Friday, June 12, 2009

Red wine! Pee! Nilla wafers!

For about 6 minutes tonight, there was ricocheting around my brain the perfect balance of red wine and chocolate cake and pizza. This perfect and delicate ratio found me swimming in great blog post quips and bites. These 6 minutes have long since passed (almost 102 minutes ago); since then, Jen decided that the red wine was giving her a headache, so I did the chivalrous deed of putting the rest of the bottle away as a solo act. This act proved to be both the death knell of my creative streak as well as the conception of my sleepy streak. That this red wine beverage is not used for general anesthesia is a terrible crime.. think of the money that could be saved. It brings The Sleeps on with alarming velocity.

I will have one image from the day stay with me, and it is this: Lily slipping around on her own urine. We gave them a psuedo-bath after dinner (long story), and afterwards let the monkeys traipse around their quarters in the buff, as they say. We keep this time of nudity relatively brief, and yet it remains to be a source of problems. And so it was tonight: Lily was standing by the closet on the hardwood floor when The Sound came. Nothing sounds like pee coming from a standing toddler; I could pick this noise out of a thousand others with both ears tied behind my head.

I should mention here that Lily has become self aware of this urination thing, and when it occurs she peers quizzically at her lower half, wondering where this lovely fountain can possibly be bubbling from.

Cleanup is usually fairly easy. I throw a towel at her feet to catch what I can, then reach over to grab her and pull her back onto another towel for a quick rub down/cleansing. The plan went awry when I reached for her and she took a step away, lost her footing on the slippery floor, and began slipping around in her own pee. She never fell; it looked a lot like that clever animation from Scooby Doo where someone (Daphne, say) would run in place for a good 4 seconds before physics kicked in and the meddling kid would take off like a shot. Lily's legs did some serious moving before I finally grabbed her up.

It's non-stop action at the Gels house.

Day one hundred and sixteen.

Abby Gels



Lily Gels


Off, off damn shoe!


I dare you to not react in a similar fashion when you eat a nilla wafer.

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Thursday, June 11, 2009

The sham of milkery

In an honest and misguided attempt at justifying my Vitamin D milk habit (which has spiraled out of control...I spent Tuesday busking with my guitar outside the Richfield Rainbow, trying to scrounge up the $1.80 I sorely needed for my next gallon (Rainbow has killer sales on Roundy's milk, fyi). At the end of the day I'd only netted $.92; apparently "Vitamin D Blues" is not as popular a song as you'd think), I'd been telling myself and random people on the street that vitamin D is an important vitamin and that is why I drink its eponymous milk. Surely something named "Vitamin D" is fit to burst with the very nutrient it is named after. I imagined myself revitalised with every creamy delicious slurp.

Thanks to a random moment of passing ennui, I know this is a horrific lie. Our elected officials fell asleep at the switch with this extreme crime against humanity. Recently I found myself with a spare moment in front of the fridge, so I decided to compare the skim and vitamin D milks' dietary/nutritional/label-of-lies information, to see just how much extra vitamin D I was getting on a "per-slurp" basis. Surely you've been able to guess by now what I'm about to tell you: vitamin D milk has the same exact vitamin D content as the non-vitamin D-named skim milk. The very same amount.

The same! I mean, seriously...how can they possibly call it vitamin D milk? Why not Ginkgo milk, it's got the same amount of that, too.

Distraught over this news, I poured myself a swimming pool of my favorite elixir and drank myself into oblivion, getting no extra vitamins for the effort. Still...totally worth it.

Day one hundred and sixteen.

No new photos, so here's a Then-Now introspective. Photos from the Big Day next to some recent ones...

Lily then.



Lily now (thank goodness Jen did not have to give birth to an aerobie as well)


Abby then (still kills me to see shots of her in the incubator)


Abby now.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Warning! This post contains images depicting gruesome details of a vegetable

The grisly remains of what were two delectably meaty artichokes. They never stood a chance.

