Simian Farmer

Children of the corn

Wednesday evening, after work, I rushed home so we could pack up the kids and the jogging stroller, grab a healthy dinner at the Wendy's drive-thru, and take the 20 minute drive outside the city to get lost for a couple hours in two and a half metres worth of corn.

Tavish kept puking up on his rain coat, Declan didn't want to ride Dad's shoulders but instead insisted on being carried in my arms, and Tav was looking for a boob for the last 15 minutes or so.  But it was three hours out of the house... and it was great!

(For those who don't know, #94 on the Edmonton Oilers is Ryan Smyth; he's ugly and insists on sporting a mullet, but he's a damned good hockey player and he sacrificed several teeth in this spring's road to the Stanley Cup Final.)

More pics below...

Random bad joke

What did the astronaut say just before his mission to a black hole?

"I have a date with density."

Pent up fingertips

It's not that I don't want to type anything here, it's more like it's just been really hard to find the time to come up with anything better than a grocery list of inane details.

Exacerbating that, both boys are getting over head colds.  Dex got it first.  We locked him in the bathroom for 46 hours with a bowl of water and kept shoving Saltines under the door in the hope that he wouldn't pass it to his baby brother Tavish.

No dice.  Tav went to bed on Thursday or Friday (it's hazy already) and woke up at 11.30 that night with a runny nose.  I picked him up and he clung to me so tightly I thought he was going to plant an embryo in my sternum that would eventually bust out of my chest singing rag-time.  That hasn't happened yet, so I may be safe; but MAN! that kid has strong hands.

Amy spent much of the weekend 'out'.  Two nights in a row -- highly unusual.  Scrapbooking until midnight on Friday (there are actually stores that stay open that late for these scrapbooking 'parties') and then out again on Saturday night to a sex toy party.  18 women all together in the same house talking about lubes, appliances, unusually-shaped pasta and eating chocolate and passing around a 'hot potato' bic lighter shaped like a penis.  She said she picked up my birthday present there, so I'm rather intrigued.

And, really, if I fess up to a required degree of honesty - as I feel I should - then I may have stayed up just a little too late Saturday night playing Neverwinter Nights on the computer because I'd gotten my dwarven warrior really close to the end and I wanted to see it all the way through so I could lay a smack-down on Mephistopheles with my +10 greatsword and finally lay to rest that little itch what's been occupying me lately.

Itch scratched.  Back to more normal stuff this week.

Just a little eerie

This is a rather boring minute of video taken on its own.

What it really is is a snapshot of nearly 30 years ago (and the 20-odd years that followed) where I am the stone-faced automaton pointedly ignoring MY brother, and Uncle Buster is the one cavorting and pawing at me to get my attention.

Sort of gives me the willies.

(Sorry about the moistened gecko on Tav's shirt; all his shirts are moistened within the first few minutes of being dressed.)

Tactful silence

Is my tongue still bleeding?  Because I had to bite it so hard when my wife and her girlfriend were chatting in our living room on the weekend.

"Here, 'Chelle, you can have this sweater if you want.  It was almost a hundred bucks and I've worn it, like, maybe three times in the last year."

[AMY tries on white, hand-knit sweater for display]

"See?  It's nice, but can you see me wearing this in a house with two baby boys any time soon?  Not likely.  I'd never get the puke and spaghetti stains out of it."

"No, probably not, eh?  Too bad though, because your boobs look pretty good in it."

"Um, excuse me, my boobs aren't accessories."

"Amy?  Yes, your boobs ARE accessories."

[Simon bites tongue.]

Simian Farmer parent hacks

A website I check out daily is called Parent Hacks, and they've got some real gems of ideas for beating your kids into submission easing the transition from the ebullience of heady, single freedom to the raw, chafing sores that result from parents' introductions to the chains that accompany at least 18 years of domestic confinement.

I thought I'd share some of our own.  I have no idea as to the originality of any of these, but Amy and I pretty much just made them up or dredged them from some recess of memory.  Amy's responsible for most of them.  That woman as a mother is a wonder to behold.  Two kids, two dogs and she has yet to seriously essay an attempt to kill any of them.

So here's 2.5 years worth of advice that we're foisting on the ether.  Amy had to remind me of most of this when I told her I wanted to post about it.  (I think I got carried away.)

More dexicon

As Declan wades ever deeper into the sometimes stultifyingly viscous morass of confusion that is the English language, he continues to entertain us, his parents, on an increasingly frequent basis.  He does this most often through the unintentional neologisms he coins on the spot.

(He also puts us in stitches with a frequent running commentary of absolutely everything he does.  A one-sided conversation like the following is not uncommon:

"Out-dide.  OH - Tree!  Big tree.  Green 'eaves.  Birdies -- tweet, tweet!  Walking; walking; walking.  RUNNING!!  Running.  OH!  Fah down.  Hohkay?  Yeah.  Dirt.  Dirty hands.  Owie.  Knee.  Hoot knee.  Gogs!  Running... Fahvey, Gingo... goggies.  Spinning!  Spinning... Dizzy... Oooo... Fah down.  Hah... lawnmower -- wheyditgo?!")

