MyThreeDaughters

Fontaine’s American Girl Molly McIntyre — wow, that’s a lot of nouns in a row — is now reminding me of the old Saturday Night Live segment with John Belushi talking about his favorite Irish phrase, “Luck O’ the Irish.” Belushi goes on to give details of the agony and demise of several Irish people, showing that it’s really “Luck O’ the Irish –BAD LUCK.”

Enter Molly McIntire (sure, she’s an American Girl, but she sounds pretty Irish).

Molly, one of Fontaine’s Christmas gifts, was previously sentenced to an American Girl-brand wheelchair, due to Fontaine’s fascination with people in wheelchairs. A previous post about poor Molly’s plight was one of the most popular ever here at MTD.com (aside from one entitled “Mommy Missing; Missing Mommy,” though Wife speculated that people probably clicked on that one to see if she had permanently fled the premises).

So, here’s an update. In one of her few attempts to hobble around without the wheelchair, Molly fell and broke her leg, as you can see in the photograph. She is not very good on crutches. Then, on top of that, she came down with a cold, and you can see she is well bundled and resting on the couch in the other photo.

It would seem that Fontaine is taking excellent care of her, but appearances would be misleading. When questioned as to why Molly was covered in blankets on the couch, she explained that Molly had a cold.

“I gave her mine,” Fontaine said.

Then she smiled.

Is this like when a fireman sets a fire and then rushes to put it out?

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Yeah, men might like to sprawl on the couch and watch sports on weekends. (And some weeknights.)

We might think a gourmet meal is a steak and potato.

We might be a little hairy and not have skin that’s all smooth and silky and soaked with Shea butter from L’Occitane en Provence, and we might not smell good, we might have been workin’ the same haircut since 1997, the same favorite sweatshirt since 1989, we might, in fact, have bodies “like Jeeps, for getting’ around,” as Elaine on “Seinfeld” said.

We might, like Cavemen, still get a huge kick out of cooking meat over fire.

But sorry, women. And buck up, fellas.

Guess which chromosome – out of all the chromosomes, I think there are 365, no wait, that’s days – is EVOLVING the fastest?

Why?

Y.

The Y chromosome.

That’s us, boys. I wasn’t sure when I saw the news, so I looked it up.

The writer – apparently an overly evolved man — takes pains to point out that this discovery doesn’t mean that men themselves are evolving more quickly.

I guess he’s evolved into a chicken – or else he’s seen my friends and I sitting around watching football.

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It fell out of the back of Rosebud’s kitchen-table booster seat.

It hit the floor not as a splat, but as something hard. I picked it up and looked at it, then put it on a white piece of paper and got out my camera phone.

Wife knows what’s up when I get that out.

“Oh, don’t write about that,” Wife said. “Sometimes, people come to our house and eat.”

Click.

Whatever it used to be, it had dried up after someone had stuck it in the plastic flap-opening built into the back of the booster seat for no apparent useful reason. Maybe, it used to be green, because there was a green tinge around the edge. Or maybe it became green along the way.

“Well, if they have kids and come to our house to eat, they won’t be surprised,” I said. “But OK, I won’t write about it.”

Besides, it’s not Wife’s job to periodically clean out the plastic flap-opening that was built into the back of the booster seat for no apparent reason. We haven’t actually doled that task out as a chore.

Besides plus, the next time someone comes over, it’s not like we’re going to serve them the shriveled up hardened green sliver for dinner. (We’d serve them the usual: a Trader Joe’s cereal bar and a glass of orange juice.)

“Oh, whatever, write about it, I don’t care.”

Any guesses what it is? Rather, what it was?

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I hate balloons.

I never thought I’d have occasion to hate them, but, again, I hate balloons.

Oh, a kid, grocery story clerk says, take a balloon. What color do you want?

I don’t know, the child thinks, what color will look best lying around my parents’ living room, or on the couch, or sitting like a shriveled pruin underneath the kitchen table or beside my bed two weeks from now?

Yeah, yellow sounds good.

So when we were tidying the house a few days ago, and when they all went upstairs, I got a sharp knife out of the kitchen drawer, and I turned the music up…

What happened next is best described in the headline. And the photo.

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Sometimes, I wonder how I’ll get into some topical Dad subject like the near-meaninglessness of college bowl games these days, and then one of the girls just comes through.

It was New Year’s weekend, and Elizabeth and I sat in the family room, while Some Team played against Some Other Team in Some Bowl Game. Neither of us was watching closely; I was on a laptop, she was lining up dolls.

But Elizabeth was watching more closely than I thought.

“Daddy, I see that one of the team is from America…where’s the other team from?”

Huh?

“I saw an American flag on the helmet of the one team,” she said, sliding another little person into a spot in the dollhouse.

Oh, I thought, the flag emblems that teams of almost every sport and every level slapped onto their uniforms in the days following the 9/11 attacks so that we would all forever remember 9/11 – and then forgot all about them.

Oh, they’re both from America. They’re…

“Then why are they playing against each other?”

Ah, heck, I don’t know, basically, it’s just a fancy scrimmage. How’s that?

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