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.