Tag: funny

Channel Surfing At Its Worst

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I’m gonna keep this brief, because I’ve got leftovers to shove down my neck.

The Pavs are staying at a hotel this Thanksgiving, which means all the delightful things that go along with staying away from home as the parents of toddlers (packing a literal vanful of stuff for a two-day stayover, remembering that the 18-month old doesn’t do well at all with staying away and therefore won’t sleep or nap, and therefore, NEITHER WILL YOU… you know, minor inconveniences).

But today, I’m sitting here, both kids asleep (amazingly!) and with a little time to kill, so first of all I’m blarging a bit, and second of all I’m looking around to see what’s on TV, which is of course a mistake. Nothing’s on TV on Thanksgiving except a bunch of Black Friday ads that I don’t care about and the first in several networks’ series of holiday marathon movies. In short, I could turn the TV off from now until January and probably not miss a thing.

Anyway, I’m flipping through channels and not having a lot of luck, and I find this handy-dandy reference card by the TV. You know, the list of local stations. But there’s a problem…

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Just look at that abomination. Who in the name of all that’s holy designed that monstrosity? It’s totally unreadable and useless to anybody who might be looking at it. Channels arranged alphabetically? Who in their right mind, staying at the Holiday Inn Express from out of town, knows enough to wonder what station KET, Scottsville IND, or Trojan are on (these are all stations on the card, for the curious)?

Sorry, channel card designer, when I am sitting in my hotel room looking for something to kill thirty minutes on the idiot box, I want to know first what’s on the channels as I’m flipping through them, second — maybe — what I can expect to see in a few minutes on the same channel. Like, I’m flipping, and I see what looks like a documentary on giraffes, but I want to make sure I’m actually watching Animal Planet and not Fox News, where they’re about to replace the lovely peaceful image of a giraffe with some idiocy about how the giraffes have ruined the plumbing at the zoo and Obama is to blame.

Further, if you ARE going to list the channels alphabetically like an absolute tosspot, at least have the decency to list them left-t0-right. Top-to-bottom listings should be reserved strictly for numerical sortings. What are we, savages?

How dare they call this thing a Channel-Surfing Guide. More like a do-it-yourself instant aneurysm kit. My eyes won’t uncross.

On a more serious note, it’s Black Friday Eve, so I’m stockpiling ammunition and taser cartridges for my shopping sortie tomorrow. If you cross my path, it’s nothing personal, but I’m getting that last Minion doll.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Parenting High-Five!

PavowskiLeave a comment

As a dad, I am always worrying about the things I’m passing on to my kids. Am I teaching them the right lessons, showing them how to be wise adults, instilling in them the best values?

It’s impossible to tell, day to day. Raising kids is a little like growing bamboo; you plant it, and you water it, and you tend to it day in and day out, but for years — years! — you get no outward sign of the plant’s progress. Kids, meanwhile, are angels one day, demons the next. Their moods can swing like pendulums on things as inconsequential as the order you buttoned their jackets in. So there’s really no telling how things are going in their little heads.

Until your oldest brings home his Thanksgiving project from preschool.

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If you can’t read it, that says “I am thankful cause I give mommy and daddy highfives.”

I could quibble with the grammar, but I won’t. (Yes, I will. It should say “because” or, at the very least, have an apostrophe before “cause”; Mommy and Daddy should really be capitalized; and high-fives should be hyphenated.)

That picture up there tells me I’m doing something right.

Excuse me while I take a victory lap and then high-five my son at the end of it.

Totally Not Helpful

Pavowski2 Comments

Reading the search results that lead people to my site (when they aren’t blocked… thanks Google) is sometimes insightful, sometimes telling, sometimes hilarious.

Today’s gem?

what happens if you accidentally inhale a puff of comet

You’re not going to see me going grammar stickler all over somebody’s search terms. It does, however, give me a fit of the giggles that somebody — presumably in a panic after breathing in a lungful of bathroom disinfectant — stumbles onto my site, looking for some sort of deliverance from their freshly bleached trachea, and finds only my short story about a kid who sneaks onto the train that carries the elderly into space on a one-way trip.

Totally not helpful, but maybe I have a new reader.

Unless the comet did its work and ravaged his throat and windpipe enough to make my site the last thing he saw. Which is, if you think about it, kind of still a win.

