Joshua's Spot

Where, oh where, have Boo and Ben done gone??

For those who follow this here blog (both of you), this summer has been a long, undeserved dry spell - and for that I'm sorry.

I have a number of excuses that I'm willing to try out on you, in the long-standing tradition of pasta chefs everywhere (throw some at the wall until they stick, and then you're done):

1. Last week was my first experience being truly on my own with two boys. Momma went back to work, Grandma Kay and Pop-Pop fled back to Michigan, and, well, I could have asked Bubbe and Poppy Mike for help, but I was too damn proud. (We all survived. Gimli, however, is still complaining about neglect and threatening to call the ASPCA.)
2. Neither Felicia nor I have been getting enough sleep - Felicia because she's been getting up to feed the baby a couple times a night, and answering pages when she's on call, and I because, well, I've been... hearing her get up. (Okay, lame, I know, but still.)
3. We're about to switch from our 4-1/2-year-old Dell to one of the new iMacs, and I'm holding off on any new photo or video projects until I have the new computer. Honestly, it's just more files that I'll have to find a way to move over from a Windows machine that is within a single lock-up or failed reboot of taking a nose-dive off the edge of the hill. We're all better off if I wait, believe me.

Truly, the kids are fine. Baby Ben was up to 11 pounds 6 ounces as of a week ago Monday (the 27th) - he's gone from the 25th percentile in weight at birth to the 75th in just 5 weeks. (Powerful stuff, that Momma Milk.) He's developing a nice second chin, which he'll just have to work off on the jumpy chair in a few months, once we start the baby aerobics program that seems to have worked so well with Josh.

Momma, meanwhile, is having No Issues At All with the Milk Fairy this time around. In fact, she's out-producing the little human fire hose by anywhere between 12 to 18 ounces a day. (Remember how stressed out we were, this time with Josh, about every last 1/4 ounce that got wasted??) Not only does she have the entire lower compartment of our kitchen fridge's freezer filled to capacity, but she has stuffed a little mini-freezer in the garage that we bought especially for this purpose to the point where if she stopped pumping tomorrow, we could probably feed Ben until he's about, oh, four. (Years, that is, not months.)

The Milk Fairy taketh away, and then she giveth...

The Blog Fairy, however... well, you'll just have to wait until the iMac arriveth. And then, watch out.

Catching you up

If you've been wondering why I've been so quiet this time, it's because it's Deck Season. I.e., I've been out every spare moment with a pressure washer and a spray bottle of cleaning solution, trying to get the gigonzo deck we built ready to refinish, since what we put on last year hasn't held up well. If you want the full details, you can go here - in my typical overzealous, wordy fashion, I've been trying to document the process for posterity in my ample spare time (ha!) so there'll be just a bit more information out there about working with these exotic woods and finishes that we've become saddled with through our own folly. (Felicia's going to say, "Aha! So that's what he's been in there typing all this time!")

Don't worry - I'll get back to taking pictures of and writing about our Booish hero in no time. Speaking of which, there are a couple of new ones in Josh' album, and more will be coming as soon as I get them off the camera's memory card.

Meanwhile, belatedly, here's what we did a couple weekends ago...

We went up to Howard Prairie Lake up in the crest of the Cascades, for a little bit of camping and sailing. We stayed at the North Campground at the Resort, back in the woods a bit, with a quiet little spot shaded by trees. It was beautiful, and I did my best to spoil Felicia – and Josh, and Lisa (Felicia’s office manager and best friend, remember? she joined us for the camping) as well – in the manner to which they aspire. Filet mignon for dinner, along with grilled corn and mushrooms and salad, and plenty of wine for those who could/would drink it (including Josh, who thanks to his mom had wine and marshmallows for dinner, but don’t tell Child Protective Services!). On Saturday a bunch of friends drove up to meet us for the day, and we launched the boat for her inaugural voyage under new ownership. Our friend Patrick joined me for our first outing, and we had a blast, zipping up and down the lake near the marina and generally having a great time. Patrick isn’t an expert sailor, but he’s been on sailboats before – even took a class (for credit toward his degree, no less) in sailing at Michigan State back when, so once I reminded him about what everything’s called and what it does, he did a great job.

