Monday, June 06, 2011
Out With the Old: Notebooks, Sleeplessness, and the Champ
With little fanfare - and with fans as little as mine, the fare is negligible - I’ve started a fresh writing notebook. At times of epochal shifts such as this, I like to take a little time for retrospection with the delicate diligence for which I am so rightly renowned. One retro I invariably spect is what I’ve got left in my old notebook - the essays not blogscribed, the notes deemed not noteworthy, the letters unsent and poems abandoned like ficus plants in long-vacant offices. There’s old shopping lists, to-do self-directives that are substantially done, and a plastic divider pocket full of follies and foofarah. Some items, initially dismissed in the overheated eagerness of real time, turn out to be worth a second look - perhaps even enblogulation. Some are, by definition, defunct, devoid of enduring value. And then some are just plain enigmatic. Those are the ones I’m really noticing now. Up next: enigma retrospection. You’ve been warned.
When I say “enigma” here, I don’t exactly mean ‘enigma,’ which is just enigmatic enough for me to give up looking for a better word for it. What I’m talking about (Willis) is stuff I wrote when I was full of passion and emotion and creative fervor, or when I felt positively compelled to memorialize some damn thing or other. I can see it in the way my crabbed scrawl surges across the page, and my retrospection now revives it. I just don’t feel it where it counts anymore. Maybe I worked it out of my system by transcribing it, or by surviving long enough to care less about it. Or something else. But for whatever reason, upon retrospection, this just-filled notebook has had more pages filled with utterly unblogworthy material than any I’ve had in my many years of notebook-filling, and when a fellow sets the blogworthiness bar as low as I do you know that’s a pretty damning indictment. But so be it. I’m not going to regurgitate my reflections on summer vacations in Northwest Ohio from when I was 14 years old, or a letter written (but never sent) to the Editor about professional sports management, or my horrible poem about horrible poetry. I’m moving on and leaving such dross behind. And that’s as good a segue as I’m going to get for divesting the furnishings of urineings.
Semi-new topic: Since our first child came home to us in 2005, certain articles with a distinctly juvenile orientation have shared our space with us. A crib, that gave way to a toddler bed, that got paired with another one when boy number 2 learned to vault his drop-gate sleeping cage… A series of gates and doorknob-fittings, to keep youthful explorers safely in-bounds and out of our fireplace… And of course, that magic white plastic cylinder, the R2D2 of dookie - our Diaper Champ.
For the blissfully uninitiated, the D.C. is a repository for soiled diapers, about 3-1/2 feet tall and 18” in diameter, with a hemispherical dome on top. One fits a plastic garbage bag inside it and latches down the lid, which is designed with a handle on one side and a hole punched straight down through the center, into which a solid piston has been inserted that slides easily within the dome but does not fall out. Utterly elegant design, if such may be said for any device intended solely to be a fecal disposition unit.
When one finds oneself in possession of a disposable undergarment laden with juvenile bodily extrusions, said object is placed into the hole at the top of the dome and the handle is rotated from one side up and over to the other side. In doing so, the entire surmounting dome reverses its orientation, depositing the diaper into the main compartment within while the piston shifts smoothly in its track to secure the unmentionable excrescences beneath it and keep the room from smelling like the inside of a porta-potty at a poorly-funded music festival. For those whose lifestyles place in their paths the more-than-occasional craptastic diaper, the Champ is indeed aptly named.
Since 2005 the Champ has resided in the room designated as the boy’s, or, later, the boys’. It first stood next to the crib, then the toddler bed, and now, the big-boy twin sleeper. For it was only a few months ago that we went through another piece of familial evolution and broke down the matching toddlebeds for a pair of full-on twin sleepers - and not a minute too soon. Z was getting too tall to tuck comfortably into his old toddlebunk, and J sleeps too actively to be entrusted to such a modest mattress. Every night one or both of them would be jarred to wakefulness by their too-small beds and they’d come in to sleep with me and mom. This would typically happen sometime between one and three a.-goddamn-m., and at that point the grownups’ night of sleep would effectively end.
We eventually convinced Z to resort to a bedroll in our room if he woke up before 4, but J is still too young to rely on our plentiful ceiling-projection clocks for his behavioral cues and he cries much too loudly and enthusiastically for us to allow him to throw an I-want-your-pillow tantrum in the dark wee hours. He’d show up whimpering at the bedside and, for the sake of the landlady sleeping right downstairs, we’d have to hoist him up and tuck him in with us. After an hour lying next to him, trying to return to sleep while taking punches to the eyeball and heel-jabs to the kidneys and tenderer zones, one of us would retreat to a living room couch to salvage a little shuteye. Maybe both of us would scramble, leaving the whole king-sized bed to the youngest among us. That little fellow can really take up a lot of room.
It was a serious challenge, putting up with the kids’ sleep issues, but we suspected someday it would end - and now it seems to have. It’s not like the boys always play along just the way we’d like them to. Occasionally they beg for the big bed during mom-and-dad-only time and one of us still has to load out in the chilly dark to ease a little boy back to sleep in the new bedrolls that we’ve built out of two toddler-bed mattresses set end-to-end in our bedroom. It might take as little as five minutes to get them down again, or as long as thirty. But then it’s over and we return to a bed that remains our own. And even this only happens sometimes now. More often than not, these days when I go to bed, I remain there undisturbed till the alarm goes off - always too early, but at least at the conclusion of a full night’s undisturbed sleep. Time’s incremental accretion has brought us out of the era of regular, nightly kid invasions and rotating exiles to the big green couch. Now is the era of nocturnal ease.
Standing watch over this change is the Diaper Champ. Stalwart aid to household happiness that it’s always been, we find we’ve grown past our need for its poop-concealing powers. The boys have that issue under control, continent and autonomous. It’s an important movement, as it were, in the right direction. And so now, as we plan to dispose of D.C. as a furnishing of households with kids less mature than ours, we’re even awake enough to appreciate it.
I’m about to dump a notebook full of stuff I don’t need anymore, and that’s all find and dandy - but when we cut loose the broken-down toddlebeds and the Diaper Champ, my whole world will have changed. I do dispose of a lot of things on a regular basis, but sometimes it’s a process that demands more retrospection than others. Even then, sometimes, in retrospect, getting rid of something means moving forward with less, and sometimes, with a great deal more.
