Ahhhhhh, WIPEOUT with Jack!

No matter how much you wait, and anticipate, and wait, and anticipate, and wait for the first word to babble from a tot's lips, you soon learn to dread the day when their sentences send shivers up your spine.
And I don't even mean statements such as this:
· Uh, Dad, I think the engine blew on my car.
· Uh, Pops, I think I'm pregnant.
· DAD! Howcum I can't get a pager yet, when everybody ELSE has one? (And doesn't that question date me as a technological dinosaur? Hell, kids are twittering now who are so young they’ve never even HEARD of a pager.)
But I'm beyond the days of such questions — and I stress that I didn't hear the middle one.
But some sentences still can scare the bejabbers out of me, though. Such as when Jack asks me, "Papa Mike, where are the wipes?"
You see, it's never a GOOD thing when he asks me where the baby wipes are, because I know he’s not volunteering to change a diaper or to clean the furniture.
Rather, it’s because the little lad has SPILLED something. He’s a great kid but, well, he has this clumsy streak in which he sometimes seems to trip on air, even.
After all, he’s no Michael Jackson, rest his soul, who could WALK on air, or the MOON.

That conjures up memories of the early days of MTV, when Michael Jackson’s videos MADE the franchise for a network that doesn’t even seem to know what a video is these days. Indeed, whenever “Thriller” came on, my oldest, Annie, would scream so loud the neighbors could hear her: “DAD! MICHAEL’S ON!!!”
Of course, I’d drop whatever was at hand — unless it was a bowl of ice cream, of course — and run to watch it with her. Our lives stopped for that 13-plus minutes as we watched the genius of that video and its groundbreaking choreography. (And, although you haven’t asked, I’ll acknowledge: I DID buy one of those red jackets.)
Back to the subject at hand: Jack asking for wipes. Very often, that means chocolate is involved, as in spilled chocolate ice cream, or milk, or candy.
I’m going to rat myself out here, before my kids do, and admit that — well, let’s just say I haven’t always treated spills with the calmness of a monk. Truth be told, whenever they wanted to see fireworks, all they needed to do was spill something.
I’ll be getting up there in years some day, and I’m developing a sense of calm in anticipation of those years. So when Jack asks where the wipes are, I pat him on the head and tell him I’ll help clean up the mess.
After all, such spills are accidents, right? And he HAS graduated from the days when he couldn’t figure out why I would get a tad upset when he couldn’t seem to hit his mouth with the spoon and he would get chocolate ice cream EVERYWHERE.
These days, we calmly clean up whatever is spilled.
I guess you could say it's a wipeout of a different sort from the old Surfin' Safaris hit.