|
I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who has a little boy about two months older than Alden. That puts him at just over two-and-a-half. Apparently, over the weekend, he turned to his mother and said, with great earnestness, “Mommy, I love your butt, but I don’t want to marry your face.” When pressed for explanation, he only laughed. Further editorial being entirely unnecessary, I leave you with your thoughts. This is Helén.
In addition to being a very nice person with a winning smile, she teaches Vinyasa Flow Yoga a few blocks from the barn. For those of you who have taken classes from Helén before, she has a new studio about twenty paces from her old one. Look for the barn at the end of Artist’s Alley (just off Cannon and Cross Streets).
For those of you who have not taken classes from Helén, you are not quite as happy, flexible, or in touch with your chakras as you could otherwise be. Take it from me, the bumbling clod, who stepped into one of Helén’s classes last fall only to find myself transformed into the graceful, elegant creature you know today. Such remarkable transformation can only be enacted under the guidance of a trained master. Helén is such an outstanding teacher that even a baby can master even the most difficult techniques. For example, Kato knew nothing of yoga at 3:00 this afternoon.
With a little help from Helén, by 3:15, he was performing even the most advanced moves with ease!
To further support my point, Helén can even teach a surly two-year old how to do Yoga. Alden was quick to master downward facing dog.
And have you ever seen a finer example of this move (the name of which is too complex for me to even share with you)?
In all seriousness, Helén is a truly gifted teacher: kind, patient, and passionate about what she does. I’ve taken four of her classes already and am looking forward to the start of a new one next week. If you’ve enjoyed yoga in the past or have ever been curious about trying it, check out Helén’s site and give it a try. She still has a few spots left for the fall (going quickly, as babies all over town are clamoring to improve their posture). In twelve short weeks, you could look like this:
In other news, Kato learned how to crawl yesterday. He has been threatening to do so for some time, demonstrating strength and proficiency in both arms and legs but failing to enact the necessary coordination to convince both upper- and lower-body systems to work in concert. As is the case with so many things in life, the motivating factor seemed to be desire. He was lying on the kitchen floor looking longingly across the expanse of floor at Iggy’s shiny bowl. Something in him seemed to click, and moments later, he had slithered his way over to the bowl and was gumming it with the sort of enthusiasm that only a 7-month infant can muster. We were proud knowing that he had reached this important milestone (and a bit worried knowing that whatever funky ailments of the mouth Iggy might possess have now been passed along to Kato). Strange though it may seem, the point of this post is not that Kato learned to crawl. No! Emboldened by his first major discovery of the day, he proceeded to imagine even broader horizons. Within moments, he had slithered his way onto the back of Alden’s plastic car and proceeded to take it for a spin around the kitchen.
One trembles to contemplate what he will learn today. I’m hiding the keys to the actual car. I noticed he was peering at it longingly. Yesterday was a banner day here at the barn. After much consideration, Matthew and I decided that Alden and Kato have become so independent that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to give them a bit of a coming-of-age gift. Just a little something to let them know, “we trust you. We believe you can make your own decisions and that you can handle your independence in a mature and level-headed way.” So we bought them a new car.
Or, should I say, we received one in the mail full of toner. Alden got to take the first spin. She was thrilled. She said it handled well, had good pick-up, and the dashboard was classy but not too obtrusive. She especially liked admiring how she looked in her new ride.
True to form, she didn’t fuss, didn’t whine, when it was Kato’s turn to try it out. We knew she could handle this responsibility with class. Kato first just sat in it, enjoying that new car smell.
Then he turned it on.
“This baby can sing!” he exclaimed. He took it for a spin around the kitchen. Then down the hall into Alden’s room. It was when he got on the carpet that things started to go wrong. “This thing’s got no power!” he yelled. “What is this, a slant-four?! Where’s my four-wheel drive?!! What kind of guy do you think I am?!!! I can’t drive this piece of sh**!!!”
We took the keys away. We put the toner back inside. We put it in a cupboard for another day, in the distant future, when his highness proves he can handle the responsibility without the macho attitude. So, a couple weekends ago we had a fantastic trip to the area known as the “Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania”. It’s quite beautiful there.
