I Taught I Taw A Putty Tat

With Fred fully implanted into the Terrible Two’s we seem to be constantly having to reel him in. As a parent there’s a fine line between letting your child have fun and letting him do whatever he wants. There are days Lucy and I go to bed feeling guilty for having said “NO! STOP THAT!” all day and other times when we feel we haven’t said it enough.

While we do spank, we tend to save that for extreme cases like throwing rocks at your mom cause you don’t want to leave daycare or boxing your dad’s ears when he stops you from playing in a crowded church parking lot. Basically you can’t beat the kid all day so what you end up with are several trips to Time-Out.

In the Blockhead household Time-Out involves going into the front room (originally it was to be the family room, but for some reason we refuse to sit in there) and sitting in an elephant shaped chair facing the door. This generally works for all minor violations. By now he knows the way so all we have to say is “Go to Time-Out” and he takes off head hanging in shame. Though there are several toys in the room, they weren’t a problem until this past weekend.

“Fred we do not throw our juice cups across the room!! Time-Out”

Head hung and sobbing he takes off followed by myself just to make sure he makes it there ok.

“5 minutes! No crying. Then if you can behave we will play some more”

Two minutes in we start to hear voices coming from the other room. At first we think it’s the neighbors then we decide that unless they are sitting in our front yard screaming their love of New YoGo’s Fruit Roll-Ups, Fred has discovered the ON button to the Television.

“Fred. Did you turn on the TV while you were supposed to be in Time-out?”

Sitting there where we left him in the elephant chair facing the door Fred looks up eyes wide and says “Nu Unh”

“You didn’t? Then who did?”

With his arm and pointed index finger suddenly slicing through the air like a Ninja throwing star Fred gave the only possible and most obvious explanation.

“Kitty!!”

Buttons and Fred have this love hate relationship that has grown over time. At first Buttons couldn’t stand Fred. Than Fred didn’t like Buttons. Then Fred learned to feed Buttons. Now Buttons lets Fred pet him as long as Fred sneaks up behind him and does it while I’m scratching his ears. At the mention of his name Buttons who was sleeping in his trunk across the room raises up and cut’s a mean look in Fred’s direction.

“Are you sure Kitty turned on the TV?”

“Unnnn Huhhhh!!”

“You saw Kitty get up, turn on the TV, then go waaaay over there, and fall back to sleep?”

“Unnn Huhhh. Kitty sleeping”

At that point Time-Out ended. How can you punish him after coming up with that fantastic story? Already I’m planning on using it the next time Lucy finds my shoes under the coffee table and when my boss wonders who ate the last of the donuts.

Catching Up

After a week of poison ivy and the subsequent roid rage I experienced afterward trying to get rid of it, I decided to take a week off from blogging….well sort of. The BOB’s are still going on for another month and I’m looking at about 50+ blogs a day. I think all the critiquing of my fellow bloggers made me look too close at Charlie. Sure I keep up with who’s reading, but I’ve never let numbers dictate what or when I write. Overall the whole “freelance writing” thing has pretty much dried up for me for the moment. The people I normally turn to for work don’t currently have anything and after a couple of months of not being able to scratch up any of my own (most blogging jobs receive an average of 500-2000 applicants per day) I decided last week to quit putting so much effort into finding good paying part-time work and start focusing on getting a better paying 8-5.

Meanwhile I’ve got a couple great adventures to share this week including one about what happens in Time-Out when nobody is looking and another concerning Fred’s growing need to be the opposite of everyone else. First off though I need to clean house and take care of a couple of things namely The Top 5 Consequences Of My Steroid Use and I was given an Excellent Blog Award!!!

As an Excellent Blog Award Winner(which has nothing to do with the Best Of Blog awards I'm working on) I must do two things 1) I must acknowledge the person who gave me the award with some linky love (thank you my darling Weird Girl) and 2) I get to pass the award on to ten of my favorite bloggers which must in turn do the same as I and countless other recipients have done. So here we go in no particular order:

1. Adventure Dad

2. Poop N Boogies

3. Sarah And The Goon Squad

4. Jules

5. I Think This World Is Perfect

6. Jim’s Running Commentary

7. Child’s Play X 2

8. Father Of Five

9. Mitch McDad

10. Dad Stuff

Some of these are my favorites because they are from my area of the country, others are funnier than I will every be. Either way most of these I check out on a daily basis. So pass on the linky love. Now on to……

The Top 5 Consequences Of My Steroid Use

1. I actually told the Wednesday night Bible Class for young married couples “The Love You Make Is The Love You Take”
2. Par’d my first hole of golf ever!! Followed by my second par ever on the next hole!! Followed by a couple of nice bogey’s a few holes later!! Must have been the extra muscle I was putting behind the ball
3. Got into a huge un-provoked argument with Lucy over why I can never wake her up in the morning.
4. Lucy got a nice bouquet of flowers for “no reason at all”
5. Inability to sleep allowed me to clear my Tivo To Do List. Thus leaving me worried that I might be caught with a spare moment in which I have nothing to watch and consequently filling it back up with reruns of House and episodes of Law & Order SVU

Steroid Scandal Rocks The Blockhead Family

You read it correctly. The rumors are true. No need to have some long winded Congressional sub committee look into the startling allegations brought on by a beefed up no count ex-athlete turned punk author looking to make a quick buck. I confess.

