Elvis and Car Seats

Pictures: Luke and Kathy visiting yesterday. Luke raises an eyebrow, "What are you lookin' at?"

First I have to recognize the fact that I switched the 1 to 10 chart around. In the hospital, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 is very little pain and 10 is the worst pain you've ever felt. I was using 0 as the total lack of joy, and 10 as the most joy possible. I apologize, and in the future will try to use the appropriate scale (1 being good, 10 being bad).

So what’s with car seats being so heavy? They create them to be “convenient” and “safe”, but what’s convenient about lugging around a fifteen pound carrier with an even bigger baby in it? Because you know baby has to stay in that car seat until they’re 20 pounds AND a year old! And what’s safe about throwing your back out to maneuver the car seat through a doorway while holding the door open with one foot and swinging the dead weight of the car seat onto your elbow, propped on your hip? Also, what’s safe about having a baby screaming behind you while you’re driving who you can’t distract because they’re facing away from you? You end up pulling your arm out of it’s socket so you can torque your body around to make your head still face forward while you put the soother back in your baby’s mouth, or give him your finger to suck. Now tell me, what’s “safe” and “convenient” about that?!

Luke has decided he doesn’t like driving anymore. He cries when you put him in the car seat, quiets down for a moment while you carry it to the car, then screams the minute it clicks into the base. Yesterday when I went to Morris to meet with Kathy I tricked Luke into sleeping for the first fifteen minutes. But when he woke up he rolled his fingertips together menacingly and shouted, “You may think you’ve pulled one over on me, but just wait and see how I can pull one over on YOU for the next thirty minutes! Hehehe”. Or maybe I just imagined he shouted that. Anyway, he was shouting.

While visiting with Kathy I had a cinnamon roll at the golf course restaurant in Morris. This toasted cinnamon roll, homemade by “Pat”, should go above Grands cinnamon rolls in my list. I haven’t quite come up with a good rating for it yet. Maybe Smiling Silently to Self. And by the way, toasted is good. She cut it in half like a hamburger bun and toasted it on the grill.

Now about Elvis. Luke does a really grea Elvis impersonation. I hold him up under his arms, he stands on his legs and waggles his hips around with a look of extreme concentration on his face. He even changed the words to the song “Nothin’ But a Hound-dog” to “You ain’t nothin’ but a baby/crying all the time. You ain’t nothin’ but a baby/cryin’ all the time. You got poopy, stinky diapers/and those ain’t friends of mine!” And he learned how to raise one eyebrow just to make his Elvis impersonation more believable. I tried to tell him that his height might lose him the job in Vegas, but he insists on sending his audition video in. I’ll try to get you a copy of that this week.