Daddyfesto

Black Celebration: A Tale of Black Friday

2009-12-07T22:57:00.003-05:00

[ed note: The following has little to nothing to do with fatherhood]

"Let's have a black celebration. Black celebration tonight. To celebrate the fact that we've seen the back of another black day." - Depeche Mode

The first snowfall of 2009 in the greater Cleveland area occurred on November 27, at 4:54 a.m., at least that's when the first snowfall occurred approximately 3 miles South of downtown.

I know this, because I was standing outside, in line, right behind my newly made friend Sharon, outside of a Target store, when the first flurries started coming down. In fact, I was about 60th in line, which I was pretty dang happy about. When I first saw the flurries -- first big, dustball-sized, and later wet slushy ones -- I was listening to a man in Target bull's-eye apparel, perched on a stationary Segway, giving a speech, imploring me to "take it easy and be kind to my fellow man. Don't push. Don't run. And don't worry. All side doors will be locked until you are all inside for at least a minute."

This year my alarm went off at 3:30 a.m. in the morning. Years past I had taken shortcuts, set it for 5:30, set it for 4:45, set it for 4:30 but snoozed away an hour.

If I were writing the rules of Black Friday -- and of course we can only be talking about Black Friday -- the first rule would be that, absent a Black Friday veteran (a "BF Vet") to mentor you, you are going to screw up your first several Black Fridays. Mastering Black Friday is like ... it's like figuring out how to cook pork ribs or brisket just right as an adult, or learning to smoke a cigar as a teenager or learning to do nearly anything when you're four. While at first glance the task may appear simple, you only need to try it once to realize how deceptively difficult it is. Trying again and again, you never really know if you are making any progress at all in figuring it out until, well, you one day just understand it and all is well.

And those first years, when I came home with fifteen dollar DVD players, even though a minority of me truly felt "woo-ahh" for scoring not one but two fifteen dollar DVD players (even more sweet because of how Limit-1 policies had forced me to buy the fifteen dollar DVD players at two separate stores), a majority of me knew I was just a pretender. I knew I had dragged my ass out of bed early, had braved the elements, had ruined a decent portion of my day-after-Thanksgiving and, perhaps most importantly, had abstained from alcohol on Thanksgiving, all for the privilege of coming home with fifteen dollar DVD players that Radio Shack had paid nine bucks for and that I could've paid twenty-five or twenty-seven for a week prior. [1] [endnotes are at the bottom]

I mean, my first year, I really didn't get it at all. My first year I had dreams of going to Best Buy, and -- -embarrassingly only waking up after Best Buy had already opened -- had driven for 5 miles to the highway and hopped onto it for the final two mile stretch. As I closed down on the exit ramp I could see the looming blue and yellow logo, not a tenth of a mile off the highway, calling out, but my peripheral vision seized. Snippets all around me made it clear it wasn't quiet -- like it should be in the middle of the night -- but instead gave the unmistakable sense that there are things going on here. A quarter-mile from the exit, peering down, the size of the crowd of people milling about outside that I could see from the highway scared me out of the exit lane and back onto the highway, scurrying a mile ahead to the next exit so I could meekly loop around back to the Radio Shack that opened 90 or so minutes after the real Black Friday Stores had opened.

My second year I was still out of my depth, boggled, arriving at Circuit City at 5 a.m., not comprehending why the parking lot, in the midst of a shopping district, was more crowded at that time than on any Saturday afternoon I had ever been there. And after shuttling the car into a space at the far end of the crowded parking lot, there I stood, hanging on my open car door, looking confusedly at the line of many hundreds of people stretched under every poorly-roofed walkway of the outdoor strip mall. I could do nothing but just confusedly stare and soak it in for a minute until I broke from my trance and shunted myself off to other second-tier Black Friday stores, going aimlessly to the ancient relic of the mall (the indoor kind), ending up at Sears, this time paying $18 for the privilege of owning a crap $30 DVD player. And later on hitting up OfficeMax and buying the doubly crap office chair (that I sit in now) for $50 to make myself feel like I accomplished something. This same chair that I tried to make more impressive by holding it back and making it a Christmas gift to Daddy from Santa, a strategy that never came close to working and just made everyone a little sad, the idea that Santa has all year to plan and all he ends up giving to fathers are crappy office chairs.

This year my Black Friday prep commenced as Black Friday prep can only commence, really: with a stroll down the driveway to claim the Thursday morning paper. Indeed, the penultimate Black Friday experience is the one or two or three hours spent touching newsprint. Spreading out the circulars, accumulating the Kohl's and the Michael's and the Joann Fabrics and the bizarre local photography store into the "don't bother" pile, sticking the Sears and the Walmarts into the "if I'm not inspired" pile and returning again and again to the electronics, the crown jewel of Black Friday, the jungle domains of the HH Greggs, the Circuit Cities (R.I.P.), the COMPUSAs (R.I.P. again), the WIZ's and Fretters (trips R.I.P.), reading some of them a fifth and sixth time to confirm in your turkey+wine-addled brain that "yes, it does have the same amount of RAM and memory but is still $60 cheaper than Office Max."

And OfficeMax can go to hell for that (among other things), by the way.

"And it's OfficeMax's doorbuster deal and Best Buy don't even have it in the paper! Not even a good enough deal for Best Buy to put it in the dang circular!" That's what the guy -- a fellow customer, kind of -- at OfficeMax told me in 2006 (while I was getting my chair). This guy, waking up early on Black Friday, heading off to OfficeMax, apparently did so for the purpose of milling about OfficeMax and standing around, talking shit about the deals OfficeMax was offering. And while Black Friday had impressed me up to this point -- the commercialism, the bit of naughtiness of waking up early, the electronics fetishizing, the fun for the male-non-shoppers-getting-to-shop-hardcore-once-a-year, the rushing around, the father tugging the arm of the 8-year-old son almost out of his socket, imploring "c'mon" racing through the parking lot (but with their racing destined to end in 45 seconds at the end of a hopelessly-long-for-an-8-year-old line) -- this was great. It had all impressed me previously, but I hadn't previously understood that under the surface there was an absolutely immensely beautiful social aspect of Black Friday.

This is the second rule of Black Friday: one-quarter of the people that leave their houses in the wee hours knowing that they aren't going to buy a single thing because they aren't going out for the merch. If you were to view a Black Friday line, seeing the groups of threes and fours chatting, you would assume that these were groups of threes and fours that know one another and had arrived together, and you would be completely wrong. The most sullen withdrawn individual, stuck into a Black Friday line, will suddenly become chatty , befriending everyone five groups to the front and back of him in his line (although this love only extends so far; those far ahead in line are jealously despised and those far behind are mocked or at least pitied).

And certainly, out of the 365 days of the year, this was the only single one of those days -- and these were the only hours --when a man could stroll into a store and reasonably strike up conversations with complete strangers to talk shit about the products they were considering buying. This guy, a left-behind from approximately sixth grade or whenever the social sorting commences, a casualty of that sorting -- probably for not adopting deodorant or toothpaste quickly enough or for not maintaining any pretense of coolness or for just being too poor to be able to not wear vinyl too much -- and now, here he is, and you're chatting and you see he's finally getting comfortable in his 40-maybe-year-old skin (but who knows with these types .. maybe he's 70 or 25 or whatever), and he's just there, having his day, explaining to a guy he might be there with but probably just started talking to randomly (like he did to you) that OfficeMax's Sandisk 1-GB flash drive price even today, Black freakin' Friday, isn't as low as a regular price he could get you on the internet or even down the street at even HAR HAR Radio Shack (!) HAR HAR,[2] and while a part of you is even a touch proud of him for being out of his shell, it only takes about 90 seconds for another part of you to just start to revolt and you find yourself walking away from him, past the long checkout lines and through the exits and ... trying to sneak back in, of course, for your $50 office chair that is actually worth around, well, approximately $50 (the furniture equivalent of the McDouble from a value perspective, which isn't bad, actually). But you didn't have to bother sneaking. You cared way more than he did. He was already on to the next guy, chatting away.

And so, in 2009, the year of doing it right, it's 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. and you have done the winnowing and you have the four or five Circulars of Possibility ("C.O.P.") spread about you on Thanksgiving night, and you have choices that are not so different than the choices faced when choosing a mate.

Best Buy is, hands down, the homecoming queen. Maybe an average guy like you could score, but it would be all luck, you stumbling into the party with her drunk and breaking up with her boyfriend and randomly venge-fucking you. Anyone going after Best Buy deals better be finishing their turkey and heading straight to their cars and hitting the Best Buy parking lot with that new-style folding chair with a footrest and with thermoses of coffee, with parkas and sleeping bags and ziplocs of homemade gorp.

In 2009, Wal-Mart is a whore. For BF Vets, however, Wal-Mart was this year a true godsend, a real sucker-magnet, something trashy for the dumb boys to chase to keep them away from the girls we really want. Anyone driving into a shopping complex with a Wal-Mart in it in the wee hours of November 27 got sucked in because it was already open.[3] A Wal-Mart greeter got trampled in a Black Friday store opening in 2008 on Long Island (no, really). Wal-Mart managed to use this as an excuse to ruin their workers' Thanksgivings by opening up all stores late Thursday. Although open late Thursday, the doorbusters still weren't available until 5 a.m., and were apparently shrinkwrapped[4] so many times as to render the transparent plastic nearly opaque from to all the layers, so people had a very hard time figuring out what they were lining up for.

But Wal-Mart was in fact wide open by 12:01 a.m. to accommodate the huddled massed yearning to at least avoid the 4:54 a.m. Cleveland snow, of which there were many, judging by the parking lot. I'm sure it benefited Wal-Mart (and Toys R Us and Old Navy, the two other stores that fucked their workers and likewise opened up at midnight) by being the only store of its kind open on the block. But by lowering the level of pain of standing in line, they simply increased the number of hours people were willing to wait. And so the shoppers got there at midnight and stayed. As the 6'6" guy seven spots behind me in one of my Black Friday lines said to raucous group laughter: "I got there [to Walmart] at 2:30 a.m. and wandered around and there were lines everywhere, so I got in a pretty long line and it was for $3 pajamas. And then I finally thought 'damn, it's just pajamas' and I had to get out of there ... [laughter] ... I'm too old for this shit. [double down laughter]" Despite being the clear crowd favorite and having won the "loudmouth comedy directed to total strangers event" -- an event normally conducted in mens' restrooms at athletic events -- after winning hands down, he still found it necessary, after everyone stopped paying attention, to add a disclaimer: "Of course, I got my electronics last year," not wanting the BF Vets to think less of him, and apparently having participated in Black Friday this year solely to wallow in his purchase echo.

The truth is that -- unless you were willing to drift into the creepy club scene of BJ's, Sam's and Costco [5] -- Best Buy and Wal-Mart dominated the scene in 2009. Everyone after them in 2009, however, just seemed second-rate.

And this is where we smelled our openings.

This year I got up, snoozed once at my 3:30 alarm (but got up before the snooze expired, which never happens), early enough so I could move purposely and deliberately, put on some overly warm clothes, and grabbed some pre-printed disposable reading material, copies of the C.O.P. -- this last decision making me nearly celebrity level popular fellow in my lines later on. And of course my cheat sheet, which I had written out before, distilling onto one page the specific items of C.O.P. important to me.

I got to my car, chose the urban cookie-cutter shopping strip option over the multiple suburban cookie-cutter shopping strip options, and drove toward downtown Cleveland, over the collapsing bridge over the Cuyahoga River, and then down the three mile stretch of highway South of downtown to the Steelyard Commons ramp. Driving down that ramp, like every time I go there, I was struck by the location of the Steelyard Commons shopping center. Looming immediately behind the big box stores is a 60 foot+ towering Home Depot-punifying steel mill. And next to it is a whole damn switchyard full of trains. It's all a little weird.

Steelyard Commons, your basic new-breed outdoor shopping center (with its Applebees, et al), was built on the same land that had once been used by the big Cleveland steel companies, and the shopping center had been comically pitched to the City of Cleveland as an economic replacement for the lost heavy manufacturing, as if buying and selling something could somehow ever be comparable to building it. This is the kind of economic fantasy that those on the coasts might be tricked into believing with fancy studies and words; those of us in the Rust Belt would desperately love to believe this fantasy -- it's the only economy fantasy we're being offered these days -- but we just know too much, know that nothing is better than building something.

When I arrived, I had not yet chosen my particular destination. My plan was to get off the highway, size up the competition and make my decision in real time, which this year was 4:14 a.m. Best Buy and Wal-Mart were plainly a mess. Target was closest and it beckoned. I drove in and got in the line, which started at the Target doors but wrapped away from the Target around the corner, without much thought.

4:17 a.m. About 50 people in line ahead of me. I had poorly chosen a pea coat, and the scent of wet wool was already upon me. But I had my cheatsheet, I had my copies of the C.O.P.s[6]

My mood? I was then and at all times resigned.

A third Black Friday rule: no one without real inside information really knows what to do. The C.O.P.s might say "at least 10 per store" but if the assistant manager wants to let in his family 5 minutes early and sell 6 of them to his brother-in-law, or just never let them out of the backroom, there's no 911 number for that. You get there early, you pick your stop and you just hope.

It was about 36 degrees and it was raining (the snow hadn't started yet). I, along with a handful of others with fortuitous placement in the line, was under the awning of a Jimmy Johns sub store. I began to aloofly read my dampening pre-printed Sports Guy column. About 45 seconds into my reading, I heard Sharon (not that I knew her name was Sharon at that point) whisper, in perhaps the only time she whispered the entire night, to the girl beside her: "I think that guy has a copy of the ad." I pretended to read a few more seconds and then nonchalantly decided to look around and see what I was up against.

I wanted to know who was talking about me, so I started by looking in the opposite direction, behind me. And I apparently had woken up three minutes too early, as, three minutes into my 43 minute wait, there was absolutely no one behind me. People never get in line behind you as quickly as they were getting in line in front of you when you got there.

Nonchalantly swiveling around I immediately met the eyes of Sharon, a late-50-something chain smoker of slims, averagely overweight for her age, white, wrinkled, a bit tan, wearing a red hoodie. Sharon gestured to my Target C.O.P. "Can I see?" I paused but, lacking options, turned it over (this would not be the first time my C.O.P.s would be borrowed that night) and Sharon began to whip through it lightening fast, each page being dotted with raindrops (Sharon was standing slightly outside of the Jimmy Johns awning, not caring for some reason that she could move two feet and be under it with the rest of us).

Looking through the line later that night, I appeared to be the only one with my C.O.P.s at hand, which made little sense to me. Not only was I one of the few with C.O.P.s, I may have been the only person participating in my Black Friday area to have adopted A.D. technology by picking up a writing utensil and using it to assist me in my shopping by taking the extraordinary step of writing an actual list.

Maybe some Black Friday shoppers were trying to recreate the surprise of Christmas morning for themselves, allowing themselves to walk into the store -- "woo hoo, a TV on sale for $399!!" But later it seemed that most simply had no need for lists because they knew exactly and precisely the reason why they were there, were there for something specific, something they had stared at and memorized so that they even knew exactly where it was on the pages of the C.O.P.
After four or five seconds, Sharon had found in my Target C.O.P. what she was there for and was pointing at it. And this white middle-aged (old, really) intense woman was there for ... what's this? It looked like Pokemon card knockoffs? Eh?

"Got kids?" Sharon asked.

"Yes, I do."

"How old?"

" 9, 6 and 3."

"Then you know! They just love that Bakugan, don't they? I got the whole arena. Magnets and everything."

I had no idea what Sharon was talking about. "Oh, really?"

"Do you even know about it? They roll the balls on the cards and they pop when they hit the magnet! Kids just go wild. At Toys R Us, just one of 'em is $7." Sharon moved the relevant C.O.P. passage closer to my face: "Check this out! 6 for $10!" I had not reacted sufficiently. "That's ... $30 I'm saving on this one pack. And maybe I'll get two. You gotta get some. Kids just love these things. Your kids will love them."[7]

My experience in line with Sharon was harmless, which isn't always the case.

Indeed, about an hour later, after exiting Target and realizing it wasn't even 5:30 yet, it struck me that I could attempt the "double opening" on Black Friday, where you wait in line, shop at one store, nab your doorbuster, and then get in line at a different store and get a second doorbuster. The "double opening" is Black Friday mythology, often discussed by the BF vets and often accomplished, but rarely accomplished impressively. You can open a 5 a.m. store, but you normally end up wasting extra time in the store (soaking up as much doorbuster afterglow consumer buzz as you can, just wandering around smiling in the florescent light), and then the checkout lines are often scandalously long, so by the time you're out it's way too late to think about opening another good store. Your double-opening options are then reduced to 8 a.m. bullshit openings, things like The Gap and Marshall's and other worthlessness.

Here, it was actually 5:19 a.m.! I could head over to a store that opened at 5:30 a.m. or 6 a.m.! The 5:30 lines would be maxed out, but the 6 a.m.'s were ripe. Staples was the pick here. An OK chance at a cheap laptop and a decent chance at a cheap big computer monitor so I could give up the crap 15" screen I had. Realizing the unique nature of the opportunity, speed was of the essence. Staples was only a quarter-mile down the strip, but I had to drive because (aside from the fact that I'm American and that's what we do) I didn't want to risk having new electronics get wet. No time to find the snowbrush, the sleeve of the wet pea coat made quick work of the slushy mess on my windshield and I was off and in the Staples line by 5:24 a.m.

Just 30 seconds after I got there, a 15-year old black kid came running up, who would soon appear to be the stereotypical Hollywood black kid with a heart of gold, polite as hell, who had dragged his saint of a mother out that morning to drive him around so he could shop (she appeared 2 minutes later, having dropped him off and then parked the car to potentially save a place or two in line, classic Black Friday teamwork in action). I listened to them banter for 10 minutes with a respect and a familiarity and a closeness that teenage boys and their mothers aren't supposed to have, a closeness that suggested that maybe they had been through a lot of crap together. If one of them had played a trick on the other, they probably would have called it "joshing."

This kid varied from the Hollywood stereotype of the black kid with a heart of gold, however, by being an enormous nerd.

Eventually, even though I had taken to hiding my C.O.P.s to prevent unnecessary weather damage, it is impossible to hide a C.O.P. from a serious Black Friday shopper. And so Black Teenage Nerd asked to borrow my C.O.P. I acquiesced, happily for the only time that morning.
He muttered to his mother "There it is. Twenty one POINT five inch full HD Monitor. NineTEE dollars. Minimum 10 per store." Over-enunciating words out of sheer hope and joy.

A pit of guilt opened in my stomach.

Now he's up on his tiptoes, neck peering. To his mother: "How many people are in front of us?" There were about 40, I figured. "I think about 60." Maybe there were 60..

Don't ask don't ask don't ask.

Continuing to his mother: "I hope they aren't all here for the monitor." Now to me, handing back the C.O.P.: "Here you go." And then the awful question: "So ... what are you here for?"

I was there for the same monitor he was there for. We were Black Friday competitors, and this immediately changed our relationship, except at this point, only I knew this. What would happen if we got in the store and there was only one left? This was fantastically unlikely, right? I shouldn't worry about that. Still, I needed to be prepared for things like this. What if I got the last one and he was all bummed out and I felt sad for him. Would I give it to him? No, that would be condescending and racist. Best to be non-racist.

"I'm here for ..." maybe I should lie. Just tell him I'm here for something else so he doesn't get all jittery on me. Argh. That won't work. The store isn't that big. He's a nerd, so he's smart so he'll find the monitors fast like me. He'll see me with a monitor and know I duped him.

The truth was the only option. "I'm here for the monitor."

Fear in his eyes. "The Acer Twenty One POINT Five?"

Sheepishly: "Yes." I had just lowered his odds of getting a monitor by 10%, and he would naturally be sad.

But maybe not. 5'11" 225 pound 37-year old males such as myself do not have people's eyes on their bodies very often, but I did now, as Black Teenage Nerd was sizing me up. The phrase "I can take this guy" was very clearly written across his face. I shifted my weight ever so slightly, leaning my shoulder in the direction that made it clear that, yes, I am ahead of you in line, stuffing my C.O.P. back into the pile with my others, finally breaking eye contact.

At around 5:40 a.m., Staples Ticket Guy came out, handing out high-value-item -tickets on four items: "the Garmin," "the HP laptop," the "eMachine laptop" and "the camera." This is how they were referred to, and no one had any problem with this. No one needed clarification. We all knew exactly what he was talking about, and here is where I realized that maybe I was the only one holding my C.O.P.s because I was the only one that hadn't memorized them.

The passing out of the tickets caused an immediate culling of the line, with some of the "winners" heading to their cars to wait the last 20 minutes out of the rain/sleet/snow mix and cold and with some of the "losers" heading off to see if they could steal a 6 a.m. doorbuster at another store. Having convinced myself earlier that scoring the laptop would be too good to be true, I felt no pain even though the laptop tickets ran out only eight or nine ahead of me in line.

Black Teenage Nerd and I both began to smile. We had both realized that whatever the reason for the line culling, it meant that people were not aiming to get their hands on the Twenty-one POINT Five ahead of us, so any line culling could only help us. As Staples Ticket Guy worked his way down the line with the tickets and fielded a few questions, we heard no one even ask about the monitor. Our odds were going up.

And just like that, Black Teenage Nerd and I were friends, able to chat a bit over the next 20 minutes (with Black Teenage Nerd using nerd shorthand, posing one-word questions to me like "Gamer?" to which I responded with hip retorts like "Pardon me?").

And we were right to lose our fear, because we both eventually got our Twenty One POINT Fives once we got into the store. In fact, we were the first and second people to get the Twenty One POINT Fives. This was mainly because, in Staples' attempt to sell overpriced monitor protector screens, they had taped large "Monitor protector screens for only $14.95" flyers on holiday green paper in big letters onto each monitor in the stack at the back of the store.[8] While about 10 people were standing in front of the monitors when Black Teenage Nerd and I got there, they were zombie-like staring at the pile, all trying to figure out if the things in the boxes were the monitors or were the $14.95 protectors, those there with a friend talking animatedly and waving their arms and looking around for Staples customer assistance, no one wanting to be the first idiot to pick up a monitor protection screen thinking it was a real deal Twenty One POINT Five.

Navigating around the pile, Black Teenage Nerd and I were possibly the only people there able to think to actually look at the box and see that yes, these actually were the Twenty One POINT Fives. We apparently were also the only two able to read the giant "21.5 INCH ACER MONITOR ONLY $89.95!" sign above the pile. After Black Teenage Nerd and I each grabbed one, the entire crowd's eyes locked onto us, herd mentality pushing them to grab one, but not strong enough yet.

I had pity. I think I said a quick "yes, these are the monitors," but maybe I just telepathically communicated it. Whatever the communication source, the damn broke and several hands lurched at the pile to claim Twenty One POINT Fives while I walked away (looking closely at the box in hand a third time to make sure I wasn't going to the checkout with a $14.95 monitor protector), managing to be first in line at the Staples checkout.

But back to Sharon and Target.

I had decided, based upon the line, that Lego Troll Warship was an appropriate purchasing goal for this Black Friday. My six-year old son loves complex Lego sets and excels at putting them together (and my wife and I are bizarrely proud of this) and we had struggled a bit with ideas for what to buy him for Christmas and this was right up his alley. Normally retailing for $90, unavailable anywhere on the internet even -- when you search for it, you get the weird result "unavailable in the United States." [9] I mean, with Lego products rarely discounted, grabbing it for $50 felt like a steal and would let me lock in a guaranteed $40 savings.

At the time I decided this, I hadn't realized that this was an utterly ridiculous thing to strive for. It was basically no different than Sharon's Bakugan-based Black Friday strategy. I was setting my sights too low, repeating the error I had made in my Black Friday Cheap DVD Player phase. Managing Black Friday expectations and setting Black Friday goals properly is the largest part of the mental game of Black Friday. Black Friday shopper expectations are all over the board. You have fools that appear five minutes before store openings, thinking they were going to score real merch. Compare those fools to those that are fourth in line at Best Buy and worry that they won't get what they came for. The fifth rule of Black Friday is that you can determine whether you are an optimist or a pessimist in life based upon whether the merch you get on Black Friday is better or worse than what you expected.[10]

I justified my Troll Warship strategy to myself based upon the store map. Did I mention that there were maps? At about 4:30 a.m., a hunchbacked Target employee, whose age I would estimate at 94 years old, could be seen slowly working his way up the line, passing out something. What was it? This was the only topic of conversation in the line for the next five minutes. All the BF Vets were sure that it was high value merch tickets, but some of the signs were off just enough to make them doubt themselves, the fact that the man appeared to be handing the somethings out indiscriminately, that he didn't seem important enough to be entrusted with such a task. When he finally worked his way back to us for our handout, we discovered that it was just a map of the store (identifying where the doorbuster merch was) and a free target bag.

This caused some consternation amongst the BF Vets. Stores that "ticket" for high value items favor the old and infirm (as can be seen at Staples, because you get your ticket, then you can go sit in the car and you can wait until the rush all gets in the front door if you want). Whereas "no ticket" stores will draw the vicious and pushy that can improve their position via nefarious means once in the store. I think most stores that don't use tickets do so because it helps staff morale to see the idiot customers running and tripping through the store. In any event, the lack of tickets was apparently why Target Segway security followed closely behind Map and Bag man, to lecture us (this a guy who probably got into department store security due to his lifelong desire to fire a Taser) about love for our fellow man.

The map only confirmed my inclination to be a conservative pussy about the whole thing. The maps showed that Lego Troll Warship was to be located reasonably near the front of the door, at the Western edge of the Boys' clothes department. I could grab it, lock in my savings, and then turn to the next item. You see, deep down I wanted an HDTV, even a small crappy one, and I figured I was probably the only thirty-something professional male in the United States that enjoyed sports that did not yet have an HDTV, as I had been depriving myself in a puritanical and masochistic fashion, stemming from a retarded impulse to prove to my wife how easy it was not to buy things you want. In any event, the HDTV was not the primary strategy. Lego Troll Warship was the primary strategy.

The next 20 minutes went quickly. My reading material helped; I handed out my C.O.P.s a few times. A drunk man[11] came up and yelled at his wife because he thought she was supposed to be in the Wal-Mart line and he had been looking for her for 30 minutes, "and it was fucking crazy over there, and here you are in line at Target, bitch, without even telling me?!?! Give me the damn keys; I'm going home!" Of course, the most important part of this rant to us in line was how it validated in our Target decision by confirming the insanity of Wal-Mart. But the solidarity of the crowd allowed the wife to roll her eyes and turn her back on her husband. He never got the keys, nor did he get in line with her. As we were all trudging ahead in line, he was standing there, leaning against a trash can in the snow. Good for you Black Friday!

Finally, at 5:00 a.m. on the nose, the line began moving.

As the line of those waiting around the store got sucked inside -- if the a blimp were overhead, this would've looked to it like Lady from Lady & the Tramp (Target) devouring the spaghetti (the line of BF Vets) -- my linemates and I began to reach the mouth of the store. As we did, however, several groups of vicious line-jumper gangs were sprouting from everywhere, running up from their cars (where they had apparently waited in warmth) popping up alongside of us, seeking to join the line wherever they pleased. Despite prior promises of justice, Target Segway Security was standing by blithely, talking to Target Non-Segway Security, discussing Segway performance characteristics in snow.[12] In the snow, with snow falling, lights flashing, pained faces on dirty women, carrying inappropriately dressed children in crappy coats (why are you waking up the kids for this?), I immediately termed the line-jumpers the refugees.

I got into the doors of the store and the natural order of the line began to splinter further into those that wanted carts and those that didn't care. It struck me that if I could just get my hands on Lego Troll Warship quickly, I could probably get to some of the other merch. I was now faced with the choice of my means of getting to the place where Lego Troll Warship was. What I was really asking is: Would I run? Was running OK? A number of people plainly found running to be acceptable; indeed, everyone physically able to run appeared to be running, although this was in fact only about 15% of the crowd. In the course of about 20 feet, I tried out running, dropped it, tried out walking casually -- realized that trying to act cool after waking up at 3:30 a.m. in order to shop at Target for Legos was a touch pointless -- and ultimately settled upon something of a speedwalk with moderate arm action.

Within 45 seconds I was in the western edge of the Boys' clothing section but, looking around, I could see no Lego Troll Warship. It was all Boys' clothing. I spied a bunch of boxes over there on some shelves; but those were Candy Land and other board games (why were these in a clothing section!?). Looking around some more, nothing resembling a box of Legos could be seen.
The map! I knew I hadn't gotten this wrong, but there was nothing else to do but look at the map. Mine, which had gotten wet, had ripped in half in my pocket. After reassembling the puzzle, I confirmed I was in the location where the Lego Troll Warships were supposed to be.
There was singing. An unseen man was freestyle singing "This is a great day. What a lovely glorious day" to a tune he was crafting on the spot. Hearing others' victory cries while my plans were turning to dust doubled the tension level. I must just not be seeing it! I turned around looking, spun some more, looked around again, finally noticing that my arms were flying out from my body from the centripetal force[13] of the spinning, first a 360, then a 720 and more.
The red target carts began appearing the aisle. Were those small sized carts? They looked smaller than normal. No, the carts were normal sized. Those were just large sized HDTVs.
Where is Lego Troll Warship, dammit!?! Maybe there is a Target worker I can talk to. There's no Target worker anywhere near me! Actually, there's no one near me at all!

Indeed, despite the fact that the store was filling up, no one was within 30 or 40 feet of me in any direction. I thought: if any other BF Vet had been looking for Lego Troll Warship, they would have been standing there with me, confused like I was. But there wasn't anyone else there. And it became very clear me to that this was because I was the only idiot that had woken up at 3:30 a.m. for Lego Troll Warship, and that Lego Troll Warship was still going to be available (if it was available at all) in 30 minutes. Lego Troll Warship plans were scrapped. But what to do next?
HDTV? According to the map, the epicenter of HDTV land according to the map was far from the electronics department, wedged in near women's delicates, actually, only adding to the mystical allure of high definition. But the map was unnecessary. The carts full of HDTV's had an almost gravitational power. It was soon apparent where to go through a simple reversal of the vectors of the carts sprouting off in all directions. But I felt I had little hope now. I could see at least a dozen people with televisions and there couldn't be that many more. My Lego Troll Warship escapade had wasted only two minutes or so, but at this point people that weren't even in line at 4:55 a.m. were probably getting into the store.

Approaching HDTV epicenter, it got crowded. I started to use maneuvering skills I hadn't employed since roaming the halls back in junior high and high school,[14] even breaking out a spin move to avoid a cart, a move I had previously only ever employed in jest. The first palate I could see had 2 boxes on it, but they were tiny, not televisions at all. Next to it was a palate stacked with televisions, but they were the 40 inch plasmas that weren't really all that good of a deal. On the other side is where people were coming from with the real bargain: the $246 32" LCD HDTVs.[15]

The cheapest 32" inch in the country on Black Friday.

There was a woman who wasn't quite yelling, but was definitely not using what parents refer to as an "indoor voice" either, attempting to get across the plasma palate to the LCD palate, imploring passersby for help, as if we were to toss her a rope or something. As I ignored her and went around plasma palate I saw five $246 32" LCD HDTVs left.

You have to hand it to Target . The five $246 32" LCD HDTVs were on the palate vertically, standing up on end, as placing them horizontally would have required the person with the $246 32" LCD HDTV above yours to remove it before you could remove your own $246 32" LCD HDTV, which would have been sheer chaos, but these five ... make that four ... now two ... were easily grab-able.

I was twenty or so feet away now, but, adrenalin now coursing, senses sharp, I could see that everyone closer than me already had their prize and was walking away with their $246 32" LCD HDTV in hand. I ducked and weaved, sucking in my gut as much as possible, feeling the rack of women's clothing tilt as I pushed past it, praying it wouldn't topple. About five feet away now. A hand appeared out of nowhere, claiming the second to last $246 32" LCD HDTV (six rule of Black Friday: touching with any part of body = ownership). I was past everyone, through the clothes, my feet were on the palate now and I took one large moon step across the palate and my hand landed on the final $246 32" LCD HDTV. My pinky immediately felt pressure, as another hand hit about a second after mine. I took two steps forward and was now straddling my $246 32" LCD HDTV, riding it like a wild stallion.[16]

Whatever downsides in life I have experienced in recent years from being a large man were rectified, as today it was only upside. Feral, I turned to the scrawny middle-aged line-jumping refugee whose hand was on my pinky, watching her withdraw quickly before even spoke. I got my arms around my $246 32" LCD HDTV and lifted, stepping off the palate and carting my prize off as quickly as possible from the crowds.[17]

Instead of trying to go back the busy way I came, I decided to go deeper into women's clothes and work back to the aisle indirectly. Immediately it was clear that my initial directional choice was a bad one.

