The Road to Hell is Paved... That's All It's Just Paved.

There are many things you can do in the span of eight hours. You could take a flight to to France, have tantric sex or wait for a Joe Louis to pass through your body. All of which are way more fun than waiting in a traffic jam on the 401.

Both take 8 hours to pass through the intestines

I live in a province where Family Day is observed, a day off to spend with your loved ones. Suck on it New Brunswick, enjoy your work day.  What better way to spend Family Day then in a car where every idiosyncrasy of your loved ones are magnified to the point where it’s probably best you can’t gain enough momentum to careen your car into the median killing you all.

I blame my parents who were selfish enough not to move from the community they’ve lived in and made lives for themselves for 32 years rather than move to a giant smog filled impersonal city.

Monsters

That, and this mess...

Ironically the transport was carrying a shipment of Weebles

This is what kept us trapped in a car for eight hours, a trip that should take about three-and-a-half. Traffic jams of this magnitude are a true test of sanity. When we first stopped I was steadfast about not moving to another lane. As history and comedians from the 80‘s has proven, that lane immediately stops once you enter it. It was so tantalizing that lane... moving at 10km/hour instead of our 5km/hour. That’s like -15 for you Americans. I didn’t do it though. Then we came to an offramp. I got into that lane and suddenly the highway was clear. It called to me like a siren’s song, “Clear, clear, join me, lay your tires upon my face.” I did it only to discover this around the bend.

Sonabitch!

That’s when we were trapped in traffic for the majority of the eight hours.

When trapped in a car that long you go through all five stages of grief.

1. Denial
“This can’t be that long a traffic jam. Really how long can it take to get to the next exit. If I just restart my phone twenty times to get a connection we’ll see that the next exit is only seconds away.”

2. Anger
“Goddamn it! Why the hell are there so many assholes in front of me? Why is my wife breathing so loudly? I’m going to punch this traffic jam in the throat.”

3. Bargaining
“Okay, so if we start moving right now I’ll stop masturbating for a year...” I left out the part where I said a year on Mercury. You know, just in case it worked.

4. Depression
“If we drove a winnebago I might be able to hang myself and bring sweet relief to this day. Stupid Sedan.”

5. Acceptance
“Okay, if we set the front seats on fire we could cook and eat the dropped Cheerios on the floor as well as stay warm tonight. Once we get internet access we’ll change our mailing address to here. I wonder what the postal code is for the 401?”

The highlight of the trip was when my five-year-old announced she needed to have a poo. I threw on the emergency lights and parked by the side of the road. My wife went to the bushes with her as I watched cars slowly moved past us, jealous of the five car lengths they got before she returned to the car.

It turned out that my daughter has a shy anus and refused to poop in the woods saying she didn’t need to. I merged back into the parking lot and ten minutes later my daughter once again announced she had to poo. It was my turn to go to the woods.

Once we were there she refused again. I begged and pleaded, explaining that I had no idea when we would make it to a bathroom. I offered to hold her up in my arms so she wouldn’t have to squat in the snow. I would have tried to aim at something, using her bottom like a disgusting Nerf gun. No dice. Back to the car we went.

We drove again, and again ten minutes later she made the announcement, with the same results in the woods. As a parent it’s important to not make a big deal about using the washroom for a kid. If you do, you could give them some weird complex later in life. However, panic does start to set in when there is the possibly of sitting in a car with soiled pants. Especially when the wearer of said pants just ate McDonalds food.

We sang her songs of pooping our pants as children and how humiliating and uncomfortable it was. Mine involved an autumn pants pooping at recess and an attempt to clean up before class using fallen leaves. Scratchy and I’m sure a joy for my mother to clean up.

Now do you want to jump in it?

We decided to ignore the issue and continue quietly seething about the traffic. At some point we went off the deep end. My wife started playing ukelele, while I entertained passing motorists with a moose hand puppet that the kids had grown tired off two hours earlier.

"Hi I'm Morton Moose. I'll suck your cock for a helicopter ride out of here."

