My Great Shame

I don’t know how to build anything. I don’t know how to fix anything. I know nothing about cars. I really have no skills at all. But it’s not my fault. I grew up with a father who also lacked skills. He is the kind of guy that when something breaks, calls a repairman or gets a new one. This way of handling a problem has been passed down to me.

I think handiness may have skipped a generation. As I recall, my grandfather was handy. But for some reason, it didn’t transfer to my dad. Maybe it was some form of rebellion that my father perpetrated against his father. But it’s left me without a mentor.

Sure I can do the easy stuff. I can change a light bulb. I can screw together Ikea furniture. I’ve even replaced a ceiling fan. But if the toilet is running or a faucet is leaking, I’m stumped. I don’t like being like this. I want to be able to fix stuff. I hate shelling out my hard earned cash to repairmen whom I know are over-charging me. But I have nobody to teach me.

I don’t feel that I should experiment home repair skills on my own house. If I break something, as I’m all but certain to do it’s going to cost me even more money to get it fixed. I bought a set of Black and Decker home repair books, but they will only take me so far. I wish I had the wrenching gene. I wish I could walk into a hardware store and actually know what I was talking about.

I know we're almost done with the Aughts and we should be beyond old fashioned gender roles. But as a guy, this is my great shame.

What’s yours?

-Daddy Geek Boy

Midsummer Midterm Exam

In his bestselling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes the point that kids in some other countries do better academically because they attend school for more days each year than kids in the US. Gladwell shares the results of some studies that suggest knowledge is lost during summer vacation (ya think?)

An interesting wrinkle, though - the knowledge is only lost to children who don't read and study during the summer months. His point being that children from well-off families tend to read and do intellectual activities during the summer, putting them ahead of their lesser-off peers.

With the economic downturn, I'm guessing we're all feeling lesser off these days. So in a spirit of helping everyone stay smart, I'm giving all the Hot Dads and Hot Moms a midsummer midterm quiz. Pencils up. Ready?

First the elementary school questions:

1. Who is the US President?

2. How tall is Lance Armstrong? (take a guess)

3. Could Tom Brady's wife, Gisele Bundchen, have any more tattoos? (image link)

Now the middle school questions:

4. Does anyone have a better hamburger seasoning recipe than me? (haha)

5. What do the Hot Dads think of Friends with Benefits?

6. Does anyone care about the Jon and Kate divorce, let alone about Jon and Kate Gosselin dating news?

And now for the Isaac Asimov genius questions:

7. Is raising girls easy?

8. How does Michael Caine like his women? (video link)

9. How many licks does it take for a Hot Mom to get to the center of a tootsie pop? (video link)

I was going to give a tenth question, but summer is calling, and it's time for everyone to put those pencils down.

Go forth and be stupid. It's summer vacation!!

Easy answers: 1) Barack Obama, 2) 5'10", 3) no

Middle school answers: 4) no (hey, it's my post!), 5) various responses (you have to read that post), 6) yes (or they wouldn't be on People magazine)

Genius answers: 7) for some, 8) like his sangria (watch the video!), 9) 3 (watch the video!)

Kids, Immagination and Yoda

Am I the only one who thinks that imaginary friends are an odd fucking thing?

I have come to find out that I live in a house with 3 girls and 1 (really sexy) woman who all have or had imaginary friends.

We talked about it at dinner tonight and I could not be convinced that having imaginary friends was a normal, everyday thing. I was bombarded with fun little chatter about everyone’s ‘friends’…including the chickens that lived in one’s eyes…who even had a slide, the little boy Charlie who had to go everywhere with them and even had to have plates of food prepared and set out for him, the hand/finger elephant that would play for hours on end, and yes, the group of stuffed animals and dolls that were actually alive and talked…but only one person could hear them….

I proceeded to say that I never had an imaginary friend, played with dolls, talked to my hand or any stuffed creatures that resided in my room. Along with all of that…I do not recall any of my 5 brothers and sisters having any of the above either. The closest I think I came was pretending that I was Yoda and trying to move shit 'with the force.'

