The ten that got away

“Son, I’m going to teach you to be an idiot,” I said to my son Evan, in effect, as we came upon a ten-dollar bill in the grocery store parking lot last week.

We were lions that had just happened upon a wounded gazelle, but no, we would not pounce.

“Look, buddy, there’s money on the ground.  It’s not ours, though.  We’ll leave it there in case whoever dropped it comes back looking for it,” I said, a bluebird lighting on my shoulder.

“Leave it?” Evan asked. 

“That’s right, we’ll leave it right there,” I said, picturing the sweet old lady who would drive back into the parking lot any moment now, so glad to find the money she needed for her prescriptions right where she hoped it would be.  Then she’d pat us on the head, call us Sonny and give us each a Werther’s Original.

Evan watched from the cart as I loaded the groceries into the car.  Somehow, I’d just spent $100, even though I’d only gone there to get toilet paper.  Groceries seem to breed in the cart.  You can’t leave Mr. Clean and Mrs. Butterworth alone for a minute.

As I worked my way through the unending bags, I glanced over at the ten spot on the pavement just a few feet behind me.  I thought about walking over and snatching it up, but this seemed like a good opportunity to teach my son something.  What exactly the lesson was, I hadn’t sorted out yet, but surely, he would learn something important.

A woman in her early twenties strolled past us, carrying a single bag of groceries.  After about ten feet, she stopped, looking back toward the store.  She seemed to be trying to read the denomination on the bill using only her peripheral vision, like how guys check out women when their date is sitting across the table.

She hesitated, then circled back toward the store, walking straight past the bill.  Then she stopped again, and you could almost see a visible beam coming from the money, pulling her back.  She was Gollum, and the ring was calling. 

The woman looked in her grocery bag and pretended to remember that she didn’t need to go back into the store.  When she was standing directly over the money, she dropped a package of marshmallows on the bill, knelt down and scooped everything up in one swift motion.  Then she beelined back to her car, probably caressing the money and muttering, “My precious!  My precioussss!” to herself.

Evan and I watched her from under our tailgate, a lion and his cub doing nothing while a hyena dragged their gazelle into the bushes.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.  No head pat.  No Werther’s Originals.  The whole show with the marshmallows was only necessary because the woman must have assumed there was a decent chance that the money had fallen out of my pocket, and she was quite happy to take it anyway.

Hopefully, she’ll use that money to buy a case of Ramen noodles for the orphanage she runs.      

As I closed the tailgate, I wondered: what did I just teach Evan, anyway?  It would have been far better to have him deposit the money in a charity bucket in the store, a game plan I didn’t develop until about three hours too late.  Anything would have been better than letting the marshmallow ninja run off with it. 

While I latched Evan into his car seat, I thought about how the bill was folded in half, exactly the same way I stuff wads of cash into my pockets. 

“You’re a moron,” said the bluebird on my shoulder.

You can drop a bag of marshmallows on Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

In the home, ears are ringing

“I’m going as fast as I can.  If anything, you’re just slowing me down,” I said, but my two-month-old son Zack remained defiant, pouring every ounce of his energy into making sure I had sufficient motivation to hurry.

“Rinnnnnnnnnng,” he said, or at least that’s what registered in my ears, as Zack explored the upper ranges of what an adult eardrum can handle before it explodes like Greek debt.

“That is totally unnecessary, bro.  I’m already getting your food together.  Okay, okay, take your bottle, you ingrate,” I said, corking his screamhole with the nipple.

As he noshed on the bottle and peace settled over the room, the ruckus upstairs became audible.

“I’m going to count to three, and then I’m going to pick you up and put you in bed,” my wife Kara said.  Tiny footsteps galloped down the hallway as our son Evan shrieked and ran into his bedroom.

The chaos of raising two children often overshadows the tender moments, but they do happen.  

Earlier that evening, Evan stood on a kitchen chair beside me as I prepared scrambled eggs, the only meal I can cook without Mama Celeste’s help.

“That’s juuuust right,” Evan said, shaking pepper into the mixing bowl.  Then we both took out forks and whisked the ingredients together.  I stopped and watched my little sous chef plopping his fork into the mixture, his tongue sticking out with concentration, and the moment caught me just right.  That was my son standing there, wanting nothing more than to help his dad cook dinner.  My son.  Sometimes, I can’t believe that phrase applies to anyone at all, much less someone so insanely adorable when he’s not screaming.

