Weekend in Review

What a weekend. The entire family, even the Florida branch, got together to celebrate the birthday of the Matriarch Formerly Known as Purelight. The last time we all got together, there were sixteen of us. There were eighteen this time. We stayed at Great Wolf Lodge and had Birthday Dinner at Riverwalk Cafe at another giant resort right across the street.

It was great seeing the whole family and meeting or getting to know better some of the new additions. I think I missed some good conversations because of chasing Thumper around, but as Mom said in her birthday night speech, we're all connected not just to her but to each other. Renewed contact keeps those connections live, and I'm glad we (almost) all made it. Thanks badkitty812, Pirate71, and all you other non-commenting family lurkers, and even *gasp* non-blog-reading family members. It was good reconnecting.

And now of course, returning to my narrow focus: this Thumper kid amazes me. I fret and worry about things like the long drives to and from, and the sleeping in the hotel room, and the missing of naps, the staying up late, etc. etc., and he handles it all with grace, charm, humor, and patience. He loved nearly every minute in the pool, in the lobby, in the hallways, playing with his cousins, his aunts and uncles, his grandparents, perfect strangers, the guy vacuuming the lobby in the morning.



We made him skip a nap the day of the drive to the resort so that he'd sleep most of the 3 1/2 hours, but he only slept one hour and spent the rest of the time playing and chatting and singing. He did the same on the drive home again. I can't figure out how we got so lucky with this kid. Part of me wants to take credit, saying that it's because we did the right thing having a stay-at-home parent for him and giving him a solid schedule that makes him secure enough to be able to deviate from it now and again. But really, I think we're just lucky. Sometimes I get weird, paranoid twinges when I think about how wonderful he is, and I think of parents of children murdered or killed by horrible diseases. They always say what a joy the child was, what a spark, how he brought light into the world. And I think he's too perfect, he can't last, I'll lose him. What can I say, I've got a dark side. The kid is unbelievable in a way I can't believe I deserve.

And lastly, I have to just mention this: I went to bed before 10 o'clock last night. I know, that makes me officially an old fart, but it was a tiring weekend. So I was about as dead asleep as I could be when Aerie decided to come to bed around 11:30. I woke to her cuddled up against me, softly kissing me. She whispered, "I need you to come listen to something." So I dragged myself back up to consciousness and tried to pay attention. She told me that when she turned off the living room light, an alarm went off. She couldn't figure out what it was. It sounded sort of like the UPS on the computer, but not quite, and she was afraid the house was going to burn down. We went out to the living room. She turned the light off, and sure enough, there was a strange sound. I staggered back toward the bedroom.

"It's the puzzle," I said.

Gummas and Gumpa got Thumper a Melissa & Doug Vehicles Sound Puzzle for Christmas. A sensor (apparently a light sensor) knows when a piece is placed, and it makes a sound. The cruise ship piece was askew, and when Aerie turned off the light, it fired off the ship's foghorn, convincing Aerie that danger was imminent.

When she came back to bed, she was giggling hysterically. She apologized for waking me. And then she made it worth my while.

The Color Fuschia

There's a fly in the house. Watching Thumper try to track it as it flew was fairly amusing. But then he spent several minutes waving and saying, "Hi! Hi, pie! Hi! Hi!" when it landed and "Bye! Bye bye! Bye, pie!" when it took off again. God, I love that kid.

So anyway, I told Aerie I would have to blog about how sexist she is. She said I'd have to include her "in my defense" point, though.

Yesterday, Thumper and I went to Austin Baby!, which is the hippiest of stores in the hippiest of Austin neighborhoods. It makes me feel a little funny inside. I mean, not only am I a man invading a nurturing and supportive maternity/breastfeeding outpost, but I'm driving in from the suburbs to do it. I don't feel warmly welcomed there, at least not until I make it clear I'm there to spend hundreds of dollars on cloth diapers. Again.

But I went back instead of shopping online for one reason: they buy used cloth diapers. Seriously. I didn't know this last time I went there, when we upgraded from Bum Genius to Fuzzi Bunz.

Can I just mention here that Fuzzi Bunz kick Bum Genius's ass? We bought Bum Genius One-Size thinking it would keep us from having to upsize as the boy grew. Nice idea, but the velcro stopped sticking and the gussets stretched out. The Fuzzi Bunz snaps have not torn out, the gussets haven't stretched. If you're comparison shopping, Fuzzi Bunz definitely wins because of their durability.

