You know you’re a dad when, during your lunch break, you head to Target (thankfully within walking distance of the new office) and fill up your cart with as much formula (a special kind for Katie's digestion issues that costs more per ounce than black market uranium) and Stage 1 baby food that your arms can carry. Even five short years ago my same arms would have been carrying bags of snacks and other assorted goodies for our childless household at the time. Instead of bags of CDs and DVDs and various electronic goodies, they’ve morphed into bags of diapers, tubes of Desitin, and assorted other creams/ointments/balms/salves used to treat wounds/dry skin/rashes/dirty clothes and whatnot.
Now I’ll go from store to store to try to find hard-to-locate batteries for a stupid little Peter Pan pin (which came with the DVD) that blinks. My daughter absolutely loves to wear it all the time. I still haven’t found these specific 1.5V batteries and I even lowered my standards and went to the stinkhole that is WalMart and left empty handed there also. And you know what? I’m going to keep on trying every darn store I know until I find those batteries – all in the name of putting a smile on my daughter’s face and allow her to hold on to the illusion that her daddy can do and get almost anything for her (within reason, of course). This is SO going on The Bill I hand her on her 18th birthday for Services Rendered.
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Imagine the look on my face when I trudged the garbage out for pickup and one bag made a really odd sound. At first I thought it was some animal making a low-frequency hiss at me. As my brain was scanning my mental sound collection, it raced for possible explanations. Chemical reaction? Animal? Broken container? Nope. It turns out we had thrown out an expired whipped cream can and the nozzle had been bent upon me placing the bag in a new position and it was emanating expired whipped cream inside the bag. When muffled, a whipped cream can being deployed is an eerie sound if you don’t know what it is immediately. Thankfully there were no animals with a sweet tooth on the prowl last night before the garbage was actually picked up and the bag was left intact.
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Rare is the case where we get two snowstorms in one week here in the south but this actually happened last week. You saw the initial mini-snowman we created which was about 8 inches tall. Ally and I were able to make a slightly larger one this time around (about 20 inches tall) and it even contained a carrot this time in order to be a bit more faithful to the Legend of Frosty. Since it still wasn’t a true sized snowman, we had to use the pre-packaged baby carrots for a nose since a normal carrot would have made his schnozz truly ludicrous. Frosty’s arms have been beefed up with this version too although we suspect he’s been abusing Human Growth Hormone. You simply don’t grow arm mass that fast within a week. He claims that there were no rules in place banning it at the time he took it, so I’m considering renaming him Froster Clemens or Sammy Snowsa.
