First off… Don’t change anything!! This has been an excellent course and I’m happy I got to take it with you. You somehow managed to open my mind to a world of English I never experienced back in high school. My memories of English were the dreaded ‘Read to Kill a Mockingbird’ or ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and write a massive book report. I never was able to write what I wanted to and this course changed all that. As I said before, don’t change, adjust or rearrange anything…its great just the way it is.
Looking back at all the stuff I’ve written, the one that I like the most was the last one. It was supposed to be a comparison but it wasn’t, it just came out--like a voice in the back of my mind came through telling me what to write faster than I could type it. Thanks for opening that doorway, even though I had fun with every assignment. I actually gained a lot of good information out of the Isearch too. I will be using what I learned in the upcoming months when it comes time to get down and dirty with the basement.
Thanks again for the great course. =D
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Comparison Essay
Just like the rest of us, both of my kids were born. I know it sounds stupid but when you think about it that’s the first thing we all do in life. The pregnancies and births can be very different from mother to mother and even more so from child to child as my wife and I found out. My wife was eighteen when our first child was born and twenty-four with the second. Also both children were born in separate hospitals, one was born sick and the other was beyond healthy. It’s strange that two boys from the same parents can come into the world so differently and start life completely opposite.
When the day finally came that my oldest son, Seth, came into the world, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. We lived in Bangor at the time and my wife had been receiving all of her pre-natal care through EMMC. We lived across town over near the airport but fortunately most of our appointments took place at the Healthcare Mall right on Union Street just a minute or two away. The night before he was born my wife had complained of back pain but didn’t think it was anything more than the joys of being pregnant. She tossed and turned all that night still not thinking anything was wrong. I got up in the morning and started getting ready for work. I asked her if I could do anything for her and got the same old joys of pregnancy routine. While I was killing time playing video games before I had to leave her mother comes screaming into the driveway, practically tears the door off the hinges getting in, and starts yelling, “WHERE IS SHE!?!” over and over. I had no idea what was going on until my wife comes waddling down the hall carrying her bag for the hospital. As I soon found out she was in labor and thought her water had broken, she had called her mother at work about it and had never said anything to me! Off to the hospital we went and after about thirty minutes I was a new dad. Now with our second son, Ryan, things were a little different. We lived out in Garland, a small town due south from Dover-Foxcroft. This time around all the pre-natal care had been done at Mayo hospital in Dover. It was a much more relaxed setting than EMMC with the exception of my wife’s crazy, scare tactic using doctor. Her doctor was concerned that the baby might be small and that there might not be enough fluid for him. She had my poor wife hooked up for non-stress tests at least once a week for about two to three hours per session. Finally during one of these appointments her doctor decided to induce labor. So began what would turn out to be a fifteen hour long labor all the while still hooked up to the stress/contraction monitor. The sound of the baby’s heartbeat thumping away in the background, it took days to stop hearing it after all was said and done.
The moment of truth was very different between the boys as well. My mother in law literally grabbed us and threw us in her car and tore off across town toward EMMC. I was no stranger to crazy driving but that lady scared the shit right out of me. Speeding through downtown Bangor, running red lights, and darting in and out of traffic I remember thinking as I held on for dear life, “What good is racing to the hospital if we’re all dead before we get there?” I kept my mouth shut though; I didn’t want to distract her while she was ‘In the Zone’. We sped up to the front doors and the car came to grinding halt, she jumps out and sprints to the doors yelling something like, “Lady having baby, need wheel chair!!” The funny thing was how calm everyone else seemed, myself and my wife included. When we finally made it to the delivery room there must have been fifteen people all crammed in practically shoulder to shoulder. Nurses and Practitioners all yelling at each other, other people yelling down the hall, it all faded into a mumbled static to me. I just stood there, dazed by what was happening and getting my hand squeezed in my wife’s vice like grip. As the words “PUSH” started coming through the static and my knuckles started popping under the pressure. In no time at all it stopped, there he was new to the world around him but the nurses quickly whisked him away, something was wrong. Fast forward six years and my wife is in labor again at Mayo this time. We had been in a delivery room for the last twelve hours waiting for things to ‘get moving’. Nothing to eat for my wife except green jell-o and ginger ale, she was not happy. When her water broke things got hard, three intense hours of pushing finally paid off with a loud cry. In the room this time were two nurses and a doctor, very relaxed for the situation. I got to cut the cord this time also, things were so frantic the first time that I hadn’t been able to. After Ryan was cleaned up, weighed and measured, and swaddled up in a blanket we got to hold him for a while and get to know each other. As I mentioned before that was not the case with Seth.
