Little Ear Drummer Boy............

While Keith and I were at a baby shower (FYI, First and last time I start a sentence off that way), I found out that Cole busted his ear drum. Crazy, right? Well, I'll get to Cole's ear in a minute, but let me attempt to justify my involvement in the baby shower first:

A) It was a couple's shower, and there were actually more guys than girls there.

2) I helped plan the event, and we came up with games such as a baby toss, baby pictionary, a grab bag jar of baby food race, and a baby-bottle beer chugging race. (A race in which I came in a dismal 4th place out of 4 people. If you would've told me ten years ago that I'd finish dead last in a drinking contest at a baby shower, I would've punched you in the face. And I wasn't even a close 4th. It took me an awkwardly long time. I haven't felt that inadequate and pitied since I was a fat kid playing basketball, and everyone would cheer for me when I scored. Not just our team's parents would cheer, but the other team's parents, the other team, the janitors, everyone would stand up and clap. Thanks for the gesture everybody, but I'm just fat; I'm not retarded.)

D) Deviled Eggs!!

So after about 7 hours of baby showering ('baby showering' looks a little strange as a verb, no?), Keith and I were sitting there, watching a UFC fight (yes, I'm still trying to boost the perceived manliness of the baby shower), and Rach calls me. Now at this point, to my knowledge, Rach and a friend were taking the kids to the movies at around 7pm, although that was not what the tone of the following conversation led me to believe.

Rach: Where are you at? (Not the time to point out that she ended her sentence with a preposition.)

Me: We're still at the---

Rach: What?@! Yall better get your @sses home, right now! I just left the hospital! Cole's got a busted ear drum, and I'm at Walgreens getting his prescription!!

Me: Wait. What happened? Is he---??

Rach: (Click)

So Keith and I ran out of there faster than you could say, "I'm scared to death of my wife."

So what happened to Cole, you ask? We still really have no idea. They were all in the theater watching the movie, and Cole started complaining that his ear hurt. It started hurting so bad that he went to the bathroom and threw up. The doctor said it looked like his ear drum had been busted for quite some time, but there was no way to tell when or why it happened. Cole hadn't complained of any ear pain, and said he didn't remember doing anything that would've caused it. (This is why I need to become a doctor. For situations like this. I think med school will pay for itself with the money we save on ER visits alone.)

Apparently, Rach's distress stemmed from the fact that Cole had just puked all over the floor in Walgreens, and she'd be damned if I was going to have any fun while she was cleaning up half digested popcorn and JuJuBees.

So the next day (Cole was fine, by the way.), Keith and I were joking around with Cole about his puking episode:

Keith: So you just puked right in the middle of the aisle?

Cole: (Kind of sullenly) Yeah.

Me: Did they come over the loudspeaker and say, "(Squawk) We need a cleanup on aisle 2, cleanup on aisle 2."

Cole: (still somber) No, it was aisle 9.

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On Sunday, in order to get back at me for having fun the night before, Rach made me watch A Walk To Remember. Quite possibly, the girliest, most depressing movie ever made. Nicholas Sparks, you have no soul. And I hate you. The thing that really confuses me, though, is why on earth Rach would even want to see this movie. She had already read the book, and admitted to barely being able to see the pages through her tears. So she basically knew that she was going to cry for about two hours. I mean, can you just kick me in the groin right now and get it over with? In a 24 hour period, I went to a baby shower and watched a Nicholas Sparks movie. Monday morning I forced to myself to eat shards of broken glass while I hit myself in the stomach with a sledgehammer just to be able to call myself a man again.

I know my wife is crazy, and you know my wife is crazy, and hell, even she knows that she's crazy. But damn it if I don't love that crazy broad. Her crazy is never boring, always makes me laugh, and keeps me constantly on my toes. It's the kind of crazy that I'm going to grow old with. Or it's the kind of crazy that's gonna kill me in my sleep. Either way, should be fun.

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A couple of quick notes:

Cole got a 100 on his --I mean our -- Leif Ericsson project. I haven't been that happy to get a grade on a project since, well, um, never.

I don't care what you say,
this is going on my freakin resume

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Jaxon has come home with all smiley faces for two consecutive days. In my opinion, this streak makes Cal Ripken look like Carl Pavano. (For all you non-baseball fans......Ahhhh, screw it. Just laugh. I don't feel like explaining it.)

I mean, how can you give him
anything BUT smiley faces......
Oh, wait, I forgot; he's a demon.

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Tori danced in a Veteran's Day program at her school. I got some video, but couldn't get close enough to be able to really see what was going on. It was really good though. But I REALLY should've gotten video of her teaching me the dance later that night. Twinkle Toes, I am not. I guess there was bound to be something that I'm not good at.

Swine Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest................

