Evening out

There's a time when you just stop going to sit-down restaurants with a baby. It becomes easier to not deal publicly with the possibility that she will refuse to eat, scream at you, or poop her pants.

Then months pass and you finally do take the child to a proper restaurant again. The woman in black pants leads you to a table and someone brings you a glass of water, and you feel like a high roller. The laminated menu feels classy and sophisticated, like a British waiter.

"A basket of bread? Yes indeed, my good man. A straw for my water glass? Well let me see...I would love a straw!"

And you pray your kid behaves herself.

Twenty-five seconds after we sat down, Lyla had extracted every piece of gum from the pack I gave her. Julie handed her an empty bottle of hand sanitizer from her purse. Lyla knew just what to do with it.



She pretended to reapply and re-scrub about 37 times, like a cheerful germaphobe.

Time passed. Food arrived and slowly disappeared. Then Lyla and Julie walked around the restaurant while the waitress boxed our leftovers and I paid the bill. Ho hum. No big deal. Just a regular evening out with the family.

Conferences...again

I am sitting here once again at parent/teacher conferences. Six weeks remain before summer vacation. All of my students have approximately the same grades they always have, and parents can access all grades online. Therefore, there are only two logical reasons why a child's parents would show up to talk to me tonight.

1. They want to thank me and give me a present.

2. They feel they should apologize for their child. And give me a present.

Five minutes have passed. I just told a lovely Midwestern couple that their son continues to earn an A in my class, as he has all year. He is delightful, so obviously they had nothing to apologize for. Nor did they bring me a present, however, so the conference accomplished nothing.

Oops, just had another one, another lovely Midwestern couple whose daughter has a B+, has always had a B+, and likely will continue to maintain a B+ through graduate school. Again, there was no present.

I need three wooden boxes with slots on the top: "Apologies," "Gratitude," and "Gift Cards." Then I'll set a cardboard cutout of myself in the chair and go home to my daughter, who will never be exactly this age again.

Later at home:

Being mean

Lyla has smart teachers and dumb teachers. I'm not being mean; it's just the way it is. Lyla hasn't been herself since about Saturday, so yesterday when I picked up the sniffling, out-of-sorts child, I asked one of the dumb teachers if she had noticed anything unusual. She answered with a series of statements that sounded like questions.

"Yeah, um, not really? Lyla just, you know, seems more fussy? But she was fine today...just a little fussy?"

"So you didn't notice anything out of the ordinary." Lyla began to whine and ask for her mama.

"Um? I mean, not really, you know, just a little fussy?" The woman's eyes began to glaze over as though she had forgotten she was alive.

"Okay." I moved with Lyla to the door, and the smart teacher called after me.

"Lyla didn't have a BM all day today. And she barely ate."

I glanced at the dumb teacher, who briefly interrupted her standing coma to offer me a shrug.

So this hot mess of a child was a hot mess because of her inability to create a hot mess in her pants. That would suck. The problem continued last night and this morning, so this afternoon when I picked up Lyla again, I walked with her right past the dumb teacher to the smart teacher, who took one look at me and said, "At 11:15 it all came out."

"Dude," I said. "Was it pretty intense?"

"Ah, yes. The pants she arrived in are in a baggy in her cubby."

I thanked her, and Lyla and I strolled away. "Bye bye?" said the dumb teacher to the backs our heads. Lyla turned around and waved. I love that kid.

Deliverance

Lyla loves this tunnel because it reminds her of being born.




She's very uneasy about grass, does not want to touch it with her hands. She must have heard the phrase "blades of grass" and thereafter associated it with knives. "Stay away from knives, Lyla! They'll slice your fingers into blood-spurting knuckle-stumps! Now crawl to Dada through those blades of grass."


I tried to convince her as gently as I could that she was being a prissy little girl, a strategy that could not have been less effective. So I reached in and pulled her out, and once again the wiggling, crying child found herself delivered into the great shining world.

Mondays

Mondays are always a little rough.

Not with a fox, not in a box

This morning Lyla would pull a book off the shelf, stand on it, and look at Julie while smiling devilishly. It reminds me of The Breakfast Club when Bender began de-alphabetizing the card catalog.

In other news, if you ask Lyla a question, she will say "Yeh" unless she is certain the answer is no.

"Lyla, are you going to see Auntie Lori today?"

"Yeh."

"Do you like monkeys very much?"

"Yeh."

"Is it time to go nigh-night?"

"Yeh."

"Will you please drink some apple juice?"

"No no."

She is maddeningly stubborn when it comes to juice. If she gets an upset stomach and needs a break from milk, then lots of luck to you.

"Just one sip of delicious juice, Lyla."

"No no."

"See, Daddy likes it. Gulp gulp gulp. Want some?"

"No no."

"Would you drink it with a fox? Would you drink it in a box?"

"No no."

"Can I have a million dollars?"

"Yeh."

Talking about weeding

Julie: I have to go outside and weed.

Dan: What do you have to weed? Stowies?

Julie: Shut up. You're helping me.

Dan: You can't weed by yowself? Awe you illitewate?

