Feeding and Care

Here’s a little Random Factoid, not even really a proper Anecdote. When I was in high school my buddies and I used to go to the local diner a lot to hang out. It only just now occurs to me that the diner was a lot like a bar, in that we could go there in a group of any size and sit around and shoot the breeze for long, theoretically open-ended spans of time, with the added benefit of not needing to be 21 (or have a fake ID, or just be located in a college town where the proprietors have a business model based on not caring overmuch) to get in. As opposed to most restaurants, where if you stay very long past the point where you’ve finished your meal they start to look at you funny and suggest that you take things elsewhere, the diner staff didn’t seem to mind if we made modest orders and then nursed bottomless cups of coffee for hours.


I almost always ordered the same thing every time we went to the diner, which was the Pizza Burger Deluxe, something which is not quite as monstrous as it sounds (but only barely). It was basically cheeseburger which used mozzarella instead of American and also trapped a layer of marinara between the melted cheese and the beef. You might be thinking that the “Deluxe” part of the name alluded to extra pizza toppings like pepperoni and sausage and mushrooms and olives and so forth, but in fact it simply meant that the platter came with french fries. The burger was also on a regular bun, not between two slices of Sicilian or anything like that. So, only vaguely pizza-esque. More like a Meatball Parm sub with the shape and ingredient proportions rearranged. But I was addicted to those things. I think I might have started eating Pizza Burgers before I actually acquired a taste for normal cheeseburgers, weirdly finicky eater that I was as a kid.

I was thinking about the old diner go-to order today because it’s been a long week and I did not bring lunch to work (mostly I forgot, but didn’t really have a lot at home I could bring to begin with) and I’ve exhausted my laid-in supplies here at the office, so I was forced to wander the streets in search of food. I didn’t wander far, just to the café across the street to get … a bacon cheeseburger. The café does not offer Pizza Burgers on its menu, sadly. I haven’t had a bacon cheeseburger all year, since I’ve been trying to cut back on eating crap and spending unwisely, but I felt entitled to treat myself – like I said, long week.

Not much else of notable insight beyond that, I’m afraid, and this weekend looks to be busy despite currently being unplanned, due to the painting and furniture-assembling that I would really love to be more or less done with by Sunday night. I shall report on Monday as to whether or not those dreams are realized.

A Bonny Boy

I have an admission to make which may make a slight ding in my geek cred (and others besides, at that) but it helps organize my thoughts for today so that’s a risk I’ll have to take. Here goes: I kind of like Gone with the Wind.

I had a girlfriend in high school who was a gigantic Gone with the Wind fan, both the novel and movie, and we were together long enough that it was somewhat inevitable I would end up reading the novel and watching the movie. The whys and wherefores as to the appeal of Gone With The Wind in my girlfriend’s specific case are probably neither here nor there, but she was enough like me that her fandom manifested not just in enthusiastic affection for the object but also a desire to learn behind-the-scenes trivia and generally become something of an armchair expert on the subject. I can spontaneously rattle off the names of alien Green Lanterns in a list long enough to choke a giraffe; she was able to quote zingers that Bob Hope had delivered when he hosted the Oscars ceremony which Gone with the Wind more or less swept. And that really is a kind of geekery in and of itself, which no doubt drew me in.

Not to say that I might not have eventually worked my way around to Gone with the Wind on my own. I have previously copped to going through a phase as a teen when I purposefully read incredibly long novels just because it seemed like the kind of thing I would reliably do. And Gone with the Wind, in both incarnations, is such a pop culture touchstone in its own right, even if it is a romance and inherently girly or whatever, that never having read it or seen it would feel like … well, like the way it feels when I confess to never having seen Jaws or read The Da Vinci Code. (Both true, the former being something I do intend to correct, the latter something I’m stubbornly proud of.) Sure enough, when I took an American film class in college of course Gone with the Wind was on the viewing list, but by then I had already seen it. Probably more than once at that point.

