Housebound Housewifery

In which your humble narrator comments on the banality of his day.

It snowed about 8 inches. It's only 10 degrees and very windy. I'm stuck in the house all day with the children.

Wife-a-roo sent me a link to a Salon blog by Aaron Traister which pretty much sums up my existence these days. A particularly salient paragraph:

"My view of parenting and its effect on the adult mind is particularly sour right now since my daughter has just entered into the most difficult stage of development. She is 10 months old, and while most people would point to the fabled “terrible twos” as the most challenging and exhausting time with their young ones, the interval between 8 and 15 months is almost indescribably difficult for me, especially because it is making me not good at words plus how to use them."

Child #2 is 7+ months old now and at the incredibly obnoxious stage where she is increasingly mobile, but only in uni-directional pathways. For example: she can maneuver from a seated position to lying either on her back or her stomach, but is unable or unwilling to move from either of those positions to any other, more satisfactory position. This necessitates righting her or rearranging her approximately every 2.5 minutes* since she doesn't like lying down: the position, but only lying down: the act. Thank God for overalls.

Last night I was in the kitchen with the children. Child #2 was sitting in her high chair screaming unhappily and refusing all toys or diversions while Child #1 was merrily running head first into the kitchen cabinets and trying valiantly to drop cast-iron cookware on his feet.**  Wife-a-roo was late because of the snowstorm and I was trying to cook dinner (modest pasta dish). It occurred to me: "If I'm going to live the life of a 1950's housewife, I'm pretty sure I deserve some of the pills."

* I have righted Child #2 eight times during the writing of this post.
** He still has a cold. Colds make him insane and self-injurious.

The White Menace is Coming! Surely We Shall Perish Anon!

In which your humble narrator procures medication for his daughter gets his media criticism on and discusses the cultural differences between the frigid tundra of Minnesota where he lives and the smoggy, semi-southern hills of Cincinnati from whence he came. 

Child #2 has an ear infection. We were supposed to get round 2 flu shots for both children yesterday but the on-again-off-again fever of Child #2 spiked once more yesterday morning so we took her in to see the doctor. The regular baby-doctor is off on Mondays so we saw a tall, laconic family practice doctor of Scandinavian descent, named "Olav Olson" or "Hjalmar Carlson" or "Lindstrom P. Nordic" or "Sven McSwedish" or something. He seemed delighted that we spoke in low, measured tones and communicated primarily by subtle eye-brow movements. Prescription for antibiotics in hand, we repaired, as a family, to the fancy-people's grocery to get some drugs at the pharmacy and donuts at the bakery.

Child #2 seems in better spirits already, just in time for the much ballyhooed snowstorm of the season which is supposed to begin later today. After attending to my personal grooming this morning, I flipped on the teevee to watch the weather while I got dressed. The local news boys and girls were nearly wetting themselves with anticipation of the (potential) 5-7 inches of white snow which will (maybe) fall on the metropolitan area (or somewhere else) over the next 36 hours. The sparkle of weather-related insanity gleaming in their glassy teevee eyes, they prattled on and on about the coming snowstorm as if it was the long-awaited messiah of frozen precipitation set to come to earth.

I don't remember this kind of frenetic weather mania from my childhood in Cincinnati. We had a couple of good snows, the occasional tornado and a lot of thunderstorms, but not the single-minded obsession with the weather that occupies a large portion of the real estate in the heart of any true Minnesotan. For example, the pre-first-snow paroxysm is not unique. There is also the annual "first thunderstorm rumpus," and the "first 80 degree day madness." The local newsies are an excitable bunch.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. I like winter. I don't even mind the shoveling since it's an activity that, even Wife-a-roo will admit, cannot be pursued with small, stroppy children in tow. The only things I don't like are scraping snow off the roof, and the media frenzy that precedes each potential life-threatening snow fall. For God's sake, people. It's Minnesota. It's not like winter should come as a surprise.

Hoop jumping

In which your humble narrator describes slogging through the writing of an academic paper with no parameters.

In my continuing quest to complete my Ph.D. in Educational Psychology so that I can become unemployed, I am currently involved in the revision of my oral preliminary exam paper. My department gives both written and oral preliminary exams  for doctoral students. I passed the written preliminary test when child #1 was 6 months old on the Saturday before we moved to our new house. It was a giant waste of time.

For the oral prelim, I have to write a 20-50 page review paper of some literature without providing any plan for my dissertation (that's part of the next hoop, dummy). It's ostensibly supposed to show my "evaluative skills" and prove to my committee that I can write a literature review, though I think it's actually just to provide some framework for what they might want to ask me about during this upcoming 2-hour fun-fest.

My adviser's instructions for writing this paper (as the department provides virtually no direction other than what I mentioned above) were to (wait for it) "write about something I know a lot about."

I wrote most of the paper this summer while I was teaching and was allowed to leave the house more than once a week. Now I'm reduced to working on it during the 24 minutes between when the children are finally settled in their beds and when my brain turns off and NASCAR starts seeming interesting. 

Perhaps it would have been better to finish this degree before transmitting my genetic material to another generation of crabby, demanding little persons.

