I’m not cut out for this shit

          I’m not cut out for this shit

Girl Scouts were tossing out sales pitches to gullible customers as we excited Sam’s club. Behind the stacks of cookies sat two of the scouts’ mothers collecting the money and no doubt gossiping amongst themselves about the other girls moms that weren’t there. In an instant, recollections of my future as a father to a little girl flashed across my cerebrum. I told Lilly, “I will never do that.”



With immediate understanding showing on her face she said, “Yeah right, you have to.”

“No way man, I’m sure there will be plenty of go-getter moms around that will be more than willing to take charge of everything that our kids are involved in. They can manage the festivities for the kids.”

“Yeah, absolutely there will be, but you will have to help.”

“Help, okay maybe I will drop her off at the official den mothers cookie house, but hanging out with a bunch of girl scouts, and in public, is one barrier I would rather not break. Let that glass ceiling stay intact.” The pressure on my veins was pulsating as a wave of new realizations hit me of what being a father to a girl would mean. No, let me clarify that; of what being a stay at home dad to a girl will entail. Because being a stay at home dad, having to coordinate car pools, parties, girls scout meetings, sitting in public with all the moms, are things I would bet that most working fathers rarely do. I know, I know, it’s been done before……but I am afraid…..very afraid.

In Which Some Old Crusty Hag Mistook Me For Someone Called Mr Mom

          In Which Some Old Crusty Hag Mistook Me For Someone Called Mr Mom.

Taking our seat in the large waiting room of my doctors office I stuck Mr Pants’ cup of juice in his mouth, flipped open his book and handed it to him, and unzipped his baggie of pretzels in hope of having a continuous and unhindered flow of paraphernalia to keep his mouth and hands occupied at all times, then I firmly secured my arm around his waist with a death grip only impervious to 17 month old kids, for a few minutes anyway.

Why didn’t I see what I sat next to before I sat there? Wasn’t the bright red lipstick that was far overshooting the edges of her thin and fragilely wrinkled lips to make them appear as if they were actually not 80 years old and deflated, enough of a red flag? Clearly I missed the misplaced purple and permed wig that sat at an odd angle upon her crusty scalp, clearly. The black knew high leggings which didn’t quite make it under her moo-moo were enough to cause me turn around, if I had only seen them in time. If I had noticed these warning signs, I would surely not have sat right beside the old flee bag.



Immediately upon planting my butt firmly in the chair while I was fortifying the boy’s postion she said in an old raspy voice nearly soft enough to pretend that I didn’t hear it as she cackled, “You’re a Mr Mom huh, heh heh heh.”

I let that hang in the air as I didn’t look up at her as I slightly nodded and faintly released a faux smirk upon my face. Apparently I was so subtle she didn’t think I heard her and repeated again, “You playing Mr Mom?”

I couldn’t ignore her twice, considering our close proximity. I looked up at her with a blank face and softly said, ‘yeah.’ But I hesitated. I am usually quick off my feat. Quick come backs and snide sarcastic comments and funny one liners often come readily at my disposal in social settings. But not this time. My brain was on overload from only sleeping three hours the night before due to stressing over if we should buy a house or merely move out of our apartment to rent a house while continuing to wait for the housing market to bottom out. It was also Mr Pants’ bedtime, and consequently mine also as I put myself down when he goes down. So I was in a fog of parenthood at the time. So I froze in search of a comeback. But not just any comeback, no. I was in search of something that would let her know I didn’t agree with the term Mr Mom. I needed something which on the surface seemed to be cordial, and yet after the exchange of courteous smiles, only then would she realize that I just shunned her remarks. The kind of comeback that hits you with a bad aftertaste, minutes later. I’ve said them several times before. More than once when someone calls me Mr Mom I would say, ‘Oh no, your confusing me for someone else, I’m his dad.” And twice people have said, “Oh it’s so good of you to babysit your son today”, or “You’re babysitting today?” Of which I always reply with something to the effect of, “Yeah, I babysit full time….without pay.” I have a good one that I haven’t been able to use yet, and it goes like this: If a working aged woman were to call me a Mr Mom I would ask her if she works, when she replies with a yes, I would say, “Oh, so you’re Mrs Dad?” But this old coot was so far over the hill, she should have been tagged and buried in the bog at the bottom. The only work she does full time is doctor visits.

So I sat there for several seconds in search of a rude comment to make. And yet it never came. So I just nodded my head again out of courtesy, then said, “Yep, a lot of dads are doing it these days.” How lame. How completely and utterly lame was I. A lot of dads are doing it….bah. I could do better than that.

