April 30, 2008

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


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.

April 27, 2008

Socialization of Your Children

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).

April 25, 2008

Parentricity Update

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

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.

April 20, 2008

Children as Motivational Tools

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.

April 16, 2008

1 + 1 = 0

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.

April 13, 2008

Fatherhumor

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).

April 8, 2008

Beautiful Absurdities: The P Sign

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.)

April 5, 2008

Chasing Kids With Lawnmowers

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.

April 4, 2008

Parentricity

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.

April 3, 2008

Sometimes Google is a Wonderful Thing

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.

April 1, 2008

Pathetic Nepotism

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.