Juniorbird.com

The namesake of this blog is an umbrella cockatoo named Junior. Junior picked me back in June of 1998, and we spent 15 years being best friends. But, when the baby came, Junior changed his mind and asked for a new home. Now he’s gone, off to seek new fortune, searching for a home he thinks he can be happy at. And I think he’s not wrong to seek that elsewhere, even if it does leave this blog with no mascot as well as no story.

When I got Junior, I lived with a woman who loved parrots and her two birds; but shortly Junior and I found ourselves on our own. That time surely started with some troubles — for the first three months it was just the two of us, Junior wouldn’t come out of his cage to me. He clearly missed his first mom at first, but soon we bonded and were hardly apart thereafter. For the next dozen years, I worked mostly for myself and was at home all day long most days; Junior helped me at my work, hanging out on my shoulder or roosting on my lap as I typed. Sometimes, for a break, he’d perch on a wall and caw back at the crows, or up and walk down then driveway and say hello to neighbors as they walked past:

It continued outside of the daytime, too. For fifteen years there was hardly a dinner I didn’t cook with Junior on my shoulder, looking on, or a pile of dishes I didn’t wash without the same kind of assistance. He’d stomp around the bed every morning as I got dressed, and, before that, perch on top of the shower door as I washed.

Yes, he loved to play with a q-tip, he’d run it through his beak, hold it in his claw, and delicately remove the cotton.

And, of course, there were tons of cuddles: there’s little a cockatoo loves as much as being held closely and stroked softly. He’d make little clacking noises with his beak and whisper sweet words like “good” and “pretty bird” and “gimme a kiss”

The story obviously is: we spent a ton of time together, which a super-social, attention-hungry bird would love. And we were blissfully happy. He fell in love with my bride from the first time he met her, and he even loved her little pup (sadly, not reciprocated). When we got married, the new family suited him well.

But then I got a new job, full-time at an office, and we got a new pup to be friends with the first one. Maybe, in retrospect, I can see Junior getting a little less happy back then. There were a few cranky mornings when he didn’t want to come out and help me shave and brush my teeth, and a few evenings when he just would rather be in his cage than feed the dogs or do the dishes. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I also didn’t find any extra time for the bird.

Nonetheless, when we moved to the new place, we seemed happy. The whole house was in some disarray for a couple of weeks after we started the move — a very last-minute thing undertaken with an 8-months-pregnant wife, as we belatedly concluded that our little bungalow wouldn’t fit a family of three — so the bird actually boarded for about three weeks around the move. With everything barely under control, I’ll admit to having had some nerves picking him up: Junior is a high-maintenance animal and I was worried that a brand-new schedule in a brand-new home would hardly accommodate him.

But he came home, and I thought we’d fallen in love again. I couldn’t believe how happy I was when we hung out, and he seemed to have good times too. Unfortunately, the honeymoon was short: soon the baby came along and I began to neglect everything except him and his mother. (In fairness to myself, I’d anticipated this and took delivery of a wide variety of new toys for him, to try to keep him happy until I figured out this kid thing and made him a priority again.)

Sometime in that, Junior stopped eating. You could tell he was sad: almost every day he seemed to want to be left alone. I’d coax him out of his cage, and we’d hang out, but rarely was it party time like it had been before. For six weeks I neglected him; then I suddenly noticed how skinny he’d become. And then I changed my ways. Every night we hung out, watched a TV show just us two, alone from the family. I made sure he joined me in every dishwash and every cook. We’d cuddle again and again. Even his days alone got fuller as I discovered that he loved Nick Jr. (I’d tried some “just for parrots” DVDs on him before and he’d hated them; I figured he didn’t like TV. Boy was I wrong!)

These were great times. The cuddles were adorable and Junior seemed happier. But he still wouldn’t eat. So we gave him fruit galore; a banana treat with one of us was fun, or a bite of apple, but a half an apple left in his cage would sit untouched until the flies found it. And he got skinnier, until you could feel his keel bone. That’s how you tell a parrot is skinny — if the keel bone sticks out. Never in 15 years had I felt Junior’s keel bone, but now it felt like a blade as I touched his belly.

