MaxieC: The Man, The Mystery

The Mrs.: [first, turning down the music because she thinks she's my mother] "MaxieC has a little boy problem."

Me, CherkyB: "Oh? What's that?"

The Mrs.: "He zipped up his penis in his zipper."

Me, CherkyB: [crossing legs] "Oh. That hurts."

The Mrs.: "Yeah. I need you to go check on it. He won't let me anywhere near it."

Me, CherkyB: "Oh."

------

Me, CherkyB: "Hey MaxieC, I hear you got your junk stuck in your zipper."

MaxieC: "Yeah. It really hurts."

Me, CherkyB: "Are you unstuck now, or are you still attached to the zipper."

MaxieC: "I'm unstuck."

Me, CherkyB: "OK good. You'll be fine. You just gotta remember to keep your junk out of the zipper."

MaxieC: "OK Dah."

A half hour later...

The Mrs.: "Mumble mumble mumble your help."

Me, CherkyB: "Huh?"

The Mrs.: "Mumble mumble."

Me, CherkyB: "What do you need?"

The Mrs.: "Your help."

Me, CherkyB: "My help what?"

The Mrs.: "Your help."

Me, CherkyB: "'Your help' isn't a complete thought."

The Mrs.: "I need your help in here." [points to the floor in MaxieC's room]

Me, CherkyB: "That's a turd!"

The Mrs.: "Yes. And it's been stepped on."

MaxieC: "No it hasn't!"

Me, CherkyB: "Then why is it all squished flat?"

The Mrs.: "Is there any more poop hiding in here, MaxieC? Like in your pajamas? In the closet?"

MaxieC: "No, that's it."

The Mrs.: "AAAaaaaa!!!! It's all down your leg!"

MaxieC: "No! That's chocolate!"

Oh, the joys of footed pajamas.

MaxieC, Musical Humorist

MaxieC has been playing with my 3rd grade recorder. Tonight, he was tooting away, and suddenly he started waving it in The Mrs.'s face.

MaxieC: "It's a butthole!"

MaxieC: "Sniff it!"

MaxieC: "It smells like pooooop."

The Ever Supportive The Mrs.

MaxieC: "Mommy! I pooped my pa-ants!"

The Mrs.: "Of course you did."

I like my new tires

Yup. Very excellent in the snow, which we've had quite a bit of over the last three days. The Firestone Destination A/T's are definitely living up to their high (#2) ranking on TireRack. I drove The Mrs.'s winivan on Sunday in the snow, it it really underscored the difference. The stability control was constantly kicking in there, whereas I can drive the pickup in RWD through much nastier stuff with no troubles at all.

Being a pickup, it doesn't have stability control. What it has is a little knob that says "2WD, 4HI, 4LO". You leave it in 2WD until you slide off the road into the ditch, yelling, "Hold my beer and watch this!" Then you flip it to 4HI and drive back out.

I haven't had to do that at all this year. Which is good, cuz I hate spilling beer.

I believe that I may just very possibly finally have gotten the tire chains onto My Precious lawn tractor so that they don't fall off when I blow the snow with My Beloved. This morning was now the fourth time this season I have gotten to use My Beloved, and it was the first time one (same one every time) of the chains didn't fall off. The first time, I actually broke a link. After repairing that, I just couldn't get it to stay on. I even had to google for pictures to see if I was doing something wrong, but I wasn't.

I think you just have to put it on, drive a little bit, and if it's loose, tighten it up, and repeat for a while. That's what I ended up doing last time, and it is holding up nicely.

Not that you care.

I had a whole wonderful blog thought up yesterday when I was waiting for HannahC at her swimming lesson. It had to do with the relative popularity of sweatpants and sneakers vs. nice clothes and shoes among the mothers in the audience, and reasons for that disparity. But, I decided the majority of my readers (since Me, CherkyB, like daytime television, skews mostly towards the mommy crowd) would be offended by my observations. I'm like The View.

Only funny.

And not rabidly left-wing.

See above about funny.

We got our first blog Christmas card Saturday from someone I've never met but who has somehow, in a bizarre twist of fate, become e-pals with The Mrs. It included in it a sheet of paper with many photos of the fambly printed on it. Naturally, The Mrs. said, "Hey! A sheet of photos! We could do this!"

Naturally, by "we" she means "Me, CherkyB," as The Mrs. has steadfastly refused to learn how to lay out a bunch of photos on a page in Powerpoint, which is one of those skills that takes maybe 15 to 20 seconds to learn. In previous years, we've special-ordered custom Christmas cards with a photo of the fambly on the front from Snapfish, but we just haven't gotten off our butts to do that this year, and now it's too late.

So we'll be sending out store-bought cards. If you're lucky, The Mrs. will insert a page of photos in a blatant ripoff of the C, H, C-H fambly, but I wouldn't count on it. She's pretty lazy, and I post every decent photo I take onto the blog.

Oh, and MaxieC today decided that he wasn't really potty trained, and that it was more fun to play games on nickjr.com than to go potty. So he pooped himself at the compooter, and then peed himself a couple hours later. No compooter for him tomorrow.

A Thanksgiving Tradition

Somehow, I thought this year might be different. No Granny Moo Moo. No visitors at all. Just the four of us for a nice, peaceful Thanksgiving dinner.

