It walks among us

So it's true, the Simon has now advanced into the bipedal realm. I was sitting at the dinner table the other night when all of a sudden, Ashley gasped and said "Simon is walking." She was looking right over my shoulder. The look on her face, the tone of her voice, she could have been telling me that there was a snake slithering up the wall. I turned around and there he was, toddling along, eyes front, legs wobbly, belly leading the way. And he's been keeping at it ever since.

Unrelated....you remember that episode of The Simpsons, there's that moment where Nelson the Bully points at his own reflection and does his signature "Ha Ha!", but then frowns and says "Hey, that hurts. No wonder nobody came to my birthday party." Of course you remember it. Simon had a similar moment recently. You see, the kid's a biter. He gets the biggest kick out of sinking his teeth into his mom and I. And it doesn't seem to be just when he's teething, it can happen when he's in the best of moods. My shoulders bear teeth marks that may never completely go away. So the biting is Simon's "Ha ha." I was cradling him in my arms as he was falling asleep. He was just about off to dreamland, but part of him was still clinging to the waking world. He took my finger in one of his little baby hands and pulled it towards his mouth, as if to take a chomp. I took my finger back, but in his half asleep state, the little guy didn't realize. He put his own fingers in his mouth and bit down. "Hey," he said. "that hurts." "Yeah," I said. "Hurts like hell. Lucky you're cute."

Necessity is the mother of some such or something like that

Sunday night after the boys were asleep, The Ash and I busted open the boxes and decorated the tree that had stood in the corner all afternoon, naked, patiently waiting for our attention. Every year, somewhere during the tree decorating process, I find myself stepping back for a moment and considering the strangeness of this tradition. What might a visitor from another planet think of this practice of bringing a tree into one’s dwelling and adorning it with all manner of lights, ribbons, and bright shiny objects of various shapes? Not to mention the rest of the traditional Christmas decor. You know which one always cracks me up? The nativity scene with the kneeling Santa Claus. That’s just the most Christmasarrific mashup ever. Maybe at Easter, there should be a giant bunny dressed as a Roman soldier. Or maybe a wabbit pushing a stone away from a cave. I’d put that on my lawn.

Monday morning, the boys discovered the tree. Our nearly one-year-old is plenty mobile and plenty curious, so we left the bottom foot or so of the tree undecorated. It’s like the tree is dressed in a short skirt. Just showing off a little leg, ya know? Hey, a tree’s got needs. So I watched as the nearly one-year-old, my little New Year’s Eve baby, eyed the lowest hanging ornament, a shiny silver bell with colorful stripes all the way around. From his sitting up position it was well out of his reach. He raised his hand towards it and attempted to stand. His legs wobbled for a moment, then he thunked back down on his little baby butt. He tried again, same results. I watched him try this maneuver again and again, never taking his eyes off of that bell. Finally, he stood up and held his stance firmly, long enough to reach out and pluck the ornament off of the tree. I have you now, pretty shing thing. With it safely in his grasp, he sat back down and inspected his find more closely. The bell remained stoic.

I suppose if all the good tasting fruit grew out of the ground, humankind would still be crawling.

You think I'm locked in here with you, old man...

...but it's you who's locked in here with me.

Can your kid do this?

I shall now levitate this corn...

Flow Baby

Further Dispatches From The Holmesfront

Between all the rememberating that's been going on here on this little blog, there's also been a wee bit going on around here in real life, and some of it might even be worth recording for my posterity's posterity to look back on and think, "Damn, Grampa T wasn't always an incoherent ass-grabber." So let me drop a few bullet points.

- Crawlariffic - this kid'll be mobile soon. He sees his big bro on the go, and he wants to join in the fun. Once that happens, I get to join the ranks of y'all who already get to enjoy chasing multiple kiddos around. It should make trips to places like Target that much more life-affirming.

