Parenting from Scratch

A belated Father’s Day ode to Trevor, my partner in:

Crime. Just kidding.
Fun.
Getting shit done around the house.
Making the moneys.
Paying the bills on time.
Keeping Sadie alive.
Keeping Sadie happy.
Changing diapers.
Getting that kid to sleep.
Practicing giving Sadie a sibling (wink).
Watching movies and TV on the laptop in bed.
Eating a whole 12 inch pizza.
Getting through the hard days.
Making fun of ourselves and each other. And maybe other folks, sometimes.
Staying up past bedtime.

Trevor, you are the dish washer to my cooking. Happy Father’s Day, and here’s to many more to come.

A happy birthday, indeed, was had by miss Sadie Diane. We are all wiped out (and still awake, cripes!), so here are just a few phone snapshots for now

Having spent three days last week in day care, it’s no surprise Sadie came down with a cold just in time for Super Bowl Sunday. Rather than drag her along to a party an hour away and infect the other wee ones, we decided to haul the TV out, set up a little coffee table spread, and do a little Super Bowl party of our own. Sadie rocked it out till halftime.

Trevor decided to dress Sadie in Packers colors. So, according to her wardrobe options, Sadie's a Green Bay Baby.

Getting into the game.

Attempting to recline. Ha!

Hamming it up for the camera, doing an impersonation of a player wrapping his gloves.

Even Too Big Baby gets in on the Super Bowl action. Like me, she's just watching for the commercials.

Alright, alright, I know Sadie’s not REALLY a music snob. I’m sure it’s totally normal for toddlers to get fixated on something, like the same song, and practically refuse to diversify their interests. But it IS kind of funny to think of an almost-20-month kid as a music snob, no?

Bertha by the Grateful Dead was the first song Trevor noticed that Sadie liked.

So he played it. And played it. Anytime Sadie would be grouchy while in her high chair, Trevor would play it. Soon, she began recognizing the album cover and pulling it out, specifically requesting it be played. Now that she’s a verbal tot, she’s been requesting it by name. Oh, and she’s picking up on the lyrics, too. “More” was, not surprisingly, one of her first few words, so “Bertha don’t you come around here anymore” often has Sadie chiming in, “more” in her cute, drawn-out way. It has to be the most-played record in our family’s history.

Talk on Indolence by The Avett Brothers is her car song.

There’s a pretty dramatic shift in the song, and Sadie loves it. Sitting in her car seat, she bops her head and kicks her feet. It was cute at first, so we started putting it on regularly. Then we started putting it on whenever we needed to perk her up on a drive. Then, for a while, it was the only way I could get her to sit down in her car seat. She just calls it “song.” She wants Her Song played. Sometimes when we’re outside, Sadie will try to drag me to the car, saying, “Song!” because she just wants to be in the car and listen to it. Now, it’s about the only thing we can listen to in the car. Forget NPR. Forget any other bands we happen to like. We get to hear about some guy being nervous being seen in his swimming trunks, fountains filled with bottles and cigarettes, and getting raging drunk. I can’t wait for the day Sadie picks up THAT line. Oops.

In her bedroom, it’s all about King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub. I’d never heard of this, but apparently Trevor and his sisters grew up with it. It’s a book, but there’s an accompanying audio bit that jazzes up the story. She wants it on day and night. She’s even napped with it on loop. It takes some serious work to get her down for the night without playing it (I mean, come on, it’s REALLY not sleeping music.). We have to convince her that the King (“Keee!”) is sleeping. We even wave night-night to the King, whose CD resides in her sock drawer, when it’s not in the CD player.

In the hopes of expanding her horizons, Trevor recently purchased a good handful of old children’s albums. We’ve got some Disney stuff, some Muppets, Sesame Street, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. So far, no dice.

This is normal, right?

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love costumes. I love candy. I look forward to when Sadie is really old enough to fully enjoy it. I think she’s going to love it! She might have had a little bit of Halloween candy today. I might have had a lot.

For the record, I wish I'd known wearing wigs was SO MUCH FUN.

Quack! Quack!

The littlest pair.

You'll get to go trick-or-treating next year, guys.

For the most part, the fact that I never get around to posting hasn’t meant too much. In other words, although Sadie is cutely chugging along through toddlerhood, most of the things in our lives are pretty much the same.

Well, there are actually a couple of things that I’ve wanted to write about, but haven’t gotten around to doing it, so now you can have them at once, because they’re kind of related.

