QUESTIONS THE THEOLOGIANS NEVER ANSWER

From my Noodle, looking at the creche at our local church:

"Mommy, who changed the baby Jesus' diapers?"

Frankly, we're at a loss on that one. Any ideas?

HECKUVA RIDE

It's all ended with me and mine in a better place than we were at the end of '07...which is nice...but as a creature of habit, I'd rather not make a habit of the kind of scrambling we experienced in the fourth quarter.


I remain a mighty lucky man, this much I know.

Thank you all for your continued readership, patronage and pestering. If your 2009 brings you half the good fortune I've had this year, you'll be doing mighty well indeed.

Sláinte and santé, and long may your big jib draw.

WHAT ARE WE DOING NEW YEAR'S EVE?

You're kidding, right? See the time stamp on this entry? It's about when I've gone to bed for almost my entire non-collegiate life.

I haven't seen a Times Square ball drop live but once* since 1981, and that was only because Noodle was a baby at the time and had woken up needing a diaper change at five 'til midnight.

But you kids have your fun. Just stay safe. Lotsa knuckleheads out there.

* - in 2000 we cheated and watched the St. John's, Newfoundland ball drop at 10:30.

DO YOU SEE A GIANT BUG ON MY MINIVAN?

Been getting calls all day at work from an apparently elderly woman who keeps misdialing the exterminator by one number.

One more call and I think I'll ask if she'll babysit the kids in exchange for me going over to her place and having a whack at whatever's infesting it.

ON THE KIDS' PLAYLIST

Beast: "All That Heaven Will Allow" - Bruce Springsteen

Noodle: "The Pigtown Fair" - Tom Paxton

FOLLOWER NUMBER SEVEN, WELCOME!

Michael down in Florida has picked up on the unalloyed genius we spew forth here, which means that with five more followers I am officially entitled to a messiah complex - although the kids will then think I'm made of loaves and fishes and demand I go pick up that toy they threw into the Hudson, and my wife will get grouchy if I go to the liquor store when I can just make a perfectly good riesling out of that bottle of Poland Spring in the fridge.

This is why Jesus never got married. Family life is too much of a time-suck if you're going into the savioring business.

MY FAMILY CHRISTMAS CARD, 2008

Really it was.

CHRISTMAS TUNEAGE

Charles Brown:



Gordon Lightfoot:



Ray Charles:



Stevie Wonder:



That'll do ya a little, if you've had it up to here with "Wonderful Christmastime" by now.

Merry Christmas.

IN WHICH I GET ALL McGYVER

So tonight at dinner Noodle accidentally bit her tongue. Really gave it a good chomping as only a five-year-old can do. The standard cold packs and other refrigerated soothers were not remotely cutting the mustard...what's a dad to do?

Snapped one of these right off the gutter for my little girl, I did.

Oh, it's not perfectly sterile; of this I am aware. But having told her in the past not to lick the cat, not to eat off the floor, not to drink her bathwater, not to play by the litterbox, not to chew on the DVD case, and not to put the driveway chalk in her ear...how bad could an icicle be?

Reminds me of a song...

UPDATE: Woot! I've just received word this little solution of mine will be featured next week over at parenthacks.com. At last, my fifteen minutes arrives - and remember, you read it here first!

GETTING SN...NO, WAIT, IT'S WIND

So that means it's single digit windchills. You think that's cold? You have no idea what cold is.

The forecast for Christmas Day in Ojmjakon? Overcast, high 29 below.

Christmas Eve? 63 below.

Wow. Just...wow.

GETTING YET MORE SNOW

What a weekend.

25 inches of snow and counting. Forecast says it's all outta here by nightfall, so at least I have time to plow and get out to work at a reasonable time. Give it a day or two and it'll be excellent snow-fort snow. I've already built a most excellent snow fort. It looks a little like this:

And let me tell you: 10,000 uruk-hai are no match for a three-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl.

STILL GETTING THE SNOW

What am I supposed to do, blog about my plowing and shoveling techniques?

Um, okay.

The trick, as I see it, is advance preparation - before it snows, park your cars on the parts of the driveway that are the biggest pains in the kishkes and with any luck they'll stay clear. If you can find a spot where you can brush snow off the car and have it all land off the driveway, you're ahead of the game. After it snows, broom off the cars, get them warmed up and start plowing. After plowing, move the cars to their regular spots and tie up the loose ends.

