Life is diapers

Conversations with boys

2008-08-19T10:23:00.001-04:00

Midwest vacation

2008-08-17T20:35:00.005-04:00

Freshly returned from the Wisconsite hinterland, we present 693 of your new favorite pictures. (The Northeastern vacation, which occurred before we'd set up the Flickr Pro account, is documented less substantively here.)

P.S. 01: About 20% of these pictures, by the way, are the somewhat obscure type that She calls, derisively, "art": intentional blurs, textures, or giant hissing cockroaches. The first Flickr Pro who can tell me how to easily get the art out of the set without deleting it wins the Boy's autograph.

P.S. 02, to parents: Flickr is a service like Snapfish, or Picasa, that allows you to order prints online. You can mail them to yourself, or pick them up at Target. These enormous image files should make good-quality prints as big as 8" x 10". Go wild.

Edit, 19 August: Aunty Christy's pics are posted here.

Realpolitik

2008-06-29T14:38:00.001-04:00

Grandpa Gene is visiting, and asked Declan about the departed pup.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Do you remember Lawrence?

Oh, yes.

And he's in dog heaven now?

No, he's in the ground.

Media-savvy family

2008-04-08T15:24:00.003-04:00

Maybe I'm reaching, but the layout made me smile when I tidied up the table today.

(And yes, you wiseacres, stop smirking: I tidied up the table.)

Granted, soul and history don't give you lockjaw

2008-03-27T18:15:00.005-04:00

Now that the sun's starting to come out, and we can afford some mid-day park trips, I again have a choice of several area playgrounds. (Another way of saying that when you live far away from everything, everything's far away.)

Some of the playgrounds feature equipment that's obviously of recent manufacture. No components older than a decade, all pieces fabricated from brightly painted adamantium. The older playgrounds, though, have a certain something ... what's the term for what they have? Soul? History? Oh, no, I remember the phrase: it's "rusted, inch-long, exposed screws."

Full disclosure: these photos are legit, but the hardware protrudes from walls, not floors. The bottom shot has been rotated for, let's say, maximum shock value.

Sitting on it

2008-03-17T09:46:00.004-04:00

Coins aren't a regular part of unsupervised play – there are still noses and ears to be considered – but The Kid loves finding "money," and it was fine that he came up to the counter and found two twenty-five-cent "moneys" while I did the dishes. After rubbing their edges together for a minute, he asked for help putting them in his pocket. As we both sat down, we had this exchange:

Did you get all your money?

I have all my moneys.

Where did it go?

It's in my pocket!

What are you going to do with it?

(Brow furrowed, as in 'Are you stupid man?') Sit on it! I sit on it in my rocking chair.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

So maybe he had the good fortune to be born with his aunt's fiscal sensibility rather than his dad's.

Cameron Simpson

2008-03-13T23:00:00.002-04:00

This portrait courtesy of the good people at Simpsonize Me.

phonecameron

2008-03-13T12:50:00.001-04:00

phonecameron
Originally uploaded by RichMilNix.

Bookworming.

Now wasting your bandwidth, not just your time

2007-12-28T18:09:00.000-05:00

Santa brought Mom a video recorder.

Can you tell me how to get to Misery Street?

2007-12-28T16:21:00.000-05:00

One benefit of a day job at the library is that you get to take home some of the extras and castoffs. These 80s-era Sesame Street books are pretty good, but many of them use the Muppet characters to help the young reader explore bad times and hard feelings; the upshot of that is that as I was sorting through them, it just seemed like cover shot after cover shot of sad Muppets. And that, of course, calls for malevolent rechristening.

2007-12-09T23:07:00.002-05:00

The menorah was still burning when I hauled the Christmas tree inside, out of the rain.

Between the nights I work, the two afternoons at the YMCA, and a weekend trip, this was the first night I’d been home to see the candles get lit; as I began to sing, “Baruch atal adonai, don’t poke me in the eye,” She poked me in the ribs and said “Stop!” It turns out she knows – and can sing! – the real prayer. Who knew?

Nothing makes you examine your own loosely held agnostic disbelief as ardently as the possibility that you might accidentally pass it along to someone else.

Cool kid

2007-12-09T21:20:00.001-05:00

vintage: 21 November 2006.

Mwah!

2007-12-09T21:18:00.001-05:00

vintage: 12 November 2006.

all this stuff

2007-10-04T13:59:00.000-04:00

The bother-in-law* has posted, more succinctly than I ever would have, the explanation:

And I know, it's been a while.
It'll be a while longer, terribly busy.
As are we all, I suppose.
And yet.
There's all this stuff, you see.

