BK4Life

Wifey and I used to do a really good job of planning a menu for the week and then going on a big grocery trip with Little Man on Sundays. In the past 2 months we have fallen off the meal-planning wagon. This has led to a few different problems.

Problem the 1 st: Many a trip to the grocery store to pick up ingredients here and there. We are going to the local grocery store (luckily at the bottom of our street) about 4 times a week. Instead of one looong trip where we walk the entire store and get a ton of groceries, we are constantly running to and fro.

Problem the 2 nd: We end up getting fast food too much. Besides the relative lack of nutrition associated with the food that is fast, there is also the cost per person financially for the partaking of the neatly wrapped hand held fatty, salty, sugary foodstuffs. I am not sure you, dear readers, are quite aware of just how unhealthy fast food is. Oh wait, you may also not realize that the sky during a non-cloudy day happens to be a light blue, or that humans need air to breathe. Regardless of what you are or are not aware of, fast food is not what we want to base our health upon.

Problem the 3 rd: We are falling into a rut of expedient eating at home. We are making the same things over and over and over and over and over. I think even Little Man is getting tired of the same old meals coming across his plate. We have 4 or 5 really solid cookbooks that we used to draw upon to come up with some kick-ass dinners. Since we are just piecing meals together at the last second, we are making the things that we have memorized or just making it up as we go. These 2 methods are not bad, but they should not be the only methods.

Problem the 4 th: There are no left-overs that I want to bring to work with me. Since we are making the same meals over and over and over and over, I am tired of the typical. I need some interest. This causes me to eat out for lunches way too often. I enjoy the people that I happen to lunch with, but it is waaay too costly to eat with those jokers on a daily basis.

What I am getting at with these 4 problems is that I have no idea what Little Man and I will be having for dinner tonight. Wifey, conveniently, has a meeting this evening that has food. Most likely it is foods that will aggravate her tumor which in turn will punch her gall bladder in the proverbial “jimmy” causing her mush discomfort, but she will not have to figure out what to have for dinner. She is ever so lucky. Ever so. I will, on the other hand, be trying to convince Little Man that he wants a hamburger made by yours truly instead of a clown or a plastic monarch.

Who knew the King was “street?”

To recap:
Staring at a blank Word document does not help a post get written
Especially when I have only allotted 20 minutes to create a post for today
I am afraid, dear readers, that inspiration does not work on a timetable
Schedule it all I want and things won’t necessarily fall into place
I don’t like running
I don’t like scissors
And yet…

Inter-racialocityishness

One thing that I often forget is the fact that Wifey and I are an inter-racial couple. There are many reasons for this memory lapse, the main reason being that in Columbus, we don’t get stared at like we are circus freak shows on display for our aberrant union. It is rare indeed when we go out for dinner and are the only inter-racial couple/family in whatever restaurant we happen to be going to. The other reasons tend to come from my own whacked out philosophy and weird ideas about humanity, but today I am not going to get into the race politics in the U.S. more than saying, sometimes racial stuff comes up with my family from time to time. Granted, I get to say all this from a really privileged point of view though, being an adult white male in the U.S. between the ages of 25 and 45, and since I am in the power majority of the US (I am “the Man,” so to speak) it is very beneficial for me to say I don’t feel like dealing with the race issue. That way I can hire another white guy and feel okay about it.

Anyway… all that crap being said, this weekend was one of those moments where our inter-racialality was brought into sharp focus. There are places in the world where my family does not feel safe (hello, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, etc…), and there are places where we just don’t feel comfortable. This weekend was one of those discomfort escapades.

Wifey and I went to a wonderful wedding this weekend. It was a nice low-key affair with some great music and sweet and sour meatballs. The event was about 2 hours to the southwest of Columbus. I won’t mention town names because I don’t want to start a blog of name-calling (unless it is about making fun of Alabama that is a different story all together.). After the wedding, Wifey and I decided that we were going to grab a bite to eat. We went to the local mall to find some food. With Wifey’s gall bladder issues and recent tumor discovery we have found that fast food is really difficult for her to stomach, so we eschewed the food court and went to one of the restaurants inside the mall. As we walked though the mall to find our restaurant, I started wondering if Wifey’s tumor was visible. People were just starting at the 2 of us like… like… like they could see Wifey’s more than golf ball sized tumor pulsing with purple light (I am not sure it pulses with purple light, but it makes it scarier in my mind’s eye, so I go with it). Wifey had to stare down a few people on the walk to the restaurant. It is funny, usually when people stare and we confront them with a return stare (Wifey is better at this than me), they usually look away pretty quickly. There is always at least one 65+ year old white guy who will just keep staring, so offended by our union that he cannot look away.

