End of Silence

We’ve long speculated that our 20-month-old, aka The La, is an alien observer from another planet. She’s been known to make other babies cry by staring at them unflinchingly for inhuman amounts of time with no show of emotion on her face. She also seems to pick up behaviors (both desirable and undesirable, the latter mostly from The Boy) like a sponge, much more so than her older brother.

The Wife reports that yesterday The La woke up early and cranky from her nap. After attempting various methods to appease her, The Wife plunked her down in front of The Tube for some Blue’s Clues action (one hopes of the Steve instead of the Joe variety). The La watches for a few minutes and then notices the as-yet-unopened-and-unread local paper. She picks up the paper and gingerly removes it from it’s plastic bag. She then walks over to the trash can, paper in one hand and bag in the other, and deposits the bag in the trash. She returns to the couch with the paper, situates herself, and then proceeds to "read" the paper, something that she’s seen her mother do most mornings of her life. Scary.

We went to see Hidden Fortress last night at the Paramount as part of their annual Summer Film Series. It was good. I hadn’t ever seen it before and always enjoy seeing old films for the first time at this series. I’ve seen War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Magnificent Seven, Shane, High Noon, The Apartment, Witness for the Prosecution, Rear Window, and Vertigo in the past.

We got some friends to babysit the kids while we saw the movie and ended up getting them around 10pm. Of course, neither of them went to bed at their usual time of 8pm, so they were a little out of it when we arrived. They went to bed without too much incident, but LaLa has subsequently woken up three times tonight and been screaming and inconsolable. We can’t figure out what it is. She’s had allergies/a cold for the past several days, but no fever or anything. We’re contemplating an early morning doctor visit.

On top of that, it’s been raining like crazy the last week or so. We NEVER get this much rain in May and June. It’s great for the foliage, but it seems to be overwhelming my roof. For the second time in the past year, we’ve got a leak. Since I noticed it at 3am this morning dealing with LaLa, I haven’t had a chance to inspect it from the attic and it’ll be too slick on the roof to climb up there and investigate. Part of me hopes that a tree limb punched another hole in the roof (the cause of yet another roof leak several years ago). There’s also the rationalization that it’s just leaking due to the sheer volume of rain that we’ve had lately and that it won’t happen again anytime soon. On the other hand, our roofing guy noted that we were due for a new roof when he was here for the last repair. I don’t even want to think about that right now as The Wife’s car is on it’s last legs and we’re in a serious hunt for a replacement in the next few weeks.

Finally, I’ve got a lot to get done at work this month and three blocks of one or two hours of sleep is going to make that difficult.

Whee!

My brother-in-law spent Memorial Day weekend with us. We took him to Cooper’s on Monday. There’re a few pictures in the Moblog to commemorate the occasion. It was gut-bustingly good as usual. Later that night, The Wife and I went to see A Perfect Circle at the Erwin Center with a few friends. They were really good, although they didn’t deviate much from the two albums of material. I think they only neglected to play two songs off of Mer de Noms and everything off of The Thirteenth Step. Maynard took the opportunity to bash both Schwarzenegger and Bush along with Clear Channel.

I finally took advantage of one of Best Buy’s ridiculous two years – no interest sales and bought a home theater package. It’s a Yamaha receiver with Klipsch speakers. I’ve been delayed in hooking it up as The Wife took mounting surround speakers on the wall as an excuse to re-paint our den. We successfully completed that yesterday, so I should have everything hooked up this weekend. I can’t wait. While buying hardware to mount the speakers, we also got a ceiling fan for The La’s room. It’s supposed to be installed next week. Now all I have to do is get some drywall and seal over the opening for our house fan which we almost never use. It just sucks the A.C. from the house into the attic which is like a furnace this time of year. Anybody have any good dry-walling tips? This’ll be my first attempt on my own. It doesn’t seem all that difficult.

I finally got around to updating the pictures of the week with a few shots from a trip to Pease Park in mid-May.

After a couple months hiatus, it’s time for another installment of Baby Chaos, which I guess should really be called toddler chaos at this point.

The Boy had his last soccer game of the season on Saturday. He seems to have enjoyed it enough to play with the same team again in the fall. Even though we weren’t keeping score, I think they were undefeated. He’s shown a lot of improvement since starting in February. The coach decided to dye all of the kids hair green for the final game.

On a family note, we spent the weekend with the in-laws. The Boy had a soccer game on Saturday morning. He got into an altercation with one of the other players and had to be chastised by both the coaches and us. In all fairness, that kid was pushing. If they actually had refs, he would’ve at least gotten a yellow card.

While it was muggy and in the 80’s during the game, the rest of the weekend was unseasonably cold and very rainy; good for the lawn, but bad for easter egg hunts and antsy kids. We were treated to some Guero’s and Hoover’s along with some Amy’s and Krispy Kreme. I continue my donations to the gym with nothing to show for it except my ever-expanding middle. I spotted a former co-worker at Hoover’s and we both did a good job pretending that we didn’t see each other. The Wife almost ruined it by looking directly at him and smiling. I recognized him as soon as we walked in. He must’ve recognized us as we sat down at the table right next to his. I wonder if he’s still working at the same place.

Finally, on a less snide note, my paternal grandmother passed away on Saturday afternoon. I’m not looking for sympathy, so please don’t post any condolence comments, but this is the first death in my somewhat immediate family since I started blogging.

She was in her 90’s and has been having a variety of health problems for quite some time. My grandfather passed away in 1996 and I think, as with many widows/widowers of long marriages, she’s really just been waiting to follow him. I didn’t have a lot of contact with her because we lived in Texas and she remained in New York and wasn’t very fond of travelling. More recently, it’s been difficult to talk with her on the phone due to her poor hearing and the stroke that she suffered not long after my grandfather’s death. Still, I’ve always wished that we’d been closer and that I’d been able to ask her more about the past. It’s an old cliché that the elderly drone on about the past, boring everyone within earshot, but my grandparents never really did that. In fact, I wish they had done a lot more of it because now I’ll never have the opportunity to hear it. I think we all become more acutely aware of this sort of thing when we have kids of our own.

On my father’s side, I now have only one great aunt living in Midland and a great uncle who still lives in the village in England where my grandfather was born. My mother is actually scheduled to visit the aunt this weekend. I’m going to make a point of calling her while she’s there and try to get her to talk to me more about the past and see if we can make it a habit. My parents will also be in England for my cousin’s wedding over Memorial Day weekend. I wonder what the chances are of getting my great uncle to correspond via e-mail…

I wanted to make it to my grandmother’s funeral on Long Island, but it turns out that the ceremony is on the same day that the wife leaves for a vacation with some old college friends. It figures that the one week that I absolutely cannot leave town is the week that she dies. On top of that, I’ve had a sinus infection all this past week that I’ve been trying to treat without running to the doctor for antibiotics. I know from experience that having a sinus infection during landing isn’t the best idea.

I talked with my parents a couple of times over the course of the weekend and it sounds like they’ve unearthed a bunch of old photos, some of which my father hasn’t ever seen. I’m hoping my mother will bring them all with her the next time she visits so that I can get them scanned in and post some on the site.