Dad On Duty

A few months after Gabriel was born, I was able to attend a New Dads course. At this point, 3 1/2 years after the fact, I can't recall if it was two or three sessions but I can remember those of us who chose to converge being representative of a new generation of men, whatever that might be. We caught and corrected ourselves when we risked talking about babysitting our children. Others in the group bristled with the tension and challenge that came with fatherhood and in some there were hints of baggage that would cause or had already caused difficulty and left some overmatched for the task of being open and vulnerable to their prime vocation.

I have been capable of talking or writing a good game when it comes to being a father, but there are, granted, times where patience runs thin and there is a reversion to whatever offers expedience or an easy response.  In those moments where I'm losing my temper or just cutting corners to get out the door or the like I feel like the laggard of the partnership. For example:

When brushing teeth during the bedtime routine, I more often than not forget to wash his hands and face.  Same thing with sunscreen when heading out for the day.

Last week, I left a developmental screening report from his daycare in my backpack neglected long enough to become a sopping wad in the torrential rains that fell last Friday. A great "my dog ate it" variant.

I've let him stand instead of sit. (Discuss in your groups.)

I often forget his water bottle when heading out and have to buy him bottled stuff en route.

I mix up his indoor and outdoor shoes at daycare and bring him home in the wrong pair.

I had refrained from slathering every part of his zone with cream before sealing up his diaper.  I also preferred the pull-ups over the tape tabs even though I recall practicing with pins and cloth in the 1980s when I took a babysitting course and was willing to go the cloth route for the first few weeks of his life until I was overruled in favour of more sleep.

I occasionally rush ahead a step or two on a Lego project when his attention has drifted instead of trying to recapture it or setting things aside. I mean, c'mon, it's Lego!

I skip entire pages rather than mere adverbs in his books when it is time for him to nod off and he is adamant about his quota before turning in.

I've laughed when I shouldn't such as the time that he squeezed a bottle of ketchup and geisered a wad of the red stuff onto his shirt, his hair and myself.

Those little things out of each week or day or hour leave me conscious about the opportunities that are constantly available to me and leave me convinced that I'm the second-stringer or the laggard in the task of raising Gabriel.  I wonder if I have taken the verb "father" more literally than I care to admit.  "Father" doesn't have the long term connotations that the verb "mother" does and perhaps there is something wired in me, despite my better intentions, that prompts me to slack off or become reluctant to put on the original Disney score that he prefers when my jazz is playing.

I do, however, remind him to look someone in the eye when he says, hello, thank you, good bye or sorry.  I stroke his forehead or rest a hand on his stomach when he is too restless to find sleep and I get the chance to tuck him in or settle him down.  I've gently pointed out the proper use of "because" and "so" which he has mixed up regular in phrases such as, "It's raining because I'm wearing boots." I've even tried to work a second language into his head by practicing Japanese and a bit of French with him.

Perhaps it all stems from being the first one to leave the house after he arrived and in the nearly four years since he was born, starting with that rush to the pharmacy to get some formula while we were still waiting for the milk to come in.  In that time there have been so many moments that I have missed out on, things I have only heard afterward, secondhand.  I have not been synched with his every need the way that my wife has whether it is from the moment of his arrival or going back to the closer synchronization that they once shared.

Regardless of the cause, when I am on duty alone there always seems to be an error or two or an oversight to make me self-conscious. My wife assures me that there isn't a wrong way and that is a brief bit of balm. Last week, though, when I had full on Dad duty to put Gabriel down for the night, he was finally signalling it was all right for me to go with the see-saw rhythm of his sleepy breathing. I slipped out of his bed as stealthily as a could and promptly activated the hard rock guitar riffs of one of the toys that did not get put away (by me? by him?) before turning in.  A froze on the spot as a litany of curses went through my head.  I paused to see if I could detect some disturbance in his sleep. On the crest of his snoring he uttered a drowsy, "I love you," and remained asleep.

Whew.

Renaissance and Revelation on the Trail

As the summer of 2015 winds to its end, something harshly portended by a 24-hour cold snap that included freezing temperatures and snow, we took Gabriel for a hike in the mountains.  He had gone on a hike or two around the city on well-worn public trails, but today he took on a 4K hike with a gain in elevation of 250m.

