Stay At Home Grandpa!

My dogs are old. They don’t usually act like it, but they are twelve and thirteen years young. Pepper, the older of the two, has gone mostly deaf. She can hear some loud things and certain tonal ranges, but for the most part, she’s oblivious. Pepper also has had issues with her back and hips. Nothing too debilitating, but they do bother her. She takes occasional anti-inflammatory medicine because of it. Which means she can be startled pretty good by a baby sneaking up and smacking her somewhere.

I have tried to teach the kids that when Pepper is on her bed, that’s her quiet spot and she shouldn’t be bothered. Julian eventually got it, or at least it seems that way. Layla, not so much. Layla just loves animals and soft things too much. It’s beyond her control. It’s a constant struggle keeping her from bothering the dogs. Of course, for some reason, they always want Pepper, the one most likely to be cranky. Pepper has snapped a few times–both kids have had the fear put into them. But it lasts about thirty seconds. The problem is that when they sneak up on Pepper and grab her or slap her or whatever, it’s their faces that are within Pepper’s reach. She has left a small dental dent on both of them from swinging her head around in an instinctive snap. She would never intentionally bite or hurt them, I’m sure of that, but on these surprise occasions, it’s scary.

Now, it doesn’t happen all the time. It’s not a daily occurence. It has happened maybe three or four times, maybe five between both kids together. But yesterday was the most worrisome. Layla was being her usual goofy self. I was giving her a bottle and she would drink some, get down and go play with her shapes box, come back for more milk, go play with the shapes, back and forth. Then, out of nowhere, she stands up from the shapes box, looks over at Pepper (lying in her bed in the “no touch” zone, of course), and runs over and dives on Pepper–who was facing the other way and sleeping. There was an extremely loud yelp–I’m sure it not only startled, but hurt her as well–and then Layla was crying. I know it probably scared her more than anything, but I could see the usual dent in her temple where Pepper’s canine hit her. This time, though, it looked like she hit her pretty good and maybe with several of her teeth!

I picked Layla up to comfort her and went to the freezer to get a piece of ice to help sooth it, putting the ice in a wet cloth. Layla didn’t like that and something about the ice made the “dent” actually start to bleed. It had broken the skin! There was also a small mark right by Layla’s eye. Scary stuff. I cleaned her up and put a little “dot” Band-Aid on it and continued to try to ice the surrounding area because I figured it would probably bruise–it was a “hit” at least as much as a bite.

Within a few minutes, Layla was “over it.” She was already looking at and wanting to go play with Pepper. I wasn’t so sure, however.

It obviously wasn’t Pepper’s fault. Nor was it Layla’s. I guess it could be mine, but there wasn’t any way I could have stopped her and I was right there, no more than five feet away. It was all that quick. I shudder to think what it must be like for a kid who is actually attacked by a dog. The damage that can be done so quickly without malice is surprising enough, but a dog with a purpose? Scary.

I have the “corral” or Super Yard, whatever you call it–a plastic collapsible fence I used when the kids were smaller. I’m going to see if setting a few sections around the dog bed will keep the kids away. The dogs will be able to go to their bed by going around the chair. It’ll be a lot easier if I only have to worry about that end of it. Yes, Layla is more than capable of going around the chair, but if she can’t get through from that end, I think it’ll work out just fine. And, with any luck, she’ll figure this all out in the next month or so–I think that’s about the same time Julian finally stopped terrorizing the dogs.

According to the CDC, 4.5 million Americans are bitten by dogs each year. That’s about one in every sixty-seven people. One in five of those cases requires medical attention. That’s a lot of dog bites. Hopefully our household is done being part of that statistic.

Shh! Layla’s sleeping.

She’s such a dear little thing. Today she had a smoothie and loved it. I made it with yogurt, chocolate soy milk, spinach, carrots, black cherries, pineapple, and blueberries. She loves to drink with a straw and made short work of her smoothie.

