“Mother ___________”

I'm one of those guys lucky enough to be married to a stay-at-home Mom. And yes, I was once one of those guys who assumed that most stay-at-home Moms divided their daylight hours between changing diapers, running on the treadmill, and sipping vodka martinis.

But that was yesterday.

Today, I am enlightened. That's because this afternoon, I came home from work to see a whole bag of tricks that Babe-O has been carefully cultivating with her Mom's diligent support, day after day.

She can stand up in her crib, clinging to the rail. She can sit on her butt, all by herself. She can roll over, if she wants something close by badly enough.

She's also finding her voice, which is really cute; though I'm told that it causes headaches if you listen to it seven hours a day. She has kind of a jovial, high-pitched squeal that she likes to let rip for long periods of time. Still…you can tell she's working on getting some words out. She will enunciate when she's happy and mutter under her breath when she's mad.

Her first words can't be far off, which might be problematic because her Mom and I haven't quite gotten our potty mouths under control yet. On the plus side, even in the most profane scenario I can think of, Babe-O's first phrase still begins with "mother." In the scrapbook, we'll just leave it at that. 

Remedial Snowman Building (retraction)

A few days after I published my Remedial Snowman Building post, there was a knock at the door. Standing out front was a local attorney, retained by my mother to deliver the photo below, which was accompanied by a formal Cease & Desist order forbidding me to "further discuss in public forum any childhood deficiencies as they may relate to parental instruction or lack thereof with respect to snowman construction."

That said, and given the fact that I can't afford another snowman-related lawsuit, I'll take this opportunity to correct my snowman post. While it is true that to this day, I have absolutely no talent when it comes to snowmen, in my lifetime I have clearly built at least one with moderate success.

On the plus side, this means if Babe-O ever gets mad at me for not being able to build her one, I can show her this photo and point out that I USED to be able to build a snowman, but I must have pushed the knowledge out of my brain to make room for learning how to build all of her baby contraptions, which fit together like Erector sets from hell.

So there, I said it.

I have built a snowman. I was raised properly.

Oh – and one more thing: The snowman Polaroid was not really delivered by an attorney. It arrived along with a box of baby stuff and other goodies. Many thanks to the 'rents/grand'rents!

“You suck, Daddy”

Today was a heart-breaker.

At 7:15 this evening, Babe-O and I were where Babe-O and I always are at 7:15 in the evening – playing in the kitchen sink. We were about half way through bath time and I noticed my little girl, who was quite smiley just moments before, was giving me a kind of strange, stern look. In that moment, I felt a little like the soon-to-be loser of a quickdraw gunfight: by the time you realize you've made a mistake – you're dead.

In less than a second, the quiet stern look turned to an angry shouting look. She looked me right in the eye and started to cry very deliberately in my direction. I quickly realized that I had let her catch a little bit of a chill during her bath, so I turned the water back on and waited for it to warm up before pointing it towards the chilly baby.

Once the water had heated up (5 seconds in people years, 35 seconds in dog years, nine days in screaming baby years) I grabbed the spray/hose/nozzle thing and gave her a warm-up squirt…without taking into account that the sprayer needs to spit out that first bit of ice cold water before the warm stuff comes out.

SCREEEEAMING ensued.

For the very first time, I got what was very clearly a "You suck, Daddy" look. I was able to identify this particular look because when Mom-O came running in (the scream was very alarming), Babe-O immediately reached for her while glaring at me. At that point we aborted the bath project, and even as Babe-O was being carried upstairs, she never broke her angry gaze, which was aimed directly at me until she was out of sight.

All in all, tonight was a little bit of a heartbreaker, but it was still pretty adorable to catch another little glimpse of another side of Babe-O's personality.

So now it's your turn, fellow parents: when was the first time that your baby got really, really mad at you? Share your story in the comments below!

The handliest hand she’s ever seen

Right now, we're kicked back watching Supernanny on TV while Babe-O lounges around, probably amused by how long ago her bedtime was. We were doing some visiting this evening, which led us to missing our 7 p.m. bath/bed routine – which was fine until it wasn't.

Babe-O was delightful for most of the visit, being cuddly and wonderful, but once it started getting past that magic 7 o'clock hour, she got a little prickly. She slowly went from happy to sleepy, then from sleepy to pissed.

And I really mean pissed. She cries when she's upset, but she screams when she's pissed. She pretty much shouts deliberately right in your face. Then, when she gets really mad, she starts enunciating angry little sounds, which I'm pretty sure in her mind are the worst swear words a four-month-old girl can muster. My little sweetie.

So now we're back at home, cat in my lap, baby in Mom's lap, and dogs strategically arranged on couches.

Babe-O is acting like she always does when she's up way past her bedtime and is fighting sleep, which to the untrained eye might make her look like a little stoner. Right now she has rediscovered her left hand and is waving it slowly in front of her face, obviously amused by the handliest hand in the history of hands. When that got old (which took longer than you'd think), she looked up and noticed the ceiling fan, which, incidentally, is the fanliest fan in the history of fans.

As I'm writing this, I can see she is drifting off. Here's to a sleepy Friday night...

 

...I wish my hand was that cool.

Intro to sitting

Babe-O gets cooler and more fun to hang out with every day. Her latest advancement is sitting, which I now realize I've been taking for granted for quite a while now.

For years I've been going from office chair to meeting chair to desk chair to car chair to dinner chair to home office chair to recliner chair (rinse and repeat). But until the last week or so, Babe-O couldn't really sit anywhere, at least not without some help. But now she can finally sit up on her own, which means that we can stick her in her high chair or her Bumbo sitter and let her chill out in the room with us while we do stuff. She loves it and will either watch us bustle around doing our thing or will amuse herself with her toys.

