out of the loop -- or thrown for one

the cover to carrie's blog.

this is my friend carrie and her daughter, julia.

i've known julia all her life and carrie, for about 13 years. (that's long enough to have gone from k through 12, isn't it?)

i remember when she started work at the paper and started dating my buddy, mike, and when they got married.

i remember when she, kris and i all moved down to charleston, s.c., to start new jobs, then when the three of us departed said jobs within weeks of each other not a year later as she and mike moved to florida and kris and i moved back to charley west.

i remember her and mike being our wedding sponsors. i remember later learning the day we got married was the day mike noticed a lump on his neck would turn out to be cancerous.

i remember visiting her and mike after we got married. mike was getting thin, but he was one being one brave dude. i remember when he died two years later.

i remember carrie missing west virginia in the fall from her florida home and when she moved back. i remember installing her dryer at her first house and again when she moved to a smaller townhouse.

i remember when she introduced me to a new man in her life, andrew. and i remember when they got engaged.

u-haul rental center, racine, ohio.

today, i helped her pick up a u-haul truck not far from ravenswood because the charleston rental office tried to pawn off on her one almost twice the size that she needed.

tomorrow, she, her little girl and fiance move to charley south.

i wrote a blog post a few minutes ago and linked to her blog and discovered that it had not been updated for nearly a year.

then i read her last entry and learned it was because it was her last entry.

originally entitled "a bowl of cherries," a play on her married name, it documented life with baby. then it became "just the three of us" maybe after mike first got diagnosed. now it has no name at all.

i don't remember checking on her blog much after mikey died. but with the last entry after she spread mike's ashes in the ocean, she writes of the story of their family:

So it seems fitting that our story will end here.
And while it didn't have the happy ending we wanted, our story had so much happy. So much happy.

when i went to her link after so long, i really expected that she would have continued documenting all this time how her life had advanced since mike passed.

but on the other hand, this was a new chapter in her life. maybe it should have its own home.

i began this post kind of lamenting the end of that blog because i really, really hate endings.

but as i write now, as carrie prepares to move to a new life in a new place, i think i can see that as much as you love your past and even your present, you have to keep moving forward.

this is life.

big friday

sometimes, it is the answer.

an eventful day.

made my first trip to ravenswood via a wrong turn en route to racine, ohio, to help our friend, carrie, pick up the right-sized u-haul truck for her move back down to charley south.

came back in time to interview an applicant for a job that will be opening up on copydesk.

followed that up with a haircut for me and the boy downtown. (he behaved fairly well in the chair. sort of runaroundy once he was let loose, but even then not out of control. seriously.)

then, as the boy and i were hanging out on the back porch and playing in the sand -- well, me enjoying a leftover beer, and him playing in the sand -- i get a text and a phone call and a, well, blockbuster that made me drink more beer.

needless to say, this will be continued.

not a bad week

the boy got his own shopping cart.

i know i'm inviting all manner of dreadful behavior, as every effort to document progress seems to be followed by moments, if not days, of epic back-sliding.

our approach to raising the boy these days seems to involve concocting strategies that play to the boy's strengths while attempting to mitigate his weaknesses.

a trip to the grocery store last saturday cost him -- and me -- dinner out with friends and their children when he failed to listen to his mom and generally made a loud and violent spectacle of himself, much to her mortified dismay.

he and i tried it again on wednesday -- a long and ambitious three-store run: pick up lysol concentrate at pile hardware, get a new faucet handle at lowes and fill mama's grocery order at the kroger store.

pile hardware was an in and out operation, including a few minutes trying out tractors and taking a whirlwind tour of the entire store.

i got ambitious at lowes, grabbing two bags of charcoal and a new charcoal chimney in addition to the handle. (i talked him out of sitting on their massive tractor displays by pointing out that the seats were all wet from being left out in the rain.)

kroger was the return to the scene of the crime. i recalled a conversation with my mom earlier in the week where she recounted how my youngest niece was proud to help my sister with her own little cart when they went out shopping.

i figured the boy likes pint-sized versions of chairs and tables and knew he wanted to walk on his own in the store. i figured he had a better shot at good behavior if we accommodated his desire with an actual responsibility of carting our groceries around the store. (no eggs or other breakables, naturally.)

ready to load the car.

he mostly stayed the course -- with some repeated orders from me to stay close and not run. the cashier and bag person were even kind enough to put a few purchases into his cart for the long trip to the car. (a journey in itself for an easily distracted lad.)

this week was mostly like that. give him pep talks. remind him of the ramifications of his actions -- in both rewards and punishments. and he mostly responded like a champ.

it will be a great day, though, when he learns to share with his sister both his toys and the spotlight of attention.

