Mr. Handsome

It’s been a while since we’ve had a humorous post from Mr. Handsome, so here goes…

For those of you who haven’t spent a lot of time around babies, this question will sound absurd and barbaric. In fact, if you had asked me such a question before we had children, I would have recoiled at the disgustingness of it. But hey, here we are.

No matter how careful you are, there is simply nothing you can do to prevent getting spit-up on your clothes when you have a baby. You can use burp cloths, towels, or bibs, but there is just no way to catch the mess 100% of the time. More often than not, your baby will choose the most inopportune time to spit up…right onto your favorite article of clothing.

With the first child, you start off changing clothes every time you get gunk on them, but then you have to do laundry twice as often. So one day at 2am, you wake up to feed the baby and he spits up on you, and you say, “Well it’s just a little bit. I’ll wipe it off and deal with it tomorrow.” This of course starts the rapid descent into spit-up covered clothes.

So now I have to ask, what is an acceptable level of spit-up to have on your clothes and still consider yourself to be a functioning human?

From Mr. Handsome:

Little Buddy is right in the middle of a “Can I help? Let me do it!” stage. No matter what kind of project Mommy and Daddy are doing, he wants to be right in the middle of it. It is really quite sweet that he is so eager to help, but it makes it virtually impossible to get anything done.

There is no job too small. He wants to cook, clean, paint, drill, hammer, shovel, and just about anything else he sees us doing. I used to be able to give him a different task to do alongside me, such as bang his plastic hammer against a random board, but he is quickly becoming too smart for that. He wants to do big people tasks.

I try to let him do as many things as he safely can, but there are still so many jobs that are too dangerous. I just love his helpful spirit, and it always makes me sad to tell him that he can’t help with something. It’s an unfortunate paradox that a child’s motivation to help is highest when the amount of tasks they are able to help with is lowest. I’m really hoping that as his ability to help increases, his interest in helping will not decrease. However, it’s a sad truth that teenagers, who are old enough to do many of the household tasks that adults can, are often very much not interested in working alongside Mom and Dad.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

From Mr. Handsome…

How many of you, in your teenage years, saw adults do something you thought was lame and said to yourself “I will NEVER do that”? I would like to take a minute to apologize to my 16-year-old self. I think he would be very ashamed of the older version of me.

It all happened last week, when our friends were nice enough to babysit Little Buddy for the evening. We kept the baby, but he is pretty chill and does well when we take him out and about. So in theory, we could have gone to see friends, had dinner at a restaurant, shopped at the mall, or gone bowling. The world was our oyster.

But you know what we ended up doing? We stayed home, watched Netflix, and took a nap.

When you have small children, all you really want to do is sleep. Sometimes even when you get a full night of sleep, you still feel tired. So staying in and relaxing was the best thing we could think of doing.

We greatly enjoyed our wild night of relaxation. We decided to liven things by having not one, but two, scoops of ice cream with homemade maple syrup drizzled on top. Take that, 16-year-old self!

Is there anything you do that your teenage self would be ashamed of?

A few years ago, we posted about the bachelor party that Mr. Handsome planned for his youngest brother. His other brother recently got married, and Mr. Handsome helped plan that bachelor party, as well.

Bachelor parties get a bad rap because some people engage in inappropriate behavior at them, but if done well, bachelor parties can be a great way for men to bond and strengthen their friendships.

Of course any time men get together, the highlight is food. Mr. Handsome chose pulled pork for the occasion. I bought fifteen pounds of pork shoulder on sale at Kroger, and he spent an entire day smoking it. He used hickory wood from our yard to add flavor to the meat. He was a bit on edge because the smoker, which was a gift from a friend who was upgrading, is new to him, and he didn’t want to ruin the party by messing up the main dish.

Thankfully, the pulled pork turned out delicious (I had it for dinner the night before), and the men loved it. Several of them said they thought Mr. Handsome should start a BBQ restaurant.