"Make her give me one!!" one woman wailed, hands on the arm of the supervising Target employee with responsibility for the palates, the other hand pointing at a woman standing by the wall with four televisions. [18] "It's limit one! how come she has four!"

Hearing "she has four," others began to gather. "Why does she have four?"

The Target employee was aging before our eyes. "The limit will be enforced at the checkout."

"She has to give three of them back."

"The limit will be enforced at the checkout. The 40 inch plasmas are still available, you could get one of those."

"We don't want one of those."

"The limit will be enforced at the checkout."

"Well, what are we supposed to do, follow her around?" This was clearly a threat, and it seemed to me that it could apply to anyone walking around with a fresh, mint condition $246 32" LCD HDTV. I turned around and headed in the opposite direction.

The $246 32" LCD HDTV was heavy, and even when I wrangled a cart -- good job again Target! by sticking carts throughout the store -- the $246 32" LCD HDTV sat in it awkwardly, and you had to keep one hand on it to steady it, at least that's what I assumed because everyone else was doing it, and then I realized that maybe it was a refugee protection trick or the pleasure of just handling the merch.

I basked in the glow for three minutes, wandering around the store with a smile, seeing what the hubbub was here, figuring out what people were rushing to buy there.

I made my way over to the toy section. Sharon, having no idea who I was, came rushing past wild-eyed but smiling with her shopping cart, the cart entirely empty but for a small Bakugan package at the bottom. Wading into the toy section, after much aisle wandering -- a task becoming more and more difficult with a $246 32" LCD HDTV in a cart in a quickly filling store -- I finally located, in the single empty aisle in the entire toy section, a grand total of three Lego Troll Warships. But they were there, and they were priced as advertised at $49.99. Not a single box was missing. No one had touched them before I did.

I checked my cell phone for the time. 5:12 a.m.

In my lifetime, this may have been the earliest time of day at which I could state with certainty that no matter what else happened that day, when it ended, I was going to look back on it as a good day.

***********************************************************************************

ENDNOTES

[1] Black Friday not only screws up Thanksgiving day to some extent, its effects also ripple through the week. Because Black Friday occurs on a holiday weekend, even a BF Vet may have no reason to wake up on Saturday morning or Sunday morning early. Getting to Sunday night, they mindlessly flick the "ON" switch, with thousands BF Vets across the country finding themselves awakened at 3 a.m. on the Monday following Thanksgiving, having forgotten to reset the time.

[2] At this second HAR HAR, I was laughing too, except I was laughing mostly at the continued and inexplicable financial viability of the business of, and linguistic viability of the words, Radio Shack.

[3] Continuing the whore analogy waaay too far: it was open for all comers; anyone could just come up and walk right in, greeted by something old and wrinkly at the entrance.

[4] This fact about the shrinkwrap I learned in line. Indeed, a large number of the facts in this story have not been directly sourced or substantiated, but are facts I learned in line from BF Vets. And most are from conversations not really directed to me, but which I overheard while pretending to look at my C.O.P.s.

[5] These club stores really do have Black Friday deals, but I keep thinking that there's going to be some kind of nasty or tawdry catch involved, so you'll need to find out about them somewhere else.

[6] A word about Black Friday circulars. A few years ago, I took my Cleveland Plain Dealer out to my folks' house -- which is only 60 miles West of Cleveland -- and compared its circulars with those in the local paper. Many circulars were identical. In others, the pictures and layouts in the circulars were nearly identical, but the prices weren't even close. BluRay players that were $329 in one were $289 in the other. TVs city folk were required to pay $799 for was just $749 for the rural folk, leading me to think that rule number four would have to be: Geography matters! You need to wake up even earlier on Black Friday to drive the 60 miles away from civilization if you really wanted the deals.

I like to think that the pricing has to be adjusted down in rural areas because rural shoppers are savvier, won't be tricked by OfficeMax-style fake-doorbusters where the doorbuster price is worse that someone else's normal price. I like to think of this as a testament to some fundamental deep-seated superiority in those of us raised in small towns and in rural areas. I imagine dark rooms in the bellies of Arkansas (Wal-Mart) and Minneapolis (Target), giant rooms with hundreds of computers, running algorithm after algorithm, and at the end of a room a meeting room full of serious men listening to the presentation being given by the smartest of the smart. One of them points at the midwestern area of the map, stressed to the point of tears. Another unleashes an anguished cry: "we've discovered that if we raise the price by only 2% to get more profit, they just completely stop buying! They're uncannily brilliant! Damn you Huron County!!!!"

On the other hand, with cheap land and cheap labor, maybe it's just cheaper to run a store in the sticks.

[7] Bakugan primer link

[8] Doorbusters are always at the back of the store, as the hope is that whether you nab a doorbuster or not, you will fill your cart on the walk back to the front.

[9] With the Danish Lego corporation apparently afraid of what would happen if their proprietary pirate technology became available to young Americans.

[10] As you shall see, I am apparently a pessimist.

[11] At least I hope he was drunk, because someone that is that much of an asshole whilst sober would have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

[12] I expected some serious reactions to the line-jumpers from those of us in line (my blood began to boil a bit), but the Target crowd -- true to its left-liberal roots -- showed that it doesn't mind cheating, so long as it is done by poor people.

[13] Yes, I know it doesn't exist. But this isn't science class. You know what I mean.

[14] In Junior High, two classmates and I had written a dozens of pages on the "Laws of the Hall" with diagrams showing how to best navigate the crowds, particularly in our school where we shared the halls with the much bigger and scarier high schoolers. At that time, I had no idea that my study and preparation would develop skills that, after 25 years of dormancy, would come alive.

[15] Nevermind about the brand. Why is that important? It's just labels, man. Labels are for phonies is what Holden Caufield would tell you, were he here right now.

[16] But not like a Wyld Stallyn.

[17] Little considered is how Black Friday is a black day for cable companies as well, as the hordes with new HDTV's (including $246 32" LCD HDTVs) descend upon them to exchange cable boxes, doing you the favor of allowing you to stand in line for an extra 30 minutes to remind you of how you got to stand in line earlier that day.

[18] What's the play here? Hang out at the checkout and, like a teenager outside a liquor store, try to get people to buy the $246 32" LCD HDTV for you? Maybe call your family and get them to Target and then, once you have four people, check out? I guess there are options.

Pointing Lessons for Fathers

2009-03-22T16:44:00.001-04:00

It’s surprising everything that fatherhood changes. Take pointing, for example. You might think that pointing would be the same for men that are fathers as it is for men that aren’t fathers, but this is not the case, at least if you are pointing at something moving.

It takes a 2-6 year old child at least 4 seconds to look at what you are pointing at. So if you have a 2-6 year old child, and you are pointing at a moving object, you need to lead the point, and point in front of the object. Pretend you back in sixth grade, playing backyard football quarterback. If the object is moving fast, point 20-30 degrees in front of it. A fast moving object may require pointing a full 45 degrees in front, however. Just remember to lead the point and you won't go wrong (and your kids won't end up crying because they didn't see the deer/bird/train/airplane/whatever it was you were pointing at).

Pitchfork 500

2009-03-07T00:58:00.001-05:00

If you like modern music, I am going to try to post about all of the songs in the Pitchfork 500 book that came out in November 2008 (that attempts to identify the top 500 songs of the past 30 years).

The blog for that is here.

Flashbacks in Parenting

2009-02-16T23:00:00.002-05:00

A weird thing happened to me when I had children that some, but not all of you, might be able to relate to. For me, becoming a father has occasionally caused intense flashbacks to my childhood. No, I don’t live in the house I grew up in or anything like that. For me, it’s the fact that I come from a family of 6 and now have my own family of 5.

I am the oldest of four. After I was born, there came a sister, a brother and another sister. If you look over on the sidebar, you should see where I’m going with this. I’ve got the same thing going on now, two girls and a boy, even in the same order. All (obviously) younger than me (but this time substantially younger). I’ve never called them by my siblings’ names, but I’m sure it’s coming.

Something really bizarro happened nearly two years ago, when my wife and her mother went on their dream vacation to England. Instead of simply staying home, the 4 of us left behind went on our own vacation down to the Great Smoky Mountains with my parents. The bizarre part was that there were 6 of us on vacation, my parents, then me, then three young ones, exactly like it was throughout my childhood.

Having these flashbacks forced into my face has brought home for me one of the downsides of parenting, which is that it contains a lot of the bad elements of being part of a family: the same elements that made most of us want to move out of our parents’ houses the minute we turned 18.

Once I did finally get out of my folks house, I, like most people, did not follow any one single person around obsessively as if I were required to be with them by law. I did not try to take the exact same college classes as any particular person. And, best of all, when someone was pissing me off, I immediately and happily dropped them as a friend. But when you’re a kid, you’re bound to your entire family as a unit on most days in some way, even if it’s in the car to and from school or on other family events. No dropping allowed. By law, even.

But it turns out that the freedom that you yearn for, the freedom you grasp with two hands at age 18, is not freedom at all. It’s only a hiatus.

For me, a 10-year one, because it all comes back.

Once you’re a father, you eventually have to go to restaurants that you don’t like 4 times out of 5 because “it’s someone else’s turn to choose,” just like when you were a kid (a friend that chose poorly would simply have no accompaniment). Someone being annoying in the car? You'll just have to deal with it, not only for that day, but for the next week or month or however long that person decides to be annoying (you can’t just not invite the loser next time around when "the loser" is your 4 year old).

And the feeling that’s most come back is the raw emotion of frustration mixed with resignation that you get when you realize that, just like you were stuck with your brother as he went through his moronic childhood phases, the grating traits of your children are going to be with you. You get to watch your child pick their nose and wipe it on the floor, and you realize that there’s no chance that you’re going to be able to get them to stop doing this (just like with your brother back in the day). But now it’s worse, because you can’t just roll your eyes and walk out of the room. Now you’re actually supposed to do something about it.

If you’re a youngest child, like my wife, then, like my wife, you probably have no earthly idea what I’m talking about in this blog post. Youngests have no recollection of a smaller sibling doing idiot things in their house; they have no experience with it.

They are horribly unprepared for parenthood.

Songs That Didn't Make the Top 20

2009-01-18T09:45:00.003-05:00

I am hard at work at the “Top 20 Rock/Pop Songs for Kids” list, which involves me locking my children in a room, playing music and saying “Do you like this?” many many times (and saying things like “How the hell can you not like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit?’”). I expect to have that posted soon (I have 20 songs but there are other candidates to try). But I want to flag some songs that are definitively NOT on the top 20 list.

Sympathy for the Devil - Rolling Stones: I thought they’d be into the “woo hoo”’s, but my son informed me that this was “not rock and roll. It is Jungle music.”

Loser – Beck. I tried this one, getting them to put the L symbol with their thumb and forefinger on their foreheads and everything. They just were not into saying “so why don’t you kill me.” Self-preservation instincts apparently out-muscle the ability to enjoy self-expressed irony, at least through age 8.

Anything by 7 Seconds or Fugazi - My kids reject Straight Edge music. No black X's on hands are in their future, apparently.

But the real purpose of this post is:

Puff the Magic Dragon – Various Hippies. Knowing that you’ll have to give up something you love may be something that’s going to happen to you in life. I get that. But that doesn’t mean its fun to sing about, and it certainly isn’t fun for kids. If I released a song titled “Sex might be fun now, but in a few years, when you’re old, sex will become rarer and not nearly as much fun and eventually it will be awful,” then no one would expect a hit. When it wasn’t a hit, I couldn’t say “but it’s about sex!” So why do people think kids will like Puff, which might as well be titled “Kids! You Know How You Like to Imagine Things? Well, When you Get Old, You Will Desert Your Imaginary Friends, Such as Puff the Magic Dragon, and Those Imaginary Friends Will Cry!” What the fuck? Was their next song “Santa Is a Fake! In 4 years you Will Learn This!”

So the entire theme here is ridiculous and inappropriate, but then there are the details. What the fuck is “Honah Lee”? Why is Puff all psyched about being given strings and sealing wax? I know, I know, HAHA the song’s about pot. Puff is apparently building a bong or something. But seriously, this song was not written in 1740 when presents like that might’ve somehow been cool. This is addle-brained hippie nostalgia for something I’m not sure they understand.

Go and read the freakin’ lyrics to this song and tell me that this song has any place on a kids’ album. The claim to this being a kids’ song is that its mellow (which hippies think kids like, but kids don’t actually like… mellow makes kids tired, which their parents like, but kids really don’t) and that there is a dragon in it. But it’s not a very cool dragon. It doesn’t breathe fire or kill or fight anybody, so it might as well be a mule or something (ok, ability to transform into a boat is a little bit cool, but only a very tiny bit). And just because there’s sex in my proposed song above doesn’t make it a Barry White standard.

My kids don’t like this song and I don’t blame them one bit.

Top Financial Realization of the New Father

2009-01-14T10:14:00.000-05:00

A lot of wives out there do the billpaying in households these days but for the fathers that still have responsibility for making sure everything gets paid, there is one unexpected financial realization that you will have during the first year you have children (it’s not “kids are expensive”: that’s the expected financial realization), and its this:

Holy fucking shit, health insurance actually matters

Guys in their twenties float along blissfully. Those is Washington may be oh-so-concerned about their lack of insurance, but most (like m back them), actually personally go to the Doctor about every 3 years. Why pay several thousands of dollars (or even ten thousand these days) for the privilege. Now it is very clear to me. These little people are going to the Doctor all the fucking time; and that’s to say nothing about wives getting doctoring for their ladyparts.

I used to think that old people were just whining (like they normally do about the weather and shit like that) when they complained about health insurance, but with explanations of benefits, deductibles, co-pays, flexible spending debit cards, prescription coverage, dental vision. I mean, Jesus Christ it’s a pain in the ass to keep track of.

So if you're an expecting father, get ready. You’re going to have to learn about it.

Shifts in "Guy Rules" in Fatherhood

2009-01-10T09:42:00.005-05:00

It is very well possible that the entire purpose of family life is to destroy male friendships. Male friendships are just too much fun, there’s often very little baggage attached to them. Women are jealous, they’ve conspired over the years to create this value system that causes male friendships to be slowly but surely destroyed between first date and the man’s retirement (at retirement men are allowed to have friends again because their wives are sick of them and want them out of their fucking house).

All men understand as early as high school that their girlfriends are going to nudge out the guyfriends. Women are unfortunately trained by the culture that this is a good and necessary thing. I mean, compare the number of romantic comedies out there that are based upon the premise of the women getting the guy away from his ape-like friends and getting him to grow up to those painting the woman as the bad influence. It’s pretty much all of romantic comedydum vs. Saving Silverman. Of course, girlfriends having to come up with ways to nudge out the guyfriends is 50% of the reason high school boys get laid, so complaining about this impulse, even in retrospect, feels ungrateful. So we live with it.

What many men don’t realize, though, is how their own children will conspire with their wives in this way to destroy their male friendships.

Take sporting events. You may have, like many men before you, had a general rule about getting to sporting events like baseball or football games on time, paying attention to the action while there and staying until their very end, regardless of the score. You may have even actively mocked the “Dodgeresque” fans that arrived in the 3rd inning, or those that never sat back down after the 7th inning stretch in order to “beat traffic.”

When you bring kids to the game, all these, and many other, rules are out the window. Instead, you get there when you can. You must stop watching the game for multiple bathroom breaks and cotton candy breaks. Be ready to pay attention to about a third of the game. Half if you’re lucky. And that’s for the innings that you’re actually there for.

Because at some point in the game, the whining of the kids will commence. The first whine signals the 15-20 minute warning (10 if your child is particularly skillful; 5 for the ADD set). Whining kids effect men’s ears differently. We aren’t attuned to it and it causes immediate pain. Other people’s whining kids are doubly damaging (remember, men are supposed to hate other people’s kids). In this situation, the first thing that will happen is, in an effort to stop the whining, the whinerfather will focus inwardly on his kids for about one minute. This will end the whining temporarily, but one father will inevitably begin telling a story to the other (and 2 ½ hours into a game, it probably isn’t one of the guy’s best stories or it wouldn’t have been saved for the 7th inning, and, really, if it is a story told by a father who has as little of a life as you have, how good can the story really be anyway? (see how I’m rationalizing … my wife has already won ... she won YEARS ago)), and the child will start whining over the story, and the father will realize “I like this guy, but I’m now straining and pretending this squirming creature isn't making these awful noises for the purpose of hearing a barely average story. This just ain’t fun any more.” The first time this happens, you'll stay until the end as a matter of principle anyway. The second time, the "no leaving early" rule goes out the window.

Getting carryout is another area of shifting guy rules. Inevitably you will end up at your new “family friends’ house” (because you were smart enough not to go out for dinner) and you will order pizza or Chinese food or something and a crucial time will arise. It will be the Time To Go Pickup the Carryout Order. You may not have known, but this is a very important time. Indeed, a new guy rule that you have to learn is “all of the fathers go together to pick up the food” (corollary: unless there is a very good sporting event on: then one guy’s job is to prepare a one minute summary of the action on the field that the other guy misses).

This rule has two purposes. The first is that a group of fathers’ goals when at each others houses is to get as far away from the kids as possible. This is why fathers say “come see my new tools in the basement.” They don’t give a damn about the tools. They just know that no wives or children want to hang out in a dark, damp stank basement, so no one will follow them down there.

But the second reason for the “everyone in the car to get carryout” rule is because men in family friend situations know that they have to try to pay more than their fair share of the bill and at minimum must pay their fair share. As a male, once you are married, whether or not you get into heaven mostly depends upon whether you’ve tried to overpay group carryout bills enough. It’s in Corinthians somewhere. And all men know that if one or two guys pick up the food by themselves, you create an unequal bargaining position. It’s like the other guys will have snuck missiles into your personal Cuba. They’ll never let you know how much the tab really was. And then you will have to use non-guy-approved payment methods, like giving the money to the wife, which is pretty much a concession that you're a loser, or, even worse, hiding money under books or napkins or shit nice that. If you’re doing such wimpy things like this, you might as well just stick the cash down the other guy’s pants. And then your wife will want to know why you didn’t pay your fair share, and the next time you see the other guy he’ll give you the “I bought your wife dinner last time” look, which is really kind of like him making out with her if you think about it. So you pretty much have to get into that carryout pickup car

(although for the big sporting event exception, a male truce is implied and cannot be broken; the guy that is the less intense fan has to go get the food; ties mean that the host father gets in the car).

Inappropriate Restaurant Games That I May or May Not Play With My Kids At Skyline Chili

2008-12-13T17:46:00.004-05:00

I may have previously mentioned the affinity that me and my kids have for Skyline Chili. I know why I like it: Mixing spicy Habenero cheese with chocolate-enfused chili and putting it on a plate of 10-cent-quality spaghetti noodles that were cooked 5 hours before you got to the restaurant: it’s just magic. But what isn’t entirely clear is why the kids like it.

(if you don’t know about Skyline Chili; well, the simple description above does not do it justice; just go here and come back in a minute).

And they like it very much. My daughter insisted on making us go there for her birthday two years ago: including my wife’s parents and my parents, who came in from out of town to be subjected to the Skyline experience.

The reason it makes little sense that my kids like this place is that none of the kids actually eat the chili. My daughter eats the hot dogs (which are mini-hot dogs), my son eats oyster crackers and multiple bowls of shredded cheese and my other daughter east the overly sticky noodles and maybe some cheese. Yet they claim to love it.

I’m sure part of it is them just feeding off me and my enthusiasm, but I suspect a large chunk of it is the familiarity – really, the ritual of the experience.

And there is a ritual for us. In fact, for my family, Skyline Chili is the land where jokes never get old, where things have to go perfectly. And if we skip a step, there is hell to pay from the kids.

For each Skyline experience must proceed as follows:

I’m Lost: First, I am required to pretend like I don’t know where I’m going as we drive there. Normally I’m supposed to say things like “So we’re going to the fish restaurant, right?”

Race: Once the kids direct me in the mini-mall complex, and once we are safety under the mini-mall overhang, we are required to race to the restaurant. Not just running, either. I am required to mark-off appropriate head starts for each of the kids and participate as well. Once in the place, we always sit in a booth.

Worm: Once the drinks come, when you take the straw wrapper (straw sleeve?) off the straw, you crinkle it all up before you take it off the straw. Then you use the straw to get a few drops of coke/sprite/water into your straw and you drop it on the crinkled-up straw wrapper and it starts to expand and wriggle like a worm.

Here’s a video.

Cracker Soccer: Cracker soccer is the bastard cousin of the study hall paper football game When you sit down at skyline chili they give you a bowl of oyster crackers with – I’m not making this up – a fork. I’m not sure I get that one.

Anyway, we sit at a booth and the kids take their straws and I take mine and we put an oyster cracker in the middle and try to blow it off the table on the other person’s side.

This is more fun than it sounds like.

Pass Daddy the Ketchup: This is probably the kids’ favorite and the most ritualized Skyline Chili practice. We get in the both and I tell the kids that I LOVE to eat oyster crackers and ketchup and I ask them to pass me the ketchup. They pass me the hot sauce, watch me put some on an oyster cracker and eat it and then watch me over-act like a Wil E Coyote cartoon, complaining about how hot it is. Then they race to give me water and ask me, as if I might be permanently injured, whether I’m OK.

Nothing in this world is better to them than this. I’m not sure I totally get it, but I absolutely go along.

Competitive Eating: Once the food gets here, the kids start talking about how it is not enough like they are Joey Chestnut or Kobayashi or something. My son gets two bowls of cheese and demands two more. My daughter’s mini-hot dog eating record is, I think, five, but often a far greater record is alleged. Most of the time in life, when it comes to food, they are nibblers. This is the only time in the world that they think eating tons of stuff is cool.

Superballs and Such: A kids’ meal at Skyline Chili ends with a choice of a sucker or oreos (they used to provide both -- when my kids were forced to choose starting about 18 months ago, there was a minor revolt and I was required to let them choose suckers and give them cookies at home). After that, they demand quarters for the superball machine. For some reason, any ball with a design is considered good. A pool ball superball is considered bad, unless it is your current age. Luckily, pool ball superballs can normally be traded to the two year old for her ball, so as long as we only get one pool ball out of three, we’re good). At this point we must have nearly 100 superballs bouncing around our house.

And that’s about it. That’s the Skyline Chili experience every single freakin’ time we go there.

(and I kind of love it all too, so maybe it’s not just the kids that like the ritual)

DadBlog Pimps and Crayon Physics

2008-11-30T00:08:00.002-05:00

I do no pimping on this site for the most part, other than for people that I’m pretty much required to be nice to as a legal matter.

In fact, I think I’m in a tiny minority when it comes to parent bloggers. Surprisingly, I’ve learned over the past year that many parent bloggers view this whole thing as a networking exercise; that blogging is somehow a career-like activity, where the blogger apparently holds out dreams of becoming a kind of oddball semi-interesting internet sensation and possibly cashing in, likely for something stupid like getting fired for blogging, instead of becoming famous for blogging well (aside: I would question the idea that anyone is good enough to actually get paid for parentblogging; it just seems silly). But the network-bloggers think that the appropriate “ends” that they need to achieve is to get as many hits as possible, and they’ll exercise whatever means are necessary to achieve their goal. Others are lonely and want friends. A few others use it like a personal diary, never expecting anyone to really read it. That’s about the universe.

And a few people like me blog mostly for friends, partially to see if anyone out there might also enjoy what we have to say but don't think of it as a second source of income. But we're the minority.

If you start a daddy or mommy blog, the following things will happen to you: (a) you’ll get people who email you and ask you to link to their site; (b) you’ll get people who visit your site and leave comments with the express goal of getting you to visit their site (or maybe they're just really friendly, I can't tell); (c) you’ll get “best of the web” start-ups that get 20 hits a day telling you that you have the “best post of March 16, 2008” (they figure if they do this 365 times, they’ll get at least that many hits in a year); (d) you’ll get some people that will offer to pay you to review their site; (e) you’ll get some commercial enterprises that will try to convince you to link to their site (see below). All this seems incredibly bizarre to me, kind of like when I learned that the nerds in my high school had a social hierarchy not all that dissimilar to the one that the jocks had. The main difference was that the nerd one was so so much more pathetic, because who wanted to climb to the top to be crowned King of the Nerds?

Maybe I’m naïve. I once got a nice email from an outfit called Kobold Toys . It was friendly, they claimed to like my site (not sure if they actually read any of it, but lets give them the benefit of the doubt) and they asked me to link to them and say something nice and, in exchange, they were going to have a portion of their site that linked to blogs. I promptly ignored the email. Looking at other dad blogs a few days later, I stumbled across a dad blogger with a “for sale” sign on his own forehead that, well, decided to play along and actually pretended to have stumbled across this great toy store website and pimped it for them. And then the toy store linked back to his review from their website as if it was all spontaneous instead of orchestrated via email behind the scenes. And then the kobold toys blog stuck his blog on the “blogroll.” It all just struck me as dishonest and sad. People actually taking the time to sell themselves for links. I felt like Jeff Smith learning that Senator Joe Paine is in the party machine’s pocket.

Just looking at the number of google ads out there on blogs that get tiny numbers of hits just kills me; it’s hilarious. It’s the equivalent of someone in your neighborhood putting up a billboard in his front yard, and selling space on his car and on his children’s shirts. I mean, what are you people fucking doing with all this advertising? Why does this seem like a good idea to you, commercializing yourself so you can get $7 checks in the mail each quarter?

This is totally not rock n roll guys.

In any event, I don’t pimp things as a matter of course, but…

… you gotta check out the new game Crayon Physics. WOW this is cool shit.

Although it’s not out yet, I’m quaking with anticipation. My kids and I have spent hours playing the very limited free demo. My son was 4 and had little trouble mastering the concept or the controls (he couldn’t solve it all, but loved creating crap and dropping it on the balls anyway). My 8 year old ran with it.

I'm pre-ordering this thing now. You and your kids gotta try this game. Trust me.

And for the record:

****THIS IS NOT A SLIMY TIT-FOR-TAT OR PAID ADVERTISEMENT****

p.s. Thanksgiving was actually still fun. Although my siblings had to tend to their own children, they were now more into children in general, so they still played with mine and let me be a lazy ass. All in all it was a win-win.

Thanksgiving May Very Well Suck This Year

2008-11-29T09:50:00.003-05:00

Yes, yes, I know; it’s really two days after Thanksgiving, but my family’s get together is today, Saturday.

Going back to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving and Christmas used to be a great joy for me. I’m the oldest of four children and none of my siblings had kids, so the day would be spent (a) with other people watching and playing with my kids, often in cool ways, with me sitting my butt on a couch (sometimes with glass of wine in hand), (b) talking with people that have semblances of real lives (those people being my siblings and their spouses) and actually know some things about the world and stuff, so it was good to get all caught up.

Now a terrible thing has happened. The last 12 months have made me an uncle three times over. All three of my siblings have had their firstborn children.

Now my wife and I will get to (1) hold a lot of babies, (2) watch my siblings worry waaaay too much about their kids (likely chopping turkey into unrecognizably small bites) (3) listen to them discuss the merits of different brands of baby clothes and videos and toys and car seats, things upon which we have all kinds of opinions, but we will have no way of expressing them without seeming like obnoxious know-it-alls, so we’ll have to just shut up, (4) watch the confused look on my children’s face as grammy and grampy aren’t devoting 100% of their time to them, (5) worst of all, I will have to entertain my own children while the tryptophan forces my limbs deeper and deeper into the couch.

To be clear: this isn’t to say that my siblings and their spouses are going about this the wrong way. I love my siblings and spouses quite a bit (and even like them too!). They’re good parents. If anything, we very well may have been more unrealistically anal about our firstborn when she was young than any of them are. But, as my wife says when she hangs out with college friends that just had their first baby: “I’m happy for them, but it’s just hard to get excited about their baby stories after a while. I’m kind of over it all.”

We’re leaving in 45 minutes and I’m not sure I’m looking forward to it this year.

Really Being a Father

2008-11-16T18:47:00.002-05:00

It may seem from a lot of what I’ve written that a large part of fatherhood involves getting away from your children. And it seems that way because it is true. You have to maintain your individuality. Way too many people, once they have kids, think that their kids are their life. And they sweat and toil and think “I am making my kids’ life better.” And then their kids have the grandkids, and the kids sweat and toil for the grandkids and, down a generation, the grandkids sweat and toil for the great-grandkids. And at some point you realize that people are sacrificing themselves on down the line from generation to generation with no payoff. If every generation is selfless until it isn’t, then you have 6 generations of saints busting their ass down the line until you get unlucky and you reach a generation of jerks and assholes who say “ok; now we’ll just spend the money. Thanks suckers.” (kind of like this generation of the Kennedys, Hiltons, etc.). In any event, that whole generational live-your-life-to-pass-it-all-ondown kind of enterprise never struck me as something that gives purpose to a life.

The trick of fatherhood to me has always been trying to balance my life and my fun with my obligations to the kids and to society (to raise the kids right). I will sacrifice for my kids, but I won’t ruin myself in the process if I can help it.

One way I try to do this is trying to get them into the stuff that I’m into, so we can have fun time for Dad at the same time we’re having fun time for the kids. Getting them into chess, sneaking math lessons in now and again, taking them to Tribe games, etc. But that’s not always possible. Sometimes I have to do my own thing, or something with just my wife, and without them.

But if you’re going to take “alone time” every once in a while, you better be ready to commit yourself to “kid time” every once in a while too.

I think the mistake that many fathers make is that they are afraid to truly and fully commit to children’s play. They won’t give themselves over to it. When your kid wants to play princess and make you a prince, you gotta attack the role like you’re fucking’ De Niro. You are the prince. Do you like your crown? Should you try to get one in a different metal, such as platinum? Do you recall your childhood or do you suspect that you might once have been a frog? Why am I not wearing the royal purple? I should go get a purple shirt on. Why is this princess smaller than me? Lets come up with a logical explanation for that, like you got zapped by a “giant-maker” ray. You gotta feel it, man! Be the ball! And it can’t be a self-conscious wink-wink act where you’re playing cute for your spouse (or the blogging community; I define "not playing cute" as limiting ironic comments to once every five minutes). Leave your shame on the treelawn and keep it out of the house today, my friend, as it has no place in here. It's all about the kiddies.

Here's another experiment, particularly for the young (which I've only successfully been able to pull off twice). If you are walking down the street with a 2 or 3 or 4 year old, forbid yourself from saying “hurry up” or “let’s go” or “this way” or from even touching their hand to guide them. Walk at their pace wherever they take you, even if it takes you 45 minutes to get four houses down the block. When they stop and bend over to look at something, you stop and bend over, or sit on the sidewalk patiently. (once again, leave the shame before you being your trip, as the people in the house whose sidewalk you are in front of will be peering out the windows wondering why you’ve camped out on their sidewalk for 10 minutes).

For 60 minutes you gotta live in their world and ignore the phone and other adults and listen to every word they speak and treat it like it was the most important and serious thing in the world. Two or three of those sessions a week –120-180 minutes -- and you’ll be not telling them but showing them that you respect them and take them seriously, and that’s gonna go a long way in about 20 different ways.

And you won’t feel nearly as guilty when on Tuesday night you decide to read that new book you’re obsessed with instead of playing with them.

Christmas Cards

2008-11-11T00:12:00.000-05:00

Holiday season is coming. One thing I like about late December / early January is by that time our family accumulated a giant pile of Christmas cards, most of which I haven’t seen because my wife gets the mail in our house. So each year I settle in and go through them before they get thrown out.

Christmas cards are one aspect of life that is totally obscured from the view of single bachelor men. Single men don’t buy Christmas Cards. Single men don’t normally receive more than three or four Christmas Cards, maybe from their sisters and mothers. They really have no idea that after being married five years, they’ll have 75 Christmas cards flowing into their mailbox during the month of Christmas. A cultural surprise it is.

