Cleaning the pukey sheets while your wife cleans the small child.
Using baby talk when giving the dogs their medication. “Who wants a widdle gwu-co-sa-mine? Yes you do-o-o.”
Walking in the door, seeing the look on your wife’s face and silently leaving the house only to return fifteen minutes later with chocolate raspberry truffle ice cream from Bruster’s.
Cleaning out an uncooperative child’s nose.
Giving the cat medicine even though it means flesh wounds.
Staying awake afterwards to talk to your wife when all you really want to do is sleep.
I inflicted a non-romantic broken heart upon myself this week. In the grand scheme of things, the entire episode is unimportant to anyone but me. Brooding about this one small thing became a giant Katamari of drama that should be illegal if you are not a teenager.
Despite being together forever and knowing each other so well that we can finish each others sentences, *Doug still thinks that his response to my whining should be the offering of solutions. When women whine about the way things are, they don’t want to know what they did wrong. They want a hug.
Example #1
Her: “My feelings, blah, blah, blah.”
Wrong Him: “What you should do is <- insert male behavior here ->.”
Right Him: “I’m sorry about your feelings. Can I have a hug?”
Example #2
Her: “And then this happened and then that happened and then blah, blah, blah.”
Wrong Him: “Well, you shouldn’t have blah, blah, blah and if I’d been there, I would have blah, blah, blah.”
Right Him: <- Insert hug here. ->
*I love him for caring enough to try when it’s futile to do anything except offer a hug.
I spent the weekend painting doors. Taking doors off hinges, carrying them outside, sanding, priming, painting and rehanging until the sunlight was no longer available to guide my brush. When the children were tucked in bed and the morning outfits were neatly organized, I collapsed in bed. Doug sat with his laptop while I tapped on the iPad. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Doug sniffing his armpit. I turned to watch him just as he sniffed his other armpit.
Me: “Is there a problem?”
Doug: “I thought I smelled funky, but I don’t.”
Doug: “Look at all these updates for your ___! When’s the last time you updated?”
Me: “I did a backup and update yesterday. Those patches appeared overnight.”
Doug: “Oh. Never mind.”
In no particular order and requiring no explanations, five actions that warrant the bad foreplay card:
1. punching partner in the face
2. noxious gas from any orifice
3. “I like this one best, because it’s bigger.”
4. “One of the animals threw up in the other room, but we’ll clean it up afterwards.”
5. “I’m sorry. I drifted off for a few minutes.”
Surprisingly, this post does not fall on the list.
Him: “What do you want to do today?”
Her: “We could work in the garage or we could start thinning out the junk in our closet. After that, Evan needs new shoes.”
Him: “I was thinking it’s a good day to plant grass in the yard. We have some spots that are full sun and some that are complete shade, so I’d like to compare the different varieties of seed at Home Depot and Ernie’s and . . . <- At this point in the conversation, my mind started composing our conversation into a blog post, but I was subconsciously following the key words enough to know that the topic didn’t change. -> . . . get seed out before tomorrow’s rain.”
Her: “Okay.”
Him: “Okay what?”
Her: “You hunt for grass seed while I play on the computer.”
Our beaker is extremely full. Adult time is so important that it should be a large rock. In reality, it is somewhere between gravel and sand. The boulders that take top priority don’t just make time something that we have to use whenever it is available, they complicate space availability. In other words, if we want adult time, and we do, we have to be constantly aware of opportunities for time and location, irregardless of the unconventionality of the time and location. Quantity exists only because we are flexible about times. And locations.
Soooo, these nontraditional time and location choices frequently lead to unexpected consequences. The best, albeit unplanned result is laughter and we do get to laugh at ourselves a LOT. On the other hand, every so often adult time results in injuries. Don’t get me wrong, the injuries are accidental and invariably hilarious, but they just aren’t as much fun as laughter without the pulled muscles and, well, the black eye.
We have two very large dogs whose primary household job seems to be maintaining watch over the family members. The fact that we can successfully hide from the children, but not the dogs is a topic for another post, but a fact nonetheless. Large dogs are surprisingly stealthy, especially when you are distracted by the companionship of another adult. We have several pocket doors in our house. If you lean on a pocket door, it acts more like a pocket flap and makes a frighteningly loud noise. Large dogs who have quietly found their way to that pocket door only to discover that their people are on the other side of a pocket door, will make a sudden and unexpected noise that causes grown adults to demonstrate the Moro reflex.
I.e., the dog bulldozed through a door and Doug punched me in the face.
The three youngest children were tucked safely in their beds, so I went hunting looking for Doug. I walked in our bedroom and heard rustling in the closet. I walked toward the closet and said in my very best Dr. Girlfriend voice, “We’ve got 15 minutes alone. Wanna fool around?” I reached the doorway as the last syllable left my lips and stared deeply in the eyes . . . of the teenager who was raiding my closet. I mumbled something about thinking I was talking to Doug and ran upstairs as quickly as I could, to blog the conversation.
In a small house with a lot of people, it takes work to find the time to be alone. When most of the people in the house are children, it takes work, careful planning and elaborate attention to detail to have any adult only time. Tonight, the youngest two children were sleeping in their own beds. The girl teen was out of the house on a date. The teen and tween boys were happily discussing computer games. A window of opportunity opened and I raced to take advantage of it. I arrived in our bedroom to find my spouse sitting cross legged on the bed. Wearing rubber gloves. Staring at a rectangular box. Waiting on me to do comic book archeology. Sigh.
It was not the way I had planned to spend our time alone, but how long could it possibly take to do a comic book inventory? Weeeeell, if you pull out one single copy at a time, read the title and volume number aloud and put it back in the box before repeating the process, it takes a very long time. “Spiderman #x … Spiderman #y … Spiderman #z … ” A comic box holds 150-200 comics and after pausing to stare at almost each and every one, Doug finally reached the back of the box. And screamed. He stood up and slooowly and increasingly loudly read the volume number. “…ten, eleven and twelve! I’ve got all of them! I have the whole Watchmen series!”
I suggested that Tommy would really enjoy reading the comics. “WHAT? These can’t be opened. They’re not for reading.” Umm, okay. I made a mental note to watch Toy Story 2 with Doug in the near future. We were now half an hour into the brief time between Evan falling asleep in his own bed and Evan wedging himself in between Doug and I in our bed. Doug returned the comics to their vault/closet and I thought he was done with the evening geezing. Dressed as Dr. Manhattan, Doug raced to his computer. He tweeted and texted and googled for half an hour.
Doug finally returned to our room and focused on something that wasn’t a comic book for a period of time that I will leave to the imagination. Except, as soon as there was a resting point in that non-comic book activity, he went back to his computer to read about his comic books again. So, I went to my computer and blogged. “What are you writing about?” “You.”
