And some guy got off a train.

The interval before that was more or less filled by close-up shots of really bored men sitting around and waiting for the train, alternately sweating, messing with bugs, or … well, there was more sweating. And some stuff dripping. And more sweating. And sitting.

My attention span is not made for this sort of thing. Just kill me now. Or better yet, put something else on.

“If you think about it,” said the Guy, “this is a lot like a samurai movie.”

“No it isn’t. Samurai movies aren’t boring.”

With that in mind, I started the first steps towards a baby quilt yesterday, despite the fact that I was sick as a dog yesterday (thank you, son. One of these days when you are all grown up and have a life of your own, I will hunt you down and snot at you. Just to see how you like it. There’s no point in doing it now; you’re too young to appreciate the horrors. No worries. I can wait.)

Quilting is one of those random hobbies that I take up and drop from time to time, just to see how I like it. It’s something I’m improving at by degrees, which is a lot like the other hobbies I have on my chain. There’s a circular routine to my hobbies; I take them or leave them at intervals, improve a bit on one, then lose interest and move on to another. This explains why I have in my house: 1 pink lace shawl, half-finished; 1 knitted red kimono sleeve; 1 requested digital painting of a really depressed-looking girl in various shades of green and blue with a water retention problem; 12 chapters of 3 different novels.

The Guy puts up with it, as he does most of my aberrations. From time to time he will register that I’m buying more thread or more yarn or more … whatever, sigh, then buy some more hardware in a sort of retaliatory parity. We have incomes that can support this sort of half-assery, and if my attention span isn’t at the level of, say, your average pill bug’s, so be it.

Speaking of which, I can’t remember what the point of this post was.

Right. The quilt.

So, I’m making one.

That is all.

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

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.

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.

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?

“Ask her,” I said, after I’d calculated the cost of flying husband, toddler and self up to Seattle for the holiday. “Because it would be a lot less expensive if she just came down here, and if you’re going to be down here anyway–”

“Okay,” she said agreeably, and wandered off. A few minutes later, she returned with another, “Okay.”

“What?”

“She says, ‘okay.’”

“Really?”

Funny thing. Turns out that if you ask for stuff, sometimes people will give them to you.

And how was Christmas, you ask?

It was like this:

And this:

And this:

Perhaps the best part of Christmas, tooth pain and root canal notwithstanding, was our first visit to the San Francisco Zoo. My mother was obsessed with the idea of taking Hobbes to the zoo, which she explained to me as being for his own good. If you take children to the zoo, she heard on Japan TV, they grow up without allergies to animals.

“I’m allergic to cats and dogs and anything with four feet,” I said, by way of rebuttal.

“Of course you are,” she said, which she seemed to think clinched her argument.

This is the same media source that informed her that eating frozen aloe vera and tying your toes together will make you thinner, so I took all this with a grain of salt. Scientific method is all well and good for Japanese scientists, but Japanese television hasn’t met a stupid idea it didn’t like, package, and distribute to the gullible Japanese people. For a people who has had two atomic bombs dropped on them, you’d think they’d be a little more cynical.

The Guy, claiming debilitating misery, stayed at home, so it was a Hirata trip: three grown women to one small toddler. The ratio was just about right, as it happened. Hobbes had a most excellent time.

I took the requisite pictures of bored animals going about their business while tourists gaped at them. They weren’t anything spectacular, so I won’t bother linking them. The biggest hit of the three hour trip was, as might be expected, the petting zoo.

And the biggest hit of the petting zoo, which I suppose we should have expected, was the little tractor that Hobbes could just about ride on.

I suppose the worldview on domesticated animals is different to a person who has to look up to go eye-to-eye with a sheep.

“This tooth,” he said. “This tooth,” as though I should have known exactly what he was talking about. Of course I did, being both an attentive wife and a concerned one.

“Refresh my memory,” I said, tactfully.

He did, but since I wasn’t listening the first few times, I’ll have to recap as best as I can piece together from subsequent fragments of conversation I actually paid attention to.

The Guy has a tooth, “This tooth,” which has been bothering him for about a year now. Intermittent pain, indicating (he thought) varying degrees of attention with the floss. He is British, and floss does not figure largely in his world view. Neither do dentists, for that matter. A few months back, the hygienist at his new dentist discovered a crack in the tooth, which was promptly filled.

“It hurts,” he mumbled.

“You should call the dentist,” I said.

He eyed me with disfavor.

That was on Thursday.

By Saturday, he was actually unable to sleep because of the pain. I caught him in the kitchen popping painkillers like tic-tacs. “Call the dentist,” I said again, which I had said repeatedly over the course of the last three days. The previous times, he had fobbed me off with various mutterings about it being a holiday, about the pain going away, about how he was handling it just fine with the ibuprofen. “You big baby,” I tacked on, because nothing motivates a man like being taunted.

“I’m pretty sure I need a root canal,” he said. “I did research online.”

