Merry Dadsmas! (and a Happy Dad Year)

I'm back!  I know, I'll let you catch your breath and put away the noisemakers (though that delightful mango pudding you made can stay).  Somewhere out there, cheers are emanating from my parents, three people at work, and my wife, along with the occasional Google user who was looking for the history of Goofus and Gallant and ended up here.

Where have I been?  I've been busy not helping with nighttime feedings, continuing to sow the story of Santa into Simon's head (true story, kids, winkwink, parents), and watching Cecily reach the age where she can do more pushups than I can.

Days of Yore

Some time last week, Simon - during his routine exploration of all the objects in our house within his now seemingly massive armspan - found our old yearbooks.  Katie had all four years yearbooks from high school, like any normal child would, but I only had two - one from senior year and one from sophomore year.  Obviously, I thumbed through my senior yearbook with Simon in an attempt to get my son to badmouth pictures of kids I didn't like and to show him how dorky his dad used to be.

I'm just kidding!  I'm still a dork.

Fast Food

You know the one thing I miss the most, now that I'm a parent?  The one everyday event that has fundamentally changed?  Meals.  Meals at home, not so much.  Meals out?  What a different world that must be, to sit there calmly eating your meal, discussing whether to have dessert.  I'm sure those days will return, but with an infant and a toddler, every meal out boils down to being a race.

Can we finish our meal before Simon becomes impatient and wants to get out of his high chair?  Can we squeeze in travel and eating time between Cecily's feedings?  The longer it takes to reach our destination and the longer it takes for our food to arrive, the more we tend to eat like Nintendo cutie Kirby - inhaling our food in seemingly one puff (although Kirby would probably gain a half-useful magical ability from such a thing, like getting horns if he ate a hamburger).

Back to Work

Yesterday, I went back to work.  My seven weeks of living high off the hog on the taxpayer dime (or, at least, 55% of the taxpayer dime - so, 5.5 cents I suppose) had come to an end, and my sense of duty and our family's affinity toward having enough money to not live in squalor both prompted me to pull up my britches and bring home the bacon.

It's just yet another transition on the path of parenthood, and like most of the milestones on our journey, it's been different for everyone in the household.  For Katie, it meant losing me for most of the day, most days of the week.  More practically, it also meant being the only adult in a house with a toddler and an infant, suddenly needing to corral two small forces with only two hands.

That Night with David Rakoff

David Rakoff died about one month ago after a battle with cancer.  He was a frequent This American Life contributor and his writing was often funny, sometimes melancholy, and always compelling.  I obviously didn't know the guy personally, but I always enjoyed when he would read his work on TAL.  I'll be honest; he usually played second fiddle to another David who was often featured on This American Life - the public radio celebrity David Sedaris.  I'm a huge Sedaris fan, so I didn't get as excited when Rakoff hit the air, but my ears would still perk up when his name was announced.

I was sad when I heard he had passed away, but I knew he had been battling cancer.  I saw David on screen at This American Life Live! earlier this year.  He was already suffering from his illness, but read a story he had written about having to live with one of his arms losing the ability to function.

Playground Posse

A few weeks ago, we took Simon to the park playground and encountered a pack of unruly kids.  They were all clearly friends with each other, had come to the playground together, and were mean and disrespectful.  They were unsupervised and ranged in age from maybe 5-8 years old (although, who am I kidding, I'm one of the worst age guessers ever).

Simon stayed away from them, partially because we guided him to other parts of the playground, but partially due to some emotional instinct.  Another kid on the playground was not so lucky.  He was playing in an elevated tube connecting two parts of the playground and some of the mean kids in the group were pushing him down and calling him names.

Would Smell as Sweet

There's this book that I read in high school, which was turned into a movie in 2006.  The book is called Perfume: The Story of Murderer and it was recommended to me by our school's resident gay gothy creative writer type.  I say that with all the affection in the world, as I really admired this guy's writing and candor, and I'm fairly certain in hindsight that he was one of the main forces that kept me writing throughout school.

Anyway, the story is at turns captivating and gruesome.  It is about a man with an uncanny sense of smell.  He ends up in the perfume business and gets into trouble when in order to bottle the perfect scent, his methods sometimes require dabbling in homicide.  Without giving away too much, as I want to encourage you to find a copy of the book and read it, the reason I'm referencing it here is because it is at its core about attempting to hold on to smells that we cannot truly create.  (The movie may also be decent, but I've only seen some of it, so I can't rightly say.)

