Adam Carolla: Daddy, Stop Talking! : And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

If it’s not Ninjago spears piercing the soles of my feet, it’s a fake spider or rattlesnake freaking me out when I stumble around half-drunk in the middle of the night. What happened to robots and rocket ships? I’m not going to head downstairs for my third tumbler of Mangria and think a miniature robot broke into the house. But if I see the fake rattlesnake in the dark through my boozy filter, I’m going to attack it with a mop handle.

Sonny’s Legos did provide a cute moment one day, though. He had a new Lego set, and the box said “Ages 5–8.” So he came up to me and asked, “Dad, are you the right age to help me put this together?” I laughed. It was really cute how he thought that once you were past eight you couldn’t build with Legos anymore. Of course, I told him I was too old and went to take a nap.

So finding the kids’ stuff is very easy when they lose it. Just take off your shoes and walk around in the dark, and you’ll find every Ninjago spear and fake tarantula you’ve ever paid for. But you know what I can’t find? My shit.

As a parent, you can fill your house with toys, as I have, and the kids will still go for every item you want them to leave alone. Their favorite toy when they were two was my alarm clock. They were constantly messing with it. They’d take it down, pull the plug, remove the batteries, take a leak on it and beat it with bats like Joe Pesci and his brother at the end of Casino . My house looked like a Gymboree, but they were still attracted to the only thing that I needed them to not screw with. It was either the alarm clock or the universal remote. (Which I still think should come with a button that you hold for four seconds to put in lock mode. That way kids can’t go monkeying with it.) The twins’ hit list of shit to mess with when they were terribly two was: #1 my alarm clock, #2 my universal remote, #3 the wrapper from my wife’s protein bars, #4–#9 anything I didn’t want them to play with and #10 their toys.

The worst is when in addition to playing with your stuff, they hide it. A few years back, Lynette lost her iPhone. The kids must have been five or six at the time. We searched high and low for a week, and couldn’t find it anywhere. Eventually, we gave in and spent the four hundred bucks to replace it. Of course, twenty-four hours after we spent that four hundred bucks it magically turned up. Natalia brought it down from the upstairs bathroom, saying that she found it underneath the rug.

Now, mind you, this is the shared bathroom at my previous abode, which had double doors and the Jack and Jill sinks. (By the way, I put the jack in that Jack and Jill bathroom.) This was the family bathroom, the one everyone brushed their teeth in, the one that the kids took baths in. It got the most traffic. Natalia claimed that after a week of looking for and not finding the iPhone, she simply stumbled across it sticking out from underneath the corner of the three-by-two bathmat. There is absolutely no way that with everyone in and out brushing their teeth and bathing not one of us spotted it. I think there was foul play involved. Natalia did get a twenty-dollar finder’s fee.

When something gets lost, I want to either never find it again or, at a minimum, find it a week later, twenty-eight miles away washed up on a beach. The part where you find it in your own home a day after you pay to replace it is a cosmic fuck you, on top of the underhanded behavior of your children.

Plus kids are always sick and that means a mess. If it’s not piles of snotty tissues, it’s puke. I’m not sure why, but my son was yakking all over the house the other day and the cleanup job was going to be massive. You know it’s bad when you skip right over paper towels and go for something to scoop it up instead. On those days, you end up creating a makeshift excavator out of the Pennysaver and a flip-flop.

Vomit is the worst thing you can ever clean up. There’s snot rockets, wizz and loogies, but puke is the worst thing the human body can produce to remove from a rug. But the people who do the vomiting, especially when they’re children, don’t have to clean it up. When they’re kids, they’re sick and just collapse back into bed and moan while Mommy and Daddy bust out the Lysol wipes. When they’re adults, they’re passed out in the back of your car while you head to the gas station to put a quarter in the vacuum. If you vomit at school, the janitor has to throw down that sawdust and scoop it up. Even if you vomit in a restaurant because you ate too much, some poor Mexican has to mop it up. I vomited in an icemaker in Tijuana and I sure as shit didn’t clean that up. But if you knock over a cup of coffee, you clean it up. Why not the vile substance that you actually produce?

I’d like to watch a never-ending reel of people trying to get adults who vomited to clean it up themselves. Forcing drunks to sop up their own sick while their head is still throbbing and they can’t stand would be a viral video sensation, I’m convinced.

Vomit really tells you where you stand in life. There is a sweet spot when it comes to vomiting or seeing someone vomit. You don’t want people constantly puking around you, but if you haven’t seen someone vomit in the last twelve years, you probably aren’t experiencing life to the fullest. The optimal position is not having yakked in a long time yourself, but having seen a buddy puking into a trash can at a ball game or a concert in the past five months. I’m proud to say that I haven’t upchucked in several years. I have a good constitution, and I’m a heavyweight when it comes to drinking.

Plus, I hate it so much. Even worse than the vomiting itself is that moment when you think you’re done puking and the nausea creeps up again. You know, that moment when you’ve been puking all night, you’ve burst the blood vessels in your eyes and you’ve been laying on the filthy tile floor of a frat-house bathroom and you feel like you’ve finally evacuated everything… and then that queasy feeling comes back again.

There are too many question marks about hell to really be scared of it: how hot is it really going to be, who’s going to be there and so on. Because, when you think about it, there’s probably going to be a lot of cool dudes and whores in hell. It might be a good time. But the nausea that breaks the blissfully ignorant feeling that the vomit storm has passed, that queasy moment when you know the yack is back, if you told me that was hell I would straighten up and fly right for the rest of my life. I’d be the second coming of Mother Teresa.

Anyway, the cleanup. Sonny, you’re on notice. Next vomit, you’re cleaning up. Then later when you’re older and Dad is drunker, I’m going to puke and guess who’s cleaning it up? Get the dustpan, boy, and don’t go asking the maid for help. Speaking of…

Hillary Clinton wrote that book saying that it takes a village to raise a child. She was right. That village was in Guatemala, but now it’s in my house. (By the way, my next book will be about gay parents and called It Takes the Village People. )

We had hired help from day one. We had to. When Sonny and Natalia were born, I was working my morning radio show while shooting my first independent movie, The Hammer, at the same time. So I would have to get up at four forty-five, roll into the studio, do four hours of unscripted comedy and interviews, then head out for several more hours of shooting (and essentially directing) an indie movie. With that schedule, there was no way I was going to physically be able to get up at three, feed and burp the kids and go back to bed. So the first thing we did was hire a night nurse. Again, throw money at the problem. When my kids were first born, I was just going around with a T-shirt cannon stuffed with twenties, firing it at people to get them to change, burp and nurse the kids while I went out and earned said money.