Oh, and let's not forget the sitting up:

So much better than the spitting up:

- Agree to disagree - so I knew kids could be disagreeable little beast dwarves at times. What I was not prepared for, however, was my child's ability to completely ignore any and all facets of this thing called reality, even when they are sitting right there in front of him, politely introducing themselves. "Hi there, I don't believe we've met. We're Facts. And you are?" Here are a few things Henry has argued with me about in the past few weeks:

• Whether or not I am hungry...not him, but me.
• Whether or not the dog is hungry.
• Whether or not Simon is hungry/sleepy/upset.
• Whether or not I'm driving the right way to Grandma's (I was, thank you very much).
• Whether or not dinner is on the table.
• Which shoes I wanted to wear.
• Whether or not Yoda is a Jedi Master - I found this one particularly upsetting, so much so that I actually allowed myself to get pulled into the discussion. Always a mistake.

Not that his "arguments" are all that thought-out. They're typically just emphatic declarations that the opposite of what I said is actually the truth.

- I am beautiful in the mornings:

This is not so much news, but more of a reminder. Don't front, you know you'd love to peer over your morning coffee at this vision of manly loveliness.

- I am the best husband on my block - So we bought one of those little kiddo crawly tubes from Ikea so that Henry could have something to crawl through other than the underside of our deck. I stepped out of the shower one lovely weekend morning to hear my wife calling for help. I walked downstairs and found this:

I hummed "Mack the Knife" to myself as I strolled to the office to fetch the camera, grabbed it with a flourish, then danced back to the playroom to snap a few pictures. The awareness that I was creating photographic evidence of her predicament served as sufficient motivator for The Ash to work her way out of the child-sized tube, so you see, I was actually just helping her out. And creating blog fodder. It should be noted also that I asked her if it was okay to blog about this, and got the yeah-totally-for-sure on the condition that I point out that she was NOT stuck because she's fat, because she's not fat. No, she was stuck because the tube is made for a child...so my wife isn't fat, she just doesn't think things through sometimes.

- Aesop Rock - Hip-hop show buddy and I headed out for another night of hipping and hopping, this time with the mighty Aesop Rock.

It's funny, I live in a city full of music, but on the rare occasion that I take a night out, this seems to be the music I'm interested in seeing lately. I may be on course for a bit of genre burnout, but no biggie.

- And one last thing - See this face? It's gonna rule the world.

Pictures to prove it

So we turned Henry loose with our old old digital camera. The results were nothing short of fucking art:Note the deep reds of the fingers captured through the technique of placing them extremely close to the lens, obscuring most of the picture beyond, suggesting perhaps that as human beings, we are often unable to see beyond the blood in our own hands. Brilliant.

Of course, there were some rather frightening entries in his portfolio, like this one:

Perhaps the lumbering beast is dreaming of a letter that will come through that mailslot in the background. Such striking composition, and a bold move focusing on a subject so badly in need of a shave.

Little Simon AKA Turtle AKA Chubb isn't snapping any pictures yet, but he has learned what to do when the camera is turned on him:

This gets me every time

Good morning, time to get up and go to work

So after a much too brief leave of absence, I returned to work the last half of this week. To say that I was super-excited to be back at the grind would be a great big stinker of a lie. Being OOTO (that's "Out Of The Office" for you non-office types, not "Off Over The Ozarks" like you were thinking) for so long caused me to get used to spending my days engaged in a variety of simple yet satisfying activities, things like playing outside with Henry, enjoying the cooing and gurgling that can emanate only from a newborn, blatantly ogling my wife, not shaving, practicing my juggling. It's a good life. Oh, and I conducted an experiment to test the depths of Simon's stay-asleep-itude, inspired by my amazement at the sight of a newborn baby who actually likes to sleep. Henry took a staunch anti-sleep stance in his first months on this planet, so much so that we couldn't even lay him down without him letting loose with a blast of screams. We actually managed to bottle some of those screams and sent them off to a lab where a team of mathematicians, linguists, and anthropologists translated them into English for us, so now we know that all that screaming was just Henry's way of asking, "GOD, WHY DO I HAVE SUCH SHITTY PARENTS?!" But lo these two years and some change later, the great Simon experiment of 2008 boldly asks the question, "Will he, in fact, stay asleep while his father hammers nails into a wall in the very same room?" Turns out, yeah, he will...I got a whole wall full of pictures hung, and not a single baby dream was disturbed.

