So Little Dude’s lower tooth has been “wiggly” for the last few months, which for him has been a pretty big deal. Last night the dream was realized as he came running up to me: “Exciting news, Papa!”

“You landed a child acting gig and all our financial worries are over?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Did your tooth pop out?”

“Yes! Yes it totally popped out but now I can’t find it!”

After some bedroom floor scouring, Little Dude dug his “central incisor” out of the carpet and straightway threw it under his pillow. Apparently, dude wasn’t messing around. Dude was ready to make some MONEY.

Since I’m not real practiced on the Tooth Fairy* side of things– I was a pro at the receiving end, after all– after Little Dude fell asleep I tore the house apart looking for cash and stressing about the going rate for teeth these days. I mean, I got .25 a pop back in the day but there’s inflation, cost of living and the stress of fairy tale payout parity when Little Dude compares his haul to other kids. I settled on 12 shiny quarters from the change jar and if I’m counting right, that’s about $3. (C’moooon educated guesses… No Whammies!)

So this morning Little Dude comes down the stairs as I’m huffing out a sweaty pull-up with P90X: “Papa! The Tooth Fairy Made Me Rich!”

Jackpot, Baby. Three bucks it is.

*SPOLIER ALERT: The Tooth Fairy is on my short list of “fanciful creature” lies we tell our kids I’m pretty sure should be abolished– along with the Easter Bunny, Leprechauns and Hanna Montana.

Little Dude had a bad day at school yesterday. And you know as much as it sucks to hear that as a parent, that’s just part of being a kid… and if I can remember those kids on the bus making fun of my drawings and grow up to talk about it without having served time and still thinking I’m awesome, I know he can too. So I relayed my bad day experiences in Elementary school to make Little Dude feel better, including the time Some fro-headed kid named Jamie beat my head against the pavement and pushed me into a ditch like a sissy. Little Dude wasn’t down with that:

“If someone tries to hurt me where I’ll be in the hospital I’ll definitely knock them out. They won’t even wake up for 10 days because I’d definitely knock them out.“

Little Dude likes a little time alone when he wakes up. I’ll usually hear our door shut very quietly and a minute later hear a chair sliding across the kitchen floor as Little Dude raids the “treat cupboard” for cookies. Unfortunately for him, the other day Mama was up before he’d had his fill of wandering the house unsupervised.

“Mama! I didn’t want you to wake up! You just give me rules and I want to be Free!!”

Whenever I’m about to drop the new hotness (aka- some movie scene, trailer or new song) on Little Dude, I usually tell him I’m about to let him see/hear something that’ll blow his mind. I’ve been on a Hans Zimmer kick lately and both Little Dude and I bob our heads and pretend we’re AWESOME to “Retreat and Revielle“. Still, I snuck in a little of Michael Kamen’s “Band of Brothers” theme song to even out Zimmer’s swarthy machismo. While the BOB’s theme moves me to chills virtually every time I hear it, Little Dude wasn’t impressed. At all.

“How can this song blow my mind when it’s a church song?”

Little Dude’s been on a carrot kick. On a recent drive through a low-cloud covered Sardine Canyon, he let us know why; Dude can see what the normal human eye can’t:

“I can see super good because I’ve been eating lots and lots of carrots. I can even see the mountains through all that fog.”

Spring soccer season is in full effect. In a recent game, Little Dude was battling another player for the ball and went down. As he got up and trotted away he was limping and wincing in pain. The coach called out, “Hey- you OK?”

Little Dude’s diagnosis: “Shew! Yeah, I just popped two blood vessels.”

The other day I was sitting in the living room doing something (probably) totally important as Little Dude went off to use the potty when I hear this man-sized thunderclap come out of the bathroom “TRRRRRRRRT!!

Me: Holy Cow! Was that you!?

Little Dude: “Yeah! And it bumped me up and down!”

Little Dude wants pets. Before the chickens we’re now raising, Little Dude would take ANYTHING. Caterpillars. Wasps. Spiders. A few days before taking on chickens, Little Dude was chasing a fly around the house.

“Papa! I caught the fly. I’m going to turn it into my pet. A fesity, fesity, feisty pet. It’s name will probably be Joshua.”

Pause…

“Yep– Joshua.”

