The Walking Dead: Season One, Episode One - With the Kids

Renaya (11), Laura (10), and Frederic (8) curled up on the couch beside me, and we began.

It didn't take long for Frederic to be watching, peeking out between his fingers, Renaya to be begging for spoilers so she could feel better about the current scenes, and Laura, weeping into her lap, curled into the fetal position at the end of the couch.

Then came the scene where Rick himself curled up in the fetal position in his empty house and wept over the assumed loss of his wife and son. I looked over at Frederic and his face was falling. He began to cry. Tears flowed down his face as he gurgled out a request to crawl up onto Mommy's lap. 

Fred has one hell of a heart.

When Rick finally made it into the tank and the kids heard Glen's voice come over the radio, they all gave each other relieved looks and started to giggle. Renaya then wailed at the television, seeing the horse mutilated on the street.

If I ever come upon a group of zombies eating a horse, I'm shooting them all dead! They're mean!

Smugly, I retorted:

They's already dead. 

Yep. She loves horses. But she wouldn't buy the argument that it was the horse or Rick. I mean, this isn't Horse Land, 'Naya.

They are now all three curled up in Renaya's bed, having mutual nightmares together. I gave them a dull axe for safety. 

Read about Episode Two and Three...

Daddy, I'm Scared You and Mommy Were Fighting

The car door slammed, the engine roared to life, the gears shifted, the tires crunched over the sand I missed while blowing off the driveway, the thud happened as the tires bounced into the gutter, the brakes squealed softly, the gears shifted again, the motor revved, and Mommy drove off to meet a friend for an evening walk.

I sat in the living room, the warm spring breeze lightly brushing past the right side of my face.  It was a bit chilly for this time of year and I tucked my feet up under me.

I heard footsteps on the stairs behind the massive door to my left.  

They were deliberate footsteps - a bit slow - but, nonetheless, they were purposeful.  The door handle turned and through the door came Laura, my nine-year-old little girl.  She was weeping.

"Daddy, who drove awaaaay," she wailed.

"Mommy did," I said, while letting out a chuckle.

"I'm scared.  I'm scared you were fighting.  We're you fighting?"

I giggled at her.

"No, Laura, we weren't.  Mommy went off into the sunset to go out with a friend.  Now go back to bed.  Love you."

One thing is for certain: I now know that everything I do affects at least one of my children acutely.  What a powerful incentive to love her mother.

I Am Not the World's Greatest Dad

I arrived home to the smell of steamy poop.  The dining room smelled like it.  The living reeked.  Kristine had just left for work and I needed to make supper.  I decided to breathe through my mouth and close my nose with my epiglottis.  You become a master at that exercise as a dad of six kids.  I'm as good at that as a woman doing kegels (in preparation for childbirth, of course).

We began training Analisse (2) to go to the bathroom on the potty a week or so ago.  She forced our hand by ripping off her diaper and marching to the toilet, opening it, peeing, wiping herself, and then notified us of her victory by slamming the cover down so hard, it shook the house.  I heard the noise and rushed into the bathroom, only to be greeted by a giggly little girl, so proud of her accomplishment, she was spewing out the words in perfect sentences:

"I went peeeee!!!!"

She got candy.

But that was pee.  She loved doing it.  She hated diapers - unless she had to poop.  Kristine sat with her a few days ago for a few hours, finally coaxing her to go one little turd.  She kept hopping off and coming back, hopping off, and coming back.  Finally, she succumbed and let out a little sheep ball of blackness.  That was the last time.

I found the pork chops in the freezer and walked up the basement stairs.  I could smell the fecal matter as I neared the top stair and went into denial mode, covering my nose again from the inside.  I defrosted the meat and sliced potatoes, hoping beyond hope, grasping at the elusive possibility that Kristine had left a diaper on her from nap time.  I convinced myself of this, even though Kristine had informed me on the second day of Analisse's potty training that she slept through nap time with underwear on.

I finished defrosting the chops, poured olive oil into the bottom of two glassware cake pans, covered them with salt and freshly ground pepper, shoved the pans in the oven at 350 degrees, and began to fry the potatoes.

Analisse ran past me giggling.

I laughed as she ran past me, momentarily forgetting that I was purposefully plugging my nose.  I breathed in deeply - and choked on the rancid air.  This was most definitely not a diaper issue.  She had gone in her underwear.  I knew it.  But, I had one last glimmer of hope and, grasping at it, I yelled out to the living room:

"Renaya!  Laura!  Frederic!  Change The Freak's diaper....NOW!!!"

Every good parent knows that you yell the names of all capable hands.  Only one will really end up doing the task, but she'll pummel the other two and force them to help her.  This way, if things go bad, they might, together, be able to get something done successfully, decreasing the chances that you'll need to pitch in and help where you would rather not.

I just wanted to cook supper!

The kids sprang to action, sitting up slightly in their resting positions in the living room.

"Now!! Dammit!!!" 

Now they knew I meant business and slowly dragged themselves out to the kitchen, chased The Freak down and I listened carefully as they laid her down in the living room, preparing to change the diaper.