I mean, I’m not a total apologist for Gone with the Wind or anything. I don’t think it’s great literature by any stretch (though I will argue for the many technical merits of the movie) and to say that the wishful misrepresentation of slavery and race relations in the antebellum South is problematic is a massive understatement. But on balance, I’ve always responded positively to it. And for all its flaws and ugly warts and various elements which may or may not be someone’s cup of tea, it does contain a font of pure awesome: Rhett Butler.


Seriously, I would argue that Rhett Butler is in the all-time top five upper echelon of characters from American fiction, full stop. He is practically the quintessential avatar of American maleness, both in his positive and negative qualities. More than once when I have been indulging my creative muse and trying to portray a character as badass and cool as hell, I have subconsciously modeled said character on Rhett Butler: ladies’ man, gambler, scoundrel (the line from Rhett Butler to Han Solo is straight as an arrow), iconoclast, and of course … doting father.

As recently as a few years ago I would have been hard-pressed to pick my favorite Rhett Butler among the many chameleon-like shadings he takes over the course of the story. There were times in my life when what I found most affecting was his fierce love of Scarlett, which might as well have been unrequited for the fact that she never quite loved him back with the same intensity, even when they were married. There were other times where I dug his bootlegging adventurer persona, who helps a war effort on his own terms without being so foolhardy as to enlist, and other times where I preferred the moment-of-clarity Rhett who does go ahead and enlist. (Yeah, yeah, wrong side of the war to root for, I know … again, I take my enjoyment of it all a la carte.) But since my little guy came along, and especially since I now have a little girl on the way, everything else pales in comparison to Rhett’s unconditional love for Bonnie Blue.

Remember those thoughts I said I was trying to organize? Here they come! The little guy started at his new daycare this week and it has gone very well. Granted, he refused to take a nap either on Tuesday or Wednesday, but other than that it’s been nothing but positive reports, both from school and the little guy himself. No two-and-a-half year old makes for a reliable narrator, and ours is no exception, but he seems genuinely happy. My wife and I had some misgivings about pulling him out of one school and dropping him into another, for fear of bruising whatever social attachments he was just beginning to develop, but that looks to largely have been projection. (I moved mid-schoolyear in fourth grade. It SUCKED. Note to self: Preschool I is not Fourth Grade.) The little guy is home today with his mother, but he’ll no doubt happily scamper back to daycare tomorrow, and everything seems pleasantly back to normal.

In fact, it may even be better than back to normal, because it represents a clean slate. And here there is not even a trace of confusion in my mind – I am well aware that the clean slate is for me, not the little guy. Not too terribly long ago, the little guy received a birthday party invitation from one of his daycare classmates, and I basically dropped the ball. At this point I can’t even remember what general cognitive dissonance convinced me that attending the little fete was a non-starter (no doubt something about being overly busy and weekends being at a premium and my wife having to work that Saturday and so forth) but not only did I opt the little guy out, I didn’t even call the parents of the other tyke to RSVP with regrets. Which is probably no big deal but also not very cool.

Of course I had anxiety about the party and invitation etiquette for toddlers and so on going in, but it increased exponentially on the other side as I imagined the snubbed parent talking behind my back to other parents and my little guy not even getting invited to the next kid’s birthday party all because his dad is socially maladroit, and the part of me that wasn’t sighing over the utter absurdity of it was sick to my stomach. Not a very good reason to enroll the little guy in a new daycare, in and of itself, but if other circumstances happen to lead down that very path … you can see how I might look on such a development as a second chance.

And thus this week I’ve been thinking about Rhett and Bonnie, and the moment when Rhett realizes that while he and Scarlett have never cared if society snubs them or shuns them or looks down their noses at them or whatnot, he refuses to force his daughter to bear that burden. He never stops thinking that the upper crust is a big joke, but he stops openly sneering at it, and in fact starts playing the game. And of course he’s exceptionally good at playing the game, because he is a smooth mofo. The montage in the movie of Rhett Butler kissing up to the dowager matrons of Atlanta, with just a hint of sarcastic laying-it-on-too-thick which the old biddies simply obliviously eat right up, all to give Bonnie a path of entry to genteel society … that may not always have been my favorite part of the movie, but it is now.

