bentangle

It is interesting how much emotion can be conveyed with a small amount of words.  For instance, this morning as I was getting ready to leave the house I called up the stairs to everyone to let them know that I was leaving for work.  Each of my family members replied in turn in their own unique ways:

Grasshopper: BYE DADDY, I LOVE YOU!

Cricket: I belong to you, Daddy!

My wife: The money is on the table.

The last sounds odd out of context, though in truth there was no immediate conversational context to it – my wife and I just have a very down-to-earth relationship and have a knack for picking up random long-dead conversation threads and/or answering each others unasked questions.  But the tone of each response reflects much greater depth of the emotions behind them than the words themselves convey.  My kids are full of exuberant, idealistic affection for the father that they only see in passing in the morning and for a few hours in the evening. My wife, already in the trenches of dealing with getting the kids ready for the day, sticks with purposeful messaging (the love we share is known, implied, and not in need of constant reinforcement).

I can’t help but wonder sometimes, when in my own life the level of emotional openness and heightened expression that my kids seem to exude had faded.  What are the factors that delay or expedite this process?  When should I expect my daughter to transition from her current puppy-dog phase to something more similar to the cynical teen that I’m sure she might become?  Should I try to stave it off or just accept what comes?

The oddity of it is that it is so dissimilar to my own attitude I find myself sometimes wondering if we are really related.  I wouldn’t necessarily call myself cynical (though I certainly maintain a healthy level of cynicism), but I’m definitely a picture of nonchalance.  A perfect example of my cool under pressure demeanor is one that is often cited by my in-laws – usually around Thanksgiving.

The event in question happened during a Thanksgiving about a decade ago at my wife’s aunt’s house.  While my aunt-in-law and several other of the matriarchs of the family were buzzing about the kitchen and the majority of the men and children where engrossed in whatever football game happened to be on, I walked through the dining room to grab a snack from the kitchen island on the other end of it.  As I did so, I noticed that one of the drip candles that were on the table seemed to have dropped a piece of wick and as a result a circle of the tablecloth about two inches across had been charred and was slowly edging wider by some very low flames.  I calmly walked into the kitchen and asked my aunt-in-law “Aunt Ann, your table is on fire.  Do you have a pot holder I can borrow?” to which she responded with a flabbergasted “What!?”.  While she wended through the people in the kitchen to get to the dining room and see what I was referring to, I grabbed the first thing I could find to handle the task – a damp dishrag.  By the time I got back there, she and two of my wife’s cousins were watching the now soda-can diameter ring of fire in abject shock.  I skirted around them and patted the fire out with the dishrag, blew out the candles to avoid any possible recurrence, and grabbed a couple of sweet gherkins from the pickle tray and went about my business.    The rest of the ladies seemed to bustle about it for a while before the table was retrimmed and the commotion reformed in the kitchen where it previously resided.  Many of the men didn’t even seem to notice anything had happened.  But my aunt-in-law tells the story of it almost every year.

Anyway, I know that I am somewhat unique in my lack of excitability.  But there are times when I wish a little of it would rub off on my kids (and perhaps at moments my wife as well).  While I appreciate the positive end of their heightened emotional state, the negative side of it is rarely much fun.  Cricket is a picture of indecisiveness – she can easily waste a half-hour trying to decide whether pink or yellow shorts go better with the brown shirt she is wearing (and then throw on leprechaun socks).  Grasshopper will have a 20-minute stand off over not liking green beans (including throwing silverware and having a tantrum across the house) before finally eating a forkful and realizing he loves them.  The trouble with family drama seems to be the balance – keeping the levels of comedy and tragedy in line and not pegged at 11.

Last night as I’m kneeling on my son’s floor waiting for his stuffy sniffling to transition to the stuffy mouth-breathing of sleep, I found myself pondering the number of times I’ve found myself in such a position – apparently enough to know that neither sitting nor lying down would have left me in a comfortable state when I left.  These moments are much fewer than they’d been in the past; at times my wife and I practically took turns sleeping on his floor.  Now it is once a month on average at most.

Grasshopper’s sleeping woes have typically been just what one would expect from a toddler:  afraid to be alone, afraid of the dark, afraid of the sound of the washing machine on the other side of the wall.  In the past few months he had resorted often to sleeping on his floor claiming he was scared of his bed.  His bed, mind you, is a happy, plastic fire engine, so I wasn’t really clear of what there was to be afraid.  But it was easier to setup a couple of comforters on the floor as a mattress than to delve into the motivations of a 3 year-old, so we accommodated him and went about our activities.