We sat down to dinner, and as people were beginning to eat, I started to deliver my prepared speech on the meaning of Thanksgiving, as that is my job as the patriarch of the fambly. I had just gotten through thanking The Mrs. for "slaving away in the kitchen all day", and she had just finished interrupting me to assert, "two days!" when MaxieC ripped a big one.

I made a pithy comment about how MaxieC was also giving thanks in his own special way, and then I continued. However, I was having a hard time being heard, as MaxieC had started yelling, "Diarrhea! Diarrhea!"

The Mrs. got up to check. Yup. Diarrhea.

Mr. Hanky Visits for Christmas

Been a couple days since my last post. A couple fun-filled days, including Christmas itself. I'll have a comprehensive Christmas summary at some later date (probably after next Christmas), since these kinds of things tend to be a bit dull. Already, my life is too dull for AdSense context sensitive advertising, which is running hurricane relief public service announcements instead of cash-paying ads again.

Overall, Christmas went very smoothly. The childrens were both surprised that they did not get any charcoal in their stocking, unlike last year. This is mainly because I have a gas gill at the new house, and I gave away my old charcoal grill along with all the charcoal before I moved. So I didn't have any available.

HannahC got so excited that she kept thinking she was going to throw up. She would stuff her face full of Christmas goodies (cookies, candy, chips, etc.), and then run around like a crazy idiot for a while, then run to the bathroom and sit in front of the porcelain alter saying some prayers. I was pretty sure I was going to get a good barf-blogging story out of it, but alas, she held in her cookies.

When evening rolled around, I put MaxieC into the big tub so he could try out his Mater motor-oil can bubble soap and his foaming spray bath soap. Things were going along swimmingly when suddenly he yells, "I need to go poop!" I run him to the toiley, and he makes poop in there. Everyone is happy. Except I remember last time. I'm not going to leave a log in there to be found in the morning this time. I search all over the tub, pushing the toys and bubbles aside - no log. I examine and cross-examine MaxieC about whether he left a present in the tub. No log.

So I return him to the tub.

A little while later, he stands up. He's looking down into the water forlornly. What's up, MaxieC?

"I pooped!"

Oh crap.

There, just behind his feet, is a magnificent log. It's as big as his arm. Or, at least, it seems to be. I holler for The Mrs. I can't deal with this on my own. The poop. The boy with poop on his bottom. The toys. Too much for me.

The Mrs. comes up and immediately blames me for MaxieC pooping. She told me he wouldn't have pooped if I had been watching him.

Like he's never pooped in the tub when she's giving him his bath. She has a very selective memory, that one. I hear all wives are like that, but this is the only one I have, so I can't say for sure.

Anyways, my job was to fish out the bath toys and wash them. Seems simple, right?

How many toys were in the poop water?
	9
	24
	56
	71
	98
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Answer will be posted in a couple days. In case you don't know who Mr. Hanky is, he's the Christmas Poo.

Day 4 of 17 - 0 for 20ish

The potty training is going poorly. I'd like to issue a correction to a previous post. In that post, I talked about what a wonderful job MaxieC had done to poop on the potty. Well, one thing I did not mention was that he had been in the bath tub at the time of his declaration of needing to poop, and me yanking him out of the tub and setting him on the potty immediately. Oh, and it was a bubble-bath.

The next morning, The Mrs. calls down the stairs, "I think you missed something in the tub." I go to investigate.

There, sitting quietly along the side of the tub, is a poop log. A Code Brownie.

So I guess he was really 1 for 7 that day.

That remains his best day thus far. Monday and today he has had a zero success rate. Zero. The kid won't even sit on the potty for me. His mother can get him on for a little while, but he never does any bidness.

I am thinking it may be too soon. We shall see.

In other news, The Mrs. decided to take a bunches of MaxieC's old toys to the used toy store in order to make room for the new stuff for Christmas. She started collecting it last night, and MaxieC caught on to her pretty quickly and started hollering. Somehow, she assuaged his fears at the time.

This morning, she went off to the used toy store for like two hours (apparently, everyone in Fort TomCollins had the same idea, and they all saw the same weather forecast that said we'd have a blizzard for the next two days and decided to got there this morning). I got stuck making crepes for breakfast because of how long she was gone and on account of the fact she had promised crepes to HannahC.

Not that I'm objecting to making breakfast, mind you. I'll make breakfast with no objection. I object to crepes. Now, those of you who follow along probably figure this is because they're French, and I hate everything French just because it's French. Except French Canadians. I hate them because they're Canadians.

But I digress.

I hate crepes mainly because you can only cook one at a time, they take about 3 minutes each, and a meal is 5 of them. And with 3.5 people, you're looking at an hour (including mixing time). This is just a remarkably time-inefficient breakfast. Which is just fine for those French F'ks, cuz they have nothing to contribute to the world with their time other than sitting around making inefficient meals and, maybe, poking fun at the British and Spanish. I, on the other hand, had a brand new issue of America's First Freedom to read.

Anyways, in the middle of all this crepe cooking, The Mrs. came home. She was holding two puzzles in her hand, and I said, "Hey, don't we already have those?" She said, "Yeah - they didn't want these."

This is all MaxieC needed to hear. He started wailing, gnashing his teeth, and all that, about how he didn't want his toys to sold to the used toy store. He wanted them back. They were his. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.

So, The Mrs. applied time-tested logic.

She gave him the Rescue Rangers she had picked up at the store for him for Christmas.