The Brown Badge of Courage

I’m sure you’ve all had a similar discussion with expecting parents. For me, it was Matt and Nicole. We’re chatting about crib sheets and Robeez, when all of a sudden the conversation takes a turn. In our case, it was Matt who asks the big question: “how bad is the whole diaper thing?”

You know what he’s really thinking: “just how much is poop going to invade my life?” Of course you say “it’s really not that big a deal. You get used to it” What else could you say? There’s no turning back for them at this point. But in reality you want to lean in, cast a steely gaze across the table, and say in hushed tones through clenched teeth:

“You don’t know the horrible aspects of poop. I’ve been through two children and I know. I’ve seen Diaper Genies overturned. I’ve seen poop in the tub, poop on the carpet. I tell you, poop is Hell!”

We all remember our first time. You’re wrapping the diaper up for disposal and maybe just once you wrap it a little too tightly. You can feel an odd sensation – a little warm and gooey on the back of your hand. You’re a little bit in shock and your brain doesn’t know how to react. But then the realization strikes you like lightning “OH MY GOD! I TOUCHED POOP. I TOUCHED POOOOOP!!!!!!”

You were green then, and it didn’t kill you even though you thought it would. Five years and two children later, you are a grizzled poop veteran. You have the battle scars to prove it: this scar is from the blow-out diarrhea when you were out of diapers… at Target; that scar is from the billowing brown clouds emitting from your son’s bathing suit at the pool. This one is from constipation. That one is from diarrhea¹. There are so many more scars, you couldn’t even count them if you wanted to. Heck, you’ve forgotten where you got half of them.

The biggest scar of all is on your very soul. Parenthood called and you responded. You’re not proud of everything you’ve done, but you did what you had to do. The tattered regimental flag still flaps in the breeze. You’re still standing. You ain’t been whipped by poop yet and you ain’t plannin’ to let it whip you in the future.

And if this crazy world has taught you anything, it’s that poop is just a part of life. Like being an orderly in the old-folks home, dealing with excrement is just part of the job of a parent and you do get used to it. But make no mistake, it is a dirty job. Some of you expectant couples may think parenting all glamor and glory, but let me tell you, boys:

Poop is Hell!

 

¹Footnote: the biggest poop catastrophe in Kimmel family history – probably in all of human history – occurred in 2012. Chiara was on stool softeners for constipation. Cody showed his admiration for Chiara by eating several. Cody always likes to wait until the last possible second – every trip to the toilet is an emergency – and this time was no exception. I frantically sprint with him in my arms, but in removing his pants his underwear snags on his foot. It was all over: what I swear was five pounds of very loose poop come out – all over him, all over me, all over the bathroom floor and rug and shower curtain. I couldn’t even move for fear of tracking it all over the house. So Andrea went about what I’m sure was the worst parenting experience of her life – while Cody and I took an impromptu shower. We hid the stool softeners from then on.

Just Air it Out!

One thing I just cannot figure out in my house is laundry. How is it possible that we do so much laundry? I am not exaggerating here, we average a load of laundry every single day. Add in the sheets and towels on Saturday and it’s up to multiple loads in a day.

Here’s the big problem with laundry: folding. Back when there was nothing but adults, you had big articles that filled the machine and you fold them. Now you’ve got a load that is the same size, but three times as many small articles. The effort to fold a small clothing item is the same as a big clothing, but twice as many fit in the washing machine. Now my daily past-time is folding.

Another problem: We’re also constantly running clothes either overnight or while we are at work (or, we had good intentions of finishing the laundry in the evening and we fell asleep). That means that clothes sit around for a long time and get wrinkly. That means a lot more ironing – ironing clothes that you used to not have to iron – and a lot more time wearing wrinkly polos. This has done wonders for my professional appearance (and career prospects no doubt).

The great mystery is: How is it that the kids can generate more than one day’s worth of clothes in a day? I swear that, in that load of laundry every day, there are multiple outfits for each child. Plus there are always things like jammies and bathing suits to help round out a load.

Actually, I know where all the laundry comes from. It’s their mother, who oddly enough feels like they should actually wear clean clothes. We’ll go to an activity at a friend’s house in the evening and she’ll want to put the kids in a new set of clean clothes. This is obviously nuts, since the “activity” seems to usually mean to “roll around in the mud” (Cody, when playing outside, can be relied on to find whatever may exist and put himself face-down into it; Chiara isn’t much better).

Instead, I think Andrea should employ a strategy from my days in the college dorm: grode clothes. You may remember the bonfire at Texas A&M before the terrible accident (I graduated the year before). Your “grodes” were the clothes you wore to the site where you cut the bonfire firewood. Your beloved dorm mates would do their best to make sure your grodes got as dirty as possible – not just with mud and the like, but preferably with whip cream and maple syrup as well.

