Water parked

     I am not in top physical condition. I don’t even think that I’m in moderate physical condition. I’m overweight. I never lost my baby weight. My wife did, but I have resigned myself to dad bod status. I’m also asthmatic, which certainly doesn’t help in the fitness after 40 department. Given this, our recent trip to an indoor water park for our daughter’s birthday proved to me that my current level of physical fitness is certainly lacking.

     Our daughter’s favorite part of the water park were the slides. There were different slides, each designed to convey a specific raft built for 2, 4, or up to 6 people. The slides were totally enclosed and were about five stories high. After climbing five flights of stairs while soaking wet and in bare feet for the sixth time, I didn’t know if I would make it another trip. Breathing was hard. As we reached the top, I thought that I saw the cold, bony fingers of Death beckoning me from deep within the darkness of the water slide. The slide had become the River Styx, and my innertube was about to ferry me across it.

     Preparing for my impending demise, my daughter and I situated ourselves on our raft. This one was an innertube built for two, like a figure 8 where the smallest person sat in the loop in the front, and the larger person tried to fit their butt though the loop in the back. My daughter, with mermaid-like prowess, swam under the tube, popped up through the hole, and hopped into her spot with ease. I attempted to sit in my spot but soon realized the tube was wider than my stride. I couldn’t simply step across it as I had intended. The nice, athletic, teenage attendant immediately recognized my conundrum and offered his advice, “Why don’t you try hopping into it, like try to jump across and land in it”. So, I did. I tried. I missed. I landed on the back edge of the tube which, as it turns out, is actually a rubber ejection seat. As I was completing a back-flip I heard the attendant shout, ‘You jumped too far”, as my daughter was chortling wildly. I landed face first in the water, and with my total immersion I was baptized as the founding member of The Holy Church of the Water Slide.

     Apparently, my symbolic rebirth allowed me the ability to get on the innertube without further embarrassment. As I lowered myself into the opening in the tube, my butt sank deeper than I thought it should. There was now a disparity in the weight distribution on the tube. My relatively light daughter was in the front half and my large rear end was in the back. My butt was now acting like the anchor of a boat headed for a waterfall. As the attendant shoved us toward our doom, my butt dragged the bottom until we reached the precipice of the slide. We were then sucked into the maelstrom and started our break-neck descent down five stories of looping water slide. My daughter was screaming and my butt was bouncing off of the bottom as we sped into the heart of the watery darkness.

     Moments later we shot out of the tube into the lagoon at the bottom. Once we hit the deeper water of the landing area my daughter fell through her hole in the front of the tube. She disappeared like she had been sucked into another dimension. Now that I was the only one on the tube, back I went. The tube flipped over backwards and I was re-baptized. Apparently the first one didn’t take.

As we dragged our soaked and beaten selves out of the water, she exclaimed that this was the best birthday ever.       

With great power comes an expensive power bill.

     My kids have superpowers. That’s the only way I can explain the feats of which they are capable. My daughter, who has been the focus of past writings, produces enough energy in a day to power the Death Star for several years. I vividly remember the moment she was imbued with her abilities; she was not quite a year old and we had gone outside to witness a partial solar eclipse. She stared skyward for a few moments with a wide-eyed curiosity, a stare that only a child whose mind is ready to be filled with all of the information they can possibly absorb, can have. Then, something happened; her eyes and face transformed from wide and innocent to pensive and discerning, as if she had just experienced an epiphanous manifestation of some great store of power and knowledge. I’m fairly certain that a craft from an alien civilization, one endowed with understanding and technology far superior to our own, was using the eclipse as cover while searching for a human in which to deposit powerful abilities. Their purpose, no doubt, was to test our mettle as a species and determine if our fragile form could handle such advanced physical and mental capabilities. They, in their great wisdom, did not, however, have the forethought to grant the parents of their great experiment the abilities to cope with those powers.

