All Good Things

I had to say goodbye to another friend this week. Saj, sometimes referred to in this blog as "Lab" has gone on to better fields and ponds and more plentiful tennis balls and squirrels to chase than we could ever dream of. She was thirteen. By conventional wisdom that made her ninety-one in human years, and yet she still had a streak of puppy-like enthusiasm up until even her last days.

We got Saj (pronounced "Sage") on New Years Eve 1999. The ridiculous spelling of her name I place solely on the shoulders of my sister, who was so incensed that I came up with the best name for the puppy that she insisted on adding her "creative" (cough cough) flair to the name by throwing together random letters and assigning them to the sounds made by the word "Sage" (think Gob Bluth from "Arrested Development.")

She was five weeks old when she came home - too young, really, but her mother stopped feeding the pups and she came home with us and assumed for years that she was human. She played the part well, but not flawlessly. Setting aside the four leggedness, and the persistent facial hair, she was too loving, too loyal, too faithful, and too eager to please to ever pass as truly human. It is in some ways astounding she lived to the age she did. When she was six months old or so we came home to find her carrying my mother's brand new dogwood sapling around the yard in her mouth like a chew toy, happy as you please. Lab's, if you have never lived with one, are a force of nature - particularly in puppyhood. Saj was no exception.

She was my dog only for a short time - I left for college, and she stayed home. I visited, and I loved her dearly, but by the time I was in a position to take her with me she belonged to the whole family equally, and it would have been unfair to take her into a crummy college apartment. She was the epitome of a family dog.

We brought Beagle to meet Saj the day the Wife and I adopted him more than six years ago. Despite a rough beginning in which Saj tried to eat Beagle, the two of them became... if not friends, precisely, at least companions. Beagle was all dog where Saj still held on to the illusion that she was mostly human. Beagle taught her to embrace her inner dog, to play with toys, to roughhouse and play with other animals. Saj taught Beagle very little, because he is a beagle, and too stubborn to learn anything much. He did at least learn to stay out of the reach of bigger, less patient dogs. As I write this I am looking at a picture of the two of them sharing Saj's pillow. You can only see their heads in the photo, but as was typical of their relationship, Beagle is undoubtedly stretched out to take up the maximum amount of space on the oversized pet bed, and Saj has her head alone on the pillow beside him. Saj was a giver. Beagle's a jerk. We love them both.

I will miss my lab. I didn't want to make this a terribly somber post, because it's somber enough that she's gone without adding to it. Dog's lives are so much shorter than ours I sometimes wonder if bringing them into our lives is worth the inevitable pain it brings. But I don't wonder for long. The answer is yes. If everyone in the world could strive to be the type of person their dog believed them to be, what a fantastic world would we live in? They love freely and ask little in return. A ball, a bowl, a bed, and a little love.

The title of this post refers to the phrase "All good things must come to an end." The problem with the phrase (besides being the title to a rather weak ending to Star Trek, the Next Generation) is that I don't entirely agree. I won't get into the theological debate about pets and heaven, and I'd thank you to not share your own thoughts on this forum. As with many theological issues, I like C.S. Lewis' take, and that's all I'll say. But I do not believe the good that came from Saj's life has come to an end. You were and are loved Saj, and our lives are better for you, and you continue to share in that. Rest easy girl.

Dragon*Con 2012

Over Labor Day weekend, the Wife, Olivia, and I made our way to Atlanta for geek-Mecca: Dragon*Con 2012. For the uninitiated, Dragon*Con is a science-fiction, fantasy, geek-(excuse me, pop-) culture based convention taking up the better part of downtown Atlanta's hotels for a long weekend once a year. Officially, five of the largest hotels in downtown Atlanta play host to the affair, but since the entire block of rooms set aside by the convention sells out within two hours of being announced, attendees tend to take up a great deal more hotel room space than at just the host hotels. We, for instance, planned our trip in late May/early June of this year, and were not able to find a reasonably priced hotel room anywhere near downtown. Of course, over Labor Day weekend, Atlanta also played host to two college football games, a NASCAR event, and Braves Baseball. But mostly it was nerds in steampunk gear.

Dragon*Con consists of panel discussions and Q&A's presented by guests both famous and obscure. This year's guests included actors from shows like Star Trek TNG; Stargate (all of the iterations); Battlestar Galactica; and Firefly to name a few; numerous writers of sci-fi, speculative fiction, alternative history, and fantasy; and lots and lots of fanpersons who hosted discussions on their pet fandom.

Here's a quick rundown on the good, the bad, and the ugly from Dragon*Con this year.

The Good

James Marsters. As you can see from the picture above, we had a chance to chat with Spike (of Joss Whedon's Buffy and Angel). Super nice guy, and obviously appreciates cute babies. Asked us to check out his band, and you can too - Ghost of the Robot, downloads available on iTunes. Can't speak to the quality as I haven't actually checked them out yet (Sorry Mr. Marsters), but I figure he can take the time to speak with me and let me flash a camera in his face, so the least I can do is pimp his new project.

People watching. This is the most entertaining part of Dragon*Con if you can ignore the massive crowds. Lots of off the wall costumes (which undermine my belief that I am an informed geek, since I haven't the foggiest idea what most of these people are going for). Some of the costumes are just sad, but many of them are incredibly intricate and impressive. And they are everywhere. We were in the distinct minority by not dressing up. Mostly this was a logistical decision. Or laziness. Whatever.

Celeb Spotting. The majority of Dragon*Con's celebrity guests are B-List, if we're being honest, but it's still pretty cool to rub elbows with people you've watched on TV for years. Besides meeting Mr. Marsters in the Con's walk of fame, we were yards away from the likes of Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Jewel Staite, Adam Baldwin, Jason Momoa, and Richard Dean Anderson (that's right, MacGuyver).

The Bad

People Navigating. The crowds are obnoxious. Not the people - everyone is a geek at this thing, so most people are pretty friendly. But the sheer mass of humanity if ridiculous, especially on Saturday when the Dragon*Con parade takes over downtown. There is no such thing as moving quickly through these crowds, and the simple act of grabbing lunch in a food court is a two hour proposition. Several of the host hotels have elevated walkways above street level (super convenient, right?). Yeah, they reek of body odor, and require you to tiptoe slowly behind the three hundred other bodies compressed into the same small space and headed in the same direction. Fun times.

The celebs... some of them. So, the downside of being in close proximity to celebrities you've loved watching for years is that you may be disillusioned by them. Some actors are nicer than their on screen personas. Some, not so much. Also, some of the actors seem to enjoy the Con atmosphere... too much. The number of actors we saw in panels who were apparently drunk or hungover was a little embarrassing. While they may be more entertaining this way, to my mind it shows a lack of respect for the fans.

Parking. Same as people navigating, only with cars, SUVs, and lots of pedestrians to avoid killing.

The lines. A necessary evil of any Con of significant size, any popular panel required lining up an hour or more in advance. Apparently if you've ever been to Comic*Con (Dragon*Con's more trendy, popular cousin from San Diego) you scoff at these type lines because yours have been known to be twelve hours or more. But I don't like waiting. Fortunately, as mentioned above, the people in line with you are mostly nice, like-minded nerds who are willing to wait for the same thing you are.

The Ugly

Spandex. Seriously folks. It's a privilege, not a right. There are a lot of scantily clad people at Dragon*Con. And there are a lot of scantily clad people that have no business being scantily clad people at Dragon*Con.

Furry Fans. Tails, leggings, ears, whole body animal costumes, and a whole subculture I'm glad my daughter was too young to ask about.

Inconsiderate fans. In a group this size, I honestly expected much more of this, and so was pleasantly surprised at how rare the truly rude or obnoxious fan was. Unfortunately, while they were in the minority, the instances I saw were glaring. For instance: while I'm fairly certain the host hotels only permitted assistance animals, we saw at least one con-goer walking a distinctly non-working animal through a (carpeted) lobby, where said animal, probably scared out of its mind, promptly shat in the middle of foot traffic. The fan saw this, and promptly scurried away laughing. Seriously.

