Merry Christmas '12

This Christmas Season, my family went to visit my mom and dad 600 miles away.  We also got to meet up with our new niece and Addy's cousin, Callie!  It has been a wonderful trip!  Addy is still a little bit too young to really understand what Christmas is all about and my family usually takes hours (all day) to open gifts, so that was too much for her.  But, all in all, things have worked out well!  Congratulations to Callie on her baptism!

So here's a short little post about Addy.  I like to say that she is a mimic, and it is true.  She tries to dance, she copies everything she sees, and she has started to say "baby" when referring to Callie.  But what is really interesting is the fact that she is making connections.  Her aunt pointed to an ornament of Santa and asked, "Who is that?" expecting her to say "Santa!" or hold her belly and go "Ho ho ho!!"  Instead, she pointed to a different ornament of Santa, one that look very different from the first.  She also goes up to her aunt and asks "Baby?!" enthusiastically.  It took us a while to figure out that she really means, "Where is the baby?"

Sharing things has always been difficult, but sharing affection is particularly hard.  Right now Addy doesn't like having to share grandpa.  She tries to tell the baby "no!" and takes her toys away.  Hopefully, she'll grow out of it by next year and will start to show Callie how to do things instead.

Surprised by Cute

Addy is always very cute, but sometimes she does something that is surprising AND cute, which usually just leaves me laughing so hard my head hurts.

Today there were several examples of this.  My dad used to do this little game with her where he would move his finger around erratically towards her while buzzing like a bee.  He would then poke her on the nose and say "beep!" and she would giggle.  A few days ago, I decided to try this on her.  After I did it, she started to do the same thing... but when she goes "BEEP!" it's super-high-pitched and enthusiastic!  And today she did it to me... to mommy... and to both of her godparents!  Grandpa will be thrilled.

Another instance of her surprising me happened tonight.  She likes to sit on my belly and read, but this time she wanted to bounce like I was a horse.  So I started to bounce and sing the William Tell Overture.  She giggles, but when I stop, she keeps bouncing and starts to make the same "bum da bums" that I did.  I can hear her actually trying to sing, I think for the first time!

I swear she's going to give me diabetes...

Tragedy

I was going to write a post today about how my daughter may have just said her first sentence ("which, incidentally, is "This is awesome"), but when we got home from the park we learned about the terrible shooting in Newtown, CT.  I feel compelled to write about this instead.

Facebook has become a forum for everyone's misguided opinions, and I have no illusions about this.  But today it and the people who populate it have made me extremely sad.  After hearing about the news of this national tragedy, do people mourn?  No.  Do they try to post links to help?  No.  Links to news sites that are covering it?  No.

They post political jibes and conjecture.  Suddenly everyone is an expert in gun control, mental diseases, and social infrastructure.  The first thing I read was an attack on Obama, on all people.  This person decided to use this for a political platform.  I'm 100% certain, however, that whenever there is a national tragedy like this, the incumbent president is blamed for it by at least a few idiots.  Now Facebook has let them and their bigotry intrude into our lives.

Surely the first reaction to an event like this should be shock, followed by an outpouring of prayers, good thoughts, sorrow, aid, and gratitude that the rest of us still have our children.  Then, after all the facts have been obtained, and only after all the facts have been obtained, we, as a people, should try to figure out IF this was preventable and how it could be prevented in the future.  There should be no political attacks, no uninformed conjecture.

So, allow me to say that I cannot even begin to imagine how the parents of those 20 or so children feel. When my daughter was born, she wasn't breathing and didn't breathe for about 4 minutes.  Even though I didn't get a chance to know her, I was filled with a terrible dread that I had lost her.  Already I was in love with her.  Now that I know her...  I cannot fathom a worse fate for a parent.  I will be praying for all of their families.

If you would like to help them, search for some sites that provide aid to the parents.  My wife found this one, but I haven't had time to verify how valid it is.  Nonetheless, it is better to give and held than it is to point fingers.

http://www.indiegogo.com/NewtownShootingFund

May God be with all of the victims and their families.

The Great Pacifier Hunt

Before Addy was born, my sister very thoughtfully sent us some pacifier clips that not only keep her pacifiers attached to her, but also keep them rather visible.

I hope we are not the only parents who are on a constant search for pacifiers.

We currently own 4 that she will actually use, along with 3 clips.  But at any one time there may be only 2 that we can find, if we're lucky.  And it's random as to when one will surface or disappear.  Sometimes they are near her crib, sometimes they are in a couch cushion, and once I found one buried under a cat bed.  For some time now, the yellow clip and its pacifier have been missing.  I searched the whole house, but I still hadn't been able to find it.  That is until today.

