Every Day is the 14th

     Before we begin, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that it has been several weeks since the last time I posted anything. Unfortunately, as someone with a full time job who is also a full time husband, the father of a two-year old, and a general purveyor of insanity, writing (although I rather enjoy it) ranks somewhere around number ninety-five on my list of things to do. As brilliant and fantastic as it would be for this to be my full time job, writing overly dramatic stories about the trials and joys of life with a highly energetic toddler does not come with a paycheck. That being said, I will do my best to keep the stories coming in semi-regular intervals.

     Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and when one has young children who are in school, it means it is time for the Valentine’s Day pre-school party. For days before, my daughter was practically rabid with excitement as she was looking forward to the party which awaited her. She couldn't stop talking about all the things she was going to get to eat at school, such as: cupcakes, cookies, chicken nuggets, cupcakes, pies, cupcakes, chocolate, doughnuts, strawberries, cupcakes, candies and chocolate cupcakes. I knew going into it that it was probably going to be a challenging evening, so as I walked into pre-school to pick up my daughter, I was braced for the inevitable.

     I've come to realize that pre-school teachers find joy in inflicting undue stress on parents with young children, and they look at the aftermath of school parties as some sort of hazing ritual which parents must endure. As I tried my best to peel my daughter from the ceiling of the classroom and cope with the sugar overdose that had obviously taken place, the teacher starting wringing her hands and laughing like a mad scientist who was about to unleash the fury of her creation on some innocent village (my house) and she started saying, “She’s yours now! Have fun tonight.” As I collected my daughter, who was obviously high on chocolate, I was handed, by the mad scientist teacher lady, a white paper bag full of candy which had a balloon tied to the top. Of course, as soon as my cracked out daughter saw it, she started screaming, “MY CANNNNDY! MY BALOOOOOOON! MY CANDY! I WANT MY CANNNNDDDY! I WANNA EAT IT!” Anyone with any common sense or who has had any experience with children knows that waving a bag of candy in front of a toddler who has been fed copious amounts of sugar for eight solid hours is tantamount to waving a bag of heroin at a junkie. It will, unequivocally, lead to bad things. So, as I loaded my strung out daughter into her car seat, the only way I could stop her screaming was, of course, to hand her the giant bag of candy. I could still hear the pre-school teacher’s maniacal laughter in my head and, I thought, in the chaos of trying to get everyone loaded into the car with as little commotion as possible, I could see the pre-school teacher peering out from the classroom window, face pressed against the glass, smiling and laughing as her wicked plan came to fruition.

     The ride home was blur of screaming, ruffling through a sack of candy, random bits being thrown about like someone looking for a treasure in a sack of rubbish, shouting what she planned on eating, what her favorite candy was, another fit of screaming, then yelling, “I’M TRAPPED” as the car seat straps prevented her from ricocheting around the inside of the car like some cartoon balloon that was having its air all let out. Things then took a slight downturn as she, apparently, began experiencing chocolate withdrawals. Her voice changed slightly, got a little deeper and she started growling and saying, “NAOOO! NOOOO! I NEED CHOCOLATE…I NEEEEEEED IT”, like a little, tiny Hulk who was running out of Gamma Rays. And then she broke down into a quiet sob.

     It was just a ploy. The pure, nuclear energy being generated by the processing of sugar in her tiny body was not letting up. As we got home, I had to pick up the debris of strewn candy that had been tossed about and as I put each one back in the white bag, she would say, “I’m gonna eat that.” When we finally made it inside and to the kitchen, the only possible answer for what she would want for supper was “Chocolate.” Mommy was nice enough to have ready some chocolates and a Valentine’s Day card with a detachable, paper Valentine’s Day crown on it, so, out of the spirit of the holiday and because I knew she wouldn't stop until she got them anyway, I relented and let her have a few more pieces of candy. We then detached and assembled her paper crown which made her look like Princess Valentine, Bearer of Hyperactivity as she bounced around the room and screamed for more candy.

