Rehab is for Quitters

This is my new favorite picture of Harper Jo. In fact, it's now my desktop background. The beauty of it is not just in the circumstance (that she's reaching into a cooler for a bottle of wine) but in the timing. A split second before or after and we would've missed that perfect, dazed look: eyebrows raised, eyelids drooping ever so slightly. That "I'm really drunk but it's a holiday so I better keep drinking" face. In college, my friend Tyler wore that face so much, I think it's probably in the yearbook.

But somehow, it's her expressionless mouth that clinches it. There's not even the slightest hint of a smile. Just a pure debauched haze. That's what pulls the whole image together for me.

In her face, I see the following statement: "Huh? Oh, yeah. No, I'm okay. Just getting another bottle of hootch."

Sesame Asylum

Generally speaking, I watch a lot of really bad television. Don't get me wrong, I also watch a lot of great TV. McCall and I love 24, Lost and Heroes. But we do watch quite a bit of VH1's Celebreality lineup. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you are a healthy well adjusted citizen. If you do, you should be ashamed of yourself (although Surreal Life Fame Games was SO good).

Anyway, now we have to TiVo shows that Harper can watch. If she watched the shows we watch, she'd think that torture, gunfire, and super powers were part of daily life. She'd also think "bleeping bleep" are the most common words in the English language. So now all kinds of crazy shows are popping up on TiVo that range from the fun and tolerable (Johnny and the Sprites), to the PC indoctrinating (Happily Ever After: Stories for Every Child).

However, it's hard to beat the old standards, and Sesame Street definitely fits into this category. But, as I was watching it the other day with Harper, I realized something a bit disturbing. Sesame Street is full of crazies and alternative lifestyles. Below are the list of offending characters on the show:

1) Big Bird:

A Beautiful Mind? I don't think so!
Okay, lets start with the kingpin. Big Bird is one giant, yellow paranoid schizophrenic. He has visual and auditory hallucinations that take the form of a woolly mammoth named Aloysius Snuffleupagus (aka Mr. Snuffleupagus or Snuffy). Big Bird exhibits all the classic signs of PS; he is delusional in his belief that Snuffy is real, and carries on conversations that only he can hear. Nobody besides Jack saw Tyler Durden and nobody besides Big Bird sees Mr. Snuffleupagus, draw your own conclusion.

2) Cookie Monster:

Not Pictured: About a million trillion other cookies he's eaten.
Cookie Monster is an addict. His addiction takes the form of an eating disorder focused on cookies. Cookie Monster needs serious help and I believe he should start going to Overeaters Anonymous meetings and get a sponsor. During the episode that I saw, he had an enormous cookie, at least four feet in diameter, which he ate in less than one minute. He tried to contain himself. He started by only taking one bite. But his addiction wouldn't allow him to stop. Pretty soon it was all crumbs dropping out of his mouth. I really think it's wrong of the Children's Television Workshop and PBS to exploit his weakness for their own profit.

3) Count Von Count:

The Count was later found dead from hypothermia.
Otherwise known simply as the Count, this poor soul clearly suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He has an irrational need to count any and everything in sight. He is most affected by repetition of sounds (e.g. clock chimes) and a need to sort items (such as snowflakes) into groupings of successive integers. What may be most disturbing about his illness is the heightened level of mania he displays while acting out. The Count laughs uncontrollably between each item he counts. These empty guffaws obviously mask a great deal of emotional pain and distress.

4) Bert and Ernie:

Gay or Not Gay?
These may be the most controversial of the Sesame Street characters. Are they gay? I don't think so. At least not Bert. Any gay man with half a brain would get that unibrow waxed post haste. Plus neither has any fashion sense and their hair styles can best be described as Troll. And while they share a bedroom, they sleep in separate beds. That's not very gay. They aren't homosexual, they aren't even metrosexual. They are just a couple of buddies too broke to get a two-bedroom apartment. All that being said, there's definitely something odd about Ernie's obsession with his rubber ducky. I can't quite call it a psychological disorder, but it's not normal.

