The GusBlog!

Number one: I’m kicking myself, because this post was complete, was DONE, and I was just going to insert the pictures when I noticed that my scriptblocker (NoScript, for Firefox, no I won’t insert a link, I’m steaming) had forgotten that of all the sites that is allowed to run scripts, mattwhitman.com was at the top of the list. So I allowed scripts, and it promptly reloaded the “edit this post” page, and all my text was gone. [pounds head on keyboard]
Back to the post, recreated from my luckily-eidetic memory but laboriously retyped:

So occasionally, whether out of a desire to torment myself or a desire to remind myself of what life was life pre-TDW, pre-The Gus, I return to the archives of this very blog. I go back in time, back to when it was still hosted on blogspot, back to when I was full of fire and frenzy, back to when I had all the answers, back to when I was proudly self-righteous about having just voted for Nader for the second time.

[sobs quietly]

[sobs quietly, the sobs gradually silenced by bourbon]

[mmmm, bourbon]

And when I see all those posts, sometimes multiple posts a day, on current events, politics, books, web trends, and everything, I marvel at the sheer posting energy I displayed. Then I remember two things: first, I was surfing the web far more than I should have been while at work. Second, the fact that this site has turned into a de facto daddy blog, and one only intermittently maintained at that, doesn’t mean that my world has contracted. It has expanded. Every day, The Gus teaches me something new about myself. Or at least, this being the terrible twos, he teaches me new patience. That’s a virtue, I hear. So please don’t take the utter absence of any post in the entire month of March 2008 as a sign that the whole Whitman clan was in some disastrous accident on March 1, nor that I have abandoned you, all my faithful readers, both of you. That would be wrong. It doesn’t do justice to our eternal bond.

March in fact took place. Time passed. Things happened, and the camera was present at some of them.

For example, The Gus took a nap on the floor, for no apparent reason than he figured it would provoke the paparazzo:

On Easter, he hunted eggs, with some limited success:

He also got an Easter basket, back at the abode. It contained an Easter treat, high in B vitamins:

And a new Easter friend:

We also went on adventures, including to the store:

Just this past weekend, we went to Black Butte, where there was snow:

We played in the accumulated snowdrift after the previous night’s light dusting melted:

That made us cold, so we warmed up on the heating grate:

Then we climbed in the dog’s cage, just for kicks:

All of this naturally plumb tuckered us out:

The Gus now is of an age where preferences are king. Because we subscribe to a formalistic parenting philosophy that involves eliciting and honoring preferences from the little feller (you get to choose which socks to wear, kid, but Mama and Dada get to choose when you go to bed), that means that The Gus gets to make a variety of choices that he will someday regret, particularly as we are immortalizing them on the Internets:

Nice outfit, kid:

It turns out the orange turtleneck goes with everything, and nothing:

But he got himself a six-string, and played it ’til his fingers bled:

Except for the “tanned” part. SPF 45 is de rigeur now, and when sunscreen says “waterproof,” it means it.

We are freshly back from Mexico, where it was not as warm as we expected (I packed no long pants, to my occasional regret, but the man-pris got lots of wear) but WAY WAY WARMER than our beloved hometown. So we swam in the ocean, which was warmer than the pool.

We went with Deek and Christine and far more importantly, Carver, their son and The Gus’s Best Friend In The Universe. Each day The Gus would wake up and say “Cawwer Cawwer Cawwer Cawwer Cawwer Cawwer!” And we would take him downstairs to the common areas and they would shriek, and push each other over Tonka-truck primacy, and engage in tentative Tonka-truck sharing rituals. Then they would play on the beach together and bury Tonka trucks in sand. Life is good.

Especially for us. We typically try to go someplace warm in the cold wet months, and have had fits since The Gus was born, because how can one relax on a chaise-longue with a drink in one’s hand and a trashy novel in the other hand while still making sure the toddler doesn’t fall in the pool? The answer? Bring a nanny! We brought our world-traveling nanny Jane, bought her ticket and put her up in a room, and in return she watched The Gus and The Carver. She even brought an apprentice, The Amelia, who was just as cool and responsible and engaged with the kidlets as Jane was. We got two nannies for the price of one! It was, as The Gus would say awww–SUM!

In any event, we stayed in a little town an hour north of Puerto Vallarta called Guayabitos, at a fantastic place called Villa Corona Del Mar. It was lovely. We also ventured south fifteen minutes to a surfing town called Sayulita, which is the place I realize I should have spent my eighteenth year, rather than wasting it on binge drinking an rebellious haircuts in Eugene. I don’t surf, but it turns out that one of my favorite things to do is watch other people surf.

Eventually the toddlers were felled by a cold, but no one got the dreaded Mexican GI ailments. It was a good vacation. Look at the pictures by clicking here.