Bracing For My 40s

By the time this week ends, I'll be 40, so it was fitting that I spent one of my final, 30-something days in a dentist's chair with a mouth stuffed full of a pink, gum-like mold while drooling all over my chest.

There is no point at which you look dignified while drooling. It's impossible. The assistant helping me said that, "This is totally normal," but then she left the room for several minutes and I swear I heard guffawing coming from the direction where she walked. But at least I got some practice on drooling etiquette, which was good because I expect that the amount of time I spend involuntarily secreting saliva shall increase gradually from here on out.

But I wasn't sitting in the chair on Monday for drool practice, I had a purpose: I'm getting braces -- well, the expensive, invisible kind sold only to vain adults such as myself who absolutely refuse to wear the metal kind, having remembered the sheer amount of grief I'd given braced friends way back in junior high. I certainly wouldn't want perfect strangers to know that I'm a middle-aged man who finally decided to get his teeth straightened, which makes me wonder why I'm writing this in a blog post.

(I know why: Nobody actually reads this thing. So my secret is perfectly safe.)

I've always had crooked teeth, which may explain why so many people think I'm from the British isles despite my Minnesotan accent. But I'm also cheap, and decided to live with a set of teeth that looks like its been placed there by a Coachella concert-goer, rather than drop a few thousand dollars that could be better spent on worthless junk. Then, one day, my dentist said that I'd lose a tooth if I didn't get braces, and my fear of losing a tooth overcame my frugality.

(As an aside, I also bite my tongue a lot, which might have something to do with my misshapen teeth; at least I hope so, because biting one's tongue really, really sucks. You can only provide a muffled scream because your tongue is injured and your hand reflexively covers your mouth to comfort it, and so you're reduced to a violent shaking of the head. I also stamp my feet for emphasis. As a result, I either look like I'm having a nervous breakdown or I'm jamming to Metallica.)

I realized that being an adult getting braces would take some getting used to, because during my two orthodontist visits now I've been the oldest person not sitting aside his teenage daughter. There were no private rooms in this office. Everything was out in the open, in one large room, so all these kids kept staring at me, giving me odd looks.

I'm used to the looks, being the uncle of a handful of nieces who are either teenagers or who exited teenagerdom within the last few years. But I still felt really weird, and everybody there knew that I felt weird, because the employees were all just a little too nice to me -- like they were pitying me for not getting braces when you're supposed to get braces, as a teenager, or they pitied my decades-long stubbornness. There, there. It's OK. We'll take your money, too.

I don't have the braces yet. A computer is currently scanning my mold so it can design several sets of braces that will gradually move my teeth into position over the next two years. And then I'll have straight teeth when I turn 42. Just in time for me to begin losing them.

Toddler Speech: It Keeps a Parent Going

The Sequel is learning to talk, or at least I think that he is, because some of the random babbling sounds like words I actually speak. There's "bah bah" (bye bye, which he cheerfully says every time I leave, as opposed to screaming when his mom leaves) or "bah bah" (the sound a sheep makes) or "bah" (bear) and then "bah" (book) and "bah" (hey, look at me pointing in this random direction while saying "bah!").

Of course, he says "Mama" and "Dadda," though he says "Mama" a heck of a lot more and sometimes he says it when he's looking straight at me, which for only the briefest moment makes me question my gender, because maybe he knows something I don't. You can get him to quack like a duck ("Ack!) or bark like a dog ("UUFF!"), roar like a lion ("RAAA!") or moo like a cow, and thus he becomes something of a trick pony whenever guests are around, because nothing is more impressive than animal sounds. He also says "Ah-Gah" for alligator and "BAY-bee" for, well, you know.

He also knows his brother's name, which is Owen, but which he pronounces "O-muh." That sounds suspiciously like the word he uses for Elmo, or "Uh-muh," which makes me wonder whether he likens his brother to a red muppet with a squeaky voice. (As an aside, we have no idea how he got so into Elmo -- he has not once watched television; he doesn't have an Elmo stuffed doll and we've never read to him an Elmo book; I'm telling you, these kids find out about these characters by osmosis).

