FIve Bucks For A Bottle Of Wine? You Can Tell Sweetie Picked A Winner (Thinking The Lions)

Sweetie and I went for a date last week. As we sat at the Perkins restaurant and tried to decide what we’d order on our last-minute-hastily planned date, I realized that the quality of dates which I’ve taken Sweetie on have not exactly improved over the years.

In terms of dating excellence, my relationship with Sweetie would look at lot like one of those slides that they used to have in pools, the really, really steep slides with the really, really tall ladders. After beginning low, we shot up really high, and then rather steeply declined before dropping under water.

Our date was hastily-planned because we needed a break from the routine stresses of our lives.

Last Saturday, the date of the Hasty Date, was also the day that Mr F finally broke down the last of our crib defenses, a day Sweetie has been fearing for a long time. Our parenting of Mr F and Mr Bunches has largely tracked what the Germans did in anticipating of D-Day: Build up defense after defense and keep our eyes peeled for the breach. We didn’t know where it was coming from, but we knew it was coming, and last Saturday was D-Day.

The one refuge that we get from the Babies! and their sometimes/mostly impossibly energetic behavior is when they sleep, which they do only rarely and which they never do willingly. They fight sleep, fight it with every inch of their bodies. They will walk around, jump, kick their legs, pull hair, and slap themselves to try to stay awake, to keep up the constant motion that is their lives. They are kinetic Babies! who do not stand still, even in their sleep, and who have necessitated the build-up of defenses over three years, beginning with cribs, and moving on to fastening those cribs to walls, and then topping those cribs with mesh “Crib Tents” that were put in place to keep the Babies! from jumping right out of their crib, as Mr Bunches did before we had the tents.

Faced with those seemingly insurmountable barriers, the Babies! redoubled their efforts to stay in motion and stay awake, beginning with constantly undressing. Put to bed in their shorts and t-shirts for a nap, it would take them only seconds after the door closed to disrobe. Sometimes we could hear the clothes hitting the floor as we shut them in, followed by giggling. If we didn’t go in and investigate, they would begin groaning as though in pain to get us to come in and check out the situation. So we fought back by putting sleepers on them, sleepers with zippers and snaps. They figured those out, too, at which point we put t-shirts on over the sleepers, bundling the Babies! up like Eskimos even though it was July, and forcing us to run the air conditioner to combat the layers of clothes we had piled on them to keep them dressed.

It was no use, though, because they figured out how to slither out of those outfits, too, and, having become bored with escaping their clothing, the Naked Houdinis turned to defeating the Crib Tents. They first achieved that goal by simply ripping the nylon mesh. I don’t know how they did that, since I tried and was unable to tear it myself, under any circumstances, but they did, and we went in one day to find that they’d torn holes in the Crib Tents and climbed out.

Sweetie sewed up the holes, and that fix lasted a week or so until the Babies! discovered that they could squeeze out the ends of the tents. The Crib Tents are fixed to the sides of the crib by a Velcro strap that doesn’t entirely cover the crib edge, and it’s possible to slide between that strap and the wall of the crib and then force one’s way outside of the crib tent, although one would have be two-dimensional for part of that trip to make it work.

I found out they could do that, get out that way, when I went in one night to check on them and found Mr Bunches (naked, of course) pinned between the edge of the crib and Velcro strap, chin up, eyes focused, and trying to edge his way up and out to freedom.

I dressed him, put him back and fastened the tents to the end of the crib with the only thing I had at hand: spare cords from the old DVD player we used to have in their room. We’d thrown out the now-broken DVD player but had kept the cords, for some reason, and so I used them to tie the ends of the crib tents tighter to the edge of the crib.

They fought back, as they always do, first by Mr F’s show of brute strength: last Friday afternoon, Mr F simply broke off the entire end of his crib.

I’m not joking in any sense about that. Middle had gone in to check on them and come out and told me that Mr F’s crib was broken. This was the second time he’d broken it, but the first time was just a crack in one bar, so I thought nothing much of it as I headed upstairs to check it out. I was confronted with the entire end of the crib, pushed off and broken in half and hanging on to the crib by a thin metal attachment. The crib was rickety and barely standing and the end hung raggedly in space, and inside it, Mr F slept soundly. He hadn’t even tried to escape; he’d broken his crib in two just to show us he could do it.

After an emergency trip to Wal-Mart for a new crib (and a Butterfinger candy bar, but that was more of an impulse purchase) Mr F was securely locked into a more-solid, newer crib that we thought would stand a chance of lasting until the end of the week, maybe, given some luck.

That led to Saturday, when we were watching TV and heard some mysterious crashing and snapping sounds from upstairs. I was dispatched to investigate and found Mr F in the midst of a collapsed crib tent, the entire mesh affair in shambles around him, and him smiling.

In the midst of a lecture that he paid no attention to at all, I reassembled the crib tent and was about to leave when he attacked again. As I watched… as I watched… he jumped up and grabbed the bar of the crib tent at its highest point, and then fell, holding onto the bar, fell like deadweight, pulling the crib tent back down around him only seconds after I’d repaired it.

Then he smiled at me.

I thought about reassembling the tent, but decided it was too dangerous at this point. I didn’t want him to break a bar and poke his eye, or break his neck trying that trick a third time. So I took the crib tent down, and told him sternly to stay in his crib and go to sleep. He seemed not to hear me, but that’s probably because as I said it he was climbing out of his crib and heading for the door.

I put him back and told him again: ”Stay in bed,” and then picked him up and put him back again, as he’d climbed out while I said that. We did that for a while before I wisened up and put him to bed and quick left the room, smartly closing the door behind me.

I was three steps away when he opened the door and began to follow me.

I put him back again and then grabbed a gate, of the kind that we use to keep the Babies! out of the furnace room, and put that in his doorway. He stood there watching me, having gotten back out again. I put him in his bed again, closed the door and snapped the gate into place.

No sooner had I done that than Mr F opened the door and looked at the gate. Then he looked at me. Then he began climbing over the gate.

That’s when I gave up and announced to Sweetie that he was just not going to nap that day, and that’s what led to a stressful afternoon of us debating what to do.

Sweetie took the stance that we should do something.

I took the stance of what is it that you want me to do?

Sweetie then took the stance of we need them to stay in bed.

I then switched to what is it that you want me to do.

Mr F then toddled through the room and hugged Sweetie.

We tried debating some more, with Sweetie also pointing out that I was not taking things very seriously and me pointing out that Sweetie was taking things very seriously, and both of us strongly implying that the other was not correct in his/her viewpoint, at which point Sweetie summed up her side of the argument with: we should do something. I hung strong with what do you want me to do, and that settled things, except that nothing was settled.

Eventually we hit on a strategy of “Let’s see if we can’t get Mr F to stay in his bed when he sleeps,” with a side of And Daddy will be the one to monitor him staying in bed each night until he falls asleep since it was Daddy’s idea to take down the crib tent, and an implied And since Daddy doesn’t seem to take this seriously, that serves him right. We also decided that later that night, we would go out and get a cup of coffee or a dessert or something to spend some time together, time that did not involve Mr F occasionally meandering through us with a tired look on his face, and time that did not involve the weighty questions of what should we do and who’s not taking this seriously.

Then, Sweetie abruptly moved our date up to dinner, instead of sometime after dinner, which is how we ended up at Perkins, a little wary because of the near-quarrel of the afternoon and a lot tired because Mr F, frankly, had exhausted us.

That was our date. I’d like to say it was more romantic or elaborate than that, but it wasn’t, really. I ordered a burger, Sweetie ordered a salad, and we split a plate of appetizers, and then we drove a little and talked and then we went home. I think we also might have dropped off some library books, too, but I can’t be sure. I might have decided that “running errands” wasn’t a good mix with “romantic burger” and opted to leave the books at home.

During our date, we talked about the kids and about movies we’d seen and about how crazy my family is – all our usual topics of conversation – and we managed to each stick to the appetizers that we each like, and during our drive we talked about those things, too, and that was about it.

