"Some babies do that."

My Sammie has this thing that she does. When she gets mad, she has a tendency to lose her breath. There's this silence instead of a cry and the cry doesn't come. Instead, she simply reaches and reaches for the cry, but fails and then passes out. I've witnessed it twice and I think that Paige has, too. Sammie's pediatrician assures us that we shouldn't worry and that "some babies do that." After she passes out, she'll start to breathe again and everything will be fine.

My second and most intense experience with this was last night. I put her into her swing so that I could have my hands free to tend to something routine and insignificant. She started to fuss and instead of picking her up immediately, I thought I'd give her a minute to adjust and maybe I could get done whatever it was I was trying to deal with. Instead of the cry, however, there was just that pained silence from my little girl. I saw her struggle and I lifted her from her swing. No sound. She was losing color in her face and I felt that conflict between panic and remembering what the doctor said. Remembering tips and tricks I'd heard before, I blew in her face to startle her back to consciousness. It didn't work though and she went blue in the face and limp in my arms. I continued to desperately blow in her face and call her name and she finally came back around but probably no thanks to my efforts. My Sammie was still a bit dazed and it wasn't until a minute or so later when she started crying that I was no longer worried. Just like her doctor said. Some babies do that.

My question to anyone reading: Have you ever experienced this? Sammie is my fourth baby. I've never seen this before and, of course, there's nothing scarier as a parent than to deal with this scenario. "Some babies do that" isn't a phrase that makes it much easier either. Since blowing in her face to startle her didn't seem to work, are there other tips for helping her catch her breath before she passes out again? Making sure she's never, ever unhappy again will be one solution, but probably not something I can count on.

Listening to Brett Rosenberg

I got a new favorite bunch of songs that I'm listening to this morning. Brett Rosenberg, recommended by The Joiners on their site, is exactly perfect for the new music I needed to find. Listen to his muxtape recordings in full here. Here's hoping you dig it. Have a nice day.

The Musical Saw

A melancholy mood snuck up on me tonight. Lucky for me, I can complement that mood with appropriate music played with the perfect instrument: the musical saw. It's used yearningly and woefully on The Black Rider's "November" by Tom Waits. It's also the instrument of choice by the man billed simply as "Tried To Escape" in 1991's wildly eclectic and imaginative Delicatessen, featured below.

Words by Ari

Arianna's not settling down to sleep as she should so I go in and lie down next to her, silently reading The New Yorker on my iPhone and hoping she'll finally close her eyes and go to sleep.

"Are you reading inside your brain?"

I look at her and nod, saying nothing.

She then asks, "Is it too much for your mouth to talk?"

I love that kid and her way with words.

Outside the Frist

Disney for my kids, quiet time for me.

The cat's out of the bag. The initial plan was to not tell the kids
that they were going to Disney until their mom entered the park's
parking lot. Instead, since it was likely they'd find out anyway, they
know now. Boy, are they excited.

They've never been. Josh is six and Ari is five. As into the whole
princess thing she is, this is likely a dream come true for her. Her
mom signed her up for some kind of thing that is special for kids like
her. I forget what exactly, but it involves princesses.

I wonder what Josh will love most about it. The last time I went to
Disney, Pete from Pete's Dragon was in the parade and he waved at me.
It might have been a general wave to the crowd, but I'm pretty sure it
was specifically to this boy that he waved.

While the family enjoys their time in Florida, I'm here enjoying a
very quiet apartment. I unplugged the television and all other
unnecessary appliances as soon as they drove away. This in hopes of a
lower electricity bill and also just for the heck of it.

I might go watch some animated and live action shorts at the Belcourt
tomorrow. Come along if you like.

My cursed mellifluous voice.

Texting with my wife who knows me so well. I'm in green.

Sissy and Me

An excerpt from Caitlin Colford's Sissy and Me:

"I watched my mother destroy my best friend, a friend who took the pain away from my heart and tucked it inside her own.  Sissy was diagnosed with bi-polar depression after Daddy moved out of our house and into his own.  My mother said feeling sad was in our blood and not to worry."

Read the rest here. She also writes at The Rumpus.

Thanks to Holly for sending me a link to Caitlin's work.

Glorious Glorious

The Joiners have a new record coming out in a month or so. You can hear "Harder Than It Looks" and three other great songs from it at The Joinerhouse.

My early opinion? This is their best yet. Goosebumps listening to "You Love."

Makes my day.

It's After Midnight. Here's A Paragraph Or Two.

Big thanks to my mom who knows me well and gave me a calendar with pictures of trains to hang on my wall. I'm up late and sipping Sam Adams Black Lager and listening to Rain Dogs and Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years. I've got regrets that make me want to turn back the clock thirty years and I've got regrets that make me want to turn it back a day, but forward is the only way we get to go. One way forward and twenty-four hours a day, the great equalizer among us.

My son woke me from a nap this afternoon singing "16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six." Well, not the song, but that title line. I had been singing it earlier in the day while making his lunch and I guess he was paying attention. Maybe I'm more influential than I know. Speaking of Tom Waits and his songs, I'll share a quick confession, a sacrilege possibly among fans. I never cared for "Tom Traubert's Blues." It's good enough a song, but I never got why so many people who dig Waits seem to have that at the top of their list of favorite songs by him. It's grand and sweeping and melancholy as all get out, all good qualities for a song that resonates, but I get more out of "Time" and "Innocent When You Dream" when needing that signature Tom Waits song fix.

While I'm telling the Internet that I think about things, here's a line that I liked from the New York Times piece titled Depression's Upside:

If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

I'm a wreck, a mess, and a misfit in so many regards, but a man with "endless ruminations" sounds so much better. Some nights, I don't figure I've got a chance at all in figuring out whatever it is that I need to figure out. Here's to the theory that I'm buying some wisdom by ruminating all the damn time. I sure hope so.

That said/written/blogged, I'm off to bed. I hope I dream about trains.

On Depression

Two very interesting articles on depression that I read this week:

Head Case by Louis Menand in The New Yorker and Depression's Upside by Jonah Lehrer in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Good luck, bicycle guy.

I wonder if my wife will let me read this to the kids.

iPhone apps

My wife and I love our iPhones. So do our kids. Ever since they saw us playing games on our phones, they want to play, too. We should have never let them see that iPhones are cool. Ari loves the glow hockey game (anything hockey is cool with her) and Josh likes Labyrinth. I saw tonight that Kottke linked to a list of good games for kids. I play Madden NFL and the rest of my apps are mostly camera or news related. The big hit for me is Words With Friends.

If you have an iPhone, what are some apps that you think I would like? Extra cool if they're free.

Randomness on the Internet

I don't own a webcam so I haven't visited ChatRoulette yet, but Sam Anderson's piece on it in New York Magazine is a very fun read.

The part that made me laugh out loud:

One person had the courtesy to give me, before disconnecting, a little advice: “too old.” (I’m 32.) A girl with heavy makeup looked terrified when my image popped up on her screen—I actually felt guilty, a few rounds later, when the engine of randomness threw us back together and she had to look at my face for another excruciating half-second.

Poor Sam. I'm forty and would likely get the same reaction from all of those young and cool twenty-somethings who typically use the site. One thing that the writer did like about it was its randomness and lack of filters. You see the face of a fellow user on a webcam and if you aren't interested in chatting, you click "next" never knowing who'll pop up. You might not (except in the above example) ever see the same person twice.

When I first started using the Internet—remember WebTV?—randomness was what it was all about. Message boards and football stat sites, chat rooms and websites that I'd read about in Wired Magazine were among my most visited online destinations. One site (I forget the name) was created solely to take you to random websites at each click of a "next" button.

Now it's just Facebook that everyone is on. In the lobby where I work, I see dozens of business travelers a day working and killing time on their laptops while they break between meetings or wait for business associates or airport shuttles. For the most part, it's just Facebook that I notice on their laptop screens. I met a mature traveler recently who was very serious when making sure with me that her guest room would have wireless Internet service. I assured her that it did and she excitedly remarked that she had been on the road since early that morning and hadn't been able to check her friends' Facebook status updates. I smiled and asked her if she was on Farmville, too. "Yes!," she laughed. "I am so addicted to it."

We use the Internet now with so many filters and feeds, following and friending and sharing and pinging. It's all great and I get a kick out it, too. While I probably won't be making my way over to ChatRoulette anytime soon, I would like to explore beyond the social networks more often and maybe stumble across some of those interesting gems that are surely out there. Now where's that old website that used to do that for me?