With pictures, even.

This was a special weekend (in Summer, aren’t they all?) because we celebrated my 33rd birthday. (Technically it’s my 34th, counting the very first one on July 19, 1977, but we generally leave that one out of the official tally.)

We piled in the car to come down to Indy early, on Friday, and spent the afternoon at the pool with Veda. Despite being unable to swim, she’s great company there, and never at a loss for playmates. (I didn’t get any pictures of that, though, since the camera was stashed out of soggy harm’s way.)

Then Mom came over to Katie’s house (where we were staying) with homemade Gardenburgers and we had a nice dinner. I’m reporting the facts of the weekend in order as best I can remember them, in hopes of either filling in the blanks with more interesting insights later or, at least, being able to look back on this post *much* later, like in December, and remember what a hot summer weekend feels like.

After dinner came presents, and Mom got me her usual… undershirts and Mike & Ike candy, in addition this time to fun stuff like kites and a shirt that says “Distorted Sound of Rock N Roll.” She got Katie some stuff too (her birthday’s just three days before mine), but I don’t remember it as clearly as I’d like, because I’m a self-absorbed jerk. Apparently.

Oh wait! Katie got lots of brightly colored ruffly tops and dresses and stuff. She was thrilled. We wore hats – silly birthday tiara things. I remember now.

Saturday was different from the usual. Veda was up early, probably on account of sleeping in a strange place, and I figured that Katie and Penny would love to sleep in while Mom, on the other hand, was likely already up. Plus I missed Vince, who was staying with Mom so that Katie’s crazy cat wouldn’t pluck out her own fur in a fit of dog-induced anxiety.

Cats.

So Veda and I headed over to Mom’s for a visit. It’s fun surprising your Mom at 7:30 in the morning with her granddaughter. Surprising your dog is a nice bonus.

And the light from the skylight in my old bedroom (now Veda’s room) made for a strangely intense-looking baby in my arms.

Our days these days are divided into sections: Early Morning (pre-Mama), Breakfast, Morning (there’s usually a walk for Vince; sometimes I get to come along), Nap, Lunch, Afternoon Activity, Nap, Dinner, Evening Play, then Bedtime at 7 or so. After that Pen and I can do whatever we want as long as somebody’s here to listen for Veda, and if that someone is us (almost always), that whatever we want to do is relatively quiet. (I usually work, which is quiet and stationary indeed.)

We try to pack a lot into those stretches between naps during the day. That’s our time to go places, run errands, check out stuff. On Saturday we checked out the new 100 Acres Art & Nature Park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

There I anticipated very little splashing, so the big camera came along, and we got lots of fun photos of different scenic stuff. There was “Team Building (Align),” two massive rings suspended over a patch of grass. During the summer solstice (missed by three measly weeks!) the rings’ shadows overlap perfectly. On July 10th, they just amaze little redheads named Veda.

There was “Park of the Laments,” a huge square within a square, connected by an underground tunnel, that the artist Alfredo Jaar intended as a refuge for “purging global atrocities.” That said, I’m pretty sure Veda missed the point. But she did enjoy running around in it.

And the first picture above was from all of us on one of the 15 parts in “Bench Around the Lake,” a series of sitting/looking/playing spots that encircle the 35-acre lake on the grounds. Wowseph.

Even the visitor pavilion was scenic. Very much so.

Then it was back to Katie’s for lunch and projects, like replacing the lights outside her garage, troubleshooting a faulty sensor in her house alarm and landscaping in front and back. Followed by more swimming, strolling, drying and showering.

Then, a date. Mom watched Veda while Penny and I went out with Katie and her new beau, and with three, count ‘em, three destinations (Santorini Greek Kitchen, New Day Meadery and The Brass Ring, all neat and all in the grittily charming Fountain Square neighborhood of Indianapolis), I got to break in the new foursquare social media/traveling around app that my friend Ryan hipped me to.

On Sunday Veda was up extra early (midnight, as a matter of fact, and Penny brought her to bed with us to ensure that *nobody* slept soundly that night), but at 6 she was up for good and another visit to Mom’s was in order.

So we played with my Mom, and let Veda’s mom snooze until 9.

That left enough time in the morning to finish up Katie’s garage lights (I didn’t know photocell-sensor things could go bad with time, but bad they went) and the yard projects Penny and Katie had started.

THEN it was up to Fishers for some baby shopping with our sister in law Niki. Penny’s mom wanted to get her something nice in person, rather than just bringing a gift to the shower. (I abstained from the Babies R Us adventure, and instead dropped them off and took the car to go read books in a nearby Barnes & Noble. Also ended up stranding them all outside the baby store, since my phone somehow lost all service inside the bookstore and I never got any of their pleas for pick-up. Thanks, AT&T!)

