In 3 1/2 months as a grandparent, I have learned I can still change diapers and calm a crying infant

My grandson Cal is doing great. He is great. I keep saying this, but I had no idea how attached I would get to him so quickly. It's a highlight of my week when I know I'm going to see him.

Before Cal was born, I wasn't sure how fast my baby parenting skills would return, or if they would return at all. But it would seem I had nothing to worry about.

For one thing, changing a diaper is like riding a bike. You do it a few thousand times as I did back in the 90s and early 2000s and it becomes awfully hard to forget.

You remember, for instance, how to open a fresh diaper with one hand and position it underneath the child while using the other hand to lift their butt by pulling their feet up. You quickly recall wipey techniques for fast and efficient clean-up.

And in the case of boys, you remember to cover them up so as not to get doused by an unexpected arc of pee.

All of that was fine. But it turns out I'm also still pretty good at getting babies to sleep.

I have, I think, a natural rhythm and bounce that allows me to calm little ones down when I'm holding them. I always had a knack for getting my own kids to sleep years ago, and it appears to have transferred to Cal.

Well, it's either that or else I'm just insanely boring and the kid can't help but drift off in my presence. Either way, I am the Baby Whisperer.

It is such a joy when Cal comes over and I go to take him out of his car seat. He looks at me for a second and then gives one of those big baby smiles that says, "It's you! I know you! Mom, it's that guy! Grandpa! I love him!"

To say my heart melts in those moments is something more than an understatement. That's when I can't wait for him to grow up so I can start spoiling the little guy properly.

Spoiling, in addition to diaper changing and getting cranky babies to sleep, is right near the top of the grandpa job description.

Our cats are lucky I love them

 

We have five cats, and I suppose I am more involved in their care and maintenance than anyone else in the family. It just sort of happened that way over the years, to the point that it's difficult to imagine doing anything other than feeding them and scooping out their litter boxes every day when I first wake up.

Contrary to popular belief when it comes to cats, they are all affectionate to one degree or another. They seem grateful for the easy life they live (at least as far as cats can be grateful), though there are times when they clearly take this as nothing more than their proper due.

I've generally been OK with that, but the three boys are trying my patience as they age.

The other night/morning, for instance, Charlie woke us up at 4:30am making a strange sound. Terry got out of bed and discovered he had a mouse in his mouth. I'm pretty sure the mouse was dead – that, or he was doing a bang-up job of playing dead – so I grabbed it in a paper towel, took it outside in the pouring rain, and flung it into the grass.

Then there's Fred, whose urinary tract issues are relatively under control, but only through daily effort on our part and not-inconsiderable investment in vet bills and prescription medicine. I've not cleaned up a puddle of Fred pee for a week or two, and I'm of course happy about that, but the total amount of his urine I have sopped up over the years would fill a large backyard swimming pool.

I apologize for the nauseating image, but it's true.

There are regular piles of nasty cat puke to clean up, some of which fall to me and others of which various family members (and here I'm thinking mainly of Terry) take on themselves to address.

Add to this Charlie's constant need to assert his alpha status by tormenting the other cats, plus the shedding, plus the cost of specialty food for Fred and regular food for the other four, plus the need to keep certain doors closed so that cats don't go in there and deposit a random biological substance on the floor, and...well, it's a lot.

Pet ownership done right is never easy, no matter what sort of animal you own. But the cats know all they have to do is present themselves to me for petting, and then loudly purr once I touch them, and all is forgiven.

I am an eternal sucker.

In June I'm going to walk from Western New York to Cleveland, and I need to get in shape for it

It must be "250 Week" here on the blog. Yesterday I told you how I was duped out of $250. Today I'll fill you in on my plan to walk 250 miles.

So my company, Vitamix, will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2021. This surprises a lot of people, many of whom assume we couldn't have been around before 1980 or so. But it's true. Vitamix (which wasn't actually called Vitamix until the mid-60s) was founded in 1921 by William G. "Papa" Barnard, the great-grandfather of our current president and CEO Dr. Jodi Berg.

Since 2017, I have been planning the various elements of our 100th anniversary celebration in my role as Director of Communications. We'll be doing all kinds of things, both internally and externally, to mark this milestone, which only a very small percentage of businesses reach.

One of those activities is my little walk. Back in 1938, members of the Barnard family joined a man named Bernarr Macfadden on a 265-mile walk from Cleveland's Public Square to Macfadden's "Physical Culture Hotel" in the village of Dansville in western New York.