What we learned

All around, the Con was a great time, and we'd likely do it again one day. Without kids. Olivia was fantastic - better than she had any right to be all weekend - but the logistics of moving with a small child (particularly as she gets older and more able to locomote on her own) are limiting in an environment like this. We also discovered that the opportunities to take cute photos of your baby with famous people are less accessible than we expected, at least if you don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on posed photos. All told, there is less to be gained by bringing your kids than by leaving them with grandparents.

We also learned that staying downtown (and thus, planning further in advance) is the way to go. While a few hotels offer shuttle service into downtown, there are no good ways to get in to the city for this event. Also, while the night life aspects of Dragon*Con are for people younger than me (sad to admit), there are a number of late evening panels and events we didn't get to attend because we were staying outside of the city. Had we been closer to our room, it would have been an option. Also, we would have punched a puppy for a place to put our feet up for an hour or so in the middle of the day, and might have saved some money and time on meals if we had stuff in our room to return to.

We will probably pass on 2013, but there are better than average odds we will go back one day. Hope you fellow nerds have a chance to go one day as well.

Year One

Olivia turned one a few weeks ago. This is shocking in a number of ways. It is a trite, cliched, and utterly true expression parents use in describing the growth of their children when they say "time flies." It is equally and paradoxically true that it is difficult to remember clearly what life was like before kids. I don't get it either, but both are true.

One year is a great age. Of course, as I understand it, they are all great ages until somewhere between eleven and thirteen when every child suddenly needs to be beaten daily and locked in an Iron Maiden until they turn twenty-five. But that's a ways off. At year one, Olivia has a lot of personality. She is very social, and rarely fussy. This has nothing to do with her age or any successful parenting strategy and everything to do with luck. (Don't worry - whenever the hypothetical number two comes along we'll get our payback.) She loves books - being read to, throwing them, pulling them off shelves, tearing the pages, and (just to drive her aunt Sara crazy) dog-earring the pages. She also loves music, and has developed the fascinating habit of keeping a beat with her feet when songs she recognizes come on . I'd say she could replace the drummer from Nickelback, but I'd like her to maintain some standards.

She has just started to become somewhat pickier about what she eats. I don't think she actually cares what she consumes so much as she likes to screw with us about when she's willing to eat it and when she's going to throw it on the floor and laugh. Or feed it to the dogs, and then get angry at them for having the nerve to eat it. The good news though is that there is nothing (or virtually nothing) she can't eat now, which makes feeding her when we are out and about much easier. Where we used to have to stop and feed her healthy organic strained squash, we can now throw a bag of Oreos at the kid and watch her go nuts.

Olivia is tentatively trying to walk. What this means in real terms is that she is walking all over the house with one hand on walls, furniture, bookshelves, etc, then taking her hand off of said "support" for about one second, realizing she is free-standing, and plopping on her butt and crawling away. We're signing her up for a Five K in a few weeks. Nothing like the deep end of the pool to teach a kid to swim.

This past year has been pretty amazing. Part of me wants to take five and enjoy this phase a little while longer, but that's not how this whole thing works. I do look forward to seeing what comes next.

Another Sci-Fi Battle: Stormtroopers v. Redshirts

Umm... fair use?

As my posts on the Borg Cube v. the Death Star were fairly popular (it's all relative - this is a noncommercial blog after all), I think treatment of another cross-franchise conflict is in order. This one was suggested by a friend of mine, and I've decided to consider the question carefully, despite it being a little absurd. Why absurd? Well let's consider - Stormtroopers and Redshirts are the cannon fodder of the Star Wars and Trek universes respectively. Both have a talent for ineptitude. Stormtroopers (despite Obi-Wan's comments regarding the accuracy of blast points on the broad side of a Sandcrawler) have no more ability to hit what they are shooting at than Death Star engineers have of building a space station without a glass jaw. Redshirts, on the other hand, are famed for dying more easily and in more contrived fashion than the hero of the original King's Quest games (dude could trip over a cat and fall to his death. Seriously). Stormtroopers do die by the truckloads, but usually because of something a Jedi-related, and in mass casualty Death Star explosions that have little to do with their own inability. Redshirts have no particular reputation at all regarding an ability to shoot, kill, maim, or otherwise influence any part of combat. This is generally because they die of fright when the blasters come out. Or when a Tribble coughs. You know. Whatever.

So, taking all of this in to consideration, the question is not really one of who would win in a fight. I don't think there's much of an argument to be made that Redshirts (singular or in huge numbers) could take down a like force of Stormtroopers (but by all means if someone has an argument for them, please make it). Rather, I think the better question is, which set's seeming supernatural ability would prevail in a fight? The Stormtroopers' ineptitude (which would result in a draw) or the Redshirts' deathwish (thus Stormtrooper victory)?

I'm tempted to answer the question with a resounding "who cares?" but that would defeat the purpose of sparking nerdy discussion. Needless to say, the battle would be one of the most painful to watch in the history of science fiction. It would almost certainly take hours, and involve Redshirts jumping out from behind cover while dropping phasers as Stormtroopers fire into the ground, or behind themselves. I'd estimate there is a roughly 5% chance of the Redshirts prevailing outright due to massive "friendly fire" casualties in the Imperial ranks. Ultimately though, I think the Redshirts resort of falling on jagged rocks or giving in to congenital heart defects even as the blasters continue to miss them by miles, and the Stormtroopers would prevail in spite of themselves.

Feel free to discuss in the comments, or suggest any other sci-fi faceoffs that need to be considered.

On Father's Day

This weekend represents the first time I have been a father on Father's Day. Last year at this time, the Wife was showing, so I will admit that I pressed the definition of technical fatherhood with a local restaurant's "Dad's Eat Free" Promotion. I think I heard the waiter cursing lawyers under his breath the whole time, but I got my free hot wings. This year is a little different, what with the baby being on the outside and all. I may or may not take advantage of the free wings again.

Fatherhood has been a frequent subject, directly and indirectly, of the posts in this blog. It is not the whole of what a man is when he has a child or children, but it certainly does its share to define him as a person. Fatherhood changes you. Hopefully, if you are a father, you have experienced love before - love for your parents and family, and ideally love for the woman you share a child with. But the love of a father for his child is completely different from these other loves. Not to say greater, but different. Unlike a parent or a spouse, a child is a child -  completely helpless and dependent on you for survival, knowledge, skills, affection, everything. A father's love for his child is as deep and resounding as it is because it resonates with hopes and dreams you have for that child's future, with our responsibilities, with the joy of watching that child grow day-by-day, and the delight of seeing them develop into the person they will become. These are all things that, by and large, are not all that similar to our love for our parents and spouses. Adult parents and spouses don't need our help to survive, they have their own hopes and dreams, and, by the time we meet them, they are generally far along the path of character development. But a father has great power in shaping a child, morally, ethically, spiritually, physically (although this latter aspect is mostly genetic). As Stan Lee is credited with saying, with great power comes great responsibility.

Fatherhood gives you new perspective. In an ideal world, it gives you added patience. At a minimum, it frequently exercises the patience you already had. Children need all the time. They are the definition of consumers. They consume time, energy, resources, and until they reach a certain age they are unable to communicate what it is that they need to consume. Hence the patience thing. Objectively, they give you nothing in return. Subjectively, nothing they could ask of you is too much for the joy they bring.

I cannot fully describe what it is like to be a Dad. Even if I could it would mean nothing, because despite shared experiences most fathers would have, every experience of Fatherhood is unique. To anyone who hasn't yet experienced fatherhood, my descriptions would be inadequate in any event. All I can say is that there is nothing like it in the world. Olivia's laughter brings me more delight than the view from the heights of a  mountain, her smile is more beautiful than a sunset, and the simplest demonstrations of her ever-expanding set of skills - gripping a spoon, standing, throwing toys on the floor - are more awe-inspiring than the greatest feats of man's ingenuity. Watching every single "first" as she experiences it is priceless. I love this child more than words can say, and she has me utterly and completely at her mercy. Thankfully, she is still too young to fully understand that.

