R.I.P.

We're on number 5. They say deaths come in threes. I've never really understood this because, well, deaths come in the hundreds of thousands every day. I guess they mean they come in associated groups, and now we're in a cycle of dying famous people. You can't swing a dead celebrity without hitting a famous person who's going to die, it seems.

And, since it seems like the popular thing to do--and I'm always one to try doing something popular, though I usually only put a half-assed effort into it, which invariably makes the whole thing blow up in my face--I'm going to weigh in on the first five of what will inevitably be a six person death toll (and then I'll tell you who the sixth one is going to be).

The problem is that the media makes ALL of these deaths seem very important, so it's difficult to know exactly how you should feel about it, so I'll tell you how you should feel about it based on how I feel about it. And I'll even give you a handy 1 to 5 rating scale (with 1 being "who cares" and 5 being " the world is going to end") so that you can easily share with your friends just how much or how little you are affected. You're welcome. (Note, I consider everyone who isn't famous and isn't being covered ad nauseum by the media as having a 3.5/5 rating for the importance of their death. So, I guess that gives everyone a benchmark for figuring out how much regard I hold for the notion of celebrity)

David Carradine



I felt a little saddened when I heard Carradine had died. I generally liked the things that he did--but never enough to say that I actively sought out his movies or TV shows to watch. If he was in something that I was watching already, I didn't change the channel as soon as I saw him (as I do with Ben Affleck, John Travolta, Mel Gibson, and Nick Cage), so I guess that's something. His death, however, is about as awesome a way to go as possible: auto-erotic asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel. Come on, you couldn't PLAN a cooler way to die (except, obviously, you could plan at least this cool of a way to die). Unless your obituary reads, "Killed while defending a crossing guard and seventeen first graders from street racing ninjas with flame throwers on the hoods of their cars," you just couldn't ask for a better way to be remembered.

For being David Carradine, I give him 2/5, for the way he died, I give him another 1.5/5 for a grand total of 3.5/5.

Ed McMahon


Ed was a bit of a legend, really. Of all the passings this week, I think his is the one that I'll feel the most. No, wait, that isn't exactly right. I won't feel it, because it's not like I knew him or we were family or something, but, of all the famous people who've died, Ed was the one that I spent the most time seeing on TV. So, in that respect, I guess I knew him better than any of the other famous deceased and, thus, will regret the void that is being left. I LOVED "Bloopers and Practical Jokes" when I was a wee little laddy. And who didn't enjoy impersonating his "Here's Johnny!" every once in awhile?

However, the sad truth is that I will remember him most for his schilling. He had his sweepstakes gig that he'd kept up for years--that was to be expected. But the image that will be forever etched into my brain is of him hocking a solid gold toilet on a cash4gold commercial (from last year's Super Bowl, no?). Not a very good last image to leave with people. Humbling, sure, but also incredibly humiliating.

For being Ed McMahon, I give him 2.5/5, for allowing his once illustrious (well, shiny, anyway) image to be forever marred by the cash4gold blight, he gets -.5 for a total of 2/5.

Farrah Fawcet



I am mostly indifferent about Farrah's death. She was just slightly before my time. I DO remember her nipples from her famous poster, but that's about it. I only watched MAYBE a half dozen episodes of "Charlie's Angels," and I certainly wasn't a "Burning Bed" fan, so I really didn't have any feelings for her passing--beyond just the sympathy I have for anyone who dies "before their time" (everyone's ideal time, of course, being somewhere around 90, after that, you don't really deserve sympathy anymore).

For being Farrah Fawcet (and for letting me see her poky nipples in her poster) she gets a 2.5/5. For making the fight for her life public, thus raising awareness slightly, I'll give her another 1/5 for a total of 3.5/5.

Billy Mays



Whatever your feelings about how annoying (almost to the point of being douchey sometimes) Billy Mays was a very effective advertiser. The first time I saw one of his ads, he was hocking Oxyclean. I immediately found his abrasive approach displeasing, but you know what? I went out and bought some Oxyclean to try and pick up some stains that were on the carpet in our living room before we moved into our house. It didn't work on the old stains, but the Oxyclean DID remove red wine puke that ended up on our carpet (and on some of the wall, and our hardwood floor in another room, and in the mesh of our screen door, and all over our porch) towards the end of one of our wine parties. So, not only did he convince me to go out and buy something that I normally wouldn't have (albeit the smallest container available), it was also a pretty good product. I still buy Oxyclean (though I rarely remember we have it and just end up throwing stuff with stains on it in the wash and hoping for the best).

So, for being Billy Mays, an overly-aggressive, abrasive salesman, he gets a 1/5. For being so good at his job that he talked me into buying something despite my instant dislike of his personality and character, he gets another 1.5/5 for a total of 2.5/5.

Michael Jackson



Ah, the best for last.

Let me be straight here, I don't have much good to say about Michael Jackson. So, if you are one of his adoring fans, one of the people who is willing to forgive all of his transgressions over the last few decades just because he brought you some pleasure in the form of Moonwalking or white gloving or Thrilling, then you might want to visit one of the multitude of media and fan pages that seem all too ready to apologetically address the issues of his life and death and declare his death a major loss to the world. If you, like many, choose to dismiss all of his possibly heinous acts as "his personal demons," then you might want to move right along. I'm all for giving people credit for their personal demons (see the Carradine death critique above, for example), up to the point where they start affecting people other than them. Then I have zero tolerance. Famous people should not be exempt from the laws of decency just because they have more stress than normal people or higher expectations than normal people or whatever excuses people might want to throw out there.

Now, I know, his child abuse stuff was ALLEGED, but, come on, you can't tell me there weren't a whole HOST of things wrong with that guy. How could he NOT be a child molester? He had such a tenuous grasp on reality, how could he possibly differentiate between right and wrong? If something felt like a good idea, I'd bet my house that he just KNEW that it WAS a good idea and there was nothing wrong with it. The kind of ego and narcissism that created a person like that wouldn't stop him just short of doing something "bad."

How about this, if Mike had been convicted of child abuse, what would the difference be in how we're approaching his death? That one simple conviction would have changed EVERYTHING. He wouldn't be the hero of the 80s, the bringer of beauty, the misunderstood artist that everyone is celebrating now, he would be another dead child molester, and who would care?

Perhaps I am just a little extra bitter because I never cared for Michael Jackson. Even during his hey-day (I was just discovering music in 1983 and 1984, so I got the full force of MJ), I just didn't give much of a crap about him. I thought the Thriller video was novel, but I didn't really like the song much. Actually, I can't really think back on any song of his that I liked more than a little. In fact, MOST of the time, if I hear something of his on the radio, I'll change the channel.

I know, heresy.

Bottom line, though, I don't have a few years' worth of fond memories from my childhood to fall back on in my opinion forming of MJs death. I can't say, "Well, he did have some problems, but MAN I loved him growing up, so I'll just remember the good times instead."

Thus, for being Michael Jackson, a VERY notable person--someone almost everyone in the world could identify--and a giver of art that MANY people appreciated (even if I wasn't one of them), I give MJ a 4/5. However, for being a goddamn FREAK for the last 20 years of his life--and not the interesting kind of freak either--and for the damage that I'm relatively certain he did to many people, even if he never touched a single person in an inappropriate way, I give him a -4.5/5, leaving MJ with a -.5/5 rating, which means that his death is actually less important than nothing.

Who Dies Next?

