The GusBlog!

But the www doesn’t lie, I suppose.

What to say? The summer is coming to a close. For a somewhat more complete chronicle of our journey, hit the flickr page. We’ve done lots. Why haven’t I posted? Who knows. Avoidance behavior, maybe. But The Gus only gets better with age.

We have gone to Kruger’s Farm a few times for Thursday evening concerts. The Gus had a hay ride with his mama:

When the weather got hot his cousin came over and played in our little pool.

TDW took Gus to Black Butte without me once, and I went with them once. The Gus rang a fire bell:

We went to Orcas Island earlier this month. It was purty.

Gus touched sea creatures.

He danced.

And now we are pushing Labor Day. We’ll go to the beach with family, and the camera will see much use. Maybe I’ll be better at posting. Maybe you’ll be better about just checking the flickr page.

Here is the berry in question:

This dried cranberry spent the better part of two hours lodged in The Gus’s nasal cavity this morning, perilously close to his brain. It finally was removed without damage (to The Gus or The Berry), but it required medical intervention, in the form of a kindly pediatrician with a set of Extra Long Tweezers For Removing Objects From the Noses of Toddlers.

The Gus was brave and stoic throughout, and was very still when he was asked to be so. We think he is about the Best Kid Ever.

It was early spring last week, late in coming, so we made up for it by skipping straight over late spring and early summer. Midsummer arrived on May 14 this year, and we got out the kiddie pool. If you overspend on a vinyl pool, it turns out that you get all the bells and whistles: an inflatable slide, basketball hoop, and sprinkling-arch (no better bunch of words describes this bizarre architecture). This combination renders The Gus almost catatonic with joy, and in the past four days he has spent perhaps fifteen hours in the pool. So here are pictures:

Number one: I’m kicking myself, because this post was complete, was DONE, and I was just going to insert the pictures when I noticed that my scriptblocker (NoScript, for Firefox, no I won’t insert a link, I’m steaming) had forgotten that of all the sites that is allowed to run scripts, mattwhitman.com was at the top of the list. So I allowed scripts, and it promptly reloaded the “edit this post” page, and all my text was gone. [pounds head on keyboard]
Back to the post, recreated from my luckily-eidetic memory but laboriously retyped:

So occasionally, whether out of a desire to torment myself or a desire to remind myself of what life was life pre-TDW, pre-The Gus, I return to the archives of this very blog. I go back in time, back to when it was still hosted on blogspot, back to when I was full of fire and frenzy, back to when I had all the answers, back to when I was proudly self-righteous about having just voted for Nader for the second time.

[sobs quietly]

[sobs quietly, the sobs gradually silenced by bourbon]

[mmmm, bourbon]

And when I see all those posts, sometimes multiple posts a day, on current events, politics, books, web trends, and everything, I marvel at the sheer posting energy I displayed. Then I remember two things: first, I was surfing the web far more than I should have been while at work. Second, the fact that this site has turned into a de facto daddy blog, and one only intermittently maintained at that, doesn’t mean that my world has contracted. It has expanded. Every day, The Gus teaches me something new about myself. Or at least, this being the terrible twos, he teaches me new patience. That’s a virtue, I hear. So please don’t take the utter absence of any post in the entire month of March 2008 as a sign that the whole Whitman clan was in some disastrous accident on March 1, nor that I have abandoned you, all my faithful readers, both of you. That would be wrong. It doesn’t do justice to our eternal bond.

March in fact took place. Time passed. Things happened, and the camera was present at some of them.

For example, The Gus took a nap on the floor, for no apparent reason than he figured it would provoke the paparazzo:

On Easter, he hunted eggs, with some limited success:

He also got an Easter basket, back at the abode. It contained an Easter treat, high in B vitamins:

And a new Easter friend:

We also went on adventures, including to the store:

Just this past weekend, we went to Black Butte, where there was snow:

We played in the accumulated snowdrift after the previous night’s light dusting melted:

That made us cold, so we warmed up on the heating grate:

Then we climbed in the dog’s cage, just for kicks:

All of this naturally plumb tuckered us out: