Tidy Husband

Eligible for the seniors discount and the Happy Meal deal at the same time.

  1. Graduation Day

    Way, Way, Way back in the fall of 2024, I realized I had a few problems:

    silhouette of people standing on hill

    Photo by Baim Hanif on Unsplash

    1. I wanted to write more. I guess if I want to be a writer it’s important to write.
    2. I wanted to remember the little things as she grew up. It’s too easy to think that nothing changed in a day but then you add up the days and a lot has changed.
    3. I wanted to see if I could write every day.( I can! )
    4. I wanted to see if I could build an audience (slowly, but yes - thank you!)

    Thus, Tidy Husband was (re)born. I had been writing on/off over the past year or so but the writing was intermittent at best.

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    So, I decided to be less intermittent and more…whatever the opposite is.

    Anyway, when she started kindergarten I started to write, and every day I manage to write about something quasi-interesting in our mundane little lives.

    Today’s Mundane: I am pleased to announce that she has had her last day as a kindergarten student and is now ready to move ahead into 1st grade!

    She came home today with a little goodie bag with some questionable choices for gifts:

    1. a laser light - who gives a 6-year-old a laser light? Thankfully it broke in the first hour of ownership.
    2. baggie of sand. Sand? really? It went right to the garbage can. She’s going to spend the summer at a beach camp, she will be bringing home more than enough sand as it is. We don’t need to import it from school.
    3. A book - finally something I can get behind.
    4. A diploma that states she has completed kindergarten. Yay!

    She goes tomorrow am for one last time for a whopping 2 hours. She will spend almost the same amount of time on the bus than at school but she is going. We’re getting our money’s worth out of the entire school year. Besides, it will be a party and she won’t want to miss it.

    To celebrate, she’s going to have lunch and then we will break all the rules and go have ice cream in the afternoon. As of noon tomorrow her summer vacation will have started. ! Lord help us.

    Back in the Day: The first day of school

    We have 5 days before summer camp starts so hopefully we can find something for her to do. Her classmates will be in a similar predicament so perhaps they can just terrorize the neighborhood like we did in the good old days.

    I can’t believe we’ve come this far. It seems like yesterday we were putting her on the bus and now she’s much bigger and older and smarter and sweating to death like the rest of us because BW has some crazy thing where she enjoys being in a heatwave even though we have air conditioning.

    Because we’re a family that loves each other her we’re putting up with this for one more day and then the temps are supposed to drop to a more agreeable number. But the airco is going on in July - mark my words.

    We’ve gotten good use out of the pool this week and thank God fans are allowed with this rule:

    Keep your fingers away from the fan! yes, her shirt is backwards.

    I don’t think we would make it otherwise.

    That said, I said the same thing about having a child in kindergarten and we managed to make it to that milestone. I guess anything is possible if you put your mind to it.

    To many more milestones,

    TH and Co.

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  2. Screaming for Ice Cream

    For those that are counting this is the second time that we have gone out for Ice cream this week and they were both by accident, in a way.

    just look at the size of those scoops…

    You see - and we had talked about this all week - tonight was the night for the ice cream social at her school. We had been looking forward to it all week. In fact, when she got sent home from school earlier this week the first thing she said to me was that she hopes to get better in time to go to the ice cream social. I guaranteed that we would have ice cream on Thursday night regardless of what happens.

    Subscribe. It’s better than ice cream.

    So, we had an early-ish dinner and then got out the door to go to the ice cream social at her school and then we pulled up to her school and found there were just 3 cars in the lot.

    This is not good.

    Huh. It seems not a very popular social….. Wait? Do we have the date right for this?

    No. Of course not.

    CUE THE SCREAMING

    We screwed up. They send her home with so many activities and dates an forms and emails - it’s hard to keep track lately and then there’s the over zealous nurse and the unneeded doctors appointments and well…we screwed up.

    In our defense we did have the day right - to order our ice cream. The actual date is in 2 weeks for the ice cream so all is not lost as there is MORE ice cream in her future.

