Our minds are wonderful factories of ideas and creations.
It’s where anything is possible, great and awful. It’s where our dreams are made. It’s also where we give more fuel to fear than fear could ever get by itself. The mind is freshman year away from home, loaded with 15 extra pounds but also a transforming class.
It’s a buffet where no one counts your pizza slices. How do you even navigate that?
That journey in our minds can’t even be measured in milliseconds or milligrams, but it can cover miles and millenniums. What’s the limit? It’s where the final turn in the cure for cancer will happen.
“Too much, daddy,” Elise would say as I grated it on top of her spaghetti or stuffed it in her burrito or slapped slices of it on her sandwich when she was little.
Translation: “heap it on, pop!”
These kids are the cheesiest. Cheese goes on cheese, even.
I mean, it’s dairy. It’s good for you. I love it too.
“That’s too much cheese.”
Nope, it just doesn’t feel natural coming off the fingers. Feels like a Rockies fan rooting for the dodgers. Un.natural.
It goes by quickly, a block of cheese. As I prepared a spaghetti dinner for my three cheeseavores, they surfaced constantly at the stove top, mouths agape, eyes googly, and the only way to fend them off was to drop another chunk of cheese in their hungry beaks, and watch your fingers.
By the time I’d grated the rest of the block to pile on their seashell noodles, I noticed something odd about the cheese wrapper: It was kid-ravaged empty.
“Girls,” I declared, holding the cheese carcass up to the light for inspection. “We just polished off an entire block of cheese.”
Cheers went up.
Not polite cheers, mind you. But the big, bad headlines kind of cheers. The Dewey beats Truman kind. Giants win the pennant. Stock market falls. Again.
They danced and celebrated over the defeated cheese block like Ewoks around C-3PO.
They danced and celebrated not only their victory over the cheese, but over the dad whose discipline more resembles Swiss cheese than Cheddar.
This sort of ravaging and mutiny could happen only on a dad’s watch.
Here, things aren’t always as they seem. Survival becomes paramount. Expect the unexpected. Know that the deck is stacked against you. The odds, not in your favor. Things will never be the same.
We’re talking parenthood, y’all.
There are good things. Like when your kid hits a home run. Or aces a spelling test. Or picks her nose at the buffet undetected. There are tough times, too. Like when your kid scores in her own goal.
Welcome to the jungle.
Just a dad ... 