The Things They Carried. Or Were Carried In.

There are a lot of things about being a Dad that rock me like a hurricane. For example, the fact that my kids have never heard Rock Me Like A Hurricane, but sometime in the near future I'll suddenly explode it into their lives like a 300lb water balloon full of Teutonic-accented ketchup — and the knowledge that this revelatory act of revelation will leave them quivering blobs of white kid jelly, shaken to their foundations and begging for more. That's the definition of badass, my friends, and perhaps the most powerful argument for parenthood you'll ever hear.

On the flip side: kids generate a lot of crap. I don't mean that in the "I'm incontinent" sense, although god knows that navigating your way through years of diapers and butt wipes and handling the fecal matter of others is more than enough justification for a serious case of the screaming heebie-jeebies. What I mean, gentle reader, is that by virtue of them being little people who don't necessarily want to spend their first hours on earth watching reruns of WKRP in Cincinnati or reading magical realist novels of a New York that never was or... um... sleeping, other things are required to keep them amused, engaged, involved in the world around them and - most importantly - prevent them from screaming every fucking minute of every fucking day.

They grow, of course. And as they grow, some of this crap falls by the wayside like fast food burger wrappers along the edge of one of those "make the Indian cry" highways. You know what I'm talking about. And that's why one of the most joyous days in any parent's life is the day that he or she hauls some of the crap their kids no longer use out of the garage and brings it to the dump, thereby making way for new crap that will someday become crap they no longer use, which will then migrate to the garage and then, finally, to the dump. And thus, the circle of life is complete. To whit:

• STROLLERS
I fucking hate strollers. We've got a lot of kids - three, to be exact, and once you've got more kids than you've got adults you're pretty much into what a dear friend of mine once referred to as "unnatural number of children territory" - and subsequently, we had a lot of strollers. I think we actually had four, at one point. Why did we have four strollers for three kids? I have no idea. I think we were trying to cover every possible contingency. Whatever: the point is that for more time than is rational or healthy, our garage was literally overflowing with strollers, except for the literally part. Jogging single. Jogging double. Massive-ass double travel-system nightmare my wife called "The Bus," only without the lovable connotations frequently associated with Jerome Bettis. Plus one of those weaselly cheap foldable little crap strollers that you can beat the hell out of and not feel bad about it. And now, they are gone, baby, gone.

• EXERSAUCERS
There was a time when the exersaucer was the ring of fire in our home, but in a good way: it burned, burned, burned through the near-constant violent rage of our twinfant girls by providing them with a way to be upright and entertained for entire minutes of a time without - WITHOUT - the support of human hands. That's right: hands-free child care. A miracle of Red Sea proportions. Every morning for... I don't know: months? Four? Six? A year and a half? It's all fuzzy now. But every morning for a-way-wicked-long-time, we'd plop our girls into the exersaucers and suddenly find ourselves with at least a half our of "free" time in which we'd actually be able to get dressed, throw down a little breakfast, pay attention to neglected kid #3, and prepare for the glories of the day ahead. The down side, of course, was that the twinfants in question would inevitably exhaust themselves flipping over plastic-encased cards, banging away at fake-ass little piano keyboards and generally spinning themselves in circles... and subsequently, would pass out cold on their saucers about 30 seconds before we'd be ready to pick them up and haul them off for the day. This happened almost every day, without fail, for months at a time. And d'you know what happens when you wake up vicious, bloodthirsty twinfants who just passed out? They get really, really pissed off.

I'm so very, very glad we're past that point in our lives now. Goodbye, exersaucers, You served your purpose. Now, you just take up space.

• BIG PLASTIC STAND-UP TOYS THAT MAKE TOO MUCH FUCKING NOISE
I feel like the Grinch here, waxing ragaholic about all the toys, toys, toys, toys that make all the noise, noise, noise, noise. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong. What happens when infant-type children get past exersaucer age and start to become self-propellant? First they crawl, then they want to stand and walk. Which is why every toy manufacturer on the planet puts together these next-generation plastic monstrosities that entice young'uns to pull themselves upright - as all right-thinking post-primates are wont to do - by virtue of their deafening bells, screaming whistles, seizure-inducing flashing lights and admirable dedication to short-term attention spans and immediate reward. Do I understand that, in theory and (to a degree) in practice these are tools designed to help little kids take an important developmental step? Yes. Did that make me any less irrationally angry at their staggeringly disruptive capabilities? No. 

If there is a hell, it is filled with these toys, playing the first couple of bars of "Old MacDonald" over and over and over again for all eternity.

• WOODEN KID PUZZLES
I hate wood! No, no, no... that's not it. What I'm talking about is those thick wooden Doug & Melissa-style puzzles where there's a little light-sensitive diode buried inside. When the kid pulls up the wooden peg with a picture of a duck, the diode gets exposed to light, and the puzzle quacks. Educational? Sure. Fine motor coordination, learning to associate the image of an animal with the sound stimulus that animal produces? Great. Little brains stimulated. Neurons set firing. Learning occurs.

But riddle me this: what happens when the little battery in these puzzles start to die? I'll tell you what: you suddenly get a barnyard's worth of animals all howling together in half-speed agony. At 3 o'clock in the fucking morning. At 3x normal volume. And what happens then — above and beyond all your little monsters abruptly being awakened by animal noises that will cause them to awaken screaming from nightmares for weeks afterwards? You try to make the noises stop. You pull the pieces out, then put them back in. You search frantically for an off-switch that doesn't exist. You fight your way through the stress and trauma of the moment until the solution occurs to you.

Which is how you end up in your driveway at 3:15am. Maybe even in the middle of winter. Standing there in your bare feet. The puzzle laying on the asphault, mooing and clucking in symphony and torment in the moonlight. And the hammer in your hand rises and fall, rises and falls, and you beat the puzzle to death.

(Afterwards, you hide the broken wooden corpse in the garage. And there it remains, hidden beneath the other debris and remnants of a childhood lost day by day, until years later when you begin to cleanse yourself of the past. And this - and other sins and memories - rise with the current before they are forevermore swept away.)