I used to love the rain. Rainy weekends were excuses to stay in bed or waste hours on end on the couch, nursing one's invariable hangover with bad television and an ill-advised pint of ice cream. Walking around in the rain could be fun too, and not just in a self-indulgently melacholy, sombre Nick Drake-y sorta way either. A nice spring rain on a misty day was lovely, and a summer thunderstorm even more so.
With little kids in the house, however, rain is tantamount to a jail sentence. Since Saturday morning, it's been raining cats'n'dogs here in New York City, leaving myself, my wife, my daughter Charlotte and little Oliver all holed up in this apartment, all going slightly "woodsqueer" as my wife calls it (a charming colloquial Britishism for "stir crazy," which might inadvertantly conjure up some disquieting scenes from "Deliverance," for you 70's cinema buffs like me out there). It's not a hard driving rain, but it's damp and cold enough to keep everyone in-doors. I took Charlotte out in it for a bit yesterday (she under the hooded rain cover of her stroller, I in a heroically ill-prepared leather jacket and baseball cap combo, despite the expensive rain slicker I procured from Victorinox last year for just such an occaission). We retreated back inside swiftly after both of us had been chilled to the bone by the unyielding damp.
In the interim, both kids have been trying to outdo each other in the sweepstakes to drive their parents completely mad. Poor Charlotte woke up this morning with a bloody nose that made her crib look like a scene out of "Camp on Blood Island," scaring a decade off of my life in the process (she's fine, by the way), whereas Oliver has been relentlessly refusing to sleep on his back and -- whenever possible -- sees fit to unleash a variety of disarming noises that collectively sound like a panic-stricken warthog frenziedly submerging in quicksand.
I'm not saying it would cure all our petty ills, but a little sunshine would really help out right now.
Recent Comments