2008 September » the eelfang chronicles

Tue 23 Sep 2008

Lesson#2: Supporting your wife

Posted by Todd under parenting, pictures
[4] Comments

Next post about having our niece and nephew over for the weekend.� This one will be pretty short, in hopes that it’ll entice me to write more sooner.

One mantra that we kept repeating to ourselves over the weekend with Saben and Annika was that “when we get a child, it’ll be a newborn that can’t move far, and it’ll (probably) be only one of them”.

Having our first over-night parenting-type experience be with two children, both very much ambulatory and both rather high on energy, was exhausting.� Saben would be running around, demanding that we make spaceship noises for his rocket, while Annika wandered off into another room, while the third kid was busy spilling Legos all over the floor, and the fourth kid was asking for a glass of milk, and the fifth kid was refusing to drink any milk, and the sixth kid needed a diaper change, and the seventh kid was busy reminding us that all of this movement and noise was actually only coming from two kids.

Whew!

The key to good parenting, I have found, is to make your wife handle both children at once, feeding both of them while her food turns increasingly cold, while you fiddle around with your camera and try to line up the perfect shot:

… or maybe that’s just the key to getting dirty looks and exasperated sighs from your wife.� I often get those two confused.

Taking care of the kids was definitely a two person task, and by the time we got them down to sleep for a little while, caretaker nap time was a two person task as well. I kept thinking back to some great advice that I got from my friend Doug the other day:

Parenting might seem really scary right now from the outside, but you learn what needs to be done.� And the great thing is that you’re growing as a parent at the same pace as the kid – when you first bring them home, all they need is a diaper change and some milk, so you learn those skills, and you’re good.� A few days later, they need a bath, so you learn that skill, and you’re good again.� And as they grow up, they keep on making these small, incremental growths, and you learn your lessons as a parent in small, manageable pieces as you go along with them.

It’s really reassuring to remember that – the child will be as inexperienced being a human as we are being parents, and we’ll learn at the same time.� And as long as I remember to put down the camera and help wipe up the spills, we’ll both have good teammates by our sides.

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Tue 23 Sep 2008

some things that happened!

Posted by blog under pictures
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Our poor little car got hit on Saturday!� We were driving towards the freeway, on the hill just east of White Center, and came to slow and complete stop at the stop light.� No one in front of us, no one behind.� About 10 seconds into our wait, I hear Betsy shouting something towards the rear-view mirror, and then a huge thump and crash.�� The guy hit us at around 20-25 mph – we’re guessing that he just wasn’t paying attention, didn’t notice the red light, and didn’t notice that we weren’t moving forward.� It’s probably the most “absolutely not our fault” accident one can be involved in.

The guy was suitably apologetic and distraught at his carelessness.� However, the guy was not suitably insured, so we’ll see just how apologetic he actually is.� The damage is relatively minor (crackled paint on the bumper, slightly popped out on one side), and considering that bumpers on modern cars are hundreds of dollars, we’re planning on getting a quote and seeing if he’s willing to make good on his promise to pay for it.� If not, we’re just going to drive it as is.

When comparing notes after the crash, Betsy and I found that we had independently had the same thought: we were happy that, if we were to get in a crash, that is was only the two of us in the car, and that Eelfang wasn’t with us yet.� This situation was a manageable level of stress, and we were able to talk about our injuries and self-diagnose – it would have been much different with a baby on board.
Pictures!

The good news is that neither of us got hurt – my shoulder was a bit sore for the rest of the afternoon, and Betsy’s arms felt like she had done a bunch of pushups, but we both felt totally normal by Monday.

Sunday was a better day, though, as we treated ourselves to some lovely pastries at Bakery Nouveau – mine was the almond croissant in the foreground, and it was awesome. � After church, we returned to West Seattle to check out the car show, and then later in the evening, picked some of the squashes we grew this year in our garden.

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Wed 17 Sep 2008

shout out!

Posted by Betsy under open adoption
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A quick little shout out to Scott & Bobby: We hope you two�are busy doing much more exciting things tonight�than reading this here blog…but either way, prayers of peace, love and�perfect timing�comin’ atcha!

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Mon 15 Sep 2008

photo dump

Posted by Todd under pictures
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Here are some more photos from our life.� I’ve been bad at my goal of taking a picture every day – it’s been more like 4 days a week, instead.� However, that’s still about 3.99 days a week more than I used to, so it’s progress.��

I still have more to write about having Saben and Annika spend the night at our house (such as the first time I ever changed a diaper!), but after a long day of work, captions are about all I have the energy to write today.

�

One consequence of being the main photographer in the house is that I don’t show up in many of the pictures.� So here’s a�mildly disgusting�one of me to make up the difference.��I’ve just come back from my morning jog in this shot.

Once again establishing who is the cute one in the house, Betsy is seen here picking blackberries over at Magnuson Park.� We’re not sure if it’s entirely legal to do, but there were a couple of other families with young children picking at the same time, and we figured we could run from the police faster than a three-year old could, so we were safe.

We took the blackberries home and froze them, and then a couple of days later, we had some of them on top of our oatmeal.� I love the look of partially-thawed blackberries, where it is dark in the creases but frosty on the “bulbs”.

