I'm going to be selfish, and that's OK.

I had an "I'm a bad, selfish dad" moment on the walk home from dropping Theo at his 2-morning-per-week school.

It was supposed to be school pictures, but because they take the pics outside and the weather was threatening, we found out when we arrived that they rescheduled. Then it hits me ... they rescheduled when kid and I will be on a roadtrip west for him to spend time with Grandma and Grandpa while I get a long weekend of R&R and booze with college buddies.

In addition, I realized that this Monday is Columbus Day, and therefore he'll be missing school for two full weeks out of this month when it's all said and done.

So on my walk home, I started wondering to myself, is it really fair of me to make him miss so much school just because I want some time to myself and I don't like to fly? He loves going to school, we're paying for it, and the class is so small that he'll probably be missed by the other kids. We already missed a week last month so I could help some friends while one of them had surgery.

Plus I was really looking forward to having the school pictures of him. I love the shirt he was wearing and can't get enough pictures of him in it. I started thinking, maybe I can still get a flight for that afternoon AFTER school. Heck, that way he'd only have to miss one day, because I could get home quicker than we could driving. And sure, It would cost a whole lot more than the car trip will, but why waste the day and a half in the car, when he could have that time to be with his friends... and ... and ... and...

And then it hit me: WHAT ON EARTH AM I THINKING??? When exactly did I lose my fucking mind and turn into the guilt-ridden parent who can't keep the needs of his family versus the needs of the individuals in the family in the proper perspective?

HE'S TWO. HE'S TWO. HE'S TWO! He goes to school SIX HOURS a week and mostly it's just playtime. I myself have one or two memories, tops, from that early in my life and from talking to other folks I suspect I'm above average in that department. If his two-year-old, two-day-per-week preschool ends up being a long-treasured part of his life or mine, then that isn't cute or sentimental, THAT IS A PROBLEM.

Plus, as a two-year-old, he's still about the most perfectly selfish being on Earth. He doesn't know "fair" any better than he knows how to take a crap in the toilet. I'm the one in charge of enforcing "fair" around here, and it isn't very fair that it's been two years since I had a break from him of more than a few hours.

He'll never know he missed a thing, and even if he does remember, he should remember that his primary role model wanted to do something other than cook, clean and read Dr. Seuss all day, every day, for months at a time.

So I'm going to be selfish and not apologize. I'll take a picture of him in his cute shirt when he gets home from school today.

Proof that a year has passed

Daddy is finally getting motivated enough to remove the infant seat and install the toddler car seat in Otto the car. He's probably borderline on the weight limit, but it's been very hard for me to give up the convenience of carrying the seat back and forth. It's also been nice to have a seat that easily straps into other people's cars when we're out visiting. It's been on plane and car from Chicago to Mississippi to New York to Virginia.

But we have the new seat and it's ready to go, so it's probably going to be installed this afternoon. To mark the occasion, I took a couple photos of Theo yesterday after his last ride in the infant seat.

For comparison, here he is just less than a year ago, coming home from the hospital, his first trip in the seat:



I had to check the manual to make sure it was rated for a kid who weighed just a tad over 5 lb at the time.

Here he is yesterday, after his last ride in the seat. He may take a while to get used to the new one, but I'm guessing he'll be more comfortable:

A YEAR? Says who?

Theo is officially a year old today, although with Ruth's work schedule we're not going to do any celebrating until the weekend, and even that will be extremely low-key. First birthdays are usually about adults getting together to watch a kid who hasn't quite figured out how to use his hands yet smear frosting all over his face. Why have a huge party when the guest of honor doesn't quite know what's going on?

Still, we made the day as special as we could, starting with swim class (his favorite time of the week), then lunch with his Mommy, and finally a late afternoon walk strapped to Daddy's chest. He's not quite sure what to make of his new jogging stroller yet (a post all its own, maybe later this week), so I think most of our walks will still use the Moby wrap and for now the stroller will be used mainly for Daddy's exercise and times when I just don't feel like carrying 20+ extra pounds.

Having a year behind us has reinforced all the contradictory thoughts that come with being parents. On the one hand, he's definitely not much of a baby anymore, and we're sad to see the trappings and rituals of baby-hood fall away.

On the other hand, most of what we're losing was annoying, inconvenient or both at the time -- would we really want to spend the rest of our lives with a helpless, noisy 20 pound ball of squirm who never lets us have a full night's sleep, can only speak in screams and needs us to wipe his ass 5 times a day? (Note that this is also a handy list of why we own cats rather than dogs.) So thank goodness he's growing up -- Come to think of it, why isn't he in college yet?

