The Littlest Addict

Gabe has a monkey on his back. Actually, for the past two days, he has had an actual monkey on his back--a monkey band-aid. He got a bite while playing outside Tuesday night that Libby covered with the giant band-aid. But that's not the one I'm talking about. I'm referring to his binky problem.

Now that we've had one of each--a binky user and a non-user--and I can compare the differences in sleep patterns between a child who uses one and one who doesn't, I don't regret getting him hooked in the least. He didn't sleep through the night until he was one, of course, but for a few months before that he was only getting up once a night and, often, that time we were able to simply re-bink him and he went back to sleep. In addition to being a simple remedy, it also meant that his diapers didn't need to be changed to avoid a leaky mess.

Norah, however, is another story. This past week--after her nightmarish weekend of being sick and teething at the same time, which resulted in her sleeping no more than forty-five minutes at a time--she's made a few steps, FINALLY getting down to just one or two wake ups during the night. But then, she requires at least six ounces of fluid in her bottle to get back to sleep, so a pair of bottles (AND the one she takes when going to sleep) means her bed, her clothes, her little plushy bed mate, her pillow, and anything else in her crib is as wet as if we'd dropped them in the pool and needs either a good wash or a semi-negligent parent who doesn't mind the smell of dried pee.

I'll take the binky addiction, thank you very much.

And it is a full-blown addiction at this point. I know this because I watch House (or used to, anyway, through the first three seasons or so). Towards the end of the third season (I think, though it might have been the second), House crosses paths with a vindictive police officer. House, being House, is a jerk and offends the officer's sensibilities. To get back at him, the cop makes it his mission in life to catch House up in his pain killer addiction.

Of course, nobody House works with knows the full extent of his addiction (and neither did anybody else to this point because it wasn't yet deemed a viable plot element). The cop gets a warrant for House's apartment and finds dozens of prescription bottles hidden throughout the house. Addicts, we're told, do this all the time. To make sure they always have a fix close at hand, they will make assurances against ever running out by stockpiling and hording, to the point where they aren't even aware they have so much of the addictive substance around.

At the time, I filed this away as possibly interesting but more than likely fictionalized information (along with my knowledge that a strike, if properly placed, to the front of a jukebox will illicit the exact song one wants to listen to) that I learned from TV shows. I have a goodly sized portion of my brain dedicated to this information. I believe it is now housed in the part of my brain that I used to use for remembering names and directions--which is just as well, why would I need to remember how to get to what's his name's house anyway? Unless HE knows how to make the jukebox trick work. Then, damn my brain!

Anyway. I think I have a bit of proof that this piece of addiction trivia is, in fact, legit, and Gabe has provided it over the past week.

For months now, we've been trying to limit his binky usage, with very little success. We've tried reasoning with him ("Big kids don't use binkies." And then we give him a list of big boys who don't). We've tried shaming him ("Norah doesn't use a binky, and she's a baby!"). We've tried bribing him ("If you let us have all of your binkies, you can have X toy." This one seemed to work at first, until he realized what we were actually asking of him--I guess he thought it was a part time trade, and try explaining a contractual agreement to a three year old). And we've tried being annoyed with him ("Take your binky out of your mouth! We can't understand anything you say when you talk with it in there."). To no avail. All of our jibes and comments roll effortlessly off his back as he mentally weighs the options of being without his binky versus not being hassled about it and finds the latter not all THAT bad to put up with. Moreover, with comments like the one about not being able to understand him (which, I'd say, we make about a half dozen times or more a day), he completely wipes them from his memory, choosing not to remember that the binky makes him even more unintelligible than usual despite our repeated evidence to the contrary.

Probably these are signs of addiction, too, but I'm too lazy to learn more about it.

Finally, this past week, I laid down a new law. It was a weak and mostly toothless law, but it had a fresh coat of paint, at least. I declared that binkies were for upstairs ONLY. At first I declared that binkies were for bedtime ONLY, but this was met with the most soul crushing crying jag imaginable. So I compromised. I told him he could use his binky freely while he was upstairs, but he couldn't AT ALL downstairs.

And he is very clear about the rule. I know this because his actions have told me. At first, he'd come down the stairs with his binky in his mouth, as if nothing were unusual, and I would make him spit it out on the stairs. He protested every time, usually pointing out that I was "Making him sad and I should stop because it's mean." But, eventually, I got the binky away from him. After that, he tried to be sneakier, coming down the stairs with his blanket over his face so I couldn't see the binky. Obviously this didn't work either, so I think he's starting to get desperate.

Today, for the third time this week, I caught him behind the couch in his little nest with a binky in his mouth. He was TRYING to be really sneaky and smart about it, but it's pretty easy to spot when Gabe is up to something he shouldn't be up to--he's quiet. After he hopped behind the couch and I didn't hear anything from him for almost five minutes, I knew something was up. I looked over the back of the couch and this is what I saw:

I don't know why Blogger is showing this sideways. I've edited the picture three times and it always ends up sideways, so screw it. Stupid Blogger.

As I said, this is the third binky that has materialized from behind the couch this week. So, either he's got a stash back there, or he's figured out a way to hide them on his person when he comes downstairs and he tosses them behind the couch when I'm not looking. Either way, pretty nefarious, I have to say.

Now, I'm keeping a close count of binkies and I won't open the gate for him at the foot of the stairs until I've given him a pat-down for contraband. If that doesn't work, we might have to get a half dozen or so of his friends together in a room with him and have a full blown intervention.

Obviously, we're going to have to keep a close eye on this kid, probably until he's in his thirties.

Gag Reflex

Before I get started on this, I need to apologize to Libby. Saturday, she was changing Norah's poopy pants (on weekends, I usually play the "I don't want you to miss out on this rite of parenthood since you miss out on changing poopy diapers five days a week" card--but, Saturday, I played the "I shouldn't have to change poopy diapers on my birthday" card instead because variety is the spice of life) and she almost threw up right on top of the poor girl. I scoffed at her poor gag reflex. And for that, I apologize because the same thing just happened to me (though, admittedly, the diaper Libby changed wasn't that bad--being a courteous gentleman, I offered to take the offensive thing to the trash while Libby recovered and took the opportunity to steal a whiff. On a scale of 1-10, it was a 6, at best, and Norah usually hovers between 5 and 8).

On to the story.

Something just happened to me that never has before. Norah had a poop so profound that it made me gag. Here's a little perspective, just to accurately gauge just how monumental this dump was.

I wouldn't say that I have the strongest stomach, but it's not exactly weak, either. I grew up shoveling cow shit from barns--and some of that stuff was beyond wretched, not mention the sheer quantities if we'd been a little lax for a few weeks (oh, and the consistency--sometimes a grain shovel was needed, meaning, a shovel with sides was necessary to keep the seeping sewage from sliding off the sides--that sounded almost pretty, despite its horrific mental image). Oh, and don't forget calving season, when globs of afterbirth and other nefarious body excretions would be added into the mix, possibly several days after the birthing fact. I have seen dead cows that have been rotting in the hot sun for days, sometimes weeks. I've seen quite a lot of animal death, actually. Farms have a way of accumulating dead animals. It's a sad truth.

And never, not once, have I lost complete control of my gag reflex and puked all over the place.

Yet I can't say I have an iron stomach because I have gagged before. Just once, that I can recall, but it was a memorable once. I won't go TOO much into the grizzly details, but let's just say that I came upon a dead cow. I didn't KNOW there was a dead cow there--it was one that Dad had hauled off into the back part of one of our pastures to let the coyotes take care of. Apparently, the coyotes had not yet gotten there. Or, perhaps, they were too disgusted by the carnage of the sight. For the cow had exploded. Much like the fabled whale on the coastline that showered bits of decaying blubber on bystanders for hundreds of yards, the gases in this cow had accumulated until it had exploded. And I all but literally stumbled upon it in the pasture. I did, literally, slip in part of it, though. It was a gruesome scene. Black, fetid globs of blood and flesh. Maggots, oh the maggots. It left an impression.

