But there is a Starbucks a few miles up the road now. The multi-million dollar library is done and only three blocks away. The grocery store has $1.00 movie rentals?! And yet, the three houses to the left of us are all for sale. Ohhhh Ohio.

But there are some things here you can’t get in Ithaca. Like common courtesy. Or a decent conversation (even if it is about Jesus, or W). And people here don’t look at you (and avoid you) like you’ve got smallpox because you’re young and have a kid. Take that, New York.

This will all wear off soon. The three playgrounds (and giant park) within walking distance will be missed, of course. So we’re going to enjoy it. It is vacation, after all (can you get a vacation with kids?), and the second time we’ve left Upstate NY this year.

If you need us, we’ll be on the seesaws. With ice cream.

Oh, but you’re still here, because you know the books are that good.   Literary CRACK, I tell you.  Not because you can just crank through each one and can’t wait to get your next fix, but because I’ve sacrificed sleep to re-read books that I flipped through less than 9 months ago.  Exactly.

And of course this is because the fifth movie (which was one of my least favorite books) and the final book (which will pretty much make live less worth living once I finish) will be here in less than a month.  Soon.  So I’ve started at the beginning, again, and won’t see the movie or read the last book until I take in every addictively wonderful word.

Sure, I could be reading The Bible or something else I haven’t read but know I should…like Moby Dick or some other classic stuff, but then Megan wouldn’t be able to make fun of me for talking about how I want a magic wand instead of an iPhone (unless you can cast some spells or something with the iPhone, which I’m sure Apple is working on).  So that’s that, and there goes half of my already small audience.

Annnd Jonah has a cold, which he has managed to avoid for a while now.  We’re hoping that he didn’t contract it today when he ditched his delicious ice cream cone with sprinkles for a little bird poo on the picnic table.  To his credit, they looked a lot alike:  some white creamy stuff with flecks in it.  He did stick his tongue out after realizing that it was not ice cream, but not before Megan and I screamed and made sure that no one from Child Services was watching.

Live and learn, little one.

I laughed about this a few years ago when my sister went through The Experience, but I couldn’t even chuckle when I looked into the mirror this morning and saw it smack in the middle of my head: The Grey Hair.

And why shouldn’t I laugh?  I’m young.  I’m healthy (ok, slightly malnourished).  I don’t care about a tiny, grey hair.

But there it is.  Flat, dull, and void of color, on top of my shiny red mane…the product of almost two years of parenting, nine years of avoiding assholes on the road, 17 years in school, six years of photoshop, and countless late nights watching Point Break.
What comes next, glasses? Arch support inserts? I guess I should be grateful, I mean at least I sill have hair.  Although I’m sure I’m not far off from that wonderful milestone.

This is such a lame, trivial moment but it is hard to overlook.  What happened to all those things I was supposed to do by 25?  You know, the cool, cliche stuff like skydiving, backpacking through Europe, headlining Lollapalooza, showing my ta-tas for beads…meth?

And does this mean I’m too old to play Super Mario Bros. 3?  Excitebike?

I guess I don’t know what it means, aside from the ritual that I’ll have to perform momentarily, which involves plucking The Hair from my head with chopsticks, igniting it with the flame of a sandlewood candle while listening to Phil Collins…naked.

And this probably isn’t a good time to bitch about our car hitting 100,000 miles either.

This morning we thought brunch would be a nice idea. We booked reservations for our second attempt (we never made it out the door on the previous attempt) at a pretty nice place up at Cornell. By “pretty nice” I mean swanky, and by swanky I mean a potential baby meltdown situation. We knew we were in over our heads when we were forced to use the valet parking.

This is one of the many many reasons (among the 82 different kinds of assholes and incredibly promising career paths) that I refuse to return to LA. Unless you’re buying the plane ticket. And renting me a helicopter.

But breakfast was good. Jonah didn’t make a scene, and neither did I, so everybody wins. Megan did notice that we were strategically seated in a corner. Away from people, and the food. Smart.

And thinking back on it, the valet experience wasn’t terrible. We gave some dude our ticket when we left, and went outside and watched him back the car up 30 feet from where it had been parked. And this was a good thing, because I didn’t feel bad giving him a “thanks” and half-assed smile instead of a fiver. As in five dollars. American.

Jonah, on the other hand, looks grumpier than he lets on.

And we played in the water instead of crashing the wedding that was in place a few hundred feet down the coast.

