Kids Are Super Ultra Mega Fucking Weird

You poor fuckers.

You have no idea what’s coming.

Our baby goat — *is handed note* — sorry, “baby human child” will soon turn four. And you’re saying, “Uhh, it’s a bit early to be warning those of us on the road behind you. You’re like, uhhh, ten feet ahead of us.” And that sounds right. Seems accurate. I’ve got another 14 years or so before we eject this goat child into the real world with a forceful slam of the door (“TIME’S UP, NERD,” I will yell, and fling his stuff on the front lawn and then change all the locks while he’s scrambling to pick up all his weird cyborg porn or whatever’s ‘cool’ in 14 years). And parents ahead of us on the road have been warning us about all the things that will one day manifest in and around our kidling. Some of it has been right. Some of it has been so right, they had no idea. Some of it? Totally wrong. Just the same, I feel like it’s my responsibility to warn those of you with children younger than ours — perhaps even those with children that remain pre-born).

Because I see you.

I see how complacent you are.

For those of you without kids, lemme ask you: can you just like, go somewhere? Can you decide on a whim, “I am going to pee in private, then I will shower, then I plan to leave my house and go out into the world to eat food, dance, take a walk, buy a dog, buy groceries, participate in an orgy, fly a kite, kill a man, meet people, party with those people, buy IKEA furniture for my sex dungeon,” and so on, and so forth? Right. That shit ends.

For those of you with infants or babies: can you put your child down somewhere and be fairly confident that the child will remain in that space for fifteen minutes? If you return to the room, are you comfortable assuming that the child will still be somewhere near to where you left it? You won’t find the TV knocked over, clothes strewn everywhere, the window open with the curtains blowing in a breeze, a postcard from Tijuana stuck to your bedroom mirror with thumbprints of dried strawberry jelly? Yeah, eventually they get mobile.

Kids.

They get loud.

They get mobile.

And most importantly, they get weird.

They get weird quickly. The volume on their Weirdness goes from a 2, maybe a 3, all the way up to 11 pretty fast. Then they break the knob off and stab you in the neck with it.

I like to tell B-Dub stories online, and occasionally folks think I’m making them up.

I am not.

These are true things.

I would like to tell you some of the things we have seen. We are shell-shocked, like people who have witnessed something incomprehensible — an alien abduction, two Yetis making love, or this woman doing this thing with this carrot.

Please behold our tales. And tell others. Tell others what is to come.

Skeletons

The other night, B-Dub says: “There are skeletons everywhere.”

Which is true enough, one supposes, though it’s still pretty creepy when your preschooler just says that shit out of the blue. Either he can peer through our costumes of human meat to see what lurks beneath, or he’s legit seeing skeletons everywhere. And he said it in this kind of non-chalant, one-off way. Like, yeah, so what? Skeletons everywhere.

We thought that might be the end of that, but oh, no.

The next day at lunch, he starts yammering — because that’s a thing our child does now, he out-and-out babbles. Like he got an upgrade to his Language Module and is excited to use it. And he performs this monologue about skeletons, once again in a non-chalant yeah-so-what way:

“I saw a skeleton at the window this morning. And I threw something at him to make him go away. Yeah. And right now there are skeletons everywhere. They’re at the windows. They’re at the doors. There’s some right there.” *he points at the kitchen window* “I’ll punch him.” *he lazily punches both fists at the air* “Yeah. I don’t know where all these skeletons keep coming from. They’re in my room. They’re just like, running around and stuff. Yeah. They’re just so annoying. Sometimes I have to blast them.” *holds up both hands as if he’s shooting lasers out of his palms* “Skeletons. Yeah.”

He says all of this with the near boredom of a plumber describing a plumbing job. Like he’s actively irritated at the invading and presumably imaginary skeletons. I half-expected an eye-roll — and when B-Dub eye-rolls it’s notable — his eyes literally go all the way back and he rotates his entire head on his neck like he’s having a seizure. Don’t believe me? Look:

 

Anyway.

What I’m trying to say is:

There are skeletons everywhere, and my son realizes it.

Skeletons. Yeah.

This Song

Now, B-Dub doesn’t just gabble and yammer.

He sings.

Which is nice. He’s got a surprisingly good voice.

But again, his songs? Super gonzo bonanza weird.

Half the time, they’re total nonsense. Utter gibberish. So much so that I’m fairly certain he’s summoning Outer Entities (who are probably responsible for all these skeletons).

The most recent song goes like this:

FLOMMO GLOPPO!

FLOMMO GLOPPO!

JELLY JELLY!

JELLY JELLY!

That’s his song. I don’t know what it means. I do not know where it comes from. I do know that every time he sings it, the air shimmers, and reality fragments like light through a prism, and I can see squirming things on the other side of the veil — interstitial creatures, mad toddlers from beyond space and time, many-eyed precognitive preschoolers with sticky jam-hands and a hunger for incalculable geometries (and chocolate milk).

