Trying

And here I was feeling guilty for not blogging... C. Moore, where are thou?

Once a week, my mother-in-law takes Carly for the night, and we get to sleep until 7:30 a.m. I love Carly 350 percent, but this is an awfully good way to spend one night a week. I have never spent so much time fantasizing about sleeping.

So what shall I urge on my children by way of bucket lists? I am thinking now of climbing the pyramids at Giza, and realizing now is the time we counsel against recklessness. Still...

Things for kids to try

Once in their lives, at least, I think every child should sleep through the night. I dream of this -- until I am interrupted.

Teething teething teething. And regression to the mean by the elder child. When will this end?

great expectations

ok, it feels silly to try to blog right now, 3 weeks into this life. It feels silly in no small part because I'm typing one handed while Carter sleeps across my lap, his relatively full shock of curly-hair cradled in my other hand.  

So I'll just try to entice my erstwhile co-blogger into a simple list that promises to be the kind of reflective and debatable material ideal for a blog, its easy to keep up with, just a sentence every 2 days, stating something, anything, we think our kid(s) should experience.  This list of things to experience can be classically profound (a la great books) or simple (a la Mode).  

So, as a start: I recommend reading Rumi. especially the shorter poems.

tiny footprints

One thought I have, anticipating the arrival of my son, are the footprints we will leave together.

And how, when we look back on our journey, and there is only soft prints in the sand, we will know it's because we left a much lighter footprint.

And what, my friends, do you think I mean, by lighter? I in fact mean our environmental footprints.

Against many odds, we are considering cloth diapering for our kid. The logic is simple.

It's a lot cheaper.

$5000/year less is the number thrown around, which fits with my simple calculations. There are apparently also health benefits, less diaper rash and easier (earlier) conversion away from diaper use. Also, they make stunning dust rags later, and can be used on kid numero 2 if that happens.

But, being a post-sensitive male, one who is attempting to transcend my youth at a small liberal arts college, it is the green arguments that stir the emotions. Apparently a study by the UK gov't found that cloth and disposable diapers have equivalent carbon footprints more or less. Meaning that one is left with a choice between the evils of landfill (disposable) and the evils of water use (cloth).

Disposable diapers generate ton(s) of waste per child.

OK, so lets put water use in perspective. We will probably do ~30 loads per month, one per day (we'll probably do less, but for argument sake). That means 24 gallons times 30 or ~720 gallons per month of extra water. This number is known as the 'water footprint.'

Did you know that each hamburger requires 630 gallons of water footprint, and each cup of coffee is 37 gallons? Put another way, the hamburger is ~a month of wash loads.

So, I here pledge to offset my new water use by eating 1 less burger every month (no comment on how coffee intake will vary). This fact will allow me to return to Oberlin for my next reunion (2011) with a feeling of lightness.

Of course, that light-headed feeling could be due to the dehydration. Or the dizzying logic of all these abstract choices one faces when trying to get ready to raise a kid.

The girl with the arm

OMG. Can I just tell you that my daughter can throw overhand, with equal accuracy using either arm from 8 to 10 feet? That she can catch anything you throw her way? That she can dribble a soccer ball or kick it past me? That she's only 2 years old?

I avoid the bragging ordinarily, but this time I just have to bust out with it. It's not even really bragging really. Maybe you could call it concern. Is this normal or freakish?

Two weeks ago I told her to cup her hands together and I tried to toss the ball so it would land there. I worked on getting her eyes off her palms and onto the ball. With little practice between then and now, she just mastered it. This is the truly fabulous part of parenthood. Zero to the speed of light in no time.

I guess it's the long-awaited reward for profound sleeplessness. The absolute limit of fatigue is setting in at the Suo house, and there are times when yes, you do wonder why the #$%!$ you signed on for this mission. Then little C comes back with something truly amazing or hilarious: like tonight when she started looking askance at us. Yes, looking askance -- eyes down and to the right, conspiratorially, followed by a big giggle.

And the baby is coming along just fine right behind her. Giggling and cooing when she's stared at. Sleeping the rest of the time.

This stuff is hard to beat.

I'll be doggone

OK.  I realize that the average dog might be subject to the 'move ovah for the strollah' mentality of the average new Boston parent.

But, in this case, at least the dog is not average.  

Sababa, at my feet as I write this, is the sweetest mutt on the planet.  She will leave a steak on the floor if I tell her not to touch it.  She has let me clean her (unfortunate recent) surgical wound with complete trust and without complaint.  She is manipulatively cute and does not exploit it (much).  She is not, my friend, one of the things I will give up when our son is born.

It's just everything else, right?

Knowing nothing about this upcoming life other than that it will take all of our effort all of the time, I am curious about just what this means, this loss of privacy and primacy. Sabie did teach me early on that I am not angered when a helpless being needs me in the middle of the night to clean up its...product...all over the kitchen floor. While I hope I do not need to apply other lessons I learned from her case of tapeworms to my son, I definitely learned something small (and surprising) about myself then. 

But it's a really weird thing not to know how I will respond to the rest of it.  I've always held that parents need to be above the fray, above the level of kids, but I know that I'm easily frustrated when people around me aren't logical (where logical is defined as my opinion wrapped in a thin veneer of clever rhetoric).  I'm also pretty selfish about my free time:  I guess if there's nothing to be selfish about there's nothing to fear, but who knows just how I'll react to the demands. 

And, when I talk to something, I want it to talk back, not just gurgle.  

So I guess we'll see, maybe in all your free time you can tell me how you think about the Essential Commitments and how to respond to them.

At least I know one thing, that I'll have Sabie at my side to help clean the floor of any of Junior's extra Cheerios.  If I tell her to.

 

Not to be competitive, but...

Hey. Am I in a vacuum chamber here? I got a baby screaming at me and a toddler who's about to, as soon as she learns that bedtime means bedtime and that spells sleep -- no arguments, no quarter. Yet here I type. Hmmm. Any childless bloggers with write-access to this page want to explain their excuses for not sharing their content with our loyal readers?

Of course, leaving the little one to her screams is probably not sending the right message to the world either. I'd better go soothe her. You're up to bat, C Moore.