Austin360 blogs > Bottlecaps & Wingnuts > Archives > 2008 > May
May 2008
Summer photos No. 1
We went to visit the grandparents near Starrville over the holiday weekend. It was a good visit, and I’d detail it, but right now the boy is standing in his crib hollering because he figures that nodding off in the stroller for 10 minutes is all the nap he needs.
Rrrrrrgh.
My parents figured a little pool would be entertaining …
The boy was apprehensive about it, though.
Seriously. And the written instructions listed 5 rules for using the pool. The first of which was “for children 2 years or older” despite the fact that the brand name was “My First Summer.” And the last 2 rules both pointed out that you shouldn’t dive into about half a foot of water.
A little dirt on the face, I think he’s ready for summer.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: By Dave Thomas
Babysitting blues
As a semi-stay-at-home dad, I’ve had a fondness for our daycare. The half-day option is a bit pricey, but I have the option of dropping the boy off as early as 1 p.m.
Typically, though, I’ve dropped him off about 3:30 p.m. and Shannon has picked him up about 5:30 p.m., leading us to refer to it as “baby happy hour.”
The boy comes in, has a few shots of milk, flirts with the ladies, and he’s out of there. Must be a good life.
I’ve liked the daycare because it offers socialization, helps build his immunity and offers an early education in diversity.
Shannon, who foots the bill for the daycare, hasn’t been quite as enamored with the place. And it does seem kind of wrong to pay for a half-day of daycare when often we only need 2-3 hours.
The place’s most recent price hike (let’s just the cost of part-time care jumped by the price of a decent night on the town with about half a week’s warning) forced us to realize that there was no way we could pay for two kids in daycare — and we weren’t going to let our daycare determine the size of our family.
So we started looking into in-home care. Not our home, but a stay-at-home mom looking to host a baby happy hour for a few extra bucks a day.
This is scary. We met with a few nice people, but all I could think about was all the horrible stories I’ve read during a 16-year career in the newspaper business. And I’ve read some pretty awful things.
The idea of entrusting your child to a person you just met for 30 minutes last week doesn’t come easy to someone like me.
But we’ve settled on a nice family in the next neighborhood to the east of us — they’re practically neighbors. They live in a nice house, have two well-behaved boys and volunteer at their church.
(She watches kids at the church. And she passed their background check. We talked with the church. I’m pretty paranoid.)
Basically, they’re more upstanding citizens than we are. And she’s reassured us over and over that she’s sure she wants to do this and won’t bail out two months in.
So why am I still nervous about this?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: By Dave Thomas
Mmmm, tatonka
So we hit the Farmer’s Market at Burger Center on Saturday morning to give the organic eating thing a better try.
We stocked up on organic squash, organic carrots, organic ‘shrooms, organic chicken, organic taters (or, perhaps, potatoes purchased at H-E-B and smeared with a little dirt for resale at twice the price … we’ll never know) and bison meat.
Yeah, it was buffalo burgers for Saturday night. They were pretty good. I’d say better than the last cheeseburger I had. At $7 a pound for ground meat, it’s not something we could afford every day, but for a Saturday-night-satisfy-your-craving-for-red-meat-thing, it’s better and cheaper than taking the family to Chili’s.
I suppose for most of the weekend, save breakfast, we ate organic foods. I don’t feel like Bugs Bunny or Patchouli Joe just yet, but I don’t feel bad either.
Shannon, going through the ads in the Sunday paper, did point out the World Market has organic beer, but I’m just not going there.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: By Dave Thomas
Mugged
Among the stranger bits of advice I got when I revealed that Shannon was pregnant was this: “Get in shape.”
It seemed counterintuitive. This was my last chance to stay out late, sleep late, party like it was 2003. This was my last chance to spend money wildly at restaurants before I had to spend it on diapers.
Besides, I knew a woman carrying a 10-pound baby does not want to see her husband losing weight.
But it was good advice, though I didn’t follow it.
Why do I bring this up? Oh, you might have seen the new Jabba-esque mug shot over to your left. In retribution for my sins, I’m guessing, the officials here have decided to update the mug shots on all the blogs. Or, possibly, just mine. I haven’t checked yet.
I wasn’t happy about this. The previous mug shot was taken just as I was finishing my seventh month of Weight Watchers and three months after I had kicked off my train-for-a-triathlon program.
I was 212 pounds at the time and pretty happy about that. It was spring 2005.
To be fair, by the time we were telling people Shannon was pregnant in fall 2006, I weighed about 232 pounds.
The picture at left? Well, I guess if I’ve gone this far, I might as well admit it: 252 pounds, roughly.
It’s been my fault, I know. But it is hard to fit in exercise when you’re the stay-at-home dad of an infant. If the boy’s not sick, then I am. If we’re good, the weather’s bad. If the weather’s right, we haven’t gotten any sleep …
But Shannon’s determined (and when she gets that way, there’s no stopping her), to get us both in shape for Baby No. 2. She’s buying organic foods, cooking healthy, giving me the evil eye when I just want to have ONE cheeseburger, because hey it’s the WEEKEND…
It’s been several months now. I haven’t seen but one cheeseburger since February (it was good). I see Suzi’s sesame chicken plate in my sleep, but I have lost 10 pounds.
So, no, I won’t be vain. That’s me on the upper left.
But if I see the south side of 220 again, that updated mug shot is gonna be updated once more.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment Categories: By Dave Thomas
Hot times at the Farm
“Let’s go spend the night at the Farm,” Shannon said, “before it gets too hot.”
