[Update - The point of all this is now explained here.]
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September 2008
For our big trip recently, we went to my grandmother’s 90th birthday party. To say she is our family matriarch is a profound understatement. Four generations of our family piled into her house to both celebrate her and how triumphantly she has lived through everything she has overcome.
She looks about as much like 90 as our cats look like giraffes. I fully expect her to live to be 125. It was only a couple of years ago that we finally talked her out of cleaning her own gutters. She was talking at the party about needing to get out and powerwash her siding.
She lost her first husband to health complications from him being a coal miner when she was only 25. She became a widowed single mom to two kids – my dad who was six at the time and my uncle who was only a few months old. She became a waitress and sometimes walked to work with a pistol in her pocket. The Kentucky coalfields were rough places. She literally walked uphill both ways to work and home again.
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[The original post is here. If you haven't read it, go read it first. You definitely won't want to miss The Rest of the Story.]
This was so utterly bizarre that it deserves its own post.
So after the Great Sleeper Escape the other day, we just pitched the sleeper into the laundry not knowing – or wanting to know – what foulness lived in its fabric. When it came time to fold the laundry, we noticed something absolutely astounding. The Great Sleeper Escape turned out to be a complete understatement. You have to see this to believe it.
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This kind of stuff really chaps my behind. Parenting magazine has remained on my [insert bodily function name] list for years because of their tendency (and the tendency of similar magazines) to write articles that either assume that dads don’t do squat or that when dads do anything (ZOMG! He changed a pee diaper! Call the Nobel Prize committee!) that it’s cause for sacrificing the fatted Barney doll to the fertility gods.
And now according to the article, when the dad does help, we have to shift to a new message. We really don’t want dads to help! Gah!
If you’re lucky, you might even get to read some lame, token piece written by an actual dad. I know a number of dads are simply in this world to carry around carbon and a couple of liters of testosterone, but these magazines need to get over themselves.
I’ve been a stay-at-home dad since J-Man was born. I do freelance work as I have time. It was difficult at first, but you know, it worked out just fine. No one died. The space-time continuum didn’t rupture. Starbuckses kept being built (probably thanks to me). And the sun still rises every morning.
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[Bewildering update to this post available here.]
This has been the roller-coaster week from Helena, and this morning got off to a rip-roaring start, as if we needed that.
You may remember from the Houdini post that J-Man is the David Blaine of sleep clothes. One minute he’s clothed and then you blink and everything he’s wearing is piled on the floor and he’s jumping up and down in the bed butt nekkid. Thankfully, David Blaine hasn’t tried that on prime time TV yet.
So we had given up on two-piece pajamas for a while and have been cramming him back into sleepers again. The stress of having to run into his room the second he woke up in the morning to prevent endless sheet washing just got old. His sleepers are zippered and snapped and fit him so snugly that it’s hard for him even to completely straighten out. He’s chewed on the neck area of them a lot, but they’ve stayed on and always zippered up, which has thankfully thwarted any more ecstatic fits of aerobic urination in the bed.
Well, at least until this morning.
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