Back to 2001, Seth had just been hurried away by the delivery staff of EMMC. I had no idea what was going on and they were not saying anything. I was told to go home and get some things for my wife and that everything would be fine. She needed to get some much needed rest and I was told Seth was having some tests done, so off I went. When I returned with a duffle bag full of stuff a few hours later the nurses had news that was not what I had hoped to hear. It seemed Seth’s heart was not pumping the blood away fast enough and was causing congestive heart failure. A doctor that was from the Boston children’s hospital was on hand and ordered an MRI. The images shown were startling, a tennis ball sized ball of blood vessels with one massive artery dumping blood straight into his heart. This ball was where the left lobe of his liver should have been and it was killing him. A few doctors were tossing ideas back and forth on what to do and we had been told to pack bags to go to Boston. A full blown out operation to remove it was out of the question, he would never survive it. A stent to reduce the flow or treating it with steroids hoping to shrink it were the only options available. Steroids are what the doctors decided would work best and for the next eight weeks we lived out of the hospital. For the first few weeks we couldn’t even touch him, he was locked inside an incubator. As the time past he got better and better until we were released sixty-two days after his birth. That was the hardest and most stressful time I ever experienced. With Ryan we were home in less than twenty-four hours after his birth, just in time for Christmas. Five o’ clock PM on Christmas Eve to be exact, and I never went to sleep that night. I was busy preparing things for Christmas morning, helping my wife and caring for a newborn all at the same time. We had to go back to the hospital that afternoon for a blood drawing that needed to be done twenty-four hours after birth by state law. Everything with Ryan was picture perfect; he was in the top ninety percentile for all newborns. He was so big he didn’t even fit into any newborn clothes and barely fit into the newborn diapers. Very different from the first time around.
Now we are having boy number three, that’s probably why this has been on my mind lately. In just a matter of weeks we will be going through it again and hopefully it will be just like last time. I wouldn’t wish what we went through with Seth on anyone. Today Seth is an awesome kid though, does great at everything he does, especially at being a good big brother to Ryan. They love each other very much and despite their age differences spend hours a day playing with each other. The new baby and Ryan are only going to be a year apart so Seth will have his hands full, just like his mother and I.
When the day finally came that my oldest son, Seth, came into the world, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. We lived in Bangor at the time and my wife had been receiving all of her pre-natal care through EMMC. We lived across town over near the airport but fortunately most of our appointments took place at the Healthcare Mall right on Union Street just a minute or two away. The night before he was born my wife had complained of back pain but didn’t think it was anything more than the joys of being pregnant. She tossed and turned all that night still not thinking anything was wrong. I got up in the morning and started getting ready for work. I asked her if I could do anything for her and got the same old joys of pregnancy routine. While I was killing time playing video games before I had to leave her mother comes screaming into the driveway, practically tears the door off the hinges getting in, and starts yelling, “WHERE IS SHE!?!” over and over. I had no idea what was going on until my wife comes waddling down the hall carrying her bag for the hospital. As I soon found out she was in labor and thought her water had broken, she had called her mother at work about it and had never said anything to me! Off to the hospital we went and after about thirty minutes I was a new dad. Now with our second son, Ryan, things were a little different. We lived out in Garland, a small town due south from Dover-Foxcroft. This time around all the pre-natal care had been done at Mayo hospital in Dover. It was a much more relaxed setting than EMMC with the exception of my wife’s crazy, scare tactic using doctor. Her doctor was concerned that the baby might be small and that there might not be enough fluid for him. She had my poor wife hooked up for non-stress tests at least once a week for about two to three hours per session. Finally during one of these appointments her doctor decided to induce labor. So began what would turn out to be a fifteen hour long labor all the while still hooked up to the stress/contraction monitor. The sound of the baby’s heartbeat thumping away in the background, it took days to stop hearing it after all was said and done.