OK, I guess I did end up getting pretty into the grizzly details, huh? Sorry about that.

But it wasn't this macabre spectacle that set my stomach to rumbling in a most distressing way. It was the smell. The smell of death is not one that I've really been able to get used to despite getting a fair bit of practice with it in my youth. But I've never felt more than a bit nauseated by the stench, except for this one time. See, it wasn't that the smell was any worse than normal. A dead mouse, if properly aged, can smell just as bad as a dead horse--dead animal is dead animal. No, it was the sheer quantity of the smell that engulfed my senses and drove me to the very edge of lost lunchitude. It seems strange to quantify smell as though it has a measurable mass, but there you have it--and, in fact, I would swear it DID have mass. That was the part that made me gag. I, like many people probably, tend to try and reactively plug my nose when I smell something terrible . . . .

You know how they say that smell plays a vital role in taste (because we can only taste five different qualities, it's the smell that adds that subtle nuance to flavor)? Probably you can see where this is going. I took in a full mouthful of fetid, rotten, putrid, decomposing, exploded cow air. I swear, it was like a fog. And I nearly ralphed.

But I didn't. And, since that day, I've been a touch more sensitive to the smell of dead things, but I've still somehow managed to never really feel like I was going to puke when accosted by terrible smells.

Until tonight.

Let me preface this a little bit by reiterating that Norah is a stealth pooper. Gabe was great. Whenever he was taking a dump, we knew it. He bore down like he was passing a Shetland pony, and he always looked very relieved and proud of himself when he was done. Not Norah. She will appear, for all intents and purposes, to be going about her business, and suddenly we'll catch a whiff of something that wasn't there before. She might be standing, sitting, lying down, sleeping, eating, crying, laughing, walking, crawling, or playing. It doesn't matter. She won't even pause when it happens. If we're lucky, she'll fart and we can lean in close afterward to find out if it was sound AND fury, but that doesn't happen very often.

Usually, she stinks to high heaven, so it's pretty easy to catch. Unfortunately, I've had a pretty terrible head cold for the past five days, so I can't really smell anything. Add to that the fact that she'd already had FOUR poops today (the poor thing really hasn't made the transition from formula to milk all that gracefully, I'm afraid, and it's barely showed signs of improvement almost two months later), and you can imagine that I wasn't really paying very close attention to the situation.

How long the poop had been in there, I'm not sure. It couldn't have been more than an hour because that's how long it had been since I'd last changed her diaper.

Actually, I'm going to go all CSI on everyone here and try to deduce when, exactly, it happened. Based on the pattern of the poop, I would estimate that she did it while she was lying down. It didn't have a normal placement in her diaper--down where gravity would have carried it, mostly between her legs, if she'd been sitting or standing. Instead, it was riding high in the back. VERY high. About ten minutes before the fiasco began, she had been lying on the floor having a juice bottle. So, if I had to guess, that's when I would place the time of diaper death.

When it happened isn't important, but the fact that it was riding high is VERY important. After she got up, she went about her business--flipping through some books, carrying around a piece of string that's she's been strangely obsessed with for the past few days while leaning against one piece of furniture or another, and finally crawling into the dining room where I was helping Gabe put away his Play Doh and other assorted messes from the afternoon. All the while, I suspected nothing.

Then, after I finished in the dining room, I went into the living room to clean up the toys in there and I saw something on the front of my leather rocking chair. I thought it was cat puke. It had the same consistency, looking as if it was composed of 3/4 just chewed catfood and 1/4 hairball (our cat Typhoon is a narcissist and keeps her weight under control by being bulimic, puking up her food right after eating it about once every three days or so). But I hadn't heard her puking, and she very rarely does it on the furniture these days, so I went over to investigate.

I stuck my nose in close to get a smell.

"Oooooooh god," I moaned to myself. Definitely poop. I closed my eyes and silently counted to ten, carefully replacing each number with a choice curse word. There were four separate smears of the stuff on the chair. I turned to find Norah but didn't have to look very hard. She was crawling into the living room, as if inspecting to see how I had reacted to the news. She smiled at me. I picked her up and stood her in front of the television so I could get a good look at her diaper, expecting to find a bit of a spillover from the top.

There was no spillover, there was a full-fledged blowout. It ran halfway up her back and was starting to soak through her shirt and pants. I pulled the shirt back and that was when I nearly puked down my daughter's back. I think it was the sound, like peeling a wet towel off a linoleum floor. It was EVERYWHERE.

Thankfully, I quickly recovered myself and immediately began poop triage on all of the effected areas. I managed to get her out of her shirt without spreading it through her hair and finished undressing her while she was completely distracted by the TV. Then I carefully wiped off every inch of her back, butt, and legs--almost all of which were at least partially exposed to the sludge and some of which was thoroughly coated with a sticky grime that was as difficult to remove as peanut butter. I laid her on the floor and got her into a clean diaper and some clean clothes.

And that's when I realized, to my horror, that our carpet in the living room is the same color, EXACTLY, as the poop was. So, after cleaning up my chair, I took to sniffing along my carpet like a goddamn bloodhound, trying to find any toxic spills, but I found none thanks to this cold. Thankfully, Libby is a little bit ahead of me on recovering from this cold--and she had to work late tonight and should be home soon--so I'll be able to gauge whether or not I missed any spots by the reaction she has when she walks into the living room. Fingers crossed!

Staycation

Libby tacked two extra days off to the last weekend. It would be nice to say that she did this so that we could properly celebrate my 36th birthday with a big three day long party or some other bacchanalian escapade to put my aging body through the ringer and teach it a valuable lesson about putting up or shutting up. But, no. Mostly we went about business as usual, treating it like two extra days of weekend, and got a few odd jobs done around the house that had been waiting for awhile now (also, Libby and I have been suffering through pretty nasty summer colds, which discouraged anything exciting happening--though that did encourage her to buy a neti-pot, so we both added the experience of flushing our sinuses with warm water to the list of things we've done with our lives, so maybe that can be considered an exciting birthday activity).

But we did manage to work in one little adventure to the Hutch Zoo yesterday. Our plan was to get there when it opened at 10:00, spend an hour or so wandering around, then getting back home in time for lunch and the kids' naps. Instead, circumstances encouraged us to stay at the zoo until nearly noon and then we decided that we couldn't pass up the opportunity to eat at the Amish restaurant that was sort of on our way home. As such, we didn't get back until about 2:30. Both kids only got as much nap as they could grab in the car, but it was still a fun little outing and we got some good pictures, which I thought I would share.

This picture and the next were actually taken a week or two ago but I found them on the camera and thought they were worth sharing. Gabe has made a bit of a habit of bringing accessories into the bathroom with him. Sometimes it's an audience--one of his toys, a stuffed animal, or even his blankie--that he'll put on the sink to watch him go to the bathroom. That's normal, right, wanting to share your evacuations with an audience? I hope so. And sometimes it's something to use or wear on the toilet, this time his sunglasses, which, for reasons known only to him, he prefers to wear upside down. I just like the idea of dressing up to use the bathroom.

And I had to add another future blackmail picture. Really, we're pretty set on blackmail pictures. Thanks to digital cameras, gone are the days when aspiring girlfriends can be amused/dismayed by a single picture of a boy with his pants off doing something silly. Now, we have an entire arsenal of such pictures. Gabe's future girlfriend(s) will be able to spend a solid evening leaving through pictures of Gabe doing something embarrassing. His young adult years should prove most interesting.