Caption Contest

Here are some pics from Harper's last photo shoot. Leave your own ideas for captions in the comments area.

1)Pink cowboy hats. The next big rage!


2)Shut up! Seriously? Memoirs of a Geisha is out on DVD?


3)Eat your heart out, Anne Geddes.


4)Who me? I didn't do it.


5)Um, you're going to need a lot more than this.


6)This is my favorite part of my belly, right here.


7)BUSTED!

Sleep, Thy Name Is Enemy

Harper hates to sleep. I could pretty much stop there and you'd get the basic point of this entry. In fact, if someone says to you, "Tell me about Kyle's new post", and you totally space the content, don't worry, all you need is "Harper hates to sleep". But to leave it at that would be kind of like saying George Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze is a good painting.

I know some of you are questioning my choice of metaphor. "Washington Crossing the Delaware???", you think as you conjure up an image of the painting; most likely remembered from a school text book in which it was shown at maybe six inches by two inches. Well, in case you forgot it, here it is below gloriously displayed at six inches by two inches. Enjoy.

Washington applied his "laissez-faire" attitude to all aspects of life.

I've had the pleasure of seeing this painting in person at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I was absolutely stunned when I saw it. I was just walking down a hall looking from one painting to the next and suddenly I was before this huge canvas. I couldn't believe it was the same painting from history class. The actual image is twenty-one feet long by twelve feet high! That's tall enough for Washington to have been painted life size (though I don't think he is). The detail is amazing and there's so much going on in the background that you just can't see at a reduced size. See, the painting has layers, and my initial statement has layers. Just as there is so much more to Leutze's masterpiece than old George standing in a boat, there is so much depth to Harper's hatred of sleep.

Harper has always struggled when we try to put her down. Nap or bedtime, she fights against her physical need to sleep. We try to keep our routine standard. Whenever it's time for Harper to sleep, one of us will take her to her room, put on a CD of lullabies or nature sounds, rock her in the glider and hold her as she drifts towards slumber. At least that's the theory.

First of all, you can't just hold her. We recently quit swaddling her so now we have to deal with flailing arms and kicking legs. She loves to swing her arms around or reach up and grab your face. She'll just see if she can get a big handful of throat, lips, eyes. If she can't, she'll try to grasp at arms, nipples, hair. Anything within her reach will be pinched, pulled or clawed. But not in a violent, thrashing way. It's much more like a compulsive instinct. Her hands will not stop (I mean ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT STOP!!!!), until she's been asleep for ten minutes. That's right, she doesn't settle down and then go to sleep. Hell, she doesn't even settle down when she goes to sleep. She settles down ten minutes after she's already asleep!

Sometimes I'll try to stroke my hand across her forehead and down over her eyes so she'll close them. Usually she senses that this is an effort to get her to go to sleep. Her immediate response is to burst out in heaving sobs. She will also generally be very squirmy. Every now and then I'll just let her do what she wants to do. I figure she needs to get comfortable, then she'll settle down and go right to bed. Nope.

First she'll arch her back and turn over so she's on her stomach. Then she'll push away from my chest and look at me (usually attempting to grab my face) or at the wall behind me. We have these little barnyard animals on the walls so Harper can learn that dogs are blue with plaid patches sewn on them for spots. We're also teaching her that any animal will have the sound it makes appear near them. I think she's really confused that our cats aren't followed around by little bubbles that say "Meow".

After she's done facing me, she'll turn towards the door of her room. I think she's probably looking for McCall, hoping that she'll come take her into the living room where all her toys are. I also suspect that when McCall is trying to put her down she hopes the same from me. Then she'll twist over and end up on her back in my arms the same way she started. If I let her she would continue this routine ad infinitum growing more frantic and upset, but never getting any closer to sleep.

So what's the solution? Well, if letting her do what she wants is ineffective, perhaps gently but firmly restraining her would work. Yeah, about as well as Bush's plan in Iraq. Which is to say, that so far restraining Harper has led to the deaths of 3,000 US soldiers. And I'm no closer to victory, again, just like Bush. Sorry about that, let me just put this soap box away.

So right now, we don't really have a solution. The past two days Harper hasn't taken an afternoon nap. We've tried but after an hour of trying to soothe a baby to sleep and getting nowhere you have to figure it's just not happening. Then again after 3,000 troop deaths you'd figure the President would come to the same conclusion. Okay, that's it. For real, I'm chopping up the soap box now and I'm building a little fire. It's just, he makes it so easy!

And then there's night. Oh man, I haven't even touched on nighttime. Harper is good for about five straight hours of sleep. From 7:30pm to 12:30am. From there it's anything goes. She may stir every hour for the rest of the night. She may need another bottle and then sleep four more hours. She might need a diaper change and then take another hour and half to get back to sleep. And she may wake up anywhere between 5:00am and 6:30am and she's ready to go for the day.

My life is clouded, and hazy. I'm in a constant state of sleep deprivation. McCall is completely exhausted. When we wake up we're tired, all day we're tired, we eat dinner tired, we sleep tired. How can you sleep tired? I mean, just look at that sentence. It doesn't make sense. And yet, I'm living it.

Two things before I go. One, I'm really not exaggerating for comic effect here. This is my actual existence and right now, it sucks. Really badly. And two, there's probably someone out there with triplets who all have colic and have never slept ever and they're six years old and you're starting to fear them because sometimes you wake up and they're standing over you with knives in their hands and you're probably thinking, "This guy doesn't know how easy he's got it", and you may be considering posting a comment or emailing me or something. Well save it. I don't care about your situation. Go get your own blog or better yet, get a time machine, go back in time pre-babies and get a vasectomy because I don't need to live in a world with homicidal, insomniac triplets, okay!

Solids

There are so many things we take for granted as adults that I see Harper struggling
with. For instance, I can easily roll from my back to my front and vice versa. I can sit up by myself and even look around without losing my balance and falling flat on my face. I can stand without assistance, I can walk, and when I'm tired I can put myself to bed and go to sleep without crying. But watching Harper, perhaps what impresses me most about me is that I can feed myself.

We have recently started Harper on solids. First, it was rice cereal, then we introduced peas, sweet potatoes, squash and carrots. Now we're giving her oatmeal, bananas, and apples. But you shouldn't imagine these delicacies as actually solid in any way. Harper still doesn't even have any teeth (another way in which I'm supremely superior to her). Everything is this kind of mushy, almost-liquid. It's basically the consistency of mashed potatoes. The bottom line: it's baby food. But she seems to love it (or most of it anyway).

The problem is she wants to try to feed herself. I know that in her still developing brain (mine is rather nicely developed, thank you very much) she thinks that she can do it. However, put to the test, she fails miserably. To start, she doesn't have enough motor control of her extremities to scoop anything and lift it to her mouth. Hell, it wasn't all that long ago that she was knocking herself in the forehead with her rattle. Big deal, right? She was aiming for her mouth. There's something hilariously pathetic about watching a baby concentrate so hard to do something so simple. She would watch the rattle as it neared her mouth bringing it steadily closer. And then for some reason at the last second, BONK! Forehead.

In addition, she doesn't have the sense to maintain a grip on anything long enough to feed herself. From the moment she picks something up it's a countdown until she drops it. And there are times when it seems like her hands are actually fighting each other over which gets to hold whatever item she's trying to manipulate. The left will snap at a teether and pry it free from the right. The right will greedily grab it back and attempt to grasp it tightly while the left redoubles its efforts culminating in a furious battle of...drop. 30 seconds! Way to go, Harper. A new record! Oh, and FYI - I can hold an object as long as necessary.

