Tidy Husband

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

  1. The Nap

    Once in a blue moon....

    Here’s the scene.

    Photo by Jackman Chiu on Unsplash

    I come home from an afternoon of driving the very nice people of Buffalo, NY around and when I get in the door it’s quiet

    Like, FREAKY quiet

    BW is in the family room buried under a pile of fuzzy yarn working her obsession project of 2026 (this in itself could be a post) and there’s no noise.

    At first, I heard and misunderstood that she was over at Carson’s house but I was wrong. Shewas home, but where.

    “I dunno, upstairs” BW told me

    I did what any concerned parent would do when it was way to quiet. I went a looked.

    She wasn’t in her room, but there was a clue - our bedroom door was closed. Our bedroom door never closes because we like to hear what’s going on

    I went downstairs to tell BW what I had found and she suggested I check.

    “If she’s asleep, I’m not waking her up”, I told BW.

    “She might have her device on her” BW replied.

    Nyeah, she can be bad, but she knows better. She loves that thing too much to mess with the no-device rule that much.

    As I was going to check on her against my instincts, I was met by the child at the top of the stairs.

    “Did you have a NAP?” I asked,

    Turns out that yes, she did have a nap. We keep telling her that naps are needed sometimes and apparently the trampoline at Carson’s house combined with a a healthy dose of fresh air wore her out…and she was out.

    And, you guys - she was a delight tonight. Yes, there was a little bedtime pushback but nothing serious and she PJ’d up and brushed teeth and then played quietly in her room for a good half an hour.

    When she was done, she came looking for me with her favorite stuffy in her hand and told me to tuck her in - she was done.

    When I was tucking her in tonight she told me that she really liked the nap and she might have one the next time after she plays with Carson.

    I gave her a kiss on the forehead and told her that I thought that was a good idea because naps are awesome.

    Tonight’s Lesson: Even the ones that fight naps the hardest eventually succumb to the power of the nap.

    Until Next Time,

    TH and Co.

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  2. There's a New Girl in Town

    And she’s looking good.

    Her Name is Sparkles!

    I tried to go without, I did - but after you see her sleek body skim across the floor like a ballerina you will know you must have her in her life.

    Photo by Dreame Vacuum Cleaner on Unsplash

    They say you can never go back once you’ve seen her swipe away dirt and this new model is so much prettier than the last.

    I tried to make it work with the Roborock, but we just couldn’t see eye to eye and I knew it was over when she just put on new lipstick but came back to me with the same flaws as before. I sent her packing after this.

    Then,my eye started to wander…for a new girl. There were a lot of models to choose from, but we were working on a budget and instead of getting a new model we decided to go with an eBay Refurbished model. You’re taking chances here because they could have come from a broken home or had to go back for some hidden damage repair, but sometimes to quote George Michael: You gotta have faith.

    I pushed the buy it now button and the child was so excited about the arrival of our latest family member - we tracked her status every day in the UPS app as she bounced across the country.

    When she arrived our first thought was that’s she’s bigger than the newest models but that’s okay - she’s been refurbished so chances are she’s better than new and the repairs were made before being shipped to us.

    After unboxing, we learned a few things:

    1. she washes her mops herself
    2. she empties herself
    3. she doesn’t bump into things
    4. she dries her feet
    5. she even de-tangles herself from dog hair and strings that were supposed to be picked up.

    Overall we’re pretty happy with our new arrival. There’s a learning curve when you live with others, but so far she’s behaving and we’re all living in a clean house once again.

    Welcome Sparkles. We’re glad you’re here.

    Until Next Time,

    TH and Co.

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  3. This Hour has 180 Minutes

    And sometimes more

    Tonight, we had a discussion at the dinner table about decorum and how we sit at the table until everybody finishes eating. This means we don’t get up and dance around and sing in the middle of the kitchen and we don’t check the fridge looking for dessert while Dad is still eating.

    Photo by Thanos Pal on Unsplash

    This drives me crazy like I can’t explain. And, I can’t explain it either - we’re getting into the 7th year and the getting up and the lack of using a fork is being a thing we can’t ignore any more.

    This is one of the many reasons why we can’t go out for dinner.

    I told the child that we have a rule that we have a kitchen table to eat at because that’s where we eat our food - if we did not eat our food at the kitchen table then we could get rid of the table and put a very small bowling alley there instead.

    But we do have a kitchen table - so we eat at the table. Which kind of explains the whole kitchen table and the reason for having and and also: have you ever seen anybody eating on a bowling alley?

    No. So, sit down.

    It didn’t get any better as the night progressed either. It took me/us over 3 hours to get the child anywhere near the bed. There was no bath needed and nothing to do but put on PJ’s, brush teeth and go to bed so on paper it should have been an easy night.