And Christmas Cards are a very good thing. Once you have kids, you have no choice. You gotta do your part and contribute. And the primary reason that you have to contribute is because your Christmas Card is your message to the world about Who You Are. A Christmas Card is to a married couple with kids is what a Halloween costume is to a 22-year old. It is a public form of quasi-art that you know people will see. It is planned and considered in advance. The idea is yours and expresses what you think is funny or interesting, but it’s not just mental; your physical pluses and minuses are part of the package. And your choice will convey a message, whether that message is “I don’t care,” or “We are straight-laced” or whatever. You have an opportunity each year to do the equivalent of blast faxing your friends with something you’ve created (or paid to have someone create). You gotta do it right. [ed note: of course, the primary reason that I now believe in the fundamental importance of Christmas cards is because my wife put together a smashingly funny one last year; two years ago I thought they were crap and a waste of money, but lets just ignore that for now]

The father’s primary purpose, as in countless other aspects of family life, is simply to keep your wife from going horribly wrong. In the picture (and if you have kids and you’re sending a Christmas Card without a picture, you may be beyond help), your pet can be an accessory but can’t be given equal billing with the kids. Matching outfits are only permissible if both adults wear the outfit as well, making it plainly over the top. Boys’ hair must have been cut at least four days prior to the picture and should not be glued to their heads. Parents must be in the pictures at least every 3-4 years so your out of town friends aren’t horribly shocked at how friggin’ old and fat you look after not having seen you for ten years (or to prep them for the plastic surgery and/or Hair Club surprises).

In addition to the Christmas Card being a form of semi-art you circulate around, the other key purpose Christmas Cards serve is to allow those friends that don’t see you very often to see if your kids are uglier or better looking than you. Sometimes you see a Christmas Card with two attractive parents, and you look at the kid and you know with certainty that the parents are thinking to themselves “what the fuck happened here?” as they’ve done the genetic equivalent of mixing Dr. Pepper and Vanilla Almond Special K, managing to create a gross and disgusting thing out of two great ones. Other times the kid is so cute it makes you wonder…

One old tradition that I’m sad that apparently has died is the Christmas letter. The Christmas letter was roundly mocked and derided as shameless self-promotion and prattling on about things that aren’t interesting [ed note: like a blog? Dddyfsto: Shut up]. As a result, at least for my generation and social circuit, the Christmas letter is now extinct (my parents’ friends still occasionally send them, but baby boomers have never been shy when it comes to shameless self-promotion). This is an awful shame. These things were great. At the absolute worst, you got to mock and deride the letter and, at best, they were actually kinda funny and informative. I mean, if your friends are going off the deep end and getting all weird on you, don’t you want to know that before you travel and visit them and find their house postered wall-to-wall with I Can Has Cheezburger kitties? Wouldn’t it have been nice to know that they were going down that path before you agreed to spend the weekend? You can see, we need the Christmas letter!

And who are the people that are complaining? These are people that think Christmas letters are boring, but when they get yours, instead of just not reading it, they read it anyway so they can complain about how boring it is. I can respect people that like X-mas letters; I can respect people that don’t like them and don’t read them. But people who enter into an unpleasant experience so they can mock it later. Who needs those people as friends?

So c’mon, join with me. Let’s bring back the Christmas letter! Who is with me here? [as this is a blog, I am supposed to say something like “let’s see a show of hands in the comments section”]. Time is short, but how long does it really take to write a page of your family’s accomplishments and to figure out a way to portray them in a reasonable/interesting/or funny way?

C'mon people. I’m expecting some letters this year. Let's do it!

Science Proves That Your Mother is Better At Watching Your Kids Than You or Is Maybe Just Scared of You

2008-11-07T23:29:00.003-05:00

I read an interesting study this week that just came out in Pediatrics magazine . The researchers looked at kids that were 30 to 33 months old and tried to figure out what attributes in the kids’ parents or lifestyles made it more or less likely that the little tots would be injured.

Most shit didn’t matter, even stuff you might think would matter. Income didn’t matter. Child’s birth weight didn’t matter. The mom describing herself as depressed didn’t matter. The mom thinking she was competent didn’t matter. Race didn’t matter. Ethnicity didn’t matter. Of the things they tested, 5 things mattered. Three decreased the chance of injury and two increased it.

The two things that increased the chance of injury are kind of boring. First, if the parents split up, the kid got hurt more. This one’s simple math: one person potentially watching out for you vs. two. The second is whether the kid’s father was identified as the primary caregiver. Then the kid was more than twice as likely to get hurt, which basically proves that when toddlers start trying to climb bookshelves, fathers have an impulse to sit back in their chairs “just to see what happens” that they have to overcome before springing to action. Apaprently this is not an easily overcome impulse. Or dads are pulling a Cosby and trying to prove their incompetence so as to be relieved from their child-watching duties.

The decreases are more interesting, at least to me:

(1) How old your mother was when you were born.

This one is easy. Old moms aren’t gonna play a lot of running around games themselves. And old moms have earned enough money in their lives to have bought actual nice stuff, so they don’t let their kids tear shit up in the house. Kids have to play calmly, thus they don’t get hurt.

(2) Whether you’ve moved recently.

This is the one that shocked the researchers. If you moved recently, kids got hurt a lot less. But this one’s obvious too if you think about it. Anyone that’s ever moved knows that your parents don’t let you do shit, don’t let you even cross the street they’re so overprotective.

(3) Whether your grandparents take care of you during the day

This one is the best, and is news that will surely be greeted smugly by all grandmothers around the globe, who I’m sure suspected this, never doubted it for a second. The conclusion was that if the grandparents take care of the kids during the day, their chances of being hurt are cut in half compared to if someone else or the mother herself watches them. The best part about this one is that it apparently isn’t wisdom or experience that makes grandmothers better at this, because if the mom is out of the picture and the child is watched by the grandmother full-time, the injury rate goes back to normal. So grandmothers aren’t better at parenting. They are only better at watching their grandchildren if the parents are still around.

Best I can tell, this suggests that there are one of two things are going on (or maybe both). First, the grandmothers are keeping the children from being injured simply as a way to look better compared to the mothers. It’s a simple “watch me do this better than you” dynamic, which is really pretty awesome that science has demonstrated this (even though it was obvious, it’s nice to have scientific proof that moms are secretly competing with their mothers and mothers in law despite their denials to the contrary). The other thing that might be going on are grandparents that are deathly afraid of the kid getting hurt and the mother starting to withhold the presence of the grandchildren.

So either your parents think they are better than you at raising kids, or they’re afraid of you. You can decide which one applies to you, but you can’t deny both.

Halloween for Dads

2008-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

I’ve never been all that big on Halloween. We weren’t a big Halloween family when I was growing up. I’m not a big chocolate fan. The insides of pumpkins gross me out. Costumes seem like a pain in the ass.

Sure, I attended a few Halloween parties later in life, in college and thereafter, and made half-assed efforts to wear costumes to some of them. But I can’t say I was ever a big fan.

And so after I got married, the one (bizarre, hilarious and sometimes more) advantage of Halloween – watching women skank it up – didn’t really matter anymore. To the extent we were still going to parties, watching thirty-somethings skank it up had the potential to be less than appealing or disastrous.

So I was content to let Halloween fade away. I figured I’d let my wife run with this holiday with the kids, I’d put in an hour or two of work every year and that would be that.

But taking the kids out trick or treating the past few years, I’ve begun to recognize a glorious thing. A surprising number of dads wandering around carrying red plastic Solo cups filled with unknown liquids. Stopping to sip from their unmarked water bottles an inordinate number of times. People seemed happier and friendlier than usual. One street near our old house essentially created a mini-block party, with most of the adults out on lawn chairs on front porches or in the lawn.

This is great! I mixed myself a special beverage last year and, figuring the cops would have their hands full with pumpkin tossers, I became brazen this year and just carried my Coors Light around with me with another in my jacket pocket. I dropped the empty cans at the houses of neighbor we know. It worked out great.

This Halloween thing might actually have some potential.

Halloween Racists

2008-11-01T23:27:00.003-04:00

How do you spot a racist?

No one wants to be friends or even friendly with racists. But how do you really know who in your neighborhood is racist? In most cities, you’re left to wonder, but in Cleveland Heights, there’s a way to find out.

Cleveland Heights is a city that’s as racially integrated as any (the trick being that not many cities in the world are very integrated). In any event, Cleveland Heights has about 27,000 white people and about 21,000 black people. Cleveland Heights also borders East Cleveland, one of the most maligned cities in Ohio (and for good reason) and some of the sketchier parts of Cleveland. And while it is numerically racially integrated, in practice the whites and blacks tend to live in different parts of the city. We have about 16-20 houses on our street, only three of which are occupied by black families.

If you want to know who is racist in Cleveland Heights, you wait for Halloween. You wait for what I affectionately call the “visiting trick-or-treaters.” A number of presumably-poor black families that you’ve never seen before in your lives descend upon the mostly white streets of the moderate to upscale streets of Cleveland Heights. Every one of the kids using a pillow case for a candy bag. Not every one in costume; many in poor or barely recognizable costumes.

In Cleveland Heights, if you want to find the racists, look for the residents of the nice neighborhoods that are just put off by this. And they do exist, and it sneaks out of them all night long. The dad who you are chatting with you mentions that “those people that aren’t from this neighborhood are just all over tonight.” Or the woman at the door of her house who, passing out candy, shrieks “my goodness I’ve never seen so many trick or treaters. Where did you all come from? You just take one a piece now!!” My father-in-law speculates that a quarter to a third of the neighborhood turns off their lights because they just “don’t like it.”

(I have to say that I am sometimes myself irked by the annual visit of the 35 or 40 year old woman, who appears to be escorting her kids, who steps up herself to stick her pillowcase in my face. Some version of this woman appears every year. One of them a few years ago was kind enough to lie that the bag was for “her sick son,” which made it easier not to hate her, but screw the rest; I fantasize about not giving them candy, but my sorry, pathetic self gives up the peanut butter cup every time).

It's tough to know what to make of this at first, but the more you think about it, the harder it is to complain about this. The visting trick or treater parents don’t want to expose their kids to the nastiness of their neighborhood after dark. Instead of sitting at home, they want their kids to experience trick-or-treating. They're willing to live with the embarrassment of it all. So they cross the border for goodies, like seniors in the United States used to take the bus to Canada for medicine to pick up their prescriptions on the cheap.

There's no way to really complain about that when you think about it. And that doesn't even take into account the racial gay-dar they bring that lets us know which neighborhood folks need to be skipped over when it comes time to invite people over for a cookout.

The way I see it, they’re really doing me a favor.

Break-I-Festo

2008-10-31T14:36:00.000-04:00

After getting killed by work for 6 weeks, things are slowing up, so I plan to post this weekend and resume posting through the end of the year.

It's always heartening to look at your hit counter and realize that people read your blog more when you aren't posting.

The Mantra That I Need

2008-09-13T19:19:00.006-04:00

I am not a big brother.

Well, actually I am a big brother;, I am the oldest of four children. But what I need to remember is that I am not my children’s big brother (I am also not my wife’s big brother, which is something that she tends to remind me about when I try to push her off the bed at night because she said something annoying). This is probably my biggest failing as a parent (when it comes to my failings as a husband, this is but one to choose from out of a veritable cornucopia of choices).

[it's really kind of easy for me to get confused, however, because when I was younger, I had 2 younger sisters and a younger brother; and now I have 2 girls and a boy; are you buying this excuse? me neither I guess]

For example, the kids and I were leaving to drive somewhere this morning, and after I shuffled them out the door onto the driveway, I realized that we had a full bag of trash in the kitchen trash, so I went back and de-leveraged and de-suctioned the bag from the kitchen can and carried it in my left arm outside toward the trash can. In the 30 seconds it took me to do this, my 2 year-old managed to find the puddles in the driveway and begin stomping in them, soaking her shoes and pantlegs.

So I said “Argh… what are you doing!” which is fine, but then I said “I am going to throw you in the trash can,” which is really not completely fine. My 2-year old laughed a bit at the fact that she made me “Argh” (which annoyed me a bit more) and I hurried over and scooped her up with my right arm. I then walked over to the trash can, to deposit the bag of trash.

As I walked over the trash can, my two-year old (utilizing the normal observational skills of a two-year old, and thus having no freakin’ clue that I had a trash bag in my other hand) began to think I was serious. She whimpered. She squealed. The problem is that, at this point, full-on big brother mode kicked for me in here (which I was able to recognize by my inadvertent smile). An actual, responsible adult would have stopped himself immediately and put the child down or something. I, apparently being a naturally evil person, however, went ahead and took the lid off the trash can, causing the two year old to shout “NO Daddy!” At this point, the big-brother-in-me said “now you should laugh in a really evil way” and I actually started to do that until the father-in-me finally, about 20 seconds too late, beat the shit out of the big-brother-in-me and I stopped being such a jerk and put the kid down.

This is not the only time I have done this. When my oldest (named Emma) was 6-years old, our old dilapidated garage was on its last legs and needed to be replaced (we had nicknamed it “deathtrap” and considered inviting the really annoying neighbor kid over to play in it). But trying our best to be fun, creative parents, my wife and I decided that the garage’s imminent demise meant that we could spray paint the fuck out of the old thing the day before it was scheduled to be demolished. My wife bought a can or two of red spray paint while I was at work at we were ready to go that night. While the kids played inside, we snuck out after dinner to get a chance to loose our inner graffiti artist before handing over the cans and allowing the kids to take over (knowing with a certainty that there would be no turns left for us once the kids started).

My wife drew a few shapes on the door and I watched until I burst needing my out chance. I sprayed a line or two and got an idea. I sprayed “Emma wrote this” on the garage door in large, red letters. I put the garage door up, so there was no evidence of any painting.

I called my daughter out of the house.

I told her she was punished for the bad thing she had done. She looked at me quizzically, having no idea what I was talking about.

I pulled down the garage door.

My daughter read it and became hysterical, screaming “I didn’t do it I didn’t do it I didn’t do it.” She then began to run. Fast and far. My daughter, the girl that had been going out and running 2 miles with me back then (and who now, at age 8, kicks my butt), was off to the races. Down the driveway, turning at the sidewalk and just going.

It began to dawn on me that overteasing your 6-year old isn’t cool. Not at all, not at all, not at all, not at all not cool not one bit. Luckily my wife eventually tracked my daughter down and, after about 20 minutes, she actually stopped crying.

Parents are supposed to be a comfort to a child. Parents are the two people that will always love their children and accept them for who they are, unconditionally. Yet here I am, screwing with a six-year old. Sigh.

I’d like to say that I’m cured; that I’ve stopped teasing my kids. The fact that I’m blogging about it (and posting a pic), however, suggests that part of me still, and inappropriately, thinks that it was kinda funny.

But I really am trying to remember that I'm not their big brother.

Teaching The Hatred: A Father's Duty

2008-09-09T06:30:00.000-04:00

LeBron James has done it again. On Sunday I was in my living room, watching the Browns vs. Cowboys game, and there is LeBron on the sidelines at Cleveland Browns Stadium … unfortunately, he’s on the Dallas sidelines. LeBron famously showed up at an Indians vs. Yankees playoff game last fall sporting a Yankees cap, rousing the ire of Tribe fans, but later explaining that he’s always liked the Yankees. Maybe having your professional sports stars like other teams is OK when they are from somewhere else, but people most in Cleveland felt that, as someone actually from Cleveland, LeBron should “get it” and should be an Indians and Browns fan. So this new move should come as little surprise, at least.

Lots of people had takes on this. Some good. Some not so good. I personally always thought that LeBron had a legitimate built-in excuse: he grew up without a dad around. I mean, most kids learn about sports by seeing their dad watching the NFL on the tube Sunday afternoon, or by riding around in the back seat listening to the baseball game on the radio. Some even get taken to some games by their dads. Who took LeBron to a game? Did anyone ever tell him to like the hometown team?

We learn from history that racism was (is?) largely taught to children by their parents, probably more often than not by fathers. Hatred of something can, in this way, be passed on from generation to generation.

I am inspired by the example of our Southern brothers. If they could teach their kids from generation to generation something that is as freakin’ stupid as “black people are inferior,” then I should have no trouble teaching my children the plain truth that “maize and blue people are inferior” and the “Pinstripes suck.”

This is one of the best things about sports: it is the main place in modern society where you can pass an irrational hatred of something on to your children, where can put your mark on your children -- and, if you are a Cleveland fan, psychologically mar them -- in a way that, if you do it properly, will so impact them that they’ll similarly deform their own childrens’ psyches.

It’s great.

For example, I’ll be sitting around, watching let’s say a baseball game on ESPN Sunday night baseball or something. One of the kids walks in, and it goes like this:

“Daddy, who is playing basketball?”

“It’s baseball. And it’s the New York Yankees against the Boston Red Sox.” (I mean, why in the world would anyone show any other game on TV if you can show the Yankees Red Sox? Ack.)

“Who do we want to win”

“I guess the Red Sox.”

Pausing, “So we don’t like New York.”

“Nope. Nope. Nope. We don’t like New York.”

“Do we hate them?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do we hate them double?”

“Yes, we double hate them. Triple even.”

“So we like the Red Sox, right?”

“No, we hate them too, but just a little bit less than the Yankees.”

“Oh. That little guy Ped-Roy-A is annoying to me. I think maybe I hate the Red Sox a little bit more.”

“So long as you hate both of them, which one to hate more is up to you to choose. It’s a personal philosophical choice that each person has to decide for himself. Post-2004, there’s no correct answer when it comes to Red Sox and Yankee hating; both are valid personal choices.”

“Do you hate the Yankees more than Michigan and the Steelers?”

“Ummm…. Errrr.”

(This is where I normally pass out simply from the thought of the question.)

You see, LeBron didn’t get any of this crucial training at a young age. So he ends up a Yankees fan and a Cowboys fan. I mean, I almost feel sorry for the guy.

Not Quite There Yet

2008-09-07T14:29:00.002-04:00

It happens to all parents. You are trying to teach your child something (or hoping that they’ll learn it without you having to go through the exercise of actually teaching it, via osmosis or TV or other really effective methods like those) and you get the impression that they’ve got it! You can see, with your powers of super-perception, that they’ve gotten it – even if it doesn’t seem like it -- and you tell your spouse or mom about it and … actually you’re just full of crap. I always thought that the kids were smiling at us well before they were. My wife once thought our 20 month old was reading (and even made me get out the video camera so her mistake is preserved for posterity). Every time we leave the kids with my mother alone overnight, she mysteriously claims that they’ve learned some new skill that we see no evidence of once we take them home. (It’s possible that she’s just fucking with me to get back at me for years of harassing her, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on).

My nieces, who live in the Middle East (not as in “Maryland” but as in “near Syria”), came to visit us and their grandparents again this summer. They are 13 and 10 years old, and my now-8 year old daughter (the oldest) absolutely loves their visits as she can have the older-sibling-type relationship with them that she’s deprived of otherwise in her life. The nieces go off to camps sometimes in the summer and come back with all kinds of interesting stuff to teach my 8-year old (none of it is the bad kind of interesting yet, at least as far as I know).

One of this year’s camp hand-me-downs was “five-minute mysteries,” which are basically short riddles. For example: “There is a man in a yard with a fence that no one can climb over that is locked from the inside and he is lying on the ground, dead, with a stab wound in his chest, and a giant puddle underneath him. How did he die?” You can ask questions in a 20-questions kind of way, ultimately trying to come up with the answer: “it was winter and an icicle fell onto his heart and killed him and then melted.” She had a half-dozen things of that genre. My eight-year old loved it and it seemed to me that my nearly five year old was kinda getting it too. I was kind of proud of him for being able to follow what was going on.

I often overestimate the walking that my son will be able to do. I figure “he’s almost 5, he should be able to walk a mile or two” and it never really works out that way. The other day we were going to an Indians game and hitched a ride downtown, thinking we would take the Rapid train home (something my son loves). Post-game (OK, really, post-7^th inning) he was able to walk the half-mile from the game to the train, but once off the train, it was shoulder-back time for the mile or so walk home.

So we were trudging up a hill on our way, and I spotted a dead bird on the sidewalk ahead of us. I hesitated, not really ever having to address death with the boy. Unfortunately, he asked.

“Daddy, look at that bird.”

“Yeah … it looks like it’s dead. That makes me sad.”

He paused. “Maybe it’s just sleeping.”

“I guess that’s possible, but I don’t think so, buddy.”

When a serious topic springs up out of nowhere, having a kid on your shoulders is rough. You can’t see their faces, their eyes. You have no idea if they are shaken up or have moved on. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I wanted to see his face so bad that I spent 3 or 4 seconds trying to roll my eyes up so far as to see the face of the boy sitting on my shoulders.

We walked past the bird and about 20 paces beyond.

My son drew a deep breath and said: “I guess it will always be a five-minute mystery.”

(maybe sometimes they don't get it when you think they do)

Family Friends

2008-09-01T10:55:00.001-04:00

While you and your wife may have brought your own sets of friends to your marriage to begin with, if you’ve been married long enough, you’ve probably been around when your wife (or you) actually met someone and became their friend. And that new friend probably had a significant other. And somewhere early in the relationship, you probably went out as a foursome. And if it was her making the friend, if you hated the guy, couldn’t stand him, then her relationship with the female maybe never got off the ground, or was probably restricted to shopping or girls nights out or something like that. And vice versa. The basic standard that most people seem to have is this: you get to maintain the friendships you came to the relationship with (you don’t have to get rid of the high school friend no matter how annoying to your spouse), but all new friendships have to be cleared with the spouse before commencement. That’s just the way it goes.

Having kids takes this in a whole other direction, since now you have to find a family that is not just acceptable to mom and dad: you have to find a couple with kids to be friends with since you’ll bore regular non-childed people to death discussing diaper brands (or your top ten worst diaper “blow-outs”). And the kids generally have to be the same age as yours (your actual age no longer matters; in parenting terms, if your kids are older than someone else’s, then you’re the “older” parents). You may resist this restricting yourself to childed couples at first, but soon you’ll recognize the advantages of having another set of parents with kids to hang out with.

But first, you have to realize that in choosing these friends, how much you like them and they like you counts, but other stuff counts at least as much if not more. Perhaps most importantly, you need to make sure that they have a reasonable level of attachment to their kids and a reasonable discipline level. Some people believe that once the adults are talking with a cocktail in their hands, all adults are to pretend like the children don’t exist. These are the people whose kids are probably down in the basement, pulling your kids’ fingernails out with pliers when you aren’t there. That’s too far. Other parents, however, will actually follow their kids around your house from room to room and show them how to use toys and will pay more attention to the kids than to you. You might mention to these folks that if you wanted to follow kids around, you have your own. You didn’t need to invite their’s over. So you need to find balance here. Someone who when the kids play in the backyard proposes that the parents sit on the deck, or at least in the family room with the window. But not in the yard.

Another big test once the kids are older is how do the other parents react when you say to their kid “Frankie… stop standing on Julie’s head” in a stern voice. When you discipline their kid. If they’re OK with it, you’ve got family friends for life, even if their favorite band is ABBA and they watch CBS constantly.

This is one of the key reasons why, as you get older, adult brothers and sisters start to hang out with one another. Not because they’ve grown closer or actually like each other. It’s because they’re WAY more comfortable yelling at their own flesh and blood in the form of nieces and nephews when they do something ridiculous like tear up the garden. If it’s not family, you force yourself to think “I didn’t like those flowers anyway.” When it’s your nephew, you grab them by the scruff of the neck and deal with it.

So you’ve got these new couple friends. What are they for? It’s important to do the right stuff. For example, do not ever ever take your family of 3 or 4 out to dinner with another family of 3 or 4. That’s just a disaster. You’re now a table of 8, and you’ll sit in the lobby for 45 minutes waiting for the 2 tables in the restaurant that seat 8 to open up while your kids scream “I’m hungry.” No, what another family is ideal for is for breaking the monotony of weekends stuck at home or weekday summer nights. You go over to the other person’s house, you turn the kids loose and you drink a beer or a glass of wine and spend 2-3 hours together. That’s what these new friends are for.

I wondered why my dad never did anything solo with our “family friends’” dads. It’s because he didn’t actually like many of them as actual friends. And, look, you’re gonna have to lower the bar here. Sometimes you get lucky and you find some guys that you’d normally actually be friends with. When this happens, they normally have a kid who keeps trying to kiss your daughter’s belly or a kid that kills small animals or a wife who your wife hates because she’s really really hot, I mean smoking hot (despite the superficial attraction to that situation, don’t become friends with that guy: it ain’t worth it). There’s never an ideal situation. If you accept that, you can have a blast with the new friends.

The problem really arises when you get older. You not only need a guy that you’re ok with, you need a wife that your wife is ok with, and ideally they will have approximately the same number and ages of kids as you, and hopefully similar gender distributions. There probably are 17 families like that in the world, but only 3 of them speak English. So someone’s gonna get screwed, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. Just make sure that kid gets an extra Christmas present: preferably a Nintendo DS so they have something to play with when you go over to that family’s house and the rest of you have fun.

More Parenting Definitions

2008-08-23T14:40:00.000-04:00

Last time around, a commenter observed that I seem to be coming up with sniglets here, which I'm sure he meant as an insult, but which I have decided to treat as a compliment.

Baguette Skins – the crusty shell of a baguette that your kids leave for you to eat after pulling out and eating the soft fluffy bread center.

Drive-Thru Swap – After driving-thru at Wendy’s or McDonalds on one day to grab a meal for your kids, when you intentionally drive your spouse’s car through the drive-thru the following day so that the fast food employees do not recognize that you’re feeding your kids fast food every day.

Handshake Drugs – A style of paying a babysitter employed by most parents, where the money is palmed and handed over to the babysitter in the most discreet way possible (Why? Are we worried that our kids secretly think that the babysitter has a platonic crush on them, and that’s why she comes over?)

Sandwich Birth Order – When you have three or more children, with only the youngest and oldest of the same gender, like Girl Boy Boy Boy Girl.

Living Close to Home

2008-08-18T00:31:00.001-04:00

There’s an odd thing in other major America cities: Other City bars. Washington or Chicago have “Boston bars” or “Ohio State bars” or “New York bars.” Cleveland doesn’t have any Other City bars, I’m pretty sure because no one from other cities ever actually moves here, or at least not enough of them to support a bar. Practically everyone that’s here in Cleveland is from here or from around here.

But several other cities have Cleveland bars. And therein lies the problem.

When they grow up, my kids are going to grow up and they are going to move away. I’m trying to come to grips with that, the fact that it is highly likely that they aren’t going to live anywhere near Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland is the 15^th largest metropolitan area in the nation, yet young kids clear out of this place like they clear out of Podunk Population 102 towns throughout the Midwest (and like they clear out of Lincoln Park in Chicago on December 23).

I said a few weeks ago that I was going to explain reasons that I wanted to have 3 children. This is one of the reasons: I live in Cleveland, Ohio, and if you live in a Cleveland and want to have at least one kid stay in the area once they grow up, you better have a whole bunch of kids to improve the odds. In fact, 3 probably isn’t enough.

Living close to home is underrated in our society. A lot of people, particularly in the upper middle class and above, act like if their career calls for it, they’ll move anywhere. Especially in academia. People assume that if you’re offered a slightly better professorship across the country, you’ll pick up and move for that slightly better job. But it’s everywhere. Good students often go to the best college or doctoral program they can get into. Doctors go to work for the best hospital they can get a residency at.

Sometimes I hear someone about to move for a “better career opportunity” and I think that they must be joking. In my life, I would have moved for friends, for better weather, for love, to get laid more or to be near family. Moving for a career … yuck. That kind of requires you to admit that you want to have a career in the first place, requires you to admit that you’re into your career, that you care deeply about your career. I’m just too immature for that.

Technically I grew up 60 miles away from where I live now, but my wife grew up a mile away, and I think living where you generally grew up is a great thing. Your friends are your lifelong friends, and you know their parents and their families firsthand, not just from stories. Your relationship with your parents turns into one of equals as see each other enough to learn to live with one another, instead of continuing into your 30’s the somewhat stunted relationship so many have when they live away from their folks and only see their parents for a week a year (and, during that week, 24 hours a day is spent with them, inevitably bringing back all the old frictions). If your brothers and sisters stick around, you not only maintain a relationship with them, but develop one with your nieces and nephews.

This summer, my wife and a friend, both drawing on their decades of experience with the Cleveland area, put together a set of Cleveland-centric kids’ activities that was really impressive, a list they never could have figured out if they weren’t from here. I’m trying not to turn this into a love letter to Cleveland. The ability to do that could be true about any city someone is from. But having my wife from here, we know where the closest drive-in and putt-putt courses are, which playgrounds have the new equipment, the best place to see a sunset out on the lake, a good route for a family bike ride, the street that are full of college kid rentals, which Chinese places are crappy and which are worth bothering with. We know that all of the Rib Cook-offs in town are a rip off. We know where to sit so we can see the Air Show for free and which fireworks are the best and where to sit for them too. We get to actually go see the sports teams that we love, and listen to the hometown team on the radio and on the local news. And, on the love letter to Cleveland side of things, here’s a list: Cedar Point, Towpath, Voinovich Park, MOCA, Parade the Circle, the West Side Market, Beachland Ballroom/Cleveland Agora/Grog Shop, the Saffron Patch, The Colony and all the Lee Road bars; Coventry Road; The 4^th of July at Public Square; the Feast of the Assumption; Slyman’s; Put-in-Bay; University Circle generally; all the amazing bridges over the Cuyahoga. And that just scrapes the surface.

I know very much how sexy the lure of other cities was for me, and will be for my kids. New York is an amazing beast of a city. Chicago, at its best, feels like a Cleveland or a St. Louis or a Milwaukee, but just hipper and bigger and smarter and faster and better looking. Columbus and Indianapolis are just so damn friendly. I understand the impressive pluses of a Denver or a San Diego or a Seattle or a Sante Fe or a Boston (Dallas and Atlanta, on the other hand … those I don’t get at all).

But you don’t pick from scratch. You're from somewhere.

And I am going to tell my kids exactly that some day. You are not an asylum seeker coming in from a foreign country and freshly choosing where to live from a menu of choices. You have a history here. You don’t pick from scratch.

I won’t unduly pressure them (OK, I probably will unduly pressure them, but I hope I won’t), but I really do hope that my kids live around here when they’re grown. Living elsewhere doesn’t mean that they don’t “get it,” but if they live here, I’ll have one more data point of proof that they do “get it.” And really, I think that they’ll have a more satisfying life if they live here.

But I also think that I’ll have a more satisfying life if they live here. I mean, I’m (hopefully) not moving, and I like my kids, quite a bit, and expect to like them for a long time. And I’ll tell them that too.

Allowance? What's In It For Me

2008-08-12T16:21:00.001-04:00

Probably belatedly, the wife and I began giving our 8 and 4 year old kids' allowances this past Winter/Spring. After doling out the allowance for a good 6 months or so, I've realized several things that make me wonder why I didn't start handing out the dough several months' earlier.

First, holding the allowance over their heads is an excuse to make your kids do chores around the house, something my wife is semi-successfully using. My children are fighting back, of course, utilizing their world-class whining skills, largely bringing the standoff to a draw, but at least my wife is armed now in this battle to try to get them to do chores and clean their rooms.

Second, as part of my attempt to emulate life from 1950's TV shows, I have a change bowl near the back door of my house into which I deposit the contents of my pockets at the end of each day. The allowances are normally drawn, in part, from that change bowl. In the past, change sometimes mysteriously went missing. I don't know that the kids had any real intent to steal; it was just that the ownership of the change was never firmly established and it seemed like just another toy to them. Now that they know that they are getting paid from the bowl, if anyone touches the bowl they come running to me to tell. No one is cutting off their source of funds!

But really, the most important reason to give an allowance is that is serves as a magic cloak that you can wear when hanging out in the checkout aisle of a store with your kids. They want tic tacs, a crappy yo-yo, a cigarette lighter? There's no need for you to buy them anything. All you need to do is say "maybe you can spend your allowance on this." (note: when kids get older, you can change the response to the more brusque "what the hell do I give you an allowance for?"). Of course, they never have the money with them.