Good question. Originally, I thought I'd predict Abe Vigoda, because he seems like a pretty safe bet. But I changed my mind. For one, I like Abe Vigoda, so I don't want to accidentally wish death on him or somehow curse him by bringing his name back into the full view of Death (because, let's be fair, he HAS to be hiding somewhere Death can't find him because there's probably no other real reason that he's not dead). And for two, with the exception of Ed McMahon, all of the people who have died were rather unexpectedly young (well, Carradine wasn't a spring chicken, but he SEEMED younger than he was), so I think the next person will be another "shocker" death.

Thus, I predict that Amy Winehouse is going to suffer "cardiac arrest" sometime in the next week.
Still not really going out on any limb with this prediction. She couldn't possibly make it into her 40s at the rate she's going.

In Baby Related News

Since there is little more to report than bowel activities when discussing babies, I'm going to report some bowel activities.

Little Button has begun to move away from her "curds and whey, heavy on the whey" phase of poop and into the "cottage cheese mixed into pumpkin bread batter" phase of poop. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, she has been pooping just once a day instead of nearly every hour like she was when we first got her. On the other hand, it looks like COTTAGE CHEESE MIXED INTO PUMPKIN BREAD BATTER and smells like fermented death. And she is producing entire diaper fulls of the stuff, almost to the point where it is spilling out the TOPs of her diaper. And god how it sticks, to everything. Quite terrible, really, but one more necessary step towards solid food and poop that wipes with fewer than six wet wipes.

A Self Deprecating Story

That's right. I said "deprecating," not something else. Don't worry, this isn't yet another story about poop. But it IS a story about boobs. Sort of.

So far, the most trialling aspect of caring for a three week old while keeping a two year old entertained comes during the feedings. Button is a breeze to take care of MOST of the time when she's awake. She doesn't mind lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, for shortish period of times, which is a blessing. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, this is a completely foreign notion to us. Gabe could only be placed under his little baby gym thing when he was already asleep. Otherwise, he shrieked and screamed. Because I can put her down from time to time, I'm able to give Gabe my undivided attention, and that makes him happy.

There are, however, some of those moments when I simply can't pay attention to Gabe like he wants because the baby needs to be fed or calmed down. To deal with this problem, I've struck on something of an ingenious system that I'm almost positive nobody has ever thought of before (that was a joke).

While I'm holding the baby on my rocking chair, I encourage Gabe to grab a book or his blankie and come up on my lap, too, either to snuggle and watch shows or to flip through his book. The problem is, this requires me to use my "feeding hand" to engage Gabe, making it impossible for me to hold Button's bottle and her at the same time. So, instead of cradling Button in my left arm, as I usually do when I feed her, I put her down on a pillow that covers the armrest and my lap and feed her with my left hand while I deal with Gabe with my right.

I know. Confusing description. I really wanted a picture to go along with it, but Libby's never home when I'm actually doing this, and the cats have a TERRIBLE sense of S Curves and the Rule of Thirds, so I don't let them get close to the camera anymore because their "art" offends my better sensibilities.

Basically, I'm holding the baby on a pillow such that her head ends up pretty close to my armpits (and, yes, I've already considered the fact that I might be giving my child some weird, Kevin Kline's character from "A Fish Called Wanda," B.O. obsession--but I DO wear deodorant all the time, so hopefully she'll grow up to appreciate the musky freshness of Right Guard's "Xtreme Powerstripe: Arctic Refresh" instead, which would at least be a hygienic fascination), with my arm running down her left side and her right side held against my chest.

Now, this would actually be a pretty natural posture if I were breast feeding. You know how I know this? Now we come to the self deprecating part of the story. Yesterday, after I had finished feeding her and put down her bottle, and while I was turning pages for Gabe, our little Button tried to suckle on my man boob.

Gross, right? More than a little disturbing, too, I might add. But there you have it. Kids are inappropriate.

And, in my defense, I don't have BIG man boobs, so it's not like they are the most inviting things to infants. I have MAYBE an A cup. MAYBE. But there it is. A baby's hunger knows no discrimination, I guess. All of a sudden, I felt a little mouth gumming at the side of my masculintittie.

Needless to say, I freaked out just a little, but I made sure not to show it to Gabe because, you know, I don't want to give him the wrong impression. It's NOT OK to react too strongly when you're in a situation that, for all intents and purposes, strikes at the core of pretty much every aspect of gender identity and personal appropriateness that I can imagine. These situations have to be handled with aplomb and poise.

So I hastily slid him off my lap, into a confused little pile on the floor, grabbed the bottle, fed her, and took a mental shower to wash away all the weirdness.

My Baby Has Jowls

So, our baby is starting to put on some weight, which is good, I'm sure. I know babies are supposed to gain weight. If they didn't, then the world would be filled with people who weight under 10 pounds and houses would only be four to eight feet tall, max, and filled with adorable little dollhouse sized furniture. It just seems like she's gaining it all in her stomach and in her face to me, and that has me a bit worried. Libby swears up and down that babies are SUPPOSED to be fat. She says she's excited to see her get "all cute and pudgy." But I'm just not sure how I feel about it.

I mean, who looks good in jowls? Nixon? Mimi from Drew Carey? Who wants their kids to look like that? I'm just worried because we've only had her for two weeks. If she's put on this much cheek fat in just two weeks, by the end of August her head will be the size of a watermelon! It's very troubling.

But, here, you decide.

This was actually the second picture I took, but it shows off her jowls a bit better. She's beginning to get lip dimples!


Here's the first picture. Her first exposure to flash photography! Here, her jowls were pronounced, but I was afraid the obvious Popeye homage was too overbearing.

So there you go. Jowly. But kind of cute and adorable, right? Well, cute, adorable, and Popeyey.

I also took our first video of her tonight. Normally, I'm against video of children who can't even move under their own power yet. I mean, what can they do to endear themselves to the camera? Even jazz hands are almost out of the question. But I decided to take this because I feel rather confident that she is already trying to talk. Every once in awhile, she'll just start squeaking--and she sounds like she's experimenting with it. She's just making noise to make it, which seems a bit advanced to me (though, admittedly, Gabe only communicated through varying degrees of scream for his first year, so I might just have off-kilter expectations). Sadly, she stopped as soon as I got the camera. Nonetheless, I thought I'd share, since I'm guessing someone out there would like to see it.

Three Nice Things to Say about Summer

It's no secret that I hate summer. Hate it. It ranks right up there with pus oozing boils and dysentery, as far as I'm concerned. But, unlike both pus oozing boils and dysentery, summer is something that I have to experience annually--and for about four months of each year, at that.

However, in my bid to try to find nice things to say instead of constantly ranting, gnashing my teeth (which isn't easy to do mid-rant, believe me), and waving my fists at the indifferent heavens, I'm going to offer a few observations about the nice things that summer brings--brings to me specifically, mind you.

But first, I want to rant a little bit, just because it soothes my soul.

Kansas has to be one of the least pleasant places in the world to live for an unreasonable portion of the year. Yes, yes, I'm sure there are worse places. Antarctica, for instance, can't be very nice ANY time of the year. The Sahara is also quite unpleasant, I imagine. But those places are uninhabitable by any but the most bizarrely masochistic people. As far as inhabited places go, Kansas has to rank up there among the worst.

Kansas technically has four seasons, but they are unevenly distributed.

