The New Normal

I did the first ten minutes of 30 Day Shred yesterday (before the baby woke up) and now I can’t sit or stand but seem to be stuck in some sort of human figure eight you might see as the closing pose in a rhythmic gymnastics routine. But Simon woke up at 5:45 so he could go to CrossFit (I KNOW) and then run 5 miles and then climb a rock wall, all in training for this season’s first triathlon, which starts so early in the morning on Saturday they might as well call it Friday, and therefore I figured breaking out the old workout DVDs was the least I could do. If he’s going to go all aggro and get in the finest shape of his life, I might as well strap into an adult diaper and do a few flappy jumping jacks in the living room, eh? (Did someone say flapjacks? Mmmmm…pancaaakes.)

Simon pokes fun at my system, which sometimes has me eating chocolate chips while working out, but I think I helped him understand my method when I reminded him that I’d eat the chocolate chips anyway, workout or not, and besides, he comes home from spin class and makes pancakes for the whole family, so even steven.

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In the house I grew up in (birth to age 22!), we never had a cordless phone. (I come by my “They’re listening!” paranoia honestly.) What was cool was that all of the phones had super-long cords, which I always figured was simply happy happenstance but just now realized was probably by my father’s very specific design, the point of which was that a person would be able to switch from phone to phone to phone without ever having to set one down to pick the next one up. We had something like five phones on the 1,000-square-foot main floor, and some of the cords were probably a dozen feet long.

I thought of this as I was looking around my current house and realizing I could probably get through all seven rooms of this 1,000-square-foot main floor by hopping from burp cloth to burp cloth. We have a least one stationed in every room at all times, they someone all end up on the floor, and I swear to god they’re multiplying out of control, or at least that’s what I think until I actually need one and can’t find one and then end up wiping milkbarf off a certain little piggy’s chinny-chin-chin with a swaddle blanket or a miniature beanie or a rogue Wombat sock or my own shirt. So it goes.

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I’ve mentioned before that we’re not the tidiest people, but the state of Wombat’s room over the weekend made me gasp.

I don’t even know how/when/why that happened, but I hope he grows up thinking our laissez-faire attitude toward many domestic duties makes us Cool Parents and not Perpetrators of Obvious Neglect. (At least there was no food hidden among the rest of the preschooler detritus.) Just to keep things interesting, I do make him clean it now and again, and I even manage to do a pretty good job of making it seem as if I care about this sort of thing an awful lot, when I actually would rather eat popsicles on the front porch while we wait for Daddy to come home. Three is the age at which we must earnestly start training a kid to be a good, responsible person, but it’s also the age at which every moment has the potential to survive as said kid’s earliest childhood memory, and perhaps I’m letting my own preferences cloud my judgement here, but I’m more partial to memories of blue popsicle tongues than those of learning which vacuum attachment works best for sucking the crumbs out of couch cushions. Rationalization? Maybe. But I don’t care. Popsicles for everyone!

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Finally, this: