Things My Wife Complains About #32: Packing

When I met my wife, she had one condition: Move me to Nebraska in the next twelve years or I'll find someone who can. I'm ready to deliver, and we move to Omaha this summer. The only problem: packing. Who is going to put all of the things we own, almost all of which we neither like nor need, into boxes? The answer, unfortunately, is she is. While I've been dutifully unpacking my juvenalia, texting pictures of it to my high school and college friends, and then putting that back into the same boxes, she has been depositing the rest of the house into boxes, taping those boxes, and stacking them in our den.

How many blankets do you think we own? The answer is 5,000,000,000,000, after we donated a bunch. My wife, personally, has 36 tank tops (actual number), which is good because Nebraska screams tank top. We also have several million legos of mutually exclusive sizes. Our kids have not been super helpful. Whenever we secretly remove something, they not only find it but also passionately love it, regardless of how long it's been since they played with it. There are stuffed animals they haven't seen in years, which they now treat as siblings. When I donated a stroller that my daughter no longer used, she stood in the door like a child from a Stephen King novel, staring down the person from Craigslist.

My wife, on the whole, has maintained a pretty good attitude. Not even three times a day she says some variation of "I hate everything" or, more convincingly, "I'm burning everything." But she hasn't burned one thing. Instead, she's packed it all into boxes, and after those boxes have been moved, they'll be unpacked, where she'll remember how much she neither needed nor liked the things inside in the first place. Then we'll get a bunch of new stuff.

Possible solutions!
1) Buy new blankets in Omaha.
2) Commute to Nebraska from New York.
3) Make honest and responsible decisions about what we care about and prepare our future accordingly (hard)

How much for 36 tank tops?

Diary of an Angry Pink Baby #11: Hiking

It took longer for the leaves to change this year because the world is ending, meaning there was still opportunity to see them in mid-November! So the family made the fifteen-minute drive to Wildwood State Park, and for the first ten minutes of our hike through the woods, everyone enjoyed leaf-centric banter, walked with the legs attached to their bodies, and complained only lightly.

Wildwood State Park

The remainder of the hike didn't go as well, mostly because Miranda decided she was tired, first of walking and then, incredibly, of being carried. We debated turning around until we reached the exact place where it was a thirty-five minute walk in either direction, and this is when Miranda entered some sort of Memento loop wherein she only understood the following three things:

1) I'm tired of walking.
2) I'm tired of being carried.
3) Are we going to Grandma's house?

I addressed these, relentlessly, as follows:

1) Everyone else is walking.
2) Nobody else is being carried.
3) We're going to Grandma's house in ten days.

To which Miranda replied, earnestly, as though we might not know, and it was important that we truly understand:

1) I'm tired of walking.
2) I'm tired of being carried.
3) Are we going to Grandma's house?

Then the woodlands of Eastern Long Island transformed into a sort of Euro discotheque, wherein Miranda, in my arms, jamming a "pink" (red) leaf into my nostrils, mixed the order, sometimes lingering on 3) up to five times in a row (Grandma-Grandma-Grandma-Grandma-Grandma) before spinning a few 1) or tossing in 2) to keep us all on our toes. Her toes were in the air.

Miranda "hiking"
Finally, after a couple of miles, Miranda spotted a playground, which she legit sprinted to with newfound reserves of energy. She left maybe thirty minutes later, aggressively crying, because she both wanted to stay and leave. Her teenage years should be FINE. The rest of the day she forgot about being tired and only mentioned Grandma's house six or seven hundred thousand times.

Things My Wife Complains About #31 Bedtime Etiquette

I did something bad. I slept on a decorative pillow. I've been sent to husband jail. It's filled with men who slept on decorative pillows. Every man's story is the same: He saw a pillow where he sleeps, so he slept on it. The guards, who are all wives, have no mercy for our ignorance. They only allow sleeping pillows on our cots. These are the worst kinds of pillows. It's a hell none of us could have imagined, this absence of decorative pillows, this outrageous economy wherein pillows function simply as sleeping devices. I feel like an animal.

