SMILE HONEY! DON'T MIND THE BLOOD ON YOUR CHIN!

So yesterday, we remembered our veterans in a solemn trip to Walmart.

Susie was all like, "Remember that guy that used to come to that bar we used to work in that was in Vietnam? The one who always got way too drunk and started talking about all his friends being dead?"

"Yeah," I said solemnly. "I remember him."

"Let's get all solemn thinking about him," she said.

"Okay," I replied.

So we sat there in silence, thinking about Crazy Jack and wondering what he's doing now.

Then we pulled up into Walmart's parking lot and our remembrance time was over. It was time to get ... ANDREW'S PICTURES TAKEN!!!

We get there and Andrew's in a great mood. He's yelling happily and glad to be alive.

Susie's holding him in her arms and the photographer asks her to place him on the podium where the pictures are taken.

Susie, in all her clumsy glory, goes to sit Andrew down like she's unloading a sack of potatoes on her shoulder. She basically tosses the kid like it's nobody's business.

His chin catches on her shoulder, jacking his jaw and forcing him to bite his tongue.

The crying starts.

And continues.

And continues.

"Way to go, Mom," I said sarcastically.

"I didn't mean to!" she hissed at me, giving me that look that says "Don't say one more thing!" I know this look. Andrew should fear the day he gets this look. It's not a pleasant look. It's the kinda look that makes you want to turn tail and run screaming away from her. You KNOW you've pissed Mama off when she gives you that look.

So she picks the screaming Andrew up and jostles him, trying to get him to calm down.

This takes about five minutes before his crying jag stops. The kid had his jaw jacked. We're lucky it only took five minutes for him to stop crying.

The photographer speaks up.

"Is he ready now?" she asks.

"I think so," Susie says.

Susie goes to put him back down on the podium.

THIS IS NO LIE. THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE IS NO LIE. THIS HAS NOT BEEN WRITTEN FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED.

...She puts him down on the podium exactly the same way she did the first time, jacking his jaw once again.

He screams.

I'm rolling my eyes and mentally measuring the circumfrence in my wife's neck to see if my hands could fit all the way around it and shake her violently until her wind pipe is sufficiently crushed.

The photographer suggests that maybe DADDY should hold him and put him down on the podium since Mommy is temporarily insane.

I hold him and rock him back into a quiet state. Once he's quieted down, the photographer wants to try this again.

I CAREFULLY put him on the podium. But now, he's associated the podium with horrifying pain to his head and wants no part of it.

Mama scoops him up and the photographer and I both instinctively say "Be careful!" She glares at both of us because we've lost total faith in her mothering skills. Duh.

So she's "Shhhh-ing" him for another five minutes and doesn't realize that what she's doing is making him extremely tired.

Which makes him extremely cranky when he's released from our grip.

She sets him back down CAREFULLY and SUCCESSFULLY this time. By "successfully", I mean that she didn't do any physical harm to our child.

He has absolutely NO INTEREST of sitting and getting his photo taken. Mama tries a few things to get him to stop crying to no avail.

I pull out my cell phone. The kid LOVES my cell phone.

"That's not going to work," she hisses again.

"Yes it will," I say. "He loves the cell phone."

Sure enough ... I give him the cell phone and everything's right with the world. He's jabbering away into the cell phone, the tears are gone and he's in his own little world.

Getting him to smile while holding the cell phone was tough. We were yelling "PEEKABOO!" at him so loudly that they must have heard us in the produce department.

The end result?

You get seven photos of the child. Four of them turned out decently. Two okay. One, the last one, he was crying and we weren't going to get any more smiles out of him. I just told the photographer to use that one since we weren't planning on buying all seven photos anyway.

So ... you want to see them?

Keep in mind, these are grainy shots that Walmart puts on disc for you. They touch the actual photos up in the studio so that they look better.

They're all in the Drew Dogg Photo Album.

But here's the first one to whet your appetite.

It's amazing how happy a child can get when you're screaming "PEEKAFUCKINBOO!!" at him at the top of your lungs.

We left Walmart and went to check on our lot to see how it was coming along.

There are stacks of cinder blocks all around the property which means sometime this week, the foundation will probably be poured.

We walked around the perimeter of our property for the first time. Holy sheep shit...this is one big-assed amount of property.

At this point, Andrew was taking a stab at claiming the title for "The Fussiest Boy Ever" so we decided to take him home for his nap.

Andrew had five stinkies yesterday.

Five.

That's a lot of dirty diapers.

He apparently has some sort of stomach virus, caused by Grandma's cooking on Sunday when she watched him while we went to Mattie Gee's wedding.

Grandma fixed him turkey and dressing and broccoli and some other crap.

But Grandma likes to buy all of her food in the dented can aisle. The meat that's on its last day of sale before it expires. The vegetables that are on top of the trash in the dumpster are just fine with her.

See? She saves money this way. Money that she owes us.

I won't eat Grandma's cooking. I've told Susie that I didn't want Andrew eating it.

He ate it. Now his poo-poo is all runny and seeping out of his diaper every two hours.

Susie swears it can't be her mother's cooking that made him sick.

So I gave her an alternative to the "Grandma's Cooking" theory.

"Then I think your mother is coming over here, taking a big hairy Granny dump, wiping her Granny ass with her bare hands and forcing Andrew to suck her Granny fingers dry," I suggested during dinner last night.

She walked away from the table after that one.

Which was cool.

I got the rest of her filet mignon.

Alright...here's the deal.

If you DON'T leave a Suck Ass Poem today, I'm shutting down that site AND this site and devoting all of my time to the study of Buddhism.

You've been warned.

Go leave a Suck Ass Poem for me.

I deserve AT LEAST that.

You rotten, damned, ungrateful kids.

GET OUT OF MY YARD!!

(Uncle Bob shakes his fist at you rotten ungrateful kids until he runs out of energy, sits back down in the rocker on his porch and tugs at his testicles while mumbling stories to himself about crazy war veterans he once knew.)