Anyway, Austin Baby! told me they'd buy back the used Bum Genius. Even with stains. Even with stretched out gussets. Even with velcro that wouldn't stick. I think we got $4 each for them. Talk about genius! I guess there are much more skillful and committed parents out there who buy the used diapers and replace the worn-out bits. More power to them, but I ain't that guy. It takes me an hour to thread the needle on the sewing machine.

I was going to buy 24 of the Medium Fuzzi Bunz at the time because that's how many Bum Genius we'd had, but they only had enough in stock for 20 if I excluded the pink ones. I felt guilty about it, but 20 instead of 24 saved us money, too, and you'll notice that I did not in the beginning make any claim of not being sexist myself. And in my defense, I did keep the lavender ones.

So when Thumper outgrew his Medium Fuzzi Bunz, I washed and packed them all up, put him in a disposable, and drove him to Hippie Central. And they bought them back! At $6 each! The new Large Fuzzi Bunz were $16.95 when bought in a lot larger than a dozen, so that $6 is a 35% discount. And no shipping costs. Since cheapness counts, it was definitely worth being a stranger in a strange land.

But how does this make Aerie sexist? The store only had 11 Large Fuzzi Bunz in stock. I wanted 20. All but one of the 11 were solid colors, with the 11th having a fuchsia floral print, which I rejected on moral grounds. There were 3 Bubble Gum, 1 Baby Pink, 1 Lavender, and the rest were Red, Sage, Butter, and White. I briefly considered rejecting the Bubble Gum and Baby Pink for not being "boy colors," but I reasoned that it would be annoying enough to get through the week with 10 diapers, let alone only 6. Plus I didn't want the lady behind the counter thinking I was a stereotypical sexist homophobe who's oppressively locking his child into prescribed gender roles and who's afraid he'll turn his boy gay if he sticks a pink diaper on his ass. Plus, they mostly don't show outside of clothes, especially when he's wearing a onesie. So I took them all.

When Aerie got home from work, she saw the diapers sitting in the laundry room waiting to be washed before wearing. She made me promise not to put the pink ones on him when we're out in public. Then she reconsidered and asked me to take the Bubble Gum and Baby Pink ones back. Then she reconsidered and added the Lavender, too. Because they're not boy colors. Can you believe that? We'll have to use more disposables this way for them to remain unused so I can trade them for different colors out of the new stock next week. So there you go. She's sexist. AND an anti-environmentalist.

In her defense, she insisted I mention that she hates pink, even for herself. She wore only black for a large portion of her adolescence. And admittedly, the Bubble Gum is pretty ugly. It's a lot closer to fuchsia than it looks in the picture. And while we did have Lavenders in the Mediums, she always disliked them. Too close to pink, I guess.

Too Long for Twitter

Somehow I thought SPF50 sunblock (UVA AND UVB!) would keep the boy as lily-white as his Mama. Turns out two or three hours a week at the pool or the water playscape is cooking him into a lovely nut-brown color. He's got Coppertone white-butt tan lines! For some reason that tickles me.

What Life's Like in Mrs. Rodius' World (or Yet Another Reason Why I'm Glad I'm not a Woman): shampoos must be rotated. Apparently, every shampoo leaves behind a residue that slowly builds up. No, a shampoo cannot wash out its own residue, or it wouldn't be leaving one in the first place. Duh! But oddly enough, each shampoo can wash out other shampoos' residues. So you gotta rotate the stock, baby! Man, it's complicated being a woman.

The Weekend Reviewed in a Series of Unrelated Sentences

Little old ladies watching their grandkids' commencement are sweet. Mostly.

It's endearing how bad Mrs. Rodius is with directions. She called me four times for help driving 9 1/2 miles on Saturday. God love her.

Biggest Brother, Big Brother, and I spent the best night out that I can recall in recent history. It was deeply satisfying to get to know Biggest Brother a little better, and all three of us discovered some common ground we didn't know we had. And we stayed out talking so long, we actually got kicked out of a bar when it closed. Crazy! That's way past my bedtime!

Thanks, Mrs. Rodius, for getting up with the baby at 7 a.m. on Sunday. You are way nicer to me than I deserve.