For the past few weeks it had escalated to the point that his mattress sat on the floor for him to sleep on and I was close to sliding his fire engine bed out to the back yard as play furniture.  But as I contemplated this plan, I realized that I should really address the root problem rather than work around it (after all he was running out of floor space).  So I put his bed back together and we attempted a return to relative normalcy.  Of course, that very night as I attempt to settle the troops, he starts to get anxious and claims that he is scared.  So I ask what it is that he is afraid of.  As it turns out, he is afraid of a shadow that his night light makes on the wall as a result of a hump on the side of the bed along the wall.  So I grabbed something firm and rectangular, wedged it alongside the mattress to block the dip where the hump shadow was visible and – voila! – problem solved.  Unfortunately the object I grabbed was a picture frame which I didn’t realize actually had glass in it, so yesterday there was a clean-up issue.  But now the frame has been replaced with a blanket and a pillow and all is generally leveling out nicely … until allergies kick in.  It is always something.

Seeing the bedtime drama I still experience with Cricket, I know that the end is not yet in sight.  But it is at least getting easier to diffuse.  And soon I may never have to sleep anywhere but my bed … unless my wife has something to say about it.

Fruit flies, that is.  I somehow gained them last weekend while my wife was away and by mid-week despite our best efforts to thwart them, they became a plague upon our kitchen (still not sure what they were drawn to).  I began to think that I may have to share residence with them long-term and considered whether they could somehow pull their weight around the place.  But after a couple of strokes of ingenuity, I managed to reclaim my keep.  My remastery was a three-pronged attack involving (a) ‘humane’ traps (not that I really cared for their welfare) of old veggies and vinegar in bowls covered in perforated plastic wrap, (b) inhumane traps (fly strips) and (c) a vacuum with a long hose – the latter proved to be the game-changer.  There are a few survivors, but they won’t last in the long game.  I’ve got their number.

In other news, we are doing our best to squeeze what juice we can out of what remains of the summer.  Yesterday we treated ourselves to a dessert of evening pool time.  We bought a membership in for the summer and I think that it was only the third time I’ve personally made it there.  I did get the chance to see the fruits of my daughter’s swimming lessons.  Her general swimming and treading water has improved a lot (still room for growth, but she has more confidence at it) and I got the treat of seeing her jump off of the diving board about a dozen times (the last two of which she actually attempted to dive and succeeded in belly-flopping).  My son, who chickened out of his lessons 3/4 of the way through the first session, still sticks to hit comfort zone.  I guess I should look on the bright side – he has never seemed overly concerned about how he compares to anyone including his sister, so perhaps peer pressure won’t be all that heavy a factor with him later in life (one can hope).

In continuing our summer fun and not to be daunted by the stormy weather, today (I guess yesterday by the time this is posted) we spent the day at Giggleberry Fair (an indoor play place in Peddler’s Village).  The kids had hours of fun, my wife got tons of pictures, and I got pelted a lot by foam balls and dragged through many spaces not meant for upright, full-height adults.  Granted it was a blast, but by the end my neck and knees ached, my hair was slicked and my shirt semi-saturated with sweat, and my thirst nigh unquenchable.

But now the temperatures seem to be going back into the miserable range (and there is that pesky thing called work), so our summertime adventures will be dwindling as the start of first grade looms on the horizon for Cricket (and Grasshopper will too be returning to preschool, though details as to where have yet to be worked out).  So I return to the grind, mindful that there will be storms to be weathered and some share of pests, but fully prepared to dive in and slough off what missiles life shoots my way.

It seems that it will be a mom-free weekend.  Starting tomorrow morning through Sunday it will be just me, Cricket, and Grasshopper fending for ourselves.  I’m not actually particularly concerned.  I’m not one of those passive working dad’s who defers the majority of parenting to the matron of the house.  I even cook sometimes (mostly on the grill, but not exclusively).  So I’m sure we will survive …. hopefully.

