Month: October 2007

One of the more entertaining ways of measuring how big an impact becoming a parent has had on my life is to tick off on my fingers the things that I have done that I had previously said I would never do as a parent. Things like using the words “because I said so,” owning a minivan, using my pinkie to pick my child’s nose, and using my pinkie to pick my child’s nose while in public. This week I got to add another item to that ever growing list.

Geralyn, as she is wont to do if I don’t keep an eye on her, signed me up for another after activity after work earlier this week. Actually, it sounded kind of fun: all the dads were to bring their kids to the preschool that we had been hearing so much about and we would carve pumpkins and eat hot dogs. Sam lead me the sidewalk to the school entrance, promising to introduce me to all the “school people” I knew only by name or the occasional nefarious deed. When we got there, she promptly began acting like she didn’t know any of these people from Adam or Eve, but we had fun carving our pumpkin nonetheless.

After the carving we moved inside to dine on some of the most godawful hot dogs I’ve ever tasted, plus cookies and stupefyingly tart lemonade measured out in six ounce dixie cup servings. It was at this point that the teachers unveiled the surprise they had for us: All the kids (like, 30 of them) were called to the front of the room where they lined up and started singing us songs! Halloween songs!

This is the point where I started doing something I had always thought I wouldn’t: I started gufawing and clapping like some kind of moron. By any meaningful, objective measure the performance was dreadful. Half the kids weren’t even facing the right direction, half looked bewildered and thoroughly shocked to be up there in the first place, half were screaming the lyrics at the top of their lungs more than singing them, and several of them actually wandered off to grab another cookie. One girl even started wandering up and down the line, bellowing “HAPPY HALLOWEEN” while bludgeoning the other children over the head with her magical fairy wand.

And yet I sat there, utterly delighted and snapping picture after picture. Despite the rather gauche nature of the performance there was something about seeing my Samantha up there singing to me (well, when she could remember the words) filled me with delight. So, yeah, add that one to the list.

Mandy has her own growing list, mainly consisting of little developmental milestones. She’s started crawling with her knees up under her, and is now capable of achieving alarming speeds, particularly when we leave our various stairs or displays full of antique thumbtacks exposed. She also really surprised me when I told her to “Wave to Sammy” and she complied. Suspecting a fluke, I conducted a few more trials where I told her to wave to Geralyn, me, and the cat. She did them all, correctly, each time. I’d have to check my notes to be sure, but I think this kind of language comprehension is happening sooner than it did for Sam.

And so the comparisons continue…

Ah, flu season. We should have known that something was up when Sam wanted to go to bed at 6:00 last night, and sure enough she started feeling miserable shortly thereafter. Fever, cough, runny nose, general piss-offedness. And about 3:00 this morning I was in her room trying to console her when she climbed into my arms, pressed her forehead against my lips, and promptly barfed all down the front of my shirt. Copiously. Actually, though, she did say “Um, sorry,” afterwards and seemed to feel a lot better.

That aside, it was a fairly uneventful week. Ger and I both had child unfriendly things to do on Saturday, so we tag-teamed the kids and hung around the house. Sam’s new favorite thing to do is “play rockets” which involves building rocket ships out of her snap together blocks, then attach poor animal astronauts to the top and take them on a ride. It’s a ride, by the way, which always ends the same way: with Sam shouting “OH NOES!” and the rocket plummeting back to Earth, where it breaks apart. Sam’s version of NASA never suffers a setback, though, as wave after wave of animals are sent up and brought back down in flames.

As far as Mandy goes, I don’t think I can deny any longer that she’s mobile. She still won’t get her knees up under her when she crawls, but her kind of “scootching” works just fine, and allows her to traverse where she likes. Well, except hardwood floors, which rob her of the friction needed for forward momentum. I started to do some baby proofing, but quit. This house just doesn’t seem to want us to baby proof it. First I put some latches on a bathroom cabinet, only to discover that the way the doors were kind of countersunk that I had, in effect, sealed the thing with the kind of permanence probably hoped for by the architects of ancient Egyptian pyramids.

After much cursing, yanking, and snapping of plastic, I finally had access to my hair gel and deodorant again, but it’s obvious that a new approach will be called for. My Plan B currently consists of just babyproofing the hall closet and then restricting Mandy to that space when outside of her crib, but this proposal has yet to really garner much support among committee members.

Sorry, folks, things have been very busy lately. And also, there has been Team Fortress 2 (look for me as “jmadigan” on Steam!). So it’s mostly pictures this week.

Sam and Mandy went to two pumpkin patches this week. Actually, it was the same one once. They went during the week with one of those crazy Mom’s Group things, then on Saturday I went back with them for photo ops. Unfortunately it rained, but we still got some fun in. They had these huge pyramids of hay bails built, which served dual purposes. First, kids could climb up the 30 feet or so to the top. Second, the dark interiors of these structures actually had mazes built into them so that you could foolishly wander in and possibly die in there.

Sam wanted to go in one of the mazes, so I decided to go with her. You know, to keep her calm. Let me tell you something: It’s DARK inside a mountain of hay bails. And when you get good and lost in there, with your arms flailing around in front of you and a nervous toddler clutching at your extremities, you start to think about things. Like whether or not the guy who build this thing had any kind of engineering degree from a certified 4-year college. Or how soon the dozens of kids clomping up and down its exterior will cause its inevitable collapse. Or if that would happen before or after you get eaten by a grue.

Eventually, we turned a corner in the dark and found another intrepid hay explorer who had thought to bring a flashlight into the darkness, which was SMART, as opposed to not bringing one, which was STUPID. We latched onto them and finally found the exit.

