Baby's First Girlfriend

Through an intense series of negotiations, I have officially been given permission to disclose the following:

Eli has a girlfriend.

I am not at liberty to disclose much about her. She is a human. She exists in our part of the multiverse. She occupies space, she has mass. She is between 3ft and 7ft tall. And is between 15 and 4,000 pounds.

Plus, she’s super sweet. 

Embarking on a junior high level relationship in the age of COVID is strange. Lots of texting. So much texting. I think they also talk until all hours of the night. I also assume they communicate through TikTok. What is TikTok? I totally know, but maybe you should tell me so I can double check that you know.

They’ve arranged a few COVID social distance dates. Here is how the last one went: His girlfriend insisted on buying them lunch at Chipotle. In true Hamann fashion, Eli panicked and bought her a pair of shorts at Target to even things out. The math checks out.

The Pandemic hasn’t dampened Luca’s duty as little brother to be an absolute nuisance in this budding relationship. Luca spent an afternoon tracking one of their dates like Lord Baltimore (I watched “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” the other night). Phone theft is rampant. Eli’s girlfriend takes it all in stride, and is super cute about indulging the nonsense.

Speaking of nonsense, I can’t resist. I text her frequently to encourage her to play practical jokes with my insider knowledge. I also do that thing where I press my index fingers together and make kissing noises whenever Eli talks about her. Eli and girlfriend, sitting in a tree and so on and so forth.

 Eli takes this all in stride with good humor. Oh wait. No. He hates it and screams at us to shut up whenever we butt in on his relationship.

A little bit of normalcy in an insane world. 

Baby’s First Surgery

In the middle of the general collapse of society, Elijah needed to have some minor surgery. In the interest of preserving the last shred of his privacy, let’s just say he had a none of your business removed from his none of your beeswax.

I was delighted to discover the hospital would only allow one parent to accompany him. And then horrified to learn they relaxed that policy the day before his surgery. It’s not that I didn’t want to be there, I just didn’t want Eli see me have a complete emotional breakdown.

On the morning of, I went into full Rick Mode. Which meant sitting in the car 45 minutes before we needed to leave and communicating only through a series of grunts and clicks. 

I do not recommend going to a major hospital during a global pandemic if you have anxiety issues. But the Children’s wing did their best to make wearing a mask and not touching anything fun.

Eli was understandably nervous. When asked about pain, his doctor had given the kiss of death, “There will be a little discomfort for a couple days.” And that, my friends, is how you get a new Playstation.

Once the sedatives kicked in, I pulled out my phone to record any viral hits, but then felt gross and put it away. He did give a hilarious monologue about his new superpowers and the benefits of gravity, but mostly just behaved like a bridesmaid who made the mistake of mixing whisky and wine on an empty stomach. 

Then the nurse said, “Okay. If you want to say goodbye, this is the time.” Goodbye? Remember that one girl who died from anesthesia? Was that at the dentist? Why are we doing this? Run. Run! I wondered how far I could get with a hundred pound babbling sack of Jell-O. Diana and I kissed him and told him we loved him.

They wheeled him out of the room and he shed a single tear down his cheek. At which point I died. 

Diana and I spent the next couple of hours silently scrolling Twitter and washing our hands. Diana received texts about the Eli’s progress like she was receiving a package from Anthropologie. 

The procedure was a complete success. Eli did great.  His recovery was a little barfy, but our post op nurse was amazing. A playfully gruff southsider who seemed to exist to play against all nursing stereotypes. His entire goal in life was to “get you out of my hair.” We loved him.

Eli and I became roomies for the next couple of days. He needed pain meds every three hours and wasn’t supposed to leave his bed, so we built a little nest made of video games, Doritos and opioids. 

But now he’s up and about and is healthy enough for me to yell at him about leaving wet towels on the floor.   

Fully Clothed Crazies

Longtime readers of HamannEggs will remember the “Naked Crazies.” That time between dinner and bed when baby Luca and Elijah would race around the house being, uh, unclothed and loony. It was best just to curl up into a ball and wait it out.

Diana has her own version: The “Fully Clothed Crazies.” The Fully Clothed Crazies are when she will dive headlong into a house project and there is no tearing her away until it’s done. Last week, it was cleaning the boy’s basement video game room/garbage barge. It was dis-gus-ting. Broken toys everywhere. Half chewed candy debris. Doors off hinges. There was even a pile of white powder that I can only assume was high quality cocaine. 

She attacked the basement with the furor of a meth addict taking apart an air conditioner. She boxed up hundreds of pounds of plastic, she scraped socks off the ceiling, she scrubbed and vacuumed and straightened.

