I picked P up from her day care late this afternoon, whistling as I walk in the door. Any time I walk into a space in which Kate or Piper can hear me, I give the same little three note whistle I’ve used for years to announce myself — tonic, dominant, major-third. Piper hears this and comes excitedly running out to meet me.  She pauses for a second, looking past me for Kate before I explain that her mom’s at work tonight, and that we’ll be having dinner as a twosome. She’s psyched to head out, though, and so I gather the day’s masterpieces (unfinished raviolis in her lunch bag and a scrawled-on picture of a squirrel, HELLO JACKSON POLLACK) and bundle her into her purple coat.  She says goodbye to Emily, the afternoon caretaker, with a cheery “Shabbat Shalom!” — I’m guessing Piper is likely the only kid being raised by two Quaker parents who knows to say that on Fridays, but when you’re attending a day care named Gan HaYeled, this is perhaps unsurprising, and totally charming — and we run out to the car with a rain squall bearing down on us overhead.

We drive home, Piper pointing out stop signs and busses, and telling me when lights have turned green. We get a brief, blatting shower as we park, and Piper insists that she can hold the umbrella as we walk up to our front door … and she’s right. Holding it upright and going up the steps proves a challenge, though, so I take the umbrella down and we both burst in the door dripping. We marvel at the new couch and chairs, which showed up only this morning, and then I go to transmute several days of base-metal leftovers into one new golden meal for the two of us. Piper leans on the new couch, ransacks her room, rummages through some kitchen cabinets, and finally settles down on the kitchen floor to recite Maurice Sendak’s “Chicken Soup with Rice” to me.

Meanwhile I’m chopping up a shallot; some leftover cooked chicken from the batch we raised, killed and butchered this summer; and a bunch of broccoli. I sautée the shallot with some garlic, and Piper asks to smell the garlic.  Then she wants to smell (and sample) the chicken. Then she wants to watch me stir the rice in.  As I fetch out the usual bottles to jazz up the stir fry, she requests a taste of each and its name: soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, sesame oil.

We sit down at the table and I serve her a big scoop of the fried-rice-and-stuff; on a whim, I put a few drops of each of the four seasonings on her plate, too.  She spends easily the first five minutes of the meal dipping an index finger into each one. “They’re not spicy!”, she reports, before going back for many repeats on all four: especially the puddle of mirin, natch. Then she tries dipping pieces of broccoli into each one in turn and tasting them that way. Having finished her broccoli, she finally hoovers up the chicken and rice. That, I figure, earns her a little dessert, so I get out a frozen peach pop for her and prop the iPad on the table.

As she ate dessert, we video chat with the Massachusetts Hankins, who proudly display their Halloween costumes and play peekaboo with an amused Piper, who keeps proclaiming, “I’ve got a peach pop!”  Then, off for teeth brushing. Piper’s developed some occasional and (thankfully) mild resistance to helping out the tooth brushing process, but after a request from me to help her get to book-reading more quickly, she leans back and says “Ahhh,” all the while signing the ASL word for “help.”

Three decently long books, as Piper fitsherself under my arm: “How to be a Baby,” “Lots of Dots,” and the last story in “Owl at Home”: “Owl and the Moon.” I turn out the light and do the bedtime ritual, which begins with “What a fun day!” and a recounting of everything (that I know) she’s done that day, with especial attention paid to friends and meals. We talk about what we’ll do tomorrow, and then I ask her for a few of her animal sound renditions. Tonight she happily neighs as a horse and chatters as a dolphin; she laughs knowingly but won’t perform when I ask her about crows, and she giggles when I ask about whales, because that’s my cue to make the lowest rumbles and the highest squeaks I can. Then it’s serious business: what does Mama say?  ”I love you.”  What does Abba say? “I love you.” What does Piper say?  ”Dawa.” And with that, I ASL-sign I-love-you-all-time, wish her a good night, and leave the room.

And then go back to her door 30 seconds later to tell her that no, she doesn’t need any orange medicine. (the kid ibuprofen we use apparently tastes really good, but it’s only for actual tooth issues.)

And then I’m back 30 seconds later with a sippy cup of water, at which point I say firmly that we’re done and good night: I’ll see you in the morning, kid, and don’t call unless there’s blood, flames or flashing lights.

It’s not that any of this evening is particularly remarkable. It is, in fact, that this is a thoroughly typical evening that makes me want to record it, lest it be lost in a generally pleasant blur. It’d be way too easy to only jot down the screaming fits or the Calgon-take-me-away moments… but man, these kinds of gently curved few hours together make me astoundingly satisfied to be a father.

CODA

I wonder whether we’ll have these quiet periods of awesome when the second one comes along?

Almost precisely halfway to a second / Due March 12, 2012 Gender: unknown

Context: I frequently ask Piper, “So, what’s your diaper situation?” To which she always invariably replies, “Good!” The verbal response is not the one I’m watching; if she sidles away while saying “Good!” than she’s trying to get out of smelling range, which indicates un petit falsehood as to her pants’ status. If she stays put, she’s most likely telling the truth.

However, this is not actually a diaper story. This morning, I took the bag out of our kitchen trashcan. While knotting the damn eco-friendly trash bag, I noticed a dead fly down in the bottom of the can, and figured I would swab out the whole thing when I came back from taking the bag out.  As I walked towards the back door, though, Piper walked over and peered down into the bottom of the can, and then quizzically looked at me. “What’s the bug situation?”

Late update: tonight we got asked about “the music situation,” during dinner.  So I think we officially have a catchphrase of the week.

It’s just shy of 8 a.m., and our apartment is uncharacteristically quiet. Kate was supposed to be working today, but felt so wretched overnight that she called out (at 0530, I believe) and is sawing wood in the next room. Piper, just a day over the same illness, is having one of her rare lie-ins as well.

I’m in a liminal state, and it’s not entirely comfortable.

My job and I parted company in early January. Keeping the lessons of Dooce and the constantly-circling search engines in mind, I’ll simply refer to the exact nature of the parting as “firm, but amicable.” Journalism is in a state of flux just now, as you may have heard; unlike my years working as a sysadmin, my next job was not breathlessly waiting in the wings. That’s been a little depressing, despite my knowing the reasons for it.

Seven Days of the Week (I Never Go to Work) – They Might Be Giants from They Might Be Giants on Vimeo.

When I applied to journalism schools back in 2006, Kate had told me that of the cities on my list, New York was the least interesting to her in which to live, but that she’d accompany me to wherever the school search led. Coming up on four years later, we’re both feeling like we’re about Done With New York City… so I haven’t been pounding on the doors of media outlets here in town. Instead, Kate and I are looking at options in other cities. Should they come to fruition, we wouldn’t move until our lease runs out… and so even if another full-time journalism job surfaced here in town right now, I’m not sure I’d take it. I know there will be another stretch of 9-5 career in my life, but having nothing definite on the horizon contributes to feeling rootless. It’s a little like watching the status board in an airport, waiting for a long-delayed flight to arrive. Once it comes, I know there’ll be a flurry of activity and motion, but until then…

Piper’s growing and talking and picking out letters: on the subways, on my t-shirts, from her floating letters in the bath. Every day she calls out more and more of the details around her. She’s a funny, easy kid, and we’re having an absolute ball with her. One of the big upsides to not working evenings any more has been getting to see the arc of her days that much more clearly. She’s in a phase where she wants to hear the same books and stories again and again; after a week of reading the same books (this week: “On Noah’s Ark,” “Everywhere Babies”) three and four (hundred) times a day, we’ve taken to “losing” particular books for a while, just to provide an opportunity for something fresher to take hold.

My brother’s in a bit of a rough spot, and my only connection to him is via paper mail. The last serious paper correspondence I had was probably 20 years ago (Hi, Nicole!), and that was all longhand and doodles. This time I’m cheating a little and printing out typed letters.

My stepfather’s cancer numbers have ticked up again, though with the sheer number of cancers and treatments he’s had over the last decade, it’s gotten much easier to remain in a wait-and-see mode with it. The first time you hear “cancer,” it really sounds like “CANCER!”; by the six or seventh time you find out someone’s own cells have gone rogue and are trying to slowly take over the world, it sounds like something you can talk about briefly over lunch and then ignore it while you go do something else.

