It’s your party and I’ll cry if I want to.

Firstly, I would like to thank everyone who helped with and attended my daughter's birthday party. You all made it quite memorable for her and she is still talking about it, so thank you for helping to make my daughter's day special.

Secondly...

    I have fond memories of my birthday parties from when I was young. I remember having my friends come over, having some cake, playing with everyone and being slightly disappointed with the presents that I got.  As a child, I thought a birthday party was a fun, stress free time when my family and friends could get together and have a blast.  I have seen it from the other side now and my life will never be the same.

     My daughter’s second birthday came and went like a plague of locusts tearing through my house, devouring and laying waste to my humble abode. Her birthday was actually on a Sunday, but the festivities started on Friday at daycare as they celebrated by pumping her full of carrot cake, which might as well be jet fuel to a two year old. As we had planned her party for Saturday afternoon, my wife and I, along with two of our dear friends, decided to decorate on Friday night after our daughter went to bed. The carrot cake induced nuclear reaction that happened that evening is too exhausting to put into words, but if you’re the slightest bit familiar with my daughter or any of the adventures that I have previously chronicled, you can imagine the screaming fit of hyperactive rage and attitude that exploded when it was time for night-night. The fight culminated after she was in bed with her throwing her blanket out of her crib in protest and screaming at the top of her lungs, “MYYY BWWWWWANNNKETTTTT!!! I WANT MY BWWWANKET BACK!!!!”  So, after a few rounds of fetch the bwanket, she and I had to come to the understanding that if her blanket made it out of her crib again, it would stay where it lay and she would be a bwanket-less girl that night. It was a shaky truce, but the adults were able to continue our decorating for the upcoming festivities.

     My wife had decided that an “Under the Sea” theme would be best for our daughter’s party, and in my simple, simple mind I envisioned popping The Little Mermaid into the DVD player and getting some paper cutouts of Ariel and her fishy little friends and hanging them from the ceiling or something to that cheesy and clearly unimaginative effect. I, of course, was laughed at and ridiculed for having such a poor perception of how a child birthday should REALLY be. I was shown the light when my wife and her friend spent week after week in preparation by building all of the decorations by hand, which included a four foot tall mermaid made of poster board that was fastened to the wall amongst equally homemade poster board bubbles and seaweed. Not to mention the seven or eight giant jellyfish made from paper bowls, ribbon and giant googly eyes. Then there was the school of a dozen inflatable fish that were hung from the ceiling. And the blue and green filtered lights reflecting off of the portable disco ball to give the room a shimmery ambiance.  

     After working well into the night to transform our living room into an underwater lair, naturally as we awoke the next morning and made our way back into our new aquarium living room, everything we had taped to the ceiling in an exhausted haste the night before was laying on the floor as if the birthday party gremlins had paid a visit (I’ll never buy cheap tape again). My daughter, seeing the newly transformed and dilapidated underwater living room ran screaming, “MY FISHEEEEEEEES” toward the pile of inflated fish that now looked like they had been tossed out by some cartoon fishmonger.   Then it was time to redecorate, get the food ready, wrap the presents and be all ready to go by just after lunch.

     The thought of having this birthday party in my living room brought to mind visions of an alliance of toddlers banding together to squelch the tyrannical rule of the adults by any means necessary, and the more violent the better. It didn't turn out much differently than I had imagined. Children everywhere…screaming…running…throwing…total and absolute chaos exploded at a soprano pitch in my living room. Food and drinks were splayed out like the aftermath of a tornado at an unfortunate state fair. Children love cheese. Children aren't very good at holding on to their food and have a general disregard for putting things where they go. I had put out little, tiny sandwich fixings as hors d’oeuvres for the adults and as actual food for the kids which meant kids were grabbing cheese by the handful, taking a few bites and then tossing the leftovers with reckless abandon and letting the remains lie wherever they happened to land, which was generally very close to their feet. Those feet then stomped and ground the saliva soaked half eaten cheese into the living room rug, the kitchen floor, the top of my ottoman, or it was smeared across the glass doors of the fireplace. The adults drink cups were routinely swatted off of whatever surface upon which they had been perched. It was almost like some sadistic childhood game where the adults had not been given a copy of the rules, they had just been dropped into the middle of knee-high mayhem and expected to survive. I don’t normally fare well in those types of situations, so I was running around like some kind of butler at an insane asylum trying to scrape soggy cheese mash out of my rug and cleaning up spilled drinks and crushed juice boxes the moment they hit the floor, all while humming the theme to “Doctor Who” to myself in an attempt to keep the raucous cacophony from the party horde from splitting my mind in two. Decorations were being pulled down and destroyed, inflatable, plastic fish were apparently dying from the shock of it all and were falling from the ceiling like flies and bouncing off of little kids’ heads, which of course lead the children to then pick up the deceased sea life and pummel each other about the head. This went on for three solid hours.

