Why wait? Place your order today³!

¹Super Orange’s mom is none other than Jody “Sunshine Soul” Pratt. He was born in the late 1990s in the Connecticut hills.
²We reserve the right to substitute all My Little Ponies requests, as they are lame and I refuse to draw them. Plus, being ungulates, they can’t really high-five. Though, technically, most ‘80s cartoon characters can’t either since the ”five” in high-five connotes having five fingers, but it’s my FREE BONUS offer and I’ll make the rules around here, missie!
³And by today, I mean whenever you read this post rather than the actual date of the timestamp. I’m not saying you should put it off forever, but I don’t want to be too pushy.

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It really took shape one night as the family sat in the living room, playing toys and reading from Hazel’s many books. Our daughter wandered over to the surround system’s bass module and started forcefully slamming it against the wall. Hazel is sort of a Bamm-Bamm like toddler: if something can be lifted overhead or knocked over, she’ll do it with surprising ease and violent grace. Immediately, Megan and I sprung into Responsible Parent mode and firmly yet warmly told Hazel: “Hazel, no, don’t do that.” She left the hunk of electronics for about 15 seconds before returning, banging it once more against our living room sheet rock. Again we told her “No.” and again she stopped, but she didn’t let go of the bass module. Instead, she turned slowly to face us, a devilish grin splitting her chubby face, and shouted, “No!” Hazel’s voice currently sounds like that of a frog who smokes too much. She repeated “No!” with the same mischievous smirk then turned back to her task of wrecking both bass module and wall. Megan and I simply had to laugh since she was so darn cute. But our Inner Parent soon gained control and pulled Hazel from her destructive aims.

Since that night, Hazel will wander over to the bass module (or the kitchen garbage can or the bowl of cat food or the back of the toilet) and just place one finger upon the taboo object, turn to us and yell “No!” in impish delight. This proves that

1. she knows she isn’t suppose to touch these things;
2. she understands what the word “no” means; and
3. she thinks it’s really funny to push Mom and Dad’s buttons.

When not flagrantly screwing with us, Hazel will just walk around chanting “No, no, no” like some kind of Big Brother mantra. She still listens when we deter her from certains behaviors, but her parroting is becoming less macaw and more mocking bird.

We’ve tried to catch her doing these things for the pure comedic value, but as soon as the video camera comes out, Hazel ceases all activity and just tries to manhandle the camera lens as much as possible. After a few of these “When Animals Attack” footage sessions, we just gave up. But, if you can imagine the nicotine toad voice, you can use the bully sidekick from A Christmas Story as your visual representation. I fully expect Hazel’s first sentence to be, “Say ‘Uncle,’ yous guys!”

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1. I had an off-site client meeting on Friday that went very well despite of (or perhaps owing to) the inclusion of the phrase (not by me), “I wouldn’t piss in his mouth if his teeth were on fire!”
2. Megan finally convinced Hazel that occasionally wearing a plastic bucket on her head is normal behavior.
3. Saturday was our fifth wedding anniversary!

Although being a dad is awesome, a weekend with just Megan was very overdue. Not only did we have the opportunity to take romantic walks around Jordan Pond followed by an equally romantic luncheon out of doors, but we were able to swear as much as we wanted. In truth, neither Megan nor I cuss all that much beyond the occasional “hell” here or “damn” there, but with Hazel safely at my in-laws, we were able to let the expletives fly. I suppose it’s akin to when you’re on a road trip and you pass one too many rest areas while drinking one too many Snapples. After holding it in for so long, once you finally reach a bathroom (or well-concealed roadside knoll), your bladder opens up and you pee so much you think you’ll never stop and will have to build a boat while whizzing so as to stay above the rising tide. The whole drive down east, Megan and I suffered from the silliest form that Turrets can take.

“Um, what road am I looking for? FART, ASS, FART, CRAP!”
“We keep going straight until…DOUCHE, CRAP, HELL, BITCH-WICH…we get to Route 233.”
“VAGINA! Thanks, dear.”

Megan had found us a killer campsite right near Acadia National Park. We ironically called ahead and reserved the Walk-In lot, which the lady in the camp office told us is their most popular. And she didn’t lie; our site was way off at one end of the campground, away from everybody (by everybody I mean the other six groups of people camping this early in the season), nestled on the edge of a bluff overlooking Somes Sound. We instantly decided to book that place every year from here on out.

After an evening spent in downtown Bar Harbor carousing the shops, eating lobster, and playing mini-golf (I was on fire on the minuscule links, scoring a 38 on an 18-hole par 42), we headed back to our camp site for some marshmallow toasting. Unfortunately, I neglected to buy any firewood during the drive up, so needed to scrounge up some by electric lantern light. Unfortunately, our lantern’s batteries were stone dead and charging by car would take fifteen-hours, so I would have to hunt around by the light of our small emergency flashlight. Unfortunately, our small emergency flashlight was sort of missing in the infinite blackness of night, so I only had the waxing gibbous moon to light my stumbling way.

Luckily, Megan was able to find both the flashlight and fresh batteries for it, so we wound up having a pretty decent fire for being woefully unprepared. If there is a clearer analogy for our marriage in this anecdote, I surely can’t spot one. When life is at its darkest for me, unnavigable to my shortsighted gloom, Megan time and again is able to shine a bright light for me, helping me along in our joint efforts. She’s totally the brains of our operation.

While being a child-free couple for a weekend was fun, we both were glad to get back to life with Hazel. And she got so big while we were away, she mows the lawn now!

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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)!

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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.

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Syllabically speaking, Eight-Eight scans well but don’t count on any reliable amount of iambic pentameter this go around.  But when you write for free, what more do you suspect?

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