Having a kid takes the “vicariously” out of “living vicariously watching others”. When was the last time you stood in a mud puddle in the summertime and felt warm mud goosh through your toes? How about a surprise soak from a waterspout on a hot day at a water park? How about going down a slide or swinging in a swing? The list goes on. When your one and a half year old son decides to try that stuff out, he needs supervision, and that usually means participant observation. Before a couple of weeks ago, I would’ve answered “at least a decade or two” to each of those questions. Today the answer to that same question would be “In the last couple of weeks”.

It feels good.

On a number of levels, too. Firstly, just physically, all those things are fun. Warm mud in between toes is pleasant just on it’s own. But more so, it feels good to see Coop become his own guy, to have his own experience. To boot, my own experience is starting to matter more to me than it did when Coop was a little baby. It used to be that whatever I wanted to do was deferred to the more immediate responsibility of taking care of his needs. You start to lose track of your ego in those early months. As my friend Deb put it, “You are no longer the centre of your universe; someone else is. You are always just off-centre”.

Turns out though, it doesn’t take that long for that to turn around. I am still very aware of my role as parent and his as child when we are together, but as time goes by, he’s becoming his own person, and I find Coop and I are keeping each other company more than fulfilling obligatory family roles of care giver and care receiver.

When Coop was a tiny baby, he used to turn his head when he heard a bus go by outside on the busy street we live on. As he started to crawl and walk, he’d rush his little body to the window to look out and see if he could catch a glimpse of a bus speeding by of it after hearing the diesel roar. “Bus” was one of his first words, and it’s probably the one he’s uttered more than any other. He loves pictures of buses, toy buses, and youtube video of buses.

A few weeks ago I was on my own with Coop; it was the first day like that in a while. I was looking forward to that day and I’d come up with a plan. I had him up and fed early, and packed a bunch of snacks for both of us in the diaper bag. We went downstairs, on to that busy street, and hopped on the first bus that came by. It was the number 6, it took us through downtown, across Victoria’s Inner Harbour and to the home of the Pacific Naval Fleet in Esquimault. On the bus driver’s advice, we stopped downtown on the way back, and took the number 50, a double decker, out to Langford and back. We sat in the front row on the top deck, munching on granola bars and blueberries. We saw birds, a deer, and countless other buses. there were all kinds of folks who couldn’t help smiling at Coop’s enthusiasm for the trip, and airplanes galore (some real, some imagined).

It was a really great day. I know Coop was loving it, but my efforts in making it happen weren’t all for him, I had a great time too. Parenting didn’t feel like work that morning. It really felt more like hanging out with a family member I liked.

The moments where you realize that transformation from infantdom to personhood are subtle to notice, but they hit you like a ton of bricks when you figure them out.

We couldn’t track down one of Coop’s new shoes a while back, and that really was a drag, because we’d just bought them and the old ones weren’t going to fit for too long. It was gone for two days, and we looked everywhere. We’d both figured it was probably lost out for good; it had probably dropped off his foot in the stroller or on an outing at some point.

Then, while I was distractedly hammering away on my laptop, Coop comes up to me and hands me his shoe, the one that we were looking for. It really hit home. Only Coop knows where that shoe was. Only he knows why he put it there. That experience and knowledge is all his own, not anybody else’s.

Where the shoe was and why it was there is pretty insignificant knowledge. And it shouldn’t surprise me, that Coop is a person who can have his own unique experience and knowledge. Babies are where people come from, and unique experiences and knowledge are things people have. I’ve known that pretty much my whole life. But, when Coop was an infant, so small, so helpless, so tiny, and so mine, he really felt like an extension of myself. Literally, I found he felt like an appendage on my body, like another limb. When he was just a tiny baby, scarcely more than a year ago, I felt his pain when he cried, and his joy seemed my own when he smiled,

And when he was a tiny baby, and I was taking on his emotions, as well as everything he needed, I really couldn’t have imagined him experiencing or knowing something that I didn’t. But there in his big boy hand was his big boy shoe, and he put it somewhere, and then he decided to give it to me. That was his all his prerogative, his experience, his knowledge, and not mine at all. WHAM! That’s a person standing there, albeit a small and short-tempered one without much of a vocabulary. Still, hardly a baby at all.

He’s his own guy with his own interests and motivations. He really loves buses. He has secret shoe hiding places. He likes toast and broccoli but doesn’t care for sweet potato. He loves a good laugh and enjoys collecting carpet lint.

I’m still the Papa, the guy in charge between the two of us. On that bus ride, though, I wasn’t taking Coop out for an adventure. That day, it was Coop who was taking me.

