child milestones

Childhood Sweet Spot

· October 23, 2022 · Musings · , , , · No Comments

 I’m entering what I assume to be my last holiday season.

No, I’m not suffering from any sort of debilitating illness. My bout with Covid was, much like most people’s, little more than a couple days of a sore throat.

Why will this be my last holiday season, then? Because my daughter is eight.

Truthfully, she might not even believe in the big guy anymore. Fortunately, though, she’s never brought up any suspicions. Granted, when the stupid, fucking elves “forgot” to move from one spot in the house to another spot last year, she seemed to think we were responsible. Like honestly kid, what the hell do your parents have to do with your elves’ choice of locale? Maybe you accidentally touched them yesterday and fucked up their magic.

Then I politely remind Wife that I never wanted to do NSA on the fucking Shelf in the first place. 

Santa Claus isn’t the only one she’s still on board with. She hasn’t even shown skepticism about the Easter Bunny, which I remember giving up hope on long before Big Red. On St. Patrick’s Day, she still giddily set traps out for leprechauns, because evidently that’s a thing now. Why am I not being consulted before we add random nymphs to holidays? I’d like to register my opposition to the forthcoming Fourth of July Sprite ahead of time.

Ditto for the Tooth Fairy, although now that I’m living through it, I realize there’s a long gap between losing tooth number eight and nine, which makes a natural barrier. She lost all eight in a span of twenty-four months between kindergarten and second grade, but the next tooth isn’t likely to come out till fourth or possibly even fifth grade. And by then, she’ll probably want a Target gift card instead of cash under her pillow.

But even if her tooth came out early, I don’t know how vested she’d be in a perverted bone harvester sneaking into her bedroom at night. Because eight years of no verifiable proof is about how long it takes most people. Unless I’m raising a flat-earther or anti-vaxxer or something. Hopefully that’s not in her future. But you know what is? High school.

I teach high school, and for most of her life, there was a clear demarcation between the child in my home and the children in my classroom. It’s still there, to be sure, but it’s becoming blurrier. There are times I can see the high schooler she’ll become. Sometimes in the past, when her school has had a day off, I’ve brought her into my classroom. The teenagers are usually on their best behavior when there’s a little kid. Now I’d be worried she’d sit in the back row rolling her eyes with the rest of them. Maybe they would show her how to take twenty minutes in the bathroom and come back smelling like weed.

Yes, in the year 2022, teenagers still can’t figure out how to mask the smell of weed. It doesn’t matter that edibles are legal. Vaping is also widely available, despite the government’s decided effort to ban them so people go… back to smoking? But nope. Teenagers still feel it’s much better to give everybody else in the room the munchies.

And just like those teenagers, OMG the fucking DRAMA my third-grader brings home. Girl A wasn’t playing with her last week, so she started playing with Girl B. This week, Girl A wants to play and she’s quick to throw Girl B to the curb. Next week Girl A will be playing WITH Girl B and Daughter is just beside herself wondering why she has no friends. It’s sort of like Mean Girls, except it’s not a small cadre holding reign over the school. They’re ALL Mean Girls. Until puberty and/or cheerleading sorts out the alphas, society has no way to determine who has the right to demean others. So they’re all practicing being at both the top and the bottom of the social pecking order. 

And to think most of them aren’t even interested in boys yet. Yikes. I always thought those neurotic tendencies only came out when interested in the opposite gender, but if Daughter’s third grade is any indicator, our own gender fucks us up plenty good on its own. I recently took a day off to help the science docent at her school. And of course, when the students came in for the science docent lesson, all the boys went to one side of the room, all the girls to the other. That’ll change by high school, when only about 80% of them self-segregate and the others surreptitiously hold hands in the middle. And all the boys and all the girls were competing against each other in one form or another.

I’ve thought the national obsession with bullying the last twenty years odd. Obviously we don’t want to encourage bullying, and when bullying delves into harassment territory, we should definitely come down with a zero-tolerance angle. But in elementary school EVERYBODY is a bully. I remember kids who bullied me, and I could probably guess at a few kids who thought I bullied them. And the crazy thing is that there’d be plenty of names in the middle of that Venn Diagram. Every elementary kid is a bully and bullied, because they’re still figuring out how reality works.

A funny thing happened a couple weeks ago. Daughter called out from the top of the stairs that the dog had pooped upstairs. Although on second thought, she reported, it didn’t really smell like poop, per se. Maybe pee? “It’s something rotten, like raw sewage,” were her exact words. Imagine her horror when she realized the stench came not from a canine’s nether regions but from her own armpits!

Of course, we still can’t parlay this realization into more than two bathings a week. Maybe we need to get some of those bullies in on her. I started bathing every day around second or third grade, but I still only did my hair once or twice a week. Until somebody rode me mercilessly in sixth grade. “Why don’t you take a shower?” he said to me on a daily basis. When I’d finally had enough and told him I showered every damn day and it was a stupid insult, he said, “Well, your hair doesn’t look like it.” Touche. Guess what I started adding to my daily shower? Now, approaching 50 years old, I still use my hair as the barometer on when I need to bust out a shower over a three-day weekend or over Summer Break.

I took another day off when she was getting an award. Her school, like most, makes up some adjectives they want their students to exhibit and then make an acronym tied to the mascot. It’s bullshit because we come up with the acronym first, then decide how our students should act. At my school, we’re the Hawks, so we came up with SOAR, then found attributes that started with each of those letters. I tried a write-in campaign for “Hawks CA-CAWWW!” but came up just short. 

Daughter got an award in both second and third grade. After her second grade award, she decided she wants to get all four by the time she’s done with elementary school. Let’s see how she’s doing. Second grade, she got Accountable. Third grade, she got… Accountable. Great. I’m raising a narc. At least she’s consistent. Now she might as well go for four straight years of Accountable. Because I don’t think she’s ever getting the “Cooperative” award.

Yes, that’s TWO days I took off to support Daughter’s education this year. Normally I don’t take days off for jack shit, because if I can accumulate more than 185 sick days, I can retire a year early. But in another couple years, she won’t be caught dead having her parents there to support her at a school event. I can recoup my sick days then.

I think that’s where I’m going with the whole “Childhood Sweet Spot.” Most of their childhood, you’re usually looking forward to something. It’ll be so much nicer/easier when they can walk, or talk, or when they’re in school, or when they can watch something besides “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.” Now she’s able to do all those things. She’s watched all of the phase one Marvel movies. She’s got legitimate opinions about things. She’s found a sport she likes playing and wants to get better at, and she’s even tried to engage in watching some MLB playoff games this year. 

