Happy Birthday to Me, a day early

Erin came over this morning after dropping Toni off at school; the plan was for her and Char to get some last minute, pre-baby shopping done, and to stock up on groceries neither she nor Miko would feel like shopping for over the next few weeks. She was getting uncomfortable pregnant and didn't want to have to shop for more than essentials until after the baby was born, and with two weeks to go, it seemed reasonable to stock up on non-perishables. After all, she had grocery runners living a couple blocks away if she needed us and just couldn't bear to pull herself up and get the kids ready to go out.

That all sounded good, because I wasn't being forced to go and was going to get to spend the morning with Travis, until her water broke in the middle of our kitchen.

I was ready to pick her up and slam her into the car and race to the hospital; both she and Char were a little too calm, looking at watches and declaring there to be plenty of time. Erin called Miko and told him she'd be heading toward the hospital "in an hour or so" and Char called Brad to ask him to pick our kids up, and then to swing by Toni's school to get her. Erin called Miko's mother to come get Travis; she was content to babysit and wasn't going to spend all day sitting in a waiting room and preferred to watch her grandson. You couldn't have kept me away from the hospital, even if all I did was sit in the waiting room.

It took me an hour to get those women out the front door, and then another 20 minutes at Erin's because she "had" to have her laptop, Kindle, change of clothes, focus object, and probably a six pack of beer, judging by how big the damned bag was.

I was fully prepared to pull the car over and deliver that kid right there on the side of the road, she was moving so slowly. I did ask her to just cross her legs tightly and hold on for another 18 hours or so, just so that he would be born on my birthday, but holy shit, that girl has a mouth on her. I have no idea where she gets that from.

So instead of getting final baby things and stocking up on groceries, Erin and Char spent the day watching TV while Miko and I played cards and snoozed, until Erin stated matter-of-factly, Well, I think it's time.

Half an hour later, 9 lb 2 oz, 21" long Thaddeus Nicoli Kosta popped out into the world, and after getting their own very long look at him, his parents graciously allowed Char and I to count his fingers and toes and proclaim him one of the 6 most beautiful babies we've ever seen.

Baby Thad will get to go home tomorrow, but because it's my birthday, Erin promised to stop here first, so that I can properly welcome my newest grandson into my life.

I'm too old for a toddler

Erin is in the last few weeks of her pregnancy, and is feeling it. She's ready to have this baby and if sheer will could start labor, we'd be rushing towards the hospital. Miko would be ticked off because he would miss it, but I think she just wants to be done.

He's on an extended trip for work, getting some last minute things taken care of so that he can take a couple of weeks off when the baby is born, something Erin is happy about, but she's also annoyed that he's not home to help with Toni and Travis, and she's exhausted. Last week she was sick, this weeks she's just tired.

So yesterday and today, after she took Toni to school, she dropped Travis off here so that she could go home and sleep, then do as much of nothing as she wanted to until Toni got home in the afternoon. To give them a little non-infant-enhanced time together, we're keeping Travis until almost bedtime.

I'm having a blast with him, all day without Alex and Rachel and Kevin helping to watch him, but this is tiring. He's a tiny tornado, into everything and trying to walk as fast as he can, falling over every third step (at which he says quite seriously, Oh no!) If he's not trying to speed walk, he's crawling almost faster than I can catch up to him.

He's beginning to talk more, expanding his vocabulary beyond, Mama, Dada, and Oh no. He can point at Tank and say puppy and chases the cats while meowing at them. If you ask him if he's hungry he says, Yes, yes, yes! and if you ask him what he wants to do he'll tell you, TB (TV, which invariably means Sesame Street.)

What he refuses to say, though, is Grandpa. I've been trying, bribing him with cookies, but all that's doing is making him laugh at me, and he gets the damned cookies anyway.

He gives good kisses, though, so I suppose he's forgiven.

Miko called at nine this morning wanting to know if we could babysit; he and Erin had a couple of non-kid friendly errands to run and it would just be easier to not cart them around, but fine if we couldn’t watch them. With no Saturday classes to get in the way and nothing on our schedule, we jumped at the chance to spend the day with the kids.

Char’s dad showed up at ten to take the bikes out (why Rachel has no problem with him riding, I don’t know, but she was in tears last weekend when she thought I was going to ride) and stayed for lunch (prompting a few “huh” moments when Toni said “Grandpa” and we both answered. He’s just used to answering to it, but it made Toni giggle so much he kept it up all afternoon.) When the baby had a massive diaper blowout, though, he suddenly had to go out to the garage to make sure he hadn’t parked the bikes too close to the lawn mower.

I have to admit, this was one of those afternoons that makes me think moving is going to be a good thing, as much as I haven’t felt like I wanted to. It’s such a long drive from Erin and Miko’s to here that we don’t get to babysit as much as we would like, and once we’re in the new house they’ll be three blocks over and we’ll be able to see the grandkids much more frequently.

As a complete aside, my sister (and I hope you’re reading this) really screwed herself over when she kicked Erin out. She’s missing out on every major moment her grandkids have, and she handed them over to me. I get to experience the sheer joy of Toni’s innate sweetness and Travis’s insane giggling fits. I get to be the one who hears “Grandpa” in both tears and happy squeals, and I get to be the one who gets the crayon scribble pictures and ribbon-tied puffs from their first haircuts. My sister has two incredible biological grandkids, and she’s missed it all and will miss it all. I don’t know if Erin will ever completely recover from it emotionally, but she has family who gives a damn, and Char has been able to help her wade through a lot of the feelings of being abandoned by her mother.

Totally aside from anything.

We spent the day playing with the kids, or watching them in the back yard playing with each other. Alex and Rachel humored us by playing Simon Says and Tag with Kevin and Toni, and even the dogs got it on it. There was a lot of laughter surrounding us today.

When Erin and Miko came back to pick up their kids, she pulled Char and I aside to tell us why they needed some time without an inquisitive little girl along for the ride. They needed to confirm something.



Sometime in May, I get to be a Grandpa all over again.

Now I want to move.

Her hangover mostly abated, Char decided tonight was a good night to offer babysitting services to Erin and Miko. Essentially this meant “bring the kids over, Grandpa will suffer diaper duty and will intimidate his granddaughter into eating broccoli and I will play with them.” I don’t mind diapers and I don’t mind staring down a 6 year old until the vegetables are gone, but I expect something for it and being the one to play with them would be nice.

When our kids were told their cousins were coming over, they couldn’t have been happier. They learned quickly that if I have to cook for a 6 year old, it’s going to be hot dogs and macaroni & cheese with a broccoli chaser, something that turns Char’s stomach (Do you know what’s in hot dogs? That’s not even real cheese! How can you feed them that?) And they started making plans for activities with the 6 year old that did not involve either Char or myself.

Basically, I was down to feeding through intimidation and diapers. Play time with my granddaughter was usurped, but hell, I could hold the boy hostage.

Except that Alex got to his baby cousin first and I don’t think I held him for more than 5 minutes in the first four hours he was here. I waited for the first dirty diaper to rear its ugly head, but Alex took care of that. He handled the bottles. And he wandered through the living room carrying the baby and announced that he really wanted one of these. From the other side of the sofa I heard Char mutter I am tying your dick in a knot until you’re twenty five.

Considering he can out walk her run right now, he wasn’t worried.

Char and I didn’t actually get any time with either of the grandkids until an hour before Erin and Miko came to pick them up, and then it was only because Rachel wanted to make cookies and they handed the baby over because they knew their attentions would be divided.

I think it struck both of us while we sat on the sofa holding a very sleepy baby: Alex turns 14 in less than three weeks. Erin landed on our doorstep when she was just shy of sixteen, and shortly after that Miko was sniffing around, trying to convince me he was worthy of dating my niece. He had a brand new driver’s license and a POS car, he barely had peach fuzz, and he wanted to take my niece places.

I did not relent easily. Aside from the circumstances under which we assumed custody of Erin, I had never parented a teenage girl; Char wasn’t that far removed from those years and was perhaps more sympathetic than I, but our parental experiences were limited to someone who spoke monosyllabically and ran around with gummi worms hanging out of his nose.

Miko was patient. He spent an entire year not dating Erin, but hanging around our house, allowing us the time to get to know him and trust him. I don’t doubt that there wasn’t a whole lot of tonsil hockey being played when we weren’t looking, but he was respectful without being boorish about it, and I gradually warmed up to him.

Char made the decision, finally. She caught me when my defenses were down and pointed out that their prom was four months away, and it would probably be a good idea if I let them go on an actual date before then. Whatever Erin had done before she came to live with us didn’t count; she’d earned our trust and deserved to have it shown. I relented; as long as he had her back by curfew—and I was a son of a bitch about what time—they could go out.

