My Kids

My Kids

Once you start having kids a few things change. Daddy has to be careful while watching internet porn. Mommy goes from being in pictures with her friends during college to looking at those pictures while drinking from the bottle of Jack she hides under her side of the bed.

Regardless of the sacrifices, it is all worth it. I don’t want to sound like a guy looking for sympathy for having to change a diaper at two in the morning. No matter how bad the shit smells or how much of my face the piss covers when it goes vertical I laugh back at the baby while the baby laughs at me. Then I say, with a straight face, urine dripping from my pointed jaw, Keep laughing…you’ll be changing my diapers someday. Breast feeding is the best way for a man to get sleep. There is little he can do when the baby wakes up hungry in the early morning hours of a frigid winter day. And kids are so handy at tax time, if you know what you are doing.

My daughter is the entertainer, the eccentric, the socialite and possible politician. She is a light bulb and a shooting star, a comet looking for somewhere to land. I don’t know where she is going as an adult, but I imagine she will be well known for her personality. If she would only give up on watching iCarly I might like her more. That, of course, is a joke and a bad one at that. She wanted an iPod because another girl in her kindergarten class had one and she wanted songs by Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus. I told her she could have an iPod with songs by the Beatles and Stones. I’m becoming my grandfather but for the fact that he hated the Beatles and Stones and he is so out of the loop regarding what is cool that he would have no idea what a Taylor Swift is or a Miley Cyrus and if I told him that Miley’s father was a man named Billy Ray who had a mullet twenty years ago he would look at me like I’d told him Frank Sinatra liked to tight roll his stone washed jeans while listening to Motley Crue albums.

My young son shows an analytical, scientific approach to everything from pancakes to pantomimes complemented by a sense of discipline and a tender nature. He is a sensitive sort and that keeps him on the sidelines socially. I don’t think I’ll be signing him up for little league football this fall. He’s a smart kid, smarter at four years old than I ever was during either of my years in the first grade. I’d claim that my mom and dad were good American parents who held me back a year in school so I would be bigger and more physically developed for high school sports but I have no athletic ability. Instead, I blame, in part, the reading program at the first Catholic school I attended. With small, short books that had sentences like Here deer, eat some meet it was nearly impossible not to become a reading ace but I was incapable of that. I was more concerned about not dropping my pants while using the urinals with the rest of the guys in my class. Big boy go potty has no place in the overly disinfectant smelling bathrooms of my school. Luckily, I eventually ended up at a school that kept me until I went to high school. Our basketball team was horrible but the teachers found an excuse to pass me to the next grade every year, so I like them pretty much. Some of those teachers are still there.

But my son, he’s a man going places. I suspect he will end up at a big snot type joint and I don’t worry he will ever forget me. I see him using his scientific nature to make groundbreaking advances someday in the future and it is likely that he will create a better cell phone for us all or at least a better and more efficient way for our government to kill more people in less time abroad. It is an exciting time to be a dad and an American.

The End.