Category: …And Little E Makes 3

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Jam-packed pre-Christmas update

The Daddy & Evan ShowSorry I’ve been neglecting you, blawg (and any readers still left out there). I’m still getting used to the whole rhythm of having a steady job. You’d think (and I would’ve thought) I would’ve gotten used to it by now, but it still hasn’t happened for whatever reason. Evan has lots of overnight outbursts, and sometimes I think they’re all about making up for lost daddy-and-Evan time. He just wants me to hold him until he falls back asleep. Daddy can do that… but it robs me of sleep on the flipside, and I have to try to get some nap time in after Evan goes to day care, and the end result is that it often seems like I do two things: work and sleep. My hours have normalized a bit – no more radical changes in my in/out times from day to day – but the sad part is, the hours have normalized to where I’m only home to tuck Evan into bed two nights a week. At this point I think I’m having more trouble with that than he is. I miss my Evan time.

I do make the most of it while I’ve got it though – he’s been wanting to sing along with the ABC song and Jingle Bells a lot lately, and I’ve been trying to accommodate him, especially since his musical tastes aren’t developed enough to know that daddy can’t really sing worth two craps. He also listens to every word I say on the drive to day care in the morning. Case in point: one day I had some choice words for the driver ahead of me. Evan then repeated those choice words all day at day care. Thank God the words were only “NICE TURN SIGNAL, BUDDY!” (In case you can’t tell, some vital portions of my trash-talking-other-drivers education took place during one of my visits with my grandfather; the classroom was the maze-like street grid of New York City.)

Three Amigos

Evan’s been getting along just fine with the other new addition to the family too. Actually, everyone’s getting along with Puck, the new black cat (code names: Puckalufagus, Puckbill Cat-a-puss). Puck also got some of his education on the mean streets, and it shows: now that he’s in our house, he has absolutely zero interest in going outside (unlike Oberon). We’re still experiencing a bit of a learning curve with convincing him to stay off the kitchen counter, out of the trash cans, etc. etc.; I gather he’s had to dig through a few trash cans to find dinner in the past, and it’s a habit he’s having some trouble breaking. But he’s not being destructive or terribly messy – on the contrary, he doesn’t leave a single crumb when he eats – and he’s emerging as a very benevolent alpha male, keeping the peace when the other two cats fight. Puck has been allowed to keep his claws intact because he’s very choosy about using them, and that give his enforcement of household feline peace a little bit of authority too. It’s not uncommon to see all three cats curled up together, which may be a new ground speed record for universal adoption-to-acceptance in our house. He sleeps with me at night; as yet, I don’t know if he picked me or if I picked him. Considering that he showed up at my workplace on the first night of my new job, I’m leaning more and more toward the former.

Speaking of Oberon, today marks three years since we adopted him. December 19th being the life-changing day that it is in our family history, that also means three years since I saw Sultry drown right in front of me, three years since I gave my notice at the station where, ironically, I’m now working again (though in a very different capacity), and all of those events directly or indirectly are tied in with Evan… happening. Looking at where I am now is kind of eerie: I’m back to working at the same TV station, where a black cat showed up to replace my sorely-missed black cat… more than once I’ve looked around, worried, to make sure that I get to keep my kid out of this deal. It’s nice to have the job (and even nicer to have the cat), but there are some parts of the status quo that I don’t want restored.

Oh, and by the way…NICE TURN SIGNAL, BUDDY!

I’ll try to blawg a bit more often. In fact, there’s some really startlingly inconsequential blogging just around the corner…… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Pyg(flu)malion

Evan hasn’t been feeling great lately; on Monday, he was running a fever at day care, and there was a bit of a scramble because that’s one of the days that I go to work fairly early. The doctor said he had the flu, and of course even a solitary sneeze is treated as H1N1 these days, so it was Tamiflu time…and Evan had to stay home the whole week, which made my work schedule interesting. Fortunately, he’s got a new friend to help keep him company while he gets to feeling better.

Evan and.... what's his face … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3

“Hi…dad”

Evan has this particular funny little way of getting my attention: “Hi…dad!”, complete with awkward pause in the middle as if he’s trying to determine if I’m actually mom or something. Some days he’ll actually beat me to the punch of getting out of bed, and I’ll wake up with him standing next to my bed, giving me blankie horse kisses. “Hi…dad!”

Oh yeah, it’s entirely possible for him to get out of bed before I do, even though it’s not really supposed to work that way. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3

EVAN takes 3 HP damage. DADDY fails saving throw against GUILT TRIP spell.

So last Saturday the boy and I went to see my dad; I knew he was going to have his place to himself so I thought it’d be a good time to have a bit of a boys’ get-together with him. We really didn’t get to have much of a cordial visit, because Evan was into…well…everything. I had to peel the boy off of, at various times, a sword hanging on the wall, two shotguns leaned up in the corner behind the front door, a lighter that was left out on a table, about six thousand pill bottles, and a back door that he could easily open. Not much of a relaxed visit, but my dad got a couple of hours’ worth of seeing me be a dad for a change.

Another thing that Evan wouldn’t keep away from was my dad’s space heater. I got him away from it before he could burn himself, every time he tried to jump on it (literally – he treated the white “tower” fan in my room at home the same way, which is why it’s no longer in my room). Finally, he tripped over his own feet trying to make a running jump at the space heater. I grabbed his ankles and dragged him back to the chair that I was trying to remain seated in as much as possible. The boy giggled his head off and said “Again!” and threw himself in the floor face first. So I dragged him back to me again. The carpet at my dad’s place isn’t like the carpet here, so I figured it was just tickling him. He kept giggling and throwing himself in the floor, and we did this for about ten minutes.

I’m not sure “horror” is an adequate word to describe what I felt when I took Evan’s shirt off at bedtime that night and saw the gigantic patch of carpet burn on his tummy. It looks terrible. I had made sure his shirt wasn’t riding up when I was playing with him earlier in the day, and at no point had he made any protest – I would’ve stopped at the slightest indication that it was hurting him. And the fact that he hadn’t made any noises about being in pain since then told me that it wasn’t hurting him now either.

But when he looked down and saw that he was damaged? Oh boy. Freaked. The. Hell. Out. Probably took him half an hour to stop crying hysterically.

When I took him to day care on Monday morning, I carefully explained to his teachers and to the day care administrator exactly what they’d see if they or he lifted his shirt, and why it was there, and hopefully made a convincing case for why they shouldn’t call the cops to haul me off for doing horrible things to the boy. They seemed to get it. I’d like to think they know by now that I love this little guy more than any other human being on the planet – in fact, more than most other human beings on the planet combined (if this includes you, I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel; if you’re not human, please disregard) – so I wouldn’t deliberately do anything to make this happen.

Sorry, buddy. But now you can show everyone your war wounds and freak them out too. He’s already demonstrated a willingness to show it off to his teachers – he lets them look, then covers it with his hand and plaintively says “MY BOO BOO.” :-/… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Monkeying around at the zoo

For Evan’s second birthday, he and I went to the Tulsa Zoo. We would’ve gone someplace closer if there was someplace closer; I would’ve driven further if he’d been old enough to be disappointed by the place (more on that below). As it is, he had a blast, caught a little bit too much sun, daddy did a LOT of walking, and, oh, by the way, thank God for rent-a-wagons into which squirmy just-hours-away-from-two-year-olds can be secured and moved around.

Evan's trip to the zoo … Read more