Love letter to my iPod

Andrew Hicks

We have an anniversary coming up, you and I. Five years. Half a decade since you came into my life. I have a hard time remembering what things were like before you came along, and I can’t picture my life without you.

Yeah, we’ve had our rough patches. Remember when I lost your charger for like two months? Remember when the Bose dock bit the dust? Remember how mad I would get when I’d put you on shuffle, and you’d pick the same “random” songs every time?

But iPod, I’m not kidding — I love you, man. You were around before I had kids, when I used to party all the time. They called me the Music Nazi because I didn’t feel like a social gathering was complete unless you were front and center, spitting out jams from the My Top Rated playlist.

You’ve gone from the forefront to the background and now back to the forefront. These days, you have to compete with Barney, Kipper and Caillou for background noise in the room. Soon, I might have to silence your Geto Boys and all your ’90s West Coast gangsta sheet, but right now we’re kickin’ it like it’s the good ol’ days.

I both love and hate how you’re frozen in time. When you first came around, I had to load all your songs from my roommate’s Mac. I went crazy, cycling through all my old CDs and begging any friend who gave me a ride home to bring their CDs inside so I could stock you. I checked out 20 CDs from the library at a time so you’d be more full-bodied.

I thought I was being discriminating at the time, but now I wish I would’ve hidden more guilty pleasures in your 30-gig canon. Why did I think in 2006 that I’d never want to hear “Round and Round” by Tevin Campbell again in my life? I love that song.

Inevitably, there will be loss. One day, you will die or get dropped in the toilet or maybe even be stolen by a visiting Jehovah’s Witness with questionable morals. And on that day, I will be sad, inconsolable and probably too broke to immediately buy your replacement. But let’s enjoy what we have while we have it.

So how about we do a shuffle right now? Ready? Okay… What? Wilson Phillips?! Ah, you know me too well, iPod.

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BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

Sarah with a Funsaver camera. I can't wait till she's old enough to look at this picture and ask, "Daddy, what the heck is that thing?"

Examples of Dad’s geekiness

Andrew Hicks

 

• Likes to refer to Sarah’s rainbow bib as “Roy G. Bib.”

• When burping Silas, will frequently pat his back to drum beat of “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie while singing, “Let’s burp!”

• Got a good laugh out of a little kid on “Barney” saying, “She’s like a brother to me.”

• When Silas peed on Dad’s leg while flashing a huge grin, wrote a Facebook status about it on phone before cleaning up.

• While half-awake, could have sworn Elmo was singing “Skeet skeet skeet skeet” on “Sesame Street.”

• After breaking ankle on neighbor’s stairs last fall, wanted to purchase said stairs and comically reenact Stephen King‘s practice of buying and destroying the car that hit him in 1999, when he broke every bone in his body. Later found out King didn’t actually do this; he just bought the car and had it junked.

• When Silas smiles, sometimes calls him “Smiley Silas” because it rhymes with the name of Billy Ray Cyrus‘s uber-famous teenage daughter.

• Occasionally uses the prefix uber-.

• Upon learning Sarah would automatically laugh when hearing the word “sassy,” Dad tracked down every Phil Hartman quote he could find from 1991 Sassy’s Sassiest Gentlemen” SNL sketch.

• Now can draw Elmo’s head in seconds with five pen strokes.

• Built most of this blog posting around months-old material written on a yellow legal pad. (Sorry, this actually belongs in the companion piece “Examples of Dad’s Laziness.”)

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FAMILY PICTURE OF THE DAY

My 3 favorite ladies -- Tiffany, Sarah and my mom. Christmas 2008.

14 hours, 23 minutes late

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author of this blog, Andrew Hicks, is participating in WordPress.com’s 2011 Post a Day challenge. He has committed to produce 365 consecutive blog posts in a timely and entertaining manner. So far, he has missed the midnight cutoff twice.

The first time, his 6-month-old got him up at 4 a.m. afterward and he wrote the blog during the morning news and backdated it. The second time, which occurred on Sunday, January 9, Andrew optimistically decided to go to bed at 10 p.m. and was reconsciousified at 11 p.m. He had no creative inspiration at the time, although he did have a pretty solid if vague idea he could’ve killed a few hundred words on.

