It's 9:45AM on Monday, November 7, 2011. Today is Tina's first day back at work, and my first daddy daycare duty day. I have been looking forward to this for, let's be honest, about fifteen years, as my blog description points out. And less than three hours into my first official day, I have three scraped knuckles, a mess to clean up in the bathroom, a spilled cup of coffee in the back yard, and I've been laughing at myself for the past half hour. Sometimes, it's either that or cry, and laughter is so much more fun.
Let me start from the beginning. Which today is about 3:30 or so. Okay, fine, I may as well set the whole stage. Let's start last night as I finished up my daily
NaNoWriMo writing. Everyone else had already gone to bed, as they had to get up for school in the morning, and I had decided not to write past midnight. I didn't quite reach my 1,667 words for the day, but I did fairly well. I dragged myself to bed and drifted off to sleep.
Tina has been doing just about all the nighttime tending to Esme for the past six and a half weeks. Sure, I'd wake up and know things were going on, but Tina pointed out that she had to be up anyway to feed her, so I (perhaps too readily, I'll admit) accepted that -- with the caveat that once Tina went back to work that she would take care of feeding Esme, but would wake me up for anything else that might need to happen so she could maximize her sleep. In the wee hours of the morning I became aware that my services might be needed. Sure enough, Esme was done eating, but still feeling a little fussy. And no wonder -- she has her first stuffy head. (No fever, but a little cough, some sneezing, and a head in varying states of cloggedness. Which can become a problem when she wants her pacifier and can't really breath through her nose.) So I, well 'woke up' is the wrong phrasing, but suffice it to say that I was playing the hokey-pokey with the nuk, and trying to position Esme for optimum drainage. She likes to nuzzle in to people when she sleeps, and I kept moving back, bit by bit, to be able to still tend to the nuk. (For those of you unfamiliar, nuk is a brand name of pacifier. I don't want to lose anyone by using overly specific terminology.) By the time she had calmed down and was breathing somewhat smoothly through her nose, I had my back to the edge of the bed, my pillow was wedged up behind me (half off the bed) to keep it out of her way, and one of my arms was going to sleep, but so was Esme. I decided to let them both sleep.
I stayed like that throughout the rest of the night, only moving once Tina was already up and out of bed. As I moved her over to the center of the bed and reclaimed some real estate for myself, Esme mumbled something about losing her nice warm spot on the bed before drifting off to sleep again. I considered trying to go back to sleep, but with the dryer running in the basement (directly below my bed), the shower going (on the other side of my bedroom wall), and two people getting ready for school with accompanying conversation, hair dryers, and whatnot, I decided to watch Esme sleep. After a while, I knew Tina would need to feed Esme before leaving, so I got up and, as if on cue, Esme started waking up also. By the time Esme was more fully awake than me (how does she do that without coffee?), and started to ask for some breakfast, Tina was ready. Soon after that I kissed my beautiful wife goodbye, and she headed off to work.
Esme was seated next to me on the couch, looking like she was going to drift right back off to sleep. I thought that would give me a perfect opportunity to catch back up on my writing and picked up my computer. Esme had other ideas. Instead of the sleepy, mildly congested girl who had been sitting next to me moments earlier, I had a much more wide awake girl who was starting to work some of the congestion out of her. Much of the next hour was spent trying to calm her and help her breathe more freely. We were again alternating for a while between breathing and pacifying, which, I'm here to tell you, is not a fun game for either participant. When I finally did get her calmed down again, I grabbed my cup of coffee to head out to the garage to organize a couple of things that I was going to need later in the day. While I was out there (not more than two minutes), I heard Esme crying in the monitor. I went to set down my coffee, missed the picnic table and watched it tumble to the ground. (I may have muttered an expletive at that point.)
