Author Archives: Cabol

Oct 12 2007

Hot Dogs, Tater Tots, and Styrofoam Plates

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Being forced to eat a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on gooey white bread and a styrofoam cup full of chicken noodle soup from a can.

Being forced to nap on a thin, blue mat in a dim, crowded room when I wasn’t tired.

Being forced to carry home a plastic ziploc bag with wet undies in it for everyone to see.

And that horrible smell.

These are my main memories from the daycare center I went to when I was a kid. Luckily, I only had to go there every now and then…like when my Mom had a doctor’s appointment. I can’t remember liking anything about it. I hated daycare. I didn’t want to be in daycare, and I don’t want my kid in daycare.

When we found out Anya was on the way, we spent a long time pondering options: Would I stay home or go back to work? I really wanted to stay home, but when we found out that medical insurance through Andy’s work would cost half his take home pay, we realized it wasn’t really a good option. We found a lady sort of on our way to work who had five kids of her own and just seemed to love kids totally. Her family seemed nice. She met her husband online. She’d use cloth diapers for us. Sounded good so we reserved a spot.

Anya has been going there for about three months, and things seemed fine. Yeah, I always had something to complain about, but I think that had to do a lot with me being jealous that the daycare person (DCP) was spending more time with Anya than I was. There were a few things that went beyond that, but they were things that didn’t matter so much to me with Anya so little but made me think it would be a good idea to move her when she was older…like seeing DCP’s three-year-old eating from a bag of fritos at 8am one morning in plain sight of DCP. Everything changed on Wednesday.

My parents are here for a while, and I met them and Andy for lunch and went home with them. I planned to pick Anya up early. (My parents weren’t watching her because they were here to get a bunch of stuff done around the house, and we also wanted to keep Anya with her regular routine.) Andy asked if I’d called DCP to let her know I was going to be there early. I said no. She’d told me I should pop in unannounced from time to time, so that was my plan. DCP had a habit of going places without telling me even though she said she would. It bothered me a bit, but not too much. I wondered on Wednesday if she would even be there when we arrived. She wasn’t. As we turned into the driveway, I saw right off that her big, kid-toting vehicle wasn’t there. I decided to call her with my Dad’s cell phone, but his phone didn’t get service there.

I asked my Dad what time it was: 4:08.

I decided to stay and wait for a while. I went next door to see if the neighbors were home, so I could try to call DCP. No one answered the door. My parents and I played with DCP’s cat. We peeked in at the dogs. My Dad and I walked down the long driveway and back up.

I asked my Dad what time it was: 4:33.

I decided to leave and have Andy pick Anya up after work. We started to get into the truck to head out when I saw DCP’s vehicle on the hill aways away. As we waited for the car to pull into the driveway, I got all bouncy. I bounced and waved at DCP as she pulled up and parked. I headed towards the car to get Anya. DCP got out. Her kids started to pile out. DCP got all babbly and said something about how she had to go out for a few minutes and Anya was sleeping. I was confused. The doors on the car were all closed now, and DCP and her kids started heading to the house.

The house where Anya was. Alone. For half an hour or more.

I was still confused and a bit in shock. I acted like nothing was wrong. I got Anya, and we all got into the truck. When the doors were closed, I asked my parents, “Was it just me, or was that really bad?” Andy and I spent the evening trying to decide what to do. Do we pull her out of daycare and try to find a new spot? A spot for a baby in this area is almost impossible to get short notice. Most places have 3-6 month waiting lists. The better places have waits of one or two years. Or, do we send her back and hope this was a one-time thing…maybe have a serious talk with DCP?

In the end we decided to stop sending Anya to DCP and to try to find a new place. I contacted about half a dozen places yesterday, and none have openings. I’ve talked to a dozen or more people at work and asked them to keep their ears open. Andy has a list of another half dozen or so places he is calling this afternoon. I am not hopeful. There was that one listing on craigslist for someone with five spots open, but I don’t want my kid being taken care of by someone who believes that “and” does not have a “d” in it. For now, she’s at home with my parents.

