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| Feeling Crabby? (Above) Xavier is displaying his patented "You Ruined My Life" face. |
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I don’t
mean to sound hyperbolic, but my five year old son Xavier has clearly got to be
the most over-dramatic human being in the history of the known universe (and I
have absolutely no idea
where he gets it
from).
Last
weekend we were at a family friend’s house, and not just any family friend’s,
but our one family friend who happens to own a trampoline. We all have that couple that believes that
their kids don’t get into enough trouble at sea-level, so they decide to
install a Venti-sized trampoline in their backyard so they can see what happens
when a young child picks a fight with gravity (let’s just say that gravity is
undefeated).
So the
moment that we walk into the house the first thing that Xavier does is take his
shoes off. Now Xavier isn’t doing this
because he wants to be particularly polite or because he is half-Asian and it
is part of some ancient tradition. Oh no, the reason that Xavier is so quick to
discard his footwear is because he wants to get ready for the trampoline
immediately .
We stayed
at our friend’s house for a couple of hours and talked about boring grown-up
things like drapes, the weather, and why
we chose to send our kids to private school. The whole time that we’re there Xavier and
his friends were jockeying for position on the trampoline. I’ll tell you, those kids were like big ole’ titties
on a treadmill: just bouncing like crazy all over the place. Once my wife and I had exhausted all of our
lite-conversational skills we made our way out to the backyard and gave Xavier
a “Five Minute Warning”, a warning that he completely ignored.
When we
saw how much fun he and his friends were having we took a deep breath and went
back into the kitchen to have another “very exciting” adult conversation. If I’m not mistaken, this truly inspired
dialogue started out with a very controversial topic proposal. It was something really edgy like “So how
bout this drought? Pretty dry ehh?”
Ten
more minutes passed and we attempted our second round of goodbyes. We attempted to pull Xavier off of the
trampoline and he just was like the unborn child of a woman whose hell-bent on
having an abortion “He just wasn’t having it.”
His
friends were still playing on it laughing and bouncing. Children black and white holding hands and
singing in perfect harmony. It was as if Martin Luther King Jr’s Dream had come
true, but instead of happening on mighty-mountaintops it was happening in a
bounce-house. Once again my wife and I caved and said “Alright
Xavier, 5 more minutes and that’s it!”
So we
go back into our friend’s kitchen and we start talking about President Obama,
in that way that all white people talk about the President. We talk about how he’s a great speaker, and
how we voted for him the first time around, but now we’re just not so thrilled
about the direction that he’s taking our country in (and we love Michelle’s
bangs, even if they do slightly accentuate her man-hands every time she brushes
them from her face) and does that make us racist? You know, that whole thing.
After
that talk we finally put our foot down and said, “Xavier, we’re going home,
NOW!”
It’s at
this point that we realize that being on a trampoline is a lot like being on
crack… it makes you giddy, it gets you high, and it convinces you to try to
preform front-flips that you wouldn’t have otherwise attempted.
So
Xavier, hops off of the trampoline in a hissy. He runs to the front door, grabs
his shoes, holds them in his hands and crosses his arms in a way that’s equal parts ferocious and
adorable. I approached Xavier and asked him, “Okay Babe, what’s wrong?”
That’s
when Xavier drops a phrase on me with the weight of the world behind it, a
phrase that I wouldn’t have expected to hear from him until his mid-teens.
When I
asked, “Okay Babe, what’s wrong?” Xavier responded by saying, “You ruined my life!” That was really a
shocker, I didn’t expect Xavier to use language like that until he was a 16
year old white girl.
I
picked up Xavier by the armpits and took him out to his car-seat, and he never
once had the common decency to put his shoes back on. So his dirty shoes and
socks were hovering over his arm-pits, creating an orgy of bacterial organisms
that I had to reach through in order to pick him up. To make matters worse
Xavier also spilled a 3/4ths full bottle of Pediasure all over himself. For
those of you who are not yet parents, Pediasure is a shake-like beverage that
has been designed to help young children increase their calcium intake and at
the same time make them smell freaking awful when they spill it on themselves.
Somewhere
in the sea of stoplights between our friends house and our home, Xavier fell
asleep in the back seat. And he was so tuckered out from all of his trampoline-ing
that he never removed his shoes and socks from under his armpits.
We got
home, and I now have to reach through wet-socks, shoes and a currently curdling
dairy product in order to pick up my son and bring him into the house.
I was
able to carefully change him into a pair of pajamas without waking him up so I
put him to bed in his room, then I went to rendezvous with my wife in our
bedroom. Now my wife and I don’t usually get an ample amount of alone time, so
I was ready to go. I rushed into our bedroom without even washing my hands.
While I
was ready to go, my beautiful bride usually needs a little bit of coaxing to
get her into the mood, so I had to pull out my patented, “Waiting for the
elevator” move, which I started using in middle school, and will occasionally utilize
to this very day. This is when a highly suggestive hand-motion will come in
handy… how can I explain it? You know when you’re waiting for an elevator door
to open, and when those doors don’t open up soon enough you just start
finger-banging that button over and over again, even though you know that deep
down you’re probably not really helping out your cause all that much… but oh
well.
Eventually
those doors opened and the elevator came (and by that token so did I). How was
it? Well, it was married sex, which can be best described as, “physically
happening”. My wife and I both went to bed released and relieved.
That
next morning my wife was experiencing some heavy irritation in her lady loins,
so she went to the gyno and the gyno said, “tell your husband to wash his hands
before he takes you to bed.” Yep, I had been charged with inadvertently giving
my wife a bacterial-based yeast infection because I had rang her door-bell without
first using soap as a welcome mat.
The Verdict? Guilty. The sentence,
2-3 weeks without sex.
Personally. I don’t think that the
whole thing is my fault. After-all, it was my son whose dirtiness put my
fingers in their compromising situation. So that night (the first of the 2-3 weeks’
worth of sex-less nights) at the end of reading my son his bedtime story,
instead of saying, “The End” or “Goodnight” I said, “YOU RUINED MY LIFE!”