This is only our second summer in this house, and already my yardwork standards have gone waaaaay down. At least I'm still edging! I wish I hadn't recently watched Kinison's first appearance on Letterman. All I can think about now while I mow and trim and edge and weed is, "My life was so boring, I actually worried about my yard. The rest of my friends had goals, careers, visions, doing things with life. I was out there looking for crabgrass, weeds and stuff, going, 'I have a responsibility to the neighborhood....'"

Yeah, Sometimes I Am

While choosing a sweater, Mrs. Rodius asked me if I liked the orange one. I said no, I didn't. She asked which one I liked better. I said the yellow one. She explained that yellow does not go with her skin tone. I told her I thought it was funny how she asks my opinion about these things and then explains why I'm wrong. She said she doesn't tell me I'm wrong, but in this particular case, I WAS wrong.

Later, at home, she embarked on a lengthier explanation of clothing color and skin tone and hair color and which one goes with the something and the other thing. I was trying to pay attention. Well, actually I was trying to look like I was paying attention while I tried to listen to Edward Norton telling me about Strange Days on Planet Earth. At some point during her explanation, I laid my head back, closed my eyes, and snored.

First she said she was going to tell her mama on me. I pointed out that her mother loves me. Then she said she was going to tell MY mama on me. But then she got it: she said she was going to go on my blog and write a post about what a fucktard I am. So I figured I'd better beat her to it.

I love you, honey!

Brainwashed and Right on Time

For as long as I can remember, I've tried very hard to be punctual. Being late, or even the possibility of being late, gives me anxiety. I am often early in order to avoid being late. I'm not sure when it began; perhaps my mother would say that this concern with punctuality did not begin when I was a child. Whenever it began, I hate being late. I try not to get mad when other people are late, but mostly I steam. I fume. And then when they show up, I say, "Oh, that's OK." And then they do it again the next time, and I fume some more.

I don't generally consider myself an uptight person. When Mrs. Rodius and I met, I was a lazy slob, and she was a tightly-wound neat freak. She and her sisters had and have the highest standards of cleanliness, inherited directly from their mother, of any people I've ever met. I wouldn't go so far as to call them obsessive-compulsive germophobes, but hey. You draw your own conclusions. Over the years, I've increased my standards, and she's lowered hers. Otherwise, we might have killed each other. Or divorced. I know that she pines for a home as clean as her sister's, but neither of us really want to commit to that level of time and attention, and we've reached a sort of happy medium. We don't clean the bathrooms as often or vacuum as often as we used to back when Mrs. Rodius was crazy. We rarely dust. There are piles of opened mail, baby equipment, and other various daily detritus piled on the kitchen table and counters. But now, I find myself doing things, and my mother would certainly confirm this, that I would NEVER have done as a child: this morning, I swept up bread crumbs to maintain the cleanliness of the kitchen floor that I swept and mopped on Friday. Am I becoming one of them?

That's what I wonder: As I age, am I becoming an uptight prick with standards way out of whack? Is it just an Austin hippie thing? There is virtually no one that I know who pretends to care even on just a theoretical level that punctuality is mildly important. Am I crazy? I found myself giving a lecture on punctuality the other day, explaining that I think that being late is disrespectful and communicates that you don't care very much about the person or people that you agreed to meet at a specific time. I got the feeling my lecture was less than convincing.

And I've been in other people's homes. I've been to the homes of friends who were expecting me. When I buy things off of Craigslist and am invited into the homes of people who knew I was coming, more than occasionally the word "squalor" comes to mind when I see the conditions in which they conduct their daily lives.

Am I crazy? Have I been brainwashed by my crazy in-laws to believe that it really is easier to maintain a clean home than it is to clean a dirty one? Am I the only one out there who regularly shows up fifteen minutes early in case I run into traffic or other easily predictable delays? Let's get together for lunch and discuss it. Say, 12:00? I'll be there at quarter 'til. I'll be fuming until you get there around 12:30 or so. It's a date!

Talk Talk

Thanks, Mrs. Rodius, for blogging for me yesterday. I can't remember why in the hell I thought blogging every single day would be a good idea, but I really appreciate the tag team action. It's another item on the list of reasons why I don't deserve you. In return, I will now proceed to engage in what could conceivably be construed as teasing you. Rest assured it's all in the name of healthy academic discourse that hopefully makes people think. (Speaking of which, thanks Tracey. I hardly think of myself as "the thinking man's" anything, but I appreciate the nod. And I appreciate the tag more than usual because God knows I need the material. I'll be taking advantage of it tomorrow, I think.)

