Dadblog

one small step for [husband]

I drove the kids up to Connecticut to visit with my parents last weekend. Rachel has made this trip without me before, but this was my first long-distance drive without her since Lizzie was born. I came home from work by 5:30 and we waved bye bye to Mommy at 6:00. The DVD player was loaded up with Pee Wee's Playhouse Season 1 Disc 2 (episodes 6 through 10). Lizzie figured out how to scream at the secret word, which sounds ghastly but was actually pretty cute.

I put the question to the kids, did they want to eat early, or hold off until we got to the really cool McDonalds with the giant playland? Alex decided on the group's behalf that they'd all prefer to wait. She can usually talk Andrew into a better understanding of his so-called best interests. By the time we got through four episodes of Pee Wee and a smattering of old, public domain Popeye cartoons, we were at our preferred fast food restaurant.

The McDonalds 12 miles north of the Turnpike/Parkway interchange is where we usually stop to change diapers, change into pajamas and otherwise break up the trip. Alex asked me why we always stop there and I answered in my Tevya voice:

You may ask, "Papa, why do we always stop at this McDonalds?" And I'll tell you...I don't know. But it's Tradition!

After a very short meal, I set the kids loose in the playspace. They had it all to themselves, and they were so excited. Lizzie was the most ecstatic one of all. She didn't hesitate to climb to the very top chamber. When it was time to go, she came down the slide head first, on her belly, squealing with laughter the whole way. Except she didn't realize it was time to go and started screaming when I carried her out. Had she known, she would never have come down that slide and I would have had to go up in the tubes to extract her.

At 9:30 I insisted that the DVD turn off and demanded quiet for the rest of the trip. I put on WCBS news radio to discourage conversation. Everyone was asleep by 10:00 pm. My parents had to help carry in the older guys when I arrived at 10:45.

youth, hostile

As mentioned in a previous post, we're having our floors redone. This is a stinky process and we have been out of the house almost the entire time. Last night, we planned to be gone overnight while the polyurethane coating cured.

To celebrate our anniversary, Rachel and I stayed at a very fancy hotel downtown for a modest price last weekend. We thought we could spend even less to stay at a funky little suburban Marriott-style place midweek, but we were wrong. Philadelphia is crawling with conventioneering dentists this week. Every room in the area is booked.

We decided to try something a little unorthodox, a little less refined. Rachel made reservations with a hostel in Fairmount Park. It costs $50/night for a four-bed dorm room, sheets and towels extra. I thought, hey, a youth hostel. We'll meet lots of conversational youngsters from foreign countries, some of whom will issue open invitations to visit their parents house when we finally take that big family vacation to Europe. Surely there will be some friendly young frauleins who offer to watch the kids while Rachel and I play Scrabble and discuss politics with other guests.

We got there a little later than we intended, just in time to dump our bags in our third floor room and try to find dinner. I wanted Indian food (buffet = fast) but Rachel pointed out that everything would be too spicy for the kids. She suggested Larry's, the cheesesteak emporium I used to go to back when I was in college. It didn't sound great to me, but it had the advantage of being nearby, and it was already seven o'clock.

Larry's is about the same as I remembered it from 15 years ago. The dining room has been spiffed up with new furniture, and the Greek counter staff is now Arab, but the giant pile of sizzling sliced beef on the grill looks exactly the way it used to. The wait for our food took 20 minutes. I stood at the counter and watched the grill man chop and flip while Rachel shepherded kids in the back. Andrew fell in love with the arcade game, CarnEvil, a nasty piece of entertainment not intended for children. I would never have been able to stay away from it either if I was a four-year-old boy.

I told my story about how my classmate John ate two bellyfillers on a bet. (Download bellynotfull.txt ). Alex wasn't as impressed as I hoped. Andrew ate three bits and asked to be excused so he could shoot some more clowns. Lizzie ate some cheese fries and joined Andrew. It was amusing to see her hoisting her enormous purple gun.

Back at the hostel, we did not make contact with any engaging young people. Mostly we saw older, grubby guys staying at the cheapest bed in town. Perhaps some exciting guests were hosteling with us last night, but they were doubtlessly partying with the dentists in our vibrant city, not slumped on the communal sofa watching "George Lopez" on TV.