Let’s see, Mandy, Mandy. News about Mandy? Not much, except that she’s really getting more interactive and actually able to play, both with us and her big sister. Geralyn is teaching her to play patty cake, with surprising effectiveness. I’m way overdue on babyproofing, aside from moving all our razor blades and scorpions to higher shelves. I really need to put up a gate.

Over the last year or so Geralyn has developed a mild addiction to what I call her special happy fun time classes. These are events offered through local churches, schools, and other family-oriented organizations and they include swim classes, parents as teachers classes, sibling fun classes (whatever that is), play dates, and a group called Moms of Preschoolers Just Get Together to Hang Out, which is probably the most honest of them all. Up until this week my involvement in these events has been limited to sitting through debriefing meetings, which when Sam ran them were largely incomprehensible so I really never got the full picture.

This week, though, Geralyn took the initiative to sign me and Sam up for a “Cooking With Daddy” class one evening after work. I assumed the idea was that I and a bunch of other dads would trek to the local Happy Fun Child Development Center of Happiness center and stand around while our kids turn a table full of cooking supplies into something that looks like a cross between 30 Minute Meals with Rachel Ray and The Three Stooges. I wasn’t far off.

The “cooking” in the class ranged from the lame —piercing fresh fruit with a stick to make “fruit ka-bobs”— to the only slightly more advanced French toast. Children were not allowed to go near the grill for the latter, which is a rule that I think most of the dads should have also followed based on the general level of cluelessness I observed. Watching these dads (and in one case what I took for a little girl’s “other mommy”) was pretty interesting, though. Most of them seemed to hover parents, in that they stood about 1/16th of an inch away from their kids at all times, taking pains to direct every activity and make sure that the kid didn’t do anything objectionable by 18th century Puritan standards. I, on the other hand, had long ago decided that when a kid is placed in a room full of toys, books, games, and a giant tub of dry oatmeal that the best thing you can do is just stand the hell back and let ‘er rip. Especially if you’re not the one who’s going to have to clean up. At any rate Sam seemed to have fun, and the French toast was pretty good in a sickeningly sweet mush covered in raw egg kind of way.

The other big even this weekend was a “Safety Fair” that my employer put on. Think a huge company picnic with lots of booths where people tell you how not to get yourself killed or maimed on the job or at home. In addition to free food and really good giveaways like bike helmets and backpacks, they were offering free rides up in “bucket trucks,” which are those huge things that lift utility pole repairmen into place in these little buckets, up to a hundred feet in the air. Since I had volunteered to work at a booth where I was telling people that they should really avoid being shocked to death and Geralyn had Mandy in a stroller, Sam had to go up in the lift all by herself. At first Ger thought this would terrify her, but Sam calmly let herself be strapped into a harness and lifted into the tiny bucket to be raised about 80 feet up in the air. Instead of the expected shrieking and hysteria, Ger craned her neck to look up and see the Sam poking her face over the side of the bucket and waving at her. I tell you, this girl is unflappable. She CANNOT be flapped.

Lest I neglect Mandy in this week’s update, it’s important to note here for the historians of future ages that this is the week she started to sit up. Ger went in to fetch Mandy from her crib one afternoon to finder sitting up and looking quite pleased with herself. She’s also crawling, if you can call dragging herself along like a secondary and thoroughly wounded character WWII film epic crawling.

I also tried to feed Mandy something more solid this week in the form of these little rice puffy things that are supposed to taste like sweet potatoes, but which my experimentation reveals to taste more like monkey butt. I demonstrated to Mandy how one is to take one of the rice puffs and place it in one’s mouth, but she apparently decided that cramming them in her nose was close enough for our purposes. After tasting the things, I can’t say I blame her. So I just had Sam make us some fruit-ka-bobs.

As you might expect by this point, Sam does pretty well with her speech most of the time. We can understand her, at any rate. Occasionally, though, she’ll pronounce something in a way that completely baffles us, and now that she thinks she knows how to spell it just gets all the more confusing. The other day we were driving in the car and she pipes up, “Daddy! I saw a skwarull!”

“A what?”

“A skwarull!”

“A school?”

“No, a skwarull.”

“A floor?”

“NO! A SKWARULL!” And then she spelled it out, “S-P-O-O-G. Skwarull!”

“You saw a spoog? What’s a spoog?”

“No, don’t say that! Not a spoog! A SKWARULL! He climbs trees and eats nuts!”

“Oooooohhh. A squirrel.”

“That’s what I SAID.” This said in a tone that suggests I am Chief Admiral Moron of the Nincompoop Brigade.

“Okay, I understand now.”

Several minutes later: “Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“What’s a spoog?”

Mandy isn’t quite at the same level of shenanagains, but she has recently rediscovered the power of her voice. For a long time Ger and I considered ourselves fortunate that Mandy was exteremely even tempered and never cried without a clear reason. This is still mostly true, but she has in the last couple of weeks decided to harness the power of “YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRG!!”

It’s not crying per se, but a kind of sustained bellow that she’s getting more and more comfortable with. Dare to walk away in the middle of a feeding? YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRG!! Fail to quickly retrieve a toy that she just ignanimously swept to the floor? YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRG!! Just standing there? YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRG!!

Other than that, though, you can tell that Mandy really wants to start talking. She’s making all kinds of babbling sounds, and she has Mama and Daddy down pat, plus there’s this kind of unintelligible sputtering that I think is supposed to be “Sammy.” The two of them are interacting more every day, what with Sam constantly wanting to give Mandy hugs and retrieve things that she repeatedly throws to the floor. Mandy has started to pay attention to Sam, too, as evidenced by how she erupts into glee spasms when Sam wanders into the bedroom every morning. I’m hoping that soon they can pretty much just take care of each other and I can get out there and mow the lawn.