Baby Translator

Okay okay, sorry I've been away for a while, lost in the abyss of daily life. Well I'm back, and today I'm going to mention a little something about baby translation. You see, Jessica is at that stage of life that every parent loves, that stage where she has words for about everything and very few of them are in the dictionary. For example, let's take "dwaffies". What are dwaffies, you ask? Well, it was time for the evening snack, and Jessica was frantically pointing at the fridge yelling, "Dwaffies! Dwaffies". At first I thought she wanted a waffle, but no, her word for waffle is "Farfel". Or is that her word for flower? I forget. Anyway, I then thought she wanted a cracker, but that would have been "quackel". Then it occurred to me. About five minutes before we have been discussing various fruits, and strawberries were mentioned. I said, "do you want Strawberries?" Her answer to that was an ecstatic, "Yes! Yes! Dwaffies!!" Followed by a heavy sigh that could only mean, "My god, these adults are so freaking STUPID."

Hilary has often told me that my ability to translate Jessica-speak is uncannily accurate, and far better than she can do. It's been more than one where Jessica would be running around yelling, "finglide, finglide!" Hilary would ask what it was she wants and, without skipping a beat I would tell her, "She wants to go outside on the swings and slide down the slide."

Some other important terms to know around our house:

Booma = banana
Boom = Balloon
Yellow = yellow
Yellow also = purple
Purple = Barney
See = Jessica (note that she picked that one up from "JeSSE")
Mike = Daddy. No, say "daddy."...."Mike"....."Fine, whatever".
Updown = down
Bof = Bath

By the way, at this moment in the other room I hear a baby screaming and a 4-year-old yelling, "I need that! I need that". Hilary then told her that she was being rude and not sharing, to which her response was, "But it's not rude to me!!"

Bliss. Nothing but bliss.

Love for sale

So, this weekend, we had a yard sale. For those of you on the east coast, that would be a tag sale. It was time to eliminate about 1800 cubic feet worth of crap from our house, in preparation for that next generation of Things That Stain, Things That Clutter, kiddie pools, and Disney Princess Fire Hazards. So after about three weeks of planning, attic emptying, closet purging and soul searching we were ready for the onslaught of (as my sister calls them) Freaks And Weirdos that are yard sale patrons. I figured we had it made, because at the bottom of the street the local church was having a "huge yard sale" on the same day, so through some strategic signage we would be able to grab those shoppers that just couldn't get enough of the chotckes at the church and needed another fix.

Well in the end, Natalie did far better financially than we did by selling lemonade. Who, honestly, could resist a little redheaded girl (Charlie Brown couldn't, that's for sure) following you around saying, "would you like some ice cold lemonade? It's only a quarter and I made it myself!" Well, it turns out Natalie made almost as much in tips as we did in the whole sale.

It seems that folks in the North Hills of Pittsburgh don't want our crap. They have enough of our own. In fact, I head a story on NPR (this is true) about the Do-It-Yourself Storage industry where someone cited a statistic that "Americans have consumed more stuff since 1960 then then entire world did in all of history before 1960." Okay, so how did they calculate that one? By the end of the day, perhaps 10% of our stuff was gone. And mind you, it was good crap too. I mean surely there must be someone who needs a completely unused floppy drive and a dozen highball glasses that say, "Greece Vacation" on them, no?

No.

And no, we've never been to Greece.

And God and The Fairy Passed Over....

So, we decided to take a trek to visit the family for the Passover holiday. This would be the holiday in which "God and the Fairy Passed Over the Jews' houses", according to Natalie. We hadn't been back home in a while, so the time had come for that long, long, very long drive across PA to CT. Conveniently, our friends Paul and Lee Ann were in Philadelphia visiting from Dallas with their new baby, so we made it a point of leaving Thursday to visit them and use Philly as a half-way overnight stopping point before continuing on to CT. Or so we thought.

Earlier in the week, Natalie had a fever that she couldn't seem to shake. So we played it by ear (or ear infection, as the case may be), planning on deciding at the last minute whether or not we would leave Thursday. Well, when Tuesday morning came and Natalie threw up all over the living room couch, we decided it was a safe bet we weren't going anywhere Thursday. So we pushed the trip off by a day so she could get better, which she did. No big deal. Or so we thought.