Fall, for instance, is all but nonexistent. About mid-October, the weather turns from miserably hot to something else. Usually, we'll get a week of temperatures in the 60s-70s, maybe two weeks if we're lucky. During those two weeks the leaves are expected to change, but that usually happens without much of the pretty orchestration of colors that so many places get. Our leaves are killed quick and, probably, painlessly by the stark contrast in season switchings instead of being allowed to linger. As other leaves' colors shift to the reds and oranges associated with their slow strangulation and eventual demise, our leaves simply transition from green to brown. So, maybe that's nice for the leaves, getting to die quickly. I guess I can put a positive spin on it that way.

Then, possibly by the end of October, it starts to freeze. Thanks to what I have to assume is global warming (though I'm willing to admit it's just a shift into a non-wintery cycle that's lasted about two decades for us now, just because I like to be difficult), our winters are often mild. We still get temperatures below zero Fahrenheit (and it usually happens in December, before winter even begins, which only adds to the frustration of figuring out our seasons), but don't last that long anymore. And we hardly ever get snow to speak of. When we do, it comes and then melts quickly. So, really, winter is more like a series of VERY uncomfortable periods interspersed between periods of MOSTLY uncomfortable weather.

Spring is a little better. Truly, it is the nicest time of the year. But Kansas feels it's necessary to destroy even that. While the weather might be its most pleasant (not factoring in the frequent threats of a tornado, of course), the rest of the nature around here tries to spoil it as best it can. This is where my nice things about summer come into play here in a bit, so I'll save it for now.

Finally, summer is miserable. If Mother Nature were to actually look like the ancient statues of the Mother Goddess (the morbidly obese, big-boobied ladies), then Kansas' weather would be akin to living inside one of her deepest FUPA folds while she enjoys a long steam bath. Our temperatures will hover around 100 for 2-4 months, and the humidity will rarely dip below 50% (it's 55% today, and one of the least humid days we've had since last week). The only breaks we'll get come in the form of thunderstorms, which routinely include straight-line winds over 60 miles an hour, vigorous lightning, and torrential downpours. And tornadoes, of course. There's always a chance for one of those.

This is the reason that I stand firmly behind my ranking of air conditioning as my #2 most important invention of the last 1000 years (#1 being toilet paper).

And now for the nice things that summer brings:

1) No more mowing. With the extreme heat, even the most frequent thunderstorms dry up quickly, and the grass simply can't survive without constant watering (which is an absolute waste of water as far as I'm concerned). We will only have to mow one or two times until the end of August.

2) No more mosquitoes, sort of. With the drying up of all neighboring bodies of water, the population of mosquitoes (which has been near plague levels thanks to a relatively wet spring) will dwindle.

3) No more cotton from our goddamn devil tree. Or from any other cottonwood tree, for that matter. FINALLY, one month after it started, our tree is starting to run out of fluff. I can't adequately express my gratitude to the hot weather for this blessed release.

So there you go, summer, stick my shining kindness right up your ass!

Another First

So I guess this must be some kind of landmark week. I'm not sure if amazing milestones are coming in droves or if it's just the fact that I'm trying to make a more conscious effort to document them, but we seem to be getting more firsts than usual (or maybe it's just that my definition of a milestone is a little too lax).

Today, Gabe did something he's never done before.

A Gabe First

He fell asleep on the couch! While the TV was on and I was right there and everything! No doubt, this doesn't seem like much of an accomplishment to most people, but for us it was a spectacular event.

When we first got Gabe at 3 months, he was a VERY reluctant sleeper. At the time, he would only sleep while being held (after a while, we figured out ways to surround him with rolled up blankets in his crib or in his vibratey chair to simulate being held, but it took around a month before we could get that to work with any sort of regularity). By 6 months, though, that wore off, and he would NEVER sleep while we were holding him. Moreover, he wouldn't sleep anywhere that wasn't his bed. Car rides? Forget it. He'd scream for the entire duration of the trip because he couldn't move like he wanted, was bored, and couldn't be constantly entertained by us because we were driving (the entertainment part has just now started to change, but he still only sleeps in the car when he's VERY tired and the ride is sufficiently long). Lying on the couch, in a chair, or on the floor? Not a chance. When he is tired, he melts down, so we know it's time for him to go up to his bed. Once there, he'll fall almost immediately to sleep if he's really tired. But he wouldn't sleep anywhere else. Ever.


This is the FIRST TIME he's ever just dozed off on the couch. So, obviously, we were caught by the novelty of it all and had to take a picture, just to prove to ourselves that it happened, because I can pretty much guarantee that it was an anomaly and won't happen again any time soon.

In other news, not much is going on. Button is still a darling, but she's taken up some very unusual sleep patterns of her own. For some reason, she's gotten it into her head that the middle of the night is the ideal time to be awake. She sleeps through most of the day, then, about 6:00 in the evening, wakes up for about an hour, falls back to sleep until about 9:00, then stays awake until about 3:00. Not surprisingly, this is playing silly buggers with our sleep. I'm hopeful that things will start to level out and fall into a normaler schedule sometime soon. Hopeful, but not optimistic.

An Important Gabe Milestone

Though my ongoing effort to document milestones often dips into the shallower end of the necessary pool, this one, I think, is a TRUE milestone and needs to be recorded for posterity.

Yesterday, Gabe learned a very important skill--well, maybe not IMPORTANT, as such, but it's one that I have found a quite a bit of use for over the years and find myself using still (though not as often as I'd like). I don't want to build this up TOO much, but it's probably changed not only the playing field, but the game itself. Yeah, it's that big of a deal.

Week 1 Review

So it has now been a week since Button joined our ranks, and it's been a busy week, filled with long hours, little sleep, and poop. Oh the poop. But it's been a quite eventful week in terms of development! Since we got Gabe at three months, we missed out on several of those first key milestones with him. This time, though, we're getting to see them all.

First, I don't mean to brag on our baby, but I'm pretty sure she can kick everyone else's babies asses. She's an overachieving badass. In just one week, her muscles have developed tremendously. Her neck went from rag-doll limp (go back and see pictures of The Faceless Stalker for an approximation) to merely "flopsy" in just these past few days. When we hold her up to our shoulders to burp, she is starting to hold her head up and away from our shoulders like a champ. If we put her on her stomach for a bit, she can already lift her head (though she tends to put it back on the ground rather gracelessly, which can't feel good on her nose, so we tend to not give her much tummy time just yet).

Apparently, newborns' stomachs can only hold about a half an ounce, but within the first two weeks, the stomach expands in size to hold about two ounces--which is why they need pretty much constant feedings at first. Button, however, can drink about three ounces now without trouble--and she almost never spits up. This seemingly tiny infant achievement might not portend to overachieving greatness in her relatively distant future of the becoming-president or saving-the-world variety, but it MIGHT suggest that she has a possibly successful future in the competitive eating world. Someday, she might even be the first woman to hold the world hot dog eating competition championship. A dad can dream.

The best news about this expanding stomach thing, though, is that she is starting to sleep in slightly longer intervals. Being old, as we feel, the sleepless nights, even divided between Libby and I, were quickly wearing us out. Now she'll sleep in good two hour intervals, and, somehow, her schedule has adjusted slightly so that she's sleeping more during the night and less during the day (it had been just the opposite until two days ago--then, miraculously, it flipped). All of this means Yippee!

Notice the outfit she's wearing. Our friend Megahn gave it to us. It has tiny little dancing slippers on the feet and it says Twinkle Toes on the chest. It SHOULD have said Tiny Dancer to be the awesomest, but it's still pretty adorable. I swore early on that we'd try to steer as clear of pink as possible with any girl we raised, because I think the color pink is insulting in many ways--to me and to society in general. But I'm finding that avoiding pink entirely is very nearly impossible. Stupid sweatshops and their insistence that little girls be covered in frills and abominable color schemes. Still, on this outfit, I think it works.

