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Although he is too young to produce meaningful speech, Leif is an accomplished babbler and sometimes makes sounds that are identifiable as words.  A few days ago he enuniciated a very clear, distinct, and exasperated “Oy!”  This morning, Jared was convinced he heard him say “Ham.”

In other news, be on the lookout for my upcoming pamphlet about how to eat when you’re a vegetarian (except for a bit of fish, but even that’s limited due to the DEADLY MERCURY!!!), compounded by being a picky eater, compounded by being generally unable to tolerate spices or other exotic flavors, compounded by having to avoid both dairy and soy (I repeat: both dairy and soy) due to nebulous infant tummy issues, compounded by not really knowing how to cook, compounded by requiring a tremendous amount of calories to produce enough breastmilk for a rapidly-growing organism and to sustain one’s extremely necessary running habit.  The pamphlet is called “I Hope You Like Muesli!”  and the illustration on the front is of me punching myself in the fucking face.

Due to a typical bit of bumble-fuckery in which my car’s registration was misplaced (in the passive voice, you see) and then replaced a month before it was due to be renewed, it never actually got renewed and was left to expire unnoticed.  I was pulled over today while heading to the Yuppie Mart for foods that are compatible with my new pediatric-gastroenterologist-ordered diet.  This was not my first time being pulled over for driving without a current registration; last time we escaped scot-free due to sheer chutzpah.  This time I was handed a citation, but happily the officer decided not to have my car towed on account of the baby in the backseat. And once again, the long arm of the law gropes and grasps for me but just barely fails to ensnare me.

There is no real point to this post.  I mostly just wanted to link back to my entry from four years ago because man, that was frigging awesome.

Various parenting books and websites say that establishing a bedtime routine is of mega-importance if you want your child to develop good sleep habits.  Between the two of us, we have really shitty sleep habits: I’m an insomniac with chronic pain and a fear of the dark, and Jared typically stays up until the wee hours coding or gaming.  So we’re definitely interested in instilling Leif with a healthy sleep ethic.  Here has been our routine for the past few nights:

1) Put baby on the bed and turn on the lamp

2) Darken the room by closing the blinds and curtains

3) Knock down one curtain rod

4) Participate in argument about how it’s possible to keep knocking down the curtain rod, and whether this is more an issue of being dumb and/or clumsy, or of the curtain rod being a cheap piece of shit

5) Put the curtain rod back up

6) Read a book.  So far Leif’s library is limited to “Goodnight Moon”.

7) Add running commentary or ad-lib additional details into the reading.  (Tonight, I came up with the unintentional rhyme “And a bearskin rug, and a pair of Uggs” *)

8) Turn off lamp

9) Swaddle baby

10) Nurse baby while Jared and I listen to podcasts on a shared pair of earbuds

11) When baby falls asleep, gingerly transfer him to pack-n-play with ultra-smooth ninja-pilates techniques

12) Chill for a while until he wakes up, then repeat steps 10 & 11

13) See step 12

14) See step 12

15) Go to bed/code/game

* Refer to your own copy of “Goodnight Moon” for verification; this is not a joke

Valid reasons to emphatically ring someone’s doorbell at two in the morning, on the very night that someone is desperately trying to get a good night’s sleep:

1) Zombie apocalypse

2) Robot apocalypse

3) House on fire

4) Someone in the building is dying and only I can save them

5) The Big Crunch is happening

6) Imminent terrorist attack

7) Combined zombie-robot apocalypse

Invalid reasons to emphatically ring someone’s doorbell at two in the morning, on the very night that someone is desperately trying to get a good night’s sleep:

1) You are a cop who just caught someone stealing something from my neighbor’s truck, you ran the plates to find his address, and then were too inept to ring the right fucking doorbell.

Last week Jared and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary, but I think today is at least as notable:  we have been together for seven years!  To commemorate this happy occasion, here are seven bullet points regarding our awesomeness.

1) On our flight home from Berlin last year, we hit some significant turbulence.  It should be noted here that I didn’t fly until I was well into my twenties, and I’ve never flown without Jared.  As we started to bounce around in our seats, he reached over, tightened my seatbelt, and took my hand.  The moment was a pretty good metaphor for our entire relationship.