I did something else bad. I filled the glass I leave on my wife's bedside table each night too high, and she "spilled water everywhere." It was something that could have been prevented had I measured better. Fortunately, now that I'm in jail, my tyranny of water pouring is finished. I can only assume every glass of water is poured perfectly, and her sleep--her whole day--is better for it. It's worth noting, perhaps, that my wife admits to "never drinking water." As such, water glasses function only as things to be spilled. I thought I understood what pillows and glasses were for until I got married.

Possible solutions!
1) Stay in husband jail indefinitely
2) Break out of husband jail and fill bedroom with decorative pillows and perfectly-poured glasses of water to show I get it
3) Don't sleep on decorative pillows or pour so much water (hard)

Using the decorative pillows

Things My Wife Complains About #30: Supporting Our Family

For the last eight years, I've had a job that requires me to go to the office three days a week, forty-four weeks a year (sometimes less). This schedule is very hard on my family, who find my being home only four days a week--the weeks I'm not home every day--fundamentally unacceptable. My friends with full-time jobs are generally away from the house for fifty to sixty hours a week, so I assume their families don't speak to them, if my friends manage to maintain families at all.

Each morning I leave, my son wails, "Dada, don't go to work AGAIN." When I get home, my daughter rushes to the door and clings to my leg, as though she's spent the day scrubbing floors or avoiding a whip (in reality, my daughter spends all day drawing, clicking things into other things, pushing buttons that make noise or glow, hiding remote controls, crying over nothing, attacking her brother or mother brutally without reason, eating on demand, and napping).

My wife is similarly afflicted. Recently, after a three-day work week that followed Spring Break and preceded an Easter trip to Massachusetts, I had little time to do anything but work and take care of the kids. So bereft was my wife during this time that she wilted like a plant deprived of water. Fortunately, Family Day was coming! Family Day is when nobody works, so everyone can commit all of his or her energy to getting on the nerves of someone else in the family. It happens every Saturday, and we start drinking before dinner.

Possible Solutions!

1) Build downtime into schedule by eliminating sleep
2) Complain full-time while someone else supports family
3) Become independently wealthy (hard)

At work (last summer)

Things My Wife Complains About #29 Apple Picking

It's fall, which means it's apple picking time! As someone who has long enjoyed apples, what greater pleasure could I take than paying to pick my own dirty, worm-infested apples? I'm so tired of buying clean, tasty apples that someone else picked and washed. I enjoy pork, too, but it's not like I get to slaughter my own pigs in an abbatoir, alongside hundreds of other tired families. Lame!

If you think you're about to read a snarky takedown of picking apples, guess again, because despite traveling to two different orchards, nobody in my family picked a single apple. The first orchard, to be fair, had a lot of rules. First, somebody told my wife she wasn't allowed to bring in her purse. Second, I don't remember: The gatekeepers were just generally weird and scary. So, for some reason, we bought a lot of peaches. Has anyone in our family ever eaten a peach? Possibly. Now we have approximately three hundred of them.

We knew what to expect from the next orchard, namely more not apple picking. This orchard has so many places for children to play, it's a miracle anyone ever picks apples. Here's what we did instead of picking apples: Eat apple donuts (close), drink apple cider (arguably closer), get stuck inside a plastic tube (daughter), shimmy inside the tube to retrieve the child while people gathered worriedly around one open end of said tube (wife), burst into tears after being told it made Mama very sad he said he didn't want to pose for a picture (son), stare expressionless into the distance (me).

Possible solutions!

1) Stop eating fruits and vegetables
2) Start picking less popular produce, such as potatoes
3) Go apple picking again very soon (extremely likely)

Tractor

Tractor

Ship

Ship

Train

Watch out Miranda is driving!

Before the doom

Happy pumpkin

Confused ghost

Diary of an Angry Pink Baby #10: Driving

My daughter doesn't like driving, or perhaps it's more accurate to say--since she's only eleven months old--that she doesn't like being driven. When my son was younger, he didn't like being driven either, which I covered previously (search: "vomits" and "sanity"). Now that he's almost four, he likes driving fine; it's everything else that fills him with the abiding unhappiness of a nineteenth century Russian novelist.

But back to my daughter, who really hates being driven! My wife and I have sensitively adjusted to this condition by repeatedly placing her in a rear-facing car seat and taking her on long drives in the middle of the day. Recently, we drove the whole family to Charlottesville, Virginia, which is one of the most wonderful places on earth if you don't have children or a debilitating illness courtesy of those children.

