I think I have a pretty good grasp on reality, though I don’t doubt that I could lose it someday.  Recently, in fact, I’ve felt my grip slipping ever so slightly.  Stress and fatigue seem to have wedged just a little extra space between the world and my perception of it.

Exhibit A is Jay who, as usual, figures large in my eyes.  Our relationship has been fraught the past few days.  I’m feeling thin and brittle, with really no room to absorb his three-year-old mishegas.  He senses this- how could he not- and only ups his antics in response.  It’s a bad cycle that needs disrupting.  Yesterday I tried to break it by buying Jay a chocolate chip cookie from the bakery case at Whole Foods.  He ate one half, I ate the other, and for five minutes we were friends again.

The scariest part (from this side of the line) of going all the way crazy is that it would seem impossible to find your way back. You always need at least one thing you can say for sure is real or not, like those little totems Leonardo DiCaprio and his pals carried in Inception- the one surefire way to tell the difference between dreaming and waking.

Sometimes I build Jay into my nemesis; I think, as I’ve written before, that he really is out to spoil my day.  But when my ideas about him harden in this kind of pitted unreality, he has blessed knack for cracking them.

Yesterday afternoon we were watching Blues Clues.  It was the episode where Blue and Steve go to outer space and learn about the planets of the solar system.  As we watched, Jay asked me what planet we live on.  I told him earth.  He asked me what planet Steve lives on.  I told him that Steve lives on earth, too.  Jay disagreed.  I said, what planet do you think Steve lives on? Steve lives in the t.v., Jay replied.

I laughed, and tucked his comment away as a reminder that Jay lives in his own special three-year-old world and that from there he’s unlikely to be capable of or interested in cultivating a deliberate, long-running antagonism with his father.

Later that day, after I’d put an exhausted Wally to sleep, I went upstairs to Jay’s room where he and Caroline were playing before bed.  I found the two of them lying next to each other on the floor.  Caroline explained that they were planning a sleepover party and that they were inviting all the characters from Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?  Then Jay told me that the party was going to be at his house and Mama’s house, and that the two houses were going to be connected together by construction.  And also, there were going to be three activities for the friends at the party: dancing, snacks, and “Settlers” (of Catan).

I stood there listening to him tell about his party, his eyes wide, his face unspeakably bright, and I thought, if I ever feel like I really am losing my grip, that right there is the image to hold onto.

Between the boys being sick again and all the ice outside, I’ve been feeling kind of brittle recently.  Summer feels a long, long way off and even my daily cup of tea isn’t giving the pleasure it used to.  Perhaps that’s why last night I found myself descending into fantasy as I trekked down to Wally’s room where he was awake and crying, hot with fever.

Two nights ago Wally had also woken up sick.  Then I’d gone down into his room with a bottle but when I’d sat him down to drink I realized his forehead was burning and his diaper was already nearly full.  I carried him upstairs, rousted Caroline from bed for help, and a middle of the night scramble ensued to find a diaper, insert a Tylenol suppository, and then give the beseeching kid his drink.

So last night Caroline and I vowed to do better.  Before we went to sleep we laid a diaper, a suppository, and a jug of water to refill Wally’s vaporizer on the kitchen counter.  As I arranged our supplies I thought of an article I’d read earlier in the day about a daring bank robbery in Sydney, and I imagined myself a criminal mastermind meticulously laying the groundwork for a middle-of-the-night heist.

Wally awoke a little before 2am, right on cue; my feet were on the floor before he’d finished his first cry.  Caroline and I moved downstairs with the precision of Navy SEALS. She took the suppository and the diaper, I grabbed the bottle and the jug of water.

Seconds later we breeched the door to Wally’s room.  Caroline changed him and dosed him while I carefully but quickly removed the vaporizer’s hot top, poured the water in without a splash, and retreated to a position behind Caroline, where I waited for her to finish her work.  My heart pounded as I counted the seconds.  Five, six, seven.  Why wasn’t she done yet?  Finally I heard her zip Wally’s sleepsack.  In one motion she stood up, handed him to me, and went for the door.

As she left I turned my body to block Wally’s view so he wouldn’t see his beloved Mama leave and I thought about how ingenious I was, like the incredible pickpocket magician featured in last week’s New Yorker, who uses his body in key moments to block his victim’s view while he extracts their treasure.

Now down on the floor, Wally leaning his hot head back against my chest, the bottle at his lips, I turned into the child whisperer.  “Shh, shh,” I said to ease his fast-beating heart.  I held his hand, kissed his head, readied him for a return to sleep.  He drank four ounces, pushed the bottle away.  My pulse quickened.  If our plan was going to fail, this is where things would go wrong.  Was he going to cough and vomit?  I stood up and steadied him against my chest.  He put his head against my shoulder.  No coughing, no gagging, we were golden.

