You know what’s awesome? Winning my second fantasy football championship in the last 6 years with Roethlisberger and Mendenhall leading the way. That’s what.
You know what else is awesome? Being home when you get a polling call about the 2012 Iowa Caucuses. I gave favs and unfavs for a whole list of the Republicans possibly running. Haley Barbour, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, etc., but I achieved a first today, for me at least, by actually making the lady making the call laugh out loud and totally lose her place in the script.
“Do you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of Sarah Palin?”
“Favorable.”
“What do you like best about Sarah Palin?”
“That she’s freaking awesome! That every time she says something she makes all the liberals mad. That the GOP establishment cringes whenever she’s around.”
“Well, sir that’s the first ‘freaking awesome’ I’ve had this evening.”
“Yeah, well when the guys who paid for this poll read the verbatims, it’s going to crack them up even more. Now ask me something about Mitt Romney so I can blast him.”
Awesomer than that? Riley is 11 and we had her watch the other two girls while we went to a movie. How Do You Know with Paul Rudd and Reese Witherspoon. Mom is a Paul Rudd fan. And after watching his acting genius as Brian Fantana in Anchorman and finding out he’s lifelong Steelers fan, I’m okay with him too. But the awesomeness comes from the fact that we were able to watch a movie outside of our house without children and without paying a babysitter.
We didn’t even really have to plan it either! I know, weird. We just woke up and said, hey, let’s go to a movie tonight and have Rye just watch the two little ones.
I know, the levels of awesomeness are almost incomprehensible. Our oldest kid is just old enough to watch her sisters for a couple hours without lighting the carpet on fire. Mom and I used to go to movies all the time. It was our thing. Friday night and the movies just went together. Like May of ’83 and first seven guitar chords of Photograph.
This is an entirely new phase of life. Rye is just going to keep getting older. And we’ll, over time, be able to leave her at home to watch the other two for longer periods of time. Your mind fills up with possibilities faster than a room of coaches fired by Al Davis. Seriously, this is a breakthrough reminiscent of Operation Cobra in July of 1944. Only thing we’re missing is Patton’s tanks racing through the bocage.
Our window of opportunity here isn’t small either. She won’t be able to drive until she’s 16. That’s not soon. By then somebody will have come up with a suitable replacement for LOST and the comeback of hair metal will be going strong.
The key, we think, is to maintain the illusion that we’re not going to take advantage of this every single weekend. Because, at some point, Rye is going to start asking for a little something. She’ll start talking to her friends about working conditions, wage discrepancies and pretty soon we’ve got labor problems and a union movement.
So we’re trying to maintain our composure. But most of the time we look like this:
Chronicles of Dad 