It is humbling to think that there are people who loved me this way as well. Intellectually we all know, unless we are from a rough background, that our parents love us. We see demonstrations of it all our lives. You never doubt your parents' love for you, but you do not fully appreciate it either. It is something else entirely to go from conceiving of a parent's love for us in the abstract, to experiencing it, and realizing that your own father and mother experienced that for you - had those hopes and dreams for you, felt the same pressures and fears, delighted in you the same way you do in your own child.

So this is my twist ending - this post is only ostensibly about my own experience as a father. As yet, I am too inexperienced with the concept to have anything more to say than rambling sentiments on the subject. But what my experience has taught me is, I think, a better and deeper understanding of my own dad. Somehow, socks and ties seem an insufficient gift this year, and in any case, the Wife does all the gift buying anymore because she's better at it than I am. The only gift I could come up that seemed appropriate for my old man this year was the public embarrassment of a blog post sappier than any Hallmark Card I could ever hope to buy. Happy Father's Day Dad. I love you too.

requiem

I don't normally spend much time on this blog on things that are very serious. There's enough seriousness in mainstream media that I think there are better ways to spend my efforts on a glorified vanity page.

But some things should not pass without being noted.

Tonight I lost a friend to cancer. Fred was diagnosed a little over a year ago, but by the time they found it, it was metastatic. He fought, and he kept living life to the fullest extent he could. He traveled. He did projects around his house I'm not sure I could have managed with a healthy body thirty years younger. He spent every moment he could with his friends and family. Two weeks ago he went into the hospital, and he never left. Today was his birthday.

Fred was a good man. That phrase gets thrown around, but the truth is there are too few good men left. He expended himself for others more than most people I've ever met. He was a committed Christian, and even in facing this disease he would tell anyone who would listen that he was not afraid of dying - just the suffering beforehand. I'm a Christian too, and I believe we are promised eternal life, but I'm not sure I could honestly say the same thing were I in his shoes. In any event, even the part that worried him is behind him now and he is better for it. This side of heaven just feels a little emptier now.

I met Fred through the Orangeburg Part-Time Players, a community theater group in my home town. He was a founding member, had served onstage or off- in every capacity possible at one time or another, and had literally built the stage the group called home with his own hands.  I was a stupid teenager who got talked into trying out  for a musical by a girl. Despite that, Fred still thought I was worth calling a friend. We worked on many plays together, and he gave me my first summer job during college. We stayed close and I saw him nearly every time I came home to Orangeburg, even when I no longer considered Orangeburg home. He was at my wedding, and my sister's, and he got to meet my beautiful daughter Olivia, for which I am profoundly grateful. He called out the best in the people around him, probably in large part because we knew there wasn't a thing in the world he wouldn't do for us. We wanted to give our all in return.

The worst part of growing up, I think, is that time isn't trucking by for you alone. Everyone else is getting older right along side you. If you live life at all, if you love and share your life with other people, then inevitably you open yourself up to hurt when time takes it's inevitable toll on those around you. And cancer is one of the more pernicious ways this happens. I've lost family to it. Recently a wonderful woman who was a surrogate mother to half my high school class lost an incredibly long battle to cancer. And now Fred.

The last few weeks, visiting Fred in the hospital, a line from one of my favorite bands has played on loop in my head:
There is God in the way that life comes to an end; in the way we all draw to a close; 
In the saying of soul to the house of the skin; you're too weak now to really oppose...
It has kept repeating not because it was easy to see God in the way my friend died, but because I had to remind myself that God was in it even though I couldn't see it. Fred is home. The loss felt by those of us still here does not change that at all.

There will probably not be any grand media coverage, no CNN updates about Fred's passing. He was not a celebrity except to the patrons of the OPTP. And the passing of good men is rarely noted as it should be. But he will be remembered, and those of us who remember him are better for having known him. I am, truly, incredibly grateful to have been able to call him a friend.

Requiescat in Pace, my friend. Until we meet again.

Who needs sleep?

Parents who are fortunate enough to have infants that sleep through the night (that being defined, in parent-speak, as a six hour window while it is dark outside) are both envied and despised by the rest of the parenting population. For a brief, magical period of time, we were those despised parents, who woke every morning at five a.m. to our daughters gentle nonsense coming over the monitor only a little bleary-eyed.

Then, one day a few months ago, Olivia decided to wake up at three. Then two. Then three again.

We were in denial for a while. Just a phase. Just a few off nights. She got thrown off by going out of town, by the change in time, by teething, by the state of modern political discourse. Ultimately, we had to admit, she was not sleeping through the night anymore. We got a night here or there, but nothing consistent.

As I have noted previously, Wife is the most awesome wife ever. While these middle of the night wakings are a bit of a pain for me, it is she who gets up to deal with them the vast, overwhelming majority of the time. Our usual midnight dialogue: Me: "grumble grumble work in the morning snore"; Wife: (as she stumbles to the nursery) I hate you." Yet, awesome as she is, Wife is not superhuman. When faced with a choice, at three a.m., between rocking our infant for an hour to soothe her back to sleep in her own room, or plopping her between two warm adult bodies in our own bed, keeping a firm finger on her pacifier, and going back to sleep immediately herself, Wife will choose the latter in 99 out of 100 cases. (The 100th being the "kick the husband until he fixes it solution.") The other alternative is the "cry it out" approach, which we were grand proponents of before we had a real live kid. This approach has the added disadvantage over the rocking solution of interrupting both parents sleep equally. I therefore reject it out of hand.

This is how we have come to the tradition of having the baby in the bed with us when I wake up in the morning.  Or, put another way, having a baby in the bed wake me up in the morning.

I'm usually a snooze alarm guy. I know, intellectually, that I am not getting useful sleep after that first alarm goes off. My response is "shut up, my bed is warm and cozy." But now, when I roll away to hit the Snooze, I run into an issue. In that instant, my sleeping infant daughter, so sweet and gentle, who is normally the rough diameter of a large roll of bounty paper towels and fits neatly between the Wife and I... that daughter expands instantaneously to take up the entirety of my side of the bed. While still asleep. So....I guess I'll take my shower ten minutes earlier...

I've also discovered how tall my little girl is getting in the worst possible way. While her tiny head still rests neatly at shoulder level with Wife and me while she sleeps in our bed, her feet are now in a position to do serious damage to her future siblings should her dreams call for tremendous kicking. (I think she replays the 1994 World Cup in her dreams about once a week). Awesome way to wake up. Really.

The best though, is when she wakes up in our bed, happy and bubbly, at 4:13 A.M. wanting to play. These days will never come again, and she's so cute and happy, and just wants to play with Daddy's hair and taste his nose and it's adorable. BUT IT'S 4:13 IN THE FREAKING MORNING.

Sleep loss is part of the package deal, and it creeps up on you in all kinds of subtle and not so subtle ways. The 2:30 kick in the boys being one of the less subtle ways. Nonetheless, it's worth it. I wouldn't trade it for all the sleep I could ever want.

Still...when the grandparents come to town, I'm taking a damn nap.

Nine Months

Obviously, regular posting has gone right out the window, along with predictable sleep patterns, and interruption free se- uh, sessions of Trivial Pursuit (yeah, that'll fool 'em). This is parenthood.

Despite the rather cliched complaints about having kids (all of which are true, which explains why parents are all, to a greater or lesser extent, terrible cliches themselves), Olivia is in a pretty fantastic age right now. We are approaching nine months - that magic point at which she has been an outside baby for as long as she turned the Wife's insides upside down. This gives me, as the dad, a new perspective on pregnancy. It lasts forever.

Some science types, attempting to make a name for themselves, have opined that human babies actually have a gestation period of 18 months - not nine. This is really me grossly oversimplifying their doctoral theses, but since none of us are going to care enough to read them anyway, I feel like I'm allowed. The reasons for this theory of human development are simple. Unlike most other animals, which are born with some basic abilities that might give them a possibility of survival, humans are born more or less useless (in a purely anthropological sense). It is only at about nine months (give or take) that a human infant begins to show the level of survival ability that other animals generally have within hours or days of birth. The theory goes that we are born in this underdeveloped state  because our far greater intellect (as compared with, say, a boll weevil) would require a head circumference at eighteen months too large to permit childbirth. So, we come out half-baked, and do the rest of our cooking on the outside. For nine more months. Give or take.