Or you could get one of them newfangled garage things and make sure you're not an idiot like me who filled their garage with...I don't rightly know what.

GETTING THE SNOW

And thus, not a whole heckuva time to post much of anything. Stack up a coupla pre-Christmas-wired kids on top and you can see where the time goes -foof-.

But yeah, I'm here. Covered in icicles, but here.

Last-minute Christmas shoppers, if you make your sojourn to Amazon through that Boogershoppe link over there to your right, Amazon slides me some gold. Frankincense and myrrh, not so much.

WAITING FOR THE SNOW

Here's something to get you in the right frame of mind:

HAIL AND WELCOME

To new acolyte "momoffive". Thanks for enjoying whatever it is I've got here, and do tell your friends!

I LOVE IT WHEN THE LACK OF A PLAN COMES TOGETHER

So after the telephonically-truncated nap, I went over to Noodle's school to pick her up to be dropped off at the grandparents' while I met the missus to take care of the various legal things that we'd put off because of general parental day-to-day frenzy: wills, health care proxies, &c.

Stood there at the school like a lox until it sloooowly dawned on me that Noodle was already at her grandparents' because she was under the weather, slunk out, picked up Beast and off we went to Poughkeepsie. 9/9G traffic is many shades of evil in the afternoon, so we took the Milan-Schultzville-Salt Point route to the grandparents. Over the river and through the woods, indeed.

Dropped off the kids, got talking to my father-in-law about growing up eating brains for lunch; seems like every ethnic enclave has its old-school brains dish, and now I can add French-Canadian to the list since he grew up along the Massachusetts/Rhode Island border in Blackstone/Woonsocket, which is the largest French-Canadian area of the continent south of Montreal. All this talk of brains (braaaaaains) was grossing out my mother-in-law a bit, so I took that as a cue to make my exit and meet up with my wife.

And when I got to our meeting place the meeting was already over and done with, and I hadn't done had to be there nohow no way. Five minutes, boom, and Bob's your uncle. Which meant...

Free time. With my wife. And only my wife.

DINNER DATE!

We hadn't had one of those in...I can't keep track of the months, it's been that long.

Suffice to say there's a new entry in the Food and Drink section of the blog, and that's Peza in Hopewell Junction, in that plaza on 52 just west of the Parkway. She: the shrimp scampi pizza. Me: the macaroni & cheese with chicken and caramelized onions.

We like.

A shame it's 40 miles away from us up here in the boonies otherwise we'd be there more often, but if you're a Parkway commuter it's right there for you. Om nom nom nom, ladies and gents.

I even got a smooch at the end of the meal even though I had cheese-and-onion breath. Score!

UPDATE: my old mate Miller reminds me that Longobardi's in Wappingers is also a good one, so it's on the List now as well.

I WANT TO KNOW HOW THEY DO IT

So I get home at 1:30 today, which I figure gives me just enough time for a quick nap before I head back out on my other errands in this insanely compressed day. No message on the machine or my phone, so I can lie down here on the couch and--

RRRRRRING. RRRRRRRING.

The eye doctor. And then Nana. Aaaaand my wife.

How do they do this? How do they know? What sort of fiendish conspiracy is this, I ask you?

RE-SCAN THOSE LINKS

I've added a few new local restaurants to the "Food & Drink" list. More to come, and you can always email me if you know any other good ones 'round here.

HOT STOVE BASEBALL

This blog is the only entry that comes up when you google the phrase "mooned Fenway Park".

Thanks, son!

(Oy, the things I do when I have a minute of free time.)

SOMETHING ELSE ONLY PARENTS SAY

Overheard just now from Beast's room:

"Don't pee on your friends. Your friends don't like it when you pee on them. Trust me on this one."

The sad thing is, once Beast masters toilet skills he'll be the neatest person in the entire house. Soon to come: extensive photographic evidence of Beast cleaning.

If he keeps this up, and maybe learns a little cooking, every mother in a four-county area will want him for their daughters. Looks, brains, charm, and he cleans? There's got to be a catch. Maybe his dad is dysfunctional.

