DadCentric

You Know What Really Pisses Me Off?

Cuz I sure didn't.

I hear all the time about a parent's need for patience, and I have become Greg Zenmaster Flash compared to my pre-kid days, but I still sometimes surprise myself at how pissed off I get at some seemingly insignificant thing or another the kid does.

For me, it turns out to be playing with her food. Whenever the kid even hints at waving a yogurt-filled spoon around, or--see, even as I write it out, it sounds so illogical. It's not like I'm a huge neatfreak, but for some reason, there's just one behavior the kid does sometimes that sets me off, and I have to put my temper in lockdown. A few times, though, I've snapped at or yelled at the kid [and stunned and scared her, or made her cry, which totally sucks, of course] before getting myself in check [or walking away].

If I were a more hot-tempered guy to begin with, I probably wouldn't even notice; or maybe I'd be worrying about dealing with smacking and baby-shaking instead. As it is, I immediately feel like an asshole and a barbarian who's scarring his kid for life with exactly the kind of food- and parent resentment-related disorders that after-school specials were made of.

Then a couple of weeks ago, as I was ready to chalk it up to an unhealthy mix of testosterone and emotional immaturity, my wife told me how she'd shocked herself by getting so angry at the kid she almost smacked her. For her, it was the kid's new habit of saying "Ummm":

Kid in bed: Mommy, sing me a song.

Wife: You pick a song, and we'll sing it.

Kid: Ummmmmmmmmm Ummmmmmm.

[repeat three times]

Meanwhile, I'm like, "eh, so she's a little indecisive sometimes." Not helpful.

Somehow, having a kid lowers the water level in the ol' reservoir, and now the contours of the never before mapped lakebed can pose new hazards. And here I am, buzzing along in the ski boat of fatherhood, when all of a sudden--BAM!--I run aground on a sandbar of rage and, um, yeah, I kind of lost myself in the metaphor. But anyway, I find I get really pissed over seemingly inconsequential things, and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

A Lesson in Defensive Parenting

Tonight while we were eating birthday cake and ice cream, Veda asked me to confirm something, but I didn't quite hear what. When I asked her to clarify, Neve said, "Just say 'yes', dad. It'll make her happy."

"Neve honey," I replied, "if there's anything that 12 years of raising kids has taught me, it's that you never agree to something you don't understand."

I can't recall the number of times I agreed to something inane, arduous or life-threatening before I caught on to this axiom of parenthood. I've been subjected to various tortures  - from putting a swingset together without the help of migrant labor to enduring the noise-fest that is Chuck E. Cheese - because I believed that nodding like an idiot was a safe fallback strategy.

This rule must be tightly enforced - especially when it comes to teenagers. Teens don't give a damn what you're doing when they need something from you; what matters is that they need it now Now NOW! Thus, they lodge requests when you're in the middle of 10 different activities. Then when you ask your unwashed mass where he ever got the notion that it was "okay" to go bungee-jumping off of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, he whines, "But I asked you and you said it was fine!" In point of fact, he asked you while you were simultaneously cooking dinner, participating in a conference call, and carting around a toddler who's attached himself to your leg like a growth. And your actual words were "Sure, fine, whatever" - which get transmuted by the teenage brain into, "That's an awesome idea! You ought to file for a patent before someone steals it!"

Kids. Give 'em an inch, and all your base are belong to them.

Attention, Citizens of Tokyo! DadCentric Is Approaching! Run For The Hills!

Check this out, dear readers: our patron, Federated Media, has launched a new Parenting Metamechagodzilla Blog. The site features some of the blogosphere's best parenting blogs, including Amalah, Dooce, Laid Off Dad, ParentHacks, Suburban Bliss, Finslippy, Celebrity Baby Blog, The Mommy Blog, and Paper Napkin. And us. On the same page. Pretty sweet. Go visit. Right now.

Bye Melanie. Hello Any Other Two-Bit Hooker You Can Come Up With.

I should've known when she started letting her hair down that something wasn't right.  I'm talking about Melanie, the host of "The Goodnight Show" on Sprout.  It seems she has a couple of skeletons in her closet.  And by skeletons, I mean skank videos that have been deemed inappropriate enough that PBS has canned her from her position as our go-to distraction host of the popular show geared towards 2-5 year olds.  Evidently, before her stint at Sprout, she appeared in a couple of spoof videos called "Technical Virgin" where she mocked PSAs on how to keep your virginity. 

Yeah, I know..."so what?"  And I agree, really.  She's an actor for God's sake.  She's allowed to have had other gigs and it's not like she was throwing beaver shots to the camera or going for the money shot in these videos.  Besides, what's the chances of my kid ever making the connection between Sprout and these vids?  What do you think?