My wife will be departing early tomorrow morning on a trek to NYC for a blogging conference (in case you weren’t aware, she has not one, but two blogs that she likely updates more often than I do: Down to Earth Mama and She Acts).  She will be whooping it up in the Big Apple for the weekend with blog-related discussions and parties.  Not that I would worry for the sanctity of our marriage regardless of the nature of the conference, but being that she will be surrounded mostly by female bloggers, the most that will likely happen is some all-girl drunken music videography (it’s happened).  I guess there is a sliver of the possibility she might get swept into an overzealous celebration of the repeal of Prop. 8, but I’m not overly concerned.  What hyjinx will ensue are likely to be of a much more tame and innocent variety of which she greatly deserves.

Anyway, besides regularly scheduled events of the weekend (of which there are surprisingly many) I have very little in mind for our sans matronus weekend.  As it stands, I have to take them to swimming lessons, the farmer’s market, a family reunion, and potentially a free movie screening (and probably some other events that my wife will point out that I forgot to mention and therefore will not remember to do).  So outside of meals there is limited bandwidth for other events.  But I may try to fit in some shopping and some other entertainment where I can – perhaps even some fruit picking if time and weather permit.

My biggest concern is that I’m going to be plagued with work issues that try to follow me home.  I’m slowly working to have more redundancy and less direct dependency for certain things, but the curse of being good at certain things is that you are the only one who can handle them – I’m not playing arrogant here, it is simple fact.  But I’m training a new guy to be the next me, and trying to leave no issues up in the air so that I can make the most of a wife-free and hopefully work-free weekend.

I’ve decided that I need to redefine what I term a vacation. While I enjoy visits with my family immensely as they are rare due to distance, such visits are not truly vacations and often another one is required shortly thereafter (no offense intended to those family members I recently visited – we absolutely enjoyed coming down). Being back at work is no vacation, that is for sure. Anyway, there is no single cohesive narrative of my trip, but a number of small anecdotes. So that will be the form of this post.

Part of our visit to my parents’ house overlapped with a visit from my grandmother. My grandmother is very religiously-minded and has a very low tolerance for bad language. I like to think I was tame, but my wife pointed out on our drive home that I still managed to drop a few mild bombs (e.g., what the hell, darn) and whenever I did, my grandmother would visibly flinch. Meanwhile, one of these overlapping evenings she was playing cards with my mother and had a moment of frustration with her choices in discards to which she exclaimed some phrase that was clearly not a swear, but carried all the tone of one. I made a comment along the lines of whether it was really not cursing if the inflection was there to which I got no response from her, but my mom nearly burst into snorting laughter.

On the ride home (which was during the day this time), the kids spend good amounts of the time ‘reading’ – by which I mean the got out theyr Tag books and let their Tag readers read the stories to them. They were entertaining themselves and not complaining, so I can’t fault them on it. Well there was a book that Cricket wanted to read that was one of Grasshopper’s and which was only on his Tag reader, so she asked him nicely if he wanted to switch readers. He responds by looking at her and saying “No,” in a tone suggesting it was a stupid question then turns to the back of the reader where his name tag is affixed and drawls out his name as if reading it slowly to her. Being as he is 3 and can barely recognize all of the letters in his own name, I couldn’t help but find the moment hysterical.

Due to coincidental travel, my sister-in-law had left her cat at our house while we were gone (there are clearly a lot of questions as to the logic there, but bear with me). See she lives about 30 minutes away from us and her parents (who live a mile from us) and she doesn’t have any reliable acquaintances near her who could feed and check on the cat at their own home. But she didn’t want to have to burden her in-laws with another cat in their own house, and since my mother-in-law had already been commissioned to water our plants, it seemed to stand to reason that she could feed the cat while she was there. So we came home from our travels to a paranoid cat. It would spend the majority of its time hiding from all of us and only seemed to eat food at night when we were all sleeping. Cricket wanted to take it for a walk … in its carrier. She seemed rather disappointed when we turned her down.

We also managed to fit in a beach trip this weekend (though it still involved visiting family). The kids had a blast – Cricket spent hours getting knocked over by waves while Grasshopper chose to have no truck with the sea and stuck to digging randomly in the sand. I played in both capacities off and on and eventually resigned to relaxing in a beach chair and reading on my new Nook (book and product reviews coming soon). Being that it was a very sunny day, we were vigilant with sunscreen application – the kids got at least 2 extra coats and I reapplied at least 3 or 4 times. Ironically the kids came out of the day with minor rosiness in a few spots and I ended up lobster red from waist to neck. But I was able to drown my pain in boardwalk food, so it is all good.

Now if only I could find time (and money) for a real vacation ….