See? The plan was part of a grand surprise for Matthew’s dad John’s 65th birthday. His wife Judy had planned a surprise trip back to PA, where John and Matthew had spent many a vacation together as youngsters. Everything was all hush-hush and mum’s-the-word and John didn’t even know he was going anywhere until 5 in the morning when Judy woke him up out of a sound sleep and said, “Hey! Get up lazy bones! We’re going to the airport!” Or, at least, that’s the way she tells it. We were in on the plan, and had given John a series of fake-outs saying we were driving down to a book show in Georgia (GEORGIA!) that weekend, so that’s where he thought we were headed. We were all very excited for another vacation (seems we’ve been doing a lot of these lately…). However, before we left, we had to deal with the Volume 27 mailing. For those of you who aren’t subscribers, Volume 27 is an oversized poster that condenses 4 walls and a ceiling’s worth of mural into one piece of paper. Mad genius, I say! Or just plain mad. We’d been putting off the mailing for many reasons, not the least of which was a lack of willingness to unleash all those mailing tubes in our house.
That’s only 1/5 of them, by the way. Also (I believe I have mentioned this before) Matthew has a tendency to act like a complete lunatic when we put together mailings, presumably to keep himself from poking his own eyes out in unbridled boredom. This was an equally important deterrent for me. So, when it came down to it, I made him leave the house with the kids and I rolled and packaged them all. It saved us all some agony. So if you have any complaints about how your poster was rolled, please contact me directly. If Matthew finds out how many of you are dissatisfied, he’ll insist on helping next time. Once they were all packaged, we still had to put stamps on them and sort them into domestic and international and home delivery piles for each of the subcategories – expiring, soon to expire, and not expiring anytime soon. We had so many different piles that we had to enlist some free child labor to help us out.
She proved surprisingly capable. I’m working on teaching her how to use a stapler, though. In preparation for SPX, we are going to need to make a boatload more books. Once that was completed (not even in the wee hours!) we were free to head north. Along the way, we saw lots of rain:
lots of power lines:
and a surprising number of cold, wet chickens:
Our arrival was a great surprise for John, who had been secretly moping in the grey gloom when we got there. Kato celebrated the reunion by learning how to sit up.
Alden chose, instead, to attack John with a pillow.
She is truly inscrutable. There were too many highlights to go into too much detail. But we all had a pretty great time. Except for Kato, apparently, who couldn’t even summon a little bit of a smile for the family photo.
He’s usually such a sweet little guy, so rarely anything but smiley, that I was a little worried. I asked around, seeing if anyone had noticed the sudden change in his demeanor. Judy suggested it might have something to do with what she discovered John feeding him earlier: Not the baby food… the salt!
Apparently he downed 4 full shakers before he was satisfied. You just can’t trust grandpas. They will just give give give without question. We did some hiking, though Kato’s attitude did not improve.
“Turkey Path?” he said. “That sounds like it would be good with some salt!” A highlight I cannot leave out was going out to dinner at a local dive. Quite local. Quite divey. When John went to scope out the place (after having been turned away at a less-local, less divey sort of place that was full) he passed a guy in the bar playing pool who was yelling at his cueball not to “f**ing go into that goddamn pocket, you f**ing c**sucker!” We thought it was the perfect sort of place to bring our newer, saltier baby boy. He could learn so much. But the other draw was that this place is known for its prime rib. And prime is right. The four of us ladies ordered the “King” size to share.
The picture is so blurry because Matthew couldn’t hold still so furiously was he shaking with envy. He had ordered a calzone, the foolish, foolish man. The piece of meat was literally 6 inches thick. And dee-li-ciousssss. Heading out to leave early the next morning, Matthew managed to get us impossibly wedged between a rock and a log in the tippy edge of the steeply sloping driveway. He tried to imply that it was because of the added weight that resulted from my bulking up on the King cut the night before, but I think it had more to do with his imperfect driving skills. At any rate, we were hopelessly stuck. No amount of gravel under the front tire would pull us out.