First! Trevor’s lovely sister, Gwen, has recently moved to Little Rock. As in, she arrived Wednesday night and is going to be living in our garage apartment! This is awesome on many levels. One, Trevor will finally have an immediate family member within hollerin distance. His family is pretty tight-knit, so it’s been a big deal for him to be so far away (Have I mentioned that I hijacked him to begin with?) Two, Gwen and I really get along well. We’re actually closer in age than Trevor and I are. So it’s like having a fun friend living in the back yard. And three, we are going to be taking Sadie out of daycare, and Gwen will be keeping Sadie at home four days a week. Needless to say, we are all very excited. Of course, you’d never know it in person, because I think Trevor and I might be the least outwardly excitable people alive.

Gwen and the Sadiebug.

P.S. Gwen comes as a package deal with her dog, Omie, who looks like Nari’s cousin and will be a great addition to the pack once she calms down a little about the cats (Sadie suddenly decided that the cats are now “Cats!” and not “Kitties!” the other day.)

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Second! Tomorrow, I am leaving for a very exciting, pretty selfish vacation to Orlando. My college roommate and I are celebrating her graduation from pharmacy school (amazing) by going to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (and also the rest of Universal Islands of Adventure and one of the Disney parks). OMFG, I am so excited about this. We made these plans when Universal first announced they were going to open the WWHP… back before Sadie was even a sparkle in my eye (gag).

Leah and me in our glory days of youth.

So… Sadie is staying home. The plans were back and forth for a while about whether or not she’d come with us, and it ended up working out logistically best for her to stay home with Trevor. This will be made possible, too, by Gwen’s presence. I am all kinds of mixed up about this emotionally. She’s too young to understand that “I’ll be back in a few days” doesn’t mean “I’m never coming back.” She’s not weaned in the slightest. I recognize that this might be a total disaster for everyone involved who isn’t going to Orlando… and I’m really nervous about it. This is probably the least Attachment Parenting thing I’ll have ever done. But. I’m going. It’s happening. Everyone will survive. Just some of us will have more fun than others (and this is usually not me, so that’s probably why I’m having such a hard time wrapping my head around it). I’m ridiculously grateful to Trevor and Gwen. And to Leah.

Heck, yeah! Summer vacation. The last time I took one of those, I was seven weeks pregnant, got a nasty head cold and spent approximately 96 percent of my time in a dark room watching a marathon of a show I’m embarrassed to mention (and only about four total hours on the beach). Thanks to the oil spill, my family relocated our vacation to Big Cedar Lodge, which is just outside (drum roll, please) Branson, Missouri. Now, I’ve grown up being kind of a snob about Branson (Fawn, I’m sorry. Also, I had no idea people actually came from Branson.). Probably has something to do with the obnoxiously cheesy Silver Dollar City commercials we in Little Rock grew up being subjected to. But the fact that the drive is less than four hours long definitely had its appeal.

Summer being the busier season for the cycling business, it’s pretty tough for Trevor to get time off (Wait, it’s ALWAYS hard for Trevor to get time off. Richard, are you reading this?). Being a crafty gal, I came up with the plan that Trevor, Sadie and I drive up on Sunday, meet up with my family at Big Cedar on Monday, and Trevor could drive back to LR on Tuesday, which meant he only had to take one day off from work. To be fair, I was all, “Let’s go camping!” and Trevor–often the voice of reason–convinced me to stay in a hotel in town. Considering that the heat index was eleventy billion degrees Fahrenheit, this was a good call. So that’s what we did, to much success. Sadie and I stayed on with my family until Thursday, leaving me with a luxurious long weekend doing mostly normal things with Sadie before going back to work.

Being the awesome person I am, I failed to pack spare batteries, so when my rechargeable batteries turned out not to be recharged at all, I resorted to my phone as camera (let’s ignore the fact that when I was unpacking, I discovered my battery charger was in my bag the entire time). We’ll also ignore the fact that the only photos I’ve been taking in the last few months have been with my phone because I’ve been too lazy to charge batteries. AND the fact that I could have surely found four AA batteries, for a princely sum, of course. Hopefully some of the pictures taken by various family members will make their way onto my hard drive. Because I suspect there are some cute ones of Sadie with her cousins.

So! Our trip, more or less:

Sunday night, we went down to Branson Landing. It’s a kind of pedi-mall on the White River. There were lots of shops and places to eat, and we wound up eating in this restaurant that was actually on the river. Why I didn’t think what this would mean to a person like me, I don’t know. But as soon as Trevor pointed out that the light fixtures–and, really, everything–were moving, I knew I was in trouble. Sure enough, by the time I was writing in the tip amount on the receipt, I knew I had to get the heck out of there, or I was going to lose my “Hunter’s Meatloaf.” Sadie had a blast, of course. She’s recently learned how to drink from a straw, so every glass of water on the table pretty much becomes hers. She had a freaking death grip on this one, and did some serious ice crunching.

After dinner, we walked along the river and paused to look at some ducks.