Rebel Dad talked about this Daily Mail article that references a study that says (which a bunch of qualifiers on it) that dads may not prepare their sons academically as well as moms because they don't provide "the same degree of cognitive stimulation..." It's sons, and it's toddlers, and it's entry-level school exams, and it's dads who spend 15 hours per week or more, etc. etc. etc., but that's what it boils down to.

When I mentioned it to Mrs. Rodius, she predicted my reaction would be to call "bullshit" on the study, because I work pretty hard at speaking to, singing to, signing to, playing with, and otherwise stimulating young Thumper, cognitively and otherwise. But honestly, when I read Rebel Dad's reaction, I thought to myself, "I could buy that." I guess it depends on how "cognitive stimulation" is defined. If it's talking, I'm leagues behind Mrs. Rodius.

Mrs. Rodius thinks aloud. It took me awhile to figure out that while it appears that she is talking to me, she is quite frequently talking to herself. She verbalizes her internal monologue because it helps her think. It used to flummox me when she would say things like, "I'm thinking that option A is best." And I would say, "I agree. Let's go with option A." And then she would proceed to go through all of the benefits of option A and all of the detriments of option B as if I had just said, "Option A? Hell no! What on earth would make you think that option A is best?" So I would say things like, "You know I just agreed with you, right?" And she would point out that she's not trying to convince me, she's just going over it again verbally to reassure herself that option A really is the best. The other day, I made the mistake of saying to her, when she caught me not quite paying attention while she talked, "You're not talking to me; you're talking to yourself. It doesn't matter if I'm listening." Because while that may be kind of a little bit true, clearly there are some things that definitely don't need to be said out loud.

And it's not just her. Our nephew is the only child of a single mother, and she's a mother who talks. A lot. Even Mrs. Rodius gets off the phone with her saying, "Man, she talks a lot." So she always, from the day the nephew was born, talked and talked and talked to him. And he grew into a toddler who developed excellent verbal skills very early. Now that he's a teenager, he doesn't talk so much, but that's a different story.

And I've seen SWSIL ("Social Worker Sister-in-Law") play with Thumper, and she talks and talks, and makes funny voices. I understand that each individual is different, but I could totally see how this could fall down gender lines. If "cognitive stimulation" consists largely of a running monologue, I readily admit I can't keep up with the women folk. The women folk, they likes to talk. Sometimes, Thumper and I just like to look and think quietly to ourselves. Hopefully that doesn't doom him to the short bus.

Happy Kissiversary!

I wasn't going to blog this one, and I didn't take a picture, because I was too embarrassed to make two Martha Stewart references in a single week. But what the hell. The kid's asleep, and I can't think of anything else to blog about while I'm not folding the laundry, so here you go.

Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of the first time Mrs. Rodius kissed me and I kissed her back, so Thumper and I decided to make a nice dinner, by which I mean that he slept long enough for me to make a nice dinner. After our morning walk, we shopped for the ingredients, then he commenced to napping. I made a baked turkey tenderloin, cranberry relish, roasted carrots and sweet potatoes, a salad, and a cherry almond cake. It was all from scratch (except the pre-marinated Honeysuckle White tenderloin), and all from two different issues of Everyday Food, which in my defense, I subscribed to as part of my nephew's school fundraiser, and I didn't know it was a Martha Stewart publication until much later. I mean, it's not like I have a Martha Stewart fetish, or anything. Come on, people! Get off my back! It's not like I've started watching Oprah or anything!

OK, maybe I'm a little defensive about the Martha Stewart thing.

On the cake, in decorator icing, I wrote, "Happy Kissiversary" and drew a little heart. I wish I'd taken a picture of it, but maybe it's best that I didn't. My cake-writing apparently isn't that legible; Mrs. Rodius squinted at it and said, "Happy Kiss... Kiss... Kiss what?"

