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.