Layla usually gets two naps a day. They vary in length, but she’ll usually sleep at least an hour and a half in the morning and about the same in the afternoon. Now that she is sixteen months old (I can hardly believe it), she might start transitioning to one nap a day, but for now she’s sticking with two. On a good nap day she’ll go for two hours or even a bit more. You can tell when she’s ready for a nap. She’ll rub her eyes or her ears and look at you with these squinty eyes that say, I’m tired!

She doesn’t always go down quietly, even if she is ready. In fact, the more tired she is the more likely she is to fuss. But she doesn’t usually fuss for long, maybe ten minutes on the outside (though there have been times where she really, really fought a much needed nap).

Today she fussed for about thirty seconds. After I had left the room and closed the door, walked to the kitchen, and ran the tap, she piped up and let out a few squawks. And then, her usual M.O., nothing. Silence. She’s probably in there right now with her little bum up in the air and a stuffed animal snuggled under her chin snoozing away.

Perhaps its because of her upbringing–lots of distraction, usually sleeping in the same room as her mom and dad, all of that, once she’s asleep she’s usually really asleep. She’s a good, hard sleeper. And if she sleeps a long time she wakes up in a really good and silly mood. She’s a very silly baby to start with, but give her a lot of rest and you’re in for a treat!

Julian stared swim classes last week so I thought I’d go check him out today. It’s a short (25 minute) class, twice a week, to help get him used to going in the water, going under, kicking his legs, basic things like that. He seems to really like it. His favorite thing is going down the little slide into the water. He comes up spluttering and spewing, but he’s ready to go again immediately. Apparently I was distracting him today–he kept pointing over to me and saying “pop pop,” or however you would spell what it is that he calls me! (Yesterday, I think my name was bear paws.)

Julian seems to be very comfortable in the water. His instructor told Steph that he was going to graduate up to polliwog because of his comfort level, etc. All he has to do is spend five minutes alone with the instructor in the water, instead of mom, and he’ll be good to go. He’s definitely doing better than an older kid in the class at the other end of the pool–the kid screamed and cried the entire time. He didn’t want to do any of the stuff the instructor was trying to get him to do. Steph said he’s like that every time!

Here are a couple of shots–before class, during class, and after class.

I just spent several days in Vegas and had a great time (even though I consumed as much alcohol as I probably would in a year otherwise). It was hard shopping for souvenirs for the kids–not too many things are actually made for babies in souvenir shops. There were the usual cheap t-shirts and “onesies,” but they were were cheap and expensive. T-shirts were $10.99–and you know they aren’t going to last. But then I found some pretty nice stuffed bears wearing sweaters that said Someone who loves me very much went to Vegas and brought me this bear, or something like that. I actually ended up buying the same bear for both kids. There was a white tiger version that would have been good for Layla, but the bear is much softer and she loves to lay her little head down on soft things (it’s the dearest thing). The problem is that on the way home we stopped at the Route 66 Historical Museum in Kingman, AZ, and our friend Marie saw this really cute t-shirt for Julian. It’s a little black t-shirt with a row of flames broken in the middle by the image of a red tricycle. Below it it reads Cruisin’ Route 66. I had to buy it (it was only $8.99). Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything there small enough for Layla. Even though they are too young to think about equity of gifts, I still feel like the souvenirs are out of balance now. Oh well. We’ll probably all get over it.

Julian and I had a good day today. His mommy had an appointment so I met them there and whisked him away for an hour or so. We went over to the mall and walked around–we shared a small Robek’s juice drink (fine, I drank most of it) and a very overpriced Mrs. Field’s chocolate chip cookie–$1.90 for a regular-sized cookie? Seriously? We sat down in the food court area and Julian wrote down some clues in his notebook. He’s been watching Blue’s Clues lately and can now say notebook (bo-book!). I gave him a little notebook I had in my pocket for grocery lists and the like and he carried it all around with him.

After that we walked down to the germ-infested play area and climbed around on and down the slide several times and Julian crawled through some big tunnels. Julian also spent some time admiring a green cement lizard. They were good friends by the end of our play time.

