Abbie & Ian & Tory Update

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Due Date Dilemma

Whenever someone discovers that Ellie is pregnant, one of the first questions we hear is “When are you due?” This question usually comes right between “do you know what you’re having?” and “how hard does it suck to be you?” This question is understandable, people like making conversation and it should be fairly straightforward for most people to answer. Many women have their due date engrained in their minds as the day when they stop dealing with the swollen ankles and aching joints of pregnancy, and start enjoying their newborn child. These women are of course suckers because few newborns arrive on their due-dates, and even fewer newborns are enjoyable.

The due date question is hard for us to answer because the date Ellie is due and the date we’re actually expecting the full manifestation of our horrible blessings are two completely different dates. The median arrival date for multiples is three weeks before the due date.* This is because 37-weeks is when twins discover their wonder powers and transform into an eel and a river, allowing them to escape the womb easier than a single fetus not endowed with wonder powers. Plus all that extra weight softens up the pregnancy gateway that much sooner.

When people ask the due date question, I have to decide what to tell them. If the questioner is someone I know and like, or at least don’t actively dislike, I’ll go into the whole story about twins and they’ll probably come early. When strangers ask and I don’t want to go into detail, though, I run into a problem. I could tell them the truth that the due date is January 15th, but that feels like a lie since we’re not only expecting them in the previous month, we’re expecting them in the previous year. My general answer is “around the new year,” which is more truthful and accurate, but feels vague. I can almost hear the strangers say, “What kind of loser father doesn’t know the exact due date for his twins? That’s the attitude you get from a father who brings his screaming daughter to garage sales and lets her run loose.”

Perhaps I need to change my answer to December 28th. That’s specific, closer to the day we actually expect the twins to arrive, and therefore not a total lie. Plus, if Ellie gets her way that would be the specific day the twins arrive since that’s the first day of her paid holiday vacation. If successfully timed, she will have her entire holiday vacation plus her maternity leave to stay at home, recover from the delivery, and care for the twins. That works out to almost two months of paid leave, or just long enough for the twins to become accustomed to her presence and then be disrupted when she’s no longer home all day.

I could just tell strangers that we’re having twins. Right now I just tell strangers that we’re expecting a boy, which is true even though we’re expecting another boy to come minutes after the first one. Telling people we’re expecting twins just invites more questions, and rifling through used baby clothes is too intense to concentrate on while fielding questions.

“Are they identical?”

“I don’t know and we won’t know until after they’re born.”

“What are their names?”

“We haven’t decided yet.”

“Did you use fertility drugs?”

“No. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“How hard does it suck to be you?”

“Very.”

* Keep in mind I found this information on the internet, and according to the internet George W. Bush is actually a woman, so the information may not be fully accurate. Nevertheless, it sounds true, and I know twins do come early, so I’m going to believe it.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Funny, But Not Hehanhhehanhhh Funny

Abbie has the strangest laugh right now. Trying to describe a sound in print is a foolish endeavor destined for failure, much like “The Brothers Grimm,” but I’ll try anyway. It’s kind of like one long “anh” sound, punctuated with “heh” sound; “hehanhhehanhhhenhanhhhhhhh.” She has an outright giggle she uses when something really entertains her, but this laugh is the one that comes out most often. It comes as close to an evil cackle as possible for a toddler’s laugh.

I know of a few ways to elicit this laugh, including the newest one I discovered yesterday. I was sitting on the floor just outside of her room while she played in the bathroom right behind me. I imagine she was playing with her favorite bathroom toy, the electronic scale. When she pushes it once, the display lights up and says “0;” when she pushes it again the display numbers dance for a few seconds before saying “E” because the poor thing can’t read an accurate weight with a toddler constantly pushing up and down on it. Wait a few more seconds, and the display goes blank letting the process begin again. It has a few bonus features too, like clicking every time she pushes it and irritating daddy by playing with it.

While sitting on the floor, I decided I should do something that resembled parenting, like grab a book and encourage her to read or at least not break its binding. I moved from my spot on the floor just outside her room to a book on the floor just inside her room using the easiest locomotion possible, crawling. When caring for a toddler, it’s important to do the always do the easiest thing to conserve energy because you never know when you’ll need to bound across the house to knock a pair of scissors our of her grasp that were left in a location that she certainly couldn’t have reached yesterday.

Abbie emerged from the bathroom as I adjust my position to all fours. I don’t know if it was the sight of daddy being silly and crawling when everyone knows darn well I can walk just fine, or just the sight of daddy’s big butt hoisted in the air, but Abbie started laughing when she saw me. “Hehanhhehanhhh.” I turned, saw she was smiling, and realized I didn’t need a book or any other toy to prevent her from destroying the scale; I simply needed to keep crawling. I crawled another few steps, and drew a few more laughs. I crawled even further, and drew even more laughs. Then I tackled her.

Tackling her is the surest way to make her laugh. It’s not so much the process of being dropped to the floor that makes her laugh, but the roughhousing that ensues. With her horizontal on the floor, I position my hand on her tummy and shake up and down or in a circular motion vigorously enough to alert child services if she weren’t laughing. Apparently she finds the contraction of Shaken Baby Syndrome funny because she laughs uproariously as long as I’m jiggling her tummy. Perhaps this explains why she doesn’t talk yet.

I have a few other tactics for making her laugh. I can blow on her face, though that seems somehow unsanitary. Why I should be concerned about giving germs to a child who habitually shoves rocks in her mouth I don’t know, but I am. Then there’s the head shaking game where she shakes her head back and forth, and I shake mine back. On a recent car trip, I entertained her for many miles by shaking my head in the front seat while she giggled in the back seat. I may have endangered the lives of my entire family by briskly shaking my head while driving on the interstate, but at least she wasn’t screaming at the moment. Since I cut my hair, she seems to enjoy watching my head shake, so I may need to wait a few more weeks before leaning on that trick again, and hope she still finds it funny, or at least as funny as watching daddy crawl.

Monday, August 29, 2005

Registration Required

We have now registered for baby gifts at two different stores, so you have no excuse for not knowing what we want. In case you’re unfamiliar with the process, you go to a participating store, tell them you wish to start a baby registry, and they will congratulate you, register you, and loan you a scanning gun to add baby essentials to your registry such as bottles for feeding, diapers for changing, and 12-packs of Mountain Dew for staying awake during late night feedings and changings. Your friends and coerced acquaintances can then visit any store in that chain, or even the chain’s website, and print off a list of items we want before deciding nothing on the list is in their price range and just buying us a gift card anyway. This service is free as long as you don’t consider the price of giving your personal information so they can bombard you with advertising, and sell your information to other companies who will in turn bombard you with advertising. Much of this advertising contains coupons, though, so it’s like you’re being paid for your personal information anyway.

We registered at Babies Backwards R Us* Saturday night. Ellie had some free time and thought this would be an enjoyable way to spend the evening. Abbie missed her books, her animals, and her woodchips, and decided to spend the night whining with extreme boredom, at times breaking down into tears from the tedium.

We sat down with the helpful registration assistant. I like to throw out the fact that we’re having twins to every retailer in the hopes that one of them will say “you’re having twins? Then please, accept this generous gift basket filled with coupons, formula, diapers, and a helper monkey.” Unfortunately they offered nothing more helpful than 10%-off the purchase of two identical large items, like car seats and cribs, or a double item, like double-strollers. They did not offer a reason for why they don’t just mark down double items by 10% in the first place. The register did offer some empathy when, after noticing Abbie, she remarked, “my daughter is 19-months, and I couldn’t imagine trying to take care of her and newborn twins.” Thanks for the reminder of our impending hell.

They gave us a list of about 140 items with the title “must haves!” The title is obviously sarcastic, but I doubt many people understand that since sarcasm doesn’t translate well into print. Thanks to Abbie, we got the joke and could ignore the frivolous items (that means you, bottle warmer), plus we already had many of the really must have items. Mostly we registered for duplicates of things we knew we’d need more of, like crib bedding and a nursing pillow (but not the unfortunately named “My Brest Friend”). We also registered for a lot of things that Abbie could use soon or even right now, like a stepstool, and just hoped that no one notices or is at least not offended that the twins won’t use it for many months.

We realize that not every town has a Babies Backward R Us, though they are in many large cities like Omaha, so we also registered at a more ubiquitous store, Target.** I had to register there by myself yesterday since Ellie was on call, which means that she has to spend 24 hours ready to work at the hospital on a moment’s notice in case they need her (yesterday they needed her for about 23:45 of those 24 hours). I tried dropping the “twins” bomb when I registered, but all the only help I got was advice to be sure that I register for the proper number of items. Doubtlessly lost on the clerk was the irony that if I couldn’t figure out that one on my own, I’d be in a lot of trouble when the twins came.

I was by myself and Abbie was whiny, so I had to move faster than the Bears move through starting quarterbacks. I zoomed through the aisles registering for must have items that I hadn’t yet registered for. Lots of clothes and bibs made the list because I now realize I can never have too many of those. I registered for a closet full of wipes because I know I’ll use them. We went down the toy aisle and anything that distracted Abbie long enough for her to quit complaining made the list. In my haste, a bottle warmer may have also made the list, but if we get it I can exchange it for an actual “must have,” like a couple cases of Mountain Dew Code Red.

* Motto: “Lots of material goods to prove your love.”
** Motto: “Some of Wal-Mart’s low prices, none of the anti-pr campaign guilt.”

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Poopiest Post Ever

While I finished my breakfast yesterday, Abbie was nice enough to play quietly in her room, destroying nothing except the binding on one of her oldest books. As always, I checked her diaper immediately after breakfast; that’s prime pooping time. Usually I need to bend down for a closer sniff and possibly a visual inspection to check her diaper, but this time I could tell the diaper was full immediately upon entering her room. The smell wasn’t the dead giveaway since keeping her diaper pail behind a closed door for hours every day is enough to give the entire room the perpetually permeating odor of poop. The obvious sign that her diaper was full was the poop overflowing up and out of the diaper’s backside.

