my actual name; "Dad," or "Father" or "Household Ultradude" generally suffice around here).

* I had a big pile of relatives at my house for several days. I spent the entire time cooking, cleaning and wondering why nobody will pay me a nickel every time I say "No, Boy, it's NOT time for you to open gifts yet." You know, because I'd be a flipping gazillionaire by now.

* It was great having all those relatives at our house for so long, but it was nice to have my house back once they all left. My first thought upon their departure was this: Thank God I can now strip down to my underpants.

* The Wife's first thought after their departure was -- wait for it -- "I hope my husband doesn't strip down to his underpants."

* My neighbor's first thought: "Why is that guy wearing only his underpants?"

* I got a Wii this week. It has a bowling game that is fairly realistic, though it's lacking the smoke, the stale beer and the big, rowdy guys in the next lane. And my balls don't go in the gutter nearly enough.

* This ad pretty much kept me from buying a Wii Fit.

* I got my Wii at just about the typical time for one of my technology purchases: Right after everybody else got sick and tired of theirs.

The Child Wake-Up Theorem

I need to talk about a serious problem that every parent faces. It's a problem that they don't tell you about in parenting books or in seminars or in the media. Nobody talks about it, because they know the moment they say something about it, you'll take a vow of celibacy to avoid having any children -- which, by the way, is the same reason nobody talks about potty training to would-be parents.

I'm talking about the fact that kids never, ever sleep in when you want them to.

This is the Child Wake-Up Theorem: The likelihood that a child sleeps in decreases the more that child's parents want them to sleep in.

I had to wake both of my kids up this morning. They slept in because I didn't want them to. The Boy had a bus to catch, which provides me with a nice, stressful deadline, which is just what I need in the morning. (For those of you who do not know, I'm what one would call a "night person." And being a "night person" makes me "grumpy" in the mornings. Ergo, a deadline makes it worse.)

The Sequel was relatively easy to wake up. I just lift him from the bed and he is virtually helpless, especially when I'm an uncomfortable ride because I'm jogging from one room to the next trying to get everything done before I have to go to work.

The Boy is not so easy. When he decides it's time to sleep in, it frequently takes a series of pulleys and a team of big horses to extract him from bed. And you'd better make sure that the straps are on tight, because the skinny little thing will find a way out of them if you don't.

This never fails. When I need them to wake up, they sleep in. When I want them to sleep in, which is on most weekends, they insist on getting up as early as humanly possible, assuming they went to bed in the first place, so they can get their full day's worth of shouting and jumping and laughing and crying and leaping upon Dad's sensitive body parts.

I should be used to this by now, for I've had offspring for five years. But my body still expects to sleep in on weekends and on holidays and I feel cheated when I don't get to.

(By the way, I also feel cheated when I have to wear nice clothes to work on Friday, when we normally get to wear jeans; maybe I could just change whenever my dressy-uppy meeting is over ...)

So when The Boy or The Sequel wakes me up early on a weekend, he reduces me to a whimpering mass of humanity, a sad spectacle for anybody who holds fathers in high regard. I do what comes naturally -- I whine, I cover my head with the pillow, and I dive underneath the covers, all the while begging the kids to please, please, for the love of all that's right in the word go ... back ... to ... sleep.

But it never happens, and I'm afraid it never will. It's our curse, as parents, to this fate.

So maybe I should get to bed.

Waiting for an honest Christmas letter

Every year, we send an annual Christmas letter to all of our friends, family, and people we barely know who somehow landed on our Christmas card list even though we haven't seen them in 12 years and we don't like them. As we say around here, nothing says, "We're thinking of you" quite like a generic, hastily-written form letter.

I've been known to fib a few times in our Christmas letter, mostly because our lives are so colossally dull that I have no choice. Seriously, who wants to read about me painting the bedroom or taking a trip to Cereal City in Battle Creek, Michigan?

(I actually did tour that place one year when we lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, back in our DINK days when we could take unplanned weekend trips; aaaaah, those were the days, except for the trip we took to Toledo where we -- and I'm not kidding about this -- turned around and went home almost immediately.)