Meanwhile, the list of things we’re looking forward to is dwindling. Acne? Interest in boys? Hard pass. Driving seems pretty far in the distance. Double her current lifespan, in fact, and at the rate the current generation is waiting to get their license, it might be another half-decade beyond that. 

Which is not to say everything’s honky-dorry right now. It’s amazing how seeing a video of two-year-old her “reading” (ie reciting from memory) through Brown Bear, Brown Bear makes me so nostalgic for her sweeter days. Missing from that video was the fact that she usually did this while spending a fucking HALF-HOUR on the fucking toilet, with either Wife or I, often both, in attendance the whole fucking time. Now wonder we recorded it. We’d already finished reading the copy of War and Peace we grabbed when she said she had to pee.

But the video of it is sweet. Now.

I’m sure I’ll find things to enjoy about her future, as well. Perhaps she’ll be able to engage in conversation about more worldly topics. Maybe, instead of doing soccer and softball and volleyball and gymnastics and dance and art, all poorly, she’ll focus on one or two activities and excel. Even better, maybe we can drop her off at those things and leave. She won’t be caught dead having her parents come to each practice and game, so Wife and I might actually be able to breathe on a typical weeknight.

I have a friend with a younger child who is in a similar boat I was once in, impatient for the walking, then the talking. I tell him not to be in such a hurry. Looking back, those were some fond times, and they go by so quickly. And now that this age I’ve been looking forward to is skimming by, it’s probably a good note to myself. Each age comes with its own pros and cons, and they ain’t coming back when it’s gone. Sometimes I miss the toddler days with the constant discovery of new abilities. 

I distinctly remember the time I took her out of my car with very full hands and thought, “Wait a second, if I put her down, she can walk toward the front door on her own.” Nowadays I’m more likely to remind myself that I can send her to the garage to get a Phillips screwdriver. Or I don’t have to hover over the pool with my shirt half-unbuttoned every time she’s more than two inches away from the side. But the idea is the same. 

That’s why I only get a smattering of parents to my high school Back-to-School Night as opposed to the 80% or so who show up to Daughter’s. Of course, when she was in kindergarten, it was pretty much 100%. Because, you know, kindergarten is so demanding, we need to make sure we understand the complicated assignment structure.

Not sure how I feel about becoming less and less important in her educational journey. Or any of her other journeys in life. Sure, it’s a pain in the ass when I’m doing important things, like blogging or video gaming, and she’s asking me what six times seven is. Will I look up from a full blog page one day in 2030 and wonder what level of math she’s in?

And no, I’m not going to get into some Cat’s in the Cradle bullshit where I never gave her the time she needed until it was too late. Here’s the thing about that song. “My boy was just like me.” No he wasn’t, you self-centered ass. Your son blew you off, in part, because “the kid’s got the flu.” So he’s actually being a father to his kid, which you hadn’t been. Him ignoring his father is not the same as you ignoring your son. 

Sorry, where was I?

A week or two ago, she came downstairs around her bed time and asked if I was coming up to snuggle her. I had just turned on the baseball game and was preparing to do some editing, and damn near told her sorry, can’t be bothered on this particular night. Or any other night, really, because 9:00 pm is the only time I get to accomplish jack shit on a daily basis, and I’m probably crashing by 10:00. Plus, I remember this game from her youth and if go lie down with her or, hell, even sit on the floor next to her and rest my head, there’s a damn good chance I ain’t getting back up. 

But then I realized it’s not a request I hear often anymore. Not that she doesn’t whine about a lack of attention, but it’s usually more along the lines of a passive aggressive “I guess nobody’s going to snuggle with me,” which drives Wife and I absolutely bug-nutty. But this request was an earnest desire, not a spoiled whine. In fact, the way she asked was awkward, almost like she wasn’t sure how to ask for it. did it used to just happen organically?

At some point, she will ask for snuggles for the final time. Maybe this was it. Because it won’t come with a pronouncement. Just like she’s won’t wake up December 1 claiming that by next year, she won’t believe. But they’re both coming and fuck me if I let them pass me by. 

If only I could get her to mispronounce all the words in Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

That’s the thing about raising children: The days drag, but the years fly by. 

One Tooth Down

· January 7, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , · No Comments

Daughter just lost her first tooth, which means it’s time for the Tooth Fairy to come and visit. Another round of parenting fun.

Sorry, did I say fun? That’s not the word I was looking for. Is there an adjective that means anything you do is going to be a monumental fuck-up and make you the laughing stock of the parenting community and a cautionary tale spread throughout all of suburbia until the end of time, alongside razor blades in apples? What is that, if not fun? I’m sure the German have a word for it.

First of all, when they hell did kids start losing their teeth so early? 

I had Daughter late in life – just shy of my fortieth birthday. I was marginally aware of some parenting things in my twenties on account of two nieces I was close to. And I have some oddly prescient memories of my own upbringing in the 1970s, nut-hugger shorts and all! Bowl cuts before they were white supremacist!

I’m pretty sure I lost my first tooth around the end of first grade. I know this because when I lost my first tooth, well, I lost my first tooth. I was trying to chew through a helium balloon string on my hand when my tooth went flying into the grass. I was freaked out that I wouldn’t get my money from the Tooth Fairy. So I went home and wrote a note, an action I wouldn’t have been able to do in Kindergarten.

I was young for my grade. I was born in October, so the memory in question would’ve made me about six-and-a-half for me. They’ve changed the laws since then, so now I wouldn’t be in the grade I was in. I’d be one of the older kids in my class instead of the younger. I would’ve lost my first tooth at the end of my Kindergarten year instead of my First Grade year. But I still would’ve been six-and-a-half.

My daughter is five-and-a-half. Granted, she’s somehow always been physically advanced. Each of her teeth came in on the early end of the range. She’s regularly in the 90th percentile for height, which I don’t understand because I’m 5’8″ on a good day, Wife tops out at 5’5″, and we’re both taller than our parents. Never did I think I’d be trying to gear a progeny toward volleyball and basketball to take advantage of her height.

Although it’s going to be volleyball, cause the kid’s inherited my (lack of) running stamina.

But the crazy thing is that Daughter isn’t the first in her Kindergarten class to lose a tooth. Far from it. She’s a May baby, so she’s somewhere in the middle of the age range, maybe a little on the younger side. There are a fair number of six-year-olds in her class. But most of them are losing their teeth before they turn six. Heck, the September and October babies are already down three or four teeth. That was second-grade shit back in my day!

