You get up early on the weekend to feed your kids, your old-lady is still in the sack and you want to make some delicious stone-cut oatmeal. Your water is boiling and you go to your pantry to get some dried fruit and honey for flavoring. Your honey looks odd though.

Shitballs. That’s crystallized. You aren’t using that honey today. Or are you?

If you happen to have a baby at home who’s still using a bottle, you’re in luck. Get out that baby bottle warmer, fill it with an ounce of water and drop in your jar of honey:

If your jar doesn’t fit. That’s ok. Set it in the top as best you can and let that steam go to work. A bottle warmer is perfect for this because it gently heats the honey and it’s made so that it won’t melt plastic bottles, so if you’ve a got plastic little bear, his ass won’t melt.

By the time your oatmeal is done, your honey will be perfectly liquid allowing you to easily add it completing a delicious breakfast.

Some of you may remember my son’s colossal biff from a few weeks ago. While it may be tough to top the level of pure failure seen in the first installment, it won’t stop Dominic from selflessly risking life and limb for his daddy’s twisted amusement. Luckily he’s built like a tank. This week, he proves that no equipment is necessary to achieve a truly spectacular biff–just a unique reckless abandon and complete disregard for his trajectory through space and time.

That little “Ask the Dads” link has been up in the header of this blog for two years with nary a submission. I’m here to tell you that It is a cold day in hell, my friends. I believe we have received our first legitimate reader-submitted question. True to my word, I will draw upon my vast three years of fatherhood experience to offer expert advice to this poor soul in dire need of some alone time with his lady-friend.

East Cobb Dad writes:

Sometimes, my baby’s mama & I need some time to ourselves, if you see what I am sayin’.  So, like, what can we do to occupy our son with an outside, like, activity while we interact?

Need an answer NOW,
East Cobb Dad

Well East Cobb Dad, you’ve come to the right place. Little brains are malleable and easy to influence. I have spent the last few months training my son for this exact situation:

At this point, I feel the need to stress the importance of proper ottoman ventilation. Safety first, people.

By providing foodstuffs and a pillow, my son will hide for upwards of 7 minutes before growing bored—plenty of time to take care of any necessary business and make a ham sandwich, at least in my experience.

If for some unknown reason you have a hankering to play some Candy Land before your little romance assassin emerges from his hiding spot, simply summon him forth as seen here:

Before you call Child Services on me, please note Dom’s excitement to play our special game again. Unfortunately, my wife rarely shares his enthusiasm. East Cobb Dad: you’re welcome.

For the rest of you, please feel free to take East Cobb Dad’s lead and use that little “Ask the Dads” button in the header. If your question isn’t horrible, I just might honor you with a response too. After all, without you I’d have to find some other outlet for my recycled humor and false bravado. And for that, I count each one of you as a special little gift.

That’s right, you charlatans, he is. No longer can this injustice be tolerated.

Below is the email I just submitted to Georgia Pacific Consumer Products regarding its Dixie brand Vanity Fair to-go Coffee Cups. They claim it’s their mission to make my life easier, but not only do they sell a coffee cup that leaks when it’s used to consume coffee, they have the audacity to limit my rapier wit to 500 characters or less. Fortunately, I like a challenge. After my email, I have given you, my faithful readers, the unabridged account of this tragedy.  

Product Name: Dixie

Product Type: Cups, On-the-Go

UPC Code: 3187828122

Plant Code: CC28144/25

500 char or less is too limited to express my anguish. My wife switched from PerfecTouch to Vanity Fair disposable coffee cups. They are fancier and eco-friendly; seemed like a win/win. With 315 char left, I can’t discuss what the concept of an eco-friendly disposable cup does to my brain, so I’ll get to it. The act of drinking coffee quickly breaks the seal on the cup’s bottom. Go to www.notoriousdad.com for an unabridged account of my strife. It’s a magical site free of character limitations.

The past two mornings, like all mornings, I poured myself a cup of coffee and carried it around with me while performing my usual pre-work rituals. The only difference was the coffee receptacle. As stated in my email, my wife switched it up this week and went with the fancy Vanity Fair Dixie brand coffee cups instead of our tried-and-true blue-collar PerfecTouch Dixie Grab ‘N Go cups. Don’t ask me why. I guess she likes to keep her shopping trips fresh by challenging the status quo. She also randomly decides we need to rearrange the living room every few months. As I’ve said many times before, she’s too pretty for me, so I just go with it.

Before continuing my story, I need to stop here to point out that I recognize it’s wasteful to use disposable coffee cups when I’m not even leaving the house. If you promise to forgive me, I promise to refrain from calling you a tree-hugging hippie. However, I think we can all agree that calling a disposable coffee cup made from 12% recycled material “eco-friendly” is like hailing BP for its heroic effort to clean our gulf beaches. But as usual, I digress.  

During the course of any given morning, my coffee cup is placed on a number of side tables and counters. When I got home from work today, Kerry pointed out a series of dried coffee rings dispersed throughout the house in incriminating locations: the bathroom, the table in front of the living room mirror, the other bathroom, etc. Now, I’ve never had this issue before, so I decided to run a little experiment.

I filled one of the new Vanity Fair coffee cups with fresh, hot coffee and let it sit on the side-table next to Mac the Truck and Roy the Bengal tiger, as depicted below. I waited 10 minutes. To my disappointment, no coffee ring appeared.  

I gave up and decided to drink my coffee, foolishly assuming that the whole thing was just a figment of my brilliant imagination. However, after taking a few sips, I noticed this:

After cleaning up the coffee rings to keep my wife from having an OCD induced heart-attack, I carried the Vanity Fair disposable cup into the kitchen to investigate. I poured out the remaining coffee and to my horror, I saw this atrocity:

After a painstaking dissection, I found that the bottom of the cup is made of a thin piece of paper wrapped in an even thinner layer of plastic. In minutes, the hot coffee heats the plastic, causing structural weakness. Once the plastic defenses have been breeched, the slightest squeeze of the cup causes catastrophic failure, resulting in what I think the entire coffee-drinking free world will agree is an abomination against all we hold dear.

Now, I’ll allow that it’s possible I have a firmer grip than the average coffee-drinker. Perhaps the Vanity Fair brand is designed to attract a more delicate touch with its dainty floral pattern. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that Vanity Fair was completely unprepared for the unabashed masculinity embodied by my vice-like grip. I ask you, my faithful readers, am I to blame for the raw power that courses through my mighty hands? Can a bird help but fly?

I think you’ll agree that Dixie owes me reparations. As always, I’ll post any response I receive in its entirety.

Dom has finally come down from his sugar-induced mania, giving me some time to reflect on Easter Sunday. As a Christian man, I’m supposed to tell anyone who will listen what I believe. If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I’ve “witnessed” to more people in the past month about how awesome the first season of Walking Dead is than I’ve told about my faith in the last year. I figure if 17 people get through this post, at least I’ve evened up the score between my faith and the zombie apocalypse as topics of conversation. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Now, I know why I’m uncomfortable doing this. Partly because I’m writing on a blog with a tagline stolen from a Notorious B.I.G song, but mostly because I have more questions than I have answers. Those of you who know me well, know that I don’t usually put myself in that situation. I don’t even profess to be a particularly good Christian, so it should come as no surprise that I feel vastly unqualified for the job of “witness”. However, it is Easter, so I’ll step into the batter’s box. For those of you who just groaned, I promise to include an extra fart joke in my next post.

Here I go: while I certainly don’t believe the world is black and white, I do believe in a real moral law that is wholly independent from ourselves. I think at base level, we all know how we ought to behave, but we rationalize doing the other thing all the time. It’s easy to make excuses for ourselves, but the fact remains that we still feel like we need to make the excuses, even when nobody else knows about it.

