Yesterday, when I got home from work, Megan and Hazel were hanging out front in the shaded (as opposed to the shady) part of the yard. I pedaled up, making a damn dashing entrance even with my dorky bike helmet perched atop my head like an oversized conch shell. After a few minutes of debriefing on our days, Megan ran inside to finish up some stuff, leaving Hazel and I outside to occupy ourselves with Hazel’s two favorite outdoor activities: digging up mulch from our various flower beds and picking up rocks from our gravel driveway. The common thread between the two actions is that Hazel stalwartly clutches her toy shovel regardless of her need to shovel anything in particular. It’s her security blanket when playing in the yard.

So as dinnertime approached, I sat on our side steps watching Hazel choosing just the right stone to lift up from its gravelly brethren. With spade in hand, Hazel found her geologic target and stooped down to grab it. Then, and I swear you could easily track the thought processes going on in her developing mind, she looked from the rock to her shovel slowly and, with tiny tongue protruding askance in determined concentration, took the rock and tried to place it in her shovel. Unfortunately, the trowel was upside-down and rather than a welcoming scoop, her rock tottered on a standoffish convex plain. Smartly realizing that this would not do, she saved the stone from its plummet and returned it to her wee fist.

Still driven by the desire to put the rock in the shovel, Hazel then negated her earlier clever analysis of the situation by keeping the spade’s orientation constant and simply taking the rock and pressing it firmly against the concave side underneath. And as you would expect, gravity did its thing and the rock fell to earth, micro-pantomiming its take on how the dinosaurs went extinct. After assessing what had happened, Hazel merely bent back down and grabbed a different rock to see if that one would stay within the shovel’s scoop.

Clearly Hazel’s grasp of Newtonian physics is akin to my own understanding of how a car works. Beyond the fact that I realize that cars need fuel and an occasional change of oil, the whole happenstance of why my turning of a key brings a large machine to transporting life may as well be magic. And I bet that Hazel will understand gravity long before I’m able to rebuild a carburetor or whatever. But I would have been sad if Hazel had given up after just one failed attempt at sticking a stone to an upturned shovel’s blade. If she did, she would be accepting a reality that is indomitable and as dry as a slice of plain white toast in Death Valley. As we get older, much of the magic of life gets lost amongst paying bills and washing the dishes. Somewhere along the line, we start to accept that those rumblings in the sky are scientifically explainable and not a bunch of angels in a bowling tournament. I’m hoping that Hazel’s world remains saturated with the purest imagination she can muster for a very long time.

Take it away, Ben Vereen (starting around the three minute mark)!

Upon reflection on my weekend alone with Hazel, I think the key to success was keeping busy. I know that I get unduly cranky when I’m bored, so maintaining an environment of constantly shifting foci would surely stave off any whininess Hazel could muster (or at least keep her off-kilter enough for me to trick her into staying quiet). To start, I took Hazel on her first real walk down by Rockland Harbor. We’ve taken her down to the boardwalk of our coastal town many times before, but always within the confines of a stroller, five-point harness holding her in place. Given that Saturday morning was so cloudy, the place was pretty empty and I felt safe in letting her meander along at her own pace, wandering from one side of the boardwalk to the other, scooching down whenever she felt the urge to take a closer look. I suppose even when you’re only 30-inches tall, you still need to duck down for greater meticulous investigations.

The great thing about the boardwalk is that it leads to the Ocean Street Playground. This is our recreational area of choice since the larger one by the library is always full of young toughs delinquentin’ it up cuss-tastically. The overcast morning delivered to us an empty playground too, so we swung on the swings and slid down the slide without having to worry about pesky sharing. Eventually, another dad and kid duo did show up, which was fine as they were both amiable and Hazel is just more social than me. The father of the pair, a New Zealander by birth, was very gregarious and as we chatted, I surprisingly realized that our wives grew up together. In fact, they had been in touch by email ever since we moved back to Maine, but have been unable to meet up. Now, thanks to the Dads, their young Jack was able to meet our young Hazel. For a big place, Maine is pretty small most of the time.

Apart from other fun trips to the beach and such, I took the opportunity to interlace the weekend with loads of music. Sadly, the extent of most Mainers musical tastes hover around country music and classic rock. While both genres have something to offer, there is just a ton of music out there, more than I could ever hope to hear. Since I grew up in the pre-Internet world (more or less), I was limited to whatever the radio or my family played, i.e. Alternative Radio, Oldies, Bette Midler, and Celine Dion. I felt that I had to do a lot of catching up as a young adult and want it to be easier for Hazel. The Internet will help, but I should start now. So with my iPod on shuffle, she heard some weird stuff. I think she also heard most of the Super Mario World soundtrack as played by xoc.

