There should be a test before you're allowed to reproduce

It should go without saying that I'm not mature enough to be the father of two small children.

If you have any doubts about that, just ask my wife.

Tonight I came across reason #429 why I'm too juvenile to be in charge of an entire family.

Wife was reading a bedtime story to Daughter, and one of the lines was:

Grandma is a businesswoman who often works at night.

Am I the only one who thinks "world's oldest profession" about that line?

Blackberry ain't got nuthin' on me

Despite the fact that I have a blog, I'm a profoundly low-tech person.

To give you an example, I just figured out how to check email using my cellphone. That's the same bit of technology that a friend showed me on his phone in 2001.

I'm exactly one dog year behind the curve.

Yet that's not always a disadvantage. On Monday, anybody with a Blackberry was without service for the span of a few hours.

Luckily, while all the Blackberry users were suffering on Monday, I was still fully wired. When you communicate like I do, the service is constant and impervious to disruption.

How do I communicate, you ask?

Two soup cans strung together with twine.

That may sound inconvenient to you, but I can assure you it's not. I've got several sets in my trunk, and I start my day by thinking about who I might need to call. Then I swing by their place, drop off a can, and say, "Keep that string tight. You may be hearing from me today."

It never fails.

And I get free nights and weekends, which is pretty nice.

Do you ever wish you could get a do-over?

You ever have one of those days where you should have just stayed in the safety and security of your own bed?

Today was one of those days where if something could go wrong, it did.

I woke up this morning to find that our kitchen pipes had backed up into the basement. So before I could get dressed from work, I had to whip out the shop vac and remove the stinky water.

I drove 40 minutes to work in another office knowing that I would have to turn right back around and be back in town for a noon board meeting.

Our network connection was dead at work, so I couldn't send or receive emails or do any work online.

Some other problems cropped up at work. Then I got in the car again and headed for my luncheon.

After lunch, I came home, changed out of my suit into jeans and a t-shirt, a vacuumed a morning's worth of sludgy kitchen water out of our basement. Only to watch more water come right back up.

Then I called the plumber, put on my work clothes, and went back to the office. Only to find out that a management team meeting that was canceled last week had been rescheduled for today. And no one told me.

I sent my apologies for missing the meeting and went back home to wait on the plumber.

When I got back home, I was almost overwhelmed by stuff to worry about. For once, I did exactly what the moment called for.

I stopped right where I was and prayed.

I prayed not for God to take away the day's problems, but for the wisdom to keep things in perspective.

And in His time, He delivered.

I calmed down. The plumber came. The other pressures eased up.

The kids, without being asked, behaved like angels.

God is good.

Tomorrow is a new day. There's no telling what it will bring. But for now I'm safe and secure in my big brown chair.

How was your day?

At some point, I'll pray that they DON'T take drugs

I think Son thinks we're trying to poison him.

What else could explain the massive wig-out he's thrown when we've tried to give him his children's multi-symptom cold medicine these past few nights?

(I'm kidding. We're not giving him multi-symptom cold medicine, since it turns out that stuff actually is poison.)

But he has started pitching a big fit when we try to give him a tiny dose of Delsym to keep him from hacking up a lung during the night.

Luckily, the child has one parent (his mother) with actual parenting skills. If it weren't for her, who knows what kind of shape he would be in right now. My knee-jerk reaction to the cough medicine tantrum is: "You're going to pitch a fit? Fine. NO MEDICINE FOR YOU!"

Which I think is exactly how the American Academy of Pediatrics would suggest you care for a sick child.

Last night I thought I could trick the little dude into taking his Delsym if I poured it ahead of time. So while he was downstairs finishing his dinner, I was upstairs pouring a little dose of goodness for him.

But apparently he has a sixth sense which can detect medication fraud from across the house.

Of course, if a kid's got to have a sixth sense, I guess that's not a bad one to have. At least it's not the "I see dead people. All the time!" sixth sense. But if I could take my pick of sixth senses, I'd like for him to have the one where he can guess lottery numbers or where he knows today what's going to happen in the stock market tomorrow.

Anyhow, by the time my little buddy made it upstairs, he was primed for a showdown over his medicine. It just wasn't going to happen.

In my quick-thinking wisdom, I thought, "Maybe if I put his dose of Motrin in with the Delsym, he'll want to take it."

In other words, maybe I can add some appeal to this medicine by adding more medicine to the medicine. Maybe then it won't be so medicine-y.

That's solid logic, eh?

As I alluded previously, I praise God every day that these kids have the mother they do, because today we've had to add antibiotics into the drug cocktail. Strep and ear infections and all.

Today, my sweet Wife figured out that these little monsters will gladly slurp down their medicine if it's mixed with a few ounces of lemonade.

Daddy jazzes the drugs up by adding more drugs. Wife mixes the drugs with something sweet and delicious.

I was trying to be a pharmacist. What they needed was a bartender.

You can't make this stuff up

Wife and I have a strong bond.

Our marriage is built on a very firm foundation.