I know this isn’t the only indication of kids developing physically more quickly these days. Puberty is hitting two to three years earlier than a century ago. Middle school used to be the puberty years. Sequester the seventh and eighth graders to protect them from the olders and to avoid traumatizing the youngers. But puberty usually hits around fourth or fifth grade these days. And then I end up teaching 16 and 17 year-olds who are well beyond their “learn by” dates. 

Diet gets a good deal of the credit or the blame. After all, a century ago everybody ate dirt or, even worse, vegetables! I don’t think beef was even invented until after Sputnik launched. And if Junior’s on a regiment of pizza and Ding-Dongs, he’s going to growing tits and pubes. 

Except it’s not like we were withering away in the Carter years. We might have waited in lines to get gas, but there was no delay at the McDonald’s!

But now we put probiotics into our food. Or maybe it’s the soy in our milk. Or chickens genetically altered to resemble Pamela Anderson. Seriously? A half-beast is a full pound? Put a bra on that hen!

Maybe it’s the rBST in our milk. I have no idea what rBST is, I only know that I have to pay extra to get milk without it. And then I’m supposed to ignore the fact that this organic milk has an expiration date months later than milk should naturally last. I think the non-rBST organic milk in my fridge is going to last longer than Daughter’s other 27 teeth. 

So yeah, I don’t have the foggiest idea why kids are losing teeth the first week of kindergarten. All I know is that, as a parent, five years old is way too early to be losing teeth. We’re still adjusting to schooling. I mean, shit. I’m still trying to figure out how to explain what a sight word is. Now I’ve got to play Tooth Fairy, too? 

Oops. Spoiler. Hopefully there isn’t some random 6-year old that found this on her very first Google search. At least I won’t spill that other big secret. You know, the old dude in the red suit. 

Hey kids, Iron Man is TOTALLY still alive at the end of Avengers: Endgame.

Although, if my prescience about my own mindset forty years ago is legit, it seems that I gave up on the Tooth Fairy long before than I stopped believing in San… uh, “Iron Man.” It didn’t take long for this nascent free marketer to question how the fairy economy worked. After all, if Mr. Fairy ain’t using these teeth as a natural resource for some larger picture, then why the hell is he sneaking into my room in the middle of the night to take my Chiclets? Perv!

I held out my belief in the other guy much longer. I mean, the dude runs a sweatshop, and ain’t nothing more ‘Murican than making a bunch of cheap shit in a foreign land with near-slave labor. Plus, using Pascal’s wager, if I stop believing in Santa and it turns out he’s real, I’m losing out on a ton of shit. The Tooth Fairy? Meh. If he holds out on me because I no longer believe, I can find a quarter lying on the street and come out even.

Not that it’s a quarter anymore. But back in my day… 

Which leads to the worst part of any tooth loss and subsequent visitation from the smallfolk. Anyone know what the going rate on a pearly white is?

I know for damn sure that it’s going up much faster than inflation. The Fed better not be adjusting the interest rates based on lost teeth. Or maybe they should, then I can get a better COLA.

And I know from when my nieces were in this age range that the Tooth Fairy pays more for the first tooth than for subsequent teeth. Not sure why. He clearly knows nothing about the Law of Supply. If he wants us to keep producing his resources, he’s got to up the price, not lower it. What is he, some sort of drug dealer, giving us a sweet deal on the first go-around so that he can milk us for years to come? 

Seriously, Tooth Fairy, what the hell are you doing with these things? Because you’re acting shady as fuck.

We opted to give Daughter five dollars for the first tooth with the intention of lowering the payout to one dollar in the future. Wife’s been asking around and we’re “in the range.” Daughter told me that her best friend got three bucks for the first one. Unfortunately she told me this after she lost her tooth, and I’d been carrying around a crisp 5-note for two week by then. And it would be awkward to go buy a pack of gum to get change and complain that the singles are as dirty as a stripper’s g-string.

Hey, how do you tip strippers in countries that don’t have paper for their basic currency? I don’t think the g-string will keep the Loonie in place, and there’s no fucking way I’m tipping a fiver every time. Shit, a five-pound note is worth almost ten dollars. That’s one expensive thong! Well, a five-pound note was worth ten dollars before Brexit. Now it’s worth substantially less. Probably about the value of a baby tooth.

But the problem with giving Daughter a five-dollar bill, or three one-dollar bills, or really any sort of monetary denomination, is how little impact it will have for her. I’m not saying she doesn’t understand the value of money. She does, to a certain extent. Maybe not as much she will at seven, when God and nature decreed children to lose their teeth, but she understands that money is exchanged for goods and services, and that when one has a finite amount of money, one must assess the opportunity cost of a purchase versus holding onto said money for a potential later use. 

It’s not the concept of MONEY that she’s missing. It’s the concept of cash.

Seriously, how much cash does one use these days? We take Daughter grocery shopping with us. She hits Home Depot and Target with us on a weekly basis. We go out to eat, we talk about online orders with her, we donate to SPCA. She’s used gift cards at Baskin-Robbins and Starbucks. 

What we don’t do in front of her is take out paper currency and hand it over to a cashier. We don’t get change. I often give her whatever change accumulates in my pocket at the end of the day and she stores it in a Moon Jar. But if her primary notion of cash is that it is to be put away and never exchanged for goods or services, then she’s not going to get too excited when the Tooth Fairy leaves her some pointless green piece of paper. If he really wants kids to be happy about turning over their teeth, he should be leaving a Target gift card. Or maybe some Bitcoin.

We just started Daughter doing chores. Only we don’t pay her cash. We place a dollar amount for each item, and when she gets up to a certain amount, we get her a gift card. She gets to choose where. Unfortunately, her last choice was IHOP. Is it too much to have her get a BevMo card? Then I can tax it just like I do her Halloween candy.

We must not be alone in this regard. Because as the excitement of cash has diminished the Tooth Fairy experience has been replaced by a shit-ton of pomp, circumstance, and fluff. We used to put the tooth underneath the pillow and voila!, a quarter replaced it the next morning. 

Now there’s a booklet (basically an oversized wallet) and an envelope and a tooth “pillow” that’s really just another stuffed animal, as if Daughter doesn’t have enough of those. We put the tooth inside the booklet, along with a note welcoming an odd man inside my baby daughter’s bedroom, tied a bow around it and put it under her pillow. Then beside the bed, we put the tooth stuffed animal, under which we placed the empty envelope.

Then we learned the secret handshake of the Freemasons and Illuminati and she was off to la-la land.