In fact, he learns new words all the time, which will begin what is officially the most adorable period of a human life, bar none. A toddler learning to speak is powerfully cute, enough to turn even the most hardened human into a big pile of jelly. It's this period, in fact, that confirms the entire reason we have kids in the first place, which is a good thing because otherwise the toddler years completely suck.

The kid has the power of mobility, but no power to understand that his life could end in a split second. So, while out on our driveway, there is nothing but my own outstretched and frantic arms to keep him from running out into the street after the ball he just rolled there. He also has a built-in, male mischievous streak, so he looks to see if I'm not looking, then darts out toward that forbidden street.

Inside the supposed safety of the home, he has climbed the ladder to his brother's bunk bed, only to be rescued, prompting us to remove said ladder and temporarily relocate The Boy to the bottom bunk. The Sequel did take a tumble off another ladder, this to a three-foot tall slide. He needed about a nanosecond to get up there, which I guess is what we get for blinking.

He gets into cupboards and drawers and makes off with items he's not supposed to have, so that shoe you thought was by the door is now in a pile of clothes on the other side of the room. Or the keys you smartly left on the coffee table have been relocated to another part of the house. So you have to watch every item in the house to ensure that it is not within toddler reach, lest it be moved or chewed or slobbered upon or tossed or, most likely, some combination thereof.

As a veteran of one child's toddler years, I know enough to store most things in a crow's nest several stories above my home that can be accessed only through a scan of my eyeball. The Boy does not, and so he often leaves items that are either very important to him or of choking size within reach of his younger brother.

All of it forces a parent to be constantly vigilant, but I knew I'd have to do that when I signed up for this parenting business years ago. What bothers me more is the smirk. I tell The Sequel, "Please don't yank on that power cord," but much louder, and he simply looks back, smirks, and then pulls the power cord anyway.

I haven't even come to the meltdowns or the random, unexplained crankiness or the waking at least one hour before your body lets you get up.

But then he starts with his babbling or his little toddler words and then I completely forget whatever it was that drove me nuts in the first place. If only they could keep that cuteness through their teenage years.

On Being A (Temporarily) Single Dad

Contrary to popular opinion, I do not consider being by myself with the two boys for two and a half days to be a fate worse than death. There are plenty of other fates I consider worse than this, like being forced to watch a Meg Ryan movie or to listen to my wife's choice of "music" for longer than 10 minutes. And besides, I like my kids. They're developing my sense of humor. That's a good thing, even if the idea periodically sends my wife huddling in a fetal position in the corner.

Still, I might have loaded up on Tums and Rolaids and Prilosec and lots and lots of sweet, sweet liquor in the days leading up to The Wife's trip to New Orleans, where she's "speaking at a conference." I guess that's what people call "staying up all night celebrating my temporary childlessness" these days.

And numerous people in that time also kept looking at me as if they knew that a meteor was about to land on my head. They act as if I'm about to face the firing squad, which explains why people keep offering me cigarettes. Some are kind enough to offer their home for a specific period of time. But mostly, I get stuff like this: "You're going to be with the kids all by yourself? All by yourself? You're DOOMED. But then again I'm kind-of surprised you've lived this long to begin with ..."

I don't think The Wife gets this reaction when I leave town.

The truth is, it's easy taking care of two kids at the same time on your own, so long as you keep your expectations low, and you have a plan. Here, for instance, is mine:

Eat every meal outside the house. Nothing is harder than cooking while a needy toddler is in your care, unless that toddler is also suffering from a fit of curiosity. I swear The Sequel would crawl into a fully-heated oven if given the opportunity. Plus, cooking creates all those nasty dishes that have to be painstakingly placed into the dishwasher. Who wants to do that? I'm letting my local restaurateurs do the cooking for me.

Go to work as usual. Thank you, employer, for giving me a wonderful, eight-hour break today.