The moment of truth was very different between the boys as well. My mother in law literally grabbed us and threw us in her car and tore off across town toward EMMC. I was no stranger to crazy driving but that lady scared the shit right out of me. Speeding through downtown Bangor, running red lights, and darting in and out of traffic I remember thinking as I held on for dear life, “What good is racing to the hospital if we’re all dead before we get there?” I kept my mouth shut though; I didn’t want to distract her while she was ‘In the Zone’. We sped up to the front doors and the car came to grinding halt, she jumps out and sprints to the doors yelling something like, “Lady having baby, need wheel chair!!” The funny thing was how calm everyone else seemed, myself and my wife included. When we finally made it to the delivery room there must have been fifteen people all crammed in practically shoulder to shoulder. Nurses and Practitioners all yelling at each other, other people yelling down the hall, it all faded into a mumbled static to me. I just stood there, dazed by what was happening and getting my hand squeezed in my wife’s vice like grip. As the words “PUSH” started coming through the static and my knuckles started popping under the pressure. In no time at all it stopped, there he was new to the world around him but the nurses quickly whisked him away, something was wrong. Fast forward six years and my wife is in labor again at Mayo this time. We had been in a delivery room for the last twelve hours waiting for things to ‘get moving’. Nothing to eat for my wife except green jell-o and ginger ale, she was not happy. When her water broke things got hard, three intense hours of pushing finally paid off with a loud cry. In the room this time were two nurses and a doctor, very relaxed for the situation. I got to cut the cord this time also, things were so frantic the first time that I hadn’t been able to. After Ryan was cleaned up, weighed and measured, and swaddled up in a blanket we got to hold him for a while and get to know each other. As I mentioned before that was not the case with Seth.
Back to 2001, Seth had just been hurried away by the delivery staff of EMMC. I had no idea what was going on and they were not saying anything. I was told to go home and get some things for my wife and that everything would be fine. She needed to get some much needed rest and I was told Seth was having some tests done, so off I went. When I returned with a duffle bag full of stuff a few hours later the nurses had news that was not what I had hoped to hear. It seemed Seth’s heart was not pumping the blood away fast enough and was causing congestive heart failure. A doctor that was from the Boston children’s hospital was on hand and ordered an MRI. The images shown were startling, a tennis ball sized ball of blood vessels with one massive artery dumping blood straight into his heart. This ball was where the left lobe of his liver should have been and it was killing him. A few doctors were tossing ideas back and forth on what to do and we had been told to pack bags to go to Boston. A full blown out operation to remove it was out of the question, he would never survive it. A stent to reduce the flow or treating it with steroids hoping to shrink it were the only options available. Steroids are what the doctors decided would work best and for the next eight weeks we lived out of the hospital. For the first few weeks we couldn’t even touch him, he was locked inside an incubator. As the time past he got better and better until we were released sixty-two days after his birth. That was the hardest and most stressful time I ever experienced. With Ryan we were home in less than twenty-four hours after his birth, just in time for Christmas. Five o’ clock PM on Christmas Eve to be exact, and I never went to sleep that night. I was busy preparing things for Christmas morning, helping my wife and caring for a newborn all at the same time. We had to go back to the hospital that afternoon for a blood drawing that needed to be done twenty-four hours after birth by state law. Everything with Ryan was picture perfect; he was in the top ninety percentile for all newborns. He was so big he didn’t even fit into any newborn clothes and barely fit into the newborn diapers. Very different from the first time around.
Now we are having boy number three, that’s probably why this has been on my mind lately. In just a matter of weeks we will be going through it again and hopefully it will be just like last time. I wouldn’t wish what we went through with Seth on anyone. Today Seth is an awesome kid though, does great at everything he does, especially at being a good big brother to Ryan. They love each other very much and despite their age differences spend hours a day playing with each other. The new baby and Ryan are only going to be a year apart so Seth will have his hands full, just like his mother and I.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Practice Final
If existence is a buffet and my plate was my life, I’d say I may have tasted some things that were hard to swallow. Unfortunately life is not a buffet, you can’t ignore that not so tasty item that you selected, you just have to eat it. Somewhere between age eight and ten seems to be hot spot for accepting reality. It may be the realization that all those myths and fairy tales aren’t true or that death means there is no coming back. As we progress into the teen years small tastes of what is yet to come become clearer and clearer. It takes money to get most things accomplished and there is no way you can survive on birthday and Christmas card cash alone. As a teen most of that doesn’t matter anyway, after all you are invincible. When that gloomy day arrives and you figure out you’re an adult, some people say, “My God!, I’ve turned into my parents!” That can be a harsh wakeup call when you utter those words to yourself. Life’s hard truths can be a process to get through but unless the invisible blindfold is removed it cannot be accepted for what it is.