Mum was in her element, having grown in the shadow of the mountains we hiked through and honed her rock climbing skills at the place where we peaked for the day.

She has regularly promised him that she will take him to Nepal and he in turn has promised to take her to Madagascar.  (I am not certain if it is the real one or the animated version he has in mind, but he has been earnest each time he has made the promise.) As we ascended the trail, Mum opted for the tougher trail and laid out the courtesies and the strategies of the hiking trails: step between, not on, the roots and rocks that obstruct the way; step aside for the faster hikers and make sure you say, "You're welcome," to those who thank you; to roll a needle between your fingertips and know that it is from a spruce by square edges make the roll rough.

I could see a long-dormant side of my wife resurfacing as she had a chance to initiate Gabriel into a long-held passion that she has set aside over (at least) the last four years and is now getting the opportunity to share the fundamentals of.  Whether or not he takes up this passion to the same extent that his mother has, it is a thrill to see that side of Mum emerge for him and flesh out one of the main characters in his life while she rekindles a spark that has idled for too long. He will see her, eventually, as more than just a provider and healer but as someone who has lived with this particular passion: to hike, to climb, to travel and so many other things that he still does not know about her. Perhaps there is knowledge of this in him already, aspects of her that will resonate and possess a trace of deja vu in a story she will tell about her achievements or hard-earned scrapes on rock-face.

He climbed his first big climb easily and with more enthusiasm than fatigue.  When we got to the top he was preoccupied with dogs that had made it to the top, but he did take note of the rock climbers who ascended by the toeholds that took them even higher than we went.  He confessed to preferring the hike down, despite the utilitarian scenery of an old fire road setting the background instead of the rock staircases and the approaching roar of waterfalls. Don't we all, though?

More importantly, Mum is already eager to get the next hike in sooner than later and is sorting through the terrain of the mountains and parks that formed the backyard of her youth and the landscape of her imagination. One thing that seems possible or even evident as Gabriel closes in on age four, is that we will be sharing more of ourselves on ventures such as this. It will be good to show more of ourselves to him as time goes on.

Mom and Dad Dare to Get a Babysitter

Letting ourselves out of the house, as adults, sans Dude, took us some time.  After a few months of having the memory of the clunker of a movie Tower Heist and an indulgent trip to Five Guys as our last "date," just hours before Nadine conceded we ought to go to the hospital just to see if everything was okay, we let ourselves go out for an evening to see the Blue Man Group.  The tickets were purchased long before Gabriel was born and it was the night of or night before my birthday.

Gabriel has been a low maintenance little guy almost straight out of the gate, but we still felt reluctant to not so much trust him with anyone as to ask for the favour or impose on anyone who dared to offer.  Even so, we settled on asking close friends first rather than asking one lone teenager to take him on. We basically enlisted a team: mother, father and their then 4-year-old who had been doting on him since his arrival and may have been ready to shoo her parents home to take over.  Instead, her parents shooed us out before we could complete our eighth utterance of the double checking, "Any questions?", with the assurance that they'd babysat before, or something like it and that Gabriel was in good hands.  We reviewed all of the things that might occur and reiterated our desired turn in routine and time as we retreated.

We trotted off to see Blue Man Group at a theatre that was a 12-minute walk away from home.  I'm still not sure if we would have let ourselves out that night if it was a 20-minute walk or drive.  We sat and never really allowed ourselves to acknowledge or enjoy the fact that we were out for the night. For the first part of the evening my cell phone sat on my thigh and kept glancing at it on a constant basis.  Eventually, the show grabbed a bit more of my attention, but (no offence intended) I never quite got fully immersed in the program.

We returned home after 2 hours and 23 minutes of entertainment, walk there and sprint back to find that the dude was sleeping as he was intended, but that the routine we had requested had not been followed to the letter.  Our "sitters" varied the routine as they were comfortable with and Gabriel responded well and, much to our surprise, was not thrown off kilter by the variation. There was, it seemed, even a broadening of horizons after the 4 1/2 months of being locked into the patterns that my wife and I established for ourselves.