     My son, who is now a year old, unleashed his powers at a moment of pain and fury. He is teething and is currently working on a molar, which, judging from the time, effort, and discomfort he is experiencing to produce this particular tooth, must be burrowing into his head from another dimension. As I was getting him dressed one morning, he was visibly uncomfortable. His little fists were clenched in a way that looked like he was ready to waylay something with tiny, Kung-Fu fury. His eyes widened, his little mouth opened, and then he unleashed a sound that I had never before heard from man nor beast. Imagine if a velociraptor and a banshee performed a duet and broadcast it through that giant speaker in the beginning of Back to the Future that blew Marty McFly backward across the room and caused everything on the walls to fall. It was like that except louder and much higher pitched.  My head hurt for days after. It is now his favorite thing to do. His scream is so loud that it causes localized temporal distortions, and time actually folds in on itself in the immediate area of the shriek. For example, he awoke the other morning at 5am and thought it would be great fun to shriek until the paint peeled from the walls. After what appeared to be several hours of this grueling trauma, I checked the clock on the wall and only fifteen minutes had elapsed.

I hope they use their powers for the good of humankind. I would hate to be the dad responsible for the downfall of Earth. 

Chicken Butts and Other Lovely Things

     Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the ringmaster in a circus. Now imagine that both of your arms are tied behind your back and the sole member of your circus troupe is a small, psychotic alien who wants to devour the audience members, and it’s your job to stop it from happening. The alien moves with immeasurable speed and is completely unpredictable in all that it does; no thought or action follows conventional wisdom. Now imagine that as you’re putting everything you have into distracting the tiny, aggressive entity and trying to thwart its devious intentions, a stiff wind blows, ripping the circus tent from its foundation and sending it sailing into the distant horizon like a wayward shopping bag caught in the evening breeze. When you finally regain your senses and look about you, you realize you’ve been surrounded by an unflinching, remorseless army, akin to The Terminator when Skynet decided to obliterate humanity once and for all.

That’s rather how my weekend went.

     We’ve recently moved halfway across the country in a bid to provide a better life for our family. Living in Los Angeles with a young child and no real family support system (well, that and my somewhat neurotic tendencies) made life unnecessarily difficult. So, when an opportunity was presented to relocate to Fort Worth, Texas and be near my wife’s family (who fled L.A. fifteen years prior), we took it. Being near her family and having my family in Florida within driving distance would certainly provide us with both the extended family support system we’d been lacking, and a better overall quality of life. Sure, we would have to leave behind some great friends but life would be instantly better, right? Guess what? A four year old is a four year old no matter where they live. In fact, we found that moving halfway across the country and exposing our daughter to a new environment seemed to only heighten her mutant abilities.

Given our new proximity, my family came to visit for the weekend. Under normal circumstances, my daughter produces the energy necessary to bend space-time, but when she knows someone is coming over; add that energy level to the excitability of a tweaker who just stumbled across a No Country for Old Men sized score, and she reaches critical mass. The slightest shift in the wind could either cause a catastrophic meltdown or unleash a reaction of boundless energy not unlike what would be unleashed should the red supergiant, Betelgeuse, supernova.

The festivities started days prior to their arrival when my daughter decided that 2am would be a great time to check their progress.

“Daddy, are Grammy and Grandpa here yet?”

“(Snore, snort) Huh? Wha? No. Please go back to bed.”

“Why aren’t they here yet?”

“Because it’s 2am on Tuesday and they won’t be here until Friday night. Please go back to bed.”

“I’m not tired anymore.”

And she wasn’t tired again until the following Monday night.

     I know that her excited state attributed to her lack of sleep, and that lack of sleep caused my daughter’s behavior to degrade to more or less what one would expect from a drunken sailor on shore leave. The first morning my family was in town, we met them for breakfast at a local establishment (who is kind enough to allow us to return) wherein they serve pancakes the size of satellite dishes. My daughter loves pancakes, not so much for the pancakes themselves, but for the butter and syrup which accompany them. As her fluffy satellite dish was plunked down in front of her, she immediately went for the butter packets, as butter has been well established as being her favorite food. My father, while not at all a weak individual, is known for having a notoriously weak stomach. Witnessing my four year old daughter lick butter out of a shiny gold wrapper like some kind of Armageddon survivor looking for sustenance wherever it could be found, while at the same time seeing my Dad’s watery eyes and slightly green-tinged face elicited from me a muffled request that she please stop doing that unless she’d like to wear Grandpa’s omelette. Then came the maple syrup. The mere inhalation of the sucrose molecules wafting from the sticky, stainless steel boat of syrup was enough to drive her over the edge. It produced an instantaneous energy spike that caused her to literally run around the restaurant like a chicken with its head cut off. Well, figuratively, because she was a girl and not a chicken, and she still had her head. But she was running back and forth and bagoking like a chicken. Needless to say, breakfast quickly came to a close.

From that point on, the visit became a blur of increasingly inappropriate behavior. Some of the highlights include:

Randomly lifting her skirt and flashing her knickers.

Asking Grandpa, “Did you just fart?”

This wonderful exchange: “Hey Grammy, guess what?”

“What, sweetheart?”

“Chicken butt.”

And the absolute top prize goes to my daughter’s use of a backhanded compliment. She had been complimenting various accoutrements of Grammy’s wardrobe, when she arrived at Grammy’s purse. “Oooh Grammy, I like your purse.”

“Why thank you.”

“I’d like to open it up and poop in it.”

My wife and I were on opposite sides of the room at the time, and our daughter hadn’t reached the second ‘p’ in poop before we sprang into action. Grammy and Grandpa sat in utter awe of the ninja like reflexes my wife and I displayed as we swooped in perfect choreography, gathered the tiny offender and whisked her away for her correction. I descended the stairs to find Grammy and Grandpa still sitting in slight confusion regarding the preceding incident.

“What just happened,” My dad asked with a bewildered curiosity, “we don’t even know what she said.”

“Well,” turning to Grammy, “she said she wanted to open your purse and poop in it.”

The two erupted in uninhibited laughter.

If I threatened to poop in someone’s purse, I’m pretty sure I’d find myself either pummeled about the head and face with said purse, or thrown in jail as some sort of terrorist. I’d better check my backpack in the morning. 

Excuse Me, This Isn’t What I Ordered

I love to cook. I’ve been cooking most of my life and even did it professionally for a time. If I had to swear under penalty of death that I had a hobby, cooking would be that hobby. Naturally, when we learned we were going to have a child I had grandiose ideas of the foods we could make for our darling, little child who would, of course, enjoy my gastronomic ingenuity with all of the  sophisticated etiquette of a tiny, Emily Post. She would, with perfect use of her sterling silver utensils, take the tiniest nibble, gasp in awe, and exclaim in well cultured Received Pronunciation, “Oh, Daddy, this is the most delightful morsel I have ever tasted! I am in utter awe of your culinary abilities, and I am so proud to call you my father.”  I would then grin like some cartoon character as a bright, star-shaped sparkle flashed across my teeth accompanied by a chiming ‘ding’ sound effect, all  while I plated and slung servings of Baked Alaska to all of our closest friends like a fire-juggling card dealer. Everyone would cheer and applaud as old-timey flash bulbs exploded around us like miniature supernovas and photographers with fedoras and clunky cameras would jostle for the best vantage point to get a picture of the world’s greatest dad.

For the following months of my wife’s pregnancy, that naïve delusion infected my mind to the point that I was scoffing at the thought of buying baby food. Why should we? I can make it at home with all of that time and energy I’ll have. Baby food sweet potatoes are nothing more than pureed sweet potatoes…I can do that! I have a food processor! We can buy organic food and make it ourselves! It’ll be great! I’m amazing and I can do anything!!

Fool.

Then our daughter was born and a tiny, livid reality came clawing into our world. The ludicrous fantasies of becoming The Miraculous Artisanal Super Chef Dad that had so permeated my thoughts were quickly decimated in the nuclear heat of our tiny banshee’s screams. Survival was now the goal; any thoughts of cooking were hastily buried in a shallow grave somewhere in a misty valley deep within the recesses of my mind, and that valley was guarded by a screaming baby. Even adult interaction had become sparse. It was as though my wife and I were trapped in a purgatory that was oft visited by restaurant delivery drivers who were taken aback by my disheveled Castaway-esque appearance. With wide eyes and trembling accents, they would kindly refuse our invitations to come in and talk or be friends. The site of two sleep deprived individuals with fixed half-grins, glassy, blood shot eyes and the overall demeanor of escaped asylum patients who jerked and shuddered at the shriek of what sounded like a rabid Tasmanian Devil is enough to keep away all but those with the strongest of fortitude and constitution.     

Nowadays, however, cooking meals is again the norm; but our daughter wants nothing to do with any of it. Most attempts to serve civilized food to my daughter are met with screaming contempt and venomous hatred. I’m convinced that she not only houses a tiny nuclear reactor inside her, but that she also has some sort of mutant digestive system that allows her to thrive on crusty goldfish cracker crumbs, boogers, and dirty bathwater (not to mention, her knees and elbows have been trained by deadly ninja assassins to destroy any testicle within reach, but that’s for another time).  

She happily announced over her pancake breakfast this morning that her favorite food was butter and that she intended to eat the entire container of yoghurt-based-pretend-that-it’s-butter spread. Then, like a tiny pirate, she plunged her pancake cutting knife into the depths of the pretending-to-be-butter bucket, pulled forth the heart of the buttery beast, and began to lick the butter straight from the butter knife like it was some kind of Paula Deen popsicle. The made with love Mickey Mouse shaped, chocolate chip pancakes weren’t good enough, even though that’s what she specifically asked for, no, she wanted to pirate a pound of butter off of a knife, then lick the sugar-free syrup from her plate like a dog. So, by the end of breakfast there was a Mickey Mouse pancake with a hole chewed right through the center, and a four year old whose face was covered in pretend butter and syrup with little bits of pancake shrapnel embedded in the buttery-syrup spackle. She looked as though the breakfast wars erupted all around her and she had emerged victorious from the sweet, fluffy rubble.

As per her current attitude toward dining, we are doing the general public the favor of not taking her to any restaurants. We’ll have to cross into that war zone eventually. 

Potty Mouth

     After nearly a year of trial and error, success and failure, joyous celebration and befuddled frustration, we have finally ascended that seemingly insurmountable Mt. Everest of toddlerdom: potty training. Never in my still early, naïve career of parenthood could I have ever imagined that not pooping in your pants would be such a difficult goal to achieve.

     The success, however, is not yet complete and there are still episodes of tragic embarrassment that have to be endured. My wife and I have found, that through the apparently never ending exercises of toilet training, one thing has remained constant with our daughter and that is: EVERYTHING is more important than stopping to use the bathroom. One shining example that happened recently involved my wife as she and our daughter met a friend and her mother at a water park for an afternoon of attempted fun. This, mind you, was the first time our daughter had ever gone without a diaper in the water, so not only was this going to be one giant leap for toddler-kind, it was to be attempted at the risk of the proverbial Baby Ruth in the swimming pool.

     All was going well for the first half hour or so until our daughter yelled at the top of her lungs “I NEEDTA GO POTTY, MOMMY!” To which, my wife, with the reflexes of a Jedi Master, leapt across open water, grabbed our daughter and leapt back to solid ground without as much as getting her toes wet, then sprinted at light speed to the rest room to ensure our daughter made it to the toilet in time. Sliding into the bathroom like a cat running across a tile floor, my wife pounced into an open stall, and in one fluid movement stripped the wet swim suit off of our daughter and plopped her on the questionably sanitary toilet seat just in time to hear, “No, I don’t need to pee pee, I wanna go play.” Bewildered, but not defeated, my wife waited a few minutes with our daughter still perched on the toilet just to make sure the coast was clear. It apparently was, as to her account nothing happened but wiggling and begging to go back out and play.

     Back out they went. My daughter made a bee line for the water to play with her friend and my wife sat on the edge with her mom friend as they watched the two toddlers splashing before them. Not five minutes after our daughter re-entered the kiddie splash pool, my wife noticed her grabbing her butt as what appeared to be a tail was poking through the back of her swim suit. Armageddon had commenced. Time ground to a stop as adrenaline began coursing through my wife’s veins, elevating her senses to uncharted levels. Almost telekinetically, she reached out and grabbed our daughter as the protrusion in her tiny swimsuit grew in slow motion. Wincing while holding our daughter with arms fully extended, much like Wile E. Coyote would hold a cartoon bomb that was about to go abysmally wrong, my wife, again, ran full speed to the public restroom and found an open stall. Alas, it was too late; the deed was done. The inherent problem with one-piece bathing suits, my wife suddenly found, is that there really is no control over any potential contents whilst you are stripping said swim suit from a toddler. As my wife struggled to strip the wet swim suit from our squirming daughter, the single, perfectly shaped poop that had been deposited in the back of the swim suit flew out, landed on the floor, rolled under the stall and rested against the flip flop of the seemingly preoccupied lady sitting there. My wife and daughter simultaneously screamed in surprise, fear, and awe as they watched the horror unfold before them. My daughter whispered, “Mommy, the poop ran away,” as my wife scrambled to get a handful of toilet paper to retrieve the offense before the lady who was apparently sleeping in the next stall awoke to find that her foot was being attacked by a rogue poo. Swiftly, gingerly and protected by a pound of toilet paper, my wife was able to roll the stinker back away from the comatose lady’s flip flop, pick it and deposit it in her own toilet. It was done; the crisis had been overcome and the only evidence that would remain from the event would be the emotional trauma that would haunt my wife for the foreseeable future.

     As the events of the day had been just short of unbelievable and as it was getting late in the afternoon, my wife decided that it would be best if she and our daughter came home to wash away the combination of chlorine and unfortunate sewage that had accumulated during their fun get away. They came inside and I was briefed on the events that had unfolded as my wife started a bath for our daughter. As I could see that my wife was clearly stressed, I made my way to the kitchen to fetch a glass of wine for her. It was as I was on my way back to the bathroom with the wine that the screaming started. I stepped into the bathroom just as my wife started yelling, “GREAT! Now there’s a shit in the bathtub…I have had enough shit for today!”  Apparently a poop nugget had somehow unknowingly been lodged between our daughter’s butt cheeks and when she submerged into the bath, it broke free and popped to the surface like one of the yellow barrels from Jaws. I took over the haz-mat clean up and handed my wife her glass of wine as she walked out to have a few minutes for herself. My nearly three year old daughter’s eyes were wide with confusion as she questioned, “There’s a shit in the bathtub? Daddy, who shit in the bathtub?”

That blessed day of the last accident is right around the corner, I can smell it. 

Whatever Happened to Saturday Mornings?

     When I was growing up, there was a certain ritual surrounding Saturday mornings. It had been passed down from generation to generation and had evolved to meet the needs of the parents and children who wanted it, but regardless of what decade or in which family it was being observed, it revolved around two primary pillars: sugar and television.  I remember countless Saturday mornings lying, stomach down on our vintage 1976 green(ish) carpet, as close as legally allowable to our three ton, monolithic, Magnavox cabinet television which, for all of its behemoth size and child crushing weight, had only a twenty-five inch screen. It amazes me that my phone today is capable of better picture quality and entertainment choices than that glorious monstrosity ever was. On that screen played some of the best Saturday morning cartoons ever enjoyed by children, and to keep us watching those cartoons my mom fed us a never ending supply of super concentrated breakfast sugar. If it wasn't steaming hot, chocolate-flavored toaster pastries encrusted in a crunchy, sugary coating (Hey kids, try microwaving them if you can’t reach the toaster!), it was a bowl full of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs (Hey, Moms! Now made with crackly rice product, because everyone knows that rice is healthy!) which were covered in full fat, Vitamin D enriched, super homogenized, bovine-growth-hormone saturated milk. And boy, was it good stuff. My brother, sister, and I would stare, expressionless at the television for hours as a sugary crust developed around our mouths while we ate breakfast and watched nonsensical cartoon characters beat each other senseless, sword fight, shoot each other with whatever cartoon gun they had, blow each other up, throw one another off of cliffs, or whatever other ultra-violent acts you could string together in a cartoon to advertise the latest action figures. The cartons of that day reflected the socio-political atmosphere of the times. We were in the midst of the Cold War. There were always some problems with the Russians, but I never really could make out what it was. The Middle East was in turmoil, there was always something on the news about bombings. And some terrorists had blown up an airliner. The fact that these things happened registered in my mind, but I didn’t grasp the importance, the international ramifications, or the way in which those occurrences would shape our future. I didn’t have to, I had my family and we had our breakfast and our cartoons on a Saturday morning. Everything was good with the world.

     Fast-forward thirty years. My television screen is fifty-five inches across, about a half an inch thick and weighs what seems like six ounces. It literally has the ability to play any television show from any decade, including some of the best Saturday morning cartoons ever watched by children. The problem is they’re the same Saturday morning cartoons I watched because nobody makes Saturday morning cartoons like they used to.  As she hasn’t been exposed to cartoons from my era (frankly because they’re just too violent for kids to watch) my daughter will ask to watch some strange show that she heard about from someone at pre-school and we will gladly find it for her on our super-powered television. Once we start playing it, my wife and I will instantly revert back to Saturday morning behavior from decades past and zone out, eyes a glaze and faces wiped free of any expression while we drink our coffee. And while she and I are watching some surreal cartoon about a dog who talks to people because she ate too much alphabet soup, our daughter will sneak into the bathroom, steal some toilet paper, climb back onto the couch, tear the toilet paper into little bits and sprinkle it onto our heads, and we are none the wiser until we start raining little toilet paper snowflakes about the floor as we walk around. As are the cartoons, the days of sugar packed breakfast bits are certainly a thing of the past. In case it hasn't been made abundantly clear in anything I've written before, giving my daughter sugar is tantamount to inciting a fission reaction in Uranium 235 and watching the surrounding Earth melt because of energy that is unleashed. Not to mention the fact that it’s just not the best thing a child can have for breakfast.

     This particular morning, cartoons were on, we were having breakfast and just as if it were 1986 there were problems with the Russians, the Middle East was in turmoil, and some terrorists had tragically blown up another airliner.  My wife was drinking her coffee (still with bits of toilet paper scattered in her hair), my daughter was practicing her twirl in her new “ballerina” dress, and I decided to leave around 8:30am to make the trip North along the coast a few cities and go to my barber (I am very particular about who cuts my hair, and it is indeed a strange treat to have a gentleman with a heavy Korean accent sing along with “Staying Alive” as it blasts over the oldies station while he cuts my hair). As I drove along the rocky and constantly shifting Pacific coast, dodging the participants of the weekly Tour de Palos Verdes,  I opened the sunroof (the poor man’s convertible) and let the heavy, marine layer air flood into the car as I turned on some Rodrigo y Gabriella (excellent driving music). The air held a faint, warm saltiness that it had gathered as it crept in over the Pacific like a Mediterranean fog, and it flavored the breeze with its sweet brininess as it settled like a blanket over the rocky peninsula. With the tranquility of the drive, the frenzied Spanish guitar plinking through the stereo and the still fresh vision of my daughter twirling in her dress that was playing like a .GIF in my mind’s eye that I was subconsciously timing to the guitar music, I knew that despite what may be going on elsewhere, I had my family, it was Saturday morning, and all was well with the world.              

You Never Forget Your First Time

     The fact that we have made it nearly three years without a major medical incident actually rather surprises me. Given the unwavering rambunctiousness and absolute disregard for caution normally displayed by my perpetually energized daughter, I generally feel that I am constantly wobbling on the precipice of a trip to the emergency room.  My fear finally achieved fruition on a recent Friday evening when a two-and-a-half year old found that she was no match for gravity or the principle of the fulcrum.

     My daughter has stopped taking naps. My wife and I believe that her stubbornness is outweighing her need to sleep, as although she develops the zombie eyes of death every afternoon, she absolutely refuses to nap. This has been made abundantly clear to me by her pre-school teacher who consistently regales me with stories of how my daughter, despite her obvious fatigue, tries her best to wake up her little friends during nap time so they can go perform random acts of anarchy and chaos. I have found that by Friday evening, after a full week of no napping, trying to pick my daughter up from school without incident is akin to attempting to put an angry Tasmanian Devil into a straight jacket. Therefore, I try to prepare myself mentally before undertaking that task.