I Charlie Blockhead come before you today to admit that I have and am still currently taking steroids……AND I’M LOVING EVERY MINUTE OF IT!!!!

After all they are not only knocking out the poison ivy, but I’m thinking about giving ole’Broccoli a run for his money and taking the title of BUFFEST BLOCKHEAD. I’m also considering ripping a tornado sized path through an unnamed cube farm and blaming it all on roid-rage.

Before the drugs take full effect and while I’m still able to feel sympathy for others, I’d like to also apologize in advance to the members of my family for my future attitude. Remember Fred that’s not Daddy telling you boys don’t wear yellow sunglasses, that’s the drugs talking. Lucy….well Lucy since every year at this time I seem to find myself once again trying to get the Prednisone monkey off my back all I got to say to you is be thankful it’s only for 7 days and remember how happy I make you the other 51 weeks of the year…..on second thought I love you and deep down I will understand if you kick me out of our bed and into the cat hair covered twin bed in the next room. No matter how much I insist that I’m perfectly happy being thrown out of my own room, please know I’m secretly aching on the inside. Though Button’s nails may be longer, your heart is bigger.

As for the rest of the world your best bet is to stay out of my way and give me plenty of room to breathe if anything else for out of fear that I may actually show you the horns that grow out of the top of my head as a direct result of the steroids and that I may tell you where I plan to stick them if you don’t quit doing such idiot things as refusing to drive 1 mile over the speed limit, including tomatoes on my burger even after I have made sure to order said burger using the exact phrase “I’d like a no tomato burger, with bacon, no tomato, cheese, not tomato, and chili fries with no tomato”, and not holding the door open for me at the Hill thus making me have to enter in that stupid yet obviously necessary safety door pass key number even though I waste 5 minutes of my life every morning doing unto you while risking the annoying stare of my boss as he notices once again that I’m late and would more than likely laugh me out of the office if he knew it’s because I continuously find myself regulated to doorman between 7:35 and 7:40 every morning.

You have been warned. Exit Bruce Banner. Enter THE HULK.

Who We Are Now

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about life before Fred and Lucy. Maybe it’s got something to do with my recent neck problems (Dad’s Dr. seems to think it’s hereditary), plus this cough I can’t shake, mixed with my first case of poison ivy for the year (caught it on the first weekend cutting grass!! Yeah me!!), in addition to all this gray hair I’m sporting, but suddenly it’s like I’ve taken a step back and I’m seeing things….people for who they are today and not who they were. You may remember that in the first month of this year alone Fred caught Pneumonia twice, spent 3 days in the hospital, the car broke down 4 times, Lucy changed jobs, insurance changed, and life in 2008 seemed like a scary place to live in. Not so much now though.

Fred is changing so much I’d need to quit the day job in order to blog about all his exploits. I often wonder what Lucy and I did all day Pre-Fred. We waited 8 years to have a child and part of me knows most of that was spent building the life we have today. Climbing our way out of debt and out of that 1 bedroom slum that shines like a golden palace in our memories. I don’t regret those days at all until I stop to consider all that we accomplish in the 24-hour 7 days week Parenting Lifestyle we now dwell in. I wonder what we did with all that free time we never knew we had. I simply don’t remember anything other than Lucy and I being in love. Sure there are images and stories that are stored away somewhere in the recess of my mind, but life now is like the sequel to some great adventure that will never truly end….the purpose just changes.

Boy meets girl, they fall in love, struggle through years of hard work to build a world together, get everything they always wanted….The End.

New book, same boy and girl, life is different, cast of characters has moved on and some have moved away, baby comes and….the adventure continues. Same but different.

I no longer recognize that boy that fought day in and day out with the angry man. I wonder what he thought life would be like twenty years later. Truth is, I somehow know that he never thought about anything other than “where’s everybody hanging out tonight?”

The brother and mother….the family torn up and yet better off. The Nani went to Nashville to see Broccoli this weekend and after a brief call to let me know she made it back, I got the sense that I’m not the only one waking up and staring out amazed at the new world that has grown up around us in the blink of an eye. As if we were coma patients suddenly finding ourselves light years into the future and swearing a heartbeat of time had only passed.

Even the Gigi seems to be changing. We are never meant to get along with our in-laws partly because we’ve just spent the greatest part of our lives trying to break away from our own parents only to be given a new set, neither of which by choice or some process of personal selection. To see the bond between her and Fred and how he runs through the house for entire days saying “Gigi? Nani? Gigi? Nani? Gigi?” as if one or the other is hiding just around the next turn waiting to surprise him, erases all thoughts of how relationships were and how we got to this point. The important thing is we are here.

