Welfareloser's Blog

baby gate #4 eats shit after a particularly emphatic rattling session:

i’ve now had to do it at least once on 3 out of 4 kids. DramaQueen wins the honor of never needing it (so far. i wouldn’t put competitive hot-dog swallowing past him at some point in his middle school career.) EvilGremlin wins the honor of needing it the most – at least three times that i can remember before age 2. that little shit did the worst job i’ve ever seen of swallowing, something that you would think would be instinctive, but apparently is not.

a few nights ago, it was MonkeyBeef’s turn. as i was cooking dinner, i became aware of MB making a really fucked-up noise, just as EvilGremlin shouted “oh my god i think he’s choking!” every now and then he made a horribly labored noise as he breathed in for all of a second, and then it would get choked off again. i swiped through his mouth, found nothing, and started the heimlich. the second i heard air rushing in, i’d go digging in his pharynx, but by the time i got my finger there, he had sucked the object back down. i tried to get him to eject it more forcefully, but he never seemed to be able to move it completely out of his airway. and so it went, for a good two minutes. two minutes of trying to get your baby to breathe is a very long fucking time.

finally, my finger caught the object: a marble. a slippery, round marble. i jabbed my finger in good and hard to make sure i got behind it instead of it slipping to the side and getting pushed back down. i probably scratched him in the process, because when he coughed up the marble, a fat rope of bloody mucus came with it, like a comet tail. he was still making fucked-up, labored noises, which resolved when he finished puking up the bowl of popcorn he had just eaten, but was terrifying until then.

and did i mention all of this happened in the middle of a tornado? going to the hospital wasn’t even an option!

yeah. fun night! anyway. heimlich maneuver. good shit to know. i guess i’m officially a “veteran” parent, because not only was i able to hold my shit together well enough to figure out a sort of hybrid between the baby-technique and adult-technique heimlich, i also had the presence of mind to call EvilGremlin over and talk him through what i was doing to MonkeyBeef so that he would be able to do it himself in the future. AND i finished it off with an explanation to the twits that this is why you don’t try to fit as much food in your mouth as possible, because sometimes, that actually isn’t going to be hilarious.

LiquidCourage thought maybe that would teach the little shit not to eat glass. and by god, two minutes worth of punching the boy in the stomach did what two years worth of scolding couldn’t do… he doesn’t put marbles and dice in his mouth anymore. later that night, he stole a pair of dice from his brothers’ board game, held them up to his (closed) mouth, and looked at me fearfully. when i said, “no, no, hurt you!” he threw them at the wall and started wailing like… well, like i’d just punched him in the stomach.

so, uh, back to square one with the recovering arm (so much for “no lifting anything over 5 lbs”) but the look of terror on MB’s face when he spots a marble is totally worth it!

and your mom told you to clean your room? and you were like, what? why? why do i have to clean my room? and she was like, do it! and you were like, awwwwww, man, why?!?!??!

THIS IS WHY:

now go apologize to yo mama. you know you need to.

we took the kids to the city museum with TalkyTalky and TalkyJunior. the other kids had been several times, but it was MonkeyBeef’s first time. he had a good time, and we didn’t lose him, so we’ll call that a success!

the little kid ball pit, for kids 6 and under:

now, right next to that ball pit was another ball pit for the big dogs. and it was very, very thunderdome dodgeball deathmatch in there. teenagers ran around screaming, hanging from the cage walls and roof, swinging on ropes, and winging playground-quality dodgeballs at each other with deadly force. EvilGremlin begged to go over there. my exact words were, “the kids over there are really big, they’re playing rough, and i guarantee you’re going to get hurt. and if you really want to, yes, you can go.” so his skinny 9-year-old ass (which is roughly the size of your average 7-year-old ass) bounded over there and dived in. he skulked. he snuck. he sniped. he actually got in several really good hits and did an excellent job of hiding, and completely dodging the few hits that did come screaming in at him. and then, at about the 30-minute mark, he caught a ball right on his eye. there was a loud THWOCK, his head snapped back, he clapped his hands over his eye. it had to hurt, but he didn’t let on. he just slowly, carefully crawled over the balls and came back to sit next to his dad and sip quietly on his slushie until we moved on to the next area.