That's right, my daughter is already vengeful. Is she aware of her vengefulness? She might be. Her favorite word is "no," which she understands to mean "sure!" She happily shakes her head when you tell her no before resuming whatever she was doing, such as swallowing a nightlight. In the restraints of the carseat, there is little she can do, so she responds by crying or screaming or a sort of crying-screaming hybrid that sounds almost like laughter. She insists I hold her hand, difficult though not impossible as that may be while operating a moving vehicle. I thought that the fourteen-hour roundtrip drive might cure my daughter of her driving hatred, but it seems only to have reenforced it.

Just kidding, I never thought it would get better! Really, I didn't think anything at all. When more than one person in Charlottesville asked me what our plan was for the ride home, I started laughing or maybe crying-screaming. You have to understand I was very ill. At one point, on Route 29, my wife, son, and daughter were all asleep. The Blue Ridge Mountains rose to my left, and hills rolled gently into fast food restaurants and gas stations to my right. I thought: This isn't so bad. And it wasn't. Then somebody or everybody started crying, and I thought: This is very bad! Then I forgot, which is the only thing you can do.

Asleep... for now.

Diary of an Angry Pink Baby #9: Eating

Everyone said Miranda looked like James when she was born, which makes sense since they were both enormous. Now that Miranda has thinned to a svelte young woman, it's easier to see all the ways in which they're different. For instance, Miranda sleeps at night! (James only began sleeping at night in January, and he's still not exactly maintaining a regular schedule: Despite no longer napping, he's presently [4:00 pm] passed out in front of the television, as "No Signal!" bounces around the blue screen.) Also: Miranda doesn't take a bottle, which means she eats ALL DAY LONG. Here's a comprehensive list of the things Miranda does besides eat and sleep:

1) Smile because she's going to the bathroom
2) Smile because she's surreptitiously going to the bathroom, though you think she's smiling at you

That's it! That's the list.

Miranda's non-stop eating has been hard on my wife, since she's breakfast, lunch, dinner, fourth meal (copyright: Taco Bell), brunch, snack, nightcap, etc. My wife has responded to her new role admirably, feeding on demand, while simultaneously moving several thousand photos from one computer to another and watching whole seasons of previously unheard-of shows on Netflix. James has also risen to the occasion, showering his sister with generous affection, though his three-year-old ego is now so fragile he has a complete breakdown if even the slightest thing doesn't go his way. Ketchup on his face, for instance, is a crisis. Another crisis would be removing ketchup from his face. James has developed a nearly erotic attachment to the itsy bitsy spider, which is the last thing he thinks of before sleeping and first thing he thinks of upon waking. He sings the nursery rhyme on unending loop and looks for the spider in every drainpipe. A typical summer afternoon consists of James running around the living room screaming DOWN CAME THE RAIN while my wife feeds Miranda and I look for my wife's phone, which is invariably next to her, usually physically touching her.

Smiling?

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Things My Wife Complains About #28: Pillows

Here is a quick pillow breakdown of the master bedroom:

Normal pillows: 4

Decorative pillows: 2

"Pregnancy" pillows: 2

"Wedge": 1

Total pillows: 9

I am allowed to use one pillow, but this pillow is given begrudgingly, as my wife claims I use no pillows. Actually, she claims I'm actively hostile toward pillows. (Apparently, this is genetic, as my brother did not even own pillows until my wife, horrified, insisted we buy him pillows.) In any event, two nights ago James figured out how to drench his pillow in urine, so now I have zero pillows. 

My wife complains, repeatedly, that there are "no pillows." I'm not sure how many pillows a queen-size bed can support, but nine seems like a lot with one six-foot non-pregnant person and one five-foot pregnant person. Often, my wife complains that I'm taking up too much room, which is sensible given that she is invariably surrounded on three sides by pillows. Only her feet have no pillows.

Of course, the nine pillows are never on the bed at the same time because the two decorative pillows are only allowed to be on the bed when people are not. I don't want to get into how ridiculous this is to me because I recognize that the concept of decorative pillows makes complete sense to about half the people in the world and no sense to the other half, and there is no gray area or hope of conversion.

It's also worth noting that one pregnancy pillow was recently banished for reasons I don't understand.