Grode clothes were never washed. They were just hung out of your dorm window to dry out. Come to think of it, that was pretty much our cleaning philosophy for everything in the dorm room – just air it out. It was the cleaning equivalent of Hakuna Matata – and trust me we had “no worries” when it came to the cleanliness of our dorm. That this philosophy ran contrary to our primary goal of attracting female mates never occurred to us.

But therein lies the solution. The kids aren’t trying to attract mates at this point. Andrea and I aren’t either (you can tell as much by my wrinkly polos). So the kids can get their clothes as grodey as they want, and we can confidently bring them to whatever activities that may come our way.

For those of you who might invite us over but would prefer not to have two grodey kids tracking maple syrup on your living room carpet, just remember this tried-and-true technique for cleaning from Texas A&M’s Dunn Hall: Just Air It Out! Hakuna Matata!

Warning: Parenting is hazardous for your health

At my most recent doctor’s visit, I was diagnosed with borderline high blood pressure (pre-hypertension). Three years ago I was running marathons and the healthiest I’d ever been. Now we’re having discussions about the possibility of taking Lipitor for life.

It’s small wonder. I mean, taking care of the kids does not exactly put me in a Zen meditative state. When I’m fighting Cody to put his socks on after kicking them off for the tenth time, I don’t need a blood pressure cuff – I can feel my diastolic skyrocketing. And that’s just the stress dimension. Look at what kids do to the other aspects of your health:

Diet: I don’t know about you, but our diet pretty much consists of chicken nuggets and ice cream. That’s on a day that we can convince the kids to eat the chicken nuggets (sprinkles, yes sprinkles, on the chicken usually do the trick). Andrea’s and my diet doesn’t seem to be much better. The four major parenting food groups in our household have become: caffeine, ibuprofen, alcohol and Twix bars. Sometimes not in that order.

Exercise: If anyone has figured out exercise while working and parenting, please leave a comment, because I have given up hope. My doctor has recommended 30 minutes of brisk walking every day. Now that Chiara can ride a bicycle I had a fantasy that we could do this as a family. But the 30 minutes of brisk walking has become: 5 minutes of arguing with Cody that no, he can’t ride his tricycle and has to ride in the stroller; 5 minutes of slow walking while Cody suffers through the first block on his tricycle before giving up; approximately twenty 30-second brisk walking intervals between stops to pick up pine cones, pick Chiara out of the dirt, and say “hi” to passing dogs; 5 minutes looking for snail shells at the pond; heading back with twenty more intervals as before; 3 minutes of brisk walking while carrying a tricycle. Add on a shower and it’s just not something we can work into the schedule every day.

Sleep: Okay, sure, we could use more sleep. But listen, when we get the kids down at 8:30 we’re not just going to flip off the lights. Mommy and Daddy need our few, precious hours with just the two of us… and 2-3 episodes of Breaking Bad. So we’re running a sleep deficit to begin with, and then both kids interrupt our sleep in turn. And I mean they wake us up every. stinking. night. Having a size 11 foot in your gut isn’t great for rest and recovery, either, by the way.

Joint and muscle health: Any parent of an infant knows you’re going to be sacrificing your back to parenthood. The kids just get heavier from there. Mine are both around 40 pounds. Basically, I’ve had car accidents that were better for my neck and shoulders than the piggy back rides that seem to be required on a daily basis.

Time for quiet contemplation: Hahaha! I can’t believe I just wrote that!

So, bottom line, the prognosis for my blood pressure is not good. Nor for any parents’ blood pressure as far as I can tell. I knew having kids would be a lot of work, and expensive too. What I didn’t know was that they should come with a label: Warning, parenting can be hazardous to your health!

Tick-tick-tick

Here’s the basic problem with the kids, especially in the mornings: no sense of urgency. Their parents are type-A, on-the-go, git-er-done, MBA types. In the morning the kids have the urgency of clinically depressed tree sloths on a hot day.

They wake up when they want; it takes an age for them to even start breakfast in the morning; getting dressed is a fight. Even worse, they always want to distract themselves with television. Don’t they understand we have places we need to be? We are going to BE LATE TO SAFETY TOWN! You can’t be LATE TO SAFETY TOWN!