And here's Norah testing out to possible professions that involve the use of glasses. This first is what it would be like if she grows up to be Elton John--certainly not a BROAD career path, but one that I bet would prove interesting.

Here she is trying out Dour Librarian--a 180 turn from Elton John, to be sure, but possibly a safer bet as far as employment options go. There might also be School Marm considerations here, who knows.

On the train. The zoo has a train that runs all along the back side of the park. It's a weird thing. Since it doesn't actually go by any of the animals, they've put up a number of concrete animals along the way for the passengers to look at. Still, it was a train ride, and, for these boys, it wouldn't have mattered if the only thing they had to look at was a raw sewage treatment facility, they were happy.

Libby had finally had enough of Gabe's sass talk, so she socked him in the nose. No, no. Only kidding. He held her hand up so Gabe could "pound it"--something he's always preferred to do to "high fives" for some reason (probably because he's a terrorist, as this is one of their favorite things to do, I hear).

This is a "working" cow model. Visitors are encouraged to milk it. We just liked the curious way the kids approached the situation. The udder is filled with water which can be squeezed from the teats into the bucket (or onto passers-by). Speaking from experience, this isn't a very good model. If you tried to milk a real cow the same way, you wouldn't get anything out of it. Cow milking requires subtle hands for maximum output and efficiency. Just saying. It is nice when my farmer past allows me to pass judgments of the most esoteric sort. It makes me feel all warm inside.

And, finally, a picture of Norah at dinner. The fact that she's eating and playing with a spoon isn't all that unusual. What's all over her face is. Libby, in an inspired moment, opened up a little tub of whipped butter (which wasn't home whipped by the Amish--a point I found a little disappointing) and let her go to town with it. That's right. Butter. Not surprisingly, considering the only foods she will pleasantly feed herself these days are crackers, fruit loops, and fried foods, Norah LOVED it. She loved it so much that she had to spread it all over her face and up into her hair in an attempt to become one with the greasy topping.

On Being an Older Dad--Part 2

Yesterday I noted several things that suck, as far as I'm concerned, about getting older. Today, I'm going to spend a little time noting things that suck, as far as I'm concerned, about being older as a parent.

Thanks to the basic maths skills that I left school with (which were the ONLY maths skills I left school with), I've been doing a little mildly depressing pondering on various childhood milestones and how they related to the age my parents were at the time, and where I, personally, will be when Gabe starts to reach them.

Obviously, this is an exercise in pointless masochism, but what the hell. That's what thinking about getting older is all about, right?

In my mind's eye, my parents have always been about 50. If I think back upon my youth, when I picture my parents, I picture them pretty much exactly as they look right now--maybe a little less gray and that sort of thing, but pretty much the same. But the truth is, they had me when they were around 24 years old, so, by the time they were my age now, I was 12 years old and starting to discover the real appeal of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition.

By the time they reached 40--an age that is CLEARLY within view for me now--I was a junior in high school and had already been suspended for trying to sneak bourbon onto a pep bus. Which means that they were 41 when I graduated from high school, something I can't fully wrap my head around. And, get this, they were only 46 when I got married (fortunately, Libby and I started dating when I was 19, so I have two more years before I have to start belaboring the fact that we've been together for as many years as we were ALIVE before we started dating)!

It's weird, really. All of these dates and ages didn't start resonating in my head until I started having my own kids. Why is that? Was it just something that I never thought about or did it take the proper context for the relevance, such as it is, to really start sinking in? Dunno.

In contrast, when Gabe becomes a teenager in 2020, I will be the same age my parents were when I got married. When he graduates, I will be turning 50 that year. And if he, like me, doesn't start to have children until he's 33, I won't be a grandparent until 2040 and I'm 66 years old!

Which begs the question: Is it better to have children young or to be an old parent?

I've given this question MUCH thought over the years. And, despite the fact that all of my ponderings would seem to suggest that I wished I was younger when we had kids, I don't think I can, in good conscience, regret our decision one little bit. I mean, there is no denying that having small children is a young person's game in terms of keeping up with their demands, dealing with the complete lack of sleep, and all of the other energy sapping stuff that goes along with raising kids. Physically, I think humans are better suited to having kids when they're younger. Mentally, emotionally, and financially, however (at least in my case), not so much. In essence, I wish I could be younger right now while still having waited to have kids until we were older and more settled into things--the best of both worlds.

To be honest, I don't think I would have been prepared to have kids much before I turned 30 (we started trying when I was 28, and that was as early as I would have ever considered it). Plus, it was awfully nice being able to spend the first 10 years or so that Libby and I were together getting to know one another and not having to worry about the effect kids have on a relationship. It gave us something solid to work on now that we get pretty much ZERO time to ourselves--for this I blame all of my friends and family for either not being close enough or for having children that aren't the right age to babysit. Selfish bastards, not fashioning their lives around our child-rearing time tables.

And I guess that's all I have to complain about. Not that I'm REALLY complaining--more gnashing my teeth and shaking my fists at the heavens.

In other news, I have a new video of Norah. Yesterday, she discovered how to fake laugh. In this video, you'll notice the lion "punching bag" thing behind Norah. Yesterday, for reasons known only to her, she decided to sit on it. She just plunked herself down on its weighted base, facing the TV. And then she started fake laughing. Loudly. Perhaps in victory of her accomplishment. I was sitting in the dining room putting a puzzle together with Gabe at the table, so I had my back to her, and she started to make this noise. It completely freaked me out because it was unlike any other noise she's ever made before. I thought maybe she was choking or something. My heart raised and I think I pulled something in my neck I turned so fast to see what the problem was.

And there she was, sitting on her lion, her head tilted back, maniacally laughing like a super villain with volume control issues. She didn't do it for long, so I didn't have time to get the camera (that was when I brought the camera into the living room, though, in the hopes that I could catch either that or her walking, and got the other video I posted yesterday). But today she did it again and kept doing it for about three minutes, so I was able to catch a bit of it.

Oh, and she also discovered makeup yesterday. Well, not REAL makeup--washable marker used as makeup.

You can't see it in the picture because she wouldn't really hold still enough for me to get the side of her face, but her entire cheek and part of her ear are also black. I hope this isn't a sign of her being goth. There are many "phases" that I am mentally prepared to deal with, but I don't think goth and emo are on that list.

Interlude: Norah Walking (Sort of) and Gabe Doing Weird Things

I finally brought the camera into the living room with me long enough to catch Norah sort of walking. It's been tough to capture on video because, like Big Foot, Norah doesn't like to cooperate with the camera. Also like Bigfoot, Norah makes a lot of incomprehensible noises. Actually, the comparisons between the two could go on for some time--but my immune system finally caved in and I have the cold that everyone else in the house has been going through for the past week, so I'm not really in the mood to wax . . . whatever. I was going to come up with some way to combine Big Foot and "philosophical" to go at the end of that sentence, but . . . shut up.

Anyway, here's some video. Gabe, at least, did a pretty good job of filling in the lulls in Norah's action sequences (and, really, for her, the few steps she took was pretty actiony).

Oh, and the stuff all over Norah's face and arms isn't something disgusting. It's marker. She's discovered the joy of writing on everything in our house, but especially herself, with washable marker.

On Being an Older Dad--Part 1

Saturday, I turn 36. Sadly, thanks to the premature aging that having children has rigorred (perhaps that should just be rigored, I can't remember the rule, not that it would matter what the rule said, as this could just be made an exception anyway) all over my body, I'm not sure I can believably claim to be 29 any longer. Maybe I'll try to claim that I'm 34 for a half decade or so, though I'm not sure that saying I'm 36 would be all that believable to the casual observer.

As my yearly tradition dictates, I've spent the last, well, twelve months, really, reflecting on what it means to get older--as it applies to my being a father and in general, and I've come to several important realizations.