Recipes made recently:

• Rosemary-Olive-Oil Cake
• Leek-Potato Dill-Oil soup
• Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip cookies
• for watching the Super Bowl, with a partial-orlop contingent in Connecticut: Pierce St. Vegetarian Chili

I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing daily, and will be taking it up again, whether here or privately. It’s funny, the things I now feel like I can’t mention on my own private/public journal, thanks to technology and the increased attention it brings.

[jwplayer config="Moieus" file="http://web.baz.org/~adam/dailies/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/03/Piper-Eye-View.flv" width="640" height="390" ]

And then Piper decided to wake up earlier than usual and demand the bottle of milk we’ve been denying her for 36 hours. We’ve been waiting to return her to dairy products until she stopped casually yakking up random bits of food and beverages, so giving into the hostage-taker’s demands and giving her a full bottle of warm milk while she sat in the middle of our bed felt a little like handing her a goldfish bowl full of grenades and live snakes and asking her to keep it upright.

I figured I’d treat everyone and make some quick pancakes, but because of Kate’s eyes, I kept most of the lights off and cooked by the faint crepuscular glow available, which meant that I was stumbling around the kitchen, too, while Piper pointed her hand at … something on the table, we’re not sure what … and yelled two syllables we’re hearing a lot of these days: “DA-WA!”

Unlike “GAT” and “TUCK” and “DOG” and “CAR” and “ANANA” and “BAH-BREES” and “SOX” and “SCHOOSS” and even “DAH-WOK,” all of which come from Piper with clear ASL signs and well-known translations (cat, truck, dog, car, banana, blueberries-for-the-love-of-god-people, socks, shoes and music, respectively), DA-WA has become a generic and oft-repeated entreaty for whatever she’s pointing to, thinking of, or has seen recently. Woe betide the slow-to-comprehend parent who can’t intuit what she means! Even those who, on two three-hour chunks of sleep neatly divided in the middle by an orange cat who insists on feezling his whiskers around one’s nose, mouth and ears while one sleeps, feel like they’re doing pretty well just to be vertical and not falling asleep in the pancake batter. Or on the stove.

Anyhow, there we sat, eating our breakfast in the near-dark, Kate wearing Matrix-style wraparound sunglasses and wincing at every photon and Piper demanding who knows what. A return to the gold standard, maybe, and a little goddamn comity in Congress. Me, I just ate four pancakes with grapes and almond butter and maple syrup and told Kate she was pouring soy sauce on her breakfast.

For months, now, Piper’s been getting physical therapy to make sure her gross motor skills keep relatively on track with the rest of her. (She could identify ducks and squirrels and dogs and trucks early on, knew the ASL signs for them, and damn near had her Masters degree in fruit-specific botany terms before she deigned to try walking on her own.)

For a long time she insisted on having an adult finger in both hands when trucking around on the playground, and it took a little while to get her down to walking with just one hand clutching ours. But in the last several weeks, her confidence and balance have come roaring to the fore, and as of a few days ago, she’d made the switch from “default to crawling” to “default to walking,” with all the congratulations and hubbub from her parents and grandparents that you might imagine.

So when she and I got to the park yesterday, I unbuckled her from her car seat, lifted her out, reflexively swept the seat for pretzels and cereal, set her down on the ground, and reached out my hand so we could start strolling.

Instead, she took off without me.

For the next hour, I mainly let her take the lead and set our pace. We stopped to snack and shoo squirrels and make beelines for other parents who might have more interesting food, but mostly she toddled and explored, reaching for my hand only when she needed to go up or down stairs, or take an off road trip into the bushes or back paths. She would occasionally (and very carefully) bend at the waist to pick up acorns or particularly sparkly rocks, usually managing to stay on her feet.

Coming down a set of stone steps, she demanded my hand at the top and immediately released it at the bottom, having seen a particularly alluring acorn, and I found myself, just for a second, momentarily and ridiculously … sad.

“But sad for what?”, I asked myself. Sad that the hand-holding rituals of a whopping two months were changing? Sad that this little person is discovering and exploring her independence? Or sad to find myself one eensy bit less necessary in this one aspect of her life? I knew rationally that all of these are cause for celebration, but surprised myself by still feeling a minute sliver of loss when she didn’t grab my hand again.