I’d like to say that our dates weren’t, or aren’t, always like that, except that during the time I’ve known Sweetie, as I said, the dates mostly were exactly like that.

Probably the best date I’ve ever taken Sweetie on was our wedding, and I count that as a date because getting married is the ultimate date. A date, after all, is a romantic night out when you’re supposed to get dressed up and have dinner and do something romantic and then show your date off to your friends, and that’s a wedding in a nutshell. The groom picks up the bride (at the altar), they go for a short ride and eat a dinner that neither is much interested in while making small talk, then some dancing and socializing and then on home.

Our wedding was, by my standards at least, a very successful date in that I didn’t do anything to screw it up, at all. On most dates, I manage to do something or other to mess things up. I may, as I did last Saturday, put on a nice shirt for a change so that Sweetie can enjoy seeing me in something other than my Green Lantern t-shirt, but if I do, on my date, wear a nice shirt, I am guaranteed to also, as I did, spill ranch dip on it more or less the very minute the appetizers arrive.

Or I might mess up a date in a worse manner, like I did on our first “romantic date” ever, when I had Sweetie to my apartment for dinner.

Up until the Apartment Dinner, Sweetie and I had gone on dates mainly after work, leaving from the law firm where we both worked when we met and heading someplace that was inexpensive enough for a law student who earned $10 an hour to be able to buy something for his date and still have gas money to get his Ford Festiva back to Madison, 48 miles away. That meant that most of our dates were to the coffee shop in Baraboo, where I would get a coffee and Sweetie would get a soda and we would sit and talk and sometimes play a game of chess before she walked me back to my car and I headed home and she headed home.

But for the Apartment Dinner, I invited Sweetie to drive down for a night of romance, “romance” being a rented video (Fargo), a homemade spaghetti dinner, and a bottle of wine.

“Romance” didn’t include, as it should have, a corkscrew, something I didn’t realize should have been included until I tried to open the wine after Sweetie was there, only to realize that I had no way to the cork out of the bottle. Having spent nearly $5 on the bottle of wine, and knowing that “romance” in my case depended heavily on Sweetie being at least drunk enough to not notice when I spilled spaghetti sauce all over my shirt, I tried to pry open the wine bottle with the only thing I could find handy, a sharp kitchen knife. I tried to poke the knife in and twist the cap back and forth and back and fo

rth, but that didn’t help get it out and in fact forced it into the bottle a little more.

Then I thought: What if I just push the cork into the bottle, instead? I could then pour the wine around it. So I used a wooden spoon handle to try to do that (while Sweetie sat politely on my old green couch in the other room) but that just jammed the cork further in and I couldn’t dislodge it anymore.

I then hit on Plan C, which was to use the original sharp knife to slice into the cork, little by little, in hopes of cutting enough out that I could then pry the cork back up o

ut of the bottle. That worked, but not the way I intended it to: Instead of cutting out a bit of cork and pulling the cork out, I cut out a bit of cork, and then a bit more, and then a bit more, and then the remainder of the cork disintegrated and the entire cork, now in very small pieces, fell into the wine.

I stared at that and wondered what to do now. Could I strain the wine and pour it back in? That seemed unlikely, as I didn’t have a strainer. I thought about using the coffee pot – pour the wine in, hit brew, and then have the wine burble up into the pot and through the filter. But wouldn’t that make it hot, and take time? I thought it might, and time is rarely on my side in dating, s

o I opted for the direct route. I prepared a plate of spaghetti and poured the wine into the two nice glasses that I (improbably) owned, and took them all out to Sweetie for us to eat off of my coffee table.

“Dinner is served,” I told her, and held up her glass. “Just try to spit out the cork parts,” I explained in what I hoped was a casual manner, as if to say that’s how cool people drink wine, anyway.

Our relationship survived that and continued, and survived, too, the next time I tried to cook dinner for her – the Sage Taco night, when I offered to make us tacos and she (unwisely) took me up on that. I was 98% done with dinner when I thought I should maybe spice things up a little. The only spice I had was “sage,” and so I took the jar of sage and prepared to put just a smidge onto the

ground beef to make this a fancy taco dinner, but the lid fell off, dumping an entire canister of sage onto the meat and turning the meat green, and making the entire apartment smell vaguely like Oklahoma. Or at least how I imagine Oklahoma might smell.

Sweetie lived through that and kept dating me, for some reason, and lived through a variety of other disastrous dates – like the one where I got pulled over for speeding

on the way to a family reunion and found out that I didn’t have a driver’s license due to identity theft, and like the one where I took her to play golf with my dad while she had a kidney stone (she won) and the trip to Great America where a semi-truck nearly ran us over and I almost got arrested for arguing with the police officer about whose fault it was (I felt I had the right to be angry, having nearly been driven over by a truck, a truck that was still parked nearly on top of our car while an officer questioned me about whether I’d accidentally driven under the truck instead of it driving over us) and through it all, Sweetie has kept her chin up and put up with everything life throws at her – while I’ve paid her back with corky wine and salads at Perkins.

It’s not as though I’ve not taken her on good dates – there was our wedding, of course, and the honeymoon, and also I took her to Mexico for a week early on in our relationship. It’s that those good dates are so few and far between, and even when they do occur, they frequently are marred by some sort of poor planning on my part, like when I planned a weekend getaway for us to Washington D.C., only to find that what we were “getting away” from was, primarily, food, since there weren’t any restaurants within miles of our hotel and most of Washington D.C., at least the part we could afford to eat in, closes at 5, so that for four days we subsisted mostly on some candy we’d boug

ht from one of those mall candy shops.

And I should take her on more dates, and better dates. That was the other message I gathered, as we sat and ordered our dinners last Saturday. The haste with which she’d planned it made me realize that maybe Sweetie needs a little more romance in her life, something to offset t

he constant battle that the Babies! present, to help ease the stress of having to keep up with not only twin 3-year-olds but also to monitor the activities of The Boy and Middle, and even Oldest, who’s been coming around a lot lately, so much so that I suspected maybe she got evicted from her house (she assured me she didn’t, but I’m not certain, because she’s been over nearly every day this week). I decided, sitting there last Saturday, that not only does Sweetie need better dates than simply a drive and a salad, but she needs dates period.

It’s not just that she needs them. She deserves them, deserves a nice date. Anyone who on a daily basis can deal with the mountain of diapers and half-eaten bananas and football practices and phone calls about changing work schedules and insistence that only a certain kind of lunch meat be purchased, and can deal with that while doing all the laundry and all the grocery shopping and all the cooking (although, can you blame her?) and can do that with a constant background noise of teenagers playing their music while Babies! watch Little Einsteins for the 54^th time that day, and can at the same time act interested when her husband, who is supposed to be earning a living, calls her and mentions that he just found out that, in the comics, Batman died, anyone who can do all that and not simply move out and leave us all fending for ourselves, deserves to be treated to a little romance now and then, a night out on the town, dressed up and eating fancy foods that she didn’t make, eating dinner without having her sleeve pulled on and without having to hear about whose turn it is to take out the garbage. Anyone who puts up with what Sweetie puts up with ought to have a night away from all of that, a night of enchantment and romance and fun.

But, since she’s married to me, she’s going to end up with Sage Tacos and Cork Wine.

What we really need are more songs in the world with a "Yodel Outro."

Sometimes I worry about the future of the human race. That's because I am optimist who tries to see the best in people.

True, I don't particularly like other people and don't want to spend much time around anyone and get astoundingly frustrated when I'm driving along and someone in front of me has the temerity to go the speed limit, when I want to go 4 or 5 over the speed limit. But none of that prevents me from being an optimist and thinking that people are basically decent, albeit they are basically decent people who are usually in my way and slowing me down or otherwise bothering me somehow by making a special trip up to my house to use my computer so they can enter information in for their cruise so that all their activities are preplanned, thereby saving themselves a whole 30 minutes on the cruise, while simultaneously using up my entire Saturday afternoon.

