Quick Hitters

I.
It takes a while to get to know a little baby. J gets a chance to acquaint herself with Owen about every three hours, because he needs to nurse. She gets to look at him and talk to him, and give him another chance to memorize her face and voice. She talks about his personality and some of his mannerisms which I haven't noticed.

I was sort of excited when he woke up early yesterday. It was about 6:30, and I was just going down to the basement to practice (muted, of course) when I heard him squawk on the baby monitor. I made my upstairs, stepped carefully across his dark room, and reached into the bassinet. He was whimpering, and his arms were out of his swaddle. I picked him up, cradled him, and brought him downstairs to my desk.

As soon as I sat down in the chair he sneezed violently once, twice, three, four, five, six times. Then he looked up at me, saw my face, and gave me a grin that took up his entire little face. I smiled back, overjoyed. He wiggled in my lap, eyes bright and fat cheeks dimpling.

And then he started shrieking and crying inconsolably, and couldn't be calmed down until J came downstairs. He's getting to know me too, and yesterday he might have figured out that I can't feed him.

II.
James is into the Little Critter books, by Mercer Mayer. Only, since he can't say his "L" or "R" particularly clearly, we hear a lot of this: "Daddy, you wanna wead Widdew Qwiddew?" They are short and cute, and he likes to find all the little hidden treasures in the illustrations, like the mouse or the spider. And, they aren't G-E-O-R-G-E, which is a nice break for us.

The first one he got into was Just Go To Bed, down at the Davis house. Then we brought him back a copy of The New Baby, right around when Owen was born. We read those a lot, because whenever James adopts a book we read it until he has it memorized. And then we read it some more, so that he can recite along with us and correct any mistakes we might make.

It turns out we have a Widdew Qwiddew collection. There are SEVEN stories in that book, as James will happily tell you. The first morning James found it he cajoled J into reading it 4 times. That's a lot of Little Critter stories. I congratulated her on reading to James for 2 hours instead of giving him the 2 hours of TV time that so many three year olds get, but I'm not sure that Little Critter is that much deeper than a half hour of PBS. Anyhow, if you're over visiting and James asks you to read the "Big Widdew Qwiddew" you might want to head for the hills.

III.
We took down all the Christmas stuff. As I drove away this morning I saw the tree sitting out on the curb with the rest of our trash, which is always a sad sight. The living room looks a little bare, to be honest. I got used to seeing the stockings hung up, and there's a little less color in the downstairs. On the other hand, I was SO excited to have appropriate storage space for our Christmas boxes. (Between the tree stand, the small fake tree, the ornaments, and the nativity set, there are now several.) At any other living situation the Christmas boxes were the most buried an inaccessible. In North Carolina they behind several other boxes above a shelf. At St. Vivian's they were in a cramped basement storage room, which was probably the best arrangement for them. On Washington Street they were at the very bottom of the small closet area of our laundry room, which meant that I had to unpack every other box in the closet and crouch down under the stairs to excavate them and then put them away. (The putting away is the tiresome part...at least you're excited for Christmas when you get them out.) At Clover Park we had then buried somewhere deep in the storage unit, down two flights of stairs and padlocked. This year I climbed my ugly aluminum ladder and put the boxes in the overhead storage in the garage, stowed away safely and neatly, but easily accessible if I needed to get to them and with no extra lifting or stacking.

Of course, as soon as I put them away we find two other ornaments and the leftover wrapping paper. But it was easy to set up the ladder again and go get the box.

But when we found another lost ornament I decided it was too cold to go out in the garage again. We'll see how long that red bulb sits on my desk.

IV.
There are several things that are lost at our house. We bought a stud finder when we moved, and that was an important purchase. For two people whose livelihood depends on analyzing minute variations in pitch, J and I had absolutely no luck locating studs in the walls by the tap and listen method. But that wasn't a problem for us at the old apartments. If the walls aren't yours, you don't feel bad about drilling another hole and just covering up the bad one with the other side of the shelf.

When it's your own house you want to find the stud on the first try. Our stud finder, however, seems to have walked off. I can't remember whether we put up the big mirror in the bedroom or the dining room shelf last. Either way, it didn't end up back in either of my toolboxes or J's. I have a vague image in the back of my memory of James holding the stud finder and using it as a train. I think I was holding Owen at the time. I asked him whether he knew where it was, and he told me he wanted to read a Widdew Qwiddew. He isn't very helpful sometimes. I looked in closets, drawers, and cupboards. No luck. But it has to be somewhere in our house. At any rate, now we'll have two.

J and I both feel like we've looked at it. We've seen it SOMEWHERE. We've also seen the spare exterior light cover SOMEWHERE. We know we've both looked at it. The front facade of our house doesn't look great anyway, and the bare light bulb beside the door was starting to bug me. I remember seeing the cover in a closet, or maybe in the basement, and thinking "you need to go mount that." We think maybe it ran away with the stud finder, though, because three days of looking has produced neither.

James added his own lost item to the list. The sixth (of the seven, not that I'm counting) Little Critter book is about how the Critter can't find his baseball mitt, and he ends up getting it back in the end once he cleans his room.

"James, do you have a messy room?"
"Nope."
(He does)
"Do you think you might find some good things if you cleaned in your room."
"I wanna read more Widdew Qwiddew."

After we read the Baseball Mitt story, James wanted to find his own.

"Daddy, where my baseball glove?"
"I don't know. Is it in your wagon?"
"Nope, it's not in my wagon."

We looked all over his room, without success.

"Do you think your baseball mitt might be behind your bed, just like Little Critter's?"
James rolled his eyes.
"It's not a baseball mitt, it's a baseball GLOVE."

Oh, I stand corrected.

We found it eventually, in his closet. And then he wanted to read more Little Critter. I started to read:

"I couldn't find my baseball glove anywhere--"
"No, no, he doesn't have a baseball glove, he has a baseball MITT!"