Tag Archives: children

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.

Why can’t you appreciate art, Daddy?

After two months of preschool, my son came home with an armload of artwork he had created. Our refrigerator was wholly unprepared for a collection of this magnitude. I dare say, even a completely naked fridge would have become weak in the coils at the prospect of supporting such a volume of work.

Leave it to my wife (as I often do) to come up with a brilliant solution to this parenting dilemma. We now have an entire dining room wall covered with my son’s masterpiece paintings and drawings. My wife’s ingenious mental stone has also killed a second bird by covering up a good portion of our dining room wall paper, which no one likes but no one has the gumption to remove.

My son refers to this wall of pictures as his art folio. He is demonstratively proud of it, as are we all when we realize the passion that has been poured into creating these wonderful works of art. The works are so triumphantly abstract that we had to ask which side was up before hanging each of them; sometimes the artist seemed to have to guess the answer himself.

Art folio wall

The art folio. Somebody’s great-great-grandmother would be rolling over in her grave if she could see how we’ve covered over her favorite wall paper.

Normally, we would never insult an artist of this caliber by asking him to name the subject of each piece. But since we feel that we are on rather familiar terms with this particular artist, we have granted ourselves the privilege of asking questions that might otherwise be taboo.

frog painting

The Ghost Frog. His eyes follow you all around the room.

The artist was so kind as to describe the images to us one evening over a grilled cheese sandwich and some apple juice. “That one’s a ghost frog,” he said, pointing out what should have been obvious to us. “That one’s a ghost ship,” he continued, moving down the line. “The next one’s a Frankenstein ship, then a mozombie ship.” (Mozombies are zombies who have that little extra special mo to set them apart from your run-of-the-mill walking dead.)

finger painting

This is a Ghost Ship, or a Frankenstein Ship, or maybe a Mozombie Ship. At any rate, it’s some sort of ship; that much is obvious.

The boy took a sip of juice and pointed at the picture at the end of the row. “And,” he continued, “I’ve been trying to work on my spiders.”

drawing of spiders

He certainly has been working on his spiders, and with impressive results.

“What’s this one?” my wife asked, pointing to a picture dominated by broad, straight lines of brown.

I jumped in, thinking I would show my son how well I remembered a clue he had given me earlier. “That’s a map,” I said.

“No,” he corrected, giving me a look that questioned my faculties. “That’s a tree. It’s a dead tree because it’s winter.”

Tree in relief

The tree that shut Daddy right up. What a bumpkin that guy is!

Then I realized my mistake. It was the picture I thought looked like a microscope that was actually a map. Clearly, this one was a tree. It even had a falling limb, if the viewer were inclined to look at it, instead of shouting out ignorant guesses.

At that moment, I understood the biggest challenge facing this kid’s artistic development. He has only a few short decades in which to figure out how to keep his artistically bereft father from embarrassing him at his gallery opening.

Don’t start a crawl you can’t finish

The baby has been working on his crawling for the past few weeks and has finally honed the single skill that will give him the confidence to become a proficient crawler. I call this skill the exit strategy.

For the first couple weeks of crawling practice, the baby did the natural thing by rolling himself onto his tummy and pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. This was all well and good while it lasted, but he was doomed to lose this posture before long and find himself flat on his belly, hopelessly trying to doggie paddle across the carpet.

He found this to be an awkward and vulnerable position. All he could do was cry and hope that some helpful walker would take pity and set him back up into a sitting position. From there, he could play quietly and forget all about his crawling woes until some inviting object, just outside of his reach, tempted him into another fiasco of failed locomotion.

Crawling had descended into quagmire for him. He could get into proper position, but then not really go anywhere, except maybe a few inches in reverse, before his limbs gave out and left him beached on the unforgiving shores of immobility.

crawling practice

He’s in the starting blocks, but is he in forward or reverse gear?

This flawed routine was beginning to gnaw at his confidence. It certainly made him cry a lot, and perhaps develop a habit of searching the space above him for circling birds of prey. It also made him less threatening to the cat, who no longer seemed to worry about letting down his guard around such an unpredictable creature.

That was when ingenuity took precedence over instinct. The baby stopped working so hard on trying to move, having assumed the proper crawling position, and started working on putting himself back into a stable, upright sitting posture. If you don’t agree that this breakthrough has undoubtedly saved the human race from extinction, imagine the world’s ancient population of cave people lying flat on their bellies in predator-filled forests, crying out, “Unga munga wunga!” (Loosely translated: “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”)

Once the baby knew that he could rescue himself from crawling mishaps and put himself back where he could swat at any potential swooping birds and keep the cat in his proper place, crawling was not the high-risk ordeal it had once been. It was amazing how much more eager he was to practice crawling once he knew that he controlled how practice would end.

baby and toys

Ambition –noun– def: strong desire for achievement, as when a baby desperately crawls toward a walker.

The boy is not a proficient crawler yet, but it’s all downhill from here. He’s conquered the one thing that could stand in his way; he’s conquered his fear, and he did it with a remarkably well-ordered plan.

Our budding little human developed his first exit strategy, which is good news for him, but bad news for the cat, because now the cat will have to develop quick exit strategies from anyplace that is floor level.