Nine months or so also happens to be a pretty fun age. Babies have a lot of personality at nine months, and provided your baby isn't a total jerk (some are) they can actually be a lot of fun at this point.  Olivia can crawl now, which means every morning, after her first feeding session of the day, my Wife and I get our blood pumping by playing hockey goalie to keep her from stage diving off of our bed. She is also much stronger, faster, and more curious than she has been previously. Glasses of liquid within her eyeline are fair game to go in Daddy's lap. The only time we can safely stop paying attention to her for three seconds is in her playpen, where Beagle lays nearby staring at her, confused by the human version of his crate. If she is anywhere else, and we turn our attention away, we inevitably turn back to find her with baby wipes, power cords or dirty shoes in her mouth. This is an astonishing ability, really, since it doesn't matter if any of those items are even in the room with her when we set her down - she will force them to materialize.

We're expecting the letter from Hogwart's any day now.

The only real downsides to this age as far as we can tell are baby-proofing (see above if you are confused about why) and teething. Your average baby has six teeth between six months and twelve months. Some spread them out. Olivia is still sporting her toothless smile, but they are getting close, and will probably be coming all at once. She is not amused.

Got no creative closer this time - gotta get back to baby proofing. Hooray.

Home Improvement

Homeowners uniformly understand the pain of home improvement projects. Sure, they all seem like they'll be great fun, and the house will look so much better afterward, and you'll be increasing the value of your home... then someone loses a hand on a borrowed circular saw, you make three hundred trips to Lowe's and still have the wrong drill bit, and things in general start to go downhill.

I am like most men in that I like to think of myself as a DIYer (that's a "Do It Yourself-er" for the uninitiated).  What I mean is that most men like to think of themselves as someone who can handle most any task, but would rather not actually be bothered with the handling of anything more difficult than changing a light bulb (I currently have at least four burned out in our house, and will get to them when I get to them). DIY sounds great - most guys equate power tools with fire and red meat in terms of thing that elicit primal bliss. But most DIY projects are undertaken less for the masculine joy of the thing, than for the very practical reason that it's a lot cheaper to do it yourself. This  is borne out historically. The very concept of being a DIY homeowner - someone who handles all but the most arduous of home improvement and maintenance tasks themselves - is a relatively new concept. Fifty years ago, it was just called being a homeowner. If you bought a house in the fifties or sixties, it was more or less understood that you had some basic mechanical proficiency and you would be taking care of your home and wouldn't need any damn professionals to fix a leaky pipe or change out a ceiling fan. Much the same with cars "back in the day." Sure, you could take your Chevy to a mechanic, but if it was for anything less than a thrown rod, you handed in your man card with the keys. 

Our society has gotten more specialized, and as a result it is more than acceptable to pay someone whose time you value less than your own to do unpleasant tasks like painting your trim, putting up fences, or de-pooping your backyard if you have pets or free-range children (I kid you not, this service is now being advertised on the radio locally). It has become increasingly quaint to actually do significant manual tasks  around the home yourself. There is a reason for this, as I have recently discovered. "Significant manual task" is just a fancy way of saying "hard damn work." All other things being equal, I'd rather pay someone to do that kind of stuff and spend my free time playing with my kid. Or playing Mario Cart. With my kid. Who is six months old. Shut up. 

Before

Despite this recently acquired insight, the Wife and I, along with a sizable portion of our social circle, have recently completed (mostly) the single most significant home improvement project of our relatively brief home-owning life: we replaced the twenty year old carpet in our downstairs with hardwood flooring. Among other minor projects thrown into the mix just for funsies. The flooring thing has been a long time coming, but the fact that Olivia is getting closer to crawling everyday kind of forced the issue. The carpet was bad, and the fact that Auxiliary Dog had three or four dozen favorite accident spots downstairs did nothing to help matters. So it had to go.

Sans Flooring

We rolled out the padding last Friday night, after the carpet and original pad were taken up. We started the process of putting the flooring into place, but didn't get very far that night. We basically put down four rows of snap-and-lock flooring, just to get the feel for it. We were glad for that the next day. On Saturday we had a group of friends come to pitch in on the heavy lifting. With a few exceptions, actually placing the floating floor boards is a (forgive me) snap. The tongue and groove generally lock together pretty well, and you use a vinyl block and mallet to close the gaps periodically. The hard part is the constant measuring and cutting, which itself isn't so bad, except that the various tasks require you to constantly get up and down, kneel on hard surfaces, and avoid losing digits to a table saw. Over a twelve hour day, this can wear on you. I have always thought I had respect for people who do back-breaking labor for a living. I woke up Sunday sore in places I hadn't known about. Next time I will pay someone and thank him for the privilege. And yet, sore or not, the show must go on.

Thought about keeping the blue motif...

Saturday we nearly finished the installation of the floors, and I thought we were about 90% there with the whole project. We did manage to polish off the floor installation on Sunday in a matter of just a few hours. This, I thought, meant we were nearly done, with nothing left but a few hours of finishing work. Hah. Right. Finishing work is a cute little euphemism for the final 2/3 of any given project. In this case, the finishing work involved the installation of about 200 linear feet of quarter-round (shoe molding, if you prefer) and several floor transitions (thresholds or floor molding - pick you poison). The problem started with the fact that I hadn't bought any of this stuff in advance, assuming that our local home improvement warehouse would have an ample selection of everything we needed. True for the quarter-round. Not so much for the thresholds. See, being the amateur installers that we were, there were several places in our floor where the standard three-inch wide floor moldings offered by Home Depot weren't quite sufficient to cover our "creative solutions" to the more intense installation problems. We needed something wider, and it was nowhere to be found.

Table-sawing by lamplight. Brilliant.

In the meantime was the quarter-round installation. This is relatively straightforward, if a couple of assumptions hold true: (1) you are at least mildly competent with a power saw that can cut at 45 degree angles, or have a hand saw and miter box; (2) your house has straight walls; and (3) you've done everything with your install completely correct up to this point. I'd love to say one out of three ain't bad, but here I'd be lying. Needless to say I needed some guidance on this part of the project, and there was much weeping and gnashing of the teeth when it came to certain cursed corners of our home. While we are generally very happy with our house, it is obvious in a few places that this house was part of a planned development and some of the subs cut corners to move on quickly to the next house. The curved wall in our hallway wasn't all that obvious until we had to work around it. Stupid wall.

I finally found a place that sold thresholds wide enough to cover all of my half-assery. This wonderful establishment had the audacity to hold the inconvenient hours of 9-5, Monday through Friday, and be located near Williams Brice Stadium, thirty-five minutes from my house. This is only relevant because, in my frugality, I bought precisely as much threshold as I needed and promptly ruined the first piece I tried to cut. I nearly killed a friend of mine in the process, but no actual blood was spilled. I think I ended up going to this place three times, all told. And, as I've intimated, we're not really all the way done yet. 

After multiple trips to every hardware store in the midlands, and a full week of working on the "finishing" work, the project is about where I said it was after the first full day of working on it - about 90% done. But this is actually 90% done as opposed to incredibly naive assessment 90% done - the downstairs is usable again, and the floors really do look fantastic. There are more nails to countersink and putty, and one last threshold to go in once the grout sets in the bathroom (one of those other "fun" projects thrown in for good measure). All in all the experience was a good one, though I do believe that weekend projects should never last beyond the weekend in which they begin. But they always do. Stupid projects.

The (more-or-less) finished product

Shortly, Beagle and Auxiliary Dog will come back from their exile to my parents house to a home that is wholly unfamiliar, and provides them with limited traction. This, by itself, should be worth every penny. I'll try and get video.

Super Bowl Edition

In the spirit of ESPN's ten takeaways from last night's game, I've decided to offer up my own short list of takeaways for the common man - the man who, like me, is from somewhere other than Boston or NYC, prefers college football to the overpaid, over-praised divas of the NFL, and didn't really have a dog in the fight last night. This sub-par Bud commercial is for you.