Then we beached the boat and had some lunch with Felicia and Josh and the rest of the gang, and I asked for additional volunteers to go out. Darryl (of “EpiDarryl” fame, the nurse anesthetist who gave Felicia her epidural when Josh was born) wanted to go, so we loaded up and away we went. Now, Darryl is a big guy – probably 6’5” and 260+. And he’s been on a sailboat exactly once, a 40-footer, as “ballast”, and knows basically, well, nothing. We went away from the beach with me teaching him what the various lines and sails and spars do, and got about 300 yards away when I noticed that my feet were wet. (??!) Turns out someone, still unidentified, had pulled (and absconded with) the drain plug out of the back of the boat, and there was water pumping in through the opening and flooding the cockpit. So we did a quick tack and went back to the beach to bail out the boat and figure out how to plug the drain hole. (The plug never did show up, and we never did figure out how it got pulled out in the first place.) I tried doing the Midwestern adapt-and-survive thing, commandeering a wine cork (too small) and then a hand lotion bottle (too big); meanwhile, Darryl walked down to the marina and (get this) bought a replacement. They actually HAD THEM IN STOCK.

I think they have a racket going. Steal drain plugs out of boats, sell the owners replacements as emergency equipment at $5 a pop, make a nice little profit as a sideline. I’m putting the Department of Homeland Security on the case, I’ll tell you.

So once we got the near-sinking incident out of the way, I asked Darryl if he wanted to try again, and he was game. So we went out for another try. We zipped across the lake and back again, and had a blast. So we decided to go for another round, and I gybed the boat to head around again. Well, long story short, Darryl failed to duck, the boom caught him in the forehead, and instead of switching sides he sat there stunned – providing 260+ pounds of ballast on exactly the WRONG side of the boat just when we needed it least. (Totally my fault, of course, since I was the one who was supposed to be in charge.) Over we went – the whole boat went over in slow motion, and just kept on going until the mast was pointing straight down and I was actually trapped in the air pocket underneath the boat.

At which point I discovered that in the 30 years since I’d last had to right a capsized sailboat, I’d forgotten most of what to do.

Luckily, a motorboat came by with a guy on board who used to race Lasers (fast little dinghy sailboats even tippier than ours), who basically proceeded to take charge and get us sorted out again. He righted the boat for us, pulled us both back aboard, and then jumped off like Tarzan to go back to his own boat. At which point somehow we managed to capsize AGAIN, in ways that are still mysterious to me.

At that point, our mystery rescuer just stayed aboard and Darryl rode back to the dock on the motorboat. So Tarzan and I sailed the boat back to the dock, and I saw how it’s actually supposed to be done.

By then, I was pretty well hypothermic, so that was the end of the sailing day. We got the boat back up on dry land, I ran back to the campsite for dry clothes, and all our friends scattered back to their homes. We (I) made dinner, then Felicia and I looked at each other, said “are you as exhausted as I am?” agreed we were, and packed up and fled back to Grants Pass and our own beds instead of staying another night. (We hadn’t slept much the night before, since Josh refused to stay in his Pack N Play and spent the whole night in/on his sleeping bag in between us, sleeping perpendicular to everyone else, basically in his mother’s face with his head and his daddy’s face with his feet.)

The following Monday we took the boat back out, to Applegate Lake this time, so I could get back on the water and recover some of my Darryl-damaged self-esteem. I had a good time, and did fine, neither sinking nor capsizing the boat, though it proved harder to handle alone than I expected, due to specifics in the rig that I’ll spare you. The wind gusts right down the middle of the lake, so it was a little hairy at times, and the wind was piping up as the day got longer, so I pulled back up to the dock around 1pm and had lunch with Felicia and Da Boo and Da Gim on shore, and then put the boat back on the trailer. Josh threw tons of rocks in the lake, Felicia took some video (which I'll post as soon as I can get to it, honest!), and Gimli, well, drooled.

So that's the last really fun thing we did. Otherwise you'll have to read the blog about the deck refinishing job to see what else I've been up to lately.

Hey, I'm trendy! (Who knew??)

Check this out - guys like me are downright famous!

My child knows me too well

So, we bought a boat yesterday.

