Monthly Archives: December 2012

One year of Snoozing on the Sofa: Are you feeling refreshed yet?

Today is the one –year anniversary of my first blog post. This is my 80th post, which means that I have hurled my precious nuggets of fatherhood at you about 1.53 time each week. I hope that I’ve helped you hone your ducking and dodging skills.

The pages of this blog have been viewed a bit more than 6,000 times. That’s a modest number to serious bloggers, but I think it’s quite a feat to attract people to weed through 6,000 junkyards of completely useless information. It must be my charm.

Anniversaries are a time for reflection and acknowledgement. Therefore:

What (I think) I’ve done right

I’ve tried to make all of my posts worth your time. I’ve worked to make my posts substantive, amusing, and identifiable. Sorry I couldn’t make them informative as well, but I know my limits. I’ve done my best to add interesting images to break up the monotony of my tiresome words, and I’ve always responded to comments as intelligibly as I was able to at the moment.

What I’ve probably done wrong

I can’t get the hang of mentioning my blog to new people I meet within the first minute of meeting them. I am not a great self-promoter. If you don’t believe me, ask any of the people who don’t know about my books. I guess I just wasn’t raised to be the type of guy who goes around whipping out his blog in public.

Acknowledgements

My wife and my boys. This is really their blog. They write all the worthwhile material. I’m just the guy who inserts all the filler in between the good parts.

The Library of Congress. The good people at LOC have come through many times when I just didn’t have the right photograph for a post. LOC has been an invaluable resource for amusing, old (and most importantly, royalty-free) photos.

Man in sleeping bag

Taking a snooze on the sofa was a crude activity in the olden days. Fatherhood was probably a bit more rustic too. (Image: Joseph J. Kirkbride)

WordPress.com. WordPress may not be perfect, but it beats the hell out of trying to do this from scratch. There are limitations, but overall I think they make it ridiculously easy to do what I do here.

My fellow bloggers. I’ve met many wonderful bloggers. We share a labor of love (i.e. we don’t make any money off it). Support from these hard-working folks is the perfect tonic for those moments when you get to thinking it really would be better for everyone if you traded blogging for running a moonshine still in the back yard.

You. Your visits, comments, likes, Facebook shares, etc. keep this blog going. Otherwise, I would be scribbling lines about my family into a notebook, where they would collect dust. Because of you, these notes have a life they never would have had. Thank you. If you are new here, I invite you to dig into the archives and discover the path that has led to this moment. If you’ve been here before, welcome, old friend. I hope to entice all of you back very soon, and don’t feel shy about bringing a friend.

writing blog at computer

Exclusive behind-the-scenes photo of the making of this blog. The scotch is just a prop. I don’t use it to blog; I have to save every drop of it for when I need to do some top-shelf parenting.

There’s a storm brewing: the baby is mobile

I wrote recently about the baby’s achievements in learning the art of crawling. Since then, he has improved by leaps and bounds, such as those jumping acts apply to one who cannot yet stand upright.

The little fellow has become increasingly mobile in his desire to see the world, as defined by the first floor of our house. Now, having helped the child attain such a glorious milestone, it is time for all good parents to experience remorse.

It is time to regret all of the crawling demonstrations given to the wide-eyed infant. It is time to wish away all the helping hands provided in keeping his little knees underneath him as he wobbled back and forth. It is time to think better of all the encouragement and clapping of hands that accompanied the gaining of that first inch of ground.

It is time to feel the horror building from the pit of the stomach as the realization sets in: we’ve given this monster the superpower of mobility.

baby playing with cat

Even the cat asks us, “What the hell were you thinking?” with his shocked and alarmed eyes.

There must be some side-effect of parenthood that makes people stupid and forgetful. We are too stupid to realize that a stationary baby is far less a danger to our persons and our property than is a mobile baby. And we can’t even remember this moment of terrible revelation from the last time we went through it.

We should have been tipping him over every time he climbed up upon his hands and knees. We should have been furiously barricading his path with bookcases and upended dining tables. We should have clapped and cheered every time his arms gave out under the weight of his body.

But we did not do these eminently practical things. We did everything he needed us to do in order for him to achieve his nefarious ends. We did it all, because we would rather live in a house, destroyed or barren up to the waist, than suffer our child to be one moment behindhand in his development.

Well, the joke’s on us because we don’t have a cautious child at all. Instead, we have a charismatic manipulator, who beguiled us into the role of henchmen with his three-and-a-half-toothed smile. Only as we begin to pay the price for our callow enthusiasm does the spell begin to fade.

cat watching baby crawl

The reality of the situation having set in, the cat makes plans to abandon this area to the raging whirlwind. Note the overturned bus in the background. Add those unfortunate commuters to the storm’s toll.

It’s too late. Things are getting misplaced, broken, and maybe even slobbered upon. Every day the house becomes more and more top heavy with precious items too dear to be sacrificed as low hanging fruit.

And of all the foolish parents in the world, we are perhaps the biggest fools, for we have helped this baby hone his crawling skills just in time to make a playground of havoc out of a Christmas tree.