Though I’m considering dying the gray out of my hair and have suddenly taken up the habit of falling asleep in front of the televised Sunday afternoon golf game, all of this change has made me feel younger than ever. Never in my life have I wanted warmer temps to get here so badly. There are kite’s to be flown, Frisbees to be thrown, a pack of sidewalk chalk that demands to be used up. There are more adventures to be had by Lucy, Fred, Gigi, Nani, Broccoli….and of course Charlie Blockhead.

I can’t wait to see how this turns out.

Phantom Menace

Over the weekend my neck started cramping up in a bad way. It started Saturday and immediately I wrote if off to a crick, except that it sorta started in the middle of the day and got worse. Then I remembered trying to play He-Man Friday night with a new push mower I had bought (it includes a grass catcher so that Fred can play outside and not have to wade through a foot of dead grass). The salesman seemed to have lifted it with ease, so why should I have a problem doing the same. When I tried though something popped in my neck and the thing didn’t budge.

That was 4-5 days ago and it’s still killing me….then I had a conversation that has now got me completely freaked out. My dad lives in Jacksonville, Fl and though I only get to see him once or twice a year, we talk on the phone about every 2 weeks. I had last chatted him up about a week ago and he was still suffering through the flu. He said he’d call me back when he felt better. No big deal. A week goes by and The Granny calls asking when the last time I had talked to him was. Seems she had been trying to reach him for a few days and couldn’t get him to answer the phone.

Later in the day I called, got him to answer, only to discover that he’d been to the ER 3 times in 4 days. It turns out that out of the blue his neck had cramped up so severely that he may have to start taking some physical therapy depending on the results of an MRI they have scheduled for this coming Friday!!!! It wasn’t until I hung up the phone and tried to turn my head without looking like a robot, that I realized the freaky connection! Now I’m wondering if the timing is coincidence, yet possibly something genetic I need to be aware of is going on or if I’m having sympathy neck pains.

Alabama Skank And Seafood

When somebody opens up a conversation with the words “This weekend I thought we’d go to this seafood restaurant that used to be a brothel” One’s first reaction is “Allll right. I can go for that. How long ago is “used to be”?”

When that somebody happens to be your grandmother (the same one married to a preacher) one’s reaction falls along the lines of “Granny do you know what a brothel is and what they normally serve there?” To this she added, “Back in civil war and yes I know it used to be a place where ladies of the night conducted business, but they have great catfish”

So there we were, down to see the GP’s for Easter Weekend with Broccoli and Brookli in tow and somehow wound up in the classic setup to every backwoods horror movie ever made ala “From Dusk Till Dawn”. Tucked away underneath a bridge and just a few feet away from the muddy banks of some unknown river, lies every brother- that-ever-married-their-sister’s dream of fine dinning aka Ezels (apparently that’s French for lady of the night). From the looks of the place and the constant remarks being made by Granny as she pointed to what used to be top floor suites, I pretty much had my mind set on what I was going to find once I crossed the crooked threshold. Instead what I found was worse.

How worse? A squirrel’s face glued to the butt of a stuffed deer worse. Now I should probably end this here and let you think about that last sentence overnight (not that I would blame you for not wanting to), but the story demands to be told.

I’ll say it again; a squirrel’s face had been cut off and glued to the butt of a stuffed deer. Like some scientific experiment gone awry from the Island Of Dr. Moreau, Broccoli was so shocked by it’s presence he just had to know what was literally staring him in the face thus making him forget all about the catfish he had been promised.

So as I was saying; there we were Lucy, Granny, Broccoli, Brookli, Fred, and myself all making direct contact with each other so as not to be grossed out by the table clothes that had not been changed since confederate soldiers once marched in looking for companionship (the place probably smelled the same). All the while feeling the eyes of at least 30 stuffed animal heads (deer, hogs, fish, that squirrel deer thing…a squireer…) staring us down as we attempted to keep the conversation up so as not to hear the sounds of Ned Beatty squealing like a pig somewhere in the not so distant background.

It was during these first few moments of the meal that Fred decided to throw a tantrum…little did we know his cries would make our existence known to something more frightening than a squireer. Suddenly as I sat there calming Fred down (nobody likes to be scolded) everyone at the table looked up in terror at something just to the left of me. As I peered over my shoulder wondering what could possibly make that many eyes bug out at the same time (other than possibly the squireer walking up to take our drink order) I saw none other than:

 

That’s right!! The story of the witch that tempted Snow White is true except she offers her prey greasy hushpuppies instead of juicy apples. With a crooked finger and the look of the completely insane she whispered “What’s wrong little boy?”

Being the brave father that I am I quickly switched the baby to my other shoulder thus blocking him from any ancient dwarfing curse that could be cast upon him and begged the witch to leave us alone….we just wanted some catfish and were not there to anger the ghost of prostitution past. With that our food was served, the squireer was commanded to haunt my every sleep, and we ran out of there before it got dark and the hillbilly hookers showed up for third shift.