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When Coop starts to get tired, he becomes a little on the emotionally labile side. This means he might pull a tantrum at any moment, but on the brighter side he sometimes starts to get really entertaining, and also very entertainable. Here he is displaying irrational exuberance at toast.

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I went on about this a month or so ago, here it is for real.

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

Also from that same photo shoot:

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Our little boy took his first steps today, just shortly after his first birthday.

He didn’t take many, but he wanted to get from me to his mama, and she was holding her arms out, and rather than get down on the ground and crawl, he just took two steps, and there he was. We got all excited, and spun him around, and sure enough, he took two steps back to me.

I think he actually didn’t really see this as that big a deal. He’s pretty quick with cruising on furniture, and these days when he stands up and leans on me I can feel that there is barely any weight there, and while there used to be a little tug and wobble, he’s stable on his two feet now. Us parents were sure excited, though!

I remember when he started to crawl, we were terrified. Suddenly he was mobile and had to be watched. He could get his hands on God knows what and stuff it in his mouth and that would be the end of him! Gone would be the days of just leaving him with a toy on the ground to answer the phone in the next room. We’d have to baby proof like crazy. How proof is babyproof anyway? Everything, I mean, EVERYTHING looks like a choking hazard when you are trying to babyproof.

But you know what? It was not that bad.

Sure, pocket change is now enemy #1, but instead of needing someone to bring him toy if Cooper was bored, after he started crawling he could just get it on his own. Instead of having to be shown anything he was going to learn, he could now open and explore and figure out without any help. He’s got the hang of putting things into other things. He’s stacked blocks on top of other blocks. He’s learned a hard lesson or two about gravity. While we’ve been there to help him learn that stuff, and we make the occasional suggestion to him, I don’t think we can’t take much credit for his accomplishments. He’s a consummate researcher, conducting all kinds of experiments all the time. He retests hypotheses and proves his theorems. Without his crawling, he’d have a much harder time doing his work.

And now that he’s starting to walk, I’m trying not to freak out in the same way I was when he started to crawl.

But that’s hard, because it’s new, and I don’t know what new dangers walking will show us. For one thing, the babyproof zone just got about 18” taller in our little house, so that will take some rejiggering. For another, I’m going to have to improve my reaction time. On all fours, I can give him about a 6 second head start when he’s making a run for a forbidden doorway accidentally left open. How will walking change that number?

So while that’s all kinda scary, I am trying to remember the good changes that happened with crawling. I anticipate soon I won’t be carrying him so much. I suspect we might soon be able to make use of some of the great looking playgrounds in our neighbourhood. I’m looking forward to spending more time outside.

The question I am considering now is, how long after he’s walking do I have to make adjustments to get used to him running?

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Every day our kiddo is changing and learning new stuff. He used to be a cute little lump, and I do miss the cute little lump, but his new tricks are mind-blowing to me. It’s all so fast!

But it’s also great. Like the other day, he figured out the social convention of waving. Seriiously, the previous day he wasn’t doing this. This video was taken within 20 minutes of the first time he ever waved at anyone or anything.

And that is totally fun. It’s a big thing, when I get to communicate with him like this. Lumps don’t wave.

Here’s even more waving:

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The funniest word in the world is, “KNITTING”!

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OMG! SRSLY! ROTFL!!!!111

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Turns out he is!

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So here it is, my first Father’s day as a father.

It was grand! Pancakes for breakfast! A long, loud screaming, failed attempt at a nap! A trip to the museum! Chinese food for dinner! Blog writing whilst chocolate cookies bake right now! Could life be finer? Well, reading that agenda you could probably identify exactly what would make the day finer, but that’s the new life I lead. Gratefully, I might add.

And I am grateful. I love that littly guy. The time I spend with my family is the most important time for me these days. Today is Father’s day. It’s the day of all days to appreciate that. So I’ve been thinking about fatherhood, and that’s had me thinking about my father.

My brother and I know my dad like no-one else in this world does. We know him as a father. In fact, I know that Mr. Lathrop in ways that he doesn’t know himself. I’ve been watching how he does things carefully for the last 36 years. Sounds weird, as I write it, but it’s true. I’m his son. I can’t help it. It’s what I am meant to do. In case you’re reading this, Dad, and I know you are, I think you have done and are doing a great job. Happy Father’s day!

Now I’ve got a son. Know what? I am on to him. He is watching my every move. I can already tell, he knows me in ways I don’t know myself. Like I said, though, I am on to him. I get to know him, too, as my son. That’s something new that I now I have in common with my Dad, I know what it’s like to have a kid. It’s a trip. It’s big to think about. It makes me feel like part of a bigger chain of parents and children in time. I’ve got a new place on that chain, and it isn’t at the end anymore – there’s a link on both sides now.

