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I almost crashed the car….


Besides the joy of driving a car with a V3 engine, we had a couple of problems with The Prius.
First, it was small, and we had to use a roof rack pretty much any time we wanted to go anywhere or do anything. Second, The Prius had this horrible habit of getting broken into and, more recently, getting its roof rack stolen. With two kids under the age of five, we knew we were going to replace our car in the next 18 months — so, all of the above added up to a desire to throw in the towel a year and a bit early.
Years ago, we decided we were going to buy American for our next car (USA! USA!) and we went to the dealership basically only looking at Ford’s. Escape. Flex. Explorer. My Texan wife decided that the Escape was too small, even though it was 237 times the size of The Prius. I vetoed the Explorer, because I’m the one that has to street park that beast.
So we settled on the Flex. Until, thank god, we walked by a Jeep on the way to our final test drive. Whew.
The Prius is dead. Long live The Prius. Oh, and happy birthday, Sparkler.
Sparklet and The Mighty Quinn are both obsessed with Jimmy Fallon’s Classroom Instruments segment. It began with “Let It Go” (naturally) but has progressed as far as “Blurred Lines” (thank God they don’t understand the words).
So, our previous nanny share family bolted. After about 6 months, they decided they were done, and gave two (2!) weeks notice. This is pretty much exactly why nanny share families need a contract with each other more than they need a contract with the nanny.
(I’m not sure who they think is going to pay the nanny’s salary in the meantime, but — oh, wait, it’s us. I’m sure they have a great reason for screwing us and the nanny that’s served them loyally, but — oh, well, good riddence.)
Anyway, we’ve just complete yet another global, exhaustive search for a nanny share partner and this one is normal and cute, and i’m sure it will last forever.
i’ve never seen quinny be so happy to be away from D.C. — happy to play with any toy he wanted, happy to get everyone’s undivided attention, happy to put a toy down and know exactly where it will be when he gets back.
maybe it wasn’t D.C. that he was excited to be away from.
so we got doug.
doug the dinosaur is a lamp, on a timer. we explained to the mighty quinn that doug was his new roommate, and that we weren’t allowed to get out of bed until doug “woke up” in the morning. (this wasn’t our idea, fwiw. we stole it from friends who, in turn, paid for the advice from a sleep therapist.)
the first day we set the timer for 5:15am, and put the mighty quinn back to sleep (unconvincingly) until doug woke up about 30 minutes later. the second day we moved it back five minutes, and then ten, etc.
by day five, the timer was actually going off FIRST, at which point we just set the timer to 7:00am and called it a day. and, for a bonus, even when the mighty quinn gets up first, he plays quietly in his crib until doug’s awake.
and sanity and balance has been restored to the household.
for the first time for either kid, while we were eating dinner in the zoo’s snack bar, he just walked right out the front door — looking for mommy, who had taken sparklet to the bathroom about five minute earlier.
fortunately, the dad of a family who was sitting near the door saw him wander out and assumed that something wasn’t quite right.
but it’s officially the end of the innocence for the parker family.
case and point: when we decided to change practices, it took us 8-10 phone calls and 12+ weeks to get our records transferred — and after confirming that they’d be ready on morning of our appointment with the new pediatrician, it turns out that the records hadn’t been signed, and so they couldn’t be turned over to our new doctor.
good riddance.
in other news, the mighty quinn is still in the 97th+ percentile — 36 lbs and 36 inches, which i think officially makes him round. sparklet is 40″+ now, which puts her well on the way to the 2028 women’s olympic volleyball team.
we’ve got absolutely nothing on the agenda sans going to the beach, and taking advantage of the pool that came with the house. aaand, doing whatever is necessary to forget that we’ve voluntarily moved into a house with four kids under the age of four.
the mighty quinn was playing inside one of those mechanical rides — the ones you find in malls, or in front of supermarkets — when a cub scout saw that we didn’t have any change to make the train actually go.
so he ran over from the other side of the exhibit, and gave us a quarter out of his pocket.
thank you, mr. scout.
that said, in an eight day trip, it really only effected our plans once — and even then it probably shouldn’t have. (only one day did it thunder, but it was so distant that we probably could have swum if we wanted to.) we made sure it was going to be nice before we did the national park, but other than that we didn’t even really have to schedule around it.
plus — rainy season meant WAY less people, which seems like a completely fair price to pay.
