Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
|
|
|
M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
|
|
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 Wide Awake in America Our house is home to an endangered species: the weekend-afternoon nap. M. Small wants no part of it any more. He needs to realize that the nap isn’t just for him; it’s for me. I didn’t need naps when I could sleep until ten or eleven a.m. on weekends, but since that’s no longer an option, the deficit has to be made up somewhere. When he crashes, I can do the same. Or, failing that, a little laundry. This shouldn’t be hard. His day care provider claims that he naps from noon to two every weekday afternoon. But then at two on Saturday, we’re still trying to get him down. There are signs that he’s tired – a generally short fuse over the mildest challenges to his autonomy; a refusal to give up his pacifier without a wobbler, no matter how many times we insist “Pacie is for bed”; his total inability to keep from drifting over the fog line when driving on the freeway. But none of it matters to him, because there are only so many hours in the day and he’s got a lot of running around to do and a lot of shit to try and break. And there’s only so much of that he can do from inside his crib. Yes, he’s still sleeping in a crib. We’re beginning to suspect that at 25½ months, it may be a little late. On the other hand, we’ve always been told that when the kid starts climbing out of the crib, it’s time to switch to a bed, as in that very day. Except he has yet to climb out. I thought for a while that it’s because the walls were high enough to prevent him from heaving himself over, but now I’ve been in there a couple of times when he’s lifted both feet off the mattress and balanced his entire weight along the top rail until I went over and tipped him back in. So now I think it’s just that he’s old enough to realize that if he does go over the wall without a spotter, that hardwood floor is a long way down. Eventually he’ll figure out how to swing down while holding on with his hands and lower himself to the floor, and then we’re screwed. Unless of course that happens the day he goes off to college. There is a toddler bed waiting in the garage, which his b-rents scored for free, just in case he does graduate from the crib before he graduates from kindergarten. When we phase that in, only the fact that it’s shaped like a car will be able to keep him in it. And who knows how long the novelty of that will last? It’s bad enough putting him in his crib already. I parked him in there at about 1:30 on Sunday, then settled down with Trash in the next room to read while we waited for him to drift off (gosh, I’d love to clean the bathroom, but we have to be quiet until he falls asleep). Instead of hearing restful silence after a while, we were treated to a one-tiny-man radio play full of nonsensical monologues, calls to action, things hitting the floor, and the sound of thirty-odd pounds of human being bouncing on the mattress again and again. Those bounces kept getting further and further apart, but it wasn’t because he was winding down. It was because he was starting to get some serious air. After about an hour of this, I went into his semi-darkened bedroom. Everything in his crib – toys, stuffed animals, sippy cup, his pants -- had been hurled to the floor. He greeted me with the remark that awaits almost every time one of us goes in there: “I want to get up.” No shit. I knew that if he’d just lie down and close his eyes for two minutes, he’d be comatose less then a minute in. But try explaining that to a two-year-old. Or, if he already understands it, which is possible, try explaining that it’s a good thing. After he spent an hour or so wearing himself out to prove he wasn’t tired, I decided to say screw it and take him along on a Target errand. We left around three or so. This was taken ten minutes after entering the store:  I guess he showed me, huh? posted by M. Giant 9:13 PM 8 comments 8 Comments:Ella, at 21 months, is getting pretty difficult to get down for a nap as well. And she also throws every single thing from her crib when we put her in to bed. BUT I know she needs the nap, and she's not crying or yelling when she's in there, so I figure she can sit in bed for 2 hours amusing herself and maybe that is a bit of a break even if its not a nap. She always falls asleep though. Do you think M Small is just totally past that stage? Or are you giving up to quickly? I hope its answer B, because I don't want to even consider the possibility that I only have a few more months when I can actually sit down during the day.
By Our youngest daughter is the same age and we set up the toddler bed for naps, at first, then did nights after she was used to the other bed. She loved the toddler bed so it helped getting her to take naps...maybe you could try letting him sleep in the toddler bed for naps as a "treat."
By
Our son is almost 30 months and still in his crib. Granted, he's pretty small, but he has also never tried to climb out of the crib. We tried the toddler bed last week, because he was talking about a bed, and wanting to make his bed, etc. Yeah, that whole being-able-to-get-out-whenever-he-wants? Two year old wandering the house at 2am was a little unnerving. Not to mention that he was totally freaked out by the bed. So we had a kid who slept on his own (most nights) in his crib, and created a kid who would only sleep with us. Needless to say, the crib went back up. Otherwise, he still loves the afternoon nap . . .