Yeah, I know, more pink. And here she is sleeping again. I'm afraid that's about as interesting as it gets right now. Adorable, yes, but totally lacking in zazz.

And, you know what, I'm going to take a moment to say something nice about someone who isn't me or mine. Single mothers. I just can't even fathom how they manage--especially the ones who have more than one kid. Gabe is a great kid, but he's a handful to keep up with alone--and he's even more of a handful whenever the baby is awake, it seems, as he's vying for our undivided attention. To be honest, if we're both not here--one to watch the baby and the other to entertain Gabe--it's a bit of a nightmare. How the hell do people without any support network manage? All I can say is, the single moms out there who DO manage it, have my utmost respect. I am now 100% certain that I could never handle it. But I also think they should take every opportunity to share their experiences with all those high school girls out there who think having a baby isn't such a bad idea. Those kids need a serious wakeup call. Perhaps we, as a society, should start a volunteer network. All of those eager girls out there could spend, let's say, a week caring for the children of some fraught single mother. Dollars to donuts, that experience changes a lot of minds. Get on that, society!

Anyway, that's pretty much where we are right now. Baby is well, Gabe is well, Libby and I are tired but well.

And here is a video Libby took last night at Finn's place. The boys are playing in the collapsible house.

An Observation on Poop

I am in the middle of my shift. Well, not really the middle since it's 10:00 and I'm on duty until 2:00. Baby Button seems to be working on a slightly different schedule than she has the last few nights. Previously, she's slept all day, until about 8:30 or 9:00, then she's been more or less awake until the end of my shift at 2:00 (and, of course, she falls right to sleep as soon as Libby starts her shift, allowing her to fall back to sleep on the couch, if she so chooses, though I'm SURE she'll try to give you some sob story about how she actually gets less sleep than I do and her shift is much tougher because she also gets to deal with Gabe when he wakes up at 5:00, but it's all balderdash, I assure you).

Tonight, however, she woke up about 6:00 and has been up and down ever since, until about a half hour ago, when she showed signs of going to sleep and then, miraculously, she DID (the first time she's done more than doze for me, in fact). What did it, I think, was the poop she had. I'm assuming it had to be glorious and more than a little exhausting. It certainly sounded, and felt, like it.

If you've never had the pleasure of a small creature shitting squarely in the palm of your hand, you're really missing something special. I don't mean special as in it was a "nice" thing, I mean that it was an event so far out of the realm of pleasant that it is almost certainly going to brand itself deep in my memories so that my brain can dredge it up as a very unpleasant interruption to my most engrossing dreams. I can see it now.

I'm in the middle of a giant industrial complex that is moonlighting as a top secret research and development department or, possibly, a unicorn breeding and harvesting facility (what can I say, my dreams tend to run the gamut of oddities--the only constant being that they tend to include people from high school or college that I feel guilty for never getting in contact with). Whoever happens to be behind whatever is going on is just about to do something that will inevitably affect me in some way--my dreams also tend to be painfully vague and I often end up waking myself up from them on the grounds that the plotline has become convoluted beyond repair and not even a Shyamalanian twist at the end could pretend to make sense of it all. But before all of this happens, some sexy lady starts directing her sexitude in my direction (this woman is almost always very vague, just a representation of "woman" unless--and this is the sadest part--the woman in question is Libby. Yes, we've been together just that long). She's all in my business and things are getting steamy.

Then she shits in my hand.

It will happen. Mark my word!

Anyway, I spent about an hour feeding Button three ounces of formula, because, at seven days old, human children are terrible eaters. Besides being terribly inefficient and slow, of that three ounces, probably 1 1/2 ended up dribbling out her mouth, down both cheeks, and forming puddles in the folds under her chin or behind her ears (which is exactly the reason why, after about 24 hours, she starts to smell like a wheel of cheese that's taken a shit--and the worst part is that we're not supposed to give her more than a spongebath until her umbilical "stump" [and that's actually very much what it looks like, a black, charred, disgusting little tree stump growing out of her stomach, it's entirely unsightly] falls off, so she's not really getting much better each time we bathe her). And then she shat.

Now, our baby girl may be as cute as a button, but she farts like a gorp fuelled lumberjack. And each fart usually contains an explosive blast of molten liquid waste that, if not for the confinement of the diaper and her sleeper (and under ideal conditions, of course--proper winds and the like), would surely squirt a broken stream of vile pooh matter ten feet from her posterior. Up to this point, I guess I had been lucky. I'd heard the farts, even felt them, to an extent, as I held her, but my hand had not been properly positioned to feel the full force. Until just a little while ago. Because of the way I was holding her, my left hand was tucked up under her butt and I felt the full force of the blast and the accompanying hot squirt of blech.

It was truly a moment to remember, for all the wrong reasons, and I'm just happy that I could share.

A Trip to the Zoo

This morning, we took Norah for her first trip to the zoo. She loved it! I mean, she is only 7 days old, and she slept the entire time we were there, but I'm sure she loved it. Gabe enjoyed it, though, as did Finn (Kris and Jess joined us there).

Gabe and Finn eating. Gabe decided to eat only foods that started with the letter "c" today. He would only touch carrots, corn, and cookies. And he was drinking cherry limeade, which I'm willing to accept as a "c" food.

Gabe and Finn's first chicken fight! As per Alabama rules, Gabe won because he stayed mounted the longest. Neither of the boys were terribly impressed with their rides. I was surprised Gabe didn't have more fun considering his inherent daredevil nature.

Everything is going pretty well so far. We're SORT OF adjusting to the sleeplessness. See, we got Gabe when he was 3 months old. Since he was a premie, and had been pretty badly neglected once he got home, he was just 10 pounds when he came to live with us. And he was already a screamer, a relentless, ear-splitting screaming shrieker, which is a habit we've almost been able to break him of, though it's taken us two years to do it. Despite the fact that he was, developmentally speaking, about where he should have been as a one month old when we got him, he was already sleeping in somewhat longer spurts that come with newborns. So, we got to skip the every-hour feedings. And, believe it or not, that extra hour between feedings makes a HUGE difference. With Gabe, Libby and I were able to take turns with feedings, which meant we'd get about four hours of sleep between turns.

But Button is an every hour girl, and a completely unpredictable sleeper. Take this morning, for instance. She woke twice to be fed while we were at the zoo, but went promptly back to sleep. Otherwise, she slept from the time we left until the time we got home, almost five hours. But last night, from 11:00 until 2:00, she barely slept for five minutes at a time. I know this because Libby and I have split the night in two. I get to stay up from 8:00 until 2:00 in the morning and she gets her from 2:00 until 8:00.

Sorry, no pictures of Button from the zoo. She was bundled up in her little carrier all morning, so there wasn't much to take pictures of. But here's one of her sporting this summer's hottest new look, The Burrito. Mark my words, all the kids will be wearing this until Labor Day. Unless they are losers, of course. Or their parents are too poor to afford a hoity toity "receiving blanket."

However, aside from the slight sleep deprivation we're fighting through right now, everything is as right as rain. I've only heard her cry maybe three times--and once was for her first bath last night, which she desperately needed because she smelled like a wedge of cheese that had shit itself. It's almost unsettling some times, to be honest. I've attuned myself so completely to Gabe's wails of abject anguish--which was his go-to mode of communication until he started "speaking"--that, not hearing them all the time coming from the new baby, I assume she's asleep. When I notice that, in fact, she isn't, I instinctively wonder what's wrong with her that she's not crying. I suppose I'll get used to it eventually, but I'm already enjoying it immensely.