     My daughter has recently become totally enamored with Alice in Wonderland (the original Disney animated film), so for the last week or so it has been playing non-stop in the background. As you can imagine, (or maybe my experience is so surreal that you actually can’t) this entire episode played out as if I was trapped in some Disney home for the insane. I had my daughter, who was wearing a giant paper crown, bouncing off of the walls and screaming for candy, while in the background I had the Mad Hatter and the March Hare screaming about Unbirthdays to the theme song of the spinning teacups at Disneyland, and there I was, just trying to make sense of it all and make it stop before my head exploded. I did. There was no explosion. I was able to get my daughter in bed at her normal time of around seven-thirty. And as she was still high on sugar, she spent the next hour and a half sitting up in her bed and barking like a dog. I hope they don’t do anything special for St. Patrick’s Day.

One Flew Over the Baby’s Crib

     I’m not sure if the phenomenon I've been exposed to is unique to my daughter or if the majority of parents with toddlers witness similar episodes, but I believe with near certainty that my daughter either suffers from a severe, yet undiscovered form of disassociative identity disorder, or she has had some sort of symbiotic alien attach to her brain which makes her act as though her mind is fractured into different people whose thoughts and feelings violently contradict one another’s, and whoever is in there must battle each other, out loud, for every single decision that needs to be made, regardless of how menial it may be.

     Maybe it’s because I’m still not completely healed from my pneumonia and I've not yet quite  regained the constitution required to adequately manage life with a high energy toddler, but I have noticed a drastic increase in what I can only really define as moments of apparent insanity. Every day decisions, such as “What would you like for dinner?” are turning into one sided shouting matches that leave me absolutely befuddled and slightly fearful for my safety. As I was driving my daughter home from pre-school recently, I posed the question of what should be for dinner and it was initially met with a pensive silence. My thought was (as I, who is a dad without, as my wife puts it, “the intuition of knowing when to not speak”) to offer suggestions of what COULD be had for dinner. “Mac-n-cheese?”

 “NO!”

“ Fish fingers?”

 “NOOO!”

“Pasta and meatballs?”

 “NAAAOOOOOOOOOOO!” Ok, I thought, I’ll just leave it for now. Then I heard a tiny voice mutter from the backseat of the car, “I want mac-n-cheese.” Brilliant. Problem solved. 

 “OK, I’ll make some mac-n-cheese for you as soon as we..”

“NNNNAAAAAAOOOOOOOO!!!!! NO MAC-N-CHEESE!! NOO! NOOOO!!” Screams and tears and shouting erupted from the backseat as if the tiny two year old strapped in the car seat who had experienced a brief moment of lucidity was now being beaten aback and silenced by whichever mind invading alien was trying to make its presence known, along with the fact that it had an unnatural hatred for macaroni and cheese. The screaming and apparent internal conflict continued for the remaining ten minutes of the drive, during which time I cranked up the volume to the radio and belted out a rather embarrassing version of “Smoke on the Water” (which was apparently being played in honor of the fires currently raging northeast of L.A.) while keeping an eye on my daughter in the rear view mirror to make sure her face didn't transform into some otherworldly visage or she didn't start tearing a rift in the space-time continuum. If anything of the sort had started to happen, I’m pretty sure I would have bailed out of the car while still at speed, knowing she probably would have used her extraterrestrial powers to fly the car back to her home planet.

     The internal crisis she had been suffering apparently came to a quick and decisive end because as we walked inside our home and made our way to the living room, she said rather affirmatively, “I want man-n-cheese.” I said nothing at all as I turned on Netflix and started whatever random, nonsensical children’s show was queued, hoping to keep her distracted just long enough for me to slink into the kitchen and microwave the container of macaroni I had previously made.

     Things such as this are occurring with much more frequency than they had previously, but this type of outburst is not the only thing that has me concerned. My daughter can be laughing and having a wonderful time and suddenly, without warning or apparent reason will burst into a fit of screaming and flailing, as if someone has just destroyed her most prized possession. Or, she can be playing and acting somewhat relaxed (which for her, is still, in my experience, at an energy level about ten times higher than normal children) and then will suddenly and without provocation explode in a fury of activity. I liken it to a power station that has generated way too much electricity, so before it disintegrates in a giant ball of lightning, it must funnel that excess energy somewhere. This means for a little while, the lamps in the local town burn a bit brighter, the clocks run faster and the glow on the television screen just won’t go away. In my daughter’s case, it means she begins to shake violently whilst yelling, “I’M FREAKING OUT, DADDY!”  Then she’ll begin to run in tiny circles that get  larger in diameter and exponentially faster with each consecutive lap until Newton’s first law of motion takes effect and she smacks into either a wall or a piece of furniture, thus ending her centripetal acceleration and beginning screams of shock and surprise. Normally, this is enough to reset her system, as it were, and return her to semi-normal state of toddlerdom.

