Adventures in Fatherhood

I love taking naps.

In fact, we have a long-running, er, I was about to say joke, but it’s more of an understanding in our household about Saturday afternoons, and the occasional habit I have of lying down on the couch to “read” a book or magazine.

I place read in quotes because Karen and the kids know that if I have time to lie down on the couch with a book on a Saturday afternoon, no one is reading anything. I’ll fall asleep before I turn the first page.

But since my children have outgrown their naps, I rarely have the chance to catch that quick snooze.

Celeste’s infant days were golden. She would sleep for three hours every day, whether she closed her eyes at noon, 1 or 2 p.m. The rainy days were the best because I didn’t have to feel bad about missing a nice day outside.

Sure, I could have spent the afternoon doing chores around the house, but let’s be real. If you have the choice between doing chores and taking a nap, well, that’s not really a choice at all, is it? It’s like choosing between a piece of chocolate and a sprig of broccoli. Even the president of the VeggieTales fan club would choose chocolate.

Of course, it wasn’t every day. Celeste had her days when she wouldn’t nap, which gave rise to one of the nicknames we have given her over the years: No-nap Allanach.

When No-nap showed up, no one’s afternoon was safe. The days after a sleepless night were the worst because she didn’t give us the chance to catch up on our sleep. Some days I think I’m still running a deficit.

Gavin came along a few years after Celeste, and the beginning of the end to Saturday naps appeared. He would only nap for two hours in the afternoon, and had his share of sleepless days.

He quickly lifted the No-nap Allanach name from Celeste, and at 5 years old no longer naps, which makes for some tense evenings some days. We can tell when he’s had a full and tiring day in kindergarten. He’s punchy and won’t leave Celeste alone no matter how often (loud, actually) she tells him.

When we sit down at the table for dinner, we usually ask the kids about their day, and if they did anything exciting. Celeste’s days are always “fine” or “good,” answers that will serve her well once she starts taking multiple choice tests. (She might need some help with the essays, though.)

It’s harder to tell about Gavin’s day. He’ll usually go off on some incoherent tangent about how one of the kids played Spider-Man or how Iron Man served them lunch — a typical response from a 5-year-old boy who is obsessed with superheroes.

He often runs around after dinner, but when the time comes bed, he develops a sudden and acute leg condition. They stop working, and he complains loudly about how much they hurt. He can’t possibly walk upstairs on his own because his legs hurt “so, so bad.”

It seems to clear up quickly, though, if I tell him that he must be too tired for stories and he should go straight to bed. If the academy had a category for “Best Bedtime Drama Performance,” Gavin would have several Oscars and we’d fight to evade the paparazzi every time we go to the store.

I don’t know where he learned his flair for drama. Celeste is the queen of stall tactics — she always has to stop and pet our cat Obi whenever it’s time to go up for stories — but she isn’t dramatic about it. She just quietly tries to sneak a few more minutes of awake time when it’s time to go to bed.

I suppose I should be thankful they don’t take naps any longer because then they would not feel tired when bedtime rolls around. But it’s hard to feel that way on a Saturday …. on a Saturday nnmmkkkkkk ….. afternoon when …. xxxccccc ….. when my eyelids are heavy, my fingers are clumsy, v;I,dtyu. smkl …. and the only thought on my mind is … zzzzzzzzzzz….////////////////…………………

This is a repost of a column that appeared in The Gazette on Oct. 21, 2010. Both Celeste and Gavin have long outgrown their afternoon naps, but I still like to sneak one in occasionally.

I’m no pack rat.

Why, I might just throw away my own baby picture if I happened to find it laying around the house during a cleaning fit.

Just some of the newspapers I’ve collected over the years, but am finally recycling.

But I must admit to one exception: newspapers.

I have stacks of newspapers stored in plastic bins on homemade shelves in the basement. I even have a few errant stacks laying against the wall downstairs, just sitting there as though they were corns on the left foot of my home.

In fact, I probably have more newspapers than your neighborhood carrier before he starts his morning route, which isn’t saying as much these days as it might have 20 years ago.

It makes sense if you think about it. For nearly 20 years I worked as a reporter and editor for a chain of community newspapers in Maryland before accepting a buyout in December 2011. A person can collect quite a few newspapers in two decades.

I don’t remember when I decided to work at a newspaper. I only remember learning early in school that I could write well, and newspapers offered a career in which I could write every day.

I didn’t care about being the next Woodward and Bernstein, contrary to many other journalists-to-be who grew up in the shadow of Watergate. I only cared about making a living doing something I did well. Who doesn’t want to make money using their natural talent?

I remember my first summer internship at a community newspaper 23 years ago. I worked eight hours a day, five days a week for that small paper, and didn’t earn a dime.

But I wasn’t doing it for the money. I needed clips, which is newspaper jargon for published stories I could show potential employers after I graduated college. I suppose you could say they paid me in ink, and I was happy to do it.

I was equally ecstatic a couple years later when I landed my first job as a reporter for a competing newspaper, the one I ended up working at for nearly 20 years.

It ran on less than a shoestring budget. Our computers had no hard drive, so we had to boot them up off of a 5-inch floppy disk every day. We had no internal network. I turned in the stories I wrote to my editor on a floppy disk, and she had to send them to the mainframe via modem after she finished editing them.

I went to more night meetings of town councils and commissions than I care to remember, and learned more about urban planning, stormwater management, and the politics of trash incineration than I ever thought existed in the first place.

I loved it. Not the long meetings and learning the details of wastewater treatment and zoning regulations, mind you. I loved earning a paycheck doing what I love to do: tell stories through the written word. I moved around different beats through the years in several offices and rose to the level of county editor before my time was up.

I suppose I had reached my level of incompetency, as the saying goes, just as the economy crashed harder than it had since my grandparents were young. Work became a chore. Layoffs became the norm, and staff reductions a nearly monthly occurrence. It was no longer fun, so when my turn came to voluntarily leave, I did.

But through those years I collected stacks of newspapers. I did not save every single paper of my career, but I saved enough to make a corner of my basement look like a small-town archive.

I think of this all now because last week I marked my one-year anniversary of working at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Washington, D.C.

In many ways, my job is similar to that of a journalist, primarily in that I look for ways to tell people a story. The stories I tell now, though, focus on the Dutch culture, the Dutch influence on the world in the last millennium, and Dutch relations with the United States.

I enjoy my job, the people I work with, and learning about international relations, diplomatic traditions, and the geopolitical reality in which we all live.

I don’t miss my old job. The newspaper I left was far different from the one I started working for and loved, and yet still I have those stacks of newspapers downstairs serving as physical reminders of the job I once loved.

Or at least I did. I am slowly recycling them, so the stacks will eventually disappear. I’m sure my memories of those days will eventually fade, and that’s OK. People aren’t built to remember every detail of their lives. As the saying goes, you can’t live today if you are busy reliving yesterday.