Babyland

The weekend before Easter we got to spend a day at Babyland, the birthplace of all Cabbage Patch Kids. I prepared myself for a pretty lame day, yet turned off my typical cynicism so as not to ruin Zoë’s time.

The day started with “Breakfast with the Easter Bunny”, an event with several hundred parents and children. The local Lyons club provided pancakes and sausage while a DJ kept us amused with fantastic (god-awful) music. Jen’s mom had bought the tickets and the breakfast was actually surprisingly fun. They gave out prizes like crazy, though we never actually won.

The “Easter Bunny” was a person in a massive CPK costume with bunny ears tucked away in a little nook with a line of bazillions of kids waiting to get a picture for $5. We didn’t spring for the picture, but Zoë was too busy enjoying the atmosphere and running around like crazy to even notice or mind.

Jen’s mom works as an accountant for the power company up in Habersham County, GA, and every year they are involved in a handful of parades in the area. Part of the reason we were at Babyland was because Cleveland, GA, where Babyland is located, was throwing a parade and Toni’s company was to be represented.

Originally this meant that Jen and Zoë were going to help with the parade. Through a large series of events, another child ended up being foisted upon us. That was Darcie, Toni’s step-granddaughter. Unfortunately, Darcie had ZERO interest in being with us at Babyland and would not do anything but sob. Jen decided to stay with Darcie and Zoë and I were sent to work at the parade.

All I knew about the parade was that I would be in the back of “a truck” helping to dispense candy or take photos.

That “truck” turned out to be a 1932 Ford. The one on display in the lobby of the power company. The first truck the power company ever owned. Totally awesome. I got to ride in the front while we prepared for the parade and noted the lack of seatbelts, unsafe glass, removable seats, and many other death features available in that year’s model. (Don’t mistake that for dislike, I was in awe being in that truck.)

Zoë and I were to ride in the bed of the truck with a few other people. There were some walking beside the truck handing out candy. I was asked to film the parade for the power company. Zoë got a little hardhat and off we went, zipping through the streets of Cleveland.

To call this parade small would be a bit of an understatement. It was small even in comparison to the annual Hartland Memorial Day parade. Maybe 7 floats altogether and only a few hundred spectators. But it was fun nonetheless.

Of course Zoë being the ever helpful type, recruited herself to “assist” with the candy “dispersement”.

I might add, as noticed in the next picture, that this was the day that Zoë discovered what pockets were really used for. She thought she was being sneaky, but I busted her.

Here’s a picture taken from the sidelines. It kind of cracks me up because it appears that I was the main attraction in this parade.

After the parade was done we headed back to Babyland for the Great Easter Egg Hunt.

Let me tell you, these guys know how to setup a hunt. They had 25,000 eggs set out for the kids to grab. These were broken into 4 separate sections, 0-2, 3-5, 6-8, 8+. Each of these sections had anywhere between 4,000 and 6,000 eggs to snatch.

Of course, these weren’t real eggs but plastic. That marks a distinction beyond just their outward appearance. Plastic eggs have goodies in them. And apparently a handful of these 25,000 eggs contained coupons for various local businesses. Most just had candy.

Zoë was so excited to go grab eggs she could barely contain herself. We had to stand there waiting a good 10-15 minutes before they blew the whistle. It was a tad chilly and VERY windy. This was the day after those major storms rolled through town.

We managed to keep her happy for a bit and even got a nice little family photo taken.

Finally, she could take no more and the whistle finally blew.

4,000 eggs. The space of half a football field. 0-2 years old. This should be a good 20 minutes of fun, right?

I took a fast motion series of photos when it started. 10 pictures in 5 seconds. Here is the first picture:

And here is FIVE SECONDS LATER

Note the nice young lady towards the right with her thong sticking out. She’s just tucking her child under her arm and snatching as many eggs as possible. These vultures managed to pick the lawn clean of eggs in LESS THAN A MINUTE. I started our video camera less than 15 seconds after it started, and all you see is the four of us trudging through a devastated war zone.

And because of the unstoppable greed of the other parents, this was what Zoë got:

Yep, tears. She got four eggs, and that’s ONLY because Jen snatched them up before the other carrion feeders had a chance to co-opt Zoë’s fun. Zoë never even left the starting line because we were afraid of the stampede. You would think it was a Black Friday sale at Wal-Mart or something.