Mr. Handsome and the guys had a great weekend. They ate BBQ and then shot clay targets at a local shooting range. Later, they camped out at a remote location with incredible scenery. My thoughtful brother-in-law carried in all the ingredients for campfire spaghetti for dinner and pancakes for breakfast.

It always makes my heart happy to see my husband enjoy fun and fellowship with other guys who desire to live for the Lord. He said they had some really deep conversations around the campfire about marriage and faith.

Have you heard of any good bachelor (or bachelorette) party ideas?

When we first got married, I started asking Mr. Handsome why he ate so fast. In the six years since our wedding, he has thankfully kicked this habit, but his reasoning for why it was so deeply ingrained is pretty funny. To bring you your regular dose of Mr. H humor, he wrote a post:

“Babe, why do you eat so fast?”

The question startled me so much that I almost choked on the T-bone I was inhaling. “What are you talking about Ellie?”

“I’m talking about the fact that I’ve hardly sat down to dinner, and you have almost finished 16 ounces of steak.”

That wasn’t the first time that someone commented on the speed at which I used to consume my food. My answer was always the same: “I have six siblings.”

All of you who come from big families know exactly what I’m talking about. For those who don’t, I’ll explain. We had to eat fast in order to survive. It’s called natural selection; only the fast eaters make it. Watching a big family eat dinner (or lunch, since most of us were homeschooled) is like watching a small rabbit being fed to a pack of starving hyenas.

In all fairness, we never went hungry, and there was no real shortage of sustenance. But there was always a shortage of “edible” food. After all, cooking in bulk when you have a bunch of little kids pulling at you is hard.

On a typical morning, Mom was trying to get seven children up and dressed, teeth brushed, hair combed, and diapers changed, all while cooking a pound of bacon and a dozen eggs. Inevitably, about a third of the bacon was as soggy as a wet noodle, another third was burnt to a crisp, and the other 33.3333 perfect was just perfect. (Soggy bacon was how I learned to convert fractions to percentages.) Keep in mind that the two best pieces were saved for Dad, so if you didn’t your eggs fast, you got the bacon that was less than desirable.

The situation was the same by the time lunch rolled around. There would only be a small amount of food that you really wanted to eat, maybe three or four hotdogs or a couple of hot ham and cheese sandwiches. And if you didn’t eat quickly, you weren’t getting any of that.

But have no fear, Mom would supplement with something that still sends chills down my spine: leftovers. Big families are the kings of leftovers. Was that green bean casserole so unpalatable that no one even touched it at the church potluck? No problem, feed it to the kids as leftovers. Was that hamburger helper so atrocious that the dog went howling into the backyard after smelling it? Just add a little salt and pepper, and it will taste like a 5-star restaurant. And as much as I loved mac and cheese, leftover mac and cheese is just plain gross. Somehow it succeeds at being both dried out and soggy and the same time. But Mom wasn’t going to waste 99 cents on a new Kraft package.

Of course, Mom was always willing to quickly slather some peanut butter and jelly on two pieces of wheat bread and call it a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but she never got the proportions right. Just last year, I learned about one of her tactics to save money. She would take the end pieces of each loaf of bread and turn them inward so the sandwich looked like it was made with two normal pieces of bread. Peanut butter and jelly still makes me gag to this day. Somehow Ellie and Little Buddy eat it all the time, but I just can’t.

As I got older, I started to figure out the system. I would wake up early and eat the good food before anyone else got up. For a while, no one could figure out what was going on. “I could have sworn that there were three pieces of pizza in the fridge last night, but they’re gone,” my brother would complain. “What happened to the dozen homemade cookies that I made last night?” Mom would ask.

Please don’t tell Ellie, but I have continued some of these food consumption tactics into marriage. I would hate for her to figure out why I always wake up early in the morning when there is only one doughnut left.

Due to some scheduling conflicts, we were not able to celebrate Ellie’s birthday on the actual day. As a loving husband, I suggested that we designate another day as Ellie’s Day, a day to be focused entirely on Ellie.

 “What would you like me to buy you for your special day?” I asked my wife. “How about something really nice? I want you to treat yourself.”

