The poop chronicles…

Well for the first time, ever I think, I saw my wife reel back at the sight of a dirty diaper.  She is, and always has been, a trooper when it comes to pee and poop and vomit.  She works with the elderly and so these are part of the daily routine.  But today, we were running a little late and after a morning bottle Grace had a BM that rivaled all others.  Let me back up a bit...

Her normal daily routine is to have Kristy, or I, get her up at 6:30 am and give her a morning bottle.  After the bottle is a diaper change, change of clothes from the night time sleeper to the day time fashion and it is off to day care.  Lately, she has been getting to day care having made a BM in her pants on the 20 minute trip there.  It is never a big deal because she rarely poops out of her clothes.  On this day, we were running late, and the daily wake up started at 7:15 am.  And since you can set a clock to Grace’s BMs, she had one before I was able to get her out the door and on the road.  Kristy was the first responder to this massive event.  She opened up the diaper and I only had a glancing view of the situation and it did not look good.  And it was stinky.  Stinky like we never smelled before.  Kristy’s head snapped back and all I heard was, “Ugh.  Oh my…”  I being the nice guy offered to take over.  If it was making her almost gag, with all her bodily fluid encounters and work and being a 14 month seasoned parent, I knew that it must be bad.  She muscled through it and got the job done, but quickly passed the loaded diaper to me.  It must have been 2 pounds (exaggeration).

Ah parenthood, you never know what crap will come your way.

Eating Contest

Sometimes children and trying to manage all that they entail and all that you still need to do for yourself is like a carnival.  Lots of rides, many you have to pay extra, above and beyond your entrance fee, to enjoy and many distractions along the way.  One event is the pie eating contest.  More on that later.

Last night I decided to make tacos for dinner for Kristy and myself.  Something we have on a regular basis and is one of our favorite meals and has become very routine to make.  Prior to making our own meal, as is typical of our evenings, the kids get fed first.  Grace is still eating cereals and purees and is not feeding herself, so it is still very hands on.  I look forward to the day when we can feed her the same food that is on our plate and just hose her down when she is done.  I am sure that she will enjoy making messes of every meal.  Abby is, well, a 5 week old and is still completely dependent of us facilitating her meals.  So the kids eat before we even conceptualize making food for ourselves.  It used to be that around 3 pm Kristy and I would ask each other, “What’s for dinner tonight?” and we would have a plan in place.  Now it is what are we still up for making at this hour and many times the answer is a bowl of cereal.

So I make dinner and realizing that Kristy is only 20 minutes in to the usual hour long ordeal that is feeding Abby and I say, “Should I plate your food, or wait?  I don’t want it to get cold on you.”  That is a pet peeve of mine, letting freshly prepared hot food sit and get cold with no one to enjoy it.  She says to me that I should just eat and that I can hold Abby when I am done to give her a break and let her have her meal.  And the race begins.  I don’t know why, because it was never prompted for me to finish in a certain length of time, but I felt like I had just entered and eating contest and had to finish before everyone else.  Funny part is that I was competing against myself.  I ended up eating three LOADED tacos, two with a potent hot sauce on them, in less than 5 minutes.  I had a stomach ache and a whole mess of regret for having eaten like it was the first meal I ever had in a month.  What was I thinking?

I guess kids will do that to you.  You eat at separate times from them and your spouse, you act like every meal is your last and when all the smoke clears, you are left with taco sauce all over your face and no one to give you the first prize trophy.

The mind plays funny tricks when you have had little sleep…

It was early in the morning, I am not sure exactly when, but Kristy had gotten up to feed Abby.  The girl eats all the time.  Luckily, she is starting to show signs of 3 and 4 hour periods at night so if we share shift and do every other feeding, each of us can get a decent bit of sleep.  On this particular night I was especially tired and Kristy was going to do me the favor of all the feedings that night.  Well after feeding her for an hour and having Abby fuss for another 45 minutes, Kristy was at the end of her rope and I got up to comfort Abby so that Kristy could finally get back to sleep.  Honestly neither of us could tell if she was still hungry or just gassy and fussy, so I was prepared to do what it took to get her past it.