     I've recently been wondering how people would react if I were to have outbursts of insanity akin to my daughter’s. I can see myself at work as my compatriots decide where we will venture for lunch and one would ask, “How about sushi?” and my response would be, “NAAOOOO! NO SUSHI! NO!” as I start flailing my arms and running in circles in my office as I cry. I’m pretty sure, though, that actions of that sort would land me in a dingy hospital, lying in a bed and freshly lobotomized where another, rather large patient would take pity on me and smother me with a pillow to put me out of my misery. He would then promptly throw a huge bathroom sink through the window to make his escape. I don’t think I’ll go that route. I’ll continue to play the part of the responsible father and let my daughter be the two year old. If she’s still acting like that in fifteen years, though, we might have a problem.       

A Plague O’ My House

     I like to think that I have a pretty resilient immune system. I haven’t really been “sick” in a very long time, other than allergies and the like…at least that was the case before I had a daughter. My daughter attends pre-school now, and I have found that pre-school is merely a facade for what is really a system of clandestine laboratories that specialize in producing biological warfare agents.

     It all started innocently enough one morning when getting my daughter ready for school. She had a minor cough (which for her, was as far as it would progress) that really didn't seem like any cause for alarm. That is, until I picked up her, her lunch box, my backpack, her backpack, her milk cup and her bag of pre-school, nap time linens to carry everything (in the world, apparently) to the car so we could load up and make our way to school and work. About the time I was able to hoist myself back into an upright position after being laden like some pack animal, is when she coughed directly into my face from point blank range. I felt the microscopic droplets of poison being ejected from my daughter’s mouth splatter against my eyeballs and into my open mouth. I shook my head in disgust and disbelief and reminded her that we must always cover our mouths when we cough, and she obliged by burying her mouth into the crook of her elbow and uttering a fake cough. “SEE, I DID IT!” Yes, indeed she had.  Oblivious to the fate that loomed before me, we went about our day.

     A chain reaction of biological catastrophes were set in motion that morning which just a few days later would have me laid up with pneumonia. No doubt, this entire scenario was brought to fruition by the cesspool of filth and disease known as pre-school. And, I have my suspicions, that this disease factory is probably propagated either by some covert government agency whose sole purpose is to use children as disease carrying weapons against the adult population in order to make us more susceptible to a hostile alien takeover , or by some unfortunate, third world asylum seeker who sneaked (walked in broad daylight) across the border into my country and who hails from a place where an immunization consists of drinking some bubbling concoction that has been brewed in a rusty cauldron over an open fire next to a pen of goats and chickens, and any disease one might already have is treated by dipping a handful of reeds and straw into a bowl of potion that was stomped into liquid form by some witch doctor’s stinky feet, and then using that handful of now dripping reeds and straw to thwack the afflicted about the face, chest and back until they are adequately covered with enough of the brew to cure their illness and keep everyone they know at least fifteen feet away until the accompanying funk subsides. Regardless of its origin, I had grown rather ill.

     Two year old children do not understand the meaning of “daddy is sick” and life doesn’t pause even when pneumonia is involved. What does happen when pneumonia is involved, though, is that the slightest physical exertion would send me into a fevered fit of coughing and gasping for breath, because every breath feels like you’re inhaling Jello and the desire to not drown makes your body instinctively try to retch it out. Seeing me in such a state of disarray meant nothing but fun for my daughter, who whenever I would collapse onto the couch in a coughing attack(which happened about every three minutes), would climb up onto my lap, get in my face and scream, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING DADDY? COVER YOU MOUTH! WHAT’S THAT? I WANNA WATCH STRAWBERRY CUPCAKE! GET UP! I NEED SOME WATER!” My inability to breathe combined with Doc Holiday style coughing and a two year old screaming in my face was more than enough to render me absolutely useless. My condition deteriorated to the point where I was delirious with fever and lack of oxygen. I watched in a half conscious daze as my two year old transformed into a teenager and asked me for the car keys so she could go to work. I sat for hours and watched the same nonsensical episodes of Strawberry Shortcake (whom my daughter calls Strawberry Cupcake) over and over until I thought I was living in Berry Bitty City and my name was Rhubarb Ross. I’m pretty sure at one point when I was nothing but a heap of semi-coherent wreckage, lying limply on the couch and drooling all over myself, my daughter was bashing me in the head with one of her plastic frying pans and laughing hysterically.