UP AT 12:30

Celebrated the kids going to bed early just a little soon. They started waking in shifts starting at 12:30. Beast, scared of something. Noodle, potty. Beast, scared of something else.

I am told this is what happens as children's imaginations develop. We will have to teach Beast in particular how to be a brave little bear.

STILL HERE, NO WORRIES

Just the kind of day where 20 pounds of WTF got stuffed kicking and squirming into a 10-pound bag. Nothing bad, just a lot to (not) get done.

Thank you in advance for understanding.

NO MUTANT CHRISTMAS TREE THIS YEAR

Got our tree at Heller's Farm in Germantown this year, figuring it was the closest cut-your-own to our place. A whole bunch of real beauties up there if you're still looking, along with a few man-I-shoulda-brought-the-camera weirdo mutant trees nobody's going to buy unless they have a bit of a contrary streak and a spouse who's either equally contrary or extremely understanding.

I headed purposefully toward one specimen that looked something like the tuckamore we saw on our honeymoon in Newfoundland back in '01, but Her Awesomeness' romantic streak does not extend that far and she shot me one of Those Looks that indicated my tastes needed to be adjusted toward something a hair more symmetrical and not the Joseph Merrick of Christmas trees.

On the way back, hey! New market in Germantown! Her Awesomeness reports that the coffee at Otto's is excellent and the cookies look tremendous, but they were short on half-and-half and at 3 in the afternoon we scooped up the last two of their homemade donuts. Eh - they haven't been open ten days yet, so some hiccups are to be expected. You open up a new business and hustle, in an out-of-the-way location in this economy, some slack should be cut.

NOODLE WANTS US TO KNOW SOMETHING

"Daddy, I licked the ends of the bunch of marshmallows, and they stuck together, so now I made...a marshmallow caterpillar! And I ate it!"

FIRST, THERE'S A STORK

Wife got the "How does a baby get into a mommy's tummy?" question from Noodle last night.

Okay, it's like this: First, Daddy makes sure there's Marvin Gaye in the CD player. Then, the--

Look, the rest of you can give us a break right now about the CD player. This was six years ago, and nobody in this house was going to be shelling out that kind of money for any kind of newfangled MP3-playing computer device thing you kids go for, not when we had to be down in't mines for tuppence a day.

/get off my lawn

HOME AMID THE MESS

One bad thing about getting the power back on after it's been out for long enough is that every bit of junk that was lying around when the power went out is still there, but the alarm on the sump pump down in the crawl space at least stops howling like one of the Nazgûl once the power's back, and since the pile of scoodge-encrusted dishes in the sink are now merrily being cleaned in the dishwasher we will score this as a win for having electricity.

Oh, but has it ever thrown off Noodle and Beast's schedule. They've been down at Mémère and Pépère's having a barrel of laughs on their second straight unscheduled day off...and that means no FREAKIN' way were there going to be naps, but they WILL zonk out in The Awesomemobile (wife's car, if you haven't gathered) on the way home, making for one tremendous challenge to get them from sleeping in the car to sleeping in their beds. I'm hoping the restarted oil burner can heat the house in time, otherwise we've got a Phil Collins song on our hands:

RIDING THE STORM OUT

So I'm spending the night down here in Fishkill because of the impending ice storm...and there's no ice. Lots of godawful blatting cold rain, but no ice. Not here, and not at home.

I'm going to feel a right idiot for asking my new employers to put me up at a hotel down here if all we get is a couple of inches of rain. Still. This is one niiiice room we're talking.

I just wish I had the wife and kids here to enjoy it, too.

Although I did get to have an entire movie theatre all to myself just now for the first time in my l life, and it was the first movie I'd seen without the kids since "Return of the King", and the first movie of any kind I'd seen in a theatre since "Cars", which just goes to show how often we get out.

"Bolt" is good stuff, if you haven't seen it yet. The non-Pixar Disney stuff is really coming along nicely, if this and "Meet the Robinsons" are any indication. "Bolt" is a good one to bring the kids to as well, although there's the odd scary part. My kids loved it when they saw it a few weeks ago, and they're five and three so make of that what you will. It clocks in at 1:30 and change so you might actually get through the whole movie without somebody needing to pee.

And now, I'm going to get me a full night's sleep, if sleeping from 7 until 3 is anybody's idea of full. Nighty-night.

