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Julie over at a little pregnant has compiled an impressive list of blogs about infertility, adoption, and parenting. She admits the parenting portion is a work in progress—and we should work to get a few more dads on there—but it’s still a far better digest than Kinja could (or would) ever put together.
UPDATE: Julie has already added a few more sites to her parenting section. If you know of any others, click on over and send her an e-mail.
On our way to swim class this morning, Robert and I walked past Sesame Street's Luis, who was emerging onto First Avenue from Stuyvesant Town. It took me a while to place his face, since it appears that the makeup wizards over at CTW are earning their money. In person, the man looks a bit like Count Chocula.
Astute LOD spelunkers have noticed that I’m migrating some June entries over from the old site, which is deader than a duffel bag of dearly departed doornails. I’m especially curious if anyone out there is as PO’d as I am about Crayola’s soul-stifling Mess-Free Color WonderTM system, which we mock on a regular basis. (“You want to force my son to draw a flower, eh? Well, let’s just see what MR. SHARPIE has to say about that! Mwah-ha-ha!!)
Fight the power, etc.
And speaking of power, I’d like you all to know that I was hand-washing a 16-oz. tumbler this morning when I placed my hand inside, clenched my fist to squeeze some soap out of the sponge, and shattered the glass, sending shards all over the sink. As I wiped the blood off my knuckles, I briefly considered a name change to Laidóff ver Laidóffsson.
Lately, Robert has become so dissatisfied with prosaic conversations about crayons and poop that he’s begun directing his own scripts.
He [picking up his harmonica]: Can you lie down and go to sleep?
Me: Boy, am I tired! *snore*
He: [shrill harmonica blast]
Me [sitting bolt upright]: Whoa!
He: Can you say, “What happened”?
Me: What happened?
He: I blew a song and it woke you up! That’s what happened!
Me: Wow! You sure did!
He: Can you go to sleep again?
We shot this scene about 200 times. The kid makes Scorsese look like a slacker.
Irony has taken a beating over the years. Alanis Morissette confused it with bad luck. Post-modernism, heralding the End of Earnestness, confused it with insincerity. September 11 nearly killed it altogether. But it’s back, baby, and not just because 1) media wags like to add “meta-” to everything, and 2) hipster kitsch-diggers are slumming on over to the new Brooklyn Target and acting all disaffected toward the mass-produced stuff we parents buy by the cubic yard.
In truth, the purest sense of irony—of effecting the exact opposite of what you want—never left us. It lives on through our children.
Robert and I will be getting ready to go out and meet Mama, for example, and the boy will strip himself and run around wailing for Mama, unaware that his little nudie meltdown is delaying what he so dearly desires. He attempts to curry favor from our cat by trying to yank its tail off. He likes to help us clean by slapping dust bunnies around the house with the dustbroom.
Then there’s the wet sofa cushion that greeted me when I came home from class the other night. My wife explained that Robert was watching the Order of the Toileteers (part of the Bear in the Blue House DVD, which played a crucial role in his potty training), when he came over to her and admitted he’d had an accident. That’s right: the DVD that inspired him not to pee his pants mesmerized him so much that he peed his pants.
So that's ironic. (I really do think.) If we could write a whiny song about it, we could pay for college.
I know I shouldn’t make this blog into a litany of Darling Things My Offspring Does, but lately I can’t help it. I’ve reached the point where I want to freeze-dry this kid, to introduce trace amounts of liquid nitrogen into his growth hormones, and keep RMF Version 2.4 in our lives for as long as possible. He’s curious, effusive, conversational, and out of diapers. Even when he’s driving us nuts with his constant boundary testing (refusing to stay in his new big-boy bed, for example), he’s still great company.
(I recently mentioned these feelings to a Certain Anonymous Relative, and the response was “Enjoy it now, because it only gets worse.” And not in that kids-are-a-chore-but-don’t-you-just-love-’em sort of way. The tone was earnest and genuinely without mirth. This is why I have more trouble relating to this person with each passing day. More as this story develops.)
Anyway, to the point: My wife was in the kitchen the other day when Robert pranced in from the living room pantless and announced he had made “a ‘C’ and a little round ball.” Naturally, she was a little perplexed, so she came to investigate and found two masses in his potty that were shaped as advertised. An exclamation point curled into its rounded confines.