Peter Fonda Freaks me Out

In which your humble narrator describes his anxiety regarding acting family scion, Peter Fonda.

Peter Fonda freaks me out. So I usually avoid him. Except I can't for two reasons. First, he's on this creepy baby-boomer infomercial all the time hawking a TimeLife collection of hippie music that's on in the middle of the night. What with having a baby and being prone to occasional insomnia and not having cable, I run into "Flower Power" after the midnight hour.*

Notice that his arms appear to be paralyzed. His torso is strangely motionless. Also I suspect he's heavily medicated.

Second, Child #1 has this creepy Thomas the Tank Engine movie called "Thomas and the Magic Railroad," which is a weird mash-up of regular old British-style Thomas stories with the PBS series "Shining Time Station," (where Thomas first appeared in the states) with a bizarre subplot about a magic railroad and some magic gold dust thrown in to make it more confusing. The movie features: Alec Baldwin, Didi Conn, Russell Means, and the (again) apparently heavily medicated Peter Fonda. Actually, the whole cast may have been medicated. If I tried to explain the plot, gentle reader, you might think I was heavily medicated.

Fortunately, this movie isn't usually in heavy rotation on Child #1's playlist, but someone seems to have gotten it out a couple of days ago.

For additional evidence of Peter Fonda's creepiness, please see:

• brother of Jane Fonda
• Easy Rider
• Voicing the aging hippie character in a Grand Theft Auto game
• Escape from L.A. (with the comparably creepy Kurt Russell)

*This makes me glower and feel dour for at least an hour.

Things I saw on the way to teach my class today

In which your humble narrator lists the assorted oddments that he surveyed on his way to teach the little children about educational psychology.

1. A man running down the street wearing and parka (no surprise... it's 26 degrees here in The Cities today) and no discernible pants (Very surprising. Minnesotans eschew nudity even during the summer) and very, very white legs.

2. A golden eagle hunting along the Mississippi River bank.

3. A tiny, wizened, old man with a long, flowing bead very slowly riding a tiny bicycle along the river while wearing a top hat.

Oh Woeful Woe!

In which your humble narrator discovers that his progeny are little more than tiny incubators for disease germs and laments the brain fever of Child #1.

I don't get sick very often, or rather, I should say that I used to not get sick often. Since the birth of Child #1 I've had four or five colds, two sinus infections and varicella-zoster (chicken pox for big boys!). And the children are sick again. It's only been six weeks since they were sick the last time. At least this time, snot doesn't seem to be a major component. And I'm sick again. And it's not too bad, but it's lingering. Everyone's been out of sorts since the day after Thanksgiving.

I should mention that Child #1 goes completely crazy when he's running a fever. It overheats his brain and rather than laying around feeling lousy, he careens around the house caroming off of and colliding with furniture, the cats, the floor, Child #2, toys, his parents, and anything else easily accessible. I feel lousy and all I want to do is lay on the couch and watch television. He feels lousy and wants to jump off the couch and hang from the light fixtures. The baby feels lousy, but she just mostly wants me to keep reinserting her pacifier every five minutes so she knows I'm still paying attention to her.

I'm pretty sure that from an evolutionary perspective it's much better to be cute and pitiful when you're sick than manic and insane. Yesterday with a fever of almost 100 degrees, Child #1 actually ran laps around the coffee table for about 10 minutes. 

We're spending the morning upstairs since it's the room with the least hazards and the most padding (big bed, carpeting). I believe we may have gone for two hours without any new bruises.

"Off to the Races" or "Eat my dust, you old biddy!"

In which your humble narrator realizes that he's in a competition with a mean old lady, proceeds to calmly to glorious victory and offers her a heaping helping of loser pie.

I took the children to Target yesterday morning to buy all the things that I forgot to buy at Target on Sunday. On Sunday, we had been at the Midway Target (Targhetto) which is nice enough and close to our home. But Targhetto is always out of things and also it's full of a bizarre mix of annoying, urban, boutique liberals and poor people*. This makes it our natural habitat since we're poor, urban crabby-liberals who wish we had the cash to shop at boutiques.

But on Monday we went, instead, to the suburban paradise Target where everyone is glassy-eyed and dead inside and all the little girls are named "Ava." We collected our stuff and walked to the check-outs. We were proceeding along the mostly closed registers back toward the end of the store where we had parked when a mean old lady with flaring nostrils came up on the inside track to ace us out from the first open register. She scooted in ahead just as I was starting to turn the cart and stood stone-faced as if we did not exist.

But then, sweet vindication! The other old lady in front of the mean old bat had 147 coupons and was clearly paranoid that the 18-year-old cashier had malevolent designs on her social security money. We scooted down to the next lane and proceeded through check-out as the mean old bat started fuming, abandoned her lane and trotted down to the express lane, nostrils flaring violently all the merry way. We concluded our transaction just as she finally made it to a register. We just had enough time to cut her off at the front door and made it out into the parking lot before her. But did I pretend that she was not there?

No, gentle reader, I smirked at her.

*It's probably the only place they see each other.