“Well I was thinking that Little Buddy would really like a toy sandbox, and I would just love to see him play in one.” That seemed like a good idea to me. Ellie picked out a turtle-shaped sandbox from Walmart and had it delivered just in time for Ellie’s Day.

To start the day off, I insisted that she sleep in and I get up with Little Buddy, who is a very early riser. As I crawled out of bed, I whispered “Is there anything I can make you for breakfast?”

“There are two of my favorite jalapeño cheddar sausage patties left in the fridge that would be delicious,” she responded.

As I was cooking breakfast, I told Little Buddy that we were letting Mommy sleep in and that she would wake up to the sweet fragrance of sausage cooking in the fry pan.

 “Is something burning?” Ellie wrinkled her nose as she stuck her head out of the bedroom.

“No, everything is going great” I stated as I fanned the billowing smoke away from the smoke detector.

“Fire, Mama!” exclaimed Little Buddy, as he pointed to the pan.

“One of my greatest desires for Ellie’s Day is that you don’t burn the house down,” Ellie explained gently. “Maybe you should just microwave some oatmeal.”

After breakfast, we loaded up the minivan and went to visit the historic Carter House in Franklin, Tennessee. This has been on Ellie’s to do list ever since we moved to Nashville. She enjoyed it so much that she already wrote a blog post about it. Unfortunately the weather was a little rough (approximately 37 degrees Fahrenheit with freezing winds). But thankfully only half of the two-hour tour was outdoors.

On our way home, I decided to really treat Ellie and let her do some birthday shopping.  She chose Kohl’s. As we walked in, I handed her a $100 dollar bill and told her that she was required to spend it. Unfortunately she couldn’t find anything that she liked, but there was a nice leather jacket on clearance that was perfectly my size. It was usually $180 but was on sale for 50% off, putting it right at $90.

“That still leaves $10 to spend on a pair of socks for myself!” remarked a happy Ellie

“Well this is Ellie’s Day,” I exclaimed. “So go for it!”

We also stopped at one of Ellie’s favorite places in the world, Costco. She loves the good deals and free samples. I took her straight to a beautiful display of organic goat cheese and gluten-free crackers.

“This looks delicious!” exclaimed Ellie. “Can I try a sample, please?

“Sorry, no free samples due to COVID,” the clerk replied.

“Oh well,” I consoled Ellie, “It’s been such a good day for you already, and of course nothing is perfect.

“You are right about that,” replied Ellie. “Nothing is perfect.”

We each took a cart and decided to meet at the cash register in 30 minutes. Ellie came back with food, tissues, and paper towels. I had also picked up a few essentials.

“Why is your cart filled with new power tools and a pellet grill?” asked Ellie.

“I thought since it was Ellie’s Day we could celebrate!” I exclaimed.

“We are not buying any of that,” Ellie informed the clerk at the checkout line.

Next we stopped at the Vegan Vee Gluten-Free Bakery to get Ellie a delicious pastry. Unfortunately, the Vegan Vee had new hours that they hadn’t yet updated on their website, and they were closed. I have to say, that put a bit of a damper on an otherwise perfect Ellie’s Day.

But thankfully there was a grocery store down the street, and we were able to buy her a loaf of plain gluten-free bread. And it turned out that my favorite donut shop was just down the street, so Little Buddy and I ate donuts while Ellie enjoyed a plain slice of bread.

“This has really been a special Ellie’s Day,” I said.

“Yes it has,” she responded. “Very special.”

And now, another word from Mr. Handsome…

One of my worst fears growing up was that I would turn into my dad. Now don’t get me wrong, Dad is a wonderful man and a good father, but when I was a teenager, he was certainty not cool. In fact, it seemed like he went out of his way to try not to be cool.

Other kid’s dads would gel their hair, wear stylish jeans, get tattoos, work out at the gym, drive sports cars, and wear Air Jordans. My dad wore farmer jeans, paid $10 for the same haircut from the same barber for 20 years, wore plain white New Balance casual footwear, and drove the 15 passenger family van. But the more I grow older, the more I find myself doing the same things he does. It’s horrifying. Here is a list of the things I swore I would never do.