Even if we do find some place, I won’t be happy. I’ve been looking at daycare websites for hours and hours the last two days. I don’t want Anya growing up in any of those places. I don’t want her being forced to eat hot dogs and tater tots every Wednesday. I don’t want her being forced to sleep from 1:00 to 3:00 every day because that is what’s on the schedule. I don’t want her being embarrassed because she didn’t get to the front of the line for the potty in time. More than that, I don’t want to miss her first step. I don’t want to wonder if that bruise on her forehead was from me bopping her head when I took her out of the car or from someone doing something to her. I don’t want to sit in some cubicle with nothing but clerical peon crap to do while her picture is staring at me.

We don’t really need medical insurance, do we? We can just ignore the calls from those pesky collections people, right?

Oct 2 2007

Farewell, Grandpa Don

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Farewell, Grandpa Don. Andy, Anya, the kitties, and I will all miss you very much. I hope you and Grandma Betty are together again. Thank you for being a great grandpa and for always sending the kitties a Christmas present.

Donald Volker 1919-2007

Sep 12 2007

Four months

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Welp, it’s time for another installment of “What’s Baby Doing?” She…

+ rolls side to side over and over and over again for hours and hours at a time
+ can almost roll onto her tummy / off of her tummy, but her arm gets in the way
+ knows that if she pulls on the handle on her bouncy seat, the music will start, and mommy and daddy will dance for her
+ eats her feet
+ outgrew size 1 diapers and most of her 0-3 month clothes
+ drives the bottle during feeding time…we just have to support it for her
+ can sleep all the way through the night, but chooses not to
+ splashes happily in the tub
+ said “mama” twice (and if you give her a typewriter, eventually she’ll write Shakespeare)

Sep 10 2007

120 DIFFERENT colors!

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I bought a box of crayons today. One hundred and twenty different colors. ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY. Wow. One hundred and twenty DIFFERENT colors.

We were at Walmart today, and while Andy hunted down cat food, I meandered into the back-to-school section. Crayons. The smell of them is pretty much as good as it can get. Ranks right up there with new text books, clean baby, and cinnabuns. I stared at the boxes and boxes of crayons and remembered, as I always remember when looking at new crayons, how cool it was in elementary school to get a new box at the start of the year. Back then getting a box of 48 was pretty much the cat’s meow. A box of 64…well, I don’t think I got a box of 64 more than a few times. When I saw that box of 120 crayons (each a different color, I checked), I gave a little yelp of glee.

And I knew I had to have them.

One cool thing about being a grown up is that if you want a $7 box of crayons, you can buy them. I bought them.

120.

What good are crayons, though, without coloring books? I don’t understand why the coloring books are not in the same place as the crayons. At the grocery store, there is often a banana display rack in the cereal aisle. At the hardware store, the paint brushes are always near the paint. Coloring books, though, are in the toy section while the crayons are far far away in school supplies.

I’m picky about coloring books. I don’t like those pesky mixed books…with coloring pictures and silly activities. I don’t like to be distracted by goofy crosswords or lame-o connect-the-dots. I just want pictures. I also prefer simple pictures with heavy black lines. Some coloring books have pictures with such high level of detail, the crayons don’t fit between the lines. Maybe those are good for colored pencils or even skinny markers, but for crayons? Nope. I’m also not real keen on books about cartoon characters like Dora or Cinderella. Even with this stringent criteria, I managed to find half a dozen books (strangely, three were about cats). With Andy’s help, I narrowed the stack down to three: baby animals and two of the cat books.

When we got home, I took out my crayons…peeled off the plastic…and took in all the glory of those wonderful colors. Only one problem. The (120) crayons were stuck in the boxes (two 48 boxes and one 24) all random! How can you know which green you really want when the greens are spread out over three boxes? How do you know the purple you picked is THE purple you need?

I dumped all the crayons out on the floor and spent the next hour putting them in order.