Or so I’ve been telling myself, along with “I can do this.” I can turn on the charm with my little guy’s new teachers and the parents of his new classmates, and do the same for my daughter when she gets here. I can reorient my natural inclination toward saying yes to party and playdate invitations (or at a bare minimum make a really heartfelt apology while declining). I know I can’t control everything, and there could still be unfathomably mean kids or their mean parents or teachers who make my children’s lives miserable for no discernable reason. But I’ll be hanged if I’m going to actively cause any problems for my kids because I think it’s not worth my while to play the game. I’m old enough now to realize that there can be situations which are both totally ridiculous and yet have real, non-ridiculous effects, and that pretty much makes it incumbent on me to handle those very kinds of things as best I can. I don’t plan on wasting my one free hit of the reset button.

Unabridged

I’m sure you are all on virtual tenterhooks so allow me to set you at ease: Amazon and their designated delivery partner (UPS I think?) did in fact come through, and The Wise Man’s Fear was waiting on the front porch when I got home yesterday. I got pretty close to the end of the first novella in Full Dark No Stars on the way home last night, because the Metro slowed down to 15 mph aboveground for “safety reasons” (I really don’t even want to know) and thus the ridetime was extended. Didn’t find any time to read last night but I did return to the novella over my coffee this morning, and then I threw both books in the car, so that when I got through the morning rush hour traffic on 66 I could finish the last 10 or so pages of the King novella in the Metro parking lot, and not have to lug two hardcover books in my workbag all day. Started Wise Man’s Fear on the Metro and the first 30 pages are, as I expected, delightful.

Anyway, it occurred to me today that at one point towards the end of last year I was telling myself that, when the weather got nice in the spring, I would start going for walks on my lunch hour on Wednesdays – specifically walks across the nearby Key Bridge and into Georgetown, where I would be able to reach the doorstep of a local comic book shop with a reasonable amount of time. I figured this would be a good way to get some (relatively) fresh air and sunshine and exercise midweek while also allowing for a dependable, recurring release for my lingering geek-out needs. But I guess that’s not in the cards anymore, because the agency is moving offices this month. I used to work in the neighborhood we’ll be moving to, and unless a new comic shop has opened there I already know there aren’t any within walking distance of the new digs. Alas.


But as if to balance things out, I did get some unexpected good news this week: Ms. Antisocial is leaving! I’m not sure exactly under what circumstances, whether she requested that her employer transfer her to a different contract with fewer interpersonal hostilities and was given just such a dispensation, or whether she just up and quit, or what. Of course I’m not sure, because she certainly isn’t going to be forthcoming about it and I’m not about to poke the wasp’s nest by asking. But on Monday I overheard Ms. A. talking with the de facto office manager here at the agency, and it certainly sounded like they were talking about end-of-employment arrangements like handing over hard drives and ID cards and things like that. Then yesterday I distinctly heard Ms. A. tell someone on the phone “Well after this Friday I won’t be here anymore.” So honestly that is a big relief. I don’t harbor any particular ill will toward Ms. A.; I think she’s definitely a bit off and, consciously or unconsciously, decidedly rude and unpleasant to be around, and on the one hand I’m sympathetic to how difficult that must make her entire life, but on the other hand I’m not too keen on having to put up with her difficulties any more than is absolutely necessary. Apparently after Friday it won’t be necessary at all, so woo-hoo to that.

Overdue books

Yesterday I completely forgot to bring a book with me to read on the commute. I suppose I should take some pride and/or solace in the fact that I can probably count on one hand how many times I’ve made that mistake, and I’m going on four years now of the Mass Transit High-Volume Reading Initiative. But it still bugs me every time it happens.

