The Brothers Ewy: An Evening in Pictures and Video 2 21 2011

I have this trick where I can make Sarah cry by simply saying "boy haircut."  And it's good to see there's something still ceremonial enough that a simple mention sends someone into silent weeping.  Last night I thought I'd capture Otto moments before his first trim.  Luckily, he and his brother made it easy to forget:

Quin is the biggest faker ever, and somehow, at only 20 months, Otto knows well his role as little brother: be a PITA.

After all four of us ended up in the Great Clips bathroom, and made it a worthwhile trip by all taking turns on the potty, we sat down with our "stylists".

I'm across the room griping about everyone having too many kids. 

Now you're probably like, "Wait, isn't there footage of Q's first haircut?"  Why yes there is.

Now a man, Otto makes his move.

The boys were fantastic.  We got home to a new chapter in our lives: Otto awake to television choice.  For the first he time battles his brother for the right to watch what he wants to watch. 

Quin tries his Big Brother mind trick but to no avail.

ET has a relaxing quality for our youngest son.

And that's how it goes, an evening never passes us by without being riddled with activity.

Take Only as Directed

There are things you need to be careful with.  Some of the top contenders are fire, slippery surfaces, nitroglycerin and NyQuil.  What does that word “NyQuil” even mean?  I could offer a rough translation, like “unable to find your feet.”  

It’s my fault.  I got giddy because when your wife says “you should take some NyQuil,” she’s essentially giving you a hall pass to incompetence.  She could also say, “You can go out drinking all night,” and it would be the same thing.  There is one difference.  When you’re “out”, like literally, not NyQuilly, you don’t have to deal with helpless children.  I was in, but still gone, when I was trying to figure out why I was in the bathroom.  

First, why it’s my fault.  I don’t do medicine.  I have this thing that I should feel what my body is telling me.  Last night my body said, “drink a lot of that sh#t.”  And therein lies my second thing: I don’t like sharing the little NyQuil cup.  “Hey, everyone that uses this is sick!” shouts the little, plastic tumbler.  You can wash it over and over, but so can you a toilet, and you still don’t drink out of it.  Unless, of course, you’re our youngest son, but that’s a different story.  Although it brings me back to the bathroom.

I had tipped my head back and poured the allegedly cherry-flavored elixir into my mouth.  I felt it was about the normal dosage.  Apparently for an elephant.  Because I was out and dreaming about a little town called “Outlaw” where a tall Mexican kid made a killing selling talking pornographic shirts.  These t-shirts would moan and shout expletives and I couldn’t figure out how he made any money, but he said he did.  That’s where your brain goes when it no longer can function in a cognitive and responsible fashion.  

It was in the middle of this dream that I came to in the bathroom.  I was feeling tender and small.  My boxers dangling around my waist and my skin contracted with the cold.   I needed some time to re-establish, but that’s not what happens when you have kids.  I was still not ready to walk when Quin brought in Otto to pee.  This is commendable, but there’s that old saying about “no good deed.”  Quin wants Otto to pee in the little toilet, which I had to quickly assemble.  I was on the floor half praying and half groping plastic parts when a tussle erupted.  

Otto didn’t want to pee in the little toilet, he wanted to pee in the big one, just like his brother.  Quin needed to poo.  So Quin was on the toilet and screaming, while Otto, with his pants around his ankles, does a war cry and goes about pushing Quin off the seat.  This would be a difficult scenario for even a sober parent, let alone one who filled his mouth with, I think, a meth ingredient.  

Quin is screaming “It’s too loud, it’s too loud!” because he needs silence to eliminate, and Otto is about to slip and fall in the urine he’s let fly at the base of the toilet.  And I congratulate Otto, for he’s been peeing ON the toilet for about a month now.  He wants to be just like his brother, and wants to stand without a stool or be lifted to the necessary elevation. This is something we don’t want to deter as he may never like the toilet again.  But we hope he gets big fast as that’s a lot of urine to clean up in the time it will take him to grow six inches.