I found out why the crayon people put the crayons in randomly. It’s tough putting them in order. Does this green-blue crayon go with greens or blues? Should I put all the fruit-named crayons together? Must Caribbean Sea go next to Pacific Blue? Where does white go? It sticks out no matter where it is. Do the colors of the paper wrappers mean something? Should all the crayons with the same color wrappers go together? But if so, why does a crayon that is surely a yellow have the same color wrapper as a crayon that is surely a red?

I broke the crayons down into six groups: reds, blues, greens, yellows, purples, and earthy colors. The earthy colors managed to fig quite nicely in the 24 box. I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to box up the others…I could put the blues, greens, and yellows in one box but was left four short. If I put the reds, blues, and yellows together I had one too many. Should I break the blues between boxes? If so, which few blues were most un-blue? Andy kept looking at me funny this entire time…asking me if I sorted my legos when I was a kid. (No, I didn’t. I remember being more concerned about the number of bumps on the lego blocks than the color (2, 4, 8?). After all, color isn’t quite as important when you are building as size and shape of the block.) After I got things broken into boxes, the arranging went fairly quickly. Some crayons really didn’t fit the progression from light to dark I was working for in each color group, but I just stuck them in where they seemed to go best.

Now they are all tucked in happily. All one hundred and twenty colors. Time to color.

I started writing this about a week ago but didn’t finish it. I’ve since found out another reason the crayon people didn’t bother to organize the crayons. Once you get them where you want them, it’s tough to keep them that way. When you take one crayon out, the others wiggle around to fill in the gap and things get all wonky.

Aug 9 2007

3 Months

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Three months now. I’ve been back to work since July 2, so this last month Anya has spent her days with her zookeeper. I suppose there could be other things she can do that I don’t know about because of that, but I think she’s been pretty good about sharing her tricks with us. So, without further ado, here is what Anya was up to in July:

+ With the help of her Aunt Rebecca (a champion thumb sucker in her youth, I hear), Anya now knows that thumbs are quite tasty and good for slurping on.

+ She has almost total control of her head. She says that life is much more interesting now that she can turn hither and yon at will.

+ She can also sit up with help. She likes to sit up. Sometimes she likes to spit up, but mostly she likes to sit up.

+ She has mastered the friendly skies and took her first plane ride to / from NY.

+ As shown in the hippo picture a few days ago, Anya is an expert grabber. Since her hands are so tiny, though, she is a bit limited into what she can hold onto. So far the list includes Hippo (duh), her feet, my hair, my shirt, my bra, my dinner plate, and cat tails.

Jul 10 2007

Two Months

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Another month has gone by, and we’re all still here. (Though there were a few times Anya almost ended up living with the sheep.) I started back to work last Monday, so Anya spends her weekdays at an in-home daycare with her zookeeper and lots of kids and dogs.

Here’s Anya’s list of accomplishments for the last month:

+ Focuses on things and follows stuff when it moves
+ Has perfected her right hook
+ Smiles and chortles
+ Rolls from her back to her right side and then starts to cry ’cause she can’t roll back to her back
+ Appreciates the value of scales (the musical kind)
+ Is working on a gnarly mohawk
+ Slept from 11:00 pm to 6:00 am (once…last night…I, however, still woke up at 3, 4, and 5)
+ Chews on her fist
+ Makes a lovely neck cheese

She has her two-month doctor visit on Wednesday and will get lots of shots. I plan to make a voodoo doll of the nurse who gives the shots, so Anya can get some revenge.

Jul 6 2007

Bloody Nightmare

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This morning I had my six-weeks-after-the-baby checkup, so I couldn’t sit around in my pajamas all morning. I was actually up and ready in plenty of time and was topping off the baby’s tummy while I waited for Andy to finish up with the animals and get ready to leave. Baby and I were lazing on the bed nursing, the fans were blowing, the birds were chirping. It was all pretty idyllic, so when I thought I heard Andy yell something from outside I tried to ignore it. No no, I was just imagining I heard his voice. It was nothing. A figment. A weird bird. My brain kept working, though, and realized that (A) Andy had been outside for a very long time, and (B) weird birds do not say, “SHEEP HURT.”