For those of you who have been keeping up with us primarily via blog lately (not very well, alas, given how lackadaisical I've been about updating this thing - sorry!), this may come as a bit of a surprise. But if you've actually been inside our house anytime in the past year or so, you'll probably be saying something like "jeez, it's about time." I think I've probably been driving everyone around me mildly crazy with my boat obsession for quite a while now, and I strongly suspect that Felicia suggested we just go ahead and get one - a little one, mind you - mostly out of self-defense, as an attempt to give my sailing obsession something concrete to fasten onto before it morphs into something more out of control and a lot more expensive. So she suggested we look for a little daysailer that we can take along to the local mountain lakes when we go camping, so I'll have something to putter around on and she and Josh and Flippy will have something to learn on.

I spent a good three or four weeks researching my brains out and looking through every classified ad within a 500 mile radius, looking for just the right boat, with all my usual impossible criteria. Yesterda y, I took a trip up to Eugene while Felicia spent a rare day alone with Da Boo and looked at half a dozen used boats, none larger than 17 feet. Most of them were pretty old and battered - some even older and more battered than I am, which is saying something these days - but I found a couple that would be suitable, and settled on one of them, a beautiful, new-series, 7-year-old Lido 14, which I just had to bring home with me, like the little puppy in the window. ("It just followed me home, honey - can we keep it?")

It was too late by the time I got back to Grants Pass last night to show the boat to Josh, so I spent his naptime today setting up the mast and getting the maze of rigging out of the cockpit, and then took him out to see it after he woke up. I put him in the cockpit, and explained that this was for teaching him to sa il, and that we'd take it along when we went camping so we could go sailing on lakes together.

He really got into the boat, and liked running his Matchbox cars around the seats and everything. But about the point where I started explaining what the different ropes and lines were for, he looked up at me and said (and this is an exact quote): 

"Daddy, you're crazy."

Clearly, someone has been teaching this child some things that I'm not aware of...

The Big Momma of All Catch-Up Posts

The star of this here blog is becoming quite a character.

To pick just two examples among many:

1) This morning, he decided that one of his many little plastic animals - it happened to be a bear - was "naken" (naked) and needed "clean diaper". So off he galloped, arms and legs flying in his pieces-parts-everywhere style of running, bear in hand, to remedy the situation. I followed him just to see what he was going to do about the "naken" situation, and sure enough, he'd pulled a diaper out of the bin and was standing there waiting for me to do what daddys do - namely, change the diaper, already, daddy. So I did my fatherly best to fit a size 4 diaper on a bear no bigger than Josh's foot. Then Josh decided that bear needed to go "night night sleep tight bedbugs bite", which means of course that he had to read the bear a book in the rocking chair first. So he had me get a book out of the crib, and he proceeded to "read" to the bear (meaning he would tell the bear about the pictures he saw on the page). It's too bad this didn't last long enough for me to get the video camera - it would have been precious.

2) We've been trying to get Da Boo used to the idea that he's about to become a big brother, that Mommy's going to have a baby soon - not sure that it's really penetrated his little dinosaur brain yet, but we're trying. In one of these attempts to send warning shots across his bow, we asked him what he thought his little brother's name should be. He thought about it in all seriousness for a moment, and then smiled and said, "Flippy!" (Someday his little brother is going to be veeerrry unhappy with him for saddling him with that one.)

Grandma and PopPop arrived a week ago, to both Joshua's and Gimli's great delight. Gimli has pretty much abandoned our bed in favor of Grandma's for the duration, so we've lost our dog. Joshua, meanwhile, didn't want anything to do with his parents for a few days - he spent the first 48 hours showing Grandma and PopPop every last toy, book, and stuffed animal, not to mention all of his tricks (jumping, dancing, running, throwing - it was like the ToddlerLympics around here for a few days). He'll eat anything Grandma gives him, which doesn't sit too well with his Daddy given how much trouble *I* have getting him to eat pretty much anything, and he loves following PopPop around to see what he's going to do next.

This weekend, for instance, PopPop found a frog (inside the house, thankyouverymuch; this was one very lost amphibian) and rescued it by giving it a new home in our water feature. Ever since then, the frog has been happily croaking away all night long every night, to Josh's great delight (and our mild annoyance). PopPop, of course, had to turn this into a "learning moment," so he grabbed a flashlight and took Josh out to look for the frog. So every now and then, when Josh hears the frog croaking, he'll say "frog croaking" and go grab the flashlight (which is longer than his leg) and go point it vaguely out the window and announce that he's "looking frog". (Given that the frog is about the size of a nickel, and that Josh's aim with the flashlight always seems to wind up with the thing pointing toward, oh, Venus, it may take him a few weeks or months or years to find it. But that's not the point anyway, now is it?)