(note: don't fall prey to the "I'll pay you back" line. They are your kids. They owe you, if you think about it, tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in room and board, educational expenses, etc., none of which you're ever going to see. What makes you think they're going to pay you back for the $1.50 they just borrowed from you? Also, payday lending is getting outlawed in many states, so you can't charge them high interest rates anymore, so it's just not profitable).

With these benefits, there's no doubt in my mind that providing an allowance is a good idea. The problem I'm having now is determining the proper amount. One of the divorced kids from my kids' school is was alleged to be getting over $10 by the second grade by compensating parents. The children of the hippies at our kids' school are getting nothing still ("Teach kids about money! No way! Down with capitalism!"). Right now I'm giving my 3rd grade $3-4 a week and the kindergartener $1.50 a week, but I have no idea if that's the right amount or not. I didn't think I'd be able to get away with giving them different amounts, but the younger one hasn't thought to complain yet. Actually, since he normally leaves the money lying around the house on the floor anyway, if he complains I'll just up his allowance to $100 a week, since I'll be able to get it back at the end of the day anyway just by walking around and picking it up.

On Vacation With the Kids

2008-07-30T21:54:00.000-04:00

Off to see the Atlantic Ocean and visit our nation's capital.

I'll be back August 9th or 10th.

Why Three?: Parenting Marginal Cost / Economies of Scale

2008-07-29T21:50:00.003-04:00

Some people have asked me why we had three children, so I figured I’d answer it in my next few posts (actually, these are the reasons that I claim now: the real reason is that my wife controls the birth control and she wanted three ... but anyway...)

People seem to understand why people with two kids of the same gender would try for another. But we “already have one of each” with a girl and a boy, and thus had no reason to have a third.

There are a number of reasons for this, but a big one is the “economies of scale of parenting,” by which I mean the fact that, once you have one child, each additional one is marginally more attractive to you (for the economists in the crowd, it’s all about marginal cost: and the first child has the huge marginal cost; the rest are nothing compared to the first one). Another, less kind, way of putting it is the “My life is already ruined anyway” way of thinking.

Financially, the economies of scale are clear. You already have the crib, the diaper table, the pacifiers, the bottles, the breastpump the 3 strollers, the car seats, the ultrasaucer and the baby books. Not to mention enough onesies (mostly stained, but still) to choke a cow. If you have another kid, you don’t have to re-buy all that crap. If you can double or triple up on gender, you don’t have to redecorate or buy much in the way of new clothes AND you can double up on rooms. Other than food, a second or third child of the same gender is practically free.

From my perspective, as a father whose wife stays home with the kids, I always noted that I wanted to “get my money’s worth.” Since we were sacrificing an entire second income and my wife was going to stay home with the kid(s) no matter how many of them were running around, I figured that I might as well give her as much work as possible to do. I was mostly adding to her workload; not mine (at least when I was at work).

Outside of the monetary reasons, there are practical economies of scale as well. If you’re going to sit around singing ridiculous Raffi songs, there might as well be two small pairs of ears listening to you instead of one. Getting multiple uses out of the Robin Hood animated DVD (i.e., now 2 or 3 different children can watch it 8 times each).

Anyone being honest would admit that having a kid takes its toll, emotionally, financially and freetimily. I mean, really, if you have a kid, you’ve just ruined 18 years of your life. If you give that kid a sibling when he’s two, you haven’t doubled the ruination. You haven’t now ruined 36 years of your life, because the years overlap. You’ve only ruined an additional 2 years, for a total of 20 years, which isn’t that bad, come to think of it. A whole extra kid for just 2 extra ruined years seems like a bargain after the first one.

I don’t mean to say that there aren’t emotional and other benefits from having children. There definitely are, and I think it’s a good trade on balance. But the benefits are paid out over time; the change in lifestyle for you is abrupt and definitive. And crap. Your life goes from 40% fun to 20% fun. If the fun percentage went down equally for each subsequent child, at two kids you would be down to 0% fun and you’d be absolutely miserable. If this were the case, no one would be stupid enough to have a second child. The planet would be China, but with the one child policy being self-imposed instead of imposed by the government.

But in actuality, once you’re at 20% fun, you’re pretty much at the bottom anyway; it can’t get much worse. So you might as well have another. Then life is still 16% fun. Three only takes you down to 14%, so why not?

Refreshment

2008-07-27T11:17:00.002-04:00

Refreshed.

That’s what people say. They go on vacation from work, and they get back and you see them in the hall, or talk to them on the phone, and you say “how was the vacation” and they say “I’m refreshed. I’m ready to get back at it.” Or you read a study saying how vacation is important for the mental health of workers because it refreshes them.

Me, personally, after a weeklong vacation, I get back to the office and start to work (normally digging out from under god knows how many emails, voicemails and interoffice memos) and, at some point, I look up and check the clock for the first time of the day, and it will say “9:36” or “10:09” and I think to myself “In no way, shape or form do I feel refreshed.” For me, vacation just reminds me that working kinda sucks when compared to life at home or on vacation.

In any event, my parents, who live about an hour away, took the kids and had them sleepover for the last three nights. My folks are good like that, taking the kids 2-3 times a year to give us a break, sometimes so we can get away for a quick vacation, other times so we can stay at home and “do projects.” We have high hopes at the start of these visits. “We’re going to paint the bathroom” we’ll claim and then we end up acting like lazy bums all weekend, gloriously sleeping in until 10 a.m. each weekend day and then still lying down for a nap in the afternoon or playing tennis together or actually having a beer with friends after work and marveling at how wonderful it is to do all that. So we get nothing done, really, and we didn’t get anything done this time either, but it was nice.

Just a few minutes ago I got home from picking the kids up this fine Sunday morning. At the end of these visits, I do start to miss the kids; I get a kick out of seeing how excited they are when I pick them up. You forget how they were a pain in the ass and whiny just 3 days ago and how you couldn’t wait to get rid of them. So the drive home was great, with us laughing and talking and singing and joking them telling me about the weekend. These weekends away do “refresh” me as a parent. And it “refreshes” your kids in some ways: they actually seem to appreciate hanging out with you.

For a while.

At some point, it wears off and the feeling of refreshment ends on both sides.

In fact, I’ve figured out a formula to figure out how long the refreshment lasts. Get out a pencil and paper! Take the number of days your kids were away and convert it into hours. Add 15 and then take the square root and add 12 to that. Then double it. Then take that piece of paper, crumple it up, get out a new piece of paper and write “90” on it.

That’s how long you’re refreshed. 90 minutes. Enjoy those 90 minutes, but don’t expect to get more than that.

The Only Rule of Coaching

2008-07-19T10:40:00.002-04:00

This year, my 4-year old son is playing T-ball for the first time. My 8-year old daughter is in her 4th or 5^th year of tee-ball and softball. As the years have gone by, I’ve become more and more involved in helping out at games and practices. In the 100+ hours I’ve spent on this stuff, however, I’ve only learned/noticed one non-obvious thing And that is this:

When your kids are young, don’t coach your own child

My daughter's coach is a woman we know pretty well. She’s a short-haired athletic woman of about 40-years who plays softball herself. She’s known for her somewhat boisterous personality and yells at the girls in a lovingly joking way. She’s a good coach. Another coach in the league is a very nice, super-positive guy; he wears baseball pants, so people are afraid of him and are skeptical at first, but he’s great once you get to know him. He’s a darn good coach.

The female coach’s daughter has refused to wear helmets, refused to play the field, refused to “take a walk” after missing 8 pitches in a row and sat out entire practices and games a couple times. The male coach’s daughter, instead of throwing the ball to the pitcher of the opposing team, kicks it … very slowly … back to the pitcher. She loves to play first base, largely so she can chat with the opposing team. You can see how it troubles these coaches – two people that love baseball – that their kids clearly just aren’t that into it. It doesn’t kill them, but you can see that it does bum them out somewhat.

So me and another mom, to avoid having our being the coach make our kids act like little shits and/or make them dislike the game hatched a plan last Saturday. We decided that next year, when my daughter is in 3^rd grade and hers is in 4^thgrade, I would coach her daughter’s team in the 4^th-6^th grade division, and she would coach my daughter’s team in the 1^st-3^rd grade division. Thus, no coaching our own kids: no problems!

Of course, I agreed to this before realizing that a man volunteering to coach 4^th-6th grade aged girls, when that man has no familial relationship whatsoever with anyone on the team isn’t the type of volunteering normally accepted by a standard park and recreation department (I can just see myself writing “I just really enjoy working with girls of that age” on the form: that would go ever well, I’m sure). So I doubt I’ll follow through, but it seemed like a reasonable idea earlier this week.

How the 1970s Hold Up

2008-07-13T02:41:00.000-04:00

I was a fan of Star Wars. I was about 5 years old when the first movie came out back in 1977 and I remember it as the first movie I ever saw in the theatre that wasn’t animated. I got the toys, did a Halloween at age 7 or 8 or so as Luke Skywalker (with my sister as Leia). I remember taping Star Wars on VHS off TV in the early 1980s and watching it 13 times, partially so I could brag to my friends that I watched Star Wars 13 times. I was a fan, but I never became one of those teenaged Star Wars geeks that just wouldn’t let it go (like these guys).

And so when I considered watching Star Wars with my daughter around the time that she turned five, I figured that it would be something that just she and I shared (and that the bigtime Star Wars geeks shared with their kids). It was, after all, a 25 year old movie. And the new series didn’t seem particularly popular. But soon after we watched the original Star Wars movie, my wife informed me that lots of kids were “into” Star Wars these days. A trip down the toy aisle at Target confirmed that kids these days were very much into Star Wars.

Certainly the new Star Wars movies had something to do with it, but it’s not like Spiderman had most of an aisle to himself, and he had popular new movies out too. So it was clear that Star Wars was something more. Kids were drawn to the whole universe like moths. This was something from the late 1970’s that kids took and claimed as their own. It had stood the test of time.

This led me to wonder exactly what else from the late 1970s (and in some cases the early 1980s) stands the test of time in the eyes of kids today. Here’s a short list of things I came up with and my thoughts regarding whether they hold up 30 years later or not:

Buck Rogers (1979-1981) Twiki-twiki-twiki. My wife rented this DVD the other day and tried to watch it with the kids. They were mildly interested for about 10 minutes. Also, my wife was right: Twiki’s head does look like male genitalia. Verdict: Doesn’t Hold Up.

(side note: Erin Grey, however, definitely holds up.)

Being Terrified of Teenagers. (Late 1970s/Early 1980s). Kids today don’t understand this, but in the 1970’s, us younger kids were absolutely terrified of teenagers. Teenagers were scary as hell. They were hairy. They had lots and lots of acne, since they had no Clearasil or Pro-activ to get rid of it. They were smoking and swearing all the time too. They would kick the crap out of you as soon as look at you.

These days, teenagers have clean faces and just sit there silently typing at their phones, well-dressed and not scary at all. Verdict: Doesn’t Hold Up.

Benji (1974) This is a close one. I watched this with the kids in the Spring. It has that 1970’s made-for-TV-movie touch with 3-minute songs accompanied by a montage of slo-mo shots of Benji running, as if he was Bo Derek coming out of the pool or something. It’s just weird. I blame the Graduate for stuff like that. But the dog-actor (who was apparently 14 at the time of the movie) was incredible. And animals doing their own stunts: that’s cool. And without all of the quick cutting, in your face, MTV-ish directorial style that movies have today, so the kids don’t feel overwhelmed (plus that makes the dog's acting all the more impressive). They can follow what’s going on (and they’ll be terrified by the scary teenage bad guys). Verdict: Holds Up.

Not Wearing Seatbelts. (1978) I was shorthanded on car seats the other day and had to hit the grocery store, which is about 2/3 of a mile from my house, so I told the kids, for the first time in their lives, to just hop into the back seat and they didn’t have to wear seat belts. You would’ve thought they were at a freakin’ amusement park they were so excited. The problem is that they were so used to their every movement being restrained, the younger two fell to the floor twice: once when I stopped; once when I went around a corner. Verdict: Mixed. Kids like it but don’t know how to do it anymore.

Cordouroys: (1976-1981) Still kicking around. I’ve noticed that the cords are tighter. Kids these days aren’t dealing with the quarter-inch sized cords that we had to deal with. But you still hear the familiar nostalgic zwhishing when a kid walks past you every now and again Verdict: Holds Up.

Adults Smoking. (1492-2004) Sadly, too many kids today have never actually seen an adult smoking in real life, so it is impossible to gauge how they would react. Verdict: Unknown.

Atari. (1977-1983) I got one of those fake Ataris – the Atari Flashback - a few years ago that comes with about 40 games built in and I play it with the kids now and again. Verdict: The games Pac-Man and Adventure hold up. Kids these days find it mind boggling (and thrilling) that in Adventure, “you are just a dot but you can still fight dragons.” Other games don’t hold up.

Shaggy Bowlcuts. (peaked with Adam from Eight is Enough in 1977). Hipster parent websites are trying to bring back plaid, but not even they dare to try to bring back bowlcuts. Verdict: Doesn’t hold up.

The All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. (1977-79). While it aired, this was perhaps the greatest television show on. It’s possibly the greatest show of all time (if you’re curious, the other competitors re It’s Your Move, Sledge Hammer, the Simpsons, Seinfeld, Homicide and the Sopranos; The Office is close). Only 24 episodes were made. After that, why mess with perfection?

Every kid in the universe has, at one time or another, sought to mix and match different fantasy character genres (i.e, who would win if Chewbacca fought Harry Potter?) Outside the world of comic books, rarely do the characters actually mix. Best I can figure, it’s happened 3 times. There’s Alien vs. Predator (twice). There’s Freddy vs. Jason. And then there’s the All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. And the All-Stars were doing it decades before the others.

You remember, don’t you? The three teams: the Yogi Yahooeys with Yogi, Huckleberry Hound and the whole A-team Yogi crew plus Grape Ape. These guys were so rich and famous already, they had nothing to prove, and competed accordingly. The Scooby Doobies (I can’t believe they got away with that name with Shaggy on the team) with Scooby and the gang, Dyno-Mutt and Captain Caveman, among others. And, finally, the Really Rottens, with all the bad guys, including Muttley, with his smoker’s laugh. The three teams would compete in simply bizarre events seemingly conjured up by a group of suspended-adolescent stoners.

It was the 1970s, where realism was king, so even in a cartoon show, the bad guys were allowed to win dozens of individual events and actually won 3 of the 24 episodes outright.

(side note: Why is “A-Lympics” spelled this way? It’s part of the beautiful mystery)

Of course, there is no DVD set and no plans for one. There is practically nothing on Youtube. There are apparently some 1996 VHS tapes of 8 of the 24 shows, but you can't even get those on ebay. And that’s it. So I couldn’t show it to my kids to gauge how it held up and had to simply explain the gist of what it was like.

I said it’s like Dora the Explorer, Diego, Franklin, Clifford and the Backyardigans against a team comprised of Pokemon, the Teletubbies, Boobah and the Wiggles against a team of Wall-E, Nemo, Ariel, Mowgli, Balloo, Tigger, Woody and Buzz Lightyear. This description certainly piqued their interest.

But they never saw the actual show, so it’s unclear what the verdict should be, so I have to guess at this one. On the one hand, this is the greatest concept of all time, so that’s a positive. But kids today have only a vague notion of who even Yogi and Scooby are, and the minor characters (Snagglepuss anyone?) are complete enigmas to them. Thus, sadly … Verdict: does not hold up. But only because the classics have been lost. If kids are prepped with 25 episodes of Scooby Doo and other 1978 Saturday morning cartoons prior to viewing, it would definitely hold up.

Understanding Child Abuse a Bit Better

2008-07-10T22:48:00.002-04:00

A major impact of having children is that it grants you special kinds of understanding. Having children makes you understand many many things with a fullness that you never appreciated. You understand exactly the havoc that pregnancy wreaks on a woman’s body. You understand how it is possible to sleep next to a woman for over a month and not have sex with her even once, something the 18-year old version of you simply could not have comprehended. You gain an understanding of why it was that your father cracked open a beer Sunday afternoons a little earlier than seemed necessary and why there was a small smile on his face Monday mornings when he left for work. And one thing that you unfortunately gain an understanding of is the genesis of child abuse.

After we moved into our house a year ago, we noticed a strange thing. In the second floor hallway there was a hook-and-eye lock on the outside of one of the bedroom doors. Obviously it was there to lock a child in. Even worse, the lock was 7 feet from the floor, suggesting that the prior occupants of our house wanted to make sure that none of the other children would be able to rescue their brother/sister.

If I had noticed this 7 years earlier, before I had children, I would’ve been aghast. Actually, I’m still a little bit aghast now, but in many ways, now I understand how people could get to the point where locking your kid in their own room seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

Actually, these days, I’m pretty much ready to give the parents there the benefit of the doubt on just about anything. Even when I see one of those leash kids, I figure the kid probably deserves it and that it just might be necessary (well … almost … the leash kids probably cross the line, but the fact I’m even thinking about it shows how much less judgmental I am about stuff like that than I once was). You start to realize that even some of the stuff that would make you aghast might be necessary, like when this guy installed a lock on his the door of his autistic son's bedroom because he was sneaking out of his room in the night and had started a minor fire one night. You gotta do what you gotta do.

But that kind of thinking can also lead to problems. Most anyone who has had a particularly testy baby has had a moment that scared the bejeesus out of them: the moment of recognition where they said to themselves “I really want to do something unspeakable to this baby/child right now.” It happened to me once when I walked past an open second story window with my daughter after she had been screaming for an hour plus. I had the urge to throw her out similar to the urge many people (including me) feel to jump off a cliff if they get too close to the edge. I of course didn’t, but for a moment it seemed like a possibility there, and it was creepy scary.

These feelings thankfully pass, but after breaking down because of my kids’ behavior, I always feel a particular kind of shame, a blend of two wholly different kinds of pathetic. On the one hand, you feel pathetic because a child that’s been on this planet just a few months or a few years has, in some ways, beaten you by getting you so mad that you have to walk away. It’s like you are the one backing down (from a masculine perspective, it is very pathetic to be beaten by such a small creature). On the other hand, you feel pathetic because this is your child, and for some reason you haven’t raised them properly, because they are crying too much, or acting like such a complete jerk. And you’re pathetic for that reason as well.

An odd thing will happen to you when you’ve had a baby for a few months. You’ll be watching the local news and see a story where a father (or boyfriend) kills a five month old baby who just wouldn’t stop crying. And maybe for the first time ever, you’ll actually pay close attention to this kind of story. You’ll be interested in it. If you’re honest with yourself, maybe you’ll … in some bizarre way … realize that you can in some way relate to the guy.

In the criminal law, if you kill a guy in the heat of the moment after catching him in bed with your wife, that’s supposed to get you a lesser prison sentence than if you plot and kill some guy in cold blood. And there have been times that I would have strongly considered letting my wife cavort in bed with someone else if it meant that the baby in my arms would just stop crying. So if catching your wife doing it with the neighbor is a mitigating circumstances when it comes to murder, it makes you wonder why a baby crying for two hours can’t be mitigating as well.

Don’t get me wrong. You’ll still think the guy should be locked up for life for what he did; but that doesn’t mean that you don’t understand how it could’ve happened. And that’s an understanding that you previously never would’ve thought possible.

Sandra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic

2008-07-04T09:03:00.003-04:00

This article, part book review, part essay, is perhaps the best thing I've ever read about working moms and the like ("so many roads lead to a wet wipe" is a classic.)

In fact, looking over Loh's last half-dozen articles, she's on a tremendous roll.

The Pattern of Life

2008-07-04T08:25:00.002-04:00

I think I may have figured out how life goes.

Once you become a preteen up until you’re age 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or even 35, you spend a decent chunk of your life developing principles and thinking that there is a particular way that you like to live your life and molding your personality into the kind of person that you want to be.

At various ages, you decide whether religion matters to you; whether staying in shape via exercise or diet matters to you; whether you’re going to try recreational drugs or not (and whether you are going to continue to “try” them each and every morning after you wake up); whether you want to go to college and ultimately do with your life from a career standpoint; the types of things you save up for and spend your money on; what your political beliefs are; what clothes you wear and how that expresses who you are; what sports you’ll play; what clubs to join or hobbies to have; whether you’ll play video games or not; how to wear your hair; what car to drive; what music to listen to; what books to read; what TV to watch; what bars or clubs to hang out in.

But you don’t just choose religions and philosophies and art and material goods. You choose the people that you will live your life with. You choose your friends. You choose a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Lots of these decisions are big and lots are small, but in the 21st Century, your identity is no longer determined by who your family is, or what “class” you’re from. Who you are is based, in large part, by the choices that you make. Lots of people take this seriously, spending thousands of hours deciding who they are; making choices that they can respect the rest of their lives.

What no one tells you when you’re 20 is that you shouldn’t spend so much time figuring this out, because you ultimately just give it all away.

For men, I think it starts with the girlfriend. Specifically, I think it starts with the first chick flick that a guy goes to see with his girlfriend. It continues when she buys him his first shirt with a designer label (yuck!) and gets him to stay home instead of going out with the boys. When I got married I was a little horrified to find my wife going to Jazzercise classes.

But the spouse or girlfriend is nothing compared to the children.

Earlier this week, I was flipping ahead on Turner Movie Classics and AMC, to see if there were any movies I wanted to TIVO this week. And I saw “Look Who’s Talking” come up and I thought “oh, the kids might like that” and I hit the Record button.

And it didn’t even hit me (that's probably the worst part). I didn’t even notice that I had, completely without irony, chosen to record “Look Who’s Talking.” I couldn’t help but flashback to the teenaged version of myself, when I believed Look Who’s Talking to be so odious and held it with such disdain as to not be worth mocking (since everything is worth mocking to a teenager, this means I held it in such low regard as hair metal bands, the song “I Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode, my sister's Jelly shoes and people who didn’t like Catcher in the Rye). The teenaged me wouldn’t recognize the man who just chose to record Look Who’s Freakin Talking without irony.

I think most people in their early twenties realize that on some level they’ll get more tolerant when they get older, or they start to realize this as they actually start to get more tolerant.

What I’ve just come to realize is that it’s your own damn kids that largely do this to you. You may have always thought playing with dolls and barrettes are silly, but you don’t think your daughter is silly, so if she cares about that stuff, ultimately you do too on some level. So I’m a 35 year old man that has opinions about the merits of different kinds of barrettes now. You might have thought, pre-children, that “People that have kids are just making excuses about not working out and I am going to work out six days a week after having kids” and then, when you have kids, that goes out the window (at least when they’re real young, it has to).

You start watching absolutely ridiculous TV hows, like that new show Wipeout or American Idol or (the worst) America’s Funniest Videos with the kids, simply because the kids love it. And after watching them crack up at 10 ridiculous videos of people falling off three-wheelers, it will be tough to maintain your dislike for that damn Tom Bergeron (or Bob Saget, if watching reruns). I mean, I’ve used flash cards with my kids. I’ve said “because I said so.” I’ve worked at a job I’m pretty damn ambivalent about for 9 years.

Hell, half the crap I write about in this blog is exactly this: me surrendering principles at the altar of my children.

You might hate McDonalds and fast food. But your kids won’t and they’ll mellow you out about it. You may have chosen certain sports to play in high school or at least favored those sports (I played tennis and would’ve loved to play football had I weighed over 140 lbs). And you probably thought some sports were silly (for me volleyball and, later, lacrosse). But when your kid is out there playing, your prior opinions will go out the window. So if my kids like it, it’s LAX for me baby!

The increasing-tolerance principles-out-the-window affect even applies to serious stuff. While there are certainly horror stories from the gay community about parents rejecting gay children, the more common outcome these days is for the gay child to convince the parents that there isn’t really anything wrong with being gay. And you hear a lot about parents and children fighting over politics only to come to terms with the other’s political beliefs a few years later.

It is a cliché how parents complain about how their grandparents coddle their grandchildren and how “things weren’t like that when they were raising me.” It is similarly cliché how “the first child has it the worst” when it comes to discipline. And while simple fatigue is part of the reason for this, half of this is simply because, at age 60, you don’t have the principles that you had at age 30. Maybe at age 60 you don’t think hitting someone because they took your toy isn’t really so bad; you don’t think kids making a little too much noise in a restaurant is such a big deal; and you realize that giving a kid extra candy now isn’t going to spoil them and ruin their life 20 years hence, making them so lazy as to be unemployable or something.

So that’s it. You gather up principles for the first quarter or third of your life and you spend the rest giving them away.

Finally, you whittle it down to just one principle.

And that last principle you give up is the principle that you like life more than death.

Socially Retarding Your Oldest Child

2008-06-27T23:44:00.001-04:00

Since all parents are busy giving their children a variant on the same generic style of upbringing it is a truism that every family at some point has to consider when to bite the bullet, take the plunge, climb the mountain. I am talking, of course, about when to embark upon the dreaded and mystical Orlando vacation. Obviously this is mostly for Disneyworld, but I’m advised that now there’s apparently all kinds of other shit there as well.

The topic of the Orlando vacation is not something a good father ever raises himself. The discussion is nearly always thrust upon him by his oldest child, but sometimes you can get surprised while offguard by a meddlesome grandparent, so be cautious.

You may or may not be a Disney fan. I haven’t been as an adult, so I’m not really sure if I am a fan, but regardless of whether you like it or not, the key goal of any father when it comes to Orlando is simple: go to Orlando as many times as you want, but make sure that you only pay for it once. If you personally purchase plane tickets to Orlando three or more times, you’re a horrible failure and, frankly, you’re raising the bar for the rest of us, and the organized dad community is going to have to blacklist you. No more letting you admire our grills and stereo systems and shit like that. You’re getting the Miller Lite in a can at the cookout while we enjoy a Red Hook or Great Lakes brew. Consider yourself warned.

So how to scheme so you only have to pay for it once? You have to try to go at a time when your youngest child is at least 5 or 6 so that they’ll remember it when they are older and don’t try to claim that you photoshopped them into Disney vacation pictures to trick them. So the main key is delaying that first visit.

After that, a few years will go by and the youngest will whine about going again, but by then your oldest will be in high school and will think Disney is uncool. So they will do your dirty work for you and put the kibosh on any Orlando vacation for you (this is one of those situations where the oldest mocking out the youngest at the dinner table for wanting to go see Mickey Mouse “like a baby” needs to be deftly ignored by you).

So how to delay the first visit? I could only come up with one solution: Socially retard your oldest child. You need to make your oldest child a giant pussy. When they’re seven years old, tell them how the rollercoasters normally “kill probably three or four people a day” due to “flying offtrack on the hills.” So when they’re eight and Disneyworld comes up you can say “Sure, but are you ready to go on the rollercoaster, yet? We don’t want to go now when you aren’t ready for the rollercoaster, yet!” Normally this will shut them up for at least six months.

This is a strategy you can use in any number of scenarios; not just Disneyworld. A problem a lot of families have is, when going to the movies, the 12-year old wants to go see the PG-13 superhero movie that would completely freak out the 6-year old, whereas the 6-year old is still up for the G rated fare. How to get around this problem? You need to introduce nothing to your 12 year old until absolutely necessary. Stretch Teletubbies out until age 3 (it will be very painful, but worth it in the long run). Sesame Street stays on until age 9. Resist your impulses to share Star Wars and other cool movies with your oldest. That way your oldest will have no problem when you make him go see the latest Winnie-the-Pooh movie at age 9 along with his 3 year old little sister.

A handy guide I use is to THINK MORMON. When it comes to my oldest child, I ask myself “Would Tagg Romney let his son or daughter do this?” If no, I don’t let my oldest do it either.

Of course, the flip side for those of us with 3 children is to make sure that the youngest is raised a little bit ahead of her time. She needs to figure out Spiderman and Batman movies and be ready for the PG-13 slashers by age 8 or 9 at the latest. I’m pretty sure this is why although she’s only 18 months old, my wife is making sure that she has a good handle on most of the swear words out there.

Roofing It

2008-06-20T23:50:00.002-04:00

(Settle down; no, this isn’t a blogpost about a date rape drug. jeez … this is a parenting website for chrissake)

Most of the things that I do with my children tends to fall into two categories. Category One is in the “pure fun” category. Sometimes I’ll just go for a ride on the public transit trains (in Cleveland, we call it The Rapid) with my son just because he loves it. Or we’ll go to the drug store and buy a bunch of licorice or play music and dance or play video games. Category Two is the “crap that has to get done” category: taking them to school, getting clothes on or off; brushing teeth, picking up the playroom, etc.

But like most parents, I try to do things aren’t just fun and aren’t just crap that has to get done (although it doesn’t happen as much as it should). Like most parents, however, one of the things that we do that is fun AND good for them is reading. Early after the birth of our daughter, my wife informed me that, if we were an English class, she was “literature” and I was “grammar.” Translated, this meant that my wife would read to the kids all the time (which she does), but she was looking to me to do the heavy lifting when it came to actually teaching them how to read.

I had some educational training (of dyslexic kids) right after I got out of college, so I just happened to have a professional set of phonics flash cards in my old teaching box. And so when my oldest daughter was three and showed an interest in reading, I started showing her the sounds the cards made and taught her a dozen cards or so and started going over them with her, without thinking about it very much. And then, all of a sudden, I realized that I was using flash cards with my three year old child.

Certainly this crossed the line. Doing this seemed like what we call a “strict liability” offense in the legal profession: if you are using flash cards with your children, it doesn’t matter what your excuse is: the judge doesn’t want to hear it, you’re guilty of overparenting and that’s that. Commercials make fun of behavior like this.

And so I put the flash cards away, intending not to use them, but my daughter requesting the “sound cards” and so I ended up using them 50 or 100 times with her as she was learning to read. Yet another principle of mine out the window.

After 6 or 9 months of enjoying this, she eventually plateau-ed and stopped getting better at reading. It got a tad frustrating for her, so she stopped wanting to try to read, and so it got frustrating for me as well and I’d sometimes nudge her (“come over here and lets finish the cards”). And I think she sensed my frustration and that led her to establish some unfortunate negative associations with reading. What kind of father makes their child dislike reading? The kind that uses flashcards, I guess. I felt awful.

After letting things go for a while, I eventually wanted to start reading in the home again. Thus, I resorted to a parent’s last resort: bribery. Simple candy or toys seemed just too cheap. I wanted to offer something better, and so I said “if you will read to me, I’ll let you read to me on the roof.” This got her attention.

In our old house, we had a screened in side porch that probably ran 10 feet by 18 feet, but there was no house over the porch, so you could climb out of our second story bedroom window onto the lightly pitched porch roof. The trees hid the street. It was actually really really nice. And I could take my 5-year old outside with a book and a bag full of grapes and she’d read for 30 minutes or more. The roof was magic. Her little brother would complain about us getting to go out on the roof, and I explained to him “when you are ready to read, we’ll go out on the roof too.” This was going to be my magic bullet.

But there was a downside (there’s always a downside).

My wife is one of those people that loves a good breeze, the windows always have to be open in the summer unless the air conditioning is on. Unfortunately, some of the screens in our old house were tough to put down. So one day, walking through my bedroom, I heard someone say “Boo.” I whirled around and say no one in the room. I heard laughing and looked out and saw my three year old son, hanging out on the roof by himself. He hadn’t even taken a book out with him. With that incident, my wife brought a swift conclusion to roof reading.

Of course, in our new house, the accessible part of the roof is flat and bigger and really safe. And my four and a half year old son has stalled out on his reading …

Father's Day

2008-06-16T22:22:00.001-04:00

As I hope most of you remembered, it was yesterday. I had a good one this year. After my first few Father’s Days, I began to think that passing down crappy Father’s Day traditions was something that women are really good at. What I’ve now realized, and what new fathers need to know, is that Father’s Day is one of those days that just takes your family a while to get right.

The thing about Father’s Day that still seems just wrong to me is almost too embarrassing to mention because it feels so selfish. What seems wrong is that your wife will do stuff for her dad and you have to do stuff for your dad. It’s like sharing a birthday with a disabled uncle or something and having to go to Chuck E. Cheese for your party at an inappropriate age because that’s what they want to do. You don’t begrudge them: they deserve their happiness. But you kind of feel ripped off. And, I mean, c’mon, it’s not like your dad or you father are still doing any day-to-day parenting, dammit. (Even typing this just seems like inappropriate whining, but at least I was able to get it off my chest somewhere, and my dad and father-in-law are very good about this).