All right, that latter example is not all people; it's just my dad. But he's a person. And because he's a person, I worry about his future the same as I do the future of all people because I'm an optimist who believes the best about people.

That optimism causes me to butt heads with The Boy a lot. The Boy claims he, too, is an optimist. The Boy's optimism was recently expressed to me like this: I was discussing a short story I'd written and my hopes that it would be published and The Boy said "Nobody's ever going to publish that." When I pointed out that he was being pessimistic, he said he was just being "realistic."

The Boy also told me then that he is an upbeat person, which he summed up in this exchange:

The Boy: I am too an upbeat person. Do you believe that people are basically good?

Me: Yes. Yes, I do.

The Boy: I don't. I think that people are all inherently evil.

Let's hope he never takes off those rose-colored glasses.

Despite my optimism, though, I worry about the future of the human race not just because someday The Boy will be in charge of at least a portion of it in some way or form, but because of the examples I see around me that we, as a species, are not really meant to be in charge of ourselves.

If you want proof of that, check out the warnings we need on the things we do. I'm not talking about all those dumb warnings that tell you not to put your toaster in the bathtub. I'm sure those are absolutely necessary. Nor am I talking about the warnings that came on the crib tents Sweetie and I purchased not that long ago.

"Crib Tents," in case you're wondering, are exactly what they sound like: a mosquito-netting type of structure that goes over the top of the crib for your Babies! to keep pets out, or, in our case, Babies! in. They look like this:

We had to get crib tents as the second safety feature on Mr Bunches and Mr F's cribs; the first safety feature was that they're bolted to the wall. (The cribs are bolted to the wall, not the Babies!.) Both safety features are necessary because Mr Bunches and Mr F have an addiction to jumping, which they do all the time. Mr Bunches greets me after work by jumping in place. Mr F jumps in his high chair. They jump on the couch, the chairs, the kitchen table, and especially their cribs, where they turned jumping into a kind of extreme sport for Babies! by bouncing so high they almost rattled the crib apart and, in Mr Bunches' case, bouncing right out of the crib and onto the floor in front of a shocked Sweetie.

We didn't know what to do at first. That is, we knew what to do first, which was pick up Mr Bunches, but then we didn't know what to do next, so I turned to the only source anyone ever needs in an emergency: Google. We googled a series of questions designed to (a) get us something to help keep the Babies! safe and (b) alert the child welfare authorities that something was seriously amiss at our house. Searches like my baby jumps out of his crib and how can I keep my baby from getting out of his crib and what will keep my baby in his crib will eventually end up in some government office and result in a social worker raid on our little house. Doing those searches, we eventually found crib tents, which we ordered and got shipped there as quickly as possible because our interim solution was -- and I am 100% serious -- using old belts to strap pillows and couch cushions to the bars of the crib, and then placing cushions on the floor in case they got over the fluffy barriers we'd set up.

Keep in mind, men, that when your wife tells you to get rid of old belts or shirts or shorts that don't fit, you could argue that you never know when you will need them as an emergency safety measure and if she gives you the fish-eye, ask her: Which is more important, throwing out my raggedy Kennebunkport sweatshirt that I bought in 1990, or keeping our children alive? That'll put things in proper perspective.

That's an argument, I've found, that works in literally every situation. Which is more important, Sweetie, that I stop watching this episode of Battlestar, or keeping our children alive?

The crib tents, when they came, had warnings on them -- as you'd expect, given how extremely dangerous all children's furniture is-- but the warnings took me back a little. The labels warned that "Crib Tents are not a substitute for parental supervision."

Who needs that warning? Is there someone out there who has managed to procreate but who is also still capable of thinking well, now that there's absolutely no way my baby can get out of her crib, I can go away for the weekend?

That, too, is not the kind of warning I'm talking about, though. The kind of warning I'm talking about is the kind of warning that lets you know that it's maybe 2 or 3 years until the human race is done and the squirrels take over. (People think it'll be cockroaches, or maybe dolphins, but who took over when the dinosaurs died out? Not the bugs. Small mammals took over. And the bugs blew it back even though they had a whole lot better chance to rule the world then, because bugs when the dinosaurs lived were like 4 feet long. Nowadays, they're maybe an inch or two in most cases. They've got no chance. So I'm betting on the squirrels.)

Anyway, the kind of warning I'm talking about is the kind of warning I saw on this commercial:

That commercial, as you saw, involved a guy walking through New York City, but it was a New York City that was bubble wrapped for his safety and enjoyment, leading him (naturally) to think Well, I'd better jump off the Empire State Building.

Note: I do not know if it was actually the Empire State Building. I don't have time to keep track of which buildings in New York City are the Empire State Building and which are not. Let's just agree that if there's a building in New York City and that building appears on TV or in a movie, then that building is the Empire State Building. You know, like how every building in England is Buckingham Palace, every building in Paris is the Eiffel Tower, and how there are no other buildings or cities or countries beyond New York, England, and Paris.

Note, two: I know that, technically speaking, Paris is not a "country." It's a smell.

Note, three: The reason I'm too busy to know what buildings in New York City are or are not the Empire State Building is that 98% of my time is spent on the Internet looking up things I remember from my childhood, like the song "Una Paloma Blanca."

What makes me worry about humanity from that commercial is that there's a warning, when they show it on TV, and that warning is "Do Not Attempt." It flashes just before the guy jumps off the Empire State Building/Buckingham Palace/Eiffel Tower.

Now, in what world is that warning necessary? In what world does someone even have the ability to bubble wrap New York City, which I know is a pretty big city because Sweetie and I went there on our honeymoon and we walked around a lot and saw a big chunk of the city -- concentrating on those parts that were not scary and especially concentrating on those parts that sold "I [Heart] NY" shirts-- and in what world can that person bubble wrap the city and then make it up to the top of the Eiffel Tower to jump off?

And, also, while bubble wrap is addictive and we all love it, blah blah blah, is there anyone out there that thinks that bubble wrap would break their fall from the top of a building? And if so, wouldn't the human race technically have a better chance of beating the squirrels if we let that person, um, test that theory?

And, also-er, the Youtube version of that video doesn't even have the warning, and I understand that upwards of a dozen people a day look at Youtube (in between updating Sinbad's status on Wikipedia), so now I have to worry, too, that the kind of people who would try to bubble wrap the entire city and jump off Buckingham Palace won't even get the warning that it's not a good idea to try to do that.

It's hard to stay optimistic under those conditions. But I've got something that really helps. Ladies and gentlemen, the George Baker Selection!

Have you checked out The Best Of Lame/Cool Month? Why not?

Squirrels
by

brianefp

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Vacation Day Two: Fish Bones, No Bones & Billy Pilgrim

Part Three of "Thinking The Vacation." Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.


The plan for the first full day of vacation was a breakfast buffet followed by a trip to Seaworld -- because what goes together better than a belly full of breakfast food followed by fish smells and a roller coaster? Nothing, that's what.

I like to get an early start on vacation. But with Babies!, there is no such thing as an early start. Or a quick start. Or, as it turns out, sleep.

At home, the Babies! have "crib tents," which are exactly what they sound like-- tents that go over the cribs and keep the twins from jumping out of them, in the process transforming the entire crib into something that recalls a 6th grade science class bug collector, but the thing works: the Babies! stay in the cribs, no matter how much they jump, and eventually they will fall asleep. We'd come to take the immobility of the crib for granted, because Mr F and Mr Bunches never want to sleep and do everything they can not to. It seems, sometimes, that they simply don't sleep. We have a baby monitor and at times we'll wake up at 2 a.m. to hear the boys jumping in their cribs, or just talking in their mysterious twin language, with bursts of English. There will be babbling and humming and then one will say "Yeah."

