Have You Seen This Weirdo?

Wanted: For the Dual Crimes of Silliness and Adorability

A Little Less Action, A Little More Conversation Please

Each day I get home from work, depending on which end of the house I enter from, I encounter a different kind of disaster. From the back, I come in through the kitchen and see an incredible mess of my own making. I am loathe to wash dishes immediately after eating dinner and as such, they sit around until I get home the next day and need to make room to start the whole process again. I could hope that Bruce would do the dishes for me but I could also hope a white tiger glides down from the sky on a rainbow and presents me with keys to a new mansion guarded by unicorns. Between the tiger and Bruce doing the dishes, only one of them is utterly ridiculous and it's not the tiger.

If I come home through the front of the building I am confronted by our living room. And hallway. And bathroom. And dining room. All the way until I get to the kitchen I am forced to wallow through drifts of brightly colored plastic, shoes and clothes, trucks, pieces of what used to be trucks and half eaten sandwich crusts. What I am saying is, is that every day, I come home to an enormous distasteful mess. It is, to say the least, disheartening. I would love to have a nice, clean home. It's not like I want a show place or anything, my standards for cleanliness are ridiculously low but the never ending cycle of picking up toys and their subsequent re-dispersal is beginning to wear on me. In a few more weeks, sometime after birthday and Christmas presents have all been opened, rejected for their packaging and discarded, I may be a very broken woman. I am not even certain when I am supposed to find time to do all the necessary housekeeping. My day is essentially: wake, shower, work, cook, eat, play, pass out on the couch, bed. I suppose I could cook less and use that time to clean but then what would be eat? I would love to skip out on work for my chores but until there is an affordable healthcare option for the self-employed and their families, I am SOL in that department. And play? As it is I have less than five waking hours a day to spend with my son. Vacuuming is nowhere near as important to me as Calder.



I suppose a great deal of the blame for this can fall on my own poor planning skills. I am the one who decided to put Calder's play area in the living room. That way he could enjoy himself with the things he likes best like his trains and trucks and I can enjoy myself with the thing I like best, the television. Although I can't be too hard on myself though, it's not like we had a great many other options. Calder's bedroom is large enough but it has several awkwardly placed doors and a double bed hogging a great deal of the space. Plus he never, EVER hangs out in there. That could be because they amount of fun stuff is significantly lower in his room or perhaps because he associates it with bad things like being put to bed and having his nose deboogered. Additionally, the play area as it is is kind of ideal, it's cut off from the rest of the room by a large couch with only a small walkway to get in. Theoretically, that should hold the bulk of his amusements in but, alas, it does not.


Calder is not content to while away his time in such confined spaces! No! He is a child of action and vigor. Why would he resign himself to quietly playing trucks in the corner when those trucks could be taken outwards and had their fantastic features demonstrated for the cats? I don't think that Calder is trying to engage us in his play either, he seems totally content to amuse himself. Like when he drags out the entire bucket of play food and dishes, it's not so we can help him cook some delicious pretend ham, it's so we can admire and exclaim as he plucks each individual item from its plasticy morass. He doesn't want us to play with him. He wants an audience to watch him play. He once explained a fire engine to our fish for over five minutes, while wearing sunglasses nonetheless. And his trains, good god, they are practically performance art. Who knows why the only acceptable location for his ever expanding collection of Choo Choo TA-miss is on the floor directly in front of the television but it is. An ordinary day in Sodor becomes a near Greek tragedy with wailing and the rending of garments with each minor derailment or bridge collapse while Mommy and Daddy play the chorus, consoling the weeping and proffering advice that goes unheeded. Hopefully, the arrival of a train table in December will correct some of this but that leads to just another conundrum. Where the hell I am going to put a train table?

Pho-tohs

Due to an insane 30th birthday weekend+ I haven't had the time nor the mental capacity to write a post. So instead, here's some pictures. There's bacon. And cat stacking.

It's a Y (chromosome) Thing

Lately Calder has started grabbing my chest and shouting, "Boobs!". He also thinks the dog's "pee-pee" is hi-larious. I had no idea that bathroom humor was actually a sex linked trait along the lines of baldness and being color blind. I can't wait for his first fart joke.