Toddler Life, Chapter 331: Dinner Plans

Pavowski2 Comments

Parenting is nothing if not a slow ceding of control over your own life to humans less than half your size. You think you’ve got things more or less figured out, and then along come the sprouts and you realize that not only is the world not what you thought it was, but it’s incredibly and ridiculously more dangerous than you thought. I personally can no longer do the dishes without keeping a wary eye on the upturned silverware on the tray in the dishwasher. Incidentally, you also learn just how slippery certain surfaces can become when covered in chocolate milk or melted popsicle or (and this is happening alarmingly often of late) toddler vomit.

Control slips away by degrees.

First, it’s sleep — you are now slave to the sleep schedule of somebody who has no need for an alarm clock to wake up at 4 AM or earlier.

Then, it’s evening entertainment — gone are the days of late (or even evening) movies. Banished are quiet dinner dates. No more can you even enjoy a leisurely glass of wine while cooking. The rugrats steal all this away in great grabbing gusts.

But there was another milestone, another reckoning of just how far we’ve fallen, and it’s come over the past few weeks, because our oldest has started to develop a taste and preference for certain foods. Pizza is a big hit, though he knows he can’t have it all the time. Grilled cheese is a several-times-a-week favorite.

But you know the toddlers are running the house when you’re having bacon and eggs and pancakes for dinner on a Wednesday.

Respectable adult life, I hardly knew ye.

Parenting: It’s Really Not That Hard

Pavowski4 Comments

Our kids go to daycare, and my wife and I both work in education. So perhaps we’re a bit more sensitive than the average individual to the herd mentality and group dynamics that can sprout up in kids of all ages in a common setting. I don’t, however, think we’re smarter than the average person, or more capable of seeing obvious problems associated with otherwise everyday actions.

Our daycare has a pretty strict and pretty clear policy on bringing in food from outside for your kids: you can’t do it. To say nothing of the obvious danger for kids with peanut allergies or similar maladies, having one kid who brings in a hot sub while the rest of the class is having overcooked nuggets and sad, limp green beans is just a recipe for bad news, especially with kids who don’t even have the vocabulary yet to explain why they’re mad that Johnny’s chowing down on a delicious sandwich that probably cost as much as the lunch for the other fourteen students in class combined. So food from outside is disallowed.

This regulation is posted pretty clearly all over the building.

And yet.

The teacher in my son’s class told me about a parent who, earlier in the week, dropped off her child at 7 AM — while the rest of the class is sitting down for a breakfast of fruit and toasted english muffins — with a McDonald’s bag. Then tried to hurry back out the door.

“Ma’am, he can’t have that in here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you can take him out and sit with him in the lobby while he eats, if you like, but he can’t have outside food in the classroom.”

“I can’t stay; I have to go to work. This is his breakfast.”

The (severely underpaid) teacher then had to explain to this woman (who is presumably in her thirties and has, also presumably, learned at least a little bit about the way the world works) why they couldn’t allow her son to sit down and eat a McDonald’s breakfast at the same table with the other kids. You don’t have to use your imagination, really. Kids get jealous. Arguments start. Whining breaks out, then outright screaming. Pretty soon, one kid has impaled another against the wall with a lance made of Legos while the other kids are crowning a hash brown Harvest King with a diadem of braided hotcakes. Lord of the Super Size.  Preschool pandemonium.

Honestly. It’s really not that hard to get this aspect of your parenting life right. It takes getting up an extra ten minutes early to make sure your kid has something to eat in the morning, or — or! — you can just let the kid have breakfast in class with the rest of the kids. Either solution fits just fine into the accepted social order and — let me put a fine point on this — necessary routine that dealing with a room full of three-year-olds requires.

Or, you can be a to-hell-with-the-rest-of-the-world, me-first and my-kids-only jerko scumbag and send your kid to school with a bagful of grease and gristle. Which will promptly be thrown in the trash.

And then there are the parents who can’t be bothered to send their kids with show-and-tell items from home, so the kids feel left out. Or the ones who can’t do the simple homework assignments like tracing their kids’ hands on a sheet of construction paper so they can make turkeys in class. Or the ones whose kids go to school biting and scratching at the faces of other tiny humans. Or the ones who rant anonymously about other parents on their vicious little blogs.

Wait, what?

Okay, this rant is over, because I’m in serious danger of falling into a rage-spiral over the parents at our daycare, To be fair, I actually really like our daycare. Our kids have fun and they actually seem to be learning things. It’s the other parents I can’t stand.

Sartre said it best. Hell is other people.

And their snotty, sticky, smear-finger-paint-on-your-trousers-while-you’re-leaving-for-work kids.