Water

The whole concept of a glass of water on the bedside table was completely foreign to me before I met Diana. I was simply used to a constant low grade dehydration all the time. Keeps the skin nice and brittle.

Elijah has fallen into the bedside water routine as well. In fact, if you toss him into bed and he doesn’t have a full glass of water, it gives him a great excuse to sneak out and watch you watch “The Wire” on DVD and drink wine. When busted for spying, he throws the blame on his waterless bedside.

But here’s the thing. The kid is a water magician. Over the course of one night, he can turn 7 ounces of fluid into several gallons. Every morning his diaper weight roughly 40 pounds. Not to mention a completely sopping wet bed. Every. Morning.

Yesterday morning, Luca was engaging in his usual early morning crib-side chats about Thomas The Tank Engine and Elijah decided to sleep on the daybed outside our bedroom. I awoke to Eli shouting, “Dad! I peed on the daybed! And on my pants! And on my shirt!”

Sure enough, I stumbled out to find him swimming in his own liquid waste.

So last night, I decided in my head that we were putting an end to the nighttime water. I got him dressed in his pjs, read some books and then announced “nighty night” and closed the door.

Diana had already popped the cork and we flipped on the TV. We were ten minutes into the Baltimore drug scene when we heard a door creak. Tiny footsteps announced his arrival.

“Daddy, you forgot my water.”

“No. We aren’t doing waters anymore. It makes you pee pee too much at night. We’re taking a break.”

I have never seen a sadder face in my life. Remember that scene at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark?” When the Ark of the Covenant melted all those Nazis' faces? That’s what it looked like. He was horrified and mortified. Huge tears streamed down his face. He wept the tears of a boy deprived of life giving water.

I told him to knock it off and go to bed.

But I couldn’t get that little sad face out of my head. All night the Ark of the Covenant melted his little face in my brain. Finally, I relented and placed a half full glass of water at his bedside.

This morning his bed was dry.

p.s. Sorry this was a light month for posts. August was busy at work. I promise more stupidity in September.

Puking Crazies

With Elijah, we called them “Naked Crazies.” That hour between taking a bath and hitting the crib were all bets are off. Running, falling, laughing, jumping, kicking, screaming.

And with Luca, puking.

Luca gets so amped up during Naked Crazies that he’s taken to emptying the contents of his stomach all over the floor. Or all over Grover. Or all over Diana’s cleavage. It never seems to bother him all that much. He just shouts, “Puke!” and keeps running. Eli loves to see Luca puke to no end. He treats his younger brother like shaken up Budweiser can. And as soon as Luca pops, he screams with delight.

After the 5th or 6th night in a row of Puking Crazies, we decided to put a stop to it. We declared a moratorium on all running, chasing, bed jumping, etc. Basically, fun of all kinds was banished. From now on, the only things legal to do in our house after 7 are sitting quietly, reading, sipping warm milk and telling mommy she looks pretty.

But the Puking Crazies aren’t something you can simply regulate out of existence. Elijah and Luca treat their puke inducing fun as contraband. They wait until we walk out of the room and break out the insanity in small, intense batches. They scream and chase each other until we come rushing back into the room, scolding. Then they try to play it cool, pretending they were having a Shakespeare discussion. But it’s hard to cover up a massive pile of second hand milk.

Elijah spends a lot of time on the steps. We’ve threatened him with having to clean up the mess himself, but we think he’d enjoy sipping carpet cleaner too much.

Sceered

When you look across the great genetic bouillabaisse that is your kid, you hope they get the stuff you like about yourself (ability to grow a fantastic beard) and you hope they skip the stuff you don’t really care for in yourself (beard that starts just below the eyeballs).

And for the most part, I think Elijah and Luca have lucked out in the DNA department. They have my baby blue eyes. They have Diana’s beauty. My love of Star Wars and Diana’s love of wine. I assume.

However, Luca seems to have inherited my childhood skittishness. Eli, as you well know, has no fear. There is not a stranger who can’t be talked to or a diving board that can’t be leapt from. But Luca, he’s a scaredy cat.

He gets that from me. I was a petrified little kid. I would vomit at the idea of going to Kentucky Fried Chicken with my grandparents. And not because of the idea of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. Steve and I used to hide in our basement, huddled together protecting ourselves from dangers that never seemed to exist.

More times a day than I care to admit, he’ll look at you with pleading eyes and say, “I sceeeered, daddy.”

I’ll say, “What are you scared of, Luca?”

“People.”

Ugh. I’m hoping this is a phase. Or an attention getting device. Or something we can give him a DNA transplant for. And I did grow out of my sacredness and can, on occasion, eat at a KFC.

So when he says, “I sceeeered, daddy,” I say, “That’s okay. You can be scared. Daddy won’t let anything ever happen to you.”

