our bathroom door doesn't lock. come to think of it, our bathroom door doesn't even latch. it stands wide open much of the time, occupied or not. casting a glance that way while walking down the hall often results with spying bella sitting on the john chin resting on her bracing arm and her legs dangling from the seat.

you may think that given the state of our door hardware, people would respect that when the door is swung closed, the room is occupied. we're not quite there yet. five minutes before the writing of this thought i was attending to my late afternoon constitution when the door pushed open enough for bella's head to pop through. "oh!" she exclaimed. "sorry dad, i just need one of these." her arm reached to the back of the door and pulled a bath towel off a hook and she and it disappeared. she called a "thank you dad" out as she quickly ran down the hall.

i'm not a math guy but this equation is one which i'm all over. that is, if bella is hurriedly after a full size bath towel, something pretty bad just went down. there was a time i'd try to figure out if it was one of my valuables or another's but parental experience has shown me that it is always my stuff. the kids have yet to be employed and therefore haven't acquired anything of merit or value. the last thing marty voluntarily purchased out of need or desire was back in 98 and that item fell when bella was just three. so what is left is a house chock full of dad-stuff. and it's not like i prefer delicate and costly electronics or anything. and certainly not stuff that couldn't withstand being doused with a bowl full of milk that got upended during a scuffle between bella and alex for the remote while yelling "my show, no my show, no my show, NO, MY SHOW".

many more of those sorts of battles and that argument will become a moot point because marty and i are in agreement that we're not replacing any more broken household items until the children leave for college. if you could see some of the antics that go on in our miniscule tv room, you'd know the tele is already living on some serious borrowed time.

this weekend, bella and alex had a spend the night at their grandparents. when we dropped them off bella said to my mother in a very serious manner.

BELLA
grandma, i'm going to try real hard to not say 'oh my god!' while i'm at your house because i know you don't like it when people say that.

GRANDMA
well that is true bella. i would appreciate it if you did not say that at my house or ever. i think there are better things to say than that.

BELLA
yes i know, father told me. so instead we've been practicing saying things like 'oh my goodness', 'oh dear' and 'oh bother'. but sometimes i forget and still say 'oh my god' but i will try not to.

GRANDMA
well, i guess that's all i can ask.

upon getting the sunday report, bella didn't say it even once the whole weekend. and when she saw the one-legged man at the nursing home while visiting her great-grandfather, she didn't even ask him where his other leg went. so far, five seems way more mature than four.

yesterday i had two at-home jobs. the first was making dinner. after toiling to prepare wholesome and tasty sustenance for mi familia, bella sang a song through the meal, chin on palms, annie the orphan style that partially went something like this:

i hate being a kid
because everyone is mean
i hate being a kid
i wish i were a kitten
because everyone loves kittens
and father is so mean
father is so mean

we received this ten-minute, off-the-cuff serenade because i didn't serve her milk to her in a bowl. unbeknownst to me she was playing kittens and kittens don't drink milk out of cups, they drink milk out of bowls and fathers who don't know this are stupid-heads (child speak for priggish asses) and deserve, yep you guessed it, to be fired.

my second job was washing towels and rugs (because i didn't complete my chores on sunday). so i finished them and brought our fluffy yellow bathroom rug up. the kids were the first to get the benefit of the dryer-warm carpet, alex in particular. the second i pulled his diaper off for his bath he loosed a ten-inch long torrent of urine diagonally across the rug, smiling broadly at the arcing stream. not a drop hit the tile which could have been easily dealt with. all of it was perfectly placed and then absorbed into my freshly laundered mat.

but to be comprehensive about the day, while i was making dinner bella and i were playing prison-break. how prison-break works is she sneaks up behind me and bear hugs the bottom half of my legs together so i can't move. this is the prison part. then i have to use the keys, my tickle fingers, to try to get out of prison. this is the break part. when bella was three prison was fun. now that bella is five and quite strong, having her lock on unannounced is akin to someone duct-taping my feet together, hanging a fifty pound weight around my neck and giving me a hearty shove at the top of a stairwell. alex has watched this production a number of times, thumb-in-mouth and always standing a safe distance away. tonight he decided to step up and while bella was gigglingly bear-hugging my calves from behind and i was trying to tickle her loose i heard a quick, sharp crack, immediately followed by bella wailing. i turned to find alex with the biggest, proudest smile, resting a wiffle ball bat on his shoulder as if he's between walk-the-batter pitches. bella is holding the crown of her head with both hands screaming childs' curses towards him. this is one of those parental moments where the best you can do is simply not laugh out loud.

so obviously for a guy who gets heckled through the dinner he prepared AND has someone piss all over his day's labor moments after its completion, it's not shocking to learn the highlight of my march 14 was when my two-year old brained my five-year old with a long, yellow club. i mean, at least it was a plastic club and to be fair we were playing a game named prison-break.

in regard to yesterday's post about our four year old's blue language, i'd like to add i never use the phrase 'stupid-ass' but do have a certain lady-friend i'm married to who will on occasion drop the 'stupid-ass' bomb.

for those keeping score of who is responsible for bad words uttered by our kids, the tally currently stands at marty, two and troy, zero. although it's a rather empty victory because when bella finally does get around to floating a true troyism out there for our relatives or her classmates and either gets the family ostracized or herself expelled, i think marty's going to argue for a greater point value. but worry not, i'll negotiate it down ... to a double digit offense at least.

at alex's 2-year birthday party, all four grandparents were very impressed when bella said something was 'despicable' although it sounded more like 'spicable'.