The Bumbo sitter is a really cool invention, because it can actually prop up a baby pretty well even when the baby is too small to sit up solo. We could put Babe-O in hers when she was tiny, although until recently she would either tip over to one side or get tired and start to cry if she was in there for more than a minute or two -- much love for the Bumbo.

Anyway, the product is great but the marketing is quite terrible. If you are ever at the baby store, be sure to check out the Bumbo box. Just as a preview, Below is the photo they use, which features the two ugliest babies I've ever seen in print. And best of all, they look like tiny versions of the guys from TV's King of Queens. 

How's this for an obscure television reference?

Remedial snowman building

Today I was less of a baby parent and more of a dog parent. For starters, I spent lunch at work eating a god-awful ramen noodle "just add water" concoction and missed my usual noontime date with Babe-O. Then, because I had some client work to do this evening, Mom-O took over the bathtime ritual and left me to my own devices. 

Before long, the baby was sleeping happily and I was done with my work and puttering around the house with no one to play with.

At about ten o'clock, I headed outside with three dogs and a splash of whiskey in a coffee cup.

I knew it had been snowing outside, but it wasn't until the back door wouldn't open all the way that I realized just how much. Last night I cleared off the back deck and spend a little more than an hour snow-blowing and shoveling out front. By the time I went outside tonight, it didn't look like I had done either.

I started over on the back deck, first clearing the door area and then brushing the rails, carving out the steps, and doing all the heavy lifting. As I did this, the dogs just watched me, which was odd, until I realized that there was so much snow in the back yard that they couldn't even move around out there. The littlest and most enthusiastic one would hop along like a furry swimmer doing a very cold butterfly stroke, but the other two weren't having it.

So with my sweat pants tucked into my boots, one black glove, and one blue mitten (I was in a hurry to get out there), I started trudging. Oh, and I'm not usually a sweatpants kind of guy, but in the few minutes I spent with Babe-O today, she managed to pee all over my jeans.

Anyway, I trudged my way through the almost waist-deep snow until there was a big oval. This activity was much more tiring then I expected.

Once the oval was in place, the dogs had a blast running around like greyhounds at the track. The big dog was the only one tall enough to see over the edge of the trench, so unless you were standing up on the deck, you couldn't even see the little dogs. But there they were, going around and around until they were completely whipped.

At that point, I was roasting from trudging around in circles and didn't want to go inside yet, so I made them stay out a little longer to keep me company. I planned to stand out on the deck and finish my drink, but by this time it was thoroughly frozen to the deck rail that I couldn't even pick it up. When I finally did pry the thing off of the wood, my mitten-wearing hand lost its grip and send the thing flying into a three-foot snow bank. My littlest dog found it immediately and signaled the location like he had just spotted a downed bird.

With my (empty) cup perched safely on the doorstep, I figured I would take a few minutes and make a snow man. Then, if there was time, maybe a snow baby and a snow BMW.

Well, it turns out that I couldn't make a snow golf ball, much less a snow BMW. After a few minutes, I thought back a little bit and realized that to the best of my knowledge I've never made a snowman in my life.

What kind of childhood rip-off is that? As of my sixteenth birthday I could tell you how to shoot a potato through a garage door, open a beer bottle with the edge of a coffee table, and pull a quick U-turn using the parking brake. But apparently I missed that day in third grade where they teach you how to make a damn snowman.

I guess that's what HR types refer to as "distinct skill sets."

After staggering back inside, my skill-rich wife promised to take me outside for a lesson in snowman building later this week. Which is good, because otherwise I'd eventually have to endure Babe-O's what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-my-daddy-and-why-is-he-using-duct-tape-and-a-basketball-to-make-me-a-snow-man look a few years down the road.

Table for Three

My wife and I have a nasty television habit. It isn't so much that we watch a lot of it; it's just that the stupid thing is on all the time. Constant background noise. All day, all night – it's just sort of always there.

Which is fine. Every once in a while it feels like I've got voices in my head and need to grab the iPod (like now) or work outside (too cold). But other than that, it's fine.

At least until Babe-O came along. Babe-O also enjoys the TV and her little eyes jump at the thing every chance she gets. We'll catch her watching with one wide eye while she's nursing, or enjoying the flickering of the TV's reflection in the window.

Basically, we try to discourage that sort of thing. Except, of course, during dinner.

Dinner time has always been in front of the TV for us. Maybe that's pathetic, but the TV trays stay out day and night. The kitchen table is pretty much a catch-all for modern day debris like the mail, little piles of baby laundry, and the diaper bag.

Well, tonight it was time to take a stand. As soon as I got home today, Babe-O and I suited up and went to work ("suited up" referring to Babe-O being strapped to my chest in her Jeep baby sling).

We cleaned up the kitchen quickly, while she hung on my every word as I told her what all the kitchen crap is (spoon, fork, digger thingy, little chopper guy, giant spoon, another &%$# giant spoon, etc). Then we unearthed that kitchen table like a couple of Siamese archeology majors.

Once everything was cleared off, we gave it a quick wipe-down, using lemon juice and water at the recommendation of our slightly hippyish pediatrician ("mercury-based vaccines are no big deal, but Windex will kill your ass"). And if I do say so myself, it is a good-looking kitchen table. Many thanks to my Aunt-in-Law for donating it to us when we got our first apartment.

Anyway, we got the table cleared off and then stuck one of the chairs in the corner to make way for Babe-O's high chair (thanks for the high chair to another Aunt-in-Law).

Then, for the first time, we had a little family dinner together. Babe-O is still 100 percent breast fed, so she just watched us and played while we ate. She was obviously a little uneasy about the situation at first, but eventually settled into playing with a spoon and a cup and even made a little conversation with the occasional cooing.

I enjoyed it much, and think that the girls did, too. Call us retro, but I think we've got a new routine on our hands.