It’s fully expected that this storm will strengthen into a hurricane, and then there will be many, many jokes about Hurricane Danielle around this house.

We’ll have to wait and see what, if any, impact this will have on her ship, but I’m sure her shipmates will also get a lot of mileage out of this.

For one thing, I find myself answering the following question a lot, lately:

“What’s that, Daddy?”

“Daddy, what’s that?”

But a lot of other stuff has been going on, too. Like potty training. And getting used to Danielle being on sea duty, again.

And putting Sean back in bed—over and over and over again.

It’s this last part that I’m finding most difficult to deal with. By the end of the day, my Patience Meter is about at empty, so following the experts’ advice (don’t talk to him, don’t make eye contact, just take him back to bed) is hard to follow.

How can this be fun for Sean? He’s gotten out of bed nine times since I started writing this blog post. Ten. Seriously: what kind of satisfaction does he get from this little game? And when I eventually lose my temper? How is that incentive for him to continue?

Eleven.

It must be some perverse quirk (twelve) of the toddler psyche. Somehow, it’s a game (thirteen). A game he’s very good at, and I’m very bad at (fourteen).

(Fifteen.)

It must have some kind of point system (sixteen).

Make it out of my room: 1 pt.
Make it down the hall: 2 pts.
Make it (seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, 21, 22, 23) into Mum and Dad’s room: 5 pts.
Jump up on Mum and Dad’s bed: 10 pts.
Make it downstairs: 50 pts. (24)
Make Dad shout: a million pts. (25)
(26, 27, 28)
Cry and make Dad come back and tell me he’s sorry: win.
(29, 30, 31, 32)

I earn points on (33) a different scale: (34) Every time I successfully put (35) him back in bed without speaking or shouting or making eye contact, I score (36). The number of points I score increases as the game goes on because the difficulty of the one maneuver I have at my disposal also increases with time, according to some algorithm I don’t have the (37) mathematical wherewithal to (38) work out.

I win when he goes to sleep. That’s worth (39) infinite points.

Sean just scored 50 points by making it downstairs (40). I figure my (41) successful retrieval was worth (42) about (43) a hundred thousand points, based on my level of irritation, right now.

He’s now bringing different things out of his room (44) every time: his blanket, his giant stuffed duck, his water bottle, his blanket and his stuffed duck (45). In his mind, that must be worth something. Perhaps I should assign point values to the various (46) things he could bring with him with each successive escape….but, really, who’s keeping score? (47)

The incredible part is, after almost 50 returns to his bed, he has the balls to ask me if he can watch TV. Astonishing.

48, 49, 50, and…

I win.

UPDATE: 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57… (I’m still winning, though).

What I have been doing is a lot of gardening and home maintenance, computer repair, and “home theater optimization.” (Separate posts to follow for some of these.)

The biggest change is that Danielle is now gone from roughly 5 a.m. until 6:00 or 6:30 p.m.—on a good day. On a not-so-good day, she hasn’t been able to come home at all, as her ship is prepping for a long-ish trip later this year.

This, as you can imagine, has been hard on her. Not getting to see Sean for more than maybe an hour a day will be the most difficult adjustment by far.

The adjustments I’ve had to make are trivial, by comparison. In addition to writing, Sean-rearing, and house-wrangling, I can now list “gardening” amongst my daily activities. It’s been a long time since I had a yard to care for, and I’d forgotten how quickly it can become an overgrown eyesore. I’ve been referring to all yard work as “gardening” because I’m hoping the Power of Positive Thinking will help me see the grasses, flowers, trees, and shrubberies outside my windows as part of a creative enterprise, and not simply as endless drudgery.

In fact, maybe I should refer to all my daily activities as “gardening.” Caring for the people and pets and other possessions that fill my family’s life.

It sounds very Zen, don’t you think?

It’s good to be back.

Succubus

Last night I woke up at about 12:30, and I wasn’t wearing any pants. This is curious because I was wearing pants when I went to bed. After that, I did not sleep well. I just kept waking up.

And so this morning when the alarm spun up at ten past six, I actually got up. I heard the compact disc spindle motor whir to life well before any music played, giving me ample time to sit up and hit snooze before the opening notes of U2′s “Beautiful Day” or Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire” or Tracy Chapman’s “Change” vibrated forth, which makes me wonder why we have an alarm clock that can play compact discs in the first place. I knew the coffee would be finished soon in the auto-drip, and I’d only been about a quarter asleep for the past hour anyway.

Father and Son

I have a lot on my mind. We’re winding down our time here in Newport, and I’ve been thinking about my career and what potential opportunities I’ll find after the move. So yesterday I took Sean to the bookstore to have a look at some magazines on parenting to see if I might find a new venue for my work there.

Alas, no.

The idea I’d had was for a sort of “Father and Son” monthly column about my adventures with Sean. Sure, it would be another parenting column, but it would also be a traveling column and maybe a cooking column. It could be a lot of things. It could be really interesting and fun.