We have a healthy marriage.

Nobody ended up weeding today. Luckily for me and luckily for the weeds, Julie talks about weeding more than she actually weeds.

It does beg the question, though, of how we will entertain a toddler while managing to keep our yard and garden areas from looking condemned. I don't remember last summer. I think we just stuffed Lyla in a papoose or something and harvested our corn or whatever. What do we do now that she can run?

Wishful thinking

This photo makes Lyla look like a down-and-out milkaholic.

Lyla used to call every Sesame Street character Elmo, and recently she calls every color red. Makes sense: try to learn a language from scratch, fully immersed, and you'll screw stuff up too.

Lyla has a boyfriend at daycare who is named Everett. The other day when Julie dropped her off, she ran up to Everett and his mom, pointed at him and said "Ev-et!" We'll have to teach her about playing hard-to-get.

Lately, she calls all of her friends Ev-et. It's weird because she knows lots of the kids' real names. She knows there's only one Everett.

Clearly, she wishes there were more.

Surprised

Lyla's a baller.

We had to rename the "Happy/Mad" game; now it's "Happy/Mad/Surprised." Whenever she gets mad in the car about something cracker-related, I say "Lyla, art thou mad?" and she immediately stops crying and says "Hah-peh!" and makes a goofy face. Then she does the surprised face without provocation, and I have to remember I'm driving and should probably watch the road.

In other news, one mannerly act that Lyla hasn't mastered at daycare is staying seated at lunchtime. She'll see a shiny object somewhere and take off after it. Then, according to Lyla's teacher, the more senior members of the class shout "Lyla Lou, get back here!"


Where the "Lou" came from, I have no idea, but learning of Lyla's new middle name made me feel like this:

Pancake paint

I took Lyla to Starbucks this afternoon because our kitchen was being painted. Paying someone to paint your kitchen: cheaper than you'd think, and worth every penny. So here's the terrible photo I took with my phone.


I bought some whole milk for Lyla, a tea for me, and a piece of pumpkin loaf to share. She sat next to me on a cushy chair, her feet dangling barely past the cushion, and we ate the loaf and drank our respective beverages. It was like we came unstuck in time and zoomed forward to summer vacation.

Here's a slightly better photo.


Then we met Julie at Potbelly (a sandwich chain that gives you a potbelly if you eat there too much), where Julie ordered a salad with 7,259 grapes in it. Lyla ate every single one. We generally cut grapes in half for Lyla, but tonight when she got her fingers around a whole one, she politely bit it in half. Still, whole or halved, I think of grapes as a choke food, so I keep my Heimlich fist always at the ready.

Back at home, the painting dude was done. The color is monroe bisque, which looks exactly like pancake batter. It's hella-boring, but on pancake night it might compel us to hand over the batter beater to Lyla and let her go nuts.

Cracker misconduct

In the daycare parking lot when I extract the Ritz crackers from their plastic shield, I say to Lyla, "How many crackers?"

"Doo!" she says and raises both index fingers.

But this afternoon while we drove home, Lyla got her crackers confiscated for various offenses. Mainly it was that she was rubbing them together so vigorously that it created a cracker crumb storm, not unlike what happens when Edward Scissorhands carves ice sculptures.

She also clapped them together several times like chalkboard erasers, at which point I morphed into the archetypal dad who drives and simultaneously reaches into the backseat to discipline the child. "No more crackers."

"Caca!" she said happily.

"No caca."

"Caca."

"No caca."

The conversation continued without variation for half a mile. Then it occurred to me that I could give Lyla one cracker instead of two, and everyone would be happy.

I handed back one half-demolished Ritz.

"Caca!"

Now I'll have to teach her a new answer to the cracker question.

"Okay Lyla, how many crackers?"

"One. And then later, one more."

Might take awhile.

Breaking up

Lyla is reading Elmo's 12 Days of Christmas, otherwise known as the most annoying book to read in April. It's a leading contender for December, too.

This afternoon I had a secret rendezvous at Lyla's new daycare to turn in the paperwork and deposit check. She'll start there two days a week in the middle of June. We still haven't told Lyla's current daycare that we met someone new, had an affair, and are packing our bags.

Julie's making me tell them. I don't mind at all; I've never broken up with somebody for somebody else. It was always "Let's see other people" but without the vaguest notion of who the "other people" would be. Plus I was always faithful to even my cruelest, most incompatible girlfriends, so it'll be titillating to say "We've been cheating on you with another daycare."

I wonder if the director will cry. I'll be sure to say to her, "It's not us, it's your insane prices." I hope there will be some Jerry Springer elements. Maybe she'll throw a stapler at me.

The monkey exhibit

This was 11 months ago.


This was today.


More from today:








Later Ava came over.



It turns out we have a lot in common.

Black diamond

Our friend Luke took this photo. What do you even say about it? It's so cute that I feel like a big ugly ogre by comparison.

After a late afternoon nap failure, we took Lyla to the Hyland Play Area, which locals refer to as Chutes and Ladders.


We spent an hour playing on the age-appropriate apparatuses, at which point I decided Lyla was more than ready for the black diamond.