I can’t fully blame Babyland for this. There’s really no way to contain that many people. But honestly, for the 0-2 area parents should be able to help and that’s it. Where’s the fun in the herd blindly stampeding towards egg domination?

When that was all said and done we made our way to the main attraction of Babyland, namely the Cabbage Patch nursery. This is where CPK are born and eventually adopted.

Jen snuck in there while we were at the parade to get the lay of the land and the two of us managed a trip while Zoë was in the car.

Those adorable Cabbage Patch Kids? Yeah, the cheapest one is $60. They go all the way up to $300. We had a team huddle with Toni and advised which section to steer Zoë towards.

Those kids that are half-ensconced in the cabbage? They move up and down, twisting all the while. It’s a tad disturbing, but not as morbid as the macabre workings of the birthing process.

I don’t have any photos of the process itself. I do have a video of the whole thing, but obviously that won’t be in this document.

I found it more than a little disturbing that the birthing process is rife with jokes about episiotomies, c-sections, drugs, and the like.

Apparently the mother cabbage is pollinated by some type of bee. Once she’s ready, a doctor comes along and puts in an IV (ivy, in this case), injects her full of Imagicillin and then determines her dilation status. (Ours was 10 leaves) If the baby is “branched”, they can perform a c-section (cabbage section). They even do a little sonogram before they yank the shivering fetus from the cabbage womb so all the kids can see if it’s a boy or a girl. Then they have the audience name it. Really quite frightening stuff.

Anywho, Zoë ended up getting a baby wearing a purple outfit. Purple’s her favorite color. As you can see from the above photo, it is an entirely unique and dissimilar doll from all the others.

She did, however, get to name it. Her decision? Mine. Mine Baby Hettenhouse. Poor girl, dad now torments her by grabbing her doll and calling it mine. J

Easter

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Zoë in the last couple of weeks, it’s that she shares Lara’s absolute terror when confronted with a person in a costume. Here’s a lovely selection of photos from our various attempts at getting Easter Bunny pictures:

That’s the best one we have. She snatched the candy out of his hands and then ran screaming.

That one was at Walgreen’s. We tried removing the bunny from the scene altogether, but the fear still radiates.

This last one is my favorite and sums it up nicely:

So yeah, she might not much care for the Easter Bunny, but she seemed to enjoy Easter all in all.

Owing to illness and multiple other issues, last year there was no Easter. She was too young to have cared anyways, but this year she was ripe for the picking.

Saturday night we began the official festivities. We laid out a couple of egg coloring kits (while I played Patton Oswalt discussing Paas in the background) and set to work coloring about 2 dozen eggs. Bobby was over for the night and our friend Brian was there as well. We had tie dyed eggs, sparkly eggs, eggs you could write on, anything and everything.

There’s Dad displaying his lack of creativity.

Zoë LOVED coloring the eggs and was running back and forth trying to dictate how it would all be done. She ended up throwing (and I mean THROWING) three eggs into one dying cup. I had to keep reminding her that we were not going for the grand prize on the Bozo show here.

It may seem a bit of a cheat, but here are a boatload of pictures taken from that night. You can see she was being quite the ham.

AWWWW. Isn’t she the CUTEST? We’ll talk more about that night in "The Incident".

After the incident we hid eggs all throughout the living room. Of course, Zoë being two, we couldn’t really “hide” them, so much as “place them right out in the open”. She had a bit of a mix of real eggs and fake plastic ones that we put little candies or coins into. We figured she’d wake up, see everything and excitedly come get us.

Well, not so much.

Apparently she got up very early that morning and discovered the eggtopia we had hidden in the living room. And she found most of them. And found the candy in others. And figured out how to unwrap candy for the very first time. And ate ALL of it. She was so busy stuffing her gullet that she didn’t even notice her easter basket on the table. She came and woke the two of us with a wicked, chocolate stained grin.

Seriously, that girl was a like an ADD kid on meth drinking Mountain Dew. And this is before I’ve had my coffee, so I’m trying to placate her and calm her.

We helped guide her towards the stragglers she left behind. The problem is, she had mostly missed the real eggs. So by the time she’d gotten around to this, she’d figured out that most eggs had a surprise hidden inside. So she’d pick up the real eggs, stuff her fingers into them and crack them open, only to find yolky goodness instead of a nice choccy.

