Time, Out At My Boss’s House

My boss watched the kids last Sunday.

He offered.

“For fun,” he said, though at the time he made the offer we were at a going away party for a colleague and I’m not entirely sure he was sober enough to be making that kind of an offer. When it turned out that none of our sitters were available because one was in Hawaii and one was in Spain and the others were out of state (yeah, it’s killing me too) we took him up on it. He didn’t back out when we gave him the chance. In fact, he made us all breakfast when we dropped them off.

#5’s first words to him upon entering the apartment were, “I know bacon when I smell it!”

My boss has a ten-year-old Vizsla. Currently, a temporary bonus dog that belongs to the other guy who mixes my show is staying there: a ten-month-old teacup chihuahua named Vato (that’s Spanish for Dude).

Um, he’s awesome. I loves him.

Vato has a bark control collar. Instead of shocking the dog when it barks, the collar sprays the dog in the face with a refreshing burst of citronella.

If you’ve read about them here, you know that the Puggle and the Fuggle are horribly trained dogs. Or, more correctly, they have us trained very well. Barking’s a problem. We even got a ticket one time, for the barking. I’m thinking about giving the Vato collar a try, though knowing my dogs either Casey will make Jack do all the barking for both of them, or else they’ll develop a citronella habit and bite open their collars to start mainlining it.

Here was the kids’ day with my boss (who has actually known them longer than I have):

He took the kids and the main dog plus the bonus dog for a walk in Central Park, where #5 almost fell into the boat basin; #2 and #3 renamed Vato PC, for Precious Cargo; #5 asked to be carried on the walk back to the apartment, to which my boss replied that he could only be carried upside down, which #5 agreed to until the point where he started falling out of his pants because gravity was working against him; and finally they came back to the apartment where they played an epic game of Monopoly and ate Chinese food.

(#5 keeps talking about how much money my boss has. I finally figured out he’s talking about the Monopoly game, which is some modern version that appears to be adjusted for inflation and has $500,000 bills.)

Then they went to the drug store where he bought them $36 worth of candy and did his damnedest to have them eat at least $20 worth of it before I came back.

When I came to pick them up after work, #5 immediately said to me, “Don’t ever leave him in charge of me again!” I asked what had happened but it took a minute to get the story, because #5 was shifting back and forth between the little boy stubbornness of trying to appear wronged and starting to realize that what had happened was very, very funny, and my boss was literally doubled over laughing so hard he couldn’t get the words out.

While Vato was not wearing his bark control collar, #5 barked into it, and it controlled him.

It is unclear exactly whose idea this was.

As we were leaving, #5 gave my boss this parting prediction: “You’re going to be a really great parent, and a really terrible parent. Great because you’ll buy your kids lots of candy, and terrible because you’ll let them get squirted in the face.”

When you were a kid, what did you think made for a great parent? What’s your favorite thing to do with other people’s kids?

The Only Slumber Party

When #4 was in the third grade she turned nine and asked for a slumber party. I jumped at the chance, erroneously believing it would be a) cheaper and b) less time-consuming than a regular party. No loads of games and activities to plan; the girls would be largely self-sufficient.

I recalled slumber parties from my own childhood, where there were usually five of us and we’d be camped out in someone’s basement and the latest we were ever able to keep our eyes open was 1:00am.

At one slumber party I went to the birthday girl, Jeanette, mandated a no-talking rule promptly at 11:00pm and anyone who broke the rule got pointed at and her name written neatly on a piece of college-ruled notebook paper, which was to be given to Jeanette’s mother in the morning. I got my name written down for trying to talk someone into sticking someone else’s hand in warm water to see if we could make them pee their sleeping bag. We expected to have to write sentences- I will not talk at the slumber party– just like in school, but I don’t think that actually happened.

On the Friday night of #4’s slumber party, approximately 11,000 ~~velociraptors~~ nine-year-old girls arrived in our living room. I had invited them. On purpose. This is the point at which I suddenly understood, on a cellular level, that we did not have a basement. Nor did we have carpeting, or any absorptive surface in pretty much the whole house.

It all started off okay. They ate the junk food we bought. We did the few activities we had planned and they began entertaining themselves, doing little girl type things. The night passed happily, if loudly. I knew I could stick it out because soon enough they’d all be dropping off to sleep and we would once again have (relative) silence in our house.

I had never imagined that there might possibly exist 11,000 nine-year-old girls that were capable of going entirely without sleep, and that they would all be in my highly reflective living room, which was directly under my bedroom, at the same time.

Around midnight we called #4 upstairs and said, hey, tell your friends it’s time to quiet down and start to go to sleep. We weren’t too bothered yet, being that we work nights and usually stay up til 2:00am.

We called her up again around 1:00am and repeated the conversation a little more loudly.

Around 2:00am I called out, gently but firmly, from the doorway of the living room, “Girls, it’s time to go to sleep. No more talking.” Which was met by a stunned silence, then a fit of giggles which escalated into an even louder bedlam by the time I was at the top of the stairs.

Is there anything worse than a pack of nine-year-old girls who are acutely aware of their power? Where the hell was Jeanette?

By the time it degraded into us actually yelling at our birthday party guests somewhere after 4:00am to no avail, I just shut the door to my bedroom, set my alarm for 8:00am, and put my iPod on.

In the morning I discovered that they had eaten all of our other food during the wee hours of the morning and we didn’t even have anything left to make breakfast with.

We shoved the girls outside to play while CC went to the grocery store and made breakfast. By this time they were all fighting because not one of them had gotten a single minute of sleep. Some mothers began to arrive to pick their daughters up before breakfast was ready. It was awesome.

Got any slumber party stories to share?

One and Done

When I was on the road as a touring stagehand, many Sundays began at 8am. No, I take that back. They began more like at 6am after about three hours of sleep with me frantically packing all my crap that I had been putting off dealing with until the last possible minute into my suitcase and then trying to find coffee and a muffin and make it to the theater by 8am for box call. We would pull the empty road cases off the semi trailers they’d been stored in and line them up in prep for the load out. Then we’d do a show. Then we’d do another show. Then we’d start the load out. Usually we finished up around sunrise and headed to the airport for the next city, where we would begin loading in shortly after we landed.

But some Sundays were different. They were “One and Done!” Sundays. These were during multi-week stops in bigger cities like Chicago, Philly, San Francisco; we’d do a matinee only and then have 48 glorious hours off until we had to be back for Tuesday night’s show call. We didn’t have to move the show. Nothing needed to be packed. It was like Christmas.

I’m not on the road anymore. The show I’m on in New York has a One and Done Sunday every week. Sometimes I even take Sundays off and then it’s like, double Christmas. Still, I love the spirit of One and Done Sundays-the sense of possibility and of not being rushed.

So I’m starting a new feature here under that name. Every Sunday I’ll post a picture. And I’ll post five links that will totally be worth your time to check out. Nice and easy.

Except today I’m posting two pictures, because I feel like it.