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:

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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.