I cringed a bit, realizing that when poop smears itself that far up the backside, it creates a horribly difficult mess to clean. The more it spreads asunder, the more wipes that must be used down under. I picked her up, careful not to touch the diaper area and smear its contents even more, and set her on the changing table. I opened the diaper, and discovered that not only was poop smeared up the backside, but up the front side as well; in short, it was her Biggest Poop Ever. I lifted her feet to limit the effectiveness of her squirming, and started wiping. This could have been an important math teaching moment had I counted as I used one wipe, two wipes, three wipes, and more, but the poop remained. Eventually, the struggling reached a pitch where I surrendered and let her legs go. Her thrashings contaminated every appendage with poop, and managed to smear the (thankfully washable) changing pad a light brown. Even the wall collected a few strokes before I successfully wiped her into an acceptably poop-free state. I then missed another important math teaching moment as I washed my hands once, twice, three times, and more.

Experiencing Abbie’s Biggest Poop Ever first thing in the morning could have been a bad omen for the rest of the day, but her attitude was fairly decent for the rest of the day, especially when I set her down for her nap. Not only did she fall asleep with minimal fussing, but also she napped for a long time, almost four hours, producing her (dare I say it?) Longest Nap Ever. She gave me so much free time, I could have added a supplemental nap to my standard one nap a day routine. Not that I did anything so smart; instead I wasted the afternoon checking third-tier internet sites, the kind of sites I would check back in college when I thought having class for upwards of three hours a day, some starting as early as 8am, constituted a crushing schedule.

Of course, yesterday was a rare day when we didn’t want her to nap for as long as possible. Ellie, enjoying her monthly “free day,” which is defined as a day when she only has to work at the hospital in the morning, and wanted to spend it registering for gifts for the twins. Registration is a separate story that may or may not appear in a future post, but I can condense the experience by saying you would think that Abbie, fresh off a four-hour nap, would be in a good mood for the process, completely refreshed with boundless energy, but you would be wrong. She whined horribly throughout the entire process even though we gave her a pen to chew on for entertainment. She wanted the scanning gun used to register, but we adamantly refused because it was probably an expensive piece of equipment that she could easily pulverize with her “Chew ‘N Toss” style of play. Plus I wanted to play with it and shoot bar codes.

We survived her whining and returned home in plenty of time to prepare her for bed. We had even more time to prepare her for bed when it turned out she was wide awake despite the late hour, much less sleepy than the average Kansas City Royals spectator. A four-hour nap will do that to a toddler. I let her stay awake much too long, not quite to her Latest Bedtime Ever, but at least within whining distance. With the late bedtime, I thought her sleep pattern would even out overnight and she would wake up at her normal time, but she remained a little off-kilter by waking up about 20 minutes early in the morning. Things are returning to normal, but I’m still dealing with the aftermath of her Longest Nap Ever. Fortunately, the aftermath of her Biggest Poop Ever is safely contained in her diaper pail.

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Runaway Spawn

Abbie used to do so well when we went garage saling. When she still fit in her detachable car seat that doubled as an infant carrier, oftentimes she would sleep while I rummaged, or I would swing her with one hand while hunting with the other. The back and forth motion usually kept her entertained much better than anything Baby Einstein has ever made. When she outgrew the carrier at about six months and I actually had to unbuckle her to take her from the car seat to remove her from the car, I simply carried her with one hand while exploring with the other. Holding her was enough to keep her happy, and even if she was unhappy she was too weak to effectively struggle. When she could stand, I would hold her up with one hand and balancing herself would provide all the excitement she would need.

Now that she can walk fairly well, garage saling with her is becoming difficult. She’s old enough to realize that garage sales are lame, and mobile enough to go someplace more exciting, like an oily patch in someone’s garage, or the street. This is a problem since the garage sale season is quickly waning, and I still need carloads full of boy clothes for her future siblings. We have some unisex items left over from Abbie’s attire, but if I don’t fill the closets with two boy’s wardrobes, I’m going to have to go back over Abbie’s old clothes wondering if those flowers would look masculine enough for a boy to wear when paired with some dinosaur pants.*

We were at a garage sale yesterday with a few decent pieces at acceptable prices. I tried checked a couple of sizes while holding her, but she almost squirmed out of my arm. I set her down to let her wander, and she promptly wandered down the driveway toward the street. I picked her back up, tried holding and looking, and she started screaming. I set her down again to let her wander, this time making sure to point her back toward the driveway, and she immediately turned around to run down the driveway. I gathered her back up, and when the hold and look tactic elicited anguished screams again, I set her down while holding her hand. This approach worked in the sense that she couldn’t wander into danger or fall five feet onto concrete, but it also made her scream hysterically.

I could feel the owner pierce me with a “bad daddy” stare for making her making her stay against her will, and probably hurting her to do it. I tried proclaiming, “you’re fine” in a reassuring tone, though the reassurance was more for the observers than for Abbie. I decided the struggle wasn’t worth it, and left potentially mind-blowing deals on the table without buying anything.

Later garage sales went more smoothly, especially the ones with large stocks of toys splayed across the ground. When Abbie complained in my grasp, I let her go and watched her move to the toys like Lawrence Phillips driving toward a gang of teens. I would check a piece of clothing, watch her, check, watch, check, knock something out of her mouth, and continue the cycle until I moved through the piles of discount clothing. I proprietors might have thought I was a neglectful parent and rude for letting her play with their merchandise, but I made up for it by buying several articles of clothing. I was especially interested in anything masculine enough to counterbalance shirts that say “princess.”

* “Those aren’t flowers, they’re roughage.”

Friday, August 26, 2005

Dead Meet Mr. Mom

While out to eat the other day, I saw something disturbing in the restaurant. It had nothing to severed appendages turning up in thick broths, but it was almost disgusting. A mom and dad walked into the restaurant with their children. Dad was carrying their youngest in a baby carrier. I’m guessing the youngest was still a newborn and one or both parents were still on maternity leave since this was a weekday lunch and neither appeared to have just left work. The father, toting the baby and looking less than thrilled about it, had thrown all dignity out the window by wearing a pink polo shirt. I mean pink, not something with pink highlights or pink stripes on an otherwise manly color, but straight, flat, non-faded “I intended to look this way” pink. He might as well have taken a black magic marker and written “whipped” across the front.

Stereotypes are awful, but you need to live with them while knowing which ones you can fight. To me, a guy, especially a dad, wearing a pink shirt is not a stereotype to fight. It sends the message “I’m being more feminine so I can better interact with my kids,” and that’s what disgusts me. You can be a guy and interact with your kids.

This stereotype that men do the outside work while women take care of the kids is one that I feel is worth fighting, probably because I’m a man who fights it everyday. That’s why I subjected myself to the new show “Meet Mr. Mom.” If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a new reality show where the mothers of two families go on vacation, leaving the fathers free to duel to the death with large, blunt objects for a chance to meet Michael Keaton, the star of 1983’s “Mr. Mom.” Sorry, I just inserted the premise for an entertaining and original show instead of the actual premise, which is loathsome and bizarrely timed to capitalize on the success of a movie from two decades ago. The real premise is two mothers go on vacation, leaving the fathers in charge of the house and kids, and hilarity ensues. The fathers compete against each other in running the house, with the winner receiving, I don’t know, a fighter jet or something.

The underlying assumption disgusts me most about the show, that the mom stays home with the kids while the dad earns the outside income. It sets up the father to be a buffoon trying to do mom’s job. It also says that “mom’s job” is more important than “dad’s job,” that the house falls apart without mom around to keep order, but apparently the family will survive without dad’s income. Why exactly does mom enjoy a stay at a luxurious resort while dad stays home alone, working his butt off while probably using vacation time from work? The show could partially solve both problems if the stay-at-home mom would do the dad’s job for a week. I bet that would be funny. Personally, I’d probably make all sorts of hilarious mistakes trying to do my wife’s job. (“Palpitate? I thought you said intubate! D’oh!”)

I started watching about 10 minutes into Tuesday’s episode. After introducing the families and the show’s setup with hilarious results, it did what any good reality show does and introduced a heavily contrived situation for the contestants to compete in. On this episode, the show cleaned every bit of food and cooking equipment out of each family’s kitchen, and gave them a strict time limit (something like 5 hours, I missed the exact time) to restock the kitchen and cook an ethnic meal for a themed dinner party that night for three surprise guests (later revealed to be mom’s friends).

Surprisingly, the dads struggled with the task. I’m sure any mom could easily restock a kitchen and cook a major meal on five hours notice. I’d have more sympathy for the dads if they would have chosen a simple ethnicity, like Mexican (tacos, a can of refried beans, some vanilla pudding and call it “flan”) or Italian (spaghetti, sauce, garlic bread, some ice cream and call it “gelato”) instead of the horribly complicated ethnicity they chose (Irish? Really? You hear “ethnic meal” and the first nationality to pop in your head is Irish?). Nevertheless, having one chance to go to the department store for all the pots, pans, plates, and utensils you’ll need, and then having one chance to go to the grocery store for all the ingredients you’ll need is a tough job. Of course the degree of difficulty didn’t stop the show from critiquing the dads as they shopped. Time management, parenting, and cooperation were all fair game, as if I or any mom wouldn’t say “this is what we’re getting, now sit down and shut up” if we were charged with a similar task without the cameras rolling.

The shopping excursion produced the most vomit-inducing aspect of the show for me from a production standpoint: Product placements a plenty. Everything was a product placement when they shopped, the vehicle they drove, the store they visited, the items they bought, the items they didn’t buy but looked at, possibly because a producer told them to look at it for the camera. One of the dads was even smart enough to wear a shirt emblazoned with his company’s logo, though he wasn’t smart enough to find a logo big enough to see on television.

The meal went about as well as the shopping trip, with the kids criticizing dad’s cooking. “It’s gross” is one comment I remember about food that didn’t look so bad to me.* I’d think that a show masquerading as a “family show” would demonstrate some better manners from the children, though in the kids’ defense, I’m sure the producers were encouraging them to make wacky comments for hilarity’s sake.

