When I got there, the class instructor was shocked and joyed to have a "daddy" there. Seems men at these classes are a rare and wonderful thing. Out of 9 parents there, I was the only man, and my son was one of two boys out of ten kids. We had some food related games and then the kids helped spread pepperoni and cheese on a class pizza to eat there, then used various items to turn two pieces of naan into "pizza faces" while the class pizza cooked. We took the pizza faces home and cooked them for lunch afterward.

They put out chopped red cabbage for hair, but they also put out big leaves of basil for ears. I borrowed a knife from the instructor's assistant and cut some basil into strips to use as hair. Much cooler... and more flavorful.

Tonight, I defrosted some pork chops and let my son help me do some of the prep work. They're the super-thick chops you get at Costco, so I butterflied them into a more manageable thickness, then he helped me scoop spices to make a dry rub.

1/4 cup brown sugar
1 rounded tablespoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons granulated garlic
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
1 teaspoon kosher salt

I sprinkled the rub onto the chops to make sure he didn't spill it all over or dump half the mix on one chop, but he helped me pat it into the meat. Then we washed our hands, covered the plate with plastic wrap, and let the rub do its magic in the fridge for 45 minutes.

I fried the chops in just enough butter to coat the bottom of the pan. I saw a thing on "America's Test Kitchen" where they said the secret to juicy pork chops it to cook them over lower heat. Bringing them up to the doneness you desire more slowly wrings less of the natural moisture out of them. I've found it works.

And doing it with my rub and some butter leaves this mixture of butter, sugar, pork fat, and just a little bit of pork juices in the pan that's a perfect medium for cooking up a couple of sliced onions while you let the chops rest. I defrosted and drained some frozen chopped spinach, then threw it in with the onions at the end to warm.

Served the chops on a bed of the onion/spinach mixture with a squeeze of lime. Mmmm. This is the second time I've done this rub on pork chops and my wife tells me it's a keeper. The boy likes it too and he likes being a part of the process.

Today as I was driving home, I had an interesting chat with him.

Son: Daddy, who drawed all of this?

Me: Who drew all of this? Like here, where we live?

Son: Yeah.

Me: Well, I guess God drew it.

Son: God drew it on a piece of paper and then made it real.

Me: That's an interesting idea.

Son: Yeah, that's what He did.

NEW TLC TV SHOW LOOKING FOR KIDS WHO HAVE SWALLOWED FOREIGN OBJECTS!

TLC is producing a special for TV about kids who have swallowed foreign
objects.

Has your child ever swallowed something they weren't supposed to? A quarter, a toy, hair clip, battery, your cell phone etc?

If so, we'd LOVE to hear from you! However you, or your doctor MUST have an X-RAY showing the object that your child swallowed to be considered for the documentary.

Email Megan a brief summary of your story and your contact info.

This just struck me as generally funny, which is why I forwarded it to a few friends, but my friend Randy Cassingham pointed out the whole cell phone bit.

I'm often coming up with funny designs or jokes for my grown up audience, but I'm a dad too (two boys) and sometimes I just come up with stuff for them like cute or silly songs.

Here's a new series of designs branded around the phrase "Born To Plunder™". They feature baby/toddler pirates and teddy bear pirates. I hope you enjoy them.

Born To Plunder Logo Shirt by gbulmash
design your own tshirt On zazzle.com

Born To Plunder - Teddy Bear Pirates & Treasure by gbulmash
Create a personalized t-shirt Using Zazzle

Born To Plunder - Baby Pirates Swinging by gbulmash
Design Custom T Shirts At zazzle.com

Born To Plunder - Baby Girl Pirates & Treasure by gbulmash
Many more t-shirts online at www.Zazzle.com

Born To Plunder - Baby Boy Pirates & Treasure by gbulmash
Buy a tee shirt online from zazzle.com

"Come watch one of the best car chases ever filmed."

He came, sat down on the couch, and I unpaused the movie. "It's 106 miles to Chicago. We've got a full tank of gas, a half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." And the fun began.

I have no idea how many cars got smashed in the process of making that sequence. I could probably look it up on IMDb, but I'm too lazy. "A lot" is an exact enough number for me. I also got to see the falling/flying station wagon. And I got to share it all with my son.

That was a good Sunday.

On the range, a pan with about 12 cloves of garlic slow-cooking in oil over low heat to be used in a pork marinade. I'll marinate the pork overnight and use it in a stew tomorrow.

