baby

Avoiding the Dad Stereotype

Mr. Mom (1983) Directed by Stan Dragoti Shown: Michael Keaton It’s been nearly seven years that I became a dad.Seven years and I’ve done the best I could to avoid being the bumbling dad stereotype on tv shows. You know the one. He pours orange juice in his coffee and puts sticks of butter in their lunchboxes.I’m the modern dad.I wore the baby.I carried his diapers in my back pocket and bottles in my backpack.(Blue bottle = formula. Red = White Russian.)I went to Mommy and Me.He’s starting first grade and I’ve made it without knocking back the dad cause or erasing the gains my fellow dads have made.We changed Amazon Mom to Amazon Family!I’ve carried the flag well I hope.Except for that one time.I was tired. It was early.He was just beginning to make recognizable sounds.I was just learning to ignore him.We were rushing out the door for daycare and I was knocking things off my before takeoff checklist.Never rush a checklist.I was calling out the items from memory and he was finding his voice.It was white noise to […]

National Adoption Month. Where Do Storks Come From?

“Father?” Said the almost five year old. “Listen, there is something I’ve been thinking about. You and I have been watching a lot of classic television programing lately. Shows like Tom and Jerry and Dumbo and I’ve noticed that in them, often a Stork drops off a baby to Moms and Dads.” “Yes?” I answer while thinking, “Here we go. It’s time to talk about his adoption story. Where’s Mom? It’s something her and I have had on our to-do list but just haven’t gotten to. Damn you MarioKart.” “So in these shows,” He continues. “The families always receive their babies from flying Storks. They are dropped from the moonlit sky and the little ones float in under a full parachute safely to land on the doorstep of their eager families. I’ve seen a Stork drop little elephants, giraffe and humans. All sorts of things. But what I’m wondering is this. Who brings the Storks?” “Uh, I’m not sure I follow?” “Well. A Stork flying around with a baby llama is quite a sight. Clearly that’s not the Storks child.

Future Daddy Blogger Support Group

The meetings are held in the basement of a church near an all-night donut shop. Although both are helpful, the location is more about the donuts than the man upstairs. The chairs are arranged in a circle. The donuts are placed on an end table in the middle. They are a focal point. The embers of a fire that never goes out. There are always more donuts. “It’s time to start the group.” The host says. “Thank you all so much for coming today. I see a few new faces and many familiar ones. Who wants to begin today? Tyler? How about you start?” Tyler was seated in the circle directly across from the host. Although he was a regular to the support group he was hard to remember. He had an unassuming disposition and talked in a hushed voice. The others leaned in when he spoke because he was barely heard over the buzz of the box fans. It’s not uncommon for the grown up kids of dad bloggers to shun the spotlight. Growing up online was enough. Tyler

My Son. My Chronological Yardstick

Every memorable event in my life that happened before the spring of 2010 is filed away in my brain with a five-year buffer. My mental calendar from the era before I had a child is ordered in half-decade increments.When did I graduate college? “I was done wearing flannel shirts by that time… mid to late 90s?” Since my son was born he has become a yardstick on which I measure time. Instead of just inches marked off on the door frame, I see months and the corresponding historical events. I look at his growth notches on the wall like a geologist sees the colors of a canyon. My brother was married the month our son’s adoption was official. June 2010. February 2011 he started scooting around the coffee table on his way to becoming bipedal. In addition to tagging my memory with his chronology, I’ve watched the evolution of mankind as he’s inched his way up my leg. His descent from the crib was akin to an early man deciding that a tree wasn’t such a great place to raise

The Beat Poets Taught Me How to Talk to a Four Year Old

Many days during my college decade were spent studying the Beat Poets and experimenting with stream-of-consciousness prose. We turned words cut from the newspapers into dialog and had nonsense talks over wine. We verbally riffed and let our talks ebb and flow on a course of their own often ending where they began… with a twist. Talking to a four-year-old takes me back to that time. Those late-night jams wired my brain to help me navigate most of my dialogs now. At least the ones I have with him. The child. With him, I know where our conversations start and how I want them to end… my job is to orchestrate the words to reach that desired crescendo. I take his words… cut them up and use them against him. All the while letting him think he has a say in things. He’s just providing the tempo. For me, it’s lots of verbal bait and switch. Subtle misdirection. Our breakfast conversation may start with him telling me how much he “Doesn’t like bagels! I will never eat them again!” With my

On Fatherhood: Almost 40 With a 4 Year Old

How different his world is in 2014 than mine was when I was his age in 1978. This is the blessing of the late blooming father. Had I begun the child rearing phase of my life a decade or more ago things would be different. We could enjoy the Hunger Games together, we could both simultaneously suffer from Bieber Fever and I could have eaten all of his leftovers without worrying about calories. Not so when 35 years separates us. Now I can easily justify saying, “When I was your age.” “When I was your age, we called a thirty second video clip a commercial.” Will I be able to teach him to appreciate the things that made me who I am today or is he too far removed from my generation? Will the coming of age moments for me be relevant for him? Will the movies, books, video games and music mean anything now or will they be campy and ironic to him? I’ve begun compiling a list of media he will need to consume (and appreciate) as he

It Puts the Lotion on the Skin or Possible Parenting Fail.

For a few years now (well, specifically since January 2010), I’ve been quoting a particular scene from a particular horror movie during a particular time in the post-bath pre-story time portion of my son’s evening. I realized today this could come back to haunt him in two possible ways. One… asylum. Two… a perfect flashback during retro movie night when he is in college, surrounded by his friends and peers. It’s the year 2030, and someone in his dorm bought a VHS player from a yard sale. Naturally, this is a perfect reason for a party. Retro movie night posters go up. Of course, they also have to buy an old TV because certainly no sets have coax inputs anymore. They search around the library and call on grandparents, looking for something to watch on this antique machine. Someone finds an 8-track cassette tape and shoves it in, almost breaking it. They find a copy of “Silence of the Lambs” still in the box. “It’s cool to see a picture of the movie before you watch it.” “The tracking lines

My Days are now in Song

I’ve been home for too long and apparently have had too few conversations with adults. I’ve been off for a few weeks and have spent the majority of that time with a child who only utters a few simple things… more like breaths with some noises attached. He’s experimenting with passing air over his vocal cords. We’ve had lots of one-sided conversations, most of them in song. It’s like a chess game with myself… again, in song. “Oh, you’re gonna play the knight I see… then I guess my rook it will have to be.” Most of these conversations end with me singing, “No more rhymes… I mean it!” And I wait and wait and wait, but he never answers. So I do and laugh, “Anybody want a peanut!” I laugh and swear that this is the end of that game, but I get slap-happy, and it starts all over again. I’ll trip over a toy and sing about why Daddy is such a klutz. The rhymes never make any sense and often start with, “Take it from me, boy…”

$#*! my son’s caterpillar doesn’t say

Several times between now and the era of the stage 2 Huggie overnight diapers, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of sleep deprivation, awakening in the land of disproportionate proportions with oversized talking caterpillars, four-key colorful pianos, and airplanes whose propellers spin with a psychedelic glow not too far off from the St. Elmo’s fire that buzzes around the blades of a turboprop before a lightning strike. It’s in this land and through my weary eyes that I make awful rhythms with toddler toys and get the toys that talk to say bad words in their little sing-songy voice. Since the voice sounds like all the ladies who work at “Gymboree,” I like to pretend it’s them swearing at the drive-thru speaker because the order was read back wrong. As I sit down with a new toy to experiment with what words the manufacturer thinks are too dirty for a baby, I start slow and pull from the standard repository of filth… I type out George Carlin’s seven dirty words. Most are censored although many aren’t spoken clearly enough to

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