"My Brain Hurts"

When I was six or seven years old, I earned myself a pretty decent concussion. I was swinging back and forth between two propped open doors, and my reverse momentum was apparently unequal to the gravitational forces underneath me. My hands slipped off of the door handles and I smacked my forehead on the concrete floor, thus rendering me wobbly and blind for about two days. After what seemed like an eternity of staring at a huge black circle that enveloped 95 percent of my field of vision, my sight eventually returned to normal.

If anyone ever asks if I was dropped on my head as a child, though, from then on I had to answer affirmatively.

The doctor called it a "mild" concussion, and I've spent the years since trying to prevent my head from ever hitting the concrete at terminal velocity again. Today I found out there's virtually no difference between concrete and drywall with respect to head injuries.

When our previously mentioned door alarm sounded at 6 a.m. today—meaning that Connor's internal clock is about as stable as a bag of popcorn in the microwave—I was in an incredibly deep sleep. I'm talkin' could've-been-sleeping-in-my-own-poop-and-wouldn't-have-known deep. For some reason, though, the alarm woke me up instantly. I jumped out of bed and attempted to throw my pants while simultaneously bolting out of the room.

THUD.

I ran forehead-first into the wall by the bed, and crumpled to the floor as if I'd just, well, run into a wall. I would say that I misjudged the distance to the hallway but that would imply that there was some thought behind this. Keep in mind, also, that this entire scene unfolded before the three-second door alarm was even through chiming. I slowly made my way out into the hall and saw that Stacey—who was getting ready for work—was tending to Connor. Groggily, I made my way back to bed. After all, this is the same guy who went right back to sleep, bloody sheets and all, after I broke my nose in my sleep when I was 15 (a stereo fell off of my headboard and onto my face... don't ask).

I still feel like there's a railroad spike poking through my cerebral cortex, and my eyes are jiggling like Dolly Parton on a see-saw, but I'm slowly returning to normal—relatively speaking, of course. I have a nice acorn-sized lump on my forehead that will probably turn purple in a day or two. But, since I don't have a 'real' job right now, I don't really care.

Of course, I may try and be more careful tomorrow.

"Free Speech For The Dumb"

Disclaimer: If you haven't read the previous post, skip this one until you've read it.
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Conventional wisdom holds that the one to scream the loudest will be the first to fall. Remember yesterday's post? I believe I was bragging about how we'd finally conquered Connor's multiple escape attempts from his bedroom...

D'oh!

The very next morning, our soon-to-be cat burglar somehow managed to break out of his room without alerting me. The most likely possibility is that I somehow slept through the doorbell-like alarm, although I'm still not convinced that some technical glitch prevented the alarm from sounding. The only way out of his room that doesn't involve a child-proofed or alarm-enabled door would be through either the skylight or the airvent. At any rate, I think I'm going to hide the Batman comic books for awhile.

At any rate, at about 8 a.m., I received a phone call from Stacey (who was on her way to work) asking me where Connor was, because she had just gotten a phone call from her mom asking where I was, because Connor was downstairs banging on her door. Still following me?

Apparently, he snuck past our bedroom door, went downstairs and closed Grammy's bedroom door, so as not to get caught, and proceeded to pour salt all over the kitchen, den and foyer. I'm still a bit perplexed as to how he managed to get so much salt from one shaker. When he was satisfied with his many masterpieces, he banged on Grammy's door until she got out of bed.

It could have been infinitely worse, though; he could have attempted to wash the floor with spaghetti sauce—like his mother did as a child.

Anyway, in light of my overt bragging, I've learned my lesson... from now on, we're chaining him to the bed and dosing him with sleeping pills.

"Ring The Alarm"

The eagle has landed. The chicken is out of the pot. The vulture flies at midnight...

Okay, I'll come out and say it... Keeping Connor in his bed until a reasonable hour of the morning (read: NOT 5 a.m.) has become more difficult than trying to arm wrestle a steel beam.

In mid-November, Connor finally figured out how to escape his crib. It's one of the only milestones he's achieved behind schedule, and we feel quite fortunate to have kept him in bondage for as long as we did. If we could just get him to poop in the toilet, we'd be in business.

For the first week of his newfound freedom—or, life in a "big-boy bed"—he stayed put all night, but he soon figured out that he was in charge of when he got out of bed. 11:30, 1 a.m., 5 a.m.; it didn't matter to him. At first it proved most difficult just to get him to go to sleep. Once we mastered the intimidation necessary to keep him in bed at bedtime, he began to get up in the middle of the night. Even a particularly frightening barrage by the three dogs thinking that he was an intruder one night at about 3 a.m. didn't stop him from attempting nightly escapes on random occasions. But, we eventually managed to put a stop to that behavior as well. Soon, though, he began attempting to get up at insane hours of the morning. Seriously, I didn't even know that 4:30 a.m. existed until just recently.

The main problem is that Connor's bedroom is on the opposite side of the house as ours, and he is sneakier than a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, which makes sense, huh? He's so quiet in his exit that we never hear a sound on the baby monitor. Something had to give.

So, rather than locking him in his room—which Stacey responded to by throwing everything she owned out the window when she was a kid—we've installed an alarm on his bedroom door to alert us to his escape attemts. At least once a night/morning/nap, we're greeted with a cacophonous BINGBONGBINGBONG from our portable receiver that now gets toted around with the now-useless baby monitor.

So far, the system is working perfectly. In the one week since its implementation, Connor's escapes have been stifled at every turn. There have been no further instances of him appearing at his grandparents' bedside, Windex bottle in one hand, Windex-soaked stuffed animal in the other hand, saying, "My Daddy is asleep upstairs and I did a pooper!"

"Go With The Flow"

I've been given a fair amount of grief over the past two weeks for neglecting to post here. Actually, any time there's more than a six-hour lapse between entries, I get a passive-aggressive e-mail or two, informing me that I "need" to update my blog more often.

In light of such requests, if you will all kindly pool your funds and secure me a new iPhone, I promise to pay more attention to this oft-neglected space.

Seems a reasonable enough offer to enough to me.

Until said technological innovation is in my hands, however, do not expect much in the way of updates. You NEED me, dammit!

But, to tide you over until then, I'll share a little nugget of wisdom Connor shared with me today.

On our way home from school, Connor seemed quite preoccupied with the clouds, as they were nearer to the ground than usual, fluffier than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and whiter than my Western European-inherited legs.

Noticing his obvious interest, I started trying to explain that the clouds were filling up with rain, and that when they were full, the rain would begin to fall. I dumbed the lecture down for him, and he seemed geniunely interested, but when I concluded he offered just one statement in reply.

"I just tooted, Daddy."

That's my boy.