One thing the family accountant is VERY happy to be done with is $20 a week worth of POWDERED MILK. We'll be buying a lot more full-fat cow juice than we ever have before, but even at close to $4 a gallon for non-organic regular we're coming out WAY ahead.

The things we want to remember about having a one-year old? The excited yelp and madcap crawl to the front door when Mommy comes home. The huge grin he gives to anyone we meet who smiles at him. The "AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH" noise he makes to test the echoes in an enclosed space. The way he crawls up to our shoulders and gives us a hug before we put him in his crib at bedtime. The way he smiles at me when I put him down for a nap, right before the cry of protest when he realizes that I'm going to darken the room. The singsong noises when he first wakes up in the morning, and the huge smile we get when we pick him up out of the crib.

By the way, kid: You're not getting my cell phone or my laptop anytime soon. Get over this now and life will get easier for both of us...

Another reason to drive

I'm not a fan of the current system of air traveler screening, but because I assume it's not going anywhere, the new passenger classification system being tested in airports by TSA seems to be a good idea. Average time in line of five minutes? Why, I can be oppressed and harassed in half the time! Sign me up!

A good idea, that is, until I read the details, which include a "family line."

I'd happily use the line if we were "That Family" -- the exhausted folks who look like a herd of urban homeless carrying their baby while using a stroller as a shopping cart, kids in hard-to-remove shoes running every which way, the two bags apiece full of the mountain of Stuff they can't possibly be without for a two hour flight.

Our family, on the other hand puts a premium on having LESS STUFF, and we're experienced travelers to boot. When we get to the airport, our dangerously radical LESS STUFF policy makes it easy to get through security and around the terminal. So after we check our suitcase you'll see us with just two small bags, a car seat and baby Theo strapped to Daddy's chest. Metal items and outerwear are packed away before we approach security and the adults are wearing sandals. (Yes James, I'm that guy in the airport wearing navy blue Crocs. I'm also a 6'3" 225lb man with a baby strapped to his chest, so questions about my dignity have already been answered.)

So now when we reach the airport, we'll be funneled into the "family lane" along with the other unfortunate breeders that we've spent every airport visit until now trying to avoid. It might feel like special treatment for all those folks who seem to think they're special for figuring out how to reproduce, but we will be the rare travelers whose time in security probably increases. Don't even get me started on what that lane will look like around the family travel holidays.

We could buck the system, be the rebels who try to skip the family lane and mingle with the regular travelers; but we know from previous experiences with eschewing so-called "family friendly" accommodations that it wouldn't be worth the dirty looks and "helpful suggestions." I can even predict what will be said...

Sir, the family lane is right over there.

Sir, next time you'd probably be more comfortable over in the family lane.

Oh, look who is too special for the family lane.

Sir, I asked you to remove your shoes, not your pants.

They're just so picky.

If you're thinking I'm trying really hard to come up with a rationale for not flying anymore, you'd be right. I could barely justify the mental and financial costs of air travel when it was just me and Ruth -- now that Theo is along for the ride and such a generally easygoing traveler, I'm hoping it will be a while before you find me back in the air.

I'm sorry if I didn't seem to have a point here, but the best solution for writer's block is to write what's in my head anyway, no matter how inane. I don't normally publish "writer's block" posts but it seemed like such a waste to write all this and not share it...

"...if we lived in Grand Theft Auto-ville..."

I linked her blog post in my reading list, but for those of you who might ignore those links, I wanted to reinforce that you need to read Lenore Skenazy's column "Here's your MetroCard, kid."

As I told her, I hope that I show the same composure, good sense and trust in my child as our kids grow up.

Of course, her parenting heresy brings out the nannies, ninnies and meddlers.

In a way, it's comforting to know there are so many paranoid parents out there. The children who learn independence and how to push their boundaries will be the leaders and innovators of the future; They're going to need plenty of worker bees who value security and dependence while harboring an unhealthy fear of the unknown. Today's parents are ensuring a steady supply of the worker bees far into the future...

For everyone who complains I've had it too easy

If this post is disjointed, you'll have to forgive me. I haven't been this short on sleep in a while.

Friday morning started like many others -- I congratulated myself for waking up before my Theo-brand alarm, only to hear him start to rouse before I'd even made it to the coffee pot. Still, complaining that he didn't give me any morning time to myself would be futile as well as ungrateful on my part, because the last few weeks he has been letting me have 8 hours of sleep in a row.

