Bean love and hair ties

Andrew Hicks

EDITOR’S NOTE: This blog post for Tuesday is being written on Thursday.

Domestic triumphs seem really trivial when you inject them into adult conversation. (“I closed on a house today.” “Oh yeah? Well, I finally cleaned the baseboards in my kitchen this morning. Red letter day all around, huh?”) But inject them I must. So here goes:

— Sarah loves beans! Eating-wise, it’s been tough to get Sarah to repeatedly consume foods that are healthy and well-balanced. She does love fruit, but otherwise her favorite food group is processed potatoes. Today, she peeked in on a big salad I was eating, and she wanted some of the crushed Saltines off the top. I tried to get her to eat a black bean from my salad, and she offered no hesitation. Actually said, “Mmm, tastes good.” After every bean, even! Then she asked for more beans. I had to open a can of kidney beans, since all the black beans had gone into my big salad (which was, in fact, rather large). Sarah loved the kidney beans, too. Her fiber intake is going to triple. This is the happiest food news around my house since they brought back the McRib. #jokesthatweretired4monthsago

— After numerous embarassing episodes occuring over a series of months, I can finally, successfully put Sarah’s too-long bangs up in a hair tie. I never had any little sisters, nieces or girl cousins, and I was never a dirty hippie, so I know nothing about long hair. That lack of knowledge extends to scrunchying up hair with that two-handed, quadruple-banded trick that my wife makes look so easy. I was never in Boy Scouts, I tie my shoes via a sloppy shortcut taught to me by a mentally challenged 9 year old, and I can’t properly shuffle a deck of cards. Mastering the hair tie was, thus, a major accomplishment.

Next thing I need to learn to master — posting this blog on time.

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BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

A sleeping Silas surrounded by pink hand-me-downs.

Psych-sleep at the gum show

Andrew Hicks

I’ve been staying at my mom’s for five days now. She’s been a wonderful, selfless companion this entire week, and it’s been good to reconnect with her wisdom and humor on a daily basis. After she read the Misery sledgehammer post, my mom actually burst through the door with a sledgehammer, demanding to know if I’d been out of my room. That’s prop comedy! I didn’t even know there was a sledgehammer in the house. Don’t mess with mommy, man.

My grandma, her mom, used to make my mom call her every night at 5:30 to check in and tell her about her day. My mom takes a more laissez-faire approach to her adult son (me), and both of us could be better at staying in touch on the phone. It’s great not to feel like a smothered mama’s boy, but my mom is probably my greatest underutilized resource. Her opinions and advice are like gold to me. I need to go to the well more often.

This week is by far the most consecutive time I’ve spent with 12-week-old Silas. We’ve occupied the same perches since Monday – me on the bed, pillows propped up behind my back and under my cast leg, him in the car carrier atop Sarah’s old baby stroller. The 20/20-ness of hindsight* makes me wish we’d picked a more gender-neutral design for our baby travel set than the flowery pink of the Graco “Emilia” pattern, but the stroller serves its function nonetheless.

I have just enough mobility to reach for Silas, reach for a nearby diaper and wipes, reach for the hand sanitizer, then reach for the baby bottles with pre-measured distilled water so I can add the pre-portioned formula. We eat, burp, use the bathroom, sleep, and repeat.

Silas this week has turned into a big smiler, too. He’s becoming a master of the tight-lipped grin, the one-sided smirk and the full-on gum show of delight. He smiles at dad, he smiles at grandma, he even smiles at the goofy stuffed frog with the see-through bubble belly full of what look like mini-Chiclets.

Baby Silas is also a master of the fake-out nap, or as my wife Tiffany calls it, psych-sleep. He eats, I hold him, and eventually he gets fussy, which he always does when he’s tired. I put him down, rock the stroller back and forth, and his eyes shut in peaceful slumber. I rejoice, and I pull out my laptop and get ready to hunker down to some serious writing.

Ten minutes go by, I get about half a sentence in**, and Silas wakes back up. “Surprised, daddy? I was resting my eyes, ya gullible galoot! Your job’s not done by a mile! WAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!” He builds up to his big cry, actually. It’s more like whine, whine, silence. Whine, whine, silence. Whine, whine, whine, WAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!

Taking care of a baby that weighs less than a United States Bowling Congress regulation ball*** is mostly busywork. So one thing I’ve been able to do this week is watch a whole lot of DVDs on my laptop. There’s no TV in the room, which means no sitcoms, no reality shows, no commercials and no complaints from me.

I’ve been raiding the archives of the county library, which so far has turned out to mean “mostly lower-profile movies from two years ago in the C+ to B+ range.” I haven’t seen one that’s truly brilliant or mediocre yet, just in between. Which is satisfying enough. If anyone’s interested, this is a list of what I’ve watched, from best to Still Pretty Good: Get Smart, Taking Woodstock, Outsourced, Extract, Baby Mama, Swing Vote, Charlie Bartlett. I could write a nice, entertaining paragraph on each, but that would make this post overlong and way off-topic. And Silas is going to wake up very soon, I’m sure of it.

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Before I sign off, this is my tenth post, which makes me a double-digit blogger. I really couldn’t have done it without my amazing family and the, what, like 20 of you that actually read this. Thanks to everyone who’s supporting me and offering feedback on this creative endeavor.

In celebration, it’s time to introduce the following feature to Dad’s Daytime Diary:

BABY PICTURE OF THE DAY

Silas, never too young to rock

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* = Tiffany and I were pleasantly surprised to get pregnant together once. We were never expecting an encore. Apparently, that’s what happens when you don’t use any form of birth control. Tell your friends.

** = Yes, it takes me ten minutes to write a half-sentence. It’s a run-on sentence, okay?

*** = Use a baby to bowl a 300 game, and you will receive a USBC patch. And a lengthy prison term. And probably many well-deserved beatdowns.