1.  The commercials really seem to be going down hill.

There were a few decent offerings. The Chevy apocalypse commercial was good fun, and the lack of any sense of humor from Ford's corporate office this week only makes the commercial seem more valid. Clint Eastwood for Chrysler was powerful in a whole different way, but the Seinfeld/Leno effort to sell cars was a forced, weak effort, as evidenced by the fact that I cannot now tell you which car company they were shilling for. The E*Trade baby made his customary appearance, which was good for a laugh, but he's getting a little long in the tooth. Time for some younger blood, perhaps.

Mostly though, the commercials were just kind of blah. I'm probably the only person in America not putting the Ferris Bueller car commercial into the elite category, but Broderick just kind of mailed it in (almost as if he called in sick...how meta). The typical beer and Pepsi ads were universally forgettable. Betty White's appearance (regrettably advertising reality television) was at least worth a laugh.

2.  The halftime show was (much) better than I expected.

I heard Madonna was performing and automatically thought "meh." She's not my cup of tea on the best of days, and her best days are behind her. I thought.

I stand corrected. While her music is still not going to top my playlist, Madonna proved to me that she is still a knock-out performer capable to delivering a high quality product. The visuals were amazing, and the quality of the sound and dance was top notch. Apparently there was a "middle finger malfunction" with one of the featured artists - clearly in poor taste, but I missed it. All in all a great show. Anything would have looked good after last year's Black Eyed Peas fiasco, but Madonna took it several notches above the talent we've seen the past several years.

3.  I am not as young as I used to be.

Eating my weight in junk food at a Super Bowl party used to be no problem. Now, like staying up past midnight and trying to work the next day, it's a sure way to wreck myself. Keeping a six month old up for the game and then trying to get a normal night's sleep? Also guaranteed to start your next day off wrong.


4.  The Giants won.

Turns out there was a football game on last night too. This might seem obvious to some, but since the Patriots' receiver corp missed the memo, I thought it was worth reiterating.

Go the *&^% to sleep!

Parenthood is amazing. The show is moderately entertaining, I'm speaking here of the real deal. Having a kid - it's awesome. Those of you faithful readers without kids are undoubtedly in the phase of life where you are surrounded by people like me, high on their own blissful cloud because of the joy that comes from having a kid.

You can't stand me.

It's okay. I've been there. I know how unbearable I am. I also know that the ability to reproduce doesn't make me any better, smarter, or faster than anyone else. God knows you just have to look around once in a while to see that being a parent doesn't automatically qualify you as #winning at life. But, all other things being equal, it's pretty awesome.

Olivia is probably in the best phase of babyhood I can imagine, though undoubtedly I will say that of every phase. Right now, she is smiling and laughing all the time, babbling nonstop in her consonant-heavy language of nonsense. Undoubtedly, if we could interpret her revelations, it would just be "42" over and over again. She is rolling over, and getting close to sitting up on her own. She loves to stand and sway and cuddle, but can't yet crawl or walk away, so she's not getting into all the stuff babies eventually get into like electrical sockets and day-trading. And she's sleeping through the night.

Correction. She was sleeping through the night. We have begun to experience the dreaded dormis interruptus (not to be confused with another genus of interruptus that flows naturally from having kids).

For about three blessed months, Olivia slept through the night. 5:30 or 6:00 wake-up calls were common enough, but any new parent will tell you that this is an amazing lie-in. Especially if we actually went to bed shortly after we put her down at 9:00 or 9:30 the night before. Oh man, those were the days.

Then something changed. We don't know what, or why, but suddenly she stopped sleeping all the way through the night. She first started waking around two or three, crying or wanting to play. We assumed, because this was about the time she was mastering rolling over, that she was waking herself up with her new mobility, and it would pass. Then she started needing to be fed in the middle of the night again. After going months without a midnight feeding. She started fighting tooth and nail against being put in her crib. Lately, she just doesn't really go down at all. She sleeps fitfully for a few hours, then yells. Another hour. Another yell. Another...and another...

I do not get the full brunt of these midnight air raids. Saintly Wife sees to her at night so I have an outside chance of functioning at work (I really am the luckiest man alive, and I know it). But even so, it is taking its toll on both of us. I'm getting paler, and sunlight really irritates me. Also, I've noticed that I'm starting to sparkle sometimes, and no longer think Stephanie Meyer was just writing to pay the rent. Something is truly off about me.

Parenthood really is awesome. But if you can get a robot nanny to get your kid through the night for the first year or so, definitely jump all over that. You'll all be better for it.

Weekend Edition: Primary Day

I detest politics and political discussion, and I'm not about to use my blog as a stump for any political ideology. I have enough to be getting on with on spiritual, parenting, and geek ideologies.

But today is primary day here in South Carolina, and suffice it to say, I am not impressed with any current candidate for political office, or any current incumbent politician, which doesn't give me warm fuzzies about the immediate future of our state and country.

Despite that, I do believe voting is important. If you don't vote, you have absolutely no right to gripe about the condition of our country. I value my right to gripe, so I am voting.

Just not necessarily for anyone with a shot of winning....

Please vote.

Musings upon my imminent deterioration (happy birthday...to....me)

"Thirty is just a number," he said, weeping openly into his scotch glass.

No, seriously, thirty is just a number. As ages go, it's one day older than twenty-nine.

Most of the people I thought of as "old" when I was "young" still consider thirty to be quite a youthful age.

But then, they've aged a lot since then.

If it's not clear to you yet, I've just turned thirty. Despite my rather morbid title, I really haven't been terribly bothered by the "milestone" birthday. Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet. Maybe the fact that my daughter's birthday present to me was to decide depriving me of her presence at 2 a.m. was unacceptable, and I was too tired to care about turning thirty. But the fact is, thirty really doesn't feel that much different from twenty-nine. Twenty-two? Yeah, a little different. Sixteen? Sure, lots more energy back then. Three months old? I only vaguely remember, but I'll take it as a given that there's a difference. But the subjective difference between twenty-nine and thirty is negligible.

And I find that rather odd.

See, in the back of my mind, I always sort of pictured thirty-somethings as... well... adult. Twenty-somethings are party-animals, drunks, spendthrifts, and dreamers with no real prospects. You know - college students. Thirty, though, was supposed to be the beginning of adulthood. I don't know why I assigned such significance to this number. Probably as an excuse to enjoy my twenties more. But, as stated previously, I don't really feel any different.

I don't think I expected to magically have all the answers by virtue of seniority, but back in the dark ages of my adolescence, I sort of thought that one day I'd stop having to wing it. That maybe I'd get the important stuff down. And yet, here I am. No different than I was a week ago, except that I need to shave.

By any objective measure I can think of, I'm about as adult as you can get. I've got a wife, a baby, a job, a mortgage, one and a half dogs, and Cat. I commute and listen to NPR because the rock station plays the crap today's kids listen to. And it is crap. I work behind a desk, and mostly enjoy what I do. I get excited about home improvement projects and ask for practical Christmas presents. I go to happy hours out of professional obligation, and leave by seven so I am home to see my baby girl before she has to go to bed.

And yet, most of the time, I still feel like a kid dressing up in his dad's suit. (I'm speaking metaphorically here, but as it happens my closet is about half hand-me-downs from my dad. Just FYI. That's how I roll.) I don't have all, or even a big fraction of the answers. I can't even manage most of the simple stuff on my own - stains are my nemesis, and my wife has to throw out my old  underwear to keep me from wearing stuff that has worn down to nothing but elastic bands. As excited as I get about home improvement projects, I am very fortunate I have not burned down our house. Not kidding. I'm really just kind of faking it through this whole "adult" phase until I start to get a handle on things.

Thirty hasn't changed much in that regard. But I suppose not having all the answers keeps life from getting dull. Like the old proverb says, "May you live in interesting times." I know I do.