This is all going down and I feel like a kid wearing my dad’s underwear.  I’m confused, there’s porn t-shirts in my head and I can’t get my cold feet to get any traction on the tile floor.  Sarah peered in for a little bit but there was no way she was getting past the three of us blocking the door.  That and she probably needed to go stare out a window for a while.  Finally Quin gave up on pooping, and Otto was able to belly up to the john in private.  I got to sit back on the floor and run through the explanations to the police if anything had gone terribly wrong while I was high on cold medication.  

Things cleared up with a little bit of food.  Still, it’s amazing that you can just buy that stuff at 7-11.  I may need more, if Sarah hasn’t already finished it.

Kings and Queens on Presidents Day

It was President's Day, some kind of unofficial holiday that thankfully someone with some clout turned into a day off.  I had the day off already because I'm unemployed.  Sarah got it off and spent a well-earned day hanging out at home.  The boys got to go to school because their teachers work for some crappy people.  We made sure to deliver doughnuts when we dropped them off. 

I wish I could say we did something brilliant.  Some off-the-charts expedition in to the mountains with maybe some ice climbing.  What we did do was one of our favorite excursions ever: we spent over an hour eating breakfast at The Breakfast King.  By the time we were done I peed pure coffee.  It's one of those places where the waitresses will drown you if you don't tell them to stop.  Somewhere a bean farmer loves me.

Our breakfast is usually a passing handful of whatever the boys don't eat with a sippy cup chaser on the way to school.  Today was wonderful.  We sat at one of our favorite tables.  One we like a lot because it's a corner booth where we can trap the boys between us.  With no children we nearly sat next to each other.  We didn't want to get too close because this visit was about gluttony, and probably thirty packets of sugar.  We hit the coffee hard and mowed down, in part, French fries for breakfast.  They were wonderful and not once did I have to fish a booger out of someone else's nose. 

Enemies of ennui.

Back at home we struggled with what to do.  Time was ticking against us.  Our breakfast trip had pushed us to 11am and we were already mourning the passing of our day.  I sat on the couch and stared at the computer.  I didn't watch any videos of robots or dinosaurs.  I just kind of blanked out.  Sarah went to work cleaning out her coupon drawer.  From there she would go grocery shopping for nearly two hours.  When she got back I asked what had gone wrong.  She said "nothing" and proceeded with wide eyes to tell me how she "just took her time" and wandered around "without much purpose."  It sounded wonderful, and just slightly more aerobic than my alternately checking my email and thinking of something clever for Twitter. 

The rest of the day was Hulu (god those last two Thirty Rocks were brilliant) and Netflix.  Not sure what the motivation for making The American was, but it had George Clooney and some female nudity. 

Other than that I really can't say what we did.  I've spread the eight hours of the day out in my head but I can't fill up the scrapbook.  Today is like the olden days when we didn't have a snapshot every thirty seconds, but rather a big blurry image that spread across several months.  "What did you do in school this semester?" 

"We partied." 

We made up for it this evening.  Once we got the boys we took advantage of free kids dinners at Chiles before getting each of them a haircut.  Then we went home, watched Curious George (which could be Clooney in The American) and most of ET.  All the while I battled Otto's urge to have a piece of gum after he'd already had a sucker, and Sarah tutored Quin on how to keep his finger out of the digital pictures he was taking.  One about every ten seconds.

Now they are in bed, and I'm thrilled that we still have it in us to do nothing. 

She cleared this up (from Sarah)

...but there was fear.

Sarah:  (Wiping Otto's bum) "Oh man I think you are working on a tooth, that explains the rash, and attitude."

Quin:  What?

Sarah:  Just like when you were little, you'd get a bad rash and a few days later a tooth would pop through.

Quin:  He's getting a tooth in his butt?

Building a Snowman with Quin

Quin Shows off his Snowman from Jared Ewy on Vimeo.

It only makes sense.  He would be cold.

On the Money

If you were at a Nepalese restaurant in Golden last night and wondering if the couple in the parking lot was drunk, rest assured that the kids got home safe.  We weren't hammered, only laughing like we'd eaten a bag of weed.  Somehow it came up one of my more humorous language mix ups in Mexico.

It was in 2005.  We were with my mom on what would be her last big hoorah.  We didn't know that, but after some terrifying mishaps we did find out that she had gone blind.  So by the end of the vacation I was a little hyper about the caregiver thing. 

When you don't know someone is blind, you panic much less than when you do.  That's from a purportedly sighted perspective, but as compared to our leisurely vacation mode to the resort, our exit was a might more energetic.  I wanted to make sure we left the country quickly, and with my mother.  That sounds like an easy chore.  But in her hard-headed will to do things on her own, my mom had walked straight out of our room and into a hot tub.  And I don't mean a graceful entrance, one for which my mother had always been known, but in not being able to see she dropped right into the water feature.  We were horrified, but still probably less than the family of Scots using it.  They were unnecessarily apologetic, and showed doubts about returning the scraped and bruised lady to her half-naked, hungover and sol-fried son. 

From then on I was vigilant.   And with vigilance comes bravado, which is brainless forward motion disguised as confidence, aka "Manboob Momentum" for the forward-leaning assuredness typical of its middle-aged male possessors. 

There are times when I know I'm wrong.  Someone will correct me and I have to go sheepishly back from where I came.  But there are also times when I'm so high on, I don't know, certainty I guess, that I'm beyond asking questions and all about throwing forth. 

This was the case in our packing up and getting out of the resort.  I would confuse the Spanish word for "suitcase".  So instead of telling the bellhops, the front desk, the bus driver and all the help in between that I had three suitcases, I shared with everybody that I had three wallets.  Here the Mexican populace is weary of Americans throwing their money around, and I'm shouting about my multiple billfolds. 

This probably wasn't all that good for security, as a guy who has that many wallets could use to lose a couple.  We got out of the country fine, but there's this picture in my head of the bewildered resort staff listening to the cocksure American.  I was so proud of my sentence: "Yo tengo tres carteras!"  Not only was I telling them that I had three wallets, but that they were in my room and I wanted someone to get them. 

Who wouldn't rob that guy? 

Somehow that incident came up in our dinner conversation and Sarah was laughing so hard that she told everybody she was going to pee her pants.  The kids weren't into it. Quin asked if we were okay, as I guess it sounded like I'd hurt myself.  And I nearly did in that gut-grabbing hilarity that has you both wanting it to stop and for it to never end.

But it gets even better.  Even if I had three wallets I wouldn't have much to put in them because I come from a long line of people who don't like money.  Well, I love cash, but I must say I don't in the same way a lonely guy says he's voluntarily celibate.  It's not that I'm completely broke, but my wife must pain wondering in how much comfort we'd live if I didn't do everything for free. 

So you can imagine Sarah's joy when her eldest son expressed interest in cash.  We had to leave the restaurant and go to a grocery store to get money for a tip (they had a debit card issue).  While I was in there buying 99-cent seedless grapes for cash back, Sarah explained to Quin what I was doing.  Quin replied, "I like cash." 

Sarah perked up and used the moment to foment a little fire about the advantages of money.   She went on to say that a lot of people like cash, and cash is used for many things.  Quin agreed and Sarah finished with something confirmatory about cash being good.

Quin paused and then asked, "Is cash a fruit?"

I felt some wind as I exited the store, and I believe that was Sarah's deflation.  Looks like she'll be working for a long time.  But if it's any consolation I've done a lot of jobs where people paid me in produce.

On the way home there was more laughter.  Our carteras absolutely full of it.

Daddy Daycare Chorale ft. Jake (Ember's Jake not back neighbor Jake)