He's made so much progress in his vocabulary and his ability to form sentences and otherwise express himself that he's really becoming a little boy - he's not our little baby anymore. Felicia plans to remedy this "baby growing up too fast" problem by just pumping out a continual stream of little ones, so we always have a supply of pitter-pattering little feet around the house. I, personally, think video would be a lot cheaper, but hey, I just work here.

So, in other news, since we last visited together, Felicia and Josh and I gallavanted off to southern Florida for about ten days, so I could take a sailing course and Felicia could spend a week with her baby visiting half the population of Greater Miami and Ft. Lauderdale (aka, friends and family; she grew up there). I got drenched and vaguely seasick in highly atypical southern Florida weather - 50 degrees,
rainy, and with choppy seas - but had a great time even so, with two other students and an instructor on a 41-foot sailing catamaran all over the upper Keys and Biscayne Bay. I took six tests in six days, three of them four hours long apiece, and managed to get certified to skipper boats up to 50 feet anywhere in the world, day or night, in any weather, anywhere but in offshore waters. Felicia, meanwhile, was staying with a great friend from childhood who has a 4-year-old and 2-year-old twins, one of whom was in a body cast from the waist down after breaking his leg in his crib. Needless to say, she didn't have a relaxing time, but she enjoyed the visit even so, got to spend more time alone with Josh than she has since she went back to work from maternity leave, took him to the zoo and the Seaquarium and the Discovery Museum and several parks, and got to see a lot of old family friends. It was a good trip, but we were glad to be home.

This past weekend, while Grandma and PopPop watched Da Boo, Felicia took me down to Napa (Yountville) for a series of surprises for my 39th birthday. The first surprise came shortly after we checked into our B&B, when I answered a knock on our door and found Steve and Liz standing there. It was kind of like running into your grandmother in a strip club - they were so far out of context that it took me a shamefully long time to process the fact that it was really them, and they were really there. We spent Sunday doing, well, what one does in Napa, namely tasting wine (that is, Steve and I tasted wine, while Liz and Felicia just sipped and went along for the ride). But the big surprise came Sunday night, when Felicia took me to the French Laundry for dinner. Now, there are two things you need to know to put this in its proper context: 1) the French Laundry is widely considered to be one of the top, oh, five or so restaurants in the United States, and 2) going there was one of the handful of things that I really wanted to do before I die. All I can say about the evening is that it was simple perfection. We had a nine-course meal (not counting the little amuse-bouches that they'd bring by every now and then), assisted by an army of friendly, unobtrusive people, in a very intimate, small-scale, country-style setting - and the food was absolutely astonishing. Every course was an adventure in tastes that perfectly complimented one another, and each built on the last in a way that was not at all predictable but that blended it all together to make everything just mind-blowing. At some point, maybe I'll put our menu up on the blog, if anyone's interested. In the meantime, take my word for it: it was well worth it, even if it cost a small fortune.

So now here we are, back to reality - Felicia's back to work and is starting yet another long weekend on call, I'm back chasing the Boo around all day, and PopPop went back to Michigan to deal with work. Grandma's still here, though, which Josh just loves - even if he gets kind of whiney and antsy every time I leave the room, thinking I'm going to disappear to run errands or whatever and abandon him with Grandma. And he gets all excited when PopPop calls on the phone - he walks around half the day with his plastic pickles, or jalapenos, or peach slices, talking to PopPop on the "food phone."

I have to say, for all the wonderful surprises Felicia arranged for this best of all birthdays, my favorite part of the whole weekend was when Josh got on the phone from home and said "Happy Birthday, Daddy" in his piping little-boy voice, and then said "wuv wu Daddy". It melted my heart.

Ah, the good ol' days...

I've been reading back through the really, really old archives of this here blog, just for kicks and giggles, while Felicia and Josh are turning the bathroom into a minor lake (aka "doing bathtime" [sic]).

All I can say is, I had noooo idea. I particularly get a kick out of this one: http://joshuaspot.typepad.com/home/2005/04/nesting_nesting.html

I was right about the baby socks, though. (Small victories have to count for something, in these days of low IQ points...)

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of YoBaby

So, the important news first:

We survived the sailing trip.

