April 12th, 2015  Dubsie spends most of her days in the company of a Ukrainian woman whose name is Lilia. Lilia grew up in Dnepropetrovsk, in central Ukraine, about 300 miles from Kiev. She is our au pair. Let me explain what that means, exactly.
Au pair is a French word that literally means “on equal terms” but in the parlance of America means “a live-in nanny.” Readers may be surprised to learn that Lilia has been living in our third bedroom, quietly and un-blogged-about, since September.
While I’m feeding Dubsie breakfast, Lilia steps lightly down the stairs to have her granola and yogurt. “Hi Lilia!” Dubsie says with a huge grin and wave. Soon Lilia is whisking Dubsie upstairs for a bath, while I finish getting ready for work. I say this partly in the spirit of disclosure. From reading this blog one might conclude that I am watching after Dubsie all the time in my slightly neurotic fashion, but in point of fact, most weekdays Mummy and I are off at work, and the diaper changing and washing and napping and long hours of child’s play fall to Lilia. The fact that Dubsie is not yet two and knows all the words and hand motions to “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, “Patty Cake” and “Little Bunny FooFoo”, can count to twenty, is somewhat dextrous with a crayon, is mostly potty trained, and can come up with miraculously complete sentences, like “What are you feeding me?” is due in large part to the gentle ministrations of our young Ukrainian.
I hear their conversations in the bath while I’m in another room buttoning my shirt. “Wash it??” I hear Dubsie say, in her heartbreakingly adorable way of repeating every statement an adult makes. Lilia responds in a tone too low for me to make out. “Float the ducky??” Dubsie squeaks in reply. Again a patient murmur. They are an amiable twosome, our slight 26-year-old blonde Eastern European employee and our dark-haired moppet.
Lilia is our second au pair, and the second to come from Ukraine. Continue reading Meet Lilia
April 5th, 2015 Everything was going so well up until the moment of the eruption. We’d had a happy, playtime kind of day with our friends Russ & Sunny and their two kids, and now we’re assembled in the living room to see them off, so great to see you, let’s do it again soon. Dubsie sits innocently on my arm. Without warning she throws up all over my shirt, pants and shoes, and leaves me surrounded by a puddle.
Whoa, I say. Wow, Sunny says.
A pleasant parenting moment has swerved into a disgusting one, the kind of moment that people always fret about before having children, but after you’ve been vomited on a few times it’s no big thing. A washing machine will scrub away everything but the memories. It’s more awkward than anything else, owing to the company, and hardly even that, since Russ and Sunny have two kids, and in a moment we’re all chuckling in a knowing kind of way. I’ve been there Dave, Russ says, and shakes his head as some liquid drips off my elbow. Been there.
Dubsie surveys our guests with the serenity of someone who has already forgotten that she’s emptied the contents of her stomach onto her father. She vomits without pain, anguish or remorse. Like yawning but with regurgitated food.
Mummy comes to the rescue. Here, give her to me, she says. I gingerly pass Dubsie off across my vomit moat, and we resume our goodbyes. Then Dubsie throws up again, all over Mummy, copiously, until Mummy is soaked like me and surrounded by a puddle.
So there we are. Two hosts, saying farewell to our guests, drenched in toxic waste. If I could have seen the expression on our faces. Russ and Sunny are attempting to look sympathetic while also being doubled over with laughter.
Don’t mind if we don’t see you out, I say, and gesture with one radioactive hand. We’ll just stay here and, uh, clean up.
March 29th, 2015  My ladies boarded a jet plane last week and disappeared to Texas, on a visit to family, leaving me alone in an empty house, and I took no time in regressing to a primitive, almost bachelorlike state.
‘Superbly awesome’ is really the only phrase to describe it. I wake up in the morning in this big bed and there is no pressing need to leave it. The house is quiet. No one needs a diaper swapped and there’s no one for whom to make oatmeal. I stretch my arms and legs out their full luxurious length and roll over for a few more zzzzz’s, and when I wake up, guess what? Still no one needs me!
