A Burgeoning Empire
Next week I’m introducing a new feature. It’s an advice column. If you’ve got a question you’d like to see answered on the blog, a question whose answer I may or may not know, send it to churchchomp [at] gmail [dot] com. Don’t be shy! I won’t reveal your identity.
Questions can be about anything except geography. Or geology. And I don’t love math.
Who asks math questions of an amateur advice columnist?
Not you, I hope.
Tune in soon for the first installment! And in the meantime, send in your questions.
Bunny Eating Parsley
This bunny either likes parsley a lot more than I do, or he is trying to make a point.
I think it’s more likely the latter.
I don’t know enough about the Disapproving Rabbits Youtube channel yet, but I knew that you would want to see this. Go there also to see a baby porcupine hiccuping after eating a slice of banana.
A Horse Named Bill
After I wrote about Pete Seeger last summer, the charming, delightful, thoughtful, and generous Alexis from Knot Sew Crafty sent me a fantastic CD.
It’s by a guy named Sam Hinton. It has upped the joy level for Henry, for his dad, and for me on so many car rides. I can’t thank Alexis enough for the gift of Sam Hinton!
It is one of her all-time favorites, it’s now one of our all time favorites, and it quickly becomes a favorite of whoever we share it with. I can’t send you all CDs, but today I am sharing it here!
Sam Hinton is great kid’s music but also great grownup music. He’s also got an inspiring life story: he was actually a marine biologist. Oh, and he was an illustrator. And a calligrapher.
Sigh.
Here is a picture of Sam Hinton with a fife and an accordian and a harmonica and a guitar and another indeterminate plucky thing. And you should hear this man’s frog noises. They are better than real frogs. (Don’t tell the frog community I said that; there could be trouble.)
A Major Bowes Publicity photos from Feb 1937, taken from Samhinton.org
I can’t find online performances by Sam Hinton, who died in 2009. However, I did find this MUPPET version of a song named “A Horse Named Bill,” which is to the familiar tune of Dixie, and one of the best songs on the album. Along with the song about the frogs. And Miss Mouse getting married. And the one about the tin worker. And the favorite dog who died, and eating groundhogs? I could go on.
I can’t figure out who wrote “A Horse Named Bill,” though Arlo Guthrie performed it, I think, and maybe the Grateful Dead, and also, look! Muppets! This is a shorter version than the Hinton. The Hinton has way more verses, and they are funny.
At Least I’m Not Buzz
I bought pull-ups.
It’s too soon for Henry to even be faking the wearing of the underwear, but I bought a small bag of them to avoid carrying a huge box of diapers over the skinny ice path that leads from the grocery store to my home.
The response has been astounding.
The pull-ups looked to me like regular diapers, for the most part.
The diapers we’ve most recently had in stock have Clifford the Big Red Dog on them — a character who usage was licensed to the diaper company by an employer of mine. I found that having an employer’s name peek out at me from my child’s bum was rather like an uncomfortable melding of church and state.
The new pull-ups have pictures of Buzz Lightyear and Woody on them.
I know Buzz and Woody because my nephew loved them forever and ever, though now he is 10.
Henry was not familiar with Woody and Buzz. This doesn’t keep him from being immediately and completely obsessed.
These pull-ups might as well be covered with crack cocaine, or chocolate sauce, or heaven forbid — we wouldn’t want to overindulge our child — both.
Henry looks at strong-jawed Buzz, the manly astronaut, and points. Yells, “Daddy! Daddy!” He kisses the pull-up Buzz on the mouth.
Then he looks at Woody, weedy in comparison, hicklike, in a big cowboy hat.
“Mom-mom,” he says, adoringly. He looks at me and smiles, then looks back to Woody, and nods.
Mom-mom is what Henry calls me every time he sees me. It is also what he calls Woody, my apparent facsimile, every time he sees him.
There are lots of little cartoon thumbnails on the pull-ups.
Every single Woody: Mom-mom! Mom-mom!
Buzz: Daddy!
Henry is surprisingly good at determining gender, for the most part. It might be that Woody might have a pointy nose à la Mom-mom. Or maybe it’s that he goes along with Buzz, who is clearly modeled on Daddy.
I don’t think it’s just because the characters look like his parents (?) that his love for the pull-ups is so deep. When I’m putting one on him, he wants to hold one too, to examine it.
