Take 'em Off.

Since we are now knee deep into Walker's 2nd year of living, I've been thinking a lot about all the stuff you read when you're pregnant and when the baby is still new and little. And, I have to tell you, I think there is a whole "nature" (vs. nurture) part of the equation that is just plain missing. There are a lot of child rearing philosophies that I think are interesting or sensible or have merit, but I don't subscribe fully to any of them. I sort of pick and choose what seem like good ideas or sensible suggestions. But I can't believe how many philosophies would have you believe that if you don't breastfeed for 2 years or massage your kid daily or feed him only organic food (okay, all things I believe in on some level ... so probably bad examples), you are guaranteed to raise a mistrustful, unsociable, violent little crank that will roam the countryside looking for cats to kick. Very few books and magazine articles -- or just the plain everyday parents you end up meeting -- seem to address the fact that on some level we all just show up on Day 1 being the person we will always be. It's like all parents are afraid of being blamed but they definitely want the credit if things turn out well.

Jon and I have been pretty aware that from the minute Walker arrived that he has been on his own little individual plan -- a plan that we are not privy to nor can we take credit for. At 3 months, after endless nights of crazy schedules, waking every few hours, marathon walking & rocking torture sessions trying to get him to nod off, he just decided that he'd start going to bed every night at 7:00. And that's what he did. It had nothing to do with us giving him baths, reading him a book, singing to him, blah blah blah f-in blah. He just did it on his own.

Then there's a whole other part of the story, where we've been in neverending wait mode for all the typical milestone-ish stuff like rolling over, crawling, pulling up. Not only has he had real physical challenges with his foot (um, surgery, casts, and braces will tend to slow a kid down) but personality-wise, he just wasn't interested. I remember trying to put him on his tummy last summer and he would scream bloody murder, like I was hanging him upside down while sticking him with a fork. It was utterly ridiculous. You just can't get that kid to do something he's not interested in doing. And when he starts doing something, he's tentative and careful. He wants to make sure everything's cool -- and even then he needs to think about it. It made me think a lot about my own milestones and how I did everything so late that it worried my grandparents. As my Grandma Arrow says all the time (usually after she asks if Walker is, in fact, walking yet ***ironic name alert***), "Well you walked so late AND LOOK HOW BRIGHT YOU ARE." ... as if I still feel badly about it.

So I crawled at 13 months.
Walker crawled at 13 months.
Okay, "crawled" is just too clear of a description for what he does. It's more like he drags his body weight across the floor using just the questionable strength of his little baby boy arms. I know this is called "commando crawling" but it seems more like "dead man's drag" or something. In any event, he's finally doing it.

It occurred to me a few days ago to ask my Mom how I crawled. Like I know I crawled real late but did I hitch myself across the floor like a monkey (a popular mode of transport amongst the babies in my family) or did I just full-on crawl, tummy up off the ground and on all fours. This was her response:

"Up on hands and knees, scooted first.  Then one day while grandma and I were in the kitchen at 17 Sidney Ave. you simply got up and walked across the floor!  We just looked at each other.  By the way, you did the same thing with riding a bike.  While everyone else your age wanted their training wheels off so they could ride into trees, slide on sand and destroy themselves, you would have no part of it.  You wanted the training wheels on for a longer time.  Then one day you said, "take the training wheels off", you took off and never looked back and never fell."

I love this. I'm absolutely still that person. Okay, maybe Walker does have his own little plan but maybe I can take the credit (maybe, just a little) for his late bloomer individualist streak. And I'll give Jon the blame for the fact that that kid would rather eat glass than give in to sleep. Yeah, that sounds fair.

Instrument of the Devil.

I'm slowly coming down off of what can only be described as one of the worst caffeine experiences of my life. Which is saying a lot because I've had A LOT of caffeine experiences in my life. Pots of it while studying for finals, gallons of it while pulling late nights at work which were then followed by bowls of it the next morning in order to get going. But this -- this -- is a full-fledged nightmare. I stopped buying fancy coffee drinks at fancy coffee shops in order to save money, so I've been drinking whatever coffee Jon makes in the morning. I dump it in a big plastic container with a ton of milk and a bit of sugar and lug it to work, pour it over ice, I mean it's just the ticket. But apparently Jon bought some new (i.e. cheap) coffee last week and it is literally the worst shit I've ever drank. I'm not sure if they roast it with rat poison or cut it with ajax or grow it from crystal meth, but one cup not only makes me feel like I've had 8 but it also pushes me dangerously close to a full-blown anxiety attack. I drank some on Saturday while I was doing the bills and even though I didn't think I had had that much to drink, I looked down at my hands and they were shaking. I stopped drinking it and didn't think much of it. Later that day, Jon says "Have you noticed anything different about the coffee?" and we then went on to discuss how, my God, that coffee was real speedy and tasted like crap and we were shaking and had headaches and wasn't it just the worst thing ever?

