Hyperbole and the Best Damn Sweet Potato Casserole Recipe Ever

It has been brought to my attention that there are some TRS readers out there that have taken offense to some content in the Speed Bump Chronicles. They feel I have painted Jen as a bad mother and, maybe because of what I’ve written, some of them actually think that she is a bad mother. So let me set the record straight: these people are dumb.

For starters, Jen is a wonderful mother. Check out the really cool scrapbook she made of Kaitlyn with Smilebox:

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

She also reviews the weekly updates and could at any time ask that I not post something. She usually finds that I’ve captured our mundane suburban lives in my usual satirical way. For those of you that actually think Jen keeps a freaking blender in the diaper bag, maybe I need to clarify my usual satirical way.

/ˈsæt^ər/ Pronunciation Key[sat-ahy^uhr] –noun the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

In the “or the like” category, I would include hyperbole, which is a literary device that uses extreme exaggeration. For example, I don’t really think my wife is a “traitorous bitch” any more than I think Barack Obama really has a picture of Osama Bin Laden hanging above his fireplace. Both are overstating the case just a bit. So let's move on.

I remember walking to my car one day after work several months ago and telling a buddy of mine whom I hadn’t seen in a few months that Jen and I were expecting. He's talked to me in the past about some of the “friction” he and his wife have had with his daughter who is now in college. Despite this, he made a point of telling me “I fell in love with my little girl the moment she was born”. This certainly makes him a lover, which meant a lot more knowing some of the challenges he recently faced raising his girl. I remember thinking that he was surely overstating the case. I’ve since been proven wrong on that as I too have fallen in love with my precious little oracle, even when she spits out her rice cereal at me.

Two weeks ago Kaitlyn had her four month checkup with the pediatrician. She gave us the green light to get started with baby food. Jen was tickled pink. For some reason she’s been counting down the days until feeding the baby required more effort than just watching TV in the lazy boy and holding a bottle. There I go again with the hyperbole; Kaitlyn has been holding her own bottle lately. Just like everything else though, I was behind the curve on this one. She was right, I was wrong. Baby food is pretty cool stuff when it's not rice cereal.

Who can really blame someone for not wanting to eat rice cereal? There’s no sugary goodness, no snap crackle pop, no fun pictures or stories on the back of the box. It's just...rice masquerading as "cereal", and it turns out that, despite the fact that our child puts everything in her mouth and has been living on breast milk and formula her entire life, she is not fooled one bit. But let me tell you what she can do with sweet potatoes and carrots.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case I think I’ll stick with the thousand words. Watching this child eat sweet potatoes and carrots is like watching a drug addict looking for her next score. As soon as that spoon hits her lips her eyes get big and she does this little wiggle dance in her chair like you just fed her a spoonful of pure joy. You have about two and a half seconds to get that next spoonful in her mouth or the detox process begins. You don’t want the detox process to begin. The little lip starts to quiver, the eyes get angry, and she starts to wail. While entertaining, that is nowhere near the best part yet. It gets better.

Within about an hour, the Fuzzy Headed Oracle of the Poopy Pants earns her full title. On formula alone this child was pooping about five times a day. The doctor told us that the baby food should slow things down a bit. She didn’t tell us it would also get us on Leno. This morning, not even an hour after being fed, Kaitlyn shit a carrot. Pureed baby food went in, a perfectly shaped conical orange log came out. If you took a picture of a carrot with the best camera on the market, emailed it to that fancy photo printer down at Target, and picked up an 8X10 glossy an hour later, it wouldn't look as good as the carrot that came out of my child's ass. And I'll be damned if it doesn't take longer too. This morning I thought it was a fluke, a one time deal. Then, this afternoon I gave Kaitlyn a serving of sweet potatoes. Within an hour, a casserole dish of the best looking yams you'll ever see. This takes Oracle to a whole new level.

Of course, I might be overstating the case just a bit.

Technologically Challenged

When Jennifer and I decided to move to Texas, we were also deciding to move 1200 miles away from our families. This of course has some inherent advantages and disadvantages, many of which should become apparent by the time you finish reading this. From the family’s point of view, one of the disadvantages now that Kaitlyn is here is of course a lack of access to their grandchild/niece. I think this has hit the grandmothers hardest of all.