I hopped up and ran to the window and saw Andy in the sheep pen pouring some grain into their bin. Huh. Maybe I did imagine it. Then I saw something from a horror movie: a white sheep with a bright red face.

I put the baby in a safe spot, hopped into my shoes, and ran down the hill. By now I saw that Andy had been using the grain to try and lure the injured sheep, but that hadn’t worked so Andy was chasing the sheep (one of the white ram lambs) around the pen trying to catch him.

There is blood dripping off the sheep’s chin. He broke a horn. The horn was still dangling off the sheep’s head by a flap of skin. Did I mention the blood?

I freaked out a bit and tried to get in the pen to help, but in my panic I didn’t actually turn the fence off and kept getting shocked while I tried to open and close the fence. When I got in, we both tried again to catch the sheep but weren’t able. Andy went back to the barn for more grain, and with its power we were able to grab the sheep.

Here’s kind of what it looked like: The horn (about four inches long) was dangling like I said. It was mostly hollow (and filled with a pool of blood). On the sheep’s head where the horn used to be was the horn bud-type-thing … a little cone about an inch or two tall. And it seemed like the thing was just leaking blood.

I held the sheep and Andy sprayed blukote (kinda like liquid band-aid) on the wound. It was pointless. The blood just washed the spray down the sheep’s face. We realized that was futile and tried to figure out other ways to get the bleeding to stop. One problem was that the dangling horn was really bugging the sheep, and he was shaking his head and smashing it into the ground. We decided we needed to get that horn off. Andy tried to quickly yank it, but that wasn’t going to work. I held the sheep down while Andy ran up to the house for a pair of snips and a rag to try and help stop the bleeding.

When he got back, Andy fairly easily snipped the horn off. He then held the rag to the horn stump thing, but it just wasn’t helping. He tried the blukote again. No luck.

Finally we realized we couldn’t do anything else. We talked about calling the vet out, but this isn’t a pet and as horrible as it may sound the sheep wasn’t “worth” the cost of the vet. We realized that horns break on sheep in the wild or sheep out on big pastures, and they survive. The wound would clot eventually. So, we crossed our fingers. Andy finished up chores, we both cleaned up, and we left.

On my drive home from the doctor I kept my fingers crossed that I would find a fairly healthy sheep with a stopped-bleeding wound. I was rather nervous and had this horrible thought I’d have to call up our neighbor to see if he’d bring his gun over and put the sheep down. Thankfully, when I pulled up next to the sheep pen, I saw that the sheep was doing okay and that the bleeding had all but stopped. I took another peek about two hours later, and he’s pretty much the same. When Andy gets home we’ll probably have another go at getting the wound coated with blukote to keep the dirt and bugs out.

A coworker of Andy told him about this stuff called “BloodStop” made for occasions like this. We’ll be picking some up today. If this happens again, we’ll be better prepared. As I read back through this I wonder if we should have called the vet. What I wrote sounds sort of horrible…the part where we just left. Where is the line between being neglectful and being farmer-y? We don’t want the sheep to die or be in pain, but again…this isn’t a pet. Most likely this sheep will end up being meat. I don’t know. I’ll definitely be thinking about this for a while.

Even though the blood has stopped flowing, the scene is still pretty bad. The other white sheep have red on them where they’ve come in contact with some blood. Perhaps the ram rubbed up against them or perhaps they picked up some blood from the grass. There are some bloody marks on the shelters. Andy and I both have purple stains on our arms and hands from the blukote. There is a horn in the kitchen sink, blood stained and with purple spots. Worst of all is, of course, the sheep himself. The entire left side of his head is a nasty mess of blood and blukote. It’s sort of black/purple. We may be able to wash him off a bit, but the blukote stains.

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Cabol wrote all that on 6/27 and then we forgot to post it. As an update, the sheep seems to be doing well. Most of the blood and blue kote have washed away in the rain. We saved the horn, although the kitties like to try and play with it.