Here comes the best part -- we drink it again Sunday morning. And then I fill up a plastic jug with it this morning.

You know how when you're recovering from a cold you think you feel better but then you get to work and realize you, in fact, still feel like shit? Like you felt good enough to sit up on the couch and read magazines but not good enough to sit in a meeting and have an opinion. Such is my plight today. I thought even though this coffee made me feel "a little bit speedy" at home, surely it wouldn't be an issue at work -- really the place I need that speed the most. Well, after drinking less than a cup (and a cup being HALF coffee and HALF milk), I felt like I was on drugs. Does this make me stop drinking it? No. I keep drinking it because I'm preparing for a meeting and feel like the comfort factor of drinking coffee on a Monday morning will far outweigh any of the potential negative side effects.

Guess what? I was wrong.

I sat through both of my meetings, feeling like I was hallucinating, with a crippling headache, shaking hands, and a bladder that was about to burst. I felt like punching someone. I felt so anxious, I thought I was going to cry. I thought about the line from the Flaming Lips song "Do You Realize?" that goes "Do you realize ... that everyone you know some day will die." and I started thinking about everyone I know and how much I don't want any of them to die. I thought I was going to start crying.

As soon as I got out of my meeting, I fled the building in order to buy as much food as I could, a full sandwich, a bag of chips, a giant oatmeal and chocolate chip cookie, and I topped it all off with aspirin. I'm starting to feel a lot better now and my headache's gone away. I think after another half hour or so of writing personal e-mails and other busy work, I'll finally be grounded enough to do my real work.

All I know is that the first thing I'm going to say when I get home isn't "How was your day?", it's going to be "For the love of God, let's spend some money."

Cricket anyone?

So it looks like the annual cricket infestation has begun in our home. Since this is our 3rd summer in this house, we've really been able to discern a pattern. Cluster flies then ants then mosquitoes then fireflies then mice then crickets then giant spiders then everything's dead. The cricket invasion is the one I worry about the least and I actually find something sort of charming about it. It feels like maybe they're good luck or something ... even if there are 20 of them between the kitchen and living room alone. Hey, 20 times the luck! Jon hates the crickets and encourages the dogs to kill them. I'm not sure what's happened to him since he's moved to Vermont but he's big on killing things now.

Anyway.

We had a cricket, a loud cricket, either in our bedroom or in the hallway just going off last night. I think I got less sleep last night than I did when Walker was first born. It reminded me of our first experience with the crickets when we had enough of them in the house that they could call to each other. One night while we were watching TV we could hear one in the pantry calling to one in the bathroom. Jon muttered, "Jesus, they're calling to each other!" and I replied, "Yeah, guess what they're saying?" and like a complete fool he said "What?" It allowed me to deliver this gem:

Cricket A: "Hey!"

Cricket B: "What?"

A: "Where are you?"

B: "I'm over here!"

A: "Where?"

B: "Over here!"

A: "WHERE'S HERE?"

B: "OVER HERE!"

Heh heh heh. Still funny.

I thought of another one this morning on my drive in:

"Hey!"

"What?"

"Guess what."

"What?"

"THAT'S WHAT!"

Cricket humor. I love it.

Thunder Boomers.

It's thundering out right now and it's making me think about how stoked the local weather man is going to be on tonight's forecast. And the one I have in mind is the same one Jon and I started calling "Smiley" during our first winter here. He just gets so geeked out on weather and is never not smiling. And not in that perma-grin anchor desk type of way, but in that genuinely enthusiastic "if I won the lottery I'd still keep my job!" kind of way. Sometimes I wonder if he heaves his coffee cup at an intern to get the aggression out or if he's really just that psyched on weather. Anyway, our first winter we had, like, 2 week stretches of weather where it wouldn't even get up to zero and there he'd be, smiling away, pointing out statistics like "Whoa oh boy, it's 60 DEGREES BELOW ZERO at Mt. Washington!"

Inevitably one of us would remark, "Jesus Christ, look at Smiley."

Last winter he even got a little spot on the Today show during another cold snap where he demonstrated how cold it was by fixing a bowl of cereal with milk and fruit and then turning it upside down to show how quickly the whole thing had frozen solid. He was so enthusiastic! Check it out! We're freezing our asses off up here! Yeah Katie! Yeah Matt! Fruit, milk, and cereal! Frozen! Solid! Holy! Guacamole!

We give Smiley a lot of grief but, truth be told, we are super entertained by him. He almost always refers to thunderstorms as "thunder boomers" and I told Jon last night that I bet Smiley's bummed that we've had a not-very-stormy summer because he doesn't get to break out the lingo that often. But then I added, "I bet he can't wait til Fall. 'Cause then it's time for 55 degrees to become 'double nickels'".

Rock on, Smiley.