By I'm glad to know Jamie isn't the only toddler expressing outrage through the removal and flinging of pants. I'm sure if he could figure out how to deal with the armholes, the shirt would follow...
By
Dude - it's like you're living in my house. We have the same issue with our daughter, who is 27 months old. She does basically the same things M. Small is doing, as well as her personal renditions of the ABC song, Itsy-Bitsy Spider, and counting to 10. She's also still in the crib. I was going to try to switch her this summer, but after a camping trip this summer, where she was all over the damn camper at night with no crib to settle her into, I decided to wait until after Christmas. Actually, my exact word were "She can sleep in that damn crib until she's 4, for all I care", but it may have been the stress talking.
By Fortunately our 28 month old still takes his naps (knock on wood) even on weekends when home with us. He's still in a crib too. He actually did get out one night a couple of months ago, multiple times in the same night until the last escape when I think he hurt himself a bit on the dismount. I immediately bought some sort of crib-encapsulation device (crib tent) ("I'll be damned if I move him out of a crib yet!!") but he never got out again so I sent it back unused. I am dreading the transition; it takes him at least an hour to fall asleep because of all of the singing, talking and jumping he has to do first. There's no way he'll stay in a bed. *sigh*
By
Awww, that picture is crazy cute!
By I agree, I love the picture! We shamelessly resort to driving ours around in the car till he falls asleep for his weekend naps.
By Saturday, November 25, 2006 The Wheels Come Off M. Small's favorite movie, unsurprisingly, is Cars. Not that he's ever seen it before, because he hasn't. But he hasn't seen any other movies either, so Cars, with its association to those Happy Meal cars he's been playing with for months, has a clear edge. If we'd had the courage to take him to see a movie in a theater, it would have been that one. So it's been kind of a long few weeks, waiting for it to come out on DVD (November 7, a date burned in my brain). Late October is when he saw his first TV commercial for the DVD release, and he nearly had a thrombo right there. "Mommy!" he bellowed. "My race cars! And they're REAL!" M. Small's birth parents wanted to get it for him, which was fine with us. It would have been better if we hadn't had to cancel our plans to see them the week it came out, or had been able to reschedule something before yesterday. But that just helped build the anticipation (for us, not him. He doesn't have that kind of attention span). I did happen to bring him to Sam's Club on November 10. The first thing you see when you enter that store is the fifty or so plasma, flatscreen, hi-def, and every other variety of television currently available. And that evening, every single one of them was showing Cars. They weren't all hooked up to the same DVD player, though, which meant that different parts of the movie were playing on different screens. So everywhere he looked he saw a familiar grille. "My race car! My tow truck! Blue car! It's talking!" I didn't want him to absorb too much, so we went right past. I think he was pretty bitter that he couldn't steer the shopping cart, though. "How 'bout let's go over there?" he kept saying, all the way through the checkout line. Trash gave him the DVD case to hold on the way home from the b-rents' place last night. Once he held it in his hands, he had four things to say: "Race car! Tow truck! Open it! PLEASE!" It was too late to watch it last night when we got home, so we held off until late morning. He snuggled up between us on the couch, knowing it was somehow a big occasion, and when that Walt Disney logo came up on the screen, even I had a reaction to it that I haven't since I was ten. So then the movie starts, Lightning McQueen gets his hero's entrance, the race starts, there's a minute or so of exposition. "Faster! Faster!" demands M. Small, who generally has no patience for lengthy backstory. He starts describing circles in the air with one hand, like he always does when a race is on TV. Then the multicar pile-up happens, and he gets upset. "Oh, no! Race cars broken! Scary!" We zapped that part, and went back into normal speed when the yellow flag was being lifted. "Look, all fixed," we said, pointing at the cars on the track. "They're all fixed," he agreed, but by now he was too agitated to sit still. He got off the couch and started throwing stuff, and somehow when I went to calm him down he ended up with the DVD remote, and he stopped the movie, either inadvertently or not. Settling him down seemed to be kind of a lost cause after that. I think he really loved the first two minutes of the film, though. But between that and the Curious George movie last week (by the way, thanks to those who pointed out that was actually the plot of the first book -- yikes!) we've learned our lesson: screen stuff, even kids' movies, before we show it to the kid. I thought we had a little longer, frankly. But at least now I have an excuse to sit on my ass and watch Sopranos DVDs. "I'm screening them for the kid," I can say. "I've got three suitable minutes from Season Two so far." A parent's work is never done. posted by M. Giant 8:45 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
when I was little, we had a pretty limitd video selection. It as just the two animated movies in the house, a lot of Arsenal football videos and seasons 1-3 of Blackadder.