But it was back to work for me this week, so that kind of fun has to be relegated back to evenings, weekends, and the occasional day worked from home. I was so not eager to be back that I halfway snapped at the first person who started with the litany of baby questions. Not that I don't love talking about my kids, it's just that it was 8:00 and I was NOT in my pajamas. That can be hard on a sensitive soul like me. So I spent the last couple of days repeatedly answering The Series of Standard New Baby Questions, which was pretty cool. I'm pretty happy to ramble about my kids given half a chance. Plus I grew a beard while I was out, so I had a lot of people point out to me that I had a beard. "Holy crap dude, you got a beard! And it's growing RIGHT OUT OF YOUR FACE!"

The human animal's powers of observation never cease to awe and inspire.

Could you kids just go to sleep so I can blog about you?

I've been finding it rather amusing all of the little details regarding newborns that I seem to have forgotten since Henry's infant days, just a little over two years ago. Like that whole thing where they'll just pee on your during diaper changes - that's a lesson you'd think would stick for good, but no. Simon had to drop a little refresher for me on that one. It was good of him to get that over with quickly.

And there's that neat trick where you can set them down someplace and turn your back for two seconds and they'll still be exactly where you left them when you come back. Yeah, toddlers don't do that one. Only newborns. And perhaps seniors. I like that one, although it's slightly compromised if you've got a toddler around who is very interested in his baby bro.

Not to mention how little they are. My life was such that I never actually saw a real-live newborn until the birth of my first son, and I remember being struck at that time by how very small and fragile brand new human beings really are. And in spite of his immense birth weight, I felt the same sensation when Simon was born....which reminds me of a funny story from his birth. So the little guy had just been born, right? And I was holding him in my arms, looking down at his chubby-cheeked little face, and feeling the love sweep over my being, and pondering how it could be that each and every human being that has ever lived was at one time this small and vulnerable and dependent, and as the mysteries of the universe began to unfold before me in the barely-opened eyes of this freshly-hatched little squirmasaurus, my wife suddenly started yelling, "still attached! STILL ATTACHED!"

Yeah, those umbilical cords aren't quite as long I thought. Heh.

Anyway. No neat endings tonight. Off to catch some zzzzzzzz.

Finally!

7 am on December 31st - the wife wakes you and tells you she's in labor. You know it's going to be a very long year-end closeout.

Everyone, meet Simon.

He's 9 pounds and 11 ounces of pure baby goodness. Welcome home little guy. You may have been late, but we're just glad you showed up. We love you little guy.

Thanks to everyone for all your kind words and well-wishes.

December Moon

I've been enjoying looking up at the moon through the December night air this past week. I got a wild hair on Christmas Eve Eve night and decided to see if there were any nifty settings on my camera that I hadn't yet put to use that would capture a bit of its grandeur, but this doesn't even come close to doing it any justice. Ah well.

Both the year and this pregnancy are coming to a close, though only one of them has an ending date that is for certain. The little fella is 8 days late as of today. Were this a package, I'd be online tracking it, but no such service exists as of yet. Stupid technology. The little guy may not be born yet, but he's already received his first Christmas gifts. Hope he's not mad that we opened them for him.

Henry spent all day Christmas surrounded by family. Not only did he have some new stuff to play with, he also had plenty of people around that he could grab to make play with him. In short, the kid was in his own version of toddler heaven.

Hope everybody had a great holiday. I'll let y'all know when this baby decides to make an appearance. Until then, enjoy the rest of the year.

A Missed Opportunity

How the conversation went:

Holmes's Mom: Hey, I was just calling because I remembered today was y'all's due date. Any news?

Holmes: Nope, still no baby.

Holmes's Mom: Oh okay.