When discussing this belief with my friends, most disagree with me. Generally their argument goes something like this: society has simply passed down the moral law from generation to generation, therefore no law independent of ourselves is necessary to explain it. I don’t disagree with the premise of their argument. Any parent of a three year-old has to acknowledge that we do pass down a moral code to our children. Without parental intervention, many a play-date would quickly devolve into The Lord of the Flies. I’m just not convinced that my friends’ conclusion necessarily follows.

If Mrs. Robinson, of Rushwood Elementary fame, didn’t teach me that 9×9=81, would it be any less true? Just like I can’t imagine a world where 9×9=137, I can’t imagine a world where cruelty is exalted as a virtue. Please don’t misunderstand me–I admit that people, including me, can be cruel. Incidentally, I also admit that multiplying anything beyond 12×12 in my head is slow going. What interests me is the fact that I feel like both situations have some fundamental truth that I’m measuring my results against.

Unlike Mrs. Robinson, I don’t believe that God is measuring us against a standardized test. Thankfully, I do believe He gives partial credit, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m still a million miles away from how the idea of a moral code leads to the God of Christianity and the importance of Jesus’ resurrection. For now, I will just say plainly that I believe it can. I’m going to refrain from walking you through a deep theological discussion, partly because it’s 11:57 and I’m exhausted, but mostly because it wouldn’t be much of a “discussion” without the interaction. I like sharing ideas and understanding how other people approach their belief system, not talking at people like I have it all figured out. I’m happy to have a real discussion with you about what I believe if you’d like. Just know that I will probably diverge from the topic at hand long enough to recommend that you watch the first season of The Walking Dead.

In the meantime, here are some books that helped shape my beliefs:

• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
• The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins
• What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey

Pictured above is a small fraction of Dominic’s toy menagerie, many of which come from the Schleich product line. Are you familiar with these toy animals? There’s a reason why “Schleich” rhymes with “Reich”–they’re both German, and they’re both evil. All are made from heavy-duty plastic and are anatomically correct. That’s right folks, you read that correctly. Kerry brought home a Schleich Mustang Stallion from her last trip to Target and inadvertently made daddy feel wholly inadequate. Seriously, the smaller mammals I can handle, but the horses and bulls should really come with some kind of a warning label.

The retail prices of Schleich animals range from $5.18 for your standard warthog piglet to $39.95 for the more exotic Giganotosaurus. And they quite literally make every single animal known to man, both living and extinct. There are thirteen different Schleich lions on the first page of the Amazon results alone. They even make mythological beasts, like the Pegasus and the Chimera, just to tempt dads who played Magic: the Gathering during their formative years (not that I know anything about it. . .except that Serra Angels can attack without having to tap).

I was taking inventory of Dom’s toy bin after he went to bed tonight and ran some figures:

((9 Schleich Large Predatory Cats) x (avg $9.99 each)) + ((3 Schleich Elephants) x (avg $9.99 each)) + ($5.18(baby rhino + piglet + baby triceratops + German Shepard pup)) + $24.99(Spinosaurus + Stegosaurus) = The xBox 360 that Daddy didn’t buy

How many people “make it” as zoologists, really? Could there be a bigger waste of money? I haven’t even factored in half of his Schleich animals, let alone his shoddier, made-in-China plastic petting zoo. Just to add insult to injury, I happened upon this little guy tonight:

Pteranodons have three fingers on each hand, and that ain’t the first or third.  

In the name of brevity, I won’t get into his cars, his instruments, or the bin of licensed Disney products, but it’s safe to say that Dom is personally accountable for the fact that Kerry and I have yet to sponsor a third-world child for a dollar a day. I take some solace that in the end, the joke will be on Dominic. When he turns eighteen and asks why there isn’t enough money in his college fund to cover more than three semesters, I will silently lead him down the steps to the basement and point to the 17 tubs of Hot Wheels.

Yep, that’s my little guy who comes flying in at about the :10 mark.  Just to set the stage, the goal was to sprint, land on the springboard and jump over the jump rope, a feat accomplished by the majority of the children. Dom, on the other hand, failed miserably, largely due to the unfortunate body shape that was passed down from his father. The men in my family are built for power, not for speed. . .or coordination.