He won’t put it down when we get off of the table. I’m in a mode of trying not to fight things at the moment, and I let him walk around the apartment with it. He’ll shove it into the back part of the choo-choo he pushes around. Or he’ll carry it under his arm, the same arm he carries his favorite dolphin under.
In anticipation of a meal, he will place the pull-up carefully on the dining table next to his own place at the table.
He hugs a pull-up to his face as he gets into bed. Tucked under the blanket, dolphin under his arm, Rawr the lion tucked into the corner, the musical giraffe giving off a quiet syncopated beat in the other corner, the book about becoming a firefighter down near his toes. Everything is perfect.
“Yay,” Henry whispers.
Good night, Mom-mom.
The Parenting App
For years, I couldn’t deal with iTunes. There had been a large technological revolution and because I couldn’t remember my password, or manage to get my operating system upgraded, I couldn’t participate. I mean, I even had an iPhone and couldn’t manage to knuckle down enough to get apps. Aside from being slightly ashamed, I didn’t care all that much: the phone alone is pretty amazing. I didn’t need to make it into a mirror or a cowbell or a flashlight to be a happy human.
(Not that I am always happy, but I don’t know that those things would help me out, long term. Not like a pair of boots might.)
Recently I got a new computer. With it came a new operating system, and I became determined to figure out apps.
I’d heard of some amazing ones. My friend Mark has an app wherein, if you put your phone under your pillow, it will map out your REM cycles based on how much you move around while you are sleeping on that pillow. Once the phone is charting your sleep cycles, you can ask it to wake you up in a more humane way than a standard alarm clock would, and even a more humane way than another human would.
That’s because people and clocks normally wake you up according to what time it is, or because they need you to be awake. But the phone would wake you up at a shallower point in your sleep cycle when it would be less jarring and painful and exhausting to wake up. (Yes: the app is basically the opposite of a child.) Simply by giving the phone a window during which it can wake you up, rather than an exact time, you can start every day fresh and clear-headed and happy! And get right to work on examining your REM cycles, like Mark does.
I thought that this sounded brilliant. What a scheme!
Then I talked with his wife about it. These discussions happened, in fact, right before she had their second baby.
Meg loves Mark. She knows he works hard! Yet she was driven insane by this system because it is his job to get their older child ready for and off to school. He can’t do that if he doesn’t get up because his phone is being so deeply respectful of his sleep cycles—more respectful than necessarily makes sense if you are the other parent.
I can’t really put my finger on why I found this story so wonderful. For one, I guess that it illustrates a relationship situation in 3D. Since it is not my relationship problem, I got to benefit from all of the funny and none of the actual frustration. Thanks for the laughs, Meg and Mark!
It illuminates some key things about marriage, and how marriage and even more than marriage, parenthood forces two independent people to do things in tandem. Not only do you have to be with your child all of the time, you have to be coordinated with your spouse all of the time.
Let’s say that marriage is cozy. It’s like a cozy hug! Parenthood and the attendant work and responsibilities and lack of time comes along, and can up the ante into a low-grade smother. Okay, that sounds terrible. Let’s say that it’s like a three-legged race. Overall, the forced coordination and teamwork that parenthood spawns is, like your actual spawn, a really amazing gift. It’s like why dinner parties are so much better than other parties: you are forced to sit next to someone and really get to know them, and that can be pretty excellent, whereas at a normal party, if someone isn’t forced to endure your company by dint of sitting next to you, you or they might float away and not experience the same level of interaction, which usually ends up being pretty great.
So yes, parenting can be excellent and rewarding on many days. But on other days, it is like having your leg tied to someone else’s leg. I already said that, but that’s part of the point. You do not get to untie your damn leg from my damn leg in order to escape my hackneyed metaphors. And that app you love so much? It’s cramping my style.
I asked Meg if I could write about the sleeping app here. She said sure, though she confessed a “scandalous caveat”: she is now obsessed with the app, too. She admitted to being afflicted with the zeal of the converted just before offering to send me one of her sleep graphs.
She also told me that Mark recently shared his concern with her that I’d violated the sanctity of marriage when I publicly implied that Matthew undersalts the pasta water. And that in doing so, Mark also managed to indict her for undersalting their pasta water for the last 15 years.
If “they” can make a sleep app, surely “they” could make a salting app. As for a marriage and parenting app, it’s probably in development. It’s too complicated, though. When it comes out, it will only have 2 stars and it will cost like $3.99. Apps for patience and laughing are more likely the way to go.
Church Avenue Chomp 