One Thursday morning I noticed him shivering in what was already a warm day. He was clearly too skinny, and he was only getting skinnier. It was time to do something, to put him in a safe situation in which he might eat more and, at the very least, wouldn’t starve to death. We made plans to send him to a safe home. My lovely wife took responsibility for the baby for the weekend, and I was able to make those days all about Junior and me. We hung out constantly and did everything — washed the cage, took showers, had dance parties, did all the things. And then we were done; there was nothing more special that I could do to make the most of the time we had together. We’d done it all, and we had for fifteen years. It was time for him to go live someplace new, someplace great.

So we drove up to his vet, Blue Cross Pet Hospital in Pacific Palisades, and dropped him off in a nice big cage in a pretty room with a window. The Sammy Foundation is taking care of him now, and he’s put on plenty of weight and is doing great. He’s looking for his forever home I wished I could give him but didn’t. If you are thinking of a bird, or know someone who is, they couldn’t ever do better than this guy, my best buddy, Junior Bird.

Obviously, with no Junior Bird there can be no juniorbird.com. As I said earlier, the story has changed; and now maybe the site has changed too. This will be the last story here, ever. It’s a sad goodbye for the site, to go with the sad goodbye for the bird. But this plot line is done, and fortunately there is a new one to go on to. I’ll be back in a bit with a new site, about new stories. See you then, I hope!

Now that we’re parents, we’re always looking for entertainment that’s targeted to the right intellectual level. Not for our son Declan, at just 6 weeks old, but for ourselves, at just a few hours’ sleep a night. Everyone’s talking about Homeland, but half the time I can’t handle one plot, much less hidden agendas and meaningful secrets. We love our Mad Men, but the surprise TV winner of the new parenting era is: Family Feud.

I’m not sure if it’s the jaunty ’60s-style theme; the made-for-middle-America 8th-grade sexual suggestiveness; the discovery that everyone in a family looks and acts exactly alike; the straight-from-the-90s euphemisms for bodily parts and functions; or the brilliant game design that has a successful family heading home with a big, big $900 payday; but this show is great. For instance:

There’s nothing like coming home from work, brain fried, to Steve Harvey time. It’s all family-friendly; at least, it’s friendly to this family.

(And, Joey Fatone: good job on the announcer gig, getting paid for saying one line a day is a great dream for all of us.)

I’ve been exiled to the garage all weekend long. It’s because I did the worst thing a new father can do — I got sick. So here I am, stuck out behind the house, wearing a surgical mask, napping in a chair, hoping I don’t get anybody — especially my one-month-old — sick.

It all started Friday. I thought I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but, as the day went on, I could feel it — fever, cough, general misery. I kept up a brave face at work and tried not to cough on my co-workers. All day, I thought: what will I do this weekend to avoid getting Declan sick? Do I get a hotel room? Do I wash my hands every five minutes?

I didn’t get a hotel room, but I did wash my hands every five minutes. I’ve spent my days in the garage and the nights in the guest room. It’s not so bad, since all I want to do is sleep. The problem is: all my poor wife wants to do is sleep too, but she’s got every feeding, every changing, every single thing until I’m well enough to be allowed to touch the baby. The best I can do is wash my hands, grab a paper towel, put on my surgical mask, and give Declan a pacifier he dropped. That’s not much parenting.

Unfortunately, there’s no heartwarming end to this post. Hopefully I’ll be well enough to start carrying my weight soon. I’m miserable now, which is sad; and I miss my son, whom I can only see through the monitor.

A TV dad is not truly a Dad until everything goes wrong — there’s that moment when the child has thrown up; the car has rolled down the hill; dinner has boiled over; there’s a process server at the door; and now, the bumbling fool becomes dad, the runner of life, the center of the family. Apparently, I’m now really Dad.

