Prior to becoming a parent I looked at every single one of you in the eyes and said, "tell me everything I need to know about what I'm about to experience."

And you people LIED to me. First of all, most of you didn't even bother answering just because you didn't know I was asking my question in the first place since that's not how the internet works and you couldn't hear me talking into a static webpage displayed on my laptop.

But that's no excuse. You could have invented a better internet to avoid the issue of my website being a one-way self-absorbed communication tool.

Whether it was a lie of omission or not, not a single damn one of you made sure I understood that when your child becomes a toddler, you no longer get to enjoy the experience of, what I like to call, Getting Things Done.

I have learned in recent weeks that living with a toddler is like trying to paint the Mona Lisa, except your paint brush is a shovel and the canvas is a waterfall. Also you're 41 and there are toys everywhere.

Speaking of the toys, have I told you they are everywhere? They are everywhere. I pick up the toys in a perpetual sweep. I've become a living Roomba with backpain and a homosexual amount of organization.

Friends have told me to give up on this. Just let my home turn into a landfill of toy cars and stuffed animals that play carnival music if you look at them funny.

But I can't do it, guys. I can't. I can't live that way. I would rather be eternally exhausted than psychologically claustrophobic. And so, I follow my son around the house, my hands outstretched, begging him to hand over the toy he's actively playing with so I can immediately put it right back in its place.

I'm so fun. They've been calling me Gay Ms. Rachel.

Twas not three days ago when I finally lost a battle in my whack-a-mole stay-at-home working dad life.

After extensive negotiations fell apart, we gave up on afternoon naptime.

I had one email to send. Just a quick work email. I needed but 30 seconds.

I knew better than to try to send the email with West on my lap because West has recently discovered his very favorite hobby is aggressively typing on any keyboard that comes within reach. This is very cute but it's usually not helpful because the only word he knows how to type is "slkjd'u9." And I don't even know what that means.

So, I, naive man and victim of your LIES, said to myself, "I'm a confident independent working woman. I can have it all." I placed West in the living room with an abundance of stuffed animals from the Hundred Acre Woods, telling myself this creatural congress would surely buy a minute.

As I typed the closing punctuation on my one-sentence email, I heard a distinct combined clink and splash. My immediate investigation revealed that West had decided to use his free will to deposit the Apple television remote into the dog water bowl in the kitchen.

I would like the federal government to work into its next fiscal budget funding for advanced research on why toddlers are obsessed with dog food and water bowls. Not just research. I want a cure. I want NASA's top minds on this. There should also be a telethon where Sarah McLachlan sings about it.

West has decided the most important thing in the world to him, every single day, is placing a handful of dog food into the water bowl. Then he splashes. Oh the splashing. I think this child was a mermaid in another life. A cute one with a great personality and a knack for destruction.

I snatched the Apple remote from the bowl and sprinted to a nearby drawer to retrieve a dishtowel. As I turned around, the toddler had somehow apparated from the kitchen to the living room where, I saw him standing at the door to the kitchen holding an empty cocktail glass in his right hand.

I don't know from whence he retrieved this cocktail glass. I had never before laid eyes upon this cocktail glass. I didn't even know we owned such a thing. It looked fancy. I hope it wasn't expensive.

Because the moment I saw this new scene, I, now holding a dishtowel and Apple remote, screamed a scrumpt that could be heard across the tundra and to the tops of the mountain peaks. "NO!" I shouted. And before I could even get to the end of the word, which is not a long word. It's only two letters. You may not have realized. My understanding is most of you are not able to read.

Before I even finished that word, this child pitched the glass, over-handed, into the center of the kitchen. The glass shattered into so many pieces, generations of my family will be finding them and reinventing this story like a centuries' long game of telephone.

I swear what happened next was I saw fire in West's eyes. Actual, real, fire. There were flames. And he began a sprint toward the glass, on an unequivocal suicide mission for a cause I don't believe even he could have named.

I, a barefoot father, instinctually dropped the evidence of his previous mischief and began my own barefooted self-sacrificial sprint across the shards to catch him before he could make landfall. I was successful, but not without injury.

His giggle as I swooped him up into my arms mocked me just as I saw the dogs enter the room to explore the latest commotion. It was around this moment that it occurred to me I had overcommitted by deciding to have it all, and I swore loudly as I traversed the shards again to quickly herd the canines into another room to protect them from my fate.

It was clear to me by this point that West could no longer be granted any level of independence. He fell asleep on my shoulder as I negotiated a one-armed clean up on my knees across the kitchen floor.

When I finally collapsed into the rocking chair in his nursery, West fast asleep on my lap, I realized it:

I never did hit send on that email.

~It Just Gets Stranger