This week, I am rockin' the Single Working Parenthood big time, as my wife is out of town for work until Friday. This means I am in charge of the Byzantine business of making sure my son is fully prepared for school in the morning. I have received detailed instructions about lunches and snacks and water bottles and home/school folders and myriad other bits of hooey, and our sitter has very graciously agreed to arrive here an hour earlier than usual so that I can entertain the idea of getting to work on time. And now, as I contemplate the notion of feeding, dressing, and preparing all three of us for the day before 7:30am, I figure it's best to stay up until three the night before, just to make sure the experience is a complete clusterfrig.
We went out for sushi tonight, as the three of us do when we're on our own, and I'm going on record here to say that you can tell a lot about a person's worldview by examining how they eat an avocado roll. Robert is a nibbler; he peels the roll open, munches the guts, and leaves a pile of forlorn little nori rectangles on his plate. It appears, then, that Robert wants to live deep, suck the marrow out of life, and go live in the woods for a while.
TwoBert, on the other hand, is a chugger who would cram all six pieces in his mouth at once if I let him. So his future might be a bit more Dionysian. TwoBert's favorite food is What You're Eating, and he feels completely justified in taking what he wants off of other people's plates. I'm looking forward to when he outgrows this phase, and I think he took a large stride in that direction when he stole a wad of wasabi off my plate and then frantically grabbed my sleeve and shrieked, "Daddy I don't like it!" You can imagine my conflicting emotions as I helped him put out the fire.
Unfortunately, there are too many parents who are being denied the privilege of watching their children stuff and/or contort their faces at the dinner table. So I've gone orange, to support the Food Bank of NYC. (The banner is a leftover -- ha! another food reference! -- from when we saw those gates in Central Park.) Please do what you can, so that more daddies can make sure that the snack goes in the brown bag and the sandwich goes in the big container but not next to the fruit leather because that's where the carrots go and please no I hate raisins and don't cut the apple because I like to bite it and I want my blue water bottle because it goes with my lunch box and holy smokes I should go to bed right now.
