The Pinkening

If it seems like the allegedly wild-card nature of Tuesday’s posts has inexorably morphed into an extra day per week to talk about issues related to offspring, specifically the never-ending preparations for offspring yet-to-come … yeah, I’ve noticed that too. As above, so below, or something like that. Baby-prepping has taken over most if not all of my free time. Baby-prepping-type thoughts have taken over most if not all of my non-dedicated blogging.

This past weekend felt something like a breakthrough, and one which I didn’t realize quite how badly I needed until I had it and my brain gave out a long, deep “ooohhhhhh yeahhhhh”. My wife’s parents were kind enough to come up on Saturday and keep the little guy occupied while my wife was at work, which freed me up to focus entirely on painting the nursery. I had managed, in little snatches of time here and there through the preceding week, to get masking tape on the ceiling against the walls and on the floor moulding and door and window trim, so all I really had to do was put color on the walls. Carefully, though, of course; all the previous steps had involved white primer, white ceiling paint and white interior paint, none of which would suffer from going a bit outside the lines in any direction. But the pink color we intended for the walls would show any mistakes that made their way onto the ceiling or mouldings, and I’ve learned the hard way over the years that masking tape alone isn’t always enough to prevent stray splatters, which means the painter has to exercise certain control and restraint as well (although I also learned on this particular go-around that 2-inch-wide masking tape, which is the minimum width that can block an errant paint roller, is the only kind worth the trouble).

Anyway, I applied myself to the task mindfully yet resolutely and managed to avoid major disasters and got every wall in the room completely painted in about four hours. My wife had selected a lovely, icy, subtle shade of pink which when I opened the first paint can made me think I hadn’t shaken the thing long enough because it looked white. As I started rolling it on, though, it definitely looked pink against the primered walls, which themselves had only managed to have the dark-green-with-earth-metal-overlay turned down by about 95% to a mint-green-frosted white. But like I said, good contrast for the pink. I worked my way methodically around the whole room and when I closed the circuit back at the starting point and there was no more basis for contrast or comparison, the pink went back to looking like white. (Though I attribute at least part of that to pure brain-numbness.)

In the brighter natural light of the following morning my wife and I looked at the room and she declared that it did not need a second coat of pink, a reprieve for which I dang near fell to my knees and wept. So while she was at work and the little guy was napping that afternoon, I took down all of the bright blue masking tape, and between the side-by-side contrast of the walls with the white ceiling and the natural darkening of the no-longer fresh paint, I clearly saw the pink and felt like a dunce for ever doubting its visibility in the first place. And since ripping up masking tape takes considerably less time than the little guy generally naps, I then proceeded to start building furniture. I started with a new floor lamp which took all of ten minutes and then moved on to something more substantial. I had almost finished my boy’s new, blue bookcase when he woke up, and after I got him from his crib I explained what the plan for the afternoon was and he enthusiastically joined in. He helped finish the bookcase (mostly by handing me parts I pointed out to him) and then assisted in taking all the books off his white bookcase so that I could slide it over to the nursery. The blue one went in its place and the books got re-shelved. I had honestly expected a bit more resistance to the idea of “his” furniture being reassigned for the baby’s use, but apparently the shiny new replacement softened the blow more than enough. I even went so far as to suggest that maybe some of the books themselves, especially the more babyish ones, might be given to his sister as well. He then proceeded to inform me that he would read them to her. I told him he was going to be an excellent big brother.

The next order of business was building the little guy’s new dresser, slightly more complicated than a bookcase but still not that bad, since it came from Ikea (as did the bookcase and his teeny-tiny nightstand, all from the same matching set no less). The little guy lost interest in helping with the building, which I grant is tedious and monotonous, but he did entertain himself reducing large chunks of packing Styrofoam into drifts of little white balls. So the dresser came together and I swapped out the infant changing table for it, again with no major drama.


The basic upshot is that we had planned on making significant changes to both the little guy’s room and the nursery as part of one unified effort, and at this point everything in the little guy’s room is done. The nursery is significantly closer to being done than it was last week. I still need to assemble the new glider, and we’re awaiting delivery of the new crib. Then pretty much all the furniture will be in place and we can finalize the little accent decorations that my wife selected for the cherry blossom motif of the room. Not a trivial amount of work, but compared to not that long ago when it was a half-painted room with masking tape and tarps and paint cans and trays and brushes scattered all over the floor amongst large, unopened furniture boxes … like I said, it feels like a breakthrough.