So here we go:

7:00am – We wake up and I open my door to hear “dada daddy dad!” and he’ll bounce around his crib naming everything he can see, as well as plenty of things he can’t see.  Sometimes he’ll want to jump right out and run around, other times he’ll roll around on top of stuffed animals until he realizes that I’ve got a sippy cup full of milk in my hand.

7:15am – We’ll then play with his current favorite plastic toy for a few minutes, chat, share breakfast, stir my tea, change a diaper and get dressed and then I have to get ready for work.  This rarely ever happens in the same order, but I do manage to make it happen every day without coffee.  Yeah.

8:30 – I’m out of the shower and we have time for a few songs on the guitar, or a little Strong Bad, or some time to steal The Mommy’s breakfast, and then I say “goodbye.”  No tears, no sappy anything, mostly just playing as I walk down the stairs.

8:57am – out the door, run to the bus wondering if I already missed it.

9:errr-15am – Work.

5:err-10pm -  Call Megan’s cell phone.  No answer.  Call the landline (*%&!).  No answer.  Leave a message on one (which will not be attended to until the following morning).

5:33pm - Home.

5:34pm - Jonah doesn’t acknowledge my existence until he’s done playing with whatever toy he has.  Even then, I have to do something ridiculous to get his attention.  Like sneeze five times because it’s June and I’m now allergic to “nice weather.”  Then we’re all good.

6ishpm - Dinner. Usually it is me eating something and the other two nibbling, since they are on a their own meal schedule.  One where you can eat off a plate.  With silverware.

6:35pm - Jonah runs around in just a diaper for about 10 minutes before we run, sometims laughing, sometimes screaming, to the tub.  Bath-time hilarity ensues. Maybe.

7:10ishpm - Tooth-brushing and pajama time.  Attend to any cuts/bruises from the daily routine of bumping into things.  The Mommy says goodnight and we find three books to read.  For the past week it has been Make Way For Ducklings,  Buttermilk Bear and one of the previously dissed Classic Fairy Tales.

7:30pm - J cries about not getting to read more and  I pick him up, butcher a few songs and lay him in his crib.  He rolls around for five minutes while I sing the last song and then looks at me like he’s never going to see me again.

I can’t blame the guy.  Look at that rundown.  I get almost two hours of Jonah time each morning and night.  Roughly four hours a day.  And while I try to make it four super-exciting-fun-time-daddy-hours,
he’s probably thinking “who is that guy that keeps eating all our food.”

Sorry buddy.

There is nothing more appropriate for this epic shift in your sense of time than counting down the months/weeks/days to your child’s birth, which is both a) an impossible thing to predict (“due date”, seriously?) and b) the first day in which time will no longer continue to make sense to you. Assuming that your child was born on his/her due date (which they weren’t) you’ll never be able to prepare for this switch. Well I wasn’t.

Example
Today’s date: June 12, 2007 (happy birthday Kelly!)
Jonah’s age: 22 months
Feel like I’ve been a parent for: a little while.
That period before I was a parent: feels like half a life-time ago.

22 months is not a long time. But, it feels like it has lasted an eternity. And, it has flown by. India (only three years ago) seems more like a dream than a memory. So does college. But so does that time when Jonah just drooled and slept all day and stared into oblivion (the glory days). The contradictions are endless and I’ve made no progress in understanding how to possibly prepare for the next onslaught of timewarp. But there were a few obvious contributing factors in this whole mess.

Jonah’s birth was sort of the beginning of the end for sleep. While he was napping between 14-17 hours a day during his first few weeks on Earth the few of those remaining hours he was awake were between 1-8am. But oh, its fun because you have a new baby, and he’s cute, and you’re losing your mind because you’ve been rocking a kid to sleep for 30 minutes and the sun is coming up, but it’s okay because he “cooed.” You get through it, but this inevitably defines the first stages of “Parent Time.”

Which is different from, you know, time. Going somewhere? 25 minutes late. Anywhere. We could plan a week in advance, or leave early to get wherever it is we were going with a newborn. Late. It isn’t as though Megan and I were that casual before Jonah. The “fashionably late” doctor appointment becomes uncool after 10 minutes, we learned. And missing not only the previews (sorry Meg) but the first 10 minutes of a movie you kind of wanted to see but really just wanted to get out of the house? Also uncool.

So we got used to sleeping no more than five hours a night and being late all the time. This would have been somewhat tolerable if it lasted a few days, or maybe (maybe!) a few weeks. But eight months go by and you’ve actually gone insane. Strange how that happens. Your sweet, beautiful child is crying at 3am and that’s it. Can’t go another night. “We’re letting him cry it out tomorrow,” we say. But we don’t. But then, we DO. And then (!) a few days later, he’s sleeping all night. And those previous eight months of torture kind of melt away, and our faces slowly begin to resemble 20 somethings again. And we’re happy. And so is the baby.