The internet: qualifying nincompoops for dentistry since 1991.

It was Sunday before he finally made the call. He left a polite, albeit somewhat pathetic message on the dentist’s answering machine. Within ten minutes the dentist had called him back, had prescribed antibiotics, listened sympathetically to his assessment of his situation, and promised to start trying to contact a specialist for an immediate appointment.

One would not be stretching the truth to say that I felt both smug and full of self-satisfaction at this obvious proof of how right I was in saying he should have called three days ago. Far be it for me to say so in the face of the Guy’s obvious pain — but I was still right, and he was still wrong. “What a great dentist,” I said. “He called you right back, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“In, like, ten minutes. What a great dentist. Wow. I bet if you’d called him three days ago, he would’ve called you right back. Like, in ten minutes flat. Wish someone had thought to suggest it to you. Oh, wait.”

The Guy ground his teeth. Whatever he was going to say was lost to pain. He whimpered.

“Dork,” I said kindly.

As of 7 pm this evening, the Guy has had his first root canal. I dropped him off at the dentist’s office droopy and miserable; when I picked him up an hour later, he was happily sipping a disgusting mixture of tapioca pearls and powdered tea, happy as a schoolgirl at her first Hannah Montana concert.

It occurs to me that the last time we had a long holiday, we were flattened for two weeks by some viral bug. This time, we had a root canal. At the current rate of escalation, come New Year’s, one of us will be in surgery, having a limb grafted back on.

The Guy is currently huddled under the TV, hugging his face. “The pain’s back,” he muttered. “It’s surprising how irritable it makes me.”

“Not really,” I said.

What do you mean? I’m an awesome wife.

Uh, that stain. Let me explain that stain. There was this cup of coffee….

…oh. Okay. That stain. Right. Uh, that’s from my son. Yes, that one there. Thank you. We find him cute as well. (Hobbes, stop asking about the nice man’s crotch. I know the word, “Mo?” doesn’t mean anything to him, but the fact that you’re pointing at it is frankly suspect.) Yes, he’s very friendly. No, he’s our only one.

Um.

Well, that’s– see, we were playing one day and — no, not with toxic waste. We were just playing. I was chasing him around and saying, “I’m gonna gitchya,” which he finds hilarious because he has the IQ of your average carrot, and–

–no, not now, Hobbes. We’ll play that later.

Anyway, he was laughing so hard that he just sort of, uh, projectile vomited all over the floor. And then he giggled and dashed off because of the aforementioned carrot situation, (Hobbes, stop eating the nice man’s equipment) and I started cleaning it up with everything I could find and he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t chasing him anymore, so he came back to investigate, all covered with vomit, you understand, because there was dribbling, and of course he walked right through it to get my attention, and when I tried to grab him he thought the game was on again so he dashed off again, just tracking vomit everywhere and–

–okay, but you asked, see, and I wanted to give you complete disclosure. In case that affected how you cleaned and stuff.

Yes, honey, you’re very funny. Please take that out of your nose and give it back to the nice man.

Oh. Uh, that stain?

Are you sure you want to know?

Anyway, I’ve been sick.

With the croup.

So there.

So a few days ago, my sister, who has the bedside manner of your typical payment-on-delivery organ harvester, text messaged me the following.

Mom tripped and fell yesterday while walking back from the dentist. She has a fat lip now. I hate that pavement now.

I don’t want to imply that my mother is ancient, because she’s not. True, she hit her 70th birthday a couple of months ago, but she wears it lightly — and anyway, she’s got that Asian woman thing going for her. Asian women do not age so much as they … solidify, becoming a little more unstoppable, a little less distractable, a little more “force majeure,” a little less predictable, day by day. However, she’s certainly not at the age where hearing, ‘Mom fell’ is in any way productive of any emotion beyond, “Oh my GOD.”

A speedy text message in response got nothing from Sako beyond complete silence. It’s no use saying that if there had been more serious injury, Sako would have told me in the original text message. My family’s communication skills are not to be relied on. If one of the women in my family says, “I ran into Mrs. X the other day,” you cannot assume that they didn’t mean, “with my car.” The instinct for information prioritization is simply not there. I don’t know what it is — a genetic abnormality?

A Skype call later, I learned that the only victims of the fall were Mom’s upper lip, which had swollen up to elephantine proportions, and a couple of her braces. She’d fallen down on her way back from the dentist, knocking off some of the metal on her teeth in the process. An elderly couple had stopped to help her. That was nice of them.

End of story.

I was cautiously comforted by that. Sako is finishing up nursing school in Seattle, so she resides at home with Mom for the time being. Mom is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, true, but she doesn’t actually do so, which makes me think with some anxiety to the day when Sako graduates and moves on. The point for the moment is that if something more serious had happened, Sako would have been at hand with her nursing school learning to patch things up or escalate to a higher power, whichever.

