Blog

Holiday Activities with a Toddler

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:19:19 -0800

Here’s something uncomplicated and foolproof: drag a tree into your house, hang glass balls and irreplaceable sentimental objects at arm’s reach, and string it with fascinating lights that terminate enticingly at a power outlet. What could go wrong?

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Job-Creation Idea:
So you know how everyone has miles of Christmas lights that would work but for a single burnt bulb. One goes out, the whole thing goes dark. It could be any one. Only one way to find out. You take a new bulb and swap out each bulb to check, then replace it, take out the next bulb, replace it with the new one--you work down the line. The bane of Christmas, right? Strung lights wadded up in people’s basements (“I swear I’ll do it next year”) or in landfills that would reach from here to the moon twice.

Then, on the other side of the equation, unemployed meth addicts.

What if....?

Save Me from the Duck!

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:00:29 -0800

Theo loves music. When he gets in the car, he says “uck” and points to the radio. “Myoo-suck” or “uck” for short.) When he gets in the high chair, he says “uck” and points to the iPod. I am teaching him to say “uck, please.”

We refuse to play saccharine kiddy music, and have left our iPod as is, with the exception of Radiohead Lullabies. Anyway, he says uck, and I play whatever I want and he’s happy with it.

Until 48 cruel hours ago when he decided to have an opinion. “Duck,” he said, and our life changed.

“Duck, please,” I correct. (I’ve decided to stop being a doormat.)

Of all the lyrics washing over him these past many moons, a Lemon Jelly tune jumped out at him, a sweet, electronic remix of an old English children’s song, “All the ducks are swimming in the water.”

“Duck!” he cried. Revelation! This song is talking to me! I know what a duck is! I am totally this song’s demographic!

Fine by me. It ain’t Barney, it’s a group I like so everyone’s happy.

I have since learned that a two-year-old really can listen to the same song all day every day. We have it on, oh, about one hour straight twice a day. Or more. If it advances to the next Lemon Jelly song, he screams “Duck!!!!!!”

“Duck, please,” I insist, and obediently replay the song.

I would at this point give my right arm for REO Speedwagon.

Whoops!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:54:27 -0800

I had a little web glitch wherein my site was down in favor of a web page promoting Derek’s soon-to-be iPhone app, Where the Deep Ones Are. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, sorry to RSS subscribers for spamming you with republished entries. I don’t actually know what happens when I republish stuff. I have to say, it’s fun to be web-ignorant while blogging. I feel like a toddler with a BB gun. I keep pulling the trigger. The cat’s yowling, glass is breaking, and why you lookin’ at me like that?

Barmaid

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:16:24 -0700

Yesterday I ran out of frozen blueberries. Theo was in the high chair, patiently waiting for his chow, when the call came -- and this time one course early. Usually, it’s”pata!” (pasta) and then ba-ba (blueberries/boobie). Yesterday he started right up with the ba-ba. I looked in the freezer for the plastic bag that’s ALWAYS front and center, the one sealed with a rubber band, but it was empty. Oh dear God help me.

This may not seem like a big deal. And it isn’t. Really. It’s also not a big deal when you’re working the Munich Bierfest 2009 and your tap runs dry. You’re out of the gold-medal brew we’ll call ‘Blueberries.’ “Sorry, man,” you say to a mass of drunk, sweating, baby-faced men. Men reduced to speaking jibberish and taking hopeful swipes at your breasts, much like my boy. Men with glasses empty of beer and brains empty of reason.

You state the facts because who can argue with facts?

“We’re out.”

The men look at you a long time. They seem to understand you.

“All gone!” you chirp merrily to drive it home.

But babies and drunk men have a special power to pull things out of thin air. The men start banging their glasses on the counter and shouting, “Blueberries! Blueberries!”

You appeal to reason. “I’ll get more tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Take a lot of mushrooms, or be a wasted guy at a beer blowout, or be a toddler, and then we can discuss tomorrow as a concept. Because that’s all it is. A concept. Tomorrow, in fact, does not exist. It never does--it is only a verbal construct invented to convey the hope that life will continue; and each day, when this proverbial “tomorrow” comes, we reinvent the term again. You knew the truth as a baby, just as beer makes you with drunk with enlightenment about the nowness of one’s own puny needs.

“Tomorrow!!” you holler at the drunk dudes. “More blueberries tomorrow.” They thrust their empty steins at you, brows furled. They confer with each other, trying to puzzle out what you mean by “more tomorrow,” then shrug their shoulders, bang their steins on the counter while chanting, “Blueberries tomorrow!!!”

You try the substitution angle. “I’ve got apple. No blueberries. Apple!”

The men start crying. They pee themselves. They throw their steins on the ground, wrinkle up their red faces and sob. It’s heartbreaking. No apple. No tomorrow, sob the drunken men. The only substitution is, well, would it be too much trouble if you placed your breast in my mouth, just for a minute?

So Just How Steep Are San Franciso’s Hills?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:46:17 -0700

Really steep. Derek just came home with blood on his hands. A lot of blood. Jacket sleeve and shirtsleeve wet: a 57-year-old woman tumbled forward walking down Jones between Union and Filbert and skidded on her face. (She had taken the steep-sidewalk inside instead of the side with steps.) Derek happened to be walking past and helped her freaked-out older friends turn the unconscious woman face up and head pointed hill-ward so that she would not choke on her blood, until the paramedics came.

I know this hill: I surfed down it myself in 2-inch heels one time--the day I learned that leather-bottom shoes are a liability on Russian Hill. (Or they’re lots of fun for hillsurfing, depending on how you look at it.) I learned the lesson again when I slipped on Leavenworth while six months pregnant, landing on my ankle and skidding down with the weight of 25 pounds of baby and 10 pounds of backpack on thin ankle flesh, and still have an unsightly scar. It was almost to the bone, I swear. And I was wearing flat sandals! It’s the leather bottoms that get you.

From now on, when shoe-shopping, I add $25 to every price I see: for adding a rubber sole. High heels? I remove them and walk barefoot, or carry a pair of flats, just so I can navigate that one block.

I think about these hills every time I park perpendicular on Filbert and either make precarious moves to get out of the driver side -- always thinking how it’s a matter of serious self-preservation to keep in shape in this town, what with having to open heavy car doors against gravity and climb out like a victim from wreckage. Or I pretzel myself over the emergency brake and into the passenger seat to get out downhill, in which case I better have kept up with my yoga regimen.

You can’t live this way forever. When my 77-year-old mother helps me with Theo, she’s housebound: I’m not going to ask her to navigate the hill with a baby carriage and wayward toddler.

I hope the woman is okay. I think Derek has a good bedside manner. Apparently, her eyes fluttered conscious at one point, and her friends comforted her with a rousing cheer of “She’s not dead!”

Derek told her calmly, “Well, you got a shock, didn’t you.”

“Yes” she murmured. “A shock.”