"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.
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.
posted by Matt at
9:26 PM
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