Seemed like a good plan to me. So, after about 6 hours of sleep on Friday night, we got up, packed and headed south.
Traveling with an infant, I’ve learned, is not hard. You just take everything you own.
As we headed down I-35, I looked up at the gray skies and said, “I sure hope the sun comes out.”
You know where this is going. The Weather Channel says it was 96 degrees in Pleasanton on Saturday. The thermometer at the Farm said it was 104 degrees at its peak. I’m willing to bet it was somewhere in the middle of those two readings.
It was a good time. We ate fried chicken and macaroni salad, I drank beer in the afternoon, took a break when the heat got to me, then tried to get geared up again in the evening.
But I have to admit, just short of 37 years old, the heat is starting to get to me. It’s been a lifelong silent point of pride that I could tolerate hot weather just like the old-timers. But I’m starting to get conditioned, I guess.
Can’t do nothing about the years. But I need to get outside more. Gotta retrain these old bones.
The boy, having recovered from his illness, was plenty happy through the 26 hours we were away from home, even though we pretty much failed to bring along anything for him to entertain himself with.
Finally, once it got dark, I managed to cool off enough to enjoy the evening, which was capped by Uncle Jimmy bringing out his guitar and telling me I was going to sing “Pancho and Lefty.”
I do know all the words, I promise. But I was flustered enough by my failure to keep pace with the music that I faltered a time or two. Trust me when I say I ain’t much of a singer.
Here’s a few pictures…
No, that’s not where I slept. But I would if I didn’t fear it would come crashing down on me in the middle of the night.
We found a friend. But the boy just wasn’t impressed.
It was too hot for close-up photos: The boy lunges for the camera.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: By Dave Thomas
Detonation
Shall we test the limits of this family blog?
It has been a long, long week in the Thomas household, but the boy is feeling better. His coughing is less frequent and more productive. Yesterday afternoon, he had a spell where he felt so good that he rolled around the carpet and giggled and demanded we roughhouse it a bit.
Of course that tired him out for the rest of the day, but it’s good to see the gigglemonster return.
But the real difficulty this week has been the diet. The boy’s liquid diet. All week he has refused to eat anything very solid because, well, it hurt his throat. Who can blame him?
So it’s been yogurt and liquidy baby foods and milk, milk, milk. A little pudding or sherbet when Shannon spoils him…
And, well, the diapers have shown the effects. It has been ugly. But yesterday, right after lunch, he was sitting in the highchair when I hear the ugly sound of a napalm poop bomb.
This is going to be ugly, I thought. I cleared the countertop. I got a pair of diapers (just in case). I pulled out about 100 wipes. I got the surgeon’s mask (not really, but I wish I had). Then I retrieved the boy.
Nothing on the highchair. But when I placed him on the counter … OH MY GOD. Let’s just say it had shot up through the top of the diaper all the way to his armpits.
I got the shorts off. Then the diaper. I wiped and wiped and wiped and wiped and, good Lord, there’s still more. When I got the bottom pretty clear (all the while trying to keep the boy from reaching down anywhere below his shoulders), I took a look at the shirt.
Basically, there was no way I could get this shirt off him without dragging the extremely soiled portion of it over his oversized head and basically getting whatnot everywhere.
No time to think, I grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors and cut the shirt right off of him.
After another 50 or so baby wipes, I took the boy straight to the bathtub. He, of course, thought this was the best thing ever. A bath in the middle of the day!
Convincing Shannon, via cell phone, that cutting the shirt off was necessary wasn’t as easy. But, later, as we swapped the boy in the parking lot, I think I was able to make my point by re-enacting the detonation.
Gotta get that boy back on some solid foods.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: By Dave Thomas
Attitude? Teeth? No, sick!
The boy has been sick for awhile, though it took us some time to figure this out.
By last Thursday, Friday, he was refusing to eat solid foods, or anything he had to chew for that matter. Shannon had left for Dallas on Friday morning to visit her best friend and I had figured that the boy was finally rebelling against the baby food I was feeding him.
We battled it out for a day, him only eating certain things, me continuing to try and sneak some more substantive food in there. He was big on taking a mouthful and then spitting it out. It seemed the boy had an attitude and was testing me.
Via phone conference on Saturday afternoon, Shannon suggested he had some major teeth coming in and that was causing his lack of appetite. I couldn’t feel any teeth, but it seemed to make perfect sense. I thought back and realized that it was anything he had to chew that he was spitting out. Not just the chunky baby food that he tolerated, but even things I knew he liked (he would greedily reach for a cut-up grape, swish it around for a few moments, and then ptui! out it came).
That, combined with oceans of drool, seemed like a good answer.
By Sunday night, though, it seemed there was more to it than that. He was getting more sluggish, he was feeling a little hot. A complete lack of appetite for even soft foods by Monday morning indicated things weren’t good.
Late Monday afternoon he woke up from his nap with a 103-degree fever and a worrisome rasp / squeak when he tried to breathe. We, of course, called the doctor.
Tuesday morning: The doctor says he’s probably had a sore throat for about a week and it has peaked, causing a double ear infection to boot.
I know the boy’s demeanor doesn’t help — he doesn’t act sick until he’s really sick — but, man, I’m terrible at diagnosing illnesses.
I’ll diagnose the Spurs’ illness: They’re old.
Is this it? Is the mighty run over? Well, at least I have that Game 1 double-OT victory over the Suns to remember it by. A mighty last stand before being overtaken by the irrepressible onslaught of time.
Go Spurs, go!
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: By Dave Thomas