It was not only good for us to get out, but it was good to realize that we did not need to be spot-welded to our routine.

We are still on our first hand when it comes to counting the times we've left Gabriel with sitters, other than my in-laws, for a night out whether it is dinner, a movie or something else but we are getting a little more daring.  Last week we even arranged to have that competent team of mother, father and now-8-year-old take on the first stage of the babysitting until a teenager - yes a teenager but she has graduated high school and is headed to university in a few weeks - could get to our place after finishing her day job.  We did spend a good part of the night texting to the team and the teen to ensure that the handover went as smoothly as it did and to let her know our ETA at the end of the show and we even allowed ourselves to be out for 5 hours.  We first used our new solo babysitter last October and we plan to use her again in November while we make a 12-minute walk to see a show...

Sleepy Bones

Gabriel was a great sleeper early in life.  While other parents from our prenatal class were quick to cite the sleep they had lost due to feedings and random dark AM crying, we were doing our best not to be conspicuously quiet during those laments.  We'd nod vigorously and add a well-timed, "I hear you," to avoid boasting and express our relief to one another when we were alone.

Those salad days have been long gone and apparently, according to The Walrus we are not alone. We now wake regularly to a cry of some sort from Gabriel as something disturbs his sleep.  There are occasions when he - despite our interventions - rolls out of bed with only a thud (and no howl or cry whatsoever), the soft patter of his bare feet wakes us as he comes down the hall or we stir at 4am to find his form wedged between us and eking out more space.  A recent conversation was something like this:

Nadine: Stop kicking!
Gabriel: I'm stretching.

Whereupon Gabriel is escorted back to his room and slept with until he is asleep again.  Often, Nadine or I fall asleep first and stir an hour or so later and return to our bed.  We have tried to implement a bit more of a routine and get him to stay in bed - quietly - when he wakes up rather than come to our bed or call out to us.  Nadine has come across a plan where she cues Gabriel to be in bed when the 7 is up on his digital clock and stay there until it reappears.  It has worked relatively well in the evenings but asking him to lie still and stare at the clock until the hour turns from 6 or 5 into 7.  As I type, it is 6:39am. He is just stirring now and heading to bed with Nadine.  A decent achievement, but still not enough sleep. We know that this will end eventually, when he is in his teens and the lethargy of growth sucks out all desire to move.

In the meantime though, there is the challenge of getting him to sleep through the night or cope with his interruptions on his own.  There hasn't been much luck.  Last night over dinner we talked to him about staying in bed and staying quiet until 7am, but he replied that he wanted someone to sleep with. Nadine reminded him of the retinue of stuffed animals that he shares his bed with each night and even suggested a rotation if there were new favorites that he preferred amongst, Sully, puppy, Thumper, and everyone else.

He replied, "I want to sleep with someone who has bones inside."

Nick Bland: Savior of the Modern Reading Parent

As a voracious reader and aspiring writer, the books that inhabit Gabriel's life have been a preoccupation from before he was born. I bought a Dr. Seuss compilation a week before he was born, read to him while he was in the womb and proceeded through the pages of a thick tome during the quieter moments in the delivery room and read to Gabriel from that same 900-pager in the days that followed.  Since that time, books have been a part of his routine and I can recall a meltdown two weeks ago where a very weary dude wailed his desire to go to the library that very moment despite being in his birthday suit and the library certain to close before we would arrive there dressed.

Almost everyday there have been a few books to round out the day and there are have been a few occasions where my little extrovert disappears on his own to a quiet space with a book.  I think the habit has been formed, though there enough bleary-eyed, first thought of the day requests to watch TV or something on the iPad to keep me vigilant about ensuring the habit keeps rooted.

The evening bedtime routine with books, invariably involves him promising that he'll turn in after one more book and then one more and so on.  Whether we are reading his books or those we hoard each week from the library, I am left to wonder at times what it really takes to publish a children's book.  There are so many books about fire trucks, fire stations or firemen, that have the exact same plot that I really wonder what sets a prospective kid lit author apart from the others.  After pouring through a book of truck photos or a story lionizing the limited things that trucks or construction equipment actually do, I shrug at the kid lit industry and wonder if it is all an inside game.  When bored with those books and their premature product placement by Tonka, I drifted into the tones and pomposity of a radio ad pitchman.  Gabriel responded with the first furrowing of his young brow. I've let up, unwillingly.