Purposely Wear out of Style Clothes           

It takes effort to be as out of style as my dad. His classic outfit around the house was a flannel shirt with sweatpants. Looking back, I think he was doing it purposely to embarrass us kids. But now I am doing the same thing. The only difference is I am trying to embarrass Ellie.  I still love the look of horror on Ellie’s face when I walk out of the bedroom in my purple shorts and red t-shirt.

Embarrass the Younger Generation

Dad was always saying ridiculous stuff around our friends to embarrass us. It was awful. But now I find myself doing the same thing to my little sisters, who are almost two decades younger than me. I still laugh about the time I dropped them off at summer camp six years ago. Right before I drove away, I said, “I put your blankey and nightlight in your suitcase because I know you get scared in the dark.” I made sure to say it loud enough that all their little teenage friends heard me.

Tell Long-Winded Dad Jokes

My dad had his go-to dad jokes that he pulled out whenever he could possibly squeeze them into a conversation. Every time he told them, they got longer and longer. Of course, trying to tell dad you had already heard the joke was of no use because he was going to finish it regardless. Every time he would start one of his long-winded dad jokes, I would groan inside and swear I would never tell one of his jokes. But then I was sitting around a campfire with a group of friends, and somehow one of his jokes just fit the conversation perfectly. I had no choice but to tell the joke, complete with all of dads sound effects, commentary, and vocal inflections. The worst part was, all my friends starting howling with laughter after the punchline.

Read all the Displays at Museums

On family vacations, Mom and Dad would always make sure to stop at a few museums along the way. They wanted our vacations to be both fun and educational. All of us kids would scamper from display to display and make it through the entire museum in about 20 minutes. Then we would start begging mom to let us get back on the road so we could head to the beach or wherever our final destination was. “We have to wait until your dad is finished,” she would say. So we would search the museum to find Dad, and inevitably he would still be at the first display, reading every single word. We would then spend the next three to four excruciating hours watching him read every written word in the entire building. And heaven forbid there was a self-guided radio tour, because then we would be at the museum all day.

Well on our last trip before Covid, Ellie and I decided to stop at a museum on the way to the beach. It was something like $20 per person to get in. Ellie and Little Buddy made their way through the museum very efficiently, while I settled in and started reading the plaques. I had just spent $40 for this experience, and I was going to get my money’s worth. Ellie has since swore to never take me to a museum again.

Tinker Around in the Garage

Dad was always tinkering around in the garage, and I always thought it was the biggest waste of time. Well now I understand. When Little Buddy is running around like a crazy kid, tinkering around in the garage sounds like a very attractive option.

Talk About Politics

Growing up, my dad was always talking about politics with his friends, and I always thought that was the biggest waste of time. But when I became an adult and received my first significant paycheck, I quickly realized just how much money the government felt it was necessary to take out. Let me tell you, those politicians just sit there and spend my money and waste it on pet projects and fraud, and let me tell you what I think about blah blah blah…

Flirt with Mom

This is a family blog, so I won’t get into much detail, but there was nothing more disgusting then watching Dad kiss and flirt with Mom. Well let’s just say Little Buddy may have the same complaints one day. But hey, it’s a sign of a strong marriage.

So I suppose it’s just best to accept that I am slowly but surely turning into my dad. My dad was far from cool, but he was always there for us, and we always knew he loved us. I suppose there are worse people to turn into.

Mr. Handsome has been on a roll with his blog posts. I hope you all are enjoying his humor as much as I do! And now, another word from Mr. H…

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Has anyone else noticed that us millennials really don’t want to do things the same way our parents did? If our parents did it, it certainly cannot be cool. I have a feeling that every generation throughout history has felt this way. The terms we use to describe what we are change–from “totally rad” to “groovy” to “hip” to “cool” or whatever–but the idea remains the same: We all just want to be more trendy than the generation before us.

