Tidy Husband

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

  1. Just Jump!

    That’s easy for you to say.

    Earlier this evening after dinner the child was on my knee and we were being silly as we’re known to be and I realized that she’s getting big. Too heavy for my knee heavy and I fear that knee bouncing will be over sooner than I’d like.

    She’s absolutely more active than her old man. The other morning we were outside waiting for the bus and before we knew it she had sidewalk chalk out and a map on the driveway we had to follow.

    “Jump, Dad!” she commanded.

    I told her that her Dad’s jumping days are behind him - and then I jumped anyway

    They don’t tell you that as a later-in-life Dad that you’ll be jumping in the driveway. When you learn you’re going to be a father the first thing you’re thinking of is cute baby, and diapers and the rest is unknown and uncharted and a bit murky.

    But when those later years come into focus and it’s then you’re at the end of the driveway mid-air when you realize that this is still just the start and you have no idea what you’re in for and you still have years more of being told to jump, hide, run, follow, watch, create, tape, wrap, tie, adjust, drive and a myriad of other things that she needs or wants.

    And you’re not sure if you’re going to make it. Especially if there’s more jumping.

    Enough with the jumping.

    Keeping it in mid-air,

    TH and Co.

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  2. The Junk Drawer

    This is now the most popular spot in the house.

    She has found the junk drawer.

    Photo by Patrick Donnelly on Unsplash

    Don’t have one? Oh YES YOU DO. You’re just not admitting to it.

    Here? We embrace the junk drawer.

    Ours is full to the brim with pens, and rubber bands and sewing kits and god knows what else.

    The current problem here is that the child has found the junk drawer too.

    Now she is always in it. I swear, she comes home and runs right to it 1 I wouldn’t mind if the stuff she digs out of it went back in the junk drawer, but that never happens.

    I don’t mind that she absconds with the adhesive tape to make her Happy Meal for our dinner adventure. I mind when it’s my turn to go find the tape and it’s long gone or there’s six feet of it hanging from her bedroom door.

    Tonight she was digging around in there and she pulled out a spool of string. And scissors. She cut off 2 pieces of string and then left the spool of string on the floor.

    There’s a few problems with this - the first being that she did not put it back. The second being that the dog gets it and shuffles off to her crate to eat said string.

    I explained to the child that she can’t leave string, or stuffed animals or socks or anything that the dog might eat, because if the Dog eats it and it gets stuck inside it will not end well for the dog.

    How the dog is alive still is beyond me. The child is really good about having her toys chewed to bits - crayons and magic markers are a hit and anything furry is just gone as the dog thinks it’s her toy. The child is like eh, whatever.

    What’s odd is that the child’s favorite stuffed animal gets left alone. Of course, when she was a puppy everything was fair game - but dare I say it - the dog is getting better behaved.

    There’s still disappearing crayons and well-licked stuffed animals but there hasn’t been a shoe eaten or even moved in some time.

    This isn’t to say the dog is perfect. We have a shelf up high for some special stuffed animals that are/were gifts or fancier than another squishmallow that we can replace if need be - and these special stuffed animals are placed up high out of paw’s reach.

    There might be hope for the dog after all - but t’s still to early to tell when it comes to the child. I have about 12 more years to find out how that all works out.

    Keep your friends close and your junk closer.

    TH and Co.

    1. Unless Carson is around. It’s all about Carson. ↩

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  3. You Want Fries With That?

    On Practicing for my new job..

    Tonight, it was just the child and I.

    Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash

    BW works late on Tuesdays and that means that the child and I have to fend for ourselves. Some nights we can wing it with some noodles and questionably aged sauce from the back of the fridge but for tonight: BW had a plan.

    She ordered a Blue Apron and on the menu were burgers and fries. If there’s one thing I can do, it’s follow instructions 1 and today’s recipe was pretty easy: slice some taters and fry a burger and there you have it.

    When the child found out what was for dinner she was thrilled and wanted to help and then somehow before I knew how or why we were now playing restaurant.

    And according to the child there’s really only one restaurant - and that’s McDonald’s

    I’m not sure how it happened but before I could say no she was helping and we were making a Happy Meal for her doll.

    not the doll in the background and also the McDonald’s written on the apron. You can’t cook without an apron.

    So, I put my little sous chef to work:

    Then we just had to wait for the burgers and fries to cook and we had our very own homemade Happy Meal.

    first we had to make a container for the fries.

    the burger all wrapped up.

    the happy meal all wrapped up. The toy is the top half of a plastic ice cream cone.

    I have to tell you that she loved it and all through the meal all I heard was “nom nom nom” as she ate pretty much the entire burger.

    She did learn a lesson tonight unfortunately, and that is that chapped lips and salty fries are not a good combo, so that ruined our little party a bit. She tried to put a Band-Aid on the lip but I had to explain that you really can’t bandage a lip.