THE SECOND-CUTEST GIRL ON THE INTERNET

'Scuse us while we get all pretentious with the French subtitles and all, but this young lady wants to tell a story...


Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

TROUBLE WITH THE TREES?

Been too busy/crazed to actually go get a tree yet.

Are there any decent ones still about? Cut-your-own, pick-off-the-lot, whatever. Please advise and I'll give the relevant merchants a mention or two, soon as I finish cobbling together this meatloaf.

MARKING THE DATE

For the first time in months I was able to have an uninterrupted nap today.

You can always tell the parents who have small kids because they're the ones with "take a nap" on the list of the hundred things to do before they die.

And it's taking up half the top ten.

OH, THAT?

My full-scale debut went well on WHUD and WBPM, or so I am told.

Imagine how it'll be when I hold the copy right side up.

THREE

That's the minimum number of disinfectant wipes it takes to remove seven years' worth of accumulated crudniks from a workspace long buried in junk.

The more you know...

HOLD THAT THOUGHT, KID

Noodle: "Look what I found on the floor, Daddy - a dime!"

Daddy: "You can keep it and put it in your bank, hon."

Noodle: "That's okay, you can keep it. I already have a lot of money."

THINGS ONLY PARENTS SAY: ADVENT EDITION

"Jesus does not go in the fridge."

"Careful with Jesus or he'll fall behind the piano."

"I'm not sure who changed Jesus' diapers."

"Yes, it would be nice to have angels around to help change His diapers."

"I don't think any penguins were around in the manger when Jesus was born. Slugs, maybe. But they were very very small so we don't usually see them in nativity scenes."

"Honey, the nativity scene is being torn apart by our son and a stuffed kitten."

"No, angels don't buzz people for fun."

YAY, CHRISTMAS PHOTO TIME!

Either it was Noodle acting up, or Beast, or the camera, or some combination of all three. We wound up with a lot of shots like this:

After about 40 of these...we couldn't even get a good photo-session tantrum pic, that's how bad it was...we gave up and went with the one from our summer trip to New Hampshire, viz:

Pretty much a metaphor for 2008, especially the last few months. The splash at the end was a great relief.

(Photo taken at Santa's Village, Jefferson NH. Great place if you've got small kids. It's an old-school amusement park scaled for smaller children, and without any of that Disneyhassling. We like.)

PLAYMOBIL, THE GATEWAY DRUG

According to Wikipedia:

The first Playmobil sets were themed around Native Americans, construction workers and knights. The first construction worker set included a wheelbarrow, a road roller, ten traffic cones, as well as three crates holding 18 bottles of beer. The German Ministry of Youth intervened in response to this set's packaging, which showed two Playmobil figures discussing their beer consumption (-"That's my fifth
bottle today." -"Don't worry, we've got enough beer.")[1]

Which brings us to the Playmobil nativity set brought home by Her Awesomeness for the kids. Check the size of the flagon the third wise man is hoisting there:

Duuuude. We saw the star and figured there had to be a totally sweet after-hours party or something!

This nativity scene isn't for the itty-bitty ones (<3)>

MENTAL HEALTH BREAK

Ladies and gents, the Benny Goodman Quartet with Lionel Hampton and Gene Krupa.

STRING THEORY, ANYBODY?

No matter how I try, no matter how many times I watch my wife do it, I cannot fold a fitted sheet. In my hands it winds up looking like origami crafted by a drunk in a hurricane.

Clearly there is advanced physics involved here that is beyond my ken.

PARENTHOOD ABHORS A VACUUM

Last month when I landed my new job, I set this week up so that I'd be off today and have one last free day to tie up loose ends before sallying forth in full regalia. It'll be a long time before I rack up any vacation time.

Beast conveniently filled that bit of space with a technicolor-yawn stomach bug, and the mechanic did his part to fill the household's newly-acquired budgetary space with an "oh by the way you need your 30,000 mile service and that'll be four-five-six-fitty or so..."

...so all that loose-end-tying will have to be shoehorned into some other day as I ensure that Beast has a restful day without any of that knees-bent-running-around-advancing-to-the-barf-bucket behavior.

It. Never. Ends.