Us + kids + Olly went to Nokomis after work for a walk. A post work-walk if you like. We still get lots of nice looks from the locals, and every one reminds me to enjoy it while it lasts. There will come a day, and it very well may be tomorrow, when the girls may be bratty and tantrumy and these same folk will roll their eyes in soundless judgment as they go on their kidless and stress free ways.

I should know, as I do this all the time to other parents whose children I disapprove of. However, I'm too scared to do it at them, or even at the time, so I end up doing it later. I'm rolling my eyes right now, actually, at some kid that irked me in the grocery store 3 weeks ago. That's how I roll. I also make faces at kids when their parents aren't looking, which is true and completely addictive. Try it once, you'll love it. I did this recently to a 2 year old girl at the Blue Door Pub, and she started bawling. I stopped just in time to watch her parents look around, then ask her what was the matter; I was terrified she would finger me, but I had to give the kid credit, she kept her yapper shut. Well, she kept it shut about me; she still cried for a while.

Karma will get me back for this some day. Again...may be tomorrow.

Day one hundred and fifteen.

Everyone but the cat is in this photo: my feet, Abby, Jen, tiny part of Lily's foot, and Olly. Note how much help I'm being.

Sometimes I get so wound up trying to get perfect photos up here, I forget to add the stupid fun snapshots. File this under: When Lily Attacks.
I don't remember at all how I took this and got my own nose/eye in the frame.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Some milestones.

Lily and Mommy, ready for a walk around Poho.

Successful parenting means you can be drinking a vodka tonic with game 6 of the Stanley Cup playoffs on, but you're simulataneously stripping high chairs of impacted mashed potatoes with tumeric and 5 week old avocado pieces.

So much of our existence depends on multi-tasking. Even relaxing means doing something; if you don't, there's just more to do and less to relax about later.

Boring though it might be for our intrepid readers, here's a few highlights of what the kids have achieved lately. It's the dangers of doing this style of blog...

- Abby is cruising/crab-walking/clamboring/bouldering/whateverthehellyouwanttocallit with a lot more confidence. She loves to be standing at the coffee table, and has done well navigating around the corners lately.
- Lily steadfastly refuses to learn English (or she's learned it already and simply opts not to regurgitate it back to us), but her Lily-speak has stretched to single-breath, 30 second paragraphs of epic scale. She just babbles on and on and it is compelling stuff, I tell you.
- Abby's crawling is increasing in stability and speed. Timid and shaky at first like the little goofball she is, she's now started to brave the entire first floor with increasing frequencies.
- They both would rather devour books than read them. Still working on that.
- Lily, and Abby too but to a slightly lesser degree, is using objects in appropriate manners; ie, she likes to put the phone up to her ear and pretend to talk. Both of them like to use combs and brushes on their hair. Lily tried to open the front door the other day by throwing my keys at it..."Aaarrrghh, open, damn you!" is what she babbled after I translated it.
- Abby's getting better at body parts. She can point to nose, mouth, bee bo, head, and I think she's almost got tongue. She loves her tongue. She loves my tongue. Her tiny dagger-like fingernails also seem to love my tongue. Parenting is wicked painful sometimes.
- Lily love to be chased. This is, by a wide margin, my favorite game. I snatch her up and toss her around, giggling, then put her back down. She takes a few steps, and I'm back after her and she goes nuts. Of course the cutest part is when I just let her go, and she reaches the "safety" of a piece of furniture, clutches it for life, then turns back to see if I'm coming after her.

Those are the biggies right now. This stage, though, there are a dozen little things every day that I should be taking note of. That's the precise reason for this blog, but all these things happen during the day, then the sun sets, now it's 10:30, then I get forgetful (remember that vodka tonic?), and the specifics of the day melt a bit, then quickly evaporate and they're gone.

Day one hundred and fourteen.

Abby also ready for a walk, looking quite hip.

Oh yeah, this is a notable thing, although it's been happening by both girls for at least a month now. They like to feed us. Cute as a button, right? Yeah, then you get a mouthful of pre-chewed steamed brocolli. How cute am I wretching into the sink?

The macabre side of Lily.

