Hokey Poker

"The face of a child can say a lot. Especially the mouth part of the face."

- Jack Handy

So, as I have reported in a previous entry, Adam’s favorite new word is “poker”. It’s usually quite clear, although sometimes it sounds like “Boca”. Still, we know what it means. Especially when it is accompanied by a meltdown while clinging to the garage door, while he cries the word “poker!” in between disappointed, yet hopeful sobs.

The funny thing is that it gives away a lot about our household. I mean, kids pick up weird, seemingly random words here and there, but by and large, they pick up words that have emotional relevance. So if mommy, or, let’s just say for the sake of argument, daddy, got really excited over a word, let’s say “poker”, then the child might also be inclined to repeat that word a lot. You get my gist.

And so you can say in this respect, Adam is definitely his father’s son. DH is a grown man so he doesn’t exactly sob and wail while clinging to the garage door, but I think if I told him that he couldn’t play poker for a whole week then Adam and DH would find that they have even more in common than first thought. I don’t know about you, but I want no part of that. I can barely handle a toddler meltdown, yet alone a man-in-early-adulthood meltdown, so poker goes on. Weekly. Adam only became interested in the event very recently even though it’s been going on for quite a while now. Since his bedtime shifted toward 8 pm and poker’s start time shifted toward 7-7:30’ish, he became aware of the group of loud men in his garage and needed to check out the action. Dad took him out there a few times to show off some of Adam’s new tricks (“hey baby” in response to “what do you say to my friends youngest daughter?”, the touchdown move, the high-five, and our proudest feat yet, the quadruple Lutz followed by a triple Salchow). Dad let him play with a few chips and the kid has been hooked ever since. I made the mistake of explaining a “garage” as “the place where you play poker” when he pointed to a picture of a garage in his Mi Casa book and said “wusssssat?”. So now the secret is out. There is no going back, only mediation. So he has his very own set of poker chips. I carved a hole into a small shoe box and “poker” now also means “putting blue circles into a shoebox hole”, which works to stave off a few of the meltdowns when the garage is no longer full of men waiting to see his quadruple Lutz/triple Salchow combination at 6 am when he wakes up and utters his first word of the day.

I’m not sure how or when poker turned into a weekly event. Or even how or when this event ended up happening in my garage, but as sure as the sun rises, the guys from DH’s work get together every week at the Two-Car Garage Casino to get their poker ya-ya’s out. There used to be a set night, but it has started shifting around to accommodate the fact that some of the regulars actually have lives outside of work and garage poker. I really don’t want to give you the impression that they are bothersome. With the exception of like, one, maybe two individuals (who are NOT regulars), the group is great and is welcome to use my garage weekly. They are never bothersome. And, in fact, lately they have been ordering pizza or bringing Krispy Kreme donuts and leaving tons behind when they go home. I wake up from my middle-of-the-night coma and walk out there starving to find a garage-full of food waiting for me, 8-months pregnant ME! But seriously, they are all nice, respectable guys. I don’t know what crass crap they talk about in the garage, but I really don’t care too much. DH has fun and he wins pretty regularly. Plus, it’s a relatively safe way to blow off steam. And I get the leftovers.

The funny part is that Adam has caught this poker bug with almost the same amount of zeal that DH has caught it. He literally begs to play poker at least 5 times a day. We were reading his Mother Goose book which had a page of rhymes that matched some playing cards. He pointed to them and said “poker” then ran out of his bedroom to the garage door and implored us for some poker. We used to enter the house from our garage door but I’m afraid to even pass by it anymore for fear of the meltdown. I recently tried to sing hokey pokey and it was translated into “poker”, followed by the request, my denial, and then the meltdown. So I find myself avoiding using any words that may sound like poker. I avoid the garage, which contains my soda stash (also something I generally avoid so I don’t trigger a meltdown by not letting him gulp my entire glass of Dr. Pepper) as well as my broom. Not that I really need an excuse not to get the broom out as I’m pretty good about avoiding it using my own free will. Let’s just say that Adam is a passionate child when it comes to something he enjoys. The only other thing he has loved as much as poker is The Wiggles, which are also a recent obsession and they just might outdo his love for poker, but that remains to be seen.

I think Adam gets his passion from DH. I have likes and hobbies, but I lack the energy to pursue them with the same amount of fervor that DH and Adam seem to possess. At first, DH’s passion for his hobbies confused me. I didn’t realize that it was an innate part of his personality, you see. It started off as a love for motorcycles. I just thought the guy loved motorcycles. I couldn’t fault him for that since I did, too. But where I bought a used bike that had previously been wrecked and was partially held together by twist-ties and called it good, he went on to buy the most expensive Harley, the full leathers, the Harley helmet, the custom windshield, custom foot rests, a new seat, saddle bags, and so on. Tweaking the Harley consumed weeknights and weekends. Of course, when you live in Seattle as we did when we owned our bikes you tend to do a lot of tweaking because the rain doesn’t permit you to ride as much as you wish. When it was too late or cold to go outside and tweak, evenings were spent carefully browsing parts catalogs and web sites devoted to stealing your money while convincing you that your $100 foot peg was simply not good enough for your ride.