Well, we've got the swine flu. In our family, though, the swine flu was about as inevitable as a Mike Tyson airport altercation (but in this case, can you blame him? And of all the people to stick a camera in their face, you pick Mike Tyson? While he's walking in the airport with his 10 month old daughter? What did you expect would happen?). But the swine flu? Seriously? I was about as shocked to hear that Jaxon had the swine flu as I was when I came downstairs to find Rach ripping the carpet off of the stairs. She had no explanation or anything. Just, "I hate this stupid carpet on these stairs." Which got me thinking; it must be nice to be her. To be able to immediately remedy anything that you don't like at any given time. Don't like the carpet in the downstairs bedroom? Pull it up. Don't like the paint in the bathroom? Start painting it at 11:30 pm. Don't like the way the front door squeaks? Just rip it off the hinges. Don't like your husband's camouflage shorts? Just throw them away. Don't like his sleeveless tuxedo T-shirt? Just hide it from him forever. One of these days, someone is going to tell Racheal that she can't do something, and I do NOT want to be there when that happens. One time, I tried to explain to her how we're all bound by the laws of gravity, and she shoved an ice pick up my nose and said, "Oh yeah? Where's the gravity on this ice pick, huh? Where's your stupid gravity now?" Okay, maybe that didn't happen. But you don't know for sure that it didn't happen. All I know is that I'm fairly certain as soon as Rach gets our house to look the way she wants it to look; it'll be time to move. I've already resigned myself to this.

Okay. I'm done. Back to the swine flu. So Jaxon was sick a couple of weeks ago, but the doctor said it was just an upper respiratory infection, not the flu. He was on antibiotics for a week, and seemingly got better. But then when I picked him up from school on Monday, he was running a pretty bad fever. His teacher said that he hadn't been acting like himself all day long, but that, coincidentally, his behavior was better than it had ever been. Yay fever! Then Monday night the fever got up to about 105º. Poor little guy. It's such a helpless feeling when your 2 year old is sick and you can't do anything about it. I imagine it's a lot like what Chris Paul is going through this year.

But other than the fever, Jax seemed fine. At about 1:30 am, Rach was on the phone with the on-call doctor, and Jaxon woke up and overheard Rach say something about going to the hospital, so he very happily says, "Yay! Let's go hospital! We go hospital, Daddy!" But then immediately fell back asleep. It was very Abe Simpson-ish. So Rach took him to the doctor Tuesday morning, and they confirmed that it was, in fact, swine flu. No big surprise though. Our house is basically like a damn Petri dish. Jaxon is in daycare all day with 15 other snot-nosed kids and the other kids go to school with 300 other snot-nosed kids. Short of keeping them lathered in Purel, there's not a whole lot we can do to keep them bacteria-free all day long. (I know these things, I'm studying to become a doctor.) But the good thing about living in near 3rd world conditions is that our immune systems are pretty much rock solid. Jaxon's body just laughed at the swine flu. His fever broke Tuesday afternoon, and he's been fine ever since. I'm convinced that all of us have already had the swine flu at some point. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if we were all carriers of the ebola virus too. We might even be combining existing diseases in our house and making new superdiseases. It's gotten so bad that The WHO (That's the World Health Organization, not these guys) sent us a shipment of mosquito nets just to be safe. So bad that all of the cockroaches had to move out of our house because they were all getting sick. Hey, You don't know that it didn't happen.


Here's a sick Jaxon waiting for his prescription at Publix:

After Jax left, the chair at Publix started coughing

Trick or Treat..........

That's my boys!

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. As a fat kid, I loved Halloween for the candy. Then as a college student, I loved being able to dress up in ridiculously hilarious costumes. (Some were better than others, of course. But I think Jesus may have been my favorite. Surprisingly, no one wanted to drink with Jesus, though. And no one wanted to pick up a hitchhiking Jesus at 3:30am either. Weird.)

And for the last couple of years, Halloween has been an excuse for Rach and I to go out in public in as little clothing as possible. (while going to grown up parties, of course. Not while we're trick-or-treating with the kids. Although there was definitely a lot of that going on around the neighborhood. I think 'slutty mom' was the costume of choice this year.)

And Halloween remains my favorite holiday because we still get lots of candy (still a fat kid at heart), we get to dress the kids up (always funny), and it's over by 9:30 (did I mention how old I've become?). The problem that I have with Halloween now is that it starts way too early. We had kids come to our door as early as 4:30! 4:30? That's ridiculous. If you're worried about getting your kids to bed on time, then stop trick-or-treating earlier. But don't make my kids feel like they're running late by bringing your stupid kids to my house at 4:30. I don't need the collective anxiety in my house to go up because your pansy son in the Thomas the Train costume goes nighty night at 6:30. Okay, I'm done. Sorry about that. Just had to get that off my chest. And I apologize if your kid went dressed up as Thomas the Train. I'm sure it was cute.

