Still not a regular. . .

Wow, time just continues to fly.  I really should set myself a regular schedule if I intend to keep writing.

Both boys are growing and doing well, and my Mother-in-Law is still here, so the littlest one hasn’t had to go to day care yet.  I can’t tell you how happy I am about that.  I still don’t like sending the older off, but what can one do?

Yeah, I know, I just threw in a third person phrase up there, but if that really bothers you you should stop reading this.  And if you didn’t notice, shame on you.  Go read better literature instead.

Boy, I think I just told pretty much anyone who’s read this far that they should read something else.  Probably good advice, though.

One thing that I wanted to do was write a small section on the gadgets that we use for the boys.  From the mundane items, like our single stroller, to the slightly more exotic, such as our double stroller.  I’ve got a long story about the double one I’ll tell you about later on.

And I’m writing this on a new Mac, more of which I’ll get into as well.

Monkey #2 is now 2 1/2 months old, which is just unbelievable.  Monkey #1 is now just a bit under 2 years old.  We just bought a real bed for him (at Ikea, of course), but haven’t let him sleep in it just yet.  It’s just in his room, teasing him with this 

big-boy-bed-ishness that he loves.  It’s one of those bunk beds that can pretend it’s a single bed until you need it, then you just roll it over and you can slide in another mattress and you’ve got space for two boys to sleep in one bedroom and still have a bit of area for them to play.

Currently, in Monkey #1’s bedroom there is no space at all.  With the bunk bed and the crib he’s still sleeping in and one chest of drawers it’s filled to overflowing.  When we set that room up as a nursery we painted some murals on two walls.  You’d have to understand how unartistic my wife and I are for this to truly sink in.  Imagine that you’re drawing a circle, then imagine that you color in to solid circles for eyes, got that?  Well, I can’t even get that far, that’s how difficult the project was for us.

Luckily, with borrowed a projector, and my wife’s patience, we managed to draw some fish on one wall, then a tree with a monkey and a bird, and a giraffe on the other side of that wall.  The project took us about 3 months of squabbling and painful attention to detail to finish and it actually looked pretty good to us.  And now it’s all covered up with cheap furniture!!!

Sometimes even when you think you’re winning, you’re really not.

Oh boy, time flies when you most want to hold on to it.

Months after the start of this blog, and I’m just now getting back to it.  Huge changes.  Not unexpected, but huge.

Monkey #2 has arrived!  Yup, it’s been that long.  Monkey #1 is now a year and a half old.  He’s walking, stringing a couple of words together at a time, and discovered screaming in public places.  I used to really dislike it when kids did that.  Actually, I still do dislike it, but now I feel sorry for all the parents that I thought black things of way back then.  Monkey #1 is not terrible about it, but it happens often enough to raise my hackles and not enough for me to become used to it.  He’s also really into cars.  Any kind of car, but especially big semi trucks.  We like in an industrial area, so there are tons of these when we drive around, and he loves them.  We once drove around next to a cement truck for a little while, and he was just ecstatic about that.  Not even Yoko makes him as happy as that cement truck.  

Monkey #2 is one month old.  He’s as cute as his older brother was, dimples and maybe the long eye lashes, but a cleft chin and lighter hair.

The heart-breaking part is that my wife has to go back to work in two weeks.  Six weeks of maternity leave sounds like a long time, but it really isn’t at all.  How can anyone expect a new mother to abandon a six-week old baby to the care of strangers?  And yet people have to do it every day.  We’re luckier than most, since my Mother-in-Law volunteered to watch the new baby for 3 months, so he won’t have to go to day care until he’s a whole 4 months old.  Monkey #1 will continue to go to daycare, since we don’t think she can really cope with the two of them.  Well, she could cope, but it would probably involve Monkey #1 watching lot of TV, which I just don’t like.

My son, let’s call him Monkey for the sake of clarity, is a swell kid.  Every parent says that, so you have to take my word for it that he really is one of the better ones out there.  And why wouldn’t you?  You’ve read this far, so it must be true.

