Big Ugly Man Doll

I’d like to take a moment of your time to discuss a brief gender gap. If you have multiple children of both genders, or if you teach kids under the age of, say, 18, you’re probably already aware of this difference between boys and girls. If you teach kids under the age of 8, you’re probably very, very aware.

SOBUMD has noticed and pointed out to me on any number of occasions that, on any given laundry day, she will see 5 pairs of underwear from the Human Tape Recorder, at least 7 from the Reigning Queen of Pink, and 1 from Number One Son. This solitary pair of boys underwear highlights the brief gap between genders – why won’t boys change their shorts more often?

In the interests of science, I’ve done some investigative research.

BUMD: Son, why don’t you change your shorts?
NOS: Heh heh heh. I don’t like to take them off because I’ve farted in them.
BUMD: So, the longer you wear them, the better they get?
NOS: Heh heh heh. Yessssssssssss!

So, one possible answer may lay in the marinade effect. Other reasons include an unwillingness to expose Johnny to the elements – it’s warm in there! – and simple fact that baths are icky when you’re nine, so why take one?

Youth plays a role. Most guys don’t pay much attention to the state of their underwear until that underwear stands a good chance of being noticed by non-family females. This would include the unlikely possibility of having sex with actual women, and the even more unlikely possibility of having sex with that same woman a second time. (Meaning on a different day, not just, you know, staying naked.) Boys with very clean underwear are hoping that someone will ask them to remove said briefs. Trust me on this; after a few beers “You should SEE how clean my shorts are” starts to sound like a decent opening line to most of us. (It’s not, by the way.)

So I understand the frustration, but I’m in no hurry for the Number One Son to be wanting to change his underwear twice daily. If you knowhuddimean.

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So there we were earlier this school year, driving – again – to school.  You wouldn’t think a lot could happen on a drive like this, because it’s not yet 8 in the morning and we’re only driving 5 blocks away.  You would be wrong. 

For those of you scoring at home, “not yet 8 in the morning” translates to “Number One Son has been up for at least two hours playing games and working himself into a really good crazy.  I mean, there’s “just woke up” crazy, which most of us go through to varying degrees, and there’s “ohmygodI’mlate” crazy, and we all know what that’s like.  What you may not be familiar with, however, is the “slam down whatever food I can find or open and play video games until everyone else wakes up” crazy, which really gets him chuffed into a solid gonzo some days.  An hour later, we’re up and giving him his meds.  In the face of a solid windmill-armed dervish, the chances those medications have of kicking in before he goes to school are pretty much the same odds the 3rd Grade pet hamster has in a volcano – to wit, not much. 

But once in a while, he finds his coping mechanisms and they work.  For a change, it wasn’t Number One Son screaming arterial homicide out the car window for 5 straight blocks – he leveraged his skills in transference and it was the Reigning Queen of Pink doing the shouting.  In her defense, when she does it it’s not called shouting, it’s called “addressing her subjects.” 

It’s summer, the windows are open, and she sees her friends walking to school.  One of these friends is named, believe it or not, Jack.  Can you see this coming yet?

At the top of her royal lungs, head halfway out the open window, “HI JACK!!!  HI JACK!!!”

You know, we live in the shadow of the nation’s capitol.  People really do turn and look when they hear that.  Some of them are armed. 

We got through the school’s tightened security system and the Stop Sign of Death, and I let them out.  She was still talking about having seen Jack walking to school.  Number One Son, having successfully transferred the crazy this morning, looked at her as they were getting out of the car and, in true older brother fashion, said the one thing most calculated to infuriate her. 

“He didn’t hear you, you know.”

But baby, everyone else did!

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The hat that believed in Santa:

 
…and the rest of the collection:

(thanks to docstrange for the title inspiration)

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So there I was, washing the dishes, when the Human Tape Recorder walks up to me; all of 4 years old at the time. “Daddy,” she says, “I need Cheerios.”

OK, we can do this. I dried my hands and gave her a fistfull of Cheerios. She thanked me and runs back to the bathroom, where she had been in the first place. I turned back to the sink and the dishes, contemplating the joys of Selective Hearing.

Because what she REALLY said was, “Daddy, I need *more* Cheerios for my duck.”

But I didn’t hear all of that, because deep down I knew that I didn’t want to know anything about what had happened to the *first* set of Cheerios.

And I didn’t want to know anything AT ALL about a duck.

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Yesterday the kids learned a new song about a girl named Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black, with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back. Now obviously this Goth chick’s father owns a line of trucks, and she’s in formal black because he’s dead, or getting re-married, or maybe because she’s just full-on emo Goth and it’s a Thursday.

I, of course, was honor-bound to share with them the original song about Mary Mack, which concerns the impending arranged nuptials between the singer and the subject, to wit: Mary Mack’s Father’s Making Mary Mack Marry Me, And My Father’s Making Me Marry Mary Mack.

This is about when these obstreperous and uncultured children sprang on me their twisted favorite, compliments of YouTube, which has an animated yellow cartoon face singing “Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in” and here the image inverts to negative and the voiceover yells “PURPLE!”, which is over course the FUNNIEST THING IN THE WORLD if you are less than 10 years old and your medication has worn off.

So this morning, despite my protestations, it was decided that we needed to review what we’d learned yesterday and headed back to YouTube for another round of 4 seconds of Mary Mack shouting purple, to which I was, of course, honor-bound to counter with another round of Mary Mack’s Father’s Making Mary Etc. This lead to a conversation in the car ride to school during which the Reigning Queen of Pink decided that she would never marry her brother. Number One Son explained to her that she couldn’t even if she had wanted to, since (1) you’re not allowed to marry your brother or sister, and (2) her brother was him, and he’d be damned if he’d marry her.

This quickly devolved.

By the time I got these loons to the school, which – to be clear – is only 4 blocks from the house, Mary Mack’s father was wearing purple buttons all down *his* back, presumably in a tight corset, and the Reigning Queen of Pink was marrying Mary Mack, having established that girls can marry girls and boys can marry boys, as long as they’re not siblings. I think we concluded firmly that Mary Mack (Mack, Mack) was all dressed in black (black, black) with silver buttons because her father was marrying her ex-boyfriend, Jack Jack Jack.

I’m sure their teachers wonder what the hell goes on at our house.

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