(Haiku formatting mine.)

*The typo was accidental at first, but was also perfect, though not, I assure you, true.

Knights errant

2007-07-31T16:43:00.000-04:00

As opposed to "Just Pikt," I guess

2007-07-17T19:14:00.000-04:00

The lollipop that The Boy was just given (as reward for successfully pooping, praises be) was labeled, in the flavor label place, Artificial Cotton Candy.

Is that a necessary clarification? Is it even a meaningful one?

A new kind of tired

2007-05-18T10:47:00.000-04:00

Her mom came out from Mannahatta for Mother's Day. No one was sure that that was in the spirit of the 'holiday,' but as Grandma pointed out, "you're a mother, too." So Grandma rode the bus, and arrived with bagels (still warm), lox and cream cheese. (The Boy has found his muse in cream cheese, by the way. It's ten days later and he still asks, nearly every morning, for "the white butter.")

Our contribution to the Kosher Lunch Festival was a bottle of white wine that She picked up the night before. Both of 'em are lightweights, and didn't even finish the half-glasses that they poured themselves with lunch. I don't know from wine, but I know from budget; as I prepped for an afternoon at the playground, I put water in the two yellow sip cups, then dumped the remaining wine into the pink sip cup. I figured whoever wasn't driving might enjoy a little secret sauce. They're insulated! It's fun to be a covert playground lush! She didn't think this was such a good idea.

--------------

Have I mentioned that I never drank a cup of coffee prior to my thirty-fifth birthday? It was kind of along the lines of a personal sin tax. The thought process wasn't about aversion, the way I avoided booze & smokes, so much as: okay, it's an acquired taste. Well, given that it's basically bad for me, and that in every habit I harbor, I tend toward excess, let's just not acquire it. If I stopped by your house with some small rocks, and told you that sucking them could make you pleasantly jittery and irritable, and eventually you'd get used to the taste and even like it, and it would only set you back a few bucks at the market every week, would you suck some rocks to see how well they worked?

Yes, you would. As would I. I'm on my third cup as I write this.

(An aside - I mean, not my usual digression, but a real aside - if you want to read more prattle about drinking coffee, prattle I didn't write but recommend, here's a terrific paragraph by Jim Crace.] [Link to come.]

Coffee was a conscious choice, because this is a new kind of tired. I've worked summer stock theatre, and anyone who gets the reference will know what it means: I know what it is to be tired. But this is a new kind of tired, and it's coming when I 'm closer to fifty than I am to twenty. the other day, I realized that I was sitting on the third step on the staircase, idly-but-seriously trying to parse: if cooked, would I contain both white meat and dark meat? And if not, would my texture be more like beef or lamb?

I've often compared and contrasted rearing boys to rearing dogs (including, briefly, here, but more often aloud in conversation). Having the Kid around the house is no longer like having a demure, two legged pup. It is like having a caffeinated lemur with Attention Deficit Disorder. He leaps, shrieks and grabs. There's baby proofing, and there's baby proofing, and I had forgotten how hard we had to work when we went through this with The Boy. I had honestly forgotten that it means taking down all frames with glass in them. Clearing everything off the top of every dresser because he can get there. He can get onto the dresser! He's not even three feet tall! He's like a grasshopper!

--------------

Monday morning is a time for breakfast. It's a time to start off the week right, particularly if you're three and there are so many available ways of starting it wrong. I made waffles; I cooked bacon. I served breakfast, and got down vitamins. I started cleaning dishes when The Boy pointed out that he didn't have any orange juice. No juice! At mention of it, The Kid starts to bay jooose! Jooose! Drop everything! Here's some OJ! Here are two cups! Cut the OJ half-and-half with water! Screw on the top! Serve it up!

The Boy pulled a swig (ever try to drink from one of those things? Some work is involved) and made a face. He held it out to me with the somber observation: "Daddy, this is not fresh."

Yep, I served my three-year-old son a concoction I call a Bum's Mimosa: one part organic Tropicana orange juice, one part warm, day-old white wine.

It took less than twenty minutes

2007-05-16T09:34:00.000-04:00

Daddy was on the phone with Sears.

Self-promotion

2007-05-13T23:19:00.000-04:00

~~I'll take this posting down in a week,~~ as it's just a commercial for something you can't buy, but I've finally been updating the Sketchblog with some regularity (about one per week). While it's conceivable that some of you might want to see what I put there, I'm really noting it for (of course) selfish reasons - as I've learned from keeping this one up this year, if you think somebody's looking, you keep a neater room. As Tony Millionaire pointed out in his Times profile this weekend, a cartoonist is only as good as his last deadline.