How the conversation would have gone had The Holmes been on his game:

Holmes's Mom: Hey, I was just calling because I remembered today was y'all's due date. Any news?

Holmes: Huh? Ooooh, yeah, yeah, Ashley had the baby.

Holmes's Mom: What?

Holmes: Yeah, two or three days ago.

Holmes's Mom: WHAT?!?!

Holmes: I can't remember which day exactly. We have it written down here somewhere.

Holmes's Mom: (silent disbelief).

Holmes: Sorry I forgot to call, it just sorta slipped my mind. You know how it is.

And so on and so forth. Though I doubt the conversation actually would have gone that far. After all, The Holmes's Mom did raise The Holmes, so she knows what straight-faced dubiousness he is capable of.

But as the first conversation above states, still no baby. I thought for sure that our plans to see a movie last Friday night would provide the necessary impetus for the little guy to start making his way out. I even bought the tickets in advance to give him a little extra nudge. But nope, he decided to let us sit through the whole thing, which I must say we appreciated.

This Time Next Month

The title of this post is a time I look forward to. This difficult semester will be over, we will be moved, and we can just focus on enjoying the arrival of our new little guy. I suppose it is a testament to how much we have going on at the moment that the thought of having a new baby added to our family sounds like a break. It ain't exactly a vacation, but I look forward to being able to focus all of my energies on my family for a while instead of being pulled in so many directions. I felt the baby moving around in Ashley's tummy the other night, and I felt the same sensation come over me as the one I felt in the months and weeks leading up to Henry's birth, that eagerness to finally meet him, to hold him in my arms, say hello, and just love him. Until then little guy, you just stay in there and bake.

Dispatches from the Holmesfront

Or, bullet point versions of posts that The Holmes has been wanting to write, but hasn’t the time for currently

The Business of Busyness - Somebody emailed me recently and asked if we (meaning The Ash and I) could possibly be doing any more things at once. The answer is yes, yes we could, but then we would be certifiably batshit insane. New baby on the way, toddler on the loose, condo on the market, school, work, etc. I'm actually slightly terrified of what will happen if the condo actually sells in the next month or two because then "finding new place" and "moving" will officially have to be added to the to-do list. In the midst of everything, I sometimes have to stop and remind myself what it's all for, that there's actually a reason for all this busyness, a goal behind each and every item on our list. That helps a bit. I've also been setting aside a bit of time each day to just stop doing, stop thinking, and just be. Just for a few minutes. I suppose one could call it meditation, though I'll be damned if I can do a full lotus position. It might get me through the semester.

Next Batch of Biscuit - I've been feeling kind of bad that I haven't blogged much about baby number two. True, I've written about him some, both here and over at Dadcentric, but it seems like when Henry was enwombenating, I was posting about him all the time. Of course then, there wasn't a real live toddler running around, and life was, I suppose, a bit slower. It's not that I don't think about the new baby, because I do every day. I guess it's just that his December arrival seems so far away because right now is so very very full. But I promise you this little guy…and this is where I switch from talking to readers to talking to my new son: you're going to get every bit as much love and attention from your folks as your big bro did and does. We can't wait to meet you. Until then, you just hang out in there and make.

Another Lesson in Not Making Assumptions - Perhaps it's because I'm taking more classes this semester and I spend more time among my fellow seminary students, but I'm starting to get the feeling that perhaps I'm not the only one there that doesn't quite “fit in.” Which I suppose means that I fit in just fine. True, I am one of the youngest by far, and there are quite a few more women than men in my program, but the more people I talk to, and the more theology class debates I sit through, the more I realize that I'm not the only one with some wacky ideas about God and religion that some might think would fall outside the norm of what you'd find in such a setting. It would seem that in presenting my own challenge to the assumption of what kind of person goes to seminary, I have in turn had my own assumptions about what kind of person goes to seminary challenged. What brings us all there, I suppose, is a desire to educate ourselves so we can be of service to our fellow earth dwellers, and the notion that perhaps there's a spiritual aspect to our work that functions along with everything else.