That’s all I saw of the show. After about 15 minutes, Abbie started whining, so I had to ironically take care of her, abandoning all television for the rest of the night. Where’s my luxury resort vacation?

* In all fairness I did just eat some cheese from a moldy block, not that the piece I ate had mold, at least no mold that I could see.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Safe and Ultrasound

We went in for an ultrasound yesterday. This was our first “real” ultrasound for this pregnancy. We visited an office dedicated to the art with giant ultrasound machines capable of peering through space and possibly time, as opposed to the tiny portable machines in her OB’s office with crayon-like lettering on the side saying “My First Ultrasound Machine.”

Here’s the important information: We’re having two boys, and they both look normal so far. Now you can continue reading, or quit here and return to your routine of scouring for Lindsay Lohan pics.

I see ultrasounds as a nerve-wracking procedure. Since the only notable thing they can tell you, besides gender, is that something is developing abnormally, they can only give bad news. Even if everything is developing normally, they can’t eliminate the possibility that something is seriously wrong, leaving me to walk out feeling at least vaguely concerned. They can verify that neither fetus appears to have Down Syndrome, but that just means the odds fall from 1 in 1100 before the ultrasound to 1 in 2300 after the good ultrasound, or 1 in 1150 that one of the twins will have Down Syndrome as the doctor helpfully pointed out. They can verify that the heart is present, divided into four chambers, and beating properly, but that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of a serious heart defect, like holes in the heart. They can verify the presence and proper appearance of all extremities, but they can’t remove the possibility that multiple sclerosis will render the appendages near useless. I never hear unambiguous good news. The technician never says, “Here’s the brain. This part here means he will grow up to be president. Congratulations. And this part here means that he will be another James Buchanan, if you catch my drift.”

For Ellie the best good news/confirmation that nothing bad is happening yet is that everything is still sealed tight and thick. Twins obviously have a greater mass than single fetuses, which puts greater pressure on the plumbing. When the pressure builds too high for the anatomy to handle, look out below because here comes the kids. Dams operate under the same principal. If things start looking weak, the remedy is perpetual bed rest (for the mother, not the dam). If Ellie were to be attached to the bed from now until the twins come in December, we’d be in trouble without her income. In an act of cruel irony, we would have to cancel the cable to save money right about the time she would finally have the time to enjoy it. Fortunately Ellie’s cervix is holding up nicely and strong enough to contain a Frenchman’s hatred for Lance Armstrong.

Not that we didn’t have some excitement. Discovering that we were going to have two boys instead of one of each was exhilarating, especially when I tried to hide my feelings about having to buy two completely new wardrobes instead of being able to recycle Abbie’s old clothes. The part where we had to leave the building for 20 minutes because something activated the fire alarm was pretty exciting too, though I was calmed when Ellie informed me that doctors, unlike lawyers, charge by the visit instead of the hour. Otherwise the experience was pretty banal, staring at grainy images comprised of dark blotches and not-as-dark blotches while the technician explains what we’re looking at. It certainly wasn’t exciting as searching for Lindsay Lohan pics, or insert the applicable celebrity here if you’re another James Buchanan.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Go Me, It's My Birthday

Yesterday, August 23rd, was my birthday. Some people are fortunate enough to share their birthday with someone famous or important, like Abraham Lincoln or Christina Ricci. I get to share a birthday with Shelley Long. I used to say I share a birthday with Kobe Bryant, who was born in the same year as me too, but then he did that backcourt violation thing, so now I’m back to Shelley Long, who never did anything worse than “Troop Beverly Hills.” It’s either her or Rick Springfield.

I celebrated my birthday in the same way I imagine lots of people celebrate their birthday: I went to the dentist. I made the appointment months ago, six to be exact, and when the receptionist offered the date, I didn’t want to be one of those people who are too good to go to the dentist on their birthday. My mother happened to be in town for a few days to see her grandchild, help celebrate my birthday, and spend time with Abbie, which worked out well since she could watch Abbie while I sat immobilized so the hygienist can scrape my teeth. I imagine the office could have gushed over my birthday, but I never brought it up since they were too busy oozing with excitement over the news of twins. The dentist congratulated me after checking my mouth, though it occurred to me that I never specifically told him about the twins and he never mentioned it during the inspection, so I wasn’t sure if he was congratulating me on the twins or the remarkable lack of plaque in my mouth.

The good times continued to roll when I went for a haircut next. I normally wait a long time between haircuts, getting it cut fairly short and putting off the next trim until a curl develops at the end of my locks a couple months later. This time I had waited too long between cuts as the curl had transmogrified into more of a right angle, jutting my mane into a dangerous eye-poking hazard. With my mother along to amuse Abbie, I thought the time was right to lop an inch off the top. After the culling, Abbie seemed a little concerned about my sudden change of appearance. She kept turning my head to the side at first to view my face in profile, as if trying to verify that my nose, lips, and chin still protruded at their proper angles.

With my mother still in town that night to watch Abbie (thanks, Mom), Ellie and I went out for a nice dinner. We went to Cosi Cucina, my preferred celebratory restaurant. It’s a nice Italian restaurant that’s about as upscale as I can tolerate; it’s swanky enough to list the prices without the cents, but not so ritzy that you have more than one person waiting on you. It’s a pricey establishment, but I had a coupon, which meant that I could splurge a little without fretting over how many diapers we could have bought instead. The coupon had a minimum amount you had to spend, so we developed a game plan to order two sodas, an appetizer, two entrees, and a dessert to barely meet the minimum amount. The waitress ruined our plans though when she surprised us with a complimentary dessert, apparently after hearing Ellie use the words “his” and “birthday” in a conversation. We had to order another dessert to use the coupon, meaning we would not only far surpass our intended food consumption for the night, but we were also on the hook for a bigger tip because, dang, that’s good service.

We ordered a crème brulee and somehow survived. We returned home to see Abbie playing happily in the park with my mother. I had a pretty good birthday, way better than Rick Springfield probably had.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

What I Like about You

Abbie is frustrating. Big deal; every child is frustrating. Sure, whines a lot, screams hysterically when a stranger enters our home, and tries to eat rocks, but she’s also really quite a bit above average in certain areas compared to her peers.

Abbie is a pretty good sleeper. She may whine and crank all day long, but I know that when I lay her down for the night and close that door, she will drift off to sleep after minimal screaming, and she will almost always stay asleep until I’m ready to wake her up in the morning, or at least contentedly play in her crib until I’m ready to fetch her. Some children are horrible sleepers, staying awake later than Lindsey Lohan at a movie premiere party, stirring several times during the night and insisting someone provide comfort and maybe a little snackypoo before floating back to sleep, or waking up for the day before dawn even has a chance to crack. Her good sleeping habits may be part of her nature, instinctually born into her like the ability to grasp an outstretched finger or the desire to eat dog food. Nevertheless, I like to think that, while other parents wasted their time bonded with their child, I trained her to sleep well early in life through careful adherence to The Schedule despite her protestations. With that outlook, I can hope that the twins will sleep every bit as well, giving me a fighting chance against all that youth when they arrive.

She doesn’t just sleep well, she naps well too.* I can expect her to nap for at least 90 minutes every afternoon, usually more. I’ve heard of other children who take little or no nap at her age, meaning the parents need television, chocolate, or other strong anti-depressants to last through the day. This long nap keeps her well-rested, ensuring minimal crankiness for the rest of the day. Plus her nap gives me the time to accomplish the things I need and want to do, and nothing helps me appreciate being a parent like time away from the attention hog.

Abbie is a great eater. If someone could chart her willingness to eat compared with all other children her age, she would be in the 99th percentile. At this age, most children have something they refuse to eat. Some children don’t like certain meats, but as long as they’re cut into bite size pieces Abbie will devour it. Many children don’t like their vegetables, but I have to plan meal times very carefully so that her veggies are cool enough to eat when she’s ready for them, otherwise she will scream in frustration at having to wait. Some children don’t like dog food, but Abbie will gorge herself on kibble. Okay, that’s a bad example, but look at milk, the most important building block of a young child’s diet, alongside Tasteeos. Some children her age at least periodically refuse to take their milk because it tastes icky or some other vaguely valid reason, but Abbie still downs every last drop in the sippy cup, often howling in frustration when the cup runs dry. Even foods she used to refuse are starting to go down, like lettuce. There was a time when she wouldn’t eat the lettuce I offered from my sandwich, but last night she ate some lettuce right from my taco salad. The only food I can think of that she refuses to eat is potato salad, but I haven’t tried that one recently. I’d be willing to bet that if I went out to the grocery store, picked up a pint of potato salad, dished it out on a plate, set that plate in front of her, and offered her a spoonful of potatoey goodness, that she would prefer to munch on a rock. Once she realized that rocks are not an option, though, I think she would accept the potato salad because that’s the really quite above average child she occasionally decides to be.

* This in spite of the fact that I’m waiting for her to give up and fall asleep as I type this.

Monday, August 22, 2005

The Exciting Conclusion to "I'm feeling annoyance and frustration, but also tolerance." "I feel validated by that."

After collecting enough boys’ clothes to keep Abbie’s future brother adorned in dinosaurs for his first year, we drove home. At least I drove; she rode in the backseat, expressing her displeasure at being gone for so long. Abbie has about a two-hour limit on excursions before whining her frustrations about being restrained every time we pop in and out of the car. This time limit was fine when she only lasted three hours between naps, allowing me to rummage during her first wake period, purchase Vital Supplies during her second wake period, and return home with plenty of time to make dinner and order a pizza to replace the food I burned. Now that she theoretically only takes one nap per day, I need to cram more into each excursion if I’m going to return home with enough time to ruin dinner. The result is Abbie misses her toys, hates her restraints, and whines more than a Cub fan who, for some reason, thought that this season really would be different.

