Because A Rundlet Is Tiny

This morning Caroline asked for oatmeal. OK, I said.

"With a spoon," she continued.

Well, of course.

"And some milk."

Like always...

"In a cup."

Caroline reminds me of a boss I had once who would dole out work to me in thirty minute increments, thus insuring that I was just bored/busy enough to devise but not implement any of my numerous plans to murder her. Not murder Caroline, of course, because she is mommy's own little rumbly-tumbly sweetie sweet girl but my former boss, who was... not. My point is that Caroline is a micro manager, a mini micro manager, and it is a disconcerting to have someone 34 inches high (growth spurt!) not only telling me what to do but exactly how to do it.

Patrick dressed her the other day, which is why she wound up wearing a hand-me-down flowergirl dress that is two sizes too small over a turtleneck and leggings. Patrick kept asking her if she was a pretty princess ballerina girl in that squeaky-high baby voice most people reserve for addressing dogs of the toy variety and she spent the entire day twirling and walk en pointe.

 

I guess she is a pretty princess ballerina girl. Who knew? I always think of her as more of the kevlar-and-keds type but if she wants to let her older brother treat her like a particularly spoiled cotton candy Pomeranian who am I to interfere.

We went to the playground yesterday and I took this picture and I like it.

And I took this picture the other week and mentally bookmarked the fact that I wanted to post it, along with the comment that Edward is such a tidy, careful child that he even paints neatly.

Which was true as far as it went but as far as it went was Tuesday.

Note the feet. It's like he's rebelling.

Back when my days started around noon and ended with off-brand Kahlua milkshakes my roommate Doug and I used to play a lot of Balderdash. Balderdash is a board game based upon the premise that your vocabulary is not nearly as large as you think it is and it introduced me to the word merkin. A merkin is a pubic wig and it is such a pretty-ugly gnome of a word that I have loved it ever since. Merkin. Merrrkin. Unfortunately outside of the Regency (a ribald and artificially hirsute era) you don't encounter it all that often. Even if a dear friend does succumb to complete alopecia you don't offer to accompany her merkin shopping; if anything you promise to cancel her Brazilian and take her to lunch.

Anyway, when Steve said that his friend Ted (married to my friend Noelle) had invited him to something called a Firkin Fest the first and last things I thought about were merkins. Firkins, merkins... I liked the idea of Steve and Ted strolling past booth after booth admiring all the latest in short-haired wiggery. I am simple and it amused me. After numerous peevish repeats, "No Firkin. Firkin. With an F. FIR-kin. Fuh fuh fuh FIRKIN, you idiot, stop talking about pubic hair... it's a beer tasting, damn you, called Firkin Fest" I finally gave up on merkins - however and alas - and turned to the concept of the firkin.

"You mean a puncheon," I said with the confidence of a former Balderdash champion who likes both history and liquor and the history of liquor.

A puncheon (or tertian. or firkin. not merkin) is a measurement used in the casking of wine and it equals 84 gallons which is a coincidence because I am pretty sure that is the exact amount Steve consumed on Saturday. Noelle dropped them off in Saint Paul and I agreed to pick them up and in between she and I commiserated over the fact that we felt like it was prom night and we had agreed to turn a blind eye to their implied inability to behave in exchange for knowing they were not going to be endangering themselves or others.

In general Steve is an abstemious man but he does have his moments and I think on Saturday he had about twenty of them. I talked to him a little after one in the afternoon because he had tried to convince me to pick Villanova in the suicide pool and I had said that I had a bad feeling about them and went with Cornell and it was important to me that I call him in the middle of his beer tasting to gloat. So I did. And he sounded fine and was properly appreciative of my overwhelming basketball bracket awesomeness. A few hours later I called again to tell him I would be packing up the children and coming to get them and the conversation was a little less... lucid. First it took four tries for him to even answer his cell phone and then when he did he yelled "Hello! HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!" into it about fifty times like someone who has never before used a mobile telephonic device. Once he shut up long enough to hear me telling him to stop shouting Hello at me he said, all surprised, "Oh is that you? Did you call me?"

Good LORD.