Macfadden was the Jack LaLanne of his day (if you're old enough to get that reference). He was preaching the benefits of exercise long before it was cool. He hosted these long-distance walks every year for a period of time in the 1930s, starting from a different city each time. 1938 marked Cleveland's turn.

Anyway, I plan to recreate the walk by myself this coming June. The thing is, the Physical Culture Hotel no longer exists, nor is Vitamix (then known as "The Natural Food Institute") based any longer in downtown Cleveland. So my plan is to start in Dansville and make my way westward to Vitamix HQ in Olmsted Township, Ohio. We'll promote my walk through our employee and public-facing social media and communication channels to try and bring some attention to the Vitamix 100th anniversary.

(By the way, the distance is slightly shorter than the 1938 walk because of the existence today of certain walkable roads that are more direct and weren't around 80 years ago.)

The trip should take me 15 days, assuming I can walk an average of 17 miles a day. This, it turns out, is no easy feat. Walking or not, that's a long distance to cover in one day when you have to get up again and do it the next day. And again the next day. And again the next day. And so on.

So I've been walking almost every day an average of 30 miles a week to build up my stamina. My training walks are almost always right around 15 minutes a mile. I would imagine we'll have to back that off to 16 minutes or more when the time comes in order to prevent injury, which is a real concern when you're 51 years old.

I also have to drop some weight. I have been steadily gaining since I was down to a very skinny (for me) 166 pounds back in 2016. I'm off to a good start there, but there are still pounds to shed so that I can minimize the impact on my joints from so much walking.

There are perhaps two morals to this story:

(1) You should always try crazy things. It will keep you young, at least in your head.

(2) Don't allow yourself to get out of shape because getting back into it when you're no longer in your 20s is tougher than you would think.

My only concerns? Getting enough coffee every day and figuring out where to pee while I'm walking (these two things obviously go hand in hand).

You're supposed to drink water and I hate drinking water

There's a rule of thumb that says you're supposed to drink 157 glasses of water a day or something, and I drink one.

Seriously, I drink one glass of water a day and I do it in the morning when I'm taking my vitamins.

Sometimes I have water with dinner, too.

Beyond that, it's pretty much coffee or nothing when it comes to beverages for me.

I realize what a bad thing this is for my body, and that we need to keep ourselves hydrated. I just don't like water. I have to force myself to drink it.

When I trained for a marathon 14 years ago, I downed water by the gallon because I had to. Now that my running schedule is considerably more tame, I've abandoned the water.

Again, I know this isn't good judgment. There just isn't anything about the water-drinking experience that I enjoy.

Let's set aside the whole "there's no taste to it" thing. That's bad enough in itself. Water drinking makes me go to the bathroom a lot. A LOT.

"That's OK," you might say, "your body will adjust. Give it time."

I have given it time before, and my body never adjusts. I drink one glass of water and I'm headed to the bathroom three times in the next 30-45 minutes. I'm not kidding. It's like I drink a small quantity of water, and my body uses it to spontaneously manufacture more water. It's the only explanation.

Do you drink water? How much? How do you do it? My dad used to drink huge cupfuls of water all the time. It just baffles me how people manage this.

Jobs I do around the house because I'm the man

My inability to fix things and/or do anything remotely mechanical is well documented. And I freely own up to it. But there are still certain jobs I do within our household simply because I have testicles.

I don't know why these are Man Jobs, but they are. My list includes the following:

(1) KILLING BUGS
This is pretty stereotypical, and it's also true. My wife and daughters - strong, confident women all - will force me to fly in from the other side of the continent, if necessary, if a spider is found in our kitchen. They could easily squash it themselves, but for whatever reason, insect and arachnid killing falls to me or my son Jared.

(2) CLEANING THE CAT LITTER BOXES
As I've mentioned  before, I got roped into this one years ago when Terry was pregnant with Elissa. Terry and her doctor conspired to make up a fake disease called toxoplasmosis, which they claimed pregnant women could contract if they come into contact with cat waste. I stupidly believed them, and 20 years later the first thing I do every single day is still cleaning the litter boxes. I can't believe I fell for it.

(3) MAINTAINING THE CARS
This may seem surprising, given my aforementioned lack of mechanical aptitude, but all it really means is that every few weeks I pop the hoods on our cars to check that they have the proper levels of windshield washer, transmission and power steering fluids, coolant, oil, etc. I also make sure the tires are inflated to the correct pressure. This not only extends the life of our vehicles, it also makes me feel semi-manly. Everybody wins.