Five-year-old sassafras continues. Lady-Friend asked Little Dude to use the bathroom and he refused. “I’m gonna stand out here in the hall until you turn into a Gramma!”

Getting ready for church at 8 in the morning isn’t fun. Especially when you have to put on a cold “church shirt” that’s been hanging in a closet: 

“It’s like it’s made out of straight snow and sewn into a shirt then icicles were broken off and rubbed all over it!”

Spring has been rainy. And cold. And rainy. And floody. Still, there’s a positive spin for almost anything, so I tried to throw a little positive action in on a cool and rainy day with the “April showers bring May flowers” line. Which was great and all, but Little Dude is a realist:

“April showers bring may flowers and and April thunderstorms bring scared people!”

Little Dude sometimes likes when I come home from work. The other day he was playing with his planes and wanted someone to play with… so he tried some enticement:

“You might want to come home right now, Papa… because there’s a huge airplane battle going on here.”

When I was a kid, I never got to sit in my bed and read (not that I wouldn’t sneak it out anyway). So by crap… when it’s bedtime around our house, it’s bedtime! At least in theory. I usually cave. So on nights where I stand firm, it doesn’t keep Little Dude from trying: “Papa I’m as bored as a person can get. I’m stuck in bed here doing nothin’.”

The other night we were saying prayers when Little Dude sent this gem out: “Please bless the rich people to share their money with people who don’t have anything. And that they can get a job and buy stuff so they can be rich and share. And please bless everyone. Except the bad guys.”

Every night before Little Dude hits the sack, we “talk”. It’s about five minutes where he asks questions about four categories he’s officially chosen: bones, airplanes, movies/video games (not that he plays any) or science. The other night, I got this one: “Hey Papa– are turtles reptiles or Februrarians?”

Little Dude has a weird phobia of two things: obese and old/wrinkly. I’m not sure where it came from as I was pretty “fluffy” for his first four years and as a baby he used my moobs as a pillow on too many occasions. That and we don’t make comments about weight in our house– especially about others. Maybe it’s his Mama’s skinny hotness– I dunno. But the other day we were talking about girlfriends and I asked if a heavier set girl I saw him hanging out and talking with would be a good girlfriend. “What? Why would you want a fat girl friend? A big fat girl would take up all the space in duck, duck, goose.” Oh.

I’m a sucker for mushy proclamations and tell my kids and Lady-Friend what they mean to me. Maybe too much. The other day I told Little Dude “Man, I’m so glad you’re my boy.”

“Yep- I am everything you wished for.”

So after working out in the morning I came upstairs to see Little Dude dutifully playing with his Star Wars guys. It’s great that he can happily play by himself, but sometimes I feel guilty and realize I need to be taking moments to get in there with him. His response kinda drove that point home:

Me: Wanna play a game?

Little Dude: “I’d LOVE to. Why wouldn’t I want to!?”

Of course, for every bit of cuteness that springs from the mind of Little Dude, there’s also a fair amount of crankitude.

“Want some pancakes?”

“No.”

“Ok, wanna make your own breakfast?”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t even know how to MAKE breakfast!”

As Lady-Friend was adjusting her light settings and settling into studio hang-a-sheet-ghetto-fab, Little Dude decided a cross between a P90X side-plank move and a, well, I’m not sure what– would be a rockin’ pose.  Apparently wanted to show he could dominate the ab work.

As for the rest, well, here you go.

So here’s a top-to-bottom high five for Little Dude’s Kindergarten teacher who–I think– while we work on manners at home, is also reenforcing them at school. I say that only because the other night, after Little Dude did something kind to his Little Sis (as opposed to the usual “Let’s see what I can do to make her scream/try to pull my hair out”). Of course, since this is totally abnormal, I sent praise raining down like Skittles from the heavens. Little Dude paused and looked up…

“Have my manners definitely changed? Because if they did it’s a miracle.”

Sometimes people in our family toot. I know putting that out there is riding the TMI train into “Don’tMentionThatVille”, so hey– I’m sorry. I won’t say who it was but Little Dude took no time in shaming the “I-thought-I-was-discrete” funk ninja:

“Ew! You smell like dead cow with a thousand rotten eggs and a poopy diaper stacked on top!”

