$10,000 in the swear jar

"Man, Lyla, your sheets are totally--"

I almost said they were totally fucked up.  As a child who grasps new words quickly, Lyla would've started calling everything fucked up.  "Daddy, your nostrils are fucked up."  Not good.

The trouble is Julie and I have always described imperfect bedsheets as fucked up.  I don't know why.  Julie says it's the only accurate phrase.

"Dan, you fucked up these covers."

We've assigned one of the most vulgar expressions in the English language to one of the most ordinary situations.  Perhaps we need more excitement in our lives.

"I did not fuck them up."

"You and your big galoot legs fuck up the covers every night."

"Woman, do not accuse me of these crimes.  You are this bed's chief fucker-upper."

Secret #1 to marital happiness: talk sweetly to one another.

The other day, Lyla helped Rowan make his bed.  Five-year-olds are terrible at bed-making; best case scenario involves the sheets going from catastrophically fucked up to pretty fucked up.  But you have to praise the effort.  Otherwise they might go to daycare saying fuck.

Where is my timid, cautious toddler?

Julie and Rowan arrived at the train show and found a very different situation from what was advertised.  Rather than a Thomas the Train festival with wooden train tables, snacks, and life-size characters to hug, it was a locomotive trade show for old autistic men.

Meanwhile, I took Lyla to Edinborough Park (a giant indoor play structure covered in microscopic fecal matter) and found a very different Lyla from the last time we were there.  Where was my timid, cautious toddler, and who was this chimpanzee?  I made the mistake of trying to follow her through the labyrinth for awhile.  Height difference alone meant I had to crawl while she sprinted, so it was ugly, and I was lucky to get out of there with limbs, if not dignity, intact.

Afterward, we ate at People's Organic, her favorite restaurant for reasons known only to God ("Why is it your favorite restaurant?"  "Uh...I don't know.").  It took forever for the food to come out, but Lyla waited with patience and good cheer.

Back at home, the spoils of Christmas continued to delight.

"Daddy, did you see that!?  This car is out of control!"

"Want me to teach you how to steer it?"

"Uh, sure."

In ten years, we'll have that conversation again. 

Non-bath-night bath

We've been parents for five years now and have never won a single award for the cleanliness of our children.  "My, your children are clean," a stranger has never said. 

But this evening, Rowan requested a non-bath-night bubble bath.  He wanted to relax after a tough day, perhaps, like every romantic comedy's female protagonist.  So Julie sat up there with him while he splashed around.

After 10 minutes or so, he stood up and announced,  "I wanna det out now."

Julie put down her magazine, rinsed him off, and grabbed a towel.

"I want you to mate me into a ta-toe."  (Making him into a taco involves wrapping the towel around him, neck to toes, like it's a tortilla and he's a slippery piece of chicken.)

"Okay, buddy."

Then he changed his mind.  "No, Mommy.  I want you to mate me into a baby buwwito."  (Making him into a baby burrito involves exactly the same procedure.)

Tomorrow Julie's taking him to a train show at the River Centre in St. Paul.  Smart money says the instant he sees Thomas the Train, he'll aggressively release his bowels and negate the bath.

Counting to C

I wrote this in my creative writing class today to show students different dialogue techniques.  I put myself into the story, but it was actually Julie.

            We realized the other day that even though Rowan can recite the alphabet, he has no idea how to identify specific letters on the page.  Luckily, Lyla decided to teach him.

            "Okay, buddy, what letter is this?" she said, pointing to an A.

            "I don't know."

            "It's an A."

            "Yeah."

            The lesson continued in this fashion for quite some time.  Then I suggested to Lyla to review some of those earlier letters.  She pointed to the A again.

            "What letter is this?"

            Big smile on Rowan's face, and then: "B!"  He reached out his hand to Lyla, expecting a high-five.

            "Daddy, he's not doing it right."  Lyla's lip began to quiver in the telltale pre-breakdown way.

            "Keep at it, kiddo," I said.  "Practice makes perfect."

            Several minutes later, Rowan got one right.  Lyla was ecstatic.

            "He got C, Daddy!  He got C!"

            Rowan beamed with pride.  "Daddy!  Daddy!  I counted to C!"

Farewell

Time goes on.  The world spins.  The kids grow.  Life happens.

I'm going to stop writing on this blog.  Being a dad is still full of revelations and wacky moments, but I don't feel so compelled to share them these days.  It's not that parenting is suddenly less interesting or fun; if anything it's much more so.  It's also more comfortable, and being comfortable is not conducive to good writing.