    Of Course We Still Had Ice Cream, Silly.

    The child settled down rather quickly and then it became a question of where to go? We used to go to a place a mile down the road that was great, but the sold out to a local outfit that’s bigger and is not half as good and overall this sucks.

    The choice was either Dairy Queen (meh) or Dee-Dee’s in Niagara Falls. We chose the latter and we are glad we did because even though we’ve driven by it many, many times we never stopped because we had our local ice cream joint to go to. The highlight of this ice cream shoppe is that they carry Perry’s Ice Cream as well as having soft serve.

    And I have to tell you that the Perry’s is good stuff. It was worth the drive to Niagara Falls.

    Another reason to love it? The portions are HUGE. Our small servings were TWO HUGE scoops each. Both the child and BW could not finish theirs they were so big. Me? I took one for the team and finished mine. Add this to my list of questionable life choices.

    The next time we go we’re going to order the “baby” sized, because even the baby sized portions are more than enough. I can’t imagine anyone ordering the large - it’s like 5 scoops of ice cream!

    just one of the many flavors available

    With our bulging bellies, we went home and attempted to get the child to go to bed, but because she was full of more ice cream than she’s ever had in her life she had to go run laps in front of the house first to burn off some of that energy and to get in shape for the fun run she has tomorrow.

    We have hit up every should we know for some cash to sponsor her for this run so we will be there tomorrow afternoon to cheer her on and then because it’s Friday we’ll just bring her home because it’s been a week.

    Thank you to all that have sponsored her.

    Now it’s up to her to race tomorrow. We were doing time trials tonight - she’s got it down to 24 seconds from mailbox to mailbox. (whatever that means)

    Oh. The diet? It starts tomorrow.

    Until Next Time,

    TH and Co.

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  3. I Thought Bath Time Would be Easier by Now

    She came in from playing in the front yard and had trouble getting her shoes off. So I went over to help her and as soon as I pulled her shoe off there was no denying it - tonight was going to be a bath night. Those were some smelly little toes.

    yellow rubber duck on white table

    Photo by S. Tsuchiya on Unsplash

    A bath was in her future.

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    The only thing she’s still not comfortable with is getting the bath started and temperature right - but after that she’s more than big enough to hop into the tub herself. She asked for a few rubber ducks I was happy to toss her way and I thought we had a good night ahead of us as she was happily singing and splashing away with her little rubber friends.

    I was wrong.

    While she was up there singing her heart out to her rubber ducks I was thinking that boy, bath time sure got a lot easier lately.

    I was wrong (again)

    I asked her if she washed herself like I asked her to because she was full of stink and magic marker residue and God knows what else.Tomorrow is an ice cream social at the school after dinner that she’s very excited about and I thought it would be nice if she smelled, you know - nice.

    She told me she had washed herself, but the evidence proved otherwise. In short, she lied

    She wasn’t getting out of the tub without some soap of some kind actually touching her body so I offered to help her but she was not cooperating at all.

    Sooooo…..To quote Frank Sinatra: We did it my way.

    She did not like my way.

    Finally she settled down and hopped out of the tub and I found my little charge in her bedroom teary and shivering because she hadn’t dried herself off at all and was trying to put on PJ’s on her wet body.

    I got her dried off and warm and PJ’d and when she couldn’t control the tears any more she exclaimed “I’m tired!”

    I know pumpkin. This is all going to be okay.

    Let’s go to bed.

    Also, your feet smell so much better.

    Sweet Dreams,

    TH and Co.

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  4. On Losing Teeth and Toys on the Same Day

    A Loose Tooth

    woman in white dress wearing green fairy wings

    Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash | She’s adding our address to her itinerary.

    6:10am (again with the early starts. we need to work on this )

    “Hey guys”.

    Do you know how much the tooth fairy pays these days? Subscribe and find out!

    I open one eyeball. “yes?”