Their response…almost simultaneously was…”you are no fun…lighten up!”

Maybe my thoughts have something to do with my mother being a child psychotherapist…me majoring in psychology or the numerous movies and TV shows that I’ve seen where the kids with those imaginary friends pick up an axe or flame thrower…or some shit like that and kill everyone who can’t hear their friend.

Any of you have thoughts on this subject?

D.U.I. -- Decorating Under the Influence

We are in the process of converting my daughter's bedroom from heartwarming (read: infantile) to chest-pain-inducing (read: tween). This, of course, meant that the rubber duck theme of the bathroom next door also had to go.

Thing 1 and I headed to the local Dead, Daft and Diddley to select a new shower curtain, which we did along with a plastic ice-tray mold one can use to make teeth-chattering shot glasses.

This latter purchase is a necessity because redecorating in our house usually requires serious post-project imbibing to relieve the pain of smashed fingers, sore backs and box cutter slashes. It also creates a dreamy soft focus that masks my inability to get corners to square properly and helps My Love feel more in sync with the inevitably wobbly IKEA furniture we end up piecing together.

I had just put the shot-glasses-to-be in the freezer and settled down to catch up on what TiVo had wrought when My Love said I would need to go back to the store. The hooks I had purchased to hang the new shower curtain were not big enough.

"You just might want to get a smaller rod," she said.

"Amazing," I said. "You have managed to utter a sentence that in the history of Western civilization has probably never before been said by a wife to her husband."

She looked at me askance, paused, then left the room.

Mentally, though, she took the keys to my minivan off the counter and whipped them straight into my nether lands.

Closing the Baby Shop, Part 4

I woke up the morning of the surgery, put on my tighty whiteys and sweatpants as instructed, and headed out into the frosty morning to get neutered. At the doctor’s office, I was outfitted in the classic open backed surgery gown and a pair of blue socks that had puffy paint treads on the bottom, similar to what can be found on the soles of the socks of my infant daughter. I was led to the operating room and left to wait, bare assed, blue bootied, shorn and nervous. Sitting next to me was a tray of shiny, sharp instruments, which I had been sternly warned by the nurse not to touch. As if I wanted to get up close and personal with the instruments of torture that were going to be used to slice open my anatomy.

I sat there for a while.

As the wise poet Tom Petty once said, the waiting is the hardest part. After nearly 20 minutes of solitude, the doc came in and asked me how I was doing.

“Have you ever had surgery before?” He asked in an all too chipper of a tone.

“Only above the neck,” I told him.

I was prepped, which consisted of the nurse reclining the table and ladling a brown liquid all over my crotch, and the party began. As he stood over my genitals, the doc made another crack about it being cold. I wanted to punch him in the back of the head. First off, it was cold. The nurse had even given me a blanket while I did my time in solitude before the surgery. Second, now was not the time to be insulting my manhood. My balls had pretty much figured out what was to come when their protective layer of hair was removed the previous evening. Everything had been shriveled down there for the past 12 hours. Third, you used that joke already during the consult. Time to get some new material.

I closed my eyes, plugged in my earbuds and the procedure began.

After all of the stories I had heard, the warnings from friends and the all of the nervousness leading up to the surgery, I can honestly say that the vasectomy wasn’t that bad. The worst pain endured was during the Novocaine injection, which felt exactly like what it was—a big needle being stuck into my scrotum. A shooting pain traveled from my left testicle to somewhere just above my crotch, like an electrical shock had overtaken one of my nerves. But this pain was fleeting and after it subsided I honestly couldn’t feel anything. The problem then became psychological. Even though you can’t feel it, you know what’s being done down there and no matter what, you cannot get that out of your head. I started to hyperventilate and I could feel my body temp rise. I flashed back to that Lamaze class that WonderWife™ and I had to sit through before the Bean was born. They said to breathe. I did and was amazed to learn that the stuff actually worked. In retrospect, WW™ probably should have used it during the births of our two children. However, as a result of the breathing, my throat got dry and I wanted to cough more than anything in the world. But I dared not for a single cough would cause the lower half of my body to shake. The same lower half that currently had some of its insides on the outside.