We returned home, I administered the cure for whining, a tray full of Tasteeos, and prepared Abbie for her nap. I hoped that she would take a long peaceful nap and awaken with no memory of the morning’s traumatic three-hour excursion. I had no luck on the first count when she, in a stunning display of clock watching, napped for a shade over two hours, the bare minimum I allow without subjecting her to a second nap later in the day. I soon realized I had no luck on the second count either when she started whining profusely soon after waking. I tried entertaining her with books, which used to keep her satiated for hours. Sometimes she still will sit calmly while I repeatedly read the same so many times the opposite pairs run into each other and I start proclaiming that “hot” is the opposite of “in.” On this day, no book, no matter how many flaps it had to lift or how weak the binding was to pull apart, could keep her happy; she just kept squirming and wandering and whining, like she knew what she wanted but couldn’t find it.

I tried taking her in the backyard where she used to wander endlessly through the grass. Now she’s learned that outside means rocks, which are a lot of fun to throw on the porch as they make cool rock sounds. Unfortunately we have a two-inch gap between the step and porch, a gap just large enough for thrown rocks to fall into, but small enough to keep little hands out of. Inevitably, she would pick a favorite rock from the 1,576,842,132 rocks surrounding our porch, throw it towards the porch, watch it fall into the gap, and degenerate into a wailing banshee when she was unable to recover her rock because she wanted that rock back, not one of the other 1,576,842,131 remaining rocks.

We somehow made it to supper; I may be suppressing memories of the rest of the afternoon. The meal went well, and I hoped that it would calm my little screecher at least long enough for me to clean the dishes. Abbie toddled off to her room, remembered that she hated all of her books that day, and returned to the kitchen to play in the cabinets. Normally I don’t care if she plays in the cabinets pulling out plastic containers while I load the dishwasher because returning a few containers to their place is a lot easier than fighting with her to return the same dirty dish to its place in the dishwasher several times. On this day, though, she wasn’t just content to throw containers, she wanted to climb into the cabinet, a task she lacked the dexterity to accomplish. She howled in frustration until I wished she would start pulling out dirty dishes instead.

With help from her crib, I managed to load the dishwasher. We spent the rest of the night in the park where there are no rocks to lose in crevices, only woodchips to insert in the mouth. She was content ambling about the park for the rest of the night, leading me to wonder if that’s what she wanted all along. Life would be much easier if she would just say what she wanted, and understood when she couldn’t have it. Ellie says she’s too young to enter her terrible twos, but some days I wonder how much more terrible she can act. I laid her down to sleep, and hoped tomorrow would be better.* I relaxed for the rest of the night while she slept, content that I had survived another day and glad I could finally rest. Then Abbie woke up screaming at 10:30, completing the cycle started earlier in the day and reminding me that I’m never not a parent.

* It was better, especially the part where we went to a wedding and left her at home with a babysitter.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

"I'm feeling annoyance and frustration, but also tolerance." "I feel validated by that."

Friday was rough. I spent most of the day battling Abbie, trying to stop her from engaging in bad or harmful behaviors, or, as she will likely explain to her therapist in a few years (assuming she learns to talk), force her to do what I wanted her to do. The days are fast disappearing where Abbie, without an idea in her head, will go along with whatever I want to do, much like Paris Hilton listening to an off-camera producer on her reality show. Now that she realizes how exciting interacting with the world can be, an activity will lodge itself in her brain making her insistent that she completes that activity. When she can’t get what she wants, she whines. I’m sure this behavior will only increase as she ages and develops a more sophisticated idea of what she wants, progressing from a rock, to a new toy, to a trip to the zoo, to a new car, to parents who have a clue.

Yesterday’s fun started early, as in 1:30am. She woke up screaming, which is very unusual for her. She typically sleeps the whole night through without a peep, conserving her energy for more effective whining during the day. Last night, however, she woke up and was not happy about it. She might have just woken up in the middle of the night sleepy and was expressing her displeasure about the situation. She might have had a nightmare, though I don’t know what could scare a 15-month-old besides the thought of being cared for by a neighbor. She might have wanted some overnight attention, in which case I played right into her hands by rushing into her room to sing her back to sleep.

She fell asleep again fairly quickly, which was good because we had a full morning of rummaging ahead of us. At least I had a full day of rummaging; she had a full day of tromping around strangers’ properties. She squirms too much for any man-made device to hold her while I find the onesies with the fewest holes, so I let her wander. Usually the biggest problem with this strategy is keeping her from doing a little rummaging herself, pulling things out of boxes, chewing on them, haggling with the proprietor over the price. I don’t worry about it too much because I figure if these people are selling toddler clothes, they understand my situation. On this day I ran into an additional problem of people with very steep driveways, the kind where drivers need to hit them going about 20 mph to make it up the incline, and if there’s snow or ice on the ground they just give up and park on the street. At one such slanty-drivewayed house, I let her go, and five seconds later was running after her for fear that if she stopped, she’d tumble face-first onto the pavement, or worse, if she didn’t try stopping she’d run at super-toddler speeds right into the streets. The owners asked if she’d be happy sitting with them while I looked, as if Abbie were ever happy sitting still. That home had a limited baby clothes selection meaning I only had to return Abbie to the sale once before following her out the driveway and into the car, but another house with a heavily slanted driveway had name brand remains of three boys at rock bottom prices. The owner, perhaps indulging her fantasy of having a child who doesn’t want to be a bulldozer upon growing up, kept her entertained while I perused, even giving her a container set to abuse until I scavenged through everything with the name “Carter.” I didn’t buy that container set, but I didn’t feel too guilty since I did free up enough space in her basement to store a food dehydrator and a Gazelle.

Speaking of frustrating, Abbie is awake from her nap, and I have a ton of stuff to do, so I’ll finish reliving this frustrating day tomorrow.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

A Poor Excuse for a Post

Things I did today:

1. Attended a wedding.
2. Helped an 8-year-old celebrate his birthday.
3. Window-shopped for gear for the twins.

Notice that writing a post is absent from that list?

Friday, August 19, 2005

The Iowa State Fair Rant

We went to the Iowa State Fair last night. The fair would describe itself as fun for the whole family, much better than a trip to the mailbox. The funny thing about the fair is I hate it. I mean really hate it. I mean I’d rather research and write a doctoral thesis on the evolution of Sean Combs’s nickname from Puff Daddy to Diddy than visit the Iowa State Fair, but Ellie has had a rough week and deserves a special treat. If her idea of relaxing from a week of hard work is to wander for miles though throngs of thousands of sweaty Iowans in the hot sun, then that’s what we need to do. As a bonus, Abbie is a member of the family, so that fun for the whole family thing could include her as well.

We arrived at the fair a little before 6pm. It was important that we arrive sometime after 5pm because adult admission for weekday evenings at the fair is half-price, making tickets a total rip-off at $4 instead of the bend you over and extract $8 price normally charged. Abbie was free, as are all children, because the fair likes to encourage parents to bring their young children. That way they can have as many oversized strollers as possible clogging the walkways and preventing people from taking advantage of the “free” entertainment so they can buy more food from the ubiquitous vendors. Add the $5 spent for parking to the $8 admission charge, and we spent $13 before actually doing anything. Whee!

Our first stop was at a corndog stand for a cup of lemonade. Ahead of us in line was a belligerent fellow, possibly fresh from the nearby beer tent, loudly complaining because the stand wouldn’t give him mustard for the corndogs he purchased at another corndog stand. That’s the kind of Midwestern spirit you’ll see proudly displayed again and again at the Iowa State Fair. We paid $3 for our cup of lemonade, which is a bit high considering most restaurants will give you a similarly potent concoction for free if you ask for ice water with lemon.

Ellie wanted supper next. We strolled past countless vendors selling seemingly identical varieties of fried foods: Corndogs, pork fritters, ice cream, Oreos, dough, and every vegetable you can imagine in case you feel like something healthy.* Ellie kept asking what I wanted to eat, a question that only grew more maddening because I didn’t want to eat any of it; everything turned my stomach inside out, and not just because of how much it cost. Along the way we saw a golf cart literally burst into flames. The fire department had to put it out. Thankfully, nobody appeared to be hurt. The burning golf cart was free to watch, which was undoubtedly an oversight on the part of the fair since it was one of the few attractions I would have paid to see.

Ellie finally settled on a barbecue restaurant, partially because they had indoor seating to easily feed Abbie, and possibly partially because she knows I love barbecue and would help her finish her plate. She ordered a beef rib dinner, which came with coleslaw, baked beans, and a roll, and a soda for $10.50. How can they offer such a deal? For starters, they use the World’s Worst Coleslaw, an abomination that made canned coleslaw appealing. Its creamy base was less Hellmann’s and more Elmer’s. Then I believe they saved money by simply making one giant batch of beans at the fair’s start, and have kept them simmering ever since, creating a nondescript beanish goo. The dinner roll may have been okay, but it soaked up too much of the coleslaw and bean juice to give it a fair judgment. I didn’t try any of the four ribs, but Ellie and Abbie both liked them. The drink was at least tasty.

Ellie wanted dessert next, specifically a funnel cake, a mound of fried dough topped with powdered sugar for the uninitiated. The stand she stopped at sold them for $4, or $5 with your choice of fruit topping: Cherry, apple, or chocolate.** Ellie chose the $5 option with cherry, though she should have shelled out a little more for the unmarked “fresh” variety. The one she bought had been sitting under a heat lamp too long enough to lose most of its crispness, reverting back to its original dough structure. I took two bites and decided it wasn’t worth it. Ellie ate about a third of it before she realized the same. Abbie like it though, and would have easily consumed enough to get a jump on blocking her arteries if we hadn’t just thrown it away.

We bought another lemonade ($3) and some nut rolls to take home ($13+), and started heading for the exit. On the way, we stopped to see some animals for Abbie’s entertainment. The Iowa DNR had a collection of lake and river fish in aquariums for anyone who’s ever wanted to see crappie and bullhead in a glassed-off cross-section of their natural habitat. Abbie really liked these big fish, giggling as they floated in place, though she may have simply been pleased to finally escape her stroller.

