The Modernish Father

They said it couldn’t be done. Three posts, one day. Done.

Okay, I admit it – I cheated. I wrote these all earlier this week and set them to auto-post. The net result is the same. Sorry if that ruined the magic of it for all for you.

So now that your faith in humanity has been destroyed, let’s end things today with a grab bag of what the Modernish Family has been up to for the past couple of weeks. I’m just writing these down as I go, so be prepared to jump all over the place.

Massive bag of fries collected from the bottom of many bags

• For the second time in a year, The Wife broke a sink with her freakish Hulk-like rage. She gives a full recap on that and our incident with a stray dog over at her blog.
• For this birthday, The Boy received M&Ms with his picture printed on them. And to think, we were all excited twenty years ago when they rolled out blue ones.
• Now that things have finally cooled off, The Girl has started taking her daycare operations outside.
• The Boy has decided that everything can be quantified, turning our arguments into Monty Python sketches. Full details once again can be found on The Wife’s blog.
• The Girl has entered the cute, but annoying phase of repeatedly asking what everything is. I’m glad she’s so curious about the world around her, but I wish she’d take a break every once in a while. Whereas her brother always asked, “What dat?,” The Girl instead asks, “What dis?”
• I think The Wife may have been replaced by a pod person. After decades of running away screaming from anything that remotely resembled a vegetable, she’s flirting with eliminating meat entirely and becoming one of those people.
• As legally required since we have small children, we did the pumpkin patch thing again this year. It was a classic showcase of the differences between our two children: one without fear or inhibitions, the other reserved and cautious.
• I became good friends with a ten-year old albino Burmese python named Huggy Bear at a kids’ festival. As you may have already guessed, The Boy was unsure about that.
• The Girl has taken a shine to The Boy’s gift from Milwaukee and also, unfortunately, dressing like Britney Spears.
• Cars seems to have supplanted Finding Nemo as the most popular movie amongst the 7-and-under crowd.
• The Wife still remembers all of the lyrics to the various songs from The Little Mermaid and seems to be unable to refrain from singing them anytime the movie is playing.
• The Cat is still worthless.
• President Obama dropped into town for a few hours and totally screwed up my commute home. After waiting at an intersection for 45 minutes, I was rewarded with a distant view of his motorcade going past. Woot.
• About 20 minutes later, the convoy of presidential choppers flew directly over our house on the way home. Seriously, if the president had fallen out of his ride, he would have landed directly in our living room. Of course, I didn’t get a picture of that because I had killed my iPhone battery tweeting about having to wait in traffic for 45 minutes. FAIL.
• The Boy lost his first tooth and collected a dollar for his troubles. Guess the tooth fairy has instituted a cost-of-living adjustment since I was a kid. Days later, he lost his second tooth when an errant volleyball knocked it out at school.
• The Girl has become addicted to watching videos of herself as a baby.
• Somewhere back there, I turned a year older. This was chiefly marked by an adjustment on the treadmill.
• The Wife and The Girl seem to have found something they can do together. That sound was my retirement money being flushed down the drain.
• My street running has really taken off, enough to the point where I was able to take part in my first 5k. It was a little chilly, but that didn’t stop some guys from running in togas.
• Since that didn’t kill me, I decided to run in another 5K a few weeks later. Tomorrow, I’ll run in a third. Even though I’m running 5-6k on my regular workouts now, I’ll still keep signing up for races because I’m addicted to collecting crappy t-shirts.
• The Girl likes hamburgers. This will bring balance to the Force now that The Wife has turned to the leafy Dark Side.
• Have you been worried that your Jewish four-legged friends have been feeling left out around the holidays? Worry no longer.
• The Wife + free sample day at Spec’s = what about you’d expect.
• We tried to make rock candy, but the finished product was a little disappointing.
• The Boy’s fall baseball league was a total bust. Unprecedented autumn rains meant that we only played a single game in October before they had to cancel the remainder of the season. The College Station Machine Pitch Astros finished their heavily abbreviated season with a record of 0-4-1.
• I messed up my foot and was in some major pain for a couple of weeks, but it seems to be better now. Either that or the pain receptors in my foot have quit working. Eh.
• And I think that’s about it.