(a year-end school picnic gave his mom some reassurance that ours is not the only crazed 3-year-old boy in the city, as he alone seemed to obey his parent and behaved well at a local park.)

he did lose a playground visit today with mouthiness and swatting his mama while on his time-out stool. but a good nap and a long bath went a long way to making his afternoon non-eventful.

he's in line for a children's birthday party tomorrow. let's hope he can at least make it there.

progress

so the baby begins her ascent into becoming a person.

earlier this week, her mama sends me this:

Shit! (Baby) just got up on maroon couch by herself. And then tried to stand. (Effy eff eff eff)
— stuff kris sends (@textstogrumpnet) May 26, 2013

she's big on her "al-lo?" and, oddly, seems to have a handle on finishing songs -- especially the one from "wonder pets": "team-work."

as the video shows, the boy is not happy sharing the spotlight on growing up.

scenes from the boy's life

post-bath hair.

the boy's development is by turns exasperating and enthralling.

i thought i was hearing a flukey memorization of prayers from him this afternoon before his nap.

whenever i put him to bed, i've recited for him an old prayer to his guardian angel before leaving him to sleep. i've been doing it, i dunno, maybe since he got his big-boy bed? since he started becoming a terrible two?

regardless, today, he actually finished lines of it for me.

as i said, i thought it was a one-off fluke. i mean, i thought i'd heard it earlier this week, but was i sure?

then, as i said grace over dinner tonight, he did the same thing. and again with his prayer before bedtime tonight.

needless to say, kris and i are flummoxed by the whole metamorphosis. i mean, is this another example of his brain rewiring and more synapses connecting? or is this a set-up for a horrifying and dispiriting meltdown?

as with all things in our lives, we're expecting the worst and hoping for the best.

anyway, i started this thing pretty much just wanting to post a couple of videos of the boy from the past few weeks.

here, i just wanted a recording of his wee, unabashed voice. the bonus was the funny pronunciation of a character from disney's "monster's inc."



the next, the boy was watching the musical finale of bob the builder's "built to be wild." certain songs in his favorite shows inspire him to get up and move. (if you turn the volume up loud, you can hear the music in the background.)



as you can see, this one doesn't end particularly well. (he wasn't hurt -- or even embarrassed.) but he makes up for it here.

finally, i just kinda like the surprise in this one.



it's from the playground at sacred heart preschool.

i'm doing my best to keep record of him and his sister while they are still small. and they're growing like proverbial weeds.

may the good Lord bless and keep them both -- and guide their mommy and daddy to be good and wise parents.

recycling respectably

Recycling respectably, a photo by grumpnet on Flickr.

while maybe we should be more focused on digging ourselves out of our hoarder-lite house, we still do our best to keep recycling.

as the county center no longer accepts glass, we take our refuse to our local target store.

last week wasn't too bad because although we were taking in two shopping bags full of beer and wine bottles, they were in tidy white target bags.

today, the boy and i skulked in with unmatched sacks from kroger and cabela's.

it didn't help that i allowed the boy to "help" by dropping in the second bag into the receptacle -- doh -- which he released gracelessly atop the bag i'd carefully placed into the empty bin for maximum, checkout-line-attention-getting clinkage.

the only saving grace was that the cabela's bag had two wine bottles amid its collection of beer empties and the other held a bottle of olive oil -- organic, no less -- to go with its squad of dead lager soldiers.

so it's not like i'm enlisting my child's aid to recycle for a couple of total alkies or something, right?

Via Flickr:
Nice to mix in something respectable like olive oil to throw in with a bag full of beer bottles.

bar hoping

capitol street bar

went out to pick up an illegal bacon cheeseburger after first edition tonight and the warm, spring air and the just-so light at dusk reminded me of weekday nights out before the bad times and the publication shift.

weeknights on this street at the daily mail used to be the end -- or the middle -- of an evening begun in the late afternoon over rounds of beer after work. they could also mark the nightcap to a weeknight date.

this year marks 10 years since one of those nights when i was actively out dating -- or looking for someone to go out with. by the end of 2003, i was seeing someone steadily, unaware that i was days away from being blindsided by her. (i had gotten pretty good at breaking up with girls pretty fast up 'til then.)

for all intents and purposes, that was my last year as an uncommitted, single man. kris and i started going out after the surprise breakup, after the better part of a year being just friends in the gaggle of journo drinking companions. and, save for a 15-minute breakup, we've been together ever since.

those days seem so far away now, practically a lifetime ago. those were carefree times, living on a weekly paycheck and keeping fun company while hoping, praying and waiting for miss right to come along and make my happiness complete.

and sitting here typing -- tired, frazzled and waiting for sleep -- i think it more or less worked out that way. it's not anything at all like the scenario i imagined, but the vague yearnings of my younger days now have clarity and substance. and i'm pleased to see how it's turning out so far.