What I’ve done with my evenings isn’t terribly exciting — Spanish class, going to the mall for some shirts, running, beers with colleagues after work — but it’s how I’ve done them that’s so liberating, leaving work without quite knowing where I’ll end up, acting on whims that have no room in the punctual regime of parenting. At the mall food court I casually masticate my way through a Chipotle burrito, watching the goofy gangly teenagers giggle by, and after shopping I mosey on home at whatever damn hour I please. I left my bike right in the middle of in the living room, confident that no little hands would grab the greasy chain.
Back when Dubsie was just a bump in Mummy’s belly I did some math and declared to myself, 2031.That is the year that Dubsie would turn 18 and that I would no longer be responsible for her (at least in the legal sense). Mummy and I would, hypothetically, be sprung back to the our breezy life of doing whatever we want. Eighteen years, I muttered. Whew. That’s really quite a long time.
The strangest thing about the absence of my ladies is the silence. The crunch is loud when I step on one of Dubsie’s abandoned Cheerios. This isn’t a stealthy, Dubsie-is-sleeping kind of silence, but is more like a big blank canvas, and me an artist eyeing it with paints. I could stride around in my underwear and sing at the top of my lungs, or leave a pair of scissors unguarded on the coffee table, or read a full-length book, without pictures in it, and without the risk of Dubsie running up with a substitute. I could follow a whole yoga video without someone climbing on my back. Yet in the pauses, in the moments that I haven’t stuffed with activities, the silence is oppressive. I watch the childless hipsters strolling down my street and inwardly say What do you do with all that free time? and simultaneously You poor lonely things.
 I also read a piece in The New York Times magazine — not just the first few paragraphs, but the whole story — about the difficulty of raising teenagers. In it, the novelist Rachel Cusk proposes what all the parent-adolescent strife is really about. Perhaps it’s that your child, that little extension of you, ceases to be an actor in your story and starts telling his or her own story — or even before that, discovers that the family story that the parents devised is a bunch of B.S., shot through full of lies and inconsistencies. (Dubsie, if you’re reading this as a teenager, know that my version of that narrative is being drafted as I type.) Halfway through the essay I discovered that I was blinking back tears, projecting forward to the day that Dubsie will be a young lady who is impatiently on her way out the door, and leaving her Daddy to his silent house.
Once in an airport I encountered a classic tableau: A family bidding farewell to its son who was off to college. The boy was so excited that it seemed he might float away before the plane could take him. His little sister looked up at her older brother with admiration. His mother gently said goodbye, and it was clear that she had made her peace with her son’s impending absence.
The father, however, was a trembling, wet-eyed wreck.
 Here was a man who hadn’t prepared, had been living in denial. Once his son walked through security he would be gobsmacked and bereft. Once he left the airport, the fabric of his world would hold an empty cut-out piece.
The interesting thing is that, despite this spectacular week of bachelorhood, I have since Dubsie’s birth developed a very different attitude about 2031. Pre-Dubsie, every intervening year held a packet of dread, and 2032 was full of promise. Now it’s the next 16 years that feel full of excitement, and the prospects for 2032 seem dim and uncertain. Eighteen years? That’s all I get? Come back, I wave to that future daughter already receding through the airport. I love you too much to let you go.
March 22nd, 2015  They tell you that parenting is about patience, and about poop and vomit and curtailed sleeping hours, of course, but they don’t tell you that it also requires salesmanship, especially in the realm of tooth-brushing.
Brushing Dubsie’s teeth has been difficult as long as there have been teeth. (Or ever since our pediatrician, Dr. Busse, told us sternly that those mouth-chiclets would need a regular scrubbing, or we would risk tooth rot, disfigured smiles, mocking from friends, a life of loneliness and psychotherapy, etc.)