(Note: I've just finished the first portion of this post, and already it is insufferably long, so it is now going to be a two part affair. The first portion will be general bitchings about being old and the second will be observational bitchings about my age as it relates to being a parent. You're welcome for saving you the trouble of skipping all the best parts because you're eyes are too fatigued to keep going on.)

People who say that "40 is the new 30" are either in denial or had children at a young age and are, thus, afforded a rejuvenating freedom that I won't know again until I'm in my late 40s (and 50 DAMN well better be the new 25, or I'm going to be pissed for putting forth the effort to get there). Either way, they are wrong. As far as I'm concerned, 36 is the new 50. Problems that I never dreamed of as a teenager have begun to plague me:

1) Thanks to years of careless sports activity in my youth, my joints, muscles, tendons, and whatever else occupies the insides of my appendages ache pretty much all the time. I can't sleep for more than four hours at a time without waking up feeling as though I've been confined inside a coffin or largish cedar chest for the better part of a week.

2) I have developed what I can only assume are the "corns" people refer to on their feet (I haven't had the nerve to actually find out what they are because knowing for sure would just be too depressing--as the mental image I have of corns is that of Selma and Patty, Marge's sisters on the Simpsons, asking the children to file down their corns while they watch MacGyver).

3) Plucking errant nose hairs has become part of a weekly ritual. Conversely, the hair that I've managed to keep on the top of my head falls out if the ceiling fan in the dining room is on too high.

4) Almost ALL of the foods that I love have been deemed unsafe for consumption either because my metabolism has slowed down to that of a hibernating bear and I'd rather not add "700 pound shut-in" to my already depressingly inadequate resume or because it gives me terrible heart burn. Sweet foods, anything with tomato sauce, and milk products all make my stomach feel like it used to only when I'd consumed a pint of bourbon in my younger days. And without those things, what's left to enjoy in life?

5) Every time I closely examine my skin, I notice a "new" spot. I qualify "new" with quotes because, honestly, my brain is so addled that I'm often not sure if I've noticed the spot before. That doesn't, however, mean that I'll assume it's not skin cancer. Honestly, looking back, I wish I'd worn more sunscreen. I spent much of my first thirty years on the planet sporting a pretty good tan--thanks to what I have to assume is good skin genetics, I can get a tan after only about twenty hours in the sun (spread out over a week or so). But, now, in retrospect, I have to ask myself "why did I bother?" It's not like having a good tan got me extra laid in high school or college, and it certainly didn't after I got married. So what was the point? Answer: there was none. I would have been better off either staying inside where it was more comfortable or lathering up with sunscreen and maintaining the slightly pasty pallor my skin naturally takes on so that I could now NOT worry about the night sky's worth of freckles, moles, and splotches that make most of my upper body look like the connect-the-dot section of a McDonald's tray liner.

6) Concepts like "the prostate" are now not-so-subtly pushing themselves from the very bottom of my brain up to the front where I have to acknowledge not only their existence but their possible relevance. I've always had a notoriously small bladder (I can say "notorious" because it is well known to anyone who knows me, and it has also led to quite a collection of minor memories throughout the years--specifically as it plays into various road trips and other times when being able to go more than two hours without a trip to the loo makes my normal routine of trips to the can all the more noticeable). On top of that, I am rarely more than ten steps away from a drink of some sort--I took that whole "drink lots of fluids" thing I was told constantly as a child very seriously and still do to this day. Until recently, I had always just assumed it was a small bladder, but NOW I have to wonder if I shouldn't get my prostate checked. And nobody, no matter what age, should have to carefully weigh the options of having a person who is, for all intents and purposes, a stranger plug a sensitive access hole versus letting a POTENTIALLY hazardous condition go unchecked. I won't say that I have nightmares about the many ways such an event could go horribly, horribly wrong, but that's just because I don't want to have to go into any of the embarrassing details.

7) I could probably go on for several more paragraphs, but I won't, at least not on this portion of my reflections.

And here I will postpone the latter half of this exercise until tomorrow.

Gabe Makes Pooping His Bitch, And Norah Gives Girls a Bad Name

It's been a rough past few days, and I'm not sure if there's an end in sight. The middle of the night Friday, Gabe woke up with a stomach ache and fever. The fever kept up, off and on, through the weekend and was mostly gone today, but now he's got some of that "upset stomach" they refer to on the Pepto Bismol commercials. The kind that explodes into the toilet and leaves sticky brown splatters that won't wash down all over the bowl.

But the good news is, even fighting a case of the hershey squirts, Gabe hasn't had an accident yet! He's gone two full weeks without any form of accident, and we've even gotten to the point where we don't have to bribe him with candy every time he makes it to the toilet on time. If we can just convince him that he's capable of pulling his own pants up, and then teach him how to wipe himself, then life will be just that much easier, and we, as parents, will only have two butts to worry about again (Norah's and our own--though, I worry sometimes about Libby's, just because it stinks so bad. Ha! Sorry, Libby, good thing almost nobody reads this blog, eh?). It's been a long, hard road, and one that I wouldn't wish on anyone, but I think we might be through the worst of it.

Of course, now that I've said that, he'll completely forget how to use the toilet in the next week and we'll be back to square one.

As for Norah . . . well, she's setting women's rights back centuries as far as I'm concerned. I know, I know. Getting a girl was MY decision, and I have to take responsibility for it (and, of course, we love her too much to ever wish that we'd decided otherwise--but she's not making that an easy decision. She's just lucky that she's adorable, that's all I'm saying).

The problem was, I'm sure, that I didn't grow up with any girls--there was just us three boys in the house besides Mom, and, you know, Mom's don't count as females. I had no proper frame of reference. All I had was what I'd heard and my own experiences with girls growing up.

Really, besides two male friends (one of whom became my best friend in grade school and I've kept close ties with ever since, and the other I hung out with in high school but lost touch with once I went to college), most of my friends were girls until I got into college and met the group of guys that I still hang out with whenever possible to this day. Possibly this was due to limited selection, or maybe there was some subtle "if I'm friends with the cute girls then I'll be there to swoop in when they're boyfriends dump them" (note to any high school guy that ever reads this--don't bother with this concept, it never works, all you'll ever get is loads of baggage to help them carry and not a lot else) thing going on. Or maybe I just related better to girls most of the time (I do have a taste for "chick rock" and was a fan of Sarah McLachlan several years before Lilith Fair and the "womyn" decided to claim them as their own).

So there was that. And I had also heard that girls usually bond better with their fathers than their mothers, at least early on, and figured that would be ideal since I was going to be the one at home with them. So there was that, too.

But, let me tell you, whatever you've heard about girls bonding more with their dad's is highly exaggerated, or, more likely, was coming from a family where the dad wasn't the one staying at home with the kids. Butts doesn't really want to have much to do with me if Libby is around as an option. She'll grudgingly accept me as her only option during the day, but the minute Libby walks in the door, Norah has her arms up in the air and to be picked up and won't give me the time of day again until Libby's off to work the next morning.

Anyway, on to the relevant stuff from this weekend. In addition to Gabe being sick, Norah has been miserable as well. It didn't start with her until Saturday afternoon, but it's been a rampant onslaught of god awful moods ever since then. She might have the same stomach stuff Gabe has, but she is also getting in her eye teeth. Personally, I think it's just been the teeth these past few days, so she'll probably start with the stomach stuff also tonight or tomorrow and be twice as bad.

God I hope not.

As I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone, but Norah is a drama queen. Actually, as far as my frame of reference goes, she is the Queen of Drama. And, even though I don't need to remind anyone, I'm going to, with a video.