On the first day of the NFL season, I had a dentist appointment in the morning and worked from home the rest of the day.� When the game came on, I was able to set everything up to do my work while having the game (and my fantasy football score) displayed right above my laptop.� I was quite proud of my set-up.�

Last Saturday, we had an outdoor movie night in our friends’ backyard.� We watched the 1989 Batman movie – it’s a lot cheesier of a movie than I remembered.� In the above picture, Adrian is getting the projector all set up.

And before the movie started, we had a bonfire to make sure we kept warm during the movie (and could have smores afterwards!)

�

I was able to take the bonfire picture with natural light and relatively little blurring because of the experimenting I’ve been doing with shutter speeds, aperatures and all that fancy stuff that our camera can do but that I’ve never known what to do with.�� The above picture is the result of some of that experimentation.� No post-production in Photoshop/etc applied.

And finally, the results of one of Betsy’s most recent knitting projects – a little hat with ears for Eelfang.

�

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Mon 8 Sep 2008

dirt

Posted by Todd under parenting, pictures
[5] Comments

We had our niece and nephew stay with us overnight last weekend.� A lot of stuff happened, and rather than write one long, boring post about every single thing that happened, I figured it would be better to write a few little posts that add up to something even longer (and potentially even more boring).� So, these will be rolling out piece by piece over the next week+, but it’s all about the same weekend.

I heard it said once that the healthiest thing you can do for a child is to feed them a teaspoon of dirt once a month.� (1)�Such a small dose wouldn’t have enough�bacteria/fungus/other pathogens to get the child sick, but it would be enough of�a serving to make�the immune system kick into gear and get some germ-fighting practice, and therefore cause�them to grow stronger in the long run and better able to handle the sicknesses and sniffles they’ll be dealing with the rest of their life.

I’ve always�liked the general thought behind that idea -�the best way to prepare your children for the future is not to keep them�covered up in a styrofoam-plated�pants and plastic-wrapped hands, but to let them run around, get a little scratched up, eat a little dirt, and just learn how to�be�tough and to live an active, healthy life.� I don’t have much of a “parenting philosophy” yet, as I figure�it’s better to�learn on the job than to go in with preconceived ideas, but that one is definitely somewhere in my still-forming cloud of fatherly thinking.

We took our niece and nephew down to the beach near our house last Sunday.� The beach is very much a Western Washington style beach – lots of rocks, seaweed, clams�and barnacles, and not much in the way of sand.� In short, it’s not a very good place for an unsteady walker to wander around.� But as I tried to carry her down to the water to watch her brother throw rocks, Annika squirmed and squealed and made it very obvious that she wanted down to explore the beach herself.

So, I let her down to explore�the beach.��I was going to be right behind her, the risk of serious injury was low-to-non-existent, and if she slipped on a rock and got a little scrape, well, maybe that was just the day’s “teaspoon of dirt” that helps her grow up tough in the long run.

And of�course, within 30 seconds, she had slipped, and had several bright red scratches on her�wrist.� At which point I realize that my “teaspoon of dirt” philosophy is utterly ridiculous, that I let the most amazing little girl in the world get hurt, and that I’m the most terrible slime-sucking excuse for an uncle that has ever seen fit to show his face.� I was utterly panic-stricken at what I had allowed to happen and how I had failed to live up to my responsibility to keep the kids safe for only one day.

I imagine that my sister would�be rather sympathetic to the whole “let kids be kids, even if it means a few scratches” philosophy.� After all, her husband has built a business around developing new and expensive ways to rupture one’s spleen, and when we were growing up together, she was definitely the tougher one out of the two of us.� The kids seem totally well-rounded and ready for adventure, and I’m sure they get (and will get) their fair share of scratches while under their Mom’s supervision.

But that’s not what I was thinking at the time.� All I could think of was that we had been entrusted with a baby in mint condition, and we were returning her in near-mint condition (at best).� We might have to go pick up a new baby to replace the one that we broke, and let me tell you, there’s a pretty significant back-order on babies these days.� Worse, I knew that we were going up north to hand off the kids to my parents in just a couple hours, and that there was no way to hide those scratches from my mom.�I immediately swooped down and picked her up, and gave her hugs, and kissed the scratches, and did everything a mildly-panicking adult does in a situation like that.�

But something weird was happening – or, rather, not happening.� She wasn’t screaming or crying or anything like that – if anything, she was starting to squirm again, and obviously wanted to get back down so she could walk around on the rocks some more.� The scratches had barely registered with her – maybe a minor nuisance, but she was ready to go again and didn’t mind the temporary pain.�

I set her down, and she walked further down the beach – a little slower, a little more carefully, but�still confident and�still happy to be outside.� And I realized that in that moment, she had been a lot tougher mentally than I was – that she was going to go out and explore the world whether I liked it or not.

I still think that the general idea of letting children be exposed to the world – even when they are a little bit dangerous or even a little bit painful – is still a good idea.� But maybe the real value of feeding the teaspoon of dirt to the kids is what it teaches the parents (and future parents-to-be) – that kids�are already way tougher than you think, and that teaching yourself to�let them go out and explore is worth all the bumps, scratches, and potential lawsuits from�immediate family members that may come.

�

�footnote:

(1) – Of course, now that I try to write about it, I can’t find the original quote anywhere, and searching Google for “teaspoon of dirt” only brings up pages of facts about the thousands of terrible poisons and malicious creatures crawling on every grain of sand, and how a teaspoon of dirt is about the most fatal substance the earth has ever seen.� So, uh, draw your own conclusions.

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