The wait was only 15 to 30 minutes, so we didn’t forego the mall eatery and just head to a Bob Evan’s (which was plan B, ‘cause we are “down on the farm,” yo!). We did decide to wait outside of the restaurant since that is where the empty benches were. It was alarming to see all the people come in and stare at us sharing a bench in the mall, and to realize that we were only 2 hrs away from home. Again, there were many a person caught staring at the spectacle of inter-racialocity. Our inter-racialness probably burned holes in their retinas and corrupted their very souls. I like to think we left that mall with many a person tainted by our un-recommended and looked down upon, yet legal, union.

To recap:
Tomorrow’s 20 Questions Tuesday will be about “letters”
Little Man likes wearing shorts
We found a new restaurant for him on Friday
He likes the steak nachos with black beans and no cheese, guacamole, or sour cream
Come on people! A white man with a biracial/black woman should not be considered so weird!
I have all sorts of rose thorns in my left hand
The right one just has scratches
I have to work out tonight
Yeeee-uck

Name your price

It seems that bribery works. I am not a big fan of the process for moral reasons, but it seems that it works and therefore is a viable solution to some of our more entrenched Little Man behaviors.

Case in Point, the first: Little Man’s potty training.
So far Little Man has been fine about peeing in the potty. He especially enjoys when Papa and Little Man pee at the same time. Bonding at its finest. The potty training issue that we have been fighting against is pooping on the potty. He has adamantly been against pooping in the potty for the past 6 months. Wifey and I don’t know exactly what that is all about, but we have been wiping poo off his 3.5 year old butt for far too long. Enter the bribery. Turns out that Little Man, who will not listen to reason, he determined on his own, what his price is. He named it and we haggled, and now we pay him to poop on the potty. “His price?” you ask. Well, other than answering, “None of your Damn business,” or “Get yer own kid to bribe,” and also in realizing that I have started this line of thinking, I really should answer with “Special root-beer.” That is right. Little Man will excrete solid waste on a proper toilet receptacle for a shorty (8 oz) A&W Root-beer.

Turns out he would most likely sell us to street thugs for some root-beer from a can. It is good to know he has a price. It is better to know what that price is, so we can top it…

Case in Point, the second: Little Man’s sleeping situation
We are co-sleepers. This was not a decision that we entered into thinking that we wanted to be closer to our little one and help him feel safe and secure in his slumbering. This sleeping arrangement was a decision made purely out of necessity. I shall explain. Back in the wee Little Man days when we were just the typical happy-go-lucky parents of a typical little boy, we were on the path top sleeping freedom. We were reading the No Cry Sleep Solution book and implementing its ideas as we started to move the boy into his own sleeping quarters. We just are not “cry it out” people. Nothing against people who use that solution, it just was not for us. Some people like vanilla ice cream, some French vanilla ice cream, and some people like vanilla bean ice cream. mmmmm ice cream.... where was I? Oh yes, he was at about 6 hours of sleep on his own at night and then the rest of the night in our bed. It was working. His stays in his own bed were lengthening and the time that he was not in our bed allowed for some wonderous slumber.

Then the food allergies really hit. He was scratching himself awake at night due to the rashes and eczema reactions from his food allergies (we think the itchiness was mainly soy and the eczema was the egg). For 3 months we slept, Wifey on one side and me on the other holding his little arms down so he couldn’t scratch himself awake at night. It was horrible… just plain horrible. We finally figured out all that he was allergic to and he was not itchy, but the damage had been done. We left one of the developmental stages where he would easily transition to another bed.

We started the transition process again, but this time it was halted due to his asthma kicking in. When you have to give breathing treatments every 4 hours for nearly a year, you just put the kid in your bed and sleep as best you can, when you can. When we were finally on a pretty good maintenance routine with his asthma and food allergies, he had hit the terrible 2’s and the effin’ 3’s, that was not the time to introduce a new sleep pattern. Now, I recognize that some of these are rationalizations, and some are real reasons, but the end effect is that his bed is currently butted up against ours and we all sleep (to steal a phrase) like a pride of lions.

