On Four

World Cup 2014 begins on Thursday.

During the first match of World Cup 2010, I was standing in the corner of a labor/delivery room at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse watching Mexico and South Africa take the pitch. As we moved through the process of selecting a name (we started with Mariano Rivera Paventi…well, maybe I started there), The Wife and I joked that we would name our child after the first player to score during World Cup 2010.

Shortly after 10:51 a.m. on June 11, 2010, cries and screams came from the small operating room on the labor and delivery floor. Those cries belonged to a child that had just been delivered by emergency surgery.

My child.

Grocery List: August 4, 2013

Finally.

After three nights of fighting with The Kid, she finally slept through the night in her Big Girl Bed. Transitioning to the bed has been rough. We took all of the recommended steps: talking it up, making everything special, building a wall around the bed for security.

Squadoosh.

Yesterday, after a tumultuous Friday night where she didn’t get to sleep until after 9:30, no nap and racking up about 40 miles on her legs running around the house and yard, The Kid threw The Wife out of her room before the last song and fell asleep.

At last.

We have been working a sleep chart. She gets a dot with every good night of sleep. After five dots, she gets ice cream. She cashed in her first set of dots on Friday with a trip to Chuckleberries, a serve yourself froyo stand in Liverpool. When she does not get a dot, we also ban her from the library of Sesame Street and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on the DVR.

This morning, she placed her yellow dot on the chart, which meant she gets to watch the most loved rodent in the world. And, she got to have coffee with daddy.

I don’t understand how a child rejects things like pizza and candy but willingly drinks Starbucks iced coffee. Yet, whenever I have iced coffee she has iced coffee. The Kid and I have taken to private daddy-daughter trips to Starbucks. I get my giant iced coffee. She gets her coffee, a tall cold cup with milk and just enough iced coffee to turn the milk brown. She curls up on one of the leather chairs with that and a slice of gluten-free cinnamon bread and goes to town. It’s some us time.

What we fear is that this stretch signals the end of naps. The Kid’s nap time means I get nap time or, at the very least, quiet time.

The Kid also made the ride to Wegmans today, where she was pretty well behaved for a three-year-old. All it takes is the promise of the train that runs through the bulk foods section of the store.

The Kid eats a strawberry

This ranks as big news around these parts. My three-year-old has long made picky eating her thing. First, it was formula. Then it was single-grain cereal. Then it was baby food. Then it was regular food. With the Celiac disease diagnosis in hand, her world shrank. We’ve been able to replace things like French toast sticks and crackers, but getting her to try new foods is…difficult.

Like parallel parking difficult.

Like threading a needle difficult.

Like there’s a better chance of me joining a gym than there is of her eating meat.

So, Saturday’s triumph was monumental.

This is the second surprise food experiment. The kid loves edamame. She eats them like they were coated in chocolate (we haven’t told her that Trader Joe’s sells chocolate-covered edamame yet). Even better, she refuses to eat them warm. I buy them fresh in the produce section or off the sushi bar at Wegmans and she eats them from the package. When we use the frozen, we have to defrost them then toss them in the fridge.

It’s the strangest thing (her reluctance to eat food, not her). She insists that she doesn’t like things, even though she has not tried much of what we offer. Yet, every so often we get a strawberry for the win, or a chance encounter with a soybean pod, or her diving at the bowl of pineapple-flavored (and gluten free) Dole Whip wanting more.

And that…that’s what we call a parental win.

Grocery list: April 6, 2013

The text message came through at 10:23 a.m.: “Layla is regretting her decision. She just stopped crying.”

Due to a work event on Sunday, I went grocery shopping on Saturday this week. The Wife was going to sit this trip out, but I had planned to bring The Kid with me. After a few minutes of asking, cajoling, faking sadness and bribing, The Kid refused to budge. I told The Wife that I would walk slowly to the car in case she changed her mind. I took my time putting on my shoes, put some thought into a hat (went with the orange Under Armour hat I have been wearing a lot lately), dropped my keys twice (unintentionally), and by the time I reached the car, there was no call to turnaround.

So I left.

And The Kid cried.

For a half-hour.

The Wife reports that she screamed, kicked, threw toys, and refused to be comforted. Why? Because she (allegedly) missed me and wanted to go to Wegmans.

When I got home, it was like I returned from a six-month tour of duty. Hugs, kisses and a refusal to be detached from me. And then she saw one of her new books on the coffee table and took off, going back to her normal place of ignoring me.

Grocery list: March 10, 2013

“Mama. I want a snack.”