    That’s it! We made a happier happy meal.

    Until Next Time,

    TH and Co.

    1. Oh, Hi, BW. I didn’t see you standing there. ↩

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  4. I'm Just Singing a Song

    It’s from a movie in her head. A very dark movie apparently.

    Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

    Today was a bit of a doozy. Our little terror was in full terror mode this morning.

    The reason? Lack of sleep.

    This kid will not go to bed at a reasonable time. We have tried every trick in the book and so of course Monday mornings are no fun for everything.

    We have tried idle threats, rewards and no matter what it’s “Dad, I have to tell you one more thing”

    I want no more things. I want a child to go to bed at 8pm and get up at 7pm and be happy and healthy. That’s what I want for Christmas.

    The rest of the day was pretty normal. She came home and changed into her swimsuit and bounced over to Carson’s house so they could jump on the trampoline and run under the sprinkler at the same time. It sounds dangerous, and probably is but this is happening at Carson’s house instead of ours so there’s that.

    I was tasked to go collect my wet charge from Carson’s house and halfway there I found the child standing on the sidewalk just standing there. At first I thought she was talking to somebody but then I realized, no, that’s not it.

    Maybe she’s watching a bird or cat or deer…nope

    She was singing a song. Itwas called:

    The world doesn’t seem so fair to me

    I asked her if she felt the world was unfair and she told me no, that it was just a song and that it was “from a movie in my head”.

    Oh. Okay.

    Well Then. What the heck do I do with that? That’s pretty dark for six. What happened to sunshine and unicorns?

    She ate well tonight and I thought we could get her to go to bed at a good time and it was better but not great still. We did not hit the 8:00pm deadline and it was more like 8:15 by the time she surrendered to sleep.

    It’s been a rough few weeks with the emotions here and I blame lack of sleep and school, which now keeps her much busier than kindergarten I think. I have no idea how parent are taking their children to after to school activities too.

    We have one weeknight activity:

    I like to call it: Go To Bed!!!

    Here’s to being well rested.

    TH and Co.

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  5. Your Call is Important to Us

    I doubt it. I have the chat record.

    tiPhoto by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

    Time for a rant:

    I have a smartwatch. The only reason I have a multiple hundred dollar smartwatch on my arm is because it came “Free” with a new phone.

    And, I like the watch. I don’t use all the features but it works well to tell the time and I suppose I could actually use is as a phone too.

    Anyway, this is not to sell you on watch features.

    Because this is a portable glass item I’ve been paying the five bucks a month for the insurance because this stuff is expensive to fix and all tech dies after a while - especially anything with a battery.

    A few weeks ago I noticed the watch was dead by a little after noon so this weekend I got around to see if I could get the battery replaced or the watch replaced or something.

    Yesterday afternoon, I get to support and they have me try all the power-sucking things and turning them off. They had me send some diagnostics report right to Google.

    The result? “Try keeping all the features turned off and see if the battery life improves”

    Sigh. Okay, FINE.

    But then I got to thinking: I paid for an extended warranty so I could use all the features of the watch and not the ones that don’t suck battery life. I might as well just get a $20 Timex and call it a day.

    Also, I’ve been paying five bucks a month for the warranty and now I would like the warranty to be honored. Nothing more.

    Today, I tried again. It took them half an hour to figure out the problem and my name and then I get bounced around to five different support agents. Five! At this point the support is just comical.

    As anybody who has called before, it’s not like your data follows you to the next agent You have to start all over with name and serial numbers and date of purchase. It took me almost 2 hours to get some resolution, which wasn’t a resolution at all.

    The solution was they sent me to another website and of course, when I try to enter my serial number they don’t recognize the device so I’m back to square one.

    All I want is an RMA number so I can send them the watch to repair. I’m really surprised and disappointed about how hard this was. I’ve lucked out in the past with warranty stuff so this is a bummer.

    I’m not giving up though. I’ve sent an email to support and see if that helps any - probably not, but I feel better and that’s the main point.

    I said to BW it would have been cheaper to self insure with this stuff.

    This reminds me of the time BW dropped her watch and cracked the screen to bits and we were to find out the repair was going to cost twice the price of just buying a new one- so that’s what we did and I sold the old one on eBay for too much money considering it was broken to bits.

    So, that’s how I spent a good chunk of my afternoon.

    Somehow the child snookered Mommy into stopping at the supermarket for cupcakes so we could have a birthday party for one of her stuffed animals.

    Yes, there was singing happy birthday to a stuffed animal and yes cupcakes were eaten.

    Soon singing to stuffed animals will be over and we’ll miss it.

    What I won’t miss is the crappy support I had today.

    Until Next Time,

    TH and Co.

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