Pace Yourself

Mars Bar,

Let me start by saying that I received a very passionate letter today on behalf of the name Bear. Just need like a thousand more like it and we might get your mom's attention.

We opened presents today (your mom worked on Christmas). For a dude who's got two weeks left in utero you cleaned up. Frankly it got a little excessive around here. I think we're going to have to put the brakes on things before next year. Nixie has suddenly gone from one little stuffed cat that she hauled everywhere to a whole army of fuzzy and crying creatures that must be at her side at all times. She won't eat breakfast until they're all arranged where they can see. She ferries them between rooms like an army. And because they're all very important Ripples enjoys kidnapping and hiding them. It's kind of a recipe for disaster.

Last night I was thinking about things like your middle name, what kind of cell phone I'd really like to have, and other important trivialities when a friend sent me this trip report from some guys out of Salt Lake who'd spent three months hiking across two Alaskan mountain ranges and three glaciers, two of which had never been crossed, and then paddling out to sea before working construction to earn gas money to drive home. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if someone were following me around with a tape recorder and they forced me to listen to half the crap I end up talking about. Forget waterboarding, I'd probably tell you anything just to keep from having to hear myself. The drawbacks of stainless steel refrigerators with black sides, the merits of LCD vs. Plasma, the weird bulge in the realtor's slacks on House Hunters, how do these things even merit the energy it takes to fire my neurons?

You're about to complete the journey from a little bundle of cells to screaming crap machine in just thirty nine weeks. That's a pretty breakneck pace when you think about it. My best advice is to keep it up. If anything, go faster. It's a whole lifetime you've lived in these last nine months. These guys stuffed one into just three.

Mojo!

Mars Bar,

We should probably talk about your middle name for a minute. I thought I was over Mojo, but it's been keeping me up at night. I think it's keeping your mom up also, but only because she hates it so much. I may have used up all my crazy points on Mars.

Your sister Nixon was supposed to be Nixon Bear Killen, and when I say supposed to be I mean that it was her name for the five seconds between when I thought of it and when your mom shot it down. Then we somehow settled on Jones as her middle name until your mom got cold feet in the final days and out of nowhere assigned her Campbell. One of my life's big regrets, along with thinking I could wear my mom's shoes to school and no one would notice, is not having fought harder for Bear. I feel like if I don't land you Mojo you're going to end up a Ted or a Tom at the last second.

Your mom's pushing Kyle in an attempt to appeal to my vanity. She doesn't seem to understand that I don't really have a lot of fondness for the name. She obviously doesn't remember that the Kyle I know wore women's shoes to 8th grade.

So the leading non Mojo contender seems to be Cooper. It's a great name, it just feels a little overused. I bet there's ten Mars Coopers in your first grade class. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm going to fight the good fight, but I'm a pretty crappy fighter (see above note about my footwear choices). Fear not, if I can't land it for you we'll just have another one. Little Mojo Bear Killen. It's going to be hell trying to find you guys gift shop license plates.

No Way!

Mars Bar,

Christmas Eve here. The girls have pulled much of the wrapping off the presents and all the decorations off the tree. Not that they care what's in side, they're just mildly destructive by nature. Today they were sitting about three feet from each other, hurling legos at one another's heads, and laughing like maniacs. It's like living with very small frat boys. I could tell you to watch out for them in every post and I'd still be underselling it.

Nixie has eliminated the word no from her vocabulary and replaced it with the more specific "No WAY!" More milk Nixie? "No WAY!" You want your shoes off? "No WAY!" Today we were doing last minute shopping at the mall and I was in a hurry so I had them both in the stroller. Nixie prefers to push the stroller while Ripples rides in it (which is admittedly pretty cute) so the whole time I was rushing through the mall Nixie was screaming "NO WAY, NO WAY, NO WAY". I think we got out of there just ahead of Child Protective Services.

Anyway, enjoy a last Christmas in your little liquid world. By this time next year you'll probably be wobbling around like a drunken sailor, dodging sisterly projectiles like the rest of us, and remembering fondly when you had a nice, dark, quiet place to hide.