MonkeyBeef had no fear:

SpazMonkey, then PositiveRoleModel and MB coming down one of the bigger slides:

the caves in the basement, full of crystals with rainbow backlights, fake dinosaur fossils, tunnels that parents can’t fit through, exposed wiring, and lots and lots of darkness!

all the boys headed through yet another hamster tunnel… lemme tell you, i had to avoid killing my elbows, so instead of crawling through miles of tunnels, i freaking duck-walked through them. and my elbows and hands survived with no further damage, but the next day my legs were about as sore as they’ve ever been, far beyond even what a fencing tournament did to them:

outside on top of the building. PRM instructed DramaQueen to “look scared”

we took a break for lunch on the third-and-a-halfth floor, ordering cheese pizza, more slushes, and caesar salad. now, here’s something i have to share about TalkyTalky. PRM and i use his name as a verb. when you get talked into doing something that you intended not to do, you have been TalkyTalkied. this is a guy who can walk up to someone he’s never met before, find out the guy intends not to drink that night because he has a job interview early the next morning, and say, hey, dude, that’s cool. but could you hold my beer for me? cool, thanks. yeah, it’s good beer; you should taste it! oh, right, right, you’re not drinking; i forgot. you should smell, it though; this is a really fresh keg, or maybe they changed the recipe or something. smells better than usual, right?

two hours later, mr. job interview is doing kegstands and can’t find his pants.

now, TT also uses his superpowers for good, and actually not only got SpazMonkey to try the caesar salad, he got him to eat an entire PLATE of the shit. this is the kid who, at age 2, could be chased from the dinner table screaming and crying if you menaced him with a forkful of lettuce. this is a kid who will not sit next to an adult who is eating something as nasty as freaking salad. but after listening raptly to TT’s treatise on how salad gives you superstrength, just like popeye and his cans of spinach, how caesar dressing was just like ranch dressing, only with MORE SUGAR in it, and then finding a small pile of salad “accidentally” on his plate, he was popping into his slackjawed mouth with a befuddled, almost hypnotized look on his face.

if i had a superpower, i’d want invisibility, but the talkiness might be a close second.

and now a few video clips. they all love the skate park, and MB is steady and skilled and fearless, and wouldn’t need watching at all if not for the fact that, upon hitting the bottom of the halfpipe, he feels no need to look out for 120-lb teenagers as he tears off for the stairs to do it again.
skate park movie 1
skate park movie 2
skate park movie 3

and he learns a life lesson: if you have to duck to get IN the tunnel, you’re probably going to have to duck when you turn around to come back OUT of the tunnel: tunnel movie

we also went to the st. louis zoo with PRM’s mom and stepdad.

for reasons that should be obvious (if not, say it three times fast and slur it just a little bit on the last word), the twits’ favorite animal was the buff-crested bustard:

EG’s favorite was the somali wild ass:

MB’s favorite was… not the penguins. DEFINITELY not the penguins. you approach the penguin house on a nice sunny day, and as you enter, you’re suddenly overwhelmed by darkness, cold, and the well-balanced smells of dead fish and poop. before you can even figure out what the hell happened, suddenly, at eye-level, some phallic-shaped creature dives into the glass-walled tank of water in front of you and flaps its wings to close in on you like a bat out of hell. as with all of his brothers before him, this reduced him to screaming in terror until he had gotten the hell out of the bat cave.

he did kind of dig the free-range peacocks, though. they look awfully easy to catch.

so today’s field trip was to toys’r'us for their “BAKUGAN TRAINING CAMP AND TOURNAMENT!!!” the night before, the kids sat and carefully selected their bad-assest bakugan and cards to take to battle, and i explained, so that they wouldn’t get their hopes up about winning, that there would likely be some kid there who had really, really powerful bakugan that they wouldn’t be able to beat, and it was okay, it didn’t mean that they sucked, they were just going to have fun, etc. i felt that i had to prepare them for the possibility that bakugan had gone the way of pokemon, wherein 16-year-old SAK‘s spend hundreds of dollars on eBay to stack their decks with the rarest, most powerful cards, and take great satisfaction in going to pokemon tournaments and kicking 6-year-olds’ asses until they cry.

happily, this bakugan tournament was not at all like that. there were about 10 other kids, all under the age of 10, and all really sweet. there was one 8-year-old who had a ridiculously powerful bakugan that nobody could defeat, but he was so nice that he was helping SpazMonkey choose cards to play when battling against him, and he seemed genuinely surprised every time he won a battle. the oldest kid there was very confident, had an entire, well-organized spinning rack full of bakugan, but he was also unfailingly polite, and when he wasn’t playing a round himself, he sat down next to DramaQueen to help him with his strategy, and not only wasn’t pushy about it, he was encouraging every time DQ was defeated, high-fiving and hugging him like a good big brother (even though he seemed to be an only child himself.)

EvilGremlin took 3rd place in the tournament, winning a carlsnaut, which is a BRAND NEW SEASON 2 PREVIEW NEW VESTROIA BAKUTRAP (ooooooo! ahhhhhhhhh!)