The sound of The Kid’s voice echoes throughout the downstairs of my house, mercifully and momentarily drowning out Elmo, the furry red menace of our time.

“You have a snack. It’s in the bowl.” The Wife had provided my daughter with a bowlful of pretzel sticks and squares, better known as frosted shredded mini-wheats.

“But I can’t reach it.”

And that’s basically how today has gone. Our 32 months and 29 days old daughter had a marvelous Saturday, which has since morphed into whine and more whine. The Wife thinks it’s because The Kid awoke at 6:30 this morning, the first day of daylight standard time, and one day after sleeping in until well past 7. I think she’s constipated and just needs a good solid crap. It could go either way. The Kid is a brand new person after a lengthy nap, and I’ve seen them magic that a good, cleansing bowel movement has on her attitude. My cousin Mike, father of two boys, once told me that parenting was about shitting and sleeping. I’m not sure he’s ever been more right.

This week’s grocery list reflected a need for some essentials: deodorant for The Wife, wipes for The Kid, drain cleaner…exciting stuff.

Cookies with The Kid: Super Fast Fudgies

The Wife is a teacher, in case I had not mentioned it before. Last week was her February, or mid-winter, break. This is an antiquated holdover from the Carter-era energy crisis, used to send kids home for a week and prevent the need to heat schools. It’s a useless break in a calendar that makes no sense (Side note: Your school calendar, and school day, is based on the needs of 19th and 20th century farmers that needed their children available at particular times of the day and year to tend to the fields. We’re long past the point of needing summers off.), but you can’t get rid of it because most parents use the full week as an excuse to take longer winter vacations. Don’t get her started.

Wait, what the hell was this post about?

Oh, cookies. Right. So The Wife was home last week and kept The Kid home with her for part of the time. There is only so much you can do with a two-year-old inside the house before it gets old (The Kid has memorized all of her books) or mind rotting (she can tell you what Elmo’s World is within the first three seconds of the episode).

Grocery list: February 17, 2013

“How the hell did we spend $91?”

The Wife’s query was relevant, though the fact that she posed it to the cashier at Target did not seem to make much sense. The cart was not that full, by any means. Target is just one of those stores that, even though you need just a couple of things, you come out spending six times as much as planned.

“My razors were $19, but I had a $5 coupon, so…” My justification for the big package of Schick Hydro5 razors was based on an expired coupon where I was supposed to buy two items. It was weak, but it was the best I had.

“The dishwashing tabs were $11. And we spent $10 on frickin’ Kleenex.” My justification of $1 off coupons for each didn’t seem to settle. The $91 trip to Target came on the heels of a $91 trip to Wegmans, so I think that stung a little.

I used to tell The Wife that I would spend more money when she came shopping with me. It was true pre-child. A simple 10-item grocery list would explode with her. “Hey, let’s try this,” would act as a prelude to her dropping $20 in snack mixes or candy into the cart. The Kid’s birth didn’t really do much to the grocery side. I had become a coupon ninja in terms of formula and had it worked out where the store would actually owe me money (How you ask? Think back to 2010 when Similac had their big crisis with dead beatles in the powdered formula. The manufacturer got the stores to drop the price of the liquid stuff until production resumed. So, a $6 bottle of formula was now $3.50 at Target or $4 at Wegmans. I hoarded $5 off coupons, swapping them with other people for other brands. Between the coupons and those formula checks, I could clear a shelf at Target — I would go early on Saturday mornings when they stocked the shelfs and take the boxes right off the palette — and make out $30-40 to the good. There’s a reason why Target now reserves the right to limit coupons. His name is Jared. I ruined for everyone.).

Cookies with The Kid: Peanut Butter-Oatmeal Chipsters

I’m a selfish person. I admit it and am comfortable with it. If you are a regular reader of this blog, this fact should not surprise you.

For Christmas this year, I bought Nancy Baggett’s book Simply Sensational Cookies for The Wife. It was widely regarded as one of 2012’s best cookbooks, but my motive was simple: she needed to bake more, particularly more cookies. She enjoys baking and had not done it much since The Kid arrived. On the other side, I like love obsess over miss when she made me would put out for enjoy cookies. For store bought, Trader Joe’s does a nice job, and Provisions is probably the best bakery cookie in Syracuse but, nothing beats homemade.

The Wife took to the kitchen on Saturday and brought along a helper. The Kid has been very curious about what Daddy is cooking and I typically let her stir something when it’s on the stove. While my parents and grandparents would have seen no problem in giving e a knife to trim green beans at age 3, I think it will be a few years before The Kid takes on a functional role in the kitchen. But, cookie making is just The Kid’s speed.