Defeat!

My preschooler bested me in a Mario Kart race. What is happening? This is the same boy who pronounces tornado as “tomato,” sleeps with a blankie, and survives on a diet of peanut butter and apple juice.

Yum

How do you know when your son is playing too much Minecraft?

ANSWER: When he mispronounces M&Ms as “Endermans.” As in, “I want a bowl of Endermans.” And doesn’t know he’s saying it wrong.

VeggieTale Moments

To help my 4-year-old overcome his fears, I introduced him to a classic — VeggieTales’ “God Is Bigger Than The Boogie Man.” This was one of the earliest VeggieTales entries, awash in clunky ’90s CGI, with low rez rendering, awkward motion, and not-quite-right textures.

The title song caught on with my boy, but not exactly as intended. He now enjoys randomly inventing his own alternate chorus lines, which have included such gems as “God is bigger than the balloons” and the quintessential anthem of preschool theology, “God is bigger than the chips.”

Kids Say the Darnedest Things

Me: Here are your strawberries.

4-year-old: Thank you, Strawberry Man!

Work From Home!

Working from home means getting interrupted by a 4-year-old with an urgent message that he wants it to be Halloween again. Then he hands you a Kinder egg he found downstairs and asks you to open it and get the toy out and show him what it does.

I guess it beats being interrupted by office gossip.

Patchwork

My 6-year-old wears an eye patch to strengthen his right eye. When he remembers. Which means when Mom and Dad remember. He’s got abnormally bad vision and has already graduated to Coke-bottle lens territory, and we’re doing the best we can to deal with that.

So tonight I put on a show he’s never seen before. The Three Stooges. The kid points out a character who is supposed to be some sort of Middle-Eastern baddie and joyfully informs me that that guy wears a patch just like him!

I guess he forgot about Pirates.

He’s Baaaack!

I’m dusting the bookshelves and bringing out fresh towels for Muscular Parenting. It’s been years, so let me bring you up to speed on the state of things in the MP household.

1. The Things have replicated. We now have four children, ages 10, 6, 4, and 2.

2. We moved to Pennsylvania.

3. I now work from home, but for the same employer.

4. The wife has a tissue connectivity disorder.

5. As I write this, the little darlings are retrieving the kidnapped fireflies from our living room rug and returning them, crushed and crippled, to the backyard.

6. We have a backyard!

Stay tuned…

Kids vs. Walmart

The internet loves photos of large Walmart shoppers. My toddler does not share that love. Whilst navigating around an obese woman whose posture accentuated her generously endowed rear end, Widget2 said to Mom, “Watch out for the butt!”

A Childhood Remembered (With Apologies to C.S. Lewis)

When I read, I read as a writer. The result is that I rarely finish books.

Bad writing makes me want to gouge out my eyes with an unusually sharp semicolon. Good writing makes me feel guilty about all those unfinished projects that were supposed to have hit the New York Times bestsellers list by now.

What does heaven look like?

What does heaven look like?

Widget1: “Green… From space, that’s what it looks like.”

There you have it, folks. Heaven looks like green. From space.