I Liketo Eat, Eat, Eat Apples and Bananas

But only sometimes if you are Calder! After reading this, I started really thinking about how Calder's eating habits have progressed, and then regressed over time. Because seriously, first it was easy -- breast milk and formula. Bottle or boob, it did not matter one whit to Calder, he was a happy guy as long as he was getting some approximation of dairy into his system on a regular basis. Then we made the decision to start him on solids. (Well, he made it himself since he started trying to swipe everything we ate or drank.) Calder took to that pretty well, eating a wide variety of jarred foods. He even once graciously ate a rancid looking mixture that I whipped up that could only be described as vegetable diarrhea. Hey, I cook big people food, not purees. Ask Tom Collicchio how he feels about purees.

Once Calder started eating non-baby food, he was all gung ho about it, whatever it was. You got naan? I'll take some. Fajitas? Send 'em this way. Cheese? All cheese and any cheese, cheese as the day is long. Calder would horf it down with no regard. It was a glorious time. A time of juice boxes and roses.

But now? Well, starting a few months ago really, Calder slowly stopped eating things. Instead of being a literal omnivore Calder became an "ehh, sometimesvore". Basically food falls into three categories for Calder: Always eat, Sometimes eat and Never, ever eat (Mom, why would you put this in front of me?)

Now I know I am generalizing here but I can pretty safely say that everyone wants their children to eat the healthiest food available to them. I certainly entertain dreams of an all organic, free range whole grain lifestyle. I actually like eating like a goddamn hippie and it's probably best for everyone and best for the environment. I would certainly rather shop at Whole Foods than Aldi and I bet a lot of other people would too but it doesn't always work like that. Sometimes the cost gets in the way OR sometimes you own damn child gets in the way. Let's just say what I want Calder to eat regularly, sometimes and almost never does not seem to line up with his own personal assessments of those foods.

Always Eat

Obviously things like chips (salt & vinegar), candy, cake, cookies fall in here. Calder is a junk food MANIAC. Sadly, Bruce does nothing but encourage this. I think he enjoys having a fellow sweet tooth around since I am always foisting shit like kale and brown rice on him. Fortunately there are a few foods that could at least be considered reasonable if not outright good for him that Calder will almost always eat. Cheese, but only orange cheddar (not too sharp); PB&Js, jelly flavor doesn't matter; Couscous, (at least he maintained some of taste for international cuisines); fried rice, (it has vegetables in it, yo); french fries (sigh, I know); hot dogs; chicken nuggets and the biggest shocker - BROCCOLI. Of course Calder doesn't eat the whole broccoli piece, he just gnaws on the fronds and throws the half-masticated stems on the floor for the dog (note to Calder: Elby is not a beagle). But that? is pretty much it. Ok, well apples and bananas too like the title says. Oh right, and butter. Calder really, really likes butter. Like, if I set him up with a spoon and a tub of margarine he would be one extremely happy little guy.

Sometimes Eat

Sometimes can mean frequently or it can mean only by devious means of trickery. For example: Cereal. Calder likes cereal a lot. He usually gets Honey Combs or Kashi Heart to Heart (Hey, I am trying). He even asks for cereal by name. that does not mean he eats right away it however. Calder seems to prefer pieces of cereal that have been laying on the floor for a day or two to actual non-stale cereal that is placed neatly in a bowl before him to snack on. Actually, I have no idea where he gets all this old cereal from (blatant lie). He seems to hide it away like a squirrel in his play area. he does this with other foods that he seems to only like aged like bread. We'll be hanging out in the living room and all of a sudden Calder will come up from his trucks with a piece of pita that has to be at least a week old and starts munching away. I know I should take it away from him but by that point it's pretty much a pita chip, right? Other sometimes eat things are foods that used to be always eat like other varieties of cheese, non-processed meats and carrots. Sometimes Calder will nibble a few times on a carrot stick and then chuck it away. Cooked carrots fare even worse. Usually he throws them at me without making any pretense of trying to eat them. These days to get carrots into Calder I need to hide them in couscous. One time I got him to eat a piece of sauteed spinach because it was stuck to the bottom of his hot dog piece. I consider that a victory.


Never Eat
I could save myself time and just say, "Everything not mentioned above" because seriously, this post is already way too long but that's seems like it would be anticlimactic. So let's just say food Calder will never eat, even under penalty of death or no more Choo Choo Thomas include Green vegetables not ending in -occoli, non-fried potatoes, beef (BEEF!), or anything even remotely spicy. Hell, even lightly seasoned gets the kibosh from him.