I shuttled up and downstairs with Alex and Lizzie, then just Alex, while Rachel tried to keep the bedtime process flowing. When I returned Alex upstairs after two games of Kings on the Corner, Andrew was asleep but Lizzie was lively. Rachel had her tucked alongside her in the single bed. She popped up and came to bring me some shoes she found on the floor. "Hi Daddy!" she crowed. I scooped her up and put her under the sheet with me. "Good night," I told her.

Rachel said, "Now she's going to stick her finger in your ear and say "shhhhh!!"

Instead, Lizzie twisted out of bed and strolled over to Andrew. "Hi Andoo," she cooed, stroking his hair. "Lizzie! No!" Rachel and I both whispered. Lizzie wandered over to talk to Alex.

At 10:30, she was still padding around. When I put her in her portacrib, she screamed. We were leery of disturbing the other guests, and even more leery of waking up Andrew, so we popped her out again and let her roam some more. Rachel eventually called her over and took her back in bed again. I fell asleep.

A short time later, Andrew rolled out of bed onto the floor with a giant crash. I woke up gibbering and disoriented, but he stayed asleep through the whole trip down. I picked up his inert form and tucked him back in his bed.

"You're not going to leave him there, are you?" asked Rachel from across the room. "He'll fall out again."

"But it doesn't seem to wake him up," I protested feebly.

"Bring him here," she said. "No wait, I'll just come there." She handed me Lizzie and crawled into Andrew's bed. I stood with Lizzie, rocking her gently. She was awake but not unhappy. I stashed her in her portacrib, covered her with a blanket and extinguished the nightlight. This time, the treatment worked and she didn't howl.

I woke up about ever thirty minutes. I had vivid children-in-mortal-danger dreams. My back was stiff. Lizzie cried out at 6:10 am, which is when I woke up for good. Andrew was up at 7:00 am and I went to take my shower in the communal bathroom.

Keeping Andrew and Lizzie at boarding-home-acceptable levels of quiet was not easy. Andrew's baseline voice is shouting, and he kept forgetting to whisper. Stoking little children's superegos is a tough business even when they're not tired, and Andrew and Lizzie could not summon the slightest concern for the needs of people sleeping in an adjacent room. At one point, Andrew started crying without any restraint. Lizzie had just put the wrong toothbrush cover on her toothbrush, and he was bereft.

Alex, who was awake and shivering under her sheet, made lots of sarcastic comments but had the grace to issue them sotto voce.

With what dignity we could muster, we crept out the main entrance as soon as the alarm was deactivated at 8:00 am. Andrew begged to go to breakfast at the store with the gun game. Rachel thanked me for not slinking out at 7:00 to catch a bus to work.

We have a reservation for tonight, but we're not staying.

on the road

We're on vacation - details and a humorous blend of wonder, wisdom and whining to be posted upon my return.

DC Part 4

A continuation of the Family Trip saga

Back in the room, we threw the suitcases off the cart and started looking in yesterday's pants pockets. We looked under the sofa. The kids were less than helpful, asking questions like "Does this mean we're going to have to stay here forever and ever?"

The last time I remembered seeing the keys, they were on top of the TV by the door. Lizzie had spied my keychain and wanted to play with it. Rachel and the kids had been at the pool, and I was going to give the baby her bath. I knew I had taken the keys away from her. I had also jammed the plastic no smoking sign in the door jamb so the rest of the family could get back in the suite when I had Lizzie in the tub. I was pretty sure that I had heard the shim fall to the ground when Rachel returned from the pool, but I still had a nagging fear that someone had lifted the keys while I was in the bathroom.

I went down to the parking garage and saw the car was still there, to my great relief. I returned to the room and found all our suitcases open, and Rachel pawing over them. The kids were fussing with their light-up space shuttles.

I looked through our possessions for the third time. I went down to the restaurant to check the booth where we sat. I returned to the garage and opened the car with my plastic wallet key (doesn't start the engine) to see if the key was on the seat. I sat inside the van, read the owner's manual section on missing keys, and contemplated a long and expensive train ride home.

