24/7

It was cool yellows and blues and greens outside when I brought The Boss to the lab for bloodwork this morning. Inside, the empty office was shockingly white. It smelled of a cleaning product and paint combo. The Boss, though feverish and fatigued for the five days prior, galloped around the waiting room with vigor. When the sole phlebotomist on duty brought us back to the bloodwork room, she gestured to Number Two and asked who was going to hold him. I looked at her, I looked at him, and I looked at The Boss. "I am," I said. "Then who's going to sit with her?" "She can sit there by herself," I said. The nurse gave me a skeptical look. A four year old? Alone in that stark white seat for a blood draw? Well, I never. "If she can't sit still, I'll have to send you to another lab with more staff. I'm all alone here." I nodded. I was, strangely, not worried. The Boss climbed into the chair with the kind of confident ease she brings to...

"I can't reach the hand soap on the bathroom counter," The Boss said, bursting into the living room in a flurry of eye rolls and the pursing of lips. "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize." I was a bit taken aback by the histrionics. I directed her toward more accessible soap and told her I'd rectify the situation when I was done feeding her brother. The Boss was not deterred. "Why did you do that, mom? Why'd you put the soap so far back?" She stared at me with her father's righteousness while she contorted her mouth into one of so many expressions that even strangers comment on. "Did you think my arm was as long as yours? Did you?" I refrained from comment. The Boss's eyebrows danced above huge blue disks, rising and falling amidst all that width of sight. Then she flourished her right arm in accusation and demonstration. "It's this long, mom. My arm is this long." *** Parenting requires a change in perspec...

Number Two loves balls. His own, of course (what boy doesn't?), but also the other varieties: beach, base, basket, tennis, foam, and bouncy, just to name a few. His infatuation started with a balloon and now that's what he calls all these round objects, invoking the name with a precise glee that contradicts his otherwise meager vocabulary. My boy cannot--dare I say will not --utter the word "mama," but balloon rolls off his tongue with a smooth "ball" and then an "OON" that pops. He could play with his balls all day (not unlike The Partner, though in that case I'm again referring to the baser definition). Number Two once had a pink helium-filled balloon that he chased around the house for a week until it was nothing but a pathetic choking hazard. He learned to walk, I believe, because it was easier to carry balls that way. He won't eat when in the presence of balls because food just isn't as interesting. I was worried about his lack of...

We took our 27' recreational vehicle across 8 states with 6 occupants in 4 days before arriving in Missouri. Two of the travellers were under 4 years of age; one was over 60; another was a dog. The Partner drove. I sat in the front passenger seat, alternately reading, sleeping, and watching corn stalks whizz by. The Boss's oft-professed hatred of Interstates did not articulate itself on the journey, except for one or two "I do not care for highways" that she threw in more as statements of fact than of complaint. Number Two kicked up his heels in his bucket car seat and only resorted to cries upon becoming hungry, a condition quickly alleviated when my mother would rush to his side with gifts of crackers and cheese. We drove for more than 9 hours a day on the way out. We'd stay each night at a different state park or, on one occasion, at the home of friends. Each day got later, with the sun and moon competing for evening domination. The moon won out, as it always ...

The house sat on a lake in Kansas. Unlike Kansas, it was modern and glassy. Like Kansas, it sprawled. The place belonged to the daughter of my father's brother, and it was our first visit. Uncle Sonny left Hartford for good in the 50s. He stopped in Topeka more than twenty years ago, setting up house in grand style. His daughter's place is grander still, built on the strength of her husband's endodontics practice in a town with lots of bad teeth and few practitioners with the two extra years of schooling necessary to root all those canals. Not long after we arrived, my mother asked me if I'd seen the bathroom. "It has a window for a wall," she whispered. I raised an eyebrow at her. "A window," she repeated. " For a wall !" Two Bud Light Lime's later, I saw it for myself. I closed the door behind me to find a toilet to my left, a sink like white art to my right, and an unobstructed view of the lake in front of me. The wall was floor-t...

Sometimes at night, the tinted screen of the computer makes a haze that is the only evidence an outsider can see of life within my window. This is me when I'm reading your blog, or clicking on the "newlywed" bulletin board I continue to visit without knowing why, or Googling "recurrent high fever infants" to find some reasoning behind the fact that Number Two spikes a temperature of 104 if he so much as looks at a bacterium. Sometimes the calendar on the wall is two weeks out of date; sometimes it's a month. Sometimes my answering machine blinks with a message that I've already heard, being that I was sitting right in front of it as the caller left a taped proclamation of her desire to speak with me. Sometimes my desk is messier. It's rarely neat. The glow is more fascinating than the reality. It's the not knowing. It's the imagination of children as they drive by houses on a summer evening, looking in windows while the warm air pushes throug...

I found The Partner's first Father's Day in an old blog of mine. It went like this: Last night The Partner did the most amazing thing. He walked into the banshee's lair, placed his hand on her writhing back, and lulled her to sleep with his presence. The incredible part isn't that she calmed down so easily; it's that he reached out. The gesture was a year in the making. His hands-on approach toward swapping out car engines or turbo-charging lawnmowers never extended to the day-to-day maintenance of a baby. What he wanted from life was simple: cars, trucks, boats, cable television and pie. He thought a wife to hand him the torque wrench and laugh uproariously at his jokes would be quite nice, too. At 27, he was sure he had a few more good years of buying toys and watching Modern Marvels on the History Channel before Father's Day would be anything but a celebration of his own dad's role in his upbringing. At 28, he realized he was wrong. Much petulance ensued....