Did the boys help? Well, if you mean being constantly distracted and frustrating and complain-y, yes they helped. Like all Fully Clothed Crazies, it was best for everyone to just get out of the way and compliment Diana vigorously afterwards.

The mistake the boys made was blatantly ignoring Diana’s frequent request to clean their rooms. And being kinda stinkers about it. I can’t remember what snide response set her off, but at some point in the evening the Fully Clothed Crazies turned into the Fully Clothed Rage-ies. 

The boys got both barrels. They did nothing to help around the house (true). They did not help with the dogs (also true). They were spoiled little jerks (pretty true). I was just glad that a blog-worthy meltdown wasn’t mine for once. 

The boys were determined to clean up after themselves. Which is hard for kids who spent a lifetime throwing things over their heads like Ralphie and Randy with socks on Christmas morning.

I decided to employ a time honored Dad tactic: being as annoying as humanly possible. 

Every time I find a granola bar wrapper, t-shirt or nerf bullet, I shout throughout the house, “Boyyyyyyyyyys! Boyyyyyyyyyyys! Come heeeeeeere!”

From the Fornite battle comes the response, “What?”

“Come heeeeeeere!”

“What?”

“Come heeeeeere!”

This goes on for a few minutes. I know my annoying voice will win eventually and they’ll come crawling up from the depths. 

Then, like a one year old who sees snow for the first time, I’ll gleefully say, “Oooh. Look. A sock. Guys! A sock! Come here. Look. A sock…”

This non-yelling annoyance disgusts them. And they’ll pick whatever it is up. 

I do this thousands of times a day. “Boyyyyyyyyyyyys!”

I think it’s slowly working, because Eli volunteered to clean up his lunch mess today. Was it because he is becoming responsible? Was he utterly annoyed with me? Does it matter?

Black Lives Matter

This blog is meant to be a place for poop and pee stories, but it’s also a time capsule Elijah and Luca can look back on and know what the world was like when they were growing up.

Right now, the world is…f*cked. 

The Pandemic of racist killing in America spilled over into riots, violence, looting and acts of unbelievable heroism and villainy.

Even in our delightful suburban bubble, windows were smashed, the Best Buy was looted and Diana had a scare in front of everyone’s favorite Froze stand, The Wine Goddess. Diana and I put on masks and marched alongside thousands of Evanstonians who shared stories of intimidation and violence from our very own police.

Our suburban bubble has been weighing heavily on my mind lately. We’ve been clear with the boys about the evils of racism. But it’s just so far away. We live in a temple built of white privilege.  Eli and Luca can ride their bikes without being called names. They can walk through the mall without being followed by security. They’ll never be pulled over, harassed, beaten or murdered because of the color of their skin. They were born into the upper middle class, and by all statistics, they will stay upper middle class their whole lives. 

Luca put a “Black Lives Matter” sign in our window. We give money to the NAACP. We re-tweet messages decrying racism. 

But it’s just not enough. Not even close.

We can’t keep hiding behind our lucky spin of the DNA wheel.

Black lives matter. And it’s my job as a dad to make sure the deaths of so many black sons and daughters aren’t for nothing.

4pm

We’ve been pretty lenient with screentime during this whole mess. When you are stuck inside for two months without any real human contact, you have to turn a blind eye to a few extra games of Fortnite here and there.

Like how every morning Diana quietly recycles that wine bottle I shouldn’t have opened the night before. 

And like those extra portions of wine, there comes a time when Luca just has to dry out. Because he pissed me off royally.

Last weekend, we visited the cabin so we could be surrounded by nature, family, and roughly 4,000 chipmunks. As you recall, our cabin has terrible wifi, which makes me very happy. It makes Luca miserable. 

While the rest of America was honoring our fallen heroes by refusing to social distance, Luca spent Memorial Day weekend complaining nonstop. My urge to yell was at barely a simmer for the drive up and occasionally got to a rolling boil when he hid in our room in the dark for hours, siphoning the tiny wifi signal for his ipad. I managed to maintain my temper by laying in my hammock and drinking Michigan beers.

When we got home, Luca immediately raced to his xbox and spent the next 4 hours mainlining digital violence. We let it go because we found a fun new TV show to binge. 

Around 9, I called downstairs for Luca to get off the game. No response. I called again. No response. I finally gave him my angry dad voice and Luca came stomping up the stairs. I don’t even remember what flippant thing he said, but my urge to yell not only boiled over, but got knocked off the stove and spilled all over the floor. 