As such, dinner time in the ol' homestead is getting kind of depressing. I make one big people nice meal for me to eat and for Bruce to inhale and Calder gets a rotating assortment of hot dogs, nuggets, PB&Js or spaghetti accompanied by whatever veggies we are also eating. Not that they ever get eaten. I feel like maybe one day, after endless days of rejecting peas and flinging carrots I will finally break Calder's spirit and he will knuckle under my culinary will. Until that time could somebody get me that book by Jerry Seinfeld's plagiarist wife for Christmas? You know the one about hiding turnips in brownies or some such nonsense. That could maybe work... until Calder decides he doesn't like brownies either.

Third Time's a Charm

Despite Sleepy von Sleeperson up there's best attempts to avoid trick or treating, we finally managed to wrangle Calder into a costume and get his ass out on the street, hustling for some candy. Now I say A costume because he would not, once again, put on the turtle. I guess one wear a day is his max.*

Calder did, however, agree to put on the baseball outfit which I accessorized with his Red Sox hat and a nifty sweater that was given to him by my sister which gave him a nice olde-timey baseball player look. Although I don't think the olde-timey uniforms were made from acetate. Just a guess.

This is basically Calder realizing that this whole expedition is for the sheer purpose of allowing people to give him some candy. I think he finally forgave us for the costume at this point too.

Calder learned pretty quickly to check out the goods as soon as we got off the front lawn and out of eyesight. I knew we had for sure picked the right hood when at one house Calder was presented with his treats by a lady standing at the end of her walkway in a FULL LENGTH FUR COAT.

This is just a nice picture. I want to steal these people's house sooooo badly.** We went out of our own neighborhood since we wanted to go to a place that had more single-family houses than apartment buildings. An added bonus to picking the house heavy-hood is that we got a see a pretty spectacular Halloween decorative display. Calder was quite taken with the blinking eyes that several people had attached to their shrubberies. I on the other hand was quite envious of the fact that these lucky bastards have yards to decorate in the first place.

Towards the end of out street-and-a-half odyssey, Calder was finally brave enough to go up to the doors by himself. Of course he couldn't reach the doorbells and his attempts at knocking were on the newborn kitten side of weak so Bruce would eventually have to help him. Well, help him or just stop him from turning the knob and busting into the house unannounced. Calder is cute but maybe not THAT cute.

Calder was literally running between houses, like he though that they might stop the candy orgy at any moment. Lord know we did miss out on a few houses because they had already run out but how much chocolate does a person who is still only 3 ft. tall need anyways?

OMG! It's a spider! It's a ring! It's a spider ring! And yes, he did try to eat that too. Fortunately it got spit out. Other things that got spit out: Skittles, an eraser that was shaped like a witch head, Play-Do and a half chewed Tootsie Roll. Let me just mention that "Tootsie Roll or Cat Poop?" is not the most fun game to play the day after Halloween when you have a decent hangover combined with other issues of the ladytude variety.***

Seeing as how I was headed out to join grown-up weirdos in costumes for the evening, I certainly didn't interfere with Calder's insane candy mauling. That's once sugar rush that was not going to be my problem. I think Bruce eventually had to hit him with a couple of tranqs before getting him to bed. After letting him stay up and watch Scream 3, that is. Bruce is the BEST father.

Look, Calder is SMILING! Not grimacing, not looking at me with boredom or mild annoyance. It's a Halloween Miracle! Although I suppose it could be less earnest smiling and more my face is stuck like this because of all the dried Tootsie Roll juice that is covering it.

*Do you, or do you not just want to nom on those hams up there.

**Like, con way my way into their home using social engineering and then murder them and take over their lives. Seriously, this house had a cupola. And a gazebo. And a wrap around porch. And a M-Fing ARBOR.

***Don't get all up in arms about me talking about my cramps. This is a space where I once described what my cervix looks like. You should have learned the first time.

Halloween Spirit

I guess the Halloween mood finally hit Calder today. Not only did he agree to put on his turtle shell (we'll work on the rest of the costume) but he also wanted to wear one of his dino/dragon costumes from last year. Too bad that one is too small to close the bottom since it seems that's the best chance I have to get him out of the house all dressed up. Well, there's also a cheapo baseball player costume I can use as a last resort. If Calder ever wakes up that is. He refused to take a nap after lunch and as such is passed out on the couch with no pants on while the rest of the children in the neighborhood are pouring out of their houses to shake down all the local stores for candy with a few houses thrown in there along the way. I have an enormous bowl of candy just in case but they never seem to ring our buzzer so I guess if Calder doesn't get his lazy ass up in the next hour or so, we can just fake his first trick or treating experience. That's me, half-assing Halloween, just like everything else. Why should today be any exception?