the same could not be said this same evening when she later called one of her teddy bears a 'stupid-ass' which pretty much came out sounding like 'stupid-ass'.

the experiment is over. marty has returned to the flock. a synopsis:

day 0 or preflight or the last day marty was with us : height of the roman empire
day 1 : rome is crumbling
day 2 : rome has fallen (detail)
day 3 : the new world is discovered (detail)
day 4 : still the new world, but with a lot of crappy neighbors.

yesterday (day 4) had multiple peaks and valleys, a meltdown or two and some good laughs interspersed throughout. my guess would be this is the most representative of what Walt experiences from one day to the next. as for earlier, i think the goodness of day 3 was just as aberrant as the badness of day 2.

to all you current and future fathers. this experience is a must, especially if your partner is a full-time caregiver. and, i'm not talking about a four hour stretch or even an overnighter, i'm talking about a multi-day escapade of a you-against-them kind of scenario. this is some exhausting shit. without doubt. and what seems to make it so taxing is the sheer unpredictability of it all. you can only ever reliably see five minutes into the future. any premonitions beyond that is wild speculation and about as accurate as the 10 o'clock weather.

empathy is your friend. understanding is your currency. appreciation your lifeblood.

now, if we could only experience menstruation.

last week we paid $4,000 to replace our home's furnace which had been acting flaky. after the installation and seeing that our new furnace was equally flaky we surmised that it was instead our $100 thermostat that was having issues.

this is called putting one in the L column of home ownership.

last week i received the worst haircut i've had in over 10 years.

this was my second haircut PL (post-Larry).

and, this was my first.

is it butt-naked, buck-naked or are both acceptable?

you wouldn't believe how much i haven't got done for thinking about that damn question.

and if you read that previous sentence out loud in my house you would have bella tell you that DAMN is one of the two words on the CAN'T SAY list.

the other word is STUPID.

and, everytime i hear the 'stupid'-word-rule i can't help but think of the uphill battle we're going to have in front of us if we're drawing the line in the sand at the word STUPID. if i were expected to live by this standard there are people in my world who'd think i'd turned mime or gone mute.

while playing outside at the neighbors house, bella ran up to me and said she had to go pee. "so go pee" i told her. she promptly whipped down her pants, squatted and proceeded to urinate in the grass pretty much right where she was standing when she asked the question.

some of you may think that the odd part of this story is that i not only encourage but actually instruct my child to drop trow and whiz in someone else's lawn, but it is not. nor is it in the detail that one of the boys playing with us, a four year old, ran up behind bella, laid down on the ground desperately trying to see the pee come out. i'm watching this little guy watching my daughter and thought, man this kid is a freakshow.

ten minutes later freakshow-boy announces his own need to urinate. his mom, like me, told him to go ahead and go. so he pulled the bottom of his shirt up to his neck, pinching it under his chin. he then pushed his pants and underwear down to his ankles and jutted his groin out in front of him as if he were trying to form the letter C for some seseme street skit. now for those of you out there certain this nearly naked pose is the weird part of my story, slow down. the weird part is not his body's pose, but what he did with his hands during the stance ... using both hands, he made a diamond shape around his penis/genitals, framing them while he peed. as i'm taking this whole vision in, i spied bella squatting a few feet from him studying the heck out of this dude's urination technique. i considered yelling at her to leave the freak alone while he peed but was myself too transfixed for such petty administration. so we both, father and daughter, watched the 4 year old from next door empty his bladder into the front yard of his home.

in closing, i can't even tell you how much i'm looking forward to my next work day where i can casually stroll to the bathroom, cram my polo shirt up under my chin, lower my pants and boxers to my ankles, jut my doughy paunch forward, letter-C-style, and aim for the urinal which will be an impressive four feet away. the only real question left will be if others in the bathroom will lay on the ground (ala freakshow) or simply squat (ala bella) to observe, what i'm sure they will all agree is, a mesmerizing vision to behold.

the following events happened to me in a seven minute span on an otherwise picture-perfect day.

1. i sat down to watch some queued up college basketball when alex changed the channel on the remote. for those who don't have tivo, just accept that this is not something you want to happen.
2. after taking the remote away from alex and turning back to the tv to turn the channel back, he reached up and pushed my Vietnamese iced coffee over onto our white futon. for those who haven't experienced Vietnamese iced coffee, it is the approximate color and viscosity of 10w30 motor oil.
3. after removing the futon cover i went to the basement and started the washer only to find i just doused a load of laundry that had been washed but hadn't yet been moved to the dryer.
4. after emptying the washer and waiting for the water to fill, i was spraying a stain treatment onto the futon. it took my brain a few moments to realize i was bathing the nine open cuts on my hands with Zout. and these were not your average scrapes or abrasions, they were the mementos from my latest window project which means they were slices from glass which makes a paper cut feel like butterfly kisses from your high school sweetheart.

and, i'm not entirely convinced this isn't further retribution for yesterday's post.

and, i'm sure i'm not going to have to suck the pipe for this either.

after a mishap in the basement, bella informed me that 'this is not a house where we say dammit'.

she's right. fact is dammit is possibly the cleanest expression of disgust ever uttered, shouted, screamed or just plainly said in our house. fact is, dammit only came into existence about a year after bella came into existence. fact is, dammit is what i reserved for when in the company of a relative or a person of the cloth. fact is, i feel i can now say dammit with the conviction and intonation to make one feel i just said something much, much more severe. fact is, it's really to damn bad ours is not a house where we say dammit.