Tag Archives: kids

The gift of an hour

I was in the living room with our one-year-old when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard my wife’s voice on the other end of the line. That’s when it hit to me:

The call was coming from inside the house!

But this is more of a Christmas than Halloween story, so nothing terrifying happened.

“A Disney Christmas Carol is on channel 48,” she said. She was upstairs, getting ready to go to bed early. She didn’t want to yell down the stairs and let Buster know where he could find her. He might decide he’d rather be with her, which would ruin her sleep plans.

I like watching A Christmas Carol. I love reading it. I try to read it every December because I think it is one of the most perfect stories in the English language. No one else in my family is old enough to remember when words were used, instead of CGI, to paint a story. So, with them, I watch it.

Big brother was already in bed, visions of making it to kindergarten on time dancing in his head. It was just Buster, me, and special guest Jim Carrey as Scrooge. We rocked in the recliner. It lacked an hour until Buster’s normal nodding off time. I wondered how long he would watch before he climbed down and looked for a toy or a mother.

Ghost of Christmas Past

Jim Carrey seems most human when he is computer animated. The Ghost of Christmas Past is a delight to little boys. (Image: Disney)

He looked for neither. He watched with me. He didn’t fidget or look around the room or punch me in the ear or anything. He watched, like he was interested. He seemed especially mesmerized by the Ghost of Christmas Past with his flaming head and superluminal flying skills. He made it through an entire hour, until the visit to Scrooge’s nephew’s Christmas party with the Ghost of Christmas Present. Then, he rested his head on my chest and nestled in to sleep.

It wasn’t much, only everything. That one hour was the kind of time a dad cherishes. Sharing something you love with your son, and having him be interested in it, doesn’t happen every day. Yes, he was interested on a completely different level, but still, it was a moment we shared.

Maybe he won’t care for it at all, next year, but that hour gives me hope that he will. It gives me hope that someday, we’ll read the story together. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but maybe someday, he’ll read it with his son. Of course its title will be changed to A Holiday Carol by then, but I expect Dickens will still be dead, and a little rolling over in the grave never killed anyone.

Illustrated Christmas Carol

My illustrated edition: beautiful words and pictures, but no computer animation, so we’ll have to wait and see how well it catches on.

I’m not a very religious person, but I do believe Christmas, taken in the right perspective, can add light to one’s soul. Maybe I’m just a backward traditionalist, but if we don’t give our kids something enduring at times like Christmas, we leave them nothing but toys. And we all know how long toys last.

We hope you had fun at our Christmas potty

I spent an hour in the mall over Thanksgiving weekend. That alone would be worthy of pity, but hold the sympathetic tears for a minute; it gets worse. I spent half of that time in the men’s room.

Okay, let the wailing begin.

While on our mall visit, my wife, who is uncannily in tune with such things, noticed something in the way our five-year-old was walking. “Do you have to go potty?” she asked.

“No,” he replied, which meant, “I do, but I’m really into these Christmas ornaments in the Hallmark store right now, so I’m gonna pretend I don’t.”

I led him down the corridor of despair that leads to the mall restrooms. Inside the men’s room, he took off his coat and handed it to me. I thought this unnecessary, but little boys have peculiar peeing habits.

He walked past the urinals toward the stalls. “Oh, it’s one of those?” I moaned.

“Yup. One of those.”

An inspection of the three choices led us to the least disturbing toilet. In my head, I heard my wife’s frantic voice demanding a buffer between her child’s precious behind and the germ-ridden seat. I wiped the seat with toilet paper and laid down one of those paper seat rings with the punch-out center. Having prepared his nest, I left the boy alone with his duty in the stall.

God rest ye merry gentlemen.

Waiting for the patent on my holiday themed seat cover.

I placed myself in the sink area. That seemed like the most innocuous place for a figure lurking in the men’s room, with no legitimate business there, to stand. As people passed me to get to the urinals, I held my son’s coat prominently, testament that I wasn’t camping in the restroom without reason. It would have been more clever to hand out paper towels, but I’d left my tip jar at home.

One gentlemen said hello to me as he passed. I decided to relocate.

I retreated to the stall area. The other stalls were empty, leaving me free to converse through the door without raising a response from the wrong squatter. “Almost done?” I asked.

“Nope. When I do this, I do it slow,” he replied. “I’m not good at doing things fast.”

“Just keep plugging away then.”

I had to warn my wife. I went and stuck my head out the men’s room door.

“What’s taking so long?” she asked.

I held up two fingers.

Her eyes grew wide, like from some sharp, internal pain. “Oh my God! Did you put down toilet paper?”

corner stall

“Oh my God! Did you put down toilet paper?”

I patted myself on the back as I nodded to her.

I returned to the stall door. “Almost done?”

“Not yet.”

I leaned against the wall, holding up my child’s coat of a flag for all to see. People came and went.

And then.

From behind that stainless steel door, came the sound of gentle humming – the melody of his favorite Christmas song: Carol of The Bells.

“Dum de de dum.