I looked away for a second, feeling a little misty, and when I turned back, Evan was holding out his hand to me, signaling for me to take something.  I offered my hand, and Evan swiped his finger across my palm.

He stared at me, waiting for a reaction, and I realized what had just happened.

“You just wiped a boogie on me, didn’t you?” I asked.

He smiled and nodded.  That’s why they’re called tender moments, not tender hours.

Later that night, I could hear Kara upstairs, trying to extract herself from the bedtime routine.

“Mommy!  Mommy!  Mommy!” Evan yelled.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Zack will like red and blue when he gets bigger,” Evan said.

“Yes, those are good colors,” Kara replied, sighing.

She was caught in the Evan Vortex, the place where logic and reason go at bedtime to be crushed beyond all recognition.  The process takes a while, which is why it exists.  The only way to escape the pull of the Evan Vortex is to put a door between you and the source, and even that isn't always enough.

“Need to go potty,” Evan said, sensing that the door was about to close.

“You just went four minutes ago,” Kara replied.

“Need to go again!” he said.

Evan knows how badly we want him to start using the potty, so at bedtime he becomes more prolific than an incontinent racehorse.

When he returned to bed a few minutes later, I could hear Kara start to swing the door shut.

“Where’s Lamby?” Evan yelled, and Kara sighed again.  Evan spends the day stuffing his sheep-blanket Lamby into obscure crevices of the house, so that by the time you find Lamby and return him to bed, Jimmy Kimmel is already asleep.

But it’s kind of cute that Evan can’t go to bed without snuggling Lamby every night.  It’s like how Kara and I used to be, before we had kids.  Now we just collapse wherever we happen to be standing once the last kid stops screaming.

You can wipe stuff on Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The days of snore

I reached through the darkness to pull my slumbering wife, Kara, closer, putting my hand on her shoulder and running my fingers through her downy soft fur.  She shifted toward me before sitting up, cocking her head and scratching her neck with her foot.

Then I snapped awake, remembering that the dog and I had been banished to the guest room.

“Can you wake up the dog?  She’s snoring again,” Kara had said an hour earlier, back when I was still a resident of my bedroom.

“Mmmph,” I replied, flopping my arm over the bed and nudging the dog before drifting back to sleep.

“Now you’re both snoring,” Kara said a moment later.  After a ten-year hiatus, I’m back on the snoring circuit.  I had stopped snoring right after college, leading Kara and I to conclude that the root of the problem had been some combination of pizza, beer and research papers.  For no discernable reason, though, my uvula has decided that it can no longer hang quietly by when, just inches away, there’s a perfectly good wife to annoy.

“The two of you are driving me insane.  Can you please go to the other room?” she asked.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” I suggested, but I was already gathering my pillow and my blankie.  I mean my blanket.  No self-respecting man still sleeps with a blankie, and he certainly doesn’t admit to it in a newspaper.  

Snorers are the permanent underclass of any household, relegated to the fringes of sleeping society, tucked out of earshot in guest rooms and on futons.  As the dog and I headed down the hallway to our exile, we knew that we had only ourselves and our respiratory structures to blame.

Really, though, it was small punishment for us, since the newborn baby across the hall makes sure that we experience plenty of family togetherness twenty-four hours a day.

“Too late for birth control now!” he screams throughout the night.  At least that’s how my brain processes the screams it hears between the hours of two and five a.m.

Zack is actually a very easy baby, and we’re thankful every day for our blessings, but taking care of an easy baby is still a little bit like running an easy marathon.

Shortly after I awoke to find the dog beside me in the guest bed, Zack piped up from his room, requesting another nocturnal audience with his food-givers.  Someday, he’ll come to appreciate that his parents have so much else to give besides food, such as timeouts.  I stumbled into his room, scooped him up and took him to the couch for his bottle.

I recently discovered the show “Walking Dead” on Netflix, and while it’s not the most relaxing show to watch while feeding your baby in the middle of the night, it does help keep you awake.  Also, when you live in a house that gives you at most three hours of sleep at a time, you really start to identify with the zombies.

“Yeah, that’s what I looked like last night,” you’ll say as a zombie drags itself across the floor, groaning incomprehensibly, covered in goo.  Then the zombie will pull itself to its feet and walk straight into a wall.

“Been there,” you’ll say.

“Are you sure this is the best show to watch with the baby?” Kara asked as she stocked the fridge with more milk.

