sounds familiar

It’s Tuesday night and Sharaun made a rockin’ southwestern chicken chipotle soup for dinner.

I love soup.  Sometimes I think I could eat soup all the time.  Nearly every one of my lunches, when taken at work, are comprised of soup and bread.  I love the primeval quality of soup as a way of preparing and presenting “food.”  I picture soup (and stew) as the third evolutionary step beyond first raw and later flame-cooked in formation modern cuisine.  For some reason I always go back to the mental picture I formed in my head as a kid reading The Lord of the Rings when Sam cooked Frodo the rabbit stew in Ithilien.  Such a good scene.

The baby is kicking now. Not that I can feel yet, but enough to get Sharaun’s attention. I looked back to my entries when Sharaun was pregnant with Keaton and was helped in remembering that I didn’t first feel her kick until about four months before she was born. If that’s any indication I should be able to feel what Sharaun’s already feeling in just another few weeks. In addition to that big milestone out on the horizon, an equally big one is looming even closer. I’m talking about the big boy/girl reveal which is scheduled for tomorrow morning (as you read this).  I thought about turning the whole blog from its standard green to either pink or blue for fun… but I haven’t done any stylesheet modification in preparation so I doubt it’ll happen.  More than likely I’ll just get trumped again by Sharaun posting on Facebook.  Maybe look there if you’re impatient.

Me, I’m excited.  For whatever reason I’m convinced that the good Lord’s gonna give us another girl.

Goodnight.

Happy Thursday.

Another tearful pregnant moment tonight. Sharaun again expressing her intense searing hatred for our new wood floors. If anything on earth would motivate me to invent a time machine, it would be the chance that I could go back in time and choose a cheaper, more durable laminate over the more expensive, more easily marred, hardwood. A year of the old “I hate this carpet” stuff… that’s what I’d trade for one evening of this hormone-intensified hardwood drama.

But onto things more random and less self-pitying.

Sometimes when I’m in bed at night drifting off to sleep I’ll try and “seed” my dreams. In other words, I’ll spend those last few minutes of my waking day daydreaming about something in an attempt at establishing continuity from my conscious thoughts to the subconscious ones that come unbidden once I’ve submitted to the Sandman. I don’t think I have much success, but it’s hard to tell.

I do know that, for whatever reason, since I was a kid I’ve always thought that the quality of my pre-sleep daydreams can be impacted by how I’m physically laying. That’s right. As a kid I could’ve sworn that laying to one side or the other was more or less conducive to keeping my fantasy thoughts on-theme.

For example, if I was trying to kickstart a sleeping dream about being at the beach I’d do some closed-eye beach daydreaming in bed. Thing is, I found that laying to one side or another made that easier or harder. To the left – beach thoughts swirled and coalesced nicely; to the right – I couldn’t keep my mind on-task.

I still do this today, so many years later. I’ll flip and flop around until I find just the right spot and can vividly picture the elaborate treehouse I’ve moved our family into. We’ve got all the Swiss-Family style mod cons and we’re setup to enjoy the essence of living tucked away together in some forest or on some island. If I turn my hip just so and get it to not dig into the mattress at that odd angle I can even smell the pine or ocean. Maybe I can parlay this into some fantastic dream about the future of our life together in this place. If I can just manage to get a pinch of comforter between my two knees so the hard bones aren’t resting on each other, I’ll be able to see the cloudless sky. C’mon subconscious… do this for me.

Before I go, let me ask you guys a question: Is the text on the blog too tight? I mean line-spacing, is it hard to read? Would it be easier if I put a little more space in there? Aesthetically, visually, I like tight text. I think blocks of words look better without all the whitespace but I don’t want to lose readers because of it. OK thanks. Oh before I get off the meta-blogging, I’ve added support for threaded comments (i.e. you can reply to others’ comments now), which is kinda cool. It should make the overflowing comment situation a little more manageable. Sarcasm.

Goodnight.

Halfway mark again.  Halfway to Friday over and over again makes it feel like you’ll never ever really get there.

Gym still filled to bursting with the new-year converts.  Got there and realized I’d forgotten my headphones.  Wrecked my whole plan.  I had the iPod on “all songs” for Radiohead and was planning one hell of a shuffle.  Was gonna bliss out to Radiohead and read my vintage 1950s “masterpiece” about junkies and junkie life, Burroughs‘ The Naked Lunch.  Got turned onto the book from some hipster messageboard.  Those guys may be too cool for anything but they have some good taste in literature.  Decided to abbreviate the workout, put in 500 calories worth and called it a night.  I’m under count today anyway.

Let’s write.

Remember when you were a kid and you assumed that everyone did the same things you and your family did in the same way you and your family did?  From early gradeschool through just before highschool kids go through one long period of social sensitivity training.  During this time a kid finds out, experience by experience and person by person, that the world is a whole lot bigger and more diverse than their tiny family, the things they do, and they ways they do them.  I remember being confused when people didn’t understand the slang my family used, the special places we knew or why they were special, or even the things we didn’t know or hadn’t done.  It’s hard on a kid… finding out things are different than what you know, finding out people might think something that’s all you’ve ever known is “weird.”

I went over to a friend’s house to spend the night once.  I thought it was so odd that his family made a kind of chocolate milk drink but instead of using chocolate syrup they used regular old pancake syrup.  “Syrup milk,” my friend called it when he introduced it to me.  “Weird,” I thought.  But that stuff was good.  My friend knew what he was about.  Back around the same time I used to go with a group of kids to a certain house after school.  The mom there ran a sort of after-school care thing for about ten local neighborhood kids and my brother and I were two of them.  Also in the group was a set of twins.  The twins came from a christian family, matter of fact they had model christian names, prophets I think.  These kids were fun; good kids.  I liked them.  But man I couldn’t shake the “off” feeling I got when they kept on about Jesus this and God that.  See I wasn’t exposed to that.  Wasn’t normal for me and was thus foreign.

How about from the other direction?  Remember the first time you realized not every family prayed before they ate?  If you ever ate at my house you would.  We’d dig right in, not a word of thanks to God.  Food comes from the grocery store.  I thanked the produce man for the firm broccoli; put a dollar in the Jerry Lewis thing too.  Don’t call me heathen.  When these revelations of youth coincide with religion I bet it’s particularly stark for a kid.  What do you mean you don’t do Family Home Evening on Mondays?  Don’t you know your sleepover is on the weekend I’m being confirmed?  What do you mean you’re not going to be called up to the Torah?  What do you mean “What’s the Torah?!”  How can your church not believe in having a kitchen?  It’s not a “bracelet” it’s a kara.  You mean your God doesn’t require Wednesday night worship?  Gotta miss the first part of band practice; salah.  But don’t you guys use the same Bible?  Wait.. there are different Bibles?

I can remember being embarrassed the first time I called a mosquito a “gaboo” in front of friends.  I knew it was called a mosquito.  I just though everyone called them gaboos.  Apparently not.  Gaboos was some baby-speak invention of mine, appropriated into family parlance at some point and further legitimized by my folks’ frequent usage.  How was I supposed to know it wasn’t a real word?  I’d heard it all my life and just assumed it was.  What other words should I question?  What more lies had my parents fed me in order to humiliate me in front of my peers?  Is that thing between my legs really a “bosco?”

I don’t know, I’ve just always put ketchup on my macaroni and cheese.

No.  My folks don’t make me wear a helmet.

My mom says God said pork is unclean.

You can watch PG-13 movies?!

A shower?  At night?

Yes a kid’s worldview can be shattered and re-arranged on a daily basis as they start to absorb the world around them.  Gets even more complicated once you get old enough for overnight trips to friends’ houses.  Talk about getting a firsthand view to some of the stranger of folks’ daily rituals.  Watching another kid’s bedtime routine, another family’s mealtime choreography, TV preferences, household policies.  It can be quite the experience to realize things aren’t the same as, to you, they’ve always ever been.  A critical part in the culturing of a person, defining moments for future tolerances and interaction.

Think about it, you know your family did something “weird”…

Growing up.  Goodnight.

I know “they say” you can’t catch-up on sleep. But Monday’s lack of writing is because I tried to do just that. Went to bed around 9pm on Sunday (hence no blog) and had one wonderfully blissful sleep where I awakened a couple times to revel in how rested I was feeling.  Perfect sleep.

In just over a week Sharaun and I find out the sex of the little life currently steeping in her womb. And although it sure felt like it was a long-time coming, the pregnancy has, so far, been speeding by in a month-by-month blur. Sharaun’s been feeling mostly well, a few bouts with migraines (she suffered from this with Keaton as well) and an overall malaise at points, but by and large she’s been top-shape. With her condition in good shape our brains are free to wander: dreaming up names for both boys and girls, contemplating how to best deal with the space constraints of our current house once the baby is here, and generally trying to remember what it’s like to have an infant (funny how fast we forget).

When asked, over the past few years spent “trying” for number-two, what I “wanted,” I always responded “a boy!” Which is true, really… I always have wanted a boy… for a bunch of different reasons. Now that the time is near, however, I find my feelings on the matter a bit less simple. Sure I’d still like a boy for all sorts of reasons – carrying on the family name, father/son bonding, Star Wars, etc., – but some part of me is a little more nervous about it than before. I mean, I know how to do girls… I’ve done girls already. A boy is a whole other thing, and there are some things about that thing that truly inspire some sort of nervous fear within me.

For instance, as a man I feel there’s an increased potential for me to “mess up” a boy. I mean, young men look to the older male role models in their life for guidance and to pattern their behavior (consciously or not). I know young girls are equally shaped by their fathers, but the “weight” of my role as a father to a boy seems greater than that of a girl.

Maybe this is because I feel like, at some point in Keaton’s life, what she’s going through will become foreign to me. I never got my first period or had a crush on a boy or grew boobs or needed to shave my legs before I was allowed. I simply cannot relate to those experiences, and that’s where Sharaun will step in and become a trusted companion. I hope to still be there and still be important, but I can’t play like I can relate.

On the other hand I know firsthand what it’s like to get your first wet-dream while spending the night at a friend’s house. I’m well-versed in the spontaneous erections of middle school and know the conflicting feelings that swirl as you’re cheered on by friends to drink that that first beer or smoke that first cigarette. I know the tension before a first kiss and the teenage gravity of “being cool.”

Yes, to these things, I can relate. And because of that I feel like I may be more “relevant” to a boy in those key adolescent years than I might be to a girl. This could be wrong, but it’s something I think about. If I give bad guidance to, set a bad example for, or simply can’t relate correctly to my kids (girl or boy) it can have a big impact. Something in me feels this responsibility more keenly when it comes to raising a boy, however. Maybe this is a fleeting thing… something brought about by the anticipation of the unknown. I guess I won’t know until we find out; or maybe until each kid is a teenager; or until they’re grown and are proven adults; or maybe never.

What’s funny is I feel increased responsibility not only because I might be able to relate to a boy a little better, but also because I’m scared there are some “traditional” boyhood things to which I won’t relate well at all. Let me explain: This past weekend I was talking to a buddy of mine and he was telling me how he’s teaching his kid to swing a bat. His son is five. He explained to me, expecting recognition in my eyes, “You know I tell him to drop his elbows, get his feet right, bend his knees, and swing with his belly button.” I nod, not because I understand but because the logic sounds fine to me. I have no idea how to swing a bat, so these tips sound fair. In the same conversation my confidence was further shaken as he got into how to kick a football.

I just don’t know how to do those things. What does the secondary do? What’s a pivot foot? How do you throw a curveball? Wood or iron? Where should the sweeper be? I have no idea. “So what?,” you may be tempted to say. Yeah, I know… so what. Say it’s silly if you will, I would too… but it’s something I think about. I won’t be the little league co-coach for my son’s team, won’t be much good pitching around with him or setting him up with practice grounders or pop-ups. Where should you be if the other team’s in the paint? I don’t know. I can’t help you there. Who played slide on Cowboy’s 1971 album? Oh no worries, everyone knows that was the incomparable Duane Allman.

So yeah, part of me is worried I’ll stink at some archetypal dad stuff more with a boy than I would with a girl.  I tell myself not everyone can be good at everything, and that I won’t be able to teach my kid much about Eskimo folklore either… but it doesn’t help much.

Yes I still want a boy, but both Sharaun and I are convinced we’re gonna get another girl because of it!

Goodnight.