I grab formula for Theo, coffee for Daddy and we head to the couch. Theo pushed the bottle away with 3-4oz left in the bottom. This is all too normal for him; if nothing else, Spud has taught his miserly Daddy not to get upset over wasting powdered milk.

In a not-so-normal move, the moment I turned him around for a burp, he deposited all the formula and a few chunks of last night's dinner square in my lap.

"Huh," I said to him. I was too shocked to come up with anything else. But he's puked before, so following standard procedure I changed our clothes and took him downstairs to see if he was hungry.

All the parents out there with extensive puke-related experience are going to notice all the mistakes I made from this point on. Please just laugh at me amongst yourselves and resist the urge to tell me about my shortcomings in the comments, because I already feel like crap and have a ceiling-high pile of laundry here reminding me of my mistakes...

Suffice to say the rest of the day was a blur of puking, changing clothes and trying to get something to stay in his stomach. The craziest part was, he wasn't bothered at all by any of this. He would just puke, look at me, and grin from ear to ear, then go back to whatever he'd been interested in before. On the plus side, he was smart enough not to pick up stomach contents and use them as hair product.

After a couple more episodes of "Daddy didn't like that shirt anyway," Mommy brought home some pediatric kool-aid at lunchtime, which helped a lot. [NOTE: In an attempt to avoid one registered trademark, I just fell back on another. Duuuuuurrrrrr, screw it.]

The pedialyte and some rice cereal stayed down all of the afternoon, which calmed the little voice inside my head that was encouraging me to call the doctor before the clinic closed while also inspiring me to add a little bit of formula powder to the same formulation at dinnertime. Oops. Dinner and lunch go everywhere, and now the clinic is closed. No problem, we'll just put something back in his stomach, right?

So after yet another cleanup, I put him to bed with a few sips of pedialyte and a couple swallows of rice cereal. [Yeah, remember what I said above about realizing now that I was dumb? Feel free to laugh.]

I sent Ruth off to watch the season premiere of BSG with some friends, and sat down to calm my own stomach (When did I eat last? who knows) with a couple black bean tacos and some instant noodles.

...And 10 minutes after finishing, realized that those WEREN'T hunger pangs in my stomach. After doing my best imitation of Theo (except I did it over the toilet! yay me!), I was actually OVERJOYED. "Oh thank goodness this has probably just been a stomach bug!" Parent logic is like that. So I went to bed a little before 9, and thank goodness spud slept straight through, so neither of us woke up until after 8.

Theo woke up acting perfectly normal -- happy to see me, but STARVING. Still not noticing the pattern from yesterday, I gave him a full bottle. Then a half-hour later, as normal, I fed him some breakfast, sticking with the pedialyte and cereal.

This time, most of it ended up on my shirt, until I put him down in his crib to clean myself up, when he went Vesuvius all over his sheet and anything else within a couple feet. An archaeologist could have found everything he ate that morning, plus cereal from the night before.

Then the kid pretty much went catatonic, lethargic, staring-off-into-space. I called the clinic weekend number, confirmed that I'd been a dumb-ass and received their blessing to take spud to the ER, because the clinic can't do forced rehydration.

Luckily we're only about a 10 minute drive from the hospital. Even though the kid clearly wasn't acting like himself at this point, I was never really worried. I could tell he wasn't dangerously dehydrated, but I knew if we didn't get him looked at and get some expert input into my mistakes, he could get there.

The ER went as well as I could've possibly hoped. We'd brought homework and a computer and beverages, girding ourselves for the "hurry up and wait," but ended up being there less than 90 minutes, with no long waits to speak of. We gave him a couple oz of pedialyte in the waiting room when he got grumpy, which perked him up quite a bit.

He never did smile at the doctor or triage nurse, but I wouldn't have big grins for a lady shoving a glass tube into my rectum either. Just not my kink.

The Doc and nurses reassured us that we'd done the right thing, that dehydrated babies are a bad thing and we shouldn't hesitate to call or bring him back if he didn't seem to get better.

They also made me realize, without saying so directly, that what DIDN'T help the situation was Daddy's paranoia that the kid would somehow starve to death in a matter of hours without calories in his tummy. For almost 11 months my world had revolved around getting every possible calorie into this little person's mouth -- now I'm supposed to just STOP? Until I heard it from the doctor and read it in the instructions, it seemed like crazy talk.

Since he'd already kept 2-3 oz of pedialyte down for an hour, we were at least able to skip the "feed him with an eyedropper" stage. The rest of the afternoon was spent filling a bottle with 2 oz of pedialyte every 30 minutes and giving it to a hungry boy, who would spend the following 30 minutes crying and fussing because he was still hungry. NOT good for Daddy's psyche, but I administered plenty of hugs and didn't budge. Midway through the afternoon he grinned at me, back to his old self and started playing on his own like nothing had happened.

By bedtime we were able to give him just a little bit of very diluted formula, a process we repeated through the night. He's been getting me up a lot the last couple nights to put something in his empty stomach, but he's still not as hungry as normal (and I now know better than to push it).

If he's not back to normal by tomorrow, there will be a trip to the pediatrician, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Sigh. It's 11:30. I should eat some breakfast.

[UPDATE: At James's suggestion, I'm posting a photo. This one is from Saturday afternoon but it's still an accurate portrayal of our moods this morning.]

A not-so-modest proposal

Public Health Risk Seen as Parents Reject Vaccines -- NY Times

I've read a bit of anti-vaccine propaganda as I was researching cloth diapers and baby carriers. I also got to read about the oft-related practices of "family bed" co-sleeping and why your baby needs to nurse until they enter high school, but that stuff doesn't really affect me or my kids, so to each their own and the less said about it the better; it is breakfast time after all.

So having read what these parents have to say in their own words, when I read articles like this, I just think to myself that I'd rather hang out with flat-earthers or evolution deniers, who are at least more up-front about hating science, the enlightenment, the expansion of knowledge and the whole idea that humans can make the world better for themselves.

In fact, would it be so bad to clear out a big island somewhere like Madagascar, and dump both groups in caves with some lit torches and pointed sticks? Maybe in a few thousand years, when the survivors have invented seagoing vessels, they'll be equipped to rejoin the rest of us.

The current residents of Madagascar? We can move them to the suburbs to take the nice houses and good jobs left behind by these stone-age throwbacks. I'm guessing they'd actually appreciate them.

His job is "bringing the cute" and he's good at it

Sure I'm hip. Watch how I wipe baby puke off my chest.

Found via FARK, the Amazon "Car Lust" blog defends the minivan.

The minivan gets a bad rap in this country--it is almost universally reviled as a symbol of dweebish parenthood and mindless suburbia, a scarlet letter attached to soccer moms' chests...Okay, so minivans are universally scorned. But why? What are the minivan's crimes? The only crime I can see is that it's too good at its job.

Having lovingly imagined himself a premise with absolutely no basis in reality -- calling it a strawman would be an insult to straw -- the author mounts a spirited defense of a vehicle which, judging by Target parking lots everywhere, needs absolutely no defense at all.

In the minivan's intended market of families with children, there is no stigma attached to minivans whatsoever -- it's practically expected that you will add this exalted member of the family before your second child arrives. Every option from the navigation system to the number of cupholders are discussed by bragging fathers who embrace the minivan with no less reverence than they would their bachelor muscle car. Mothers pore over safety ratings, making sure all their friends know that not even a speeding locomotive could harm their little miracles. I have three close friends in the "Odyssey Club" and have been mocked for not buying a minivan.

"Universally scorned?" Only in the author's hometown of DesperateForABlogPostville.

I've taken my share of shots at minivans as totems of the suburban wasteland, but we still considered buying one, because the family is only getting bigger from here. After all, I'm sarcastic and desperate for jokes -- not a moron.

We've rejected the minivan not to maintain our mythical hipster cred, but because we're frugal, and it would be silly for us to spend a premium of thousands a year in sticker price, insurance and gas mileage on a vehicle we'd truly need a few times a year.

Note that even Amazon's blog author, needing a rationale for minivan ownership, only comes up with "road trips." For us, that's why Hertz exists; spend hundreds a year renting a utilitarian second vehicle when we want it, instead of thousands a year watching it depreciate. It's one thing for two-income families or the ever-more-mythical "family of five," (more power to them) but for us? I'll watch my bank account grow along with the kids, thanks.


It's probably more accurate (but so much less conducive to writing a blog post) to say that the minivan is used by the childless as shorthand, a symbol of all the other reasons they mock people with kids.

Having been one of those mockers, and now as a daddy for almost nine months, I can say without a doubt that I was right then and I'm right now. Those childless folks should mock us. Even parents like my wife and I, who consciously reject the child-worshipping modern parenting culture of materialism and mindless catering to the little snowflakes, act like complete dopes in public and private on a daily basis.

I can't believe our unmarried/childless friends will still talk to us and the minivan owners are suspicious, wondering if our pre-parenthood brain chip implants were successful. We'll just have to put up with the funny looks from both groups.

Theo, from this morning. Just posted it for a friend and figured WTF not post it here too...