Staying up all night talking enthusiastically is cute when they're safely in their room down the hall trapped in their cribs and I can sleep. It's not as cute when they are sharing a room with you in the time share and their beds are air mattresses that are great to jump on but don't hold them in at all, so that they can do what they want, which is not sleep, and if theyy're not sleeping, I'm not sleeping. Throughout the vacation, including the first night, we tried to get the Babies! to sleep in a variety of ways.

First was by letting them play until they slowed down. The flaw in that plan was that they won't slow down. Ever. They just keep bouncing and running and throwing things and grinding Oreos into the carpet and trying to climb the blinds on the window.

The second plan was sitting them on their air mattresses to watch TV and drink a bottle. While that seemed like a good idea to us, they had a better idea-- to them-- the better idea being to jump on the mattress and throw the bottle, and then go running across the room to pound on the door to the older kids' section.

The third plan was sitting them on our laps and watching one of their movies until they fell asleep; if you can hold one of them motionless for long enough, the engine stops running and they conk out. This plan is harder than it sounds, because they are strong kids. Holding Mr F and trying to make him sit still is something akin to trying to cram a bag of ferrets into a box that's too small for it. Worse, if he can't get away, he still tries to fight sleep using whatever means he can, including slapping himself on the cheek to stay awake. It's like watching a miniature truck driver try to make a deadline.

A few nights in, I tried a fourth option -- let the Babies! do whatever they want, and snooze on the couch. It would have worked brilliantly if Mr F hadn't decided to hit me to keep me from sleeping. Sweetie didn't approve of my fourth option, although I think she secretly approved of Mr F's response to it.

The result of all this is that Sweetie and I got roughly 1 hour of sleep per night, and not one solid hour; it was an hour pieced together between trying to get the Babies! to sleep and then trying to get them back to sleep, and then trying to avoid being kicked in the head when they'd wake up and crawl onto our bed and fall asleep, because they are violent sleepers: they flip and toss and kick and roll. At one point, Mr Bunches was sleeping next to me, and there were four feet of space between us and Sweetie. Mr Bunches out of nowhere inched across the bed and kicked Sweetie in the head. While still sleeping.

At least, I think he was sleeping. I was watching him the whole time and he never opened his eyes. The fact that I didn't try to stop him is probably why Sweetie later approved of Mr F's slap attack on me.

But we made it through that first night, and I got up at the crack of maybe 7. I couldn't tell because all the clocks in the time share had a different time on them. I tried to make coffee, but I couldn't figure out how to get the coffee maker to turn on, and then when I did I thought I had figured out where to put the coffee and the water, but it never made coffee. It steamed and burbled and the pot remained empty and eventually there was some gross water in the basket that I considered drinking but dumped out.

While not making coffee, I also tried to go use the bathroom. There were two in the condo, one in our bedroom where Sweetie and the Babies! were still sleeping and kicking each other, respectively, and the other in the older kids' area. Rather than wake our side, I went to use the older kids' bathroom, only to realize that they had locked me out. So I sat and watched the news of the overnight murders and sex scandals, and the weather, all without the sound on again because the TV was right outside the bedroom and I didn't want to wake anyone up. I tried to gather what the weather for the day would be, but I couldn't read lips and everything the weatherman showed on the screen looked like a hurricane. I thought maybe there was supposed to be a hurricane, but wouldn't they put a warning up about that? The weatherman wouldn't just calmly stand there telling everyone some sort of superdestructive hurricane was coming, without at least some little storm ticker, right? The expression on his face didn't say "hurricane." I've never seen what expression a weatherman would wear when he was telling people a hurricane was coming, but I'm pretty sure it would be recognizable. This guy just looked bored.

I later asked Matt whether it was hurricane season, and he said "Yes, but it'll just be a tropical storm by you," which, like the shark answer, did not reassure me. It also made me wonder, because Matt sounded bored by that, so maybe Floridians take sharks and hurricanes for granted.

The weatherman also had something I called the "Comfort Index," a graphic which showed a temperature, and a humidity reading, and a bar labeled "Comfort" with "LO" at one end and "HI" at the other. At 7 a.m., the temperature was 96 degrees. The "comfort" arrow was as far towards "LO" as it could be. It never moved the entire time we were in Florida.

Eventually everyone got up, and we began the laborious process of getting the Babies! ready to go out into the harsh Florida atmosphere, which already was so hot and humid that it approximated a trip to Venus. Getting a kid ready meant grabbing a baby and changing his diaper, then putting clothes on him, then putting sunscreen SPF 50 on him, then putting mosquito repellant on him, then changing his diaper again because that took so long to do, then washing his hands because you know what Babies! do as soon as their diaper comes off, then putting more sunscreen and mosquito repellent on because you'd just washed it all off cleaning the baby.

With the twins slathered in their protective coating of chemicals, we set out for the breakfast buffet. I love "All You Can Eat" Breakfast buffets, but I will be the first to admit that they are not for everyone. The charms of the breakfast buffet are lost on those who don't see the pleasure in having a plate-- or plates-- piled up with pancakes, french toast, sausage, pineapple, gravy, watermelon, biscuits, and chocolate chip cookies. The one we went to also had soft-serve ice cream cones and sundaes available. I washed it all down with a diet Pepsi. It's important not to overdo things.

I was a little slowed down at the buffet because Mr Bunches decided that he wanted to stick close to me and not sit in his high chair, so I had to eat with him on my lap, and go through the line carrying him or holding his hand, and carrying my plate in the other. Each option - -carrying or walking him-- posed problems. If I carried him, he tried to grab stuff off my plate and throw it and tried to stick his hands in the various entrees and soft-serve ice cream in front of him. A breakfast buffet is not the most sanitary of restaurant options in the first place, I know, but I felt like I would be bothering my fellow overindulgers if I just let my kids stick their hands in everyone's food randomly. They already stick their hands into my food randomly, but I'm used to it. When I share a drink with them, for example, Mr Bunches will take a sip and then helpfully put half of it back for me. Mr F doesn't even sip; he just reaches his hand in up to the elbow and grabs ice cubes. What I'm saying is you don't want to ask me to share my drink.

Holding Mr Bunches up wasn't an option. On the other hand, if I walked him, he'd investigate every nook, cranny, and dropped piece of food on the floor. I wasn't worried about him eating stuff -- Mr Bunches does not like to eat, period, and we have to trick him into eating by distracting him. We'll get a spoonful of yogurt ready and say Look, over there, and when he falls for it, we'll slip the food in. Or we'll put something he might like on his plate, like a Cheeto, and when he tries to put it in his mouth we'll also cram some green beans in there.

So I didn't think he'd try to eat anything off the floor, but he did want to see everything that was on the floor, so about every inch we moved, he'd crouch down and investigate whatever blob of junk he'd found. We were holding up the line, and, equally importantly, holding up my access to gravy-covered chocolate chip cookies. So I tried to keep him from slowing us down, but Mr Bunches and Mr F have a trick up their sleeve if they want to stop: They go No Bones.

"No Bones" happens when the Babies!, holding a hand, go limp, as though all their bones have evaporated. It's a nonviolent form of protest they've developed to get their way, and Mr Bunches used it at the buffet. I'd try to take a step; he'd want to inspect a crust of toast. I'd say "No, come on, we have to keep moving," and there'd be a tug on my hand and I'd look down and he was flopped on the floor, hanging limply by his left arm, a puddle of baby looking up at me. It looks exactly the same as if I'd tazered him. It's an amazingly effective tactic. I intend to use it the next time I'm shopping with Sweetie and she wants to go in a store I don't like. I'll just go limp at the entrance and flop down.

Back at the table, The Boy, Middle, and Sweetie were trying, unsuccessfully, to keep Mr F from throwing napkins all over the place and rubbing stuff into his hair.