(4) CLEANING UP PEE, BOTH ANIMAL AND HUMAN
If one of our cats pees on the carpet and I'm home, I clean it up. I'm not sure why this is, but I'm fine with it. The problem is that, from time to time when the kids were little, they would also pee on the carpet, and again...the clean-up was assigned to me. Like this one time, one of my daughters who shall remain nameless was sleepwalking at our old house. Wearing her little Barbie nightgown, she stood at the top of the stairs and announced, "I can't take it anymore." And then she just started peeing. Terry cleaned her up and got her back to bed, while I soaked up the pee and broke out the stain remover. The unwritten rule is that Scott is to clean up any and all urine-related incidents within the confines of the house.

(5) MAKING SURE THE KEURIG RESERVOIR IS FULL
Our Keurig coffee maker gets used a lot. Which means the water level in the little plastic reservoir attached to the machine tends to drop quickly. In almost all cases, I'm the one who fills it back up. Again, I don't know why, but it bothers me to see that "Add Water" indicator on the little Keurig screen, so I'm quick to take it over to the sink and fill it up. It's my job. It's what I do.

I'm The Man.

The fun and routine of putting your kids to bed

Some years ago, I wrote a song that I would play on our old Yamaha keyboard for the kids before they went to bed. I honestly don't remember why I wrote it in the first place, or why it started to become a bedtime staple in our house. But I did, and it is.

Now before we go any further, I should make the honest disclaimer that saying "I wrote a song" is probably a little ambitious. I mean, it IS a song. And I DID write it. But in reality, it's just a short melody with a small bridge section. Playing it through once probably takes something like 30 seconds.

OK, wait, here's what I'll do: I'll run upstairs right now, play the song, and take a quick cell phone video so you can at least hear what I'm talking about. Here it is:

Sorry for the poor camera work in the second half of the video. Not only am I not a songwriter, I'm most definitely not a videographer, either. But you get the idea.

Anyway, the point is, this song has become a strange nighttime ritual for us. I've played it many hundreds of times since it was written (in, I think, 2005?) At first I did it for Elissa, Chloe, Jared and Melanie when they were little. Nowadays it's played only for Jack's benefit, since he's the first one to go to bed each night.

As you heard in the video, I like to put background music to it to spice things up a little. Sometimes I do it as a samba. The next night might be heavy metal. The following night could be ska or punk or country or whatever other musical styling our Casio keyboard (a definite step up from the original Yamaha on which the tune was written) has to offer. But it's always the same melody played in essentially the same way.

This got me to thinking about bedtime routines we parents have with our kids. As they get older, they of course start getting themselves into pajamas and brushing their teeth and all of the little activities they'll likely adopt for the rest of their lives.

But when they're little, you as Mom or Dad have to drive the process. You brush their teeth. You get them into pajamas. You tell them to go pee. And if you're so inclined, you say prayers with them. It can be time-consuming, but it's also very comforting.

I've always enjoyed bedtime with the kids because it's a nice opportunity to wind down from the day's whirlwind of activities and just spend a few one-on-one minutes with your child. When Elissa was really little, after she said her prayers, I would pretend to spread ice cream all over her and build "an Elissa Sundae," which I would "eat" off of her belly and tickle her when I was finished. She loved and always looked forward to it.

Now she's 19 and we don't do the Elissa Sundae thing anymore. Well, maybe she does it herself, in which case that's her own business and I don't want to know what weird, cultish bedtime rituals she's into.

Anyway, I would be most interested to hear what nighttime routines you all have, or what memories you have of routines with your own kids, or even from when you were a kid with your parents. It's not often we step back and realize how much our children will remember those night-in, night-out activities the rest of their lives.

Especially if they involve weird, synthesizer-based music or ice-cream-related tickling practices.

Thoughts on childbirth from someone who has never had to do it

I know several women who either recently have or very soon will be giving birth. This is extremely impressive to me. As I've mentioned before, I've had a front-row seat to this event five times, and the whole thing is mind-boggling.

I often say that the sheer physics of the process alone is puzzling. You can talk all you want about how a woman's hips widen and her body adapts in order to accommodate the exiting child, but it still doesn't change the basic fact of large-baby-passing-through-small-opening.

I don't get it. I really don't. I've seen it happen, but it seems like an elaborate magic trick or something. Like after the child emerges, David Copperfield should walk into the delivery room and explain how the whole thing was just an illusion and the baby was actually grown in a laboratory somewhere. That would be far more plausible than what really occurs in childbirth.