And you know what? It kind of works. And I love that it works.

Love and Bagels

Elijah has a full blown case of Girl Crazy. He loves girls. L-O-V-E-S them. And he is very vocal about it. But not all girls, however. He’s picky about who he loves.

There is an Old Navy commercial out right now with three unbelievably hot women (they may actually be teens, but who can tell?) dancing in a bowling alley. Eli will point to the screen and say, “I love that one and that one, but NOT that one.”

“Are you nuts? They’re all crazy hot.”

“I don’t love her,” he said matter of factly.

He’ll pick out female characters in his books that he loves more than others. For instance, in the book where the animal kids earn money to go on a field trip, he loves the girl fox (natch) but not the girl badger.

He will also pick out women on the street he loves.

“Daddy! I love her.” And he can’t really articulate why. Is her boobs? Is it her hair? Her boobs?

“I just love her.”

He fell madly in love with a girl at Einstein Bagels who was sitting on the other side of a plate glass window. She noticed he was staring at her and began flirting with him through the glass. He completely freaked out and hid. I encouraged him to go over to her and express his love. He balked. Because he’s a Hamann.

And the other week, we were pulling into a parking spot at Whole Foods when Eli proclaimed, “Daddy! I love that lady in the car!”

I looked to the car next to us and saw a woman in her late 40s who could hardly be described as love at first site material. Seizing an opportunity, I leapt out of our car and pantomimed for the woman to roll her window down.

“Excuse me. But see that little boy in there? He just told me he was in love with you. I thought you’d like to know.”

The woman was far more touched than I thought she’d be. She blushed and meekly waved at Eli and drove off with a massive smile on her face.

Eli was mortified.

Locked

And now, I present the soon to be classic HamannEggs story, “The Time Diana Locked Luca In The Car.”

In the Denver Botanical Gardens parking garage, Diana found herself contemplating the sheer amount of crap you have to cart around when you’re out and about with two kids. She saw the stroller, the sippie cups, the purse, the diaper bag the snacks the kids the grappling hooks and the box of grenades and thought, “Too much.”

So Diana tossed the diaper bag into the trunk and closed it. Roughly 0.558 seconds after doing this, she realized her keys and cell phone were in the diaper bag, now locked in the car.

Oh yeah, and Luca.

For those of you who believe in heaven and hell, make no mistake you better be nice and pray a lot because if you go to hell when you die, it will be Lower Level 1 of the Denver Botanical Gardens parking garage.

Seeing the look of utter horror that crossed his mother’s face, Luca knew something was up and started to howl. Now keep in mind, we paid big money to have our windows tinted a year ago. So while Luca could see his mother’s panic, Diana couldn’t see into our car.

Diana tried to Get Luca to unlock the car from the inside, but he was strapped into his seat (stupid well constructed child safety products).

Luckily, a woman happened to be passing by and Diana begged her to use her cell phone. The woman said, “You should really invest in On-Star.” I’m not sure what happened next, but I think Diana murdered her.

The woman gave up her cell (since she was presumably murdered), but THERE WAS NO CELL SERVICE IN THE PARKING GARAGE. So Diana had to leave Luca and walk up to street level to make the call.

CUT to me in a plush editorial suite across town complaining about the quality of their free snacks. I saw a strange number on my cell and opted to answer it.

A voice that sounded like a robotic version of my wife was on the line. “Be quite and listen to me. This is an emergency…”

Roughly 30 seconds later I was screaming across Denver in a borrowed Mercedes SUV. I made it to the DBG and realized I had no idea where they were. So I slowly crawled around the garage hitting the unlock button on my key fob and swearing loudly.

Eventually, I ran across Elijah slumped over a stroller and Diana shout-singing the “Bob The Builder” theme song into our back window.

I popped the lock and Luca was extracted. He was soaking wet and covered in a hysteria induced rash. Diana covered him in smooches and he wept, “Push elevator buttons?”

Diana said, “Yes, sweetheart. You can push all the buttons you want.”

Elijah said, “But I WANT to push the elevator button.”

Best Day

Dear Luca,

There will come a time, years from now when you’ll be asked a simple question. The question will most likely be posed after you’ve had three beers. Probably you’ll be sitting on a couch.

The question is, “What was the best day of your life?”

Now, you may be tempted to say something about a baseball game or a day you met a girl (or boy, no judgment) or a day you took drugs and saw a jam band.

But you will be wrong. Your best day was August 4th, 2011. Case closed.

