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.