Normally, Rachel carries her keys with her, but she had misplaced her set the day before we left and hadn't had time to search for them. I considered that our worst case scenario involved another day's hotel stay while I dashed home and back to get the valet key we keep in our house. With a grim face, I returned to the room to search under the bed some more.

It was 90 minutes from the moment we thought we were leaving the hotel until I found the keys behind the nightstand. I determined that I had dropped them on the nightstand next to my bed while I was removing Lizzie's swimsuit the night before. Oh, it's a great feeling to find missing car keys. It almost made up for the lost chance to see the Jefferson Memorial. (Between the undissipated stress and the baby's nap schedule, the morning was officially a wash.)

We drove home, stopping at a completely unremarkable civil war site off the George Washington Memorial Parkway to run around. Andrew didn't want to run very much - he said his legs hurt. All our gummi snacks were consumed by the time we crossed the border into Maryland. We stopped for a late lunch at the Joppatown Friendly's again, curious to see what our friends found so appealing. Rachel and I each had a cup of sodium chowder, and the kids had hot dogs and a blue drink that reminded me of window cleaner. Both adults were having a hard time with what we call travel food. The kids didn't seem to mind.

We continued to rush home, our deadline a 5:00 pm soccer game. We were running behind, so we didn't go home first. We made it to the field by 5:15 pm and found it deserted. We think it was a Passover cancellation, but there was no phone or e-mail message saying so.

Home by 6:00 pm, nothing in the fridge. We started unpacking and feeding the freaked-out cat. We dunked kids in the bath and got them ready for bed. While Rachel was toweling someone off, there was a knock on the door. It was the cat-sitter, feeling a nauseous wave of guilt about forgetting to feed Vinnie while we were away. We assured her that he was okay, but she still felt terrible. "What if he had had a diabetic event and died?" she asked, rhetorically. Rachel and I both assured her  that it would have been very convenient.

The next night, I went to the grocery store and bought the promised box of Lucky Charms. There are many indulgences that Rachel and I grant our children, but sugar cereal is one line we've never considered crossing. Thus, I had to bite back my urge to explain to the checkout clerk that I don't usually buy Lucky Charms and then tell her this whole four-part story.

Two days later, Rachel called me at work to say that she had found her keys in one of the van's hidden compartments.

road show part 1

We spent last weekend visiting Washington, DC. For the first time, we launched a major trip with no extended family involvement. In addition to being a lot of fun, the journey also served as a proof of concept - that we can go on vacation together and have fun, and that it would be sane to do this again in the future, perhaps on a larger scale.

We had originally planned to leave late on Friday morning, to avoid rush hour traffic and get some recreation time in the evening, but then Alex was invited to a birthday party that Rachel and I recognized as having critical social and political importance in the first grade. We reserve the right to make future decisions in the other direction, but this time we agreed to postpone the departure. We were kids once too.

On the advice of a friend who drives to Virginia frequently, we got off the highway in Joppatowne, MD to find the Friendly's restaurant there. Our friend said it's a good place to break up the trip. Because of slow traffic out of Philly, we didn't reach the Friendly's exit until about 7:30 pm. Our kids weren't starving because we'd been doling out snacks from the moment we left our street. (I had experimented by adding smoked mozzarella and proscuitto on Triscuits to the menu, but I was the only one who enjoyed it. The strawberries were a much bigger success.)

It turned out that the Friendly's is where Joppatowners go to celebrate the weekend, as it was packed solid. It didn't help that their computer was down, and all the checks had to be hand-tabulated. The manager, on his third day of employment, told us it would be about 15 minutes for a booth, but I overheard the back of the house staff threatening to quit that very second and figured it would be a little longer until we got our food. After Rachel and the kids came back from the rest room I leaned over the lectern, crossed my name off the reservation list and we got back in the van. We ended up buying Happy Meals from a drive-through as the quickest way to feed the kids. For our dinner, Rachel and I ate the grocery store sushi (brown rice California rolls, cucumber rolls) that the kids had rejected.