By Wednesday, November 22, 2006 Curiouser and Curiouser M. Small's a big Curious George fan lately. He's enjoyed the books for a while, but then he saw a few episodes of the current animated series (narrated by William H. Macy!) when we were in New Mexico, and he was hooked. I even kind of dig it myself. "What's Curious George doin'?" he'll ask. "Something you should never, ever do," is usually the answer. Trash ordered a couple of used videos off the Internet, but they were kind of a disappointment. For one thing, they aren't the Bill Macy-narrated episodes he likes. When the first tape arrived, it turned out to be little more than a semi-animated filmstrip from the sixties. In each little painfully formulaic and static vignette, the Man with the Yellow Hat takes George somewhere you have no business taking a monkey and leaves him alone. "George was curious," the narrator narrates, and then George gets into trouble and pisses off several dozen people. "George was scared," the narrator narrates, and then there's a big chase until somebody points out how George's most recent act of vandalism was all for the best. The nice thing about them is that they're about two minutes long. The bad thing about them is that there are about five hundred of them on the tape. But it's still vastly preferable to the other Curious George video that showed up last week, which I think might be actively damaging. I think it represents the state of the art in stop-motion animation. In 1982, when it came out. It also somehow prefigured the present-day vogue for origin stories, because it tells the story of when the Man in the Yellow Hat first met George in the jungle. There's this cheap framing device where the two primates are looking through old photos together and find the first picture of George ever taken. This triggers a flashback to their first encounter, where MYH observes George from hiding and his first reaction is to stage a kidnapping. Sure, just says, "I'd like to take him home with me" in his creepy, soft-spoken child-molester voice, but then he uses George's trademark curiosity to get him stuffed in a sack with nothing but his head sticking out. The better to see George's panic and misery, you understand, of which there is plenty. At least until he's on the ship, where quickly cheers up and has a great time falling overboard and nearly drowning while trying to imitate seagulls. It's a laff riot, I'm telling you. I'm told that Curious George resonates particularly with adopted children, in the sense that it's about being welcomed into another home and family. That's why I try not to be too creeped out by MYH's insistence on treating George as a small human once he gets him home. He tries to get him to eat soup using silverware, dresses him in MYH-sized pajamas, and makes him sleep in a bed. It would be a lot less weird if the internal logic were consistent, but instead MYH constantly keeps talking about how he plans to put George in a zoo. Make up your mind, you colonialist prick. Then there's the weird interlude where MYH sits down to smoke his pipe. He gets up, leaving it behind, and George of course picks it up and starts puffing away. "What's Curious George doin'?" M. Small asks. What, indeed. Curious George learns his lesson, though, becoming so sick from the pipe smoke that he has a literal out-of-body experience. Then MYH catches him and throws the pipe away. Pick up the "smoking is bad" message? It's not that I'm pro-smoking or anything; I just don't want my pre-schooler introduced to the concept by a pre-school video. The next day, George watches MYH call the zoo, but instead of being upset at having been uprooted and then rejected for no reason at all, George plays with the phone himself. Naturally he reaches the fire department, who come tearing across town in full force in what is admittedly a very technically impressive (at least for that time) sequence. When the Keystone Kop-like firefighters arrive at Casa Man with the Yellow Hat, they're so pissed at the false alarm that they have George thrown in a medieval dungeon. There then follows a long, long, long, depressing sequence wherein George sits in his dark, filthy cell and cries. I'm not making any of this up. I fast-forwarded that part. Eventually, George escapes and ends up flying over the city hanging onto a bunch of helium balloons. "Fortunately," the Man in the Yellow Hat spots him, and is there to catch him when he comes down. And how does MYH express his relief at getting him back after thinking him lost for good? Well, he sticks him in the zoo like he always planned to, of course. We see George looking all happy in the zoo, sitting high atop a tree surrounded by all the other animals, just so we know it's a happy ending. Except we still have the framing device to get back to, so then we're back at Casa Man with the Yellow Hat, and he closes the photo album, and then he's chasing George around because it's bedtime, and now I'm creeped the hell out all over again. Again, the animation is pretty decent for the early eighties, even though the picture looks like it was shot through a dirty fish tank and the soundtrack seems to have been recorded in a pillow. I just don't know how, with its script-it-as-we-shoot-it storyline, it ever got the approval of the Rey estate. Or how they got the thing narrated by June Foray of all people, who really should have known better. I do know, however, that taping a few of those Bill Macy episodes off of TV for M. Small just became a higher priority. posted by M. Giant 8:21 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:
That's actually the plot of the first Curious George book. Kidnapping, jail, pipe, near drowning, the whole nine yards. It's actually incredibly depressing.
