Changes... Changes...

There are some changes that are good and don’t interfere with a person’s everyday life, like changing into clean underwear every day. While giving my kids lunch yesterday I looked out of the window and saw a vehicle with the words “Parking Enforcement” stuck to the side idling in the middle of the street while the driver alternately contemplated our car and looked down into his lap in the posture of someone writing out a violation.

Shortly before, the garbage men had hauled away our trash, so I decided to go outside and put our empty cans away while working up the courage to approach the gentleman and ask him what the problem was. Turns out I didn’t have to approach him at all; he watched me drag the garbage cans away from the curb before indicating that he wanted to speak with me.

When we first purchased our home fourteen months ago there was some confusion about how the parking on our street worked. Our house is on a corner lot and on the side of our home people park facing the “wrong” way because the wooded hill on the far side of the street negates people being able to park there at all; in front of the house cars parallel park on the opposite side of the street and angle park on the side our home sits on. We were mindful to watch how our neighbors parked their own vehicles and mirrored our own parking after theirs. We live in a city, so it isn’t unusual to see a police car cruise down the road. Never having gotten a parking ticket before we assumed that we had a solid grasp on the parking situation.

Well. Without going into boring details it would seem that our car was not twenty feet from the corner, nor was it parked at the appropriate angle. Even though there was nothing gracious about his attitude he graciously voided the ticket and made me solemnly swear to move my car twenty feet from the corner (about halfway down the block). I really don’t see what this new parking scheme is going to do other than lose us one parking spot on either side of the corner, I mean, there isn’t even a stop sign there! But I suppose rules are rules even when they don’t make sense. Being forced to take a whole different approach to parking in front of a person’s own home is the type of change that isn’t life changing, but it can seem like a huge nuisance initially.

I put my daughter in a long sleeved dress yesterday and she found it challenging to crawl on her hands and knees because her knee would pin down the dress and she was unable to move her arm forward. So for the whole day she had to change her crawling style from hands-and-knees to hands-and-tippy-toes. She looked like Spider-Man grasping the floor with her fingertips and toes while her rear-end stuck up in the air! I tried in vain to get a picture to post after we got home last night from a day at Nana’s, but she was cranky and in no mood to be tortured by the camera. Even after she was out of the dress and into her jammies she still crawled that way.

About once a year my husband decides to appease me and shave his beard off. He usually does this in the summer time so that his face can get a chance to breath. This year the whole face-shaving ritual came a little early. He came downstairs last night (after he had splashed water all over the bathroom and left a layer of tiny little hairs on the sink) without the beard.

The baby always cries when men she isn’t used to seeing all the time try and talk to her. She took one look at daddy and totally freaked. It took him a little while to convince her that he was indeed her very own daddy. The poor kid is already having some separation anxiety issues after being left with her auntie last weekend. Now I can’t even leave her in a room with her daddy, whom one would think looks like the man with a scar down the left side of his face and bald patches strewn throughout his otherwise long hair by the quality of the baby’s earsplitting scream.