One of his newest creations is 'god-poop'.

For some reason, he loves walking around the yard with me, pointing out each smelly pile and waving buh-bye as it gets shoveled into the bag.  On days when the minefield hasn't been cleared (most of the time), we frequently warn him to watch out for dog poop as he's RUNNING!! around.  He's gotten quite adept at this and now points it out all the time for us; only it's god-poop.

With that kind of fertilizer, I'm convinced we're going to have one helluva lawn next summer.

*****

(previous Dexicon entry)

Pre-dawn flailings

Tavish, now past six months, has settled into something of a regular sleeping pattern.  At least, it's regular in its predictable irregularity.

He has three naps during the day; sometimes he takes fully as long (or longer) to settle down as he does finally asleep.  Pretty exhausting for his mother.  He goes to bed at night with slightly less fanfare (normally), thankfully, in large part, to boob-induced torpor.

He's good until some time between four and five-thirty AM when he makes known his disquiet.  Amy gets him, rocks him back to sleep in the chair in his nursery and then, since he's proven quite vehemently (and vocally) anti-crib after that, she brings him to bed with us until he fully wakes around seven.

Me, I'm largely ignorant of all these goings on since the baby monitor is on my wife's side of the bed and, really, she doesn't need it in the first place.  Though in my defence, I can say that when my gal pal went carousing out of the city overnight this weekend past I was highly attuned to the nocturnal sounds of our wee-est bairn.  No coo, murmur or burp went unnoticed.

What I do regularly notice when Amy's somnambulating with the boy in the pre-dawn hours are his semi-conscious flailings after she plunks him between us in our bed, and later, if I haven't gotten up yet, when he starts to stir.

A tiny set of hands and fingers meander erratically around an area on my back or up and down my right shoulder.  If I'm positioned just so, one small fist invariably finds that tender patch of skin where my neck meets my shoulder and his fingers clench spasmodically, the surprisingly painful strength belying his apparent fragility.

Serendipitiously, at least lately, these morning movements occur right around the time my alarm goes off and I attempt to lure myself out of bed to a morning run.  (More success with that of late, thank goodness.)

Aside from the occasional raw neck suffered, there are very few ways more pleasant to be roused from slumber than the timorous ticklings of one's infant son as he, himself just waking, strains for the familiar.

Non sequitur

A friend with whom I exchange regular email correspondence has given me cause to burst out laughing unexpectedly about once a week for the past several months.

She was doing research on family history and made mention in an email of a geneaologist she found who was immensely helpful.  Reading that made me pause and furrow my brow, because what in the hell sort of help would a gynecologist be in digging up family dirt?

I had to read that sentence of hers about five times before I clued in.

About once a week or so - still - it comes at me sideways all unexpected like, sucker punches me in the kidney, and I find myself snickering uncontrollably.  It's especially funny now because, really, when you think about it, the two professions aren't completely disparate.

Last holiday of the year, day seven

Although the working title of this post, right up until I caved to conformity, was:

NORM ABRAMS: EAT YOUR HEART OUT!

Amy's away south in Red Deer (contains no actual deer) visiting with a girlfriend over night; Dex is with Granny and Grumpy, and I'm left home alone with the wee infant, currently slumb'ring quite efficiently.  (It's Amy's first night away from her second son and - we think, after conferring about it this afternoon - only the second time ever (by herself) since Dex was born.  That woman's gotta get out more.)

I have half a page of notes on the kitchen stove concerning what to do with Tavish between him waking up and Amy arriving back home some time before noon.  Amy has to let go in baby steps; but she only called once tonight, and that was for directions before leaving Edmonton, so I'm reassured by that.

So...

After using up most of my holiday staring out in the backyard at where the dog house ought to have been built by now, it finally is.

An unexpected problem cropped up.  Declan adopted it as his new playhouse.  He took one look at the partly finished Dog Mahal and promptly declared, "Castle!"  I think the canines will have to share it with him.  Which should not be a problem, taking into consideration that all six family members can fit in it at the same time, though our Jack Russell barely counts.

Amy can stand up inside with her head scraping the apex.

I'm not too sure at exactly what point I got carried away, but I think it may have been right at the beginning.  Having acquired free 4 x 8 foot sheets of plywood, I figgered it would be easiest to make a 4 x 4 base to build on, and just kinda went from there.

Where it went from there was UP.  There's still some cosmetic stuff I want to do, and Amy's brain is percolating with ideas for painting the behemoth, but it's structurally complete.  It's mostly done.  In the same way that Westley was mostly dead after succumbing to level ten of Count Rugen's water torture in The Princess Bride.  Not all the way done, but still pretty well done.

Right then; a few pictures.