Ridin’ the range, okay, the family room, Berkeley, CA.
Archive | Re: the lil’ peanut RSS feed for this section
Reach for the sky
Hold up! Berkeley, CA.
Wordless Wednesday is better than No Post A’tall Wednesday, I always say. Or rather I’m trying to get back into the habit of saying. Â
He is treating my gardening hat very nicely, but I do think we’ll have to get him his own cow poke outfit soon. The boy has a flair for the dress-up, no doubt about it.
Wordless Wednesday, sublime smile subcategory
A great many Wednesdays around here have gone by wordlessly of late, so the post title is a bit misleading. Slowly (slowly! I am a 21st c. resident, on a 20th c. timeclock!) I am finding my way back here. I feel a post comin’ on soon (ok, I see a chunk of time on a plane tomorrow, some of which time I may wrestle to polish off a long half-baked explanatory note). On the other side of this upcoming weekend is a wee clear patch in the ongoing (thrill a minute!) steeplechase that is my new job. I have pencilled in “catch breath.” Hope also to ink in “write more.”
Meanwhile, me boy. Â Yes, that’s a haircut up under the cap there. He wanted it. Sigh. He can come back again to the Roger Daltry/ Robert Plant look again in his teens, I s’pose. Grandma’s looking adoringly on in the blurry left foreground. And me, behind the camera lens, catching another glimpse of him as a young man (as I try to catch my breath).
Who loves ya, baby
Never have I loved a boy like I love this boy. Apparently, never have I been loved by one like I’m loved by this one, either. We’re both in the same, very happy boat.
May you, too, enjoy a handsome return on your affections, today and every day.
One small squirt for boy, one giant squirt for parentkind
Yes. That means what you think it means.
Those fortunate readers who have not slogged through upwards of 5,000 diaper changes — ha! ya think I’m exaggerating! no, I AM ACTUALLY UNDERESTIMATING, I COUNTED — might think the above is merely an unremarkable, if slightly overshare-y image of somebody’s toilet. But that’s where you’d be sadly mistaken, my friend. The above is an image of victory! Triumph over recalcitrance! The onward march of youth toward their destiny, eventually fishing Mama and Baba out of the bowl of despair!
For months, nay, years, I would whimper quietly as I pulled the package of organic, free-range, fairly unbiodegradable diapers from the grocery store cart and placed it up onto the checkout counter. The larger the size on the diaper — 3, then 4, then 5, and then, finally and most humiliatingly, the dread 6 (and for you diaper-ignorami, they just don’t get any bigger than 6: next stop, Depend® undergarments) — the more pitious my sotto voce whimpering. It got to the point where the clerks simply could not meet my eyes. I didn’t blame them.  The beloved and I swap grocery store runs weekly with our co-housing in-laws, and whenever I would write in the word “diapers” on the list for them, I would follow it with a little sad face. 
 We didn’t talk about it.
But today! Today, I strode into our neighborhood grocer’s, head held high, baseball cap cocked at a jaunty angle, just so, and I traipsed up and down those narrow aisles, and I hummed as I packed my cart full of all manner of items, NOT ONE OF WHICH WAS A PACKAGE OF DIAPERS! Ha! Ha ha!
You will forgive me the heady delerium.
I leave you now with a wee (!) musical selection, here. O hell, lemme just paste it:
[Note: youngsters ignorant of musical history and a bit impatient, give what's on the other side of that link this quaint ditty at least 30 seconds. Rest of youse: turn yer monitors up to 10.]
I have no doubt
His sister loved this t-shirt (a beloved gift from a beloved chum, who now runs the women’s center at Ohio University, thankyouverymuch). I was tickled whenever I saw our daughter wear it, but must confess I am even more tickled to see it on the boychild. I wasn’t the one who dressed him this morning, but I can see him picking this one out because it’s a pretty color. That, and he remembers seeing it on his the sun rises and sets on her big sister.
I can’t recall whether she asked what a feminist was. If she had, back when she was little enough to fit into this shirt, I’m not sure what I would have said. I’d have been tempted to go to Rebecca West’s gem, from way back in 1913:
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a door mat or a prostitute.
Problem with that is that then I’d have to explain what a door mat was.
- lizk: I'll take it, too! I was not expecting him to ev...
- Lesbian Dad: Amen, is all I can say. As with so much that's ...
- rockyv: damn it. Now I'm choked up at work. You've touc...
- Lesbian Dad: Amen....
- AT: It takes a village, and sometimes that village is ...
- Lesbian Dad: Ah, ol Chum(py). So very nice to see you again! An...
Truer words were never splashed across a Band-Aid
Whenever he comes even close to skinning a knee — the surface of the skin isn’t even broken; maybe there’s just a wee abrasion — he calls out with a dramatic intensity on a par with graduates of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, “IS IT BLEEDING?!”
Don’t know when it will be that I stop keeping Band-Aids (the never-fail placebo) in my wallet. When that day comes, a major chapter of this parenthood will have come to a close. Of course there’ll be whole new ones to follow. Probably in which I turn around and apply the Band-Aid to myself. (“Is he even in this ZIP CODE?! This AREA CODE?! The frigging TIME ZONE!” Or, “Would it kill her to just text me back A SMILEY FACE EMOTICON SO I KNOW SHE STILL Â POSSESSES THUMBS AND EYEBALLS?!”)
That day will come. And I’ll be damn lucky to see it.
Continue Reading →