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Results For "Month: June 2012"

Grumpy Old Man

Saturday 30 June 2012

They say that life is circular. At least Shakespeare did:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

It’s no surprise then when a little boy sometimes looks like a grumpy old man.

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Ready for Bed

Friday 29 June 2012

If only the Boy were as easily prepared for sleep as his bed is: a matter of laying out an oddity that’s essentially a sleeved sleeping bag.

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To get the Boy to this point, there’s been at least half an hour of eating and another half an hour spent keeping him vertical to avoid spillage from burps and reflux.

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And that’s on a lucky day.

Tummy Time

Tuesday 26 June 2012

As parents, we sometimes deliberately subject our children to discomfort, frustration, and anger. For the Boy, that occurs several times daily, and the Girl has named this torture “Tummy Time.”

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“You have to exercise those neck muscles,” she explains as we did so often before. For the Girl, though, it’s more than simple entertainment: it’s a brief glimpse into her own infancy.

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Perhaps that’s why she’s so keen to watch each and every time. She comes running from wherever she might be when she hears, “Okay, little man, it’s Tummy Time.”

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Photo Walk

Monday 25 June 2012

After the Boy’s six o’clock feeding, nothing soothes his nerves (and K’s) like a walk. Without K. Or the Girl. So the three of us head out alone, I with the Boy, the Girl with our little point and shoot camera.

It’s a fairly standard route we take. Usually, the only question is direction, and in the late afternoon, the sun dictates counter-clockwise. And so we begin with the mysterious flowers that have been blooming for a week now and the daily request: “Daddy, can I pick a flower?” The bush hangs over an embankment, with thorns and danger swirling around it.

“How about a picture?” I suggest.

“Okay,” she chirps, then explains that today, she’s going to focus on pictures of nature.

Yet when we get home, we see that there was another motif that crept its way steadily into the eighty-some pictures she snapped along the half-hour walk: the road.

Endless pictures of the road. The road and the grass beside; the road and our feet; the road and her foot; the road with crumbling asphalt; the road with new asphalt; the road without lines; the road with lines.

“Why so many pictures of the road?” I want to ask, but I know the answer. “I don’t know.”

I remember taking pictures that way: not really sure why I was taking that particular picture, but somehow certain that the photo would reveal something not immediately observable in reality.

After all, isn’t that the motivation behind most modern art? If Marcel Duchamp can display a signed urinal as modern art, isn’t a food processor on the side of the road at least as deserving of artistic attention?

Surely, at the very least, a dog’s urinal is art.

 

Afternoon with Big Sister

Saturday 23 June 2012

I put the Boy on a small sleeping bag the Girl has spread out in front of her doll house. As often happens, things turn photogenic.

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Waking Up

Wednesday 20 June 2012

“Let’s go wake up Big Sister,” I say to the Boy as he fusses this morning.

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Soon, everyone is smiling.

Nap

Saturday 16 June 2012

“Can you hold the boy?”

Sure — for as long as necessary.

Wonder that Is Not

Thursday 14 June 2012

Infants are deceiving: they sometimes look as if they’re entranced with something, gazing into the distance and lost in thought.

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The pediatrician assures us that the Boy can’t even really focus at this point. His muscles have little minds of their own, and things blur and crystallize without his conscious thought or control.

Sometimes its better to read into it what we will, though.

Knight Study

Tuesday 12 June 2012

“Daddy, can we play chess?” the Girl asks almost daily now. She’s learning — slow steps — but her enjoyment of the game is most gratifying. Today: knight study.

“Put a pawn at each square this knight is attacking,” I say. She forms the circular pattern around the knight.

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“Notice,” I continue, “that the knight is on a white square but is attacking all black squares.” I hope this will help her complete the exercise, but we end up getting pawns on random black squares in a few moments.

I suppose the next lesson — moving the knight to the edge of the board to show how its power is effectively halved in doing so, proving the old adage, “A knight on the rim is grim” — will have to wait.