We rolled up at the Embassy Suites in Arlington at 9:30 pm. This was much later than we had aniticpated, but the kids were still in high spirits. I checked in at the front desk at the same time as the first of two middle school bands disgorged its busload of teenagers. "So I don't have to worry about my kids keeping the hotel up all night?" I asked the front desk clerk. He permitted himself a wry smile and said, "No, sir, I don't think so."

I went outside, helped the bellman stack our huge array of suitcases on the cart and drove off with the family into the underground garage. We rode the glass elevator up to our floor (a great reason to stay at the Embassy Suites with young kids) and moved into our suite. Alex and Andrew were just amazed at the splendor of a hotel room. "Look - TWO Teevees! And there's little shampoo bottles in the bathroom!" We unfolded the sofa bed for the big guys and started changing them into pajamas. The crib wasn't in the room yet, so we couldn't get them all asleep, and they were still wired anyway.

After twenty minutes, I decided I could call downstairs about the crib without sounding rude, and one appeared five minutes later. Alex wasn't very happy about sharing a bed with her little brother, who has a tendency to pivot through all angles of the clock while he's sleeping. Rachel and I ended up sitting in the room with them, in the twighlight of the nightlight we brought with us, severely shushing every whispered complaint. We had them asleep by 10:45 pm.

...TO BE CONTINUED...

Three is the magic number

We hit the road this past Friday evening and went up to my parents' house in Connecticut. We were off to a late start, and traffic was thick. Perhaps it was all the Canadians rushing north for Thanksgiving. We didn't clear the New York City area until 10:30 pm, and both Rachel and I were concerned about child behavior at the next day's wedding with such a late bed time.

Then it occurred to us that we could turn off the DVD player before we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa's house. The protest was surprisingly mild, and everyone in the back of the van was sleeping 15 minutes later.

The kids were fine for the wedding. I was so pleased that they had been invited. Andrew spent most of the afternoon parked directly in front of the band, watching the bass player with intense concentration. Alex found some other kids to run around with while I reconnected with dear friends.

I took the train to New York City to visit with still more high school friends at another party. Rachel took the kids back to my folks house. I had another series of joyful reunions, but also got a weird look at the parallel universe where I wasn't a dad. One friend is expecting a baby in December, but no one else at the party had kids. Many of them don't ever even see kids.

Rachel drove the kids to Brooklyn to pick me up the next afternoon. We were in a relatively family-friendly neighborhood, but didn't notice anyone with three children. Dinner was at a child-friendly restaurant but no other family had more than two children. After seeing two fairly representative apartments in two days, I can see why - there is no place to put them, much less their Happy Meal toys.

On our trip home, we made the mistake of trying to cross Manhattan to go through the Holland Tunnel. The trip across the island took 75 minutes - almost the entire screening of "Finding Nemo" - moving at an average of three miles per hour. Despite a forced potty break in the restaurant, all of our bladders were sorely tested. (One measure of maturity is how loud and often you complain about needing to pee.)

On this drive, we turned off the movies at 9:00 pm, and the kids again fell asleep shortly after.

scenes from the car

Alex: Andrew! Be quiet! Lizzie is sleeping!!

Andrew: But I want to TAWK!

Alex: SSSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Andrew: [spits] THBTHBTHBTHBTHBTHBTH!!!

Mom and Dad: Stop it, both of you!

Alex: Shhhhhhh.

Andrew: thbthbththbth.

Alex: Strike one!

Andrew: thbthbththbth.

Alex: Strike two!

Dad: Alex, you're not an umpire. What will you do if he strikes out?

Alex: Well, if he strikes out, I'm going to have to break the promise I made to kiss him every day for a whole month! Remember mom?

Mom: Uh...

Andrew: thbthbththbth!

Alex: Strike three!

Andrew: thbthbththbth!

Alex: Strike four!

Andrew: thbthbththbth!

Alex: Strike five!

Sub Argument()

dim lngStrike as long

lngStrike = 1
do until arrivehome
Andrew.print "thbthbthbthbth!"
Alex.print "Strike " & lngStrike & "!"
lngStrike = lngStrike + 1
loop

End Sub