Parenting 101 On Sale Now

Parenting 101 sounds like a great title for a book or a website dedicated to being the best mommy or daddy one can possibly be. Cue twinkled front tooth and cutesy wink. The cover is a fun, primary color kind of vibe with a smiling, razor thin couple with marshmallow white chompers, matching maroon fleece vests and an aura that yells, “missionary position!” I am sure the web address is already taken with its million man hit ratio and the Barnes and Noble self-help section is overflowing with a collection of paperbacks with a variation on the uncatchy and clear title. I would love to believe that a smattering of words held between two covers would be enough to answer all the questions and doubts and fears and struggles that come along with procreation and its aftermath.

Shit, I would love a pill that I could take any time I feel unsure, overwhelmed or confused as how to approach a particularly difficult or trying parenting situation. When Otto argues with me and insists on cupping his penis when urinating, thus creating a human fountain with his hand and a puddle of yellow liquid on the bathroom floor that I have to clean up, I could just swallow a blue pill and magically have the answer. Or when he refuses to put on his clean camouflage pajamas and only wants the crusty, filthy Lightning McQueen ones that are at the bottom of the laundry hamper begging for me to put them out of their misery with a flame thrower and bottle of bleach, I could pop a little red friend and fix this unfixable mess.

Jacqueline Susann, the doyen of drug addiction, the black eye liner loving “author” who perpetuated the mystifying representation of female stress with pill popping aplomb was oh, so wrong in her caftan lusciousness. No woman with children, a blossoming sexually transmitted movie career and a hardcore Valium addiction has the time, energy or inclination to commit to the arduous upkeep of a beehive bouffant that could secretly house a family of squawking herons while fighting tooth and nail to survive the daily battle of the wills with tiny, treacherous trolls demanding food, shelter and apple juice.

Not even a closet full of mink bed jackets, a rainbow of patent leather flats and a treasure trove of baby doll jumpers with matching coin purses could screw in the screws unscrewed by the modern child. There are no happy pills that can quick fix a toddler tantrum. There is no medicinal magic that can cure a one-sided argument involving fecal covered Play-Doh, a broken, a toxic, plastic dump truck filled with dirty pennies and a Matchbox car draped in day-old applesauce that smells like old lady smell.

All the heroine heavy, hypodermic needles in the world could not solve the age-old question,” Why, mommy?” multiplied by Pi. Mountains of Colombia’s crustiest and cruelest cocaine could not possibly be the white flag of surrender needed during a harried hair washing or a terrifying tooth brushing. And no amount of meth-coated magic could possibly mask the intense, searing pain that comes when a small, determined running back propels his perfectly formed skull into your ill prepared pubic bone leaving a bruise on your vagina ironically shaped like the Virgin Mary.

The solution, if one does indeed exist, is not in the potion but in the perspective. I recently attended a parenting discussion group at Otto’s school where our wonderful principal and a favorite teacher and education professor talked about healthy parenting by setting limits. Running late as usual, due to a child who sleeps as late as a preteen stoner, I stumbled into what I thought would be a tiny circle of relaxed, nanny-loving, uber-confident, well rested parents killing extra minutes with a little face time and chit chat. I thought for sure I was the only one who needed some sage advice and witty words of wisdom. I had convinced myself that I was clearly the only failure in a school of fabulous.

But to my sleepy surprise, what I found was a room overflowing with eager, overwhelmed and wayward wanderers looking for answers and experience in all things cranky kid. These were mothers and fathers who, like me, had random, rough days, hard mornings and difficult nights with their children. They too hoarded memories of inexplicable tears, headstrong hollering and speechless moments looking for the right words to soothe, the correct combo of syllables to calm, the perfect pairing of this wine with that whine. To hear other stories of impatience and dread and fear and heartache made me feel as rejuvenated as a botoxed bottom lip. I didn’t take joy in their problems. I took comfort, comfort in knowing that I was not alone in my self-doubt and exhaustion on those even days and overflowing joy on those odd days.

