Teacher's Pet

i think its every dad's primary goal, as a parent, to raise a kid that turns out like the Fonz.

not necessarily by playing out to the stereotypical italian greaser typecast... i'm talking about in terms of coolness, here.

my own daughter, as it were, is not the Fonz. let's get past the part where she's not a greasy, italian guy and focus on the fact that she's not nearly fulfilling her 'cool' quota at school.

she's a toddler now, and has been in the toddler classroom at her school for a few months now. however, as it turns out, the kid doesn't necessarily 'play well' with the other kids in her classroom. she prefers - get this - the company of the teachers instead.

that's right. the teachers.

so we raised a teacher's pet.

not necessarily the coolest thing we could've done as parents. not only is our daughter a teacher's pet, but she also seems to get beat up in school quite a bit. now, i realize that these scrapes and 'owies' are the result of other toddlers getting over-excited when she comes into the classroom in the morning, as they do like her and all; what bothers me is the fact that she doesn't clock one of these kids back when they give her an overly-aggressive bear hug.

yes, she's smaller than most of other diaper-clad hooligans in her room. that's fine. being small doesn't necessarily mean you need to be pushed around.

look at yoda - that guy rips up bad guys for a living. and i'm pretty sure yoda and my daughter are the same size.

...of course yoda has the force going for him. i suppose i should get my daughter's metaclorian count tested.

- brian

Snazzercisin'

what's up, players.

we're about three weeks into the summer, folks. three weeks have gone by and i've managed to accomplish little of what i had initially set out to do. the lesson planning for the upcoming 2009 - 2010 school year? yeah, not so much. the writing? a little, but not nearly as much as i'd prefer. the mundane side-projects - cleaning up my iTunes libraries, working on iMovies and slideshows for family, cataloging and organizing my vinyl record collection (i know, shut up) - here and there.

the problem in my inefficiency so far this summer stems from one, blatantly obvious source: my daughter.

chasing after this one year old time bomb takes up practically every, single, waking moment of my daily routine, and my consequent inability to get anything done, day in and day out, is driving me insane. nothing gets done with a kid in the house. feeding, changing, bathing, playing... and i though the wife was high maintenance.

on a plus side, folks, i have managed to somewhat land myself into a pseudo workout routine of sorts. for about 30 minutes a day, a few days a week, i bust my ass on the Nintendo Wii Fit, which, for those of you who can generally be found living under a rock on most days, is a videogame that utilizes a sensor-based board so that the user can exercise whilst playing videogames.

i know it sounds stupid, folks, but it works. at least it does for this guy, at any rate.

i should probably be doing it everyday - despite all of this exercisin', i think the remainder of the day where i'm loafing around my apartment playing super-dad is canceling out all my hard work - but, for the time being, i'm holding onto that almighty clothing standard of dudehood: medium sized shirt/32" waistline. that's my 38th parallel, and i'm going to hold that line as long as i can.

speaking of which, its time to get off my ass and start this evening's sweatfest.

cheers,

- brian

Reproducin', Part I: The Cannonball

what's up, fan club...

as most of you guys know, preggosaurus went into labor on monday and shot out a little baby girl, which, after a few hours of deliberation and polling from the public, we named alayna renee (who we often refer to as 'cannonball,' for reasons disclosed below.)

our tale begins on saturday, the 14th of june... allow me to backtrack for a sec, here...

kris had just finished swimming in the pool and was home showering off when she thought her water had broke. the folks at the hospital figured it was best to err on the side of caution and had us drive from our place in hunter's creek to the winter park memorial hospital (all the way across friggin' orlando). after four hours of running tests and sitting around a hospital labor room, bored of our wits, the doctors discharge kris and tell her that, in fact, her water had not broke. more than likely, they said, preggosaurus had peed herself.

the next day, absolutely nothing at all happened. it was a really boring day, and kris was so exhausted she couldn't really do much. this all changed, however, at about 2 am, early monday morning, when she started having severe contractions. they started off being an hour apart, then began at half-hour intervals, then fifteens minutes apart, and then finally at ten minute intervals. not wanting to drive all the way across town for yet another false alarm, i told her to call the doctor's office when they opened at 9am and ask if they wanted her to go to the hospital again. in the meantime, i had to drive down to kissimmee for that stupid, boring ESOL strategy class (the one i mentioned before in my last posting), and, as you all remember, i could only miss one day of class before they'd drop me like a sack of wet laundry.

i was not about to use up my own absence on yet another false alarm. so i went to class.

after about 45 minutes of sheer, mind-wrenching boredom (that class was horrible, horrible business), i received the phone call from kris stating that the doctors wanted her back at the hospital immediately. i drove back to the house, picked her up, and we went back, yet again, to the hospital in winter park.

this time, however, they wanted her to stay. preggosaurus was dilated to 4, and she was thinning out like nobody's business.

while kris' cervix was spreading apart like the red sea, i was frantically calling my HR department for the school district and trying to see if i could retake that ESOL class in the fall. i was convinced that i wasn't going to be able to make it back the next day at 8am and continue to attend class regularly for the next two weeks, thereby completing my teacher's certification requirement and, consequently, keeping my job. by the time kris was dilated to 8, i had been told that i could take that boring ESOL class in the fall. trumpets sounded from the heavens.

these trumpets, however, turned out to be the thundering approach of a terrible lightning storm that would kick off around the time of the baby's birth, and which would ultimately screw up my mass picture texting from the hospital (for those of you who received the same picture text message three or four times that afternoon, and for those of you who didn't receive anything at all, this is why).

now, kris has bore witness firsthand to the painful throngs of labor before, and she wasn't having any of it. natural vaginal childbirth was not something she was down with. therefore, she had an epidural done as soon as possible to nullify the pain of the contractions, which, for those of you previously unaware of this practice, is when they drive a railroad spike into your back and run a feeding tube of numbing goof juice into your spine. with this done, kris was oblivious to just about everything afterwards.

by noon, the nurses brought in this skinny, piece of blue plastic the size of a shortsword and rammed it up kris' crotch to break her water. for nearly three hours afterwards, absolutely nothing at all happened. nothing. it was boring as hell, and the only thing on the TV in the room was a marathon of home improvement. i wanted to kill myself. you always hear about the emotional and chaotic times of people in the delivery room, but it wasn't like that at all for us. occassionally, kris would ask me to check the monitor thingy and see if she was having a contraction or not. she'd feel a little bit of pressure, but that was about it. so yeah... really boring for a good three hours or so there.

...then the nurse came in and realized kris was dilated to 10, her uterus was vanquished, and the baby's head was in view. holy crap, its time to call the doctor.

the delivery gear was brough in and the doctor told kris to start pushing. she does this, no joke, about three or four times, before the baby's head comes out and the kid cannonballs its way into freedom. that was it. that was the delivery process: four or five minutes of painless pushing. and then we had a screaming, bloody baby on our hands.

in closing, i highly recommend all women out there reading this considering reproducing any time soon to receive a railroad spike of goof juice in the back. totally worth it. just make sure you bring crap along with you to the pass the time, just in case you're stuck in a room with nothing on but home improvement.

- brian