Look Upward, Angel

I have been wanting to post this picture for awhile. Gammy took this picture during outside play time at school. She went with Wendy and Kiernan to school while I was at the Sundance Film Festival. I just love this picture.

Like Father, Like Son

My Aunt Claudia sent me this picture. I had sent a picture of Kiernan to my grandfather--his great-grandad--in Virginia (it's one of the closeup pictures below...probably this one) and it reminded her of this picture she took of me many years ago.

This picture made me pretty happy. I love the hair in particular, because up until two days ago Kiernan's looked like that, all shaggy and long. We were out in public this week and somebody asked me if we were going for a Luke Skywalker look for him. Poor guy could barely see.

So Wendy arranged for his hair-cutter extraordinaire, Godfather Darren, to come over on Thursday and cut his hair. Boy, was that fun! Yeesh. I swear, Kiernan was less fussy about open heart surgery. It was something of an ordeal, but not because of Darren, of course. He is amazing at cutting hair and is just wonderful with Kiernan, but the little guy was having a rough day. We had dropped his mom off at the airport early in the morning for a business trip. His schedule was a little off because of this, but more to the point, he was in Super Clingy Mode, which he gets in every time she takes a trip. Super Clingy Mode means I cannot take two steps without him jockeying to get in front of me and holding up his hands and saying, "Bup! Bup!" (his way of saying "up") over and over until I pick him up. This is especially fun when I'm trying to cook his meals. He wedges in between me and the cabinets, squirming in and holding up his hands. Makes it a bit difficult to cut carrots and grate cheese for a quesadilla when you're holding a twenty-two pound weight on one arm.

A friend of ours recently got us a cookbook called "The One-Armed Cook" which might be of help. I'm not sure if it will be, since I got annoyed with it when I started reading it. This is very silly, I know, but in their introductions the authors--two women--were constantly referring to the challenges of stay-at-home moms. Moms, moms, moms. Nary a mention of dads who cook. Just the constant assumption that the book was only being read by moms, as if they are the only ones doing the cooking in all families. As I said, I know this is a silly reaction on my part, but the rise of political correctness suddenly became a little clearer to me.

I also got an idea to write a cookbook of my own, for dads. Great idea, except for the fact that all but maybe two of my recipes come from The Joy of Cooking and Alton Brown's television show, "Good Eats" (and his excellent books). Borrowing recipes for your own book...that's not plagiarism is it? I mean, food is in the public domain after all.

Anyway, he was having a clingy day anyway and we did his haircut. He's so good natured usually, but this proved to be too much for him. Part of this is my fault because I really chose the wrong distraction video. As I've written earlier in this blog, our policy is not to let Kiernan watch any television until he's older. He does see some things--it's hard to avoid basketball this time of year, for instance, and we went to Darren and Daniel's house to watch the Oscars, and it's hard to avoid seeing their television if you are anywhere near their house. Which is why, when we can, we watch movies over there.

Wait a minute. Awesome television and great sound setup. Jacuzzi. Great beer. Excellent cooking. Come to think of it, I may spend my next vacation at their place. I wonder if they have any openings later this spring.

So he does see some incidental teevee, but we just don't park him in front of it and let him watch videos. When he's getting a haircut, or we're cutting his nails, we do put a video on and put him in his feeding table. Because he watches so little television, it's usually a very effective way of distracting him for these tasks. This time I made the mistake of turning on the television and checking some kids' channel before putting in one of his "Baby Einstein" dvds. The show that popped up on the channel was a collection of "Tom and Jerry" cartoons, something Kiernan had never seen before and which he immediately liked. I mean instantaneously. The mouse dropped an anvil on the cat and he just giggled, like we were testing his reflexes or something. But I got kind of a queasy feeling about this, especially when I saw that the mouse was smoking a cigarette. (I kid you not...Darren told me it was part of the pre-execution ritual: blindfold, cigarette...sadly they left out the hooker.) I don't think of myself as a fuddy-duddy about such things as cartoon violence, but the idea of my fifteen month old getting images of cartoon characters executing each other just didn't seem to jibe with what I want for him at this stage of his development.

The damage was done, however, because I put in the educational dvd, with its classical music and sweet images of kangaroo puppets and stars and while he liked it, it couldn't hold a candle to "Tom and Jerry" in the attention holding department. He was okay for a lot of the haircut anyway, especially when Darren squirted him with his spray bottle. He uses it to mist the hair, making it easier to cut, and Kiernan, water baby that he is, thought getting misted was just hilarious. He'd start crying because I was holding down his hands, but when Darren would spray him the crying would stop instantly and Kiernan would start giggling. Daniel and I sung along with "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star" as it played on the dvd and that helped too. But eventually he just had a meltdown. It was not pretty.

I feel the worst for Darren. Here he is trying to help out, performing one of his godfatherly duties, and Kiernan is just going nuts. To their credit, he and Daniel were patient and upbeat through the whole thing.

Anyway, he's got short hair now and it looks great. Also, his mom's back home from her trip so all is well with the world.