Batchin' it with Dad
With Melanie having retreated to the solitude of the valley, Trip and I are holding the fort down. From salty black liquorice & Don Hertzfeldt to bacon & podcasting.
My boy and I are batchin' it over the long weekend.
Melanie has deserved solitude for months (...years) and at the suggestion she retreats to a friend's rural cabin in the valley, I was helping her pack. She writes in the night while parenting and managing her career through the days. As I wrote, recorded and released an album, she held the fort down, as I spent the winter in Nashville, she held the fort down, as I farmed through the spring, she held the fort down. Mama Bear has left the city.
Dad always said we were "batchin' it" when mom would specifically be away with my sisters. Must be a no girls allowed thing in order to properly be called as such. It comes with a certain amount of machismo (which coincidently enough, was a nickname by Dad also used to call me), it should have its own allure in comparison to time spent alone with mum, and select rules are temporarily suspended for the sake of core memories.
We are hot off a 3rd birthday so there is plenty of LEGO. Four separate baking sheets, each with their own set of directions and pieces scattered. We were lucky that Trip never did take to putting things in his mouth, even a pacifier was a rarely used tool. Before the age of 2 he naturally gravitated towards his cousin's LEGO. Anxious to the dangers, I told him that he couldn't play with it until he turned 3...hyping up the milestone for months before realizing that I was depriving my son of some serious neuron-time. I had never once owned or put together a LEGO kit. We had a classic bucket of second-hand randomness growing up so upon discovering the simplicity of the instruction manuals, they were looped in with all the other reading material we put in Trip's direction. The result being his Grandmother confidently buying him the Bouquet of Roses decorative arrangement kit with a suggested age of 18+ as a birthday present. It is currently in progress, along with Majestic Tiger 31129, Birdhouse 31143 and Mighty Dinosaurs 31058.
The kitchen table has been pulled to the centre of the room with its butterfly leaf installed for more surface area. Atop sits a 500 piece Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles puzzle. In a Funko Pop universe, our foursome is being attacked by Mousers, Foot Clan, The Shredder, Be-Bop, Rocksteady and Krang as the Technodrome rolls into the streets behind them. The Turtle Blimp flies overhead and April captures the chaos from the Channel 6 helicopter. I flip all pieces and sort them into their characters for Trip to begin assembly.
Ice cream and salty black liquorice was a given. We shared a double cone banana brownie fudge and green apple and caramel. We ate $11 in skole-kridt, platte salmiakjes, shoelaces and triple-salted. Those that express shock that our 3 year old has acquired a taste for such potency, I remind them that he's a Swede. His mother craved pickled herring through the pregnancy. His eyes are their own hue of piercing blue. He's down with salty black liquorice.
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