I know this doesn’t look bad, but what you can’t see is the precarious 5 foot drop to the immediate right of the car. We were too distressed to take any more pictures. The day was saved by some local dudes who saw us, climbed out of their truck, did a little pushing to no avail, and returned 10 minutes later with a bigger truck and a chain. We owe them our lives.
We tried to give them some money to buy themselves, say, a King cut of prime rib, but they refused. This is the sort of out-of-the-goodness-of-the-heart that one finds in the back woods of Pennsylvania. Thank you, guys. And so ended our trip to Pennsylvania. In spite of the rain, we managed to have a really great time. There’s nothing better than just lounging around with the folks.
Unless, of course, it’s beating them into submission.
I have spent the past three days putting together a server that will host our gajillion pictures and be a backup system for our sundry Idiots’Books files, which are going to be priceless as soon as we hit the big time. Actually, I should say I have been trying to put it together. Using this handy-dandy diagram from my right honorable genius geek friend Varzeus, I felt well-equipped to figure out whatever was headed my way:
This diagram unfortunately did not prepare me for the following, however:
So today I am calling it done. Everything’s getting backed up, and for the most part it is doing what I want it to, but some of the things it touts as its great benefits I just can’t figure out. I am giving up on calendar sharing, for example. I’ve decided it will take much less time for me to walk over to Matthew’s calendar whenever I need to look at it for the rest of my life than it will take for me to figure out how to make one server calendar we can both work on. Perhaps the right honorable Varzeus will help me, but I believe I might have overtaxed him with the diagram request. (He has, BTW, suggested he might design a whole website like that, in MacPaint. I would be all over that.) So now that I’m done, I thought I would finally turn my attention to writing those final few thank you notes that I’ve been meaning to write on behalf of Kato (the lazy SOB) for presents he got when he was born (did I mention he’s lazy?). It’s seven months in, for god’s sake. But there is sad news: I have lost the list. The list that had who got him what and whether I had written them yet or not. I swear, I only have a few left to go. But if you are one of the few who hasn’t gotten a thank you note yet, I profoundly apologize. Here’s what it looks like:
That’s on the front, and it says, “… but only because I have to” on the inside. And, of course, “Thanks for giving me stuff. I like stuff.” He’s older now, but the onesie still fits (figuratively and literally). So, thanks to you folks who haven’t received a proper card. If you still are due one, please write me, and I’ll send it to you. I promise. It only hasn’t happened yet because I also suck. (I would, of course, be remiss to forget to mention that the onesie is an Idiots’Books creation, available here for the bold, here for the even bolder, and here for the bold and thrifty.) Way back when, I used to care a lot about how I looked and what people thought of my appearance. Then, somewhere along the way, this concern mysteriously evaporated. I never dressed well, but now I don’t dress well on purpose. I spent years abusing my face with a razor every morning, and now I let my whiskers express themselves as nature intended. I never used to wear sunglasses, because I was an eyeglass wearer and I could never afford the kind of glasses that had that special sunglass clip-on feature. But today, my friends, I’ve come full circle. I am now a devoted sunglasses wearer. A few years back I discovered the answer. I remember the day well. I was browsing Wal Mart on a lazy afternoon, wondering what sort of inexpensive plastic items I might buy in bulk that day. I wandered down the aisle, and there they were, luring me like Sirens, the biggest, most comprehensive sunglasses I had ever seen.
As I saw it, the shades offered five compelling features: 1) Not one ray of light would ever reach my eyes. Not ever. Because I am me, careless and clumsy, I frequently destroy or misplace my magnificent sunglasses. Luckily, every Wal Mart in the country continues to sell them (because of their rampant popularity, I assume). Over the weekend, I lost my last pair, so yesterday Alden, Kato, and I headed to Middletown, Delaware, to find me some replacements. These shades come in several sizes, and I’m always torn between large and extra-large. I tried on the large and examined myself in the mirror.
