Initially I was suppose to go on a trip to NYC with my wife, her sisters, and their respective husbands.  However, due to certain things that can not be mentioned in this blog, the husbands were uninvited and my wife’s female cousins took our place.  I have no desire to go to New York so it didn’t bother me that much, besides it never hurts to have the “you went to New York for five days” as a card to play when needed.  That being said, who was going to watch my kids? I need daily me time and my two kids were not going to have any of that, especially since my oldest refuses to go anywhere in our house unaccompanied by an adult.  There’s a word for him, but that may offend the three female readers currently reading this blog, although if I haven’t lost them yet, they may be here to stay.

Thursday at noon my wife jetted to NYC and I was left on kid duty until Monday morning.  Thursday went by smoothly primarily because I allowed them to each purchase a movie at Meijers to watch that evening, my oldest opted for Cars 2 and my youngest picked a Shrek Halloween DVD.  There’s an old saying that goes “while the cat’s away the mice play!”  My saying is “when Shirley is away I throw things out.”  A few years back  I ordered a roll off container so I could empty our house of unneeded shit.  You would think my wife grew up in the depression as difficult as it is for her to part with anything.  My attitude on the other hand is if I have any reservations about tossing something out I pitch it.  After I had finished filling up the roll off container with our unneeded items, Shirley came to me upset because I had thrown out her green bag.  I said you mean that green bag that you haven’t used in two years?  Yes, that green bag.

On Saturday morning I realized the clock was ticking and I only had 48 more hours to rid the house of things that served no purpose other than collecting dust and taking up space.   For some reason I decided to start with my closet which Shirley has no interest in.  It took me roughly an hour to get it organized and decide what to donate to goodwill and what to keep.  In the end I actually donated one slalom water ski glove along with a lot of other stuff.  Do you think they actually try to sell one glove?  What do you think they do with all of the socks they get that don’t have a match?  Do they just put them with other socks that are unmatched?  Oh, these look good together.  I have a feeling that if you are purchasing socks from goodwill, matching pairs are the least of your concerns.  Yeah doc, I knew I was taking a pretty big risk buying gently used socks from goodwill, who would have thought you could get an STD from a sock?

The next item on the agenda took a bit more courage than my closet task.  I’m not sure if anyone out there has done this, but I pulled our bed back from the wall and almost threw up.  Now, we aren’t the cleanest people, but we aren’t the type of people who just leave piles of dog shit lying around, at least not piles that are in plain view.  There was an empty yogurt container, a pacifier (it’s been two years since Ted had a pacifier), and a whole lot of smegma.  I spent about fifteen minutes cleaning the baseboard, vacuuming, and eradicating stubborn smegma that had worked it’s way into the carpet.

I’m not trying to brag hear but we actually have a coat room with lockers, it’s quite amazing, unless you are one amazon purchase away from being a hoarder, then it is no longer a coatroom but a place that causes unnecessary anxiety due to it’s disorganized state.  On one side of the coat room we have a wall that has a contraption that was an add on that has 9 drawers to house various odds and ends.  I wasn’t planning on eradicating the coatroom of it’s clutter but once I brought some hats down to put in the drawers I realized it had to be done.  The contents of the drawers were primarily winter ware, specifically hats, gloves, and scarves.  There were at a minimum 60 pairs of gloves and mittens and at least 20 hats along with a number of scarves and even some hoods to coats that we may not even possess any longer.  As I made my way through the winter wear I asked myself this, “Do designers intentionally make women’s winter hats ugly or is this done by accident?”  All my wife’s hats are hideous but I obviously couldn’t discard all of them, so I left her the two that were the least objectionable.  If she doesn’t like those she can wear the hoods that I didn’t throw out, they will look a little strange without the coats they came with, but they will get the job done.

The rest of Saturday was fairly uneventful but the kids were a bit disappointed because the didn’t get to go to jurassic quest.  Somehow, Jurassic quest, which I was planning on attending with my mom and sister and the kids, was sold out.  Hell, if it sold out it must be awesome, right?  My logic was quite flawed and I should have used my personal experience to realize sold out does not necessarily mean awesome.  Jimmy Buffet concerts sell out and they are the opposite of awesome, I’m ashamed to say this, I have attended two of his concerts, but in my defense I was black out drunk the first one so that’s probably why I agreed to attend another one.  The black out drunk one was by far the better experience.