And here is a little video of the boys splashing in a puddle at the zoo. Even though there were only TWO puddles in the entire zoo this morning, they managed to find both of them and splash them completely out of water. Boys.

An Actual Update

Well, it's early evening of our first full day with our new foster baby. We've decided to nickname her Button. Unofficially, her name will be Norah--and if we get to adopt, then that's what we'll change her name to. But we don't really feel comfortable calling her that until we know it's a done deal, but we didn't want to call her Elena either because we figured that would confuse Gabe (and, really, us and anyone who heard us using that name then switching to Norah later on). So we decided that we needed a nickname.

Gabe went by Bubbie (with the "oo" sound of "foot, not the "uh" of "butt") for the longest time, and it's still more or less the term of endearment we use when we don't call him by his name. We thought long and hard, for about twenty seconds, on some possibilities. I suggested Schmoopie, which is a term that Norah's Aunt Molly is fond of using, but we decided that, while it's an amusing word, it's just a little too tough to say on a repeated basis. It just doesn't roll off the tongue. So the next suggestion I tossed out there was Button--as in "cute as a." It's not the most original, I know. It's hardly inspired work. But it's easy to say and SORT OF catchy, so we'll see if it sticks.

Anyway, from now on, I think I will refer to her as Button in this blog, just to hedge my bets in the (hopefully) unlikely event that she is reintegrated with her parents (which is, apparently, not the kind of slam dunk that we thought it was going to be).

We're getting on quite well with Button so far. Gabe is handling it pretty well, but I'm convinced that is only because there have been two adults in the house whenever he's been here and awake--which means there is someone to pay exclusive attention to him while someone else cares for the baby. The real trial by fire will come tomorrow when it's just me and the two kids in the house. I'm thinking he will have a few serious meltdowns when I'm not able to get down on the floor and play with him because I'm holding the baby or feeding her or something. Should be good times.

But she is an absolute ANGEL. She is the exact polar opposite of how Gabe was when we first got him (not to disparage Gabe's role in his early attitude--it was entirely not his fault that he was so miserable when we first got him, but, once he learned how to scream and cry, he sure made the most use of it he could until he was about nine months old). She sleeps quietly for about an hour at a time, wakes up, has a bit of a nosh, burps, poops, gets a diaper change, then goes back to sleep. I've only heard her cry maybe four times in the last 24 hours (and to be perfectly blunt, Gabe has cried more times since he woke up from his nap around 2:00 this afternoon).

And that's it for now. I posted some pictures on Facebook, but we really haven't taken a ton of them yet. I swear that I will at least attempt to take plenty of pictures of her. I know it's always tough to show the same kind of motivation for the non-first children, but I'm going to try and rise to the challenge. Just not tonight. I'm friggin tired.

Update!

Naw. Just kidding. Nothing new has happened yet. We're still waiting on a call from our case worker to let us know when we can pick up our new bouncing baby girl. I'm quite excited! Not by the prospects of not sleeping for more than two hour stretches for the next few months--that part I not-so-silently dreading. But I AM excited about documenting, on here, the developmental milestones as they take place. I didn't do such a hot job of that with Gabe, and now we really can't remember when he started crawling or sitting up on his own or walking--I mean, we REMEMBER it, but we can't remember exactly how old he was or anything like that, which isn't really of any use for people who might be curiously reading these blogs for that kind of information. I DO remember, with crystal clarity, that he was 13 months old before he started consistently sleeping through the night--though, technically, that's still not REALLY the case since his definition of "morning" begins at 4:30, which I consider entirely unreasonable. Anything before 7:00 a.m. is "bedtime" as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, you have those updates to look forward to.

Oh, I guess I do have one milestone that I can record for posterity with Gabe. A couple of days ago, Gabe figured out how to intentionally remove the cap from a bottle of lotion we have for him in his diaper cupboard. He then proceeded to lubricate most of his arms, the front of his shirt, and a sizeable portion of the floor in the nanosecond it took me to notice and the couple of seconds it took me to leap across the room while screaming "NOOOOOOO!" in slow motion. This isn't the first time he's removed a cap and made a mess--he's accidentally done it at least two other times that I can think of--but this was the first time that he actually seemed to know what he was doing. I know this not because I was watching how he removed the cap--that would have been pretty stupid of me to do considering the mess he made--but because I watched him repeatedly go for the cupboard to find the tube so he could practice his new skill all over again. So, if you're looking for a 24 month milestone, removing caps from things seems like a pretty good one.

Oh, wait, there's another new one, too. He knows what "owies" are now. The night before last, he started doing something pretty funny, and he's done it to me two more times since. He is quite fond of the kisses we give his owies, so he's been intentionally "hurting" himself to get them. He'll smack the floor with his hand or step lightly on a toy on the floor to get one on his foot so he can come running up to one of us and say "Owie!" and hold up the offended appendage. In this video, he'd been sitting on the floor in the dining room slapping the floor, saying, "Owie," and holding up his hand for Libby to kiss. As soon as I got the camera, though, he stopped doing it for a bit while yelling "Bop!" and smacking the wall had his attention. But, towards the end of the video, he did demonstrate "owie" a bit.

And, don't worry, we'll let everyone know when we have some news about the new baby.

Oh! And the puke! Oh, god, I'd forgotten about all the puke. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to that again either. I've gotten rather used to being able to wear the same clothes for an entire day. Oh well. I guess the washing machine is going to start getting a good workout again. Which is just as well. It was starting to get soft.

Speech Impediments and the Cleaning Ninja

So I do have a couple of videos to share from the last couple of days that I forgot about when I posted earlier.

The first one is of Libby and Gabe, Friday night, I think. The video is pretty self-explanatory and also quite amusing.

This second video I took earlier. A month or so ago, Libby bought Gabe some kid sized brooms. For some reason, the kid is obsessed with brooms. Every time he sees one, he picks it up and has to start "cleaning" with it--though, in reality, he's usually just knocking things off shelves and tables or batting around things on the floor like he's playing hockey. My hope is this means he's one of nature's cleaners--which is a natural inclination I will happily exploit when he gets old enough to actually know what he's doing--and not that he's got a long and industrious future as a janitor ahead of him.

Anyway, he started carrying both brooms around and trying to use them at the same time. Right before I started recording, of course, he was holding them up, crossed together, in front of his face like he was some sort of warrior (which inspired the name of the post). Then he put one of the brooms in his mouth and tried to stick the other one up his nose (which inspired me to get the camera, though what I actually got on tape wasn't nearly as amusing).

Dipping into the Shallow End of PBS' Programming

Today's post is going to be short because I'm friggin exhausted. Libby couldn't sleep last night. USUALLY, it's her job to wake up with Gabe before even the butt crack of dawn. It is her duty because I blame her for the fact that he gets up before 5:00. For the last year I've said, "Ignore him until 6:00. Sooner or later he'll figure out what time we're willing to get him up an around." But she's never been able to do it, and he just keeps getting up earlier and earlier.

Last night, though, she was stressing out about an early morning meeting and the fact that she couldn't sleep, so I volunteered to get up and let her sleep in. Of course, KNOWING that I had to get up far too early made it impossible for me to get to sleep too. Still, I started dozing around midnight, only to be woken with a start by a nasty thunderstorm that blew through. Thus it was after 1:30 before I finally fell asleep, and I woke up every half hour thanks to dreams that Gabe was awake and making noise, until he finally woke up at 4:50. Freaking ugh.

