Father’s Day

Here’s me and Ryan on my second Father’s Day. Gina got me a wallet, a major victory as she’d been campaigning to get rid of my old one. Ryan got me two new belts and eight straight hours of sleep. What a blessing it is to celebrate this day in a whole new way.

Hello, abs? It’s me, Moose

When it comes to inherited traits, I can thank my dad for my calm demeanor and blame him for my missing abs. All of the Moose boys are plagued with bellies with the consistency of jello, a genetic scourge which has claimed untold pairs of pants and belts, as well as our ability to easily see our feet. As my belly has taken on the same definition as the baby’s, I’ve decided to take action. I am reintroducing myself to the concept of (gulp!) exercise.

This is my fourth week and Gina’s second doing the P90, a series of fitness videos. The idea is that you get a workout in 30 or 40 minutes. But in order to do this, they don’t give you any time to putz around. You move from one exercise to the next in rapid, relentless fashion. This suits me fine, as I want to get the pain over with quick, but clashes with Gina’s legendary technique (at the gym, she was known as The Staller.)

The other idea behind the P90 is that by switching from one muscle group to the next, your muscles won’t have time to plateau so you’ll build them up faster. The P90 marketers call this concept “muscle confusion.” This must be working, because my muscles are positively befuddled. As in, “what are you doing to me?” and “why are we up so early?”

But there’s a line forming in my midsection I’ve never seen before. Out of the shapeless mass that is my belly, a muscle has emerged.

One cold, two crises

It turns out that Boo wasn’t up two nights ago just because of a soaked diaper, but because he was coming down with a cold which is now in full bloom. The little guy was up half of last night with a runny nose and cough. So daddy was in the jump seat again making sure he was okay. Gina and I decided it would be a bad idea to take him to a birthday party at her Mom’s, but as it turned out the party didn’t happen anyway.

As Gina was about to drive down, Nana called me saying that Sue (Gina’s sister) was dealing with a flooded basement. Happy Birthday, Sue! Gina called Nana to get the scoop, right as Amy was getting a cup of water out of her microwave. The water splashed over Amy’s hand and wrist and gave her a serious burn. So as Gina was en route to visiting Sue to deal with one crisis, she called to report the second family emergency at Nana’s.

Gina dropped in on Sue and her plumber and then went to see Amy. Gina says the burn looks bad, but Amy’s already withstood a broken wrist and elbow so she’s used to toughing things out.

So all in all, I’d say that’s enough excitement for one day.

Blast from the past

Yesterday my friend Dave brought a real find into work: a 1979 Sears catalog. It was quite the trip down memory lane seeing all these toys I’d loved but forgotten. Like this set of play pans I used to have, although after awhile all that was left was the frying pan and his peeling face sticker:

Or this Little People play set. I dig the portable barbecue:

And I love how over the last 30 years, the Little People figures have gone from limbless choking hazards to happily obese:

And then there were other oldies but goodies: the original Perfection game, a toy record player that played thick plastic discs with huge grooves, a handheld water game where you used button-press water jets to try to get a basketball through a hoop. But as glorious as it was, the `79 catalog didn’t have one of my favorite toys:

All hail Mazinga, my favorite one of the Shogun Warriors, a super-cool line of two-foot tall robots with spring-loaded weapons. Mazinga’s specialty was firing eye-gouging missiles from his fingertips.

Now that’s what I call a toy.

As young as you feel

I don’t think the reality of being a parent has really sunk in yet. Which is strange considering everything I’ve already experienced. Seeing your baby being born is the kind of magic trick you won’t forget, and the first few weeks of parenting? It doesn’t get more real than that. But the concept of being a parent is still wonderfully new.

There are days when Gina and I look at the baby and say, “can you believe it?” It’s not that we’re in denial. It’s more like it’s too good to be true. I think everyone finds themselves surprised by their lives at one point or another. Like, how did I get to be 40? Or when did my baby sister grow up? My dad is 77 years old with 15 grandchildren. But in his heart, I bet it feels like he just met my mom.

Thursday night, I was holding Ryan while he was fast asleep. It’s true when they say a sleeping baby looks just like an angel. I’d been thinking a lot about how it was the National Day of Prayer, and if you asked how I felt to be a father, I would have said grateful. I got teary-eyed looking at my son.

How about that? I’m a dad.

Sacramental pileup

This morning we went to church and arranged to have Ryan baptized. The problem is his godparents, my brother Andy and his wife Brandi, have their twins Faith and Hope’s first communion on the day we picked, May 2nd. Apparently it would be bad form to skip their daughters’ sacrament in favor of their godson’s, so we are going to see if we can bump the baptism to the first week of June instead.

One thing that I really like about how my church does baptisms is that after the baby is immersed in the water, one of the parents gets to hoist the baby like Simba in The Lion King. I was practicing with Ryan and really getting him over my head, and Gina asked, “is that what you’re going to do?” Like daddy would drop his kid. Although there was a case of a baby rolling off of the altar. I’ll have to watch out for that.