Home

When Lyla's old enough to know better, she'll never let us embarrass her by throwing down the big blanket in inappropriate places. In the above photo, we're inside an Illinois overpass oasis, blanket on the dirty tile floor. Tables and chairs surrounded us, but there we sprawled on the floor. "It's like an indoor dirty picnic," we'll say to Lyla when she's five, and she'll run off to try and find cooler parents.

Here we are a couple hours later on a grassy knoll outside of a Wisconsin gas station and McDonald's smooshed into one sad building.


Of course on the other side is Menard's, where Wisconsonites go to pray.


The only reason we made it home without Lyla banshee-wailing us into madness is because we tired her out on the dirty blanket.



We tended to other business, too.


But we made it home in just under 12 hours. Without a baby it would've taken us 8. Now it's time to sleep.

Cookie

Julie read somewhere to give your baby a Nilla Wafer. Can you imagine Lyla eating green beans now that she's aware of the existence of Nilla Wafers?




We did have to dig it out of her mouth a couple times. Lyla also discovered the taste of sand. She tried it once or twice earlier in the week, but today she officially promoted it to the status of food group.



Today was an ideal beach day: calm and warm. Lyla was a champ all day and crashed as soon as we got back to the hotel. It took us a week to figure out that the smart move was to just give up on regular naps. We'll know that for next time. As for this time, we leave tomorrow. Back to the real world--and the start of part-time daycare.




Hopefully Lyla will sleep all the way home. Ha! Wish us luck.

Fun

Can't we just stay here?

Developments

Due to a sketchy weather forecast today, Julie and I are heading to an outlet mall and leaving Lyla in the capable hands of Auntie Lori and Grandma Julie, as well as a large cast of supporting sitters.

God help them. Lyla has grown wise to our baby-soothing tricks and has become all but impossible at nap time. Hey, maybe she's teething. Maybe she needs an exorcism.

This morning I put her in the Bjorn and walked two laps around the outside of the hotel before going inside and zigzagging my way upstairs, through corridors, and eventually back to our room. Then, satisfied that she was asleep, I put her down in the playpen. Hysterics immediately ensued.

Later...

She has diaper rash! We came back from our shopping trip, several articles of clothing richer (and monetarily poorer), and my mom reported that some "icky poop" must have caused the rash. Then, while elaborating, she repeated the phrase "icky poop" like 150 times, and I thought I might hurl.

So I drove to Walgreen's and bought some zinc oxide on the recommendation of the pharmacist. And now here's my question: is there some kind of utensil you can buy to apply that stuff? I squirted some on a diaper wipe, but it totally didn't work. Then I said screw it and used my fingers. And again, almost hurled. Do they sell zinc oxide applicators, maybe in the shape of fingers?

And now Lyla is an effective sleeper again. Case closed.

Falling

I am typing this from the hotel lobby at 10:45 in the morning. Julie is in the room, convinced that she can do what I failed to do an hour ago: get Lyla down for her morning nap. It seems to be a theme with the last couple posts, that the key to maintaining sanity while vacationing with an infant is making sure she sleeps.

If we're home, I'm a pro. I put Lyla in her crib, give her a high-five and a kiss, remind her that Daddy loves her, and leave. Away from home, I can only get her about 80% of the way to sleep, which anyone knows is the worst possible state for an infant to remain in for long. For some reason, I can't close the deal.

Julie can. She rocks Lyla as only a mother can. She sings to her from her tiny repertoire of songs. (My favorite Julie quote from two days ago: "Man! I sang Silent Night, Joy to the World, and Fifty Nifty United States, and she finally fell asleep.")

I'm afraid we're undoing the months we spent establishing Lyla's sleep routine. We put her to bed at the cabin just after dinner, then wake her up and bring her back to the hotel and put her to bed again. We struggle to get her to nap on the beach. I guess you could argue that we're effectively preparing Lyla to one day survive with an obnoxious college roommate. Or you could argue that we don't know what the hell we're doing.