But despite that occasional fib (this year DD met the Queen of England and was recruited by the CIA for a top-secret mission; it's classified and we can't tell you the details but the initials are W.M.D.) most of our letters are filled with benign, mostly positive news. And in fact, this year's letter didn't even include one of our biggest stories of the year, mostly because we didn't think that our family members really wanted to hear how I underwent The Anti-Child Procedure.

(That's odd, because I wrote about said procedure in this blog; so I'm afraid to tell family and friends, but perfect strangers are OK.)

And most letters are just like mine. Some are written by cats or grandkids, and a few include some real sad news or medical problems, but for the most part they're all positive, some of them disgustingly so. One letter we got from a person every year was so annoyingly upbeat that I had to resist the temptation to burn the letter, bury the ashes and then stomp on the little burial mound while shouting "DEATH TO BAD CHRISTMAS LETTERS!!!"

On the other hand, some go into too many details. "This was a great year! I'm happy to say that the hairy moles in the shape of the big dipper have all been removed from my back, and the procedure to remove the corns from my feet was also successful. And the rash near my genitals turned out to be just an allergic reaction to my new laundry detergent. And speaking of that region, Viagra works wonders!"

Here's what I'd like to see in my mailbox: A brutally honest Christmas letter, but without the gory surgical details. (And by the way, the following example is COMPLETELY MADE UP; any similarities, perceived or real, between this and real situations is coincidental ... Mom.)

"This year my kids drove me up the wall so bad that I went and hugged the urologist who gave me a vasectomy. I also spent large amounts of money on hockey and baseball equipment for my kids because I'm living vicariously through them in an effort to make up for my own perceived childhood shortcomings. I spent lots of time playing solitaire at work and got a substandard review so I blamed it on my boss to everybody I know and then started looking for another job on the side, using company equipment. I also spent the year bidding up items on eBay for fun but then got busted when I accidentally bought a collection of Barry Manilow LPs."

Alas, this is probably just a fantasy. Then again, this IS the season of miracles.

That's right: A post about Tiger Woods -- sort of

I was making breakfast on Sunday when The Wife asked me a question that nearly made me choke on my aebleskivers.

"Is something going on with Tiger Woods?"

What?

"Is something going on with Tiger Woods?"

Wait ... You mean you don't know?

"Uh ... no."

The fact that The Wife succeeded in getting to last Sunday without hearing about Tiger Woods and his dalliances tells you two things:

1. My wife officially lives in a cave. (Our house kind-of looks like a cave; it's gray and a lot of it is underground, but I'm actually talking about a figurative, avoid-lots-of-media type cave.)

2. She hates golf and deliberately avoids any story with the words "Tiger" or "Woods" in it (which would be a real problem if we lived near a forest in India or Mongolia, but so are I'm glad to report that she hasn't missed any warnings about tigers wandering the woods in our suburban county park).

And by the way, when I say that The Wife "hates" golf, I don't mean that she just generally dislikes it. I mean that she hates it the way a normal person hates being stabbed with a rusty knife. I don't golf, mostly because the pants scare me, but if I were to change my mind and take up the sport she'd be liable to beat me with a 9-iron. And my head would probably hit the green in two.

I know only enough about golf to make me dangerous. I know it involves guys cursing and breaking things as they try to get a small white ball to land somewhere near a not-much-bigger hole. And I also know that gophers are somehow involved and that mentally ill groundskeepers routinely use heavy explosives to get rid of them.

But I know more than The Wife, and so when she stumbles across a vague golf reference in one of the unfunny comics she reads every day, she turns to me and ask. So when I don't know the answer, which is often enough, I usually just make something up based upon what I remember from Caddyshack.

Where am I going with this? Oh yeah, my wife hates golf, and as a result she managed to avoid hearing about the Tiger Woods affair -- or affairs -- until just now. Which, the more I think of it, is a good thing. Perhaps I'll start hating golf, too, so I can avoid stories about Tiger Woods. Because otherwise my only other option is to throw my TV out the window and cancel my newspaper subscription and talk my boss into canceling the Internet. None of that would work, either, because I'd still find out by osmosis. I now know more about Tiger Woods' love life than my own.