{"id":1587,"date":"2013-08-07T23:00:06","date_gmt":"2013-08-07T21:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=1587"},"modified":"2013-08-14T15:45:09","modified_gmt":"2013-08-14T13:45:09","slug":"the-walking-fred","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=1587","title":{"rendered":"The Walking Fred"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>We are having a family party and that means I am in a house surrounded by my two arch enemies: complex carbohydrates and children. I find myself trapped at a kiddy table with a bottle of Mexican beer, fruit salad, my sister and her kids: my niece Quinn (4), and my nephew Fred (2).<\/p>\n

I decide to make the best of it – and besides, I love the little rugrats – so I settle in, wash down some cantaloupe with limed beer, and jot down some observations.<\/p>\n

My first observation is that toddlers are like a mixture of aggressive wasps and the drunkest person at a wedding. They buzz a table as though it was a rival hive. Then, after recon, they come back and destroy something, throw another thing on the ground, smash that thing, pee themselves, and then stab themselves with a utensil. After the shrieking and hysterical wailing, they cram a waffle in their throat and pass out.<\/p>\n

The remainder of my observations center around my sister\u2019s kids, especially my nephew Fred. Full name: Frederick Jennings Dickinson, thus guaranteeing an occupation as either a war correspondent (\u201cLive from Baghdad, this is Frederick Jennings Dickinson signing off.\u201d) or a middle linebacker (\u201cCan you believe the hit that Fred Dickinson just laid on that poor receiver?\u201d)<\/p>\n

Right?<\/p>\n

But now, before one of those burgeoning careers, he is a toddler. And this means that he walks around like a drunken zombie. He lurches into walls, tables, people, and stairwells.\u00a0 He does this while groaning, growling and emitting some wild gibberish around whatever object he has stuck into his mouth. In a room of 11,000 pillows and safe toys for children, Fred Dickinson will find a hidden fireplace poker and smack it into a wall right before he smacks the wall into his nose and crashes in an overall clad heap on top of the poker.<\/p>\n

My sister is like a perpetual motion machine. Grabbing this kid, pulling a dead mouse out of that kid\u2019s mouth, bringing Fred (who has found the stairs: the one place in the house he isn\u2019t allowed to go) down the steps upside down, and asking them questions like: \u201cRemember that deal we made, Quinn? No stabbing Freddy and I\u2019ll give you a cupcake,\u201d and \u201cFreddy, do you really think you should be playing with a huge golden telescope?\u201d and then she\u2019s holding a horizontal kid whose kicking and screaming, and I mean, SCREAMING, and she\u2019s pulling a butcher knife out of the other kid\u2019s hand \u2013 oh, and where the fuck did that come from!? \u2013 and as all of this happens, she looks at me and mentions with a casual air, like a sideline reporter commenting on a game in which Fred Dickinson has just annihilated a tight end in the end zone, \u201cMan, if I didn\u2019t have kids, I\u2019d be much fatter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the fact that I often comment that children are tiny evil human manifestations of mouth herpes, I do not want them to get hurt. If I had kids I would spend my life in constant terror, right up until the moment I checked myself into an insane asylum picking my nose and wearing a Harry Potter robe. This is especially true since toddlers seem to have an ability to find ‘fourth level of Zelda’ hidden shit that can hurt them. So I cannot understand how my sister hasn\u2019t wrapped her kids in two hundred pounds of bubble wrap as she downs a half bottle of Xanax.<\/p>\n

I give her, and all of you parents, immense credit.<\/p>\n

But when you feel the freak out approach, just leave the kids with your spouse and remember that I have an extra room in my Prague flat. I will supply the Harry Potter robes, and bubble wrap (no kids, but who doesn\u2019t love bubble wrap?), and you bring the Xanax and the complex carbohydrates.<\/p>\n

The beer will be Czech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are having a family party and that means I am in a house surrounded by my two arch enemies: complex carbohydrates and children. I find myself trapped at a kiddy table with a bottle of Mexican beer, fruit salad, my sister and her kids: my niece Quinn (4), and my nephew Fred (2). I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-pB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1587"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1594,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions\/1594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}