Well, it's now 11:07, and I have no idea what's going on upstairs in our room. The cabin and the beach and the family await us, but we won't leave until Lyla gets her morning nap. Hopefully Julie is working her Jedi magic. I guess I'll just sit here in the lobby and wait for her to text me. A maid is vacuuming around me. In a minute I suspect she'll ask me to lift my feet.

A little later:


She did it. Amazing.

Peachy

We're having fun.

So check it out:


Okay, take a moment to guffaw at my amazing farmer tan. Get it out of your system. A tan like that takes devotion, folks.

Julie picked up the floaty star thing at Target. I nearly hyperventilated while blowing it up. We brought Lyla out in the waves, and she thought it was okay. Compared to her size, the waves were massive, worthy of giggles and gleeful shrieks. I tried to model appropriate wave reactions by saying "Woo!" every time a big one came, but Lyla just looked at me patiently as if to say, "I'm glad this is fun for you."

There was a bit of an incident later in the day. Julie and I took a walk to the public beach to buy ice cream cones, leaving Lyla with my mom, sister, brother, and aunt.

We came back to this scene:


That's my mom holding a fast-asleep Lyla. I'm not sure if I understand the entire story, but apparently during a diaper change, Lyla passed something the size and hardness of a small peach pit. Our girl was a bit backed up, you see, and when the problem presented itself, it was not without some high drama. And then she fell asleep on Grandma.

So in other words, Julie and I timed our walk perfectly.

And in case you were wondering, Lyla recovered just fine:

Vacation

Lyla is napping in our hotel room. She's napping, as in taking a nap, as in sleeping. For me, the morning nap in the hotel room is a point on which our whole trip could pivot toward triumph or hideous failure.

The issue is that Lyla's mother takes approximately 137 minutes to get ready in the morning. I take 11. I suppose it makes sense since she is much, much prettier than I am, and prettiness necessitates the daily use of many bottles, currently assembled in minibar-like fashion on the bathroom counter.

So if Julie's use of these bottles was punctuated by the shrieks of her daughter and the loud sighs of her husband, then it might start to feel less like vacation and more like Sartre's No Exit, which famously demonstrated that hell is other people.

But if Lyla can nap like this every morning, then we might all survive together peacefully in this 400-square-foot room.

Later:





So far, so good.

Safari

Lyla is napping. Julie just got out of the shower. I've been up for almost three hours doing this and that so we might get out of here today. It's pouring outside. I hope the cargo carrier is waterproof.

I would say what we've done is a model example of packing overkill. I picture us finally loaded in the car and backing out of the driveway, and the axles just snap underneath us. "It was the highchair," I'll say to Julie. "I told you we shouldn't have packed the highchair."

We'll be the people driving 55 MPH down the freeway. Maybe we'll put a sign on the back window that says "That's as fast as it goes; we're carrying the equivalent of a medium-sized elephant."

Umlaut

I'm going to try to keep up this blog during our vacation. I haven't missed a day since I started, so I'm hoping the hotel really does have free wireless like it claims to. Julie tells me I should chill out about it, take a day off once in awhile. It doesn't quite work that way, though. One day would turn into two, then three, then forever, and these are days we won't get back.

Lyla was a whiny monster today. Or maybe I was and I projected it onto her. I cleaned the house today, even Swiffered the floors, and now Lyla's finally in bed and apparently sleeping. I don't know what her deal was. I think she's teething--which has been our standard scapegoat for five months now.

I have assembled the bag of random junk in hopes that the child stays entertained in her car seat. There's the rubber spatula. There's the rubber brush thingie that I use to apply melted butter to bread for grilled cheese sandwiches. The kitchen is full of fun items for babies. There's the Wüsthof Santoku knife. Well, we'll save that for when she's older. (Really I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to finally, after all this time, type an umlaut.)

And we have unopened toys that I might let Lyla play with once I'm tired of them.

But tomorrow could be complete disaster if Lyla decides to be a demon baby from the swamp of destruction. Hopefully she got it all out of her system today.