On the other side of the range, 6 baby bottles in an assembly line to get filled with formula. Normally I make the bottles right before I go to bed, but that's the kind of thing you think about as a dad... "I should probably make the bottles before I handle the raw pork."

Volcano Smokey's Pizza Place by Greg Bulmash is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.brainhandles.com/contact-us.

At Volcano Smokey's pizza place
There was a din-o-saur meeting space
Where all the triceratops would go
To see the famous singing bronto
The T-rex would play the stand-up bass
While raptors on drums would rock the place
The dinosaurs danced with such grace
At Volcano Smokey's place

Pterodactyls flew through the dusky blue
Shining spotlights in the twilight
By the gingko roots they played silver flutes
On pizza they dined while the starlight did shine

The big sauropods stomped
Little fabrosauri romped
And the allosaurus chomped
On a big plate of pasta all covered in cheese

In moonlight, as the dino-band played, love entered the room
Indosaurus danced with Vulcanodon and swept away the gloom

They danced 'til night was done
And nobody had to run
All the dinos had some fun
At Volcano Smokey's great pizza place.

Took him about 36 hours to recover (mostly), and everything seemed to be on the up and up, until Saturday morning, when my older boy and I were struck down. He threw up all over his toys while I... let's just say I was thankful the Immodium worked.

My poor wife. She hasn't had any symptoms, but she had to contend with a two-month-old who is needy at the best of times, a barfing four-year-old, and her back-up was running a 101 fever and sleeping all day, getting up here and there to drink some Gatorade or ginger ale.

Right now, I'm watching the baby so my wife can get some sleep. She put him down at 9 and went up to bed, but he's been up and down for the last two and a half hours. I think I finally got him down for a good nap. So far he's been good for about 30 minutes.

This will not affect the next chapter of Hell on $5 a Day. I've basically got the next three chapters ready to go (18 still needs a little work), so don't worry.

The thing that bugs me was that I was going to start a new diet on Monday, and have been prepping a diet blog to help me stay the course, the way publishing my novel here has been helping me stay the course with that.

But even if I'm feeling better, you don't radically alter your diet right after a stomach bug. Gotta give your body a couple of days to recover its equilibrium. On the plus side, if I move my start date to the next Monday, it means I can have some beer while I watch the SuperBowl.

Now I've got to go deal with the little man who's trying to pry my head open.

For me, this morning, it was the Nicholas Cage stinker Next. At one point, he and Jessica Biel were driving through the rain and one of them said "I like rain."

I was walking the boy around and started singing to him: "I like rain..." And this song (link to MP3 of me singing it acapella - 25 seconds, 200k) developed.

I Like Rain

I like rain
Rain on my face
Rain in my hair
All over the place

Nobody likes a rainy wet butt
So don't rain on my pants.

And if you liked this one, you'll probably like the fart song I made up for my older boy.

That reminded me of a problem we had when we tried to get my oldest to stop sucking his thumb. A teacher at his day care decided to make him him wash his hands every time she caught him sucking his thumb. This helped control the daytime thumbsucking, but it had an unintended consequence.

He was also being potty trained at that time, and both we and the day care insisted he wash his hands after going potty. Unfortunately, this teacher had taught him to associate hand washing with punishment, so he never wanted to go potty because he'd have to wash his hands afterward. This made potty training more difficult.

So take it from this dad. If you're trying to get your kid to give up thumbsucking and need a punishment, make them sit in the time out corner on their thumbsucking hand for 5 minutes, but don't make a positive behavior like hand washing a punishment.

My son, a.k.a. "twoboo", was born yesterday, tipping the scales at 9 pounds, 11 ounces...

... ten fingers, ten toes, and one stylin' hair do.

Last week, there was a Shelby Cobra, red with white rally stripes, in the parking lot at the supermarket. My 3-and-a-half-year-old was mesmerized. He spotted it the moment we pulled into the lot and said "Daddy, I want the red car." I could only second the emotion.

I'm turning 40 in a few weeks, have another kid due a few weeks after that, and I'm trading in my Elantra GT (which I bought because it looked like a Saab 9³) on a CR-V LX with AWD today.

Instead of getting a Corvette and a pretty new wife with even newer breasts, I'm buying a sensible car and sticking with the gal what brung me to the dance. Best I can do is get it in red and put side steps on it (mostly to help pregnant wives and small children get in and out of the car, but with a bonus of them looking sort of cool).