We all compared the good, the bad and the scary and exchanged book recommendations and belly laughs. The speakers gifted us with tricks and tools that had worked for them in the past assuring us that we were not crazy and never alone. They talked about their parenting anecdotes that caused them stomach aches in the 70’s but were now great Thanksgiving table tales that made their grown children howl in delight and shudder with dread for what was to come with the next generation.

When the meeting was over and the notes were scribbled I left the room a different person and, I hope, a tad better mom. For the remainder of my week I have had a sense of calm and resolve I have not felt since scoring the winning basket during our city basketball championships in 1979 while wearing two-toned dolphin shorts and a lopsided, despondent Dorothy Hamill haircut. I find myself approaching each moment with this wonderful army of school parents standing behind me with their hands on my shoulder and their voices in my head. I get down lower when I talk to Otto and speak calmer and clearer. I give him reasonable options without showering him with too many choices and a time crunch. I try to see the world from his new fresh angle instead of my scattered, ragged cliff’s edge, teetering on a crumbling precipice, waiting for the inevitable plunge into the anemic, polluted river down below.

I have included a list of books and a website that this glorious group of grown-ups tossed out during our meeting of the mending minds. I still haven’t read anything on the list but I will as soon as the laundry is done, the rug is vacuumed, the snack bag is stocked, the dog has pooped, the cat pee is mopped up, the boy is scrubbed clean and the Olympic women’s figure skating medals are dangling on anorexic necks. Until then, maybe just knowing that no parent is alone in their suffering or solo in their salvation is enough to sustain us all through these tricky yet terrific times.

Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher

Raising Cain by Michael Thompson

Blessings of a Skinned Knee by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin

1-2-3 Magic by Dr.Thomas Phelan

Hand in Hand Parenting.org

And of course, commiseration.

Crazie For You

Grace Suzanne Eisner

Born February 3, 2010

7 lbs. 11 oz.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost and now am found.

Was blind but now I see.

No, young lady I am not talking about myself and I am pretty sure I do not speak of your father after he returned from being on location covered in a biblical skin condition and a frame only an Olsen twin could pull off because he refused to eat the local food, the kind of fare that one can only identify by the sounds of “glop” and “crunch”, the kind of food whose caloric equivalent matches that of the entire buffet table on a Carnival cruise ship before it sickens the passengers and forces everyone on board to spontaneously poop on the captains’ table.

I dare say the wretch I refer to is the multitude of characters that your dear old daddy sneakily coerced me into watching on the big screen, the freaky scary, bloody, oozing, badass, dripping killer whack jobs he brought to life called The Crazies. And the really hot lead actors who make mere mortals look like dirty, gas station toilet seats.

Yes, Amazing Grace, the thought of you and your beautiful face and your father’s smashing career and stellar directorial skill and innate charm and overall wonderfulness plus all the free meals he and your mother, grandfather and grandmother so loving fed me, Dave and your boyfriend Otto these past few summers kept me from running full speed out of the theatre and into oncoming traffic at the intersection of Sunset and Hillhurst Ave. in boots and a leather jacket that made me look like the fifth and least cool or known Runaway, the sad one Joan Jett insisted be dumped due to limp hair and cultural irrelevancy.

By the way, that is not an intersection you or any one else should dare sprint into. It is filled with speeding, dented buses, transsexual hybrid she-males, drunk hipsters, limp, retired gang bangers and crusty homeless men who want to be cool eastsiders instead of complacent wanna-be Nick Nolte Beverly Hills bums who would rather eat expensive cat food out of tiny little cans than scarf up a half eaten taco truck burrito they find stuck to the front quarter panel of a parked 2008 Prius owned by the Los Feliz Ironic Guy that we all know and hate.

You need to know that your daddy makes movies, really great movies, movies that look pristine and sound amazing and feel alive, alive enough to make you think that the people on the screen may very well jump off said screen and grab you by your frilly and fabulous dress, gnaw on your collarbone and turn you into a Crazie just like them. You need to prepare yourself for a life of long editing nights where daddy eats a tub of Red Vines with a regret chaser, hectic and hilarious script revisions by your Uncle Blitz, exotic locals complete with Scotch-Brite bed linens and cement mattresses, catered truck food that bites back and a hoard of extras who want to be upgraded to zombie #3 to fill an black hole left by years of rejection, bad relationships with food and poor fashion choices.