I read once that men around the age of forty are a billion times more likely to cause their own accidental deaths than any other age/sex. It's like they reach d'un certain age and their brains short-circuit and they suddenly decide that they might have a knack for chainsaw sculpture after all.

Is this sexist? I suppose it is. God knows I love men. A LOT. My brother is a man and he's one of my best friends, not to mention Steve to whom I devote my slavish adoration. But sometimes - like when I am rolling a specific someone out of his coat because he has "fallen asleep" fully dressed after Firkin Fest or when that same person climbs on the icy roof with pitchers of hot water to melt the snow off the satellite dish - I wonder about them. Do I ever drink one too many glasses of wine and wake up with a slight headache? Sure. Do I ever drink so much in the middle of the afternoon that I am unable to figure out why my pants are ringing? No I do not.

Huh. Am I going anywhere with this? Apparently not. Do you want to tell me a story about the dummy dope(s) in your life? Of course you do. Then we can all sit (safely and daintily) on our couches and drink a (small) glass of wine and smirk at each other. Prissily.    

Comments

[victoria]

I don't know if I can keep reading your blog. Your children are so beautiful that they kill me. Those pictures just stab me in the heart.

I am flabbergasted at what I lost by agreeing to my husband's plan not to have kids. Yes, we travel all the time, my passport is always in my wallet, and I am so good at it by now that in ten minutes I can prepare for a week abroad with nothing but a large handbag (the secret is silk or synthetic fibre clothing that you can wash every evening andl let dry overnight: I have spent ten days in one dress -- happily), and we fly biz class so we don't even suffer the general annoyances usually associated with travel.

So that's nice. Also it's good for my French and Italian, which is good for my brain.

But my god, oh, my god, your children are so beautifl they slay me. WHAT WAS I THINKING? How could I have been so shallow? HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO STUPID???

Part of it was my mother's incessant complaining about my brother's and my toddler years; she had us too close together and her daily chant was "two kids in diapers at the same time took ten years off my life."

Part of it is the fact that I married a good, brilliant, charming, loyal, kind, sober, faithful, funny, rich man who reads Plato in his spare time and diverts me with discussions about how time is relative and whether the universe is finite but who has never once walked the dog because he refuses to pick up dog poo and who always knew he never wanted to deal with the puke, poo, and wails of infants.

So when I married this incredible catch, I agreed not to have kids.

So that was part of it, too.

But a big part of it, Julia, honestly, was that when I was still young enough to have had the choice, I HADN'T READ YOUR BLOG.

I really never understood the joys of having a child until I read your blog. I just didn't get it. I didn't see how they could be funny, smart, beautiful, and fascinating in every way.

Before reading your blog, I just saw how annoying my friends' kids were when I would visit them: the incessant whinging and tantrumming because mommy was paying attention to someone other than their smelly, poopy, snot-covered self.

I had never really understood a mother's love for her children until I read your blog. Seriously. I really thought "kids ruin your life." When you have kids, you lose privacy, sleep, free time, travel, romance, all intimacy with your partner, essentially, every form of adult recreation until the kids is old enough to look after himself. At which point they present a whole new set of problems.

I saw the misery but not the joy -- seriously, until I read you.

And now I am sad. -victoria

[Julie]

Oh Julia, I knew we were kindred spirits when you talked about merkins! They have been a favorite joke with my friends since we were in high school. Once while working at an Italian restaurant my friend changed the menu board from "Chicken Frescobaldi" to "Merkin Frescobaldi" It was up for two hours without comment! "Does the Merkin Frescobaldi come with a salad?" That same friend later made me my own tie-on merkin with red shag fur, white sequin flowers, and dangling crystals. I think I still have it 23 years later! Truly a work of art.

[Loonanj]

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who are unaware of the word "merkin," and those who wish there were more opportunities to use it.