One reason that Father’s Day can be a flop for new dads is that I suspect what happens is that most wives remember doing things for their fathers – picking them flowers; making them pancakes; or buying them ties – and, if their dad was a good actor, they remember that their fathers seemed to like it. So the first few Father’s Days, they just go on autopilot and have the kids do the same stuff that they did, without stepping back to think that maybe their own dad was faking his enjoyment of nasty M&M pancakes they used to make. Another potential pitfall is the actual real budget-busting gift that costs twice as much as you would’ve spent on something (and you’re just paying for it anyway).

But this year, everything was golden. I got to sleep in past 10 a.m.! The kids got me a big jar full of Bottle Caps, my favorite old school candy, and a nice video thank you. And we went to see the Indians and C.C. Sabathia beat the Padres and Greg Maddux. And then I went and bought myself a new grill (the old one was 9 years old and on its last legs, so we were going to get one anyway). That’s quite a day.

The Last Day of School

2008-06-11T21:50:00.003-04:00

Last Thursday was the kids’ last day of school, as I’d imagine is the case for most of you with school aged kids. The approach of the last day is always a tad bittersweet for me. I think most working adults think, even if just for a second “damn those kids are lucky,” and I’m no exception (and I was a teacher for two years, so I also think “damn those teachers are lucky; why the hell did I stop doing that?”). But at least I get a reprieve from my normal help-get-the-kids-ready-and-drive-them-to-school duties, so summer break does normally mean 30 extra minutes of sleep for me, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. And to the extent that I sometimes feel that my stay-at-home wife has it easy with two kids in school these days, now with all three kids home all day well … lets just say she’s working harder than me these days.

The first last-day-of-school that I remember was in 1980, when I was 7 years old, finishing up second grade. I remember the sheer chaos, the stray papers floating around the school. But the thing I remember most was the 8^th grade class, who were all singing a song I had never heard before, a song that had just been released a few months prior. I can still hear the words echoing down the hall:

We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control

That was all they sang, just the one line, over and over. It was simple enough that many of us younger kids picked it up and started singing it, over and over (and dumb kids in my class simplified it further to “we don’t need no education; we don’t need no education”: repeat). That phrase must’ve been uttered 10,000 times at St. Mary’s elementary school in June of 1980.

I was thinking of this last week, driving the kids into their second to last day of school. They were chatting to each other in the back seat and I just started singing along. I began to get into it and, before long, I was belting out “Hey, teacher, LEAVE US KIDS ALONE!” I looked in the rear-view mirror to see four eyes staring at me, wondering who the hell their father was talking to.

That night, my four-year old son (who’s technically just in preschool, but its 5 days a week, 3.5 hours a day, so it’s kind of like real school) asked us if he had school the next day. Excited, my wife told him. “Yes, tomorrow is the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!!” thinking my son would be oh-so-excited to hear that. My son replied “ARGGHHH” and followed that up with a whine, which I think definitively proves that four year old boys are focused very much on short-term penalties and not long-term rewards.

The Kindergarchy and Laissez-Faire Aren't the Only Options

2008-06-07T00:41:00.002-04:00

There seems to be a backlash recently (or maybe I’m just paying more attention) to the phenomenon of overparenting and overscheduling kids: people are just saying no to too many activities. An article that came out last week written by Joseph Epstein about how the United States has turned into a Kindergarchy (a term I really like) where Epstein rails against our overly child-centered lives here in the 21st Century. Add this to the “Free-Range Kids” champion, Lenore Skenazy, the mom who let her nine-year old ride the New York City subway unaccompanied (something I support, by the way) and got all kinds of guff for it (luckily the article includes a handy picture for all the pedophiles out there that are looking to nab an unaccompanied minor on the subway … I keed!). And a few years ago, Caitlin Flanagan emphasized in some of her articles in the Atlantic that her mom tended to not pay too much attention to her. There are other examples…

A few things about this. Of course kids should play outside and shouldn’t have scheduled activities taking over all of their after-school time and weekends all of the time. The fact that you shouldn’t overschedule your kids and let their schedule dominate your life is so incredibly basic and such a cliché that it’s hard to work up the energy to even build up this paper tiger enough to knock it down. You shouldn’t be dropping your kid off at the airport at age 9 to spend a month at Bela Karoli’s gymnastics camp. You shouldn’t taking your 9 year old to 5-day a week soccer camp, even if you think he’s the next Landon Donovan. If you don’t get that, you probably aren’t reading this anyway. So on some level Epstein and Skenazy are of course correct in their basic assertions: don’t schedule the hell out of your kids. But 97% of people don’t actually do this (at least for more than one season).

But there are really two over-scheduling issues here, based upon the age of the kids. At ages 5 through 11 or so, the parents are generally in control with respect to the activities their kids participate in. They can pretend that the kids want to swim an extra hour but, at this age, kids will express their preferences. And most kids at this age are hedonists at heart. They make a quick and simple decision when choosing between an second hour of violin lessons each week or using that hour to go outside and play freeze tag with the neighbors. But, at the end of the day, you’re in charge.

But older kids, 12 and up, tend to, well, do what they want. And kids these days, for a variety of reasons, tend to schedule themselves into all kinds of activities. Part of the problem here is cultural. If a kid wants to be a swimmer, the high school invariably instills in him or her the idea that they have to try to be state champs and devote themselves to the sport and come in for 60 minutes before school in addition to the 2 hour practices after school, not to mention the offseason programs and weight training. Many high schools athletic programs resemble the programs that Olympic athletes went through less than 100 years ago.

But if your 15 year old wants to go out for the team, and wants to be good, are Skenazy and Epstein saying that the parent is supposed to forbid it?

I get the sense that the demographic that Epstein and Skenazy really are focusing on is the younger 5-11 bracket; and the younger children of rich people. So really how many kids are they actually worried about?

And they do what everyone tends to do: lionize the past. I grew up in a nice middle-class town of 15,000 people where lots of people had kids and the kids roamed the neighborhood. As the oldest of four kids, my mom often had her hands full and the only enrichment activity I was given was to “go outside and play.”

I vividly remember those days. Kicking around in the driveway for 15 minutes. Deciding to actually try to find a friend. Getting 3 guys together and then finding another … we’ve got 5! … neighborhood kids together and spending another hour trying to get one more so we had 6 guys so we could get a real backyard football game going (anything less than 3-on-3 kind of sucked). And then, when the last guy finally finished his chores, and the game was ready to go … we’d get one series in, and one of the guys invariably would get called in for lunch. And the game would be off, or we’d end up with a less-than ideal lineup.

So there’s 4 hours outside and the end result is a game that lasted all of twenty minutes. Great.

And that was if we were able to avoid the older kids who would steal our ball and teach us the meaning of all kinds of new vocabulary words with never an adult in sight. I guess if this was a good thing, a good educational tool, then I think we should suggest that all adults be mugged, just to know what it feels like, right?

Back then, I just thought getting the ball stolen by Randall just sucked. All it did for me was imprint the notion that life wasn’t fair and treating someone like crap actually had no real consequences most of the time. Isn’t that the opposite of what we try to teach kids?

I don’t doubt that all this no-rules-laissez-faire kicking around the neighborhood kept me busy, and kept a lot of kids busy (and I’m sure that if you are only given 10 books to read in your childhood, you’ll get to know those books very well, and might even appreciate books in general more than someone who has had anything they ever wanted to read). But wishing this mundane existence on the youth of America; nay, demanding that it be imposed upon the youth of America; I’m not sure why anyone would want that.

If such a thing could even be imposed today. I was born after the baby boom ended, but even then, the world of the 1970’s is different demographically from today (and I don’t mean that today there is more crime and some huge wave of sex predators out there; I don’t buy most of that, since while crime rates did spike for a while, they are generally back down these days). Overall, there were a whole lot more kids running around back then, for a lot of reasons. People were having kids earlier, so there were less DINKs out there. People were living shorter lives, so there were less old people with no kids filling out the neighborhood. Families were larger back then; now a family has 2 kids instead of 4. Back then people had less money to spend on outside activities, so they couldn’t afford to be out of the house paying to do things: they were hanging out near the house.

All of these factors combined mean that there were generally more kids running around back then than you see today. If Epstein’s boyhood self hopped into a time machine, I doubt he would be able to scare up much of a stickball game here in 2008.

And so I don’t see a lot of value in giving your child a completely unscheduled childhood these days. It looks particularly valueless when compared to kids’ activities. Indeed, young kids actually really like to have a couple of things to do a week. My daughter has a weekly 30 minute lesson from a piano teacher and, while she’s really just getting started, so far she absolutely loves it. My kids play baseball or softball in the spring, have swimming lessons in the summer and soccer in the fall. They go to art classes and nature camps from time to time. They like this stuff a heck of a lot more than I ever thought they would.

But there’s an entirely different area that Epstein and Flanagan delve into that Skenazy doesn’t seem to touch, and that is the idea that it is somehow debasing for parents to involve themselves in matters that are thought to be childish. Epstein and Flanagan seem to want us to feel shame if we play Go Fish with our kids.

I’m sorry guys, but life isn’t neatly divided into adult activities that exist over here and kid activities that exist over there. I personally have tastes that run the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow to everything in-between. Many of those tastes – complicated literature; European porn (again, I keed) – can’t be properly enjoyed by a child. But other things I enjoy – watching baseball, eating at a greasy diner, hiking, playing chess – are completely accessible to my kids. If I like these things, why shouldn’t I enjoy these things with my family, the people that I love? Why is that debasing?

Writers in many ways devote their lives to the pursuit of influencing people’s opinions on things: Leaving aside the obvious examples of editorial pages and opinion columns, journalism is often the pursuit of giving people more facts so they are more informed. Biography and memoir are often dependent upon the empathy of the read. And I would hope that most people would admit that there is literature out there that changed their outlook on the world.

Yet Flanagan and Epstein, who have devoted their own lives as writers to influencing people’s thinking, seem to be saying that parents should actively try to avoid influencing the thinking of the people that they care about the most: their kids. They want to convince everyone else of the way to live their lives, but they don't want to influence their kids. Does this make any sense at all?

In fact, the unbalanced nature of the parent-child relationship opens all kinds of great areas of conversation. I enjoy baseball games with my friends, but my friends don’t want to hear me talk about the way 2nd baseman is positioned for half an inning. My daughter, however, hearing for the first time how the middle infielders often position themselves based upon the batter, or lean one way or another based upon the pitch that’s called … when I explain that to my daughter, and then she SEES IT …

… she gets a smile of recognition on her face that is beauty and magic and just every wonderful that exists in this world. Watching the light bulb of a great idea go off in your kid’s head: I’m not sure there’s anything better.

I realize that, at the end of the day, it’s a balancing act. There’s no reason why kids can’t sometime be kicked outside, away from the supervision of their parents, and sometimes have a friend over and pretend they’re animals. But there’s no reason that the next day they shouldn’t be sat down and be taught how to play that marvelous game called Euchre, and why they can’t be taken to a Little Gym karate class every now and again.

I don’t want to live in the Kindergarchy. I also don’t want to live in a wholly parent-centered society.

But at the end of the day, no one is asking you to make that choice, and there’s plenty of room in between: and there is the space where most of us raise our kids.

So I hope Epstein and others have a good time beating down that paper tiger. Because now that I've spent 2 hours writing this, I'm going to go play with water balloons with my kids.

Parenting Terminology

2008-06-03T21:47:00.001-04:00

There is a whole set of terminology that you’re going to have to learn if you’re gonna be a parent.

Here are just a few of the words and phrases you should learn:

Babisinki Syndrome: Helsinki syndrome is when a hostage begins to develop positive associations with the hostage-taker. Babisinki Syndrome is a similar phenomena that occurs with children that is best illustrated by example:

You’re home alone with your 22-month old. She wants ice cream. You say no. She shrieks “EYE-ZZZZZ KEEEEEEM!!!! EYE-ZZZZZ KEEEEEEM!!!!!” You say “no.” Repeat exchange four times. Your 22 month old then whips herself onto the floor crying and screaming. You walk away. 60 seconds pass. Seeking comfort from her crying, your 22 month old runs to you – the tormentor - seeking to be picked up and cuddled: Babisinki syndrome.

Daylight Savings Time. Multiple definitions. 1. (fall) A time change system designed to ensure that children wake their parents up at 6 a.m. on the weekends instead of 7 a.m. 2. (spring). A time change system designed to ensure that children do not go to bed at a reasonable hour.

Helium Balloon Storage Unit: The part of your house with a vaulted ceiling.

Kid Latin. When your children start using rhyming words because they are banned from using a naughty word. For example, after banning the word “poop” from our dinner table, our children began calling each other “soop.”

Do you have any idea if you’re supposed to punish your son for telling his sister that “she likes to eat soup?” Me neither. Which means he ended up in the corner.

Kiddisonification: When your toddler enters the phrase where they name all inanimate objects. For example, in early 2003, our daughter nicknamed two of the washcloths in the bathtub "Sadaam" and "Starburst.”

Primogeniseat: The seat in your car in the backseat behind the passenger seat. If you want to know which kid is a mother’s favorite, check who is sitting in this seat. From the driver’s seat, you can see the kid in this seat and chat with them while driving. You can hand them snacks. If they drop something you can reach the floor beneath that seat whereas you can’t reach the floor in the seat behind you very easily without being double jointed.

The seat behind you? If you put your favorite kid in the seat behind their kicking of the seat will quickly make them your not-favorite kid.

In child abuse cultures, this seat is known as the Slap Seat.

Pump and Dump: When a mother who is breastfeeding goes out for a night on the town and consumes some adult beverages and then, in order to not poison her child, pumps out the breastmilk and dumps it out on the street for the hoodlums to get at it.

Soft Serve: A description for what young kids’ poop looks like in potty-training books. In real life, it will actually look like this twice annually. You may be tempted to take a picture, but you should not.

MRS. 42

2008-05-28T20:40:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how being a dad, instead of scaring all of the weirdness out of my life, had actually added all kinds of absurdity to it. Another example of this came to mind driving the kids to school this week.

Since I often work late, I make it a point to try to drive the kids to school, and have been successful in being able to do that about 90% of the time over the past 5 years (early morning conference calls, business travel and hangovers account for the other 10%). On the days when I know I’m going to be working particularly late, I realize that the 5 minute car ride to school will be my last chance to hang out with the kids on that day, so the pressure is on to have a worthwhile conversation with them. Unfortunately, I am decidedly not a morning person, and my children seem to be taking after me in this regard, so my attempt to get things started with “What are you going to do at school today?” is often answered with silence, or the shout of “HOW SHOULD I KNOW!!!” If they knew how to swear, this is when they would use that skill.

Our route to school includes a two mile trek down Fairmount Boulevard, one of the swankier streets in the Cleveland area. Trying to maintain the illusion that public transportation is for everyone, however, Cleveland’s regional transit authority mandates that a bus travel up and down the length of Fairmount six times a day: three in the morning and three at night. This bus - Bus Number 42 - is almost always empty or virtually so, since anyone with the means to live on or near Fairmount Boulevard almost certainly has a car (some probably have chauffeurs, even). I happen to personally know how full the bus is because the 3rd and final pass of the morning down Fairmount each day occurs right at the 8:15-8:20 a.m. time that I take the kids to school. So we end up actually seeing (and passing) the bus about once a week.

If we’re a tad early (or the bus a tad late), about halfway along our trip down Fairmount, we see an odd site: someone actually waiting for the bus. Other than a few nuns who appear to be from outside of the United States, I've never seen another soul waiting for the bus.

She's a woman, probably in her mid to late 50’s, standing at the bus stop. Slightly on the smaller side and apparently of some kind of some indeterminate Asian descent. Thick, coke-bottle glasses.

She rides Bus Number 42.

She is Mrs. 42.

When I’m struggling for conversation with the kids, whether or not we are going to see Mrs. 42 is something the kids will talk about. The kids may not want to talk about their day, but they’ll speculate as to whether she’ll be there (they’d probably gamble on it if they knew how ... actually, hmmm...). If I see us approaching Mrs. 42, I have to inform my younger child so he has sufficient time to actually turn his head and look out the window (as all parents of young children know, this action surprisingly takes at least 6 seconds, so you have to tell them to look out the window pretty damn early).

If we don’t see her, my older daughter will sing a song (to the tune of Scooby-Doo):

Mrs. Forty-Two.
Where are You?
Did the Bus Pick you Up Already?

And if we’re lucky that day, and actually get to see Mrs. 42, well, that topic of conversation will carry us all the way until drop-off. “Is that a new coat?” “She looks tired today” “I think she got a new pair of glasses!” “I like that red umbrella that she has.”

I can only imagine what this woman would think if she knew that there existed a 4 year old and an 8 year old (and a 35 year old) who were experts on her wardrobe, where she likes to stand, her stance, her schedule.

Not only does Mrs. 42 give me a conversation topic, she provides other benefits. We use Mrs. 42 as a geographic marker now. If the question is “Are we almost to school daddy?” then I can answer, with complete understanding, “No, we’re not even to the Mrs. 42 spot yet.” We use Mrs. 42 as a racial marker. “Y’know the guy that looks kind of like Mrs. 42?”

So thank you Mrs. 42. Whoever you are. And thank you for whatever odd reason exists to make you ride the bus every day, whether it’s that you never learned to drive, a DUI, an involuntary manslaughter or maybe that your car is being repaired by the slowest auto mechanic on the planet. Thank you from the bottom of the morning-hating hearts of me and my kids. You make our morning drive a happy time.

Aunt and Uncle Birthday Wars

2008-05-23T18:18:00.003-04:00

It’s hard enough to figure out what your own kids want for their birthdays. I struggle with
whether to buy them exactly what they say that they want (but where’s the surprise in that?), or to buy them something that they would want if they knew existed, or to buy them something that they might not even think they wanted, but will eventually like once they start playing with (that’s the ideal, but failure is common) or to buy them something that’s good for them, whether they want it or not. It can be tough.

Lucky for my oldest daughter, as the first grandchild on my side of the family, she has gotten presents each birthday from all of my three siblings, her aunts and uncles. But she is doubly impossible to buy presents for, for reasons I won’t bore you with.

Her 8th birthday just happened earlier this week. My wife and I struggled to figure out what to get her (thank you Amazon for the just-in-time sale on Flip video cameras, by the way), so we weren’t expecting much success when the presents rolled in from others. If it went like last year’s birthday, she would act appreciative, but never actually play with many of the toys.

And the presents did roll in this year from my siblings. But it appears that all three of my siblings have thrown up their hands and completely given up on trying to figure out what a good present might be for her, because all three of them gave her money.

The danger inherent in this choice is that, since they all gave money, it was easy for my daughter (and, OK, me) to compare and contrast gifts to figure out who is generous and who is cheap. And while that might seem like an easy comparison, we had to grade these on a curve:

My young sister gave $8. Four bonus dollars are awarded to her for actually knowing how old my daughter she is. So we’ll count this as worth $12.

My brother gave $10. Now arguably, this would beat the $8 gift, but he also sent the gift via overnight mail, apparently paying an extra $16.50 in the process. It’s tough to know how to count this one. We’ll award him three bonus dollars for spending the extra cash. But he loses two bonus dollars for forgetting her birthday until the last minute. So this gift is worth $11.

My old (but still younger than me) sister gave $20. This looks like the winning gift. This sister, however, lives in Chicago. $20 in Chicago is only worth $15 here due to cost of living issues, so this gift only counts as $15. Plus, she gave really good gifts in the past, so expectations were high. Deduct an extra $2. Still, at $13, old sister takes the prize.

Accordingly, my old sister and her husband will now be called, to my children, “your generous aunt and uncle” whereas the others will be “your cheapskate aunts and uncles.”

(Note to my siblings: next year, a small separate check made out to me will influence who I deem the “winner” in future comparisons of this sort, and may well be worth your while).

Another good thing about this cash-based-present development is the precedent that it sets. My young sister gave birth to a son in February. So utilizing her logic, next February, he gets a shiny Sacajawea $1 coin for his first birthday. Cheap for me! My brother’s wife gave birth to a daughter last December. Since his philosophy is to spend more on postage than on the gift, and stamps are now 42 cents, his daughter will get 40 cents. As for my old sister? She’s pregnant, with a baby due in a few months. When that baby is born, we’ll give him/her (I know which gender it is, but I’m not telling you) $5 and tell my sister that for poor folk here in Cleveland, that’s a full day’s wages.

$6.40 on three presents next year. What a deal!

Why We Don't Party

2008-05-18T10:49:00.002-04:00

“Just because we get married and have kids, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop going out.”

That’s what people say to themselves before they have kids. They pledge to themselves that they are going to get babysitters and still go out and have some drinks with their friends once a week, or every other week. They pledge that they are going to keep some semblance of their pre-child social life going. What they don’t realize is that married couples don’t stop going out because they’ve become lame. OK, that’s certainly part of it, but it’s not the only reason people like me stop going out so much.

These are the reasons married couples don’t go out:

(1) $9 beers. If you knew that going to bars would cost you $9 a beer, would you keep going out? Trust me on this one: you don’t want to know what babysitters get paid these days (and most of it is your wife overpaying them to make sure they come back).

Here’s how the math works. The babysitter comes over and you enter the 30 minute transition period where, because your wife needs to show the babysitter where every single thing is in the house is. (just to clarify, don’t get to leave, but you’re still overpaying the babysitter for this time). So the babysitter gets there at 8 p.m. You leave at 8:30 p.m., meet your friends at 8:45 p.m. You’re out for 3 hours and home at midnight. That’s 4 hours of time for the babysitter at, maybe, $9 an hour, for $36. If you and the wife each have 4 drinks during those 3 hours, that’s 8 drinks. Assuming $4 a drink, that’s $32 at the bar, lets round up to $35. But you didn’t really pay $35. You paid double, because you also gave the babysitter $35. So you paid a total of $70 for 8 drinks, or about $9 a drink.

The big problem with this is this: what if some uninteresting topic of conversation comes up while you’re out? In your pre-child life, who would care? At $9 a drink, you care. Every moment has to be interesting and exciting, because it’s costing you! And so having to sit and listen to your wife discuss the wallpaper designs she’s considering for the downstairs bathroom will make you cry.

(2) Getting a Ride Home. What if you really need to blow off steam and you drink a bit too much? You hopefully aren’t gonna drive home. In the old days, you might walk home or hitch a ride with someone less inebriated and then come back to get your car the next morning. But how does that work now? Now, when you wake up the next morning, your spouse can’t just drive you back to your car, because you’d be leaving the kids home alone. You have to go back to get the car as a family. And there’s nothing more edifying than getting to show your kids where daddy got his drink on the night before. That will certainly fill you with pride.

And what if you took the primary family car out that night? The one with all of the car seats? Then, when you drive from home to bar the next morning, you’ll be forced to let the kids ride 70’s-style sans carseats, kids all piled up in the backseat while you go get your car from the bar (now you’re really a good father).

The alternative is even sadder: you have to remember, when leaving the bar, to go back to your car only to get the carseats out, and then hitch a ride home with a friend, while carrying all of the car seats with you in their car. It’s tough to maintain the illusion that you’re a cool couple out for a hip night on the town if you’ve got an armload of empty carseats with you. It doesn’t exactly scream “party.”

(3) OK, You’re Home, Now What. You wanted to avoid the $9 beers, so you figured the best way to do that was to hire a younger babysitter so you could pay her less. This was an ingenious strategy until you got home and realized younger babysitters can’t drive, and now you have to drive her home. So if you get hammered, you and your armload of empty car seats will be sitting up front in the passenger seat in your buddy's car, with the babysitter in back, while your soon-to-be-ex-buddy drives your babysitter home with you.

And even if you were OK to drive yourself home, there’s a moral difference between being willing to drive yourself home after 2-4 drinks (but still within the legal limit) and feeling OK about driving a young babysitter home after those same 2-4 drinks. So now you’re drinking about two beers when you go out to make sure you don’t push it. I don’t think this is what the pre-child version of you had in mind.

A similar potential problem arises with younger babysitters in that they’ll ask you when you’re going to be home. One time my wife and I hadn’t been out for months and got an 8th grade babysitter that lived a few houses down from us. The wife and I planned to hit a bar and grill a mile from our house for dinner and drinks with friends. We were excited because we knew we didn’t have to drive her home and told her we’d be home “around midnight.” She informed us that she “had to be home by 10:15.” Wow, a night out that ends at 10 p.m. The pre-child version of you would not consider this “going out.”

(4) Wake Up Call. They say that one effect of alcohol on the central nervous system is that your body essentially doesn’t get much benefit from sleep until much of the alcohol is out of your system. This means that if you’ve been out drinking and get home at 1 a.m., the sleep you get for the first few hours – say, from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. -- is pretty much worthless. So even if you manage to get a cheap babysitter that drives herself, and even if you go out to a bar within walking distance and can get yourself home, you still are gonna be screwed when your kids wake you up at 7 a.m. or so. And God forbid one of them has a nightmare.

I’ve considered trying various things to try to figure this out.

I've tried having the babysitter to keep the kids up extra-late (until 11 p.m. or so) in an effort to get them to sleep in! Although this seems like it should work, it invariably fails for at least one kid. And the kids are whiney and cranky the next morning, which is excellent for keeping your hangover going.

I’ve considering buying happy meals in the McDonalds drive thru at 1 a.m. and “getting breakfast ready early” by leaving it on the table at 1:30 a.m. so that it’s there for them when they get up 6 hours later and hopefully will just eat and leave me alone.

I’ve even considered sneaking into the baby’s room and moving her from crib to floor in the middle of the night so she won’t wake me to get out in the morning.

And I’ve actually tried sleeping in an undisclosed location so I couldn’t be found, which unfortunately only causes your kids, with a handful of cold fries, to wander outside in their pajamas looking for you, which never improves your standing in the neighborhood.

(5) Breastfeeding. Drinking is a doubly-dirty business if your wife is still breastfeeding. She has to pump in advance, save up the milk, and then has to undertake the dirty business of the pump and dump the next morning, where the alcohol-tainted breast milk is expressed and tossed. There’s just something much more tawdry and depressing about drinking alcohol when it causes you to dump breastmilk down the drain. The health effects seem much more real to you.

************

So there’s five big reasons why we – those that are married with younger children – don’t “party” any more. And those that are child-free with schemes for how they are going to go out once they have kids, well, maybe you guys ought to go out extra for the next few months and get it out of your system.

Numbers of Relationships

2008-05-12T23:17:00.000-04:00

I was watching my two youngest children interacting the other day. We were on a short walk, and my 4-year old son walked over and grabbed the hand of my one-year old daughter. It was a cute moment, and made me pay attention the rest of the day to how they interacted, what they said to each other, what they played. It was really interesting to me to really just focus on the two of them and how they related.

I mean, before I had kids, my family had a single relationship. Me and my wife. ONE. That's it. One thing to focus on (or obsess about, at times).

Once you have a kid, however, you increase the number of relationships in your family. Now there’s you and your kid, you and your wife and. of course, your wife and your kid. That’s three relationships right there. And the dynamic is always different if all three of you hang out, so if you count that, then when you have just one kid, there are four completely different ways your family could interact together instead of just one.

This is what makes “the family” so much more interesting than “the relationship” (which is what marriage is before kids). There’s just so much more going on in a family once there are kids around.

Adding more kids makes these numbers explode. If you have a second kid, you go from three two-party relationships to six two-party relationships (you&wife; wife&kid1; wife&kid2; you&kid1; you&kid2; kid1&kid2). Also, there are now eleven ways your family can interact if you add in three and four party relationships.

Three kids means ten two-party relationship and a mind-boggling 26 ways that you can hang out in groups of two or more. Four kids means 15 two-party relationship and 56 total ways in which you can hang out in groups of two or more. 56!!! (I’ll spare you by not listing them).

If you’re the type of person who liked people-watching or stuff like that back in college or high school, you can kill some serious time watching and analyzing the myriad ways in which your family members can and do interact with one another.

This may seem like a funny math point or something obscure, and it is, but it really does open up whole new worlds. You’ll realize that you and your oldest and youngest are perfect for going shopping together or something like that, and you wife and you son can hang out and work in the garden or something. The combinations matter.

It’s fascinating stuff.

Roughhousing: A Guide

2008-05-08T14:00:00.000-04:00

One humongous benefit of having children is that you now are allowed to wrestle with people! Pre-children, you likely have far too little wrestling in your life (not counting special wrestling). Children give you wrestling partners for at least a decade. And, unlike in middle school, this is satisfying wrestling, as you’re wrestling with people whose asses you can kick at your leisure.

Honestly, apart from the benefits for you from burning off a little end-of-the-day stress, it’s a lot of fun for the kids to have their father throw them around. In fact, if you’re a little on the rough side so that it’s actually a bit dangerous, like tossing them 5 feet or so through the air onto a couch (or a pillow), they can sense the danger and they really like it. It psyches them up and gets their adrenalin pumping even more. In fact, in my house, if a roughhousing activity ends with a kid crying and injured, that’s what they want to play the next time.

I’ve learned, however, that many fathers, maybe if they were the only boy child or maybe if their father was older, sadly do not understand the many forms of roughhouse available to them. And many wives, particularly women with only sisters, will look at you like you’re crazy when you tell them that you are going to wrestle the children (oops… wrestle with the children … note that adding the “with” makes it sound friendlier and thus more likely that your wife will permit this). My wife has was very much a skeptic but has, over the years, eventually warmed up enough that mommyfesto occasionally will charge in from the kitchen and side with the kids to kick my ass if she feels I’m being a bit hard on them.

So, for the uninitiated, here are some forms of roughhouse experienced in the daddyfesto household (note: although this may appear to be a parody, this is actually serious). Please note that this is only the tip of the iceberg. I tallied at least 20 different things we’ve had going in this house at one time or another (in fact, I tallied so many that it made me realize just how much you’re cooped up inside in the winter in Cleveland and just how much that stinks). Without further ado:

Standard Roughhousing. This is just wrestling, except that instead of trying to pin your children, you are trying to incapacitate them and tickle them. The primary rule that you, the father, must abide by is that if the kids land a solid blow, you have to act stunned (whether or not you are actually stunned). If you are roughhousing with two children, such a blow would permit a trapped child escape (hopefully this will teach your son chivalry). Think Olympic Boxing. It doesn’t matter if the punch hurts, it still scores a point; so if it’s a clean blow, you have to act stunned for a second.

“Super” Roughhousing. The difference between roughhousing and super-roughhousing is that super-roughhousing is nasty. Mainly, I the super version allows punching anywhere except the face and private area. I even allow scratching (if nails have been clipped recently). We’ve had to create additional rules as my son tests out various ways to injure a human being (e.g., no poking daddy in the eye, even if it isn’t a punch), but generally, they get to whale on you.

What do you get? Super-roughhousing was invented after I first realized that if you hit a child square with an open hand in the middle of their back you will (a) make a cool sound, akin to hitting a watermelon with a baseball bat on a check swing and (b) more importantly, not hurt the child. I’m not sure why it doesn’t hurt the child. All I know is that while I’ve never completely “let go,” I’ve probably smacked them on the back harder than I should have, and no crying or game stoppage has resulted (but make sure you hit them square!) Of course, I’m sure there internal bleeding or something, but really, it’s the visible injuries that are gonna get you in trouble, so don’t concern yourself with that.

Super-roughhousing needs to be used sparingly. It needs to be reserved as a reward for the kids getting through tough periods, like having to spent 4 hours cooped up at a wedding and reception. It is for a time when they have too much energy and no good outlet, as you’re essentially volunteering to be a punching bag.

Harry Hungry Bed: When you’re changing the sheets on your bed, take the kids up there. Stand at the foot of the bed and lift the mattress (but not the box spring) into the air, so that the bed, from the side, forms a “greater than” sign. Have your children dart across the box spring while you count down “5…4…3….2….1.” At one, let go of the mattress, then check and see what you’ve caught. If you’ve caught both, pretend to leave the room and go to work. If you’ve caught only one of multiple children, you get to climb onto your bed and pretend to sleep while the remaining child has to pull your fat ass off the bed. If all children are caught, you get to roll around on the bed for a bit while your wife yells things at you involving the word “suffocate.”