Friday arrived, and we left first thing in the morning. Twenty minutes into the drive, the PA turnpike came to a complete standstill for almost two hours. Truck accident. Got some cute pictures of the baby wandering around aimlessly on the highway. Probably will show up on some "bad parenting techniques" website someday. Conveniently, a nice couple in a Winnebago ahead of us offered to let Natalie use the bathroom. Inconviently, she took the couple up on her offer at much the same time that traffic finally began moving. So after thousands of people on the PA Turnpike waited for Natalie to pee, we were ready to continue. Good thing girls don't usually experience "freeze-up."

So on to Philly. Everything seemed completely normal for the rest of the day, until dinner when we noticed Jessica seemed to be on fire. She had caught "the fever," which later in the evening turned to a croupy cough. Good thing Paul's sister was nice enough to let us stay at their house, with three other little kids around to act as receptacles for the disease machine we seemed to have brought with us. We will be lucky if Paul's sister ever speaks to us again.

So that night the four of us all slept in one room. Natalie and I camped on the floor in sleeping bags, Jessica in a crib, and Hilary on a twin bed. The night was surprisingly not too bad, with Jessica sleeping through all of the night except those points where someone walked on the massively creaky hardwood floor outside the bedroom. Jessica didn't take kindly to that. The next morning, Jessica was still coughing but seemed to be on the mend. After an hour's debate of whether to return home or continue to CT, we decided to schlep on, where at least there were others who could potentially assist with the care of sick children.

Oddly enough fate was on our side somewhat, in that by delaying the trip by a day we managed to miss the deadly truck accident that shut the Jersey Turnpike down for 16 hours. Had we left on the day we originally planned, we'd have been in it. So despite heavy traffic, a half-hour wait in line at a NJ gas station, heavy downpours the entire way, and a slow line moving over the GW bridge, we were happy to make it to CT in one piece and in a normal fashion.
The rest of the trip had its ups and downs as well. Hilary got sick one night, the weather blew chunks, and being carriers of typhoid we weren't able to visit our friends and their kids too much. By Tuesday were we ready to head home. We expected to be on the highway by 9am. Or so we thought.

I spent the night before repacking the car and getting everything in order. That morning we strapped the kids in the car, asked which DVD they wanted to watch first, and....realized we couldn't find the DVD case. Where was the DVD case? we looked everywhere. We knew it had to be in the car, but it just seemed to have magically vanished. Luckily my sister came through with some backup movies to take, and about three hours into the drive it dawned on me I had probably folded the rear seat of the van down sandwiching the DVD case inside the seat. Sigh.

So here's a useful mathematical fact. To plan out a long distance drive, take the estimated driving time and add two hours per child in the car. In this case, the normally 8-hour drive took 12 hours. With a limited quantity of DVDs that end up getting repeated over and over again throughout the drive, that 12 hours ends up feeling like about 18. Next year, we wait until after spring cold season, and fly.

So now, it's about a week later. Whatever disease the kids had, Hilary and I are now suffering through. we spent the entire weekend coughing and hacking, sneezing and blowing, getting absolutely no sleep. I need a vacation.

The Pledge

Okay, so this is a little silly, but I found it as a memo in my old Palm Pilot today.

When Natalie was an infant and breastfeeding, she had a habit of holding her hand to her heart as if pledging allegiance. So, we wrote a special pledge for her:

I pledge allegiance
To mommy's boob
And to the Lactation Consultants
Of america
And to the nutrition
For which it stands
Two nipples
In the bra
Indispensable
With vitamins
And sustenance
For all.

The Magic Eraser

Today Natalie (the elder young'in) ended up in Time Out for scribbling on the wall. It seems that she got carried away at her drawing table in the family room and, in an artistic burst of passion, sketched out in dramatic strokes of Vibrant Orange, Laser Lemon, and Burnt Umber what I believe to have been an octopus riding a bicycle in a rainstorm.