Some Thoughts Before Your Crash Landing

Mars Bar,

Hey buddy. Two weeks left, huh. Seems like you've gone from rumor to beachball overnight. Your mom constantly points out that that you're significantly heavier than a beachball and that walking around with a beachball wouldn't hurt her back or keep her up at night or make it hard for her to breathe. I've told her that I'm also suffering, and repeatedly showed her this nasty cut on my tongue I got when one of your sisters kicked me in the face (BTW, watch out for your sisters, they'll kick you in the face) but she's incapable of sympathy.

I realize I've done a poor job of keeping you up to date. No news about your newly minted organs. No existential freakouts about becoming a father. No advice on how to choose your genitalia.

The truth is, I'm both busier than I used to be and just as lazy. Having two lip splitting daughters and an actual paying job will do that. In fact, I'm writing to you from the wrong side of a deadline. I had a script due Friday. I told them I could totally hand it in on time, but that I had suddenly realized my main character should be Hitler. Since it was supposed to be a modern day story of self discovery you can imagine how that went over. The upshot is, if you want an extension on something, just threaten to make the main character Hitler. I now have until the day you're born to figure out a non-Hitler solution to my problems.

The point is, I haven't forgotten you. In fact, in exactly the same 'do your homework five minutes before class' way that I've lived the rest of my life I plan to remedy my radio silence. In addition to de-Hitlering my script, wrapping presents, and trying to eat with just the healthy half of my tongue, I plan to shoot you a hello everyday between now and your arrival. Think of yourself as a astronaut about to crash land into a foreign planet and me as mission control trying to give you a quick picture of the natives culture before they show up and start kicking you in the face. With any luck we'll both be ready by the time you pull your rip cord.

Until tomorrow spaceman.

A Brief Note To Suitors

If you ask the girls for a kiss, they will let you lean in, pucker your lips, and then they will headbutt you. I'm willing to put up with this in the hopes that this remains their definition of kissing well into their teenage years.

Proper Anniversary Post

Note: I was supposed to post this on our actual anniversary, but was instead visiting landfills. The idea was to do it yearly to not only remember the fateful day, but to avoid ever having to actually write an anniversary post again. The fact that I'm late my actually be the best possible comment on what it's actually like to be stuck with me.

Some number of years ago, some number of people turned out to watch Amy put on a gorgeous dress and make an incredible mistake. Armed with the courage of an open bar, this is what I told them -

When Amy was in medical school she was assigned partners for each of her various rotations. And from talking to them it sounds like having Amy in your group was a mixed blessing. On the one hand she was likely to make you a pretty nametag that not only told people who you were, but used drawings of little animals to depict your inner self, and stickers with phrases like “You’re Super” and “Neato” to keep your spirits up when times got hard. Someone told me it was like going to work everyday with a cheerleader. The problem was that on most rotations the attending only gave out one A and it turned out that the cheerleader was as smart as she was happy, and anyone who uses the word “Yippe” in conversation is pretty damn happy. And so the next thing they knew her partners would look up and the smiley little blond girl would have taken the A. Her classmates came up with a name for this phenomenon, and that’s how Amy became known in some circles as the Little White Cloud. Some days it’s a puppy, some days it’s a little bird, but it always looks cute and harmless, right up until it rains on your head.

I met Amy when I was in fourth grade and spent the next eight years with the Little White Cloud, so I was intimately familiar with this phenomenon. At some point you just come to accept the fact that she seems to float along while the rest of us have to walk. In fact, after a while, in its own warped way, it almost seems fair. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that you can never really escape the Little White Cloud. The minute I met her I knew that Amy was one in a million. When I went away to school in a city of something like 16 million I figured I had at least a fighting chance of finding another one. But it turns out it’s not really a question of large numbers. As anyone who’s ever met her can attest, Amy is absolutely unique. And that’s when I discovered the second curse of the Little White Cloud: even when it’s gone, it casts an impossibly long shadow. When she’s around you’re desperate just to keep up, and when she’s gone you’re desperate for something that measures up. Either way, there is only one Little White Cloud.

When we actually started dating I fully expected one of two outcomes. Either she would eventually wake up and move on, or I would wake up and discover that it was all a dream and that I actually lived in a small cardboard box. So I’m not positive how we actually ended up here. What I can say is that for the past 8 and ¾ years she has not only tolerated my idiocy, but supported, encouraged, and made cute little nametags for it. What I’ve chosen to do with my life isn’t easy and it certainly doesn’t pay well, and if at any time she had ever asked me to stop, to give it up, I’d have done so in a heartbeat. It’s a testament to just how incredibly lucky I am that the only times she’s used the words "stop" or "give up", they were directly preceded by the word "never".

So the question I get asked most often, right after where are my grandchildren, is why it’s taken almost nine years to get here. Honestly, like most of the people who’ve crossed her path in the past, I think it’s because I’ve spent the last nine years trying to be her equal, when all she’s ever asked is that I be myself. Given that she’s such an incredibly brilliant person, I have no rational explanation for why she’s sitting next to me today, except to say that this must all be in my head. So if, as I’ve suspected all along, this is indeed too good to be true and tomorrow I do wake up in a box I will gladly look around my cardboard home and count myself lucky to have even dreamed of such a person, let alone to have imagined marrying her. I will simply walk down to the nearest liquor store, buy myself a malt liquor, and next the time I find myself staring up at a little white cloud I will raise my Colt 45 and say I knew you were too good to be true. But until then, and for the last time tonight, I will raise this glass and thank you all for making it seem so real. Cheers.

NY People

Amy and I are now in year 12 of what I consider the best first date ever. To celebrate we went to NY. In lieu of gifts we posed for pictures near a landfill. That's how you do it in year 12.

To be fair it was a lovingly crafted landfill, built by some of the most talented landfill technicians in the feature film business and some of Amy's pictures include the back of JF's head (you know, the director, I just don't want to bait the search engines), which is the kind of thing you don't get if you just go to your local landfill for your anniversary. In all I think Amy saw enough of the filmmaking process to grasp how unglamorous and surprisingly smelly it all is. I expect her to pay more attention to locations in my future scripts. 'Would it hurt to put this North Korean prison in Paris?'

Anyway, we got to ditch being parents for a few days and just trying being people again. NY People, which are like regular people but louder and more likely to whistle at each other. Turns out we're both still totally awesome at it. Especially me. I got several compliments on NY Kyle.

And then we came home.

The twins have become obsessed with this sing a long DVD. It was written, performed, and delivered to our car by Satan himself. It's twenty minutes long, it plays on a loop, and it's all I think about. I sing the songs in my sleep. I introduce myself to people as Tempo the Tiger. I can only do mathematical calculations if they're phrased in terms of the number of monkeys still jumping on the bed plus or minus the ones who've already bumped their heads. NY Kyle would never do these things.

Which is why he's dead now. Actually, the DVD just had him on life support. Stacey pulled his plug. Buried him unceremoniously, and, ironically, in a landfill.

I became fascinated with couchsurfing.org as she was planning her own trip to find NY Stacey. Basically, people offer up their couches and floors to strangers, and in turn sleep on the couches and floors of other strangers. This is basically the only way I've ever traveled, and there are no shortage of people with stories about me not getting off their couch to prove it. I can't even go to certain parts of Seattle because a fellow surfer somehow thought a closed bathroom door was a clear indication our hosts wife would NOT be naked on the other side. He was wrong, and I haven't been near UW since. Anyway, with such great experiences, how could I not sign up? So I did.

Stacey's response: Why? You have two kids who go to bed and get up at 7:30, a pregnant wife, and you're asking them to sleep on your dining room floor. Why would anyone want to stay with you? She's basically saying that my life has become so lame that someone in their 20's wouldn't even visit, FOR FREE. Your NY self just isn't going to survive something like that.

Of course Stacey has been walking around in a baseball cap for the last day because she did something to her eyebrows that she absolutely refuses to reveal, and she did just have a 20 minute argument with Amy over whether 'frot' was just a synonym for 'rot' only to have wikipedia reveal it actually refers to homosexual dry-humping. So I'm not going to declare my couch hopeless just yet. There's a Mormon boardgame lover out there somewhere in need of a place to crash.

I guess the important thing to remember from all this is, if a girl with no eyebrows offers you a frotten banana, you should run.