By
Yep, it sure is the exact plot of the first book, which I unwittingly purchased for a quarter at our local library's annual used book sale. (My 3.5 year old kiddo loves CG so much that she insisted on being CG for Halloween...)
By Have you checked out the new Curious George movie? I haven't seen it (I can't get past how the monkey looks nothing like he did in the books I enjoyed as a kid), but I've heard good things. It's out on DVD now. http://www.curiousgeorgemovie.com/
By
I don't know your political views, but you might like this:
By
Our two year old loves CG, but I am referring to the movie. He watches the PBS show if we happen to catch it, but the movie really keeps his attention. He even started to immitate certain scenes while the movie is playing.
By
"I'll take 'Things Velcrometer Has in Common with Ken Jennings' for 2000, Alex."
By Saturday, November 18, 2006 Aisle Be Damned Trash and I did something we haven't done in quite a while today: we went grocery shopping without M. Small. Even when one of us goes alone, we tend to bring him along, just to get him out of the house. He likes to ride in the shopping cart anyway. And when both Trash and I go, we generally take him with us. We heard somewhere that it's a bad idea to leave a two-year-old at home alone, and although that might just be one of those urban legends one hears, you can't be too careful. But this weekend, Trash's mom and stepdad were in town. So they all went over to my sister-in-law's house for the afternoon. We don't usually have the house to ourselves on weekends, so naturally we left. And we remembered what grocery shopping used to be like. That little shelf right in front of the shopping cart handle, for instance? It can hold food when there's not a toddler in it. It's possible to deliberately and methodically go over your list and sort through your coupons, absent a small child who demands constant motion when perched on anything with wheels, and enforces this requirement by snatching anything paper-like from your hands. You can get through the whole store at your own pace, instead of rushing through so the kid doesn't hit the proverbial wall in aisle six. (Trash hit it in aisle eight, but because that was her own wall and not someone else's, it was still liberating). Best of all, when you get to the cash register and you start taking all the stuff out of the cart, it's all stuff that you knew was in there. Normally, when we get home with everything, it's pretty much a race to get the groceries in the fridge and the cabinet before M. Small has them in the living room, the nursery, the basement, the bathroom, and the mailbox. You can imagine what this does for the level of organization in our shelves. But today Trash took everything out and we reorganized it all. Which ended up saving a lot of space. For one thing, we had three open bags of popcorn in there. Consolidating them into one is a much more efficient use of the room we have in there, although I am a little concerned that now it's going to take me three times as long to find it in a week. In short, Trash and I would seriously be considering putting M. Small in day care on grocery day, but since his absence allowed us to spend a lot more money, maybe not. Not that he's not great to have along on shorter trips, mind you. It's just hard to focus on both the kid and the shopping sometimes. Which reminds me of a story Trash's brother told us last week, about when he and my (almost five-year-old) niece Deniece were at the grocery store. He's working his way down the aisles, only half-aware that his daughter is entertaining herself with some jaunty little song and dance she's making up. But to keep her distracted, he sort of joins in, bopping along, nodding his head, pointing at people when she does. Then he starts to notice the looks he's getting, and tunes in to the lyrics of Deniece's little tune: You're old, and you're old, and you're old, and you're super super old, and you're very old, and you're old… After that, the express lane was a no-brainer. posted by M. Giant 9:00 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Aah, the weekly manic trek to the grocery store, toddler in tow. I feel your pain, M. Giant. The favorite request of Lucas (2.5 years) is to see the lobsters. Every time we get near the Seafood Department-end of the store, it starts up, "I wanna see the lobsters". It's fun after the first six visits. The best times are when the Seafood-dude uses the rake to stir them up!
By I remember grocery shopping with my mom when I was 6, my sister was 3, and our brother was 1. He was riding in the cart while we walked. My mom was walking in front of the cart, pulling it along, so she didn't see my brother pick up a carton of eggs, open it up, and start dropping the eggs on the floor, one at a time, leaving a little trail through the store. My sister and I thought it was hilarious, but for some reason, we didn't say anything. After Mom noticed what was going on, we got in more trouble for not alerting her than he did for the actual offense (which I thought was totally unfair at the time, but as a parent I now understand).