Anyway, on to our costumes. I think they all came out pretty good.

The Boys

Cole recycled my Leonides costume from last year, and I think he made some improvements. He definitely classed it up a little from last year's version.

Like Father, Like Son........well, sort of

Gavin went as a skull motorcycle rider, but it was pretty hot outside and he got pretty sweaty pretty quickly. Then he took his jacket off. So within 20 minutes of dressing up, Gavin went as 'Gavin With Gloves'. Jaxon went as the Incredible Hulk. He had been sick all week, and hadn't really started to feel better yet, so he was extremely reluctant to let me paint his face. Finally, in order to get the make up on his face, I didn't tell him what I was doing; I simply acted like I was brushing something off of his face.....repeatedly. Then he asked, "What you doing, Daddy?" So I showed him a mirror, and he got all excited about having a "Geen Face!" And if you don't think that I was thiiiiiiiiss close to painting myself green and matching Jaxon's Incredible Hulk costume, then you don't know me very well. I decided against it because I could never compete with his abs. I mean, he's even shredded up while he's sitting down:

Is it bad to be jealous of
your 2 year old's costume?

So Cole, Gavin, Jaxon, my parents, and I started going through the neighborhood trick-or-treating. Cole and Gavin were complaining a little bit about Jaxon slowing us down, so we decided to let my parents take Jax while I took the boys. Within 10 minutes of being on our own, the boys started complaining, "My feet hurt." and "It's too hot." and "This mask stinks." and "Do we have to walk the whole time?" So we headed back toward our house. And on our journey, one of the houses had this giant inflatable cemetery thingamajig. It was huge, and had an archway that you had to walk through to get to the door. As I was waiting for the boys on the sidewalk, I see the cemetery move up and down out of the corner of my eye. I look over, and there's Cole faceplanting into the grass. Then I look over at the lady still standing by the door, and she yells out, "Oooh, I'm sorry. There's a few ropes in the yard!" Cole then proceeds to get up and fall back down on his face about 9,000 times. It took him 20 minutes to get out of her yard. It was like watching Stevie Wonder go through an army obstacle course. Gavin and I just stood there and watched in amazement. High comedy.

Scarlett

Scarlett went as a witch. But she didn't want to go as just any witch. She wanted to go as a dead witch, so I had to do her makeup. And when it comes to doing someone's makeup, I'm about as useful as Obama in a toll booth. (Get it? Can't make change? C'mon that's pretty good, right?) So here's Doonie's before picture:

That is one sassy witch. Where's the Gucci broom?

And the after picture:

I seriously missed my calling. Because if I can make
someone as pretty as Doonie look like this....

The funny thing is, I didn't actually do her lipstick. I finished her makeup, but she said she still wanted to look pretty. So she put on some hooker red lipstick. Nice.

Tori

Tori didn't want to dress up at first. She said she was too cool for school. (Okay, she didn't actually say that. I said that. But she's getting to that age where she's juuussst about too old to trick-or-treat.) But then I told her that if she didn't dress up, then she didn't go trick-or-treating. AND her Uncle Keith told her that if she didn't dress up, then he wasn't going to get her an LSU shirt like he had promised. So this led to Tori and a couple of her friends scrambling around for last minute costumes. They decided to go with 'dead softball players'. So my dad cut a few softballs in half, we tied the half softballs to their heads, I masterfully painted their faces, and voila! Dead softball players. Although the softballs didn't last too long on their heads.

Without the softballs, they ended up looking like
Tammy Fay Baker at a charity softball game.

Racheal and Maxine

Rach and Maxine stayed behind at our house to pass out candy and decided to have a little fun of their own. They hung a giant black sheet of paper over our porch to make everything really really dark. Then they put a strobe light behind it to make it kind of creepy. Then they put one of our barstools on the porch with a candy bowl on top. Then they crouched behind the front door and front window and waited for people to walk up to the house. Whenever someone would reach into the candy bowl, Rach and Maxine would scream as loud as they could and bang on the door and the window. And I'm not talking about just a normal little scream. I mean, these chicks were brutally loud. (By the way, I think Racheal and Maxine screaming to scare people is a little like putting horns on a crocodile. Aren't they scary enough? Couldn't Racheal just as easily have opened the door and done the crazy, one eyebrow raised look she gives the kids?) Anyway, they were scaring the ever loving crap out of people. As I walked up to the house, there was a rather largish woman at the candy bowl. Rach and Max started screaming their lungs out, and Rach reached through the window and grabbed the lady's arm. She turned around and Usain Bolted her ass out of there so fast that she knocked over three little kids on her way to the street. There ended up being a congregation of people outside our house with people saying to each other, "You go. No, you go. I'm not going. You go." It was absolutely hilarious. Just one more reason to love Halloween.