When I called Mom a couple of days later over Skype, I saw that Sako wasn’t kidding about the fat lip. It seemed, to my slightly fevered imagination, to take up a good third of my computer screen. Really, I think Sako should’ve warned me ahead of time how bad it was, because my initial reaction was maybe not the most tactful in the world.

“Holy crap,” I blurted out. “What the hell is on your face?”

I think I might have made Mom a little self-conscious.

It’s been a couple of weeks now, and the swelling has died down to a manageable portion of Mom’s face. The blotch remains, a dark red watermark on her upper lip that doesn’t appear to be fading away. We’ve all gotten used to it enough that I’m no longer impelled to comment on it, either out loud or in the ongoing monologue that feeds through my brain. Really, the end of that adventure could have been so much worse; a little cosmetic difficulty is hardly worth mentioning, when you consider the various limbs and joints that could have been broken by a really bad fall at her age.

sun child

In other news, the camera on the Droid is actually a lot better than I really expected. It is still not the best I’ve ever seen, but it’s pretty decent, all things considered. The Guy is infatuated with his, and uses it obsessively.

Well, maybe not obsessively. He has a ’shoot everything you can as often as you can and then maybe out of all that mess, one of them will work out’ approach to photography, which is as close to a real world application of the infinite monkeys with typewriters in a closed room will produce Hamlet theory as you can get.

(Now, how many ways could I have crafted a worse sentence than that?)

Did I mention that we bought Droids?

For the record, Hobbes is feeling much better and is now back in day care. Though the photo shows him in the full bloom of health, that’s because it was taken back in November one day, when we thought — naive parents that we were — that taking him on an actual walk would be a good idea. Apparently, toddlers do not go for walks. They go for starts and stops, picking ups and digging intos, pluckings and eatings, trippings and investigatings, dashing aways and sitting downs….

He’s not feeling like his old self yet, but he’s almost there.

In the meantime, his parents are feeling horrible.

Thanks, sweetheart.

Where other children suck their thumbs, he actually licks people when he is tired or stressed, which I find both hilarious and messy; it’s bad enough to get snotted on, but looking down to discover that he is busily applying his tongue to my shirt as though LL Bean embedded salt licks in their designs is something that needs to be experienced in order to be believed. I cannot explain what has brought him to this pass, or where he learned the habit. My primary concern is: how does one break a child of that habit in years to come? I have read solutions for thumb suckers and pacifiers, but painting jalepeno sauce on my blouse every day seems like a non-starter, while taking away the shirt altogether — frankly, he is perfectly happy to lick bare skin as well, and my coworkers might look askance at me walking into work every day wearing nothing but a tasteful bra.

Anyway, last night before bed he picked up a little board book and clutched it possessively through the majority of his pre-bedtime ritual. He held it while I was reading other books to him; he held it while I fed him his nightly bottle. He tussled with me over it in complete silence when I took him to his crib, and when I finally set him down in it, he carefully adjusted it under him so it would neither be uncomfortable, nor would I be able to reach it. And then he fell asleep.

This morning when he woke up, you would have thought that he was an illiterate, raised in a house of illiterates — books? what are those? — and instead became entranced with the idea of sowing cereal seeds in an uneven distribution across our living room carpet. He appears to be suffering the delusion that every piece of cereal he buries will eventually grow a cereal tree. Since he is equally enchanted with running the roomba on a daily basis, I can’t really object to this, although I draw the line at allowing him to try his seed-growing experiments with my belly button and my bra. I am a liberal woman, and my stomach and boobs may be used for many things. Agriculture is not one of them.

Personally, I blame video games.

Which isn’t to say that Hobbes is in any way convinced that things are okay. He listened to the nurse on the speakerphone with a great deal of skepticism. Nothing you can say will convince me that a 14 month old can’t be skeptical. True, he regularly tries to shove corn kernels into his ear — and often succeeds; really, it’s astonishing what sorts of things an ear canal will willingly absorb — but the looks he gives me when I suggest something he considers of dubious merit are perfectly understandable. Meryl Streep couldn’t convey skepticism more clearly, and she’s a trained professional.

He’s been flopping around the house feeling mightily sorry for himself since Sunday evening. By association, so have we. Daycare won’t take him if his fever is too high, and even if it weren’t (which it wasn’t the last day or two) he’s been sick enough that letting him mix with other kids didn’t seem like an option. It’s difficult enough to entertain him when he’s healthy and happy; to do the same when he doesn’t feel well is a task beyond our powers. Out of sheer desperation this morning, I let him into the spice rack. This kept him engaged for a blissful ten minutes.

It’s the little things that give a parent joy. Not to mention a toddler. That boy really loves his paprika.

I have hopes that tomorrow will be good to see us all in our appropriate places: daycare for him, work for the husband and myself. Don’t get me wrong; I would be happy to be a stay-at-home mom for Hobbes if we could afford it and if I thought it would really be that much better for him. Frankly, since the first one isn’t true, it’s just as well that the second one isn’t, either.