My wife had four conventional deliveries (as if there's anything "conventional" about it) and one Cesarean section. The C-section was with baby #5, and Terry still says she wished it would have come the normal way.

(NOTE: In that one paragraph alone, I referred to the commonly accepted method of delivery as "conventional" and "normal." I did this because I can't bring myself to type the V-initialed medical term for these sorts of births. I know it's no big deal and all, and we're (mostly) adults here, but my fingers just won't do it. I'm eating lunch as I write this, and typing that word would very likely ruin the experience for me. Just so you know.)

Anyway, the C-section was a real trip. We had planned to have Jack the, uh, regular way, but at some point during labor he decided to flip upside down, and the doctor pretty much said it was either a C-section or else the baby was going to stay in there forever. Terry opted for the C-section.

Once that decision was made, they whisked her away to do whatever it is they do to women who are about to undergo this procedure. A nurse came in and gave me a set of scrubs to change into, so I did that and then waited around for someone to come and get me so I could be there when my son came out.

This took a long time. Or at least it seemed like a long time. I waited and paced for something like 45 minutes, when I guess someone in the O.R. with Terry looked around and said, "Wait, is the dad here? Someone needs to go and get the dad." So someone came and retrieved the dad and I walked into the delivery room, where my wife was laid out helplessly on a table with a surgical curtain draped across her chest.

The curtain was there so that she didn't have to view all the messiness associated with an operation in which they cut you open and lift a child from your womb. I, on the other hand, had been in operating rooms several times during my years at the Cleveland Clinic, and I tend not to mind blood and gore. As they were working on her, Terry asked me to peek over the curtain and let her know what I saw. So I did.

"Organs and goo," is what I reported back. Because that's really all I saw. They had taken various bodily organs out of her abdominal cavity, as far as I could tell, and laid them off to the side like jigsaw puzzle pieces. I made a mental note to ask later if they remembered exactly how everything fit back in there, because I'm terrible at puzzles and would be of no help.

Anyway, after a few minutes they hoisted Jack out of his mother's belly and held him up to allow me to announce his gender to the room. We never found out the sex of any of our babies ahead of time, instead preferring the very cool surprise you get when you discover the answer at the moment of birth. But they held him up at a strange angle, and it took me several seconds to get a clear view of the goods. It was pretty clear he was a boy at that point, and as if to confirm the verdict, Jack peed all over his mother right then and there. I was so proud.

It may have been messy and required several stitches afterward, but the C-section was a far more enjoyable experience for me -- not that I obviously counted for much, but still -- than the four clearly-physically-impossible births had been. Watching my first four kids being born was a lot like being in a car accident: I was dazed and confused afterward, I wasn't quite sure what I had seen, and there was a heck of a mess that I was willing to pay someone else to clean up.

Because honestly, there's a lot going on when a child is born. They show you the video in biology class or Lamaze, but nothing at all can prepare you for the reality of it. Things came out of my wife that I didn't even know existed. Medical personnel whom I hadn't seen all day suddenly came out of nowhere to fulfill whatever small role they were assigned in the birth of my child. People started speaking in urgent tones, telling my wife to PUSH PUSH PUSH, though I'm quite sure she didn't need any prodding from them.

And I wasn't even the one giving birth! I was just a clueless bystander. My wife, the star of this whole show until the moment the baby came out, displayed a quiet confidence and ability I had no idea she possessed until she gave birth the first time. I may have been freaking out, but she was pretty clearly in control. There was always this look on her face that said, "Seriously, don't worry, I've got this." And she did, too.

A lot of women like to say that men could never have babies. And I don't know that I fully agree. I mean, I could do it. If you put a growing baby inside of me, I would eventually find a way to pass the thing. But there's no way I would ever do it as well as Terry did. God just didn't give me the same capacity for this that He gave her, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing.

It's not so much the actual birth that would throw me off. It's the nine months or so leading up to it. In addition to your body getting larger, there are all sorts of physical discomforts associated with pregnancy that would seriously wear me out. Especially in the summer. Two of our kids were born in August and September, which means Terry spent the last trimester of two pregnancies during the warm, humid summer months. Not good.

But she bore up well under the burden of it. I, on the other hand, would have whined about it 24 hours a day. Seriously, I would have complained constantly. One baby would have been enough for me. But she somehow made it through five. God bless her.

Street walking

Because I'm stupidly competitive, I walked nearly 17 miles to work the other day.