I have compiled a list of things that my parents did that myself and other millennials wouldn’t be caught dead doing; but in reality, we rjust do these same things but with different names.

Talk Radio

 One sure way to be labeled a “fuddy duddy” is to listen to talk radio on the am stations. Whether it’s NPR, Rush Limbaugh, ESPN radio, or Dave Ramsey, if you accidentally land on one of those radio stations, you need to change it immediately, or else you are in serious danger of being labeled dull and boring. I mean who would want to just listen to someone talking on the radio?

Thankfully, us millennials have a much more intelligent way to spend our time. We listen to podcasts. What are podcasts? They are completely different then talk radio. Talk radio is just lamely listening to someone talk about some random subject.  Podcasts, are…well….uh…basically listening to someone talk about some random subject. But podcasts are cool because, you know, they are totally different than what our parents did.

PBS Documentaries

We all remember seeing our dad sitting on the couch watching horrible documentaries. I mean, who wants to waste their time learning about sports history, an unsolved crime, or some flamboyant character in history? That feels way to much like school. In fact, some of us even had to watch these boring documentaries in school. Today we have much more interesting things to watch: Netflix Docudramas.

Shows like The Last Dance, Making a Murderer, and Tiger King are “all the rage” among millennials. What are these shows about? Well they are shows were you learn about sports history, an unsolved crime, or a flamboyant historical character. Wait, isn’t that exactly the same thing as a documentary? No way, these are hip new docudramas.

Remodeling

Remember when your parents decided to remodel your childhood home? It was miserable. They took out all the shag carpeting, fake wood paneling, and avocado green bathrooms and painted the entire house beige. How boring! They probably made you help scrape up all the old wallpaper, pull up the carpet, and repaint. Remodeling was just about the lamest thing you could do and certainly nothing you would do now as an adult.

As a millennial, you watch HGTV, and you don’t remodel your home, you do a “home makeover.”  You go in and remove all the disgusting beige colors your parents thought were cool and replace them with the new, exciting, trendy color of our time: gray.

Being a Handyman

Remember how your dad could fix anything? He would never call a plumber, electrician, or mechanic. He would never even look at an instruction manual. He would always try to show you how to fix stuff, but you just wanted to play with your friends.

Now that you have your own home, you certainly are not a handyman like your old pops was. You are a DIY-er. You also won’t hire someone to work on your house, but that’s just because you are a millennial and you are broke. You also don’t read an instruction manual or one of those home improvement books they used to sell at Home Depot; you look up how to do things on YouTube. As you can see, a DIY-er is completely different than a handyman

Antique Furniture Collecting

Growing up, you parents had antique dressers, mirrors, and chairs. The furniture could have come from grandparents, flea markets, or antique store. Nowadays you don’t want to look like you are living in the past, and nothing screams outdated like filling your home with antique furniture.

 Instead, millennials fill our homes with “reclaimed” furniture, which is completely different than antique furniture. The definition of antiques is “old objects, such as a piece of furniture or work of art, that has a high value because of its considerable age.” “Reclaimed” furniture, on the other hand, is just old junk that has been repurposed. See how much more hip that is?

Farm Fresh

 If there is one thing millennials understand, it’s the importance of farm fresh, pesticide-free, organic, free-trade produce. We understand that mass produced food is not as healthy and may be harmful to the environment. Amazingly, we are the first generation to figure out that getting your produce straight from the farm is the way to go.

Our parents just don’t understand this. They certainly didn’t go to the farmers’ market to get farm fresh. When my parents grew up, they got their food a totally different way. They would…..well now that I think of it, my dad grew up on a farm and grew his own food. And my grandparents…..well come to think of it, my grandma would actually raise and butcher her own chickens in the backyard. But you see, that’s not how you are supposed to do it; you are supposed to go to Whole Foods and spend three to four times as much to buy something that says “farm fresh” on the mass produced packaging.

So there you have it, millennials just do things better. The good news is that I know my children will understand that the way I do things is the best way.