Then we (children, look away!) took the tooth, put the fiver in the envelope, wrote a note FROM the Tooth Fairy thanking Daughter for her note TO the Tooth Fairy and for the very nice tooth and how we/he can’t wait for her to lose more teeth so we/he can return to her bedroom while she sleeps and give her more money. But not in a pervy way.

Wife even found a special Tooth Fairy card

(Now you’ll note I knew I lost my tooth in first grade because I could read and write, but then I said my kindergartner wrote a letter to the Tooth Fairy. The difference is that I wrote my letter by myself, whereas Daughter’s letter was about 90% letters provided by us. The joys of half-way through Kindergarten. “Mommy, Daddy, how do you spell Thank? How do you spell You? How do you spell Tooth?”)

After all the notes and pillows and incisor sleight-of-hand, we have to figure out what to do with the damn tooth. Do we flush it down the toilet like a dead fish? Is there a spot for it in her baby book? Not that we’ve kept up on her baby book since she was, like, a week old. Plus if we put it there and she someday decides to peruse said book, she’s going to wonder why we, instead of the Purveyor of Fine Bones store in Fairytown, are the ones in possession of it. 

Seriously, whoever came up with this whole thing didn’t really think it all the way through.

Wife put the tooth and the note in an envelope. Not sure if future teeth will go in there as well, but I assume that someday, when Daughter’s older and the gig is up, we’ll look back on it and laugh. She’ll read the note she wrote as a sweet, innocent, 5-year-old and be saved from her teenage cynicism for an evening. Then she’ll see the tooth and think her parents are freakazoid hoarder sickos. 

And then we’ll tell her that, congratulations, she gets to start paying her own health insurance the following month.

When Daughter woke up, it was pretty much as imagined. She was super jazzed to see that the tooth was gone. And ooo, there’s a note from the Tooth Fairy. Can we read it to her? And let’s snuggle with the tooth pillow and can we read the note again?

Oh, and what’s this in the envelope?

“It’s five dollars.”

She promptly puts it on the floor next to her and goes right back to the note. I should’ve just given her a fucking quarter like the good old days.

Oh well. Now it’s on to bunnies fucking chickens to celebrate our risen Lord. 

Who wants therapy

The Potty Fairy

· October 21, 2016 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , · No Comments

The Potty Fairy visited our house!

Are you familiar with the Potty Fairy? She’s similar to the Tooth Fairy, but instead of taking teeth, she takes bodily fluids. And instead of putting the item under your pillow, you deposit it into a toilet. And instead of replacing it with money, she replaces it with a clean toilet bowl… and an empty diaper drawer… and no more wiping of asses.

Okay, there is still asswiping. But it’s with toilet paper! And it’s in the asscrack! It’s no longer seventy-five babywipes removing the artistic spackle-smear of shit spreading its territory from knee to ribcage.

The excitement and anticipation my daughter will someday have about the approach of the Tooth Fairy is nothing compared to the excitement and anticipation my wife and I had over the arrival of the Potty Fairy.

My wife always hates when people post about the potty training process on social media. Nothing can quite derail the beautiful, picturesque stroll through election postings  and hipster food photos than a description of a potty fail. It’s like “Trump, Hillary, pot pie, Trump, shit dribbling down the leg, Hillary.” Come to think of it, can we have more descriptions of bodily functions? Seems less offensive.

Because of this, I have politely refrained from any discussion of the trials and tribulations of this process on the Facebook and the Twitter. But this is an anonymous blog, so nobody will be any the wiser.

Oh wait, did I mention that I’ve recently been published? And finishing the sequel was what kept me away from blogging for the last few months? So if I start shilling my book on this blog in the future, it won’t be anonymous anymore. Shit.

I mean, oops. I shouldn’t be using “shit” as an exclamation in this post. Henceforth, shit shall only refer to the scatological product of a bodily function. Can’t run the risk of causing confusion. That would be a pisser.

The potty training started as quite a surprise. My wife and I had discussed it, dreamed about the day, but more in the vein of some future trip to Tahiti. We weren’t really sure when or how to begin.

Then one day my daughter’s talking things over with her mom.

About shit, not Tahiti.

“Pee pee, potty?”

“Yeah, baby. Mommy and daddy pee pee in the potty. Someday you’ll pee pee in the potty.”

“Pee pee… potty?”

“Wait, do you want to pee pee in the potty right now?”

“Pee pee… potty… right now.”

Oh, shit!

I mean… Whoa!

We were caught completely unprepared, but we took her to the toilet, anyway. We didn’t even have the child’s seat, so instead, daddy had to hold baby up hovering in the middle of the toilet seat.

For a half an hour. Because baby was going to be milking this one.

Guess I won’t need to be doing sit-ups this month.

And the result? Nothing. Baby was convinced she had accomplished something, but I can neither confirm nor deny whether anything exited my daughter into its proper watery receptacle. Too bad her vocabulary is not full enough to teach her the “Here I sit, broken-hearted” poem.

Next came the true adventure of baby’s first toilet experience: the wiping. She was all jazzed to wipe. Of course, she didn’t really wipe, just emulated what she had seen us do. Grab a few squares, place them between your legs, then drop them into the toilet.

And by a few squares, I mean three or four or, I don’t know, twenty?

Then she’d need to “wipe” a little more.

“One more, daddy. One more.”

She held up one finger to indicate what she meant by one more, a phrase I was previously unaware she knew. From a linguistic standpoint, she definitely understood the “more” concept. The “one?” That needed a little more work.

By the time she was done, about half a roll of toilet paper had been dumped into the toilet. Wife read that this was normal and that we should let her explore it on her own. You know, in order to increase her comfort in the bathroom.

This child-rearing literature, however, must not allow for low-flush toilets. Because when we finally flushed the alleged half-ounce of urine with the half-gallon of toilet paper, wouldn’t you know it, the toilet clogged. And this wasn’t one of those, “plunge it and flush it again” types of clogs. I assume that too much of the paper hadn’t touched water, and plungers seem predicated on breaking apart wet products. So even when we went in with the snake claw, it only tore away the first layer of wet paper, barely exposing the next line of wad.

This particular clog required going in from the outlet valve on the outside of the house.  Good times.

But with that crisis averted, we were revitalized. We had that enemy, the diaper, which had entrenched itself in our household for close to two years, on the run. We hit the Babies’R’Us for the weapons necessary to finally vanquish our foe. We bought the baby toilet-seat extensions. We purchased Pull-ups and underwear with cute critters on them. We ensured there was never more than a half of a roll of toilet paper on the spool at any given time.

And then… nothing.

