Excuse me, Hazel?

How old are you today?

Darn tootin’!

I realize that I have been remiss in reporting funny Hazel anecdotes, illustrated by unbelievably cute photos of our little girl. Just so you know, this post won’t really have much to say about Hazel, but with her First Birthday coming up in just two weeks(!), she’ll have much attention lavished upon her. For now, let’s focus on two occurrences that happened this week to pull Ragozzine optimism into a pin-wheeling nosedive.

First off, let’s turn the clock back a few nights. Hazel was slumbering peacefully in her crib, affording Megan and I the chance to sit back and watch some good old fashion network television. With upwards of four static-snowed channels provided FOR FREE by our rabbit ears antennae, a veritable world of entertainment waited for us in our living room. One of us was already sitting on the right-side of the futon when the other came in and sat down on the left-side of the futon, and with a KER-THUMP! the left-side of the futon frame collapsed to the ground, leaving us askew and laughing. That futon has been through a lot, including holding up the heft of O³Paul (One Ounce Overweight) on several occasions with nary a crack nor a sag. But its time has obviously come, so we resolved ourselves to buying a new couch with our well-timed economic stimulus check.

We settled on a sofa from IKEA’s Ektorp series. Not only will this match our Ektorp loveseat, but now we have twice the reasons to randomly bark out “Ektorp!” in a nigh passable German accent. Ektorp! And yes, we realize that IKEA is a Swedish company. But just like Paul, Ektorp has a distinct German connotation to it. However, unlike Paul, our soon-to-arrive Ektorp sofa won’t set off any “too much weight” elevator alarms.

I suppose now would be the best time to wish Paul a happy birthday. We hope to be making fat jokes about you for decades to come, so here’s to your long and joyous life!

The second ill-fated happenstance bubbled to the surface yesterday morning. In addition to May flowers, April showers brought us another flooded basement. We just got too much precipitation in too short a time earlier this week and the excessive water found its way inside again. Since we already have everything of value off the floor following the last flooding episode, nothing of great importance was lost except for some tag sale stuff, a few more cardboard boxes left over from our move, and all of our surplus stock of toilet paper. If you know me, you know that the latter actually may impact us fairly hard, but I’m trying to be positive.

After 5 hours of work with our utility pump and wet/dry vac, the tides seemed to have turned, so Megan and I went downtown for some lunch (Hazel having been magically whisked away to Grammie house). When we returned to the basement after about an hour or so, all the water had come back. Clearly our methods were not keeping up with the rate of ingress. Lucky for us, though, a new Lowe’s store opened up just 4 minutes from home and were offering 10% off on all purchases to celebrate their opening. So we were able to buy a larger, better pump with an electronic on/off sensor along with a few other things necessary to get our affairs in order. After just three more hours of work, the pump could now keep up with the water’s continual entry and we could take the rest of the night off from mopping and such.

All told, I wound up moving about 300 gallons of water by bucket and vacuum container up our bulkhead steps. In a moment of desperation, we also tried moving the many bags of tube sand off the floor drain (covered over by me based on a theory that it is not so much a drain as a forever-on faucet for groundwater) to see if it would do what it was designed to do. After hoisting 540 lbs of sand up the stairs to the backyard, we discovered that the drain is definitely where the water comes in; when I lifted up the last bag, water began gushing in like a leak in a submarine. So back down came 420 lbs worth of tube sand (the two last bags were just too many) and we picked up where we left off with water removal. If we can agree that one gallon of water weighs about 8 lbs, then I moved about 3400 lbs worth of water and sand yesterday up and/or down a half dozen cellar stairs. That’s close to 1-3/4 tons of stuff that I personally relocated, which ain’t half bad for a guy who hasn’t been to a gym in five years!

I’m happy to report that no new water has gotten inside, so things are looking up once more. In closing, I think this week can be most adequately summarized thusly: EKTORP!

In lieu of paragraphical content and in honor of Hazel crossing the ten-month threshold, here’re some quick Hazel stats:

• Age: ten months, two days
• Height: 29 inches or so
• Weight: 20-ish lbs
• No. of Teeth: six visibly through the gums, two more nearly there
• Ability to Crawl: attained and utilized mercilessly to exploit her parents’ sleep debt
• Ability to Walk: reliable fallback but mostly overlooked in favor to lightning crawling
• Verbals: bah-bah (bottle, food, desire), dat (what’s that?), up (lift me higher), mom (Mom), da-da (Dad, any man in sight)
• Nonverbals: waving hello and goodbye, pointing at what she wants, smiling with a scrunched up nose to get what she shouldn’t have, tilting head to side just to get adults to dumbly do the same
• Likes: Mom, Grammie, Cats, Light fixtures, Light switches, Toys, Books, Cords/wiring, Technology, Songs/singing, bath time, opening doors, Food (hers), Food (yours), Elmo, Dogs, Abby Cadabby, Car rides, Dad
• Dislikes: Bananas, Blowing her nose, Getting her nails cut, Loud noises, Naptime interruptions, Toy removal as discipline, Repeating a spontaneous act of cuteness for posterity, Dad