I decided to order tickets for Sunday so that the kids wouldn’t be disappointed and so that I would have something to threaten taking away form them to use as leverage to get them to behave somewhat until Sunday afternoon.  Unfortunately, I didn’t do any research and thought hey I should probably purchase VIP tickets for them so they can do all the cool stuff.  Prior to attending Jurassic Quest we had to make a pit stop at my parents for dinner, now there is a lot of reasons I wanted to tell my mom no thanks, but the primary reason is that she has attempted to give and get me to read parenting books on two occasions.  Do I have a complex about my parenting due to this?  Hell yes I do and bringing my kids to my parent’s for dinner could only end in complete disaster.  Sure enough, we get to my parents and my kids immediately start demanding things without saying please.  I want some….. which would be a fine way to ask for something if it was followed by please, but it wasn’t.  This immediately got things off on the wrong foot.  However, Tod needed to bring it up a notch and said as loud as he could while my mom was in the kitchen and we were in the adjacent dining room, “Grandma’s food is gross!”  Fortunately my mom is Dutch and has no feelings so I’m pretty sure his comment bounced right off from her and was a merely a negative reflection on my parenting.  Can’t wait to see which parenting book she gets me this Christmas.  My mom’s go to drink for lunch is sparkling grape juice that looks like wine, not sure why this is, but she loves it.  Unfortunately, my kids don’t share this love and let her know about it immediately. Strike two!  For dessert my mom made an apple pie, her apple pie is the best around,  she is a wizard when it comes to baked goods.  “We don’t like apple pie, we want raspberry pie!”  Strike three!

Ultimately, I skated out of my parents as quickly as possible and made my way to Devos place for jurassic quest.  Upon arrival there was a line that could only be rivaled at the Secretary of State’s Super Center in Centerpoint mall.  However, the people who hang out at the Secretary of State’s office are of a much higher quality than the people comprising the line at Jurassic quest.  I patiently waited in line all the while realizing this was an epic mistake, I have made a lot of poor decisions as a parent, hell I even thought about taking my kids to Thor this weekend, but even if I had done that, going to Jurassic Quest was the worst decision as a parent I have ever made.  All I can think is that the people who created this thing new it sucked, but they also knew if they created price tiers and priced it just right they could get people to believe it was going to be great family entertainment.  The VIP pass was $30 per kid.  At $30 it has to be close to the amount of fun you would have at an amusement park since it is similarly priced.  To add insult to injury, an adult ticket is $16.  My guess is the majority of the people attending heard $30 a ticket and thought hell this has to be worth getting a couple of months behind on lot rent, we can get caught up when we get our tax returns back.

As we entered the main exhibition hall we were greeted by an animatronic dinosaur that was fairly large and my oldest seemed genuinely frightened, living up to what I had earlier labeled him in this blog.  My youngest wasn’t phased at all and we gradually made our way around the dinosaurs that were put on display.  Jurassic quest was basically the Ionia Free Fair crammed into 10,000 square feet accompanied by a bunch of rubber dinosaurs.  On top of that, the thing was being run by a bunch of carnies, now I know what they do in the off season.  After making our way through the dinosaurs the kids finally settled on going into one of the bounce houses.  The line was equally as long as the line to get in and when we finally reached the front there was an impoverished looking women with a whistle “you all know the rules of the bounce house?”  I thought to myself that they couldn’t be all that complex if she knew them off the top of her head.  “You get two minutes in the bounce house and when I blow the whistle you have to gets out of the bounce house.”   Immediately I started thinking of ways I could bribe my kids and get them to willingly leave.  Ice cream, Thor, a Porsche when they turn 16?

Honestly, my kids didn’t even seem to enjoy the bounce house all that much and Ted even said he was sick of waiting in lines.  However, they did spot the dinosaur shaped balloons that were filled with helium and looked to have the life expectancy of the women running the bounce house.  The balloons were listed at $6 a pop, seemed a bit steep but they may as well get something out of this whole debacle.  When I told the guy I wanted two dinosaur balloons he told me $31.  I would have told him to F himself had I not had my kids with me (the $6 balloons were the ones you take home and blow up yourself, the only thing worse is a take and bake pizza) I just walked away.  Lets get out of here kids, I think we can catch the next showing of Thor if we hustle.