daddy night

Here is something I don’t understand – FOOD. I just don’t get food okay? So sue me. Sometimes when I’m trying to decide what to eat I don’t have a problem having French fries with my baked potatoes. I mean really – what is the big deal? I like food, I really do. But sometimes it just isn’t that big a deal to me if I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day of the week for every meal. Sure I don’t feel like running a marathon or riding a bike but my stomach is full and as long as I have some ibuprofen I can fend off a headache and life can move on. I don’t really like waiting for food either. Once it is time to eat…IT IS TIME TO EAT. This occasionally has its problems when there is no food around or like when we used to go on vacation with my mother-in-law who could go days without eating in order to squeeze in a little more Monet or redwoods or bike ride or something.

Most of the time this problem (the needing to eat now problem that is) is manageable. The other problem however (the I don’t know what foods go together problem,) is still tough. This brings me to Thursday nights. Thursday night is daddy night. Not understanding food is not really a problem for me but when innocent children are involved I feel a little more self-conscious about the problem. Marie works Thursday nights and so I’m in charge. I can handle bed time, I can handle play time, but I can’t handle dinner time. So I usually punt. On the receiving end of the punt is usually someone named Ronald or Wendy but now and then I like to mix things up and head a little further south to one of the little known fine restaurants in this valley. IKEA! I love Swedish meatballs. Seriously – I love them. A lot. They are certainly in the category of being able to eat them every day. So one night recently after the official kid handoff that sometimes makes me feel like a divorced dad we decided to break the McDonald’s cycle and head out to Ikea for some meatballs. Everything was going great. We got the meatballs, we were sitting down to eat when Laine declares she cannot eat hers. I asked why and she explained to me that she didn’t like all that heavenly gravy touching her meatballs. Just as any good dad would I picked one up with minimal gravy and wiped it with a napkin. “not good enough” she declared. I examined the meatball, contemplated my options and then promptly popped it into my mouth, sucked off the gravy and gave the meatball back.

Apparently this is exactly the result that Lainey was looking for. Now feeling satisfied she ate the meatball. This leads me to something else I don’t really understand very well. Four year old girls. She won’t eat her bread if it has touched her meat. She won’t eat her noodles if Romney has touched them…but she will eat anything I lick clean. I distinctly remember in school when you wanted someone to NOT touch or eat something of yours…..you licked it! This is how things are done. But for Lainey she is just the opposite. It must be licked clean in order to acceptable. This was proven once again tonight as we sat at McDonalds, back in our routine eating our chicken nuggets. Laine was finishing off her ketchup one finger lick at a time when I suggested she use one of Romney’s uneaten nuggets. She said okay, grabbed in but noticed just in the nick of time that there was a small dot of Romney ketchup on one side. At this point it was declared unclean and unusable. I appealed to reason and failed (duh.) She asked me to lick it clean for her so what was I supposed to do? I had no choice really. I licked it clean and sent her on her merry little ketchup-dipping way. She ate the whole thing. Hopefully someday I’ll understand enough about food to be able to think of something for dinner when we come home but for now it looks like I’m going to have to just keep licking my daughters food clean and spending my Thursday evenings hoping the kid that just climbed out of the slide in the playland soaking wet didn’t really just pee all over the whole thing.

i wear my sunglasses at night

I think the universe is in support of my blog - it just keeps sending me blog-worthy material! is there any other reason why romney would wear sunglasses...just for eating dinner? It looks to me we have a rock star in our midst - and he's already hired a bodyguard/bouncer to keep the papparazzi out of his face so he can enjoy his mega-noodle soup in peace, for crying out loud.




quirky side note of the day: laine ate her dinner.

a new home

Well, as it happens, as soon as Jane jumped us into the world of blogs and set up an entire and lovely blog for us, Jim decided that he had an opinion, and wanted to change it - well, the title and location at least. (for the record, that is usually my job, and I'm glad to see he's coming around.) so here we are, a little bit new and hopefully improving: wombat and the hurricane.

we'll see if Jim will make up for our rude uprooting by actually posting...

Laine, of course, is the hurricane, our in-home force of nature, posing here with Old Faithful in the background. if only we could figure out how to get her to sleep... or eat... or do anything, really. her "middle name", if you ask her, is Big Mess, and she prefers it to her nickname of Laine the Hurricane. both are appropriate and entirely fitting.