     It’s been nearly a week since the tiniest apocalypse unfolded in my home. There are still the remains of undersea decorations sticking to my wall, and a four foot tall poster board mermaid still lays trampled and broken in the corner by the fireplace like the sole, unclaimed soldier whose remains decorate the battlefield. My wife and I are still exhausted. Our daughter thinks it was the best day of her life. 

Excuse me, have you seen my marbles?

      Earlier this week, a gentleman who works in my office returned to work from taking time off for the birth of his first child. He bounded into the office early one morning with a spring in his step, a smile on his face and looked as refreshed and invigorated as one who had just returned from a six week stay at an all-inclusive resort and spa for new fathers.  I thought he had to have been lying about what he had actually been doing for the past month and a half. There couldn't have been a baby…he looked so well rested…

     Then he did the new father thing, whipped out his iPhone and started showing the myriad of pictures all new proud fathers take. “So, what’s his name?” I asked the newest member of the office’s paternity of fatherly brotherhood.

“Her..”

“His name is Her?”

“No, it’s a girl.”

Of course it was. There just wasn't any hair. I was so used to my daughter’s Rapunzel-esque volume of hair that it was an alien thought that any poor female child be born bald, so it must have been a boy, a boy no doubt foreshadowing his future, unfortunate hair loss. The uncomfortable moment between us passed quickly, although I did realize that I was probably the newest ostracized member of the office’s paternity of fatherly brotherhood. He continued swiping through the pictures on his phone and something rather odd struck me (other than the fact that I STILL thought the baby looked like a boy in a teeny, tiny dress). In nearly every single picture, which constituted the first six weeks of that baby’s life, the child was asleep. Asleep and looking like a bald-headed little angel.  

     In one of those “life flashing before your eyes” moments that usually only happen on bad television shows or to people on drugs, I was taken back to when my daughter was born and forced to recall my own experience. My wife went into labor on a Tuesday at about 11:30 at night, and that baby didn't get here until Thursday at about 4pm. We didn't actually go to the hospital until Thursday morning at about 8, which means we woke up on Tuesday September 20 thinking it would be a day like any other, and then we wouldn't go to sleep again until sometime in the second week of October while my mom was visiting and then only after I wheeled my wide eyed infant daughter out in her bassinet and yelled something to the effect of, “You’re watching the baby tonight”, although I’m quite sure it actually sounded more like, “Bwahhlrrggsa AAAAHHHHHH.”

     The day my daughter was born, I didn’t really feel the fact that I had been awake for two solid days, but then the following two nights in the hospital started to wear on me. A screaming newborn who hates the world because she has been unwillingly forced into it coupled with perfectly timed visits every fifteen minutes from nurses who are completely oblivious to the fact that the thing most needed by new parents is sleep does not make for an ideal way to get any kind of rest. And it all went downhill from there. By the time we got home with our newborn daughter, she had decided that she was so mad at the world that she would do everything in her power to bring it to its knees and wouldn't sleep a wink until she had had her vengeance. The two weeks I had taken off from work began as a time of family bonding and turned into a 336 hour marathon of insanity. There were nightly instances of me rocking like a madman with my daughter swaddled like a tiny mummy while she peered up at me with eyes full of fire and hate as I tried to put her to sleep at 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 in the morning. She and I once went for a drive at 1:30 in the morning because I got the foolish idea that the vibration from the car might lull her to sleep… a foolish idea, indeed. She would never take a pacifier, so one night I tried to tape the pacifier to her face so she might actually be pacified. All she did was scream and wish death upon me. At one point, I actually considered the idea that she might be possessed.