The procedure was soon over and as the table was raised, I was given a Dixie cup of the most delicious cold tap water I’ve ever had. The nurses slid a jock strap over my legs and around my waist in the exact same way that I put on the Bean’s underwear in the morning. I stood up adorned in the jock-strap (or, in the words of my take-home literature, my “scrotal support”), which accentuated the ass-less gown/bootie ensemble perfectly. Ladies, I was looking hot. They gave me two specimen cups, for my follow up visits, in a bag labeled “biohazard” and sent me on my way. A half-hour later I was in bed with a bag of frozen corn on my balls, eating a delicious peanut butter and jelly square that WonderWife™ had made for the occasion. (Have I mentioned how totally awesome that woman is?)

I would have gone to work the next day, except that I was inadvertently all fucked up on narcotics. After the procedure, the doc asked me if I wanted pain medication. The answer was a no brainier, “Yes.” I took the pill, Ultram, the afternoon after the surgery and felt fine until the next morning, when in the shower I realized that I felt both drunk and hung over at the same time. There was no way I was going to operate a motor vehicle or subject myself to the scrutiny of my colleagues and boss.

The day after that, however, I was amazed how much the pain had receded from my balls. I went back to work and only my boss knew of the real reason I had missed two days of work.

So that was it. I’ve been snipped. And it was much less of a big deal than I had imagined. I told a friend of mine about the surgery and he turned pale saying, “I feel like I’m chewing on tin foil.” But really fellas, we shouldn’t be melodramatic about this whole thing. Women have it so much worse.

Happily, it’s all over for me. After I clean out my system, I will hopefully be given the all clear from the doc and then I will be able to officially turn the sign on the front of the baby shop from “open” to “closed”.

Click here for parts 1, 2 and 3.

-DGB

Closing the Baby Shop, Part 3

Click here for Part 1

Click here for Part 2

The dreams started about a week before I was scheduled to have the procedure. Clearly, my subconscious was concerned about the vasectomy. In one dream, I sat in the waiting room indefinitely, thumbing over and over again through the only magazine they had—a dog-eared copy of Highlights for Children. In another, I had forgotten to wear sweatpants and briefs, as I had been instructed, and was forced to walk around pant-less, until WonderWife™ could bring me the garments. In the strangest one, Stephen Colbert was my doctor. His cocky attitude did not make for a great bedside manor.

During my consultation, I had been instructed to shave the night before the surgery. This was a surprise. I had listened to many anecdotes about vasectomies and none of them included self-shaving. Nonetheless, I arrived home from work that night and headed into the bathroom, armed with determination, electric clippers and my Gillette Fusion.

I had not been given specific shaving instructions and as I stood in the bathroom, pants around my ankles, I realized that I had no idea what area they wanted shaved. It’s not like there’s any resource for this. I certainly wasn’t going to Google “male scrotum shave”. So I decided that the best thing to do was to get rid of it all.

Admittedly, I had been rather lax about my manscaping over the past few months, so things were more unkempt down there than usual. Shaving myself was a perilous process that took a lot of time, nearly half a can of shaving cream and two blades. At first I worried about cutting myself, but soon realized that was a ridiculous notion. No small nick would compare with punishment that my boys were going to face the next day.

I finished up, toweled myself off and called out to WonderWife™, who was kind enough to preserve my dignity by giving me privacy during this ordeal. Though I’m sure she was giddy with curiosity to see the result. She raced in and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a laugh. My poor balls looked pathetic and bare, like a naked mole rat. My boys hadn't looked like this since I was 11.

One of the major complaints guys have about vasectomies is that they diminish one’s manhood. I was beginning to see why. I was not looking forward to how it was going to feel when things down there started to grow back.

"There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum...it's breathtaking." - Dr. Evil

To be continued...