The One Weekend Method says this would be a good time to go cold turkey. There’s one problem this plan, though, and that’s Day Care. In California, the mandated teacher-to-child ratio changes at age two. So two-year-olds tend to be in a different room than the babies and toddlers. If our daughter, being 21-months old, were to go into the “Twos” room, where the bathroom is, the day care center would be in major violation of state law. And from what I gather, day care centers tend to follow state law. At least our particular one does.

So what’s the use of potty training her if they’re still requiring her to shit herself at school? Instead, for a few months, we stayed in a holding pattern where we talked extensively about the potty. Baby occasionally pretended she needed to use the potty, but more often than not it was “All full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Shakespeare wrote that about flatulence, right?

Even when baby’s wolf-crying was legitimate, the process and result were more novelty than normalcy. She became very good at telling us WHEN she was expunging herself. Telling us BEFORE was still a mystery.

She became more aware of her bodily functions. One bathtime, she let out a fart that I could have won some fraternity championships with. “Oh shit,” I thought, both literally and figuratively, envisioning a reenactment of the Baby Ruth scene in Caddyshack.

I asked her if she needed to poo-poo or if she was just farting.

“FAR-eeeeeeeen,” she said, then laughed hysterically.

Yep, that’s my daughter.

A month or so after she turned two, we noticed she was consistently staying dry throughout the night. She would go long periods of the day without shitting or pissing herself. I can’t always make the same claims for myself, so we figured, what the hell? Let’s do this.

We didn’t quite go the “cover all the couches and floors and have her go naked all weekend” route that the cold turkey’ers suggest. Instead we took her to the potty on a regular basis. Sometimes she went, sometimes not. By the end of the first day, she was pretty adept at identifying which times she would pee and which times she would not.

By the end of the next day, she was potty trained.

I’m not going to say she’s batting 1.000. She still has some “Oopses. And by “Oops,” I mean “Shit.” A few pisses, too, but most of her oopses are shits. It seems odd that she would recognize an impending urinary incident more readily than a bowel emergency. To me, the latter seems much easier to feel coming from a mile away. But I’ve been assured that #1-awareness usually predates #2-awareness by the teacher in the two-year old room to which my daughter was recently promoted. And if you aren’t going to believe someone who spends her entire day around two-year olds, who are you going to believe?

And why does the Toddler keep saying “Poo Poo Power”? Oh, never mind. She’s saying Purple Flower. Lost my translator for a second…

A week or two after “The Transition,” this same teacher asked if I wanted to take home the diapers and wipes we had at Day Care. It hadn’t occurred to me. When I got home, I presented the returned items to my wife.

“I guess we can clean out her diaper drawer, huh?”

“I can hand them down to a co-worker.”

“You know what? We haven’t had to empty the diaper sausage in a month.”

We looked at each other and smiled. It was only then that we realized what had happened. The look we shared was the same look of hope that a child has, waking up and gingerly lifting the pillow to see what lies beneath…

“The Potty Fairy was here! The Potty Fairy was here!”

 

 

 

 

The Great Red (Muppet) Menace

· May 12, 2016 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , · No Comments

Back around Christmas time, I remember talking to some family members and friends who had kids around my daughter’s age (between 14-20 months). Lots of questions about what her favorite TV shows were. I tried to fake some answers but in reality, she didn’t watch much. It’s not like we had actively tried to encourage or discourage TV Time, but there were certainly times that the TV was on, and even times we put on a children’s show in an attempt to actually get something done around the house. But she didn’t seem interested and when confronted by other parents, I wondered if she was an anomaly Were we good parents or were we the bad parents?

I mean, the experts say no screen time until they’re two, right?

Hey experts, you want to come offer some free babysitting while I’m getting ready in the morning?

Because my baby’s aversion/disinterest in television came crashing down right around twenty months. Now she regularly wants to take her place among the American public by plopping her butt right in front of the Boob Tube. And she can binge watch like a motherfucker.

Oh hey, kids? If you just found this blog after googling Sesame Street, this might be a good time to move along to another blog. And maybe stop going to the 117th page of Google results.

My daughter’s tastes are not all that refined, however. In fact, there are really only two shows she watches. The first is Bubble Guppies. I like Bubble Guppies. It features six mermaid-type kids that are in school. Or at least they are enrolled in school despite their best attempts at truancy. Each episode starts with two of them seeing something as they dally, unsupervised, on their way to school. Then they get to school and are excited about what they witnessed, and their teacher, Mr. Grouper, immediately delves into a lesson on the topic.

Really, Mr. Grouper? It’s called a lesson plan. You’re just going to scrap what you were going to teach because some kids come in excited about something? If I did that, every day I’d be teaching about teenagers getting “hella crunked over the weekend.”

To say nothing of the Bubble Guppies’ parents. What the hell are you doing letting your kids randomly walk to school through marathons or loading docks or the train station? Just because their teacher indulges their delinquent behavior doesn’t mean you should!

But I digress. The episode then revolves around this theme. They sing songs, they set up a make-believe shop selling items related to the topic, then they have lunch, then go outside (“Line up, everybody, line up, line up…”) and pretend to be that thing. And through it all they ask the viewers to help them solve problems with budding skills in math and literacy.

As I said, I like Bubble Guppies. But my daughter quickly grew tired of it, and now always tries to push me toward her current addiction. She asks, and I say, “Bubble?” “No Bubble, Daddy.”

Except sometimes she manipulates me. After I say I don’t want to watch the other show, she says “Yes, Bubble.” And I say, “Yay, Bubble,” then I go turn on the TV, and repeat “Bubble?” Then, with the TV on and me already thumbing through the DVR, she magically changes her mind. “No Bubble….”

“Elmo!”

Shit.

“Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!”

I don’t even know how she learned who Elmo was, but she was saying his name before she had watched an episode of Sesame Street. I’m sure it’s just like every other addiction – peer pressure from those other kids at school.

I originally pushed for Sesame Street. Before we discovered Bubble Guppies, Sesame Street was one of the shows we tried to occupy her with back when she wouldn’t watch. I was keen to avoid the likes of Caillou and Barney and the other dregs of children’s television.

I grew up on Sesame Street.

But this ain’t her father’s Sesame Street.

“Can you tell me what they’ve done, what they’ve done to Sesame Street?”

And before I get all “get off my front lawn” about it, I’m not saying they should have always kept things the same. I’m not opposed to change for change’s sake. It wouldn’t really make sense for all of the characters to be wearing disco pants like they were when I was watching the show in the 1970s. And for obvious reasons, Jim Hensen can’t voice a lot of the Muppets that he used to voice.