2) A few nights ago we were discussing encounters we’ve had with famous people.  I paraphrased, “I was a roadie for Metallica…bunch of assholes,” and even though he didn’t immediately recognize the quote, he laughed hard enough that he spit out his lime-aid.  Again, our entire relationship in a nutshell.

3) When we realized that our seventh anniversary was approaching, we were riffing on the concept of the “seven year itch” and Jared made reference to the “seven year prolapse.”  And yet he still seems to think I’m pretty.

4)  Roughly one year ago, we skillfully combined our genetic material into a cell that then became the cutest possible person.  Who knew all that potential was just sitting there in our pants all these years?

5) Jared has supported and encouraged me through literally everything I’ve done during these past seven years.  I’m not going to go overboard and say that, without him, I wouldn’t still be a happy and decent person…but I would almost certainly be a different person.  I was barely out of my teens when we met and I’ve grown up with him by my side.  That’s pretty fucking wild.

6) We disagree on a number of topics, and sometimes during a heated conversation I’ll wonder how a human being living on the same Earth as me could hold such a dramatically bizarre and wrong viewpoint.  I’m sure he wonders the same thing about me.  But in the end we always understand where the other person is coming from and how he/she got there, at the very least.

7) Starting with the look on his face the first time he saw our son, Jared has shown me that ‘father’ and ‘family’ don’t have to be painful words.  I don’t know if I can give him anything quite as profound or precious, but I do know that if I can’t, he won’t hold it against me.

When Leif’s weight was announced shortly after he was born (8 lbs, 5 oz) my immediate thought was yeeeeeah what! I pretty much expected everyone in the room to raise the roof in my honor…and they pretty much did!  8-5 isn’t all that big, but for some reason everyone acts like it is, and for some other reason it makes me very proud to have gestated such a big, strapping son.  I’ve even found myself feeling vaguely competitive when discussing weights with parents of smaller babies.  My baby could fuck your baby up, and how!

Basically every single person who has stopped us in the street to admire Leif asks how old he is and then freaks out over his largeness.  Again, he’s really not that huge…but I like the reactions.  I like the (perhaps completely non-existent) implication that my milk is the richest, finest, most nutritious milk ever to flow from a human breast.   Why do I care about these things?  It’s weird is what it is.

Leif has been refusing naps and bedtime lately.  If I stand over his bed and sing or talk softly to him, he just smiles up at me and wakes up even more.  Just now, having run out of other options, I picked up the acoustic guitar that just so happens to live next to his bed.  It’s been so long since I played (and I use the term “played” loosely) that I couldn’t even remember the chord progression to Earth’s simplest song, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (and couldn’t figure it out by ear, since that’s how hard I suck), so I just strummed a random sequence of G-C-Am-Em-D.  Within a few minutes the little blue eyes were closing, and now 1) my baby is napping and 2) I finally have a no-excuses reason to start practicing the guitar again.

*Update:  Aaaaand after that nap he stayed awake for EIGHT HOURS.

A neighbor gave us a package of “Peepee Teepees”, which are small cones of fabric you can put over a little boy’s junk to prevent him from peeing all over the place during diaper changes.  Our pee situation is more or less under control, but today during a high-risk post-bath pre-diaper moment, I decided to try one out.  As it turns out, Peepee Teepees don’t prevent baby boys from peeing all over the place as much as they simply get propelled up and away by the stream of urine, absorbing a drop or two along the way until coming to a damp, undignified rest several inches away from a fresh, warm puddle of pee.

My earliest Halloween memory is of the year my mother cut two holes in a white sheet so I could be a ghost.  I donned the sheet but immediately took it off because I was afraid of myself.

Lately the sunlight has been beaming its way around the sides of the window blinds, making it hard for me to get back to sleep after Leif’s early morning feedings.  It occurred to me that I could fold up a bandanna and tie it around my face to block the light…but the mental image of myself lying in bed with my eyes covered all hostage-style just creeps the hell out of me.

If you can stomach my high-pitched nonsensical babbling, this video will allow you to hear one of Earth’s funniest sounds:  Leif’s goofy, gutteral chuckle.  Jared and I are happily learning about the many ridiculous things that people are willing to do to get their babies to laugh.