He gave me a long-suffering look when I tried to entertain him with finger puppets tonight. “Really?” his look said. “Finger puppets? This is what we’re reduced to? This is your solution to my boredom? At day care, they have real toys. At day care, I have friends. At day care, they sing and do silly dances to entertain me. Where’s the love, here? Dance, woman. Caper to my whims, damn you.”

He really is incredibly communicative with those shiny dark eyes of his, I have to say.

In other news, he has added several more words to his vocabulary.

He now says, “Apple.” And “More.” In fact, he never stops saying the second word, which he seems to think means, alternately, “Give me,” “I want that,” “What is it,” and yes, “More.”

Oh. He also says, “I love you, Daddy.” As you can imagine, this is productive of a great deal of attempted bribery and complaint.

“Say Mommy, Hobbes! Say Mommy!”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“MOMMY, Hobbes. MO-MMY. I love you MO-MMY.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“Pleeeeeeeeease? Say Mommy! I’ll give you this … this shiny dinner knife!”

“MORE.”

“Yes, you could say more, or you could say–?”

“I love you, Daddy!”

Kid takes after the wrong side of the family. I swear he’s messing with me.

That, in a nutshell, explains my November. It was a remarkably disciplined month for me, and I settled into a routine that actually worked. By day I went to work and took care of Kazu. Once he went down for the night, I would (1) clean the kitchen if the Guy cooked; then (2) write until I hit my 1700 word count for the evening. What time was left over from that, I spent reading or alternately, drawing a lot.

It was a creative month. Just not a communicative one.

As might have been expected from a month long writing effort, I have produced several hundred pages of crap. This isn’t a disappointment in and of itself; it’s actually pretty much what I expected, and at least I’ve attained my goal. More on that at some later date when I’m not distracted by the Guy playing Fallout 3.

Anyway, I’m back. Four days of Thanksgiving holiday has extended into a more stressful five, due to the flu bug biting hard on the resident spawn. He is fretful and listless with a fever of 103, which makes him both cuddly and impossible to please. This is the first time we’ve had the flu in that particular member of the family, and as might be expected, the parental units are both extremely anxious.

Once more, the internet fails to deliver. “Trust your instincts,” says one site. “If your child seems sicker than she should be, go to the doctor.”

“Should be” is “anything sicker than the video below.” Me and the internet, we need to have a talk.

Poppi ring - garnet roe

“What is that?” the Guy demanded when I came home last night.

“It’s a new ring. I bought it. And,” I added defiantly, “I love it. LOVE it, do you hear?”

Hobbes was instantly fascinated, and wrapped his little hand around the ring. “HI,” he said.

The Guy looked deeply skeptical.

“I know, it’s not my usual taste. But it’s awesome. And it’s comfortable. And it’s red. And I love it. So shut up.”

“It looks like something you’d buy on etsy.”

“When was the last time you bought something on etsy? And no it doesn’t. At least, it could be, because etsy has a lot of professionals on there too, but — stop trying to rain hate on my parade. It’s a great ring.”

And it is, too. It really isn’t my usual style, and my hand is far too pudgy and short-fingered to carry this look off, but I do not care. A girl’s got to have some fun. “And anyway,” I told him, “I look fantastic with it on.”

“Right,” he said.

“Fantastic,” I repeated loudly.

At least Hobbes agrees with me.

Good boy, Hobbes.

Ring purchased from Poppy Arts Gallery online, which incidentally has great customer service and really fast delivery times.

You see where I’m going with this?

The Guy’s birthday happens to be after mine, on October 23rd, two days before Halloween — just go with me on this. It’s easier to just trust my worldview than to ask me to explain — which provided ample opportunity to plan coals of fire. On the day before, I left work early to head over to his workplace, arriving just after he’d left to pick Hobbes up from the airport.

Two of his friends let me in.

Birthday sabotage

The Guy is a good man, but he has a grumpy outer crust that I imagine is a bit tough for his coworkers to penetrate. He is, if you will, the Jack Lemon (or maybe Walter Matthau) of software development. Heart of gold, really! But there’s more than a bit of the, “Get those damn kids off my lawn” about him professionally. Perhaps because of that, the coworkers who happened to be around — quite a few, as it happened — entered into the spirit of things with surprising enthusiasm once they figured out what was going on.

“Do you think he’ll be ticked off when he sees this?” one of the coworkers asked another, in my hearing.

“I hope so,” I answered for him. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

“Sorry,” I told his boss, when I glanced up and found six or seven developers gathered around the cube. “I’ve sort of ruined your team’s productivity for the evening.”

Since his boss was busily filling a helium balloon at the time, it would be fair to say I didn’t meet with shock or dismay at the revelation.

“You’re a nice wife,” one of the developers said. I didn’t catch his name. “Where do I find a wife like you?”

