Soy = Teriyake?

This was one of those days. In a few ways, not all. Work was normal enough (though I had to learn a few mapping operations on the fly, something I find embarrassing, even though I didn't bill myself as an expert. But running somewhat scared to start off a job is probably a good thing). No weather or traffic hangups, the car ran normally, I didn't fart during a meeting or anything.

The trouble started when I got home. Maybe it was an omen for how smoothly my evening would go, when I didn't see the 4Runner in the parking lot out front, so I assumed Kate was out shopping, or possibly at the gym, and reacted with almost unpleasant surprise when I saw her at my desk (having organized and rearranged it while I was gone).

"Um...where's the Toyota?"

"What?" she replied, echoing my slight stress.

"It's not out front."

Well, I checked out front a minute later, and there it was, but on the other side of the parking lot, not near where Kate ordinarily likes to park (close to the building so it's not so far to carry the baby seat). She hadn't been out at all today, so she hadn't moved the car from where we parked it Sunday evening, when lots of other folks had already taken better spots. Oopsie on my part.

Monday's her yoga day, and I've taken to going to the gym solo, though it means I get to lug the baby along, and I'm limited to one hour total before I need to pick her up from child care. (And going to the Y between 5:30 and 6 means I'll be doing plenty of lugging, since the parking lot is pretty near full. Bringing Eva in and out is a decent addition to a workout itself.)

Only tonight, I'd neglected to take a whiff from my daily asthma inhaler (got a mild form of it while working last year in Louisiana), so after just 7 minutes of running my ribs were aching and I was losing breath. So I bagged out of the cardio and went to do some squats. Bad idea...my lungs felt down to about 3/4 capacity, and I was starting to feel lightheaded and nauseous. So I called it a night, coughed my way through a brief hot-tub soak, and went to pick up the little girl.

She was scrambling and crying again tonight, not having burst her diaper like last time, but still pretty unhappy. A bit of singing calmed her down, but once I stopped, she picked right back up for me. Eh, live with it, she usually shuts up in the car, so I toted her back out to the Toyota, and true to form, she was asleep within minutes.

Though she did show a glimpse of that childrens' cunning. She was quiet as I carried her--as she almost always is while in motion--but once I'd snapped the seat into place inside the car, she exploded again. A kiss on the forehead did nothing. Eh, whatever again, I shut the door.

She went silent immediately.

I opened up the door on the other side to deposit the diaper bag and my duffel on the seat, and she looked over at me, and started crying again. I spoke her name but she wasn't impressed and went on sobbing. So I closed the door and she quieted down again.

I opened the driver's door and got in, and the little creature started sniffling again.

Kate and I have noted the buildup in her alarm level these days, from merely conversational to asking insistently for attention, then becoming frustrated and gaining volume, followed by manufacturing a cry. Then might follow a full-out cry, or else she'll give up and quiet back down for a little bit. This time, once the car got moving, she quieted down. By the time I reached the supermarket (free coffee!), she was fast asleep. Punched herself out again.

My plan to Kate had been teriyaki chicken. We've been desperate to get away from the plain, baked-chicken-or-pork routine we'd been in since last summer, and a bit of Japanese stir fry seemed one good way to do it. Only I pulled the kind of move only a husband can at the grocery store...and I consider myself a reasonably intelligent grocery shopper.

See, in the Asian section, the cheap (La Choy, baby!) sauce bottles are on the bottom shelf, and the soy sauce bottles look identical--same size, shape, color and lettering--to the teriyaki sauce. Except, of course, that the soy sauce bottles say soy sauce, and the teriyaki bottles say teriyaki. You'd think this would still be an easy distinction to make, despite the slightly heightened degree of difficulty.

And we also have two big bottles of soy sauce in the fridge, thanks to my forgetting, last time we had sushi, if we had any soy at all. So now we have too much.

Got the stuff for dinner--chicken, broccoli, and sauce--and went home. Kate would be gone until slightly after 8, so I had to care for Eva and get dinner going. I was doing alright with the baby until I decided to give her some formula in a bottle, since she'd have gone nearly three hours since her last feeding.

But we haven't bottle-fed Eva since probably October...she was less than happy to see the bottle, and started crying almost as soon as I tried to use it. Then began the cycle of calm-the-baby-down, talk-and-sing-to-her, then-try-again, which only made things worse. Which made me tense and start to get angrier...I tried squeezing a little bit from the bottle into her mouth, so that in spite of herself she'd get just a little bit (smart, Dad, really smart). She loved that, of course, and started crying even harder. By the time Kate got home Eva was screaming as loudly as she ever has and I handed her off less than ten seconds after Kate had walked in the door.

My excuse was making dinner, but I was about to discover something.

I'd marinated the meat, and simmered the broccoli in water, and had the whole thing frying up nicely on the stove, and went to the fridge to add just a bit of sauce...and found three big bottles of soy sauce. Not two bottles of soy and one of teriyaki...just three bottles of soy.

Most of the time I consider myself intelligent, and then I go do something like that.

Kate enjoyed the stir fry for being different, and she did finish all of hers. But different is what you get when you screw something up. Different is putting orange juice on your cereal. Different is putting a sausage patty on the grill instead of a hamburger. Different is putting jelly on your baloney.

So yeah, dinner was different. At least Kate finished hers.