FROM THE NEWSROOM
I don't get our much anymore
By Blake Wolfe/The Scugog Standard

I never thought it would come to this.

My six-month old daughter already has a more active social life than both her parents combined. Her father, at least.

This was not an immediate shock - it crept up slowly over a series of weeks. First it was baby storytime: sounds fair enough, a place for babies and mom and/or dad to go for an hour and enjoy a tale or two away from the distractions of home and life in general. The snowball was already in motion.

Next came baby sign language (yes, there is a theme developing), right up the street, in fact. In addition to the potential for springing me loose from the office for a quick visit on Tuesday mornings - a notion which has sadly, and hopefully only temporarily, joined other pipe dreams like homemade guitar cabinets - there is the possibility that grandma might one day accidentally be on the receiving end of an unsavoury hand gesture. I’m not sure whether to cringe or chuckle quietly to myself on that one.

Hot on the heels of sign language came infant massage. This is not the class where your children are taught to rub your aching feet after a long day behind a desk or toiling in a salt mine. This is the one where parents are informed on how to properly relieve baby’s stress - you know, the kind they build up napping five times a day in between someone tending to their every need.

There is also an unfortunate side effect no one tells you about. You see, babies only have one way of expressing their relief from stress and that’s through - you guessed it - crying. Which is fine, except for the part where no one told me until the first night after massage class.

Perhaps the most useful of these is a music class for babies. It means that Norah is well on her way to learning how to be musical (read: noisy) much to mom’s delight, and that the house will have another amateur musician living under its roof. It also means that I have an excuse to buy all kinds of simple instruments - everything from those egg shakers to a reed flute (I’m convinced the young lady at the Scugog Heritage Centre who sold it to me was confused and/or stifling a laugh) - to add to an ever-growing collection.

Naturally, I’m jealous that I don’t leave the house nearly as much or for reasons even remotely that interesting. Shopping for tartar sauce on a Tuesday night sounds pretty crappy compared to getting a back rub or learning how to say ‘pig’ in sign language. By the way, it’s two squeezes of the hand in front of one’s nose.

A couple weekend’s back, though, we had a pretty good reason of our own to get out of the house. Two more friends took the plunge and got married in an out-of-town ceremony which, in addition to seeing good friends after way too long while an open bar beckons in the distance, means it’s mom’s and dad’s first weekend away. No baby. The big return to a busy social calendar, right? Sort of.

Let’s just say my better half had more fun than I did, and I had a blast. Tales of late-night visits to fast-food establishments and early morning lobby hangouts seem to ring a bell.

What did I want to do after the main event? What any recent father would probably want to do on that first weekend away as a couple since baby’s big arrival. Sleep. At least until the frantic knocks at the door and the phone calls from the front desk, reminding me that my wife was out on the town without a baby or a room key.