I busied myself with the frying, counting down the six seconds that it would take to discover underwear vs. a diaper.  Sure enough:

"Ewww, Daddy!  YUCK!  Gross, Daddy!  This is disgusting.  Blecht!  Oh, nasty!!!!!"

My heart hit the floor.  

I rushed into the living room, scooped Ani up in my arms, walked quickly to the bathroom with a bucket of wipes and laid her down on the bathroom rug.  Her shirt and pants were fine as I peeled them off but I could see her underwear was a thick and slimy mass of soft squishy wonder.  I took them off slowly, yelled for a garbage bag (threatening no supper if I didn't get it in seconds), got it delivered to me in record time, cleaned up her butt, kicked her out of the bathroom, happy and giggling, and then focused my attention on the underwear.

The poop was halfway between a hard ball and diarrhea.  It covered the entire area of the back of her underwear.  I rolled up a wad of toilet paper and tried valiantly to scrape the contents into the toilet.

The poop wouldn't budge.

I began to turn on the hot sink water, thinking I would wash it off, hoping the majority would melt away or evaporate into hot steam, hoping I wouldn't plug up the p-trap.  The p-trap!  

Turning around, I tossed the underwear in the garbage bag, tied it closed, washed my hands, and texted Kristine that we needed to buy more underwear.  I returned to the kitchen and finished supper - arguably more flavorable at this point. 

The Stars Always Amaze Me

UPDATE 3/18/2012 2:28P CST:  When I wrote this post on June 29, 2012, I still believed in some sort of God - just not the god of the Bible. Since then, I have left that belief altogether and have become an undefined agnostic.  Regardless, enjoy the post by looking at the world through the innocent eyes of a child.

I love things that are bigger than I am.  Things that boggle my mind.  Things that the experts can explain, but my simple mind sees only God.


Tonight, getting home from Nature Camp, where my sister, who has a degree as a Naturalist (no, that doesn't mean she did her thesis in a nudist colony) took care of my six squirts while my wife and I went on a date, the kids had to go right to bed.  Everyone fell asleep immediately - except Frederic - Juaca Baby, as I call him.


Frederic has a tough time going to sleep.  He loves to get out of bed and play, helping his little brother out of bed and keeping him awake well into the night.  Sometimes, he'll sneak downstairs and find our various hiding spots where the candy is stored and have a ball.  Other times, he'll find any container that can hold liquid and make concoctions out of water and anything else that can go in water, which is, well....anything.  We have thrown away more moldy something-or-others than Kleenex from a month of family colds.


Tonight was no different.  Frederic got to come downstairs and sit in his chair and enjoy the hustle and bustle of my bride and I, sitting around chatting, blogging, and staring at each others smokin' hot bodies.  Ok, maybe a stretch, but hers is most definitely so.  Mine....I'm starting to sag in all the wrong places.  In truth, we were actually cleaning and waiting for one of my wife's friends to come for the weekend.


While cleaning, I took the garbage out and happened to glance at the dark, moonless sky.  I was taken aback at the beauty.  Stars were everywhere.  Bright ones, surrounded by hundreds of dim ones, providing a perfect backdrop for satellites orbiting by.  I rushed in to grab Fred.


We went out in the driveway, folded up his train blankie, and laid down, our bare backs against the smoothish concrete.  For an hour, we played games like, who could find the biggest triangle. (I won that one by cheating.  I picked three stars from each horizon.).  Or, who could find the perfect square.


Fred was fascinated by the bright stars.  Two satellites glided past in a similar orbit going different directions.  A small plane flew overhead with red and green lights on the under-wing tips, bright whites flashing in even intervals, and a yellow incandescent-ish light on the tail.  The engine sped up as it neared the runway approach out of town and disappeared over the tree line.  A star blinked in my peripheral vision and yet could only be seen by the both of us if we kept flitting our eyes past it, never really looking directly at its position.  In the distance, a brighter satellite flew by - maybe a high altitude plane.


As always happens when I stare at the stars, I couldn't get my mind off of wandering into thinking how small and insignificant I was.  The conversation with Fred (6) turned to God.  As any six year old, he spoke confidently of God's enormous size.  How God could bridge the distance between us and the millions of miles in between, to the nearest star.  How God's head was bigger than the whole world and all the worlds in the sun.  How his arms could reach out and push two stars together.


I listened with intense interest, interjecting once, and getting thoroughly rejected, because his older sister, Laura, had told him it was true.  So I listened.  When he was done, I spoke of my understanding of God, His Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Very simple.  No complexities.  He didn't care.  The stars were his image of God at the moment and explained perfectly what he knew of Him.


I realized right then and there that I was free.  I was free to tell my son what I knew of God without the guilty feeling that I needed to convert him then and there.  I didn't need to push my son to believe what I knew of God.  He would get there.  God, in His time, would reveal Himself to Fred.


We got up and went inside.  Inside the house that God was too big to fit his nose into and yet, as Fred said, lived inside of anyway.  He went to bed happy and fell asleep.