     As the weeks dragged on, sleep was becoming nothing more than a distant memory.  Day after day after day without sleep combined with the stress of trying to figure out why my daughter wanted to torture me made my mind deteriorate to the point of delirium and hallucinations. Every sound I heard: a passing car, a squeaking door, a faucet turning on, a cat’s meow, in my head sounded like a screaming baby. I would shudder at the screaming baby driving past me on the street, grate my teeth at the screaming baby hidden inside the telephone, gaze in utter befuddlement at the fat, gray cat who was screaming at me like a baby. I was snapping, losing touch with reality. Then I had to go back to work. I feigned comprehension when my coworkers would talk to me, because in my new reality, everyone either sounded like a screaming baby or Charlie Brown’s teacher.  I would stare at the computer for hours on end and watch the letters swirl around my face in a flashing vortex of confusion. I remember seeing myself from across the room and the me who wasn't me was pointing and laughing at me. I had come undone.

     So, to have such a cheerful, well rested new father show me pictures of his sleeping baby threw me for a bit of a loop and made me momentarily relive that which I had tried so hard to purge from my memory. I’m past all that now and facing new and bigger challenges.   

I'd like a shot of that, please.

     As someone who, until recently, hadn't exactly kept up with his regular medical checkups for longer than some people have been alive, I can understand the sense of trepidation surrounding going to a doctor's office to have a stranger do things to you which, in the absence of a medical license, would be a thoroughly inappropriate violation of personal space. I, a rational adult with a fair degree of cognitive ability, am aware that such things are for my own good and I am able to suppress any feelings of irrational fear and discomfort that may be manifesting in my psyche and making me want to either lie on the floor in the fetal position or lash out at the strangers around me like some kind of Neanderthal. Now, let's put a toddler in that same scenario and see how it plays out.

     I'm not in the business of advertising, so, as a caveat, let me say that this is not an advertisement of any kind for any specific medical professional, but merely a recognition. I have to say that my wife and I have chosen who we believe to be the best pediatrician in the entire known world. This doctor has been in the game for quite a while and she shows a genuine interest in not only her little patients, but also their parents. In one particular instance, my daughter came down with tonsillitis when she was about a year and half old, and we spent nearly eight solid hours in the medical complex running various tests to pinpoint the issue. The doctor could see the fatigue and wear taking effect on me and actually brought me lunch while I was waiting and took some time to make sure that I was okay. She is a genuinely wonderful person. So, if you're in the L.A. area and are in need of a pediatrician, I would be happy to pass on her info. That being said, it is with the deepest respect that I apologize from the bottom of my heart to her and her staff for any psychological trauma that my daughter may have caused during any of her visits.

     A visit to the doctor normally starts out like a visit anywhere my daughter goes: running full speed and leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. "I WANNA SEE THE GOLDFISH" can be heard by anyone in the entire medical complex as we make our way down the hall and toward the doctor's office. No sooner than I can swing open the medieval sized wooden door to the office, my daughter bursts in and leaves a DeLorean style trail of fire behind her as she screams toward the fish tank at the opposite end of the waiting room. A waiting room which is filled with sick children and beaten down parents who track my daughter in bleary eyed amazement as if they're watching a race car power toward the finish line as she runs full speed toward the fish tank screaming, "GOLDFISHES." While intermittently picking her up to see the "goldfish" (which are not actually goldfish as it is a saltwater tank, but my daughter has been lax in her marine biology studies), she feels that it is necessary to try to sit in every single chair in the waiting room (whether it's occupied or not) while simultaneously running from one end of the room to the other. This always makes for some very interesting glances from parents and occasionally a shriek from a less than healthy child who either has never borne witness to or simply cannot fathom a being of that size displaying that much unbridled energy. Needless to say, we aren't very popular in the waiting room.