More importantly, Da Boo didn't fall out of the boat. Nor did the Boo Elephant, which was my next-worst nightmare - imagine if Joshua had thrown his little elephant baby overboard, and then had to stand there crying and wailing watching it float away forever... NOT good, right? Well, that didn't happen either.

Nor did the grandma fall out of the boat, which isn't as far-fetched a potential disaster as you might think. And she didn't have a massive anaphalactic reaction to some random shellfish exposure and have to be helicoptered out of some remote island to make an emergency dash to the nearest hospital - also an all-too-likely bullet that we somehow dodged.

Nor did the baby get horribly seasick, or refuse to sleep on the boat the whole time we were on it (though THAT one was a close thing, for a while there), or get so terrified at the motion of the boat that we had to put in to the nearest port shortly after leaving the dock and call the whole thing off.

No one killed anyone else, and we didn't have to resort to cannibalism due to lack of food OR a simple desire to get rid of anyone in particular out of sheer annoyance.

(You can see I had a lot more anxiety about this trip than I was ever letting on... AND you can start to get an idea of how vivid my imagination can be, when it comes to dreaming up things to worry about. Aren't you glad you aren't me?)

Actually, we all had a really good time, within the limits of what can reasonably be expected of a group of people (me, Felicia, Da Boo, my parents, and my sister) with such a wide range of experience with and conceptions about and comfort levels with the whole sailing idea. Felicia would have liked it better if it had been about 30 degrees warmer so she could have broken out the bikini and gotten a nice tan; I would have liked it better if we could have done more sailing; Da Boo would have liked it better if there were more rocks to throw, and stuff. And we all would have been happier if the boat were about twice the size - not that we could have sailed it (or afforded it) if it were - so we had more elbow room and more options for sleeping arrangements, including a better, dedicated, QUIET space for His Poopiness to sleep in (as it was, he wound up in bed with his momma, which was fine for him but not so great for his momma... or me, since I wound up in a bunk bed by myself, alas and alack).

Still... the weather was gorgeous, most of the time. The places we visited (Friday Harbor, Roche Harbor, and Rosario) around the San Juans were quaint, beautiful, quiet, and full of little shops to visit and little paths to walk around on. I did my best to make sure the food was decent (you'll no doubt recall that Cohens, if not Smiths, are entirely food-motivated - and that it was no less a personage than Napoleon who noted that "an army marches on its stomach"), and since we didn't have a mutiny, I guess that part worked out okay. Mom got lots of great photos (though the shots of the one lighthouse she really, really wanted to get pictures of didn't turn out so well, due to the captain trying to head off a quickly escalating crisis with a cranky, tired baby by turning the boat around just a little too soon; sorry Mom!). Christine got away from Toledo for a while and was appropriately chaperoned on the anniversary of 9/11, which was probably a good thing, all things considered - AND she got to teach her nephew a bunch of new things, like "wow," and "uh-oh" (which is now his very most favorite thing to say ALL THE TIME, thanks, Christine), and "me me me" (which, luckily, didn't catch on), AND she got a new nickname ("TeeTee", which is apparently as close as he can come to either "Auntie" or "Christine," we're not sure which).

And I... *I* just wanted to make sure Felicia had a good enough time that she'd be willing to go again, as the first and most important step toward my ultimate nepharious plan of taking her off on a sailing trip around the world someday. (No, really.) Since she's talking about how we'll do things differently the next time - which implies that there will BE a next time - I guess that means I succeeded. (Score.)

There were two important crises we had to deal with, one anticipated, one not. The first, anticipated one was coming up with a safe, comfortable, reasonably sleeping arrangement for Joshua. Our first effort didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped. We tried to rig up an enclosed bunk for him in our cabin, on the lower of the two bunk beds next to our double berth, with a lee cloth (basically a nautical version of a toddler's bed rail, meant to keep adults from rolling out of the bunk while the boat is heeling under sail) to keep him in there at night in spite of his all-too-active sleeping habits. This, folks, did NOT work. The first time he sat up, he bonked his head on the upper bunk, and then woke up to find himself in a dark hole, where he could hear but not find his momma, and without room to move around or any idea where he was. You can imagine how quickly he wound up in our bed, hysterical and scared out of his wits - and from that point on he never left it, all week, including the two nights we stayed at a friend's house in Seattle after we left the boat. Neither Felicia nor I (nor Da Boo, for that matter) slept very well all week - but at least we slept, which is better than it could have turned out, given how finicky and stubborn this kid is about his sleep habits.

