We have a pretty tidy routine at home. Each family develops their own pace and decides which activities are considered normal, and soon after the cold water shock of having children registers and takes its toll, a method emerges. Things really turned the corner for us when our youngest finally started displaying some intestinal responsibility and outgrew diapers. I am worthless with dates and live in a perpetual Diet Coke flavored now, so if memory serves, it was somewhere in the child’s third year that life improved for us as suddenly as it did when electricity arrived in the suburbs. With almost no notice we were freed from the floral tether of the diaper bag and the hazmat clean-up kit that accompanied us everywhere we went while the child was constipated and unmotivated, but was nowhere to be found when she would quite literally explode, like a truck driver that just had two Spanish omelets and drank from the tap in rural India. Timing my child’s movements proved more tricky than the tides, but those days are behind us, and now we only contend with the fact that our friggin’ kids simply do not grasp how important it is to flush. Walking into my bathroom is like a scene from the Hurt Locker, complete with heavy mouth breathing, compromised visibility, and bite your nails suspense.
All of this notwithstanding, I am awfully happy where my family is at. Everybody is quasi-responsible and other than that flushing business, we pretty much stay out of one and others schee. This has allowed a routine to emerge, and I am beginning to realize that our shtick is ritualistically dependent on a near frantic sprint to get from the door to the bed as soon as possible.
The second we darken the door we spring into action like a caffeine fueled NASCAR pit team trying to get everything cleaned, stowed, and fed as fast as possible. Amy is especially competitive with her times, and normally begins building her case for haste
and cleanliness well before she even turns onto our street. She will start listing haste-demanding reasons like a block away, “OK now I don’t want to see anybody getting out of this car with empty hands, it’s full of your crap and we are going to bed early tonight! We have been up way too late every night this week, and that’s when kids start to get sick, if you guys don’t start getting more sleep, you’re gonna get sick! I’m serious, we are eating dinner then lights out!" The kids listen to this speech with the same indifference of a Columbian cab driver listening to El Presidente talk about economic progress, they’ve heard it before and just not having any of it. 
We get in the door, and all bets are immediately off. Kids scatter to the wind and proceed to disgorge their flimsy contribution to the unloading part of the job and any attempt to focus their kinder-energy has a medically alarming effect on both their thirst and urinary mechanisms. Once you’ve asked a kid to do anything, they are simultaneously possessed with both Boris Yeltsin-grade thirst, and the bladder of a hamster. It’s like half time at the Super Bowl and everyone stampedes for the toilet farthest from the proposed chore. Amy and I are equally guilty in that we don’t give half a damn about all of the Arthurian tasks we just assigned; our real intent is to keep them busy so they will leave us alone. The oh-so-important quest we spend the last 10 minutes endowing with near religious significance now lies all but forgotten in the silky dust ruffle of our one true aim, the bed. Sleep isn’t the ultimate design per-se, it is more what it represents, the quiet, the comfort, a bit of darkened relaxation, and hopefully the only kidfree spot in the house. Our oldest child has figured this out and she gets it, if you just get away from the parents at the earliest opportunity, then the parents will leave you alone. Kind of an interfamilial urban-flight, the quiet implication being that distance will protect you from any of the unpleasantries inherent in proximity to “them” or “their kind.” Say what you want but demographics just don’t lie, have you ever been to East Saint Louis? Get real. 
Call me a bad parent but my psychosomatic “mattress response” is more Pavlovian than smelling movie popcorn. As I pull into my driveway my jaw begins to drop in a tight chin-ward yawn because my reptilian brain knows the bed is near. If we attempt to do anything like read, or relax out in the open, we will be buried beneath a pile of relentless inquiry, pleas for help, and empty chatter that would draw sighs of pity from Paris Hilton’s personal assistant. It’s our only refuge, and it’s become incredibly addicting. Modern sociologists have given names to a legion of imaginary phobias and afflictions which all share the same characteristic of driving a person into their bed, which is really all they want. And take a look at what our society has done to the bedroom, with Nate Berkus owning everything east of the Mississippi, Pier 1 more convenient than Burger King, Target engaging the likes of Simon Doonan and Philippe Stark, and those damn home design shows airing 24 hours a day, the boudoir has been morphed into a den of personal luxury and indulgence previously reserved for day spa’s in Bahrain.