     That all changes, however, when the door opens and the nurse calls out my daughter's name. When we cross the threshold into what a nearly two year old mind must think is the place of nightmares and my daughter sees the nurse, fear and the overwhelming sense of self preservation takes over. This nurse, mind you, is one of the sweetest and kindest people I have ever met, but to a toddler, she might as well be wearing an executioner's hood and carrying a double-sided ax. She has one of the most unfortunate jobs in the world; she has to stab little children with needles and make them cry. At the sight of this harbinger of doom, my daughter usually reacts by shaking her head from side to side and screaming, "NO NO NO NO NO NAAOOOOOOOO" while fighting to climb over my shoulder so she can do a ninja flip onto the floor, run down the hall and dive through the third floor plate glass window in slow motion while simultaneously spinning around and shooting back into the office to make her Matrix style getaway. But, she needs her vaccinations, so I can't let that happen.

     As the door to the examination room closes behind the nurse who is holding her little basket of death, my daughter accepts her inevitable fate and realizes that her fighting is futile. The nurse, with all of the sympathy she can muster, administers the injections and slinks away, only to re-emerge sometime in the future when it's time for another visit. As I collect my sobbing daughter and parade her through the admin area to make our next appointment, she is showered with stickers and high fives from the rest of the staff like the tiniest war hero. She waves a teary eyed good-bye to everyone as we leave and knows that she will have to face this foe again...and swears vengeance.

The Accidental Hobo

     Many a weekend over the last two years have come to a labored, exhausting end, much like an over matched boxer who has been rope-a-doped for five or six solid rounds, then takes a right to the chin and gently slides down the ropes and into night-night land, unable to continue. As I look at myself in the mirror whilst getting ready for bed on any given Sunday night, I'm often in shock at what appears to be a weathered, homeless person looking back at me. After that moment of fright subsides, I then try to figure out why I smell like hot onions, why my clothes are crunchy and why my teeth taste furry. Then I remember...I haven't spent more than five consecutive minutes in a bathroom since Friday.

     It isn't just me. At the culmination of a weekend, my wife normally staggers toward the bed and collapses in its general direction, hoping to actually hit the mattress. For lack of a better word, our daughter is high energy (also for lack of a better word, I am not). On any given Friday at around 5 p.m. (although in reality this happens almost every day), I will arrive at my daughter's day care to walk in and find half a dozen children sitting calmly at a little table playing with choo-choo trains or dolls or whatever human children play with at daycare, only to see my daughter running laps around the room like some kind of tweaked out greyhound chasing an imaginary rabbit and screaming "I'M RUNNNNNNIIINNNNNNNGGGG." I'll give her a few more laps as I mentally prepare myself, then after I've explained that it's time to go home (and I'm really not sure how long it takes for my words to catch up to her as she's running at nearly the speed of sound), I'll scoop her up as she makes another pass and even though she is no longer in contact with the ground, her legs will still be moving at the same speed for at least thirty seconds as she screams "NAAAAOOOOOOOOOO" and fights to break free like some wild, baby piglet who is certain that nothing but her doom awaits wherever she is being carried.

     From the moment my daughter's eyes spring open on a Saturday or Sunday morning, she is moving at full speed and doesn't stop until she is put to bed. I liken the experience to attempting to avert a nuclear meltdown every single minute of every single day. My daughter wakes up before either of us do, and when we hear her in her room we know it's showtime, so we take a collective deep breath and go fetch her to start the day. We know that if she were to be left in her room alone for too long, she would probably pick up her bed, throw it through the wall, escape and wreak havoc on L.A. She would then subvert the local government and set up her own rule whilst gaining the trust of the general populous so that she could have millions upon millions of minions at her very command. As a responsible father, I just can't let that happen. In order to react expeditiously, I normally throw on whatever clothes I can see as I leap out of bed, which usually happen to be the clothes I was wearing the night before. Unshowered and unkempt, I move to the kitchen to start the breakfast proceedings which usually consists of my daughter telling me at least three different things she would like to eat, me preparing each of them and then her screaming "NAAOOO" at each plate whilst waving her arms like she's trying to knock circling biplanes out of the sky.

