Free Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan Page A

to play with it, wear it, eat it, and, especially, unroll it. Leave a toddler alone in a bathroom for five seconds, and they somehow unroll three hundred feet of toilet paper with supernatural speed. Then you walk in and bust them, and they just look at you like, “What? This stuff is obviously for me, right? It’s right at my eye level, and it’s the most fun thing in the house.” All the geniuses at the Fisher-Price laboratories have yet to developsomething as fun for a toddler as a ninety-nine-cent roll of toilet paper. Unfortunately for me, whenever this unrolling happens, it’s always the last roll in the house. Have you ever tried to reroll an entire family-size roll of toilet paper? I just leave it in a big, undulating pile next to the toilet. I’m not going to throw it away. After all, it is still toilet paper.

    I reckon a two-year-old is on the loose in these parts
.
    After toddlers make the evolutionary leap to
Baby erectus
, you still end up pushing them in a stroller or carrying them most places if you’d like to reach your destination in the next decade. Fifteen-month-old Michael loves to run around, yet he always wants me to carry him everywhere in my sling. He is huge, but I can hardly feel my back breaking when I walk around with Michael in the sling because of the attention that he draws from everyone we encounter. I call Michael a “gateway” baby. Even people who don’t like babies or children melt around his sweetness and charm. Michael makes the crabbiest New Yorkers smile. It’s like I’m carrying the heaviest ventriloquist doll ever, but the routine is in gibberish.
    The interesting thing that happens when walking around with a baby strapped in front of you at adult eye level is the baby acts like he thinks he is the one walking around and you are just this weirdo strapped to his back. He starts to have “conversations” with adults that you encounter. When babies move away from just the
mama-dada-baba
sounds, they start to make sounds that
could
be words, but they’re not. It’s the seriousness with which they deliver their baby talk that is the most entertaining. Michael’s babble is delivered with the intensity and cadence of an Obama speech. People are compelled to respond in kind, but then Michael will just look at them like, “That’s not what I said at all, you moron.”
    They make up for it when they turn two and they just start
talking
, and I mean talking all the time. It’s as if all of those things they wanted to say before just come jumbling out in a whirlwind of botched sentences. They can’t pronounce anything. “I wan pahk go down yittle swide eat appoo.” I’m like, “C’mon, learn English. This is America, for God’s sake!” When Katie was two, her English was so bad I thought she might be al-Qaeda. Some of this may have been because I when dressed her in a baby burka, she looked kind of suspicious.
    Toddlers, for some reason, are always out of breath. They always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours in order to deliver important news. “Mommy, Mommy, Daddy, [
breath, breath, breath
], I need to tell you something [
breath, breath, breath
] …” This news is so important, parental titles are unimportant. “Daddy, Mommy, Daddy! I need to tell you …” I’ll chime in, “Yes, yes. What is it?” By that point, it will be apparent by the look on their face that they have completely forgotten what they even wanted to tell you. “Um … can I have some juice? I mean, I wet my pants.” Toddlers also love to tell you secrets, especially when you are wearing a white shirt and they’ve been eating chocolate.
    Everyone with a toddler has had that embarrassing moment when their kid will innocently yell a word in public that sounds like a really bad grown-up word. Once when two-year-old Jack was playing swords in the park with another boy, he yelled, “I’m gonna hit you with my big stick,” but using the
d
sound instead of the
st
.
    When