A Few Nursery Pics

I'm really sort of a huge dork about this. Lately I have only one default topic of conversation. I can't even go to the town dump without rambling to the dump guy that the reason I'm bringing three carloads of cardboard to be recycled is that my wife and I are expecting our first child, and we just had the shower, and we just finished setting up the nursery…

Speaking of which, the nursery is all set up now! In keeping with the storybook theme we framed the covers of some of our favorite children's books growing up and spent a Saturday hanging them all just right. The final step was putting up the ceiling fans that we bought two years ago and never got around to putting up until just now. My wife's cousin and her husband came over so he could help we with that and what should have been a simple 30 minute task ended up stretched into almost seven hours between Home Depot selling me the wrong equipment and our house's Kafkaesque wiring set up.

But I'll save the details of that for when I launch the Electrician Blog and Grill. For now, I wanted to share some of the pictures my wife took of the end result. So here you go, assuming I'm adding them to this correctly:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hey, it worked! Pretty cool, huh?

So, just some other thoughts, now. My favorite thing about this upcoming election – which is to say, the only thing about this election that doesn't make me want to barf myself to death – is that now that we're in the final weeks leading up to it, any story about it that I read online or hear on the radio is going to include some variation on the phrase, "With only twenty days left," or however many days are actually left. And for me, this has become (close enough) to a countdown to Donovan, too, since our due date is just one day after the election. 

Obviously the accuracy of this countdown is a bit dubious, but it's nice how quickly my internal monologue can shift from, "Grrrr, Trump," to "Oh yeah, Donovan's almost here!"

Last night I dreamed that we found out that the previous predictions and ultrasounds were wrong, and that we're having a girl instead of a boy. Kaite was so disappointed! So many of my dreams lately – the ones I can remember anyway – have involved either Donovan or my own father. My subconscious is rarely so… unsubtle.

Anyway, I'll leave you as always with Jeff's Dad Joke of the day. This is a good one, my favorite knock-knock joke of all time.

Q: Knock knock!

A:

Actually I realized this doesn't really work without you here to participate. That's too bad. Sorry for the disappointing end to this blog post. For what it's worth, it was Interrupting Cow. I was going to tell Interrupting Cow. If you don't know Interrupting Cow go ask your dad. He'll let you.

See you next week!

Bye!

 

A Most Happy Anniversary

Just a short, belated entry today in acknowledgement and celebration of the 356 days that have passes since my fiancée stopped being my fiancée and started being my wife! (Belated, I mean, in the sense that I've been trying to post these every Sunday and now it's Tuesday. I'm not late for my anniversary, which is today! Which is Tuesday. Not Sunday)

I simultaneously cannot believe that it's only been a year and also that a year has gone by so fast. 2016 will be remembered for many terrible things – all the best celebrities dying, the bitter divisiveness of this election, a terrible Walking Dead finale – but I will always remember it fondly as our first year of married life, as well as the year we welcomed a new life into ours. Assuming, of course, that Donovan isn't born two months late.

And how wonderful to be expecting a child at this point! This is the only anniversary we'll ever spend that it's just the two of us. In a way our child like this date is a celebration of our union, a new and unique human being made of equal parts her and me, who wouldn't even exist on earth or anywhere but for our love.

So, happy anniversary, Kaite! The only thing I'm more excited about than celebrating out past year is thinking about the many, many years yet to come!

Showertime!

So, our baby shower was yesterday!

It was a great time, though I suppose I would have enjoyed it a little more if I hadn't been quite so exhausted from staying up late the night before to finish putting together the crib. It's worth it though; there's a certain pride of ownership that comes from having built it myself. Even if it is a pretty steep down from my grandfather's days, when he would actually go into the forest, track a tree back to its lair, shoot it, and drag it back home to do whatever it is you do to turn a tree into furniture. 

No, all I had to worry about was a set of needlessly dense instructions (Step One: Insert tab A into slot B. Step Two: Do literally everything else) and an absolute mis-labeling of every single piece of hardware it came with. 

Anyway, the shower was great; the cake had a squid on it, which is significant if you know that the giant squid is my spirit animal. It had a storybook theme, so instead of cards folks brought a copy of their favorite book growing up and wrote a little inscription. So Donovan has an instant library, which is good because I'm probably going to spend about 78% of my time reading to him. Between everyone who came we got a good mix of old classics I remember from my childhood as well as more titles that will be just as new to me as they will be to Donovan.

The theme extended to the décor, with classic storybook covers framed around the room (and even the cover of my own first novel, Soapy Animals, among them! Although, just to clarify, it is very much not a children's story) and little bags of gummy "bookworms" on every table. When Donovan finally shows up in a few weeks, he'll be well-equipped to begin a lifelong love of literature!

It was great seeing everyone, and we got just about everything we needed, especially onesies. We got so many onesies, they probably add up to about a fifty-sevensie! (That counts as your dad joke of the day, by the way.) Of particular note was the little tiny Hawaiian shirt my mother got for him, an almost perfect match for one of mine, and the set of baby sandals with a pair of baby white socks. (I make no apologies for my love of this particular footwear combination, and it's nice to know that even before he learns to walk my son will quite literally be following in my footsteps.)

Anyway, I've been thinking about my own father a lot lately, naturally, and one of my earliest memories from when I was a real little kid is watching some of his favorite movies – which would, of course, go on to be some of mine. Enemy Mine, The Big Chill, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Man, I loved watching those Nazi faces melting off! 

At the time, I just thought he wanted to watch some awesome movies and I just happened to be there so I watched them too, and over the years I never even thought to question that assumption. But as I get closer and closer to having my own son I realize that he was, in fact, sharing his favorite movies with me – he wanted me to see them. I know it seems so obvious in retrospect, but when I think about it I start to consider all the things I want to share with Donovan, eventually.

So I'm starting a new semi-regular feature in this blog, which I'm calling, "A list of some of the things I want to share with my son, eventually, when he gets old enough for each of them." (I'm not very good with titles.) I don't even mean just movies, or books, but experiences that I think should be universal across childhood.

The other day when I was taking the pup for a walk I saw an enormous woolly bear caterpillar crawling across the driveway. It put me in mind of my youth, catching woolly bears in the tall grasses just outside the greenhouse, building a nest for them in a glass jar using twigs and leaves, watching it build a cocoon and then rushing home every day from school to see if it had emerged. And then, that bittersweet joy of seeing it as a moth and setting it free.

Okay that's it! See you next week!