They’ve got this “fire and water” show at Branson Landing, which was pretty cool. This is not the fountain, because we had to skeedaddle as Sadie was a little freaked out by the giant bursts of flames coming from these metal tubes. After this, we headed to Marble Slab for ice cream. This has been my favorite chain ice cream shops since my friend moved to Dallas and I first got to try it. I always get the same thing–chocolate Swiss with cherries. On our stroll, Sadie was more than a little obsessed about all of the babies we saw. She kept pointing, saying, “Bay-bee? Bay-bee!” There was this one little girl walking around with her parents, and Sadie stood stock-still, arms outstretched, beckoning the kid to come to her. Finally, Sadie just ran up and gave her a hug. Fortunately, the girl’s parents though this was cute, especially as Sadie continued to harass her until they went out of reach.

On Monday, we drove to what the map suggested was Branson’s zoo and aquarium. We weren’t sure if we really wanted to go to a zoo or not, but Sadie fell asleep in the car, so we figured the drive was worth checking it out. Um, no. We didn’t even get out of the car. We headed back to downtown for lunch, and then we decided to head on out to Big Cedar Lodge to wait for my family to get there. The building where registration is located has this awesome table of tinker toys. Sadie was all too glad to stick them in her mouth. And to stand in the seat, of course. She likes to stand up on things that she apparently knows she shouldn’t and says, “Shit.” I’m sure she means “sit,” but it’s pretty cute. And slightly nerve wracking.

We had dinner at the fancier restaurant at the resort on Monday night. Sadie is stinking cute in her new moccasins, isn’t she? They’re a little big, and she won’t really wear them until it’s cold anyway, but it was fun to have her wear them a couple of times. Dinner was, shall we say, a total nightmare. Our reservations weren’t until 8:00–already a catastrophe in the making. Then, the table that was supposed to seat all 20 (21?) of us wasn’t ready. I don’t know what time it was when they finally seated us, except that it was meltdown time. Luckily, we were with family who were willing to give us a break from trying to keep Sadie happy, so we were able to scarf down our meals and get out of there.

We played a little miniature golf with the little cousins while the older kids did this Kids’ Camp thing. Miniature golf is on the very short list of things I suck at yet completely enjoy doing anyway. It was crazy hot, though. We kept the babies cool by strolling them into patches of shade as we found them.

Boating! On both Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, we went out on Table Rock Lake on a couple of party barges. I was a wee bit nervous about how Sadie would react to being on a boat for four hours. As you can see, it was a hit. The first day, she wasn’t so crazy about getting in the lake with the life jacket on. She didn’t seem to mind it when we were in the boat, but once we were in the water, she wasn’t a happy camper. Wednesday was a different story. She really seemed to like watching the water as we sped through it. And I can’t even imagine what she thought at the sight of me tubing.

(Aren’t her little crossed feet the most nomable things ever? I swear, this must be a genetic habit–my feet are crossed the same way right now–and pretty much all of the time. We are ladies.)

In all, it was a totally fantastic vacation. Sadie had a blast with her cousins, and it was so much fun to watch her interact with them. Hopefully this will be something she gets to do ever year.

Trevor shaved his goatee (affectionally known in this family as his goat beard) this morning. He last shaved his chin before moving to Arkansas to volunteer at Heifer Ranch. Nearly SEVEN YEARS AGO. I have never, before now, seen his face totally clean-shaven (other than pictures). Handsome, let me tell you. Handsome either way.

It’s the end of an era.

Until he changes his mind, that is n

Okay, so I’ll admit that I’ve been boy-crazy my whole life. I always crushed easily, and I typically took it in stride. I had this theory: if you didn’t put yourself out there, it was almost certain that nothing was going to happen. So I kind of went around telling most of the boys I had crushes on that I was sweet on them. Sweet on you; that’s what I’d tell them: I’m sweet on you. Because I was.

My crush on Trevor was pretty bad. In fact, I couldn’t even get up the nerve to tell him in person that I was sweet on him. I had to write it in a note. I’m not sure what it was…maybe his quiet nature, but he made me nervous in a way I wasn’t used to. After he read my note, he didn’t say anything. Being who I am, I had to bring it up. I don’t remember quite how the conversation went, but I remember it was in his car, traveling back from Hot Springs after going to the 2003 Documentary Film Festival. I didn’t feel like we really got anywhere with that conversation, other than I was pretty sure he was sweet on me, too. I knew I had to step up my game, so the next week, I did.

I feel like we’re in a place where I need to step up my game again. We’ve gotten pretty comfortable with this parenting gig, which is awesome. But sometimes I feel the crush slipping away. Or I forget that I even have a crush on him. But then he’s in the kitchen, shirtless with his steamy man arms (sorry, y’all–it’s so true), DOING THE DISHES. And I’m crushing all over again.

Trevor, I know you’re reading this…. I’m still totally sweet on you.