And since it all began with margaritas all those years ago, I made margaritas. They were nearly lethal, since I followed the recipe that said 3:2:1, tequila:cointreau:lime juice. Mrs. Rodius drank about a third of hers, pronounced it a little too strong, and made me drink the rest of it. So what could I do? I had to drink it. I mean, Cointreau isn't cheap; those were like $12 margaritas. I couldn't let it go to waste! And then I had to finish the last one left in the pitcher. I didn't want the lime juice to go bad.

Happy Kissiversary, Mrs. Rodius!

In the Beginning

anniemcq emailed me this morning to make sure I understood that she was not offended that I used her sweet, innocent child as the starting point to a story about anonymous sex in public spaces. She also expressed the desire to give my pea-coated, pipe-smoking, bearded nineteen-year-old self a hug. It occurred to me that my nineteen-year-old self could've used a hug, and it was a good thing he connected soon thereafter, despite himself, with the future Mrs. Rodius.

So, even though I should probably be saving up this kind of thing for NaBloPoMo, I thought it was the perfect time to tell the story of "How Mrs. Rodius and I Met and Didn't Murder Each Other."

She lived on the floor below mine in the dorm, which, rumor had it, had once been a mental hospital. There were strange inserts in the doors that I heard used to be removable for shoving trays of food through to the nutjobs. I wished I'd lived in the dorm across the street, which was dark, musty, and mazelike, with low ceilings and uneven floors. It was rumored to be haunted.

My first impression of Mrs. Rodius was that she was definitely out of my league. She was a sophomore, and I was a freshman. She's four months younger than I, but I had spent my first year out of high school taking only a couple of classes at the local community college before following my Brandeis-attending girlfriend to Boston. We maintained a long-distance relationship for a year after high school, but within a month of me moving to Boston, that girlfriend had dumped me. She liked me more when she saw me less.

Mrs. Rodius was confident. She had friends. She walked with authority, thumping her heels through the hallway like she had places to go and people to see. She had a boyfriend who wore a fireman's coat. It was the coolest coat I'd ever seen, much better than my pea coat and felt cap. I was jealous of him in his coat. He also had a job at the college radio station, and you can't get much cooler than that. I later found out, though, that the coat really was his best feature.

I was also in the same French class as Mrs. Rodius. I had two years of French in high school, but Mrs. Rodius had no previous French experience. She had taken Russian instead, a fact that made her even more intimidating. But she was defensive about the fact that she was behind the rest of the class due to her lack of previous experience in French. I was a little cocky because I felt sure my pronunciation was lightyears ahead of the rest of the class, what with my familiarity with Inspector Clouseau and all. Consequently, I thought she was a bitch, and she thought I was an ass.

Our professor was much amused by our interactions in class and decided always to pair us together in classroom exercises. He even took me aside after class one day and asked me to take her under my wing, as it were, and correct her pronunciation at every opportunity, thereby jacking up my ass factor considerably. Our annoyance for each other began to really blossom over the first few months of the semester into a deep and abiding dislike.

Over time, though, our dormroom proximity and my tendency to skip class for no good reason began to bring us together. We came to each other to find out what homework assignments we may have missed. She began to spend more and more time in my room, finding great pleasure in toying with one of my roommates who was, incredibly, an even greater ass than I. We discovered a shared appreciation for Captain Morgan and Diet Coke. She started treating my roommate and I very well at the sandwich shop at which she worked, one of a couple of jobs she held while paying her own way through school. I was impressed by that, because I was attending entirely on my parents' dime, as were most of the student body there. And for the most part, those who had it the easiest were achieving the least.

By the time the school year ended, we'd become good friends. She dumped the boyfriend with the cool coat, whose ass factor was also greater than mine, though perhaps not greater than my roommate's. With the free ride from my parents ending, I couldn't afford to come back to school after the summer, but I moved into an apartment with my roommate, who wanted to stay close since he would be returning. So by the next fall semester, I was working full-time and no longer a part of the college community, though I stayed close to it.

Mrs. Rodius went back to her parents' home for the summer and returned in the fall looking absolutely smoking. She'd worked out all summer, partly out of revenge against the ex-boyfriend, and she looked amazing. I honestly didn't realize that I was attracted to her, though. I wrote SWSIL (Social Worker Sister-in-Law) a letter telling her about my good female friend, and how nothing would ever happen between us because our friendship was too strong.