We made it through breakfast-- and left a large tip-- and headed over to Seaworld. The older kids had picked this as their theme park to go to. When we started planning the vacation, we were going to go to Disney World for the Babies! and then another theme park for the older kids, but then we realized that the Babies!, being only 21 months old, really have no concept of what Disney World is and would never remember it. They get every bit as much enjoyment out of bouncing on the time share couch as they would out of Main Street, U.S.A., more, maybe, if we also let them play with straws and napkins, so we opted for just one theme park, and let the kids choose. They opted for Seaworld, and I'm not sure I understand the choice.

Seaworld is not really an "amusement park" the way I think of it. There are only two rides in the entire place -- a water ride (shown above) and the "Kraken," a roller coaster. The rest of it is devoted to water shows, aquariums, displays of sting rays and dolphins and turtles, and a playland. It's basically an aquarium that lets you pet the fish and has a couple of rides.

If I had opted to take us to Seaworld, I'm fairly sure that it would be seen as something educational and thus boring, since everything I opt for the family to do is seen as educational and thus boring, a rap I get from the time I proposed, on our trip to California, that we go to Death Valley and along the way also see a canyon where there were fossils. I was voted down and in place of that we went to Rodeo Drive. But since the kids opted to take us to an aquarium, it was seen as "cool."

After waiting in line for 30 minutes to get tickets, which we did because we didn't want to risk getting whatever fake tickets every store in Orlando promised to sell us if we'd just look at their time shares, we got inside and the first order of business was cooling off. The temperature had risen by that point to something in the three digits, or maybe low four digits, and the humidity had hit infinity. Sweetie saw a guy selling water and those little spray-fan bottles and said we should get one to keep everyone cool.

"One bottle and a fan please," I told the guy.

"$17.75," he told me, and I almost choked. I paid it, but I wasn't happy. $17.75? I could have saved a lot of money by getting the water and just dumping it on everyone's heads. Or by 'accidentally' falling into the dolphin pond. But that's the way theme parks work, and I was prepared for that. We'd gone to Universal Studios in California a few years back, and had taken along a budget of $150 for the day for refreshments. That was spent before noon. A soda in a theme park will set you back between $5 and $10 -- more if you want the "souvenir" cup, which I always do want. If you eat dinner at our house in the months after a vacation, you will have the option of having your beverage served in a very-classy T-Rex cup, or day-glo souvenir "Gatorland" plastic thermos. You should opt to use those, because they have lids and that will help keep Mr F's hand out.

Seaworld is an extremely interesting place filled not just with $17 fans but with all kinds of animals that you can interact with, take pictures of, pet, watch do tricks during shows, learn about, feed, and otherwise have a great time with. You can do all of those things, though, only if you are not traveling with The Boy, Middle, and The Babies!, each of whom had their own agenda.

The Boy wanted to see the Shark display; that was his only goal for the day, as it turns out. The Shark display, though, is not anywhere near the entrance or any other exhibit; you've got to go through the whole park to get to it, which meant that The Boy had no patience for any of the other exhibits or rides. Take the sting rays: He pointed out for us the sting ray exhibit where you can pet sting rays. So we went there, and a Seaworld employee was giving a talk about sting rays and people were gathered around the tank trying to pet them. I petted one and took some pictures and a video, but was getting urged to keep going by The Boy. When I tried to slow him down by getting him to pet a sting ray, he stuck his hand halfheartedly in the water towards one about 8 feet away. "It doesn't want to come by me," he said, and moved on.

We did eventually see the Shark display, and I could see why he loved it; it's incredible. It's one of those aquariums where you walk through in a tube underwater and the sharks all swim around you and over you, so you're almost in the water with them, and there's more sharks than you can ever imagine in one place.

Sweetie had this to say about the sharks: "They don't look that big." Jaws has ruined sharks for a lot of people, I bet. I tried to explain that six or seven feet was plenty long enough to be scary, but I don't think she was buying it. I could tell she didn't think they were scary because she was walking Mr Bunches and made no effort to put herself between him and the sharks. (Mr Bunches did not notice the sharks for almost half the trip through the aquarium. He was examining the floor. When he did look up and see them, he seemed impressed. But, then, he is also impressed by his own index finger, which he will examine for minutes at a time.)

Middle's agenda for the day was to ride the Kraken, so she, too, had no patience for anything else, before or after. We got to the Kraken relatively early in the day, skipping only the sea turtles and dolphins to do so, and because the lines were short we rode on it twice. I have a love/hate relationship with roller-coasters. I think they're fun and all, but I can't stand heights and so I hate that first ride up the hill, when the roller coaster is getting slowly yanked up by a chain, and it's creaking and groaning and laboriously climbing to the point where the ride gets quick enough to be fun.

It's not the heights, per se, which bother me, either, because I'm sitting in the roller coaster, so it's not as bad as it would otherwise seem. What bothers me is the idea that the train will stop, and I will have to climb out of the train and walk back down the rickety-looking stairs to the ground, a task that looks to me far more scary than the roller-coaster itself. So while everyone else is riding up the hill anticipating that first thrilling drop and the loops and twirls and all, I'm looking at the stairs wondering whether they're the kind that would crack open if I stepped on them and I'd fall to my death that way. If roller coaster designers really wanted to scare people like me, they'd have the exit be a flimsy rope ladder.

Also, I never feel quite like the safety belt is adjusted perfectly, and those shoulder bars always have just a little too much play in them for me to feel at ease. I worry that I maybe have a little more belly than the designers intended -- especially after a stop or four at the breakfast buffet -- and that the bar didn't get down far enough and only looked locked, so I clench it to me with a fierce passion. I always want to try it on the way up the hill, to see if it is locked, but I don't because what if it isn't? Then I'm screwed and I know it. I'd rather not know it.

The Babies! agenda was much simpler than either The Boy's or Middle's. Their goal was simply: keep moving at all costs. If we stopped their stroller for a microsecond, they'd start crying and try to climb out. Maybe they were intent on getting to the sharks and the Kraken, too. I don't know. But whenever we stopped to look at something, one of us had to keep the stroller moving, spinning it and rocking it and pushing it back and forth, to keep them pacified. The alternative was to let them out and walk them holding their hands, but that would again result in inspecting each iota of Seaworld's ground, and we'd still be there.

So we mostly let them out of the stroller when inside a building, like the Shark exhibit, where they could walk around and look at stuff and inspect the floor without reducing the whole procession to a crawl. That's when I realized that there was a significant difference between what is interesting to one of the twins and what you would think would be interesting. The entrance to the shark exhibit is a series of aquariums including one where the aquarium is built into the floor below you, so as you walk over it, you see all the fish below you swimming around.

Seeing that, I got Mr F and Mr Bunches out of the stroller and walked them over it, thinking that at last I'd found something they would want to inspect and could do so to their heart's content. They were mostly uninterested. Mr F did try to pick up a fish, but finding out that there was glass between us and it, he got bored and didn't perk up until we moved on to the carpet, where there was lint to look at.

Sweetie's agenda that day, aside from worrying, was to find personalized souvenirs for the Babies!. As a person whose name is unusual, I've long stopped trying that for myself. The Babies!'s real names are different, a little, but not weird or unusually spelled, and yet we could not find anything for Mr Bunches. They have every name you can imagine, names that don't even look like names, names that sound like the noises people make when they're trying to describe what they think a gravy-covered-chocolate chip cookie from the breakfast buffet would sound like, but they don't have Mr Bunches' real name.

The Shark exhibit was early in the afternoon, and leaving it we realized it was raining. Everyone else wanted to leave, but I put Matt's advice to work. "Don't worry," I said. "It won't last long. It never lasts more than an hour." I kept saying that for over an hour, when I switched to "I think it's letting up." A half hour later, I gave up and said "Matt's a liar."

The rain eventually lightened to the point where we thought it would end, so we tried to walk a little further into the park, but then it worsened and we eventually gave up, heading back out. The point we gave up at was the part of the park that was farthest from the entrance, so we were thoroughly soaked and exhausted by the time we reached the car and the rain started up again in earnest. In all, Tropical Storm Neverend continued through the entire night.