I also spent a good deal of time on Sunday evening (and last night too, for that matter) re-reading a book my wife and I acquired during her first pregnancy which explains the ins and outs of natural childbirth. It ended up being fairly helpful, even though there was little to nothing natural about the (medically very sensible given the circumstances) induction that brought on the little guy’s delivery. We’re hoping it will be even more applicable the second time around, but, of course, we both know all about best laid plans.

To wit, my wife had a doctor’s appointment yesterday and they did various measurements on the baby, who is doing splendidly and I daresay superlatively. My wife texted me to say that the baby was measuring at about seven pounds. I texted back asking if she meant that’s what they were predicting the baby would weigh if she were born on her due date. My wife kindly repeated herself and explained that meant the baby weighs seven pounds RIGHT NOW. WITH FIVE WEEKS TO GO. I know these from-the-outside measurements are notoriously unreliable but, especially after the 7 lb 4 oz little guy, the thought of anything like a 9-lb-plus baby almost seems like a totally different ballgame. And then again, a lot can happen in the next month or so, not that I am bracing myself for anything terrible, but a whole world of possibilities from an unavoidable c-section to an unexpectedly fast labor that sees our daughter born in the back of a taxi sitcom-style still wait in the unknowable future. (OK, maybe not the sitcom-style anything. But still.) My current comfort, though, is that however the baby girl manages to make it into the world, when she comes back to our home she’ll have a lovely bedroom awaiting her.

Helicopters

The highlight of last week, insofar as the time I spent at work goes, revolved around a fairly dumb joke. My co-worker and workspacemate Mr. Voluble was grumbling to no one in particular (or possibly to the entire world within range of his voice) about a case he was working that involved training and helicopters and the Swedish armed forces and so on. I pointed out to him that I was going to start using the phrase “Swedish Helicopter Training” in conversation whenever I found myself inclined but unable to say “shit”. Mr. Voluble actually thought that was pretty hilarious and suggested expanding it further to “Swedish Helicopter In-country Training” which is a real thing but also fulfills the acronym requirements that much more completely. Out third counterpart Normal-ish Dude thought this was a handy phrase to have at the ready as well, so it got repeated a lot over the course of the following days.


I did find it somewhat interesting to watch my two colleagues proceed to beat the joke to death as the week went along. Do not get me wrong, I enjoy a good running joke, as well as (maybe even especially) one with a little bit of backstory to it. And I admit I’ve been known to take this a little too far, making private jokes in mixed company which only tends to negatively reinforce senses of insiders and outsiders and so on. The problem with private jokes is that opening them up to anyone who wasn’t there when they started involves, inescapably, explaining the joke, and man nothing kills humor deader than belabored diagramming. (I’ve been known to try to mine humor from the diagramming itself by stretching it to ridiculous extremes, but that’s neither here nor there.) So whereas my inclination would be to use “Swedish Helicopter In-country Training” sparingly, and probably pare it down to just “helicopter” eventually so that it wouldn’t be so obtrusive in conversation and could just function properly as a minor, immature amusement … my co-workers, not so much. Normal-ish Dude, in particular, managed to shoehorn into almost every conversation running for a couple of days, and then of course felt compelled to ask people if they caught what the initials spelled out. I’d like to be able to parse all that by calling it a generational difference, not even necessarily a Gen X versus Boomer thing but maybe just a temperamental difference between the old needing to know they’re being attended to and the young being more content to simply do their own thing, but that really doesn’t hang together. I’m not that young, and while Mr. V. is a Boomer, N.D. is within a few years of my age. And I know people of my parents’ age cohort who can take a joke and run with it but not drive the thing into the ground. Maybe N.D. is just a dullard.

The really important thing, though, is that I couldn’t imagine that kind of joke being made, let along taking on an obnoxious life of its own, if Ms. A. were still in the office. Between the profanity and the stupidity I’m sure she would have been appalled and disgusted, and we all would have known that and never even tried it out in her presence. So, yup, still glad she’s gone!

I held off on posting this until the afternoon because I was expecting an announcement about the office relocation, and sure enough, it came through about a half an hour ago. The move has been delayed until mid-to-late May. Ah, well. The upside of that is I probably won’t miss it due to paternity leave; instead of getting the move done and then taking FMLA for the new baby’s homecoming, I’ll take FMLA and come back with time to spare before the move happens. I’m not thrilled about the extra time I’ll be spending riding the Metro, of course, but I can roll with it.

