Reclaimed Keyboard

A comic about childhood, parenthood, and pooping

[reclaimedkeyboard]

As it turns out, it can be really, really challenging to explain fundamental reality to someone. While it may seem obvious to me, as an adult, that when I do something the immediate effect is that the something becomes done, it’s not nearly that cut and dry for young people. To them, it is entirely possible to love smashing cookies into dust, but still view yourself as a victim of outrageous misfortune because somehow, some way, your cookies have become smashed into dust. The act of a cruel and vindictive god, perhaps.

I guess I can’t say too much. I engage in a daily ritual of drinking coffee, and then half an hour later saying “woah, stomach’s up to something today!” like I’m new here. I am not new here! Nobody on earth should be more qualified to understand that correlation than me!

I still want that coffee though…

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We haven’t really done much in the way of sleep training, per se. When the kids were crib-bound, we’d often rock them to sleep and then leave, but as they’ve become more mobile/capable of escaping from containment we’ve taken to just lying down with them until they (we) fall asleep. I know we’re supposed to like, want them to fall asleep on their own so we can stay up and be adults or whatever, but the bedtime conversations are pretty great and we both really like having the time with them without other activities to distract. Have you ever asked a three-year-old about their day? They get up to all kinds of wacky stuff apparently. We figure they’ll want to be left alone in their room all the time soon enough; we might as well lean into it while we’re still invited.

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Our household is in a limbo phase between kids’ potty training experiences. In the aftermath of the Naked Kid incident, our eldest more or less has things locked down, and the youngest is just starting to dabble with the idea a bit. We’ve got a long and winding road ahead of us before we’re out of the doo doo forest yet though. She can take her own diaper off now too, so there’s an added element of tension there. It certainly elevates the stakes whenever I have to play a round of “please be chocolate” while cleaning up the rug.

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You guys know how people do Inktober every year as a fun little challenge? Well, we wanted to do that, but we kind of ran out of time and didn’t get to it until after the new year. By then, it felt like we’d missed the hashtag bandwagon or whatever, and “Inkuary” is, at best, a D-tier portmanteau—terrible mouthfeel—so we wanted to go another direction. In looking around the arts and craft supplies the children have diligently scattered around every room in the house, we realized that there was a dumpster-worth of crayons lying around, so we just leaned into it.

Anyways, Crib is dead; long live Big Girl Bed. I don’t know what the American Academy of Pediatrics would say about this move, but the options in front of us were 1) Big Girl Bed 2) Get woken up every night by the sound of our daughter impacting the floor at terminal velocity in protest. I suspect that we’ll be vindicated in the long run.

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WELP. We put up the best fight we could, but the Christmas tree went up a few weeks ago. It has orange lights and pumpkins on it, but we’re under no delusions about what this means. The seal is broken; we have an uncontrolled Christmas leak seeping into the ground water. We’ve been watching the grinch and talking about presents, even as we eat Frankenstein Reese’s cups and rapidly change our minds about what costume we’re going to wear. It’s a total loss, and it’ll take generations to fully contain and decontaminate this incident.

So to you and yours, Merry Halloween. If you see some weirdos out there singing carols while they trick or treat, that’ll probably be us; sorry for any vibe dysphoria we’ve caused you.

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She did this to me. I didn’t deserve it; we weren’t beefing. She wasn’t even paying attention to me until right before she spat a wad of cheese cracker slurry into my drink, and then went on with her day as if that were normal behavior for normal people to do.

Toddlers are a really interesting study in what feral humans with no impulse control or respect for social norms must be like. They’re sweet, and fun, and energetic, and just such weird little guys. There was no malice or spite in this action. It wasn’t premeditated; she didn’t even think about it. She simply found herself in a situation where she had a mouth full of mush and a cup in arm’s reach and couldn’t conceive of a universe where they weren’t meant to be combined somehow.

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Have you ever sat down and tried, really tried, to explain to someone why they don’t want to poop in their pants? Or, barring that, why they should at least tell you when they do, so that you can clean it off for them? It’s hard to really connect with somebody on this stuff when you don’t agree on whether it’s bad or not to be covered in urine and feces. That’s essentially all potty training is though: trying to convince someone with no impulse control to stop doing something they like and go do something they don’t really want to do in order to prevent an outcome they don’t care about. It’s a hard sell for adults, never mind toddlers.

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It’s kind of interesting how sickness can alter your idea of normalcy. I’m not talking about, like, big, life-changing ailments, just a persistent string of upper respiratory tract infections. Once you get 3 or 4 of them lined up back-to-back, that just sort of becomes your baseline. You get used to a life where you can’t breathe through your nose, or constantly gag on post-nasal drip. Eventually, you don’t even miss being healthy anymore.

Other people don’t feel that way though.

The effect that a single sick toddler can exert on any number of healthy, child-naive adults is swift and terrible. It is disease on another level. You can tell yourself that you have a good immune system, that you “never get sick,” but you’re deluding yourself. You’re not ready for the big leagues. Frankly, if you aren’t taking turns licking the foot pedal of a trash can in a room where a dozen babies get their diapers changed, you aren’t even showing up to practice.

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Happy New Year to everyone who recognizes the linear progression of time! 2022 has been a wild one, and like the old saying goes, New Year, Everything I Own Broke And My Whole Family Has Been Sick For Six Months Including Right Now. It’s a challenging thing to draw anything digitally when every piece of technology you interact with fails catastrophically. First my laptop died. Then, my father-in-law’s laptop that I was using died. I dug up my wife’s old college laptop, reinstalled windows, and had just finished downloading the Krita installer when the craziest thing happened. It also died.

So, I’m sitting here, typing this on a very nice, new laptop that I begrudgingly bought after finally accepting that I’m not good enough at soldering to be a real-life techno-scrapper. It’s the surface laptop studio, it was on a great sale, and I honestly love it so far. It turns out that USB-C is pretty cool actually! Due to some weird economic strategy that I can’t possibly hope to fathom, Amazon had the i7 one with the RTX 3050 ti listed for cheaper than the i5 one with integrated graphics too, so I’m a certified mobile gamer now. I simply cannot wait to get absolutely destroyed in Overwatch from the comfort of my dining room table.  

Maybe I’ll actually be able to finish some comics if I can go a few weeks without killing this thing!

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I am not usually a heavy sleeper. Moreover, toddlers are not usually terribly stealthy. But when this kid gets it in his head that he’s gotta come get me, I almost never wake up before he’s 3 inches from my face whispering “Dadaaaaaa…” We’re partly to blame here; we’ve tried to really drive home how important it is to be quiet at night because his sister is sleeping. Most of the time he just gently wakes me up and asks me to come lie down with him for a bit. Sometimes though, he engages in tactical night pranks.

Additionally, and this is probably related, we’re sick. All four of us, and maybe also our dog, got Covid a few weeks ago. We finally started testing negative after 14 days, but we keep getting tagged by other diseases that are having something of a renaissance at daycare. Fortunately, everyone seems to be limping along alright. Boogery and bedraggled, but otherwise intact.

Oh, I killed another laptop. I’m not sure what the technical term for what happened is, but the hand-me-down laptop my father-in-law gave me asked to restart for an update, and then just lost the operating system. Can’t find it; windows left; must’ve had something else it needed to do. The hard drive is shot as near as I can tell. When I load up Windows 10 install media to try and do a repair, it says there just isn’t a hard drive. I was able to get to C:\ using command line, but the only directory left on the whole drive is my Neil Cicierega mashup albums. 

Which, obviously, means it is perfect and that the computer is perfect and there’s nothing anyone can or should try to do to improve it. Set us on fire and send us to Valhalla—we’ve peaked.

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Yeah, I know, alright? It’s called dog food; the appropriate end user is stated in the name. In my defense, kids are pretty fast and pretty sneaky, and as previously stated the dog is [fully colluding | https://reclaimedkeyboard.com/2022/06/02/hunting-lessons/] with them at this point. Besides, the boy preferentially eats floor stuff. You can’t stop this kid from finding old cheerios under the radiator or goldfish dust that’s been ground into the carpet. He prefers them! His refined palate favors the mellow flavors of an aged cracker, seasoned with floor dirt and crayon residue. A true gourmand.

In other news, my laptop died. It didn’t die in a quiet, conventional way; it died in a “become a lithium-based incendiary device” sort of way. This has, unfortunately, somewhat stymied my comic output over the past month or so. It’s hard to justify working on my little doodles while the battery pack in my surface pro 4 slowly inflates, bulging the screen further and further out from the body of the device.