“It’s never too early to teach your baby about the post-apocalypse.  No, really, he can’t see the screen, and I turn the volume down whenever someone’s getting devoured,” I said.

“Okay, if you say so.  Do you need anything before I head up?” she asked.

“BRAINS!” I replied.

“Yes, that might be helpful,” she said.

You can show Mike Todd to his futon at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Between a rock and a high place

When the cops show up at your family outing, it becomes tougher to argue that you’ve planned it well. 

Last week, due to the corrosive effects of pollen on our brains, we decided that it would be a good idea to pack up our toddler, our baby and our dog and take them to climb a fire tower at sunset.

You might be thinking that a fire tower sounds like the perfect place to take a bunch of creatures who, if left to their own devices, lack the balance to keep from falling off the couch.  If you don’t think that way, I bet you rarely have law enforcement show up at your outings.

The seed for this adventure got planted a few weeks ago, when I took my son Evan for a walk in the woods that started next to a large communications tower. 

“Wanna climb the tower,” Evan said, pointing into the sky.  His ambition was especially impressive given that the tallest object he’d climbed to that point had been the stepstool beside the potty.

“Sorry bud, you can’t climb that one,” I replied.

“Why I can’t?” he asked, incensed.

“Nobody’s allowed to climb that tower.  It’s not for climbing.  It’s for cell phone signals, or maybe radio
transmissions,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

I tried to think of a better answer than, “That tower magically shoots sounds into things,” but I couldn’t, so I said, “I’ll find us another tower we can climb soon.”

When you make a promise to a toddler, you won’t be able to forget about it for long.  Contracts made with Lucifer are easier to break.

“What do you want for breakfast?” I asked Evan the next day.

“Wanna climb a tower,” he replied.

So I found a fire tower that was just a thirty-minute drive away, accessible via a short hike up a gravel road, and figured we could all head up there after work one day.  My wife Kara agreed that our entire herd would go, then one of us would climb the tower with Evan while the other remained earthbound with the dog and baby.

Of course, to pack our family for a two-hour excursion takes longer than the excursion itself.  By the time we were all in the car, the sun was already setting.

“We’re too late for the sunset,” Kara said.

“Nah, we’re good,” I said, rolling through another stop sign.

We parked and headed up the gravel road in the dwindling light, with Evan on my back, Zack on Kara’s front and the dog trotting ahead.  By the time we got to the tower, the sun was down. 

Evan climbed halfway up, felt the swaying structure and the chilly breeze, then immediately started his descent.  As soon as Kara and Evan reached the ground, Zack started screaming for food. 

“I guess I need to breastfeed him,” Kara said.

“Oh man, I’m so glad you brought those things,” I replied.

So Kara sat on the bottom step of the tower with Zack while darkness fell upon us.  When we finally rounded the corner to the parking lot, a cop was shining a flashlight into our car.

“I’m finally going to get a ticket for being an idiot,” I whispered.

“We’ve had some vandals out here recently.  You guys don’t look like vandals,” the cop said, and I felt a little insulted, like maybe I needed a tattoo on my neck.  You’d think he’d at least give us the benefit of assuming we had some screws loose.

The cop was quite friendly, chatting us up and even posing with Evan for a picture, which for Evan was the tween-girl equivalent of getting a picture with Justin Bieber.

So Evan didn’t get to see a sunset, but he did get to see a policeman.  The cop saved the trip for us, and maybe someday I'll plan a family outing that won’t require emergency personnel.    

You can plan a family fiasco with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

No column this week

I took last week off from the column.  If you'd like to read the beautiful tribute my sister Amy wrote for our cousin Dana, or the wonderful eulogy she delivered at her funeral last week, please follow those links to Amy's blog.  We love you and miss you, Dana.  Catch you all again next week.

Shear ineptitude

“Don't worry, it'll just be a little tickle,” I promised my son Evan as he suspiciously eyed the buzzing implement of doom that orbited his ear.

He gripped the steering wheel of the Barbie Jeep and braced himself.  He might have looked tougher if he’d chosen to have his haircut one seat over, in the little red airplane, but at that moment, he was the toughest person I’d ever seen driving a pink car with purple wheels.

“You're doing great,” the hairstylist said as the trimmer began removing the traces of the proto-mullet that had been forming on the back of his neck.

I wandered into the mall for a moment and wondered briefly how the pizza parlor across the way went out of business while Radio Shack, the cockroach of the retail world, had somehow survived the recession.  They must be coasting by on the profits from the VCR cable I bought there twelve years ago.  

