On Saturday night Regina was fortunate enough to attend the U2 concert at TCF Stadium. Her ticket was in a luxury box with great food and easy parking and she experienced the concert with other attorneys from her firm. It was a stormy night in the Twin Cities and despite the rain U2 played a two and half hour set in a steady downpour. Regina said the show was incredible, that the band sounded fantastic, their use of technology was astounding, the stage was great – she came back from the show fairly glowing. I was/am happy for her. Would I like to have gone too? Would I potentially injure another human being for such tickets? Would I sell a lung or perhaps agree to have a toe amputated for the pleasure of seeing U2? To all the above questions I whole-heartedly say, YES. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. NO!!!
But Saturday was great, really. It was great. Allow me to give you a little report:
Regina left the house at about 5:15pm. I set Henry in his chair at the kitchen table and served him a bowl of honey-flavored yogurt. I then turned my back on him to perform other household chores. When I looked back at him, perhaps only moments later, he was lathering his hair and face with white yogurt, apparently under the presumption that yogurt has “lotion-like” therapeutic value. I cleaned him off with a rag but needless to say, there was still yogurt everywhere. We went into the bathroom to take a bath together.
Henry has been doing very well of late with his potty-training. He has been peeing in the toilet about 2-3 times a day. But Saturday night was the first attempt at a trained poop. He sat on his orange duck-themed potty/stool and I sat on our toilet and we watched each other attempt to move our bowels. After some time had elapsed, he said, “Dad. Poop.”
I glanced in his toilet. There to see a nugget of feces not unlike what I would expect from a rabbit. And yet, I was elated. This was success, very clearly. We high-fived and then I moved him into the bath-tub for our daily shower/bath, or what I grew up calling “a shath.” Again, I turned my back on him for no less than twenty seconds. When I looked back at him he was saying, “Daddy. Big poop.”
I looked at the bottom of the bathtub, near his feet where a giant log of crap sat deterioting in the shower water. “No problem,” I said to him. “Next time sit on the toilet longer.”
While Regina was watching Bono and The Edge prance around TCF in the rain, I picked up a fecal brick with my bare hand and tossed it into the toilet. Then we washed up.
This, is fatherhood.
In other news I can’t sleep at all and have been working on my novel in longhand, which prevents me from wasting time on the Internet. I’m still working my way through Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace and looking forward to Moby-Dick, which I will be studying in the fall (a James Galvin led seminar – Yes!)
Light Travels Faster Downhill 