Get Some Beer…And Some Cleaning Products – In further evidence that there are Others Like Me at seminary…and this might be just because my theology teacher looks like he would be friends with Floyd from "True Romance", but the other day when he talked about Saint Stephen “getting stoned”, I noticed several people tittering like teenagers. What is this, freshman sociology?

Kid Toys, Adult Party - Last Sunday was Free Museum Day in lovely Austin, Texas, so I scooped up the kiddo and we headed for the Austin Children's Museum while The Ash and her brother painted our living room. Henry had a blast and all, but man, I think I want to rent this place out for my birthday party. We can all drink beer while we play in the Shadow Garden or develop our problem solving skills in the Tinkerer's Workshop. We can station the keg in the game center and play all manner of drinking games. We can use the Austin Kiddie Limits center for karaoke.

For Your Purchasing Pleasure – I’m thinking we should make ink prints of the placenta and silkscreen some tee-shirts and onesies.

Standard play time is 8:00, so I was caught unawares

While it is true that I am guilty of making the occasional idiotic wisecrack about their humble origins in the backwoods of Appalachia*, the fact of the matter is that I actually quite like midwives and doulas. The ones I've met anyway, they all seem like good people, undoubtedly a breed unto their own. Not to mention the fact they've got the skills to bring the biscuits, and that's some skill worthy of respect.

But who knew they could be so dramatic?

See, in preparation for the birth of our little Mo'mo, The Ash and I are taking a class in natural childbirth taught by a midwife and doula pair. In spite of their slightly disorganized manner, in spite of the fact that our books didn't arrive in time for the first or even second class, in spite of the fact that class is every Tuesday night for six weeks and I typically have a crappy attitude about going since it's Tuesday and Tuesday is just Monday's frumpy cousin with no personality, in spite of all that, I already feel better prepared for this birth than I did for the last one. Sure, we took a class to prepare for Henry's birth, but all I really remember of it is how careful the teacher was to match up each couple with a baby mannequin of the appropriate color. Because there's no way I could ever care for a non-white baby mannequin.

So far in this class, there have been no such awkward acts of color coordination, but that is not to say that nothing of note has taken place. In fact, at our very first Tuesday night session, the doula lady kicked things off by freaking my shit out. Without warning, without preface, without the slightest inkling of what she was about to do, she suddenly started acting out the part of a woman in labor having a very serious contraction. My first thought was, "Oh look, she's pretending to have a contraction. Gosh, she could have warned us." But then the act continued, the moaning, the rocking back and forth, and all the while the midwife stayed by her and soothed her. The student body, we all kept our seats and said nothing. And then the thought occurred to me, what if this isn't an act? What if she's having some kind of seizure right here in front of us and nobody is doing anything because we all assume she's acting out a contraction, but in fact somebody needs to be calling an ambulance right fucking now? You know, like when actors actually get stabbed on stage because some knave switched out the dummy knife with a real one, but the audience doesn't react because they think he's just acting, which is truly ridiculous since that bastard couldn't act his way out of a paper sack and the only way he could ever deliver a convincing death scene is if he was really dying so it serves him right anyway? Not that I would ever do such a thing, mind you. I began to wonder if I should speak up, if I should run for the phone, if perhaps my long dormant first aid skills would be required to save the day.

Thankfully, just as I was about to spring into action, she brought her little act to a close, which was a relief since we paid good money for that class and we didn't need our teacher to go all spazoid on us.

Not that I mind a bit of dramatics thrown into the midst of everyday life. I have a rather expensive piece of paper from U of T that implies as such. Still, a bit of warning next time ladies.

* Yes, I know midwifery did not originate in Appalachia, but for some reason the two are hopelessly intertwined in my brain, so that's just how it has to be.

The revealing of new baby's name

No, not his real name, silly. It's much too soon to be sharing such privileged information, even with loyal readers such as yourself. All apologies.