Glorified G

Toy guns. I had an arsenal of them when I was a kid; pistols and rifles and submachine guns, from an M16 to an Uzi to an M1 to a Winchester repeater, I waged imaginary wars across several hundred years of armed conflict. My campaigns were waged across the fields and rolling hills of Illinois and Oklahoma - an unused drainage ditch became a trench on the Western Front, or an Iwo Jima foxhole, the patch of trees down the street became Belleau Wood, or the Wilderness. Get shot and you "died" for ten seconds, and the bad guys always surrendered just before dinnertime.

The other day I was out in the yard, watering some of the plants while Lucas played with his favorite toy dump truck. He came across the sprayer attachment for the hose, picked it up and pointed it at me. "Bow!", he yelled. "Bow! Bow!" As a parent, I do my best to not overreact to "bad" things that the kid does; he is two, and so deserves a bit of slack. But my reaction to his playing with "guns" (he's done similar things with the odd stick, spoon, and banana) surprised me - part of me was absolutely horrified. It's the part that carries an image that I saw on CNN, in the early days of the current Iraq war - a man, perhaps a father, digging through the rubble of a bombed-out, pulling a kid no older than my own out from the ruins, a naked, blackened bloody little boy, still alive and screaming in absolute terror. It's the feeling that runs through me after reading stories like this, the feeling of having battery acid poured onto one's heart. It's looking at kids like these and wondering what would I do, if that dying or dead kid was my son, and not coming up with an answer because it's just too much, an abyss that no parent should ever have to stare into.

Heavy stuff, and if I told you that I gave this topic any serious thought before having a kid I'd be lying. But the kid is growing up quickly, and he's impressionable; I don't recall seeing Bob the Builder pop a cap in Pritchard's mangy ass, but he has seen The Incredibles about 54,239 times, and that flick has it's fair share of gun-toting baddies. This gun thing is one of the many, many conundrums that somehow didn't make the instruction manual that came along with the child. But I wanted to apply all of the logic, reasoning, and parental guidance I'd accumulated over the past two years, and address Lucas' desire to shoot/water me.

"Hey Lucas?"

"Daddy?"

"Don't do that."

"Why?"

"Because it's icky."

"Ok. Icky."

From the mouths of babes, right?

PBS Wants My Kids to be Neville Chamberlain When They Grow Up

Being a semi-reformed TV addict myself, I watch a lot of the kids' cartoons. Most of them are respectable; some of them are fantastic. As Disney Channel Bob Schooley of Kim Possible fame has noted, most of the shows on today make the cartoons we used to watch as kids look like they were beaten with an ugly stick during post-production.

But sometimes, I'll catch something that pisses me off. The latest offender is an episode of the PBS Kids show Cyberchase, about a group of kids who travel through a computer world and solve problems in their mission to save the benevolent Motherboard (sort of a digitized version of the Great Goddess of yore) from the wily villain Hacker (think of him as Angra Mainyu to Motherboard's Ahura Mazda). All good, nonviolent fun, for the most part.

One recent episode, however, got my parental panties in a knot. In "Snelfu Snafu", Motherboard gets sick, and needs a special computer chip inserted into her slot to get better. (I'm not gonna go there - let your imaginations run wild with that one.) The problem is, someone whom they regarded as their ally has absconded with the chip, and put it up for auction! When the kids confront the auctioneer and tell him to give it back or else cyberspace is doomed, he tells them to piss off. Like his role model Quark, he's all about the profit.

So what do the kids do? Do they form a crack paramilitary squad to take this chip out of the hands of the wicked profiteer? Do they even give him a good moral scolding? No! They retreat with their tales between their legs, and then hatch a scheme to earn enough money in the next 10 days to bid on the chip themselves. Since the five kids can earn a total of 10 "Snelfus" a day, they wager that they can earn enough before the auction ends to win it. Never mind that Hacker is a criminal mastermind with vast financial resources at his disposal, and that five kids and their paper routes can't begin to compete. Never mind that the future of their world depends on this chip falling into the right hands. Nooooo. PBS has decided that morality takes a back seat when it comes to creating an artificial situation to teach children how to multiply by 10.

I'm all for playing nice and discouraging unnecessary aggression. But shouldn't we teach our kids that, sometimes, people deserve a hearty man-beating?

A warning to PBS: If my kids grow up and cede Czechoslovakia to Germany, it'll be on your heads.

[Vote for this story on Netscape!]

Dogs of the World Unite

I apologize if I'm coming to this party a little late.  The original article appeared in the June 25th edition of the NYT and was written by animal trainer, Amy Sutherland.  Now, you're probably asking yourself, "Why the hell is Dubya writing about an animal trainer?"  Thank you for asking, let me tell you.  On Wednesday, I stumbled across this on MSNBC: • E-mail: Want to train your husband?   I was intrigued.  Not about training my husband, but how I could be trained.  So I clicked.  Oh, how I wish I hadn't.  Here's what's there:

Want to train your husband to be perfect? Tired of your better half leaving dirty dishes in the sink? Not listening? Being chronically late? Or losing his temper? Ask Amy Sutherland, who studied exotic animal training, for tips on how you can change his bad habits. Sutherland, author of 'Kicked, Bitten and Scratched,' applied her unusual expertise to improve her husband’s behavior. She’ll answer your questions in a column next week. Write to us today!