When we play this these days, my kids tend to scream louder. This suggests that either I’m gaining weight or it’s time to get a new bed or both.

Fairground Ducks: Pillow-Style. This one is best done in a hall or place with hardwood floors. (Even better if you have a hall that ends with a carpeted room!) Gather up some smaller pillows. Have your children stand at one end of the hall with you sitting at the other. Whip the pillows down the hall in a Frisbee-like motion and have your children leap over them as the pillows fly by. Once all pillows are gone, they have to gather them up and run them back to you for another round. If you get a solid shot they can’t dodge, their legs will whip out behind them and they’ll hit the ground hard (which is why it’s best if you can put them on carpet). Score! Stone skipping techniques work better than you think with the pillows.

Note: Warning! If your child, like my son, has a 2 inch vertical leap, he’s not going to clear any of the pillows and you’re going to fucking annihilate him, a fact I luckily discovered while my wife was not in the house (insert white boy can’t jump joke here).

Walk on Daddy’s Back. Self-explanatory. A definite two-birds-one-stone-situation. Having kids may be worth it for this reason alone. With multiple children, choose the child based upon the severity of the back pain. Some days you need a light 4-year old walk; other days a 7-year old it called for. If you do it on your bed and shake every once in a while so they’ll fall off, you can call it a new kind of roughhousing and trick them until they get bored after about 5 minutes.

Blind Monster. Sit and position yourself in the center of a room with as little furniture as possible. Close your eyes and spin to disorientate yourself. You’re allowed to move but must stay in the room. Using your sense of hearing, your goal is to snatch up the children as they rush in and out of the room. The kids’ goal is to jump onto your back, and if they are successful, they win. There you go.

Explaining to hospital workers that you broke your child’s cheekbone playing a game will be a tough sell, so be sure to swing your arms low to the ground. This is also a good time to break out the standard Obi Wan style father joke: “you are going to smile and start laughing now” which nails the young kids within 5-10 seconds almost every time if used judiciously. Also, make sure the toddlers (and any cats) are out of the room with mom so you don’t clock them.

Have you tried to close your eyes for 15-30 minutes straight without being asleep? It’s not natural. So you ultimately open them inadvertently and the kids cry foul. So essentially this game teaches them that daddy is a cheater. And so it also serves to prove to children that daddy is just a mere mortal man after all. So I guess this is another two-birds-one-stone situation.

Wake Up Daddy. This one was invented by my 20 month old. If daddy is sleeping, or even just resting his eyes and not even asleep, come up and whack him on the head as hard as you can and shout “wake up daddy.” Then run away. Then laugh. Like everything else with 20 month olds, repeat ad nauseum. I normally wake up after about 15 whacks.

Throw Children In Air. Is it never shake a baby or always shake a baby? I sometimes forget. No, seriously, once the kids are old enough so you aren't violating maxims so basic they are printed on the sides of city buses, this one is fun (and is exactly what it sounds like).

One important tip is to throw the youngest child first. If you throw the oldest child first, you might get used to putting some umph behind your throws and you’ll end up with dent marks of your youngest kid’s head on the ceiling.

If you’ve got a room with a vaulted ceiling, it’s extra fun and has the added benefit of actually giving your arms a workout (make sure to do multiple reps of tosses). If you don’t have a vaulted ceiling, do it BowFlex style and tell your kid to put their arms up in the air to keep them from smacking their head on the ceiling. Since they are pushing off the ceiling, it becomes a kind of resistance workout.

********

There you go. Those are some of the basics we use around here, and should get you going. Since your wife likely has sough to retire from the “wrestling” circuit, and since men don’t hug enough, roughhousing will give you the physical contact you need for a healthy emotional state.

Happy roughing.

I Think I Accidentally Wrote a Book

2008-05-07T23:30:00.003-04:00

It's surprisingly hard to figure out how many words there are in an average book. Googling the question gives unsatisfying answers.

In any event, by mucking around online and counting words on pages in 3 books, I determined that, roughly, you have maybe 250 words on a page (but I got as many as 400 for books with smaller typefaces and larger pages, and we're still talking trade paperbacks, so I'm sure some books have more). If you figure 200 pages is a book, that's 50,000 words or so. Figure blank pages, chapters, etc., and maybe 45,000 words or so. A book length piece of writing is between 45,000 and about 125,000 words.

And I just checked WORD COUNT in WORD to see how many words I've posted here, and it's roughly 43,000.

(no wonder I feel like I don't have anything interesting to say anymore)

CSI: Cleveland Heights Edition

2008-05-02T23:34:00.003-04:00

I really just don’t care.

That’s what you think when you’re peacefully settling in, doing something you enjoy like reading a book, and one of your children runs up from the basement and tells you the awful and terrible thing that their sibling just did to them.

But you can’t just not care, because you’ve probably told them that this is what they’re supposed to do. You said: “If your sister tries to start a fight with you, don’t hit her. Come tell me or your mother. We’ll deal with it.” That’s what you unfortunately said. And now you’re living with the consequences.

Lots of parents renege on this commitment. They listen to one child’s story and then try to redirect them into another activity. After hearing how their sister hit them, instead of looking into it, they say “do you want to sit up here in the kitchen and color?” Other parents intentionally try to not get involved, under the theory that it’s better if you let kids work out problems themselves instead of always mediating for them (of course, if kids figuring it out without parents is always better, why not let them do everything without parents: fix their own meals, take themselves to school and … hell, why not get them their own place at age 8?)
Unfortunately for me, the 10-year old version of myself made me promise to myself that I would not do this. That I would not be overly hands off when it came to family fights.

For when I was younger, I “clashed” quite a bit with my sister that was 2 years younger than me (note: as used in this paragraph, the word “clash” includes everything up to and including attempted strangulation). We fought a fair amount but, at times, when things were escalating, one of us would have the good sense to back off and run and tell our mother that a fight was brewing. But inevitably our mother’s response was unsatisfying. If you were just sitting there and got hit and told mom, she’d try to redirect you. You’d be offered a carrot and told to play in a different room. But you didn’t come get your mom because you wanted a carrot. You wanted justice.

It quickly became clear to me that appealing to the authorities would get me nowhere. I was going to have to take matters into my own hands. And luckily, in the early 1980s, I had plenty of role models for this endeavor.
And so my sister and I waged some epic battles. Weaponry and shrieking like a female Asian mercenary was involved on her end. Biting was once involved on my end (which wouldn’t be that embarrassing if I hadn’t been in middle school at the time), amongst other sordidness. Ultimately we learned to stay the hell away from one another. And although my sister and I became friends again when older, I can’t help but wonder how much we damaged our relationship during the several-year period we were at each other’s throats.

Looking back, it seems clear that my mom’s approach wasn’t all that bad, but was less than ideal. I mean, for 90% of the kids I hung out with, we really did work it out ourselves. But for 10% of the kids I was around (for my sister and two other younger kids I knew while growing up), it only made us stop involving the parents and take things into our own hands. But all too often, that involved getting so angry that even I knew things were getting out of hand, and I knew deep down that something was very wrong with how mad I got. And so all that led me to promise myself that I would not employ a similar hands off attitude toward my children’s fights.

So now, in my house, when a child comes to me with a complaint about how they are being treated, CSI: Cleveland Heights springs into action. I put on my David Caruso sunglasses and get down to work with a five-step investigative program.

Step one is to segregate the offenders. Place the combatants in separate rooms where they can’t see one another or anyone else. Isolation will weaken the criminal mind.

Step two is to search for eyewitnesses. Unfortunately, in our house, if the older kids are fighting, the eyewitness is 22 months old. And if normal eyewitness testimony is unreliable, I can only imagine what baby eyewitness testimony must be like.

Step three is to review the physical evidence. My wife normally cordons off the area of the fight with police tape and then declares that she will be unable to clean that area of the house for the next month “because it is a crime scene.”

Step four is a thorough interview of each side. It’s best to employ re-enactment techniques here. Use of toddler children as stand-ins is encouraged. Since toddlers love being allowed to be a part of anything, this can double as “quality time” with them.

The fifth and final step is to bring both sides together and subject them to rapid fire questioning (while holding their wrists to utilize pulse-rate lie detection techniques). If you’re lucky, after repeated incidents, one of them will eventually develop a stutter.

Employing these techniques has led to some Perry Mason moments:

“Your baby sister couldn’t have thrown a block and hit you from way over there, as she can only throw things directly into the floor, approximately 12 inches away.”

“But he couldn’t have called you that name, because he doesn’t even know that word!”

“Your sister couldn’t have used her penis to make the floor wet”

Even if none of the kids crack and confess and there is no Perry Mason moment, normally, with enough perseverance, you’ll catch the culprit.

And your kids will dislike your bizarre behavior so much that they will do anything to avoid fighting with one another.

Dddyfsto's Review: Daddy Needs a Drink, by Rob Wilder

2008-04-30T00:19:00.004-04:00

DADDY NEEDS A DRINK: An Irreverent Look at Parenting From a Dad Who Truly Loves His Kids -- Even When They're Driving Him Nuts (2005)

I was ready to not like Robert Wilder. There were red alerts flashing as I examined the book cover and delved into the first few pages. Wilder lives in Santa Fe, a town which (admittedly based only on a week long visit there 10 years ago) seems to combine some of the worst qualities of college towns (our politics is pure!) with some of the worst qualities of California (we are just so damn laid back and cool!). Wilder married a woman named Lala, who is an artist (a folk artist even). Wilder doesn’t have cable. He has a very loose disciplinary style. He named his children “Poppy” and “London” and never once feels the need to explain this. The picture on the dust jacket shows a man with longish flowing locks.

And so I was ready for a book that was a little too precious, or that expressed Wilder’s need for a drink because his son was too aggressive or his daughter not earthy enough. And, on balance, the book actually is a bit too precious. For example, there’s a chapter written in mock surprise at how him, him, Rob Wilder! actually shops at Sam’s Club after his father introduces him to it (Really! Can you believe it!? A cool guy like Rob Wilder shops there! OMG!)

But I did like Rob Wilder. Quite a bit, even. I don’t know the man, but I would guess that I liked him because all of the potentially negative signs listed above are outweighed by a simple fact: Rob Wilder is a teacher, a junior high and high school teacher. And I’m sure that contributes quite a bit to his realistic, no-nonsense, grounded, humble perspective on the whole fatherhood thing (and most other topics).

Wilder’s book is divided into around 30 chapters, which are largely independent of one another. In fact, some of the factual background in the chapters is repetitive, so I suspect they were once weekly or monthly magazine pieces or something (I’m too lazy to read real reviews and figure that out). But this makes the book good for travel/bedtime reading, and makes it OK to skip the boring chapters or even put the book down and pick it up a few months later, like I did. Most of the chapters - and all of the good ones - use an anecdotal style, but often step back for Wilder’s look at the big picture, often compellingly, and often about a father’s worries about his children and what, exactly, he’s doing to them. At times, the English teacher within Wilder inspires him to try something different stylistically, with acceptable, but less effective results. (For example, a more "literary" thought piece about crying falls flat). Other stories focus on the nuts and bolts of fatherhood and show Wilder to be an involved and very thoughtful and self-aware dad with some cool ideas worth learning from, like how he had his car painted with chalkboard paint so his kids could draw on it and the aftereffects of that or how he took his toddler son to a burning-man like ritual, but forgot to explain to him that they were going to set fire to what looked to his son like a large person. Wilder draws from odd children outside his own family in three chapters to describe “biters,” kids inclined to poop wherever they feel like it and toddlers that madly run from their parents at every available opportunity, all to comic effect. It rarely makes you laugh out loud, but it makes you smile an awful lot.

Personally, I think Wilder is at his best when he tells a story that involves fatherhood, but isn’t really about the father/child relationship (or at least not primarily about that). For one example, in a chapter about baby monitors, Wilder talks about how (prior to the birth of his first child), he set up the baby monitor in the window, and how it picked up the lovemaking sounds of his neighbors … for the next few weeks. Another chapter talks about his son’s obsession with the word “pussy” and it’s impact on his life during that period. In another part of the book, Wilder talks about the intolerance that other people have for kids on airplanes, and while he spends part of the story ranting about that fact and defending his kids, part of what you get out of the story is how he himself got a bit irrational and overreacted to the entire situation. Lots of the time you can almost picture Wilder looking, hoping even, that fatherhood will be more interesting than it actually is (you can almost picture him getting excited when something bad happens to him), and running with the idea of it becoming interesting perhaps a bit further than is warranted. But his eagerness is what gives him his awareness, and his awareness is what lets him notice quite a bit of good stuff.

It seems to me that most books about fatherhood are largely interesting to fathers-to-be, or are interesting to fathers of small children, where the father can read the book and look forward to or learn about what lies ahead. Many of us with older children live that stuff: we don’t always want to spend our free time reading about it more; we’ve had our fill. Wilder’s book, by contrast, because it focuses on the cool and neat stuff on the margins of parenthood, holds something even for those with kids older than toddlers (But this also means that it is far from a how-to book, and those looking for that should look elsewhere).

The quality of writing is generally good, with interesting (but sometimes baffling) references and sentences that sometimes make you work to unravel. A little too often, Wilder takes it a bit too far and his writerly way of saying things drifts into groaner territory (on page 128, Wilder notes that he said “said 'huh' like a Midwesterner at an authentic Chinese restaurant”… p. 271: “studied so much feminist theory in college and grad school that it made my penis shrink”… yikes!). And at times he seems to be in a contest to see how many punchy details he can pack into a paragraph. But despite the writing missteps, Wilder paints a reliable and authentic picture of the cool stuff about fatherhood, including on an emotional and personal level, and does so in an interesting way.

This isn’t a book that will change your life or really teach you anything. But it is a pretty good description of a guy enjoying his kids and his life and noticing the cool stuff that comes his way. To me, that made it worth the read.

5 out of 7.

Socialization of Your Children

2008-04-27T14:11:00.002-04:00

At some point, everyone begins to worry about their children’s socialization. You want your kids to go out into the world and bond with other children; to enjoy friendships and everything that goes along with it: games, sharing, conversations about things of interest, etc.

If by three years old or so your child isn’t thinking about interacting with other children and making friends, then maybe you figure that there might be something wrong. Of course, although your child should think about making friends at this age, any actual success in making friends should not be viewed as any kind of victory.

My wife and I were very worried about our son’s ability to make friends. We’d ask him who he played with on the playground after pre-school and he’d say “nobody.” We’d ask him if he wanted to have another child over after school and he’d say “no.” We were a bit concerned.

Then one weekend we went to a school picnic with all the parents and children and I actually got to watch him and his pre-school classmates. After watching the many children run around and abuse one another for a day, I realized that his unwillingness to bond with these children was not a problem; it was a sign of intelligence or good taste even: I wouldn’t want to be friends with these kids either.

You sometimes forget that young kids – even the good ones – are oftentimes beastly, narcissistic animals, particularly at ages 3 or 4. At this young age, lots of these kids have very little conscience. And the worst one have morals comparable to humankind’s worst dictators. And so, just as you would be upset if your child found Sadaam Hussein or some other despot to be friendworthy, you should be happy if your child refuses to make friends until ages 5 or 6, when at least some of the kids that age begin to evolve out of their animalistic phase. Kids that make friends at age 3? Those kids are at times like the sad, low-self esteem chubby girl from high school who was willing to take attention from anyone, even when it was a bad kind of attention. Or if not that, then what they are making is not really a "friend" but a "fighting partner" or "someone to boss around" (which is what our daughter was looking for in a "friend" at age 3) or "someone to boss them around." So I wasn't too concerned that my son remained and remains, at 4 and a half, wary of making friends yet.

Whenever it happens, when your kids first start to make friends, however, you will soon realize that it is more interesting to you than the best Real World episode, the best tabloid, the best US Weekly story. Rumors of your children’s social interactions will be crack cocaine to you. You’ll ask the teacher at parent/teacher conferences who your kid is hanging out with. Another mother will mention how she stopped by school and saw your child talking to another child and you’ll demand to know who. If she doesn’t know the name, you will demand physical descriptions and when you get home, you will pull out the class picture and engage in rampant speculation with your wife over who your kid is talking to. Ultimately, my wife and I were reduced to bribing our oldest with candy to get out of her who they played with that day. It will be a part of your life that you care desperately about.

And one day you will realize that you are obsessed with the social life of a 4-year old. (If this isn’t a sign of how pathetic YOUR OWN personal social life has become, I don’t know what is.)

Luckily, ultimately you’ll realize, after observing your first child’s social life over a period of months, that it’s inanely and incredibly boring. It’s probably kind of like what it would be like to actually have to watch the Real World / Hills / whatever people all day long (personally, I find that when the condense a whole week into 60 or 30 minutes, it’s insanely boring, but my wife begs to differ). And so you’ll stop worrying about it and you’ll act like a regular parent and not give a good goddamn about your kids social life until they get to Junior High (when I’d imagine I’ll have to start chasing away the kids that come to your door smelling like smoke, or worse).

Parentricity Update

2008-04-25T10:10:00.001-04:00

It has come to my attention that people can't get into Parentricity from the link I've provided.

If you click on this link, I think you'll be able to get into the site. If not, let me know in the comments.

The Peter Principle of Parenting

2008-04-25T00:42:00.003-04:00

In the business world, the “Peter Principle” is the principle that has been applied to describe whether people within an organization are competent at the jobs that they do. The Peter Principle states that any person just doing OK (or worse) at their current job will stay at their current job. Any person that is particularly good at his or her job, however, will be promoted. If the person keeps doing well, they don’t keep their job for long, since they’ll continue to be moved up the corporate ladder. Since the people doing their jobs well keep getting new jobs until they perform poorly, eventually the entire organization is full of people that have been promoted one time too many and are at best OK, and often inept, at the job they are allegedly doing. Anyone who has worked in corporate America for any period of time has either heard of this principle and is probably sitting there right nod, nodding their head in recognition.

The same principle applies to parenting.

Some couples in this world have one child, realize that it is a ton of work and that they’re in over their heads and they say “we’re stopping here.”

Most couples, however, after having the first child decide to have another. If that goes well, they have another. And so on and so on. Until things aren’t going well anymore.

Indeed, when I was young, I remember days of sheer happiness with me and my parents and my younger brother and sister. And then my youngest sister came along and everything fell apart...

Like my family growing up, in most homes in America there are families that have one child more than the number that would have allowed everyone to maintain their sanity. No one is happy. Everyone has one extra kid.

The Peter Principle brought home.

Children as Motivational Tools

2008-04-20T11:57:00.003-04:00

Spring is certainly upon us here in Cleveland. Temperatures got into the mid-70’s this week on more than one occasion. And while this is certainly excellent news, the weather getting good is bad in one way: it removes my primary excuse for not exercising, which is the 5 month Cleveland winter.

So about 3 weeks ago I laced up the shoes and started running again. Normally I’ll go 2 or 3 or 4 miles at a pop. Last year, I started getting my oldest daughter to come with me every now and again, and I’ve gotten her to come on about half of my 10 or so runs of this April.

I should back up a bit. I’ve never been a fan of exercising. I ran cross country for a year in high school but wasn’t particularly good (ok, I was terrible … I finished 56 out of 56 at the conference meet, which is really very hard to do). And starting in college, I smoked for years, and smokers generally aren’t exercise fans. When I quit smoking about 4 years ago (and naturally started eating more) I decided that I needed to try to do something, and since I’m much too cheap to join a gym, I started trying to go jogging.

This has never really worked out. What normally happens is that I’ll start running regularly, three or four times a week, but invariably, after two or three or four weeks, I’ll go running and I just won’t “have it” that day, and I’ll feel like I’ve got a truck trailer roped to me, and halfway through the run, I’ll quit and just walk home. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that when I was the slowest person in the entire Northern Ohio League conference, I was running at almost a 7 minute a mile clip, and now I’m normally running 10 minute miles or so, so it can be a tad disheartening to not be able to keep even that up.

With this base of self-loathing firmly in place, for the next week or two I’ll mysteriously find better things to do than go running. Like drinking. Or playing with the kids. Or reading. But normally drinking. And after a few weeks, if I try to run again, I’m completely out of shape, and I figure “screw it.” And running is over for a couple months. So the key for me has always been to find a way that I won’t quit in the middle of a run.

So fast forward to a week ago, with me and my daughter going out for a run. I had planned for us to jog the mile to a local lake/pond and turn around and jog back home for an easy two miles. But when we got to the lake and I started to turn around, my daughter said “Huh? We’re not running around the lake?” There was no disdain in her voice. There was no hidden agenda. It was an honest question. But I knew that having her father not want to jog the extra mile around the lake would have opened up all kinds of cans of worms.

I could write about how she might have recognized her father’s mortality, and begun to understand the nature of aging and death, and maybe those things are true. But another way to put all that is that I wasn’t going to let my 7 year old daughter think I was a giant wuss. So we went around the lake.

And she started to push me a bit; jogging ahead and making me push a bit to catch up. I mean, look, every father knows and even hopes that their kids will exceed them mentally and physically someday. I don’t have a problem with my 16 year old son or daughter being faster than me, but a freakin 7 year old is a little too much to take. It can happen eventually, but just not this day. And trying to comfort myself by saying “but she’s almost 8” is just pathetic. So let’s just say that there was no risk for walking as we went around the lake either. And since the lake we run around is a popular running spot, most of the runners that passed us thought that my daughter was simply adorable for threatening to kick my ass.

My mind did start to think of secret ways I could have a break. Unfortunately “Look, a goose” doesn’t really work on a 7 year old anymore (they still look, but they are able to look and keep running at the same time, unfortunately). I thought about telling her to go one way and then letting her run on ahead, then calling her back saying that she went the wrong way while I stood acting impatient. I considered trying to time it so we arrived at the one busy intersection with the lights against us so we’d have to stop. But all that just seemed too devious

And so I ran 3 miles - without risk of walking - at a healthy pace (for me).

Since then I’ve taken my daughter out several times with me, and each time I haven’t walked.

And as side effect, once or twice a week I have to sneak out and go running after she’s in bed: I need the extra training to make sure that I can keep up with her the next time.

1 + 1 = 0

2008-04-16T23:21:00.002-04:00

So you’ve had a child, he or she is a few years old. It’s time to play again! All of the bad romantic comedies you saw while courting your wife had this absolutely right: while there may be some romance in baby-making the first time around, there is absolutely no romance in baby-making the second, third or fourth time around. Prepare your body to be used.

Being used for your body is necessary, really for one reason: have you met the only children out there? A cast of serial killers are better adjusted. Only children are the kids at college that go through four roommates in a semester, the people at work who get irrationally peeved when someone makes a funny noise when they walk past their cube. It is cliché, but true, that only children get waaaay too much attention and, because of all the attention they get from their folks, have an unrealistic view of how important their own feelings and concerns are. Really, who wants to raise an ass? So, if God and/or biology allows, do your first kid a favor and improve his personality by popping out a second.

When you do have a second child, in many ways you’ve doubled your work. And while one child was enough work for one and a half people, two children is an appropriate amount of work for three parents. Unfortunately, your wife will not find this to be a reason for you to take on a second wife.

When you’re watching them yourself, it’s a ton of work. If the baby is still immobile, then whatever game you’re playing with the older one will have to wait while you (choose one) finish feeding the baby the bottle / finish changing baby’s diaper / finish putting baby to bed.

If the baby is older and mobile, it’s the terror of your older child(ren). Want to play blocks? The baby will knock down any towers that are built. Coping with this leads to any number of creative strategies. You try to play with one kid in one room and the baby in another, or maybe you let the older child climb onto the dining room table, or you treat the baby like a middle-ages ogre and barricade it into part of the room (and you’ll realize why playpens were so popular back in the day). And you’ll see firsthand how having a second child really is detracting from your ability to parent and have fun with the first (and you’ll be depressed about that).

When the baby gets even older, you’ll then be pulled in two directions: the baby, demanding that you hold it or read it a book. The older child, asking you to “watch this” or participle in their stuff. Part of you will sit and wonder how the hell people with 4 or 5 children even survive. That’s 4 times the work or 5 times the work. It will strike you as unbelievable.

Yet one day, when the second child reaches 18 months, or maybe two years, or maybe two and a half (I’m not sure when it will happen, but it will happen), one day you will be in the other room and instead of the children fighting over who gets to spend time with you, they will, seeking amusement, look to one another.

It will be a glorious day. A special day.

I can vividly recall the day my wife, after an exhausting (mostly for her) multi-month stretch, called me at work and said “Oh my god, for the last 20 minutes, they have actually been sitting in the other room, just playing with each other. It’s like I went from having two kids and feeling guilty for not being able to pay attention to them both to going to having no kids, because neither are bothering me. This is unbelievable!”

Most of the time, one plus one equals two. But at times, maybe only for 20 minutes at a time, with kids it equals zero. A beautiful, perfectly round, pristine zero.

Fatherhumor

2008-04-13T13:13:00.004-04:00

If you’re a guy that likes to tell a joke or crack wise every once in a while, fatherhood is going to be a disappointment to you. For the most part, the people you’re hanging out with – your wife and kids -- aren’t going to appreciate your sense of humor any more. You’d think that your wife would be able to continue to find you humerous, but her general sense of mild disdain toward you will cloak her and serve to strip the humor out of any and all remarks while the sound waves travel from you to her. So all your hard work, your careful joke-crafting, will go to waste. Fathers around the world have countered this with in one way: by adopting the generic “dad” sense of humor, to punish your family with bad jokes because they don’t appreciate your truly good ones. Hell, you aren’t just punishing your family for their not liking your jokes, you’re punishing them for not finding anything you have to say interesting.

Aside from punishment, fatherhumor is also nice because, if you spend a lot of time with your kids, there is only so much you have to say to them. Fatherhumor fills dead air.

Anyone remember the TV show Run's House, which aired on MTV for a while in the past few years. Run, one of the three geniuses behind Run D.M.C., the seminal rap group, was a hard, hard man and epitomized old school rap. Did his kids want to hear him talk about that stuff? Nope. If he wants to communicate with his kids instead of being a vacant father, he jokes around and acts hokey and silly. That’s what he does. And I figure if fatherhumor is good enough for the Rev, it’s certainly good enough for the rest of us.

I’m told that in some cultures, each father gets a card in the mail when his first child turns two that instructs him on the sense of humor that he will thereafter be required to use. Like a rogue magician, however, Daddyfesto is here to reveal the secrets of black art of fatherhumor to the world.

The following are the permissible styles of humor – and they are the only permissible styles to use around your children. Master their use.

(1) Confused Deaf Dad. In this style, the father acts like a sit-com dad, announces a fact that is clearly wrong or mistaken and then acts on that bad information without deviation despite the children’s many attempts to correct him.

For example, on a weekend when in the car with the kids, driving to someplace fun (zoo, playground, Skyline Chili, etc.), you say “Where are we going again? To school?” No matter what the kids say, just mutter “we’re on our way to school” every few minutes. When they’re older, you can take this farther, pull into their school parking lot and tell them to get out. Or go and bang on the school door and act confused and say “must be a snow day.”

Pretending that hot sauce is ketchup is another favorite of mine that’s this style. The kids hand you the “ketchup,” you put it in your chili and then act like you’re Tom in a Tom and Jerry cartoon and just swallowed fire. You can put on children’s clothing and pretend that their coat is your own before leaving the house. You get the picture.

The other styles of fatherhumor are optional. Each dad picks and chooses his own. Confused Deaf Dad is mandatory. It is a father’s birthright handed down through the ages.

I am such a master at this form of fatherhumor that my four-year old has heard this schtick so many times that he no longer finds it funny and now, when we get into the car, he says “Dad, please don’t pretend you’re lost, OK?”

When your children, before you even speak, ask you to not use fatherhumor: that’s like being a blackbelt in fatherhumor.

(2) Jokey Threatening Dad. When you want your child to do something and they are ignoring you, but you don’t want to get actually mad yet, you use Jokey Threatening Dad to get their attention without having to get angry.

Example (shouted down the basement stairs): “I better stop hearing fighting going on down there or I’m gonna throw you all in the washing machine.”

Some dads take this too far. Once I hung out with a dad who said things like “you better get over here or after you go to sleep me and Santa and your grandma are going to put you in a giant blender that I keep hidden in the garage.”

Remember! It is Jokey Threatening Dad, not Child Abuse Dad.

(3) Obi Wan Kenobi Dad. This style involves no actual joke. You simply tell your child “You are going to start laughing in the next 10 seconds,” and then you start counting to ten.

Until they are 8 or so, it works every time...

(4) Belief-in-the-Mystical Dad. When seeking to criticize or correct a child’s behavior, you point out the wrongness of the result but attribute it to mystical or otherworldly forces.

For example, walking into the living room and saying “"Kids! Quick! Check this out! A group of squirrels broke into the house and ate a bag of chips and left crumbs all over the living room floor!" or, while in the car, in the middle of winter: “"I have to take this car into the shop. A ghost keeps making the back window go up and down."

Of course, my guess is that at least half of all imaginary friends can be traced to an overuse of Belief-in-the-Mystical style of fatherhumor, so be careful with this one.

(5) Reader Dad This is only useful when you have a kid learning to read. It involves you telling them what the word is without them knowing that you’re telling them.

For example, if reading a book, and the sentence in the book is "That would be too easy," when you get to the last word, you have to say "You can get this one. This word is easy.”

Or, where the sentence is “The branch is long” you say “Uh-oh, you’re going to have trouble with this word. It is really long.”

The best part of this style of fatherhumor is that your 4 or 5 or 6 year old kid will think it is sheer genius. I mean, you’ll never have such praise heaped upon you for such a stupid joke in your entire life.

(6) Corny Hokey Dad. This is a special advanced style of fatherhumor for use by dads with children 11 or older. Before getting into this one, a brief step back.

As noted above, the purpose of fatherhumor is not really to be funny but to punish your family and, for older kids, the punishment normally comes in the form of embarrassment that they have a father who tells jokes like this.

Eventually your kids will pick up on what you’re doing; they’ll realize that the whole humor thing is a schtick you use just to communicate with them. The child eventually realizes that when they are ready to drive your car and you say “bring the car back in one piece” that you are trying to reach out to them and say “be safe,” even though you have nothing at all of actual interest to say. The child will think that your efforts at humor have failed miserably, and they will roll their eyes at you, but deep down they appreciate the effort and will have empathetic and mildly warm feelings toward you. Mildly warm feelings are the maximum possible positive feeling a child aged 11 or older can have toward their father, so you take what you can get.

Corny Hokey Dad exploits this idea. While none of fatherhumor is supposed to be funny, Corny Hokey Dad lets the kid in on that little secret. Corny Hokey Dad tells the joke “How do you get Holy Water? You boil the hell out of it!” or “How do you catch a unique wild rabbit? Unique up on it! How do you catch a tame rabbit? Tame way, unique up on it.” If a child says “I’m eating some chips,” Corny Hokey Dad responds “I’m gonna eat your chips” which, really, completely doesn’t even make sense (and even sounds vaguely perverted), but that’s OK.

Corny Hokey Dad is looking for a gig writing jokes for popsicle stick companies. Think Mr. Walsh on 90210 or the dad on 7th Heaven. That’s what you’re aiming for. Jokes so bad that even your kids know that you can’t be serious for telling them.

(6-B) An offshoot of Corny, Hokey Dad is Puntastic Dad, who never lets a pun go past. If you pass a hooters, make sure you say “I hear that they are having financial problems and might go bust!” I could keep going, but my wife pays me to not do these, so I’ll stop right there.

And there you go. The 6 primary styles of fatherhumor. Use them wisely.

(Note: I’m talking about verbal humor here; not physical comedy, which is a whole ‘nother topic for another day).

Beautiful Absurdities: The P Sign

2008-04-08T22:01:00.003-04:00

Back in school, a friend and I lived in the same apartment building. Shortly after moving in, in part fueled by the anticipatory buzz that hangs over a college town in late August, we created MouseCon. MouseCon (a play on words on DefCon) was comprised of a couple simple elements. First, we had numbered stickers, 1 through 5, which we stuck to my buddy’s kitchen doorjamb vertically and well-spaced, from about belly-button height to eye level. Underneath each of the 5 numbers, we hammered a nail into the wall. Finally, we took a plastic mouse, whose tail would hang nicely from one of the five nails.

