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.

Oh Dorkmas Tree

The Wife and I have a minimalist view of decorating. Most of our walls are white and have few photos and we're in an ongoing debate over the value of curtains. When we painted an accent wall in our basement red two years ago the governor of Minnesota seriously considered holding a press conference marking the event.

But we make an exception at Christmas, as if we release our inner Elsie de Wolfe for one month out of the year. (That said, it's not as if this inner Elsie has the same skills as the influential 18th century designer whom I hadn't heard of before I Googled "famous interior designers" for this post; we still pretty much suck at interior decorating, but with everything loud and bright this season it's not that decorating for this time of year is especially difficult.)

We also begin early -- I start the decorating the moment the last bit of stuffing is unceremoniously crammed into a cheap plastic container and imprisoned into the refrigerator until Christmas. When your home's major design element is a Playmobil pirate ship and an infant's toy piano, the arrival of a tree and twinkling lights and fake garland is refreshing. That inner Elsie is just dying to get out.

I have to get a big one, because I still remember the old episode of The Waltons where they got a tree so big they poked a hole in the roof -- I've been shooting for that goal ever since. We get the wood trees, the versions that emerge under candy-cane colored tents on abandoned lots every November. We like the wood trees because we love having our carpet coated with pine needles until July. And I love scratching the roof of my van and getting my hands coated with enough pine tar to require surgical removal. And I really love the annual argument with my wife titled, "Is the Tree Straight?" It goes like this:

ME (doing serious damage to my back by bending underneath the tree for hours all while wondering, "Why can't she do this?"): Is it straight?

WIFE (clearly tired of holding the dang tree): Yes. Yes it's straight. Like an arrow. Or a compass. Now can we get on with my life?

ME (after spending several hours and numerous cracked knuckles trying to twist the screws in the tree stand): Hey, that's not straight! (Insert numerous cusswords here, then follow them with a nice gripefest between husband and wife.)

THE BOY: Mama, why are we going to the hospital?

WIFE: Because I accidentally shoved the tree down Daddy's esophagus and now it's stuck.

THE BOY: I hope he gets the same room he did last year.

This year's tree decorating required a bit more skill than usual, because this year's home includes a crawling, standing infant just tall enough to wreak considerable havoc upon any poorly placed Christmas ornaments. As you might imagine, a tree filled with lights and shiny, dangling objects is irresistable to a curious infant eager to find shiny objects he can stick into his mouth. But it's not the ornaments I'm worried about, but the tree -- a tree toppling upon my youngest would not make for a quality holiday season.

We do have some breakable ornaments, and most of them have already broken. Those that haven't been reduced to a fine layer of dust at the bottom of our ornament storage box get put toward the top of the tree. The ugly, non-breakable ornaments go toward the bottom. And then the whole tree is anchored to the wall because I'm really paranoid, which is what happens when you've had Christmas trees in homes occupied by toddlers and cats.

While my paranoia kept the two cats I used to have from taking down the tree, I've seen it happen. I was in fifth grade. I spend the night at a friend's house, and the cat repeatedly -- and I mean repeatedly -- kept knocking over the tree, all night long. Everybody woke up. The mom lifted the tree back up, grumbled about "that damn cat" and then everybody went to bed. Ten minutes later the cat did it again and the family repeated the process. Eventually, they quit putting the tree back up. Ever since, I've viewed cats as killers of Christmas trees. And that family as total idiots.

How to liven up your Thanksgiving shindig

I'm going to spend Thanksgiving like most of you: Stuffing my face surrounded by people who drive me crazy.

Truthfully, I like my family members, but most of our holiday gatherings are dull affairs that involve mostly child watching. We could venture downstairs to where I keep my television so we could watch football, but people are usually too full of turkey and cranberry sauce to get up off their chairs and, besides, who wants to watch the Detroit Lions play, anyway?

(Every year I wonder why anybody in their right mind would let the Lions play every year on Thanksgiving in front of a national TV audience. What is the NFL trying to do, make everybody in the U.S. barf at the same time?)

Occasionally, somebody will go crazy and break out a group game, and then at the end somebody will note that this year's event was successful because nobody began snoring in the midst of the festivities.

This year I aim to change that, and have come up with a few ideas to liven up the Thanksgiving feast. And, because this blog is, above all things, a source of important information, I'm sharing them here so you ccan use any of these ideas at your own holiday event.

One word: Booze. The problem with most holiday meals is that they're non-alcoholic. I say inject every item with brandy, port, 150-proof vodka, moonshine or rubbing alcohol. Sure, everything will taste bitter, but by the time your meal is over the entire family is dancing on the table. (You may consider getting an extra-strength table if you plan on doing this.) And nobody will care one bit that your turkey was dry and that your stuffing tasted like soggy Wonder Bread. (Warning: You may want to avoid this if you plan on having any uncles at your party, to avoid the dreaded drunk uncle, which actually eliminates my celebration. By the way, I would not be the drunk uncle, as I don't drink and, besides, I earned the "creepy uncle" label long ago.)

