the trade-off

this is my lovely wife on her last day of work, back in february. (can it have been so long ago?)

as our child peacefully slept, we sat at dinner friday, savoring her refrigerator clean-out invention -- french-italian marinated chicken with bean sprouts and pasta spiked with frank's red hot sauce -- she wondered if i regretted her decision to stop working.

my immediate response was "no." the rationale was more labored in its articulation.

i gestured at our repast, signifying the great pleasure i was deriving, not only from its melding of flavors, but the moment of being able to share it with her on my saturday.

when she was working as city editor, her weekends were conventional, saturday and sunday; as copy desk chief, mine were friday and saturday.

you'd think the overlap would suffice as time for togetherness. it wasn't.

by the time her weekend began, sometime after 3 on friday, i had been caring for a baby all day.

she was tired, i was tired. and -- as it was about time for the boy to wind down and go to bed -- neither of us had it left to cook, let alone enjoy a pleasant meal afterward.

all we wanted was sleep.

and come saturday, kris would let me sleep in, while she devoted her morning to him.

so by the time i was up and about, the morning was half-gone, and the day was pretty well filled with the stress of having to cram a weekend together, whether it was leisure or work, in the remaining hours of daylight.

kris was glad for the leisure of shopping -- not having to get everything done in one trip for a week. she can actually just leave for a few things and come back.

we don't have the financial cushion we were used to, but at the same time, we also got rid of the hard, hard chair it rested on.

hurricane boy

getting tanked, a photo by grumpnet on Flickr.

the story really began yesterday.

that's when the boy employed the skills he learned at the playground climbing wall to attempt to scale our built-in book shelves.

luckily, he slipped on the second shelf and landed square on his keister.

later in the day, he used his inner monkey to convert the box that kept his blocks into a step stool for reaching another shelf and taking the jar containing his mama's dried bridal bouquet petals and sprinkling them into his toybox.

(he was lucky the box -- not resting on its wide mouth, but on its tapered side -- didn't slip out from under him.)

you'd think those would be his major accomplishments in mischief for the week.

as the boy got his breakfast appetizer going this morning on the cat's perch, none of us had any idea what this day would have in store.

after a hearty meal of eggs, banana and oatmeal, the boy set after the cat, invariably grabbing her haunches or her tail.

otto had about as much as she could take when she wheeled and nipped him on the forearm.

the boy licked his wound before starting after her again. this time, he was grabbing her by both ears and yanking as if he were trying to pull them off.

so i took him outside.

before long, we were on the back porch, where he went for a bag of charcoal ashes, a can of insecticide and my bike chain.

we wound up in the front yard again, where he dragged the broom he was wielding like a scepter out back.

we visited our next door neighbor and he knocked on their door. i was surprised when one of her boys answered. i laughed and waved as he shut it.

with not a little protest, he was taken indoors again. he was due some hydration after our time in the mid-morning hotbox that's been the kanawha valley these past few weeks.

i set him in front of the fridge while i diluted some milk for him.

in the few seconds it took to pour into his sippy cup and close the fridge, made his way toward the cat as she ate.

as i lifted him off the floor, he snatched at the dish, spilling its contents.

i set him over the baby gate with his cup, while i went to clean the spill.

the brown handprint on the floor did not bode well.

mama was out of the shower and greeting the boy when i asked if she saw poop on his hands.

yup.

then i saw the turdlet that must have been stuck to otto's fur before it dropped to the floor.

a change of clothes and a bath later, we were headed for town. i laid on the couch in a fetal position until i had to get dressed.

he was actually pretty good in the backpack as i visited the newsroom to do a little work, went to the bank with his mom, then paid property taxes at the courthouse.

we picked mama up at the library, then ran into our buddy jon, who got married a few weeks ago. this was his first time to meet the boy.

once home, we ate lunch -- he ate two sausage links, a slice of cheese and half a box of raisins. a pretty big-ass meal for him.

he napped and i tried to nap.

while in bed, i missed him waking up, then clambering up the dining room chair, before finally climbing and kneeling on the table.

such progress for only a day and a half. at least was tired enough after supper that he went to bed without much fuss.

so ... to recap. in about 36 hours, the boy:

1. learned to climb shelves
2. learned to create makeshift stepstools
3. lost all fear of the cat
4. handled varieties of dirt, poison and grease
   
5. displayed lightning grab reflexes
6. smashed poop that wasn't his
7. summitted his first dining room table

i can hear roller coaster chains clanking.

(in his defense, he also ate three really good meals, spoke on the phone to both grandmothers, behaved well in a newsroom, branch bank and two county government buildings, had a nice, 2-hour nap and mostly slept through the night. i'll take it.)