DramaQueen was initially upset when the tournament was over and he hadn’t won a single match against anyone. as he started to cry, i told him that when big kids and little kids play together, the big kids usually win, that’s just how it is, and someday he would be the big kid. and i’ll be damned if that didn’t work perfectly. he stopped crying, and he was totally cool. i need to write that one down so i remember it for the next kid! also, it didn’t hurt that they all got a bakugan poster, some candy and magnets and other random participation prizes. the highlight for me, though, was that they were all gracious losers (and EG a gracious winner), and a close second was the reminder that there are far more good kids out there than turds. turning my kids loose to play in the streets almost invariably ends with some other kid being an asshole to them, and of course getting away with it, because the only kid you can turn loose on the street and not worry about is an asshole (or possibly enormous and freakishly strong. they’re a lot rarer than your garden-variety asshole, though.) after several incidents in a row, i start to wonder if my kids aren’t sheltered pussies, then i remember that it’s been this way since i was a kid, and probably since long before that – the kids allowed to roam the streets unsupervised are assholes. their parents don’t watch them, because they don’t have to – their kid isn’t the one who gets hurt, so why worry about that other kid who’s crying suspiciously near him? if your kid says he didn’t do nuthin, that’s good enough for you! why get off your ass to explore the possibility that you’ve set up a “parenting” system in which your child’s every lie and bullying tactic is rewarded by your laziness? any kid who isn’t an asshole is going to lose in that lord-of-the-flies regime, so your choices are to teach your kid how to beat assholes by being bigger assholes, or to stay out of the game entirely.

watching my kids grow up to be polite – not just snivelling ass-kissers when they know adults are watching and pencil-dicked tyrants when they know adults are NOT watching, but genuinely kind, fair, and nice, even when they think nobody is watching – is well worth it to me, and obviously to a lot of other parents, too. i’ll happily suffer the scorn of lazy parents for my “uptightness.” i’m pretty sure i win.

but i digress! after the tournament, we went to an A&W retaurant for cheese curds, cheeseburgers, cheese dogs, chili cheese fries, and root beer floats. they have never had root beer floats before, despite ice cream and root beer being two of their favorite forms of sugar. two years ago, they were disgusted by the idea of combining the two, and when we stopped at an A&W restaurant a year ago, their soft-serve machine was broken. today happened to be “mega-super-gulp for the price of a small float” day, so they were dumbstruck by the paper cups so tall that they had to stand in their chairs to get the ends of the 2-foot-long straws in their mouths.

don’t worry. the intense sugar high was somewhere between “syringe full of epinephrine” and “hooker’s cleavage full of coke,” which totally cleared the cholesterol out of their bodies. it’s called a “balanced diet.”

some low-key summer vacation fun.

more fun to chase than bunnies, because unlike the hyper little mammals, the waddlers tend to give the children hope of catching them until the very last second:

noms. also known as “glitter,” “playdoh garnish,” “the herpes of the craft world.”

painting some wooden boxes in utterly hideous color combinations:

MonkeyBeef and SpazMonkey have an unusually civilized breakfast of cap’n crunch:

MonkeyBeef drags a chair over to check his busy social calendar:

an intensely intellectual game of chess between DramaQueen and EvilGremlin. i would say something funny here if i could, because you’d think this would be comedy gold, but they actually play chess really well, think out the games carefully, and constantly improve their strategy. no shit!

and we have occasionally made it out of the house, in between my arms being ripped to shreds.

the mall:

the north liberty barbecue and blues festival:

me: so, since i can’t drive much this summer, we can think up some projects to do at home. like SpazMonkey and DramaQueen are raising tadpoles, and i’m going to help them make stuff from their special effects cookbook, and they’re inventing Metroid Monopoly. you’re all helping getting your new upright bass-

EG: my DAWGhouse! (note: it’s a 1/8 size bass. this amuses the hell out of me. it’s basically a couple inches taller than a cello, but his 4’3 ass is going to stand next to it and thump it like a doghouse.)

me: -and reading all those books on electronics, and building robots. i’ll eventually build my new banjo, and until my arms get better i’ll be reading all my new fencing books.

EG: and what about dad?

me: he’s studying for his next board exam and gardening.

EG: and what about MonkeyBeef?

me: well… he’s learning how to talk. and how not to be a butthead. that’s probably enough for him.

EG: yeah… maybe you should just pick one of those for him.

DQ: i did it!

me: you’re awesome!

DQ: yeah! i’m so awesome you can’t even understand me!

EG: you got that half right!

me: god, you’re stupid.

PRM: you’re fun!

SM and DQ are walking around the kitchen table, where the rest of us are sitting, repeatedly crashing into each other in their “robot armor,” which consists of my old tae kwon do sparring pads.
EG: well, dad; you were right. iowa does stand for idiots out walking around.

SM and DQ cackle madly and continue bashing into each other; MB jumps down to join them, knocking them on their asses with repeated running head-butts.

EG: i was born in illinois, right?