Chapter Five: “I’ll Watch the Kids”

Hey all!

I was going to post this last night, but I decided to hold off and chill for this weekend and post chapter five today. After this chapter, I’ve smashed through the 20,000 word mark for the new novel, well on my way towards making it halfway! If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that I’m doing this for National Novel Writing Month and that I am kicking some big fat booty with this book! Hoorah!

Anyhow, check out Chapter Four, where you can click to read subsequent chapters from there too.

Also, don’t forget to click that wonderful paypal button in the right hand corner. I’d really appreciate the donation. All it takes is a couple of pennies. Or maybe a dollar. A dollar for all this wonderful writing? I don’t think that’s too much

Its 9 a.m. and I’m playing with Lego blocks on the floor with Jake. It’s Friday morning, and the dishes are cleaned from breakfast and the children have had their fill of Pancakes and Bacon. Jake and I are building a large Lego fort, and have been working on it for two hours. I am amazed that a 6-year-old with a television blaring cartoons would have already been distracted. But as always, I’m wrong. These new cartoons on nowadays, some hybrid breed of little kid action hero crap that has quite possibly the most horrible animation in the whole entire world is on. The sounds of explosion comes from the speakers, and Jake looks towards the television and see the cartoon is on, and suddenly becomes mesmerized.

The cartoons today are no match for the old Warner Brothers’ cartoons. Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck are much better characters than the ones we have today on Cartoon Network or the horrible Toon Disney channel. Ok, before you begin to scoff at me, Toon Disney does have two good things about it. One, it plays Schoolhouse Rock shorts, and two, it also plays all the old classic Disney movies on Saturday afternoon. I’ll admit that sometimes I do watch Toon Disney specifically to get to see Dumbo, or Bambi, or Snow White, or Cinderella all over again like I did when I was seven or eight and we had a VCR.
But who can compare the old school violence of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner in the desert with the new breed “Codename: Kids Next Door?” You can’t. It’s impossible to say that a cartoon that rips off plots from classic movies like Indiana Jones, Star Wars and other great movies is even remotely in the category of good. I watched it the other day and the elementary school kids attacked a middle school a la Star Wars episode four and took on some middle school kids. This is crap, plain and simple, and I can’t stand any bit of it. I forced myself to watch it to remind me how good I had it when I was a kid. And besides, what sixth grader is going to plot to enslave an entire elementary school? This crap doesn’t happen in real life. Kids have too much to worry about nowadays to even think of something as bold as human enslavement. Like, for instance, when some crazy little kid is going to come in with their father’s pump action 12-gauge Remington shotgun and start blowing holes in his fellow students. Or peer pressure. Kids now have drugs in schools, mental disorders, and all sorts of problems that we can’t even begin to fathom as adults. The modern age has caught up with the children. So I declare that “Codename: Kids Next Door” horrible, pretentious crap that is full of gaping plot holes. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a kid who could strap tennis ball cannons on the back of a tricycle and go riding through a school to interrupt a principle hard at work in his office. I’ve never met a principle that stays in his office all day. And once up a time, I used to be a kid in school. Therefore, I think that “Codename: Kids Next Door” should be called “Codename: Let’s Rip off Classic Movie Plots Because We’re Uninventive!”

I myself find that the cartoons today just aren’t amusing. They’re in this category of flair, more filler for commercials that sell toys and junk food that will rot the teeth out of parents and their children alike more than being actual good programming. You know what the only cartoon I’ve watched on TV that has been good since the early to mid-1990s after they took the Bugs and Daffy show off of ABC? The only show I’ve liked so far has been Dexter’s Laboratory. Do you want to know why I like it so much? Because it still has that element of cartoon violence that you saw with the old cartoons, and the animation isn’t half bad. The animation isn’t great, but it isn’t half bad. So now you see why I can’t go wrong with Dexter’s Laboratory. It’s just well written and fun to watch, because it’s so unbelievably cool that a little kid has built an evil genius lab underneath his home, and his parents didn’t even know! Now that is they type of cartoon that I sense to be cool, because you have this definitive sense of disbelief that goes with it. You are absolutely sure that a little kid couldn’t build an underground evil genius laboratory without some help, blasting equipment and earth movers. Plus the soil moved alone could probably cover the streets of his town in a layer of mud a half and inch thick.

