Hockey and Patchouli: A Well Rounded Infanthood

House of Laughter 38

I have wanted to sit and write for a while, but some good news and bad news has kept me away from my keyboard.

The good news, Nancy, Isaac, and I have been watching the Carolina Hurricanes fight their way to a Stanley Cup win over the last few weeks. This means getting together with our friends, Mark, Carrie, and their little girl Hannah and watching a three hour hockey game every third night for the last two or three weeks. We all had a great time cheering for Carolina. This is not as easy as you think, because if you live in North Carolina, and see that much ice on TV, your first impulse is to run to the store and buy bread and milk.

The bad news is that two of our dearest friends are going to be leaving Greensboro in August. Marnie and Daniel have both taken positions with Passport youth camps which is based in Birmingham Alabama. Our church will miss their leadership, and Nancy and I will miss their friendship. Isaac will miss getting his face licked by their dog Annie. Secondly, our computer caught a virus, and I’ve been trying hard to get rid of it, with moderate success. (Computer viruses would almost be worth the hassle if they let everyone who ever got infected by one beat the holy hell out of the programmer who wrote it when they catch them.)

So onto Isaac news!!!

I wrote about a construction set we bought Isaac at a garage sale. There are two very specific pieces of white plastic that Isaac has become obsessive about. They are two small white girders that hold up a hopper. He will dig through the whole box of track and construction vehicles just to find these two pieces. (I’ve named the toy “XX” since each girder forms two “X”s.)

Nancy and I pulled nursery duty a couple of weeks ago. Normally I’m not crazy about nursery duty. It was warm, stuffy, and smelled vaguely of used baby food (poop joke alert). I was pretty miserable, until I started playing with two of the older boys, Daniel and Duncan. We would build big towers out of cardboard boxes and then knock them over. I also showed them how you could turn the “Garden Play Set” upside down and make it into a fort. I ended up having a pretty good time after all.

Sorry to all of my vegan friends out there for this next item, but I love it. Nancy and I had steak for dinner last night, and halfway through dinner Isaac started squirming in his seat. Nancy cut a portion of her steak into very small pieces and put them on his tray. I have never seen him take to a food so quickly. It was almost as if he snorted the minced steak. It was gone in no time. I cut up a small portion of my steak, and the same thing happened. The steak had a peppery “Monterey” seasoning, but that didn’t stop him. The boy can wolf down some steak. He left everything else on his plate, but made a beeline for the steak as soon as it hit his tray. I hate to admit it, but I’m pretty proud of my little carnivore.

Tonight while I was doing laundry, he crawled all the way from the kitchen to the bedroom. He made the return trip on top of a pile of dirty clothes, and rode back to the bedroom the last time inside the dirty clothes hamper. For those familiar with my athletic ability, it will only be a few months before he can run faster than me.

We met our friends Seth and Colleen and their new hound “Rusty” at the Greensboro Arboretum for the Solstice celebration tonight. The Solstice celebration is a kind of hippie, new agey thing, where middle aged women, Guilford College students, and non gender specific folks put on fairy wings and frolic around the park . There are stands offering body painting, body glitter, feathers, flowers, massage, and what hippie gathering would be complete with out a couple of drum circles? In our hometown of Gainesville we had another name for this type of gathering…. “Typical Tuesday Night”.

We walked around for a while, and then settled into a grassy nook off the beaten path. Isaac was sweaty in his jammies, so true to the spirit of the event, we stripped him down to his diaper, and I jokingly called him “Moonbeam”. Isaac, Nancy and I played in the grass, caught fireflies, and Isaac even did a five second unassisted stand. I remembered last year walking around the same event with a pregnant Nancy telling her that when we have a son, I’ll let him dress up as Darth Vader and use his light saber to catch fairies.

A year goes by so quickly.

I saved the biggest news for last. We are done with the helmet. Nancy and Isaac went to Winston on Monday, saw the doctor, and they said he was fine. In true “Nancy-Anal-Retentive” style, she asked if he should still wear it at night. The doctor said “Well if you want to, you can for the next month or so” (Don’t tell Nancy, but I put him to bed tonight with a beautiful naked noggin.)

Well that’s all I got for now.

Strength and Honor,

Big Matt

P.S. Remember, everything you have (job, spouse, family, friends, church, parents, school, pets, kids) is only temporary. Enjoy it all, and let them all know how much they mean to you.

I'd Rather Have This Bottle In Front of Me.....(HOL 37)

House of Laughter 37

I’m trying to decide if Isaac is like me because he is clever and inquisitive, or just lazy and no good at sports.

He has a small basketball hoop that Grandma DuFran got him for Christmas. If you make a basket, it says a letter, number, or spells a word. Isaac learned that by putting the ball in the basket, he got to hear sounds and watch lights flash. It only took him a short period of time to realize that there is a little switch inside the basket that you can manually press without a ball involved. He likes to see how fast he can get through the alphabet.

He has been pulling himself up onto tables and clearing any lose debris like papers, remotes, etc. He will walk the perimeter of the table. He can stand and push his toys slowly across the room as long as the coefficient of friction is high enough to keep them from sliding away without him.

