Father's Day 2017

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Every year, the big Evanston street fair lands on Father’s Day weekend. I love that our town  throws a giant party filled with bird people, geriatric belly dancers and henna tattoo artists for all the dads. And we upper middle class dads came out in force, dressed in our definitely not cargo shorts, our best Star Wars shirts and Vans slip on shoes. The bravest among us dared to wear the straw hat from last year’s trip to Mexico.

Custer’s Fair (named after the street famous for no other reason than it’s where the fair is) runs right by Diana’s store, so she needs me to man the Wine Goddess booth. There is no better way to spend Father’s Day weekend than miscounting change and explaining over and over that no, there are no free samples like the fudge booth. I actually love it. I get a front row seat to a parade of people who seemed to be conceived from a mind meld of George Lucas and John Waters.

At the end of my shift, my brother arrived with Elijah and Luca. Steve had the look of someone who was spending his Father’s Day weekend watching his brother’s kids. Luca proudly asked me if I wanted to see the gift he just bought. I held out my hand, and in it he placed a “#1 Dad” button.

I made it. All that hard work. All the late nights. All the yelling finally paid off. Number one. I was the top dad in the world. I mean, they don’t just give out that button to anyone. I wonder if Luca needed to give some kind of presentation. Was there a committee? How did I beat out that dad who brings the baseball pitching machine to the park? There must have been some pretty dark stuff in his closet besides that pitching machine.

I ended Father’s Day with that most fatherly of activities: having a catch with the boys. Where I threw a baseball right into Luca’s groin. 

Thankfully, there are no give backs with #1 Dad pins.

Pee Mystery

It’s been a while since we’ve had a good old fashioned poo and pee story at HamannEggs.

All of the apartments we lived in while I was a kid kind of run together. They all blend into a shag rug/bunk bed/fern clump. In my memory, the living rooms were all covered in cat barf and the bathrooms were all covered in pee. I vividly remember my mother shouting, “Don’t you even aim?” With three sons, she never stood a chance. 

Luckily for Diana, the boys are fairly decent shots around the toilet since they are short.

However, in the hours between 10pm and 7am, someone pees all over everything. Toilet, floor, sink, ceiling, neighbor’s house. It would be impressive if it was so disgusting.

Unlike my mother, who just succumbed to the squalor, Diana wants to find and punish the culprit. Elijah and Luca, who are in a phase where they must destroy each other, build elaborate legal cases against their foe.

“Eli always drinks too much water before bed.”

“Luca pees so angrily.”

“I heard Eli telling his friends the other day that he plans on peeing on the seat so you’ll sit in it at 2am. True story.”

The boys suggested putting a camera in the bathroom to catch the pee thief. I didn’t like the idea of my phone being covered in any other pee than my own.

Diana simply leaves the seat up now in the midnight hours so there is a slightly larger target for the boys. It seems to have held back a little of the flood.

The other morning, I was petting Grover in the wee early hours (Rick Time) when I heard a child’s door slam open. The child raced into the bathroom and whizzed over everything, and then raced back into his room. I could tell he was still deep in R.E.M. sleep. And must have been dreaming about the Skokie water park.

I didn’t have the heard to wake him up and chastise the boy. So I won’t reveal his identity now. I’ll just continue to encourage pre bedtime pees and maybe go buy a tarp.