A few weeks ago my wife was talking to her mother. She was waxing on about a friend of hers who also recently became a grandmother and who is also geographically challenged when it comes to seeing the little one. But every morning this friend has breakfast with her daughter and grandchild through the miracle of the Internet. “Oh by the way our new laptop has a built-in camera”…hint hint. This got me thinking, and last week I went up to the media room, dug through a box of miscellaneous technology I have sitting in the closet, and found…tada!...my webcam I bought seven years ago in college.

I’ve been out of the videoconferencing circuit for awhile, so attaching the web cam to the computer left me with a bit of a conundrum: what software should I use? Surely there have been some advances in videoconferencing technology in the past seven years. I think the last time I used the web cam I was using Microsoft Netmeeting. The video was choppy at best and it was usually easier to call the person you were conferencing with rather than deal with the shoddy audio of a video conference. To my disappointment, my usual go-to source for software solutions does not appear to have anything in the way of video conferencing, not even in the Google Labs. So I did an old fashioned Google search and decided to try Skype.

For those of you who’ve used Skype before, you know how easy it is download, install, and set up a free account. It’s very similar to downloading GoToMyPC or AOL Instant Messenger in that you follow a setup wizard to create an account, install a small piece of software, and you’re off and running. I told my wife to call her parents and tell them to install Skype. My father-in-law was taking a nap when Jen called their house. He is the designated technologist in the household, and grandma was quite adamant about not waking the sleeping giant. We got tired of waiting and went to bed.

Sometime the next day we got a phone call. Grandpa was ready for his close-up. We brought the Fuzzy Headed Oracle to the office and with amazing ease, dialed up the grandparents. A lot has changed in seven years. The video quality streaming in from California was about as real-time as it gets; none of that hokey every fifth frame stuff we saw during the first Gulf War when correspondents would report using a videophone. And the audio—it was just like being on the phone. For an hour we broadcast Kaitlyn in all her glory, scooting across a blanket on the floor and sitting in her Command Center.

On most Sunday evenings you’ll find my grandfather, a.k.a The Silver Fox, at my parent’s house for dinner in Orange County. Having had success web casting with one set of grandparents I knew it was only a matter of time before I got the disgruntled phone call or the snappy email from my parents—specifically my mom—saying “how come we don’t get to see Kaitlyn on the computer?” I decided to head this one of at the pass and maybe even kill two birds with one stone. While Jen was at work Sunday afternoon, I called my house.

As predicted, the Silver Fox was there for dinner, but my dad was still working. I asked my mom, a.k.a. Miss Daisy, if she wanted to see Kaitlyn scoot. Normally she wants nothing to do with computers once she’s left work, but the thought of seeing her granddaughter LIVE ON THE BIG SCREEN must have appealed to her. She and the Silver Fox eagerly marched up to the room formerly known as mine.

Over the next thirty minutes or so we somehow managed to get Skype installed on my parent's computer, a process that ended with this conversation:

Sean: “Is it done?”

Mom: “Yes. It wants my Skype name.”

Sean: “You need to set up an account.”

Mom: “How do I do that?”

Sean: “There should be a link that says set up new account or I don’t have an account or something to that effect.”

Mom: “No, it just wants my Skype name.”

Sean: “See where it says ‘Skype Name’?

Mom: “Yes.”

Sean: “Just below that, it doesn’t say ‘Don’t have a Skype name?’?”

Mom: “Oh yeah, there it is.”

Sean: “Kaitlyn, when you learn to read make sure you learn how to read ALL THE WORDS”.

Mom: “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”

Once we finally got the web cast up and running, I set the Fuzzy Headed Oracle in her Command Center and she pushed some buttons which caused a series of LED’s to start flashing with some sound effects.

Mom: “Kids these days can’t just sit and be, they have to have constant stimulation.”

For the love of Pete. My mother is turning into one of those people that would have me surrender the color pixels in our television because she didn’t watch color TV in 1955. Along those lines I asked her, speaking of constant stimulation, to remind me how big her brand new 47” LCD COLOR television is with flashing lights and sound effects??