Despite this bedroom extravagance, all we are really gonna do is douse the lights and zone out with the TV. For me, television is more potent than the barbiturates they used to sedate Elvis. Twenty minutes of that stuff and my eyes glaze over, less with your run of the mill exhaustion that with a serious looking case of carbon-dioxide induced hemotoxy, I go cold and grey and lapse into a Pink Floyd grade coma.
I am dead to you and the world. I might as well wrap myself in a warm blanket and ask my granddad to tell me how he feels about Asian people after pounding a turkey dinner, I am out. But it works differently for my Amy. She gets all into it. Sappy dramas, empty nightly news shows, entertainment recap, and all of the reality based flatus. When it comes to television, women are like men in Vegas, suddenly there are no rules and all sense of right and wrong and taste and decency are out the window. My wife scored 31 on the ACT, studied biology, and can re-task a satellite from her cell phone, but while her I.Q. looks like a bowling score that would earn you a plaque on the wall, it might as well be the same as the digits on Bond's vanity plate when the boobtube is on. When did this happen? When did women claim the right to be as trashy as us men?
I remember as a kid and Daisy Duke would walk on screen wearing her oh so revealing jean shorts, my mom would clutch her chest and gasp like someone just belched during the national anthem. Now I go over to her house and she is Tivo-ing Real Housewives of New Jersey and is saving those yummy left-overs so she can hunker down and watch The Bachlorettes mini marathon on Bravo. And there is simply no end to the amount of CSI based shows that she and my Dad can ingest. I would think CSI Akron staring a now horrendously overweight Flavor Flav would appeal to a slightly more Afro-centric demographic, but it turns out that schee is like baby boomer crack. If your parents went to college when Lydon Johnson was running the show, forward emails about Nigerian Princes who just can’t wait to do business with them, and shout like they are trapped in the bottom of a well every time they speak on a cell phone in public, chances are they are addicted to a cop show staring an overweight rapper that spend most of their time in the 90’s urging people to “F da police”. I take my hat off to the media wizards that pulled that one off.
We get a few minutes into the bedtime groove and I just couldn’t be happier. As I slide into the cool sheets I let go with a deep Tibetan monk back of the throat groan of satisfaction. I adore our mattress. My single challenge with the nighttime groove is that as soon as I get settled I become possessed with a hunger that could only be duplicated by chaining Kirsty Alley to a radiator. This is particularly frustrating because during the non-vampire hours I can control my diet with only a mild amount of discipline. All day long I can eat whole grain, vegetable grilled bowel stiffening whatever you want, with no afternoon snacking or top drawer stash of Hostess SnoBalls or any of that stuff. But come about ten in the P.M. and I display the self-control of Adam Lambert in the front row at Thunder Down Under and lose all composure.
I once got out of bed and decimated an entire roast chicken, left the bones on the counter, went back to bed, and then accused Amy and the kids first thing in the morning. So whether I resist the carbo-urge, or succumb, we still have yet to deal with the dilemma of our programming choices. Most nights I just click on the Tivoed Modern Marvels , she enthusiasticall counters with a plug for the latest installment of Survivor. I offer only flimsy resistance because we both know I’m going to be drooling into my pillow before the first tribal whatever you call it. I get into position just in time to see three willowy white chicks standing on what appear to be bamboo stilts while a handful of clubby looking guys wrestle with the winner getting an entire box of oreos. And that’s as far as I ever get. But having Amy gone these last few days makes me miss our routine and the team participation of the whole thing.
