The beer: Lagunitas DogTown Pale Ale
The commentary: The bye weekend was spent redeeming $40 of iTunes gift cards and playing in the snow with my daughter. The former resulted in some after-the-fact Christmas songs (to spare me from having to buy them next December) and other non-holiday favorites from Michael Yonkers, the Fall and the Miracles. I also managed only one song more expensive than the stock 99¢ and it was Dr. Lonnie Smith’s “Psychedlic Pi,” clocking in at almost ten minutes. Surely worth the extra three-tenths of a dollar.

The snow? The snow! It’s hard to tell exactly how much, due to intense drifting that revealed bare spots of grass, but about a foot of the light, fluffy variety fell from Thursday to Friday. Work was closed—as closed as working from home can ever be—and shoveling early Friday evening (with a can of Newburyport Pale Ale cooling in a nearby snowbank) wasn’t too difficult. We were excited the next morning to take G. out in the snow for the first time (we didn’t have the right clothes last year) but it was cold and not worth the risk, especially since Sunday was supposed to warm up anyway. And it did!

After eggs and muffins we bundled up and decided that a playground up the road was a good destination. It was familiar and, more important, well protected from traffic. A. stayed behind as father and daughter set off! Ten minutes of semi-shoveled sidewalk and occasional demands of “Carry me!” later we approached the southwest corner of the little league field (I have no idea if it actually is the southwest corner). Some boys were sledding down a snowbank across the field, if you can call that sledding, and G. started with “I don’t want to see the boys. I don’t like the boys.” Wonderful philosophy. OK, let’s walk up a little farther. That’s where the swing set was anyway, my backup plan in case this introduction to the lifeless depths of frozen nature was a failure—during the walk she’d gone so far as to stick an eighth of an inch of three fingertips into the stuff. Hard to say how we’d make out.

It took some time but I eventually got her to walk in the packed snow on her own, and all I had to do was point her straight at the swings. She’s likely old enough to be able to use the regular ones, the kind that you (!) and I use, but I still favor the “baby” ones for her because I can push as high as she wants to go while she’s safely secured. Those snow pant-swollen thighs were a tight squeeze through the harness but it was worth it—we both had a blast. She wasn’t ready to stop for fifteen minutes and I was aware the entire time that we were wasting the winter day on summer activity. Let’s get familiar with this white stuff already!

I plucked her out of that swing and lost one of her boots in the process. I took advantage and carried her over to a bench, sat her down on my lap to put the boot back on and asked “Hey, do you want to walk in the snow some more??” As if it were the greatest thing. She said “No!” with such passion I’m not sure how I ever got her to do it. Those steps were really something to witness. Is anything a mystery anymore? That’s sort of what I like most about being a father, just watching G. understand more and more how the world bends around her.

The photo was taken moments later, her first real steps through the deep snow. She wandered into this strange little pen, between the swings and the basketball court, that houses a stone-and-bronze monument (for some reason) and took it all in. Holy shit, this outfit. How I wish I could have made a mold of those boot prints. From here we trekked over to the playground and its large-scale multiple-slides-and-things apparatus. She climbed up the steps, ran up the ramp and darted toward the cluster of slides. This part, as the lone adult, always makes me nervous because I can rein her in at either the top of a slide or the bottom. Not both. Gravity works one way so I stayed on the ground and had faith that her choice of slide—all starting within a few feet of each other but ending as far as thirty feet apart, with the “bridge structure” in between—would be close to predictable. At thirty-nine, am I quick enough? Am I quick enough in six inches of packed snow? I would have to be. Several rides on the “funny slide” (long and steep with a gradual curve) and even more on the “crazy slide” (corkscrew; and these are her terms) soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread—old age and gravity, mean bastards both, had taken the day off. The worst part was when an evil ogre—her father—appeared to end all the fun, carrying her off kicking and screaming toward lunch and a nap. I did let her walk along the top of a low stone wall for a couple of blocks and we spotted some snowmen that made her laugh so she was in good spirits in time to see mom. I’m still beaming.

I sort of glossed over Saturday. Jumped right from Friday to Sunday! That afternoon, G. absolutely would not nap. We left her alone in her room for almost an hour (I was writing most of last week’s post) and could hear that she wasn’t quite asleep. Wasn’t quite non-violent, either. Eventually I resigned to check on her, make sure, oh, she hadn’t gotten into my closet, pulled all my neckties off the rack and piled them up in the middle of the rug so she could roll around on them. Also, to make sure, in the off chance any of this had happened, that she didn’t have a diaper leak. Well…

In an effort to jumpstart a bit of rest—and, honestly, to settle parental impatience—we decided to leave early for dinner. Car rides usually do the trick so we took the scenic route to Burlington—home of the mall, some restaurants and absolutely nothing scenic. Tonight it was Tavern in the Square with friends whose son (irregular tube socks) is less than a month younger than G. (Say what you will about chain restaurants but they’re overtly family-friendly. They have to be.) The steak tips and pale ale were yummy and G. settled in pretty well, opening up enough to yell “It’s a blowout!” at the television when the Chiefs were achieving just that. Oops! We know nothing about football. I’m sad that tonight’s game will air too late for her to watch (she’s napping as I write this and, with dinner to follow, will maybe catch the end of Seahawks–Saints II). Hopefully the football-shaped balloon I got her yesterday will soften the blow. I am an excellent father.

Up next: The Colts try to hold the Patriots to fewer than fifty-nine points. The Patriots try to hold the Colts to fewer than fifty-eight. Cheers!