Last year when we found out we were probably going to become Hot Sexy Dads, Skylar insisted we dip into the savings account I painstakingly built up to send you all to summer camp to instead buy every expensive thing he could find on the internet that purported to make parenthood easier. It was going to be a good summer camp, too. The kind where you'd all meet your twin you didn't previously know existed and then switch places so you could discover what it's like to run a wedding dress shop with your mom in London. Sorry.

Before I knew it, my home became a house filled with contraptions, some that I'm still not convinced weren't a scam. There were bassinets. Baby bathtubs. A tube you apparently use to literally suck, with your actual American mouth, the boogers out of your infant's nose. This is a part of parenthood I have successfully refused to engage in so far. I draw the line at sucking out another human's boogers. This mouth is for my boogers and my boogers alone.

Far and away the most useful thing we have acquired is the Baby Brezza, which I told you about recently on this Academy Award Winning Website. That's the instant formula machine that's so advanced it makes the Jetsons look like the Flintstones. (I keep the vibe at Stranger young with my references to current pop culture.)

I don't know what we paid for the Brezza but whatever the amount was, we could double it and add a nip slip and a quarter of my virtue and it still would have been worth it. I'm naming my next child "Brezza." And if I don't have a next child, I'm naming yours Brezza.

The whole parenthood preparation affair became particularly expensive once Skylar insisted we convert a room in our house to a nursery. Our family's Executive Committee then unanimously selected for our intended nursery the room I have used for a full decade as my personal creative and hobby space.

What's a family Executive Committee? I'm glad you asked. That's the governing body that makes all decisions for my life. Skylar is the only member of the Committee and the family bylaws do not include any avenue to override its determinations.

Once I and my things were evicted from this room, we scheduled a contractor to come and rip out the ceiling and asbestos and actual active wasp nests the size of my perky boobs (BIG). It was then that we discovered this room literally had no insulation whatsoever, which was a much more logical explanation for why that room was always cold enough that you could see your breath. (We previously believed it was The Sixth Sense related.)

Now, we weren't yet the experienced perfect parents who know how to raise all children, including yours, better than anyone else in the world, like we are now. But we were pretty sure you're not supposed to keep a newborn in the equivalent of a walk-in refrigerator.

So, we paid this contractor $300,000 and a lap dance to essentially reconstruct this entire part of our house and make it habitable. Sorry, guys. We had already blown through the summer camp budget. Now you don't get Christmas.

Then we had to paint this room. And by "we" I mean "I" because Skylar said "it would be so fun to do it together I think its called nesting blah blah blah" but then he dragged one brush across one wall one time and then I never saw him again until I completed the project all on my own.

The final piece of this remodel I didn't ask for was the carpet. I had never, before this experience, bought carpet in my life. Did you know carpet costs more than NASA's annual budget? Our local economy experienced a notable and sustained spike just from our carpet purchase last year.

The carpet buying experience was A Whole Thing. Skylar has not stopped talking about it in the last ten months. I've never seen him as mad as he was in that carpet store that day. It was all because of a pushy saleswoman that for purposes of this story I'll call "Barbara" (even though her name was Deborah).

I think her greeting when we walked through the door could technically be classified as an attack. She followed us around the store for nearly the entirety of our visit, asking over and over, "can I help you have you picked out the carpet you want WHICH CARPET DO YOU WANT" and no matter how many times we politely said "can we please just look around and let you know when we're ready to be helped" she would not listen. We nearly had to get a restraining order. Which I hate to do because I love attention.

At one point Skylar whispered to me, "can we please just leave? I can't handle Barbara." But I refused to give up because I am a tired man with a bad attitude and I could not be bothered to kick this errand down the road, especially if we were doing so only out of principle.

We finally selected the carpet we wanted. The carpet we chose was white, because we are extremely stupid men who make terrible choices for our home that is inhabited by two dogs and a baby that vomits every hour on the hour like the possessed Exorcist girl.

By the time we were ready to check out, Barbara was on a phone call so I asked another woman to help us, which turned into A Whole New Thing (which is the straight to VHS sequel to A Whole Thing) because when Barbara got off the phone she descended upon her coworker like it was D-Day and started yelling at her and us. I think they call this "carpet bombing" in the business.

Ba dum CHING!

I'll be here all week.

We were then passed back to Barbara and Skylar was so annoyed with the whole situation by this point that he put himself in timeout in the parking lot while I finished the transaction. Then Barbara called me twice a day for the next two weeks to give me updates that usually sounded more like nondates because they were always something like "I just wanted to let you know I'm still waiting for your carpet to arrive."

Then she'd ask me to go online and fill out a customer service survey for her and Barbara is damn lucky she got my phone number and not Skylar's because I did fill out that survey and it was packed with glowing praise because this bitch ain't no snitch. Barbara could have shot me in the face with our baby booger sucker and I still would have given her five stars and nominated her for employee of the month.

Finally the carpet arrived and a very nice man who overshared about his struggling marriage spent the afternoon installing it.

Then we started selling organs to fill this room with special baby furniture because apparently babies need their own special baby furniture now. When I was a baby they kept us in buckets and fed us used cigarettes. But when I told Skylar this as he was in the middle of purchasing a bassinette that doubles as a spaceship and teaches you calculus, I was shushed.

The baby arrived just as we put the final touches on the nursery, which I had to admit was quite charming and cozy. In the seven months since then, we have all basically moved into this space because it's the nicest room in our house.

Listen, we may not be Martha Stewart, and nobody is knocking down our door to star in a home remodel show where we make everything look like a barn.

But, we think we didn't do so bad for a couple of Hot Sexy Dads.

~It Just Gets Stranger