Madness sure does make the time fly by. At once point I went on a diatribe of how I had become one with the car. My hands permanently fused to the steering wheel, my eyes changing shape to that of headlights. I was to be known as Sedanson from this point on. “Put the gas nozzle in my bellybutton and feed me premium you cheap bastard!”

To my daughter’s credit she made it to the next exit another three hours later. Where a Tim Hortons was overrun with bulging bladders.

Come to poop and stay for the Tim Bits, they look the same.

I changed the baby in the front seat of the car while my wife took the eldest into the restaurant. She pleaded with people to let her cut in line as it stretched out the door. Most adults were sympathetic and let them go ahead, until she reached the first two women in line who said they had to go too. My wife explained the situation, that my daughter is five-years-old and has had to go for hours. One woman said she was forty-five, “Forty-five, five, what’s the difference?” I believe the answer is that the five-year-old was more mature.

We got home in time to put the kids to bed and lay down ourselves, our bodies still contorted into sitting position. We can’t wait for our Easter trip to visit family. I know it will be different. For one we will all be wearing diapers...


**special thanks to Jen Hendriks at My Sensitive Girl Hole for the picture of Morton Moose.

Walking in A Winter Wasteland

A few weeks ago Toronto had the largest snowfall in five years. Air travel was cancelled, businesses closed and people gave up and carried their Smart Cars under their arms the rest of the way to work.

Both my wife and I grew up in areas where large snowfalls were commonplace, so for us it was business as usual. I’m happy my oldest daughter is only five-years old and still enjoys school, because when I was a kid, the sentence, “Busses are cancelled, but schools are still open,” would have sent me into a tantrum not seen since God turned that dude’s wife into salt, thus dooming us to worry about our sodium intake forevermore.

A herd of deer and cows devoured her moments afterwards

For us it just meant bundling up and heading out. I do sometimes feel bad for the baby. I bundle her up in a fleece onesie, a snowsuit, boots, hats and bubble wrap, only to take her out of it again twenty minutes later. We do this four times a day between errands, shoveling the walk and taking her older sister to school and back. She does tend to get crabby after the third time it happens.

"For the love of God help me up, I don't know whose hands those are that are reaching for me."

"Enough of this shit. I'm moving to Florida."

When there is this much snow, traveling with children can be difficult. I heard many stories of strollers abandoned in neighbor's front yards, like a toddler version of an apocalypse movie where cars have been abandoned and the passengers either eaten or fled. I have a million dollar idea for parents. A snowblower with a baby carrier on it. This would clear the snow as you walked your baby. I call it, “The Baby Blower”. On second thought I may rethink that name.

Trust me, this will sell better than my baby wood chipper/stroller

I didn’t attempt the stroller, instead opting for the trusted carrier which goes on my back. The only issue with the carrier is that it acts like a roofie making my daughter fall asleep instantly, with her head hanging at unnatural angles. I’ve been often told by strangers that my baby must be dead as necks aren’t supposed to bend like that. I normally reply by shrugging and saying, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just go sex up the wife to make another one. Babies are the ultimate renewable natural resource after all.”

Whoops broke another one. This is why we can't have nice things*

When my oldest was under two years old and before I became a pro baby carrier, I only wore her on my front. In the winter I would wear a large coat and zip her up inside it. This opened the door for old men, who likely only ever carried cigars when their children were born and never an actual child, to comment that I was obviously smothering my child and that I should be ashamed of myself. My only retort was to flick their varicose veins and run away.

I can't help it is she keeps dropping her breathing tube!

With the heavy snowfall I got a new concerned citizen comment regarding the baby on my back. “Snow is gathering on her face.” Sure enough a small drift had formed on her sleeping face that was pointing straight up at the sky. I did not have a snow scraper and had to ask strangers to help clear her face. Had I been thinking I should have salted her face before leaving the house.

Getting the five-year-old to school was another issue. I thought I was brilliant in pulling her and her friend to school in a toboggan. Two five-year-olds in a toboggan, me pulling and carrying a baby on my back and fresh soft snow did not make for an efficient trip. I imagined that I was a part of an avalanche rescue team saving three people from a fresh slide.

Exactly like this, but with Baby Mum Mums.