Declan wouldn’t go down; the poor pup’s schedule wants to go 12 hours off everyone else’s. Through his angry screams, I quietly comforted him until it was feeding time. Then I comforted him continuously until the next feeding time, three hours later. Well, not continuously; I tried putting him down, which worked well until, stepping away from his bassinet, I whacked my toe on the chest at the foot of our bed:

The second-smallest toe is supposed to be that color, and as big as the next one up, right?

I was very careful to not scream or otherwise wake the baby, which was of course futile because he could smell my fear or something. So I also tried other soothing techniques, like shushing and rubbing his tummy, which seemed to be working well until the dog woke him with an incredible retching sound. I finished pulling the vomit-stained blankets out of the dog’s crate just in time for Declan to start crying again. Baby under my arm, I shooed the dogs out to finish throwing up outside.

Declan was crying because he’d leaked through his diaper. He did it again the next time I changed him, and the time after that as well. Later, I discovered that, in my exhaustion, I’d been accidentally tucking his t-shirts down the back of his diaper, creating a little capillary action conduit for pee.

But, despite the toe pain and the screaming baby, I’d managed not to wake my wife somehow. Which was great, because she let me sleep in the next morning, until she yelped when she took the cover off the crate and found the two dogs covered in poop. And then, tired and unable to figure out where the spigot is at the new house we’re renting, I washed the crate out by hand with Formula 409 and paper towels.

My wonderful wife let me go back to sleep afterwards; and, best of all, I only stubbed that toe one more time getting that crate clean.

It seems, on the one hand, a little absurd that two people who just had a baby would be thinking about giving that baby to someone else to care for. Nanny, daycare — oughtn’t the parents be best for the baby? On the other hand, I prefer to hire someone with experience to do my plumbing, auto repair, database administration, and other skilled jobs; why not someone who’s worked with babies before? ‘

Yeah, we’ve been doing the finding-childcare thing lately. I love paid family leave, but at some point the wife and I will get off what I’m pretty sure conservatives call Welfare and get back to work, so we need to find some options for Declan.

We’ve looked at the nanny thing, and we’ve looked at local daycares. Naturally, having already had our baby, it’s far, far too late for us to look for daycare at the most prestigious places, like the place we visited on Wednesday with the two-and-a-half-year wait list. I felt a little silly looking at their infant rooms… but not as silly as the nice couples with two-year-olds on the tour must’ve felt. Enjoy your month in daycare before first grade, kids!

I’ll admit, I’m a little confused about how any infants get into a program with a two-and-a-half-year-long wait list that requires a confirmed pregnancy to get on it. But we’ll move past that for a moment. Beyond the waiting list, was there anything I took away from my daycare tours? Yes, in fact, there was:

• It’s important to have children in your daycare when you offer tours; no matter how cutting-edge your prestigious daycare is, it looks cold and, frankly, silly without kids in it.
• Your tour should be given by someone who can sell, or a teacher who obviously has the personality to connect with kids, not by a cold, efficient administrator, no matter how skilled that administrator is.
• If you have a good daycare, you have a long waiting list; almost nobody with a good daycare is trying to grow to absorb more of their waiting list. A kingdom of riches probably awaits someone who can figure out how to scale the provision of daycare services.

So I think we’ve chosen which daycare to apply to. Which is great, because I’m excited about the place. It reminds me of the caregivers who showed me love when I was growing up, and if Declan does half as well he’ll have a wonderful start to life.

I started this blog years ago for an audience of 1: me. I thought my writing lacked creativity, so I decided to try some creative writing. Later, it lived and thrived because it had another audience: a girl. I wanted to teach her about who I was, and stories seemed the way to do that.

And then it worked, and we got married. Suddenly, I found that there were no more stories to tell on the blog — because she was on all of my adventures with me. And so the blog died down.

For years now, I’ve wondered: when will I have a new story to tell, when will I have someone to tell it to? Will this conversation ever be back in my life, or was this blog the period of an era that’s passed?

Then this little guy came along:

And suddenly I think I might have stories to tell, and someone to tell them to.

Please welcome Declan Brady Armstrong, born January 23 at 10:53 am. And, maybe, please welcome back Juniorbird.com.