“Oh, no. This isn’t me being nice. This is me doing my damnedest to embarrass my husband in front of his peers.”

I think the developer was new; he briefly looked uncertain. If he’d known my husband, he wouldn’t have.

“He forgot her birthday,” someone said, kindly letting him into the story.

“This is what you do when you’re mad?”

“To be fair, he really did feel bad about forgetting your birthday,” the Guy’s friend told me. “And he made up for it.”

(In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that the Guy eventually gave me one of the new iPhone Nanos, yellow, with a charming little engraving on it from himself and the Hobbes. It’s a great little gadget. I use it almost daily.)

“It’s the principle of the thing,” I told his friend loftily. “And,” I added, because I am also capable of honesty, “it’s just funny.”

Which it was.

Notice the idea one of his coworkers had about his shoelaces? And his keyboard?

It was almost 11 when he finally instant messaged me the next day.

(10:48:11 AM) The Guy: we want kaiser right? I have to do open enrollment again
(10:48:22 AM) Me: Sure.

A short pause ensued. Then:

(10:49:04 AM) The Guy: you evil monkey
(10:49:07 AM) Me: Yes.
(10:49:09 AM) Me: Happy birthday.
(10:49:14 AM) The Guy: thank you
(10:49:22 AM) Me: You’re welcome.

Fortunately, his coworkers had taken pictures the day before — the ones in this post are from them — since the first thing the Guy did when he arrived at his office was to start popping balloons. Killjoy.

(3:54:02 PM) The Guy is no longer idle.
(3:54:10 PM) The Guy: thanks for the cake
(3:54:19 PM) Me: Did you just have it?
(3:54:21 PM) The Guy: you really really pulled out all the stops huh?
(3:54:23 PM) The Guy: yeah

Next year, if he forgets my birthday again, I’ll start getting serious. I noticed the place that I rented the helium tank from also rents jump houses. And one of his coworkers mentioned that there is an adults-only balloon shop in San Francisco.

I’m just saying.

It was true, thinking back, that I had missed out on documenting a lot of milestones which may not have been particularly remarkable in the grand scheme of babyhood — almost every child cuts his first tooth, learns to walk, says his first word, and figures out how to unlock his mother’s Blackberry and speed dial his aunt at some point or another — but had all the shiny wonder of being an achievement of our very first (and possibly only) child.

Somewhere on the internet there is a young man who once informed a group of us that he would acquire a new word for his vocabulary. “This is the third time I’ve heard people use it,” he announced, “so I’ve learned it. Level up!” I laughed about it for days, but this is now what the Guy and I say in all seriousness whenever Hobbes has gained a new skill. “Achievement unlocked!” the Guy says, because he is a gamer and can’t help himself. “Level up!”

Hobbes is sort of like those strange and exciting packages you can buy from the backs of comic books. Formless powder. Add water. Watch as the cryptic little lint turns into real sea monkeys!

We finally got around to cutting Hobbes’s hair the other week, after I made a botched job of getting wisps of hair out of his eyes. That is to say, we took Hobbes to a professional. The job I was doing was getting us nowhere, fast.

Apparently, one can get away with charging quite a bit for a child’s haircut. I found it hard to begrudge the cost, though. The Guy and I certainly weren’t up to doing the job; we can’t even brush the child’s teeth. For a person the size of a small microwave, Hobbes has surprisingly powerful jaws. When I’m on the floor on top of him, trying to pry his mouth open with both hands, I find myself put forcibly in mind of those ants in rainforests, whose mandibles can take out entire warthogs. How he manages to keep his mouth closed and yet scream at the top of his lungs — with syllables, no less — is a secret that eludes me, I confess.

The hairdresser made quick work of it, with Hobbes shrieking the entire time. You would’ve thought we were trying to castrate him with dull tweezers, by the sound of it. The hairdresser, who had apparently gone through this many times before, phlegmatically whipped an electric razor around his head and voila! done. When I’d initially walked in with him, she’d asked me how I wanted it cut. I’d just stared at her blankly.

Experience with my husband has not made me an expert on haircuts that don’t make one look like a girl.

“You want him to look more like boy, okay?” the hairdresser said, telling me more than asking me.

New hair cut

Afterwards, she gathered up a tiny lock of hair, sealed it in a small plastic bag, and stapled it to what looked like a certificate. “You write his name here,” she ordered me, “and date here.” I obediently did so. After which she signed it and handed it across to me.

Certificate of Achievement. I kid you not. ‘This is to certify that (insert name here)’s first hair cut took place at (salon name) on (date).’

I showed it to the Guy without saying a word. He stared at it.

“Is that hair?” he demanded.

I started to snicker.

The Guy raised one of Hobbes’s little fists and pumped it in the air. The child yodeled. “Level up!” said his father.

“Tickle!” said Hobbes.

In other words, Hobbes has acquired his second grown-up word.

He now says, “Hi.”

