This kid had a great birthday last week:
In other news, Spoonflower continues to pick up steam. I joined some friends for a fishing trip in Hot Springs over the weekend and didn't even take a fishing pole. Instead I had a massage and hottub soak at the spa across the street from the campground. How Brokeback Mountain is that? Oh, well. I can take it.
Phoebe Alice Fraser was born last Monday, December 3. She's a sweetheart, but seems to have come down with her sister's cold this week. Phoebe is a name we both liked (see previous post), and Alice was my father's mother's name.
As anyone can see, Salutor has languished in my long absence. Odd as it is to to pop up suddenly with a real-time update on a personal matter, that's exactly what I'm doing. It's the Sunday evening following Thanksgiving and we remain on the precipice of a third daughter. The only certainty is that she will be here soon. Her "due date" is Tuesday.
My post here is prompted by the fact that some faithful friends may in fact be checking up on me via the Internet rather than calling, concerned that we might be semi-conscious, mid-post-birth stumbling about the house, a state in which unexpected phone calls can be the difference between a manageable state of wonder and utter, bewildered chaos. So, at least as of Sunday, please feel free to call. Anyone in the know, of course, remains glued to my wife's blog.
While I'm on the topic of the new baby, the name we've chosen this time originates in Greek mythology, but appears in the Paul's epistle to the Romans as well as Shakespeare. It also features prominently in a counter-cultural, American novel first published in 1951. Anyone...? Her middle name will be Alice after my father's mother: Alice Cran Fraser.
The other girls continue to do well. My youngest gets wilder by the day. Like all children she enjoys being buried alive.
Before bed. Watch disc 2 of the third season of Deadwood, the most densely written, brilliant television series ever produced.
Going to bed. Trying to explain to Kim what Edward Tufte is all about and why I have requested the book
Beautiful Evidence
Leaving the house. Lula clambers up into my lap in order to roll her "googly guy"-- one of those sticky, stretchy, rubber hand toys -- through my hair. Eye-level with her diaper, I note aloud that she needs to be changed. "Noooo," she says, eying me mirthfully. "I'm not poopy. I happy, Papa."
On the way to work. Hear a duet on WKNC between Lucinda Williams and Flogging Molly, a band that invites comparison with the Pogues in their heyday. My college days.
At work. Wondering if I should buy an iPhone next month.
The doc thinks she'll be six feet tall. Her birthday present is the sandbox I am trying to finish by Saturday. It's a bigun'. I'm having 2,700 lbs. of sand delivered to the house on Friday (in 50lb. bags). That should be quick to move, right?
My daughter will be two years old tomorrow. She's a strong, active and curious child with curls that become more pronounced on rainy days. Last night she and her older sister spent close to an hour playing with a toad we found in a puddle, shrieking and chasing it and pulling it around the yard in a yellow wagon. She is excited by birthdays in general and often sings "Happy Birthday"-- perhaps her second favorite tune these days, after the a-b-c song.
Last week while dining at our usual Mexican restaurant, one of the waiters stopped as he always does to say hello to Lula in Spanish. She responds to this like most children her age, with a certain amount of shyness--uncertain what to reply despite my urging her to say hello in kind. As he walked away however, a thought came to her and she leaned out over the table: "I yuv you man!" she said.
"When he comes back," I suggested, "you can say, 'Hello, Señor!'" Just then he emerged from the kitchen again at our table, smiling and waiving at Lula.
"E-yo, Seymour!" she said brightly, then pronounced her version of the word 'fish' and pointed at the wall behind him, which indeed featured a wooden fish. He looked puzzled.
Last night as I played with my daughter Lula, who is almost two years old, on the floor of our den, she pointed to one torn arm of the sofa, turned to me and said, "Papa, what's that?"
This is, I should add, probably her most oft-uttered phrase, followed closely by "What's that, Papa?"
"That's a spot where the kitties scratched the sofa and tore it," I explained.
Lula turned back to the sofa arm to scrutinize it more closely and, to clarify the point, said, "That where kitties tore sofa dammit."
She walked over to the other arm of the sofa, similarly frayed, pointed and added, "Kittie there tore sofa dammit too."
This is not very interesting to anyone else, really, but my daughter enjoyed watching it repeatedly this morning: A public service commercial for the Town of Chapel Hill greenways that includes a short glimpse of Lula and me walking in a nearby park. (They edited out the footage where she stopped walking, busted out some freestyle yoga, then stood, pivoted, and began running toward the camera.)
I continue to tweak the design of Salutor.com, which may prove annoying to any subscribers to the feeds as I republish the front page repeatedly. If so, please accept my apologies. I am getting close.
So the other morning as I was trying to get out the door to work my daughter pooped in her diaper. If you are looking for evidence that parenthood softens the brain, look no further than my un-ironic use here of the verb poop. The poop was not a surprise, as my daughter has yet to show any sign that she'd prefer to use the potty for this sort of thing and for her the morning is, well, a prime window of the day for a healthy bowel movement. As it is for many of us.
I was, of course, playing with the little tot at the time. As she does every day, her level of engagement with me takes on an intensity, sometimes a slightly frantic one, as I prepare to leave for work.
I stoically lifted my daughter into my arms to carry her upstairs to the changing table, putting aside a tiny flash of dismay that her mother was still enjoying her morning tea and I would be delayed a few minutes longer from departing for the office. One of the unanticipated side-effects of becoming self-employed has been losing access to hastily muttered excuses like "I'd change her, but I don't want to be late for work." My wife was the first to detect this absence.
Upstairs, assuming the position over my wriggling child on her changing table, it became apparent to me that this was not a run-of-the-mill poop. It was a large poop, a poop explosion as my wife and I often say, and its foulness was enhanced considerably by the presence of a number of semi-masticated blueberries. The toddler parents among you are nodding sympathetically at the mention of the word blueberries. My anxiety increased commensurate with the additional delay this represented.
I went about the work as quickly and efficiently as I could, but still failed to prevent my daughter from dragging one foot through the sodden mass in the diaper or from engaging in a Joycean stream of terms reflecting the preoccupations of a twenty-two month old brain: poo-poo papa pa-poo bu [blue] bu-papa bu-bay [berry] papa. She finished her thoughts on the topic by energetically twisting her body to try to get up and simultaneously wiping her poop-smeared hands on my shirt.
The shirt, I should add, was freshly returned from the dry-cleaner. At this point my wife walked in. As she surveyed the devastation around the changing table, she made what struck me as a feeble attempt to keep from smirking.
"She wiped poop on my shirt," I noted as I finished up and lowered my daughter to the floor, trying not to sound resentful. My wife was still holding her tea. I tried to sound brisk. "Ok, now I'm really off to work."
"Aren't you going to change your shirt?", my wife asked incredulously.
I looked down slowly at my torso, realizing this was a question I'd
been avoiding. My daughter, who had by this time collected several
books from her bookshelf, was now tugging at my leg and demanding that
I read to her. I wanted to leave.
"It is a brown shirt...." I paused, reluctant to glance up at my wife, whose smirk had escaped entirely and was now romping across her face. "Yes, I guess I should." Outside my car sat cold on the street. As I turned to walk back to the bedroom I could see the neighbor backing out of her driveway, her Subaru steaming in the February air.
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