the idea started 18 months ago, when the lady sparkler and i decided we wanted to go to the Osa penninsula — a location I had worked on a lot while i was at large, unnamed conservation organization.
but, after 9 months of talking to people who had been to Osa, we quickly decided that we were more likely to bring back both of our kids (alive) if we went somewhere else. then, after another 3 months of deciding whether or not coming back with all of our kids was a priority for us, we decided to go somewhere else.
manuel antonio is still on the pacific side of Costa Rica, and still has access to some stunning beaches and rain forests, and is a little more family friendly. though, i should point out, the miami airport is not. stunning. or family friendly.
but, it’s all trade offs — and the miami airport is all that stands between me an 7 days of sitting on the beach.
for several months now, i’ve been poking fun at my “crappy” canon 20d — mainly because i’m pretty sure my iphone, even though it cost half as much, has a better zoom and twice the resolution.
so, i threw my 20d under the bus — well, more specifically, i tossed it to my camera deprived father — and my beloved family got me a brand-spanking new 6d for my birthday. it’s unreal how well this camera performs in low light, not to mention the cropping that i can do now that my resolution has quadrupaled.
i, quite literally, don’t know what to do with myself i’m so happy.
mommy just figured out (about three months after i did, i should note) that mr. quinn is only making a ruckus in the middle of the night because he knows his mommy will come and pick him up for an hour or two.
somebody just got cut off.
just on a whim, i ebay’ed “sky striker” about two weeks ago, and found out not only are they for sale, but hasbro has re-released the sky striker on it’s 30th anniversary. it’s on sale at amazon for $34.
so, now, The Mighty Quinn is the proud owner of a sky striker, though he’s going to have to fight with daddy for the right to take it down off the ceiling and play with it.
as of yesterday, i was nearly two months behind in blogging — the longest cold spell since sparklet was born three-plus years ago.
good news is that not much happened:
the mighty quinn is tottering on the edge of crawling (and has been for most of the last two months.) he’s on to baby foods, and just this week started some real food (blackbeans, just like his sister.)
he’s also officially a beast, off the charts on both height and weight. seriously, however big you think he is — double it. and then double it again. and then burn whatever you thought you were thinking.
for her part, sparklet (who just turned three) is having entire conversations now, mostly with herself. she makes up songs from scratch, and they are often are laden with not-so-hidden messages. (“riding on ca-rou-sels is funnnnnn! i’d liiike to riiide on a ca-rou-sel todaaaay.”)
moreover, she has figured out how to say the two worst words in the world — “no” and “just” (eg. “no, no, no, no, i don’t want to eat lunch, i just want a snack.” and “no, no, no, no, i’m not eating — i’m just checking to see if there are snacks in the bag.”)
finally, i realized that i have ten tons of unused vacation days that i’m going to lose in December if i don’t start taking them quick — so i’m cobbling together a better-late-than-never paternity leave from random days across the remainder of the year.
oh, and that election thing happened. oh, and i got an iphone that takes neat panorama photos. oh, and halloween happend (sparklet was a fairy, and mighty quinn was yoda, and we picked pumpkins). and, oh, this is my 2,000th post since 2004.
back in the saddle, and i hope it lasts.
for the third consecutive time, i took the mighty quinn to the pediatrician (alone) and it turns out nothing was wrong.
i’m pretty sure that’s a life lesson — if my wife thinks the baby is actually sick, she makes time so that she can visit the doctor herself. if she sends me alone, i think we can safely say it’s not life threatening.
the mighty quinn loved his beer, fwiw.
today’s day one — national gallery of art and the national museum of the american indian. and he only slept through half of it.
… and sparklet got to look at a fire truck up close when someone smelled a gas leak in the street in front of the house. win, win.
the early evening was made a little more exciting by a string of thunderstorms that came through right around bedtime, but that didn’t slow the under 6 year old girl demographic who used the extra time to jump on an air mattress for two or three hours.
sparklet didn’t go to bed until well after 10am, but she was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
it truly is the little things in life that matter most.
i neglected to mention it at the time, but at our last check-up mommy pointed out to our pediatrician that the mighty quinn’s head was still a little mis-shapen from delivery. the doctor said that she was sure there wasn’t anything wrong, but we should schedule an appointment at Children’s National Medical Center here in D.C. just to be sure.
