Songs That Didn't Make the Top 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)