• Choice

    At nearly every turn, someone is giving you a choice. Every time someone gives you a choice, it’s like they’re doing you some great service. Politicians have made a political living campaigning on “choice.” I’m here to tell you that choice is not all it’s cracked up to be. That’s why, in this time of 3 a.m. feedings, I’ve engaged in a wardrobe simplification program. It works like this. You take the laundry cycle of your house (i.e. how often you do it) and select one t-shirt and undergarment for each day of the cycle. Then divide the cycle by two, round up to the nearest whole number, and select that number of shorts. By my calculations, you can get double the wear on a pair of shorts if you restrict your activities to the indoors. (Who wants to go outside and sweat twelve hours after a 3 a.m. feeding anyway?).

    The rewards of this program are two fold. First, there’s very little need to trouble your muddled mind deciding what to wear. Our household has a three day laundry cycle, so I only have to choose between one pair of shorts and two t-shirts (I’ll be wearing one of the pairs of shorts one of the t-shirts at the time). Even I can handle that. Second, laundry time is greatly simplified. I just take the heap out of the dryer and toss it in a corner. The key is finding a corner where your wife doesn’t look.

    One day, years from now, I’ll come across my Amicalola Falls t-shirt and wax sentimental. “That’s the shirt I wore after Adam was born.” You just can’t buy that kind of sentiment. It has to be nurtured over time – in this case, about three weeks.

  • Never discount the savvy of a mother of two

    I like to think I’m a decent enough guy, but my wife doesn’t call me the sultan of sloth for nothing. My history of drawn out, delayed, and down right ignored projects has reached legendary proportions (if only more people knew about it). So today Cheryl had a baby shower. Like many things in my life, it wasn’t exactly timely, but it’s the thought that counts. Who knew Adam would be a month early? So some of our friends bought us a changing table; a nice changing table, a nice changing table that required assembly. They brought it by before the shower, which was cool because it was a big box, and who needs anther big box to move around. Anyway, sometime between the box being dropped off and Cheryl leaving for the shower, she somehow learned that other people who had purchased this same table had some trouble putting it together – and they recommended an extra set of hands. I didn’t ask her how she knew this, I just took it on faith. Then she said the words that would shape fifteen minutes of my evening, “John, Butch said that he would help you put it together, so I think you had better give him a call.”

    Was she just calling me out? Am I crazy, or was she just questioning my manhood? Since before man migrated from the plains of Africa, settled the rivers of Mesopotamia, and perfected those cardboard sleeves that make your pizza crispy when you nuke it, man has distinguished itself from lower beasts by manipulating tools. Am I to believe my wife was reducing me to the level of lower primates? Just say it, I need help because I’m a bumbling boob. I SHOWERED AND SHAVED THIS MORNING, SO GIMME A LITTLE CREDIT!

    I resolved right then and there to put that thing together. I’ll show her! I’ll put that thing together before she gets back from the shower! That’ll put her back in her place!

    So I did it. It took me less than fifteen minutes. I felt vindicated. Then Cheryl got home; saw it was put together, and let slip a sly little smile.

    Our hero had been had.

  • War of the whiskers

    Last night I wrote an entry about shaving. It was very late. This morning I woke up and said good morning to my wife and children. The first words out of my wife’s mouth were not “good morning”, but rather, “you are shaving for my shower.”

    So I shaved. Some things are just not worth the effort. And seeings how the scrub was the product of sloth, we all know I haven’t been really big on effort this last week or so anyway.