o'side daddy raisin' younguns in socal

So tonight is one of those nights.

Actually, I should back up.  LAST night was one of those nights.  While running through Lowe’s hardware store, Ollie bonked his head on the edge of an outdoor grill.  While the grill probably sustained more overall damage, we still took Ollie and the bloody puncture wound on his head over to an urgent-care facility for attention.  Attention, in this case, means three hours of filling out paperwork, wrangling Ollie (fully-recovered now) and Reid through various rooms filled with various pieces of expensive equipment and sitting on the brand new chairs (one of the nurses yelled this at someone else’s kid — I swear, someone else’s kid) and watching Clifford the Dog: The Movie (or some other such child-oriented hypnosis material).  After the excitement of trying to keep two two-year-olds from driving a toy-train over every defibrillator in the place wore off, a physician tied Ollie down with a papoose (like a straight-jacket for kids — instant burrito — he smiled for most of it), and glued the small hole in his head shut and sent us home.

Back to tonight.  Tonight is one of those nights.  Ollie decided he did not want to go to sleep tonight, and spent the first half-hour after his tuck-in engaging in the following forms of protest:

• Screaming at the top of his lungs.
• Crying.
• Banging on the door to his room.
• Jumping up and down on his floor so hard that the cookware in our kitchen rattled.
• Did I mention screaming?  Or crying?
• Yelling for “Daddy” (this is nice, sort of, but still…)
• Under questioning, asking for the following: “I want go downstairs. I want watch ‘Thomas.’  I want light on (on other nights, this question has been quickly followed by “I want light off”, so I’m leery).  I want that toy.  I want daddy hug!”  I confess, I caved on that last one a few times.

The best attempt, though?  Banging on the door, and yelling, “DAAAAADDY?!  TRICK OR TREAT?!”

So, Ollie and Reid just recently went through a brief phase of using “I’m too busy….” as their general-purpose excuse for not doing something they don’t want to do.  Best recent example was after getting off the “Peter Pan” ride at Disneyland, Ollie — a little shaken from the ups and downs of the ride — was asked if he’d like to go again.  Tucking his chin and tilting his head to the side and offering his most sympathetic look, he very slowly, very quietly said, “I’m too busy to go on Peter Pan.”

Shortly after that, he was too busy to go on Dumbo, too.

The URL of my blog is ironic today; today I learned that you can never have the “just say ‘no'” chat with your children too soon.  Ollie got into a bag (yes, we now know why they make child-proof containers) of Advil tablets, and having just been introduced to M&Ms only yesterday, assumed they were the same thing; and immediately proceeded to act upon that assumption.

Beth was only a short hop from a hospital, where she and Ollie (and eventually I; the hospital was a forty-five minute drive away for me — I made it in thirty) spent the afternoon.  The funnest part of course, was having liquid charcoal spat and exhaled at me by my two-and-a-half-year-old son, as I held him motionless with all my might while two nurses worked to shove it down his throat and suffocate him into ingesting it.  A bit of advice for other parents facing the same choice:  if they offer to put a tube down your child’s throat, instead of wrestling with him for an hour, take the tube.

Take the tube.