All through the mall lots of people said hello to Julian and tried to get his attention but he ignored most of them. But then, as we were passing by Claire’s jewelry he decided he was going to pick up a girl he saw in there. He yelled at her and ran up to the glass and banged on it. She looked out at him and flirted with him. It was kind of silly. I was tugging on his monkey leash but he really didn’t want to leave–he kept trying to turn back and go back to her. How old is this boy? I think we might be in trouble.

After the mall we met Julian’s mom for lunch at Ole’ for some delicious Mexican food. I had rellenos. Julian thought about getting fussy and cranky, but after moving over to sit by grandpa and some judicious goofing around, he was fine. He can be such a silly one.

All in all, that was a good day with Julian!

It has been almost two months since I’ve written anything here–and so much has happened. I think Facebook has taken some of the juice out of the blog. It should be the other way around! I’m going to try yet another tactic–I’ve set the blogs as my startup pages.

Since I last wrote Layla turned one! That’s big! She runs around like nobody’s business and is smart and funny and just a beautiful baby (although, at the moment, she’s crying because I put her down for a nap–but she’s already losing steam). One of the dearest things is her kitty sound. When she sees a kitty in a book or when you ask her what a kitty says she makes the dearest little “Owwwwww” sound that sounds more like a real cat than the traditional “meow.”

I’ll be posting some belated birthday pics and will try to get caught up. If nothing else, I should treat this as some kind of daily journal. Maybe that’s the ticket.

It’s odd to think that this Sunday, on Easter, Layla will be one year old. In some ways it seems so long ago when she was born. It seems like a long time since I made the trek to Reno to help Tina and Justin and Layla move back to Tucson. That was one eventful trip–I fell asleep at the wheel and almost killed us, the vehicle caught on fire, so on and so forth. But here we are and Layla is going to be a year old. She has made so many changes and has grown so much. She is a silly little thing who likes to laugh and make silly noises. She loves to bounce around and gives every indication that she will be some kind of daredevil. She’ll probably want to go bungie jumping for her fifth birthday–oh, please don’t!

I thought she was going to be walking already. She has been standing on her own and walking along things for some time now. I thought she’d be running around like dervish by now. So far all she is willing to do is stand up on her own in the middle of the floor and take a couple of steps, no more than three. Then she plops and crawls. Maybe it’s a speed thing. Maybe she’s just being efficient. Could be. I think she has the ability, she just needs that little boost of confidence to send her on her way.

The other thing is how much she has to say! She talks up a storm. She doesn’t really say anything (though she says kitty!), but she rattles on and on and it sounds like she’s forming sentences along the way. We’re going to be in trouble when she can talk for real!

I seem to have an inordinate number of photos of the kids in high chairs. I think it’s because it’s about the only time I can get them to stay relatively still! These are all from March, and probably from only two or three days at that!

So, right on top of my rant about doing with less, so on and so forth, I write this.

My little Mans has a pair of Faux Crocs that he got from The Children’s Place. He loves them. He wants them on all of the time. He loves them so much that today, like a good consumer, I went to Target and got two pairs of my own  Target faux Crocs, one for indoors and one for outdoors–backyard gardening and the like.

I’m such a hypocrite.

As I started to say in my previous post, there’s no reason to believe my grandchildren won’t see the end of this century. And, again, if I and science hold out, I just might see the middle of it. I think of the changes I have seen and the social changes that happened around me, whether I was all that aware of them at the time or not. For instance, I was a young kid in Detroit during the days of the equal rights movement and I have vague memories of the race riots happening only a few miles from my home. I remember the National Guard driving down my street, though I had no idea why–I just thought it was cool that “the army guys” were driving in front of my house. I didn’t know why my mom wouldn’t let us out on the street to watch, though.

In 1973, the year we moved from Detroit to Traverse City, the American Indian Movement was under siege at Wounded Knee. I was ten years old and had absolutely no concept of what was going on. I thought it was cowboys and Indians. I suppose it was that same old story, but back then I was ignorant enough not to realize whose side I should have been on.