When I first got up, the time was 2:30 am, she did not seem particularly hungry so I reserved myself to just sitting in the arm chair next to her bassinet and waited her out.  Of course I drifted in and out of sleep but awoke at the slightest whimper.  When she would not stop fussing I held her belly down on my chest, a position she LOVES, and reclined the arm chair deciding to rest with her a bit.  Again I drifted in and out of sleep.  I was not sure how much time had passed but I found myself suddenly talking to my best friend from high school, Ley.  Keep in mind that I have been out of high school since 1989.  It seemed so real.  We were at my parent’s home in NY and I, still holding Abby on my chest as if by Velcro, was fully immersed in this alter-reality.  Ley and I decided that it would be a good idea to go out and get pizza, despite the hour.  In this dream it was also 2:30 am.  And so we left and we drove through the back roads of my home town searching for a place that would sell pizza at this crazy hour.  Again, it seemed so real.

I awoke for a small bit and repositioned Abby with her head to the other side, still belly down on my chest, and was immediately propelled back into the scene.  This time, the back roads of NY took us to the local roads that I now know, here in NH.  Just like that without travelling 5 hours to get there I was in a more familiar place.  At this point in the story, since Ley was following me in his car and I was driving separate, I had discovered that I lost him on the way.  Maybe too quick of a turn, a red light I made it through and he didn’t, but he was nowhere to be found.  With no best friend and no pizza shops open, I decided to head home.

Again I awoke, Abby was still content and I decided to change her position to holding her, cradle style, in my arm.  Closing my eyes it was now sunny and I was no longer driving a car, but peddling a bike up the bare rock face of a steep mountain.  For some reason there were at least 5 dogs all chasing me and nipping at my feet.  The baby was in the basket on the front of the bike, much like Toto to Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ.  My legs were killing me because not only was I peddling furiously to get away from the dogs, but was doing this without my hands on the handle bar.  After that I woke up with some leg cramps.  The time now was 4:00 am.  I ended up not needing to feed Abby at all and put her back in her bassinet where she rested soundly until morning.

Consequently I had pizza for lunch today.

401-954-****

The time is 2:30 pm on a Tuesday afternoon, EST.  Less than 6 hours prior, at 9:00 am, I had a business review with my manager to talk about some techniques to get back on track with sales and making my metrics.  In my job we are expected, during two specific times of the day, to make outbound calls to new prospective customers.  The goal: make at least 15 calls and spend at least a total of 20 minutes on the phone in that hour.  For me the biggest issue is distractions.  I like to multi-task and with my cell phone right on my desk, e-mail, IM, and 5 other applications that I use to do my work, not to mention the internet on all day, there is a lot to be distracted with.  Also for me, business reviews are very motivating and usually get me back on track.  I am a goals oriented person and as long as there is a goal in mind I strive for it with focus.

So here I am ½ hour in to the second of these call blocks during the day and I am doing it.  I am focused, keeping out all distractions and then my cell phone goes off…

401-954-**** (number starred out to protect the stranger that will enter the story shortly).  It is a number I not recognize.

I hit “IGNORE” and keep up with being focused.  Usually I would have answered it right away.  I am curious like that.

401-954-**** rings again.  Now I have to answer it.

“Hello.”

“Joe, this is Kristy.  Don’t hang up.  I am calling from a nice man’s cell phone.  I am at the Target parking lot.  I just locked my keys, my phone, my purse…and the baby in the car.  Can you come down here and unlock the car?”

Now luckily, the parking lot at Target is just 5 minutes away from where I work so I was out and back by 2:45 pm.  Funny thing is that I took the last 15 minutes of the hour I was supposed to be focused in and wrote this post.  So much for no distractions.

How long does it take to watch a movie?

The subject above is an interesting one and the obvious answer is actually another question, “well how long is the movie?”  The real answer is, “how many kids do you have?”

So the other day Kristy and I decide that after a long vacation of fitting in many things that we would take the Sunday before (me) going back to work and just relax around the house.  Laundry would get done, the pile of dishes would get washed and we would, should the stars be aligned with both kids taking a nap at the same time, we would get a nap in too.  The goal was to make breakfast and sit down and start watching a movie that we had gotten in the mail from Netflix.  Rango was the title.  Breakfast was late that morning because we all slept in and so we were all in our seats at 10:30 am.  Like all good intentions they are thwarted by the unexpected moments of changing diapers, feeding babies and the occasional crying because Grace, the older of the two (now almost 14 months) goes too far and bangs her head on the coffee table, or floor or any of the other various surfaces that are harder than her head.