We have this thing with oatmeal. Oatmeal is one of the few foods we can convince the kids to eat in the morning, mostly because by the time the kids are through with it, it’s packed with more sugar than a Kit-Kat. First we use the maple and brown sugar variety. Then, the kids add sprinkles (at least two kinds, but not the two you first pick out of the cupboard) and chocolate chips. This is my law of parenting precedent: if you ever agree, even once, to put a topping on oatmeal, you’ll be doing it for the rest of your blessed life.

Basically, with the toppings and the baked-in brown sugar, we’ve taken a natural, wholesome and fulfilling meal and turned it into the equivalent of Krispy Kreme. That goodly Quaker on the front looks down with his benign smile, but frankly he’d be terrified the mockery we’ve made of the oats he worked so diligently to gather (no doubt on horse and buggy).

The sprinkles aren’t the half of it. Oatmeal must, without exception, be served in the correct bowl – pink for Chiara, blue for Cody. It must have the exact right water content: Chiara likes hers very thick, Cody likes his soupy. It’s good that Cody likes it soupy, because he always wants to “help” pour – the result is an oatmeal swill that I don’t think I could stomach.

Finally, the oatmeal must be within a temperature band approximately the width of a human hair. This requirement is especially rich, since as I alluded to earlier, the kids are typically lollygagging on the couch while the oatmeal is at the proper warmth. We then reheat it and it is scalding; distracted by cartoons it then gets too cold again. Repeat ad infinitum - remember, you have to get all this perfectly right; not getting it right could result in a chocolate-maple-sprinkley-oatmealy stain on the kitchen rug.

And that’s just eating. Although they are fed, the kids are still in their jammies with messy hair and un-brushed teeth. Maybe in a future post I’ll cover these ridiculously time-consuming steps. Meanwhile, I gotta go. The minutes until Safety Town are ticking away!

Sundays in the Vestibule

We go to the best Catholic church in the world. Why is it the best? No kneelers. Kneelers are apparently God’s way of testing your devotion by inflicting stabbing pain on your lower back while cantors chant lengthy lists of saints. At Saint John’s we don’t have them. We stand and we sit. We don’t kneel. It’s the greatest. Also, the homilies are short, especially when Father Dennis delivers them. This church is why we are never moving again.

Basically, my measure of the quality of a Catholic church is how little pain it inflicts on me. Judging by the number of families skipping the closing hymn and blessing after communion, I am not alone in this view. But not even Saint John can save us from the biggest church pain point of all: Cody.

I don’t know why, but Catholic tradition is to keep children of all ages with you in the pew. As a non-Catholic, few things strike me as such a bad idea as this. We’ve attended church for five years constantly distracted by poking, whining and crying. We get nothing out of it. There could have been two Popes since John Paul II for all I know.

John Paul is still Pope, right?

The kids get nothing out of it, either, except for regular time outs. When people ask me where I go to church, I tell them “the vestibule at Saint Johns,” where I’ve spent an hour each week for the past three years trying to keep Cody from going back into the service.**

Those sitting around us get nothing out of it either. They get a constant distraction and annoyance for a full service. They let us know their feelings via glares. But we don’t care, we’re staying in the pew. There is a cry room, but we refuse to go on principle. We’re not second-class citizens who should be banished behind glass because we procreate (which, in case you’ve missed it, the church supports). The cry room is full of, guess what, crying. It’s also full of kids playing loudly with toys. What it’s not full of are people who can actually hear and participate in the service.

So no one gets anything out of this arrangement. Why does the Church insist on keeping kids in the pews? I’ve heard many Catholics say it’s so children can learn to sit still and listen. This is apparently why adult Protestants can’t stay in their seats.

Mostly, I think it’s about obligation and demonstrating your devotion through thick and thin. The Catholic Church just seems to have that ethos. But I don’t. I’m Methodist. So I think that having kids in the pew is just nuts.

I think kneelers are nuts, too, and I don’t care who knows it. You can tell John Paul the next time you see him.

 

**Footnote: Parishioners of Saint Johns will rightly point out that the church has established a nursery. Of course, this was started by Andrea, so it’s not totally in the church’s win column. Plus, it’s not open that often – like during the summer or whenever the bridge club wants the space.

All dressed up with no clambake to go to

I’m sure many men out there would agree with my position “I don’t like shopping.” But I’m guessing few have taken it to my same extreme, “I don’t shop.”

That I’ve been fortunate enough to manage this has required a tradeoff. Andrea and I have an implicit agreement that, because I don’t shop, I’ll wear whatever she buys. Clown pants? Fine. Punk skater look? No problem. Anything but sweaters. I don’t know why I don’t like them, I just hate the way they cling to my elbows.