I found out that Santa was an imaginary being implanted into my mind by my parents at age eight. I had secretly set my alarm clock to go off at 4 A.M. Christmas morning and had hid it under my blanket next to me in bed. When it went off I shut it off quickly to prevent my parents from hearing it, I then put it back in its usual place and proceeded to creep down the hall to our living room. There under our tree were the same presents that had been there the night before, no new presents had been placed there by the jolly fat man. My mind raced with the thoughts of ‘the older kids at school were right. Maybe he isn’t real.’ Or was he real and I had been bad? I snuck away back to my room and sulked thinking of all those great presents I asked for and would not be getting. About a half an hour latter I heard a few thumps and bumps coming from down the hall. I got out of bed as I had earlier and proceeded down the hall in a covert manner. As I poked my head out into the living room I saw my mother back to wheeling a new bike into place beside the tree. Without thinking I announced myself with a loud, “What are you doing?” My mother jumped about three feet into the air and her face dropped to the floor. “Uh, Uh… What are you doing up?” she questioned. “I knew it was all a lie” I said. There was a long pause between us until she finally broke the silence “Well I guess I don’t have to get up early and do this anymore huh.” It wasn’t as crushing as I thought it would be after all, the whole thing didn’t seem possible anyway. “No mom, you don’t have to pretend anymore, I know all that stuff is make-believe”. Her abrupt response seemed a little harsh but we had been dealing with the death of her father just a few weeks before. Christmas without Gramp was something that none of us wanted to face, and it had been hard on both of us. Just like finding out Santa was a myth, his death stole the joy out of Christmas that year.
As I grew older I wanted things that came with a higher price tag and bumming money off my parents didn’t go very far. Cash from birthday cards and Christmas seemed to amount to less and less and the higher price tags made it disappear faster and faster. “No big deal”, I said to myself, “I’ll get a job”. Not such an easy task when you’re only fourteen with no transportation. Fortunately for me my dad had retired from work and was able to give me rides to a redemption center that my cousin owned. He offered me five bucks an hour to separate and count cans and he fed me lunch for free every day too. I saved as much of my earnings as I could and after two years I had finally put away enough to buy a car and get my driver’s licenses. It just so happened that one of dad’s older cousins was selling her 84’ Pontiac Parrisenne for $2500 bucks. It was in mint condition with only 41k miles on it, it still had the original tires on it complete with three inch white walls. As I soon found out the V8 engine had plenty of power, more than enough to get me in trouble. Within three months I had earned two speeding tickets and the fines that went with them. Apparently the state didn’t like my driving very much and they took my license away for demerit point accumulation. So now I had bills to pay and no way to get to work to earn the cash necessary to pay them. I worked out a deal with my dad and he paid the fines for me, then I worked my ass off for him doing any kind of physical labor he could come up with. He taught me a good lesson though; don’t be dumb if you can’t bail yourself out.
“Get your shoes off the couch!” “Quit running in the house” “Why did you poke holes in the ceiling?” “Why are you acting like this?” “Oh my god,… all I do is nag at you…its true… no, it can’t be…I have become… one of them”. This is just a small sequence of the things that made me realize it happened. I became my father and my mother all in one person. How could this be? I’m too young to act this old, wait a minute, no I’m not. I have to act this way or else this child will be more of a wild animal than he already is. Now the people who made me this way allow you to get away with murder at their house loading you full of sugar and then sending you back home to destroy my house. This is my mother’s way of getting sweet revenge. She always said she hoped my kids would be ten times worse than me and now she is adding fuel to the fire. I can’t complain too much though, both my kids are great compared to some of the other ones out there. My seven year old does great in school and when he gets out of control he is really just being himself, a seven year old boy. Now that I’m older turning into my parents is not such a bad thing, they are both great people and if it weren’t for them who knows what I would be like. Maybe I wouldn’t be a good parent and my kids might not be good kids. I thank my folks for raising me the way did with good values in mind.
So if life is a buffet, don’t be afraid to do some taste testing. No one wants the same bland thing all the time. Life needs to be experimented with and adjusted to compensate for the hard truths we face and the lessons we learn from them. Make the most of life in the short time you’re here on this place we call earth. In the end there is only one guarantee, you’ll never get out alive.
I found out that Santa was an imaginary being implanted into my mind by my parents at age eight. I had secretly set my alarm clock to go off at 4 A.M. Christmas morning and had hid it under my blanket next to me in bed. When it went off I shut it off quickly to prevent my parents from hearing it, I then put it back in its usual place and proceeded to creep down the hall to our living room. There under our tree were the same presents that had been there the night before, no new presents had been placed there by the jolly fat man. My mind raced with the thoughts of ‘the older kids at school were right. Maybe he isn’t real.’ Or was he real and I had been bad? I snuck away back to my room and sulked thinking of all those great presents I asked for and would not be getting. About a half an hour latter I heard a few thumps and bumps coming from down the hall. I got out of bed as I had earlier and proceeded down the hall in a covert manner. As I poked my head out into the living room I saw my mother back to wheeling a new bike into place beside the tree. Without thinking I announced myself with a loud, “What are you doing?” My mother jumped about three feet into the air and her face dropped to the floor. “Uh, Uh… What are you doing up?” she questioned. “I knew it was all a lie” I said. There was a long pause between us until she finally broke the silence “Well I guess I don’t have to get up early and do this anymore huh.” It wasn’t as crushing as I thought it would be after all, the whole thing didn’t seem possible anyway. “No mom, you don’t have to pretend anymore, I know all that stuff is make-believe”. Her abrupt response seemed a little harsh but we had been dealing with the death of her father just a few weeks before. Christmas without Gramp was something that none of us wanted to face, and it had been hard on both of us. Just like finding out Santa was a myth, his death stole the joy out of Christmas that year.
As I grew older I wanted things that came with a higher price tag and bumming money off my parents didn’t go very far. Cash from birthday cards and Christmas seemed to amount to less and less and the higher price tags made it disappear faster and faster. “No big deal”, I said to myself, “I’ll get a job”. Not such an easy task when you’re only fourteen with no transportation. Fortunately for me my dad had retired from work and was able to give me rides to a redemption center that my cousin owned. He offered me five bucks an hour to separate and count cans and he fed me lunch for free every day too. I saved as much of my earnings as I could and after two years I had finally put away enough to buy a car and get my driver’s licenses. It just so happened that one of dad’s older cousins was selling her 84’ Pontiac Parrisenne for $2500 bucks. It was in mint condition with only 41k miles on it, it still had the original tires on it complete with three inch white walls. As I soon found out the V8 engine had plenty of power, more than enough to get me in trouble. Within three months I had earned two speeding tickets and the fines that went with them. Apparently the state didn’t like my driving very much and they took my license away for demerit point accumulation. So now I had bills to pay and no way to get to work to earn the cash necessary to pay them. I worked out a deal with my dad and he paid the fines for me, then I worked my ass off for him doing any kind of physical labor he could come up with. He taught me a good lesson though; don’t be dumb if you can’t bail yourself out.
“Get your shoes off the couch!” “Quit running in the house” “Why did you poke holes in the ceiling?” “Why are you acting like this?” “Oh my god,… all I do is nag at you…its true… no, it can’t be…I have become… one of them”. This is just a small sequence of the things that made me realize it happened. I became my father and my mother all in one person. How could this be? I’m too young to act this old, wait a minute, no I’m not. I have to act this way or else this child will be more of a wild animal than he already is. Now the people who made me this way allow you to get away with murder at their house loading you full of sugar and then sending you back home to destroy my house. This is my mother’s way of getting sweet revenge. She always said she hoped my kids would be ten times worse than me and now she is adding fuel to the fire. I can’t complain too much though, both my kids are great compared to some of the other ones out there. My seven year old does great in school and when he gets out of control he is really just being himself, a seven year old boy. Now that I’m older turning into my parents is not such a bad thing, they are both great people and if it weren’t for them who knows what I would be like. Maybe I wouldn’t be a good parent and my kids might not be good kids. I thank my folks for raising me the way did with good values in mind.
So if life is a buffet, don’t be afraid to do some taste testing. No one wants the same bland thing all the time. Life needs to be experimented with and adjusted to compensate for the hard truths we face and the lessons we learn from them. Make the most of life in the short time you’re here on this place we call earth. In the end there is only one guarantee, you’ll never get out alive.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Example Essay
My youngest son Ryan is eleven months old and somehow he managed to hit the terrible twos early in life. It’s easy to tell when he is up to no good because he gets this look in his eye. It is the look of total destruction, even his grandmother sees it, she calls it the look of the devil. As he crawls along the floor, looking back and forth you can almost hear that old Metallica song ‘Seek and Destroy’ playing in his mind. His destruction cannot be limited to only three categories but three of the most prominent are his desire to empty every drawer within his reach, no matter what the contents. His constant determination to destroy everything housed in our entertainment center, mainly the X-box. And his undying will to ‘help’ empty or fill the dishwasher, or at least cover the clean dishes with whatever greasy substance may be on his fingers.