This time around it really wasn’t that surprising. I finished a book on Friday, through a combination of semi-conscious planning and weird happenstance. I had taken the VRE and planned to watch a couple of episodes of Smallville, one in each direction, which works out well since the episodes are 40-some minutes long and the one-way railtime is about 50-some minutes. I also brought the book I was reading because it’s a little easier to read while standing on a train platform than to balance a portable DVD player while doing the same. Then my train home ended up getting delayed by a good twenty minutes or so because high winds had knocked a tree onto the tracks which had to be cleared away, and that extra travel time ended up being all I needed to finish the book.

I put the book away on a shelf after I got home but didn’t immediately replace it in my workbag, which was clearly my fatal misstep. It wasn’t totally due to negligence or absent-mindedness, though. I had a vague notion that selecting my next bit of reading material was going to be tricky (almost as if I have a tendency to overcomplicate really straightforward and trivial life decisions). The complication in this instance was that I had pre-ordered a book from Amazon (at 40% off using a gift card that was earned with credit card rewards points, he said so as not to feel guilty about frivolous spending) with a delivery-upon-release-date scheduled for March 1. And I knew as soon as the book arrived I would want to start reading it straightaway, or the closest thing to that, which would be the Wednesday morning commute.


The book in question is The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss which I know isn’t exactly a household name but if you were paying attention last summer when I talked about all the various series and trilogies I’m in the middle of reading you might have noticed I led off with The Kingkiller Chronicles as I bemoaned the fact that said fantasy series was still in the process of being written and I was eagerly anticipating the forthcoming sequel to volume 1. Well, at long last, volume 2 is here (or presumably will be on my front doorstep when I get home tonight). I’ve been waiting for The Wise Man’s Fear to come out since August of 2007, when I read The Name of the Wind, so clearly I will need to devour it immediately. But going back to last Friday, I also needed to find something to read on Monday and Tuesday which would either be quickly started and completed in two days, or else be something I wouldn’t mind setting aside and picking up again later to allow for the Wise Man’s Fear interruption.

I briefly thought that perhaps I would bring Stephen King’s Needful Things on the commute for a couple of days so that I could finally polish it off. I started reading that novel back in October (or re-reading it, after getting a couple hundred pages in when it was published back in the early 90’s but giving up on it due to slight King burnout) specifically designating it a “read when I have a few minutes of downtime around the house” book rather than a “pass time on the commute” book. Usually it’s ne’er-the-twain-shall-meet as far as I’m concerned with house-books versus Metro-bus-VRE-books, because I’m meticulously compartmentalized like that. Still, after almost five months of leisurely consumption I was ready to be done with Needful Things (in several senses, it’s … really not one of King’s best) so that could have worked out well, but it actually turned out that I had just enough free time over the course of the weekend to finish it at home, and so I did.

I also went to the used bookstore on Saturday, partly as an excuse to get the little guy out of the house for a bit and partly because there were still a couple of boxes of books marked To Be Sold in the garage, lo these fourteen months after we’ve packed up and moved and unpacked. The store was willing to offer trade value for most of the stuff I brought in, and funny enough they had multiple copies of Stephen King’s latest in hardcover at about 50% off the cover price. And this latest, Full Dark No Stars, is a collection of novellas, which is just about perfect for my purposes: I could read one or two novellas over the course of Monday and Tuesday, then hit the Rothfuss as of Wednesday, and then get back to the other King novellas after that. In addition I picked up a few paperbacks of some literary classics that are on my Resolutions list to read this year (Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, Frankenstein) and the little guy even picked out a few new books for himself (which, with very little guidance from me, turned out to be two Bob the Builder books and another starring a John Deere promotional character named Barney Backhoe; since Saturday I have now read each of those books approximately twelve thousand times). All well and good.

But, see, I’m jumbling the timeline a bit here, because I bought Full Dark No Stars on Saturday but didn’t finish Needful Things until Sunday, so there was a delay in the decision-making as to which Stephen King book I would be reading on Monday, and between wrangling the little guy while his mother was at work over the weekend and then devoting as much time toward quality togetherness as possible once she was home, the time tripped on by and next thing I know it’s pre-dawn Monday morning and I’m heading for the Metro turnstiles and saying, “Aw, shoot.”