Constant Flailing

The boy is constantly moving. Even when he’s sitting still, he is flailing. You will be sitting there in the living room, and one second he’s just hanging out, playing with some LEGO, and next thing you know, he’s somehow on the couch, upside-down. Then he’s in your lap and he’s kneeing you in the face. Then he’s swinging from the ceiling fan. Then he’s piloting an F-111 stealth bomber. Then he’s on the moon. He’s like a teleporting orangutan.

He can’t stop moving. Watching him will make you dizzy. If ever we enter into another energy crisis, I will submit a plan to harness the energy of four-year-olds. Just seven of those wiggly little weirdos could power an entire city with all that kinetic razzmatazz.

That’s right. I said “razzmatazz.”

It’s scientific, you wouldn’t understand.

The Poop Reversal

Poop is still a hot topic at our house, which I suppose is good news because I find it endlessly hilarious. B-Dub will sometimes just go on a litany of poop-related phrases, “Duck poop, poop butt, TV poop, Hulk poop, poop doggy,” and on and on. One of his favorite activities at present is me firing up SIRI on the iPhone and then we say these poop-related phrases to her. SIRI responds by telling us we’re not being very nice, and B-Dub cracks up.

But poop isn’t just a topic of conversation.

It’s a way of life.

Earlier I noted that kids go through these bizarre and unexpected phases, some of them quite short. One of B-Dub’s phases was: “Refusing to poop.” Which led eventually to him having to poop so much and so bad that what he deposited in the potty looked to belong not to a tiny human but rather a morbidly-obese, pizza-roll-addicted yak.

As I said, we tried incentivizing the process.

A few weeks ago, we switched gears and changed the incentive.

It was these crunchy chocolate “rocks.”

It became these little chocolate hearts.

Hardly a change at all, right?

It worked.

It worked well.

It worked too well.

Now, our child has developed super-human control over how much he poops. It’s as if his butt is a paper cutter, like he has robotic control where he can leave behind a turd that is roughly the size and shape of a slice of hot dog. Then he’s all, “Hey, look! I pooped! GUESS IT’S TIME FOR MORE CHOCOLATE.” And we scrounge up a tiny piece of chocolate and he eats it greedily like he’s Gollum with a fresh-caught trout in his hands. It happens like, 47 times a day. We are going to give our child diabetes because of how much chocolate he gets to eat because of his newfound preternatural poop control. Once more we pull back the incentive in the hopes that the habit has taken and that he will shake the POOP = CHOCOLATE habit before he reaches adulthood because otherwise, man, his life will maintain its current weirdness trajectory. (“Hey, boss? I just took a poopy in the men’s bathroom. Don’t look at me like that. Just hand over the Snickers. It’s my reward. GIVE ME THE GODDAMN SNICKERS, OLD MAN, OR I QUIT.”)

Other Things B-Dub Has Said

Here is a list of things B-Dub has said recently.

“I HATE THIS HOUSE. I DO NOT WANT TO LIVE HERE ANYMORE. I WANT TO LIVE AT TARGET. I AM LEAVING.”

“Mustard butt! Cookie dude! Big red bed head! Fridge!”

“GOOD MORNING, BATMAN. I HAVE SOME NEW MOVES.”

“I’m the Flash. I have powers like super-strength and heat breathing. But I can’t fly.”

“I have a baby in my tummy.”

“YOU BE INCREDIBLE HULK. I’LL BE A BABY PANDA.”

Me: “What do you want for breakfast?” Him: “I want to eat fresh snow. It will taste like chicken.”

“My poop looks like dinosaur feet.”

“SWEET DREAMS, REFRIED BEEF!”

“I have a baby cardinal.” *pause* “I do not have a baby cardinal. But I should. And if I did, it would be really cute.”

“The silverfish are all alone. So alone. They need me to find them.”

*hands me a headless LEGO figure* “Now he has a ghost head.”

Me: “What do you want for breakfast?” Him: “A glass of wine.”

*hands me his stuffed animal doggy* Him: “Boo is sick. He needs a doggy doctor.”  Me: “What’s wrong with him?” Him: “He was jumping in dungeons.”

*points to me* “All of this is buttness. Your feet, your arms, your shoulder. But not your head. Everything else is poop-butty.”

*gives me a correct lecture on the difference between ‘transparent’ and ‘translucent.’*

“Daddy, you’re full of teacups.”

*gesticulates wildly at the dinner table* “I AM A ROBOT. WHY ARE MY ARMS MOVING.” *pause* “I like robots. I am a robot. I like: flowers, rainbows, owls, doggies, glasses, DVDs, colors, and carrots.” *pauses to ponder this, then repeats the list again*

*points to his butt* “This is my energy compartment” *he toots* “That’s my energy release.”

See?

Kids? Super-weird.

And if yours haven’t gotten there yet, they will.

They will.