Possible solutions!

1) Replace me with Kevin-shaped pillow

2) Fill house with pillows, so wife might fall asleep anywhere at any time in comfort

3) Deal with a pregnant woman's demands for another half a month (hard)

James likes the pregnancy pillow

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Things My Wife Complains About #27: Buying Her Gourmet Cupcakes

My wife complained the other day that nobody brings her cupcakes. She said this not in the tone of "nobody brings me flowers" but in the tone of "nobody brings me oxygen." You are encouraged to imagine my pregnant wife on a respirator of cupcakes, complaining.

I told her to find a place that sells the cupcakes she wanted, and the next day I went to that place. The cupcake she selected was 975 calories and cost $4.50. I used to buy pitchers of beer for less than that in graduate school. Probably, some of you are old enough to have purchased homes for that price.

The cupcake was a complaint-fest from the beginning: It was too big, too sugary, too cake-y (?). Then, when she attempted to consume the cupcake, a series of unfortunate events occurred wherein she was wearing most of the cupcake, and milk was everywhere. This, obviously, was my fault.

I didn't leap to her rescue fast enough. I focused on cleaning the couch, not helping her, and I hadn't even bothered to wipe chocolate off the milk cup. What, she asked earnestly, had I been doing? I had been reassessing the place of the cupcake in my life. It was a soul-searching moment.

Possible solutions!

1) Replace cupcakes with literally any other food item
2) Admit that I forced her to spill the cupcake and, in fact, secretly relished the experience
3) Question a pregnant woman's cravings (hard)

 

Crumb's Thin Mint Cupcake

Things My Brother Complains About #1: Being Whipped by a Mostly-Naked Man

I decided for Andrew's Christmas present this year that I would do something different but mostly very scary.

I knew we'd built a trust level where I could hand him to stranger who asked Andrew to surrender his belongings and enter a room full of naked men. We had, after all, just visited Key West for his thirtieth birthday. After seeing a lot of hairy behinds, we descended to a subterranean sauna where a mostly-naked man interrupted the wringing of towels to escort Andrew personally into a hot dark room. Are you dying of jealousy yet?

Inside, the man asked Andrew to lie on his stomach before placing a wet towel over his head. The man proceeded to hurl several buckets of cold water over Andrew's body between lacerations from a whip of oiled oak leaves. I'd paid in advance for this old-world relaxation. The man then insisted Andrew soak in a forty-five degree pool. I'm not sure of the exact medicine, but I believe the idea is to simulate a heart attack, so as to cause a heart attack or prevent one or something. It's called pampering.

Afterward, we enjoyed various light Siberian delicacies with friends and freshly-squeezed juice. Merry Christmas!

 

Brothers enjoying Christmas morning

Diary of an Angry Pink Baby #8: The Dentist

Poor James had a mouthful of cavities despite never eating sweets and only possessing teeth for a few months. The main culprit, Ericka and I concluded, were the several gallons of milk he drinks a day. So now we thoroughly brush his teeth before bed and allow him no more than two gallons of milk a day. It's called parenting.

James wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything before his 9:00 am pediatric dental appointment, and this was my biggest fear, as he knocks back milk, oatmeal, and yogurt long before the sun rises each morning. At 4:00 am, James sprinted into our bedroom and immediately commenced a list of horrifying demands: "Milk dinner bagel yummy. Dada, I NEED this. HUNGRY." In James's defense, he has consumed milk upon waking every day of his life; my offer of water was dismissed with a combination of crying and angrier crying. Rarely have I seen anyone more disappointed by anything than James and the sippy cup of water. He would have traded me on the spot for eight ounces of milk. This is not hyperbole. He might have done it for four.

At the dentist's office, James got intoxicated for the first time, though unfortunately for James it was a baby sedative. His reaction was a little funny, but mostly it was sad. He tried to flirt with another kid, but he couldn't walk. The waiting room was like a bar full of toddlers. We then received a guided tour of his house of horrors complete with the usual spears and razors, as well as a baby-sized straitjacket. I was thumbing the Velcro of the latter when we received the unexpected news that we wouldn't be allowed to sit with him during his session. Instead, we sat directly outside the room to listen to him scream. I suggested coffee. Ericka looked ready to cry.