I think that’s what surprised me: that in 15 months, the biological imperative To Protect And Serve could have already been grooved so deep into my brain that Piper’s polite “thanks, but no thanks” could leave me for a moment wondering what I’m supposed to do with my hands when I go walking now.

(Do all parents meet their kids’ increasing independence with this same mix of 19 parts joy and 1 part mourning the moments just passed? More worryingly, does this put me at risk for mawkish wistfulness for the “simpler” days of infancy, when “all we had to worry about” was getting enough sleep to let us remember to move the oatmeal out from under our faces before we passed out on the dining room table? Lordy, I hope not.)

For better or worse, I felt necessary again about 20 seconds later, as Piper cussed me out for my stubborn insistence on walking between her and the curb, beyond which rolled the cars in the parking lot. “What a jerk you are, Abba,” she said (paraphrased) as she tried vainly to get around me and go give the Escalade a big hug. “Ah, yes,” I thought to myself, intercepting her. “Those familiar twin feelings of Being Needed and Being Yelled At: we’re not done with them quite yet.”

I scooped her up, buckled her into her car seat, handed her the raccoon trap filled with dried fruit and cereal and pretzel twigs, and we headed home.

(Does mentioning a substance that came out of my child officially make me a parent blogger, now?)

One of the more pleasant pictures of Piper while ill, immediately after an eye-scrubbing.

Anyhow, four days of rotten sleep left the entire Hirsch family clobbered and susceptible to a hacking summer cold, just in time to return to New York City and watch all the sidewalks melt down to slag as a giant heatwave rolls through town. It’s around 11 p.m.; I worked from home today to avoid coughing on anyone at WNYC, and I feel like a horse ran over me today. I’ve had no appetite at all, though I forced myself to have a bowl of cereal and a handful of trail mix this afternoon. I’m about to go to bed, and it’s still approximately two thousand Kelvin degrees outside. My environmentalist side has required me to put the window a/c units on “economy” mode, and the cats are still melted down to little furry piles of butter.

Piper’s coughing herself awake in her room, which portends another rotten night’s sleep for all of us: Kate’s working overnight while Piper and I keep the home fires extinguished.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 11 months:

• Having a kid did not magically change me in one instant. This notion that parenthood flips a switch inside one’s head is bunk, as near as I can tell. We came home from the hospital and I was surprised by how little had changed. Dirty dishes: check. Meals to cook: check. Books to read, jobs to do, Kate to laugh with: check, check, check. There was just this small person who sleept a lot, in the next room. Was I a father then, or simply a caretaker? Dunno.



• I know I’m a father now, though. Eleven months of having this marvelous little person in my life has altered me as surely as wire shapes a bonsai tree. Slow, ever-changing circumstance and gradually altered habits have crept up on me.
• I watch her learn – to roll, to babble, to eat, to splash – and I am amazed.
• Cooking for the people I love is one of my greatest joys, and cooking for Piper one of the best of those joys. So many people seem to assume that babies should only eat bland, pureed, overcooked mush… and sure, Piper’s eaten that sort of thing. But watching her happily scarf down the curried lentils and currants I’d just made, and then go back for seconds? Awesome.



• Just in the last week, she’s crossed a threshold: to wit, the door from her room to the hall. I set her on the floor and turned my back while doing [SOMETHING DIAPER RELATED] and when I turned around, she had actually left the room to go out and investigate the fringe on the edge of the hallway rug. Friday she tossed herself into the frigid sprinkler at the park. Yesterday she chased the cat around the living room in slow-motion Lurch-O-Vision. This morning, she beat on the glass-fronted electronics cabinet with her remote control. She is going to break things, it’s clear: She is going to fall down, cut herself, bang her head. There Will Be Blood. And I will put band-aids on her and cheer her on as this heady cocktail of pride, caution, adventure and foolhardy exuberance hits us both.
• I am her Abba, this year, even if Piper has not yet mastered the word.

Admittedly, her movement technique has a bit of the “harbor-seal-galumphing-on-dry-land” about it, but I’m sure that’ll smooth out with time.

This bodes very well for her sense of humor, I suspect.