When I came back into the salon, pandemonium, as it has a habit of doing, ensued.  Evan was wailing while my wife Kara was holding a tissue to stop the bleeding behind his ear.  The hairstylist was running toward the back of the salon, perhaps to make her getaway out by the dumpsters.  

“What happened?” I asked.

“She nicked him with the trimmer,” Kara said.  Just a little tickle had turned into just a little trickle.

That’s when we noticed blood behind his other ear, too.  In the ten seconds I’d been gone, the Barbie Jeep had turned into a triage station.  Turns out, Evan had been right about the doom aspect of the trimmers all along.

“I’m so sorry.  That’s never happened before,” the hairstylist said as she returned with more tissues.  And it never will again, at least not with us.  This hairstylist must have graduated from the same barber school as my Great-Grandpa Sweeney.

The nicks really weren’t that bad, and after the initial surprise and commotion, Evan’s crying, and the bleeding, stopped.  The next day, you could barely tell there’d been a scratch.  Evan even sat still for the rest of the haircut, but I think that’s just because he was trying to figure out how to throw the Barbie Jeep into gear so he could peel out of there.

As we went to pay, I cringed to see how Kara would handle the tip.  Her cranial orifices were still billowing rage-smoke.  Still, I get squeamish about giving bad tips, no matter how atrocious the service.  I winced as Kara handed over the cash, sure that she’d stiffed the hairstylist.  Then I did the math and realized she’d just tipped 25%.

“We sure showed her,” I said as we left, with Evan happily noshing on his post-trauma lollipop.

“Well, I felt bad for her,” Kara said.

Fortunately for truly awful service-sector employees, if they do a bad enough job, they generate the requisite sympathy to ensure that they don’t get Darwinned out of their jobs like they should.  In fact, if they’re awful enough, they’ll make out better than if they were good.  Being a little bit slow won’t do the trick, since that will just result in a pared-down tip.  They have to go the full monty, dumping coffee on people’s laps or shearing their children’s ears to make sure they get their sympathy bonus.

As a busboy in high school, I benefited from this phenomenon, noticing that people seemed to leave better tips when you dumped glasses of ice water on them.  That’s why we always gave our customers towels on the way in.

“Don’t worry, it’ll make sense later,” we’d tell them.

Of course, this is all just a long way of explaining Evan’s eventual ponytail to his grandparents.

You can take a little off Mike Todd’s top at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Simply the breast

“You’re going to drop the baby.  Stop multitasking,” my wife Kara gently suggested last week.

I glanced up from Facebook to notice that, indeed, there was a baby in my lap.  I had a vague recollection of stumbling into his room a few minutes earlier, prompted by his near-hourly hunger shrieks, but then my brain went into standby mode so that it could properly navigate the Internet.  

It’s just as well that Kara prompted me to start paying more attention to giving our son a bottle and less to Facebook, since half of all Facebook posts these days talk about races that people are running for some reason, even though nobody is chasing them.  There’s also a Nike app that keeps me abreast of the athletic activities of people I kind of knew in high school, saying, “I just finished my run!  Distance: 3.17 miles.  Pace: 9’16”/mi.”

 I know these posts are meant to elicit supportive comments and keep people enthused about being healthy, but I think attacking the problem from the shame end of the spectrum might be more effective.  What about a Krispy Kreme app that would announce to all your friends and acquaintances: “Mike just ingested 2,400 calories and 144 grams of fat.  Dude, he ate the entire box!”

Giving my old tormentors from high school the chance to comment “Boom-babba!  Boom-babba!” on my Facebook status would be a fantastic motivator, and I wouldn’t even need to buy running shoes.

“Sorry, I’ll pay more attention,” I said to Kara, putting my iPod back in my pocket and taking a swig of water.  The great thing about having a newborn is that you can drink a gallon of water right before bed and there's a zero-percent chance that the urge to urinate will be the thing that wakes you up.  Parenthood means you can hydrate with impunity.

The three of us sat in Zack’s room at 3:30am with the sound of Kara’s breast pump pulsating in the background: WHACK-o.  WHACK-o.  WHACK-o.  You may have visited the Great Pyramids, or gone snorkeling off the Great Barrier Reef, but if you have never seen your wife hooked up to a breast pump, then you have NOT seen it all.