     After two weeks of feeling and acting like a one hundred year old man who had smoked for seventy-five of those years and then was forced to chase a toddler through the house every day, I began to heal. The myriad of antibiotics, inhalers, decongestants and codeine laced cough syrup had finally begun to work its Western Medicine magic and I could feel the strength returning to my worn out body a little each day. My daughter still doesn't grasp the concept that I've been ill and that it’s hard for me to pick her up and walk up and down the stairs as she screams in my face, but I muster the strength and do it anyway. Sure, I have to stop at either end of the stairs and lean against the wall to catch my breath, but it doesn't faze her.   

     I could faintly see, over the horizon of my days to come, a hint of fully recovered health returning to me. Then as I picked my daughter up this morning to give her a hug, she coughed in my face again. I figure that I’ll be nothing but a shriveled corpse by early February. 

Break a Leg, It’s Christmastime

     Christmastime brings about a myriad of gatherings, celebrations, revelry and chaos. Among the rushes to random retail outlets to dispose of one’s income on the latest sale, the office parties where someone invariably deteriorates to a level of inebriation that leads them to become the fodder of the upcoming year’s legendary tales and the hobos walking down the streets of L.A. dressed in random Santa Claus garments in varying levels of disrepair, lies the school Christmas pageant.

     To be more precise, it was the pre-school Christmas concert (and I use that word as it’s the closest representation of what actually transpired) that my daughter’s school had put on for friends and family. It became apparent about a month previous that her class had been practicing singing Christmas songs, as she randomly started singing a very garbled version of “Jingle Bells” around Thanksgiving. Shortly thereafter, a notice was posted in her class that they would, indeed, be putting on a show for everyone, which automatically led to words like “precious” and “cuteness” being bandied about our home, with, of course, slight reservations about how the program would actually coalesce.

     The day arrived and we made certain to be at the school as the doors opened so we could try to find a seat which could give us some vantage point to record the night’s events. The three hundred other people in the room had the same idea, and of course, they showed up five minutes before we did, so while we didn’t get the best seat in the house, we had a great view of the embarrassment that was about to pour forth from that little, tiny stage. The show was comprised of exactly five songs, and those were arranged one each by age group. As I’m sure you can imagine, the prospect of trying to get a group of toddlers and pre-kindergarten age children to maintain their composure for more than one or two versions of a single song is much like stacking all of your fine china as high as you can and then attempting to carry it all down a flight of stairs while blindfolded…there will be carnage.

     As my daughter’s class is the youngest, they were the first class to sing, but they were preceded by a brief dance demonstration by the school’s dance troupe.  Dressed as little Christmas hula girls, the tiny dancers performed a totally unsynchronized version of Bing Crosby’s “Mele Kalikimaka”. Half a dozen little girls trying to say mele kalikimaka, by the way, is a comedy in and of itself and they could have spent twenty minutes just on that bit and I think the room would have been happy. There was one little girl, right in the middle of the group who absolutely froze on stage to the point where she wasn't even blinking. Her face was contorted in what looked like the beginning of a scream that never escaped, and there she stood, like a Christmasy hula version of Edvard Munch’s painting, forever aghast at the surrounding scene of onlookers, fake grass skirts and the gibberish Hawaiian that was being shouted from every direction. At the end of their performance, she was gently helped offstage where I’m sure she collapsed into a heap of emotional wreckage. I bet her parents are re-thinking the cost of those dance lessons.

