faulty vision

“Wow. You look really … Asian.”

Thank you. That was the look I was going for, after the last haircut made me look too … white?

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have had the misfortune to give birth to a morning person, which just seems like added insult to injury when the man I married turned out to be a morning person as well, something that he didn’t reveal until after the knot was tied. How he managed to keep that under wraps when we actually lived together for several years before we got married is a question for the ages, but here we are, the three of us, balancing on the precipice of justifiable homicide and no salvation in sight.

Hobbes spends nights in his crib, but when he wakes up at around 5 or 6 AM (as he is too prone to do) and if I choose to pretend I didn’t hear anything, the Guy will bring him to our bed and drop him somewhere on the mattress between us, whereupon the child will ooze like a tentacled brick across our bodies and fall asleep for another hour or so. Occasionally, out of some perversely peppy sadism, he will simply stay awake, and demand our attention until one of us is driven bodily out of bed and forced to take him downstairs to play.

On days when the Guy takes him for a while in the mornings to let me sleep, I am usually awakened by the heavy creak of what he fondly imagines to be his tip-toed entrance into the bedroom. This is two-second advance warning before he holds the baby over my head. When I open my eyes, it’s usually to discover Hobbes spread-eagled in the air over me, his mouth wide open in a delighted grin. Normally I have just enough time to think the word, “Crap,” before the Guy drops him on my face and then walks away.

The Guy and Hobbes think this is hugely funny. Insofar as jolts to the system go, caffeine has nothing on it.

Yesterday, I woke up to the sound of clapping. I lifted my head to peer down the bed and discovered him upside-down in a fold of the comforter, his head resting on my leg and his face mostly covered by blanket. Who knows what he saw on the ceiling to give him such joy, but he was happily applauding — I can only assume the accomplishment of surviving another day and night despite his parents.

The day before that, I fell asleep on the sofa while watching him play, only to wake up unpleasantly when he gave my nose an open-mouthed kiss and sneezed into it.

The day before that, he was absolutely unable to sleep, and cried miserably until 1 AM, at which point I took him downstairs to the living room sofa. There he continued to cry until 4 AM, at which point he fell asleep half-on and half-off the sofa, his head balanced on a little stepstool. The only reason he didn’t fall off was because I held it in place for the next half-hour, at which point I got tired of being (1) awake; and (2) a bookend. Apparently, I fell asleep.

He fell off.

In the grand scheme of things, this was not as serious as it might have been. He was limp and floppy, and the floor wasn’t that far away. He grunted, complained sleepily for all of half a minute, then fell asleep as soon as I’d lifted him to the sofa. Stupidly, I hadn’t made allowances for the fact that I needed room on it to sleep as well, and after the night we’d had, I wasn’t in any mood to potentially wake him by moving him.

I piled a few throw pillows on the floor and fell asleep next to the sofa.

An hour later, he rolled off of it and landed on my head.

He was too sound asleep to care. I was too tired to object. I woke up again half an hour later with him still folded belly-down across my face.

I peeled him off and trundled upstairs to the bedroom, ready to murder the first person I saw. Fortunately, marriage had supplied me with a ready-made target. It was 7 o’clock. The Guy was sound asleep, looking perfectly comfortable in our bed. I stood over him with the saggy body of our son and glared at him with red-rimmed eyes until the beam of homicidal rage I was directing at him peeled his smoking eyelids apart.

“I’m so tired,” the Guy groaned, when he saw me.

“I hate you,” I said.

My morning boys

“Oh, yesterday the milk in his bottle was spoiled,” said the lady at the daycare when she saw me, “so I threw it out.”

I stared at her. Hobbes teetered around the breakfast room and tried to pat a classmate on the face. “What?” I said.

“I hope it was okay,” she said. She didn’t mean the milk. “I heated it up and it smelled funny, so I threw it out. I used our school milk.”

I stared blearily at the bottle in my hand. Well, crap. “That was a new container,” I said, a little accusingly. “We just opened it–” When had we opened it? Was it possibly the day before Hobbes stopped sleeping nights and started screaming his head off all night long instead? We were on night 2 of that, so I wasn’t thinking very clearly. The last part of his bedtime routine was a warm bottle of milk. My shoulders sagged. And here I had thought my son was just being a dipshit.

We threw out the milk.

Weirdly, he slept perfectly soundly that night.

Our day care, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of the great joys of my life, landing on the scale right above medical insurance and right below air. It is, in other words, cataloged as a ‘necessity’ as far as I’m concerned. To imagine a world where I don’t have childcare is terrifying as best, and the fact that we’ve managed to find one that’s beyond fantastic is something I’m daily grateful for. True, it costs somewhere between an “ouch,” and a “#*%&,” even taking into account the fact we pay the monthly fee that was in effect before the owner raised the price another $500. Frankly, it’s worth it, and neither the Guy nor I regret it in any way, shape or form. We may wish that it was cheaper, but in the same way that we wish we didn’t have such a big mortgage, or that Hobbes would eat food that was any color but white. It is what it is. We deal with it and move on.

