Lucas Camilo

Krista is in Washington DC this weekend and so it’s just me and Lucas.  We’re missing her but also enjoying ourselves in the good weather.  My dad (aka Papa) is coming over today and we’re going to have some quality boys time.  Lucas doesn’t like college football so I guess we’ll have to crack a couple cold ginger beers and watch “Polar Bear Polar Bear” on youtube repeat…

Yesterday Lucas and I spent the whole day alone together without interruption (except for a 45 minute occupational therapy visit in the morning).  It was both glorious and challenging.  By the end of the day the house was a minefield of crayons, markers, books, banana-stained rags, medical supplies, toddler clothes, dirty dishes, and more… I was so tired that I didn’t bother to clean up, just collapsed into bed to watch a movie once Lucas fell asleep*.

Though I was tired, I also felt really good.  Lucas was in a great mood, one of those days when the longer we spend together the better it gets.  In the afternoon Lucas was being especially hilarious, pleasing himself with simple things like removing and replacing the cap on the little insect-catcher.  After I had released the honeybee, spider, and lavender leaves, he would  look into the empty plastic container and say “No one’s in there!”  By the time I got the camera out he had settled down, and sometimes video just doesn’t do justice to Lucas’s ridiculous sense of humor.  But here you go anyway:

A day alone with Lucas also brings home the tough reality of caring for a child with acute special needs: your options are limited.  Krista has more experience with this since she spends more time with Lucas, and has been home alone various times over the last year especially (because of my work travel schedule).  She tends to be more adventurous, pushing Lucas to take excursions even when it’s just the two of them, fearlessly loading him and all his gear into the van for a trip downtown to the aquarium, or making plans to meet up with friends.  When she’s gone I’m inclined to hunker down at home with Lucas, since getting out and being social AND taking care of Lucas alone is complicated, to say the least.  We’re both fortunate to have a lot of support from family but nevertheless it’s tough.

Yesterday was so beautiful that Lucas and I couldn’t resist taking a walk in Seward Park, and then spending a few hours playing on the grass in the back yard.  The best part of the day, though, was lying down in bed together to watch the first half hour of “Finding Nemo.”  It’s really the only movie that Lucas will watch more than 5 minutes of, and last night he was enamored with the fact that it was Nemo and his dad swimming around together.  Each time there was a scene involving Nemo and Marlin Lucas would exclaim “Nemo and his daddy!” and then point right at my chest, with a huge smile on his face, and say “I’m a daddy too!” (he’s still got a little pronoun confusion).  By the time he fell asleep – and I took one look at the bombshell that was our house and decided to jump in bed rather than clean up – all I could think about was how damn happy it makes me to be Lucas’s dad.

(* Note: the movie that I ended up watching was Restrepo, an Afghanistan war documentary which I highly recommend, yet may seem like a strange choice given the feel-good, sentimental-parent mood I was in at the time.  Alas, it’s on my short list of “violent movies that Krista probably won’t watch with me”, and as we near the 11th anniversary of that war’s beginning it seems important to remind myself, in a visceral way,  how brutal and misguided war really is.  Perhaps it goes along with the sentimental parent thing after all, in so far as I long for Lucas to be able to live in a country that doesn’t dedicate a huge chunk of it’s shrinking budget to funding death and destruction… But I guess that’s another blog post.)