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We’ve Got Crabs!
Hello blogophiles! Yes, I am still alive…barely. My apologies for not posting recently. 
Hopefully you will forgive me as I have been busy solidifying my position as the Christian Grey of our new home. If I can just get the wifey to sign those non-disclosure agreements…
Lil B doin’ work
Anyway, what I would really like to do is update you all on the little ones since the last installment was purely rodent related. M & Lil B are doing quite well in getting adjusted to their new digs. In fact, they have almost become fully acclimated to cleaning the additional square footage of the new crib. In fact, they are becoming more efficient and are quickly working their way toward getting 3 full hours of sleep each night. This is a great milestone and it gives me confidence that they will be able to keep the new house clean while still keeping up with their regular yard work duties. For a minute, I thought that we were going to have to have another child to supplement M & Lil B. Thank God the wifey is a Tiger Mom and she runs a tight ship…I don’t know if I could handle having to purchase fast food for an additional mouth…the thought sends chills through my gelatinous body…
As a reward, of sorts, for the kids taking on the added chores, we have let them get a pet. Cats are out because of allergies. Dogs are out because you actually have to interact with them. Farm animals are out because my therapist does not think I am fully rehabilitated yet. This leaves us with boring old fish…That is until we are at the Stepfordville Mall one day making the kids do some power walking to increase their chore productivity, when we stumble across the perfect pet…Crabs. That’s right, we’ve got crabs!
May I just say that these crabs have been the perfect pet thus far. They just sit there in their little sand-covered prison cell and all we have to do is keep some water in there for them and feed them now and then. (I am now fully qualified to be a prison warden! Feed ’em, water ’em… execute ’em!) The best part about having crabs is that the kids have a pet to call their own and caring for the crabs does not take away from their chores! This is waaaay better than the last time I had crabs…
Badda Bing-Badda Boom
In addition to the giving the kids crabs, we also allow 30 minutes of television per week (assuming all work tasks have been completed to our satisfaction). One might think that M & Lil B would choose to watch cartoons, or one of the preteen shows on Disney, but not my little workers. They spend their TV time watching Cake Boss! If you haven’t seen it, Cake Boss is a reality show featuring an entire family of overweight New Jersey Italians making kickass cakes. Obviously, they eat a lot of cake too…Needless to say, the kids now walk around the house spouting off in their best Jersey-Italian accents. It is funny to hear a 5 and 3 year-old tossing around terms like fondant, “butta cream” and “I’m the borse” Next thing I know they will be watching Snookie blow some dude in a bathroom on Jersey Shore…God help us…Why can’t they just watch Nickelodeon? Now it’s just me that watches Victorious and Wizards of Waverly Place…alone in the dark with my scented lotions…don’t judge me…
“Kids Show” Victorious…watch it…watch it real hard
It’s Holiday Season Again: Christmas…Execution Style
I am proud (or embarrassed) to present the final installment of the Holiday Season Series. So sit back, drop your pants, tighten that belt around your neck one more notch and try not to lose conciousness before you “finish”.
Ah Christmas, the culmination of a long journey that is the holiday season. Complete with enough glitz and glam to impress even little bearded baby Jesus, who just happens to share a fake birthday with our favorite day to celebrate capitalism. It’s funny really when you take a step back and look at how we have bastardized what was once a holy day to many. Frankincense and Myrrh have been replaced with PS3 & iPad. Saint Nicholas is now a fat ass cookie-gobbling home invader, and the traditional nativity scene now comes with Yoda as the baby Jesus. But hey, at least we are winning the war on terror… Suck on that Bin Ladin! However, I admit that I, too am to blame for the capitalization of Christmas, but screw it, I like blinky lights and boxes wrapped with shiny paper just as much as the next guy, which brings us to Christmas and my family.
I have purposely waited 2 months to publish this entry because it has taken this long to recover. I still shutter at the mere thought of a Christmas tree. Once upon a time Christmas could quite possibly have been my most favorite time of year. My folks were blessed with the good fortune to be able to afford to buy my sister and me pretty much anything we asked for, and believe me, we asked for a lot. I think at one time I had enough G.I. Joe paraphernalia to invade a small country and my sister had a enough Barbie dolls to recreate Hugh Hefner’s wildest Playboy Mansion shindig…that is until we turned all of those plastic bitches into Pope-shredding Sinead O’Connor doppelgangers! It’s safe to say that my sis and I loved us some Christmas.
Fast forward from prepubescent, kung fu grip-enthusiast to 37 years old, married with kids. Now I am getting a glimpse behind the shimmering, happy happy-joy joy facade that is Christmas and I don’t like what I see. I used to look under the ole Christmas tree and I was instantly transformed into a present-hoarding Gollum, or Smeagolif you prefer…my precious…Now when I look under that same tree I see boxes wrapped in my money and an ever-worsening toy infestation problem in our home.
Looks more like my sister than me
I don’t know how my folks did it. It seems like my sis and I had a ton of toys and somehow my folks managed to keep the toys from taking over their home. I can’t walk through my house now without stepping on a Zooble (WTF is a Zooble??), or having to clear the furniture of stuffed animals and books just to sit down. In fact, we once had a guest room in our house that is now overrun with Elmo and his gang of Asian-made marauders. And this Christmas is no exception.