The other potential crisis that we *hadn't* foreseen was a wrinkle in the "how to keep the baby in the boat" worries I'd had. The boat we wound up chartering, a two-year-old, 43-foot French-built deck salon sloop, had a pass-through area leading from the cockpit onto the swim platform on the transom, which wasn't particularly well closed off even as designed. On this particular boat, the movable seat that was supposed to close this walk-through under way was broken, so not only could His Danger-Prone-Ness potentially crawl under it (and thus go right off the boat), he could just push on it and make it fall out completely, and thus go right off the boat. Needless to say, this played all too well into my Overblown Parental Anxiety Attacks, and I got on top of the problem with the charter company about, oh, 33 seconds after we first saw the boat. The solution we collectively came up with proved to be a real gem, and turned a potential problem into a huge asset. With a piece of plywood screwed over the opening, that little pass-through became a perfect Boo Spot, where he had support on three sides even while the boat was moving around, so he could stand there securely (right next to his daddy at the wheel) and look around and be part of the action... and throw rocks into the wake of the boat as we sailed or motored along.

Perrrrr-fect.

So, we all survived our first family sailing trip, more or less intact.

On the way home, while the grandparents and the auntie went off to Portland to get Christine to the airport (with a little exploration of the city along the way), Felicia and Joshua and I went to visit Felicia's college friends Larry and Dawn and their two oh-so-rambunctious boys, who are 6 and 3 (give or take), in Kirkland WA, just outside Seattle. Joshua learned a LOT about how to roughhouse with any potential siblings he might have, and we learned that in the proper context, he isn't NEARLY as peripatetic a Tasmanian Devil as he could potentially be. These kids ran on fusion reactors, I kid you not. It was weird to see Joshua in a situation where he's the youngest, quietest, least vocal, least advanced child in the group, given that to us on a day-to-day basis he's such a miracle and is learning so many things so fast. We got a pretty good reality check about just how much we have ahead of us, from potty training to the whole "why" thing to the endless series of mind-bending questions that he's eventually going to start asking about, oh, everything.

Larry took us and the whole gaggle of kids to the Puyallup State Fair, south of Seattle, that Friday - not so much for the kids' sake, really, but because Larry is kinda scarily addicted to state fairs and has hardly ever missed one since he was knee-high to a grasshopper himself. Which is kinda odd in a podiatrist, really, but it's not like I'm exactly normal myself, here, so oh well. The kids had a blast, including Joshua, who was REALLY into the whole petting zoo idea - though in his case, predictably, it was more of a kissing  zoo. Joshua, unlike Larry's two little demons, was too little for just about all the rides, and too tired for the merry-go-round... but he did find this neat drum stand thing, that someone had created out of old steel drums and bottles and jerry cans and cow bells and things, and left out with a jarful of home-made drumsticks for the kids to play on. Joshua spent a loooonnng time around that thing, both banging on everything he could find and watching the other, bigger kids to pick up pointers. (He's gotten really into watching, and absorbs everything - which means we'd better clean up our act and watch what we say around him, like, PRONTO.)

Larry, among other notable accomplishments, is a semi-professional photographer who is one of the official volunteer photographers for the Seattle Seahawks, with a collection of  high-tech gadgetry that makes my poor little Nikon D70 look like a toy - AND, more unusually, Larry has the skill to take advantage of all the capability those gadgets offer him. He took some gorgeous shots of Joshua at the Fair, including those you see here.

There are tons of other photos in the gallery, which you are more than welcome to peruse at your leisure, all three of you out there. PLUS, as a special bonus for being patient, I've finally updated the pics of the Big Dig, so you can see how our ridiculously drawn-out remodel is coming along, now that the landscaping is allllmoooosst finished, even though it sometimes seems to be moving along about as slowly as grass grows.

Enjoy.

A few tough days - with intermissions

Okay, so:  Felicia's been on call like, forever.

(Yeah, I'm exaggerating. But it FEELS accurate.)

