I have a new post up at milspouse.com/blog: “Adult Conversation.”

The other day I was explaining to my wife Danielle on the phone that Sean (our 17-month-old) and I had discovered two new monsters in our presence. One was the Washcloth Monster, who feeds on the crumbs little boys leave behind, and the other was the Hand Wipe Monster, his cousin, who follows us around town and feeds on little boys’ sticky paws.

Danielle said I needed more adult relationships, ASAP.

The social breakdown started happening long before it was Tom and Sean Time, All the Time, however. During the Year of Bliss, we became aware of a downward trend in how much we cared about typical social mores. We called it our “desocialization.” I’ll spare you most of the particulars. Bathroom doors started staying open, I began to find it very funny to show off my belly button lint. Etc.

As you spend more and more time as a family unit, you become more and more comfortable with each other, more and more secure in the knowledge that, for example, passing gas is not going to sour the deal.

I don’t know if you can ever go back to the way things were before. Probably not. Nor would I necessarily want to.

On Saturday, we spent our morning the way we pretty much always do—did—dammit. We got up with Sean and ate breakfast. Then, during his nap, Danielle and I watched the President with Jay Leno, The Daily Show, and Dollhouse, all on Hulu.

Danielle had a big presentation to work on for one of her classes, but it was such a nice day that she decided to blow it off so she could go to the bike shop with Sean and me. At the bike shop, we got fully outfitted so Sean can ride shotgun with me this summer.

We all spent the rest of the day at home, having decided subconsciously to not do anything that would require us to get in the car. We finished off the day with a glass of Aberlour Double Cask Matured Scotch, which we picked up at the package store at a nice price.

Sunday morning we walked down to Gary’s for breakfast—sweet potato pancakes for Sean and me, eggs and toast for Danielle—and then we just chilled at home. Unfortunately, Danielle had to work on her project, so Sean and I started cleaning out the shed in preparation for turning it into the garage for the new two-seater.

(I really need to come up with a catchy, Battlestar Galactica-related nickname for my bike, now.)

I may be totally delusional or just blissfully ignorant, but I’m not really worried. I’m sure it’s going to be harder to be the solo at-home parent than I’m imagining, but I’ve always been more of a “react-er” than a worrier/planner.

Of course, it’s fully possible—maybe even probable—that next week will come and find me totally unprepared. The blog will go strangely silent. The phone will ring unanswered. Piles of laundry will develop intelligent life.

But I hope not. So, now I’m wondering how to adequately observe this, the Last Weekend. Any ideas?

With a bunch of index cards and a binder clip, you have all the good things you’d get from a notebook with the added ability to rearrange the cards, remove cards you don’t need, create a weekly dinner plan you can post on the refrigerator, etc.

Right now, the Litchfords are in a kind of gray zone, which is good because it allows me to get things figured out while Danielle is here to help. But it also makes me a little lazy.

She’s back in the office in a week, and then I’ll really have to get a handle on all this housekeeping business, while still keeping up with my other projects.

Let the adventure begin!

We’ve made some schedule adjustments (slightly later morning nap, slightly later afternoon nap), and things seem to have stabilized, for now. Let’s just hope they stay that way.

Something about being on shore tour has made Danielle and me more anti-social than usual. We don’t go to church. I’m not a member of the spouses’ club. We don’t know most of our neighbors.

To make matters worse, we live on an island, and, like true islanders, we hate leaving it. We just want to stay close to home and spend as much time together with our little one as possible.

As you can probably guess, recent events have only encouraged this.

Today, though, we did venture over the two bridges between us and the mainland for a visit to the Target, you’ll be proud to know. It’s actually a really good thing we’re two bridges and several towns away from that store, because we went in there today to buy index cards, a couple picture frames, and chopsticks, and we somehow wound up spending $150 on a couple picture frames, several bottles of soaps and lotions, 300 on Blu-ray, index cards, and an enameled cast iron pot. After spending $40 at freaking Trader Joes.

I have a few things to say about Trader Joes, but that’s another post, entirely.

Sean had his one-year well-baby doctor’s visit, and his doc ordered blood tests for iron and lead levels. Sean also needed to get his immunizations, so we thought, ‘Great, we’ll get all the unpleasantness out of the way in one afternoon!’

Not so fast. The immunization clinic was backed up, short-staffed, and their computers crashed while we were waiting to sign in, so we decided to come back the following day, in the morning.

We had the vaccinations done first, and Sean got 4 needles, which he was not happy about. Then we went upstairs to the lab. The corpsman looked at Danielle, who was holding Sean, and said, ‘Please tell me this is for you.’ Danielle said, sorry, no, it’s for the baby. He pulled up the order and said, ‘Oh, no.’ Then he went for ‘reinforcements.’

The blood lead level test the doc ordered, apparently, requires a fair amount of blood, because a finger-prick would not suffice, here. No, the blood had to be drawn from a vein, which meant the nurse (the aforementioned ‘reinforcements,’ who was, the corpsman said, really good at this, usually) had to find a vein. That’s not generally too difficult on a compliant adult, but a one-year-old full of fight is a different story—not to mention that she was trying to find the vein through a quarter-inch of baby fat.