Blah

We leave Friday morning for the Dunes; we'll be gone a week. The car-top cargo carrier arrived a couple days ago. Tomorrow I'll see if it actually fits. I'm trying to imagine all the stuff that'll go in it: highchair, Exersaucer, and on and on. I guess you have to pack them rather tightly so the contents don't smash around in there.

Riveting subject matter, I know. It's crazy to plan a week-long trip with a baby. Tonight I dropped off the dogs at Julie's sister's. I don't think I'll miss them at all. It sounds horrible to say, but dogs are such an unbelievable nuisance when you have a baby. Lyla's first word is bound to be "Daisy!" said with annoyance, anger, or seething rage. Or "Tulip, get!" That dog, I swear. She likes to lick her own shit and then lick you. Fuse Tulip and Daisy's brains together, and you might end up with one mildly stupid dog as opposed to two complete imbeciles. Hey, maybe that's what Tulip's trying to do when she humps Daisy.

Oh, they're sweet dogs. And Tulip (the shit licker) likes Lyla very much, lets her yank her face fur without so much as a yowl. Daisy's a bit more squeamish, opting to move across the room if Lyla gets too close. They'll be good for Lyla to grow up with.

But anyway, today I did six or seven loads of laundry, and tomorrow I have to clean the house and pack as much as possible before Julie gets home. Blah blah blah. When you're a stay-at-home parent, you don't need a vacation from work, but you need one from planning for vacation.

Rookie

I finally hung out with another stay-at-home dad today. It feels like I've been strolling around on Mars for four-and-a-half months and suddenly encountered another human. Not that my mom friends aren't human, but you know--they're from Venus. He and I work at the same school, and his daughter is three months old. He's taking off the fall and winter trimesters to stay home with her. His wife went back to work yesterday.

He's so screwed. If only he possessed an ounce of my wisdom. I remember staying home with a three-month-old. You're like this giant mental case taking care of a tiny mental case. Three-month-olds don't know how to sleep properly, they can't put the binky back in their mouth, and you're still afraid that you're going to accidentally maim them somehow. I got entire blog posts out of incidents that seem ridiculous to me now. A whole post on turkey-basting out a booger? Please, I can do that blindfolded while bowling now.

He and I are the same age, we work in the same school, we live in the same city, and our wives work for the same company. Yet, the five months that separate our daughters' ages might as well be decades. The baby crams so much information into your brain during those months that you basically go insane. You come out of it, and of course he'll come out of it too, but the thing is, he's not even in it yet.

I think I'm jealous.

Fight

Lyla was in the Exersaucer when suddenly my nose detected that she had made some intense memories in her pants. Whenever this happens, I pause and consider whether one of the dogs might have farted. I sniff again, deeply, as though into a swirling glass of red wine, and my nose palette tells me the answer. It's always her.

Upstairs in the nursery, a cursory inspection of the diaper revealed a fairly accurate reproduction of Van Gogh's Starry Night, though in chocolaty browns instead of blues.

Diaper changes are easy when babies are very young because they put their legs up automatically and stay that way. But Lyla, who is eight months old today, now prefers to twist and bend like she's doing yoga, especially when she's covered with shit.

By the way, try to say "You're covered with shit" calmly. Go ahead, right there at your computer. Pretend you're staring at someone who is covered with shit, and tell them so. If you can do it without totally freaking out, then maybe you should change the diapers of psychotic yoga babies for a living.

So Lyla and I had a huge fight because I insisted that she remain in a traditional diapering position. She screamed obscenities at me that would make other babies blush. Now she's taking a nap, and we may or may not be on speaking terms when she wakes.

Worm

Lyla has figured out what a camera is. I mean, look at that picture. Look at yesterday's. Two weeks ago to get smiles like those, I would've had to do a realistic imitation of an aerobic instructor squirrel. Now I just point the camera at her.

Her crawling is hilarious, but I think crawling is the wrong word for it. It's more like inch-worming if you were an inch worm who had suddenly sprouted elbows. Her ample gut still drags across the carpet, so we should put double-sided tape on her shirt and let her delint the room for us.

