So Uncool

With a permanent mental age of 15, I worry about how uncool I must seem to the three teenage boys next door. Every time they see me, I'm unloading groceries, dragging garbage cans around, carrying one or more screaming children in my arms, pulling vines that are pulling our fence apart.

Oliver thinks I'm cool because I ride the train to work. But, at 4, he's already trying to enforce a no-singing rule on his parents, because it's so embarrassing.

Today Is Tuesday

"Today is Tuesday" read the hospital's doormat on the morning of Oliver's adenoidectomy. This was the last thing the hospital got right for a while--entering his medical history into the wrong patient's file, starting surgery two hours late so that Oliver was still conscious having missed breakfast and lunch, leaving me waiting for more than an hour after the operation while other parents were told their kids' surgeries had gone fine until I forced my way into the O.R. and learned that Oliver had gagged and begun choking under anaesthesia and that his doctor had been forced to paralyze the muscles in his neck, intubate him, and do his breathing for him for about ten minutes.

The doctor, an old man whose bedside manner consists of saying things like, "Ninety-nine bananas," while looking in kids' ears (much better is Oliver's allergist who asks Oliver's permission to look for butterflies in his ears), was still ashen and shaken when I finally spoke to him.

The surgery worked wonders and Oliver can now breathe and hear freely. His sense of humor has sharpened, too. "Does N-O spell yes?" he says.

What does "vorpal" mean, again?

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

What would it be like to try D&D today as a full-grown adult? [...] There is something to said for having to imagine what that Sword of Vorpal Wounding looks like, or how it would feel to face a White Dragon. My question for the Nerds among us is, Have any of you guys tried D&D as adult? Did you just put away the polyhedral dice and say forget it? Do you ever get the hankering to go rooting through the Caves of Chaos?

Make it stop

For the last four years, since the day the fashion-consultant dad asked the lawyer-who-wants-to-be-a-writer dad out to a diner, they have been making the rounds of TriBeCa’s better breakfast spots, a rotating lineup of seven or eight guys, whiling away the morning hours with hash browns and wide-ranging banter that somehow seldom strays far from the locker room.

“It’s like ‘Sex and the City’ with coffee instead of cosmos,” Mr. Katz said.

—NYT

Oliver Rolls A 101

I was a little apprehensive about taking Oliver bowling for the first time, but the technology has advanced to the point where a three-year-old can roll a 101. He was given a ramp for launching his ball. Our attendant stuck a hook into our gutters and raised guardrails that would keep all but the wildest shots in play. Bad shots actually do better as they zig-zag back and forth.

Unable to sit through an entire game of Candyland, and usually indifferent to the concepts of winning and losing, Oliver knocked over three pins with his first roll and promptly pressed the 3 button on the scorer's table, all without me explaining the rules.

Unlike the driving games of my youth, in which you'd crash, be thrown from your vehicle, and laboriously shift through your gears again, the driving game in the bowling alley also had guardrails so that it was impossible to drive off the road.

Double Negative

Oliver was saying no to bedtime and no to getting up and no to the first three or four choices for each meal. "He's saying no to everything," I explained so my mother visiting from Maine wouldn't feel bad about his rejections. Oliver heard this and said, "No, not no to everything." Since that day he has been much more of a yes man.

Ollievision

Oliver was on the news for a second last night, the only kid looking at the camera while every other kid in his class looked at the Labrador to whom the SPCA was teaching them to be kind.

My own debut was on a Portland, OR kids show which featured incredibly violent cartoons and a smile contest which I unbelievably won since I share Oliver's dread of being seen. Crooked teeth, less than perfect skin, and a kid-hating stepfather usually taking the picture or looming behind me are to blame for my failure to win any more smile contests.