What's in a name

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My son, Squirmy, is only a couple months short of his second birthday. And I take great comfort from his desire to hang out with his Daddy. We're traveling in England this month, and I'm splitting my time between the office here and hanging out with the family, visiting friends. Squirmy's doing great with the travel, and enjoying playing with all the lovely British children and in the beautiful gardens. But when I make it back from the office, he grins, laughs, and makes a bee line for my lap, to insist that I spend the next 20 or 30 minutes playing with whatever toy that has grabbed his attention at the moment. This morning, as I tried to quietly move around the room getting ready to head out to work, Squirmy stuck his head up out of the covers and groggily rubbed the sleep from his eyes with his fists. When he saw that I was already dressed and had my laptop over my shoulder, heading out, he scrambled out of bed, grabbed his shoes, and tried to put them on to go with me, pajamas and all. I sat and held him for a few minutes, and then had to sadly pass him back to my Bride to deal with his screaming as I left. I couldn't ask for a better Father's Day present from my youngest than his clear and innocent displays of love. Why, then, I ask you, can he get his sister's name, our St. Bernard's name, label the chickens, tell you when he wants his choo-choo, or juice, or milk, or needs to change his clothes, or say the name of the dog he was just introduced to five minutes before, but the little sh*t still calls me 'Mommy'?
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Year end wrap up, 2008

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This Christmas has been one of the most relaxing we've had since... well, last Christmas. We've made a habit out of low key holidays since we got the first kid, and with the addition of the other one, we've re-committed ourselves to not ever leaving our house again during a national holiday. Not even Arbor Day. This gives us the opportunity to really enjoy our house, the full fun and fruit of decorating our home and putting up the trees - Every year we get two Christmas trees. Because even before she was bringing home macaroni ornaments, I knew that I wanted to have a "kid's tree" where macaroni ornaments could go. And a grown up tree that was everything fancy and beautiful like I saw in those magazines, but could never have because my Father, the Surgeon, always insisted on tinsel and giant, fist-sized colored lights, when I wanted simple white lights and traditional ornaments. This is so much part of our annual holiday tradition now that the Critter looks at other kids who don't have to put up with the second tree thing as if they live in a magical story book land, you know, you've heard about those places, but gee, I always thought they were just made up. Every year, we tell our family that as much as we'd love to see them, we have the children and an aversion to fighting our way through insane Christmas airport traffic while trying to keep a pair of small, feral monkeys from eating one another, flinging their poo at random strangers, or telling me right after we get in line at the check-in desk that she really needs the toilet right now. But we're here, and our door is open. This year, for the first time, one of our family members called our bluff and came to stay with us for the duration. My Bride's sister arrived just before the 3 feet of snow we got the weekend before Christmas and stayed for the duration. In the Critter's eyes, her Auntie ranks someplace between Minnie Mouse and Baby Jesus, so actually having her here at Christmas time made her head explode just a little bit. It also gave my Bride and I an extra barrier between sanity and the endless parade of "When does Santa get here? Is he on his sleigh yet? Don't the reindeer get tired? What shall we leave out for Santa?" questions. I've many things to be thankful for this year, probably most of all the opportunity to be at home, safe and warm with my loving family while this snow accumulated outside (seriously.. for a boy from Georgia, getting 3 feet of snow in a couple of days was a daunting experience. I was looking at my chainsaw and the forest behind our house thinking that I might need to tackle a couple more trees before it was all over). But a very close second in order of thankfulness was the absolutely fantastic set of spice jars I received this year from my sister-in-law. Oh my God, these things are fantastic. I've been wanting to do this for years, ever since I saw Martha use these, but I didn't want the whole magnet backed thing, because a) I figured they'd just get messy if they were out all the time, and b) I don't have anything to stick them on that's ferrous except for the front of our dishwasher. And who puts spices on the front of their dishwasher? But look at how beautifully lined up and organized they are! It gave me the chance to consolidate, clean up, throw out old spices and really see what I had hidden away in my cabinet. Every time I open the drawer and see these I am inspired to cook new and different things. I've already found myself using things I had forgotten about (toasted rice - one of the key ingredients for so many southeast asian dishes that you've tried to replicate at home, but can't figure out what that last ingredient you remember tasting and feeling in your mouth - it's partly about the texture - it's probably toasted rice.) In the new year, I hope to carry this spirit forward and re-claim some of the organization I've lost in the past few months during all of the move craziness. There are a hundred and one little projects to do - I finally started converting the attic into a playrooom for the kids, and I have to say it's looking pretty cool. I laid out the raised beds for this year's new vegetable garden before the ground froze. And then there're the chickens we're getting this spring. Because everybody needs some chickens. Right? In addition to the house projects, there are a dozen or more other, professional efforts that will keep me going in the new year, which I'm really looking forward to, but I'm hopeful that I will also have the time and inspiration to write more in one shape or another. Or at least photo-document some of the madness that keeps us hopping. In the mean-time, I hope you are having a lovely Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/or Pagan Yule Log. Whatever floats your boat. Here's to another fantastic year, from our house to yours.
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Kind of like paying the barber to make your hair look like it did when you sat down