Lyla has the short-term memory of a gnat, so each time she sees a shiny treasure in front of her, she invents the inch-worm maneuver all over again. You see her concentrating to figure out just how to coordinate everything, and when it works, she looks like Peter Parker did when he discovered he could shoot webs from his wrists. But sometimes she's too tired for it and howls, as if to say "This simply is not possible!" Reminding her she did it an hour ago does no good.

But we are on the precipice of major change: Lyla's contentment with here is about to morph into eagerness to get there.

Hero

Here is Lyla by Lake Superior. We did not amputate her right foot. It's an optical illusion; the rock is like a saddle--never mind. We're back from Duluth, now experts at traveling with an infant.

The best decision we made was to bring a large blanket. On the way, Lyla lasted about an hour before she explained from the backseat that she might not be cheerful much longer.


Yes, this is a patch of grass adjacent to a McDonald's parking lot. If up to this point you have pictured us as a highly fashionable family, I imagine this photo just set you straight.

It worked, though. After half an hour of rolling around and playing with toys, Lyla slept the rest of the way.



She liked the hotel room very much. We took her to the lobby, which overlooked Lake Superior, and she chewed on a Caribou Coffee lid for like 45 minutes and flirted with every person who looked at her.

We were nervous about the reunion dinner since it started at Lyla's bedtime. By the end, Julie hadn't eaten much because she was so focused on keeping Lyla entertained. I'm more ambidextrous, I guess. But anyway, we have this rule on vacation that if one of us is suffering in any way, the other must don the proverbial hero cape. Back at the hotel, a hungry Julie said that more than anything in the world, she wanted onion rings.

(Note: she is not preggers.)

So I pulled on my extremely tight Superman unitard and flew to Dairy Queen. Along with onion rings I got a Dilly Bar, an ice cream cone, a raspberry iced tea, and an anemic-looking chicken sandwich that would ultimately go uneaten.

Back in the room, we turned on the TV and put Lyla in the Pack 'n Play, strategically positioned in a darker part of the room by the bathroom. Within five minutes, she was asleep. Miracle.

At 3:00 in the morning, I heard the muffled suck of liquid in a straw. It was Julie, finishing the raspberry iced tea. "I am unbelievably thirsty," she whispered. "I think it was the salty onion rings. We have no water. I pulled this out of the garbage." Julie will not drink water from a bathroom sink. She's a princess.

"You're drinking garbage?"

"Shut up! I'm soooo thirsty."

"Shh. I'll get you some water out of the vending machine."

Ten minutes later, Julie was chugging her special water. Lyla never even stirred.

"Good night, garbage drinker."

"Good night, hero."

The real hero was Lyla, who slept until 8:30.

And after an eventful family picnic today, on possibly the coldest July 18th Duluth has ever seen, Lyla slept the entire ride home.


And tonight, 20 minutes after this photo was taken, Lyla crawled forward for the very first time.

Fooled

Vacation starts next Friday, but today we'll bring Lyla on her longest trip yet: a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Duluth. Cue the scary organ chords.

My mom's side of the family has a reunion there every summer. Mostly it's second cousins and uncles and aunts a generation or two removed, but I also have a smattering of first cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents who are always fun to see.

Hopefully Lyla agrees.

We're bringing her Pack 'n Play for her to sleep in. Our thought is that after spending almost her entire life sleeping in the same room in the same crib, she'll be utterly fooled when we switch it all out for a playpen in a hotel room.

We're screwed, aren't we.

Giraffes

When I read a book to Lyla, she's not the least bit interested in the nuances of plot and character. All she pays attention to is when I go off script and tell her what the animals say. With this in mind, I'd have to say her favorite animal is the bird. "This is a bird, Lyla. A bird says, 'Tweet tweet!'" Lyla thinks birds are frickin' hilarious.

Then we get to the giraffe, an animal that should be eliminated from baby literature. "This is a giraffe, Lyla. They don't say anything." The only thought on her face when we get to the giraffe is, "Next!" It's like someone wrapped up a diaper and gave it to her for Christmas.