Little Sis is destined to be a nudist, which kind of concerns me as her Father and stuff. Chick loves running around naked, wiggling her hips and flashing nakedness to all comers. I was in the living room when Little Sis pitter-pattered down the hall in a diaper changing jail-break and into Little Dude’s room. Seconds later…

“Papa! Little Sis is spreading her bum cheeks and showing me her prunehole!”

“Uh, ok… then don’t look.”

“Ok… I’ll try.”

Little Dude has a had a crush on cute little girl with a cute name. I was kinda impressed he was swinging for the fences and more impressed she was crushing on him, which was totally obvious when they ran into each other at a soccer game and threw big-smiled, head ducked finger waves back and forth. So of course we always ask about her at dinner.

“How’s [Cute Little GiiiiiIIIIIIIiiiirl]?”

“I only like [Cute Little Girl] as a friend now.”

“Wha? Why?”

“I have a crush on a new girl.”

“Oh yeeeeah? Who?”

“Harry Potter’s Friend. She’s real, right?”

Bananas are kind of a staple for little kids. Easy, sweet, natural, filling. A quick knife slit to the top and a hand-off and the kids are quietly gnoshing instead of crying, fighting or complaining about how they’re starving to death. But what if there were no knives? What if you were a monkey in the jungles of Bora Bora? This must have been the deep question Little Dude was thinking about when I handed him a banana and he asked:

“How do you open a banana in the wild?”

There’s a kid in Little Dude’s class that’s kind of rowdy. We all had them, the jerk kid who was overly aggressive and rude and who you tolerated but knew at a moments notice would go all chimp on you if you tripped his wire. I was talking with Little Dude about that kid and explaining it doesn’t matter if kids like that don’t like you because they don’t like anything. Yeah, so much for “Christ-like” on that one. Still, Little Dude surprised me when he came to his defense… kind of:

“He’s a good kid… he just eats too much sugar.”

Recently, I’m pretty sure Little Dude has abandoned this line of thinking, but at one point, when talking about that rowdy classmate again, sugar wasn’t the only culprit:

“Mama, if you watched TV every day you’ll be totally crazy!”

Last year Little Dude went on a camping trip where he was permanently traumatized by a ghost story about a dude who lost his foot and came looking for it. Every once in a while he’ll stay up whimpering about it. On these nights I’ll go in and give him a hug and talk him down with stories about how I used to be scared of “Jenner“, the animated “Gollum” and Paddington The Bear. Yeah, yeah. Shaddap. Still, things like this are what keep Papa’s smiling:

“Papa, when I’m with you I don’t feel sad and scared.”

Little Dude sometimes likes it when Little Sis naps or sleeps in. He usually takes these chances to whip out a game we can play together before I go to work. As we were setting up the game early one morning, Little Sis started in with some chatter and a final “I’m done sitting in here cry of “Paaaaapa. Maaaaaaama. Paaaaaaapa!” I started to get up with a “Just a sec…” when Little Dude grabbed my leg and commanded:

“Don’t worry about her. She’s OK.”

Even though it dumped 4 inches of wet, heavy snow last night and broke almost every old tree in town, spring is right around the corner. Apparently, Little Dude has some seasonal memories this time of year…

“I remember when [Cousin] gave me an Indian burn… that’s when spring was in the air.”

So Little Dude comes home from school, flops his backpack on the ground, kicks off his shoes and sidles into the kitchen to bum some food off his Mamma.

“What’d you do in school today?”

“I dunno, Mama. I’m a forgetful man. I even forget I have a secret crush!”

Little Dude definitely has an aversion to wrinkles. I’m not sure what sparked this, but apparently restaurants need to lay off the cheap labor and start hiring up old men en masse:

“Wrinkly old men can’t do anything except wash dishes because they’re wrinkly and old.”

Just so you know:

“A prune hole is always clean except when poop comes out of it.”

Little Dude has a BFF across the street. They’re very much alike and so, as BFF’s they get along but they also get along with having colossal fights and Diva contests… and they’re both dudes. So yeah, whatever. Still, the two are always talking about their crushes. We got the low-down:

“I asked [BFF] if he had a crush on Olivia and he said he liked her for a friend… I think he told me that so I wouldn’t know he has a crush on her.”

Still, Lady-Friend managed to snap this shot off of Little Dude as he climbed through a tangled, dead juniper and I kinda like it a lot as it shows him in his element. Flip-flops, exploring and giving crusties. Awesome!