So far he shows absolutely no interest in calling for his parents by name. From his point of view, I can see why not. What’s the point, when they’re always around?

My mother may be in her 70s now, but she is not a moron. Our insistence that we clean the dining room (and the living room and the kitchen and the entryway) would have seemed suspicious to her even if we hadn’t spent most of our time under her roof doing things that end up on reality TV specials involving industrial strength cleanser and riding crops. We fudged it a bit by saying that we had invited a couple of friends over to hang out on — oh, oops, is that your birthday? We thought that was Friday.

“How many?” she asked, in increasingly insistent anxiety as the answer moved from a handwavey, six or seven, maybe? to an apologetic, maybe twenty? followed by an even more alarming and inaccurate, Or more? Adding, don’t worry about it. It’s all under control didn’t noticeably appease her domestic alarms. Neither, to be fair, did our efforts to help her clean.

She has passed on many of her better qualities to us, but apparently one thing we never did inherit was her ability to really clean. Sako tends to just throw everything out. I take care of surfaces and visible bits. Mom has a craftsman’s pride; the dust bunnies might be under the sofa, but she’ll know they’re there.

It was Hobbes’s first taste of cake, and he enjoyed it a little too much, with the aftermath being that he scooted around on the floor like a mad spider in search of his life’s vengeance, Inigo Montoya on all fours. He was not the least inhibited by the fact that most of the people in the house were complete strangers to him. Insofar as he was concerned, they had all been invited to flirt with him. Since nobody raised any serious objections to this perspective, we kept the peace and all was good.

In all other respects, the visit to Seattle was quite successful. Our arrival was (somewhat) of a surprise as well, not as extreme as we had actually planned since in retrospect it seemed cruel to suddenly show up at my mother’s house with a one year old in tow.

It took all of a second for Mom and Hobbes to strike up their old lovefest again. Skype has been good for keeping my son’s memory sharp on that subject. Mom hasn’t needed any help.

“It’s too bad we don’t live closer together,” I commented. “Then we could leave him with you to babysit and go out sometimes. Hint hint.”

A couple of years ago, Mom would immediately have reminded me that she was old and weak and not up to the task of wrangling a small infant. This time, she simply said, “Too bad.” And it sounded like she meant it.

Hobbes's 1 year portrait, with grandma.

This isn’t to say that everything went all that smoothly. Hobbes was working on his third tooth and getting quite vocal about his objections to the task of teething. The Friday we were there, one of Mom’s old friends — in fact, an old family friend, Dr. Evelyn Hermann — learned that she had terminal cancer. The Sunday that we left, Mom packed herself, Aunt Michi, and a lot of leftovers into the car and headed out to Yakima to spend the day with Dr. Hermann.

And of course there was that party thing.

Hobbes and Dad, Seattle - Sept 2009

“How was your vacation?” my boss asked when I got back.

“Vacation?” I said weakly. “Vacation? Really? Is that what I said I was going to do?”

Our initial thrill of vicarious achievement has matured into a durable and completely idiotic pride in his accomplishment. This bodes ill for the future. I never had ambitions to be a doting mother, but I’m horribly afraid it’s inevitable.

“He’s working on it,” I said.

“Hm,” she said, and gave me a pitying glance as I bore a chuckling Hobbes away.

Two steps. That’s all he had ever done before. Two shuffling steps, after which he would fall over flat on his ass. And then tonight he levered himself up to his feet, looked very pleased with himself, and shuffled a good four, five feet to his father.

I rewarded this as it should be rewarded.

“Holy crap,” I said.

“We are so screwed,” said the Guy.

“Ti-kow,” said Hobbes, and applauded.

“Um,” I said.

“Uh oh,” Hobbes said.

“Well, that’s sort of a word!” the doctor congratulated.

“And he says, ‘cheeto,’” I said.

“What?”

“Uh oh,” Hobbes said again.

“And,” I hurried on, seeing the doctor’s face, “it’s not fair because it’s not like he’s actually ever seen a cheeto, much less eaten one.”

I blame the Guy for this, frankly. While we were in Seattle last week, he introduced Hobbes to the concept. “This is a bag of Cheetos,” he said, waving a big bag of them in front of him at the grocery store. “You don’t get to have any now, but your Mommy poisoned you while you were in her tummy by eating lots and lots of them. You are contaminated now.”

Out of all those words, Hobbes picked the one that was most calculated to embarrass us in front of our friends. “Cheeto,” he said, clearly and distinctly.

“Oh, no,” I said. “You did not say what I think you just said.”

The Guy started to laugh.

“No. I reject this reality and replace it with my own. He did not say this. To date, his only recognizable word is ‘uh oh.’”

Back in the present day, Hobbes stared at me gravely. “No worries,” the doctor said, when she had recovered her composure. “He’ll pick up other words later on. Does he Mama or Papa–? No? Well, it’ll come.”