I walked him for a minute, but just as I was about to lay him in his crib I realized I didn’t know where I’d put the empty bottle.  I couldn’t believe it.  They always tell you: Put bottle in the same place every time, so you can pick it up quickly on your way out without making any extra noise.  I strained in the dark to find it but I couldn’t see anything.

Ok, deep breath, don’t panic.  If I was going to get out safely I’d have to improvise.  Slowly I laid Wally down in his crib; he raised his head for a moment then slumped back down to sleep. I turned towards the door, afraid I was going to kick the missing bottle and ruin everything.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the faintest little glow, the vaporizer’s red light reflected off the glass bottle, which was sitting on the bookshelf.  With one step I reached the bottle, grabbed it, pivoted on my left foot and stepped out the door, pulling it closed behind me: Mission accomplished.

Upstairs in bed Caroline was awake waiting for me.  We high-fived, or kissed, or maybe just grunted at each other.  I lay down, turned on my side, feeling flush with competence.

But just as I closed my eyes, a voice called out from the other room. “I need help going back to sleep.”  It was Jay, who’d coughed himself awake.

Fuck, I thought. This I don’t have a plan for.

Jay learned about the New Year at dinner on the 31st over three flutes of sparkling apple juice. By the next morning he was in the swing of things.

We were flipping pancakes together in the kitchen when Wally started whining—stuck atop a nearby chair. “I’ll help him,” Jay said. He ran over in his new red apron and with a bear hug, lowered his brother to the floor. I hope that act of kindness marked the start of a good year between those two.

We arrived back home on Sunday and as we crossed the state line into Michigan, Caroline and I were pleased to note that our family was in much better shape than when we’d left nine days earlier: no more stomach flu, no more travel, and Wally eating (and keeping it down) like he’s got a pound or eight to gain.

We spent a lot of the drive home talking about all the people we’d seen on our trip. We saw a dozen friends, met two new babies, got to know a couple toddlers who’d tripled in age since we’d last seen them, and generally caught up—over tea, breakfast, corned beef sandwiches, take-in Thai—with a lot of people we don’t see often enough.

We’ve been away from the east coast—and our east coast friends—for 16-months now and things have changed in that time, with us, with them. Across all our visits I got a sense of not being quite so young anymore, and of having turned a corner from the rapid-building stage of life to something slower and more permanent, where happiness and failure play out over decades instead of years or months.

Because for the last decade Caroline and I and our peers have been experiencing life in bursts: graduations, new jobs, new homes, marriages, kids. They are all important milestones but they’re also preliminary, too. Getting married is just the start of being married, which is the harder and more monumental thing. And becoming a parent and tending to a sleepless newborn are easy trials compared with the long-term project of raising kids and trying to balance all the parts of family life.

Our week catching up with friends made it clear that, in our early-thirties, the game has changed. The markers of a successful life are subtler than they were; satisfaction and disappointment would seem to run deeper now, which is exciting because what’s earned is not so easily taken away, but also scary because it’s harder to turn the tide when things aren’t going the way we want them to.

All told, life seems to be asserting itself as I guess we always knew it would. There’s melancholy in the creeping bald spots and signs of paunch on a few of my friends and in the gray hairs that dominate atop my own head.

But it’s thrilling, too, to be midstream with our friends after so many years together close to shore.

I just wanted to write a quick post to let you all know that Wally is doing better.  We spent most of yesterday in the ER at Children’s National Medical Center where the care was good and Wally submitted bravely to his IV and choked down barium four ways.  

The net result is that he’s healthy by all measures except for the vomiting, which has diminished in the last 24 hours.  His organs are fine (ultrasound), his blood chemistry is good, and his chewing and swallowing are more or less normal (barium test).  Our best guess as to why his throwing up has surged in the last two weeks is that he’s had the stomach flu a lot longer than the rest of us (we were all better in a couple days).  It’s a mystery but one we can tolerate for now.

And all told Christmas Eve in the ER is not as bad as it sounds, especially when the results come back good.  Caroline and I enjoyed the chance to spend some relatively quiet time together and between visits from the hospital staff it was kind of cozy to sit the three of us on the bed, munching goldfish crackers and reading books.  

So, thank you everyone who expressed concern for Wally.  I imagine I’ll write more about this once we get back to Ann Arbor and continue trying to figure out what’s going on.  But for now, Merry Christmas.

On Saturday morning we set out for Virginia under inauspicious skies: For the last week all for of us had had the stomach flu; more troubling, Wally’s underlying health concerns- his weight, his frequent vomiting- had worsened nearly to the point of crisis. On Friday night, our bags packed, the boys asleep, Caroline and I leaned against each other on the couch and concluded that this easily had been one of the four worst weeks in the last six years.