Really, she was just my excuse to go down it myself. Ignoring the fervent protests of her mother, I hiked Lyla up the mountain of steps, got in line behind some pint-sized adrenaline junkies, and finally hefted myself into the tube of death, Lyla on my legs. It was faster than when I was a kid, probably because my receding hairline makes me more aerodynamic. At the bottom, I turned Lyla around and discovered her grinning and saying "More."

So we did it more. Clearly the child has an appetite for things that are bitchin'. And after watching us for three runs, Julie with her healed neck developed an appetite of her own.


The little blond girl was unharmed.

Cracker packs

There's a basket of assorted individually wrapped cracker packs as you exit daycare, and Lyla's daily cracker pack selection is, to her, a matter of global importance. There is not another act in her day into which she puts more time or thought. "Just one," I tell her when her fists finally reveal Ritz and graham to be the two finalists. After several minutes of careful deliberation, she opts for Ritz.

Once she's strapped in her car seat, I pry the still-wrapped cracker pack out of her mouth as she says "Caca! CACA!" I explain to her that the pack contains two crackers and that once she has eaten the two crackers, the crackers will be all gone, so therefore crying for more crackers will be futile, not to mention distracting to Dada as he drives the car.

"Lyla, please summarize what I've just said."

"CACA!"

When we arrive home, Lyla runs to the kitchen and knee-slides to the fridge, her mouth dry with cracker crumbs, and becomes the poster child for a "Got Milk" ad.



And yes, daycare rounded out theme week with pajama day.

Wacky day

It's another theme week at daycare. Monday was sports day (see Lyla's Minnesota-inappropriate Celtics t-shirt a couple posts down); Tuesday was beach day (she wore a sun dress but was already in pajamas at picture time); and yesterday was costume day (the homemade flower that devolved into the Jello-ketchup flower).

Today is wacky day. Our strategy: "Dan, just pick an outfit."

On non-wacky days when I pick the outfit, Julie changes it to prevent Lyla from looking obnoxious or like a boy. So today I just put Lyla in the articles of clothing most commonly and/or violently rejected by Julie. Then I added a skirt. It did look wacky.


Downstairs, Julie threw out her neck in the shower. I believe she was reenacting the Herbal Essences commercial where the woman is so excited by the smell of the shampoo that she starts dancing and whipping her head around in ecstasy. Then she spends the rest of the day in her bathrobe, barefoot in the meadow, eating yogurt.

Julie came out of the bathroom moving like the 90-year-old version of herself.

"Huuuuuuh," she said.

"Huh?" I said.

"Huuuuuuh."

So I drove Lyla to daycare because Julie wouldn't have been able to lift her.

"Hey, you remembered wacky day," was how Lyla's teacher greeted me.

I played dumb. "Wacky day?"

The poor woman's face turned cherry red as she looked again at Lyla's outfit, then at my furrowed brow, then back to Lyla. I took pity on her and told her I was kidding. It was wacky.

Then I left and called Julie, who had decided that Advil, ice, and going to work was the proper regimen for her neck injury. "If all else fails, I can lie down on the floor during my meetings."

That's wacky.

Before and after

That flower design is a Julie original. It's fleece and ribbon and thread. She's like Martha Stewart without the cooking or felonies.

So of course she took these photos this morning because you never know what kind of shenanigans Lyla will get into at daycare.

This afternoon when I entered Lyla's classroom, the kids were singing a song that urged everyone to shake, shake, shake their sillies out and wiggle all their worries away. But as Lyla saw me and subsequently bull-rushed me, I couldn't help but worry a little. It turns out that the day's shenanigans were profound: ketchup and Jello.



When Julie got home, she asked if they had actually dipped Lyla in Jello. I said it was tough to know for sure.

Frog tat

"Um, what the hell is that?" I said to Julie.

"Language. What the 'H' is what?"

"That."


"Oh my God," she said. "Is that a tattoo of a frog?"

"Language."

"What? What did I say?"

"God."

"Fog," Lyla chimed in, redirecting us.

"Yes, that's a frrrog," Julie said.

"Fog!"

"Just don't pronounce it frag," I said.

"Why not?"

"Never mind."

The dilemma with the frog tat is that Lyla got a bath last night, so she's not scheduled for another one until, like, May. So what will her teachers think, day after day, when they see no change at all in the frog's luster? Oh gosh, darn it to heck, are these people secretly testing us? Are they seeing which kids turn out to be the biggest dirtballs?

I know that's really stupid. Still, I scrubbed that frog until it was a ghostly green smear.

Requesting a fork

Lyla was certain her pasta was too hot ("HAH! HAH! WAAH!") even though it was as tepid as anything served on Delta Airlines. I think she's teething, and based on the intensity of drooling, sucking, and fussing, I'd say we're looking at upper and lower canines, molars, and four impacted wisdom teeth.

So it became a dinner of pears.



And in other news, I've been very careful when teaching Lyla the word "fork," over-elongating it so it sounds like "fohrrrk." You don't want the kid sitting at the lunch table at daycare requesting a fuck. Just saying.