It turns out that what Andrea just loves is the preppy New England look straight out of the J. Crew catalogue – seersucker pants, plaid pants, pastel pants, pants with little lobsters or sailboats or seahorses on them, woven belt, boat shoes, white polo shirts. The sweater goes over the shoulders, so I can live with that. She likes this look a lot, and now I could go to 8 or 10 clambakes in a row without risk of embarrassment that I would be caught in the same outfit twice. The problem is this: we don’t go to any clambakes. We haven’t been invited to a clambake since moving to Ohio. Even when we lived in New England we might go to only two a year. 

So I have a closet full of unused pastel pants. I can’t wear this stuff to work – the Miller Time guys who do the real work at my company wouldn’t let me get away with that. And they’re too nice to bum around in on the weekends. I’m not sure when, if ever, I should wear them.

And the clambake clothes are just a few of the articles that I have no idea when or where I am supposed to wear them. I had a pair of flip-flops with orange straps that I kept trying to wear out on the weekend and Andrea would say “those don’t go with your outfit” (note: “outfit” here is defined very loosely to include stained shorts and a crummy t-shirt). After twenty or thirty tries, I finally said “what exactly am I supposed to wear these with?” Andrea bought me a bright orange t-shirt shortly thereafter.

I now wear that orange t-shirt, stained shorts and matching flip flops almost every day between Memorial Day and Labor Day – it’s the only summer “outfit” that I know matches. Unfortunately, the orange t-shirt is the exception. I’m mentally stuck with many articles of clothing, so I just end up wearing the same 5-10 outfits to work and another 5-10 while bumming around on the weekend. I have a pair of paisley – yes, paisley – shoes that I couldn’t match to an outfit to save my life.

And so my closet is kind of like the warehouse at the factory where I work, where the inventory is classified A, B, or C based on how much is used. Like the warehouse, I have the A-movers, the stuff that I wear every day. The B-movers are the slow movers but at least I know what to do (hey, that restaurant is funky-dressy! I have an outfit for that!). The C-movers - the preppy gear and sweaters and paisley shoes – well, they just hang there unused waiting for the accountants to write them off.

Kiddie Capitalism

Many parents complain of being overloaded with kids’ activities. Our trick? Only sign up one child for anything. Chiara does piano, dance, gymnastics, reading lessons and, at one point, soccer. Cody… well, Cody plays with sticks in the dirt.

I have to tip my cap to these institutions in how efficiently they separate us from our money. My theory on dance is that the lessons are basically a breakeven proposition – and that the real money is made at the recital. Between $50 in tickets, $80 costume, $40 pictures, $60 video, $20 flowers and other required (okay not required but come on, who’s not buying the video?) purchases we’re into the recital for several hundred bucks. We’re not alone - the auditorium is chock full for multiple recitals. This year Chiara increased from one to two recitals – Saturday and Sunday – which besides blowing a hole in our weekend schedule also blew a hole in our budget. Man, what a business.

If the dance hits you with a full frontal assault in the form of the recital, gymnastics is more of a covert operation. These guys have it to a science.

“Look into my eyes,” they say, waving a gymnastics medal in front of our face, “Chiara is doing VERY well.”

“Chiara is doing well,” we repeat, mesmerized.

“She has a lot of talent!”

“She has a lot of talent,” we drone.

 “I think she’s ready to move up to pre-team!”

“Pre-team… checkbook…” The coach cackles. Our brainwashing is complete.

Pre-team is twice a week instead of our current once per week. It’s $200 more dollars a month. But this is the path to competitive greatness – the road to Olympic gold runs through pre-team.

Never mind that to an outside observer Chiara’s ability to do dip-steps on a balance beam is indistinguishable from all the other girls in her class. Or that these are essentially the same dip-steps she was doing a year ago with only glacial signs of progress. Chiara has talent that really should be nurtured. Plus, the pre-team class is undersubscribed this year.

Never mind, too, that there is always one more level to go and the different levels and classes have absurd complexity. The gym has classes named after colors, letters, numbers, celestial bodies, and designations like “team.” Which class is the best amongst red, level 3, comets and pre-team? I’ll be darned if I know, but I’m sure the coaches will tell us the best next step for Chiara.

Left to her own devices, I’m sure Chiara would be perfectly happy doing dip-steps to the end of time in “Comets.” But we have social standing to maintain. Another girl in Chiara’s class moved up to pre-team before her. This simply cannot stand, since Chiara is clearly the better talent (ignore what I said above about no discernible difference in these girls. Chiara is clearly the best!). So come the fall, I predict that Chiara will be in pre-team with coaches encouraging us to move to level 3, we’ll be $200 a month poorer, and Cody will be digging with sticks in the field behind the gymnastics studio twice a week instead of only once.