The next day, it was my turn to witness Robert get off his potty and shout, “I made a mountain!” And he wasn’t wrong about that, either.
It seems Robert has chosen to pursue the aesthetic limits of his new talent—just the thing to emphasize if we were inclined to interview at some of these pompous Manhattan pre-schools. We could arrive dressed to the nines, trade some genteel banter, and then showcase Robert’s creativity and cognitive prowess with a series of still-life turds, each with artistic annotation. I don’t know if they’d like it, but I know that it’s art.
If a train leaves Chicago at 11 a.m. and heads westward at an average rate of 55 miles per hour, and a second train leaves Billings, Montana, at 2 p.m. and heads eastward at an average rate of 75 miles per hour, which of the following did Robert say at the dinner table with his mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother in audience?
I. “Pee comes from the tip!”
II. “I farted!”
III. “Girls have vulvas, and ladies have vulvas also!”
(A) I only
(B) II only
(C) I and II only
(D) I and III only
(E) Holy crap, he said all three.
Answer: (D). He has announced his flatulence often, but in this case, he thought the shock value of I and III was more than sufficient.
Just got off the phone with the little man, who's about to finish lunch with Mama and the grandparents and then skitter upstairs for his nap. He signed off thus:
“I love you too, and I am eating salami and I am at Great Grandma’s house, and I will fly back soon too see you, and I am at Great Grandma’s house and I am eating salami right now.”
I miss him all to pieces.
You know what the dark underbelly of potty training is? Constant trips to the can. Seriously. The kid is so enamored of the process that he’s convinced he has to pee every 20 minutes. We’re inclined to humor him during this crucial transitional period, so we alternate chaperoning him while he washes his hands, strips, piddles, slams the seat, flushes, forgets to pull his pants up, and waddles back to the sink. It was charming the first 3,000 times. Then, not so much.
The airplane toilet was a little too high for him, so I had to give him a hoist. In doing so, my clip-on shades, which were hooked in the neck of my T-shirt, fell into the bowl and rightdown the spout. After Robert peed on them (like I had a choice), I thrust my hand down into the tiny aperture and barely grazed them with my middle finger. They’re still there! Alive! They haven’t yet been formed into a bluish gel-cube and dumped into a Pennsyltucky sorghum field!
My little squirrel brain sprang into action, thinking of ways to fish them out. A wire coat hanger. A plastic fork. Maybe my wife’s knitting needl—
Flush.
A devout completist, Robert pushed the button I had ironically just taught him to use and effectively put the whole sad business behind us. And I spent the rest of the day seething and squinting.
What’s the truest form of vacation for the parents of a two-year-old predawn commando? Having lots of family to help keep pace with the child’s unflagging energy. Up at first light, you say? Why not go downstairs and show Grandma your new trucks while Mama and Daddy wrap themselves around each other and sleep in?
The three of us spent a relaxing week with my wife’s family, swimming in and boating on the Mississippi, and I’ve come back alone to attend a class at Fordham. And when my week as a bachelor grad student officially began, the first order of business—OK, the second, after I bought some beer—was to clear all of Robert’s pooparatus (two potties, booster seat, stepstool) out of our voting-booth–sized bathroom. Thus, Daddy will greet the return of family life with open arms and unbruised toes.
While I’m here alone, I have been charged to dismantle Robert’s changing table and crib, for now that the boy is about to reach the Underpants at the End of the Rainbow, we’re getting him a big-boy bed. We haven’t changed a poopy diaper in weeks, and his “sleep-diapers” come off him almost bone dry. It’s amazing. My wife told me about the mystical powers of her grandmother’s house, where many cousins have arrived filling their pants and left brandishing a stack of diapers they no longer needed. The testimonials are impressive, but I’m not entirely convinced.
In my view, Robert has espoused his toilet training mostly for the ancillary thrills of 1) walking around with an unfurnished basement in front of company, 2) washing his hands about five times, before and after he goes, 3) slamming the toilet seat down, and 4) flushing with unbridled relish. These are great perks, but the alacrity of No. 3, and its proximity to his little privates, gives me the jitters. Every time he reaches for the lid, I say a little prayer for my grandchildren.