I like that they encourage kids to get up and move around more than they used to.

And I know that Snuffleupagus can’t be an imaginary friend anymore because we don’t want kids to keep quiet about abuse. I might question how much it’s made a difference. I’d be interested to see if there was an uptick in child abuse reports once Snuffleupagus was revealed to be real. But if that statistic was even one, then it’s worth it.

And truthfully, some of the problems are getting a little better since HBO took over. HBO’s increased the production value immensely. Once you can get past the all the full frontal nudity. (I’ll take “The Obvious Joke” for two hundred, Alex.)

But there are some things about Sesame Street  that still bug me:

  1. Character Voices.

Grover is now voiced by the same person that does Miss Piggy. Grover sounds exactly like Miss Piggy. And Big Bird sounds like Big Dork.

  1. Muppet Lower Torsos.

I assume this is easier with CGI, but just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. It just looks awkward. Check out the closing credits from last year or this year. Awkward. And man, in the latter, Grover needs to do some squats or something. Not sure how he manages to lug that potbelly around on those spindly legs.

  1. Abby.

If you’re as old as me, you might have noticed some new Muppets in those clips. Of course, I pre-date Elmo, but you would have had to be deaf and dead to not know of him. One in particular, the pink one with pigtails and a wand, is Abby. Abby Cadaby, to be exact. She is a magician. Abra Cadabra – Abby Cadaby, get it?

Abby is probably the second-most featured character on Sesame Street these days. She hasn’t infiltrated out amongst the general population as much as Elmo has yet, but among Sesame Street groupies, she’s almost as ubiquitous.

Abby Cadaby, being a magician, actually casts spells and makes things magically appear. Really, Sesame Street? Magic? What a lazy shortcut to storytelling. I mean, stick to the giant talking birds and cookie-obsessed monsters and green dudes that live in trash cans. Why do you need to add something fake, like magic?

  1. Episode structure.

I seem to remember that the interactions between humans and Muppets on Sesame Street (ie the entire point of the show) were spread out over the course of the entire episode, interspersed with various vignettes. A typical episode might go: Introduce Problem/Theme, Video of animals, Continue storyline, Aliens creating compound word, Preview resolution on “The Street,” Different Muppet video, then back to the Street for resolution and lessons learned.

Today’s episodes frontload all of the plot/lesson/Street scenes so they are self-contained, and completely over by the time we hit the ten minute mark. Then it’s on to the vignettes, maybe with Murray and his Little Lamb at a school or Cookie Monster exercising self-control. I will address the last ten minutes in #5 below.

I assume this re-organization is partly because episodes are now only a half-hour instead of an hour. Damn you, Mitt Romney! Oh wait, he lost? But you know what happens. Republicans are elected and they cut funding, then Democrats are elected and they restore the funding but also increase the ability of Muppet Local 2658 to negotiate exorbitant pensions that shoestring the show’s budget.

Or maybe it’s because these whippersnappers can’t pay attention to a storyline once it breaks away. We’re no longer training the TV watchers of tomorrow to remember the plot through a commercial break. Boy, back in my day, we had to watch commercials, uphill both ways, in the snow. You little rats have DVR’s now.

Then again, Bubble Guppies can break up the theme throughout an episode.

“Bubble? Bubble?”

“No, Daddy, no….”

  1. Elmo!

As I mentioned, I was familiar with Elmo going into this rediscovery process. I used to use Tickle Me Elmo as an example of demand and shortages in economics class, up until that particular zeitgeist craze started pre-dating my students. I’ll let that sink in with some of my older readers – current high school seniors were born in 1998.

So yeah, I was aware Elmo existed. What I wasn’t aware of was that Sesame Street had pretty much become the Elmo show. Take Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, multiply it by Cartman in South Park, and raise it to the power of Barney in How I Met Your Mother and you will begin to approach the degree to which the Giant Red Menace has spread his socialist scourge across Sesame Street. And his pinko girlfriend, Abby, too.

I would guess one of those two is on screen about seventy percent of the time. And if you only count the times that a Muppet is on screen, that would rise to over ninety percent. I’m trying to think of a time that any other Muppet shows up without Elmo lurking on the margins like a Mafioso Union Boss. The only time is when Murray and his Little Lamb go to school, and that’s only in the recent HBO shows. By comparison, Big Bird doesn’t even show up in half of the episodes, and Oscar the Grouch might as well be considered a guest star these days.

Oh, and that “last ten minutes of the show” I referenced earlier? That’s “Elmo’s World,” a completely separate entity. No other cast members, puppet or human, are allowed entry into Elmo’s World. Not even Abby. It’s Elmo, his pet goldfish, and a couple of humans named Mr. Noodle. There are two Mr. Noodles and they are both called Mr. Noodle, unless they’re both on the screen at the same time, in which case they are Mr. Noodle and Other Mr. Noodle. Just like a tyrant to not let the dudes each have their own name. But Mr. Noodle(s) are contained in the Sweatshop that is Elmo’s World, and are not allowed to venture out into Sesame Street proper. Elmo needs to keep his empires separate, like when Walter White picked up that second cellphone.

And really, how is Elmo a good role model? He talks about himself in the third person constantly. “Elmo has a question.” “Dance with Elmo.” “Elmo’s gonna fuck you up and Elmo-shit on your Elmo-fucked corpse.”

That last one might be a misquote.

I know no Muppet is perfect. Each has his or her own little foibles. Oscar represents sloth, the Count has certain OCD tendencies, and Big Bird suffers from the deadly sin of dorkiness. Cookie Monster, in addition to some slightly gluttonous persuasions, also uses the word “me” in place of “I.” But a little subject/direct object pronoun confusion is fine next to the megalomaniacal tyrant that is Elmo.

In fact, I expect Elmo to endorse Donald Trump any day now. It’s too bad he’s only been around since the early 1990s, he’s too young to be Donald’s VP pick. They’d make a natural pairing, and Elmo might be able to bring Republicans back to the fold, reminding them of the third-person self-references of the Bob Dole days.

And with Elmo on the campaign trail, maybe I’d finally win the mental tug-of-war with my twenty-three month old daughter.

But until then, it’s another steady dose of…

“Bubble? Bubble?”

“No, Daddy, no… Elmo!”

Bah, Bah, Goo, Goo

· February 6, 2016 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , · No Comments

My baby is talking!

My baby is communicating!

Bear in mind, these two usually do not go hand-in-hand.

Hey, it’s not my fault if Daddy and Doggie sound exactly the same coming from her. Aww, my baby’s saying “Daddy” and pointing at me. She loves me. How sweet…. Shit, the dog’s right behind me.