It starts off early in the morning, just after his breakfast. A clean diaper and a full tummy is more than enough to keep him going for a least a few hours. He waits until neither my wife nor I are looking and then makes a mad dash to the Tupperware drawer, his favorite hangout. We automatically know what he’s up to by the signature sound of lids hitting the floor. As if we didn’t know what he was doing we both turn to each other and ask, “What is Ryan doing?” At that point one or both of us go to the kitchen only to find him standing at the drawer back to. The various lids come flying over his shoulders like rapid fire from a machine gun. A sudden “HEY” gets his attention rather quickly and he jumps from being startled. As he turns around a huge shit eating grin sprawls across his face followed by an expression that reads “Oh, was I doing something naughty?” He then plops down on his butt and does ‘The big hand crawl’ toward us. The ‘Big hand’ term was given because as he crawls along with every forward movement he raises his hands over his head and slaps them off the floor. It reminds me of a charging bull grinding its hoof into the ground right before the charge. He comes charging across the floor with that same grin smeared across his face until he reaches my legs and pulls himself up. When he is stable enough and sure of his footing he stairs up with an evil smile and another expression that reads,” I know I’m not supposed to be doing that but, I love you”. At that point I walk over and put the Tupperware back in the drawer. After all it is my fault; I’m the one who still hasn’t replaced the worn out child locks that he so easily snaps open.
One of his other frequent stops on the path to total destruction is our old and tired entertainment center. At his level are four main points of interest, the cabinet on the left, the matching one on the right, the satellite box, and his personal favorite the X-box. All are very intriguing to him, the cabinets are capable of killing an hour worth of time just by grabbing and pulling until there is nothing left to come out. The satellite box has a large number of buttons to push and a door for a credit card that he opens several times in a day. But the main area of focus is our old X-box, it’s not a new X-box 360, if it were I don’t think it would be within his reach. Often times when my wife and I think he is just playing in the living room we hear an odd noise. I can only describe it as a diver bouncing on a diving board before making a big splash. It’s actually Ryan after he has opened the CD drive on the X-box and is making a game out of making a disk bounce in the open CD tray. He figured out how to open the disk tray a few months ago but has only recently discovered that if he pulls down on the open tray it makes the disk bounce out of the tray. We have reminded our older boy time and time again that if he leaves a game in the X-box and does not turn the console sideways Ryan will have it broken by the time he gets home from school that day. It will only be a matter of time before he figures out how to rotate it back and get at the CD tray.
Sometime back in early September I installed a dishwasher for my wife as an anniversary present. Ryan however thinks it was a present for him. If he is on the floor and sees the dishwasher opened he crawls as fast as possible over to it and stands up bracing himself on the open door. From there he firmly grasps the bottom rack with both hands and starts shaking it back and forth making the dishes rattle and bang off one another. This is great fun for him and within the first few shakes has developed that famous ear to ear grin. Opening and closing the soap dispenser also proves to be a great time. The spring loaded door always gives him a slight jump every time it pops open even though he knows what is coming. Loading up the dirty dishes isn’t too bad, every once in a while he has to be pulled away and slid across the kitchen floor. That buys enough time to straighten out the dishes and put the bottom rack back on its track, he is so quick though that this needs to be done at least three times in one loading. If the dishes are clean it can be a different story and the ten foot walk from the dishwasher to the cabinet seems more like a mile. Pull all the plates out and stack them on the counter, move Ryan away, close the door. Go back to the counter, grab the clean plates and put them in the cabinet. Back to the dishwasher and open the door, Ryan comes running. Remove all the clean bowls and coffee cups, slide Ryan across the kitchen floor again and close the door. This process goes on until the load has been emptied and with any luck there are no baby finger prints smeared on the clean dishes.
With all the mischief he gets into there is still one looming thought in the back of my mind. He isn’t even walking yet, although he is capable of it. He paws his way around on two feet clinging to furniture and any other stable object he can get a grip on. He will also balance without assistance for a minute or more. These are telltale signs that he will be running in no time, at that point nothing will be safe. Looking toward the future, one year from now he will be almost two and will have a little brother that is his age right now. When I think about that I realize I need to get moving on replacing those worn out child locks.