There aren't many actual sketches there, by the way. The definition of what goes there is graphic content that doesn't go anywhere else. The two categories that tends to include are: A) images I'm working on that might be done but I'm not sure I'm ready to (or don't have the time to) put them in the portfolio yet; and B) goofball stuff that I elect to inflict on you - phonecam shots of street trash, mostly.

You've been warned.

Edit, six months later: I didn't take it down in a week.

Envy me / Pity me

2007-05-11T11:13:00.000-04:00

Envy me.

The Kid came in and woke me early, as he's done every day this week, but then went on his way without much further input. I might have preferred to sleep until oh I don't know SIX, but given that that wasn't an option, lying in bed reading magazines for an hour while the sun shone in and birds sang loudly wasn't a bad second choice.

Eventually, like the iron filings they are, the monsters all (including the dogs) gravitated to me, and we all stumbled downstairs together at seven. Out onto the deck, where we all (including the dogs) ate cereal and drank orange juice. (The dogs have the Kid to thank for their share of breakfast.) I read the Times while The Boy had a second helping of Organic Cereal In Smug Packaging The breeze blowing o'er the fields across the way reinforced the pastoral setting. The whinny of the horses up the road getting their morning constitutional was interrupted only by the sound of the school buses going by. iTunes served Dave Brubeck followed by Thelonious Monk. I cleared the table, baby-proofed the kitchen and took a hot shower.

Pity me.

While I showered (in general, I prefer a nice, soul-cleansing, womb-returning, wallpaper-loosening three-hour orgy of hot water and suds, which I still observe sometimes on weekends, but this was my usual weekday responsible-parent slip-in-soap-up-rinse-off-roll-on-home), The Kid took a crap in his diaper, then loosened one of its strips, so most of its contents spilled onto the (white) rug in his room. Its other strip remained intact, though, so swung around his ankle like a tetherball as he wandered out of his room, leaving little tidbits; he then used his new weight and proficiency to defeat the baby gate that stands silent, now useless sentry over the door to the office. (The office is, in theory, the one Adult Safe Zone here at Toad Hall.)

To exercise his newfound freedom, he used a brown Sharpie to decorate the Wacom tablet and his own chubby arm. The only document he pulled off the desk was the multi-page contract confirming Her new job, which was awaiting only a signature and a stamp, but is now covered in poopy-foot poop (from stepping in the diaper). He gave the FM transmitter a good enough knock that I am now listening to right-channel-only mono. And did I mention that The Boy also dropped a load in his diaper? Did I mention that he's so old and so big, now, that when he does, what I clean up is roughly the mass and weight of an adult human head?

On the way to school, The Boy asked, "Daddy, what are we doing?" which is one of his usual Zen inscrutables (the most common is "What's that?," while not looking or pointing at anything). Today, though, I had a good answer:

"We're driving fast and playing the radio loud, because that's what you do on a morning when you get poo on your hands."

I mean, it is, right? Isn't it what you'd do?

Call to arms

2007-05-11T10:28:00.000-04:00

If anybody (is reading this and) will be in the Hudson Valley the afternoon of Sunday, 10 June, and would like to attend Declan's fourth birthday party, drop me a line. The mare the Moorier, as Othello whispered to his favorite mount.

Fear of the singing rats

2007-05-11T10:14:00.000-04:00

On the way into school this morning, I asked the boy what he was going to do today.
Do you think you'll sing today? Yeah. And make shapes.

Do you think you'll have Spanish class? I think we will.

Will it be fun? I have fun. Sometimes I get scared.*

Scared? What are you scared of? Singing.

You're scared of singing? Yeah. And the rats, and also I'm scared of the fires.

That is one hardcore preschool.

*I'm pretty sure, at this point, that "get scared" is a universal euphemism for "not have fun."

Further proof of my influence

2007-05-06T09:05:00.000-04:00

The ducklings in Make Way For Ducklings are named Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Oack, Pack and Quack. That's a bit cutesy, but repetition is the spice of life for a three-year-old, so my only bow to silliness is to change Quack's name every time we read it (and we read it a lot). Every time I change it, He points out that I'm doing it wrong.

Today, after I read "Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Oack, Pack and Jehosophat," He said this:

No, Daddy! You're being silly. Now I'm going to kill you, and I'll kill your father.

So: sorry, Dad.

I suspect this is proof of my influence on him

2007-05-01T22:05:00.000-04:00

As I crossed through The Play Zone into my office tonight, I heard The Boy exclaim, "I just have to kill somebody and then I can be the winner!"

2007-04-29T06:57:00.000-04:00