This was just a minute of what we've been dealing with for the past forty-eight hours or so, more or less every minute she's awake and not utterly distracted by something. She's refused to sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time--with one or two hour breaks in between--and because she's so tired and hungry since she won't sleep and refuses to eat, she won't be consoled by anything.

Gabe (who's a boy, in case anyone has forgotten), meanwhile, has been an ideal patient. He's decided that it's best if he just lies quietly on the couch and watches Monsters Inc. for the fifteenth time in the last week.

I blame all of this on her being a girl.

Unfortunately, even though I know that's a broad generalization and probably entirely unfair, I can't be any more specific because she's awake again and screaming her little girl lungs out. Maybe next time.

Video Round Up

A little over a month ago, Libby bought a new video camera. It's not a full-fledged video camera (which we have--we bought it shortly after Gabe's arrival, and have used it to film roughly five minutes of video, choosing, instead to use the still camera for video since it's so much easier to transfer to the computer), but it's not a digital still camera either. It's like a still camera, except it only does video. Why, you might ask, would we need such a beast when we have to cameras already covering the spectrum of still to video? That's the same question I asked Libby. Her answer, "Because I wanted it!"

Sigh.

Anyway, today I decided to go through this camera to see if there were any videos from the past few weeks that I needed to share with folks. Here's what I found, in no particular order and probably without any descriptions. Yeah, feeling a bit lazy today, so I'm phoning this post in.

Norah doing stuff.

Gabe doing stuff.

Gabe and Finn not really doing stuff.

Yeah, so most of the videos on this camera aren't very entertaining. It's not ALL gold, you know, but I thought I'd post them anyway.

Also, you know, Norah's starting to walk. Did I fail to mention that earlier? Yeah. Still not doing it reliably, and it's certainly not her go-to mode of movement yet, but she's making strides (he he). She's made it across the room a couple times, but, so far, all of our attempts to capture her doing it have been met with failure. As soon as she sees the camera, she gets distracted. This video was an attempt to catch her doing it (which is why it's so long), but she never really cooperated. I've decided to include it because, well, why not.

Here is where a video of the kids goofing around should have been posted. After four attempts, though, I think it's safe to say that Blogger isn't having anything to do with it. So, just imagine that you watched something that was more entertaining and interesting than what would have been posted.

When Is It OK to Start Grammar Naziing?

First, let me just say that I love the English language. I spend a goodly amount of time thinking about it--somewhat less now that I'm not teaching it, of course, but more than I did just a year ago now that Gabe is learning many of the tricky in's and out's. I studied it in school for several years and taught it for several more, but I still wouldn't consider myself anything like an expert on it. I learned just as much of its storied--possibly even sordid--history as my interest and attention span could tolerate, but then I backed off and contented myself with being "proficient." That seemed like a good place to settle down.

English is a brilliant language to use as a medium for creative thought. Its colorful lexicon (especially if drawing from one of the non-American versions, American English being about as boring and functional as it possibly could be, like American architecture) offers nearly limitless possibilities. Its basic nature is very fluid and mutable, making it possible and accessible to just about anyone with a passing understanding of its function as a canvas of the mind--making it possible for the transference of abstract concepts from one mind to the other.

To be honest, that alone is a concept that I find myself grappling with on a nearly daily basis. How wonderful/scary/fantastic/unbelievable is it that I can think of a completely off the wall concept like, say, the notion that the world is carried on the back of a giant tortoise, and with but ten words I am able to transfer that thought from my brain to another person's? It is a flabbergastingly (there, I just utilized the inherent flexibility of our language by adverbing a word that doesn't usually work that way--and I verbed two more words in the process!) complex process that startles and excites me every time I try to come to grips with it.

Yet, for this exact reason, our language is stupid. It is breathtakingly complex. When I was teaching, I started my first day of class with a brief history of the English language that I always prefaced by saying something like this:

"More than likely, you are not looking forward to this class. Few people do. Probably you have had many English classes in the past and, if you are like the majority of people, you found those classes and the concepts being discussed therein tiresome, boring, and surprisingly difficult to fully grasp for someone who has spent their entire life speaking the language well enough to get by. There is nothing to be ashamed of in this. English is among the most complex languages in the world. Our vocabulary changes all the time, our punctuation rules are strict to the point of being often ignorable, and our sentence structure can be all over the place if we allow it. Add to that a list of nearly 400 irregular verbs with varying forms (here I would give them an example of the inconsistencies of our irregular verbs by putting "sing" "sang" "sung" on the board then putting "bring" on the board and asking, rhetorically, of course why "bring" "brang" "brung" isn't the acceptable conjugation), and you have the recipe for a language that nobody in their right mind would ever WANT to learn that much about."

This little monologue would go on for a while, during which time I would discuss the fact that, despite all reason, English is becoming as close to a World Language as we've ever come (after which I would take a little break to discuss Esperanto, because I find it interesting, and the fact that William Shatner starred in the movie Incubus one of the only movies ever performed entirely in Esperanto), and so on and so forth. By the end of it, I would conclude with something like this:

"So, what does all of this mean? What can you take away from this first bit of lecture that you can apply to your own writing outside this class? (Obviously, in this class, I would remind them, we'll be trying to follow the strictest rules, but more so they knew where those rules as a sort of guideline for future writing--you have to know the rules before you can justify breaking them, after all.) Here you go. There are only three rules in English that ALWAYS apply: Start a sentence with a capital letter, end the sentence with a period, question mark or exclamation point, and you can write your entire life and never use a semicolon."

This, I'm sad to say, was the "ideal" version of this lecture. I am not one of nature's public speakers, and I detested relying on my notes any more than absolutely necessary to keep me on track, so I tended to wander all over the place and probably missed several key points along the way. Who knows if any of my students ever walked away from my classes with anything but a slight headache.

But that's not the point. The point is, if I can recall where this post started, is that I have a bit of a history of language sticklering. Because of my long exposure to the "correct" form of our language, I have a bit of a tendency to mentally correct just about every grammar/usage error that I see or hear, and this has been a bit of a trouble source the last year or so while Gabe's language skills develop.

And I wonder, at what point does it become OK for me to start correcting his honest mistakes without making him question everything and start to approach talking with timidity and trepidation for fear of being corrected (that, of course, is assuming that Gabe would EVER have fear of something so mundane as grammar correction--considering how little he pays attention to ANY of my corrections up to this point, this might be a moot point).

For instance, earlier today, he was playing with some "money" (this was the instance that prompted this little bit of linguistic soul searching on my part). I'm not sure what he was doing, exactly, with it, or even what his intention was. His grasp on the concept of currency is still a bit nebulous. I think he understands that money is used to buy things--and this because we have often used a lack of said money to NOT buy him things in the past--and he can readily identify coins as money, but he has no concept of where money comes from or anything like that.

Anyway, he was throwing his money over the back of the couch, which is the kind of money management that I'm sure he's learned from his mother (zing!), and saying, "I buyed new helicopter for Buzz." Then he climbed over the back of the couch, threw the "money" back over, then climbed back over--no Buzz and no helicopter.

"I BOUGHT a new helicopter for Buzz," I corrected.

And he lowered his brow at me, clearing questioning my credibility, as, I'm sure, any student of the language who had already learned "I try," "I tried," "I am trying" would surely do. "Don't be daft," his look said. "Of course it's 'buyed.'" And, when he refused to repeat the nonsense I was spewing, I decided to let it go and started to wonder when I would start making some kind of sense to him.

Then, just to make myself feel a little better, I picked a news article on Yahoo! at random and started correcting the grammar of the people who posted comments there. This lasted all of five minutes before I threw my hands up in the air and cursed the removal of phonics from grade school curricula (though that might be different now, I have to admit, since I haven't been paying much heed to it these last few years). Apparently, language naziing is something I'm just going to have to keep to myself for the time being.