I tried to get back on track (as it were) today but while I remembered to throw Full Dark No Stars in my bag, the first novella in the book is 133 pages long, and that’s about twice as much as I can read in a single roundtrip day on the Metro. Which kind of augments the frustration, because it really would have been perfect for Monday and Tuesday combined if I had remembered it yesterday. Again, assuming the book I want to read tomorrow really was delivered today, I no doubt will tear into it in the morning, and either I’ll somehow sneak the time to finish that first novella tonight or I’ll leave it unfinished for a couple of weeks. Not the end of the world, but as well all know by now, these are the maddening pathways my mind meanders along fairly regularly.

To say nothing of the fact that I had intended to read one literary classic per month to get in 12 for the year, and here it is March and I’m choosing between King and Rothfuss while the only canonized novel I’ve knocked out so far is Don Quixote, so I’m already behind on that score too … ah but the year is young. And paternity leave is coming!

Cracks in the facade

Believe it or not, the ice seems to be thawing just a tiny bit in my workspace, perhaps in honor of the fact that the weather’s been in the mid-70’s the past few days (though that’s probably just a coincidence). Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that everyone is suddenly buddy-buddy, but at various points today my male colleagues and I had unavoidably crossed paths with Ms. A., and she has actually spoken to us instead of pretending we don’t exist. Nothing as friendly as a greeting or anything like that, but at least saying something along the lines of “I just need something off that shelf” as she steps around us in tight quarters. On the one hand, a limited exchange like that just kind of underscores how off-kilter the whole situation feels, but on the other hand, it’s better than the oppressive silence.

At any rate, I did have a terrifying-but-then-funny moment last week, on the heels of the previous Monday/Work blog post, so it seems appropriate to revisit it here. After singing the praises of my contracting manager so effusively the day before, my manager stopped by my desk on Tuesday morning and asked if I could come to a meeting at 10 a.m. in the conference room. I said sure, no problem, and he left without explaining anything any further.

I have always been of the opinion that I don’t really need to be given lots of advance info for things like meetings. I’m not important enough to insist on a justification being made for my time; if someone says “come to this meeting” I just show up, and I’ll find out what it’s all about when I get there. I trust my superiors enough to believe that if I needed to do any prep for the meeting and come prepared with answers to questions or anything like that, they would let me know in no uncertain terms. And of course it’s easy to say all of that and generally adhere to it, but every once in a while I get a little paranoid that I’m being included in a meeting because the topic of conversation is going to be me: something I’ve screwed up or something that’s going to negatively impact me like a blindsiding round of layoffs. Such things really have no basis in reality whatsoever and are the height of out-of-control paranoid flightiness, but in light of the recent hostilities exploding in my workspace, I think a little bit of self-interested hyper-concern might be understandable.


At any rate the appointed time arrived and I went down to the conference room. Turned out that my manager had called the meeting not just for me but for every contractor in the office who works for our company. This brought on a wave of relief as I realized that it wasn’t going to be a one-on-one or two-on-one dressing down, which would have been ironic given how highly I had been lauding my manager the day before. And then the relief was suddenly replaced by a completely different kind of irony-driven paranoia via which I was completely convinced that my manager had called everyone together to announce that he was quitting or retiring or otherwise abandoning us in two weeks or less, which would necessitate bringing in a new manager who wouldn’t be the person who hired me and knew why I was worth keeping around and always gave me good annual reviews and so on. Which would be a total drag, and (according to certain cosmological belief systems, the allure of which I am not completely immune from) would actually be my fault because I had jinxed everything with my oblivious blog-psalms. Or something.

But of course the farewell speech did not materialize, either. My manager instead simply explained that he had been inadvertently collecting the little tokens that corporate sends out to managers to pass along to employees when they hit one or two or five years of service, as well as the certificates for divisional employee of the month, for a couple of years and he had meant to give them out at the Presidents’ Day luncheon but the venue turned out to be less then totally conducive to that kind of ceremonial ado (and he had conveniently forgotten all the tokens and certificates back at his office anyway). So he spent a few minutes in the conference room handing them out to the appropriate people in front of everyone else on the team so we could add a smattering of applause to the occasion. Which was nice and all but somewhat anticlimactic after everything that had been racing through my head up until the big reveal.

