#same thing happened with spiders georg no emails back for like 4 years of the print and when i finally did get back

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

Just received your print of the egg man speech in the mail, it was a gift for my brother who can recite the whole thing from memory. Needless to say he was very satisfied with the gift, and me and my siblings sat around it for 10 minutes cackling, till our mom showed up and we scattered. His room mates are jealous of it and want their own. 10/10 thank you <3

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sjfgjsfdhsfshd thank you! glad it could bring joy to your beloved gremlins

for the rest of ya, this is the print in quastion:

it looks like this

[iamsoneurotic]

Kids are gross.

I figure I’m long overdue for an update.

I don’t even know where to begin. There’s so much changing about these boys that it’s almost not worth trying to list. Short version: I have a 2 year old, a 4 year old and a world full of stress!

Let’s begin with the little bug, Noli. He’s gone through phases – He loved Curious George, he loved Thomas the Train… But oh me oh my, no love compares to his obsession with Spider-Man! I wish I could pinpoint the moment it happened. I want to say in an effort to silence one of his Cthulhu-level tantrums we shoved an iPad in his face and YouTubed Spider-Man footage from the movies. Love at first site. Honestly, who can know these things though. My memory has always sucked and poor Rachael is reaching record-breaking levels of mom-brain. These dang kids have obliterated her ability to perform simple brain functions like string a series of words together to complete a sentence. Sometimes I hear her mumbling “Abort, Retry, Fail?” in her sleep. I wonder if she can be restored to factory settings…

So as I said, Noli is obsessed with Spider-Man. He wears a Spider-Man cape, he has two Spider-Man stuffed dolls (a large one named Spider-Daddy and a small one named Spider-Baby) and he has a pair of red & blue shoes which are simply called Spider-Shoes. He pretends to shoot webs from his hands as well, something I’m rather proud to have taught him because while it appeared I was teaching him a cool superhero thing, I was secretly just teaching him to throw up the horns and rock n’ roll.

Milo does it too – because, as brothers do, they mimic everything the other does… and they do this to incredibly annoying extremes. They were in the back seat one day and per usual Noli began ‘shooting his webs’ at Milo, so Milo did it back to him. Rach and I thought it was cute until we realized it was an all out war in the backseat and these two were angrily trying to shoot each other TO DEATH with their imaginary webbing! So within a matter of minutes I realized I had reached that point in life where I spend my car rides yelling at children to stop shooting imaginary webs at each other. This is actually a thing I have to enforce now. “If you shoot your brother with webs again, you’re getting a spank!”

Yes, we spank. I had always been iffy about writing anything about it for fear that some obnoxious crunchy parent would start bombarding my email with complaints of child abuse, but then I realized that A.) I don’t care, and B.) Even if I did care, I highly doubt more than 3 people read this. Whatever, I live in Texas now – At any given time I’ve got about 4 or 5 other parents within shouting distance willing to spank my kids for me if my hands are full. God’s country, baby!

One night when I was getting Noli ready for bed, he grabbed the ‘spanking spoon’ which was within his reach, patted himself on the butt and said “Obey daddy?”… It was funny until I thought about how horrible that would look if he ever did that in public. There’s a lot of things you have to worry about when you’re in public. It used to be the thing you feared most was your child crying or making a scene - that’s all but expected now, but eventually your kids start saying things that aren’t fit for public areas. It’s not even things they’re learning from listening to me – and believe me, there’s a plethora of highly inappropriate words and phrases they should have picked up from listening to me empty their training potties, but the things they say they just figured out by putting sounds together randomly on their own. Noli, for instance (actually all of these things are Noli. Milo is a grammatical angel), started saying “Pop-a-tit”. Nobody knows what it means, nobody knows where it came from, nobody even knows if he knows what he’s saying. It just came to be one day.

The worst is when my mother asked him “Pappa what?”, and he just bluntly answered “Tit!”... Sorry, mom.

Luckily he says that one less frequently, but it just got replaced with something of equal socially unacceptable value: “Poop-shoot toot”. Now, I know where he learned poop and I know where he learned toot… But where in God’s green earth did he learn to string together Poop-shoot?? It doesn’t help that I laugh every time he does it. It’s a dad’s job to delight in his child’s potty mouth when mom isn’t looking.

Whatever though, talking about poop is as common as breathing air in my house. Milo’s almost fully potty trained now and I find myself longing for the days of diapers. When I was little, I’d yell “I’m all done!” when it was time for my tooshie to be cleansed of its own aftermath. Milo, being the ever so elegant child he is, just yells “HEY! WIPE MY BUTT!” ... Again, I find myself realizing my life’s situation as I reply without hesitation, “Hey, it’s wipe my butt PLEASE.”