Ghost of Christmas Past

Christmas is a time for making memories and, as you get older, for elevating and embellishing the older memories far beyond the quality of the original experience. Many people tend to think that Christmas used to be way better than it is today. Maybe, but I think Christmas is pretty much the same today as it has been since post-WWII - same movies (except for those starring Chevy Chase and Tim Allen), same songs (except for the one Mariah Carey sings), and let's face it, there hasn't been much innovation on the decorations front in that amount of time either. A friend recently joked that Christmas is the time of year when we try and replicate the Christmas experience of the Baby Boomers' childhood. It's kind of true - there's not much support for the idea that Christmas 100 years ago looked much like it does today. Tradition isn't much more than something you can get two generations in a row to do more than once in a lifetime.

None of that diminishes the fondness with which I hold many of my Christmas time memories. I'm just a bit of a realist and recognize that childhood memories (mine, at least) tend to get exaggerated over time. So while my fondest Christmas memories (and I think those of most people) tend to be the oldest, I really think Christmas is pretty awesome today as well.

I say all this only as an unnecessarily long preface to a few reminiscences of Christmases past. I'd like to share them in the hopes that you might have some similar experiences to share, or at least some pleasant memories of your own to enjoy.

Christmas as a kid usually meant lots of time with my grandmother. My mom's mom lived nearby, and would usually stay with us over the holidays, and keep us kids while school was out. My dad's parents lived further away, and while we usually saw them for a short visit over the holidays, I had nothing like the same degree of time spent with them. Gramma's presence, as with most grandparents, meant we were spoiled rotten. Among other things, this meant anything we wanted for breakfast was fair game. I could probably have asked for lobster thermidor and she'd have found a way to do it, but invariably I asked for nothing but french toast for breakfast for the whole of Christmas break. We also had a seemingly endless supply of "Gramma cookies" - homemade sugar cookies cut into Christmas shapes and sprinkled in red or green. For a special treat, we'd get an occasional pan of homemade cinnamon rolls which made Cinnabon look like the mass-produced, overly-sugared lumps that they truly are. Really, it's kind of no wonder I was a chubby kid. Food is awesome, and the homemade variety doubly so.

We didn't have many huge traditions. I don't recall caroling as a family, no big Christmas letters or Christmas cards with pictures of the kids in their Sunday best (I fought tooth and nail against my Sunday best on Sunday, let alone on other occasions), and we didn't have elaborate light displays on the house a la the Griswold's. We had a tree, of course, and in later years we had a small secondary fake tree set aside specifically for mine and my dad's Star Trek and Star Wars ornaments. The Death Star v. Borg Cube debate raged even then in the midst of an artificial evergreen microverse, complete with lightsaber sound effects and Spock hailing the Enterprise with "Happy Holidays" from the shuttlecraft Galileo. But I digress.

In the weeks before Christmas, it was traditional for me to take every opportunity to snoop for my gifts in every nook and cranny of our house. My parents weren't stupid, however, and either used a hiding place I couldn't access without being noticed (like the pull down attic) or kept all of our gifts at Dad's office until they were wrapped. I usually only managed to discover wrapped gifts, and wasn't quite bold enough to attempt the unwrap/rewrap game. Only once did I manage to discover what I was getting ahead of the big day, and that was through no particular cleverness on my part - an instruction manual was left out from where my parents had the foresight to test and make sure my present actually worked. Unfortunately, I made the discovery in plain view of my parents, which nearly cost me the present. Now that I am a parent myself, I finally understand what got them so upset. Not so much the spoiling of their big surprise as the sheer stupidity I showed in asking "what's this?" when the perfectly obvious answer was "it's the instruction manual to the gift you've begged and wheedled for over the past six months." They were undoubtedly furious that they had wasted so much effort over the preceding years on a high-achieving moron. If Olivia demonstrated that lack of subtlety, I'd probably ask whether she needed to be held back a grade.

At some point every year I recall hearing the Charlie Brown Christmas Special on in the background. The Grinch, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Clay Lump, and even the rather forgettable Garfield Christmas special made occasional appearances as well. I don't recall seeing any of the "classic" Christmas movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," or "Miracle on 34th Street" until I was much older, but "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" and "A Christmas Story" did get some occasional play. Growing up in South Carolina, Christmas very rarely meant snow, but on the few occasions where we got some December flakes we took full advantage, sticking a carrot in an 18-inch pile of dirty ice and calling it "Frosty."

We went to Christmas Eve services at church every year. I enjoyed that more than most church services as a kid because they let me, yes, me, play with fire. Well, a candle. Christmas morning usually involved me sneaking in to the living room as early as possible to spy out whatever Santa had brought (Santa's gifts were traditionally left unwrapped). There was no explicit rule about waking the parents up - just the general understanding that if you wanted to enjoy your Christmas presents at all, you would let them lie abed until the unreasonable hour of six a.m. or so. I do fondly remember the Christmas I received a Sega Genesis (I was not an SNES kid, and we can debate their relative merits in another post), which had quite kindly been hooked up for me in advance. I'm not sure how early I got up to snoop on my presents that morning, but I'm fairly confident it was in those wee hours that blur the lines between "too late" and "too early." In any event, I had not been playing terribly long when my dad came stumbling in, sleep-blind and in desperate need of coffee, five more hours sleep, or both. Rather than sending me back to bed though, he sat down, and we took turns running Sonic the Hedgehog off of cliffs.

My dad had as much talent for the Sega's three button controller as I have for the 60-button fiascos that come with modern consoles. But we had a blast. I did anyway, and he at least humored me.

There are lots of other good memories I could share - Lights at the Zoo, listening to Christmas music on the radio until you wanted to puke, the elaborate nativity scenes of some of our neighbors, and Monopoly-based brawls with cousins while visiting family out of town. This last was not so much a Christmas specific memory as a fact of every family gathering between the ages of 6-12, when someone had the clever idea to ship the Monopoly board to Jimmy Hoffa. There were some rough Christmases too, of course, like the year Gramma passed away, along with several other beloved family members. There was the Christmas Eve in college where I very nearly totaled my truck on the way home from Columbia. Still, no one was hurt, and the honey-baked ham in my floorboards was unscathed. Vehicles can be replaced, but those hams are expensive. There have been some pretty incredible Christmases in more recent years too, like five years ago when Christmas came a mere five days before the Fiancee became the Wife. That was a great year, and a great celebration.

Now come the memories we get to make as parents. Our perspective on Christmas over the next few years will undoubtedly be world's apart from the perspective Olivia will have, (for starters, our perspective is about five feet further from the ground) but I look forward to helping shape her memories and experiences of  this time of year, and creating some traditions of our own.

We have already decided to nix the egg-nog gallon challenge, and I'd recommend you do the same.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Christmas - the least interesting title possible for a blog post about Christmas

Saying "Christmas is my favorite time of year"  in a crowded room in America is akin to saying "No way! You're a fan of eating and breathing, too!?" There are certainly grinches, scrooges, and those who object to the holiday on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds. They are wrong, of course, but they are out there, and are part of the reason why Wal-Mart greeters will generally only give you the generic "Happy Holidays" as you flee a hoard of ravening Black Friday shoppers.

Even when you love the season, it's easy to get cynical about certain aspects of it. Materialism is at a peak between Thanksgiving and New Years, and it's easy to get a little grouchy when you have to sit in traffic moving at the approximate speed of a glacier on a Saturday afternoon because everyone else lacks the good sense to Christmas shop on Amazon.com. Not that I'd know firsthand. There's also the fact that the primary message of the season tends to get lost in the "traditional" Christmas shows and movies. Christmas is fundamentally a Christian celebration that has been all but completely secularized. Yes, I am aware that before it was a Christian holiday, December 25 (more likely the 21st) was the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, later Saturnalia, that it was chosen for convenience by the first Holy Roman Emperor, and that in all probability, Jesus was born sometime around April. So? I suppose I should also acknowledge that there is only marginal biblical authority for the existence of the Easter Bunny. So what? I'm making a point here.