So yes, I confess it. I still watch cartoons on Saturday morning. I watch them because there is nothing good on Saturday morning anymore. When I was growing up, we used to have “Saved by the Bell” and other quality teen programming that would come on, reminding us that drunk driving on prom night and steroid use before the big football game against the cross town rivals wasn’t a good idea. And that while the pranks you could sometimes get away with were always fun, they sometimes had unintended consequences. And then, Saturday morning programming went all modern. I blame the networks trying to become internet savvy, and missing the point completely. Little kids don’t get up as early on Saturday morning anymore, and they don’t watch cartoons. You know what little kids normally watch on a Saturday morning? They watch movies, and stuff on the Discovery channel, or maybe they Animal Planet and History Channel with their parents. Shows about cars and airplanes, or shows that show off cool motorcycles. Some kids don’t even get to watch TV in the morning anymore, because their parents take them into the great outdoors with all the smog and pollution created by the crap the advertisers are trying to sell on TV. Or the parents take them to soccer practice, or baseball. The kids also go to football, basketball, karate, dance, cheerleading or any number of activities that can keep the children occupied for three hours while their parents take whatever drug it is they desire to “calm their nerves.” As if the parents have a hard life anyhow. Kids nowadays get a bad wrap.

I’ve decided that people need to sleep in later on Saturdays, or give me my good cartoons back. But it isn’t Saturday, it’s Friday. And the Today Show has been over now for thirty minutes, and my fort is almost done. Jake leans over to look inside the fort to see what the large main tower looks like, supporting himself with his little arms and on his little knees. He’s still over it as I begin to place the last block….

“Whoops!” Jake declares as his underdeveloped arms collapse under his bodyweight and crushes my fort.

“Uh-oh!”

The little boy cries out in me “No! Not my fort!” and is devastated at the loss of the great masterpiece now lying in ruins in front of me. But the adult in me puts on a stoic face, and reminds me that it’s only Lego blocks and I can always rebuild. There is always a sense of hope in all that we do. Nothing is ever lost. It just goes to a different form. The atoms and particles always stay the same.

So I look down. The only thing I can think is how unfortunate it is that my fort couldn’t hold up a sixty pound little boy. My engineering was completely off! It might be the materials I used to build my fort, since Lego blocks aren’t exactly known for their ability to perform well under weight stress. If I had been building the fort out of stone, or wood, or even papier-mâché, it might have held up better than Lego blocks seem to be. Oh well, things start to fall apart at some point. It was a matter of time before it fell.

The phone rings and Andrea, who is sitting on the couch in the living room behind Jake and I gets up and runs to answer it. I can’t hear the conversation here in the living room over the loudness of the television, but no matter, not my phone and none of my business, really. Jake, who has been rolling around on the floor, gets back up and jumps onto the couch and watches more cartoons. He watches with his mouth half open in a look of joy, and the cartoon shows a blackened character who just had something blow up in front of him. Jake laughs and points at the TV.

“Look Josh! Isn’t that funny?” he asks me.

“Yeah Jake, that is funny.”

Samantha, meanwhile, gave up on cartoons about an hour ago and elected to go into her room and do what she loves to do best. I’ve not watched her read, but I imagine that she has her nose buried inside the pages of a book. She is one of the few people I know who actually reads, and on a grade level well advanced of what we would normally consider to be reasonable in a child of her age. Did I mean to be wordy in mentioning this? Why, yes. This is how Samantha would want me to describe it, with as complex of a vocabulary I could use, so that way she would have a reason to look up a word in the dictionary, like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. And even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, it is still amusing that she can read enough to run circles around myself.