-DGB

Sports Talk

Baseball season has started again. I know this not because I’m a fan of the game, but because my Red Sox obsessed friends suddenly started mentioning it in their Facebook status updates. Thus begins another sports season, which means all summer there will be conversations in which I cannot participate.

I was not born with the sports gene. I was never a strong athlete as a kid, and the shame of being a boy who’s not good at sports pretty much sucked all of the interest in them from me like a dry sponge in a bathtub of water. Now that I’m an adult male, and thankfully not measured by my athletic abilities, or lack thereof, I’ve come to respect sports and even like them somewhat. At least I like the competitive aspect of them. But since I’ve spent the majority of my life actively avoiding things that require you to buy equipment and keep score (video games excepted), I know very little about them. Sure, I know the basic rules to most of the major games, but I’m lost when it comes to players and stats—the two factors that make up 99.67% of sports talk.

It’s too daunting a task to try to get up to speed on a particular sport, which would be like trying to learn how to speak a new language or play an instrument. It would take a frustratingly long time and suck up the remainder of my rare and precious free time. Besides, my brain is already filled with movie trivia and Simpsons quotes, I'm not sure if I can add anything else without running the risk of losing important information like my wife's birthday or my social security number. I’ve tried to join betting pools, thinking that if I have money on the line, I’ll be motivated to study. Turns out that me joining a pool is the equivalent of walking up to a stranger on the street and handing them a wad of cash.

Because I’m ignorant about sports, I’m left out of a lot of conversations. Get a bunch of guys together and sports is guaranteed to come up at some point. When this happens, I’m left ignorantly nodding my head, trying to keep up with the barrage of facts and figures that have no relevance for me in the slightest.

It’s worse in one-on-one situations. A guy will never ask another guy, “Do you like sports?” The sports assumption is always made with questions like, “What sports do you follow?” or, “Who’s your team?” or the trickiest query, “What did you think of the game last night?” When faced with one of these questions, my admission of my non-sports status is usually met with a puzzled and disapproving look that says, “Why don’t you go stand in the corner and knit a sweater or something?”

When in my office, guys don’t understand that the picture on my desk of the Bean wearing a football jersey and holding a beer and a remote is a joke. They view it as an invitation to talk sports. The subsequent explanation about the picture is both wordy and uninteresting. It’s hard to explain irony.

I secretly hope that my kids get into sports, so that I will be forced to bone up in order to better communicate with them. However, growing up under my roof it’s more likely that my kids will watch Bugs Bunny than baseball.

So as this summer’s barbeque season approaches, I know that I will find myself at a party, drifting from one sports conversation to the next, until I inevitably wander over to a group of women who are talking about TV.

However, I don’t watch “American Idol” either.

-DGB

Closing the Baby Shop, Part 2

There were a handful of other patients in the waiting room of the urologist’s office. I was the youngest one there by three decades, easy. It was a startling glimpse into the future.

I took a seat and dug into the mountain of paperwork, which included a plethora of Really Useful information about vasectomies. The doc was already a half-hour late, so with nothing better to do, I began to read. Amongst the papers was a jaunty little pamphlet simply titled “Vasectomy” in big bold letters that had a lot of illustrations. It was like an elementary school book, only with a lot more penises. On the cover, a cartoon couple was holding hands on the beach. The man had a sly look on his face, as if he had just asked his wife to do it right there on the sand. The wife had a slightly annoyed look, as if her husband had just asked her to do it right there on the beach. It was not clear if the man had just been snipped or was just about to be.

Inside, the pamphlet offered an idealized world of vasectomies. Everything was bright and clean, without pain or suffering. One picture promised what I could expect after the surgery:



Look at how happy the man is in his Lay-Z-Boy and slippers. Look at how happy his wife is to serve him. See, it isn't so bad...you get apple slices! I’m glad I have this booklet so if WonderWife™ refuses to bring me apple slices, I can wave it around and say, “But the pamphlet says you have to!”