Apart from those books, there are my wife's well-worn and loved collection of Dr. Seuss books which we have complemented with the brilliant posthumous works that have come out in recent years. There has been great relief and pleasure in the discovery of current writers.

I've been lucky enough to have friends recommend the likes of Canadians Melanie Watt and Jon Klassen, but the great discovery in the kid lit section of the store has been the work of Nick Bland, who has in about 10 years assembled a body of work that I have quickly come to trust and adore.  My wife and I can recite the entirety of Bland's The Very Cranky Bear from heart in the dark as the concluding tale for the night before putting Gabriel down.  Cranky Bear has the depth of theme that is missing from so much of the other kid lit that is aimed at the appetite boys or girls have for the items that fill their respective toy boxes.  I know that there is a lot of Young Adult lit that will not match the depth that Nick Bland has etched into the few hundred words he carefully penned for this story and the subsequent ones with the Cranky Bear.

Beyond that brilliant series of five "bear" books are other paths that Nick Bland has followed about incompetent monsters, fathers, pigs and hugs (my non-Bear favorite) that have further confirmed his talent as a big-hearted, wise and ambitious author willing to give kids a little more or require it of them.

With that, I say a resounding, "Thank you," to Nick Bland and look to compile more of his brilliant work.  He will emerge as an author to join Seuss and Sendak in the masterful blending of poetry, humour and simple wisdom.

And if you want the kid's point of view, Gabriel's one word review is, "Again."

Walking Boy

A simple goal for Gabriel is for him, when the time comes, to walk to school.  It seems a simple goal, perhaps even an odd one to set or aspire to, but as someone who walked to school throughout Primary in 1972-1973, I'm motivated to make sure he manages this, especially since it is a shorter walk.  Too many children are bussed to school or ferried by their parents.  Apart from the concerns about the sedentary thumb-flexing routines of children today, I just want to have him walk a bit and get a sense of independence sooner rather than later.

After having Gabriel in a daycare closer to my wife's work than to home, we have had the luxury of placing him in a daycare merely 500 metres away from home.  With that, we have had the opportunity to walk home at the end of the day and there have been a few occasions where he wants to have me walk him to school at the start of the day as well.

The walk is usually a distracted dawdle as the seasons invite him to pick rocks or dandelions to bring home to mom or a preoccupation with whatever leaves and branches hail or strong winds may have thrown into his line of sight.  There is also the regular stop outside the fence of the daycare for him to bid farewell to his friends who are "still on the inside" and have yet to be picked up.  As our first winter of walking home passed we relished the first opportunity to walk home in daylight and I was happy to assure him we would have daylight for the walk for the next eight months.

On Saturdays, thanks to a theft of Gabriel's stroller, the test was a much more ambitious sequence of walks for the routine of story time at the library, the traditional pizza lunch that has been a part of my Saturdays for over 8 years now and then on to Mount Royal University for music class.  It is a long day, with a departure around 10:30 in the morning, two trains, two busses, a few lengthy walks uphill and a return home by 4:30 or 5pm.

On the occasion that the stroller's departure was realized, I grit my teeth in anticipation of how quickly he would walk and how much energy he'd have after a few long walks.  I dreaded the possibility of him trudging into his music class only to depart early because of a meltdown that would try the patience of his gracious instructor.  If he whined that he was tired, I was ready to loft him onto my shoulders and carry him along if need be.

Nothing.  Throughout the day that we were first thrust into the routine, Gabriel never uttered a complaint.  He actually liked being able to grab a seat on the train or the bus and interact with other passengers, not to mention the diggers and other construction equipment that are the only things that ever line his routes through the world.  He was great throughout the day, only to fall asleep on my lap on the last bus home to leave a puddle of drool on my denims.