The difficulty of toddler dental hygiene is it is both unappealing (mouth probed with brush) and extremely easy to defend against (close mouth). When Mummy or I would perch Dubsie on our knee in the bathroom, she would clamp her jaws shut, and any attempt at force only led to fusses and weeps. We relented.
And cuddling at night we were haunted her halitosis.
At times while waving the brush over Dubsie’s pursed lips I remembered our family cat from when I was growing up, Lido, a psychotically imbalanced animal who was a constant source of menace. With Lido you never knew whether the hand you offered would lead to a purr orgy or a slash of claws. During one unfortunate era we had to give Lido medicine. The only way to do it was to sneak up on her with a thick terrycloth towel and, while grimacing in fear, wrap it around her struggling body like a straitjacket until just her head stuck out. Then you cradled her like an infant, sticking the dropper between her jaws while she glared and spat.
But I digress.
We never tried anything like that with Dubsie — talk about therapy sessions — but instead turned to this special baby toothbrush, a blue rubber thing that hugs your finger like a minature toothbrush-condom. That worked pretty well, especially when she got rewarded afterward with a little sip of water from said toothbrush-condom. That tool got retired when Dubsie discovered her second line of defense: biting. (“Owwww owww owww owwww Dubsie that hurts!“)
The solution that is working, at least for now, is part salesmanship and part participation.
Daddy (at dinnertime): Dubsie, when we’re done, are we going to change into your night diaper?
Dubsie: Uh-huh.
And then are we going to put on pajamas?
Uh huh.
And then are we going to (gasp of feigned excitement) brush our teeth??!
Uh huh.
A sales pitch alone doesn’t do it; she has a role to play. It was Mummy’s idea to have her brush my teeth while I brush hers. I urge her to the bathroom (“brush brush brush!”) and we grab our respective implements. She sits in my lap. Then she immediately closes her lips around her toothbrush in order to suck off all the toothpaste. Then I am allowed to work her mouth, angling around the molars, sneaking behind the incisors, and saying eeeeeeee! and AAAAAAAA! in a mostly futile attempt to tune the size of her mouth opening, while she does various things with my toothbrush — whapping me on the cheek with it, or scrubbing my clavicle, or dropping it to the floor, or occasionally putting it in my mouth, to clatter it between my molars or stab my tonsils.
But whatever it takes. On most nights most of her teeth are touched by a brush, albeit briefly.
Then it’s time for the singing, the final ritual of the night. Around Christmastime we made “Away in a Manger” the Official Going to Bed Song. If Mummy is there we sing it in two-part harmony. Now Dubsie knows the words well enough that she’ll drowse off to sleep murmuring about the little lord Jesus laying down his sweet head, until the singing trails off and her fragrant breaths turn deep and rhythmic.
March 15th, 2015  Of all our devices, the one Dubsie finds most relaxing is the pager. When she gets her mitts on it she’ll kick back on the bedroom rug like she’s reading a trashy novel in goddamn Ft. Lauderdale.
The other gadgets aren’t for relaxing but for the pushing of buttons. (Tactile buttons and her parents’ buttons.) If you’re in the bathroom without a visual on her and from the bedroom hear a click-click click-click click-click, that’s her turning the stereo power on and off. She gets our ceiling fan to spin like mad in the middle of February.
(Once we were surprised to see the bedroom lights drop from full strength to an intimate glow; we didn’t even know they could do that. It was Dubsie who discovered how, by pressing her tubby index finger against the On button and keeping it held.)
If you hear a burst of beep tones and my mother saying “Hello? David? Is anyone there?” she has infallibly found the redial on the cordless, and there is nothing more irresistible than the red Panic button on the back of the key fob to the car, and the amusing look on Daddy’s face when the horn starts blaring outside.
And the iPhone. Catnip for little fingers. She hasn’t figured out my password but presses numerals until the security system locks me down. She stabs at the screen as fast as possible until I yell at her, and then hands it over with a bashful look. Is it her first guilty pleasure?