He’s just a bit over a year old, and Monkey #2 is already on the way, but more about that later on.

Let’s fill in some basics on Monkey.  He isn’t walking yet.  He’s got a limited vocabulary, and it’s mostly centered on “hungry”, “more”, and “milk”, all in sign.  He’s definitely an observer, not a jumper-in-er.  It’s strange to think back on this, but even as a tiny infant he just seemed too aware, more so than most kids.  Really, even taking my biased opinion into account.  I’m not saying he’s a genius or anything, although he may be for all I know, I’m just saying that he really takes his time to take it all in before deciding on a course of action.

He’s a Virgo, and they’re probably all like that.  He’s also a Rat under the Chinese Zodiac, so he also fits that profile.

What else?  He’s got big eyes and long lashes, not at all like me, but like his Mother.  Come to think of it, she’s more of an observer than me as well.  He goes to daycare 5 days a week, and it breaks his Mother’s heart each and every day he has to go.  But more on the challenges for the middle class later.  There’s something to that, the heart-break of day care.  I don’t like it, but I see it as a necessary evil, so it doesn’t tear me up to drop him off every morning.

The part that bothers me is not knowing what happened during the day.  What exactly did he eat?  How much?  Did he poop?  I know, that last one is kind of weird, but it turns out that now, as a parent, the excretion habits of someone else have taken on a real measure of importance.  

Of course I ask the day care lady about this, but it’s not enough detail.  Even being told “Yes, he did poop today” is sometimes not enough, it makes me feel as though I shouldn’t have had to ask, I should have been able to eyeball him and think “Oh, yes, he looks as though he’s pooped recently”.  But enough about that.

What else?  Monkey’s very first, actual, word was “Yoko”, although if you want to get technical about it it sounds more like Koko.  For the sake of clarity, I’ll tell you that our dog’s name is Yoko.  So that was it, not Mama or Dada or ball, it was Yoko.

And I hate that dog.

The Half-Discovered or Life Confessions of a Dedicated Slacker

Starting is supposed to be the hard part, so. . .here’s the start.

First of all, there won’t really be any confessions.  If I wanted catharsis I’d tell my wife and take my lumps.  Since I’m writing here, not telling her, then I see no reason to expose myself to danger by allowing you rat-finks to tell her I’m writing stuff on the web.  Not that I think you’re all rat-finks, but some of you undoubtedly are, so I have to take into account the lowest common denominator.

Why does on expose oneself to ridicule by writing a blog?  Well, I’m doing it to learn a bit about myself as I go along.  Do I really think writing some anonymous drivel will help in that?  I’m not sure,  but it can’t hurt.  Unless you tell my wife, and then it could hurt quite a bit.  Ha, ha, just kidding!  Love you, Honey!

You never know.  Gotta cover all the bases.

Where was I?  Yeah, self-discovery, journey of a thousand words, etc. etc.

I should tell you from the start that I’m moderately happy.  And that qualifier is painful.  It detracts from my enjoyment of being even moderately happy.  It makes my moderately happy sound like simple contentment, and that’s just wrong.  There’s nothing wrong with my life that isn’t common.  I’m happily married (see?  I didn’t have to qualify that statement).  I have a son who’s brought more joy into my life than I thought he would (more, much more, on fatherhood later on), and a decent job.  Not a swell job, nor one that will let me retire at 45, or 50, or probably even 62, but it’s a decent job none the less.  And yet I’m only moderately happy, not ecstatic.  As I see it, I deserve to be ravingly happy and unlimitedly joyful all the time.  Well, not all the time, but by golly I deserve to be happy almost all the time.

Maybe I should begin there.  Why do I deserve to be happy?  Does someone owe me happiness?  I can assure you, if I had an IOU for deliriously happy in my wallet I’d take advantage of it.  Now, I’m not going to get into the religious aspects of it.  At least not any more than what is absolutely required to explore the subject.  This is going to be more stream-of-consciousness and I don’t want to stop and look up bible verses (or find quotes from  Sartre if that’s the direction of the moment).

Maybe not even that, after all, I am a slacker.