The Tao Of Childcare
Actually, I don’t think this is tao at all, but I’ve noticed something in recent weeks: The more kids you have, the harder it is to keep your house clean.
Reader's Notebook
Burmese Days - George Orwell. I read this book primarily because I saw an interesting looking travel book at Borders that is about following Orwell’s trail in modern Burma. I figured I needed the background before I could justify buying it. This is no where near as good as Orwell’s more famous works - 1984, Animal Farm - but still presents an interesting and remarkable critique of the British empire during its final glory days during the inter-war period.
Fun Day At The Pool
Posting as I listen to the new Crowded House album… We took the girls to the magnificent, opulent, new city pool here in Carmel Monday. I think the city spent something like $800 million on it (slight exaggeration) and still has the nerve to charge residents to use it. Anyway, it’s loaded with all kinds of stuff: a kiddie pool, a lap pool, a hybrid pool that is for bigger kids and feeds into a normal pool, a dive and slide pool, a lazy river (which of course was not working), and then a huge water slide.
Shitty Day
Literally a shitty day. We went through at least a dozen diapers and pull-ups today. I’m expecting anti-pollution people to picket our house tomorrow because of all the waste. When we got the girls out of bed this morning, they had each managed to remove their diapers. M.’s bed was just soaked. I’ll spare the details, but C.’s was far worse, and at 5:00 AM to boot. Not every day of parenthood can be lemonade and cotton candy, I guess.
Ed
I tend to get stuck on specific memories occasionally. I’ll call up some image from the past and it becomes a dominant thought for a couple days. I’m never sure if this is a sign, and if it is a sign what it means, or just how my brain works. For example, last fall I went through an extended phase where I kept thinking of the fall of 1994, when my roommate got a Mac and we were discovering the strange world of AOL.
On Fireworks
I have to say, no matter what people who vote red in each election might claim, I love America. But I hate fireworks. Big, pretty fireworks that can be seen from miles away are fine. It’s the ones that regular people decide to fire off at 10:45 in neighborhoods that I hate. Is it wrong that I secretly hope the idiots who shoot off their fireworks long after little ones have gone to bed lose a finger or hand in the process?
Silence
We had a few minutes of silence tonight. We ordered a two-screen portable DVD player for the van last week and decided to fire it up for the girls for the first time, just to make sure it worked. We got everything working, put the girls in their seats, popped in Finding Nemo, and for a few minutes, we had glorious silence. M. could only go so long before asking 1000 questions, “What’s that?
Kids
As we begin this holiday week, some catching up on the kids. I’ve got a couple big projects in mind for this week, which figures since most of my readers are probably on some kind of reduced work schedule this week. But, S. is working days this week, so I probably won’t get around to them anyway. M.’s first real haircut was Thursday. I say real since S. just took off an inch or two on her own awhile back, and Thursday involved going to a hair cuts for kids place and dealing with strangers with scissors.
NBA Draft
Well, the kids intervened a little, and some household chores kept me from watching as much of the draft as I would have liked. By the time I was able to sit down in front of the TV for good, I was just too tired to rewind and watch the entire thing from the beginning. So some truncated thoughts, or I guess some thoughts based on my truncated viewing and reviewing of the picks.
Draft Preview
It is my hope to continue a small tradition of the blog and provide some kind of commentary on tonight’s NBA draft. Conveniently, S. is working, so I’ll have the TV to myself. Inconveniently, we have two kids, so I’ll be DVRing and watching after bedtime, hoping I don’t get interruptions from upstairs. A quick preview seems in order, though. Oden vs. Durant. It’s not even a question in my mind.
Little Reader
As an addendum to my Reader’s Notebook entry, a funny update on what C. is up to these days. My wee girl loves her some books! We’ve got books scattered all over the house, and one of her favorite tricks to to round them up and bring them to me, one-by-one. She’ll dig through them, looking for one that grabs her interest, then picks it up, and scurries my way, giggling and shrieking the entire way.
The Lost Art (A Rant Of Sorts)
Lost arts: The bounce pass. The stolen base. Good customer service. As we were working on our various projects around the house this winter and spring, I kept a mental list of customer service issues we had with the various contractors and businesses we worked with. There were a lot of unreturned phone calls, which are always annoying. To be honest, though, I lost track of my big list because one business' especially poor performance.
We Must Look Nice
This weekend, two different times while out for a family walk, we were stopped by people driving through the neighborhood looking at houses to answer some questions about living here. If it happens one more time, we’re contacting the home owners association and asking for some kind of compensation plan, because we talked it up! I’m pretty sure houses are going to start flying off of the market thanks to our good words of advise.
Trip To The Lou
Very good trip to St. Louis Tuesday and Wednesday. I headed over with a friend from Indy who had business in the area and generally takes in a Cards' game when he is in town. He dropped me off and headed to his meeting, I did some walking and shopping and picture-taking, then caught lunch with Mr. N at a favorite from St. Louis trips past, Rigazzi’s. A little Sicilian lasagna and a nice fishbowl of Bud Light for lunch is hard to beat.
To The Lou
Just a friendly reminder that the new White Stripes album hits stores on Tuesday. As I type this at 11:07 PM, I’m seriously considering staying up until midnight to grab it from iTunes, even though my alarm is set for 5:50 AM tomorrow morning. (That is one thing I miss about the non-Daylight Savings Time days in Indiana. During the summer, you could buy new albums on iTunes at 11:00 PM on Monday nights.
Very Quiet
Quiet here on the blog and elsewhere. It’s been kind of a strange week. I’ve been doing some data migration (that’s fancy talk) which has disrupted some of my normal routines. C. is being a royal pain at night, which makes mornings tough. I’ve got thoughts, just not always the motivation to post them for you. Several folks have asked about what the job prospects are looking like. To be honest, there’s not much going on right now.
Dumb Kids
Not my kids, although there are moments where I’m thinking that. No, I’m talking about the kids who edited the paper down at campus the past two semesters. I’ve been digging through the stories I wrote to make copies to send out to prospective employers and thus reading through everything I had published. Oddly enough, I don’t always like reading my stories once they’re printed. I can’t explain why, it just works out that way.
The Deep End
We took the girls to the in-laws' pool today. It was a pretty good demonstration of how different my daughters are. M., nearly three and a two summer veteran of the pool, threw a couple fits because she didn’t want to get into the water. When we finally coaxed her in, it took her forever to relax and have fun. When she was in the water with me, she wrapped her legs and arms around me, clinging tightly, and always had a nervousness in her voice.
Big Day For M.
Hey, all those words in the subject line have three letters. How about that? Anyway, today was a rather large day for M.. Her first trip to the dentist! We’ve been educating her with a Dora goes to the dentist book for a few weeks, and for the past couple days she seemed really excited to go see Dr. I. (Long-time reader may recall that our family dentist is an extremely attractive woman.
Occupational Hazard
The potty training had been going really well this week. Then, today, poop on the floor. Not a top five moment in my parenting life.