But really none are as satisfying as that indispensable tool of the 1990s, the pager. Watching the old phone numbers scroll by like an episode of The freakin’ X-Files.
March 8th, 2015  I recall the exact moment when I decided to raise Dubsie in Spanish. She and I were walking on 5th Street, or rather “walking,” since stepping out with an 18-month old is an exercise in going nowhere. I sing-songed for her to come along, and she tripped a few steps before being transfixed by the next fascinating object, in this case a half-brick lying on the curb.
As she wrapped her hands around and tried to lift it (like me trying to carry a refrigerator), I thought about my friend Russ. He had recently closed down his life in Washington, D.C and jetted off to live in Italy for a year with his wife and two young children. He is from California like me, but loves Italy so much that he gave his children Italian names and speaks to them in a nonstop stream of passionate but not particularly skilled Italian. Russ hoped to live in the Ladin region, where the local schoolchildren are taught not one, not two, but four languages — Italian, German, English and the local tongue called Ladin. That’s how committed Russ is to exposing the next generation to other languages.
As I stood there watching Dubsie, I thought about the three years of Spanish I’d taken in high school with Mrs. Livingston, reciting alongside my bored classmates about how mi abuela makes tamales muy buenas, and the three months in college I spent on an exchange program in Mexico City, most of it at la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México where they tossed us mercilessly into college-level anthropology and history classes, led by Profesor Álvarez, Continue reading Raising a Child on Bad Spanish
March 1st, 2015  A little girl in polka-dot pants and her Mummy stand at the door of a lavender house. Yes, a lavender house, a single-floor conventional California ranch-style house, yet a whimsical and not-normal house, with a fat chimney where the beige has been painted over with more lavender, and also with an elaborate mosaic of tiny mirrors, reaching as high as the eaves and lovingly formed into the shape of a sun. There’s also a van outside, painted Easter-egg purple and emblazoned with the words BabyEarPiercing.com, Since 1987.
Mummy rings three times before the door opens, and the two disappear inside.
The walls are lavender. Little glass cases display a child’s assortment of ear jewelry, twinkly but too blunt to be tug-tug-tugged by tubby fingers. Studs in silver and gold, and hoops, and stones for every birth month. The little girl skitters across the slate floor and peers for a moment into display cases, then staggers over to look at a funhouse reflection of herself in a wall that is made up entirely of mirror shards. Next to a case of lotions and potions is a tiny sink and two half-eggshell chairs on silver posts, each with a diminutive purple coverlet.
 The proprietress of this fantasyland is a woman named Angel, and she is the only object absent of color. Her hair, if there is any, is hidden under a black cap. She wears black tights, a black turtleneck, a pair of white fleece armlets, and a gray sweater with little leather shoulder straps and severe steel buckles that make her look vaguely Goth. It is not a stretch to imagine that Angel once wore lavender flounces and a tiara, but sometime on the hard road between 1987 and here her fashion sense took a darker turn, and now she lances earlobes in the guise of a bike messenger, or maybe a burglar.
Angel is unhappy with Mummy because she’s late. In fact, it is possible that the door went unopened so long in order to exact a punishment. Mummy is informed that due to tardiness the twenty-minute jewelry consultation would need to be cut short.
 No problem, says Mummy, and in less than two minutes she has picked out a pair of studs, 18-carat yellow gold just like they adorned her with on visits with family in South India when she was a child. Next Angel asks, as if anticipating the answer, whether Mummy would want the girl in her lap during the procedure, and adds that she doesn’t recommend it. No, Mummy answers, isn’t that what the chairs are for? You’re the professional, do your thing.
The front door opens and the girl’s aunt arrives, her American father’s sister, with her two children in tow. No one wants to miss this.
The aunt first got her ears pierced when she was eight, on a trip to the fair with her own father, when he acquiesced to her whining and offered a choice between the earrings or the stuffed bear. Imagine the fit her mother had when she got home. The earrings were banished, the holes grew over, and the aunt’s ears were re-pierced at the age of thirteen, when she had crossed the American jewelry demarcation line.