In recovery, James was already developing a hangover. Things, his droopy eyes seemed to suggest, would not be the same between us. I hadn't seen that look since his circumcision, but he had no idea who I was then. I tried to explain. He was pretty droopy for the rest of the day. He has to go back for two more cavities, but I'm not sure who is volunteering for this mission, perhaps one of the grandmothers, perhaps somebody who owes us a huge favor or several thousand dollars. Very soon James will lose all of these teeth and grow new ones.

Sedated James playing with new dinosaur finger puppet from dentist.

Things My Wife Complains About #26: Second Pregnancy

If you thought being pregnant the first time was hard, you should try being pregnant again. My wife is finding the whole second pregnancy thing pretty exhausting. As in, she's tired all of the time. As in, she fell asleep while I was writing this. She woke up to fall back asleep.

There are a few things that make the second pregnancy harder, such as James, James, James, and James. Last time my wife was pregnant, nobody in the house woke up at five o'clock every morning. Nobody screamed "I NEED THIS" for everything from a Curious George book to an abandoned pretzel. Nobody dropped a fork four to seven hundred times each dinner, and nobody insisted she admire lego constructions that are supposed to be "planes" or "bats" but actually look like wheelchair ramps designed by someone coming down from a bad trip.

Beyond fatigue that borders on hibernation, her symptoms include cravings so exotic I suspect she's participating in a reality show, and I'm being clandestinely filmed. After expressing deep concern at the absence of Panda Puffs this morning and simply writing "Graham Crackers" in an email, she appeared legitimately heartbroken that I failed to bring home a pumpkin pie donut, not to be confused with the pumpkin donut or pumpkin munchkin I fetched earlier (she didn't like either). A recent trip to Trader Joe's yielded no fewer than a half-dozen pumpkin items, despite my wife's claiming that pumpkin isn't a pregnancy craving.

As noted last pregnancy, there are no possible solutions. I can now say from experience that pregnant women become increasingly rational, fair, and kind throughout their pregnancy. So I have that going for me, which is nice.

12-weeks, 10/11/13

Things My Wife Complains About #25: Not Reading Her Mind

My wife doesn't expect me to be a mind reader, but the concept of mind reading comes up so frequently that I've come to believe that she actually does believe in mind readers but not in a way that she's willing to admit, lest this undermine her credibility as someone who believes in logic but nevertheless expects me to understand what she's thinking, more or less, all of the time.

It's not unusual for my wife to begin a conversation so deep into the story that I have no idea (a) what the story is about, (b) whom or what the pronouns refer to, (c) why she's angry, and (d) why she's angry that I'm not sufficiently angry on her behalf. A theoretical example:

Wife: "Can you believe she didn't return it to her after we'd just talked about it?"
Me: (infinitesimal pause) "No."
Wife: "Unbelievable! So you take her side?"

Ericka in front of the Sphinx in Vegas

I can't give a real example because I never have any idea what she's talking about in these stories. Sometimes my wife is so thoroughly involved in a conversation existing entirely within her head that she grows incredulous that I don't interrupt to take her side. Interrupt what, I might ask. It's like you don't love me at all, she might say. Or she might not say anything before growing angry at my silence.

Possible solutions!

1) Emphasize the impossibility, given current science, of reading anyone's mind
2) Get angry at my wife's refusal to defend me in my mind
3) Suck it up and learn to read her mind (hard)

Things My Wife Complains About #24: The National Zoo 2013

We go to the zoo a lot, even though zoos are horrifying places filled with encaged, unhappy animals; trapped, unhappy parents; and wild, shrieking children. Zoos are difficult to find--you could circumnavigate the globe following signs to the Bronx Zoo--smelly and expensive to park at, despite almost every living being at the zoo wishing he, she, or it were somewhere else, such as a bar or Africa. Because of these factors and more, my wife loudly complains about the zoo. She complains at the zoo and while planning the next trip to the zoo, which is often as soon as the next day.

At the National Zoo on Friday

James is two years old and has been to the zoo three times. His favorite things to do at the National Zoo in Washington DC, include leaving the zoo, running over children slightly smaller than he is, and chasing subcontinental rodents in five-hundred-degree rooms while shouting "NO NO NO" every time the subcontinental rodent tries to do something vaguely resembling its natural routine in a not especially large plexiglass box.