i didn’t realize how nervous i was, until i got there. then i realized the only time i’ve every really seen a children’s hospital — with the aggressively saturated colors, and overly playful decorations — was when watching a horrible (or miraculous) medical wonder story on extreme makeover home edition.
as a result, i’ve decided that i’m not a big fan.
thankfully, it turns out that everything is perfectly fine. the mighty quinn’s head is well within the medical definition of normal for this point in his life, and there was no evidence of brain or cranial problem.
thankfully.
so, we’ll keep going for a couple more months, and then just take over the “share” full time for now. by the time spring rolls around in 2013, we’ll have a better idea of what the future looks like — we’ll know what school sparklet will be attending the following fall, and quinney will be getting close to a year old.
then, we’ll think about taking on another family. but, for now, it’ll just be sparklet, quinney and maria — which seems like it will work out just fine.
i will say that blogging is a bit more of a challenge, with the pooping baby, the post-op wife, and the overly energetic two year old conspiring against me getting any quality “alone” time with the blog machine. at this rate, i expect to blog again in the summer of 2029.
for what it’s worth, i go back to work tomorrow morning, but mommy is staring down the barrel of another 14 weeks of maternity leave and we’ve got the texas grandparents arriving soon with the virginia grandparents coming back after that.
that’s it from here — further bulletins as warranted.
my beloved wife saved every single piece of clothing sparklet has ever worn, because she was absolutely certain we’d be having a girl. now that we (at least temporarily) think we’re having a boy, we have six or eight tubs of girl cloths that could be looking for a new home.
i’m horrified — how can a child possible wear all those clothes in a little over two years?
but the rest of the plan went off without a hitch. we dropped sparklet with the talimo’s and sped off to sibley for admission, a beautiful corner room, a two hour nap, and a doctor’s official diagnosis of pre-term Braxton Hicks contractions.
so, false alarm.
in unrelated news, i’ve now programmed sibley into the GPS, because in all the excitement i completely forgot how to get to the hospital. again.
and, i got two quality hours with my kindle while mommy napped. i had kind of forgotten what it was like to have time to read — even though i understand it’ll probably be short lived.
in the aftermath or Thing Two’s second X chromosome turning out to be a Y, the biggest shift has been in his room. No longer satisfied with peach walls, plum carpets and floral patterns, we’re in the process of repainting and redecorating.
(I’ve also set aside the “Madeline” wall sign — though, admittedly, I’m not throwing it out until “he” pops out and I get the official confirmation.)
Part of the bedroom reorg is that the white french provincial furniture we inherited from my grandparents is now going into sparklets room (above, top) and sparklet’s slightly more gender neutral furniture is sliding into Thing Two’s room in substitution (above, underneath).
We’re also painting both their rooms a light green — there by reducing the 137 things they’ll argue about some day to a more manageable 136.
This argument reduction effort was actually kicked off last week when I saw a “Thing Two” decal in Target that sparklet and I eventually put on his bedroom door. It was officially the first time I saw something in wanted for one child that made me say “oh, crap — what am I going to buy for the other.” Fortunately, there was a stack of Sesame Street decals (with sparklet favorite Abby Cadabby) on the next display over.
That might bring the list down to 135 1/2.
sparklet quickly fell for kermit, and has helpfully volunteered to care and steward the Muppet until a time that Thing Two can care for him himself.
this quickly prompted a Saturday morning viewing of the original Muppet Movie, which sparklet loved. of course, wewatched the “Edited for Toddler” version, which involves daddy skipping from song to song to song (running time: 35 minutes).
at least we now have an alternative to hearing The Jungle Book over and over again.
mommy had a doctor’s appointment a couple weeks back, and while she and the doc were talking about the coming thing two, they noticed she was coming in pretty big and pretty fast.
so they scheduled up another sonogram for last Friday, just to see exactly how big (and whether we’d need to adjust the delivery date, etc.) a sonogram at this point is fairly unusual — you don’t get one after 20 weeks unless the doctor specifically recommends one — but we were pretty excited to see the baby one extra time.
so Friday morning, we walk into the exam room and met with our tall spindly (dude) sonographer who started chatting us up about what we were having (girl), whether we had picked out any names (we had) and other stuff that wasted time while he got everything dialed in.
and then he started giggling. it wasn’t a bubbly giggle, but more like a nervous “you’re going to rip my head off” sorta giggle.
