Dad Is Fat (9 page)

Since I am not “handy,” Jeannie tends to do a lot of the inevitable household repairs that result from having five children who break everything. Recently, I was assembling a kid’s scooter and futilely trying to shove the top piece in.

“Jeannie, do we have a hammer?”

“Yeah, we have like three hammers.”

“Where are they?”

“In the toolbox.”

“We have a toolbox?”

There is one exception to Jeannie’s superhumanness. As capable, organized, and amazing as Jeannie is at almost everything, it is baffling how many times a day she loses her phone.

“Where’s my phone?”

“Didn’t you just find it?”

“Yes, but then I put it down somewhere. Can you call it?”

[
RING
]

“It’s in your hand.”

Jeannie calls this “mommy brain,” but rather than condemning mothers as ditzy scatterbrains, I think it’s just a matter of shifting priorities and focusing on the most important issues. Like taking care of me.

Jeannie is the mother of five children (six, if you include me) and my invaluable writing partner. I don’t mean partner symbolically, like, “Oh, here’s what the client’s wife thinks.” She is
the
partner. This is very rare in stand-up, so people are surprised that she is executive-producing my theater shows while being the mother of five kids. “Shouldn’t your wife be home fat and miserable?”

We made that quilt together, too
.

Jeannie comes from a family of nine kids, and she and her mother have really bonded over the trials and tribulations of being in this awe-inspiring position of mother. There is a certain language that only mothers can understand. They talk all the time on the phone, usually having the same five-minute conversation over and over again for like eight hours. When they aren’t talking, I assume it’s because Jeannie’s lost her phone.

Toddlerhood is one of my favorite periods of childhood development, and not just because you can finally enter them in beauty pageants. (Don’t worry, they do get used to the fake teeth.)
Toddler
is a term used to describe children ages one to three. Babies and toddlers are mostly what I’ve been exposed to at this point. I’m hoping parenting just gets much easier after this. It does, right? I know this is a book and I can’t hear you, but I’m going to take your silence as a yes.

I used to wonder why I had hair on my legs, but now I know it’s for my toddler sons and daughters to pull themselves up off the ground with as I scream in pain. Based on my experience, a baby will start walking at around eleven months … I think. Oh, jeez, I don’t remember. I just know they start walking before they ride a bike and start smoking. All healthy babies eventually walk, but we treat those first steps like someone has just risen out of a wheelchair at a healing revival. “He’s
walking
! It’s a miracle!”

I guess walking is sort of impressive after ten months of just lying around. Actually, they don’t immediately walk or even toddle. They “cruise” or hold themselves up with furniture in search of the hardest and sharpest surface to bang their head on. When they finally let go and take a few steps, it’s more of a stumble or a stagger, like they are a drunken old man or a zombie extra from
The Walking Dead
.

What amazes me is that once they actually learn to walk, they are immediately trying to get away. You just say, “Time for a bath!” and they scoot away like they have an escape car outside. I don’t know where they think they are going. They can’t even reach the doorknob. I am always like, “What are you doing? You only know
us
! Think it through!” They’ve only been on the planet for twelve months, and they can’t really go stay with a friend or check into a motel, but that doesn’t stop them. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have a plan. They are just trying to leave.

Once your baby starts to walk you’ll realize why cribs are designed like prisons from the early 1900s. This is clearly because toddlers are a danger to themselves. The main responsibility for a parent of a toddler is to stop them from accidentally hurting or killing themselves. They are superclumsy. If you don’t believe me, watch a two-year-old girl attempt to walk up stairs in a long dress. It looks like a Carol Burnett sketch. Also, toddler judgment is horrible. They don’t have any. Put a twelve-month-old on a bed, and they will immediately try and crawl off headfirst like a lemming on a mindless migration mission. But the toddler mission is never mindless. They have two goals: find poison and find something to destroy.

Toddlers love toilet paper. I mean, I love toilet paper, too—who doesn’t? Even the most devout conservationist can’t live without their toilet paper. “Reuse! Recycle! Wait … What? We’re out of toilet paper? Chop down that forest! Fast!” But toddlers love toilet paper for all the wrong reasons. They have no idea what it is for or how to use it, but they are passionate about a nice, big, fresh roll of toilet paper. They love to play with it, wear it, eat it, and, especially, unroll it. Leave a toddler alone in a bathroom for five seconds, and they somehow unroll three hundred feet of toilet paper with supernatural speed. Then you walk in and bust them, and they just look at you like, “What? This stuff is obviously for me, right? It’s right at my eye level, and it’s the most fun thing in the house.” All the geniuses at the Fisher-Price laboratories have yet to develop
something as fun for a toddler as a ninety-nine-cent roll of toilet paper. Unfortunately for me, whenever this unrolling happens, it’s always the last roll in the house. Have you ever tried to reroll an entire family-size roll of toilet paper? I just leave it in a big, undulating pile next to the toilet. I’m not going to throw it away. After all, it is still toilet paper.

I reckon a two-year-old is on the loose in these parts
.

