The Beast of Bellingham Oaks

I left the house yesterday right before sun up to walk the dog and noticed a diaper in the landscaping. Hmm, that seems odd. I walk a little further and can see the driveway also has a diaper in it. Umm, this isn't going to be good. I peek around the corner where the garbage should be neatly packed into garbage bags loaded into garbage cans. It's not. It is spewed all over the yard with the garbage can unceremoniously dumped on the ground. An animal. No, strike that, a beast attacked my garbage can. The top was still on the can but it had eaten or destroyed the entire cover so the whole thing was hollowed out and destroyed. So, I leave the pooch, go into the house, don some gloves, grab a bigger industrial size garbage bag and begin to pick up the extremely nasty garbage mostly filled with dirty diapers and a few evenings ago of bar-b-que. Yummy! So I do the reasonable thing and go out and buy a new garbage can yesterday. I rebag all the garbage, secure it in the can and I bought the double clasp lid to keep this beast of Bellingham out of my apparent delicious garbage. I pat myself on the back. I relax on the couch with an adult beverage very pleased with myself.

That brings us to this morning. I again get the dog and just before sunrise leave upon on our morning walk. I see the driveway. There is some nastiness in the driveway. I am getting slightly steamed. The thought of purchasing an AR-15 assault rife briefly enters my mind. There is a wisp of smoke rising from ears. My face is red. My temperature is rising. I hold my breath and I peer around the corner. The old garbage can is still empty, hollowed out and crushed waiting for Tuesday night; garbage night. The new garbage can is sitting tipped over and empty. The nasty garbage that has been bagged not once, but twice is once again spewed across the yard. Choice words fly out of my mouth. I breathe a sigh of relief knowing Quentin is out of earshot. Parenting first! I leave the pooch again and enter my shrinking castle to once again don gloves, get yet another industrial sized garbage bag, leave the house to go back to my impending morning ritual, before sun up mind you, and once again rebag the garbage for the third time. I am really trying to out-MacGuyver this confounding critter. I bump into my neighbor who refers to the dreaded creature as a teenage mutant ninja coon. Okay, that was kind of funny.

I don't know what is in my garbage that this beast wants so bad but if it's diapers I have a daily supply and I am willing to bring them to its home and simply drop them off, but this creature of the night is rarely seen. It is only out when shrouded and protected by darkness. What to do? What to do? What to do? Getting frustrated here and really sick of picking up garbage. I clearly made a smart career choice avoiding the field. No longer pleased with myself I am left only to my haunting thoughts of the beast waiting to attack my innocent, helpless garbage can. How can I defend my garbage's honor? Is there no recourse? Poison? Hmm, that sounds like a really good idea until I accidentally kill something I'm not trying to. And since I don't really know what I am trying to kill I'm not sure where one gets poison or how much one should use I decide this probably isn't a good idea. I make a note to watch more Discovery channel to learn about poison. I really want to stake the thing out with a .22, but my neighbors live about 10 feet from my house and one errant shot, and you know there would be one, I may be deemed the neighborhood crazy, which I'm sort of okay with, but my wife probably isn't.

Want to hear the best idea I can come up with? Bricks. I know, pretty weak. So, tonight I am stacking the top of the garbage with bricks. There are claw marks all over the lid and it tried to tunnel under the garbage and dug a big old hole underneath so if the bricks don't work I'm going back to spread shot loaded shotgun. I really think shooting is the answer. The brick idea does go against my better judment, but safety first. I will go atomically balistic if I wake up before sunrise tomorrow and there is garbage anywhere outside of that can. I'll keep you posted but we may have some possum for dinner this week.

On a less serious note...From the picture you can see that clearly Quinny has a little Irish in him. His shirt says Dad's lil' Hooligan. We just told him we were going to have some green beer and this was his reaction. Oh, ya, he's my boy. Uncle Spuke was in town and his birthday is on St. Patrick's Day so we get together every year since he turned 21 when we celebrated in Boston when I lived there. This year was decidedly more calm. We played 18 holes on a beautiful day and then went to a party with about 1,500 other revelers (on a Wednesday!) and saw some live bands and had a few brewskies. Quinny celebrated by not sleeping through the night. What else is new?

Bubbles!

We celebrated Easter this weekend with the Reiter family. For the most part they behaved. Outside of some crazy talk about a left wing conspiracy - health care for all! they were normal. It was great fun for Quinny to have so many people to play with. Lucky was pretty stoked too. We haven't had the whole family down since Quentin was born so it was nice to spend a pseudo-holiday together. On Sunday we went to church where Quentin ripped some pages out of the hymnal. They weren't the good ones, so we figured it's okay. I quietly took the pages and slipped them into my pocket. I recycled them so that should count for something. I don't think anyone noticed unless you count God, in which case He chose not to smote us on the spot. Maybe because He knew we were celebrating a holiday. Afterwards we went home and cooked what we think was our first ham. Too easy! We're going to have to get that on the menu more often.