    “I have a loose tooth!”

    BW springs out of bed so fast I thought she was going to hurt something (or me) and hugged the child like she just graduated from Harvard. (or cleaned her room)

    After some inspection and caffeine for me, it’s true. - we have a loose tooth. And right where the internet says it should: the bottom middle.

    Stay tuned for the tooth fairy post. It’s coming.

    No More Bath Toys

    I have been waiting for this day, and it was good timing for us too because we could use the loose tooth as leverage about the tossing of the bath toys as big girls don’t need them, yada yada, and you’re a big girl now

    No more plucking bath toys from the far corners of the tub. No more trying to keep the bath toys remotely clean. I wonder why they have the hole? It has to be for squirting and fun, but what they don’t tell you is that after a while the water in the bath toys becomes so gross you need a radioactive suit to get near it - let alone sit in the same tub with the thing.

    They are going. Tomorrow when she’s at school they’re going to get wrapped up and tossed. No more paw patrol or peppa pig ones. I do have to say that the Peppa Pig ones held up well and brought HOURS of imaginary stories in the tub.

    We’ve had a good time with Peppa and George but it’s time to say goodbye and just have a bath or shower like big girls do.

    The Poster

    Her PJ’s are on inside out, but whatever.

    We have a house guest coming tomorrow. The child is going to have the best day ever as it’s also her book fair and ice cream social at school and then when she gets back there will be a person in the house that’s not her parents. I think we need to get out more.

    She’s so excited she had to paint a welcome banner for the big day tomorrow.

    Welcome!

    If you drop by you might get a poster of your very own to take home too! And, if you time it right - a tooth too!

    We will be here - patiently waiting for the tooth fairy.

    Keep Flossing,

    TH and Co.

    Oh. come on. Subscribe.

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  5. The Fun Run was Fun in the Sun

    See Child Run.

    Child Runs

    I went to a fun run with 100 plus sweaty kindergartners so you didn’t have to. The least you could do is subscribe

    Child has some fun

    Dad has some fun

    Mom has some fun

    Mom, Dad and Child have had too much sun.

    Run Child, Run!

    If you haven’t already guessed was the Apex Fun Run at her school. I have never heard of Apex until the child came home with stuff from school, but it’s fund raising with sweaty little runners that can barely read, but boy can they run.

    All week this Apex thing has been teaching the kids respect and the like so I can’t say it’s a bad thing but I still find the whole system kind of iffy that you have to rely on your child to get sponsors for their education. I am told this is how things are done and I just have to deal so I am dealing.

    Besides, this was about the kids and the kids absolutely loved it to death. They ran and ran and ran some more through pylons and under big tunnels and when all was said and done - in about a half hour the kids ran 36 laps.

    Thirty-Six! These laps were not the size of a kiddie pool. These were serious sized laps that I bet not many adults watching would be able to run - including yours truly.

    She had a great time and a few family members committed to 2 dollars a lap because really, how many laps can a six-year-old run?

    It seems 36 of them is the answer and imagine their surprise when the credit card bill gets dinged for $72.00. I thought BW was overspending at $50 but apparently not.

    The run itself was well done and well planned and the kiddos ran and ran and ran and ran and then when you think they could not run any more - they ran some more. They all looked like a hot mess when they were done. I didn’t see any more prizes or awards but then they might still show up next week.

    Because BW and I will take every opportunity to embarrass our daughter, we brought along a plastic stadium horn to cheer her on.

    Something like this:

    Buy your very own here

    We thought it was a great idea and we had a blast cheering her on and encouraging her to keep going. But apparently some of the other parents there did not appreciate our silliness and complained about the horn. Karens are everywhere it seems.

    I don’t see what the problem was. I was the only Dad playing air guitar with the horn while I cheered my kiddo on because that’s why we are there - to have fun and celebrate the great work the kids did and believe me, they did all the work.

    Me? I just tooted my own horn.

    You should subscribe. It’s good for you - like running is.

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