The Gemini Diaries

This is sort of a sidelight conversation I was mulling over this morning as I clocked in to work at the first shift at the baby bottle assembly line at the cleaning plant (read: dishwasher). When you train for a sport it takes practice. In tennis, you get the infamous bucket of balls, serve them all, walk to the other side of the court, collect the balls in the bucket. Repeat. In soccer, you do ball work to practice your touch and dexterity. In baseball you go to the cage. In football, you run plays. In golf you hit the range and the putting green. And so it is in all sporting endeavors. While some believe rare athletes like Jordan and Tiger were born with a natural talent, much of those thoughts have been debunked by research that shows that the most "naturally" gifted athletes also, not surprisingly, have some of the most profound and structured training regimens for their respective sports. It's like the adage – the harder you work, the luckier you get. Well that's true here too – the harder you work at something the more it looks like it comes naturally to you. Natural proficiency is born from supernatural practice.

While this is clearly my strongest sport, I do think I can hold my own in the competitive and equally rigorous fields of baby bottle disassembly, diaper changing, dirty diaper wrapping, bottle making, 5m retrieve the burp cloth before the spit up makes it to the outfit collar sprint, and track down the suddenly vanished pacifier decathlon. All of these events are repeated throughout the day enough times that there is some level of proficiency in all of these areas. In fact, if my math is correct, in the course of 3 months I have changed no fewer than 471,657 diapers. LeeAnn has changed 512,009. That kind of intense devotion to a single, repeated activity, is sure to result in skills heretofore unknown. We're like a two man NASCAR pit crew. And for some reason, at times, I wonder what things I could do to improve my technique. Maybe I should stack the bottles in rows of three? What if I take the tops off of all the dirty bottles first, THEN wash them, THEN push them in the washer – will that shave a second off my time? And if I can shave that second off, might Nike suddenly take note and sign me to a nice multi-year endorsement deal?

When they are both eating at the same time, it's sort of fun to see which one will finish first. In our house, the competitors are well matched (until recently as Mary Poole has seemingly lost the competitive edge and has taken to daydreaming during dinner time – see previous post). Some people go to the dog track, others to the horse track – the Smiths make do with the baby dinnertime track. For some reason Vegas hasn't posted their odds on this event.