🧀 Cheese Goes on Everything – Even Cheese

photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

They’re a cheesy bunch, my kids.

All three. Cheese goes on everything.

“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.

It’s not easy being cheesy.

 

🚘 Accessorizing, Categorizing, and Other -ings Daddies Don’t Do

photo credit: ShellyS via photopin cc

Daddy! I need your help!

I’ve heard this once or twice. It can mean, “I got a pizza-sauce stain on my sister’s school shirt!” It could mean, “I’ve toppled a beer display at Food Lion, and the manager hasn’t seen it.”

It also could mean something mischievous is about to happen to a relative.

Camdyn needed my expertise in sorting out hair accessories. Me? Really? It’s like asking Ndamukong Suh for directions to the kindness march. Camdyn wanted me to help her sort out girl hair accessories into four categories:

1. Rubberbands/clips
2. Poofy rubberbands
3. Elastic headbands
4. Regular headbands

Oh, and contribute to a pile of “yard sale/trash” offerings. (“Anything too stretched out goes there, dad,” she explained. “Or if it has Tinkerbell or princesses on it.)

(“But don’t write a story that says I don’t like Tinkerbell. Or princesses.”)

Sure, Camdyn. You’re asking the man who has two categories of hair accessories on his radar – those that hurt when I step on them, and those that don’t.

So, I’d better ask some questions.

Me: Why do you girls love your sidebangs so much?

Camdyn: They make us look pretty in church.

(This makes little sense to a man who hasn’t used a comb since 1987, nor had a haircut since, well, I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it was in 2012).

Me: Why do we have to do this?

Camdyn: Because Madison just throws them on the floor.

photo credit: Disney Fairies Tink’s Pirate Fairy Bling Boutique at Target 4/14/14 via photopin (license)

Good point. So the sorting went on, and so did the learning. Out went the Tinkerbell pieces (Shh!), along with those too worn out to hold together the daily paper for a Tuesday.

Clips congregated in the safety of their numbers, out of harm’s (and my feet’s) way.

The kid can accessorize.

She’s the child who helped me organize my own stuff, with such helpful hints as rolling up my belts, stacking up my soccer shirts, and splitting up my underwear into “favorites” and “not so favorites.”

For the record: None of those had Tinkerbell on them.

Or princesses.