Alden, who had not been invited to weigh in, said, “Sunglasses too big, Papa.” I had no idea that she had entered the realm of aesthetic opinion, but I took her counsel to heart and tried on a pair of extra-large.
I asked Alden for her take. “That’s is just right, Papa,” she said. Though I might question her understanding of adjectives, there is clearly no disputing her taste. In the end, I decided to buy both pairs, so that I would have options on any given day when it came to pimping my style according to my mood and inclination. Later, in the check-out line, I was wearing the large pair in anticipation of a return to the glaring Middletown sunshine. Alden had one final contribution. “Those are cute, Papa,” she told me. I can’t remember the last time anyone called me cute. Probably not since I was approximately Alden’s age and size. I glowed with good feeling. I hugged my tiny daughter. This is why we have children. This is why someone invented really, really big sunglasses. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that I’m someone’s dad. It’s even harder to remember that I’m the dad of two people. I pretty much feel like the same person I was fifteen years ago, long before I was a dad, back when my concept of “dad” was limited to my dad, who unlike me, actually was a dad. Then, somehow along the line, I became a dad. I’m reminded of this fact all the time, whenever someone cries or wants to eat or needs a diaper change. But I don’t always feel like a dad, even in the face of so much compelling evidence. Today, however, when the family went out for a walk around the block, I took one look at Alden and her footwear/sock combination, and knew, beyond all doubt or denial, that she is my daughter, and that I am her dad.
I took Kato in for his six-month checkup yesterday morning. The good news is, he is bigger than he was before. He weighed in at 14 lbs, 7 oz, and is now 26 inches long. The less good news (depending on how you look at it) is that he is growing more slowly than he was. He dropped from the 10th-25th percentile to the 5th-10th percentile in both weight and length. In this respect, he is exactly like his sister, who was, some of you long-time readers might remember, declared “failure to thrive” at her one-year checkup. You may read about that episode by clicking here, but Alden’s general reaction to the diagnosis is best summed up by the following.
Alden has enthusiastically gotten her thrive on almost every day of her life. Her diminutive frame has in no way lessened the vigor with which she conducts her affairs. Watching him eat and lurch about in search of things to grab and gnaw, it seems that Kato is bound for the same fate. If he does turn out to be a small fellow, hopefully he will be able to weather it gracefully. I think it’s easier to be an undersized woman than an undersized man. Not that I’m speaking from actual experience as a member of either category. Unlike his sister, who is generally content to lie on the scale looking mischievous, Kato refused to be weighed without a fight. He took out his frustrations on the sheet of white paper meant to protect him from the rampant cooties that must cling to every surface of a pediatrician’s office.
Kato’s doctor was at the hospital tending to a newly delivered baby, so Kato and I had to wait for a long time for his checkup. The little dude blitzed his way through about ten sheets of paper before Dr. Ramirez showed up.
But eventually he did, and Kato got a clean bill of health–along with four injections (two in each plump thigh) and an oral vaccination of some sort. It’s hard to be a baby at those first few checkups. It’s a wonder that we’re susceptible to any disease in the wake of that heartless battery of preemptive intervention. Any good scientist will tell you that an experiment is as much about the things you learn during the experiment as the things you learn in the final outcome of the experiment. (Actually, I don’t know if this is true or not. I don’t actually know any good scientists, but it sounded like one of those kernels of wisdom that wiser folks like scientists often bat around.) Unfortunately, nobody told this to the judges of my 6th grade science fair, when I killed a bunch of lima bean seeds over the course of a month of “experimentation”. I learned a lot of things not to do to lima bean seeds if you want them to live, but my discoveries went unrewarded and my experiments were deemed “failures”. Sigh. Given my difficult history with hard science and experiments in general, I have decided to take a loose approach with my children and their experiments. Luckily, no one is old enough to blow anything up yet, so I can afford to be blasé. I’m sure you parents of older kids are saying to yourselves, “Just you wait…” So, today when Alden wanted to feed Kato, I said, “Sure!” knowing that #1 her hand is about as steady as a liferaft crossing the Bering Sea, #2 Kato has a tendency to forcefully grab anything in arm’s reach and shove it violently towards his mouth, #3 Matthew just cleaned the high chair, and #4 Kato was wearing the brand new custom-embroidered bib he received in the mail from Matthew’s mom. And so Experiment #1 began. Things actually didn’t go too badly. Kato seemed willing to eat, and Alden tried to be careful. However, her rapid-fire feeding technique soon proved to be too much for Kato (and his bib), and he looked to me for help.