At this point I would like to look forward to a nice, calm, non-newsworthy week at work … but I don’t want to say as much because I don’t want to bring down the irony of the gods, so I’ll just quit while I’m arguably ahead.

Numbers crunched

So I suppose an altogether unsurprising post-script to the whole Daycare Drama that unfolded this week would be that last night my wife and I sat down with note and receipts and a laptop running Excel and tried to figure out a household budget for the second half of the year, because when maternity leave is up sometime in the July timeframe we are going to have two small children in daycare, which will more than double our current daycare expenses (it gets cheaper as the kids get older, so the baby will add more to the bottom line outlay than the little guy currently does). We succeeded, more or less. There was no fighting or hurt feelings, at the very least, something I am given to understand cannot always be counted on when most couples discuss money in terms other than “What if we won the lottery?”

We had actually been saying for a while that we really needed to crunch the numbers and figure everything out, and I had been counterbalancing my wife’s concerns with my trademark optimism, believing not only that we could definitely handle the additional line item of infant care but that we would probably end up finding it surprisingly easy. Turns out I was half right. We got all the numbers to add up and balance, but it took some doing. We’re not going to be suffering, by any means, as always we’re going to be just fine. It’s just the version of fine that has very little wiggle room, and in the past couple years we’ve gotten admittedly self-indulgent about wiggling.

It’s in my nature to put a positive spin on things, and credit where credit is due, my wife actually gave voice to this particular spin and I am wholeheartedly embracing it. This may very well be the year that I plow through all of the entertainments that mock me from various shelves and surfaces around my home, unwatched or unread or unlistened to. I’m not going to be able to swing by Barnes & Noble or Best Buy and drop cash on DVDs or books just because, whenever I feel the urge. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t be consuming DVDs and books at my usual clip; it just means it’ll be the movie a friend of a friend thought I’d like, or the tv series all of my buddies have been waiting for me to catch up on (actually I’m pretty sure they stopped waiting for that a while ago) or the comics I picked up because I saw a full run for sale at a convention or the pulp paperbacks I bought in bulk last summer at the used bookstore so I could read whatever I was in the mood for at the beach. Honestly when I think about all the things lying around the house that I had every intention of taking in but still haven’t made time for yet, and realize what that says about how my rate of acquisition far outstrips my actual rate of intake, it’s kind of embarrassing. But there it is.


And, believe me I’ll be the first to say it, this is the most minor economic inconvenience imaginable. My family is going to be able to pay every single bill without breaking a sweat, with two kids in daycare, two mortgages, two cars, and two dogs and a cat. The downside of this will be a marked decrease in take-out meals and collectibles? Boo-freaking-hoo. If I get really desperate to pick up a new graphic novel maybe I’ll finally get off my butt and eBay away some crap I have no use for to begin with. Stranger things and all.

Plus, it’s all more or less temporary. Like I said, the daycare costs go down on a regular basis as the center concedes that children do get easier to take care of as they age. The cars are new enough that when they get paid off in a couple years we won’t immediately be replacing them. If there is so much as a hint of a glimmer of a possibility of a housing market recovery, that second mortgage will get unloaded lickety-split. I still haven’t gotten the small-but-count-it raise my recent performance review seemed to indicate was in the cards. So it’s really all just a case of dropping some luxuries to make room for a new necessity which crashes into the budget all at once, and then gradually adding the luxuries back to the mix as everything gets easier, a process which will start almost right away.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be too surprised if there ends up being a couple of instances in the next few weeks of really, monumentally silly splurging, while there’s still time to shrug it off, before it becomes the height of fiscal irresponsibility. If I report that my wife and I went out for Brazilian churrascaria and then bought a Blu-Ray player and several box sets for it on the way home, you’ll have a little pre-insight as to why that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Once more from the top

I might end up giving slightly short shrift to this, but I have told this story (in various forms of various lengths) many times since last Friday and I’m getting a bit over-familiar with it. Still, I do think it’s unfair to make passing reference to something hereabouts, promising to get back to it later, and then not get back to it. So here we are.