“i’m afraid you’re not having a girl.” turns out thing two isn’t a she — she’s a he.
and, no, we’re not kidding.
for now, let’s just skip past 20 minutes of “are you sure?” and “no, really — are you sure?” and “well, she was pretty sure when she told us it was going to be a girl…” that followed.
funny thing, is we remember that other sonogram pretty clearly.
when she first told us it’d be a girl, the lady sparkler said something like “really? are you sure?” in the same way that any mommy-to-be would say after hearing pretty much anything — and she got all huffy.
“i’ve been doing this for 26 years,” she said. “and i’ve never been wrong once in all those years.”
well, there’s always a first.
fast forward to now — we’ve got a boy coming, he’s got a lovely peach bedroom, with a soft purple rug, with bright flowered sheets, lots of pink clothes waiting for him when he gets home, in a bedroom filled with (hand be down) white, French Provencal furniture.
now, mommy and me can see the future — when this all turns out great, and becomes the story that (much to thing two’s consternation) we will faithfully drag out at every holiday, graduation and meet-the-new-girlfriend occasion.
however, in the interim, we’ve got about six weeks left to redo about six months worth of mental planning. the good news, is that (shortly before all this happened) we had basically decided on a name.
i think he’ll make a great “madeline.”
mommy had to sing about 20 minutes of twinkle, twinkle after the lights went out — a shockingly long time considering her current repulation for the easy manner with which she goes to sleep.
of course, we’re spinning this as a “present” for sparklet, but in the end she’s got to get out of the crib because thing two is going to need a place to sleep in the spring.
UPDATE: the following night it was back to normal, with a quick hop into the new bed and snoozing just 5 minutes later.
no, not sparklet — that’d be mommy, with the belly sticking out behind her. we’re about 13 weeks in and, if we’re honest, we haven’t been able to hide the baby in mommy’s belly since about week eight.
sparklet doesn’t have a clue what’s in store for her quite yet, and each time mommy tries to explain the baby bump, sparklet lifts up her dress to show us that she’s got a belly, too.
here’s the pregnancy so far:
obviously, it’s still a bit early for a gender — that’ll come in about a month, assuming God doesn’t smite my wife for insisting that she already knows it’s going to be a girl.
It’s getting a little obvious, at this point.
the lady sparkler is also starting to complain that her belly is noticeably getting in the way now (bending over, hugging people). neither are good indicator for my sanity over the next four weeks until we can tell people.
for my part, i’m just keeping my head down and not making eye contact — i nearly ruined it all the last time, so this time my mouth is staying shut even in the face of the proverbial wild horses.
this morning we went down to the georgetown waterfront, which seemed appropriate as it was where sparklet and i went on our first day of paternity leave together and also the place where she first started locomoting in public.
never has the old cliche seemed more appropriate — the more that things change, the more you wonder where the heck the last 12 months went. or something like that.
with my new found salary, we’d already started ticking off a couple of items on our long term wish list — installed a water filter next to the kitchen sink, some cosmetic stuff in our bathrooms, and patched up some outstanding items from our home inspection (including some reinforcing some joists under the porch, and blowing more insulation into the attic).
the big update, however, has been installing a murphy bed in the basement, which instead of being a rental unit we now expect will now play host to a steady stream of family over the next couple of years decades.
the bed is just fantastic — it’s built like a tank, and takes an honest-to-God real, queen-sized, 12″ thick pillow-top mattress, which i’m seriously considering putting on the bed upstairs and dumping our old mattress on our guests downstairs (i kid, i kid).
i’m not exactly sure what else is going to be added to the list, but not to worry — the lady sparkler has only been pregnant for six weeks, so she hasn’t really had time to get creative.

for my part, I’m guessing it’s true because (a) our grocery bill has doubled during the last five weeks, and (b) i’m increasingly finding myself alone on the couch after the oh-so-late hour of 9 pm.
of course the interesting twist is that while we had been toying with the notion of “trying” for a couple of months, all that came to a screeching halt six weeks ago when i changed jobs — but somehow the pregnancy fairy found us anyway.
still, despite our occasional thoughts regarding immaculate conception (and my suspicious leers towards the milkman) we’re obviously over the moon — and ridiculously thankful that the nanny has sparklet well on the path towards being potty trained.
yay 🙂
the dress makes the man