My wife had a conference in Phoenix last week, so I was in charge of both of our girls for three days (and nights).  While having two kids is more demanding than two, at least you’re not outnumbered when both parents are present.

I was outnumbered last week.

I’ve learned that when there are more children than adults in a household, you have to switch from man-on-man coverage to a zone defense.  I was essentially trying to cover the middle third of the field and not give up any big plays.  Fortunately, we are blessed to have two very good girls and there were no major catastrophes, but any time you have sole responsibility over a 1 year old and 4 year old, there will be some stress.

Take dinner time for example.  I like to eat.  I enjoy dinner with my family.  I even like to cook!  But when all the extraneous demands of parenting hit at once, dinner can easily become a race to see how fast I can get my kids to down cheese toast covered in ketchup (hey, that’s what they wanted) before anything too bad happens.

As a special treat, I cooked my homemade pizza Friday night.  Here’s a rundown on how this went:

I’m about to take the pizza out of the oven.  Olivia is watching iCarly.  “Olivia, go wash your hands.  We’re about to eat.”

“Ok, daddy.”

I begin slicing the pizza.  What’s that smell?  Amelia walks by – gotta change a diaper.

I change the diaper and bring the baby back downstairs where I finish slicing the pizza.

“Olivia, wash your hands, please.”

“Ok, daddy.”

I get the plates fixed up for the girls and put Amelia in her high chair.

“OLIVIA, WASH YOUR HANDS NOW!”

“Can I pause the TV?”  My 4 year old daughter knows how to operate a DVR – if only she could teach my wife.

The girls are at the table, blessings have been said, and I’m about to take a bite out of my delicious pizza.  Olivia takes her bite first and the 4000 degree molten cheese under a pepperoni scalds her mouth.  I get her to drink her milk and after much consoling convince her to continue eating.  Now I can enjoy my dinner.

Not yet!  Amelia thinks the tomato sauce from her pizza would make a wonderful shampoo.  Not only that, but she thinks it feels wonderful in her ears. 

I get her cleaned up.  Olivia needs more milk.

I get Olivia more milk.  Amelia needs more food.

With everyone temporarily satisfied, I get ready to take my first bite.  Before I can even get my slice of pizza off my plate, Olivia says, “I need to go poop.”  While she’s old enough to go on her own, I still have to clean up.  So I put down my pizza and wait for her to take care of business so I can clean her up before eating my dinner.

Back at the table, I finally get to enjoy my room temperature pizza.  It is at this point that my dog, who is under the table, decides to release some of the nastiest gas that has ever emanated from any creature.  I finally get to eat my cold pizza while smelling dog gas after recently wiping a child’s rear end.  How appetizing!

There will be no metaphorical tie-ins with today’s posting.  Although I could think of some applications, this is just a posting about a subject that we all deal with but never discuss.

As the parent of two children and a dog owner, it seems that I spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with poop – changing my one year old’s diaper, helping my four year old after she takes care of business, getting the shovel out for my chocolate lab two or three times a day (I think her dog food is made from little nuggets of Fiber One bars).  My oldest is now at the age where she can even carry out in-depth, philosophical conversations on poop.

“Everybody poops, daddy.”

“Yes they do.”

“I like to go poopie.”

“That’s good, Olivia.”

“I want to poop in the yard like Maggie.”

“Huh?”

You probably didn’t want to read a poop-posting and I apologize if you are reading this on your lunch break, but last Wednesday was simply pooptastic.  It started in a restaurant with my family.  It was a pretty quiet night and with our two little girls, we were the center of attention in the dining area.

Twice during our meal Olivia loudly proclaimed, “I tooted!”  This was followed by, “I need to go potty.”

She does this at restaurants occasionally just to get to walk around and see all the other people, so we asked if she really had to go.

“Yep.  I have to go poopie!”

…stares from around the room.

Once we got home, the girls needed a bath.  Both were in the tub when I noticed an underwater mine floating near the baby’s stern.  Of course this terrified Olivia, who pointed with wide eyes screaming, “POOP!”

I handed the girls to my wife, who relocated them to another tub while I bleached the bathtub and the four thousand bath toys that were in it.  Afterwards, Sara was getting the girls dressed while I rinsed bath toy number 3,998.

That’s when I heard Sara say, “Amelia, nooooo!”

Apparently, the task was not completed in the tub.  Amelia was crawling around naked while my wife got Olivia dressed.  During her naked crawling, Amelia made a few more deposits on the carpet (four to be exact – she must have gotten into the dog food) .  Of course, this went unnoticed until she crawled through one of them, leaving a poop trail on the floor.

Like I said… pooptastic.

My previous posting talked about our boat and the need to get a little more adventurous with it.  We did that last week when I went skiing for the first time.  My wife used to ski when she was younger, but hasn’t tried it in about 15 years.  Her first attempt was short-lived, but she got up on the second try and went on for several minutes before deciding that she was done.  You mean you can decide when to stop?

My attempts at skiing were a little bit… different.  I’ve never attempted to ski before.  It looks easy enough:  you hold on to a rope and stand up, right?  I made four attempts and actually got up on the third try, which everyone told me was really good.  I don’t know if this encouragement was sincere or pity.  Here’s how it went:

Attempt 1:  The boat took off.  I fell down.

 
Attempt 2:  I did what everyone told me not to do – I tried pulling myself up with my arms instead of letting the boat do it for me.  When you do this, your feet shoot forward and you fall.  Since I was trying to muscle my way up, my arms were bent.  When I fell, this put the handle about groin-high with my legs bent in front of me.  My hands let go of the handle but it was trapped between my legs.  Now my back was being dragged across the surface of the water with the handle stuck between my legs.  Neat trick… I meant to do that.  The handle finally pulled through (painfully) and I have two impressive bruises as a souvenir.

Attempt 3:  This time I kept my arms straight.  Two groin-high thigh bruises are excellent teaching tools.  I slowly came up and straightened my legs – I was skiing!  The boat built up speed and I started getting comfortable until I shifted my weight too far forward.  With the boat at speed, I actually fell forward and hit the lake face-first.  Remember the “agony of defeat guy” on the opening of ABC’s Wide World of Sports?  I told everyone in the boat that I was fine and it didn’t hurt.  I lied.

Attempt 4:  The ski rope sank and I had to swim around for while attempting to locate it.  With skis on, this is exhausting.  Add in the other skiing attempts and my legs were now two columns of Jell-O.  After the boat gathered speed, I tried standing on my wobbly legs only to dip down until my rear hit the water.  I learned that when you do this, all of the water is directed straight to your face.  I also learned that I ski with my mouth open.  I wasn’t giving up.  I got halfway up before dipping down again.  My mouth was still open, but I was tenacious.  I got halfway up again… and dipped back down.  You’d think that I would learn to keep my mouth shut.  With my legs exhausted, I was sort of skimming the surface of the water on my rear – water still directed toward my face, mouth still open.  I’m pretty sure water was shooting out of my ears.  After swallowing a few quarts of lake water and some small aquatic animals, I let go – thus concluded my first skiing trip.

Here’s an attempt by attempt analogy of my skiing attempts to life:

Attempt 1:  If you’ve never done it before, you probably won’t do well and you won’t look good trying at first.  However, you’ll never get any good at it if you don’t try.

Attempt 2:  Skiing is like a lot of things in life.  It requires balance, flexibility, and endurance.  What I lack in balance and flexibility, I try to make up for with strength.  A lot of people do this.  It works for a little while, but you end up exhausted, bruised, and bobbing in the water.  Don’t get me wrong; strength is important, but without balance and flexibility it will lead to failure.

Attempt 3:  With persistence, you may see some early success.  This is not the time to get too cavalier because you are still learning.  Continue to learn and acknowledge that you are still learning.

Attempt 4:  There is a thin line between tenacity and stupidity – learn to recognize it.  Also, when things aren’t going the way you thought they should, it is sometimes best to keep your mouth shut.

It’s a holiday weekend and I’m really not in the mood to write anything deep, so here is a recap of last week’s American Idol season finale.  This is completely irrelevant to the purpose of this blog and you can stop reading now if don’t watch American Idol.

First of all, there is the issue of the number of votes.  Seacrest kept saying that there were “almost 100 million” votes cast.  Compare that to the 2008 presidential election, considered by many to be the most important one in recent history, where there were about 120 to 130 million votes cast and you get a good sense of where America’s priorities lie (or is it lay… I never could get that one). 

Now for the performances – I didn’t really start keeping track until about halfway through the show, so I’ll omit the awkwardness of Lionel Richie with Danny Gokey and the surprisingly good performance by the combination of Cindy Lauper and Allison Iraheta. 

Since the judges always talk about contestants needing to be new, fresh, relevant, etc. what better way to celebrate the culmination of the season than to showcase a bunch of 30 year-old music?

When I saw Adam with what appeared to be rebar bent into some kind of industrial art incorporated into his costume, I told my wife that he would either be with Meatloaf or KISS.  Sure enough, KISS descended onto the stage amid some “shock and awe” pyrotechnics.  This is where everything started to get really weird for me.  I have to say, I’ve never been a big fan of KISS.  Yeah, they dress funny and wear a lot of makeup… but so does Paula Abdul.  These guys range from 57 to 64 years old.  Let that soak in.  Seeing them in spandex and u-cut shirts that showcase their harry barrel-chestedness was nauseating.  Was this a performance by rock and roll legends or The Country Bear Jamboree?

Next came the ageless Carlos Santana.  This guy is still one of the best guitarist ever and lives up to the name of the song he performed, “smooth”.  I can’t fault this one at all.

Next up… Steve Martin is playing a banjo and plugging his new album???  This is becoming a strange dream.  As weird as this was, I kind of liked the bluegrassy sound.

The adventures in surrealism continued when Rod Stewart was apparently given an adrenaline shot straight to the heart so that he could come on stage and perform a few more 30 year-old songs.  If American Idol is going for the young demographics, they really should invest in a calendar… or a time machine.

For the final performance, Kris and Adam started singing Queen’s “We Are the Champions”.  For a brief moment I thought, “Holy cow – they’re going to bring back Freddie Mercury from the dead.”  Don’t laugh, they did it with Rod Stewart.  The surviving band did appear and the show’s bias toward Adam was underscored.

To sum it up, I think all of the performances proved that there hasn’t been much decent music made this decade.  Everybody is shocked that Adam didn’t win the competition, but when you consider the fact that now he doesn’t have to record that stinker of a song that Kara wrote, he may be the real winner.  I  guess Adam can seek consolation from Chris Daughtry, who can tell him how to cope with a life of obscurity after losing on American Idol while the winner goes on to fame and fortune.  Who won that year?  Oh yeah, Taylor Hicks… he’s awesome.

My wife and I went on a mini-vacation last weekend.  We did the typical vacation thing… walked around in a bunch of shops without buying anything, slept in (until 6 am – we were on Pacific Time), and went out to eat for every meal. 

Our first night, Sara was in the mood for sushi.  I don’t know how many perfectly good restaurants we passed by in search of this one particular sushi restaurant, but by the time we got there, I was starving.

We finally found the restaurant that Sara… I mean, we were searching to find.  The restaurant was called Sushi Samba.  It was a combination of Brazilian, Peruvian, and Japanese cuisine.  This was great because as hungry as I was, I kept thinking that a Brazilian/Peruvian/Japanese restaurant would really hit the spot.  This had to be way better than those other restaurants we passed with their delicious smelling brick oven pizzas, juicy filet mignon, and completely recognizable seafood. 

Don’t get me wrong.  We are culturally diverse when it comes to dining.  I’ve enjoyed sushi for several years and I think using chopsticks is fun, but I was hungry… really hungry. 

Our server, who I could barely understand, came to our table as asked if we wanted to start with something unintelligible.  I had no idea what she asked us, but since I was starving I said, “Sure.”

Wrong answer.

I looked Sara, “What did I just order?”

“Edamame.”

“What?”

“Edamame.”

“What?”

“Soybeans.”

“Oh.”

This conversation was followed by a second conversation in my head.  How in the world do you make a soybean appetizer?

Even though I am originally from the state of Tennessee, which has to be one of the highest producers of soybeans, my culinary experience with them is pretty limited.  I know they were in those quasi-burgers we had in school and I’m pretty sure soybean oil is found in lots of tasty foods, but that’s about it.  I was thinking they would be cooked and crushed up with some cilantro, onions, and peppers into a dip and served with some tortillas.

Dream on, Wolfgang.

What came out was a large wooden bowl heaping with cooked soybeans (still in their shells) garnished with sea salt and a lime wedge.  I could not hide my disgust when the bowl hit our table.  It was like Randy Travis when he became fixated on Adam Lambert’s black fingernails.

This cost seven dollars?

I grabbed my chopsticks and ate the first one.  It tasted about how you would expect a soybean cooked in its shell to taste.  Not bad, not great.  The problem was the texture.  Since it was still in its shell, it was sort of like eating a straw hat (with sea salt and lime, of course).  Sara gave up after the first two, leaving me to attempt to finish the whole bowl.  Since I paid $7 for a bowl of beans, I felt compelled to finish it but with every bite I kept thinking, “This can’t be right.” 

About halfway through the bowl and after eating enough roughage to regulate a herd of elephants, I decided to throw in the towel.  The rest of the meal was very enjoyable.  The sushi and sides were great, but the whole experience was tarnished by those beans that, if woven together, could have pulled a tractor out of a ditch.

After having desert and paying the check, a couple sat down next to us.  They also ordered the edamame.  Fools.  I noticed Sara staring at them.  Just as I was about to tell her to stop staring, she began laughing.  From watching this couple she learned that the proper way to eat edamame is to pinch the shell so that the bean squeezes out, then discard the shell.  What I did was equivalent to eating an entire bag of sunflower seeds… and their shells… and the flower stalks.

If you are ever in a restaurant and someone asks you if want to start with some edamame, think of me… and order the spinach/artichoke dip.

I’m tired of hearing about the crisis of the day, so today’s posting will aim for levity.  My oldest daughter is now 3 and a half.  This is that magical age in which children possess an interesting vocabulary.  Their familiarity with words and attempts to incorporate them into conversation slightly outstrips their understanding of the words, resulting in some hilarious outcomes.  These are all real things Olivia has said recently:

We were playing with a toy rocket and I asked her count down for blast off.  She began counting, “One, two, three…”

“No,” I said, “count backwards.”

She immediately turned her back to me and began, “One, two, three…”

As I was making breakfast, she walked into the kitchen and said, “I love you, daddy.”  Which she immediately followed with, “And I like eggs!”

Olivia has been taking gymnastics for several weeks and always calls it “misternastics”.  We couldn’t figure out where this was coming from until we realized that “gym” sounds like “Jim”, which is a man’s first name, hence “Mr. Nastics”.

Shortly after our second daughter’s birth, we were in the hospital and the baby started crying.  After a few minutes of crying, Olivia said, “Baby sister is hungry.  She needs to eat some boo-boos.”

One night we were having dinner at a restaurant and our waiter was bald as beach ball.  Every time he came to our table, Olivia asked him, “What happened to your hair?  I’ll help you find it.”

I’m sure there are countless more, but this is all I can think of for now.  Post some replies if you have some stories of your own.

A few days ago I was in the basement working out.  My three year old daughter was down there with me because she likes to “exercise” with daddy.  Right in the middle of my last set of incline dumbbell presses my daughter informed me, “Girls like boys… girls kiss boys.”

Did I mention she is three years old?!?

Obviously such a statement required immediate action on my part.  The first thing I did was remove one of the dumbbells from my chest and the other from my face.  Then I did the sincere fatherly speech thing where I squatted down to her three year old level, looked her square in the eyes, and said, “No sweetie, girls don’t kiss boys.  In fact good little girls punch the mean, nasty boys right in the mouth if they pucker up near them.”

I didn’t actually say that, but I would if I had thought of it at the time. 

So it begins; my lifelong struggle to attempt to intimidate every boy who gets anywhere near my daughters.  I do own a lot of guns… that helps, but I know it will be difficult.  Both of my girls are blond haired and blue eyed, they have great smiles, and my three old already loves to watch football with me.  About the only thing I have going for me is the fact that she inherited my profuse sweating gene.  Suddenly global warming doesn’t look so bad.

I Googled the top 10 news stories for 2008 to find something to write about.  With all the press that the top stories are getting (the election, high gas prices, the financial crises, low gas prices, Britney Spears…) some otherwise huge news items have been completely missed.  For example, Number 10 on the list was the Russia-Georgia war.

Here I am just a few miles outside of Atlanta and we hardly even talk about our war with Russia.  I do recall hearing some low flying aircraft from time to time last year and there was that awkward moment between President Bush and Putin at the Olympics, but I don’t remember seeing any Russian paratroopers filling the morning sky like they did in Red Dawn.  Nor do I recall hearing Patrick Swayze’s battle cry of “WOLVERINES”!  

It’s amazing how such a huge story could get placed on the back burner just because everyone’s 401(k) is tanking.  Speaking of tanks, I didn’t see any of those either.  Maybe the Russians came by boat and attacked Savannah.  Wait… the story says that they attacked South Ossetia.  Never heard of it… must be on the Georgia/Alabama boarder.  I’ve been saying that boarder has been way too lax for years.  Bama fans just come and go as they please.

I live northeast of Atlanta, so my guess is that the tanks rolled across western GA then got stuck in traffic on I-285 (what I would give to be driving a tank on I-285).  This story took place during the gas shortages this summer, so I can only assume that once they got stuck on 285 they ran out of fuel and diesel was nowhere to be found.  With nothing but 24 hour coverage of the Olympics to watch, they probably became engrossed in the Michael Phelps story.  By the time he won his eighth gold medal, I am sure they were enamored by the rich commentary of Bob Costas and lost interest in their attack plans.  Thank you, Michael.  If you are ever passing our way, I’ll cook you up a few dozen pancakes.

I’ve been a dog lover all of my life.  When I say “dog lover,” I am talking about real dogs not those yappy, manicured, four-legged mammals that more closely resemble a really loud and obnoxious cat than man’s best friend.  I had an encounter last week that has caused me to rethink my interactions with the pooches of the world.

During one of my runs last week, I came up behind a young couple walking two large dogs.  I passed one of them, a chocolate lab/mastiff mix and nodded at the owner.  The second, a bullmastiff, was slightly ahead of the other.  If you don’t know what bullmastiff is, think Turner and Hooch.

I’ve never had any fear of dogs and didn’t think anything about running past this animal that looked more like a small horse than a dog.  As I passed the dog, it decided to say “hello” by taking a bite out of my right hindquarter. 

When I tell this story, I can’t help but use a Forrest Gump voice and explain that “I was just running” when “something jumped up and bit me.”  I’ve roughhoused with dogs and got the little play bites before, but this one actually tore my shorts, broke the skin, and drew blood.  I currently have ten tooth marks and a nice bruise.  

To make matters worse, 38 cases of rabies have been reported this year in the county where I live.  I checked with the owners to make sure that the dog was current on its shots because I didn’t want to start foaming at the mouth until someone took me out in the woods to end my earthly existence in the likeness of Old Yeller.

I’m not sure where I am going with this, but it’s not every day you get bitten by a 150 pound dog.  It seems that the things that end up hurting us the most are not the things that we fear, but the things that we are comfortable with.  The irony of this is a lot people spend their lives avoiding taking chances and trying new endeavors because they are afraid they may get hurt or fail.  But in truth when we take a chance, we are more cautious and alert.  It is when our daily existence is nothing more than going through the motions that we can be lulled into putting our lives on autopilot.  When we live a life of routine, boring adequacy we sometimes overlook the pitfalls of leading such a life.

I’m not saying that we always need to be on the lookout for danger and living in a constant state of paranoia.  I am imploring you to make decisions that require you to be alert rather than just mundanely running through life with a false sense of security.