The doc finally showed up and after approximately three seconds of small talk asked me to take off my pants. He made a comment about the room being cold. Normally I would take offense to this, but the truth is that things had tightened up down there. A strange man had just asked me to strip down and lie on a table, I couldn’t really blame my boys for trying to take refuge in the upper regions of my body. There was a bit of poking and prodding, which would normally fall under the category of “unpleasant” but the after the realization that the next time this guy would be in the vicinity of my crotch he would be cutting into it, I figured that this was as good as my balls were going to get during this adventure.

This doc uses a “no scalpel” technique, in which he performs the operation with a single punch through the scrotum. It sounded more like getting an ear pierced at the mall than sterilization. (Maybe I could get an Orange Julius afterward.) The literature I received described it as an “elegant way for the surgeon to perform the operation.” Although this conjured up images of top hats, monocles, classical music and caviar, somehow I doubted the actual procedure would be that civilized. The doc went on to tell me more details of the procedure, but to be honest once he started talking about incisions I lost my focus. To say I’m a wimp about this sort of stuff is completely underselling it.

Because of some of the comments in my first post, I was compelled to ask about the permanence and success rate for these things. The doc said that a vasectomy reversing itself is very rare and he’s only had one reversal in the 20 plus years he’s been practicing. So those of you who had “reversal babies” make up slightly more than 1% of all vasectomy procedures done. You guys should start playing the lottery.

Finally, I was given the option of local versus twilight anesthetic. The twilight option would knock me out and was described by the doctor as “fun" though fun is hardly a word I’d associate with any part of this endeavor. Because I’m a “real man” I opted for the local (also because I know that any anesthetic has risks and it seemed pointless to be knocked out for a 15 minute procedure). “In that case,” the doc said, “You’ll be able to drive yourself home.” This seemed odd to me since I had just signed 150 pages of paperwork promising that I would do no such thing.

And that was it. The consult was over in five minutes and I was now beyond the first, and only, obstacle that stood between me and the knife.

The surgery will be in a few weeks and the first pangs of nervousness are beginning to bubble up.

To be continued…

--DGB

Total Recall

I am one swift blow to the head from being the guy in the movie Memento.

I have a terrible memory. Seriously, my capacity for details surprisingly shallow. Each day that I wake up and remember my name and where I live is a small victory. I’m good with faces, but not names, which means that I probably give people a lot of awkward blank stares during social events. I don’t know what my friends do for a living or how old my parents are. I’ve long since forgotten the stats of my kids when they were first born.

It could be argued that my diminished capacity for details stems from one too many abuses of my brain during extra-curricular activities in college. But I’m comforted by the fact that my memory was terrible long before those debaucherous days. Though I’m sure they didn’t help.

Don’t get me wrong, my brain works. I know this cause I can remember useless things like what theater, with whom and where I was sitting for just about every movie I’ve seen on the big screen. I can conjure up hundreds of Simpsons quotes and I can remember song lyrics from the 80s. But I will forget to run the dishwasher, even though I was asked to do it a mere hour earlier.

WonderWife™ is quickly losing patience with me. Not that I can blame her. Many of our conversations go like this:

DGB: So what are we doing this weekend?

WW™: You’re taking the Bean to a birthday party because I have an appointment with Sprout.

DGB: Really? Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?

WW™: I did. We had a whole conversation about it. Last week. Over breakfast. You were eating eggs. I had a whole wheat bagel with cream cheese. You were wearing your red striped shirt. It was overcast and 67 degrees.

DGB: Nope. No memory of that. Are you sure it happened?

It’s not that I don’t care about these things. It’s just that the more mundane details of life tend to run through my brain like water through a colander. As a parent, there is so much more that I need to remember. These two extra small people living with us come with and endless amount of facts, trivia, statistics and rules. Not to mention the host of new people in our lives as a result. WW™ has excelled at cultivating different mommy communities—both on line and in real life. So now when she tells me that she’s going out with Lisa, I need to remember she is, what kid she parents and her husband’s name and occupation. I'm useless at birthday parties where it's all blank stares and birthday cake.

I used to blissfully bounce through life, unaware of what I was forgetting. But now I'm reminded of what I don't know and can't remember on a daily basis. It's starting to be a drag on everyone, especially me. But what is there to do?

