I was sitting on the outdoor patio set (a gift from Mum and Stepdad) with a forkful of potato salad (oops, sorry Dan, potatoe salad) en route to my son's mouth.
Ensconced between my son in his highchair and his grandfather, I was completely ignored - along with the potato salad - as the 15 month old boy and the 55 year old man were each trying to outdo the other: one with a gaping maw of partially masticated hamburger, the other with mouth similarly agape, upper and lower dentures extended to the point of caricature beneath his handlebar moustache.
All I could do was gaze forlornly across the table at my wife, fork still raised unseen between the duelists, mourning the divestment of what few manners we had thus far inculcated in our son.
My dad and stepmum had been cordially invited over for a Sunday supper of burgers (Superstore bulk frozen pack of 20 for $7.99!) and, as has been inferred, potato salad.
Nothing says welcome to our house like a naked baby in a diaper, just woken from his nap, taking one look at his grandparents seated across the room from him, bustin' into tears, pulling his mom's sucky blanket over his head and not coming out until coaxed with a bottle. Maybe it was the fact that Grandpa needs a haircut and doesn't sport the velcro coif with which his son's head is adorned. Or maybe it was waking to see his parents had spent the better part of the day cleaning the house and, lo and behold!, there's a visible Brave New World through them thar winders, once the dog snot, hand prints and ...did that used to be banana?... have been scraped and Windexed off.
The unnatural refulgence of the setting sun showcasing the (mostly, still) doghair-free carpet must have been too much for the stalwart little fella.
Retiring to the patio while I cooked up the patties, the rest of the family entertained themselves with the ping pong paddle-sized bug zapper that is worth way more in entertainment value than the $3.99 that was paid for it. Each of us taking a turn, our Kournikova-esque flailings were infrequently rewarded with the satisfying FLASH-POP-Hisssssss of a yellow-jacket wasp encountering its demise upon the charged wires of our deadly zapper. I felt some small amount of shame in admitting that I had previously tried it out with a daddy-longlegs spider. It's just so much fun though! It can truthfully be said that, so violent is the insect's death, the very last thing to go through its mind is its ass.
(Yes, I've also tried it out on myself, since most guys have that sort of innate curiosity about things that will quite obviously be painful but you just don't KNOW until you try it. And yes, it bloody hurts.)
Our boy has gotten rather proficient at handling a fork on his own and, with his hamburger cut into little bits for him, was deftly stabbing and eating his own dinner last night. Having quite obviously overcome the earlier fear of his grandparents, and being spurred on with encouragement from Grandpa, Declan demonstrated no qualms in showcasing his ability to compromise the integrity of his food with nothing more than six front teeth and a whole lotta gumption.
Earlier in the day, for lunch, he had shown up his dad by downing a highchair tray full of grapes faster than I could my own full bowl of the same. His mouth and cheeks full with up to four or five grapes at a time, he seems to have overcome the gag reflex and can swallow them whole; a skill he has already demonstrated amply in his consumption of rotini pasta. I shudder at the thought of him at 18 with a pint of beer in hand and being goaded by a table of friends, "C'mon Dex, I betcha can't do it again!" My own 'boat racing' days at university infiltrating my thoughts.
And so did I find myself with a forsaken forkful of potato salad hovering suspended between two males separated by 54 years in age, but not in maturity. Eschewing his chewing for the more immediate gratification of a denture-extruding grandfather, Declan kept his eyes wide and innocent as he quickly transformed his Salisbury steak into See-Food for the amusement of his elders.
Which left me to lean back and finish the salad on his behalf, sharing occasion glances with Amy across the table as we realised that our son has three sets of grandparents, leaving the two of us alone to fight a largely uphill battle against seven individuals naturally allied against us.
Lawd he'p us.
Comments