The little girl is whisked off the floor and placed in the chair. Angel dons a pair of lavender surgical gloves and dips a toothpick in ink. She marks one earlobe dead center. Her right earlobe is wider than her left, she remarks.   Little girls get upset at the markings, Angel says, looking warily at both the girl and her mother. But the mother is strangely calm for a mother, and the little girl isn’t unhappy. Bewildered at finding herself in a dentist’s chair at Lavender-Land, but not fussing.
It is the moment. Angel takes the earring, nested in a hole-punch device, and braces the sharp tip of the post against the girl’s earlobe. Mummy caresses the girl’s head in her hands. The girl looks quizzically at Angel out of the corner of her eye. A click, and the girl wails. A face crossed with shock and pain, the kind of face — I trusted you, how could you do this to me? — that has caused mothers and Angel countless bouts of anguish in this room, but this Mummy is steadfast. She envelops the girl’s squirming hands in hers as Angel places the backing on the post, changes sides, overcomes a feint by the bawling girl and pushes in the other. More wailing.
The girl is lifted out of the chair by Mummy, who is delighted at the sight of the golden baubles in her daughter’s ears, and swooped around to be shown off to her aunt and cousins, sitting in the waiting chairs. The girl is so surprised at the transition and at the sight of her cousins that she stops crying. Mummy carries her over to the room’s one intact mirror. “How pretty is the baby!” she coos. The girl looks at the image of herself in the mirror, with her adorned and slightly reddened ears, and her face screws up into a bout of blubbering.
 A moment later the crying and sadness are past. The child sits on the floor eating crackers as if nothing had happened. Angel says she had never seen such a mellow baby. Angel asks the girl if her ears feel hot, and with her hand fans air toward her ears. “Hot go ‘way?” the girl asks.
Everyone gets up to go. Angel says to Mummy, don’t you have any questions? No, you pretty much covered it, Mummy says. I’ve got my info sheet here.
A lifetime of earring-wearing ahead, and the pain of the piercing already forgotten.
February 22nd, 2015 I carry Dubsie past the intersection of 11th and Kenyon to her Saturday morning music class. This is Columbia Heights, where the kids (mostly black) go to Tubman Elementary School and the professionals (mostly white) go to little hipster joints and pay $14 for a pork roll bialy sandwich.
Outside of BloomBars is a cluster of jogging strollers. We hurry in because it’s cold. Class has already started and the narrow room is packed — maybe 25 little kids and even more assorted parents, sitting on the gymnasium mats and filling the benches that line both sides of the room.
 Baba Ras D pulls everyone together at Harambee. Opposite the entry door is a little stage, and on it are a sprinkling of children and a tall, middle aged black man who is smiling broadly in spite of a missing front tooth. His name is Baba Ras D, and his long dreadlocks swing back and forth as he bangs on a drum and sings “This Little Light of Mine” in a deep bass voice.
Most of the children have a shaker or tambourine in their hand and about half the people are singing along with Baba Ras. The class is called Harambee, which means “pull together” in Swahili, and on his website Baba Ras describes his creation as a “practice of hope, possibility and compassion.” We’ve only been here a couple of times and Dubsie is still a little stunned by the noise and the abundance of children, and the guitars and keyboards hung on the walls, and the half a boat hanging from the ceiling (that’s the DJ booth), and especially the big ecstatic black man with the dreadlocks and beard.
I smile at the polite black guy with short hair who is manning a little desk, throw $10 in the donation bowl, and hurry Dubsie out of her boots and jacket and add them to the soggy collection of clothes and bags on coat rack, surrounded by a puddle of melting street slush.