So when we did finally head east, there was good reason to hope that things would only get better from there. Two days in Virginia, though, and that has not been the case. Wally, though clear of the stomach flu, is continuing to vomit at an alarming rate (two or three times a day) for no discernible reason. He’s dropped a pound in the last week. Folds of loose skin bunch on top of his hands. When he’s not being sick he’s downright Dickensian, cheerful and energetic, tragically happy amid it all.

Needles to say, Christmas will have a different ring to it this year. For a month we’ve been emailing with Caroline’s family about the fun things we’ll do this week- s’mores, a trip to the zoo, decorating the tree- but now with a trip to the ER planned for later this morning (to make sure nothing is acutely wrong with Wally, not because he seems in immediate danger), the idea of revelry seems as distant as summer.

I’ve thought about this post off an on for the last 24 hours. Often I try to abstract an insight from the events of our everyday lives. It seems off to do that here, both because the story hasn’t been told yet and because I don’t have much depth of perspective on what’s happening to Wally right now. But if there is one thought, it’s this: approaching a heavily choreographed holiday, I’ve stopped expecting the next few days to look or feel any particular way.

Things have been quiet here lately due to a tryout I’ve been doing with the Boston Globe to write the paper’s “Brainiac” ideas blog. For the last two weeks I’ve been contributing posts over there on everything from a 90-year-old mathematician who has toiled at a proof for 50 years, to a pair of headphones that makes you sit still while you listen, to the use of unarmed drones to fight rhino poachers.

I’ve enjoyed the writing and on Friday I was offered the job!  I’ll be contributing twice daily posts to the Brainiac blog, with the best of those posts running as a column in the Sunday Ideas section. Currently I’m stuffing my RSS reader with websites to mine for story ideas, and I’ll repeat here a call I expect to be making nonstop in the coming weeks: Please send me names of any blogs or websites you enjoy (anything trafficking in news, ideas, interesting stories, in the arts, sciences, humanities) and keep me in mind next time you come across a good story (or are a part of one!).

Getting the Brainiac job made for a great weekend and then this morning, more good news: Growing Sideways has debuted on Babble’s annual list of the Top-50 Dad Blogs. We come in at #49 which I actually think is ideal: lots of room to move up, plus motivation to write well and not get dropped from the list next year.  And I really like their description of the blog: “On his Growing Sideways blog, the freelance writer, who lives with his wife and two young sons in Ann Arbor, Michigan, excels at taking a typical moment from family life and coaxing many possible meanings from it, chewing it over and viewing it from different perspectives.”

I don’t expect the Brainiac job to get in the way of posting on Growing Sideways, especially once I get my feet under me.  And in that spirit, a few words about Jay.

He has been obsessed with pirates going back at least a month. It stems from a video rented from the library and watched nearly daily (until we traced that video to Jay’s newfound fear of the dark and swapped it out for more Blues Clues).

The first thing Jay learned about pirates is that they’re bad.  For a week straight in mid-November he asked me, over and over again, usually while I was trying to get his toothbrush into his mouth, “What else is mean about pirates?” I always answered with things like, “Pirates don’t brush their teeth” and “Pirates aren’t very nice to their brothers” and “Pirates never say please.”

Of course, that backfired when two weeks later Jay announced, “I am a pirate.”  I’ve tried to walk back some of the things I’ve told him- “Actually, pirates love putting their pajamas on”- but he’s not having it. The best we’ve been able to do is form a pirate family that includes Jay, Wally, and Caroline.  Among this group of pirate kin, Caroline has managed to convince Jay that traits like loyalty and following directions are important.

I, however, have been cast alternately as “the police,” “a bandit,” or part of “another pirate family” which means I get challenged with a wooden-block-cum-sword and chased away every time I try to approach the playroom.  All told, I don’t mind it so much.

A few weeks ago Caroline and I made a list of all the words Wally’s knew at the time, when he was 17-months old.  It has taken me awhile to get it together to publish that list, and in the meantime his vocabulary has grown fast enough that I doubt my ability to make an accurate list of all the words he knows as of today.

Below is Wally’s word list at 17-months-old alongside a list we made for Jay when he was 19-months-old.  Jay’s is slightly longer but he was two months older.  All told Wally is learning to talk faster than his big brother did, a point I emphasize in order to spark sibling conflict when they’re older.

Comparing the two lists you see that there’s a lot of overlap: 16 of Wally’s first 39 words were among Jay’s first words, too.  To the extent that vocabulary differences reflect personality differences, I’d point to Wally’s early acquisition of the word “dancin’” (which he loves to do atop our dining table whenever we turn our backs) and Jay’s early acquisition of the word “keys.”