So Little Grace, get your rest, drink you milk and pack your bags because you have been chosen to hop on a colossal roller coaster ride of movie magic and dreamlike adventures. He will scare you, he will thrill you, he will entertain you and he will delight you but most importantly he will love you with the strength of a thousand zombies and the intensity of a cornfield full of method actors doused in fake blood. He is your daddy and you should be terribly, crushingly proud!

But please, for the love of God, look under the bed every night before you fall asleep. Thanks to your dear old daddy, I know I will.

The Grass Is Always Browner

Nothing but nothing sucks the dirt off a rug and into your mouth like three weeks of sickness, snot and closed quarters. Make that four. Possibly five, if you include the two colds we already suffered through in early January. Okay six, I am saying six, fudge- eaters. This is ridiculous, tremendously irritating and just plain shit cracker, this Petri dish I live in.

After Otto got pneumonia and spent nine days at home watching Lightning McQueen while his mother spoke in tongues to her collection of chipped Ikea dishware, he then turned around and snorted a line of bronchitis he must have scored from one of the “bad” kids at school. That resulted in another seven days in the house watching Ma and Pa morph into two stained, short-tempered fraying bathrobes Salvation Army would refuse to resell.

Then, after having Otto continually cough into my weeping, open mouth during daily hugs and medicine chugging, I proceeded to catch the nasty, retarded cousin of a cold to his bronchitis. This, of course, came with two hooker girlfriends named Bitchitis and Angertosis. Then, just as the dregs of disgust seemed to be slinking away into the alley behind Toast and I could smell the finish line at last, Dave got the cold with a set of chills John Travolta wanted back and a headache that could kill a Tiger Woods herpes outbreak, all fourteen cases.

Even though my pathetically unhappy husband was suffering, I knew I was at the end of my misery and almost happy again. And thinking that I would just sleep off the tail end of the germ-a-thon with a dinner of NyQuil, chocolate ice cream and Bode Miller gold, I decided to fall asleep in a position better suited for a rotting, felled tree than a numb, tired human snot rag. With one arm behind my back and the other reaching across the street to strangle the whore who was yelling at her broken down dog, I awoke this morning with a searing pain from my left shoulder and neck as intense as the ouch I felt when I fell vagina first onto the monkey bars in third grade, a true story and excruciating memory that still haunts my nether regions to this day.

No, it appears that it never ends. And no, I am not thrilled with our string of shitty luck. But as in all things life related it could always be worse. Instead of being home last week blowing his nose into my sofa cushions, Otto could have been at school when a nice and spicy lice outbreak began amongst his schoolmates. Instead of picking little white nightmares off his golden locks and washing every thing we own in hot, angry water I was simply washing a mountain of crunchy, annoying dishes, mindless reciting lines spoken by an imaginary talking car who once tried to kill himself due to a bad break up and watching Otto beam with joy every time I handed him a homemade chocolate chip cookie with a milk chaser. Glass half full people, glass half full.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Well, hello there...

Zoey Lynn Hudis

6 lbs. 10 ounces

19 3/4 inches

So, we have another arrival this month, a beautiful (I haven't seen the pictures yet but I know she is a stunner!) little girl who will write her opus early, carry her Hermes bag often and kiss her brother always. Welcome to the world of Hudis, a place where you will be cuddled, kissed and cared for like a prom queen on a hometown float, the one with perfectly feathered hair and a super cute skirt that looks better on you than anyone else.

Your new crew is brilliant, brazenly funny, perfectly appointed and as articulate as a poet laureate on an iambic pentameter bender. We can't wait to laugh at your jokes, read your crushing critiques and gaze at your deft doodles. And Otto? He cannot wait to say yes to the Sadie Hawkins dance, 2028! She'll be home late so don't bother to wait up, Mark.

