Padded Floors Worry No More

Waiting Room

This week we had our first official solo (Brian and Hazel) play date. She has had many babies come to visit her in our house but only when mom was around as well. We have also never been shy about taking her out to dinner with us or to parties and, pretty much, nowadays there are always other chillens around for her to visit with. Hazel is a very social creature, much more than her father.

There were many factors considered when we decided that I would be the stay-at-home-dad instead of my wife being the stay-at-home-mom. One of the big ones is that my personality is much more agreeable to hermit-like living. During my wife's leave of absence she could barely stand to go a day without visitors or a luncheon or what-have-you. I, on the other hand, take a great solace in the time that Hazel and I have together.........alone. I love the , what I call, “normal days” when we can keep our schedule. We get our walk in, I know for sure that she gets enough sleep and food in her system, I get a few hours to work while she is napping and then we get to spend an hour or two in the studio working on music.

As much as I love our solitary lifestyle I know (and my wife reminds me) that it is important for both Hazel and myself to socialize. So I have been trying to schedule in some sort of play date once a week or so. It has not been super successful up till now. My first attempt ended up with my daughter being stood-up (meGAN!!!!) and other tries have been chaperoned by my wife. And last week a hiccup involving my utter lack of dedication to my cellphone stymied our first playground foray.

This week we finally made it to what I call the Rumpus Room. It is a great Portland Public Parks activity where they set aside a time in this gym space at Peninsula Park for babies from 6-17 months to crawl around willy-nilly. There is a bunch of soft toys for them to climb around on and fall over and everything is nice and safe. Plus It is really nice to sit around on a padded floor and chat/compare war wounds with other parents. Cost? $1.

Josh and his son Walden met us there. I am very lucky to have good friends who are going through the same experiences we are. (That song, Waiting Room, I wrote about Josh and Sara as they were waiting for Walden to arrive)