Track meet time! The way I figure, if I keep the kids running and biking and climbing for most of their awake time, they'll not only get valuable exercise, they'll be completely wiped out -- meaning they'll sleep more. And a sleeping kid is an easy kid.

In fact, I think that staying out of the house is just a good idea, in general. Just like cooking food leads to dirty dishes, keeping kids in the house results in a disaster area. Our house is clean roughly 1.5 seconds a day -- that's the time between the completion of the cleaning job and the moment the kids turn it into an aftermath shot from the movie Twister. At least that's according to my wife. I'm a guy and don't notice such things until I step on something squishy.

Tranquilizers. Lots of them.

Visits to relatives. Hey, those people actually want to spend time with my kids. Why not give them the chance? That's what they're for, isn't it?

Don't invite anybody over. Yes, they might help. But they'd also see the state of my home during this three-day childcare odyssey. I'll go it alone, thanks.

At the Easter Egg Scrum

In case you missed it, Sunday was Easter, the day we celebrate Jesus' resurrection by glorifying a rabbit who breaks into homes and litters them with vandalized eggs. What? Those stupid rabbits aren't causing me enough grief eating my flowers and digging holes in my yard, now they have to burglarize my home and fill it with cholesterol and sugar that I will at some point be forced to eat? Stupid rabbits.

We took our boys, and one of The Boy's friends, to an "Easter Egg Hunt" over the weekend. An Easter Egg hunt is not really a "hunt" at all, unless you do your hunting at the zoo. It's more like an Easter Egg Scrum, because all the eggs are placed on the ground, with the kids held off by a rope or police tape or nothing at all. They are then told to "go," sometimes by some dude in a bunny suit, and then all the kids run toward the plastic eggs, fighting to get as many in their basket and sometimes wrestling with their fellow egg "hunters" like a group of rugby players, only more violently. Rugby players are wimpy pacifists compared to kids at an Easter Egg scrum.

We went to two of them, actually, because I'm insane. The first one was at church, and there was no bunny, thankfully (probably because my bunny hatred is well known and they fear what would happen if me and a bunny, even a fake one, are in the same room for any stretch of time; or maybe the church just agrees with me that bunnies are evil, especially grown-ups dressed in bunny suits).

Afterward, The Wife looked at the clock and said, "We could go to the other hunt." There was, indeed, another Scrum being held across town, but we hadn't originally planned to go because we didn't think we'd have time to go to both, and because two Easter Egg scrums in one day is completely unnecessary. But we're talking about me, and I'm regularly inflicted with temporary bouts of brainlessness, a problem that has increased exponentially in the past 5 years, 9 months (which for some reason is the same amount of time I've been a parent; coincidence? Damn right it's not).

So I sped across town, breaking various traffic laws in an effort to make Scrum No. 2. It was packed, probably because it was above freezing and it wasn't snowing -- a combination that, in Minnesota, is sure to lure a massive crowd to any outdoor event involving children. We parked two blocks away, and I held the hands of the two 5-year-olds in my charge and led them at breakneck speed to the park to attend the scrum.

They both got a small number of eggs, each filled with jellybeans. They also got a small prize, in this case a tiny, blue flashlight that broke within about 15 seconds. The Sequel also got some plastic, candy-filled eggs himself, but we'll mostly eat all of his candy because we're parents and we can do that and he won't remember us stealing his candy, anyway.

We also colored real eggs this weekend, which means I'll be eating egg salad sandwiches all week because I'm the only human being in this house who doesn't run away screaming at the thought of eating hard-boiled eggs, which makes one question why I routinely OK the use of hard-boiled eggs come coloring time (answer: please refer to the temporary brainlessness comment, above).

Some day, when my kids are grumpy teenagers who want to do nothing but send text messages (or whatever it is they'll be doing by then -- maybe sending holographic images of themselves), then I'll miss all of this. I'll miss the overabundance of candy and the egg scrums and even the week of endless egg salad sandwiches. But I won't miss the Easter bunny. Stupid bunny.