I don’t even know why I bother trying to teach these kids manners - they’re animals. Children are filthy, disgusting animals. They delight in being gross. They love picking their nose, eating their nails and spitting. Here’s the thing, I can handle a poop, I can handle spit up, I can handle vomit… I can handle a lot of things. But when it involves the nose or the mouth, I immediately start dry-heaving. Even as I’m writing this I’m barely keeping it together so I can just get through this wretched paragraph.

Milo’s favorite place to do gross things is during his soccer games. He knows I’m rendered powerless to do anything about it. I can’t run onto the field and scold him, and there’s just something about being that one parent screaming from the sidelines “STOP EATING YOUR BOOGERS AND CHASE THE BALL!” that makes me uneasy… So I just have to sit there and pretend he’s not my kid until the quarter is over and I can chew him out while he’s on the bench. One time, after he finished doing his absolute worst coal-mining to his left nostril, he looked me in the eye and grabbed another kid’s hand with what I could only imagine to be a finger so moist it would make a sponge swoon. I just stood there, helplessly giving him the meanest dad-eye I could conjure up… But it was ineffective. He knew what he was doing and he knew there was nothing I could do about it. I’m pretty sure the other kid got ebola and died that evening.

Needless to say the “Obey Daddy” spoon came out that afternoon.

In all seriousness though, when he wasn’t infesting other kids with his little kid germs, he did an amazing job playing Soccer. He was the smallest kid on his team but he played his little heart out… And looked adorable doing it. I’ve never been much of a sports guy, but I got really into it when he played. I had to refrain from yelling things like “KILL HIM! KILL HIM, MILO!!” and “KICK HER IN THE SHINS!!!” … It was a co-ed league. And there absolutely was this little brat ginger girl on the other team that 100% needed a good kick in the shin from a 4-year-old. Sweep the leg, son.

I kid, I don’t encourage violence from my children… They learn it all on their own. Noli has grown into quite the bruiser, which is awful timing considering he’s right at the peak of his terrible 2’s. Sure he’s still a cuddle-bug, and adorable, and squishy and the sweetest little thing on the planet, but he also happens to be a little ball of pent up Italian rage. My contribution to the family. His favorite phrases as of late are “No”, “I don’t want to”, “Go away” and “AHHHH!!!!”. Oh, and “Spider-Man”. Though he pronounces it “Cider-Man”.

He sadly inherited my clumsiness as well. He trips and falls while laying down. It’s one of those weird parenting evolutions that happens from first kid to second. The first child falls and you run to him and cuddle him and buy him chocolate and weep because you feel his pain. With the second kid, you find yourself resisting the urge to spank him when he trips on his feet for the hundredth time that morning and lands on his face. “Omg, kid, if you’re going to bleed, do it on the tile, not the carpet!”

…

Who am I kidding, our carpet is a lost cause. I don’t even care if they eat food off of it anymore, it’s their own germs they’re eating at this point.

Speaking of germs, I’m glad the school year is over because I’m tired of these little petri dishes bringing home colds from the other kids. What’s worse is they’re probably doing something really gross to get those germs from the other kids. Why are kids so gross! Stop that!

Besides whatever gross activities they’re engaging in with the other children, both Milo and Noli are great at school-related things. Like Math. Noli’s report card had a section for “Counts to 10” and the “10″ was scribbled out and replaced with a “20”... Because my 2 year old is mad smart just like his older brother. Milo likes to routinely count to a hundred by 1’s, 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. For a brief moment I heard him counting by 6’s, but he saw that I took notice and started picking his nose and blowing raspberries. My boys love fart noises. Noli likes to run up to me, turn his butt in my direction and then exclaim “I poop on you!” and proceed to make all kinds of raspberry noises while shaking his chunky little butt all over my leg. It’s adorable in a shameful kind of way. I enable it though because I do the same thing to his mother.

He’s a funny kid. When he’s not running around singing the Spider-Man song (which he sings: “Cider-Man, Cider-Man, I never Cider-can”), he’s picking up fake phones and pretending to call my brother to order milkshakes. Good lord the boy loves vanilla milkshakes - or as he calls it “Amilla Milshaysh”. His head almost exploded one day when we had my brother buy a milkshake and wait outside the door. We had Noli call him on his cell phone and ask him to bring a milkshake, and when he asked, my brother busted open the door like Commando Santa Clause and granted his wish. Now whenever the doorbell rings, he thinks my brother is at the door with sugary beverages. We teach our kids disappointment at an early age.

We have to roll his window up when we’re at the Starbucks Drive-Thru now because he keeps trying to ask for vanilla milkshakes while we’re trying to order.

Anyway, this barely scratched the surface of how much they’ve changed, but you get the gist: Boogers, Spider-Man, Milkshakes.

Animals, ~ Mark