Becoming Daddy

I sort of mentioned in in my previous note, but we (the family) are moving.  We are done with the King County experiment and we’re heading back north to Mill Creek and the ‘burbs.  There’s a few reasons for the change, but I’m only going to tell you about one of the reasons today.  Well, maybe two, if I have time.

Your Momma and me had our entire lives – 29 years, give or take – to develop into the people we were before you came along.  You’ve had just over 7 months, and you’ve flipped us all around.  See, we’ve moved an embarrassing amount in the last decade, and we’ve learned a couple things about each other in the process.  We hate 2 things: apartments, and carpeted floors.  Hardwoods are easier to keep clean, they look better, and houses tend to have things like yards, as well as having more privacy and usually, less noise.

Guess where we’re moving?  A carpeted, ground floor apartment.

It’s a great space, in a cool, urbanized development that’s surrounded by all of our friends, it offers a preview of what life is like when and if we finally buy something up there, and it’s CHEAP (thank you, Mommy’s corporate discount), but it’s still a change we never would have made had you not come along.  It’s far from the action of one of the coolest cities in the country, with all the dining, parks, and events that we’ve come accustomed to.

The reasons behind the move are several, and mostly have to do with you.  One, it’s cheap, as I mentioned, allowing us to save up a down payment so that we might be able to join the masses that have been force-fed home ownership as the American Dream, complete with the hopes of home equity and retirement possibilities.  It’s not something we really worried about until you came along and changed our retirement plans from “dying” to “not dying and thus needing money to eat and live and stuff.”

Another is that you’re just on the cusp of crawling, which is just a short step from walking.  Our nice hardwood floor is not really conducive to either exercise, and the carpet in this house is limited to a fuzzy area rug in your room and another in the living room that is mostly taken up by the coffee table.

There’s other reasons to leave, like the draftiness of the house, the obstacle-course living room created by the fireplace, gigantic floor heating grate (with its direct line to the dirt pit under the house) and narrow gap to the nice, hard coffee table, and the fact that you can hear the dryer, which is located at the far corner of the house, as well as the footsteps heading to said dryer reverberate throughout the rest of the place.  It’s impossible to tip-toe past your door when you’re sleeping when every tiny step sounds like a lumberjack stomping his way through the living room.

All in all, it’s a change that’s coming because you’re changing who we are.  We never were quite the free-wheelin’, night-life-loving city folk, but we do love living five minutes from your Aunt Rachel and Uncle Timmy, ten minutes from Molly Moon’s, Pies and Pints, and fifteen from the quirky but clean charm of a semi-gentrified Fremont.  We think this is going to be a change for the better for you, and for all of us.  Time will tell if our plan works, or if it’s another case of learning through mistakes. I’m pretty good at that one.

Love, Daddy.

Happy seven months!***

This should be a letter reporting all the fun and cool stuff you did this month, and there was a lot of it.  You’re eating a ton of good food, sitting up like it’s the easiest thing in the world, and you’re thinking really hard about crawling (to the point that if you had a bit more floor to work on, you might be doing just that.  More on that to come).  You’ve officially changed diaper sizes (from a 2 to a 3), wearing mostly 9-month-old-sized clothes, and already rocking the coolest green All-Stars.

But, this letter is about tonight.  As part of her going-to-bed routine, your Momma went in to check on you.  You were fast asleep right up against the top of your crib, which is happening more and more lately.  You have demonstrated this new, uncanny ability to roll or crawl or teleport to all corners of your bed.  Anyway, she wanted me to come in and move you back to the center of your bed, so that you’d have somewhere to roll around to tomorrow morning.  I picked you up and decided to sneak a cuddle before I laid you back down.  Now, I have to be honest; you’re quite a sweaty sleeper, and tonight was no exception.  You also farted while I was holding you – three times, to be exact (somewhere, your Great-Aunt Linda is laughing at me).  But, I really put serious thought into just holding you for the rest of the night.

There’s really no good way to describe the feeling of holding your sleeping child in your arms; it’s like tangibly holding love.  I know that you’ll outgrow this stage, and that I will soon wish for the time that the contents of your diaper were the most stressful part of our relationship, but tonight . . . it was perfect.

Love, Daddy

***Actually, by now you’re seven and 1/3 months.  Silly, lazy, procrastinating Daddy.

Thursday, you were six months old.

It’s been a busy month for all of us.  Momma and Daddy had their 10th anniversary, which meant that you got to have your first sleepover at your Nana and Poppa’s house (and your Mom had her first sleepover without you).  Everybody survived the experiment.  You learned a bunch of new noises from your Poppa, had some good tummy time with Nana, and became completely enamored with the colors and creatures in your Aunt Angela’s fish tank.

You’ve mastered the art of the front to back rollover.  You haven’t been able to go from back to front yet, but I think that’s because you still don’t really like to be on your belly.  While you’re there, though, you are grabbing at things and kicking your little feet like you’re trying to go somewhere.  Soon!  Your favorite thing is still the Jolly Jumper.  You’ll bounce around in that thing for nearly an hour at a time, laughing and giggling the entire time.  You’re not doing front flips yet, but I did catch you working on a triple lutz the other day.

We’re slowly introducing you to solid food.  I’m sorry to say that it’s only rice paste for right now, but I’m sure it won’t be too long before you’re in the freezer with a spoon in the ice cream.  I’m not sure that you actually like the cereal, but since you still haven’t encountered anything that you won’t put into your mouth, it’s pretty easy to get you to eat it.  As is to be expected, the best part is seeing how much of it you end up wearing instead of eating.

The best part of this month has been that you’ve started to reach for us when we come to pick you up.  For a couple months, when we come get you from your crib, you would wave your arms and your head, almost like you were making a snow angel (a bed angel?).  Now, when we stick our head over the side of your crib, you give a huge grin and reach your arms up.  You do it when you’re on your change table, when we stop your swing and get ready to take you out of that, and when we’re unbuckling you from your car seat.  This is another one of those developmental milestones that makes the poopy diapers and the screaming worth it, because there’s not a greater feeling in the world than picking up your child and having him (or her, i would imagine) be so excited to be in your arms.

Love, Daddy