Instead, Andrew sat up with Silas until the little guy got appropriately tired and fell asleep around 1:45, then Andrew stayed up hisdamnself in selfish nonproductivity* until 2:30. Then 2-year-old Sarah woke up crying at 6:30 a.m., and Silas quickly followed suit, and Andrew got up with both and ate a killer breakfast sandwich** and watched old Disney shorts on YouTube with her***. Then Silas fell asleep, and Sarah and Dad were starting to feel like they were out of bed too early.

So everyone went back to bed and lounged around for a number of daytime hours, until finally Andrew pulled out his laptop to write yesterday’s blog post while Silas flopped around his activity mat and Sarah got to drink her very own large water with lid and straw. Sarah has been good about using cups with lids and straws, even if Dad has to remind her a few times to hold the cup down so it doesn’t spill.

Sarah eventually finished her water and went to drop the plastic Quik Trip cup in the recycle bin. Dad stopped her, saying, “Sarah, get that back out, we’re gonna wash it and use it again.” Sarah realized there was unfinished business with the plastic cup, so she pulled it out of the recyclables and ceremoniously crushed the cup in the center, like her mom and dad do with aluminum soda cans as they’re dropped in. It was cute toddler stuff, and Andrew couldn’t be mad.

Anyway, Andrew hopes you’re not mad this post is going up 14 hours and 23 minutes late. He assumes it’ll get slept on anyway.

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*a.k.a. hanging out, a.k.a. unwinding

**A couple months ago, while looking through a ShopKo Holiday catalogue sent via junk mail, Andrew’s wife Tiffany decided she wanted a $30 egg poacher/2-slice toaster for the family. Andrew thought it might be an unnecessary purchase but agreed his wife deserved to have something new and functional around the house. Well, Andrew was immediately proven wrong when he realized that a poached egg was the best and easiest companion for sliced bread since Extra Heavy Duty Mayonnaise. A poached egg is Andrew’s new favorite condiment. It’s the new mustard.

***This is one of the things Andrew is bound to address in this blog, so let’s get it out of the way right now. 2-year-old Sarah, in the past few days, has fallen hard for old Disney cartoons. Her favorite characters, in descending order, are Pluto, Mickey and Donald. Mischevious chipmunks Chip and Dale are starting to gain in popularity. Andrew likes this because — unlike his toddler’s previous forays into the worlds of the Teletubbies, Barney and Elmo — Daddy can watch, enjoy and comment on this on a non-mind-numbing level. Watching old Disney shorts, mostly from 1936-1952, on YouTube has the added bonus of frequently being dubbed into Spanish, French, you name it. Or it’ll have foreign subtitles superimposed on the bottom. I don’t kid myself that my toddler will grow up with true mastery of any language other than English, but it’s great to acclimate her while very young to the idea that there are all types of people and ways to communicate.

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SPAM COMPLIMENT OF THE DAY
From loyal reader and spambot John: “http://creditcard.stealsky.ru The good blog very much was pleasant I will watch your news”

Public apology to Barney

Andrew Hicks

At various points in this blog, starting with the very first post, I’ve made reference to “Barney’s bitch ass.” All along, my wife Tiffany has insisted that Barney does not have a bitch ass and is, in fact, a positive influence on small children.

Over the past couple months, Barney has sent me cycling through the Five Stages of Grief, from denial (“There’s no way my beloved television is really issuing forth hour upon hour of a giant, lip-synching, borderline-retarded PBS puppet”) to bargaining (“Okay, Barney, I know my kid’s going to clamor for at least two more hours of you, but only if you put let me change to the Weather Channel for a second first, so I’ll know whether we’ll be able to go outside and escape you tomorrow”) to scabies (“Was that you who gave me scabies, Barney? If so, not cool, dude. Not cool”) to now, finally, acceptance.

I accept that Barney is a semi-permanent, lumpy member of this household. I’ve started buying groceries he likes. And, really, he keeps Sarah really happy. She sings, she dances, she has manners. She thinks kids in wheelchairs are cool. None of this would’ve been possible through traditional parenting and Teletubbies alone.

So, in this public forum, I address the following words directly to Barney: I retract my previous statement that you have a bitch ass. You are welcome in my home, and you can hang out with my daughter anytime. You are, however, a major lamewad, so don’t come around when Sarah’s asleep. You and I don’t hang out. Ever.

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BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

Thanks to my mom for capturing this beautiful shot of Sarah posing in a tree in her yard.