Big stuff to think about, but I need to stop writing now and answer the cookies that are calling me. I am indeed a very lucky man.

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I haven’t been blogging so much lately. I promised a monthly picture. I guess I fell off that wagon pretty quick. It might be the advent of Cooper that’s caused this, but I think it’s more likely Twitter.

Twitter allows me let off steam a bit at a time, rather than all at once in a big blog entry. It’s a shame though, because when I read my tweets, I can’t say I really feel that they are anything to be proud of. Not so with the blog entries – when I look back and read them I see a record of the headspace I was in and the person I was when I wrote it. All I get out of the tweets is a record of what kind of lunch I had on a given day, or something equally as banal.

And, dare I say it, this is a trend in the way human communication has been affected by technology. We go from fewer, more intimate connections to impersonal ones in a greater quantity. It used to be we connected face to face. The telephone let us connect from afar but only from voice to ear. Then email came along, and while easy to write, the inflection of speech is lost in binary text. It’s less personal than a written letter, too, we lose the flourish one can give a written word with their unique penmanship.

It used to be a blog entry seemed a little impersonal to me. Compared to a tweet or a facebook status, however, a blog entry is hardly impersonal. It seems that the more social platforms are invented, the more we are encouraged to communicate in quantity, not quality. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I just can’t sum up most of the experiences that count in my life in 140 character packages.

All that said, I like Twitter. I like the immediacy of it. If I know what so-and-so had to say 20 minutes ago, doesn’t that imply a connection, regardless of the content of the communication? I like feeling that connection. I also like that I can contribute to my followers in less than 60 seconds by writing a quick tweet. Not much thinking is involved, so it is very convenient. I can still concentrate on the other 10 things I am doing at the same time.

But something gets lost. I have friends I read tweets from regularly that I haven’t spoken to or heard from otherwise in months. I start to assume we’re in touch, and I guess we are in a way, but I don’t really know what’s going on any more than I do the guy I saw in the elevator this morning. (I said, “hey”. So did he. I said “How’s it going?” He said, “Good and you?”, and I said “Good.”).

If that guy read this blog entry, I think he’d know me a little better. I guess that’s why it’s important for me to make time for blogging.

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Or if you do, I recommend having a washcloth ready.

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I ordered a new computer the other day, and I am giddy about its imminent arrival. I’ll miss the current one, though. My old laptop was purchased in the beginning of 2005, and has served me very, very well.

When I bought it I did an experiment. Previously, I’d always focused on specs per dollar. Whichever machine had the most RAM, processing speed, or hard drive space won out. Back when I bought this one though, I tried putting a new criterion ahead of all that.

I walked around the store, trying out the laptops and judged them for their physical attributes. Not for aesthetics, but ergonomics. I wanted keys that didn’t have different functions printed on them. I wanted a number pad. I wanted ports on the side instead of the back. I wanted a well placed touchpad that didn’t get in the way of typing. Once I found a machine that felt like I wanted of too, then I went about finding the particular model that had the specs I needed.

And honestly, I think that’s why I’ve kept this old thing as long as I have. I love working on it and always have. Hopefully the new one serves me as well.

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As promised – the monthly photo.

There were highlights from February too:

• The birth of my new nephew, Will. I am thrilled for Cooper, who had 4 girl-cousins before, now he has 4 girl-cousins and one boy-cousin who is only a couple months younger!
• Going back to work. My first day back was February 2nd. I like my job, but not working for 2 months was pretty great. I can see why people buy lottery tickets.
• Going to the Butterfly Gardens here in town, or just outside anyway. Julie and I went and joined part of a meetup.com group of folks with kids doing kid friendly stuff. It was fantastic – I expected the visit to be interesting, but didn’t forsee it being relaxing. We bought passes.
• Hanging out with visitors from Vancouver, Elizabeth, Gord, and Tamara.
• Watching Cooper with his Nana and Pop when my in-laws came for a visit.
• Slowly but surely, finding parenthood more and more normal, and finding bits of time to do some of the stuff I’ve always done – fiddling on computers and playing music with my buddies.

There are highlights from March already too, but I’m going to save them for later.