[Tracy]

Oh do I have a story about my dummy dope. It is...colorful, to say the least. He was attending a bachelor party for his best friend. Don't a lot of dummy dope stories start this way? They consumed some amount of alcohol that was off the charts. In the limo on the way home they all demanded that the driver pull over so they could, ahem, relieve themselves. There was a chain link fence that they all leaned against in their inebriated state. My husband decided he couln't even manage to hold "it" to go. So he balanced himself in such a way as to use the fence to hold "it". His friends thought it would be so funny to then shake the fence. So there he was... stuck! The chain link crossed over his.. you know... and he screamed bloody murder. They were about a minute from calling the fire department when the only sober person there, the limo driver, figured out how to free him. He came home, showed me the evidence, swore he'd never drink again and then explained it all to the doctor the next day. He was mortified, I was giggling and he has never gotten drunk again.

[jemy]

I also know the word merkin and alopecia, but from a book called "The Superior Person's Book of Words" which is hilarious and you should read it. The book recommends becoming a Muggletonian or Abcedarian in order to get out of going to church in the army.

I'm not in the army. But it is funny.

[Rbelle]

My adored dummy dope has problems in social settings not knowing when to quit. I'm actually not sure he's ever been able to hold his liquor as well as he thinks he can, but now that we drink very intermittently at home, he really can't deal with more than a few beers a night. And yet we had to leave his Christmas party "early" this year (while half the office was still sitting around the fire pit talking) because if we stayed, he'd "want to keep drinking." Uh ... huh. I never know whether to be amused or concerned at his apparent lack of resistance to social pressures. It's only more mind-boggling when you consider that he hates being hungover, and always swears off drinking the next day.

As for stories, none of them were that funny at the time - threatening the valet when he opened a car door for me? getting into a wrestling match with an equally drunk friend and cracking a tooth (four grand to replace, thanks) while I was driving everyone else home at 3 a.m.? - but I'm getting more mellow about it, especially since he only gets that drunk a few times a year. Plus he's content now to have people over to OUR place, so at least I don't have to drive him home.

We did, however, have the following conversation the other night, when we were desperately looking for something on our DVR to watch.

Him: "Don't we have Jackass 2?"
Me: "You watched it already"
"I did?"
"Yep, when Brian was over."
"When Brian was over? I don't remember."
"Maybe not, but you watched it. It was on when I got home."
"So I was already asleep?"
"Passed out, yes. But that counts as watching, so I erased it."

Wonder if I can get him to watch the latest season of 24 "when Brian is over." :P

[txtingmrdarcy]

My charming Army Boy is a typical man in that... well, he doesn't LISTEN. This leads us to alot of situations where he must ask me to repeat what was just said, because he was off roaming the Fantasy Hardware Store in his mind. MEN.

*sips blue gatorade. prissily.*

[Debbie]

Merkins on Etsy....where else would you find them? Excuse the long link, that is all I know how to do:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=38380367&ref=sr_list_10&&ga_search_query=merkin&ga_search_type=handmade&ga_page=&includes[]=tags&includes[]=title

[elana]

i laughed so hard i almost choked on the chocolate that i am stuffing into my mouth during my twins' "nap" time. and we all know how you feel about choking.

am going to go read this again and then save it to read to my own loved oaf later.

[Korinna]

From the time Patrick first coined "dummy dope," I haven't stopped finding it amusing.

[Angela]

OMG. I'm so glad you write. I enjoy your entries so much.

[Heather O]

Well, my DH is a professional brewer and I am often a brew fest widow. However I have to give him credit that while "working" he tends to keep it together...its the brewmaster after parties that are his undoing. I only get mad when he comes home from "working" for a weekend and is too "tired" (hungover) to function well. Usually the first thing he does is take a nap...when of course I feel I am the one who deserves a nap after being sole parent for a weekend!

Anyway, He wanted me to let you know that there is in fact a beer called Velvet Merkin brewed by Firestone Walker in California and has almost certainly been served in a Firkin.

[Heather O]

And P.S. There is also a Major League Baseball player named Merkin Valdez. DH wanted you to know that too.

[Maren]

Ahh, puncheon. Thank you for adding that to my vocabulary. Here is, of all things, a day in a comic archive dedicated to merkins. http://achewood.com/index.php?date=09172007

"Do NOT drag that merkin in the breakfast eggs! You goan RUIN that merkin!"