Baba Ras transitions into “The Wheels on the Bus” without his smile dimming a single watt. I find a yellow egg-shaped shaker for Dubsie and a spot for us on the floor, and clasp Dubsie’s shaker hand in mine and follow along with the hand motions as we sing along. Maybe four parents in the room are black. The overwhelming majority are white, some still in their Patagonia or Arc’teryx coats and some stripped down to T-shirts against the rising puppy-pile warmth. The parents sitting on the gym mats, I’ve noticed, almost always sing; those against the walls encourage their children to sing but themselves tend to just watch, in contrast to Baba Ras, who is working so hard that he’s sweating through his shirt.
When I first came, I assumed that this was Baba Ras D’s place and that the mild-mannered guy at the front was his assistant. I turned out I had it backward — the guy at the front is John Chambers, who left his corporate P.R. job and founded BloomBars eight years ago. Baba Ras D is just one of many performers who circulates through during the week.
BloomBars is a desperate affair by the standards of the salaried audience. The mostly volunteer staff get a bed to crash in at Chambers’ house. It’s a hip-hop-spoken-word-film-exhibition-improv-belly-dancing-meditation space that contains many contradictions. The schedule of performances is regular and robust but the cash donations are erratic. It’s called BloomBars, in the plural, though the place is singular, and it also isn’t a bar, because Chambers maintains a no-alcohol policy. He thinks it takes performers and patrons off their game.
Dubsie has gotten her groove on and has figured out how to work the shaker herself, mostly, and as Baba Ras sings “One Love” she busts out her favorite dance move, which is turning ’round and ’round slowly on her short little legs.
Harambee is only half an hour long and it’s over before you know it. Baba Ras concludes by saying, as he usually does, that he’s grateful he has the chance to bring music to the children and to bring the people together, and this time he adds he is thankful for the positivity of this place, which is a break from the sadness of the world, and he says that that helps because lost a dear friend this week, and a shadow crosses his sweaty face. I find myself wondering what life is like for Baba Ras D when the children are gone and he lies like Bob Marley in a single bed.
Chambers takes the stage and thanks everyone for coming and reminds everyone to vote for BloomBars for Best Arts and Culture Non-Profit in the City Paper’s Best of D.C. competition, which BloomBars has won several years running. Please vote, Chambers pleads to the buzzing room, because the place runs on donations and needs all the help it can get.
The parents struggle off the floor and families begin a humid, slow-motion exit of boots and jacket sleeves and good-byes and Emma, where are your gloves. I’d hoped to hang out with a couple I know, but their daughter has fallen on a tambourine and has a couple of jingle-sized scrapes on her cheek and is crying.
Outside, while no one was paying attention, it has started snowing, and the parking lot of baby joggers are carpeted in white.
February 15th, 2015 Any catalog that arrives in our mailbox is hurled directly to the recycling bin, unless I pause to call the company, recite its serial numbers with the cold precision of an executioner, and send it to oblivion with a please-allow-six-to-eight-weeks-to-be-removed-from-our-mailing-list. To my way of thinking, a catalog — and especially a novelty catalog — is a tree that was needlessly felled, pulped and flattened in order to be made into a glossy book of useless plastic gizmos that are bought by people who can’t think of anything better to give Uncle Jim this year. I want Dubsie to walk through a world of cathedral forests, not a suburban plastic hell where people throw away $29.95 plus shipping on a pair of Pawz dog boots or a garden gnome or one of those baseball helmets with cupholders glued to the sides so some idiot can suck from two Pabst Blue Ribbons at the same time.
 One of the more difficult catalog items to explain to Dubsie. But at Christmas a crush of catalogs arrives no matter what. One evening in mid-December, when Dubsie was fussing and wouldn’t have another bite of chicken and rice, I pulled one catalog off the top of the pile and plopped it onto her tray.