Dum de de dum.

Dum de de dum. . .”

It goes to show that even the horrors of a public men’s room can’t rob a child of his Christmas spirit.

 

No girls allowed

“Oh my! I already know what it is,” the ultrasound technician said as soon as she set her fancy air hockey paddle on my wife’s belly. She nodded toward the monitor. “That’s a boy – no doubt about it.” She typed the words “It’s a Boy!” on the screen with an arrow pointing to the peninsula of grayish-white protruding into the sea of black.

My wife grinned. She knew I was thinking, “Yeah, they’ve never had to squint to find it on any of my boys. Score one for heredity.” I gave her my You’re a Lucky, Lucky Woman nod. This is one moment when a man should be allowed to be full of himself.

We always assumed it would be a boy, because that’s what we do. We’re used to boys. We have clothes for them. Everything we know about children we learned from boys. Only after the ultrasound was over did we notice that both of us were wearing something pink. I wonder what that means.

Gentlemen's railway car

The quiet club for civilized gentlemen that our parlor is destined to become in just a few, short years. (Image: George R. Lawrence)

This ultrasound seemed to last a lot longer than the previous ones. If they’re going to drag this process out, like Major League Baseball games, I think they should try to save the penis for last, just to keep some drama in it. Instant penis is like a 10-run first inning. After that, they’re just padding the score sheet until its time to go home.

The face, fingers, feet and things are nice, but they don’t really tell you anything specific about your child, except that he has those things. The ultrasound pictures of our boys are indistinguishable from one another. They all flashed their junk and then presented generic baby parts to the camera.

Our one-year-old was watching with me. He was excited to see the pictures at first, but soon became bored with all the semi-distinguishable parts. When the technician wouldn’t let him run the machine, he decided he was outta there. He and I walked the halls, he trying to sneak into offices and find buttons to push.

When Mommy was done, she joined us in another room where we waited for the doctor. Our little boy was bored and antsy, so we had to find something to occupy him. They have interesting pastimes in an OBGYN office.

He started with a pen and a pad of paper, each sheet printed with a diagram of a uterus. He made a nice drawing over the lady parts. When this got dull, he found a sample birth control ring on the counter. It was attached by a string to a little box. On the box was a button that, when pushed, retracted the string like the cord on a fancy vacuum cleaner. It made a delightful toy, but I had to wonder, is the real ring attached to a retractable cord? That would be surprising, though it’s probably convenient.

one-year-old's souvenir from the OBGYN

A doctor’s office activity book. Somebody had already colored the picture, which was okay since we couldn’t find the crayons.

The doctor said everything looked good. Did we have any questions?

Yeah. Why are we wearing pink to a peninsula party?

No, we’re not really morning people

My last post was about things I am thankful for. This one is about something I’m not thankful for. I am starting a new tradition (if it doesn’t already exist) that I will call the Post-Thanksgiving Bitch and Moan Fest. You in?

Good.

Because of the nature of the floating shifts at my wife’s part time job, I must often use pieces of my vacation time to take the kids to school and day care or pick them up. Picking them up is easy; you just show up and ask for your kid. You repeat the process until you have everybody you started the day with. Then you go home.

Dropping them off in the morning is a royal pain in the butt. Specifically, getting the kindergartener up, clothed, fed, and into the car in reasonable amount of time will be the death of me.

The kid is not a morning person. I get that. I’ll never forgive 7 a.m. for showing up uninvited day after day, and yet I get up every morning because it’s part of my job. Kindergarten is his job. On one level, he understands that, but that one level is the last to become conscious in the morning. The intervening levels complain that the light hurts their eyes. Hurt eyes make it difficult to go back to sleep.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. He’s not buying it. It’s infuriating, how much like me he can be. I make him eat, which he does in tiny, protesting bites. I even set an example by choking down something myself, if I can find a moment between prodding him to eat and packing a lunch that he might nibble at before recess. His master plan is to build up his appetite for a big snack after school before pestering his parents to take him out to eat shrimp. It’s a bad plan.

Who wants my sandwich?

The lunch sandwich: made with love, battered in transit, nibbled at with indifference.

Assuming we didn’t spend a half hour pouting over the lack of stylish clothes to wear to kindergarten, we will only be moderately late when it’s time for coats and shoes. Perhaps there is no five-year-old who can maintain a sense of urgency; there is none in my morning. When a dad says “Hurry up!” 100 times in the space of five minutes, you might think there’d be no time in between for a boy to be distracted by a piece of lint. There 99 such opportunities.

Finally delivering the boy to school, it is only a matter of dropping off his brother at day care and trying to escape before the little boy’s crying stabs the dagger of guilt into my heart. Feeling like I’ve already had a full day’s work, I head to my job to hunt with the other late-comers for a precious parking spot, because the university we work at doesn’t believe that all its daytime employees should be able to park there on the same day.

My eye stops twitching about an hour later.

This leads me full circle to something I am very thankful for: my wife, who conducts this process more often and with much more grace than I do.