Love,

Dotty, Dave and of course, Otto

I Bet St. Valentine Never Got A Card

It’s Valentine’s Day, 2010 and that means heart shaped arguments, red and pink silences and boxed chocolate bitterness. Unless, of course, your beloved drove to the local Kaye Jewelers in a pink stucco mini mall off the 10 freeway, bought you a sparkly diamond pendant in the shape of an unsuccessful, deflated heart transplant and forced you to wear the bobble while drinking a tepid bottle of Freixenet.

Then you will indeed have a super awesome, crazy romantic pixie dust-sprinkled V. Day and go back to the office on Tuesday gushing with the dirty details of a long holiday weekend spent listening to John Mayer’s greatest hits and eating chocolate covered strawberries grown in Chile off of your lovers kitschy heart-splattered boxers you bought him at Nordstrom’s rack.

Me? I will spend it watching the most boring Olympics in modern times, trying to make a decent batch of chocolate chip cookies using expired baking powder and taking Otto’s temperature every few hours to insure that his four day fever has, in fact, broken. Add to that a disappointing shower, a failed attempt at reading all of the Sunday Times and lastly, refusing to wish my husband a Happy V.D. on the principle that Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday that does nothing more than encourage the rejection of the ugliest, loneliest and least popular members of society, one cutesy card at a time.

But just to prove I am not a total buzz kill, bitter Betty, kill joy, heart attacker, couple crusher and the type of person that universally shits on the happiness of others and poops on the people that LOVE this day of love and embrace it as if it were the long lost twin they were separated from at birth because of a drunk father and a twice-raped teenage mom, I will acknowledge Valentine’s Day in my own way.

I will eat at least two pieces of expensive dark chocolate. I will draw floating, lopsided red hearts on construction paper while my son draws fast green cars and black steam engines. I will peruse our extensive and expensive cookbook collection and look for a love-themed dessert to bake for Dave, my soul mate in all things anti-Valentine. Then I will finish off all the chocolate in the house, close the cookbook without even turning on the oven, wash some crusty breakfast dishes, do a load of red towels to make me feel all Valentine-y inside and call it a perfect day.

Pessimism Is The New Optimism

I think looking at things with the glass half empty can sometimes really work to your advantage. A few hazy days ago I needed to drive over to the local hospital to pick up some film for a doctors appointment I had yesterday at another hospital across town. Anyone who knows me knows that if it is not with a half-mile radius of my dream apartment than I want nothing to do with it, whatever IT is. The hospital that had my original x-rays is close enough so I could have walked but I didn’t want to miss one minute of writing/alone time, a commodity more precious to me than doughnuts and bikini waxing, two tastes that taste great together.

Now, the powers that be at the first hospital couldn’t just send over the film to the second hospital because that would have been far too convenient and awesome. That would have saved me time, money and aggravation and without those things, L.A. would fall into the ocean along with Matthew McConaughey’s surfboard collection and his curled, upper lip, the one part of his body that actually knows how to act its way out of a used In-N-Out paper bag.

And surely, my local hospital cannot have parking for less than fifteen dollars because one quarter of their property, a collection of parking lots and towers that rivals The Mall of America, lies on the Beverly Hills property line. And lest you forget, the unspoken and horribly accurate rule specifically states that you get what you pay for. Cross that city line from L.A. to B.H. and you have a whole different way of life, baby! Shiny, wrinkle- free, chemically peeled faces, tiny button noses that look like half-melted Milk Duds, a fleet of Mercedes four-door sedans large enough to drive the entire Third Reich into the Baltic Sea and enough Hermes alligator handbags to form a nubby, fashionable bridge across the widest part of the Amazon river just in case an undiscovered indigenous tribe needs a short cut to its ultimate destruction.

So why would they ever charge less than a fungus-sprinkled pedicure to park your car at an institution that claims to save lives, one massive medical bill at a time? I love getting sticker shock when I drive up to a parking kiosk in a multi-million dollar medical office park and a small man asks me for seventeen dollars and fifty cents after my car has been in a stinky basement for less than forty minutes. It really fills me with the kind of joy an unexpected rectal exam does, the kind of high you get when you lie on the cold, paper covered table hoping you will feel nothing but quickly realizing that nothing has latex gloves on. A sudden, cold, lubed up jolt of shame goes into your Bat cave, runs up your chest and into your head, forcing you to shut your eyes and think happy thoughts like rainbows, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and revenge.