There's no question in either of our minds that we will grow old and gray together.

Yet today, for the first time, I think Wife got a little nervous that there's a woman out there who might one day come between us.

This image is an excerpt from an ad in today's newspaper spotlighting this month's Newspaper Carrier of the Month.

She sounds like an incredible woman!

Sitting in a dingy customs office is no way to spend vacation

Amanda, whose life just got a little more interesting, had a fun experience trying to get a passport for her daughter.

I had an interesting experience with a pair of passports this weekend.

In a few weeks, Wife and I are leaving for a week-long vacation. Not just a week-long vacation, but an Every Child Left Behind vacation.

For this particular trip, we both need passports.

Since we moved to the new house in August, locating our passports was not guaranteed. Luckily, I was able to find mine in a shoe box in the top of my closet along with an empty Barnes & Noble gift card and receipts for suits I bought a few years ago.

You know, in case I want to take those suits back and exchange them. Or walk into Barnes & Noble and not buy a book.

Anyhow, I found my passport, but I still had no clue where Wife's passport could be hiding.

As I looked for hers, a cold chill ran down my spine as I started thinking about the age of Wife's passport.

If memory served me correctly, she hadn't renewed hers since before our wedding. Her passport could very well be expired, I concluded.

If it was indeed expired, we'd have to get it renewed before our trip. And a handful of weeks is not the ideal turnaround time when you're dealing with a big government bureaucracy.

I pulled open my sock drawer, which for many years was the "safe place" where I kept important documents like our passports and my membership card from the Downtown Tampa YMCA and my student ID from the semester I spent at American University in Washington.

Because I'm sure I could still go workout in Tampa using a membership card with a picture of me from 1990. And I could probably grab a meal at AU using my old ID.

Imagine my surprise when I pushed back a pair of socks to find Wife's passport staring up at me. I walked over and sat on the bed to ready myself to see that it had expired a month or so ago.

I opened the front cover and glanced at the picture of Wife.

"Hey hottie," I said.

Then I took a look at the expiration date.

Summer of 2009.

So while numerous other circumstances will, I'm sure, crop up in the next few weeks to try to derail our trip, passports won't be an issue.

We're good to go. And I am counting down the days.

Who needs a shredder when you've got a diaper pail?

Monday is trash day at the MBI Estate, so part of my Sunday night routine is roaming from room to room bagging up trash.

Each week when I bag up our office trash, I think about which pieces of mail should be shredded and which can just be thrown away.

We probably don't shred as much stuff as we should. Here's why:

After my Sunday evening Tour de Trash through the house, the big bag I lug around with me is pretty horrendous. It bears the contents of three diaper pails, bathroom trash and a litter box.

Who really needs a shredder when all those credit card offers and other shred-able documents are tossed with all that garbage-y goodness?

My thought is: If there's some crook out there who is willing to sift through all that foulness just to get my Social Security number or bank account number, the dude probably deserves a little something for his effort.

Until the kids are completely out of diapers and our silly cat goes on to her great reward, I'm not going to worry too much about people picking through our trash.

Answer to Movie Line Friday

Yesterday's Movie Line turned out to be a bit of a stumper.

Congratulations to Brian H and Sister, who both correctly answered that this line:

No, not really, um... as soon as you get that trunk upstairs and have finished your nap I guess you could fix that step and jump down, turn around and pick a bale of cotton. And while I'm gone see to it Miss Scarlet stays away from the Union army will you?

is from Fletch Lives. It's part of a conversation Fletch has with Calculus, the caretaker of his deceased Aunt Belle's plantation.

Thanks for playing!

Friday links

The kids seem to be having another bout with winter germs. Going forward, you should probably just assume our kids are sick. If they wind up getting well for a day or two, I’ll let you know.

There has been much coughing and Tylenol slurping and not much sleeping around our house this week.

Despite all of that, I’ve managed to keep my focus on the important things, like reading blogs and playing World Golf Tour.

Here’s some good stuff I came across this week:

Karen at The Big Trade-Off opened an Etsy shop to sell some of her creations. Turn that woman loose with some good fabric and her sewing machine and she’s going to knock out some great-looking kiddy clothes. Go visit her shop. Better yet, go buy something.

Jennifer at the Brains on Fire blog writes about an interesting product partnership. Shoes that smell like…juice?

Scott at Honey I Fed the Kids celebrated his 100th post this week. It’s the best 100th post party I’ve seen. He has a very entertaining blog.

Creed Bratton from Dunder Mifflin writes about how to put a band together. I read this post yesterday and I’m still chuckling about his description of what to look for in a drummer.

Here’s hoping everyone has a great weekend. Anybody got big plans?

Movie Line Friday

It's time for this week's edition of Movie Line Friday!

Bonus points if you can name the character to whom this line is addressed.

Here's the line for this week:

No, not really, um... as soon as you get that trunk upstairs and have finished your nap I guess you could fix that step and jump down, turn around and pick a bale of cotton. And while I'm gone see to it Miss Scarlet stays away from the Union army will you?

Good luck!