At some point during my tirade, I bellowed that there would be no screens until 4pm from this moment forward.  As I caught my breath, I heard Eli’s voice from upstairs, “Does that include me?”

Urge to yell…boiling.

Today, both boys steered clear of screens. They read. They drew. Eli put together a desk that I refused to construct. 

Luca and I spent some time together in the late afternoon. We both knew we had a little repairing to do to our relationship. So we played with Jerry and had a hilarious bike ride in a downpour. 

Luca said, “This is the most fun and the most wet I’ve ever been!”

I resisted the urge to say, “See? You don’t need screens!”

He asked me to play Jenga and we sat and laughed and spilled little blocks all over the dining room. I noticed that his eyes flicked to the clock at 3:59 and I said, “I think we can let you off early.” 

Luca raced to his xbox with a wide grin and I resisted the urge to open a bottle of wine.

Lucavision

I can never remember what we call this whole sitting at home thing. Something in place? Shelter something something? The end times?

Whatever it is, our family falls into two distinct camps:

1. Giant bouts of activity.

2. Laying on the floor, face first.

Elijah and I fall into camp 2. Luckily, my job allows me to conduct much of my business in sad sweatpants, scraggly beard and a hairstyle best described as “difficult.” I just had a full conversation with Eli in which he discussed the ins and outs of E-learning while not releasing his lips from his filthy carpet. We’re doing great.

Diana and Luca, on the other hand, are more productive than ever. Diana is engaged in her own apocalyptic movie at the wine store. She fends off hordes of thirsty Evanstonians, shuffling bleary eyed towards her, moaning, “Beeeeer…whiskyyyyyyyyy.” She’s never been busier and happier. 

Luca is also engaged in a fury of activity. He wakes before everyone and blasts through his E-learning so he can focus on his true love: building a Youtube empire. You know those videos where a dude plays a video game and then says stuff like, “LET’S GO BABY!” Yeah, they make no sense to me, either. 

Luca tapes himself playing Fortnite and then adds supers, music and voice over where he says, “LET’S GO BABY!”

He works late into the night writing the perfect quips for his videos. It’s almost too adorable for words. Take a look at this one. Be sure to check out the end battle. I’ll wait:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om--Rd_85wA

Intense, huh? He’s my kid, but he’s also pretty good at killing other 10 year olds.

At the end of every video, he asks for people to subscribe to his channel. That’s the currency among his pals. Who has the most subscribers. They each have 28. Because there are 28 of them.

Wait. Maybe you all could subscribe! It’s like bringing your kid’s Girl Scout cookie sheet to work. I’m going to pimp my relationship with you to add to a meaningless number. 

Do it. If you love me, do it. But if you are currently lying on your floor, don’t worry about it. I totally understand.

JERRY!

Every day during the COVID crisis, I wake up and say to myself, “You gotta do a HamannEggs. You owe it to your readers.”

And then I fall into a 14 hour hole filled with sweatpants, awkward video chats, and bouts of screaming to please, for the love of all that’s holy, put your dishes in the dishwasher. 

The next morning starts it all over again. 

If only there was something that could totally upend these days that run one into another. Something cute. Something bitey. Well, we found it and his name is Jerry! Jerry the puppy!

Or Jerry Gergich Hamann to be correct. Do not allow any Dianas try convince you his middle name is Garcia. It’s Gergich, after the hapless “Parks and Rec” character. 

We got Jerry from the same Goldendoodle breeder as my boss (the ultimate brown nose move). However, due to the pandemic, we were required to pick him up in an empty suburban parking lot like we were purchasing a kilo of black tar heroin. They showed up in an unmarked SUV and we were instructed to have one, only one, person approach the vehicle. One I handed our check over and they essentially tossed Jerry into my arms before slamming the gas pedal back to their breeding paradise in the country.

Almost immediately, all the Luca and Elijah promises regarding puppy care went right out the window. They avoid his little sharp teeth and frequent need to go potty by hiding behind their xbox controllers. And since Diana has to maintain her essential business of helping Evanston’s residents stay drunk for the entirety of the pandemic, the dog duty (doody) is all mine.

He’s a good boy and is trying his best to figure out what these chattering monkeys who kidnapped him from his littermates want. 

You may be thinking, “How does Grover feel about this whole Jerry situation?” He’s not pleased. His dreams of living out his days lounging on our bed, occupying my 100% attention were dashed. But he occasionally plays with the little fella for a vigorous 45 seconds before collapsing on the floor.

Please enjoy this photo of Jerry smoking a cigarette.