There have been times when I've tested her to see if she might actually be able to feed herself yet. Not with the solids, because there's no way I'm cleaning up that mess. She'd get about one pea in her mouth and the rest would be in every other conceivable place within a six foot radius. No, what I'll do is set her bottle on the tray of her high chair, sit back, and observe. You see, on some level Harper is my own private anthropology experiment. I love to just watch her quietly as she tries to do simple things (usually failing miserably) that I can do with little or no effort at all.

So with the bottle set, I watch. The other night she grabbed it and actually got the nipple into her mouth. The problem was she had the bottle pointed straight up. Then she dropped it. After I placed it back on her tray she was able to gather it up again, but this time she had the bottom of the bottle and tried to put it in her mouth. I thought to myself, "That bottle might was well be on Jupiter, for all the milk you're going to get out of it." Then I took it from her and promptly finished it off. Hey, I'm not about to let good boob milk go to waste.

The biggest pain when it comes to the transition to solids is simply the mess involved. Every night, when Harper is done eating she needs a full bath. Every night! That's probably only happened to me like four or five times in my whole adult life. But after dinner Harper's face looks like some crazy piece of abstract art. Or like a palsied clown putting on makeup with his off hand. Or Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Except instead of Scottish War Paint Blue, it's Gerber's Gooey Carrots Orange.

During mealtime, I usually hold Harper's arms down while McCall feeds her. Yes, I have to physically hold her arms down or she'll try to grab the spoon, the cup, the plate or whatever. McCall told me she wished we had a baby seat with electric chair-style restraints to hold her arms down and her head back. That got me thinking. Maybe they have a mini electric chair. I mean, how else do you execute midgets? We could get one and just remove all the stuff that makes you die. The more I think about it, the better that idea sounds. I think I'll go check Craig's List for "miniature electric chairs." They got to have it, I mean, they have everything else.

There're Grandparents and Then There're Great-Grandparents

Not long after Harper was born we undertook a very challenging trip to Cleveland. Due to a couple of different factors we chose to take a train. No wait, we took an Amtrak. I want to make the distinction because Amtrak is in a class by itself. But please don’t mistake that statement for a compliment.

Riding the Amtrak from Los Angeles to Cleveland is no joke. It’s about 56 hours including a four-hour layover in Chicago. Harper was three weeks old, McCall was still in serious pain from her C-section, and I spent my first Father’s Day staring out the window as New Mexico turned into Colorado which itself turned into Kansas. You may wonder what would spur such insanity in brand new parents. What was so important that we would attempt such an ambitious trip after less than a month of child rearing experience? The question isn’t “What?” but “Who?”


Gram and Gramp with a "yawning" Harper




We took the trip so that Harper could meet her great-grandparents, Gram and Gramp Sanders. Or rather so they could meet her. It wasn’t really an option for them to come to LA and since I was on paternity leave, we figured we’d strike while the iron was hot. My parents visited us shortly before we planned the trip and encouraged us to go even if the thought was a little nuts, even if we didn’t really have the money. My mom told us of how they had gone into debt to take my two older brothers and me to the East coast when we were young to meet my dad’s parents. She emphasized how important that trip was for them, how they never regretted it even as they had to overcome the financial burden afterwards. That trip still retains very important memories for me. Primarily because it was the only time I met my grandfather.

It was with the same attitude of purposeful sacrifice that we watched the country slowly lumber by. The money wasn’t important; in 30 years we won’t even know what it cost. The discomfort and pain wasn’t important; in 40 years we won’t even remember what hurt. The meeting was important, the togetherness. In 50 years we’ll still remember when Harper met her great-grandparents. And when they were introduced to the fourth generation of their lineage. What an amazing privilege! I pray that we will be so blessed.

Gram and Gramp are amazing people. They are brilliant and funny, considerate and generous. I love being around them. They are truly inspiring not only in their longevity, but in how they still so obviously love and care for each other after almost 70 years of marriage. I pray that we will be so blessed.

During our rehearsal dinner, I remember looking over at the Sanders family table and seeing them all gathered together. As a man, I imagined what it must be like for Gramp to sit there and look across at generation after generation. A living heritage that he and his beautiful wife begat. I pray that we will be so blessed.