Mom: “That’s different.”

Of course it is. I know, I know, don’t talk to your mother that way. I’ll probably get voted off the family island now.

As if this all weren’t excitement enough, my dad, a.k.a. The Cozy Bear, came home. Grandpa Cozy is ultimately responsible for the Fuzzy Headed Oracle’s morning Star Trek habit. It didn’t faze him one bit seeing baby Kaitlyn sitting in her Command Center, pushing buttons that open trap doors underneath grandma. His first comment was critical, but not of the technology his granddaughter was enjoying (after all, in 1966 his favorite program was aired in color). His comment was critical of the technology we were using: “Can’t you clear up that picture?”

And not to be outdone, grandma weighed in as well: “yeah, it looks like you’re broadcasting from Iraq.”

I’m so glad Kaitlyn and I took this opportunity to chat with Frank and Marie. Clearly these people have no appreciation for how far videoconferencing has come in the past seven years. Star Trek has spoiled them! I pointed out that my camera was not exactly representative of the most up to date technology.

Mom: “Well can’t you get a new one?”

Sean: “Maybe the grandparents will buy us one so they can see their granddaughter better!”

To make an excruciatingly long story a little bit shorter, they did. I must admit, the new camera is much better. And the best part: it has a built-in flashy LED light. Kaitlyn loves it.

The Fuzzy Headed Oracle

About three weeks ago, I took this photo of Kaitlyn sitting up by herself on the couch. I set it as my desktop wallpaper on my laptop and when one of my coworkers saw it, she said she looks like a little Fuzzy Headed Oracle.

Since then, the FHO has practically taken over our daily work tasks. When we get pointless assignments, hear about absurd management decisions, or just get to a lull in the day we consult the FHO. I thought about having some bumper stickers made that say WWTFHOD?

At home I used to call Kaitlyn "Princess Poopy Pants"--for obvious reasons. Now I call her the Fuzzy Headed Oracle of the Poopy Pants, which I think is a promotion.

It's Your Turn

My wife is an elementary school teacher by trade. She earned her Bachelors degree in Liberal Studies from Cal Poly and has valid teaching credentials in both California and Texas. If you were to add up all the days she’s actually worked in the past year, I don’t think you’d need more than two hands to do the math. It’s not her fault. The plan was for her to resume life as a substitute teacher here in Texas upon our return home from England last fall. Unfortunately nine months of nausea meant a different plan. By the time she had the baby and was ready to resume school, there were only about two weeks left until summer break. Again, not her fault. But it turns out all this unscheduled unemployment has taken its toll on our bank account, so I sent my wife back to work.

One of my favorite things so far about fatherhood is the hand off. It’s most apparent on weekday afternoons between four-thirty and five O’clock. That’s when I usually come home from earning the money to pay for the diapers and the formula and the dog food (crap, we’re almost out of dog food) and the electricity and the water…you get the idea. As I push the button to open the garage door I utter a sigh of relief, “ah, home sweet home”. I pull into the garage, pondering what stuffed animal my dog will bring me as a welcome home gift today. I get out of the car and walk to the door. In one hand are my keys and the mail, in the other, my empty lunch bag. Closing the garage door behind me, I stop in the laundry room to put away my sunglasses, badge, keys, and blue tooth. Look at that, I now have a partially free hand. Hallie greets me with one of her toys. I don’t dare acknowledge her yet, she’s too excited and would pee on the carpet. I walk into the family room, anxious to be kissed by my wife and greeted by my little princess. Pay close attention, here comes the hand off. With eyes on my partially freed hand, my wife, sitting with the child in the lazy boy, holds her high in the air. “Here’s your princess, she has a poopy diaper. It’s your turn!”

What the hell happened to “give her to me”?

It seems being a stay at home mom was taking it’s toll on my wife, so I sent her back to work.