Now, usually I just laugh this stuff off, but for some reason it struck a nerve.  Most pieces of this kind are generally written tongue-firmly-in-cheek.  But, after Googling her name and coming across the original article, I found myself biting my tongue.  Now, I know it's Friday and we're all usually a little loosey-goosey (what am I?  80?) around here, but I was just wondering what everyone else thought about this?  Men?  Ladies?  Did you read it?  Did you think about it?  Did it anger you in any way?  Allow me to provide some excerpts - just some food for thought, if you will (any emphasis all mine):

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

...I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.

In the margins of my notes I wrote, "Try on Scott!"

I really feel for Scott.

What I Meant To Say Was...Oh, Wait, I DID Say That!

A few weeks back, I was pleasantly surprised to get pinged by Nancy Churnin, a reporter from the Dallas News; she was interested in what I had to say about BabyFirst TV. We've broached the subject before, so sure, why not. I emailed my thoughts on the round-the-clock kiddie channel to Nancy, and a few weeks later, the story ran. Here's my quote, lifted from the story:

"BabyFirstTV seems to be yet another rallying point for parents who are ever so eager to vilify others for allowing their kids to (gasp!) watch T.V. Now, my 2-year-old son has the option of watching about a half hour of PBS Kids Sprout on weekday mornings while my wife and I are trying to shower, shave, get ourselves dressed, eat breakfast, walk and feed the dog, bathe the kid, get the kid dressed, feed the kid, bathe the kid AGAIN because he decided to give himself a new hairstyle using the strawberry yogurt we gave him for breakfast and get out of the house. For us, Big Bird and The Count provide a welcome few minutes of distraction."

Except that it wasn't. Not really. And contextually speaking, not by a longshot. Here's what I emailed to Ms. Churnin:

"My take on BabyFirstTV: if there's an "issue", it's that BabyFirstTV seems to be yet another rallying point for parents who are ever so eager to vilify others for allowing their kids to (gasp!) watch TV. Now, my 2-year old son has the option of watching about a half hour of PBS Sprout on weekday mornings while my wife and I are trying to shower, shave, get ourselves dressed, eat breakfast, walk and feed the dog, bathe the kid, get the kid dressed, feed the kid, bathe the kid AGAIN because he decided to give himself a new hairstyle using the strawberry yogurt we gave him for breakfast, and get out of the house. For us, Big Bird and The Count provide a welcome few minutes of distraction.  And many times they don't; he'd rather read a book, play with his toys, or try to ride the dog around the living room.  Do I personally want a 24 hour kiddie programming channel? No. Call me a starry-eyed optimist, but I believe that most parents are responsible enough to make good choices for their kids. Whether or not we let our kids watch TV, most of us can think of better things for a toddler to be doing at 3:00 in the morning. (Sleeping comes to mind.)"

So BabyFirstTV people, please don't think for a second that I advocate your product - it is what it is, and to me, it's about as useful as a screen door on a submarine (cringes as he writes that tired cliche). And to the editorial staff at the Dallas News, perhaps you can tell me the difference between the following sentences:

"The Dallas News is an excellent paper."

"The Dallas News is an excellent paper if you're looking for something to line your cat's shitbox with." (Yeah, I realize I ended it with a preposition.)

Long Lost Cactus

Hi.  Is this thing on?  Do you remember me?  Yes, after a long absence, I have returned.  You see, I've had this major thought drought.  I haven't been able to come up with anything worthy of this exalted space.  Why?  I'm in awe of time, and the velocity with which it moves.

On Saturday, my daughter will be a year old.  How, exactly, did this happen?  Really.  I'm asking you.  How did this happen?  Where did the year go.  Did the dog eat it?  Was it sucked into a hitherto unknown rift in the space-time continuum?  Did the earth begin rotating faster on its axis?  If you have answers, I'd really like to know.

A year ago, my daughter was born and she instantly became the most important aspect of my life.  It is because of her that I was asked to contribute to this exalted space.  Thanks for making me a dad, Mia.  Now, slow down with the growing, okay?

Put Down the Vegetables and Walk Slowly Away from the Child

I don't get art.

Someone recently pointed out to me that someone I hate is working with photographer Anne Geddes.

"Do you know her?  The photographer who poses little babies like eggplants and butterflies.  Twisted stuff.  An unholy alliance if there ever was one." 

I hadn't heard of her, but I was intrigued, so I checked her out.

Now I'm no art critic, but it looks to me like this woman specializes in pictures of plants eating babies.  Is this a celebration of human life, or creepy as shit?  I vote for the latter.  And is it just me, or do some of her models look both incredibly uncomfortable and precariously close to becoming lawsuits?

I'll take over-exposed pictures of my daughter with food smeared in her hair over her audition tape for Little Shop of Horrors any day of the week.