I also love when Dom totally punks the teacher and denies his high five. What the teacher wanted to celebrate is still beyond my comprehension—I guess maybe the fact that Dom wasn’t concussed? And don’t get me started on the preschool Olympian with the perfect front roll in the forefront of the frame at about :24 seconds in. That little freak-of-nature showoff is intentionally trying to make Dom look even less coordinated by comparison.

In a way, Dom is kind of like the anti-Natalie Portman. He has the raw energy and emotion necessary to be the Black Swan, but lacks the grace required to be believable as the White Swan.

Well, I guess the world needs “mathletes” too.

Before I tell you this story, you need to know two things about my wife:

1. As seen above, she is beautiful even when she’s eating.
2. Besides being a special education teacher, she teaches lyrical dance to high school girls as a side gig.

Without further ado:

I scooped up a pretty fantastic first job out of grad school. I was making decent money, at least compared to my previous gig as a graduate assistant, and I was surrounded by young, fun people. Because this was pre-Dominic, I had all the time in the world to waste after work. I became fast friends with a few of the guys on my new team, and was excited to get to know them a little better. The following is a close approximation of the actual conversation I had with one of my new co-workers about two weeks into my new job—we’ll call him “Dan” because I don’t care if you know his real name:

Dan: Hey Shotzy, we should grab a drink after work sometime.

Me: Sure! Mondays are best because Kerry dances on Monday nights.

Dan: Alright. . .next Monday it is.

Did you notice anything there? At the time, I didn’t either.

Over the next three months, Dan and I became pretty close. He was introduced to my wife, and they quickly got to know each other on a “hugging-to-say-hello” basis. We hung out, we laughed, we drank. Good times were had by all.

Fast forward another few weeks. Here comes the inevitable payoff that you’ve probably already worked out for yourself. The following conversation is another close approximation:

Dan: Hey Shotzy, do you want to go to the Firehouse this Thursday?

Me: I can’t. That’s the night of Kerry’s dance recital.

Dan: Dance recital?

Me: Yeah, she’s a dance teacher—I told you that.

Dan: Ooooooh. . .she teaches dance.

Me (sarcastically): What, did you think she was a stripper?

Dan: (silence)

And there you have it, my faithful readers. Even after getting to know Kerry on a personal level and having explicit conversations about her day job as a special education teacher, Dan thought my wife moonlighted as a stripper. In his defense, she is a hugger, but Varsity Blues aside, how many stripper/teachers are out there? Despite the fervent wishes of 14 year-old boys everywhere, they have to be in the minority. And why would I be so nonchalant about it? Did he think I was bragging? It’s not like I said, “dude, my wife just bought me a new Xbox with the money she makes by rubbing her intimates all over strangers’ Wranglers.”

When asked directly, Dan replied that he thought we were just extremely open-minded. At least his eagerness to hang out finally made sense—I assume he was hoping to get an invite into the Just Teasin’ dressing room.

I’ll be honest. I personally just don’t see it. I mean, my wife is empirically hot, but she’s clearly not tall enough to work the main stage.

Copied below in its entirety is the response I received from the manager of the Highland Heights Panera (last names omitted for no good reason):

Hello Andy

I was very sorry to hear of your recent experience at our Highland Heights Panera. The product you received is certainly not up to the standards we hold here, and it was entirely unacceptable. I am most certainly reviewing this with my staff. With the new chicken noodle recipe, the all natural ingredients do tend to settle at the bottom, and poor portioning is certainly to blame here.

I would, of course, like to offer compensation for the poor experience your family had with us. I would like to discuss this further with you if you wouldn’t mind giving me a call at 440-484-4170.

Thank you for your comments and for the enjoyable read,

Sarah

General Manager

Highland Heights

Panera Bread

Sarah did a lot of things right in her response:

• She didn’t begin with lazy stock language
• She took ownership of the issue and addressed it directly
• She worked in the phrase “all-natural ingredients” with a straight face
• She acknowledged my email was enjoyable (I also would’ve accepted “hysterical”)

The request for a phone call seemed a bit unusual at first, but I think it proves that Sarah is quite savvy. I happen to love the sound of my own voice, and I suspect she surmised this from my email.

Regardless of the reason, I decided to make Sarah’s day and granted her request for a phone call. The five minutes we spent together were truly special, and I believe we connected on a personal level. I’d like to keep what was said between just the two of us, so as to not taint the moment we shared. However, I can tell you that she is an enchanting lady and that she offered to buy me dinner. You’ll have to learn to live with the disappointment if you were expecting all of the juicy personal details. Some things are sacred.

As a final aside, I stopped by Panera for lunch today and I’m happy to report that my black bean soup had plenty of black beans. It also gave me the chance to meet Sarah in person. I’m pretty sure she thought I was at least a 7.5.

It has been some time my faithful readers. I didn’t mean to deny you the drug that is notoriousdad.com for so long, but a man of my unique talents is in high demand. I make no apologies for focusing my unique brand of humor, rugged good looks, and raw charisma in other directions for the last year. However, I now publically decree that I’m back, and that this blog shall rise like a phoenix from the flame. The time to rejoice has come!

I hear some skeptics asking, why now? To them I reply, because a special lady named Mari asked me nicely on the same day Panera called down my righteous wrath. I will get back to making fun of my son in the coming days, but for now I give you my latest complaint letter, sent to Panera Bread, outlining the latest food-related tragedy that has befallen my family. It is reproduced here in its entirety:

Dear Unfortunate Customer Service Rep Stuck with Me,

First I need to set the stage for you, so you can truly understand my pain. I married a woman who is much too pretty for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a solid 6, but she’s easily a 9 and probably squeezes out a 9.5 when she wears one particular little black dress, but I digress.  I bring up our relative attractiveness, just so you understand how crucial it is that I take good care of her and get the little things right. 

This morning, she came down with a really nasty cold. On my way home from work, she made a simple request. She asked that I stop at the Panera in Highland Heights and pick up a group portion of your hearty Chicken Noodle Soup. 

My experience began on a magical note when I was informed that I had a free cappuccino waiting on my Panera Rewards Card. I thought to myself, “fantastic, I can pay this delicious treat forward and grab my wife’s favorite beverage along with her soup.” Everything was coming up Andy. The service was both delightful and prompt, and for the first time ever, I was given the proper allotment of bagguettes without having to ask. Service has been spotty in the past at this Panera location, but today, the world was apparently my oyster

Little did I know you were setting me up for crippling disappointment that would shake me to my core. As I dipped my spoon into the chicken noodle soup, I was met with little or no resistance–a bad sign, but I was still optimistic. I assumed the high quality ingredients were so hearty that they had sunk to the bottom of the container like a delicious little surprise.  I began pouring out the broth so I could evenly distribute the noodles and chicken among my family. I poured and poured and poured and poured.

What I saw at the bottom of the container designed to feed 4-5 was no more than 11 noodles and 4 pieces of chicken. My son started to weep as I cried out to the heavens cursing the cruel and unjust universe that would let this travesty play out on the tragic stage that had become my life. My beautiful wife (an 8 even with her nasty virus and puffy eyes) was crushed. Her husband had just paid $12.99 for 4-5 portions of chicken broth.  If you’d like to see the picture documenting this abomination, please visit my blog at www.notoriousdad.com, as I cannot submit a picture to your site.

I ask for only two things: (1) make this right. I’ll pay you $2.99 for the broth that I admittedly didn’t drive back up to the store, but I consider the $10 hole in both my wallet and my soul your responsibility. (2) Teach your good-intentioned line workers proper portion management. I’m assuming your soup comes in portion-controlled bags with a strict broth-to-stuff ratio, so either the guy before me or the guy after me won the chicken noodle jackpot, and it cuts me deep that I wasn’t that guy.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter. Please restore my faith in both your company and the universe

Sincerely,

Andy

End Note

As always, I will post any response I receive in its entirety.