The only way I could get Alden to slow down was to tell her to look at the camera right when she put the spoon in Kato’s mouth. I have about 32 pictures just like this one, each with the same concerned look on Kato’s face and varying amounts of food on his bib.
Though the bib and the floor suffered terribly, nothing was irreparably damaged, including Alden’s pride (of which, frankly, she has plenty). The experiment was considered a success. Kato might beg to differ. Experiment #2 was more of an investigation. Thursday, Friday and Saturday of this week are Chestertown’s “Crazy Days,” in which all of the local stores put deeply discounted items out for sale on the sidewalks. It turns out that Eastern Shore Tents and Events, located just across the street from us, had SnoCones that were so deeply discounted they were free. Alden insisted on trying one.
She started out pretty disappointed at the size of it.
I must confess, I had secretly signaled the SnoCone girl behind Alden’s back to make it a small one. There’s only so much Blue Razzberry aftermath a mom can handle. What I hadn’t understood was how frustrating eating a SnoCone can be if all of it sits well below the rim of the cone. While I was busy mugging for the camera, Alden was trying her best to figure out how to eat the damned thing.
She finally demanded my help.
I ended up having to mash up the SnoCone with my fingers and hand her bits of it. In between times, she would demand the SnoCone back, try to eat it and only get bits of paper cup, shove the SnoCone back at me, and roll over and pout on the steps. It took a long time, and thankfully used up a lot of her new influx of sugar power. After all the ice was picked over/melted, she finally got to down the syrupy delight at the bottom of the cup. It was perhaps the only redeeming thing about the experience.
When I asked her how she liked her first SnoCone, she gave it the thumbs up.
Slightly disappointed, I suggested it might have been worth two thumbs up. She grudgingly agreed, but really, only grudgingly.
Experiment #3 has been a long time in the works. We have many members in our family, you see, and Kato is just starting to realize that he is only part of a complicated web of relationships. On the family totem pole, I am above Alden, Alden is above Lily, Lily is above Oscar, Iggy is usually above Oscar but sometimes below, Matthew is sometimes above Alden, but then sometimes he’s below Oscar, who, if you haven’t figured it out, is almost always pretty much down towards the bottom. Kato, being a relative non-entity until recently, is trying to jockey his way into the line-up in what I consider a pretty gentlemanly way – starting at the bottom. Today he made several overtures to Oscar, hoping to establish a strong foundation with the lowest rung of the ladder. It’s a lot easier to move up the ladder when the folks you’re moving past are happy to help you up.
Things started out pretty well. Kato and Oscar shook hands, sized each other up, and Kato somehow convinced Oscar that he wasn’t that much of a threat.
They chatted awhile, and they were feeling pretty friendly. Unfortunately, Kato accidentally let slip that he hadn’t been neutered at his 6-month check up. Oscar was astounded.
“But they’re going to do it sometime, right?” Oscar asked, starting to feel a bit defensive. Kato assured Oscar that there was no such talk at his appointment, and that, in fact, the doctor had had a look to make sure his parts were all still there. “Hey man, we can still be friends, though, right?” Kato asked, hopefully.
Oscar wasn’t going to open the door on this one until he absolutely had to.
Oscar figures he’s just not going to deal with the little rat until he’s big enough to chase him around and pull on his tail. Until then, he’s not open for negotiations. Kato is, after all, just a baby. And a baby is still easy to break, even for a castrated 13-year-old cat. Experiment #3: Fail.
|
 Play with our recombinable, death-defying, story-making watchamajig! |
|
|
Copyright © 2010 IdiotsBooks - All Rights Reserved |
||
