The Night Max Finally Wrote the Title to my Children's Book

 I won't bore you with the details; suffice it to say, today's adventures involved a broken stove (in our house), craigslist, an unbroken stove (in someone else's garage), a hundred bucks, two trips to the hardware store and a nervous wife who probably felt like she was getting updates from those fuzzy communiques in the first edition of "Myst": "Honey, I found a new sto. . garbled static . . just need. . . static. . .bungee cords. . . static. . . gas lines don't fit. . . static. . . a few parts. . . static. . hardware store. . . if it works. . .static. . . make Miles a pizza. . . static . . . garage painted red" And we wonder why Katie puts child services on alert when she leaves the boys with me.

Finally, finally, when the stove was installed and the pizza was baking, Max suggested we eat dinner outside in the dark. We made a game of tripping the motion detector on the yard light so Max didn't mix up his soy milk with dad's well-earned beer and Miles passed me star-lit pepperonis from his pizza slices. At the end, when it was bath-time, Max began his traditional whirling dervish chant exulting the night time.

Tonight, though, he pulled a large black, plastic, serving-type spoon out of the sand box, tossed it in the air and proclaimed: "I just made a wish with my wishing spoon!"

Me (pretty much drunk) "What?"

"This, daddy, is my Wishing Spoon!"

"Your Wishing Spoon? Do you have to throw it up in the air to make the wish?"

"Yeah, I throw it up into the air and. . I. . .makeawish!" He punctuates this by, again, throwing the spoon into the night air.

"What did you just wish for?"

Devilishly: "I wished for a tornado!"

"Yeah, that seems like fun in theory, Max. But, really, in practice, it's kind of scary."

"Oh, daddy."

So, folks, look for it at your local bookstore or in the "buy-this-out-of-pity-for-the-author" section of Amazon in a few years: "The Wishing Spoon" by Max's Tired, Drunk Daddy.

Miles Wallace

Freedom!

Oh, and, yes, the broom laying in front of the easel did indeed just get dipped in a big puddle of mixed up paints and then dramatically swiped across the canvas.

Your "Daily" Max Moment

It's been a good summer for Nice Summer Nights. The kind of nights that soon, when he's 15, Max'll stay up late, riding bike; looking at the stars, thinking about a cute girl (or boy), pondering life's meaning; or stealing cars. Those kind of nights.

Anyway, the other evening, post-sunset, Katie pulled into the garage after a dinner at Pop-Pop and Gange's. Max jumped out of the car and proceeded to run around the backyard in large circles, yelling "I like the night-time! I like the night-time! I like the night-time!" over and over again.

It's the Shoes: A Post Not Really About Shoes

I won't post explicitly about the gargantuan collection of fantastically cute shoes that Katie has stashed away for the boys. That would be validation and validation would be taken as implicit approval to spend even more on cute shoes. Let's just say that when Katie implores the boys to eat, it's not really about health or protein or fiber, it's about growing bigger, sooner, to fit into the next size up of shoes that wait, oh so patiently (and cutely) in the closet.

Really, what this post is about, is Miles: Super Baby. Hey, how many times have we seen the kid with the ice cream cone go to lick the scoop on the cone and they lick the scoop right off the cone. There they stand: empty cone in hand, scoop on ground, time machine being built in kid's head to get scoop back on cone? How many times?

You'd think 22 month-old Miles -- Miles "Hey-I'm-not-going-to-walk-'til-I'm-18-months-old-I'll-just-scoot-ok-thanks" Miles -- that Miles, would be a prime candidate for the aforementioned cone/scoop tragedy. So, tonight, at Pumphouse Creamery (We love you, Pumphouse!), not only did Miles NOT need his time machine (he uses that for hunting dinosaurs), he grunted and stretched and contorted his way up onto a bench, holding his cone the whole time and, people! It did not spill. In fact, after twisting and contorting into a sitting position, he nonchalantly lifted the perfect cone to his mouth like it had been in some magic pocket the whole time. . . . or a time machine.

The Torch, um, I mean, The Whisk is Passed

 Now that Max has mastered all things pancake (less the flipping), he's grown bored with the process. Thankfully, Miles has stepped into the role of pancake mixer and all I have to do is slide ingredients at him while I lean on the counter, drinking coffee.

Nothing Even Remotely Cute

Oh. Hello. I was just digging around under the couch for the last of Monday night's popcorn and I found this blog. It seemed familiar, somehow; didn't appear to be edible. So with a shrug and a crack of the knuckles, I decided to write a posty-post on this bloggy-blog-blog.

What really happened (although, the popcorn part is true. I'm always amazed by how tasty it stays!) is I got promoted. Somebody fell off a forklift or got hit by a forklift or something at the giant, non-evil wholesale club and they needed a manager. Stat! At first, the nine or ten or eleven-hour days didn't put too much of a crimp in my blogging lifestyle but, sort of suddenly and unexpectedly, Katie's work schedule also increased significantly.

I bore you with all the details but, for the last month or so, we've pretty much been "Hi/Bye" parents. As in: "Hi, I'm home from work." "The kids are in bed. Bye, I'm going to bed." Katie, who was home more frequently and normally took all the cute pictures that kinda fed the writing, hasn't been around to capture the cute. And our wonderful, free, super-generous babysitters, while dexterous enough to change diapers and microwave Boca burgers, have enough trouble getting the Thomas DVD going without worrying about snapping images for the blog.

So, while I am comfortable half-assing it when it comes to plumbing, running electrical wires and fixing my car, I am uncomfortable half-assing it when it comes to coffee and blogging about my kids. Faced with a choice between pictures and pithy commentary (fully-assed blogging) or just pictures (half-assed), I chose no blogging.

Bad choice.

Once things get back to "normal" or, better, I figure out how to big, sexy blog in the ten, non-catatonic, kid-free minutes I have each day, we'll get back to the insightful, hilarious and touching observations all three of you have come to expect. Until then, enjoy the pictures and the captions!