Then, things really start to move. He’s eating solid food, and you can barely remember the time when he was just eating mush. And he’s walking, which is great, but he’ll surely kill himself in the process, and you crave a time when he sat in the bouncer all day (which, again, seems like it lasted ages but was only a few months ago).

But this doesn’t stop happening. There is always a milestone, always something your child is doing or learning that changes everything in your life, and you think “remember when ____” and realize that you may never experience that again. But you can’t dwell on this because look, he’s 22 months old, can speak full sentences, and will possibly remember getting a splinter today. Or making home-made Play Dough with his Mom. Or strumming the guitar with his Dad. And you can’t explain it, but it’s comforting, in an uncomfortable way.

And for some reason we’re consuming cereal in this place faster than oxygen.

But it is a little warm around here.  And that makes Jonah’s hair unnaturally curly.  Which is nice.  If you like a baby boy who look like girl.  His hair has only been cut once since August 2nd, 2005, and that was only to fight off a mullet a few months back.  He’s currently sporting this hipster swoopy hair that looks ridiculous on anyone over the age of 3.   Did you hear that hipsters?!

But we had ice cream tonight. And we had to peel Jonah off the walls to get him into the tub afterwards.  And I discovered that giving a baby a bath after eating ice cream looks a lot like when a cat falls into a toilet. No one wins in these situations.  No one.

Tonight’s adventure involved a vegetarian take on sushi (!), a giant and deliciously undercooked cookie, some walking, a loud and shady bar, and tiredness from lack of proper “going out” skills.

We’re too young to only be doing this once a month.

Not that we’re about to get all sappy and nostalgic over 22 months, but now we can feel better about telling everyone he’s “almost two” rather than saying “21 months” and watching people scratch their heads to quickly do the simple math only to figure out he is, actually, almost two.

Granted he looks like a bit of a giant compared to most kids his age, I still can’t seem to accurately guess the age of any infant, toddler, child, whatever, under the age of 14, and even that is a stretch. I like to think that I have improved at this “profiling” a little bit, but it has always been a struggle.

It doesn’t help that you can’t ask a kid how old they are, either. Well you can, but you can’t trust them, just like no one should trust Jonah when he is asked his age and replies: “Yellow.”

And to make matters worse, for some reason – since Jonah learned how to say this word – anyone that doesn’t have facial hair or boobs or is under 5′ 3″ is a “baby.” As the present stay-at-home-person Megan has run into this a lot, and told me many stories of how our little toddler has pissed off 3 or 4 or 8-year-olds by calling them “baby.” But don’t they deserve to be called that if they can’t take smack-talk from my 22-month-old son?

Not that Jonah is trying to be mean, or sees anything wrong by it. He loves other kids, all kids. Babies, teens, whoever (unless they try to swipe one of his Elmo toys). And maybe this is just something leftover from our overuse of the word for the first year of his life. But it makes for some grumpy kids and weirded-out parents.

Until Raffi shows up.

Now like all new “kids” albums we end up with, I always say “oh hey, this isn’t that bad.”  And since I have a slightly vague recollection of this childhood “favorite” I was optimistic.  But when I have “Oats And Beans And Barley” in my head at work during a client meeting I know that CD has got to go.

But he loves it.

So I try to find alternatives.  Backup favorites in the past include select Gnarls Barkley tracks  and anything by Feist.  Jonah will occasionally make my day and request a Jetsetter (my pseudo-band) song and we’ll listen – me, pretending I’m “gonna make it one day” and him, pretending to like it.

So we try real instruments.  I get out his slightly unused xylophone from his first birthday.  Nothing.  Our sweet Casio keyboard?  A little response.  The guitar makes an appearance and it is something to climb/chew on.  And his teeny tiny mallet for his “toy” drum is a LETHAL WEAPON.

So it’s back to Raffi for the time being.  And surprisingly he’s picking up on words (and notes, or at least some sort of change in pitch).  Which is both amazing and slightly painful.  But I’ll take it.

Now it used to be that a short board book was both a delicious snack and the perfect length for my child with the attention span of, say, the length of this paragraph.

But now not only will he sit still the entire time, he’s picky.  One Morning In Maine? No problem.   Roget’s Thesaurus? Sure.  The Giving Tree? Yes. No. Maybe. What?