Finally we visited a petting zoo. They offered pony and camel rides which we declined to experience, mostly because Abbie was too small to ride one, but also partly because they cost $3, and partly because they wanted an extra $5 if you want to take a picture of your kid riding one of them. The actual petting zoo was inside a fence, so I stayed with the cart while Ellie showed Abbie the animals. She really enjoyed this experience, giggling the whole time, even though her idea of “petting” involved touching the animal with her index finger, and then putting that finger in her mouth in an attempt to ingest Escherichia coli O157:H7. I watched from the outside, momentarily considered taking some pictures of the camel and pony riders just to screw with the attraction’s operators, but decided to watch my little girl enjoying the event. It’s the last time I’ll have the opportunity to do so for another year. Hopefully much longer than a year.

* In case you’ve never been, I swear I’m not making up any of these fried foods.
** Only at the Iowa State Fair does chocolate qualify as a fruit, although considering that the real fruit toppings were just warm pie filling, the chocolate was probably every bit as nutritious.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

"I never seen a place with a walk-in mailbox."

I imagine that for the average parent, retrieving the mail is no big deal. You open the front door, take two steps to the mailbox, open it up, pick up your credit card offers (or threatening letters from your credit card companies, depending on your credit), and walk back inside to discover what your child broke during your 5-second absence. In our home, claiming the mail is an adventure fit for the whole family, like going to the state fair without the odor.

Our mailbox is located far away from our house. I’d estimate the distance to be about 100 yards from our front door; that’s the equivalent of just under nine football fields. We have one centrally located mail receptacle with slots for all 31 units in our complex, similar to the system used by many apartments, dormitories, and prisons. A locked door individually seals each slot, ensuring that that amazing offer for 5000 bonus miles after the first charge goes only to the addressee. The pathway is mostly grass, with a little driveway and sidewalk near the house mixed in for excitement.

With such a distant mailbox, I have to take Abbie with me while collecting the mail. If I left her home unsupervised for a couple minutes, she could throw a Weeble through not just the china cabinet, but through objects previously thought impervious, like a wall. When the weather is cold, bringing her outside becomes a major ordeal as I have to wrap her in layers of warm clothing, and she hates having to wear lots of clothing more than members of the University of Nebraska marching band hate Tommy Lee. When the weather is warm, like today when the high temperature is expected to hit 144 degrees (heat index of 168), taking her outside is no big deal since it involves minimal preparation. She doesn’t even need her hated shoes for such a short trip.

I always carry her out to the mailbox. I could let her walk, but she has a habit of moving in random directions, and I don’t have the patience to struggle with her for direction since I’m dying to know if any good coupons came today. On the return trip, though, I set her on the grass and let her go. She does a good job of staying on the narrow grass strip and running generally toward the house, especially if I walk behind her as discouragement for turning around and sprinting back to the mailbox. While she chugs in the proper direction, I read the mail, pausing only momentarily to ponder if I could be a winner.

The return trip always takes longer than the departing trip for several reasons. First, Abbie, with her stubby legs, just can’t move as quickly as I can no matter how hard she tries, even if she runs. I’m pushing her hard to rectify this with daily suicides run in the backyard. Second, her speed is never constant. Sometimes she sprints, and sometimes she stops moving to look around confusedly as if she were Ozzy Osbourne. She falls down a lot, too, and that slows her down considerably as she has to take time to pick herself back up, regain her bearings, and fall down again, this time crying so I have to carry her the rest of the way. Finally there’s the sidewalk. Rarely is the time when I don’t have to carry her from the sidewalk, across the driveway, and into the house. Abbie has created a game, for lack of a better word, where she will walk from the grass onto the sidewalk with no problem, but when she crosses from the concrete sidewalk onto the asphalt driveway, she takes a couple of steps, notices that she’s no longer on the sidewalk, and turns around to run back onto the sidewalk. She will repeat this process dozens of times, and no amount of coaxing or false promises of access to the television remote will usually convince her to run back to the house. The only break in this game is sometimes she will turn 90 degrees and run down the sidewalk.

As long as the weather is nice, I’ll humor her sidewalk game for several minutes, intervening only when she falls and hurts herself, or when she runs down the sidewalk far enough to run into the street. I generally only force her inside when she falls too much, or becomes too ornery about staying away from dangerous objects like moving vehicles or contagious hospital patients. I could force her to come inside earlier, but she’s happy outside, while she’d probably just whine inside. Anyway, I can read about the sale items at the grocery store just as easily outdoors.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

The Double-Huge Announcement

Ellie and I decided a while ago that two is the optimal number of children for us. We always knew we wanted at least one child, but we wanted that one child to have a sibling. Having no siblings, I completely missed the sibling experience, and Ellie missed a lot of it having one sibling 11 years younger than her. Plus we figured that two children could entertain each other meaning we wouldn’t have to do so much parenting all the time, and anyway only children tend to turn out kind of weird. If we had more than two, though, we would start running into space issues, like trying to hold onto more than two children with only two hands.

Our original plan was to wait until near the end of Ellie’s residency before adding a final piece to our family. That way everything would be easier because it was all in the future. Several months ago I started thinking that I want to do something more constructive with my life than saving big bucks by making my own baby food, and the sooner we have that next child, the sooner we can dump them in school, and the sooner I can return to having a career, preferably one that in no way involves food preparation.

In April we decided it was time to try for another child. By May, we knew the frighteningly glorious news that Ellie was pregnant, and due January 15th. My head was spinning as I finally wrapped my mind around the concept that I had acquiesced to having another child, and that child would arrive when Abbie was only be 19-months-old. Still, this was what I wanted, and, boy, was I going to get it. If everyone waited for the perfect time to have kids, no one would ever have children. Though I can see an upside to that world, I’ve also heard lots of stories about children being blessings so I’m going to take their word for it.

I was anxious to discover the gender of the new delivery. Ellie was anxious too, but that was for different girlie reasons; my reasons were utilitarian, specifically to know how much more stuff we would need. Some things, like the crib and bottles, we could recycle for either gender, but for other things, specifically clothes, I need to know the gender. If it’s a girl, we can recycle almost everything we used for Abbie without fear of the younger sister complaining about hand-me-downs for years. If it’s a boy, we need to discard heaps of pink and flowery outfits in favor of blue and dump trucky outfits. Since Ellie works in a hospital, she has ready access to ultrasound equipment for peering inside, so we just had to wait for the little organs to develop. By July, I figured things had progressed far enough to determine gender, so I started pestering her about every other day to check so I could start rummaging if need be. Several days ago, she finally had the free time to check. She took a few pictures and brought them home for me to see, and after she explained what the heck I was looking at on the ultrasound, we had a verdict: We’re having a boy! And a girl! Well, maybe a girl because the second one was in a bad position to see, but the important part is there’s definitely a boy and a second one in there!

NNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After I stopped bawling, I started to consider the ramifications of what would happen. For starters, twins almost always come early, so I’ll be entering extreme parenthood sooner than originally expected, probably right around the end of the year. Then there’s the logistics of it all; I barely managed to raise one child this far, how could I possibly care for two babies simultaneously while continuing to care for the slightly older one, what’s her name, Abbie? What about space? We live in a tiny two-bedroom home, and both bedrooms are already occupied. We need to start making better use of our available vertical space, but nobody makes a bunk crib.* And then there’s the future; name any age 2 and up, and we’ll have three children right around that age. That’s three kids in diapers. That’s three children under 4, with two in their terrible twos and a third in her not-much-better fours. That’s three teenagers in the house. That’s three teenage drivers, each needing a car and insurance! That’s three kids in college!! That’s three weddings to help finance!!! At least I get to go back to work early.

Don’t get me wrong; we’re excited, just a little apprehensive. While shopping for baby stuff, we ran into another couple doing the same thing for their expected twins. They were much more excited and pleased about the impending event, but this was also their first (and second). We have Abbie, so we already vaguely know what we’re getting into; they don’t. Suckers. What can I say? We’re blessed. Horribly, horribly blessed.

* Trust me, I already checked.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

A Brave New Unscheduled World

Abbie’s new variable nap system is wrecking havoc on my daily schedule. As a reminder, I’m letting Abbie sleep as long as she can for her first nap to transition her from two naps to one. Sometimes she naps for about 90 minutes and wakes up about 1:45pm as I’m stepping out of the shower, forcing me to dress and make her lunch as fast as I can, which usually results in me wearing sopping wet clothes since I mostly skipped the towel dry phase, but at least her unexpected awakening gives me a good excuse for not shaving that day. On these days I have to put her down for a brief second nap before supper and hope she actually sleeps instead of screaming for a full half-hour. Other times she keeps napping, giving me adequate time for a proper towel dry, a thorough shaving, and a complete application of shredded toilet paper to stop the facial bleeding. On these days, she can nap well past 3pm, which throws a kink in any plans I may have that day to venture out that day to purchase any Vital Supplies or frozen custard. I prefer to go out in the afternoon instead of the morning because Abbie is usually crankier in the afternoon, and shopping for Vital Supplies is a good way to keep her entertained. Plus the frozen custard is that much sweeter in the hot afternoon sun.

Yesterday I actually had an important errand that had to be done that day: Ellie had a bridal shower to attend that night and between all the Vital Supplies and rummage sale goodies we’ve had to sift through, we haven’t had time to buy a gift yet. I planned a wondrous afternoon trip for Abbie and I to the nearby mall to search for the perfect shower gift, “perfect” defined as “the item that comes closest to without exceeding $X on their gift registry at the mall-based big box store.” While in the big box store I could buy my Vital Supplies, cat litter among other things in this case, and then spend the rest of the afternoon blissfully playing in the mall playground until I had to take care of other things at 4:20, specifically head home to make dinner and prepare the present for the shower. The past two days she had only napped about 90 minutes, so I anticipated this pattern continuing for another day, giving us a solid couple hours to spend at the mall. When 2pm hit and she was still asleep, I expected to hear her rustling at any second. I checked the internet for a while, and when 2:30pm passed, I started eliminating potential stops in the mall; I wouldn’t be purchasing any books or obscenely large frosted cookies on this trip. At 3pm, Ellie called to see what I bought. That, and her job was driving her crazy and she needed to talk to someone who was dealing with even more whining. I told her I hadn’t even left the house yet since Abbie was still asleep, but she could be assured that I would find the nicest gift possible selling for under $X.