By Tuesday, November 14, 2006 Shrink Wrap I could call the power company and ask them to send someone to my house to do an energy audit -- one of those things where they come and tell you how to spend the winter heating your house and not your yard -- but I already know how it's going to go. Some guy will come out, take one look at our original, circa 1950 windows, and tell us to replace those creaky old beasts. Sure, most of them still work fine, and have all the pieces, and you can't even get them in those sizes any more, but in the long run it'll be worth it because with the increased energy efficiency, the expense will easily be covered in a matter of centuries. Drop a few thousand now, and I'll be glad I did come December 2253, when it's going to be so much cheaper to keep the house cool. Much easier to just get some of those plastic window insulating sheets and tape them up. If you're reading this south of the Mason-Dixon line (or even, if you're as lazy as I was until last year, south of Canada), a window insulation kit is a less well known but no less ingenious product of my neighbors, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, better known as 3M. They're the folks who brought you Scotch Tape, Post-Its, and all manner of digital media, and they're not paying me at all. The way they work is that with some double-sided tape (included), you stretch a sheet of clear plastic across your window frame. Now, anyone who's ever attempted to sleep in cellophane sheets probably doesn't think that sounds very cozy at all (especially after the sex is over), but the insulation actually comes from the air space that the plastic creates. And you can still see through your windows, unlike those ignorant souls who every winter attempt to seal out Old Man Winter with a layer of Owens-Corning fiberglass and end up having a very itchy winter. The things are even so easy to put up that I used to do my own bedroom window when I still lived at home. Since then I've added a degree of difficulty, in that back then I had to decide in advance how high I wanted my window shade all winter. These days I cut little holes for the rod and the cord so we can open and close them even when they're sealed up tight behind plastic. Also complicating things is that when I was seventeen, I didn't have a two-year-old running around "helping." Otherwise my life would probably be quite different right now. I like to get the film up nice and tight; not only for the insulating qualities, but also because, as I've told Trash, it's like wrapping a Christmas present that you're going to have to look at for the next four or five months. But what's great about this film is that you point a blow-dryer at it for a few minutes and all the wrinkles disappear when it goes tight as a drum. "Tight as a drum" turns out to not be an entirely good thing, in a house with a percussion-minded toddler in the house. Last year, for instance, we ended up having to use a few of those other aforementioned 3M products to patch things up (No, not Post-Its. Jeez). But that issue may have been self-correcting this year. We only have one hair dryer, and as a safety feature it's got a built-in GFI on the plug. You drop it in the bath, it automatically goes dead before you do. Then you dry it off (but…with what?) hit the reset button and it's good to go again. Except Sunday, when I was heating up the front window, M. Small found that button and pressed it so many times that it killed the hear dryer for good. And since neither Trash nor I is in the habit of blow-drying, it was our only one. I think they last time either of us even used the thing was last year when I insulated the windows. Anyway, I've got five of the main-floor windows sealed up so far, with two-and-a-half of them blow-dried. There are three to go, not counting the ones in M. Small's bedroom. And since I plan to do the rest of the windows while he's asleep, I think we'll just leave those two the way they are. Those heavy quilts we've got hanging over them should be good for keeping out more than just light, right? posted by M. Giant 9:17 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:When I lived in Japan --the land of icy winters and exterior walls made of approximately 3 cm of mdf or pylwood, where doubleglazing is a myth unless you live in Hokkaido-- I discovered the wonder that is bubblewrap on windows.