Her gaze did not waver from my boy. But she was a real eye bleeder this one. I don’t usually have anything against old timers, except when I’m behind their car. But this lady was just gross and creepy looking. I certainly did not want to get stuck beside her as she cooed at my boy, it might have given him nightmares. And I was beyond tired and could not maintain a courtesy smile for the next thirty minutes. So I quickly jerked my head up and looked over at the receptionist desk, as if I had just remembered something I forgot to do over there. Then I said something under my breath to the affect of, ‘Oh yeah, I need to ask them…..’ and let my voice fade off into silence. Quickly tossing all my boys crap into my bag as he yelled at me for prying his juice from his mouth, I scooped him up and ran from the old coot, stopping by the desk to maintain authenticity for merely a second, then sitting down again on the opposite end of the room. Free at last, free at last.

In Which Pigs Can Fly

          In Which Pigs Can Fly

Pigs are flying. Right through the air and into our noses, straight into the blood stream where they reprocreate and replenish their host with more flying Swine. So what’s next, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, you know, all that biblical shit. Except that merely a fraction of the swine infected people are dying compared to the regular seasonal flu, go figure. But what can one do when the hoopla surrounding this has nearly overrun the media and caused a frenzy unlike anything I’ve seen in recent history. So we go and inject the swine into our bodies in hopes of fighting off the flying pigs. I am not thrilled about getting the vaccine, but I am not completely opposed to it. We do have an unborn girl on the way and a 17 month old son that are more susceptible than we. The media has done a successful job of scaring the shit out of us. So I reluctantly did it.



Upon driving up to the toll booth the attendant stepped out of his shack and I said, “We’re here for the Swine.”

“You’re here to get vaccinated?” He asked.

“Yep.”

“Okay, hold out your arm,” he asked me as he reached back into his booth to grab something.

Caught off guard and in the moment I actually lifted my arm off the door rest and hung it out the window towards him. When he turned back he laughed as if he just heard the funniest joke. He smacked me on the arm twice as he said, “Silly goose, I’m not going to give you the shot big guy.”

It took me a second to process that one and I saved face by saying, “Obviously, I thought you were going to give me a wrist band.” Then he pointed and showed us where to park.

From the parking lot leading into the convention center was a temporary path constructed out of cones and yellow caution tape. It appeared as if we were entering a crime scene. As we followed the yellow taped path two dudes wearing red vests stopped us, and we finally got the green wrist bands I thought the gay toll booth guy was going to give me. My boy did not get wrist banded without putting up a proper fight.

There were three cops at the entrance, supposedly for crowd control, and yet there were no crowds. No mobs of people as we had anticipated. No three to five hour lines such as we’ve seen all over the news about these vaccine stations across the country. The makeshift yellow tape crowd control paths to the swine were useless. Apparently someone forgot to send the memo out.

There were around fifty people inside the convention center, all filling out the paperwork or getting their vaccines at the multiple booths set up. We didn’t have to wait at all. We filled out the forms and walked right up to the vaccine table. Recently, at a local pharmacy they were administering vaccines. The line wrapped around the block and was literally a three hour wait. I know that most doctors have not yet been given the vaccines, so people are still lining up at these weekend setups to get it. But there was hardly anyone there this weekend. The lady behind the table told us they had 7,000 vaccines, and they still had most of them left, and this was already in the afternoon. But these things are only advertised if you check the government websites directly. Otherwise you wouldn’t know about it. And, this one was not listed on the LA county site. We happened to look on the Long Beach cities website to find out about it. I think perhaps that is why it had a small turnout. Their advertising was pathetic, and subsequently a lot of people that currently need the shot, simply don’t know where to get it. They have been extremely slow to distribute the vaccines, and when they do you either wait in a line all day, or you don’t know where to go. Pathetic. But hey, it saved us a long wait.

As I handed my forms to the lady behind the fold out table she looked up at me and asked, “What’s wrong with you. Are you sick or something?”

I construed my face in bewilderment and said, “No, why, do I look sick?”

“It’s for the young, elderly and the sick, right now.”

“Well as you can see,” I said as I pointed to my wife, my son and unborn fetus, “I live with a baby and we currently have one on the way, so we thought it a good idea that I get vaccinated also.” As if that wasn’t smack you right upside the head obvious. She waved us past and pointed to the vaccine tables behind her.