So long as she dodges her generation’s equivalent of The New Kids on the Block, Britney Spears, or High School Musical, then I’ll be one proud papa.

Starting Friday, Megan is going away to her childhood summer camp with her childhood summer camp friends for a long weekend of reliving their childhood summer camp memories. I never went away to summer camp as a kid and I’ve always been secretly¹ jealous of Megan’s halcyon summer days spent bunking in a cabin by a lake with oodles of other young people, whiling away the weeks with swimming, arts-and-crafts, and beans for dinner every night. She totally deserves this time away from home and I am very happy that she is taking advantage of this opportunity.

Mixed with that happiness, however, is the nervous dread of being Hazel’s sole caregiver from Friday at 4 p.m. until Sunday afternoon. It’s just going to be me and Hazey for something like 47 hours —plenty of time for ol’ Dad to screw up. I mean, I’ve seen Mr. Mom, okay? I know that, the first second of the 169,200 total seconds Megan will be out of town, the vacuum cleaner is going to explode or Hazel will eat a non-food item and need her stomach pumped or a superheated geyser will erupt in the front garden, totally messing up our hydrangeas. Megan assures me I can handle it, so let’s hope her prediction is spot on.

On her way to the grocery store, she called to ask if I wanted anything special food-wise for the weekend. I told her not to worry, as it is surely time that Hazel learns the dangers of fast food. Have you ever watched that old Donald Duck cartoon where Huey, Dewey, and Louie buy their uncle a box of fine Cuban cigars for his birthday? Donald spies the boys strutting proudly from a cigar store downtown and jumps to the incorrect conclusion that his nephews are planning to smoke the cigars themselves. As punishment, he traps them in their tree house and sadistically makes the boys smoke cigar after cigar until the entire box is empty, thereby making them associate the social evil of smoking with immediate physiological endangerment and severe gastrointestinal distress. If that’s not good parenting, I don’t know what is.

Likewise, to help Hazel dodge the cholesterol-soaked bullet of a poor diet, I owe it to her to feed her nothing but McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and KFC² all weekend. To be fair, I suppose I’ll have to eat the stuff to. Maybe I can feign food poisoning to really drive the message home. If only we lived near a Sonic Burger; I hear that stuff turns even the hardiest constitutions into goose grease.

¹And by “secretly” I mean “loudly griped every time Pilgrim Lodge or other things pilgrim-y come up in conversation.”
²My more observant readers may note that I did not include Wendy’s in the fast food menu schmörgåsbord for this coming weekend. My reasons are twofold: 1) Wendy’s is slightly above really gross fast food in quality and is our quick road food of choice so any forced aversion pressed on Hazel now will just make family vacations in the future that much more challenging; and 2) the nearest Wendy’s is 28 miles away and high gas prices supersede well-crafted and scientifically sound fatherly life lessons.

Back in grade school, our class did a unit (haha) on sign language. We learned some basic words as well as the alphabet. I still remember how to sign my name—complete with the pinkie swoosh flourish—though have never been called upon to do so in the heat of any moment.

Apart from this instruction, the only sign language I was exposed to was at the end of each episode of “Reading Rainbow” when LeVar Burton said assuringly, “I’ll see you next time.” In fact, that phrase, along with “But you don’t have to take my word for it,” jump out of my conversation hopper quite often; the latter of which necessitates a robust dun-Dun-DUNT vocalization at the end.

Months ago, Megan started teaching Hazel baby sign language. I admit to being skeptical at first. Isn’t grunting while pointing at what she wants good enough? Will this stifle her speech development? How much of this will I have to learn too? Why is the baby sign language sign for “Daddy”¹ so dumb looking? Thankfully, I moved beyond my initial reactionary laziness because baby sign language works well and has truly helped Hazel express herself. Of course, being a baby, she doesn’t have much to express except basic emotions and biological needs.

The first sign we tackled was “More” and “All Done.” These are both super useful at mealtime, since Hazel can now let us know if she requires more food or if she, in the words of my Gram, has “had sufficient.” Previous to this, Hazel would kindly let us know that dinnertime was over by throwing any food within reach onto the kitchen floor. Soup Night was the worst.

“More”

One night this past week, Hazel had finished her meal and was wandering around the house while Megan and I ate ours. Lately, Hazel has become a post-dinner grazer, coming up to us and asking to try whatever we’re eating. It’s pretty darn cute, as I can only see the top one-fifth of Hazel’s head above the table edge when she goes begging at Megan. She comfortably uses the “More” sign when doing this, so Megan decided to introduce the “Please” sign, which is a small rub of your upper chest (I guess connoting that the request comes from the heart…or sternum). She showed Hazel how to do this twice and Hazel picked it up immediately. Whenever she wanted another small bite of our pasta dinner, she would walk over, look up lovingly, and sign, “More, please.” I swelled with pride before deflating before Hazel’s intelligence. If she is this smart now, what chance do I have of stopping her when she attempts to rule the world with a teenaged iron fist, proselytizing the masses to join her junta of angst and , like, you know, stuff.