Five days after I sent that letter, the roommate and I were throwing a party; Mrs. Rodius was working late that night and would miss most of the party, but I invited her to come over after work for a margarita and a massage. I think she believes that this was me being smooth, but honestly, smooth was not in my repetoire. She came over long after the party had petered out. We sat on the couch and talked. Eventually, she asked me, "What would you do if I kissed you?" I think I said something like, "I'd probably kiss you back." And so we did. Now, fifteen years later, there's finally a third attendee at the party. I'm glad he's here, but it's strange no longer being alone on the couch together, after all this time.

Graduated

Mrs. Rodius and I officially received our Birthin' Class Diploma last night. Last week, the teacher hung a poster just inside the classroom door. It asked: "What one thing can reduce the likelihood of c-section, decrease the need for pain medication, reduce the use of forceps, vacuums, and other interventions, improve latching on for breastfeeding, and increase a mother's satisfaction with the entire birth experience?" We were encouraged to write our guess on the poster. Some of the guesses were yoga, or emotional support, and one brown-noser wrote, "this class!" They were all good guesses, but not what she was looking for. If I tell you that the teacher is a doula, it's easy to see the answer coming, though: a doula of course!

This week, we entered the classroom to a dry-erase board full of "Resources for More Information on Doulas," so after we spent the first half of our last class discussing c-sections, I was afraid the second half of the evening, after the obligatory pregnant chick pee break, was going to be entirely a hard-sell session. Thankfully, though, she kept the doula marketing to a minimum.

Dutch at sweet juniper! called birthing classes "Fifteen hours of your life you'll never get back." I didn't feel that way about it. I consider myself an educated guy, fairly well-read, and the subject does interest me, so I know a little about it. Even if there wasn't a lot of information in the class that I didn't already know, though, it felt good to talk through it all with someone who was experienced and with a roomful of other people who were just as nervous or more so as we were. I'm usually not a group activity kind of guy, but I enjoyed the feeling of being in it with other people this time.

I did try to get Mrs. Rodius to skip the last half of the last class with me, though. The dry-erase board said we would be doing a "birthing rehearsal." Like I said, I'm not a group activity kind of guy, and the thought of a birthing rehearsal really kind of turned me off, I think for a couple of reasons.

One, performance anxiety. The doula had led the women through breathing and relaxation exercises each week, with a clothespin to pinch the ear to simulate a contraction. Some of the partners really got into their supporting role during these fake contractions, stroking the mother's hair, whispering encouragement to her. I kind of tried to, but I felt self-conscious, and I didn't want to compete for the position of Best Supporting Actor.

Two, how useful an exercise could it really be? Mrs. Rodius and I are both very familiar with the standard relaxation exercises. They're the same body awareness and focused relaxation techniques used in hypnosis and meditation, and we'd both used them throughout our lives. I had first encountered the techniques in the fourth through sixth grades, in a gifted-and-talented program called REACH ("Realizing Excellence in Academic Cognition Heuristically." What does Heuristically mean? Hell if I know...) Once a week, we spent half an hour in a guided breathing and relaxation session. When I think about it now, I can't imagine a public school committing resources to a similar program in elementary education, though it was the one thing about that program that has stuck with me the longest and proven the most useful in my life. In high school, I also played around with self-hypnosis and successfully blew my own mind by actually changing the temperature of my skin, verified by thermometer, by visualizing a heat source near it. So I just didn't think one more session of breathing through fake contractions with a clothespin on her ear would really change things much for Mrs. Rodius.

So I tried to get her to cut class. But she wouldn't do it.

"What about the diploma?" she said.

"What do I need with a birthing class diploma?" I asked. But I should've already known the correct answer:

"Put it in the scrapbook!" she said.

I should've known. She's been planning baby scrapbooks longer than she's been planning for a baby. I think she got her first Little Suzy's Zoo stickers three years ago. So we stuck around, and we graduated. And we've got the document to prove it. Come by our place some time next year, and I'll show you the scrapbook.

Boys Will Be Boys

At dinner last night, Mrs. Rodius said that Thumper must be sitting on her sciatic nerve, because she was getting a buzzing and burning sensation. She leaned a little to her left in her chair and said she was "relieving the pressure." I said it looked like she was letting one rip.

She was so genuinely shocked that I could suggest such a thing, I almost felt bad for saying it. If you never make a single joke in fifteen years about your wife farting in public, she really starts to develop a false sense of security.