I asked for the nasal spray vaccine. She sprayed it into each nostril as I held my head back. All I was thinking was, did I use my nose hair trimmers recently, I hope so, oh well she won’t mind, she’s old anyway, and I hope they don’t recycle these things. After she injected my nostrils with the Flying Swine, I snorted deeply and felt the bitter drip hit the back of my throat. I immediately recalled the last time I had been in that convention center….. Rewind to ’97, I was there with a mob of friends smoking weed all day at the Bob Marley Fest. It also happened to be the first time I tried coke, and it certainly was not the last, as those evil drugs tend to go. As I snorted down the swine flu vaccine and it hit my throat I could almost feel the long past bitter, numbing, and addicting cocaine-drip gag me back in ’97. There I was using drugs to stay healthy, and the last time I was in that building I was using drugs that were the antagonist of health. A shudder rung through my body, the lady noticed as I said, ‘gross’. She nodded her head. Although, it was virtually tasteless, and obviously painless without the penetrating needle. Not so easy for my boy though, he got a nice fat needle to the thigh. He cried for ten seconds or so, but quickly forgot it ever happened.

After he was injected I asked the lady, "would there be any risk for him contracting the virus if I were to sneeze on him right now?"

"Why, are you about to sneeze," she asked sarcastically as my wife laughed nervously behind me. I always seem to embaress her when we're out in public and I open my mouth and release words to strangers.

"No. But considering that my nasal vaccine was a live version of the virus, and his is not. Aren't they more susceptible to the live virus, that's why they give them the dead one?" I asked.

"Well, yeah, I guess there might be a slight risk of sneezing it on him right after receiving it. Just keep your sneezes to yourself."

"Yeah, okay I'll do that."

Last week I watched John McCain and several other congressman cause an uproar on the floor concerning the lack of the vaccine availability. Only 30,000,000 vaccines have been distributed, 8 billion dollars allotted for it, and they need another 270,000,000 to go. By the time there’s enough to go around, everyone will have already come in contact with the Flying Swine. Way to go….that’s a perfect example of a government run health care at work.

Hot Dads Post Debut

          Hot Dads Post Debut

My first bonerfide Hot Dads post is up and ready to be scrutinized by the masses. I should let you know that it’s nearly as long as my psychology class essay at over 1,500 words. I would be doing my experiences an injustice if I were to cut them down to a mere few lines. Most of my posts are long, and I realize that may work against my blog. But I can’t bring myself to write stories without explaining them in full disgustingly graphic detail. I admit, even I sometimes skip a post on someone’s blog that I frequent if it’s really long. Often I just want a one liner to entertain me. But I’m better at story telling than one liners, so that’s how I write. And I don’t want to share with you that we went to the store, and the baby shit himself, and granny came over, and we snuggled into a big pile of family on the couch at the end of the day, and bore bore bore. I wait until I have something of substance, then I nail you in the face with it.

Striving to be a creative writer requires many words of descript and emotional insights. Take the following line, ‘Torrents of chunky vomit gushed forth from his mouth without prejudice or warning upon my unsuspecting face….’ And that’s only half the sentence. I could have simply said, ‘He puked all over my face.’ But where’s the fun…where’s the colorful story…and where’s the drama in that? There is none, so I use wonderful descriptive words and add my feelings in the mix to build character…depth, I suppose is what my brother the drama twinkie might call it. Then there’s this line later in the paragraph, ‘His nostrils were as mini fire hoses, two perfect streams of the nights garlic sautéed chicken dinner and apple juice came bursting forth upon me.’ Sure I could have said that ‘chunky puke spewed from his nose also.’ But that sucks. Our stories can be so much better than simply relaying what happened. We need to re-invent the scene, with words of descript so powerful you can almost taste it……mmmmmmm, garlic sautéed chicken and apple juice…. It just makes your mouth water thinking about it, doesn’t it?

I don’t write a journal here, I write stories. That is in part, why I often only post a few times a month. Because I wait until I have something substantial to post, something with spunk, either funny or revealing or shocking. Journals are fine, and I like to browse through the hundreds of parenting blog journals out there, but I’m in it for the glory, for the gushing diapers and vomitous mouths and lactating…..sorry I got carried off by the winds of sahd-dom. So just go check out my post. In fact, it’s one of my favorites. I wanted to keep it for my own blog here, but considering I was honored with being invited to the ranks of Hot Dads, and this week is my first post there, I offer it to the Hot Dads of the world.

Pregnancy Irrationalities

          Pregnancy Irrationalities

Lilly had become quite upset at me while standing at the checkout isle in the grocery store, for no apparent reason. Well, she had a reason, but it certainly didn’t warrant her tyrannical mental beating she bestowed upon me, the (near) innocent bystander. Perhaps I should have been a little more sensitive to her needs, but regardless, she went way overboard. She just started going off, not yelling, but irate just the same.