Finally around 3:15pm, after a three-plus-hour nap that would make our cats jealous, Abbie woke up. The dog helped wake her by barking ferociously at a suspicious plastic bag blowing past the house, which could be the first time I haven’t wanted to kill the dog in such a situation. I scrambled to fill her with a super late lunch, waited the requisite five minutes for her post-lunch poop to change her diaper, and threw her in the car. Our leisurely afternoon at the mall had turned into a half-hour sprint through the big box store. Just to ensure that we moved quickly, I left her diaper bag filled with all manner of Abbie entertainment in the car, making her boredom-induced whining a constant reminder that I needed to move. I found a gift, found a card, found the cat litter, and found an empty checkout lane. It was good that the lane was wide open because the time was already 4:20, and you know what 4:20 means. I need to head home to make supper.

Monday, August 15, 2005

Frustrated, Incorporated

I admit that I can get frustrated pretty easily. One might think that my years of experience playing video games where the computer is obviously cheating because there’s no way I can drive that fast would help inoculate me against real world frustrations, but one would be wrong, just like anyone thinking the Cubs still have playoff hopes would be wrong. I do my best, but I can lose my cool when I need to do something vitally important, like load the dishwasher, and Abbie, recognizing a rare opportunity to meddle in said dishwasher, toddles over and starts pulling out dirty silverware and threatening to chew on it as fast as I can pack it in. If I’m feeling generous, I go along with her and just accept the fact that I have to load everything twice, and maybe turn it into a learning experience for her by naming everything she pulls out. “That’s a spoon. That’s a fork. Ahhh, butcher knife!” Usually I knock her hand away when she reaches for something and keep the door shut when I’m not actively loading. After knocking her hand away for the dozenth time, frustration starts to build in me and I start looking for a way to finish the dishes unperturbed. Books and toys have already proven no match for the wondrous lure of dirty dishes, so I need a physical restraint, specifically mommy if she’s home and not trying to recover from a long call night of delivering babies and an even longer presentation she had to give. If mommy is unavailable, the crib with its attached lights and sounds aquarium toy works well for a couple minutes of entertainment. Thus I can finish the dishes, the frustration subsides, and I feel minimal guilt for wanting to spend time cleaning dishes instead of playing with my beautiful, delightful, charming, tolerable, middling, whining, maddening, exasperating daughter.

The frustration I feel is nowhere near what Abbie feels. Young children are easily frustrated when they want to do something but can’t physically do it, and when you’re just over a year old, there’s lots of stuff you can’t physically do. Like when I enter the bathroom and close the door behind me, and Abbie knows I’m having all sorts of fun in there chewing on soap bottles and tossing her rubber duck around the bathtub. She will bang on the door screaming hysterically in frustration that she can’t join me in the glamorous world of the bathroom. When I open the door to leave, she toddles into the bathroom and the tears stop, at least until she slams her fingers while trying to lift the toilet seat.

Last night while cleaning the kitchen, I shut the dishwasher door to keep meddling hands out of it. Our portable dishwasher was positioned in front of the cabinets, so Abbie waddled over to them since they’re the closest things for her to poke around in. I had the dishwasher situated to block most of the doors, but one door was completely uncovered, and another’s handle was exposed though the dishwasher prevented her from opening it more than a couple inches. Abbie tried opening the partially obstructed door first, and was upset that she could open it no more than a couple inches. She wanted access to its magical contents, like the George Foreman Grill,* possibly because she had a cut of meat she wanted to cook while knocking out the fat. After a couple of tries, she realized that no matter how hard she pulled or how hard she screamed, that door would not adequately open, and moved to the uncovered door next to it. She tugged once, but the magnets keeping it closed held it in place, so she tugged harder, hard enough to swing the door wide open. Of course, being a young child, she didn’t expect that to happen, and thwacked herself right in the nose with the door as it flung open. At this point she was frustrated that our elaborate cabinet security system continued to stymie her and her nose was in searing pain, and that combines to produce a powerful set of tears. I picked her up and comforted her for a while. I even read to her for a few minutes to help take her mind off the nasal throbbing. Once calm, I returned to cleaning the dishes because this was vitally important work and she was happily entertaining herself in her room. About 18 seconds later I deposited her in her crib.

* We call it the “Foremanator” in our house.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Bed is the Word

The three of us spent yesterday morning rummaging. Rummaging has lost a bit of its cachet for me recently because I’ve already stocked Abbie’s dressers beyond full with lots of cute clothes that are so lightly stained you can’t even tell. Since her wardrobe is complete until at least next rummage season, there’s no point to buying more clothes, or room. Nevertheless, occasional rummaging is still enjoyable since we can always use more toys and books, and it doesn’t hurt to buy the occasional bargain-priced, super-cute, super-lightly-stained outfit. As if that stuff wasn’t exciting enough, on this morning we were also searching for a toddler bed. Someday soon, probably before the next rummage season, Abbie will need to leave her crib and start using something using something she can crawl into and out of by herself. Since Ellie won’t let me throw a mattress on the floor and call it a bed, we needed to find a toddler bed, preferably a used one. Whenever you walk into a retail store and mention that you’re looking for something as vital to a young child’s life as a bed, their eyes light up and their pupils morph into dollar signs, because you want something nice for the child you love, not something cheap. “Cheap” is just a synonym for “bad” in store lingo, and your child deserves better than a “cheap” bed. Plus the type of bed you buy is a direct reflection on your parenting, and you’re not “cheap” parents, are you? We inevitably wind up seeing nothing but beautiful solid-wood beds with gorgeous carvings handcrafted by magic elves who are represented by a strong union (the International Coalition of Elvin Carpenters and Bakers, Local 165) meaning it would be cheaper to just buy her first car now and let her sleep in it for a few years than to buy her a new toddler bed.

Garage sales can be rather hit and miss, especially when looking for a specific item. Sometimes I find garage sales stocked with swaths of name-brand, barely worn clothing whose owners just want to jettison it for whatever they can get to make space in their basements for that new pool table and wet bar. I call these “jackpots” because, like the slot machine variety, they pay off handsomely, and, also like the slot machine variety, they help you forget about all the “losers,” where “lots of baby clothes” in the newspaper ad becomes “a couple heavily-stained size 4T boy’s shirts that Aunt Frieda found in her attic and decided to drop off” in real life. “Jerks.” Yesterday was pretty good; no jackpots, but we did find a toddler bed frame at an early garage sale. It was in decent shape, but they still wanted $10 so we decided to look a bit more and come back for it if needed. I did pick up some cheap books at this sale, including one book with photographs of young children riding toys straight out of the 70’s. When I saw the price tag that said “free” and the picture of the 3-year-old with an Afro big enough to double his head size, I knew I was so getting that book.

Our next sale had what looked to be the exact same bed for $20, but with a couple of advantages. First, it included a mattress, and since it’s watertight, it’s worth the extra ten bucks right there. Second, it was disassembled with the original packaging and instructions so we could easily transport it back home and store it until we needed it. Or at least we could have easily transported it if we had the truck, which we didn’t at the time. I gave the proprietors $20 and had them hold it for us until I could return.

On the way home we stopped at a big box store to try to find the same bed. That way we could compare prices and quickly determine if we hit the jackpot by saving money, or if we’re just losers who spent too much. We didn’t find anything similar, just the standard magic elf beds. I didn’t go home without picking something up, though. The store’s music was playing “Cherish” by the Association, and danged if it hasn’t been stuck in my head ever since. It’s been about 36 hours since my exposure, and I’m still humming “Cherish is the word I use to describe.” I tried listening to music I like, namely the latest Ben Folds on the way to pick up the bed, and at the other end of the spectrum I tried listening to Meatloaf, and not just any Meatloaf, but the Rear View Mirror song. I’m still whistling it. I’m whistling “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I had told you” right now. I need to just put it out of my head and concentrate on the most important thing about yesterday, namely that I found a suitable toddler bed at a suitable price. Of course the other important thing about yesterday is cherish is the word. Dang it!

Saturday, August 13, 2005

"I climbed the unclimbable mountain! Bow down before me for I am your king!"

Abbie’s scrape around the eye is healing up nicely. Yesterday the scab fell off, possibly after being scraped during another fall, and all that remains is a pink spot where the scab was and a bruise on the forehead. The bruise isn’t very noticeable, though, it’s mostly hidden behind her hair and it’s pretty small, I have fruit right now with bigger bruises.* Her wounds have healed to the point where I feel confident in taking her out in public and people will notice my “just showered yesterday” odor instead of what a horrible father I am for letting her collect such horrible abrasions. She apparently misses her disappearing injuries because she’s doing her best to collect another one by climbing on everything.

Inside the house, Abbie is mostly climbing on furniture. All of our furniture is still too tall for her to successfully mount, but that doesn’t stop her from slapping her hands down for traction and trying to swing her leg up, and then whining when she fails. One day I’m going to return from the kitchen and drop my freshly buttered slice of banana bread trying to catch her as she dives headfirst from the top of the couch. She loves trying to climb on the couch, probably because that’s where we hide fragile items that we don’t want her to touch like remotes and cats. Once she can climb furniture, the cats will have nowhere to hide except for under the furniture, but with they rate they’re fattening up, it’s just a matter of time before they’re too rotund to squeeze under the dresser. She also likes trying to climb the dining room chairs, which is a little frightening because her weight concentrated on one side would be enough to tip one over and cause some bruising when she hit the linoleum that would surely attract the authorities. Her favorite indoor obstacle to ascend is the bed. Her fondness for the bed may stem from the fact that her favorite people are always on it, namely mommy, daddy, dog, and kitties. She may also like the bed because she can bounce about its surface without fear of injury, unless of course she bounces too close to the edge and falls off the bed, but we’re attentive parents who would never let her wander into such a dangerous location, and if even we did let her fall once or twice there’s nothing down there that would leave a mark so you couldn’t prove anything.