We got home from running errands and Addy wanted to play in the leaves in our front yard.  She loves to play in them and throw them over her head.  This time she wanted to be buried in them.

Imagine my surprise when I dig her up and sitting right there next to her, happy as the day is long, is the yellow paci.  It had been buried in the leaves of the front yard for who-knows-how-long.

I guess next time I'm missing a pacifier, I'll have to remember to search outside as well.

CHANGE!

It has been a while since I updated this blog, or any blog, huh?  It is always the same excuse: I'm too tired, I'm too busy, I'm trying to write a novel, I'm a stay-at-home-dad, I'm too absent-minded.

Well, enough of the excuses!  It is time for a change!  This blog is going to be different!  More of a journal.  I might even try my hand at *gasp* drawing once in a while.  We'll see.  Though, for your sake, hope that I don't get that far.  I may think very visually, but I can't draw to save my life and don't really have the time to learn.  I know how long it takes to get good, two of my siblings are artists (4, if you count siblings-in-law) and they're too busy to draw my ideas.

So, since this will try to be a frequently-updated blog that will be light-hearted.... your first new post!!!


I am convinced that parenthood is about teaching parents to do their repetitive tasks and mind the details more than it is about teaching their kids these things.  And not things like feeding and changing...  allow me to give you an example.

There is a scene that plays out all the time in my house, and it's so easy to avoid.  I start out typing away on the computer, either writing down an inspiration, trying to work on my novel, reading a webcomic (such as http://www.christophercomic.com), checking the weather, or, since we don't have TV, reading the news.  I know I should be spending every waking moment watching my child, but sometimes I need to do something to feel like.. ME... and not JUST like dad.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love being dad, but I like to think that dad is just one part of me; the other parts need loving, too!  And I like to think that I'm teaching Addy how to play on her own as well as with me.

But there's only so much of this that Addy can take at once.  I'll be reading about what happened in Angola and how the current political system's abuse of filibustering is undermining the very fabric of BABY!!  Addy has had enough alone-play time and crawls into my lap, her cute little butt on my computer.  She has a love-hate relationship with our computers.  IF we're paying attention to them, then we're not paying attention to her.  But if SHE'S paying attention to them, they're "forbidden" and thus fun.  Well, in this case, they're the enemy.  I can tell this because not a moment after she wiggles her butt against the touchpad, I can smell that she needs to be changed.  BADLY.

So, I put my computer down, pick her up, and swing her happily through the air, trying to get her to giggle before the trauma of a diaper change.  It is quite a hassle to change her if she's squirming, and worse if she's poopy.  I hate having to wash poop out of hair.  I finish cleaning her up despite the struggling, but I have to take care of the dirty diaper that is currently sitting folded on the hamper filled with its toxic package.  I've already had enough of her screaming and fighting me, so I put her down to run around while I head to the toilet not 10 feet away to dump out-
OH GOD!  THE COMPUTER IS OPEN!  Why did I leave the computer open!?  My novel!  Forget this diaper!  I just toss the whole thing in the toilet and run as fast as I can to catch up with speedy chubbylegs gonzales just in time to see her pounding away on the computer keyboard.

You'd be surprised at how much damage that can cause.  My wife has had her screen turned off after one of Addy's poundings... and we couldn't get it back on.  So, I pick her up, check the computer to make sure it is still worki-
OH GOD!  THE RADIO!  She's run across the room and is now pulling the speaker to my nice radio down and trying to eject the CD so she can... stuff it down her diaper or something.  Quickly, I close my computer, hoping I didn't just turn it into a paperweight, and run to stop her from knocking the radio off the shelf.  But she sees me this time, and now it's a game!  She giggles cutely and runs away, looking over her shoulder and hoping I'll catch her.  And, of course, if I don't, she heads straight for the bathroom to go for...
THE DIAPER!  OH THE HUMANITY!


One of these days, I will learn to put my computer away BEFORE I change her...

Lost Traditions

One of the things my wife and I have been thinking and talking about is how we are going to be handling family traditions.  Of course, almost every family has to go through this; which traditions from which family do we want to keep, and which family will we be visiting for which holiday (or visiting us)?  We are truly a neolocal society now, and this threatens a lot of traditions.  Although our parents all live in the same area, we live hundreds of miles from them, hundreds of miles from my sisters, 2 hours from my brother, thousands of miles from my extended family, and across the country from my brother-in-law.  There is no family near us.  We have friends, of course, but we will be moving not too far from now, and they won't be.  It hits me a lot harder than I thought it would, probably because at times I a can be extremely extroverted.  Back in college, when I lived with my family, I had dozens of friends I could see at any moment, and did see every day.  Traditions were easy to make and easy to keep.

