I present you, first, with a clucking chicken:
I then present you with the entire Hearn crew, post-trick-or-treating:
Hope your Halloween was rad, and devoid of horrible peanut-allergy reactions!
(For ease-of-reading, any speech below attributed to little boys has been translated into adult English, so that you don’t have to read text like “Thaniel, can you klay wif me?”)
Charles, like many kids his age, is remarkably literal. If I have to chastise him for not eating, I will often unthinkingly say things like, “No you may not leave the table; you’ve barely touched your food, Charles.” He usually responds by pressing his hands onto his food and saying “I’m touching it! Can I be excused?” It’s amusing, even when it’s annoying.
On Saturday we had a little early Father’s Day party at my parents, since for various reasons we can’t get together next weekend. My sister brought her brood as well, featuring her son Nathaniel, who is just about 9 months older than Charles, but roughly the same size. Charles is very fond of Nathaniel; I’m not sure that the feeling is entirely mutual. Anyway, Charles has the annoying habit of tackling people that he wants to play with. (This partly my fault, since I allow him to climb all over me when we roughhouse, but I’ll be danged if I can’t wrassle my son as I see fit.) After he’d dragged Nathaniel to the ground a few times, we convinced Charles to stop, or at least to ask first. So later that afternoon, he asked:
“Nathaniel, can I wrestle you?”
Nathaniel replied, “No.”
We complimented Charles for asking permission, and someone suggested that perhaps he might have better luck asking his Daddy. So Charles looked up at me and said,
“Daddy, can I wrestle Nathaniel?”
We found this greatly amusing. Charles likes when other people laugh, even if he doesn’t get the joke, so we got a hearty guffaw out of him as well.
Antibiotics suck. Not only is Charles still fighting an ear infection, the Amoxycillin gave him a yeast infection on his, um…how shall I put this? On his nards. His berries. His junk. This is absolutely something we wanted to be worrying about 4 days before having our second child.
The in-laws were kind enough to take him to the doctor on Monday, who diagnosed his various ailments and gave him a different antibiotic (hopefully one that won’t give him explosive diahrrea, another fun side-effect of the Amoxycillin), along with a topical cream for Dong and The Twins (Alphonse and Mortescue, he calls them (not really)). It seems to be doing the job, but the challenge is to get him to take the medicine, because even with grape flavoring, it mainly tastes like nasty cough syrup and just a wee soupçon of brake fluid. Also any ministrations directed at his groin are met with resistance, defined as “a lot of screaming and flailing of legs,” which means that every time I put the ointment on his Wang and the Chungs, I get kicked in the head. Repeatedly.
For those of you that aren’t parents, this is what being a father is like: every day, your offspring will do something so unbelievably cute that you can barely stand it. Also, every day, you’re going to have to do something gross like put lotion on your son’s balls. That is parenting, in a nutshell.
I’ve been trying to find fun stuff to do with Charles before The Baby comes and takes us out of the power play and into man-to-man coverage. Earlier in the month we went to the zoo (always a favorite for me; I love a good capybara). Yesterday, I discovered that as a result of Monday evening’s rainout, the Wilmington Blue Rocks were going to play a twi-night doubleheader, with the first game starting at 5:05. I figured we’d get there late, stay to the end of the first game, and then sneak out before the rains started.
I picked up Charles at the usual time and asked him if he wanted to go to a baseball game, and he was SUPER-excited. (One great thing about children is that they cannot hide enthusiasm: they actually say things like “Yay!” and “Wow!” completely unironically.) So we got in the car and headed down to Frawley Stadium. Charles, being under the age of 4, required no ticket, so I bought a general admission ticket for $6. We went inside and were each given a free Rocky Bluewinkle hat, after which Charles got to meet the moose himself and shake hands. Then we went and found a little bench just outside the reserved seating area to watch a few at-bats.
Next to us, a stadium usher was chatting with an EMT (of which there were several around; I wasn’t sure if the Blue Rocks’ fans had a particular problem with coronary thromboses, or what; I can report that most of the fans, myself included, are well into the “obese” area of BMI measurement), discussing what idiots the fans were for thinking that they could move out of the General Admission seating into the almost utterly empty “Reserved” area. Anyone that tried was summarily dismissed to the bleacher seats. By the end of the game, there were hundreds of people crowded into “GA,” and literally tens of fans in reserved seating. Supposedly they would be permitted to upgrade their seating for the second game, but c’mon, Blue Rocks management. That’s kind of a silly policy on a Tuesday evening with threatening skies.