Of course there are lots of objects for her to climb to face-scraping heights outside as well. You may remember that I said she loves it when I help her climb on the neighbor’s deck and toddle back and forth. She still loves their deck, but she now can scale their approximately 18-inch tall deck and scare the bejeebers out of the neighbors with no assistance from me. At least, she could scare the neighbors if they were home, but they’ve been out of town at the Sturgis motorcycle rally ever since she acquired her new climbing ability, which is probably a good thing because you could just imagine what the kind of people who visit the Sturgis motorcycle rallies would do if they caught her trespassing on their deck. She also loves climbing the playground equipment in the park. The equipment has a series of five progressively elevated platforms leading up to an 8-foot square crow’s nest area. These platforms are apparently elevated about 19-inches apart because they’re just barely too tall for climb by herself, not that that stops her from trying and whining when she fails. I have to grab her hand and help lift, but she will zoom right up these platforms where she can tromp back and forth high above the ground below, much higher than even daddy can step unassisted. This crow’s nest is enclosed behind fencing, except for a slide, a ladder, and platform access, which is a good thing because she could really collect some interesting abrasions if she fell from that height.

* That reminds me, I need to make banana bread today.

Friday, August 12, 2005

Spoon!

We have a major parenting debate brewing in our house. It’s not spanking vs. timeout; we both agree that spanking is a barbaric form of punishment that teaches the child that hitting is okay, though to be fair to spanking she hasn’t really ticked us off yet. It’s not the dreaded whole milk vs. 2% debate; we both agree that whole milk is best right now, though that debate is surely coming since Ellie wants to ensure that Abbie receives all of the necessary fats and other nutrients found in whole milk for as long as possible, and I’m too cheap to keep paying the extra 25-cents per gallon for whole milk over 2%. Our brewing debate is over self-feeding.

Currently, Abbie feeds herself about half of her foods. I’ve forced her to feed herself milk for months now, first out of a bottle and now sippy cups, though I do have to help her finish her milk now by unscrewing the lid and helping her drink commando since no one seems capable of making a sippy cup that leaves less than a quarter of an ounce of liquid in the bottom. The first solid food we let her feed herself was Tasteeos at about 7-months-old, which is probably too young for such an endeavor, but boy did they keep her occupied. We enjoyed a couple months of peaceful dinners while she was strapped in and spending 30 minutes happily fumbling for tiny whole-grain donuts. Now she can devour a handful of Tasteeos in about two minutes, which gives me enough time to enjoy microwaving the next course in peace, provided the next course isn’t so big it requires extra time. We also give her small semi-firm vegetables to feed herself such as peas and green beans along with the occasional broccoli piece from my plate.* She eats these by taking a giant handful, stuffing as much as she can into her mouth, letting the rest fall onto her high chair seat, and waiting for me to scoop up vegetable droppings from her seat to refill her tray.

That’s about everything that I let her feed herself, just the fairly non-messy foods. I feed her plenty of messy foods like applesauce, spaghetti, and chili,** but I always use a utensil to scoop and deposit in her mouth for her. I do this partially to keep her clean because a baby trying to feed herself spaghetti is messier than a baseball player testifying before Congress about steroid use without perjuring himself. Mostly I do this because Abbie will not use utensils. Not that I expect spoon mastery at this age, that’s as ridiculous as expecting a highly paid professional football player to show up for preseason training camp. It would be nice if she would hold the spoon and maybe try to bring it to her mouth, but she won’t. She used to grab a fork from me if I offered it to her upright with the food pre-speared, but now she just leans forward and tries to put her mouth around the fork while I squirm in fear that she’ll just poke her eye instead. If she won’t show the initiative to talk, I don’t expect her to show the initiative to feed herself.

Ellie thinks she should show the initiative to feed herself. Last night she asked why I don’t just leave the spaghetti in front of her with a spoon and let her figure it out. I said because I don’t want her to scream since I thought she was much too prissy to touch something that messy with her fingers. Nature’s way of telling you a baby is ready to self-feed is by having the baby kick up a huge fuss and refusing to eat anything that comes directly from your hand. I humored her, though, and left the spaghetti on her tray. After a couple minutes of poking and prodding and seeing that she had no other option, she dug in to scoop giant handfuls of spaghetti onto her shirt and into her mouth. It mostly ended up onto her shirt, though. This saved me time since I could prepare my meal while she ate, instead of sitting down and spooning. Of course I lost all of this saved time and more when I cleaned her off.

It was a worthy experiment, but for now I’m just going to continue feeding her messy foods myself. I do accept Ellie’s point that Abbie should be learning to self-feed, so I’m going to encourage her to take the utensil after I’ve loaded it for her. I’m just going to have to keep her eyes safe while doing it.

* Yes, she likes broccoli. She asks, nay, demands some while I’m eating it.
** Of course I don’t feed the baby chili. It’s too warm to make chili during summer.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

An Entire Post about Poop

Abbie has diarrhea. Thankfully it’s not the “strap on a diaper, stand back, and hope it holds because a tsunami of liquefied baby poo could be coming at any second” kind. It’s more of a “strap on a diaper and check it frequently because something is coming, and one diaper ain’t gonna hold it” kind, which is bad enough. She’s not pooping any more frequently than normal or even at weird times, just her standard one to three times per day after meals schedule. This diarrhea just consists of super watery, and stinky, poop instead of those nice firm poos that peel off and clean up easily for trouble-free ammunition suitable for chucking at cars, if desired. Super watery poop isn’t a problem by itself, per se,* but it does tend to overflow the diaper, like two-pounds of sausage stuffed into an Olson twin, which makes changing her extremely exciting. It’s not easy pulling a onesie off a wriggling child without letting one bottom corner touch anything because dear lord it’s everywhere.

I’ve been trying to determine the source of the diarrhea, but not having much luck. I have a feeling that it’s somehow tied to the Sioux City daytrip we just completed. Ellie’s dad was sick with a stomach bug when he saw her, and even though he was barely around her, she could have caught something from him, or any of the myriad of strangers she saw that day. I really doubt that she has any sort of bug, though. She seems to be acting fine, no crankier than usual, and no fever. More likely I think the diarrhea is stress related. What kind of stress could a 14-month-old experience? Feeling separation anxiety from her toys? Missing her tight deadline for talking? Worrying about her lack of money? For starters, she spent more than six hours that day strapped into her car seat, plus probably another hour strapped into various chairs for meals. Constraining movements for that long everyday would cause stress for anyone, as reflected in the Geneva Convention, which limits high chair usage to two hours per day. Then there’s all the crying she did that day. This wasn’t the everyday crying to signal “I’m bored” or “I’m hurt” or “no, really, I’m hurt, I think it’s broken” that I’ve come to know and ignore. This crying mostly signaled, “I’m terrified,” as we continuously and cruelly subjected her to her grandparents and the stranger anxiety kicked in. She really needs to overcome this hang-up before offending her grandparents and ruining any possibility of future spoilage. She also cried solid for the last 20 minutes of the car ride home, but I still don’t know what that signaled. My best guess is “I’m sleepy,” though that would conflict with her behavior once we arrived back home, which was to run into her room and read quietly by herself like a little angel until we drug her to bed screaming. She may have been saying “I’m hungry” since we gave her her bedtime milk an hour late, but she showed little interest in her milk and left half of it in the cup like she was some sort of Olson twin. Maybe she was saying “I need to poop, but I refuse to do so in this sodden diaper” because she pooped as soon as we changed her into her overnight diaper, a very unusual occurrence. I suppose that holding it in like that could also cause diarrhea, so maybe it’s in some small way my fault that she’s dropping a mudslide in her diaper.

Whatever the cause, I hope she recovers quickly because I’m getting tired washing her clothes every time a diaper leaks, which is every time she’s pooped the last couple of days. I’ve started digging into the crummy clothes I bought for her at rummage sales because I don’t want to risk ruining a decent outfit when the poo surges past the protective elastic and dear lord it’s everywhere.

* “Per se” literally translates to “not a problem.”

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Legends of the Fall

The last task in my strict vacuuming schedule is to empty the vacuum’s crud compartment. Our vacuum is one of those bagless varieties, which means that instead of needing to go through the hassle of changing a dusty bag after every few vacuum sessions, I need to go through the hassle of emptying a dusty plastic bin, or “crud compartment,” after every vacuum session. The bin is easy to empty, simply turn upside down and dump, but it also has a HEPA filter, a breathable cylinder made from a folded paper-like material whose job is to catch the dust in the air so it doesn’t contaminate the dust bin. This filter takes a minutes to beat clean in a job that needs to happen outside or else all that dust I worked so hard to vacuum up will escape into the house’s atmosphere and settle into a location strategically chosen to aggravate my allergies. I was in the backyard emptying this crud compartment the other day when Abbie decided she wanted to join me outside. Normally I just leave her inside so she can rearrange the toys I just picked up in that randomly strewn style she likes. It only takes me a minute to whack everything acceptably clean, and I figure that since I can’t find any dangerous chemicals around the house when I need them, there’s no chance she’ll find them in such a short time. Today, though, Abbie started banging on the door and whining when I stepped outside, so I opened the door and carried her outside with me. She stayed on the porch, as is her wont these days while I thumped the soot out of the various pieces of the crud compartment. I must have been extremely determined to knock that last piece of dust loose because I never noticed her wander near the edge. The next thing I knew, she was lying face down and screaming on the cement base for our porch.

Yes, I screwed up. While I should have been watching her, she took a header off our porch three feet away from me. She didn’t fall very far, maybe about 18-inches, but she did land on the cement with enough force to scrape her face pretty good. Here’s a picture of the horrifying scars caused by my delinquent parenting:

DSC01149

I felt confident in turning my back because she’s normally very good about staying away from the edges. She normally likes to toddle up to the edge, peek onto the ground inches below, turn around, and repeat the process on the other side. For some reason, on that day she decided to wander up to and over the front steps. Maybe she lost her balance. Maybe she saw an exceptionally enticing rock tempting her at the base of the stairs. Maybe a dog pushed her. Maybe she’s not as smart as I give her credit. Whatever the reason, I heard a thump much like a cantaloupe hitting the floor, followed by a lot of screaming from that cantaloupe. I dropped my vacuum parts, rushed over to swoop her up, brushed her off, and tried to calm her down, but boy was she mad. She was angrier than Hillary Duff at a Lindsey Lohan convention, or vice versa if you wish. She had every right to be mad, with the falling, and the bruising, and the bleeding, and the doubtless countless hours of therapy she’ll need to recover in the future. I feel really bad about it, and consider it my greatest failing as a father since I neglected to notice she was eating dog food yesterday.

