Blog

  • My daughter follows the Pope on Twitter

    Letting my 10 month-old girl play on my laptop. She manages to call up Pope Francis’ Twitter page and turn off the TV.

  • Shiny Coat

    I caught my 10 month-old gnawing on our Pug’s Busy Bone. On the plus side, at least she’ll have a shiny coat.

  • My easily attainable 2014 New Years Resolutions

    My easily attainable 2014 New Years Resolutions

    I make resolutions with the bar set really low, so I can attain them.

    1. I resolve never to purchase a Perfect Polly™ this year. Or any year.
    2. I resolve not to eat my fellow travelers if we’re stranded in the Arctic.
    3. Expanding on that last one, I resolve not to go anywhere I could possibly fall into a canyon (alone) and be forced to saw off my own hand.
    4. I resolve not to defect to a Communist nation.
    5. I resolve not to use my spit to hold my daughter’s hair in place.
    6. I resolve not to punch a Great White Shark in the face.
    7. But I do resolve to throat-punch anyone who plays What Does Fox The Say in my vicinity.
    8. I resolve not to learn Hungarian this year.
    9. I resolve not to vote for Rob Ford.
  • Spirit Animal

    I think my spirit animal was taken by the Humane Society and put up for adoption.

  • Parenting: What no one told me

    Parenting: What no one told me

    So I became a father for the first time. At 49. I had pretty much given up the hope of having children, but then it happened. No, don’t congratulate me. It was easy. What wasn’t easy was sifting through the reams of advice you’re given from doctors, family, magazines, blogs, friends and complete strangers—yes the same strangers who feel compelled to feel up your wife’s belly like she was a prize Berkshire hog at a county fair.

    Most of the advice a new parent gets seems to come from well-meaning, but childless adults who are disappointingly often dead right. Other parents? Off their bloody rockers.

    There are many things I found out on my own that no one warned me about. You bastards. Thanks for hiding this from me.

    Defying gravity

    It’s true. Babies are able to poop upwards against gravity. I was under the impression that only the esophagus could do this through peristalsis. Boy, was I wrong. The sphincter of an infant is quite capable of rocketing poop straight up their shoulder blades. While fully clothed.

    Now you know why they smile at us after they’ve pulled off a power squeeze.

    The Gatling Gun

    Babies like to kick when you change them and one’s natural tendency is to grab their tiny feet and pump their little legs back and forth. Resist, dear reader. You will release a stream of .50 calibre poo-nition. After mentioning this frightening fact to my father-in-law, he matter-of-factly replied, “Oh sure. All babies do that. It’s like a pump-action rifle.” Thanks for the heads-up.

    Oh, is that new?

    Babies can sense that you have on nice clothing the way bees can smell fear. If you’ve just put on something nice—especially something expensive and dark—your baby will promptly spit up roughly a quart of milk all over it. This will seem all the more unusual when you realIze she only drank six ounces of milk and you’ve just changed her diaper. No matter. Small babies produce spit up the way Pekingese dogs produce poop 11 times on a short walk around the block.

    Delicious

    Babies are rather like Mako sharks in that if you cut one open, you will find all manner of objects partially digested in their stomachs. Toys, cotton balls, tuna can lids, wood chips, hamsters—nothing is too perilous, scabrous or unsanitary for a baby to digest. It’s like babies have a death wish and choose to put the die in diet.

    Banshees

    Around nine months of age, babies find their voice. And by that I mean their screams are able to shatter champagne glasses, split eardrums, deafen bats and dry up cows. And it’s not a cry of pain. That remains a “reasonable” 90 decibels. No, this is an inexplicable cry that happens with no warning, and for no reason.

    My daughter generally employs her boisterous battle cry a few seconds after a good meal and prior to having her bib removed. I have no idea why she does this and I wish I could remember to brace my ears for this nightly assault on my senses. But I’m stupid, so I expect to be fully deaf by March 9, 2015.

    “Do the chickens have large talons?”

    The three most efficient cutting tools in the world are as follows:

    1. Lasers
    2. Diamond blades
    3. Baby fingernails

    Being scratched by an infant’s fingernails requires an immediate call to an EMT. I’m not kidding.

    First off, their nails are sharper than anything you can imagine. Secondly, the clippers made to trim baby nails are not worth a damn. Thirdly, they have a Shaolin-like ability for striking sensitive, high-damage zones such as major arteries, eyes, genitals or nasal passages.

    The latter is my daughter’s specialty. A simple nose-honk becomes a death-grip on my nasal cartilage, her nails digging ever deeper until she draws blood. Then she adds insult to injury by giggling.

    And spitting up.

  • Two Shakes of a Lamb’s Tail

    How come when someone says, “I’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” it always takes about 45 minutes? Just how big is a lamb’s tail?

  • Ready? Package is up… and PULL!

    Ready? Package is up… and PULL!

    Amazon claims it will use flying robot drones to deliver packages to us in the near future. Sorry, USPS. You’ve been replaced. Perhaps this is smart thinking on Amazon’s part as they plan for a United States that may lose its short-sighted postal service.

    On the other hand, duck hunters now can have twice the fun blasting the bloody hell out of someone’s 50 Shades of Grey novel.

  • For the Time Being

    When people say, “Oh, it’s just for the time being,” I freak out. We have Time Beings that demand offerings from us? When did this start? Next thing, you’ll be telling me the government is being run by Reptile People.