So we had a nice feast and then Quinny went looking for his Easter eggs. It took him a while to hit his stride and get it, but once he did he was having a blast. We hid two dozen plastic eggs with treats inside like goldfish and teddy grahams. He's too young for candy. In his Easter basket he had a toothbrush because he's constantly mopping the floor with his current one, which I think defeats the purpose. If your brush is dirtier than your mouth, well, that's not a good thing. So he got that, some coloring books, good old fashioned regular books and some bubbles. He loves bubbles. He can say bubbles too, which seems like a complicated word for such a youngster but he screams BUBBLES!, BUBBLES!, BUBBLES! And you do not want to be the person that decides that was enough bubble blowing for one day. Oh, no you didn't! He will scream and scream and scream. He loves his bubbles. And he does not take kindly to the mommy that takes his bubbles away.

The bubble blowing starts out with you blowing them and him screaming with excitement chasing them around the backyard. This is equally as much fun for the dog. After a few minutes Quinny will want to take 0ver. He's more into dipping the stick into the container and throwing the bubble solution on the floor and repeat and repeat than actually blowing bubbles. This puts you, the consumer, in a bit of a catch-22. On the one hand he is quite literally having the time of his life. He is loving every second of it and that is the point right? On the other hand you are watching your money literally get poured out on the ground with no bubbles in sight so it takes a bit of convincing to realize throwing the solution on the floor is providing the same joy that one would get out of actually blowing bubbles. In about a 20 minute window he can get through a half bottle of bubbles. Good thing there is this thing called the internet because we learned we can make our own. Thanks moms! In short we've bought bubble solution stock to hedge our bets.

Here is a short video of him blowing bubbles - three feet away from the stick. You can see by Carrie grabbing the stick that she wants the bubbles to get blown soooo bad instead of winding up on the floor. We eventually agreed we can afford throwing $2 on the floor as long as the Qster was having a good time. It was a very windy day so we got some free bubbles by the wind throwing us a thrifty helping hand. Enjoy!

Doging a bullet but still getting shot - twice

Quinny dodged a bullet this week when he went in for his dreaded 15 month check up. It's the MMR visit and your wishy-washy government (FDA two years ago, "BPA is totally safe for consumption." FDA today - "Umm, BPA is dangerous and we are banning it for children)." Exactly. So, just like SIDS we are biding our time to get past the autism age and I was unable to attend the doctor visit adding unneeded stress to the situation so Carrie asked if he could skip the MMR treatment until his 18 month visit and that was an acceptable arrangement. He was instead given another hepatitis shot and a tetanus shot so they were looking at giving him a total of 5 inoculations. He's a champ, but we aren't so he dodged three bullets but still got show twice. I think at the 18 month visit he'll only get his MMR so we get to sweat for another three months waiting for that.

On more positive news he is still shooting up like a bean sprout and gained nearly an inch since his last visit. He came in at 33 inches (95th percentile) and weighed in at 27 pounds 10 ounces. No wonder the pipes are buffed up for beach season. If only picking him up gave you abs. Hmmm....pipe dream I suppose. Well, that's what the old wedding ring is for anyway. One wouldn't want to look too good on that beach with all those spring breakers. Surprisingly he was only in the 75th percentile for weight. Man, alive they have 30-35 pounders at 15 months old? How is that possible? Bottle full of soda and donuts for breakfast? Right, deep fried butter. We asked about his constant eating and sweet, sweet buddah belly but we were told it's totally natural to be sporting an outie at his age. Being a kid has so many perks. If only I could get the same okay we'd be in business. The dynamic buddah duo.

The Qster has been pretty crabby lately and it was confirmed that he's getting his two year molars, so he's down to his last teeth. The next ones he'll get will be because he slammed the door with the ol' string tied on to a toof and lost one to make room for the next one. How far are braces away at this rate?! He has one visible on the bottom left but we can't confirm any others at this point. He's not quite as keen on letting you stick your finger in his pie hole and search around for sprouting teeth like he used to. In fact it's like sticking your head in an open alligator's mouth. He has a tendency from time to time to chomp down and I don't think he's cognizant of the force involved so you leave with a smarted finger. He's been waking up in the middle of the night, which is odd and we think it's from these big square teeth pushing through his gums. His drool is a bit more acidic as well causing a rash where he likes to wear his "bah!" which is his way of saying pacifier. He got up at 4:45 am this morning, so you run up the stairs, turn on the light, and he greets you with bah!, bah!, bah!. Got it little dude, it's 4 am cut me some slack while I'm tracking the elusive bah down will ya?!

He's looking forward to seeing his extended family this weekend as the Reiters are making a road trip. They should arrive tomorrow so we are going to celebrate Easter as a larger family this weekend. I have some trips coming up and Carrie is starting to travel like a rock star as well so we are moving Easter this year. The calendar moves it every year anyway so we figured we can too. We are contemplating moving daylight savings to our convenience as well. Whenever we get sick of dark winter days we'll just make that our spring ahead day. What?

Quick glamorous travel note - I was in the airport for 13 hours yesterday trying to travel 1100 miles from Harrisburg to Tampa. Let's see 1100 miles divided by 70 miles an hour equals 16 hours of driving. However, if you speed and get that up to 85 you would beat plane travel in this country. I got standbyed and went 0 for 4 before finally catching a seat, 44F (last row, last seat) at an ironically delayed 9pm flight (2nd to last one of the day). Comical. 63 people were on the standby list and I bet at least 30 of them still are right now. They were handing out free drinks for anyone willing to trade seats with any family that wanted to sit together. I believe the entire plane raised their hand willing to give up their seat(s). Interestingly enough when it's a bad day for you, it's an equally bad day for the flight attendants so they like to mix it up once in a while to. I got home a smidget before midnight, had dinner and hit the sack. Quinny got up at 4:45 am. It is so very glamorous traveling the country. I do give Harrisburg a thumbs up though. I had dinner in an old firehouse one night. It was built in 1870 and used until 1980 at which point they converted it into a very top notch restaurant. www.thefirehouserestaurant.com/Harrisburg.htm We don't get mileage out of buildings like that any more. Think of your tax dollars getting that kind of work out. They just don't build them like they used to.

Lingerie and Waffles

Quentin stayed home from school yesterday with a fever. Carrie drove him to daycare and then upon dropping him off realized he felt warm and they took his temperature. They won't allow you to leave him there with a fever. They only allow children there with contagious diseases. A fever they don't want any part of. Snot running down your face, now they actually promote that, but a fever not so much. So it was take your son to work day over here. It wasn't quite as exciting as directing air traffic in New York's airspace amigo, but he did jump on some conference calls and scream Magel into the phone. It was a nice reprieve to get to see him all day. He was super happy even carrying that fever all day. I don't think I would get much done with him here on a regular basis though. People ask us all the time, "Oh, so you work from home and just care for him at the same time." Umm, ya, obviously you've never reared a child before or held a job. For the record, that's a negative.

Speaking of magels I mixed it up a little bit for junior this morning and slipped him a lego my eggo waffle. I toasted that bad boy up and then was putting some clean dishes away while he was munching away and when I peeked around the corner I noticed junior was doing a little reading with his breakfast. I take a closer look and what is that son of mine reading? That would be the latest issue of Vickey C's. Yup, he grabbed the Victoria's Secret magazine off the table and was paging through it. See picture. Notice the look on his face. Like what, this isn't normal 15 month old behavior? Oh, ya, keep dreaming buddy. So my kid enjoys a delicious waffle with his lingerie. What's wrong with that? I didn't let him take it to school for show and tell. Who knew? I tell you the Q-dog is an endless source of laughs. Enjoy!

I want a magel!!!

It's no secret that our son has a bit of a belly on him. If he's wearing outfits that don't button into a onsie (I think that's the correct name??) then his belly protrudes like a Homer. He's sporting 2T's that are too small because of that awesome belly. His belly button is permanently an outie these days and we all celebrate his little buddah. It's also no secret that he is an early riser so our routine is someone drags themselves out of bed, and it's rarely Lucky, goes up and gets him and then brings him into our bed hoping, praying that he will go back to sleep for an hour or so. He usually just kicks you to death until you lament and get up, but all that is for another time. So, upon finally dragging your weary body up and at him he greets you with a resounding "MAGEL!" As in, it's dawn and he's jonesing for a bagel, which he emphatically pronounces magel.

He knows what everything is now so he'll climb out of our bed, run to the pantry and point to the toaster. Magel, magel, MAGEL!! So we toast one up and then he wants a banana and he knows what that is as well. He is also saying mmmmmmmik! for milk of course. He more or less gets a moo in there so that's fun to hear him say. What isn't so much fun is taking him to the grocery store, because he sees his favorite foods and he wants to eat them. He doesn't grasp the concept of keeping it in the cart and paying for it first, so he feels absolutely tortured being so close to a banana and not being able to eat it. Tragic for him personally and for the tantrum he's throwing in the grocery store. So, now I am watching him while Carrie does the shopping most of the time. He still loves fruits and vegetables first. But he does enjoy a good pretzel rod now and then like Grandpa.

Here is a short video of Q getting his groove on. It's not R&B but check those moves out. He loves the tunes and I love the fact that he's into music. He's impartial to the Dead but we just lost our free XM. We're going to get him started on Buffett in anticipation of the warm up that has to be around the corner. We are 4 sub 60 degree days away from setting the coldest winter on record.