Christmas Eve: My House
Since Francine, our Elf on The Shelf, came to live with us a couple of years ago, we have ceased to travel for Christmas. The original thought of setting up the Santa crime scene was endearing…until we realized that “some assembly required” means that you will spend endless hours putting together toys that your kids will play with for about an hour on Christmas morning. Those same toys are never to be seen again once they are shuttled off to the confines of Elmo’s World…er the playroom. Still, with the dexterity of South American sweat shop workers we assemble toy after toy. We are about half-way through a handle of Crown when I notice that the decals are going on a bit crooked, but screw it, we are on a mission and we will not be delayed by drunken decal-ing! It is about midnight and I am putting the finishing touches on Lil B’s new basketball goal when in walks a groggy M. We just freeze like a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar (who the hell has an actual cookie jar?). The wife suddenly breaks herself from the Crown-induced haze and shields M’s eyes from the harsh reality as she whisks her back to her bed.
Thank You Roofies Jr.
Amazingly, M has no recollection of waking up that night and is fully surprised on Christmas morning…thank you Rohypnol!- (When simply being an irresponsible parent just isn’t enough)
Christmas morning goes as expected, or at least my hangover-hazed memory tells me that it did. M walks into the room calm and collected. She makes her way through the maze of toys that “Santa” painstakingly set up and she is silently taking inventory. The first thing from her mouth is not, “YAY!” or screams of delight. No, M remembers exactly everything that she asked for and she is mentally scratching each item from the list as she makes her way around the tree. Upon completion of her rounds, she simply looks at us with a sad little face and says, ” I didn’t get the Zhu Zhu Palace”…(WTF is a Zhu Zhu??)
To add to our toy prison overcrowding problems, our kids just happen to have some of the best grandparents in the world. With the undying love of grandparents comes…you guessed it, boxes and boxes of toys arriving almost daily throughout the month of December. My neighbors must think that our house is acting as an overflow distribution center for FedEx. It got so “bad” this year that if there was no box on our porch when we went to check the mail, that my greedy kids thought something was wrong. The toy situation is so bad that we have to cull through the post unwrapping carnage and sneak as many of the toys away as we can to be hidden away and used for bribes during the coming year. (I highly suggest this if you have the room to hide more toys)
Despite the fact that we are prime candidates to make an appearance on Hoarders, this Christmas goes off with little incident. We are thankful and lucky to have such great grandparents and an Elf on the Shelf that knows how to regulate. I am starting to feel the stress of the holidays melt away as we edge ever closer to spring. In fact, I am already making a list of toys to get the kids next Christmas. Actually, my list is not toys, but rather a list of those to be executed. Three guesses as to what bearded, fat-bellied bastard is at the top of that list.
One Down...Now where is that damn Easter Bunny?
Into The Wild: Installment 2
We are recovering after the rough shelling that we took on D-Day. M hit us with enough emotional shrapnel to make our hearts look like Swiss Cheese. Thankfully, and this is probably the only time that you will see me type these words, but we were able to go back to work today which helped take our minds off of our bruised parent-egos. We sit though dinner this evening mostly in silence. Each of us wondering what tonight’s Skype call with our wayward daughter is going to bring. Will she want scream and cry on the webcam begging to come home? Will she hurl bathroom word-laden insults at us again? It’s time for the call. (If you would like to catch up on Installment 1: https://genericdad.com/2010/06/13/into-the-wild-installment-1/)
Our stomachs are in knots as the Skype gods decide how many attempts we have to make before getting the webcams on both ends working. The gods say 3 times tonight (it was at least 5 times last night). Immediately we can tell that GG and M have had a long day. They both look like our Skype ringtone woke them up. Half-closed, drowsy eyes stare blankly back at us. We pepper them with questions about Day 2 and quickly find out why they are a heartbeat away from being zombies. They went to M’s great grandparents, they went to the mall, they went to build-a-bear. Apparently there is a store where you go and build your own stuffed animals. (What would the Taiwanese sweatshop workers say if they knew that rich Americans were out to get their jobs?). 
They went to the lake beach again, and finally they went to the park. A pretty lazy day…if you are a marathoner, or triathlete…
Once again M showcased that she does not possess the ability to miss her dear parents (or primary care givers, as it probably sounds in her mind) During the 2o-minute call we saw her little face a total of 5 minutes at best. The other 15 minutes consisted of GG’s glossed over haze-eyes all the while there’s a purple blur shooting to and fro in the background. One thing did improve in the fact that ony one of us gets to be called a bathroom part. Yes, it was me and I get called “Daddy Butt”. The rest of the conversation from M revolves around her panhandling for Mom and Dad to make funny faces. I think that we may be raising a future homeless person. She does not seem to care where she lives, and apparently she is already mastering panhandling skills. I say that she is mastering begging because when we sat through that 20 minute Skype call with our tongues out and making pig noses. If she were on the street she would have just earned a cool five bucks for “gas money”. 
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment which is now a quest for our daughter’s affection…
Generic Dad 