We debated the matter on the way home, to epic proportions. Completely playing out the scene again as if we were rehearsing for a cheap Lifetime drama. Going over every detail with a pair of tweezers. Effectively making the scenario into something it never should have been. Eventually we dropped it and unloaded the car.



That night, I sat down with my new book, one about children and how TV has been ‘proven’ to wrought their little brains. It’s actually a very informative book, written with common sense, and often challenging studies and pointing out their flaws and how they can be improved upon. She read the dust jacket. She began asking me why I hadn’t bought it earlier. About how we had talked about getting these types of books, and she wanted one when she was still pregnant. And why the hell I didn’t get one then, or when our boy was only six months old. Why did I wait so dam long. As if it was too late now, the boys older at 15 months, any damage we’ve done with the tv has done repairable damage to his little noggin. The earth is coming to end, our lives are forever altered. Doomsday sort of stuff.

“Don’t you think you should have started reading this stuff before we had him, to prepare for it? You know I like to prepare early for things.” Lilly said.

“Yeah, but I wanted to wait until now, because now is when I will apply it, that way I will remember it better and not forget it from reading it too early.”

She started in another tirade about how she couldn’t understand why I didn’t buy these kind of books a year ago.

“If you wanted it so bad why didn’t you just buy one? And anyway, this first kid is here to make all the mistakes on, the next one will turn out better for it.” Again, I try to defuse a situation with my humoristic sarcasm. Sort of an oxymoron I suppose, as sarcasm has a taste of anger in it.

She started getting crazy again. More doomsday scenarios about our kids brain. Something about his grey matter melting off because of my Xbox, I don’t know, by this point I was lost in a fog of dementia from the pregnant induced irrationality. Trying to see the light of day, but getting dragged deeper into the abyss of hormonal rage.

“Lilly, whats wrong with you!”

“I don’t know,” she said with a long drawn out mewl, somewhat of a sob, somewhat of a plea for help.

That was the perfect answer. Her answer flipped a switch in my rational male brain. I went from being angry and irritated and annoyed and just altogether frustrated with her irrationality. When I heard that It immediately changed my perspective on what was happening. Often with me I hold on to my anger, unable to release it after an altercation for hours, even days. But her admittance that she did not know what the hell had com over her tonight melted that all away in an instant. Her admitting that she was but a slave to her acting out, the completely and utterly irrationality of it all, just warmed my heart. The feeling was foreign to me at first, as it is not often that she will say something in the middle of one of our tirades that completely releases the tension, such as this. So when she did I didn’t know the feeling when I felt it. I took a few seconds to process what had happened. I wanted to stay angry and yell back, but it hit me. Holly shit, she’s openly acknowledging that she doesn’t know why she’s acting crazy. Which was just like saying, ‘sorry I’m acting completely crazy and irrational! And we both know it’s because of her raging pregnancy hormones.

“Ooohhhh.” I sounded like a school girl cooing in front of a baby. What could I do? All I could do was drop my jaw in wonderment, as I sit there for a brief moment mesmerized by her admittance, I was admiring her courage. “Give me a kiss.” “No!” “Come one, gimme a kiss!” “Nooo!”



On a side note. Because I receive all the comments to my wonderful posts in my email box, It’s nice to be able to reply to those comments right from my e-mail. Unfortunately, it seems that many people have their e-mail address hidden. I find it’s just easier to reply as soon as I read the comment, as opposed to then going back my blog and then replying. And I find it often starts an ongoing conversation through e-mail, which isn’t always practical in the comments section of the blog. I also talk dirty in e-mail, which isn’t kosher on the blog…. You’re missing out. So do this: edit your blogger profile, and the third check box down click on ‘Show my email address’, and you’re good to go. Try it, you’ll like it. Do it now.

Farewell Summer Buns

          Farewell Summer Buns

Ahh summer. How we will miss you. We hang out at the beach checking out the waves….


Chasing the tides…


Burying our glasses in the sand….


Getting my camera wet…


We go sailing…



And swim with the seals…


Ahh yes, we will surely miss summer. There’s something for everyone to do at the beach. My boy frolicking in the sand, banging his shovel and buckets and getting buried.


And checking out the baking buns. (Sorry Lilly, it was for the blog, merely for the blog. I didn’t even look at those while I was there. I only noticed them when I viewed the pics on my computer.)

Although, where I live it really doesn’t matter that summer is gone, it’s usually warm enough to go to the beach half the year anyway.