Taunting a small mammal

My wife has been to the zoo four times with me. (The first time was the perfect zoo trip: There were no children, and everyone was drinking because it was a wedding.) Her favorite things to do at the National Zoo in Washington DC, include complaining about the absence of pandas (actual quote: "I'm going to write a letter to the editor to the Washington Post about how there are no pandas), complaining about the absence of giraffes (one of the few animals James reliably recognizes), and complaining about the ubiquity of fried dough (actual quote: "Is it weird that THIS ENTIRE ZOO smells like fried dough [editor's note: the entire zoo actually smells like animals pooping]). She also enjoys comparing the present iteration of the zoo unfavorably to her memory (unreliable) of the National Zoo and trying to coax James into appreciating animals, leading to exchanges like the following:

Wife (pointing to five-ton Asian elephant): James, what's that?
James (picks at infinitesimally small speck of dust on the floor)
Wife (pointing more emphatically): What's that?
James (backs into several small children, spins around, smiles, tries to steal whatever is in their hands)
Wife (picking up James and holding him before five-ton Asian elephant): What's that, James?
James: A hippo!

Elephant?

Possible solutions!

1) Wait until James is old enough to appreciate zoo or renounce it as inhumane
2) Only go to zoo during childless social events featuring alcohol
3) Do anything else in New York City or Washington DC other than zoo (hard)

 

We were assured cheetahs "cannot jump or climb" and so were unlikely to eat James

Things My Wife Complains About #23: Agreeing with Her

There's no greater sin in our house than being defensive. If I entered the kitchen dripping blood, the first thing my wife would do is complain about my getting blood on the floor. If, at this point, I tried to explain that I'd just saved a family from a horrific accident, she would ask me why I couldn't just apologize for getting blood on the floor. Then, as I grabbed the chair to steady myself from my own significant blood loss, she would storm out of the room, complaining that I never admitted to doing anything wrong.

Conversely, if I apologized for getting blood on the floor before admitting that I'd committed a quadruple homicide, she would say it's okay and tend to my wounds before placing dishtowels on the widening pool around my shoes.

I came to believe that eschewing defensiveness at all costs and agreeing with my wife no matter what was an assured path to marital success, but this belief was mistaken, as evidenced by the transcript from the other night:

Wife: I'm grumpy.

Me: I know.

Wife (incredulous): Why would you say that?

Me: I know you're grumpy. You're allowed to be grumpy. It's okay.

Wife (storming out of room): And I was going to apologize!

In lieu of possible solutions, I came up with an alternative dialogue:

Wife: I'm grumpy.
Me: I hadn't noticed.

Wife (curious): So you admit that I'm grumpy.

Me: Did I say that?

Wife (storming out of room): Why can't you ever admit to doing anything wrong?

Wait! Let's try that again:

Wife: I'm grumpy.

Me (too terrified to speak): 

Wife (incredulous): Are you ignoring me?

Me: No! It's just that--

Wife (storming out of room): Do you have to be defensive about everything?

That was worse. OK, last try:

Wife: I'm grumpy.

Me: Can you believe the AAP has a new vaccine schedule?

Wife (excited): The craziest thing is pertussis. Did I tell you my whooping cough story?

Me: Several hundred times. But I would love to hear it again.

Wife (sitting): I went to the doctor, like, three times and...

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

Things My Wife Complains About #22: My Not Complaining

There's a game my wife and I play (she plays), in which she places her circulation-deficient hands on my abdomen, ostensibly to warm them. Last night her true reason was revealed, however, as she expressed disappointment that I didn't unleash my customary agony over having two frozen objects dropped without warning onto my skin.

Wife: It's not fun if you don't complain.

Me: You want me to complain?

Wife: It's like you don't even love me.

You might remember that my wife complains about my complaining, an entirely reasonable position for someone so tightlipped about her own world weariness. In contrast to her previous position, however, she now complains about my not complaining. To review: My wife complains, complains about my complaining, complains about my not complaining. She's a triple threat of logic.

Why, you might wonder, did I not complain? One possibility is that my wife told me not to complain. Another, more plausible, possibility is that James wakes up before 4:45 am every day, and I can't feel anything by the end of the night.

Possible Solutions!