I feel just like my parents did about their trip. I have no regrets. It was so important, not just to us, but to Gram and Gramp as well. They wanted so badly to meet Harper and we made it happen. Even if Harper never has the opportunity to see them again, even if she never remembers the trip, we’ll have the pictures to show her. She can see how her great-grandparents held her, cradled her, and gently rocked her. She can see the love in their eyes and understand for herself why the trip was so important.

Gramp and Harper

Today is Gramp’s 90th birthday. And I dedicate this entry to him on such a significant day. Gramp, thank you for being such an amazing father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Thank you for giving me such a spectacular wife in your granddaughter. Thank you for seeing us off on our honeymoon, for chatting by the grill, and for dinner at “your” table at the yacht club. But perhaps most importantly, thank you for providing the line that joins together with my own to help complete the mosaic of our now unified family. You are truly a great, grand father.

Sewing Machines Whirring

I’m losing control of my home. I guess that’s not accurate because it implies that at some point in time I actually had control of my home. And that’s just silly. But I am beginning to feel a bit overrun. And really the feeling has little to do with Harper and the ridiculous influx of baby junk that has invaded our apartment like a vagabond tribe of brightly colored, noise making squatters. It’s because of McCall’s new “business partners”.

See, last week McCall got the idea to start a bib making business. I don’t want to reveal too much because I know the top bib makers in the country are reading this blog and they would steal the idea. Lousy, thieving jerks. But basically it involves three women, a sewing machine and a bunch of fabric, which on it’s own sounds like it could be a bad sitcom. Or it could be a smash hit on the WB…oh wait.

Anyway, so now when I get home from work each day there’s usually two more females in the house than I’m used to. I’m sure any single guys reading this are thinking, "Sweet!” Meanwhile all the married men are thinking, “Yikes!” Because married men know that more women in your home is never a good thing. You have to be careful how you look at and talk to them. The “I was just reading her t-shirt” excuse can only be used so many times. Plus, the trademark Lawrence Charm can easily be mistaken for flirting and has the unfortunate side effect of making the ladies swoon. I can’t tell you how many times I walk away from a gaggle of women only to hear the familiar refrain of “He’s so dreamy!” Of course, I do tend to start conversations about Brad Pitt before walking away from gaggles of women, but I don’t think there’s any connection.

But there are really two major downsides to the additional estrogen. One, is I’m totally outnumbered when it comes to the TV. You might imagine my wife and her friends all gathered in a spare bedroom working away while I rule the television roost. But the reality is that they’ve set up shop in our dining room, which is connected to the living room. And neither of McCall’s friends are lesbians so they have zero interest in sports. And even if they were, they’d probably only want to watch the LPGA and WNBA. So here it is, Monday night, and instead of football, I get stuck with reruns of 7th Heaven. I sure hope Della Reese can save the day…oh wait.

But I have to say that the single biggest adjustment is the bathroom situation. Long ago, my father instilled in me the joy of toilet reading. The bathroom is one of the only places I can go to get a bit of privacy and I like to read my sports magazines on the john. Rick Reilly’s editorials in Sports Illustrated are the perfect bathroom readers. Just the right length and always a good read.

And although we have two bathrooms, I never use the guest bathroom. Meanwhile, our bathroom is connected to the office and when I got home today, I found McCall on her laptop, one of her friends on my laptop and a pressing urge to read suddenly becoming an embarrassing situation in the making. I mean, what I am I supposed to do? Drop off the kids at the pool while McCall and her friend sit ten feet away? The doors in our apartment aren’t exactly made of steel. So I did what any grown man should do in a similar situation. I waited until a more opportune time.

I know you may be thinking this is not a pleasant topic. Well, I don’t care! This is my everyday life. This is what it’s like to be Harper’s dad: sewing machines whirring, TV watching usurping, and bathroom going delaying. And at the end of the week what’s my reward? I got to watch the Cowboys lose to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Oh well, at least my fantasy team won…oh wait.