Allow me to prove my point. Luca, you are one of those boys who love construction equipment. If it is yellow and moves earth of some kind, you love it. You have a set of yellow plastic loaders and dump trucks (dumb f*cks) that never leaves your side. You say goodnight to your construction equipment before bed. There is a book about diggers that you’ve forced me to read so often that I now know it by heart (A digger can dig a very big hole. A digger has a arm with two parts, the boom and the dipper…)

But your true favorite of the construction vehicles is the Backhoe Loader. The Backhoe loader is all you talk about. All you think about. You say the words “Backhoe Loader” so often, the words have morphed into a new word, “Backaloader,” which sounds an awful lot like “Baklava.”

On Thursday morning, August 4th, 2011, a trailer arrived in front of our house. Riding on the back of this trailer was, you guessed it, a Backaloader. When this fact was pointed out to you, you literally pooped your pants with excitement.

For the next 4 hours, you stood on our front porch shouting, “Backaloader!” and jumping up and down while clapping your hands. You watched the Backaloader do whatever it is they do with more awe than if a dinosaur suddenly appeared in our yard.

Eventually, the men and the Backaloader left and you spent the rest of the day asking, “Where backaloader go?”

Also making August 4th, 2011, the worst day of your life.

High Chair

For the last couple of weeks, Diana has been suffering through a disturbing trend with Luca. The minute she turns her back on him when he’s eating, his high chair tray crashes to the floor. BAM! Food everywhere. Grover pounces, Diana scolds and Luca cries.

And the funny thing is, Diana couldn’t figure out how he did it. She’d jiggle the tray, Yank on it and shake it and it would stay locked in place.

But every night for weeks, as soon as Diana leaves the room to check email or answer the phone…BAM! Tray hits the floor. Grover pounces, Diana scolds and Luca cries.

Diana got to the point where she was seeking council from Elijah to see if he knew what was going on. Eli would just shrug and say, “Luca is doing it.”

Sick and tired of cleaning up yogurt and spaghetti, Diana called the manufacturer of the high chair for advice. They asked for 100 photographs to cover their legal butts and asked for $100 for replacement parts.

Diana then began the creepy process of finding a new high chair on Craigslist. But before she made the probably fatal mistake of visiting a Craigslist seller’s house, she just had to know how Luca was unlocking a tray that baffles his 39 year old father.

So she served up the boys a big plate of, oh let’s say spaghetti, and made a big show of leaving the room.

“Whelp, that’s all for me. Going to leave the room now. Not going to spy on you at all. Do whatever it is you do when you’re alone. Bye now! Bye bye!”

Then she stomped her feet in decreasing intensity and then quickly ducked behind the wall. And began spying.

This is what she saw:

Elijah looked around to see if the coast was clear. And then he (I am not making this up) literally tiptoed across the room to Luca’s tray. Then he quickly unhooked the tray and dumped it onto the ground.

“MOM! Luca dumped his tray on the ground!”

Diana leapt up and shouted, “A-HAH!” Busted. Busted. Busted.

Needless to say, he lost his screen privileges.

Play Thomas

Our Illinois turned Colorado friends Jimmy and Liz are great friends. They’re incredibly kind. They’re funny as heck. They have good taste in friends. But they’ve introduced an evil into our house than I will never, ever forgive.

Thomas The Train (Insert evil dramatic music here).

One day I was minding my own business, playing Star Wars guys and talking about Star Wars and praising my children for mentioning Star Wars. The next day, there was a massive box in our basement filled with literally hundreds of Thomas The Train things. Tracks. Battery operated Engines. Bridges. Those circles where the train turns around and goes the other way.

It completely blew Elijah and Luca’s mind. But mostly Luca’s mind. Almost immediately, Luca began a constant plea to “Play Thomas?”

“Play Thomas? Play Thomas? Play Thomas? Play Thomas?”

It kind of screwed up my morning routine. My normal morning ritual is to change diapers, shove milk into face holes, turn TV on and enter that place of consciousness just above complete sleep.

Now, when I normally should be mostly sleeping, I hear a tiny voice plead, “Play Thomas, daddy? Play Thomas?”

I tried encouraging Luca to play by himself, leaving Elijah and I to bask in the glow of Fraggle Rock. But a couple things stood in my way.

First, the battery operated trains make a “tick tick tick tick” sound that burrows directly into my brain. Even from two rooms away, it’s as if Thomas’ little friends were nailing railroad spikes into my eyes.

And second, Luca can’t keep Thomas from hurting him. At least once a day, Luca will stick a battery operated Thomas into his beautiful brown hair. The little battery operated gears keep moving until they are completely filled with beautiful brown hair.

Scream scream scream. Yank yank yank. Snip snip snip.

So it’s far better for me to lay on Luca’s floor and moan while Luca points and shouts, “Thomas! Look! Thomas!”

I’ll get you, Jimmy and Liz. Oh, yes. I’ll get you.