Our Milk Money

This week's Blog is over at http://ourmilkmoney.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

Mother's Day

Having a child gives a whole new meaning to Mother’s Day. It used to be “Okay, I have to call my mother and send her a gift.” But now there is a mother right in your own house. That’s TWO cards, TWO gifts, but probably still only one phone call. Still it’s like twice the work.

A few days before Mother’s Day my wife said, “We don’t have to go out to brunch on Sunday. We can just stay home.” Obviously I then immediately started pricing brunches and checking availability for Sunday. When a woman says you or we don’t have to do something, you better get going and do it.

Our daughter made my wife a nice present at school and I bought her chocolate and some bath stuff. I’m not really sure what it was. I got it at the mall and it smelled orangey and citrusey.

As I was paying for it the girl asked me if I wanted to buy gift-wrap and a gift bag. I said sure. Then she asked me if I wanted her to wrap the gift for me.
“Of course.” I replied, like that was a ridiculous question. She noticed.
“Sometimes people want to wrap it themselves,” she explained.
“Are they men?”
She laughed and shook her head. Then she wrapped the gift.

Sure enough on Friday my wife said she changed her mind and did want to go out to breakfast on Sunday. But the prices for brunch were insane, like $30 a person for pancakes. So we went out but too a restaurant instead.

But going to a restaurant with a toddler is like playing a game of Russian Roulette. Sometimes good, sometimes… not so good and someone has to be drug screaming out of the restaurant. Then my wife went back and got our daughter.

But that didn’t happen this time. Sometimes you get a pleasant, uneventful day and I was thankful for it. Bella was good at the restaurant, Audge liked her presents, including the wrapping, and we relaxed the rest of the day. We even called the “other” Moms who are now called Grandmom and Nana.

Now when my wife asks me if I want to go out for breakfast on Father’s Day I’m just going to say, “Yes.” See how easy that was? Oh, and no one has a Father’s Day Brunch. What’s up with that? I like eggs benedict too, you know.

"My Mom is Going to Kill Me!"

So we’re getting ready for the new baby which is coming July 15. We still don’t have a name picked out. But there are another million things to worry about so it’s not like I can spend a lot of time on it. I mean, not spending a lot of time obsessing about not having a name, not spending a lot of time actually picking one.

So we’re getting the house ready. I’m looking my office so we’re converting the garage. We’re having problems with the contractor but that’s another blog. Also in the garage is all the baby stuff put away for the next one. Yes, “The Next One” is now the official placeholder name for the baby.

So we looked at the crib to make sure it looked OK for round two. We hoped The Next One would like it. Then my wife said, “I have to find the screws.” Fine. She originally had taken them from me “to put in a safe place” so if and when this day would come she could find them with no trouble. Cut to:

“I can’t find the screws.”
“I thought you put them in a safe place.”
“I did.”
“I guess they’re really safe then.”
Never rile up a pregnant woman. Lesson 3,678. She then proceeded to tear the house apart looking for the screws. No luck.

After hours of searching my wife actually said, “I can’t find the screws. My Mom is going to kill me.” I thought I had heard her wrong. “Did you just say your mom is going to kill you for losing the screws to the crib?”
“Yes, she helped pay for it and if we have to buy a new one she’ll torture me about it.”
“You have your own house, you’re almost 40, and your Mom is 3,000 miles away,” I calmly pointed out, “Plus, your sister is finally getting married this year and has started to plan the wedding. That puts the target on her back for a while.”

OK, so it would suck if we had to buy a new crib. But I wasn’t worried. I would just call the manufacturer on Monday and order replacement screws or take the parts list and replace the screws myself at a hardware store. None of those arguments work on an upset pregnant woman.

Sadly, my mother-in-law still had the power to upset my wife no matter how far away or how trivial the item. I thought it was getting better with time and distance, but no dice. It’s like that bond between Penny and Desmond from “Lost”, except in a bad way. I just wanted to hide in “The Hatch”.

Then crisis number two hit. A friend of mine e-mailed me and said the cart on my new web venture wasn’t working. www.comedyfilmnerdsdotcom.com in case you were wondering. So now I break out into a cold sweat and try to see what is going on, call my partner, who was surfing (not web surfing, actual surfing), and in the background hear my wife run around like a large round Tasmanian Devil as she looks for crib screws.

As this was all going on our three year old daughter fell asleep on the couch without a pull-up on. She’s potty trained, just not when she sleeps.
“Did you at least put a towel under her?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I SHOULD have asked “Did you put a towel under the part where the pee comes out?”

So my wife was in the garage still looking for screws. I was on the computer, tearing at my hair, trying to figure out why the cart wasn’t working.

Our daughter was asleep on the couch. Or so we thought. Audge had given up on the garage and came back inside. But Bella wasn’t on the couch. She came in the office looking for her. I told her she wasn’t here. It’s not like we have a big house. It doesn’t take that long to search it. That is, if you’re not obsessed with tiny IKEA-like crib screws. Audge looked for Bella and found her in our bedroom.

Bella had woken up disoriented and peed on the couch, around the towel. She then got up, walked to our bedroom and then got on our bed. She then finished emptying her bladder in the middle of our bed. She had picked the two worst places to have an accident. It was like strategic, surgical peeing. Since my wife wasn’t even in the house, she missed both payloads.

Why our daughter felt she had to mark her territory like an angry coyote we have no idea. I just don’t know where she got so much pee. It was almost as if she had invited the neighbor’s kid in to do some of the peeing for her.

Eventually both problems got resolved. Audge found the screws and I fixed the website. But now there was a lot of cleanup, laundry and scrubbing to be done. Thank God! We were getting so bored during our nice relaxing Sunday.

So what did we learn? Because my wife, at 39, was afraid of her mom finding out she lost the screws to the crib and because the cart on my website wasn’t working we now have pee all over the house. If there is a lesson here, I’m not really sure what it is. All I know is that it somehow involves toddler urine, the internet, and guilt. This will be a good story to tell The Next One.