In reality, Felicia was on call all of the last weekend of August, and Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday this past weekend (she asked a partner to fill in for her on Friday so she could break up the stretch a little bit). Plus she has meetings, more call, and various other busy-ness most if not all of the evenings this week, so the lead-in to our first major sailing vacation together (with my parents and Christine, up in the San Juans northwest of Seattle) looks like it's going to be typically trying. By the time we actually get on the boat, we will be SO ready for a tropical vacation that we will not be having. Hopefully sailing in the Pacific Northwest will be an adequate substitute.

To add to the general excitement, Joshua has had a couple of difficult days - the leading theory (between me and Jan, our housekeeper/borrowed-grandmother) is that he's cutting a set of molars. Plus he had a haircut yesterday, which is always a trial... you'd think we were cutting off something that wouldn't grow back, to judge by the hollering and dodging. And to make things as fun as possible all around, your faithful author spent all last night having horrible Parent Dreams - you know, the ones where your precious child gets abducted and turned into a sex slave for some crazed fake-gentle psychopath named "Bull" and comes back to you a year later all twisted and broken, and grows up to be Vice President and work for Halliburton. NOT the sort of thing to start my day on a good note.

Felicia, meanwhile, is ready to try human sacrifice as a way to encourage fertitilty in her quest for a second child. (After all, it's an ancient and once well-respected pseudo-medical practice...) If I were Christine, I'd be a little worried about getting on a boat with her, out of sight of land. Hmm.

Life with a Soundtrack

One of the after-effects of hanging out with The Crazies in NH didn't appear until this past weekend, when we made a run to Costco and impulsively bought an iPod, and thus finally, very belatedly joined the digital music revolution. A week of watching the ease with which Kelly played DJ out of a pretty extensive music collection, without having to shlep along a stack of CDs or try to figure out what happened to the disc that's supposed to be in a particular case but isn't or deal with scratches or fingerprints or whatever, was pretty impres sive. And I realized how much I missed music - I haven't really been listening to anything much for years, and it's hard to remember the last time I bought a CD. (My radio, in typical Dave-nerdly fashion, is tuned pretty much permanently to NPR News.)

The final straw was watching how all the kids were just entranced by the "iDog" that Kelly had - this little robotic creature (actually a speaker, hidden in the back of a little plastic dog with movable head and legs and ears) that dances with its head and lights up with little colored patterns in time to music. Pretty useless, but very cool, and Da Boo liked it.

So we broke down and got ourselves an iPod this past weekend, and of course I had to go out and get an iDog to go with it (which, predictably, we call the "iPuppy"). So all this week we've had a house full of music, as I've burned in what remains of my old CD collection - those that I haven't long since sold off, or lost, with nothing but an empty case left - and rediscovered a lot of stuff that I'd totally forgotten about. It's like rediscovering the whole concept of music, and at my advanced age that's kind of miraculous.

Now, if only I had some clue what's been coming out in the past, oh, 15 years, since the last time I paid attention to new albums, the big band was Men at Work. (I'm exaggerating, a little. But only a little.)

Da Boo's really grooving on all this. We've been doing a lot of dancing, and he especially likes bouncing around with the iPuppy (as you can see for yourself). Of course, "dancing" in toddler terms has to be interpreted somewhat loosely, since it basically looks like a cross between an epileptic fit and a bathroom emergency, but you have to give him credit for trying. After all, a lot of us white boys still dance the same way, thirty or forty years later.

Meanwhile, we're still doing our damndest to get going on another little Boo - and no, no luck so far. We've been trying, and hoping, and wishing for another baby since Felicia quit breastfeeding in April (as you may recall, it was the desire for another child that finally pushed her into giving up on the breastfeeding to begin with). As time goes on, with no sign of imminent pregnancy, and with an increasing number of patients and friends who delivered around the same time we did with Joshua getting pregnant again while we emphatically do NOT, the tension level slowly ratchets up in the house. Felicia herself was convinced within a few weeks of weaning Da Boo that this just wasn't happening quickly enough and it was time for Desperate Measures; I've been slower to lose faith, but even I am starting to worry a bit, if for no other reason than because I don't like to see Felicia in a constant state of slow-burning frustration and minor-league despair. She keeps asking me things like how I would feel if Joshua was the only baby we ever have, or what I think about adopting, or whether or not I think she should try to force ovulation (keep in mind that as an OB, she has a scary number of tools at her disposal if she should REALLY get impatient).