It starts off early in the morning, just after his breakfast. A clean diaper and a full tummy is more than enough to keep him going for a least a few hours. He waits until neither my wife nor I are looking and then makes a mad dash to the Tupperware drawer, his favorite hangout. We automatically know what he’s up to by the signature sound of lids hitting the floor. As if we didn’t know what he was doing we both turn to each other and ask, “What is Ryan doing?” At that point one or both of us go to the kitchen only to find him standing at the drawer back to. The various lids come flying over his shoulders like rapid fire from a machine gun. A sudden “HEY” gets his attention rather quickly and he jumps from being startled. As he turns around a huge shit eating grin sprawls across his face followed by an expression that reads “Oh, was I doing something naughty?” He then plops down on his butt and does ‘The big hand crawl’ toward us. The ‘Big hand’ term was given because as he crawls along with every forward movement he raises his hands over his head and slaps them off the floor. It reminds me of a charging bull grinding its hoof into the ground right before the charge. He comes charging across the floor with that same grin smeared across his face until he reaches my legs and pulls himself up. When he is stable enough and sure of his footing he stairs up with an evil smile and another expression that reads,” I know I’m not supposed to be doing that but, I love you”. At that point I walk over and put the Tupperware back in the drawer. After all it is my fault; I’m the one who still hasn’t replaced the worn out child locks that he so easily snaps open.
One of his other frequent stops on the path to total destruction is our old and tired entertainment center. At his level are four main points of interest, the cabinet on the left, the matching one on the right, the satellite box, and his personal favorite the X-box. All are very intriguing to him, the cabinets are capable of killing an hour worth of time just by grabbing and pulling until there is nothing left to come out. The satellite box has a large number of buttons to push and a door for a credit card that he opens several times in a day. But the main area of focus is our old X-box, it’s not a new X-box 360, if it were I don’t think it would be within his reach. Often times when my wife and I think he is just playing in the living room we hear an odd noise. I can only describe it as a diver bouncing on a diving board before making a big splash. It’s actually Ryan after he has opened the CD drive on the X-box and is making a game out of making a disk bounce in the open CD tray. He figured out how to open the disk tray a few months ago but has only recently discovered that if he pulls down on the open tray it makes the disk bounce out of the tray. We have reminded our older boy time and time again that if he leaves a game in the X-box and does not turn the console sideways Ryan will have it broken by the time he gets home from school that day. It will only be a matter of time before he figures out how to rotate it back and get at the CD tray.
Sometime back in early September I installed a dishwasher for my wife as an anniversary present. Ryan however thinks it was a present for him. If he is on the floor and sees the dishwasher opened he crawls as fast as possible over to it and stands up bracing himself on the open door. From there he firmly grasps the bottom rack with both hands and starts shaking it back and forth making the dishes rattle and bang off one another. This is great fun for him and within the first few shakes has developed that famous ear to ear grin. Opening and closing the soap dispenser also proves to be a great time. The spring loaded door always gives him a slight jump every time it pops open even though he knows what is coming. Loading up the dirty dishes isn’t too bad, every once in a while he has to be pulled away and slid across the kitchen floor. That buys enough time to straighten out the dishes and put the bottom rack back on its track, he is so quick though that this needs to be done at least three times in one loading. If the dishes are clean it can be a different story and the ten foot walk from the dishwasher to the cabinet seems more like a mile. Pull all the plates out and stack them on the counter, move Ryan away, close the door. Go back to the counter, grab the clean plates and put them in the cabinet. Back to the dishwasher and open the door, Ryan comes running. Remove all the clean bowls and coffee cups, slide Ryan across the kitchen floor again and close the door. This process goes on until the load has been emptied and with any luck there are no baby finger prints smeared on the clean dishes.
With all the mischief he gets into there is still one looming thought in the back of my mind. He isn’t even walking yet, although he is capable of it. He paws his way around on two feet clinging to furniture and any other stable object he can get a grip on. He will also balance without assistance for a minute or more. These are telltale signs that he will be running in no time, at that point nothing will be safe. Looking toward the future, one year from now he will be almost two and will have a little brother that is his age right now. When I think about that I realize I need to get moving on replacing those worn out child locks.
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