Hobbes babbled happily in something that sounded like Ewok. The doctor listened with great interest.

“It’s like he’s really talking, isn’t it?” she said. “I feel like it’s our fault for not knowing his vocabulary somehow.”

Hobbes chattered again with great urgency, making his point. I patted him on the head. “Good boy,” I said.

“‘Cheeto,’” the doctor said, and bit her lip. “Well, that’s a new one.”

I reported the conversation to the Guy, adding darkly, “And if you teach him any other words like that–”

“Tikotiko,” said Hobbes.

“I never heard him say it,” the Guy claimed with perfect, if inaccurate, sincerity. “It was just your guilty conscience.”

“Tiko tiko tiko,” said Hobbes.

“You did too hear it. You laughed.”

“Ticko ticko ticko!”

“I didn’t. You just said he’d said it. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Then why were you laughing?”

“Tickow tickow tickow!”

“It was the look on your fa–”

“TICKOW!”

I stopped. “Is he saying ‘tickle tickle tickle?’”

Hobbes beamed. “Tickow tickow tickow.”

“I told you he’d been doing that.”

“Since when?”

“Tickow tickow tickow tickow tickow tickow–”

“Goddammit. This is your first official word? Not Mama or Papa? Tickle? I’ve only said that to you a few times. C’mon, son. Say ‘Mama.’”

“Tickow,” Hobbes said smugly, and shoved his finger up my nose.

Opening his very first laptop

How time flies.

In one year, Hobbes has learned to:

1. suck
   
2. roll over
   
3. sit up
   
4. pick things up
   
5. put things in his mouth
   
6. smile
   
7. laugh
   
8. clap
   
9. stand up
   
10. say a word
    
11. walk (while clutching something)
    
12. climb stairs
    
13. blow a kiss
    
14. remember where he put something
    
15. hide things under the sofa
    
16. self-feed
    
17. hold his breath under water
    
18. Skype the Guy’s coworkers at random, without warning
    
19. play hide and seek by faceplanting in the carpet

We won’t go through the things that I’ve learned this year. In the grand scheme of things, his accomplishments are far more spectacular, considering where he started from.

Happy birthday, little boy!

“Uh oh.”

One might think that this doesn’t technically qualify as a word, since it consists of two interjections slapped together in a colloquial misalliance, like “oh yeah,” and “Bai Ling.” However, the resident expert informs me that this is a legitimate word, and Merriam-Webster agrees. I have been less prone to contradicting the Guy when it comes to vocabulary since he won the “argumentation” discussion. (Oxford English Dictionary verdict: real word, used only by the inhabitants of a small, inbred set of islands off the coast of France. Wankers.)

Hobbes’s adoption of the word comes about a week and a half after I spent two hours repeating the word at him whenever I had the chance. I set the bar low, I admit it. Since, at the time, he acted like he had the comprehension of your average pygmy seahorse, I hadn’t much hope that anything I did would penetrate. Apparently, it did — he just has a slow processor. Live and learn.

With that success under my belt, I’ve been trying to convince him to pick up a new word, and so far have narrowed it down to three. One of them is “entropy.”

I won’t tell you what the other two are. I’m hoping to surprise someone.

1. heights
   
2. gravity
   
3. concussions
   
4. spiders
   
5. loud jets flying very low overhead
   
6. angry dogs
   
7. strangers
   
8. motorcycles
   
9. blood
   
10. car accidents
    
11. explosions
    
12. sudden loud bangs
    
13. pain
    

Things that terrify Hobbes:

1. sand
   

There are times when I just have to wonder about boys and the evolution of the species. Survival of the fittest? Really?

This is like the conversation you get when you ask your husband, “Which one of these jeans makes me look fatter?” Normally the Guy is much more wily than this. I can only ascribe this uncharacteristic lapse on his part to lunar influences, the Republican Party and maybe Satan.

At one point during lunch today I glanced over at Hobbes to find him dangling over the edge of his high chair, his head hanging, his wee arms waving aimlessly. His toy was on the floor. Well, of course it was on the floor: he had thrown it there.

Since this was the third time I’d picked it up for him, I wasn’t what you would call moved by his loss. “Do you expect gravity to reverse itself?” I asked the back of his head.

His arms stopped waving for a few seconds. He contemplated the floor. “Meep,” he said. And then his arms started revolving again in a hopeless helicopter movement that was intended, I suppose, to Jedi mind-trick the rattle back into his hands. Considering it was only a few months ago that his arms grew long enough to reach the top of his head, I considered this optimistic at best.

I was reminded of nothing so much as the T-Rex from Meet the Robinsons.

For those who are wondering, I eventually retrieved it for him, only to watch him toss it onto the floor and stare forlornly after it yet again. He spent half of the meal like that, draped over the edge of his high chair and waving his arms around. It kept him entertained, at least.