So I thought I would briefly discuss some of the PBS shows that I can't stand--mostly because I'm in that kind of mood today. I'm not sure that PBS is producing much in the way of pre-K shows right now aside from "Sesame Street" and the new show "Sid the Science Kid," both of which I'll hit on later. They seem to be focusing on their K+ shows that run in the afternoon, so most of what runs in the morning for the younger crowd is reruns of older shows (like "Clifford" which stars the voice talent of the not-recently-departed John Ritter). Nonetheless, there's still plenty of stuff that shouldn't have been made in the first place to dislike.

"Barney"

Barney is stupid. There's no need to mince words about it. It is insulting to me, my family, my friends, children everywhere, and the concepts of intelligence as a whole. Barney is a gelded moron and the kids on show are creepy music spewing drones--some FAR too old to be on there in the first place. Avoid "Barney" like the plague.

"Caillou"

"Caillou" is an import from the French Canadians. I could actually rant for quite some time about how much I despise this show, but I won't. It follows the plodding and pointless antics of a four year old boy named Caillou. The show is, for some reason, a perpetual "flashback," with softened, whited out edges and corners. I have no idea WHY they do this. They do flash back considerably in the show, but even at the beginning when, presumably, the show is in the present, the flashback graphics are being used. And speaking of graphics, the animation is deplorable. An episode was on the other day wherein the little sister was going to pick up a toy car. The car was on the bottom of the screen. She descended from the top of the screen down to about the middle and bent over, then the car was magically in her hands instead of where it had been down below. Awful.

Bugger. I can't think of another PBS show that I really, really hate right now. There are several that I can take or leave, but it would be unfair of me to lump them in with these two stinkers. Even the unwatchable "Teletubbies" and "Boo Bahs" aren't so bad that I think they belong here--they do, after all, have a FEW positive aspects. Oh well. More later.

A Good Excuse and Some Trivia

I thought this was as good a time as any to try and make a case for my fundamental resistance to going outside. There are those who will argue its value--and I would tend to agree, on a theoretical basis, that there IS value. For people who aren't me. But whatever value there MIGHT be in spending time outside is almost certainly dashed against the rocks of sound reason when THIS is what awaits.


For those unfamiliar with the trees of this region, what you see here is the puked forth cotton from a cottonwood tree. ONE tree. We actually have a few very substantial trees around our house that make damn sure that all of our yard looks pretty much like this. Now, this isn't the total accumulation of cotton by any means. Two days before I took this picture, it rained, which knocked most of what was on the ground before that into the grass. And then it rained the night after I took this, and the yard is starting to fill up again. It looks like it's snowing around our house--miserable, itchy, inhalible snow. It gets EVERYWHERE, and it sticks on just about anything.

And it's not just the cotton. A few weeks before the cotton starts to fall, the tree drops tiny yellow seed pods of some sort that stick to everything and, without further dampening, will permanently stain whatever they are attached to--including our bathtub if some happen to fall off our feet while we're showering. These little bastard seeds will continue to show up throughout our house for another month as our feet find one buried in the carpet or under a shoe and later deposit them somewhere to do irreparable damage to the carpet or a piece of white clothing.

All of this from just one tree. I'm actually convinced that it's not a normal tree. I can very nearly prove that, in fact, the tap root from this tree (assuming it has one, of course, which I do) stretches down far below the earth's crust and straight into the circles of hell. I don't think it has made it to the final circle, YET, but I'd say it's probably made its way down to the 5th Circle right now, drawing its strength from the waters of the River Styx (as opposed to how it would be if it were drawing its strength from the band Styx, which would be magical).

I've been actively trying to kill this tree with malicious thoughts for nine years now, but the fact that it's still alive seems to be pretty clear evidence that I'm not dealing with a normal tree. Such are my mind powers. One day, though, we'll buy a chainsaw, which trumps mind powers in the Hierarchy of Killing Yard Things, and then it will see who's boss.

The bit of truly useless trivia that I wanted to share was something I discovered in my bathroom book last night.

But first I'll explain the last part of that statement a bit.

At any given time, I'm working on at least three books. Traditionally, they have fallen into their own category: Bathroom, Bedroom, and Work.

The first book is almost always non-fiction (the only exception being a fiction book that I don't have much interest in reading, so I put it in the bathroom where I'll HAVE to read it or read nothing at all--so far, there has only been one of these "The Poisonwood Bible," which a friend told me I MUST read. It was, at best, boring as hell most of the way through, so after a month of failing to read it somewhere else, I moved it to the bathroom, and, after about a year, finished the damn thing. Then I promptly donated it to the library, which, if you've seen my collection of books, you'd know is a punishment reserved for a very special kind of book). I don't read a great deal of non-fiction, and what I do tends to be of the humorous bent, so I've found it makes for a delightful trip to the potty.

The second book (Bedroom) is my primary read. I like to read for at least a half hour before bed every night--sometimes more if I am enjoying the book a little too much. These books have the fastest turn-around time. I'll usually finish one in a few weeks. Currently, I have "Children Standing Playing before a Statue of Hercules" by David Sedaris up there. I am largely disappointed by the book. Having simply added it to my wishlist on Amazon without first seeing what it was about, I had no idea it was a collection of short stories COLLECTED by Sedaris and not a book of his own work. Being someone not particualrly interested in reading something "because such and such loved it," I'm finding the collection rather tiresome and boring. That and I'm not a huge fan of the short story these days. I like the idea of a short story, and I appreciate them as an art form, but I just don't care to read them all that much. I prefer to make a commitment to my reading. I like characters to linger and my stories to develop slowly over the course of chapters. I don't like getting thrown into the middle of something all willy-nilly. By the time I figure out the characters, it's time to do away with them forever, which seems like such a waste. Plus, most short stories these days seem to focus on regular, standard-issue people, which also seems like a waste. If I'm only getting to see a slice of someone's life, that life better be goddamn interesting, that's all I'm saying.

The third book (Work) is an unfortunate bastard that languishes in my book bag most of the time. Before I accepted the role of full time parent, I could make it through a Work book with decent speed. Any time I was somewhere that didn't require me to pay much attention to what was going on around me, I'd pull out the book and read for awhile. Now, since I only work two or three Saturdays a month at Ten Thousand Villages, I don't have much time for reading (especially since I also have all of my writing stuff in the bag and I veiw my time at Villages as prime writing time). As such, I've had the same book, "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome--which is actually a quite amusing 19th century travelogue following a poorly executed trip down the Thames--in my book bag for the last year and a half.

Anyway, the snipet of interesting information came from my bathroom book--currently "Made in America" by Bill Bryson. Normally, I love Bryson. His mixture of facts and fun is exactly the recipe that my brain needs to stay interested in factual non-fiction. Plus, this book is about words, which is another favorite topic of mine. Specifically, he traces the origins of hundreds of words and phrases that have been coined here in the US over the past few centuries. The combination of Bryson and word nerdishness SHOULD have meant a slam dunk of interesting reading. However, it has not proven thus. His other word book, "The Mother Tongue," was fantastic. This one is, sadly, almost impossibly boring. I'm not sure what the difference is, but there is one, and I've been slogging hopelessly through this book for about nine months now. It's made my bathroom time rather rushed and less than enjoyable, frankly, and I'll be glad when the book is finished.