Unfortunately, I apparently set the camera that morning to ape my own vision, so every shot is essentially a big blur. This is the closest I can come to providing a halfway decent image. (Note that she’s tearing out Minnie’s brains as practice for the wedding).

From there it was off to Grandma Toni’s for Easter lunch, more egg hunting, and lots of technical support on computer / electronics issues.

Not wanting to be a rude guest, I made up some sushi to bring along.

The day was more or less uneventful, but nonetheless very fun for Zoë. She got to hunt eggs and then play in a little miniature pool. She ended up having a large water fight with Grandpa Joe.

I’d have to say she loved Easter. She played and played and more or less collapsed once we got home. We all did, actually. The average was a 2 hour nap, then up for an hour, then going to bed.

The Incident

I guess we’ve known it’s been coming for quite some time. Aside from the occasional tantrum, we like to assume that Zoë is our perfect little angel. And for the first time she sought to prove us wrong.

I like to refer to the incident as what will likely be one of Zoë’s earliest memories, and quite possibly be the reason for her laying on a couch explaining her miserable childhood twenty years from now.

So Saturday night. We’d finished dying Easter eggs. Jen took Zoë into bed and was reading her a book called “Daddy’s Scratchy Face”. Zoë requested my presence for a demonstration. I gladly obliged, then gave some loves and left the room.

I spotted something on the way out. Looking back, I could have prevented all of this.

On the way out of the room I noticed a bottle of baby powder next to her little shopping cart. Said bottle was open (the little holes up top at least, not full blown cap off). I thought this odd because we never use baby powder. Seriously. Never. But I figured Jen had just brought her in there and changed her, so maybe she was changing things up. So I said nothing.

Fool.

Twenty minutes or so later I’m sitting out on the porch having a cigarette and enjoying my favorite Mexican Narco Cartel blog when Jen pops her head in.

“I need you. We have a toddler issue and you’re not going to like it.”

The blood in my veins ran icy. All I could manage was “I think I know where this is going” as I walked back into the house.

The first thing I noticed was the smell of baby powder. Not substantial, but hanging in the air.

Then I saw the child on the naughty stool in nothing but a diaper, bawling her eyes out and white as a ghost. And I mean literally white.

I walked into her room and was greeted by a Michigan winter. Unfortunately, the very few pics I took were of awful quality. Partially because I was laughing so much and partly there was already a bit of a cloud in the room.

You really can’t tell from the photos, but she had sprinkled baby powder over EVERYTHING. It coated her bed, was all over the floor, on her toys, the walls, her furniture.

Of course, rather quickly things turned from jovial to more and more pissed as I started to clean the mess she’d made. Particularly because one thing became very evident while I cleaned. This was no accident. This wasn’t “I’m curious what will happen”.

No, her favorite blanket and doll were pushed over by the door so that she could intentionally NOT hit them. She wouldn’t want those ruined, now would she?

From what I’ve heard after the fact when Jen busted her there was a stare down between the two like an old Spaghetti Western. She knew she’d been caught red handed. I still wonder how she thought she’d get away with it.

Anyways, I set to cleaning her room, starting with a can of compressed air. At first I was joking that I felt like I was in an outtake from Scarface, but with each passing moment I began to realize the severity of what she had done.

Baby powder is incredibly fine and resistant to moisture, which means that it was kicking up massive amounts of dust. It quickly went from “Jeez, that’s some dust”, to me having to leave the room every 15 minutes or so to chug a half liter of water and hit Jen’s inhaler. My nostrils were solidly lined. I TASTED the powder. The cloud got so bad that it became difficult to see and I was hacking and wheezing trying to breathe the solid matter. By the time I was done I was white as a ghost. Zoë and I had taken a shower earlier that evening and we both once again found ourselves in there, washing a fine coating of dust off.

It took 2 hours to clean her room. Dusting, vacuuming, steam cleaning, setting up fans to blow dust out the window. The cloud infiltrated the living room. Jen has asthma and had to be told to stay far away from the room. Bobby wanted to help but I told him to stay away as well in case I needed a driver to get me to the ER. It was bad.

My lungs burned for two days afterwards. I’m still coughing up little bits of talcum.

As always, click the pics for a larger view.