The International Conspiracy to Make Me Late

I’ll start with last night, though this has been going on for a while, at my 4 year-old’s suggestion we ordered Chinese, and everyone is enjoying their food, we usually eat in our dinning room, which is really like 1/6 of our great room/ living room. I was making my own peanut sauce because I don't really like Chinese, so I got my fried tofu & broccoli sans sauce, so my wife was in charge of feeding the kids, now my 21 month old can feed himself, but he’s not proficient with utensils yet and mostly uses his hands, which is cool for finger sandwiches, chicken fingers and cookies but not the neatest way for him to eat vegetable fried rice, but my wife insists on letting him feed himself so about 50% of the food misses his mouth, 25% on his lap, 25% on the floor. I tell her to remember that if she’s going to let him feed himself that she’s responsible for cleaning up after him, and next time to feed him in the kitchen rather than the dinning room because no one wants food tracked all in the living room, in theory she has no problem with this, cool.
My four-year-old finishes his dessert, asks to be excused from the table, and goes to the bathroom to wash his hands, all good, but on the way he knocks the tray off of his booster seat adding a handful of brownie crumbs to the ¼ pint of vegetable fried rice his brother put on the floor, great game 7 of the Mets pennant series is already underway, no problem I can watch the game while I’m cleaning up the food off of the floor and my wife can take the kids upstairs and start getting them ready for bed, I’ll even help her out since I’m already on the floor and clean up the toddler’s mess. But then the four year old gags as he’s having a cup of milk and yaks up his beef stick & brownie in the hallway and then in the kitchen, great now I’ve got a good 20 minutes of cleaning to do, which usurps the time I was planning to spend putting away laundry, which means extra time trying to pick out his outfit for school tomorrow, so I tell my wife to take the kids and I’ll take care of the floors (this just made me remember that I have my sons puke spittle covered slippers in the washing machine waiting to be washed).
So I wipe all that shit up, mop the floors and thank god that we don’t have wall-to-wall carpeting.
I hear my big boy crying about something upstairs and my wife calls me up, he’s saying he wishes he could go back in time to a day a few months ago when he turned down an offer to go to Target with me saying, “You don’t need me to keep you company, you’re not going to be alone you’ve got your bones and muscles to keep you company.”
Wow, kind of a creative way of saying keep your own damn self company, I didn’t mind that he didn’t want to go shopping and that he wanted to stay home and hang out with his mom (shopping solo is way easier than with a kid in toe), but I explained to him that that wasn’t the nicest way to turn down an offer to do something.
So now months later he wishes he had gone and is sorry that he hurt my feelings, my wife and I both tell him it’s totally okay, you just have to realize that when you make a decision to do one thing it often means rejecting another thing, so make your decisions carefully. This does not make him feel any better, I think this was triggered by his realization that now that he’s in school full-time I do many things with little brother and without him, like a recent trips to Target and Costco. He basically wants me to come upstairs to and get into bed with him and my wife, which means leaving cleaning up the dinner dishes until some mystical time in the future, which means I’ll probably be doing them sometime tomorrow which means I may not have the bottles and containers I need to pack his lunch the next morning, which means I’ll have to hand wash them, which means I’ll be late getting him to school again, which means I’ll be batting 1000% for lateness this week, but he’s upset so I get into bed with them until he falls asleep and it makes him really happy.
I leave my wife and son asleep in bed and move the 21 month old in his crib, go downstairs to watch the second half of the game and clean up. The game is totally stressful and tight at 1 to 1 all game and the baby wakes up crying so I go get him and let him fall back asleep on my lap, so I’m not cleaning up during the commercials as I planned but honestly I probably wouldn’t have been done so anyway.
So of course being part of the international conspiracy to make me late the Mets can’t just loose in quick fashion but hold on until the 9th inning to give up a two run homerun, which I didn’t actually see because I could see the writing on the wall and nervously kept turning the channel when it looked like a Cardinal was in good position to get a hit. (In my channel surfing I saw part of a porno documentary on HBO where they interviewed some couple that started off as Christian Missionaries in the outer islands of Alaska, then moved to LA and wound up getting mixed up in the porno business, which they now have been doing for 25 years, talk about going from one end of the spectrum to the other, I have cognitive dissonance from going from someone who was barely employed and got high everyday, multiple time a day to an corporate employed urban hipster to a painfully sober suburban stay at home dad, I guess there’s always someone who’s done more and stretched themselves more than you have.)
So the Mets loose, I’m bummed I get to bed after midnight which means I’m getting like 5 ½ hours sleep again for about the 12th night in a row.
Baby wakes up at like 5:45 AM, I change his diaper, change his clothes because his diaper leaked through, put on a Bear and the Big Blue House video and get back into bed, not going back to sleep though.
Moving forward to 7:30 AM I make the kids bottles, my wife leaves for work, I bring them downstairs for breakfast, the baby’s highchair is still covered with food, my wife never cleaned it up and it’s raining outside so there’s no easy way to clean it up (I will often just take the chair outside and turn it upside down to get the food off), so I have to waist time picking sticky rice of chair and out of its crevasses, making us later.
I’ve taken to telling my preschooler to go potty rather than letting him wait until the last minute as he often does. So I already had him go but he didn’t poop, so I know that’s on the horizon.
One thing you don’t realize while the little ones are in diapers is that once you get them potty trained you still have a bunch of work to do because they don’t wipe themselves very well, they forget to wash their hands, or spend 20 minutes washing their hands, so basically you still have to monitor what they are doing when they go to the bathroom, so you save money, the yuckiness of changing diapers, and diaper rash but don’t really save time, plus when you are in public sometimes you wish they had a diaper on when you have to find the public restroom in a crowded store with a jumping and screaming kid who doesn’t want to have an accident.
Now back to the conspiracy to make me late, my big boy has taken to lying about having gone poop because he doesn’t want to take the time to wipe up afterwards. So we’re already about 20 minutes behind schedule and he has to go to the bathroom again, I’m shoveling food into his little brother, he goes, washes up and comes out, I ask what did you do, poop, pee-pee, both? He doesn’t answer, did you poop, he runs back to the bathroom, so he didn’t lie, but he didn’t wipe. A few minutes later he says he’s done wiping, we go up stairs to get dressed, I say let me check to see if you need to wipe anymore and he’s like, “NOOOO! You’re going to find more poop!” which I do, so basically we’ve got a serious not wiping his ass problem going on here which means I have to give us an extra half an hour in the morning to make sure I can monitor him in the bathroom, but since we’re always late already I’m not sure how I’m going to do that, actually I am, I need to go to bed at 10 PM rather than 1 AM and have even less of a life than I already do.
The toddler has added unzipping his jacket to his repertoire of stalling tactics, which may not seem like a big deal, but when you’re already loosing your mind, 10 minutes late, one second you have your two wards already to leave standing next to you having just put on their jackets and shoes and setting the house alarm and the next the one’s running away from you with his jacket off the alarm is beeping and you didn’t know he knew how to use a zipper, and you don’t know where the jacket is and it’s raining outside, trust me it’s annoying.
At least it’s not like the yesterday right before we were ready to leave when the toddler flipped himself off of my bed backwards hitting the back of his head on a night stand, or the day before when we were leaving to pick up his brother from school and I noticed the toddler laying on the living room rug face down, I tie my shoe and look again he coming towards me covered in vomit, and has somehow in 30 seconds managed to cover a 1 by 4 foot area of the rug in white curd like puke which I didn’t have time to clean up right away because we were of course already running late to pick up his brother and the school fines you for picking up your kids late. Mmm extra time for the rug to absorb the pleasant sour milk scent, just wonderful …