     Then it was my daughter’s turn. Her class was led onstage by teachers at both ends of the line of students, much like a pair of trainers would lead a line of monkeys into a circus performance. Once onstage, my daughter was at first a little overwhelmed and she shrank from the spotlight as if she wasn't quite sure what was happening. Then, she saw Mommy waving to her from the crowd, and all was well with the world. So well, in fact, that her spirits were raised enough to make her explode with joy and start jumping up and down and flailing her arms about as if she were trying to fly away. In her fit of spastic outburst she flailed errantly and smacked herself in the face, which made her erupt in a resounding scream that could be heard throughout the entirety of the auditorium. Then, the music started. She regained her composure again once she heard the jingling of the bells come over the boom box, and each member of the little class started their own random toddler shuffle as the chorus to “Jingle Bells” began to play. At about the middle of the line “Dashing through the snow…”, my daughter decided to embed her finger in her nose at a depth of about the second knuckle and dig for treasure. Her exercise in cranial spelunking brought a roar from the audience, which made my daughter smile and start jumping up and down again. She pried her finger free and began dancing and jumping and spinning and paying no attention whatsoever to the choreography that had no doubt been meticulously planned. Of course, nobody on stage was doing anything that even remotely resembled “Jingle Bells”. A few were dancing the two year old dance, a few were clapping to their own beat, a few were standing still and staring out into the vastness of the audience before them, and of course a few were in tears. My daughter, between bursts of jumping and spinning, would stick her tongue out at the audience to get a laugh. Then, the random, seven foot tall, inflatable Grinch Who Stole Christmas collapsed in the corner by the stage and broke everyone’s concentration.  Finished or not, the music was stopped and the performance was capped by a poorly played Santa Claus who burst into the room (bearing the conspicuous outline of a pillow in his shirt and who, I’m sure, smelled faintly of whiskey) ringing a bell over his head and shouting, “HO HO HO.”  To a group of two year olds, a giant, red, hairy, deformed figure who is ringing a bell and shouting is an object of sheer terror that could only have burst into the room to eat everyone. As the menacing Kringle lumbered towards the stage, the group of children naturally burst into tears and tried to flee for their lives. My wife and I sat dumbfounded and looked at each other in sheer disbelief at the scene that had unfolded before us. It was an absolutely surreal experience.

Apparently a month of singing practice with a class of two year olds is utterly meaningless, and they probably could have started the day before and achieved the same result.  Hopefully they’ll tweak the program for next year’s performance. 

Thanksgiving: A Terror in Three Parts- Part 3, Friday: Welcome to Thunderdome

     When it rains in L.A., you might as well assume that the world is coming to an end. I spent most of my life in Florida, the land of the afternoon thunderstorm and home to monsoon like rains that could easily wash Los Angeles into Davey Jones' locker. But, because rain in L.A. is such a rare occasion, the slightest sprinkle not only generates news reports for days before and after (the question normally posed to the random public is some variation of “What are you planning to do/ What did you do during all of the unimaginably terrible weather”...it's like the L.A. version of interviewing trailer park dwellers after a tornado) but it sends Angelinos everywhere into a frantic survival mode. I'll refrain from detailing how after such inclement weather the freeways are always littered with the hulking remains of cars whose drivers haven't the comprehension of how to navigate wet streets, mainly because they have no idea where the switch that operates the windshield wipers is located and their misguided logic dictates that the best way to get through the rain is to drive faster.

So, when it rains, mommies and daddies have to have a place to take their children to play, since children, especially toddlers, can develop cabin fever and transform into raging maniacs of destruction in the blink of an eye if their attention is not held or they are unable to expend the apparently limitless superhuman energy that they possess. The answer to this, of course, is the indoor play place. This is not the type of play area you find in a questionable fast food restaurant where unfortunate, sweaty people dressed as some overstuffed mascot try to coerce you into eating coronary inducing synthetic food, but a large and elaborate indoor area with various structures, pits, swings and slides on which children can potentially cause grievous bodily injury to themselves or those around them. This was our Day-After-Thanksgiving adventure, our own personal Black Friday. This particular play place was crafted by an ingenious sadist (a Japanese business man, who according to my wife, “rocks a Kung-Fu mullet”) who walks around in workout clothes apparently making sure that the play structures are still standing and that no children have been maimed on his watch. This place offers an interesting opportunity for adults as well, as there is a café inside where mommies and daddies can enjoy lunch while they watch from a safe distance as children go careening about.