After a glorious week in which I could sleep through Zack’s middle-of-the-night feedings, I’ve been drafted back into service.  He wasn’t gaining enough weight through breastfeeding, so we’re giving him bottles in the hopes that he’ll be strong enough to breastfeed on his own soon.  The danger of giving him bottles is that Zack might never take up breastfeeding again, due to something called nipple confusion, which sounds like a condition your congressman might suffer from while visiting a gentlemen’s club.

"I'm so sorry, I thought you were someone else.  Must be the nipple confusion.  I hope I haven't lost your vote!"

The regular reader(s) of this column might have noticed that I haven’t been dispensing much breastfeeding advice lately, instead devoting space to topics I’m more qualified to discuss, like nuclear proliferation, string theory and various manifestations of household vomit.  If you know anyone who might be more of an expert on that last topic, please offer them my sincere condolences.  Something I’ve learned over the past several years is that, of all the adjectives that pop into mind when you think of your dog, perhaps the least desirable is “queasy.”  

Until our first child was born, I thought a lactation consultant was the guy at Ben and Jerry’s who helps you decide whether to order Chunky Monkey or Chubby Hubby.  But after watching Kara go through tough times with both of our children, and hearing from family and friends who have had similar or worse experiences, we’ve both learned more about breastfeeding than we thought possible.  Hopefully, Zack will get the hang of it soon.  If not, I look forward to much nocturnal reading about everyone’s jogging exploits for the next several months.

You can share a box of Krispy Kremes with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Sleep Deprivation Games

“There will be twenty-four of us.  Odds are someone else will kill him before I do,” I read aloud to my little listener last week, who stared at me with crossed blue eyes.  At four days old, he might have been a little young for The Hunger Games, and I might have been a little old, but if you average my thirty-four years and his zero years, we’re right in the target demographic.

I wasn’t sure what else to do with him at four in the morning, as he gazed at a point about six inches in front of my nose, expecting entertainment.  I grabbed my wife’s Kindle and started reading the only book that wouldn’t have featured a shirtless Highlander on the cover.

Actually, I’d heard good things about both The Hunger Games movie and the books, so I thought my night shifts with our new son, Zack, would be a good time to get caught up on my cultural literacy, which is currently at an all-time low, in large part because I’ve never seen any of the “Real Housewives” shows.

Since Kara had already read the books, I wanted to get through them, too, so we’d be in good shape to see the movie during our next free evening, which should be in about three presidential administrations, or thirty-seven iPhone models.

“…and for a brief time we grapple for it and then he coughs, splattering my face with blood,” I read to Zack in a soothing voice as he, captivated by my narrative skills, tried to breastfeed on my sweatshirt.

Just then, a scream pierced the stillness of our house, which happens with enough frequency that it’s more surprising that there’s any stillness in the first place.

Our older son, Evan, began crying from his bed upstairs, threatening to ruin the hard-earned nap that Kara was trying to enjoy.  On cue, Zack started screaming for milk, an hour before his schedule called for it.  Our sons were like loons calling to each other across a mountain lake, if loons sounded like hyenas fighting over a vulture carcass.

It was my first experience with dueling screaming children.  I knew this moment would come, and actually felt somewhat prepared to handle it, though it might have flustered me just a few years ago.  Kara and I are both more confident caregivers now.  Over the past couple of years, we’ve successfully raised both a baby and a dog, and only one of them has eaten a box of crayons.

“Shhhh, quiet, quiet,” I said to Zack as I ripped off the tangle of baby blankets and pillows that pinned me to the couch, trying to quiet him down and get to Evan before the cacophony woke up Kara.  The teenagers killing each other with medieval weaponry in our quiet bedtime book would have to wait.

I cradled Zack like a powder-blue, screaming football and headed up the stairs.  The dog, always loyal and wanting to be helpful, trotted alongside, looking for a way to alleviate the situation and deciding that, in the end, she could be of most use by vomiting at my feet.

“Seriously, dog?” I whispered.  By that point, I might as well have dispensed with the whispering.  A New Orleans jazz quartet marching down the hallway festooned with cowbells would have been quieter than Zack and Evan’s a cappella performance.

Kara stumbled into the hallway, trying to figure out if someone pulled a fire alarm.

“Everything’s under control,” I said, though I’m not sure she could hear me over the racket.

“Well, I’m up.  We can start my shift once we settle them down, and you can go back to sleep,” she said.

Then she went into Evan’s room, and I gave Zack his first high-five.

You can tuck Mike Todd in at mikectodd@gmail.com.