Mr Mom, meet Mrs Donkey

Andrew Hicks

The babies and I have been back home for a week and a half, and it’s wake-to-sleep childcare, house chores and writing for me, with some lazy patches in the middle. I’m enjoying it, and the days when I wasn’t surrounded by my tiny progeny seem distant already. Silas is a calm, sweet-natured baby with occasional fussy times. Sarah is an adorable, curious little chatterbox who is almost always amused, loving or both.

Lately, Sarah’s been really cracking me up, too. She grabbed one of her favorite books, opened it up and pretended to read, “One time, there was a story. The end,” and closed the book. I’ve since made those eight great words into a catchy Nate Dogg chorus. Ask me to acapella it if you ever run into me at Karaoke by Kris in the bowling alley lounge.

Another hilarious Sarah exchange came just after she’d woken up, bright-eyed from a good night’s sleep, and was lowered into her highchair to eat some breakfast. She stretched out her arms, threw her head back and announced, pseudo-dramatically, “Sooo tired.” I replied as if she was being silly: “You are not,” and she insisted, “Am!” Does Reader’s Digest still pay people like $300 for Very Cute Little Kid jokes? I admit, I used to love all the Reader’s Digest domestic niche-joke columns: “Humor in Uniform,” “Life in These United States,” “My Time in Juvey,” etc.

Fictional armchair philosopher and ADD sufferer Jerry Maguire would insist that we live in a cynical world, but it really doesn’t seem like it when I spend an unseasonably warm fall afternoon hanging out in my big backyard with my little play-buddy. Stuff like that truly is “what it’s all about,” even more so than the Hokey Pokey. My heart melts when Sarah excitedly calls out “Daddy! Daddy!” Although, I admit, sometimes I’ve already heard “Daddy! Daddy!” a hundred times in the last ten minutes, and I start to wonder where Mommy! Mommy! is hiding herself.

More than anything lately, Sarah likes to sit in my lap and have me read her books. Sarah’s current favorite little-kid book is called Mother, Mother, I Want Another. Very basic, intriguing little plot for a toddler. Baby Mouse is put to bed and, as mom’s leaving him to sleep, he asks mom, “Can I have another, mother?” Mrs. Mouse freaks out: “What? You want another mother?! Whatever will I do?”

Mayhem ensues as Mrs. Mouse dashes off to grab, one at a time, Mrs. Duck, Mrs. Frog, Mrs. Pig and Mrs. Donkey, and they all sing lullabies to Baby Mouse. Finally, Baby Mouse explains that their lullabies were great and all, but he really just wanted another kiss from his mother. Ohhhhhh… all the Mrs. Animals say, and they all realized they were yanked away from their families for a completely false emergency. Baby Mouse should’ve spoken his ass up sooner.

Good lessons here: Misunderstandings are a waste of time, clear communication is necessary, and damn, does Mrs. Donkey have some bad breath.  Sarah right now likes MMIWA at least as much as famed film critic Pauline Kael enjoyed Chinatown, “with its beautifully structured script and draggy, overdeliberate direction.”

Sarah subscribes to an activities magazine for preschool kids. It transfixes her even though she has no clue yet how to play the counting games and run her little crayon through the mazes. Her favorite thing to stop, point and shriek at is the tiny cover art of some PBS semi-all-star Christmas DVD they’re shilling in an ad. This particular picture, like an inch tall, is buried among lots of other visual noise, but Sarah is repeatedly drawn straight to it. And she’s always excited to point to the mini-image of each little kid mascot when I ask, “Which one’s Thomas the Train? Which one’s Barney? Which one’s Fireman Sam?”

Sarah’s good at pointing to those little head-and-shoulder shots of popular children’s characters that sometimes appear on the front and back inside covers of kid books. And she’s pretty accurate at identifying the purple horse, black sheep and white dog in the sophisticated children’s masterpiece Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Sarah right now likes BBBBWDYS as much as Roger Ebert hated Mad Dog Time. “Watching it,” declared Rog, “is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line.”

Single me would bitch-slap married me for spending 800 words on the redemptive beauty of being around my children. I’ve already been accused of selling out, although to me the key component of selling out involves receiving money. Maybe I’m selling out on consignment. I should ask Mrs. Donkey what she thinks… What? Oh, Pauline. Her name is Pauline, not Mrs. Donkey. I always forget.

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BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

Sarah swings.

I move to the couch!

