Big Daddy Paul

I have always enjoyed watching the superbowl. Check that, I have always enjoyed superbowl sunday. Despite the great games in the past few years, the games are mostly lame. I do, however, enjoy hanging out with my best friends, eating super awesome food and, while I hate to admit it, I like to watch the superbowl ads. Don’t tell anyone, because the stay at home parent just watching the Superbowl for the commercials is so cliche. This year was no exception, although the game has certainly changed.

This year, the kids were there. We had about ten adults and six kids over, meaning you couldn’t swing a dead chicken wing without knocking over a child (and then wiping off the wing sauce.) Instead of getting drunk, betting on every play, yelling at the screen and eating myself into a partial coma, this year I got drunk, broke up fights, stopped one-year-olds from eating chalk and falling off the couch, and ate myself into a partial coma. Having kids at any event changes the essential nature of the event, but it doesn’t mean that the event is no longer any fun.

Sure, the days of wet tee shirt contests and jello shots at our house are gone, but in its place something oddly alluring has sprouted: parenting. During the game I got to teach Malcolm. I taught him how to check raise before the flop during the annual pre-superbowl poker game. I taught him how to read the score off the TV screen. I told him sad the people of New Orleans have been and how happy this football game was going to make them. I taught him what “squares” were and how if the Colts didn’t throw that last interception he was going to win $40. Then, I had to tell him that when you gamble you lose money most of the time. I taught him that you get to eat whatever you want on Superbowl sunday, even if that means your dinner consists entirely of chocolate chip cookies. (Thanks for the awesome batch Diedre!)

If you offered me the chance to, for one day, be childless again, I am not sure what my answer would be. Of course, I like jello shots and wet tee shirt contests. I like to watch football games without any distractions and swearing loudly whenever anything truly exciting happens. I like talking to my friends about things other than new teeth, first steps and who’s kid hit who. Seeing Malcolm actually watching the game, though, was pretty cool. Answering his questions about what was going on made the game fun in a brand new way.  I guess I’m actually glad we had kids there and I was able to share some experiences with Malcolm.

Oh wait, I’m not that guy. Give me a shot, a chair at the judging table and some chicken wings. Let someone else have fun with the kids.

I don’t want Malcolm to be an economist. Economists, with the exception of Amy’s dad, are well known to be immoral pleasure seekers who drink and gamble all day. Actually, that explains Amy’s dad perfectly. We sure wouldn’t want Malcolm turning out like that, would we? That’s why I am troubled by Malcolm’s continued trip down the path to mastering economics. Last time, he learned the law of diminishing returns through eating a grilled cheese sandwich.

This time, it’s opportunity cost and girlfriends. Economists would define opportunity cost as the value of the next-best choice available to someone who has picked between several mutually exclusive choices. Of course, we all know what economists do with their time, so I’ll break it down into language that non-degenerates can understand: If you do or buy something, then you can’t do or buy something else. The something else is the opportunity cost. If you buy a My Little Pony set, you can’t buy an ounce of weed with that money. If you go bowling, you can’t go to the strip club. Sadly, both of these examples are decisions Amy’s dad had to make last week.

The other day, I asked Malcolm if he played with his friend Clio at school. He said that he hadn’t because Clio only wanted to play kitties and he didn’t want to play kitties anymore. (Kitties is a game where Malcolm and Clio are the mommies and the toys in the schoolyard, dinosaurs and sharks included, are the kitties.) Malcolm said that he wanted to play “superhereeyoes,” a game in which Malcolm and his friends in the yard run around using their special “powers” to beat the living tar out of each other. Malcolm used to play kitties all the time, but now he seems a bit bored with it. He has decided that the opportunity cost associated with kitties (the value of beating the tar out of his friends) is higher than the enjoyment of playing mommy to a shark he pretends is a kitty. So, he has acted as a rational decision-maker, and chosen the option that gives him the most satisfaction. Judging by the large gash one of his friends took out of his cheek, I am guessing he needs to learn how to fight a little better. Maybe Amy’s dad can teach him, but that will be another lesson.