When we arrived there was dozens of other parents who walked their kids there in hopes of an afternoon nap while they were in school. I saw one mother coaching her child who was making snow angels. She instructed him to "wave your arms like you are on fire." This lead to a lot of thoughts for me. First, how is being on fire in his frame of reference. Was he once on fire, and if so why would this mother make him relive that? Second, when on fire you stop, drop and roll, not lie on the ground and wave your arms up and down.

I swept away the ashes before taking this picture.

*Thanks to Jen Hendriks for the photo. See her blog at My Sensitive Girl Hole

Daddy's Night Off

As a full time parent it’s important to to find time for yourself. Time to reflect on who you are, what your goals are, how you are going to get that shit stain from an explosive diaper out of your pillow. Suffice to say I find it difficult to separate myself from home life.

Fact: Pillows can hold twenty times their own weight in bodily fluids. Don't believe me, try it at home, or better yet a Motel.

I try hard to find small moments in the day for myself. The 45 minutes between bedtime and the first wake up, in the shower (cut out masturbation and I gain a good three minutes of thinking time), or after being knocked unconscious from banging my head on the changing table while picking up a feces filled diaper that’s fallen poop side down on the floor.

Injuries like this should occur only when picking up awesome things like gold or jelly rolls.

My wife is very good about urging me to, as she puts it, “get the fuck out of the house.” I suspect I get tedious to listen to. My wife will ask my daughter questions about her day, which I will answer like it’s some sort of sick game show where adults are pitted against small children. Imagine how much an adult of average intelligent would dominate over a five-year old at Jeopardy, let alone a hylee intelleigent persun like me.

"Seriously kid, you are an Troglobite."

Every few weeks I take a night to go out on my own. I normally try to go see a movie, but have recently become super focussed and worried about how bad a night will be with children waking up. The youngest has recently had a few weeks of bad nights which means my wife and I have bad nights, which means we have bad days, which will eventually lead to a bad divorce.

So a movie has to be close to the house so that travel won’t take much time and it has to be close to an hour and a half, so I can get back home to bed for a snooze before the festivities of waking children begin. Quentin Tarantino obviously does not care enough for his audiences who have children.

Hates children and silence.

On Thursday I decided to skip a movie and do some window shopping. Before kids I was able to wander the streets of Toronto for hours on my own, window shopping at used book and record stores with no issues. The first sign that this was not going to be a satisfying evening out was noticing that I was standing on the subway platform rocking back and forth as though I had a child in a sling attached to me.

Next I was walking the streets and started to miss being asked a million questions about everything around us, “How do all those lights work,” or “Tell me about the olden days, when you were a kid,” or “Why is that man sleeping in the alley with a belt around his arm?”

"His sleeves are too loose sweetie."

I don’t care for eating at restaurants by myself. This stems from years ago, where I went into a sit down restaurant by myself and they sat me directly in front of the entrance and ceremoniously removed all the plates and cutlery from the opposite side of the table. I was left trying to avoid eye contact of people entering the restaurant for the entire meal. If I was in a speed eating contest I would have won that night.

So instead I opt for fast food, that I can either eat while walking, or sit in silence with numerous other people sitting in silence. All of us judging each other while wishing someone would start a conversation. Fast food joints are a gathering place for the introvert who wishes to be an extrovert.

On this day out went to a fast food place that I had never been to before, let’s call it Hero Certified Burger, because that’s it’s name. Also, if they wish to sue me, they won’t get much unless they are interested in my vault of cloth diapers and Penaten riches. This place has been around a while so I imagine most people in the city are familiar with it. I was not. The cashier asked if I wanted “Hero Certified Sauce”, this meant nothing to me. She might as well have asked me if I wanted “Monkey Doodle Frazenbutt” on my burger.

Monkey Doodle Frazenbutt

I asked what exactly the sauce was. She looked at me like I was the one speaking another language and answered “a sauce”.  Good enough for me! Shoot some of that undescribeable goo on my food please. It tasted like undescribeable goo too.

With goo in my belly and boredom in my heart I headed for home. Knowing my wife would be concerned (read: annoyed) that I had returned home within an hour and a half, I was smart and brought home a magnum of the finest wine a twenty dollar bill can buy.