Be-Mused

When I was fairly young, second or third grade, I wrote my first short story (assuming you are willing to use a very broad definition of the term). Before that I was given to drawing big, sprawling, action-oriented pictures which had a certain inherent narrative, and from there I had progressed to making my own comic strips and illustrated Golden Book style tales, but I still remember that first foray into letting the words alone tell a story. I no longer have this particular scrap of my literary development, and I don’t even remember a lot about it (which may simply be because there’s not much to remember) but I do recall that it was a fantasy story about heroes killing a monster. It had to have pre-dated my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons, but somehow I had absorbed the hack-and-slash tropes all the same by the age of eight or so. Actually considering that my dad liked to read sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks (which always had the best cover art) on his commute, and Clash of the Titans was on HBO fairly often, and various other things in the early 80’s zeitgeist, my choice of subject matter is pretty unsurprising.


More than the story itself, though, what I remember vividly is that once I had written out the entire thing I realized that whatever self-expression itch I had felt hadn’t yet been fully scratched. I needed an audience, wider than my parents, in fact as wide as possible, which at that age could mean only one thing: my class at school. So I also remember carrying the story to school one day and asking my teacher at some point in between lessons if it might be possible for me to read it in front of the class. I feel like I need to go back over that again to make sure my point is clear here. This was not a school assignment and I was not making a graded oral presentation. Nor did my teacher have any kind of pre-existing policy about earning extra credit by producing and performing original works. It wasn’t even Show and Tell day. I just had gotten the idea in my head at home to write a story for its own sake, and then also gotten the idea that rather than hand it to one of my friends to read I would render it dramatically to the entire class.

My teacher indulged me (I suspect this is because she must have gotten her teaching degree in the free-to-be 70’s) and I was excited for the premier of my epic. And I didn’t get stage fright or freeze up or get heckled or anything terribly traumatizing; I got through the whole story and it was politely received and the creative urge finally felt something like resolution and life went on. But one particular moment stands out in my mind almost thirty years later. The story involved swordplay and ogre-slaying and, because I was a typically bloodthirsty little boy, the descriptions were fairly graphic and gory. And as I was reading those words aloud towards the climax of the story, I suddenly felt acutely self-conscious about the content. I actually censored myself at one point with a last-minute word substitution: I had written something, at about the point where the main hero decapitates the evil monster, along the lines of “blood flew from the sword and guts spilled out the neck” but reading it in front of my class I said “blood flew from the sword and more spilled out the neck” because I was horrified at the thought of saying “guts”. Not at the thought of guts, themselves, because at that age I mentally pictured guts as looking vaguely like pink rice pudding. But I didn’t want to inflict the word guts and its icky connotations on my captive audience. So I edited it out on the fly. And I took away a strangely compelling personal lesson about the power of words.

I’m sure if anything approaching the above happened in a third-grade classroom today the parents would immediately be called by school officials to discuss whether or not there were any unlocked assault rifles in the child’s house, but I don’t have a single memory of any repercussions from my phantasmagoric ramblings. Not even so much as a funny look from a teacher who probably thought in ten years I would have long hair and a black van with a wizard’s tower airbrushed on the side. (She’d have been right about the hair but not the van.)

There’s a lot of reasons why this little childhood vignette is on my mind today. I’m reading a fantasy novel right now which just happens to have a running theme about performance and art and the power of names and stories and so on. I’m marveling at the way my little guy’s play is becoming more and more narrative-driven all the time and wondering when (not if) the making of stories will be secondary to sharing them for others’ entertainment. Every time I set myself to writing for the blog I know, consciously or unconsciously, I’m doing on-the-fly self-editing and clearly I can pinpoint exactly when I started honing that trait. But of course mostly it’s just one of the many little anecdotes that build the case that, yes, I really was always an attention-craving verbally-precocious little geek from basically as far back as I can remember.

Fleeting

Right about now we are getting to the point in the Rearing of the Little Guy where I’m never quite entirely sure where things stand. Previously I’ve felt like just about every parenting decision his mother or I make is largely inconsequential. No, I take that back, obviously many decisions have consequences, but those are correspondingly major choices. My wife had to decide whether or not to breast-feed, the two of us had to agree on daycare arrangements, and we frazzledly worked our way through co-sleeping and the transition to crib-sleeping. We put him through surgery to give him some relief from near-constant ear infections. We consciously kept the little guy away from television for as much of his first two years as we could, and we read to him every day almost from the time he could keep his eyes open for more than five minutes at a stretch. I’m entirely at peace with those decisions, which felt right at the time and maintain that status with the benefit of hindsight. The little guy is healthy and happy and sweet and smart (for appropriate values relevant to a two-and-a-half year old, at any rate) and I’ll take a portion of credit for that.