     This particular Friday evening pick up was going as I had anticipated: an absolute refusal to cooperate accompanied by incomprehensible, guttural screams which I’m fairly certain were curse words from some Germanic based language. After a few minutes, she had calmed down to the point where we could walk toward the corner of the classroom where her cubby-hole, containing her lunch box and her never used cot linens, was located. I was holding her hand as we were walking (I have to hold her hand when we are trying to leave because, if I don’t, she will turn and run at warp speed out of her class, through the hallway and into a room far, far away where she will hide under whatever furniture is present so she can assert her desire to stay and play with her friends, even though they are all going home as well, albeit with much less of a drama filled and catastrophic process) and as we approached her cubby-hole to retrieve her belongings, she decided to once again ignite a toddler temper tantrum by dramatically jumping, performing a perfect plank in mid-air and flopping flat on the floor, all whilst kicking and screaming. Unfortunately, because I was holding her hand during that entire, split-second exhibition, her elbow became the hinge which was swinging her entire mass. Toddler elbows, apparently, are not made to do that, so they hyper-extend and induce a condition which I now know is called Nursemaid’s Elbow.

     She was actually rather calm and quiet in the Urgent Care waiting room, which combined with the fact that she was not moving her left arm, illustrated that there was indeed something wrong. She passed the two hours we sat in that chamber of horrors by making funny faces at the nurse behind the admissions desk and pointing at random, injured people and whispering, “Look, they’re in the hospital too.” After another hour having x-rays taken and being subjected to the prodding of a rather nice, but totally befuddled medical practitioner, I have found evidence that non-pediatric physicians really don’t know what to do with children other than offer them lollipops and princess stickers in hopes that they will be quiet and grow out of whatever is ailing them. This became inherently obvious when the doctor said, “The X-Ray is normal, but her elbow is obviously in pain…I don’t know what’s wrong with her. Here, have some princess stickers. I suggest you take her to an orthopedist. I’ll call you to find out how she’s doing.” He never called. Other than getting a cool, black arm sling to keep her immobilized, we were no closer to being healed. I could have saved three hours and given her some princess stickers myself, we have tons of them.   

     MY wife was just as flabbergasted as I was at Western Medicine’s apparent ineffectiveness, so she aired her disgruntled point of view with a brief synopsis of the night’s event on Facebook (I am not at all savvy on the use of social media, so she takes care of all that). Literally fifteen seconds later a good friend of mine responded with, “Oh did you snatch her arm or something? It’s happened to my kids, like, three times. It’s called Nursemaid’s Elbow. You’ll have to give it a Mr. Miyagi.” As I vaguely remembered the Karate Kid reference, I texted him to find out a little more info. “What is it?”

“Nursemaid’s Elbow. Look it up on YouTube. I fixed my kids’ elbows when the doctors didn't know what was wrong, sounds like the same thing.”

“Does it really work?”

“Yeah, it works. It’s going to HURT, but it’ll be fine right after.”

      Since Western Medicine had failed me miserably, I saw nothing wrong with taking a totally unqualified Chinese-American’s medical advice, which was based solely on internet videos and a 1980s action movie. I watched the suggested video and memorized the procedure. My wife had just given our daughter at bath and she was now sitting on our bed whilst my wife attempted to get her into her pajamas. I stealthily crept to the other side of the bed and approached quietly, as not to rouse any suspicion from my daughter. I gave my wife, who was aware of my plan, but in total disbelief, a nod to signal its commencement. The game was now afoot. I crawled onto the bed and gently grasped my daughter’s injured arm as my wife held her good arm away, and I began the procedure. A slow movement here, then a total extension and flexion, and “POP”, everything was back as it should have been. Good as new. The instant the arm popped back into place, my daughter went off like an atomic bomb and screamed, “NAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” and began to pummel the daylights out of me with her newly functioning arm. Her other arm, which my wife had recently released, quickly joined the fray and began to batter my face with all of the vigor a two-and-a-half year old can muster. The only reaction I could summon was hysterical laughter as I realized the utter ridiculousness of the situation. My wife, apparently overcome by the sight of her crazed daughter trying to murder her hysterical husband, muttered, “I have to go…” and with mouth agape and eyes wide in disbelief at the insanity that had unfolded before her turned and sauntered toward the stairs.

I hope the next time is much less awkward.