1) Complain

2) Not complain

3) Complain while also stealthily not complaining (hard)

Cooling her hands with the snow

Things My Wife Complains About #21: Seeking Her Best Interests

James is on a pretty regular schedule now. He wakes up between 5 and 6 am and goes to bed at 6:30 pm. During those thirteen hours or so, he takes one nap, and all of this is normal for a kid his age. My wife wakes up with James most days, and she's understandably tired and solicitous of a wake-me-up like coffee or amphetamines or high-grade cocaine. I prepare the coffeemaker for her before bed, and when I hear the whirr of the beans grinding, I know she's making coffee and James is dancing, as he thinks the whirr is a particularly good song. He has very bad taste in music.

When I don't hear the beans grinding, I know she's going to be mood challenged and I'm going to be accused of not showing sufficient sympathy or breathing too loudly or impregnating her in the first place or not impregnating her again or nothing at all, followed by a loud accusation that I'm ignoring her. Usually, I've already started grinding the beans or cutting the cocaine by this point, but recently my wife pointed out that I'd suggested she have coffee AFTER her nap. She naps with James. From her tone, you might have guessed that I'd suggested she join the Taliban. We had the following conversation:

Me: I thought you might sleep better.
Her: You made me this way.
Me: I wanted you to be rested for the day.
Her: Do you understand that this is your fault?
Me: Maybe we should make you some coffee.
Her (bending her arms in the matter of a tyrannosaurs rex): RARRR
James (getting his head stuck between the chair and the wall): RARRRRRR

Possible solutions!

1) Brew decaf coffee and hope for the placebo effect
2) Follow a morning stimulant with a morning depressant, like whiskey
3) Get James to nap by himself (hard)

Dinosaurs at rest.

Diary of an Angry Pink Baby #7: End of Roadtrip

Nobody asked James if he wanted to go on a two-and-a-half-week road trip, which is probably for the best because if he were asked, the answer unambiguously would have been "no." Since the only words James knows are "mamamamamamama" and "ohohohohoh" (as sung to the New Kids on the Block's "The Right Stuff"), he responded to this unasked question in the method he knows best: puking all over everything in the car.

But we made it a long time before we reached this point! More specifically, we made it to the drive from Kentucky to Cincinnati. James had already been to several hundred states and probably a few planets by then, so we can't hold it against him. He even gave us a warning, which led to my pulling off the highway in search of the Golden Arches. (Based on this trip, my wife could write another blog titled "McDonalds We Disgraced," though I don't know what kind of readership she should expect.) Before anyone so much as lowered a Koala Kare, however, we had the following exchange:

Her: Don't stop. I just want to get there.
Me: Are you sure?
Her: Yes.
Me: Are you positive?
Her: Go!
Me: Okay, but--
James: (vomits on himself, my wife, the carseat, the backseat, all of the windows, the ceiling, the notion of future road trips, my wife's sanity, my ability to form words) MAMAMAMAMAMAMA

At this point, we had two hours to go. We would have considered getting a hotel or sleeping under the highway, but Jason had acquired excellent seats to the Reds game. Unfortunately, I can't relay any more information about getting to Cincinnati because I had it permanently erased from my memory. Sorry!

James's expression conveys his feelings on this matter

The next 48 hours were fun and only a little pukey. Then we had the twelve-hour drive from Cincinnati to Long Island.

James was REALLY finished by this point. He went to sleep in the car early but he made no promises. When I pulled over to get gas, he woke up and never went back to sleep. As in, he's awake now, staring at me with a look that says, You did this to me. Look, I didn't mean to, James. I just wanted to expose you to experiences that have no chance of registering in your long-term memory. Does that make me a bad father? (James's tired look confirms that it does.)

Need I say that we did not make it home? We stopped at a Super 8 hotel where the following things happened: (1) I transported two-hundred pounds of luggage into the room, (2) James didn't fall asleep for ninety minutes, (3) James woke up four hours after he kind of fell asleep, (4) We all drove half a mile to Dunkin' Donuts, where James commenced crying and there was no coffee large enough. The last five hours included two diners and James basically giving up as we drove over the George Washington Bridge into New York. In unrelated news, he was sick for five days.

