Marauding Rugrats

GeekHaus Child Infiltration Test Alpha — Passed

This weekend marked the first time we, and our home, has had children under three over for a visit and although the apartment survived without any damage, the same can’t be said for HoBiscuit and I. In fact, the looks of terror on our faces as the small children ran rampant throughout our house was enough for the parents of said children to fall to the floor in fits of uncontrollable laughter.

They even pointed. And did spit-takes.

Saturday was our baby-test, where our friends with a nine-month-old baby came over to visit. Before I get into details, let me say that this little girl is very, very cute. So cute that I find myself questioning whether there might have been a mix-up at the hospital leading to my friends taking home the wrong baby. I mean, my friends aren’t Quasimodo and Medusa, but still… for them to have such an adorable baby must be some sort of crazy cosmic joke on me. I swear, if my baby is ugly I’m going to find a way to suck some of the cuteness out of their baby and inject it into mine. Heck, I might just do it anyway to give my little girl a leg up on the cute baby competitions at the playground. And I’m telling you, those playground mothers are fiercely competitive!

They scare me.

So, this nine-month-old bundle of cuteness comes over on Saturday and HoBiscuit and I are so frightened of her that we can barely bring ourselves to sit down near her. At one point, her parents needed to change her diaper and offered to allow HoBiscuit or me do it as ‘practice’. I jumped and ran away so fast that there was a whistling noise as the air rushed to fill the space I had occupied in the room. Later, after they had gone home, I felt the need to hose down my leather couch to remove all the drool she had left behind as a memento of her visit.

Yeah, I’m a little bit of a neatnick.

On Sunday some other friends came over with their 18-month old and two and a half year old boys. The main difference between these two boys and my other friends’ little girl, aside from the plumbing, is that the boys are what they call ‘toddlers’. That means they can stand up and walk under their own power.

O. M. G.

I never knew children were so fast! I honestly believe these boys were planning trouble before they arrived at the apartment. They had to have had a plan of attack that they worked out beforehand, with PowerPoint slides and topography maps and everything, because they almost instinctively knew where to go to make every adult in the room jump up after them shouting, “No! No! No!”

I think that was their favorite game.

And, I now know that one day the human race will definitely find a way of traveling faster than the speed of light, or perhaps inventing some sort of instantaneous transporter, because these two kids could get from point A to point B so fast I had to learn how to blink without letting my eyelids meet. They would literally be sitting down on the rug at our feet, happily playing with some cars or something and the very next millisecond they would be across the room trying to lick a power outlet. Meanwhile, mom and dad are doubled over laughing so hard at the scared-out-of-our-minds look on both HoBiscuit and my faces that they can’t even manage to stop the 18 month-old boy from grounding goldfish snacks into the carpet and then eating the powdery residue off the floor. Why didn’t I ever notice how horrible children were before HoBiscuit got pregnant?

Holy crap, what am I going to do when I’m a father?