So I ask of you, Hot Dads readers… Um, what was I talking about?

How Do I Know I Am The King, And Not Just A Schmuck?

Whoo! Okay, I finally made it over here to do my first post on Hot Dads. Please don’t judge me *sniff* I’m sensitive and all; I just might run and hide if you folks were angry with me. I have my reasons, though, primarily due to job searching and chasing after my Wee Lass. She is fast, especially when she is nude and running around prior to her bath.

Speaking of Wee Lass, that brings me to this post. There has been a lot of talk recently about the things that the wee ones do that make us crazy, the repetitive rituals they want to do, or the stubborn refusal to stay in bed once they are in bed, and I have to say I’m all over that like white on rice. The awesomesauce that is the Fruit o’ My Loins is an amazing critter in her own right. She has her own fixations that are cute on one hand and drive me batshit crazy on the other.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter more than life itself. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to protect her or make her happy. And that includes putting underwear on my head and doing the Dance of Joy around the living room. What? Who hasn’t done that?

It isn’t stretching the truth to say that I would do anything to make her smile, hear her laugh. I wish I had an audio clip of her laugh to embed with this, because it truly does make me melt and call down some rainbows and generally make me feel like there is nothing in this world that could hurt me or make me want to run and hide.

Her laugh does make me feel like Superman.

Which brings me back to the subject of rituals. Wee Lass is fond of her rituals, bedtime and drop off at day care, you name it. Lately, she has taken to a certain insistence on a number of hugs n’ smooches to be administered before we part, no matter what we are doing. She even gets oddly specific as to the number of hugs and smooches to be delivered. Today it was 10 hugs and 10 smooches, plus one extra. And all of them have to be counted out when delivered, no shirking there.

I don’t mind so much when everything is calm, and I can do my thing to fulfill parental obligations, get some luv and then move on. But lately, Wee Lass has taken on the characteristics of Velcro when I try to leave her anywhere. She gets all weepy and clingy and keeps wanting to show me stuff or help her talk to other people.

As a dad who Gives A Damn (I hope), I don’t mind catering to my daughter’s every whim. I do it all the time, probably more than I should. I have tended to play along, generally, because it was no skin off my back and it makes her happy. However, it can lead to some awkwardness and frustration. I haven’t yet figured out how to accommodate her with a minimum of fuss. And do that in a reasonable amount of time so as to be able to get in some reasonable “me” or “us” time for the evening!

In other words, how do I keep her happy but not feel like such a dick when I want to walk away?

I say this because Wee Lass has found a weakness, and she is getting pretty good at exploiting it. And it leaves me feeling like crap when I don’t realize at first that she is trying to be nice. As an example, our bedtime ritual includes a number of kisses/hugs in combination, to be determined by her. And by how much patience I can muster.

Last night, Wee Lass and I seemed to have reached an equilibrium of sorts. Or so I thought. She was a little calmer than usual, and in a good mood. I reckoned I could do my “6 hugs and kisses” and out, turn off the lights and head downstairs. So far, so good.

I had my hand on the doorknob. “Daddy! Daddy!”
“What?”
“One more hug and kiss! Turn the light on! Please???”

So I turn around, turn on the light, and head back over to the bed for the hug and kiss. I turn to leave, light out, hand on door. “Daddy, daddy!....”

This repeats itself twice more, at which point I am starting to steam and get a little snappish. This pattern has been cycling over and over for weeks now. I know I should be more patient, but…”Daddy, Daddy!”

“WHAAAAATTT, NOW?!” gritting teeth, trying not to scream.
“One more thing, I want to tell you.” she says in that impossibly cute voice.
“WHAT?”
“I love you, Daddy, three times.”

I am absolutely gobsmacked. What can I say?

“I love you, too, sweet pea. You know that.”
“’Night, daddy.”
“Good night.”

So I slink off to the couch, feeling like a schmuck, but knowing that someone in my world thinks I am the shizznit. And that’s a good feeling, indeed.

Posted By Irish Gumbo