It’s been a slow process. Usually, when she comes up with a new word or gesture, I don’t realize it’s intentional. She repeats it two or three or twenty times, and all of a sudden, I’m like “Yes, that IS the doggie,” and she responds with either a proud gleam or a rolling of the eyes that clearly communicates “Finally, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

It started off subtly. All of a sudden she could understand a lot of what I was saying and even follow directions. Sure, she had been able to understand basic meanings or instructions for a while. But up until a month or so ago, it couldn’t go beyond, “milk?” or “put it there.”

Then one day, in some amalgam of a delaying tactic and a scatterbrained daddy moment, I muttered a string of steps that needed to happen before we went for a walk. “We need to get your shoes and go find a jacket and load the stroller and free the hostages and re-form the Beatles and blah, blah, blah.”

Next thing I know, she’s standing in front of me with her shoes in her hands. Random, I thought, but whatever. I put her shoes on and followed her as she walked back toward the front door. Sitting by the front door was her stroller, upon which she has already placed a jacket. The only thing missing was Ringo Starr.

Whoa, there’s no way she just followed my instructions. Must be a coincidence. But I’m always one for a science experiment, and since there wasn’t any enriched uranium atoms around, what would be the harm in using my daughter as a control group?

“Can you go get your sippy cup from the kitchen and bring it here?” I asked.

And she did. Shitballs! She can understand me! Maybe I shouldn’t be using “Shitballs!” as my primary exclamation anymore.

Before I knew it, the baby was following complex sets of directions. I don’t know that I’d trust her to cut the blue wire, not the red wire, but “go close the door” and “take this spoon to mommy” and “don’t be late for your job at the coal mine” are well within her wheelhouse.

Then came the pointing stage. She communicates like that fake sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s funeral.  A typical interaction might start with her pointing to her mouth because she wants to eat, then when I ask what she wants, she runs to the refrigerator. Do you want milk? Shake of head. Yogurt? A pause, then a more subtle shake of the head. A line of cocaine?  Emphatic nod.

Everyone knows to store their crank in the fridge, right? That was purple drank in the Sunny D commercials.

Her gestures are not always reactionary, though. She’s a master at curling her hand toward her in a beckoning motion, followed by patting the ground next to her. She wants me to come and sit there. I remember the first time she did this and was shocked at how well it worked.

Let’s see, I beckoned mommy and she came to me, what do I do now? Pat, pat. Momma sat down Let me try it with Daddy. Ooooooooohhhhhh!

At this point her eyes and mouth got very big. She ran up to look me in the face, then turned around, did a U-Turn toward my wife and her mouth grew even wider. Have you ever seen Shaq’s dunk face? If she could speak right now, she’d be screaming “Holy Cunt-ticles!”

I really need to watch what I say around her.

Then came the words. Or maybe “the syllables” would be a better description. Or half-syllables. Sometimes it’s the first half of the syllable, sometimes it’s the second. Two syllable words become one syllable. Kee-ee is kitty. Me can be me or milk. Mo is more, which is code for anything from “I’m hungry” to “Let’s do that again.” No means no, and boy, when she first mastered that word, stomping her foot down with an emphatic “NO!” well, the dark side s strong with this one.

Baa might be bear or might be ball. Baa might also mean sheep, because a sheep says baa. Evidently this is a word. When the doctor asked how many words she can say, we were low-balling it to “properly enunciated words used in the proper context. But the doctor assures us that “If she say ‘moo’ when she sees a picture of a cow, that counts as a word.” Uh huh, Doc, let me explain that to the College Board when she takes her SATs.

One thing I can take credit for is her first compound word, baseball. Or, more precisely, “bay-baw.” It started during the World Series. Then we spent most of November playing MLB: The Show on my Playstation to get her to fall asleep. Like mother, like daughter.

She also says “bay-baw” for football if it’s on the TV. And curling. And, for a while, I’m pretty sure the TV itself was “ba-baw.” This trend has re-emerged now that her favorite TV Show is Bubble Guppies.

My wife says she knows the difference between baseball and football, and that the latter sounds  closer to “boo-baw” than “bay-baw.” I’m skeptical, but I should believe my wife, because she’s much better at catching the nuances of baby language. I think the baby’s making random sounds (“eee, eee”), and my wife busts out “She wants cheese,” and the baby nods.  Crap, I thought “eee” was the sound a monkey makes. Gonna have to study harder for my own Baby SAT.

Then the baby says “Fucktwat” and I give her a high five for listening to daddy.

Her most recent communicational leap was reached around New Year. The doctor told us to be on the lookout for stringing two words together. And sure enough, her first sentence came out clear as day, while sorting through things with my sister-in-law.

Auntie moved one item from the front of the line to the back of the line. Baby grabbed it from her, then shouted, “NO, MINE!”

I’m patiently awaiting my Parent of the Year Award.

 

 

The Drunken Midget Phase

· June 24, 2015 · Musings · , , , , , , · No Comments

My daughter just turned one year old.

Woo-Hoo! She made it!

Not sure if that’s more impressive or less impressive than me turning forty. In either case, we seem to be celebrating nature and astronomy more than perseverance. But this poor girl has me as a father, so we’re not taking anything for granted.

We’re at that milestone-a-minute phase right now, and really have been for a good six months or more. First it was rolling over. Then it was sitting up with assistance. Then without. Then the Lieutenant Dan Body drag, followed by crawling. Then it was- well, you get the idea. But I think the current milestone is the last big one.

Of course, I say “current” milestone, not “last” or “next,” because these things tend to evolve slowly over days or weeks, despite what popular culture would have us believe. Movies and TV shows always show babies purposefully doing an action as a result of some cognitive leap, then immediately honing this new skill until perfection. In reality, there’s never that big “this is her first <fill in the blank> moment.”

What was my daughter’s first word? Well, it depends. Do you mean her first purposeful word or the first part of her random enunciation that sounded close to English? She says “yeah, yeah, yeah” a lot, and occasionally it’s even in response to a yes or no question. I’m pretty sure she’s said “ma” and “da” on purpose a number of times, but I still don’t know if we’ve yet reached the 50% plateau of those sounds being a specific reference to my wife or I.

It’s the same thing with standing and walking, which is our current undertaking. Can she stand on her own? Sure. Even done it a couple of times. But if there is something or someone to pull herself up on within, oh say, a square mile, she’s crawling to that object instead. Has she taken her first step? Absolutely. She’s even made it three or four steps, albeit with heavy coaxing. And even though she can both stand and take steps, she’s much more likely to plop herself down and crawl, evolution be damned!