He never failed to have her home at least half an hour before curfew. The night of their junior prom, while we waited in the living room and I grudgingly said he could keep her out until 2, when the venue they would be at officially closed, he was man enough to look me in the eye and tell me he knew what I was most concerned about, and he would absolutely not try that.

I got no promise the next year while he waited for her to get ready for their senior prom, and I do not want to know; what I do know is that he has always treated her with respect, and he has always treated my relationship with her with respect.

Alex is in his sophomore year; it’s a year early, but in a few months he will be at a point in school where Erin was when Miko first began working overtime to be allowed to date her. If we hold him to my anger-inspired declaration that he’s not dating until he’s sixteen, he’ll be a senior. He wouldn’t have that experience of being stared down by someone’s father for his junior prom, and he won’t have the opportunity to prove himself, either to a girl’s father or to us, before he’s very nearly out of high school.

The greater question becomes whether or not we risk stunting him socially because I had a knee jerk reaction to his sixteen year old girlfriend, or we hold fast because I don’t want him making hormonal mistakes when he’s too young to have a clear head about them.

Char reminded me that I gave Miko a chance just by letting him hang around here; Erin wasn’t ready to actually date for a long time after she moved in, but I did let the little hornball stay for hours on end. Alex is at least as mature as those two were, so why not give him the chance?

I’m not sure I’m happy about it, but she is right. And I appreciate that she’s trying to make it seem like this was my decision when we both know who made it. Alex won’t be able to drive for two more years, so chances are he’ll have to avail himself of Dad’s Taxi, but we’re going to allow him to at least put himself out there.

You know family dynamics can look odd from the outside yet perfectly ordinary from the inside; I've had to explain my family so many times I can do it from a rote, practiced explanation, but today I tried explaining it to a nurse and mucked it up enough that she either thinks I'm insane or sleep deprived or both. Our oldest is 13.That's easy enough and the nurse met him yesterday. Today she met my grandkids and I could tell by the look I got that she didn't quite get it. I didn't quite explain it either. But they weren't there to see Char so I didn't really have to.

I took custody of my niece when she was 15. There's a lot of unpleasantness behind that but the short of it is that my sister is no longer in her daughter's life, and God only knows where the girl's father is. So my niece is more like my daughter and the relationship was sealed pretty much like that before she graduated from high school. Her daughter doesn't realize I'm not actually her grandfather yet, and her son is too little to know who anyone really is. But the gist of it, my oldest child is 13 but I have a 6 year old grandaughter and a 5 month old grandson.

Erin brought them to the hospital today while she visited Char. She knew they would not be allowed in the room with her but I think her bringing them was intentional. I stayed in the waiting room with them and got to hold the baby while trying to convince him it was not possible to get lunch on the tap from me, and I got read to from an assortment of Dr. Seuss. The distraction was nice and I probably needed it more than I realized.

Erin was the only visitor I allowed in to see Char today, because she just wasn't up to it. Alex (eldest son; not using their names was turning my brain into crap) didn't ask this morning and I overheard him telling Rachel and Kevin that Mom was"exhausted after the operation" and he didn't want to bother her but he promised he would see her tomorrow and if they want to send notes he'll take them. That kid drives me nuts sometimes and after all the crap we've gone through the last month with him it's easy to forget that he is a good kid and he's a very good big brother.

Tomorrow I'll start making a pain out of myself at the hospital because I'm not convinced they're handling her pain levels well enough. I would have done it today but I wasn't exactly sure who I needed to talk to but Mike (Thumper's Spouse Thingy) turned me in the right direction and I have an appointment with the PIC of the ICU tomorrow and hopefully we can figure out what to do for her. Today she was in a lot of pain and spent most of it fighting tears because of it. That just pisses me off because I don't think she needs to suck that much up.

On the bright side, she had a little bit of an appetite today and was willing to try to eat. She hates that she needs help but even though the right side of her body is just bruised it's still sore as shit and hurts to move. I don't want to contemplate just how upset she's going to be when the solid food is actually digested and the bedpan gets dragged out (and yes, I apologize for that, angel, but it amuses me a little because now you know how I felt.)

It amuses me too how someone you've been married to for 14 years can suddenly be so modest. Evidently bed baths are mortifying and husbands are not allowed to be witness to them. Lesson learned.