The Battle of Christmas

One of the many gifts that my boys received on Christmas morning was a pair of Nerf guns. They ooohh’d and aaahh’d at them for a few minutes, fired off a couple of shots and then moved lustfully on to the next present like George Clooney at a speed dating dinner. As we opened the rest of our presents I often glanced enviously at the sleek plastic toys of destruction, my itchy trigger finger begging for a scratching. What I missed amid all the presents was that my wife was apparently casting an equally envious eye at the Nerf hardware.

Sometime in the afternoon when the boys were calmly drawing in their coloring books, my wife loaded one of the Nerf guns and attacked. I quickly grabbed the second weapon and drafted David, my oldest son leaving my wife with Graham. The battle raged throughout the house, David and I would take cover behind couches and doors and at one point in time I think we even tried to duck behind the dog for cover.

I would on occasion find my wife without any ammo, it was at these times that I learned a dark truth about myself. I am perfectly willing and able to shoot an unarmed woman, in fact I actually derived a great deal of pleasure out of it. In those times when I was without ammo, I found myself telling my first born to run out in the open as bait so that we could collect the balls that his Mother shot at him.

While David and I were laying prone behind a couch I looked at him and said “I’ve got a mission for you but it’s a Black Op, do you know what a Black Ops mission is?”
“No,” he replied.
“It’s the kind of mission where you earn medals, but they have to send them to your next of kin,” I explained. “I need you to go find out where Mom is and then report back to me with her position.” David took off running, not even giving me the chance to explain that if he was caught by the enemy I would disavow all knowledge of his mission. “Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do & die.” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

Pretty soon we had recruited the younger boy to our side too, and I had David feeding me ammo while Graham did reconnaissance to determine my wife’s hiding place. This was short lived however, as Graham was easily swayed by my wife’s use of biological warfare (candy from his stocking) and his mental faculties were rendered useless. He was powerless to resist her chocolatey charms. I would later perform a Code Red (swirly) on the little one for his disloyalty.

The battle ended when David went out to gather more ammo for me. I heard my wife yell “Hey! You cheater, you can’t do that!” and I knew that he was about to make me proud. Sure enough, he came running around the corner carrying my wife’s gun with my wife in hot pursuit. I jumped up and laid down a barrage of suppressing fire, stopping my wife in her tracks and causing her to duck into the office for cover. I set my gun down and hugged my son. He had gone above and beyond the call of duty. Never had I been so proud of him, and never have I been so glad that I have boys.

Shopping With Kids

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT HALF-FAST 11/1/07

After work on Tuesday night I went out with my family to purchase a Garmin Forerunner because quite frankly, I deserve one. I have been contemplating buying one for some time now and I received a gift card to Road Runner Sports for my birthday so I planned on using that to pay for the new toy.

There are very few things in this universe that I don’t understand, but among them are the following: Why Monday Night Football hates my eardrums (see commentators Tony Kornheiser, Joe Theismann, Dennis Miller, etc.) Why people are paying upwards of $2,000 for tickets to see Hannah Montana. Why anyone feels that it’s OK to converse with me while we stand exposed at the urinals. And finally, why my kids lose all perspective of what constitutes socially acceptable behavior the instant we enter any sporting goods store. It figures that the one store that I don’t mind going shopping in is the one store where my kids become devil-children, or los niños del Diablo for those of you south of the border.

Tuesday night was no different. The over-eager sales associate came over to offer us assistance and while I was explaining what I was looking for, my oldest son was tugging on my hand demanding I remove his coat. The sales associate, whose name was Tom, glanced nervously at my kids and then back at me as if to say ‘I really don’t like kids very much.’ I hate it when people act like this when I’m with my kids. ‘Hey Tom, guess what? I don’t like them very much either but at least I possess the decorum to not show it in front of them!’

Tom quickly shows me to the Garmins and then leaves just as quickly. In what would turn out to be a horrendous mistake I remove the 4-year-old’s jacket which leads to me also removing the 2-year-old’s jacket, and I turn my attention to the Garmins. Not thirty seconds later a fight breaks out in women’s apparel in which jackets are being used like nunchucks. My wife and I separate the pair and she ties their jackets around their waists after declining my more radical idea of tying them around their necks.

I go back to looking at Garmins, debating if I want the one with the heart rate monitor or the cheaper one without the heart rate monitor. Cheaper wins out and I try it on to see how it feels. Somewhere on the other side of the store a jacket takes flight. I'm guessing by the size of it that it wasn't the sales associate’s jacket and I can tell from the trajectory that it was launched from somewhere around 2 feet above ground level.

My wife and I decide to divide and conquer. I take the youngest boy to one side of the store and she takes the oldest to the other side. This is a great strategy if you can put up with the downside: Going out with your wife and not ever seeing her because you’re afraid of the consequences of uniting the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. This is also why I won’t be having any more children. We currently have two, which means that we can still play man to man defense against them. When the third child arrives you have to switch to zone defense and it’s just not as effective.

Having settled things down, and after re-hanging countless shirts, shorts and socks back on the rack I headed to the cash register with my new Garmin. Well worth the hassle we’d endured. Unfortunately the gift card didn’t work, and Tom would have to... blah, blah, blah, -long list of excuses that don’t make any sense to me-... and long story short, I’ll have to order it online. This means that our pilgrimage to the running store was completely futile other than to raise my blood pressure a few degrees and cause me to sound like my father. “Don’t touch that!” “Put that back!” “Stop playing with that!” “No yelling!” “No running!”