I did not want to head back to the time share yet, but there's not much to do in Orlando in the rain otherwise. I decided, therefore, that it was time to achieve the only remaining goal I had left in life.

I've gone to college, gotten married, had kids, gotten a career, started my own business, gone skydiving, been to foreign countries, met a Supreme Court justice, swam in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, visited the Grand Canyon... I have done a lot in my life, but there was one elusive goal that I had not met yet, and that was to eat at a Sonic Restaurant.

Ever since the advent of cable TV, people everywhere have been getting inundated with ads for businesses that they can't actually spend their money on, and that drives me crazy, especially when it's a business that I would definitely spend my money on, like a place where I can drive in and have them bring me my hamburger and ice cream right to my car. Sonic is that place. I'm not getting paid for any of this, and Sonic likely has no idea how I feel, so you can rest assured that this is my true emotion: I am hypnotized by the prospect of Sonic restaurants. For years now, I've been watching TV and those great ads come on with the funny people eating things that look delicious and having the time of their life, and I get excited about doing just that, only to again realize that there is not a Sonic restaurant within three states of where I live. I know that for a fact; I've checked, because one year I was going to make Sweetie go to one for our anniversary but it was too far to drive.

So Sonic seemed to me to be a dream beyond reach, something I'd hear about all my life and want to see but would never actually encounter, like tidal pools, until we decided to go to Orlando, and it occurred to me that they might have a Sonic there. So while the kids were planning trips to Seaworld and the beach and Sweetie wanted to go shopping and we were making sure there was a kiddie pool for the Babies!, I was also mapquesting a route to the closest Sonic, and I had my directions handy as we made our waterlogged exit from Seaworld.

The drive to Sonic, in the rain, took about 30 minutes, during which I became more and more anxious about whether Sonic would really exist because we seemed to be getting no closer to it. We went by various buildings and restaurants and miniature golf courses as we drove along "International Drive," which is to Orlando what 5th Avenue is to New York, only with smaller buildings and infinitely more franchise restaurants, including one called "Fish Bones," which said it served fish and steak. I'm no marketing expert, but I don't think the skeletal remains of the meal are the main selling point in luring hungry diners. Calling a restaurant "Fish Bones" did not make me think "Let's go eat there." Maybe "I hope they know the Heimlich maneuver there" but not eat there.

While I was concerned about that, The Boy was getting enraged by the miniature golf courses. These drew The Boy's ire because we saw a miniature golf course called "Pirate's Cove," and there is also a miniature golf course called "Pirate's Cove" in the Wisconsin Dells, not far from where we live, relatively speaking. The Boy thought this was an incredible ripoff, that Orlando minigolfers would think they could golf at "Pirate's Cove" when there was only one real "Pirate's Cove," ("real" being a relative concept in the world of miniature golf). We tried to mollify him by pointing out that maybe it was a franchise, that these were owned by the same person as the Wisconsin Dells site, but he remained unconvinced. I even tried pointing out to him that, historically speaking, Florida has more of a claim to pirates than Wisconsin would, because there were actual pirates in Florida at some point in the past.

"There were no real pirates," The Boy informed me. When I tried to convince him otherwise, and pointed out that Thomas Jefferson had to deal with the Barbary Coast pirates and that pirates had actually existed, he tuned me out. This was a first for me, though. The Boy has seen all the "Pirates of the Caribbean"movies, and generally speaking, if something has been in a movie or on TV, The Boy assumes it existed and actually took place. So Jurassic Park, the moon landing, Gotham City: these are taken as historical fact by The Boy. But take a historical fact like pirates and put it in a movie, and he assumes it is fake. I blame the Internet, because that's what parents do: we throw up our hands and blame the Internet. I don't know what parents blamed before the Internet. Fish Bones, maybe.

We made it to Sonic, finally, and I was so excited that I had Sweetie videotape our entrance to the parking lot. I'd share that with you, but it's too private. I get a little choked up just thinking about it. I'm going to keep it alongside our wedding video.

We pulled in, and I was overwhelmed. This might be my only chance to ever eat at a Sonic; I wanted to get everything. Plus, it all sounded really good, although that may have been that we really hadn't eaten anything since the breakfast buffet, and that gravy can only carry me so far.

It turns out that the trip would be more historic than even I can imagine, because Sonic is where I really came to understand Billy Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim, you'll remember, was the star of Slaughterhouse-Five who had a sad experience, one that haunted him all his life, on vacation. Billy went to a cave with his dad, and the guide was going to turn out the lights and place Billy into total darkness for the first time in his life -- darkness more complete than any human being will ever experience. Only, when the guide did that, [SPOILER ALERT!] Billy was standing next to his dad, who was wearing a glow-in-the-dark watch -- so Billy missed out on the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The message of that story? Dads screw things up without even trying. As I learned at Sonic, where I became Billy Pilgrim. Or maybe Middle did. Someone did, and here's how: We ordered, and I ordered the special -- the "Island Fire Burger," prominently advertised and loaded with bacon and two kinds of cheeses and sauce you could get only at Sonic.

My rule when going to a restaurant is: get what the restaurant is known for. If a restaurant specializes in one kind of food, order that. Don't go 'off the board' as they used to say in The Joker's Wild and get all tricky. I once ended up at a Red Lobster with my mom and my sister. I hate seafood so I ordered a Caesar salad and a burger. (Because I was dieting at the time, and because I had no idea what a "Caesar salad" was, I ordered it without dressing. The waitress just stared at me until Mom and Sis explained what was wrong.) My salad and burger were awful and tasted like fish anyway. At "Johnny Rocket's," once, I ordered the burger and Sweetie got chicken. When my burger came, she was jealous because her chicken was awful.

(You should note that my diets include burgers. That's the way to diet.)

While I got my "Island Fire Burger," Middle ordered a regular double cheeseburger. The food was brought out to us, we distributed it, and ate our meals, and only after eating it did we realize that Middle and I had accidentally eaten the other's sandwiches.

My once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the first sandwich I'd ever eat from Sonic -- the only sandwich I'd ever eat from Sonic-- was the wrong one. Just like Billy Pilgrim, only in a more burger-esque way. Or Middle was just like him. I'm still not sure, but we both got the wrong burger and it was very significant in a literary sort of way.

But my burger was still really good. Let me emphasize that. It was a great burger.

In retrospect, I'm not sure how we did not realize the mixup. For my part, all I thought while eating it (besides "I can't believe I'm at Sonic! This is great!") was this: This is not as spicy as I thought. I wasn't sure which Island, exactly, the "Island Fire" was coming from, but it was definitely not one of the spicier islands; it was an island where maybe British citizens would go on holiday, like the Isle of Wight. I don't know what Middle thought as she ate her burger, but I do know that she was more disappointed than I was because for the rest of the trip, she wanted to go back to Sonic and get her "real" burger. So maybe she's Billy Pilgrim in this story. I was never very good with symbolism.

I got over my literary-esque disappointment in the best way: Ordering dessert, which posed its own dilemma because all of the desserts, too, were enticing, and there were exotic, one-of-a-kind things to order like a Coconut Creme Pie Shake. In the end, I opted for the Blue Coconut Slush drink, because "Blue" is always the best possible flavor for desserts. There is no flavor so great already that you can't make it a little greater still by making it "Blue."

With that, Day Two was essentially done, because there was nothing else to do and we were all tired from running past Seaworld exhibits to get to other Seaworld exhibits, and from keeping the Babies! moving. That and we were three hours into the rainstorm that Matt promised would last only an hour, a storm which showed no signs of letting up. So we drove back to the time share and began trying to wind the Babies! down to get some sleep, because we'd need all our energy for the next day... since the next day, we were heading for alligators.




Tomorrow: Gators! And, I reach the limit of my sample-ness.

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I Wish I Was A Muppet

Wouldn't life be better if our whole world was Muppets?

Mine would.