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Earlier, I talked about how we discovered, in an upfront and personal way, all the lead the old-timers used in making the inside of our house look so purty. Now that we finally knew where it all was, in excruciating, triplicate-formed detail, we had to figure out what exactly we were going to do about it. Again, there are stories out there about families spending crazy money on the process, even before you take into consideration the little things. Like the fact that you can't live in the house during the process. It becomes sort of like that scene in E.T. with the men in white suits and an air-lock instead of a front door, but no peanut-buttery Reeses Pieces to offset the discomfort. Massachusetts law requires any house built before 1978 where a six year old (or younger) lives to be certified as "lead safe". Given the median age of a house in Massachusetts is at least, oh, 80 years old, I would think that this would mean that about every fourth person you met at the grocery store would be in some way involved in the de-leading business, wouldn't you? Wrong, mein Freund. There are surprisingly few. And, it seems, most are involved in "commercial" de-leading (I think that means old warehouses-turned-apartment blocks or some such). Our main concern was that we find a way to make the place safer for the little tyke without either a) losing any of the historical bits or b) breaking the bank. For example, there's a place inside one of the cabinet doors above the fireplace mantle that someone graffiti'ed with the date... back in 1861. We're partial to ancient graffiti, I guess. We'd kind of like to keep that. And it's a pretty low-risk area, right? So we can do that. The first guy we lead through the house suggested that we could put some plastic over it 'like a poster frame'. Hmm. Not exactly the look we're going for, here. Keep walking, buddy. We'll try again. The next guy we found specializes in antique homes, and knew enough about the construction of our house to tell us where the secret room is (a small hideout in the middle of the central chimney called the "Indian room" - kind of like a Colonial 'panic room' where a family could hide if they were afraid of getting, you know, scalped and stuff). We didn't even know about the secret room. Now I know where to retreat when the Revenuers come knocking... At any rate, between his knowledge and obvious passion for old homes, and a passing reference to his connection to the founding producer of This Old House, I had a good feeling that this guy would do a pretty good job for us. I also had a good feeling that he would charge accordingly. In the end, though, we were able to pick and choose a bit of the work to make sure the essentials were done without going overboard, and end up at a price that, while more expensive than many of the cars that I've owned in my life, was tolerable (on the other hand, we've seen the kind of cars I buy). The painful part of the whole ordeal is that we're paying extra for this guy because our goal is that the finished job will look as if he had never been there... the same finish and color paint on the walls, floors, windows, etc. In other words, if it's successful, it will look like we just paid this guy a whole bucket of cash to make our house look exactly the same as it does today. Awesome. I suggested to my Bride that we could try the John Travolta, boy in a plastic bubble route for Squirmy as an alternative. He'd only have to stay in there for a few more years, and besides, then we could take those gates on our stairs down, and just sort of roll him down to breakfast in the morning. And think of all the fun we could have at the beach. Like a really big one of those hamster wheels. She wasn't convinced. So when the boy comes to us later with his big dreams of Harvard medical school or whatever, we're going to remind him that his college fund got eaten right along with all that lead he chewed off the chair rail as a baby. Mmm. Tasty.
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