Cut to a few less months ago when I found a Better Homes and Gardens (what?) meatloaf recipe asking for beer. Enter, epiphany central: “Beer? I have beer!”

I cracked open a can and with its WOW-busting, nose hair singeing contents made some of the tastiest meatloaf–which in and of itself is 80% oxymoron– I’ve ever had the privilege of gagging down. High five and a backslap from me to me.

After I finished, I put the leftover beer in a tupperware cup to use later.

Later never happened.

What did happen was– just a couple days ago– Little Dude came in from playing all red-faced, sweating and looking for a “cold drink, Mama”. Apparently, apple juice was IT and lucky for him, someone had already poured a cup and left it nice and cold in the fridge.

This is where Child Protective Services shows up at my door tomorrow, because Little Dude climbed up into the refrigerator, dug that leftover beer “apple juice” out of the recesses of the top back shelf and started guzzling it.

First, it had been in there for months. Second, it took to him approximately 1.5 seconds to realize he’d made a huge, huge mistake. In the same moment, Little Dude ran to the sink and dumped the tupperware container and all its amber, meatloaf enhancing glory down the garbage disposal.

“Mama! Don’t drink this apple juice! It’s totally disgusting and rotten!”

No, Little Dude. That’s what Papa likes to call “meat loaf magic” and suddenly I’m pretty sure I’ll be much more sympathetic and guilt-ridden if you come to me as a 21-year-old frat boy lush in 5-year-old body thanks to the unintended consequences of having a pub in the fridge.

Still, for a couple five year olds with the green light to build a sloppy mud Valhalla? Hello, heaven.

There’s a wide open open door for a cutesy comparison with this dreamy treat, but I’m not going to take it.  Directly, anyway.

For a few seconds, anyway.

Little Dude is sneaky. Still, we’ve found his early morning sneakiness (IE- raiding the cupboard and subsequently enjoying his slice of pilfered heaven while hiding under a blanket) trends on the heels of a candy/ice cream shopping trip or some kind of treat bonanza the night before.  Enter, Lady-Friend and her recent shopping trip.

Lady-Friend is tough, but she’s no match for the power of her fruit snack cravings. Case in point: When I left for work Tuesday morning, our cupboard was a graveyard littered with stale crackers, orphaned candy and “There’s cereal in that box, but it’s the crappy crumbs so I’m not eating it but maybe someone else will“. When I got home Tuesday evening, the graveyard had become to a tooth-busting storage shed for every  Watermelon flavored Gusher (or, as Little Dude calls them: “Gutters”) the grocery store had in stock that afternoon. Which is cool. I just tend to think Gushers feel more like biting into a fruit-flavored octopus than an actual treat.

Needless to say I’m in the minority and after Tuesday’s Gusher liquidation binge, Little Dude’s trend of daring dawn raids remains unbroken.

I walked into the kitchen Wednesday morning to see a blanket– the same blanket we’ve repeatedly pulled back to reveal Little Dude grinning over half-eaten tubs of ice cream, cake, jam, popsicles and aerosol cans of whipping cream– wedged up against a wall in the tell-tale sign snacks were being snuck. After a couple uninterrupted and unusually quiet minutes, an empty wrapper out slid out from under the blanket.

Apparently, Little Dude still operates under the idea if he can’t see you he’s invisible. I kind of think that’s awesome.

I know this for two reasons:

1) The other day he picked a caterpillar out of the dirt and explained to me how he’d train and feed it. Sadly, after eight hours in a jar in the sun, that didn’t quite work out.

2) Last night, he asked me to take pictures of him with Brownie, our neighbor’s sweetheart of a dog.

“Hey, Papa. Come take pictures of me with Brownie!”

“How come?”

“Because I don’t have any!”

OK, makes sense.

Still, when I think about getting a pet (and by pet we’re talking dog– that holy grail of suburban pet ownership), I get all weak-kneed under the weight of responsibility. Poop responsibility. Polka-dotted lawn responsibility. Hair all over clothes responsibility. Potentially smelly house responsibility. Required adoration responsibility. Not being able to vacation without worrying about abandonment guilt responsibility.

Which I guess makes me a crusty, poopy-pantsed jerk. Still, these pictures beg the question… Why buy a dog when you can enjoy someone else’s?