Monday, June 8, 2009

*Insert whip/whoosh sound here


Sneakily does the little house monkey try to nip a jade leaf from the greenery.

When I'm spoon feeding the girls, I will at times make a whipping/whooshing sound when I bring the next spoonful up to their mouths. The sound is essentially the two-part whipping sound, only without the second "Tsssch" portion. "Wwwhhhuuuuoouuogghhh". I always make it throaty and loud, and it has a great success rate for making them laugh and eat the bite.

A couple days ago I was feeding them something, but there was no spoon in sight, it was all finger food. For no particular reason, with no warning, I did the sound: "Wwwhhhhoooouugh". Abby's mouth popped wide open in an instant.

Pavlov would be proud.



Bonus content! I hate Dateline NBC's Keith Morrison, like, a lot. But I also love him and, like the proverbial car wreck that his reporting is, I can't stop watching. I just watched 13 minutes of Dateline tonight and promptly vomited; that's the body's natural response to Keith Morrison. I found a nice SNL parody of him and added it below. Good times. If you know who Keith Morrison is. If not...maybe not very funny.



Day one hundred and thirteen.







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Sunday, June 7, 2009

Wow, I'm actually finishing a blog post before 10!

A self portrait of me and Lily.
She loved all the dangly silver in this booth, which then required a hasty exit when she was unhappy about not being able to lay her little sausages on any of it.

Jen's first day back...and she took off for a spa day and left me alone with the kids all day. Typical.

Kidding, of course. When the girls woke up, I went to get them. Abby was ornery right from the moment I opened the door; she wasn't being a total jerk or anything, she just was not happy. So I swiped the girls, one in each arm, and took them into our bedroom. Abby's face, when she saw Jen and that first wave of recognition took place, was astounding. She was so happy. I've never seen her go from that crabby to that laughing and squeaking so quickly. Lily was definitely very happy too, and her reaction was nice, but Abby's was especially fantastic.

The morning was passed lazily while all the female memebers of the family reacquainted themselves with each other. I think Lily's platform is still a little "pro-Daddy" right now, but it won't last long. Jen is staring down the barrel of a whole summer with these girls, so by the time the leaves change, there will be no doubt whose kid Lily is.

This afternoon we toddled off to the Edina art fair, not the most exciting thing in the world but it was all about getting out of the house. I'm starting to get a little burned out on art fairs; there is a strict quota for how many laps I can make around the same canvas tents sequestering kitschy wares, hyper-real 5' x 12' color photo prints of Greek islands, unending jewelers, ho-hum ceramic vases... there's not a lot of innovation at art fairs (shocking news, I know), usually just a couple stalls of interest that draw me in and leave me asking mysef, 'Have I not already seen this guy last year?' Any reason to be outside and get a corn dog, though. Which we didn't get. The girls seemed to have a good time. And I counted 3 grown men carrying lap-dogs around, which gave me a constant source of chuckling and glee. It's mostly about people watching the Edina crew for pure enjoyment. It is a masochistically claustrophobic fair - the average lane between stalls being around 2.9 feet - and there is no shortage of older women darting this way and that, interminably annoyed at both my presence and my gall for bringing children. I eye them quickly ducking into several artists' areas, then reporting back to their waiting spouse, some guy sitting idly on the sidelines, talking cooingly to his chihuahua. Good. Stuff.

Afterwards, off to my Dad's for dinner, delicious as always. Anarchy as always. Fun. Tiring.

Day one hundred and twelve.

Mommy and Abby navigate the cutthroat art fair milieu.
These photos were taken in the most barren stretch of the event (on purpose), so they in no way reflect the severity of the crowdedness.

Warning! Only a rock star can manage this get-up at art fairs. I wish I could be the first working father to bring their kids onto the New York Stock Exchange, equipped just like this. "Buy! Buy! Sell! Sell! Sippy cup!"

I thought about cropping myself out, but no....I like this photo as-is. Jen was making googley at Lily during the walk back to the car, and she was devouring it. I managed to snap this over the shoulder, and it turned out sublimely good, I think, even though I look like that random d-bag who ruins a good photo.