Concentration and Trouble

No, this isn't a post about board games--though I don't think I'm surprised that the two words I would use to describe Norah's current stage of development ARE the names for board games. I could probably even think of others that apply: Life (that's a stretch, since it pretty much applies to anyone who isn't dead), Risk, um, Monopoly (of my time and energy) . . . er, Hungry Hungry Hippos. OK, so maybe my brain isn't filling in the blanks so well here, but I'm sure there are other board game names that doubly apply to raising children.

It never ceases to boggle (ah ha! another one) my mind the different ways that children develop. Gabe was all about moving around. It was as if he developed with the goal of getting at as many things as possible as quickly as possible--a quantity over quality form of development, perhaps. He rarely mastered any one skill along the way in favor of sticking as many proverbial--and literal--fingers in as many different pies as he reasonably could. Nothing was safe in our house (really, that part hasn't changed as we still can't safely leave the gates open for fear that he will empty the refrigerator or pull all the books off my shelves just because he CAN). For Gabe, we really needed every child-proofing safety precaution we could think of.

Little Butts, on the other hand, is all about perfecting skills before moving on to other ones. This includes basic gross motor skills AND fine motor skills (Gabe hasn't really shown much interest in perfecting ANY fine motor skills yet, though I'm hoping that changes soon as school begins to approach). When she learned to sit, she wasn't the least bit interested in figuring out how to crawl until she had sitting mastered. Now that she can stand, she's determined to be the best, sturdiest stander in the world before she messes with walking (I still think she COULD walk if she wanted to, she just isn't interested yet).

But she, unlike Gabe, will sit with a toy for thirty minutes trying to figure it out. Gabe burns through toys like there is no tomorrow. He'll get something new and it will be the object of his undivided attention for, maybe, a day, then it's on to bigger and better things. Norah, however, will come back, time and again, to the same toys to play with them until she's got them figured out. At this point, I think her attention span might actually exceed Gabe's, which seems rather extraordinary to me.

However, Norah is not a silent thinker. She is a groaning thinker. No matter where she is, I can always tell when she's found something to keep her interest, because a low, slow groan will carry throughout the bottom floor of our house while she's doing it. In a way, it's pretty cute. In another way, it's about impossible to watch anything on television while it's going on.

The Groaning Thinker. Again, I am pretty surprised at how well she is managing these little stacking rings. I don't think Gabe mastered this toy until he was eighteen months or more--and then I can't remember him doing it more than once or twice before he was bored with it.

And then there is the Trouble aspect of Norah's development. This one, obviously, we're no stranger to. Gabe was, and is, trouble--entertaining trouble, to be sure, but there's never been a time where we've felt entirely secure leaving him alone in a room for very long.

Norah's brand of trouble, though, is a little different. Gabe might break something or draw on something or step on a cat or slam his finger in a door or pull out one of those useless little electrical outlet covers and see what could fit in there, but there was always a certain level of innocence at play, of pure exploration--as if he was just doing these things to see what it was like or because he couldn't see what the problem might be. Norah, though, seems a bit more premeditated. I don't want to say malicious, because it's such an unpleasant word, but I can't think of any other word that fits quite as well. She honestly seems to do many things just because she knows she's not supposed to. Maybe it's the way she looks out of the corner of her eye, just to see if we're watching, or the impish little smile that will often crop up as soon as she hears one of us say "No!" to her. Actually, there really shouldn't be any maybe's about it. That seems pretty obvious.

Here's an example--the throwing food game. For weeks we've been scolding her whenever she purposely tosses her food on the floor, but she continues to do it, and seems to derive great joy from it.

Naughty, but funny. I love that the cheesy smile is coming along with it now. I'm sure it doesn't help that Gabe goads her on with the toddler equivalent of a move that Stephen Colbert often uses at the beginning of his show, quieting the raucous crowd down with one hand while "secretly" encouraging them to be louder with his other hand.

Again, I really expect that she's going to be a handful as she gets older. I'm OK with that, I think, as long as she continues to do it in an entertaining way. Trouble is so much easier to forgive if you're laughing while you're doling out forgiveness.

Possibly the greatest aspect of Gabe's developmental approach is his near complete lack of shame. We can ask him to do pretty much anything and he'll do it, enjoying the silliness of it all. A week ago or so, Libby bought him some Buzz Lightyear PJs (funny little side note here--yesterday, I picked him up one of those shake and go vehicles, this one a Buzz Lightyear spaceship. Most of yesterday morning he was shaking it and saying "Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger" over and over as he set the ship in motion. The first time he said it, though, I swear he said "Bud Weiser, Space Rager." It's apropos of nothing, I just thought it was a funny thing to hear). For some reason, one of the prominent "styles" of boys PJs right now is to make them out of skin-tight, elastic cotton. To me, they look like exactly the sort of thing a male cage dancer might wear in a bondage bar (minus the S&M accessories, obviously). Every time he puts these things on, I want to ask him which of the Village People he's supposed to be (probably because one of his PJs is a construction worker and another is a set of camos).

Anyway, he was wearing his Buzz PJs yesterday, which are, I think, even more inappropriate because, in addition to the clingy "wifebeater" tank top, they also include a pair of hot pants. It's a hilarious outfit that I made even more hilarious by rolling up the bottom of the shirt to make it look like some sort of midriff disaster. At least he has the midsection to pull it off.

Utterly hilarious. Who designs these clothes? I suspect the children of this generation will be doing some research and tracking down these clothing designers when pictures like this start to crop up on memory collages at weddings and other major milestone events. Someone should pay for this fashion disaster sometime, I do know that.

Another Reason Why I Don't "Get the Kids Out" More Often

So, yesterday afternoon, in a flurry of inspiration to do something active, I decided to get the kids out for a walk. My plan was to hit the bike path near the house, walk down to the big park, do a lap around the road there, then head back.

This was a stupid plan that I knew was going to fail, but I was determined to try it anyway. See, there are THREE separate sets of playground equipment scattered throughout this big park and they all follow the road I wanted to make a lap around. Originally, I intended to stand firm behind my desire to get exercise and I would NOT listen to Gabe's demands to stop at the park. I would pit all of my willpower against his, and we would both experience a defining moment in our household pecking order. I would define myself as the Boss, and he would grudgingly accept the fact that he is one of my minions, destined to do my bidding through all eternity.

We made it through the first few blocks without incident. Both kids were enjoying the sights and sounds of the busy walking path and the river it follows. Then, about a block away from the park, Gabe spotted the playground equipment.

"Park! Park!" he exclaimed.

"Yep," I said. "But we're not playing at the park today. We're just out getting some exercise."

"No," he countered sternly. "We're going to the park. I want to go 'whoosh' on the slide."

"Nope. Today we're just walking," I stuck by my guns.

He went on to debate the fact for the next few minutes that it took us to pull alongside the park. Finally, once I could see the park clearly, I went back to a line of reasoning that had gotten me out of stops at the park before: "We can't go to that park. There are big kids playing there, and it's too dangerous to play in the park at the same time as big kids." This, he knew from experience, was true. Gabe has a nasty habit of hanging close to big kids--and strange big kids have a nasty habit of not paying him a lick of attention, to the point of knocking him over while they go about their business.

So we continued our walk along the loop of road, around the side that doesn't have any playground equipment. Once the first set of equipment and its big kids were out of sight, though, Gabe put them immediately out of mind and returned to his persistent pestering to stop and play.

"No," I insisted. "We're just walking today. Daddy needs some exercise."

Then he found one of the fatal flaws in my line of reasoning. "But I need exercise," he reasoned. "I play at park and 'whoosh' down slides for exercise."