Is the CR-V really a "mom car" as I saw someone call it on one forum when I was Googling to see what people had done with their V's?

Has anyone done any interesting paint, lowered one, jacked one up, put rally stripes on one? I'd love to see one with rally stripes.

Has anyone strapped on a turbo charger, run a dyno after putting on a CAI, anything?

When I was thinking about the Mazda5, I could find lots of discussions on performance and appearance mods. But for the CR-V... not much.

Help!! Aside from an Obama bumper sticker (he's popular with the young folks, I hear), what can I do to make it look cooler? Do you have URLs for sites where there are pictures of pimped CR-Vs that I can use for inspiration.

Help!

If the plate is hot enough that you feel the need to caution us about it, then it's too hot to put directly in front of a three-year-old. What is so hard to understand about that? It's not like this is an item off the regular menu either. It's off the children's menu. It's obviously for a smaller child. What part of "child" don't you understand?

And this isn't at Tony Roma's only. This is all over the place. This is a fairly regular occurrence. They're putting the plate down in front of a freakin' toddler while cautioning us about how hot it is, and nothing is clicking in their minds.

If it's off the children's menu and the plate is hot enough to warrant a "hot plate" warning, move the food to a cool plate before you bring it out. How hard is this to understand or to make part of your employee training?

We got a portable air conditioner a while back, and when it gets this hot, we trundle it out to cool down our bedroom. Because my wife wasn't feeling well, I experimented with putting it up on a table and blowing it out over the bed, so she could lay down and cool off. We have a fairly tall bed (top of the mattress is at the bottom of my ribcage and I'm 6' tall), so when it was on top of the table, the cold air vent was just a little higher than the top of the mattress.

It worked within reason and seemed to be more effective on cooling the room overall than when it's on the floor, but the vent wouldn't blow straight out. It blew slightly upward. And due to logistical issues, the AC unit couldn't be right at the foot of the bed. Thus the cold air was blown upward above the bed, not providing much more direct relief from the heat than how it cooled the room.

At bed time, we were both hot, and though the AC's thermostat read that the room was at 75, I was still sweating when I laid on the bed. I came up with the idea of attaching a spare bedsheet over the AC unit and extending that to the bed. The cold air would be trapped by the sheet and blow out from under it, getting cool air directly onto the bed where it was most needed.

It worked beautifully. We could put our feet under the sheet and cool them down, which helps cool the body, and then the cool air flowed up up our bodies. After a minute or two of cold air washing over her, my wife turned to me and asked if she'd recently told me how much she loved me. I was too busy chilling my man parts to reply. If you're a man who hasn't known the joy of a sustained blast of cool air washing over your man parts on a hot day, let me highly recommend it. Cool man parts are happy man parts.

I believe my wife felt the same way about her newly cooled lady parts, which is why she was reminded of how much she loves me. Ahhhh, cool man parts and the love of a good woman. Is there anything better?

Of course, this state could not be sustained. With cold air, "too much of a good thing" is a very real concept. But in that brief period of joy, brought to us by my improvised Wind Tunnel of Love, we could forget it was "bite someone's head off" hot outside and just enjoy life for a moment.

If a machine makes egg burritos, then veggie burritos, they have to note on the veggie burrito label that the machine that made them also processes egg. Normally, they clean the machines pretty thoroughly, but if they screw up, someone with an egg allergy could eat that veggie burrito, thinking it was safe, and end up in the hospital with their throat swelling shut.

So, before I feed my kid anything, I always have to check the ingredients not just for eggs, but to see if the food was potentially exposed to eggs. We were going to try that new pasta from Pizza Hut, so we checked the allergen information. Half of their dough choices, all of their sauces, and five out of their seven meat options all either have potential egg exposure or have egg in them. So Pizza Hut is now banned from my house.

But Trader Joe's just shocked me. A package of pre-cooked pot roast... not even with gravy. Just a vacuum sealed lump of pot roast. Potential egg exposure.

Banana chips... Potential egg exposure.

A can of black beans... Potential egg exposure.

A package of refrigerated soybeans in the shell... Potential egg exposure.

When you go into Trader Joe's, finding a prepared item that's safe for someone with allergies is an adventure. And if you're a Vegan, you better think twice about Trader Joes.

It annoyed me when I couldn't buy a single type of Oroweat bread because they refuse to segregate the few products they make with egg from all their products that could otherwise be considered egg free. But to find an entire supermarket that's an eggy landmine... I won't be going back to Trader Joe's for a while.

Sigh.