Despite its basic disinteresting nature, there have been a few little nuggets of useless information that I've uncovered in there, and one of them struck my fancy last night.

Apparently, the Puritans were pretty forgiving when it came to premarital sex. They had a strangely complicated system for it, but, by the 1770s, nearly half of all marriages involved an already pregnant woman. This struck me as completely odd since every instinct in me wants to refer to prudish behavior as "Puritan" and blame it away on our ridiculously fun-sucking forefathers. But that's just not the case (that's not to say they still didn't suck a lot of fun--the outlawed just about everything else that was fun, so I guess they had to have SOMETHING to do with all their time). Our culture's sexual squeamishness mostly began with the Victorians. Stupid Victorians. We are not amused by their Puritanical ways!

Anyway, that's it. Lots of build up for a relatively pointless fact. You're welcome!

The Day That Lived in Infamy

Is it, perhaps, a little over the top--maybe even a touch disrespectful--to compare my two hour trip to Chuck E. Cheese to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor? No. I don't think so. If anything, it's a little UNDERstated. In terms of importance, I can't think of a date that rings with the same kind of consequence. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914? The Battle of Hastings in 1066? The day time finally stopped moving backwards allowing wedding planners everywhere to utilize a standard calendar on 0 A.D.? That day roughly 6000 years ago when God pulled a bone out of Adam's chest to create Eve then sent them on their merry, if ultimately disappointing, way? I'm not sure any of these dates hold the same kind of significance in the annals of time as the day I took Gabe to Chuck E. Cheese.

Actually, I'm kidding. It really wasn't all that bad.

We were lucky, actually. Even though it was 5:00 when our party started, the place was still pretty deserted. And even as the early evening wore on, the business never really picked up THAT much. So, the kids were able to roam pretty freely, moving from one ride to the next without having to worry about pushing some other unsuspecting kid out of a seat.

But my god was Gabe a fireball. He ran--and I'm not exaggerating here--pretty much non-stop from the time we got there. We had to actually force him to take the first bite of cake, just so he'd realize that it was something delicious we were trying to get him to eat and not the plain old yucky "dinner" (of pizza, which shouldn't be the kind of punishment he apparently thought it was) he'd refused to sit down long enough to eat three or four times before. Even then, he could only get about half of the cake eaten before he had to get back to running around.

Gabe with the Creepy Van Man. I think he's supposed to be a Veterinarian, thus the dog that's in there with him. However, he's got his arm thrown over the seat, as if waiting to embrace whoever is sitting in the driver's seat, and he has such a lecherous, expecting grin on his face. This was the only ride Gabe would sit in from start to finish--and he rode in it four or five times. Should I be worried?

Because we got one of the "birthday packages," we received about 180 tokens, all told, for the kids to use (which turned out to be impossible in less than two hours--we ended up having about $10 worth of tokens left over at the end). As such, every time Gabe approached a ride or game, we plunked a token in it. He'd sit on the rides just long enough to get it started, then he'd bail out and some other wandering kid would get in to finish the ride.

Gabe having a bit of a meltdown because we wanted him somewhere other than where he happened to be going already. This was a recurring theme. "Hey, Gabe! Let's go eat some cake!" Then he'd say, "No, no, no, no!" and run like hell in the opposite direction. When we caught him, he collapsed to the ground like this. Toddlers are such fun!

By the end, we had a trail of just about every kid under the age of 5 streaming behind us, finishing up the rides and games that Gabe had abandoned because he couldn't sit still long enough to enjoy them.

Then came the presentation of the cake, brought out by the giant Chuck E. mascot. We knew Gabe would love the giant mouse. Being completely devoid of all fear, I'm not the least bit surprised that he loves mascots. He even loved the creepy-assed animatronic singers on the stage. He kept walking in front of them, carefully examining them whenever they got to a speaking or singing part (and, by the way, the music at Chuck has gotten MUCH worse over the years--I was embarrassed for the big mouse and some of the abominations of music they performed, and that's saying something).

Animatronic Chuck E. Cheese. Pretty goddamn creepy, isn't it? The left eye wasn't stuck like that, it was ticcing uncontrollably, like Chuck was having some sort of stroke or something. How this doesn't give every child that comes in there nightmares, I'll never know. Who thought giant robot mice were a good idea in the first place?

This moment was golden--easily one of the most memorable moments of his young life (for us, probably not for him). They made a HUGE deal. The animatronic band sang a song that lasted five or ten minutes. The mascot Chuck and our assigned waiter led a "train" of kids around and around and around the eating area, clapping and singing and waving and stomping. And Gabe PARTICIPATED. We were floored. We can't get him to follow or do anything we ask without multiple attempts and more than a little cajoling. Apparently, we just need to wear a giant mouse costume and he'll gladly do everything we say. He followed Chuck around the eating area three or four times, laughing and clapping and waving. And we got it all on video!

Except the camera ran out of memory before it was over, so I hastily tried to delete a few scrub movies I'd taken earlier.

And I think I accidentally erased what was probably the best video we would have ever gotten of young Gabe. Either that or the camera screwed up because we ran out of memory (because I swear that I didn't erase it--yet, it was gone and how likely was it that the camera screwed up? So, yeah, it was probably my fault.). I think someone might have gotten some still pictures of him on his walk, so we might have that to remember it by.

And we got PLENTY of other slightly less amusing videos of him doing stuff. Libby posted the better stuff on youtube, so I won't repost them here. Also, I'm hoping people will share some of the photos they got on Facebook or something because we didn't get that many stills.

So, all in all, it wasn't as nightmarish as I feared it would be, and Gabe seemed to have a good, if entirely distracted, time. Mission successful, I suppose.

Title Censored for Insensitivity Issues

My original title was going to be a clever play on the similarities between the words “ethics” and “ethnics” but then I went ahead and decided to be racially sensitive. Go figure.

I don’t usually spend my Sundays working on posts for this blog (though it will likely be Monday before I actually get it posted) because Libby isn’t fond of me sitting on the computer while she has to entertain Gabe. But today is a special day and I need a little distracting. Today is special because it comes before tomorrow afternoon.

Chuck. E. Cheese.

Two words and a letter shouldn’t strike such wearying fear into my heart, but they do. I might not be able to sleep tonight in uneager anticipation. It really should be quite hellish.

All I know is this BETTER be the first memory that Gabe can recollect at much later points in his life. Sometime soon he’ll be forming that first sticking memory (I have a few from periods between 18 months to 3 years, but they all just sort of blur together now as I get older—which isn’t saying much, really, since the last 10 years just sort of blur together too), and I’d like to think he’ll form it with a deeply seated appreciation of the trauma his parents went through to give him a special second birthday. If, on the other hand, he DOESN’T remember it, then what the friggin frig was the point of us even having this party in the first place?

Anyway, today I’m going to discuss three, er, internationally themed shows: “Dora the Explorer,” “Toot and Puddle,” and “Ni Hao, Kai-Lan.”

“Dora the Explorer”

Gabe relaxing in the early morning, basking in the glow of Dora's radiance.

In the beginning, when I was just familiarizing myself with these shows, I disliked Dora nearly as much as Diego. However, over the last year, I’ve decided that Dora isn’t all that bad.

Unlike Diego, Dora doesn’t set out with unrealistic pretenses. Her show isn’t pretending to be “science” as conducted in some fantasy-rific Mexican wonderland. Her show is supposed to be “fun” in some fantasy-rific Mexican wonderland, and she does a pretty good job with that.

Though I do have a little trouble with yet another five year old out doing whatever the hell she pleases without any sort of adult supervision. While I agree kids should be raised to be independent (I know part of me can’t wait until Gabe is ready to move on to college), I think five or six might just be a little too earlier for kids to be forging off to battle bridge trolls and face off against snakes and crocodiles and giant spiders in the forest. Call me old fashioned.

Unlike Diego, Dora has some charming characters to it as well. Diego’s characters fall into one of two categories: animals needing rescued, and Diego. Dora has several rather entertaining characters. My personal favorites are Benny the Bull and Swiper the Fox. I like Benny because he reminds me of some big dumb simpleton of a literary character. I just can’t think of which one for some reason. I’ve been racking my brain for five minutes now. I really wanted to say Boo Radley, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the character I had in mind. No, I know who I’m thinking of—Lennie from “Of Mice and Men.” He, he. Lennie. Benny. I’m guessing the similarity in names was intentional. I just now made the connection, though, because, honestly, I don’t spend that much time thinking about the shows Gabe’s watching (in fact, I’m usually trying to do just the opposite to maintain my sanity).

Swiper I find hilarious. He is possibly the greatest villain in history, and I don’t say that lightly. I think he’s the ultimate villain because HE DOES IT JUST TO BE A JERK. Swiper has NOTHING to gain from doing what he does. His only intention from the beginning is to grab something of value from Dora and Boots and throw it into the forest so they’ll have to spend their valuable time looking for it. Plus, he’s very easily foiled, which all ultimate villains should be (though, obviously, the word “ultimate” suggests there should only be one, thus making my use of the word “all” completely confusing—which is only compounded by my observation of said confusion here instead of simply backspacing and changing the original text, which I’m simply refusing to do out of mean-spiritedness, as any ultimate villain would appreciate). All they have to do is say “Swiper no swiping” three times before he reaches whatever he’s trying to steal and Swiper has to say, “Oh, man!” and leave. And he always sounds so sad when he says “Oh, man!” The futility of it all often makes me laugh. And for that, I appreciate Dora.

Plus Gabe loves her. He’s got a thing for, um, non-white girls, let’s say. They always catch his fancy. And he likes Boots—and who can blame him, monkeys are hilarious. Always.

“Toot and Puddle”

Gabe definitely NOT watching "Toot and Puddle." The show wasn't on in the background, but it was on according to the schedule. This is a collapsible house thing that Libby got about a year ago and just found in the closet over the weekend. We buy so much crap for this kid that we don't even know what we have anymore. Sad.

“Toot and Puddle” is a relatively new show. It is a Noggin exclusive. In the last six months, Nickelodeon has released two new shows, and both of them have pigs as their main characters—this one and “Olivia.” I find this mildly disturbing. Pigs are not appealing creatures to base main characters on. Sure, Wilbur was a nice pig, but I can’t imagine trying to follow his daily adventures. It just sounds displeasing to me. Plus, pigs are ugly. They’re all pink and hairless and, well, I know very well how pigs smell. There is no smell like pig smell. Growing up, whenever I would complain about the smell around one of my uncles, he would always say, “Smells like money.” To which I thought, but never said, “You need a new wallet.” I know, not the best comeback. And, to be honest, off and on I’ve tried to come up with better ones for almost twenty years now, but haven’t been able to. So, I’m open to suggestions.

Anyway, pigs are gross, but Nickelodeon is obsessed with them recently for some reason. “Olivia,” I might talk about later, but it’s not AS bad as Toot and Puddle.

I don’t know what irks me about this show, but I really don’t like it a bit. They don’t show it often during the day, but I purposely avoid Noggin whenever it is on. The concept is pretty simple—they are world traveling pigs. OK, that sounds like it should be rather complicated, actually, what with pigs not being natural travelers. That is one problem I have with the show—it’s TOO easy for them to travel. Again, two unsupervised children (and, again, without parents or any adults really to look out for them) can just pick up and travel anywhere in the world they want with almost no notice. They wake up, say, “Let’s visit Egypt,” and then they are on their way.

I think what bothers me the most about it is the cutesy attitude and the little phrases they mutter like “Ab-so-TOOT-ly!” Obscene. Or maybe I just really don’t care for pigs as characters. I don’t know what it is.

Fortunately, Gabe doesn’t really care about them one way or another, so this one is pretty easy to avoid altogether.

“Ni Hao Kai-Lan”

Gabe watching Kai-Lan. Rather, it would be, except they were showing an all-morning marathon of Dora this morning. Really, you could look at the picture for Dora above and his reaction to Kai-Lan would only differ in the character names he repeatedly half mutters through the show.

If I had to pick a favorite show for Gabe, Kai-Lan would definitely be in the top two. And, actually, I’m sort of OK with that.

Kai-Lan is a pretty new show—they only have about fifteen or so episodes of it right now, I think. However, even though they show it about ten times a day between Nick Jr. and Noggin, and I might catch it twice a day if I’m paying attention to the schedule, I haven’t really gotten tired of it yet. The show’s concept is pretty basic—sort of like Chinese Dora, really. Each episode, Kai-Lan and her friends (a tiger, a monkey, and, for some reason, a koala bear that is unhealthily obsessed with panda bears) have some sort of minor adventure (one time they are planning a party, another they are going to a roller rink, so nothing of actual importance like Dora where everything sort of seems like a life or death situation). During the adventure, one of the non-Kai-Lan characters has some sort of melt-down about something trivial, and Kai-Lan, using her astute powers of observation and keen common sense, solves the problem with sage advice like “It’s nice to share,” and the lesson of the day is invariably delivered in song.

Like Dora, along the way, Kai-Lan tries to teach kids a few “handy” Chinese (I have no idea which dialect, of which I think there are MANY) words. How, exactly, knowing how to say “pull” or “red” or “slipper” in Chinese is ever going to help anyone, I don’t know. Still, considering the fact that China pretty much owns the USA thanks to our very responsible spending practices of the last few decades, it’s probably not a terrible idea if ALL children start getting their feet wet in Chinese culture.

In fact, I might encourage Gabe to keep watching this show well into his teens in the hopes that he’ll want to become fluent in the language. It can only improve out odds of surviving when our new Chinese Overlords take control. Besides encouraging my child to develop the language skills that I’m too thick-headed and, let’s face it, lazy to learn myself, I’ve also been boning up on Chinese history for about two decades now by playing the Romance of the Three Kingdoms line of video games. This might not help me bridge any language barriers, but it might give me a few odds and ends of ancient Chinese trivia to break the ice at a Revolution Party. “How about that Guan Yu, eh? Some Tiger General, that one!” And then, obviously, we could delve into Taoist theory from there. I’ll be in like Flynn. Or, if not, Gabe can apologize profusely for me in Mandarin for my obvious lack of any real knowledge of Chinese culture and blame it on me being a “Stupid American.” Either way, it’ll all work out thanks to my forward thinking.

Plus, let’s not forget that Asian girls are hot. So, I figure I’m only doing Gabe a favor by engendering in him a healthy appreciation for the ways of the East. I’m sure he’ll thank me for it some day.

And here's a little video of Gabe playing with an entire roll of scotch tape. We didn't have enough memory to record the entire event, but, eventually, he had the roll completely depleted and its contents wadded into a Gordion knot on his tray. This was mildly amusing, but secretly we were hoping he'd get himself entirely wrapped up in the stuff. That would have been movie gold. It did manage to keep him occupied for about ten minutes, though, while I made dinner. So that was nice.