Apart from putting in the mileage, the regular travel has made him familiar with the travels.  He knows the name of his stop on the LRT.  He knows to watch the traffic and press the button (about 9 to 11 times) for the walk light at the busy intersection between daycare and home on our afternoon walk.  I suspect that he is more capable than I am prepare to test to make his way to the playground near our house and to the library on his own.

Despite his potential to do those walks on his own, I'm in no rush to thrust that independence upon him.  I wonder if he would be able to make those walks on his own without drawing the suspicion of an adult who would raise an eyebrow and the possibility that the independence is required because of abandonment.  Colleagues of mine with school aged children have already admonished me for even thinking of letting Gabriel walk to school on his own when the time comes.  I also know that no matter how capable Gabriel would be at walking to the closest supermarket and traversing the LRT tracks and busy street that are in his way, the biggest issue would be the dismaying sight of an 8-year-old heading to the Safeway to buy a loaf of bread on his own.

That prospect is at least 5 years away, but there I already have to acknowledge that there will be pressure to put that off until he is much older than I was when I ventured on similar chores with the mantra of eggs, bread, milk dissolving in my mind and learning whatever there was to learn about my neighbourhood and myself in that interlude of the day.

Abbegard!! Or... As Memories Fade

As Gabriel closes in on 4 years of age, I thought it was time to start blogging about screwing him up raising him.

Why now?

It has not been a matter of suddenly finding the time to get to it. The notion had come to me on a regular basis over the years and even prior to his arrival. There were times that were learning moments for me when his ability to be excited, open, capable of resetting his moods in a split second and so many other things that he has the youthful capacity to do that I have treasured and taken pause to savour.

At the same time, there are moment of his life that he has moved on from and left behind without him even knowing and they are things that I know will predate whatever living memory he can look back to a few years from now. My wife and I and others who have seen Gabriel grow will be able to tell him the things that he used to do but already those conversations leave him puzzled and perhaps even nonplussed as we try to suggest where he has come from and he -- yes even at this formative stage -- was.

When watching Inside Out with him we had to have a conversation with him about the Memory Dump: a dark, forbidding place in the mind that was frightening with its darkness and fade of past. It may have seemed an apocalyptic setting to him, a place of demise although on so many levels that we are otherwise indifferent to. At least we are indifferent to it when we lose those early memories without much contemplation.

In Gabriel's case one of those early disposals to the memory dump was a made up word he sprung upon us when he was just becoming verbal. Amidst all the mama's, dada's and other combinations that my wife and I deciphered during his first year came this utterance: "Abbegard!" We struggled to figure out what it meant.  The first thought was that he had latched on to someone else's use of "Oh my God" around him and we went through mental checklists of our own possible use of it and then other people who may have been careless enough to use it around him. Time went on, the checklists turned up empty and we tried to figure out other interpretations.

Apgar? He might have heard the nurses or doctor complete their assessment of him while his mother and I were far too distracted to notice such a calculation being uttered.

Avant garde? That would have been just the tonic for this artsy Dad who would rather pressure him into art school that accounting, engineering or law.

All blue car? No. We didn't even get an impatient shake of the head that we, his parents, were already not gettting it and were out of touch.

All blue cars? Okay, never mind.

I wondered if it was some remnant from a previous life, a soul that had revisited this world clinging to that random fragment of language. A talisman to carry it back to consciousness and to shape the next road that he would follow.

After a while, my wife and I pieced together a pattern. It occurred at moments of celebration or excitement or simple bliss that he wanted to share or punctuate. Abbegard (my spelling) was a highlight of the day, a sign that things were good, great.

Other words formed and over time his single word disappeared. It was pushed aside by a more rational or shared connection to what we see and share each day and eventually it was gone.

As we watched the movie and tried to explain to Gabriel what happened in the Memory Dump and tell him that it was happening to him, I told him about his word and its demise from his vocabulary. He tried repeating Abbegard a few times. He was half-hearted and it was evident that the resurrection was brief, already ending.  His word had no chance to return to him.

And so I will write. To preserve those aspects of me, my wife, him and being with him that will not be as indelible as I hope when I am in the moment that I flood with their power. I look to the poignancy, the failure, the renewal and joy that live and morph into one another with such casual, passing power at any moment.