We watched a few at-bats, and I tried to explain to Charles what the fielding positions were; he grasped “pitcher” and “catcher” because, well, they pitch and catch, respectively. We got to see one Salem player knock one out of the yard, and I thought of Harry Kalas. Charles’s attention span being what it is, we had to find something to do after a bit, and got some chicken fingers and fries. Again, his attention span failed us as I got him to eat approximately 6 fries and no chicken before he spotted what he called a “trampoline,” but was in fact a small moon bounce. I insisted we eat some dinner, but he was too amp’d up. I finished off the chicken and threw most of the fries away (in our defense, the fries appeared to have been cooked during the last Democratic presidential administration) and wandered over to the moon bounce, where I was charged $2 for the privilege of watching my son bound around with wild abandon.
Once I finally convinced him to take a break, we headed up into the General Admission area, to the top row, where he watched baseball for about 30 seconds and then spent 10 minutes watching trucks go by on I-95. After a time, he decided he needed some popcorn, so we went off to retrieve that, and then returned to the bleachers to watch some more. By then it was close to 7pm, and Charles was entering a loopy state wherein he would say deliberately unintelligible things and then giggle uncontrollably, so I realized it was getting to be time to go. We shuffled out of there back to the car and were home and watching Thomas do his Tank Engine Thang by 7:30.
The Blue Rocks won, 8-3.
Everybody at Team Hearn has been fighting a nasty cough for the better part of, oh, 2009. It’s just going back and forth; Charles came down with it first, then I got it, went to Sarah, back to Charles, back to Sarah, back to me, back to Charles again. It’s icky. Worse yet, it resulted in Charles waking us up at 4am last Thursday with a 104-degree fever.
We gave him a big cup of water, which he chugged, and then threw up on my pillow because he drank it too fast. Sarah mopped it up with a towel, but he refused to sleep near it, instead taking up almost my entire side of the bed. I, an official Large Person, had to sleep in a section of bed roughly 9 inches wide.
In the morning his temps were down in the 101-102 range, but we decided he shouldn’t go to my parents for the day as he would normally do, so Sarah stayed home in the morning and I came home around noon so she could hit the office. He perked up a bit in the afternoon, which was good to see. He had napped intermittently through the day, which messed up his sleep schedule, so he came into our room at 2am early Friday wanting to play; his temperature was 99. Yay!
Friday morning, however, he was back up to 104. We medicated him as usual, and then Sarah had doctor’s appointments of her own, so I took him to my parents. But his temperature didn’t come back down as it had the previous day, so the decision was made to take him to the doctor. Sarah called our usual family doctor’s office, but despite the fact that they have something between 8 and 19 doctors on staff, no one could see Charles that day. Not one doctor had 15 minutes to look at our sick son. Sarah and I are baffled by this. I could understand if we saw one pediatrician, but this is an office full of MDs and DOs and other various and sundry post-nominal letters! Not one of them had a moment to spare.
So we were forced to take him to the ER at AI Dupont Children’s Hospital. I met Sarah there and was tasked with carrying Charles, since he was 40+ pounds of sadness and plush giraffe. He was miserable. The only things he was willing to say were:
The hospital staff had us triaged, documented, hand-stamped, tattooed, and retina-scanned (I may be hazy on some of the admission process) in half an hour and in a doctor’s care in under an hour. Yay doctor! She took one look at his ears and determined that both were infected, and prescribed Amoxicillin for the infection and Tylenol for the fever. Within a half-hour of dosing him up, he was asking for food and polished off a bunch of crackers and some Froot Loops. A half-hour after that, he was running out of the place under his own power to go look at ambulances.
In short: boo usual doctors, hooray AI Dupont Children’s Hospital!
So the pictures of Charles that I promised would be up last Wednesday or Thursday are up on Tuesday the following week. Don’t let anybody tell you I’m on time, because they would be UNCORRECT.
Click here for the rad. Party on!
Who’s the king of unfulfilled promises? (Points to self) This guy!!! Here is the batch of Charles pictures I promised would be up on Friday. Forgive me; I know not how stupid I am.
In lieu of actually writing something (things continue to be INSANE at the office, and I end up either spending all evening doing work, or actively avoiding computers at all costs), I give you a recent update to CharlesHearn.com. Enjoy! There will be more in weeks to come.
Charles is as bad as I am about posting, but here’s some new pictures to keep things THRILLED TO THE MAX!