Andrew Hicks

Week 3 of my ankle-break recovery exile is offering a change of pace. Instead of sitting in bed at my mom’s house all day into the wee hours of the night, I’m sitting on my in-laws’ basement couch all day into the wee hours of the night. It’s 2:23 am right now. Silas is asleep beside me. Ten minutes ago, he was awake. An hour ago, he was asleep. Two hours ago, he was awake. And so on. Awake, asleep, awake, asleep. He’s an indiscriminate, narcoleptic infant.

Really, the only time Silas concretely decides he wants to be awake is when I turn out the light to go to sleep. I can’t decide whether he’s afraid of the dark or is just a jerk. I’m kidding, of course. I’m the jerk, I think. I feel inconvenienced when Silas decides he wants to eat just as I’m getting ready to enjoy my own piping hot food. I mean, can’t the kid wait? He eats all the time. He gets like eight bottles a day. I only get four to five giant meals a day. If I’m lucky.

I’m sending a message by moving my base of operations from the bed to the couch. The message is, I’m not helpless anymore. Okay, I still have food brought to me, and I’m still not doing my own dishes or laundry, and it’ll be a little while before I’m back to work, but I cleaned my room today. And, let me assure you, that’s an accomplishment even when I’m not injured.

After the washcloth bath I gave myself* early afternoon, I brought my dirty clothes back to the bedroom by gripping them in my crutches and tossing them forward a few feet at a time. Takes a little while, isn’t pretty, but achieves results. I liken this process to a dimwit simpleton with a chopstick in each hand, tossing lo mein toward his mouth and occasionally hitting his target. I also managed to make the bed in fifteen minutes flat while hopping on one foot.

I’m even watching both my kids simultaneously again for up to two hours at a time. My best bet with Sarah, almost 2, is to keep her close to me and engaged. We read the same two books four or five times each, and we watch a little Barney** on the DVR. Then I get bored and crack the lid on the laptop, at which point Sarah makes a beeline for the laptop and asks optimistically, “Elmo? Elmo?”

I cruise to Sesamestreet.org and show her an Elmo video, it ends a couple minutes later, and Sarah asks, “More Elmo?” She just learned the word “more” in the last week or so, but she’s 100 percent on top of it. This girl can’t be happy with one of anything. She needs to watch more Elmo while she’s eating more cookies–uh, I mean carrots. More carrots. Lots and lots of carrots. I’m not one of those dads.

If I keep her close by and occupied, there’s no trouble. Couch-bound with a broken ankle, I can still grab my daughter’s legs and lift her upside down above my head, twisting her back and forth and exclaiming, “She’s upside down! Sarah’s upside down!” while she laughs and squeals her head off. Then I deposit her safely on my chest, and she says, “More! More!” And I oblige her. Being a dad has its simple, sweet moments.

It’s the idle hands that truly cause problems. If Sarah gets distracted by the stuff in the room, she’s simultaneously meticulous, thorough and unbelievably sloppy about moving every object to somewhere it doesn’t belong. Tonight, she wandered over to the CD tower, grabbed a CD from the rack, walked back over, handed it to me, said “Here you go,” and repeated the process a couple dozen times.

This was the most exhaustive look I’ve had through the music collection of my wife’s parents. Checked out some Glen Campbell, Tony Bennett, the Benedictine Monks Chant album (triple platinum!), the second of Amy Grant’s fifteen Christmas albums*** and lots of Bach. Towards the bottom of the stack are the CDs you can tell my in-laws bought on a foldout merch table at the back of the church directly from the artist. Nice of them. These are the CDs with no bar codes on the back, released by people you’ve never heard of. I wonder when those CDs last made it off the rack for a courtesy listen before Sarah haphazardly yanked them off earlier today.

Time to sign off. Silas is awake again, and he smells poopy. This could be a five-wipe affair.

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* = You don’t want to smell me until I can walk again. Chances are, by that point, you will still not want to smell me. But I normally give off a pleasant aroma. I’m still rotating Perry Ellis For Men and Hugo colognes I bought duty-free on my cruise vacations in 2004 and 2005. I don’t see an expiration date anywhere on the bottles, so I’m gonna spray those things until they run out.^

** = It seems like every “Barney” episode lately has one of the little kid dinosaur puppet characters getting mad, then Barney reacts by singing the same cute song about mad LKDPCs. Which, by the end, makes the LKDPC into a happy LKDPC. Sarah loves it. I scratch my head.