I think at some point she finally gets annoyed with the sound level of the television and walks out of her room, stomping all the way into the living room and grabs the remote control. She presses the buttons, and the sound comes down about 20 decibels. Samantha decides to hand the remote control back to me, being the responsible adult, and asks me to “please try to keep it down, I want to finish the new Harry Potter by the end of the week.”

Jake doesn’t like this one bit. He wants his cartoons at the highest volume possible without making your ears bleed within proximity of the television. He wants his cartoons to blow you away, like a bomb or a movie shooting where you fly backwards. So Jake jumps on top of me and yells an emphatic “NO!” at Samantha giving me the remote control, and her turning down the TV.

“NO JAKE! Get off of Josh! I’m trying to read right now, and it’s not fair that the TV is so loud!”

“But I’m WATCHING CARTOONS!” Jake shouts in a whiney voice. Samantha just stood there, her arms folded across her chest watching his temper tantrum.

“Jake, jumping all over Josh and trying to wrestle away the remote from him isn’t going to help you. He’s not going to willingly hand over the remote control, are you Josh?” Samantha asked with a little authority in her voice that kind of reminded me of her mother. But Jake wasn’t going to listen to anyone, he wanted his remote back come hell or high water. He struggled to climb up on me high enough to get the remote away, and stepped on my crotch in the process.

Can we say ouch?

Yes, yes we can.

“AAAAAHHHHH!” I yelled out.

Andrea looked in from the kitchen, and mumbled a “I’ve got to go, I’ll call you back in a minute,” to whoever was on the other line, and hung up.

“JAKE! GET OVER HERE!” She yelled.

He jumped off of me and ran over to his mother and looked up at her.

“Mommy, Josh stole the remote from me after Samantha turned the sound down and handed it to him and I was watching my cartoons and she took the remote and turned down the sound and I don’t like that one bit.”

“Jake, that doesn’t mean you can jump up and down on Josh like that. It hurts him,” Andrea tried to tell him, but he wasn’t having any of that. He wanted a fight. Even for a little kid, he was, well, active is the best word for it. In everything that he could get himself involved in.

“But Josh is a lot bigger than me! How am I supposed to get my remote back to turn the sound back up on my cartoons?” He asked. The logic was there, in a way. It was there in the little kid logic, but not in a way that adults could understand and accept. So Jake was in trouble, and got hit on the bottom twice for jumping up and down on my crotch.

He rubbed his butt in a “that hurt” motion and suddenly had a sad face. He was pouting in my direction, and didn’t like me anymore. He didn’t like me because he thought that I got him in trouble for trying to hurt me while trying to get back what he saw was his property, the remote control.

“Josh, can I talk to you in here for a minute?” Andrea asked me from the kitchen.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. Before I left the living room, I told the two children to be good for a few minutes. I didn’t really see that as a problem, since Jake was pouting on the couch and Samantha walked back into her room to read the rest of Harry Potter.

I got into the kitchen, and Andrea looked annoyed by whatever it was that happened on the phone.

“Guess what?”

“What? Chicken butt?”

“Not now, time to be serious,” she scolded me. She stood there from a moment, sighed and told me what happened. Apparently, someone at her office where she works as an IT manager screwed up their network over Thanksgiving and now she needed to go in for a few hours and figure out what happened. “So here’s what I need from you. I need you to watch the kids until Ben can get here to pick them up.”

What? Ben pick up the kids just hours after he dropped them off? I. Don’t. Think. So. What is he going to do with them? Take them up to the ranch and let them ride four-wheelers again? Andrea didn’t look too happy about hearing that. Is he going to let them wrestle bears? No way, Jose. Thus, I must step up and be a man.

“I’ll just take them for the day.”

“No, no, no. I can’t ask you to do that.”

“I don’t mind, really. They’re both good kids when they aren’t stepping on my crotch.”