Hazel’s latest photo session, commemorating her eighth month of life on the outside, did not go over swimmingly. Lately, she has started whining a bit should we take away something she wants; in this case, she really wanted to chew on Megan’s digital SLR and that mean mommy simply wouldn’t give in. Instead, Megan gave our little technophile her cell phone to gaze upon in wonder. And as the warm, glowing, warming glow of the phone’s backlit screen soothed the savage tot, Megan started snapping pics once more.

Of course, you cannot expect a baby with such a treat to just stare at it and simply noodle some buttons. At least, not for long. What started as mere nibbling soon ballooned to outright gnawing. Despite having enough teething rings to hold the toothiest crocodile at bay, Hazel decided at that moment to cut her choppers on Megan’s Nokia. The improvement in her mood could not be resisted and Megan just kept taking pictures. All in all, the photo shoot was rescued from a threatening tantrum and we can have a smiling baby in the Month Eight space of our First Year frame. Oh, and no teeth came out, even after several minutes of mobile munching.

After work, I called Megan to see if she needed me to stop and pick up anything on my way home. Her phone went right to voicemail. Thinking that odd, I called the house phone (which is actually Megan’s office number so I never use it lest I fall into the company of supply houses and sales reps). Megan answers and explains that her phone has stopped working. She recounts for me the tale I just told you – albeit much more succinctly and linearly – and tells me that she’ll be getting a new cell phone the following day. Luckily, that day came and her phone had “dried out” enough to function again to an acceptable degree. No new Moto for Meggo.

Should I ever land my dream job in international espionage, I’ll eschew the fancy technology for a good, old-fashioned baby. Need that microfilm destroyed? Just give it to your government issued baby and it will be a drooly memory in no time. Still need to dispose of those stolen top secret blueprints to the latest Doomsday Machine and enemy agents are hot on your trail? Just hand them over to your diapered sidekick and not even Mike Wazowski will be able to reassemble the torn-up mishmash. Mark my words, in the next James Bond flick, 007 will be sporting a BabyBjörn carrier and crashing Lamborghinis through plate glass windows all in search of a restroom that has a diaper changing station.

The first time my parents came up to see Hazel, she was just one-week-old and was stuck in the hospital with a bad case of jaundice. The second time my parents came up to see Hazel, she was seven-weeks-old and back in the hospital for hernia surgery. The third time my parents ventured north to see Hazel, it was this weekend and the state of Maine got socked with a pretty ample snow storm. The white stuff is still falling today and is collected on the ground in one- or three-foot drifts. In short, grandparents should have it easier.

Luckily, with being snowed in all yesterday, Hazel enjoyed tons of Gramma and Papa time. They may have said they were coming up for my and Megan’s birthdays, but once my 29 candles were blown out, I may as well have been a houseplant. This of course is fine by me, me being Dad John. It may have taken a little punching down upon my inner Young John to step aside here, but my birthday gift copy of Emmett Otter’s Jug-band Christmas certainly helped sooth the whiny beast. If you’ve never seen this holiday classic, think “The Gift of the Magi” meets The Wind in the Willows. I dare say that the movie is worth the flight to Maine needed to get oneself to my living room for the next DVD viewing. I’ll even supply the popcorn.

Today Hazel turns six-months-old. It’s hard to believe that just a few months ago, she was nothing more than a grainy ultrasound blip that occasionally kicked the inside of Megan’s belly. To say that our lives have been different this past half year would be a bit of an understatement.

But at the same time, things have been fairly consistent for us. Megan can still crack me up like nobody else. I still sing every day, except now I have a fairly captive audience. Oddly, I watch less cartoons than I did before becoming a dad, but that’s mostly a time management issue. When I look back at the years and years I’ve been an adult, it boggles me how much time I wasted. This is not to say that I’m mister efficiency now, but I do have a higher sense of urgency when free time crops up. To think of all the times Non-dad John could have been doing laundry – what the hell did I do all day before Hazel showed up?

The past few weeks especially have witnessed a transformation in Hazel’s personality. She laughs all the time now. She has favorite toys. She’s really jumped the gap from mere baby to little person (there is a difference). Sure we haven’t had a full night’s sleep in months and we don’t really get to go to concerts or movies or anything anymore. So far, parenting beats the hell out of six months in a leaky boat. No contest!