Having mommy work nights and weekends has hastened the daily hand off, but it’s improved household morale. For example, Kaitlyn and I are celebrating diaper bag liberation. For some reason my wife packs enough accoutrements in that thing to cross the Sahara. When we’re out together I always end up on the wrong end of a hand off, after all, it’s my turn. I remember one especially frustrating experience in the family restroom of Target. Kaitlyn had what we affectionately refer to as a “blow out”. That means there was shit everywhere, literally.

I took her into the bathroom and flipped down the changing table. I carefully placed our changing pad on top and then put the disposable changing cloth on top of that, just like mommy taught me. I extracted the child from the stroller and placed her on the changing pad with a robotic lift and twist maneuver that kept her literally out at arms reach. This was for her protection and mine. I tried carefully peeling off her clothing so as not to smear crap all over both of us. I failed. By the time the outfit came off she had shit on her head.

It's a funny thing about family restrooms; they give you your own room with a handy dandy changing table, but that’s it. If you need to set anything besides a baby down in there, you’re shit out of luck, so to speak. I needed to put the soiled outfit in the sink, but the sink was covered by the diaper bag. I knew there were plastic bags in the diaper bag, but it was across the room and if I let go of Kaitlyn I knew she’d make more of a mess. I decided to start with the mess. I took off her diaper and started the cleanup effort. Once satisfied that she would not be able to smear crap on anything else, I decided to look for a bag.

It's a shame I was alone in there with just Kailtyn. What followed would have been a great magic act. I felt like Bullwinkle trying to pull a rabbit out of my hat. I pulled out clothing for a blizzard, clothing for a day at the pool, a formal outfit in case a spontaneous wedding took place at the cash register, a rubber duck, a bath tub, a flashlight, freeze dried ice cream, and a blender, because you never know when you’ll want a margarita. There was not one single plastic bag, at least not that I could find.

Meanwhile back at the changing table, Princess Poopy Pants decided to pee, soiling herself (again) and all of the accessories I was using to change her. So now I have a soiled child, a soiled changing table, and no place but the toilet or the sink to put her while I clean things up. To top it off, I still had a poopy outfit and no place to put it. I was up shit creek without any plastic bags. In a balancing act worthy of the big top, I managed to get the child—and myself—cleaned up. But I learned my lesson.

Daddy and Kaitlyn had a lunch appointment yesterday afternoon with some neighbors. Since mommy had to work, it was finally my turn to decide what was worthy of the magic diaper bag. I took out the spare tire, the encyclopedias, and the army meal rations and packed only what was necessary for the two hour outing to a restaurant. Not only could I find everything, the bag actually fits in the car now.

This is the first weekend mommy has worked both Saturday and Sunday, which made daddy’s weekend chores a little more of a chore to complete, especially with a lunch date. The top priority this weekend was the yard: the back yard needed some fill dirt, the side yard had a broken sprinkler pipe, and the front yard needed to be mowed and trimmed lest we get a nastygram from the HOA Nazis. By the time mommy left for work Sunday afternoon, daddy was way behind schedule. The dirt was done and most of the beer was gone but that was all. To make matters worse, Kaitlyn did not get her morning or afternoon nap. Add that to the 95 degrees plus the 45% humidity and the afternoon was heading downhill fast. After a quick trip to Home Depot, Kaitlyn hung in there for the sprinkler repair, but then she started getting fussy. Half of my garage was out on the driveway, dirt needed to be swept up, and Kaitlyn was sitting in her stroller in the garage wailing like an air raid siren. Neighbors were coming outside and, upon hearing the commotion staring at me as if I was unaware of the squealing noise leaking out into the cul-de-sac. I did my best to get everything cleaned up and put away so I could bring the poor abused child inside to scream and be miserable. I finally got her down for an afternoon nap and the rest of the evening went quite well.

About twenty minutes ago mommy came home. I heard the garage door open and saw Hallie scramble to find a present. Then the phone rang. It was my wife.

“Would you like me to leave your car outside tonight? There’s a stroller in your parking spot.”

Dammit. In all the chaos of fixing the sprinklers, sweeping the dirt, putting away the tools, absorbing nasty stares from the neighbors, and bringing the screaming child back in the house, I forgot to move the stroller out from the middle of the garage. Touché

But she was still on the phone.