She tried one arm, then the other, then his hand, then his arm again, tying the tourniquet, poking and scratching at the skin, before we finally asked if this was all really necessary. The short answer was no, it’s not really necessary.

Rhode Island state law mandates blood lead level tests for kids nine-months to five-years old before they can be enrolled in day care or school. Sean will most likely not be enrolled in either one for the entire time we live here, so, after the nurse stuck the needle in and missed, we decided to forget the whole business.

What troubles me most about the situation is that I can’t think of a good justification for the test. Sure, sure, lead poisoning is bad. And yes, there are a lot of old houses, here. But I doubt the Rhode Island state government’s motivations were entirely altruistic. At best, this is one of those laws that allows politicians to say, ‘We care about children’s health!’ At worst, it’s a law that shields schools and day care centers from lawsuits.

After a nice supper with my folks (mmmmm, hammmmm), we left for Lynne’s house in Ann Arbor. Sean was asleep and my parents were babysitting. We were hoping he would stay asleep at least until we got back.

We wanted to stop for coffees on the way so we stopped at Meijer, where there’s a miniature Starbucks, but it was closed. Then we drove up to Espresso Royale, and that was closed too. Then we spotted a place near Lynne’s that sounded like a coffee shop (something like Classic Cup Cafe) but proved to be a sit-down restaurant. So we had to do without.

At Lynne’s we were surprised to see our friend Mike, in from L.A. We sat down to eat a bowl of lobster bisque and proceeded to ‘talk small,’ as the young Octavian in HBO’s Rome would say. I’m sure I offended at least two people I didn’t know.

Then Megan and Luke arrived and we were entertained by their story about their cab driver’s views on the economy and the Gaza conflagration.

Then, at about 10:35 p.m., my phone rang. ‘Your son’s been awake for an hour,’ my mom said. He had woken up hungry, as he sometimes does, and wouldn’t settle down without seeing Danielle. So my parents were watching TV with him.

Thankfully, we hadn’t been drinking copious amounts of champagne (contrary to Nan’s sage advice), so we could drive home and deal with the baby.

The rest of the evening was quiet and uneventful, except for (oh my God!) Dick Clark’s sad sad sad continuing presence at Times Square.

And that, my friends, is why we don’t go out very often.

Tonight we’re going to attend a low-key New Year’s celebration and probably be in bed before Midnight. There’s really no need to get drunk on champagne while watching some simpleton in Times Square, who is, in turn, watching a big sparkly ball.

Or maybe we’ll wind up having a blast and staying way past the end of 2008. One never can tell.

Christmas this year was a little tamer than in years past, but I don’t know whether that was a function of us as a family getting older and not being able to justify truly unnecessary gift-giving/-receiving, or if it’s a function of the current recession.

(At what point does a ‘deep recession’ become a ‘depression’?)

We also just celebrated Sean’s first birthday, which is unbefuckinlievable. He horsed down a big piece of German chocolate cake (pictures to follow when we return to the East).

Anyway, Happy New Year!

We made it past Albany before we saw a single snowflake. And then we saw lots of snowflakes. The only safe place to drive was the right lane, where a caravan of cars and trucks was keeping a two-track of asphalt uncovered. There were, of course, a fair number of daredevils—eighteen-wheelers on a schedule, front-wheel drive Honda Civics without a clue—passing in the left lane, but I stayed out of it except in extreme cases.

The Raptor’s all-wheel drive handled the mess admirably. We only felt her lose her grip a couple times during our two days of driving. We had her serviced (heh) the Monday before we left. The Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) dash light had clicked on, so I asked them to check that out and rotate the tires and do the rest of the 20,000-mile maintenance.

I’m a little peeved at the Mazda service guys because the TPMS light chimed on again the night before we left. When I checked the pressure myself, one tire had about half the PSI it’s supposed to have, and two more were at about seventy-five percent. On Sunday, during the second leg of the journey, we ran out of windshield washer fluid. Grr.

On Sunday, we faced more bad driving conditions. Danielle woke me up before sunrise. ‘What time is it?’ ‘Quarter to five. I’ve been laying here for forty-five minutes having visions of horrible weather and a long line at the border.’

So we got up and, after getting around and saying goodbyes to her grandparents, with whom we were staying, we hit the road. At six-thirty a.m. in December in New York, the sun’s not up, yet. The roads had a couple inches of snow on them and more was falling fast. Shortly after sun up, I spotted a tractor-trailer in the snow a hundred feet off the road.

Then, just east of Buffalo, the real snow started. Danielle was at the wheel in white-out conditions, creeping along at twenty m.p.h. with her hazards on (at her backseat-driving husband’s request). Once across the bridge into Canada (the lines were non-existent; most people weren’t stupid enough to be traveling), we missed a turn because we couldn’t see the road signs.

We finally arrived at our destination after a full ten hours on the road across New York and Ontario. Four hours more than it would have taken in clear weather.

Ugh.