The First Rule of Parent Club

I'm going to let you in on a secret.  It's the #1 rule of dealing with parents.  Any parent.  Every parent.  Ready?  Here it is: don't give parents unsolicited advice on their children.

Let me elaborate.  Every parent is the expert on his or her child.  That's it.  Nobody else is.  If everyone just realized this and stopped attempting to give unsolicited advice to other parents, the world would be a much more peaceful place - or at least, the portions of the Internet where parents congregate.

Potty Time

So, Simon's learning how to use a potty.  I'm not exactly sure what compelled me to decide to embark on this grand adventure when we have an infant in the house, but we bought Simon an adorable seat that looks like a frog, so he can pee in it.

I actually do kind of know why I decided to push for potty training Simon now, actually.  First, he's almost two-and-a-half.  All the books and websites and advice animals suggest that you wait until your child "is ready" to start training them to use the toilet (or a mini toilet that looks like a frog).  Let me tell you what's challenging: trying to get a 2-year-old to respond intelligently to a question like, "Do you want to use the toilet and not have to wear diapers anymore?"

Like Sunday Morning

Infants are easy.  They eat, they sleep, they poop.  They scream when they're upset, and they lie there (and sometimes scream) when they're happy.  As long as you can deal with a crying little person who can't tell you what's wrong, infants are cake.

And toddlers are easy, too, right?  They can talk, so they can actually tell you what's bothering them.  They can understand you, so you can tell them why certain things are good and certain things are bad.  And they've been around long enough that they've established a certain routine.  You know when they'll want to eat, sleep, and play.  Heck, they can even take care of themselves most of the time!  Toddlers are a breeze.

Big Pancakes

There's something both awesomely wonderful and awesomely terrifying about the autonomy that Simon has begun to show.  He's not quite two and a half, and he's already begun to turn into a real boy.

Up until pretty recently, he's been pretty much a parrot and a yes-man.  He would often reply, "OK" to almost any demand or request, and would obediently do whatever we would command him to do.  At some point, like every human who has escaped the yoke of oppression, he suddenly realized that he can have his own opinion.  And like every American who finds their way to an online political forum, he discovered that he can assert this opinion, even if it is wholly misinformed or simply factually incorrect.

...and the Strangest Things Seem Suddenly Routine

I knew it would happen.  I knew it.  The moment I hovered over the Publish button on my last post, I muttered to myself, "they're gonna call." And they did!

If you remember, in my last post, I mentioned going to the emergency room for what turned out to be a kidney stone.  I also went on to explain how I managed to successfully pass it the same day and joke about the episode like it was something funny that had happened on Who's The Boss.  However, despite my casual tone and the fact that I was pain-free in less than 24 hours, my parents kind of wigged out, leading to me looking at my phone at one point, having missed three calls from my mom.

They called to make sure I was OK.  Which I was.  Because, you know, I had said so in my last entry.  I had laid out the whole sordid tale, as it were.  And I know I'm being a bit hard on them, but I guess I've felt that way since I turned from a precocious math-loving child into a surly math-liking teenager.

This Too Shall Pass

So, fun fact: yesterday at around 2:30 AM, I checked into the emergency room.

I had woken up about a half hour prior with severe abdominal pain, and based on my extensive medical background of watching sporadic episodes of Gray's Anatomy, I was 90% sure that my appendix had burst and was shooting little appendix bullets into my other surrounding organs.  After some painkillers and a CT scan, I was told that I actually had a kidney stone that was slowly and excruciatingly making its way from my kidney to my bladder.  I was then dismissed with a handful of medications for dulling the pain and a device that is perhaps best described as a pee sieve.

You Will Call Me Sister, Will You Not?

One of the things that felt entirely new with the birth of Cecily was the interplay and relationship that she would have with Simon.  I grew up an only child while my wife had two siblings, and we were both interested in how Simon would react to having to share "his" house with another child, especially in the early days when we'd probably be lavishing a bit more attention on his new sister.

The Sound and the Newborn

Approximately 48 hours ago, my wife brought our second child - a daughter named Cecily - into this world.  I was once again plunged into the world of a newborn.  We have a two-year-old son named Simon, and maybe he was the same way he was just born and I'd blocked it out, but Cecily seems to be much more of a screamer.  It's nothing that seems unusual; if anything, maybe my son was an exceptionally mellow newborn.  It's hard, though.  It's hard because outside of changing her diaper or handing her over to the wife to feed, there's not much I can do to make her feel better.  With Simon able to articulate his feelings and communicate his frustrations, it's tough to go back to a world where the only feedback is decibel level and the intonation of a yelp.