My buddy's task was to adjust MouseCon periodically to reflect his mood by hanging the mouse on the nail that best reflected how he was feeling. If he was maniacally happy, he would move the plastic mouse up to the highest nail, which was described as MouseCon Five. If he was sad and depressed, the mouse would hang from the lowest nail, MouseCon One. If suicidal, the plastic mouse resided on the floor. Sometimes I'd walk into his apartment and see him moping a bit and walk over and adjust MouseCon downard myself.

[an aside: Y'know how they say that if you make yourself physically smile it makes you happier because of the psychological associations? We tried experimenting like that with MouseCon by moving MouseCon up from 2 to 4 to see if my buddy would automatically get happier, but, alas, it never worked]

Obviously MouseCon was completely stupid, the type of thing that college kids with too much time on their hands do. But it was one of my favorite kinds of things, because although it was a little bit funny and completely stupid, it was more weird and absurd than it was stupid or funny. When you explained it to people (after looking at the two of us with a quizzical look suggesting "when are you guys going to come out of the closet?") they would maybe chuckle, maybe ask a question, but they'd mostly just feel a tad awkward and get an weird expression on their faces. And I loved it

I can be an odd bird. I like absurd stuff (if you can make it exciting or personal, even better). But I figured when I had kids, some kinds of weird fun things would become available to me because of the kids (after all, no one but my kids would be impressed, or want to see me pretending like my belly was a face, with nipples for eyes, etc.), but most absurd or wacky stuff would be in my past.

On the one hand, most people know that a kid that's 3 or 4 years old is a virtual machine for creating absurdities, but most of it isn't the good kind of absurdity. It’s the kind absurdity like any question you ask gets answered with “Kwee Kwoo” for an hour. If that was it, it would suck. But luckily, kids create all kinds of truly absurd situations – situations that those without kids never even get close to - that can give you an outlet for the side of your personality that has a love for the weird.

Enough talk. An example:

When my eldest daughter was about 2 1/2 or 3 years old, one day she complained that it hurt her to pee and that she didn't want to do it. We tried to get her to go, but she wouldn’t. And she hadn't gone for quite a while. Part of me just thought “let’s just walk away and eventually she’ll have to go, and we’ll clean it up then.” But I remembered the cause of death of the famous astronomer Tyco Brahe (burst bladder), and my daughter was not taking it well, getting more and more upset. So my wife began asking her questions about her malady. “Does it burn?” Etc. My wife turned to me and the phrase “bladder infection” was used. I announced that I had recognized that there was an Official LadyProblem discussion occurring and I was therefore invoking my rights as a male to immediately suspend the discussion until I could get out of earshot. So I went into my bedroom, shut the door and knelt to pray to God to thank him that I'm not a single father that had to deal with crap like that myself.

My prayers weren’t answered however, as even though I watched two whole episodes of syndicated Simpsons, I began to hear, through the door, the increasingly pained and whiny sounds emanating from my daughter and the increasingly frustrated and pleading sounds coming from my wife. I began to felt guilty and realized I couldn't do my ostrich impression any longer, so I came out of my room to find my wife in the bathroom with my daughter, who was naked and in the bathtub, with my wife trying to coax my daughter to, well, do her business in the tub. Things were not going well.

"But you CAN'T go potty in the tub," my daughter screamed.

“You can this time. It’s OK,” my wife said. My wife indicated that they had been back and forth from tub to potty for the past hour and that my daughter refused to use the potty.

I winked at my wife to indicate to her to play along, and asked my daughter how things were going. I got a scream in response.

Ignoring my daughter, I said to my wife, "Did you put up the P sign?"

"What are you talking about?" my wife said.

"The P sign, of course. You don't know about the P sign? Duh!"

Our daughter anxiously watched our exchange.

"No, I don't know about it."

"You have to make a sign that has a big P on it that makes it OK to pee in the bathtub, because you're normally not allowed to do that."

"Oh. [Daughter], c'mon let's go make one."

"OK" said my daughter.

Daughter sprang from the tub and we whisked her downstairs in a blanket and gave her markers. I slapped a white sheet of paper in front of her, and my wife guided her hand and they drew a giant capital P that filled the page. My daughter very quickly decorated it with a few stickers and, of course, quickly drew some small animals, we stuck a few masking tape donuts on the back and we sped back up the stairs to the bathroom and let my daughter slap the sign on the bathroom wall above the tub. My daughter climbed back in the tub.

And while she sat in the tub and stared at the P sign, our problems drained away.

(Of course, when I realized a few months later that we never actually took the P sign down after that night, it made me wonder a bit about the baths that occurred in those intervening months.)

Chasing Kids With Lawnmowers

2008-04-05T10:39:00.003-04:00

Last weekend the weather got a little warm and I went out and cleaned out one of the cars and opened up both garage doors just to let the air blow through. Spring is finally coming! Kicking around the garage I grabbed my lawnmower and pulled the cord on that 8‑year old thing to make sure it planned on working for me again this year.

It started easily, and so I knew that I would be able to undertake for the next 6-7 months the mowing that I hate (this is the one good thing about living in Cleveland; only mowing half the year). But I do it still. I mow. I mean, I'm 35. I can't start paying someone to mow my yard now, or I'm just going to get more and more pissed off over the years. I gotta do it myself, at least for the next decade or two.

And since I'm going to hate my "time in the yard," I figure it's only fair that those that share my genes share my pain, so last year I made sure to kick my kids off the computer or out of the TV room and sent them outside to play in the yard when I mow. After I started doing this, however, the kids complained about the mower noise and the grass clippings that showered them. So the normal pattern was that I would go mow the front yard while they played in back. Then we would switch. I would walk down the driveway to the back, they would stop what they were doing, scream in mock (I think) terror, and run down the driveway and play in front while I then mowed the back.

The mock terror was an open invitation to play that each week I declined. But one day it was just too good to pass up. That day, after the kids ran past yelling, I turned myself and the mower around and started running down the driveway after the kids. I soon realized they were getting away from me, going too fast. So I ratcheted up my speed and slowly started to gain on them. I wasn't going to let a 7-year old and 4-year old outrun me! And a roar started building from within me, it was barely audible over the roar of the mower, but my mouth was open wide and…

… y'know, sometimes it's a good thing to be married. Not always, but sometimes. Most of the time, almost all of the time, even. I'm not trying to set up my life as a sitcom marriage with the wacky dad and the common sensical mom (spending five minutes with my wife will dispel that notion). But sometimes, just seeing your wife will inject common sense into you and remind you that you, in fact, are an actual adult and should probably act like one and re-examine whatever action you're then taking. Seeing any adult would probably do it, but since your wife is normally the other adult that happens to live in your house…

… so I'm running down the driveway and I see my wife in the window, looking at me suspiciously, and I stop my roar and I smile and I see an increasingly quizzical look on her face and I realize that it might appear to an outsider, or even an insider, and, maybe even to my wife, that I'm trying to kill my children with my lawnmower. So I gradually slow down, play it cool, turn the mower around, act like nothing ever happened. And so ended the lawnmower chase.

It's when I look back at times like these that I sometimes question my fitness to be a father.

Parentricity

2008-04-04T00:30:00.000-04:00

It appears that I am shortly going to be blogging about fatherhood over at a new website that launched in November 2007 called Parentricity (http://parentricity.com), a social networking site for parents that also plans to have some original content.

I can't say that I know much about it. It's currently in alpha stage. You can give it a visit now, but the site is currently being finalized/upgraded, whatever. So if you aren't impressed, be sure to check back in a few months.

I'm advised that I will be found in the ParentRap portion of the site, but I plan to keep blogging/cross-posting stuff here as well.

Sometimes Google is a Wonderful Thing

2008-04-03T09:21:00.002-04:00

Last night, in the middle of the night, some poor soul from Tel Aviv typed "Recipes of shakes with hidden vegetables for kids" into google (like this) and the first hit was my post with a bunch of fake recipes. Hopefully none were attempted.

Pathetic Nepotism

2008-04-01T19:23:00.002-04:00

Feel free to be skeptical about my nepotistically linking to my wife's blog, but the post comparing Britney Spears' mothering abilities to our one year old's is just too damn funny. Check it out.

Gender Roles?

2008-03-31T01:33:00.006-04:00

I have never been one to think that boys act a certain way and girls act another way. I always assumed that nature played some kind of role, but deep down I figured that nurture accounted for the majority of differences in gender roles. Maybe I believed this in part because both me and my brother were never the stereotypical rambunctious boys and at least one of my sisters wasn’t really a girly girl.

But I was dead wrong. Nature can have more to do with it than I ever imagined.

One of my daughters is a self-described tomboy. She definitely has plenty of stereotypical female qualities: she is incredibly verbal, empathetic, emotional. But she also goes head-first down the slide and the snow pile. And my son is not the stereotypical hyperactive and aggressive boy; he’s thoughtful and quiet and shy. But he's also logical and loves to build. Those two children are mixed. My other daughter, however, is a walking stereotype.

If made to wear pants for a day or two, she’ll demand to be permitted to wear a skirt or dress. If given a choice of clothing, she’ll pick the frilliest, laciest thing available. When she gets dressed in the morning, she immediately runs to the mirror to check herself out. She loves to wear bows in her hair. If my wife makes herself a salad, she’ll insist on eating part of it. Her drink of preference is diet coke. She likes to dance, but only to danceable songs.

Now you might think that the above may simply be evidence of how we’ve raised her over the years and isn’t an argument for nature at all. But that’s because I know something you don’t know. My daughter that has all of these traits is 21 months old (and I am not left-handed).

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. She’s absolutely obsessed with shoes. I mean, that seems like a joke, but it’s not. If you mention the word shoes, she’ll shriek "shoes!!!" and dart to where the shoes are kept in our house and start presenting pairs to you as if you were a high-end designer or somesuch.

She fears snakes; even snuffed-animal snakes. She’ll claim she isn’t hungry and then eat off your plate. She thinks she’s entitled to smack her male relatives, but rarely acts that way to her female relatives. When I wrestled with the older kids, once she learned we weren’t serious, she still shied away from it and would only jump on the pile when things are exceedingly calm, and then would immediately call to be removed, being too dainty to get into the rough fighting. She loves long luxurious baths, but she doesn’t really play with toys in the bath. She just lounges about. She loves all of her female relatives without reservation and seems to only barely tolerate her male relatives. She'll just sit for 30 minutes and page through a clothing catalog. There is literally almost no female stereotype she doesn't address.

Perhaps the oddest thing to me is her obsession with taking care of babies. It is difficult to get her to read a book about anything other than babies. She has a stable of 8-10 babies and her main play activity is to line up the babies, put blankets on them and put them to bed, or to stack them all into a play highchair and feed them. The first time I watched my then 16 month old daughter take care of babies, it struck me as massively odd.

I mean, I’m a 35 year old man. I don’t fantasize about taking care of, bathing and feeding 34 year old men. On top of that, even if she is destined to be maternal, what if she’s right? What must it be like to have figured out the core message of life for yourself at 16 months of age! To know your goal and your probable destiny in life at that age and then …what?!? Just play out the string? How completely different and separate from the modern ideal of a life spent exploring and discovering.

I mean (assuming she really wants to raise kids as her primary life activity, which is admittedly a huge assumption), then she would have figured out life in about 1/25 of the time I've spent at it. So she's basically 25 times better at living than me. You kind of have to respect that.

We've started to teach her how to diaper her baby dolls. I mean, if that is what she wants to do when she grows up, might as well start learning early.

Gone for the Weekend

2008-03-30T00:30:00.002-04:00

I'm starting to wonder about all of the mommy bloggers / stay-at-home-daddy bloggers out there.
I'm off work this week. My wife and my eldest took off on Thursday late afternoon on a trip, leaving me at home with the two younger ones for the past 3 days, and once I get them into bed and to sleep at 9:30 p.m., the last thing I want to do after spending a whole day child-rearing is to sit down and write about child rearing.

Being a daddy-blogger is much more fun when you aren't wearing your daddy hat 14 hours a day.

Your Sex Life in the First Few Years

2008-03-29T22:44:00.003-04:00

Normal men that have witnessed a nine pound creature emerge from their wives thank God when the OB tells their wives that the couple shouldn’t have sex for 4-6 weeks. Just consider it a special gift from the guy who knows your wife’s anatomy better than you do. And after a few weeks go by, even if the potential for ugly flashbacks has lessened and you’re ready to “take the plunge,” taking care of shit and piss and lack of sleep with all the extra shit to do isn’t going to boost your libido. But the ruination that children cause to your wife’s libido is many times worse.

I mean, if you think your wife is doing to be able to change your son’s diaper and wipe off his penis and then walk into your bedroom 3 minutes later and have anything to do with your unit, guess again. There’s at least a 90 minute cooldown period from the time your wife has touched your son’s penis to when she can touch yours (and some wives, such as mine, have even been known to claim that the cooldown period is 90 hours). So you gotta work around that.

And I’m not even getting into talking about changing your daughter’s diaper in this context, mostly for my own sake, not for yours. But let’s just say that if you were into having your wife shave herself bare downstairs anymore, you won’t be into that any longer.

On the “silver lining” side of things, does your wife like cuddling a little too much? Guess what! She doesn’t need you for that anymore! In fact, after having another living being parasitically draped off of her for 10 hours a day, the last thing she might be looking for is human contact. Even after sex. So after your quarterly lovemaking, you don’t have to cuddle. So it’s not all bad.

But mostly it’s bad. Do you like breasts? I hope you got your fill of them in years prior, because they are no longer yours if your wife is breastfeeding. No touching for you (did everyone know this but me?) You have now given away one of your wife’s best features to the child (and when you get them back from the little fucker, he will have wrecked them like they were a rental car). And if you’ve got a boy, at some point in the first few months of his life, that young punk will suck on your wife’s breasts with you in the room, and he will stop for a moment to catch his breath and he and will look over at you, and he will smile at you. And he just might wink.

Many teenaged boys do not understand why their fathers are concerned with their sexual activity; they do not understand why they can’t take girls up to their rooms. They don’t understand why their fathers appear to be actively trying to thwart their efforts. It’s clear what’s going on from the father’s perspective. It’s cockblock revenge and it’s being served very very very cold.

I should note that you’ll see in your young boy your son’s first attempts to trick women. Particularly if your wife, like mine, grew up in an all-female family and doesn’t really understand boys, your son may just be able to trick your wife into things like, say, holding his penis down for him when he takes a dump because he doesn’t want to do it himself because “his hands are cold.” (I swear that he winked at me after he said that once). And you will learn that, even if your hands are cold, the same courtesies will not be extended to you.

Dddfsto's Review: Guy's Guide to Toddlers, by Michel Crider

2008-03-25T10:01:00.005-04:00

THE GUY’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING TODDLERS, TANTRUMS, and SEPARATION ANXIETY (yours, not your kids!) by Michael Crider (2007)

This version of the Guy’s Guide is the third entry in a series of books by stay-at-home-dad Crider (including guides to the first year of your kid’s life and a guide to the first year of marriage). The Guy’s Guide covers 15 topics about fathering a toddler, with each chapter beginning with a short excerpt from a reader letter or email and with each chapter ending with a jokey fake quiz to recap “What Have We Learned Here?” This version of the Guy’s Guide runs 173 pages, but if you cut out blank pages and acknowledgements, you’re down to 160 pages. If you cut out the reader emails, you’re probably down to 140 pages or so. And these are pages in a book that runs four inches by six inches. If this is your bathroom book, it probably isn’t going to last the week*** and might be making you wonder what you spent your $12.95 for (and Canadians will be really mad; at $15.50 CAN, with a $1.02 exchange rate, that’s over $15). So for dollars spent per minute of reading enjoyment, you’re getting about as good of a deal as Eliot Spitzer did.***

A book this size isn't necessarily a problem if it were chock full of keen observations. Yet Crider all too often appears to be working on earning his master of the obvious degree.*** Crider has chapters on the phrase “Because I said so,” the fact that kids say “Why?” a lot, how kids’ birthday parties are out of control, how Crider’s parents are nicer to his kid than they were to him and how your kid will sleep in your bed and that this may harm your relationship with your wife. Anyone who watches a week full of WB sitcoms (is it CW now? Have you watched that network recently? Me neither!!!***) would have been able to write most of these chapters, and that’s one-third of the book. Many other chapters, including ones on potty-training and preschool interviews, aren’t much better. Part of the problem here is likely that Crider has only one kid and he isn’t a teacher or anything like that. So it’s kind of like reading a sex guide from a McLovin-type that’s only burrowed beaver once.***

A couple chapters are bizarre. I’m learning that 95% of stay-at-home dads feel that the discrimination levied upon them apparently makes their plight similar to blacks in South Africa under Apartheid, and they are not shy about voicing the awful state in which they find themselves in America in the Oughts. And so Crider launches an extended rant on the movie Mr. Mom and it’s unfair portrayal of stay-at-home dads. Note to Crider: Even if we cared about your whining about the situation, dude, that movie came out in 1983! Are we next going to hear about your thoughts on that fierce Lakers/Celtics rivalry? Whether John Hinckley should be declared insane or given the death penalty?

Another chapter contains a several page rant about how your kids will come before your spouse and that’s “how it should be.” Really? There is also a weird chapter on the many roles of a father ("I am the clown ... I am the doctor ... I am the punisher"). Crider may have written that one while wearing a loin cloth at a male sensitivity retreat in the woods or something.***

Crider alerts us early on that he isn’t going to let an easy joke go by. Ever. I actually tried to kind of emulate his style in this book review by creating all of the triple-starred (***) “jokes” above but just didn’t have the skill for it and couldn’t keep it up (and my wife and friends would assure you that, in fact, I am skillful at the bad joke). In an early 3-page stretch of the book, we have jokes on the following topics: Monica Lewinsky; Rosie O’Donnell’s penis; the French like to surrender; anorexia; the “number one rule of being an author: kiss your audience’s ass”; pissing on the toilet seat; and Paris Hilton. That’s pages 4 through 6. And, remember, these are not big pages. The quizzes at the end of each chapter generally follow the same kind of humor pattern or are topical and tend to restate the “jokes” within each chapter. Crider’s statement that he has the sense of humor of “a 12 year old at a slumber party” might be the truest statement in the book.

I think the "humor" is supposed to be Crider establishing himself as the type of guy that is manly enough that he could write a guy’s guide. But Crider can’t seem to even say “I love my son” without feeling the need to next talk about how he enjoys big breasts or threesomes with the babysitter in the next page or two (he even acknowledges that this is how he feels he has to “redeems [his] manhood”).

Which isn’t to say that there’s nothing here. A chapter on Christmas is inspired work (including on how a kid’s first Christmas just sucks and how even if you weren’t previously “into” Christmas that you’ll get into it if you have kids). The kid’s party chapter, while obvious at times, has some funny stuff (do the kids at these parties even know who the parties are for?). A chapter on how other people’s kids suck: that observation is sheer genius! Noting that when your kid swears, you can figure out whether the mother or father has the potty mouth based upon what swear words the kid uses. That's good stuff. The chapter on sex has some funny moments too (although his idea that you might have to teach your toddler about sex is a little crazy).

This book might be the perfect book to buy for your boorish brother-in-law if your sister is pregnant. Crider’s style is a tad obvious, jock-ish and Republican (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you), but is also friendly and laid back and far from intimidating. Crider’s the type of guy who, if he lived down the block from you, would invite you over to look at his grill and have a beer or two with you and you’d have a good enough time shooting the shit.

But you’d decline beer three.

3 Stars (out of 7)

UPDATE: Amazon apparently read this and agrees with me on the pricing. It’s now on sale for $2.59!!!!

Children's Entertainments

2008-03-24T17:32:00.001-04:00

People are waiting longer to have kids these days. There are a variety of theories as to why that is. Many people think that people are waiting longer because people are living longer in general and are thus waiting longer to do everything in life; others subscribe to the theory that a better educated populace (particularly a female one) wants to become established in their careers before having kids.

I subscribe to a different theory, The Wiggles and Teletubbies Theory, which goes like this. People happen to be channel surfing one day, and they happen to catch the Wiggles or the Teletubbies on television (or they are at their older sister’s house while her kids are watching it). After being exposed to the show for 30-60 seconds, they are so intensely horrified by what they see that they often become celibate so as to not have to risk ever having children and having to see those programs again.

Of course, some of us fail in our quest for celibacy. But even then, when your wife is pregnant, you’ll make a definitive no-joking statement that, once the kid is born, that shit is not coming into your house no matter what. No dumbass kiddie TV shows. No Wiggles. No Teletubbies. No Barney. No Boo-Bah.

And then one day something will happen. Your child, who never before paid attention to the television when you were watching The Office or the Browns or the Indians will happen to see the Wiggles (maybe you’ve left the room and your mom put it on or something). And your child will be fascinated and glued to the television. And you’ll, of course, rush to turn it off, but when you do, your child will cry. If they catch 60 seconds of one of those shows, it’s over. They are hooked. The Wiggles et al are crack cocaine for babies.

This will be a decision point for you. Part of you may think your kids should be kept away from that pap. But do you always keep yourself from non-edifying things? I mean, personally, every now and again, I like a good action movie; from time to time I will enjoy a good pop or rap song with few redeeming artistic qualities. I see nothing wrong with permitting myself a guilty pleasure now and again. If I let myself have that, can I deny my children? I’d love to have them watch the wholesome and healthy Sesame Street. But sometimes they just ain’t digging Oscar.

So I caved. Most dads do. I could see it in their eyes that they really loved that shit like nothing else out there, and as a father, you’re going to have a weakness for that. So I let them go.

Thankfully, within a year, each of my kids grew out of watching the worst crap out there and moved on to barely-tolerable crap (Clifford; Dragon Tales; etc.) or decent stuff like Sesame Street. So I didn’t have to pull my Clockwork Orange impression or anything like that.

NOTE: Speaking of the Wiggles, do you realize how rich those smarmy Australians must be from singing that pap? I once went to a Wiggles concert at $20+ a seat with over 5,000 people in attendance; it was a truly frightening experience, with several people essentially turning their children into Wiggles groupies, with t-shirts and posters and signs and other random merch. At least 100 people brought actual roses at god knows what cost, because the Wiggles’ dinosaur apparently has a thing for roses. Apparently this happens at every show.

But you know what? Every time I watch one of those shows I think “shit; even if you offered me the millions that the Wiggles make, it wouldn’t be worth it. There isn’t enough money in the world.”

A Tip For Those Buying a House

2008-03-20T22:57:00.004-04:00

These days it seems that most people are swiftly vacating their houses, not buying new ones, but if you happen to be swimming upstream (and probably grabbing a great deal) and are looking to buy a house and you’ve got kids (or expect kids to someday grow up in the house you're buying), there’s lots of extra things to think about. Most of the things that are helpful with kids are things that everyone knows: is there a good school system, a bedroom for each kid; finished basement or family room; eat-in kitchen; a separate bathroom for kids and parents; decent-sized back yard; are you off a busy street; is it a kid-friendly neighborhood; close to a park?; is their space for a third car in the driveway (thinking way down the road)? No one gets all these, but you do your best and try to get as many as you can while still buying a house that you actually like.

From a child-centric perspective, however, there is one thing that’s easily as important as these things, and that is: Is there a way to run through the house without re-tracing your steps?

I spent my formative years growing up in a “dead end” house. If you were in one part of the first floor of the house and some one chased you, you could run from the living room, through the hall, through the dining room, through the kitchen and into the family room. And there the house stopped. You were caught. This absolutely sucked. I mean, it was a nice house and all overall, but that aspect of it sucked.

If you played hide and seek there was no way to get behind the seeker into the other side of the house without them hearing you. Sock wars -- y’know, you divide into teams, you throw socks at the other team, if you’re hit with a sock you’re "dead," there's a capture the flag type goal --invariably devolved into World War I-style wars of attrition, with the teams camping out and fortifying their respective sides, with occasional skirmishes in the Thermopylae-esque hallway. There was absolutely no hope of ambushing from the opposite side. And not only did chasing games stink (since you were caught in 15 seconds), when you really had to run from someone (i.e., your mother, wielding a wooden spoon), you were also screwed.

So when I was house hunting, a key thing I was looking for was a “circle house.” (any of you architecture types want to tell me what this is actually called?) I wanted a house with a way to walk around the main floor so you weren't re-tracing your steps. I was not going to resign my children to the ghetto dead end house

But we did one better. While house hunting, we found the holy grail: a figure-eight house. It was heaven . Our daughter, when 2 or 3, used to just run for 15 or 20 minutes a couple nights a week. Chasing games were so fun even the wife got into it. It was awesome. We even had a small circle path on the third floor. I haven't unveiled sock wars yet -- I've got that one stashed in my back pocket, but that's coming out some day as well.

Just a little something to keep it in mind if you’re house hunting.

Note: Other things to think about that are cool for kids: A large fir or evergreen tree, possibly bordering a fence or a house, that can be trimmed low to the ground to form a hidden fort-type area; a back staircase (or an outside entry into the basement); laundry chutes (a game of catch in a laundry chute is a great way to kill 20 minutes)!

Kids dig all this shit and, frankly, since you’re gonna have to act like you’re a child and play with them every now and again, you’ll dig it too.

A Quick Thought About Mommyfesto

2008-03-20T20:58:00.002-04:00

One nice thing about the new blog is that, if I ever do get divorced from my wife, I don't think I'll have a hard time showing why I should get joint custody.

Copyfesto?

2008-03-20T00:15:00.002-04:00

Nope, MOMMYFESTO.

Because there is nothing in the world better than two parents sitting at their computers blogging about parenting while completely and totally neglecting their children.

Just a Thought

2008-03-19T23:29:00.005-04:00

The wife and I are heading out on short vacation on Friday, driving the 6 hours to Chicago, leaving the kids with her mom, planning to come back on Monday. I know this drill as we've done maybe 10 weekend trips since our first daughter was born nearly 8 (!) years ago now, and I'm really ready for another one. The next 36 hours can't go fast enough.

If you're like me and most of American men in their 30's, you just get tired. You go on a long weekend vacation with your wife like this, sans children, and you have a little too much fun. You get drunk once or twice and actually get to sleep in instead of waking up way too early (which feels like it triples your hangover). Hell, sometimes if I have to wake up after drinking (which is rare, thankfully), I try to wake up extra-early so that I'm still drunk just to avoid that awful feeling. But even better than sleeping in after a bender, you'll get to sleep in after going to be sober. And that feels even better. And waking up slowly, gradually over the course of an hour instead of rising with a jolt, like a school bus accident, with kids screaming.

And after this four-day vacation (because your wife doesn’t want to be away from your kids for a whole week), you come back refreshed and when you see your kids, you’re … well, you’re really excited to see them, because you missed them. Remember: they’re your kids, not other people's kids, so you actually like them. And everything will be great with the kids.

For a few days.

And then, after about three or four days with the kids, you think “Wow. I’m ready to go on vacation without them again.” Luckily for you, you’re not a woman, or you’d feel guilty about having this thought. Instead of feeling guilty, you start to scheme. How can I get this again? How can I get my parents and my in-laws to take my children for 3-day weekends every single weekend? But your parents aren't going for it.

But then you’ll think: wouldn’t it be amazing if we could come up with a system where you could have your kids for three or four days, and then get rid of them for three or four days. What kind of amazing nirvana would that be?

And then you realize that divorce is the answer.

Look. I love my wife dearly. And she's cool; I like hanging out with her; like doing shit. But damn if it ain’t tempting to leave her to get this awesome 3 on, 4 off deal. It's outrageous all the fun shit I can imagine myself doing if I only had my kids half the time. The 50% divorce rate so widely quoted almost makes sense to me now. You could be married to Helen of Freakin’ Troy and that would be almost too tempting to pass up.

Bedtime

2008-03-16T00:14:00.004-04:00

Once your child is a few months old, unless you are some kind of weirdo co-sleeper or something, it’s time to get them used to their crib. It was a pain to put together; you might as well use it. Although the Ferber-ite types have started to cave in a bit and are saying that you shouldn’t be too hardcore about making kids go to bed by themselves, there remains a debate regarding how best to get children to “put themselves down.” (note that, not for no reason, the phrase for getting a kid to go to sleep and the phrase for killing a suffering, dying animal are the same)

Our get-them-to-sleep approach was to put the three/four-month old kid in the crib, shut the door and ignore any sounds emanating from the room for at least 30-45 minutes: screaming; yelling; choking; crying; she could’ve started talking and yelling "auito mio padre.” It didn’t matter. We weren’t going in. After a week or three, this approach had our daughter falling right asleep about 90% of the time. As for the other 10%, did I mention that she fell asleep very quickly about 90% of the time? This was perhaps our first victory of parenting after a series of early struggles and we were so impressed with our results that started bragging about it to anyone who would listen. We were finally winners.

As a result of all this bragging, someone finally pointed out that if we weren’t going to go in the room under any circumstances, what was the point of even being at home? Essentially, since there was no sound that would make us enter the room, the only help we could possibly provide to the child would be in the case of a fire. And a fire seemed unlikely. The baby didn’t even have matches or a lighter in her room or anything. So we realized that we were essentially giving our daughter the same quality of parenting that someone who tucks in the kids and then goes out and hits the neighborhood bar. But we weren’t actually getting to go the bar. So we were not only bad parents; we weren’t getting to have the fun that bad parents have either. So we weren’t actually winners after all; we were doubled-sided losers.

So the lesson there was when you’re happy with how shit’s going with the family, just shut the hell up and don't muck it up by talking too much. This is a lesson that my dad has been trying to teach me by example his entire life, and I’m finally starting to buy in.

But, anyway, once your kids are 2 years old and definitely sleeping through the night (largely on their own, hopefully), it’s time to set a bedtime. Many new parents think that the reason to have a bedtime is to make sure that your kids get enough sleep.

This is a fallacy.

Secretly, for the last 50 years a small cabal of parents around the world (a cabal that is actually an arm of the Tri-Lateral Commission and being hunted doggedly by Ron Paul) have been paying off researchers to publish studies concluding that young children need 10 or 11 or 12 (or sometimes 14!!) hours of sleep. (ed note: really 14? Dddyfsto: Yup. Look here if you don’t believe me) The number of hours listed in the study varies based upon the size of the bribes made that year. (ed note: Wow; it really says 14!?! Are you fucking kidding me? I can’t believe that even passed the smell test. People believe this? Who could possibly need to sleep that much?). Since most scientists are themselves parents, they have sometimes engaged in pro bono work in this regard and reached these conclusions sans payment. (ed note: I’m still stuck on this 14 thing. Did they do the study by putting the kids in bed and then going outside and timing how long it was before the kids wandered outside to find them? 14-15 hours? I’ve drunk a fucking case and not slept that long) Parents everywhere are the beneficiaries of this group’s efforts as they now have an excuse to get away from the fucking kids for a few waking hours a day. (ed note: if kids sleep 14-15 hours a day, then how fucking hard can parenting be, really? I mean, they’re pretty much sleeping the whole damn time; sign me up!) So you really should thank these researchers when you get a chance. What these researchers have buried (and what anyone who has actually sat and watched a child during the nighttime hours knows) is that kids (once they are 4 years old or so) actually need about 9 hours of sleep. Some need 10, but all kinds of kids are completely fine with 8 or 9 hours a night; some with less.

Now there’s no harm in a kid spending a little time in bed awake. So setting a bedtime is much less about necessity and much more parental choice than most care to admit. And the bedtime you set for your kids says quite a bit about you as a father and you and your wife as parents.

One group of parents sets bedtimes earlier than 8:00 p.m. so they can spend between 8 and 9 p.m. tattooing the words “I’m no fun” or “I secretly fucking hate spending time with my kids” on their asses so they have more time for important stuff, like a daily re-calculating the value of their 401(k) or ironing creases into their khakis or going back to re-shred their credit card bills "just in case."

Another group of parents sets a 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m. or later bedtime because “they” are a lonely single mom that somewhat pathetically keeps her kids up to keep herself company. Or maybe they don’t ever want to have to be alone with their spouse for too long. Or maybe they live in fear of their children and want to be bitch-slapped around by their kids a little extra each day. Or, my personal favorite, they are still trying to be hip or different or alternative and are rebelling against the conventional wisdom of parenthood out of reflex because rebelling against parental wisdom has been their primary goal in life since adolescence.

A message to parents in this last category: if your kid isn’t going to school yet, and you want them to sleep from midnight to 10 a.m., you should realize that you’re making Li’l Johnny miss the best cartoons, but other than that, it’s your own damn business. I’m ok with that. But can we clarify that your doing that doesn’t make you hip; it doesn’t make you yourself personally cool or some kind of rebel? Can we just clarify that right here? Thanks for your time on that one.

So you figure out what bedtime between 8 and 10 works for your kids and you run with that. But it can still be challenging. First, your children, who normally clam up like they’re in the mob if you ask them questions about their social life, who will break off 90% of your conversations with them with no warning and for no good reason, will, at bedtime, all of a sudden be as chatty as junior high school girl at a sleepover. And chatty in a very good way. Well over half of my best conversations with my children have begun with them in bed and me doing my damndest to escape the room.

Example:

Me: “you have your drink, your blanket, it is totally flat, I’ve tucked you in, I’ve hugged you, I’ve done our secret handshake (and no your sister didn’t see it, don’t worry), your mom kissed you too, I saw it so don’t lie and tell me she didn’t, your nightlight is on, your music is on, doggie is here, the door is open, I’m leaving now, goodnight”

Child: “Daddy… what makes a thing funny? Also, explain infinity to me. And I liked that Pixies you played today; can we listen to more tomorrow?”

Even if they are manipulating me, it is a magnificently skillful manipulation, so it only makes me proud.

Once you’ve escaped the room, however, you probably haven’t escaped. You’ll notice, particularly when you first take the kid from the crib to a bed, that your kid keeps getting out of bed and bugging you and interrupting you when you're trying to get all the swear words out of your system that have built up over the course of the day. So you’ve got a decision to make. Most fathers, thinking the next step is obvious, create a “no leaving your bed” rule. My first child, however, being the child of a lawyer, asked “I can’t even leave my room in a fire?” So we had to identify a number of exceptions to the “no leaving your bed,” including (and these had to be re-explained each night for several months): vomiting, bleeding, pooping the bed, peeing the bed, fire, invasion of house by robbers, water dripping on you from the ceiling, caving in of wall to your room in any fashion, loud screaming from downstairs (this one was later repealed after repeated abuse) or a window breaking. There may have been others that I don’t recall. “If monsters try to get me” was proposed by my daughter but vetoed. My daughter struggled but was ultimately OK with this because she noted that I was “good at tripping people” so she was reasonably certain that if a monster was coming upstairs I would be able to get into the hallway and prostrate myself and utilize my trip skills in the nick of time. (at least it’s good to know that later into life she’s going to be good at making shit up and lying to herself and living a deluded existence.)

Anyway, with these rules in place and well-explained, we thought ourselves all set. The kid would be in bed, wouldn’t bother us unless there was a problem.

The kink in the plan was that now, whenever she needed something, anything, she would scream our names at the top of her lungs “DADDY … MOMMY.” We had no desire to scream in return, so would trudge up to her room to hear the tragedy (example tragedy: "I forgot my hippo stuffed animal. Please get it.") Even worse, after her brother was born, we would have to sprint to her room once the screaming began to shush her harshly before she woke the baby.

So after a month or two, the “no leaving your bed rule” was abolished and replaced with a “no yelling” rule. “If you need something, you can leave your bed and come downstairs or into our room and tell us what you need.” As an entirely unintended consequence, this rule quickly morphed into a “no sex for dad” rule, since my wife thought it possible for our daughter to come into our room at any minute because, after all, we told her she could come find us if she needed something (and she wasn't shy about exercising the privilege). If I waited until I could go in and check that my daughter was actually asleep to "make my move," my wife was commonly asleep (or feigning sleep) already as well, since she was in the habit of going to bed about 30 minutes after the kids did (does any other man feel tricked that his wife goes to bed at 9:30 p.m. or 10 p.m? I feel totally fucking cheated, tricked by my wife into thinking she was cool during courtship only for her, post-nuptials, to unveil her true goin-to-bed-early-ass self).

In any event, it was only several years and another child later (about 9 months ago actually) that we stumbled upon the solution. When our son, at age 3 and a half hit this stage, we left him something in his bed that solved our problems: we left him my cellphone. The “no leaving your bed” rule was reinstituted. If he needed anything or was scared, he could call our land line, and we would address his issue. There was no chance of his walking in at an inopportune moment.

And, as a side benefit, he learned our phone number.

Sharing the Load

2008-03-13T20:32:00.002-04:00

I had always believed that, once my kids were born, I was going to be an equal partner in raising them. Once my wife decided to stay home, here’s how I thought it would work: We would develop a set of rules and patterns and a methodology under which we would raise the children that would be consistently applied. Once I got home, we would be equal partners; sometimes I would feed, bathe, change diapers; sometimes she would. Each of us would have equal input at all times and each of us would undertake equal labor during the hours I was at home. So I expected to sacrifice a lot for my kids: money, time, energy, the ability to watch an entire sporting event uninterrupted. And in exchange I thought I would get the experience of crafting a young life or young lives.

Here’s how it really works: When the kids say that they want chips at 4 p.m. after school, and you aren’t there, and your wife is cleaning up the baby’s room, which has vomit all over it, she might just say “ok” to get them to stop fighting and shut up. And you won’t have any control over it. Your three year old will come into the living room one day, hungry, and seeing you will say “where’s mom?” instead of “I’m hungry,” as if you, the father, had no idea where the food was, because he's used to mom getting it for him. You’ll go somewhere as a family and your wife will get in the passenger’s seat and just expect you to drive. You’ll go to change a diaper but you’ll have no idea that your wife changed where the wipes are kept and so you won’t even be able to get through a diaper change without calling her in for an assist. You're not going to have equal roles within the home no matter how hard you try.

And it’s not like your notions of equality are eroded over time. They’re pretty much gone from the get-go, as within the first few hours of your child’s birth, your wife is breastfeeding the child or holding the child and you are fetching things for her; your wife is helping the baby; and you are helping your wife.

The fact of the matter is that if you work, and your wife doesn’t, then she is pretty much going to take charge of the kids. And so, at the end of the day, a lot of the decisions that govern the kids' everyday lives aren’t up to you. Maybe you'll look at what gets packed in their lunches and realize that it's not what you would pack if up to you (string cheese for an older kid just seems embarassing to me). Maybe you wished your kids would have to play outside for an hour after school each day (or if not a rule, at least you’d heavily encourage it) and your wife just doesn’t have the same priority and they get home and sit around and color instead. Maybe you have fond memories of nerf basketball in the family room with your brother, but your wife wants to keep the nicer china in there, and so the nerf gets put into the garage. And so you’re not sacrificing all the things you’re sacrificing so that you can mold and shape new lives. You’re doing all this so your wife can mold and shape new lives. And that’s something less than what you had probably hoped for. (It's at this point that you might realize that when choosing a wife, the qualities your mother suggested you focus on seem a bit more important)

Every father realizes that some day they have to start to sever the emotional bonds and let their kids go; every father realizes that some day the kids will leave home and go out in the world. Every father even realizes deep down that because his expectations and hopes for his kids are higher than are really possible, their kid will break their heart in some way. You expect this at 13 or 21 or 16. What you don’t realize is that your wife might have them in her hands and, through no volition of her own, never let them really wander on over into your grasp to begin with.

And while you won’t be sharing the good parts of the load, you also won’t be equally sharing the bad. Your wife will naturally just get the kids clothes on them on the weekends and you’ll stop even considering that it’s your job, because she just does it. She’ll start changing 80% of the diapers on the weekends because she’s used to changing 100% of the diapers during the day while you’re at work. You’ll start to notice that you’re a little harsher than your wife when disciplining the kids, and its really because she has to live with them all day, and disciplining relatively strictly just takes too damn much time.

And when you notice this, it will start to really bug you. It really bugged me. But the scary part is that even though it bugs you, and you do what you can to fight back against it, you eventually make your peace with it in some way. You find some middle ground between 2008’s we-are-equals couple philosophy and a 1950 Ozzie and Harriet-style family and you live with it.

I’m not saying it’s a good thing, I’m not saying it’s a right thing. I’m just saying that if you’re having a kid, it’s something you should probably be ready for.

A Daddyfesto Book Review: Mack Daddy, by Larry Bleidner

2008-03-11T00:59:00.016-04:00

MACK DADDY: Mastering Fatherhood Without Losing Your Style, Your Cool, or Your Mind (2006)

by Larry Bleidner

Per the back cover, Larry Bleidner is “a television producer and writer” who “lives in Los Angeles with his wife and young daughters.” He uses the term “MACK DADDY” as a compliment and he ALWAYS CAPITALIZES IT. The book cover proudly displays an expensive running stroller with fancy rims. So I guess I was on fair notice of what I should expect. Bleidner has certainly succeeded in writing the book on fatherhood that you would expect from an L.A.-based television producer who believes that not “losing your style” is appropriately of utmost concern for a new father.

Bleidner’s book covers the time from conception through the first six years of a child’s life, but doesn’t dwell on pregnancy or childbirth for long (Bleidner and his wife wrote a childbirth book published in 2002 and he apparently was out of bad material about that topic). Bleidner starts the book setting up a number of archetypes and giving faux quizzes to the reader to drive home the point that the archetypes all suck except one. The archetypes are: Daddy Distant, Mack Daddy, Lactating Daddy (beware the “man-o-pause” joke), Der Fuerher Daddy and Rubber-Stamp Daddy. I kept turning the pages trying to find the archetype that I wanted to be and ultimately had to check the front cover to remind myself what I was to meant to aspire to here. Bleidner then uses an informal, highly assured, cool guy, SoCal (and at times obnoxious, ranting and evangelistic) writing style, employing these archetypes periodically throughout the book in his attempt to provide fathers-to-be with practical and serious advice, with a comical touch. Thus, we have “Mackin’ Vacations” and “Mackalicious Dinin’ Out.” Etc. A heavy comical touch, I guess.

One major problem with MACK DADDY is the quality of the advice being given. Some of it is reasonable or even helpful, including an extended section on how to assemble / decorate a nursery, advice on buying a camera, a section on vacations with the kid, dropping them off at school. Certain of his pointers are nice: “Before you take a kid to task for bad behavior always consider first the two reasons to let bad behavior slide – fatigue and hunger." This is reasonable stuff.

But too much of Bleidner’s advice is hopelessly obvious: Libraries are good places for kids. Don’t leave a child with a stranger. When a doctor recommends surgery on your kid, get a second opinion. If you swear around your kids, the kids will start to swear. Wading through Bleidner’s many lengthy exhortations to the morons who might happen to have picked up his book gets a touch tedious.

This wouldn’t be so bad if you were wading through the tedium to get somewhere good, but most of the time you ultimately arrive at “advice” that’s just pathetic or wrongheaded. Bleidner describes a woman’s adoption and mocks the fact that she took “maternity leave” from work after the adoption (his quotation marks, not mine). Bleidner includes an extended anti-circumcision screed that compares it to female genital mutilation. Bleidner on women: “If [women] wrote the rules to baseball, anyone who stepped up to the plate would advance to second base just for having his shirt tucked in. Everyone would win, too (Except when it came to who had the biggest tits, best hair, nicest shoes/tennis bracelet/husband/boyfriend with the biggest wallet/job/cock … then they get competitive.)” So he’s clearly a real feminist. Bleidner rants about Ritalin in a section titled “When They Are Trying To Get Your Kid” and recommends that kids try yoga instead.

Even then, one piece of idiocy rises above the others. Early in the book Bleidner posits that there are two major pieces of advice that fathers need once they learn that their wife is pregnant, the second of which is “You are needed ... now more than ever.” Which is good and all, but he then explains that you are needed because your wife will be worried that motherhood will “ruin any possibility of [her] ever becoming a Laker Girl / Playmate / Victoria’s Secret model.” So at least we know that his wife had honest-to-god goals. Bleidner explains that your job as a father-to-be is to note to your wife all of the hot Hollywood models who have had kids (he actually names Cindy Crawford, Pamela Anderson and about 10 others). Bleidner concludes that these celebrities are “All moms. All smokin’. And of course, your wife is hotter than any of them.” And your job is to, apparently, assure your wife that these Hollywood actresses have blazed a trail that she too will follow.

What excellent advice. Mentioning to Daddyfesto’s wife – who of course is hotter than the hottest women in the world (how could anyone question that premise) – how Hollywood women have had kids and still look "smokin" is absolutely a winning strategy. There is nothing that a wife loves more than hearing about how hot Cindy Crawford is even though she has kids. MACK DADDY'S readers should let me know how this one works out for them.

But enough about advice.

There’s the comedic aspect as well. For example, there are at least 6 jokes about “Lactating Daddy” having breasts and/or breastmilk.

So comedy is covered.

Bleidner’s claim to live L.A. certainly seems confirmed in a number of ways. There is the use of certain terminology, including jing (money?), vines (clothes?), the “industry” (the movie/TV industry?), shredded (muscular?). Bleidner certainly complains like people from L.A., spending a little too much time on minor slights to fathers in the entertainment industry (i.e., Lifetime movies depict dads in a poor light! Boo hoo!) and playing the victim card in response (in light of Bleidner's claim on the back cover to be against "political correctness," the victim card is an odd choice).

Other things in the book are just odd. The book ends with a 4-page section that aspires to be a tear-jerker about giving your daughter away at a wedding. Per the back cover, Bleidner lives with his “young daughters” so I’m not sure what wellspring of experience he’s drawing upon there, unless he’s weekending in Utah and marrying off the little ones at age 11 or something.

Between Bleidner’s sheer idiocy, his ripping apart paper tigers and his seeing a mild annoyance, blowing it way out of proportion and wildly overreacting to it, he does have his moments. He shines in a few attacks on his Daddy Distant archetype. Bleidner’s love for his daughters truly and legitimately comes through in his writing, for example in an anecdote about treating a child’s knee-scrape at a park by filling your mouth at a drinking fountain and spraying the wound like an elephant. Bleidner implores the reader to help their kids “find their own bliss” and tells dads to introduce kids to all kinds of great stuff – and provides helpful examples of how to do it. Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in his advice is that all fathers need to give their children undivided and real attention (no radios in cars; don’t waste too much time on football) and truly engage them on their level with respect. In fact, in his finer moments, Bleidner moves you and starts to make you think that he knows what he’s talking about.

But not quite. Actually, fuck him. Bleidner got the opportunity to write a book and tell the world about his fatherhood experience and he used it to tell men to play I Spy with their kids and choose the next color by ogling the smallest miniskirt he passes in his car. Bleidner devotes several pages to implore fathers to work out and look good, so that the “hottie in marketing will take interest in you.” He devotes several pages whining about how women get baby showers and men get nothing and proposes the creation of a party for prospective fathers called the THUNDERSTORM (shower for women; thunderstorm for men, get it?).

This is what he thinks men want or need these days? A fucking baby shower for dads?

Look, ultimately, I don’t have much of a problem with Bleidner’s fathering techniques; when he focuses on interacting with his daughters, he doles out some decent advice. My problem is that when he relates to anyone in the world other than his daughters, he’s pretty clearly an obnoxious SOB that you wouldn’t want to spend 20 minutes with, much less 210 pages.

So most of the time, you’ll want to be doing the opposite of MACK DADDY.

Be a Daddy Mack and Kris-Kross MACK DADDY off your reading list.

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1 Star (out of 7)

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Daylight Savings Time Was Clearly Not Invented by a Father

2008-03-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

Spring Forward = Fuck, I’m never going to get these kids to go to sleep at bedtime.

Fall Back = Great, now they’ll wake me up at 6 a.m. on the weekends instead of 7 a.m.

I’m moving to Indiana or Arizona.

The Unbalanced Holy Trinity of Fake Creatures

2008-03-08T15:31:00.005-05:00

I am certainly a moralist, but even Daddyfesto is not someone who thinks that lying to your kids is never OK. In some cases, you gotta lie, and here in Christian lands, unless you’re an ass or aren't a Christian, one thing that you have to lie about is about the existence of the holy trinity of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. This is an uneven trinity if one ever existed. Most dads actually care about Santa Claus and the Christmas tradition. The Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, well: they just kinda suck away your money and time. Some moms like making the baskets; most dads could give a shit. I could handle a lifetime without peeps, personally.

But you will, of course, have no choice and be performing all three roles. It takes a few years to adapt to all this, but luckily your child at age 2 isn’t catching on to all that much when you put half a bag of candy into their Easter basket and leave the other half sitting on the counter. So there is room for a learning curve.

And there are advantages to your new role. At some point in the first few years you’ll be up late on Christmas Eve, maybe putting together a simple toy, maybe arranging a new set of blocks from Santa, hopefully with a nice buzz on halfway through a six pack of a fine Christmas Ale … and it will feel just about perfect to you. It will be one of those sublime moments of fatherhood (enjoy it, you only get two of these a year for each kid; savor the ones you get).

Five years later, when you have 3+ children and its Christmas Eve and you’re putting together complex toys (including affixing dozens of stupid crappy stickers onto plastic because your wife insists on “putting them together right” and apparently it’s not even cost effective to have those kindly Chinese workers who made the toy affix the stickers at the factory) until 3 a.m. when you count the presents under the tree and realize that you bought one child twice as many toys as the other, so you start trying to figure out what gifts you can downstream to the underbought child, but you’re not sure which gift is which, so you actually have to unwrap the gifts to figure out what they are and re-wrap them at 3:30 a.m., and then you realize that you engaged in insufficient battery purchases (children of the 1970s and 1980s would probably think having insufficient batteries is inexcusable, but it’s actually harder now, because a lot of newer toys actually include batteries, lulling you into a false sense of security), and so you run into the basement playroom and start digging into the kids’ old toys, battery scavenging, and you can’t even get the old toys fucking open because you're fucking hammered because those Christmas Ales are like 9% alcohol and you finished the whole fucking 6-pack it took so damn long getting those toys together, and you are smashing the old toys against the basement pipes to get the batteries out at 4 in the fucking morning … and then it will no longer be sublime.

Especially since, at 4 a.m., you have about 30 minutes before the kids – and thus likely you –are waking up.

With the Tooth Fairy … well, I like to say that the Tooth Fairy does a different continent every night, but no one knows his schedule. That’s why sometimes you get your money on the first night. Other times, it takes four or five nights until he comes. You don’t think he can do all the continents in one night, do you? That’s crazy. He doesn’t have reindeer or the ability to manipulate time or any of Santa’s other advantages.

After a few years pass and your kid gets to 7 or 8 or 9, another problem arises. The rumors start going around school about how Santa Claus isn’t real. You might hear your child talking to a friend about whether Santa is real. Worse, your child might put you on the spot and just ask. If that happens, there’s only one thing to do:

Sell the Easter Bunny down the fucking river.

I mean, let’s face it, out of the three members of the trinity, the Easter Bunny is by far the least plausible. Jewish people must be completely laughing at us behind our backs on this one. I mean, I've now been through 35 Easters and I’m not even clear about whether he’s a regular sized bunny or a giant man in a bunny costume kind of bunny, or whether he can talk, or how he gets into the house. Because there’s almost no Easter build-up -- it’s just BAM it’s Good Friday, it’s Easter, it’s over -- with no build-up, kids don’t dwell on it, no questions are asked, parents can wing it and get away with it. Hell, I make up something different every year (“it’s a green bunny, that’s neither male nor female” or “it flies through the air and kills silly Englishman”) until I am pinched by my wife.

Look, I understand fucking over the Easter Bunny may not seem cool. You might not be down with that. And let me assure you that I’m totally down with Carmello and don’t like snitching either. But we’re talking about protecting the big dog, here. We’re talking about Santa, and when Santa is threatened, it’s time to take action.

So just pull your child aside and explain to them that the Easter Bunny is completely made up, tell them it’s a sham that all adults are in on. Tell them that the child’s mother and you buy the candy and hide the eggs yourselves, then mock the entire idea of a giant bunny going all around the world. Then say: “The Easter Bunny is fake. Not like Santa Claus, who is completely and totally real. Make sure you don’t tell the other kids!”

This has two effects. Obviously you are building you own street cred, whereas the other kids’ dads aren’t telling them “the truth” about the Easter Bunny. More importantly, you have created your own little double agent to sow confusion within the child community. [In this regard, it might be best if some dads say the Easter Bunny died; other dads can say it’s actually Santa Claus in a bunny suit; coordination to maximize confusion can only help us here ... I might start a separate website on this … but I digress ...]

Screwing the Easter Bunny should buy you an extra year of Santa Claus that you didn’t deserve. It also means you never have to have a four pound rotting mound of chocolate in your house that your child only gnaws the ears off and which will melt on the first really hot day of summer. So it’s really a no lose situation.

A WORD OF WARNING

It is a Holy Trinity of Fake Creatures. Do not make the mistake of creating additional fake creatures to try to make it a quartet. I learned this the hard way (after originally thinking I was oh-so-clever) in creating the “Starburst Monster.”

The Starburst Monster appeared in two ways. First, if a child were to ponder and consider the very existence of the Starburst Monster and then throw a nickel into a fountain – any fountain in the lower 48 -- a pack of Starburst would fall magically from the sky (let’s just say that a child concentrating on getting a coin into a fountain isn’t paying much attention to what you’re doing in your back pocket). If we didn’t have a pack of Starburst on us, if my daughter asked for change, I showed her what I had and just said “that’s not a nickel,” even if it was a nickel. (For a while my child thought there was a coin called a “fraggle” but other than that, no harm, no foul.)

Second, the Starburst Monster would hide packs of Starburst in ridiculous places – in hoods of sweatshirts, in letters and even (in an inspired stroke, if I do say so myself) inside the child’s sippy cup full of water – and then call on the phone and, utilizing a mysterious gravelly voice, tell the child to look in the place for the pack of Starburst. Oddly his calls seemed to coincide with my trips to the bathroom.

This worked well until it all of a sudden didn’t. When my daughter explained the “Starburst Monster” to other adults who laughed and then said “did you make that up?” and she got a tad upset. The Starburst Monster was one subject in a parent-teacher conference at school. She was a tad messianic about the Starburst Monster, and her friends – even in preschool – thought she was a fucking idiot. Once my daughter learned the names of the coins and knew what a nickel was (and clearly she was incentivized to learn this), I had to be carrying Starburst on my person (or make sure I had no change at all) every time we were near a fountain. When I had no change, eventually my daughter figured out to say “well lets buy something and get a nickel in change that way” and I knew I was totally screwed. So the Starburst Monster hasn’t visited in 2+ years and I’m trying to kill him off but he’s not dying an easy death. Every now and again my daughter questions why he doesn’t visit anymore.

So play it safe. Keep it easy on yourself. The trinity is hard enough to manage.

Toilet Training

2008-03-05T21:04:00.002-05:00

Toilet training? Two words: woman’s work. This may be the last frontier in which sexism needs to be kept alive and well.

Don’t be bothering with toilet training. Your wife may think you should be involved, however; so tell your wife that the diaper budget will become the shoe budget once the kid is potty trained and she’ll have them pissing in a toilet before their first birthday. OK, that’s sexist too. But it might work, and you should be willing to risk sexism and many other awful things if it gets you out of toilet training. If the show gambit is somewhat ineffective, have your parents fake an illness or something during potty training and go live at your parents’ house for three months. Take a business trip. Get out now!

DO ANYTHING TO AVOID POTTY TRAINING.

Many of you guys will think you can handle this. You’ll think “hell, I change diapers.” You think that you’ve developed an immunity to being grossed out by changing diapers other than the worst poo bombs; even in the man-poo stage, you’ve learned to just grin and bear it. You think that nothing phases you. To you, it’s as if it is not even real shit (and I mean actual poop). Within the confines of the diaper, to you, it’s a completely different thing than real, actual human feces.

But what seems fake and manageable in a diaper becomes all too real and takes on a life of its own out of the diaper. When it is on the floor, or smeared over the toilet seat, or running down your child’s leg or your wrist or – just the worst – balled up in their underwear … then there is no mistaking it. It’s shit. The long semi-hypnotic state you’ve been able to manage that has allowed you to change diaper for two years comes crashing to an end, and you realize that what you are dealing with is simply shit. Human feces, plain and simple.

If you’re considering getting involved in the toilet training, sit back for a moment and think to yourself what you will do when your kid starts going in the pot most of the time, so you reward him with no diapers, and you’re at the mall one day and your kid shits his pants (and I’m taking it easy on you by letting it be your son that shits his pants in this little thought experiment). And let’s say you (oops) have no change of clothes with you. Even if you make it to the mall bathroom, how do you pull his pants down without the shit falling out all over place? If it falls out on the floor, what do you do? Can you leave it there? Should you kick it behind the toilet with your shoe? How do you clean your shoe? What if you accidentally kick it under a stall divider into Larry Craig’s stall and he mistakes the signal? If your son is sitting on the toilet with his pants on (these are his pants which are full of shit), and you are inching his pants down, how do you get the shit (and I mean actual poop) out of the pants? If he’s screaming, in a stall in a public men’s restroom, because he doesn’t like how the smushed up shit feels up against his body, how will you quiet him down? Once you get the balled-up lumps of shit into the toilet (normally by poking your finger on the clean side of the underwear and trying to knock it out and propel it through the air into the toilet (don’t overshoot!); a high stakes version of one of those wooden handheld labyrinth games where you try to navigate the ball through the maze past all of the holes) and clean him up, what do you do with the underwear? If you said “throw it away” do you realize that you’d probably have to buy 20 extra pairs of underwear, because this isn’t just going to happen once? If you have a newborn kid, you probably have the dirty diaper pail in your house yards and yards away from anything important to you. If you have a son being potty trained, it’s almost guaranteed that your wife is taking your regular clothes and mixing them in the laundry with your son’s shit and piss-stained clothes – particularly when she’s pissed off at you.

Look, the fact of the matter is that you want no part of this. I refuse to be in the same room as my children for at least 6 months after potty training commences.

You need to join the military and get your ass to Afghanistan or get assigned to the Asian division of your company and generally just be out of the country for approximately a 6-month period before and after potty training is to occur. Just get the fuck out of town. Trust me on this one.

Your Wife, At Home, During the First Twelve Weeks

2008-03-02T23:38:00.004-05:00

Once upon a time (i.e., the day before your kid was born and each day before that (i.e., a million years ago)), you and your wife lived similar lives. You likely were both working, a bustle of activity at home in the morning, commuting to and from work, packing lunches or choosing where to eat out for lunch, both having to shop for work clothes, both dealing with office or work politics, maybe both using email at work and being connected to the internet. Hitting a happy hour or the gym after work. You had a wealth of common experience to share with your wife. Common understandings. In many ways, you were the vision of the 1960’s women’s movement. You were equals in the eyes of society and equals in your relationship, and you liked it that way.

Every man whose wife chooses to stay home with the kids will have a time when he calls his wife and explains that he is coming home from work. “See you in 10 minutes honey.” And he will get in his car and drive home, but before he gets into his driveway, he’ll see an oddity in front of his house. It is his wife, holding his child. And he’ll wonder what she’s doing. She isn’t gardening. She isn’t talking to anyone. She isn’t going for a walk. She isn’t getting the mail.

What she is doing is this: she is just standing there, doing nothing, waiting for him to get home. This is the same independent woman who (in what feels like another completely different lifetime) used to insist on paying for her own beers and who can drive a stick shift better than him. This is the same capable, independent woman that he fell in love with, and, here, in this place, she’s so desperate and frazzled that she’s hanging out on the curb so she will notice his arrival home from work 20 seconds earlier than she otherwise would. And she will not look good.

After you go back to work after a week or two, like most men, your wife will likely stay home for the first 12 weeks at least; maybe even longer these days. And your wife might end up staying home for good. Either way, while she’s home, this is her life: she doesn't talk to practically any adult all day long (except for the number of calls to you at work, which will double at least). She shops at the drug store during business hours when there’s nobody else there. She goes for meandering walks before lunch with no destination and no time limit and passes playgrounds where kids are having recess (when is the last time you saw a playground with kids on it at recess during a schoolday?). She now has access to a TV during the day, when TV is really, really bad, like way worse than Friday night even. And she might start watching some of those really bad shows … admittedly, there isn’t much to do with a baby on your teat, or while holding a bottle for it… if you stayed home, you’d feed with a bottle in one hand and flip to Sportscenter with the remote with the other. But her shows are called Oprah and Dr. Phil. And because your wife doesn’t have people to talk to, if you were a fly on the wall, you might see her actually speaking to Oprah and Dr. Phil,, even though you are reasonably sure (but maybe not completely sure) that she realizes that they are not really in her living room. And now, your wife, with whom you used to have minor differences because you liked to have lunch at Arby’s once a week, while she preferred Au Bon Pain, is now officially living on a different planet from you. She lives on the planet full of people that actually talk to the screen when Oprah is on. She will start to obsess about things like where the pacifier is. She will cry because another baby’s mom slighted her by asking if your baby is smiling yet, when he isn’t. She will cry because, at times, she fucking hates being a mother. She will have all kinds of reactions that seem foreign to you. You might ultimately understand them, after multiple explanations, but you’ll never really be completely on the same page anymore.

I would like to tell you what to do about this, how to address this, but there’s just nothing to say. If your wife stays home, you and your wife are going to be living different lives now.

And you probably are going to be living different kinds of lives even if she doesn’t stay home.

You Got the Name: Now What?

2008-02-29T00:03:00.004-05:00

Earlier I wrote about choosing a name for your baby. Some commenters noted some aspects of what to do once a name has been chosen that need to be addressed.

Particularly this: after you've (hopefully) followed Daddyfesto's rules and you’ve chosen your baby’s name, the next serious question you’re faced with is whether to tell other people about the name. There are two schools of thought here.

The first school of thought is the “dibs” / “no snakes” school of thought. In this school of thought, baby names are like seats in a crowded college apartment: you gotta call it to reserve it. By announcing the baby name widely and loudly to all of your friends, you put everyone on notice that this is your name and that if anyone stole it for their own baby, the wrath of God (a/k/a the wrath of your pregnant wife) would be unleashed upon them. This school of thought is most likely to be useful if you have a number of friends that are also pregnant, particularly if they are farther along in the pregnancy than you.

But, ultimately, for most people, this way of thinking is probably silly. These days, people choose names for their babies like “Ronan” and “Qdoba” or are spelling names in crazy Irish ways with all kinds of extra vowels. People are getting all trendy with the names. So if you’re choosing a weird one, most of your friends and acquaintances are going to think the name you choose for your kid is fucking retarded. By calling dibs on the name, you’re only announcing that you think that the retarded name you’ve chosen is actually so amazingly cool that people might steal it. So it might actually be better to just keep your head down on this one.

The second school of thought is the “keep it to yourself” school of thought. This school is largely pragmatic. People from this school recognize that, before the baby is born, other people think that they have a right to express their opinion about names. I mean: more people than you realize are willing to say, after you tell them the proposed name, “that’s a stupid-ass name.” The fact that the baby isn’t born yet seems to make people think that they have license to say whatever they want about the name and can be rude. And so then when you name your kid the name anyway, other people feel really stupid and it’s very awkward. And when you get drunk with them, your wife will bring it up.

Living with a few awkward moments with most people would be OK, but, frankly, the primary people that are going to tell you what they honestly think about a planned baby name are your mother and your mother-in-law. And so living with even more awkwardness in that relationship might actually be a problem. The best way to fix this problem is to have your wife create and send the baby announcements prior to the child’s actual birth, instead of after the birth, as is presently the custom:

“Jhohhny Rotten Jablonski is due to be born around November 2, 2007 and is supposed to be 9 pounds or something ridiculously big like that, so labor is going to suck. He better be born by November 3, or I’m cutting myself open and dragging him out and I will also give him less love throughout his first 18 years. Do you hear me Jhohhny? If you don’t like the name, too fucking bad, we aren’t changing it, so start pretending like you like it pronto."

The best thing about this kind of baby announcement is that it is in writing and final, so it doesn't invite comment, and as long as your mother and mother in law receive it, no one else has to. So give those two the announcement, blame it on the wife's pregnancy hormones, maybe call dibs on the name solely to other pregnant moms and zip your lip with everyone else and tell them you’re still on the “M’s” in the baby name book and won’t have a decision until the date prior. Easy as pie.