God bless us every one. amen and amen.

staying in the lines

looks more like coloring, less than scribbling.

just last sunday, watching the boy coloring, i began to wonder just when it was that kids stopped scribbling on a sheet and began trying to replicate what they saw -- red apples or yellow suns and the like.

then monday, kris sends me this picture: a brown monkey with his friend in the yellow hat sitting in front of a green bush.

kris tells me he asked her regarding subsequent coloring pages what color other things were -- minnie mouse's bows, for example.

i showed our graphic artist this image and one from another tweet, which impressed him. "i think you've got an artist on your hands," he said.

as a sunday school teacher, he says he doesn't see that level of ability until a kid turns six or so.

this made me happy that the boy might be ahead of his years developmentally speaking, but also made me wary that these things usually don't come without a cost.

my enthusiasm was tempered by reports from his preschool teacher just the week before of shouting and defiance toward his instructors and aggressive behavior to his classmates.

stopping to sniff the shrubbery.

we're not sure what it is at the moment -- his being a brat, for one, or suffering the side-effects of foods that make him crazy, or child-rearing strategies that are simply ineffective or wrongly applied.

then there's the scary stuff, like psychological issues, that turn a sweet, bright, happy boy into a manic, disagreeable, exasperating one.

this is the dark, shadowy part of the parenting adventure you hope you can bypass.

i hope and pray it is just deeply shaded section of our path that we are merely passing through and not the entrance into a root-strewn, winding darkness that we will stumble through for the rest of our journey.

crazy baby

Guitar face, a photo by grumpnet on Flickr.

the girl has been fighting, fighting, fighting her naps for about a week now.

which wouldn't be bad if she weren't so noisy.

one nap she fended off last week devolved into going to her sleeping brother's room and pounding on the door.

and then this, last night while the boy was supposed to be down for the night:

Trying to get boy down but (baby) is in there SINGING at the top of her lungs.
— stuff kris sends (@textstogrumpnet) May 6, 2013

(kris said it was both elmo's song and the wonder pets' "teamwork" song. while she was exasperated, kris did admit she was also impressed with the baby's good rhythm.)

seriously, this kid is out of control. we're not sure if it's illness, pollen allergies or teething, but we hope this phase passes real soon.

mass times

cleaned up after the face plant.

last week, i had to leave mass early for the first time since i started bringing the boy to church.

it was noon and he'd been up for a while and he was more squirrelly than usual. the kicker came after the offertory and he just laid out on the kneelers. he never does that. he was put into the car kicking and screaming.

we went at nine today and, while he was not exactly sitting still, he was mostly quiet, save for the whispered running commentary on his kids meal toys' movement in the pew. (that ended after i gave him a reporter's notebook and a pencil.)

as promised, we headed out for the playground at the adjacent pre- and grade school and had the bonus of getting to play in the fountains at the entrance courtyard on the way.

he did pretty good with the running around except for slipping on the steps of the big playset and landing on his face. he was running too fast, slipped and -- bam -- was sprawled on the landing, screaming and crying and, oh, look, bleeding.

like a good dad, i was looking at my phone for pictures of him to send to his aunt while following him up the steps when all this happened.

i tried to calm him down and hold his head back while i applied pressure to the side of his nose until the bleeding more or less stopped.

i don't think he likes the sight of his own blood. (he may have said "i'm bleeding, i'm bleeding," but maybe i'm getting confused.)

he recovered quite nicely. within minutes, actually, and was back to running around like a madman. slightly chastened with a nice fat lip, but a madman nonetheless.

welcome to the jungle.

we spent about an hour and half at the playground, the fountains and the meditation garden he likes to call "the jungle."

he didn't fight going back to the car for home and polished off the last third of a bottle of water on the drive back. (btw, he has also gotten tall enough that he can now reach wheelchair accessible water fountains without my help. a lot of the water wound up on the front of his shirt before we headed to the jungle.)

apparently, the morning tired his ass out, because he took a nap with no fuss after lunch. (he snarfed down his turkey burger and his spinach-carrot "milkshake" cleverly disguised as a peanut butter-banana smoothie. as kris says, "thank God for patterned, covered drinking cups.")

unless kris tells me of a bad night, i'll call this a good day.

local service

colonial exxon, south hills, a photo by grumpnet on Flickr.

noticed kris' car had a flat on thursday. i knew where i was going to get it fixed even before i changed the tires.

the flat-tire culprit.

it's one of the last full service gas stations i know of in the city, with three garage bays and free air.

they even offer free bottled water for an 8-gallon purchases of gas. (yeah, yeah, i know. but i always grab one when i fill up, anyway.)

the staff is friendly and knows its way around cars. i'd trust them for just about any routine auto maintenance.

i hope it being in the tonier part of town will keep it in business for as long as we live here. i'm going to do my part to keep this disappearing piece of americana alive.