A lifetime of learning

As much as I value the knowledge I gained through formal education, sometimes life's most important lessons are learned through day-to-day experiences. So, to help you and me both avoid work and productivity for a little while, here is a quick list of lessons I've recently learned:

1. August is not the time of year to do home-improvement projects inside your attic. This sounds like common sense, I know, but yet I have been (and continue to be) determined to complete a radiant barrier project in my attic before Georgia's sweltering summer ends. The idea here is to see whether and how well the radiant barrier works, as its mission is to deflect away some of the sun's heat energy, cooling down the attic on hot summer days and then cooling down the upstairs rooms.

Despite knowing that the attic temperatures easily top 100 degrees on sunny days, I attempted to work in the space two days straight a couple of weekends ago. It was very slow-moving work (applying the radiant barrier mixed with paint by roller), and my clothes were entirely drenched with sweat, as if I had jumped into a pool. I knew I had to call it a day at about 1:00 on Saturday afternoon, when I found myself sitting on a plank between two ceiling joists feeling so sluggish that I considered taking a nap inside the attic.

I'll be back attic, and I'll defeat you. But on rainy days when the sun has not baked through the roof all morning.

2. My best solution in the what-baby-stuff-to-register-for crisis (See prior post) is this: Register for almost everything and then return to the store the things you don't use. Seriously, it was really hurting my head for a while, trying to figure out a way to be a minimalist at the whole raising a baby thing. Trouble is: I've never raised a baby. I've only seen other people do it, and I've never seen anyone else do it in a way that I would consider even close to minimalist. Plus, I know many family and friends are going to buy us lots of stuff, whether we register for it or not. So I've decided (and I think Meaghan agrees) that we're going to err on the side of getting things, and then when we see what we are not using we'll take that stuff back to the store.

That's not so much a lesson learned from day-to-day experience as a decision to escape my usual indecisiveness.

3. In any garden or area of self-installed landscaping, the most expensive plants always die first. This is a repeat lesson, exactly the same as the one nature taught us last summer, but we had hoped this time it would be different. Of the various flowers, bushes and ferns we set out this year (not an overall expensive lot, mind you), the only ones making any effort to continue flourishing are the absolutely cheapest white flowers in the garden. There is one fern on the front porch that continues to do well, looking like its own miniature rainforest, while its counterpart (which received the exact same watering treatment) is the equivalent of Charlie Brown's twig of a Christmas tree.

I suppose maybe the real lesson here should be: Plants die without water. We are pitifully neglectful about watering our plants. If I do go to the trouble of ever planting a vegetable garden in my yard, I will most certainly have to install some of those drip-irrigation hoses to keep it watered.

4. Wherever there's a hole in a fence that you're pretty sure your dog can't get out, the dog will most certainly get out. Maybe two days in a row. Especially if that dog is Jewels.

No worries; we got her back. She had just gone next door to visit another dog. And the hole is officially repaired now. She's not getting out at that spot again unless she learns to use a pry bar and pop the nails loose. I'm pretty sure.

5. Gently jogging a couple times a week on an indoor track is poor preparation for running a very hilly 5K road race. Seriously. Some of you may be familiar with a certain hill topped by a tower topped by a clock. Well, try running up that hill in the middle of a 5-kilometer footrace. It hurts. I haven't been that sore in a long time.

That's pretty much all. I hope that, deep down, I have learned much more valuable lessons than these in the last several weeks, but they're escaping my mind at the moment.

Is it sad that I'm excited about diapers?

A quick prologue here: I realize it will be tempting to comment on this post with a simple, "Yes. Yes, it is." Resist that temptation, or risk having your comment deleted by the administrator (that's me). I'm looking for something a little more thoughtful, despite the forbidden yes/no-question title.

The wife and I have recently discovered that there's a whole lot of crap out there for babies. Mostly plastic crap.

Crap for them to sit in, sleep in, ride in, drink out of, eat out of, pee in, vomit on, swing from, make noise with, chew on, and of course crap for them to crap in. I shouldn't really say we've "discovered" this abundance, because we kind of already knew about it. We had been to stores before and seen much of this crap in passing, but the reality sank in hard when we recently visited an area megalo-store (whose name started with a "Tar" in case anyone is wondering) to begin creating a baby gift registry.

Apparently some kind, generous people whom we know and in some cases share DNA markers with are planning to buy gifts for us to be used for the baby's benefit. (In reality, probably just a few of them are kind and generous, while many others will feel obligated by some ancient tribal tradition to buy tiny baby outfits by the case-full, complete with cute shoes that the child will never wear. Regardless, the point is: we'll get stuff.)

So, to help them select this stuff to get us... well, we select it for them, walking around the store(s) with a little barcode-scanning gun to compile an electronic list.

The point of all my rambling is that we, as first-time parents and wanna-be environmentalists, had no idea how to distinguish the stuff that we'll really need from the stuff that Gerber just really wants to sell us. (Good environmentalists don't buy stuff just because Gerber tells them to.)

Meaghan did find several articles on the Internet on the subject --- the general theme of which was the baby mostly just wants to eat, sleep and be loved, so don't stress about the stuff. It was morale-boosting advice, but didn't really get us any closer to deciding whether to buy one car seat with two snap-on bases (one for each car), or two car seats, or a car seat-stroller "travel system", or a car seat that's adjustable for all stages of baby-toddler-young childhood.

The good news is -- and this is the uber-dorky variety of excitement of which you were warned -- we have found an earth-friendly alternative in the diaper category that I can feel really good about as a parent-to-be. (Do I need to stick the word "advertisement" in tiny print at the top of this post? Cause that last sentence sounded like one of those "advertorial" letters in a cheap magazine -- you know, you get halfway through the letter and then realize it's about how some nutritional supplement changed this woman's life and saved her marriage.)

We have decided we're going to use gDiapers. (Cue the dramatic music.)

This crowd can immediately see the problem with standard disposable diapers, I'm sure. You do an awful lot of disposing, not to mention the ills of the plastic manufacturing process. I read that diapers are something like the No. 3 single largest contributor to U.S. landfill waste, an annual dump of 3.5 million tons of poop and plastic (but that came from the gDiapers website, so the data might be skewed for impact).

gDiapers look to be an excellent alternative to the disposables (says the guy who really has no idea how much work this whole diapering process will require). As explained on the website, though, it looks like the changing process is not much different from disposables.

The gDiapers are outer cotton pants, with an inner protective liner and then a refill liner. The refill liner is meant to catch all the pee and poop, in most cases. (Sometimes there's leakage or squishing, as with any diaper. A gross truth of child-rearing that I somehow already know.)

So at each changing, you just tear out the refill liner and flush it down your toilet. The main liner stays put (unless there was leakage or squishing) and you just put in a new refill liner. You wash the outer pants and main liner as needed; the frequency of washings will depend on how many pairs of the pants you have.

There's nothing to throw away! It's fantastic! It's earth-friendly. It's... it's... greentastic!

OK, calming down...

The refill liners actually are made of fluffed wood pulp with some standard absorbent material, so they can be flushed or thrown away if you've got old plumbing that gets clogged easily. We'll see what works at our place, which does have old plumbing, I'm afraid. But, even if you do have to throw the refills away, they're biodegradable, so much so that you can actually compost the wet ones in your own home compost pile. (Not the poopy ones. Don't compost the poop of any being that eats meat or dairy.)

Not only do we escape the guilt of producing a lot of waste this way (and hopefully keep a lot of stink out of our trash cans), but the materials are safer for baby's health. No plastic, no bleaching used in manufacturing, and so on.

I suspect these gDiapers will end up costing us a little more than disposables, but probably not much more in the long run, since the flushable refill liners are the only piece that we'll have to keep buying over and over. The cotton pants seems somewhat expensive, at $17 to $19 a pair, although we can get a little break by buying the "starter kit".

Regardless, the cost won't be exorbitant (any more so than other diaper options) and I'm happy to be going with this option. I hope the concept will catch on quickly in the U.S. Apparently gDiapers originated in Australia, where they're already fairly popular.

It will be great peace of mind for me that Mickey, my environmental conscience, won't be scolding me in my head every time I change a diaper.

So, if you come across any other marvelous green innovations (how about greenovations? yes? no?) in baby-raising equipment, send them my way.

Guess what's growing in my wife's uterus

Some (if not all) of you have already read about this over at Whatever Happened to Schoolhouse Rock, but just for the record: we're having a boy.

We took this as good news, since now the lone nephew on my side of the family will have another boy to play with at family gatherings as he grows up. Also we had already settled on a name for a boy, whereas we were still debating girl names. (Logan Matthew, by the way. You already know all this. There's no suspense here.) Plus, Meaghan confessed she was a little nervous at the prospect of raising a girl, especially through the teenage years, and she's even more excited than I am about traditional boy things like Little League.

More "for the record" stuff: we would have been happy about a girl too, probably for slightly different reasons. Most importantly, the baby appears to have all his parts in all the right places.

It's amazing what you can see on the most basic "level 1" ultrasound. The technician verified a beating heart, with four properly divided chambers. She pointed out specific parts of the brain, the names of which I've forgotten now. She showed us that the spine has appropriately formed inside the skin.

And, of course, he's got the usual twig and berries that make him a him, and he was not a bit shy about showing them off for the "camera".

So, I think this officially puts us in the second half of the pregnancy. Roughly 20 weeks (give or take a week) down and roughly 20 more to go.

Then, it's on to the easy part -- raising the child.