Via Flickr:
otto is right to eye the boy on her perch. he would later be chasing her around the living room and pullng her tail and ears. she let him know that wasn't cool.

blackout

at the moment, around 05:30 hours, saturday 23 july, i'm writing in apple's textedit program because the internet is out.

up until about midnight, the power was out -- and had been for about four hours. i suspect we got off lucky.

this stormy summer, while the area has experienced numerous blackouts -- some lasting for days -- we've made it through with nary a flicker.

our number came up last night. and, of course, it was only fitting that it happen on an evening when we were expecting company.

luckily, kris was making a simple meal of pizza and the last, lurching surges of electricity continued just long enough for her to finish the toppings.

the thunderstorm announced itself for about half an hour with deep rumbles.

when it finally arrived, it was with fat, heavy drops, and then buckets of rain with explosive cracks of lightning that seemed like they were just above the treetops.

then it just parked itself on top of us. i began thinking about the great red spot on jupiter.

i can't say i can remember such a heavy and sustained downpour here in a long, long time.

the boy was getting antsy because it was near his bedtime, but i was able to keep him occupied watching the windows get streaked and splashed with the torrent spilling down from the roof.

i was pleased and impressed that the thunder didn't seem to faze him. with every boom, i expected a frightened cry, but he carried on as usual, even as i was putting him to bed.

by that time, we had no power, so i closed the door to his room to enter a house now heated by a gas oven with windows shut and no air conditioning.

i grew apprehensive at the thought of adding two more warm bodies to the mix with the oppressive humidity we'd been smothered with this week waiting to spread inside.

while the pizzas cooked, i drank a guinness that had been waiting in the fridge and sent out an all-points electricity check to a few friends in various parts of the city.

west side out. fort hill out. corridor g ok. my east end friends' numbers were in my other phone and i couldn't remember if my kanawha city friends were in town.

by its end, the storm mercifully took a lot of the moisture out of the air, so when our friends heidi and jamie arrived right around dusk, we were able to open windows and get a nice crosswind.

(coming in from huntington, there were half a mile from the exit, when they were stuck by flooding on the interstate. people actually backed up their cars from the rising water. jamie said a couple of guys got out of their cars to clear the culverts of debris and allow the roads to drain.)

the visit itself was quite nice. there was muted chat and lots of low laughs by candlelight. they'd kindly brought beer and heidi had made a chocolate cake from scratch, which was amazing in its dense richness.

and the pizzas rocked.

i can't remember a summer as stormy as this. i wonder if this is part of the climate change we've been warned about and if this is something we're going to have to get used to.

schedule rhythm

my housework schedule is linked to the one in the newsroom.

the days after my monday and tuesday are spent mostly trying to rest from the shock of returning to work. kris lets me sleep in after the baby wakes up.

come wednesday and thursday, the energy begins to return and i'm up with the baby for childcare, although then i need to take a nap before heading to the paper.

by friday, i know i have two days coming for r&r, and i can push myself from an early rise to take out the trash all the way to getting out our second edition.

i've come to accept this as the present state of my reality and have stopped wondering why i'm so listless early in the week.

in about four months, this is probably going to change when baby no. 2 arrives on the scene.

stay tuned.

wee folks and small talk

i took a day off work in anticipation of a shindig for a 40th birthday bash for my sister and her two crib mates, joy and perky.

(this is not my sister; she is perky's sister.)

i figured during the night and ensuing day, there'd be a lot of socializing and catching up and commiserating with old friends and i didn't want to miss it.

thing is, there was a small variable i didn't account for. he's a smidge over 2 feet tall and weighs about 25 pounds. yeah, that one.

almost everyone i wanted to see saturday was there. but i didn't get to say more than "hi" and "how are you" before i had to chase after the boy.

and even if the boy was with someone, i was distracted enough by his breakaway potential that i couldn't focus on the person with whom i was speaking.

mostly what came out of my mouth were chit-chatty non sequiturs, like so many one-liners to fill the space where personal interest should have been.

i'm not particularly upset, just a little taken aback by how i'd wrongly assumed i could simply plug back in to my old social habits despite the very evident change that my life has undergone.

it's odd that i thought somehow my relationships with those outside the home would remain static when those within have progressed so substantially.

adjusting to life with a toddler is like gaining weight then having to learn which clothes fit only after trying them on.

you have to re-learn for every situation since you don't know which outfits you'll be wearing from event to event.

some parts of your life slip on like a trusty t-shirt and are about the same as before. others will have to wait until things are back to "normal," and some, i suspect, you'll never get back to again.

i think, now that the boy is mobile at gatherings, i'm going to have to seek strategic sitters i can trust for more than five minutes at a time so i can actually engage again.

and if that doesn't work ... well, we'll catch up in about 10 years or so.

thunder and lightning

meet the one-two punch that's threatening to knock out mommy.

seriously, the boy's been on something of a tear this week -- waking up pissy and throwing these amazing hour-long temper tantrums.

kris tried taking him over to a friend's for supper last night and he made such a fuss while over there that she said she wasn't ever going to take him out in public again.

and the cat? she's just getting fat. so fat that she can't clean herself. so fat that the cling-ons don't cling very long and fall off after her visits to the litter box.

kris has threatened to kick her out of the house if she ever steps in the cat's stuff again.

hopefully all this is just a passing phase or the next 18 years or so are going to be very interesting.