Despite being so far from our families, I had always thought, even as a child, that there would be certain traditions, certain experiences that I would share with my own children.  One of them... is gone now.  And perhaps permanently.  I remember going to the Flying W Ranch as a child, and I went almost every time I visited Colorado Springs.  It was always fun to see the old west town, to visit the stores, to try the food, to listen to the cowboy music sung by the Flying W Wranglers.  I stirred the imagination as a child, and as an adult it makes me nostalgic.  Or at least it used to...

According to this article from the NY Times, the Flying W Ranch is gone.  I knew it was in danger when my relatives who live near it told us it was surrounded by flames.  But now, it is confirmed gone. The wildfires that ravaged the West have burnt everything to cinders, and the band is running out of money.  It seems unlikely that it will be rebuilt or that the band will survive.  I always imagined going there with Adelaide, seeing the look on her face, buying her a cowboy hat, showing her how to hold the little metal plate so she wouldn't burn herself.  I feel like a piece of my childhood was destroyed and a piece of my future robbed from not only me, but my entire family.

Quirks

One of the biggest joys of being a parent, I'm finding, is learning what your child is like. What does she enjoy? What does she hate? What does she imitate? However, I feel that this is also one of things that can easily got lost over the years. I thought it would be good to keep a bit of a chronicle of the things Adelaide has done which are incredibly cute.

For starters, she is definitely musical. She has always bobbed and danced to music, even while we're eating. She loves her little toy piano and ipod, especially now that she has figured out how they work a little better. We have been exposing her to all sorts of music - from artists such as the Beatles, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Mozart, Queen, Yes, Gorillaz, Duran Duran, Faure, Tempest, Dream Theater, Bob Dylan, Geckt, Louis Armstrong, and Beethoven, among others. And she seems to like it all! When we watch recorded concerts on Netflix, she claps whenever the song ends. She'll clap all the time now, and has even learned how to make sound with it!

She also has learned to wave, which she does when she meets people, when people are leaving, or just because! She now says "kitty!" and squeals at the cat. She hasn't learned how to pet without hurting the cats yet, but she tries! She is definitely an animal lover, and squeals at every animal under the sun, even the squirrels, or things on TV.

We went to the Children's Museum a little while ago, where there is a market for kids to pretend they are shopping. She loved to push around the cart and put oranges and syrup into it over and over. I've caught her doing that many times with other things. She is definitely imitating us! Sometimes we can make a game of it, where she copies what we're doing.

I'm very glad she's become more independent than she was. Now she likes to play with other kids, and will even want to be left alone to play with others, while earlier it was a struggle to get her to take more than a few steps from us. Now she likes the bath tub, too! She loves to play with water, and will even go towards the "deep" end to stay in a little bit longer. :D

She's been walking since she was 9 months, and for a long time looked like a drunken sailor after a binge. But she always picks herself up and wants to go on her own. Getting her to hold our hands is a challenge! She loves to play "catch me if you can", which always ends in her being caught, falling over, and giggling! She also giggles when I give her a zerbert/raspberry on her belly, or even when I just act like I'm going to. Same with tickling; I don't even have to touch her to make her giggle. She gets it from me...

At the moment she is sleeping on me, so I will close this post before she wakes up and tries to add typing to her repertoire.

1 year...

I know I do not post on here. But if you do run across this post, I would like to commemorate a full year with my daughter! Adelaide is now official a 1-year-old! It has been a long year for me, with a lot of adjusting. But when I look back, it has seemed to go by quickly. To be honest, that worries me. I don't want to miss any of my daughter's life, but at the same time I don't want to miss my own. I have a feeling adjusting is something that is ongoing when it comes to kids.

Today we went to the Greenville Zoo. We have a membership there, so we do go rather often. Today, however, it was very busy. I let Addy walk around on her own most of the time, and I tried to take pictures, though it is certainly difficult to take a picture of a squirmy, inquisitive little girl while trying to prevent her from falling off ledges and tumbling down stairs. She also fed some of the animals (or attempted to at least) and she had her first sandwich, french fries, and snow cone! Pictures have been taken... who knows, perhaps I will post some?