After toddlers make the evolutionary leap to
Baby erectus
, you still end up pushing them in a stroller or carrying them most places if you’d like to reach your destination in the next decade. Fifteen-month-old Michael loves to run around, yet he always wants me to carry him everywhere in my sling. He is huge, but I can hardly feel my back breaking when I walk around with Michael in the sling because of the attention that he draws from everyone we encounter. I call Michael a “gateway” baby. Even people who don’t like babies or children melt around his sweetness and charm. Michael makes the crabbiest New Yorkers smile. It’s like I’m carrying the heaviest ventriloquist doll ever, but the routine is in gibberish.

The interesting thing that happens when walking around with a baby strapped in front of you at adult eye level is the baby acts like he thinks he is the one walking around and you are just this weirdo strapped to his back. He starts to have “conversations” with adults that you encounter. When babies move away from just the
mama-dada-baba
sounds, they start to make sounds that
could
be words, but they’re not. It’s the seriousness with which they deliver their baby talk that is the most entertaining. Michael’s babble is delivered with the intensity and cadence of an Obama speech. People are compelled to respond in kind, but then Michael will just look at them like, “That’s not what I said at all, you moron.”

They make up for it when they turn two and they just start
talking
, and I mean talking all the time. It’s as if all of those things they wanted to say before just come jumbling out in a whirlwind of botched sentences. They can’t pronounce anything. “I wan pahk go down yittle swide eat appoo.” I’m like, “C’mon, learn English. This is America, for God’s sake!” When Katie was two, her English was so bad I thought she might be al-Qaeda. Some of this may have been because I when dressed her in a baby burka, she looked kind of suspicious.

Toddlers, for some reason, are always out of breath. They always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours in order to deliver important news. “Mommy, Mommy, Daddy, [
breath, breath, breath
], I need to tell you something [
breath, breath, breath
] …” This news is so important, parental titles are unimportant. “Daddy, Mommy, Daddy! I need to tell you …” I’ll chime in, “Yes, yes. What is it?” By that point, it will be apparent by the look on their face that they have completely forgotten what they even wanted to tell you. “Um … can I have some juice? I mean, I wet my pants.” Toddlers also love to tell you secrets, especially when you are wearing a white shirt and they’ve been eating chocolate.

Everyone with a toddler has had that embarrassing moment when their kid will innocently yell a word in public that sounds like a really bad grown-up word. Once when two-year-old Jack was playing swords in the park with another boy, he yelled, “I’m gonna hit you with my big stick,” but using the
d
sound instead of the
st
.

When Marre was two, I was in line at a crowded New York City grocery store, and I gave her a sippy cup of
juice
in a futile attempt to stop a meltdown. She bellowed at the top of her
lungs, “I don’t like jews!” Thank God, we live in New York City and my family looks like Hitler’s fantasy. Otherwise, that would’ve been pretty awkward.

Jeannie has often described two-year-olds as at the peak of cuteness. For some reason, everything a toddler says is adorable. Maybe it’s the squeaky voice. Maybe it’s the made-up words: “Lasterday I had pesketti.” or “It’s waining! Can I bring my unclebrella?”

They can talk, but they can’t exactly follow logic. Dr. Harvey Karp, author of
Happiest Toddler on the Block
, calls it the caveman phase. I’ve never known a caveman, but I guess that makes sense. You can’t really reason with a two-year-old. There is a lot of redirecting: “Okay, instead of playing with the scissors, let’s play with the ball. No, the hanging wineglasses are not a ball. Here, sit in this crib.” Two-year-olds don’t understand consequences. “If you keep taking off your shoes in the cab, you will lose your shoes!” Then you realize that’s the point. They are trying to lose their shoes. That’s why they are taking them off. The only consequences are for you. You will have to get them a new pair of shoes. Toddlers are adorable, but taking care of them doesn’t really get easier. Whoever came up with the term “terrible twos” must have felt very foolish after their kid turned three.

Three-year-olds are just rude. They are still supercute, but now they are supercute
and they know it
. They have gotten supersmart, and they are not afraid to show it. It’s like living with a child emperor. They act really entitled, bossy, and outspoken. They think the world revolves around them. I realize I’m describing myself, but somehow it works better for a three-year-old.

Recently I took my three-year-old, Katie, to the post office. As we were walking into the post office, a lady was walking out and stopped and smiled at little Katie. Katie took her thumb out of her mouth, looked the lady up and down, and said rudely, “What are
you
doing here?” This wouldn’t have been so awkward, impolite, and funny if we knew the woman. We had never met or seen the woman before and didn’t even know someone that looked remotely like the woman. In Katie’s three-year-old world, this was an appropriate response to someone smiling at her.

Katie still sucks her thumb at three years old. When she was two, everyone told us that she would stop when she was three, but she kept on sucking her thumb. She is our third child and our first thumb sucker. Thumb sucking brings with it so many mixed emotions. There is that immediate fear that somehow we have failed her. That she is sucking her thumb because she doesn’t get enough attention or she wasn’t nursed long enough. The reality is that she probably gets more attention and has better parents than our first two kids. Still, why the thumb? Am I worried that one day the thumb will be replaced by a crack pipe? Yes. Is that likely to happen? No.

Thumb sucking is adorable in many ways. When Katie is angry, she uses the thumb sucking as an exclamation to emphasize her point. “I’m not taking a bath … [
insert thumb
].” When she has a stuffed-up nose, it is incredibly comical to witness her attempt to suck her thumb and breathe at the same time.