I was so twisted up at the thought of driving over to a hospital I didn’t feel I should have to drive to, sitting for hours in a depressing waiting room for films that should have been mailed for me and then having to pay forty dollars for parking that should have been free. I was an emotional pretzel before I even left my dirty front stoop. I truly expected to have a terribly unpleasant morning breathing in recycled H1N1 air and pretending to enjoy reclining on the soft muted colors of mauve, taupe and cream. My chipped, cheap juice glass was half empty and I was ready to spill the contents all over my shoes.

But because I had chosen to lower the bar on my day, everything looked up from that gutter of preconceived notions. Surprisingly enough, I found a metered parking space three blocks away, put money in the meter and walked over to the hospital records room to pick up three years worth of black and white pictures of my large, womanly cans that have served me and a multitude of boyfriends quite well. It took ten minutes, cost a dollar and a half and made me feel as satisfied as an American business traveler in a Thai brothel. I'll drink half a glass of nothing to that.

Bouncy, Bouncy Five Dollar

It is so great when the weekend rolls around and you have definitive plans with your toddler that include out of the house fun time and massive stimulation. This past Saturday we had another kiddy birthday bash to attend and yes, the kid birthday is my new favorite activity besides mentally braiding Kara DioGuardi’s arm hair and staring at my 2004, Sarah Jessica Parker dark roots. My love for these pre-planned adventures is nothing new. I write about it, talk about it and dream about it as often as Lindsay Lo (Ho) Han and Samantha Ronson fistfight in dark nightclub parking lots wearing ill-fitting $400 teen jeans and Jo Malone Essential Tee Tree Oil Personal Vaginal Mist they find in a People’s Choice Awards pre-show goody bag left under the passenger seat of the wrong Range Rover they fall into.

After eight birthday parties the past few months, it is now Otto’s turn to blow out the candles and cover his face with sugary crumbs the color of cow dung. I am a birthday whore, a celebration slut, a holiday hooker looking for a good time in the form of paper hats, finger food and frosted, cakey goodness. Otto is much like his mother, a lover of all things self-absorbing. He adores getting presents, seeing his friends envy his haul and gorging himself on illegal snack products while every one stares him down.

This year I want to do something great for his birthday. I want him to feel special, like a black rose in a bouquet of wilting, red carnations. But here in Los Angeles, the scam known as the kid’s party, haunts me like my first sexual experience on a Naugahyde waterbed with a future ex-con. Once, many moons ago, is was fine to have all the tots show up on your front lawn, throw a Duncan Hines sheet cake into the wind and let the mongrels fend for themselves.

Now, the socially acceptable children’s celebration has become a gathering fit for an arranged marriage, complete with an animal act, a newly graduated clown from the John Wayne Gacy school of terrifying, a bouncy house in the shape of the Dubai skyline and an emotionally unstable guest of honor who is simultaneously overwhelmed and under nourished while riding out a sugar high as intense as Lou Reed’s sense memories. This, of course, is if you have a house with a yard and more than one room, not including the bathroom and the coat closet. You will also need accessible parking for all your guests, a plethora of dishwashers and your head examined when you are left with a mess only an army of two-foot terrors could possibly create.

If you care to have the fiesta at a special activity center (this is where the word scam comes into play) in order to avoid the inevitable destruction and subsequent clean up, the one star crap package will cost you a minimum of $500. That includes the right to sit at a chipped, germ-festooned table while a few under paid staffers help you tape down a plastic, Disney-themed tarp that you bought at Target. Then they will assist in scattering the matching plates and cups, also on your dime, and maybe, if you are really lucky, they will cut up the cake that you also supplied, into squares, instead of the requisite triangular lumps that they prefer, and pass them around to the throngs of starving, tired toddlers that are your honored guests.

You will need to bring all the food, all the balloons and all the annoyingly tiny juice boxes and environmentally devastating water bottles. You will have to do your own choking hazard goody bags, take your own fuzzy photos and supply socks for any asshole that shows up in Crocs or open-toed hiking sandals. Note: Do a quick phase out/break up with any friend or parent who would actually wear the always hideous and unacceptable open-toed hiking sandal. This fashion atomic bomb is an automatic deal breaker in any relationship whatsoever.