[Amy]

I love these stories and am suddenly feeling a lot better about my own husband's antics! A few years back he went to his brother's bachelor party. It was about a 3-hour drive to a lake house, and he arrived in the early afternoon on an empty stomach, at which point his brother immediately handed him a beer.

Fast forward two days and my husband returns home sunburned, with a giant cut on his face, and bizarre rug burns all over his body. His shirt is covered in puke stains. He had started drinking immediately and his brother and all of their friends piled onto a pontoon boat to go drunken boating. My husband drank so much that he fell flat onto the table on the boat and broke it, then declared "We don't need this thing!" and tossed it into the lake. Then he got into a giant wrestling match with his brother, on the boat, scraping up his whole body. He then passed out before dinner time, and missed the entire rest of the bachelor party. There are, sadly, pictures documenting the entire thing, including my husband and his brother simultaneously throwing up off the side of the boat.

That is actually the last time he's gotten truly drunk, but I still remember an incident a few years before THAT in which we were at a football game in a very crowded stadium. We live in a college town and my husband went to the games a lot. Anyway, this random stranger suddenly stopped my husband in the aisle and said "You! Hey, it's you! You're that guy!" And my husband was all, what? And the stranger said "You're that guy! You're the drunkest guy I've ever seen!" Turns out they'd partied together at a game a couple of years prior, and of course my husband had no memory of it.

[LMM]

Two brief stories about the drunken escapades of my EDD (that would be ex dummy dope):
1. We're living together, a few short weeks before our wedding. I hear him come home just clobbered drunk and stumble around for a while before coming to bed. About an hour later, I kind of half wake up realizing that I'm pretty sure he just walked into my closet. Sleepily, I wonder what in the world he could be doing...then I BOLT from bed just in time to stop him from peeing all over my wedding dress.
He thought he was in the bathroom.
Yes, I did get peed on.

2. It's February and it had snowed that day. We're coming home from a party that was thankfully just a few blocks away so we could walk. He, once again, is quite drunk. We're in formal wear and his shoes are slippery...as are the streets. He falls. Repeatedly. And is too big for me to hold up (and I'm in heels anyway) and too drunk to catch himself so he keeps cracking his head on the street. After the 4th time he says, "Save yourself" and wants me to leave him there. In the street. In the snow.

Good times. Can't believe we divorced.

[ailo]

After reading this post:

me: you merkin :P
Ben: excuse me? merkin?
me: pubic wig.
Ben: pubic wig?
Ben: WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??!
me: merkin! --> you!
Ben: what?
me: I'm trying to think of new insults.
Ben: what is merkin?!
me: a pubic wig!
Ben: that exists?
me: duh.
Ben: ...
me: :D

...

I've said this before, but oh do I love your writing style. No other blog can make me laugh so hard. I want to read you forever. Please don't stop.

[Christiana]

I can only remember the New Year's Eve where, in the 15 minutes it took my best friend and I to walk to the car and back from the hotel we were staying at, my husband decided he needed something new to drink, made himself what was basically a bar shot in a highball glass and proceeded to get so drunk off his rear that he giggled ALL NIGHT LONG. Even in his sleep. I refer to that night as his "Undoing"

[Christiana]

And I think Caroline makes a lovely ballerina princess or whatever it was. I'm actually sort of impressed by Patrick's fashion sense. :)

[Patty]

Oh my God....thanks for the laugh out loud reading! I have only been drunk to the point of praying to the porcelain Gods once and that was enough for me. I was on a trip and called my husband the next day to tell him I was never going to drink again. At which point he was laughing so hysterically he couldn't talk any longer!

[Lioness]

Oh Victoria, you broke my heart. I'm so sorry for what you lost. I wish you peace.

[Heidi]

No drinking story, but hearty appreciation for your hilarious and well-crafted sentence:
"Do I ever drink so much in the middle of the afternoon that I am unable to figure out why my pants are ringing?"

[Sheila Z]

Every since Pres Bush kept pronouncing in his fake Texas twang the word American as Merkin I've been laughing. I thought it fitting that Shrub was speaking of fake pubic bush. Cracked me up every time.

[Chris]

You all are probably way too young to remember this movie:

Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

Yeah, I thought so.