I think we need to trim Isaac’s fingernails. When Nancy puts him bed with me in the morning, the first thing he does is goes right for my nose. Evidently there is something really good in there, because he checks both nostrils thoroughly. With his little talons, I’m worried I might get the world’s first fatal nosebleed.

We are a little pissed off at our daycare today. In the last three days, they have sent home the wrong bottle twice. The first time it was an empty washed bottle that looked very much like the ones we send…..No harm no foul. Everyone screws up now and again.

Today, Nancy gets home and finds another child’s bottle full of breast milk. Let me be the first to say “ehhhw.”

Nancy and I both called the daycare and were assured that Isaac didn’t get any of the foreign milk, but how do you really know for sure? Everyone makes mistakes, but damn. That’s a pretty big screw up there. I told Nancy that I’m going to change the message on Isaac’s helmet to say “My name is Isaac, don’t give me anyone else’s bottles”, but she thought that was being a little bit snotty about the whole thing.

We’ve decided that we are just going to send sippy cups from now on. Sure it’s going to make a mess, but you know what? They can deal with it.

Speaking of minor beefs with daycare, they sent home a fundraising kit. There isn’t even the illusion anymore that the child is selling this shit. Isaac can’t even talk, and already they want him to sell stuff to raise funds. Luckily it’s cookie dough, which like crack cocaine, pretty much sells itself. The girls at work have been very generous, and I have to admit, I like the thought of having three pounds of butterscotch and chocolate chip oatmeal cookie dough in the freezer at my disposal.

Finally, I think Isaac has started saying “Uh oh”. I went to visit him at daycare the other day, and while he and I were playing, some child dropped their cup. A chorus of “Uh oh”s spread around the room, and Isaac seemed to join in.

Go Hurricanes!!!!

Strength and Honor

Big Matt

P.S. Do you want to buy some cookie dough? The money goes towards a new high tech bottle identification system for our daycare, so the liquid that comes out of a strange woman’s breasts doesn’t go into my child’s mouth.

This One is Free (HOL 36)

House of Laughter 36

Well it’s official, Isaac likes pie. The three of us went to the Greensboro Farmer’s Market this morning. After we finished shopping for locally produced veggies and cheese, Nancy remembered something she wanted to buy. Isaac and I bought a small coconut pie, and sat on a grassy hill next to a creek. I let him sample the crust, and he really took a shine to it.

I had several paragraphs written Thursday night, but the power went out (right in the middle of the third period of the Carolina/ Buffalo game with a tied score) and I lost it. I wanted to write last night, but it was a dreary rainy night. Nancy was feeling crummy, I was tired, and the boy was tired and hungry. That set the atmosphere for an unpleasant evening. I will complete the picture with the warning, “If you are having a small stupid fight with your wife, and by chance you are listening to a comedian doing a bit about couples who have small stupid fights, you had better not laugh your ass off.”

Nancy and I are teaching Isaac the word/concept of “No”. Right now, it mostly relates to throwing his sippy cup to the ground from the high chair. The routine goes like this: 1) Isaac dangles his sippy cup over the edge of his tray. 2) Nancy and I say “No” firmly several times 3) He looks at us with a mischievous grin as if to say , “Are you two shitting me?” 4) More often than not, he puts the cup back on the tray.

This morning, at a garage sale, I bought a plastic construction set. Even as a kid, I thought this particular set was cool. It comes with a little battery operated car, that wound around a track moving about a dozen black plastic pellets around. At different points in the track, the car became a dump truck, earth mover, and another piece of construction equipment. I brought it home, and took it out of the box, and was disappointed to find that several key pieces were missing. I was disappointed that I had wasted that 50 cents, but Isaac ended up playing with the bright plastic pieces of track, and the box all afternoon long.

Isaac has discovered the dog and loves him. Nancy and I were worried that Max would be aloof and territorial. On the contrary, Max seems to love Isaac for two reasons. 1) When Isaac is eating, it’s a free buffet for Max. 2) Isaac loves petting Max. The other night, Isaac crawled over to Max, and reached out to pet him. Max shifted. Nancy and I tensed up hoping the dog would just move out of the way. Instead, Max rolled on his back and let Isaac pet him until his heart was content. (Just to stem the concerned letters now: The two of them will never be alone unsupervised).

Finally, I wanted to share a concept that was in one of Nancy’s baby books. It’s the concept of “This one is free”. It’s the idea that sooner or later, all parents are going to have a lapse of judgment, and a potentially bad thing will almost happen. For example, you walk out of a room for a second, and return to find a bottle of Tylenol spilled on the floor around the toddler, and three pills are on their way to his mouth.

Evidently these sorts of things happen to every parent, and you just have to be grateful that things don’t go as badly as they could have, and you sharpen the parenting skills for next time.

And yes, we had a “This one is free” moment about a week ago. I was lying on the floor, Nancy was “Freshening” Isaac’s diaper on the changing table. She turned for a second to throw away the diaper, and I saw him start to tilt and fall off the edge of the table, head first. I was lying flat on back, scooting as fast as I could to catch him, or at least give him a soft landing spot, all the while yelling a stream of profanities at the top of my lungs. Nancy turned back and caught him at the last moment.

Yes we felt like the worst parents ever that night, but Nancy learned her lesson. From now on, I have to change all the diapers.

Strength and Honor

Big Matt

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