Shortly afterwards I realized Abbie was fine. I carried her inside, washed her off a little, and she was good as new, except for the scarring. Then I set her in the safety of her crib, activated her aquarium for entertainment, and went back outside. That crud compartment wasn’t going to clean itself.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

"Bacon? Ham? Pork chops?" "Dad, those all come from the same animal." "Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal."

The hospital where Ellie works recently completed their hog roast. This is one of the social highlights of the year for the residents. On Friday night, all the residents and their families gathered on an empty stretch of the hospital’s lawn to eat pizza and drink various beverages, except for the first-year residents. They were at the lawn too, but their job was to dig a six-foot deep pit to roast the hog before guzzling beer and gorging on pizza. After completing the pit, they threw several bags of charcoal topped with a couple bottles of lighter fluid and lit that sucker, creating a 20-foot tall fireball. Once the flames died down, they took a whole pig, which had been injected with good stuff and wrapped in foil, and threw it in the pit for the night. In the morning, they lifted out the pig, shredded its meat, and served it alongside assorted side dishes at a picnic for the entire hospital staff. Perhaps the most amazing thing about all of this is I’m not making any of it up. Well, maybe the fireball wasn’t 20-feet, but it was pretty big.

On the night of the pit dig, I took Abbie out to the lawn to watch the festivities. This was the kind of event where in a previous life I might have enjoyed eating pizza, drinking pop, and socializing until the wee hours of the morning, much later than my current bedtime of 10pm. Today I’m a parent, though, which means I have a child who goes to bed at 9pm, and if I don’t follow her to sleep soon after, I’ll be awful sorry, and pretty tired, the next day. I stayed for a little while consuming pizza and pop, letting Abbie try both, and generally basking in my unfitness to be a parent for letting her consume pizza and pop. I might have socialized more, but supervising a 14-month-old doesn’t multitask well with chatting with others. If I try to hold her while talking, boredom quickly sets in and she will squirm, bite, whine, pick at the mole on my neck, or whatever she has to do to convince me to put her down. When I set her down, she moves faster than the Cubs’ dithering playoff hopes. Being in an open field surrounded by plenty of adults still sober enough to watch children, she couldn’t wander anywhere very dangerous, but she could still find many creative objects to stick in her mouth. After a couple rounds of listening to a story, digging something out of her mouth, returning to the group, and trying to figure out if I was listening to the same story or a different story, I gave up and just followed her as she wandered. She meandered through much of the field before stumbling upon the surgically enhanced Slip & Slide the residents set up for the older children. This Slip & Slide went downhill and had an extra 30-feet of plastic staked to the end so the children could reach speeds normally seen only on TV specials with names like “World’s Violentest Police Chases,” which was okay since we had a nearby hospital emergency room. She thought the flowing water was pretty nifty, but it was the mud at the top of the hill that attracted her like a giant pile of dog food. This mud puddle could have ruined her shoes had she walked through it, but she thoughtfully reverted her age by a few months to save her shoes by crawling for the first time in weeks right through the mud. With her pants ruined, I decided to call it a night.

The next morning, the residents woke up early* to prepare for the picnic by shredding the cooked pork. I could have helped, but I was too busy watching Abbie. Plus, the carcass would have been a constant reminder that I was coursing through roast pig flesh, violating my rule to never touch meat when I can still recognize the animal it came from.** The picnic had an inflatable bouncy house that I thought looked like a fun way to pass some time. I removed her shoes and threw her in the air-filled rubbery goodness. She didn’t like any of her bouncing toys when she was younger, and unfortunately she still doesn’t like to bounce. She just sat motionless for a few seconds before bursting into tears, turning the bouncing house into more of a crying house. I took her out and let her scavenge for wood chips in the hot sun until the food was ready. When I sat her down for lunch, I discovered that she does not share my qualms about eating recognizable meat because she scarfed down lots of shredded barbecued pork along with plenty of baked beans. At least she shares my taste for barbecue sauce.

* Early being a relative term, remember they had been up late drinking the previous night.
** Yeah, I’m a wuss.

Monday, August 08, 2005

How Was Your Day?

Ellie’s sister spent the past several days with us. She was being a good big sister and taking her sister shopping for Vital School Supplies, like flannel pants and cell phone accessories, while saving their father the pain of going bra shopping. The original plan was to have Ellie drive her sister back home Sunday, stay overnight, and drive back Monday. I knew she didn’t have the stamina to drive there and back in one day, so I offered to accompany her to help drive. She declined, though, saying she wanted to spend some time with her family, which was just as well since six hours in the car in one day would seriously disrupt Abbie’s routine.

Sunday morning around 9am, just as I was planning a blissful onion-filled dinner with some dessert crammed with chocolate, Ellie asked if my offer to help drive was still good. Her father was sick with a nasty bug, and she didn’t want to risk catching it by spending the night in his house. I checked my watch, considered how I could possibly keep Abbie on some semblance of her schedule, and said we’d better hit the road.

Less than an hour later, we hit on the road, which was pretty remarkable considering that at 9am nothing was packed, I hadn’t showered, and her sister was still asleep. With a valiant effort that involved ignoring Abbie’s whining with boredom, we managed to fill the car in less than an hour with the approximately 91,984,351 Abbie-related things we would need for a day trip, forgetting only a few minor items. The stage was set for a perfect, quick day trip, making only the occasional necessary stop.

Ha! We stopped twice before leaving the city limits to purchase supplementary back-to-school supplies, and a made a third stop at 11am for lunch. This stop completely threw Abbie’s schedule off since she normally eats about half her lunch at 11:30, naps, then finishes her lunch when she wakes up between 1:30 and 3:00. It also threw my schedule off since I normally eat lunch when she finishes hers in a meal late enough to be called lunner. When you’re on the road, though, you eat when you can, so I stuffed Abbie full of milk and an entire Fruit and Yogurt Parfait, minus the granola. I kept her granola for my Fruit and Yogurt Parfait, which I grabbed with a sandwich on our way out the door so I could eat my lunch as late as possible. Then Ellie ate her original granola and I was down to a single yet tasty serving of granola. As they say, “easy come, easy go,” or in French, “il y a un brouillard dans le jambon.” Before we left I took her into the bathroom to change her diaper and discovered the most major forgotten item: A changing pad. Unlike about a year ago, Abbie is now pretty good about not peeing while being changed, so a changing pad is mostly to protect her from the changing surface. In someone’s fairly clean home, she doesn’t need too much protection; in a restaurant without a changing table in rural Iowa where I have to change her on a floor covered with microorganisms nasty enough to carry her away if I turn my back, I missed that changing pad. I had to use the diaper bag as a makeshift changing pad to save her from bacterial abduction.

The original plan was to have her sleep in the car for about two hours, waking up fresh as a daisy when we arrived at their family. I thought she might wake up at most 30 minutes early, but the three of us could entertain her in the car for that long. The plan started well, as she quickly dozed off with nary peep. After 30 minutes of peaceful napping, we hit a big bump, the bounce activated a battery-powered toy, and she turned wide stinking awake a full hour before her minimum acceptable nap. Amazingly, with lots of singing and pointing and singing and reading and singing and playing and singing, we drove the full 90 minutes without too much screaming, though I may have developed a violent allergy to the sound of Elmo’s voice.

We arrived at their family’s home expecting Abbie to be a screaming, whining, tired mess instead of her usual screaming, whining mess. She mysteriously decided to be pleasant for two entire hours smiling at people, playing nicely by herself, and prancing about the living room. If only she could behave that well at home. We left their home about 4pm, and prayed that Abbie would sleep during the 30-minute car ride to see my parents because, hey, we’re in town for a quick day trip, why not stop by for dinner? Sleep she did, again quickly falling asleep with nary a sound. She was so sound asleep that she didn’t wake up when we arrived at my parents, so I left mommy and daughter in the car with the air conditioner running while I grabbed my parents. After a few minutes, Ellie brought Abbie into the house, and she must not have woken up well because she started screaming like a photographer shot with a pellet gun outside Britney Spears’s house. Part of it was probably stranger anxiety because she refused to calm down until she was back in the car. Once she saw my parents again at the restaurant, she started screaming again. Only after spending several minutes in close proximity to my parents, with a good portion of that time spent being fed by them, did she calm from outright hysteria to general unease. By the time we left, she tolerated my parents holding her, but just barely.

We left town a little after 6pm. Even with the newly minted interstate speed limit of 70, it still took us almost three and a half hours to drive back to Des Moines. Part of the reason it took so long was we needed to stop for gas at a station where people were lined up for the privilege to pay $2.299 a gallon. We made use of the down time to pick up some snacky treats, including a fountain drink for myself. I shared this drink with Abbie to keep her occupied on the way home. I knew she could drink through a straw ever since Ellie tried sharing her strawberry malt with her and she sucked the milky goodness through the straw with the voracity of a Hoover. Alas, all the pop in the world couldn’t keep her content for the entire trip, and neither could pointing, reading, or even singing. About 20 minutes from home, she suddenly degenerated into a blubbery mess, desperate to escape her car seat and return to her idyllic life of tearing book pages and chasing kitties. After The Longest 20 Minutes Ever, listening to her scream uncontrollably the entire time, we arrived home, and Abbie ran into her room as happy as a dutiful girlfriend leaving the “Duke of Hazzard,” and proceeded to read without caring that she could finally drink her milk (an hour late) or go to sleep (30 minutes late).

So I guess what I’m trying to say is I was busy yesterday and didn’t have time to blog.