THE LITTLE GUY CONCUSSION SAGA

My wife got a phone call at work on Friday because the little guy had smacked his head hard. These things happen, especially with a child as high-spirited and generally rough-and-tumble as our son. The little guy’s pretty resilient, though, but better-safe-than-sorry is one of the fundamental principles of our parenting technique, so my wife called it a day and headed for the daycare center.

When she arrived the staff informed her that the head-smacking accident was the result of a breath-holding tantrum, which we all (his parents and his daycare providers) know the little guy is prone to from time to time. We also know that while these fits are distressing and ugly to bear witness to, they are not terribly dangerous in and of themselves: either he’ll get woozy and then finally inhale so he can scream some more, or he’ll pass out but then immediately start breathing normally since he’s no longer consciously freaking out. The main hazard, then, is that he might get woozy or pass out and then fall down, and hit his head on something on the way down, and that incidental injury could be a problem. So on the one hand accidents happen and neither my wife nor I expect anyone to keep our child 100% bump- and scrape-free no matter how much we’re paying them. But on the other hand, if something sets the little guy off on a tantrum, there’s at least half a minute before he’s so worked up and has held his breath for so long that he might whack into something, so why wasn’t someone able to intervene and make sure that didn’t happen? Plus the staff’s version of events included the phrase “he was holding his breath and ran into a wall”, which … no. I’ve thought about it a hundred times since Friday and that just does not freaking fly. I’ve seen enough of the breath-holding spells to know that they primarily consist of him going rigid with rage, and there’s no running anywhere, let along running into things. Again, falling down is a real concern. But not blind stumbling into obstacles.

Also upon my wife’s arrival she was informed that, in the time since she had initially been called, the little guy had thrown up. Which of course sent up a HUGE red flag to her but didn’t seem to be creating major concern for the staff, such as perhaps an immediate follow-on statement along the lines of “so we already called the ambulance!” or anything. My wife asked if she could use the office phone to call our pediatrician and see what they would recommend. The pediatrician said it would be a good idea to bring the little guy in to get checked out. The phone call took place one desk away from the director of the daycare center, who was on her own phone conducting what sounded to my wife like some non-urgent business like contacting a reference for a job applicant. At no point did the director get off the phone to speak directly to my wife, make sure everything was all right, address her concerns, or anything. And that was profoundly disappointing.

(Like I said, I’ve told this story quite a few times now and more than one person has pointed out that if the director had made a big deal out of it and gone through a whole “I’m so sorry, is everything all right?” spiel that simply acknowledging a possible problem would have opened a crack of admission-of-guilt which could be exploited if my wife and I decided to sue the center. Which I’m willing to concede as a possibility – that maybe that was what the director was thinking, not that my wife and I would sue – but which I would also point out is not terribly mollifying, to say the least.)

My wife went to the pediatrician, who pronounced the little guy healthy but advised my wife to keep an eye on him at home. Apparently one upchuck does not a concussion make, but repeated incidents would merit a trip to the ER. Of course that’s exactly what ended up happening. The little guy threw up at home a couple of hours later, my wife immediately took him to the ER, and he threw up one more time at the hospital. The nurses gave the little guy some Tylenol and anti-nausea medicine, and there was no more hurlage, he stopped complaining of head pain, and basically went from listless back to his normal ebullient self. They also did a CT scan on the little guy, for which he was astonishingly calm and brave and cooperative, and they assured us there was no visible brain damage or other signs of trauma. So just a concussion, then, which seems like an odd way of looking at it but, again, our son is a total kook of a daredevil who stands a good chance of pioneering new extreme sports like race-car-wrestling of some type, and it may not be unfair to say that a concussion was for him something of an inevitability. It could have been worse, but it wasn’t, and we were grateful for that.