The wedding yesterday was actually quite nice, and was in a beautiful location — the Auberge du Soleil in Napa — though far, far, far away. A two and a half hour car ride with an angry infant was not high on our list of things we wanted to be doing that day (or any day, let us be honest) but in fact it wasn’t as bad as all that. Hobbes slept peacefully for about an hour of the trip, entertained himself for another half hour, and since the car ride was broken up by a stop at a diner that did serviceable omelettes, I had no real complaint to make either.

He started screaming half an hour from our destination. You know the sound a dentist drill makes when it starts grinding through your teeth? This was worse.

Our trip back, being plagued by tourist traffic and insane, out-of-town driving — I naturally exclude us from that definition — was a lot more painful. The Guy, never the most forgiving of drivers to begin with, began huddling over the steering wheel with his shoulders hunched up around his ears, muttering things under his breath that Hobbes will be punished for repeating someday. Hobbes was by no means reconciled to being trapped in his seat, for that matter; he spent a good 40 minutes screaming as we inched our way into San Francisco.

We stopped by Japantown for a break all around, and found a J-pop festival going on. We were too frazzled to take pictures, although I wish I had; San Franciscans have their own sense of style, but Japan takes things to a whole different, weirder plane. The best I can do is link to pictures that I found online at carouselofcrowns, a blog that I know nothing about except that it showed up on my google search for that day.

Hobbes? He was happy as a clam in mud. The Guy and me? Enh. We ate a couple of crepes at the Kinokuniya mall, stared with great interest at the goth lolitas, and eventually headed home through still more traffic, a little over an hour’s worth of driving.

There was more screaming. I’m not entirely sure it was all from Hobbes. We arrived home a little over 12 hours from when we’d set out, collectively exhausted and piecemeal grumpy.

“And that,” the Guy said grimly, “is the last social commitment I’m making for a while.”

“We should buy plane tickets for Seattle next week,” I said. “For Mom’s birthday, you know.”

His mouth said, “Okay.” His eyes said, “I hate you.”

“I love you too,” I said.

“Jesus,” he said.

I have no feelings about Him.

For the record, we are all still exhausted.

In other news, Hobbes is starting to stand on his own for a good half-minute at a time. He is extremely pleased with himself when he does it, though I’ve been noticing that the size of his head often overbalances him.

It must be difficult to have your center of balance located between your ears.

Anyway, exposure to unnecessary information is not part of my mental diet. I reject it.

Moving on….

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I guess he is.

Isn’t that nice of him? What a sweet boy. Excuse me. I have to go to bed now.

“So’s John,” Sako said.

“He tries, but every time he fails. Like the time he brought me flowers on the back of his motorcycle and all the heads got ripped off by the wind–”

“John did that.”

“He did?”

“No, but it’s the kind of thing he would do.” She paused for thought. “Except that he wouldn’t buy me flowers to begin with.”

“Headless flowers.”

“You’re never going to let that go, are you? What’s it been, six years? Seven?”

“Anyway,” I said.

“Are you romantic?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with any of it.”

“Neither do I,” she confessed.

We’re neither of us romantic — the Guy and I, that is — at least with each other, though I suppose that begs the question who we would otherwise be romantics with. I have no answer for that. I suspect that both of us have silent yearnings towards self-expression in that direction, coupled with a deep-seated, insurmountable fear that we’ll be laughed at by the other party if we ever try to demonstrate it. Not an unfounded fear, truthfully; most of our relationship is based on mockery, laughter and nitpickery — the best foundation of any relationship being common ground, no matter what Dr. Phil may say — so it’s not unreasonable for the Guy to suspect if he brought me flowers and a box of expensive chocolates, I would point out that the flowers would just die and that I’m also a diabetic.

I satisfy my romantic cravings by reading Georgette Heyer novels in bed late at night. He satisfies his by playing Super Mario Galaxy on his Wii so he can save Princess Peach.

“You know what John would do?” Sako said. “He would fix the toaster.”

“So would the Guy,” I said.

“I would say on Sunday, I want toast, but our toaster’s broken, darn. And on Monday he would fix the toaster so I could have toast.”

“So would the Guy.”

“Except by then, I wouldn’t want toast anymore.”

“No. But it’s the thought that counts.”

“And that’s kind of sweet, right?” Sako said doubtfully.

“Right.”

“In a really dorky kind of way.”

“Yeah.”

We both fell silent for a moment. Then I ventured to ask, “Would he bring you the toast in bed?”

Sako looked thoughtful. “Is the bed broken?”

“No.”

“Then probably not.”

“The Guy might,” I suggested, though not, it should be noted, with any degree of optimism.

“John would fix the bed,” Sako said. “And that would be sweet.”

“Except that you sleep on the ground, in a sleeping bag.”

“He could fix the zipper, or sew a– he could fix the zipper.”

“And move some rocks around so you weren’t lying on them.”

“He could do that.”

“Our guys are such romantics,” I said.

Sako sighed. “And now I’m craving toast.”