Grr. I could hardly argue with that kind of logic. I couldn't claim that he didn't need exercise (though, really, he doesn't, since all of his waking hours are exercise as he climbs on everything in our house, runs around in circles, and jumps over anything that's on the ground), and I would never suggest that he SHOULDN'T get some exercise because, frankly, I would love for him to grow up with a better attitude about physical activity than I have myself.

"OK," I relented, establishing the pecking order/minion status in our household beyond a shadow of doubt. "If there are no big kids at the other big park with the sand, we'll stop."

And, of course, there weren't any big kids. At least not at first. There wasn't any reasonable out for me, so we unloaded from the stroller.

Let me take another moment to further lament the purchase of this stroller. I strongly believe now that it was not designed with the moving of children in mind. Or, perhaps, the people who engineered it had never had children of their own and they figured that children would not ride in it once they weighed more than, say, twenty pounds. With a light load, the stroller works pretty well. But, then, anything with wheels that didn't weigh very much would move pretty well. Once children are added--specifically, two children that weigh somewhere around seventy pounds together--the dynamic of the stroller is inexorably altered. It becomes unwieldy and awkward. If the surface being traveled upon has even the slightest incline to one side or the other (as all roads do, except in the very middle where it's impossible to walk without causing a traffic stir, and many spots in sidewalks do, especially when crossing driveways), the stroller lists down that incline with such blind determination that anything less than total dedication to keeping the stroller on target will lead to a two child pile up in the nearest gutter or ditch. Constantly fighting the stroller back from one direction or the other is exhausting work that completely detracts from the overall joyful experience of going for a walk--if one is so inclined to find joy in walking.

I hate that stroller. God how I hate it. I'm not sure I've ever hated an inanimate object as much as I do this stroller.

Anyway, we stopped at the park and unloaded. Gabe hit the playground equipment and I put Norah down for a little time in the sand. As soon as Gabe took his first step up the stairs, though, two big kids appeared out of nowhere and climbed up the stairs, overtaking Gabe and commandeering the high ground. Bollocks.

So, now my job had changed. With only Gabe and Norah there, all I had to do was focus on Norah and her handfuls of sand--to make sure they didn't go in her mouth, because, I swear, she loves the taste of sand more than anything else in the world right now--and keep Gabe in the corner of my eye so I could direct him past the parts of the equipment that were beyond his age level. Now I had to keep Gabe out of harm's way so he didn't accidentally get pushed off some twelve foot tall playground equipment. This meant carrying Norah and shadowing Gabe from the ground, so I did just that.

Gabe decided that he wanted to try one of the big slides. To date, Gabe hasn't made it down any of the big slides. I don't think he's scared, exactly, but, for some reason, he always stops himself right before going down the slide and decides that he'd rather be doing something else. This time, unfortunately, he didn't stop himself until he'd already slid a few feet down the slide, where he jammed his legs into the side, twisted himself up, and clung to the sides with his hands for dear life.

"Help! Help!" he wailed.

And so I was faced with a dilemma. I had a child in my arms and another jammed in a slide. I didn't like my chances of being able to keep a hold of Norah while prising Gabe free of the slide, and I certainly couldn't put her down way up at the top of the equipment long enough to get at Gabe, so I had to put her down on the sand. I did so and sprinted up the equipment stairs to pull Gabe free.

While I did this, three more big kids appeared, again from nowhere--or, possibly, they slid in from an alternate dimension. I hear big kids can do that now with all their modern gadgetry. I think there's an app for that.

I escorted Gabe down through the bustle of kids, back to Norah on the ground. When we got there, I found her on all fours with her face down in the sand. She wasn't crying and, in fact, seemed quite pleased to be buried cheek deep in the sand that was still damp from the past few days' worth of rain, so I guessed that she had purposefully put herself in that position and hadn't, instead, tried to stand and faceplanted, which I suppose was better, at least from a standpoint of producing a spectacle of wailing for everyone to see. I pulled her up and her face was caked with sand. Actually, her entire front half was caked with sand. She must have laid down flat on the ground before raising up to her hands and knees and putting her face in the dirt.

"That's enough of that, then," I decided, and I escorted them back to the stroller, instructed Gabe to load up, then cleaned Norah up the best I could before putting her in. I probed around in her mouth with my finger to try and excavate as much earth as I could, then handed her sippy cup to her in the hopes that she could wash the rest of it down.

Gabe protested, but this time I wouldn't bend. "We can play in the sandbox when we get home," I assured him. I didn't want to do that, obviously, but it was the only thing I could think of to keep him happy. Once playing outside was on the table, nothing but enough time outside would prevent a tantrum of three year old proportions, and spending time in the sandbox seemed like a lesser evil at this point.

Once home, we played in the sandbox for fifteen minutes or so before Libby got home--thankfully, she came home early since she'd gone into work early that morning, so I didn't have to deal with them alone for very long. Nonetheless, before Libby got home, Norah managed to put at least six handfuls of sand into her mouth (and one little rock, which I found stranded like a small island in the middle of a puddle of pooh this morning--her body hasn't made a very gracious switch from formula to milk, I'm afraid). Perhaps she is part chicken and she needs the sand to help her digest her food or whyever they do it (I think it might have to do with egg manufacturing, actually, but whatever).

After Libby arrived, we decided to give the kids a Hillbilly Bath in their little swimming pool. What the hell, we thought. We had the warm water already as it had filled up with the rain and it was pretty warm outside, and our back yard is shielded from the view of the rest of our neighbors. I grabbed their shampoo and Libby lathered them up.


Then, to complete our white trash evening, we decided to feed the kids in their underwear/diapers because, well, they'd already had a bath and I didn't figure it made much sense to dirty a new set of clothes before changing them into their PJs.

Notice the trail of food down her belly. She had chicken fingers and tater tots. When Libby changed her diaper before bed time, we found a chunk of chicken and half a tater tot in the front of her diaper. Probably Norah thought she'd save it for later.

And so now you see another reason why it's best not to get your kids out for "exercise." It will inevitably lead to social decline. In one afternoon, we descended into the realm of white trash, and all it took was some damp sand and a playground slide. So, be warned, it could happen to you, too!

Fireworks Are Stupid

We made it through another 4th of July. Actually, all things being equal, this was probably a better 4th than we've had for awhile. Lovely Hurricane Alex blew all sorts of moisture up our way, so we had a really rainy extended weekend, which was a great deterrent for many of the firework-happy sociopaths in our fair city. See, our town doesn't really have any restrictions on fireworks. I imagine there are SOME restrictions, but you wouldn't know it from the constant barrage of noise that blankets the city for about five days of the year. I swear I'm not exaggerating when I compare it to a battle zone. Sunday night, there was a break in the rain for a few hours and everyone decided to make the most of it. We went outside after about two hours, and, because the wind had died down too, there was a pall of thick smoke covering our yard. It smelled like gunpowder and fear out there. Every animal in a five mile radius was cowering for shelter. And it sounded like we were being shelled by the Luftwaffe.

Add to that the fact that our neighbors across the street have spent as much as $2000 on fireworks in previous years, and it's probably no surprise that Gabe has developed a kind of shellshock for the holiday.

He's always had a thing about loud noises (unless he's the one MAKING the loud noise, obviously, then he has little to no trouble with it). The few times I took him out to watch people blowing crap up, he curled in close to me and refused to let go of whatever body part he could grab until I picked him up and took him away from the spectacle. The 4th of July is not his favorite holiday.

Fortunately, since he is pretty well wiped out by 8:00, we were able to get him into bed every night this weekend before the real heavy bombardments got underway. Thankfully, he's a heavy sleeper. Norah, not so much. She was waking up every thirty minutes or so during the louder parts of armageddon.