Despite the many aspects of the season there are to be cynical about, most people who grew up in the U.S. have pretty fond memories of Christmas (because, despite what Occupy would have us believe, the poorest U.S. Citizen is still in the 1% of the rest of the world). With a few notable exceptions, most of my own best memories of Christmas have little or nothing to do with the gifts I received. They have more to do with the people I spent the holidays with, the traditions we observed (sometimes unwillingly), and, inevitably, the food. Based on common wisdom and a complete lack of personal research, I know that the sense of smell is  the most prominent memory trigger we have, so it's really know wonder we develop strong memories of Christmas and Thanksgiving, when we are surrounded by scents and tastes that we might not have any other time of the year.

As time goes on, my memories of Christmas actually seem to get stronger (probably more exaggerated), while my enjoyment of the season itself .... I suppose the best word for it is "matures." I remember as a kid experiencing this overwhelming anticipation for the day itself. Christmas Eve had me wound tighter than a guitar string. Christmas Day was an explosion of gift wrap and boxes, and flurried visits with cousins to compare loot, and finally, the inevitable crash. Not like a let-down crash, more like a kid coming down off a sugar high (which more often than not ran parallel to the Christmas adrenaline). You enjoyed your gifts and started counting down for the next year, which never seemed to come.

These days my experience of Christmas is a lot more sedate. I find myself more and more often asking for "practical" presents and finding myself overjoyed with them. Christmas doesn't seem to take anytime at all to get here, but the  enjoyment of it seems to start a lot earlier - maybe because the family has grown, and our get-togethers have started spanning the entire month. The gifts are nice, but the gatherings, the food, the planning, the parties, the cards, the songs, and the general feeling of the season ... none of these have to wait for a date on the calendar. Neither do the gifts in point of fact, but the Wife still won't let me open any.

I am overjoyed that my Christmas experience will now include building traditions and memories for our little girl. I know - this year she's a touch young to actually retain anything, but it will come. I can't wait to enjoy watching her ever-growing anticipation, helping her decorate the tree, singing hymns with her at Christmas Eve services, and holding the ever-present threat of Santa over her head for her obedience and cooperation (though I draw the line at that creepy Elf on a Shelf).  

I hope to share some of my best Christmas memories with you in another post in the near future, but for now I'll just say that I hope you and yours are enjoying the Christmas Season. Watch a bad clay-mation movie with a fire in your fireplace and apple cider or eggnog in your mug. Kiss your wife under the mistletoe. Put reindeer antlers on your dog and take bets on how long they last. Mostly, have a Merry Christmas.

In which I expound on parenting like I've actually got a handle on this thing...

Olivia, with gas

Parenting, I've been told, is the most exhausting job you never get to retire from. I can see it.

The Wife and I have been parents (in the fully accepted, "outside baby" sense) for just over three months. Being a parent is a blast. It's also a lot of work.

Despite my expectations that having a kid is like having a dog that slowly learns to talk, kids don't get housebroken within a few weeks of bringing them home. They might, if you were allowed to crate train them, but child welfare agencies get a little touchy about things like that. Nor will the Wife comply with my wishes to "freerange" our baby. So, you've got the work of near constant diaper changing to contend with as a new parent. I mentioned in an earlier post that our daughter's bladder control is inversely proportional to the newness of the diaper. It's not as bad anymore, but she has gotten to the point where she is entertained - I'm not making this up - by immediately soiling a fresh diaper on occasion. She laughs all the way through the changing.

She has my sense of humor, and I am doomed.

Babies also cry. Some more than others. Some only with cause, while others cry for no apparent reason. Boredom, hunger, temperature, pain, anxiety, and sheer excess energy can all constitute cause, so they might as well all cry for no apparent reason. As a parent, you spend a lot of your time doing things to keep your baby from crying. Exhausting things, like holding your baby while standing up and swaying gently. Sounds easy? Try it for four hours straight. Don't have a baby? Try a ten pound flour sack, and keep in mind those don't squirm. If you don't believe you will spend a lot of time doing this, try to get a new parent to stand still for a ten minute conversation. See that unconscious sway? Yep. Muscle memory is a powerful force.

You also do lots of rather undignified things to keep your child happy (or at least quiet), like making stupid faces and singing and dancing. Well, "dancing" is a rather loose term. My daughter's current favorite form of entertainment is for me to move her feet rhythmically to a stupid little tune. She has no idea it's the song from Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars IV, but when she's a little older she may wonder why she has such an affinity for that scene.

Feeding your kid is a lot of work too. Mostly I get a pass on this since I lack the necessary equipment, but we've started supplementing with formula, so I get to help some of the time. The biggest challenge in bottle feeding is getting most of the food in her mouth rather than on her face, neck, bib, onesie, bunny blanky, or daddy's shirt. Oh, and don't take that thing away from her until she tells you she's done. This is usually conveyed by passing out.

Dressing a child ... I'm not sure that I can give a better description than one I've read previously so I'll just steal it. Dressing a child is like trying to get a live squid in a fishing net without any tentacles poking out. With girls I think the problem is exponentially more complicated. Little boys get onesies. Maybe overalls, or a shirt and pants combo. If you are really ambitious, you might try putting your little man in a button up and clip on bow tie, depending on the level of pretentiousness you are going for. You are not likely to put him in tights, or bloomers, or put bows in his hair. But girls can be infinitely accessorized (see above picture for illustration). They also make a game of seeing how quickly and stealthily they can ditch those accessories, with extra points for leaving a sock or headband in bizarre places. I, for instance, don't recall leaving our daughter in the pantry (it's not a walk-in, in any case), so I'm not sure how her socks wind up in the back corner.

This is only a short list of the myriad "jobs" required to maintain a baby in good working order. And, keep in mind, this is only what is required during the "easy" period between getting your baby used to being out in the real world and when they start to crawl, walk, and talk, which necessarily means crawling away from you, falling down a lot, and repeating everything you say. How you are supposed to handle a kid at that stage I suppose we will figure out when we get there. Right now, we will try and enjoy her immobility and the more-or-less-reliable six hours of sleep a night she allows us.

In exchange for all this effort you get a helpless poop-machine, who laughs at your nonsense and owns you in every sense that matters. The joys of parenthood are not logical, and they are certainly not economic, but there is an inexpressible joy that comes from watching your baby achieve the simplest, most objectively silly task, like placing a pacifier in her mouth (the wrong way around) or roll over for the first time or hold her head up unassisted and follow you with her eyes. And any father with an ounce of his twelve-year old self left in him will get sophomoric glee from hearing his baby belch with impunity, and fart like a bellows with a huge smile on that little face.

The next twenty some odd years or so are pretty well booked for me. I don't think I'd have it any other way.

Thanksgiving

Food...coma....setting in...

I have not participated in the Facebook craze du jour where I list the million things I am thankful for, but actually use it as a passive-aggressive tool for complaining about my life ("I am so thankful this day is almost over", "I am grateful that I won't have to do that again for a long time!", etc). Miss the point much?

Admittedly, I think more people than not do get the point, and have probably been well served by the deliberation and introspection that comes from actually writing down something you are thankful for everyday over a period of several weeks. I just love to point out peoples flaws and foibles. I'm thankful for that opportunity you might say.

As we enter the holidays, and once again feed our children a ridiculously inaccurate historical fiction to justify feeding them ridiculously caloric and fatty foods, it is even more appropriate that I lay aside my prejudice against the herd mentality that says "I saw it on Facebook so I must do it too!" and list a few of the things for which I am thankful.

1) I am thankful that my football team will not be utterly embarrassed again this year in Atlanta. Yes, it was heartbreaking to lose the East, especially in a year that we beat every single SEC East team - unprecedented for South Carolina. And yes, we all had dreams of playing spoiler to someone's BCS title hopes in the Championship game. But honestly, with apologies to Chris Low, the East title this year isn't even a consolation prize - it's a sentence. Whether LSU wins out this weekend, or UGA has to face Alabama (or through some fluke, Arkansas), it's likely to be a one-sided affair. Possibly a brutal one. We had that experience last year. I'll be glad to watch someone else take it this year.

2) I am thankful to have no affiliation whatsoever with Penn State. I don't think this needs much explanation.

3) I am thankful that Dreft will take poop, pee, and vomit out of clothes. Most of the time.