Now Esme has a tendency to work up to crying silently, then kick in the volume late in the program. So by the time I made it across the lawn to the door, it sounded like she was moving beyond crying and trying to see if she could build to a full wail. I sped up, but in pushing the door open, I scraped the back of three of my knuckles against the door frame rather forcefully. (I am very likely to have done more than
muttered an expletive at that point.) As I reached Esme, I could see that her nuk was just out of her reach, so I offered it back to her. She immediately took it and calmed down, much to my relief. Then I looked at my hand.
"Oh, that was worse than I thought,"I thought, and immediately headed to the bathroom. Now Tina and I have different concepts of how things should be organized. I tend to value function, while she values form. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but when I opened the medicine cabinet to reach for the shelf where the band-aids, first aid ointment, and liquid bandages were all crowded together, I found a very neatly organized array of deodorant, cleanser, and hair products. Oh right, I remembered, Tina reorganized this a while back. (Momentary congratulations to self for not having need of a band-aid in quite some time.) Looking back at my hand, I decided rinsing it off would be a good start. As the water hit the backs of my knuckles, I heard a plaintive cry off in the distance. Having done so much writing recently, I almost expected it to be a scene in which I come to realize that I am the one crying out due to the sting of the water on my fingers. But no, it was really a cry, and it was not me. For the next five or ten minutes, I did the best one man Three Stooges impersonation of my life. Rinsing off the scrapes made them bleed more, so when I would go out to give Esme her nuk back, I would have to hurry to be able to get back to the sink before dripping started. After rinsing again, I started looking around for the band-aids. I would get through one or two drawers, cabinets, boxes within cabinets, etc., before Esme would start crying again. Back to the sink, back to the nuk, back to the sink, back to the search. As the bathroom came to resemble the aftermath of a tornado at the Johnson & Johnson factory, I did locate the band-aids, and it only took me three more nuk trips before I had my fingers covered. I never did find the first aid ointment.
After tending to the wounded, and sitting with Esme to help her go back to sleep, I retraced my steps to try to clean up my messes. When that was finally finished, I could finally sit down to laugh at myself and start to write again. But as you can tell, I did not get back to my NaNoWriMo novel, but instead decided to update my blog.
Perspective is a powerful thing. I came into this knowing that I have a solid history in childcare, I have been a nanny for a newborn, I am confident and in control and thrilled to be here. Yet in the first two official hours as a stay-at-home dad, I have managed to mangle my hand, spill my coffee, destroy the bathroom, and trip over at least two different cats, all while keeping my daughter crying.
(Whaddya mean 'what's my superhero powers'? This IS me as a superhero.)
Esme seemed to take that as an opportunity to assert herself.
My family has a Christmas tradition that goes back as long as I can remember. We always open at least one present early. Sometimes, that has been just a few days before Christmas, other times it has been several weeks ahead of time. This occurred to me as I stood in the check out line at Whole Foods, looking at a display of what appeared to be life-sized penguins made by Melissa & Doug (a great toy company, if you're looking for real wooden toys or stuffed animal penguins). I tried to pass on the penguin, but my eyes kept straying back over to them as I got closer to the front of the line. When it was finally my turn, I grabbed the penguin and added it to my purchases. Add odd shopping list, to be sure: beer, cat food, penguin.
But for me, the real excitement came the following morning. We waited until the Michigan/Ohio State game was underway here in town, then headed out to one of our favorite breakfast places. Angelo's has been an Ann Arbor institution since the 1950's, and never fails to satisfy. We had a trio of Benedict's: Eggs Benedict for Tina, Lox Benedict for Emma, and Eggs Florentine for Wade. 
But in any case, 50,272 words later, I'm done with the writing of The Rapscallions, and I finished it with a little over twelve hours to go. Hopefully, I'll have a Kindle/Nook/iBook book for you to buy sometime soon. In the meantime, enjoy the weekend reading material -- I plan to catch up a bit!