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Here are some things I’ve learned in the first two months of parenthood. These are listed in no particular order, except for the #1, because it belongs at the top of the list:

1. Julie is amazing. We decided to have Cooper, and bringing him into the world was no easy feat. It took a lot of hard work and dedication on her part to make that happen. I was there, but she was carrying the baby. Now that Cooper is here, the physical and mental demands on her are even more apparent, and while it’s not easy, she’s mustered the courage to take it all on, and it makes me proud and happy to know Cooper has such a great mom.
2. Having a contiguous thought for more than 10 minutes is a real challenge these days. Hence the bullet points. I took a little more than two months off work for the arrival of Cooper, and I had all of these grandiose ideas of how I would spend my time. I thought for sure I’d be blogging like a maniac. Twitter is much more conducive to the parenthood experience so far. The block of time necessary to write a paragraph is hard, but for a sentence or two, not so bad.
3. The days are long, the months are short. Lack of sleep and constant attention for the Little Man make the days seem long. Watching his behavior and physicality change so quickly, however, makes me very aware that the newborn Cooper I knew a month and a half ago is gone, and never going to return. It was great to know that 2 week old little Little Man, and I miss him, but now I have had the pleasure of knowing several other versions of the Little Man since then, and I’ve loved them all just as much or more.
4. There is no right way to do anything. All one can do is to survey all the right and wrong ways that others have done, and based on one’s intuition, try to pick the least wrong and most right among them.
5. I can function fairly well on not much sleep for an extended period of time. Getting 3 hours straight is good, and I think the all-time high has been around 6 or so between feedings. I always wondered how medical personnel do it, like the residents who work 36 hour shifts and the like. Now I know.
6. I can go from feeling extreme disappointment and dread to knee melting love and adoration in no time flat. When I’ve just gotten him to sleep, and done what I need to do to get the house in order to get my head on the pillow, and he starts to cry, that’s a pretty low moment. Seconds later, when I am holding his little head in my hand with him close to my chest and his sniffles start to stop, I can’t believe how lucky I am (admittedly, sometimes more than others).
7. Mini vans really do rock.
8. We’re really lucky. We had a rocky start with the NICU and everything, but since then, Cooper’s proven to be a pretty easy going and normal healthy baby. I feel blessed, and hope he keeps on that track!
9. There are many kid people out there. This is most apparent at the mall when one is there with a stroller. Some people will sprint far out of their way to get the door, then will greet me with a wide smile and ask about how old, what gender, if he sleeps through the night etc. These people will usually want to smile and stare at the baby for as long as I can stand it before I feel I need to go. Sometimes it’s welcome, sometimes it’s a little weird, but I always appreciate it.
10. There are many non-kid people out there. These people vary in their non-kidness magnitude. Some regard at Cooper and see an obstacle to get in front of before “it” slows them down on their sidewalk journey, or they might be offended by the time it takes to change him when they are behind me in the lineup to use a change table equipped washroom . For others, it’s more pronounced. I can see that when they look at Cooper, there is some part of them feels the same way a soldier might when they first notice an enemy grenade tossed into the bunker. They want to get away fast, before “it” does something unpredictable, and would prefer not to be in the same 20 foot radius as him. Fair ‘nuff, I guess, but I think they forget they were once no bigger than he.
11. Kids, or infants at least, aren’t that expensive to maintain. They don’t even really take up much space. The big commitment is time and sleep.
12. Life would be simpler if Cooper’s grandparents lived in the same city as us. We’re lucky though – they are motivated to visit and have the means. this is the next best thing.
13. Acquiring a deep freeze has turned out to be a very, very good idea.
14. I thought I’d be grossed out by dealing with diapers all the time. I am totally used to it now. Poop shmoop.
15. Everything changes. The things I liked to do and the ways I identified myself in the world pre-Cooper are mostly gone now. I have whole new set of things I like to do now, and a whole new way to identify myself in the world. I miss some of those things from before, but on the whole, it’s a very good change. Thanks Patrick and Cris, who both pointed this out to me before he was born.
16. Everything I thought would be terrible, isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and everything I thought would be great, is even better than I thought it would be. Thanks Robert, for pointing that out to me before he was born. It’s entirely true.

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We took this photo across the street from the Chinese Public School on Fisgard Street during Chinese New Year’s celebrations here in Victoria.

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Julie had a great idea – take a photo on the first of every month like this one, the kind you take holding your hand out with the camera, aiming without the vewfinder and hoping for the best. This one was taken January 1st, 2009.

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Just a quick post to showcase this YouTube video of just how happy my boy can be. He isn’t like this all the time (by a long shot), but moments like this make all the screaming and crying worthwhile!

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This is just video of my baby sleeping. A little bit of voiceover from his mom. Not very exciting, but I could watch this guy sleep forever.

Okay, not forever. I meant to watch Cooper while Julie was in the shower, but I became a participant observer.

I should also note that there are more photos up of the little man here .

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Fist off, they have these signs plastered up all over the mother and babe ward:

Doesn’t it look like the sign should fully read, “Don’t Leave Your Baby Unattended, We Have A Problem With Giant Birds Taking Off With Them.”

Also I noted this sculpture that sits in the main foyer. It looks to me like this guy is at the hospital to have his groin injury taken care of.

Also, there are more photos up at Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/bigmikephotos/081215#

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