    Here’s what we did instead of going to bed

    1. watched mommy knit and ask her what she was making
    2. chased the dog around
    3. snuck upstairs to the bathroom and use a half a container of hand soap giving her ponies a bath and the bathroom floor a free wash in the meantime.
    4. Got talked to by Dad that she’s too big for ponies in the sink now.
    5. Made a computer monitor out of an old box
    6. Played with a scrap piece of wool.
    7. got really interested in an ice cream play set instead of going to bed
    8. brushed her teeth again because I don’t believe she did it the first time
    9. jumped on the bed while I was trying to end my night by making the bed.
    10. Watched me get the robot vac setup and run for it’s nightly lap
    11. Found 1001 other excuses or “just one minutes” to not go to bed.

    Tonight she did go all the way - to 11 - on dear old dad’s patience meter.

    A short post for a long evening here.

    Enjoy losing an hour of sleep tonigh!

    TH and Co.

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  4. She's in Control

    It’s a tossup most days.

    We have a thing we say around here:

    “Who’s in charge?” I ask.

    “MOMMY!” is the reply.

    And most days that’s true.

    But not today. Today, the child was totally in charge of the day and it was because she had a plan.

    A plan to entertain. And it was planned all week and it included Carson. This was serious - she was going to have him come over and play on the Nintendo with her new controllers, because hey had never played 2 player games before. It was going to be fun.

    Well. This morning I had a few tasks, and one was to get the Nintendo all set up for the child while she was at school so that I could get things all setup without somebody telling me I am doing it wrong and also asking me constantly: ARE YOU DONE YET?

    I grabbed the controllers that were supposed to have charged - but it turns out they were not. Huh. Weird. Oh well, I have a few cables and adapters to try and long story short - I could not get these things charged no way no how and it was 4 hours until showtime.

    I was nervous. I feared the wrath that would come if I didn’t get these stupid things working. I searched Amazon for help, I asked all the AI’s and for the life of me I could not get them to charge.

    Let me remind you how important this was to me - I had two end-of-the-week tired school age kids wanting to play their first video game together ever but dear old Dad couldn’t get the freaking controllers together.

    Eventually AI told me to try and use a lower power charger like from the laptop so I tried this and went away to drive Uber for a few hours. I came back and nothing had changed.

    They worked, but nobody knows for how long because the beeps and blinks these thing make have no manual to explain what they might do.

    5 minutes to go…..

    The child hops off the bus and announces that Carson is coming over. I have sweat running down my face as I have to face up to the fear and tell the child that she may not have a long time to play with Carson because the batteries on the controllers die and dad has no way to fix it.

    “That’s okay Dad”, she says and then skips off to find a snack.

    I stand there stunned because I devoted my entire day almost so that the great Nintendo-palozza went off without a hitch and she could care less.

    So. How did it go, you ask?

    Just fine.

    After all that struggle to get these things working - they played for about 20 minutes and then got bored, so it turns out there was more than enough battery life to get through the first ever dual player Nintendo challenge her at our house.

    Me? My next challenge is returning these 2 controllers and hopefully find something that will work and charge as they should because we all know that this time next Friday: Carson will be Back.

    And he’s going to come fully charged and expect the same from the controllers.

    Until Next Time,

    TH and Co.

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  5. The 48 Hour Rule

    It’s still a LOT of Screen Time

    We have a rule at our house: No screen time on School Days

    Photo by Rahul Chakraborty on Unsplash

    It’s still a lot of time. If she didn’t do other stuff like, oh, sleep and eat I am sure she could do a you-tubeathon and probably win. We’re better than that and we don’t let her watch all the time - It ranges from 1 hour a weekend to 47 hours. We do have guidelines.

    Tomorrow, being Friday night she’s so excited to bring her little friend Carson over and play on her Nintendo because I’m a great Dad and bought 2 controllers so they could both play together on the TV instead of fighting over the little screen (the controllers were really a gift to me)

    It helps that the same no screen rule applies at Carson’s house too so by Friday they are both dying to see a screen and this weekend she’s got it all planned out: Carson comes over and bounces all over my couch and they play games until 5pm when Carson has to go for dinner.

    A Perfect Friday night’s plan for the 7 year old crowd.

    Anyway, I don’t really want to write about screen-time - what I really want to write about is what happens the other days where we encourage painting and dancing and reading - kind of how today turned out:

    This is what happens when the screens disappear.

    Tomorrow will probably be a Super Mario Cart all-night gaming extravaganza (or until Carson has to go home at 5pm. ) but today and only today the parenting gurus would be proud of us.

    One day at a time,

    TH and Co.

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