One more Todd joins the world

"You're doing great.  Is there anything you need right now?" the nurse asked my wife Kara last Tuesday.

"An epidural, please," Kara replied.

“We're still waiting for your lab results to come back before we can do that.  Should be here any minute," the nurse said.

“I have ice chips!" I offered.

Kara’s request was the same thing as someone running into a fire station and yelling, "My house is on fire!  I need a fire truck!" and getting the response, “How about a Diet Coke instead?"

When your wife is in labor, they hand you a cup of ice chips and a plastic spoon to make you feel useful.  It's like when you want a toddler to feel like he helped bake a cake, so you give him a ladle and a piece of Tupperware to play drums while you do the actual cooking.

Kara did eat a couple of ice chips, but part of me can't help but wonder if she'd rather have had anesthesia instead.

Dave Barry once wrote: “Childbirth, as a strictly physical phenomenon, is comparable to driving a United Parcel truck through an inner tube.”

As the epidural continued not to materialize, we began to worry that Kara might deliver our own little UPS truck in the absence of modern medicine.  We have friends who decided on natural childbirth, delivering their children without the aid of pharmaceuticals, except perhaps for the psychotropic drugs that caused them to arrive at that decision in the first place.

The nurse left the room, leaving Kara alone with me and my ice chips.

“What can I do to help?” I asked.  I wondered if I might employ my spoon in catapulting ice chips at medical people until one of them gave my wife some anesthesia.

“Why did she leave?  I need an epidural!” Kara yelled.

I stepped into the hallway and looked left and right, seeing no one.  You’d think the maternity ward would have epidural vendors roaming the hallways like watered-down-beer vendors at a ballgame.  I began to worry that I was going to have to put down my ice chips and catch the baby myself, which would make a great story, but a terrible thing to actually happen.

A few minutes later, the nurse reappeared and said, "Can I get you anything?"

"An epidural!" Kara replied.  She had been pretty consistent on that point all along.

The nurse checked her computer and said, “Your lab results are back!  The anesthesiologist will be here in a moment.”

I'm not 100% sure what being "nine centimeters dilated" means, but apparently, if that phrase applies to you, you wouldn't mind at all if someone gave you enough drugs to incapacitate a bull moose.

Finally, a new doctor pushed a cart into the room.

“I’m the anesthesiologist,” were the sweetest words I’d ever heard, pretty much canceling out the obscenities coming from the other side of the room.

A few moments later, thankfully, they were able to give Kara some relief.  Given our family’s brief, involuntary flirtations with natural childbirth, I finally understand why so many people prefer it.  It is because they are insane.

About thirty minutes after the anesthesiologist brought Kara back from her exciting exploration of the pain scale, Zachary Mason Todd, our second son, landed headfirst in the world.

“Welcome to Planet Earth,” the nurse said.  They wrapped him up as his tiny cries filled the room.  When they handed him to Kara, her face turned to a teary smile as if the preceding ordeal had never happened.

And just like that, our little family became six pounds and thirteen ounces bigger.

You can tie an “It’s a boy!” balloon to Mike Todd’s mailbox at mikectodd@gmail.com.

On kidnappers or contractors

The kind of van that could only belong to a kidnapper or a contractor greeted us in our driveway, the ladder on top suggesting the latter.

“Hey, David’s still here, buddy,” I said to my son Evan.

“Yay!” Evan yelled from the backseat.  Evan loves running around to the back of the house to watch our contractor David doing loud things with power tools.  I fear that it’s refreshing for Evan to see a man using a drill for something other than taking the battery cap off Tickle Me Elmo’s foot.

Also, when’s the last time you heard somebody yell “Yay!” the way the word was meant to be used, rather than with a world-weary roll of the eyes?  Non-ironic expressions of happiness are just one of the many benefits of living with a toddler, in addition to all the ear-cleansing screaming.

As we walked around the driveway to see how much progress David had made that day, Evan repeated the line he says every time we look at the back of the house: “David building a scween woom.”

“That’s right,” I said as we rounded the corner to see David standing on the wooden platform he’d built.  I would have tackled this project myself, if not for the extenuating circumstance of my complete lack of applicable skills.  The aforementioned toddler also requires a fair amount of attention, and though he probably wouldn’t notice if his daddy lost a few digits, it’s still best that I don’t get too close to a table saw.

“I like David,” Evan said.