Diary of an Angry Pink Baby #6: Mt. Jackson, VA 2012

James hates being in the car. While this is not a singular hatred, it is a strong one. He will reluctantly tolerate the car during nap-time or bed-time, but during any other time, he views the car as an affront to his God-given right to stumble around, before smashing his head into something. If the car seat allowed James to smash his head into something, he would only hate being in the car as much as he hates being told he can't eat a cardboard box. Eating boxes, he loves.

In no particular order, James's favorite things to eat are sweet potatoes, whatever is on your plate, books, bananas, and cardboard boxes.

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How James looks when he is displeased

We had a good idea for my Spring Break. The good idea was seeing our friends in DC and Virginia, which my wife has written several thousand posts about in the past 36 hours. The bad idea was coming back to New York.

We got as far as the Shenandoah Valley, which is not far at all, when James realized what a bad idea his parents had dreamed up: eight hours in a car, many of which would happen before bedtime? And that's the best-case scenario? No, James said. At his urging, we stopped in a Virginia town nobody has heard of, whose biggest green space consisted of a thin strip of grass between a busy street and active train tracks. I was willing to see how this played out, but my wife thought we could do better. In this instance, better consisted of a vineyard many miles out of the way that was closed.

Mount Jackson, Virginia

To be fair, there was no way of knowing the vineyard was closed, but James didn't see it that way. We weren't a mile from the abandoned parking lot when James offered every last drop of the two bottles he'd consumed, as well as several cheerios, as his counter to our vineyard jaunt. I pulled off the road onto a very rocky driveway. I stepped out of the car, and my wife handed me James. He looked like he'd been attacked by a fire extinguisher. He looked he was having a bad time at a foam party. The only place he didn't have vomit was inside his veins. When I put him on a flat stone to change him, he rolled into the red Virginia dirt.

Did I anticipate that eleven months into fatherhood I would be scraping vomit out of velcro shoes in a West Virginia Chick-fil-a? I did not. Yet this is what I was doing. I would like to say that things got better, and it's true that this was the nadir of our trip, but things didn't get THAT much better. James never forgave us, I was tired with hours to go, and my wife was wearing a tremendous amount of regurgitated Similac.

Spring Break woo!

Things My Wife Complains About #20: Watching Television

My wife watches a lot of what I consider to be good television. She watches dramas like Mad Men and she watches comedies like Modern Family. She also has a seemingly insatiable appetite for terrible television, which three factors have conspired to bring out in horrifying fashion.

Factor #1: DVR. Because FIOS is cheaper than Time Warner, I felt justified in paying extra for DVR technology, which has emboldened my wife to record shows she would never risk the shame of watching in real time. Did you know, for instance, that there are several programs about families with at least ten children? That there are several programs about people with hoarding disorders? That my wife has watched, or is currently watching, all of these programs?

Factor #2: Netflix streaming. With the assistance of the Roku box, my wife is able to stream some of the worst programs, documentaries, and films ever created. Many of these shows nobody has ever heard of, including the people involved in the acting, production, and distribution (I leave out writing because these shows could not possibly have employed writers). It is not uncommon to find my wife on Episode 72 of a show that not a single person alive has seen.

Factor #3: James. At the age of ten months, James does exactly two things: (1) run into things and (2) cry about having run into things. If you put James in a rubber room with no furniture, he would run into the rubber wall, cry about having run into the rubber wall, and begin licking the rubber while also crying. While James does the two things he does, my wife often watches television.

Factor #3

What does my wife complain about? You're not going to believe this, but there are a few things. She complains about my skill operating the DVR. I fast forward too fast. That's an actual complaint. When I offer to let her operate the DVR, she complains that I won't do it for her.

She complains that I turn off the television when she's not watching it. The idea is that she might want to watch it again soon, and if she does, what is she supposed to do? Turn it back on??? My wife mistakes energy efficiency for not caring. We had a conversation about this.

She complains that Netflix doesn't offer closed captioning, an essential when James is crying on the floor, which again is half of the time. This is not a complaint against me, but my wife sees Netflix's lack of closed captioning as one of the singular injustices of the modern world.

Possible Solutions!

1) Unplug television

2) Never turn off television, practice DVRing, hire a stenographer to write transcript of Netflix dialogue

3) Teach James to do more than two things (hard)

James's pensive face