“Do I need to come out there and move it?” I asked.

“Are you busy?” she replied.

No, now that I think about it, I think it’s my turn anyway.

Mommy Doesn't Know Everything

Yesterday, Kaitlyn celebrated her sixteenth week of life and she’s already following in her father’s footsteps. Here’s a summary of her travels and experiences so far:

• Two minor league baseball games
• Lyndon B. Johnson Lake
• Southern California
• Austin and a tour of the Texas Capitol
• San Antonio Riverwalk
• The Alamo
• Fredericksburg, Texas
• First airplane ride
• First emergency room visit
• First ear infection
• First laceration

That’s not even including the time she spent in Europe while in the womb. We’ve had our share of good times so far, and a small dose of trauma.

We traveled in late May to California to have Kaitlyn baptized. We returned with an ear infection that earned us a trip to the emergency room with a fever of 104. If you want to see a new mom freak out, show her a thermometer that reads 104. Another way to make a new mom freak out: show her blood. This afternoon Jen was trimming Kaitlyn’s fingernails and accidentally missed one and hit the finger instead. All ten are still accounted for, but there was enough blood drawn to cause a stream of tears and a moment of hysteria. Kaitlyn cried a little too. If nothing else, these little incidents serve to remind mommy that she’s not alone, and she doesn’t know everything.

When we first brought Kaitlyn home from the hospital, she barely weighed five pounds. My wife was literally afraid to touch her. I’ll admit, it was hard to get a handle on something that small, especially since it liked to squirm. One of the nurses referred to Kaitlyn on her birthday as a "little jelly bean". For at least the first two weeks of Kaitlyn’s life, I was the go-to guy for just about everything. I even tried breastfeeding once. It turns out mommy does know a thing or two about that one.

I changed Kaitlyn’s first diaper. I bathed her for the first time. After she ate, my wife would hand her off to me to burp her. At bedtime I was the one that swaddled her. When Kaitlyn was fussy and nothing else seemed to work, daddy came to the rescue because daddy watched The Happiest Baby on the Block about four times, once in slow motion. I was useful. I knew things. Then over the last four months, something happened: my wife became an expert…on everything.

Now if I sit with the child, mind my own business, and she starts to cry, my wife can’t hold back her expertise: turn her on her side, pat her bottom, she needs to burp, she needs to crap, sit her up, lay her down. It always ends the same way: GIVE HER TO ME, which is like the triple dog dare of parenting. It’s not just the words, it’s the tone. It’s the same tone she uses at the end of an argument when she says “fine”. “Fine” at the end of an argument does not mean everything is fine. It means, “fine, you're sleeping in the tub". That’s the tone I’m talking about.

To compensate, I like to think I go the extra mile with the little things I do still know. For example, I always seem to be qualified to change a poopy diaper, especially if I've been hiding at work all day. No problem, I embrace it. I treat changing poopy diapers like an Olympic event. Mommy sometimes takes five or ten minutes to change one. She must be buffing the child's ass because I can get it done in about 60 seconds. Of course, according to mommy, I put the diaper on wrong most of the time.

A few weeks ago my wife asked me to change Kaitlyn's clothes. She already picked out a dress for her to wear and laid it out on the bed. I was honored. The outfit my wife picked out was a little dress with all snaps. I set Kaitlyn on top of it (after changing her poopy diaper of course), put her arms through, and snapped it up the front. I carefully double-checked her diaper to make sure I’d met all of mommy’s requirements, then triple checked that I had all the snaps lined up properly--apparently that’s a big deal too. After a thorough inspection, everything looked good. Kaitlyn even had a smile on her face. I proudly marched to the living room. My wife took one look at us both, shook her head, and told me the dress was on backwards. No gold medal for that event.

I’ve thus come to cherish the little traumas, when I hear "do something" instead of "give her to me". When the fever hit 104 it was daddy that drove to the hospital and daddy that carried the little girl into the ER while mommy parked the car. Today, when mommy cut off the child’s finger, it was daddy that calmed her down; then I calmed the child and put the band aid on.

By the way, daddy still does most of the bathing. Mommy hasn't mastered THAT yet!