But America’s big child-rearing magazines—Parents and Parenting—don’t seem to have the space for something like that. They are almost indistinguishable from each other at a quick glance, and like many magazines, they are full of numbered lists and bullet points and subheads. It’s the website-ification of printed matter (he writes on his website), the “we’ll think for you” school of writing.

I’m being glib. Those magazines are in the business of service journalism, and that’s what a lot of parents are looking for. (Help me raise my kid! Please!) It’s just that they’ve gone so far into the realm of service journalism that they’ve left no room for anything else.

The January Thaw

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I left the bookstore with Sean to do some exploring. There is a road—Reservoir Rd.—that I’ve been itching to hike for months. It all started when Danielle noticed it on the map while we were out for a drive. But we couldn’t find the actual road sign. What we presumed to be Reservoir Rd. proved to be nothing but a two-track that was unsuitable for the Raptor, all-wheel drive or not.

What made this road even more mysterious to me was a conversation I overheard while waiting in line for coffee. One man was telling another that he’d been managing a “gentleman’s farm behind St. George’s (School).” That had to be off Reservoir Rd.! I had to see it.

So finally I was going to take Sean on an exploratory hike. The January temp had soared above the freezing point, and the sun was shining. We drove as far as we could along the paved portion of Reservoir and parked. Then I put Sean on my shoulders and set off.

The two-track was muddy and gashed by truck tires. Lumps of unmelted snow and patches of grass were the only safe places to step. Sean held onto me by the hair as I walked past empty fields. I saw the campus of St. George’s to the East.

And that was all there was to see. The house was not magnificent, and there was no livestock. I don’t know what I’d expected to see on a “gentleman’s farm,” but it was more than empty fields and rusted tractor parts. Is it just an excuse to own a lot of land? Maybe the recession’s been hard on them, too.

Nevertheless, I felt good as I walked back up the track with Sean on my shoulders, my hair in his fists. Clouds were moving in and snowflakes were floating down and it was a good morning.

Filling in the Blank Spaces

When Danielle got home from work, I finally got around to telling her that I had woken up in the night pantsless. She swore she had nothing to do with it. Some mysteries are doomed to never be solved.

Then Danielle had to sit down with the business manager and hear her pitch. And, finally, when everything was signed, when I was off playing with Sean, the manager (a great beast of a woman with terrifying hair) told Danielle she also lived in Newport.

“Is your son in pre-school?”

Danielle told her, no, but that I stayed home with him. Whereupon the woman said, “Oh, he’s doing the Mr. Mom thing.”

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Yikes!

It should have been a great experience, but this one little thing was like putting a dollop of shit icing on a beautifully decorated cake.

Still, though, we love the car. (Zoom-zoom!)

They covered our losses, which were significant, within a week. I was beyond amazed by the level of customer service we received.

For those of you renting out there, if you don’t have renters’ insurance, get a policy. It’s cheap, and it covers you in situations like this.

Sean and I stayed with friends from the old neighborhood while we conducted our search. I gave Meg and Tim literally two days’ notice that we were going to be in town, but they swore they didn’t mind and opened their home to us. We spent the week laughing and telling stories just like we used to, as if it hadn’t been three years since we last saw each other.

While Sean and I explored apartments, Meg and Tim and their twin five-year-olds went about their day. It worked out great. Then on Thursday, the day before we were going to head home (having successfully found a place to live), Meg got sick. She did her best to keep from getting anyone else sick, but we knew it was time to let them have their house back.

So Thursday night I packed up everything we wouldn’t need that night: toys, laptop bag, stroller, diaper bag, etc. Then I went to bed with my Kindle, my phone glowing softly on its charger, alarm set for early the next morning.

Tim was already awake when Sean and I got up and showered and went downstairs. He watched Sean while I went out to load the suitcase in the car…

…Only to discover that the glove box was open. That’s odd, I thought, before remembering what else had been in the car. A quick survey of the back end revealed the laptop bag had been taken, as well as a pair of my shoes. (I wouldn’t realize until the next week that the stroller was also missing.)

No windows had been broken. Which means either I stupidly forgot to lock the car, or someone was very handy with a slim jim.

I was so pissed off. We were in a nice neighborhood, parked in the driveway, and still, nothing’s safe. The part I found completely inexplicable was the shoes. Just a pair of beat up L.L. Bean camp mocs. Maybe they were the right size.

To cap off the day, Sean started really complaining when we hit the Palisades Parkway. Pulling his knees up to his chest and crying. I thought he was just sick of the car seat. But when we stopped for dinner (at a Barnes & Noble—he likes the quiche), he got sick in the high chair, even before he’d had a bite to eat.

We were in Norwalk, Conn., about three hours from home, but he kept getting sick. All our clothes were dirty (including the ones we were wearing), so I carried the little guy into Old Navy so we could get outfitted for the night, then I booked a room at the Doubletree.

Three hours from home. I watched “The Hangover” and Sean fell asleep in my arms.

He was fine the next morning. We had coffee and pastries at the Starbucks in Martha Stewart’s home town. (There were more than a few exceptionally nice cars in the parking lot.) And then we finally went home.

Next up: Why USAA Is the Greatest Insurance Company Ever