We are about to exacerbate this giraffe problem by giving Lyla the most well-reviewed teething toy on the market: Sophie the Giraffe. I expect she'll fall in love with it, and I hate to disappoint her when she gets old enough to ask me what it says.

I could lie. I could whinny like a horse but make the whinny sound taller. I could make up nonsense, take advantage of her giraffe ignorance. "Lyla, a giraffe says, 'Bliggity shmiggity!'" Then she'll squeal with glee and run off and play giraffe.

But this will cause issues once she starts kindergarten. "We think Lyla might have Tourette Syndrome," the school nurse will say.

"No," I'll reply. "She just loves giraffes."

Toes

I placed a plethora of enticing toys in front of Lyla to compel her to turn and crawl forward.


It didn't work.

History

After Julie requested it, I made her a mix of cheesy 80s songs. I think there might be a redundancy in that sentence.

She didn't want any rock songs like "Sweet Child O' Mine" or "Livin' on a Prayer." Her idea of rocking out is "Footloose" and "Jessie's Girl." But aside from being a bit girly, the mix is a good representation of 80s hits. Which will one day embarrass the hell out of our daughter.

Maybe not. In terms of time passage, the 1980s for Lyla will be roughly like the 1950s were for Julie and me: an impossibly long time ago when our parents were kids. Elvis ruled the 50s, which was always fine with us. But certainly there's not an Elvis-equivalent from the 80s, someone Lyla can latch onto to convince herself that her parents' musical taste wasn't totally lame.

I guess Michael Jackson is probably the closest thing to Elvis that the 80s had. But I wonder if Lyla's generation will know him more for his music or for all that other stuff.

And I wonder what hideous music Lyla will listen to, compelling us to shout--like our parents shouted at us--to turn off that infernal racket, that noise, that--"For Pete's sake, Lyla! Is that what passes for music these days? Do they even know how to play instruments?"

But see, unlike our parents, we'll be right.

Snooze

Lyla goes to sleep around 7:00 and sleeps until around 7:00. She takes two or three naps as well, each for an hour, sometimes two. We have no complaints about this.

But I'm wondering what'll happen when Lyla starts daycare. The director there mentioned that they try to get the kids down to one nap per day, and I'm guessing that doesn't mean one three-hour nap. Plus, we'll have to wake up Lyla an hour earlier just to get to daycare. Will we need to start putting her to bed at 4:00?

Parents of older kids do say that infant sleepiness goes away, that they long for the day when their hellion even went down for a single nap. It's hard to imagine Lyla any other way: you turn on the fan, some music, lay her down, and she's good. To take that away from her--to take that away from us--is tough to swallow.

Oh well. Maybe it's best to nip this in the bud now. She'll never get through medical school sleeping 16 hours a day.

Nails

It's tough to keep Lyla's fingernails trimmed. That might be the most boring sentence on the entire internet.

She wakes up from time to time with a new scratch on her face. We could get little gloves for her to wear to bed, but that feels like the not-so-distant cousin of padded walls and straight-jackets. "Here Lyla, let's put these on. We need to protect you from yourself."

And that reminds me of the Simpsons episode where they move to Cypress Creek and Bart ends up in the remedial class and the teacher says, "Now everyone take out your safety pencil and a circle of paper." We don't want that to happen to Lyla, do we?

Or Edward Scissorhands when Winona Ryder says, "Hold me" and he says, "I can't." Tragic!

I should mention that fingernail cutting falls under Julie's jurisdiction, not mine.

"Um hello? I cut her fingernails all the time. I cut them before she scratched herself the last time."

"Okay, I'll let them know."

"You know, you could always cut them."

When Julie starts italicizing everything, I know it's best to shut up. And there's no way I'm going near Lyla's fingernails. All I can think about is missing the nail and clipping off the finger, blood everywhere, duct taping the thing back on--not pretty.

But Lyla's scratches do typically disappear by lunchtime. She might have claws like Wolverine, but she heals like him too.