An embarrasing injury

It's one thing to accidently cut your thumb a little bit while slicing an apple. Or maybe miss a step when coming downstairs, so you hurt your ankle.

But yesterday I hurt my wrist while scooping ice cream!

Evolution of parenting: the stairs

Child #1 (6 or 7 years ago):
As soon as you detect any type of independent movement from the baby, you begin defense preparations. When he first moves his legs and arms around, after some extensive research, you purchase safety gates for the top and bottom entrances to the stairs. When he starts to roll over, you ensure that the gates are securely mounted in the proper locations. As the crawling starts, and even well into the early stages of walking, you constantly create a buffer zone near the gates, making sure he is never close enough to come into contact at all with the stairs.

Child #2 (a little more than 4 years ago):
You notice that the baby is crawling now. You can't find the gates you used to have installed. Instead, you move a few chairs away from the kitchen table to block off the general area of the stairs.

Child #3 (this past week):
The baby learns how to do the stairs by himself while you watch TV in the other room with your wife.

April 1

I made this note and put it on a bunch of computer monitors here at work this morning:



I hope it works on some people, at least for a minute.

Wild and crazy

Are you like me? Do you take big risks? Do you like to live on the edge? Are you living on borrowed time!?

I was warming up my food for lunch at work today in one of the public microwaves in the cafeteria. I wasn't cooking a bag of microwave popcorn. But... I used the popcorn button anyway!!! That's NUTS, right?! Who, in their right mind, would use the popcorn button just to warm up some leftover casserole from the night before?! (...which was an excellent casserole, by the way, thanks to my lovely wife...)

On a related note, the guy using the microwave next to me was even more crazy: he was having THREE corn dogs for lunch.

(I love me a good corn dog. And two is pretty good, too. But three would definitely be pushing the envelope.)

An obvious sign that you shouldn't have cut your own hair

Within 24 hours after cutting your own hair, you've had four comments similar to the following:

Did you recently get a haircut? Looks kind of interesting... Um, did you do that yourself!?

Peeps

I hate those sugar-coated marshmallow peeps. They taste like sticky cotton, covered with sand. The Easter Bunny brought some for my kids one year. If he ever does that to me again, I'm gonna set a trap for the Easter Bunny and make some soup or something.

Movie Review: Dan in Real Life

You're a good father, but sometimes you're a bad dad.

That was one of the most memorable quotes from the movie. There aren't a lot of good movies that are mainly about a dad or a father. It was humorous and funny, but not necessarily hilarious. I was very pleasantly impressed.

I've been thinking a lot lately since I saw the movie about the difference between a "father" and a "dad." I'm not sure what the exact difference is, but I agree with the movie: you should try to be both.

Leprechaun Trap

My 7-year-old son used a cardboard box from the garage yesterday to construct a trap to catch a leprechaun:



He wanted to get the leprechaun's pot of gold so that we'd be rich. Then he was going to keep him and feed him Lucky Charms cereal, which I guess is what leprechauns eat. I told him we should train him to be our slave.

The trap was placed in our pantry in the kitchen. Inside the trap, he made a Wii out of paper and tape, which he thought would be a good lure for the leprechaun. And on the outside of the trap's door, he wrote "gold!" and "lucky charms party!"

At night, after the kids were in bed, I put the note in there and put a few Reese's peanut butter cups for the gold.

I always chuckle when...

... I drive by someone in heavy traffic and glance over to see the person with his finger up his nose. It makes me laugh.

Then, while I am laughing, I look in my rear view mirror and notice that I got my finger up my nose, too. Oops!