When it comes down to it, I think things tend to have a way of working out for the best, and we have 27-some-odd pounds of very busy, pitter-pattering-around proof that we are capable of doing this eventually. But we're also conscious of the fact that "advanced maternal age" is approaching very quickly - and if we want to stuff the house with rambunctious little diaper-clad monsters, we've got to get a move on.

So wish us luck. Maybe a little fertility music would help...

Gone and Back Again...

...and I'll bet you didn't even notice. (After all, silence sounds pretty much the same on a blog, whether it's coming from Oregon or New Hampshire...)

Yes, while you've been (not so) patiently waiting for me to get off my sorry ass and let you know what's been going on, we've been off to deepest darkest New England on a little cross-country jaunt to hang out with some friends whom we haven't seen since our wedding. Jean and Beth (and one-year-old Melissa) and Meredith and Kelly (and 2-1/2-year-old Grace) and Roger (who is more than sufficient unto himself, thankyouverymuch) have stubbornly persisted in inviting me and my growing numbers of hangers-on to join them for their annual gathering every year, in spite of the fact that the last time I made it out there Bill Clinton was still president, the economy was still growing like gangbusters, and France was still everyone's favorite foreign country. This year, we finally decided we'd wrench a week away from job, house, and extended family obligations, and catch up with my few remaining old friends before they all forget what I look like. So we shlepped off to Grantham, New Hampshire (not far from Hanover, where one would find Dartmouth, if one had any interest in looking for it), where Jean's wonderful dad and step-mom have a condo in a beautiful area surrounding a lovely little forest-clad lake.

The short story is that we had a great time, Joshua loved the water (mostly), we didn't get him to take very many naps (surprise!!) so we didn't get to see much of New England, but we had a great time even so. The kids seemed to enjoy each others' company, especially Josh and Melissa, who are close enough in age, size, and capability that they were following each other around all week, teaching each other all kinds of things that we really didn't want them to learn. (Grace was enough older that she mostly just observed the silly antics of the little tykes from a safe distance, with lots of running commentary and questioning peppered at her parents, along the lines of, "Daddy, why is that baby hitting himself on the head with a stuffed bear?")

The major focus of the week, predictably, was The Beach - namely, a little private strip of sand alongside the lake, with a nice shallows at the edge of the water so the kids didn't get in over their heads too quickly, and a floating platform for the older kids... and even Jean's Dad's little sailboat for us wannabe Captains Nemo to take out whenever there was enough wind to ruffle the lake a bit. My favorite memory of the week was watching His Poopiness trying to return the entire beach to the lake, one fistful of sand at a time - pick up, throw, pick up, throw, all week long. It was also precious to watch him around the water - he'd wade in until he got up to about mid-calf, then stop and shuffle his feet a little bit (wary, I think, after his first attempt to wade in, when he wound up falling on his face in the water and spluttering and crying, until I picked him up and had him try again), then turn around and walk back up onto the beach until he hit the dry sand, when he'd shuffle his feet again and say "hah" (Boo-ish for "hot") and turn around and walk back to the water. He'd repeat this circuit for an hour at a time if you let him.

Da Boo also spent a lot of time collecting rocks, checking out bark, playing with shovels in the sand, kissing Melissa and Grace and the neighborhood dogs and anyone else who didn't get out of his way fast enough, and running around the condo we rented getting into everything. In other words, he was pretty much his normal self, up to and including not napping during the day. (At night, we had him sleeping in our bathroom with the doors closed, which was embarrassing - but hey, ya do whatcha gotta do.)

I'll be working on processing and posting the pictures and video shortly. I'm still trying to recover from the coxsackievirus that Melissa gave me, via Joshua, which knocked me flat on my butt earlier this week. (It's not Melissa's fault - Jean practically barricaded the door when we first arrived and warned us that Melissa was just getting over it and that it's incredibly contagious, but we recognized a lost battle when we saw one and chose not to worry about it. Joshua was miserable with it for about 36 hours in the middle of our visit, but I didn't start feeling it until we were in the middle of our first, long plane ride back. It's not fun - kids, don't try this at home.) In the meantime, suffice it to say that we had a great time, we really enjoyed everyone, we're home safe, and it's great to be back in our own house - which is pretty much the story after every trip away. (Which makes one wonder why we leave in the first place... oh, yeah, to see people. Okay, then, that's a good reason...)

Stay tuned for pics 'n' movies, and perhaps more travel stories. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel.