Everything is going great here in Wien.

Personally, I’ve turned the corner. They say that expats typically go through a cycle. There’s a “newness” phase where everything is great and wonderful, then reality sets in that, “damn, it’s hard” to raise kids thousands of miles from any support system one may have had and that, “gee, nobody here ever gets my jokes” and, in many cases, the type of work expats get is very demanding and, specifically in my case, there was a time when I thought my work was just about going to kill me. Anyway, when that starts to happen, a lot of people’s attitudes and desire to stay around plummet. I’ve heard it takes about 2 years, but I think I’ve already done the cycle, and now I’m on a Vienna “love buzz”.

I mean, seriously, this place is awesome—both for me personally and statistically, too.

And, of course, we’ve just had the blessing of our second daughter and that couldn’t be going better. Maple is just in love with her, and Adele is just a very easy, smiley, hungry little baby.

We’ve found a new Kindergarten for Maple that gives me and Halane a buzz when we think about it. It’s location is perfect, the teacher is awesome and, above all else, Maple absolutely adores her.

So it was with that sort of positive attitude and general feeling of “hells yeah” that Halane and I found ourselves laughing hysterically after being completely traumatized by what will be the first of innumerable “two kids” incidents. It went a little bit like this.

I was holding Adele after just having clothed her so we could run errands when I detected a little whiff of something special accumulating in her diaper. “I’m going to change the baby before we leave,” I announced and headed off to our awesome expat on short contracts changing table, which is made out of boxes. I did the usual: unwrap, inspect (it was tiny), wipe a bit while holding her feet, remove soiled diaper and replace with clean—oops! I forgot that step.

I hesitated at the moment of truth, took my eye off of the ball, blinked in the staring match.

Moments later, as I reached for the clean diaper, having remembered that I missed a step, a quick rumble, emanating from my tiny angel’s darkest innards was followed by the cutest, but absolutely most forceful spray of poop I have ever seen. About a quarter cup of the good stuff sprayed at least a foot out, hitting the wall in droplets, landing on several freshly laundered changing pads, ensuring several packages of sterile gauze saw the bottom of the trash can.

“Oh my!” I exclaimed.

“What happened?” replied both Maple and Halane. Halane rushed in, offering assistance. Just then, as I maneuvered to get the baby’s clothes out of the path of the now-running pool of poo, a fountain of number one gold shot forth from the cuteness that was now in very real danger of taking a mud bath.

We managed to wrangle her out of her clothes and sop up enough of the brown to have everything manageable when Maple walked up.

“What is going on, Daddy?” she asked as she climbed the little stool we have so that she can help change diapers. But before I could answer, she was gagging. She hopped off and turned toward her room. I heard the splashes and caught a whiff.

“Halane!”, I explaimed, holding a baby by the feet with one hand while trying to use baby wipes to clear the area of Adele’s little explosion. “Maple’s puking!”

Halane bolted into action and got Maple’s hair out of her face just before a big heave hit her.

So now we’ve got two children rocking two very unpleasant but very different bodily functions, and I looked over at Halane, to see how she’s doing with Maple and how Maple is doing, and we both just started cracking up.

I mean, seriously, it’s funny, right?

“That sure was a stinky poo poo, huh?” Maple asked, as she recovered.
—-

Father of two.

Not really a description I imagined applying to myself, say, in 1994 in Aspen as I lay in the basement apartment I shared with Bowers listening to the next-door laundry room sounds and dreading the inevitable soaked carpet that would result when the machine broke, as it did just about weekly. I didn’t know it back then, but should probably be thankful that it was god-awfully cold in the apartment because the window was broken and covered in ice, because that probably made it hard for mold to grow.

I remember freezing my ass off while wearing a bathrombe and rinsing my feet of the grease and food that would come up in the drain whenever we showered.

I remember hiding from a lot of things back then, too. Mainly my girlfriend, but also the future. I’d lay in bed and think of all the great things I was going to do. I’d fantasize about them, one after the other, but never really did anything at all other then write a lot of letters and hide from my girlfriend. That is, of course, a whole different story because, well, I, of course, was never able to really hide from her, but I definitely managed to hide from a lot of other things, and I definitely managed to hide in plain sight with her. I pulled the strings and pushed the levers, but my heart was somewhere—anywhere—else but there in Aspen.

I’d click on the computer I received as a college graduation present and get on Compuserve and BBS-es and do stupid shit like search for all people named Partee and send them emails. I’d decide I wanted to learn something, something totally irrelevent to anything, like, for example, how thread was made and, in the days before Google, it’d take about $3 or $4 worth of online time to get your answer.
—-

“Daddy, I have to poo-poo!” Maple announces while getting off of a stool she’d been using to eat a snack.

She had been sitting on her feet, and climbed down the stool rather gingerly.

“Maple, is there already some in your pants?” I ask. It happens from time-to-time; she gets so engrossed in what she’s doing that she forgets to go and a tiny nugget might do the turtle before she realizes what’s happening.

“Don’t touch my booty, Daddy!” Maple says as she does this weird, bow-legged, wobbly walk to the bathroom. “We can’t go fast, because I can’t walk fast.”

I help her do her thing, and there’s nothing in her underpants. Everything’s cool.

She gets off of the toilet, cleaned up and read to go, when she announces “I still can’t walk fast, Daddy.”

“Why not?”

“My legs are asleep.” She responds. Then she holds her arms straight out. “My weight is redistributing.”

Where does she get this stuff? If I ask her, we all know the answer she’ll say:

“I got it at Abledee dot com!”
—-

Other than some emails and a few minor edits to documents I had already created, I’ve not worked one bit in almost four weeks.

We brought in a great guy who worked with us before to sort of fill the void a bit while I’ve been on holiday. Now, I’m going to begin my paternity leave, which is 2 months of half days.

I know, right? Bangin’, isn’t it? People don’t need to wonder too hard, but there are thousands of reasons I love this job, and that’s 8 weeks worth of them right there.

Anyway, despite a month off of work, I have had no time to do pretty much anything but hang out and take care of the chitlins. This is rewarding work, but I was kind of hoping to get out and about a bit, maybe meet up with some peeps here and there, but no dice. Oh well, half days might work out for some of that, but I doubt it.