I used Ubuntu to format the drive before recycling it, although all my computer-inclined friends kept telling me that if I just waited it would probably format itself (and everything in a one meter radius) sooner or later.

“Friends” feels like strong language, now I think about it.

Fortunately for me (extremely, extremely fortunately) my father-in-law just bought a new laptop, so he let me repurpose his old one for my dark works. It took a while to get all my drivers and settings configured how I like them, but I think we may be up and running again now! I successfully posted a comic tonight, so that seems pretty promising!

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We occasionally indulge in some of what I’ve heard referred to as “screen time” around here. It’s not our policy to have express, hard limits on it as of yet, but we try to be present and engaged for discussion anytime something’s on. I think it helps to have us there to contextualize new or challenging ideas. For example, “why does that man have cans instead of hands?” and “why is he spraying soup at people while rapping?” aren’t questions I want them lying awake at night thinking about.

Historically, I remember PBS being kind of tepid. I watched Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and Barney, and the whole time I remember thinking “this doesn’t look as good as street sharks” and “why are none of these characters rude dudes with attitude?” Fear not, friends and colleagues; this is no longer the case. The kids who grew up on borderline traumatizing 90’s Saturday morning cartoons are making the edutainment programs now, and I’m here today to tell you that it’s getting weird in a good way over there.

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I had thought, perhaps in the naiveté of my youth, that door-to-door sales was like… over? Like I thought that was a plot point in movies about the dust bowl or whatever, not a thing I was going to have to literally deal with during my actual life. If you’ve been similarly misled by popular media, let me assure you: the wolves are still at the door.

They preferentially come when your children just fell asleep, too.

I genuinely cannot imagine this is a successful way of improving your brand’s reputation. Whenever a business attacks us in this way, I take time out of my busy day to find every avenue I can to leave them a negative review, and when I get there I usually see that I’m not the only one. I dunno if being the most hated solar company within 100 miles on multiple social media platforms is good economically, but one organization around here is certainly checking to see. Good luck to them, I guess.

Bad luck to them though, for real. I hope you guys got blood that mosquitos go buck wild over.

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The dog is an incredible older sibling by any metric that matters. He loves the kids, looks out for them, and teaches them how to do things. He also seems to think it’s fun to body slam them and watch them fall over, and one of the things he tries to teach them are “which mystery poops you should roll in,” but hey; I wasn’t a perfect big brother either, you know? We’re all just out here learning as we go.

The rodents of our yard are on notice though. If they thought they had it bad before with a terrier after them, the addition of a gangly bipedal ape with thumbs has not improved conditions. He’s always shoving sticks under the shed to chase them out and pointing out their hiding spots. It’s cute to see them working together, but one of these days it’s gonna get real dark real quick.

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I can see why one might want to chew on a keyboard I think. Good mouthfeel, full body. The wired ones are nice because you can drag them around the house, leaving a trail of shattered keycaps in your wake (which is a good thing, we like that.) The only issue I can think of—and I’ll fully admit that my bias is showing a bit here—is that I have trouble using computers that do not have any sort of peripheral for me to interact with.

I’ll file that one under “my problem” I guess.

Anyway, this is where the name came from. We were chatting about some available domains I had looked into, and this one felt appropriate given that I seem to have second dibs on all the keyboards in the house. Fortunately, they haven’t figured out the baby gate yet, so they can’t get into the basement to steal my laptop. The clock’s ticking on that one though; I can feel it.

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Here's to a clean-ish slate! Clean adjacent! I wouldn't, like, eat off of this slate, but still!

This is (in theory, if everything is going according to plan) an internet website for a comic my wife and I have started making. It’s largely about our lives and the lives of our friends and family. I’ve drawn comics for a few web-based projects in the past, but a lot of them were a little on the crass side. We wanted to start new and work on something that wouldn’t be incredibly traumatic for our children to discover in 10 years. I can’t protect them from those old, unsightly images if they’re competent googlers, or I guess like, they take my phone and open my cloud drive, but what I can do is create a safe space here that abides by some rules:

Nothing gross

No crude language

No personal identifiers (Please do not dox us. That would be uncool behavior.)

Try not to humiliate the young adults that our children will grow up to be

I’d like to think these are attainable goals. Maybe not the last one, but if adolescence is anything like how I remember it by the time they get there, shame is kind of an integral part of the experience. I’ll do what I can to not make it worse though.