     Next on the agenda is the park. If my daughter hasn't made it out the door for the park by 9:30, pieces of furniture start to levitate and my living room develops its own weather pattern. Trips to the park are made up of running through the grass, running through the sand, running back and forth across the play structure, running up and down the basketball court and running circles around the swing set, which is why I try to keep her in the swing as long as possible. All that running means sweat for me, and that is on top of the already day old clothes that I'm wearing. Not to mention that parks in L.A. are hot in the summertime. Hot because the people who planned the parks didn't think about placing trees anywhere near where children might play, and hot because the sun always feels like it's three feet away from your face.

     A trip to the market usually follows the park since weekends are really the only time we have to do any shopping. And we all know who lives at the market...MUFFIN MAN. So, that's generally a fiasco. Amazingly, though, my daughter always takes the time to say "HI" and wave to random people wherever we happen to be, and the market is no exception, until we get close to the baked goods section. After the market, it's lunch and nap, which means a brief reprieve for Mommy and Daddy where Mommy usually passes out on the couch and I stare at the television in a semi-vegetative state while my body attempts to recuperate.

     After nap, it's another trip to the park, more running and sweating, then playing at home, then dinner, which usually goes about as well as lunch, then more playing in the living room which usually involves me lying face down on the floor while my daughter uses my back as a trampoline. By this time, it's approaching   7 p.m. and it's time for bath and bed. By the time it's all said and done, it's around 8 p.m. and my wife and I usually try to keep from falling face first into whatever plate of food we've been able to scrape together.

     Before I know it, it's the next day and the cycle starts all over again. The clothes I pick up on the way to start my futile breakfast endeavor are normally the ones closest to me and easiest to grab, which are generally the ones I had peeled off of myself the night before. By the time Sunday night offers respite from the weekend's perpetual activities, I am a haggard, beaten down version of myself who could easily be mistaken for someone living on a bench in Venice Beach.

But, my daughter tells me "Night-night, Daddy", so I don't really care how I look.

Take a picture, it'll last longer

     I have a brilliant idea. Why don't we get a professional photographer, my wife's wedding dress, a 75 pound wing back chair, a dozen helium balloons, and a toddler with the demeanor of the Tasmanian Devil and haul them all to a park and try to take pictures of the aforementioned toddler. And just to make it fun, let's give our daughter some coffee in the morning just because we think it's cute when she drinks it. That's how you should spend a Saturday.

     That is exactly how we spent last Saturday. My daughter loves going to the park. Living in L.A. makes frequent trips to the park quite a necessity as houses with yards aren't exactly easy to come by (at least if you want to live in a neighborhood where you can actually go out into your yard). Also, my daughter is not really known for her ability to do anything that requires standing still or sitting in one place for more than about a second. Needless to say, the idea of going to the park, or as she calls it, "PARKANDSWING" but not actually being able to go swing or run around in the grass didn't really sit very well with her.

     The photographer's idea for the photo shoot was actually pretty cool: have our daughter wear my wife's wedding dress whilst sitting in a giant chair in a pretty park making cute poses, then tying a sundry of balloons to the chair and having our daughter ooh and aah at the balloons, and so on and so on. I'm sure that this idea would have been magnificent had it been attempted with a human child, but I think what resulted was actually the photographer deciding that she never, ever wanted to work with children again.