So thank you for reading.  God bless you.  If I post here again, I'll link to it from Facebook.  I wouldn't rule it out entirely; certainly I've failed at quitting before.  But this time I feel done.  Or at least in need of a good, long break.  I want to write other things.

I don't like ending.  We don't like endings, we humans.  So this is hard for me.  But it's the right thing, too.  See you around.  I'm going to go write a story.

Best moment

Rowan was pretending my hoodie string was a snake.  "Son, you're making Daddy nervous as hell," I couldn't bring myself to say.

Screen time:

Lyla, proving once and for all that she takes after neither one of us:

Rowan, mildly pleased with ice cream.  You know, whatever.  Just ice cream.  Yeah, he thinks it's all right.  No biggie, though.  

Only the best moment of his entire life.

Mugshot

They wanted me to take their pictures in the daycare lobby.  Not sure why Rowan chose to pose with his mugshot face.

Not Raingirl

"Daddy, my last dance show was on the 22nd."

"Uh...really?  Was Miss Amy talking about your dance show or something?"

"No."

"Did she say that your last show was on the 22nd?"

"No."

"How did you know?"

"I don't know."

I checked; she was right.  May 22nd.

Later:

"Daddy, we moved into our house on a Thursday."

Also right.  Thursday October 18, almost a year ago.  So I tested her.

"Lyla, what day of the week was your birthday on last year?"

"Wednesday."

It was Tuesday.  Thank God. 

Insects of destruction

"Daddy, fire ants can spray fire."

"Where did you hear that?"

"[Girl at daycare] told me."

"You think she knows what she's talking about?"

"Yes.  She's five."

Fuhball

Rowan's good enough to play for the Vikings.

Hangin'

Lyla loves green peppers.

Amelia Bedelia books suck.  The humor lies in her taking everything literally, a characteristic she shares with Lyla and Rowan.

Here we are being Tyrannosauruses:

Five-point

All the research says to leave a kid in the car seat until they are too big for it, no matter how old they are.  Lyla has wanted a booster seat for months, but she's still short enough for the car seat.  Times have changed.  She'll be five years old in a car seat.  By the time I was five years old, I occasionally rode shotgun.

It's probably one of those instances where parents today are overly cautious wienies, but to me, cars are different.  They should install regular-kid-sized five-point harnesses in the backseat.  Better yet: seven-point harnesses.  Secure the feet or something.

"Daddy, I want a booster seat for my birthday."

Not gonna happen.  Well, maybe her sixth birthday.

Jumping off stuff

At the playground closest to our house, there's a picnic table that looks half buried in woodchips.  Unless you're very small, it's terrible for sitting, your legs all contorted and mashed in.

However, it is excellent for jumping.

You're supposed to let your kids jump off stuff, right?

Weird and Weirder

Weird:

Weirder:

Long time

"Daddy, how many days are in 18 years?"

Good time to teach her about multiplication.

"If there are 365 days in a year, then you need 18 of those.  It would be like counting to 365 eighteen times.  That's called multiplication.  You're wondering about 365 times 18."

This was not the answer she was looking for, so I turned my iTelephone into an iCalculator.  "Let's see here, you take 18 times--see the 'x' there?--365.  And the answer is 6,570."

Her mind was sufficiently blown.

"But wait, Lyla.  With leap years added, it's more."

"What's leap year?"

"Every four years, you have a year with one extra day: 366 instead of 365.  It has to do with the revolution of the earth around the sun."

She nodded, humoring me.

"So there are two possible answers.  If the first year is a leap year, then there would be 6,575 days in 18 years.  If the first year isn't a leap year, then there would only be 6,574 days."

"Oh."

"Hey, why did you want to know how many days are in 18 years, anyway?"

"Rapunzel looked out her window for 18 years."

Freaky

Are you ready for a totally freaky photo of Lyla? 


3


2


1...

I picture her climbing out of the screen, like the girl from The Ring.

Academia

Lyla's in a room full of academic rigor.  Today she came home talking about cylinders.  Very exciting.

Player

Rowan's recent promotion to the Monkey Room includes the privilege of playing on the big kid playground.  With Lyla.

"Mommy, today Rowan kicked sand at me and my friends."

"Rowan, did you kick sand at Lyla and her friends?"

Highest voice ever: "No."

"Mommy, he's lying."

No, Lyla.  He's flirting.

Favorite thing

"Besides what you ate, what was your favorite thing about going to Grandma and Grandpa's house?"

"I ate hot dods and mat and teese!"