NO, SANTA'S NOT BRINGING YOU JARTS

The Cool Mom Picks Safer Toy Guide is out. Lovely stuff, too - and it's a handy dads' guide too since I'm the kind of Santa who's at the point where he'd give his kids a rusty chainsaw for Christmas long as it wasn't encased in an impermeable plastic bubble, sixty twist ties and a mile of packing tape.

A SWELL FIRST WEEK BACK AT WORK

Tuesday: Noodle nightmare at 1:30, insisted on staying up to see me off to work at 3:00.
Wednesday: Noodle nightmare at 1:00.
Thursday: Beast urpage at 2:30.

My new co-workers must be wondering what they've gotten into with this baggy-eyed thing that comes schlepping into the station to do the news.

FINALLY, HUMAN FOOD AGAIN

The last of the turkey leftovers, soups, carcass bits and other assorted by-products have all been consumed - with the exception of some stock that'll come in handy in about...

HOLY CRAP THERE'S ONLY 22 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT AND I HAVE DONE BUBKES!

Er. Anyway, there's room in the fridge again and at this there was much rejoicing.

TESTIFY, SISTER

Finally. I knew chasing "balance" was a fool's errand:

Have you seen the piles in my kitchen? Have you heard my kids whine for my attention? Have you noticed the unfinished manuscript sitting on top of my desk? I don’t spend all day sitting around inside of a virtual gym, working on my virtual six-pack and flirting with virtual hotties. I spend all day running around like a freaking maniac. I schlep kids to dentist appointments and to after school activities, and I help them with homework and I make dinner every night, and I fill out camp forms and in case you haven’t noticed, I just spent three days cooking for twenty-seven people, and all of last weekend hand-sewing a Native American baby carrier for my first grader’s Thanksgiving costume at school. And oh, yeah, I also, allegedly, work. So of course I’m a freaking novice at balance...

It took a session with a Wii thingy for her to figure this out, so I'm glad she arrived at the conclusion for me; I've got this odd luddite streak when it comes to gaming and gaming-related paraphernalia.

Yes, I who have foolproof Pac-Man and Asteroids strategies lodged deep within my cranium, am not all that big on video games these days.

I REMEMBER THAT GLARF BLARGLE FEELING

When the daughter wakes up at 1:30 with a nightmare and then wants to stay up because she wants to see you off to work at 3:00 and then work's okay but the drive home is a sodden clog of pointless traffic lights, and I swear there's a sensor that tells people to get on the phone and call me just as I'm drifting off into a nap...

...if anybody in the service sector is reading this, PLEASE. We in the non-9-to-5 world would rather you email us instead of calling so that we're not jarred awake by ringing phone at all hours of the day...

Gaaaah. I'm a moron. Forgot to get the milk on the way home, of course. And now it's time for Noodle's dance class and throb throb throb goes my head, where in the name of all that is holy is the Advil?

HOW TO LIVE TO 100 98

"Her recipe for a long life was to eat lashings of cream, keep fudge in the car and consume a jar of ginger snaps on the way to church."

Rest in peace, Eppie Buist.

RECALIBRATING THE CLOCK

At this time tomorrow morning, I'll be at work. Not on the air just yet, but getting the hang of things over at the new place. My first official on-air day is December 8

Which means I will have been up for around two hours already. So if any of the next day's posts are a bit off coherence-wise, I hope you'll understand that sometimes glarble forf penguin kershlump.

Hooray for once again being gainfully employed, but a month of putting Noodle on the bus while me and Beast waved her goodbye was tremendous wonderfulness, and now Beast knows a panoply of rock-star moves thanks to being home with me and accidentally switching on VH1 Classic while a Who concert was playing. My son is to pancake syrup and ketchup what Keith Moon was to alcohol, but aside from that his tastes are running more toward the keyboard-player end of things. Which is a relief, because when he gets to be my age and older I'm thinking you want to be living more like Tony Banks and less like dear Keith, who never did get to be my age.

And it looks like Beast wants to be back hanging with his pals at nursery school anyway. Dude's got a girlfriend. I can tell she's his girlfriend because a couple weeks ago when I took him to a special music day back at the nursery school, he glared at me when I called him Sweetness as I am wont to do on occasion because...

...if you're going to use a sports figure for a nickname you could do a whole lot worse, but Beast has yet to discover the glories of the NFL.

It's a shame John Facenda never did lullabies.