So reading Elmo one night is the Greatest Thing In The World but the next he’ll scream until I set it on fire and throw it out the window.  We have found however, over the past week, that there is one book he will never refuse, and it is simply called: Classic Fairy Tales.

At first it was cute.  We’d get out of the tub and he’d point through the wall to his book and say “fairy tales???” and wait for our response.   And so it began.  We’d try Goldilocks or The Frog Prince and he wouldn’t blink until I closed the book. Every night we’d open up the book and read a very very very long version of all the old school fairy tales I’d grown up hearing/reading/seeing.  But maybe it is my memory, or this “classic” edition, but these stories seem different.  Creepy different.

Yesterday’s Hansel and Gretel was pretty much the last straw.  I had endured the Three Little Pigs making an ass out of the Big Bad Wolf, and then boiling him into a stew.  I had hurried through Snow White being poisoned THREE TIMES (stupid stupid stupid Snow White) only to move on to the Big Bad Wolf (again?!) eating a grandma and her Little Red granddaughter (and then watch the wolf get served AGAIN).  But I wasn’t prepared to read how a step-mother convinced her husband to leave their children in the forest, who stumble upon a crack-house of candy and are abducted by a the psychotic owner who tries to eat them, only to get tossed into the oven herself.  Nope, didn’t see that one coming.

So my 21-month-old learned the big fact of life: kids have it rough, but if you stay alive long enough, your enemies will die a horrible, painful, unnecessarily graphic death.  Karma? Maybe. But needless to say we’re off the ‘tales for a while.

“PIZZA!”

“Jonah?”

“PIZZA!”

“Are you all done?”

“PIZZA!”

Jonah, this is The Interwebs.
Interwebs, Jonah.

You two good? Okay. Good.

J was born on August 2nd, 2005, not quite nine months after conception. We opted out of the ultrasounds and decided a “surprise” gender would be swell. Swell. Many pregger nights were spent dwelling on what to name him/her. Anything in the top 100 for the past five years was out, so that left us with some sweet options. Like Mable. Or Eugene. (sorry Mables and Eugenes). Or Murphy. (not sorry)

We kept coming back to this website like dope fiends, at first because of all the pretty colors, then because we realized it was a pretty nifty contraption. We even set up an online poll (omg!) for friends and family to vote on our top five favorite names. Thinking back now I can’t remember all ten names, just the top boy and girl names.

Lydia, or Elliott.

So after many a hot summer night, I wake up to a moist bed (not pee), a girlfriend in contractions, and baby on the way. And a cool eight hours later and he (He!) is out.

And he doesn’t look like a Elliott. Or Lydia.

So the little guy didn’t have a name. This has to be the strangest thing I have ever experienced in my life. The birth, very cool, not too weird. The pregnancy, a little weirder, a little cooler. But sitting in a hospital room looking at the tiny human being you created and not knowing what to name him, a name that he will be forced to live with, made fun of, and identify as until he’s 12 and disowns us…definitely strange.

But it’s all good because the family is visiting, and the nurse comes every hour to poke Megan, or the nameless child, and it’s in the back of our head as something we should take care of. My mother calls to suggest names, and eventually brings in a few more baby books. And everyone is waiting. And we’re not sure if Colby sounds too country club or if Holden is too “hey I’ve read Catcher In The Rye too!” but nothing is fitting. There are no worthy family names to pass on (sorry Douglas and Richards, not our baby) and everyone’s suggestions suck. “No I’m not naming him Aiden or Evan or Jacob.”

And then we remember a quiet, unassuming name that Megan I vetoed during the first trimester.

“How about Jonah?”
“Jonah?”
“Yeah, he looks like a Jonah.”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t we think of this name, like, 6 months ago, or was that Jonas?”
“I vetoed Jonas, it was Jonah, and you didn’t like it then.”
“Oh.”

And thats it. Little did I know of the implications in naming my child after a character from some obscure book called The Bible. But it stuck. We had never met a Jonah at the time, and to this day have only seen one, and he wasn’t nearly as cool as ours. Ours is better. Way better.

But the thing is, I watch him like a hawk. A hawk with allergies and some serious hand-washing OCD. I’m at the sink for less than 10 seconds and *bump*. He doesn’t cry the majority of the time, which is becoming more troubling than if he actually did start wailing. Since he just had a doctor check-up this past week and everything looks good, I’m not going to worry. Or at least not going to obsess over it. Or sneak into his room and examine the contour of his skull. And wake up and do it again every 3 hours.

It’s stuff like this that make Dads look like idiots, and for the most part we’re not. But it doesn’t help.