Once upon a time, I was rather fond of the 4th of July. It has never been one of my favorite holidays, but, being a boy, I enjoyed the blowing up of things growing up. I have memories (possibly fond, I haven't decided yet) of my brothers and I doing all the things boys do with fireworks--we melted action figures while trying to change their color with smoke bombs by trapping the toy and the bomb together in a capped coffee can (we were successful one time, changing a stormtrooper from white to a grotesque melange of burnt orange and red, every other attempt left the toy a mangled, fused, melted mess of mismanaged body parts), we blew things up, and we tormented pets and farm animals. We bought those little tanks and boats and were supremely disappointed when they failed to drive around and blow crap up like real tanks or boats (even when we set something RIGHT in front of them, they still failed to make something explode). And so forth. We saved up for months and bought our own fireworks (because Mom's idea of a good time was those super lame "snakes" and sparklers). A couple times, I even special ordered fireworks from neighboring Missouri because they had no statewide bans on some of the stupider, more self-destructive fireworks.

Even once I passed into adulthood, we still managed to buy fireworks every year (heavy on the Roman candles, because we liked to shoot them at each other--at a good distance, of course, which pretty much guarantees safety, as Roman candles are notorious for hitting everything BUT what you're aiming at if you're more than ten feet away from it).

Until we had kids. Now I hate the holiday. I think it's all a waste of time, money, and peace and quiet. It can't be a coincidence. Granted, we did have kids right about the time I was naturally progressing into the "cranky old guy" phase of my life--but I rather expected a love of blowing things up to be universal, something I could cling to even as I was limply flinging black cats with one hand while the other clung desperately to a walker.

Apparently, not so. I WANT to be able to say that I dislike the holiday now because of the safety concerns it will undoubtedly lead to when Gabe inevitably weighs the disadvantages of his fear of loud noises against the prospects of making things go BOOM and finds his fears lacking in comparative conviction. But, in the fairness of full disclosure, I'm afraid I have to admit that my feelings toward fireworks is entirely self-serving right now. In short, I hate them because they might disturb the sleep of my children, which, in turn, will deprive me of the time when they are out of my hair. For that, I fear, I can never forgive fireworks.

Also, this past week, Famous Uncle Ben and Aunt Skye came for a visit. Sadly, for reasons he probably can't even say, Gabe now only calls Ben "Uncle Ben," only once referring to him as "Famous," but that time he'd just heard us say it, so it obviously wasn't something he was doing instinctively. Oh well. It was a good visit, and Gabe had a great time--as he always does--with non-Daddy people in the house. Unfortunately, the kids really didn't do MUCH that was noteworthy through the entire time they were visiting, so no pictures to speak of.

Ben did, however, introduce the kids to the Whoopie Cushion, which was a resounding success. So much so, that Libby went to Wal-Mart and bought about a dozen of them--all of which the kids destroyed by over-zealously squashing them. Amusingly, Gabe calls them "toot balloons." I like that name MUCH better and think Whamm-O or whoever makes them should seriously consider a new marketing campaign built around the new name. I also expect my child to receive some royalties for his contribution.

We didn't get much video of them playing with the toot balloons, but we did manage to get one of Norah experiencing it for the first time.

My Optimism Is Waning

As I've pointed out in previous posts, parents are amusing in the optimistic appraisals they hold for their children's futures based on what they do when they are toddlers. For instance, the go-to standard: when the child displays basic stacking abilities with blocks, inevitably, someone will say "He's going to be an architect when he grows up!" This is, of course, absurd, but parents can hardly be blamed. Every parent wants his or her child to grow up to enjoy the kind of success that a job as an architect would signify--it is a high paying job that is safe and requires very little manual labor. It makes perfect sense, obviously. Parents want their children to have long, happy, productive, EASY lives, and architect seems like a job that would fit that bill nicely (though, I'm sure, like every job that involves working, it would end up sucking, just like everything does--this isn't me being a pessimist, I am simply basing this off my lifetime so far of working and doing it with other people that usually ends up with them pissing me off or me wishing them dead, two attitudes not typical to my personality type).

We were guilty of those same claims early on as well, I'm afraid. It's difficult NOT to think your child is a genius of some sort (they are, after all, so dim in those early years that ANY act of intelligence seems multiplied a thousand times because it is such a foreign concept). When we saw him stacking blocks, we thought he would be an architect (despite the fact that he only built things so that he could later destroy them) as opposed to being a day laborer at a construction site. When, at the age of two, he counted out nine tires at a tire store, we assumed that he was going to be an engineer or mathematician and not a grease monkey at a Quick Lube (or Monsieur Lube, if he were to move to Canada). When he showed an affinity for moving boxes, crates, or baskets that seemed far too large for his size . . . well, there wasn't much we could assume positively from that, I guess. There aren't many high end jobs that require moving heavy things, though it will certainly come in handy in a household where both parents have back issues (and, secretly, I'm holding out hope that he'll someday be a World's Strongest Man competitor, just because it's still one of my favorite challenge shows to sit down and watch on a slow TV night).

But, the reality of it is, Mozart began study of the piano at age three and his first symphony was completed when he was just eight. Gabe is not displaying these types of traits. Nor would I really expect him to, or even hope that he would. There is little future in symphony composition. The best he could hope for after successfully composing several symphonies, these days, would be a hosting gig at some NPR station or other. Not a BAD life, to be sure, but not one typical of pie-in-the-sky hopefulness.

As with the lifting of heavy things, events of the past twenty-four hours are difficult to spin into an optimistic outlook for his adulthood field of choice. Gabe has become a full-fledged daredevil.

I mentioned in my last post his desire to fall backwards from the couch onto a pile of waiting blankets and pillows. At the time, I was able to dissuade him with tales of confinement to bed for extended periods of time, but the fear of being bed-ridden didn't last long in his mind. By yesterday morning, he was asking me to sort through everything behind the couch to move anything that might hurt him when he fell.

"Sorry, hon," I said. "Those are Momma's things back there. She'll have to move them when she gets home tonight. Be sure to ask her when she gets back from work."

"Ahhh," he moaned, but he let it slide from there and he really didn't say anything else about it the rest of the day. Mission accomplished, I thought. By diverting the responsibility onto Libby, who wouldn't be home for several hours, I figured Gabe would forget about it and we could delay the inevitable for a few more days.

Wrong. As Libby walked into the living room last night, Gabe turned to see her, and the first thing out of his mouth was "Momma! Move sharp things from behind couch so I can 'Pssh'!" "Pssh," or something pretty similar to that, is what he's decided to call the action of sitting on the back of the couch and falling, on his back, onto the padding below.

There was no real way to avoid it now. We were cornered. Our choices were to comply or to shoot him down and deal with the tantrum that would undoubtedly last until bed time. So, Libby cleaned up her mess from behind the couch, and he didn't waste any time trying it out. Libby managed to capture his first attempt on video.

We didn't even have to go to the hospital. As long as this remains a popular game, though, I'll try to keep the phone close at hand to reduce the emergency response time by a few minutes.

And a little more of the same. Notice that I've tried to stay neutral by lying on the floor to stretch my back.

Thus I'm left with a bit of an optimistic conundrum. What positive line of work could this POSSIBLY allude to? Stunt man? Daredevil? Cirque du Soleil performer? Best case scenario for his life as a daredevil, he'd end up a shattered husk of a man who possesses fantastic mythical proportions in the minds of an entire generation, like Evil Knievel. But who, really, would wish that kind of pain on their child? Or maybe he could be a stunt man turned bounty hunter like Colt Seavers in "The Fall Guy." The fact that Colt was "blown up for Raquel Welch" was one of the high points of his career, and I'm just not sure I can get THAT excited about the prospects (especially since, now, he'd be getting blown up for the likes of Megan Fox, which hardly seems worth the effort).

Maybe I'll send Lee Majors an email and see if he has any suggestions. He can't be that busy these days.