By Saturday, November 11, 2006 Bullsheetrock I really can't complain about the contractor who's been running the remodeling on our home. And not just because I have a rule about not making fun of people here whom I know in real life. Sure, I can be hard on celebrities, because I'm not actually going to meet too many of them. So far I've only met one famous person that I'd dissed here (an Oscar winner, as it happens), and it's not like he knew about it. But our contractor is cool. He told us it would be six to eight weeks, and so far it's only been two and a half months. Since contractors are generally like Scotty from Star Trek in reverse, I think that technically we're ahead of schedule. Even the delays we've run into so far haven't been his fault. The second year we lived here, we built a deck in the back yard and learned an important truth about doing home improvements in Minneapolis. City inspectors here are picky, busy, and backed-up like the freeway at rush hour, so getting stuff approved so you can move on to the next stage can be a time-consuming stage of the process. This happens several times in between the acquisition of the building permit and completion of the project. This isn't the important truth we learned. The important truth we learned is, don't get a permit. All of our home improvement projects have gone a lot more smoothly since we adopted that rule. But our contractor is going a little more by the book, probably because the sheer scale of the project surpasses anything we've attempted before (which, after all, is why we got a contractor in the first place). So all the permits and papers and inspections have been in order for a couple of weeks, setting the stage for the guy to come and put up the sheetrock. Now if only the guy would come and put up the sheetrock. He's not an employee of our contractor, but a subcontractor. And as far as I can tell, he's been here twice in the past two weeks. The original plan was for him to come three Fridays ago, and finish up that Monday or Tuesday. Instead, he showed up for a quick looky-loo on Saturday, and we expected him back after the weekend. Monday and Tuesday came and went, as did Wednesday. Wednesday night, BuenaOnda and English showed up for their scheduled visit, and we had to put their air mattress on the floor in what will be M. Small's room, because that was the only place that didn't have sheets of unattached drywall stacked all over. Thursday, while they were still here, the drywall guy showed up late morning, acted like a big grump to everyone, and put in a few hours of work. He did part of our bedroom and part of the bathroom and knocked off for the day, probably to go find someone else to charm. But at least he'd gotten started, and we figured that even if he wasn't done, things should be finished Monday or Tuesday. This was based on the assumption that he'd be back Friday. He wasn't. Nor was he back the following Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Yesterday, it looks like he stopped by and did a bit of work. He screwed a few haphazard segments to the ceiling in M. Small's room and also covered the entire south wall. I'll miss the window that used to be there, but progress is progress. What's funny about this is that when we were originally putting together the contract, I suggested to Trash that I do the sheetrocking myself. Just to save a thousand bucks or so, you know? But Trash said no, it wouldn't be worth it, because it would take me weeks, while the pros could do it in a matter of days. Now here we are, hoping we'll have it ready to paint by Thanksgiving weekend. I can only take comfort in the fact that I'm not that good at it anyway. It's a little weird, being in a position where you find solace in knowing you suck at something. Our actual contractor has been great, completely on our side through this. We call him every night and say, "Dude didn't come again," and he promises it'll get done this coming week, even if he has to do it himself. "It's just that he really does good work," he says. "I just wish he'd do more of it," I have to respond. Maybe the guy's been sick, as our contractor tells us. Or maybe he looks at all the weird-ass angles he has to deal with and becomes disheartened. Don't know, don't care. I want my walls, dammit, posted by M. Giant 8:28 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Do you have a "penalty" in your contract for late work? Even if you don't, just tell your contractor you're deducting 10% if the work isn't done by Thanksgiving and he can go to court if he wants to get the money back. The first rule of working with contrators, particularly ones you like and don't want to fight with, is have very clear financial penalties for them if work is not done within a certain time frame. I'm sure you have atleast 50% of the bill left to pay which gives you a lot more leverage with these guys. In any case, the only thing that makes them listen is the money. Good luck!
By
You think the Sheetrocker is bad....wait until the very very amiable "snail-like" taper and mudder shows up. He's friendly and kind but he takes FOREVER!
By I've got to somewhat agree w/anon above - we worked w/a lovely man as our contractor, who never knowingly did a single thing to upset us, but yet sometimes the only way I could get him to lean on his subs was to withold HIS payment (we were on a monthly payment schedule.) I have no idea what kind of attitude he used on his subs after that, but stalled projects very quickly got done. I hated it, because we've known the contractor for years but had never worked w/him, but my Daddy reminded me that "bidness is bidness." (I won't depress you by telling you how long we spent building our custom house. AND we were out of city limits and not liable for any sort of codes or inspections.) After this became a repeat pattern, I wound up hiring subs myself. Just hang in there and put any thoughts of polite (or even civil, at times) behavior out of your mind. Some subs only respond to absolutes - why, I have no idea.