See how quickly I can creep out my niece's boyfriend. Meh. This won't take long. I'll just show him this blog post.

Chair tossing contest. Some time ago, legendary Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight tossed a chair across the basketball court because, apparently, he was cranky. Why not replicate this at home? Sure, you may get your wife/mom/sister/aunt/uncle/boss really angry, but imagine the fun you'll have after you've tossed a chair from the living room past the dining room and into the kitchen while your cousin Earl hits the wall. BAAAHAHAHAHA! Take that Earl!

Stage diving. I did this in college with my roommates. One of us dived off the couch, and the rest of us caught the diver. We each took turns. We had a blast until one of us got smacked in the head, but I'm sure that won't happen to grandma if we replicated this. So I might give this a try.

Hey, why don't you watch a movie? Wait. Did I just put something totally obvious in here?

Slip n' slide. You might consider this a bad idea, given that I live in Minnesota and would put my guests in danger of hypothermia, but I'm thinking of doing this inside. And on the steps into the basement. (Hey, I have a sump pump; what could possibly go wrong?)

Rooftop skiing. Too bad we don't have any snow. This would be a great one. Maybe Christmas.

Bungee jumping. This might work. The top of my garage roof reaches two stories. We'd just need a particularly short bungee cord.

A rousing game of "Clean DD's Refrigerator." OK, I can't do this on Thursday because I already spent about five weeks clearing my fridge of the various life forms that had taken up residence while rediscovering that the inside of said appliance was actually white. (Who knew?) For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to reduce the risk that one of my sisters would open the fridge to find some heretofore unknown species screaming at her. But this would be a good idea for future holidays. Instead, maybe we could play a game of "Re-Organize The Garage" or "Replace The Roof," "Install My New Water Heater" or "Build Me A New Deck."

Entering the movie drought

In my pre-kid days, when The Wife and I had time and money and were not chained to a pair of cute but loud distractions, we went to the movies. A lot.

We like movies, but mostly we went because we couldn't think of anything else to do with all of our time and money and personal freedom.

"Uh, we can go to the movies or do absolutely nothing again."

"Let's go to the movies."

So when The Boy's arrival was imminent, all I could think of was how many movies we were going to try and fit in by the birth day.

(While we were trying to have kids, we, uh, made various efforts to avoid getting pregnant during March and April; officially, the reason was to avoid having a Christmas baby; unofficially, the reason was to ensure that we'd be able to see Return of the King in the theaters. That said, when it was evident that The Boy would be born in July, I prayed a time or two that he'd show up only after Spider-Man 2 was released. My prayers were answered, by the way, and I indeed dragged an extremely pregnant Wife to the movie's opening. She spent most of the time in the bathroom.)

Not surprisingly, this is one thing I miss: Seeing movies unencumbered. Yes, I have Netflix, a television and a comfortable couch. And yes, I don't miss cell phones and obnoxious teenagers and the fact that I have to pawn the family jewelry to be able to pay for a night at the movies and a bag of popcorn. But I do miss the big screen, the pre-movie trivia, the clinically depressed theater staff and the decades-old unworking arcade games in the waiting area where the high scores are dominated by some dude named Ass. And the giant, in-theater movie posters. I miss them, especially because most movies hit their peak when the poster is made. I almost never want to see a movie as much as I do when I see the poster.

(A few movies hit their peak later, when the first trailer comes out; The most infamous of these was Godzilla, which years ago teased me with the single best trailer of all time, one before The Lost World, which showed Godzilla's big, green foot stomping upon the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex; I was hooked, and wound up being so disappointed several months later when I finally saw that horrific piece of cow dung that I've refused to see Matthew Broderick in a movie ever since.)

Going to movies these days is a chore, because we have to get baby sitters. And while we have a great baby sitter in the form of my niece, it still requires the expenditure of more money along with another layer of complex, advance planning. And I'm cheap and lazy. So we don't go to many movies. And I'm hardly alone. Parents of young kids routinely say things like, "I haven't seen a non-child movie in the theaters since Ben Hur. That was back in the days before the 'Talkies' came out."

Still, the temptation to see a movie is great, to the point where I actually wondered aloud whether I should see a movie -- gulp! -- by myself.

I have no problems with people seeing movies by themselves. I have a problem with me watching a movie by myself, mostly because I can't help thinking that a single, lone, middle-aged male watching a movie in a dark theater is just really creepy. As if to confirm this, when I told my wife I was thinking of taking myself to a movie that she didn't want to see, her first reaction was "Don't do anything creepy."

What does she think I'm going to do?

ME: Uh, dear, I got arrested.

WIFE: What for now???!?

ME: Indecent exposure.

WIFE: I thought you were at the movies!

ME: I was.

WIFE: And I thought you were watching "A Christmas Carol."

ME: Uh, I was.

And at that thought, no movie for me.