Continuing, you will have to look rested, ecstatic and totally together as you watch fifteen to twenty three-years old propel themselves off dirty, plastic gym equipment and poop themselves far too close to the buffet table. Then, when the din of shrieks has died down and your belly feels bloated from financial irresponsibility and bad take-out platter spread you didn’t want to buy, eat or serve, a Fun Gym Time employee, a woman who thinks Otto is spelled A-U-T-O, will hold out her chipped, French manicured paw and asks for the remaining balance for a party that took less time than the average American dump and costs more than a recalled Prius car payment.

Now, if you are like us, and live in an apartment with no backyard, a front yard as wide as a Brazilian bikini wax and a living room that could hold a dozen children as easily as the palm of a crippled octogenarian’s hand, then you are a slave to the destination birthday. No matter what we do we will be forced to spend a lot of green on meaningless, unsatisfying crap that goes along with my second favorite day of the year, Otto’s birthday. The first is, duh, my birthday, and a day I should start ignoring due to my advancing age and narcoleptic ways. But alas, my narcissistic tendencies continue to thrust me into the spotlight year after year and who doesn’t love their birthday?

Sure, we could have it at a public park like we did the last two years. But the amount of work and the unreliability of March weather practically killed us both times. On Otto’s first birthday it was 110 degrees and eating hot fruit salad and liquid chocolate cake while getting a third degree sunburn was not the best way to welcome Otto into the world of single digit living. Then, on his second birthday, the weather gods decided to bless us with an unseasonably bleak and cold storm front, which brought with it gloomy cloud coverage and terrible lighting. The professional photos we had taken as a gift to all the families, while ever so beautiful became artsy examples of dark grey skies and shivering subjects, making everyone’s family photo look like a Dorothea Lange retrospective with a forward by Sylvia Plath.

We have a few days to decide the fate of Otto’s Bar Mitzvah money. We have compiled a list of possible locations that involve trains and rides and slides and filth. The great guest list is set, which consists of his entire class and a few stragglers he could not live without. The menu is a go, a cornucopia of greasy, easily accessible paper plate fare. Otto will wear his standard dude ensemble of rock t-shirt and ripped jeans while his parents, both clinging to their youth like two steerage class passengers on the side of a sinking Titanic dingy, pathetically wear the same denim and tee combo as their age appropriate child.

I just don’t know if I can stomach the thought of spending the equivalent of five movie nights, three dinners out or one pair of diamond encrusted Jimmy Choo stilettos on a party I could throw in my imaginary backyard without batting my unfortunately short eyelashes. But it is for Otto and God damn it! I love this kid! I mean, really, really love him, like painful, tummy ache love with a side of nausea! He deserves a thumping three- year old version of the VH1 Sweet 16 bash just like all his classmates. And maybe he won’t notice if we throw him the cable access version, complete with a homeless, ranting lunatic, generic candy corns, day-old doughnuts and tap water in Dixie cups. He is only three, after all. And how will he ever tell the difference? I’ll just change the Evite to say NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY and B.Y.O.CAKE. Besides, in a town like Los Angeles, no one eats dessert and if there is no photographic evidence of an event, it never really happened. Or did it?

LMF #2 Has Arrived!

I don't know her name yet and I have no idea what she weighs. But I do know this. She came along somewhere around 7:45 p.m. tonight and if she's anything like her mother and father, she has the most delicious eyes, infectious laugh, a wicked and electric sense of humor and awesome, amazing hair, the kind that will win her Best Hair, class of 2028. Add to that Best Smile, Most Likely To Succeed and Most Fun At An Italian Restaurant. Why? She will love Spaghetti marinara more than her daddy, a feat as close to impossible as Tila Tequila being invited to The Johnson Family Reunion in East Hampton next August.

Welcome little Buttercup! We can't wait to hear your name and your beautiful little chirps! And just for the record, Otto says, "Call me!"