In April of 1970, just a few days past my seventh birthday, we celebrated the very first Earth Day. It was an age of environmental awareness and, despite all of the bad things that would follow Richard Milhous Nixon to his grave, despite that he really was, in some ways, a crook, he was also a pretty damned good environmental President. A lot of our clean air and water can be directly attributed to the acts of Dick Nixon.

And it’s the environment that spurred this initial post. I’m not sure how it got off on television and playing outside and all of that, but the original intent was to ruminate a bit on the future of the world from an environmental position. You see, science clearly tells us that fifty years from now we will be living in a world very much different than the one we occupy today. Oh, sure, it will be the same size and shape, as long as a huge meteor doesn’t strike us somewhere along the way. The continents will generally be where they are now, though they will be just a bit smaller as sea levels rise and much of our current coastline sinks below the waves. Global climate change is occurring and there’s little hope of stopping it, or abating it in any significant way.

And that’s what worries me. What will the world be like for my grandchildren? Millions of people will be displaced around the globe, mostly in regions that are already stricken by poverty and a lack of food. Fresh water will be a concern not just in those places, but right here as well. Many people–people we should be listening to, by the way–tell us that fifty years from now our concerns will not be for petroleum, they will be for clean, fresh drinking water. You can, however inconvenient it may seem, live just fine without petroleum. Try living without fresh water. It doesn’t work. Water will be the most valuable commodity, followed closely by food. It is for these two things that the wars of the future will be fought.

We live in a world of nearly 6.8 billion people. The United States has a mere 300 million of those people and we use 25% of the world’s resources. By 2050–a year I could conceivably see as a babbling, senile, all but useless 87 year old man–the world population is expected to be over 9 billion people. Some say as high as 10 billion. We are already living, well, most of the world beyond our borders, anyway, in a world where resources are stretched thinly and are nearing the breaking point. If you start eliminating coastal regions due to flooding and storm damage brought about by climate change, you’re looking at a lot of hungry, thirsty, displaced people who are going to be looking for better digs. We is the better digs, folks.

Scientists have been telling us these things for several decades now–it’s not just some crazy idea that Al Gore thought up. Al Gore just happens to be one of those rare people who was in a position to get accurate, factual information about what’s coming down the pike and he got scared enough to use his influence to try and do something about it. But a lot of people who like their current lifestyle and don’t feel like changing anything so some kids in the future can maybe be happy once in a while have done everything in their power to vilify him and try to make the rest of us think he is nuts and all the global warming science is a myth. Well, it’s not.

We are in the midst of the next great extinction. We have been for at least a century. They come around every couple hundred million years or so. Anywhere from 75%-90% of species generally die off during these events. That’s what happened to the dinosaurs. There are estimates that as many as three species go extinct every hour. Every. hour. Plants, animals, etc. It’s an estimate, yes. And probably not easily confirmed since a lot of the species are rainforest species that might not have even been cataloged yet! There were over a thousand species of mammal on the IUCN Redlist in 2008. Their report “has confirmed an extinction crisis, with almost one in four [mammals] at risk of disappearing forever.” It is much more than likely that I have seen animals that my grandchildren will never see. By 2050 we’ll be living in a much different world; even if we change every single bad habit we have as a species, some of these events are already in place and inevitable. It’s quite possible that American wildlife will be little more than white-tailed deer, coyotes, possums, rats, sparrows and black birds, vermin, and not a whole lot more. Diversity is dwindling and not just in the suburbs.

Somewhere in the middle of this I have to have hope. I have to hope that something will happen and we’ll get ourselves on track before it’s too late and maybe, just maybe, we’ll preserve some semblance of a decent world to live in. I want happiness for my grandkids. I want them to be able to go out for a hike and see animals. Different animals. And not just in zoos. I want them to be able to see more plants and insects than they can readily identify. I want there to be some mystery to their world. Something exotic in a pleasing way. I want them to live a life where they can have a varied and healthful diet and clean water to drink and I want them to be able to have these things not at the expense of people around the world. There’s a way for all of us to live sustainably. We just need to find it. To, first, look for it and strive for it. The future is now, as they say, and it’s high time we all start looking for ways to break out of our paradigm and start shifting things around because our sense of importance is completely upside down.