But, whether with support or not, we’ve definitely entered my favorite stage of childhood. Or at least my favorite to observe from afar. Some call it the toddling years, but let’s be honest. My bubbly baby girl is turning into a drunken midget. Think about the last time you saw a toddler. Now think of an intoxicated dwarf. If you’ve never been around an inebriated midget, think of a full-size boozer and then just shrink them down.

The swaying from side to side. The bumping into random stationary objects. The propensity to fall down for no reason, in a manner that would send a sober adult to injury rehab, and then to giggle uncontrollably at it. Am I describing a one year old or a lush? You decide.

Last week, my daughter was “walking” around. To do this, she holds onto my fingers over her head for stabilization like a chimpanzee. At one point, she lost her grip on one of my fingers, and consequently lost her footing. Instead of sitting or re-establishing her grip, she clamped down harder on the remaining “support” (i.e. my right finger). Her feet flew out from under her and the rest of her body entered a spinning pirouette along multiple axes – a centrifuge with my finger as its fulcrum.

Her final resting position had her upper torso on the ground, legs in the air supported by my calves, right hand still grasping that finger as if it mattered. I asked her if that was fun. She locked eyes with me, paused for a moment, then laughed way more than the situation called for.

Now, let’s just replace my finger with a doorknob or a handrail, my lower torso with a wall, and the floor with, well, the floor. I’m pretty sure that I’ve, uh, let’s just say, “seen some people” in that exact same position after Last Call. Probably laughing just as hysterically, too.

And the similarities aren’t just physical. Who, other than a lush or a baby, is likely to swing between happy and sad, pleased and pissed, on a moment’s notice, without being able to recall the previous emotion? My daughter has a noise that is half-laugh, half-cry. And when it appears, one of the two noises is mere seconds away from an onslaught. A quick move by me might influence which direction it goes. Or it might not. Sound like any alkies you know?

Who else, besides a drunk or a child, can fixate on mundane objects for a half-hour? Remember the video of David Hasselhoff eating a hamburger? I could totally see my daughter doing that, and it would probably be just as messy.

She also has been into stacking and sorting lately. She’ll take all of the  items in front of her and move them, one by one, behind her back. Then she’ll look around, astounded at where all of her missing items went. Tell me you’ve never played “hide an item from drunkie” before. Shoot, I’ve had people so drunk that we hide their drink from them. They look around like my daughter, murmuring “I swear I had a drink here,” before finding something else to fixate on. Like a disassembled hamburger.

I mentioned that I felt the drunken midget stage, a.k.a. toddling, is the last major milestone. I could hear the eye-rolling scoff from you parents out there. “Oh, just wait until talking or potty training or losing teeth or, I don’t know, differential calculus,” I hear you saying.  And yes, I know there are many more changes to come. But it seems to me that this is the last major physical hurdle. The rest seem to be more mental or developmental milestones. Baby talk might be just as cute as toddling, but there’s substantially less chance of them ending up with their ass on the ground. At least until they enter the “Drunken Sailor” phase.

The post-walking milestones, potty training and learning how to speak, also seem to be more of parenting milestones than baby milestones. Parents usually force the former, while parents are there to correct and guide the latter. But up through walking, the parent plays little role. “No, no, baby, that’s not the proper usage of the foot while standing.”

And really, should we even bother celebrating parenting milestones? Instead of milestones, they are more like signposts: “This way to good (or bad) parenting,” or “Blind curve ahead.”

And those parenting signposts are constant. I mean, seriously, how many wipes does it take to remove oatmeal from a forehead? Let’s get the Tootsie Pop Owl on that one.

During my first week of summer break, wherein we cut back on some daycare days in favor of Mr. Mom time, I took my baby to story time at the local library. Of course, she wanted to take a nap right before story time. So I put her down thinking no story time this week, maybe next time. But of course she wakes up without a moment to spare, so voila, there we were at the library.

I could not have been more out of place if you dropped me in the Sahara Desert.

First of all, I was the only male above the age of three. Then there’s the fact that the Stepford Wives that were there were all regulars. They knew all the songs, they knew all the dances, and the lady in charge knew all of their children by name.

To add to the “fish out of water” sensation, I walked in about five minutes late. Oh, and I hadn’t showered, because I still haven’t figured out that whole “when to shower when you’re the only adult in the house” trick.

My daughter was the only toddler not wearing shoes. I didn’t want to go all “The pediatric board doesn’t suggest that” on, but hey, I have science on my side.

Plus, for some reason, before I put my daughter down to take her nap, I had only buttoned one button on her onesie. Perhaps I was going to change it because it was also dirty from breakfast? I can’t remember, but sure enough, while we’re sitting there clapping our hands and hokey pokeying (hey, at least I knew the words to that one!), the one snap comes undone. Had she just been wearing the onesie, it probably wouldn’t have been very difficult to re-fasten. But no, I had thrown some cute little cargo pants over them, which her onesie stayed outside of. Oh, and did I mention it was still stained from breakfast?

So, here’s me and my daughter. Both unbathed, in dirty clothing, her onesie open and flapping about. She’s not wearing shoes. And we’re raining on the parade of the regular stay at home moms. They’re looking at the two of us like we’re the Clampetts busting in on their afternoon tea.

“Man, they just let anybody into the library these days. Shouldn’t they, like, require a membership card to get in?”

The other signpost I’ve recently seen is something I probably shouldn’t be proud of, but I totally am. We don’t watch a lot of TV around the baby. We’re not those “no screen time” parents or condescending “Better than you because the TV isn’t on” people. But hey, if wife and I sometimes aren’t home until 6:00 and the baby goes to bed at 8:00, maybe The Walking Dead can wait until 8:15.

As a bonus, when the TV is on, the baby doesn’t pay it much attention. A sport event, with its bright colors and fast movement, might catch her attention briefly, but then she’s back to sorting cups or engaging in thorough tests of the Law of Gravity.

Last weekend, my wife was flipping through channels while we were doing chores in the bedroom, and said “I’m guessing you want to watch this?” She was correct. And I wasn’t the only one. I was holding my daughter and she looked, too. I expected her to look away after a couple seconds, but she didn’t. She was tracking what was happening on the screen. It was bound to happen at some point.

What were we watching? None other than the 1980 classic, Airplane! Yep, she’s my daughter. And I’m sure it was a learning experience for her, too. Now she’ll know she has to choose wisely on which day to stop sniffing glue.

Or to stop being an Oompa Loompa blowing a .15

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