Back in my drinking days, I worked at a winery and went to a party there after work. Then the after party. Then the final party at a fellow partier's home. I was on my way home at about 5:00 AM and there was the hubs, fretting, telling me he was about to call the police. I said that wasn't really a good idea.

Another time I woke up in our guest room. I went into the guest bath and found all of these buttons on the floor. Apparently I was in too big of a hurry to unbutton myself when I got home. Plus there was the car in the driveway with two flat tires.

Amazing how stupid I could be and am thankful to be alive and not have killed anyone. I have a mojito about 2x a year now and only when I'm on foot and on vacation.

[Michele]

Merkin!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/26/lucy-lawless-talks-sparta_n_514402.html

[Proudmary]

When I was six months pregnant with our first child, we attended a wedding (The wedding happened to be held on my birthday, which I had mistakenly thought was a happy coincidence) where my husband was the unwitting victim of over-attentive wine pouring. It became apparent as we were leaving the event (he, carrying the centerpiece, floppily walking like a sad clown, crashing into me and then crying about it) that we weren't going to be taking the subway home as planned. Having only a few dollars in my pocket, we took a cab to Union Square. While trying to exit the taxi, attempting to find support, he whirled off the back of the cab and fell into the street. Someone helped me pick him up, and I propped him up on a street post to try to extract more money from an ATM to get us the rest of the way home. By the time I came back, there he was, holding onto the post for support, and using the centerpiece as his vomiting focal point. It was disastrous, disgusting, but pretty classic. I talked another cab driver into taking us home, I think he must have been sent from heaven, because no one should have picked us up. So we drove home to Brooklyn, my husband sitting on my lap so I could hoist his head up high enough out the window so he could puke down the side of the car, during gridlock traffic and many horrified faces on the Williamsburg Bridge. We got home and I helped the cabdriver wash off the car and gave him all the money I had in the house. And it was over. I still bless the stars that we made it home that night. And I still torture my sweet husband about it, occasionally.

[nrbp]

Both my husband and I are terribly boring, and neither of us has ever been drunk. No stories about that. The minute you ask for absent-minded professor stories, though, we are golden!

However. I am sometimes called upon to substitute in the resource (special ed intervention) room at my kids' school where they use a reading program that gives a spelling rule and then an (apparently) automatically generated list of words that follow the rule. Which is how I found myself explaining to a 3rd grader that a "merkin" is a....ummmm...kind of fur.

[Lou]

I wish to note only that "smirkin'" also rhymes with "merkin."

[Kelly]

My husband hails from the UK and can usually drink many, many pints - far more than myself and our American friends - without consequence. However, one night last summer we both got pretty drunk out at the bar with friends. We rolled in at about 3 am and both crashed in bed. As we live in Tucson and don't have A/C (don't even get me started on THAT!) I can only presume that my ridiculously drunk husband became too hot. I awoke randomly at 5am to discover he was no longer in bed and I could hear water running. I got up to investigate and found my husband (still fully clothed) in our bathtub as it was teetering on the brink of overflow. {Sidenote: I have never seen my husband take a bath prior to this occasion.} I said: "What are you doing?" In an overly exaggerated and incredibly snooty British accent he comes back with: "I'm taking a bath. OBVIOUSLY."

Yes, right - what was I thinking? A 5 am bath, of course. How obvious.

[Gillian]

Oh, oh, me, me! My husband left on a fishing trip last father's day (approved by me), but he LEFT THE PROVINCE for 24 HOURS and I had NO IDEA WHERE HE WAS for that entire time and he didn't pick up his cell phone. Obviously, I had no idea what he was planning, and when he finally came home, told me he didn't think I'd MIND. Our baby was 1.5 years old at the time, and I MINDED A LOT, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. Idiot.

[heather]

this post is almost as good as the one where you ordered Steve pants on-line

[Amy]

I'm sad for/with Victoria too. Ditto Lioness' comment.

[Corinne]

Oh god this post killed me. But I'm the dummy dope in my marriage, and the girl who vomited out of the back of a cabana in Las Vegas then texted her husband, who promptly showed it to all of his co-workers.

Lesson learned.