*** = She went overboard with the holiday releases, but I love ’80s Amy Grant. I grew up in the church and spent eleven years in Christian school. I’ll still take some “Where Do You Hide Your Heart,” “Find a Way,” “Stay For Awhile,” “Lead Me On,” “Sing Your Praise to the Lord,” “Angels” and “In a Little While” on the Bose headphones any day of the week.

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^ = A black lady I worked with once asked me, “Is that you wearing all that cologne?” I eagerly responded back, “Uh huh, it sure is,” thinking she was going to compliment me. She continued, “And I mean, ALL that cologne,” and tossed off an unpleasant nose wrinkle. My wife loves that story. I’d like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about cologne moderation in the eight years since the incident in question.

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BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

Sarah and Silas, both looking at a non-existent camera to their left.

Walker vs. Crutches? No contest

The physical therapy people at the hospital seemed deadly serious about their proclamation that they would not allow me to be discharged unless I had an approved assisted walking device. Nothing so conventional and unobtrusive as crutches, either. Crutches were not on the approved list. What I needed was a walker. And they were going to hook me up. I said sure, okay, whatever, and I fell back into a light, drug-addled sleep.

A knock came on the door a couple hours later. It was the hospital’s official walker dealer with my shiny metallic wheels. He had an info folder, and he’d taken the liberty of contacting my insurance company to find out how much of the burden they’d shoulder. Results were inconclusive, as was the sticker price itself, but he got me to sign here and here, and initial there, and he was off. I rolled over and went back to dreaming about running half-marathons or whatever.

Now, I would have imagined “Walker Salesman” to be a real Job From Hell. None of your peers take you seriously, you have to make cold housecalls in retirement communities to people who can’t hear you and are living on a fixed income, et al. Not true, it seems. This guy’s got the sweetest gig ever – a captive audience of injured, over-medicated marks who are led to believe their only option is his walker at some price to be announced at a later date.

Fast forward three days, and I can tell you, there’s no practical use to having a walker in your home. The thing is just plain cumbersome and not maneuverable. The getting up and down sucks, the getting through doorways sucks. Take that thing out the front door into the real world, and strangers and friends alike are guaranteed to laugh their heads off while reaching for their camera phones. No wonder old people with walkers seem pissed off all the time.

If you’re ever in my position, dealing with the surgical aftermath of ankle bone popped through skin, find a way to go the crutches route. Several major pharmacies and grocery chains will loan you crutches for a refundable $25 deposit, and they’re portable. If someone laughs at you for being on crutches, they’re automatically the lesser person. Plus you can use a crutch as a retaliatory weapon. You’d need a whole lot more coordination and cunning to beat someone senseless with a walker.

I think what turned the tide for me was lying in bed, nonfunctional leg elevated, and watching a viral clip on “Tosh.0” of a beautiful woman doing an elaborate salsa dance routine with a one-leg amputee who had nothing but one crutch as support. I knew I had to upgrade. I was struggling to use my walker to get from the bed to the heaping plate of delivery pizza in the kitchen, while this one-legged mega-pimp was making his Salma Hayek mambo dreams come true with a single crutch.

My father-in-law drove up yesterday to help with the kids while my wife was at work. I felt uncomfortable asking him to empty my pee jug, but I was only too eager to share with him my dream of crutching my way down the stairs and out to the street to pick up the mail like a normal human being. He was so enthusiastic he put on his cabbie hat and rushed out to Walgreens before I think he realized he was leaving his two small grandkids with an invalid who hadn’t shaved in five days. I held down the fort in his absence, walkering my way to the loveseat so I could feed and placate infant Silas and sing along to those godawful Barney songs with toddler Sarah.

The crutches are worlds better. That’s not to say being in this situation doesn’t still suck. My armpits are a sore mess, and each of my wrists sports a circular skin break the size of a hole punch where crutch steel has worn me away. But I did actually set foot outside in the daytime today. I crutched into the neighborhood barbershop and got myself a trim, and I picked up a footlong Cold Cut Combo from Subway. My wife was with me the whole time, and both legs were screaming at me when we were done.

I’ve been in bed ever since, injured foot propped up. And you know what? When you’re laid up, you have lots of time to read. I got a look at the small print in the walker paperwork. I have 30 days to return that piece of crap with receipt for a refund, for any reason. As far as reasons, you can’t get more all-encompassing than, “Your product sucks, it was forced on me, and I don’t even know how much it cost. Eat it, Walker Salesman!” Hopefully, he can take use my returned walker to convert some other motion-challenged hospital dischargee into a spiteful-assed bitch.

