Sometimes we get busy and in a few short days we turn around and life has happened all around us. This is my attempt to capture a few moments over the last week and a half.

Annual Toy Clean

We are overrun with toys. Four kids with eight grandparents. Birthdays. Christmas. A little something for Easter. A little something for Valentine’s Day and the occasional “If you keep your senses about you in Wal-Mart then we will buy a treat”. For the sake of calculation let’s assume that each child has ten times in a year that they might receive a small toy or sticker book. That is a total of forty occasions with a minimum of five potential donors. I figure this gives us an annual toy potential of around two hundred units.

Last weekend we cleaned the bonus room above the garage. Those estimated toy numbers were an understatement. We threw away somewhere around seven bags of trash. Three bags of broken toys.

Someone peed in a tin box with a rabbit painted on the top. I have to focus on the rabbit to forget about the pee. What in the actual…

The dog took a shit on a doll’s head and the kids reaction was to shove it under a bookshelf. I guess Judy Cornbread has made allies out of the girls. One of them at least.

On the bright side… Jane wants to be a vet.

Supermom BDay Party

Supermom celebrated another 22^nd birthday. The eleventh 22^nd birthday so far.

We visited the safari park and enjoyed a fresh coating of animal slobber on the side of our van. Buffalo are scary. Camels are assholes. Emus are creepy stalkers. Llamas do not wear red pajamas.

Also… see if you can spot the error in the informational sign. Comment at the bottom. Winner gets a thumbs up.

Early Baby

My brother and sister-in-law have been expecting a baby who was due in August. He decided on an early arrival and showed up about eight weeks early. It was a scary couple of days and has been a cautious few days since he entered the NICU but everything looks to be trending in the right direction. I’m sure he is just hard headed like his father.

They are in the middle of construction of a new home and I got drafted to help finish some tile grouting. I found it therapeutic. For about thirty minutes. Then it was exhausting. I was oddly satisfied once we finished even thought I couldn’t move through my full range of motion for the next two days. I will never own a successful tile business and that is okay.

Fourth of July Party

We had a local pool party to celebrate the 4^th since Baby D made his hasty entrance. My sister and her baby, Keanu, were also in town for the holiday. I felt life come full circle when we were all gathered around the pool and I watched someone else’s child become the focus of some hilarious action. It was a certified Pool Biscuit. I’m not saying he shit in the pool but I will say that no one else shit in the pool and there was definitely shit in the pool. I blame Grandaddy for not monitoring the diaper status.

Gecko on the Run.

So we found the missing snake. I already told you guys that information. However, we have had an escape of Vanderwal the Gecko. We searched for an hour but a gecko has sticky feet and the ability to walk on walls and the ceiling. That means he has five times as many places he could be and we didn’t find the snake for a week. I’m hoping that the dog or cat eat the gecko long before we locate him via smell. I would love to find him alive and well but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Maybe he will crawl on someone’s face in the middle of the night!

Cracker Barrel Urinal

We ate dinner at Cracker Barrel tonight. For the readers who don’t know about Cracker Barrel. It is a southern food restaurant that serves deliciousness. Chicken fried chicken with hash brown casserole is pure dopamine. Or serotonin. Whichever is the happiness chemical. I ate the happiness.

I also drank sweet tea. Not iced tea. Sweet tea. You put the sugar in while the tea is hot so it gets super saturated. It is impossible to sweeten iced tea after it cools. I traveled to Boston once and a waitress brought me iced tea with packets of sugar. That is the sadness chemical. I drank sadness that day.

The reason I told you about the sweet tea has to do with going to pee. If you drink enough sweet tea you will have to pee. I went to the Cracker Barrel bathroom and while standing at a urinal an old man walked up to the urinal next to mine. Guy code demands that you approach this situation one of two ways; a) small talk about the weather, music, or exclaiming how much you have to pee or b) look up and never make eye contact.

This man was old enough that he has abandoned social rules and decided that telling a joke about big penises was acceptable. The joke where one man says “this water is cold” and the other says “its deep too!”. Usually the joke has the setting of two men peeing off a bridge but not when this renegade comedian told the tale. No sir! These two ficticious men were just like us, standing at a urinal. All I could think about was the totally gross fact that two men in this joke had dipped their penises into a public urinal. Who cares about length at that point because it has become a poisonous disease vector. Congratulations on your endowment, pity that it will probably fall off in a few days. Remember children, reproductive parts are not water quality sampling devices.

Pikachu In The Hood

We left Cracker Barrel and headed for home. Suddenly, Supermom’s phone dinged and she squealed in excitement, “Pikachu! Turn Right!”. We raced to the right to track down the elusive Pikachu. Holy grail of Pokemon-GO!. The Poke-Stop that we were trying to locate was in the parking lot of the Sacred House of Judah Church. We drove through a couple of housing projects.

I know I might not be qualified to say we were in the hood but I would offer the following evidence. 1) Three small children without parental supervision were throwing rocks at a man walking down the sidewalk while quasi-leaning on a single crutch. It is mid-summer and he was wearing a jacket. 2) Sixty percent of the driveways had inoperable vehicles and the other driveways had old police cars purchased at public auction. 3) A very large lady, who I assume is of Scottish descent because of her red hair and ivory white skin, was dressed in a camouflage night gown and Crocs. Nothing else from what I saw. She was speaking very aggressively and pointing a long pink fingernail at a tall skinny man talking on a cell phone and trying not to make eye contact with the enraged woman. In the pauses between her yelling I could see she was missing a single front tooth. In my mind, the man’s name was Curtis and her name was Merida and she was upset that he didn’t come home last night because he laid out drinking beer and smoking weed with his friends. Curtis had some explaining to do. We drove without stopping to ask for directions.

As we emerged from the hood, we saw the Sacred House of Judah Church. It was an elusive building because the name had actually been changed to Word Truth Church. Supermom began an epic battle with Pikachu who, like the neighbors nearby, was unhappy about our presence in the neighborhood. She tried to place Pikachu under arrest. He resisted. On the third attempt, Pikachu was apprehended. He was wearing a backwards cap that was colored similar to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. These smartphones try to track and adjust for everything. It was weird.

If you like birthdays, kids taking dumps in pools, looking for Pokemon in dangerous parts of town, cleaning playrooms, premature babies, or safari parks… this post was for you! You’re welcome.

-Underdaddy to the rescue.