Dear Evan:
Last Friday, I spent eight hours putting together a new entertainment center, complete with bookshelves, for the living room. Your mommy and I, during this first year of your life, thought of furniture as luxuries best left for another day. And then you began trying to crawl.
Our living-room setup was what could generously be called shabby chic: The television (admittedly, a large flat-screen, so not as shabby as the rest) rested atop a century-old dinner table whose rounded ends could fold down, leaving only a rectangular surface. The table, I should mention, was painted lime green at some point in the 1970s. I’ve always wanted to strip the paint and restore it, but that will have to wait. A fairly unsteady nightstand was pressed into surface as a pedestal for a tower of cable box and VCR. (Yes, we still own a VCR.) My XBox, which gets more use as a DVD player, stood between the two pieces of dubious furniture. Our books lived on a sort of dingy green and highly unstable set of cheap folding bookshelves.
Obviously, with you days away from being mobile, the tangle of cords and potential avalanche of books would have to go.
And so it was your mommy and I looked for something… well, adult. We splurged (more’s the pity for your college fund), and a few days later the deliveryman very nicely stowed six huge boxes in our garage.
I’ll spare you the gory details, though I will say that for once on a construction (ha) project, my injuries were limited to sore muscles and a shard of metal in one thumb that your mommy ably and quickly plucked out. The bookshelves are standing in the garage, ready to go out with next Monday’s garbage, and the table was relocated to our front room-turned-office. The nightstand still lives in the living room, albeit as a table to one side of my battered leather couch.
As for you, you’re trying so very hard to crawl. When I got home from work today, I stood at the door to your bedroom, and you looked up from the thick brown rug and smiled and smiled and smiled. You pulled yourself forward a bit, but after a few moments I broke down and picked you up.
You’re doing much better at standing. I wonder whether you’ll walk before you crawl. Either way, you’ll be off and running soon.
Love,
Daddy
