"Honey, is it your turn to set firm, loving limits? Or is it mine?"

Yesterday evening was the great daycare center Halloween costume parade and potluck, which had shaped up in the mind of daughter L. as the great formal event of the season.

"I'm going to school after my nap!" she would say to me yesterday. "I'm going to be a bunny! Not a yellow bunny. A pink bunny!"

The yellow v. pink thing had come up a couple of days earlier when daughter L. had fallen into conversation about Halloween with a two-year-old friend of hers who had been riding with us in the car.

"I'm going to be a bunny," said daughter L.

"I'm going to be a bunny," said friend.

"Um," piped up friend's father in the front seat. "Um, you're actually going to be a firefighter."

"I'm going to be a bunny," said friend.

"Nooooo! I'm going to be a bunny!" said daughter L.

"I'm going to be a yellow bunny," said friend, really wanting to rub it in.

"Nooooo! Bunnies are pink!" answered daughter L., starting to cry.

"Yellow bunny!"

"Aaaugh!"

Let us draw a curtain over this scene, which essentially ended with the arrival of naptime and in fact had derived a certain bulk of its emotional momentum from its very proximity to naptime. But suffice it to say that the bunny costume has been something of an all-consuming idea for daughter L. I mean, all-consuming in those odd moments that she had not been obsessed with the arrival of her Big-Kid Bed.

Daughter L. has spent the past several months sleeping on her old crib mattress on the floor of her room. This has been sort of touching for her father, to come into his daughter's room at night to see her sprawled across the floor like some tiny little grad student. Especially as I spent a portion of my college years sleeping in a nest of scavenged blankets on the floor.

Anyway, we finally decided it was time to upgrade beds for everyone in the house and trooped out last Saturday morning to purchase a twin bed for daughter L. and to upgrade to a queen-sized bed for the happy conjugal pair. I have been of course strangely racked by some strange psychic sell-out-slash-impending-mortality guilt which no doubt traces its source to turning my back on my pseudo-punk rock DIY bedding roots. Thus, I have been playing up the whole mattress-box spring thing to daughter L. So when conversation had not been taken up with discussion of the varied colorations among the family Leporidae, talk had drifted dreamily to the possible delivery of the Big Kid Bed.

"Is the bed here yet?" asked daughter L. on Sunday.

"They're bringing it on Thursday," answered a heedless parent. Of course, I may as well have said, "Sometime in the next millennial period, sweetie," for all the comfort my answer brought.

But at last Thursday morning came. The delivery truck pulled up and daughter L. began her ululation. The delivery guys both wore that mildly hostile and somewhat glazed expression that I remember so well from my long days back in the food service industry, an expression that is generally meant to keep the customer (the wellspring of life's myriad irritations) held at a social remove. Or an expression that at the very least betrays that the service provider might be a trifle on the hung-over side. In any event, one is not to mess with such an expression.

But ah! what wall of glazed indifference can long stand proof in the face of a jubilant two-year-old? Esp. when said two-year-old spends your entire visit cheering for you?

"He's got my Big Kid Bed! He's got my Big Kid Bed! [Jump jump jump.] Aaaaaah!"

The talkative delivery guy with the homemade neck tattoo (he had said something along the lines of "huh" when he saw the stairs to our bedroom) was once seen to betray a small grin; by the end of the delivery, his silent partner no longer visibly winced when addressed directly.

And now we will jump ahead in a manner meant to evoke the capricious emotional states of a two-and-a-half-year-old: shortly after the delivery of the beds, daughter L. and I found ourselves making an unplanned trip to an apple orchard and u-pick pumpkin farm in rural Ypsi. Why? Because my daughter wanted doughnuts.

Yeah, yeah, Dr. Sears. But we were both pretty much sick of staying home and we needed pumpkins and the weather was nice and we knew we could see goats out there and . . . geez, whatever. It turns out that the cool thing about shopping for a u-pick pumpkin with only a couple of days left before Halloween is the sort of Mutter Museum-quality range of pumpkins left in the fields. Daughter L. managed to hike about a half mile out to the far field, which had a few unculled pumpkins which still managed to suggest the whole pumpkin dasein thing. Daughter L. stumbled dutifully through the fields clutching at her stuffed dog until she was unable to stand the constant scrabbling of the dried-out pumpkin vines at her ankles and I was forced to stagger back to the car with pumpkins clutched under each arm and a daughter riding on my shoulders.

So we were all pretty beat. Which is sort of why yesterday I found myself at 4:15 in the middle of cooking up quick batch of your basic tameta bateta-nu shak for the potluck, because I have only three real vegetable dishes that I know how to cook and for some strange reason which at its root has something to do with my paranoia re: food poisoning, all these dishes are Gujarati.

Anyway, I was in the middle of cooking this up and calling wife B. at work and saying we might have to push back her pick-up time before we headed over to the daycare costume parade and potluck because geez, the damn potatoes aren't boiling yet and yes, I realized that we didn't want daughter L. to miss the beginning of the costume parade, and thus we eventually did the whole screeching-up-to-the-door-with-coriander-scented-potatoes-sloshing thing, and between plunking my tupperware container of c.-s.-potatoes onto the potluck table and the start of parade I inadvertently managed to call one of my daughter's classmates "a monstrous travesty of the laws of God and man," which did not endear me to the classmate's mother, though I think said comment could easily have been taken in an endearing sense since after all her son was a thirty pound bumble bee!

So, between marching around the block with a mob of costumed preschool children and making strained conversation with other parents in an effort to avoid alienating other members of my peer group, I spent the balance of the evening monitoring the potluck table to see (ever-so-casually) if anyone was eating what I had brought for the dinner.

I am of course happy to know that I am not the only at-home dad who can on occasion get a little competitive about the whole potluck thing, viz. the latest Mimi Smartypants,

This week it was our turn to bring "snack" to preschool. The snack is more symbolic than it is about actual nutrition, as even toddlers could probably handle a whole ninety minutes of gentle play and finger puppet rhymes without breaking for food. As the only dad involved in the preschool, LT was determined to make those Montessori moms respect his ass, and he refused to wimp out with goldfish crackers or some other slacker snack. Monday he brought an elaborate fruit salad, and Wednesday he took a pumpkin cookie cutter and made Halloween shapes out of deli cheese. Oh yeah! You got served! LT may be unshaven and slightly hungover, but when he gets you in the Parenting Smackdown ring you are going to be crying for your mama! In a manner of speaking!

Okay, so preschool snacktime is not really a competition, and it is a sad commentary that at-home dads ever get the fish eye in the first place, but still. I am proud of him.

The potatoes were pretty much cleaned out, luckily, or wife B. would have had to have propped up my already fragile self-esteem. Of course, my daughter did not eat any of my food. But then she never eats my vegetables. My self-esteem is proof against her tastes. Though it must be noted that she ate her first cupcake last night.

Which may have been why she was running nude through the house with a toothbrush in her mouth at 8:00 PM last night while her mother and father each sat slumped on the floor.

Comments

[bitchphd]

Pseudonymous kid is a 38-lb mouse.

And when it was his birthday we damn well bought cupcakes at the grocery store. Oh, I felt kind of bad about that for maybe 10 minutes. And then I decided not to.

On the other hand, I spent the entire day before the at-home party baking custom-designed mouse-shaped cakes and cookies. Sigh.

[flea]

On the other end of the scale, Christopher is going to be a thirty pound dinosaur.

[G.]

The reason the whole "travesty of laws of God & nature" comment came up was because parents were trying to persuade their kids to pose together for pictures and for the most part the two-year-old kids had very little desire to stand next to these strange beast-kids and there were in fact a lot of kids clinging to grown-up legs during the pre-parade photo op and (in fact) I was a little freaked out to survey a parking lot full of these 30-lb. mice, bees, dinos, tiggers, etc.

But: Meeses! Dinosaurs! Bunnies! All so cool, and not a travesty in the bunch.

Had our sunames fallen into the proper place of the alphabet, we would have been allowed to bring a (store-bought) baked good. But we had been shunted into the veggies. Which at least were cheap.

[Typeepickex]

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