4) I am thankful that all of NBC's attempts to reboot seventies television shows have failed quickly, giving us more time for wonderful reality television. Actually, I'm only being sarcastic about the latter part of that statement. A new Wonder Woman? Seriously? Who thought that was a good idea.

5) I am thankful that stores waited until Halloween to replace their Thanksgiving displays with tinsel, bells, and fake snow.

Between this post and my Halloween tirade, I'm sure I have firmly established my place as the Scrooge of all fall holidays. I'm fine with that. Now that it's out of the way, let me be serious and tell you a few things I really am thankful for.

1) My family. Not just an incredible wife, and an adorable, healthy baby girl, though they certainly come first to mind. Our entire family is fantastic, and as a young couple with a baby and a lot of student debt, but not enough free time to hold up a sign about it, I don't honestly know how we would make it without the love and support we get from all of them.

2) My friends. I could just as easily include all of them in the "family" category, except I'm less likely get random bags of groceries foisted upon me by my friends. It is truly amazing to have a community around you, especially when you are going through big life changes, i.e., marriages, moving, changing jobs, having kids. All of which we've experienced in the last five years. Some changes multiple times. Friends rock.

3) Beagle. And to a lesser extent Auxiliary Dog. And to a significantly lesser extent, almost not worth mentioning, Cat. Cat is pretty damn cute rubbing up against my little girl. But the first time those claws make her cry it's Project Pet for you buddy.

4) A house, a job, a car that works. And lots of books. A fireplace and a cup of coffee, and a damn fine grill on the back porch.

5) God. Biggest for last, maybe? I believe every last thing I am grateful for is ultimately an unearned blessing. Whatever worth I may have, whether the product of nature or nurture, I had absolutely no control over, so even the abilities I have that allow me to "earn" a living are a gift. My faith is a gift, my church is a gift, my salvation is absolutely a gift that I did not deserve. Perhaps this strikes you as more of a Christmas-y message. Meh. It's my list. It's what I am thankful for. And I really, really am.

Happy Halloween

Briefly, I'll acknowledge how sporadic my blogging has been over the past few months. I have an infant at home now. What do you want?
If you follow this blog with enough regularity that you feel personally affronted by my inconsistency, (a) I'm flattered, and (b) you need a hobby.

Fall is a fantastic time of year. I think you really have to be an adult to fully appreciate it. As a kid, fall just means school started back really recently, and you are as far away from summer vacation as it is possible to be. As an adult, you get the schadenfreude of watching kids go off to school, while enjoying (mercifully) cooler weather, college football, pumpkin flavored everything, and the approaching food and booze filled holiday season.

This Halloween is our first as a family of three. We are spending it quietly sitting at home, watching reruns of Warehouse 13 on Netflix, while our daughter compliantly snoozes in a pack-n-play and the lights on the front porch remain definitively off - the universal bah-humbug to trick-or-treaters everywhere. See above about the snoozing baby if you are wondering why we are so decidedly unwelcoming. We did not even do a jack-o-lantern. We carved out a pumpkin with visiting family a few weeks ago, and even baked the pumpkin seeds and made a pumpkin pie with the innards. But we found out the hard way that if you carve out a pumpkin, but don't carve a face into it to let the inside dry out a bit, it tends to do something I can only describe as "putrifying" within a relatively short time.

Personally, I've always been of the mind that holidays are a state of mind and should be dragged out and enjoyed as long as possible. I'm kind of halloweened out at this point. I realize Olivia won't remember any of this October, but we took full advantage of her first Halloween to do every kitschy family oriented outing we could think of. We attended Boo at the Zoo, where hundreds of barely controlled post-toddlers rage around animal exhibits in pursuit of sugar while displaying their parents' taste in costuming (or lack thereof). We saw a lot of fellow geeks in the crowd, mostly in Star Wars paraphernalia. We went with a group of friends to a corn maze, where the corn barely came to our shoulder and the group was lead unwaveringly through the maze by someone who practically had the layout memorized. It required no active thought on my part, but we still had fun, despite not getting lost for countless hours with a two month old. We went to a friend's Halloween themed birthday party where Olivia survived her first zombie attack. And, in a sign of the holiday creep infecting even my cynical self, the weekend of Halloween saw us hosting a few friends for a pre-Thanksgiving feast. Yes, that's right. Thanksgiving in October. We had to try out some tweaked recipes thanks to Olivia's dietary restrictions, and I daresay our friends made willing guinea pigs.

I look forward to taking my daughter trick-or-treating and all that Halloween necessarily means to a walking, talking kid, but I enjoyed this October just the way it was. Hope you did as well.

Now I'm going to return to shunning Trick-or-Treaters. Happy Halloween.

Adventures in Baby Feeding

Remember back before Olivia was born, when I had time to blog occasionally, and complained on my wife's behalf about all the things she had to leave out of her diet? We looked forward to the days of having an outside baby so she could go back to eating whatever she wanted.

Not so much.

Some babies don't deal well with certain foods, even when those foods are getting processed through mom and delivered as breast milk. Dairy is a big offender, but occasionally babies can't tolerate soy, wheat, eggs, and so forth, which means you have the potential as a mom who is attempting to breastfeed to have a MORE restrictive diet with an outside baby than you did when you were pregnant. This is not exactly the same as having an allergy to the offending food product. As I understand it, babies' digestive systems just can't always process proteins associated with those foods, and ideally they will begin processing them correctly as their systems' mature.

Ideally. In the meantime, the inability to process these proteins can cause inflammation in babies' intestines, which manifests as stomach pain and incredible fussiness. Personally, I think there's a good chance that a lot of you whose parents described you as "colic babies" probably had issues with something you were eating. But what do I know? I'm a lawyer, not a nutritionist.

Olivia has an intolerance for dairy protein. So we went from no soft cheese in pregnancy to no cheese, yogurt, milk, ice cream, cream based soups, most sauces at Olive Garden, and a surprising number of bread products. But dairy hasn't been the end of the story. We are currently experimenting with eliminating soy from Wife's diet, and that appears to have taken care of most of the rest of Olivia's digestive issues. Do you have any idea how many things have soy in them? Between the two intolerances we are seriously considering the cro-magnon diet where you eat nothing but unprocessed meat and produce.

The only other realistic option is going formula. There's nothing wrong with formula in my opinion except for the ludicrous expense. Especially if you have to find a formula that is neither dairy nor soy based. So, ladies, if you are expecting and looking forward to eating everything you've missed out on for the last few months.... go have some ice cream. It might be the last you have for a long time.

What I did over Fall Break

I remember back in high school and college when I was too spoiled to truly appreciate all the free time I had. In my naive, spoiled point of view, Christmas break went by far too quickly, spring break wasn't long enough by a long shot, and fall break, that glorified long weekend that usually coincided with Columbus Day (a holiday for one of the most celebrated screw-ups in history) was a damn tease.

Oh, for the days when responsibility was nil, and days off were plentiful.

In adulthood, a long weekend is a precious commodity. The only way you can really replicate the type of responsibility-free time off you have as a kid is to retire. Barring that, take time off between ending one job and starting another.

And that's what I did last week.

Some of my Constant Readers already know that I have left state employment for private practice, but for those of you not in the know...I ...left state employment for private practice. That's pretty much all I have to say about that since I don't blog about work as a general rule. Mostly out of courtesy for you all - law practice isn't really that exciting.

But last week the Wife and I took Olivia on her first beach trip with some of my family. You might be questioning our sanity, taking a seven week old on an attempted vacation. You'd be right. By and large, she was great, but take a new baby out of their element and surround her with lots of new stimuli, as well as grandparents, aunts, and uncles all itching to hold her constantly, and you've got a recipe for an overstimulated baby and a destroyed schedule. As if a seven week old has an established schedule.

Nonetheless, we all enjoyed ourselves. Olivia got to visit the aquarium (which I'm sure amounted to a lot of soft colored lights to her), and put her feet in the sand and water on the beach. The latter was a bit cold, and elicited a scream or two. Olivia didn't like it either. It was a good trip and a much needed break.