As my daughter is two, she thinks she is capable of anything, especially if there are other children doing it, regardless of how big they are. She was quickly shown otherwise by the “Swinging Palm Trees of Death” as I like to call them. The device in question is a large rotating set of swings that spin around a central post and the whole thing is cleverly disguised as a giant palm tree with branches that hang to the ground. Instead of seats, however, the end of the swing arm is what looks like a medicine ball that the children sit on whilst holding on for dear life. Once it gets going, it resembles a beach themed G-Force simulator like one would see in an old NASA training video. My daughter thought it would be great fun to try to grab onto the ball as it was spinning, and she held on just long enough to build up the momentum required to fling her toward the nearest wall, where she smacked into it Wile E. Coyote style.

After a brief fit of screaming, she moved to the ball pit. This ball pit is only accessible by climbing a steep ramp, then crawling through hamster-like tunnels on the second level and then by descending several platforms down to where the pit awaits. Of course, everything on that particular structure is toddler sized, except for the distance between the platforms one must navigate to get to the ball pit. Two year olds are adept enough to climbs down the platforms, but they aren’t quite tall enough or strong enough to pull themselves back up when either they or their parents want them out. Since the ball pit is surrounded by mesh and separated from the rest of the play area, the only way in or out is to traverse the aforementioned labyrinth. Slightly overweight and out of shape fathers are not best suited for this particular environment. As two year olds are want to do, they may spend anywhere from five seconds to ten minutes in the ball pit before trying to fruitlessly climb out, which then results in screaming for mamma or dada who must come to the rescue by climbing up the ramp, squeezing through the baby tunnels, then contorting themselves so they can lower themselves down, level by level until they reach the ball pit of doom, there I would then pick up my screaming child who would absolutely refuse to walk and carry her back up the ridiculously narrow passage of levels, through the tunnel of despair until we reached the opening where the ramp leads back down to main floor. This junction of tunnel and ramp is often where my screaming daughter would decide to break free and run down the tunnel to the other end where a giant slide would offer her an escape route back to the carnage of the play floor. Then I, shaking my head, would have to continue to crawl on my hands and knees toward the ramp opening before I could stand up and walk upright again and then down the ramp where I would pass my daughter as she was careening back up the ramp to make her way back to the ball pit where the process would start all over again within just a few minutes.

Three hours later when my wife and I had decided we had taken enough abuse, it was time to go. My daughter, of course was in the ball pit again and I thought, foolishly, that I could ask her to come out since it was time to go home. A few moms had taken up residence in the ball pit as they apparently got tired of making the trek and were sitting on the ledges, so my daughter thought that since they must live in the ball pit, she could ask them if it was ok to stay and that would overrule my decision. They were kind enough to look at me and chuckle as I made my way back to the pit to fetch my daughter who was now in full melt down mode as making her leave the pit was tantamount to a death sentence in her mind. My wife collected our things and met me at the base of the ramp (taking pictures, of course) as I hauled my screaming daughter out of that infernal maze of insanity and took her home for her nap.



It was a busy Thanksgiving week, indeed.

     

Thanksgiving: A Terror in Three Parts; Part 2- Thursday: The Home Invasion

     I don’t really have hobbies, per se. In my mind, hobbies are things that require a hefty investment of both money and time (neither of which I have in excess), and from what I've seen, hobbies are, in many instances, a means to escape one’s family. I suppose if I were to try to categorize my interests and label one a hobby, I would have to say that cooking probably falls closest to that mark. It’s something I enjoy doing, something I grew up doing, and I even did it professionally for several years. So, when Thanksgiving approaches, I normally start gearing myself up for an epic cooking marathon.

     It was not to be this year. We were invited by some very close friends to spend Thanksgiving with their family, a change from the norm as we normally host the Thanksgiving festivities at our house. My wife literally danced a jig at the prospect of me not disappearing into the kitchen like some mad scientist, only to emerge days later covered in rendered turkey fat and having bits of exploded cranberries lodged in whatever facial hair had grown during my self-imposed exile. I, however, was not as enthusiastic about the prospect. As the days crept closer and closer to Thanksgiving, I felt more and more uneasy. Two thoughts weighed on me with an almost unbearable persistence: first, I had no idea what to do with myself since I wasn't cooking (Playstation 3 solved that pretty quickly). And secondly, what would be the ramifications of unleashing my daughter in someone else’s home for a major holiday? My wife had the same thought, so being the resourceful, organizational mommy that she is, she did some research (I was busy venting my frustration over not cooking with the latest Batman video game). The answer she came up with was a bag of new toys from the dollar bin at Target. The thought was that new toys would grab her attention and keep her focus on something other than waylaying destruction on a very nice home in a very picturesque Los Angeles neighborhood.  

     The car ride to our destination was without incident. It reminded me of a scene in any random suspense or action film where the protagonists are approaching their enemy’s secret lair, basically unimpeded, and one says to the other, “It’s quiet…too quiet…” and it turns out to be ambush of epic proportions. It was indeed an ambush. People without children don’t really grasp the fact that young children will get into EVERYTHING… especially your antique Peruvian charango because it looks like a really cool guitar and it makes noise (I really do hope that it isn't broken). And your piano because, hey it makes noise when you hit it. And, look, you left your laptop open, let’s see what you’re working on and how it can be improved. And, oh, what cute kitty cats you have. Oops, they ran upstairs, I shall run upstairs after them and scare the bejeezus out of them. Ooooh, there’s the kitty cats’ litter box…let’s look for buried treasure. And oh, Mommy brought bubbles…I WANT BUBBLES, I WANT BUBBLES, I WANNA GO OUTSIDE. It was an absolute nightmarish tornado of toddler and cats and pretty blue cat litter and the accompanying musical score was performed by the striking of random musical instruments. And we hadn't even sat down for dinner yet.

     Finally, dinner was served (really only about half an hour had passed since we arrive, but it felt like days) and everyone took their places at the table. My daughter sat in my wife’s lap with her own little plate of food placed before her, and we made it about three seconds into the blessing of the meal before she burst into a chorus of “I WANNA GET DOWN I WANNA GET DOWN I WANNA GET DOWN I’M ALL DOOOONNNNNNEEEEE,” which burst through the moment of solemn quietness like a rock through a stained glass window. I let out an embarrassed chuckle in an unspoken attempt to apologize to the rest of the party, and my wife and I exchanged exasperated glances. My wife then quietly carried our daughter into the living room and busted out her secret bag of tricks. Our daughter plundered through the bag like some little Viking who was ransacking an unfortunate village’s treasure box. She found her prize and exclaimed, “I WANT PWAY-DOUGH” as she pulled it from the bag and held it up in triumph like she had just won the gold medal in crazy at the toddler Olympics. Why we would bring Play-Dough into someone else’s home when we know what happens when it rears its mushy little head in our home is beyond me, we might as well have brought plastic explosives. When you’re two, what do you do when you have a handful of Play-Dough? That’s right, you tear it into little bits and chuck it everywhere. And what isn't launched around the room is formed into Dali-esque shapes and deposited on the dinner plates of those who are attempting to enjoy their Thanksgiving meal. My wife and I are used to living in chaos, but for some of the other guests who hadn't spent a significant amount of time around our daughter, I assume they felt that the experience was akin to trying to eat a turkey dinner on an active battlefield.

     Dinner was enjoyed, for the most part, despite being peppered with interruptions from a toddler who would crawl under the table at one end and emerge at the other holding a randomly shaped chunk of Play-Dough which would then be shoved towards someone’s face with the explanation, “I MADE DIS FOR YOUUU…EAT IT!!” Everyone was a good sport about it and pretended to eat whatever concoction was being thrust at them. We decided it would be best to take our dessert to go and get our circus of rambunctiousness packed up and headed toward home so that everyone else could talk about us as they enjoyed the rest of their evening. As our host was generously packing our dessert for us, I slipped under the table to collect the neon blue shrapnel that had been littered everywhere. I emerged from beneath the table to our host’s surprise and befuddlement.

“Watcha doing down there?”

“Picking up bits of blue, I didn't want to leave it for you to find later.”

“That’s very nice.”

     It wasn't nice. It was the responsible thing to do. And it was the least I could for the reign of mayhem we unleashed at his family’s holiday gathering. Thursday was waning to its conclusion, but we still had Friday to contend with.   

Thanksgiving: A Terror in Three Parts; Part 1- Wednesday

     For those of you who are either uninformed or thoroughly confused regarding American culture, or if you are in need of a refresher, Thanksgiving is an American holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. The entire country comes to a grinding halt so we can engage in unadulterated gluttony and eat ourselves silly as an act of remembrance for those pilgrims who came to this country long before it was civilized. As most Americans still are, these pilgrims were absolutely incapable of surviving outside of the pinnacle of luxury and were facing certain doom at the hands of a particularly cruel winter when lo and behold, they were saved by the local native population who were quite adept at living off the land (of course, as thanks for their kindness we later invaded their lands, rounded them up and tried to eradicate them).  At least that’s the version we are taught in school, so it may or may not actually be based on historical events.  

     As all good American children do, my daughter’s pre-school had a class Thanksgiving feast on the day before the actual holiday. Schools are normally closed on Thursday for the holiday, as well as Friday, since who wants to go back to school on a Friday after you've eaten more in one day than what some small villages eat in a week, unless you’re a retail shop then you don’t really close for the full holiday as for some reason modern American society thinks you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO do your Christmas shopping on Thanksgiving night and overnight into Friday (which, since we are American, leads to riots, fights, arrests, and general anarchy so you can get a good deal on the latest television or whatever…civilized society, indeed), but I digress…Absolute chaos erupted at about 5:15 that evening when my wife and I picked up our daughter from her pre-school. I stayed in the car, so I only have second hand information regarding the events that actually transpired inside the school walls as my wife went in to fetch our daughter, but the evidence presented as they walked out confirms everything that was alleged. Apparently the floor of our daughter’s class was littered with toddler vomit which was being sopped up with towels by a very unlucky teacher. It appeared that a feeding frenzy had erupted at the pre-school celebration and some poor child (or children) had engorged themselves to the point of eruption. I was notified to my family’s exit of the school building by my daughter’s blood curdling screams, so as a concerned father, I exited the car and made my way to the school entrance to do what I could to help. Apparently, my daughter’s class had made Native American style feather headbands out of colored paper and she wasn't wearing it, but really, really wanted to. She wanted to so much that she had to scream. I’m quite certain that the metric tonne of sugar she consumed at her school party was a contributing factor to the behavior she was exhibiting. This was further clarified after I put the headband on her head for her as a gesture of love and kindness, and she in turn ripped it of off her head whilst screaming “NOOOOOOO” at the top of her lungs. So, into the car we went so we could get to the market to pick up some things for dinner that night. It wasn't until everyone was securely strapped in and we were pulling away from the school that my wife turned up her nose and said, “What is that smell…” We then collectively realized that our still screaming daughter must have stepped in the puddle of sick in the school and it was now polluting the sweet, apple scented air being generated by the air freshener in the car. The smell of apple scented chemicals mixed with toddler wretch was quickly becoming more than my wife could stomach, and as her face was turning green like some kind of Bugs Bunny cartoon, I could tell she was reaching critical mass so I rolled down the windows to air out the car before her lunch came up as well.

     By this time we had reached the market and our daughter was still screaming over the headband that she wanted to wear but wouldn't let us put on her head. As it was the night before Thanksgiving and most Americans will procrastinate until the very last moment, the traffic to get in or out of the shopping center where the market was located was an absolute nightmare. We didn't make it in…screaming child plus stomach churning stench of death plus standstill traffic meant we weren't going to the market and we would forage whatever was edible from our fridge for dinner that night. I was fine with that decision and set our heading for home. Shortly thereafter the screaming stopped and was replaced by a rustling sound. Our daughter had found a bag in the backseat area of my wife’s car that contained random items that my wife exchanges in and out of her purse depending on her needs. So, "Whatever," we thought, our daughter was quiet, she wasn't screaming and the open windows were doing a fairly decent job of sucking the foul stink of upchuck from the cabin area, so it looked as though the remaining few minutes home might be peaceful. Moments later, the rustling sound from the back seat was replaced with a distinctive “shakey-shakey” sound. Our daughter had discovered a bottle of ibuprofen in the bag of random bits. I sounded a mild alarm at the discovery, but the consensus was that it wasn't a big deal since the bottle had a child proof lid and we were mere seconds from being home. Well, guess who can open a child proof pill bottle in the dark whilst strapped into a child seat in a moving vehicle…of course she can…and as I pulled into the garage I heard the nightmarish sound of pills being poured from a plastic bottle. I turned around and grabbed her before she could eat a handful of them. Thanksgiving, indeed. And it was only Wednesday.