So my oldest boy, Fletch, is almost three years old. My youngest, Riley is six months. Currently, my fantastic wife is out of town for a week. So this week I am Mr. Mommin it up. You don’t realize how much effort kids really are until you lose half your team!
You see – the problem is now I am outnumbered. It’s two on one right now– its coming full speed, and the two little Holder runts are plotting a takeover of the family estate.
The night my wife left, I thought “I got this, no prob.” That night, after 452 episodes of Sesame Street, I finally got Fletch to bed at 10pm. The baby woke up at midnight screaming bloody hell as he wanted that bottle he loves so much. I hooked him up with his babba, swaddled him up in my straight-jacket style wrap and then bounced him on the overgrown yoga ball til he nodded out. At three am, he was hungry again. Ok, now I have figured out how to prop his babba up on a pillow and lay him sideways in his cribby so he can eat and pass out simultaneously. All good.
At five am, Fletch is up in my grill whispering “dada, lets go out back and hit baseballs.” It’s five am. It’s dark outside. He says it again. I get up, hit the coffee button and head out back and turn the pool lights on so we can see, and we hit baseballs.
While we are doing this, the baby wakes up and wants the hell out of his cribby. As I go to take him out, I step on something that sticks to my foot. For the umteenth time, I have hit the one spot that one of our eight hundred dogs likes to poop on.
Baby in one hand, Kleenex scraping the poo off my foot in the other, wondering where on God’s green Earth my fricking coffee is, Fletch starts screaming outside. We run out to find that he has thrown his bat up in the lemon tree a good eight feet up and is beyond distraught at this event (which he self inflicted).
I put the baby in his little jumpy thing outside and proceed to get the bat. Riley starts yelling and I look over and see that our dog Chaplin is peeing on his jumpy and our other dog Gummy is licking the baby’s face like the owl in the old school Tootsie Pop commercials.
OMG, it isn’t even seven in the morning.
I say to both my boys and my posse of mutts “That’s it, dada is going to enjoy his coffee and watch Sports Center. You are all welcome to join me.”
It is at that point that Fletch looked at me serious as an uninsured motorist and said “Dada, I don’t like your attitude.”
I have not laughed that hard in a long time. Kids are awesome. It’s hard work, selfless efforts, sleepless nights, long days, but so worth it – I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
I just need my wife to come home…….:)