But the baby does have his official in utero name. It was actually Henry's idea, in a way. See, when there's something that Henry's got that he likes, and he's suddenly out of it, he does not hesitate to ask for more. As in "moa!" Or the more common "mo mo [insert item Henry wants here, raising the last syllable slightly as if one were asking a question, or as if one were speaking with an Irish accent]." If Henry runs out of milk and must have more, it's "mo mo mano!" (mano = milk in Henryese...or is it Henryish?) If he scarfs down all the beef on his plate without giving any to the dog, we hear "mo mo beef!" If I'm swinging him around the room and yelling "Wheeee!" as part of the little game we play called "Wheee!" but then dare to put him down, I get demands of "mo mo whee!" Which is hilarious since the kid is visibly dizzy, stumbling like a drunken toddler across the floor.

If the song ends, casting us into musicless silence, it's just "moa." He doesn't yet have a word for the nicely put-together sounds that come out of the speakers.

So I figured, since there will be more baby around to love, new baby may be referred to as Momo. As in "mo mo baby!"

Plenty dopey, I know, but it only has to last while he's baking. Once he's made it out into the world with us, little Sherman Washington or Justus Aurelius or Apollo Marcon or whatever the new little Holmes comes to be called (you like our short list?) can ditch his womb moniker for good.

The Zombiewalk

It's not always easy to get the kid to perform, particularly if he sees a camera in my hand. He granted me about 1.5 seconds of his baby zombie walk, but his agent said his contract forbade going beyond that without some serious renegotiations. Ah well, that's what editing is for. Enjoy.

Doings of the young man as of late

Henry's got a thing about containers and shuffling the contents of one to another, particularly when those contents are liquid. Today, I watched him pour some water from his water bottle into his little red wagon, then lift the wagon to his lips and drink the water from there. I guess sometimes the easy way isn't the fun way.

When I was young and I heard adults talk about how fast kids grow up, I thought they were full of shit because it seemed to me as if I couldn't get grown up fast enough. Being a kid felt like a long drawn-out pain in the ass. And of course, now's the part in my little narrative where I tell you about how I see things differently now that I'm on the other side of the generational divide. It seems such a cliche thing to say but it's so damn true. It seems like Henry does new and amazing stuff everyday that I don't manage to get down in writing. I suppose I have this idea that I'll have this blog to look back on in my old age as a record of what was going on in our lives all those years ago, but who knows, maybe, hopefully I'll still be too busy with the present to spend too much time on the past.

I will say that Henry's in this language phase now that I already know I'm going to miss when it's gone. It's as if he's taking all the words he knows and trying them out in combinations to see how they sound together. By far, the best of these combos is "doodoo-mao." To explain: Doodoo is Henry's name for his crazy great aunt from New Orleans, a name he came up with all on his own, lest ye think we were calling her names. And mao (as in Tse-Tung) is his word for cats, a word he settled on after hearing a cat talk its talk. How doodoo and mao came together is a mystery for the ages, but together they are.

There's also this love affair with cars that's brewing. When we walk out to our car, he points and shouts "tacah!" Cars drive by us on the street. "Tacah!" He sees the car out the window. "Tacah! Tacah!" It could be that he inherited the love of all things mechanical that seems to run in his mom's side of the family. He sure as hell didn't get it from me. He loves cars so much that we even bought him one. Yes, I know, spoiling our child with a fancy car before he even has a license, contributing to the ruination of today's youth. It could be that the car is one of the best places to rock out. Just tonight, the little guy got to hear that kickass new White Stripes song for the first time, and he banged his little head as much as his car seat would let him.

News!

I have news! Such big news! We're talking like OMG big big big news.

Oh yes, such news.

Which is my completely unnecessary leadup to the part where I tell you the actual news, which is that we're having another baby! Woohoo! We're due in December, which is all far away and right around the corner all at the same time.

Oh my little Henry, you're going to be a big brother.

I'm excited, oh yes, but the thing is, the excitement is bit, I dunno, different this time. I go into a bit more detail on my Dadbloggers post this month.

I'll keep everybody posted.

El yay!