[Amy]

My husband got wasted at a baseball game and then we went to a bar afterwards. (the bar had a shuttle to the game, so we had to go back because our car was there.) I had just recently quit working at the bar so we knew everyone. He was obviously tanked and I was mortified. He asked for a glass of water at the bar and when the bartender gave it to him, he poured it over his head. The whole thing. Right on his head. Water and ice went everywhere. Then he went outside and threw up and sat on the curb of a very busy street until I went and dragged him to the car.

[Melissa]

Welll, sometimes I am the dummy dope (early January, too much wine...), but usually it's my husband. I just feel cruddy the next morning, but my husband takes it to a new level.

Two of my faves. We live in a European city. He went out with some guys one night. I stayed home with our little girl. I went to bed fairly late. I woke up at 4am with no sign of dummy dope, no texts, nada. I call him in a panic. He's pretty coherent. He is walking home. He doesn't really know where he is. He has a sort of idea because when the tram driver WOKE HIM UP and told him he had to get off he took notice of the tram and the little map beside it. Good thinking there.

The other story involves him being physically dragged out of a bar by a couple of friends because he was regaling the locals with the prediction of their own demise due to their low birthrate. Good times. The real gem in that one was that I stayed home with one of the other guys wives (and all our children) and they call us at 9pm, half-lit and tell us we "can go ahead and order pizza." Riiight, dummy dopes. We've been starving the kids and ourselves in the hopes that you would grace us with your presence.

[cadiz12]

my fiance doesn't drink. so my behavior (me attempting karate-kid kicks after the rum takes effect, and he having to help me limp home) probably puts me in the dummy dope category. i'm glad to have him, though.

[Cris]

Victoria - I know (a little) how you feel. Whenever I see the twinks I think, "I wish that IVF had worked... maybe we should try it again." Its a tough one.

[MsCellania]

LBJ, our dog-ear pulling president from Texas, use to drawl "My Fellow Merkins..." until a quick-witted English reporter commented on the fact that he was calling all his citizenry pubic hairpieces by way of salutation. After that, good ol' LBJ would drawl "My Fellow A-merkins" with mighty emphasis on the "Ah" and that was his solution.
I don't drink alcohol, but my husband usually has a drink or two when we go out. The fact that I am then expected to drive home was not sitting well with me. So I now insist that he ASK if I want to drive home. And he does. Problem solved. Ask and ye sometimes shall receive.

[Alison]

You say firkin and I saw 'kilderkin' - one from Balderdash that has always stuck with me.

You would be a genius at British pub quizzes.

[Callie]

Totally unrelated but if you get a chance, would you mind posting an update on Edward's speech? My son had his eval today and will be starting therapy twice a week on April 13. Just wondering if it's been helping Edward and what kinds of things (if any) you do at home to spur him on.

[victoria]

On the drunk spouse story front? I got nothing. I've seen him intoxicated twice in 20 years.

He also doesn't swear. Or objectify women. Or fart (at least, not that I've ever been able to catch him at it). Or masturbate (unless he's VERY discreet).
Or gossip. Or overspend. Or repeat himself (ever). Or eat junk food (ever). He runs 4x/week.

His only real shortcoming is, uh, the no kids thing. Also the no dog walking thing, I guess, though I don't mind that so much.

[LMM]

OMG.
I get the daily emails from Etsy, always full of interesting, unique, sometimes pretty items.
Today, I kid you not, they feature a pair of MERKIN UNDERWEAR!
You must go see.
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=37588615&utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Merkin+Hair+Panties+MATURE&utm_content=etsy_finds_040110_N&utm_campaign=etsy_finds_040110_N

[June]

I dearly love my dummy dope, but I was seriously worried about his suitability as a father during my first pregnancy. He came home so drunk I had to undress him, and so so so drunk that he actually wet the bed... twice.

But since turning 30, and having the child (soon to be two, if all goes well), he seems to have reached a greater maturity that will no doubt continue for about another 8 or 9 years. Then I will install rubber sheets.

[June]

Although my absolute least favorite is when they are so drunk they can't stand up and are still protesting that they're Not Drunk. And then in the morning, they're not hungover, they just have a stomach bug.