If you think that sentence is absurd, you're right. So is getting up at 4:50 a.m. for an almost-four-hour walk to work. I don't necessarily recommend it.

Here's the deal: We're having this wellness initiative at work. There's a contest in which employees get a certain number of points each time they exercise, lose weight, etc. For no good reason at all, I decided I was going to do something really big that no one else would match.

Are there cash prizes for the winners of this competition? Not that I'm aware of. Any rewards at all? I don't think so. My only interest in winning is so that I can win. Does that make sense? No, it doesn't, but it's the way I'm wired.

I did the walk-to-work thing once before, back in 2008. It's actually sort of fun for me, if you set aside the fact that I stepped in a puddle three miles into the walk and covered the last 14 miles with soaking-wet feet. And the inevitable post-walk pain in my feet and ankles. And the chafing in those areas I didn't grease up with runner's lube. And the not-so-pleasant feeling of spending the rest of the day in work clothes worn over a body from which I could only minimally clean off the dirt, sweat and grime in the men's room at our office.

But other than that, it was great!

You have a lot of time to think on a 3-hour-and-45-minute walk. And to listen to your iPod. I went through a whole Seinfeld comedy album and a good chunk of the Dave Matthews catalog. But the thinking part was fun, too.

My church buddy Sarah Lansing suggested I recount some of the random thoughts I had during the walk. I'm not sure they're in the least bit entertaining, but here's what I remember:

(1) I AM A HOPELESS SUBURBANITE...AND SO ARE MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY: The route I took wound through the cities of Wickliffe, Willoughby Hills, Richmond Heights, South Euclid and Cleveland Heights before leading into the City of Cleveland proper. People who live in my suburb are generally scared to death of Cleveland. As far as most of them are concerned, it's filled with murderers and drug dealers. And certain sections are, I guess. Just not the ones I walked through. And yet I still kept my head on a swivel at all times, as if the Clevelanders waiting at the bus stops at 6:30 in the morning were going to attack me. I will never lose this fear of All Things Citified no matter how many years I work downtown or how many times I take this walk. This just strengthens my hold on the title of World's Biggest Suburban Dork.

(2) IT'S EASY TO PEE ANYWHERE WHEN YOU'RE A GUY: I took water and juice with me and drank it all. Some of it I sweat out. Some of it I didn't. The stuff I didn't sweat out had to go somewhere. I think you're getting my drift here. I took four bathroom breaks along the walk, and it wasn't difficult to find places to answer nature's call. Why? Because I'm a guy. Guys will pee anywhere. All I had to do was find a patch of woods -- stunningly easy to do in Richmond Heights and Cleveland Heights -- and voila, I had my own natural Port-a-Potty. At one point I wondered what I would have done if I was a woman. Probably suffer in silence the entire walk...or at least until I came across a McDonald's or a gas station or something.

(3) YOU KNOW WHO I LIKE? TOM HANKS: I spent five minutes thinking about Tom Hanks and what a nice guy he is. That's it, just a few intertwined thoughts on Tom and his nice-guyness. I told you, 3 hours and 45 minutes is a LONG time.

(4) THE LUBE THING I MENTIONED ABOVE? IT'S REAL: I have a tube of this stuff called Body Glide. You runners know all about Body Glide. It looks like a stick of deodorant, but the idea is to rub it on areas of your body before you go on a long run or walk to decrease friction and chafing. I did just that before I went out the door. I rubbed it all over my feet because I was afraid of blisters. My feet were fine. As it turns out, I should have done my thighs, too. Big mistake. I've been paying for it since then.

(5) I MISS BALONEY SANDWICHES: When I was little, my mom used to make me these generic baloney sandwiches on white bread. Nothing special, nothing fancy, sometimes with no condiments at all - just baloney (NOTE: As my buddy Wendy Skoch Hart so kindly pointed out when I was too lazy to look it up, the correct spelling of the lunch meat in question is "bologna." But I'm sticking with "baloney" because I'm sure that's how I would have spelled it circa 1978.) At one point in the middle of the walk, I had a powerful craving for one of those 70s-era baloney sandwiches from my mom. All I had were granola bars. Not the same thing.

And that is honestly about all I can remember. For the most part, when I wasn't checking Facebook or text messages on my phone, I was zoning out. I don't have the mental capacity or patience to maintain any sort of concentration or productive thought for every step of a 17-mile walk. So usually I would just fall into a state of half-consciousness as I walked.

Man, I really miss those baloney sandwiches.