Tiny Bites by Rad
Right now I am between my one year wedding anniversary and my wife’s birthday. For one of those events she requested that I start writing about what’s happening, so I reckon its pretty good I am writing now. We just had a baby so for our anniversary she made some pumpkin brownies in a heart shaped pan. After our anniversary we left a tiny spoon in the pan and worked away at the brownies and that seemed to me about the right way to celebrate. Tiny delicious bites in passing, but nothing major.
I have the baby now so my wife, Whitney, could take a shower and manage her online yoga presence as recent events called for that to be tended to. The baby is swinging left and right over and over in an electric swing. He is awake and peering at me over his blanket, pacified by the noun of that verb and the rocking motion. When he looks up he sees a convex mirror so his face looks huge and distorted to him. Who is that disproportionate person staring back at me?
He is also not wearing a diaper. We have decided to hell with diapers and the baby has only peed on me three times in the last two hours. It’s just baby pee we say. We have gotten good enough so that we catch about half of his pees in jars and various containers. My wife is showering which she is doing in preparation for a bath. Why she needs a shower and a bath is up to her. I got to go on a bike ride in Griffith Park and she gets a shower and a bath and that’s how we get along.
Now he is looking at me with one eye barely open. Sleep is overcoming him but he feels he must fight to keep at least one eye on that silhouette of a man lest he try and shove me into various garments or do the thing where he wraps me in a blanket so tight I can’t move and am so furious I immediately sleep for hours.
He saw his first break dancers today. He didn’t care. He is still working on recognizing colors and movement. The break dancers or b-boys as they like to be called, were on Hollywood boulevard in front of a theatre dancing for batman, Cinderella, middle America, and new parents who needed to shop for some work and breastfeeding clothes. The b-boys were from Los Angeles but had friends from Switzerland. The Los Angeles b-boys had a lot of style whilst the Swiss boys were very athletic. To me doing gymnastics to rap music isn’t really a genre of dance, but the guys from LA had a lot of style in their movements and made me wonder why I had not dedicated my life to break dancing.
One thing that they don’t tell new dads is that women have special food needs not just when they are pregnant but after they are pregnant. They need all the food necessary to make milk, which oddly rarely includes dairy products. Today this milk fodder was a donut. I have learned by now that if Whitney wants something, such as a donut, that I should get it for her or get ready to pass some time with the food crisis troll that lurks within all of us. I ran across six lanes of traffic and got two donuts. Whitney likes plain everything so I got her a plain donut and a differently shaped plain donut. I still feel like we are celebrating our anniversary because I love her so much and in my mind she took tiny delicious bites of those donuts with a tiny spoon.