Just pause it I will be right back turns in to the screen saver mode and on two occasions timing out and actually shutting down.  Of course after taking 3 hours to watch 20 minutes, lunch needs to be made and more diapers changed and bottles administered.  I am not sure what happened after lunch, but there was a long period of time when we switched over to TV and abandoned the movie because we had been watching it in 5 minute increments and was too much work to manage rewinding and playing the same scene over and over.

Late in the afternoon we had a good go at it but then the most amazing and unlikely thing happened.  WE GOT A NAP.  The question asked after we were all up and conscious again was, “did you finish the movie without me?”  My usual answer would be yes, because I tend to stay up later and movies keep my interest longer than my wife’s, but this time I was good.  I knew that the goal was to watch it, together, by the end of the day and so I was patient.  And it is not like we were trying to beat the clock because of late fees.  This was Netflix.  No late fees.  In fact, the movies that we had before these two were received in May.  We had them for three months.

After the craziness that surrounds every meal with having to spoon feed Grace, bottle feed Abby, change the girls’ diapers, feed the dog and make our own meal (you notice we are last on the list) we committed once again.

We finished watching the movie around 9:30 pm.  No one fell asleep at the end, and it turned out to be a fantastic flick.  So how long does it take to watch a movie?  The answer is simple: 11 hours. 

In the beginning...

Funny thing happened on the way to the web...
I started a blog.

For technology the way it has advanced since I was in high school using Apple IIe computers to today, from a textual Internet only to what we have with social media, I have remained staunchly opposed to all of it.  I don't My Space or Facebook or send out tweets.  I don't have my own website or pretend to know a lot about HTML, but the engagement of my activity in such things and the genesis of this Blog is a simple one.  Here's the story.

When my first daughter, Grace Carole, was born on June 20, 2010 it was the most wonderful moment of my life.  There was a new found love and joy that consumed me and in the coming months ahead, it only grew exponentially.  Grace was just that, a blessing from God and my wife, Kristy, and I have never been the same.  One day while we were in a Starbucks nested inside the local Target, feeding Grace, a man, a stranger, that was sitting at the adjacent table said that we should cherish these moments forever.  Well duh, we are parents, why would we not?  What he was driving at was a practice that was suggested to him when his kids, now much older, were born: get yourself a journal and write down all of the good and bad moments.  When you are feeling blue, read back over them and it will lift your spirits.  So that is what we did, we went to Barnes & Noble and got our self a nice notebook and started writing every day.  We took turns, some days she would write, and others I.  We even had the Grandparents and God Parents write her a passage to commemorate the occasion of their first visits to us as a family.

As time went on, daily writing became weekly summaries and the weekly summaries became a calendar that I was updating with events in the hopes that I would go back and capture the moments again.  There is nothing like writing when you are inspired and capturing the moment when it is fresh and still real.  Well Grace turned a year and I look back with the guilt that I never finished the year writing.  In fact my last entry is for the week of 12/12/2010. 

Not soon after Grace was born, Kristy and I learned that she was pregnant again, due August 7, 2011 with our second.  We, like with Grace, found out in advance and it was to be a baby girl.  She, also like Grace, came early and was born on July 18th, 2011.  As if the guilt of not finishing the journal for Grace wasn't bad enough, what was I going to do about Abby?  Would I start that task again.  I lost time and motivation with one kid in the house, how was two going to make the task any easier?  I can hardly shower every day let alone write in a book after the two of them are finally down for the night. 

Snap to another story real quick...
I have a good friends that since 1988, we have been writing letters, yes postal mail, ever since he moved away from my home town.  We lost touch rarely and took breaks hardly.  Our longest was when he moved back in to the area and attended the same college as me for a bit.  We had lunch every other day, why did we need to write?  There was a long break and I had moved, so not having kept any of his letters, I no longer had his address.  I tracked him down only to find that he had moved in with his sister after his father's passing and, obviously had a new address.  The letters started up anew.  But once Grace was born., the time between receiving his correspondence and me replying got longer and longer.  And here is the point of the story: he finally wrote me an e-mail to my work and we started up again, electronically.  I spend nine hours a day in one seat at work and so this was the best way for me to be good about replying regularly and frequently. 

And that is where I got this idea to start Abby's journal in the form of a Blog.  I can write on my lunch at work, be good about writing every day and wah-lah, guilt gone, problem solved.

So Abby, when you are old enough and interested enough, this is for you.  Sorry in advance Grace if this keeps up longer than the journal did.

-Dad