Our friend, Dave, was the host at the time, and opened the door for us to make my trip in with the stroller much easier. He also motioned us to be a little quiet, as there was a television interview going on. Renee, the co-owner, was being interviewed by Detroit's channel 4 news about their upcoming expansion to India. (Yes, you heard that right. Our locally produced beer, with locally sourced food, is opening a branch in Bangalor, India. I gathered from the interview that the only real change to anything on the menu will be changing the name of their flagship IPA from Sacred Cow -- not likely to be a popular name for a beer in India -- to Raging Elephant.) As I sat and had a beer and a bowl of soup and wrote 1500 words on my NaNoWriMo novel, Esme slept. In fact, she slept just about the entire time she was in the carrier on my chest. (And I found out later that I made the six o'clock news: they filmed my beer being poured, carried, and delivered to me, and apparently cut the shot as I was picking it up and taking a sip. No word on whether Esme was visible in the shot. And we don't have TV and they didn't post the video on their website, so, as far as I know, I can't go back and check.)
On Thursday morning, after our mid-morning feeding, we headed out to Trader Joe's to pick up a few groceries. (For those of you who live where there is no Trader Joe's, I'm sorry.) I was worried a little about Esme's reaction to Meijer on Monday, so I was prepared to zip out of there with the bare necessities, if necessary, but, like her parents, Esme had no trouble with TJ's. As we went in, there was another dad with his two or three year old daughter who was not happy about going shopping, and made it very clear to anyone within a five hundred yard radius that she really, REALLY didn't want to sit in the little chair in the cart. I tried to get away from them quickly so Esme wouldn't get upset, but she didn't seem to mind the noise -- and I think she might have enjoyed the attention each aisle as we would pass them, or they us, and the little girl would say, with greater happiness each time, "Baby!" Nice to know Esme's a good influence on other kids. May it always be so.
We were also approached by a TJ's employee who confided in me that she was pregnant and so had to talk to just about every person with a baby who came into the store. And by a retired teacher who told me that "all children are gifted until they're eight." When I told her I was a fourth grade teacher (I have a few 8 year olds at the beginning of the year, but mostly my students have been 9 and 10), she simply said, "Then you know what I mean," and walked off. No, ma'am, I'm not sure that I do, but thanks for agreeing that my baby is gifted. (I still believe all children are gifted, though I don't necessarily appreciate all gifts, and I have found myself wishing I could re-gift some of them at times.)
This coming week we're looking forward to our two month doctor's appointment on Tuesday, a family visit on Thursday (and we're going to leave the Thanksgiving cooking to the fabulous restaurant where Tina and I were engaged two-and-a-half years ago, The Quarter Bistro), and picking up Esme's first Christmas tree on Friday. Plus, added bonus, Tina has the whole week off! It's going to be family week at the Davis'.
If you want to see more of what we did in North Carolina, see What's Up Doc? Mostly it was visiting with family, eating well, reading, napping, and relaxing. (And yes, napping and relaxing are two separate categories. I would think that should go without saying.) I will share one family tradition that my mom started with her grandchildren. She found an old Chinese Medicine cabinet and has each of the infants pose in it. Here, then, is the fourth grandchild, Esme, doing her best to fit inside the thing.
Towards the end of the day, north of Columbus, we were ready to get back home and hoping against hope that Esme would sleep for the duration of the trip. Neither of us believed in that possibility, as her last feeding had been in southern Ohio -- if she made it all the way home, it would be well over four hours between feedings, and like I mentioned earlier, we'd never seen that before. Amazingly, she did make it literally all the way until we turned onto our street before she started crying -- and we probably would have made it all the way home if I hadn't stopped for gas (but driving for over 30 miles with the low fuel light on when we were so close to home didn't seem like the best plan -- I was having flashbacks to a family trip I'd been on as a child when we ran out of gas within sight of our exit from the interstate after a 12 hour drive). 
Super deluxe bonus: when we got home, there was a frost forecast, so I was able to head out to the garden and harvest a bounty. In late October in Michigan I harvested carrots, two kinds of tomatoes, two kinds of very spicy peppers, arugula, kale, mustard greens, green onions, and a pumpkin (but you'll see that in a later post...).