The reason Natalie ended up in Time Out was not because of her wall art, but rather because she attempted to blame it on her sister Jessica. Mind you, Jessica's drawing skills at this point in her 18-month life carry very little artistic merit and would in fact be poo-poo'ed by many a SoHo critic. The Time Out was to teach her a lesson, but in fact the lesson I believe she actually learned was NOT to not place blame on her sibling, but that next time she should avoid signing her NAME to the artwork. You see, across the bottom of the picture it clearly said, "EILATAN", which is her own 4-1/2 year old way of spelling her own name backwards. Curses! Foiled again!

So, in order to teach her a lesson, I took the little graffiti artist with me to the supermarket, had her pick out and pay for (yes, I gave her money) a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, and together she and I scrubbed the walls down. Okay, well actually I scrubbed while she catched the drips that ran down the wall.

P.S. I highly recommend one of those Magic Eraser thingies. I wish that the walls of our house were actually MADE of whatever these things are made of.

The Isle of Tools

The other day Natalie and I were playing with a puzzle, one of those wooden puzzles with about a dozen pieces, each piece with a little knob to pick it up with. This one contained pictures of different types of transportation. A police car, a tractor-trailer, a helicopter, a ship, etc. I decided to make things interesting by making a story out of it, picking up a specific piece whenever I mentioned it. Something to the effect of, "one day, a man was riding a Motorcycle, he drove too fast and was stopped for speeding by a Police Car. The policeman said, "you're going to crash into a Tractor-Trailer if your not careful!" Well, you get the idea.

Natalie then decided it was her turn. Her story began, "One day, a man was riding a Motorcycle. He rode to an island where there were no people, only tools."

I never heard the rest of the story, because I was too busy dreaming of that wonderful, wonderful place.

Filtering Internet content for your children

The other day I managed to mentally scar my 4-year-old (not the first time, and probably not the last) by introducing her to the concept of the Shockwave file. My dad had emailed a moderately humorous Easter-based internet cartoon showing a chicken launching an egg at the screen. Natalie watched over my shoulder, laughed hysterically (4-year-olds are easily amused) and asked to see other cartoons on the computer. So I, like a moron, obliged.

I did a Google search for “funny swf files” and came across a site listing just that. Among the listings was one entitled “valentines day”. Clicking it brought up a cute little kitten (think Hello Kitty) in a box, with three buttons next to it. It was entirely pink and cute-looking, so naturally it had to be a safe bet, right? I clicked the first button entitled “Flowers”. A hand came into the screen and handed the kitten a bouquet of flowers. The kitten began making all sorts of cute “thank you” squeaks and purrs. Then it sniffed the flowers, and began to sneeze. And sneeze.

Suddenly, the kitten decided to hold it’s nose, and that’s when things rapidly went downhill. It sneezed once more, and its head blew apart, covering the screen in virtual blood, brain splattering against the wall. The decapitated torso then flopped to the ground, twitching and lifeless.

Natalie, who up to that point was fully enjoying it, suddenly launched from my lap, screaming and covering her eyes. She then proceeded to scream for the next half hour, demanding that I throw the computer in the garbage and never show her anything again.

I’m an idiot.

Small Pieces Of Cloth

It's 3:40pm on Wednesday, some time early in September 2000. The only reason I knew this is that my Timex Indiglo Ironman, for which I used the “I need it to time contractions” excuse to buy, told me. I never timed a single one, by the way. Instead I used it to tell me if I should be eating, taking out the garbage, sleeping, watching the Simpsons, or heating up a formula bottle for our 4-day-old newborn baby girl. It was a very tired, tired time.

Life quickly became a whirlwind of smelly diapers, washing bottles, and small pieces of cloth everywhere. It's amazing that the new kid was home no more than 4 hours and our spotless house turned into the set of one of those movies where the asteroid plows into Los Angeles.

So about those small pieces of cloth. There were burping pads. Sleepers. Gowns. Onesies. Changing pads. Receiving blankets. Tushie wipes. Washcloths. Diapers. Wet ones. Swaddlers. It seemed we could have made it easier if we had picked up one good sweatshirt and a garden hose.