The River Runs Through It

This past week we survived a whopping case of walking pneumonia and a 103-degree cabin fever with flying colors and very few tears. Otto became sick last week with what appeared to be a mild cold and low, yet relentless fever. Super Dad Dave had a weird feeling and didn’t like the sound emanating from Otto’s chest cavity, a sound I could not hear to do my addiction to earplugs, background NPR noise and rock.

Side note: When you have front row seats to The Who Rocks America tour in 1982 at The Cow Palace and Pete Townsend looks at you, waves his hands and gives you a thumbs up and then, you try to shimmy up the twenty foot mountain of speakers to hug his tapered pant leg, it does not occur to you that you may become as hearing impaired as Helen Keller’s dog. You just accept that the ringing in your ears may never stop. And despite your new found deafness you can still get back to your life of weekend quarters and going to third base with cute yet emotionally unattainable ninth grade surfer dudes. The upside? You can't hear the phone when they never call. The downside? You are fucking deaf.

So, with Dave’s witchy powers on full and a last minute appointment, I took Otto to the doctor thinking the worst it could be was a mild influenza or a slight case of Dengue Fever. But the moment Dr. I Am So Much Younger and More Accomplished Than You listened with her cute, red stethoscope, her eyes became poker chips and she dropped the “p” word. Yes, of course I burst into tears and beat the shit out of myself for not hearing or even suspecting something serious was going on in his gorgeous little lungs. How could I? I am partially deaf and I blame it all Baba O’Reilly. And who the hell can really spell pneumonia without spell check?

The rest of the week was all $200 electric vaporizing, medicine drinking, TV watching, fever dreaming and bed-wetting. Because of the amount of liquids we were giving Otto, as well as the size of his ever-active bladder, he peed through his nighttime diapers more than usual leaving his sheets as damp as a misty mountain top. To be fair, he has been partly potty trained for some time now and is known to enjoy a good sit down winkle and chat. But, the nighttime toss and turn is still a game of dodge the yellow snowball, even without his excessive fluid intake.

A few months ago we wrapped him in two #6 diapers hoping the excess would overflow into the second. But his legs are pure muscle, not an ounce of baby fat on the All- American, gold medal winning, Master’s green jacket wearing, jock strap. No matter what we did his pee would dribble past the elastic and land on his blankets and stuffed best friends that littered his toddler bed. This, of course, made his pals stinky and me crazy, knowing that I once again, had to strip the sheets off and wash, washes wash that man right out of everything.

For those who do not have small likeness of themselves who excrete large amount of fluids from every orifice until their eighteenth birthday, when their college roommate then has to deal with the mess, diapers are made for fat babies and their cheese log legs. That is not my child. He is fatless, lithe and closer to a Roman marble statue than a pudgy flying cherub. He is more Jamaican sprinter than Hungarian shot putter. He is McLean. They are Big Mac. And yes, I am bragging because his is Olympic and I am intramural. On any given day I look like a rumpled hollow-fill quilt left out in the morning dew while he looks camera ready and good to go, doing laps and backbends while I strive to simply walk down the front steps without tripping on my Glamour Don’t ensemble.

After a week of a fever and a bubbling brook of urine we came up with a winning combo platter of fluffy absorbent goodness. We now put a #6 diaper inside and a #5 special nighttime diaper outside, which is, for the record, a phenomenal piece of cotton hardware that makes any small boy feel like he is wearing a Maxi-Pad with a couch cushion lining. With a tighter leg hole and a smaller surface area, the smaller outside diaper seems to do the trick. Thanks Huggie's for ruining the environment, one crotch cloud at a time. It’s that or suspend all diapers use and start him on a high dose of Toviac, a new fangled bladder control medication I saw advertised while watching Golden Girls reruns on Lifetime. It’s specially formulated for those dribble-prone people who can’t stop the sprinkle of their tinkle.

I am open to new things and hey, you never know. It may just do the trick for Otto, the human Trevi fountain of youthful urinating And I thought not recognizing that your child has a respiratory disease that killed off half of Jane Austen’s heroines was good parenting. I just hope he lets me snake some pee-pee pills from his stash. I am a lot closer to reading Yellow River by I.P Freely than he may realize.