     As I walked from the parking lot carrying a giant, art-deco styled chair upside down on my head, my vision was really limited, but what I could hear was my twenty-three month old daughter screaming "PARKANDSWING PARKANDSWING" as her little voice faded off into the distance which meant she was already running, full bore, toward the play area. I rotated the inverted chair around on my head and could make out both my wife and the photographer running after her to prevent her from diving, face first, into the sand that surrounds the play area, because, of course, we were here to take pictures and a sandy baby simply would not do. I chose a spot that I thought would be a great spot for picture taking (mainly because I was tired of carrying that ridiculously heavy chair) and we set up all of the equipment. As I said earlier, this concept was great in theory, but trying to make my daughter sit in a giant chair wearing a full size wedding dress when the swing and slide were RIGHT OVER THERE just wasn't going to happen. Without fail, every time someone would sit her in the chair, and even before we would take a step back away from her, she was out of the chair and making a bee-line for anything that was not us taking pictures of her. A toddler in a full grown adult's wedding dress can't really run that well, so there was a lot of tripping over a wedding dress, face planting into the grass and yelling out "I'M OKAYYYYY" as she would bounce up and start running again. As to not potentially ruin the wedding dress, it was decided to put regular clothes back on her, when meant she was then totally unencumbered and could again run at her normal speed, which I have clocked at approximately Warp Factor 3.

     As the day was playing out pretty much exactly as I had dreamed the night before, I decided that I would not actively participate in chasing the littlest thunderbolt around the park trying to snap pictures of her, but I would watch from the relative comfort of a giant wing back chair that I hauled into the park like some hobo Sherpa. What I witnessed was a type of psychological and physical torture that I was certain my daughter was inflicting on her mommy and that poor photographer with absolute calculation. As the photographer would run ahead of my daughter, my wife would try to herd her toward the photographer so she could snap some pictures and try to salvage something out of this nightmarish day. Whenever the camera would be in a position to get a good shot, my daughter would either make a sharp turn and run perpendicular to the camera or she would do a quick spin, double back and totally evade my wife who was trying to catch her. This went on for a solid twenty-five minutes before I decided to meander over and suggest calling it a day. The now out of breath photographer said to me, "You know, this really gets easier when they're four or five years old". I asked, "Would you like to come back then?", which elicited an only half joking chuckle. The decision was made to keep trying to get pictures with the thought that if my daughter ran around enough, she would wear herself out and become docile enough to take decent pictures. What the general public is unaware of, however, is that deep in the center of my daughter's being is what I can only assume to be a neutron star which generates more energy per second than the entire population of the earth consumes in any given day. So much energy, in fact, that when our sun eventually collapses in on itself and then supernovas, my daughter will still be running around a park somewhere at several times the speed of light.

     I decided to wander back to where the chair was set up and contemplate the lessons learned that day. As if the day had not yet been crazy enough, I was struck by what I like to refer to as "Random Crazy", or simply "getting crazied." From behind the bushes near where the chair was set up, I started hearing, "Hiiiii-Yaaaaa" over and over and over with some very labored breathing. I peered over the bushes and was met by the sight of a rather old gentleman (and by gentleman I mean crazy person) dressed in black, tactical fatigues and wearing a silver helmet doing what was apparently a drug induced version of shadow kung-fu. He was Hiiii-Yaaaa-ing to nobody and kicking the air with all the fervor of seasoned martial arts master, except he was a crazy old white dude dressed up like a drug store soldier for hire.

     This was more than I could handle, so in utter, exhausted, amazement I picked up my armchair from the middle of the park and started the trek back to the parking lot. The others in my party of the damned followed suit and made it to our conveyance back to the world of the sane. We'll try again in ten years.

In case you're wondering how the pictures turned out, here's one that was taken in one of the split seconds where my daughter wasn't moving faster than modern cameras could capture her:

Do you know the Muffin Man?

     I sometimes amaze myself  with my total disregard for common sense. Being the father of an almost two year old daughter, one would think that by now I would have learned to pick my battles wisely when it comes to trying to teach my daughter the virtues of proper behavior. There comes a time when one must choose to stand his ground and fight or make a hasty retreat and avoid the oncoming destruction that is about to be waylaid upon him by such a seemingly innocent child. I apparently have a hard time making that distinction.
   