Which leads me to the next bribery. It seems that Little Man is enamored with a loft style bed… with a slide! There is a light at the end of the family bed tunnel and it is a loft with a slide. He likes the mission style loft in black (Twin Junior Loft with slide in the Mission style in black... Boy's got taste). Not our choice in color, but if it gets him out of our bed it could be pink with yellow polka dots. If Little Man can sleep in his bed on his own for a while (Wifey and I have not discussed the time frame yet) we will order the loft. He is on board with that.

To recap:
Took an hour to dig out and get the car moving today
Yeeee-uck
Happy Valentine’s Day to all who celebrate
Happy Single Awareness Day to those who celebrate
VD and SAD, that is just pitiful
Bribery could definitely pay off
Goodness Gracious! I hope so
Not much more to recap
Not sure what is for dinner tonight

Family Gifts

Typically we have to open my parent's gifts to us weeks prior to Christmas so as not to ruin the day of Christmas for me or my wife. Usually the crap they foist on us as Christmas presents gets either my wife or myself absolutely pissed off about the lack of thought and/or the cheapness associated with the gifts. For example, one fine Christmas we openned a lovely gift of a dirty t-shirt with sparkly cats on it that smelled like cigar smoke and a green vinyl table cloth that also smelled heavily of cigar smoke. Both of these fine items made it to the dumpster immediately after openning. More often then not we use their crappy gifts as some form of white elephant gift in one of our work related holiday gift exchanges.

This year, however, was oddly different. My parents actually got us a fairly nice gift. It is so appropriate that I am actually a little un-happy about openning it prior to Christmas morning. Turns out that they actually put a bit of thought behind this particular gift and that this gift will actually be useful in the long run for my family.

Now, the gift that they got my little boy, their grandson, was nothing to be envied by anyone, but that is a different matter all together. That gift's crappiness is a direct result of my mom's propensity to shop at Dollar General, The Dollar Store, The Dollar Tree, Crap for a Buck, Two Bits Four Bits Six Bits Crappola, etc... Now, I do not want to come off seeming like I think that my little one deserves expensive gifts from my parents and that something that is not made of gold with ivory inlays is clearly beneath his worthiness. What I am saying is that the "Look, here's something for a dollar, and I happen to have a dollar on me" mentality should not be the decision making process for finding a gift for a loved one. Cheap is not bad. Lack of thoughtfulness (thoughtlessnessocity) is bad.

This general cheapness and her general lack of awareness of age appropriate gifts is really how her gift choices tend to suck. When little man is trying to figure out the DVD player, 4 3 page soft crib toy books is not a good gift. This year's gift would have been good for last year, but now the gift is clearly too young for him to be interested in it.

I also do not want everyone out there in cyberland to think that I am just beating up on my mom for her gift choice, Dad doesn't even help her out, so the bruden of gifting rests with her alone. He is also culpable in the crappy gift giving due to his lack of activity.

So for this year... one out of two ain't bad.

Why visiting family sucks

The big reason that visiting with family sucks is that no matter how emotionally healthy one is on their own, when placed into their family of origin dynamic, there is always some regressing. Always

Old survival methods kick in and healthy behavior goes flying out the window to be hastily replaced with "I just gotta get through this in one piece" behavior. For me (at its worst), this means a whole bunch of shutting down, to where the only feelings left are those of hunger and physical discomfort. Most likely I will just be a bit short with the ones I love the most and be entirely way to sensitive about what is going on around my little one. When I am around family and large crowds of marauding barbarians, I tend to get a little over-protective of the boy.

For the day after Turkey Day I will be seeing my parents, my brother, his 2 kids and his new wife. It will be a mildly enjoyable day, but more likely, chock full of apprehension and dread. My brother's kids are good kids, just amazingly neglected. One seems to have resignedly moved himself to the background, while the other has been doing everything he can to get noticed (good or bad). My brother is incredibly indecisive, and has a difficult time thinking for himself as well as making decisions. His wife is just now realizing what she has married into, so she often seems the deer in head-lights to some of my family's behavior. My parents are 2 dreadfully unhappy people. They are good people, but are just not nice people. Anything they do not understand is belittled, and they do not understand a whole bunch. Therefore, they do belittle a whole bunch. The easiest way for them to feel better about themselves is to tear down others.

Therefore it sucks and equates to Hell and/or Purgatory. Whether I visit them or they visit me.