We took the doctors at their word that he wouldn’t slip into a coma if we let him sleep through the night, and sure enough he didn’t. The ER pediatrician had told us to keep an eye on him for “weird behavior” but, again, see above; what qualifies as “weird” from a child who likes to pretend he’s a train engine while he bodyslams people? Not that such an assessment stopped me from watching the little guy all weekend like he was my own teeny Flowers For Algernon incarnate, but I had to admit that all of his previous mental functions seemed totally intact.


What wasn’t intact was our trust in our daycare providers, and of course the incident would have to happen on a Friday afternoon, which gave us all weekend and then some to stew over it – again, not the accident in and of itself but the downplayed and underwhelming response to it. Which frankly came on the heels of (for my wife especially) not being terribly impressed by the new director of the center ever since she took over for the previous director (who had been a real selling point in selecting that center in the first place) and a growing feeling that what had once been a tight ship was getting a little too loose and chaotic. I’m a pretty laid back consumer and I am unlikely to freak out about, for example, poor service at a restaurant or buying a lemon of an electronic entertainment device or something. But if there’s one place I’m going to insist on some fairly exactingly high standards, it’s going to be wherever I entrust the care of my children. (Yes, again, the travails of the toddler dominate the conversation but let us not forget there is an infant incoming!) At any rate, my wife was determined to meet with the director on Monday morning to discuss her concerns, both stemming from Friday’s incident and in general trends.

First thing Monday morning, she called and set up a 10 a.m. appointment. 10 a.m., my wife shows up, only to be told the director had run out to the store, she must have forgotten she had an appointment. I know, I know: WHAT THE FRIGGING WHAT. My wife waited for about 20 minutes but ultimately it was just one flake-out too many, and she cleared out the little guy’s cubby (he was at home with grandma, since we wanted to keep him out of daycare a few days if only to decrease the risk of visiting injury upon injury which is of course a majorly scary concussion no-no) and bailed.

At this point of course the scramble was on, with my wife making arrangements to take an unscheduled day off Tuesday while I did the same for Wednesday and we realized we needed to find totally new daycare arrangements for the little guy (and his little sister) because he was never going back to that center. My wife started visiting some places almost immediately, and also contacted the regional director of the daycare chain (one of the upsides to going with a large corporate provider, I suppose, is that there is that kind of hierarchy up which to escalate matters) and made an appointment for Tuesday morning to discuss what went wrong.

Happily, Tuesday morning ended up being the turning point because the regional director was everything the center director was not: engaged, concerned, empathetic, apologetic, etc. Neither my wife nor I wanted to get any of the staff at the center in trouble or grind out a grudge or anything, and the regional director (to her credit, I think) did not throw her subordinates under the bus but rather expressed sincere (or at least sincere-seeming, which really is close enough) regret that there had been a serious breakdown of communication at multiple points in the process. The even better news was that the regional director’s office was contained within another location of the daycare company, which is brand new and super-sparkly nice, and which is nowhere near as crowded and chaotic as the one we had been using, and the RD offered to let us transfer the little guy there immediately with no additional costs or any hassles at all. My wife still checked out a few other places and had me do the same, as well as asking me to double-check the sparkly-new place, but long story short (ha) that ended up being the solution. So on Monday the little guy will begin attending that alternate location, which conveniently enough is just as much right along the route from our house to my wife’s work as the old location was, just a little closer to the work end. Cue gigantic sighs of relief.

So yeah, right around Saturday when there were dark, low-hanging clouds of doubt concerning whether or not the little guy was really-really going to be all right, and when we had no clue as to how far a Monday morning meeting with the daycare center director might go toward allowing us to maybe not feel like we had no choice but to pull our son out of there, things were pretty dire. But now that the whole daycare conundrum has been fortuitously resolved (not just regarding the little guy but also looking ahead to a much better infant-room set-up for the baby come July) and there’s been nary a disquieting sign of lingering intracranial trauma, things are better. And now you know!