On Presidents Weekend, my wife left town for a “girl’s weekend” where she headed up to Salem, Massachusetts to hang out with the witches and explore creepy, haunted places. Very presidential indeed. This all meant of course that I was having a boy’s weekend with my seven-month-old, Christian and my seven-year-old, Matthew.

Megin left on Friday morning and the day started off pretty eventful, as our dog Niko had somehow gotten a splinter stuck in his paw the size of a chopstick. Thank God for our friend Carla the dog chick, who luckily pried the splinter out of his paw—saving us a trip to the vet. Next, me and the boys took a mid-morning stroll down to the baseball card shop and then we were homebound for the rest of the day waiting on some delivery men to arrive.

Megin and I purchased a washer and dryer (her Valentine’s gift) a few days prior. That’s married life for ya—all Meg wanted this year was to do some laundry. Unfortunately, they weren’t working properly so we had the company come back to take a look. After tinkering with some buttons, it was given a clean bill of health but they stopped working again several hours later. So, we called again and they agreed to come back with new units. We also bought Christian a new crib as he had grown out of his bassinet and the new crib (along with a new toy chest for Matthew) was also scheduled to be delivered and put together on Friday…

R&J Appliances came with the new units (tracking a whole bunch of mud all over my floors), and yippee—spin cycle time! Kiddie World brought the crib as soon as I was done mopping the floor. Yippee—nap time! After all that screwing and nailing, me and the boys were really living dangerously—we had dessert before dinner.

My indoor S’mores have become a favorite of Matty Boy as you see from the pic here, and I came up with a real easy way to make them. Three steps: 1.) Pre-heat your oven to 250 for ten minutes and then turn it to “warm” mode. Insert a tray of Log House Candiquik chocolate and after another ten minutes the blocks of chocolate will get to a silky, liquefied consistency. 2.) Take some graham crackers and spread Jet-Puffed marshmallow cream (it’s smoother than Fluff), on top. 3.) Drizzle on the chocolate and close with another cracker to make your S’mores. Better than being by the campfire and no chance of burning the kids! (Although if Megin was there she probably would have been disappointed because without a campfire you can’t really gather round and tell scary ghost stories.)


After that madness, we had dinner (Chinese food) and played an exciting game of “Tic Tac Throw” since we couldn’t seem to locate the poker chips. Then, we were gonna pop in a tape of my fourth birthday party but I couldn’t get the VCR working. Maybe it was haunted. So we watched a few episodes of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” instead, and then it was off to dreamland for the boys. Meg called me shortly after to check in and to tell me all the new spells she was learning so she could turn us all into frogs when she came back home.

Day 2 of our weekend, we all woke up and braved the tornado-like winds and walked down to the diner for lunch. Dodging tumbleweeds, we all held on to our meatballs and made it safe and sound. The boys flirted with the waitress for some crayons and made some rockin’ doodles on the placemats. Apparently, all that walking and doodling tired the kids out and they dozed off when we got back for a long afternoon siesta. This enabled me some quiet time to Google meatball tattoo designs (my gift request to my wife - hint - for my 30th birthday in May).

When Meg finally returned, we fired up our Soda Stream Home Soda Maker—a wedding gift from my cousin—and whipped up some homemade Brooklyn Egg Creams. Oddly, Meg wanted to use blood in place of U-Bet syrup to concoct some freaky potion. I told her that in “Psycho” they used chocolate syrup to simulate the blood in the shower scene so it would be okay if we did the same. We enjoyed these fine beverages over witch tales.