"Mommy, he didn't understand the question."

Tiger

0.002 seconds later, that whiffle ball shot a hole through the fence, crashed through the neighbors' bedroom window, and slammed into a feather pillow, which then burst into flames.

Crackling back

Every new outdoor campfire brings my mind crackling back to previous outdoor campfires.  All those experiences, the campfires light the way like ellipses.

One campfire when I was five or so, my mom or dad finally cut off my consumption of roasted marshmallows.  I asked whether I could keep making them but not eat them, and that is how I became the short order marshmallow cook, roasting them up for older relatives, for it wasn't so much the eating as the roasting that fed me.

Boy Scout camping meals, you threw some carrots and onions onto a sheet of aluminum foil and meat on top and then more vegetables, and it's not because you liked vegetables but because the vegetables kept the meat from burning, and you packed it all together with more foil and tossed it onto the coals.  Later you forked out (better yet, knifed out) that primitive food like some wild hunter/gatherer caveman.

First time taking Lyla camping, age three, along with her friend Maia and Maia's dad, Dave, past the girls' bedtimes, both girls huddled in blankets on lawn chairs, mesmerized by the flames.  Later the girls nestled in their sleeping bags, and Dave and I added logs to the fire and passed a flask of whiskey between us and wondered why we didn't do this more often.  I'm wondering now why we haven't done it since.

In the flames of tonight's fire, they're all there, those memories flickering back to me, those and others, and promises of what's to come.

Doesn't hurt to ask

"Daddy, can I have an iPhone for my birthday?"

"No."

"Why?"

"You're unemployed."

"Can I have an iPad?"

"No."

"Can I have my very own pen?

"Now you're talking."

Argumentation

Our neighbor stopped by with a bunch of vegetables from his garden.  This led to the unlikely scenario of having to tell Lyla to hang up the cucumber and wash up for dinner.

In other news, Julie and I were sitting and talking about our day when suddenly we noticed a lot of quiet coming from the kitchen.  We found Lyla and Rowan at the table with paintbrushes, glasses of water, and a stamp ink pad.  They were painting.

We had previously rejected Lyla's request to get out the paints.  "Too close to bedtime," we told her, and she sulked.  So seeing them there painting sort of represented a direct nose-thumbing at our parental authority.  Lyla got down from her chair and faced us, hands on hips.

"First," she began, raising an index finger at us, "we really wanted to paint."  Her middle finger joined her index finger.  "Second, the other paints are very messy, and these paints are not messy."

"Huh," I said.

"Okay then," Julie said.

Then Lyla turned on one heel and returned to the table.

T.A.?

Lyla recited/read to Rowan.  I could tell she only had parts of the book memorized because occasionally her pacing slowed way down, and she stopped a lot to ask for help.  Cool to see her actually reading.

"Daddy, what does R-E-T-U-R-N-I-N-G spell?"

Rowan did his best to follow along, but eventually his attention wavered.

I wonder where she'll be a year from now.  Think she'd help me grade papers?

Back to bed

"Daddy!  I wan my stuff!  Daddy!  I wan my stuff!"

I stand outside Rowan's room, ear to the door, and determine by his tone and volume that this isn't a let-him-settle-himself-back-to-sleep moment.  The dude requires intervention.  I enter and there he is, miserably sitting on the edge of his tiny big-boy bed, feet dangling, pillow and blanket on the floor and Grover doll across the room, the victim of a mighty launch.

"I wan my stuff!" he says again as I walk to him.  With the hallway light peeking into the room, I see his tears, his snot.  He's so new to the bed that he doesn't realize he could technically leave the bed to retrieve his stuff.  The idea of getting out of bed hasn't entered his mind, and Julie and I plan to keep it that way as long as possible, ideally through at least the first half of adolescence.

I put his pillow back, and he collapses his head onto it, practically bouncing from all that exhausted downward force.  I get him Grover, who half-disappears into the crook of his arm.  Cover him up with the blanket and say, "Have a good sleep, buddy."

"Have a dood sneep too, Daddy," he replies, and I edge my way out the door.  When you say something nice to Rowan, he often says it back to you with "too" added, which has its most profound effect when you tell him you love him.

1/20

Lyla's friend Anja just turned five, which reminds me that Lyla is going to turn five.  That's like half a decade.  That's like 1/20 of the way to 100.  Or 14 years from college.

The party was at Pump It Up.

Then to Anja's house for pizza and cake, and then home.  An hour or so past nap time, the kids were in fine form.

They love when we photograph them when they're pissed.