And then, finally, we hit the road for home. It had been a full three days, and pretty different from other birthday outings.

Everything’s Veda-centric now. But I’m not sure I – or we – would have it any other way. And at the end, even though it’s a lot more work to do all this stuff with a 17-month-old (as of today!), and sometimes it kind of wipes you out…

It’s more fun too. And it makes you look forward to the next adventure.

It’s kind of fascinating… The ancient Olmecs may have been the first to use your previous age, perhaps around 36 BCE, though it’s debatable whether the Babylonians had the basic idea down (after all, they did have a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, as we know, but they never used zero by itself or at the end of numbers, so there was no way to tell a small number from one many times its size; you had to go by context. This was one of a number of things that presumably sucked about Babylonian-ness.)

Did you know, Veda, that the Greeks used to argue over your age’s very existence? Zero just couldn’t quite be a number, they figured, and they are reported to have wondered aloud, “How can nothing be something?”

Well, now you’re something. For sure. You walk, and sort of talk, and even hold up your little index finger when we ask you how old you are.

(This is, I must admit, so cute I have to collapse on the floor and die every time you do it. We clap, and you clap, and everyone laughs and it’s wonderful.)

You’re getting so big so fast that I can’t seem to keep track of all your changes. I don’t really manage to scribble them all down here, and I wish I could. But I take lots of pictures, and write lots of little notes to myself. Let’s hope that there comes a time when it all makes sense, and I can speak knowledgeably, helpfully about it, and it isn’t just a mad torrent of growth and change and learning and frustration and boredom and chaos and wonderfulness. Let’s hope that’s soon.

I’ll be counting the days.

In the meantime, keep on rockin’, my one-year-old girl.

You’ve done it, Veda. After 11 months, and so much learning, so much falling, you can walk.

Unlike your birth, and your first smile, and the first night you went to sleep at 8 and didn’t get up until 6, this feels like it was entirely your achievement. Not just biology taking its course, though I’m sure that’s actually a big part of it.

You tried, and tried again, and tonight you did it. Now you can do anything.

Enjoy, and if I don’t talk to you before New Year’s, have a happy start to 2010 too.

Now it’s time to get back to more merriment and food and gift-giving and food and family togetherness and food.

Merry Christmas!

Veda, crawling, cutely.

Veda, crawling, cutely.

I’m interested to see, of course, even though I do get a little squeamish about how I might affect the outcome. It’s much easier to imagine yourself sitting back and beholding this little person sprouting up into a full-blown human being without your interference, you see – anytime it occurs to you that you, personally, will have a hand in the process it seems almost terrifyingly certain that you’ll screw it up.

I’m sure this is universal among new parents, too. Your baby is just perfect the way she is, of course, and somehow getting even perfecter every day. (Mainly because she doesn’t know what incredible goobers she landed as parents.) When the day comes that Veda can observe what I do, how I approach this task of living life, and take little baby notes, hoo boy. It’s all downhill.

(Even the word “task,” just there, felt like a wrong turn. Shouldn’t I have said “opportunity” to live life? “Gleaming, shiny, blessed exalted lottery prize of consciousness”? But no, I go with “task.” Arduous, agonizing, ugly obligation. Way to go, Pop.)

Can you imagine when she’s able to ask me questions, and solicit my opinions on worldly matters such as justice and literature and how much jelly goes on a PBJ? Oh man. All I can say is, enjoy your ignorance while it lasts, little one.

***

Sometimes you’re afraid to even make predictions. After all, before I’d even met Veda, I was on record as hoping she’d be happy, and here nine months later, what do we have? A little girl who draws comments from strangers: “Such a happy baby!”

Stuff’s spooky, man. What if I’d hoped wrong?

I like the happy thing, though. I say we keep going with it. Even if that’s the only quality Veda is ever noted for, fine. Her name means “knowledge and wisdom,” which are also nice to have, but you can do without either, in my experience. Even when we were naming her, I felt a little peculiar about, you know, deciding someone’s destiny and all. I actually ran across a picture of a couple of Vedas on a baby names site, and was happy to see that it still left a pretty wide range of personalities she could one day embody.
Lotta leeway there.

I momentarily thought it would be funny, a while back, to go the other direction and try to point out characteristics I hoped she *wouldn’t* have, especially if I could name celebrities who fit the bill, even including unflattering pictures if possible.

But I quickly ran into trouble there. It turns out that most people have some redeeming qualities, encouragingly enough, and I honestly had a hard time finding *anyone,* obvious folks like Hitler and Stalin excluded, who I could say is or was such a failure as a human being that I prayed my daughter never resembled them.

It’s actually a pretty awful thing to say. About anybody. Especially celebrities, you could argue, since you don’t even know them that well. Plus they’ve got parents too, and you just know some of those moms and dads already shake their heads when they think about how their little boys’ and girls’ lives are going, so why pile on?

And besides, I may be Veda’s dad, but who am I to say how she should or shouldn’t be? I want her to be happy, yes, but free too. If I could click a button and ordain her fate right here and now? No way. As I thought about it, I pictured her as a 16-year-old one day, in 2025 (!), browsing her floating hologram web terminal, and finding an ancient post by her dumb ol’ dad, saying he was crossing his fingers she didn’t turn out, oh, to play the accordion.

She’d eye the virtual screen with horror, read and re-read the words, then cast her saddening gaze over to the pearly white music case leaning against the wall by the corner, and vow never to play “Beer Barrel Polka” again. Ever.

I just can’t do that to her.

So what I settled on instead were circumstances I hoped never to see her in. That seemed safe enough. “Love the sinner, giggle at the sin,” right? Finally, the funny pictures started to fall into place. Right away I noticed several snapshots I hope never feature Veda’s face in them:

Again, these may all be fine, decent individuals, at least some of the time, once, maybe, but I think we can all (even these people’s parents) agree that Mistakes Were Made in the events leading up to these photographs. And they’re mistakes I’ll do my best to prevent happening to my daughter.

I’ll also refrain from making any political statements, but will say that I hope Veda is never captured making this face during the swearing-in of her successor to public office.

Overall, she’s basically free to be whatever she wants, as long as it makes her happy and doesn’t land her on a celebrity mugshot website. Unless, of course, she got arrested for, oh, I don’t know, conscientious objection or something. Something virtuous and principled.

Preferably without a swastika tattooed into her forehead, though.

A dad can only ask for so much.

***

Basically, little one, just don’t turn out like Carl Panzram. This charming fellow was described as “rage personified” — by himself, in his autobiography — and is said to have told his executioner, right before he was hanged for the murder of 22 people, “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!”

Ah, no.

But if, on the other hand, Veda as a young woman takes a liking to music, and makes incredibly charming out-of-genre covers of current pop hits, well, so much the better. Consider that particular choice of actions Officially Dad Sanctioned.

I’m interested to see, of course, even though I do get a little squeamish about how I might affect the outcome. It’s much easier to imagine yourself sitting back and beholding this little person sprouting up into a full-blown human being without your interference, you see – anytime it occurs to you that you, personally, will have a hand in the process it seems almost terrifyingly certain that you’ll screw it up.

I’m sure this is universal among new parents, too. Your baby is just perfect the way she is, of course, and somehow getting even perfecter every day. (Mainly because she doesn’t know what incredible goobers she landed as parents.) When the day comes that Veda can observe what I do, how I approach this task of living life, and take little baby notes, hoo boy. It’s all downhill.

(Even the word “task,” just there, felt like a wrong turn. Shouldn’t I have said “opportunity” to live life? “Gleaming, shiny, blessed exalted lottery prize of consciousness”? But no, I go with “task.” Arduous, agonizing, ugly obligation. Way to go, Pop.)

Can you imagine when she’s able to ask me questions, and solicit my opinions on worldly matters such as justice and literature and how much jelly goes on a PBJ? Oh man. All I can say is, enjoy your ignorance while it lasts, little one.

***

Sometimes you’re afraid to even make predictions. After all, before I’d even met Veda, I was on record as hoping she’d be happy, and here nine months later, what do we have? A little girl who draws comments from strangers: “Such a happy baby!”

Stuff’s spooky, man. What if I’d hoped wrong?

I like the happy thing, though. I say we keep going with it. Even if that’s the only quality Veda is ever noted for, fine. Her name means “knowledge and wisdom,” which are also nice to have, but you can do without either, in my experience. Even when we were naming her, I felt a little peculiar about, you know, deciding someone’s destiny and all. I actually ran across a picture of a couple of Vedas on a baby names site, and was happy to see that it still left a pretty wide range of personalities she could one day embody.
Lotta leeway there.

I momentarily thought it would be funny, a while back, to go the other direction and try to point out characteristics I hoped she *wouldn’t* have, especially if I could name celebrities who fit the bill, even including unflattering pictures if possible.

But I quickly ran into trouble there. It turns out that most people have some redeeming qualities, encouragingly enough, and I honestly had a hard time finding *anyone,* obvious folks like Hitler and Stalin excluded, who I could say is or was such a failure as a human being that I prayed my daughter never resembled them.

It’s actually a pretty awful thing to say. About anybody. Especially celebrities, you could argue, since you don’t even know them that well. Plus they’ve got parents too, and you just know some of those moms and dads already shake their heads when they think about how their little boys’ and girls’ lives are going, so why pile on?

And besides, I may be Veda’s dad, but who am I to say how she should or shouldn’t be? I want her to be happy, yes, but free too. If I could click a button and ordain her fate right here and now? No way. As I thought about it, I pictured her as a 16-year-old one day, in 2025 (!), browsing her floating hologram web terminal, and finding an ancient post by her dumb ol’ dad, saying he was crossing his fingers she didn’t turn out, oh, to play the accordion.

She’d eye the virtual screen with horror, read and re-read the words, then cast her saddening gaze over to the pearly white music case leaning against the wall by the corner, and vow never to play “Beer Barrel Polka” again. Ever.

I just can’t do that to her.

So what I settled on instead were circumstances I hoped never to see her in. That seemed safe enough. “Love the sinner, giggle at the sin,” right? Finally, the funny pictures started to fall into place. Right away I noticed several snapshots I hope never feature Veda’s face in them:

Again, these may all be fine, decent individuals, at least some of the time, once, maybe, but I think we can all (even these people’s parents) agree that Mistakes Were Made in the events leading up to these photographs. And they’re mistakes I’ll do my best to prevent happening to my daughter.

I’ll also refrain from making any political statements, but will say that I hope Veda is never captured making this face during the swearing-in of her successor to public office.

Overall, she’s basically free to be whatever she wants, as long as it makes her happy and doesn’t land her on a celebrity mugshot website. Unless, of course, she got arrested for, oh, I don’t know, conscientious objection or something. Something virtuous and principled.

Preferably without a swastika tattooed into her forehead, though.

A dad can only ask for so much.

***

Basically, little one, just don’t turn out like Carl Panzram. This charming fellow was described as “rage personified” — by himself, in his autobiography — and is said to have told his executioner, right before he was hanged for the murder of 22 people, “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!”

Ah, no.

But if, on the other hand, Veda as a young woman takes a liking to music, and makes incredibly charming out-of-genre covers of current pop hits, well, so much the better. Consider that particular choice of actions Officially Dad Sanctioned.

- Almost nobody knows who Rocky and Bullwinkle are. The show went off the air in 1973, it says here, so actually I’m not entirely sure how I even know about them.

- Even fewer people know who Rocky and Bullwinkle’s nemeses are, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.

- When dressing up like Boris, bear in mind that it helps to be short and swarthy, only with sheet-white skin.

- When dressing up like Natasha, bear in mind that a purple dress and high heels don’t provide much protection against October weather, especially in contrast to Boris’s overcoat. This will make trick-or-treating less than appealing.

- When dressing your 8-month-old up like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, bear in mind that a costume built for dogs is actually pretty perfect, since it doesn’t constrict the poor child very much and allows her cute face to be seen clearly.

- When dressing your dog as Bullwinkle, forget the white gloves and just go with clip-on antlers. Where were you going to find gloves that size anyway?

- Overall, if your family costume is this complex, involving multiple species and props such as a black-spraypainted 12lb. shot-put, try to get a plain background for the photos. Otherwise you can’t see the bomb very well, or the antlers, and you kind of just look like a bunch of weirdos.

Happy Halloween, though!

- Almost nobody knows who Rocky and Bullwinkle are. The show went off the air in 1973, it says here, so actually I’m not entirely sure how I even know about them.

- Even fewer people know who Rocky and Bullwinkle’s nemeses are, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.

- When dressing up like Boris, bear in mind that it helps to be short and swarthy, only with sheet-white skin.

- When dressing up like Natasha, bear in mind that a purple dress and high heels don’t provide much protection against October weather, especially in contrast to Boris’s overcoat. This will make trick-or-treating less than appealing.

- When dressing your 8-month-old up like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, bear in mind that a costume built for dogs is actually pretty perfect, since it doesn’t constrict the poor child very much and allows her cute face to be seen clearly.

- When dressing your dog as Bullwinkle, forget the white gloves and just go with clip-on antlers. Where were you going to find gloves that size anyway?

- Overall, if your family costume is this complex, involving multiple species and props such as a black-spraypainted 12lb. shot-put, try to get a plain background for the photos. Otherwise you can’t see the bomb very well, or the antlers, and you kind of just look like a bunch of weirdos.

Happy Halloween, though!