So Natalie left the hospital at 3pm the previous day. She slept the entire ride home, and until 8pm, when we fed her. Then, she proceeded to wake us at 45 minute intervals until the next morning. During one episode, I checked on her to make sure she was okay (she had been silent for 48 minutes, and we were worried) and I was greeted by a stream of white goo coming from the general direction of her face. As I picked her up to clean her off, I discovered there was already a previously projected stream under her head, which she had been marinating in for quite some time.

It's amazing she survived the night, given her parents' general lack of knowledge at the time of how to keep human beings alive.

That morning, Natalie appeared interested in spending the day at rest. Mommy and I tried to catch up on sleep - but in reality Natalie had training regimen planned for us. She knew that before we had the chance to catnap, it would be time to introduce her parents to the concept of the explosive poop. I'm pretty sure they had been feeding Natalie nothing but corn salsa the entire time she was in the hospital, because that was exactly what was coming out of her. Did I sign up for that part? I couldn’t remember. Then again, I couldn’t remember what day it was without the Indiglo Iron Man. Hmm…Wednesday... Garbage night. Man, those garbage men were gonna hate us that morning.

And that’s how the first 24 hours went. Oh, how easy those days were.

The starting point

I think that before I get too far into the story, I should provide some background of how I got here.

Tuesday, December 28, 1999
Okay, let’s call this DAY 1. Ground Zero. The point of, well, point of no return, I guess. Hilary had been kind of worried that, well, her monthly bill was past due. “I’m never late,” she proclaimed. “You can set a watch by me, darnit!" (yes she said "darnit")

Well, we thought back a few weeks, and quickly realized the error of our ways. But everyone told us it would take months and months to get pregnant, so we weren’t really worried at the time. Besides, we’re about ready, right? Right?

After work, mostly to sooth Hil’s worry, we stopped at the local Giant Eagle for ravioli, pasta sauce, and a First Plus home pregnancy test. This was the beginning of a long evening.

When we got home, Hilary suddenly realized that the word “ready” meant a whole lotta things that she just wasn’t. “I’m not ready to give up the life we have! I’m not ready to gain weight! I’m not maternal enough! I still want to go back in the womb myself!!!”

I never managed to calm her down real well, but I at least convinced her not to jump out the bedroom window and to take the test. Three minutes later we found out just how well my boys could swim. We’re talking backstroke, Australian crawl, freestyle, all at Olympic levels! Months and months, my butt!

Well, if I thought Hilary was freaked before the test, there was no stopping her afterwards. My initial thought was to keep this a secret from the family until we were sure, but after that test I realized I needed to call in the extra recruits for this one. We headed straight to her mom’s place. Driving 20 miles an hour the whole way. Precious cargo, after all.

And heading there was a wise choice.

Hilary’s mom had that deer-in-headlights look for a bit, but soon she became the cucumber of cool. She convinced Hilary that she’ll survive this, that she’ll make a fine mother, and that the time was nigh.

A few hours later, Hilary realized that this could in fact be a good thing. In fact, it will be.

Me? I always knew.

What ever happened to the Natalie Chronicles?

A while back, my first daughter, Natalie, was born. I wrote a couple of emails to my friends and family describing all the things I found myself ill-prepared for when it came to fatherhood. It was then that I realized I had a minor talent for breaking down a crazy life change into humorous anecdotes. Since then I have realized that this crazy life change has tremendously interfered with my ability to wax anecdotal, as I find myself too busy with diapers, bath time, meals, Barney, naps, minivans, training wheels, Dora Band-Aids, sippy cups, babyproofing, and tantrums (including my own) to jot down a complete thought.

Four and a half years and a second daughter later, I have entered the ranks of the blogger. Okay, I'm not exactly a first adopter when it comes to the concept of a blog, and I love reading blogs created by other people, but frankly I never much saw the point in creating one myself. All that changed at about three o'clock this morning, when it dawned on me that this might just be my outlet. Many of my friends have said to me, "what ever happened to those emails?" Well, here's my attempt to get back at it. I hope you enjoy.