By Tuesday, November 07, 2006 What's in a Name BuenaOnda and her new husband English came up for a short visit last week. They spent the night on an air mattress, on our still-under-construction upper floor. It was supposed to have walls by then, but our sheetrock guy hasn't been that great so far at, you know, showing up. I felt bad about making our guests sleep in what looked a lot like the climactic scene in Blow, but they assured us that they were both quite comfortable all night. I took them at their word, because there wasn't much I could do about it after the fact anyway. BuenaOnda was last here just under two years ago. So when you consider that M. Small's 26th month is starting in a few days, you can probably imagine that he's changed a bit since the last time they met. For instance, he's walking, talking, wearing pants, sleeping through (most) nights, and when he gets impatient with a meal he just throws it on the floor in sticky fistfuls instead of horking it up into the lap of whomever would have been wielding his bottle back then. Also, he's tripled in size. So there's that. And he's suddenly gotten better at names. Shortly after our guests arrived Wednesday night, they went outside to smoke with Bitter. Trash kept them company, leaving M. Small and I in the house alone. "Let's go find [BuenaOnda]," M. Small said. When he could only come up with her cell phone, he gave it to me and explained, "That's [BuenaOnda's] phone." As for English, his nickname took a bit longer for M. Small to grasp. I normally don't transliterate M. Small's utterings here, preferring to spell them as he clearly means them. But it's quite cute to hear him say, "Come on, Igg-wiss." He clearly wasn't happy with how this was coming out, so he kept practicing. Over time, the nickname evolved through "Inn-wish," "Egg-wih," and "Yng-whych," the last of which probably could have been substituted by the more easily pronouncable "Welsh" given the spelling. Eventually he settled on something that sounded a lot like "Angwy," which kind of made me a little jealous, because "Angry" is just about the best nickname ever. Meanwhile Linda, who is probably one of the first twenty people he ever met in his life, finally got the honor of hearing him say her name the other night when she was over watching The Amazing Race. I think he made up for the delay by saying it in extra-charming fashion. This involved climbing up on something that's behind the love seat she was sitting on, leaning forward, and repeating "Winda" directly at the back of her head while grinning madly. Rather winsome of him, really. I'm just glad M. Small got my facility with names and not Trash's. When we were in our respective high schools and didn't know each other that well yet, we were at a tournament and I ran into some of her friends. "Hi, Dan," they said, because that what Trash thought my name was at the time. "Hi," I said. "But my name's not Dan." "Aw, Trash said you were a kidder," they said knowingly. The good news is that she quickly learned my actual first name, and has been reliably calling my by it ever since. What worries me a bit is that lately, so has M. Small. I'm always correcting him, "No, I'm Daddy or Dad." After a few rounds of this, he starts addressing me properly again. It's not that I resent the informality; it's just that I know one day he's going to mishear me, and then all be "Dan" all over again. "Danny silly," he'll giggle. Oh, well. He already knows I'm a kidder. posted by M. Giant 8:01 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:My 21-month-old has been reliably greeting her father lately with, "Hi, Cwaig!" (Craig) Sunday, it was "Happy birthday, Cwaig!" I'm still Mommy, even though Cwaig keeps trying to get her to say my name.
By My three-year-old niece has been calling both my brother and my SIL by their first names for almost a year now. Unless they're in public. Her new thing is spelling it, so instead of a Hi Mommy or Hi Debra, it's "Hi D-E-B-R-A". And "P-A-U-L, can we go outside?"
By Our daughter calls her father "Victor" when he's not listening to her. She's 2. It pisses him off I think but it's still frickin' hilarious.
By My 2 1/2 year old has been trying out Mom instead of Mommy and my heart is breaking! I don't think she knows my first name yet, because my husband mostly calls me Honey. If one of us calls her Honey, she usually says "I'm not Honey, I'm Sweetie!"
By Sunday, November 05, 2006 Dim Bulb When Trash and I were in Athens, Georgia in 2002, we spent an evening at the 40 Watt Club. Like Walter's Barbecue earlier in the day, It was kind of a pilgrimage for me, as an R.E.M. fan. Even as a former R.E.M. fan. (Actually, let me clarify that. I still dig their older stuff. They started losing me around Monster and once Bill Berry left and they completed their transformation to John Malkovich, Jim Belushi, and Eugene Levy's character from A Mighty Wind, I lost all interest in their new music. Too much work.) So anyway, we go to the 40 Watt Club, been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. Literally. I still have the black 40 Watt Club t-shirt I bought that night, and it's been in pretty regular rotation ever since. It's nearly gray at this point. Nobody ever comments on it, though. I thought the place was pretty famous, at least among the faithful (and formerly faithful, which I guess isn't all that faithful) but I've only been asked about the t-shirt three times. The first time was when a couple of years ago. Someone asked me what kind of club it was, and what the membership requirements were. I explained that it was more or less a bar, and membership requires an ID saying you're 21. The second and third times were this fall. Someone asked me if I was from Athens when I was at the local neighborhood festival with M. Small, and I said no, I just visited once. And then, when we were at the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, one of our friends' kids made friends with the daughter of a couple on an adjoining patch of grass, and the other kid's mom asked me if I was from Georgia. When I bought this t-shirt, I thought it was a pretty cool thing to have. But now it turns out that the one artifact of hip cred I own is only recognized by parents of toddlers. Obviously I need to reassess. * * * Okay, I've reassessed. And I have decided that clearly, being the parent of a toddler is a much more hip thing to be than I previously suspected. Now I can continue wearing my fading 40 Watt Club t-shirt with confidence. Except now I'm just wishing I hadn't gotten it entirely clean after that time he shat on it. Because how fucking scenester would that be, huh? posted by M. Giant 8:26 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:
This is precisely how we feel about our First Avenue shirt.