I went biking again today. Between the holidays and all the rain in the past few weeks, I haven’t been able to head out for a while. Determined to not the mistakes I have made in the past, I set out for some fun in the sun. My plans were almost shanghaied when my bike had two flat tires and I couldn’t find the tire pump. I knew it was in the garage but our garage looks like the inside of my colon, except with more spiderwebs. After poking around for 45 minutes, I found the pump, pumped up the tires, and decided that cleaning our garage was way overdue. (I remain blissfully ignorant about the ramifications of my colon being in its current shape.)

I started in a bit of a deficit when I noticed that I had grabbed Amy’s biking gloves for my outing. Since they are only partially frilly, I didn’t care all that much. I did feel just a tad extra pretty knowing that I was wearing ladies accessories. When I finally got out there, I had a great time!

An otherwise nice day

My Ipod expertly selected my favorite songs  (which sadly include selections from Twisted Sister, 2 Live Crew, and Erasure) while I nimbly navigated between the hordes of walkers that were enjoying the nice morning. I got a great workout, and knew so because I, for some reason, feel like I need to spit when working hard, and I spit many times during the ride. I also didn’t have to get off the bike and walk up any hills, so the outing was almost a complete success.

Almost is a pretty big word though for me, and I had another one of my moments. Blazing away around a turn singing (out loud) Weird Al’s opus to Star Wars, I encountered two women walking in the path. I announced my intention to pass on the left, but for some reason one of the women hopped right in front of me. Being a bit rusty, I jammed on the front brake. This had the foreseeable consequence of causing me to do a reverse wheelie and ended up ejecting me over the handle bars. I landed with the soft thud a pork shoulder makes when thrown onto the scale at the butcher, but managed to avoid any serious injury. Anxious to prove that I wasn’t hurt, I hopped right back up, looking at my legs to see if there was any residual damage. At precisely this moment, I realized that my fly was down (as it oft is) and immediately took corrective action. I also noticed the numerous trails of spit that had been collecting on my shoulder. I looked at them, they looked at me, and one of them asked if I was alright. I quickly hopped back on my bike, apologized for some reason, and then sped off. I was a tad irked afterwards, but smiled when I considered the story the two women would be relating to their friends:

A chubby cross dresser came barreling around a corner singing about Queen Amidala, screamed, “ON YOUR LEFT!” and then jumped over his handlebars. Then, he stood up looking like a confused monkey, zipped his fly, wiped his mouth on his shirt, grunted, “I’m sorry” and sped away. It was honestly the first time it had ever happened to me.

I think I am going to choose a new path next time I ride. Or maybe I’ll just find something to do that is less embarrassing.

Amy and I are the best parents in the world (some of the time.) When we are not the best parents in the world, though, we may be the worst. Some of the things that we do, or don’t do as the case may be, are so shockingly demonstrative of poor parenting that you would think we were accustomed to raising llamas.

For Christmas this year, I got Malcolm a shaving kit. It consists of a plastic razor, an old school shaving brush and a canister of shaving cream. The “shaving cream” is fake, it actually just spews out bubbles. The canister has a picture of Batman on it, so naturally Malcolm thinks it is the most badass present I ever got him. He loves to shave and enjoys the set every time he takes a bath. He is quite thorough, even shaving his forehead and between his eyebrows. I take great pleasure in this, because it’s really the only way for me to get him to put soap of any sort on his face. On paper, it was a brilliant parenting move.

My brilliance was counteracted by my subsequent failure to warn Malcolm about the dangers of real razors. The thought never even crossed my mind, so it was pretty shocking to find Malcolm in our bathtub last week with a thick stream of blood running from his bottom lip to his chest. Evidently, he resumed his shaving routine with Amy’s razor. I didn’t hide my emotion very well and afterwards had to explain to Malcolm what, “HOLY SHIT!” means. After cleaning off the river of blood from his body, I belatedly gave him the lecture on why real razors are dangerous and how his plastic razor is safe. From the amount of blood that he lost, I think he got my point. I then apologized for being a bad dad. Sometimes, I don’t think I’m even fit to raise a llama.