Romney, here, is the wombat. Wombat, Rombat, Rombud, Romulus, Rom-dizzle, or, if you're Laine, "Wommy." Sounds a lot like "Mommy." confusing. Doesn't he kind of resemble a wild animal (a friendly wild animal, at least) in this picture? I wouldn't say he's furry, but he growls and chases with the best of them, and you should see him when he gets those plastic vampire teeth going. very wild.

so here we are, in our new home. welcome!

p.s. random quirk of the day: romney insisted on wearing his bike helmet (which is about 4 times the size of his actual head - and that's saying something!) ALL morning long. I made him take it off to fit in his chair to sit at the table, and he wanted to put it on again as soon as he got down, and then I also made him take it off to get in the car to take laine to school. he was SO sad. do you think he has a sort of sixth sense like animals do when crazy weather or earthquakes are coming? is this a sign?

the conspiracy continues

well, I know all of my faithful readers out there have been waiting in suspense for the continuation of this riveting tale about bread. it won't be long before it takes its place in the literary canon among its peers - Hansel & Gretel (think bread crumbs), the Gingerbread Boy, Moonstruck (Nicholas Cage works in a bakery)...

so enough suspense. Romney threw me a curve ball yesterday. look at that innocent little face, those angelic curls, but don't be deceived! notice the stack of wheat bread in his hands (and in his cheeks), and waiting patiently at his feet. you might think, at first glance, that he was just overcome by his apparent LOVE for wheat bread and was driven to pull the bag off the counter, and surround himself with his choice of grain.

but after he had chewed that bite for a few minutes, he started hunting for me (bread and crumbs in tow) with that look on his face that I now recognize as, "get ready, mom. i'm about to lose it!" in the past, I've extended my hand (mother instinct), and let him spit all manner of disgusting masticated items into my formerly clean hand. no more. "Garbage, Romney. Get to the GARBAGE!" luckily, he made it, along with at least 12 entire pieces of bread, over half the loaf.

Could this have been part of his clever plan from the beginning? His way of sending me a message about his true feelings about wheat bread with his rather limited vocabulary? maybe Laine put him up to it, figuring that the sooner we got through a loaf of wheat, the sooner we might regain our senses and go back to beloved white bread. it would have been too obvious if she had done it herself, and Romney has so little culpability, what with those afore mentioned innocent eyes, angelic curls, and lack of vocabulary and understandable communication.

it's brilliant, really. I couldn't have planned it better if I'd tried.

wheat vs. white

well, my first actual post typed by my own fingers is appropriately driven by little laine. at laine's 4 year old doctor visit a few weeks ago, the doctor was asking what laine ate (trying to decide how concerned she should be about laine barely clinging to the weight/height charts.) I couldn't immediately think of anything that lainey ate reliably...so the doctor asked laine what she had for breakfast. that seems like a pretty innocuous question, generally, but on this particular day, laine proclaimed happily that she had had two pieces of bread. plain. white. no peanut butter or anything redeeming at all to elevate it from fluff to breakfast.

enter serious mother guilt!! no truly good mother would really let her child eat two pieces of plain white bread for breakfast, right? (granted, this is the same girl who, when planning her birthday party, said, "Mom, I don't want to eat any real food. I just want to eat cupcakes." what do you expect?)

well, anyway. guilt. so I stopped buying white bread. for the most part, laine responded by not eating bread anymore. I guess she's replaced it with air, which probably has a higher nutritional content anyway. but the kicker was when we were walking down the aisle at costco, surveying the multiplicity of wheat breads available, trying to choose one that tasted least like cardboard, and we walked away without a single loaf of white bread! the nerve. and laine asked as we walked away, "what, so you guys don't like white bread anymore?" to which Jim responded (of course), "NOPE." and can you guess the ending to this charming vignette? laine burst into tears on the spot, and sobbed up and down the aisles, in white bread withdrawal, until the flashing lights of the Christmas decorations already on display distracted her long enough to forget the pain (and probably the growling of her stomach now that the one staple of her diet has been removed!)

Life is Cute/brute force

Here we are. And this is my new blog. It will be a new adventure for me, so says Jane who is writing this and making me do it against my will because she "knows" I will "love" it.