But all of those big decisions by their very nature were things which afforded ample opportunity for careful consideration before implementation. What I initially had in mind for this post were the decisions made on the spur of the moment: give the little guy a cookie of his own when he catches me eating one? I concluded early on that I shouldn’t obsess over little choices like that, because I could trust in some combination of “it all comes out in the wash” and “this too shall pass” and various other aphorisms to minimize the actual impact. An inconsistency here, an indulgence there, none of it lasting.

Which is not to say that I’m blind to the fact that a recurring pattern of small inconsequentialities can eventually add up something more lasting. But what I am confessing, I suppose, is that I haven’t believed that the additive principle applied to the little guy, entirely due to his very littleness. I knew that at some point in the amorphous and indeterminate future it would apply, of course, but at ages of barely one through barely two? Not likely. Heart of a bull, long-term memory of a goldfish, that was roughly how I judged my earthly heir. Every day was a clean slate, and every day the need to firmly establish what the groundrules governing minutiae were could be safely put off til tomorrow.


This past weekend we took the little guy grocery shopping (twice, actually, because some things we can only get at Costco and other things we can only get at the regular supermarket, don’t judge me!) and in a very short span of time during that trip he caught both me and his mother off guard a couple different ways. Once was at the checkout, when the cashier said hi to him. She was a young, non-hideous girl and the little guy – oh, for old times’ sake and purposes of this story, let’s call him Casanova – has always had a fascination with individuals in that age range and of that gender (my wife and I refer to them as his “target demographic”). So he responded to her greeting, but not simply by saying hi, which I would have sworn was the response you could count on from him 100% of the time. This time he went a little further and said, “Hi … my name’s Casanova,” complete with charmingly coy delivery (except, obviously, he gave her his real name). Little guy had never introduced himself to someone by name – without even being prompted! – prior to that moment. The suddenly, boom, he’s trying out a new social convention.

The other surprising display of mental acuity came during a conversation my wife and I were having with young Casanova, yet another installment among hundreds in the ongoing attempt to prepare him for the imminent arrival of his little sister, or more specifically the fact that once she arrives we will have to give her a proper name and leave off using the in utero nickname (“Bonus”) by which we refer to her now. My wife observed that we had a nickname for Casanova before he was born, too, and asked him if he knew what it was. “When I was a baby in mommy’s belly you guys called me Freebie,” he grinningly answered, which is not only totally accurate as a statement of fact but also (to my mind, at any rate) a pretty deft bit of grammatically correct sentence-structure (and that is pretty much a word-for-word quote I gave) not to mention a crazy level of comprehension of the very idea of a time before he was born. And while I’m willing to allow the possibility that he could have just been parroting words without truly, deeply comprehending all their implications, I think it’s a remote possibility, because neither of his parents has discussed his own gestation with him in who knows how long. (Watch, now I’ll find out that his grandmother was telling him exactly those kinds of stories on one of the very recent emergency babysitting visits she made a couple weeks ago.)

Sooo … the sleeper has awakened? Possibly. At the very least, however well reality may actually mesh with my perceptions, I no longer feel like I can blithely make it up as I go along. From here on out I’ll always suspect that it’s at least possible that some decision I make, some lesson I impart (or fail to convey) to the little guy will be one that makes a legitimately lasting impression. Previously I felt like he was composed of some infinitely malleable substance that would always quickly return to its original shape, but now I think the places where I push or pull will show the evidence for longer periods of time. And it’s not as though this is a total shock, I knew it’d happen eventually, I’m not even terribly surprised by the timing. I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge it, I guess, before hurtling ever onward to the next upheaval.

International cinema

Apropos of absolutely nothing, here is a Hungarian promotional poster for The Empire Strikes Back. Arguably the one movie out of all six which is least in need of redemption via insanely bitchin' artistic license, but still ... here it is. Making for a very nice filler post if I do say so myself.

Nothing wrong, just not terribly inspired to geek out today. More tomorrow, for reals.

