Chicken nuggets, fries, and above all, chocolate milk.

Where do babies come from?

China

What do you like best about your parents?

They buy me a lot of toys.  And I love them.

If you could drive the car tonight, where would you go?

Houston and Phoenix and Miami and Sacramento and the Golden State, which is another way to say California, and New Jersey and Boston.  Have you noticed that I’m only saying places with NBA teams?

What’s the best part about being a kid?

Don’t have to do much work

What’s the best part about being an adult?

Getting a job that you like.

What’s the best part about being a big brother?

I get to put Max in Time Out.

What do you like about your friends?

They’re the only ones around to play with.

Name the three greatest inventions:

Chicken nuggets, basketball, and balls

What do you like about girls?

Nothing.  Except my mom.

What’s the worst part about second grade?

Singing time.  You have to learn songs that you don’t even bloomin’ know.

What does it mean to be happy?

Just ask the singers of, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”

If you were going to write a poem, what would it be about?

Me.  No.  Star Wars, actually.

When will you get a job?

I don’t know…..when I’m 24?

Describe a perfect meal:

Spaghetti with Mizithra at Spagetti Factory and Ramen noodles.

What’s the worst feeling in the world?

When I got a scab so deep you could see my knee bone and when I slammed my finger in the car door.

Are you a republican or a democrat?

What’s a republican?

What’s the best use of five minutes?

Playing NBA Live 2005 on PS2

What’s life all about?

Everything that you like.  That’s it.

Why did my child had to have $4000.00 worth of dental work before he was completely potty trained? Well, it could have been the 1/2 cup of sugar we mixed every day with a little bit of milk to use as tooth paste.  (It looks just like toothpaste and tastes WAY better.)  It could be that we were going for that hip, British look.  Or it could be the fact that every night of his short life, we let our son go to bed with a sippy cup full of chocolate milk.  He really loved “cocoa milk”, as he called it, and we really loved him, and so there really was no other alternative, right?

Yes, people warned us about “bottle rot” and letting your kid go to sleep with a cup/bottle of milk, but their kids must not have been as cute as our kid asking for a drink of “cocoa milk” at 9:30 in his fuzzy pajamas and sleepy eyes.  It was a $4000.00 mistake.  Perhaps one of the costliest mistakes of my life, and the day I held Christian in my arms as the anesthesiologist gave him a shot before his minor oral surgery, I wanted to ask him to hit me with a blunt object several times because I deserved it.

He survived the surgery.  I survived the surgery.  Within a couple of days, he was bouncing around with four slightly bigger and off-color front teeth.  We made some significant changes after that.  Christian didn’t get chocolate milk at night.  We brushed.  We flossed (for like three entire weeks).  We also stopped letting him drive the car home from church.  We were the parents and had to take control. 

Eventually, the first three came loose and fell out as a permanent tooth pushed it out of the way and made its grand appearance.  The fourth, though, gets loose, then tight, then loose, then tight, and dangles from his gums like a shredded flag bearing these words, “I will never forget.  I will never forget.”  From all of the loose/tight episodes, it has fallen out of place and juts out from his mouth at an 82 degree angle.

Christian claims it is his lucky tooth, but I can’t stand it.  It takes all of my common sense and maturity not to pounce on my seven year-old when he’s not looking and, with a pair of pliars or my bare hands, yank the tooth from its home and send it far, far away forever.  But, I am a rational, mature adult, and so I have made an appointment for a dentist to do the very same thing.

With our second child, Max, we are so much smarter and realistic.  We don’t expect him to do long division in preschool and we don’t let him go to bed with chocolate milk.  We brush his teeth with Splenda and inject the chocolate milk intraveneously.

“Um, Mom, have you ever heard of a business called ‘Pampered Chef’?”

“Yeah.”

“Lochlan’s mom works for Pampered Chef.”

“Cool.  Did she come and talk to you today?”

“Yeah.  Um, so, are you gonna call her?”

“What do you mean?”

“She said to call her.”

“For what?”

“She said she can teach you how to have fun in the kitchen.”

“Uhhhhh….”

“And she gave us a coupon, but we have to place our order before March thirty-first.”