“Please Josh, just let me call Ben. You’re already doing too much by volunteering to watch them until Ben gets here.”

“Don’t call Ben. You go do what you need to do at work, and then come back. We’ll sit here and watch movies and stuff all afternoon.”

“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this? I mean, I think I should call Ben. It would probably be better if I did. In fact, I’m calling Ben.”

I decided to risk it and step in front of the phone.

“No, you’re not calling Ben.”

“Yes, yes I am. I am not going to ask you to watch my kids,” she said, stepping towards me.

“No, you’re not calling Ben because I’m going to watch the kids and that’s the end of it. You go to your room, get dressed, get your pretty little ass to work and come home. Then I’ll cook dinner. We’ll have quesadillas. Sound good?”

I don’t think at this point she could argue with my generosity. So she backed off.

“You’re sure you want to watch them?”

“No Andrea, because I haven’t been standing here saying that I’m going to watch the kids for what, three minutes here. I’m getting a little tired of repeating myself.”

“Ok, you can watch the kids. Numbers are on the fridge. There’s my work, doctors, hospital, and poison control. Oh, lets not forget that Jake and Samantha’s social security numbers are on that sheet too. And Jake is allergic to sesame seeds, and Samantha is only allowed to read until this afternoon.”

“Look, don’t worry,” I said. “I’m probably going to take them to a bookstore or something.”

“Good luck with that one Josh,” she said. “Jake will rip your head off if he has to even think about going into a bookstore, library or any place that has to be quiet.”

“Oh, we’ll see about that.”

“Ok, go get changed.”

Ten minutes later, we’re sitting in the living room and Jake is back to normal playing on the floor with his G.I. Joes, which he has removed from the Barbie convertible. Andrea, who is now fully dressed, looks over at me and smiles, because Jake is playing with Sergeant Survivor Steve of the G.I. Joes. Does this make Sergeant Steve a bottom? I think this is the same type of question that you have to ask the Tootsie Roll pop people, and as we all know, the world may never know.

Andrea calls Samantha into the living room for the “conference.” Jake doesn’t want her to leave, but Samantha seems indifferent to her mother going into work today. “So is Dad coming back to pick us up?” Samantha asked.

“Nope. Josh has volunteered to watch you guys for me. Do either of you have a problem with that?” she asked both of the children. Jake shook his head no, and for the first time since Samantha came home, she actually cracked a smile. The kid seems a little too happy to be staying with me. Does this mean that maybe Samantha might have a little girl crush on me? I think I don’t really want to know that one either.

Andrea handed me a spare key and said “if you have to go anywhere, just use the key to the apartment. Make sure to bolt the deadbolt. Oh, and if you don’t mind, please water my plants real quick, will you Josh?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

She kissed me on the cheek, and then grabbed Jake and kissed him on the head and bent down and hugged and kissed Samantha. Then she walked out of the door, and went to work.

I knew I couldn’t do this alone. I’m a little kid at heart. I don’t know the first thing about taking care of small children, even if it is for a few hours. I mean, am I supposed to go into the bathroom with them every time? Do I make them wash their hands afterwards? Are they old enough to wipe themselves? Well, I’d hope that Samantha could go to the bathroom by herself. But Jake is a totally different story. I can’t handle him by myself. And even after that, what should I do with them all day? Let them play with their toys and watch cartoons and eat junk food? I can’t really cook dinner. I should have thought about that before saying it. Maybe I’ll just order Chinese food and have it delivered before she gets home. But I don’t know what kind of Chinese food she likes, because I never asked. But I bet Samantha would know, because she’s smart and would pay attention to small details like that. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll stay home with the kids all day and let them watch cartoons and eat junk food and then I’ll order Chinese food for everyone. Or maybe I should order pizza, because Jake won’t like Chinese food and he has allergies to sesame seeds in the first place. I need reinforcements. I need the national guard of childcare.

I need my mommy!