Day one of daddy day care

I'm thinking that if I can just get Eddie Murphy and either John Travolta or Arnold (whatever) to participate as well I could probably have my own reality television show. Either that or if I had a twin brother or something. Or maybe just if my brother lived here, and I tweeted a lot and knew lots of stuff about handbags like the difference between a purse and a handbag and maybe if I was dating a professional athlete like Danica Patrick or that one volleyball lady who's name is Gabi or something, then I think we might really have a fantastic reality television show on our hands about dads who have famous wives taking care of their babies, which would mostly consist of putting Oxi clean (sp?) on crapped on clothes and practicing how to blow bubbles with the lil un's. We would probably set the show in the south and I'd have the sort of accent where lil un's is totally appropriate to say.

5:23 A.M. A baby cries in the distance. I roll over to see S leaving the room and walking into a hallway of light.

5:45 A.M. S returns, and I put on my glasses ready to hop into action like Clark Kent. She mumbles something about me needing to rest and her sister taking care of Sadie. I oblige.

6:43 A.M. The child is put down for a nap. I spend the next few moments in bed staring at the ceiling and contemplating this odd feeling of loss. You see, we creatures, or perhaps just most of us, are ones of habit. So, as I lay in bed beneath the ceiling fan trying to piece together what the gilded bits at the base of the fan were (either: tulips, a crown, a man hung on a cross with Modiglianiesque arms) I felt a heavy sort of sadness settling into the still dark room. As it turns out, I was going to miss going to work at the normal time. I was going to miss the normal little life that I'd carved out for myself. The wife, the baby, the yard, the fence, the job. Isn't life about getting ducks in a row? And now here someone had come along to kick the ducks over, or so it seemed. And then I felt guilty because how could I feel sad about taking care of sweet lil s? Luckily human beings are also, evolutionarily speaking, great creatures at adapting, and so I can already know with certainty that I'll have developed some schedule with il s that I will be sad to see go months or years from now, and perhaps I'll spend that morning wondering about the shapes at the base of the ceiling fan, while the monitor buzzes on, sounding like a wave from the California coastline of my past that never recedes.

7:30 The little one awakes all smiles.

7:30-5:45 P.M.

I spend time with s. It's strange to spend time with a little being who's raison d'etre seems to be picking up various objects and then gnawing on them for a few seconds. This leads to a game where I pull her up to a sitting position and then as she pulls my knuckle towards her gaping maw I pull it away at the last second leaving her to suck on her own boring fingers. And okay, so the highlight of this period time is watching her frantically bobbing head as she tries to decide which small toy to pick up and shove in her mouth. After which, the gentle gnawing, she generally starts breathing heavily and may emit a sigh, as if the mere act of deciding which to shove in one's mouth is incredibly stressful, and I start to worry about her heart rate and cholesterol and wonder whether we should ask our doctor for some meds to make sure she's in good health in her sixties. Also, she blows bubbles, or raspberries or whatever, which creates a thick sheen of drool on any shirt and one of her three chins. It's a good time for all.

8:30-9:30 Attempt to help kindly visitor with her son as she prepares to leave. Fail. The child seems distressed at my attempts to keep him amused though he immediately grins at me as though I'm his long lost old friend as soon as his mother picks him up. I try not to take it too personally.

9:30 More raspberries, inane yelling, and bottle feeding.

11:00 Nap.

11:00
I decide that I need to continue my workout regimen at home. Google home workouts. Come up with the Spartan workout from 300. The video is two minutes worth of exercises followed by one minute of the guy doing the demo posing shirtless. I make note on the Youtube video that I found the first two minutes more useful than the last bit. I'm not sure that I can spend 1 third of my workout just posing with my shirt off because it doesn't seem like it would keep you in very good shape.
Exercise-It turns out I can't do one-armed push ups. Also, I find an old pipe, much to S's imminent displeasure who will make a cease and desist order as soon as she reads this, upon which I can do pull ups but not without ramming my head into the ceiling and the pull ups aren't quite all the way and the pipes are incredibly dusty, and I'm fairly certain that a brown recluse has been waiting years for just this moment, but I do them anyway, cheating death yet again while occasionally slamming my head into the ceiling.

12:00 Hi baby.

1:15 Nap.
nap. Now is my chance to make good on the day. I move laundry over, for S, if it were up to me we'd do one load every three months or so like I did in college, though lil s seems to need her clothes washed more frequently probably due to incontinence. Then I go outside and water our red maple, which pretty much just looks like a Charlie Brown tree at this point, no leaves to speak of, and the feckless (a word I love) workers who put it in (though one could point out that I could have probably bought and put in a tree myself) haven't delivered the bag that's supposed to go at its base, and so I'm watering it with the hose and wondering how soon until it dies like those azaleas from last year, and as much as I like gardens I think I should probably switch over to the rock variety.

2:05 Hi baby.

3:15 nap Note: Sort of. Closer to 3:30.

By this point in the day I've got the whole nap thing down. As soon as she even whimpers I take her upstairs, wrap her in a green blanket, and shove her pacifier in. The kid loves it. I remember a trip from a few weeks ago when I couldn't set her down without screaming and about how I almost went crazy and was pretty much certain that I couldn't do the whole taking care of the kid thing (of course she's interrupting this now with crying for the first time today and I'm reminded that pride cometh before the fall) and was contemplating evening jobs and cut rate workers from obscure foreign countries. But I guess I'm just going to take care of the little gal and get used to spitting raspberries and relearning my ABC's, and all that sort of stuff that a parent does when they have a child.