39

There's a definite sense of marking time that's starting to settle in, which is only partly related to some of the things I mentioned yesterday, like Ms. A.'s departure and the possible rescheduling of our office move. Going past one anticipated event and finding another one suddenly cast into limbo creates a weird, floaty disconnectedness; if we're not heading towards The Next Thing, what are we doing?

You can see other examples, too, just take your pick from the various subjects I usually go on about, from treasured to trite. The little guy seems to have successfully transitioned to new daycare with no repercussions (if you overlook the fact that he woke up loudly and demandingly at 5:30 in the morning on both Saturday and Sunday, which seemed a wee bit sadistically vindictive). Community and the rest of the Thursday night appointment television are in post-sweeps reruns. Nothing major is happening - everything just is.

Front and center, of course, is the fact that my wife's due date is thirty-nine days away. The repainting of the nursery proceeds like it's on some kind of geological timetable. Indeed, it's not so much that I'm redecorating the room as waiting on a perverse type of erosion to occur. I never thought I would ever have use for a phrase like "obnoxious, ornery shade of beige" but that exactly the phrase I am forced to employ to describe the tinted hit the previous owners perpetrated on the ceiling and moulding of the soon-to-be-nursery, a shade which is downright hostile to being covered up, even by multiple coats. Yet I assure you I realize that at this point I am LITERALLY WRITING ABOUT WATCHING PAINT DRY. Which, yes it's on my mind and all, but man. Sorry about that.

But not much else is up! Things are proceeding more or less as we expect them to. My wife is counting down the days of work she has left before maternity leave. Bulbs we planted last year are starting to send up green shoots as spring inexorably draws on. The little guy insists on being addressed as various fictional characters rather than by his own name, including but not limited to Bob the Builder, Thomas the Tank Engine, Lightning McQueen, Mickey Mouse, and in a new development last night, Captain Hook. (In that last scenario I got to be Tick-Tock the Croc, which I have to admit was pretty awesome.)


Other than that, though, no surprises, no shake-ups, nothing we haven't seen in some form or another before. I suppose I should be grateful for the calm before the storm, and I really am, but it makes the daily bloggery a bit of a chore.

Business as usual

It is down to three of us here in the workspace now, as last Friday really and truly was Ms. Antisocial’s last day. My contracting supervisor stopped by this morning to acknowledge as much. I know that lately I’ve had nothing but good things to say about my boss, but I have to admit that as last week went along and the evidence that Ms. A. was leaving mounted, I found it almost unsettlingly odd that my boss never addressed the situation himself. Granted, it wouldn’t have made any difference either way, and I’m not sure how he could have acknowledged it: an e-mail to me, Mr. Voluble and Normal-ish Dude? Calling the three of us into his office one at a time, or all together? Maybe he was afraid that if he even so much as spoke to us about it, that would be perceived by Ms. A. as talking about her behind her back, more fuel for her rampant paranoia, and might have made the end of the week even more unpleasant all around. So perhaps he chose to let sleeping dogs lie, as it were. Apparently Ms. A. took some kind of parting shot at my boss on Friday via e-mail, but he alluded to that fact this morning without coming out and explaining exactly what it entailed, and I didn’t pry. Honestly I’m just glad the tension level in the room has dropped to an entirely negligible amount.

The other newsworthy thing mentioned by my boss this morning was that he is deeply skeptical about our alleged office move happening by the end of the month. And he makes some valid points. The end of March is three and a half weeks away at this point, and as of yet we still have gotten zero information from the powers that be in terms of concrete details of the move. I was asking for info weeks ago in terms of what we would be responsible for ourselves and what would be handled by whatever moving services the agency makes use of, and what the timetable would look like, and I was referred to my immediate supervisor on the government side since she happens to be the lucky person tasked with coordinating the move in addition to her normal duties. As my contracting manager pointed out, she is out of the office all this week, so it will be March 14 at the earliest when she might start disseminating concrete move info. That seems a bit up-against-the-wall for any government office to do much of anything, let along physically shut down, pack up and relocate.

I’m really looking forward to being able to ride the VRE every day, not only because I’ll have more time to read and/or watch DVDs, less time behind the wheel of my car and no time on the Metro, so it’s a bummer to have the office move delayed. But it could be worse, as my boss was coming as close as he ever comes to griping when he pointed out that he tends to pay for parking on a month-to-month basis and he really needs to know well before April 1 if he is going to be parking during that month in one garage or another. So I will hang in there and see what happens. It’s always an adventure.