     Today's lesson in daddy decision making reared its screaming, malevolent head in the middle of a local grocery store. Ah, crowded public places...a child's favorite arena to test a daddy's mettle and rain embarrassment down upon him should the mood strike her. We had made a deal (and I say that with all of the misplaced confidence one should have when referring to a twenty-three month old's comprehension of making a deal) that if she were good in the store, I would buy her a muffin. My daughter has an inexplicably unquenchable mania for baked goods, ALL baked goods, but especially those in the muffin category, and these she lovingly refers to as "Muffin Man". Cupcake she knows, cake and pie are called by name, I'm currently trying to teach her "Bear Claw" and "Apple Fritter" (her mommy doesn't know that yet), but muffins are always "Muffin Man". She knows exactly where muffin man lives in every single store and whenever we cross the threshold into any given market, she invariably asks, "Muffin Man?", and the closer we get to the baked goods section, she begins chanting like a miniature swami on meth "Muffin Man Muffin Man muffinman muffinmanmuffinmanmiffinman" until she is either denied or is rewarded with Muffin Man. Today, since she had been rather well behaved in the store (and since I, too, love baked goods) I decided Muffin Man was in order. The chaos began when Muffin Man was placed in his little, brown bag and was nonchalantly tossed in with the rest of the groceries in the cart as we made our way to the checkout queue. To say my daughter protested not being given the opportunity to decimate the muffin right then and there would not really describe the mayhem that exploded when Muffin Man didn't end up in her hands. I thought, "this will be a great opportunity to work on teaching my daughter the concept of patience and how to behave in public". My daughter was thinking "MUFFIN MAAAAANNNNNNNNNNN". Except she wasn't thinking it, she was screaming it at the top of her little, yet super-humanly powerful lungs. I tried to rationalize with her and explain that we have to first pay for the muffin, and when we get to the car and get all strapped in she would be free to delicately enjoy her muffin like any proper twenty-three month child should, but she apparently didn't believe me. I actually believed at one point that this tantrum would culminate in a tiny, nuclear explosion that would obliterate at least my checkout lane and if I were lucky enough to be vaporized it would save me from further humiliation. That was not the case. What I did get, however, was a lot of awkward smiles and sideways glances from the other patrons. Like their children never had a complete meltdown in a public place. The nice cashier tore some stickers off of her Emergency Child Pacification Sticker Roll that she had stashed next to her register and offered them to my daughter in hopes of quenching the fires of hatred that were pouring forth. Upon receipt of the stickers, my daughter looked at them, screamed "NAOOOOOOOOOOOOOO", threw them at me and reasserted her demand of "MUFFFFFIINNNN MAAAAANNNNNNN".
   
     That's when the eighty-seven year old lady in line in front of me decided that she had no idea how to run her card through the machine at the checkout, which card to use, and I'm not even sure she knew where or who she was. What I do know, though, is that she was either ignoring or was totally oblivious to the fact that there was nuclear meltdown happening not three feet directly behind her. I don't care who you are, how old you are or what your status in life is, but if there is someone behind you with a screaming child and he looks as though he wishes he could either teleport somewhere else or spontaneously combust, please take pity on that poor parent and move on with your day so he can get the screaming baby out of that store. Alas, it was not to be. Moses' grandmother spent so long trying to figure out the machine that the cashier had to do it for her. AND THEN, once all was complete and her groceries were all loaded she had to analyze her receipt, whilst still standing in the line, to make sure she got her five cents off for using her own bag.

     The cashier was wise enough that as soon as the opportunity was presented, she scanned the muffin and handed it back to me, still nestled inside its damnable paper bag. The unrelenting scream of "MUFFFIIINNNN MAAAAAAAA___" was immediately squelched when I decapitated Muffin Man and handed my daughter the severed muffin top. A soft "Thank you, Daddy" escaped her lips as she shoveled said muffin into her face. As quickly and as violently as it had begun, it was now over and all was well with the world again.

     After packing everyone and everything back into car, whilst still frazzled, out of breath, and feeling like I had just been beaten about the head and shoulders by some overwhelming foe, I called my wife to recount the ordeal. Her only response was, "THAT'S WHY YOU GIVE HER THE MUFFIN IN THE CHECKOUT LINE". Yeah. Maybe not the best choice for a time to teach patience to someone who hasn't even the slightest concept of the idea. It's an ongoing process. For both of us.