Eventually the Harley was traded in for a sport bike (I take credit for this conversion, yay me!), but again, not just any ol’ crotch rocket. The granddaddy, the R1. It was followed by the purchase of a full leather racing suit. The R1 eventually became mine (oh, I miss you, R1) as DH moved over to a GSX-R and we had a great season of riding (and a cool-ass road trip to boot). After we started having babies we called the bike obsession quits. But the obsessions didn’t end there as the truck obsession had always been looming in the background like some great foreboding giant threatening to steal my husband away from me (along with all of our money). So I naturally assumed that the obsession was simply with vehicles. After getting rid of the bikes, DH became a voracious boating enthusiast. Not in the sense that we spent a lot of time on boats, but he pursued the purchase of a boat with an appetite I can only relate to when thinking about Krispy Kremes. At 9 months pregnant, I was dragged along to boat shops, made to watch boating shows, and was constantly fed new information about all things boat-related. I became good at recognizing “the look” when he was thinking about telling me some exciting piece of boat trivia, so I’d take the bait, so to speak. Over dinner our conversations usually went something along the lines of,

“What are you thinking of, honey?”
“Oh nothing” he’d say, “you wouldn’t want to hear it.”
“No, tell me”
“It’s just boat related”
“Well, duh! Just tell me”

He was dying to tell me. He would explode if he didn’t, but he felt bad bugging me about it again. He just needed a little prodding to get it off his chest.

“Did you know that Crestliner is coming out with a new Sportfish 867000 this year and it seats 15 people and comes standard with a 4-cylinder, 4-stroke, 200 HP outboard motor and a trolling motor and a depth finder and a live well and a cup holder in the captains chair!”
“I didn’t know that. That sounds expensive.”

It sounds like boring information, but you have no idea how hard it must have been for him to keep the information to himself until dinnertime. He was waiting for the right moment to tell me, maybe after I had a glass of wine or two, but he couldn’t sit on a piece of information that juicy for too long and so it usually came out within the first minute of sitting down to dinner followed by long moments of silence. So we have a boat now. It’s not the aforementioned Crestsport 9000, or whatever, but it’s a good boat. And it only needed a few modifications.

But the boat doesn’t live in our garage. And of course, the bikes no longer live in our garage. The lovely two white trucks we own are too big to fit in our garage. With such a void in his life, the garage has been converted into a full-blown poker palace. It started out innocently enough moving the dining room table into the garage and playing on a regular ol’ table. That eventually gave way to a portable poker table top which gave way to an 8-person handcrafted poker table with leather trim and beautiful velveteen felt, crafted by DH of course. I must say, he did a wonderful job on the table even though the project took him less than a week to finish (there is no stopping him once he’s devoted to something). His brother, unbeknown to both DH and brother was simultaneously crafting a poker table for DH as a Christmas gift. I think it’s a 6-seater. It has cup holders! Lest the two poker tables become lonely, our old couch has migrated into the garage as has a beer fridge. One of the walls has been painted (the other walls are waiting for insulation before they will get a fresh coat of paint). DH and a friend installed a gas heater, which you need in Minnesota on those cold 8 degree nights in a garage without insulation. And man, you should see the carpeting in our garage! It’s quite plush, which you can appreciate under the special lighting that has recently been installed to replace the atrocious fluorescent overhead lighting. For the extra flair of ambience, the place has been graced by a lovely fiber optic Sin City sign within the past month. The only thing lacking is a toilet, which I recommended they add. The recommendation has garnered several half-baked ideas, including holes drilled in walls, borrowing Adam’s potty chair, but none of which involve actual plumbing.

It’s only a matter of time.

There are other plans, of course. The scary thing is, DH is not alone in his obsession. The poker crew is almost as passionate as he is. And since he’s going back to work with these guys, they will have way too much time on their hands to misuse their combined creative energy. They are all programmers, so it’s no surprise that plans are being laid down for several poker-related applications to help them manage data collection that comes from their games (high hands, biggest winners, etc.) as well as the time management aspect which will require some scheduling tool. They must all have much more energy than I do. At least it’s getting used constructively and doesn’t involve sawing off Nerf guns and adding CO2 canisters.

Like Adam’s poker obsession, I have learned that with DH there is no going back, only mediation. And this is true for all obsessions of his. In fact, he’s the one who taught me the lesson. With my two passionate men, my role is help keep them reigned in and tied down to earth. I am glad to have learned this lesson. And it’s not such a bad thing to be, passionate. I might be passionate about something one day, assuming I’m not using all my energy keeping my family anchored to earth.