That's all I could think about this morning as I yet again wrestled with the downstairs shower handle, which was not working right again today. It doesn't work right almost every day. In the past four or five years, there have been about two days during which the downstairs shower handle worked right, those two days being the two days after I last fixed it, or thought I fixed it.

We have a downstairs shower that only I use, and because only I use it, it's a low priority on the list of things to fix up around the house, a list that grows longer and longer by the day, never really getting worked on because, first, we're kind of hoping that in the next year or two, we can just move to a newer house with fewer problems and a concomitantly shorter list, unloading this house and this list onto someone else who may enjoy the challenges it poses and not wish that everything in the house be a Muppet, and, second, because we've never actually worked "repairing things around the house" into our budget.


We have a budget; I know that we have a budget because 3-4 times a year Sweetie and I sit down, like Pip and Herbert, and do our accounts and look at the money coming in and the money going out, and we set up categories that we hope to live up to: mortgage payments, student loan payments, groceries, gas, and the like . We never include a budget line item for Fixing Things Around The House. Those get lumped into Surplus and Surplus has a lot more important things to take care of. Surplus has to do things like pay for the Netflix subscription, and crib tents to keep the Babies! from jumping out of their beds, and air mattresses for The Boy to take to football camp, an annual event that requires, annually, that The Boy get a new air mattress. I don't know what happens to the old air mattresses, and I've learned not to ask questions like that because the answer can infuriate or bewilder, but rarely illuminates.

So our budget, which does include polo shirts for The Boy, does not include things like "Fix the Grandfather Clock" or "Tune the Piano" or "Repair The Outside Garage Door Opener" or "Fix The Downstairs Shower," with the result being that when the downstairs shower needs fixing, it goes through distinct phases.

Phase one: The first hints of trouble begin with the downstairs shower. The handle appears loose or too twisty. Small dribbles of water become harder to shut off.

Phase two: The trouble worsens. The leak becomes constant. Hot and cold water control becomes erratic.

Phase three: Water pressure becomes random. Some showers are taken under a tiny trickle of water. Others pound at me with fire hose intensity.

Phase four: The handle no longer works. The water temperature cycles wildly. The soap appears to become upset over the problems and repeatedly hurls itself off the shelf to its doom on the watery grave of the shower floor.

These troubles, while predictably moving through those phases, are made worse because each morning, they present with a new twist to them, requiring a new solution. Some mornings, I will be able to adjust the temperature by holding the handle a certain way, pressing it, and slightly twisting it. Other mornings I have to adjust the pipe that holds the handle. Some mornings it's both. Sometimes I can't do either because I'm standing on the suicidal bar of soap and my footing isn't good.



I tackle these problems, each morning, with a renewed sense of vigor and hope, puzzling over how the shower handle will try to trick me this morning. Will it scald my eyes while I shampoo my hair? Or will I feel its icy hands pounding my back while soaping my shins? Will it turn off with a twist of the wrist or will I be required to use the pipe wrench again?

And when the problems get too bad, I go to the hardware store again, with Mr F and Mr Bunches in tow, and we pick out a new handle and install that new handle, watching the shower work for a day or two again until the cycle begins anew.

It will begin anew, because the cycle always begins anew at our house, where entropy is the true head of the household and rules with an unpredictable but still iron fist. When I am not wrestling with the shower head, twisting the pipe left while twisting the handle right while holding the central screw perfectly still, I am instead replacing toilet seats at a prodigious rate. I had to install a new toilet seat in the upstairs bathroom not two weeks ago. That's the bathroom I avoid using to shower because it's filled with a variety of lotions and hair supplies and shampoos and combs and washes and other things that I can't always identify; the last time I took a shower in that bathroom, I hunted around for something that appeared to be a bar of soap, but couldn't find anything that looked anything like soap amidst the clothes and sponges and weird apparati and bottles. So I looked around for something that appeared to be shampoo and couldn't find that, either. Stuck in the shower without any apparent way to actually clean myself (but with multiple options for smelling like almost any kind of fruit), I ended up using the Babies! shampoo-and-conditioner and hoping for the best.

(That night, Sweetie told me "You smell nice." So you men out there, forget cologne; just splash on some Johnson & Johnson's No More Tears.)

I had to install what by now must be the 37th toilet seat in the upstairs bathroom because the old toilet seat had become loose and cracked and unreliable, and I didn't ask what was going on in that bathroom that could loosen and crack a toilet seat. That question, like the question of what happens to the annual air mattress, is not one which I care to have answered, since some things cannot be unthought. I wouldn't have time to ask those questions, anyway, because it is never very long between fixes, and seemingly immediately after the toilet seat cracked, the spray faucet on the kitchen sink became inoperable.

I had known that the kitchen sink might be next on the list of things to fall to the disintegrating chaos of our house. I fixed the kitchen sink about two years ago, when the old faucet broke... somehow.

That's how things break in our house: somehow. I suspect that they break through the misapplication of force by children who do not understand that they are no longer small, that they possess a great deal of strength and power now. Middle and The Boy, the two older kids still remaining at home, are strong, powerful, athletic beings who don't seem to understand that they are those types of people, and who as a result continue to pull on handles and push on doors and walk and lift and sit as though they are 1/3 their current size.

The Boy, in particular, lifts weights and plays football and stands nearly as tall as me but is somehow broader, bigger, than he even seems to be. I accuse him of having not just the usual three dimensions, but an extra dimension or two. "He's FIVE dimensional" I frequently tell Sweetie or say to myself, usually as I'm tripping over The Boy's giant shoes in the morning, as I do every morning. The Boy puts his shoes in the front hall, and I've largely given up on that battle, and each morning when I go to pick up the newspaper and battle my way through the spiderwebs that have been strung across our front walk, I see The Boy's giant shoes there in the hall and I resolve not to trip over them, and I plot a course to avoid them, and each morning I trip over them anyway, because, like The Boy, they are larger even than they appear (and that's saying something, because the shoes appear quite large.)

I sit at the kitchen table with the kids, and watch as the table sways back and forth from the slightest touch of their elbows or hands, powerful giant appendages that barely nick the table but make it shake back and forth. And I watch the kids as they turn the faucet on and off, pulling it (they think) only slightly towards them but the application of their young, powerful muscles and their extra dimensions makes the faucet torque more and more, bending it a little more each time.

"Be careful," I say to them, constantly. "Be gentle!" I try to say to them, but it doesn't work, because moments later I am downstairs and I hear them trundling on the floor above me like thundering herds of children.

The Boy's room is right next to ours, with his bed up against the common wall. The other morning, at 5 a.m., The Boy must have rolled over or shifted slightly in his bed and bumped the wall. The bump was so light, so nothing to him that it didn't wake him up at all. But Sweetie and I were both awakened by a sound akin to a tree falling on the house. I thought at first that was what had happened, but the tree would have had to have fallen inside The Boy's room and then against the wall (which, I briefly pondered, could have happened, since I never really know what The Boy is up to and maybe he had brought a tree into his room and it had fallen over.)

So I knew that the kitchen sink would have its problems eventually, because I could see how the older kids were affecting the faucet, pulling it and twisting it unknowingly and causing the faucet to loosen, subtly, so that there was a lessening of water pressure through the faucet. I hadn't, though, suspected that the first problem with the new kitchen sink would be the spray nozzle that sits off to the side. That one crept up on me. It was only recently that I tried to use it and realized that sometimes the little handle that clicks it on and off would stick a little. And when I noticed that, I did what I always do at the first sign of those little troubles, which is to ignore them and hope that they go away.

It worked with the "check engine" light on my car, after all. I ignored that for a whole week and now it's gone off, so the engine is fine.

I couldn't ignore the spray nozzle anymore Tuesday morning when Sweetie came and got me and said she couldn't get it to turn off. The nozzle hung there, spraying and spraying into the sink, at 7 a.m. I fiddled with it, doing what men like me always do when confronted with a mechanical problem: We play with the thing.