By Dude, toddlers are the ultimate hipster accessory these days. You know you're a Grup, right?
By Hey, I live in Athens! Next time, drop by and say hello before you go clubbing with the cool kids.
By Thursday, November 02, 2006 Trick-or-Treat, Part II M. Small's second year of trick-or-treating went better than his first. In part because it started on Saturday morning. That's when the shops in our neighborhood opened up their doors to trick-or-treaters and their parents. We zipped M. Small into his Tigger costume and the three of us started going door-to-door. M. Small would hold up his little plastic pumpkin and be amazed that people he's never met before would just drop stuff into it. "Thank you, thank you!" he'd cry out. Getting him to say "Trick or treat" took a little more prompting, but eventually he got the hang of it. And not like last year, where he managed to utter one hesitant "Ktgdeekhx" at the end of Halloween evening. Meanwhile, Trash learned a little something too. Going into all these clothing boutiques that she'd never entered before, she remarked, "A lot of these stores have really nice clothes. I'm totally coming back here." "Why do you think they do it?" I responded. Another little piece of her childlike innocence died at that moment. But she's still going back. One of our last stops was the grocery store, where instead of handing out candy they were giving apples, cheese-and-cracker snacks, and little containers of milk. M. Small was barely out the door before he put down his pumpkin and reached into it for the first time that day, in order to retrieve the apple and start chowing down on it right there. That was the most forceful reminder that he's adopted I've ever experienced. Tuesday night, Halloween proper, was windy and cold. But M. Small was up for it. Bundled up in two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, three shirts and a stocking cap under what amounts to a hooded fur coverall, he was eager to get going. "Go outside!" he insisted. We started at the next-door neighbors' house, but they weren't home yet. While we waited for no on to answer the door, I coached M. Small on the "Trick or treat" aspect of the procedure. After a minute or so of waiting, we turned and headed to the next house. No joy there, either. Or the next one after that. I began to wonder if maybe 5:45 in the evening wasn't a bit early. On the fourth house, we rang the doorbell. M. Small waited a minute, then turned to leave all on his own. He must have figured this is what trick-or-treating is; you go to people's houses, ring the doorbell or knock, wait a minute, and then leave. It probably made about as much sense to him as two-thirds of what goes on in his life. By the time we decided to go inside to warm up, we'd successfully gotten answers at three houses. But unlike last year, when he was pretty much a passenger, I held his hand and let him walk. This meant that three houses took approximately sixteen hours. We made one more quick trip out, to visit a house across the street and up the block where they'd specifically asked us to be sure to stop by, and when we came home, my niece Deniece was there, along with one of her cousins and both of their moms. The little party headed back out to hit the next block down, and I think what M. Small really needed to learn how to trick-or-treat was a role model. Because by the time we finished up for the night, he had gotten the hang of it in a big way. He was running so fast he overshot houses entirely. He made me carry his pumpkin of candy between houses and only asked for it back when mounting stoops, like I was his caddy or something. He called out "My turn!" about ringing doorbells. He bellowed "Trick or treat!" at every neighbor who opened up. At one point, upon finding himself on the wrong side of an outwardly swinging door and blocked from direct access by the two older girls, he simply reached the hand with the pumpkin around the edge of the door so candy could be dropped in. Somebody had mastered the concept. Now he has to master the concept that Halloween is over, and I think it's kind of a struggle. He hasn't been asking to wear his Tigger costume any more, but when I dropped him off at day care, he looked up at where the Halloween decorations had been sitting for weeks and demanded, "Where's the pumpkin?" Fortunately, his dad is quite lazy and slow when it comes to taking down Halloween decorations at home. That should soften the transition. posted by M. Giant 9:00 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:The first time my oldest son went trick or treating,he was 2 1/2 and at every house he would lift up his Casper (the Friendly Ghost) mask and say "I'm not really Casper, I'm Nathan". He's 28 now and its still one of my most charming memorys of Halloween.
By
Ah yes, the Halloween letdown... My kiddo has been pleading to go Trick or Treating every day since Tuesday, and when I tell her no, she sits forlornly by the front window clutching her plastic ToTing pumpkin, mumbling "There's my jack o'lantern, though" to herself. (Yeah, we haven't taken down the Halloween stuff here yet either.)
By I don't understand how you post about Halloween and you don't include a picture of M. Small in his costume. What's up with that?
By Seriously! I was all set to actually SEE the Tigger-ness, and then ... nuthin'. Sheesh.
By 
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