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P.S. The one and only fun thing about the walker – Sarah loved to get in front of me as I was slowly walker-ambling up the hallway and throw all her 23-month-old strength into pulling that thing in her direction. She really exerted herself and had fun with it. Leave it to a little girl to make so cumbersome and obnoxious a chore into something downright cute for twenty seconds at a time.

Day One of daytime daddydom

If you would have run into me a week ago, and we started talking about my kids, I would have launched into a stock bit. About how I was totally cool to take care of one baby or the other at a time but that I hated being charged with both babies simultaneously and now had full appreciation of the burden foisted on single parents, etc.

A week ago, I had no idea I was going to start watching Sarah (almost two) and Silas (barely two months) every weekday from 8:30 to 6. It was an abrupt decision. Tiffany had just gone back to work from maternity leave, and we’d started taking both babies to the same babysitter. This service, by the way, was projected to run us about $13,000 a year. We figured we’d make it work somehow.

Mind you, I’d just celebrated – well, “celebrated” is not really the word for it, more like “wincefully acknowledged” – the tenth anniversary of my intended-to-be-temporary foray into serving and bartending at mid-priced chain restaurants. I graduated college with honors at the age of 21. I was going to take a year off and write a book. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not 1999 anymore, although the band Smash Mouth probably wishes it was.

I had a party-filled twenties and got some writing done that I didn’t really form into anything publishable. It wasn’t until I fell in love, got married, moved away, settled down and opened the baby factory that it seemed both feasible and imperative to get back to writing and performing words that make people smile and laugh. I started doing open mic standup last Christmas. The day Silas came home from the hospital, I joined Facebook. Two new outlets where a year before the only thing on my social/comedic radar was karaoke night.

Then this decision – go on a leave of absence from my daytime job, switch to all closing shifts at the nighttime job, and stay home with Sarah and Silas during the day. No immediate financial loss stands to take place, and things are looking good for my wife and her job. I’ve been wanting to start a new blog but was at a loss for a theme. This ending just wrote itself.

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So this was Day One of the new arrangement, and I didn’t need an alarm clock to wake up for it. An alarm clock to me indicates putting an end to sound sleep. Me, I sleep for a few hours here and there when there’s no one crying. Last time was between 5:30 and 8:30 this morning. Both babies came to life just after Tiffany left, and I started my day in triplicate. Feed Baby #1, feed Baby #2, feed myself. Change Diaper #1, change Diaper #2, take a crap. Put Sarah in Outfit #1, put Silas in Outfit #2, put on my old black Sublime shirt with the pinprick hole in the belly.

This mundane process actually takes hours. I might be able to shave off a few minutes after I’ve been doing it a couple months. Sarah can at least pull her shoes on now. She’s obsessed with socks and shoes, actually. The “socks” part I’m not too concerned with, but the “shoes” part down the road could break the bank.

Meanwhile, I’ve got the entire PBS Kids lineup playing in the background: “Dinosaur Train,” “Sesame Street,” “Sid the Science Kid,” “Super Why?” and Barney’s bitch ass. These are a daily staple. Sarah’s at the point where she can name the main and secondary “Sesame Street” characters. She can’t name any state capitals yet, but she knows which one’s Telly and which one’s Prairie Dawn. I don’t even know which one’s Prairie Dawn. All the “Sesame Street” girl muppets seem interchangeable to me.

My mom was kind enough to buy us a Graco DuoGlider double stroller. This thing is a serious piece of hardware. Silas gets mounted facing me in his car seat, and Sarah rides up front. She’s like six feet away from me when I’m pushing them. We just broke in this stroller a week or so ago, and I’ve had Tiffany show me how to unfold it six times. But while Silas is inside asleep and Sarah is strapped into the single stroller next to me, it takes me ten minutes and a hundred attempts to get the thing open and ready. If I was even remotely famous, you’d be seeing footage of this atrocity on tonight’s “TMZ.”

I feel like an idiot, but I don’t give up, and soon the three of us are walking to the bank, to the post office, and then to the park via milelong bike trail. Silas sleeps the entire time, while I let Sarah run free over an empty football field and chase the geese up toward the lake. The weather, by the way, is absolutely perfect. It couldn’t possibly be any nicer, and there’s not another human in sight.

Last week at this time, I was rolling a stack of silverware while listening to some girl ten years younger than me bitch about her love life. I think this is a change for the better. I got a new blog out of it too.