Day care allows us to work. To pay the mortgage. To do those things that would be impossible with a small child, and still know that Hobbes is happy and in the best of hands — not excluding ours, because frankly, neither of us should be trusted with houseplants, much less children, and the fact that we are just goes to show how poorly regulated this world of ours is.

So the fact that the day care shut its doors for a vacation just before Christmas, to open again the Monday after New Year’s, was sort of a disaster.

Normally it wouldn’t have mattered much to us, because we would have taken the entire two week timeframe off. Our yearly visit to Seattle, of course — but as I mentioned before, there was a small hitch in the fact that we were actually spending the two weeks here. We took off some time for my mom’s visit, but that was only a matter of a few days. The rest of the time, the Guy and I worked.

Without daycare.

Most of the time, we managed to find some suitable compromise that basically translated to both of us staying home, taking turns working or taking care of Hobbes. It would be fair to say that not a lot of work got done. Hobbes, who regarded this change in routine with deep suspicion, was eventualy reconciled to the fact that he couldn’t get rid of us, and accepted the inevitability of it with resignation and, I’m tempted to say, a slightly morbid satisfaction.

Toddlers do not have the ability to hide their thoughts the way grown-ups do; they haven’t yet learned the duplicity that allows human beings to function in groups. There were times when Hobbes would stop what he was doing and go eye-to-eye with me. Clearly, he would think, you are not a professional in the field. If I were at daycare, I wouldn’t do this because they would know exactly what to do about it, and the consequences would be both immediate and fair, neither of which would work in my favor. While I may be personally ambivalent to the notion of causing destruction and chaos without any immediate incentive, there is something to be said for experimenting just to see what you will do. Besides which, I observe that you are a placid and overweight individual, plainly requiring some excitement in your life. I consider what I am about to do a service, meant for your greater good.

Then he would beam at me.

“Good boy,” I’d say weakly, and a few seconds later, I would be given striking evidence to the contrary.

On one day that lingers painfully in my memory, both the Guy and I had to head into our respective workplaces. I had a 5 and a half hour meeting. Hobbes went with me, the idea being that it would be less dangerous for him to be playing in my work area.

Our meeting room was a small conference room; about halfway through the first hour, he put his hand on an attendee’s knee, stared at him very seriously, and then started yelling at the top of his lungs.

“This,” said the poor guy, “is going to be a really long meeting.”

I spent perhaps an hour trying to keep him contained, and then gave up. Instead, I left the conference door halfway open, and he spent the next four hours happily charging around the office, returning to my room from time to time with new toys or friends as he suckered coworkers into playing with him. He was a big hit, apparently.

I got a lot of work done. I’m not sure I could say the same for my colleagues. One of them sent me this photograph, which he took in the middle of his meeting. Apparently, he heard banging behind him and found my inquisitive son plastered to the window, staring at them. Strange goldfish they have here, I suppose he was thinking.

Let me in! I can help!

“Can I get a nametag?” I asked the receptionist.

She handed me a standard nametag sticker, and I worked over it with a pen. Behind me in the lobby, a group of three or four women had already flocked around Hobbes. As might be expected, he was flirting shamelessly with them.

“He’s so cute!” one of them exclaimed.

I’m never quite sure what to say in response to this. Thank you? It was a genetic roll of the dice; do I get to take credit for a pleasing arrangement of features, or a personality that hasn’t met a woman it doesn’t like?

Hobbes chuckled.

I slapped the nametag on his back, and steered him by the shoulders towards the elevators. He dug in his heels — elevators weren’t as entertaining as girls — and my (gentle, I swear!) shove combined with his resistance overset him. He faceplanted and stared at the floor for a long, thoughtful moment.

“Aww,” said the women in a chorus. “He fell down.”

He chuckled again.

“What did you put on his back?” one of them asked, and leaned over to look.

MY NAME IS: Hobbes. I belong to Yuhri. Please feed me.

“Might as well resign myself to the inevitable,” I said.

…I don’t know why I even bother.

THIS YEAR, HOWEVER, I WILL AIM LOW. I will consider it a successful year if I accomplish one of the following:

1. Rip out my kitchen and have it completely redone again. With sinks that my pots will actually fit in, and countertops not made out of tile.
   
2. Finish writing one story.
   
3. Write a minimum of one journal entry a week.
   
4. Get my A1C under 7.0.
   
5. Waste less food.
   
6. “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly greens.”
   

One of those things should be achievable, right? Right?