We do that because we're not mechanically inclined and have no idea, really, how any of this stuff works. At least I don't. I have no clue how most things in a house work and I don't really want to know how they work, because if you know how things work, then people ask you to fix them. My brother-in-law, a carpenter, knows how things work, and I ask him to fix stuff from time to time. If he lived closer, I'd ask him to fix more stuff than I already do. My mother-in-law knows how to sew, and we're always asking her to hem my pants or sew our couch cushions back together... the couch cushions being another of the inexplicably-breaking-down things in our house. Once a month or so, the couch cushions spring a leak or tear themselves open or otherwise need mother-in-lawing, and nobody seems to know what happens. Whatever happens, it happens overnight, because when I turn off the lights and the TV and lock the windows to keep the serial killers at bay and then go to bed, the couch cushions appear fine, but then the next morning, I come downstairs to find the television set to ESPN or Gossip Girl, and the remote controls have been moved, and the couch cushions appear to have been savagely attacked in the night, maybe by bobcats.

I don't know how to fix things and don't want to know, but I occasionally have to fix things like the spray nozzle, and so I fiddle with them in the hopes that my fiddling will solve whatever problem exists. When Sweetie couldn't get the nozzle to shut off, I took it and looked at it and clicked the handle once or twice, noting that Sweetie hadn't lied: it wouldn't shut off.

Having independently verified the problem, I then shut off the water itself. That worked: The nozzle shut off. I set it in its holder and looked at it, then turned the water back on. The nozzle sprayed me and I quickly shut it off again, and stood looking at it, pondering what to fiddle with next.

While I did that, Sweetie turned the water on, and I got sprayed again.

"Hey!" I said, and jumped back. She turned the water off. "What'd you do that for, if you just saw me spray it?" I asked her.

"I didn't see it spray you," Sweetie said, but I'm not sure that she was being fully honest. Maybe I had it coming, like the time she put popcorn in my sock as a punishment.

My next step was to take the nozzle apart, something I did using the only tool I ever really rely on, a butter knife. I pried at the handle and unsprung it and looked inside, seeing... the inner workings of a spray nozzle, and they of course made no sense to me. So I poked them with the butter knife in what I hoped was an authoritative (and fixing) way, and then put the handle back together, set it down, and turned the water on. It sprayed me.

I took it apart again and poked other parts, then I unscrewed the whole thing from the hose and poked different parts, and then put it all back together and turned the water on. It sprayed me.

I was stumped, and running out of time, as I still had to get ready for work and faced my own battle with the shower downstairs, so I came up with the short-term solution of leaving the nozzle pulled down into the sink with the admonition that people turning on the sink should be careful not to spray the water all over.

I fixed that nozzle the other day, but then today was confronted with the ever-deteriorating shower handle downstairs, which came up with the newest twist yet, and the twist that finally caused me to wish Muppetness on my whole life.

I had finished up showering with a minimum of scalding and only two soap-hurdles, and turned the handle off, holding my breath to see what would happen.

To my surprise, the water shut off. Completely. Without even a drip. Just like that. Just the way showers are supposed to work, and the way I imagine showers in other houses, houses that don't require muppetization, work.

I stared at it for a second and then let out my breath. It worked. I didn't know what I'd done, but I'd clearly done something and the shower was working again. Cheered by that, I began brushing my teeth while listening to the talk radio. When I'd finished brushing my teeth, I noticed that there was a tiny little dripping sound coming from the shower.

I should have left it alone, but I didn't. I had, for a brief shining moment, been the repairer of the shower; I'd owned a shower that shut off perfectly and I suddenly couldn't imagine going off to work with a tiny little drip after that moment of perfection.

That, and I once read a news story about a guy whose toilet ran slowly-but-constantly, and he'd gotten a $10,000 water bill that had nearly bankrupted him. I can't remember where I left my keys on a day-to-day basis, but I never forget a terrifying story that I once read in some newspaper or magazine or maybe online, and that came to mind, too, when I heard the tiny drip, so I figured I could not only return to the nirvana-like state of shower perfection, but I could also save $10,000, and I went back to the shower and tapped the handle down a little to shut it all the way off.

That turned the shower on. Somehow.

So I tipped the handle the other way, and that turned the shower on more. I moved the handle down (which usually is off) and noted that the shower flow diminished a little while the handle was in the middle. Moving the handle up (usually on) resulted in the same thing: a torrent of water, but while the handle was precisely in the middle, it let up a little.

So I placed the handle there and then began twisting the pipe, which now was wet and required that I get something to get a grip on it. That something was the Lion washcloth I'd bought for the Babies! when they were little -- it's a handpuppet-like washcloth shaped like a lion that I'd appropriated to use in the downstairs shower because it is good for gripping the pipe.

Wearing my lion, I tugged and twisted the pipe this way and that while trying to observe the effects on the shower, which fought back by increasing the water pressure and by turning steaming hot, quickly engulfing the tiny bathroom in clouds of steam that made it feel like I was breathing a hot cloud. The handle, meanwhile, loosened and I could see the screw slowly falling out, requiring me to grab the screwdriver set I keep in the downstairs bathroom for precisely such an emergency, and begin twisting it back in, while gripping the pipe with my lion hand.

That went on for about 10 minutes, during which I got soaked down again by the steam that built up in billows and during which I twice took apart the entire handle and put it back together again in the hopes that the shower would appreciate my effort and shut off.

I didn't win. I eventually got it to a small trickle of water that was the best I could do, and I left well enough alone and went back upstairs to get ready, and that's when it occurred to me that my life would be better if the whole world was Muppets.

In the Muppet world, almost everything is alive, and talks, and has emotions and sometimes arms. Doors, cars, trees, maybe even shower heads and handles, are alive and can interact with people as if they were all Jimmy's magic flute. In the Muppet world, if you didn't like what something was doing, you could bop it on the head like the Muppaphone, or lecture it, or otherwise deal with it in some manner other than simply taking it apart and putting it back together.

If my world was Muppets, then each morning, I'd go downstairs and talk with the shower and tell it to be good that day. I'd go to the handle and say "Medium-hot, please," and the handle would twist itself and smile and chat with me about my day. If the Handle wasn't having a good day, and was recalcitrant, I could cajole it or simply bop it (bopping Muppets never seems to hurt them) and it would then cooperate.

Or, if it wouldn't cooperate, I could at least feel as though I had more options than taking it apart. After all, I'm used to interacting with things that react in inexplicable ways and don't cooperate with me: Mr F and Mr Bunches fill that role already, and they don't bother me, much, except when (as last night) they're trying to use some sort of Baby Pantomime to get me to do something but I can't tell what it is.

Last night, Mr Bunches got me to go into his room -- he still stubbornly refuses to talk much, even though I know he can, because he says things like car and canoe and even tries to say motorcycle -- by pulling me by the hand. Once I was in the room, he tugged my hand down, so I got down on my knees, but then he pushed me back up. When I was standing again, he tugged me again and I started to crouch down, at which point he stopped me. I crouched there, while he studied me, and I steadied myself with one hand on the floor, but he made me lift that up. While I stood there like a baseball catcher, he stared and then came forward and grabbed my arms, spreading them out. Then he stood against me and put one arm around my neck. I thought he wanted to be picked up and so I did that, standing up, but he grunted and tried to wiggle free, so I put him back down again. He then tugged me into a crouching position again and left me there to go watch TV.

So I'm pretty sure I could deal with a household full of living appliances and Muppetized furniture and shower handles. They couldn't be any more inscrutable than the Babies!, and couldn't be any more difficult to control than the older kids, and while I might still have a house made up of automatically-shredding couch cushions, and disintegrating toilet seats, but I could at least have the fun of talking to them while they shredded and disintegrated.

And maybe they'd break into song, too. That was always happening in the Muppet show, wasn't it? I could probably learn to like that, if my shower handle would refuse to work but would sing me a song about how it wasn't going to work for me.