¹Does that woman in all the baby sign language videos remind you of the slo-mo Saviors of the World Bill and Ted that (then) Current Day Slacker Bill and Ted see in the shining hall of the future toward the end of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? [NOTE: On Windows machines, the video plays in an endless loop.  Sorry Mac users.]

Megan and I had lots of misgivings before sending Hazel to daycare. Would we become strangers, ranking behind all those fun teachers? Would she learn all sorts of nasty behavior? Would she be permanently snot-ridden and coughing? The pessimistic litany went on and on, our cyclical conversations on the matter amounting to nothing more than philosophical tires spinning in the mud. In the end, we had to admit that Hazel needs to see other kids and have other adult authority figures without us around. Independent relationships are important, and we certainly don’t want to raise a high marking but socially inept home schooler. We won’t be able to clamber onto the school bus with her on the first day of kindergarten, so we may as well give her a social head start and give her over to daycare two days a week. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen?

Well the worst didn’t transpire, but one of our top concerns reared its mucousy head: by the end of week one at “school”, Hazel managed to contract Daycare Ick. Unlike the parasitic Ich that ruined many a fish tank in my life, Daycare Ick involves a lot more sticky shirtsleeves (both the infected child’s and any nearby adult in consoling distance). Daycare Ick symptoms can vary from a perennial runny nose to a nagging cough to what Hazel wound up with: Conjunctivitis. I can easily imagine all those other kids in her room, older kids by as much as a whole year, holding her down and taking turns rubbing their grubby fingers in her then brown and now pink eyes. Between that and her dripping nose and teething aches, Hazel is only ranking at most a 7.5 on the Funshine Bear Cheer-o-meter.

But just as a South Pacific island youth must kill a Great White Shark using nothing but half a coconut, I suppose that Daycare Ick is a necessary if not annoying right of passage. What would my youth have been without the classroom colds, the locker room awkwardness, or the sundry wedgies? Fortunately, none of my wedgies were atomic and my freshman year gym teacher let us shower with bathing suits on. But don’t ask about sophomore year, I really can’t afford to miss any work from the post-recount catatonia.

In celebratory honor of my completion of hundreds and hundreds of words worth of freelance lawn mower reviews, Megan’s new 17” MacBook Pro laptop finally being delivered, Hazel’s deft mastery of getting from the living room floor to the back of the futon using only guile and a well-placed footstool, and my possession of a soon-to-expire coupon, we went out for blunch this Sunday at Café Miranda. Blunch, of course, is a meal that is further down the road than brunch, but not quite all the way to lunch. The food was as excellent as it always is — my bacon and cheddar deep dish frittata stills haunts my taste buds’ dreams.

I am always terribly nervous going out to eat with Hazel for fear that we become Those People With the Screaming Nightmare Baby, but she has never been anything but perfectly well-behaved whenever we dine out. Still, I can’t shake the fear that she is just going to freak out one day and we have to run from the restaurant in shame, covering our heads from the onslaught of flung food from our fellow eatery patrons. And despite the surety of the two crotchety old people in the corner who just glowered at us the whole time, daring Hazel to act as badly as they pessimistically predicted she must, no major mishaps occurred. In fact, the worst thing that she did was continually request a sip of Megan’s Bloody Mary by way of repeatedly pointing at the large glass with the parsley poking from the top (and no, we didn’t give her any, though she did have two Burger King French fires this weekend that kind of shattered any illusions we had at not being bad parents).

After paying the check, Megan used the restroom and I prepared Hazel for leaving. Even though it is nearly April here and sunshine streamed through the front windows of the restaurant, a very cold wind continuously blew off the Atlantic, requiring that Hazel wear a few layers. I got her tiny zip-up hoodie on just fine, but her jacket gave me trouble. She just wouldn’t sit still and let me get her arms through the sleeves. As soon as I started attempting this feat, a rather vaudevillian version of “The Entertainer” came on the stereo. The feeling that I had now become that morning’s free show was impossible to shake.

Of course, I am overly self-conscious by nature, constantly assuming that people are meticulously monitoring my every move and action. Have you ever tried to walk normally when you are sure someone is watching you to see if you walk normally? Your legs and arms simply can’t get it together and you start walking like a mannequin with mismatched limbs come to life.

Or at least I do.