It was Wireless, one of the most frivolous of the novelty catalogs, and it fell open to a spread that had, on one side, a tape dispenser in the shape of an otter frolicking on its back, and on the other, a cast-iron pig chime. Exactly the kind of useless crap that I hate. Dubsie, though, glanced down at the preposterous merchandise and got that look she gets on her face sometimes. It was an expression of total absorption, with her chin tucked and the mouth slack. Just the sort of mouth one can fill with spoonful of chicken.
So I swallowed my distaste for the time being and told Dubsie, well, this here is a tape dispenser, but I had to stop there because I remembered that she had never experienced tape. So I went and got a roll of Scotch tape and put a piece on her finger, and that was fun. She moved it from hand to hand and I enjoyed her enjoyment so much that I forgot about the chicken. And I resumed telling Dubsie, so, this is a tape dispenser that is in the shape of an otter, which is…wait, how do you explain an otter? It’s kind of like a squirrel, I told her, but without the bushy tail, and it lives in the ocean and eats oysters. Dubsie made a reverent examination of this tape-dispensing squirrel-otter. I went on to say, and an oyster is … but how do you describe an oyster?
Then Dubsie sneezed and sprayed bits of chicken and rice all over the squirrel-otter and his friend the pig-chime. If we had been reading Dr. Seuss I would have hurried to wipe it off, but who cares, it’s a catalog. I just turned the page. There’s, like, 47 more pages of random stuff. Let’s see what we’ve got here….
I quickly learned that the fashion catalogs, like Nordstrom or Macy’s, aren’t much use to a toddler. Seen one page of Coach bags, seen ’em all. But the novelty catalogs gives a father a great deal to talk about as he stuffs food into a distracted face. Look, Dubsie, it’s a double-decker London bus AND a wine rack! And here’s a lava lamp … I used to have one of those in college … and a bansai tree, which is a miniature tree, from Japan…have I not told you about Japan?
The holidays are over and the catalogs have disappeared, since of course I cancelled them all. In January one managed to struggle through. It is called Whatever Works (tagline: Garden – Home- Pest Control). We’ve been working our way through it for the last month, but we’ve kind of memorized it by now, and she’s grown accustomed to my enthusiastic musings on the solar-powered garden turtle, the New York Yankees rubber doormat, and the poison-free insect magnet. Now we’re working on identifying all the parts in the 105-piece ladies tool kit, and are struggling to identify the colors of all five models of the LED mini flashlight (to Dubsie, every color is called “geeen”).
The catalog is getting a little ratty, but maybe they’ll send us another one soon.
February 8th, 2015  A temperature of 100.8 ℉ with a chance of vomit, not worthy of a trip to Urgent Care but bad enough to force a change in my plans. Dubsie and I are on our own this weekend, with Mummy away on a business trip, and Friday night I wanted to sneak baby over to see a flick at a friend’s house. Hell, it was probably a bad idea anyway.
I’d wanted this weekend to be me and Dubsie against the world. But now with her sick, it would be me and Dubsie against the pillow. I put her into bed next to me and she tossed and turned, breathing like a snotty Darth Vader. I’d roll her into the middle of the bed and wake up an hour later with her hot little head wedged under mine.
Dubsie woke up unhappy at 4 a.m., and again at 5 a.m., and at 7 a.m. she woke up with a full diaper and I knew that I would wring no more sleep out of her. The day stretched out long and featureless.
I’d clung to the hope that she would have recuperated so I could meet some friends at Dubsie’s 10 a.m. music class. At 9:30 a.m., Dubsie finished the last bites of a snack and promptly fell asleep on my shoulder. No music class. But at least she was asleep. I slid Dubsie into her bed with a fervent wish that this would be a long winter’s nap so Daddy could knock some things off his list. Forty-five minutes later, I heard Dubsie’s little fists clanking the bars of her baby gate. Continue reading Stuck at Home
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Dubsie spends most of her days in the company of a Ukrainian woman whose name is Lilia. Lilia grew up in Dnepropetrovsk, in central Ukraine, about 300 miles from Kiev. She is our au pair. Let me explain what that means, exactly.