“That’s nice.  He’s a good guy,” I said.  I hoped David could hear his littlest admirer, though he didn’t turn to face us.

“David a little bit scary,” Evan said. 

I glanced up to see if David had heard his littlest now-heckler, but he seemed to be wearing ear protection, which is generally a good policy at our house.

Being “a little bit scary” to Evan is actually the highest form of praise, putting David in the same category as spicy chicken, Tyrannosaurus Rex and riding in the car with the windows cracked.  Evan loves things that are a little bit scary, but without that context, being told that you frighten children would probably brighten your day as much as having a 10-penny nail come through your shoe.

I just ended the last sentence that way to prove that I know what a 10-penny nail is.  Or at least that such a thing exists.

But we’re getting to the age where I need to be cautious about bringing Evan around people who don’t want their real or imagined attributes loudly pointed out, which I think is pretty much everyone.  You probably won’t see us in the mall for a few years.

But Evan does love watching the construction project in our backyard, and he’s David’s #1 fan.  For a toddler, it probably doesn’t get any better than having a construction site come to your house, short of having Dora the Explorer move next door or having your parents start a triceratops farm in the backyard that doubles as the local fire department. 

This might not be the most opportune time for us to have undertaken this project, with a baby due any day, but we decided to build a screen room because it’s something we knew from the start that we wanted to add to this house, and we figured that if we’re going to do it someday, someday might as well be now.  It’s the same way we decided to go ahead and have two kids.  If you know you’re going to do it, stop dithering and just do it. 

My point is that you can get into a lot of trouble thinking that way.

You can hand Mike Todd his fingers at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Thinking outside the uterus

The regular reader(s) of this column might have noticed that, lately, I’m having a difficult time writing about anything that isn’t directly related to local news.  Specifically, news that is local to my wife’s uterus.

The fact that a baby could very well come flying out of there at any moment makes it difficult for me to think about too much else, but I should probably spend some time recognizing that there’s a big world outside of my wife’s uterus, which is why this column will be devoted to various other topics that I’ve been neglecting, such as the Republican primaries, and perhaps my wife’s fallopian tubes.

I’ve been watching those primaries closely this year, mostly because they make me feel young.  Back in the year 2000, when bald spots were still things that happened to other people, I started driving my first car that had a CD player installed.

“Well, I’ve made my last mix tape,” I thought.  “And also, I’ve had my last thought about Newt Gingrich.”

Not that I spent that much time thinking about him anyway, but it just seemed like that space in my brain could be emptied out to house more important matters, like the phone numbers to the houses that my childhood friends no longer lived in.  But now that Newt is back in the headlines as a frontrunner among the nearly seven billion people who will never be president, I’m transported back to the days when my cranium was sunburn-proof.

Incidentally, for anyone who is concerned about the state of their bald spot but is too afraid to look, you can judge the severity of the situation by the altitude of the barber’s mirror at the conclusion of your haircut.  As the bald spot widens, the handheld mirror will drop lower and lower.

“It’s good?” the barber will ask, holding the mirror an inch from your clippings on the floor.

“Yes, the back of the chair looks fantastic,” you’ll say, content to imagine that the top of your head still looks the same as the last time you saw it, when you were twelve.

This is the kind of hard-hitting political coverage that the reader(s) of this column have come to expect, and it’s honestly a nice change of pace from the wall-to-uterine-wall writing that I’ve been doing lately.

Never mind that Kara’s doctor estimated that we have a 50/50 chance of having the baby in the next two weeks, and that he gave us this prediction last week, which means that I might very well not be able to type the rest of this sentence without having to fling the laptop across the room and run every red light between here and the hospital.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I did take a break to eat a Double Stuf Oreo, the existence of which still baffles me.  The superiority of the Double Stuf is self-evident to anyone who has ever compared it to the original Oreo.  In a just world, Double Stuf would be the default, and anyone who wanted the inferior original could pick up a package of Half Stuf.

Insights like this wouldn’t be possible if I allowed myself to be consumed by the thought that very soon, we’re going to be sharing our house with a toddler and an infant, which means that the folks going through Navy SEAL training will be getting a better night’s sleep than us.

We may not have many sleepable moments on the immediate horizon, but at least we know what we’re getting into this time.  Actually, that kind of makes things worse.

Regardless, we’re very much looking forward to welcoming the newest member of our family.  As it turns out, he’s much more fun to think about than Newt Gingrich.

You can request more election coverage at mikectodd@gmail.com.